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Slashback: Vaidhyanathan, Oregon, Opteron
'It would become impossible to have Open Source implementations of key pieces of the infrastructure. This would be harmful, perhaps fatal, to the grand plans of those who want to deploy Web services everywhere,' Bray is reported as saying, in XML Industry Newsletter ."
Waiting for the low-power version. Jethro writes "Ace's hardware Opteron review was a very interesting read which shows some real Java webserver benchmarks on SUSE and Debian Linux, and real world database performance in MySQL and MS SQL server 2000. A lot better than those synthetic mysql benchmarks that Tom's hardware served up."
And Distinguished Hero writes "[H]ardocp.com ([H]ardNews 1oth Edition) is reporting that the Opteron processor does not actually have an integrated dual channel controller. This explains why all the Opteron reviews only used a single channel configuration. While the integrated memory controlled is not dual channel, it can be bypassed by an external (Northbridge) memory controller connected to the processor via the HyperTransport bus."
One more: EconolineCrush writes "Yesterday's Opteron launch gave us all glimpse at AMD's new 64-bit platform, but the Opteron is a server and workstation chip that will be out of reach for the majority of consumers. AMD's upcoming Athlon 64, however, will bring 64-bit computing to the desktop. Drawing heavily from what we've seen of the Opteron's performance thus far, Tech-Report has posted its thoughts on what it will take for the Athlon 64 to succeed. It's an interesting read for anyone salivating at the thought of an affordable 64-bit desktop platform."
Ma'am, can you please ask those anarchists in the carrels to pipe down a bit? BrianWCarver writes "Readers may recall a Slashdot interview with Siva Vaidhyanathan, Professor at NYU, and author of Copyrights and Copywrongs. Vaidhyanathan is working on a new book, The Anarchist in the Library, and was interviewed on the blog, Eyeteeth. This is a brilliant and amazing interview where Vaidhyanathan discusses how creative communities share, the DMCA, the American industrial production of culture, the USA Patriot Act, the importance of libraries and librarians, and the policies of the FCC. It is a must-read for those who care about the future of creative and democratic culture."
Technically, Oregon is not Washington. Daniel Phillips is among the many folks who have been following the progress of a bill in Oregon (HB 2892) to encourage open source software, and he points out this Register story (picked up from NewsForge, actually), writing "Apparently, moving Oregon's open source bill forward comes down to convincing the house speaker."
Reader PotatoHead fleshes that out just a bit: " Despite reports detailing the demise of HB 2982, this bill continues to be a topic at the Oregon Legislature. We have broad support for HB 2892, but need everyone to continue showing support in the form of your phone calls, e-mails, faxes and snail-mail to your Oregon Representatives. We have the attention of the Oregon Legislature in a pretty big way and need to keep up the good work if HB 2892 is to move forward against the constant efforts of the usual industry lobbyists. If you don't already know, here is how you contact your representative. Please take a moment --right now-- and show your support for HB 2982. Every contact matters as we continue to move forward with HB 2892!"
Sir, can you direct me to the nearest buggy whip store so I can beat this dead horse? If $98 billion seems to you a bit much for the music cartel to charge students for even the most indiscriminant file swapping, you may be interested in following the chilling effects that it generates, too: PL_2003 writes "A follow up on a previous slashdot article. It really seems like the recording industry is determined to continue its fight.Check this NYTimes article (free reg. required). My Take: Couldn't they use their brains for a better business model?"
OK, here are the rules ... Grub (mentioned previously) is apparently causing consternation among many webmasters. Though they claim the client honors robots.txt , it seems that only the central servers check it (and don't honor it properly) and that grub clients don't don't check it at all. Ooops.
Time to round up and segregate the arrogant. jtheory writes "There's an AP story today here on Yahoo news) that the Justice department has dropped its probe into the recommendation policy of a Texas Tech bio professor. It's encouraging that all he had to do to stop the investigation was make some very minor changes in his policy, but it's still horrifying to me that he got into trouble in the first place. Is it even safe to encourage strict Creationists (or others with strong anti-scientific beliefs) to become doctors? Would they ignore animal research results, etc?"
The various motherboard photos seem to indicate that their are DIMM sockets to accomodate 128-bit memory. I would hope that the various benchmarks have been done with this configuration, since it obviously increases the memory bandwidth considerably.
Reference: page 15 of the AMD Opteron Processor data sheet, AMD document 23932 rev 3.00 dated April 2003.
...against those college students. They'll make nothing from it, but the results of them losing could be pretty ugly.
Could you imagine the counter-suit? I'd call a $98 BILLION lawsuit against "poor" college students "malicious prosecution."
--ZS
-- sigs cause cancer.
HB 2892 ... HB 2982 ... HB 2892 ... HB 2892 ... HB 2982
Perhaps we might actually get this bill through if we managed to figure out what the correct number is for once.
Am I a hipster-doofus?
Hell, saying Siva Vaidhyanathan three times quickly is trivial.
It's saying it one time correctly that's the challenge.
fifth sigma, inc.
When these college kids graduate, go onto careers of their own they will be in the position to BUY music rather then spend time searching and downloading it off the current hot p2p app. But will they be interested anymore?
Why would the record industry want to constantly go after their own best customers and future customers? Im no longer in college myself, don't buy much music anymore cause I prefer 80s music. I do buy a ton of DVDs though. The reaso nbeing there is great value in DVDs. I get superior picture quality and sound, a nice keep case, art work, special features, comentaries, interactive content, all for $14-$21.
If the record industry could offer such great content at a reasonable price, sales would skyrocket.
Instead they charge far too much for far too little, and on top of it, they constantly attack their own customers with threats and lawsuits and bullshit like CDs that wont play on their computer. Then they lobby for laws that punish not just music pirates but all people who wish to use the internet without restrictions. It's really quite amazing how a group of billionaires can be so ass backwards.
Im hoping their is a major backlash from the millions of students in this country.
I don't think it's right to exclude someone from medical practice just because they don't ascribe to the theory of evolution. They're still capable of observation and understanding the scientific process, perhaps even more so than those who blindly adhere to a theory because they keep their minds open to the possibility that it is wrong. Science isn't about religious prejudice.
Try not. Do or do not, there is no try.
-- Dr. Spock, stardate 2822-3.
That's a slippery slope you're suggesting.
Should we exclude people from becoming doctors because they believe that Jesus came back from the dead - a belief which is both unscientific and contrary to our understanding of medical science?
Well, from the correct Indian pronunciation:
Shiv-uh (Siv-uh is fine too)
VYE-Duh-NAT-hun
Vaidya means 'physician' in Sanskrit, FWIW.
Go somewhere random
Is it even safe to encourage strict Creationists (or others with strong anti-scientific beliefs) to become doctors? Would they ignore animal research results, etc?"
How exactly do you make that connection between Creationism and ignoring animal research? I hate to break it to you, but the people who typically believe that animals should not be researched upon are the ones who believe they evolved (and thus, are no differnt from humans and deserve the same treatment). Creationism by its very nature puts humans above and beyond other animals, and thus animals are to be utilized by humans.
If you can't see the value in jet powered ants you should turn in your nerd card. - Dunbal (464142)
Many people I know who don't believe in biological macro-evolution still believe in an old earth, and they don't deny that the fossil record shows an increase in complexity in life over time. However, they simply don't believe random genetic mutation combined with natural selection is enough to drive the evolution of life to what we have today. How is that being unscientific? How is that person going to be a "dangerous" doctor?
Forget the whales - save the babies.
This guy has written many high quality scientific papers, he does a lot of work on Cosmology, and yet he was a devout 7th Day Adventist - and therefore believed in creation.
Didn't seem to interfere with his work.
My experience in contacting my local representative. I'm impressed doesn't appear to be a form letter!
---
I am fully supportive of the bill, and as a member of the committee
(General Government) assigned the bill, I am working with the proponents
and a few other legislators to move this bill.
We had a very successful hearing on it that attracted a great deal of
opposition from some of the big high-tech lobbyists. They turned out in
force and are now trying to prevent those of us on the committee who
support it from bringing it up for a work session. Unfortunately on
their side, the lobbyists have the committee chair, most committee
members of the majority party (Republicans), and a few influential
members of the House leadership. The fact that the bill has so much
muscle against it means we are giving them a fight they did not expect
to face!
Thanks for contacting me about this. If you have not already, please
feel free to send your email to other legislators as well.
Sincerely,
Kelley Wirth
State Representative
District 16
Melissa P. White
Legislative Assistant
Representative Kelley Wirth
District 16
900 Court Street NE
Salem, Oregon 97301
503-986-1416
-----Original Message-----
From: Adam XXXXX [mailto:XXXXXXXX@attbi.com]
Sent: Friday, April 18, 2003 10:47 PM
To: REP Wirth
Subject: Internet email for Legislative Member, TO: Kelley Wirth
Dear Representative Kelley Wirth:
I'm very disappointed to hear that House Bill 2892 is being stalled
because large corporations fear it's implications. Open Source software
should be consider equally along with other costly software! If the
Open Source software is more cost effective and achieves the same
purpose it should be used in Oregon government applications. This would
be a perfect oppurtunity for Oregon lawmakers to show their commitment
to maximize taxpayers money! Thanks and please consider my thoughts.
Sincerely,
Adam XXXXXX
XXX NW 5th #XXX
Corvallis, Oregon 97330
XXXXXXXX@attbi.com
Where the Music Matters
My Oregon House Representative, Mitch Greenlick (Democrat-033), wrote back to me:
Now, I don't mean to be a naysayer, and I'd hate to quit too early, but when the man says it's dead...
Doomed feelings aside, I'm off to write the speaker of the house, Ms. Minnis... As I said to Rep. Greenlick, I'd rather not have my taxes raised when the alternative could be to use open-source software providing Oregonians with jobs (installation, design, maintenance) and saving money by eliminating the need to pay economic rent to Washingtonians (Microsoft Licensing Fees).
SLM
If you think you can hurt me again, you're wrong. I left my heart in my other pants.
I just want to take a moment to comment on Grub. In the original story we heard,
"People who choose to download and run the client will assist in building the Web's largest, most accurate database of URLs."
Already I find myself rolling my eyes.
Then I click through to the site. Aha. I will volunteer my machine on a non-profit basis for a for-profit company. This is just like distributed.net and SETI? Give me a break, these guys were bought out by Looksmart, a paid for placement ad company.
Google didn't succeed by getting slashdot editors to post stories saying they are building the most useful search engine out there, they succeeded by actually building it.
I just hope grub keeps the fools who want to regulate google away. Google succeeded because they didn't have to listen to self-important analysts.
It appears that the Opteron can report the actual address of any detected errors. Plus, it can report details of ECC errors in its caches.
But the coolest feature is that it supports memory scrubbing, a feature I'd previously not seen in a microprocessor or chipset since the iAPX 432 memory controller back in 1983.
When a SEU causes a single-bit error in a word of memory, the ECC is capable of correcting it when the word is read. But if that word doesn't get read again for a long time, it's possible that a second SEU might happen in the same word, which would then be an uncorrectable error. With memory scrubbing, the memory controller uses a small portion of the memory bandwidth to scan the entire memory, correcting any single-bit errors that are found, so that the probability of a two-bit (or more) uncorrectable error is greatly reduced.
My last several computers (including a dual Athlon using the 760MPX chip set, and a DEC Alpha) had ECC, but not scrubbing. I considered writing a Linux program to scrub the memory by direct access to /dev/mem, but this has the disadvantage of thrashing the processor's caches. By implementing scrubbing in hardware, the Opteron avoids that problem.
The Opteron has a Scrub Control Register that is used to enable or disable scrubbing and control the rate. There are independent scrubbing controls for the L1 data cache, L2 cache, and main memory.
Those of us that want high reliability really welcome this feature. Well done, AMD!
By the way, it should be noted that it is typical for a PC with 128 megabytes of memory to get a single bit error several times a week. On my Alpha, I routinely saw corrected error log messages in the syslog, which gave me much more confidence in the system than the way that most PCs simply fail to even detect memory errors, let alone correct them. The log messages are also useful in that you can determine whether you have some memory that is getting marginal. For instance, at one point I started getting a much higher rate of corrected errors on one particular SIMM. There may have been a slight amount of oxidation or corrosion on the contacts, or they may have just worked themselves loose a bit. Cleaning the contacts and reseating the SIMM solved the problem with only a few minutes of down time, instead of what probably would have been hours of down time had the errors gone unnoticed.
The results of an undetected error vary considerably; it may be in memory that is not in use at the time, or it could be in the midst of the operating system, an application, or user data.
1) Dr Dini did not change his requirement in any appreciable way:
m
Original:
"How do you think the human species originated?
If you cannot truthfully and forthrightly affirm a scientific answer to this question, then you should not seek my recommendation for admittance to further education in the biomedical sciences"
New:
"How do you account for the scientific origin of the human species? If you will not give a scientific answer to this question, then you should not seek my recommendation."
Read the statement: http://www2.tltc.ttu.edu/dini/Personal/letters.ht
He explains his requirement and *still* says that he will not recommend people who reject evolution.
2) Professors have the right to choose who they will and will not write a recommendation for. Should they be required to put their recommendation behind anyone who asks them?
3) The student in question never asked Dr Dini for a recommendation at all.
4) Dini also requires the student to have earned and "A" in one of his classes. Spradling had not done this.
5) Dini requires that "I should know you fairly well." Dini says he had no idea who Spradling was.
Basically the whole situation is a publicity stunt dreamed up by a creationists. The Spradling didn't meet *any* of Dini's criteria for recommendation.