The nice thing about PCI is that quite a few computers, old or contemporary, still have a fair number of PCI slots. With one or two truly esoteric exceptions, AGP was one slot only. You can never have too many video outs...
Are you planning to design and fab your own motherboard, as well? With the exception of hardcore; but largely irrelevant, hobbyists wire-wrapping their TTL micros, nobody "builds" computers. They buy a few high level chunks of a computer, with well defined physical and logical interfaces, and plug them in to one another. That doesn't make you an OEM, that makes your motherboard manufacturer the OEM and you the systems integrator. Unless you think that MSI will magically be more cooperative than Dell, that places you in exactly the same position...
Are the motherboards upon which all of today's "DIY" just-plug-it-where-it-fits "custom built" computers depend not OEM now?
Yes, it definitely will affect OEM products(such as, oh, every laptop you might want to use); but team "Just Build Your Own!" isn't in a substantially better position unless the OEMs that make motherboards are substantially more helpful than the OEMs that make whiteboxes(and paying $50 extra for the "enthusiast edition" that lets you do your own keyfill isn't going to cut it)...
True, though those devs were slapped down because they were stupid enough to overtly claim specific medical benefits. The FDA can, and sometimes will, slap you down for doing that. However, if your product falls under the DHSEA, you can get away with practically anything, so long as you make your claims in slightly oblique language and don't kill too many people. If it is a food item, you can get away with a similarly broad collection of "Qualified Health Claims".
In the case of a game, which definitely isn't going to be killing anybody, and probably isn't at the top of the list of the dwindling population of FDA inspectors, you could almost certainly run into no trouble so long as you kept your statements of the form "$GAME$ engages player's short-term memory and executive function" rather than "$GAME$ improves player's short-term memory and executive function". At that point, you'd just need a promising preliminary study or two, or some positive word-of-mouth, and there would be absolutely no legal obstacle to selling it, and tacitly promoting it for use in environments where patients with schizophrenic symptoms are treated...
If you make direct, overt, health claims, or try to market a drug that isn't either grandfathered or approved, the law is not your friend; but there are a number of ways around that, most being actively exploited.
The true scotsman is wearing a kilt. The false scotsman is wearing a suit and carrying 1.2 trillion in secret fed loans.
A distinction is only a "no true scotsman" if there isn't a sensible rule of assignment that allows true and false scotsmanship to be distinguished. There are, arguably, edge cases; but distinguishing the American financial services sector as "crony capitalism" isn't a terribly bold move.
It's quite a panopticonic fiefdom they have there... Still haven't caught London in terms of cameras; but the sinister image-processing central computer is a nice touch, as is the 'fusion center' and the oblique references to anti-aircraft capability...
Given the absence, thus far, of 'heroic cop wounded in line of duty while saving city from anarchist scum' stories, I'm going to go out on a limb and suspect that the protesters represent no meaningful threat to the cops who've been containing them. And, since riot cops never commit, much less revel in, the sort of activity that makes people call 'cops' 'pigs', I can only assume that the heavily equipped and rather illiberal police forces of New York have been defending one of the major local industries from outsiders with considerable zeal...
The noteworthy thing appears to be that they are trying to get a full FDA-approved-for-the-treatment-of badge, rather than just generating some modestly positive results and selling it semiformally based on the fact that you have pretty broad latitude when trying potentially theraputic stuff that isn't drugs(which, as you note, has been going on for ages). Because that strategy has already been in use for so long, apparently reasonably successfully, I'm wondering why they are trying this; but it is novel.
I'd be very curious to know what the cost/benefit is for them to seek FDA approval is: Their game has copyright protection even if it is of no theraputic value whatsoever, and games are only ever regulated by Team Morality if they are overtly sexual or violent, so they are totally clear to sell the thing subject only to the generic constraints of trade laws.
Similarly, friends/family/etc. of patients are free to do more or less whatever in the hopes that it might help, assuming it isn't otherwise forbidden, and buying a game wouldn't be. Even psychologists and psychiatrists have a fair amount of latitude to try unproven things, so long as they don't amount to malpractice(and, since a game is pretty much a waste of time at worst, that would be a hard claim to make.)
Because of that, I'm curious as to why they would go for full FDA approval, rather than just kick out a few positive preliminary studies and/or some word of mouth, and move more units, faster, albeit probably at somewhat lower unit price, rather than go through the entire approval process, with the risks and delays that can entail, in the hopes of getting it formally recognized as a treatment...
While this obviously doesn't apply to the lowest bowels of IT digi-janitor hell, if you can land an IT gig at a shop of the correct size/managerial style, CS chops can be a serious asset:
There are more than a few small/midsize places where the in-house supply of even scripting talent is rather tepid, so a lot of IT stuff either gets done manually, or is automated with some fairly expensive "solution" packages.
Such a job won't involve "pure" CS, it'll still be IT; but if you are good enough at CS that anybody would consider hiring you to write actual programs, you should be able to out-script all but the most senior or *nix oriented "IT" people, as well has having no fear of configuring any of the not-always-user-friendly-but-powerful-and-cheap SNMP monitoring/network status/inventory/etc. packages that are available; but often unused in favor of more expensive but easier tools.
You might find that this, in itself, is a decent job. If not, (assuming you can get past HR's pigeonhole), a "I came to an IT department and automated the shit out of it" story isn't nearly as stigmatizing as "I came knowing CS, I left knowing how to reinstall windows and replace toner cartridges!"
I can't tell if B&N is less evil, or if this just a classic case of the #2-#N players being nicer because they have no chance at catching #1 if they attempt a slavish "just like his walled garden, but worse!" offering..
In the specific context of bootloader behavior, we will have to wait and see: Techcrunch did a UI/market positioning/likely strategy review of the thing; but they commented not at all about the behavior of the bootloader, presence absence of cryptographic checks, etc, etc...
We'll have to see what Amazon does; but B&N has been about as far from "locking" as one is likely to find among android devices. By default, they'll try to boot from the (external) microSD slot first, then the internal flash if they don't find anything bootable. Aside from the usual peculiarities of embedded ARM boards, it's almost like dealing with a real computer!
Because they are somewhat more expensive, an SSD failure is a little more painful than an HDD failure; but the basic rules of "don't trust a hard drive" really haven't changed.
The mechanicals sometimes last a decade if you get lucky, or die within days of install if you don't. Moral of the story: If you store anything on a hard drive, you don't love that something very much. You'd better have backups.
The shape of the failure probability/time graph is likely a bit different for SSDs; but the "You'd better have backups" message, and the available means of taking those backups are pretty much exactly the same.
Again, because of the somewhat higher cost, burning your way through SSDs is a little more painful than burning your way through HDDs; but anybody whose plans involve just trusting a hard drive has always been doomed.
Historically, Samsung's offerings have been relatively solid; but quite unexciting in performance terms, and pretty tepid in performance/dollar.
OEMs love 'em because, while mediocre, they have been comparatively reliable(no equivalents of the Jmicron controller debacle, firmware that makes them show up as only 8MB in size, assorted bleeding-edge weirdness and general "No, we really do have to offer these things under a 3-year warranty to get business customers"-stopping issues.)
The enthusiast-darling crown has changed hands a number of times. Intel was the one to have a little while ago, I think that they've been eclipsed by some of the newer Sandforce gear of late. There are rather more brands than there are chipsets, so brand enthusiasm tends to swing wildly based on cost and who is releasing the new hotness chipset this month.
Yeah, I'd just be curious to see the performance/watt numbers once you factor in all the assorted glue silicon required to get the mess talking to itself.
High speed network interconnects can get a little toasty themselves, and the amount of glue logic/core would be rather higher with the smaller, fewer-cores-per-socket ARM beasties.
They might still win, I don't have numbers one way or another; but networking isn't free...(it would be interesting, of course, to see some ARM HPC design that fabbed a zillion cores onto a die the size of a Xeon, with very fast networking between them; but a just-a-bunch-of-SoCs design might be pretty tepid.)
I'm not sure. ZFS as support for using an SSD or SSDs as cache in a larger storage pool; but the phrase "that I keep gaming stuff on" usually does not imply "I run Solaris/BSD/Linux with ZFS/FUSE". In Linux, btrfs either has, or is working toward, some sort of SSD optimizations, I'm not certain how close they are to ZFS'.
Most of the reasonably nice SANs and storage appliances have support for some similar caching thing, to RAM, SSD, or a combination; but "Buy a SAN and bootable HBA" isn't exactly a desktop cost saving move.
I don't know of any commercially-available standalone software packages equivalent to this bundleware stuff, and I don't think that even the server versions of Windows do anything like that in NTFS or their software RAID modes.
Intel has something somewhat similar; but it is tied to motherboards with the z68 chipset, so that is likely either already helping you, or of no use.
I'm assuming that, sometime shortly after this product ships, cracked copies of the accompanying software will start filtering out; but I don't know when that will be...
Conveniently, we have plenty of shrill talking heads telling us that the private sector is always more efficient. That should be a viable substitute for so called "empirical evidence".
Because the best available CPUs are only so fast, and logic boards only so large, both supercomputers and clusters end up being lots-and-lots-of-cards-connected-with-some-mixture-of-backplanes-and-cables at some point.
There's a smooth-ish order of progression in terms of interconnect speed and latency(ie. SETI@home is a cluster; but inter-node bandwidth is tiny and latency can be in the hundreds of milliseconds, a cheapo commodity cluster using the onboard GigE ports has better bandwidth and lower latency, Myranet or infiniband better again, but more expensive, certain proprietary fabrics tighter still, if even more expensive).
The sharp, dividing, line, though, is probably whether or not the system runs(or at least is capable of running, some may be carved up for sharing purposes) a single system image.
In this cluster, it sounds like each 2-socket node boots up, like a standard computer, and then starts chatting over the network. In a single system image setup, all the CPUs and RAM are visible as a unified address space and collection of cores. Under the hood, there may be a lot of chatter going over cables, rather than with a single logic board; but, so far as the software is concerned, it is all one computer.
I cringe at the amount of interconnect silicon that clustering such comparatively lightweight processors would require. The 32-bit address space would no doubt be a hit, as well...
The SSD itself is a Sandforce 2281-based MLC drive with 50% overprovision for redundancy. Unless they've really screwed the firmware, it should be just fine, though no word on how it competes in price with other drives of similar size.
The caching function(unlike the Seagate hybrid units) is simply software: Supports Windows 7, no BIOS goo or specialized SATA features required; plugs into the OS somewhere in the storage handling area and shuffles data between the main mechanical HDD and the designated cache SSD.
On the plus side, that should(at least conceivably) give it considerably higher-level knowledge of what the OS is doing with which to make caching decisions(unlike caching firmware, which only has the SATA commands to go on). On the minus side, it means Win7 only, and your storage system is Not the place you want potentially flaky code, so if they aren't on the ball, we could see some serious bluescreening and/or OS hosing going on....
What is curious to me is that the flight doctors weren't catching it.
Given what we know about people's response to incentives(ie. in situations valuing the "right stuff", people generally under-report problems they can get away with concealing), and given the importance of having top-performing people in mission critical situations, I would have expected the post and pre flight medical checks to be good enough to detect vision issues. Visual acuity testing isn't the cutting edge of rocket surgery...
The suspicion, at present, is that it is caused by abnormal fluid pressures in and on the eyes, due to weightlessness.
Given that we have a reasonable amount of data about radiation exposure at 1G, we can probably make at least an educated guess about what radiation does to eyes(and it definitely does have some known effects)...
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The nice thing about PCI is that quite a few computers, old or contemporary, still have a fair number of PCI slots. With one or two truly esoteric exceptions, AGP was one slot only. You can never have too many video outs...
Are you planning to design and fab your own motherboard, as well? With the exception of hardcore; but largely irrelevant, hobbyists wire-wrapping their TTL micros, nobody "builds" computers. They buy a few high level chunks of a computer, with well defined physical and logical interfaces, and plug them in to one another. That doesn't make you an OEM, that makes your motherboard manufacturer the OEM and you the systems integrator. Unless you think that MSI will magically be more cooperative than Dell, that places you in exactly the same position...
Are the motherboards upon which all of today's "DIY" just-plug-it-where-it-fits "custom built" computers depend not OEM now?
Yes, it definitely will affect OEM products(such as, oh, every laptop you might want to use); but team "Just Build Your Own!" isn't in a substantially better position unless the OEMs that make motherboards are substantially more helpful than the OEMs that make whiteboxes(and paying $50 extra for the "enthusiast edition" that lets you do your own keyfill isn't going to cut it)...
True, though those devs were slapped down because they were stupid enough to overtly claim specific medical benefits. The FDA can, and sometimes will, slap you down for doing that. However, if your product falls under the DHSEA, you can get away with practically anything, so long as you make your claims in slightly oblique language and don't kill too many people. If it is a food item, you can get away with a similarly broad collection of "Qualified Health Claims".
In the case of a game, which definitely isn't going to be killing anybody, and probably isn't at the top of the list of the dwindling population of FDA inspectors, you could almost certainly run into no trouble so long as you kept your statements of the form "$GAME$ engages player's short-term memory and executive function" rather than "$GAME$ improves player's short-term memory and executive function". At that point, you'd just need a promising preliminary study or two, or some positive word-of-mouth, and there would be absolutely no legal obstacle to selling it, and tacitly promoting it for use in environments where patients with schizophrenic symptoms are treated...
If you make direct, overt, health claims, or try to market a drug that isn't either grandfathered or approved, the law is not your friend; but there are a number of ways around that, most being actively exploited.
The true scotsman is wearing a kilt. The false scotsman is wearing a suit and carrying 1.2 trillion in secret fed loans.
A distinction is only a "no true scotsman" if there isn't a sensible rule of assignment that allows true and false scotsmanship to be distinguished. There are, arguably, edge cases; but distinguishing the American financial services sector as "crony capitalism" isn't a terribly bold move.
you're basically protesting capitalism..
Basically protesting Crony capitalism. A Big difference there....
It's quite a panopticonic fiefdom they have there... Still haven't caught London in terms of cameras; but the sinister image-processing central computer is a nice touch, as is the 'fusion center' and the oblique references to anti-aircraft capability...
Given the absence, thus far, of 'heroic cop wounded in line of duty while saving city from anarchist scum' stories, I'm going to go out on a limb and suspect that the protesters represent no meaningful threat to the cops who've been containing them. And, since riot cops never commit, much less revel in, the sort of activity that makes people call 'cops' 'pigs', I can only assume that the heavily equipped and rather illiberal police forces of New York have been defending one of the major local industries from outsiders with considerable zeal...
It's OurSQL now, freetards.
The noteworthy thing appears to be that they are trying to get a full FDA-approved-for-the-treatment-of badge, rather than just generating some modestly positive results and selling it semiformally based on the fact that you have pretty broad latitude when trying potentially theraputic stuff that isn't drugs(which, as you note, has been going on for ages). Because that strategy has already been in use for so long, apparently reasonably successfully, I'm wondering why they are trying this; but it is novel.
I'd be very curious to know what the cost/benefit is for them to seek FDA approval is: Their game has copyright protection even if it is of no theraputic value whatsoever, and games are only ever regulated by Team Morality if they are overtly sexual or violent, so they are totally clear to sell the thing subject only to the generic constraints of trade laws.
Similarly, friends/family/etc. of patients are free to do more or less whatever in the hopes that it might help, assuming it isn't otherwise forbidden, and buying a game wouldn't be. Even psychologists and psychiatrists have a fair amount of latitude to try unproven things, so long as they don't amount to malpractice(and, since a game is pretty much a waste of time at worst, that would be a hard claim to make.)
Because of that, I'm curious as to why they would go for full FDA approval, rather than just kick out a few positive preliminary studies and/or some word of mouth, and move more units, faster, albeit probably at somewhat lower unit price, rather than go through the entire approval process, with the risks and delays that can entail, in the hopes of getting it formally recognized as a treatment...
While this obviously doesn't apply to the lowest bowels of IT digi-janitor hell, if you can land an IT gig at a shop of the correct size/managerial style, CS chops can be a serious asset:
There are more than a few small/midsize places where the in-house supply of even scripting talent is rather tepid, so a lot of IT stuff either gets done manually, or is automated with some fairly expensive "solution" packages.
Such a job won't involve "pure" CS, it'll still be IT; but if you are good enough at CS that anybody would consider hiring you to write actual programs, you should be able to out-script all but the most senior or *nix oriented "IT" people, as well has having no fear of configuring any of the not-always-user-friendly-but-powerful-and-cheap SNMP monitoring/network status/inventory/etc. packages that are available; but often unused in favor of more expensive but easier tools.
You might find that this, in itself, is a decent job. If not, (assuming you can get past HR's pigeonhole), a "I came to an IT department and automated the shit out of it" story isn't nearly as stigmatizing as "I came knowing CS, I left knowing how to reinstall windows and replace toner cartridges!"
I can't tell if B&N is less evil, or if this just a classic case of the #2-#N players being nicer because they have no chance at catching #1 if they attempt a slavish "just like his walled garden, but worse!" offering..
In the specific context of bootloader behavior, we will have to wait and see: Techcrunch did a UI/market positioning/likely strategy review of the thing; but they commented not at all about the behavior of the bootloader, presence absence of cryptographic checks, etc, etc...
We'll have to see what Amazon does; but B&N has been about as far from "locking" as one is likely to find among android devices. By default, they'll try to boot from the (external) microSD slot first, then the internal flash if they don't find anything bootable. Aside from the usual peculiarities of embedded ARM boards, it's almost like dealing with a real computer!
Because they are somewhat more expensive, an SSD failure is a little more painful than an HDD failure; but the basic rules of "don't trust a hard drive" really haven't changed.
The mechanicals sometimes last a decade if you get lucky, or die within days of install if you don't. Moral of the story: If you store anything on a hard drive, you don't love that something very much. You'd better have backups.
The shape of the failure probability/time graph is likely a bit different for SSDs; but the "You'd better have backups" message, and the available means of taking those backups are pretty much exactly the same.
Again, because of the somewhat higher cost, burning your way through SSDs is a little more painful than burning your way through HDDs; but anybody whose plans involve just trusting a hard drive has always been doomed.
Historically, Samsung's offerings have been relatively solid; but quite unexciting in performance terms, and pretty tepid in performance/dollar.
OEMs love 'em because, while mediocre, they have been comparatively reliable(no equivalents of the Jmicron controller debacle, firmware that makes them show up as only 8MB in size, assorted bleeding-edge weirdness and general "No, we really do have to offer these things under a 3-year warranty to get business customers"-stopping issues.)
The enthusiast-darling crown has changed hands a number of times. Intel was the one to have a little while ago, I think that they've been eclipsed by some of the newer Sandforce gear of late. There are rather more brands than there are chipsets, so brand enthusiasm tends to swing wildly based on cost and who is releasing the new hotness chipset this month.
Yeah, I'd just be curious to see the performance/watt numbers once you factor in all the assorted glue silicon required to get the mess talking to itself.
High speed network interconnects can get a little toasty themselves, and the amount of glue logic/core would be rather higher with the smaller, fewer-cores-per-socket ARM beasties.
They might still win, I don't have numbers one way or another; but networking isn't free...(it would be interesting, of course, to see some ARM HPC design that fabbed a zillion cores onto a die the size of a Xeon, with very fast networking between them; but a just-a-bunch-of-SoCs design might be pretty tepid.)
I'm not sure. ZFS as support for using an SSD or SSDs as cache in a larger storage pool; but the phrase "that I keep gaming stuff on" usually does not imply "I run Solaris/BSD/Linux with ZFS/FUSE". In Linux, btrfs either has, or is working toward, some sort of SSD optimizations, I'm not certain how close they are to ZFS'.
Most of the reasonably nice SANs and storage appliances have support for some similar caching thing, to RAM, SSD, or a combination; but "Buy a SAN and bootable HBA" isn't exactly a desktop cost saving move.
I don't know of any commercially-available standalone software packages equivalent to this bundleware stuff, and I don't think that even the server versions of Windows do anything like that in NTFS or their software RAID modes.
Intel has something somewhat similar; but it is tied to motherboards with the z68 chipset, so that is likely either already helping you, or of no use.
I'm assuming that, sometime shortly after this product ships, cracked copies of the accompanying software will start filtering out; but I don't know when that will be...
Conveniently, we have plenty of shrill talking heads telling us that the private sector is always more efficient. That should be a viable substitute for so called "empirical evidence".
Because the best available CPUs are only so fast, and logic boards only so large, both supercomputers and clusters end up being lots-and-lots-of-cards-connected-with-some-mixture-of-backplanes-and-cables at some point.
There's a smooth-ish order of progression in terms of interconnect speed and latency(ie. SETI@home is a cluster; but inter-node bandwidth is tiny and latency can be in the hundreds of milliseconds, a cheapo commodity cluster using the onboard GigE ports has better bandwidth and lower latency, Myranet or infiniband better again, but more expensive, certain proprietary fabrics tighter still, if even more expensive).
The sharp, dividing, line, though, is probably whether or not the system runs(or at least is capable of running, some may be carved up for sharing purposes) a single system image.
In this cluster, it sounds like each 2-socket node boots up, like a standard computer, and then starts chatting over the network. In a single system image setup, all the CPUs and RAM are visible as a unified address space and collection of cores. Under the hood, there may be a lot of chatter going over cables, rather than with a single logic board; but, so far as the software is concerned, it is all one computer.
I cringe at the amount of interconnect silicon that clustering such comparatively lightweight processors would require. The 32-bit address space would no doubt be a hit, as well...
A best I can tell, this is simply a basic SSD that is shipped with a bundled OEM copy of "dataplex" software from these guys(nice clip art...) (Here is a presentation by them about their product.
The SSD itself is a Sandforce 2281-based MLC drive with 50% overprovision for redundancy. Unless they've really screwed the firmware, it should be just fine, though no word on how it competes in price with other drives of similar size.
The caching function(unlike the Seagate hybrid units) is simply software: Supports Windows 7, no BIOS goo or specialized SATA features required; plugs into the OS somewhere in the storage handling area and shuffles data between the main mechanical HDD and the designated cache SSD.
On the plus side, that should(at least conceivably) give it considerably higher-level knowledge of what the OS is doing with which to make caching decisions(unlike caching firmware, which only has the SATA commands to go on). On the minus side, it means Win7 only, and your storage system is Not the place you want potentially flaky code, so if they aren't on the ball, we could see some serious bluescreening and/or OS hosing going on....
What is curious to me is that the flight doctors weren't catching it.
Given what we know about people's response to incentives(ie. in situations valuing the "right stuff", people generally under-report problems they can get away with concealing), and given the importance of having top-performing people in mission critical situations, I would have expected the post and pre flight medical checks to be good enough to detect vision issues. Visual acuity testing isn't the cutting edge of rocket surgery...
The suspicion, at present, is that it is caused by abnormal fluid pressures in and on the eyes, due to weightlessness.
Given that we have a reasonable amount of data about radiation exposure at 1G, we can probably make at least an educated guess about what radiation does to eyes(and it definitely does have some known effects)...