Doh, hate to reply to myself but now that I have read a bit more into the Athlon64 data sheet I see where things are happening, for DDR400 DDR the Athlon64 is limited to 2 unbuffered DIMM's: -- Up to three unbuffered DIMMs according to the loading described in Table 3 on page 16 -- Up to four registered DIMMs (note DDR400 not available on registered DIMMs)
The controller provides programmable control of DRAM timing parameters to support the following memory speeds: -- 100-MHz (DDR200) PC-1600 DIMMs -- 133-MHz (DDR266) PC-2100 DIMMs -- 166-MHz (DDR333) PC-2700 DIMMs -- 200-MHz (DDR400) PC-3200 DIMMs (unbuffered DIMMs only, two maximum)
So with cheap unregistered DIMM's you are only going to get to either 2GB at DDR400 or 3GB at DDR333. I guess AMD's engineer's didn't figure it was worth the cost to support more ram on their lower end chip where the typical user would never get near the limit due to costs anyways.
This is all from http://www.amd.com/us-en/assets/content_type/white _papers_and_tech_docs/24659.PDF
Actually the memory controller is on the CPU so there any limitation should be with the CPU and be common to all three boards. I really can't see where the artificially low max memory counts are coming from, the Athlon64 supports either 4 registered DIMM's (8GB total), or 3 unbuffered DIMM's (6GB total). Of course most people who are buying an Athlon64 instead of an Athlon64 FX or Opteron are not going to spend the huge sums necessary for 2GB registered DIMM's =)
Exactly, forget red light camera's, it's easy to go through an intersection just as the light turns red, just install similar camera's that are activated by the IR reciever and take pictures of anyone going through once the IR code has been recieved, you can't possibly say "oops I accidently activated that illegal IR transmitter".
In civilized places passive radar jammers are perfectly legal because all they do is take the incoming radiation and rebroadcast it with a slight delay that throws off the revieving unit in the radar gun.
The 800mhz to 1.x ghz range just isn't enough for anyone, anymore.
What are you on? Cause I want some. Seriously my main machine is a 1.2Ghz Athlon and I play games, encode audio, do 3D rendering, etc on it all the time. A 1Ghz Pentium-M would be even faster than my machine so it should be WAY more than enough for anything you are going to run on a tablet. If the input method is condusive to what you need to run then I really, really doubt the speed of the cpu will be an issue, and by keeping speed down to a reasonable level they can actually get a usable battery life out of the things.
A bit of hyperbole methinks. I've probably had an email address longer than 99.99% of even slashdotters and I've only had mine for a single decade. Spam is becoming such a problem that even old stalwarts like me are taking drastic action, just recently I added a procmail rule to route all email not addressed specifically to me into the bit bucket, it breaks BCC but dropped my spam by ~90%.
Then you've never seen a good IDE RAID controller. Particularly the ones from 3ware have an i960 decendant as coprocessors for communications and parity calculations for RAID5. These boards can saturate a 33/32 PCI bus and very nearly a 66/64 one, doesn't get much faster than that. Of course since there are only a few 10K RPM SATA drives and no 15K RPM ones DB apps are still best served by SCSI or FC.
What I'm saying is that without Poseiden two people potentially died. My mother or one of the other lifeguards might have noticed them eventually, perhaps even soon enough to stop them from drowning, but perhaps not. I don't know what the average stats are for a pool that size but I would guess a near drowning or two per month isn't all that unusual. Put thousands of kids, many with no swimming experience into a large pool with only a handfull of lifeguards and I think you will always have the potential for things to go wrong, Poseiden just lessens the chances significantly and is IMHO a great use of technology (computer vision in particular, an area I was going to study before leaving college to join the real world).
Poseiden rocks
on
Watching You
·
· Score: 4, Informative
My mother has saved 2 lifes as a result of Poseiden. She is a life guard at one of the first US sites to have it installed and twice she has had it alert her to a person at the bottom of the pool. She says that neither time could she see the person from her chair. The system is not without problems, for instance the water arobics classes move so little from place to place that Poseiden will often flag people as being immobile, and the initial training was quite agrivating with almost constant false alarms, but overall it is definitly worth the cost and agrevation. Btw those two saves were in about 6 months of operations.
or more likely Painst Shop Pro. PSP Has 90+% of the features of Photoshop and basically all of the ones that anyone who is not a pro will use. Not only that but it's cheaper than even the Lite version of Photoshop.
More RAM=better battery life (to a point)
This is because the OS will cache the disk fairly agressivly if extra ram is present and refreshing ram is nothing compared to spinning up the HDD.
No, but they should have tested the code before they deployed it, they should have had a backout plan, and once they realized they had an unexpected problem that backout plan should have been put into place. That's basic change management procedures and the bare minimum that should be done. Of course it's a state agency so the coding was probably done by HS dropouts at some contracter who made a mint and the new system was implemented by desperate sysadmins who can actually live on the cruddy state salary.
Maya Personal Learning Edition has been available since 2002. Unfortunatly plugins don't work, it comes with almost no textures, and it watermarks your output. I'm still using my educational copy of 3DSMaxR2 when I feel like messing around with 3D.
Reminds me of the HP tech that came out to replace the dead disk in our AV system's RAID array, for some reason when he plugged the new disk in the controller started recreating the array, FROM the new disk instead of TO it! Luckily all the data was mearly local cache of the corporate AV repository, instead of real data loss we just had a slow WAN for a couple days =)
Former coworker told me about his first real sysadmin job. Running RAID5 on a cluster of Netware servers. He was telling the CIO about how a single disk failure would go by without a problem, so the CIO pulled a random disk, no problem, then he opened his mouth and talked about how a single system failure would not effect their largest customer who ran on that cluster, well the CIO asks him if he's sure about that, he says not really but he believes so. The CIO tells him his job depends on it as he pulls the plug from one of the clustered systems, luckily the customer never noticed but man talk about trial by fire =)
He probably can't hear the difference because he's tone deaf =) I have exceptionally good hearing (I've produced a couple albums) and I can guarentee you there are people that hear the difference beteween even 192Kbit MP3's and CD's (especially with a bad encoder). I personally use LAME with the -extreme preset (I've heard there are better choices in newer builds but my environment is setup and I can rarely hear any artifacts). This spits out MP3's at ~200-220Kbps VBR, and for the most part they are indistinguishable from the CD source. I also tried OOG at the best quality that the visual encoder would allow and AAC files at the top quality that iTunes for Mac would allow, both I could pick out from the MP3 and the PCM WAV file I used for testing. I use a SB Extigy with Sennheiser headphones, neither terribly expensive but both good quality.
Btw the main developer of Lustre is a really cool dude. I had some questions about snapshotting filesystems on linux, he had done some preliminary work on one similar to Netapp's for linux. I asked him about his work and if he knew about any similar work. He said his work was on hold indefinitly while he worked his paying gig on Lustre but that if he ever got Lustre complete enough that he didn't have to work 80+ hour weeks he would probably take it up again, he also pointed me to some solutions that he thought might fit my needs. Unfortunatly right now there really aren't any non-commercial ones that do what I want, but I'm hoping that the Samba team will take up windows shadow copy service model from Windows 2003 which is almost exactly what I want.
Actually for $500 the best sounding system you could find would probably be an iPod with some mid range Sennheisers. I absolutely love mine and the sound from it is excellent.
Actually they are mostly right. When you use GPL'd software you are getting that software for free (as in beer), but it does come with some obligations (the "hidden" cost), those include making available free of charge and without further incumberance any changes you have made to the software before releasing it. If your business model is such that secrecy of the OS behind your router is important than GPL'd software is NOT the place to go looking. If you want to make a cheap piece of hardware with minimal investment in the OS and sling those in high volume then GPL'd software may be a good choice.
Actually the fact that copy and paste works seemlessly through COM IS the big advantage that office made possible. Before that you would have had to save to some intermediary format and then imported and reformatted the data. The fact that those Office users can just copy and paste the data is what made Office so special when it was first introduced. Btw I would never overestimate the average office users, I have to support them all the time.
A fellow tech had a service call at a client that had been around so long that their info wasn't even in our "new" dispatching system (dating back to the early 90's). They had a remote office that was having some problems communicating back with the main office mainframe complex. Said tech goes out to client site and finds out that the way they communicate back to the mainframe is a custom app running on an origional IBM PC XT and the reason it's not working is that the HDD has wonked out. Well he does the old rap the drive on the countertop trick to get it spun up and tells them that he will look for a replacement drive but he states very ademantly that he makes no promises. Well after having a good laugh with the parts dispatcher he finds the FRU number in an old manual and does a search, low and behold one of our third party parts distributer has 15 of them IN STOCK! He orders one and then finds an ancient copy of ghost that can deal with the old system. He attaches the new drive and copies the partition over, viola, a system that will probably run for another 15+ years.
Obviously you weren't using computers routinely before Office came out. The entire idea of using COM to link the distinct parts of the Office "suite" together was quite inventive and REALLY improves some peoples productivity (being able to retrieve data from the DB into the spreadsheet, manipulate the data and output the results into a wordprocessing doc was the only thing that made my job triaging helpdesk tickets possible). Beyond that it was a huge profit win for MS because they could convince companies to buy the whole suite at a reduced price, not realizing that overall they were probably paying 60-70% more than if they just bought people the apps they needed (the power users who use Office's cross-app features are probably only 30-40%, my previous comments notwithstanding).
Ah, but a hdd which dies is not necessarily defective. HDD's are electro-mechanical devices with a designed lifetime and a stated MTBF. Beyond that the manufacturer usually only warants the part to be defective in parts for a limited time, this used to be 3 years for consumer drives and 5 for enterprise drives (SCSI or Fibre), today the majority of the IDE manufacturers have cut this to 1 year because their margins are so slim, yet people continue to buy these drives knowing that the manufacturer only has confidence that they will last 1 year. If people wanted higher reliability drives they would buy the drives with the longer waranties and pay the increased price. Basically it's a price/reliability tradeoff and the majority of the market has chosen to go cheap. Now when a manufacturer has a widespread problem like the deathstars and fails to offer a recall THEN I am all for beating them up because they are knowingly allowing a bad product to remain on the market, other than those situations I EXPECT drives to fail, it's just a matter of how soon. If the data is important than I will be using RAID and have backups.
yp+ is the linux name for NIS+, NIS+ is standard in most large Solaris environments and is not difficult to configure under linux. As to NFS security, it's simple to configure, just see This link at docs.sun.com, it tells you how to enable KERBEROSEv5 authentication including traffic and authentication encryption. I'd hardly say that is undocumented! A NIS+ client and K5 client libraries should be available under any Unix and if you run windows there are commercial offerings from Hummingbirds and others (don't bitch about costs because you already went down the MS pay as you go road). SMB/CIFS is fine for some things but it does not mesh with the native UNIX security model so using it and complaining about security is just ignorant. Btw my setup is doable in the real world, we had it on ~12K Solaris desktops and ~5K linux desktops, most of the data was on Netapp filers so if someone HAD to have access to the data from windows we just reshared the data using CIFS and gave only those select users access to the share point.
Slashdot Mirror
Doh, hate to reply to myself but now that I have read a bit more into the Athlon64 data sheet I see where things are happening, for DDR400 DDR the Athlon64 is limited to 2 unbuffered DIMM's:
e _papers_and_tech_docs/24659.PDF
-- Up to three unbuffered DIMMs according to the loading described in Table 3 on page 16
-- Up to four registered DIMMs (note DDR400 not available on registered DIMMs)
The controller provides programmable control of DRAM timing parameters to support the following
memory speeds:
-- 100-MHz (DDR200) PC-1600 DIMMs
-- 133-MHz (DDR266) PC-2100 DIMMs
-- 166-MHz (DDR333) PC-2700 DIMMs
-- 200-MHz (DDR400) PC-3200 DIMMs (unbuffered DIMMs only, two maximum)
So with cheap unregistered DIMM's you are only going to get to either 2GB at DDR400 or 3GB at DDR333. I guess AMD's engineer's didn't figure it was worth the cost to support more ram on their lower end chip where the typical user would never get near the limit due to costs anyways.
This is all from http://www.amd.com/us-en/assets/content_type/whit
Actually the memory controller is on the CPU so there any limitation should be with the CPU and be common to all three boards. I really can't see where the artificially low max memory counts are coming from, the Athlon64 supports either 4 registered DIMM's (8GB total), or 3 unbuffered DIMM's (6GB total). Of course most people who are buying an Athlon64 instead of an Athlon64 FX or Opteron are not going to spend the huge sums necessary for 2GB registered DIMM's =)
Exactly, forget red light camera's, it's easy to go through an intersection just as the light turns red, just install similar camera's that are activated by the IR reciever and take pictures of anyone going through once the IR code has been recieved, you can't possibly say "oops I accidently activated that illegal IR transmitter".
In civilized places passive radar jammers are perfectly legal because all they do is take the incoming radiation and rebroadcast it with a slight delay that throws off the revieving unit in the radar gun.
The 800mhz to 1.x ghz range just isn't enough for anyone, anymore.
What are you on? Cause I want some. Seriously my main machine is a 1.2Ghz Athlon and I play games, encode audio, do 3D rendering, etc on it all the time. A 1Ghz Pentium-M would be even faster than my machine so it should be WAY more than enough for anything you are going to run on a tablet. If the input method is condusive to what you need to run then I really, really doubt the speed of the cpu will be an issue, and by keeping speed down to a reasonable level they can actually get a usable battery life out of the things.
the email we've known for decades
A bit of hyperbole methinks. I've probably had an email address longer than 99.99% of even slashdotters and I've only had mine for a single decade. Spam is becoming such a problem that even old stalwarts like me are taking drastic action, just recently I added a procmail rule to route all email not addressed specifically to me into the bit bucket, it breaks BCC but dropped my spam by ~90%.
Then you've never seen a good IDE RAID controller. Particularly the ones from 3ware have an i960 decendant as coprocessors for communications and parity calculations for RAID5. These boards can saturate a 33/32 PCI bus and very nearly a 66/64 one, doesn't get much faster than that. Of course since there are only a few 10K RPM SATA drives and no 15K RPM ones DB apps are still best served by SCSI or FC.
What I'm saying is that without Poseiden two people potentially died. My mother or one of the other lifeguards might have noticed them eventually, perhaps even soon enough to stop them from drowning, but perhaps not. I don't know what the average stats are for a pool that size but I would guess a near drowning or two per month isn't all that unusual. Put thousands of kids, many with no swimming experience into a large pool with only a handfull of lifeguards and I think you will always have the potential for things to go wrong, Poseiden just lessens the chances significantly and is IMHO a great use of technology (computer vision in particular, an area I was going to study before leaving college to join the real world).
My mother has saved 2 lifes as a result of Poseiden. She is a life guard at one of the first US sites to have it installed and twice she has had it alert her to a person at the bottom of the pool. She says that neither time could she see the person from her chair. The system is not without problems, for instance the water arobics classes move so little from place to place that Poseiden will often flag people as being immobile, and the initial training was quite agrivating with almost constant false alarms, but overall it is definitly worth the cost and agrevation. Btw those two saves were in about 6 months of operations.
or more likely Painst Shop Pro. PSP Has 90+% of the features of Photoshop and basically all of the ones that anyone who is not a pro will use. Not only that but it's cheaper than even the Lite version of Photoshop.
More RAM=better battery life (to a point)
This is because the OS will cache the disk fairly agressivly if extra ram is present and refreshing ram is nothing compared to spinning up the HDD.
No, but they should have tested the code before they deployed it, they should have had a backout plan, and once they realized they had an unexpected problem that backout plan should have been put into place. That's basic change management procedures and the bare minimum that should be done. Of course it's a state agency so the coding was probably done by HS dropouts at some contracter who made a mint and the new system was implemented by desperate sysadmins who can actually live on the cruddy state salary.
Maya Personal Learning Edition has been available since 2002. Unfortunatly plugins don't work, it comes with almost no textures, and it watermarks your output. I'm still using my educational copy of 3DSMaxR2 when I feel like messing around with 3D.
Reminds me of the HP tech that came out to replace the dead disk in our AV system's RAID array, for some reason when he plugged the new disk in the controller started recreating the array, FROM the new disk instead of TO it! Luckily all the data was mearly local cache of the corporate AV repository, instead of real data loss we just had a slow WAN for a couple days =)
Former coworker told me about his first real sysadmin job. Running RAID5 on a cluster of Netware servers. He was telling the CIO about how a single disk failure would go by without a problem, so the CIO pulled a random disk, no problem, then he opened his mouth and talked about how a single system failure would not effect their largest customer who ran on that cluster, well the CIO asks him if he's sure about that, he says not really but he believes so. The CIO tells him his job depends on it as he pulls the plug from one of the clustered systems, luckily the customer never noticed but man talk about trial by fire =)
He probably can't hear the difference because he's tone deaf =) I have exceptionally good hearing (I've produced a couple albums) and I can guarentee you there are people that hear the difference beteween even 192Kbit MP3's and CD's (especially with a bad encoder). I personally use LAME with the -extreme preset (I've heard there are better choices in newer builds but my environment is setup and I can rarely hear any artifacts). This spits out MP3's at ~200-220Kbps VBR, and for the most part they are indistinguishable from the CD source. I also tried OOG at the best quality that the visual encoder would allow and AAC files at the top quality that iTunes for Mac would allow, both I could pick out from the MP3 and the PCM WAV file I used for testing. I use a SB Extigy with Sennheiser headphones, neither terribly expensive but both good quality.
Btw the main developer of Lustre is a really cool dude. I had some questions about snapshotting filesystems on linux, he had done some preliminary work on one similar to Netapp's for linux. I asked him about his work and if he knew about any similar work. He said his work was on hold indefinitly while he worked his paying gig on Lustre but that if he ever got Lustre complete enough that he didn't have to work 80+ hour weeks he would probably take it up again, he also pointed me to some solutions that he thought might fit my needs. Unfortunatly right now there really aren't any non-commercial ones that do what I want, but I'm hoping that the Samba team will take up windows shadow copy service model from Windows 2003 which is almost exactly what I want.
Actually for $500 the best sounding system you could find would probably be an iPod with some mid range Sennheisers. I absolutely love mine and the sound from it is excellent.
Actually they are mostly right. When you use GPL'd software you are getting that software for free (as in beer), but it does come with some obligations (the "hidden" cost), those include making available free of charge and without further incumberance any changes you have made to the software before releasing it. If your business model is such that secrecy of the OS behind your router is important than GPL'd software is NOT the place to go looking. If you want to make a cheap piece of hardware with minimal investment in the OS and sling those in high volume then GPL'd software may be a good choice.
Actually the fact that copy and paste works seemlessly through COM IS the big advantage that office made possible. Before that you would have had to save to some intermediary format and then imported and reformatted the data. The fact that those Office users can just copy and paste the data is what made Office so special when it was first introduced. Btw I would never overestimate the average office users, I have to support them all the time.
3,125 320GB Maxtor HDD's @ $283= $884,375
391 8 bay 4U rackmount encluses @ $140= $54,740
391 4 Channel IDE controllers @ $17= $6,647
391 CPU+Mobo+Ram combo's @$100 = $39,100
22 racks @ $328= $7,216
17 24 port switches @ $61 = $1,037
4 Spools of Cat5 cabling @ $40/1000' = $160
800 Cat5 connectors @ $10/100 = $80
Grand total = $991,355
So roughly $1 Million with shipping for a cheap arse, cruddy, minimilistic way of doing it.
A fellow tech had a service call at a client that had been around so long that their info wasn't even in our "new" dispatching system (dating back to the early 90's). They had a remote office that was having some problems communicating back with the main office mainframe complex. Said tech goes out to client site and finds out that the way they communicate back to the mainframe is a custom app running on an origional IBM PC XT and the reason it's not working is that the HDD has wonked out. Well he does the old rap the drive on the countertop trick to get it spun up and tells them that he will look for a replacement drive but he states very ademantly that he makes no promises. Well after having a good laugh with the parts dispatcher he finds the FRU number in an old manual and does a search, low and behold one of our third party parts distributer has 15 of them IN STOCK! He orders one and then finds an ancient copy of ghost that can deal with the old system. He attaches the new drive and copies the partition over, viola, a system that will probably run for another 15+ years.
Obviously you weren't using computers routinely before Office came out. The entire idea of using COM to link the distinct parts of the Office "suite" together was quite inventive and REALLY improves some peoples productivity (being able to retrieve data from the DB into the spreadsheet, manipulate the data and output the results into a wordprocessing doc was the only thing that made my job triaging helpdesk tickets possible). Beyond that it was a huge profit win for MS because they could convince companies to buy the whole suite at a reduced price, not realizing that overall they were probably paying 60-70% more than if they just bought people the apps they needed (the power users who use Office's cross-app features are probably only 30-40%, my previous comments notwithstanding).
Ah, but a hdd which dies is not necessarily defective. HDD's are electro-mechanical devices with a designed lifetime and a stated MTBF. Beyond that the manufacturer usually only warants the part to be defective in parts for a limited time, this used to be 3 years for consumer drives and 5 for enterprise drives (SCSI or Fibre), today the majority of the IDE manufacturers have cut this to 1 year because their margins are so slim, yet people continue to buy these drives knowing that the manufacturer only has confidence that they will last 1 year. If people wanted higher reliability drives they would buy the drives with the longer waranties and pay the increased price. Basically it's a price/reliability tradeoff and the majority of the market has chosen to go cheap. Now when a manufacturer has a widespread problem like the deathstars and fails to offer a recall THEN I am all for beating them up because they are knowingly allowing a bad product to remain on the market, other than those situations I EXPECT drives to fail, it's just a matter of how soon. If the data is important than I will be using RAID and have backups.
yp+ is the linux name for NIS+, NIS+ is standard in most large Solaris environments and is not difficult to configure under linux. As to NFS security, it's simple to configure, just see This link at docs.sun.com, it tells you how to enable KERBEROSEv5 authentication including traffic and authentication encryption. I'd hardly say that is undocumented! A NIS+ client and K5 client libraries should be available under any Unix and if you run windows there are commercial offerings from Hummingbirds and others (don't bitch about costs because you already went down the MS pay as you go road). SMB/CIFS is fine for some things but it does not mesh with the native UNIX security model so using it and complaining about security is just ignorant. Btw my setup is doable in the real world, we had it on ~12K Solaris desktops and ~5K linux desktops, most of the data was on Netapp filers so if someone HAD to have access to the data from windows we just reshared the data using CIFS and gave only those select users access to the share point.