First of all, the gas used by spinning a small fan is nominal at best, and most likely that and much more gas is being wasted by other components that could be eliminated or just optimized.
Second, it wastes much more gas if you must first turn it into electricity, and then use it to do work. The losses right there quite probably make up the difference in gas... At least driving here in the desert where it's hot most of the time.
"The first change a user will notice after installing this system," Gotting said, "is an improvement in fuel economy. The power absorbed by a rotating fan is much higher than most people believe, and it is proportional to the cube of the speed. The fact is that a direct-drive fan can consume as much as 27 engine horsepower at 3,000 rpm, yet the level of cooling this represents is required less than five percent of the time in most applications. Until now, though, there has been no practical way to control that power consumption.
The article also addresses a lot of your other complaints about changing the fan system from a mechanical one. But, what it really comes down to, is there were fundamental engineering problems that people were trying to solve. The electric fans in cars helped solve some of them. The article I linked discussed another type of fan system that tries to take it one step further.
Well, I'm a Linux user and a gamer, and while it is true that currently I have a windows partition, I am using it less and less as more games get ported natively and as WineX matures. For me, it is a big benefit to not have to reboot into Windows to play a game. Also, Windows98 SE is my last version of Windows. I'm not willing to upgrade to XP, I change my hardware too often to deal with the registration headaches. So, as soon as Win98 runs out of steam, I'm all Linux, and that is not too far down the road. So, while you are right that today everyone who plays games dual boots, it is certainly not true for me that I will be for a whole lot longer, and I imagine that a lot of other people are in the same position I am.
Yes, but you are ignoring that fact that Sun does in fact have complete control over the hardware in that Solaris box (unless you are running x86 Solaris)
130 F is only about 54 C. AMD's processors are rated for a max of 90 C (the XPs are anyway, it varies slightly from processor to processor, but that is ballpark). 130 F is not at all dangerous (assuming you were actually measuring from a thermal resistor, and not from a thermistor under the core). The fact that you got the temperature down to 105 F (about 40 C), is simply a don't care from a part lifetime point of view. Most likely they are designed to last 10 years at 110 C (maybe 125 if they are more pessimistic).
Well, depends on what you mean by "supports open source" and "protect itself". If they plan to open source the software that they are writing, then the fact that they publish that software means that it becomes prior art. That protects them from someone else coming and patenting the idea in their software and forcing them to pay royalties.
Re:Nothing new here - take a look at the hp-pa 880
on
Intel's Big Chip
·
· Score: 2, Informative
The latency is no secret. It is a 2 cycle latency cache. Pseudo 2-way set associative (you can load from an even and an odd row at the same time, but not 2 even or 2 odd)
They have been using these things in big servers for awhile now. Not because they perform better, but because you don't want the reliability problem of "What if my fan dies".
McKinley is not a desktop CPU, nor was it ever meant to be. The sort of power supplies you see in serious workstation and servers are not the 400W things you see in a desktop. Also, while 130W is high for this space, it is not astronomical. CPUs were pushing the 80-100W envelope easily.
Re:So, McKinley isn't a properly designed system?
on
Itanium Update
·
· Score: 2, Informative
McKinley is the CPU, the system in the box that the CPU gets plugged into. So, if the box (system) is properly designed, the CPU never needs to throttle itself.
Future processors will, at least partly, be reconfigurable, that is they will load a set of instructions and save it, and then have to load
the data only.
You just described a cache, and they have been used for years.
Look at MarkusQ's examples again. "Yeah, right!" is the best one since it's so simple. There is more than one correct way to intone
it. How do you know whether to it's meant ironically or as an exclamation of revelation? I think you need Intelligence to correctly
make that decision.
The simple answer to that is, without more context, you can't. If all I have is the one phrase "Yeah, right!", I can't figure out how it is supposed to be spoken either.
In all likelyhood, when you buy a car, you have no idea who made the steering wheel, the engine, or anything else in the car. You only know who assembled it. The car manufacturers are more like whoever you buy your computer from. It is their job to assemble the computer into something usable, and if you are like most users, you don't know, nor do you care where they pulled all the parts from.
Automatically delete user directories that have not been accessed within the last days. This is an effective mechanism for only
keeping information on the system for active users. (ON) (WTF! Oops, last years holiday photos just disappeared. Junior, did you
delete dad's pr0n collection?)
Oh, like there is ever a few day period when the pr0n collection hasn't been accessed.
I think that would really only be true if the proprietary part of the program could run independantly of the GPL dll. If the program requires that DLL to run, and do anything useful (other than displaying an error message:) ) than you really can't claim they are separate, no matter how you distribute them.
I can answer 4)
The sapphire SOI stuff, was mostly by government contract, for circuitry that was going to operate in space. It turns out that sapphire offers good shielding vs. radiation. I would not be surprised to find out that there are still things that are manufactured on saphire for the same reason, but it was a specialized process, and never really intended for large scale commercial use AFAIK.
IBM's process is what is know as a SIMOX process, where they implant oxygen at very high energies into a silicon wafer, before they start to process the wafer. They then anneal the wafer (heat it up) so that the implanted oxygen will combine with the silicon to form silicon dioxide. The problems with this process are that oxygen is big, so when you implant it at these high energies, it causes a lot of damage to the silicon, which is hard to anneal out, so your defect densities tend to be very high, which means you get lower yields. Also, it is hard to control the implantation depth of the oxygen, and for various reasons, the depth of the barried oxide layer happens to be very important (it is more important that it is uniform, than the actual depth, unless you are designing fully depleted devices, which they are not).
Also, the oxide layer which is created after the annealing process tends to be low quality.
However, you do get a significant performance, and/or heat dissipation improvement from SOI. OTOH, you get significantly higher leakage, and hysterisis (sp?) in the threshold voltage, which means for dynamic logic, you are going to need more margin on your holders. To get the full advantage from SOI, you really need to design your chip from scratch to take advantage of it (and avoid the pitfalls), and it is not clear to me that AMD has done that. They could be in for a very difficult debug effort on this chip.
Re:Wasted memory bandwidth and SMP
on
Pentium IV study
·
· Score: 1
Not quite as bad as you might think. If it is an SMP system (above two way, anyway), it is probably a server. Most server applications have very good data locality (like database apps, for instance). Notice that the bandwidth they are "wasting" is from have 128 byte lines. This is only a waste if you have poor data locality, if your data locality is good, then having 128 byte lines helps you (poor man's pre-fetching, basically). However, in a server environment, the P4 would be slaughtered by it's small caches (look at the cache sizes on something like an HP, IBM, or SUN RISC server, they are huge, because keeping the CPU away from the memory system is huge in high-MP systems). So, the 128 byte lines probably don't hurt the P4 in MP systems, but the small cache will make sure that it will never really scale above 4 way anyway.
For me, often the point of having the source code isn't if I can incorporate the fix right now, but the fact that I can track the bug down! I was coding with a C++ class library once, and they had a bug in the library where they forgot to deallocate something in their destructor which they had allocated in their constructor. This caused my program to core dump. Luckily, we had a source code license for the library, because I never would have figured out what was going on otherwise. (There is also the point that it is easier to convince someone the problem is in their code when you can point out the source file and line number:) )
A couple of things on that one... First, you don't have to plead guilty to a speeding ticket. You can also plead "No contest" which means you are paying the ticket, even though you don't admit guilt. Also, when you get to the felony point of speeding, you HAVE to show up in court. You no longer have a choice to just pay the ticket and move on. (Well, at least that is true in Indiana, I am assuming other states are the same).
Sure, I was the "smart" kid, whose parent was an administrator in the school system. So, some kids didn't like me, and would pick on me. I would often show up outside of class early, after lunch because I had nothing better to do, and I remember once some "older" kids came by and decided it would be funny if they licked their fingers and smudged my glasses. For the longest time, I never understood why some people didn't like me, it really hurt.
So, then I transferred to a gifted and talented school, and there was no more problems with the other kids, none of us really liked sports, and we all came from close to the same background. The administrators on the other hand were a different story. This was a school on a University campus, which meant we were all staying in dorms, so they felt they needed to give us a bunch of totalitarian rules to keep us in line. I thought the rules were wrong, so I broke them, and when I quoted the constitution of the United States, and of the State in my defense, boy did that piss them off. So, I dropped out. Called my parents at 4am, balling my eyes out, didn't know what to do, and my parents got in their car at 4 am, and drove 2 hours and picked me up and took me home. Then I went to college, and got my BS and MS in electrical engineering.
What's the point of all of this? Basically that things could have been much different. If I hadn't had loving supportive parents, I might not have made it. That's where all this has to start. You want me to rat out depressed teens? Ok... It's all of them. Every single one. There are too many hormones, and too much pressure for them not to be depressed at some point. I know we like to talk about how tough it is for "geek" or "different" teens, but the truth is that it is also really tough for the "popular" ones as well. Often they are under pressure from their parents to be popular, they are under pressure to be the best football player, to be the winner of the beauty contest, to be whatever.
If you want to stop kids from having problems, there are really only two ways. One is to promote open communication so that they know they are all going through the same things. They all have hormones running through them a million miles an hour, they are all confused, and they all have their problems. The other way is to give every teen a set of caring and supportive parents, who help their child discover who they are and what they want from life. BOTH of those solutions start at home.
To try to get back on topic... Implementing something like Pinkerton is proposing only makes establishing open dialog between teens that much harder. It's already hard enough with the stigma that our society puts on talking about our feelings, and sharing our experiences with each other. Why bother, when you can just call a number, and get that "poor disturbed" kid some "help".
No kidding, don't take my man away! I mean, having a nice GUI environment for accessing help is great, but there are a lot of times that I am at the command line, and I just want to type 'man foo' to find something out. So, if we are going to have a new help system, I think we need to make sure that we keep an easy to use command line version available too.
I saw one being demoed in a local A/V store here in Colorado. I assumed it was available for sale, but didn't check, because why in the world would I want that?:)
You're right, the DMCA is not a problem in this case. The UCITA, however is a problem, and it would legitamive EULAs. AFAIK the UCITA has not become law anywhere, but it is up for vote in several states.
Slashdot Mirror
The truth of Apollo 13 is finally released...
Hmm... I have a few problems with that assertion.
First of all, the gas used by spinning a small fan is nominal at best, and most likely that and much more gas is being wasted by other components that could be eliminated or just optimized.
Second, it wastes much more gas if you must first turn it into electricity, and then use it to do work. The losses right there quite probably make up the difference in gas... At least driving here in the desert where it's hot most of the time.
To quote from this article , you would be wrong:
The article also addresses a lot of your other complaints about changing the fan system from a mechanical one. But, what it really comes down to, is there were fundamental engineering problems that people were trying to solve. The electric fans in cars helped solve some of them. The article I linked discussed another type of fan system that tries to take it one step further.
Well, I'm a Linux user and a gamer, and while it is true that currently I have a windows partition, I am using it less and less as more games get ported natively and as WineX matures. For me, it is a big benefit to not have to reboot into Windows to play a game. Also, Windows98 SE is my last version of Windows. I'm not willing to upgrade to XP, I change my hardware too often to deal with the registration headaches. So, as soon as Win98 runs out of steam, I'm all Linux, and that is not too far down the road. So, while you are right that today everyone who plays games dual boots, it is certainly not true for me that I will be for a whole lot longer, and I imagine that a lot of other people are in the same position I am.
Yes, but you are ignoring that fact that Sun does in fact have complete control over the hardware in that Solaris box (unless you are running x86 Solaris)
130 F is only about 54 C. AMD's processors are rated for a max of 90 C (the XPs are anyway, it varies slightly from processor to processor, but that is ballpark). 130 F is not at all dangerous (assuming you were actually measuring from a thermal resistor, and not from a thermistor under the core). The fact that you got the temperature down to 105 F (about 40 C), is simply a don't care from a part lifetime point of view. Most likely they are designed to last 10 years at 110 C (maybe 125 if they are more pessimistic).
Well, depends on what you mean by "supports open source" and "protect itself". If they plan to open source the software that they are writing, then the fact that they publish that software means that it becomes prior art. That protects them from someone else coming and patenting the idea in their software and forcing them to pay royalties.
The latency is no secret. It is a 2 cycle latency cache. Pseudo 2-way set associative (you can load from an even and an odd row at the same time, but not 2 even or 2 odd)
They have been using these things in big servers for awhile now. Not because they perform better, but because you don't want the reliability problem of "What if my fan dies".
McKinley is not a desktop CPU, nor was it ever meant to be. The sort of power supplies you see in serious workstation and servers are not the 400W things you see in a desktop. Also, while 130W is high for this space, it is not astronomical. CPUs were pushing the 80-100W envelope easily.
McKinley is the CPU, the system in the box that the CPU gets plugged into. So, if the box (system) is properly designed, the CPU never needs to throttle itself.
No. Sun's chips have always been fabbed by TI. I believe, however, that TI just recently started fabbing chips with CU interconnect.
Future processors will, at least partly, be reconfigurable, that is they will load a set of instructions and save it, and then have to load the data only.
You just described a cache, and they have been used for years.
Look at MarkusQ's examples again. "Yeah, right!" is the best one since it's so simple. There is more than one correct way to intone it. How do you know whether to it's meant ironically or as an exclamation of revelation? I think you need Intelligence to correctly make that decision.
The simple answer to that is, without more context, you can't. If all I have is the one phrase "Yeah, right!", I can't figure out how it is supposed to be spoken either.
In all likelyhood, when you buy a car, you have no idea who made the steering wheel, the engine, or anything else in the car. You only know who assembled it. The car manufacturers are more like whoever you buy your computer from. It is their job to assemble the computer into something usable, and if you are like most users, you don't know, nor do you care where they pulled all the parts from.
Automatically delete user directories that have not been accessed within the last days. This is an effective mechanism for only keeping information on the system for active users. (ON) (WTF! Oops, last years holiday photos just disappeared. Junior, did you delete dad's pr0n collection?)
Oh, like there is ever a few day period when the pr0n collection hasn't been accessed.
I think that would really only be true if the proprietary part of the program could run independantly of the GPL dll. If the program requires that DLL to run, and do anything useful (other than displaying an error message :) ) than you really can't claim they are separate, no matter how you distribute them.
There is no such thing as a "Patent Secret" :)
The whole point of the patent is that to get one, you have to reveal everything you know about it
I can answer 4)
The sapphire SOI stuff, was mostly by government contract, for circuitry that was going to operate in space. It turns out that sapphire offers good shielding vs. radiation. I would not be surprised to find out that there are still things that are manufactured on saphire for the same reason, but it was a specialized process, and never really intended for large scale commercial use AFAIK.
IBM's process is what is know as a SIMOX process, where they implant oxygen at very high energies into a silicon wafer, before they start to process the wafer. They then anneal the wafer (heat it up) so that the implanted oxygen will combine with the silicon to form silicon dioxide. The problems with this process are that oxygen is big, so when you implant it at these high energies, it causes a lot of damage to the silicon, which is hard to anneal out, so your defect densities tend to be very high, which means you get lower yields. Also, it is hard to control the implantation depth of the oxygen, and for various reasons, the depth of the barried oxide layer happens to be very important (it is more important that it is uniform, than the actual depth, unless you are designing fully depleted devices, which they are not).
Also, the oxide layer which is created after the annealing process tends to be low quality.
However, you do get a significant performance, and/or heat dissipation improvement from SOI. OTOH, you get significantly higher leakage, and hysterisis (sp?) in the threshold voltage, which means for dynamic logic, you are going to need more margin on your holders. To get the full advantage from SOI, you really need to design your chip from scratch to take advantage of it (and avoid the pitfalls), and it is not clear to me that AMD has done that. They could be in for a very difficult debug effort on this chip.
Not quite as bad as you might think. If it is an SMP system (above two way, anyway), it is probably a server. Most server applications have very good data locality (like database apps, for instance). Notice that the bandwidth they are "wasting" is from have 128 byte lines. This is only a waste if you have poor data locality, if your data locality is good, then having 128 byte lines helps you (poor man's pre-fetching, basically). However, in a server environment, the P4 would be slaughtered by it's small caches (look at the cache sizes on something like an HP, IBM, or SUN RISC server, they are huge, because keeping the CPU away from the memory system is huge in high-MP systems). So, the 128 byte lines probably don't hurt the P4 in MP systems, but the small cache will make sure that it will never really scale above 4 way anyway.
For me, often the point of having the source code isn't if I can incorporate the fix right now, but the fact that I can track the bug down! I was coding with a C++ class library once, and they had a bug in the library where they forgot to deallocate something in their destructor which they had allocated in their constructor. This caused my program to core dump. Luckily, we had a source code license for the library, because I never would have figured out what was going on otherwise. (There is also the point that it is easier to convince someone the problem is in their code when you can point out the source file and line number :) )
A couple of things on that one... First, you don't have to plead guilty to a speeding ticket. You can also plead "No contest" which means you are paying the ticket, even though you don't admit guilt. Also, when you get to the felony point of speeding, you HAVE to show up in court. You no longer have a choice to just pay the ticket and move on. (Well, at least that is true in Indiana, I am assuming other states are the same).
So, then I transferred to a gifted and talented school, and there was no more problems with the other kids, none of us really liked sports, and we all came from close to the same background. The administrators on the other hand were a different story. This was a school on a University campus, which meant we were all staying in dorms, so they felt they needed to give us a bunch of totalitarian rules to keep us in line. I thought the rules were wrong, so I broke them, and when I quoted the constitution of the United States, and of the State in my defense, boy did that piss them off. So, I dropped out. Called my parents at 4am, balling my eyes out, didn't know what to do, and my parents got in their car at 4 am, and drove 2 hours and picked me up and took me home. Then I went to college, and got my BS and MS in electrical engineering.
What's the point of all of this? Basically that things could have been much different. If I hadn't had loving supportive parents, I might not have made it. That's where all this has to start. You want me to rat out depressed teens? Ok... It's all of them. Every single one. There are too many hormones, and too much pressure for them not to be depressed at some point. I know we like to talk about how tough it is for "geek" or "different" teens, but the truth is that it is also really tough for the "popular" ones as well. Often they are under pressure from their parents to be popular, they are under pressure to be the best football player, to be the winner of the beauty contest, to be whatever.
If you want to stop kids from having problems, there are really only two ways. One is to promote open communication so that they know they are all going through the same things. They all have hormones running through them a million miles an hour, they are all confused, and they all have their problems. The other way is to give every teen a set of caring and supportive parents, who help their child discover who they are and what they want from life. BOTH of those solutions start at home.
To try to get back on topic... Implementing something like Pinkerton is proposing only makes establishing open dialog between teens that much harder. It's already hard enough with the stigma that our society puts on talking about our feelings, and sharing our experiences with each other. Why bother, when you can just call a number, and get that "poor disturbed" kid some "help".
No kidding, don't take my man away! I mean, having a nice GUI environment for accessing help is great, but there are a lot of times that I am at the command line, and I just want to type 'man foo' to find something out. So, if we are going to have a new help system, I think we need to make sure that we keep an easy to use command line version available too.
I saw one being demoed in a local A/V store here in Colorado. I assumed it was available for sale, but didn't check, because why in the world would I want that? :)
You're right, the DMCA is not a problem in this case. The UCITA, however is a problem, and it would legitamive EULAs. AFAIK the UCITA has not become law anywhere, but it is up for vote in several states.