A liquid is a substance which retains its volume, but not its shape. A solid retains both, a gas neither. A neutron star is liquid, as it's volume is stable (due to the balance between gravity and other forces), but any slight deviation from spherical (or non-spherical, if it's spinning... neutronium does weird stuff when it spins, it's not just an ellipsoid) is quickly overwhelmed and pulled flat.
Also, I seem to recall that neutronium is metastable, which would mean that you can at least fiddle it a bit when you dig it out of a star... of course, technical difficulties are another issue entirely.
Exactly. And by using it as a 'ram disk' you're giving up the huge advantage that ram has, while not decreasing the cost much. I mean, if this system used 70ns ram, it would be just as fast given bus limitations, but much cheaper... cheaper, that is, if anyone made 70ns ram any more. What it comes down to is that if we want radical ideas like this to be feasible (and this is a radical idea, in the sense that no one thought about it when deciding the current pc architecture), we need a lot more flexibility in how systems are designed. I was recently working on a random number generator in hardware for crypto purposes, and the pci bus simply didn't have enough bandwidth, so we ended up fitting an fpga into a memory slot, the exact opposite of what this ramdisk is doing. What we need is direct access to the memory bus itself through some connector (or better yet, to the hypertransport bus between the cpu and the memory controller), which would allow devices like the ram disk, or simply ram cards like you describe, to work with the current pc architecture. Timing on such a bus would be a bitch, but you could assume it remains unused except for systems with truly special needs.
And even high end x86 boxes have 32 ram slots (my machine), compared to 10 PCI slots... which means that your max ram is 64GB, your max ramdrive, if each drive uses their highest-end model, is 40GB. Makes it look even more silly. Never mind that the 100MB sustained limit is almost certainly a PCI bus limit, which means having multiple ramdrives on one pci bus (my box has 3 pci busses, so if you wanted more than three ramdrives, at least two would compete for bandwidth) just is silly. Finally, they don't seem to support 66MHz/64bit pci, which would quadruple available bandwidth, although admittedly I didn't look too hard. It just seems this technology is silly for the low end, since a ram disk works better, and silly for the high end, since it's not really sufficient. Oh, well.
Where's that 100 years number from? I generally assume (based on experience) that CDs are good for 10-15 years in the box; I have no sense of the lifetime of DVDs, but I'd be surprised if it's that much higher. Never mind that $1 DVDs from ebay are almost certainly the cheapest and lowest quality possible; I'd be very reluctant to assume more than 5 years for such a disc. Any source?
Do note, though, that there are a few surprising programs which bang on altivec heavily. For me, the biggest one is VirtualPC... using WindowsXP on my 600 MHz iBook (640MB of ram) is literally impossible... ten seconds plus to open a menu. On a friend's 667MHz powerbook (512MB ram) it's more than usable, I'd say around PII/233 level. So don't just equate altivec with graphics manipulation. On the other hand, I don't regreet buying an iBook at all.
This could be a great device with some clever client-side software. I'm assuming that it currently appears to the host computer as a standard usb mass storage device... Great device, as an mp3 player. But imagine how much flexibility you would get if it appeared to the host as a usb hub, to which is connected a usb mass storage device, a usb audio input device (standard microphone driver), and a usb->serial port bridge to which a standard serial lcd is connected. All the hardware is there, it's just a matter of appearances... with these features, it would be just as great (indeed, identical) as an mp3 player, but you could also use it as a portable microphone (the microphones on both my ibook and picturebook suck), and you could use it as an additional display device when plugged in. I just can't see any downside (besides development time) to allowing this.
Because it has more processors? I'm a recent mac (re-)convert, and a CS/EE major (graduate, soon enough), and I love the things... but the motorolla G4's simply are not effective processors for their cost. The power architecture is beautiful... I happen to like it more than any other risc architecture I've dealt with, if only because I like the way it handles the different families of power processors (particularly 400/600/900). But the G4 is not an effective implementation of power. The G3 is capable of running at 1.8GHz today... the Power3 has a much, much higher IPC count... and the Power4 may be the nicest chip you can buy for any price today. The 970 has the potential to combine the best features of all three: high clock, high IPC, and high scalability. But the G4, and motorolla's power chips in general, just don't.
Okay, great. When do they start? I'll take 10^20 cycles (on a power machine) asap, and pay about $1000 for it, as it will save me months on my thesis, allowing me to use mathematica, instead of re-hacking everything in C (which brings it down to about 10^14 cycles, manageable on a home pc in a reasonable amount of time). IBM, you sell to students?
Go for it. Coming up with ideas like this is important, and it's great that cybermace did. But it's through people taking ideas and running with them that great things get done.
As other's have mentioned, they'll be downloadable shortly. But do remember, the RPM's are not GPL'd. The programs are GPL'd. That does not mean that you have any right to them, although, as I said, SuSE does make them available. It means that, should they be available, the source would also be available. I appreciate that SuSE, and most other distributions, are openly distributed. But it is also important to keep in mind that this is not a consequence of the GPL.
I'm saying that the rights of the individual are a non-issue. No individual created the web page. No individual is responsible for the web page. No individual is in a position to have his or her ethics or mores modify how the page is created; therefore, the page is not regulated by human ethical principles... which, last I checked, most libertarians thought were an 'acceptable' if not necessary form of regulation. As such, creations like this are do not fit into the utopia libertarians imagine; being unregulated by basic human kindness, it must be regulated by somethign else; a formalized definition of basic human kindness is as good as anything.
Huh? What are you talking about? I can't tell if you're a troll or a libertarian without ethics (libertarianism can only work with ethics, in my opinion), but I'll respond. Where did this come from: "the right of a sighted person to create a website in the fashion he chooses?" Has anyone suggested, anywhere in this thread, that personal websites be legally required to be accessible? Or were people instead talking about COMMERCIAL sites? Commercial entities are not people, and, in general, don't make choices. It is very hard to hurt a legal document's feelings.
is a nForce (or better yet, nForce2) in a micro-ITX form factor. Is that too much to ask? I have this dream of a computer I can carry with my laptop, plug in to power and firewire networking when I need it, and use as a remote kernel for mathematica, when it begins to bog down... which means I need an absurdly small motherboard that can take modern processors.
I find that what hurts my neck the most is looking left and right all the time; up and down doesn't bother me as much. So I keep my monitor where it belongs, about 18" straight in front of me, then put whatever book I'm looking at (assuming it has a lay-flat binding... most reference books do, these days) right down on my desk, then put the keyboard right on top of the book. Of course, having a transparent keyboard helps.
Clearly, I have no idea what I'm talking about, but I just had this image of a perfectly transparent keyboard with a book under it, and I had to post something. Now back to your regularly scheduled programming.
With glass floors, the person walking on them is aware that someone underneath them can look up, and makes a choice. One way glass, on the other hand, could easily be considered an invasion of privacy. Although it is an interesting idea...
There are third party apps for it. But I don't really recommend it. Disabling QE only increased battery life by about ten minutes (that's wall time... 10.2's battery management is seriously borked), and noticably decreased performance. Unless the heat itself is really bothering you (and it's well within spec for the system, it's just a question of your thigh being warm), I'd suggest leaving QE on. It/is/ slightly ironic that the graphics chip is using possibly more power than the CPU... but in the iBook, the biggest power consumer by far is the screen, followed by the hard drive. Might as well use the hardware you paid for, and QE/is/ nice.
Slashdot Mirror
A liquid is a substance which retains its volume, but not its shape. A solid retains both, a gas neither. A neutron star is liquid, as it's volume is stable (due to the balance between gravity and other forces), but any slight deviation from spherical (or non-spherical, if it's spinning... neutronium does weird stuff when it spins, it's not just an ellipsoid) is quickly overwhelmed and pulled flat.
Also, I seem to recall that neutronium is metastable, which would mean that you can at least fiddle it a bit when you dig it out of a star... of course, technical difficulties are another issue entirely.
Exactly. And by using it as a 'ram disk' you're giving up the huge advantage that ram has, while not decreasing the cost much. I mean, if this system used 70ns ram, it would be just as fast given bus limitations, but much cheaper... cheaper, that is, if anyone made 70ns ram any more. What it comes down to is that if we want radical ideas like this to be feasible (and this is a radical idea, in the sense that no one thought about it when deciding the current pc architecture), we need a lot more flexibility in how systems are designed. I was recently working on a random number generator in hardware for crypto purposes, and the pci bus simply didn't have enough bandwidth, so we ended up fitting an fpga into a memory slot, the exact opposite of what this ramdisk is doing. What we need is direct access to the memory bus itself through some connector (or better yet, to the hypertransport bus between the cpu and the memory controller), which would allow devices like the ram disk, or simply ram cards like you describe, to work with the current pc architecture. Timing on such a bus would be a bitch, but you could assume it remains unused except for systems with truly special needs.
And even high end x86 boxes have 32 ram slots (my machine), compared to 10 PCI slots... which means that your max ram is 64GB, your max ramdrive, if each drive uses their highest-end model, is 40GB. Makes it look even more silly. Never mind that the 100MB sustained limit is almost certainly a PCI bus limit, which means having multiple ramdrives on one pci bus (my box has 3 pci busses, so if you wanted more than three ramdrives, at least two would compete for bandwidth) just is silly. Finally, they don't seem to support 66MHz/64bit pci, which would quadruple available bandwidth, although admittedly I didn't look too hard. It just seems this technology is silly for the low end, since a ram disk works better, and silly for the high end, since it's not really sufficient. Oh, well.
Where's that 100 years number from? I generally assume (based on experience) that CDs are good for 10-15 years in the box; I have no sense of the lifetime of DVDs, but I'd be surprised if it's that much higher. Never mind that $1 DVDs from ebay are almost certainly the cheapest and lowest quality possible; I'd be very reluctant to assume more than 5 years for such a disc. Any source?
Do note, though, that there are a few surprising programs which bang on altivec heavily. For me, the biggest one is VirtualPC... using WindowsXP on my 600 MHz iBook (640MB of ram) is literally impossible... ten seconds plus to open a menu. On a friend's 667MHz powerbook (512MB ram) it's more than usable, I'd say around PII/233 level. So don't just equate altivec with graphics manipulation. On the other hand, I don't regreet buying an iBook at all.
This could be a great device with some clever client-side software. I'm assuming that it currently appears to the host computer as a standard usb mass storage device... Great device, as an mp3 player. But imagine how much flexibility you would get if it appeared to the host as a usb hub, to which is connected a usb mass storage device, a usb audio input device (standard microphone driver), and a usb->serial port bridge to which a standard serial lcd is connected. All the hardware is there, it's just a matter of appearances... with these features, it would be just as great (indeed, identical) as an mp3 player, but you could also use it as a portable microphone (the microphones on both my ibook and picturebook suck), and you could use it as an additional display device when plugged in. I just can't see any downside (besides development time) to allowing this.
Because it has more processors? I'm a recent mac (re-)convert, and a CS/EE major (graduate, soon enough), and I love the things... but the motorolla G4's simply are not effective processors for their cost. The power architecture is beautiful... I happen to like it more than any other risc architecture I've dealt with, if only because I like the way it handles the different families of power processors (particularly 400/600/900). But the G4 is not an effective implementation of power. The G3 is capable of running at 1.8GHz today... the Power3 has a much, much higher IPC count... and the Power4 may be the nicest chip you can buy for any price today. The 970 has the potential to combine the best features of all three: high clock, high IPC, and high scalability. But the G4, and motorolla's power chips in general, just don't.
google fcode
Okay, great. When do they start? I'll take 10^20 cycles (on a power machine) asap, and pay about $1000 for it, as it will save me months on my thesis, allowing me to use mathematica, instead of re-hacking everything in C (which brings it down to about 10^14 cycles, manageable on a home pc in a reasonable amount of time). IBM, you sell to students?
Ah, nostalgia. It wasn't what it used to be, you know.
And they didn't even include a mouse.
"This signature is a secret message encrypted with a one-time-pad"
And they say those things are unbreakable? Got it! Standard xor, byte at a time... you thought we wouldn't catch you?
1d48 081e 0012 4913 0b13 061a 000c 531d 5357 0e52 180c 0d15 4503 4919 0d53 320d 4a34 4100 0a02 520d 1f54 060b 4c1b 0804 1b45 4154 7b45 785a 3a43 454a 1f17 1000
Even if he's arguing the contract is invalid? Real question, just wondering how that works.
Go for it. Coming up with ideas like this is important, and it's great that cybermace did. But it's through people taking ideas and running with them that great things get done.
Nah, that wasn't a fireball. That's just an alien spaceship. The engine leaves a trail.
As other's have mentioned, they'll be downloadable shortly. But do remember, the RPM's are not GPL'd. The programs are GPL'd. That does not mean that you have any right to them, although, as I said, SuSE does make them available. It means that, should they be available, the source would also be available. I appreciate that SuSE, and most other distributions, are openly distributed. But it is also important to keep in mind that this is not a consequence of the GPL.
Yeah, but at Cape Canaveral, you have to worry about hurting fish, and stuff. Here it's only Texans.
I'm saying that the rights of the individual are a non-issue. No individual created the web page. No individual is responsible for the web page. No individual is in a position to have his or her ethics or mores modify how the page is created; therefore, the page is not regulated by human ethical principles... which, last I checked, most libertarians thought were an 'acceptable' if not necessary form of regulation. As such, creations like this are do not fit into the utopia libertarians imagine; being unregulated by basic human kindness, it must be regulated by somethign else; a formalized definition of basic human kindness is as good as anything.
Huh? What are you talking about? I can't tell if you're a troll or a libertarian without ethics (libertarianism can only work with ethics, in my opinion), but I'll respond. Where did this come from: "the right of a sighted person to create a website in the fashion he chooses?" Has anyone suggested, anywhere in this thread, that personal websites be legally required to be accessible? Or were people instead talking about COMMERCIAL sites? Commercial entities are not people, and, in general, don't make choices. It is very hard to hurt a legal document's feelings.
is a nForce (or better yet, nForce2) in a micro-ITX form factor. Is that too much to ask? I have this dream of a computer I can carry with my laptop, plug in to power and firewire networking when I need it, and use as a remote kernel for mathematica, when it begins to bog down... which means I need an absurdly small motherboard that can take modern processors.
What a coincidence! Mine said "They look like !vending machines!." She's been studying !Kung a bit too long, I guess.
And even more ironic... since then, someone went back and marked him 'overrated.'
I find that what hurts my neck the most is looking left and right all the time; up and down doesn't bother me as much. So I keep my monitor where it belongs, about 18" straight in front of me, then put whatever book I'm looking at (assuming it has a lay-flat binding... most reference books do, these days) right down on my desk, then put the keyboard right on top of the book. Of course, having a transparent keyboard helps.
Clearly, I have no idea what I'm talking about, but I just had this image of a perfectly transparent keyboard with a book under it, and I had to post something. Now back to your regularly scheduled programming.
With glass floors, the person walking on them is aware that someone underneath them can look up, and makes a choice. One way glass, on the other hand, could easily be considered an invasion of privacy. Although it is an interesting idea...
There are third party apps for it. But I don't really recommend it. Disabling QE only increased battery life by about ten minutes (that's wall time... 10.2's battery management is seriously borked), and noticably decreased performance. Unless the heat itself is really bothering you (and it's well within spec for the system, it's just a question of your thigh being warm), I'd suggest leaving QE on. It /is/ slightly ironic that the graphics chip is using possibly more power than the CPU... but in the iBook, the biggest power consumer by far is the screen, followed by the hard drive. Might as well use the hardware you paid for, and QE /is/ nice.