I completely agree. They could even charge $150 in the first-world countries, which would then subsidize the third-world countries. And because a lot more first-world persons can afford $150 than third-world persons can afford $100, the third-world prices might end up closer to $75 or $50.
So? How much memory bandwidth do they have? Not I/O bandwidth, but memory bandwidth. I highly doubt that they have as much bandwidth PER CORE as the Opterons do, and in big applications, memory bandwidth can be a very important factor.
You cant build an enterprise machine without Ultrasparc (or Power4 or PA_RISC) CPUs.
"What proof do you have that they actually have custom hardware?"
Not only have some of the people involved with their fab leaked bits about, they even talk about it on their web page... it's not exactly a secret, man.
Hollywood-inspired? I never said that they ran traffic lights and pharmacies. But you'd be pretty foolish to believe that the best they can do with their massive budget is to buy a bunch of white boxes.
Don't get me wrong, they probably have quite a few white boxes sitting around for the easy work, but they also have much more serious hardware as well. When you get serious about things, you don't settle for a P4 or Athlon64, or even an Itanium, Alpha, or Power, you design and build your own chips - and the NSA does just that. (If you think that's hollywood-inspired, just use google.) You can try and crack RSA all day long on a P4, but just wait until you have a dedicated ASIC to do it for you, it's the difference between trying to render your favorite game in hardware vs. on a GeForce 6 series.
That's right, business as usual. It's not just motherboards, it's nearly every type of componant. I've seen motherboards, power supplies, and monitors blow capacitors, too.
You have to remember, (A) by the time the caps have blown, the products are usually well out of warranty, and (B) the percentage of customers who will ever know that you used cheap capacitors is next to nil. That doesn't give you much of an incentive not to use the cheap ones, does it?
If you only have commodity hardware at your disposal, then there probably isn't any that can be cracked in 90 days which can't be in 28 days. On the other hand, if you were an entity such as the NSA, then chances are that you could crack just about anything in 90 days.
Back when tens of thousands of computers took nearly a year to crack one of the RSA algorithms, the NSA had a machine which would do it in less than five minutes. Just the coolant pipes for the machine were around 12" or 16" in diameter. It's entirely a different league than a bunch of white boxes sitting in rooms.
Look at Newtonian mechanics. When Newton made the observations, they held true for things he could observe. And when people started finding out that things that were very small or very fast didn't behave that way, that didn't change the fact that Newtonian mechanics still held true for large, slow objects.
Likewise, just becaue quantum mechanics holds true for things we have so far observed doesn't mean that other things can't behave in other ways.
To be fair, I don't believe his claims will turn out to be true, and I think this will all turn out to be nothing. But to simply dismiss his ideas without analysis doesn't do anyone any favors. In fact, analyzing flawed arguments can sometimes be more useful than observing valid arguments...
I listened to an interview with a guy that runs a sperm bank, and he said that until laws were changed to allow people to donate for money, most all sperm used for artificial insemination was either that of the physician or from one of the interns.
My cubicle faces a window, so I took down the wall and replaced it with a half-height wall, put up shelves, and started filling them with live plants. After a few years, I've grown some plants that I'm pretty proud of.
Well, the janitors would occasionally knock over a plant, break it, and leave it, the broken pot, and all of the dirt right in the middle of the walkway. What a helpful bunch. One day, I looked over at a pile of spare stuff, and saw a $10 webcam, so I bought a long USB extension cable. Some double-sided tape fixed the camera to the wall, and the USB cable ran inconspicously up into the ceiling, then back down in my cubicle. A nifty little program called MVC does the motion detection.
Once I put the camera up, incidents like that completely stopped. That was I hoped for, so I don't even bother looking at the recorded files - just having a camera with an LED that comes on when I'm not there is enough to keep people honest.
Well, let's see. In our one measly rack, we have two 20-amp circuits, and we're above 80% continual utilization on both. That's about 4 kilowatts, figure about 3 averaged over a 24-hour period. Over 30 days, 24 hours/day, that's over 2,000 kilowatt-hours. If they're paying 10 cents per kW/h, that's $200 per month in power bills for them.
How much do we pay for the cabinet and extra power circuit? $775. Right there, that's about 25% of the cost. Now, remember that they need to provide the cooling for 4 kilowatts of heat generation - which uses more electricity.
In a few months, we're going to lease another rack - not because we've run out of rack space, but because we've run out of electricity and cooling. The thought of using more electically-efficient chips like Via's offerings sound pretty attractive, but there are drawbacks: First, with as many new dual-CPU machines as we have to throw in every year to keep up with demand, it's going to take an awfully high number of Eden or Nehemiahs. Going from a dual-Opteron to single-CPU nehemiahs, I'd probably need at least 6 Nehemiahs, probably 8. That means that not only do I have to buy 8 times as many CPUs, chassis, and power supplies, I need 8 times as many hard drives, and 8 times as much memory - and considering that each machine uses several gigs of memory for lookup tables and disk cache, that's a looooot of cost.
That being said, I'd really, really, REALLY like to see some ultra-high density Nehemiah-based server equipment. Given the size of the mini-ITX format, you should be able to pack at least 12 - if not 16 - entire systems inside of a 1U chassis.
Take an old classroom projector, and hold a black paper in front of the lens. Have something close by with which to extinguish the paper. Now try a white paper.
For me, it's been about a year and a half. There have been a small handful of decent movies, but nothing else. I even got rid of my blockbuster movie pass, because we'd go months without finding anything worth renting.
CIV 1 was dog-slow on hardware at the time. Civ 2 was dog-slow on hardware at the time. Civ 3 was dog-slow on anything but the most cutting-edge hardware at the time. The kicker is that NONE of these games were anywhere nearly as intense in graphics, AI, or *any other aspect* than other games that performed much, much better.
I haven't checked Civ 3, but Civ 2 still used an idle loop - consuming 100% of any CPU just to blink a unit on the screen. That sort of silliness was outdated half a decade (or more) before the game came out.
Please, please, do us all a favor, and get some decent programmers this time.
My providers are all out of 'solid, guaranteed bandwidth'
Really? I'll bet they're not, they just want a lot of money for it. Call them up and tell them that you want a T1 or T3 from them, and I'll bet that they'll be happy to oblige. Decent providers will guarantee that you'll get full bandwidth. If they actually are out of bandwidth, that's a scary thought.
because the cartel^w Tier-1 providers only deal with other telcos. How much do you think they will be paying per Mbps?
Why would they pay per megabit, when they can just hand traffic off to the destination networks through a non-transit peering arrangement?
The provider that I uses has (relatively) dirt-cheap prices on bandwidth (GUARANTEED bandwidth), because they have peering arrangements with virtually every network that's large enough to be of any concern. They don't pay someone else to use as an upstream, they just send it over their own network to the peering facility, and hand it off. Transit for that bandwidth, however, depends on the medium in question - telco services, like t1, t3, etc. are heavily regulated, and there are minimum prices set by the FCC.
You forgot about the 20:1 (minimum - usually 50:1 for consumer DSL) contention ratio
No, I didn't, I made a point that if every user really used their full bandwidth, the provider simply wouldn't be able to handle it. In fact, if you had read a few lines more of my post, you would have seen my statement that they massively over-subscribe their bandwidth.
> Many multiplayer games thrive with high upload speeds,
Actually, the latency is a much more important factor.
> and any bittorrent user knows that uploading is what makes > the world go 'round.
Providers don't *want* you seeding bit torrents at high speed. More in one second...
> And what if I want to run an FTP site or host my own website
Then they want you to pay for the service.
Believe it or not, bandwidth isn't free for the providers. These providers have to *massively* over-sell their bandwidth to be able to make money. If you don't believe me, look into how much it will cost you to get a hundred megabits of solid, guaranteed bandwidth - then factor in lots of equipment, and realize that if you're letting people blow 24 mbits/second on bit torrents, all that money will only cover *four* customers.
If the companies say "Sure, I'll give you huge upload speeds, let you run any services you want, and blow all of your bandwidth 24 hrs/day", then they're going to lose money, and eventually go out of business.
> Seriously though, at what point is TOO much broadband?
When it's faster than your hard drive.
When I rsync data to a remote backup server over my "measly" 768k upstream connection, how long do you think it takes when there's 5 or 10 gigs of new, uncompressable data? And I can't even think about touching my DV work, there's just no way...
steve
Quality of programming
on
Ask Sid Meier
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Having quite a few of your games, one thing has always stood out: While the game concepts are out of this world, the quality of the programming is usually very lacking, most especially in the optimization area. As an example, Civ 1, 2, CTP, and 3 all ran much, much slower on my hardware than games which by all rights *should* have been much more demanding. Why has that been the case?
You mean that this guy was carrying around his credit card number and name in an UNENCRYPTED form in his wallet? That's OUTRAGEOUS! Obviously, his credit card and driver's license, which had his name and credit card number in that same wallet, were encrypted!
Oh, wait... they weren't? Well, then. That's a bit different.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm sorry, I was first exposed to the terms in another country, where the terms "old" and "new" aren't used - it was first, second, third.
steve
I completely agree. They could even charge $150 in the first-world countries, which would then subsidize the third-world countries. And because a lot more first-world persons can afford $150 than third-world persons can afford $100, the third-world prices might end up closer to $75 or $50.
steve
Probably the same things it already does, which in large part is to simulate weather and nuclear reactions.
steve
They have 8 cores!
So? How much memory bandwidth do they have? Not I/O bandwidth, but memory bandwidth. I highly doubt that they have as much bandwidth PER CORE as the Opterons do, and in big applications, memory bandwidth can be a very important factor.
You cant build an enterprise machine without Ultrasparc (or Power4 or PA_RISC) CPUs.
I guess that Cray thinks differently.
"What proof do you have that they actually have custom hardware?"
Not only have some of the people involved with their fab leaked bits about, they even talk about it on their web page... it's not exactly a secret, man.
steve
Hollywood-inspired? I never said that they ran traffic lights and pharmacies. But you'd be pretty foolish to believe that the best they can do with their massive budget is to buy a bunch of white boxes.
Don't get me wrong, they probably have quite a few white boxes sitting around for the easy work, but they also have much more serious hardware as well. When you get serious about things, you don't settle for a P4 or Athlon64, or even an Itanium, Alpha, or Power, you design and build your own chips - and the NSA does just that. (If you think that's hollywood-inspired, just use google.) You can try and crack RSA all day long on a P4, but just wait until you have a dedicated ASIC to do it for you, it's the difference between trying to render your favorite game in hardware vs. on a GeForce 6 series.
steve
That's right, business as usual. It's not just motherboards, it's nearly every type of componant. I've seen motherboards, power supplies, and monitors blow capacitors, too.
You have to remember, (A) by the time the caps have blown, the products are usually well out of warranty, and (B) the percentage of customers who will ever know that you used cheap capacitors is next to nil. That doesn't give you much of an incentive not to use the cheap ones, does it?
steve
If you only have commodity hardware at your disposal, then there probably isn't any that can be cracked in 90 days which can't be in 28 days. On the other hand, if you were an entity such as the NSA, then chances are that you could crack just about anything in 90 days.
Back when tens of thousands of computers took nearly a year to crack one of the RSA algorithms, the NSA had a machine which would do it in less than five minutes. Just the coolant pipes for the machine were around 12" or 16" in diameter. It's entirely a different league than a bunch of white boxes sitting in rooms.
steve
Why would that make you wrong?
Look at Newtonian mechanics. When Newton made the observations, they held true for things he could observe. And when people started finding out that things that were very small or very fast didn't behave that way, that didn't change the fact that Newtonian mechanics still held true for large, slow objects.
Likewise, just becaue quantum mechanics holds true for things we have so far observed doesn't mean that other things can't behave in other ways.
To be fair, I don't believe his claims will turn out to be true, and I think this will all turn out to be nothing. But to simply dismiss his ideas without analysis doesn't do anyone any favors. In fact, analyzing flawed arguments can sometimes be more useful than observing valid arguments...
steve
I listened to an interview with a guy that runs a sperm bank, and he said that until laws were changed to allow people to donate for money, most all sperm used for artificial insemination was either that of the physician or from one of the interns.
steve
My cubicle faces a window, so I took down the wall and replaced it with a half-height wall, put up shelves, and started filling them with live plants. After a few years, I've grown some plants that I'm pretty proud of.
Well, the janitors would occasionally knock over a plant, break it, and leave it, the broken pot, and all of the dirt right in the middle of the walkway. What a helpful bunch. One day, I looked over at a pile of spare stuff, and saw a $10 webcam, so I bought a long USB extension cable. Some double-sided tape fixed the camera to the wall, and the USB cable ran inconspicously up into the ceiling, then back down in my cubicle. A nifty little program called MVC does the motion detection.
Once I put the camera up, incidents like that completely stopped. That was I hoped for, so I don't even bother looking at the recorded files - just having a camera with an LED that comes on when I'm not there is enough to keep people honest.
steve
Well, let's see. In our one measly rack, we have two 20-amp circuits, and we're above 80% continual utilization on both. That's about 4 kilowatts, figure about 3 averaged over a 24-hour period. Over 30 days, 24 hours/day, that's over 2,000 kilowatt-hours. If they're paying 10 cents per kW/h, that's $200 per month in power bills for them.
How much do we pay for the cabinet and extra power circuit? $775. Right there, that's about 25% of the cost. Now, remember that they need to provide the cooling for 4 kilowatts of heat generation - which uses more electricity.
In a few months, we're going to lease another rack - not because we've run out of rack space, but because we've run out of electricity and cooling. The thought of using more electically-efficient chips like Via's offerings sound pretty attractive, but there are drawbacks: First, with as many new dual-CPU machines as we have to throw in every year to keep up with demand, it's going to take an awfully high number of Eden or Nehemiahs. Going from a dual-Opteron to single-CPU nehemiahs, I'd probably need at least 6 Nehemiahs, probably 8. That means that not only do I have to buy 8 times as many CPUs, chassis, and power supplies, I need 8 times as many hard drives, and 8 times as much memory - and considering that each machine uses several gigs of memory for lookup tables and disk cache, that's a looooot of cost.
That being said, I'd really, really, REALLY like to see some ultra-high density Nehemiah-based server equipment. Given the size of the mini-ITX format, you should be able to pack at least 12 - if not 16 - entire systems inside of a 1U chassis.
steve
There's one problem, sails are often white.
Take an old classroom projector, and hold a black paper in front of the lens. Have something close by with which to extinguish the paper. Now try a white paper.
steve
One thing that I forgot to say is that nearly every good movie I've seen in the past 10 years has been one of the following:
- made from a book
- made from a comic book
- a remake of an old movie (which doesn't preclude #1 or #2)
The movies where the script actually comes out of Hollywood are rarely worth a thing.
steve
For me, it's been about a year and a half. There have been a small handful of decent movies, but nothing else. I even got rid of my blockbuster movie pass, because we'd go months without finding anything worth renting.
steve
CIV 1 was dog-slow on hardware at the time. Civ 2 was dog-slow on hardware at the time. Civ 3 was dog-slow on anything but the most cutting-edge hardware at the time. The kicker is that NONE of these games were anywhere nearly as intense in graphics, AI, or *any other aspect* than other games that performed much, much better.
I haven't checked Civ 3, but Civ 2 still used an idle loop - consuming 100% of any CPU just to blink a unit on the screen. That sort of silliness was outdated half a decade (or more) before the game came out.
Please, please, do us all a favor, and get some decent programmers this time.
For most people, *one* password is too many to remember.
steve
My providers are all out of 'solid, guaranteed bandwidth'
Really? I'll bet they're not, they just want a lot of money for it. Call them up and tell them that you want a T1 or T3 from them, and I'll bet that they'll be happy to oblige. Decent providers will guarantee that you'll get full bandwidth. If they actually are out of bandwidth, that's a scary thought.
because the cartel^w Tier-1 providers only deal with other telcos. How much do you think they will be paying per Mbps?
Why would they pay per megabit, when they can just hand traffic off to the destination networks through a non-transit peering arrangement?
The provider that I uses has (relatively) dirt-cheap prices on bandwidth (GUARANTEED bandwidth), because they have peering arrangements with virtually every network that's large enough to be of any concern. They don't pay someone else to use as an upstream, they just send it over their own network to the peering facility, and hand it off. Transit for that bandwidth, however, depends on the medium in question - telco services, like t1, t3, etc. are heavily regulated, and there are minimum prices set by the FCC.
You forgot about the 20:1 (minimum - usually 50:1 for consumer DSL) contention ratio
No, I didn't, I made a point that if every user really used their full bandwidth, the provider simply wouldn't be able to handle it. In fact, if you had read a few lines more of my post, you would have seen my statement that they massively over-subscribe their bandwidth.
steve
> Many multiplayer games thrive with high upload speeds,
Actually, the latency is a much more important factor.
> and any bittorrent user knows that uploading is what makes
> the world go 'round.
Providers don't *want* you seeding bit torrents at high speed. More in one second...
> And what if I want to run an FTP site or host my own website
Then they want you to pay for the service.
Believe it or not, bandwidth isn't free for the providers. These providers have to *massively* over-sell their bandwidth to be able to make money. If you don't believe me, look into how much it will cost you to get a hundred megabits of solid, guaranteed bandwidth - then factor in lots of equipment, and realize that if you're letting people blow 24 mbits/second on bit torrents, all that money will only cover *four* customers.
If the companies say "Sure, I'll give you huge upload speeds, let you run any services you want, and blow all of your bandwidth 24 hrs/day", then they're going to lose money, and eventually go out of business.
steve
- am I forever constrained to pedestrian speeds?
> Seriously though, at what point is TOO much broadband?
When it's faster than your hard drive.
When I rsync data to a remote backup server over my "measly" 768k upstream connection, how long do you think it takes when there's 5 or 10 gigs of new, uncompressable data? And I can't even think about touching my DV work, there's just no way...
steve
Having quite a few of your games, one thing has always stood out: While the game concepts are out of this world, the quality of the programming is usually very lacking, most especially in the optimization area. As an example, Civ 1, 2, CTP, and 3 all ran much, much slower on my hardware than games which by all rights *should* have been much more demanding. Why has that been the case?
Great... so, uh, want to tell us where to look?
steve
You mean that this guy was carrying around his credit card number and name in an UNENCRYPTED form in his wallet? That's OUTRAGEOUS! Obviously, his credit card and driver's license, which had his name and credit card number in that same wallet, were encrypted!
Oh, wait... they weren't? Well, then. That's a bit different.
steve
When I was 12, I spilled a nearly-full big-gulp into my Commodore 64. The screen instantly went black. I just about crapped my pants.
I took the entire thing apart, cleaned off circuit boards, keys, and all, dried them, put it all back together... and it worked.
steve
steve