I generally don't let these types of things affect the CPU I use for work. I have found that in order for a system to be fast, all components much be equally matched. When the CPU is overclocked by a factor of 2, and the memory is not, the amount of time spent waiting on memory will increase significantly. If a designer knew the chip would be run at the higher speed, more cache would generally be included to make up for the disparity between CPU speed and memory speed.
A good rule for buying new systems is to upgrade in two halves. I generally buy motherboard, RAM, CPU, and power supply at the same time for compatibility reasons. A year or two later, I will update my storage and video card. I buy a motherboard that supports the fastest memory made, I buy a lot of memory, and I buy a CPU that is at a point on the price to performance curve where spending more doesn't yield much more performance. In a year or two when software starts to actually use this capacity, Ill upgrade storage and video for a bit of a boast. Unfortunately, faster hard drives only make a bit of difference.
I played that game with my iBook G3. Eventually I got fed up with it and bought an iMac G5 20". I paid $2200 for it. My iMac G5 failed after two years, Apple replaced the logic board + power supply due to bad caps. Another two years later, the exact same failures. Apple washed their hands of it, as it was past the 3 year warranty. They openly acknowledge this is a systemic problem, but have no plans to correct it. I was a very loyal customer, with the iBook G3, the iMac G5, a Macbook, 3 iPods and an AppleTV. Having gotten the run around several times from them, I have vowed to not buy Apple again after this.
And we sell iPods in vending machines. We drive pickup trucks that get 12 MPG. We eat big macs like there is no tomorrow. We have shitty beer that you buy in 30 packs. Go on and criticize, but as long as people will spend their money on it, there is someone out there making money by selling them what they want. When it gets too expensive, this over-consumption will stop. In the meantime, there must be people who like to go to bars with lots of TVs. Personally, I prefer to eat somewhere with a TV when I am by myself instead of hearing people criticize what I consider normal.
What range of scope are you looking for? It really depends on which end of the spectrum. In the 100 and 200 MHz range, I think Tektronix blows everyone else out of the water. When you get to the 500 MHz and Gigahertz stuff, I think Tek still has the price advantage, and ease of use, but the competition is a lot closer. All three manufacturers know what the others are offering and price accordingly. I have seen LeCroy ones lock up with a LeCroy rep operating them. On the real high end, the Tektronix logic analyzers can interface with the scopes to give a coherent display of both digital and analog data.
The best way to choose is the call the local reps and use a loaner model for a week or so.
I respectfully disagree. Slashdot is less informative than it used to be.
I think the trouble comes from several sources: 1.) Slashdot has a lot more editors now, which gives less of a strategic plan. 2.) Political articles, or call to action articles. YRO stores where always present, but there are so many now that reading all of them is just depressing. 3.) I remember when things like IBM research White papers were articles. This was very informative. Now we hear 8 bajillion stores about a document format. Real men use LaTeX anyway, so who cares about ODF and OOXML? 4.) Patents. Every time someone tries to patent something stupid, an article is not warranted.
What we need more articles about: 1.) Innovative software 2.) Major hardware releases (not Nokia has a new cell phone) but its good to keep up on major things. 3.) Significant Kernel releases, GNOME, Firefox, etc. 4.) Actions of NASA and other space agencies 5.) Interesting scientific research, whether organic, medical, semiconductor, etc. 6.) Some politics as it relates to science + technology. 7.) More developer stories. And not just Ruby on Rails, most of us could care less about that. 8.) Something funny every now and then. A link to a good XKCD isnt a bad thing. 9.) More interviews. They were always interesting, and the number has decreased.
It takes 7 letters on a particular topic to attract a congressman's attention. At Purdue, we have a group of us who decide to write our representatives regarding technical issues, with the goal of sending seven letters. I am also copying my letter that I composed to address this bill. Feel free to copy this, but congressmen do not give form letters much value. Change things up to make the letter unique. Pay particular attention to the first three sentences. It is important to state very quickly a few key facts, so that a congressman's staff can quickly file the letter. First off, give your name, and state that you are a voter from their district. They will check your name against their voter rolls, and if you don't vote for them, they don't care all that much what you think. Second, state the topic. If it's a bill, give the bill number. Thirdly, state your position. These three things help your letter get filed correctly. Use the rest of the letter to argue your position, in straightforward, and approachable manner.
Dear Congressman, My name is XXX XXXXX, I am a registered voter in your district. I am writing to express my concerns over House Bill HR4137 "College Opportunity and Affordability Act of 2007." I am against the passage of this bill, specifically the contents of Section 494, titled "Campus-Based Digital Theft Prevention". As the bill stands, it requires public universities to filter internet traffic, in an attempt to block peer to peer applications. Peer to peer is a technology used by many applications to gain increased network performance. Section 494 of the bill is strongly supported by the RIAA and MPAA, which are private enterprises supported by record companies and movie companies with the intent of copyright enforcement. I believe that public universities are a disinterested third party in protecting the copyrights of work not owned by them, and not received by them. Public universities should not be expected to face the implications of filtering, including, but not limited too: filtering legal downloads, assuming responsibility of filtering accuracy, and limiting students rights to distribute their own creative content. I find the threatening language regarding possible loss of federal funding to be unnecessary, and frankly, against the interests of making college available to more potential students, which is the goal of this bill.
Kernel hacking is taught at major universities, but under the title "Operating Systems". These classes teach scheduling, device drivers, file systems, memory management, networking, etc. The goal of a university is to give you the background knowledge necessary to understand specific implementations. The specifics of the linux kernel change rapidly, but the concepts are 40 years old. No instructional course has a chance of keeping up, the kernel documentation cant even keep up. It takes a problem solver, and an inquizitive mind to be able to apply the background knowledge to specific instances.
IRQ conflicts were 15 years ago. 10 years ago was about the easiest it has ever been. Buy an ATX power supply and case, any of the hundreds of Intel BX boards, whatever the fastest Slot 1 you could afford was, a hard drive, a cd drive, (it was all the same bus then) and if you really had mad cash maybe a Geforce 1 or Voodoo3. All cards were PCI w. AGP video. Everything was PC100 memory, and it was pretty cheap for the time.
Now, you have 5 differant processor sockets, 8 differant chipsets, 3 differant memories all in multiple speeds, differant power supply sockets, PCIx, PCI, and AGP, etc... Plus, it is harder to tell which parts are the fastest or best value now that everyone says their chip all their chips are equivallent to 4 GHz. The chance of being able to upgrade to current equipment is much less than it used to be. Replacing a processor now almost always means memory, power supply, motherboard, and heat sink.
All of this is hard enough building a windows machine, but now couple on getting Linux compatibility, and I say no thanks. I have built dozens of machines for family and friends, but I no longer do. I tell them to go to Dell, buy the cheapest thing, upgrade the memory. I don't have support or warranty issues. Im not returning parts that are wrong, etc...
My best solution to this problem was that when my super tricked out brand new system got stolen, I bought a mac, and it was one of my best computing moves. I paid a rediculous amount, but 3 years later, I haven't felt the need to upgrade it once.
I bought RedHat the day it went from $26 to $19. Mgmt didn't even acknowledge the move. 25% or so of the value of the stock gone in a day. I thought surely it will bounce back. It seemed obvious that RHAT was in a great position to form some strategic parnerships especially with Oracle, similar to Sun and Oracle. What we got a week after the fact was a change of a single vice president. A week later, Oracle announced their intent to compete, and RHAT dropped to $13. It has oscillated greatly since then. I don't mind that RHAT has volatility or competition. What I do mind is the way management has not responded. There are a lot of poorly run companies, there aren't many well run companies. I try to invest more in the latter than the former.
This is very true, and often forgotten. I believe the majority of the public (techies included) do not, and do not really wish to, understand the stock market.
GE is well known for making weapons???? Excuse me? I can't say I love them, but I'm pretty sure the only real "weapon" they make is airplane engines and some weapons detectors for DHS.
A piece of hardware can never be turing complete. Turing completeness requires infinite memory. Programming langauages, or in ths case, instruction sets are.
I'll second this. Myspace may get the most hits overall, but here at Purdue, everyone who does this sort of thing uses Facebook. Facebook is infinitly better than Myspace. The photo album feature makes it easy to share photos, and the privacy of Facebook has much better granularity. Furthermore, you have to belong to one of the Universities (or now some highschools) to use it. I believe this is enforced by email address, at least it used to be. This keeps the 40 year old creeps away.
I think it's called vision. It is what seperates good leaders from wishy-washy leaders. Now that the president has set this goal, he must give money to support. If there is no money or resources, than it is IT hell.
People don't like change, but let's face it, in 20 years, do you really think we are going to have rooms that do nothing but hold computers? We will look back and laugh at the idea of a "computer lab", just as we now look back and laugh at rooms full of draftsmen, or a human telephone operator. This president is preparing his school for the future, and while doing it, the IT department has to develop new techniques. This is a wonderful role for an academic endeavor. It will be much more valuable to the community at large if the IT departement does a thourough right up or lessons learned type document.
Because all software patches must be validated through an FDA audit procedure. You can't just go patch a computer that someone's life depends on. This case makes this procedure look funny, but you can't just put any software on medical equipment. I'm sure most people are aware of the case of the Therac-25. http://courses.cs.vt.edu/~cs3604/lib/Therac_25/The rac_1.html
I'm not sure what the real solution is, but I am sure who the criminal is. If the students didn't release malicious software, that network would still be up.
similar to how Microsoft and Apple provide NTP service to their customers
I didn't realize Microsoft did this, but I know when I started buying Apple, I sure noticed it, and thought it was a very nice touch. Small things like this can give a lot of polish to a product.
They are asking $49.99. The $200 number is to buy an M10000 motherboard.
High efficency DC->DC converters aren't THAT hard to find, but they tend to be really expensive. I was working on a project a couple of years ago that used one and the converter was a good 60% of the parts cost. For someone building what is supposed to be a low cost device, it was a real stumbling block.
At $200 these guys aren't particularly cheap either, although they are rated for a higher load than most of the converters I was looking at.
It's Christmas Eve, and you need something to read while you're avoiding your relatives.
How did they know? How do the editors know that I just finished eating dinner, my football team is losing, and my relatives are looking at cruise pictures. Get out of my mind!!! Get out of my mind!!!
I counted in my computer architecture class the other day. It was 15% American, with the rest being an even split between Indian and Asian. Anyone who believes that engineering numbers for Americans are rising is just wrong. The size of Purdue's ECE class has dropped form over 1200 to about 850, while diversity has greatly increased. Walk onto any top 10 school campus, and look at who the engineers are. Just looking at the restaurants around campus's gives an indication of who the student population is.
Slashdot Mirror
I generally don't let these types of things affect the CPU I use for work. I have found that in order for a system to be fast, all components much be equally matched. When the CPU is overclocked by a factor of 2, and the memory is not, the amount of time spent waiting on memory will increase significantly. If a designer knew the chip would be run at the higher speed, more cache would generally be included to make up for the disparity between CPU speed and memory speed. A good rule for buying new systems is to upgrade in two halves. I generally buy motherboard, RAM, CPU, and power supply at the same time for compatibility reasons. A year or two later, I will update my storage and video card. I buy a motherboard that supports the fastest memory made, I buy a lot of memory, and I buy a CPU that is at a point on the price to performance curve where spending more doesn't yield much more performance. In a year or two when software starts to actually use this capacity, Ill upgrade storage and video for a bit of a boast. Unfortunately, faster hard drives only make a bit of difference.
I played that game with my iBook G3. Eventually I got fed up with it and bought an iMac G5 20". I paid $2200 for it. My iMac G5 failed after two years, Apple replaced the logic board + power supply due to bad caps. Another two years later, the exact same failures. Apple washed their hands of it, as it was past the 3 year warranty. They openly acknowledge this is a systemic problem, but have no plans to correct it. I was a very loyal customer, with the iBook G3, the iMac G5, a Macbook, 3 iPods and an AppleTV. Having gotten the run around several times from them, I have vowed to not buy Apple again after this.
And we sell iPods in vending machines. We drive pickup trucks that get 12 MPG. We eat big macs like there is no tomorrow. We have shitty beer that you buy in 30 packs. Go on and criticize, but as long as people will spend their money on it, there is someone out there making money by selling them what they want. When it gets too expensive, this over-consumption will stop. In the meantime, there must be people who like to go to bars with lots of TVs. Personally, I prefer to eat somewhere with a TV when I am by myself instead of hearing people criticize what I consider normal.
What range of scope are you looking for? It really depends on which end of the spectrum. In the 100 and 200 MHz range, I think Tektronix blows everyone else out of the water. When you get to the 500 MHz and Gigahertz stuff, I think Tek still has the price advantage, and ease of use, but the competition is a lot closer. All three manufacturers know what the others are offering and price accordingly. I have seen LeCroy ones lock up with a LeCroy rep operating them. On the real high end, the Tektronix logic analyzers can interface with the scopes to give a coherent display of both digital and analog data. The best way to choose is the call the local reps and use a loaner model for a week or so.
What is your point?
I moderated incorrectly, I am posting here to remove moderation
I respectfully disagree. Slashdot is less informative than it used to be.
I think the trouble comes from several sources:
1.) Slashdot has a lot more editors now, which gives less of a strategic plan.
2.) Political articles, or call to action articles. YRO stores where always present, but there are so many now that reading all of them is just depressing.
3.) I remember when things like IBM research White papers were articles. This was very informative. Now we hear 8 bajillion stores about a document format. Real men use LaTeX anyway, so who cares about ODF and OOXML?
4.) Patents. Every time someone tries to patent something stupid, an article is not warranted.
What we need more articles about:
1.) Innovative software
2.) Major hardware releases (not Nokia has a new cell phone) but its good to keep up on major things.
3.) Significant Kernel releases, GNOME, Firefox, etc.
4.) Actions of NASA and other space agencies
5.) Interesting scientific research, whether organic, medical, semiconductor, etc.
6.) Some politics as it relates to science + technology.
7.) More developer stories. And not just Ruby on Rails, most of us could care less about that.
8.) Something funny every now and then. A link to a good XKCD isnt a bad thing.
9.) More interviews. They were always interesting, and the number has decreased.
Around here, even if you don't get the newspaper, you get a subset of the ads from the Sunday paper delivered by the newspaper company.
It takes 7 letters on a particular topic to attract a congressman's attention. At Purdue, we have a group of us who decide to write our representatives regarding technical issues, with the goal of sending seven letters. I am also copying my letter that I composed to address this bill. Feel free to copy this, but congressmen do not give form letters much value. Change things up to make the letter unique. Pay particular attention to the first three sentences. It is important to state very quickly a few key facts, so that a congressman's staff can quickly file the letter. First off, give your name, and state that you are a voter from their district. They will check your name against their voter rolls, and if you don't vote for them, they don't care all that much what you think. Second, state the topic. If it's a bill, give the bill number. Thirdly, state your position. These three things help your letter get filed correctly. Use the rest of the letter to argue your position, in straightforward, and approachable manner.
Dear Congressman,
My name is XXX XXXXX, I am a registered voter in your district. I am writing to express my concerns over House Bill HR4137 "College Opportunity and Affordability Act of 2007." I am against the passage of this bill, specifically the contents of Section 494, titled "Campus-Based Digital Theft Prevention".
As the bill stands, it requires public universities to filter internet traffic, in an attempt to block peer to peer applications. Peer to peer is a technology used by many applications to gain increased network performance. Section 494 of the bill is strongly supported by the RIAA and MPAA, which are private enterprises supported by record companies and movie companies with the intent of copyright enforcement. I believe that public universities are a disinterested third party in protecting the copyrights of work not owned by them, and not received by them. Public universities should not be expected to face the implications of filtering, including, but not limited too: filtering legal downloads, assuming responsibility of filtering accuracy, and limiting students rights to distribute their own creative content. I find the threatening language regarding possible loss of federal funding to be unnecessary, and frankly, against the interests of making college available to more potential students, which is the goal of this bill.
Sincerely yours,
XXX XXXXXXXXX
Here's one closer.
Now I type something to get through the filter.
Kernel hacking is taught at major universities, but under the title "Operating Systems". These classes teach scheduling, device drivers, file systems, memory management, networking, etc. The goal of a university is to give you the background knowledge necessary to understand specific implementations. The specifics of the linux kernel change rapidly, but the concepts are 40 years old. No instructional course has a chance of keeping up, the kernel documentation cant even keep up. It takes a problem solver, and an inquizitive mind to be able to apply the background knowledge to specific instances.
IRQ conflicts were 15 years ago. 10 years ago was about the easiest it has ever been. Buy an ATX power supply and case, any of the hundreds of Intel BX boards, whatever the fastest Slot 1 you could afford was, a hard drive, a cd drive, (it was all the same bus then) and if you really had mad cash maybe a Geforce 1 or Voodoo3. All cards were PCI w. AGP video. Everything was PC100 memory, and it was pretty cheap for the time.
Now, you have 5 differant processor sockets, 8 differant chipsets, 3 differant memories all in multiple speeds, differant power supply sockets, PCIx, PCI, and AGP, etc... Plus, it is harder to tell which parts are the fastest or best value now that everyone says their chip all their chips are equivallent to 4 GHz. The chance of being able to upgrade to current equipment is much less than it used to be. Replacing a processor now almost always means memory, power supply, motherboard, and heat sink.
All of this is hard enough building a windows machine, but now couple on getting Linux compatibility, and I say no thanks. I have built dozens of machines for family and friends, but I no longer do. I tell them to go to Dell, buy the cheapest thing, upgrade the memory. I don't have support or warranty issues. Im not returning parts that are wrong, etc...
My best solution to this problem was that when my super tricked out brand new system got stolen, I bought a mac, and it was one of my best computing moves. I paid a rediculous amount, but 3 years later, I haven't felt the need to upgrade it once.
I bought RedHat the day it went from $26 to $19. Mgmt didn't even acknowledge the move. 25% or so of the value of the stock gone in a day. I thought surely it will bounce back. It seemed obvious that RHAT was in a great position to form some strategic parnerships especially with Oracle, similar to Sun and Oracle. What we got a week after the fact was a change of a single vice president. A week later, Oracle announced their intent to compete, and RHAT dropped to $13. It has oscillated greatly since then. I don't mind that RHAT has volatility or competition. What I do mind is the way management has not responded. There are a lot of poorly run companies, there aren't many well run companies. I try to invest more in the latter than the former.
This is very true, and often forgotten. I believe the majority of the public (techies included) do not, and do not really wish to, understand the stock market.
Ummm, have you looked at RHAT lately? Its at 17.40. It was at $26 60 days ago. It was at three digits in the not too far past.
The three of us that got that find it really funny.
GE is well known for making weapons???? Excuse me? I can't say I love them, but I'm pretty sure the only real "weapon" they make is airplane engines and some weapons detectors for DHS.
A piece of hardware can never be turing complete. Turing completeness requires infinite memory. Programming langauages, or in ths case, instruction sets are.
I'll second this. Myspace may get the most hits overall, but here at Purdue, everyone who does this sort of thing uses Facebook. Facebook is infinitly better than Myspace. The photo album feature makes it easy to share photos, and the privacy of Facebook has much better granularity. Furthermore, you have to belong to one of the Universities (or now some highschools) to use it. I believe this is enforced by email address, at least it used to be. This keeps the 40 year old creeps away.
I think it's called vision. It is what seperates good leaders from wishy-washy leaders. Now that the president has set this goal, he must give money to support. If there is no money or resources, than it is IT hell.
People don't like change, but let's face it, in 20 years, do you really think we are going to have rooms that do nothing but hold computers? We will look back and laugh at the idea of a "computer lab", just as we now look back and laugh at rooms full of draftsmen, or a human telephone operator. This president is preparing his school for the future, and while doing it, the IT department has to develop new techniques. This is a wonderful role for an academic endeavor. It will be much more valuable to the community at large if the IT departement does a thourough right up or lessons learned type document.
Because all software patches must be validated through an FDA audit procedure. You can't just go patch a computer that someone's life depends on. This case makes this procedure look funny, but you can't just put any software on medical equipment. I'm sure most people are aware of the case of the Therac-25. http://courses.cs.vt.edu/~cs3604/lib/Therac_25/The rac_1.html
I'm not sure what the real solution is, but I am sure who the criminal is. If the students didn't release malicious software, that network would still be up.
similar to how Microsoft and Apple provide NTP service to their customers
I didn't realize Microsoft did this, but I know when I started buying Apple, I sure noticed it, and thought it was a very nice touch. Small things like this can give a lot of polish to a product.
They are asking $49.99. The $200 number is to buy an M10000 motherboard.
High efficency DC->DC converters aren't THAT hard to find, but they tend to be really expensive. I was working on a project a couple of years ago that used one and the converter was a good 60% of the parts cost. For someone building what is supposed to be a low cost device, it was a real stumbling block.
At $200 these guys aren't particularly cheap either, although they are rated for a higher load than most of the converters I was looking at.
How did they know? How do the editors know that I just finished eating dinner, my football team is losing, and my relatives are looking at cruise pictures. Get out of my mind!!! Get out of my mind!!!
I counted in my computer architecture class the other day. It was 15% American, with the rest being an even split between Indian and Asian. Anyone who believes that engineering numbers for Americans are rising is just wrong. The size of Purdue's ECE class has dropped form over 1200 to about 850, while diversity has greatly increased. Walk onto any top 10 school campus, and look at who the engineers are. Just looking at the restaurants around campus's gives an indication of who the student population is.