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User: fuzzyfuzzyfungus

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  1. Re:Distraction. on AMD Breaks Overclocking Record With Bulldozer · · Score: 1

    I could imagine that the "stack-em deep, sell-em cheap" fault-tolerant cloud guys considering the possibility(at least during the mature phases of a given chip's lifecycle, where the likelihood that a chip has been binned down purely for market segmentation, not for failing validation, is much greater); but the energy costs would keep them from doing much more than, possibly, cranking a lower speed grade chip up a tier or two, since energy use tends to spike pretty badly once you get outside of a given design's marketed speeds.

    Cranking it up straight into nutty overclocker territory would be counterproductive(if your overclock involves custom modifications to the motherboard VRM, you are probably blowing the datacenter's energy budget...); but being able to trade a warranty for a free model number or two bump might be worth it, depending on the maturity of the chip.

  2. Re:Distraction. on AMD Breaks Overclocking Record With Bulldozer · · Score: 1

    I doubt it, most new architecture releases have some sort of little overclocker party, whether sponsored by the CPU manufacturer, or a bunch of gamer-gear motherboard, power, and cooling widget outfits...

    The OEMs who ship the bulk probably don't even notice them, and I'm guessing that the market for ludicrously overclocked servers is pretty much nonexistent.

  3. Re:Signal propagation limits on AMD Breaks Overclocking Record With Bulldozer · · Score: 1

    Luckily, the design limit, depending on how clever you are and what sort of work is being done, can be slightly less dire than it appears:

    It isn't necessarily a problem if you have multiple signals "in flight" on the same line; but it is a problem is signals that are supposed to arrive simultaneously on different lines stop doing so as increasing clock speeds ratchet up the requirements for what "simultaneous" means.

    You can already see it happening with external busses: check out the traces between the CPU socket and the DIMM sockets on any remotely recent motherboard. Some of them are about as straight as routing allows, some are densely squiggled, because they all have to have almost exactly the same delay.

    As clock rates get faster still, the acceptable deviation in delay between "identical" lines gets smaller and smaller and the penalty(in clock cycles) for accessing a piece of silicon some distance away(ie. RAM connected to a different CPU in a multi-socket system) rises.

  4. Re:Space food is not that special anymore. on NASA Sells Space Food, Shuttle Tiles To Schools · · Score: 1

    Aerogels kick ass, and do have a number of space applications; but the space shuttle actually uses a variety of other things.

    I'm assuming that the "tiles" mentioned are the iconic black and white LI-900 thermal bricks that most of the body is coated with. Not quite as thermally radical as aerogel, and rather denser; but more mechanically robust.

  5. Re:8ghz on AMD Breaks Overclocking Record With Bulldozer · · Score: 1

    Is their any word yet on how much punch the bulldozer cores get for their MHz? If this is AMD's version of Netburst, 8GHz will likely end up being merely competitive. If it does well per-clock and hits 5Ghz on air...

  6. Re:Hmmmm...... on AMD Breaks Overclocking Record With Bulldozer · · Score: 1

    Given that Moore's law deals with transistor density, rather than transistor switching speed, I assume that that question will be settled in the fab, long before the overclockers ever get their hands on the goods...

  7. Your Friends at DeBeers.... on Of Diamond Planets, Climate Change, and the Scientific Method · · Score: 4, Funny

    The Good People of DeBeers would like to remind you that, while "A Diamond is Forever"(tm), any extraterrestrial diamonds that may or may not have been discovered by astronomers, likely just making things up in an attempt to grub for telescope time, are not a worthy substitute for DeBeers Genuine Diamonds, harvested by hand from the heart of Our Home.

    A xeno-diamond says "My love for you is cold, alien, and almost unimaginably distant, just like this diamond."

    A good, old-fashioned terrestrial diamond, however, "My love for you is worth dying for, like the poor sucker who mined this thing may just have..."

    Make the right choice, or die unloved and alone!

  8. Re:So climate science is politics? on Of Diamond Planets, Climate Change, and the Scientific Method · · Score: 0

    Heretic. Everybody knows that so called "reality" is just a "construct" based on people's opinions, man. Science's claim to epistemic priviledge over other, equally valid, ways of knowing is, like, a form of classist imperialist oppression.

    First they started by asserting that various indigenous folk wisdom was "wrong" and "unscientific". They even built the wasteful, Gaia-raping "Apollo Project" just to assert their technocratic power over the world's sky-mythologies. Once they'd finished with crushing underprivileged minority groups, the Ivory tower education-fascism complex turned its power-mad gaze upon its true target: Real Americans, and their honest faith in God, Country, and Progress....

  9. Re:"But luckily we’re not climate scientists on Of Diamond Planets, Climate Change, and the Scientific Method · · Score: 1

    Given that science's purview is the study of how the world works(whether purely theoretical, basic research, or applied), it is almost inevitably going to overlap with the "political" at some point.

    You can make virtually no substantive claims about the workings of terrestrial objects without being "political" in some sense. Biology? Nope. Geology, not bloodly likely. Climateology? Maybe as a smiley TV weather guy.

  10. Re:Not custom... on Demand For Custom Datacenter Servers Rising · · Score: 1

    I'm assuming that people buying 10,000+ servers do care if the servers cost $40 more...

  11. Re:Why would they do that !?! on Broadcom To Buy NetLogic For $3.7 Billion · · Score: 1

    I miss the days when their (then?) CEO was still in the news. Your garden variety tax-dodging and securities fraud are boring; but a CEO who secretly builds a sex dungeon under his mansion while his wife is out of town, or is accused of drugging drinks during business meetings, that is almost enough to make me forgive the state of BCM linux drivers...

  12. Re:Threat on 50 New Exoplanets Found, Billions More Await · · Score: 3, Interesting

    We call those "Berserker Probes"...

    Pretty much the game-theory asshole's take on colonization via Von Neumman machines. The argument goes that, in an environment where diplomatic missives can only travel at the speed of light, and hypothetical relativistic kinetic-kill vehicles a few factors of ten slower, you have to do unto others before they do unto you...

  13. First mistake... on Ask Slashdot: Network Backup Solution Out of the Box? · · Score: 1

    Never use the phrase "full out-of-box solution" and "not unreasonably expensive" in close proximity to one another.

    Even just saying "out-of-box solution" is to salesweasels what homogenized fish guts are to sharks...

  14. Re:FTFA: on Amazon To Launch Digital Book Rental Service · · Score: 1

    It wouldn't entirely surprise me if the publishing industry recognizes that libraries can serve as a useful promotional instrument and state-supported proxy customer on behalf of those who would otherwise be lousy or nonexistent customers; but they would really flip their shit if libraries became too convenient.

    If buying is easier than borrowing, many people will. If the "library" now has the same interface as the bookstore, game over man...

  15. Re:Digital Book.... renting? on Amazon To Launch Digital Book Rental Service · · Score: 1

    Just you wait, sonny boy.

    Any day now, the Corporate Feudalist/RIAA/Hipster legislative interests are going to ratify the "God Damnit! It just sounds warmer!" Act.

    This act will require that all digital storage media Must introduce a small number of unrecoverable bit flips every time they are read in order to recapture America's analog glory days.

    And don't even think about employing the Circumventing Rightful Copyright 32 algorithm, or any of the more sophisticated circumvention devices in that vein...

  16. Re:Supported devices on Amazon To Launch Digital Book Rental Service · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Given that their present "Kindle" service is available as a hardware device, an iOS application, an Android application, a WinXP/Vista/7 program, an OSX program, a blackberry application, and a webapp supporting some webkit browsers(I think that there might even have been a WebOS beta at some point...), I'm guessing that Amazon isn't planning on a hardware exclusivity play...

    It is conceivable that publisher freak-outery might demand more DRM; but I'd suspect that(just as Netflix recently relaxed from "Select Android devices with special DRM sauce" to "Android, why the fuck would you pirate the shitty stream on your cellphone, not the Blu-ray rips already on bittorrent, anyway?") any publisher who doesn't run screaming at the very thought of this will accept that dedicated cheapskates are probably beyond capture anyway, and it basically comes down to whether they'd prefer a reliable revenue stream from their readers, or a riskier; but potentially larger, one...

  17. Re:Why Buy? on HTC Considering Buying Own OS · · Score: 1

    I'm assuming that when they say "Buy an OS" they want an OS in the techie sense and all the trimmings: some sort of vaguely consistent UI, a development environment and preferred model for applications, etc, etc.

    While not trivial, the strict "OS" bare-metal-to-userspace stuff is more or less a solved and commodified problem. Going with BSD would allow you to avoid the GPL in your kernel; but if your plan is to distinguish your smartphone in the marketplace based on your uniquely awesome proprietary kernel, I have some bad news...

  18. Re:Cisco Compatible on 5 Years In Prison For Selling Fake Cisco Gear · · Score: 1

    Your employer is, presumably, setting up manufacturing in China because it believes China to have a comparative advantage in manufacturing whatever widget it is that they make.

    Hint, a comparative advantage in manufacturing what you did order is usually also a comparative advantage in manufacturing the same stuff that you didn't order and selling it out the back...

  19. Re:TRON? on HTC Considering Buying Own OS · · Score: 1

    "But the US is no longer an important part of the phone industry"

    Umm, what? The US was never a terribly commanding customer, since Europe also had pretty strong, early, GSM adoption, and the US has historically been in thrall of what suits the carriers, which made for (until recently) a market overwhelmingly composed of crippled dumbphones. They've also never done huge amounts of phone hardware manufacture; but the phone industry has arguably never been more American than it is now when it comes to software.

    Our northern neighbors at RIM are turning in worse numbers every quarter, Nokia has effectively abandoned Symbian as a smartphone contender and become a Microsoft vassal for everything but their most basic handsets, HTC and Samsung have been going fairly heavy Android, with a modest side of MS. Motorola, American to begin with, is now a Google vassal.

    Even on the dumbphone side, Qualcomm's "BREW"*shudder* and various mini-java flavors by the company formerly known as Sun are ubiquitous...

    The US certainly doesn't exert unqualified dominion over the mobile phone industry; but "no longer an important part"...?

  20. Re:A judge can strip someone of their US citizensh on 5 Years In Prison For Selling Fake Cisco Gear · · Score: 1

    If they committed some sort of fraud in the context of obtaining their citizenship, that can be grounds to reverse it.

    It would be analogous to somebody claiming to be a citizen by birth; but being discovered to have been born elsewhere.

  21. Re:Cisco Compatible on 5 Years In Prison For Selling Fake Cisco Gear · · Score: 4, Insightful

    That's fraud for you. Almost any typically-legal activity can be a crime if you are lying to the other parties involved about what is going on. In this case, I'm assuming that the sticker she went to jail for raised the margin on the goods in question by a nontrivial amount.

    Now, depending on exactly how "compatible" the stuff being sold is, it could be that the seller is either committing fraud by claiming even compatibility, or committing some flavor of copyright infringement against Cisco; but selling falsely labelled goods will push you across the line from legitimate to criminal almost no matter what the product in question is.

  22. Re:The entire industry is built on piracy on Ask Slashdot: Where Can I Buy Legal Game ROMs? · · Score: 1

    Strictly speaking, some tiny percentage of the industry(the chaps who dumped the ROMs, if nobody else) is in possession of a backup copy of a cartridge that they own, which is arguably legal in some jurisdictions; but other than that it is pretty much all piracy all the time...

  23. Re:I am confused on Aussie Blogger Hit With DDoS Death Threats · · Score: 1

    "So, naturalists observe, a flea
    Has smaller fleas that on him prey;
    And these have smaller still to bite 'em,
    And so proceed ad infinitum."
    Frankly, in this case, the "scammers" sound like they(by flooding domain park advertisers with false clicks) are making domain park advertising incrementally less attractive, so I find it hard to be too sad to see them. Anybody who collaborates with those scum deserves what they get. However, the botnet herders tend to be the ones cracking machines for their herds, so they are also a blight.

    Maybe they could fight to the death?

  24. Re:Alas, poor Dualism, I knew they well on Study Suggests Magnets Can Force You to Tell the Truth · · Score: 1

    I have dualist free will! It's just that, er, my acausal free-will soul-node-thing freely chooses to act precisely as though it were actually a lump of brain-meat wholly determined by physical causation! Disprove that, skeptics!

  25. Re:Original paper? on Study Suggests Magnets Can Force You to Tell the Truth · · Score: 1

    Depends on the strength of the magnet and whether or not the field needs to be oscillating in a particular way for it to work.

    The wonders of mass-produced rare-earth magnets have certainly brought ~1tesla surface strengths down into the realm of hobbyists, and you can get fairly punchy electromagnets with fairly basic tools; but if it requires bulk superconductors, cryogens, or reasonably precise high-frequency control of large currents, that can get tricky...