Basically, they tested a specific version. That specific version (not including any patches!) and type of setup qualifies for the rating.
If there is a vulnerability that would affect that setup/version in it's configured state, then the rating is supposed to be withdrawn, the problem fixed, and the system resubmitted.
Someone has figured out that perhaps, it might be a good idea to not have the vault door sealed, and a hole drilled in the side of the wall, so they tell you to apply security patches.
For the windows 2k thing: It's evaluated configuration wasn't vulnerable to any of the security patches, therefore it remains.... which makes me wonder how stripped down it was. Probably no networking, among other things, because, I can't think of much in 2k that hasn't had a security hole!
Actually looking at it, (at least on windows, from yesterday's usage) Safari had a lot more memory usage than Firefox. Which is interesting, because on the same machine also using KHTML (via it's originator: Konqueror) it has lower memory usage than Firefox (on Linux).
Granted, it was faster than FF, Opera or IE. It was however, one of the most inconsistent apps on the Windows desktop. It appears to be Apple's app is not being consistant with the environment, which is one of the things that Mac-fanboys champion on OSX. Which pretty much means it's intentional that they moved their interface over to Windows, where it looks especially horrid.
It'd be good, if not for the interface, and the bugs (which I didn't encounter, but appear to be widespread)
It'd be relatively easy to do. The back of the calculator, is mostly just empty space filled with a grid of plastic. One could remove that, and store it there, with little to no visual evidence. I'd be surprised if the weight change would be noticible.
Everyone needs to remember that Intel's core chips are 65nm. AMD begins volume production of that next year? So Intel will have an advantage for a time. (Provided both aren't having issues like most people had when starting with 90nm.) It really isn't shocking that they would have lower power consumption than 90nm parts. AMD should worry over the more IPC, however, that may partially be due to the same thing. When this chip gets released, it will probably be top dog. It's not released so at the moment, AMD is leading...
Intel has a good thing going for them with the core chips. However, it's not just black magic to their compeditors, who pretty much started the whole processing power per watts. AMD can and will put 65nm processes into production, and they will tweak the core they use.
(And you will note that unless Intel or AMD has changed TDP measurements, they measure them differently: Intel's measurement is based on average usage (and it can go above that) while AMD's is worst case. (And even there, they do it for *classes* of processors. One of the earlier Athlon 64 revisions was 89W across the board. 1.8GHz to 2.4GHz or something like that... it's certainly going to be lower. Looked at it this way: AMD's value is highly pessimistic, while Intel's is highly optimistic.)
It's all really nice... except I, personally, am not taxing my current hardware that much, and I've got a single core processor (Granted, if I do need more speed, it runs very well on a bit more voltage to go to a 50% overclock, and get about 5C hotter). Faster processors are nice, but there's a point where you just go: It's fast enough. 95+% of the time it is clocked DOWN to it's lowest setting. Other things are a lot more important to performance now than the processor.
TV or video IN, it's very simple, IMO, just get one of the cheap Hauppauge, or ATI capture cards. (Cheaper/Older models can often can be found for $20-$50) They use either bt8x8 (878 or 848) or the saa7xxx chips, both supported well under Linux/BSD (I seem to recall BeOS and some more essoteric OSes supporting them). There is also a sourceforge project that does drivers for windows without the manufacturer's cruft (or cases where you've got a card from a manufacturer who no longer supports the device.)
Whereas that video card you have may not be supported, under other OSes. Nvidia as far as I know, and I looked sometime in the last year, didn't support capture under non-Windows. ATI's all-in-wonders also have rather crappy support. (And comparing image quality, etc, Never seen a reason to get an all-in-wonder, and not a video card + TV Capture card (and generally the combination is cheaper.)
I think the first point he was trying to make was that keyboards today are flimsy compared to older ones. (Says the guy typing on a Model M...)
The other I think was talking about the size of input, having each char take up 1/80th of a card, so you want the commands used in shell scripts as small as possible.
The problem is that if someone is sufficiently interested, zeroing it out will not actually provide security, because the physical bits will retain a small charge in the direction of their prior value. According to the rumor mill, NSA, and possibly others can retrive data after up to 7 rewrites. Admittedly, one has to wonder what you are up to to get that much interest in your hard drive.
The zeroing before backups is a good idea. It's also good to use inside emulators like qemu, which support holes in the files, so if you copy a file, it doesn't take up the whole space.
A lot of the time to change alluded to by the prior poster is due to voltage. One of the things most overclockers will do is up the voltage, then up the chip's clock. It lowers power consumption, but logically a 1 or a 0 is determined faster.
The 130nm process Ethelin 64s use 1.5V (and lower, 1.2 or 1.3, I believe at 800MHz), the 90nm process ones use 1.4V (1.1V @ 1000MHz). The original Pentium for a counter example use 5 or 3.3V. (Note that sticking a K6-2 into a slot configured for a P1 can fry it, though the K6 would use 2.5 (as I recall)) (Values from memory for the P1 & K6, so look them up, if you need example numbers)
I personally have an Ethelin 64 3000+ (90nm process Winchester core, 1.8GHz default) chip, which won't go more than say 100MHz higher at the stock voltage of 1.4V. However, if I take it out of range, and then change the clocks, the chip runs just fine at 2.7GHz, with a voltage of 1.5V. However, as I usually don't use much cpu, I've got it set to standard with cool'n'quiet, so generally it runs 1GHz@1.1V. Cool'n'quiet changes the clock multiplier, and the voltage, thus using less power if configured that way. (The changing is software controlled, 'performance' is probably the best speed governor under Linux. I've yet to figure out how Windows really hangles it. )
1. I don't expect to see that. As of right now the ONLY 10Krpm SATA drives I know of are WD's raptors, which have a small capacity, compared to 7200rpm drives. One might suggest that the Raptors are modified SCSI hard drives, where 10K is fairly common and 15K is not unknown. (Oh, and really expensive hard drives, are common.)
2. Possibly, but that doesn't really matter that much. Either the drive is reading it, in which case you can expect to get maybe a maximum of 60MB/sec off a standard drive, or it's in a tiny 8MB cache. If it's in that 8MB cache, chances are it's going to be in the much larger cache in system memory, for those operating systems which support it.
3. Most will move to it. However, there's no performance benefit to SATA 2 vs SATA 1. (Improved support for Command Queueing, a couple of other improvements.)
We are starting to finally surpass UDMA/66's threshold. It will be quite a while before we pass UDMA/100. Drives aren't much faster. The other thing that's remained pretty much constant (IDE/SATA) for quite a while is seek times, sadly.
I will have to disagree. Out of two Sis 735 based boards, I've worked with to much of a degree, one is 'flaky' as best I can describe it (under all of Mandrake ~8.1(might have been something other), RH 8/9, win2k pro/server, Gentoo), the other's on-board networking doesn't work in Windows 2000. (Does work, but very poorly in Linux/Gentoo) (I think it was ECS, I can't check remotely)
Admittedly, the flaky one is in a room, which seems to be the opposite extreme from the outside, and hard on computers (Something that's pissed me off for quite some time.) Of other computers in said room, one (a P2) has had a 269 day uptime, and multiple other >100 day uptimes, being rebooted for security upgrades. (Admittedly the 269 day should have been rebooted/upgraded earlier.) VIAs have a 1/3 for flakyness (Early Socket A VIA (KT133?) + Nvidia doesn't seem to work in one machine all the time), one rambus Intel P3 board, also works stabily (slow, but stable).
That said, I think a lot depends on the motherboard maker. I've had few problems with several of the name brand motherboards, no matter the chipset (though only Nvidia (AMD), VIA (Intel & AMD), and Intel)
AMD usually doesn't retool chip factories, and instead builds complete new ones, every couple of years. This leaves the old ones for flash. (At the moment their flash is struggling, but anyway.)
Intel retools all/most of it's fabs to newer processes. AMD finds it more cost effective to build a new fab every few years. (Indeed, Intel may be less efficient, as I've heard other companies find it more expensive to retool than to build a new one.)
AMD indeed does not have as much capacity as Intel or IBM, they have however contracted with a lot of other fabs, as a contingency measure. If say their sales force were able to sell a lot more Opterons to OEMs, you want a way to make sure you can get those processors made. (At least based on the article, their sales force does seem to be making headway.)
I really do wish people would stop propagating that myth! Many of Red Hat's most important products are entirely closed source. Not only do you not have the right to modify the code, you don't even have the right to SEE the source code! Look at their RHN products.
The other thing was that they agreed that the standard would allow use of any of the companies patents, (some confusion here, either verbally or written; I've not dug around enough to find out for certain.) made their own standard, and then started suing users of the other standard (DDR).
Not to mention, RDRAM performs like shit for most things. It was 'faster' in the sense that it had more bandwidth, but the latencies were huge compared to PC133 or DDR, which if one will notice how much an integrated memory controller helped the Athlon 64 (primarily cutting down latency) makes one realize that for many things RDRAM sucks. That said, the P4, with it's attempt to be dependant upon memory bandwidth, instead of memory latency, and long pipeline, was an ideal fit for RDRAM. It played to the P4's strengths (and the P4 was kind of designed for RDRAM as well), however, it enhanced many of the P4's weaknesses that everyone has come to know, like that long pipeline having problems if something branches a lot, and it guesses wrong.
Rambus is a company I wouldn't work with. They fall into the litigious bastards category with SCO, having turned on the standards groups/companies they worked with. If indeed the idea was to kill Rambus, I can certainly see why they did it.
Grub does not overwrite sector 0, EVERY TIME ONE CHANGES THE CONFIG. An operation which can fail for a number of reasons. (In other words, everytime lilo is run.) Grub instead writes the sector once, then relies on a text (and other files) which live in another sector. Even if grub's configuration file is messed up, grub will still come up, and likely be able to boot your old/new kernel. (There are ways of screwing this up, but all but one I can think of would result in lilo also failing, without even coming up.)
There are a lot of other advantages, but they weren't the one the GP was referring to. Rewriting Sector 0 like lilo does is like playing Russian Roulette with a hundred (or more) chamber pistol with one bullet.
AMD will not have trouble keeping up with that, because their current DESKTOP chips are using 78-86W, under one of the worst cases actually observed, and 68W when running Doom3 (Athlon 64 X2 4800) Also note that the rating is 108W, but that AMD's and Intel's TDPs are calculated differently.
The problem is that ATI announcements are starting to look a lot like several of Intel's more recent announcements. (Or the 1 & 1.13GHz P3s, minus the recall) In other words, Announce product & several months later it be out to market.
Contrast this with Nvidia, which has for every chipset announcement & launch I can remember since at least the 6xxx generation, have had working salable hardware the day of the announcement, without availability issues.
Yes, there are only a few fabs, but it still suprises me how Nvidia has of late, constantly been able to supply customers, and ATI hasn't.
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Basically, they tested a specific version. That specific version (not including any patches!) and type of setup qualifies for the rating.
... which makes me wonder how stripped down it was. Probably no networking, among other things, because, I can't think of much in 2k that hasn't had a security hole!
If there is a vulnerability that would affect that setup/version in it's configured state, then the rating is supposed to be withdrawn, the problem fixed, and the system resubmitted.
Someone has figured out that perhaps, it might be a good idea to not have the vault door sealed, and a hole drilled in the side of the wall, so they tell you to apply security patches.
For the windows 2k thing: It's evaluated configuration wasn't vulnerable to any of the security patches, therefore it remains.
Actually looking at it, (at least on windows, from yesterday's usage) Safari had a lot more memory usage than Firefox. Which is interesting, because on the same machine also using KHTML (via it's originator: Konqueror) it has lower memory usage than Firefox (on Linux).
Granted, it was faster than FF, Opera or IE. It was however, one of the most inconsistent apps on the Windows desktop. It appears to be Apple's app is not being consistant with the environment, which is one of the things that Mac-fanboys champion on OSX. Which pretty much means it's intentional that they moved their interface over to Windows, where it looks especially horrid.
It'd be good, if not for the interface, and the bugs (which I didn't encounter, but appear to be widespread)
Do you have references?
Based on a quoted 194MW for the Nimitz class ship's two reactors, these may well be the smaller of the two.
It'd be relatively easy to do. The back of the calculator, is mostly just empty space filled with a grid of plastic. One could remove that, and store it there, with little to no visual evidence. I'd be surprised if the weight change would be noticible.
Everyone needs to remember that Intel's core chips are 65nm. AMD begins volume production of that next year? So Intel will have an advantage for a time. (Provided both aren't having issues like most people had when starting with 90nm.) It really isn't shocking that they would have lower power consumption than 90nm parts. AMD should worry over the more IPC, however, that may partially be due to the same thing. When this chip gets released, it will probably be top dog. It's not released so at the moment, AMD is leading...
Intel has a good thing going for them with the core chips. However, it's not just black magic to their compeditors, who pretty much started the whole processing power per watts. AMD can and will put 65nm processes into production, and they will tweak the core they use.
(And you will note that unless Intel or AMD has changed TDP measurements, they measure them differently: Intel's measurement is based on average usage (and it can go above that) while AMD's is worst case. (And even there, they do it for *classes* of processors. One of the earlier Athlon 64 revisions was 89W across the board. 1.8GHz to 2.4GHz or something like that... it's certainly going to be lower. Looked at it this way: AMD's value is highly pessimistic, while Intel's is highly optimistic.)
It's all really nice... except I, personally, am not taxing my current hardware that much, and I've got a single core processor (Granted, if I do need more speed, it runs very well on a bit more voltage to go to a 50% overclock, and get about 5C hotter). Faster processors are nice, but there's a point where you just go: It's fast enough. 95+% of the time it is clocked DOWN to it's lowest setting. Other things are a lot more important to performance now than the processor.
Years after it was supposed to be released, and it's still not out.
In a nutshell, more people shop at Circuit City than at Newegg.
Divx still failed.
OS X on Intel performs like a rock!
Whereas that video card you have may not be supported, under other OSes. Nvidia as far as I know, and I looked sometime in the last year, didn't support capture under non-Windows. ATI's all-in-wonders also have rather crappy support. (And comparing image quality, etc, Never seen a reason to get an all-in-wonder, and not a video card + TV Capture card (and generally the combination is cheaper.)
The other I think was talking about the size of input, having each char take up 1/80th of a card, so you want the commands used in shell scripts as small as possible.
The zeroing before backups is a good idea. It's also good to use inside emulators like qemu, which support holes in the files, so if you copy a file, it doesn't take up the whole space.
The 130nm process Ethelin 64s use 1.5V (and lower, 1.2 or 1.3, I believe at 800MHz), the 90nm process ones use 1.4V (1.1V @ 1000MHz). The original Pentium for a counter example use 5 or 3.3V. (Note that sticking a K6-2 into a slot configured for a P1 can fry it, though the K6 would use 2.5 (as I recall)) (Values from memory for the P1 & K6, so look them up, if you need example numbers)
I personally have an Ethelin 64 3000+ (90nm process Winchester core, 1.8GHz default) chip, which won't go more than say 100MHz higher at the stock voltage of 1.4V. However, if I take it out of range, and then change the clocks, the chip runs just fine at 2.7GHz, with a voltage of 1.5V. However, as I usually don't use much cpu, I've got it set to standard with cool'n'quiet, so generally it runs 1GHz@1.1V. Cool'n'quiet changes the clock multiplier, and the voltage, thus using less power if configured that way. (The changing is software controlled, 'performance' is probably the best speed governor under Linux. I've yet to figure out how Windows really hangles it. )
2. Possibly, but that doesn't really matter that much. Either the drive is reading it, in which case you can expect to get maybe a maximum of 60MB/sec off a standard drive, or it's in a tiny 8MB cache. If it's in that 8MB cache, chances are it's going to be in the much larger cache in system memory, for those operating systems which support it.
3. Most will move to it. However, there's no performance benefit to SATA 2 vs SATA 1. (Improved support for Command Queueing, a couple of other improvements.)
We are starting to finally surpass UDMA/66's threshold. It will be quite a while before we pass UDMA/100. Drives aren't much faster. The other thing that's remained pretty much constant (IDE/SATA) for quite a while is seek times, sadly.
Admittedly, the flaky one is in a room, which seems to be the opposite extreme from the outside, and hard on computers (Something that's pissed me off for quite some time.) Of other computers in said room, one (a P2) has had a 269 day uptime, and multiple other >100 day uptimes, being rebooted for security upgrades. (Admittedly the 269 day should have been rebooted/upgraded earlier.) VIAs have a 1/3 for flakyness (Early Socket A VIA (KT133?) + Nvidia doesn't seem to work in one machine all the time), one rambus Intel P3 board, also works stabily (slow, but stable).
That said, I think a lot depends on the motherboard maker. I've had few problems with several of the name brand motherboards, no matter the chipset (though only Nvidia (AMD), VIA (Intel & AMD), and Intel)
as in you haven't examined it for yourself?
Intel retools all/most of it's fabs to newer processes. AMD finds it more cost effective to build a new fab every few years. (Indeed, Intel may be less efficient, as I've heard other companies find it more expensive to retool than to build a new one.)
AMD indeed does not have as much capacity as Intel or IBM, they have however contracted with a lot of other fabs, as a contingency measure. If say their sales force were able to sell a lot more Opterons to OEMs, you want a way to make sure you can get those processors made. (At least based on the article, their sales force does seem to be making headway.)
One might suggest that there is a reason it's not been popular.
Would you mind giving specific examples?
Not to mention, RDRAM performs like shit for most things. It was 'faster' in the sense that it had more bandwidth, but the latencies were huge compared to PC133 or DDR, which if one will notice how much an integrated memory controller helped the Athlon 64 (primarily cutting down latency) makes one realize that for many things RDRAM sucks. That said, the P4, with it's attempt to be dependant upon memory bandwidth, instead of memory latency, and long pipeline, was an ideal fit for RDRAM. It played to the P4's strengths (and the P4 was kind of designed for RDRAM as well), however, it enhanced many of the P4's weaknesses that everyone has come to know, like that long pipeline having problems if something branches a lot, and it guesses wrong.
Rambus is a company I wouldn't work with. They fall into the litigious bastards category with SCO, having turned on the standards groups/companies they worked with. If indeed the idea was to kill Rambus, I can certainly see why they did it.
Grub does not overwrite sector 0, EVERY TIME ONE CHANGES THE CONFIG. An operation which can fail for a number of reasons. (In other words, everytime lilo is run.) Grub instead writes the sector once, then relies on a text (and other files) which live in another sector. Even if grub's configuration file is messed up, grub will still come up, and likely be able to boot your old/new kernel. (There are ways of screwing this up, but all but one I can think of would result in lilo also failing, without even coming up.)
There are a lot of other advantages, but they weren't the one the GP was referring to. Rewriting Sector 0 like lilo does is like playing Russian Roulette with a hundred (or more) chamber pistol with one bullet.
Anorexics, being animals, will not eat when there is food around.
Though, I've not looked into it myself.
AMD will not have trouble keeping up with that, because their current DESKTOP chips are using 78-86W, under one of the worst cases actually observed, and 68W when running Doom3 (Athlon 64 X2 4800) Also note that the rating is 108W, but that AMD's and Intel's TDPs are calculated differently.
Source1: http://www.lostcircuits.com/cpu/amd_x2/12.shtml (Next page is the Doom3 result.)
The problem is that ATI announcements are starting to look a lot like several of Intel's more recent announcements. (Or the 1 & 1.13GHz P3s, minus the recall) In other words, Announce product & several months later it be out to market.
Contrast this with Nvidia, which has for every chipset announcement & launch I can remember since at least the 6xxx generation, have had working salable hardware the day of the announcement, without availability issues.
Yes, there are only a few fabs, but it still suprises me how Nvidia has of late, constantly been able to supply customers, and ATI hasn't.