By fans of the Fifth Element Programmed in Forth Costing you the third of your hundred dollar bills Sold by advertisers with second sight Redundant by the tine the first is sold
Sorry if my reply wasn't clear - I certainly wasn't intending any criticism of your post. I certainly got the point that you think IB is awesome, and I definitely agree. And, yes, you're limited by the disks, which is why the truly insane and the physics labs (there's a difference?) stripe across multiple drives.
With Infiniband, you get near-linear scaling because of the outrageous bandwidths and the ability to independently dedicate lines. Very roughly, 3 drives in parallel give you 4500 MB/s, which is just under what Infiniband'll do per line and what PCIe 2.x can deliver or absorb.
(HyperTransport 3 is even faster, but Infiniband network speeds seem to be locked to PCIe bus speeds. I'm guessing it's because it's widely used. You don't hear so much about HT3 these days - I can't honestly remember the last time Slashdot even mentioned the technology.)
Most open source databases have a niche for which they are unquestionably "the best". I believe MySQL's niche has changed over the years, but there is no question in my mind that it is superior to any other database at those specific tasks.
Likewise, Postgres, Ingres, Firebird, SQLite, QDBM, etc, are all good at their own thing. I really can't imagine anyone running a website from Ingres, but then I can't imagine anyone running a high-end scientific database through MySQL, trying to do relational work through QDBM, or running a single table database on Postgres.
Different horses for different courses. (NB: The expression does NOT originate in France.)
1500 MB/s? Hmmm. Infiniband allows you to direct one or more lines (up to 12 in any given direction) to a given target and permits switches (and routers, but that adds latency) in that arrangement, so individual packets can be switched from individual input lines to any number of devices.
Currently, Infiniband over PCIe 2.x supports 5 GB/s per line, although any given server is also limited to 5 GB/s. This would limit you to 12 servers and 36 of the storage boxes you mentioned, on a single storage-area network if you wanted to guarantee zero packet loss at maximum throughput with no throttling or added latency. (Infiniband latency, btw, is around 8 ms, using the run-of-the-mill chipsets.)
To get the same sort of bandwidth on Ethernet requires that you channel-bond five 10 Gigabit Ethernet cards together. This is possible, it has been done (in fact, they've gone as far as ten in the laboratory), but it isn't a supported configuration by industry, it's more than the cost of a single Infiniband card for the same bandwidth, you have twenty times the latency of Infiniband, you don't get RDMA (except on the few Ethernet RNICs that exist, which cost more than Infiniband cards, so you're now paying more than 5 times the cost for truly comparable performance) and switching is a lot more complex. It's also a lot less reliable when channel-bonding to that extent.
If you need bandwidths in excess of about 20 GB/s, Ethernet is simply too expensive. Infiniband becomes cheaper at that point, as well as faster. If you're using something like RAC Oracle over any sort of size of cluster, then you'd be insane to use anything other than Infiniband.
I won't say it's the best technology in the world, but it's most definitely not dying. Even Netcraft won't confirm that one. Sure, for the absolute performance freak, Dolphinics SCI cards push 2.5 ms latencies, but those're point-to-point, not switchable, so it's directly attached storage only. It also doesn't do RDMA. Frankly, I would expect to see SCI dying before Infiniband, simply because it's not as versatile and the latency reduction is going to be more than devoured by the added number of context switches between the kernel and userspace.
However, SCI is not dying. It's not doing great, but it's surviving quite nicely. So any doom-and-gloom forecasts for Infiniband seem to be doomed to stay gloomy as they're not likely to come to pass.
Microsoft'll do the same thing Sinclair did, and a few other companies have done over time, which is to load up one division with a bloat-load of debt and a few juicy trademarks, then sell it off to the highest bidder.
Microsoft gets loads of cash, offloads a loss-making division, and bankrupts a competitor all at the same time.
They'll succeed, the same way Merryl Lynch succeeded on getting bought by Bank of America. (Which only survived the take-over process at all because the US Govt bailed it out big-time. There must be some former ML execs who are seriously laughing all the way to whatever Swiss bank they're hiding their ill-gotten gains in.)
Storage systems are not trivial pieces of hardware and the range of approaches for handling the problem is staggering.
In the red corner, you've your basic NAS and SAN solutions. In the blue corner, you've direct-disk-to-memory systems using RDMA and Infiniband. In the green corner, you've WAN solutions (SCSI-over-IP, RAID-over-IP).
In the purple corner, you've smarter drives (virtual sectors, filesystems in hardware). In the cyan corner, you've more powerful hardware (many read heads per platter, uber-large RAM caches).
(Knowing Wozniak's reputation for doing things different, he's probably inventing a rhododendron corner.)
There is no shortage of opportunity. However, as with the early home computer market, there is a shortage of consensus on what a storage system actually does, other than "store stuff". That seems to be a world Wozniak does well in - the lack of standards meant the Apple II did well, the presence of standards meant that NeXT didn't. In the current computing world, where standards are everything (especially if they come with pretty holographic stickers), can he do much with the flexibility in the arena?
Microsoft, in the middle of one of the worst depressions since The Great (Old) One, is still reporting a profit. Not a loss, not even a small loss. It wasn't even a significantly lower profit than the ones they usually post. When companies like Intel were posting that their profit margins had slumped 90%, Microsoft's losses went from 4.5 billion to 4.1 billion.
Yes, Microsoft's bosses own a lot of Microsoft's shares, but the share prices will return to what they were and they get to buy back more now at discount rates. So they not only were richer than God to start off with, they'll be richer than most of the major pantheons combined once the market picks up.
So what possible incentive does Microsoft have to go Open Source? They have almost total control over 95-98% of the world's desktops. They have almost total control over virtually every OEM and every hardware manufacturer. People could boycott their entire product range for a decade and Microsoft would still be wealthier than every other OS vendor combined.
But people CAN'T boycott Microsoft. Virtually all manufacturers add in the cost of Windows into their systems. Even bare-bones systems likely carry some of that cost. I don't know how much Microsoft charges for permitting something to be classed as "certified", but no commercial company is going to permit the use of trademarks or promotional labels for free, which means all components will carry a Windows overhead as well.
So if you add up all these overheads that Microsoft gets for Windows, regardless of whether or not you actually buy the damn OS, my suspicion would be that you've paid the development costs long before you've paid the sticker price for the software. In which case, buying the OS is sheer profit for them. They can get along just fine if nobody actually buys a separate boxed copy ever again.
Sure, you can say that that means they have no motive to not switch to Open Source, but given their distaste for the methodology, I'd argue that it gives them even less motive to do so.
If the world's biggest software company can afford to underwrite fines larger than the GDP of some small countries, to the point where they're willing to keep infringing in total defiance of any rulings against them, and can swan through a severe global depression with a workforce cutback less than a third of either IBM or Panasonic (who have alternative revenue streams and no outstanding multi-billion-dollar fines), it's clear they are feeling next to no pressure to change their methods.
In fact, before this recession is over, it would not surprise me if Microsoft kills off the antivirus vendors (through questionable tactics, already well underway) and has made a bid for the software arm of IBM or Sun. They probably have more in loose change in the break rooms than Sun has in the bank, right about now. They might easily buy up Novell as well, crippling any competition SuSE might offer in the aftermath.
If they take out any two of those three, who precisely is going to form the competition?
Well, the BBC's article reports that they found bones from twelve snakes, so it's a fair assumption that they found quite a number of bones and therefore have a good idea of what part of the snake they are from.
Estimating the size does assume that you've some idea of how bones scale, but there are plenty of examples of modern snakes that range from the very small to the very large, so there should be a fair amount of data on this. The key question on this is whether they measured multiple data points or just one or two. If they measured a large number of data points and they all scale by the amounts predicted if modern vertebrae are a good indicator, then it's safe to say that modern vertebrae are indeed a good indicator, and that the resulting size is probably correct.
The temperature is slightly easier. Anything cold-blooded has to rely on external heat sources to survive. The surface area will tell you how quickly heat can be absorbed, but also how quickly heat will be lost. If a snake drops below a critical temperature, it ceases to be active. Even colder, it cannot digest food and can even rot. The ambient temperature must have been high enough for the snake to thrive in the warmer months and at least endure when it got cold.
However, there will be margins of error for all of these calculations. There is also no ceiling on the margin of error for temperature (these snakes can't have been larger than the maximum size that could survive, but could always be smaller by any amount). The maximum size of this species, under the conditions of the time, are therefore unknown, and certainly can't be assumed to be remotely close to the maximum size of the species overall.
In fact, given that the giant crocodiles of about that time were around 40' long and that these snakes probably ate such crocodiles, it would not be at all unreasonable to guess that these were juveniles rather than full-grown. This would also go a long way to explaining why there were so many in one spot. Snakes are not known for being social animals.
If we assume these were indeed juveniles, full-grown snakes of this species might easily have been in the 60-80' range. Of course, if we could just find the nearest living relative and back out all the modern genetic patches, we could find out.
If you factor in other cold-blooded creatures (lawyers, politicians) and consider their bank balances to be a part of their mass, the average size of megafauna probably hasn't changed much.
Seriously, it's scary when real-life produces a more terrifying monster than Hollywood. This creature could have devoured elephants, and likely considered their actual diet (giant crocodiles) a light snack.
I guess it's the same with Jaws and other Hollywood classics, though. Megalodons were capable of fitting five upright adult humans between its jaws, the sharks of Hollywood could barely manage a leg.
The largest eagles that could fly had 15'-17' wingspans - Hitchcock's Birds were nothing in comparison.
And Indricotherium transsouralicum, at twenty tonnes, was definitely nastier than many of the beasties in Jurassic Park.
Is it that the real-life counterparts to the horrors of scriptwriter imagination are too far beyond human comprehension? Too far beyond budget constraints? Or too big to fit on the cinema screens?
I wouldn't mind the nationalization of American TV. Anything with ads is stuff you're paying for (whether you watch it or not), because the ads don't pay for themselves. Anything without conspicuous ads is likely paid for by sponsorship (which you end up paying for), the cost of the channel merely goes towards the channel boss' yacht fleet. So you end up paying for thousands of channels of drivel, even if you don't even own a TV.
So what's the difference between that and a nationalized channel?
Well, those countries with national TV stations (such as the BBC) generally produce better shows with higher intellectual content, have mentally and physically healthier populations (fewer couch potatoes) and a higher concentration span.
Paying one thousandth as much for some content worth watching seems a damn good exchange to me. Ok, I'm elitist, I make a rotten capitalist and I prefer the UK version of Max Headroom: 20 Minutes Into The Future, but I reject utterly the idea that corporate America television is capable of producing a quality program worthy of my time.
Even in game shows, I'll take The Krypton Factor, Treasure Hunt, The Crystal Maze (O'Brien era) and The Adventure Game over Family Feuds, The Price Is Right, American Gladiators and Hollywood Squares.
Having thousands of times the options, where each option is one thousandth as good, is a net loss, not a net gain. Choice for choice's sake, means nothing if your choices are all bull.
One of the great things about Max Headroom and Year of the Sex Olympics was that they predicted - quite correctly - the results of excessive corporate media. One of the amusing things about American TV audiences is that they followed the scripts better than the actors did.
...with using IBM's Sequoia for a graphics processor? Ok, they need to work on the price a little, and maybe it's a little bulky for most portables, oh and the power supply might need upgrading, but aside from that, what have the Romans ever done for us?
Possibly, but we're talking almost a million years older than the oldest known organized religion for which any evidence exists. We're talking so early that many anthropologists reject outright that such people had the mental capacity for complex ritual.
(I suspect the anthropologists are wrong on that, but the lack of any evidence of ritual worship older than about 800,000 years ago takes precedence over my personal feelings on the matter.)
The axe doesn't look capable of making a dent in magnetite. Much more likely is that this is a translation error. I could easily see the stone axes found being used to chip away at softer rock around a meteorite, or being hammered under the meteorite in an attempt to produce a gap large enough to lever the meteorite out.
However, this begs a question. What would they want with a meteorite? Meteoric iron was popular for swords, but iron swords weren't available for another 1,829,400 years. Art deco? Somehow, I don't imagine H. Erectus having too many yuppies in the population. Besides, meteorites are heavy and this was still some time before stable static populations emerged.
As can be seen from the first link, the object is not fractured along natural lines and is definitely axe-shaped. It is not some irregular thing that could have been formed by a boulder smashing down a river.
The material is not flint. I am not certain what it is, but it's not a flint.
Slashdot Mirror
Hmmm. I'm Asperger only on days with at least two vowels in the name.
No, it would be 10^-9 LoCs. You're thinking of deci-internets.
By fans of the Fifth Element
Programmed in Forth
Costing you the third of your hundred dollar bills
Sold by advertisers with second sight
Redundant by the tine the first is sold
Sorry if my reply wasn't clear - I certainly wasn't intending any criticism of your post. I certainly got the point that you think IB is awesome, and I definitely agree. And, yes, you're limited by the disks, which is why the truly insane and the physics labs (there's a difference?) stripe across multiple drives.
With Infiniband, you get near-linear scaling because of the outrageous bandwidths and the ability to independently dedicate lines. Very roughly, 3 drives in parallel give you 4500 MB/s, which is just under what Infiniband'll do per line and what PCIe 2.x can deliver or absorb.
(HyperTransport 3 is even faster, but Infiniband network speeds seem to be locked to PCIe bus speeds. I'm guessing it's because it's widely used. You don't hear so much about HT3 these days - I can't honestly remember the last time Slashdot even mentioned the technology.)
After his escapade with mosquitos, it's a wonder he's not being locked up on terrorism charges. Oh. Wait. He's rich. Still.
Most open source databases have a niche for which they are unquestionably "the best". I believe MySQL's niche has changed over the years, but there is no question in my mind that it is superior to any other database at those specific tasks.
Likewise, Postgres, Ingres, Firebird, SQLite, QDBM, etc, are all good at their own thing. I really can't imagine anyone running a website from Ingres, but then I can't imagine anyone running a high-end scientific database through MySQL, trying to do relational work through QDBM, or running a single table database on Postgres.
Different horses for different courses. (NB: The expression does NOT originate in France.)
Silly rabbit, Rings are for Tokens! (Or is that Tolkeins? I forget.)
1500 MB/s? Hmmm. Infiniband allows you to direct one or more lines (up to 12 in any given direction) to a given target and permits switches (and routers, but that adds latency) in that arrangement, so individual packets can be switched from individual input lines to any number of devices.
Currently, Infiniband over PCIe 2.x supports 5 GB/s per line, although any given server is also limited to 5 GB/s. This would limit you to 12 servers and 36 of the storage boxes you mentioned, on a single storage-area network if you wanted to guarantee zero packet loss at maximum throughput with no throttling or added latency. (Infiniband latency, btw, is around 8 ms, using the run-of-the-mill chipsets.)
To get the same sort of bandwidth on Ethernet requires that you channel-bond five 10 Gigabit Ethernet cards together. This is possible, it has been done (in fact, they've gone as far as ten in the laboratory), but it isn't a supported configuration by industry, it's more than the cost of a single Infiniband card for the same bandwidth, you have twenty times the latency of Infiniband, you don't get RDMA (except on the few Ethernet RNICs that exist, which cost more than Infiniband cards, so you're now paying more than 5 times the cost for truly comparable performance) and switching is a lot more complex. It's also a lot less reliable when channel-bonding to that extent.
If you need bandwidths in excess of about 20 GB/s, Ethernet is simply too expensive. Infiniband becomes cheaper at that point, as well as faster. If you're using something like RAC Oracle over any sort of size of cluster, then you'd be insane to use anything other than Infiniband.
I won't say it's the best technology in the world, but it's most definitely not dying. Even Netcraft won't confirm that one. Sure, for the absolute performance freak, Dolphinics SCI cards push 2.5 ms latencies, but those're point-to-point, not switchable, so it's directly attached storage only. It also doesn't do RDMA. Frankly, I would expect to see SCI dying before Infiniband, simply because it's not as versatile and the latency reduction is going to be more than devoured by the added number of context switches between the kernel and userspace.
However, SCI is not dying. It's not doing great, but it's surviving quite nicely. So any doom-and-gloom forecasts for Infiniband seem to be doomed to stay gloomy as they're not likely to come to pass.
Microsoft'll do the same thing Sinclair did, and a few other companies have done over time, which is to load up one division with a bloat-load of debt and a few juicy trademarks, then sell it off to the highest bidder.
Microsoft gets loads of cash, offloads a loss-making division, and bankrupts a competitor all at the same time.
They'll succeed, the same way Merryl Lynch succeeded on getting bought by Bank of America. (Which only survived the take-over process at all because the US Govt bailed it out big-time. There must be some former ML execs who are seriously laughing all the way to whatever Swiss bank they're hiding their ill-gotten gains in.)
Storage systems are not trivial pieces of hardware and the range of approaches for handling the problem is staggering.
In the red corner, you've your basic NAS and SAN solutions. In the blue corner, you've direct-disk-to-memory systems using RDMA and Infiniband. In the green corner, you've WAN solutions (SCSI-over-IP, RAID-over-IP).
In the purple corner, you've smarter drives (virtual sectors, filesystems in hardware). In the cyan corner, you've more powerful hardware (many read heads per platter, uber-large RAM caches).
(Knowing Wozniak's reputation for doing things different, he's probably inventing a rhododendron corner.)
There is no shortage of opportunity. However, as with the early home computer market, there is a shortage of consensus on what a storage system actually does, other than "store stuff". That seems to be a world Wozniak does well in - the lack of standards meant the Apple II did well, the presence of standards meant that NeXT didn't. In the current computing world, where standards are everything (especially if they come with pretty holographic stickers), can he do much with the flexibility in the arena?
The music, as originally generated, had too much bass that rapidly plunged below the threshold for the human ear.
Microsoft, in the middle of one of the worst depressions since The Great (Old) One, is still reporting a profit. Not a loss, not even a small loss. It wasn't even a significantly lower profit than the ones they usually post. When companies like Intel were posting that their profit margins had slumped 90%, Microsoft's losses went from 4.5 billion to 4.1 billion.
Yes, Microsoft's bosses own a lot of Microsoft's shares, but the share prices will return to what they were and they get to buy back more now at discount rates. So they not only were richer than God to start off with, they'll be richer than most of the major pantheons combined once the market picks up.
So what possible incentive does Microsoft have to go Open Source? They have almost total control over 95-98% of the world's desktops. They have almost total control over virtually every OEM and every hardware manufacturer. People could boycott their entire product range for a decade and Microsoft would still be wealthier than every other OS vendor combined.
But people CAN'T boycott Microsoft. Virtually all manufacturers add in the cost of Windows into their systems. Even bare-bones systems likely carry some of that cost. I don't know how much Microsoft charges for permitting something to be classed as "certified", but no commercial company is going to permit the use of trademarks or promotional labels for free, which means all components will carry a Windows overhead as well.
So if you add up all these overheads that Microsoft gets for Windows, regardless of whether or not you actually buy the damn OS, my suspicion would be that you've paid the development costs long before you've paid the sticker price for the software. In which case, buying the OS is sheer profit for them. They can get along just fine if nobody actually buys a separate boxed copy ever again.
Sure, you can say that that means they have no motive to not switch to Open Source, but given their distaste for the methodology, I'd argue that it gives them even less motive to do so.
If the world's biggest software company can afford to underwrite fines larger than the GDP of some small countries, to the point where they're willing to keep infringing in total defiance of any rulings against them, and can swan through a severe global depression with a workforce cutback less than a third of either IBM or Panasonic (who have alternative revenue streams and no outstanding multi-billion-dollar fines), it's clear they are feeling next to no pressure to change their methods.
In fact, before this recession is over, it would not surprise me if Microsoft kills off the antivirus vendors (through questionable tactics, already well underway) and has made a bid for the software arm of IBM or Sun. They probably have more in loose change in the break rooms than Sun has in the bank, right about now. They might easily buy up Novell as well, crippling any competition SuSE might offer in the aftermath.
If they take out any two of those three, who precisely is going to form the competition?
Why bother with wings? The snake can devour it. How many calories are in an apostrophe anyway?
Well, the BBC's article reports that they found bones from twelve snakes, so it's a fair assumption that they found quite a number of bones and therefore have a good idea of what part of the snake they are from.
Estimating the size does assume that you've some idea of how bones scale, but there are plenty of examples of modern snakes that range from the very small to the very large, so there should be a fair amount of data on this. The key question on this is whether they measured multiple data points or just one or two. If they measured a large number of data points and they all scale by the amounts predicted if modern vertebrae are a good indicator, then it's safe to say that modern vertebrae are indeed a good indicator, and that the resulting size is probably correct.
The temperature is slightly easier. Anything cold-blooded has to rely on external heat sources to survive. The surface area will tell you how quickly heat can be absorbed, but also how quickly heat will be lost. If a snake drops below a critical temperature, it ceases to be active. Even colder, it cannot digest food and can even rot. The ambient temperature must have been high enough for the snake to thrive in the warmer months and at least endure when it got cold.
However, there will be margins of error for all of these calculations. There is also no ceiling on the margin of error for temperature (these snakes can't have been larger than the maximum size that could survive, but could always be smaller by any amount). The maximum size of this species, under the conditions of the time, are therefore unknown, and certainly can't be assumed to be remotely close to the maximum size of the species overall.
In fact, given that the giant crocodiles of about that time were around 40' long and that these snakes probably ate such crocodiles, it would not be at all unreasonable to guess that these were juveniles rather than full-grown. This would also go a long way to explaining why there were so many in one spot. Snakes are not known for being social animals.
If we assume these were indeed juveniles, full-grown snakes of this species might easily have been in the 60-80' range. Of course, if we could just find the nearest living relative and back out all the modern genetic patches, we could find out.
If you factor in other cold-blooded creatures (lawyers, politicians) and consider their bank balances to be a part of their mass, the average size of megafauna probably hasn't changed much.
No, but it was found on the Airbus A400.
A snaaaaake! A snaaaaake!
Seriously, it's scary when real-life produces a more terrifying monster than Hollywood. This creature could have devoured elephants, and likely considered their actual diet (giant crocodiles) a light snack.
I guess it's the same with Jaws and other Hollywood classics, though. Megalodons were capable of fitting five upright adult humans between its jaws, the sharks of Hollywood could barely manage a leg.
The largest eagles that could fly had 15'-17' wingspans - Hitchcock's Birds were nothing in comparison.
And Indricotherium transsouralicum, at twenty tonnes, was definitely nastier than many of the beasties in Jurassic Park.
Is it that the real-life counterparts to the horrors of scriptwriter imagination are too far beyond human comprehension? Too far beyond budget constraints? Or too big to fit on the cinema screens?
Well, this should be put in a historical context, naturally, as Professor Lewis explains.
Given the current value of the pound, a few million would barely buy you enough to have an impact on a hydrophobe.
I wouldn't mind the nationalization of American TV. Anything with ads is stuff you're paying for (whether you watch it or not), because the ads don't pay for themselves. Anything without conspicuous ads is likely paid for by sponsorship (which you end up paying for), the cost of the channel merely goes towards the channel boss' yacht fleet. So you end up paying for thousands of channels of drivel, even if you don't even own a TV.
So what's the difference between that and a nationalized channel?
Well, those countries with national TV stations (such as the BBC) generally produce better shows with higher intellectual content, have mentally and physically healthier populations (fewer couch potatoes) and a higher concentration span.
Paying one thousandth as much for some content worth watching seems a damn good exchange to me. Ok, I'm elitist, I make a rotten capitalist and I prefer the UK version of Max Headroom: 20 Minutes Into The Future, but I reject utterly the idea that corporate America television is capable of producing a quality program worthy of my time.
Even in game shows, I'll take The Krypton Factor, Treasure Hunt, The Crystal Maze (O'Brien era) and The Adventure Game over Family Feuds, The Price Is Right, American Gladiators and Hollywood Squares.
Having thousands of times the options, where each option is one thousandth as good, is a net loss, not a net gain. Choice for choice's sake, means nothing if your choices are all bull.
One of the great things about Max Headroom and Year of the Sex Olympics was that they predicted - quite correctly - the results of excessive corporate media. One of the amusing things about American TV audiences is that they followed the scripts better than the actors did.
...with using IBM's Sequoia for a graphics processor? Ok, they need to work on the price a little, and maybe it's a little bulky for most portables, oh and the power supply might need upgrading, but aside from that, what have the Romans ever done for us?
Possibly, but we're talking almost a million years older than the oldest known organized religion for which any evidence exists. We're talking so early that many anthropologists reject outright that such people had the mental capacity for complex ritual.
(I suspect the anthropologists are wrong on that, but the lack of any evidence of ritual worship older than about 800,000 years ago takes precedence over my personal feelings on the matter.)
Didn't MYA appear in the last season of Space: 1999?
The axe doesn't look capable of making a dent in magnetite. Much more likely is that this is a translation error. I could easily see the stone axes found being used to chip away at softer rock around a meteorite, or being hammered under the meteorite in an attempt to produce a gap large enough to lever the meteorite out.
However, this begs a question. What would they want with a meteorite? Meteoric iron was popular for swords, but iron swords weren't available for another 1,829,400 years. Art deco? Somehow, I don't imagine H. Erectus having too many yuppies in the population. Besides, meteorites are heavy and this was still some time before stable static populations emerged.
The only site with a decent image.
A little more info
Some more bits of info
As can be seen from the first link, the object is not fractured along natural lines and is definitely axe-shaped. It is not some irregular thing that could have been formed by a boulder smashing down a river.
The material is not flint. I am not certain what it is, but it's not a flint.