Funny. I've had at least 3 Intel Desktop Boards burn up (literally) in the last 5 years. Several more have failed for other reasons. We no longer buy IDB-based machines.
> I disagree with you on that. Bulldozer was a disappointment, but ultimately it was a necessary disappointment
And a lot of the damage has been made up by the next generation piledriver cores. We can see the difference clearly in server performance, it's not just PR guff.
The improvements in processor modules alone are substantial, but for our use it'd be nicer to have non-shared FPUs
AMD learned quickly from the mistake of over-long pipelines, unlike Intel, who kept foisting 'em on us for several years.
Before someone jumps on this and asks why we're not using GPU boxes, the code being used doesn't support 'em. Astrophysicists don't make brilliant code at the best of times.
> The person above that said it, said it right. Machines are just good enough these days.
That's the crux of the the problem and it's been coming for a while. The market hit saturation point about 5 years ago and most machines are still "good enough" for their intended purpose.
The entire PC market has been built around relentless growth and replacement of business machines every 3 years. We're finding that 5-6 year old machines do fine for most business applications, so we're not replacing them unless we actually need to.
Even research machines don't need as much upgrading. You can't put a $20k 64-core 512Gb machine on a desktop (it's far too noisy), so existing desktop machines which used to be state-of-the-art 3-4 years ago are being used as Xterms for the big boxes - and that means we save about $40k/year on desktop equipment spend. People are buying tablets instead of new desktops and they're still way cheaper than the money we used to put into the desktops.
I understand why AMD is struggling, and it's not good, but their money is in the commodity processors. Top end stuff is worth a bit of PR hype but the sales don't cover development costs. When things get tight a company has to focus on what it does best - which is graphics cards and fusion CPUs, plus rolling out more low-power kit for bulk sales into appliances.
If you think TV engineers write bad UIs, you should see the ones rocket scientists cobble together.
Seriously, a PhD in astrophysics deoesn't mean there are any programming skills whatsoever, let alone any appreciation of ergonomics.
In the UK, they have a crime of "endangering transport" - it's regularly used to nail the idiots who lase aircraft, train drivers AND vehicle drivers, as well as the ones tossing things off overpasses.
Penalties up to 15 years in jail and it's a lot easier to prove than attempted murder.
FWIW, being hit in the face with a green laser while driving HURTS - and because they're usually just along the street you don't get the benefit of handshake reducing the burn (The idiot who lased me also lased several aircraft and a police helicoptor which was searching for him. No idea if he was caught or not.)
# completely disagree. 802.11a was ratified in 1999, and still there is no significant problem with congestion in the 5GHz band.
The wider channel spacing and much larger number of useful channels in the 5GHz band helps, but the fact that there's virtually no 5GHz gear in consumer hands is the biggest reason. My wife's brand new consumer-grade Dell laptop with 802.11n is only 2.4GHz (which is irritating from a techie point of view)
War-walking, I can see ONE 5GHz access point on a half mile stretch of my street - my own one. OTOH there are more than 100 2.4GHz ones visible - and a substantial chunk of those are still unencrypted.
It means that HP and a lot of others assume that English == US Letter, Anything else == A4
That's got to be one of the most seriously fucked up defaults in Postscript.
1: Sodium is trivially extracted from seawater, so that component just came down by 90%
2: If you watch the video clip, you'll see a glance at a diagram which shows no capacity loss out past 50 cycles (It doesn't show where capacity loss starts). It's towards the end of the clip where they talk about 300mAh/g capacities (cycles aren't mentioned but are on the diagram)
3: Using pyrolised sugar means the cost of the anode just came down 90%
4: Using non-toxic (and much cheaper) metals drops the cost even further. Cobalt can be quite nasty.
5: It's not the capacity increases which matter for this technology, as much as the marked decrease in final cost.
Actually, ammunition is the killer app. You sell weapons once. They need ammunition to function as such and they keep needing the stuff to continue functioning.
Many UK speed camera boxes have video cameras in them monitoring road conditions - the flash is on a different crcuit and goes off when speed tripped even if there isn't a speed camera onboard (those use film, although there are moves afoot to legislate to allow digital storage using WORM media), in order to keep motorists guessing.
This all came out about 6 years ago when a speeding driver returned and burned out the camera box using thermite. Evidence shown on tv clearly showed video footage of the idiot staring into the camera lens and moving about in front of the camera in the few seconds before the thermite dropped in and wriecked the sensor. He got caught because the recorder was in the base of the pole and not affected by the fire. On top of that the GPS tracker in his employer's van showed that he'd been speeding earlier in the day at that point, plus the return trip at 2am to burn it out.
Additionally: UK police have been posting covert cameras to watch regularly vandalised installations for some years, if court reports are anything to go by.
There are a number of sites in the uk where the cameras go off when people are travelling BELOW the posted speed limit. One near me had a trigger point 5mph below the posted limit and was a regular target for arson as a result.
Most likely Macromedia.
Loose-lipped employees I know confirmed about a decade ago that they like to host as anonymously as possible in order to monitor file trading activities (usually on the end of multiple ADSL lines, in order to appear like endusers)
This happened in New Zealand in the 1990s. Professors would write books, revise them every year and require students have up to date compies. The campus bookshop would pay kickbacks on sales.
It came to a head when a group of computing students formed a buying group and went around the campus bookshop by going direct to the publisher, obtaining books at 90% below the retail price. They were sued for copyright infringement - and lost. This was because the publisher was in the USA and technically they were parallel importing the books - the prof had assigned NZ copyright to the bookshop.
This kind of thing still happens.
Isn't that a BBU module hanging off the side of the arxcis module?
If this really does work it'll be tremendously useful - even if 20 years later than predicted (Yes, flash-backed ram modules were being touted as the next big thing that long ago)
It wasn't just that.
Supersonic attempts at dropping dummy ordinance resulted in the items in question bouncing off the slipstream and back into the bomb bay, skipping there indefinitely. It could have been worse - there was a good chance that if it managed to get out of the bomb bay it would have decelerated so hard that the rear end would have ripped the bottom completely out of the aircraft.
ISTR one of the "bombs" dropped on Saddam Hussein's boys when they were holed up in a building was nothing more than a 2 ton lump of concrete.
A shame it wasn't anvil-shaped.
UK police authorised to carry tasers are (or used to be) required to be Tased in order to know what it feels like - The idea being that they won't do it unnecessarily. They also have to fill out a LOT of paperwork if they so juch as unbutton the holster.
Police guns in other parts of the world have cameras attached in order to try and see what the officer was looking at. These don't have a wide field of view, but every bit helps.
As a rule - yes. More than one Muppet has been done after a member of the public videoed them speeding without their flashing lights on and judges usually give them heavier punishments than mere mortals (UK traffic police drivers have special training for highspeed work and enhanced licenses but this will cut zero ice with a judge)
Generally on motorways/freeways, police vehicles drive slower than the speed limit in order to observe the traffic passing them - and drivers who seem reluctant to pass are given special attention because there's usually a reason for it (unmarked cars also drive below the speed limit most of the time). They also have big rigs out patrolling, specifically to get enough height to see into trucker cabins - apparently it's not particularly uncommon to see HGV operators reading newspapers, texting or watching TV as they go along.
Blutak is much cheaper and just as effective (so is silly putty)
The actual crud under the keys is best removed using a vacuum cleaner with a crevice nozzle - popping keycaps makes the job go faster.
Most decent modern keyboards are designed so that a cup of "whatever" won't get into the membrane layer but simply runs down the top shell and out drainage holes - this falls apart when people leave the keyboard sitting in the resulting puddle. I spent a lot of years in my youth cleaning up desk calculators (remember them) which had coffee through them and the one rule for getting out sugar was "you can never have too much water"
There are far worse things than coffee spills though. Cat urine is corrosive if not weashed out immediately, and OJ or coke don't come in much better.
You assume the passenger has any road sense at all - my experience is that only drivers know when to shut up as passengers. The rest are added distraction.
Non drivers will continue yammering at you while you're trying to navigate an urban maze. not knock down the kid who just ran in front of you from between two paeked cars and avoid that 18 wheeler bearing down on you, then get upset when you tell them to shut the hell up, or don't answer the complicated question they just asked while you're making said manouevers.
Driving _safely_ takes a surprisingly large degree of concentration. It's not the actual driving which is hard so much as anticipating hazards and navigating in confusing sitauations where there's input from all angles. Freeways/motorways are one of the safest environments because there's so little to go wrong, yet we force the most inexperienced drivers into the hardest situations first (busy urban/suburban streets).
FWIW studies have shown that driving with a head cold gives about the same impairment as driving at a blood alcohol concentration of 0.08.
Driving while talking on the phone is illegal here, but I see about 1 in 10 drivers using them anyway - and about 1 in 10 of those clearly paying more attention to the phone call than the road conditions. Given that kind of observation I'm inclined to agree with the bans.
Then again, more drivers of European SUVs are likely to be 10 feet of your ass at 70mph than not, so perhaps we should ban BMW X5s too (aggressive drivers are more likely to buy cars which can be used to intimidate other drivers)
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, it was receiver pays - but the receiver actually had the optiom of refusing individual deliveries. Can't do that with SMS.
Funny. I've had at least 3 Intel Desktop Boards burn up (literally) in the last 5 years. Several more have failed for other reasons. We no longer buy IDB-based machines.
And a lot of the damage has been made up by the next generation piledriver cores. We can see the difference clearly in server performance, it's not just PR guff.
The improvements in processor modules alone are substantial, but for our use it'd be nicer to have non-shared FPUs
AMD learned quickly from the mistake of over-long pipelines, unlike Intel, who kept foisting 'em on us for several years.
Before someone jumps on this and asks why we're not using GPU boxes, the code being used doesn't support 'em. Astrophysicists don't make brilliant code at the best of times.
That's the crux of the the problem and it's been coming for a while. The market hit saturation point about 5 years ago and most machines are still "good enough" for their intended purpose.
The entire PC market has been built around relentless growth and replacement of business machines every 3 years. We're finding that 5-6 year old machines do fine for most business applications, so we're not replacing them unless we actually need to.
Even research machines don't need as much upgrading. You can't put a $20k 64-core 512Gb machine on a desktop (it's far too noisy), so existing desktop machines which used to be state-of-the-art 3-4 years ago are being used as Xterms for the big boxes - and that means we save about $40k/year on desktop equipment spend. People are buying tablets instead of new desktops and they're still way cheaper than the money we used to put into the desktops.
I understand why AMD is struggling, and it's not good, but their money is in the commodity processors. Top end stuff is worth a bit of PR hype but the sales don't cover development costs. When things get tight a company has to focus on what it does best - which is graphics cards and fusion CPUs, plus rolling out more low-power kit for bulk sales into appliances.
If you think TV engineers write bad UIs, you should see the ones rocket scientists cobble together. Seriously, a PhD in astrophysics deoesn't mean there are any programming skills whatsoever, let alone any appreciation of ergonomics.
Nothing to add, except "Thanks for the utilities"
In the UK, they have a crime of "endangering transport" - it's regularly used to nail the idiots who lase aircraft, train drivers AND vehicle drivers, as well as the ones tossing things off overpasses. Penalties up to 15 years in jail and it's a lot easier to prove than attempted murder. FWIW, being hit in the face with a green laser while driving HURTS - and because they're usually just along the street you don't get the benefit of handshake reducing the burn (The idiot who lased me also lased several aircraft and a police helicoptor which was searching for him. No idea if he was caught or not.)
The wider channel spacing and much larger number of useful channels in the 5GHz band helps, but the fact that there's virtually no 5GHz gear in consumer hands is the biggest reason. My wife's brand new consumer-grade Dell laptop with 802.11n is only 2.4GHz (which is irritating from a techie point of view)
War-walking, I can see ONE 5GHz access point on a half mile stretch of my street - my own one. OTOH there are more than 100 2.4GHz ones visible - and a substantial chunk of those are still unencrypted.
It means that HP and a lot of others assume that English == US Letter, Anything else == A4 That's got to be one of the most seriously fucked up defaults in Postscript.
1: Sodium is trivially extracted from seawater, so that component just came down by 90%
2: If you watch the video clip, you'll see a glance at a diagram which shows no capacity loss out past 50 cycles (It doesn't show where capacity loss starts). It's towards the end of the clip where they talk about 300mAh/g capacities (cycles aren't mentioned but are on the diagram)
3: Using pyrolised sugar means the cost of the anode just came down 90%
4: Using non-toxic (and much cheaper) metals drops the cost even further. Cobalt can be quite nasty.
5: It's not the capacity increases which matter for this technology, as much as the marked decrease in final cost.
What would you make the anode from K-Ion batteries from?
Just call it the outside of the asylum.
Actually, ammunition is the killer app. You sell weapons once. They need ammunition to function as such and they keep needing the stuff to continue functioning.
Answer: yes they are.
Many UK speed camera boxes have video cameras in them monitoring road conditions - the flash is on a different crcuit and goes off when speed tripped even if there isn't a speed camera onboard (those use film, although there are moves afoot to legislate to allow digital storage using WORM media), in order to keep motorists guessing.
This all came out about 6 years ago when a speeding driver returned and burned out the camera box using thermite. Evidence shown on tv clearly showed video footage of the idiot staring into the camera lens and moving about in front of the camera in the few seconds before the thermite dropped in and wriecked the sensor. He got caught because the recorder was in the base of the pole and not affected by the fire. On top of that the GPS tracker in his employer's van showed that he'd been speeding earlier in the day at that point, plus the return trip at 2am to burn it out.
Additionally: UK police have been posting covert cameras to watch regularly vandalised installations for some years, if court reports are anything to go by.
There are a number of sites in the uk where the cameras go off when people are travelling BELOW the posted speed limit. One near me had a trigger point 5mph below the posted limit and was a regular target for arson as a result.
Most likely Macromedia. Loose-lipped employees I know confirmed about a decade ago that they like to host as anonymously as possible in order to monitor file trading activities (usually on the end of multiple ADSL lines, in order to appear like endusers)
This happened in New Zealand in the 1990s. Professors would write books, revise them every year and require students have up to date compies. The campus bookshop would pay kickbacks on sales. It came to a head when a group of computing students formed a buying group and went around the campus bookshop by going direct to the publisher, obtaining books at 90% below the retail price. They were sued for copyright infringement - and lost. This was because the publisher was in the USA and technically they were parallel importing the books - the prof had assigned NZ copyright to the bookshop. This kind of thing still happens.
If this really does work it'll be tremendously useful - even if 20 years later than predicted (Yes, flash-backed ram modules were being touted as the next big thing that long ago)
I'd love to be able to use Netflix, but they don't work on linux since they dumped flash.
It wasn't just that. Supersonic attempts at dropping dummy ordinance resulted in the items in question bouncing off the slipstream and back into the bomb bay, skipping there indefinitely. It could have been worse - there was a good chance that if it managed to get out of the bomb bay it would have decelerated so hard that the rear end would have ripped the bottom completely out of the aircraft.
ISTR one of the "bombs" dropped on Saddam Hussein's boys when they were holed up in a building was nothing more than a 2 ton lump of concrete. A shame it wasn't anvil-shaped.
UK police authorised to carry tasers are (or used to be) required to be Tased in order to know what it feels like - The idea being that they won't do it unnecessarily. They also have to fill out a LOT of paperwork if they so juch as unbutton the holster.
Police guns in other parts of the world have cameras attached in order to try and see what the officer was looking at. These don't have a wide field of view, but every bit helps.
As a rule - yes. More than one Muppet has been done after a member of the public videoed them speeding without their flashing lights on and judges usually give them heavier punishments than mere mortals (UK traffic police drivers have special training for highspeed work and enhanced licenses but this will cut zero ice with a judge)
Generally on motorways/freeways, police vehicles drive slower than the speed limit in order to observe the traffic passing them - and drivers who seem reluctant to pass are given special attention because there's usually a reason for it (unmarked cars also drive below the speed limit most of the time). They also have big rigs out patrolling, specifically to get enough height to see into trucker cabins - apparently it's not particularly uncommon to see HGV operators reading newspapers, texting or watching TV as they go along.
Most decent modern keyboards are designed so that a cup of "whatever" won't get into the membrane layer but simply runs down the top shell and out drainage holes - this falls apart when people leave the keyboard sitting in the resulting puddle. I spent a lot of years in my youth cleaning up desk calculators (remember them) which had coffee through them and the one rule for getting out sugar was "you can never have too much water"
There are far worse things than coffee spills though. Cat urine is corrosive if not weashed out immediately, and OJ or coke don't come in much better.
You assume the passenger has any road sense at all - my experience is that only drivers know when to shut up as passengers. The rest are added distraction. Non drivers will continue yammering at you while you're trying to navigate an urban maze. not knock down the kid who just ran in front of you from between two paeked cars and avoid that 18 wheeler bearing down on you, then get upset when you tell them to shut the hell up, or don't answer the complicated question they just asked while you're making said manouevers. Driving _safely_ takes a surprisingly large degree of concentration. It's not the actual driving which is hard so much as anticipating hazards and navigating in confusing sitauations where there's input from all angles. Freeways/motorways are one of the safest environments because there's so little to go wrong, yet we force the most inexperienced drivers into the hardest situations first (busy urban/suburban streets). FWIW studies have shown that driving with a head cold gives about the same impairment as driving at a blood alcohol concentration of 0.08. Driving while talking on the phone is illegal here, but I see about 1 in 10 drivers using them anyway - and about 1 in 10 of those clearly paying more attention to the phone call than the road conditions. Given that kind of observation I'm inclined to agree with the bans. Then again, more drivers of European SUVs are likely to be 10 feet of your ass at 70mph than not, so perhaps we should ban BMW X5s too (aggressive drivers are more likely to buy cars which can be used to intimidate other drivers)