btw: How come I don't see many touting that the 1.2 Ghz Athlon is some how lacking in ability when compared to the 1.8 Ghz Pentium 4?
Because the 1.2GHz Athlon4+DDR is as fast, if not faster, in most real world applications* than the 1.8GHz Pentium4+RDRAM. No one touts that it's lacking because it's not.
Here are some Linux benchmarks (do some sniffing around for some Win32 benchmarks, they're everywhere) that illustrate my point:
* The P4 platform has more memory bandwidth, but contemporary apps don't need it. The only thing that consistently runs faster on the Pentium 4 is Q3A.:-)
I swung by "Hacking Truths," his website, and briefly read his Perl journal, "Everything you need to know about Perl."
As one of his "Hacking Truths," he makes the point that the difference between subroutines and functions (in Perl) is that functions come with the Perl interpreter. This is false, in Perl nobody gives a damn, up to and including Larry, and the built-in functions are called built-in functions.
I suppose if you wanted to get technical (from a broad, programming prospective) functions do things to data and return values, while subroutines perform a list of commands with a specific purpose.
I feel better... no 15 year old is going to put me out of work! He even uses DOS Perl, not even real Unix Perl! Yeah, and he misuses shift() to parse ARGV! That's a terrible way to teach it!
(Oh no... I'm turning into one of those vindictive, cranky old men... And I'm only 20! Help me!)
The death of a great man, and the birth of a hero.
--
A warm night, a rumpled bed, crickets chirping outside, the scents of love's aftermath. She snuggled against him. Her locks spilled over the arm he had brought around her shoulders. "I've thought of what I want on my tombstone," he laughed.
"Each man dies
And ends his day.
Here he lies
Who used to lay."
"I won't get that after all," Guthrie said.
"But I will remember it," the robot said.
"Right. That's enough. Listen," Guthrie hissed. "I want... to brief you... about Fireball.... You're going to have... a hell of a ruckus... and you're still... feeling your way... into existence--" He breathed for a span. Even amplified, his question was barely to be heard. "I wonder. How does it feel?"
"Strange," the robot confessed. "A kind of--lightness? I'm an abstraction, I think." He sought for words. "But there is a, a drive yet, and I'm fond of my old friends, my old memories, yours. Not quite the same way as before--as you've been--but--but No, you were not very kind to Sheila today."
"Take care... of her. She's earned it."
"I will. She has." This also the robot shared. "Okay, what've you got to tell me about Fireball?"
Guthrie gathered strength.
"They're swarming around you already, aren't they?" he began. "Advice, requests, demands.... And you know... what I know... about them, but... have you got the--intuition--the sense of them?" He fought. "Listen. Mostly they mean well... Watch out for... Delancey.... he's after power. Too good... and administrator... to scrap, and... we mustn't break faith, ever... but keep a curb on him." He fought. "And Tanya... Tanya Eagle Tree. Good gal, besides being... my granddaughter... but she should stay with.. engineering. Steer her off of... trying to steer people. And--"
The seizure contorted him.
The robot knelt and held him close, mummy against metal, while it ran its course. "Shall I ring for help?" the robot asked. Anyone else would have done so immediately.
The expected "No" shivered to him. His vibrosensors felt the racking heartbeat, his chemosensors drank the swell of clam-cold sweat. "Hell with that. Never mind."
The spasm ended. The robot lowered the man to the pillow. Guthrie's right hand trembled toward him. "Stars," Guthrie pleaded. "Keep us aimed... at the stars... whatever your people... say."
"That night at the lake is in me too," the robot assured him.
The air was utterly still and unbelieveable clear, especially since the altitude was not much. Above the woods, stars were beyond counting. Their reflections gleamed everywhere on the lake. Anson and Juliana had the campsite to themselves; in those days, you had to backpack to here. They stripped and went for a swim. The water caressed them, almost warm. At each stroke it ran back down into itself with a clear clinking like laughter. They swam among stars. "Someday we'll do this for real," Juliana said. "Promise?"
"Good," Guthrie whispered. "Grand. That's what counts." He rested until he could speak a bit louder. "I'll drink to theat. The Scotch... is over there."
"Better not," the robot counseled.
"I'm still in command."
The robot yielded. "You are." He crossed the room, fetched the bottle from a drawer as directed, returned, and poured into a tumbler meant for water. Kneeling again, he lifted the knaggy head and brought rim to lips.
"The stars," Guthrie mumbled.
Curtains rippled evening-lit in a gathering breeze. The grandfather clock reached another hour and boomed it away.
Well, I'm rapidly drifting out of my realm of knowledge, let alone expertise (my first post was secondhand info from my uncle, who works with vintage audio equipment) but...
From what you've just told me, you have a linear combination C, made up of single frequencies A and B. You can remove B to get A and vice versa, because (as you said) it is linear and can be decomposed. But if you start taking it apart, you won't have C any more, you'll have parts of C. So what does it matter where in the frequency spectrum A and B are, it will still affect C (the resultant sound that you WANT to have in the end). Besides, can't sound waves resonant with each other to produce new sounds? Isn't that what harmonics are all about?
You can email me if you'd rather. Or just ignore me, that works too.:)
There was a fellow back in the day, when the recording industry was beginning to become mainstream, and he designed some of the most brilliant devices and consoles, the principles of which are still in use today. He had a theory about music and recording which has pretty much been proven by modern means, and it goes something like this:
Say you're in a small room with another person and the two of you are having a conversation. As the sound of your speaking leaves your mouth and resonates inside your chest, it generates sound waves that flow away from your body, almost like water. (Patience, I'm getting there.:) As the sound fills the room, it reflects off everything--the floor, your friend, the walls, it even comes back and reflects upon itself. Not so much, but it does. This is all fairly common knowledge, if you've had high school physics.
Now the trick here is to place a single microphone in the room and capture all of the above discribed chaos going on. And you really need to, because this guy's theory says that the frequencies that are NOT audible to the human ear will resonate and affect the net sound of the frequencies that we can.
This effect becomes more potent when you have an entire rock band or symphony orchestra performing a piece. Sure there are sounds that you will not be able to hear, but those inaudible sounds are what makes the difference between watching them perform live at the theatre or in a bar, and sitting at home and listening to a recording. It's just not the same.
As if the trouble with COLLECTING all the sounds isn't enough, now we have trouble REPRODUCING these sounds. When a song is dubbed to tape, it loses an upper and lower bound of frequencies because of a limitation of the medium. When the song is pressed into vinyl, is loses another set of frequencies. By the time it makes it to CD, it's crammed down to 20Hz-20KHz (or so, I don't know what the newer CDs are capable of) instead of the (potential) 0-undef it would be if you were standing right there when the sounds were originally produced.
The fallacy of music compression is the idea that unused (or nearly unused) frequencies can be removed without detriment to the quality of the music. This is wholly untrue, and I dare anyone who says otherwise to take a classical piece on vinyl or an older song from an LP and compare it to a 128Kbps CD-rip of the same recording.
Now, that doesn't mean I don't enjoy being able to store every song The Beatles ever recorded on two CDs. I just wanted to make the point that while it's convenient, it sounds terrible compared to what the artist inteded you to hear from the beginning.
There certainly is a market for Socket-370 chips yet.
I bought a Slot-1 i440BX* and Celeron 366 (O/C to 550), later upgraded to a Celeron-II 566 (O/C to 850), and now I'm looking forward to the Tualatin for my next upgrade. Because, amazingly enough, the i440BX still outperforms the i815 and Apollo Pro chipsets at 133MHz FSB, and it will be able to handle the new voltage requirements to boot.
Talk about your long-lifed chipset!
But aside from that, there's a bundle to be made with the "next generation" (sic) Socket-370 boards with the lower voltage regs. Upgraders don't want the P-IV, they want a new motherboard and CPU that'll work with their current PSU and RAM. New computer buyers don't want the P-IV, it still costs too much. Compared to Athlon hardware, at least.
Run over to perlmonks.org, set yourself up a user account, start browsing articles. In a variable period of time, chromatic will wander in (you can even view his user page in the meantime) and you can accost him in the site chatterbox, in public or by using the "advanced" private message feature (which you can read about at the site, I won't bore you with meaningless details here...:)
I don't know chromatic in real life, and not real well at PerlMonks, either. But every post, every idea, damn near every word from that man's fingertips is genuine and thoughtful. He's good people.
So write him up, ask him a Perl question, whatever. Get your own opinion.
> Is Crusoe tuned for Linux? Does Linux now have
> Power Management features? How can they claim
> increased battery life when switching to Linux?
I'm going to make an incredible intuitive leap here and infer that Linux uses less CPU on average and requires less disk activity than Windows 2000, and therefore consumes less battery power. This is probably what they based their "benchmarks" on... when the computer is actually in use (not sleeping / hibernating / paper-weighting), the battery lasts X hours.
Actually, I was looking through this, and I couldn't find any of my old haunts... then I remembered that our area code changed in like 1995. My God, it's been a long time.
That's why you hook the UPS up to the serial port on the machine, so when it starts to die a violent death it'll signal the system to do a clean shutdown. Of course, this is assuming you bought the nice, well-engineered UPS as opposed to the dirt cheap ones you get at Best Buy for $40!
The nice UPS units do a few things to insure this doesn't happen:
volt-o-meter on the circuit voltage
Doesn't just wait for the source power to go out, checks the internal power for sudden drops.
more than one battery
If one dies, the next one struggles forth long enough to send the shutdown signal.
use batteries that don't die
IIRC, the rechargeables they use in those bad boys don't just die when they have a problem, they slowly fade out. Plenty of time.
This doesn't take into account the messy situation that occurs when someone yanks the plug. But if this ever happens, it's time to get a new network engineer/sysadmin/intern.
One last idea: plug the UPS into a UPS into the wall. Mua!
Orson Scott Card is an incredible author, one of my favorites. Right up there with Heinlein, Moorcock, Zelazany, Asimov, and about a trillion others I will save you from listing here. (Dar, me like bookie things.) He is a difficult author to classify to a genre because he so effectively blends science, fiction, and fantasy with modern problems and scenarios. As an added plus he's enjoyable to read!
That being said, I would like to take this opportunity to recommend that you read the other two or three dozen novels/series/sagas he has written. Those who liked _Ender's Game_ but not the sequels will definitely enjoy _Treason_, the first few _Homecoming_ novels, _Songbird_, and potentially a few others. YMMV, browse around. If you liked _Speaker for the Dead_, _Xenocide_, et al, you will probably enjoy reading everything this man has ever written, including _Alvin Maker_, _The Worthing Saga_, _Redemption of Christopher Columbus_, and probably most of his shorter novellas, like _Hart's Hope_.
Be forewarned, if you care about this sort of thing, he is a Mormon and there is a very strong, spiritual undertone to almost all of his books. Probably the most obvious example of this is _Lost Boys_. No, nothing related to the vampire movie. But a great story nonetheless. {grin}
Good luck. Check out http://www.hatrack.com for more info about OSC. I hope you enjoy his works as much as I do.
I can have my complete works of Beethoven on a single disc. =) Or the complete works of any musical talent, for that matter... The Beatles, Metallica, Luciano Pavarotti. Some quick math tells us that while a CD (approx 650MB) can hold an optimistic 11 hours of digital sound at 128kbps, a DVD can hold almost 90. PER SIDE.
I think we're going to need a better menuing system.
> OS X may be cool, and innovative, but Apple's
> 5% market share means that it won't be a
> Touchstone. The Beatle's weren't some little
> secret band that only a handful of people had
> heard about, that was recommended by word of
> mouth. "Sgt Pepper's" was mass-market
> domination, when every damn tune on the album
> would end up being a single.
Granted, I wasn't around in the late 60's to witness the release of "Sgt. Pepper." But I have had it described to me as "seeing a new color for the first time." The music was so original, and so good, that it totally reshaped the music scene for years to come. All the tracks chained together to create a coherent "concert experience." Each and every song made use of synthesizer effects in some way. These and many other concepts were quite innovative for those days.
This, I believe, was the purpose of the analogy. OS X is supposed to be a great innovation that it will change the computer scene for years to come. Market share has nothing to do with it.
The music of The Beatles isn't nearly as prevalent today as it was 30 years ago. But before you stop to question the analogy, flip on a television and watch a Phillips commercial. Or The Wonder Years. Or thousands of other artists and producers who were entertained, inspired, and changed by four lads with bad hair from Liverpool.:-)
With the `low, low prices' (yes, K-Mart reference intended) of AMD's new processor, the Thunderbird, do we really *need* to overclock these babies? According to JC (http://www.jc-news.com/pc) and The Register, the price of the 1GHz Athlon will be dropping to $500 in September (it will be the Thunderbird core by then), with the 800MHz Athlon dropping to less than $200.
::Point::
At 4MHz/dollar on such a nice, well-designed part, why bother? For reference, my Celeron-II 566 @ 850MHz gave me 7MHz/dollar when I bought it, and that's a 150% overclock, but it's a piece of junk with no SMP and 4-way set-associative cache (opposed to Thunderbird's 16-way). I've always "rationalized" (why is it that [geeks] feel they can rationalize [overclocking]?) my overclocking madness by saying that I "have a lot to get Intel back for," the 8088, the 486SX, the Pentium MMX, etc. But at this point in the game, AMD isn't trying to saturate the market, or confuse us, or bleed us for every cent we're worth [like Intel]. Let's buy their silicon and run with it.
::Counter-Point::
On the other hand, only a select few people overclock their computers. I would say less than 1% of all the people who purchase new computers yearly and that's probably generous. Was it really worth the time and effort of AMD, Tom Pabst, et cetera to stop 10,000 or so people from getting an extra 100 or 150MHz out of their shiny new AMD CPU?
::Inference::
If anything, overclocking HELPS the market. Look at how many mainboards Abit and Soyo have sold over the last three years because of the incredible overclocking goodness of the i440BX chipset. People with a Pentium II 300 decided to go ahead and make that upgrade to 600MHz because they could do it for $200 or $300 instead of $500 like it would to buy all `kosher' parts. Otherwise they may have waited another year. Cheaper prices, more CPU purchases, more mainboards, more fans, more slotkets, etc. Basic economics, right?
::Hypothesis::
Would AMD have ever made it this far had their loyalists not bought the AMD 586 to overclock it, the K6-2 to overclock it, and the Athlon Classic to overclock it for less than it would cost to buy an Intel part?
To make things stickier, what if you want to write it for an open source platform? What's your rationalization and justification at that point?
How can you sell a product for $500 if it uses Unix, Perl, Apache, and mySQL?
Alakaboo
Tripwire, ColdFusion, and Mission: Impossible
on
Tripwire Going GPL
·
· Score: 2
The fact that they are using ColdFusion to sell a SECURITY AND INTEGRITY software package does not ease my mind.;-)
More seriously, what is this going to do for me that I can't do with ipchains, tcpdump, and chmod o-w? Do it for me? That would be nice, especially if it's going to be free. However, it has been my experience in the past that adding yet another factor (software suite/daemon) to the security equation is the last thing you want to do.
IMHO a system will never be truly safe unless it's unplugged from the wall. Even then you need at least one inept guard at the front door to watch over the physical hardware. I think the reason companies hire network and systems administrators is to make sure offsite backups happen every four hours, and that the permissions are set properly, and there are no security holes in the system software, etc.
But again, on the other hand, if I'm running a network of servers that spans the country, or even the world, it would be nice to have a summary screen saying "Tom Cruise just stole the corporate NOC list. Please attend immediately." At that point, however, I think it would be reasonable for my parent company to spot me a grand or ten to purchase said software suite. No need for open source here.
*sigh* Is it just me or do people not make sense sometimes?:-)
(disclaimer: yes, I realize it's probably just me)
It is probably far too late for me to be posting this, but here goes.
I was having a conversation with a friend about an hour ago about AMD and remarked that the Athlon has been very good for them in more ways than one. The success of this product will definitely attract more engineering talent from colleges and even other companies like IDT/Centaur and Intel. What this basically means that the K8 will be better than the K7, and so on. You can identify this effect already just by the improvements made to the K75 (Athlon Classic 0.18mu) core for the Thunderbird/Duron product lines.
I think this definitely involves VIA and Centaur. I wonder what happened to those engineers who worked so hard on the Joshua core only to have it scrapped in favor of this Centaur core. Sure, it's darn skippy that it'll run on 10W and produce next to no heat, but (as another poster remarked) this is a desktop, not a handheld CPU. If I were VIA (and I'm obviously not:) I would have kept Joshua for the Cyrix III and created a whole new division to 'compete' with Transmeta, Intel, and all the MIPS platforms for the mobile market. That would have been a much better solution, hopefully they see it now and take steps to rectify the situation.
VIA has done some nice work in the past, but IMHO they have their heads up their respective rears. The memory performance of the Apollo Pro 133(A) and KX133 chipsets has been downright awful up until very recently, and even now is still slightly less than the performance of a BX-133 (and even BX-100) platform. What good is forming a new standard (PC-133 and soon PC-1600 and PC-2100) if your chipsets *barely* support it? Not to mention crummy ATA66 disk performance and this bogus 'incompatibility' with the SocketA platform. Pfaugh. If any corporation stands the risk of becoming "the next Intel" it's VIA, not AMD. Truth be known, the only reason VIA is alive today is NOT because of AMD, but because of the Intel i820+Rambus fiasco. That's my $0.02 at least.
At any rate, back to my original point. If you were an computer/electrical engineering student with a career path leading straight to Intel, would the recent 'outbreak' of Transmeta, AMD, and VIA change your mind at all? I think so. I also think that many of the engineers at Intel are considering a lateral career movement. It's just a suspicion though.:)
Why improve the vacuum tube? Why develop switches and 1GHz Ethernet? Why even bother having computers in the first place?
Okay, so maybe liquid nitro overclocking isn't very revolutionary, but it falls under the same umbrella that the above topics do. Curiousity + [moderate] intelligence + interesting subject. "What would happen if..." You know?
As far as "why overclocking" in general... well, I just bought a Celeron-II 566 for $80, put it on an Abit SlotKET !!! and a Golden Orb, flipped a switch and BINGO an (albiet crippled) 850MHz Coppermine for about $100, $110. That's more than 8MHz on the dollar. Compared to a Pentium III 700 (which has about the same performance) for $250 or $260 (again, including slotket and cooling fan). With the money I saved I bought a GeForce.
Morals... I'm a happy owner of an 8088, an 80486SX, and a Pentium MMX, so I have plenty to get Intel back for.:)
As an aside: The BX chipset overclocked to 133MHz FSB (it officially only supports 66 and 100) is still the top-performing platform out of the Apollo Pro 133A, the Intel i815, and the Intel i840 w/ Rambus. Overclocking helps here, too.
Nerds buy the newest components so they have a fast machine. If they can have a fast machine on the cheap, so much the better. If they have some extra cash to spend and they want the fastest machine in the world, they buy flourinert and LN2. What can I say? It's cool.
It's going to be very interesting to see how the Sledgehammer stacks up against the Merced. While it's true that it might be "the easiest kernel port ever," the IA64 assembler code for the kernel is coming along just fine. Why bother making a processor that can run 32-bit as fast when everything has been ported to 64-bit already?
Now, if the 64-bit portion of Sledgehammer runs as fast (or faster, knowing some of the tricks AMD has learned with the K7) as the Merced's 64-bit... that will really be the deciding factor. Welcome to Slugfest 2001, started even before the year is over. hehe
I have to admit, the prospect of being able to switch between 32 and 64-bit code on the same CPU without a penalty is somewhat attractive.
At this point, Intel became involved with several lawsuits because they didn't want AMD and Cyrix to relabel and resell their chips under the x86 names anymore, so they switched to:
The primary differences between the original, deschutes, mendocino, and coppermine cores are: 1) Size of L1 cache 2) Size, speed, and location of L2 cache 3) Die layout 4) Packaging 5) x86 enhancements (MMX, SSE)
Traditionally, a chip attains a new architecture identifier (ie, 486, 586) when the actual processing path changes. The Athlon was considered 786 material simply because they made massive improvements to the floating point unit, and because it utilized a completely new bus protocol (EV6 vs. GTL+). All of Intel's processors starting with the Pentium Pro up through the Pentium III Coppermine are considered 'P6' or '686' by many simply because it hasn't changed.
Take a Pentium Pro 200 and a Coppermine and do the following: 1) Downclock to 200, 66MHz FSB 2) Disable the L1 and L2 caches 3) Disable the x86 enchancements (MMX and SSE)
And although I am no engineer and I do not work for Intel, I can almost guarantee that both processors will give you the same performance.
If you try the same for any scenario, 386 vs. 486, Pentium II vs. Williamette (P-4), whatever, you will probably achieve entirely different performance marks. The Williamette, from what I've seen, is a completely revamped x86 architecture.
On the other hand, many people prefer to separate generations by per-clock performance, including cache changes and x86 extensions. The then you would have Pentium = P5, Pentium MMX/Pentium Pro/Pentium II/Pentium III (Katmai) = P6, Pentium III (Coppermine) = P7, and Pentium 4 = P8. The problem with this method is that it is open for interpretation. It's obvious to me that the Coppermine cannot be grouped with the original Pentium II, but Joe Q. Techhead may not agree with me.
Or we could take Intel's word for it (which is what they obviously want us to do) and believe that the Pentium, Pentium II, Pentium III, and Pentium 4 processors each have their own bevy of industry-dominating performance.:)
This whole deal with the satellite FTP server gives new meaning to the term "web SPACE." Okay, okay, I couldn't resist.
Seriously though, what implications will this have on offsite storage, secure data warehousing, etc.? Kind of hard to sabotage that, at least once it gets off the ground. "Sir, I just completed a traceroute on our target, and I think we have a problem..."
It's a scripting implementation of a visual implementation of a language that Microsoft stole from someone else who should have had it terminated while it was still in the womb.
Let's look at the basics: 1) It's dot-syntax, in a way that it's far more like JavaScript than Java. dot-syntax languages make sense until you get about five levels down, then it's just confusing. (parent.frameA.location.form['a'].options.index.go atAss.com.dot.dotdotdotaAAHHH!!!!) 2) There's about five ways to do everything (like Perl) except none of them work (unlike Perl). I spent about three hours trying to figure out how to do a query back in Visual InterDev 1.0. I tried the online help example. I tried the other online help example. I tried the example out of the book. I tried the example online. I tried an example out of a newsgroup. None of them work! Finally I wrote my own using an average of one line from each example. That worked. But only for 'select' statements. 3) The tool (Visual InterDev) sucks. And it's expensive. 4) The operating system (Windows NT) sucks. And it's expensive. 5) The webserver (IIS) sucks. And calling for tech support is expensive.
Slashdot Mirror
Okay, looking good...
Converted my 80MB mailbox just fine...
Started up fast... real nice...
What's this? Product activation?? Netscape account (passport!!) required? What? *FRNAK!*
AAARRRRRGGHHHH!!!
btw: How come I don't see many touting that the 1.2 Ghz Athlon is some how lacking in ability when compared to the 1.8 Ghz Pentium 4?
Because the 1.2GHz Athlon4+DDR is as fast, if not faster, in most real world applications* than the 1.8GHz Pentium4+RDRAM. No one touts that it's lacking because it's not.
Here are some Linux benchmarks (do some sniffing around for some Win32 benchmarks, they're everywhere) that illustrate my point:
http://www.gamepc.com/reviews/hardware_review.as p? review=p4xlsmp&page=1&mscssid=&tp=
* The P4 platform has more memory bandwidth, but contemporary apps don't need it. The only thing that consistently runs faster on the Pentium 4 is Q3A. :-)
That's all well and good.
I swung by "Hacking Truths," his website, and briefly read his Perl journal, "Everything you need to know about Perl."
As one of his "Hacking Truths," he makes the point that the difference between subroutines and functions (in Perl) is that functions come with the Perl interpreter. This is false, in Perl nobody gives a damn, up to and including Larry, and the built-in functions are called built-in functions.
I suppose if you wanted to get technical (from a broad, programming prospective) functions do things to data and return values, while subroutines perform a list of commands with a specific purpose.
I feel better... no 15 year old is going to put me out of work! He even uses DOS Perl, not even real Unix Perl! Yeah, and he misuses shift() to parse ARGV! That's a terrible way to teach it!
(Oh no... I'm turning into one of those vindictive, cranky old men... And I'm only 20! Help me!)
--
A warm night, a rumpled bed, crickets chirping outside, the scents of love's aftermath. She snuggled against him. Her locks spilled over the arm he had brought around her shoulders. "I've thought of what I want on my tombstone," he laughed.
"Each man dies
And ends his day.
Here he lies
Who used to lay."
"I won't get that after all," Guthrie said.
"But I will remember it," the robot said.
"Right. That's enough. Listen," Guthrie hissed. "I want
"Strange," the robot confessed. "A kind of--lightness? I'm an abstraction, I think." He sought for words. "But there is a, a drive yet, and I'm fond of my old friends, my old memories, yours. Not quite the same way as before--as you've been--but--but No, you were not very kind to Sheila today."
"Take care
"I will. She has." This also the robot shared. "Okay, what've you got to tell me about Fireball?"
Guthrie gathered strength.
"They're swarming around you already, aren't they?" he began. "Advice, requests, demands.... And you know
The seizure contorted him.
The robot knelt and held him close, mummy against metal, while it ran its course. "Shall I ring for help?" the robot asked. Anyone else would have done so immediately.
The expected "No" shivered to him. His vibrosensors felt the racking heartbeat, his chemosensors drank the swell of clam-cold sweat. "Hell with that. Never mind."
The spasm ended. The robot lowered the man to the pillow. Guthrie's right hand trembled toward him. "Stars," Guthrie pleaded. "Keep us aimed
"That night at the lake is in me too," the robot assured him.
The air was utterly still and unbelieveable clear, especially since the altitude was not much. Above the woods, stars were beyond counting. Their reflections gleamed everywhere on the lake. Anson and Juliana had the campsite to themselves; in those days, you had to backpack to here. They stripped and went for a swim. The water caressed them, almost warm. At each stroke it ran back down into itself with a clear clinking like laughter. They swam among stars. "Someday we'll do this for real," Juliana said. "Promise?"
"Good," Guthrie whispered. "Grand. That's what counts." He rested until he could speak a bit louder. "I'll drink to theat. The Scotch
"Better not," the robot counseled.
"I'm still in command."
The robot yielded. "You are." He crossed the room, fetched the bottle from a drawer as directed, returned, and poured into a tumbler meant for water. Kneeling again, he lifted the knaggy head and brought rim to lips.
"The stars," Guthrie mumbled.
Curtains rippled evening-lit in a gathering breeze. The grandfather clock reached another hour and boomed it away.
Alakaboo
From what you've just told me, you have a linear combination C, made up of single frequencies A and B. You can remove B to get A and vice versa, because (as you said) it is linear and can be decomposed. But if you start taking it apart, you won't have C any more, you'll have parts of C. So what does it matter where in the frequency spectrum A and B are, it will still affect C (the resultant sound that you WANT to have in the end). Besides, can't sound waves resonant with each other to produce new sounds? Isn't that what harmonics are all about?
You can email me if you'd rather. Or just ignore me, that works too.
Alakaboo
There was a fellow back in the day, when the recording industry was beginning to become mainstream, and he designed some of the most brilliant devices and consoles, the principles of which are still in use today. He had a theory about music and recording which has pretty much been proven by modern means, and it goes something like this:
Say you're in a small room with another person and the two of you are having a conversation. As the sound of your speaking leaves your mouth and resonates inside your chest, it generates sound waves that flow away from your body, almost like water. (Patience, I'm getting there.
Now the trick here is to place a single microphone in the room and capture all of the above discribed chaos going on. And you really need to, because this guy's theory says that the frequencies that are NOT audible to the human ear will resonate and affect the net sound of the frequencies that we can.
This effect becomes more potent when you have an entire rock band or symphony orchestra performing a piece. Sure there are sounds that you will not be able to hear, but those inaudible sounds are what makes the difference between watching them perform live at the theatre or in a bar, and sitting at home and listening to a recording. It's just not the same.
As if the trouble with COLLECTING all the sounds isn't enough, now we have trouble REPRODUCING these sounds. When a song is dubbed to tape, it loses an upper and lower bound of frequencies because of a limitation of the medium. When the song is pressed into vinyl, is loses another set of frequencies. By the time it makes it to CD, it's crammed down to 20Hz-20KHz (or so, I don't know what the newer CDs are capable of) instead of the (potential) 0-undef it would be if you were standing right there when the sounds were originally produced.
The fallacy of music compression is the idea that unused (or nearly unused) frequencies can be removed without detriment to the quality of the music. This is wholly untrue, and I dare anyone who says otherwise to take a classical piece on vinyl or an older song from an LP and compare it to a 128Kbps CD-rip of the same recording.
Now, that doesn't mean I don't enjoy being able to store every song The Beatles ever recorded on two CDs. I just wanted to make the point that while it's convenient, it sounds terrible compared to what the artist inteded you to hear from the beginning.
Alakaboo
I bought a Slot-1 i440BX* and Celeron 366 (O/C to 550), later upgraded to a Celeron-II 566 (O/C to 850), and now I'm looking forward to the Tualatin for my next upgrade. Because, amazingly enough, the i440BX still outperforms the i815 and Apollo Pro chipsets at 133MHz FSB, and it will be able to handle the new voltage requirements to boot.
Talk about your long-lifed chipset!
But aside from that, there's a bundle to be made with the "next generation" (sic) Socket-370 boards with the lower voltage regs. Upgraders don't want the P-IV, they want a new motherboard and CPU that'll work with their current PSU and RAM. New computer buyers don't want the P-IV, it still costs too much. Compared to Athlon hardware, at least.
Hmm... rambling. </post>
* Abit BE6-II
Alakaboo
Devolved horns?
Alakaboo
I don't know chromatic in real life, and not real well at PerlMonks, either. But every post, every idea, damn near every word from that man's fingertips is genuine and thoughtful. He's good people.
So write him up, ask him a Perl question, whatever. Get your own opinion.
Alakaboo
> Power Management features? How can they claim
> increased battery life when switching to Linux?
I'm going to make an incredible intuitive leap here and infer that Linux uses less CPU on average and requires less disk activity than Windows 2000, and therefore consumes less battery power. This is probably what they based their "benchmarks" on... when the computer is actually in use (not sleeping / hibernating / paper-weighting), the battery lasts X hours.
Alakaboo
Actually, I was looking through this, and I couldn't find any of my old haunts... then I remembered that our area code changed in like 1995. My God, it's been a long time.
Alakaboo
That's why you hook the UPS up to the serial port on the machine, so when it starts to die a violent death it'll signal the system to do a clean shutdown. Of course, this is assuming you bought the nice, well-engineered UPS as opposed to the dirt cheap ones you get at Best Buy for $40!
The nice UPS units do a few things to insure this doesn't happen:
Doesn't just wait for the source power to go out, checks the internal power for sudden drops.
If one dies, the next one struggles forth long enough to send the shutdown signal.
IIRC, the rechargeables they use in those bad boys don't just die when they have a problem, they slowly fade out. Plenty of time.
This doesn't take into account the messy situation that occurs when someone yanks the plug. But if this ever happens, it's time to get a new network engineer/sysadmin/intern.
One last idea: plug the UPS into a UPS into the wall. Mua!
Alakaboo
That being said, I would like to take this opportunity to recommend that you read the other two or three dozen novels/series/sagas he has written. Those who liked _Ender's Game_ but not the sequels will definitely enjoy _Treason_, the first few _Homecoming_ novels, _Songbird_, and potentially a few others. YMMV, browse around. If you liked _Speaker for the Dead_, _Xenocide_, et al, you will probably enjoy reading everything this man has ever written, including _Alvin Maker_, _The Worthing Saga_, _Redemption of Christopher Columbus_, and probably most of his shorter novellas, like _Hart's Hope_.
Be forewarned, if you care about this sort of thing, he is a Mormon and there is a very strong, spiritual undertone to almost all of his books. Probably the most obvious example of this is _Lost Boys_. No, nothing related to the vampire movie. But a great story nonetheless. {grin}
Good luck. Check out http://www.hatrack.com for more info about OSC. I hope you enjoy his works as much as I do.
Alakaboo
I think we're going to need a better menuing system.
Alakaboo
Alakaboo
> 5% market share means that it won't be a
> Touchstone. The Beatle's weren't some little
> secret band that only a handful of people had
> heard about, that was recommended by word of
> mouth. "Sgt Pepper's" was mass-market
> domination, when every damn tune on the album
> would end up being a single.
Granted, I wasn't around in the late 60's to witness the release of "Sgt. Pepper." But I have had it described to me as "seeing a new color for the first time." The music was so original, and so good, that it totally reshaped the music scene for years to come. All the tracks chained together to create a coherent "concert experience." Each and every song made use of synthesizer effects in some way. These and many other concepts were quite innovative for those days.
This, I believe, was the purpose of the analogy. OS X is supposed to be a great innovation that it will change the computer scene for years to come. Market share has nothing to do with it.
The music of The Beatles isn't nearly as prevalent today as it was 30 years ago. But before you stop to question the analogy, flip on a television and watch a Phillips commercial. Or The Wonder Years. Or thousands of other artists and producers who were entertained, inspired, and changed by four lads with bad hair from Liverpool.
Alakaboo
::Point::
At 4MHz/dollar on such a nice, well-designed part, why bother? For reference, my Celeron-II 566 @ 850MHz gave me 7MHz/dollar when I bought it, and that's a 150% overclock, but it's a piece of junk with no SMP and 4-way set-associative cache (opposed to Thunderbird's 16-way). I've always "rationalized" (why is it that [geeks] feel they can rationalize [overclocking]?) my overclocking madness by saying that I "have a lot to get Intel back for," the 8088, the 486SX, the Pentium MMX, etc. But at this point in the game, AMD isn't trying to saturate the market, or confuse us, or bleed us for every cent we're worth [like Intel]. Let's buy their silicon and run with it.
::Counter-Point::
On the other hand, only a select few people overclock their computers. I would say less than 1% of all the people who purchase new computers yearly and that's probably generous. Was it really worth the time and effort of AMD, Tom Pabst, et cetera to stop 10,000 or so people from getting an extra 100 or 150MHz out of their shiny new AMD CPU?
::Inference::
If anything, overclocking HELPS the market. Look at how many mainboards Abit and Soyo have sold over the last three years because of the incredible overclocking goodness of the i440BX chipset. People with a Pentium II 300 decided to go ahead and make that upgrade to 600MHz because they could do it for $200 or $300 instead of $500 like it would to buy all `kosher' parts. Otherwise they may have waited another year. Cheaper prices, more CPU purchases, more mainboards, more fans, more slotkets, etc. Basic economics, right?
::Hypothesis::
Would AMD have ever made it this far had their loyalists not bought the AMD 586 to overclock it, the K6-2 to overclock it, and the Athlon Classic to overclock it for less than it would cost to buy an Intel part?
Humm, humm.
Alakaboo
How can you sell a product for $500 if it uses Unix, Perl, Apache, and mySQL?
Alakaboo
More seriously, what is this going to do for me that I can't do with ipchains, tcpdump, and chmod o-w? Do it for me? That would be nice, especially if it's going to be free. However, it has been my experience in the past that adding yet another factor (software suite/daemon) to the security equation is the last thing you want to do.
IMHO a system will never be truly safe unless it's unplugged from the wall. Even then you need at least one inept guard at the front door to watch over the physical hardware. I think the reason companies hire network and systems administrators is to make sure offsite backups happen every four hours, and that the permissions are set properly, and there are no security holes in the system software, etc.
But again, on the other hand, if I'm running a network of servers that spans the country, or even the world, it would be nice to have a summary screen saying "Tom Cruise just stole the corporate NOC list. Please attend immediately." At that point, however, I think it would be reasonable for my parent company to spot me a grand or ten to purchase said software suite. No need for open source here.
*sigh* Is it just me or do people not make sense sometimes?
(disclaimer: yes, I realize it's probably just me)
Alakaboo
I was having a conversation with a friend about an hour ago about AMD and remarked that the Athlon has been very good for them in more ways than one. The success of this product will definitely attract more engineering talent from colleges and even other companies like IDT/Centaur and Intel. What this basically means that the K8 will be better than the K7, and so on. You can identify this effect already just by the improvements made to the K75 (Athlon Classic 0.18mu) core for the Thunderbird/Duron product lines.
I think this definitely involves VIA and Centaur. I wonder what happened to those engineers who worked so hard on the Joshua core only to have it scrapped in favor of this Centaur core. Sure, it's darn skippy that it'll run on 10W and produce next to no heat, but (as another poster remarked) this is a desktop, not a handheld CPU. If I were VIA (and I'm obviously not
VIA has done some nice work in the past, but IMHO they have their heads up their respective rears. The memory performance of the Apollo Pro 133(A) and KX133 chipsets has been downright awful up until very recently, and even now is still slightly less than the performance of a BX-133 (and even BX-100) platform. What good is forming a new standard (PC-133 and soon PC-1600 and PC-2100) if your chipsets *barely* support it? Not to mention crummy ATA66 disk performance and this bogus 'incompatibility' with the SocketA platform. Pfaugh. If any corporation stands the risk of becoming "the next Intel" it's VIA, not AMD. Truth be known, the only reason VIA is alive today is NOT because of AMD, but because of the Intel i820+Rambus fiasco. That's my $0.02 at least.
At any rate, back to my original point. If you were an computer/electrical engineering student with a career path leading straight to Intel, would the recent 'outbreak' of Transmeta, AMD, and VIA change your mind at all? I think so. I also think that many of the engineers at Intel are considering a lateral career movement. It's just a suspicion though.
Food for thought.
Alakaboo
Why develop switches and 1GHz Ethernet?
Why even bother having computers in the first place?
Okay, so maybe liquid nitro overclocking isn't very revolutionary, but it falls under the same umbrella that the above topics do. Curiousity + [moderate] intelligence + interesting subject. "What would happen if..." You know?
As far as "why overclocking" in general... well, I just bought a Celeron-II 566 for $80, put it on an Abit SlotKET !!! and a Golden Orb, flipped a switch and BINGO an (albiet crippled) 850MHz Coppermine for about $100, $110. That's more than 8MHz on the dollar. Compared to a Pentium III 700 (which has about the same performance) for $250 or $260 (again, including slotket and cooling fan). With the money I saved I bought a GeForce.
Morals... I'm a happy owner of an 8088, an 80486SX, and a Pentium MMX, so I have plenty to get Intel back for.
As an aside: The BX chipset overclocked to 133MHz FSB (it officially only supports 66 and 100) is still the top-performing platform out of the Apollo Pro 133A, the Intel i815, and the Intel i840 w/ Rambus. Overclocking helps here, too.
Nerds buy the newest components so they have a fast machine. If they can have a fast machine on the cheap, so much the better. If they have some extra cash to spend and they want the fastest machine in the world, they buy flourinert and LN2. What can I say? It's cool.
Alakaboo
Now, if the 64-bit portion of Sledgehammer runs as fast (or faster, knowing some of the tricks AMD has learned with the K7) as the Merced's 64-bit... that will really be the deciding factor. Welcome to Slugfest 2001, started even before the year is over. hehe
I have to admit, the prospect of being able to switch between 32 and 64-bit code on the same CPU without a penalty is somewhat attractive.
Alakaboo
80486DX - Internal FPU
At this point, Intel became involved with several lawsuits because they didn't want AMD and Cyrix to relabel and resell their chips under the x86 names anymore, so they switched to:
Pentium (P5-4) - On-board cache
Pentium MMX (P5-5C) - MMX
Pentium Pro (P6) - On-die cache
Pentium II (P6; Deschutes, Mendocino) - On-card cache
Celeron (P6; Mendocino) - No L2 cache
Celeron-A (P6; Mendocino) - On-die cache
Pentium !!! (P6; Katmai) - On-card cache, KNI/SSE
Pentium !!! (P6; Coppermine) - On-die cache
Celeron II (P6; Coppermine) - On-die cache
Pentium 4 (P7; Williamette)
The primary differences between the original, deschutes, mendocino, and coppermine cores are:
1) Size of L1 cache
2) Size, speed, and location of L2 cache
3) Die layout
4) Packaging
5) x86 enhancements (MMX, SSE)
These changes ultimately resulted in:
1) Higher attainable clock speeds
2) Higher per-clock performance
Traditionally, a chip attains a new architecture identifier (ie, 486, 586) when the actual processing path changes. The Athlon was considered 786 material simply because they made massive improvements to the floating point unit, and because it utilized a completely new bus protocol (EV6 vs. GTL+). All of Intel's processors starting with the Pentium Pro up through the Pentium III Coppermine are considered 'P6' or '686' by many simply because it hasn't changed.
Take a Pentium Pro 200 and a Coppermine and do the following:
1) Downclock to 200, 66MHz FSB
2) Disable the L1 and L2 caches
3) Disable the x86 enchancements (MMX and SSE)
And although I am no engineer and I do not work for Intel, I can almost guarantee that both processors will give you the same performance.
If you try the same for any scenario, 386 vs. 486, Pentium II vs. Williamette (P-4), whatever, you will probably achieve entirely different performance marks. The Williamette, from what I've seen, is a completely revamped x86 architecture.
On the other hand, many people prefer to separate generations by per-clock performance, including cache changes and x86 extensions. The then you would have Pentium = P5, Pentium MMX/Pentium Pro/Pentium II/Pentium III (Katmai) = P6, Pentium III (Coppermine) = P7, and Pentium 4 = P8. The problem with this method is that it is open for interpretation. It's obvious to me that the Coppermine cannot be grouped with the original Pentium II, but Joe Q. Techhead may not agree with me.
Or we could take Intel's word for it (which is what they obviously want us to do) and believe that the Pentium, Pentium II, Pentium III, and Pentium 4 processors each have their own bevy of industry-dominating performance.
Enjoy the flamebait.
Alakaboo
Seriously though, what implications will this have on offsite storage, secure data warehousing, etc.? Kind of hard to sabotage that, at least once it gets off the ground. "Sir, I just completed a traceroute on our target, and I think we have a problem..."
Alakaboo
It's a scripting implementation of a visual implementation of a language that Microsoft stole from someone else who should have had it terminated while it was still in the womb.
Let's look at the basics:
1) It's dot-syntax, in a way that it's far more like JavaScript than Java. dot-syntax languages make sense until you get about five levels down, then it's just confusing. (parent.frameA.location.form['a'].options.index.g
2) There's about five ways to do everything (like Perl) except none of them work (unlike Perl). I spent about three hours trying to figure out how to do a query back in Visual InterDev 1.0. I tried the online help example. I tried the other online help example. I tried the example out of the book. I tried the example online. I tried an example out of a newsgroup. None of them work! Finally I wrote my own using an average of one line from each example. That worked. But only for 'select' statements.
3) The tool (Visual InterDev) sucks. And it's expensive.
4) The operating system (Windows NT) sucks. And it's expensive.
5) The webserver (IIS) sucks. And calling for tech support is expensive.
But out of all of these, one reason stands out:
6) THERE ARE BETTER SOLUTIONS!!
</rant>
Alakaboo