I live in Sydney and use Shopfast regularly. It's great.
I don't use it to order tonight's dinner. If I need a steak or a pound of mushrooms, I'll pick that up at the little supermarket on the way home.
I do use it for all the bulky stuff I need to buy regularly, and things that last a long time. Tinned and frozen food, soft drinks and so on. They do deliver the same day - if you order by 10am they'll deliver any time after 5pm that day.
If I need food in a hurry I dial out for pizza or Chinese. Different distribution structure.
Why does Japan need Linux when they have all these wonderful operating systems that can plug directly into your brain and have cute holographic girls who pop up to inform you when there's a problem?
It must be true, I saw it on TV!
And you'd think they'd rebuild Tokyo Tower somewhere else. I mean, it's what, the fourth time this month it's been destroyed by giant monsters.
This is true, but that's different to what the "HAB Theory" claims. The Earth's inclination, that is, the angle between its axis of rotation and the plane of its orbit around the Sun, does wobble, and the moon plays at least some part in stabilising it. The wobble is pretty slow, though.
What the "HAB Theory" claims - and what is absurd - is that the axis of rotation shifts by 45 degrees every few thousand years, so that the North Pole suddenly pops up in (for example) Madrid, and the South Pole in Christchurch, New Zealand. You'd think someone would have noticed that sort of thing:|
The Earth's magnetic field is well known to wander about. Apart from the fact that Magnetic North is currently moving at a measurable speed, lines of aligned particles of iron in rock strata show a clear history of magnetic pole reversals.
The Earth's axis of rotation, on the other hand, is about as fixed as anything can be. The angular momentum of the rotating Earth is huge; you'd need an equally huge external force to shift it. The Earth's magnetic field is puny in comparison, and can't affect rotation in this way.
Apart from the fact this this "theory" contravenes the laws of Physics, there is no geological evidence to support this (frozen mammoths don't count!) and huge amounts of evidence to counter it. All the recent ice ages occured in the (current) north and south latitudes, for example. There are no signs of the sea inundating the land for thousands of miles, which is what would ensue in such a disaster. Plus, there are fragile stalactites that have formed over many thousands of years, and which would shatter if something this dramatic had ever happened - but which are perfectly intact.
This is potentially interesting, but there are several problems:
1. The pricing model sucks. The entry price of $399 is too high for a card with one chip and four DIMM sockets. And that only supports 512MB. To go to 1GB, 2GB or 4GB you have to pay hundreds of dollars more - even though the only change is a BIOS setting.
2. The RAM pricing is absurd. These guys need a reality check, pronto.
3. The board takes standard PC133 NON-PARITY RAM. No way in Hell would I trust my data to something like that. Honestly, this is just plain stupid. The board is too expensive for the home market and no-one sane is going to put non-ECC memory in a server.
[As a side point: Even using standard DIMMs, you could do some sort of block-ECC at the driver level (or in the controller chip) and use the fourth DIMM as a parity device to recover from on failures, like RAID-3. Alternately, you could treat each DIMM as a 48-bit device and use the remainder for ECC and Chipkill. There's nothing on Cenatek's site to suggest they do anything like this, though.]
There's a few other things that annoy me: the lack of specifications (while they have a list of approved memory modules, they point-blank refuse to provide the required memory specs on their support forum). Also, the board appears to require four identical DIMMs, which is a royal pain in the bum. Expandability? What's that? Low entry cost? Don't got one of those either.
So this board appears to be worthless for its target market and overpriced for anything else.
One-word review: Sucks. Score: 3/10.
Memory is absurdly cheap, and a properly thought out board (even one that implements the ECC in software) at the right price has a market waiting. I know a lot of people doing embedded Telco apps would love something like this. This card isn't it.
The Platypus card is also over-priced, but it does support (indeed, requires) ECC, and also goes up to 8GB.
Yep. There's an epicentre of pain around heading 180, pitch 80. Works with either foot. If you get it just right, it sounds like a bunch of thugs are beating on the guy with baseball bats:)
My best effort: 479,962. I've also got two over 200,000.
You have been redirected to a ligher [sic] version of our article in order to conserve bandwidth and keep the site running smoothly for everybody. This is the whole text of the article, if you would like to read the story along with our reader comments, please click here. You are also welcome to bookmark us and explore the rest of our site! Thanks, www.palminfocenter.com
Damn! They're on to us! How are we supposed to slashdot sites if they do this?
With a file server (current buzzword is "NAS" for Network-Attached Storage) the server maintains the file system, and multiple clients connect to it to read and write files. It's a shared *file system*.
With a SAN (Storage Area Network) a bunch of raw disks is made available over a network. Currently this is normally Fiber Channel; iSCSI will bring standard Ethernet to SANs, making it much cheaper. No file system is mandated by the SAN; a machine connected to the SAN gets access to one or more raw disks and can use them any way it wants. Typically, the unit of allocation is one disk, though some systems (EMC) allow disks to be subdivided and the sub-disks handed out separately. While the storage pool on the whole is shared, each disk (or sub-disk) is only connected to one machine at a time.
A SAN provides a centrally managed pool of local disk, so you don't have to run around upgrading individual servers. This is a *big* win for large corporations.
Assuming that the increased density is split evenly between more tracks and more bits per track, we're looking at about a 30x increase in the number of bits per track. Assuming rotational speeds remain the same, that will take us from 40MB/s on a current IDE drive to about 1.2GB/s. Which is comfortably greater than 216MB/s.
State of the art is ATA/ATAPI-6 a.k.a. "Big Drive". It supports 48-bit addressing. That's 48-bit sector addressing, so the maximum size of a disk is 144 Petabytes. This standard also supports transferring 32MB of data in a single I/O. This is at least partly implemented in ATA-133 controllers.
After hitting limits at every factor of 4 (32MB, 128MB, 512MB, 2GB, 8GB, 32GB and most recently 128GB), they've finally got it right.
Ms Fnd in a Lbry by Hal Draper. They still had all the data, but they couldn't find anything because the index to the index to the index had got corrupted.
Around 1995, computers got fast enough for my work (software development). I wasn't waiting on the compiler any more, the editor was nice and snappy, even the GUI desktop was decent (CDE in those days).
On the other hand, my previous employer paid $180,000 in 1995 for an IBM server with dual 75MHz CPUs. We quickly outgrew it, upgraded to 4 CPUs, then were forced to move to Alpha at huge expense.
In 2002, you can get a dual Athlon or P4 Xeon box that will outrun a 1996 10-way Alpha - for around 1/100th the price. That's real value for money.
And then there's the games, of course.
Re:Absolute limit of 0.13 micron technology?
on
Pentium 4 2.8GHz
·
· Score: 2
That's not the design as such; that's the creation of the photomask for chip production. Even at the higher cost for 100nm process masks, it's still a minor part of the overall cost of developing a new processor. Where it will hurt is the smaller companies producing short runs of specialised chips.
Foundries are working to combat this by combining multiple designs from different customers on a single mask. So a mask might contain 5 of product 1 from company A, 10 of product 2 from company B and so on.
Also, at 100nm the mask gives about 70% more chips for a given size than 130nm, and 3 times as many as at 180nm. For 90nm the figures are 2 times and 4 times, respectively.
As far as I can see, the music industry as we know and hate it is doomed. We don't need them. Anyone can make music, burn CDs, put up a website and sell them. Distributors will come to the party soon enough.
All we lose is the saturation media bombing to promote the latest 15-minute megastar. Well, darn.
The movie industry is in a stronger position - at least for the time being. You can't get some friends together and make The Lord of the Rings, no matter how much creative talent you have. And I still enjoy going to the movies with my friends and munching popcorn and seeing it all on the big screen.
The MPAA still needs to be clubbed senseless, though. Maybe we can get some out-of-work seal trappers on the case.
Microsoft loses around 6% share this month, as register.com continues to fluctuate between using a Windows and Linux front end, and homestead.com , which originally based its business model on support from advertising, cleared away over a million sites. Homestead recently raised $5M from its investors to assist its transition to a paid for serivces model. To complete a bad news month for Microsoft's share of the survey, Reuters reports that the Federal Trade Commission will investigate the relationship between Verisign and Interland with respect to marketing domain names. The NSI domain parking system hosted at Interland is the other large repository of parked sites on the Microsoft platform. Earlier in the year large numbers of sites were reaped at Namezero, which had a controversial relationship with NSI regarding reselling domain names.
The Opteron is radically different to processors from the 8086 up to the original Pentium. It's a super-scalar 64-bit RISC core with hardware translation of x86 (and x86-64) instructions. It's designed as a low-cost 64-bit upgrade to the Athlon; the Opteron core is only about 10% bigger than the Athlon core, and will sell in the same price range.
Recent designs like the Athlon and P4 have thoroughly discredited the performance claims of RISC vs. CISC; the x86 translator has little or no impact on the overall performance. It all comes down to details of implementation. (The 8087 FP model is one exception, and SSE2 has now fixed that.)
Itanium is a huge and expensive server chip, designed to compete with other huge and expensive server chips. The original Itanium was also something of a slug, providing fair-to-middling floating point performance and lousy integer performance. The Itanium 2 is supposed to have fixed this, bringing integer performance up to decent levels (though still slower than recent Athlons and P4s) and floating point to match IBM's Power 4. The results are still estimates though, so we'll have to see what actually gets listed on spec.org.
Of course, a dual Athlon or P4 box will be faster and cheaper (if your problem can be multi-threaded).
The Athlon has good FP performance compared to previous x86 chips, but is still limited by the broken 8087 model. Opteron aims to fix this with an extended SSE2 mode.
As for VLIW... This was primarily a *political* decision by Intel. Having spent so much time bagging RISC, they couldn't face bringing out their own RISC chip. So they spent many years and many billions of dollars on the Itanium - which sucked. It ran into the same compiler issues that VLIW has always had. If the performance estimates for Itanium 2 pan out, it would seem that Intel have managed to overcome these problems, or at least provide enough hardware to bulldoze their way through.
And Itanium is NOT by any means a clean architecture. In fact, it's considerably more convoluted than x86. If you want a clean design, look at Alpha or MIPS.
Bottom line: Opteron gives you 64-bit addressing and improved performance, with no penalty for running all your 32-bit applications. And it'll be cheap enough for all but the lowest end of the desktop market.
Itanium 2 gives a big expensive chip for your big expensive servers, and provides decent performance as long as all your applications are recompiled.
Re:Windows XP reason we need more than 4GB?
on
AMD's 64-Bit Chip
·
· Score: 1
Right. Even with 4GB of memory, XP still runs like a slug.
Slashdot Mirror
I installed Everquest. It took me three hours to get it to work. I never did find out why it was locking my machine up.
I finally got online, wandered about for a couple of hours, found absolutely nothing of interest, and quit. For good.
Similarly with Ultima Online, except I didn't have to screw around for three hours to get it to work, and it was interesting for a couple of days.
So I'm back to playing Nethack. It's free. It rocks.
I live in Sydney and use Shopfast regularly. It's great.
I don't use it to order tonight's dinner. If I need a steak or a pound of mushrooms, I'll pick that up at the little supermarket on the way home.
I do use it for all the bulky stuff I need to buy regularly, and things that last a long time. Tinned and frozen food, soft drinks and so on. They do deliver the same day - if you order by 10am they'll deliver any time after 5pm that day.
If I need food in a hurry I dial out for pizza or Chinese. Different distribution structure.
Why does Japan need Linux when they have all these wonderful operating systems that can plug directly into your brain and have cute holographic girls who pop up to inform you when there's a problem?
It must be true, I saw it on TV!
And you'd think they'd rebuild Tokyo Tower somewhere else. I mean, it's what, the fourth time this month it's been destroyed by giant monsters.
This is true, but that's different to what the "HAB Theory" claims. The Earth's inclination, that is, the angle between its axis of rotation and the plane of its orbit around the Sun, does wobble, and the moon plays at least some part in stabilising it. The wobble is pretty slow, though.
:|
What the "HAB Theory" claims - and what is absurd - is that the axis of rotation shifts by 45 degrees every few thousand years, so that the North Pole suddenly pops up in (for example) Madrid, and the South Pole in Christchurch, New Zealand. You'd think someone would have noticed that sort of thing
That's just dumb.
The Earth's magnetic field is well known to wander about. Apart from the fact that Magnetic North is currently moving at a measurable speed, lines of aligned particles of iron in rock strata show a clear history of magnetic pole reversals.
The Earth's axis of rotation, on the other hand, is about as fixed as anything can be. The angular momentum of the rotating Earth is huge; you'd need an equally huge external force to shift it. The Earth's magnetic field is puny in comparison, and can't affect rotation in this way.
Apart from the fact this this "theory" contravenes the laws of Physics, there is no geological evidence to support this (frozen mammoths don't count!) and huge amounts of evidence to counter it. All the recent ice ages occured in the (current) north and south latitudes, for example. There are no signs of the sea inundating the land for thousands of miles, which is what would ensue in such a disaster. Plus, there are fragile stalactites that have formed over many thousands of years, and which would shatter if something this dramatic had ever happened - but which are perfectly intact.
This is potentially interesting, but there are several problems:
1. The pricing model sucks. The entry price of $399 is too high for a card with one chip and four DIMM sockets. And that only supports 512MB. To go to 1GB, 2GB or 4GB you have to pay hundreds of dollars more - even though the only change is a BIOS setting.
2. The RAM pricing is absurd. These guys need a reality check, pronto.
3. The board takes standard PC133 NON-PARITY RAM. No way in Hell would I trust my data to something like that. Honestly, this is just plain stupid. The board is too expensive for the home market and no-one sane is going to put non-ECC memory in a server.
[As a side point: Even using standard DIMMs, you could do some sort of block-ECC at the driver level (or in the controller chip) and use the fourth DIMM as a parity device to recover from on failures, like RAID-3. Alternately, you could treat each DIMM as a 48-bit device and use the remainder for ECC and Chipkill. There's nothing on Cenatek's site to suggest they do anything like this, though.]
There's a few other things that annoy me: the lack of specifications (while they have a list of approved memory modules, they point-blank refuse to provide the required memory specs on their support forum). Also, the board appears to require four identical DIMMs, which is a royal pain in the bum. Expandability? What's that? Low entry cost? Don't got one of those either.
So this board appears to be worthless for its target market and overpriced for anything else.
One-word review: Sucks.
Score: 3/10.
Memory is absurdly cheap, and a properly thought out board (even one that implements the ECC in software) at the right price has a market waiting. I know a lot of people doing embedded Telco apps would love something like this. This card isn't it.
The Platypus card is also over-priced, but it does support (indeed, requires) ECC, and also goes up to 8GB.
Yep. There's an epicentre of pain around heading 180, pitch 80. Works with either foot. If you get it just right, it sounds like a bunch of thugs are beating on the guy with baseball bats :)
My best effort: 479,962. I've also got two over 200,000.
Into acid? Boy are they in for a surprise!
Minerva and Bacchus have already been used for asteroids.
I don't remember any shortage of gaping holes in the plot of The Matrix for that matter.
The best part was playing "spot the building", since I live in Sydney.
You have been redirected to a ligher [sic] version of our article in order to conserve bandwidth and keep the site running smoothly for everybody. This is the whole text of the article, if you would like to read the story along with our reader comments, please click here. You are also welcome to bookmark us and explore the rest of our site!
Thanks, www.palminfocenter.com
Damn! They're on to us! How are we supposed to slashdot sites if they do this?
This former .com millionaire is taking a few months off.
The difference is very simple:
With a file server (current buzzword is "NAS" for Network-Attached Storage) the server maintains the file system, and multiple clients connect to it to read and write files. It's a shared *file system*.
With a SAN (Storage Area Network) a bunch of raw disks is made available over a network. Currently this is normally Fiber Channel; iSCSI will bring standard Ethernet to SANs, making it much cheaper. No file system is mandated by the SAN; a machine connected to the SAN gets access to one or more raw disks and can use them any way it wants. Typically, the unit of allocation is one disk, though some systems (EMC) allow disks to be subdivided and the sub-disks handed out separately. While the storage pool on the whole is shared, each disk (or sub-disk) is only connected to one machine at a time.
A SAN provides a centrally managed pool of local disk, so you don't have to run around upgrading individual servers. This is a *big* win for large corporations.
Assuming that the increased density is split evenly between more tracks and more bits per track, we're looking at about a 30x increase in the number of bits per track. Assuming rotational speeds remain the same, that will take us from 40MB/s on a current IDE drive to about 1.2GB/s. Which is comfortably greater than 216MB/s.
State of the art is ATA/ATAPI-6 a.k.a. "Big Drive". It supports 48-bit addressing. That's 48-bit sector addressing, so the maximum size of a disk is 144 Petabytes. This standard also supports transferring 32MB of data in a single I/O. This is at least partly implemented in ATA-133 controllers.
After hitting limits at every factor of 4 (32MB, 128MB, 512MB, 2GB, 8GB, 32GB and most recently 128GB), they've finally got it right.
Take a look here for more details.
Ms Fnd in a Lbry by Hal Draper. They still had all the data, but they couldn't find anything because the index to the index to the index had got corrupted.
Amazingly enough, the story was written in 1961.
Around 1995, computers got fast enough for my work (software development). I wasn't waiting on the compiler any more, the editor was nice and snappy, even the GUI desktop was decent (CDE in those days).
On the other hand, my previous employer paid $180,000 in 1995 for an IBM server with dual 75MHz CPUs. We quickly outgrew it, upgraded to 4 CPUs, then were forced to move to Alpha at huge expense.
In 2002, you can get a dual Athlon or P4 Xeon box that will outrun a 1996 10-way Alpha - for around 1/100th the price. That's real value for money.
And then there's the games, of course.
That's not the design as such; that's the creation of the photomask for chip production. Even at the higher cost for 100nm process masks, it's still a minor part of the overall cost of developing a new processor. Where it will hurt is the smaller companies producing short runs of specialised chips.
Foundries are working to combat this by combining multiple designs from different customers on a single mask. So a mask might contain 5 of product 1 from company A, 10 of product 2 from company B and so on.
Also, at 100nm the mask gives about 70% more chips for a given size than 130nm, and 3 times as many as at 180nm. For 90nm the figures are 2 times and 4 times, respectively.
As far as I can see, the music industry as we know and hate it is doomed. We don't need them. Anyone can make music, burn CDs, put up a website and sell them. Distributors will come to the party soon enough.
All we lose is the saturation media bombing to promote the latest 15-minute megastar. Well, darn.
The movie industry is in a stronger position - at least for the time being. You can't get some friends together and make The Lord of the Rings, no matter how much creative talent you have. And I still enjoy going to the movies with my friends and munching popcorn and seeing it all on the big screen.
The MPAA still needs to be clubbed senseless, though. Maybe we can get some out-of-work seal trappers on the case.
From Netcraft's site:
Around the Net
Microsoft loses around 6% share this month, as register.com continues to fluctuate between using a Windows and Linux front end, and homestead.com , which originally based its business model on support from advertising, cleared away over a million sites. Homestead recently raised $5M from its investors to assist its transition to a paid for serivces model. To complete a bad news month for Microsoft's share of the survey, Reuters reports that the Federal Trade Commission will investigate the relationship between Verisign and Interland with respect to marketing domain names. The NSI domain parking system hosted at Interland is the other large repository of parked sites on the Microsoft platform. Earlier in the year large numbers of sites were reaped at Namezero, which had a controversial relationship with NSI regarding reselling domain names.
Techie: Um, we've lost the corporate file server.
Boss: You mean it crashed?
Techie: No, it's working fine. We just can't find it.
So much cluelessness, so little time...
The Opteron is radically different to processors from the 8086 up to the original Pentium. It's a super-scalar 64-bit RISC core with hardware translation of x86 (and x86-64) instructions. It's designed as a low-cost 64-bit upgrade to the Athlon; the Opteron core is only about 10% bigger than the Athlon core, and will sell in the same price range.
Recent designs like the Athlon and P4 have thoroughly discredited the performance claims of RISC vs. CISC; the x86 translator has little or no impact on the overall performance. It all comes down to details of implementation. (The 8087 FP model is one exception, and SSE2 has now fixed that.)
Itanium is a huge and expensive server chip, designed to compete with other huge and expensive server chips. The original Itanium was also something of a slug, providing fair-to-middling floating point performance and lousy integer performance. The Itanium 2 is supposed to have fixed this, bringing integer performance up to decent levels (though still slower than recent Athlons and P4s) and floating point to match IBM's Power 4. The results are still estimates though, so we'll have to see what actually gets listed on spec.org.
Of course, a dual Athlon or P4 box will be faster and cheaper (if your problem can be multi-threaded).
The Athlon has good FP performance compared to previous x86 chips, but is still limited by the broken 8087 model. Opteron aims to fix this with an extended SSE2 mode.
As for VLIW... This was primarily a *political* decision by Intel. Having spent so much time bagging RISC, they couldn't face bringing out their own RISC chip. So they spent many years and many billions of dollars on the Itanium - which sucked. It ran into the same compiler issues that VLIW has always had. If the performance estimates for Itanium 2 pan out, it would seem that Intel have managed to overcome these problems, or at least provide enough hardware to bulldoze their way through.
And Itanium is NOT by any means a clean architecture. In fact, it's considerably more convoluted than x86. If you want a clean design, look at Alpha or MIPS.
Bottom line: Opteron gives you 64-bit addressing and improved performance, with no penalty for running all your 32-bit applications. And it'll be cheap enough for all but the lowest end of the desktop market.
Itanium 2 gives a big expensive chip for your big expensive servers, and provides decent performance as long as all your applications are recompiled.
Right. Even with 4GB of memory, XP still runs like a slug.
And Lego. Can't forget Lego.
Acutally, $2M to open the source of BeOS is pretty reasonable. If a fund can be organised (by someone reputable), I'm in for $50.