I was working for the meteorology department on campus and building a tool to slurp up weather data from every known source imaginable, including web and ftp sites, McIDAS(*shudder* I HATED THAT THING) and GOPHER! I think out of the 50 or so sources I was using only 1 or 2 used gopher. AFAIK gopher is probably still used in meteorology.
This is a perfect example of why I don't like java. If I use java then I have to stick to the decisions made by someone else even if they are completely wrong for my situation.
For real math/science stuff java is horrible. The math in java is sortf ieee, but not quite (and if you want/need ieee fp features they forgot about, oh well your screwed). If they had talked to anyone with any experience with numerical computing they would have relaxed the insane requirements on floating point math that would allow the JVM to use hardware to do stuff like trig when available.
Also, what I find humerous is the whole NIO (new IO) stuff. basically Java started out using threads to deal with multiple IOs but due to scaling issues they developed 'new' IO which is basically the equivilent of select! Yeah thats real 'new'!!!
When I was first learning linux/unix I installed RH5.something on my computer (cyrix 6x86 133+ iirc), anyway I was having weird issues with several programs so I decided i needed a fresh start, those darn dot files must be currupted. So I typed: rm -rf.* This disk started churning... about 30 seconds later the disk is still churning... damn I must have a LOT of those dot files. about a minute later.... *DOH* CTRL-C Where did all the files go? DAMNIT! I recursively deleted.. ( I was running as root, It was my personal box what could be the harm) I learned my lesson very well: CREATE AND USE USER ACCOUNTS!! DONT RUN AS ROOT IF YOU CAN AVOID IT!
I haven't noticed it with [C|DV]D's personally, but I have had problems in the past with electronics I purchased around the holiday season. My guess is that on occasion a manufacturer will push manufacturing beyond what QA can handle in order to meet demand at the end of the year. The only choice is to return, of course at this time of year the manufacturers expect high return rates so it might not make a difference.
I have a gigabyte ga-7vaxp. It will has a section in the bios menu that allows you to flash the bios from a fat formated floppy before the os boots. Very nice, if you still have a floppy drive (my current system is floppy-free).
in response to: http://aurora.zemris.fer.hr/filesystems/ Thi s seems like a pretty poorly designed benchmark. One of the major tests was copying b/w two partitions (which is a valid test), but they put both partitions on the same disk! Whichever partition hapened to be allocated near the outside edge of the disk would have a clear advantage. Also it is not clear if the read, write, and delete portions of the test were done using the exact same partition or if some filesystems were handicapped by being on the inside partition when others got the outside partition.
Actually IMHO journalling on flash would be a bad idea. Most flash memories give you only about 100k write cycles before giving up the ghost. For mp3 players or digicams this is just fine. But, the point of the journal is that it is flushed to disk immediately on a write operation, so depending on usage you could wear out the memory cells that contain the journal file an order of magnitude faster, killing your flash memory REAL FAST.
That may have been true back in the bad old days of DOS, but today we have real operating systems. When there is nothing to due the OS exectues a HLT instruction which puts the CPU in a lower power state. There are numerous other ways to get to even lower power states that are required by ACPI which M$ has more or less REQUIRED all new computers to have in the past several years.
Also even when the CPU is going different codes will heat it up by different amounts. The P4 has a rather large differential b/w its maximum heat disipation and its 'typical' disipation, whereas the AMD Athlons are more consistent about their disipation.
<speculation> I would assume what is happening is that the CPU 'powers down' parts of the core that are not being used ie an integer only code does not need the FPU/MMX/SSE etc units running so theoretically the CPU could block the clock from entering these units (since transistors more or less only generate heat when changing state ). ps I am a 'software guy' not an EE </speculation>
I have the netgear rp114 at home and it offers a very simple web interface as well as telnet. Mind you, telnet is not mentioned anywhere in the documentation, but if you telnet to the router you get a simple text-based menu system, and buried several menus down you even have the option of dropping down to a command line interface!
Look at the pics at: http://epia-center.de/modules.php?name=News&file=a rticle&sid=202
In particular the first pics shows two connectors next to the vertically mounted battery. They don't seem to be mentioned in any of the specs so I am going to guess they are for connecting an RS-232 or possibly also a parallel port.
NO! For starters your analogy should be:
Isn't that like referring to "murders" as "people who were convicted of murder"
This would definately be a more respectful way to refer to murderers, of course I do not think 'murderers' deserve any extra respect since they have chosen to be a 'murderer' (otherwise it would be manslaughter or similar)
On the other hand persons with disabilities did not choose to be disabled and IMNSHO deserve as much respect as any other person (sans murderers).
This has to do with the interaction b/w the programmer doing things 'behind the back' of the driver (ie packing multiple logical textures into one texture as far as the driver/card is concerned) and the driver/card doing things 'behind the back' of the programmer (ie multisample antialiassing in such a way that texture cooordinates may fall slightly outside the range the programmer specified).
I would highly recomend taking a day (or even a week) to work your way through all the smithsonian museums you are interested in. My favorite is the air and space museum which has such things as the Spirit of St. Louis and one of the planes that dropped an A-Bomb on Japan... it has all sorts of signs around it reasuring visitors that it is not "radioactive." The natural history museum is pretty cool too... just don't take a serious girlfriend there... they have some MASSIVE diamonds for her to droool over, it makes anything you have/will give her seem kind of paltry. Check out: http://www.si.edu/museums/ for more info, and remember all the museums are free! Also, while in DC you could visit all the usual spots: the White House, the Washington penis^h^h^h^h^h monument, and several sundry memorials. Personally I have never tried going to the Library of Congress so I cannot recomend either way for or against it.
Also, while in the dc area you could drive ~ 10 miles out to college park and see if you could sneak in to see D.root-servers.net (I think it is either in the Computer and Space Sciences building or the A. V. Williams Building) I went there for 4 years and never could get a straight answer as to where it is.
hmmm, maybe visiting all the DNS root servers would provide for an interesting place to start planning your trip;).
First off they are no longer Silicon Graphics... their name is officially SGI.
I am not completely familiar with IR or the exact ATI chip used in these boexes, but the FireGL X1 (based on Radeon 9700) can do 24bit(floating point)/channel, althoght the DAC is (iirc) only 10bit/channel. Is the 48bit color you speak of 12bit/channel fixed point?
What extensions are available on the IR that you can't get on a ATI?
I really doubt they could have sped up IR enough since they have almost no graphics patents/engineers left. Over the years 3Dfx, Microsoft, Nvidia, and ATI have pretty well divided up and taken/purchased all the graphics talent/patents at SGI.
ps
several years ago nvidia actually produced several workstations based on nvidia graphics chips, but that particular product line was VERY quickly EOLed. That was a while back when SGI was thrashing around and tried doing x86 'VisualWorkstations' (just before their ceo went to work at M$). They were kind of neat, but were very dificult to use b/c they had an odd mix of proprietary and standard parts that meant you almost had a(n unpleasent) surprise in store when working with them.
The huge news with the new systems does not seem to be mentioned on SGIs site. They use ATI chips/cards for the graphics.... SGI has given up on doing proprietary graphics solutions it would seem.. and with good reason imnsho!
First let me state that I gave up on ATI back in the rage days after having all kinds of troubles with the drivers (and the whole quake vs quack thing... ). I would be curious to move back from nvidia to ati now that ati has really improved quite a bit and has some realy interesting features (eg well done fragment shading capabilities) that nvidia is still trying to catch up to (IMNSHO).
From what I can tell there two different drivers for ATI products: the (binary only?) FireGL drivers (which AFAIK work just fine on radeon cards), and the DRI drivers. What is the difference between the two in terms of features and performance?
Even with tons of RAM pagefiles are a GOOD thing and if used properly (Even MS uses them properly these days) they speed up the system on the whole.I have done a *little* OS development so I may not be an expert but I do have an idea what I 'm talking about.
The swapfile is where the OS puts things it hasn't used in a while. On windows this would probably include things such as the portions of IE that are now part of the OS and you are forced to have loaded even if you are not using the box for web browsing. Having placed these items in the page file frees up room for things that are currently usefull such as IO buffers/cache (disk and/or net) that can dramatically increase speed by storing things such as recently used executables, meta-information.... wait this sounds familiar;)
That being said I think the technology discussed in this article is a bit too single minded. I think adding an extra level in the storage heirarchy between main ram and non-volitile HD is probably a good thing. My idea is to add a HUGE pile of PC100 or similar ram into a system and have this RAM accessed in a NUMA style which is becoming very popular. The nintendo GameCube uses a form of this aproach, there are two types of RAM with a smaller-faster section and a larger-slower section.
The problem with my idea is that the price difference b/w cheap-slow RAM and fast-expensive RAM is not enough to make it worth the extra complexity currently. But, I would guess that if someone took the effort to design/build cheap slow RAM they could find a niche market for a system accelerator device... but then again I could just be not well enough informed (a little knowledge is dangerous;) and rambling like an idiot.
Slashdot Mirror
'Cuz if I said anymore then it wouldn't be as secure ...
...
...
...
...
...
I shouldn't have said that
I shouldn't have said that I shouldn't have said that
I'm talking too much
I shouldn't say that
I'll just be quiet now
I promise (doh)
I was working for the meteorology department on campus and building a tool to slurp up weather data from every known source imaginable, including web and ftp sites, McIDAS(*shudder* I HATED THAT THING) and GOPHER! I think out of the 50 or so sources I was using only 1 or 2 used gopher. AFAIK gopher is probably still used in meteorology.
*me dons asbestos underwear
This is a perfect example of why I don't like java. If I use java then I have to stick to the decisions made by someone else even if they are completely wrong for my situation.
For real math/science stuff java is horrible. The math in java is sortf ieee, but not quite (and if you want/need ieee fp features they forgot about, oh well your screwed). If they had talked to anyone with any experience with numerical computing they would have relaxed the insane requirements on floating point math that would allow the JVM to use hardware to do stuff like trig when available.
Also, what I find humerous is the whole NIO (new IO) stuff. basically Java started out using threads to deal with multiple IOs but due to scaling issues they developed 'new' IO which is basically the equivilent of select! Yeah thats real 'new'!!!
EOR
(End of Rant)
I usually (now) do:
.[^.]*
rm -rf
http://www.abit-usa.com/technology/serillel_new.ph p
When I was first learning linux/unix I installed RH5.something on my computer (cyrix 6x86 133+ iirc), anyway I was having weird issues with several programs so I decided i needed a fresh start, those darn dot files must be currupted. .* ... ... damn I must have a LOT of those dot files. .... *DOH* .. ( I was running as root, It was my personal box what could be the harm)
So I typed:
rm -rf
This disk started churning
about 30 seconds later
the disk is still churning
about a minute later
CTRL-C
Where did all the files go? DAMNIT! I recursively deleted
I learned my lesson very well:
CREATE AND USE USER ACCOUNTS!! DONT RUN AS ROOT IF YOU CAN AVOID IT!
I haven't noticed it with [C|DV]D's personally, but I have had problems in the past with electronics I purchased around the holiday season. My guess is that on occasion a manufacturer will push manufacturing beyond what QA can handle in order to meet demand at the end of the year. The only choice is to return, of course at this time of year the manufacturers expect high return rates so it might not make a difference.
I have a gigabyte ga-7vaxp. It will has a section in the bios menu that allows you to flash the bios from a fat formated floppy before the os boots. Very nice, if you still have a floppy drive (my current system is floppy-free).
in response to:i s seems like a pretty poorly designed benchmark. One of the major tests was copying b/w two partitions (which is a valid test), but they put both partitions on the same disk! Whichever partition hapened to be allocated near the outside edge of the disk would have a clear advantage. Also it is not clear if the read, write, and delete portions of the test were done using the exact same partition or if some filesystems were handicapped by being on the inside partition when others got the outside partition.
http://aurora.zemris.fer.hr/filesystems/
Th
Actually IMHO journalling on flash would be a bad idea. Most flash memories give you only about 100k write cycles before giving up the ghost. For mp3 players or digicams this is just fine. But, the point of the journal is that it is flushed to disk immediately on a write operation, so depending on usage you could wear out the memory cells that contain the journal file an order of magnitude faster, killing your flash memory REAL FAST.
Whats the area of a circle?
/> never mind
Pi r squared
Pi are not square pi are round!
What, not funny? I beg to differentiate.
<groan
ln2(5 exabytes) is a little over 62!
(62.3 for RAM style exabytes or 62.1 for HD style exabytes).
Uh .... NO.
That may have been true back in the bad old days of DOS, but today we have real operating systems. When there is nothing to due the OS exectues a HLT instruction which puts the CPU in a lower power state. There are numerous other ways to get to even lower power states that are required by ACPI which M$ has more or less REQUIRED all new computers to have in the past several years.
Also even when the CPU is going different codes will heat it up by different amounts. The P4 has a rather large differential b/w its maximum heat disipation and its 'typical' disipation, whereas the AMD Athlons are more consistent about their disipation.
<speculation>
I would assume what is happening is that the CPU 'powers down' parts of the core that are not being used ie an integer only code does not need the FPU/MMX/SSE etc units running so theoretically the CPU could block the clock from entering these units (since transistors more or less only generate heat when changing state ).
ps I am a 'software guy' not an EE
</speculation>
I have the netgear rp114 at home and it offers a very simple web interface as well as telnet. Mind you, telnet is not mentioned anywhere in the documentation, but if you telnet to the router you get a simple text-based menu system, and buried several menus down you even have the option of dropping down to a command line interface!
They video taped an entire semester and it is available via realplayer!
I have been 'auditing' it in my spare time for a couple weeks now.
Look at the pics at:a rticle&sid=202
http://epia-center.de/modules.php?name=News&file=
In particular the first pics shows two connectors next to the vertically mounted battery. They don't seem to be mentioned in any of the specs so I am going to guess they are for connecting an RS-232 or possibly also a parallel port.
NO! For starters your analogy should be:
Isn't that like referring to "murders" as "people who were convicted of murder"
This would definately be a more respectful way to refer to murderers, of course I do not think 'murderers' deserve any extra respect since they have chosen to be a 'murderer' (otherwise it would be manslaughter or similar)
On the other hand persons with disabilities did not choose to be disabled and IMNSHO deserve as much respect as any other person (sans murderers).
Uhh ?!?!?! Who said anything about tranlucency?
This has to do with the interaction b/w the programmer doing things 'behind the back' of the driver (ie packing multiple logical textures into one texture as far as the driver/card is concerned) and the driver/card doing things 'behind the back' of the programmer (ie multisample antialiassing in such a way that texture cooordinates may fall slightly outside the range the programmer specified).
I am a geek who grew up in the DC area.
... it has all sorts of signs around it reasuring visitors that it is not "radioactive." The natural history museum is pretty cool too ... just don't take a serious girlfriend there ... they have some MASSIVE diamonds for her to droool over, it makes anything you have/will give her seem kind of paltry. Check out: http://www.si.edu/museums/ for more info, and remember all the museums are free! Also, while in DC you could visit all the usual spots: the White House, the Washington penis^h^h^h^h^h monument, and several sundry memorials. Personally I have never tried going to the Library of Congress so I cannot recomend either way for or against it.
;).
I would highly recomend taking a day (or even a week) to work your way through all the smithsonian museums you are interested in. My favorite is the air and space museum which has such things as the Spirit of St. Louis and one of the planes that dropped an A-Bomb on Japan
Also, while in the dc area you could drive ~ 10 miles out to college park and see if you could sneak in to see D.root-servers.net (I think it is either in the Computer and Space Sciences building or the A. V. Williams Building) I went there for 4 years and never could get a straight answer as to where it is.
hmmm, maybe visiting all the DNS root servers would provide for an interesting place to start planning your trip
arggghh i didn't preview ... in the ps I meant to say: ...
several years ago SGI actually produced several workstations based on nvidia graphics chips
First off they are no longer Silicon Graphics ... their name is officially SGI.
I am not completely familiar with IR or the exact ATI chip used in these boexes, but the FireGL X1 (based on Radeon 9700) can do 24bit(floating point)/channel, althoght the DAC is (iirc) only 10bit/channel. Is the 48bit color you speak of 12bit/channel fixed point?
What extensions are available on the IR that you can't get on a ATI?
I really doubt they could have sped up IR enough since they have almost no graphics patents/engineers left. Over the years 3Dfx, Microsoft, Nvidia, and ATI have pretty well divided up and taken/purchased all the graphics talent/patents at SGI.
ps
several years ago nvidia actually produced several workstations based on nvidia graphics chips, but that particular product line was VERY quickly EOLed. That was a while back when SGI was thrashing around and tried doing x86 'VisualWorkstations' (just before their ceo went to work at M$). They were kind of neat, but were very dificult to use b/c they had an odd mix of proprietary and standard parts that meant you almost had a(n unpleasent) surprise in store when working with them.
The huge news with the new systems does not seem to be mentioned on SGIs site. They use ATI chips/cards for the graphics .... SGI has given up on doing proprietary graphics solutions it would seem .. and with good reason imnsho!
news.com story
Workstation cards are optimized for SPEC Viewperf, 'consumer' cards are optimized for Quake3. Case and point.
In particular compare the Radeon 8500 (a reasonable but not really spectactular 'consumer' card) to the Wildcat3:
e.g.
R8500 is ~ 17% faster in q3 but the WCIII is ~39% faster for ProCDRS
First let me state that I gave up on ATI back in the rage days after having all kinds of troubles with the drivers (and the whole quake vs quack thing ... ). I would be curious to move back from nvidia to ati now that ati has really improved quite a bit and has some realy interesting features (eg well done fragment shading capabilities) that nvidia is still trying to catch up to (IMNSHO).
From what I can tell there two different drivers for ATI products: the (binary only?) FireGL drivers (which AFAIK work just fine on radeon cards), and the DRI drivers. What is the difference between the two in terms of features and performance?
Even with tons of RAM pagefiles are a GOOD thing and if used properly (Even MS uses them properly these days) they speed up the system on the whole.I have done a *little* OS development so I may not be an expert but I do have an idea what I 'm talking about.
.... wait this sounds familiar ;)
... but then again I could just be not well enough informed (a little knowledge is dangerous ;) and rambling like an idiot.
The swapfile is where the OS puts things it hasn't used in a while. On windows this would probably include things such as the portions of IE that are now part of the OS and you are forced to have loaded even if you are not using the box for web browsing. Having placed these items in the page file frees up room for things that are currently usefull such as IO buffers/cache (disk and/or net) that can dramatically increase speed by storing things such as recently used executables, meta-information
That being said I think the technology discussed in this article is a bit too single minded. I think adding an extra level in the storage heirarchy between main ram and non-volitile HD is probably a good thing. My idea is to add a HUGE pile of PC100 or similar ram into a system and have this RAM accessed in a NUMA style which is becoming very popular. The nintendo GameCube uses a form of this aproach, there are two types of RAM with a smaller-faster section and a larger-slower section.
The problem with my idea is that the price difference b/w cheap-slow RAM and fast-expensive RAM is not enough to make it worth the extra complexity currently. But, I would guess that if someone took the effort to design/build cheap slow RAM they could find a niche market for a system accelerator device