The Big Bang was the source of the vacuum, not a product of it. There was no space before the Big Bang, it's not just that the space was empty. Hence, expansion now.
I look forward to seeing it in an iBook soon... the current iBooks scratch too easily. And you know that Apple will be the first computer company to adopt it. Five years later, of course, Dell will.
Um... personally, I wouldn't give up an hour of use on the iBook for altivec. (10W increase in processor usage at equal megahertz would be roughly a 20% decrease in battery life, if you tend to use low screen brightness.) And, of course, the G3 iMac is not only still selling, but still being manufactured. The G3 will end eventually, surely, but there's absolutely no compelling reason to get rid of it in the next year.
Nope, unfortunately not. Currently I'm using the most bootleg case imaginable... the box it's cut out of. I'm transitioning to a cast nylon one, lines with metal mesh (screen door stuff), as soon as I can get a few minutes on the water jet. Using a compact flash adapter is a definitely cheaper than using a disk-on-module device, but it's also significantly bigger. Most cf adapters I've seen either mount vertically, or require a cable... the first bringing total high from 0.5" to 2" or so, and the other giving another point of failure. For the power supply, there are lots of things out there, but the simplest is the dc-to-dc I mentioned... and it's a small circuit board, the longest side is shorter than the epia, so it won't increase your total length much. Linux supposedly is quite comfortable on the machine although, again, I haven't tried it. Be aware that you don't have a floppy connector, so you'll either have to boot off cd, use a usb floppy drive, or just use another computer to install. Also, the machine may not need a fan, but it gets quite warm. I haven't been able to get a full power reading (some friend borrowed the damn multimeter again), but I suspect it's between 10 and 15 watts in the configuration described, including losses in the power supply. If you're particularly space strapped, and you're not thinking of keeping a CD in their permanently, you may want to consider something much smaller than the 55W dc-to-dc.
I presume you know of mini-itx.com. They're great, if you're looking for wacky case ideas. For a simply case, though, I'd really consider going down to your neighborhood metal shop or carpenter, and just showing him what you need. I think the epia's are particularly suited to a wood case, and it's certainly simpler or cheaper. Consider the metal mesh for radio shielding, if you care about such things; evcen in a sealed, non-head-conductive box, heating is no problem for at least 72 hours (haven't tested longer totally sealed). I recommend some ventilation holes, of course. The commercial cases seem great, but they're all designed for people who need disk drives. If you don't, it's probably more than you want.
The other note is that low-profile ram is available for just a buck or two extra and, at least in my configuration, the ram is the highest point besides PCI cards. Again, if you're using a cf adapter, that may or may not be the case. For PCI cards, you can use a right-angle adapter to reduce total height. You can also get a two-pci-slot adapter (right-angle), which gives you two full slots. I'm not using one currenty, but I tested two 8-serial-port cards at once, and they worked gorgeously.
I've never been as happy with an x86 machine, in terms of reliability and efficiency, as I am with the epia, and I highly recommend getting one to play with, especially at the price. And you get to laugh at everyone who talks about quieter fans and insultation to make a quiet pc... 0dB is nothing to sneer at.
You hit the nail on the head. I have a specialized need. Capacity wasn't an issue; for various reasons, I'm using two 128MB modules, and that's all I need. On the other hand, the write limits don't really concern me. As I'm using custom software, I can trade off the number of write cycles in exchange for reliability. I basically limit it to a maximum of one write per location per hour, and start moving things around on the disk if a single section consistently gets more writes than that. Again, also, I can check after each write whether it worked; if not, I just mark that byte bad, and go to a reserved backup area. Assuming my usage patterns stay relatively similar, or even double, the number of write cycles shouldn't be an issue for roughly a century.
Furthermore, I did destructive testing on a smaller unit (32MB) to get a sense of how accurate that 1M write cycle number is, since it did worry me for a bit. 1% of the write locations (byte sized) failed after 200k writes, going up to 2% at 500k, skyrocketing;-) to 5% at 1M. Clearly not quite linear, but I'm not too worried. At 10M writes per location, 65% of locations were still writeable. Not ideal, I'd admit (that brings a 128MB disk down to ~83MB), but again, that would take a millenium with my usage patterns. (Currently, I'm reserving 16MB out of 128MB for repcing bad sectors. 16% bad sectors occured at around 4M writes.)
So you're right in that this isn't necessarily feasible for a standard PC. On the other hand, with different usage patterns, you could easily just use a RAM disk. A good sized linux installation is reasonable in 2GB; this is under a thousand dollars in compact flash, with direct compact flash to IDE adapters. 2GB of ram, likewise, is only a few hundred dollars. On boot, make a ramdisk. Only write back to flash if you get nervous; or do it once an hour, and last a century. (Note also that most IDE drivers do bad sector remapping; it's not ideal, because it uses 512B blocks instead of the 1B blocks that flash actually fails in, but it's zero modification to existing code.) Needless to say, it would be more expensive than normal to build a computer this way, but it really wouldn't be off the scale.
Sorry about replying to myself, but it just occured to me. If people are interested in more info about this, send me an e-mail (adam at addaon.com). If enough people show interest, I'll write up an article. If not, I'll just answer questions as they come in. And to forestall the most common question -- it's not running linux.
Solid state storage is here today. I just built a silent PC... epia 5000 fanless motherboard, dc-to-dc (that's the brand, actually, as well as a description) fanless ATX power supply, solid state (obviously) ram, and solid state (http://www.satech.com/disonmoddom4.html was my provider) disk. total cost was about $300, including custom case, so there's no real argument about that, either. Performance is designed to fit my needs, not greatest possible. And I'll wager the thing lasts 50 years, given that it's in a fully sealed inert atmosphere, temperature never goes about 40 celcius, and internal humidity approaches zero. Oh yeah, and there's software which remaps around bad bits on disk or ram, so normal failures are acceptable there (although it may be forced to reboot if kernel memory is corrupt... fortunately, I'm using a fully journaling file system, not just meta-data journalling, so that, too, is okay). Total price, again, around $300, and reliability is quite satisfactory. What are people complaining about again?
Transparently? Well, yes, from a programmatic point of view. Your old code will run fine. But not optimally. It would take different memory allocation algorithms to get optimum performance on a Hammer box. Hopefully, this will hape with that.
And, of course, also support for the Hammer architecture, which is (smaller scale) NUMA. Each processor in an x86-64 system has its own memory bus, so time to access memory depends on whether the memory is directly connected to a given processor, or whether another processor needs to mediate, the definition of NUMA.
I agree entirely. And the book to read is Fundamentals of Computer Graphics (note: it's an associate link. feel free to avoid it, buy the book anyway.) This book is by the guy I had for a graphics class (on building a rasterizer) last year, and we beta'd the book for the class. I'll be perfectly frank and say that it's a book that will be better in the second edition, but even now it really is the best there is. If your goal is to understand 3D graphics, not just futz around until things look good by trial and error, you have to read this.
With sufficiently good design, you could even use gallium with a phase-change cooler... most phase-change coolers go liquid to gas, but gallium's melting point (around 30 celcius) is quite well placed (melts in your mouth, not in your hands). And when it's right around freezing, it forms a slushy-type mix which could still be pumped in... hmm, now I'm really thinking about this, since I have half a kilo of gallium in the fridge.
Really not trolling, so mod this off-topic, not troll... just honestly wondering how the parent pronounced '.mil' that it gets prefixed with 'an'. Sorry if it's a typo, or your not a native english speaker... but i've always said 'dot-mil', two syllables... I can imaging just 'mil' or something like that, but it still doesn't make sense. Curious!
Personally, I feel it's a fair settlement. In the time frame indicated, I purchased one cd. Even if my share goes to $3, and that's redirected to charity, I feel it's quite realistically on the scale of the pricefixing I experienced; after all, do notice that the market does support CD's, to some extent, at current prices. And, of course, this settlement only covers bad behavior through the year 2000, so if things don't get better, we get to take another x million dollars from them, next time with a precedent.
Of course, if you bought more than about ten cd's, you'd be crazy to not disqualify yourself and take separate action.
We lambast Intel not because we don't realize that the long pipeline was a tradeoff, but because we disagree with the tradeoff. Equal or better performance could certainly have been achieved with a shorter pipeline. The tradeoff was Intel selecting marketing power over computing power... from the consumers point of view, a bad decision for a computer.
A much better message than teaching them to blindly obey all laws! In the state I'm in, it's illegal for a person of legal drinking age to ferment legally obtained materials for the purpose of drinking. It's also illegal for me to drive down the main street more than three times in a single hour. Sodomy is straight out. If you don't pick and choose what laws to obey, you are begging to be lead by the nose... good for those who like latent dictatorships, not so hot for the rest of us. By all means, encourage your children to download (steal? not worth arguing) music... it's one of the easiest ways you have of making sure they have a backbone.
The prime difference between CRT and LCD isn't brightness, it's pixel shape. CRTs simply look better... LCD's unavoidably have blatantly square pixels with dark space between them, and, while it's good enough (though not great) for computer usage, it just sucks for video. This is why people pay more, lots more, for CRT projectors.
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What in specific is it that you hate about PowerPC? I've found it a very pleasant instruction set to work with.
The Big Bang was the source of the vacuum, not a product of it. There was no space before the Big Bang, it's not just that the space was empty. Hence, expansion now.
smoother than a narwhal
Smoother than a narwhal!? I take it you've never gotten one of those stuck in your eye! The buggers are sharp!
I look forward to seeing it in an iBook soon... the current iBooks scratch too easily. And you know that Apple will be the first computer company to adopt it. Five years later, of course, Dell will.
Um... personally, I wouldn't give up an hour of use on the iBook for altivec. (10W increase in processor usage at equal megahertz would be roughly a 20% decrease in battery life, if you tend to use low screen brightness.) And, of course, the G3 iMac is not only still selling, but still being manufactured. The G3 will end eventually, surely, but there's absolutely no compelling reason to get rid of it in the next year.
Nope, unfortunately not. Currently I'm using the most bootleg case imaginable... the box it's cut out of. I'm transitioning to a cast nylon one, lines with metal mesh (screen door stuff), as soon as I can get a few minutes on the water jet. Using a compact flash adapter is a definitely cheaper than using a disk-on-module device, but it's also significantly bigger. Most cf adapters I've seen either mount vertically, or require a cable... the first bringing total high from 0.5" to 2" or so, and the other giving another point of failure. For the power supply, there are lots of things out there, but the simplest is the dc-to-dc I mentioned... and it's a small circuit board, the longest side is shorter than the epia, so it won't increase your total length much. Linux supposedly is quite comfortable on the machine although, again, I haven't tried it. Be aware that you don't have a floppy connector, so you'll either have to boot off cd, use a usb floppy drive, or just use another computer to install. Also, the machine may not need a fan, but it gets quite warm. I haven't been able to get a full power reading (some friend borrowed the damn multimeter again), but I suspect it's between 10 and 15 watts in the configuration described, including losses in the power supply. If you're particularly space strapped, and you're not thinking of keeping a CD in their permanently, you may want to consider something much smaller than the 55W dc-to-dc.
I presume you know of mini-itx.com. They're great, if you're looking for wacky case ideas. For a simply case, though, I'd really consider going down to your neighborhood metal shop or carpenter, and just showing him what you need. I think the epia's are particularly suited to a wood case, and it's certainly simpler or cheaper. Consider the metal mesh for radio shielding, if you care about such things; evcen in a sealed, non-head-conductive box, heating is no problem for at least 72 hours (haven't tested longer totally sealed). I recommend some ventilation holes, of course. The commercial cases seem great, but they're all designed for people who need disk drives. If you don't, it's probably more than you want.
The other note is that low-profile ram is available for just a buck or two extra and, at least in my configuration, the ram is the highest point besides PCI cards. Again, if you're using a cf adapter, that may or may not be the case. For PCI cards, you can use a right-angle adapter to reduce total height. You can also get a two-pci-slot adapter (right-angle), which gives you two full slots. I'm not using one currenty, but I tested two 8-serial-port cards at once, and they worked gorgeously.
I've never been as happy with an x86 machine, in terms of reliability and efficiency, as I am with the epia, and I highly recommend getting one to play with, especially at the price. And you get to laugh at everyone who talks about quieter fans and insultation to make a quiet pc... 0dB is nothing to sneer at.
-196 Celcius being better known as 77 Kelvin, familiar to us all as the temperature of liquid nitrogen.
You hit the nail on the head. I have a specialized need. Capacity wasn't an issue; for various reasons, I'm using two 128MB modules, and that's all I need. On the other hand, the write limits don't really concern me. As I'm using custom software, I can trade off the number of write cycles in exchange for reliability. I basically limit it to a maximum of one write per location per hour, and start moving things around on the disk if a single section consistently gets more writes than that. Again, also, I can check after each write whether it worked; if not, I just mark that byte bad, and go to a reserved backup area. Assuming my usage patterns stay relatively similar, or even double, the number of write cycles shouldn't be an issue for roughly a century.
;-) to 5% at 1M. Clearly not quite linear, but I'm not too worried. At 10M writes per location, 65% of locations were still writeable. Not ideal, I'd admit (that brings a 128MB disk down to ~83MB), but again, that would take a millenium with my usage patterns. (Currently, I'm reserving 16MB out of 128MB for repcing bad sectors. 16% bad sectors occured at around 4M writes.)
Furthermore, I did destructive testing on a smaller unit (32MB) to get a sense of how accurate that 1M write cycle number is, since it did worry me for a bit. 1% of the write locations (byte sized) failed after 200k writes, going up to 2% at 500k, skyrocketing
So you're right in that this isn't necessarily feasible for a standard PC. On the other hand, with different usage patterns, you could easily just use a RAM disk. A good sized linux installation is reasonable in 2GB; this is under a thousand dollars in compact flash, with direct compact flash to IDE adapters. 2GB of ram, likewise, is only a few hundred dollars. On boot, make a ramdisk. Only write back to flash if you get nervous; or do it once an hour, and last a century. (Note also that most IDE drivers do bad sector remapping; it's not ideal, because it uses 512B blocks instead of the 1B blocks that flash actually fails in, but it's zero modification to existing code.) Needless to say, it would be more expensive than normal to build a computer this way, but it really wouldn't be off the scale.
Sorry about replying to myself, but it just occured to me. If people are interested in more info about this, send me an e-mail (adam at addaon.com). If enough people show interest, I'll write up an article. If not, I'll just answer questions as they come in. And to forestall the most common question -- it's not running linux.
Solid state storage is here today. I just built a silent PC... epia 5000 fanless motherboard, dc-to-dc (that's the brand, actually, as well as a description) fanless ATX power supply, solid state (obviously) ram, and solid state (http://www.satech.com/disonmoddom4.html was my provider) disk. total cost was about $300, including custom case, so there's no real argument about that, either. Performance is designed to fit my needs, not greatest possible. And I'll wager the thing lasts 50 years, given that it's in a fully sealed inert atmosphere, temperature never goes about 40 celcius, and internal humidity approaches zero. Oh yeah, and there's software which remaps around bad bits on disk or ram, so normal failures are acceptable there (although it may be forced to reboot if kernel memory is corrupt... fortunately, I'm using a fully journaling file system, not just meta-data journalling, so that, too, is okay). Total price, again, around $300, and reliability is quite satisfactory. What are people complaining about again?
Transparently? Well, yes, from a programmatic point of view. Your old code will run fine. But not optimally. It would take different memory allocation algorithms to get optimum performance on a Hammer box. Hopefully, this will hape with that.
And, of course, also support for the Hammer architecture, which is (smaller scale) NUMA. Each processor in an x86-64 system has its own memory bus, so time to access memory depends on whether the memory is directly connected to a given processor, or whether another processor needs to mediate, the definition of NUMA.
Next you'll want to take the tag off the mattress!
"Build a rasterizer in software first"
I agree entirely. And the book to read is Fundamentals of Computer Graphics (note: it's an associate link. feel free to avoid it, buy the book anyway.) This book is by the guy I had for a graphics class (on building a rasterizer) last year, and we beta'd the book for the class. I'll be perfectly frank and say that it's a book that will be better in the second edition, but even now it really is the best there is. If your goal is to understand 3D graphics, not just futz around until things look good by trial and error, you have to read this.
Doesn't X require two strokes in graffiti? In which case, isn't it as suitable as Jot?
With sufficiently good design, you could even use gallium with a phase-change cooler... most phase-change coolers go liquid to gas, but gallium's melting point (around 30 celcius) is quite well placed (melts in your mouth, not in your hands). And when it's right around freezing, it forms a slushy-type mix which could still be pumped in... hmm, now I'm really thinking about this, since I have half a kilo of gallium in the fridge.
Really not trolling, so mod this off-topic, not troll... just honestly wondering how the parent pronounced '.mil' that it gets prefixed with 'an'. Sorry if it's a typo, or your not a native english speaker... but i've always said 'dot-mil', two syllables... I can imaging just 'mil' or something like that, but it still doesn't make sense. Curious!
Personally, I feel it's a fair settlement. In the time frame indicated, I purchased one cd. Even if my share goes to $3, and that's redirected to charity, I feel it's quite realistically on the scale of the pricefixing I experienced; after all, do notice that the market does support CD's, to some extent, at current prices. And, of course, this settlement only covers bad behavior through the year 2000, so if things don't get better, we get to take another x million dollars from them, next time with a precedent.
Of course, if you bought more than about ten cd's, you'd be crazy to not disqualify yourself and take separate action.
We lambast Intel not because we don't realize that the long pipeline was a tradeoff, but because we disagree with the tradeoff. Equal or better performance could certainly have been achieved with a shorter pipeline. The tradeoff was Intel selecting marketing power over computing power... from the consumers point of view, a bad decision for a computer.
I'm a New Yorker, if I was the 'European faggot' you were speaking of.
Yes, but some of the Greek states were lovable. The US is not.
I wonder if this refers to tempest, which requires physical proximity... any thoughts?
A much better message than teaching them to blindly obey all laws! In the state I'm in, it's illegal for a person of legal drinking age to ferment legally obtained materials for the purpose of drinking. It's also illegal for me to drive down the main street more than three times in a single hour. Sodomy is straight out. If you don't pick and choose what laws to obey, you are begging to be lead by the nose... good for those who like latent dictatorships, not so hot for the rest of us. By all means, encourage your children to download (steal? not worth arguing) music... it's one of the easiest ways you have of making sure they have a backbone.
The prime difference between CRT and LCD isn't brightness, it's pixel shape. CRTs simply look better... LCD's unavoidably have blatantly square pixels with dark space between them, and, while it's good enough (though not great) for computer usage, it just sucks for video. This is why people pay more, lots more, for CRT projectors.
Check out this book... not an affiliate link. I have it. Fully waterproof. Good for hot tubs. amazon link