Frankly, this is a good thing. Floppies are shitty. They havent improved as a consumer technology since like 1987; they're prone to failure and painfully slow.
Not disagreeing with any of that. Floppies are unreliable when properly cared for, and your average Kindergarten Education major shoves them in a backpack full of cookies and subway crumbs.
Ideally, students using your campus labs should be using something like a network drive, which has the benefits of large storage, redundancy, protection against power failures, and periodic backups.
They have per-student network drives. And some students use them. Unfortunately, those drives aren't web-accessible, or even accessible over FTP. (Though the non-IT geeks have been pushing for it for years...college IT departments have a lot of inertia.)
I just bought a gigabyte of USB thumb drive for 20 dollars online. You can purchase 128M for under 10 dollars, and I suspect your campus bookstore could get a bulk discount to get them even cheaper (whether they decide to share that with students is best rated "unlikely").
They don't share the discount, or they're getting a piss-poor one. Computer Club sells the same-size drives at a lower price, as a fundraiser. And we get a decent markup.
The real problem with flash drives is that you need to unmount them before you unplug them. Many, many people don't. And sometimes their data gets corrupted.
Sweet. Now I can fix the flash drive (with their permission) rather than tell them to buy a different device. (I hated only having that option. Since I'm president of the computer club, and computer club sells non-broken flash drives as a fundraiser, it's a conflict of interest.)
On some drives, like the ones my college bookstore carries, you can't access the writable portion of the drive until after the U3 software is loaded into Windows. Hell, I couldn't even get past it using my Linux laptop.
And the U3 software fails on virtually every computer on campus, because the computers are locked down in such a way that one cannot install device drivers using a normal student account.
The real kicker? They're replacing all the PCs in the campus labs with ones without floppy drives. So even those poor kids with only a few hundred KB of data will have to use a flash drive, and us student assistants will have to support them.
Already, I've had to tell too many students that yes, they can access their data from home with that flash drive. No, they won't be able to use that flash drive here. Yes, I realize their assignment is due in twenty minutes. No, there's nothing I can do about it; I don't have any greater a degree of access than they do.
With a mid-2007 release and even longer before quad-core comes to desktop, there will be even more programs that take advantage of multi-core technology
I have yet to see apps for the unspecialized consumer that take advantage of today's dual-core offerings. Office and Firefox don't get any faster. (Though I would like to see Firefox go multithreaded--one thread per tab. Multimedia media applets tend to hiccup when I switch tabs.)
By the way, [how] do you know that AMD has only been focusing on adding more cores?
I'm sure they've got the Next Big Thing on file somewhere, but their press releases of late have been focusing on taking advantage of multiple threads, not of code stream parallelism.
The only real benefit I can see to having four cores on a desktop CPU would be the power savings benefit I could get from underclocking. Beyond a certain point (A point past which systems have run on stock settings for years), power usage goes up exponentially as clock rate goes up linearly. In short, multi-core systems will give you more MHz per watt than single-core systems, simply by being able to perform the same work load at a lower clock rate.
However, this same benefit can come from focusing on a superscalar architecture, which is easier to adapt existing applications to. And, to my knowledge, AMD hasn't advanced superscalar architecture since the original Hammer-based Athlon64 and Opteron.
Research about what? The fact that AMD designed the Hammer core to use a switching memory interface instead of a bus interface? The fact that Intel's initial one-bus-tap-per-core system makes it difficult to keep bus speeds high? Not to mention I haven't found documentation that Intel has moved away from their multi-tap approach.
There's also the fact that most consumer computational loads don't yet scale across multiple cores. Sure, you might have applications that spawn ungodly numbers of threads, but that doesn't mean many of those threads are doing an appreciable amount of work. If you have a decent task scheduler in your OS, one fast core is still Good Enough.
AMD went beyond Intel with the K7. That core lineage performed more data per-clock that Intel's competing Prescott-based cores. Now Intel is working to outperform AMD's K8, while AMD seems only to be focusing on adding more cores.
Isn't AMD depending on additional cores to beat Intel's performance similar to how Intel's Prescott depended on additional MHz to beat AMD's performance?
Sounds like the shoe's on the other foot. I hope AMD brings back the kind of engineering innovations that brought it support among those in the know back in 1999 and 2000.. (Like focusing on a superscalar architecture with the K7.)
Four cores is a fine concept, but they mustn't forget to increase the capabilities of the individual cores.
For a community so concerned about privacy, most Slashdotters haven't taken adequate measures to protect their own.
My email address is attached to this comment because I realized a long time ago that there's enough info about me in my Slashdot posting history alone to write a biography about me.
Last week, I tasked myself with determining ways to contact 72 Slashdot users. (People who'd responded to a subset of my journals in the past.) I found email addresses for fifty of them, instant messenger IDs for three others, profiles in other communities for five of them, and other ways to contact all the rest but four. That's a success rate of 94%. Oh, and I didn't spend a cent on acces to databases. Google and WHOIS was sufficient for most of them.
My recommendations to those in the Slashdot community who want to keep their lives private:
Use an anonymizer to sign up for domain names. I found a bunch of email addresses through WHOIS.
Don't base your username on the whole or parts of your Real name.
Above all, avoid using the same username on multiple communities. If I know your username, and even a small bit of information about your interests (Like, "You read Slashdot"), I can find your profile on plenty of other websites.
For those of you who've failed any of those three tests already, well, it's likely to be a long, uphill battle if you want to regain your privacy.
No, that's just deductive science. I (or we, as a society) haven't tested that every cup, glass and plate in my kitchen (or the world) is affected by gravity, but I'm preeeeeeetty sure they are.
The Work In Progress window is a kind of task manager that shows which programs are running, which programs have finished running and shows any console output that the program may have generated.
Am I the only one who things that storing console output would still be a useful feature? It would make batch processing jobs a great deal easier.
Yeah, we do. It's called general education. In Michigan, it's part of the MACRAO agreement.
Communism is still alive in North Korea, Cuba, China and Viet Nam, to name a few countries. But none of these are likely what you're thinking about. Marxist communism has never been fully implemented on a country-wide basis.
Not that I would advocate it...I like government-guided capitalism just fine.
The Star Wars prequels actually followed, to some degree, the transformation of the Roman Republic to the Roman Empire--a real-world example.
Seeing it happen again should be no real surpise, at least to those who paid attention in Intro to Political Science. (A class every Michigan college student has to take if they want to transfer most of their credits from one college to another.)
Slashdot Mirror
Not disagreeing with any of that. Floppies are unreliable when properly cared for, and your average Kindergarten Education major shoves them in a backpack full of cookies and subway crumbs.
They have per-student network drives. And some students use them. Unfortunately, those drives aren't web-accessible, or even accessible over FTP. (Though the non-IT geeks have been pushing for it for years...college IT departments have a lot of inertia.)
They don't share the discount, or they're getting a piss-poor one. Computer Club sells the same-size drives at a lower price, as a fundraiser. And we get a decent markup.
The real problem with flash drives is that you need to unmount them before you unplug them. Many, many people don't. And sometimes their data gets corrupted.
Sweet. Now I can fix the flash drive (with their permission) rather than tell them to buy a different device. (I hated only having that option. Since I'm president of the computer club, and computer club sells non-broken flash drives as a fundraiser, it's a conflict of interest.)
Thanks.
On some drives, like the ones my college bookstore carries, you can't access the writable portion of the drive until after the U3 software is loaded into Windows. Hell, I couldn't even get past it using my Linux laptop.
And the U3 software fails on virtually every computer on campus, because the computers are locked down in such a way that one cannot install device drivers using a normal student account.
The real kicker? They're replacing all the PCs in the campus labs with ones without floppy drives. So even those poor kids with only a few hundred KB of data will have to use a flash drive, and us student assistants will have to support them.
Already, I've had to tell too many students that yes, they can access their data from home with that flash drive. No, they won't be able to use that flash drive here. Yes, I realize their assignment is due in twenty minutes. No, there's nothing I can do about it; I don't have any greater a degree of access than they do.
...but you didn't violate his wordmark. Virtuadub sounds like a cheap rip-off of Virtualdub.
He was talking about using PXE to load an equivalent to NTLDR, not the entire OS.
So, it's "Classmates", without the whole "Sign up ten people before using our site" pyramid scheme?
apt-get update [CAPS LOCK]77[CAPS LOCK] apt-get upgrade
"It says something about an unrecognized argument."
With a mid-2007 release and even longer before quad-core comes to desktop, there will be even more programs that take advantage of multi-core technology
I have yet to see apps for the unspecialized consumer that take advantage of today's dual-core offerings. Office and Firefox don't get any faster. (Though I would like to see Firefox go multithreaded--one thread per tab. Multimedia media applets tend to hiccup when I switch tabs.)
By the way, [how] do you know that AMD has only been focusing on adding more cores?
I'm sure they've got the Next Big Thing on file somewhere, but their press releases of late have been focusing on taking advantage of multiple threads, not of code stream parallelism.
The only real benefit I can see to having four cores on a desktop CPU would be the power savings benefit I could get from underclocking. Beyond a certain point (A point past which systems have run on stock settings for years), power usage goes up exponentially as clock rate goes up linearly. In short, multi-core systems will give you more MHz per watt than single-core systems, simply by being able to perform the same work load at a lower clock rate.
However, this same benefit can come from focusing on a superscalar architecture, which is easier to adapt existing applications to. And, to my knowledge, AMD hasn't advanced superscalar architecture since the original Hammer-based Athlon64 and Opteron.
Research about what? The fact that AMD designed the Hammer core to use a switching memory interface instead of a bus interface? The fact that Intel's initial one-bus-tap-per-core system makes it difficult to keep bus speeds high? Not to mention I haven't found documentation that Intel has moved away from their multi-tap approach.
There's also the fact that most consumer computational loads don't yet scale across multiple cores. Sure, you might have applications that spawn ungodly numbers of threads, but that doesn't mean many of those threads are doing an appreciable amount of work. If you have a decent task scheduler in your OS, one fast core is still Good Enough.
AMD went beyond Intel with the K7. That core lineage performed more data per-clock that Intel's competing Prescott-based cores. Now Intel is working to outperform AMD's K8, while AMD seems only to be focusing on adding more cores.
Isn't AMD depending on additional cores to beat Intel's performance similar to how Intel's Prescott depended on additional MHz to beat AMD's performance?
Sounds like the shoe's on the other foot. I hope AMD brings back the kind of engineering innovations that brought it support among those in the know back in 1999 and 2000.. (Like focusing on a superscalar architecture with the K7.)
Four cores is a fine concept, but they mustn't forget to increase the capabilities of the individual cores.
For a community so concerned about privacy, most Slashdotters haven't taken adequate measures to protect their own.
My email address is attached to this comment because I realized a long time ago that there's enough info about me in my Slashdot posting history alone to write a biography about me.
I already knew who thatwas...my ex girlfriend still terrorizing me.
Last week, I tasked myself with determining ways to contact 72 Slashdot users. (People who'd responded to a subset of my journals in the past.) I found email addresses for fifty of them, instant messenger IDs for three others, profiles in other communities for five of them, and other ways to contact all the rest but four. That's a success rate of 94%. Oh, and I didn't spend a cent on acces to databases. Google and WHOIS was sufficient for most of them.
My recommendations to those in the Slashdot community who want to keep their lives private:
For those of you who've failed any of those three tests already, well, it's likely to be a long, uphill battle if you want to regain your privacy.
Think of all the people who don't know what "Ampersand" means.
It's called an estate.
Are their lawyers salaried so that they can afford to go after the estate of a dead victim?
There ought to be a law against that. (Salaried lawyers, that is. There's already laws against extortion.)
I thought that was inductive logic.
Am I the only one who things that storing console output would still be a useful feature? It would make batch processing jobs a great deal easier.
I've been watching Bonanza and Gunsmoke with my grandfather on TV Land.
Wait! That music score! That plot twist! Wasn't that on Star Trek?
We've got that going. Make sure you've got more than just yourself to pick up the slack when deadlines loom.
Yeah, we do. It's called general education. In Michigan, it's part of the MACRAO agreement.
Communism is still alive in North Korea, Cuba, China and Viet Nam, to name a few countries. But none of these are likely what you're thinking about. Marxist communism has never been fully implemented on a country-wide basis.
Not that I would advocate it...I like government-guided capitalism just fine.
Uniformed voters? Like in Starship Troopers? (the book, that is.)
That's an amusing mental picture:
A robot ends up dragging and whipping its body all over the lab, smashing and breaking things in an effort to right itself.
Of course, I assume they have it give up if it the torso passes a certain inclination.
Why don't you drop them a line?
The Star Wars prequels actually followed, to some degree, the transformation of the Roman Republic to the Roman Empire--a real-world example.
Seeing it happen again should be no real surpise, at least to those who paid attention in Intro to Political Science. (A class every Michigan college student has to take if they want to transfer most of their credits from one college to another.)