No wonder we get stupid laws like the DMCA and the "confiscate nail clippers on airplanes" one passed. Nobody will stand up for their rights.
Is this really so difficult: Radio Shack employee: "Could I have your zip code?" Radio Shack customer: "No."
Trust me, it's not hard. I've done it. I would recommend though that you not try "I can make something up or you can leave it blank - your choice", as the employees tend to get pissy.
Well, a MAC is 6 pairs of hex digits. 12 digits total, 16^12 or 256*2^40 (trillion) combinations.
If you want 1/1000 of 1% of MACs banned and you have 1000 Xboxen calling up with new MACs to ban every 5 seconds, it'll take you 163 days.
Now, each manufacturer gets a code in the first 3 pairs (IIRC) so once you know the manufacturer's code for the Xboxen, you're probably talking about more like 16^6 different combos, which is only 16M. It'd take 10 Xboxen (as above) a mere 3 months to burn through the *entire* address space. They're what, $300 each? I'm sure *someone* has 3 grand to buy Xboxen and try this out. Besides, I'll bet you could sell them for way more than $300 when you were done. I can see it on eBay now: "Own one of 10 limited-edition X-box consoles that brought down Microsoft's X-box Live service! Mods included. A steal at $500."
You're sick and tired of Microsoft stories? Well, quit bitching about it and make them go away. Click the little box on Your Preferences page and shut up.
And still got overcharged. At least I did. I got all of office for $35 (abiword's import filters just didn't cut it), and it's not worth that much. It actually hasn't even been installed for about 8 months. I'm happy as a clam with OpenOffice, which handles everything from stupid little text files to complicated powerpoint slides with aplomb. I think I might give those folks the $300 I made last month answering silly questions for Google...
me: "Dominos and porn? You've got to be kidding. This is obviously some poorly-funded German magazine (just look at that website layout!) with nothing better to do than watch dominos smack each other for an hour (wish I'd been there:). Now, where's that erotik link - what's/really/ there?"
Or more than you might imagine. 1m resolution is fine enough to see the lines in parking lots and count full v. empty spaces and see opened doors (not sliding van doors). What do you think something 7 times as good will show? Make and model of car, all doors, how many people, whether and what they are carrying, and if they wear glasses. You can probably tell the make of shoe someone is wearing at that resolution.
And that's just from one frame. With multiple frames, you increase dramatically the information you have available, and you can interpolate down much finer than the camera resolution.
The length of an RF wave is its period, not its frequency. Period is 1/frequency. A 3GHz processor has a clock signal oscillating at 3GHz, just like a 3GHz RF wave, or anything else vibrating at that frequency.
It is you who are confused about a great many things.
I hereby make a request that people who habitually complain about popup ads get off their lazy duff and *do* something about it for a change. You seeing popups is your fault, not the/. editors' and if you can't be bothered to use a browser that turns them off, you obviously don't mind them that much.
-- Blissfully unaware of popups since Mozilla 0.9.3
To be more specific, OSX 10.2 on a 1G Tibook with 512M RAM is slow. The UI feels sluggish and unresponsive, and while I spent only about 30 seconds in an hour watching the spinny-cursor thing, it seemed to take a long time to respond to my keypresses, clicks, etc. The only application I used enough to notice speed was Word (which was ungodly slow - I could type faster than it could spellcheck), though I'm perfectly willing to blame Microsoft for that. I will admit that I'm unfamiliar with OSX and that may contribute to my perception of slowness (in particular, I hate how clicking on something in the dock doesn't do anything, and then a half-second later or whatever, after I've clicked 4 more times, it starts to bounce. And bounce. And bounce.) though I can't blame an anti-mac attitude, as I went in hoping and expecting the tibook to be as cool as the specs indicated. Now if only I could find a demo Toshiba Portege and an IBM X-series to look at too...
This is compared to Redhat Linux or Windows 2000 on a 667mhz Duron with 768M SDR RAM on a KT133 chipset.
Check out Toshiba's 1.8" hard drives. They're found (surprise) in Toshiba's ultra-portables, as well as the Apple iPod, and other devices.
While the reduction from 2.5" to 1.8" doesn't seem like much (about 25%), it's actually enormous in terms of platter area. A 2.5" diameter platter has almost 10 square inches of surface area, whereas a 1.8" diameter platter has just over half that. The situation becomes even more pronounced when you account for a drive motor in the center. That's why Tosh's drive tops out at 20G whereas IBM's talking about an 80G drive in the 2.5" form factor.
If it's going to solve in a day what would otherwise take 6 years, it has to be almost 2200 times as powerful as their baseline. With 18 universities cooperating, that's about 120 times the baseline provided by each uni. From the article: "The University [one of the 18] will have 108 computer processors helping work on the problem." So, their baseline is a slow single-processor machine - who thinks that's anywhere near a fair comparison? Wow, we built a cluster! And it's lots faster than a single-processor machine! Never would have guessed!
So they've got 2000 processors working on this problem. Probably about as much horsepower as 1000 recent CPUs, or 250 U of rackspace. About 7 racks full of 1U systems with 4 Athlons in 'em. A million dollars would easily cover that, and if you stick it in northern Canada, you get cold clean air for free so the ongoing costs would be much less as well.
What I'm getting at is that I'm not real impressed, either with the article or with the project. If they spent more than 3 weeks organizing this, it would have been faster to just have one uni run the simulation in-house.
Re:Wouldn't four quadheads be more usefull
on
Making A Videowall
·
· Score: 2
Well, why don't you think about it a little bit first? You've got about 100MB/sec (800Mb/sec) available for the cards. Divide by 2 bits per pixel gives 400Mpixels. Divide by 16 monitors and you've got 5Mpixels per monitor. Even at a resolution of 2048x1536, that's only 3 Mpixels per monitor. Repeating our calculation at 32 bits per pixel, we get 200Mpixels, or 2.5M per monitor, about 1800x1440 resolution.
Slashdot has been having some issues with headlines recently. Maybe, just maybe I don't know what I'm talking about, but to me dead silent means as silent as a dead person. What this means is the computer has no moving parts (like a dead person). No CDROM. No PSU fan. No hard drive, no vidcard fan, no CPU fan, no case fan, no chipset fan. It netboots and loads the OS into RAM and accesses files over.
Dead people don't move! Dead silent PCs shouldn't either.
Yeah, but only in the way than no-one NEEDs modern medicine, central heating, or citrus fruit during the winter.
On the other hand, I NEED faster than a Duron/600 for: sending messages in ICQ (yup, sending a message is O(n) or O(n^2) - not sure which) with n the number of messages in your scrollback Encoding MP3s - I spent over 2 hours this afternoon switching CDs every 10-15 minutes. Recording TV - I can only record to divx at quarter VGA or less Using Mozilla the way I want (with 20-50 tabs open at a time and 128M of RAM cache) Using an encrypted filesystem (unless win2k's implementation is just horribly inefficient) Opening / manipulating 500M images
Sure, I could plop an XP2200+ in here, but I spent $50 on the original CPU and I'm unwilling to spend more on another until Hammer comes out. A dual Clawhammer should be about 10-20x as fast as my current machine depending on app - a most satisfying upgrade.
The dropping of the apostrophe in pluralizing acronyms is a modern phemonemon that comes about because of the modern practice, unjustifiable by traditional usage, of treating acronyms as if they were actually words.
They are not. They are abbreviations.
And the word is controller. Which pluralizes to controllers, not controlleres.
So, while you may be right in general, that doesn't make PLC's any more acceptable than before.
Well, because they've got lower, I mean higher, I mean . . . Shit, it's the internet and everybody who knows nothing about it knows there's money in them thar' hills!
That's probably only funny because I didn't sleep last night. On the plus side, I'll bet the bill makes perfect sense now though!
Slashdot Mirror
No wonder we get stupid laws like the DMCA and the "confiscate nail clippers on airplanes" one passed. Nobody will stand up for their rights.
Is this really so difficult:
Radio Shack employee: "Could I have your zip code?"
Radio Shack customer: "No."
Trust me, it's not hard. I've done it. I would recommend though that you not try "I can make something up or you can leave it blank - your choice", as the employees tend to get pissy.
Well, a MAC is 6 pairs of hex digits. 12 digits total, 16^12 or 256*2^40 (trillion) combinations.
If you want 1/1000 of 1% of MACs banned and you have 1000 Xboxen calling up with new MACs to ban every 5 seconds, it'll take you 163 days.
Now, each manufacturer gets a code in the first 3 pairs (IIRC) so once you know the manufacturer's code for the Xboxen, you're probably talking about more like 16^6 different combos, which is only 16M. It'd take 10 Xboxen (as above) a mere 3 months to burn through the *entire* address space. They're what, $300 each? I'm sure *someone* has 3 grand to buy Xboxen and try this out. Besides, I'll bet you could sell them for way more than $300 when you were done. I can see it on eBay now: "Own one of 10 limited-edition X-box consoles that brought down Microsoft's X-box Live service! Mods included. A steal at $500."
I believe I speak for all of us here when I say:
Tee hee.
You're sick and tired of Microsoft stories? Well, quit bitching about it and make them go away. Click the little box on Your Preferences page and shut up.
That's half a million times as much RAM as I have.
That's 1 kilobyte for every dollar Microsoft has stashed away.
That's five pages of text for every man, woman, and child on the planet.
That's . . . how many Libraries of Congress is that?
As long as you can avoid getting arrested for running naked through the rain, yes!
Then I paid about 50 bucks and got licenses.
And still got overcharged. At least I did. I got all of office for $35 (abiword's import filters just didn't cut it), and it's not worth that much. It actually hasn't even been installed for about 8 months. I'm happy as a clam with OpenOffice, which handles everything from stupid little text files to complicated powerpoint slides with aplomb. I think I might give those folks the $300 I made last month answering silly questions for Google...
you: "Holy shit, dominos and pron! ..."
/really/ there?"
..."
me: "Dominos and porn? You've got to be kidding. This is obviously some poorly-funded German magazine (just look at that website layout!) with nothing better to do than watch dominos smack each other for an hour (wish I'd been there:). Now, where's that erotik link - what's
me: *clicks link*
me: "Holy shit, dominos and porn!
That would be "Who's", a contraction for "who is".
Whose is the posessive, as in "whose socks are those?" or "the one whose head is largest".
Silly Slashdotter. You probably use "alot" too, don't you?
Or more than you might imagine. 1m resolution is fine enough to see the lines in parking lots and count full v. empty spaces and see opened doors (not sliding van doors). What do you think something 7 times as good will show? Make and model of car, all doors, how many people, whether and what they are carrying, and if they wear glasses. You can probably tell the make of shoe someone is wearing at that resolution.
And that's just from one frame. With multiple frames, you increase dramatically the information you have available, and you can interpolate down much finer than the camera resolution.
The length of an RF wave is its period, not its frequency. Period is 1/frequency. A 3GHz processor has a clock signal oscillating at 3GHz, just like a 3GHz RF wave, or anything else vibrating at that frequency.
It is you who are confused about a great many things.
Damn, I *knew* there had to be a reason people keep using IE! So they can't turn ads off, and see the occasional good one.
I hereby make a request that people who habitually complain about popup ads get off their lazy duff and *do* something about it for a change. You seeing popups is your fault, not the /. editors' and if you can't be bothered to use a browser that turns them off, you obviously don't mind them that much.
--
Blissfully unaware of popups since Mozilla 0.9.3
To be more specific, OSX 10.2 on a 1G Tibook with 512M RAM is slow. The UI feels sluggish and unresponsive, and while I spent only about 30 seconds in an hour watching the spinny-cursor thing, it seemed to take a long time to respond to my keypresses, clicks, etc. The only application I used enough to notice speed was Word (which was ungodly slow - I could type faster than it could spellcheck), though I'm perfectly willing to blame Microsoft for that. I will admit that I'm unfamiliar with OSX and that may contribute to my perception of slowness (in particular, I hate how clicking on something in the dock doesn't do anything, and then a half-second later or whatever, after I've clicked 4 more times, it starts to bounce. And bounce. And bounce.) though I can't blame an anti-mac attitude, as I went in hoping and expecting the tibook to be as cool as the specs indicated. Now if only I could find a demo Toshiba Portege and an IBM X-series to look at too...
This is compared to Redhat Linux or Windows 2000 on a 667mhz Duron with 768M SDR RAM on a KT133 chipset.
Check out Toshiba's 1.8" hard drives. They're found (surprise) in Toshiba's ultra-portables, as well as the Apple iPod, and other devices.
While the reduction from 2.5" to 1.8" doesn't seem like much (about 25%), it's actually enormous in terms of platter area. A 2.5" diameter platter has almost 10 square inches of surface area, whereas a 1.8" diameter platter has just over half that. The situation becomes even more pronounced when you account for a drive motor in the center. That's why Tosh's drive tops out at 20G whereas IBM's talking about an 80G drive in the 2.5" form factor.
If it's going to solve in a day what would otherwise take 6 years, it has to be almost 2200 times as powerful as their baseline. With 18 universities cooperating, that's about 120 times the baseline provided by each uni. From the article: "The University [one of the 18] will have 108 computer processors helping work on the problem." So, their baseline is a slow single-processor machine - who thinks that's anywhere near a fair comparison? Wow, we built a cluster! And it's lots faster than a single-processor machine! Never would have guessed!
So they've got 2000 processors working on this problem. Probably about as much horsepower as 1000 recent CPUs, or 250 U of rackspace. About 7 racks full of 1U systems with 4 Athlons in 'em. A million dollars would easily cover that, and if you stick it in northern Canada, you get cold clean air for free so the ongoing costs would be much less as well.
What I'm getting at is that I'm not real impressed, either with the article or with the project. If they spent more than 3 weeks organizing this, it would have been faster to just have one uni run the simulation in-house.
Well, why don't you think about it a little bit first? You've got about 100MB/sec (800Mb/sec) available for the cards. Divide by 2 bits per pixel gives 400Mpixels. Divide by 16 monitors and you've got 5Mpixels per monitor. Even at a resolution of 2048x1536, that's only 3 Mpixels per monitor. Repeating our calculation at 32 bits per pixel, we get 200Mpixels, or 2.5M per monitor, about 1800x1440 resolution.
So yes, there is plenty of bandwidth.
I do hope that was /intended/ to be +1 Funny. Because if you really don't know what postscript is, you're too young to read Slashdot...
<feels old>
Slashdot has been having some issues with headlines recently. Maybe, just maybe I don't know what I'm talking about, but to me dead silent means as silent as a dead person. What this means is the computer has no moving parts (like a dead person). No CDROM. No PSU fan. No hard drive, no vidcard fan, no CPU fan, no case fan, no chipset fan. It netboots and loads the OS into RAM and accesses files over .
Dead people don't move! Dead silent PCs shouldn't either.
Can it be suction-cupped onto a piece of glass to cut a perfect circle out?
Yeah, but only in the way than no-one NEEDs modern medicine, central heating, or citrus fruit during the winter.
On the other hand, I NEED faster than a Duron/600 for:
sending messages in ICQ (yup, sending a message is O(n) or O(n^2) - not sure which) with n the number of messages in your scrollback
Encoding MP3s - I spent over 2 hours this afternoon switching CDs every 10-15 minutes.
Recording TV - I can only record to divx at quarter VGA or less
Using Mozilla the way I want (with 20-50 tabs open at a time and 128M of RAM cache)
Using an encrypted filesystem (unless win2k's implementation is just horribly inefficient)
Opening / manipulating 500M images
Sure, I could plop an XP2200+ in here, but I spent $50 on the original CPU and I'm unwilling to spend more on another until Hammer comes out. A dual Clawhammer should be about 10-20x as fast as my current machine depending on app - a most satisfying upgrade.
And the word is controller. Which pluralizes to controllers, not controlleres.
So, while you may be right in general, that doesn't make PLC's any more acceptable than before.
Well, because they've got lower, I mean higher, I mean . . . Shit, it's the internet and everybody who knows nothing about it knows there's money in them thar' hills!
That's probably only funny because I didn't sleep last night. On the plus side, I'll bet the bill makes perfect sense now though!
"...gaseous Iodine is a little unpleasant."
And more than enough to get you out of even college chem labs when someone does something very similar very accidently.