Re:Another movie not worth reviewing
on
Movie Review: John Q
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· Score: 2, Funny
"The bad news is that the movie is so hypocritical, heavy-handed and gummed up with silly, sentimental and cliche-stuffed sub-plots that it undermines its own good intentions."
Well, I didn't see the price listed, but it does look like an evaluation board for their chipsets, not a regular motherboard. The old Sandpoint evaluation boards were in the $3k range, too, so nothing new here. I've been looking for a ppc board (that wasn't attached to an Apple) for years. Don't think this is it.
I'm also starting to wonder if maybe that ship hasn't already sailed. The PPC (motorola fork, anyway) is getting hotter as it gets faster, and Athlon will be getting cooler as it shrinks. Will the difference be worth recompiling all my software? Is there a free optimizing ppc compiler available like the Intel one for x86? The ppc advantage seems to be marginalizing over time.
Re:Use operating systems for what they're good for
on
Loki Games Closing?
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· Score: 1
I just use AVIPlay. The shocking thing was that the performance was much better under linux than using Windows Media Player under Win2k. Certain high-quality divxs on win would choke my machine, causing stuttering, dropped frames and poorly-synched sound. They play perfectly at full screen under linux. I was prepared to make a lot of compromises when switching to the linux desktop and was pleasantly surprised to find divx playback on the plus side of the equation.
Re:While Linux remains superior to Windows
on
2.4, The Kernel of Pain
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Excellent point about the difference in maintaining stable vs. development series.
While watching the 2.4 drama unfold, I've been wondering if it wouldn't be a better idea to switch kernel development to a Debian-like model -- a simultaneous Stable, Testing and Unstable (experimental) series. It may just be too much to ask bleeding-edge hackers to wait *years* before trying out their latest ideas. At the same time, those who excel at tweaking, optimizing and clarifying shouldn't have the ground shifting under them all the time.
It would probably take some more resources, but it seems that there is a surplus of good minds drawn to kernel development anyway.
What I'd love to see are ISOs of kernel + base. Since everybody needs base anyway, no bandwidth is wasted. Since CDs cost about 25 cents, no waste burning just that small amount. From what I could tell on the site, the only way to build a debian bootable CD was from debian scripts, hard to do before the install. At the least, they could write a faq on how to lay out the directories and such when writing the floppy images to disk to burn your own.
I just had to work through an install with a flakey floppy drive and it killed me to fight through all that when it could've been so easy.
Upgrading my kernel to 2.4.x, though, was shockingly easy.
I was a bit surprised to see that reaction in a lot of reviews. One said you'd love the movie "even if you thought Frodo was the weak link in the Corleone family."
A more involved anti-fantasy-but-loved-it review was in the Financial Times. Here's a snippet:
At university I fought with the strength of 10 men. Every day dozens of friends - so called - attempted to scale my battlements and conquer my integrity as a literature student. "You must read Tolkien," they cried as I beat them away. "Be a friend to Frodo!" they shouted as I poured boiling oil over them. "Do not disregard the wisdom of Gandalf," exclaimed others, whom I pushed away with a stick.
I was never vanquished. I refused to read all those tomes about elves, hobbits and creatures that whinged from dawn to dusk saying, "Oh dear, I've lost my ring." We get enough of that from Wagner, whom Tolkien evidently raided shamelessly. Finally though - price of my profession - I must go along to the movie: three hours of elves, hobbits and Sir Ian McKellen saying "Oh dear, we've lost the ring."
After five minutes, however, I was worried that I was enjoying it. After 10, I was worried that I was enjoying it more. After 20 minutes I realised that Peter Jackson's film of the unfilmable is as close to great filmmaking as an epic-sized pop-mythological kiddyflick can get.
Very surprising and very pleasing that the film is bringing this great story to at least some of the hard cord resisters.
First, I agree with what the above poster says about the card in your server. If you don't just decide on price, the only shopping point is 2d driver stability.
Second, if it's more of a home server++ thing, the Geforce 2 MX 200 has decent 3d performance with only 4w heat dissapation. If you need maximum 3d performance in your (ahem) server, the GF3 is only 15 watts. The extra 10 watts can be easily made up by chosing your hard disks carfully, adding a case fan, etc. Unless this ultra-stable mission critical server is also running a pair of overclocked XPs...
They must be running this server on an 80086 or a pdp11!
Or maybe even a 6507!
Re:Why not just make cooler running chips?
on
Wriggling Heat Sinks
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
I've been looking into this a lot recently, and there's some pretty (ahem) cool developments on the cpu front recently, with x86 architectures.
Some people point to the VIA C3-800, but if you have real computing needs, steer clear. It runs comparable to a Celeron 400, which is almost, but not quite adequate for general computing. Instead, check out the old reliable suppliers. The shift to.13u means a lot. Frequencies are so high and chips are so powerful that underclocking has become a real option. A good general target for fanless operation is about 12 watts. You can go higher with good case airflow, or lower if you're dealing with troublesome ambient temperatures.
Right now, you can take the Intel Tualatin pIII 1.13GHz (28W), cut the bus speed to around 100MHz, cut the voltage down to about 1.1v and be right in the target range. Of course you won't know exactly w/o experimentation on your cpu, but it *should* be doable. If you're worried about losing efficiency to bus speed, remember that you can compensate by running it on one of the PIII DDR chipsets that are now available (upping effective bus speeds to 200MHz) or waiting until February, when Intel says they'll release a similar part themselves. Additionally, the 512k (vs 256k) cache on the pIII-s will offset lower bus speeds. Just check out the specs of the PIII-M LV models at developer.intel.com and ask how they got to those low wattage numbers with the same core. Since the last fanless G4 was 400MHz and claimed (in its wildest fantasies) to be a supercomputer twice as fast as a pIII, a fanless 800MHz pIII is not insignificant.
Even better, surprise, is AMD. The current mobile palomino runs at 1.1GHz, 1.1v, 25w. This is clearly just an underclock of the current 1.75v desktop XPs. But what it tells you is that the AMD architecture is very open to undervoltage at lower clock speeds.
Now if you consider AMD's forthcoming die shrink, things really look good. Zdnet.de reported (unsourced) that the Athlon 1.73GHz processor would drop from about 75W to 45W after the changeover. Depending on how far you could drop the voltage, you could be looking at a 1-1.2GHz part running at about 10W! Fanless! Now imagine (a beo..no) 2 of these in a well ventilated case, with an MPX board -- 2GHz of dead silent AMD power! Wooo!
Alright, I'm calmed down. Back to your original point. It's really a shame about the alternative architectures. Every time I think of venturing into the embedded market, I get brushed off by the 2x price, 1/2x power rule. But since the ARM and PPC don't seem to be generating any economies of scale, at least mainstream processors are progressing fast enough to make cool, cheap and fast a real alternative.
Re:760 MPX was released today, along with the 1900
on
Athlon MP Reviewed
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· Score: 1
Well, possibly some bad news on the MPX front...
The Register is reporting that the MPX chipset, while announced today, won't ship in volume until 2Q02.
The good news is that by that time, Athlons will have gone.13u and the heat on a dual system will be a bit more tolerable.
You talk about debunking the great megahertz myth and give a link to the Apple marketing department for proof? That's rich. Too bad some of us do things other than run Photoshop.
Here is a good, though aging list of cross-platform benchmarks. The PPC runs about 50% faster than the PIII in normal cases, about 100% faster when Altivec enhanced. Fantastic numbers. I love the PPC. If I could get one without going through Apple, I would.
So why does Apple think they're Lincoln Steffens for giving us the same exagerations as Intel, except from a different angle? If the G5 debuted at 2.5 GHz, that "myth" angle would go away pretty quick.
Actually, I totally agreed with him on the bloat issue, especially this comment:
Joel: There's a famous fallacy that people learn in business school called the 80/20 rule. It's false, but it seduces a lot of dumb software startups. It seems to make sense. 80% of the people use 20% of the features. So you convince yourself that you only need to implement 20% of the features, and you can still sell 80% as many copies. The trouble here, of course, is that it's never the same 20%. Everybody uses a different set of features.
People keep citing 80/20 when discussing "almost there" free office suites, and this is exactly why that logic doesn't fly. Particularly when the users across a single organization don't even use the same 20% of the features.
Re:The most important...
on
This is IT?
·
· Score: 1
While I predict this will be at BEST a fad, we can now finally take the core technology and start building robotic war mecha.
Right, particularly wrt change. There's been a lot of talk about this recently: "Linux will never succeed on the desktop" and so on. What happened? Did a project deadline just slip? Did someone call out "Time's up, keyboards down, please"? Did we cross some finish line and I missed it?
The articles and analyses remind me of a couple of years ago, when the wonks were all chattering about "linux just isn't ready for the enterprise". Now, from the article:
In other words, in the enterprise, Linux has a real shot.
And now that has become current accepted wisdom, and doubtless everyone says they knew it all along. If you think "linux just isn't ready for the desktop" then don't use it. But is that grounds for calling the game over? Sheesh. Today, linux desktops are fairly usable and improving. Until they stop being usable and stop improving, don't talk to me about "over".
Yeah, I'd love to see a tiny sized board based on the nForce chipset. GeForce graphics, 5.1 audio, AMD cpu...mmmmm.
There's been an emerging form factor in the SBC (Single Board Computer) world recently, known as EBX. It's a 5.75" x 8.00" board built to be racked, stacked and expanded. They even have tiny pci cards (pc/104-plus). I'd love to see more consumer PCs based on these specs (especially an nForce one!). Great for those PCs you've always wanted to scatter around the house.
Plus, you could case-mod your old Star Wars lunch box.
I'd love to see the TV tuner coming in on that FireWire, rather than as a card. Then you could move it from box to box, as you like. I noticed ATI is selling the ATI TV-Wonder for USB but it only has 320 x 200 or so resolution. I wonder if they'll upgrade it to FireWire.
The proposal in itself is unbelievable, and I'm sure there'll be plenty of posts pointing that out. But what really gets me is that they tried to tack it on to the anti-terrorism bill.
At some point (Sept 12? 13 maybe?) someone in the RIAA looked at the smoking crater filled with 5,000 dead people in my town and said, "You know, this could really work for us..."
I don't want to sound like I'm contradicting you, but did you happen to read this link from the article? It's specifically about realtime audio. Key paragraph:
*EXCITING* NEWS:
things getting almost perfect !
Ingo's lowlatency-2.2.10-N6 patch with the shm.c part backed out and a modification of filemap.c (thanks to Roger Larsson) performs _REALLY_ well, using my usual latencytest parameters (4.3ms buffer), I got NO DROP-OUTS anymore, with sporadic maximum peaks of ONLY 2.9ms This is really exciting because it opens the doors to a whole new class of Realtime applications for Linux, simply using userspace processes scheduled SCHED_FIFO. I heard of comparable low-latencies only from BEOS, Windows can't simply guarantee these kind of latencies, not even using DirectX. Using a soft-synth on Win98 on my BOX I must use 15-20ms audio buffers to get _SOMEWHAT_ reliable audio. This is actually about more than 3-4times the buffer I used for testing under Linux ( 4.35ms).
I don't know much about the field, but the page seems to speak to several of the audio-related concerns mentioned above.
Slashdot Mirror
"The bad news is that the movie is so hypocritical, heavy-handed and gummed up with silly, sentimental and cliche-stuffed sub-plots that it undermines its own good intentions."
Hey, is this a review of JohnQ or JohnKatz?
Well, I didn't see the price listed, but it does look like an evaluation board for their chipsets, not a regular motherboard. The old Sandpoint evaluation boards were in the $3k range, too, so nothing new here. I've been looking for a ppc board (that wasn't attached to an Apple) for years. Don't think this is it.
I'm also starting to wonder if maybe that ship hasn't already sailed. The PPC (motorola fork, anyway) is getting hotter as it gets faster, and Athlon will be getting cooler as it shrinks. Will the difference be worth recompiling all my software? Is there a free optimizing ppc compiler available like the Intel one for x86? The ppc advantage seems to be marginalizing over time.
I just use AVIPlay. The shocking thing was that the performance was much better under linux than using Windows Media Player under Win2k. Certain high-quality divxs on win would choke my machine, causing stuttering, dropped frames and poorly-synched sound. They play perfectly at full screen under linux. I was prepared to make a lot of compromises when switching to the linux desktop and was pleasantly surprised to find divx playback on the plus side of the equation.
Excellent point about the difference in maintaining stable vs. development series.
While watching the 2.4 drama unfold, I've been wondering if it wouldn't be a better idea to switch kernel development to a Debian-like model -- a simultaneous Stable, Testing and Unstable (experimental) series. It may just be too much to ask bleeding-edge hackers to wait *years* before trying out their latest ideas. At the same time, those who excel at tweaking, optimizing and clarifying shouldn't have the ground shifting under them all the time.
It would probably take some more resources, but it seems that there is a surplus of good minds drawn to kernel development anyway.
What I'd love to see are ISOs of kernel + base. Since everybody needs base anyway, no bandwidth is wasted. Since CDs cost about 25 cents, no waste burning just that small amount. From what I could tell on the site, the only way to build a debian bootable CD was from debian scripts, hard to do before the install. At the least, they could write a faq on how to lay out the directories and such when writing the floppy images to disk to burn your own.
I just had to work through an install with a flakey floppy drive and it killed me to fight through all that when it could've been so easy.
Upgrading my kernel to 2.4.x, though, was shockingly easy.
I was a bit surprised to see that reaction in a lot of reviews. One said you'd love the movie "even if you thought Frodo was the weak link in the Corleone family."
A more involved anti-fantasy-but-loved-it review was in the Financial Times. Here's a snippet:
Very surprising and very pleasing that the film is bringing this great story to at least some of the hard cord resisters.
First, I agree with what the above poster says about the card in your server. If you don't just decide on price, the only shopping point is 2d driver stability.
Second, if it's more of a home server++ thing, the Geforce 2 MX 200 has decent 3d performance with only 4w heat dissapation. If you need maximum 3d performance in your (ahem) server, the GF3 is only 15 watts. The extra 10 watts can be easily made up by chosing your hard disks carfully, adding a case fan, etc. Unless this ultra-stable mission critical server is also running a pair of overclocked XPs...
If you thought lost keys were bad before just wait! Now you can lose the car keys and the Laptop HD all at the SAME TIME!.
But if you lose your keys with this thing, you can just grep them.
But as you've brought it up, go study Zen for 20 years and then come back and tell us that there's no such thing as "spirituality".
You can't learn anything by studying Zen for 20 years. Just ask a Zen master.
They must be running this server on an 80086 or a pdp11!
Or maybe even a 6507!
I've been looking into this a lot recently, and there's some pretty (ahem) cool developments on the cpu front recently, with x86 architectures.
Some people point to the VIA C3-800, but if you have real computing needs, steer clear. It runs comparable to a Celeron 400, which is almost, but not quite adequate for general computing. Instead, check out the old reliable suppliers. The shift to .13u means a lot. Frequencies are so high and chips are so powerful that underclocking has become a real option. A good general target for fanless operation is about 12 watts. You can go higher with good case airflow, or lower if you're dealing with troublesome ambient temperatures.
Right now, you can take the Intel Tualatin pIII 1.13GHz (28W), cut the bus speed to around 100MHz, cut the voltage down to about 1.1v and be right in the target range. Of course you won't know exactly w/o experimentation on your cpu, but it *should* be doable. If you're worried about losing efficiency to bus speed, remember that you can compensate by running it on one of the PIII DDR chipsets that are now available (upping effective bus speeds to 200MHz) or waiting until February, when Intel says they'll release a similar part themselves. Additionally, the 512k (vs 256k) cache on the pIII-s will offset lower bus speeds. Just check out the specs of the PIII-M LV models at developer.intel.com and ask how they got to those low wattage numbers with the same core. Since the last fanless G4 was 400MHz and claimed (in its wildest fantasies) to be a supercomputer twice as fast as a pIII, a fanless 800MHz pIII is not insignificant.
Even better, surprise, is AMD. The current mobile palomino runs at 1.1GHz, 1.1v, 25w. This is clearly just an underclock of the current 1.75v desktop XPs. But what it tells you is that the AMD architecture is very open to undervoltage at lower clock speeds.
Now if you consider AMD's forthcoming die shrink, things really look good. Zdnet.de reported (unsourced) that the Athlon 1.73GHz processor would drop from about 75W to 45W after the changeover. Depending on how far you could drop the voltage, you could be looking at a 1-1.2GHz part running at about 10W! Fanless! Now imagine (a beo..no) 2 of these in a well ventilated case, with an MPX board -- 2GHz of dead silent AMD power! Wooo!
Alright, I'm calmed down. Back to your original point. It's really a shame about the alternative architectures. Every time I think of venturing into the embedded market, I get brushed off by the 2x price, 1/2x power rule. But since the ARM and PPC don't seem to be generating any economies of scale, at least mainstream processors are progressing fast enough to make cool, cheap and fast a real alternative.
Well, possibly some bad news on the MPX front...
The Register is reporting that the MPX chipset, while announced today, won't ship in volume until 2Q02.
The good news is that by that time, Athlons will have gone .13u and the heat on a dual system will be a bit more tolerable.
Ha!
You talk about debunking the great megahertz myth and give a link to the Apple marketing department for proof? That's rich. Too bad some of us do things other than run Photoshop.
Here is a good, though aging list of cross-platform benchmarks. The PPC runs about 50% faster than the PIII in normal cases, about 100% faster when Altivec enhanced. Fantastic numbers. I love the PPC. If I could get one without going through Apple, I would.
So why does Apple think they're Lincoln Steffens for giving us the same exagerations as Intel, except from a different angle? If the G5 debuted at 2.5 GHz, that "myth" angle would go away pretty quick.
I've always wanted to start an Underground Lawn Darts league, just to publicize how out of control the federal goverment is...
The first rule of Underground Lawn Darts League is that we do NOT talk about Underground Lawn Darts League.
Now grab that C4, soldier.
Actually, I totally agreed with him on the bloat issue, especially this comment:
Joel: There's a famous fallacy that people learn in business school called the 80/20 rule. It's false, but it seduces a lot of dumb software startups. It seems to make sense. 80% of the people use 20% of the features. So you convince yourself that you only need to implement 20% of the features, and you can still sell 80% as many copies. The trouble here, of course, is that it's never the same 20%. Everybody uses a different set of features.
People keep citing 80/20 when discussing "almost there" free office suites, and this is exactly why that logic doesn't fly. Particularly when the users across a single organization don't even use the same 20% of the features.
While I predict this will be at BEST a fad, we can now finally take the core technology and start building robotic war mecha.
Well, it is made of Gundanium...
Better still, the electric motor means you won't even hear it coming.
What a piece of junk.
I heard Dijkstra wrote a really damning criticism of this. Using it could even be considered harmful or something...
And I'm hoping for Cipro in that new technology tree...
Right, particularly wrt change. There's been a lot of talk about this recently: "Linux will never succeed on the desktop" and so on. What happened? Did a project deadline just slip? Did someone call out "Time's up, keyboards down, please"? Did we cross some finish line and I missed it?
The articles and analyses remind me of a couple of years ago, when the wonks were all chattering about "linux just isn't ready for the enterprise". Now, from the article:
In other words, in the enterprise, Linux has a real shot.
And now that has become current accepted wisdom, and doubtless everyone says they knew it all along. If you think "linux just isn't ready for the desktop" then don't use it. But is that grounds for calling the game over? Sheesh. Today, linux desktops are fairly usable and improving. Until they stop being usable and stop improving, don't talk to me about "over".
Yeah, I'd love to see a tiny sized board based on the nForce chipset. GeForce graphics, 5.1 audio, AMD cpu...mmmmm.
There's been an emerging form factor in the SBC (Single Board Computer) world recently, known as EBX. It's a 5.75" x 8.00" board built to be racked, stacked and expanded. They even have tiny pci cards (pc/104-plus). I'd love to see more consumer PCs based on these specs (especially an nForce one!). Great for those PCs you've always wanted to scatter around the house.
Plus, you could case-mod your old Star Wars lunch box.
I'd love to see the TV tuner coming in on that FireWire, rather than as a card. Then you could move it from box to box, as you like. I noticed ATI is selling the ATI TV-Wonder for USB but it only has 320 x 200 or so resolution. I wonder if they'll upgrade it to FireWire.
The proposal in itself is unbelievable, and I'm sure there'll be plenty of posts pointing that out. But what really gets me is that they tried to tack it on to the anti-terrorism bill.
At some point (Sept 12? 13 maybe?) someone in the RIAA looked at the smoking crater filled with 5,000 dead people in my town and said, "You know, this could really work for us..."
Bastards.
Yeah, this puts the kernel right up there with the Emmys!
Will Joan Rivers be there for the 2.5 rollout?
I don't want to sound like I'm contradicting you, but did you happen to read this link from the article? It's specifically about realtime audio. Key paragraph:
*EXCITING* NEWS: things getting almost perfect ! Ingo's lowlatency-2.2.10-N6 patch with the shm.c part backed out and a modification of filemap.c (thanks to Roger Larsson) performs _REALLY_ well, using my usual latencytest parameters (4.3ms buffer), I got NO DROP-OUTS anymore, with sporadic maximum peaks of ONLY 2.9ms This is really exciting because it opens the doors to a whole new class of Realtime applications for Linux, simply using userspace processes scheduled SCHED_FIFO. I heard of comparable low-latencies only from BEOS, Windows can't simply guarantee these kind of latencies, not even using DirectX. Using a soft-synth on Win98 on my BOX I must use 15-20ms audio buffers to get _SOMEWHAT_ reliable audio. This is actually about more than 3-4times the buffer I used for testing under Linux ( 4.35ms).
I don't know much about the field, but the page seems to speak to several of the audio-related concerns mentioned above.