Basically, it comes out that the XP 2800+ and the P4 3.06 Ghz are neck in neck for most real world applications, with less than 10% differance between them on anything most home or business users are going to run. So it really comes down to which is the better deal, especially in a depressed economy with tight IT budgets. At the moment, only the XP 2700+ and the P4 2.8 are shown up on pricewatch.com, with prices of $354 amd $389 respectively. Meaning that AMD still has the crown in the Price/performance arena. However, the gap is narrowing.
Most routers run a BSD variant and will return an identifiable fingergerprint.
Now that's an interesting idea I hadn't thought of. I've played around
with nmap a little and it's pretty good, although for techincal people I
think there are ways around it. If you've got a linux / some BSD box
doing the routing you can set it up to be a halted firewall.
I believe this solves that problem since only NAT and ipchains
would be running. I don't believe the machine would return pings, which is
one of the things nmap depends on. There was a story discussing something
like this here on slashdot a while back, but I can't seem to find it.
Of course that doesn't help if someone is using a hardware router/firewall.
Do you think there are (or have you heard
of) any ISP's who actually do use something
like nmap to see whether or not their users are running a hardware router/firewall.
However, even if they suspect, can they do anything about it? It still
comes down to the issue that they would have to come into the house and check
physically. I mean I could just tell them that I'm running BSD on the
computer connected to the internet. They can't do anything unless their
TOS says they will only provide service to Windows users. But I'm not
sure if that would stand up in court.
On that note, how does one secure a Microsoft OS when the cableco does
not allow hardware firewalls?
How can anyone prevent you from using a hardware firewall? The best they
can do is require you to install an ethernet card that they supply and then
check the MAC address. But most descent consumer Internet router/firewalls,
for example the D-Link
DI-604, allow you to clone the MAC address from your NIC. Which
doesn't really leave the ISP any room. You can hook up a hardware firewall
(which is what the 604 is) and as many computers as you want, and the ISP
can't do a damn thing about it.
Short of coming out physically to your house and checking if you have
one that is. But short of that they have no way of knowing.
Unless you insist on telling them that is.;-)
Would you talk a bit about your development of Lifestreams, your candidate for a new information-control interface? How does elegance figure into it?
DavidGelernter:
Originated in my unhappiness, bordering on disgust, with every operating system on the market, the Mac desktop was revolutionary in the 1970's, and was beautiful in the early 1980's, but in the late 1980's, it was getting old, and today it's pathetically obsolete, whether you buy it from Mac or in the form of Windows. After all, it comes out from an obsolete, long ago, technology era that doesn't match today's computing environment at all. Matches it so badly that it's an intolerable pain to deal with. So that for example, the system was designed when the Internet was not the internet, email was unimportant, very few people used it at all, computing cycles were scarce & expensive, memory was expensive, and just as important, or more important, all computer users were new users. So in the 1980's, people didn't have many files, many directories, because they hadn't been online for very long. But today, when compute cycles and memories are cheap, and the problem isn't how to conserve those resources, but how to squander them reasonably, and the internet is bigger than ever. So many people use their computers as text managers exclusively. The operating system designed long ago for radically different computers doesn't work anymore. For that matter, the whole underlying thesis of an operating system is obsolete. There is absolutely no reason that I should ever have to think about where I have a file, what machine I'm on, what my files are named, what directory I stuck something in. What I want is to be able to walk up to a computer anywhere, and tune in my electronic life. I don't care if it's a Mac or PC just as I don't care if, when I tune in CNN on TV, I don't care if it's a Toshiba TV or a Hitachi TV. In short, for all these reasons I've sort of hinted at, I found myself so disgusted with what was available, I figured there had to be something better. Although the research I had been doing on software in the 80's was fairly esoteric stuff having to do with programming & distributed systems and artificial intelligence, I had to turn my attention to everyday computing needs because the situation was, in software terms, so incredibly awful.
Professor of Computer Science
B.A., Yale University, 1976Ph.D., The State University of New York
at Stony Brook, 1982
Joined Yale Faculty 1982
David Gelernter's research interests include information management,
parallel programming, software ensembles and artificial intelligence.
The coordination language called "Linda" that he developed with Nicholas
Carriero (also of Yale) sees fairly widespread use world-wide for parallel
programming.
Gelernter's current interests include adaptive parallelism, programming
environments for parallelism, realtime data fusion, expert databases and
information-management systems (the Lifestreams system in particular).
He is co-author of two textbooks (on programming languages and on
parallel programming methods), author of Mirror Worlds (Oxford: 1991),
the Muse in the Machine (Free Press: 1994 -- about how thinking works),
and a forthcoming book in the "Masterclasses" series about aesthetics
and computing. He has published cultural-implications-of-computing-type
pieces in many newspapers and magazines, is contributing editor at
the Manhattan Institute's City Journal, the National Review and is art
critic at the Weekly Standard.
Representative Publications
Lifestreams: An Alternative to the Desktop Metaphor, with Scott Fertig
and Eric Freeman. Proc. CHI'96 (April 1996: paper and ACM video).
Adaptive Parallelism, with Nicholas Carriero, Eric Freeman and David
Kaminsky. IEEE Computer, Feb. 1995.
Coordination Languages and their Significance, with Nicholas
Carriero, Communications of the ACM, 35 (2), February 1992, pp.
97-107.
You're making the classic mistake of assuming that Bandwidth is what matters, when in fact it's the latency which kills applications. Having bandwidth numbers without the corresponding latency is worse than useless, it's misleading for the uninformed.
First of all, we tested the Athlon XP 2800+ on the "normal" KT333 platform
with a 17x multiplier, the FSB set at 133 MHz DDR (266 MHz) and the memory
set at 166 MHz DDR (333 MHz), CAS at 2, RAS to CAS at 3, Precharge at 3.
The second time, the KT333 platform (ASUS A7V333) was set at a FSB of 166
MHz (333 MHz) and the multiplier was set to 13.5x.
...
Where do I start? There is an enormous amount of info hidden is this
table. Let us first start with the 266 MHz versus 333 MHz FSB discussion.
There have been many reports that show that the Athlon does not benefit
much from an increase in FSB clockspeed, moving from 266 MHz to 333 MHz. But Membench tells
us exactly why. First of all, compare the two KT333
latency numbers (64 byte strides). All BIOS settings were exactly
the same, only the FSB speed, and thus the multiplier, are different. Normally
one would expect, everything else being equal, that the Athlon with the 166
MHz FSB would see 25% lower latency, but the CPU with the 166
MHz FSB version actually sees a higher latency! This shows that the
(ASUS) KT333 board, in order to guarantee proper stability, increases certain
latencies of the memory controller. Memory bandwidth increases by
14%, which is also less than expected.
Now what does this mean for "real world" performance? It means that many
applications will see either a very small performance increase or none at all, as it is
latency and not bandwidth that is the most important performance factor.
Let us explain this in more detail.
Basically, the latency of the whole memory (From FSB to DRAM) system
is equal to the sum of:
The latency between the FSB and the chipset (+/- 1 clockcycle)
The latency between the chipset and the DRAM (+/- 1 clockcycle)
The RAS to CAS latency (2-3 clocks, charging the right row)
The CAS latency (2-3 clocks, getting the right column)
1 cycle to transfer the data.
The latency to get this data back from the DRAM output buffer to the CPU
(via the chipset) (+/- 2 clockcycles)
This gets you the first word (8 bytes). A good PC100 SDRAM CAS 2
will have a latency of about 9 cycles, and the next 3 cycles another 24
bytes will be ready. The PC100 SDRAM will, in this case be able to get
32 bytes in 12 cycles.
If you want to calculate the latency that CPU sees, you need to multiply
the latency of the memory system with the multiplier of the CPU. So a 500
MHz (5 x 100 MHz) CPU will see 5 x 9 cycles latency. This CPU will have
to wait at least 45 cycles before the information that could not be found
in the L2-cache will be available in the cache.
US-Israel "Nautilus" system intercepts artillery shell. US company TRW and Israel Aircraft Industries jointly developed the Mobile Tactical High Energy Laser system.
Globes [online] - Israel's Business Arena, November 06, 2002 By Dror Marom [With thanks to ATRC Newswire]
The joint US-Israel Nautilus system for intercepting Katyusha rockets yesterday successfully shot down an artillery shell traveling at supersonic speed. The trial, the first in military history, took place at the White Sands testing grounds in New Mexico, where previous testing of the program also took place.
The Nautilus, also called the Mobile Tactical High Energy Laser (MTHEL), is the first and only system to ever intercept both an individual Katyusha and a barrage of dozens of such rockets. Katyushas are much slower than artillery shells. Development of the Nautilus began before the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks and the increased threat of terrorism.
US company TRW (NYSE: TRW) and Israel Aircraft Industries (IAI) jointly developed the system. Elta Electronic Industries developed the radar, IAI's MBT (MABAT) - Weapon Systems and Space Technologyunit is developing the sensors and the fire control system, Tadiran is developing the control and monitoring tools, and Rafael (Israel Armament Development Authority) is supplying the power source for the laser. The initial development costs amount to $201.8 million. Israel put up $67.5 million, a third of the financing, mostly for development, while the US promised to pay for testing and production.
The mobile Nautilus system is designed for the Israel Defense Forces onIsrael's northern border, where Hizbollah's Katyusha rocketspose a threat from Southern Lebanon, and in other locations. US Army Space and Missile Defense Command and US Army Space Command commander General Joseph M. Cosumano said, "The tactical laser is capable of changing the face of the battlefield." TRW Space & Electronics president and CEO Timothy W. Hannemann predicts that production of the operational mobile system will begin soon.
Israel and the US are considering development of a antiaircraft version of the system.
Interesting arguement, but I don't think it holds. I served in the Israeli army and had alot of contact with the weapons R&D guys. First thing to remember is that army == massive waste. Just to give you an idea, typically something like 1 in 100 bullets fired ever effectively hits a target. You assume one missle fired means one target destroyed. But in reality it's more in the range of 20 missles fired, one target destroyed - maybe. Of all the patriot missles fired during the guld war, only maybe 2%-3% were really effective, IIRC. So there's a serious issue there already. But the main focus os this system isn't shooting down planes, it's shooting down missles and artillary. The Iranian backed Hizbullah terrorists currently have 10,000 Katyusha missles lined up on our northern border. This system can shoot down tens of those missle a second. There is nothing else in existance that can do this. And at a very low operation cost. It may have cost about $200 million to develope, but that's just the cost of about 200 advanced cruise missles. And this system is already ready to be deployed. And the cost to build additional units will be much less than the cost of a single fighter jet.
Re:Making Linux A REAL Alternative
on
Halloween VII
·
· Score: 1
We, eh? So, are you working on Gnome or KDE? Another desktop project altogether, perhaps?
I was refering to Linux as a desktop in the generic scence, not to a specific desktop shell. Regardly, no I don't work on a "desktop" although I do try and help debug mozilla, since I use it quite a bit.
Re:Making Linux A REAL Alternative
on
Halloween VII
·
· Score: 1
and why do you think the desktop is not viable yet?
Most businesses are small. IIRC businesses with less than 10 employees make up over 50% of businesses. And they have a limited number of computers, and a extremely limited IT budget. They can't afford an admin. If the layman guy running the business can't get it up, forget it. You only have to be marginally competant to get basic things up on Windowz, but you have to be a pretty competant admin to get even basic things running on linux.
I'm not quite getting you. You point to India as a country with Democracy but non-free markets, but what I'm saying is that you need both transparent Democracy and free markets. I'm not saying that you automatically get one if you have the other.
Want to convince a new generation of young (pr0n) surfers to go with Mozilla? The only feature you need to point out which Mozilla has over IE is blocking those annoying pr0n pop-ups when you're trying to get to the good stuff!
Making Linux A REAL Alternative
on
Halloween VII
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
In the memo it's stated that:
While respondents cited OSS's 'low Total Cost of Ownership (TCO)'
as one of the best reasons to support OSS, an 'alternative to Microsoft' did
not lag far behind. A plurality (40%) of all respondents felt that a
low TCO was the best reason to support OSS.One-third
of all respondents cited 'an alternative to Microsoft' as one of the best
reasons to support OSS.
I think that yearning among home and business
users for, quite simply, "an alternative to Microsoft," is one of the
strongest cards we have to play. Unfortunately, Linux is only really
an alternative in the server markte at the moment. In the desktop market
it's still not quite there. And that's where we need to put our efforts.
Everyone in Kenya knows that the president (and the rest of the government) is corrupt. They accept it and live with it. The papers rail about it, but not much happens.
But, eventually something will happen. With transparency and democracy, people know they're getting screwed, and while they might "live with it" for a certain amount of time, someone will eventually say "why should I let myself get screwed?" And they'll orginize other people who will get politically active and elect someone who will change things.
Transparency will cause people to care, because no one likes getting screwed. It may take decades for it to happen, but eventually it will happen.
Anan says, "Public tele-centers have been established in places as diverse
as Egypt, Kazakhstan and Peru," and that "bridging the digital divide
is not going to be easy. Too often, state monopolies charge exorbitant prices
for the use of bandwidth. Governments need to do much more to create effective
institutions and supportive regulatory frameworks that will attract foreign
investment; more generally, they must also review their policies and arrangements
to make sure they are not denying their people the opportunities offered
by the digital revolution."
I think this whole article misses the point. The problem in countries
such as Egypt, Kazakhstan, Peru and other similar places is their lack of
truely transparent constitutional democracy and a properly regulated free
market, or anything even approaching it. Just look at our previous
discussion on Panama.
Anan is pushing for treating the symptoms without addressing the root
problem.
If you want to solve the digital divide, stop supporting dictatorships and
other corrupt third world governments. Of course, I can understand
Anan not being able to address the real problem, being that said governments
make up about 2/3rd's of the UN's member states.
if you don't like sigs there is an option to turn them off in user preferences. therefore, i disagree with you.
I like sigs, many of them are cute. But there are some people who put sigs that have no other purpose than to be Flaimbait. As a user I shouldn't have to miss out on all of the good sigs because I want to aviod Flaimbait. That's what moderation is for.
There was some confusion as to what value there was in shooting a hole in an artillery shell.
US-Israel Test Laser Destroys Artillery Rounds In Flight
DOW JONES NEWSWIRES
WASHINGTON (AP)--A military laser cannon destroyed two artillery rounds in flight Tuesday at White Sands Missile Range, N.M., in a first for the experimental defense system, the Army said.
In tests, the experimental system called the Mobile Tactical High Energy Laser tracked each of 2-foot-long artillery rounds and burned them with a laser beam, heating them until they exploded, Army officials said.
The laser was built as a joint project between the U.S. and Israeli militaries. Officials hope it will provide a defense against short-range rockets and artillery rounds.
It was conceived to destroy the Katyusha rockets fired by Hezbollah guerillas into communities in northern Israel from Lebanon. The laser destroyed several 10-foot-long Katyushas during previous tests.
The experimental laser is mounted on a building at the White Sands test range in southern New Mexico. Officials hope to make it small enough to fit on vehicles.
Why are you posting an inflamitory offtopic sig linking to an anti-Semitic
website which openly supports terrorism?
And just to point out the bias here, Israel get's $2.5 billion (1.5
military, 1 civilian) a year in aid from the USA (the site you link to doesn't
even get the basic numbers correct), while Egypt gets $2 billion a year in
military aid. People are starving in the streets in Egypt, but the country
refuses to convert even $1.00 of that military aid to civilian aid. And of
course there's Jordan which averaged $284 million per year over the past 5
years and will go up to $300 million next year, which put together with what
Egypt get's is almost identical to what Israel gets.
And of course there is indirect aid to the Saudis. Ten's of thousands of American
soldiers protect the biggest supporter of terrorism and bin-laden in the
world. If you want to bitch about something bitch about the fact that the
state department coddles and protects a government which directly (if "secretly")
supported and still supports the people responsible for the Twin Towers bombing.
Disclaimer: I'm an American Israel Jew. I also happen to oppose US aid to
Israel, but for real reasons, not bullshit anti-Semitic ones.
Why are you posting an inflamitory offtopic sig linking to an anti-Semitic
website which openly supports terrorism?
And just to point out the bias here, Israel get's $2.5 billion (1.5
military, 1 civilian) a year in aid from the USA (the site you link to doesn't
even get the basic numbers correct), while Egypt gets $2 billion a year in
military aid. People are starving in the streets in Egypt, but the country
refuses to convert even $1.00 of that military aid to civilian aid. And of
course there's Jordan which averaged $284 million per year over the past 5
years and will go up to $300 million next year, which put together with what
Egypt get's is almost identical to what Israel gets.
And of course there is indirect aid to the Saudis. Ten's of thousands of American
soldiers protect the biggest supporter of terrorism and bin-laden in the
world. If you want to bitch about something bitch about the fact that the
state department coddles and protects a government which directly (if "secretly")
supported and still supports the people responsible for the Twin Towers bombing.
Disclaimer: I'm an American Israel Jew. I also happen to oppose US aid to
Israel, but for real reasons, not bullshit anti-Semitic ones.
(Of course, another reason planners might not talk much about targeting
aircraft with lasers is that the US and Israel have no potential opponents
whose aircraft can't be simply destroyed with Beyond-Visual-Range missiles.
Won't stop me from speculating.)
Missiles are very expensive. One of the tiny hellfire's used on
Apache helicopters costs something like $50,000 a piece IIRC.
The type of missile you're talking about is more complex than a hellfire
and probably costs more. Shooting a laser to bring down a fighter craft
would over time be much more economically efficient I would think.
This comment is offtopic, but should be discussed due to it's importance
to the quality of discussion here on Slashdot.
I've seen many times here on Slashdot comments which are funny or insightful,
but which have Flaimbait sigs. The sig is part of the comment,
and if the sig is Flaimbait, the entire comment should be modded down as
Flaimbait.
For example, let's say someone posts a hillarious comment about Bill Gates,
but has a sig which says, "Catholics Fuck Their Mothers," with a link
to a forged picture of the Pope screwing Mother Teresa in the ass. The
sig has no intellectual merit, and would seriously offend any Catholic reader
of slashdot and will overall detract from the quality of discussion on the
story where it's posted.
Slashdot Mirror
Basically, it comes out that the XP 2800+ and the P4 3.06 Ghz are neck in neck for most real world applications, with less than 10% differance between them on anything most home or business users are going to run. So it really comes down to which is the better deal, especially in a depressed economy with tight IT budgets. At the moment, only the XP 2700+ and the P4 2.8 are shown up on pricewatch.com, with prices of $354 amd $389 respectively. Meaning that AMD still has the crown in the Price/performance arena. However, the gap is narrowing.
no, that should read 'the formats they are demanding' (wma-drm?)
TCP/IP Fingerprinting [insecure.org]
Most routers run a BSD variant and will return an identifiable fingergerprint.
Now that's an interesting idea I hadn't thought of. I've played around with nmap a little and it's pretty good, although for techincal people I think there are ways around it. If you've got a linux / some BSD box doing the routing you can set it up to be a halted firewall. I believe this solves that problem since only NAT and ipchains would be running. I don't believe the machine would return pings, which is one of the things nmap depends on. There was a story discussing something like this here on slashdot a while back, but I can't seem to find it.
Of course that doesn't help if someone is using a hardware router/firewall. Do you think there are (or have you heard of) any ISP's who actually do use something like nmap to see whether or not their users are running a hardware router/firewall.
However, even if they suspect, can they do anything about it? It still comes down to the issue that they would have to come into the house and check physically. I mean I could just tell them that I'm running BSD on the computer connected to the internet. They can't do anything unless their TOS says they will only provide service to Windows users. But I'm not sure if that would stand up in court.
How can anyone prevent you from using a hardware firewall? The best they can do is require you to install an ethernet card that they supply and then check the MAC address. But most descent consumer Internet router/firewalls, for example the D-Link DI-604, allow you to clone the MAC address from your NIC. Which doesn't really leave the ISP any room. You can hook up a hardware firewall (which is what the 604 is) and as many computers as you want, and the ISP can't do a damn thing about it.
Short of coming out physically to your house and checking if you have one that is. But short of that they have no way of knowing. Unless you insist on telling them that is. ;-)
Would you talk a bit about your development of Lifestreams, your candidate for a new information-control interface? How does elegance figure into it?
DavidGelernter:Originated in my unhappiness, bordering on disgust, with every operating system on the market, the Mac desktop was revolutionary in the 1970's, and was beautiful in the early 1980's, but in the late 1980's, it was getting old, and today it's pathetically obsolete, whether you buy it from Mac or in the form of Windows. After all, it comes out from an obsolete, long ago, technology era that doesn't match today's computing environment at all. Matches it so badly that it's an intolerable pain to deal with. So that for example, the system was designed when the Internet was not the internet, email was unimportant, very few people used it at all, computing cycles were scarce & expensive, memory was expensive, and just as important, or more important, all computer users were new users. So in the 1980's, people didn't have many files, many directories, because they hadn't been online for very long. But today, when compute cycles and memories are cheap, and the problem isn't how to conserve those resources, but how to squander them reasonably, and the internet is bigger than ever. So many people use their computers as text managers exclusively. The operating system designed long ago for radically different computers doesn't work anymore. For that matter, the whole underlying thesis of an operating system is obsolete. There is absolutely no reason that I should ever have to think about where I have a file, what machine I'm on, what my files are named, what directory I stuck something in. What I want is to be able to walk up to a computer anywhere, and tune in my electronic life. I don't care if it's a Mac or PC just as I don't care if, when I tune in CNN on TV, I don't care if it's a Toshiba TV or a Hitachi TV. In short, for all these reasons I've sort of hinted at, I found myself so disgusted with what was available, I figured there had to be something better. Although the research I had been doing on software in the 80's was fairly esoteric stuff having to do with programming & distributed systems and artificial intelligence, I had to turn my attention to everyday computing needs because the situation was, in software terms, so incredibly awful.
Professor of Computer Science
B.A., Yale University, 1976Ph.D., The State University of New York at Stony Brook, 1982
Joined Yale Faculty 1982
David Gelernter's research interests include information management, parallel programming, software ensembles and artificial intelligence. The coordination language called "Linda" that he developed with Nicholas Carriero (also of Yale) sees fairly widespread use world-wide for parallel programming.
Gelernter's current interests include adaptive parallelism, programming environments for parallelism, realtime data fusion, expert databases and information-management systems (the Lifestreams system in particular). He is co-author of two textbooks (on programming languages and on parallel programming methods), author of Mirror Worlds (Oxford: 1991), the Muse in the Machine (Free Press: 1994 -- about how thinking works), and a forthcoming book in the "Masterclasses" series about aesthetics and computing. He has published cultural-implications-of-computing-type pieces in many newspapers and magazines, is contributing editor at the Manhattan Institute's City Journal, the National Review and is art critic at the Weekly Standard.
Representative Publications
You're making the classic mistake of assuming that Bandwidth is what matters, when in fact it's the latency which kills applications. Having bandwidth numbers without the corresponding latency is worse than useless, it's misleading for the uninformed.
Athlon XP 2800+: 333 MHz FSB and nForce 2
First of all, we tested the Athlon XP 2800+ on the "normal" KT333 platform with a 17x multiplier, the FSB set at 133 MHz DDR (266 MHz) and the memory set at 166 MHz DDR (333 MHz), CAS at 2, RAS to CAS at 3, Precharge at 3. The second time, the KT333 platform (ASUS A7V333) was set at a FSB of 166 MHz (333 MHz) and the multiplier was set to 13.5x.
Where do I start? There is an enormous amount of info hidden is this table. Let us first start with the 266 MHz versus 333 MHz FSB discussion.
There have been many reports that show that the Athlon does not benefit much from an increase in FSB clockspeed, moving from 266 MHz to 333 MHz. But Membench tells us exactly why. First of all, compare the two KT333 latency numbers (64 byte strides). All BIOS settings were exactly the same, only the FSB speed, and thus the multiplier, are different. Normally one would expect, everything else being equal, that the Athlon with the 166 MHz FSB would see 25% lower latency, but the CPU with the 166 MHz FSB version actually sees a higher latency! This shows that the (ASUS) KT333 board, in order to guarantee proper stability, increases certain latencies of the memory controller. Memory bandwidth increases by 14%, which is also less than expected.
Now what does this mean for "real world" performance? It means that many applications will see either a very small performance increase or none at all, as it is latency and not bandwidth that is the most important performance factor. Let us explain this in more detail.
Ace's Guide to Memory Technology
Basically, the latency of the whole memory (From FSB to DRAM) system is equal to the sum of:
-
The latency between the FSB and the chipset (+/- 1 clockcycle)
-
The latency between the chipset and the DRAM (+/- 1 clockcycle)
-
The RAS to CAS latency (2-3 clocks, charging the right row)
-
The CAS latency (2-3 clocks, getting the right column)
-
1 cycle to transfer the data.
-
The latency to get this data back from the DRAM output buffer to the CPU
(via the chipset) (+/- 2 clockcycles)
This gets you the first word (8 bytes). A good PC100 SDRAM CAS 2 will have a latency of about 9 cycles, and the next 3 cycles another 24 bytes will be ready. The PC100 SDRAM will, in this case be able to get 32 bytes in 12 cycles.If you want to calculate the latency that CPU sees, you need to multiply the latency of the memory system with the multiplier of the CPU. So a 500 MHz (5 x 100 MHz) CPU will see 5 x 9 cycles latency. This CPU will have to wait at least 45 cycles before the information that could not be found in the L2-cache will be available in the cache.
US-Israel "Nautilus" system intercepts artillery shell. US company TRW and
Israel Aircraft Industries jointly developed the Mobile Tactical High Energy
Laser system.
Globes [online] - Israel's Business Arena, November 06, 2002 By Dror Marom
[With thanks to ATRC Newswire]
The joint US-Israel Nautilus system for intercepting Katyusha rockets
yesterday successfully shot down an artillery shell traveling at supersonic
speed. The trial, the first in military history, took place at the White
Sands testing grounds in New Mexico, where previous testing of the program
also took place.
The Nautilus, also called the Mobile Tactical High Energy Laser (MTHEL), is
the first and only system to ever intercept both an individual Katyusha and
a barrage of dozens of such rockets. Katyushas are much slower than
artillery shells. Development of the Nautilus began before the September 11,
2001 terrorist attacks and the increased threat of terrorism.
US company TRW (NYSE: TRW) and Israel Aircraft Industries (IAI) jointly
developed the system. Elta Electronic Industries developed the radar, IAI's
MBT (MABAT) - Weapon Systems and Space Technologyunit is developing the
sensors and the fire control system, Tadiran is developing the control and
monitoring tools, and Rafael (Israel Armament Development Authority) is
supplying the power source for the laser. The initial development costs
amount to $201.8 million. Israel put up $67.5 million, a third of the
financing, mostly for development, while the US promised to pay for testing
and production.
The mobile Nautilus system is designed for the Israel Defense Forces
onIsrael's northern border, where Hizbollah's Katyusha rocketspose a threat
from Southern Lebanon, and in other locations. US Army Space and Missile
Defense Command and US Army Space Command commander General Joseph M.
Cosumano said, "The tactical laser is capable of changing the face of the
battlefield." TRW Space & Electronics president and CEO Timothy W. Hannemann
predicts that production of the operational mobile system will begin soon.
Israel and the US are considering development of a antiaircraft version of
the system.
Interesting arguement, but I don't think it holds. I served in the Israeli army and had alot of contact with the weapons R&D guys. First thing to remember is that army == massive waste. Just to give you an idea, typically something like 1 in 100 bullets fired ever effectively hits a target. You assume one missle fired means one target destroyed. But in reality it's more in the range of 20 missles fired, one target destroyed - maybe. Of all the patriot missles fired during the guld war, only maybe 2%-3% were really effective, IIRC. So there's a serious issue there already. But the main focus os this system isn't shooting down planes, it's shooting down missles and artillary. The Iranian backed Hizbullah terrorists currently have 10,000 Katyusha missles lined up on our northern border. This system can shoot down tens of those missle a second. There is nothing else in existance that can do this. And at a very low operation cost. It may have cost about $200 million to develope, but that's just the cost of about 200 advanced cruise missles. And this system is already ready to be deployed. And the cost to build additional units will be much less than the cost of a single fighter jet.
I was refering to Linux as a desktop in the generic scence, not to a specific desktop shell. Regardly, no I don't work on a "desktop" although I do try and help debug mozilla, since I use it quite a bit.
Most businesses are small. IIRC businesses with less than 10 employees make up over 50% of businesses. And they have a limited number of computers, and a extremely limited IT budget. They can't afford an admin. If the layman guy running the business can't get it up, forget it. You only have to be marginally competant to get basic things up on Windowz, but you have to be a pretty competant admin to get even basic things running on linux.
I'm not quite getting you. You point to India as a country with Democracy but non-free markets, but what I'm saying is that you need both transparent Democracy and free markets. I'm not saying that you automatically get one if you have the other.
Want to convince a new generation of young (pr0n) surfers to go with Mozilla? The only feature you need to point out which Mozilla has over IE is blocking those annoying pr0n pop-ups when you're trying to get to the good stuff!
While respondents cited OSS's 'low Total Cost of Ownership (TCO)' as one of the best reasons to support OSS, an 'alternative to Microsoft' did not lag far behind. A plurality (40%) of all respondents felt that a low TCO was the best reason to support OSS. One-third of all respondents cited 'an alternative to Microsoft' as one of the best reasons to support OSS.
I think that yearning among home and business users for, quite simply, "an alternative to Microsoft," is one of the strongest cards we have to play. Unfortunately, Linux is only really an alternative in the server markte at the moment. In the desktop market it's still not quite there. And that's where we need to put our efforts.
But, eventually something will happen. With transparency and democracy, people know they're getting screwed, and while they might "live with it" for a certain amount of time, someone will eventually say "why should I let myself get screwed?" And they'll orginize other people who will get politically active and elect someone who will change things.
Transparency will cause people to care, because no one likes getting screwed. It may take decades for it to happen, but eventually it will happen.
You missed out the key word, transparency. If you have that then everything else will eventually work itself out.
Anan says, "Public tele-centers have been established in places as diverse as Egypt, Kazakhstan and Peru," and that "bridging the digital divide is not going to be easy. Too often, state monopolies charge exorbitant prices for the use of bandwidth. Governments need to do much more to create effective institutions and supportive regulatory frameworks that will attract foreign investment; more generally, they must also review their policies and arrangements to make sure they are not denying their people the opportunities offered by the digital revolution."
I think this whole article misses the point. The problem in countries such as Egypt, Kazakhstan, Peru and other similar places is their lack of truely transparent constitutional democracy and a properly regulated free market, or anything even approaching it. Just look at our previous discussion on Panama. Anan is pushing for treating the symptoms without addressing the root problem.
If you want to solve the digital divide, stop supporting dictatorships and other corrupt third world governments. Of course, I can understand Anan not being able to address the real problem, being that said governments make up about 2/3rd's of the UN's member states.
I like sigs, many of them are cute. But there are some people who put sigs that have no other purpose than to be Flaimbait. As a user I shouldn't have to miss out on all of the good sigs because I want to aviod Flaimbait. That's what moderation is for.
US-Israel Test Laser Destroys Artillery Rounds In Flight
DOW JONES NEWSWIRES
WASHINGTON (AP)--A military laser cannon destroyed two artillery rounds in flight Tuesday at White Sands Missile Range, N.M., in a first for the experimental defense system, the Army said.
In tests, the experimental system called the Mobile Tactical High Energy Laser tracked each of 2-foot-long artillery rounds and burned them with a laser beam, heating them until they exploded, Army officials said.
The laser was built as a joint project between the U.S. and Israeli militaries. Officials hope it will provide a defense against short-range rockets and artillery rounds.
It was conceived to destroy the Katyusha rockets fired by Hezbollah guerillas into communities in northern Israel from Lebanon. The laser destroyed several 10-foot-long Katyushas during previous tests.
The experimental laser is mounted on a building at the White Sands test range in southern New Mexico. Officials hope to make it small enough to fit on vehicles.
Updated November 5, 2002 5:41 p.m. EST
1/3rd of US foreign aid goes to 0.1% of the population [wrmea.com]
Why are you posting an inflamitory offtopic sig linking to an anti-Semitic website which openly supports terrorism?
And just to point out the bias here, Israel get's $2.5 billion (1.5 military, 1 civilian) a year in aid from the USA (the site you link to doesn't even get the basic numbers correct), while Egypt gets $2 billion a year in military aid. People are starving in the streets in Egypt, but the country refuses to convert even $1.00 of that military aid to civilian aid. And of course there's Jordan which averaged $284 million per year over the past 5 years and will go up to $300 million next year, which put together with what Egypt get's is almost identical to what Israel gets.
And of course there is indirect aid to the Saudis. Ten's of thousands of American soldiers protect the biggest supporter of terrorism and bin-laden in the world. If you want to bitch about something bitch about the fact that the state department coddles and protects a government which directly (if "secretly") supported and still supports the people responsible for the Twin Towers bombing.
Disclaimer: I'm an American Israel Jew. I also happen to oppose US aid to Israel, but for real reasons, not bullshit anti-Semitic ones.
1/3rd of US foreign aid goes to 0.1% of the population [wrmea.com]
Why are you posting an inflamitory offtopic sig linking to an anti-Semitic website which openly supports terrorism?
And just to point out the bias here, Israel get's $2.5 billion (1.5 military, 1 civilian) a year in aid from the USA (the site you link to doesn't even get the basic numbers correct), while Egypt gets $2 billion a year in military aid. People are starving in the streets in Egypt, but the country refuses to convert even $1.00 of that military aid to civilian aid. And of course there's Jordan which averaged $284 million per year over the past 5 years and will go up to $300 million next year, which put together with what Egypt get's is almost identical to what Israel gets.
And of course there is indirect aid to the Saudis. Ten's of thousands of American soldiers protect the biggest supporter of terrorism and bin-laden in the world. If you want to bitch about something bitch about the fact that the state department coddles and protects a government which directly (if "secretly") supported and still supports the people responsible for the Twin Towers bombing.
Disclaimer: I'm an American Israel Jew. I also happen to oppose US aid to Israel, but for real reasons, not bullshit anti-Semitic ones.
Missiles are very expensive. One of the tiny hellfire's used on Apache helicopters costs something like $50,000 a piece IIRC. The type of missile you're talking about is more complex than a hellfire and probably costs more. Shooting a laser to bring down a fighter craft would over time be much more economically efficient I would think.
This comment is offtopic, but should be discussed due to it's importance to the quality of discussion here on Slashdot.
I've seen many times here on Slashdot comments which are funny or insightful, but which have Flaimbait sigs. The sig is part of the comment, and if the sig is Flaimbait, the entire comment should be modded down as Flaimbait.
For example, let's say someone posts a hillarious comment about Bill Gates, but has a sig which says, "Catholics Fuck Their Mothers," with a link to a forged picture of the Pope screwing Mother Teresa in the ass. The sig has no intellectual merit, and would seriously offend any Catholic reader of slashdot and will overall detract from the quality of discussion on the story where it's posted.