IIRC NCQ isn't 100% fully-baked on Linux yet, so even NCQ-capable controllers and drives won't take advantage of it yet. I just upgraded my home file server with NCQ-capable gear and I don't think it's using it yet, even though I'm running the latest kernel.
There are patches for libATA that enable NCQ, but they're not in the mainline yet.
The only thing worse than testing without the new technologies would be testing with half-baked implementations of them. Let's wait until NCQ is done before we try testing with it.
Yes. I fail to see the problem with a hermetically sealed transformer station (or several, for redundancy) sitting next to this thing, with insulated high-power lines (also redundant) heading to shore. Boost the voltage really high and you've got less loss to resistance.
It would be interesting to see if anything gets inducted by all the juice though. Anyone out there know what happens when a power line lies under water? Does it crust with salt or metals?
Well I've been working with Lenovo T43s all year and they seem quite rugged and reliable. I'm servicing about 90 of them, and we've only replaced one drive this year. Most of the software instability can be cured by updating the drivers and apps using IBM's 'Software Installer' tool which goes out to the web and sucks down the latest drivers for you. The best way to cure the bad software is to not run it at all though, generic Windows XP (from an SP2 install CD) and must-have drivers from the OEMs (not IBM branded, go to intel.com), with Windows controlling power and wireless.
Did you try 'dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda count=2' while booted from linux (liveCD or your install if you're done with it)
That's the command in Linux to wipe the first two sectors of the disk, which should adequately destroy the bootloader. Leave off the 'count=2' to wipe the whole disk for good luck.
I've never had trouble using a Windows XP install CD, deleted all partitions, and installed to the 'empty space', it seems to remove the boot loader for me.
Just because you're sending signals on the power mains doesn't mean you have to be any more 'connected' to the electric company's IT infrastructure that if you were dialing-up in Guam.
There's a seperate business entity running the ISP operation, and they won't be jacked-in to the systems that control the 'big switches'.
And FYI, Sasser was implicated in having something to do with the massive power outage in NYC a few years ago, there was so much viral traffic on the internal control lines (low speed, high-reliabity lines that signal electric grid status between stations) that the system couldn't send control messages fast enough to avoid the cascading failure. That's the rumor anyway.
Hell, I have a switch on my desk that's really four completely separated networks, there's NO WAY to get from one to another because they're VLAN'd and ACL'd apart from each other. It's nice to watch the broadcasts stay contained, and it lets me put infected machines onto a simulated network with a packet sniffer to analyze them without risking the farm.
You hydrogen people bother me. Hydrogen is not at all a solution to either the fossil supply or pollution problems. Producing and compressing the hydrogen takes a TREMENDOUS amount of energy that makes the overall scheme much less efficient than burning oil derivatives on-site. The issue isn't getting hydro fuel stations, it's getting the hydrogen without using tons of electricity.
The only thing hydrogen is good for is to reduce emissions from the vehicles themselves, but you only end up pushing the pollution to power generating stations, which we'll need a lot more of if the 'hydrogen economy' takes off.
The short-to-mid-term solution to the issues at hand is to produce engines that get much better mileage, like this hybrid, and to get Americans to give up their lust for uber-powerful cars. The long-term solution is effective mass-transportation, alternative energy sources (which hydrogen is not one of), and making dense walkable urban communities close to centers of commerce and industry part of western culture.
I think a good start would be to tax the crap out vehicles based on a pollution coefficient, banning light trucks (SUVs) from the high-speed lanes of highways, legislating a portion of the gas tax to fund mass-transit R&D and construction, leveraging heavy parking fees, raising the gas tax so gas costs $4/gallon, and legislation allowing for small diesel vehicles in the US (currently they are diffucult to produce, they get treated differently than gas vehicles).
I tried to move my home file server (SAMBA and NFS) from a 350MHz G3 tower to a VIA EPIA board. It was a miserable mistake. VIA loads some extra-crappy consumer-quality chips onto their EPIA boards. Not only did IDE and NIC traffic hose the CPU more than it should, but the quality of the VGA output was low, it was blurry. The 800MHz EPIA was half the speed of the G3, and the fan made it louder.
If I were you I'd get a box designed to handle massixe I/O, not a cheap consumer board. Get your hands on an old Mac G4 tower, they have PCI-X slots. Slap an Intel gigabit ethernet card (the 64-bit PCI-X server kind) and a Promise TX2/300 SATA controller in there and even a 533MHz box will serve files faster than any EPIA can. The older G4s use very little energy and are as silent as the drives you put in them. Aim for a 'G4 (Digital Audio)', but don't use the onboard LAN if you want to go gigabit, it doesn't handle jumbo frames. Linux runs just fine on them. The PowerPC 7410 @ 466MHz in my box only dissipates 9 watts at full load, it doesn't even need a fan on it.
If that's not an option, look to get something with a Pentium-3 or a Pentium-M in it, Mini-ITX form factor. EPoX and Commell sell them. You won't find great I/O performance on a mini board though, just a fact of life.
1. There is no real support for Windows x64, there's no virus protection and very few device drivers. Why go out of your way to support 1% of your users who would actually run a native 64-bit OS?
2. Intel's 64-bit extensions actually slow their chips down. That's right, they added 64-bit instructions to their microcode, but they still get broken down to the same old instructions on the i686 core that the old ones did, and the 64-bit ones take longer to digest. It was a move for buzzword compliance only.
Want to prove it? Get a pentium D830 machine, compile Gentoo on it, first a 32-bit install, then the AMD64 install. Compile both with the same options, but one with 32-bit instructions, and one with 64. The Intel 64-bit Linux will be slower than the 32-bit. The opposite is true with an AMD K8 chip, because the core was designed from step one to be 64-bit.
3. Intel doesn't forsee you needing (or being able to fit) over 4GB of RAM in a portable or business desktop for several years, after the lifetime of this chip revision. If you insist on a 64-bit Intel chip, you must be running a server, workstation, or other high-end rig, so fess-up and buy an appropriately-classed chip (the D830, EE, or Xeon).
4. They need to deliver this chip to market NOW, Intel's stronglest lead right now is with mobile platforms. These chips are in demand as-is; Apple and other vendors want them NOW, not in a few months with 64-bit extensions.
Well you'd be hard-pressed to realize that vision. Firefox links to innumerable libraries to handle all sorts of funtionality, and those libraries differ depending on which distro you're running on. One distro might use 'giflib' while another uses 'libungif', etc.
Also, one system might be compiled with NPTL using GCC-4 while others are using pthreads and GCC-3.x and yet others with GCC-2.95, the ABI is different in some cases, you'd need different binaries. Not to mention that some distros are using kernels as far back as 2.2 to save resources.
Another advantage to using dynamic libraries is that if there's a security issue with gzip, for instance, all you have to do to fix it is update the gzip library, while a static-linked binary that works on most platforms will require a whole re-release of the Firefox package, and all the other packages that have gzip built-in. This is precisely the reason Windows has 'DLL Hell', because so many apps are linked to libraries that are out-of-sync with the ones that come with the system (I know, I'm being oversimple, but the core issue is the same).
These aren't disadvantages of Linux though! Each distro is, for all intents and purposes, it's own individual OS, GNU and Linus provide ready-made pieces for folks to build their own. The modularity of the open source development model DOES make it harder for commercial vendors to break-in, but it also is the lifeblood of non-market driven innovation. If you want thousands of developers to contribute their time, sweat, blood, and money to making free software, they have to be getting exactly what they want out of the systems they use. Developers aren't going to sacrifice the flexibility of the entire OSS model so Windows refugees can get their Firefox builds a few days earlier.
If you want Firefox-1.5 today, I suggest you download a source tarball or SRPM and warm up your CPU, but I suggest you give your distro maintainer a few days to digest it and make sure they have all the functionality, stability, and integration they want to offer you.
I think that certain projects don't use the artwork when they custom-package it because it's against their mission statement to use anything not 100% GPL. Debian is one of those distros that won't use ANYTHING unless it's a completely free license.
I know that Gentoo uses the artwork, even though they have several patches and modifications in the package.
Mozilla needs to retain some control over the branding for several reasons, not the least of which being security. If a third party was distributing malware-infested or otherwise maligned binaries of Firefox, I would hope that the Mozilla Foundation could revoke their ability to claim 'authenticity'.
That's not Mozilla's job at all. Their job is to produce the best web browser, it's up to all the distribution maintainers to provide packages for thier flavors.
Mozilla already invests a tremendous amount of time, effort, and money in maintaining a three-platform build farm http://tinderbox.mozilla.org/showbuilds.cgi?tree=F irefox. Do you really want them spending their time trying to figuring out the nuances of the top five distributions as well?
Actually,I think a 1.3" tall mini with the footprint of a small stereo component would give you room to have 2 3.5" drives... which would be what you need for a PVR.
Two out of those 4 drugs are lethal with just one dose and heroin you only need to take a small dose once to be addicted for the rest of your life. Alcohol can be controlled. The rest you can't their physical addictions. No matter how you try it, quitting will cause dire physical, even life threatening consequences.
Wow, you REALLY paid attention to your DARE officer, eh? Which two of the four are lethal from just one dose? Cocaine isn't even a physical addiction, it's just a strong psycological one. I know plenty of people (myself included) who have tried heroin and decided that it's just not a good place to be, and all the addicts I know (and I know quite a few) took more than one dose to get hooked; you don't crave it right away, it's habitual behavior that you have to develop.
MDMA is virtually harmless, I'd even venture to say that if done in the right environment and in extreme moderation (not more than once or twice a year), it can be quite therapeutic. I've had a lot of people get things off their chest when dosed that they just couldn't get out with a shrink or a bottle of vodka. All the deaths I've heard that were related to MDMA were either caused by impurities in the pill or insane behavior that I'd attribute more to the user than the drug.
Heroin and morphine, when properly used, cause constipation. All the addicts you see are sickly because they're buying the drug and not food, or they are shooting up dirty drugs and not the clean stuff. Ever see a rich kid with a junk problem? They can hide it so well because it doesn't have any serious side effects, and most are smart enough to be able to keep it from spiralling totally out of contol.
Will drugs and alcohol directly kill a tiny subset of the population? Sure, but so will chicken bones served at restaraunts and slippery staircases. Will people die indirectly because of drugs and alcohol? Sure, they already do. But you don't blame a drunk driver's actions on alcohol, and I don't think you can blame some girl's insane belief that she can breathe underwater on ecstasy.
I'd rather live in a society that offered freedom and held individuals more responsible for their actions. Why shouldn't I be able to do drugs, smoke, drink, and sleep around unprotected? It's my body, and it's my business. As soon as I get on the road under the influence or start costing you more than my share in public services, or picking a fight in the bar you're at, you have full right to take it out on me. Until then, stop trying to save me from your fears.
Re:We need deadlier cigarettes
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Safe Cigarettes?
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Sure thing, then we'll replace ethanol with methanol so all the evil drinkers go blind or die, followed by poisoning bacon and fast food! Surely this will make the world a better place for the rest of us!
I have another idea! We can force everyone to exercise every day, it would save a lot of lives! We'll make it a mandatory part of everyone's workday, right after the two-minutes'-hate.
Re:What I'm waiting for is...
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Safe Cigarettes?
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· Score: 2, Insightful
What's so unsafe about cocaine? Sure, there are idiots out there who blow too many lines and then get crazy, but if you an resist the urge to fight, drive, overexert yourself, or do it all the time, it's relatively harmless.
Heroin, alcohol, ecstasy, and tobacco are the same way, you can safely do reasonable amounts for long periods without frying/killing yourself. The problems arise from people's weakness of will and inability to control themselves and their addictions.
The Apple G5 updates FINALLY gave us 1mb l2 cache per core
What are you talking about? My G3 running at 450MHz has a 1MB L2 cache, and it has since 1999. Pentium Pros and various workstation/server class chips had multimegabyte caches a decade ago.
The reason you've seen less cache is that it didn't make sense to have a slow CPU with a 4MB ache that had to dissipate 100+ watts to operate. on-die cache is expensive in terms of heat, die space, and clock speed.
There's also the marketing factor, Intel would have you believe (at least until last year) that GHz were the benchmark, to get them they had to strip out cache. Everyone has to follow Intel to some extent, or they'll get mowed down (read: Apple filing to sell 500MHz G4s when 1.7GHz P4s were out). If you made a chip today that ran at 400MHz but kicked a Pentium 4 830's ass, you'd have a lot of trouble selling it.
And as for cache optimization, CHUD is an excellent tool to profile such things. You can get INSANE performance benefits by keeping an oft-repeated loop or randomly charged dataset inside the CPU's cache.
I'm really scared by America's 'antibiotic culture'. In my office alone (twelve people), there are seven currently taking antibiotics, most for non-bacterial or non-serious conditions. Some are taking them for what I know are allergies, some to 'prevent' getting sick, some because they have a viral cold, and one for a sinus infection that I know is fungal in nature.
Three people have 'stockpiles' of antibiotics they keep from when they get prescriptions in their desk, and they share their different meds with each other.
Doctors prescribe antibiotics as a cure-all to get whining patients out of the office, and if they do try to suggest real cures that are less appealing to their patients they can kiss their revenue stream goodbye.
I stopped going to my doctor when he prescribed me Arithromycin(sp?) for a fungal ear and sinus infection. Any idiot who knows some biology knows that you can't fix a fungal problem with antibacterial agents, it will hurt more than it helps. American patients won't stand for 'eat a healthy low-carb diet for a week and get plenty of rest' when they can go next door and get 'take these antibiotics and call me if it gets worse, we'll give you a CAT scan and suggest surgery.' Your body's indigenous bacteria are a tremendously important part of your digestive and immune systems, killing them only clears the path for viral and fungal agents.
I gave up antibiotics about eight years ago, and my immune system is rock-solid. Sure, I get the occasional sinus infection or cold, but I change my diet and pamper my immune system and it usually clears up in a day or so. Every start-of-school the whole office gets sick, most people were totally out-of-commission for a week; I was sick for only two nights. I had a fever, so I drank an assload of salty chicken soup and wrapped myself up in a bigass blanket to 'burn off' for the night.
What REALLY burns me, besides that my friends and coworkers are happily skipping down the path to superbugs, is that the whole thing is subsidised by my health insurance payment. There's nothing like paying $350/month for everyone around you to abuse the system while you never need a doctor.
I don't know if you noticed, but the work ethic in this country has changed from 'if I can find a way to improve it, I'll get a raise' to 'If I can look busy and make sure this happens again tomorrow, I'll still have a job'.
The shuttle program was overbudget and underwhelming from day one. The entire project was built top-down when it should have been done bottom-up. The design process should have gone from 'how much mass do I have to lift and return?' to 'what kind of engine can lift this mass and return reusably with it?', instead it was 'this is what it should LOOK like, what can I cram into the spaceframe?'
From precious few years in the American work force, I can say, the vast majority of folks, maybe 95% of them, are looking to keep themselves busy, the other 5% either have the charisma to rise to the top of their fields, or they jump from job to job, looking for a chance to be recognized for their 'unique' point-of-view and talent.
I'd have to ride through the ghetto to get there. Sorry, I'm just not willing to risk personal danger for it.
I've rode my bike through bed-stuy Brooklyn, Dorchester, Boston, and every dark corner of Providence (which, in my opinion, is much more dangerous than either) without a problem.
As long as you acknowledge people in the ghetto without appearing threatening to them, they're happy or indifferent to have you there. Remember that most ghettos are made up of hard-working minimum-wage folks who never got the education they should have or were tossed in jail for non-violent crimes. They tend to have VERY strong feelings about neighborhood solidarity and safety of families, which is where gang culture arises from.
Take a walk through the ghetto, keep your eyes open, nod at folks as you walk by, talk to them when you stop; You'll learn a lot by making the connection, and you'll have yourself safety wherever you want it.
Every time I've seen Open Source fail in the enterprise it's been because of personal issues.
You can't fire the entire IT staff and replace them with (half as many) new Open Source aware folks. It's just not possible. The people who are from the closed-source world don't understand the ramifications of open data structures and 'built-in-house' middleware, so they fight it because they don't know it and they see it as a threat.
I've seen it time and again, most recently at my current employer when I proposed a NAS based on Linux that would cost less than half of what we ended up buying (the difference, mind you, was more than I get paid annually). The manager in charge of purchasing it didn't 'trust' that 'this Linux thing' would stay free or that he'd be able to keep it running if I left for another job. I've even been asked to do all my work on the Active Directory cleanup with Excel instead of grep and sed because they're scared that I might leave with my 'toolkit' and;eave them high and dry.
Open Source necessitates a trust of people's goodwill and happiness, while commercial software relies on vendors' goodwill and contractual obligations. If I could get the contractual part down, I'd be able to implement open-source AND make a bunch of loot, but until then, my employer trusts vendors and sales reps more than their own employees.
What I produce is NOT court-admissable, it's confirmation of suspicion, it's fodder for an argument.
I don't think the people who would do such a thing would end up calling me, nor do I think they'd get by an interview with me. I get all of my business through referalls that are made while women are alone with each-other, being honest.
In the off chance they do, all they have is a few pages of web sites that computer's been and some data from cached pages. If the husband didn't do it, he'd blame wifey or kids.
My report goes to the client, not a lawyer, not a judge. It's only to find 'the truth' for the client, you can't confront a spouse with lies and expect to get what you want.
I was living with a wonderful woman for two years. Eventually things got distant and 'weird'.
I was running a squid proxy at home at the time, so I decided to poke through the logs. I found a few porn sites I wasn't fans of, all 'cheating wife' stuff.
On closer inspection, I saw that my SO had ACCOUNTS at these sites, and was posting in forums and such.
I continued my investigation, monitoring much more closely now, and discovered that she was getting S&M training from people I knew!
I confronted her and we fought (obviously), but after I kicked her out, we had what was unarguably the best sexual relationship I've ever had. For over a year _I_ was in charge, and she loved every minute of it. I wouldn't be the person I am today if that hadn't happened to me.
She and I eventually got separated by work and geography, but I wouldn't have agreed to my first client if I hadn't had this experience myself.
I'm a HUGE fan of the firewire disk enclosure, I can just swipe the bytes and examine them from the comfort of my home on my own time.
It's safer when you're in someone's house, too. The last thing I want is for the client's spouse to drop in, I'd have to pretend to be a tech delousing the system, it would be... awkward.
Is that what you tell yourself? How the hell can you make a bald assertion like that? On what evidence?
On the lives of my clients after they finally got out of silently abusive relationships.
There was a case where the husband was gay but wouldn't admit it to the wife or himself because he was concerned about his children. It's BETTER now that 'daddy's gay and mommy's single'.
A person with a functional moral compass knows when things are good and when they aren't. I only take the job when they aren't and the situation would be a net-gain even in the worst of discoveries.
I don't go around swipe-and-snooping for just anyone. I need a detailed history and a valid reason to do this sort of thing. Like a parent reading a kid's journal, you can't just drop in and take a peek any old day, you can only do it if you have a serious concern about safety, sanity, or character.
I'm the grandparent poster, and I agree. I'll go into more detail later in the S&M post, but being in that situation was one of the reasons I got into the industry.
I wanted to help the 'good' people who were wasting their time on 'bad' people.
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IIRC NCQ isn't 100% fully-baked on Linux yet, so even NCQ-capable controllers and drives won't take advantage of it yet. I just upgraded my home file server with NCQ-capable gear and I don't think it's using it yet, even though I'm running the latest kernel.
There are patches for libATA that enable NCQ, but they're not in the mainline yet.
The only thing worse than testing without the new technologies would be testing with half-baked implementations of them. Let's wait until NCQ is done before we try testing with it.
Big fucking extension cord?
Yes. I fail to see the problem with a hermetically sealed transformer station (or several, for redundancy) sitting next to this thing, with insulated high-power lines (also redundant) heading to shore. Boost the voltage really high and you've got less loss to resistance.
It would be interesting to see if anything gets inducted by all the juice though. Anyone out there know what happens when a power line lies under water? Does it crust with salt or metals?
Well I've been working with Lenovo T43s all year and they seem quite rugged and reliable. I'm servicing about 90 of them, and we've only replaced one drive this year. Most of the software instability can be cured by updating the drivers and apps using IBM's 'Software Installer' tool which goes out to the web and sucks down the latest drivers for you. The best way to cure the bad software is to not run it at all though, generic Windows XP (from an SP2 install CD) and must-have drivers from the OEMs (not IBM branded, go to intel.com), with Windows controlling power and wireless.
Did you try 'dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda count=2' while booted from linux (liveCD or your install if you're done with it)
That's the command in Linux to wipe the first two sectors of the disk, which should adequately destroy the bootloader. Leave off the 'count=2' to wipe the whole disk for good luck.
I've never had trouble using a Windows XP install CD, deleted all partitions, and installed to the 'empty space', it seems to remove the boot loader for me.
Just because you're sending signals on the power mains doesn't mean you have to be any more 'connected' to the electric company's IT infrastructure that if you were dialing-up in Guam.
There's a seperate business entity running the ISP operation, and they won't be jacked-in to the systems that control the 'big switches'.
And FYI, Sasser was implicated in having something to do with the massive power outage in NYC a few years ago, there was so much viral traffic on the internal control lines (low speed, high-reliabity lines that signal electric grid status between stations) that the system couldn't send control messages fast enough to avoid the cascading failure. That's the rumor anyway.
Hell, I have a switch on my desk that's really four completely separated networks, there's NO WAY to get from one to another because they're VLAN'd and ACL'd apart from each other. It's nice to watch the broadcasts stay contained, and it lets me put infected machines onto a simulated network with a packet sniffer to analyze them without risking the farm.
You hydrogen people bother me. Hydrogen is not at all a solution to either the fossil supply or pollution problems. Producing and compressing the hydrogen takes a TREMENDOUS amount of energy that makes the overall scheme much less efficient than burning oil derivatives on-site. The issue isn't getting hydro fuel stations, it's getting the hydrogen without using tons of electricity.
The only thing hydrogen is good for is to reduce emissions from the vehicles themselves, but you only end up pushing the pollution to power generating stations, which we'll need a lot more of if the 'hydrogen economy' takes off.
The short-to-mid-term solution to the issues at hand is to produce engines that get much better mileage, like this hybrid, and to get Americans to give up their lust for uber-powerful cars. The long-term solution is effective mass-transportation, alternative energy sources (which hydrogen is not one of), and making dense walkable urban communities close to centers of commerce and industry part of western culture.
I think a good start would be to tax the crap out vehicles based on a pollution coefficient, banning light trucks (SUVs) from the high-speed lanes of highways, legislating a portion of the gas tax to fund mass-transit R&D and construction, leveraging heavy parking fees, raising the gas tax so gas costs $4/gallon, and legislation allowing for small diesel vehicles in the US (currently they are diffucult to produce, they get treated differently than gas vehicles).
I tried to move my home file server (SAMBA and NFS) from a 350MHz G3 tower to a VIA EPIA board. It was a miserable mistake. VIA loads some extra-crappy consumer-quality chips onto their EPIA boards. Not only did IDE and NIC traffic hose the CPU more than it should, but the quality of the VGA output was low, it was blurry. The 800MHz EPIA was half the speed of the G3, and the fan made it louder.
If I were you I'd get a box designed to handle massixe I/O, not a cheap consumer board. Get your hands on an old Mac G4 tower, they have PCI-X slots. Slap an Intel gigabit ethernet card (the 64-bit PCI-X server kind) and a Promise TX2/300 SATA controller in there and even a 533MHz box will serve files faster than any EPIA can. The older G4s use very little energy and are as silent as the drives you put in them. Aim for a 'G4 (Digital Audio)', but don't use the onboard LAN if you want to go gigabit, it doesn't handle jumbo frames. Linux runs just fine on them. The PowerPC 7410 @ 466MHz in my box only dissipates 9 watts at full load, it doesn't even need a fan on it.
If that's not an option, look to get something with a Pentium-3 or a Pentium-M in it, Mini-ITX form factor. EPoX and Commell sell them. You won't find great I/O performance on a mini board though, just a fact of life.
It's for several reasons:
1. There is no real support for Windows x64, there's no virus protection and very few device drivers. Why go out of your way to support 1% of your users who would actually run a native 64-bit OS?
2. Intel's 64-bit extensions actually slow their chips down. That's right, they added 64-bit instructions to their microcode, but they still get broken down to the same old instructions on the i686 core that the old ones did, and the 64-bit ones take longer to digest. It was a move for buzzword compliance only.
Want to prove it? Get a pentium D830 machine, compile Gentoo on it, first a 32-bit install, then the AMD64 install. Compile both with the same options, but one with 32-bit instructions, and one with 64. The Intel 64-bit Linux will be slower than the 32-bit. The opposite is true with an AMD K8 chip, because the core was designed from step one to be 64-bit.
3. Intel doesn't forsee you needing (or being able to fit) over 4GB of RAM in a portable or business desktop for several years, after the lifetime of this chip revision. If you insist on a 64-bit Intel chip, you must be running a server, workstation, or other high-end rig, so fess-up and buy an appropriately-classed chip (the D830, EE, or Xeon).
4. They need to deliver this chip to market NOW, Intel's stronglest lead right now is with mobile platforms. These chips are in demand as-is; Apple and other vendors want them NOW, not in a few months with 64-bit extensions.
Well you'd be hard-pressed to realize that vision. Firefox links to innumerable libraries to handle all sorts of funtionality, and those libraries differ depending on which distro you're running on. One distro might use 'giflib' while another uses 'libungif', etc.
Also, one system might be compiled with NPTL using GCC-4 while others are using pthreads and GCC-3.x and yet others with GCC-2.95, the ABI is different in some cases, you'd need different binaries. Not to mention that some distros are using kernels as far back as 2.2 to save resources.
Another advantage to using dynamic libraries is that if there's a security issue with gzip, for instance, all you have to do to fix it is update the gzip library, while a static-linked binary that works on most platforms will require a whole re-release of the Firefox package, and all the other packages that have gzip built-in. This is precisely the reason Windows has 'DLL Hell', because so many apps are linked to libraries that are out-of-sync with the ones that come with the system (I know, I'm being oversimple, but the core issue is the same).
These aren't disadvantages of Linux though! Each distro is, for all intents and purposes, it's own individual OS, GNU and Linus provide ready-made pieces for folks to build their own. The modularity of the open source development model DOES make it harder for commercial vendors to break-in, but it also is the lifeblood of non-market driven innovation. If you want thousands of developers to contribute their time, sweat, blood, and money to making free software, they have to be getting exactly what they want out of the systems they use. Developers aren't going to sacrifice the flexibility of the entire OSS model so Windows refugees can get their Firefox builds a few days earlier.
If you want Firefox-1.5 today, I suggest you download a source tarball or SRPM and warm up your CPU, but I suggest you give your distro maintainer a few days to digest it and make sure they have all the functionality, stability, and integration they want to offer you.
I think that certain projects don't use the artwork when they custom-package it because it's against their mission statement to use anything not 100% GPL. Debian is one of those distros that won't use ANYTHING unless it's a completely free license.
I know that Gentoo uses the artwork, even though they have several patches and modifications in the package.
Mozilla needs to retain some control over the branding for several reasons, not the least of which being security. If a third party was distributing malware-infested or otherwise maligned binaries of Firefox, I would hope that the Mozilla Foundation could revoke their ability to claim 'authenticity'.
That's not Mozilla's job at all. Their job is to produce the best web browser, it's up to all the distribution maintainers to provide packages for thier flavors.
F irefox. Do you really want them spending their time trying to figuring out the nuances of the top five distributions as well?
Mozilla already invests a tremendous amount of time, effort, and money in maintaining a three-platform build farm http://tinderbox.mozilla.org/showbuilds.cgi?tree=
Actually,I think a 1.3" tall mini with the footprint of a small stereo component would give you room to have 2 3.5" drives... which would be what you need for a PVR.
Two out of those 4 drugs are lethal with just one dose and heroin you only need to take a small dose once to be addicted for the rest of your life. Alcohol can be controlled. The rest you can't their physical addictions. No matter how you try it, quitting will cause dire physical, even life threatening consequences.
Wow, you REALLY paid attention to your DARE officer, eh? Which two of the four are lethal from just one dose? Cocaine isn't even a physical addiction, it's just a strong psycological one. I know plenty of people (myself included) who have tried heroin and decided that it's just not a good place to be, and all the addicts I know (and I know quite a few) took more than one dose to get hooked; you don't crave it right away, it's habitual behavior that you have to develop.
MDMA is virtually harmless, I'd even venture to say that if done in the right environment and in extreme moderation (not more than once or twice a year), it can be quite therapeutic. I've had a lot of people get things off their chest when dosed that they just couldn't get out with a shrink or a bottle of vodka. All the deaths I've heard that were related to MDMA were either caused by impurities in the pill or insane behavior that I'd attribute more to the user than the drug.
Heroin and morphine, when properly used, cause constipation. All the addicts you see are sickly because they're buying the drug and not food, or they are shooting up dirty drugs and not the clean stuff. Ever see a rich kid with a junk problem? They can hide it so well because it doesn't have any serious side effects, and most are smart enough to be able to keep it from spiralling totally out of contol.
Will drugs and alcohol directly kill a tiny subset of the population? Sure, but so will chicken bones served at restaraunts and slippery staircases. Will people die indirectly because of drugs and alcohol? Sure, they already do. But you don't blame a drunk driver's actions on alcohol, and I don't think you can blame some girl's insane belief that she can breathe underwater on ecstasy.
I'd rather live in a society that offered freedom and held individuals more responsible for their actions. Why shouldn't I be able to do drugs, smoke, drink, and sleep around unprotected? It's my body, and it's my business. As soon as I get on the road under the influence or start costing you more than my share in public services, or picking a fight in the bar you're at, you have full right to take it out on me. Until then, stop trying to save me from your fears.
Sure thing, then we'll replace ethanol with methanol so all the evil drinkers go blind or die, followed by poisoning bacon and fast food! Surely this will make the world a better place for the rest of us!
I have another idea! We can force everyone to exercise every day, it would save a lot of lives! We'll make it a mandatory part of everyone's workday, right after the two-minutes'-hate.
What's so unsafe about cocaine? Sure, there are idiots out there who blow too many lines and then get crazy, but if you an resist the urge to fight, drive, overexert yourself, or do it all the time, it's relatively harmless.
Heroin, alcohol, ecstasy, and tobacco are the same way, you can safely do reasonable amounts for long periods without frying/killing yourself. The problems arise from people's weakness of will and inability to control themselves and their addictions.
The Apple G5 updates FINALLY gave us 1mb l2 cache per core
What are you talking about? My G3 running at 450MHz has a 1MB L2 cache, and it has since 1999. Pentium Pros and various workstation/server class chips had multimegabyte caches a decade ago.
The reason you've seen less cache is that it didn't make sense to have a slow CPU with a 4MB ache that had to dissipate 100+ watts to operate. on-die cache is expensive in terms of heat, die space, and clock speed.
There's also the marketing factor, Intel would have you believe (at least until last year) that GHz were the benchmark, to get them they had to strip out cache. Everyone has to follow Intel to some extent, or they'll get mowed down (read: Apple filing to sell 500MHz G4s when 1.7GHz P4s were out). If you made a chip today that ran at 400MHz but kicked a Pentium 4 830's ass, you'd have a lot of trouble selling it.
And as for cache optimization, CHUD is an excellent tool to profile such things. You can get INSANE performance benefits by keeping an oft-repeated loop or randomly charged dataset inside the CPU's cache.
I'm really scared by America's 'antibiotic culture'. In my office alone (twelve people), there are seven currently taking antibiotics, most for non-bacterial or non-serious conditions. Some are taking them for what I know are allergies, some to 'prevent' getting sick, some because they have a viral cold, and one for a sinus infection that I know is fungal in nature.
Three people have 'stockpiles' of antibiotics they keep from when they get prescriptions in their desk, and they share their different meds with each other.
Doctors prescribe antibiotics as a cure-all to get whining patients out of the office, and if they do try to suggest real cures that are less appealing to their patients they can kiss their revenue stream goodbye.
I stopped going to my doctor when he prescribed me Arithromycin(sp?) for a fungal ear and sinus infection. Any idiot who knows some biology knows that you can't fix a fungal problem with antibacterial agents, it will hurt more than it helps. American patients won't stand for 'eat a healthy low-carb diet for a week and get plenty of rest' when they can go next door and get 'take these antibiotics and call me if it gets worse, we'll give you a CAT scan and suggest surgery.' Your body's indigenous bacteria are a tremendously important part of your digestive and immune systems, killing them only clears the path for viral and fungal agents.
I gave up antibiotics about eight years ago, and my immune system is rock-solid. Sure, I get the occasional sinus infection or cold, but I change my diet and pamper my immune system and it usually clears up in a day or so. Every start-of-school the whole office gets sick, most people were totally out-of-commission for a week; I was sick for only two nights. I had a fever, so I drank an assload of salty chicken soup and wrapped myself up in a bigass blanket to 'burn off' for the night.
What REALLY burns me, besides that my friends and coworkers are happily skipping down the path to superbugs, is that the whole thing is subsidised by my health insurance payment. There's nothing like paying $350/month for everyone around you to abuse the system while you never need a doctor.
I don't know if you noticed, but the work ethic in this country has changed from 'if I can find a way to improve it, I'll get a raise' to 'If I can look busy and make sure this happens again tomorrow, I'll still have a job'.
The shuttle program was overbudget and underwhelming from day one. The entire project was built top-down when it should have been done bottom-up. The design process should have gone from 'how much mass do I have to lift and return?' to 'what kind of engine can lift this mass and return reusably with it?', instead it was 'this is what it should LOOK like, what can I cram into the spaceframe?'
From precious few years in the American work force, I can say, the vast majority of folks, maybe 95% of them, are looking to keep themselves busy, the other 5% either have the charisma to rise to the top of their fields, or they jump from job to job, looking for a chance to be recognized for their 'unique' point-of-view and talent.
I'd have to ride through the ghetto to get there. Sorry, I'm just not willing to risk personal danger for it.
I've rode my bike through bed-stuy Brooklyn, Dorchester, Boston, and every dark corner of Providence (which, in my opinion, is much more dangerous than either) without a problem.
As long as you acknowledge people in the ghetto without appearing threatening to them, they're happy or indifferent to have you there. Remember that most ghettos are made up of hard-working minimum-wage folks who never got the education they should have or were tossed in jail for non-violent crimes. They tend to have VERY strong feelings about neighborhood solidarity and safety of families, which is where gang culture arises from.
Take a walk through the ghetto, keep your eyes open, nod at folks as you walk by, talk to them when you stop; You'll learn a lot by making the connection, and you'll have yourself safety wherever you want it.
Every time I've seen Open Source fail in the enterprise it's been because of personal issues.
;eave them high and dry.
You can't fire the entire IT staff and replace them with (half as many) new Open Source aware folks. It's just not possible. The people who are from the closed-source world don't understand the ramifications of open data structures and 'built-in-house' middleware, so they fight it because they don't know it and they see it as a threat.
I've seen it time and again, most recently at my current employer when I proposed a NAS based on Linux that would cost less than half of what we ended up buying (the difference, mind you, was more than I get paid annually). The manager in charge of purchasing it didn't 'trust' that 'this Linux thing' would stay free or that he'd be able to keep it running if I left for another job. I've even been asked to do all my work on the Active Directory cleanup with Excel instead of grep and sed because they're scared that I might leave with my 'toolkit' and
Open Source necessitates a trust of people's goodwill and happiness, while commercial software relies on vendors' goodwill and contractual obligations. If I could get the contractual part down, I'd be able to implement open-source AND make a bunch of loot, but until then, my employer trusts vendors and sales reps more than their own employees.
What I produce is NOT court-admissable, it's confirmation of suspicion, it's fodder for an argument.
I don't think the people who would do such a thing would end up calling me, nor do I think they'd get by an interview with me. I get all of my business through referalls that are made while women are alone with each-other, being honest.
In the off chance they do, all they have is a few pages of web sites that computer's been and some data from cached pages. If the husband didn't do it, he'd blame wifey or kids.
My report goes to the client, not a lawyer, not a judge. It's only to find 'the truth' for the client, you can't confront a spouse with lies and expect to get what you want.
I'm the grandparent, FYI.
Yes, this actually happened to ME.
I was living with a wonderful woman for two years. Eventually things got distant and 'weird'.
I was running a squid proxy at home at the time, so I decided to poke through the logs. I found a few porn sites I wasn't fans of, all 'cheating wife' stuff.
On closer inspection, I saw that my SO had ACCOUNTS at these sites, and was posting in forums and such.
I continued my investigation, monitoring much more closely now, and discovered that she was getting S&M training from people I knew!
I confronted her and we fought (obviously), but after I kicked her out, we had what was unarguably the best sexual relationship I've ever had. For over a year _I_ was in charge, and she loved every minute of it. I wouldn't be the person I am today if that hadn't happened to me.
She and I eventually got separated by work and geography, but I wouldn't have agreed to my first client if I hadn't had this experience myself.
I'm a HUGE fan of the firewire disk enclosure, I can just swipe the bytes and examine them from the comfort of my home on my own time.
It's safer when you're in someone's house, too. The last thing I want is for the client's spouse to drop in, I'd have to pretend to be a tech delousing the system, it would be... awkward.
Is that what you tell yourself? How the hell can you make a bald assertion like that? On what evidence?
On the lives of my clients after they finally got out of silently abusive relationships.
There was a case where the husband was gay but wouldn't admit it to the wife or himself because he was concerned about his children. It's BETTER now that 'daddy's gay and mommy's single'.
A person with a functional moral compass knows when things are good and when they aren't. I only take the job when they aren't and the situation would be a net-gain even in the worst of discoveries.
I don't go around swipe-and-snooping for just anyone. I need a detailed history and a valid reason to do this sort of thing. Like a parent reading a kid's journal, you can't just drop in and take a peek any old day, you can only do it if you have a serious concern about safety, sanity, or character.
I'm the grandparent poster, and I agree. I'll go into more detail later in the S&M post, but being in that situation was one of the reasons I got into the industry.
I wanted to help the 'good' people who were wasting their time on 'bad' people.