Interesting. I suppose that would make sense, based on your lower line voltage. As you might have guessed I'm from the UK where RCD devices are nearly all 30mA.
Jon.
Re:Digital Fireworks Display, one way or another.
on
Water Cooled Power Supply
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
...why not simply take advantage of them as an easy surface to which to attach cooling tubes. Most power supplies I've opened, I could solder copper tubing to the heatsinks fairly easily.
Hmmm. Soldering copper to aluminium is not immediately trivial - ordinary 60/40 lead/tin solder won't wet aluminium, you need special (silver-loaded?) solder which is much more expensive and uses pretty nasty flux chemicals.
Even then, you'll have increased the thermal resistance of the joint significantly. I'd be tempted to try a solid block of copper with a hole drilled lengthwise and copper tubing soldered (actually I'd braze it - much stronger)to the outside faces. Then use mica washers / thermal paste as usual.
...then run the power supply from a Ground-Fault Interruptor (GFI) receptacle like you'd find in a bathroom.
Be aware that domestic GFI plugs (also known as earth leakage or RCD trips) often don't trip until the current difference is ~ 30mA; typical tap water has a resistivity in the range 1 - 10 kOhm.cm, so at 120V, a few cm of insulated piping might stop the breaker tripping.
It's not the same at all - it uses a COTS (commercial off-the-shelf) processor, the TINI. This guy designed his own 8 bit CPU in VHDL and implemented it in an FPGA.
I tutor maths, physics & chemistry up to first year university level. The computer and the internet are incredibly useful in my "classroom" - the real problem with computers in education is the complete lack of ability demonstrated by far too many so-called professional teachers.
Apart from the advantages of having every syllabus for every exam board (and often sample exam papers) available to me, there are extremely good online resources for my subjects which I can use as appropriate to the needs of my students. The BBC should know better - it provides a good selection of educational materials (biased towards revision more than learning) at BBC Schools.
Hey, you see that 'B' right there in BBC? That's for 'British' - and oddly enough we speak British English, not American English. You probably think "colour" and "favourite" don't have a 'u' in them, as well. Gawd help us. At least there's a sporting chance the European scientists will be using the same set of measurement units throughout...
Jon.
Re:90 minutes of uncompressed HD video
on
1.5 TB DVD by 2010
·
· Score: 2
Yes, he's right; HD is ~ 1400 x 1200 (1050 in the US) pixels, and 10 bit resolution means 30 bits for the three channels, YUV (we're in video land here, your RGB don't buy nothing). Therefore, you're looking at
1400 x 1200 x 30 / 8 = 6 MB
for a SINGLE FRAME OF HD. Multiply up by 25 or 30 FPS and that's about 0.93 TB for 90 minutes.
Not so hard, really, now is it? Of course, that is uncompressed...
You (or your sysadmins) have a major problem. I administer our machines running (amongst other things including Debian) Windows XP with Outlook XP. It's never that slow.
You guys do know about the 100ms SMB turnaround time to Domain Controllers? By default DCs deliberately slow down SMB transactions to prioritize replication traffic; if you try to multi-role a DC you'll see degraded network performance. There is a registry setting to configure this behaviour - search the KB.
More relevant is how the performance of C7 is markedly worse on the P3 platform than C6. Very disappointing, makes me wonder what they've done.
It's optimising for P4 by default, which is missing the barrel shifter the P3 uses to generate immediate operands. On P4 it uses a 3rd cut-down ALU to handle them. Hence P3 code will run slowly on P4 CPUs (on top of the fact that P4 only gets ~80% performance clock-for-clock compared to P3) and vice-versa.
A "locked-down" UNIX box wouldn't care if you managed to get a statically linked copy of vi on your system
Did you READ the word "suid" in that sentence? If I have a user account and can get or copy a suid binary somewhere I can write/copy over it (i.e. my home directory,/tmp...), your box is toast because I can make any program I like run as root...
The context was "locked-down box". If I walk up to your secured linux system with a statically linked, suid copy of Vi on a floppy and you "misconfigured" your fstab such that I could mount and run it, that's the same problem.
He's trying to claim Windows doesn't have snprintf() - he is, of course, talking crap. Since it wasn't an ANSI C function, it's implemented as _snprintf in Windows.
Any laptop manufacturer could add this and not have to increase the price to cover the retooling costs for the manufacturing process.
They already do. My Dell 8100 (bought 10 months ago) has one on the CPU moving heat to the back of the case.
Jon.
Re:good solid business advice, jon.
on
AMD's 64-bit Plot
·
· Score: 2
Alpha is minority because post-VAX DEC couldn't market their way out of a paper bag. Look at the DEC Rainbow (their answer to the PC-XT, and technologically a much better machine). They failed to compete with IBM & Compaq (the clone factory), and that pretty much killed them.
The Alpha legacy lives on as one of the best performance / power ratio processors, the StrongARM (and XScale) both of which use techniques developed for Alpha.
I don't think it's OK to screw people in the name of business, but I don't think you should bend over and take it either...
No, it hurts so much to pay a development team to support a platform returning a tiny fraction of your overall OS revenue. MS is a business, not a charity; if your platform can't compete on price with lowest-common-denominator hardware, they're not going to spend vast amounts of time and money supporting it. If they don't get a return on XP64 it'll get dropped, plain and simple. They've done exactly the same thing with CE - SH3 and MIPS support has been dropped, because ARM is the perceived best bet.
Remember the 80/20 rule - chasing the last 20% of the market costs you 80% of the effort.
Jon
Re:Will This be Linux's first killer app?
on
AMD's 64-bit Plot
·
· Score: 5, Informative
...and I have not heard of microsoft having anything ready for this market
MS have been quietly getting ready for 64 bit for at least 2 years; they've been shipping a 64 bit SDK on my MSDN disks for over a year. There are 64 bit NVidia drivers for WinXP-64. What makes you think MS isn't already there?
Here in Scotland, UK...
on
239 MPG Car
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Argent Energy have announced plans to build a £10m plant in Motherwell to convert waste cooking oils into biodiesel - starting construction in 2003. Looks like an Austrian firm BioDiesel International is supplying the know-how. There's been a standard for BioDiesel (composition, flash point, etc) since 1991 in Europe.
Windows 'remote-desktop' won't work at all over the Iridium phone's 2400 baud connection.
There's a fully capable SSH server for Windows, and you can do one hell of a lot from CMD.EXE... Perhaps you should read the manual for NETSH etc.?
I can compile a versions of Samba for any arcatecture on one box...
So what? It STILL doesn't work properly with ADS , as of V3.XX alpha-whatever. If you want to run SMB, buy the right tool for the job. I administer a heterogenous network authenticating to Win2K ADS over LDAP and so long as you use the appropriate native system for each protocol (SMB to Windows, NFS to UNIX etc) it's pretty damn good.
Try pulging in a laptop into your COM1 port and see what you get on Windows
A kernel debug prompt. What were you expecting, an IRC client?
Can you get your Widnows servers to bood diskless over a network
Why the HELL would you want a server to boot diskless? If you're talking about clients, what do you THINK PXE boot roms are for?
The fact is Unix has had 25 years to get it right on some of the most advanced hardware in the world
Hah. More like Unix has had 25 years to get it right on proprietry hardware. It's easy if you control hardware as well as software. Just look at how great Solaris is on x86... NOT.
I've worked with several companies in the embedded field (including medical and automotive applications.) Standardisation is something that would help a lot of companies in this field, particularly if it reduces the uncertainty over embedded device support (e.g. non-PC serial port UARTs, LCD panel support, etc.).
I hope one of the first things they look at is a standard for kernel modularisation that improves on the current kernel config scripts. Configuration management of an embedded linux system is very poor compared to, e.g. eCOS.
Just turn it off! There are few legitimate uses for it, and you can handle those with correct use of security zones. I disable it on all systems I administer, and guess what? No popups, no ads, no fucking annoying "Reset your homepage to xxx.com" trojans...
Honestly, never was so much fuss made about a pointless feature that should be just be disabled and forgetten about.
The requirements have been relaxed recently; see here for more details. In particular:
Also in 740.13, to, in part, take into account the "open source" approach to software development, unrestricted encryption source code not subject to an express agreement for the payment of a licensing fee or royalty for commercial production or sale of any product developed using the source code can, without review, be released from "EI" controls and exported and reexported under License Exception TSU.
But the laser is mounted on a supersonic strike fighter... it's not like you can fire back along the straight line and expect the fighter to still be there. The best you could do is use the reverse path as a starting point path for (probably more than one) smart missiles, and hope they can find the source before they run out of fuel.
A 40W laser could weld steel plate - it all depends on the beam spot size. Think about it - a 10 mW laser pointer isn't eye safe; a 40 W laser focused to a 2 mm spot would burn a hole straight through the eyeball and out the other side.
Slashdot Mirror
Jon.
Hmmm. Soldering copper to aluminium is not immediately trivial - ordinary 60/40 lead/tin solder won't wet aluminium, you need special (silver-loaded?) solder which is much more expensive and uses pretty nasty flux chemicals.
Even then, you'll have increased the thermal resistance of the joint significantly. I'd be tempted to try a solid block of copper with a hole drilled lengthwise and copper tubing soldered (actually I'd braze it - much stronger)to the outside faces. Then use mica washers / thermal paste as usual.
Be aware that domestic GFI plugs (also known as earth leakage or RCD trips) often don't trip until the current difference is ~ 30mA; typical tap water has a resistivity in the range 1 - 10 kOhm.cm, so at 120V, a few cm of insulated piping might stop the breaker tripping.
Jon.
Jon.
Jon.
Apart from the advantages of having every syllabus for every exam board (and often sample exam papers) available to me, there are extremely good online resources for my subjects which I can use as appropriate to the needs of my students. The BBC should know better - it provides a good selection of educational materials (biased towards revision more than learning) at BBC Schools.
Jon.
Jon.
1400 x 1200 x 30 / 8 = 6 MB
for a SINGLE FRAME OF HD. Multiply up by 25 or 30 FPS and that's about 0.93 TB for 90 minutes.
Not so hard, really, now is it? Of course, that is uncompressed...
Jon
You guys do know about the 100ms SMB turnaround time to Domain Controllers? By default DCs deliberately slow down SMB transactions to prioritize replication traffic; if you try to multi-role a DC you'll see degraded network performance. There is a registry setting to configure this behaviour - search the KB.
Jon.
Sorry, that's Outlook Express you're talking about - a COMPLETELY different product. Outlook doesn't use identities.
Jon
It's optimising for P4 by default, which is missing the barrel shifter the P3 uses to generate immediate operands. On P4 it uses a 3rd cut-down ALU to handle them. Hence P3 code will run slowly on P4 CPUs (on top of the fact that P4 only gets ~80% performance clock-for-clock compared to P3) and vice-versa.
Jon.
A "locked-down" UNIX box wouldn't care if you managed to get a statically linked copy of vi on your system
Did you READ the word "suid" in that sentence? If I have a user account and can get or copy a suid binary somewhere I can write/copy over it (i.e. my home directory, /tmp...), your box is toast because I can make any program I like run as root...
Jon.
Please don't be an idiot. Thank you.
Jon.
Jon.
They already do. My Dell 8100 (bought 10 months ago) has one on the CPU moving heat to the back of the case.
Jon.
The Alpha legacy lives on as one of the best performance / power ratio processors, the StrongARM (and XScale) both of which use techniques developed for Alpha.
I don't think it's OK to screw people in the name of business, but I don't think you should bend over and take it either...
Jon.
No, it hurts so much to pay a development team to support a platform returning a tiny fraction of your overall OS revenue. MS is a business, not a charity; if your platform can't compete on price with lowest-common-denominator hardware, they're not going to spend vast amounts of time and money supporting it. If they don't get a return on XP64 it'll get dropped, plain and simple. They've done exactly the same thing with CE - SH3 and MIPS support has been dropped, because ARM is the perceived best bet.
Remember the 80/20 rule - chasing the last 20% of the market costs you 80% of the effort.
Jon
MS have been quietly getting ready for 64 bit for at least 2 years; they've been shipping a 64 bit SDK on my MSDN disks for over a year. There are 64 bit NVidia drivers for WinXP-64. What makes you think MS isn't already there?
Jon.
There's a fully capable SSH server for Windows, and you can do one hell of a lot from CMD.EXE... Perhaps you should read the manual for NETSH etc.?
I can compile a versions of Samba for any arcatecture on one box...
So what? It STILL doesn't work properly with ADS , as of V3.XX alpha-whatever. If you want to run SMB, buy the right tool for the job. I administer a heterogenous network authenticating to Win2K ADS over LDAP and so long as you use the appropriate native system for each protocol (SMB to Windows, NFS to UNIX etc) it's pretty damn good.
Try pulging in a laptop into your COM1 port and see what you get on Windows
A kernel debug prompt. What were you expecting, an IRC client?
Can you get your Widnows servers to bood diskless over a network
Why the HELL would you want a server to boot diskless? If you're talking about clients, what do you THINK PXE boot roms are for?
The fact is Unix has had 25 years to get it right on some of the most advanced hardware in the world
Hah. More like Unix has had 25 years to get it right on proprietry hardware. It's easy if you control hardware as well as software. Just look at how great Solaris is on x86... NOT.
Jon.
I hope one of the first things they look at is a standard for kernel modularisation that improves on the current kernel config scripts. Configuration management of an embedded linux system is very poor compared to, e.g. eCOS.
Jon.
Honestly, never was so much fuss made about a pointless feature that should be just be disabled and forgetten about.
Jon.
Also in 740.13, to, in part, take into account the "open source" approach to software development, unrestricted encryption source code not subject to an express agreement for the payment of a licensing fee or royalty for commercial production or sale of any product developed using the source code can, without review, be released from "EI" controls and exported and reexported under License Exception TSU.
Jon.
Jon.
But the laser is mounted on a supersonic strike fighter... it's not like you can fire back along the straight line and expect the fighter to still be there. The best you could do is use the reverse path as a starting point path for (probably more than one) smart missiles, and hope they can find the source before they run out of fuel.
Jon.