When I want a copy of Science, I take a short bike ride to my local public library. It's good excercise, and it saves me quite a bit of money.
Granted, this doesn't solve the problem with distribution in the Third-World, but I think that can be solved mainly through grants and generosity on Science's part. Third-World doctors are unlikely to subscribe due to the financial costs involved, so Science isn't going to be losing any potential paying customers anyways.
RAID is not a backup solution. RAID improves reliability in the face of drive failure, meaning that it will ensure that your rm -fr/ will execute even if you lose a drive in the process.
I don't mean to be a troll, but in my experience, Phoenix is no real improvement over Mozilla in terms of startup speed, at least for OS/2. Phoenix starts up about three seconds faster than Mozilla on a 200MHz 80586 with 64MB of RAM running OS/2 Warp v3, which isn't saying much when Mozilla takes damn near a minute to open.
Most are. Most PC software can still run under the DOS window of 2K/XP, except for those games that don't have any speed control and were responsible for the "TURBO" buttons on a lot of XT and AT class machines. And they have better hardware. Most XT through 486 systems have zero collectible value, and aren't usually worth the trouble to set up, unless they're already running and doing duty as a word processor or something. But they've got no soul.
I have a 133MHz AMD 5x86 (basically a faster 486) with 32MB of RAM. For a good eight years it ran OS/2 and functioned as an in-house news server. In that incarnation, it easily got uptimes in the 30-50 day range. It now runs NetBSD 1.5.2 and functions as an in-house DNS/DHCP/NIS/SMTP/IMAP server and easily gets 60+ day uptimes. Just because it's old doesn't mean it's less reliable.
I find it's just the opposite, in fact. This machine is using the original processor, the original memory, and the original power supply. Nothing except the hard drive (a WD Caviar *yuck*) has been replaced since it was bought in 1993. How long do you think these new AMD XP 2800+ or Pentium 4 3GHz that throw out heat like an acetylene torch are going to last?
I would assume so. Firewire drives are of the same construction as ATA drives, just with a different interface. I'm not sure about booting though, as that would probably take firmware upgrade in the BIOS.
I'm guessing some form of RAID is used. Either striping or JBOD would make sense here, although they'd better be damn certain the drives don't fail, as either of them leaves you SOL if a drive fails and you haven't been backing up.
Beware the difference between megaBITS and megaBYTES. mb is megaBIT and MB is megaBYTE. One byte is eight times larger than one bit, so it turns out IEEE 1384 is slower by a factor of two than ATA/100.
Also remember that this is interface bandwidth we're talking about. One fast 50MB/s drive is all that's needed to swamp an IEEE 1384 interface, whereas even ATA/100 can handle two of those suckers on a channel (ignoring master/slave issues).
Re:Over 10 years after DEC introduced Alpha ....
on
AMD's 64-bit Plot
·
· Score: 2
You're right on both PA-RISC and MIPS. PA-RISC was 48-bit in 1986, and wasn't moved to 64-bit until 1996. MIPS were originally designed by a Stanford research team, but the design was licensed by both Digital and SGI, and a couple embedded companies. I guess I should have done some checking beforehand.
There is something else... a 64bit app may even be *slower* as the cache can only hold half the number of words, given an equal cache size. Cache misses are a huge performance hit these days, as RAM is much slower than Cache RAM.
Not true. Not only do cache segments not have to be 64-bits apart, most 64-bit CPUs have at least 512kB of cache, and some (i.e. PA-RISC, POWER, UltraSPARC) can have up to 16MB of cache. Not even Intel's Xeon or Itanium can match that.
Re:Over 10 years after DEC introduced Alpha ....
on
AMD's 64-bit Plot
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
One thing to remember is that the Alpha was not the first 64-bit processor. Before it were HP's PA-RISC in 1986, U. of Tokyo's TRON design in 1987, and DEC's MIPS R4000 in 1991. Sun/Fujitsu moved the SPARC to 64 bits in late 1992, and IBM was late when it moved the POWER in 1995. So 64-bit processors were neither unheard-of nor new in 1992.
4. Thy application program and data shall all fit in 640K of RAM. After all, it's ten times what you had on a CP/M machine. Keep holy this 640K of RAM, and clutter it not with device drivers, memory managers, or other things that might make thy computer useful.
What do you mean? My 640kB 8088 could run both MS-DOS 2.11, TP/M\/Valdocs, and CP/M. Don't trash CP/M...:)
Sure, this thing can do 100 teraflops, but does that mean that it has any intelligence? That it can learn? Those are the true qualities of the human brain, and without those ASCI Purple is just an incredibly large and expensive calculator.
That seems to be the fear of many people, and the fear that is mentioned in the article. I receive around 80 e-mails a day, about 40 of which are spam. This doesn't include the spam that is caught and deleted by my procmail filters.
I don't see how people can complain that it takes so long to delete spam. I just read all my e-mail sequentially, and hit 'd' whenever I encounter anything that says my breasts can be larger, my penis can be firmer, or I can make a kajillion dollars a day. It's that simple.
The article mentions that multiple RocketDrives could be used in parallel. That would seem only to be practical on 64-bit PCI buses. One RocketDrive transfers 80MB/s, which is close to the maximum sustained bandwidth for 32-bit 33MHz PCI. 132MB/s is the burst bandwidth, and cannot be sustained for very long.
In fact, I would think this drive would interfere with other devices that rely on the PCI bus. I doubt you could get 100Mbps (~12.5MB/s) on the same PCI bus.
I don't know if it's the monitor itself that's causing problems, or the way it is configured. I have gone into many businesses, and they are running their monitors at 60Hz refresh rate, and quite often have flourescent lighting overhead. Almost all monitors these days can hit 75Hz at 1024x768, and 85Hz at 800x600. It's just that the user doesn't know that the monitor can (and should) be run at a higher refresh rate, or that the IT staff has been too lazy to set the monitors higher to begin with.
Businesses should also consider getting high-quality monitors, such as the Sony Trinitron, for employees who will be using the computer for long periods of time. A Trinitron is very noticeably better than the competition. It takes 12+ hours of continuous use on my five year old Trinitron monitor for me to develop eye strain. I run it at 1152x864, with a 77.4kHz vertical refresh rate, and an 85Hz horizontal refresh rate.
(Of course, if this [adoption] starts happening seriously, the Open Office site will need more bandwidth...)
I don't think that's necessarily true. There are dozens of mirrors all over the world, and I think they can handle the bandwidth, assuming people spread the load between the mirrors.
How the hell did I get 30 moderator points on brak? I just moderated a few days ago, and I thought 5 was the most one could get. It looks like some bugs have to be worked out.
Not quite. Sun's LX50 mentions support for the three Ultra3 SCSI hard drives, as does the 1RU 1000, but the 1RU 1000 also has two internal drivebays for ATA hard drives, which Sun doesn't mention. All in all, I think they are about as similar as any other 1U server out there.
The article says that this is limited to people from the United States. Couldn't someone setup a proxy or NAT server in the US to make WB's servers think that the request comes from the US?
Since the site appears to be getting kind of slow, and also seems to be a personally-hosted site, I have set up mirrors here (courtesy of Earlham College) and here (courtesy of UW-Madison).
You can turn a cell phone off and the calls will still get voice mail. Landline phones just keep ringing and ringing, which is not good when telemarketers call very early on weekend mornings.
My landline-based phone has a nice switch that will adjust the ringer volume, so I can turn the ringer off if I want to. I think I've seen that option on all phones, actually.
Slashdot Mirror
When I want a copy of Science, I take a short bike ride to my local public library. It's good excercise, and it saves me quite a bit of money.
Granted, this doesn't solve the problem with distribution in the Third-World, but I think that can be solved mainly through grants and generosity on Science's part. Third-World doctors are unlikely to subscribe due to the financial costs involved, so Science isn't going to be losing any potential paying customers anyways.
RAID is not a backup solution. RAID improves reliability in the face of drive failure, meaning that it will ensure that your rm -fr / will execute even if you lose a drive in the process.
True. I get around that by starting up Mozilla over ssh from one of our GNU/Linux or BSD boxen.
I don't mean to be a troll, but in my experience, Phoenix is no real improvement over Mozilla in terms of startup speed, at least for OS/2. Phoenix starts up about three seconds faster than Mozilla on a 200MHz 80586 with 64MB of RAM running OS/2 Warp v3, which isn't saying much when Mozilla takes damn near a minute to open.
I have a 133MHz AMD 5x86 (basically a faster 486) with 32MB of RAM. For a good eight years it ran OS/2 and functioned as an in-house news server. In that incarnation, it easily got uptimes in the 30-50 day range. It now runs NetBSD 1.5.2 and functions as an in-house DNS/DHCP/NIS/SMTP/IMAP server and easily gets 60+ day uptimes. Just because it's old doesn't mean it's less reliable.
I find it's just the opposite, in fact. This machine is using the original processor, the original memory, and the original power supply. Nothing except the hard drive (a WD Caviar *yuck*) has been replaced since it was bought in 1993. How long do you think these new AMD XP 2800+ or Pentium 4 3GHz that throw out heat like an acetylene torch are going to last?
I would assume so. Firewire drives are of the same construction as ATA drives, just with a different interface. I'm not sure about booting though, as that would probably take firmware upgrade in the BIOS.
I'm guessing some form of RAID is used. Either striping or JBOD would make sense here, although they'd better be damn certain the drives don't fail, as either of them leaves you SOL if a drive fails and you haven't been backing up.
Beware the difference between megaBITS and megaBYTES. mb is megaBIT and MB is megaBYTE. One byte is eight times larger than one bit, so it turns out IEEE 1384 is slower by a factor of two than ATA/100.
Also remember that this is interface bandwidth we're talking about. One fast 50MB/s drive is all that's needed to swamp an IEEE 1384 interface, whereas even ATA/100 can handle two of those suckers on a channel (ignoring master/slave issues).
You're right on both PA-RISC and MIPS. PA-RISC was 48-bit in 1986, and wasn't moved to 64-bit until 1996. MIPS were originally designed by a Stanford research team, but the design was licensed by both Digital and SGI, and a couple embedded companies. I guess I should have done some checking beforehand.
$50? For $20, I got a Promise ATA/100 card, which has functioned without a hitch for six months for me so far.
Not true. Not only do cache segments not have to be 64-bits apart, most 64-bit CPUs have at least 512kB of cache, and some (i.e. PA-RISC, POWER, UltraSPARC) can have up to 16MB of cache. Not even Intel's Xeon or Itanium can match that.
One thing to remember is that the Alpha was not the first 64-bit processor. Before it were HP's PA-RISC in 1986, U. of Tokyo's TRON design in 1987, and DEC's MIPS R4000 in 1991. Sun/Fujitsu moved the SPARC to 64 bits in late 1992, and IBM was late when it moved the POWER in 1995. So 64-bit processors were neither unheard-of nor new in 1992.
Sure, this thing can do 100 teraflops, but does that mean that it has any intelligence? That it can learn? Those are the true qualities of the human brain, and without those ASCI Purple is just an incredibly large and expensive calculator.
That seems to be the fear of many people, and the fear that is mentioned in the article. I receive around 80 e-mails a day, about 40 of which are spam. This doesn't include the spam that is caught and deleted by my procmail filters.
I don't see how people can complain that it takes so long to delete spam. I just read all my e-mail sequentially, and hit 'd' whenever I encounter anything that says my breasts can be larger, my penis can be firmer, or I can make a kajillion dollars a day. It's that simple.
I think people just need to learn some patience.
The article mentions that multiple RocketDrives could be used in parallel. That would seem only to be practical on 64-bit PCI buses. One RocketDrive transfers 80MB/s, which is close to the maximum sustained bandwidth for 32-bit 33MHz PCI. 132MB/s is the burst bandwidth, and cannot be sustained for very long.
In fact, I would think this drive would interfere with other devices that rely on the PCI bus. I doubt you could get 100Mbps (~12.5MB/s) on the same PCI bus.
I don't know if it's the monitor itself that's causing problems, or the way it is configured. I have gone into many businesses, and they are running their monitors at 60Hz refresh rate, and quite often have flourescent lighting overhead. Almost all monitors these days can hit 75Hz at 1024x768, and 85Hz at 800x600. It's just that the user doesn't know that the monitor can (and should) be run at a higher refresh rate, or that the IT staff has been too lazy to set the monitors higher to begin with.
Businesses should also consider getting high-quality monitors, such as the Sony Trinitron, for employees who will be using the computer for long periods of time. A Trinitron is very noticeably better than the competition. It takes 12+ hours of continuous use on my five year old Trinitron monitor for me to develop eye strain. I run it at 1152x864, with a 77.4kHz vertical refresh rate, and an 85Hz horizontal refresh rate.
I don't think that's necessarily true. There are dozens of mirrors all over the world, and I think they can handle the bandwidth, assuming people spread the load between the mirrors.
How the hell did I get 30 moderator points on brak? I just moderated a few days ago, and I thought 5 was the most one could get. It looks like some bugs have to be worked out.
Oh well, off to splurge before it gets fixed! :)
Not quite. Sun's LX50 mentions support for the three Ultra3 SCSI hard drives, as does the 1RU 1000, but the 1RU 1000 also has two internal drivebays for ATA hard drives, which Sun doesn't mention. All in all, I think they are about as similar as any other 1U server out there.
The article says that this is limited to people from the United States. Couldn't someone setup a proxy or NAT server in the US to make WB's servers think that the request comes from the US?
Yet another /.'ing. Mirrors up at Earlham College and at UW-Madison.
Be warned that I am planning on taking down the UW-Madison server for repairs and upgrades later tonight, so Earlham is probably your best bet.
Since the site appears to be getting kind of slow, and also seems to be a personally-hosted site, I have set up mirrors here (courtesy of Earlham College) and here (courtesy of UW-Madison).