I became suspicious of Gigabyte when they did a board where half the power phases were on an "optional" daughterboard.
Of course the ad copy wibbled about how it improved reliability, but what I read was "We don't have the engineering talent to fit everything on the board". With my experience, the power board was anything but optional, and even with it the board didn't really enjoy having a beefy graphics card plugged into it. Funnily enough, when I replaced it with a practically identical Tyan board, my stability issues vanished.
Java has quite a few tuning options; limits on heap and garbage pool sizes, different garbage collectors and strategies for running them, different optimization levels. Maybe it's defaulting to client mode on Windows, thus putting more effort into reducing memory use by running the gc before growing the heap (and placing stricter limits on its size and the sizes of the gc generation pools), doing less aggressive optimizations and putting them off later.
Java also has bit of a history of enjoying cheap syscalls; 1.5 ran somewhat poorly on FreeBSD because it called gettimeofday() at some significant rate of knots, and system calls on Windows are significantly more expensive than that, while Linux prides itself on them being very cheap.
the speculative imaginings in other sci-fi works generally focus exclusively on future technological advancements while the world's sociopolitical climate remains relatively unchanged
I suggest you improve your sci-fi diet. There are literally thousands of far better fleshed out, better thought out and more interesting and realistic portrayals of the ramifications of potential technological, social and political changes in the future, they're just mostly in the form of books, not crappy TV shows or movies, which are developed using a process that seems designed to filter out most of what's actually good about science fiction.
i mean, the Federation is basically a pan-galactic egalitarian communist utopia. but this isn't just a random utopian fantasy; everything is thoughtfully reasoned and explained in a way that actually makes sense
Not particularly; the technology doesn't make sense, the portrayed capabilities aren't taken anywhere near their logical conclusions, and frankly most of the universe is left completely untouched; let's face it, most of Star Trek takes place on at least semi-military spaceships, of course it looks like a communist utopia; they're mostly crew. The day to day lives of ordinary citizens is handwaved away with a few soundbites like:
once replicator technology is invented, a capitalistic economy and consumer culture no longer make any sense, and want & poverty are also eradicated
But that's bollocks; it simply shifts your economy from being driven by materials to being driven by (utterly humungous amounts of) energy and knowledge. You want the latest and greatest hovercar? Well, those engines didn't develop themselves, the 50 petawatt hours of energy for a small 2 tonne vehicle didn't magic itself into existance, and the replicators sure don't maintain themselves, the software to run them doesn't write itself, even the sleek fashionable bodywork doesn't spring into existance out of thin air. Replicators can't even make everything, so chances are you'll need to pay for some good old fashioned non-magic manufacturing to go with it; if nothing else, some assembly might be required, since replicators seem to have some upper limit on practical size.
But no, Star Trek goes with "replicators solve everything and everyone lives happily ever after, so let's go and do another stupid holodeck episode because the reality we made was too boring to make another show about".
and with nation-states similarly abolished (and without people fighting for resources), a military serves no purpose
Right, making a cup of tea involves generating and moving around the energy of 475 Fat Man nuclear bombs (assuming 100% effeciency at all points) and there's no longer any problem of resources. That sure does make for interesting social commentary. Also, people no longer have any real ideologies, and certainly don't disagree with anyone over them; there's no terrorism or politics, except out in space, where the implications of these sort of energies being thrown about are never really considered, even at times of war.
likewise, religion would be a cultural anachronism in an advanced spacefaring civilization with extensive scientific knowledge
Again, unlikely oversimplification. We have pretty extensive scientific knowledge *now* and still 90% of the planet is still rather religious, and much of the rest have some pretty strange ideas. Commenting on social and cultural progress should typically involve a little more than some just-so stories which completely ignore most of the issues involved.
Cocaine is HIGHLY addictive, and many addicts are forced to perpetrate more harmful crimes to support their habits.
So in what way does criminalizing them help alleviate this? If you make some bad decisions and end up dependent on a drug, wouldn't it be immensely more productive for you and society to provide care and support through effective healthcare than by throwing you in jail and giving you a criminal record that's going to make things that much more difficult when you get out?
Such is the case with Spore as well. Now I don't know, maybe the game gets awesome in later stages but to me, it seemed very shallow the little I tooled around with it
Everything up to space stage is just tedious filler; a mechanism for making you design a creature and form some "attachment" to it. Space stage opens up a lot, and is really what the game is all about.
But yeah, even getting that far sucks; you play a boring if slightly prettier version of fl0w; then a really dire third person, er, chomper; then an "RTS" without any appreciable strategy or tactics; then a hilariously bad and incredibly vague attempt at Civilization. That's an hour or two of time wasted in some of the worst games you're likly to force yourself to play through, and you get to do it for every creature you want to play.
Space stage gives you a lot more stuff to do and look at, but it opens up tediously slowly. By the time you've faffed about enough to start opening up the sandbox aspects where you can blow up or terraform/modify planets, you realise it just isn't really fun and isn't likely to get much better; the game makes annoying repetitive demands on you to progress (save planet $foo from ecological collapse for the 8th time! save planey $bar from pirates again!) and hides most of itself until you've done it all dozens of times, and when it eventually reveals itself it's.. disappointing.
But, it looks pretty, and it's got a marketing budget larger than the GDP of a small country, so of course it still sells well. *sigh*.
Never mind that we're light-years away from 1960's Earth, and they're apparently not hearing it through radio waves since nobody else can detect it. I can understand some sort of "signal" waking up the last remaining Cylon models, maybe even a musical signal, but a song from earth?
I learned that the idea was not that Bob Dylan necessarily exists in the charactersâ(TM) universe, but that an artist on one of the colonies may have recorded a song with the exact same melody and lyrics. Perhaps this unknown performer and Dylan pulled inspiration from a common, ethereal source. Therefore, I was told to make no musical references to any âoeEarthlyâ versions, Hendrix, Dylan or any others. The arrangement needed to sound like a pop song that belonged in the Galactica universe, not our own.
I use a quad port PCI-X Intel Pro/1000 in this machine, and Samba with UFS2 or ZFS is mostly limited by the disk. The only tuning I've done is "socket options = TCP_NODELAY".
The kmem exhaustion issues are mostly if you fail to tune the ARC cache to not, er, exhaust it. CURRENT has largely resolved the issue by making kernel VM space much larger; previously it's been limited to about 1.5GB, even on 64bit.
If it does exhaust kmem, it's not at risk of nuking the filesystem, especially with the ZIL, it's just an irritating reboot.
Other than that, well, people are using FreeBSD/ZFS in production today; even the FreeBSD package building cluster uses it, making use of snapshots to provide clean build environments.
Yeah, the latest ZFS is in 8-CURRENT; it's far too new for RELENG_7, never mind RELENG_7_1.
If you don't want to bother with the commit mailing lists, you can track this stuff using FreshBSD. You could have an RSS feed which tracks commits to RELENG_7 mentioning ZFS in the message, if you wanted to.
FreeBSD betas come with a lot of extra stuff in libc and the kernel turned on that make tracking issues easier at the expense of speed.
No they don't. There's the main kernel debugging options: WITNESS, which tracks kernel locking ordering, and INVARIANTS, which adds in a lot of asserts to validate the integrity of various data structures. libc wise there's MALLOC_PRODUCTION, which turns off a bunch of debugging things in jemalloc.
None of these are ever on unless you're running FreeBSD -CURRENT (currently the 8 series) or otherwise make a custom build where you've explictly turned them on; 7-BETA and 7-RC's are built with the same options as release builds. You'll *know* when someone benchmarks a system with them on because they'll be *significantly* slower.
Also there is that "new" BSD licensed compiler, I don't remember the name, I have no idea if it's complete enough to be able to compile said benchmarks and compete with GCC but it would had been interesting with that one to.
You're probably thinking of LLVM. It does have a gcc front-end, so can be used to compile most things gcc can.
There's another one or two, but LLVM's probably the only serious contender against gcc.
My issue is with using FreeBSD 7.1 Beta 2. They should have stuck with 7.0 (the release edition). Usually the Betas and RCs tend to be worse-performing than the final releases
Beta and RC should be pretty much as performant as the final release; there's no magical change in CFLAGS or debugging options for a release.
On CURRENT, yes, there's WITNESS and INVARIANTS which drastically reduce performance because it's constantly checking every locking operation to make sure things are happening in the right order, verifying kernel data structures and so forth. This doesn't apply to STABLE, PRERELEASE, BETA or RC releases.
ZFS in recent Solaris Nevada and FreeBSD CURRENT supports a feature called L2ARC; Level-2 Advanced Replacement Cache. This is basically the ZFS filesystem/metadata cache, backed by so-called cache devices.
So, you can get your 32GB SSD, shove it in front of your n-TB ZFS array, and it'll use it to help accelerate random reads. 32GB of storage is a bit feeble, but 32GB of cache.. that's rather compelling, especially if your storage is otherwise backed by cheap and cheerful 7200RPM disks.
I wonder if you could also do that on Venus (too hot maybe?)
50-60km up, the atmosphere of Venus is roughly at Earth-normal temperature and pressure. Bog standard air is a lifting gas there too, being less dense.
Original Install Date: 22/07/2005, 11:39:35 Hotfix(s): 340 Hotfix(s) Installed.
Hibernate works fine for me, both with the 3 or 4 nVidia graphics cards this system's been through and my current ATI, plus two different TV cards, three sound cards and two SATA cards. Granted it's not perfect, but it normally lasts about a fortnight of hibernating once a day.
Maybe it's because I spent more on a Tyan motherboard.. but then again, Hibernate worked fine on my last two Gigabyte motherboards too.
Meh, I've got a PS3, I still do the vast majority of gaming on a PC.
Consoles have far smaller catalogs, the games are more expensive, they're generally shallower, they look worse, they have poorer controls, and many of the titles worth having are also available on the PC. Certain classes of game are practically non-existant since they don't fit the console demographics or control systems or hardware limitations.
There's little to no freeware, no modding, and no publishing freedom since everything has to be vetted by one vendor. That's all a pretty hefty price for a marginally higher probability of things Just Working.
dd_rescue > conv=noerror. It'll read in big blocks and when one fails, it'll drop the block size and retry, so you don't lose a 128k chunk when there's only one unreadable 512 byte sector.
the bottom line is you need redundancy - and that's pretty much it.
Um, well, good for you if that's all you need, and Sun will surely be happy to sell you something appropriate for that too, but for some of us, we kind of need that 2TB to do more than 300 IOPS.
Sun X4240, cheap from third party reseller not necessarily in the best of configurations: ~£2700.
2 cheap and cheerful SSD's for ARC second level cache: £300. £1200 if you want ones with decent write performance.
14*146GB 2.5" 10kRPM SAS disks: £2100.
Even if you put it together and test it using slave labour, you're not getting much change from $11k.
Sure, you could just plonk three 1.5T Seagates in there, shove a RAIDZ over it and call it a day, and that would be fine for some uses, but it's not really something you buy a storage appliance for, is it?
Second level ARC is standard in recent ZFS; you could just plonk some X25-M's in your X4240, attach a disk shelf to it, configure ZFS to use the SSD's as secondary ARC for it, and pretty much have something like what Sun are selling.
You know, just with less vendor support, and more effort involved in building, configuring, tuning and testing. If you come out of it with change from $10k, you probably earned it with the effort you put in.
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I became suspicious of Gigabyte when they did a board where half the power phases were on an "optional" daughterboard.
Of course the ad copy wibbled about how it improved reliability, but what I read was "We don't have the engineering talent to fit everything on the board". With my experience, the power board was anything but optional, and even with it the board didn't really enjoy having a beefy graphics card plugged into it. Funnily enough, when I replaced it with a practically identical Tyan board, my stability issues vanished.
Java has quite a few tuning options; limits on heap and garbage pool sizes, different garbage collectors and strategies for running them, different optimization levels. Maybe it's defaulting to client mode on Windows, thus putting more effort into reducing memory use by running the gc before growing the heap (and placing stricter limits on its size and the sizes of the gc generation pools), doing less aggressive optimizations and putting them off later.
Java also has bit of a history of enjoying cheap syscalls; 1.5 ran somewhat poorly on FreeBSD because it called gettimeofday() at some significant rate of knots, and system calls on Windows are significantly more expensive than that, while Linux prides itself on them being very cheap.
the speculative imaginings in other sci-fi works generally focus exclusively on future technological advancements while the world's sociopolitical climate remains relatively unchanged
I suggest you improve your sci-fi diet. There are literally thousands of far better fleshed out, better thought out and more interesting and realistic portrayals of the ramifications of potential technological, social and political changes in the future, they're just mostly in the form of books, not crappy TV shows or movies, which are developed using a process that seems designed to filter out most of what's actually good about science fiction.
i mean, the Federation is basically a pan-galactic egalitarian communist utopia. but this isn't just a random utopian fantasy; everything is thoughtfully reasoned and explained in a way that actually makes sense
Not particularly; the technology doesn't make sense, the portrayed capabilities aren't taken anywhere near their logical conclusions, and frankly most of the universe is left completely untouched; let's face it, most of Star Trek takes place on at least semi-military spaceships, of course it looks like a communist utopia; they're mostly crew. The day to day lives of ordinary citizens is handwaved away with a few soundbites like:
once replicator technology is invented, a capitalistic economy and consumer culture no longer make any sense, and want & poverty are also eradicated
But that's bollocks; it simply shifts your economy from being driven by materials to being driven by (utterly humungous amounts of) energy and knowledge. You want the latest and greatest hovercar? Well, those engines didn't develop themselves, the 50 petawatt hours of energy for a small 2 tonne vehicle didn't magic itself into existance, and the replicators sure don't maintain themselves, the software to run them doesn't write itself, even the sleek fashionable bodywork doesn't spring into existance out of thin air. Replicators can't even make everything, so chances are you'll need to pay for some good old fashioned non-magic manufacturing to go with it; if nothing else, some assembly might be required, since replicators seem to have some upper limit on practical size.
But no, Star Trek goes with "replicators solve everything and everyone lives happily ever after, so let's go and do another stupid holodeck episode because the reality we made was too boring to make another show about".
and with nation-states similarly abolished (and without people fighting for resources), a military serves no purpose
Right, making a cup of tea involves generating and moving around the energy of 475 Fat Man nuclear bombs (assuming 100% effeciency at all points) and there's no longer any problem of resources. That sure does make for interesting social commentary. Also, people no longer have any real ideologies, and certainly don't disagree with anyone over them; there's no terrorism or politics, except out in space, where the implications of these sort of energies being thrown about are never really considered, even at times of war.
likewise, religion would be a cultural anachronism in an advanced spacefaring civilization with extensive scientific knowledge
Again, unlikely oversimplification. We have pretty extensive scientific knowledge *now* and still 90% of the planet is still rather religious, and much of the rest have some pretty strange ideas. Commenting on social and cultural progress should typically involve a little more than some just-so stories which completely ignore most of the issues involved.
Dwarf Fortress is a bit easier to get into with a good tileset like DFG.
Why would you want a CPU for video encoding when a decent GPU can do it ten times faster?.
Cocaine is HIGHLY addictive, and many addicts are forced to perpetrate more harmful crimes to support their habits.
So in what way does criminalizing them help alleviate this? If you make some bad decisions and end up dependent on a drug, wouldn't it be immensely more productive for you and society to provide care and support through effective healthcare than by throwing you in jail and giving you a criminal record that's going to make things that much more difficult when you get out?
Such is the case with Spore as well. Now I don't know, maybe the game gets awesome in later stages but to me, it seemed very shallow the little I tooled around with it
Everything up to space stage is just tedious filler; a mechanism for making you design a creature and form some "attachment" to it. Space stage opens up a lot, and is really what the game is all about.
But yeah, even getting that far sucks; you play a boring if slightly prettier version of fl0w; then a really dire third person, er, chomper; then an "RTS" without any appreciable strategy or tactics; then a hilariously bad and incredibly vague attempt at Civilization. That's an hour or two of time wasted in some of the worst games you're likly to force yourself to play through, and you get to do it for every creature you want to play.
Space stage gives you a lot more stuff to do and look at, but it opens up tediously slowly. By the time you've faffed about enough to start opening up the sandbox aspects where you can blow up or terraform/modify planets, you realise it just isn't really fun and isn't likely to get much better; the game makes annoying repetitive demands on you to progress (save planet $foo from ecological collapse for the 8th time! save planey $bar from pirates again!) and hides most of itself until you've done it all dozens of times, and when it eventually reveals itself it's.. disappointing.
But, it looks pretty, and it's got a marketing budget larger than the GDP of a small country, so of course it still sells well. *sigh*.
WebKit nightly, best of 6 runs (several failed at 98%):
Failed 0 tests.
Test 65 passed, but took 35ms (less than 30fps)
Total elapsed time: 1.18s
Opera 10 alpha:
Failed 0 tests.
Test 26 passed, but took 46ms (less than 30fps)
Test 69 passed, but took 27 attempts (less than perfect).
Total elapsed time: 0.62s
Not doing too badly. Test 69 failed on one of the WebKit runs too, but I guess a random nightly is gonna be worse than a scheduled alpha release.
Never mind that we're light-years away from 1960's Earth, and they're apparently not hearing it through radio waves since nobody else can detect it. I can understand some sort of "signal" waking up the last remaining Cylon models, maybe even a musical signal, but a song from earth?
Nope, it's not a song from Earth:
I learned that the idea was not that Bob Dylan necessarily exists in the charactersâ(TM) universe, but that an artist on one of the colonies may have recorded a song with the exact same melody and lyrics. Perhaps this unknown performer and Dylan pulled inspiration from a common, ethereal source. Therefore, I was told to make no musical references to any âoeEarthlyâ versions, Hendrix, Dylan or any others. The arrangement needed to sound like a pop song that belonged in the Galactica universe, not our own.
I use a quad port PCI-X Intel Pro/1000 in this machine, and Samba with UFS2 or ZFS is mostly limited by the disk. The only tuning I've done is "socket options = TCP_NODELAY".
(I also haven't experienced any problems with Samba; I easily break 60MB/s. what NIC do you have?)
The kmem exhaustion issues are mostly if you fail to tune the ARC cache to not, er, exhaust it. CURRENT has largely resolved the issue by making kernel VM space much larger; previously it's been limited to about 1.5GB, even on 64bit.
If it does exhaust kmem, it's not at risk of nuking the filesystem, especially with the ZIL, it's just an irritating reboot.
Other than that, well, people are using FreeBSD/ZFS in production today; even the FreeBSD package building cluster uses it, making use of snapshots to provide clean build environments.
Yeah, the latest ZFS is in 8-CURRENT; it's far too new for RELENG_7, never mind RELENG_7_1.
If you don't want to bother with the commit mailing lists, you can track this stuff using FreshBSD. You could have an RSS feed which tracks commits to RELENG_7 mentioning ZFS in the message, if you wanted to.
FreeBSD betas come with a lot of extra stuff in libc and the kernel turned on that make tracking issues easier at the expense of speed.
No they don't. There's the main kernel debugging options: WITNESS, which tracks kernel locking ordering, and INVARIANTS, which adds in a lot of asserts to validate the integrity of various data structures. libc wise there's MALLOC_PRODUCTION, which turns off a bunch of debugging things in jemalloc.
None of these are ever on unless you're running FreeBSD -CURRENT (currently the 8 series) or otherwise make a custom build where you've explictly turned them on; 7-BETA and 7-RC's are built with the same options as release builds. You'll *know* when someone benchmarks a system with them on because they'll be *significantly* slower.
Also there is that "new" BSD licensed compiler, I don't remember the name, I have no idea if it's complete enough to be able to compile said benchmarks and compete with GCC but it would had been interesting with that one to.
You're probably thinking of LLVM. It does have a gcc front-end, so can be used to compile most things gcc can.
There's another one or two, but LLVM's probably the only serious contender against gcc.
My issue is with using FreeBSD 7.1 Beta 2. They should have stuck with 7.0 (the release edition). Usually the Betas and RCs tend to be worse-performing than the final releases
Beta and RC should be pretty much as performant as the final release; there's no magical change in CFLAGS or debugging options for a release.
On CURRENT, yes, there's WITNESS and INVARIANTS which drastically reduce performance because it's constantly checking every locking operation to make sure things are happening in the right order, verifying kernel data structures and so forth. This doesn't apply to STABLE, PRERELEASE, BETA or RC releases.
ZFS in recent Solaris Nevada and FreeBSD CURRENT supports a feature called L2ARC; Level-2 Advanced Replacement Cache. This is basically the ZFS filesystem/metadata cache, backed by so-called cache devices.
So, you can get your 32GB SSD, shove it in front of your n-TB ZFS array, and it'll use it to help accelerate random reads. 32GB of storage is a bit feeble, but 32GB of cache.. that's rather compelling, especially if your storage is otherwise backed by cheap and cheerful 7200RPM disks.
I wonder if you could also do that on Venus (too hot maybe?)
50-60km up, the atmosphere of Venus is roughly at Earth-normal temperature and pressure. Bog standard air is a lifting gas there too, being less dense.
Hibernate works fine for me, both with the 3 or 4 nVidia graphics cards this system's been through and my current ATI, plus two different TV cards, three sound cards and two SATA cards. Granted it's not perfect, but it normally lasts about a fortnight of hibernating once a day.
Maybe it's because I spent more on a Tyan motherboard.. but then again, Hibernate worked fine on my last two Gigabyte motherboards too.
Meh, I've got a PS3, I still do the vast majority of gaming on a PC.
Consoles have far smaller catalogs, the games are more expensive, they're generally shallower, they look worse, they have poorer controls, and many of the titles worth having are also available on the PC. Certain classes of game are practically non-existant since they don't fit the console demographics or control systems or hardware limitations.
There's little to no freeware, no modding, and no publishing freedom since everything has to be vetted by one vendor. That's all a pretty hefty price for a marginally higher probability of things Just Working.
FreeBSD's UFS2 supports snapshots too, though they're not as effecient as you might like.
I'm pretty sure NTFS supports snapshots in the form of the volume shadow copy service, but they're not as clearly exposed to the user.
dd_rescue > conv=noerror. It'll read in big blocks and when one fails, it'll drop the block size and retry, so you don't lose a 128k chunk when there's only one unreadable 512 byte sector.
the bottom line is you need redundancy - and that's pretty much it.
Um, well, good for you if that's all you need, and Sun will surely be happy to sell you something appropriate for that too, but for some of us, we kind of need that 2TB to do more than 300 IOPS.
Even if you put it together and test it using slave labour, you're not getting much change from $11k.
Sure, you could just plonk three 1.5T Seagates in there, shove a RAIDZ over it and call it a day, and that would be fine for some uses, but it's not really something you buy a storage appliance for, is it?
Second level ARC is standard in recent ZFS; you could just plonk some X25-M's in your X4240, attach a disk shelf to it, configure ZFS to use the SSD's as secondary ARC for it, and pretty much have something like what Sun are selling.
You know, just with less vendor support, and more effort involved in building, configuring, tuning and testing. If you come out of it with change from $10k, you probably earned it with the effort you put in.