The extra registers are not available in 32-bit compatibility mode. The gains in moving applications to x86-64 will largely come from these extra registers being made available.
Actually, it's not as bad as you think, given the circumstances.
The general problem with re-encoding audio is errors will become magnified versus a direct encode to the lower bitrate. If you take a 192k or 160k CBR mp3 encode and downsample it to some other format, it is going to sound like crap. But you have to remember that modes like LAME --alt-preset virtually eliminate errors in audio reproduction.
Sure, the inaudable tones have been removed, but every bit of the audible spectrum has been accurately rendered, making it nearly as good as the original source for the purposes of transcoding.
I rip all my albums using --alt-preset standard, and I transcode them to 128k ABR for my handheld mp3 player. I've never been able to hear any perceptible difference between this and a direct-from-CD 128k ABR encode.
The PS/2 ports didn't get standardized placement and orientation until ATX, and any proper, standardized markings / colorings until the PC '99 standard:)
At least today you can easily match a modern keyboard and mouse to their proper ports, as their plugs and ports are colored pink and teal respectively ( PC '99 ). It's a good thing too, because as amazingly stupid as it sounds, most manufacturers are still shipping PCs with PS/2 keyboards and mice.
Once again, for much less, they could have a PC tied to that modem line, running linux, and have much more capability. I think it's throwing money in the wrong direction to help people.
You're missing the aspects of this device that make it more attractive than a used PC plunked down in a corner. The whole concept of using a simple palm-like device makes it low-power, rugged and ultra-portable.
How were you planning on powering that old PC that sucks 30 watts of power, when there's no electrical hookup for miles? Your Simputer uses two orders of magnitude less power, and can be run off 2 AA batteries for a month.
How were you planning on taking that computer with you at all times, given the distances that people have to travel between towns and farms, often on foot? Are you going to leave your useful computer at home?
That would help those people a lot, considering it's still tied to a modem line.
Perhaps you've never heard of a cell phone, they're actually more common in the third world than landlines these days.
Honestly, a Palm Pilot with all the advantages of low-powered, higly rugged platform paired with a simple to use interface could be a real winner. It's a lot more likely to catch on than used desktops in these rural areas.
It seems to me that globalization is making Americans more wealthy to the tune of $500 billion a year.
A Trade Deficit means we continue to import more than we export, that is, spend more than we produce.
This is a cycle most of you are more familiar referring to as DEBT, in this case, foreign debt. The cycle is hard to stop once it gets rolling, and once foreign debtors no longer believe us credit-worthy, they can refuse us credit and cripple our economy.
Read this for a better understanding of the situation. Economists have been warning about this for years, and now that our core software industries are packing up for India, things look even more bleak. Considering how every government official in America has chosen to ignore this problem, including every president since Reagan, I can't see us addressing it in time to really help.
...and thus it does not truly apply to most Slashdotters.
Think about this: thanks to the baby boom, the majority of the people in the industry are over 40 and making bank because the companies don't want them to retire yet, or even worse move on to a competitor with all that built-up knowledge.
This, of course, skews your "average", because your "average respondent" has 15 years of experience and valuable knowledge.
Whereas, most Slashdot members have under 10 years experience, in fact I'd wager most have less than 5, so OF COURSE you're all making much less than the survey says.
And this doesn't even take into account the usual survey bias for salaries, where the ( lowest / highest ) paid respondents are ( hesitant / eager ) to respond due to their ( shame / pride ). Most people who don't make bank don't like to talk about it.
Arggh.. Someone else who doesn't know how a switching power supply works. 300Watts means thats the maximum amount of power it can deliver before it melts down. It doesn't mean your computer is using 300watts constantly.
Yes, this is a point that most people don't understand: your computer's power usage is constantly changing
A typical desktop machine sold today may have a 300 watt power supply, but the total typical power usage will be around 150 watts, in use, with the monitor on. Power usage peaks for boot, when reading a drive, or when the CPU is fully engaged, and that is the purpose of the overrated supply.
You'll see higher power usage if you stress your processor full-time, and you'll see significantly lower power usage when you leave the machine idle. This is thanks to the HLT instruction, and OSes that properly support it for idle cycles ( and more recently, dynamic power management at the processor level ).
When you consider that a machine sitting idle with the monitor in standby mode is only using around 75 watts, you realize that leaving a MODERN computer on 24/7 is quite affordable.
When you consider that MOST people have computers that are significantly older than the latest, greatest power munchers, then you realize that the idle power usage is more on the order of 20-40 watts.
Perspective: All the remote-control devices in your house combined bleed more power than that ( even when off ), just so you can have the convenience of using the remote to turn them on.
And most people who really know and care rip their music to 192 Mp3
No, they do not. They either encode it to some loss-less format, encode it to OGG, or rip it using LAME --alt preset standard if they want high-quality and high portability.
192k CBR mp3 is nowhere near CD-quality.
And 128 ACC really does sound better to me.
You're comparing apples to oranges. AAC is a Variable Bit Rate codec.
Your mp3s would sound better too if you used VBR encoding. VBR was always a part of the mp3 standard, it was simply too processor intensive 6 years ago when mp3 began to take hold.
If you made a VBR mp3 with an average bitrate of 128k, it would sound almost as good as a 192k CBR mp3. If you made a VBR mp3 with an average bitrate of 192k, it would sound as good if not better than a 128k AAC track.
It astounds me to no end that people are screaming in joy just because AAC can acheive roughly double the compression rate of CBR mp3, and about %50 better than VBR mp3. Big deal, competing codecs released well before AAC can do the same ( mp3Pro, OGG, insert favorite codec here ).
"Adiitionally, 2001 the movie and book were created simultaniously, as a collaboration. They are however both based on Clarke's earlier work, "The Sentinel""
Yes, and this explains the many small inconsistencies you'll find between the two.
The largest inconsistency between the movie and the book is the destination of the voyage. In the book, the voyage is to Saturn, but in the movie this voyage is to Jupiter.
The reason for the change? Kubrick could not afford the cost of all the artists rendering Saturn and its rings, so they changed the storyline to Jupiter.
The book 2010 was written ENTIRELY as a sequel to the movie storyline. It's funny because you can read 2001, then pick up 2010, and be damn confused.
But then why not just use paper ballots in the first place??
Because one of the hottest debates in a recount is over disputed ballots. One only had to see the whole hanging chad / pregnant chad bullshit in Florida to grasp this concept.
Imagine this: the voters get clean laser printout with their selections. The voters verify the selections and put them in the box. A week later, a recount is issued, and wow! No disputed ballots! It's all there in plain toner.
Of course, the ballots would probably have a barcode to be used for recount, and some 1337 haxor could alter the barcode while printing out the proper selections, causing the recount to be skewed. But if the recount is thorough, then eventually someone will count the printed-out selections, and spot the discrepancy.
I tend to downsample my mp3s to 128k ABR, or just load them on as the original lame preset standard VBR encodes.
128k ABR is tons better than 128k CBR, because it uses 112k or 96k frames where the target quality level can allow it, and saves that space for 160k or (rarely) 192k frames where you need them the most. The final quality lies at about 160k CBR, not at all bad for an encoding that takes up no more space. And yes, the MuVo is perfectly capable of playing VBR mp3s, as should any player costing that much.
My Creative Labs MuVo is not only a good mp3/wma player, but was also one of the first to function as a convenient USB drive. Why the hell would I have paid $75 for a 128MB flash drive a year back when I could have both for $150?
Obviously, this concept is catching on and prices are dropping, so anyone who is even considering USB drive who doesn't already own a portable music player should be interested.
True this, I've had a chance to fire a few submachine guns in fully-auto mode, and the MP5 blew me away ( not literally ) with it's long burst accuracy. Even an idiot can confine a 5-round burst in 6 inches or less with this gun.
I found this especially amazing because the Uzi, a gun similar in size, kicks like crazy.
The Sega Genesis contains both a 68000 series processor and a Z-80, which I believe was used for the sound hardware.
The Z-80 could also be used to run Master System carts, provided you had the converter. This is the sole reason Nintendo went to such great extents to attempt to make the Super Nintendo backward compatible.
This only turned out to be a "failed feature" because the Master System itself failed. When you do this for highly successful platforms like the PS1, you get a much better outcome.
The way UPC works is each character is represented in BCD, with numbers only.
Each digit in UPC is represented by two bars, with 4 variations on thickness. Now, sure, that SOUNDS like 4 bits of resolution, but it's not really when you realise that the 'no-bar' case only adds 1-bit. You get 8 distinct levels from the varying thickness of the 2 bars, then the simple 1-bit off state for each bar, for a total of 10 possibilities. There is no room in the code for more. It is a BCD code without waste.
As for adding more bars, that's exactly what they're going to do with the 14-digit version.
Also, I find it unlikely that underclocking a 31W processor could get it down to 1-6W.
Sure you can.
So you claim that the direct proportionality of frequency and voltage to power usage in fet devices is completely bogus?
Granted, there is not a single desktop platform that would actually allow you to clock a P4 down to, say, ~250MHz, but if there were you could bet on a couple things:
1. You'd see a huge drop just from reducing the clock speed by a factor of 11. Roughly, your Max Thermal 82w Pentium 4 3.2 GHz produces Max Thermal 7.45w at 250MHz, nearly the same as the Eden ESP 7000.
Don't believe the simple ratio forumla? Take a look at Intel's spec sheets ( with a little fudging to account for efficiency gains in newer steppings, and other tricks ).
1.6A: 46.8w max power 3.2: 82w max power
Half the speed? ~Half the power.
2. Step 2 in optimization would be lowering the supply voltage. The voltage you apply to the processor has 2 aspects: it determines the maximum rise time, and the peak voltage on gates.
So lets say you suddenly don't need the excessive rise time of the standard voltage due to your lower frequency, so long as you're not undervolting the gates such that they won't switch, you can further reduce power consumption.
Assume a modest reduction in voltage of %10-20, and you end up with the same power usage as the Eden.
Yes, it's a sucky processor at 250MHz, but this was only a test of the worst case. I would expect to see slightly better performance numbers for a mobile Pentium IV, a mobile Athlon, a PIII Tualatin or a Pentium M.
Actually, bandwidth and route have everything to do with latency.
The efficiency of the routers / backbones you encounter is always a factor, and if one router in the chain takes forever to respond, it's going to kill your latency.
Your packet has a certain size, and the time it takes to completely transmit that packet and complete the ack is your latency. Distance and bandwidth are the prime factors.
Sure your packets travel fast on a fiber backbone, but if your last mile connection is several orders of magnitude slower ( broadband or dialup ), it's going to cause a significant increase in your latency.
Even high bandwidth cannot save you from real distance. You try to play a game on the other side of the US, you're going to add a sizeable delay even with those high-bandwidth backbones. Gaming with a server on another continent? It becomes largely unplayable.
Yes, I'll give apcupsd a look, I was planning on hooking up their USB control cable, but hadn't gotten around to it.
But you still havn't answered my other question:
Why would ANY filesystem, provided it's not currently being altered, lose files JUST BECAUSE you did a non-graceful shutdown? In concept, you should only lose uncompleted cached writes and writes in progress, correct?
Can you explain it with anything other than "must be a bug"?
Slashdot Mirror
IANAL, but I do wonder if there is some way that this complaint can be turned around to test the validity of digital signatures and EULAs.
Can Lindows theoretically put up a defense that attempts to verify the validity of digital "click-through" signatures?
The extra registers are not available in 32-bit compatibility mode. The gains in moving applications to x86-64 will largely come from these extra registers being made available.
(I know, transcoding is bad, mmkay?)
Actually, it's not as bad as you think, given the circumstances.
The general problem with re-encoding audio is errors will become magnified versus a direct encode to the lower bitrate. If you take a 192k or 160k CBR mp3 encode and downsample it to some other format, it is going to sound like crap. But you have to remember that modes like LAME --alt-preset virtually eliminate errors in audio reproduction.
Sure, the inaudable tones have been removed, but every bit of the audible spectrum has been accurately rendered, making it nearly as good as the original source for the purposes of transcoding.
I rip all my albums using --alt-preset standard, and I transcode them to 128k ABR for my handheld mp3 player. I've never been able to hear any perceptible difference between this and a direct-from-CD 128k ABR encode.
The funniest thing about this:
:)
The PS/2 ports didn't get standardized placement and orientation until ATX, and any proper, standardized markings / colorings until the PC '99 standard
At least today you can easily match a modern keyboard and mouse to their proper ports, as their plugs and ports are colored pink and teal respectively ( PC '99 ). It's a good thing too, because as amazingly stupid as it sounds, most manufacturers are still shipping PCs with PS/2 keyboards and mice.
Once again, for much less, they could have a PC tied to that modem line, running linux, and have much more capability. I think it's throwing money in the wrong direction to help people.
You're missing the aspects of this device that make it more attractive than a used PC plunked down in a corner. The whole concept of using a simple palm-like device makes it low-power, rugged and ultra-portable.
How were you planning on powering that old PC that sucks 30 watts of power, when there's no electrical hookup for miles? Your Simputer uses two orders of magnitude less power, and can be run off 2 AA batteries for a month.
How were you planning on taking that computer with you at all times, given the distances that people have to travel between towns and farms, often on foot? Are you going to leave your useful computer at home?
That would help those people a lot, considering it's still tied to a modem line.
Perhaps you've never heard of a cell phone, they're actually more common in the third world than landlines these days.
Honestly, a Palm Pilot with all the advantages of low-powered, higly rugged platform paired with a simple to use interface could be a real winner. It's a lot more likely to catch on than used desktops in these rural areas.
Yup, and Citrix Winframe was originally released in 1995, which would mean we still havn't found appreciable prior art.
I've discovered that if you are eating anything other than raw, organically grown spinach, it'll eventually kill ya.
;)
Call me back when you become Iron Anemic and have a a heart attack
It seems to me that globalization is making Americans more wealthy to the tune of $500 billion a year.
A Trade Deficit means we continue to import more than we export, that is, spend more than we produce.
This is a cycle most of you are more familiar referring to as DEBT, in this case, foreign debt. The cycle is hard to stop once it gets rolling, and once foreign debtors no longer believe us credit-worthy, they can refuse us credit and cripple our economy.
Read this for a better understanding of the situation. Economists have been warning about this for years, and now that our core software industries are packing up for India, things look even more bleak. Considering how every government official in America has chosen to ignore this problem, including every president since Reagan, I can't see us addressing it in time to really help.
WOW, a webcache and real-time compression!
.v42Bis compression have only been able to do that for, what, nearly a decade?
My browser and my modem with
...and thus it does not truly apply to most Slashdotters.
Think about this: thanks to the baby boom, the majority of the people in the industry are over 40 and making bank because the companies don't want them to retire yet, or even worse move on to a competitor with all that built-up knowledge.
This, of course, skews your "average", because your "average respondent" has 15 years of experience and valuable knowledge.
Whereas, most Slashdot members have under 10 years experience, in fact I'd wager most have less than 5, so OF COURSE you're all making much less than the survey says.
And this doesn't even take into account the usual survey bias for salaries, where the ( lowest / highest ) paid respondents are ( hesitant / eager ) to respond due to their ( shame / pride ). Most people who don't make bank don't like to talk about it.
Arggh.. Someone else who doesn't know how a switching power supply works. 300Watts means thats the maximum amount of power it can deliver before it melts down. It doesn't mean your computer is using 300watts constantly.
Yes, this is a point that most people don't understand: your computer's power usage is constantly changing
A typical desktop machine sold today may have a 300 watt power supply, but the total typical power usage will be around 150 watts, in use, with the monitor on. Power usage peaks for boot, when reading a drive, or when the CPU is fully engaged, and that is the purpose of the overrated supply.
You'll see higher power usage if you stress your processor full-time, and you'll see significantly lower power usage when you leave the machine idle. This is thanks to the HLT instruction, and OSes that properly support it for idle cycles ( and more recently, dynamic power management at the processor level ).
When you consider that a machine sitting idle with the monitor in standby mode is only using around 75 watts, you realize that leaving a MODERN computer on 24/7 is quite affordable.
When you consider that MOST people have computers that are significantly older than the latest, greatest power munchers, then you realize that the idle power usage is more on the order of 20-40 watts.
Perspective: All the remote-control devices in your house combined bleed more power than that ( even when off ), just so you can have the convenience of using the remote to turn them on.
And most people who really know and care rip their music to 192 Mp3
No, they do not. They either encode it to some loss-less format, encode it to OGG, or rip it using LAME --alt preset standard if they want high-quality and high portability.
192k CBR mp3 is nowhere near CD-quality.
And 128 ACC really does sound better to me.
You're comparing apples to oranges. AAC is a Variable Bit Rate codec.
Your mp3s would sound better too if you used VBR encoding. VBR was always a part of the mp3 standard, it was simply too processor intensive 6 years ago when mp3 began to take hold.
If you made a VBR mp3 with an average bitrate of 128k, it would sound almost as good as a 192k CBR mp3. If you made a VBR mp3 with an average bitrate of 192k, it would sound as good if not better than a 128k AAC track.
It astounds me to no end that people are screaming in joy just because AAC can acheive roughly double the compression rate of CBR mp3, and about %50 better than VBR mp3. Big deal, competing codecs released well before AAC can do the same ( mp3Pro, OGG, insert favorite codec here ).
"Adiitionally, 2001 the movie and book were created simultaniously, as a collaboration. They are however both based on Clarke's earlier work, "The Sentinel""
Yes, and this explains the many small inconsistencies you'll find between the two.
The largest inconsistency between the movie and the book is the destination of the voyage. In the book, the voyage is to Saturn, but in the movie this voyage is to Jupiter.
The reason for the change? Kubrick could not afford the cost of all the artists rendering Saturn and its rings, so they changed the storyline to Jupiter.
The book 2010 was written ENTIRELY as a sequel to the movie storyline. It's funny because you can read 2001, then pick up 2010, and be damn confused.
But then why not just use paper ballots in the first place??
Because one of the hottest debates in a recount is over disputed ballots. One only had to see the whole hanging chad / pregnant chad bullshit in Florida to grasp this concept.
Imagine this: the voters get clean laser printout with their selections. The voters verify the selections and put them in the box. A week later, a recount is issued, and wow! No disputed ballots! It's all there in plain toner.
Of course, the ballots would probably have a barcode to be used for recount, and some 1337 haxor could alter the barcode while printing out the proper selections, causing the recount to be skewed. But if the recount is thorough, then eventually someone will count the printed-out selections, and spot the discrepancy.
I tend to downsample my mp3s to 128k ABR, or just load them on as the original lame preset standard VBR encodes.
128k ABR is tons better than 128k CBR, because it uses 112k or 96k frames where the target quality level can allow it, and saves that space for 160k or (rarely) 192k frames where you need them the most. The final quality lies at about 160k CBR, not at all bad for an encoding that takes up no more space. And yes, the MuVo is perfectly capable of playing VBR mp3s, as should any player costing that much.
I did, and I bought one.
My Creative Labs MuVo is not only a good mp3/wma player, but was also one of the first to function as a convenient USB drive. Why the hell would I have paid $75 for a 128MB flash drive a year back when I could have both for $150?
Obviously, this concept is catching on and prices are dropping, so anyone who is even considering USB drive who doesn't already own a portable music player should be interested.
True this, I've had a chance to fire a few submachine guns in fully-auto mode, and the MP5 blew me away ( not literally ) with it's long burst accuracy. Even an idiot can confine a 5-round burst in 6 inches or less with this gun.
I found this especially amazing because the Uzi, a gun similar in size, kicks like crazy.
Came installed on Mandrake 9.1, and I think I wasted an entire afternoon playing it through. Not bad for a relatively simple concept.
Of course, the replay value is pretty low, but that's usually the case for puzzle games with static puzzles.
The Sega Genesis contains both a 68000 series processor and a Z-80, which I believe was used for the sound hardware.
The Z-80 could also be used to run Master System carts, provided you had the converter. This is the sole reason Nintendo went to such great extents to attempt to make the Super Nintendo backward compatible.
This only turned out to be a "failed feature" because the Master System itself failed. When you do this for highly successful platforms like the PS1, you get a much better outcome.
Everybody wants a rock to wind a piece of string around.
To make it easier!
The way UPC works is each character is represented in BCD, with numbers only.
Each digit in UPC is represented by two bars, with 4 variations on thickness. Now, sure, that SOUNDS like 4 bits of resolution, but it's not really when you realise that the 'no-bar' case only adds 1-bit. You get 8 distinct levels from the varying thickness of the 2 bars, then the simple 1-bit off state for each bar, for a total of 10 possibilities. There is no room in the code for more. It is a BCD code without waste.
As for adding more bars, that's exactly what they're going to do with the 14-digit version.
Also, I find it unlikely that underclocking a 31W processor could get it down to 1-6W.
Sure you can.
So you claim that the direct proportionality of frequency and voltage to power usage in fet devices is completely bogus?
Granted, there is not a single desktop platform that would actually allow you to clock a P4 down to, say, ~250MHz, but if there were you could bet on a couple things:
1. You'd see a huge drop just from reducing the clock speed by a factor of 11. Roughly, your Max Thermal 82w Pentium 4 3.2 GHz produces Max Thermal 7.45w at 250MHz, nearly the same as the Eden ESP 7000.
Don't believe the simple ratio forumla? Take a look at Intel's spec sheets ( with a little fudging to account for efficiency gains in newer steppings, and other tricks ).
1.6A: 46.8w max power
3.2: 82w max power
Half the speed? ~Half the power.
2. Step 2 in optimization would be lowering the supply voltage. The voltage you apply to the processor has 2 aspects: it determines the maximum rise time, and the peak voltage on gates.
So lets say you suddenly don't need the excessive rise time of the standard voltage due to your lower frequency, so long as you're not undervolting the gates such that they won't switch, you can further reduce power consumption.
Assume a modest reduction in voltage of %10-20, and you end up with the same power usage as the Eden.
Yes, it's a sucky processor at 250MHz, but this was only a test of the worst case. I would expect to see slightly better performance numbers for a mobile Pentium IV, a mobile Athlon, a PIII Tualatin or a Pentium M.
Actually, bandwidth and route have everything to do with latency.
The efficiency of the routers / backbones you encounter is always a factor, and if one router in the chain takes forever to respond, it's going to kill your latency.
Your packet has a certain size, and the time it takes to completely transmit that packet and complete the ack is your latency. Distance and bandwidth are the prime factors.
Sure your packets travel fast on a fiber backbone, but if your last mile connection is several orders of magnitude slower ( broadband or dialup ), it's going to cause a significant increase in your latency.
Even high bandwidth cannot save you from real distance. You try to play a game on the other side of the US, you're going to add a sizeable delay even with those high-bandwidth backbones. Gaming with a server on another continent? It becomes largely unplayable.
Yes, I'll give apcupsd a look, I was planning on hooking up their USB control cable, but hadn't gotten around to it.
But you still havn't answered my other question:
Why would ANY filesystem, provided it's not currently being altered, lose files JUST BECAUSE you did a non-graceful shutdown? In concept, you should only lose uncompleted cached writes and writes in progress, correct?
Can you explain it with anything other than "must be a bug"?