Can't we go back to calling them SLR? Now that digital is, for all intents and purposes, all that is sold(*), there's no reason to stick that obnoxious, annoying "D" on the beginning.
(*) Yes, film-fans, film is *not* dead. But sales of new cameras are so overwhelmingly digital that for any given purchase of a new SLR camera, chances are at least 50 to 1 that it's digital. The "D" is redundant, needless, and silly.
"animals that haven't been able to move in their whole lives can't exactly be healthy to eat. Nor are they usually "lean"."
He didn't say "lean", he said "leaner" - meaning they're not as fat as pigs which were so obese that they couldn't even stand. Pigs of today have, indeed, been bred to be leaner than pigs of ten or fifteen years ago.
Those pigs are still entirely screwed up from all of the irresponsible breeding done on them. Read "Animals in Translation", written by someone whose career has been helping the food-animal industry, and see just how bad they have it.
"Antibiotics don't select for strains of the virus, and strictly speaking neither do vaccinations."
Sure, vaccinations do, at least in some cases - including the flu. That's why the flu shot you get each year only works against certain strains of the influenze virus, and why they don't work against H5N1.
"Animal products being fed to the same species can be a problem for prion-based disorders, but that represents a very situation that produces a toxin, not a virulent disease."
They also represent a problem with bacterial, viral, and parasitical infections if the food in question isn't handled properly - which, quite often, it isn't. Producers have shown that they are quite willing to go not just into the unethical side of feeding their animals as cheaply as possible, but even to the criminal side as well. Look at the whole mad-cow thing... the practices which were prevalent right up until the big deal was made had been outlawed for quite some time (for just that reason), but that didn't keep producers from doing it.
Take a group of people, and let them live their lives normally - free to wander around and get sick if they want. Take another group of people (many thousands of people), and cram them into a filthy building where they're literally crawling on top of each other, pooping on each other, and walking around over their own dead.
It's not just that Americans don't clean the cages, it's that their often packed in so tight that you can't even get in to clean the cages. It's pretty hard to find a way in which our raising of food animals is NOT screwed up entirely.
The reason why these nasty flus come out of China is not just because they have dirty chickens, or that they have dirty chickens in such close proximity to humans. It's because they have dirty chicken farming AND dirty pig farming in such close proximity to each other and to humans. The swine, avian, and human flus all have lots of chances to "mingle", so to speak...
"The flu virus is not airborne; it is contact spread."
Yes, but it's a respiratory virus. That means that the afflicted person needs to get the virus out through the mouth or nasal passages - like rubbing their noses, or sneezing. It also means that you have to get some on you, and then get it into your respiratory tract - like rubbing your eyes or nose, chewing your nails, etc.. Wearing a mask helps prevent the spread on both ends, even if it just keeps people from sneezing on you, and keeps you from picking your nose.
"how do we operate the city when 30-40% of our staff are out sick themselves or busy at home caring for their family members"
An even better approach would be "How can we send as many people as possible home, so we're not contributing to the problem by having them spread it around at the office?"
"It's called Oral Rehydration Therapy, and I'm getting together the ingredients this week. "
You're getting the ingredients together this week? Man, if you don't already have water, sugar, and salt, then you might be in trouble.:-)
The sugar and salt method is used because almost EVERYONE has those ingredients available, not because it's the best. It is enough, though, that even with severe diarrhea, you can survive almost indefinitely - certainly long enough to get medical care. Sugar gives you a way to rapidly absorb some calories before it shoots out the other end, and salt provides soidum and chloride ions, two of the major (I should say THE two major) electrolites in the body. But, there are others, like potassium - and so a bottle of gatorade (you can buy large tubs of powdered gatorade) is much better than the salt-and-water. And there's still another major step up, pedialyte is much better than gatorade as well. Having been through some very serious illnesses in other countries, I can tell you that not only does pedialyte work MUCH better, it's also a bit more tasty than plain salt-and-sugar water.
(In some countries, hospitals have cholera units where patients are put in hammocks with a hole cut for their butts, and 5-gallon buckets beneath them.)
If you have a Linux machine that stays on anyway, buy a $10 AM/FM radio, hook it to the line-in, and tie sox and lame together in a cron job.... the downside being that you have to pre-tune the radio.
For about $50 (if I recall), I bought a Hauppauage card with both an FM tuner *and* a TV tuner with hardware MPG compression. A quick bash script takes the arguments of frequency, duration, and destination directory, and does all of the tuning and encoding for me.
"It is however not a good idea to move to a country because you are feed up with the politics of your own. "
You've missed the fact that the "freedom of exit", or the ability to leave for a better country, was one of the greatest forces that made Europe what it is today. When people got up and left, it did far more than staying around... unless they stayed around for an armed revolution.
Last week, our phone guy decided to reinstall the OS on our main voice mail server. Since it was running a "lowly" copy of Windows 2000 Pro, he decided that it needed a "server-grade" OS, and bought Microsoft Windows 2003 Server for Small Businesses. He installed in near the end of the week, and then took time off to put a new roof on his house.
Well, this morning, the machine in question shut itself off. I turned it on, it shut itself off again in a couple of hours. I looked in event log, and found that the machine was turning itself off because we violated the EULA by not setting it up as a domain controller.
Yep. Just because we didn't need to authenticate users, the machine keeps shutting itself off. Isn't that user-friendly?
You can't use solar, because the servers have to run at night. You can't use wind, because they have to run on still days, too. Natural gas power plant? That's what they're doing, it's just (probably) diesel instead of natural gas, although that isn't necessarily the case, many are natural gas these days.
There are units that can do that, sort of. They don't convert it into electrical energy, but you can use the extra heat to keep your building warm. There's a ski resort near me that runs entirely off of the grid, and uses one of those.
Most places will let each cabinet get two 20-amp circuits, for roughly 5 kilowatts. That means you can only provide power forup to 400 cabinets. But don't forget, they also have to power all of their own equipement, and that you don't want to run a generator at 100% capacity. That means that you could be talking about as few as 200 cabinets from that sort of generator.
That's still a good number of cabinets in a datacenter, but it's not the unbelievable size that seems to jump out at you when you think of 2 megawatts.
As for two smaller units, if one fails, can the other handle the full load of the data center? If not, you're screwed.
Even if the different clock speeds aren't an issue, look at die size. Building a die large enough to hold a good GPU and CPU, on a process sufficiently advanced to make the CPU perform adequately, would be MUCH more expensive than just building them seperately.
My lowly GeForce 6800 GT has a 256-bit, 1GHz (500x2) memory interface. As a comparison, an Athlon64 has a 128-bit, 400 MHz (200x2) memory interface, giving my GPU five times more memory bandwidth than the CPU.
I've used GPUs that utilize system RAM from Intel and NVidia, and they're always slower compared to their counterparts with dedicated memory. The 6200 TC does a fair job, but that's because it has 64-256 megs of dedicated memory AND THEN uses system ram as well.
Believe me, if video card manufacturers could make their chips work as fast by accessing system RAM, they'd jump at the chance. RAM has been one of the greatest hinderences in the GPU field. They finally abandoned the JEDEC and started their own standards (the GDDR series), and the industry has devoted a LOT of money to solving the problems. If they would just utilize system RAM, it would greatly benefit everyone, but unfortunately, it just doesn't work as well.
I'm not sure if it does. Modern GPUs occupy a large die, run at slow clock speeds, and have an enormous transistor count. CPUs, on the other hand, have fewer transistors, smaller dies, and higher clock speeds.
Your CPU isn't going to work well at the 200-400 MHz of a GPU, and you're not going to make a huge GPU die run at 2 GHz to get your CPU to work well. I think that their CPUs will be closer to Via's C3 than a P4/Athlon 64.
I don't think that the CPU->GPU pipe is any limitation. Going from AGP 4x->8X gave very little speed benefit, and on PCI-E connections, you have to go from the normal 16x down to a 4x before you see any slowdown.
Memory size and bandwidth are the usual limitations. Remember that if you want 2x AA, you double your memory usage, and if you want 4x AA, you quadruple it. So, that game that needed 128 megs on the video card, with 4x AA, can suddenly need 512.
... of one of my calculus professors from college. The guy was so socially awkward that if a student went up and asked him a question, he'd get really nervous, back away from them, and - if he could - pack up and leave the room. He NEVER failed a single student, because he didn't want to have to see them again. He sure was good at math, though.
Slashdot Mirror
Can't we go back to calling them SLR? Now that digital is, for all intents and purposes, all that is sold(*), there's no reason to stick that obnoxious, annoying "D" on the beginning.
(*) Yes, film-fans, film is *not* dead. But sales of new cameras are so overwhelmingly digital that for any given purchase of a new SLR camera, chances are at least 50 to 1 that it's digital. The "D" is redundant, needless, and silly.
steve
I have never installed IE6, yet IE 7 showed up as a critical update.
I suspsect the reason is that the IE7 installation process makes you validate Windows, which other criticals haven't done.
I doubt it, Google isn't listening to your phone calls, at least not yet. :)
steve
"animals that haven't been able to move in their whole lives can't exactly be healthy to eat. Nor are they usually "lean"."
He didn't say "lean", he said "leaner" - meaning they're not as fat as pigs which were so obese that they couldn't even stand. Pigs of today have, indeed, been bred to be leaner than pigs of ten or fifteen years ago.
Those pigs are still entirely screwed up from all of the irresponsible breeding done on them. Read "Animals in Translation", written by someone whose career has been helping the food-animal industry, and see just how bad they have it.
"Antibiotics don't select for strains of the virus, and strictly speaking neither do vaccinations."
Sure, vaccinations do, at least in some cases - including the flu. That's why the flu shot you get each year only works against certain strains of the influenze virus, and why they don't work against H5N1.
"Animal products being fed to the same species can be a problem for prion-based disorders, but that represents a very situation that produces a toxin, not a virulent disease."
They also represent a problem with bacterial, viral, and parasitical infections if the food in question isn't handled properly - which, quite often, it isn't. Producers have shown that they are quite willing to go not just into the unethical side of feeding their animals as cheaply as possible, but even to the criminal side as well. Look at the whole mad-cow thing... the practices which were prevalent right up until the big deal was made had been outlawed for quite some time (for just that reason), but that didn't keep producers from doing it.
Take a group of people, and let them live their lives normally - free to wander around and get sick if they want. Take another group of people (many thousands of people), and cram them into a filthy building where they're literally crawling on top of each other, pooping on each other, and walking around over their own dead.
Which ones do you think will be healthier?
It's not any different with chickens.
It's not just that Americans don't clean the cages, it's that their often packed in so tight that you can't even get in to clean the cages. It's pretty hard to find a way in which our raising of food animals is NOT screwed up entirely.
The reason why these nasty flus come out of China is not just because they have dirty chickens, or that they have dirty chickens in such close proximity to humans. It's because they have dirty chicken farming AND dirty pig farming in such close proximity to each other and to humans. The swine, avian, and human flus all have lots of chances to "mingle", so to speak...
"The flu virus is not airborne; it is contact spread."
Yes, but it's a respiratory virus. That means that the afflicted person needs to get the virus out through the mouth or nasal passages - like rubbing their noses, or sneezing. It also means that you have to get some on you, and then get it into your respiratory tract - like rubbing your eyes or nose, chewing your nails, etc.. Wearing a mask helps prevent the spread on both ends, even if it just keeps people from sneezing on you, and keeps you from picking your nose.
"how do we operate the city when 30-40% of our staff are out sick themselves or busy at home caring for their family members"
An even better approach would be "How can we send as many people as possible home, so we're not contributing to the problem by having them spread it around at the office?"
"It's called Oral Rehydration Therapy, and I'm getting together the ingredients this week. "
:-)
You're getting the ingredients together this week? Man, if you don't already have water, sugar, and salt, then you might be in trouble.
The sugar and salt method is used because almost EVERYONE has those ingredients available, not because it's the best. It is enough, though, that even with severe diarrhea, you can survive almost indefinitely - certainly long enough to get medical care. Sugar gives you a way to rapidly absorb some calories before it shoots out the other end, and salt provides soidum and chloride ions, two of the major (I should say THE two major) electrolites in the body. But, there are others, like potassium - and so a bottle of gatorade (you can buy large tubs of powdered gatorade) is much better than the salt-and-water. And there's still another major step up, pedialyte is much better than gatorade as well. Having been through some very serious illnesses in other countries, I can tell you that not only does pedialyte work MUCH better, it's also a bit more tasty than plain salt-and-sugar water.
(In some countries, hospitals have cholera units where patients are put in hammocks with a hole cut for their butts, and 5-gallon buckets beneath them.)
If you have a Linux machine that stays on anyway, buy a $10 AM/FM radio, hook it to the line-in, and tie sox and lame together in a cron job.... the downside being that you have to pre-tune the radio.
For about $50 (if I recall), I bought a Hauppauage card with both an FM tuner *and* a TV tuner with hardware MPG compression. A quick bash script takes the arguments of frequency, duration, and destination directory, and does all of the tuning and encoding for me.
steve
"It is however not a good idea to move to a country because you are feed up with the politics of your own. "
You've missed the fact that the "freedom of exit", or the ability to leave for a better country, was one of the greatest forces that made Europe what it is today. When people got up and left, it did far more than staying around... unless they stayed around for an armed revolution.
That isn't as far-fetched as it sounds.
Last week, our phone guy decided to reinstall the OS on our main voice mail server. Since it was running a "lowly" copy of Windows 2000 Pro, he decided that it needed a "server-grade" OS, and bought Microsoft Windows 2003 Server for Small Businesses. He installed in near the end of the week, and then took time off to put a new roof on his house.
Well, this morning, the machine in question shut itself off. I turned it on, it shut itself off again in a couple of hours. I looked in event log, and found that the machine was turning itself off because we violated the EULA by not setting it up as a domain controller.
Yep. Just because we didn't need to authenticate users, the machine keeps shutting itself off. Isn't that user-friendly?
You can't use solar, because the servers have to run at night. You can't use wind, because they have to run on still days, too. Natural gas power plant? That's what they're doing, it's just (probably) diesel instead of natural gas, although that isn't necessarily the case, many are natural gas these days.
Someone beat you to it.
There are units that can do that, sort of. They don't convert it into electrical energy, but you can use the extra heat to keep your building warm. There's a ski resort near me that runs entirely off of the grid, and uses one of those.
The big-boy generators (say, 20 megawatts) use gas-turbines for efficiency. You should see the size of units they install on cruise ships.
Most places will let each cabinet get two 20-amp circuits, for roughly 5 kilowatts. That means you can only provide power forup to 400 cabinets. But don't forget, they also have to power all of their own equipement, and that you don't want to run a generator at 100% capacity. That means that you could be talking about as few as 200 cabinets from that sort of generator.
That's still a good number of cabinets in a datacenter, but it's not the unbelievable size that seems to jump out at you when you think of 2 megawatts.
As for two smaller units, if one fails, can the other handle the full load of the data center? If not, you're screwed.
Even if the different clock speeds aren't an issue, look at die size. Building a die large enough to hold a good GPU and CPU, on a process sufficiently advanced to make the CPU perform adequately, would be MUCH more expensive than just building them seperately.
My lowly GeForce 6800 GT has a 256-bit, 1GHz (500x2) memory interface. As a comparison, an Athlon64 has a 128-bit, 400 MHz (200x2) memory interface, giving my GPU five times more memory bandwidth than the CPU.
I've used GPUs that utilize system RAM from Intel and NVidia, and they're always slower compared to their counterparts with dedicated memory. The 6200 TC does a fair job, but that's because it has 64-256 megs of dedicated memory AND THEN uses system ram as well.
Believe me, if video card manufacturers could make their chips work as fast by accessing system RAM, they'd jump at the chance. RAM has been one of the greatest hinderences in the GPU field. They finally abandoned the JEDEC and started their own standards (the GDDR series), and the industry has devoted a LOT of money to solving the problems. If they would just utilize system RAM, it would greatly benefit everyone, but unfortunately, it just doesn't work as well.
Steve
I'm not sure if it does. Modern GPUs occupy a large die, run at slow clock speeds, and have an enormous transistor count. CPUs, on the other hand, have fewer transistors, smaller dies, and higher clock speeds.
Your CPU isn't going to work well at the 200-400 MHz of a GPU, and you're not going to make a huge GPU die run at 2 GHz to get your CPU to work well. I think that their CPUs will be closer to Via's C3 than a P4/Athlon 64.
I don't think that the CPU->GPU pipe is any limitation. Going from AGP 4x->8X gave very little speed benefit, and on PCI-E connections, you have to go from the normal 16x down to a 4x before you see any slowdown.
Memory size and bandwidth are the usual limitations. Remember that if you want 2x AA, you double your memory usage, and if you want 4x AA, you quadruple it. So, that game that needed 128 megs on the video card, with 4x AA, can suddenly need 512.
steve
"what other prospects could a solution like this have?"
Duh. Gaming consoles. Add memory, a sound controller, and some sort of storage, and you're in business.
... of one of my calculus professors from college. The guy was so socially awkward that if a student went up and asked him a question, he'd get really nervous, back away from them, and - if he could - pack up and leave the room. He NEVER failed a single student, because he didn't want to have to see them again. He sure was good at math, though.