Is anyone else deliberately NOT watcing the Olympics in light of this corporate assholery? I'm in the UK, where we're not being censored, but I'm not going to encourage the corporate ad campaign that's masquerading as a sports event by tuning in.
If you're watching enough TV for it to be an issue you've already lost.
The way that an insurance company justifies its premiums is by saying "you're in group X who has and average rate of claims Y and they cost $Z per claim, on average". If those numbers go down, you should be paying less.
What happens if they put more limitations on teen drivers? "You can only drive between your home and work or school and not have any passengers" would pretty much all but eliminate accidents involving minors. Would they still be justified in charging the same premiums as before because they're making the world a better place?
Based on my experience with insurance companies, I don't really expect to see them use this to lower premiums, just to raise them and have excuses to terminate policies.
A great example of the shadiness of insurance companies happened a few years ago in Washington State. The insurance companies lobbied heavily to limit driving privliges for those 16-18 (limited number of minors as passengers, restrictions on driving after dark and whatnot) citing studies saying that it'd reduce the accident rates by a significant margin, which it did. The problem is that they never adjusted the insurance rates downwards to reflect these lowered accident rates, effectively giving their profits a big boost.
They aren't discussing a PC. They're discussing an XBox or NAS.
Isn't one of the requirements for a patent that it not be obvious to someone reasonably skilled in the art? Taking useful techniques from servers and PCs and applying them to a console or other computing device probably counts as obvious - the only real jump for the whole X-Box was to base a console on commodity PC technology. Once it became a general purpose computing device (however limited its intended use is), all these 'advancements' become obvious.
Why not just have the cost of filing patents grow with the number filed? It'd cut down on the shotgun patenting if you had exponential increases in price after 10 (or 100, or whatever) without having any real effect on the little guy.
Without mentioning system specs, this is a pointless post. Are we talking some guys coming from 800MHz P3s or do y'all have 2.4GHz machines?
I'd suspect that your original CPU was somewhat lacking; 2-2.5GHz seems to be the the low end of what you can get away with for a respectable gaming machine these days. Once you reach this point, you're going to see a big difference jumping from your 5200 to a 5900.
Great. We've got a dozen different hardware sites reciting press releases, specifications and mfgr's performance promises, all the while speculating about what the hardware may be capable of. Until somebody can actually say "I've been playing with one of these and they're pretty nifty", we might as well just have links point to pressrealease.nvidia.com.
Why are these things on any sort of publicly accessable network? They should, at least, be on a private network that's physically separate from everything they don't absolutely need to talk to & firewalled all to hell.
You're missing the point. The machines in the cluster, SGI Altixes, do things that -can't- be done with any available Opteron systems; each node is a 512 processor machine. This means you can spawn of 512 threads and give each one its own CPU without having to move off the system....and the Itanium2 wipes the floor with pretty much anything else on the market when it comes to floating point calculations.
Considering that the PCIe spec allows for ports at 32x, I don't think you've got a limitation of 20 channels on it. From what I've seen, the only reason you've have any sort of limit is going to be chipset dependant.
As for needing a special mobo for it, you're going to end up with a high-end workstation board if you want a pair of 16x ports unless SLI sparks enough consumer demand to bring the feature down to consumer boards. Even then, it's probably only going to be found on relatively high-end kit.
"Supports 2 TB" could mean "uses 41-bit addressing" (2^41 B = 2TB). Current IDE interfaces with 48 bit addressing "support" up to 256TB of storage but you're not going to see that kind of density on a single device any time soon.
As for replacement of mechanical HDDs - all current non-volatile rewritable storage has a limited number of write cycles, making them less than ideal for HDD replacement (imagine the damage your swapfile would do to one). If somebody had figured out a way to work around this, I'm sure it would be the #1 thing mentioned in the press release.
The fact that they don't even have a plan for how to do multi-arch AMD64 kinda scares me. I recently had to install Fedora on a machine at work 'cuz Debian's idea of multi-arch is "install 32b in a chroot & work from there".
I'm thinking it's some sort of failed attempt at bandwidth limiting...
I can load the main page, but if I try to reload or go to any of the toplevel section pages, it 503s on me, but I can follow any of the links to stories, it works just fine.
Where have you been, and where do people find these crazy screaming HSFs for stock-speed CPUs?
The first thing to do is stop buying cheap cases/power-supplies. It costs money to make things quiet; extra sensors to throttle fan speeds & quality bearings add a few $$$s to the cost of a unit.
With that said, I just threw together an Athon64 3200+ with the stock AMD heatsink into one of these and I couldn't hear it over the ventilation system. This is under full load, not sitting there idle with some sort of CPU throttling in place. It's not quite the fanless but it definately runs more quietly & cooly than your Duron 1.3.
If only specialists need faster CPUs, what's the justification for pushing SMP machines into home machines? I can't see the average home user needing multi-processor systems any more than they need 3MHz CPUs...
Moore's law says nothign about clock speed, only transistor counts. Even with the same clock speed there are several ways of boosting chip performace that use extra transistors:
more cache - Lets the CPU spend less time sitting around waiting for data & doing nothing. When you consider that most CPUs on the market have cores that run 10-15+ times faster than memory this is a big deal. AMD says that doubling the cache from 512KB to 1MB on a 2.2GHz Athlon64 moves it from a 3200+ to a 3400+.
more functional Units - The chips are already superscalar, why not make them moreso & let them do more in parallel. Of course this would probably require...
more registers -Right along the same lines as more cache, if the CPU can get to data faster, it can do more work. Of course, creating more user-visible registers can create all kinds of incompatabilities, superscalar CPUs can do some interesting tricks with register renaming to gain the benefit of extra registers without breaking compatability.
Better SIMD(vector) units - While we're on teh subject of parallelism, why not talk about vector units? x86 is lagging way behind PPC in vector capabilities. Look at how much AltiVec helps out the new Macs.
Dual Core CPUs - Everyone's talking about going dual core RSN, so this one is definately going to be happening soon. Everyone runs multitasking OSes these days, why not have multitasking CPUs?
The problem is that most of these methods introduce parallelism into the system; software that only has a single CPU-heavy thread isn't going to run any faster with 2 cores than it would with one.
Exactly. In a sense, it's a very good measure of how much code a programmer can work on in a given period of time, a good indicator of the ammount of work that can be done.
OTOH, it's a poor measure of useful work, or work done right. Something that takes 100 lines of decent C might be doable in 10 lines of Python or 1000 lines of ASM or 500 lines of poorly written C or 50 lines of C that ignores important cases....and god forbid we try to use it for estimating projects before they've been started. Thinking of facing somebody that could say "Lets see... I think we can do this project with $BIGFOO KLOC" with a straight face scares me.
Slashdot Mirror
This may be the first time I've ever heard anything positive about OS/400 or the AS/400 hardware.
Well, other than "It just works. And keeps working".
I've got the mod points, but can't find "-1 : Get over it".
How do you think I feel? I have fire bound to CTRL, jump on ALT and look down on DEL.
Rocket-jumping hurts.
This may be the first time a website has been slashdotted from simply being mentioned in a reply. The lure of free pron is not to be underestimated.
If you're watching enough TV for it to be an issue you've already lost.
The way that an insurance company justifies its premiums is by saying "you're in group X who has and average rate of claims Y and they cost $Z per claim, on average". If those numbers go down, you should be paying less.
What happens if they put more limitations on teen drivers? "You can only drive between your home and work or school and not have any passengers" would pretty much all but eliminate accidents involving minors. Would they still be justified in charging the same premiums as before because they're making the world a better place?
Based on my experience with insurance companies, I don't really expect to see them use this to lower premiums, just to raise them and have excuses to terminate policies.
A great example of the shadiness of insurance companies happened a few years ago in Washington State. The insurance companies lobbied heavily to limit driving privliges for those 16-18 (limited number of minors as passengers, restrictions on driving after dark and whatnot) citing studies saying that it'd reduce the accident rates by a significant margin, which it did. The problem is that they never adjusted the insurance rates downwards to reflect these lowered accident rates, effectively giving their profits a big boost.
They aren't discussing a PC. They're discussing an XBox or NAS.
Isn't one of the requirements for a patent that it not be obvious to someone reasonably skilled in the art? Taking useful techniques from servers and PCs and applying them to a console or other computing device probably counts as obvious - the only real jump for the whole X-Box was to base a console on commodity PC technology. Once it became a general purpose computing device (however limited its intended use is), all these 'advancements' become obvious.
Why not just have the cost of filing patents grow with the number filed? It'd cut down on the shotgun patenting if you had exponential increases in price after 10 (or 100, or whatever) without having any real effect on the little guy.
With this being a small remote tribe I have to wonder about the possibility of there being some sort of inbreeding based mental defficiency...
shoudn't that be...
Today is a good day to compile.
???
Without mentioning system specs, this is a pointless post. Are we talking some guys coming from 800MHz P3s or do y'all have 2.4GHz machines?
I'd suspect that your original CPU was somewhat lacking; 2-2.5GHz seems to be the the low end of what you can get away with for a respectable gaming machine these days. Once you reach this point, you're going to see a big difference jumping from your 5200 to a 5900.
Great. We've got a dozen different hardware sites reciting press releases, specifications and mfgr's performance promises, all the while speculating about what the hardware may be capable of. Until somebody can actually say "I've been playing with one of these and they're pretty nifty", we might as well just have links point to pressrealease.nvidia.com.
Why are these things on any sort of publicly accessable network? They should, at least, be on a private network that's physically separate from everything they don't absolutely need to talk to & firewalled all to hell.
You're missing the point. The machines in the cluster, SGI Altixes, do things that -can't- be done with any available Opteron systems; each node is a 512 processor machine. This means you can spawn of 512 threads and give each one its own CPU without having to move off the system. ...and the Itanium2 wipes the floor with pretty much anything else on the market when it comes to floating point calculations.
Umm...
Considering that the PCIe spec allows for ports at 32x, I don't think you've got a limitation of 20 channels on it. From what I've seen, the only reason you've have any sort of limit is going to be chipset dependant.
As for needing a special mobo for it, you're going to end up with a high-end workstation board if you want a pair of 16x ports unless SLI sparks enough consumer demand to bring the feature down to consumer boards. Even then, it's probably only going to be found on relatively high-end kit.
"Supports 2 TB" could mean "uses 41-bit addressing" (2^41 B = 2TB). Current IDE interfaces with 48 bit addressing "support" up to 256TB of storage but you're not going to see that kind of density on a single device any time soon.
As for replacement of mechanical HDDs - all current non-volatile rewritable storage has a limited number of write cycles, making them less than ideal for HDD replacement (imagine the damage your swapfile would do to one). If somebody had figured out a way to work around this, I'm sure it would be the #1 thing mentioned in the press release.
The fact that they don't even have a plan for how to do multi-arch AMD64 kinda scares me. I recently had to install Fedora on a machine at work 'cuz Debian's idea of multi-arch is "install 32b in a chroot & work from there".
Very sad.
I saw this link on her blog and I get the feeling that she has a lot of first dates.
I'm thinking it's some sort of failed attempt at bandwidth limiting...
I can load the main page, but if I try to reload or go to any of the toplevel section pages, it 503s on me, but I can follow any of the links to stories, it works just fine.
That doesn't make it suck any less, however.
Where have you been, and where do people find these crazy screaming HSFs for stock-speed CPUs?
The first thing to do is stop buying cheap cases/power-supplies. It costs money to make things quiet; extra sensors to throttle fan speeds & quality bearings add a few $$$s to the cost of a unit.
With that said, I just threw together an Athon64 3200+ with the stock AMD heatsink into one of these and I couldn't hear it over the ventilation system. This is under full load, not sitting there idle with some sort of CPU throttling in place. It's not quite the fanless but it definately runs more quietly & cooly than your Duron 1.3.
If only specialists need faster CPUs, what's the justification for pushing SMP machines into home machines? I can't see the average home user needing multi-processor systems any more than they need 3MHz CPUs...
You do realize that CPU temps -can't- be under case temps (when using air cooling) and your sensors are just poorly calibrated, right?
The problem is that most of these methods introduce parallelism into the system; software that only has a single CPU-heavy thread isn't going to run any faster with 2 cores than it would with one.
If they'd gone throught the trouble of converting /. to CSS, user configurable color scemes would be a trivial thing...
Exactly. In a sense, it's a very good measure of how much code a programmer can work on in a given period of time, a good indicator of the ammount of work that can be done.
...and god forbid we try to use it for estimating projects before they've been started. Thinking of facing somebody that could say "Lets see... I think we can do this project with $BIGFOO KLOC" with a straight face scares me.
OTOH, it's a poor measure of useful work, or work done right. Something that takes 100 lines of decent C might be doable in 10 lines of Python or 1000 lines of ASM or 500 lines of poorly written C or 50 lines of C that ignores important cases.