Slashdot Mirror
Memory Activity LEDs
Azert writes "Since a few months almost every popular memory maker includes heatspreaders with their fastest memory modules. Probably Corsair is setting a new fashion with their new line of memory with memory activity LEDs
XMS ProSeries modules feature a row of LED's on the top edge that display real-time memory activity level. Each memory bank has a row of nine dedicated activity LED's that alight as the level of memory activity increases. 512 Mbyte XMS ProSeries modules, with two banks, have a total of 18 activity LED's in green, yellow and red."
...is that what they mean by 'flash memory'..?
This room is fullfilled mit special electronische equippment.
Fingergrabbing and pressing the cnoeppkes from the computers is
allowed for die experts only! So all the "lefthanders" stay away
and do not disturben the brainstorming von here working
intelligencies. Otherwise you will be out thrown and kicked
anderswhere! Also: please keep still and only watchen astaunished
the blinkenlights.
Sounds like the world gets ever more closer to being something out of star trek.
I've left to find myself. If you happen to see me, please, keep me there until I return.
Now I can finally tell whether or not my memory is bad!
With enough banks of this RAM will the resolution be enough to play Pong?
Omnis amans amens
Cool! More blinkenlights! :-) Can we have one on the PCI bus too? What about the IDE bus? The USB cable. We alredy have one for the ethernet. Soon we'll be able to have our very own home discos.
Stick Men
Pretty soon it will be odd to not have a modded computer. It seems many companies are adding whiz-bang lights and windows on the computers so that people don't even have to pull out a Dremel any more.
i would like some nice looking blue myself. but anyways I wonder how usefull this really gonna be. other than a possible style thing it seems a bit useless.
At first thought, these seem to be little more than the typical "type-r" enhancements like neon lights in the case, ect. How many users have a transparent case anyway? But this could actually be useful for diagnostics.
I might as well just build my computer case from a 1997 Honda Civic hatchback with an 8-inch exhaust, 2-foot wing spoiler, blue turn signals and green neons under the car.
What is wrong with people who buy this crap? It's so gaudy. Oh my god, LEDs! That's so cool!
Case modders have the attention spans of 3-year-olds who hit every button in the elevator.
512 Mbyte XMS ProSeries modules
I want a 512 Mbyte LIM ProSeries module goddamit!
Now, will case modders with transparent cases have to face a new optical tempest problem (beware, PDF link!)? (People being able to sniff potentially critical data through analyzing LED blinking, that is...)
What in the hell is a "heatspreader"?
I know there was talk a year or so ago about some routers/modems which flashed their LEDs not just on receipt of a packet, but flashed them in accordance with the data contained in the packets, and reading that flashing would enable someone away from the machine without physical access to read the contents of data transferred
Is this the same? Would it be possible to read the contents of what's written to memory as it's written? I'm sure even when a password is encrypted it is, at some stage, moved into RAM as a plaintext piece of information. Could this be read? Are LEDs fast enough to transmit this information?
Make it blink! Then all those nerds with 1.5GB of memory will forsake all sense and buy 1.5GB MORE memory just so it blinks!
Brilliant!
Ben
Work Safe Porn
To quote the lovely Tina Fey:
"Hey! That's great! Lights on my RAM! Oh, hey, scientists: CANCER! AIDS! Let's put the blinkenlights on the RAM on the backburner and try to eradicate cancer and AIDS first!"
It is pretty cool, though...
The site actually links most of its information from [H]ard|OCP. Search for "[H]ardNews 8th Edition" to find the relevent article with pictures.
Mirror Below
I have just received some more information about Corsair his new line of memory. The XMS ProSeries memory is basically the same as their XMS series memory, with a better heatsink and an integrated memory activity meter.
Corsair Memory, today announced the ProSeries, a new series of ultra-performance modules in their highly awarded XMS module family. XMS ProSeries modules offer the same extreme performance XMS modules are known for, but also incorporate two essential new features: an all-new heatsink designed for optimum thermal efficiency, and memory activity LED's.
Corsair's new high-efficiency heatsink was custom designed especially for the XMS ProSeries. It is crafted from cast aluminum to offer excellent thermal qualities. Its mini fins maximize air surface contact area to draw heat away from the memory chips and dissipate it more quickly. The heatsink, which is bonded to the memory chips with a unique thermal adhesive, is embossed with bold "XMS" lettering on both sides of the module. On the top edge of the heatsink are windows to the activity LED's.
XMS ProSeries modules feature a row of LED's on the top edge that display real-time memory activity level. Corsair is the first company to ever offer an activity meter on the module itself. Corsair invented this feature for the growing legions of enthusiasts and gamers who use windowed chassis, so they can tell at a glance the current level of memory activity. Each memory bank has a row of nine dedicated activity LED's that alight as the level of memory activity increases. 512 Mbyte XMS ProSeries modules, with two banks, have a total of 18 activity LED's in green, yellow and red.
According to Corsair President Andy Paul, "The XMS ProSeries further extends Corsair's leadership in high performance module design. We combined the most efficient and stylish heatsink in the industry with never-before-seen activity monitoring features and XMS's legendary performance to deliver what will soon become the de facto standard memory module for gamers and enthusiasts."
The following XMS Pro Series modules and module pairs are available immediately from resellers worldwide: - TwinX1024-4000PRO - matched pair of 512MB, DDR500 modules - TwinX1024-3200C2PRO - matched pair of 512MB, DDR400 modules - CMX512-4000PRO - 512MB, DDR500 module - CMX512-3200C2PRO - 512MB, DDR400 module
Looks pretty cool I think, but on the other side I do not really think that many users will really have any benefit from memory acitivity LEDs on their memory modules. But it sure looks cool..
What were all the LEDs on the Thinking Machines CM-5 for?
Trolling is a art,
With some assembler, I bet i could make some sort of graphics out of this machine, like this.
* = on
__*___*___ = off
_*_____*_
__*****__
The trend will reverse (thank God!), and having a tasteful, plain computer-- one that doesn't look like it would have been driven by a pimp in the 70's if it were a car-- will be in vogue again.
/me looks fondly at the dead-plain, black, monolithic PC case under his desk, adorned with nothing but a small case badge that bears a photo of an F-117.
:-)
People who rice up their PCs should be locked in a large cage with people who rice up their cars, and the two groups should be made to fight to the death. Then when the winners emerge victorious from the cage, they'll be cut down by a couple well-positioned Gatling guns.
EMS/XMS memory thats one nightmare I did n't want to be reminded off.. expanded and extended memory I'd almost forgotten.
ooh, all the pretty lights....
What is meant by 'activity?' Size of memory usage, bandwidth usage, amount of power it's drawing?
Gee, something other than the color blue to look at!!
Great... Now I gotta stay inside whilst the masses party in the streets and get wasted on Zima...
Never have a philosophy which supports a lack of courage
Are they going to find a way to make the computer automatically generate that tele-type "clickety-clack" sound everytime a key is pressed... as is so popular in movies today to show how "advanced" the laptop the hero's using is? ;)
;)
Seriously, outside of "looking pretty" and appealing to a (seemingly growing) generation of case-modders, what's the point?
One suggestion was you can see if you have bad memory. Umm... (forgive the Windows-specific example) I can tell that when I get a BSOD... or the machine fails to boot.
Someone should tell these memory manufacturers that they should spend more money increasing the access speed of their memory instead of making it "pretty." Or, at the very least, work on heat dissipation.
I'm not going to be really happy until the line blurs between L1 cache and main memory.
Diplomacy is the art of saying, "Nice doggie!" until you can find a rock.
To the 1950's, 1960's, and early '70s where computers had rows and rows of blinking lights and switches Anywbody remember the PDP 11's? Or the early Altairs?
Now we just need an excuse to add dozens of little toggle switches to the side of the case.
My rights don't need management.
I for one welcome our new blinking memory overlords!
- It was the best of times, it was the blurst of times. Stupid Monkey!!
A naive question. What did the blinkenlights on the old iron that had them, show? I had always assumed that they were tied to the machine's data and address buses (with appropriate buffering), but then the things would be useless much of the time. On the other hand, the BLs on this one old machine that lived in the Chrysler dinosaur pen when I worked there, did look like they were echoing a bus. On yet another hand, the MPEG of a PDP-x(8?) booting up that I found on the Rhode Island old iron Web site, clearly showed patterns that stuck around for a second or so, implying that the panel lights were under program control, and could actually say something.
So, what was it? Was the front panel an elaborate machine-wedged-p? indicator during normal operation, or was it a program-controlled output device? Or was it something else, of which my limited intelligence can not even conceive?
Great. More lights which means nothing to me. I am colour-blind. Worse is that more and more things try to give me information by changing the color of the leds, leaving me standing in the desert of ignorance. So it tells me nothing and I pay for the power usage.
What good are LED's unless you've got a clear case mod ... or no case?
Who doesn't like free music?
With all the case modding going on, I wonder how much though has been put into the interferance being generated by all the clear cases that are around today? There's a reason computer cases normally come as a solid sheet of metal. It's called a "faraday cage", (sp?) and is used to keep the nasty interferance generated by today's high speed systems inside the case.
/. ran across any studies or sampling done on computer-generated interferance?
Most stock case systems come complete with rows of metal "fingers" along the edges where sheets meet, and where the ports mesh against the back of the case, etc., to keep emi/rfi from leaking out. I'm assuming all of this bother is to keep the case within FCC regulations for generating interferance.
I wonder just how much interferance a typical "clear case" system generates to the surrounding area? Has anyone here at
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
What next? An LED that displays hard drive activity?
Come on, guys! Don't mod it down just cause you have no history in you, and you don't understand! Will a mod who atleast understands how relevant the preceding post is do something to help it back up?
Sig.i>
Forget LEDs, I want high performance memory in ECC (unbuffered). That way, I can over clock the memory untill bit errors are detected, then back up on the over clocking. It would sure beat the hell out of tweaking untill you BSOD.
Life is not for the lazy.
I tell ya thems were the days sonny. It was always good to see my CPU usage back then... it helped relieve some of the stress of having to walk to school, uphill both ways, every day of the week, too, none of this "weekday" crap. That's how it was and WE LIKED IT, WE LOVED IT!
"To confine our attention to terrestrial matters would be to limit the human spirit." -Stephen Hawking
So live with it
())=====D
Mwah mwah.
We've been trying to figure out for months how to make our data center more impressive when we take PHB's there on tours. This sounds like just the ticket!
Everyone knows that you can tell the speed and worth of a server based on the number of blinking lights on the front of the display. Moving our switches up higher in the rack so that they were more visible did us a ton of good. Sounds like this whole memory lights thing may be the killer app that lets us charge for data center tours now!
The party of stupid and the party of evil get together and do something both stupid and evil, then call it bipartisan.
Seriously, is this aimed at professional people who can use it for system diagnostics? Or is it aimed at the happy 12 year old $random_famous_brand_name fanatics who think that a prefab window, along with prefab water cooling with prefab fanguards and of course the hideously bright blue LEDs?*
*) With proper respect to true case modders, as featured on Slashdot before.
Hate me!
Great-- I will now have a gigantic machine with rows and rows of blinking lights. Why the hell do we need this again?
I don't have a transparent case, you insensitive clod!
home
I submitted two stories this week, both rejected. One was about the somewhat serious issue that London's power blackout a few weeks ago turned out to be, supposedly, because a 1 amp fuse blew. This raises somewhat serious design issues. Rejected.
A second issue, much more to Slashdotters tastes, concerns a law being considered by the UK parliament that'll require all websites to deposit copies of themselves with UK libraries. The logistics of such an exercise, alone, would make you think Slashdot readers would be interested in such things.
But no. Instead we get LEDs in memory chips and home made silly putty. WTF?
here's the ram from the top down, showing the LEDs
slashdot: where everyone yells sarcastic metaphors to themselves to understand the issue
I sure hope they can find LEDs that blink fast enough, it would be a shame if the led couldn't blink fast enough and would slow the memory down..
Those transparent side panels, the ones I spent $16 on, plus $3.95S+H, that you said was merely for basement-dwelling lusers, well what do you think now, HUH?
Oh boy. More crap for people with more money than brains. Let's see.....
- Case which looks like it was designed by a liberal arts drop-out (and windows so we can see the dust bunnies grow): X dollars
- Lights for the inside of the computer (to highlight the dust bunnies): Y dollars
- And now, blicking LEDs inside the computer (well, at least it doesn't bring out the dust bunnies): Z dollars
Being able to remove all doubt you're a first order stupid dork: Priceless.
Yeah, go ahead and mod this as a troll.. Proves the point, doesn't it.
... that this feature makes about as much sense as the pope's scrotum.
open (SIG, "</dev/zero"); $sig = <SIG>; close SIG;
Being a visual-spatial person I'd have to say this is a pretty good idea. As far as we've come we pretty much still like to look at the 'pretty lights', yano? Some kind of indicator that what we've built is actually doing something. Helps to bridge the gap between our fascination with machinery and the circutry that we build, which inherantly doesn't inspire the awe of say..an industrial sized crane, because of its lack of moving parts.
..I think an interesting application of this would be to attach a bank of lights that could vary in intensity depending on power usage to the banks. One could test various in-case heat levels and actually observe the usage levels of electricity inside different parts of the ram as temperature rose. I dunno, I'm grasping here.. ...Pretty lights!!..
People like to 'see' an indicator that what they've built is actually working..Its comforting in a Man-machine sort of way. You could easily see if a bank was out (as someone mentioned before), but then again you'd know that when you tried to boot the machine.
So instead the USAians eradicated the natives and now they all speak some kind of pseudo-English and eat burgers. Yes, I see what you mean.
Just putting it back in perspective. Keep on flaming, old fart.
Fight hunger. Filet a politician and send him to a 3rd world country of your choice.
Hur Hur Melty server melty...
i'm waiting till my 512MB chip has 536,870,912 lights on it...not gonna buy it any sooner...
No, instead they get English (sic) and Coke-a-cola shoved down their throuts.
That's because your stories involved the UK. Nobody outside the UK cares what goes on in the UK. LEDs in memory chips and silly putty are much more interesting than the UK.
...what you can buy when you don't have to pay for your OS?
+1
I don't want my computer to take 15 seconds to open one file, be down a day every week and require a full-time administrator for 5 users. I assume a typical ClearCase system has EMF emission of a nuclear blast, because it sure has a similar effect on productivity.
How about a nice CVS mod?
Whaddya mean, "pretty soon"? People are already removing Windows in droves!
I'm running Windows and my RAM LEDs are not blinking, they are simply ALWAYS ON!
How quickly you forget that the US would still be a british colony, if not for French intervention. Brush up on the history books, young lad.
Why didn't I ever think of that? I used the C000- video area from time to time when I was only using text mode (aah, nothing like 704k of DOS memory), but why didn't I enable this?
GAAAAAH!
*bangs head*
There, better now. Where was I? Ohyes, I need another 512M to play PlanetSide better...
Well I think that was one of the versions that had something similar, but for CPU usage. A row of about 5 or 6 LED's used to swish left and right ala Knight Rider at a bit of speed, and as the machine got bogged down with CPU heavy jobs the pattern used to slow right down..
:)
Or was it the other way round.. I can't remeber. Cool none the less - wouldn't mind something similar to stick into a floppy drive blanking plate
"Hey! Unless this is a nude love-in, get the hell off my property!!"
Ever read The Register?
No, Should I?
Hehe, the only thing on MY case is a compiler construction textbook, the remote control for my industrial fan, and a pizza sauce encrusted plate. And the only thing PERMENANTLY on my case...is the pizza plate, sadly. I shoudln't have let the cheese set ;)
ASCII stupid question, get a stupid ANSI
Years and years ago I made the mistake of trying that trick to increase the memory available on a laptop. That memory range isn't just reserved for monochrome display adapters ... some laptops used/use it too for their displays.
:-)
I'll always remember booting that Gateway Colorbook 2 laptop up, only to see the screen go completely blank as EMM386 loaded. It had me really worried until I realized what was happening. Thank god for that floppy boot disk.
Whoever designed level 61 in Frozen Bubble is a sadistic bastard.
Ok, memory access is running at say 200MHz (everybody is faster than that these days). Now that implies 5ns pulses. The human eye has trouble detecting shorter than about 10-20ms. Therefore the LED's are not real-time indicators, instead they must be integrating signal corresponding to the the memory accesses.
> Anyone else like how the old BeBoxes had LED bars showing the CPU usage?
Remember your granddad telling you about how in the old days, people would have two-digit 7-segment indicators on their computers to tell the speed of the cpu they would have liked to have in their box ?
Combine that with your CPU-usage speed-bar into the spoil-o-meter (TM) !
When you buy your latest 357 BogoHZ Nonium IIXXX Cpu at $998, put the next smaller CPUs you considered buying into a list, along with their price and computing power relative to CPU you eventually bought.
That would be the 337 BogoHZ Nonium IIXXX at $698, the 250 BogoHZ Celeronium XXV at $123, and the surplus 66MHz 486DX you found in your scrap heap at $0.
Then write a utility that displays the difference in price between your current CPU, and the cheapest one in the list whose computing power would just exceed your current cpu load, on a three-digit 7-segment display.
If you begin to feel depressed, install "SETI AT HOME" - or Windows XP.
Please not I tried to put this in order but I know some of them are compleatly out of place...
Example I list the Apple II fans AFTER the "I built my PC" case stickers. By the time you could get those stickers the Apple II fans were long discontinued...
I remember when case modding was adding a lable to a S-100 computer to lable it's function.
Taping over the key caps on a terminal so users would know what the Micro keys were programmed to do.
And taping industructions to the desk.
and then there was the brackets to keep people from walking off with newer home computers (Vic 20, C64, Coco)
Or just ripping the lable off the computer so when you do your video or movie your not advertising for the computer manufacter. Forget that the computers were distictive back then and could be spotted a mile away.
Or ripping the lable off becouse your a board 15 year old.
Then there was replacing your Apple II case with one that had the number pad built in the case.
Replacing your Commodore 64 case with a nifty C128 style sloped front.
Reloading the springs in the Commodore 64 keyboard to make it a little better for typing.
Painting the Mac case to look pritty.
Then there was the 64K Atari XL.. Not 64K ram.. 64 carrot.... dimands...
Modifying the PC case for better air flow.
Actually removing the IBM logo off classic IBM brand PCs and slapping them on kit builds.
The "I built my PC" case logos
Apple II fans to improve airflow.
Mac powers strips to put the button in reach.
Reset button (If one already existed relocated to be easier or harder to reach)
Reset button cut (or modified to be harder to push such as two buttons in two diffrent locations both must be pressed at the same time thus reducing the chance of an accadental reset)
Unpluging internal speaker. Routing internal speaker to external speaker with volume control. Putting a switch on internal speaker to turn on and off.
Case mounted temp display so you can tell how how the computer is running.
drive bay fans.
vareous cooling systems.
Turnning a dorm fridge into a PC case.
(With negitive results)
reinforcing the CD rom tray so it actually will hold stuff.
System status LCD display to tell how many users are on, what the time is, how hot the system is or stock/news ticker.
Tower case
Rack mount case
Stereo cabnet fitting case.
All in one case.
Lugable case.
People who do this stuff also buy up computer hardware just to do this driving the cost of same down so the rest of us can not only afford it but get it at really cheap prices.
And some of this finds it's way back into the mainstream PC design.
So mod on guys... Mod on...
And hay find a cheap way to modle plastic so your technology can be applied to every day items like clocks and bring the cost of same down.
And if someone could come up with a way to use plastic for radio interfearence shilding even better. Conductive plastics hmmmmm.
I don't actually exist.
"Sir, these lights keep blinking out of sequence"
"Get them to blink IN sequence."
Lines from airplane 2, one of them spoken by our favorite kiptin.
They will be cool soon. Especially those darker beige.
-- Leeeter than leet
Those LEDs first displayed pre-boot CPU status. If the machine failed to get to the point where the graphics interface was active, you could look at the LED display and get some idea of what was wrong.
Once the machine came up and running, the light would bounce back and forth just like Knight Rider. There is a mod out there someplace for building an 8-LED display for the PC parallel port. Back in the 1.x days, there was a corresponding Linux Kernel driver to make the LEDs show load average much like on the Sun.
I've seen the bouncing LEDs on the 3/50, 3/60, 3/110. 3/160 and 3/260. I assume all the VME based suns had it.
That's because your stories involved the UK. Nobody outside the UK cares what goes on in the UK. LEDs in memory chips and silly putty are much more interesting than the UK.
Speak for yourself. Not a flame, but your comment sounds typical of many Americans I've met.
- Case with a window on it, with a Quake applique on it.
- Boards with different, clashing colors.
- Cables with different, clashing colors (preferrably glow-in-the-dark).
- LEDs on the fans.
- LEDs on the memory.
- Purple flourescent tube.
- Fan guards shaped like the biohazard symbol.
You, too can have the tackiest case ever!Seriously, I had a hard time finding a case without a window on it. No, I don't need a window; I know it's all in there.
Great now you can peak inside your computer to see the HDD LED on your swap/virtual drive flashing like it belongs at a rave while your DIMMs quietly do nothing.
This sort of feature is bound to introduce paranoia.
A little tweaking and we can have case mods that are just like the WOPR from WarGames!
yay.
....move along....nothing to see here....
/usr/share/games/fortunes/science has one too (Search for ACHTUNG) but it's pretty abbreviated. I seem to recall it being longer in college days, but I suspect that the school I encountered this fortune at had a different file. That was a decade and a half ago, too, and stuff tends to get lost.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Yet another bit of sarcasm that gets taken seriously. My god, people need to relax.
Silly putty. For crying out loud, SILLY PUTTY. Every website in the UK, and possibly even every website outside of there, is going to have to be copied and stored in British libraries, at the expense of the website owners, and Slashdot's more interested in goo?
If I had an attention span longer than Malda's I'd probably be furio... oh look, pretty colours!
Try here.
~Berj
Activity lights are nothing. Relatively useless in the grand scheme of things (except they'd make a wonderful addition to a good case mod)... The new Intel Blade Servers (sorry, no link, they're not released until Tuesday - you might try searching for the IBM ones, since they're pretty much the same hardware) have an LED next to each RAM slot that lights up when the stick dies (there's a capacitor on the board that keeps 30-40 seconds worth of electricity, so the LED's will stay lit up when you remove the blades from the chassis).
Do you really need reason for beer? Wingman Brewers
Yet another bit of sarcasm that gets taken seriously. My god, people need to relax.
The last thing this world needs is *more* sarcasm. Do something positive in the world.
Cause we all know that the more obnoxious lights and blinking crap you have visible makes your computer run faster. Kinda like placing a Type-R logo on you Honda Civic.
STOP the Madness!
It seems to me that there are two kind of people who go in for case modding. On the one hand, you have your causual modders. They like pre-fab windows. Might add a cold cathode light and some round cables. These represent perhaps the majority.
However, then you have the real "hard core" modders. The kind of people who build their computers in to old radios. The kind of people who want to do some special cooling project, or who want to have a unique case. My personal favorites are the concept cases, and mods that have some practical purpose (like better temperature monitoring for servers etc). They want to be creative. It's not just about pimpage.
This memory seems to be for members for the first catagory.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Seriously case prices have done nothing but go up in the last year or so with many of the vanilla boxes not being stocked anymore. Though I've had my eye on a prefab'd watercooled case for awhile due to the noise levels I still have not seen the prices of it go down where I'd consider it acceptable.
:)
If you consider the case which retails for maybe 100 dollars and a pump that runs 30 dollars and another 30 for hoses and such I still dont see the point of paying 300 for a case for that amount of silence. And there's still the amount of heat that's being output into the house to deal with. I'm considering installing a duct from the office room to a window or through the wall to pipe all the excess heat out of the house.
I'm sure I'd make it back on the 300 dollar case by pumping all that hot air back outside except in the winter when I wouldnt mind it being put into the house
America "layed the smackdown" eh?
I think Soviet Russia would have shown the Americans and the Germans the true meaning "blitzkrieg", and right now we would all be speaking Russian and writing in Cyrillic if it wasn't for the joint efforts of Britain and America in their taming of the Big Red Machine (Soviet Russia for those out there who can not comprehend metaphors)...
As for the situation with the French and the american Revolution, we would not be an independent country today without the joint efforts of France (Marquis de Layfayette), Spain (Senor Galveston brought the Spanish Carribbean fleet to break the British blockade), Holland (who assisted by donating money to the war effort), and various German soldiers (such as Baron von Steuben, the man who trained tthe Continental Army at Valley Forge)
1024x768 display with shared memory. Hah!
People who rice up their PCs should be locked in a large cage with people who rice up their cars
No way! The last time that happended 2 Fast 2 Furious was created. Think of the consequences, man!
Call me a little paranoid but this reminds me of the data leakage problems of some communication devices (Modems, DSU's, etc). Have to 'nix the plexiglass case mod now 8->. Here is the article: Information Leakage from Optical Emissions or Google HTML here
The original mainframes and minis had lights which were wired into the CPU registers. You could see what each register was doing by looking at the banks of blinking lights.
Computer teaching boxen had LED's which were wired into memory locations (you could choose which location via DIP switches). You could tell what each memory location held by looking at the banks of blinking lights.
- - - - - - - - - - -
I am a programmer. I am paid to produce syntax not grammar. Deal with it.
Cynism.
It is full of Cynism. Sarcasm is what sometimes makes it beareable.
my
The first thing I thought of when I saw this is that it might be useful for profiling complex algorithms. You might be able to get a general idea of how many times you were missing the cache, etc.
Of course, a cache miss indicator would be a lot more useful, but this might do something.
They might have swiped that from the PDP-11/70. It had an 8-bit display register. RSX-11M, and I assume other DEC operating systems, had a SYSGEN option that added code to the task scheduler to put a oscillating pattern in the display register.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
I think the red LED should be used on ECC RAM to indicate which exact bit caused my registered DDR to create a BSOD. I'll just watch carefully through my case window and shut down the system before the offending bit gets to the output of the DIMM.
Remember the "Wopper" super-computer in War Games? It had a deep pulsing hum and was lit up like Vegas. We kind of laughed at it as Hollywood overdoing something, but it may just be back in style now.
Table-ized A.I.
/me looks fondly at the dead-plain, black, monolithic PC case under his desk, adorned with nothing but a small case badge that bears a photo of an F-117.
I'll see you and raise you... well, lower you a boring beige mini-tower with two missing 5 1/4" drive-bay covers (I should replace those and vacuum out the cat hair), a non-seated floppy drive (the missing drive-bay covers mean I can hold onto the drive when I'm putting a disk in, which is never) and a missing reset button (actually, the turbo button is missing, but I moved the reset button over there because it kept getting bumped). At least the LEDs work: one green for power, one red for drive activity. It looks every bit the P-166 it is.
(Not that I'm looking for pity or anything; it's just a glorified terminal, quite adequate for what I use it for (reading Slashdot, obviously). There's a nice X-term sitting in the living room waiting to replace it. Beige pizza-box, but at least it's all in one piece, and has a 20" screen attached. But if I can't connect my ten-year-old extra-clicky IBM keyboard to it, I'll be very sad.)
Slashdot's token middle-aged housewife
I don't have a data center to play with; my budget is much more modest. As a compromise I have draped the Christams tree lights around my computer. Coool!
Every website in the UK, and possibly even every website outside of there, is going to have to be copied and stored in British libraries
So I hear, but it doesn't bother me. I have no intentions of following such a stupid law, and I doubt anyone else in their right mind would either. Its really just a silly consequence of poor wording in a draft law anyway; its not a concrete intention. I expect it will be changed before it is passed.
Does it also come with a huge wing on the rear deck and a muffler that would shame a Costco-sized can of Maxwell House? Does it have a huge "Corsair" logo across the windshield?
FFS, this is just a silly gimmick. It's just screaming out "pay more for this! You already paid for all those other stupid LEDs, why not me!"
...after all, aren't all computers supposed to have row after row of blinking lights?!
I misread this article at first. I kept substituting the word 'memory' with 'brain' for some reason ...
:P
Just so the rest of you are crystal, this article is not about little lights that flash when you think about stuff.
How cool it would be to get on a bus and see a row of guys wearing these flashing lights on their foreheads, which in turn are flickering wildly as they nervously glance over at the blonde a few rows in front
Now that Would look like the WOPR !
r rev/warpages/joshua.html
....
http://www.calarts.edu/~nstrum/macmame/reviews/wa
Which is just what I have always desired, to complete my world domination plans
Electronic Music Made Using Linux http://soundcloud.com/polyp
Reminds me of the optical vulnerability whereby the data being passed over an external modem could be read optically resulting in paranoid admins putting masking tape over the front.
So if the lights on the memory flash as data is accessed, it may be possible to read that data optically.
Who will be the first?
-Arnulf
My next casemod is going to be a solid black monolith with a hidden cover for the drive bay access. It will look like a polished solid black rectangular box with no details. Kinda 2001 style. No lights whatsoever, and watercooled with only one 120mm silent low speed fan.
There was a diagnostic card sold for the Macintosh several years back that had several red blinking LEDs for clock pulse, adb (Apple desktop bus) and other activity. Ran plastic tubing from these LEDs to the front of the case to show the regularly blinking lights.
With more blinking lights in the computer then it will make more show to have a case with a window in it. You will really see the computer working now.
Why not just hook up a heating element while they're at it?
Granted, flashing LEDs won't be the greatest source of heat, but I know from experience that LEDs can get pretty darn hot.
I released that thing as shareware (There's even one site that Google knows about that still has VID_HOLE.ZIP [for their subscribers], which actually works under Win9x for Real Mode drivers) but nobody ever sent me the $5 registration. I wonder if anyone (other than I) ever found a use for the thing?
[100% ISO 646 Compliant]
SVM, ERGO MONSTRO.
whats the point if you dont have a case mod to see the lights?
Really now. What does ESR think of that?
http://www.corsairmicro.com/main/images/Web1.mov
Kinda cheesy video and Andy looks the wankah, but it's got some nifty blinky lights so let's slashdot it anyway.
1) Next time your PHB "needs" a new PC get one of these factory mod cases with a window.
2) Install these fancy new RAM modules with the blinking lights as well as some of the other things you can see at any LAN party.
3) Profit!
Note: ALL PHBs love blinking lights.
its not a concrete intention. I expect it will be changed before it is passed.
and that is exactly why you will be wondering the reason why the day they haul YOU off to the Gulag because you refused to do anything about preventing it from being passed in the first place
I'm good with numbers -
Anyone else wondering why they decided on porn music for the video clip advertising this? (here http://www.corsairmicro.com/main/images/Web1.mov)
Maybe gamers (who this is aimed at) also need extreme memory for their porn too.
My subtext is just a figment of your imagination.
I used to use DOSMax, SHELLMax and ENVMax. Don't have any memory stats, but google found this. QEMM386.SYS + DOXMax and friends gave him 644,384 (629K) conventional memory free. And he has a ton of stuff loaded high. (SMARTDRV? GAG!!)
I think I once got a SVGA system to recognize 704KB. I must have been able to use the A000 segment somehow. Some programs that played around a bit with memory (there were many back then) freaked on that setup.
My inner casemodder wonders why things like this include LEDs, rather than sockets/jumpers onto which you could put your own LEDs. I mean, motherboards use jumpers for you to attach LEDs for drive activity, power, etc., so why not network cards, usb and pci buses, keyboard and mouse channels, memory, etc. Then you could REALLY have a disco on the side of your case.
Self Serving Sig: Hosting Comparison
On the plus, hopefully all of the other RAM manufacturers will see this as the way of the future, and lower the price of their "obsolete" LED-less RAM.
Karma? Karma? I don't need no stinkin' karma.
Oh, I guess I misunderstood what kind of memory they meant. So they are talking about computer memory here?
I clicked on the Read more link 'cuz I thought they were talking about LED's that would show when my memory was being accessed. Jeez, I could be a real babe magnet with a couple rows of lights blinking frantically across my forehead.
Why doesn't someone invent some of those, eh? It would really bring in the chicks, I'm sure. Like, maybe, buttloads.
worthless feature, pointless effort, Geek catcher!
Unfortunately I got talked into my folks giving it to a guy when I was away who said he was making something for handicapped, which I don't think every materialized. That was dumb!
I wouldn't mind having some LEDs to show what each key on the keyboard was, it would probably be relaxing. Maybe a software version is not that hard but not sure it would be as pleasing.
Video memory with a built in high resolution LCD display.
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
Is a card that plugs into the pci bus with some 8panel led's on it. On boot, displays the post codes. Cross-reference the code displayed when the system halts with the table in the accompanying book for your bios and voila - u know what the problem is. Good for systems which don't make it to loading the OS.
There are various other types of these cards.
Yay me!
I knew it... I knew it... All I had to do was wait about 20 years and the FLI instruction would come back into vogue... Buwahahahahahahahahaha... I shall riSE again!
* FLI was an instruction on the PDP-7 series if I recall correctly which flashed the front panel lights impressively until executed again...
Just open your box (although if you're the type of person buying this stuff it's probably already in a fish bowl flashing like a deranged disco ball on your desk) and impress your friends as you start up your favourite raytracer with an obscene polygon count as you take the memory into the "red zone", wow! Cool man, so interactive and all I need to do is take of the thumb screws and crawl under my desk to check out the light show.
Seriously, heatsinks (and blinkenlights) seem to crawl up everywhere. First it was the CPU, then GPU, now chipset, GB ethernet and memory. What is this going to do to PC prices? Do we need a new motherboard factor completely designed around "the mother of all heatsinks"? How long before heat-transfer costs more than the actual components?
10 ?"Hello World" life was simple then
Some wanker always has to pipe up and say he dont get what the deal is, and offer offensive comparisons to the import "tuner" scene. Not that I am offended by the import tuner scene, but if you were to call it "crackering up" my PC I would be personally offended. If you're so sure it will blow over, then please just wait it out and stop making an ass of yourself.
Aren't I allowed to have a hobby? I've learned many interesting things by sanding my computer instead of growing fat in front of it. Did I ever lord it over you, or force you to look? If I was even trying to make you jealous, I'd say it was working. Having an original idea and creating it with my own two hands will always be cool, that *IS* the standard. Doing difficult work -- and doing it well -- with tools and physical labor will always be respected, regardless of what can be ordered online. It can be a display of planning and craftsmanship. It does not always come out well. Unskilled people do try; many get better on their second or fifth efforts. This is my PC. There are many like it, but this red one with the gold scallops, smoked acrylic window, and blue cold-cathode illimination is mine that I planned and created myself and I think it looks pretty damn spiffy.
Your post inspires me to take your plain-black case and beat your head in with it. Get back to your deathmatch, you anonymous cowardly weapons fetishist; you are not amusing.
=Sigs without separators have merely achieved an annoying oneness with the message.=
I can't think of anything more thrilling than staring at my motherboard. "Look at the those electrons go!"
I guess it is still cheaper than whoring-up your car.
I needed to use Babel Fish to translate your awful writing. Even the structure of it is horrible.
How about having the LEDs indicate where exactly Window's latest memory conflict has taken place? Actually that may not be a good idea, it would fry the LEDs.
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
The politically correct term is "Innuit Sex Worker"
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
An F-117 clearly makes you a Popular Mechanics War Fetish geek.
I'm going to start marketing tinted side windows to cut down on the LED/neon glare.
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
How about a big box that displays any crazy image you want on it. It could even be connected to the CPU and the RAM for real time displays! I'll call it...A MONITOR
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
Back in the old days when you needed a different boot disk for every game I used to get out the graph paper and optimize my memory by hand.
The worst I ever did was come out equal with the optimizer and usally I could save 10K ~ 20K.
What a lame "video". 3 seconds per frame (not fps) and some stupid music to hog up probably 80% of the download.
Might as well sent me to a page that flipped through a series of still pictures and a midi bakground sound (which probably would have been better).
HOWTO: Be French
Version 0.9.1
Here's a a quick guide to becoming French.
1 - Befriend tyrants
Tyrants are okay as long as they are Anti-American and paying you money.
2 - Call anyone who disagrees with you a Nazi.
It's surprising, but calling someone a Nazi works well. It ends their career. No evidence is required.
3 - Act snotty to everyone.
Be rude and condescending toward those few tourists who still visit France. If you treat them badly enough, they'll want to return.
4 - Pretend your country still matters
Wipe from your mind that France is essentially a third world nation with a UN veto.
5 - Never take your turn.
All ways ignore queues. Push your way to the front. Always ignore traffic lights.
6 - Study the Koran.
Given the large numbers of Islamic voters in France, accept that nude beaches, gays, lesbians, and women without chadors are no longer parts of French culture.
7 - Never bathe.
8 - Sell military and nuclear technology to terrorists and anybody who hates Americans.
So there you have it. Those 8 steps should have you helping kill innocent people, aiding terrorists, and acting like a French moron in no time. France awaits you, cowardly slimeball! Just remember to turn the lights off if you're the last one out.
Why do people preface flames with "...Not a flame.."?
Dickless, why assume every post that expresses the slightest bit of anti-UK sentiment comes from America? I'm Canadian, and I couldn't care less if you whining maggots all rot.
How to be a European...
1. Forget your history
2. Find an American to blame for your problems.
3. Be invaded by islamic fundamentalists. Do nothing about it.
4. Cry to the UN because you have no power
5. Be ignored by world powers.
6. Work 30 hours a week because it is "too stressful" to put in a 40 hour work week.
7. Take a month of vacation in the summer and lay around naked in some park.
8. Find something else to blame America about.
9. Get taken over by some evil force and ask America to come and save you.
Does that sound about right?