Other computationally intense tasks could use cards of this nature as well, image processing, computer vision, etc. Pretty much anything that lends itself to parallel processing. Think of the specialized parallel processing machines based upon GPUs, this is just a consumer oriented version.
Exactly. GPGPU was conveived years before Bitcoin. Cryptocurrencies in general are a neat application of preexisting tech such as public key cryptography, p2p networking and GPGPU. It's just that most people attracted to cryptocurrencies are unaware of this wider computing background. For instance, the forums are full of Linux newbies struggling to./configure; make, as bleeding-edge software is generally distributed in source form. Of course it's great to see new people learn Linux, but it would be even nicer if they had the patience to RTFM and learn some of the general basics on their own first.
When mining Bitcoin with a GPU was still a reasonable thing to do it was common to turn down things like memory clocks so that there was more headroom available for overclocking the ALUs. I'm not familiar with the gory details or ethereum but would imagine similar optimizations are possible.
Actually, Ethereum and most other cryptocurrencies are memory-bound. Currently, Ethereum mining requires about 3 GB of video memory, and the faster the better. This is a design choice meant to deter ASIC development, and hence keep Ethereum more distributed among hobbyists rather than specialist groups. Bitcoin has a relatively simple hash so it was easier to develop ASICs, and now its mining is dominated by few large players (countering the original distributed vision).
Cryptocurrencies are moving towards being mineless. Most of the newer cryptocurrencies can't be mined and bitcoin and ethereum and moving towards an upgrade that will remove mining to a much more efficient system (that uses less than 1/1000th of the energy mining does). They are moving to a "Proof-of-stake" system from a "Proof-of-work" system.
Ah, proof-of-stake, the new fancy cryptocurrency tech introduced with Peercoin in 2012.
Non-graphics uses for GPUs have been around since 2004 or so. I recall Nvidia releasing headless GPUs for these purposes years ago. I also believe the numerous scientists and engineers using GPGPU don't have much idle time to spare, as supercomputer time is expensive.
So I'd really like to know what makes these GPUs mining-only. In my understanding, it's either an ASIC for a specific algorithm, or a general-purpose GPU which could be used for science/tech and mining alike.
how Russian scientists were involved in the mathematics behind eigenvalues, which is the underlying fundament for Google's pagerank algorithms?
I think that's a little far-fetched. While some Russians were involved, the whole "eigen" prefix should provide a hint towards Western Europe. ("Eigen" is German for "own" as in "my own car".)
Language changes (even within a sentence), deal with it. You should be able to infer a word's meaning from its cotext, by using the little grey cells in your cotex.
It's a cluster of 4 8 core CPUs connected via a high speed interconnect. I'm not saying that is bad; I just wish a tech site would have more accurate reporting.
As if "core" has any well-defined meaning besides marketing slogans. IMHO, it has 32 CPUs within a single package, in groups of 8 per die. Operating systems and applications will see 64 CPUs due to SMT.
I remember when the "multicore" chips came out around 2005, and it was portrayed as something revolutionary and hard to program efficiently. I had already been coding on multi-CPU systems years before, and putting the different CPUs on the same die didn't seem like a big deal. In fact, the shared caches and I/O seemed like a disadvantage, although there were obviously benefits too.
I'd hope such a party would know and care about Windows 10's telemetry, publicity and user tracking. If even they don't know or care means that 99'9% of people don't and so Microsoft has no reason to change and then probably Windows will get worse and worse.
It seems that the Pirate Party is the only one that knows and cares about such issues. My city council recently welcomed its first Pirate members, and they promptly took up the issue of public documents being distributed in proprietary formats. E.g. Android users could not open the documents so far, so it was something that concerned people beyond the hardcore Linux geeks.
This is probably not very relevant, but in Finland we have this thing called http://iki.fi/ that provides permanent redirect addresses for web and email. They charge a one-time signup fee around 30 EUR for life. It's only for Finnish residents, though. The closest international equivalent I can think of is http://sdf.org/ -- I also paid a similar one-time fee for a somewhat expanded account.
This reminds me of DAT, which was more or less banned from consumers, due to fears of copying CDs. Consumers were then offered MD and DCC with lossy compression instead. There are countless examples like this in electronics and computing today -- superior technology that was crippled due to various business reasons. There seem to be entire R&D branches that actively work against technological progress, spending money and time on removing features after they were first painstakingly developed.
Some of us make actual algorithmic art. Publicity stunts like this just make everything "algorithmic" look bad. See my homepage for the obligatory shameless plug.
Please tell me how one uses tulips to transfer money across the globe in a few minutes pseudonymously without intermediate parties. Cryptocurrencies are not just a fancy collectible, they perform valuable services in the real world.
GPGPU efforts started many years ago before Bitcoin, and there are tons of scientific and technical applications for headless GPUs. So pardon me if the "mining-only" definition seems idiotic. Some people even render graphics on headless machines.
It's not like players go from playing in their backyard with makeshift equipment straight to the pros, though. At some point they'll need to have access to actual equipment and facilities, which can cost a good chunk of change. I wonder how much is spent on the average high school football or basketball player compared to how much a CS:GO or League of Legends player needs to spend.
True, but everyone starts at the bottom, and it shouldn't cost much to at least try the very basics. I'm sure there are places to try out closed-source games for free, though.
I also understand there are costs in any sport, but there are usually competing manufacturers to keep the prices somewhat sane.
At least with e-sports games(or any other game really), ANYONE can join a game if they want while watching the game play out at the same time and try to imitate whatever you see on video.
Anyone can play, as long as they buy the license for the closed-source game software from the single manufacturer. Not exactly like learning football with some random spheroid.
Even simpler: ball sports doesn't need a licence to play. Imagine a world where the football is a luxury good manufactured by a monopoly, and making your own ball is a crime. Contrast that with today's stars who started out in poverty, playing backyard games with makeshift equipment.
Next time somebody compares e-sports to chess, remind them that chess is completely open-source.
Pirates 4 was already really disappointing compared to the first three
The really sad thing about Pirates 4 is that it was supposedly based on this wonderful novel. It looks like the studios had kept the movie rights for the novel for years without doing anything, and then they used them up for a bit of atmosphere and themes.
While I agree with most of your points, I've had particular worries about cooling in laptops. My Thinkpad X220i doesn't have enough fan power to keep it cool during intense graphics demos (CPU + GPU), so it starts throttling down the clocks over time. It feels like a fundamental design error if you cannot actually use all the hardware -- I wouldn't mind something like extra noise at such times.
For my last gig, I hauled around a Mini-ITX machine, though I also needed more GPU power anyway. I sometimes look at gaming laptops for these purposes, but I could do without all the "gaming" extras, I just need a laptop with a strong GPU and decent display outputs.
When I grew up, I associated Fraktur with old books, with no fuhr.. I mean further value connotations. For instance, my grandma has an ancient bible printed in Fraktur. It is only in the past few years that I have started seeing Fraktur in the Nazi light in the general media and entertainment. Likewise, terms such as "grammar nazi" are relatively recent. I have been called a "nazi" because I like to keep things in order. I'm not even going to start on the millennia-long history of the swastika. I guess fonts are one of the many tools people can use in their culture wars, but it's sad to see good things become unusable because of arbitrary associations.
Slashdot Mirror
Other computationally intense tasks could use cards of this nature as well, image processing, computer vision, etc. Pretty much anything that lends itself to parallel processing. Think of the specialized parallel processing machines based upon GPUs, this is just a consumer oriented version.
Exactly. GPGPU was conveived years before Bitcoin. Cryptocurrencies in general are a neat application of preexisting tech such as public key cryptography, p2p networking and GPGPU. It's just that most people attracted to cryptocurrencies are unaware of this wider computing background. For instance, the forums are full of Linux newbies struggling to ./configure; make, as bleeding-edge software is generally distributed in source form. Of course it's great to see new people learn Linux, but it would be even nicer if they had the patience to RTFM and learn some of the general basics on their own first.
When mining Bitcoin with a GPU was still a reasonable thing to do it was common to turn down things like memory clocks so that there was more headroom available for overclocking the ALUs. I'm not familiar with the gory details or ethereum but would imagine similar optimizations are possible.
Actually, Ethereum and most other cryptocurrencies are memory-bound. Currently, Ethereum mining requires about 3 GB of video memory, and the faster the better. This is a design choice meant to deter ASIC development, and hence keep Ethereum more distributed among hobbyists rather than specialist groups. Bitcoin has a relatively simple hash so it was easier to develop ASICs, and now its mining is dominated by few large players (countering the original distributed vision).
+1, Insightful
Also, you should really really invest in Boolberry.
Cryptocurrencies are moving towards being mineless. Most of the newer cryptocurrencies can't be mined and bitcoin and ethereum and moving towards an upgrade that will remove mining to a much more efficient system (that uses less than 1/1000th of the energy mining does). They are moving to a "Proof-of-stake" system from a "Proof-of-work" system.
Ah, proof-of-stake, the new fancy cryptocurrency tech introduced with Peercoin in 2012.
Non-graphics uses for GPUs have been around since 2004 or so. I recall Nvidia releasing headless GPUs for these purposes years ago. I also believe the numerous scientists and engineers using GPGPU don't have much idle time to spare, as supercomputer time is expensive.
So I'd really like to know what makes these GPUs mining-only. In my understanding, it's either an ASIC for a specific algorithm, or a general-purpose GPU which could be used for science/tech and mining alike.
how Russian scientists were involved in the mathematics behind eigenvalues, which is the underlying fundament for Google's pagerank algorithms?
I think that's a little far-fetched. While some Russians were involved, the whole "eigen" prefix should provide a hint towards Western Europe. ("Eigen" is German for "own" as in "my own car".)
Language changes (even within a sentence), deal with it. You should be able to infer a word's meaning from its cotext, by using the little grey cells in your cotex.
Like "fayl".
It's a cluster of 4 8 core CPUs connected via a high speed interconnect. I'm not saying that is bad; I just wish a tech site would have more accurate reporting.
As if "core" has any well-defined meaning besides marketing slogans. IMHO, it has 32 CPUs within a single package, in groups of 8 per die. Operating systems and applications will see 64 CPUs due to SMT.
I remember when the "multicore" chips came out around 2005, and it was portrayed as something revolutionary and hard to program efficiently. I had already been coding on multi-CPU systems years before, and putting the different CPUs on the same die didn't seem like a big deal. In fact, the shared caches and I/O seemed like a disadvantage, although there were obviously benefits too.
And the obligatory followup: https://xkcd.com/1831/
I'd hope such a party would know and care about Windows 10's telemetry, publicity and user tracking. If even they don't know or care means that 99'9% of people don't and so Microsoft has no reason to change and then probably Windows will get worse and worse.
It seems that the Pirate Party is the only one that knows and cares about such issues. My city council recently welcomed its first Pirate members, and they promptly took up the issue of public documents being distributed in proprietary formats. E.g. Android users could not open the documents so far, so it was something that concerned people beyond the hardcore Linux geeks.
This is probably not very relevant, but in Finland we have this thing called http://iki.fi/ that provides permanent redirect addresses for web and email. They charge a one-time signup fee around 30 EUR for life. It's only for Finnish residents, though. The closest international equivalent I can think of is http://sdf.org/ -- I also paid a similar one-time fee for a somewhat expanded account.
I was trying to imagine what Trump Fragrances smell like. I puked a little inside my mouth, which was a good thing in comparison.
This reminds me of DAT, which was more or less banned from consumers, due to fears of copying CDs. Consumers were then offered MD and DCC with lossy compression instead. There are countless examples like this in electronics and computing today -- superior technology that was crippled due to various business reasons. There seem to be entire R&D branches that actively work against technological progress, spending money and time on removing features after they were first painstakingly developed.
Some of us make actual algorithmic art. Publicity stunts like this just make everything "algorithmic" look bad. See my homepage for the obligatory shameless plug.
Please tell me how one uses tulips to transfer money across the globe in a few minutes pseudonymously without intermediate parties. Cryptocurrencies are not just a fancy collectible, they perform valuable services in the real world.
GPGPU efforts started many years ago before Bitcoin, and there are tons of scientific and technical applications for headless GPUs. So pardon me if the "mining-only" definition seems idiotic. Some people even render graphics on headless machines.
It's not like players go from playing in their backyard with makeshift equipment straight to the pros, though. At some point they'll need to have access to actual equipment and facilities, which can cost a good chunk of change. I wonder how much is spent on the average high school football or basketball player compared to how much a CS:GO or League of Legends player needs to spend.
True, but everyone starts at the bottom, and it shouldn't cost much to at least try the very basics. I'm sure there are places to try out closed-source games for free, though.
I also understand there are costs in any sport, but there are usually competing manufacturers to keep the prices somewhat sane.
At least with e-sports games(or any other game really), ANYONE can join a game if they want while watching the game play out at the same time and try to imitate whatever you see on video.
Anyone can play, as long as they buy the license for the closed-source game software from the single manufacturer. Not exactly like learning football with some random spheroid.
Even simpler: ball sports doesn't need a licence to play. Imagine a world where the football is a luxury good manufactured by a monopoly, and making your own ball is a crime. Contrast that with today's stars who started out in poverty, playing backyard games with makeshift equipment.
Next time somebody compares e-sports to chess, remind them that chess is completely open-source.
...and the mental image of Trump pulling out of her.
Pirates 4 was already really disappointing compared to the first three
The really sad thing about Pirates 4 is that it was supposedly based on this wonderful novel. It looks like the studios had kept the movie rights for the novel for years without doing anything, and then they used them up for a bit of atmosphere and themes.
- a large, very quiet chassis cooling fan
While I agree with most of your points, I've had particular worries about cooling in laptops. My Thinkpad X220i doesn't have enough fan power to keep it cool during intense graphics demos (CPU + GPU), so it starts throttling down the clocks over time. It feels like a fundamental design error if you cannot actually use all the hardware -- I wouldn't mind something like extra noise at such times.
For my last gig, I hauled around a Mini-ITX machine, though I also needed more GPU power anyway. I sometimes look at gaming laptops for these purposes, but I could do without all the "gaming" extras, I just need a laptop with a strong GPU and decent display outputs.
I'm old-school, and I think an acronym should be pronounceable as a word, such as "LesBiGay".
When I grew up, I associated Fraktur with old books, with no fuhr.. I mean further value connotations. For instance, my grandma has an ancient bible printed in Fraktur. It is only in the past few years that I have started seeing Fraktur in the Nazi light in the general media and entertainment. Likewise, terms such as "grammar nazi" are relatively recent. I have been called a "nazi" because I like to keep things in order. I'm not even going to start on the millennia-long history of the swastika. I guess fonts are one of the many tools people can use in their culture wars, but it's sad to see good things become unusable because of arbitrary associations.