Nobody uses the PS3 for supercomputing these days. The ugly secret of the PS3 is that its 'extreme performance' was mostly marketing. While it was fairly fast at release, it is ridiculously complex to code for. You're talking about a machine with 9 distinct memory spaces, 4 instruction sets and 3 compilers. And while Sony may market it as having '2 teraflops' of performance, it only has about 450gflops of total programmable computation power. The vaunted Cell processor only clocks in at around 250GFlops, which you get pretty easily with Core i7 (Nehalem)... and it's a LOT easier to get peak performance out of the Core i7. Let me repeat that for emphasis it is mindbogglingly simpler to get peak performance out of the Core i7. And if you're willing to spend more a little time and money to code to a specialized platform, GPU computing with CUDA (and OpenCL once it matures) spanks the Cell. You can buy multi-GPU machines from NVidia that are pushing 4 teraflops programmable.
Ultimately though, the biggest killer of the PS3 in supercomputing is all that power is single precision, and single precision only. You can get away with single precision SOMETIMES in scientific computing, but more often than not it's a deal breaker. Even when you can use single precision, it's often in a mixed precision context. The PS3 has no double precision support, and that kills it.
The PS3 is awesome on paper, but in reality it's just awful.
No, NASA can just do the math. It is very, very, very difficult to make a case for space-based solar power- at least in the USA. $21 billion worth of solar panels in the southwest desert would generate far more power than $21 billion worth of solar panels in orbit. Of course, Japan doesn't have a large unused desert to put a solar power plant, so the economics for them may be different. For America's civilian grid, space-based solar won't make sense unless there is a revolution in rocketry. As much as you hate gravity wells, it's hard and expensive getting out of our own. Very, very expensive.
That being said, DARPA is looking into space-based solar, which makes sense. For the military, being able to generate power in space and 'beam' it to the ground makes sense. It's probably cheaper in the long run than trucking fuel to the middle of nowhere to run diesel generators.
Except Apple switched over to Intel near the end of the PPC life... most computers with Tiger will be running on PPCs, in which case the Snow Leopard upgrade costs around $1000.
The scientists are now working on a delivery mechanism they call the 'nanodog,' to shoot the nanobees from a specialized orifice they are calling a 'mouth'.
That's not really going to stop an unscrupulous publisher or author. Let's say you want to astroturf Amazon a hundred times... so you buy your book a hundred times. That costs what... $1000-$2000? That's dirt cheap advertising. And if you get your royalties on the book sale and you get a copy of the book, which you can then sell back through Amazon again.
Meanwhile, a bunch of people who have bought your book, and would like to write about how much it stinks, can't. Because they bought it at a normal book store.
when it comes to OSs and security, a lot/.ers (and lots of other people, to be sure) seem to have this enormous blind spot; they simply cannot understand (or bring themselves to acknowledge, as the case may be) that there is, indeed, a difference in how well designed different OSs are to repel attacks. Why is this?
Because a lot of/.ers understand enough about computer security to know that the supposed advantages from Apple's vaunted design are bullshit. Does Apple use a UNIX architecture, with privilege separation and a minimal attack surface. Yes, and that's good. Does that help? Not really. Desktop security is a lot more sophisticated today than it was a decade ago. But so are the attackers.
First, while Apple has cut down on the 'invisible' attack surface of running, internet exposed services, you've still got a web browser and that's turned into a monstrous attack surface in the past few years. Furthermore, Apple has poor defense in depth. ASLR in OS X is broken and Safari isn't sandboxed. That's why Apple has loses pwn2own, badly.
Second, and more important: security features aren't worth a damn when the user opens the door, and user-initiated security breaches are by far the most common. Sure, you can keep the malware out of the system files, but malware doesn't need access to the system files to do its job.
To be pedantic, that isn't an emergent behavior. Emergent behavior is many applications of a simple system, or simple rules, leads to complex behavior. For example, flocking.
Yes, it's all the hardware makers' fault, they won't give kernel developers enough information to build fully functional drivers. It's not fair to compare it against Windows, since Microsoft relies on the hardware developers to build their own working drivers. But at the same time, Linus refuses to create a stable driver API/ABI. This is 2009, not 1999. If there was a stable, supported binary interface for 3rd party devices to use, vendors would use it, and you'd have a lot more fully functional device drivers.
Life's a compromise and if you aren't willing to compromise, you're going to miss out on things. Like battery life.
A processor running in 32-bit mode uses 32-bit values for virtual addressing. However, the processor uses 36-bit physical addressing when talking to RAM. The OS has a mechanism to assign any virtual pages in the 32-bit address space to any physical page in the 36-bit physical address space. Now, normal programs don't have more than 3GB of virtual address space to use, so if you have 64GB of RAM installed, each process can only see a fraction of the total memory available. However there are APIs since Win2K days which allow software to access memory outside of their 3GB user address space. Not commonly used outside of software like database servers, and nobody really cares anymore since the release of 64-bit versions.
I thought I'd add, the reason why Photoshop isn't available in 64-bit is because Apple canceled 64-bit Carbon, forcing developers like Adobe to port substantial portions of their codebases from C++ and Carbon to Objective C and Cocoa.
Does that include buying a brand new computer? Any Mac bought during 10.0-10.3, and most during 10.4 won't run Snow Leopard. Unless your computer came with Leopard, chances are your cheapest upgrade is a $600 Mac Mini, or a $1000 Macbook.
Here in Calgary there's a similar system called Park Plus. If you park downtown you have to find one of the park plus machines (they're not very hard to find, they're all over the place), and punch in your license plate # and a 4 digit code indicating where you're parked (those are on signs all over the place too). There's no receipt or parking pass though. The system is enforced by a set of trucks covered in cameras and antennas. I presume they automatically scan the license plate of every parked car and check against the central system whether you've paid or not. What's pretty cool about it is you can also setup a debit account with the system, and then pay through your cell phone- call the system once when you park to 'check in' and again when you leave to 'check out' and it deducts the payment from your account.
FCC: Why was Google Voice was rejected from the app store?
Apple: Whoo-hoo-hoo, look who knows so much. It just so happens that Google Voice here is only MOSTLY dead. There's a big difference between mostly dead and all dead. Mostly dead is slightly alive.
Yes, non-poaching is exactly like two car dealerships getting together. And you're right, it is a form of collusion.
And yes, collusion is illegal. Not in the 'your contract is invalid' way, in the criminal investigation way.
They're not doing either, they're doing something far more interesting. Orion is a simple capsule, and in that sense it's similar to Gemini. But the point of Orion is that it's a lot more flexible than any previous space capsule. Apollo got to the moon by assembling the entire capsule, lander and earth departure stage on earth and putting them on top of a giant rocket. Constellation promises to produce another giant rocket (Ares V), but you no longer have to cram everything onto the top of it because you can assemble everything in space. So where Apollo was limited by the lifting capacity of the Saturn V, you can launch several large components on top of several Ares V's, assemble them all in space into a much larger vehicle, and only at the very end launch your crew up to it in an Orion capsule.
Modular construction is fantastic, and could prove to be a huge advance in human spaceflight.
Here is my dream: a Mars transport vehicle, assembled in space, consisting of a nuclear reactor and VASIMR or ion engines. You can fly this thing to and from Mars over and over, and all you have to do is launch up a tank of propellant on board an Ares V every trip. There's no need to throw the thing away since it's not tied to a crew module, or anything else.
You need to learn what 'control' is in scientific terms. You can't 'control' your way out of a non-representative sample. The failure rate for PS3s in this survey is 10 times higher than other published figures (reports have the actual PS3 failure rate at around 1%, which is in-line with normal manufacturing expectations).
So it should be noted that a potential skew is that from the surveyed five thousand, Xbox users play their console more than Wii or PS3 users. While this certainly wouldn't explain the skewed percentages, it indicates the consoles are in higher use causing potentially more wear and tear.
More critically, these results are from a survey and as far as I can tell, the magazine has made little to no effort to account for self-selection bias. That makes this figure pretty much worthless. For those who don't know, self-selection bias is, in this instance, the fact that people who have had failed consoles are more likely to respond to a survey about console failures, than those who have no problems. Thus the sample is not actually representative.
The smoking gun is that the failure rate in this report, for the PS3 is above 10%. Previous reports have put the PS3 failure rate at less than 1%, in which case these numbers are out by an order of magnitude or more.
The Enterprise has 8 nukes on board, as opposed to the 2 in Nimitz and Ford class carriers, but its nukes are much smaller than those of the Nimitz and Ford classes. Overall the Enterprise has about the same generating capacity of the Nimitz class carriers. And the Ford's reactors are supposed to be much more powerful.
What does 'louder' mean in a modern context? These people aren't louder, the gatekeepers - the TV networks, newspaper editors and bloggers - just pay undue attention to the morons. These people aren't loud: they're being given center stage for some reason.
The standard, then, is not "how nasty are the remaining Bush images", it's "how many of the remaining Bush images appear to violate copyright law".
All of them? I haven't seen one Bush image where the photoshopper owned the copyright on the source material. Most are based on photos from organizations like AP and Reuters.
I don't think you can rationalize your way out of this double standard; it's pretty blatant.
Yeah, it's amazing how we made it through 8 years of the Bush presidency without anybody photoshopping pictures of George Bush. If that had happened, the neocons would have rioted, man!
Did you just crawl out from under a rock and miss the past 8 years of the internet? I think for all the things you can criticize Bush and the 'neocons' for, not being able to take a joke, is not one of them.
Slashdot Mirror
Nobody uses the PS3 for supercomputing these days. The ugly secret of the PS3 is that its 'extreme performance' was mostly marketing. While it was fairly fast at release, it is ridiculously complex to code for. You're talking about a machine with 9 distinct memory spaces, 4 instruction sets and 3 compilers. And while Sony may market it as having '2 teraflops' of performance, it only has about 450gflops of total programmable computation power. The vaunted Cell processor only clocks in at around 250GFlops, which you get pretty easily with Core i7 (Nehalem)... and it's a LOT easier to get peak performance out of the Core i7. Let me repeat that for emphasis it is mindbogglingly simpler to get peak performance out of the Core i7. And if you're willing to spend more a little time and money to code to a specialized platform, GPU computing with CUDA (and OpenCL once it matures) spanks the Cell. You can buy multi-GPU machines from NVidia that are pushing 4 teraflops programmable.
Ultimately though, the biggest killer of the PS3 in supercomputing is all that power is single precision, and single precision only. You can get away with single precision SOMETIMES in scientific computing, but more often than not it's a deal breaker. Even when you can use single precision, it's often in a mixed precision context. The PS3 has no double precision support, and that kills it.
The PS3 is awesome on paper, but in reality it's just awful.
No, NASA can just do the math. It is very, very, very difficult to make a case for space-based solar power- at least in the USA. $21 billion worth of solar panels in the southwest desert would generate far more power than $21 billion worth of solar panels in orbit. Of course, Japan doesn't have a large unused desert to put a solar power plant, so the economics for them may be different. For America's civilian grid, space-based solar won't make sense unless there is a revolution in rocketry. As much as you hate gravity wells, it's hard and expensive getting out of our own. Very, very expensive. That being said, DARPA is looking into space-based solar, which makes sense. For the military, being able to generate power in space and 'beam' it to the ground makes sense. It's probably cheaper in the long run than trucking fuel to the middle of nowhere to run diesel generators.
Except Apple switched over to Intel near the end of the PPC life... most computers with Tiger will be running on PPCs, in which case the Snow Leopard upgrade costs around $1000.
The scientists are now working on a delivery mechanism they call the 'nanodog,' to shoot the nanobees from a specialized orifice they are calling a 'mouth'.
That's not really going to stop an unscrupulous publisher or author. Let's say you want to astroturf Amazon a hundred times... so you buy your book a hundred times. That costs what... $1000-$2000? That's dirt cheap advertising. And if you get your royalties on the book sale and you get a copy of the book, which you can then sell back through Amazon again.
Meanwhile, a bunch of people who have bought your book, and would like to write about how much it stinks, can't. Because they bought it at a normal book store.
when it comes to OSs and security, a lot /.ers (and lots of other people, to be sure) seem to have this enormous blind spot; they simply cannot understand (or bring themselves to acknowledge, as the case may be) that there is, indeed, a difference in how well designed different OSs are to repel attacks. Why is this?
Because a lot of /.ers understand enough about computer security to know that the supposed advantages from Apple's vaunted design are bullshit. Does Apple use a UNIX architecture, with privilege separation and a minimal attack surface. Yes, and that's good. Does that help? Not really. Desktop security is a lot more sophisticated today than it was a decade ago. But so are the attackers.
First, while Apple has cut down on the 'invisible' attack surface of running, internet exposed services, you've still got a web browser and that's turned into a monstrous attack surface in the past few years. Furthermore, Apple has poor defense in depth. ASLR in OS X is broken and Safari isn't sandboxed. That's why Apple has loses pwn2own, badly.
Second, and more important: security features aren't worth a damn when the user opens the door, and user-initiated security breaches are by far the most common. Sure, you can keep the malware out of the system files, but malware doesn't need access to the system files to do its job.
To be pedantic, that isn't an emergent behavior. Emergent behavior is many applications of a simple system, or simple rules, leads to complex behavior. For example, flocking.
Yes, it's all the hardware makers' fault, they won't give kernel developers enough information to build fully functional drivers. It's not fair to compare it against Windows, since Microsoft relies on the hardware developers to build their own working drivers. But at the same time, Linus refuses to create a stable driver API/ABI. This is 2009, not 1999. If there was a stable, supported binary interface for 3rd party devices to use, vendors would use it, and you'd have a lot more fully functional device drivers.
Life's a compromise and if you aren't willing to compromise, you're going to miss out on things. Like battery life.
A processor running in 32-bit mode uses 32-bit values for virtual addressing. However, the processor uses 36-bit physical addressing when talking to RAM. The OS has a mechanism to assign any virtual pages in the 32-bit address space to any physical page in the 36-bit physical address space. Now, normal programs don't have more than 3GB of virtual address space to use, so if you have 64GB of RAM installed, each process can only see a fraction of the total memory available. However there are APIs since Win2K days which allow software to access memory outside of their 3GB user address space. Not commonly used outside of software like database servers, and nobody really cares anymore since the release of 64-bit versions.
Sounds like the new comment system at Gizmodo and the Gawker properties. Most posters there hate it.
Presumably because they didn't want Snow Leopard's release to be overshadowed by Windows 7.
I thought I'd add, the reason why Photoshop isn't available in 64-bit is because Apple canceled 64-bit Carbon, forcing developers like Adobe to port substantial portions of their codebases from C++ and Carbon to Objective C and Cocoa.
Does that include buying a brand new computer? Any Mac bought during 10.0-10.3, and most during 10.4 won't run Snow Leopard. Unless your computer came with Leopard, chances are your cheapest upgrade is a $600 Mac Mini, or a $1000 Macbook.
Given labour costs in Calgary? The new system. It only lakes one guy to drive the truck; almost all the administration and enforcement is automated.
Here in Calgary there's a similar system called Park Plus. If you park downtown you have to find one of the park plus machines (they're not very hard to find, they're all over the place), and punch in your license plate # and a 4 digit code indicating where you're parked (those are on signs all over the place too). There's no receipt or parking pass though. The system is enforced by a set of trucks covered in cameras and antennas. I presume they automatically scan the license plate of every parked car and check against the central system whether you've paid or not. What's pretty cool about it is you can also setup a debit account with the system, and then pay through your cell phone- call the system once when you park to 'check in' and again when you leave to 'check out' and it deducts the payment from your account.
So it sort of went like this:
FCC: Why was Google Voice was rejected from the app store?
Apple: Whoo-hoo-hoo, look who knows so much. It just so happens that Google Voice here is only MOSTLY dead. There's a big difference between mostly dead and all dead. Mostly dead is slightly alive.
Yes, non-poaching is exactly like two car dealerships getting together. And you're right, it is a form of collusion. And yes, collusion is illegal. Not in the 'your contract is invalid' way, in the criminal investigation way.
They're not doing either, they're doing something far more interesting. Orion is a simple capsule, and in that sense it's similar to Gemini. But the point of Orion is that it's a lot more flexible than any previous space capsule. Apollo got to the moon by assembling the entire capsule, lander and earth departure stage on earth and putting them on top of a giant rocket. Constellation promises to produce another giant rocket (Ares V), but you no longer have to cram everything onto the top of it because you can assemble everything in space. So where Apollo was limited by the lifting capacity of the Saturn V, you can launch several large components on top of several Ares V's, assemble them all in space into a much larger vehicle, and only at the very end launch your crew up to it in an Orion capsule.
Modular construction is fantastic, and could prove to be a huge advance in human spaceflight.
Here is my dream: a Mars transport vehicle, assembled in space, consisting of a nuclear reactor and VASIMR or ion engines. You can fly this thing to and from Mars over and over, and all you have to do is launch up a tank of propellant on board an Ares V every trip. There's no need to throw the thing away since it's not tied to a crew module, or anything else.
Not really. Enterprise has about 210MW of generating capacity and Nimitz has about 200MW.
You need to learn what 'control' is in scientific terms. You can't 'control' your way out of a non-representative sample. The failure rate for PS3s in this survey is 10 times higher than other published figures (reports have the actual PS3 failure rate at around 1%, which is in-line with normal manufacturing expectations).
So it should be noted that a potential skew is that from the surveyed five thousand, Xbox users play their console more than Wii or PS3 users. While this certainly wouldn't explain the skewed percentages, it indicates the consoles are in higher use causing potentially more wear and tear.
More critically, these results are from a survey and as far as I can tell, the magazine has made little to no effort to account for self-selection bias. That makes this figure pretty much worthless. For those who don't know, self-selection bias is, in this instance, the fact that people who have had failed consoles are more likely to respond to a survey about console failures, than those who have no problems. Thus the sample is not actually representative.
The smoking gun is that the failure rate in this report, for the PS3 is above 10%. Previous reports have put the PS3 failure rate at less than 1%, in which case these numbers are out by an order of magnitude or more.
The Enterprise has 8 nukes on board, as opposed to the 2 in Nimitz and Ford class carriers, but its nukes are much smaller than those of the Nimitz and Ford classes. Overall the Enterprise has about the same generating capacity of the Nimitz class carriers. And the Ford's reactors are supposed to be much more powerful.
What does 'louder' mean in a modern context? These people aren't louder, the gatekeepers - the TV networks, newspaper editors and bloggers - just pay undue attention to the morons. These people aren't loud: they're being given center stage for some reason.
The standard, then, is not "how nasty are the remaining Bush images", it's "how many of the remaining Bush images appear to violate copyright law".
All of them? I haven't seen one Bush image where the photoshopper owned the copyright on the source material. Most are based on photos from organizations like AP and Reuters.
I don't think you can rationalize your way out of this double standard; it's pretty blatant.
Yeah, it's amazing how we made it through 8 years of the Bush presidency without anybody photoshopping pictures of George Bush. If that had happened, the neocons would have rioted, man!
Did you just crawl out from under a rock and miss the past 8 years of the internet? I think for all the things you can criticize Bush and the 'neocons' for, not being able to take a joke, is not one of them.