I'm sure the poster would crap his pants if he found out I installed bochs on my iBook, and have been trying to get a win2K install running, for no good reason. Why do people always try and correct other people who are having fun? If it was a bad way to have fun, I wouldn't be doing it long enough for you to correct me!
I work at a computer store, and I had my company purchaser check into the VIA hardware. Unfortunately, it is sufficiently obscure that none of our regular suppliers carry any of it. I don't know that he ever tracked down a source, other than ordering it retail from England, or something rediculous. So, the problem of availability isn't limited only to the Small Shop not ordering it. VIA needs a massive PR campaign, to get more local shops to start asking about it, so more suppliers start carrying it.
I really wish our normal suppliers carried the stuff -- I Want It. I have dozens of ideas that could be well suited to a small, low power computer. I just can't get it local. Grrr... It's even hard as hell to find online to special order!
I'm assuming that not the *whole ship* is inflatable. I was assuming a ship small enough to get into a single heavy booster, but with just enough room for all four guys to have a chair, and an extra inflatable module. Then, Once you are on your way, you inflate the extra module, which gives you a lot of extra living room, making the trip to Mars more pleasant. That way, it's all a single throw to Mars, and you don't have to deal with orbital assembly, or multiple launches, or anything. And, if you fail to inflate the extra hab space, everything still works, it's just cramped.
Dood, you are so fucking wrong, you don't even know what's up. All the probes we sent to Venus are headed back *right now,* and the Martian Defense Force is planning on returning Beagle in the next few years as well. IT ALL COMES BACK! IT IS TEH SUXXORS. No, seriously, I mean it.
You aren't the only one. There are a ton of similarities. Google, if you care. I wouldn't be at all surprised if part of the reason that Halo doesn't take place in the Marathon universe has to do with contracts and who owns the marathon universe, and the microsoft buyout. Regardless, it isn't that hard to treat them as being in the same universe.
Why the heck would it be any more difficult to inflate a module after acceleration? Seriously, I don't understand at all. Except for the fact the Mars is now heading towards you, there would be no way to notice the change in velocity. It's... you know... In outer space. No acceleration, no friction, no vibration, no engine running, was a tongue in cheek means to say deflate.
Have you ever studies a Hohman transfer orbit? It's just coasting for as much of the way as possible.
My friends and I use the term "Bush It" to sneak into polite conversations with a red herring.
-What are you and Pete doing tonight?
-We are going to Bush It, and demand that the movie theater start playing Memento again.
It sounds inappropriate to an uninitiated ear, but it simply means that we intend to engage in irrational, unjustified, unlateral behavior. I reccomend any high-school age slash dotters adopt the term in an effort to make the admin uncomfortable.
Accelerate, inflate, inflate backwards, accelerate backwards. Be mindful to get these steps in the right order, and there won't be any acceleration stress on the bubble. As for impacts... All studies so far show that inflated hab modules provide better impact survivability that aluminum. I'm a metallic foil haberdasherer, so I'm a big fan of alu-construction at all scales, but even I have to bow to good engineering. >90% of a mars trip not using ion or nuke propulsion will just be coasting. (Hohman transfer orbits and all that...)
That said, I don't think it would be a good idea for the first Mars mission. We've never done one of those before, so I think the first one should be the ultimate engineering woosie mission, with as little unproven tech as possible, for, I think, obvious reasons.
I was just thinking the same thing. I picked up a 1 GHz iBook G4 today. (Open box demo unit woo hoo, typing onit right now - my first G4). Obviously, it won't be convenient. I assume it isn't just a zif socket, but hypothetically, if I was good with a soldering iron, would it go? Is there any way to get the old CPU out without breaking it? Not that my current one is slow for my use. (I've heard good things about X Code, so It will be a coding box, and Safari is pretty nice for a web browser... No gaming, probably no intense 3D - I have an athlon 64 for the serious compute, and a pile of old sun boxes if it parallelises...)
You may have issues with the speed of light kicking your ass.:) The solution is pretty elegant at first glance. Provide some simple means for large data dumps from one node to another, using AGPnet. (Or whatever you want to call it.)
If we assume that you can run at full AGP bandwidth, the simplest setup is probably some sort of bridge chip sitting on AGP which can do DMA, and transfer any requested data out to the requesting node. The bridge chip adds a bit of latency, but it shouldn't be too bad. Now, how many pins are on an AGP slot? At what clock speed? You are going to have that many wires going from the AGPnet card to the other AGPnet card, all at native frequency? Well, okay. Sounds like a plan. One problem... With that much wire, you may get into clock skew issues that are pretty substantial. Maintaining the signal integrity over 6 inches on a board is way easier than six feet of wire. Oh, and how far apart can the systems be? 3 feet? 100 feet? I can have Gig-E run pretty damned far before it is an issue. If I need farther, hubs and switches are well known, cheap, commodity hardware.
Also, can I have more than two nodes? What sort of network topology are you planning? Ring? Centrally switched? Switch adds latency. Ring adds latency when you need data from past the next node - or, you are all on a shared bus, with substantial comms overhead. (And this solution is for chatty comms oriented cluster tasks, right?)
Basically, all you have said is that we should put network cards in our AGP slot. That's all well and good, but you left out the minor detail of "the network" -- The slot itself isn't that big of a deal.
A great quote I encountered once... "Itanium was designed to be the chip of the future. It will, unfortunately, stay the chip of the future." Oh, and don't forget -- IA64 was designed with the idea that it wouldn't be covered by X86 licensing agreements, so Intel could charge AMD shitloads for the architecture. And, all Itania have X86 support in hardware, anyway, so I wouldn't say they dropped support. They just made it run so slow that it will be faster to use a software PC emulator than to use the native x86 hardware!
I actually used to live not too far away from there. Wheaton, actually, if anybody knows the area. My mom and old friends are always trying to convince me to head back there. I think they may all be due for a brief visit! Anybody know of anything interesting like this that exists in the Denver metro area? I swear, Denver is just a crappy Chicago knockoff with a better view. (Mountains are west, and go up... Lake is east, and exists because the land goes down... Soo... Symetrical...)
I never actually had a C=64. I had a VIC 20. I was always undercompensating. Even now, I underclock my Athlon 64 to convince people I'm not cool.
A cluster has poor latency and bandwidth compared to moving data register to register on a CPU. Big fast CPU's have lots of local bandwidth. Clusters have less. How in frack's sake do you expect to "Fix" that? It is the inherent distinction of a cluster. Separate boxes, with IO connecting them can never be faster at comms than the CPU itself. a 486 has more on chip bandwidth and better latency than Gig-ethernet. Sure, it only has 8 registers... Not a huge range of problems that it can solve entirely on-chip...:)
That's just what I was thinking. I sell computers, and most of our new builds are 32 bit athlons. I always mention that the 64 bit revolution is imminent, but with a more expensive board and CPU, the systems are naturally pricier than the 2200+ and 2600+ systems that are our bread and butter right now. If I can sell a reasonably cheap custom box with socket 754, and an easy upgrade path to 64 bits when WinXP-64 comes out, it makes me happy, my customers happy, and AMD is tickled shitless because somebody just bought two CPU's when they would have bought one. w00t.
Wow, as I post this, the three guys who posted this joke managed to get modded down, modded up, and ignored... crazy mods... Of course, the G-parent post is only funny if it is a Jay and Silent Bob reference...
Bah, I used my 1 MB Mach 64 card to run at greater than 1024x768. IIRC, I made it up to 1152x864. 8 bit color (if that), 43 hertz. Plenty of room to read a fair amount of text.
As somebody who attended math competitions in HS, I have to say that the game face can prevent people from scoring. We used to bring TI-92's to the competition. Even if we didn't use them, we looked so leet that everybody got psyched out. It's like Poker in that regard. A game of limited social/mental interaction, plus whoever gets the most points because of it.
I work at a PC retail shop. I just want to agree with you strongly. If anything goes wrong, the guys at the internet site will not help you. If you buy half your stuff from another store, we will blame thier hardware.
OTOH, if you just get a bunch of stuff from us, we'll take care of you. We have to deal with you face to face, so it isn't worth the hassle to screw you over.
Another reccomendation : here in Denver we have a guy named Tom Martino, "The Troubleshooter." He's on the local news show, and he does stories about crappy businesses. Know the name of whatever similar reporter exists in your municipality. If the guys at your local shop are giving you shit, don't be afraid to give them shit.
Be reasonable with the guys at the shop. Give them a chance to take care of you of something is wrong. And shit does go wrong. Don't be real surprised if you get a bad stick of RAM, or whatever. That isn't what makes somebody shady. IT's what happens next! If you inform them they gave you a shitty piece of RAM, and they tell you to go fuck yourself, it isn't right. Also, make sure you know the warranty information upfront. If you are at five times the warranty period, and expectiung a full refund, you are SOL. If you are three days past the warranty period, they should be willing to take care of you.
Last word of advice when dealing with a shop : sometimes they will only warranty a part if they install it. Don't get your panties in a knot. Some people are as incompetant ast the author of the article, so the shop doesn't want to deal with warranty replacement of backward-inserted DIMMs. They aren't calling you stupid, it just makes things easier for anybody.
Same here. I'm surprised it wound up taking so long to be mentioned. But, these damned younguns, they just don't know their hertitage. I actually have a Sol 2.X CD around here somewhere. Don't recall the exact version. It still worked fiune, as of about a year ago when I installed onto a SparcStation with it. Quite nifty.
Anyhow, yeah... Why does this matter? Linux distros have jumped versions. MS has abandoned version numbers. Some things have just gone to year based names. AOL hasn't released a X.Y version other than X.0 since 2.6, and I'll be damned if I can actually tell the difference between several of them! WinAmp recently. Apple went to Roman Numerals... And then added a version number to the roman numerals which we thought were a version number... And started at 10.0! Where was ProDOS before 3.X? At least one well known app has a version number converging on pi. Emacs refers to itself as being 20.X but hasn't actually hit 1.0! RenderMan abandoned the 2 in the 2.X version number, and went straight to the X... I think they are at about 11. There are plenty of other instances of version numbering shenanigans... Why should I care? I mean, a kernel version jump for Linux to 37.2 would be bothersome, because we have come to believe that the version numbers mean something... Foo. Foo, I say. Foo.
You mean toggle switches on the front of the case? Ahh, the good old days, when men were men, and programmers couldn't be outsourced because they had to manually set the toggle switches for the bootloader! Surely, any truly advanced civilisation would do it without evil "abstraction!"
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I'd assume that would be policy, since with a smaller crew, you need less space, so it would be less of an issue, and lower stress for the survivors.
I'm sure the poster would crap his pants if he found out I installed bochs on my iBook, and have been trying to get a win2K install running, for no good reason. Why do people always try and correct other people who are having fun? If it was a bad way to have fun, I wouldn't be doing it long enough for you to correct me!
I work at a computer store, and I had my company purchaser check into the VIA hardware. Unfortunately, it is sufficiently obscure that none of our regular suppliers carry any of it. I don't know that he ever tracked down a source, other than ordering it retail from England, or something rediculous. So, the problem of availability isn't limited only to the Small Shop not ordering it. VIA needs a massive PR campaign, to get more local shops to start asking about it, so more suppliers start carrying it.
I really wish our normal suppliers carried the stuff -- I Want It. I have dozens of ideas that could be well suited to a small, low power computer. I just can't get it local. Grrr... It's even hard as hell to find online to special order!
No worse than the inconsistencies in Star Trek... :)
I'm assuming that not the *whole ship* is inflatable. I was assuming a ship small enough to get into a single heavy booster, but with just enough room for all four guys to have a chair, and an extra inflatable module. Then, Once you are on your way, you inflate the extra module, which gives you a lot of extra living room, making the trip to Mars more pleasant. That way, it's all a single throw to Mars, and you don't have to deal with orbital assembly, or multiple launches, or anything. And, if you fail to inflate the extra hab space, everything still works, it's just cramped.
Dood, you are so fucking wrong, you don't even know what's up. All the probes we sent to Venus are headed back *right now,* and the Martian Defense Force is planning on returning Beagle in the next few years as well. IT ALL COMES BACK! IT IS TEH SUXXORS. No, seriously, I mean it.
You aren't the only one. There are a ton of similarities. Google, if you care. I wouldn't be at all surprised if part of the reason that Halo doesn't take place in the Marathon universe has to do with contracts and who owns the marathon universe, and the microsoft buyout. Regardless, it isn't that hard to treat them as being in the same universe.
Why the heck would it be any more difficult to inflate a module after acceleration? Seriously, I don't understand at all. Except for the fact the Mars is now heading towards you, there would be no way to notice the change in velocity. It's... you know... In outer space. No acceleration, no friction, no vibration, no engine running, was a tongue in cheek means to say deflate.
Have you ever studies a Hohman transfer orbit? It's just coasting for as much of the way as possible.
My friends and I use the term "Bush It" to sneak into polite conversations with a red herring.
-What are you and Pete doing tonight?
-We are going to Bush It, and demand that the movie theater start playing Memento again.
It sounds inappropriate to an uninitiated ear, but it simply means that we intend to engage in irrational, unjustified, unlateral behavior. I reccomend any high-school age slash dotters adopt the term in an effort to make the admin uncomfortable.
Accelerate, inflate, inflate backwards, accelerate backwards. Be mindful to get these steps in the right order, and there won't be any acceleration stress on the bubble. As for impacts... All studies so far show that inflated hab modules provide better impact survivability that aluminum. I'm a metallic foil haberdasherer, so I'm a big fan of alu-construction at all scales, but even I have to bow to good engineering. >90% of a mars trip not using ion or nuke propulsion will just be coasting. (Hohman transfer orbits and all that...)
That said, I don't think it would be a good idea for the first Mars mission. We've never done one of those before, so I think the first one should be the ultimate engineering woosie mission, with as little unproven tech as possible, for, I think, obvious reasons.
I was just thinking the same thing. I picked up a 1 GHz iBook G4 today. (Open box demo unit woo hoo, typing onit right now - my first G4). Obviously, it won't be convenient. I assume it isn't just a zif socket, but hypothetically, if I was good with a soldering iron, would it go? Is there any way to get the old CPU out without breaking it? Not that my current one is slow for my use. (I've heard good things about X Code, so It will be a coding box, and Safari is pretty nice for a web browser... No gaming, probably no intense 3D - I have an athlon 64 for the serious compute, and a pile of old sun boxes if it parallelises...)
You may have issues with the speed of light kicking your ass. :) The solution is pretty elegant at first glance. Provide some simple means for large data dumps from one node to another, using AGPnet. (Or whatever you want to call it.)
If we assume that you can run at full AGP bandwidth, the simplest setup is probably some sort of bridge chip sitting on AGP which can do DMA, and transfer any requested data out to the requesting node. The bridge chip adds a bit of latency, but it shouldn't be too bad. Now, how many pins are on an AGP slot? At what clock speed? You are going to have that many wires going from the AGPnet card to the other AGPnet card, all at native frequency? Well, okay. Sounds like a plan. One problem... With that much wire, you may get into clock skew issues that are pretty substantial. Maintaining the signal integrity over 6 inches on a board is way easier than six feet of wire. Oh, and how far apart can the systems be? 3 feet? 100 feet? I can have Gig-E run pretty damned far before it is an issue. If I need farther, hubs and switches are well known, cheap, commodity hardware.
Also, can I have more than two nodes? What sort of network topology are you planning? Ring? Centrally switched? Switch adds latency. Ring adds latency when you need data from past the next node - or, you are all on a shared bus, with substantial comms overhead. (And this solution is for chatty comms oriented cluster tasks, right?)
Basically, all you have said is that we should put network cards in our AGP slot. That's all well and good, but you left out the minor detail of "the network" -- The slot itself isn't that big of a deal.
A great quote I encountered once... "Itanium was designed to be the chip of the future. It will, unfortunately, stay the chip of the future." Oh, and don't forget -- IA64 was designed with the idea that it wouldn't be covered by X86 licensing agreements, so Intel could charge AMD shitloads for the architecture. And, all Itania have X86 support in hardware, anyway, so I wouldn't say they dropped support. They just made it run so slow that it will be faster to use a software PC emulator than to use the native x86 hardware!
I actually used to live not too far away from there. Wheaton, actually, if anybody knows the area. My mom and old friends are always trying to convince me to head back there. I think they may all be due for a brief visit! Anybody know of anything interesting like this that exists in the Denver metro area? I swear, Denver is just a crappy Chicago knockoff with a better view. (Mountains are west, and go up... Lake is east, and exists because the land goes down... Soo... Symetrical...)
I never actually had a C=64. I had a VIC 20. I was always undercompensating. Even now, I underclock my Athlon 64 to convince people I'm not cool.
A cluster has poor latency and bandwidth compared to moving data register to register on a CPU. Big fast CPU's have lots of local bandwidth. Clusters have less. How in frack's sake do you expect to "Fix" that? It is the inherent distinction of a cluster. Separate boxes, with IO connecting them can never be faster at comms than the CPU itself. a 486 has more on chip bandwidth and better latency than Gig-ethernet. Sure, it only has 8 registers... Not a huge range of problems that it can solve entirely on-chip... :)
That's just what I was thinking. I sell computers, and most of our new builds are 32 bit athlons. I always mention that the 64 bit revolution is imminent, but with a more expensive board and CPU, the systems are naturally pricier than the 2200+ and 2600+ systems that are our bread and butter right now. If I can sell a reasonably cheap custom box with socket 754, and an easy upgrade path to 64 bits when WinXP-64 comes out, it makes me happy, my customers happy, and AMD is tickled shitless because somebody just bought two CPU's when they would have bought one. w00t.
Wow, as I post this, the three guys who posted this joke managed to get modded down, modded up, and ignored... crazy mods... Of course, the G-parent post is only funny if it is a Jay and Silent Bob reference...
Bah, I used my 1 MB Mach 64 card to run at greater than 1024x768. IIRC, I made it up to 1152x864. 8 bit color (if that), 43 hertz. Plenty of room to read a fair amount of text.
As somebody who attended math competitions in HS, I have to say that the game face can prevent people from scoring. We used to bring TI-92's to the competition. Even if we didn't use them, we looked so leet that everybody got psyched out. It's like Poker in that regard. A game of limited social/mental interaction, plus whoever gets the most points because of it.
Some of the mathlete chicks were hot.
I think it was pretty clearly intended as a joke. He forgot the "beleagered" flag that tips us off in all the Apple stories.
I was just about to mention that movie. Somebody mod this man up!
I work at a PC retail shop. I just want to agree with you strongly. If anything goes wrong, the guys at the internet site will not help you. If you buy half your stuff from another store, we will blame thier hardware.
OTOH, if you just get a bunch of stuff from us, we'll take care of you. We have to deal with you face to face, so it isn't worth the hassle to screw you over.
Another reccomendation : here in Denver we have a guy named Tom Martino, "The Troubleshooter." He's on the local news show, and he does stories about crappy businesses. Know the name of whatever similar reporter exists in your municipality. If the guys at your local shop are giving you shit, don't be afraid to give them shit.
Be reasonable with the guys at the shop. Give them a chance to take care of you of something is wrong. And shit does go wrong. Don't be real surprised if you get a bad stick of RAM, or whatever. That isn't what makes somebody shady. IT's what happens next! If you inform them they gave you a shitty piece of RAM, and they tell you to go fuck yourself, it isn't right. Also, make sure you know the warranty information upfront. If you are at five times the warranty period, and expectiung a full refund, you are SOL. If you are three days past the warranty period, they should be willing to take care of you.
Last word of advice when dealing with a shop : sometimes they will only warranty a part if they install it. Don't get your panties in a knot. Some people are as incompetant ast the author of the article, so the shop doesn't want to deal with warranty replacement of backward-inserted DIMMs. They aren't calling you stupid, it just makes things easier for anybody.
Same here. I'm surprised it wound up taking so long to be mentioned. But, these damned younguns, they just don't know their hertitage. I actually have a Sol 2.X CD around here somewhere. Don't recall the exact version. It still worked fiune, as of about a year ago when I installed onto a SparcStation with it. Quite nifty.
Anyhow, yeah... Why does this matter? Linux distros have jumped versions. MS has abandoned version numbers. Some things have just gone to year based names. AOL hasn't released a X.Y version other than X.0 since 2.6, and I'll be damned if I can actually tell the difference between several of them! WinAmp recently. Apple went to Roman Numerals... And then added a version number to the roman numerals which we thought were a version number... And started at 10.0! Where was ProDOS before 3.X? At least one well known app has a version number converging on pi. Emacs refers to itself as being 20.X but hasn't actually hit 1.0! RenderMan abandoned the 2 in the 2.X version number, and went straight to the X... I think they are at about 11. There are plenty of other instances of version numbering shenanigans... Why should I care? I mean, a kernel version jump for Linux to 37.2 would be bothersome, because we have come to believe that the version numbers mean something... Foo. Foo, I say. Foo.
You mean toggle switches on the front of the case? Ahh, the good old days, when men were men, and programmers couldn't be outsourced because they had to manually set the toggle switches for the bootloader! Surely, any truly advanced civilisation would do it without evil "abstraction!"
Java, naturally. Run anywhere, and all that... Of course, if their brains are completely different from the brain of a human, they might use perl...