I've got three words for you: cache, cache and cache.
Why do you think Pentium Pro was such a huge success that's it's still being used in CPU intensive operations? Why do you think Sun Sparc and Digital/Samsung Alpha CPUs trash modern Pentium 4s and Athlons at 500 MHz? Yup. Loads and loads of cache. No. First, Alphas and SPARCS do not trash modern x86 CPUs, the Pentium IV 2.8GHz and Athlon XP 2800+ are the fastest CPUs in the world for integer math and the Itanium 2 is the fastest in the world for floating point math. Cache memory is only useful until it is large enough to contain the working set of the promary application being run. Larger cache can improve performance further, but after the cache can contain the working set, the gain is in the single digit percents. The working set of the vast, vast majority of applications is under 512K, and most are under 256K. You'll find that increasing the speed of a small cache is generally more important than increasing the size of the cache. Case in point: When the Pentium 3 and Athlon went from a large (512K) to a small (256K) faster cache, performance went up, for the Athlon by about 10% and for the Pentium 3...I don't recall, but around 10%. Some desktop apps, like SETI@Home, have a large working set (more than 512K) and DO benefit from large caches, but nothing larger than 1MB would improve performance here either.
Most server CPUS, like Alphas and SPARCS, have fairly large caches for the following reasons:
1) Databases love large caches. They are one of the few applications that can take advantage of a large cache, because they can store lookup tables of arbitrary size in cache. Server CPUs are oftenused for databases because Joe x86 CPU is just fine for webservers, FTP servers, desktop systems, etc. and is generally faster at them then server CPUs.
2) Most server class CPUs are fuly 64-bit and do NOT support register splitting. On the SPARC64, for example, if you want to store an integer containing the number "42", that integer will take up a full 64-bits regardless of the fact that the register can store numbers up to 18,446,744,073,709,551,616. This larger size increases the cache size needed to store the working set of programs, because all integers (and many other data primitives) require a full 64 bits or more. With 886 CPUs, which support register splitting and have only 32-bit registers, that number could be stored in a mere eight bits. The square root of the number of bits the SPARC requires.
3) Big servers with multiple CPUS are often expected to run multiple apps, all of which are CPU intensive. If the cache can store the working set for all of them, speed is slightly improved.
That said, who in their right mind would use an incredibly slow Pentium Pro for a CPU intensive calculation? A Pentium Pro at the highest available speed, 200MHz, with 2MB cache may be able to outperform a Celeron 266, but not by much and only for very specific cache-hungry software. Show me a person that thinks a Pentium Pro with even 200GB of cache can outperform ANY Athlon system and I will show you a person that hasn't a clue what they are talking about.
Look at the performance difference between the Pentium IV with 256K and with 512K (a doubling) of cache. You will have to do some research to find an application that gets even a 10% performance boost.
FYI If you are interested in competant, intelligent, technical reviews of hardware, you might like www.aceshardware.com
Re:What is the relevance of FreeBSD today?
on
FreeBSD 4.7-RELEASE
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
That is what I did. That is what happened to me. In the end, there are advantages and disadvantages to both. Ultimately, I tried Gentoo Linux and found the best of both worlds (intelligent source-based install, centralized compiler flag config files, easy application and system upgrade...) though FreeBSD is still preferable for boring servers that absolutely must not crash, ever.
Actually, it is a better reference than this quoted article because you can tell SR.com to compare all the drives you are interested in purchasing and get good* benchmarks, heat/noise, and can sort by specific benchmark. Go to the website, click "database" (near the top) and choose your criteria. In ten seconds you can find out the noise/heat/speed of every drive SR has ever reviewed, with a rather nice labelled bar graph for clarity. You can also visit the forums and get advice from some of the most knowledgeable people in the IT industry, and get information that is difficult to come by anywhere else--for example, that Samsung makes the most reliable (albeit close to the slowest) IDE hard drive. SR was also the first to discover that Seagate planned to reduce their warranty and that there are terrible SCSI performance bugs in Windows XP, among others. A very good resource, and it's been slashdotted without the server being brought to its knees. (It runs Linux/Apache/PHP)
Re:As Shakespeare said (more or less)
on
Linux Kernel 3.0?
·
· Score: 2
It isn't. Well, not for most people (even Slashdot people). I can't speak for others, but I find it mildly offensive that many people are convinced that Windows is the only way, that with software you get what you pay for, and that if a person cannot afford photoshop or MS Office that they simply cannot edit photos or create documents/presentations/spreadsheets. It is more a matter of educating people, showing them, "See, there is ANOTHER way, and it's better in many respects." Others, to a degree myself, are offended by Microsoft's (and other) commercial software company's moral bankruptsy and their screwing of users, and feel morally compelled to at least let others know that they do not have to put up with it. That nobody has to use Microsoft, and that for the most part to not do so involves very little loss and significant gain. Some people are just cheap, or truly low on money, and think they must choose between rent and important software. These people can also benefit greatly from OSS if they only knew about it. Still other people, such as aspiring programmers, often have a tough time doing any real programming in Windows because it's so damn complex and crufty, and some eventually lose interest and leave for a different interest. Some of these people would also benefit greatly from being able to see the source to their programming tools--how they actually work--rather than reading unnavigable gigabytes of MSDN documentation to find info on how to work around some obscure bug or "feature" in their tools.
What are you talking about? It isn't that simple. When you throw yourself to the ground, something has to catch your attention in a very large way. You cannot simply throw yourself to the ground and miss, you will land face first into the dirt. For example, if you throw yourself to the ground and see a translucent purple dancing octopus fly by in a miniature P38 propeller-driven fighter plane, you will probably so surprised that you forget to land. Once this happens, as long as you do not consciously realize that you haven't yet landed, you'll be airborne.
For further reference, please see the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy entry on "flight."
No, I agree with him. Note that he said *real* scientists, not *most* scientists. Plato once divided the ambitions of people into three categories: Reason (intellect, the need to seek knowledge), spirit (the need for recognition, honor), and appetite (the need for personal gain, such as wealth). Real scientists are largely reason, usually with a bit of spirit thrown in. If you ever meet a greedy scientist, s/he isn't a real scientist--just like if you ever meet a hacker that can't code and uses l33t speak in his AOL chat window, he isn't a real hacker.
In addition, fraud or forgery is comsidered far more serious in the mathematical sciences than, say, business, religion, or politics. Fraud is actually not common, and it is considered the most dispicable of dishonorable acts when it is done (as opposed to politics, in which it is expected)
"You mean the same Apple that's stuck with PC133 SDRAM now?" Me: "Every single PowerMAC uses DDR RAM." You:"Wrong! Yes they come with ddram but, the chipset slows the speed to the cpu back down to 133!" What exactly was I wrong about? Are Power Macs using DDR memory or not? I didn't say anything about the bus being DDR, dual channel, 266MHz, or anything implying that the system could make full use of DDR RAM.
This is not unlike NVidia Nforce Athlon systems. They may not be able to make use of all of their memory bandwidth (particularly if using a non-integrated video card), but the motherboard still supports dual-channel RAM regardless.
"You mean the same Apple that's stuck with PC133 SDRAM now?" Take a look at The Apple Store. Every single PowerMAC uses DDR RAM. While this is an easy mistake to make because Apple took a while to go DDR, please at least take a quick look before posting.
Article summary: Three out of ten great scientists rose to prominence by proving Aristotle was an idiot.
Proving that *Aristotle* was an idiot? Aristotle is widely known as a person who was probably among the most intelligent humans ever to have lived.
Aristotle taught Alexander the Great. His studies on animals laid the foundation for the biological sciences and weren't superceded until two THOUSAND years after his death.
Aristotle made significant contributions to logic (He and Plato founded the basic principals of logic, such as some of the rules of inference), physics, astronomy, meteorology, zoology, metaphysics, theology, psychology, political science, economics, ethics, rhetoric, and poetics However, still more astounding is the fact that the majority of these subjects did not exist as such before him, so that he would have been the first to conceive of and establish them, as systematic disciplines.
His writings, some of which you should recognize as some of the most influential documents ever written, include: On logic
Categories
On Interpretation
Prior Analytics
Posterior Analytics
Topics
Sophistical Refutations
On physics
Physics
On The Heavens
On Generation and Corruption
On psychology and natural history
On The Soul
On The Parts Of Animals
On The Motion Of Animals
On The History Of Animals
On The Gait Of Animals
On The Generation Of Animals
On ethics
Nicomachean Ethics
Eudemian Ethics
Magna Moralia
Politics
Rhetoric
Poetics
General investigation of the things
Metaphysics
Other works
Meteorology
On Dreams
On Longevity and Shortness Of Life
On Memory and Reminiscence
On Prophesying by Dreams
On Sense and The Sensible
On Sleep and Sleeplessness
On Youth and Old Age, On Life And Death, On Breathing
This person contributed more and to more areas than any other who has ever lived. That some of his sciences were found to be incorrect does not change this, particularly when you consider that he laid the foundation of the principal ideas of what we call physics more than two thousand years before his physics were superceded. Calling this man a moron is like calling Linux Torvalds a newbie programmer, or Windows 95 a reliable server operating system. In fact, I cannot think of anything more wrong than to use "Aristotle" and "idiot" in the same sentence without a "not". Name one person who has done even close to as much for human knowledge and understanding.
Printer DPI and photographic image DPI are entirely different. A 720DPI printer, for example, will be able to spit about half a million ink droplets per square inch of paper, but one ink droplet != 1 pixel. Remember, as the previous reply stated, the printer uses many small droplets of exactly four colors (some inkjets use up to eight colors) of ink and attempts to create the perception of a certain color by mixing dots of those, much like your monitor uses different and separate intensities of red, green, and blue to approximate a color other than one of those three. So how does the DPI rating of an ink printer relate to the DPI of a digital camera? It doesn't necessarily. In fact, most parts of any color printout will not have the maximum number of ink droplets (even if using absorbent photo paper) because far fewer are needed, particularly with light colors. There is absolutely no way to compare the two, but in general a 300DPI image will look better than most modern ink printers can accurately portray, and 600DPI will approach the representational limits of color laser, dye sublimation, and good thermal wax printers. The DPI-to-paper ratio is a simple matter of comparing the resolutions (say, 1600x1200) of the digital camera image with the size of the printout (say, 8x10")
With any Palladium system, you will be able to disable Palladium in BIOS, so it _doesn't matter_ if a system supports it or not. If you turn it off, you will be unable to use Palladium protected media, just like pre-Palladium systems. If you turn it on, you will at least have the option--an option I plan not to exercize.
The media promotes this hackers as uber-geeks myth because a) it sells papers and b) they are often socially engineered by the hackers. It seems you don't know any real hackers. All that I know are über geeks. They are rare, but true hackers in the strongest sense of the word do exist. Believe it or not, Defcon is still a reasonably good place to see for yourself--you just need to realize that all the people that are easy to notice and look down upon are not the ones to look for.
They were more than funny. If you look beneath the surface they were full of insights into human behavior and philosophy about our race's place in the universe. Some have theorized that the incredible wit was a cover to expose the masses to some form of real philosophy. I doubt that theory, but the books were undeniably witty and brilliant at the same time, not unlike the author. On a tangent, a friend's girfriend met Adams when she worked as a receptionist in a hotel. "Are you the Douglas Adams?" "Which Douglas Adams?" The answer was very clear.:)
"Also to troll (sorry) what use email encryption if a virus can send the contents of your inbox + personal files to everyone in your address book?"
What use is CD copy protection when someone working at the pressing plant can steal a copy for him/herself? What use is 40 bit encryption when some groups have Cray X1's?
The possibility that a rare and unlikely scenario may bypass a protection mechanism does not entirely preclude the usefulness of the mechanism.
Encryption works great in 99% of cases where someone might be snooping.
Slashdot Mirror
WINE: Windows Implementation, Not Emulation. :)
(good point, though)
Interesting. Thanks for the correction and information. :)
(not that the Itanium is an886 CPU, but it has a far smaller cache than most Alphas, SPARCS, and PA-RISC chips)
I've got three words for you: cache, cache and cache.
Why do you think Pentium Pro was such a huge success that's it's still being used in CPU intensive operations? Why do you think Sun Sparc and Digital/Samsung Alpha CPUs trash modern Pentium 4s and Athlons at 500 MHz? Yup. Loads and loads of cache.
No. First, Alphas and SPARCS do not trash modern x86 CPUs, the Pentium IV 2.8GHz and Athlon XP 2800+ are the fastest CPUs in the world for integer math and the Itanium 2 is the fastest in the world for floating point math.
Cache memory is only useful until it is large enough to contain the working set of the promary application being run. Larger cache can improve performance further, but after the cache can contain the working set, the gain is in the single digit percents. The working set of the vast, vast majority of applications is under 512K, and most are under 256K. You'll find that increasing the speed of a small cache is generally more important than increasing the size of the cache.
Case in point: When the Pentium 3 and Athlon went from a large (512K) to a small (256K) faster cache, performance went up, for the Athlon by about 10% and for the Pentium 3...I don't recall, but around 10%.
Some desktop apps, like SETI@Home, have a large working set (more than 512K) and DO benefit from large caches, but nothing larger than 1MB would improve performance here either.
Most server CPUS, like Alphas and SPARCS, have fairly large caches for the following reasons:
1) Databases love large caches. They are one of the few applications that can take advantage of a large cache, because they can store lookup tables of arbitrary size in cache. Server CPUs are oftenused for databases because Joe x86 CPU is just fine for webservers, FTP servers, desktop systems, etc. and is generally faster at them then server CPUs.
2) Most server class CPUs are fuly 64-bit and do NOT support register splitting. On the SPARC64, for example, if you want to store an integer containing the number "42", that integer will take up a full 64-bits regardless of the fact that the register can store numbers up to 18,446,744,073,709,551,616. This larger size increases the cache size needed to store the working set of programs, because all integers (and many other data primitives) require a full 64 bits or more. With 886 CPUs, which support register splitting and have only 32-bit registers, that number could be stored in a mere eight bits. The square root of the number of bits the SPARC requires.
3) Big servers with multiple CPUS are often expected to run multiple apps, all of which are CPU intensive. If the cache can store the working set for all of them, speed is slightly improved.
That said, who in their right mind would use an incredibly slow Pentium Pro for a CPU intensive calculation? A Pentium Pro at the highest available speed, 200MHz, with 2MB cache may be able to outperform a Celeron 266, but not by much and only for very specific cache-hungry software. Show me a person that thinks a Pentium Pro with even 200GB of cache can outperform ANY Athlon system and I will show you a person that hasn't a clue what they are talking about.
Look at the performance difference between the Pentium IV with 256K and with 512K (a doubling) of cache. You will have to do some research to find an application that gets even a 10% performance boost.
FYI
If you are interested in competant, intelligent, technical reviews of hardware, you might like
www.aceshardware.com
That is what I did. That is what happened to me. In the end, there are advantages and disadvantages to both. Ultimately, I tried Gentoo Linux and found the best of both worlds (intelligent source-based install, centralized compiler flag config files, easy application and system upgrade...) though FreeBSD is still preferable for boring servers that absolutely must not crash, ever.
Storagereview.com has had noise and heat statistics for years.
Actually, it is a better reference than this quoted article because you can tell SR.com to compare all the drives you are interested in purchasing and get good* benchmarks, heat/noise, and can sort by specific benchmark.
Go to the website, click "database" (near the top) and choose your criteria. In ten seconds you can find out the noise/heat/speed of every drive SR has ever reviewed, with a rather nice labelled bar graph for clarity.
You can also visit the forums and get advice from some of the most knowledgeable people in the IT industry, and get information that is difficult to come by anywhere else--for example, that Samsung makes the most reliable (albeit close to the slowest) IDE hard drive. SR was also the first to discover that Seagate planned to reduce their warranty and that there are terrible SCSI performance bugs in Windows XP, among others.
A very good resource, and it's been slashdotted without the server being brought to its knees. (It runs Linux/Apache/PHP)
int b = 6;
int question=(2b || !2b);
Heck, Netscape even skips MAJOR version numbers (they skipped 5.0)
Microsoft skipped 91 major version numbers from 3.11 to 95...and it *still* wasn't much of an upgrade.
Mouahahaha!
Linux XP!
Naah, *nix users know that the first letter of "experience" is 'E', not 'X'.
It isn't. Well, not for most people (even Slashdot people). I can't speak for others, but I find it mildly offensive that many people are convinced that Windows is the only way, that with software you get what you pay for, and that if a person cannot afford photoshop or MS Office that they simply cannot edit photos or create documents/presentations/spreadsheets. It is more a matter of educating people, showing them, "See, there is ANOTHER way, and it's better in many respects."
Others, to a degree myself, are offended by Microsoft's (and other) commercial software company's moral bankruptsy and their screwing of users, and feel morally compelled to at least let others know that they do not have to put up with it. That nobody has to use Microsoft, and that for the most part to not do so involves very little loss and significant gain.
Some people are just cheap, or truly low on money, and think they must choose between rent and important software. These people can also benefit greatly from OSS if they only knew about it.
Still other people, such as aspiring programmers, often have a tough time doing any real programming in Windows because it's so damn complex and crufty, and some eventually lose interest and leave for a different interest. Some of these people would also benefit greatly from being able to see the source to their programming tools--how they actually work--rather than reading unnavigable gigabytes of MSDN documentation to find info on how to work around some obscure bug or "feature" in their tools.
It isn't a religion, it's philanthropy.
What are you talking about?
It isn't that simple. When you throw yourself to the ground, something has to catch your attention in a very large way. You cannot simply throw yourself to the ground and miss, you will land face first into the dirt.
For example, if you throw yourself to the ground and see a translucent purple dancing octopus fly by in a miniature P38 propeller-driven fighter plane, you will probably so surprised that you forget to land. Once this happens, as long as you do not consciously realize that you haven't yet landed, you'll be airborne.
For further reference, please see the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy entry on "flight."
No, I agree with him. Note that he said *real* scientists, not *most* scientists.
Plato once divided the ambitions of people into three categories: Reason (intellect, the need to seek knowledge), spirit (the need for recognition, honor), and appetite (the need for personal gain, such as wealth).
Real scientists are largely reason, usually with a bit of spirit thrown in. If you ever meet a greedy scientist, s/he isn't a real scientist--just like if you ever meet a hacker that can't code and uses l33t speak in his AOL chat window, he isn't a real hacker.
In addition, fraud or forgery is comsidered far more serious in the mathematical sciences than, say, business, religion, or politics. Fraud is actually not common, and it is considered the most dispicable of dishonorable acts when it is done (as opposed to politics, in which it is expected)
"You mean the same Apple that's stuck with PC133 SDRAM now?"
Me: "Every single PowerMAC uses DDR RAM."
You:"Wrong! Yes they come with ddram but, the chipset slows the speed to the cpu back down to 133!"
What exactly was I wrong about? Are Power Macs using DDR memory or not? I didn't say anything about the bus being DDR, dual channel, 266MHz, or anything implying that the system could make full use of DDR RAM.
This is not unlike NVidia Nforce Athlon systems. They may not be able to make use of all of their memory bandwidth (particularly if using a non-integrated video card), but the motherboard still supports dual-channel RAM regardless.
"You mean the same Apple that's stuck with PC133 SDRAM now?"
Take a look at The Apple Store. Every single PowerMAC uses DDR RAM.
While this is an easy mistake to make because Apple took a while to go DDR, please at least take a quick look before posting.
The winners include [...] a paleoethnobotanist from Penn StateHe should get another grant just for being able to pronounce his field of study. :)
Article summary: Three out of ten great scientists rose to prominence by proving Aristotle was an idiot.
Proving that *Aristotle* was an idiot? Aristotle is widely known as a person who was probably among the most intelligent humans ever to have lived.
Aristotle taught Alexander the Great. His studies on animals laid the foundation for the biological sciences and weren't superceded until two THOUSAND years after his death.
Aristotle made significant contributions to logic (He and Plato founded the basic principals of logic, such as some of the rules of inference), physics, astronomy, meteorology, zoology, metaphysics, theology, psychology, political science, economics, ethics, rhetoric, and poetics However, still more astounding is the fact that the majority of these subjects did not exist as such before him, so that he would have been the first to conceive of and establish them, as systematic disciplines.
His writings, some of which you should recognize as some of the most influential documents ever written, include:
On logic
Categories
On Interpretation
Prior Analytics
Posterior Analytics
Topics
Sophistical Refutations
On physics
Physics
On The Heavens
On Generation and Corruption
On psychology and natural history
On The Soul
On The Parts Of Animals
On The Motion Of Animals
On The History Of Animals
On The Gait Of Animals
On The Generation Of Animals
On ethics
Nicomachean Ethics
Eudemian Ethics
Magna Moralia
Politics
Rhetoric
Poetics
General investigation of the things
Metaphysics
Other works
Meteorology
On Dreams
On Longevity and Shortness Of Life
On Memory and Reminiscence
On Prophesying by Dreams
On Sense and The Sensible
On Sleep and Sleeplessness
On Youth and Old Age, On Life And Death, On Breathing
This person contributed more and to more areas than any other who has ever lived. That some of his sciences were found to be incorrect does not change this, particularly when you consider that he laid the foundation of the principal ideas of what we call physics more than two thousand years before his physics were superceded. Calling this man a moron is like calling Linux Torvalds a newbie programmer, or Windows 95 a reliable server operating system. In fact, I cannot think of anything more wrong than to use "Aristotle" and "idiot" in the same sentence without a "not". Name one person who has done even close to as much for human knowledge and understanding.
Printer DPI and photographic image DPI are entirely different.
A 720DPI printer, for example, will be able to spit about half a million ink droplets per square inch of paper, but one ink droplet != 1 pixel. Remember, as the previous reply stated, the printer uses many small droplets of exactly four colors (some inkjets use up to eight colors) of ink and attempts to create the perception of a certain color by mixing dots of those, much like your monitor uses different and separate intensities of red, green, and blue to approximate a color other than one of those three.
So how does the DPI rating of an ink printer relate to the DPI of a digital camera? It doesn't necessarily. In fact, most parts of any color printout will not have the maximum number of ink droplets (even if using absorbent photo paper) because far fewer are needed, particularly with light colors. There is absolutely no way to compare the two, but in general a 300DPI image will look better than most modern ink printers can accurately portray, and 600DPI will approach the representational limits of color laser, dye sublimation, and good thermal wax printers.
The DPI-to-paper ratio is a simple matter of comparing the resolutions (say, 1600x1200) of the digital camera image with the size of the printout (say, 8x10")
Linus was... Wrong?!
Whoa, that's going to completely shatter the world view of many Slashdotters.
With any Palladium system, you will be able to disable Palladium in BIOS, so it _doesn't matter_ if a system supports it or not. If you turn it off, you will be unable to use Palladium protected media, just like pre-Palladium systems.
If you turn it on, you will at least have the option--an option I plan not to exercize.
The media promotes this hackers as uber-geeks myth because a) it sells papers and b) they are often socially engineered by the hackers.
It seems you don't know any real hackers. All that I know are über geeks. They are rare, but true hackers in the strongest sense of the word do exist. Believe it or not, Defcon is still a reasonably good place to see for yourself--you just need to realize that all the people that are easy to notice and look down upon are not the ones to look for.
They were more than funny. If you look beneath the surface they were full of insights into human behavior and philosophy about our race's place in the universe. Some have theorized that the incredible wit was a cover to expose the masses to some form of real philosophy. :)
I doubt that theory, but the books were undeniably witty and brilliant at the same time, not unlike the author.
On a tangent, a friend's girfriend met Adams when she worked as a receptionist in a hotel.
"Are you the Douglas Adams?"
"Which Douglas Adams?"
The answer was very clear.
it means youre pretty bad at math.
:)
It means you're pretty bad at math.
Don't criticize the garden of another when your own is full of weeds.
"Also to troll (sorry) what use email encryption if a virus can send the contents of your inbox + personal files to everyone in your address book?"
What use is CD copy protection when someone working at the pressing plant can steal a copy for him/herself?
What use is 40 bit encryption when some groups have Cray X1's?
The possibility that a rare and unlikely scenario may bypass a protection mechanism does not entirely preclude the usefulness of the mechanism.
Encryption works great in 99% of cases where someone might be snooping.
D'uh.
Agreed. But insightful?
"Duh" +5 insightful?