the 950 chip has pretty much been discontinued ages ago. It resides on the 945gm chipset, which these days is only used in some netbooks (and even there is is getting replaced rapidly by the nm10+n450 combo).
The mATX intel board i bought two years ago already has a G35 chipset with a much better graphics chip, granted it was a higher end matx board, but still, even if you only want intel chips, the gma950 has been replaced ages ago.
But yeah, a gma 950 is pretty awefull for anything but old games, it wont even run unreal tournament 2003 acceptably, we had to go for UT99 for the office lanparty..
Intel needed their large caches for netburst because pipeline stalls where extremely costly, and the memory had a very large latency, they solved both issues in core 2, with very advanced prefetchers to hide the latency, and a shorter pipeline to make stalls less costly.
AMD on the other hand, moved the memory controller on die with the advent of the Athlon64, which made for extremely low memory latency. Back in the day i read up on cache sizes for AMD chips (because i was going to buy a chip, and wanted to know if going for the large l2 was worth it). As it turns out, in not a single benchmark did a chip with 1 mb l2 beat a chip with only 128k l2 (an 1/8th) at the same clock by more then 10% (and the 10% was an extreme).
The only reason todays chips have such large amounts of L3 is because we dont just have one core sucking down data, we have four (or six, or in case of nehalem, 4+4 virtuals). If intel still had the old FSB, i3/5/7 would need even bigger caches
To be honest i dont quite understand the gripe people have with nvidia's linux drivers being closed source.
My main machine is a linux box, it has a kick ass nvidia card (GTX260), and everything works just fine. If i chose to game (which i hardly do these days), performance will be good, and it will work.
If you need to be sure that 100% of code is trustworthy on your machine, you shouldnt be running any ol game anyway (most open source games hardly require top performance), and it isnt like you are going to troubleshoot that one graphics bug by wading through megabytes of driver source code anyway.. (i wouldnt anyway, even though i code for a living).
Sure, open source is more in-sync with the whole linux/gpl/gnu philosophy, but practically speaking, i dont see any reason to bitch about it, as long as it works...
(hell, you could even set up a different linux partition soully dedicated to games if you want to be 100% sure your main system is fully open source)
i ran win 7 beta on a sempron 3000+ with 1 gb of DDR, single channel (old school socket 754), and for desktop purposes it ran snappy enough, having a browser open and streaming music and such.
Now if i started doing more things at the same time, like installing two programs and the browsing/streaming, things would clog up, but i attribute this mostly to the 1gb of ram.
I am pretty confident that AMD's slowest cpu (a 2.7 GHz single core sempron these days) would do just dandy given 2gb of ram for general joe-sixpack use in windows 7
my asus mobo also supposedly supports unlocking, but i havent gotten it to work
first cpu i tried was my x2 7750, which secretely is a complete phenom I die, no extra cores second cpu was a sargas sempron 140, which should be able to unlock to a X2 regor, nothing
the 7750 has a pretty low change at unlocking anyway, but the 140 is a much safer bet. Its still one chip though, so im no sure what the problem is, the board or the chip..
just one thing to add though, for me personally, no matter how good a deal 500/corner suspension is, if i only have 1000 bucks for an entire set, i wont ever buy your product, since it just is to expensive (not for what it is, but it doesnt fit my budget)
sad to see that a pationate technical guy like you got out of the racing biz though..
this 6-core still has only 6mb of l3 cache, the same as the 4-core, meaning the 6 core doesnt just take 150% of the die-size of a 4-core. Also the memory controller and interface logic dont suddenly swell up. All that is needed is two chunks of extra l2 cache, and 2 execution cores (and perhaps some extra internal bus logic)
I had a AGP 6800LE which i found on clearance sale for half price (just after launch even, some shop was closing up some product lines), and managed to unlock it from 8/4 pipes to 12/6, the fourth pixel-quad was borked unfortunatly, so no full GT for me. It still gave me a 300 euro card for 90 euros:)
A while later i switched to two 6800XTs in SLI, which unfortunatly didnt unlock, but they overclocked like MOFOs. those cards came with the core at 300 and mem at 600, after an evening of experimenting i had both running at 475/900, with stock shitty cooling even. After a month with these i found a killer deal on two 6800GTs, which where the last serious gaming cards for me (had a 8800GTS and now a GTX260, but i hardly game anymore)
Geforce 6 series was awesome:)
As for running outside of spec, i also have a core 2 duo e4300 running at 2.4 (stock is 1.8), with no voltage bumps, just a FSB bump, has been solid like that since the day i bought it.
it would be rather trivial to check any incomming request for a certain cookie or whatever, and if it isnt present, redirect said user to the EULA page
or just put all content behind a login, even a free login will force everyone viewing the content to accept the EULA.
at least google isnt intrusive, they just have simple text adds which dont obscure your view of actual content.
Now take kona/kontera, they have this shit which adds links with hideous mouse-over pop-ups on key-words, this is also employed in forums. Now when i read a webpage, i often mouse around, selecting random bits of text which im reading, and this shit really pisses me off.
The first time i encounter any of that shit i will not stop untill i have effectively blocked the crap out of their domain(s)
even just blocking certain content from rendering does not alter the HTML document.. It merely alters the visual representation of that document. If you already want to classify that as altering a copyright protected document, even rendering a website in a different browser could be illegal.
Anyway, it doesnt matter, i download a certain HTML element, how i chose to render that is completely up to me, by putting adds in pages the author basically makes my computer do something (download from other sources), and they have no intrinsic right to force my computer to do stuff.
Add-blocking might not be very nice, but if adds become annoying enough, i will block them anyway
As for the escapist, i enjoy ZeroPunctuation, but this kind of shit makes me feel like giving their site a permanent miss.. If you behave like a dick towards your visitors, expect them to find some place else to hang out
Hey, i never said the ipad is a worthy device, or that i consider it an actual computer, i was merely pointing out that it has the ability to run arbitrary code in a turing complete language.
As for running code input on the machine itself, that will be difficult, i might be able to think up a website which uses JS to insert JS typed into a textfield into the page, and then run it, but that still requires and outside resource, and is just a convoluted trick really..
just to undercut you with a technicality, the ipad can run javascript and any and all javascript, apple doesnt (yet) force you through their proxy. Javascript is generally considered to be turing complete.
Which brings us back full circle back to the iphone launch, when you want to run any and all code on the i*, the web is your sdk...
i will happily agree though, that the ipad in its current state isnt a computer, not because of any hardware limitation (which also would have been apple imposed), but rather because of apple's "if you dont play by my rules, i'll take the ball and go home" attitude, even though users have bought the ball, the goalposts and the frickin courtyard
I think EULAs should be entirely enforceable, but I think companies should be legally bound to quiz you afterwards. No pass, no install.
That would rock, Microsoft windows sales would plummet , iphone app store usage would be decimated after the first update as only the most devoute turtle-neck worshippers suffer through 90 pages of legalese.
In the current form, i think EULAs should be made legally null and void, no-one reads them anyway, and most explicitly contradict common law
not a rocket scientist, but making fuel on the moon:
1) mine ice 2) use solar power to melt ice 3) use solar power to electrolise water to oxygen and hydrogen, cool with ambient temps on moon 4) put both in seperate fuel tanks on vehicle 5) launch vehicle
Now i'm not sure oxygen/hydrogen is the most ideal fuel for lunar launches, but even if it isnt optimal, all the required tech is already here, or easily do-able (no-one has mining-robot yet, but come on, put spirit/opportunity in a room with a mining digger, play some barry white...). Off course a good big base would be needed to produce enough fuel for intensive missions, but why not set up an automated fueling station capable of launching supplying 1-2 launches a year with fuel?
it's not the routes over iceland, right now the ash cloud covers large parts of the UK, and the netherlands too, Amsterdam Schiphol airport is currently shut down, no flights what so ever, i imagine large airports in the UK are shut down too, parts of the german and belgian airspace are closed as well..
This really sucks though, my dad had a long weekend in rome planned this weekend, his flight is at 1350 out of schiphol, but KLM has cancelled all flights before 1400, and will probably cancel more later today..
Not to mention all the Danish colleagues here which are no stuck in holland..
There is an important legal principle; the egg shell skull which says that when he shone his light in her face, he should have taken this possibility into account.
while i agree with personal responsibility and all, in modern day america that egg shell skull thing would cripple all human contact if you actually think about it.. suddenly you would have to consider that the guy who's hand i am shaking might have severe calcium deficiency in his bones, and i might have to pay for destroying half of his skelleton if i shake just a tiny bit too hard...
besides, a kid that vulnerable to light, should be locked up in a dark room. If a single low-power led can burn her face, it is a miracle she made it to the age of 12 without being completely covered in 3rd degree burns..
To be honest, i'm not quite sure. All i know is that on the desktop chrome is my favorite browser by miles, and i think somehow, some way, the chrome team could do the same thing on the iphone.
Before i got chrome, i was perfectly happy with firefox, right now though, i hardly ever use it, chrome just feels much better to me.
One thing many first-day reviews of opera-mini said was that it was much faster then safari, even while on wifi.
I tried it yesterday (on wifi, since i have an ipod, not an iphone), and opera mini took serious time connecting to the opera servers, after which loading was fast. however, the opera-server connection pretty much killed it for me..
Opera mini is a nice try, and some things do improve on safari, but on the whole, what i really want is opera Mobile (and once the app store is open enough, CHROME) for the iphone/ipod
Slashdot Mirror
the 950 chip has pretty much been discontinued ages ago. It resides on the 945gm chipset, which these days is only used in some netbooks (and even there is is getting replaced rapidly by the nm10+n450 combo).
The mATX intel board i bought two years ago already has a G35 chipset with a much better graphics chip, granted it was a higher end matx board, but still, even if you only want intel chips, the gma950 has been replaced ages ago.
But yeah, a gma 950 is pretty awefull for anything but old games, it wont even run unreal tournament 2003 acceptably, we had to go for UT99 for the office lanparty..
this is totally architecture dependent.
Intel needed their large caches for netburst because pipeline stalls where extremely costly, and the memory had a very large latency, they solved both issues in core 2, with very advanced prefetchers to hide the latency, and a shorter pipeline to make stalls less costly.
AMD on the other hand, moved the memory controller on die with the advent of the Athlon64, which made for extremely low memory latency. Back in the day i read up on cache sizes for AMD chips (because i was going to buy a chip, and wanted to know if going for the large l2 was worth it). As it turns out, in not a single benchmark did a chip with 1 mb l2 beat a chip with only 128k l2 (an 1/8th) at the same clock by more then 10% (and the 10% was an extreme).
The only reason todays chips have such large amounts of L3 is because we dont just have one core sucking down data, we have four (or six, or in case of nehalem, 4+4 virtuals). If intel still had the old FSB, i3/5/7 would need even bigger caches
To be honest i dont quite understand the gripe people have with nvidia's linux drivers being closed source.
My main machine is a linux box, it has a kick ass nvidia card (GTX260), and everything works just fine. If i chose to game (which i hardly do these days), performance will be good, and it will work.
If you need to be sure that 100% of code is trustworthy on your machine, you shouldnt be running any ol game anyway (most open source games hardly require top performance), and it isnt like you are going to troubleshoot that one graphics bug by wading through megabytes of driver source code anyway.. (i wouldnt anyway, even though i code for a living).
Sure, open source is more in-sync with the whole linux/gpl/gnu philosophy, but practically speaking, i dont see any reason to bitch about it, as long as it works...
(hell, you could even set up a different linux partition soully dedicated to games if you want to be 100% sure your main system is fully open source)
i ran win 7 beta on a sempron 3000+ with 1 gb of DDR, single channel (old school socket 754), and for desktop purposes it ran snappy enough, having a browser open and streaming music and such.
Now if i started doing more things at the same time, like installing two programs and the browsing/streaming, things would clog up, but i attribute this mostly to the 1gb of ram.
I am pretty confident that AMD's slowest cpu (a 2.7 GHz single core sempron these days) would do just dandy given 2gb of ram for general joe-sixpack use in windows 7
not sure if you know this, but any AM3 chip can also run in a AM2+ mobo with DDR2 (if the mobo supports the new chips)
My year old AM2+ board already has a bios update for these 6-core chips
So if you have an existing AM2+ system (or an intel 775 system filled with ram), you wont need new DDR3 for that 555
my asus mobo also supposedly supports unlocking, but i havent gotten it to work
first cpu i tried was my x2 7750, which secretely is a complete phenom I die, no extra cores
second cpu was a sargas sempron 140, which should be able to unlock to a X2 regor, nothing
the 7750 has a pretty low change at unlocking anyway, but the 140 is a much safer bet. Its still one chip though, so im no sure what the problem is, the board or the chip..
very interesting story
just one thing to add though, for me personally, no matter how good a deal 500/corner suspension is, if i only have 1000 bucks for an entire set, i wont ever buy your product, since it just is to expensive (not for what it is, but it doesnt fit my budget)
sad to see that a pationate technical guy like you got out of the racing biz though..
not quite,
this 6-core still has only 6mb of l3 cache, the same as the 4-core, meaning the 6 core doesnt just take 150% of the die-size of a 4-core. Also the memory controller and interface logic dont suddenly swell up. All that is needed is two chunks of extra l2 cache, and 2 execution cores (and perhaps some extra internal bus logic)
the following die schematic for a phenom II die suggests adding two cores would probably take 25% extra die space:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Phenom_II_Deneb_-_Sch%C3%A9ma_Die.svg
Ah, good times
I had a AGP 6800LE which i found on clearance sale for half price (just after launch even, some shop was closing up some product lines), and managed to unlock it from 8/4 pipes to 12/6, the fourth pixel-quad was borked unfortunatly, so no full GT for me. It still gave me a 300 euro card for 90 euros :)
A while later i switched to two 6800XTs in SLI, which unfortunatly didnt unlock, but they overclocked like MOFOs. those cards came with the core at 300 and mem at 600, after an evening of experimenting i had both running at 475/900, with stock shitty cooling even. After a month with these i found a killer deal on two 6800GTs, which where the last serious gaming cards for me (had a 8800GTS and now a GTX260, but i hardly game anymore)
Geforce 6 series was awesome :)
As for running outside of spec, i also have a core 2 duo e4300 running at 2.4 (stock is 1.8), with no voltage bumps, just a FSB bump, has been solid like that since the day i bought it.
it would be rather trivial to check any incomming request for a certain cookie or whatever, and if it isnt present, redirect said user to the EULA page
or just put all content behind a login, even a free login will force everyone viewing the content to accept the EULA.
at least google isnt intrusive, they just have simple text adds which dont obscure your view of actual content.
Now take kona/kontera, they have this shit which adds links with hideous mouse-over pop-ups on key-words, this is also employed in forums. Now when i read a webpage, i often mouse around, selecting random bits of text which im reading, and this shit really pisses me off.
The first time i encounter any of that shit i will not stop untill i have effectively blocked the crap out of their domain(s)
even just blocking certain content from rendering does not alter the HTML document.. It merely alters the visual representation of that document. If you already want to classify that as altering a copyright protected document, even rendering a website in a different browser could be illegal.
Anyway, it doesnt matter, i download a certain HTML element, how i chose to render that is completely up to me, by putting adds in pages the author basically makes my computer do something (download from other sources), and they have no intrinsic right to force my computer to do stuff.
Add-blocking might not be very nice, but if adds become annoying enough, i will block them anyway
As for the escapist, i enjoy ZeroPunctuation, but this kind of shit makes me feel like giving their site a permanent miss.. If you behave like a dick towards your visitors, expect them to find some place else to hang out
Hey, i never said the ipad is a worthy device, or that i consider it an actual computer, i was merely pointing out that it has the ability to run arbitrary code in a turing complete language.
As for running code input on the machine itself, that will be difficult, i might be able to think up a website which uses JS to insert JS typed into a textfield into the page, and then run it, but that still requires and outside resource, and is just a convoluted trick really..
*fires up notepad for old school html/js hacking*
Wow...
that is just.... mindboggling
just to undercut you with a technicality, the ipad can run javascript and any and all javascript, apple doesnt (yet) force you through their proxy. Javascript is generally considered to be turing complete.
Which brings us back full circle back to the iphone launch, when you want to run any and all code on the i*, the web is your sdk...
i will happily agree though, that the ipad in its current state isnt a computer, not because of any hardware limitation (which also would have been apple imposed), but rather because of apple's "if you dont play by my rules, i'll take the ball and go home" attitude, even though users have bought the ball, the goalposts and the frickin courtyard
It is when you arent watching the commercials in them on live TV, or paying for them on DVD.
the copyright holders get payed for a show when a TV channel wants to air it.
I think EULAs should be entirely enforceable, but I think companies should be legally bound to quiz you afterwards. No pass, no install.
That would rock, Microsoft windows sales would plummet , iphone app store usage would be decimated after the first update as only the most devoute turtle-neck worshippers suffer through 90 pages of legalese.
In the current form, i think EULAs should be made legally null and void, no-one reads them anyway, and most explicitly contradict common law
not a rocket scientist, but making fuel on the moon:
1) mine ice
2) use solar power to melt ice
3) use solar power to electrolise water to oxygen and hydrogen, cool with ambient temps on moon
4) put both in seperate fuel tanks on vehicle
5) launch vehicle
Now i'm not sure oxygen/hydrogen is the most ideal fuel for lunar launches, but even if it isnt optimal, all the required tech is already here, or easily do-able (no-one has mining-robot yet, but come on, put spirit/opportunity in a room with a mining digger, play some barry white...). Off course a good big base would be needed to produce enough fuel for intensive missions, but why not set up an automated fueling station capable of launching supplying 1-2 launches a year with fuel?
just to set everyone's mind at ease, the dutch usually dont use those words :P (except in scrable..)
also, i thought it was "Hottentottententententoonstellings kaartjesverkoperbureaustoelschroefjesfabrieksdirecteur" :)
C-C-Combo!!!
blergh, slashdot doesnt like us dutch "Filter error: That's an awful long string of letters there.", had to insert a space..
it's not the routes over iceland, right now the ash cloud covers large parts of the UK, and the netherlands too, Amsterdam Schiphol airport is currently shut down, no flights what so ever, i imagine large airports in the UK are shut down too, parts of the german and belgian airspace are closed as well..
This really sucks though, my dad had a long weekend in rome planned this weekend, his flight is at 1350 out of schiphol, but KLM has cancelled all flights before 1400, and will probably cancel more later today..
Not to mention all the Danish colleagues here which are no stuck in holland..
*searches e-bay for an IBM badge to put on his PSP*
Now i finally own something from Big Blue!
There is an important legal principle; the egg shell skull which says that when he shone his light in her face, he should have taken this possibility into account.
while i agree with personal responsibility and all, in modern day america that egg shell skull thing would cripple all human contact if you actually think about it.. suddenly you would have to consider that the guy who's hand i am shaking might have severe calcium deficiency in his bones, and i might have to pay for destroying half of his skelleton if i shake just a tiny bit too hard...
besides, a kid that vulnerable to light, should be locked up in a dark room. If a single low-power led can burn her face, it is a miracle she made it to the age of 12 without being completely covered in 3rd degree burns..
To be honest, i'm not quite sure. All i know is that on the desktop chrome is my favorite browser by miles, and i think somehow, some way, the chrome team could do the same thing on the iphone.
Before i got chrome, i was perfectly happy with firefox, right now though, i hardly ever use it, chrome just feels much better to me.
One thing many first-day reviews of opera-mini said was that it was much faster then safari, even while on wifi.
I tried it yesterday (on wifi, since i have an ipod, not an iphone), and opera mini took serious time connecting to the opera servers, after which loading was fast. however, the opera-server connection pretty much killed it for me..
Opera mini is a nice try, and some things do improve on safari, but on the whole, what i really want is opera Mobile (and once the app store is open enough, CHROME) for the iphone/ipod
have you tasted lawyers?
I wouldn't feed them to my pet hamster..