P4 and Rambus memory on quad-processor situations: I'm not aware of any P4 multi-processor motherboard
SSE2 for gigabytes of data in real-time: you must have unbelievable high speed hard disks in multiple RAID setups, if you can process realtime gigs of data with any processor
Open source: I won't comment on this one, since I'm not informed enough.
So oddities like asteroids orbiting pluto etc are par for the course.
Asteroids farther than Pluto are not oddities, but they were in fact *predicted*, and not observed only because it was difficult.
In the last years, increasingly powerful instruments have started to found a lot of objects beyond Pluto. The surprise is that there are many objects in the 200-300 km range, and some even bigger (like this one). It wasn't expected.
As the telescopes get more powerful, expect a *lot* more asteroids being discovered farther and farther from the Sun. It is believed that the Oort Cloud (where most of the comets come from) extends for something like 100.000 UA (1 UA is the Sun-Earth distance, or 150.000.000 km. So 100.000 UAs are 15.000.000.000.000 km, roughly 1.5 light-years).
To pay the premium price for the top low-end AMD so that i can demo four.dm_66 (800x600) at 131.5 fps instead of 119.5!!!
Fps at low resolutions are NOT done to show how much fun is to play that game at 640x480x 1000fps. If tested at 1280x1024, the same game would be around 50fps for ALL cpus, because at that resolution the limiting factor is the videocard.
The only way to use a game as a CPU benchmark is to use low resolutions: you factor out the videocard, and you are left with cpu and memory performance.
Now, we could debate on the opportunity of using MDK2 instead of CPUMark2000... if you want CPU scores, use CPU benches. If you want to answer "Will my gaming needs will be satisfied?", test a real-world game setup.
Re:It's about time
on
IBM Wants Linux
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Look at distributed.net CPU speed tables. The fasted risc CPU of any kind (UltrasparcIII @ 800Mhz) is less than half the speed of a Pentium III doing 1.2Ghz (for RC5 cracking).
Hey, check your facts before making broad statements like "Sparcs are slow at RC5, so Intels are better". Somewhere in the distributed.net docs is stated that most RISC CPUs lacks an important assembly instruction (n-bit rotations, if I remember correctly), as opposed to x86 and PowerPC. Guess what, that instruction is essential for RC5 cracking, and Sparcs, Alpha and co. are slow. You might want to check DES cracking speeds, where RISC CPUs are flying at unbelievable speeds, leaving common x86s in the dust.
It all depends on the particular application that you are testing.
Sure, there are marginal improvements in total system performance from things like cache, bus speed and so on. They are marginal.
Again, no. They are marginal when you write "Hello, world" programs. But for heavy computing/database and such memory bandwith/latency is crucial. Even in the PC world, just ONE cpu can be stalled by the lack of memory bandwith. Look at the Pentium 4 test at Anandtech: in particular applications (mp3 encoding, streaming in general) there's a 30% difference between different chipsets).
Guess what happens when you have 4 CPUs on a single board, all begging memory access to random locations to complete their database lookups...
I'm not an astrophysicist, and the question "what would happen to the Sun if fusion released a trillion times as much energy" is a complicated one
First answer: The sun would explode in a fraction of a second.
Second answer: given those conditions, a star as big as the Sun would never form. You would have a much smaller star.
On a more serious note, why are we still building telescopes on Earth with the limitations we face on the ground? (Atmospheric distortion comes to mind... And I do understand they'll probably build this thing in a remote area to avoid the obvious: smog, city lights, etc. Still, though, there are some inherent limitations that they give a telescope like this by building it on and designing it for Earth.)
Many ground-based telescopes are using "Adaptive Optics" systems, where an optic module tries to reverse the atmospheric distortion. They are already quite successful for very small fields-of-view, and a next generation of instruments are under development for bigger fields. The OWL would be practically useless without adaptive optics. I personally attended a talk by ESO's director, where he said that the success of the AO modules in the next years will be the deciding factor for the OWL.
However, there is no proof that other forms of life, such as silicon-based life, don't exist.
Maybe silicon-based life can exist, but the strongest argument against it is the fact that here on Earth, with a lot more silicon than carbon, we developed a carbon-based life. If a silicon-based one was possible, Earth was the perfect planet for it.
Good new for Greg Bear...
on
Protein Music
·
· Score: 1
This gives a whole new meaning to his SF novel "Blood Music" (btw, it was about single-celled intelligent organisms... sure their DNA must be more complicated than a Beethoven score:-))
It's likely that it slows down when it gets close to the end
Probably yes, but not because of what you think. Every key requires a pretty fixed amount of time to be tested, so the speed shouldn't change.
Anyway, the network syncronization (sp?) will get more and more difficult, as slow nodes begin chomping packets that will return after the end of the contest, and there will be a lot of re-issues, effectively doubling or tripling the amount of work for the last 2-3% of the keyspace (exactly as happened at the end of RC5-56)
That's impossible, for now. RC5-64 started some years ago, when distributed.net finished RC5-56. The difference between the two is a factor of 256, and many people said that even RC5-64 was too difficult. Maybe they had a point... 3+ years for half of the keyspace is long enough.
RC5-128 would be 2^64 times longer that RC-64, and that's about 16.000.000.000.000.000.000 times longer.
If Moore's law keeps pumping, computers will have sufficent power in maybe 100 years...
Re:Matt's Windows UI Argument deconstructed
on
OSX/Win2K Deathmatch
·
· Score: 1
Microsoft has shown a complete unwillingness to correct bad interface decisions made in a previous version of their software with improvements made in the next one. Probably because of this "predictability" (not to be confused with consistancy, which *is* a good thing in a UI). How long did it take before microsoft killed the "window-within-window" MDI in Office?
I mostly agree with you, but I want the MDI interface back. I cannot stand 15 minimized windows in the taskbar only because I have too many open documents.
Guess what, I like Opera just for the MDI:-)
Interesting. I think that my dad used to have a Commodore-64, but I don't think I've seen one (maybe in a box at a garage sale) in my lifetime.
Hey, home computers are not so old. I'm 24 and I have a C64 somewhere collecting dust, which I used a lot in childhood (learning 6502 assembly was FUN).
Now if only someone puts out a SCSI Raid card for it, I can see some good use...
while ($inspace)
{
if ( abs($speed_error) > $threshold)
{
&fire_thrusters( -$speed_error);
print NASA "This is AI here. I have just corrected the speed! Send a news release.\n";
}
else
{
print NASA "This is AI here. Everythink is OK.\n";
}
}
print NASA "This is AI here. I have landed!\n";
The basic move to strengthen your back and legs is squat. Start without any weights whatsoever. Then keep your weight on your heels and lower yourself as low as you can and raise back up. I'm talking ass to the grass style here, not 90 degrees or shins to parallel. Add the bar when you get used to the move and then start working out. Don't add so much weight that you don't feel like lowering yourself all the way down. Also, you should be able to lift 8-10 reps.
Squat is a great exercise, but watch out for your knees: the lower you go, the harder they will be stressed when you go up.
1. Because of the contracts with Rambus, Intel cannot manufacture non-Rambus high-speed memory chipsets for their offerings
I think that you are missing the point, here. The "contract" merely states that, if Intel sells enough Rambus chipsets, it can buy a lot of Rambus shares at a very low price. But, if patent suits begin to go against Rambus, those shares aren't worth the trouble. Ergo, Intel gives Rambus the finger, and goes DDR or what it will damn please.
You're overlooking the several probes that did work. Clementine was particularly interesting (lunar mapping probe).
Yes, sadly that was only the first part of Clementine's planned mission. The probe was lost before the second part (asteroid fly-by).
Anyway, it's true that media report ONLY those probes that failed, and keep being silent on the many more that are successful.
And don't forget that Pioneer, Voyager and co. were hugely expensive at the time. The Voyagers, for example, had three complete systems on board - just to be sure that if one or two failed, the other could keep working. And it worked:-)
The bank "Monte dei Paschi di Siena" was founded in 1472 (a little before Columbus "discovered" America), so it's 529 years old (!). It's still one of the largest banks in Italy, and claims to be the world's oldest bank.
After a big concern by just every Italian webmaster, the law has been clarified: only professional newspapers/"webpapers" are subjected to a yearly tax, while the others (read: 99%) "news" websites are ok.
The confusion rose from the bad wording present in the law, that lead many to the conclusion that any regularly-update web site was subjected to the tax. Luckyly, they were wrong.
I don't know about the rest of Europe, but here in Italy the cost of online access is decreasing rapidly. I live in an urban area, and I have 640k DSL for the equivalent of $35/month (and I often hit 1Mbps), which is pretty in par with the US rates I hear of.
Pay-per-minute fees still exists, but more and more people use 56k or ISDN flats ($20/25 per month).
If you don't think you've been drastically misled by the media, then please, please try to explain just this one simple fact: 70% of Greenpeace "operations" result in at least one death -- and not infrequently a dozen or more -- yet you "naturally" have strongly positive feelings about Greenpeace.
Apart from the fact that I don't frequently hear about "dozens or more deaths" during Greenpeace operations, taking a single fact (70% operations with one death) out of the frame of reference is a completely wrong way of judging. For example, I guess that 70% of pneuma cancer treatments result in at least one death - should we ban those too?
Recently, a sceptical colleague objected that this was impossible due to the laws of physics. The objector claimed that the craft would have slowed under any circustances because of its momentum and effects of the atmosphere, even if it meant burning up.
He is right. "skidding" the atmosphere would only make you lose energy, and will accelerate you towards the surface of Earth. When you are orbiting, the only way to go into deep space is to use energy, i.e. firing a rocket.
Slashdot Mirror
???
P4 and Rambus memory on quad-processor situations: I'm not aware of any P4 multi-processor motherboard
SSE2 for gigabytes of data in real-time: you must have unbelievable high speed hard disks in multiple RAID setups, if you can process realtime gigs of data with any processor
Open source: I won't comment on this one, since I'm not informed enough.
Well, troll score 2 out of 3.
Subject = "The kind" / verb should be "is"
10,000 Americans die every day
gg made up stats
Made up stats? Let's see...
Assuming a population of 285 millions (U.S. Census Bureau), and an average life of 77 years (NCHS), we can work it out:
285.000.000 / (77*365) = 10140 deaths/day
Pretty close, I would say.
So oddities like asteroids orbiting pluto etc are par for the course.
Asteroids farther than Pluto are not oddities, but they were in fact *predicted*, and not observed only because it was difficult.
In the last years, increasingly powerful instruments have started to found a lot of objects beyond Pluto. The surprise is that there are many objects in the 200-300 km range, and some even bigger (like this one). It wasn't expected.
As the telescopes get more powerful, expect a *lot* more asteroids being discovered farther and farther from the Sun. It is believed that the Oort Cloud (where most of the comets come from) extends for something like 100.000 UA (1 UA is the Sun-Earth distance, or 150.000.000 km. So 100.000 UAs are 15.000.000.000.000 km, roughly 1.5 light-years).
To pay the premium price for the top low-end AMD so that i can demo four.dm_66 (800x600) at 131.5 fps instead of 119.5!!!
Fps at low resolutions are NOT done to show how much fun is to play that game at 640x480x 1000fps. If tested at 1280x1024, the same game would be around 50fps for ALL cpus, because at that resolution the limiting factor is the videocard.
The only way to use a game as a CPU benchmark is to use low resolutions: you factor out the videocard, and you are left with cpu and memory performance.
Now, we could debate on the opportunity of using MDK2 instead of CPUMark2000... if you want CPU scores, use CPU benches. If you want to answer "Will my gaming needs will be satisfied?", test a real-world game setup.
Look at distributed.net CPU speed tables. The fasted risc CPU of any kind (UltrasparcIII @ 800Mhz) is less than half the speed of a Pentium III doing 1.2Ghz (for RC5 cracking).
Hey, check your facts before making broad statements like "Sparcs are slow at RC5, so Intels are better". Somewhere in the distributed.net docs is stated that most RISC CPUs lacks an important assembly instruction (n-bit rotations, if I remember correctly), as opposed to x86 and PowerPC. Guess what, that instruction is essential for RC5 cracking, and Sparcs, Alpha and co. are slow. You might want to check DES cracking speeds, where RISC CPUs are flying at unbelievable speeds, leaving common x86s in the dust.
It all depends on the particular application that you are testing.
Sure, there are marginal improvements in total system performance from things like cache, bus speed and so on. They are marginal.
Again, no. They are marginal when you write "Hello, world" programs. But for heavy computing/database and such memory bandwith/latency is crucial. Even in the PC world, just ONE cpu can be stalled by the lack of memory bandwith. Look at the Pentium 4 test at Anandtech: in particular applications (mp3 encoding, streaming in general) there's a 30% difference between different chipsets).
Guess what happens when you have 4 CPUs on a single board, all begging memory access to random locations to complete their database lookups...
Now I'm screwed until I can find a player that will handle avi's, Mp3, and Mpgs.
You migth want to check Irfanview, a Windows viewer that I use for just everything. It's a 600K executable, and freeware.
I'm not an astrophysicist, and the question "what would happen to the Sun if fusion released a trillion times as much energy" is a complicated one
First answer: The sun would explode in a fraction of a second.
Second answer: given those conditions, a star as big as the Sun would never form. You would have a much smaller star.
On a more serious note, why are we still building telescopes on Earth with the limitations we face on the ground? (Atmospheric distortion comes to mind... And I do understand they'll probably build this thing in a remote area to avoid the obvious: smog, city lights, etc. Still, though, there are some inherent limitations that they give a telescope like this by building it on and designing it for Earth.)
Many ground-based telescopes are using "Adaptive Optics" systems, where an optic module tries to reverse the atmospheric distortion. They are already quite successful for very small fields-of-view, and a next generation of instruments are under development for bigger fields. The OWL would be practically useless without adaptive optics. I personally attended a talk by ESO's director, where he said that the success of the AO modules in the next years will be the deciding factor for the OWL.
However, there is no proof that other forms of life, such as silicon-based life, don't exist.
Maybe silicon-based life can exist, but the strongest argument against it is the fact that here on Earth, with a lot more silicon than carbon, we developed a carbon-based life. If a silicon-based one was possible, Earth was the perfect planet for it.
This gives a whole new meaning to his SF novel "Blood Music" (btw, it was about single-celled intelligent organisms... sure their DNA must be more complicated than a Beethoven score :-))
It's likely that it slows down when it gets close to the end
Probably yes, but not because of what you think. Every key requires a pretty fixed amount of time to be tested, so the speed shouldn't change.
Anyway, the network syncronization (sp?) will get more and more difficult, as slow nodes begin chomping packets that will return after the end of the contest, and there will be a lot of re-issues, effectively doubling or tripling the amount of work for the last 2-3% of the keyspace (exactly as happened at the end of RC5-56)
I thought we were working on RC5-128 now. hmm.
That's impossible, for now. RC5-64 started some years ago, when distributed.net finished RC5-56. The difference between the two is a factor of 256, and many people said that even RC5-64 was too difficult. Maybe they had a point... 3+ years for half of the keyspace is long enough.
RC5-128 would be 2^64 times longer that RC-64, and that's about 16.000.000.000.000.000.000 times longer.
If Moore's law keeps pumping, computers will have sufficent power in maybe 100 years...
Microsoft has shown a complete unwillingness to correct bad interface decisions made in a previous version of their software with improvements made in the next one. Probably because of this "predictability" (not to be confused with consistancy, which *is* a good thing in a UI). How long did it take before microsoft killed the "window-within-window" MDI in Office?
:-)
I mostly agree with you, but I want the MDI interface back. I cannot stand 15 minimized windows in the taskbar only because I have too many open documents.
Guess what, I like Opera just for the MDI
Interesting. I think that my dad used to have a Commodore-64, but I don't think I've seen one (maybe in a box at a garage sale) in my lifetime.
Hey, home computers are not so old. I'm 24 and I have a C64 somewhere collecting dust, which I used a lot in childhood (learning 6502 assembly was FUN).
Now if only someone puts out a SCSI Raid card for it, I can see some good use...
Easy:
while ($inspace)
{
if ( abs($speed_error) > $threshold)
{
&fire_thrusters( -$speed_error);
print NASA "This is AI here. I have just corrected the speed! Send a news release.\n";
}
else
{
print NASA "This is AI here. Everythink is OK.\n";
}
}
print NASA "This is AI here. I have landed!\n";
The basic move to strengthen your back and legs is squat. Start without any weights whatsoever. Then keep your weight on your heels and lower yourself as low as you can and raise back up. I'm talking ass to the grass style here, not 90 degrees or shins to parallel. Add the bar when you get used to the move and then start working out. Don't add so much weight that you don't feel like lowering yourself all the way down. Also, you should be able to lift 8-10 reps.
Squat is a great exercise, but watch out for your knees: the lower you go, the harder they will be stressed when you go up.
1. Because of the contracts with Rambus, Intel cannot manufacture non-Rambus high-speed memory chipsets for their offerings
I think that you are missing the point, here. The "contract" merely states that, if Intel sells enough Rambus chipsets, it can buy a lot of Rambus shares at a very low price. But, if patent suits begin to go against Rambus, those shares aren't worth the trouble. Ergo, Intel gives Rambus the finger, and goes DDR or what it will damn please.
Just my $.0.02
You're overlooking the several probes that did work. Clementine was particularly interesting (lunar mapping probe).
:-)
Yes, sadly that was only the first part of Clementine's planned mission. The probe was lost before the second part (asteroid fly-by).
Anyway, it's true that media report ONLY those probes that failed, and keep being silent on the many more that are successful.
And don't forget that Pioneer, Voyager and co. were hugely expensive at the time. The Voyagers, for example, had three complete systems on board - just to be sure that if one or two failed, the other could keep working. And it worked
The bank "Monte dei Paschi di Siena" was founded in 1472 (a little before Columbus "discovered" America), so it's 529 years old (!). It's still one of the largest banks in Italy, and claims to be the world's oldest bank.
After a big concern by just every Italian webmaster, the law has been clarified: only professional newspapers/"webpapers" are subjected to a yearly tax, while the others (read: 99%) "news" websites are ok.
The confusion rose from the bad wording present in the law, that lead many to the conclusion that any regularly-update web site was subjected to the tax. Luckyly, they were wrong.
I don't know about the rest of Europe, but here in Italy the cost of online access is decreasing rapidly. I live in an urban area, and I have 640k DSL for the equivalent of $35/month (and I often hit 1Mbps), which is pretty in par with the US rates I hear of.
Pay-per-minute fees still exists, but more and more people use 56k or ISDN flats ($20/25 per month).
If you don't think you've been drastically misled by the media, then please, please try to explain just this one simple fact: 70% of Greenpeace "operations" result in at least one death -- and not infrequently a dozen or more -- yet you "naturally" have strongly positive feelings about Greenpeace.
Apart from the fact that I don't frequently hear about "dozens or more deaths" during Greenpeace operations, taking a single fact (70% operations with one death) out of the frame of reference is a completely wrong way of judging. For example, I guess that 70% of pneuma cancer treatments result in at least one death - should we ban those too?
Recently, a sceptical colleague objected that this was impossible due to the laws of physics. The objector claimed that the craft would have slowed under any circustances because of its momentum and effects of the atmosphere, even if it meant burning up.
He is right. "skidding" the atmosphere would only make you lose energy, and will accelerate you towards the surface of Earth.
When you are orbiting, the only way to go into deep space is to use energy, i.e. firing a rocket.
I remember they fed the russians mcdonalds.
:-)
So, instead of shooting them, they tried to kill them in more subtile ways