As important isit is to me for a toilet to analyze my urine and play a fake flushing sound, I just don't think that many Americans (myself included) would want to to anything with a toilet but pull the handle and leave the bathroom to get less distracting things done.
Mine: Euclid's GCD algorithm implimented recursively, like: ////////// long gcd(long n1, long n2) {
if(n1 != 0) n1 = gcd(long n1, long n2);
return n1; } ///////// ...because it looks so incredibly simple yet is fairly mind-bending when you follow it through the first time you see it. Also, put in a ternary statement it can be made one line which is always a nice accomplishment for an algorithm (despite being hard to read)
OS/2 could run DOS and allow the programs to use chunks of memory that would otherwise be wasted, such as the mode 13h graphics memory (64000 bytes exactly). Ahh, I miss OS/2. Good thing we have Linux and FreeBSD.
"Does Windows cluster as well as Linux? Windows clusters FAR better than Linux! In fact, out Hotmail service has over five THOUSAND clustered servers!" (that last part is accurate. He fails to mention, though, that many of those they had to add to handle the same load after switching them slowly from FreeBSD/Qmail)
FYI/OT It was (at least later) a Micron server with a single Xeon 450 and 4GB RAM. It used FreeBSD, custom FTP software, and could serve ten thousand (!) simultaneous users. They had, IIRC, a 100Mbit connection and hoped to get a gigabit connection, but then they kinda died off with the increasing popularity of broadband, thus eliminating the need to actually buy the CDs. (which is where they made the money for the most part)
Please don't mark this message down, it was not intended for evil.
The general consensus on StorageReview.com (a site that I would trust for anything storage related) is that Adaptec cards are crap, the performance under load is mediocre, they tend to die (despite being a solid-state device) and that often times the non-windows drivers aren't the best. Don't take it from me, ask around there. If they worked for you, however, great. Whatever works.
Slashdot could encode this show into DivX/MPEG4 and allow downloads by subscribers (as allowing downloads of such a large file from every user wouldn't leave anything left over for the website)
Anyone who knows Hollywood can deduce that they will likely make the Dragonball movie a braindead pure action/fighting/violence movie (and will probably throw in some sex to fit the genre.) Thse who know Dragonball(Z) know that this isn't really what the show is about. I remember that I resisted Dragonball(Z) for about two years while I lived with some college roommates who were big fans. It simply looked cheesy and childish. Finally, they forced me to watch a good part of a saga (Dragonball Z is split up into mostly self-contained sagas) and at last I "saw the light." Unlike the vast majority of animated cartoons, much anime' excluded, Dragonball(Z) actually incorporates such concepts as character development, ethics, wisdom, honor, humility, and others. Goku, what some consider to be the 'main' character, is exactly what I would want any children that I may someday have to look at as a role-model. Being an action cartoon, Goku is a fighter, but more than that, he has the most unusual personality--he is extremely powerful and respected, yet in the face of the most intense situations he does not become furious, does not get cocky, and makes no action that might be considered a "cheap shot." It is a difficult thing to describe well, so don't take this description too literally as it is not a very good one. Different characters seem to represent different 'good people,' for example "Piccolo" seems to represent the meme of "One with great wisdom, discipline, and control." Goku's wife represents a good dose of reality that keeps the show from being too fictional. For example, depending on the time in the series, various characters can undergo a small transformation called "super saiyen" which, among benefits such as increased speed and strength, makes their hair turn blonde. (No idea why, exactly). When Goku and his son, Gohan, decide to remain super saiyen so as to conserve the energy required to undergo the transformation, the mother sees Gohan and begins crying because her son has "become a punker" (it appears as though he's bleached his hair and used more hairspray than Marge Simpson so make it look spikey.) While this probably sounds insignificant, it helps the series to remain enough within the context of reality to be believable, insofar as an anime needs to be believable. For those of you that haven't given it a good look, I recommend starting with a few video rentals of the "Perfect Cell" saga, my personal favorite so far. It doesn't have some of the attributes that tend to turn people away from the series at first glance. Overall, the series is very well written, has very good characters with real personalities that one can relate too (like a good book or RPG), and would not transfer well into a live action movie except by the most exceptionally talented cast and direction.
I name my servers after Interplay's RPGs; Planescape, Neverwinter, Icewind, etc. This would likely not work particularly well for a 4,000 server setup. In a case like that, I would probably name by function (webserver, fileserver, DB, etc.) mixed with, perhaps, location on a server grid system. For example: r6.c42.room21.db4 or something (meaning Row 6, Column 42, server room 21, database server number four) Once you have that many servers, cute little names just become a pain in the ass.
If the government decided that the group responsible for the product (who is responsible is, of course, another issue entirely) must pay damages caused by security flaws, these licenses aren't worth the bandwidth they're downloaded on. I think that was one of the implications of the arcicle. It sure would be nice to see this happen if it were to occur only with commercial software,though, but there would certainly be disadvantages to that as well.
For those not familiar with Babylon 5 (your life is incomplete, by the way) it is a five year saga that takes place in space. I would say what it is about, but there are a large number of extremely complex and well written plots and sub plots, and even some very interesting (and logically plausible) explanations for what people here in the real world call religious experiences, such as seeing angels. The series is not theistic, per se, it is in many ways transcendant above such notions in that it ties many interesting alien and domestic religions in a very unique way, without really making them a central part of the series. I very rarely watch any television...Actually, I never watch television, but this series is one that I swear by. It is a glorious masterpiece that, while it does have some flaws, is in my opinion the single best piece of science fiction every written for television or movie screen. (It isn't quite up there with the greatest SciFi books of all time, but it can hold its own) The one big, important thing to remember: Babylon 5 is a *SAGA*. If you start watching in the middle of a season, or even start watching during any episode but the first, you will have NFI what is going on. That is normal. If you turned to page 162 of the first book in the excellent "Foundation" series, you would similarly have no idea what is going on. Many people fault B5 for this, but I consider it one of its greatest strengths. Star Trek, for example, has episodes which are very shallowly connected, in fact, they are very rarely connected at all. (I do like Star Trek quite a bit, though). Babylon 5 is like one ling movie, split into chunks over five years.
If you have even the slightest spectral of love for good science fiction or a good story, Babylon 5 is a series that you must watch. It is required viewing just like Tolkein, Asimov, and Heinlein is required reading. If you are a step further, if you are a adamant fan of science fiction, your life is not complete until you see at least seasons 1-4 of this saga.
The mobile Athlon4's dissipate substantially less heat than the desktop parts do. Noteably, the 1.2GHz Athlon4 dissipates the same heat at 1.2GHz as the 1.1GHz part does. Do you think that a laptop manufacturer like, say, HP would have a chip in their laptops that dissipates 65W of heat? It would be all but impossible to deal with such heat in a confined area. That, coupled with the Athlon4's ability to throttle its speed many steps based on the amount of CPU power actually needed, makes it consume still less power. Note that Intel's Speedstep technology is just that, a SpeedSTEP--one--there is only one lower speed that the chip can run at, so it's either 100% or whatever single fraction the chip's speedstep tech has been setup to run at, whereas AMD's PowerNow is something of a hybrid between Transmeta's "Run at exactly the clockspeed needed right now" and Intel's "Run at speed A or B." The Athlon4 core may not be the/best/ for a laptop, at least not until it is reduced to 0.13 micron transistors, but it isn't bad either.
Imagine this scenario: "In accordance with the Microsoft Excel EULA, the required upgrade to Microsoft Office 2005, the latest version, has not been met. Please upgrade to decrypt your data." Would anyone really put it past them?
So surely the Athlon's inefficient design, as compared with the G4, is holding it back as well?
Yes. The G4 is by many measures designed far better than the Athlon, P4, P3, or any x86 CPU. Unfortunately, it was not designed to scale particularly well, something that could likely be improved by adding a couple more prefetch stages to the beginning of the pipeline. That would, of course, come at a small IPC cost.
Overall, the G4's design is vastly more elegant and intelligent than any x86 cpu, which has been the case with Motorola vs. x86 since the 68000CPU.
That's not really true. What are your sources?
A lot of the design of the P4 looks weird at first, but was designed to allow for more efficient SMT.
Err, actually I did word-o (a superset of typo) in mentioning the x86 decoder as it is the trace cache (the small cache that stores instructions that have already been decoded so that they needn't be decoded again--which is important due to the P4's insanely long pipeline). Here's a reference, though it can be derived from the design and optimization docs.
To quote:
Intel put 3 integer ALUs in the core, two of which operate at double the chip speed. So between them, the three ALUs can accept up to 5 micro-ops per clock cycle. But we've already learned that the trace cache can provide at most 3. So one or more integer ALUs sit idle each clock cycle. It is impossible to even feed 4 micro-ops into the two double-speed units. So why did Intel waste transistors to implement a redundant ALU, but then cut corners by eliminating a much more needed second floating point unit? (Sorry for the bold font, wanted to differentiate this quote from a quote of your message)
Huh? Where do you get that?
The FSB needs to scale with the memory linearly -- if the memory bandwidth exceeds the FSB bandwidth, the extra bandwidth is wasted as can be seen in Nforce motherboards (dual channel DDR RAM) on the Athlon, whos FSB's bandwidth is identical to single channel DDR at a given clockspeed. (This is assuming that you aren't using the onboard video, in which the extra bandwidth would be utilized and then some, but that doesn't relate)
Admittedly I did blip on the increased RDRAM clock though. My mistake.
Yes, the P4 is less "efficient" than the Athlon. Yes, the Athlon is less "efficient" than the G4. Does that make the G4 better than the Athlon?
I'm gettign sick of typing these HTML tags all the time. Anyway, as you said, it depends. If you're Transmeta, 'better' is speed per watt, which is perfectly valid as a measurement in some situations. If you're the vast majority of computer users, better is (among other things) the price/performance ratio, which AMD wins by a country mile. If you're a professional in which a 5% speed increase can reduce costs by $10,000(such as with 3D rendering), then speed is all that matters and at the moment, for many applications one would choose the Pentium 4. (actually, they're probably choose an EV6, hundred processor US3, IBM Power4 or the like, but those aren't part of the topic).
I originally just wanted to point out the huge theoretical speed gap vs. the real-world speed gap, which is pretty slim. Admittedly, I am a bit biased in that I resent Intel designing the chip around marketing its clockspeed as most people equate that directly with performance, which is a believe reinforced by advertising (which is reinforced by user belief. A vicious circle.)
Slashdot Mirror
Get one of these, downgrade your system to 8MB RAM, and run everything from swap...
Watch your system's responsiveness double.
As important isit is to me for a toilet to analyze my urine and play a fake flushing sound, I just don't think that many Americans (myself included) would want to to anything with a toilet but pull the handle and leave the bathroom to get less distracting things done.
Heh, oops, make the line:
if(n1 != 0) n1 = gcd(long n1, long n2);
instead:
if(n1 != 0) n1 = gcd(n2, n1 % n2);
My mistake.
Boy, that's geeky! /.
Gotta love
Mine: Euclid's GCD algorithm implimented recursively, like:
//////////
long gcd(long n1, long n2)
{
if(n1 != 0) n1 = gcd(long n1, long n2);
return n1;
}
/////////
...because it looks so incredibly simple yet is fairly mind-bending when you follow it through the first time you see it. Also, put in a ternary statement it can be made one line which is always a nice accomplishment for an algorithm (despite being hard to read)
OS/2 could run DOS and allow the programs to use chunks of memory that would otherwise be wasted, such as the mode 13h graphics memory (64000 bytes exactly). Ahh, I miss OS/2. Good thing we have Linux and FreeBSD.
"Does Windows cluster as well as Linux? Windows clusters FAR better than Linux! In fact, out Hotmail service has over five THOUSAND clustered servers!"
(that last part is accurate. He fails to mention, though, that many of those they had to add to handle the same load after switching them slowly from FreeBSD/Qmail)
"Hopefully, you'll write this off as a mistake, and offer 'Community Editions' of SO 6 and beyond."
Uh, OpenOffice?
FYI/OT
It was (at least later) a Micron server with a single Xeon 450 and 4GB RAM. It used FreeBSD, custom FTP software, and could serve ten thousand (!) simultaneous users. They had, IIRC, a 100Mbit connection and hoped to get a gigabit connection, but then they kinda died off with the increasing popularity of broadband, thus eliminating the need to actually buy the CDs. (which is where they made the money for the most part)
Please don't mark this message down, it was not intended for evil.
No reason. }:>
Taco will be in a very difficult situation at his work if they remove unrestricted internet access...
The general consensus on StorageReview.com (a site that I would trust for anything storage related) is that Adaptec cards are crap, the performance under load is mediocre, they tend to die (despite being a solid-state device) and that often times the non-windows drivers aren't the best.
Don't take it from me, ask around there. If they worked for you, however, great. Whatever works.
"Dear, what does that sign over there say?"
[15 seconds later]
"It says: 'Road ends: Bridge constru...'"
Slashdot could encode this show into DivX/MPEG4 and allow downloads by subscribers (as allowing downloads of such a large file from every user wouldn't leave anything left over for the website)
Anyone who knows Hollywood can deduce that they will likely make the Dragonball movie a braindead pure action/fighting/violence movie (and will probably throw in some sex to fit the genre.)
Thse who know Dragonball(Z) know that this isn't really what the show is about.
I remember that I resisted Dragonball(Z) for about two years while I lived with some college roommates who were big fans.
It simply looked cheesy and childish.
Finally, they forced me to watch a good part of a saga (Dragonball Z is split up into mostly self-contained sagas) and at last I "saw the light." Unlike the vast majority of animated cartoons, much anime' excluded, Dragonball(Z) actually incorporates such concepts as character development, ethics, wisdom, honor, humility, and others.
Goku, what some consider to be the 'main' character, is exactly what I would want any children that I may someday have to look at as a role-model. Being an action cartoon, Goku is a fighter, but more than that, he has the most unusual personality--he is extremely powerful and respected, yet in the face of the most intense situations he does not become furious, does not get cocky, and makes no action that might be considered a "cheap shot." It is a difficult thing to describe well, so don't take this description too literally as it is not a very good one.
Different characters seem to represent different 'good people,' for example "Piccolo" seems to represent the meme of "One with great wisdom, discipline, and control."
Goku's wife represents a good dose of reality that keeps the show from being too fictional. For example, depending on the time in the series, various characters can undergo a small transformation called "super saiyen" which, among benefits such as increased speed and strength, makes their hair turn blonde. (No idea why, exactly). When Goku and his son, Gohan, decide to remain super saiyen so as to conserve the energy required to undergo the transformation, the mother sees Gohan and begins crying because her son has "become a punker" (it appears as though he's bleached his hair and used more hairspray than Marge Simpson so make it look spikey.) While this probably sounds insignificant, it helps the series to remain enough within the context of reality to be believable, insofar as an anime needs to be believable.
For those of you that haven't given it a good look, I recommend starting with a few video rentals of the "Perfect Cell" saga, my personal favorite so far. It doesn't have some of the attributes that tend to turn people away from the series at first glance.
Overall, the series is very well written, has very good characters with real personalities that one can relate too (like a good book or RPG), and would not transfer well into a live action movie except by the most exceptionally talented cast and direction.
I name my servers after Interplay's RPGs; Planescape, Neverwinter, Icewind, etc. This would likely not work particularly well for a 4,000 server setup. In a case like that, I would probably name by function (webserver, fileserver, DB, etc.) mixed with, perhaps, location on a server grid system. For example:
r6.c42.room21.db4 or something (meaning Row 6, Column 42, server room 21, database server number four)
Once you have that many servers, cute little names just become a pain in the ass.
If the government decided that the group responsible for the product (who is responsible is, of course, another issue entirely) must pay damages caused by security flaws, these licenses aren't worth the bandwidth they're downloaded on. I think that was one of the implications of the arcicle.
It sure would be nice to see this happen if it were to occur only with commercial software,though, but there would certainly be disadvantages to that as well.
"Imagine if Microsoft was legally liable and a $2 billion suit was filed."
Yes, now imagine if Linux Torvalds or the FreeBSD Foundation were liable for that same $2 Billion. They would be SOL. Microsoft would just be annoyed.
For those not familiar with Babylon 5 (your life is incomplete, by the way) it is a five year saga that takes place in space. I would say what it is about, but there are a large number of extremely complex and well written plots and sub plots, and even some very interesting (and logically plausible) explanations for what people here in the real world call religious experiences, such as seeing angels. The series is not theistic, per se, it is in many ways transcendant above such notions in that it ties many interesting alien and domestic religions in a very unique way, without really making them a central part of the series.
I very rarely watch any television...Actually, I never watch television, but this series is one that I swear by. It is a glorious masterpiece that, while it does have some flaws, is in my opinion the single best piece of science fiction every written for television or movie screen. (It isn't quite up there with the greatest SciFi books of all time, but it can hold its own)
The one big, important thing to remember:
Babylon 5 is a *SAGA*. If you start watching in the middle of a season, or even start watching during any episode but the first, you will have NFI what is going on. That is normal. If you turned to page 162 of the first book in the excellent "Foundation" series, you would similarly have no idea what is going on. Many people fault B5 for this, but I consider it one of its greatest strengths.
Star Trek, for example, has episodes which are very shallowly connected, in fact, they are very rarely connected at all. (I do like Star Trek quite a bit, though). Babylon 5 is like one ling movie, split into chunks over five years.
If you have even the slightest spectral of love for good science fiction or a good story, Babylon 5 is a series that you must watch. It is required viewing just like Tolkein, Asimov, and Heinlein is required reading.
If you are a step further, if you are a adamant fan of science fiction, your life is not complete until you see at least seasons 1-4 of this saga.
The mobile Athlon4's dissipate substantially less heat than the desktop parts do. Noteably, the 1.2GHz Athlon4 dissipates the same heat at 1.2GHz as the 1.1GHz part does. Do you think that a laptop manufacturer like, say, HP would have a chip in their laptops that dissipates 65W of heat? It would be all but impossible to deal with such heat in a confined area. /best/ for a laptop, at least not until it is reduced to 0.13 micron transistors, but it isn't bad either.
That, coupled with the Athlon4's ability to throttle its speed many steps based on the amount of CPU power actually needed, makes it consume still less power. Note that Intel's Speedstep technology is just that, a SpeedSTEP--one--there is only one lower speed that the chip can run at, so it's either 100% or whatever single fraction the chip's speedstep tech has been setup to run at, whereas AMD's PowerNow is something of a hybrid between Transmeta's "Run at exactly the clockspeed needed right now" and Intel's "Run at speed A or B."
The Athlon4 core may not be the
Hitachi has developed a prototype notebook PC that uses a water-based solution to cool down its Pentium 4 processor
Doh!
You didn't know this?
You mean CTRL-C, CTRL-V? :-)
Ya, that can be pretty painful.
Imagine this scenario:
"In accordance with the Microsoft Excel EULA, the required upgrade to Microsoft Office 2005, the latest version, has not been met. Please upgrade to decrypt your data."
Would anyone really put it past them?
Actually a recent version was optimized by Intel themselves, as they seemto like to use this to demonstrate the 'power' of the Pentium 4.
Intel directly sent us a manipulated version of the conversion tool FlaskMPEG 0.6, although we don't recommend using it. This utility is only faster when used in conjunction with Pentium 4 processors, which will disappoint many users. CPUs from other manufacturers are out of luck. We'll include these effects in our benchmarks.
You can get the file here.
So surely the Athlon's inefficient design, as compared with the G4, is holding it back as well?
Yes. The G4 is by many measures designed far better than the Athlon, P4, P3, or any x86 CPU. Unfortunately, it was not designed to scale particularly well, something that could likely be improved by adding a couple more prefetch stages to the beginning of the pipeline. That would, of course, come at a small IPC cost.
Overall, the G4's design is vastly more elegant and intelligent than any x86 cpu, which has been the case with Motorola vs. x86 since the 68000CPU.
That's not really true. What are your sources? A lot of the design of the P4 looks weird at first, but was designed to allow for more efficient SMT.
Err, actually I did word-o (a superset of typo) in mentioning the x86 decoder as it is the trace cache (the small cache that stores instructions that have already been decoded so that they needn't be decoded again--which is important due to the P4's insanely long pipeline). Here's a reference, though it can be derived from the design and optimization docs. To quote:
Intel put 3 integer ALUs in the core, two of which operate at double the chip speed. So between them, the three ALUs can accept up to 5 micro-ops per clock cycle. But we've already learned that the trace cache can provide at most 3. So one or more integer ALUs sit idle each clock cycle. It is impossible to even feed 4 micro-ops into the two double-speed units. So why did Intel waste transistors to implement a redundant ALU, but then cut corners by eliminating a much more needed second floating point unit? (Sorry for the bold font, wanted to differentiate this quote from a quote of your message)
Huh? Where do you get that? The FSB needs to scale with the memory linearly -- if the memory bandwidth exceeds the FSB bandwidth, the extra bandwidth is wasted as can be seen in Nforce motherboards (dual channel DDR RAM) on the Athlon, whos FSB's bandwidth is identical to single channel DDR at a given clockspeed. (This is assuming that you aren't using the onboard video, in which the extra bandwidth would be utilized and then some, but that doesn't relate) Admittedly I did blip on the increased RDRAM clock though. My mistake.
Yes, the P4 is less "efficient" than the Athlon. Yes, the Athlon is less "efficient" than the G4. Does that make the G4 better than the Athlon? I'm gettign sick of typing these HTML tags all the time. Anyway, as you said, it depends. If you're Transmeta, 'better' is speed per watt, which is perfectly valid as a measurement in some situations. If you're the vast majority of computer users, better is (among other things) the price/performance ratio, which AMD wins by a country mile. If you're a professional in which a 5% speed increase can reduce costs by $10,000(such as with 3D rendering), then speed is all that matters and at the moment, for many applications one would choose the Pentium 4. (actually, they're probably choose an EV6, hundred processor US3, IBM Power4 or the like, but those aren't part of the topic). I originally just wanted to point out the huge theoretical speed gap vs. the real-world speed gap, which is pretty slim. Admittedly, I am a bit biased in that I resent Intel designing the chip around marketing its clockspeed as most people equate that directly with performance, which is a believe reinforced by advertising (which is reinforced by user belief. A vicious circle.)