That video features an inordinate amount of stupidity. I mean the guy installs Linux on a PS3 and then tries to run high-end games inside of that. Then he complains that Wine doesn't run on it.
Reminds me of idiots buying PlayStation games and then returning to the store a day later all upset because they couldn't figure out how to insert the CD in their Nintendos.
Hello? Every hear of PS3 games? You know, those that don't require an extra OS to run?
Also, he complains about screen resolution. I've tried my PS3 running Linux at 480[ip], 720[ip] and 1080[ip] with perfect results. And you know what? I do really cool things on it, like coding, testing, networking, learning about the Cell Architecture, streaming music and video, etc.. Not games, and that's fine by me.
"Free space" on a USB-key is dependant on the file-system used, and the USB flash wear-levelling isn't aware of which blocks are used and which aren't because it can't possibly understand every file-system out there. Indeed, in my test I use the whole device as a raw device without a filesystem on it, that is to say I write to every block starting from 0 to the last one. There is no file-system, there is no "free space".
The key just provides a list of blocks. Internally, it maps those logical blocks numbers to physical block numbers and keep its own list of un-mapped blocks, ready to replace defective ones. In the better wear-levelling algorithms, all this happens "in-firmware", transparently without the host or the user's knowledge.
I have an on-going experiment with a 2GB usb KEY. It's been happily over-written with random data non-stop for 38 days now (it takes 4 and a half minutes for one cycle), then read-checked. It's getting close to 12,000 cycles now and not one error bit detected so far.
If you believe this manufacturer's estimated MTBF, 100,000 cycles, I shouldn't see any errors before over 300 days.
Mind you, in a real-world application, you don't re-write your whole memory non-stop, so with wear-levelling I should expect Flash drives to last a good 10 years, even with swap areas and atime enabled, easily.
I can put 2 GB of plain text on a USB key, and leave it with how to implement the USB standard on paper, put the things in a thick plastic bag, etc.
In the correct environment, it will last for a long long time.
The paper will rot nicely due to its intrinsic acid content, the platic will out-gas and gum up everything near (and inside) it, then crumble into dust, the dielectric material in the key's capacitors will dry up and the resultant change in capacitance will render the circuit non-operative.
Next update, do a backup, then accept the update. Worse comes to worst, wipe the disk and restore the backup. The snag is that you _can't_ format the drive inside of the PS3 as the XMB menu doesn't come up.
Still, I'm pretty surprised that Sony doesn't have better QA on something like firmware updates. One mis-step and they can end up with millions of bricks in the wild. They should have a "restore previous firmware version" at a very low-level in the firmware. Something triggered by holding a button or two during power-up.
I've made my home machine almost totally silent by using some really large heatsinks. Up 24/24 7/7. One 12V fan running super slowly at 5 volts.
If I re-encode a movie I get:
May 21 07:48:00 ganymede kernel: CPU0: Temperature above threshold, cpu clock throttled (total events = 4742833) May 21 07:48:00 ganymede kernel: CPU1: Temperature above threshold, cpu clock throttled (total events = 4742833) May 21 07:53:00 ganymede kernel: CPU1: Temperature/speed normal May 21 07:53:00 ganymede kernel: CPU0: Temperature/speed normal
Do I care? Not really. Been like that for 3 years now. When it dies I'll swap it for a less powerful CPU and go totally silent.:)
Do NOT boot your friend's machine. Make a full binary copy of the disk and then use that as source of forensic information.
The swap area and free blocks may contain old and precious information. I've extracted account information from discarded disks which didn't live in files.
Heck, your friend could have decided to write a suicide note and then deleted it.
... The only thing I don't see happening is fractional counts - 7.5 cores (7 full, and one "handicapped"). The OS would then have to learn to avoid the "gimpy" cores for CPU hungry processes. The Cell processor can be said to be 7.5. One Power-based processor and 8 SPE units, with one of them disabled (higher yields).
In the Vectrex's memory map, there's a few addresses (ports) that control the Beam intensity, X and Y deflection, using Digital-to-analog converters. There's a couple of constant-current thingies that help move the beam in a linear fashion. Hardware-wise, that's basically it.
In order to display something interesting (and repeatable) the Vectrex maintains a software table of points and lines. A programmable timer interrupts the cpu, reads that table and feeds the deflectors values at specific intervals.
There's a bunch of standard (and well documented) ROM routines that handle all that stuff for you, even including text and zooming.
I'm only seeing one call to "ShowTopic" in show.pl, which does the decompression of a block. I thought about the possibility that bzip2 would be unlikely to split words, but there's still the possibility that the title and text tags from one set could be split over two adjacent blocks.
Anyway, gotta go to work. When I come back, I'll do some more in-depth sleuthing.:)
There's a serious problem with the article's way of treating the data that I didn't see addressed.
The wikipedia database file is one large bzip2'ed XML file which the author splits into blocks of 900k (bzip2's natural blocking) which he then parses for the "title" and "text" XML tags.
The problem with that approach is that some of these tags may well end up being split over block boundaries, so some articles risk being missed. EG:
I don't know but, if I were a Microsoft product user, I'd be mighty peeved that some guy on the other side of the world is paying $3 while I'm paying $150 for the same exact piece of software.
Where's the fairness in that? Why the preferrential treatment? Are we rewarding criminals now?
Actually, recycling glass is eco-friendly. In order to make things out of glass, you need molten glass that you can shape into things (bottles, windshields, whatever). You can melt sand to get this molten glass, or you can melt glass to get molten glass. Why would one take significantly more energy than another? Furthermore, recycling glass does not change its structure, hence you can recycle glass indefinently, unlike papers and plastics that can only be reprocessed so many times. I can see the argument against paper and plastics, which do require more processing and you end up with a recycled product that's inferior, but not for things like glass.
In order to make glass cheaply, you do need abou 10% "cullet", which is basically recycled glass that acts as a physical catalyst in the production and helps to run the furnaces at lower temperatures. That cullet can be scraps taken from the end of the production line or from recycled products.
The problem and energy waste from recycling comes from the extra transportation and transformation of the recycled glass. You can't just dump the dirty bottles straight into the furnace. You have to transport, sort, clean, and pre-treat the stuff. In the end, it's cheaper and less wasteful to use a bit more primary materials (silica, soda-lime, etc...) and you end up with a much better quality glass, without unknown contaminants.
Sorry, but more than 90% of the people who play these games are horny male teenagers, and I for one would rather spend 30 hours staring at a nubile semi-dressed cutie rather than solid chain-mail. Heck, I'm re-playing FFXII and am keeping Fran as party leader just because I enjoy looking at her.
I'm male, I'm driven by million of years of evolution which included horniness as a good selection behaviour. Or, if you prefer the stupid argument, that's the way God made me. Sue me.
They should have an option reading "Sexy Armor yes / no"
Think recycling glass bottles is eco-friendly? Think again; it actually puts more carbon in the atmosphere (uses more energy) than tossing them in the dump and buying new. The same goes for plastic and paper products. Most recycling is just feel-good about yourself. Reducing consumption is where it's at.
My Samsung 170MP 17" LCD: Full black: 49.7W Full white: 49.2W RCA 27" TV (Only CRT I've got): Full black: 132.3W Full white: 132.4W
I find myself thinking "Are these the arms of a spiral?", then I close one eye, squint the other, stand on my head and rub my tummy for 2 minutes, then I click "Star/Don't know".
They should a "Fuzz" button. Sometimes, that helps.
The most interesting object I've seen so far wasn't in the middle, so I wasn't asked about it but... Any astronomer in the audience can tell me what the object to the North-East of center is in http://cas.sdss.org/astro/en/tools/explore/obj.asp ?id=588017677691715886? Can I name it the "Mammaire galaxy"?:)
A friend of mine plays the Final Fantasy XI MMORPG on PlayStation 2. I rigged a little box with a bunch of timers, relays, the heart of a USB keyboard which can repeat timed sequences of game macros without supervision. It works wonders for some "skill-upping".
Intel's little trick wouldn't detect that as it involves no software at all, no injection of keyboard events. As far as the console is concerned, it's a keyboard, period.
I could go a whole lot more sophiticated and build a USB box that would emulate both keyboard and mouse events. Marry that with software that can "look" at the screen data and recognize patterns, and you'd have yourself an automated player.
Go ahead Intel, invent better traps. We'll invent better mice.
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Not at all. For example. hard disks these days contain a voice coil which includes VERY strong magnets, and pretty darn close to the platters too.
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voice_coil
That video features an inordinate amount of stupidity. I mean the guy installs Linux on a PS3 and then tries to run high-end games inside of that. Then he complains that Wine doesn't run on it.
Reminds me of idiots buying PlayStation games and then returning to the store a day later all upset because they couldn't figure out how to insert the CD in their Nintendos.
Hello? Every hear of PS3 games? You know, those that don't require an extra OS to run?
Also, he complains about screen resolution. I've tried my PS3 running Linux at 480[ip], 720[ip] and 1080[ip] with perfect results. And you know what? I do really cool things on it, like coding, testing, networking, learning about the Cell Architecture, streaming music and video, etc.. Not games, and that's fine by me.
What a feces-head.
"Free space" on a USB-key is dependant on the file-system used, and the USB flash wear-levelling isn't aware of which blocks are used and which aren't because it can't possibly understand every file-system out there. Indeed, in my test I use the whole device as a raw device without a filesystem on it, that is to say I write to every block starting from 0 to the last one. There is no file-system, there is no "free space".
The key just provides a list of blocks. Internally, it maps those logical blocks numbers to physical block numbers and keep its own list of un-mapped blocks, ready to replace defective ones. In the better wear-levelling algorithms, all this happens "in-firmware", transparently without the host or the user's knowledge.
There's a PDF document pointed by Wikipedia @ http://www.corsairmemory.com/_faq/FAQ_flash_drive_wear_leveling.pdf if you'd like to know more about the topic.
I have an on-going experiment with a 2GB usb KEY. It's been happily over-written with random data non-stop for 38 days now (it takes 4 and a half minutes for one cycle), then read-checked. It's getting close to 12,000 cycles now and not one error bit detected so far.
If you believe this manufacturer's estimated MTBF, 100,000 cycles, I shouldn't see any errors before over 300 days.
Mind you, in a real-world application, you don't re-write your whole memory non-stop, so with wear-levelling I should expect Flash drives to last a good 10 years, even with swap areas and atime enabled, easily.
I can put 2 GB of plain text on a USB key, and leave it with how to implement the USB standard on paper, put the things in a thick plastic bag, etc.
In the correct environment, it will last for a long long time.
The paper will rot nicely due to its intrinsic acid content, the platic will out-gas and gum up everything near (and inside) it, then crumble into dust, the dielectric material in the key's capacitors will dry up and the resultant change in capacitance will render the circuit non-operative.
Give enough time, everything fails.
Next update, do a backup, then accept the update. Worse comes to worst, wipe the disk and restore the backup. The snag is that you _can't_ format the drive inside of the PS3 as the XMB menu doesn't come up.
Still, I'm pretty surprised that Sony doesn't have better QA on something like firmware updates. One mis-step and they can end up with millions of bricks in the wild. They should have a "restore previous firmware version" at a very low-level in the firmware. Something triggered by holding a button or two during power-up.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dvb7yMQoNT0&NR=1
If I re-encode a movie I get: Do I care? Not really. Been like that for 3 years now. When it dies I'll swap it for a less powerful CPU and go totally silent.
Do NOT boot your friend's machine. Make a full binary copy of the disk and then use that as source of forensic information.
The swap area and free blocks may contain old and precious information. I've extracted account information from discarded disks which didn't live in files.
Heck, your friend could have decided to write a suicide note and then deleted it.
... The only thing I don't see happening is fractional counts - 7.5 cores (7 full, and one "handicapped"). The OS would then have to learn to avoid the "gimpy" cores for CPU hungry processes. The Cell processor can be said to be 7.5. One Power-based processor and 8 SPE units, with one of them disabled (higher yields).See wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cell_(microprocessor)
In the Vectrex's memory map, there's a few addresses (ports) that control the Beam intensity, X and Y deflection, using Digital-to-analog converters. There's a couple of constant-current thingies that help move the beam in a linear fashion. Hardware-wise, that's basically it.
In order to display something interesting (and repeatable) the Vectrex maintains a software table of points and lines. A programmable timer interrupts the cpu, reads that table and feeds the deflectors values at specific intervals.
There's a bunch of standard (and well documented) ROM routines that handle all that stuff for you, even including text and zooming.
Fudge, I had just started to write a virtual filesystem driver using IMAP as a back-end. (Not fast, but gmail's 5.2G is free.)
Oh well, I'll put it on the back-burner until I hear more.
I'm only seeing one call to "ShowTopic" in show.pl, which does the decompression of a block. I thought about the possibility that bzip2 would be unlikely to split words, but there's still the possibility that the title and text tags from one set could be split over two adjacent blocks.
:)
Anyway, gotta go to work. When I come back, I'll do some more in-depth sleuthing.
Oh, and I forgot: Articles' text which also end up over block boundaries will appear truncated.
There's a serious problem with the article's way of treating the data that I didn't see addressed.
The wikipedia database file is one large bzip2'ed XML file which the author splits into blocks of 900k (bzip2's natural blocking) which he then parses for the "title" and "text" XML tags.
The problem with that approach is that some of these tags may well end up being split over block boundaries, so some articles risk being missed. EG:
END-OF-BLOCK: blablablabla...blabla[/text][othertag][ti
START-OF-NEXT-BLOCK: tle][sometag]blablablablabla...
So searching for "[title]" in boths blocks separately like TFA does will fail for one article.
(I've used square brackets instead of lessthans and greaterthans because slashdot won't let me use them.)
...''THEY' are huge ...
::ducks::
The might be giants?
I don't know but, if I were a Microsoft product user, I'd be mighty peeved that some guy on the other side of the world is paying $3 while I'm paying $150 for the same exact piece of software.
Where's the fairness in that? Why the preferrential treatment? Are we rewarding criminals now?
Pffft!
Actually, recycling glass is eco-friendly. In order to make things out of glass, you need molten glass that you can shape into things (bottles, windshields, whatever). You can melt sand to get this molten glass, or you can melt glass to get molten glass. Why would one take significantly more energy than another? Furthermore, recycling glass does not change its structure, hence you can recycle glass indefinently, unlike papers and plastics that can only be reprocessed so many times. I can see the argument against paper and plastics, which do require more processing and you end up with a recycled product that's inferior, but not for things like glass.
In order to make glass cheaply, you do need abou 10% "cullet", which is basically recycled glass that acts as a physical catalyst in the production and helps to run the furnaces at lower temperatures. That cullet can be scraps taken from the end of the production line or from recycled products.
The problem and energy waste from recycling comes from the extra transportation and transformation of the recycled glass. You can't just dump the dirty bottles straight into the furnace. You have to transport, sort, clean, and pre-treat the stuff. In the end, it's cheaper and less wasteful to use a bit more primary materials (silica, soda-lime, etc...) and you end up with a much better quality glass, without unknown contaminants.
Sorry, but more than 90% of the people who play these games are horny male teenagers, and I for one would rather spend 30 hours staring at a nubile semi-dressed cutie rather than solid chain-mail. Heck, I'm re-playing FFXII and am keeping Fran as party leader just because I enjoy looking at her.
I'm male, I'm driven by million of years of evolution which included horniness as a good selection behaviour. Or, if you prefer the stupid argument, that's the way God made me. Sue me.
They should have an option reading "Sexy Armor yes / no"
Think recycling glass bottles is eco-friendly? Think again; it actually puts more carbon in the atmosphere (uses more energy) than tossing them in the dump and buying new. The same goes for plastic and paper products. Most recycling is just feel-good about yourself. Reducing consumption is where it's at.
My Samsung 170MP 17" LCD: Full black: 49.7W Full white: 49.2W
RCA 27" TV (Only CRT I've got): Full black: 132.3W Full white: 132.4W
NorthWest, actually, just noticed the images are flipped horizontally from what you'd expect, from a layman's point of view.
I find myself thinking "Are these the arms of a spiral?", then I close one eye, squint the other, stand on my head and rub my tummy for 2 minutes, then I click "Star/Don't know".
p ?id=588017677691715886? Can I name it the "Mammaire galaxy"? :)
They should a "Fuzz" button. Sometimes, that helps.
The most interesting object I've seen so far wasn't in the middle, so I wasn't asked about it but... Any astronomer in the audience can tell me what the object to the North-East of center is in http://cas.sdss.org/astro/en/tools/explore/obj.as
A friend of mine plays the Final Fantasy XI MMORPG on PlayStation 2. I rigged a little box with a bunch of timers, relays, the heart of a USB keyboard which can repeat timed sequences of game macros without supervision. It works wonders for some "skill-upping".
Intel's little trick wouldn't detect that as it involves no software at all, no injection of keyboard events. As far as the console is concerned, it's a keyboard, period.
I could go a whole lot more sophiticated and build a USB box that would emulate both keyboard and mouse events. Marry that with software that can "look" at the screen data and recognize patterns, and you'd have yourself an automated player.
Go ahead Intel, invent better traps. We'll invent better mice.
...If you manufacture 10 items and 1 item is a lemon you have a 1% defect rate...
That's in American Public Schools. In other parts of the world, we're pretty much agreed on 10%.
1) Backup to file.
2) Encrypt file.
3) Inject data stream into lossless image format.
4) Upload image.
5) Retrieve anywhere.