I have a TV that's large enough to be comfortable, but I'd like a larger one. The problem is that the next steps up take me near a thousand dollars for a decent set.
Well, I'm not going to pay a grand for a TV that I won't use more than a year or two, so I'm not going to do it. For now, I'll stick with what I have, and when a good wide-screen HDTV comes into my price range, I'll grab it.
Most major Universities have ways for you to test out of classes. And even for the classes you can't officially test out of, there are friendly professors (especially at smaller universities) that will let you unofficially test out.
A few months ago, I installed a fresh RH 6.2 system, disabled most all services, hooked it up to the net, and ran up2date. The next day I came back, it had crashed.
I ran it again, and watched the memory usage. On a 512MB machine with 512MB of swap, it used up *all* memory. Crap.
So I ran up2date, and picked just the new up2date package, started it, and left for lunch. An hour later, it had over 30 packages scheduled for download to satisfy dependencies, and was, of course, eating up hundreds of megabytes.
I FTP'd all of the 6.2 updates from RedHat, and (tried) to install them. Most installed. Once that was done, I was able to run up2date to get the rest of the updates to apply.
I didn't know that having a fairly "up-to-date" system was a prerequisite for running up2date.
Recently, everyone has been saying that Moore's law won't hold out much longer. And they've been saying it ever since he postulated it. I don't think it'll stop any time soon.
The 386's, when matured, were built on a 1-micron process, had 275,000 transistors, and ran at 33 MHz. Now, on a.18-micron process, we have chips with 42 million transistors running at 2 gigahertz.
So, by shrinking the size of the transistors to 1/6th of their size, we got 153 times the packing ability, and 60 times the frequency. And these transistors that they're talking about are only 1/10th the size of the current "high-tech" transistors. That means that we could pack over 100 times more transistors on a package, and run them 100 times faster. Not bad. But I suppose that they'll need a safety device to shut them down if the flow of coolant ever stops. : )
steve
Re:Smaller die == less heat?
on
CPU Wars
·
· Score: 2
Ok, I admit it. I'm confused. I thought a smaller die size increased heat. Less surface area to radiate fromm
You're confusing temperature with heat. : )
Both points of view are actually right. In the ideal world, having smaller transistors lets them operate at a lower voltage, so you use less power, and generate less heat. And if the die is smaller because of a decrease in transistors, you still use less power.
In the real world, though, you don't see Intel shrinking their dies and then leaving them at 650 MHz. When they shrink the manufacturing process, they also increase the frequency, offsetting any decrease in power usage. And, over the long run, they also increase the NUMBER of transistors, making it use even more power. So while the textbooks say that the new chips will use less power, they're likely to use MORE power, especially when they've had time to ramp them up to the higher clock speeds.
steve
Re:CPU is not problem anymore
on
CPU Wars
·
· Score: 2
Unless you are ripping Divx movies left and right or a Seti@home freak you don't need a faster cpu
Actually, these MHz wars benefit me in a very nice way. I'm still using a PIII-650 at home, but my servers have much more substantial hardware - dual CPU's are the *smallest* machines in the stack. And these MHz wars have made desktop machines that can best high-end servers of only two years ago.
Two years ago, I spent $4,000 on a chassis and motherboard that would use quad Xeons. Add in $2800 for the processors, and that's a lot of money. Today, I can spend $200 on a dual Athlon motherboard and $500 on two chips, and have a machine that will either rival the quad Xeon or beat it in almost any situation.
I remember when I was amazed that opening up an 800x600 JPEG took less than three seconds on a new machine. The funny thing is, at the time, I didn't mind waiting three seconds, and really hadn't even noticed that it was a wait. But once I'd used a faster chip, going back to the three-second wait really cramped. Even though you don't *need* a faster procesor, chances are that the next time you upgrade, you'll start noticing little things like that, and say "Wow... this is nice."
As an interesting side note, if you're looking for longevity out of a computer, go dual CPU's. I had a dual Pentium-133 w/ 64 megs sitting around that I bought for $40. For fun, I put NT4 on it, and in nearly every situation, it was almost or more responsive than a P3-650 with Windows 98. Yes, computationally-bound processes took a while, but in sheer responsiveness, it really impressed me. I think that a dual 1.6 GHz Athlon would have a tremendously long usable life span.
What does have a person in charge of internal IT infrastructure have to do with security holes in IIS and Outlook?
Ultimately, he's one of the people that dictates where they will draw their balance between cost and security. Sure, they could spend time and money educating their programmers about security concepts, and sure, they could spend a lot of time and money doing code reviews - but do they? Only a little. And he's one of the people that make those decisions.
Is that who you want handling national security policies? "Well, yeah, there's a pretty big hole there, but we don't think that most people will find out about it, especially if we don't tell them about it."
>It's funny how a cable modem link, a adsl and a microwave link can be 10 time cheaper than a t1 and provide more bandwith and more reliability.<
You're saying that DSL, cable, or microwave can compare to a t1 in reliability? Only if your t1 provider is seriously incompetant, or your broadband provider has some magic pixie-dust.
We pay $400 for a point-to-point t1 from our colo center to our office. A guaranteed 1.544 mbps, and it's very rare that the round-trip latency even hits 5 ms over the link. You simply can't get cable, dsl, or microwave service that will GUARANTEE you a connection like that, even if you do spend over $400 per month on it.
Actually, it's not that users won't upgrade until forced to, it's that the vendors won't. If your desktop had IPv6 support, your router vendor had IPv6 support available, and your upstream provider offered IPV6 addresses, how many people would actually say "No, I don't want to bother"?
You're making two erroneous assumptions: That Ethernet is the only type of network, and that every MAC address will have a unique IP address. Between the number of other networking types and IP aliasing, the number of IP addresses needed can indeed exceed the number of ethernet addresses used.
Actually, that's a terribly wasteful way to go. If you work on an easily-scalable infrastructure, then you can pretty much purchase capacity as it's needed, which not only frees up capital for a longer time, you end up spending a lot less, as the price of computers is always dropping, and the performance is always going up.
Meself, I never hesitate to use multi-processor machines. While the increase in capacity is always nice, it's the increase in responsiveness under load that really makes them shine.
If you compare the straight performance of an X86 CPU to a different architecture, it can come out very good, average, or very poor, depending on what you're doing with it. However, when you compare the cost vs. performance, they really do start to shine. I, myself, pitted a $13,000 quad-Xeon against a $25,000 dual-Alpha for database work, and the Xeon handily bested the Alpha. Had the work been pure number crunching, though, the results probably would have been backwards.
A lot of the extra money that you spend on "big iron" hardware is spend getting tremendous amounts of I/O to the various CPU's. For something like a database server, where your app pretty much has to run on a single machine, that's great. For something as simple as web-serving, which is extremely easy to cluster, you're wasting your money. Ten $2,000 Intel-based machines will deal out far more than one $20,000 Sun/IBM/Alpha.
In fact, when one company was doing an embedded solution based on the Strong-ARM chips, just for fun, they used ten of them to dish out over a million web pages per *minute* - and that was with StrongARMs.
<I think the part about Java/Resin is the most crucial. Anybody can throw hardware at a problem, but their programming methodolgy makes tremendous sense (ie: dump this Apache/CGI garbage in favor of real multithreading)>
Funny. What was our next closest competitor spent several million dollars on Sun hardware and everything done in Java. We spent less than $40,000 on some dual-proc Intel machines, doing everything with Postgres, Perl, and Apache. The result? Our servers have many times the capacity that theirs do, and they're almost completely out of business.
It's not a "Shazam, you're clean" process. A year or two ago, they measured the level of oil in the soil, and found it to be just bout half of what it was after the spill. The bacteria work, but it's a long, slow road.
At my last job, most people I worked with were at least twenty years older than I was, and had a truly "corporate" mindset, and that made it hard. There were a couple of people that I got to be good friends with, but that's out of a few hundred. It was just hard for me to really bond with someone whose main preoccupations were online gambling and keeping their teenage daughters out of trouble.
Now, at my current job, we're all mostly the same age, and we're all a lot more casual - and that makes all the difference. My fiancee's roommate married one co-worker, who was my roommate for a while. Another coworker and I built a high-power rocket together. And my boss and I go shooting together on a regular basis. Several of us go see new movies on a regular basis, and several coworkers come over to watch older movies on my home theater setup.
Whenever one of us has needed help on our house, be it drywalling or cutting down tremendous tree limbs, there's always been a couple of people from the office there to help out. Being the same age, and having common interests and attitudes makes all the difference in the world.
I do have to say, though, one of the more "elderly" employees (the director of sales) is the only reason that the owner hasn't been able to make us get rid of the two ferrets that we bought for the office....
Right after the UPS strike years ago, I ordered a laser printer. When it got there, the box made yours look like it was brand-spanking new. It had been abused so much that the entire cardboard box had become completely soft - but the printer survived. How?
When it was shipped, the company used an oversize box, sprayed expanding foam into a plastic garbage bag, and put that in the bottom of the box. Then they put the printer in, and did another foam-filled bag on top. The result was a printer that was completely surrounded in form-fitting foam. Depsite the horrendous abuse the gorillas at UPS dished out, the printer was fine, and still works fine today.
> it's quite funny actually. DJB has gained so much by creating qmail that when he released djbdns, users blindly followed into it expecting it to be void of security holes.
Alright, tell me one security hole in DJBDNS. Not in the DNS protocol, but in the program.
>The biggest problems with DNS on the internet have NOTHING to do with the software used
Actually, a decade of remote root exploits is pretty serious, and it's a problem of the software. However....
>the protocol itself is quite insecure- and what's worse is that this isn't news!
You're right. And Dan has been saying that for years. In reality, while the protocol is insecure, the bugs in BIND are no less important - either way, someone can either modify or deny DNS services at their leisure. Both need to be remedied, one without the other is useless.
The problem isn't who BIND runs as. The problem is that it's buggy. So you don't run it as root, you run it as a non-priveliged user. The next time an exploit comes up, they still have a way to access your machine. Tney won't have root - yet. It'll take them one more hop. And since they may have been clever enough to open up a way to get a shell on the machine, even as a non-priveliged user, their job is now a thousand times easier.
Security starts with running secure programs, not by putting band-aids on buggy programs.
Gee, after 10 years of numerous remote-root exploits and a legacy of bloat, bugs, and overall abominable design, they're JUST NOW starting to think that BIND might not be the way to go? Wow.
Because of the size of data that they have to serve and the incredible bloat of BIND, the root name servers are very large machines. Let's say that they chose Dan Bernstein's DJBDNS. The size of the machine would be reduced by at least half, and security would instantly become a non-issue (at least far as the DNS software is concerned.)
I know, DJBDNS isn't for everyone. It doesn't have an FSF-approved license, and of course, carries design features stemming from Dan's immense ego. But it serves as an example that reliability, efficiency, and security are out there. Between it and the other alternatives, I think that it's inexcusable for the root name servers to run BIND, and I can't think of any reason why anyone would want to use it. But hey, that's just me.
Shoot, with all the recent talk about clusters, they could use an extremely scalable cluster of commodity hardware for a relative pittance. Put a traffic director using LVS in front of a number of single- or dual-CPU machines, all of them (including the director) commodity hardware, and you have the capability to serve out over a gigabit/second of DNS- securely, reliably, efficiently. It's hard to ask for more.
Q3 itself isn't really multithreaded in the way that you are thinking. There is a way to let the video work in a seperate thread, but the actual game itself (AI, physics, sound, etc.) are not. But... the great Carmack has said that the upcoming Doom sequel will be fully multithreaded, and will be terrific on multi-processor systems.
Why is IBM important? Mainly, because when a company like IBM trusts and supports Linux, corporations are much more willing to listen. What does that mean for Linux? It means a lot more people working not only on Linux itself, but on all Linux-related software. Kernel enhancements are only the beginning.
Look at what happened with SGI - they start working on porting Linux to their machines, we get their coders porting XFS to Linux. IBM ports Linux to their machines, we get AFS, and more is in the works. IBM is also active in helping Linux run efficiently on "big iron". Companies whose business model revolves solely around Linux have been dropping like flies, but companies like IBM and SGI have the ability to keep the Linux side running, and give a lot back to the community.
Slashdot Mirror
>"With this, a usb HDD, and a usb cd-rw, it looks like I can have most of my box, outside the box, just for the geek factor"
If you really were a geek, your external components would be SCSI.
steve
I have a TV that's large enough to be comfortable, but I'd like a larger one. The problem is that the next steps up take me near a thousand dollars for a decent set.
Well, I'm not going to pay a grand for a TV that I won't use more than a year or two, so I'm not going to do it. For now, I'll stick with what I have, and when a good wide-screen HDTV comes into my price range, I'll grab it.
steve
Most major Universities have ways for you to test out of classes. And even for the classes you can't officially test out of, there are friendly professors (especially at smaller universities) that will let you unofficially test out.
steve
A few months ago, I installed a fresh RH 6.2 system, disabled most all services, hooked it up to the net, and ran up2date. The next day I came back, it had crashed.
I ran it again, and watched the memory usage. On a 512MB machine with 512MB of swap, it used up *all* memory. Crap.
So I ran up2date, and picked just the new up2date package, started it, and left for lunch. An hour later, it had over 30 packages scheduled for download to satisfy dependencies, and was, of course, eating up hundreds of megabytes.
I FTP'd all of the 6.2 updates from RedHat, and (tried) to install them. Most installed. Once that was done, I was able to run up2date to get the rest of the updates to apply.
I didn't know that having a fairly "up-to-date" system was a prerequisite for running up2date.
steve
but I fixed that with "su, deluser test, rm -rf /home/test, adduser test"
Tsk, tsk. Try this, give your keyboard a break:
deluser -r test; adduser test
steve
Recently, everyone has been saying that Moore's law won't hold out much longer. And they've been saying it ever since he postulated it. I don't think it'll stop any time soon.
.18-micron process, we have chips with 42 million transistors running at 2 gigahertz.
The 386's, when matured, were built on a 1-micron process, had 275,000 transistors, and ran at 33 MHz. Now, on a
So, by shrinking the size of the transistors to 1/6th of their size, we got 153 times the packing ability, and 60 times the frequency. And these transistors that they're talking about are only 1/10th the size of the current "high-tech" transistors. That means that we could pack over 100 times more transistors on a package, and run them 100 times faster. Not bad. But I suppose that they'll need a safety device to shut them down if the flow of coolant ever stops. : )
steve
Ok, I admit it. I'm confused. I thought a smaller die size increased heat. Less surface area to radiate fromm
You're confusing temperature with heat. : )
Both points of view are actually right. In the ideal world, having smaller transistors lets them operate at a lower voltage, so you use less power, and generate less heat. And if the die is smaller because of a decrease in transistors, you still use less power.
In the real world, though, you don't see Intel shrinking their dies and then leaving them at 650 MHz. When they shrink the manufacturing process, they also increase the frequency, offsetting any decrease in power usage. And, over the long run, they also increase the NUMBER of transistors, making it use even more power. So while the textbooks say that the new chips will use less power, they're likely to use MORE power, especially when they've had time to ramp them up to the higher clock speeds.
steve
Unless you are ripping Divx movies left and right or a Seti@home freak you don't need a faster cpu
Actually, these MHz wars benefit me in a very nice way. I'm still using a PIII-650 at home, but my servers have much more substantial hardware - dual CPU's are the *smallest* machines in the stack. And these MHz wars have made desktop machines that can best high-end servers of only two years ago.
Two years ago, I spent $4,000 on a chassis and motherboard that would use quad Xeons. Add in $2800 for the processors, and that's a lot of money. Today, I can spend $200 on a dual Athlon motherboard and $500 on two chips, and have a machine that will either rival the quad Xeon or beat it in almost any situation.
I remember when I was amazed that opening up an 800x600 JPEG took less than three seconds on a new machine. The funny thing is, at the time, I didn't mind waiting three seconds, and really hadn't even noticed that it was a wait. But once I'd used a faster chip, going back to the three-second wait really cramped. Even though you don't *need* a faster procesor, chances are that the next time you upgrade, you'll start noticing little things like that, and say "Wow... this is nice."
As an interesting side note, if you're looking for longevity out of a computer, go dual CPU's. I had a dual Pentium-133 w/ 64 megs sitting around that I bought for $40. For fun, I put NT4 on it, and in nearly every situation, it was almost or more responsive than a P3-650 with Windows 98. Yes, computationally-bound processes took a while, but in sheer responsiveness, it really impressed me. I think that a dual 1.6 GHz Athlon would have a tremendously long usable life span.
steve
What does have a person in charge of internal IT infrastructure have to do with security holes in IIS and Outlook?
Ultimately, he's one of the people that dictates where they will draw their balance between cost and security. Sure, they could spend time and money educating their programmers about security concepts, and sure, they could spend a lot of time and money doing code reviews - but do they? Only a little. And he's one of the people that make those decisions.
Is that who you want handling national security policies? "Well, yeah, there's a pretty big hole there, but we don't think that most people will find out about it, especially if we don't tell them about it."
steve
>It's funny how a cable modem link, a adsl and a microwave link can be 10 time cheaper than a t1 and provide more bandwith and more reliability.<
You're saying that DSL, cable, or microwave can compare to a t1 in reliability? Only if your t1 provider is seriously incompetant, or your broadband provider has some magic pixie-dust.
We pay $400 for a point-to-point t1 from our colo center to our office. A guaranteed 1.544 mbps, and it's very rare that the round-trip latency even hits 5 ms over the link. You simply can't get cable, dsl, or microwave service that will GUARANTEE you a connection like that, even if you do spend over $400 per month on it.
steve
Actually, it's not that users won't upgrade until forced to, it's that the vendors won't. If your desktop had IPv6 support, your router vendor had IPv6 support available, and your upstream provider offered IPV6 addresses, how many people would actually say "No, I don't want to bother"?
steve
You're making two erroneous assumptions: That Ethernet is the only type of network, and that every MAC address will have a unique IP address. Between the number of other networking types and IP aliasing, the number of IP addresses needed can indeed exceed the number of ethernet addresses used.
steve
Actually, that's a terribly wasteful way to go. If you work on an easily-scalable infrastructure, then you can pretty much purchase capacity as it's needed, which not only frees up capital for a longer time, you end up spending a lot less, as the price of computers is always dropping, and the performance is always going up.
steve
Meself, I never hesitate to use multi-processor machines. While the increase in capacity is always nice, it's the increase in responsiveness under load that really makes them shine.
steve
If you compare the straight performance of an X86 CPU to a different architecture, it can come out very good, average, or very poor, depending on what you're doing with it. However, when you compare the cost vs. performance, they really do start to shine. I, myself, pitted a $13,000 quad-Xeon against a $25,000 dual-Alpha for database work, and the Xeon handily bested the Alpha. Had the work been pure number crunching, though, the results probably would have been backwards.
A lot of the extra money that you spend on "big iron" hardware is spend getting tremendous amounts of I/O to the various CPU's. For something like a database server, where your app pretty much has to run on a single machine, that's great. For something as simple as web-serving, which is extremely easy to cluster, you're wasting your money. Ten $2,000 Intel-based machines will deal out far more than one $20,000 Sun/IBM/Alpha.
In fact, when one company was doing an embedded solution based on the Strong-ARM chips, just for fun, they used ten of them to dish out over a million web pages per *minute* - and that was with StrongARMs.
steve
<I think the part about Java/Resin is the most crucial. Anybody can throw hardware at a problem, but their programming methodolgy makes tremendous sense (ie: dump this Apache/CGI garbage in favor of real multithreading)>
Funny. What was our next closest competitor spent several million dollars on Sun hardware and everything done in Java. We spent less than $40,000 on some dual-proc Intel machines, doing everything with Postgres, Perl, and Apache. The result? Our servers have many times the capacity that theirs do, and they're almost completely out of business.
steve
It's not a "Shazam, you're clean" process. A year or two ago, they measured the level of oil in the soil, and found it to be just bout half of what it was after the spill. The bacteria work, but it's a long, slow road.
steve
At my last job, most people I worked with were at least twenty years older than I was, and had a truly "corporate" mindset, and that made it hard. There were a couple of people that I got to be good friends with, but that's out of a few hundred. It was just hard for me to really bond with someone whose main preoccupations were online gambling and keeping their teenage daughters out of trouble.
Now, at my current job, we're all mostly the same age, and we're all a lot more casual - and that makes all the difference. My fiancee's roommate married one co-worker, who was my roommate for a while. Another coworker and I built a high-power rocket together. And my boss and I go shooting together on a regular basis. Several of us go see new movies on a regular basis, and several coworkers come over to watch older movies on my home theater setup.
Whenever one of us has needed help on our house, be it drywalling or cutting down tremendous tree limbs, there's always been a couple of people from the office there to help out. Being the same age, and having common interests and attitudes makes all the difference in the world.
I do have to say, though, one of the more "elderly" employees (the director of sales) is the only reason that the owner hasn't been able to make us get rid of the two ferrets that we bought for the office....
steve
Right after the UPS strike years ago, I ordered a laser printer. When it got there, the box made yours look like it was brand-spanking new. It had been abused so much that the entire cardboard box had become completely soft - but the printer survived. How?
When it was shipped, the company used an oversize box, sprayed expanding foam into a plastic garbage bag, and put that in the bottom of the box. Then they put the printer in, and did another foam-filled bag on top. The result was a printer that was completely surrounded in form-fitting foam. Depsite the horrendous abuse the gorillas at UPS dished out, the printer was fine, and still works fine today.
steve
> it's quite funny actually. DJB has gained so much by creating qmail that when he released djbdns, users blindly followed into it expecting it to be void of security holes.
Alright, tell me one security hole in DJBDNS. Not in the DNS protocol, but in the program.
>The biggest problems with DNS on the internet have NOTHING to do with the software used
Actually, a decade of remote root exploits is pretty serious, and it's a problem of the software. However....
>the protocol itself is quite insecure- and what's worse is that this isn't news!
You're right. And Dan has been saying that for years. In reality, while the protocol is insecure, the bugs in BIND are no less important - either way, someone can either modify or deny DNS services at their leisure. Both need to be remedied, one without the other is useless.
steve
http://www.nethole.com/articles/00/09/27/2143234.s html
m l
http://slashdot.org/articles/00/09/10/2230242.sht
Seeing as how IP-over-DNS has already been done, it would be trivial to just use your existing P2P application that way...
steve
>Here's one for 'ya: don't run named as root!
>There's no excuse for sloppy administration.
The problem isn't who BIND runs as. The problem is that it's buggy. So you don't run it as root, you run it as a non-priveliged user. The next time an exploit comes up, they still have a way to access your machine. Tney won't have root - yet. It'll take them one more hop. And since they may have been clever enough to open up a way to get a shell on the machine, even as a non-priveliged user, their job is now a thousand times easier.
Security starts with running secure programs, not by putting band-aids on buggy programs.
steve
Gee, after 10 years of numerous remote-root exploits and a legacy of bloat, bugs, and overall abominable design, they're JUST NOW starting to think that BIND might not be the way to go? Wow.
Because of the size of data that they have to serve and the incredible bloat of BIND, the root name servers are very large machines. Let's say that they chose Dan Bernstein's DJBDNS. The size of the machine would be reduced by at least half, and security would instantly become a non-issue (at least far as the DNS software is concerned.)
I know, DJBDNS isn't for everyone. It doesn't have an FSF-approved license, and of course, carries design features stemming from Dan's immense ego. But it serves as an example that reliability, efficiency, and security are out there. Between it and the other alternatives, I think that it's inexcusable for the root name servers to run BIND, and I can't think of any reason why anyone would want to use it. But hey, that's just me.
Shoot, with all the recent talk about clusters, they could use an extremely scalable cluster of commodity hardware for a relative pittance. Put a traffic director using LVS in front of a number of single- or dual-CPU machines, all of them (including the director) commodity hardware, and you have the capability to serve out over a gigabit/second of DNS- securely, reliably, efficiently. It's hard to ask for more.
steve
Q3 itself isn't really multithreaded in the way that you are thinking. There is a way to let the video work in a seperate thread, but the actual game itself (AI, physics, sound, etc.) are not. But... the great Carmack has said that the upcoming Doom sequel will be fully multithreaded, and will be terrific on multi-processor systems.
steve
Why is IBM important? Mainly, because when a company like IBM trusts and supports Linux, corporations are much more willing to listen. What does that mean for Linux? It means a lot more people working not only on Linux itself, but on all Linux-related software. Kernel enhancements are only the beginning.
Look at what happened with SGI - they start working on porting Linux to their machines, we get their coders porting XFS to Linux. IBM ports Linux to their machines, we get AFS, and more is in the works. IBM is also active in helping Linux run efficiently on "big iron". Companies whose business model revolves solely around Linux have been dropping like flies, but companies like IBM and SGI have the ability to keep the Linux side running, and give a lot back to the community.
steve