-has decent horsepower at 1 GHz, considering dimensions and power consumption
-has loads of I/O interfaces, that can be put to good use (for example, USB ports for ISDN or analog modem or for printers- good use for printer server!)
-is very low power. IIRC it uses 20W peak, less on average. Less power means less ventilation needs, less ventilators, less hasle with oxidation and dust buildup, less noise.
-two builtin Ethernets let you use it as a firewall. If you plug in one more into a free PCI slot, you can skip the ethernet switch, that is, if yo have up to two machines to connect to the switch. Other possibility would be to plug in a WiFi card and cover the premises with wireless also (usefull if you have notebooks etc.)
- it has two IDE channels, which means that you can connect four disks to it (like two RAID-1 arrays). Very usefull for local noncritical data that you need to/might want to use from all your local machines.
-without loads of troubles, energy inefficiency (UPS), or costs, it can be battery powered.
-it has builtin AC97 soundcard and can be used for sound and video player (dvd, divx etc)
-it fits inside standard ATX housing and connects to the standard ATX power supply
-it is relatively abundant and not very expensive. Here in SLovenia I can get new CL for some $180 +VAT. Not cheap, but not that expensive, considering that everything else is built-in. Essentially, you need just a power supply, DDR RAM stick and disk.
AFAIK, none of the other proposed solutions can offer all this.
OTOH, if price seems to steep for EPIA or you would like to reuse something that you already have, that's another matter.
You could *underclock* old Athlon or Tualatin to get it to run cooler, fit all PCI slots with Ethernet cards and/or cheap IDE cards and use it as a switch/firewall, small data storage point, WiFI acces point, printer server, fax machine etc etc etc.
I have tried to patch a kernel with this for a bazillion times, always with explosive result...
I hate ti drive the nails in the coffin, but...
on
An Online ID Registry
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
this is really stupid.
Autor states that electronic signig and autentication never really caught on with geeks, but for some reason, he thinks that just about everybody will be thrilled with his implementation.
What a great concept ! Have your vital info notarised, scan it,s end it around etc...
Yeah! What an imoprovement over PGP etc, where you simply send a few tens of bytes of your public key...
Not to mention the smallish issue of the security of that central authorisation point.
While the official key registrars have to be secure places, they are not strictly centralised.
If AL-Quaeda guys nuke one of them, no big deal for the rest of correspondents. They would just use some other registrar.
Besides, those places hold encrypted data, so they can be blown up, but getting intel out of them is not very probable.
NEw scheme tries to be PGP Lite, just for cheap/free online services, but I don't see where the Lite part regarding implementation comes in...
It can accomodate up to 12 SATA drives in to a few RAID groups, so you can have for example two RAID-5 groups with two spare drives.
When backup is needed, you could unmount one group of drives, unplug it and plug in & mount another.
For further convenience, you could have drives already boxed in gorup of five in handy enclosures, so all you would heve to do is just reconnect 10 cables once per month.
To be safe(r), label the connectors and each drive in the group clearly (1-5 or A to E etc) to avoid mess when accessing data in the future...
Hard drives are not so expensive, neither is a solid hardware RAID card, or a few extra (S)ATA cards if you can't afford hardware RAID.
Just watch where your archive is and your data should be relatively safe...
But in essence I guess it all depends on your real needs. Does someone's life depend on that data ? Is all that data equally valuable or is there some core portion that is better not to loose and other part that could eventually be lost ?
I have dual Opteron on TYAN K8W with Gentoo Linux & statically linked GRUB bootloader and it doesn't work, while vanilla 2.6.5 kernel works O.K.
It's weird. It dies after loading, without a single comment or a beep. NOthing. Screen just remains blank for a few seconds, when it wakes up, goes through anoteher BIOS power-up checklist, loads and runs GRUB...
doesn't that invalidate some patents on CPU caches, like recently mentioned Intergraph's (from their Clipper CPU) patent, which caused significant grief to Intel and AMD ?
>Winged aircraft cannot hover without some form of downward thrust. Basic aerodynamic physics here.
I agree with you on all main issues, except this one. OP talks about winged ballon_like_structure, not an aircraft. Since it is less dense than air or at least it can be less dense, it certainly could hover..
I am still not sure if this is possible (the part with compressed air used to change boyancy), but even if it is, it has a few big problems.
First, air is relatively thin medium even at sea level altitude- something around 1.2 kg/m3. At 10 km height it only has around 0.4 kg/m3
So, in order to be able to lift anything, it has to be less dense than that-much less if it aims to reach high altitudes. At 10 km altitude air density is only cca. 0.4 kg/m3 !
In order to have lift capabilities of say 10 tonnes (is this 20.000 lbs non-metric ? ) it would have to have volume of more than 25.000 m3-provided that plain does not have any mass, that would lift only payload.
Since this is outside of technical reality, one can guestimate that needed volume would be at least 3-4 times bigger- 100.000 m3 !
That is equal to a cube with 100m x 100m x 10 m !
That would be some big ass airplane...
Besides, changes of boyancy could be minimal and so the generated energy would be relatively small, so the plane would be dog slooow.
This means that it would be only usefull for carrying cargo, for which we already have cheap and suitable means.
How many of such planes would be needed to replace one supertanker ?
And how would such plane fare in the case of turbulence ?
I thought that whole difference between S939 and S949 was that one pin that is needed for 8xx.
After looking at pinout, there seems no reason for rearrangements. HTs get premiere position at the edges, convieninently arranged so they can be routed without fuss and everything else seems to be adapted to this.
I really don't see the issue of having extra 2 layers on board. Since NorthBridge is in the CPU, that should outweight the price difference of the board.
Besides, when one pays quite a price for Opteron, why should extra few bucks for more layers in board make such a difference ?
IMHO no board should have less than 6 layers anyway. Server MBs need them for stability and overclocker MBs need them for speed...
Yeah ! AMD64 rulez ! Now if the could just...
on
AMD Back in the Black
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
...stop being such assholes and decide to use Socket 940 for all the models, stop charging insane amounts for those extra two HT links on Opterons 8xx and use some smart diferentiating qualities between subfamilies (like amount of L2 cache, for example) instead of number of HT links, Socket models etc crap, this 64-bit idea would have a whole lot more appeal...
I'm using it because:
-I need 64 bit integer ops
- I need performance increase due to 1 Mb L2 and much bigger register count than in x86
- I need better scalability than with Athlon MP.
Current Athlon MP offerings are pale compared to Opteron. With Athlon MP, there is some performance penalty to be paid when going SMP, due to different factors. One is pure frequency of available CPUs, other is sharing of the bus bandwidth between two CPUs, yet another is relatively old chipsets for SMP Athlon MP systems, compared to uni CPU Athlon boards...
Besides that, poor old Athlon can't even begin to compete with Opteron regarding bus bandwith. Even more, Opteron needs memory bus only for memory comunication. Everything else goes through HT ports, while old AThlon has to scram it all through one bus.
So, even though I only use 2 Gb per system at the moment, 64 bit architecture shows real speed advantage. After prices of RAM fall a bit, I'l probably go to 4 or 8 Gb and/or faster Opteron, but neither is criticall at the moment.
I can certainly wait a year or two with that...
How come I'm using it on my dual Opteron 240 (on Tyan S2885) ?
It's true that many things doesn't work in 64-bit mode (loke OpenOffice, Abiword etc), but system WORKS !
By "system" I mean X, cups, samba, KDE, Gnome etc.
It works so well that I have bought two dualCPU machines (update of two aged workstation machines-P4 2 GHz and Tualatin 1.4 Ghz @ 1.7 GHz) and I'm waiting for a third to arrive- that one will replace fileserver/printeserver/firewall/etc machine....
Gentoo on Opteron works, and unpolished details are getting its shine rapidly.
I use:
Motherboard TYAN Thunder K8W S2885
2x Opteron 240
2 Gb of PC2700 ECC Reg (512 Mb modules)
GeForce 4 Ti4200
HDD EIDE 120 Gb WDC
And even more, why didn't he publish the CFLAGS and CxxFLAGS used ?
What is a point of using -O2 if one misses the rest ?
I have discovered the Gentoo twoo weeks ago, after trying with just about every Suse and many other distros.
I used "-O3 -pentium3 -msse -mmmx" and I don't need a chronometer to know that this thing runs circles around Suse 8.2 in KDE...
On the whole, out of bazillion or so OS programs, there have to be some "rotten eggs", if nothing else.
But if this means that M$ is going to swing its patent stick on OS, it seems that Bill is to loose this fight.
Linux is here to stay, just like P2P, period.
In one form or another. Besides, this can be an area, where it can also hurt to be big company.
Whenever M$ gets the upper hand, it can kill a guy or a small company at best. That is, if the guy is in US- otherwise probably not (so easily).
But whenever OS guys find something dirty inside M$ merchandise, they have someone to sue. Someone who can't just evaporate and who has big $$$...
It seems that author forgot one more concept-concept of time in simulation. He says that no simulator could simulate answers faster than they appear in "our universe". But time is a matter of simulation. While I can be simulated, I can not possibly know whether my process is going smoothly or system is swaping like mad (not enough RAM?;o)
Besides, I can't know anything about the "speed of my time vs. real-time"...
I have seen something like this on our local fair and even got a chance to drive it with my celular phone .
Whole thing was done by a few hardware guys, backed by our GSM network operator...
No, but you can make very effective dead portable TV from the dead laptop, providing you have PCI slot for TV-tuner card.
Bonus is, that the card can be dead, too;o)
Don't be stupid. Picture shows 100 MHz square wave. What do you expect at these frequency ?
Imperfections might very well be due to impedance mismatch etc and not by fault of signal generator.
All in all, nice hack. I wanted to do it myself, but signal generators on the MB these days are very limited to be of real use for me. They offer a few frequencies and that's it.
Some older models were much more versatile, having ability to synthesize any frequency from 0 to over 100 MHz with microHerz resolution...
If you piss on people, don't hide. Post your name and credentials.
PS: Congrats to Samba team. Your work keeps my network alive. Not that all is perfect, I have a few headaches, but it might be I have misconfigures something.
Main thing is, IT WORKS, IT'S STABLE, IT'S FREE !!!
Slashdot Mirror
Main attractions for your application:
-It is small (17x17cm)
-has decent horsepower at 1 GHz, considering dimensions and power consumption
-has loads of I/O interfaces, that can be put to good use (for example, USB ports for ISDN or analog modem or for printers- good use for printer server!)
-is very low power. IIRC it uses 20W peak, less on average. Less power means less ventilation needs, less ventilators, less hasle with oxidation and dust buildup, less noise.
-two builtin Ethernets let you use it as a firewall. If you plug in one more into a free PCI slot, you can skip the ethernet switch, that is, if yo have up to two machines to connect to the switch. Other possibility would be to plug in a WiFi card and cover the premises with wireless also (usefull if you have notebooks etc.)
- it has two IDE channels, which means that you can connect four disks to it (like two RAID-1 arrays). Very usefull for local noncritical data that you need to/might want to use from all your local machines.
-without loads of troubles, energy inefficiency (UPS), or costs, it can be battery powered.
-it has builtin AC97 soundcard and can be used for sound and video player (dvd, divx etc)
-it fits inside standard ATX housing and connects to the standard ATX power supply
-it is relatively abundant and not very expensive.
Here in SLovenia I can get new CL for some $180 +VAT. Not cheap, but not that expensive, considering that everything else is built-in.
Essentially, you need just a power supply, DDR RAM stick and disk.
AFAIK, none of the other proposed solutions can offer all this.
OTOH, if price seems to steep for EPIA or you would like to reuse something that you already have, that's another matter.
You could *underclock* old Athlon or Tualatin to get it to run cooler, fit all PCI slots with Ethernet cards and/or cheap IDE cards and use it as a switch/firewall, small data storage point, WiFI acces point, printer server, fax machine etc etc etc.
Furthermore, when will it work on Opteron ?
I have tried to patch a kernel with this for a bazillion times, always with explosive result...
this is really stupid. Autor states that electronic signig and autentication never really caught on with geeks, but for some reason, he thinks that just about everybody will be thrilled with his implementation. What a great concept ! Have your vital info notarised, scan it,s end it around etc... Yeah! What an imoprovement over PGP etc, where you simply send a few tens of bytes of your public key... Not to mention the smallish issue of the security of that central authorisation point. While the official key registrars have to be secure places, they are not strictly centralised. If AL-Quaeda guys nuke one of them, no big deal for the rest of correspondents. They would just use some other registrar. Besides, those places hold encrypted data, so they can be blown up, but getting intel out of them is not very probable. NEw scheme tries to be PGP Lite, just for cheap/free online services, but I don't see where the Lite part regarding implementation comes in...
Like, for example 3Ware's 8506-12 ?
It can accomodate up to 12 SATA drives in to a few RAID groups, so you can have for example two RAID-5 groups with two spare drives.
When backup is needed, you could unmount one group of drives, unplug it and plug in & mount another.
For further convenience, you could have drives already boxed in gorup of five in handy enclosures, so all you would heve to do is just reconnect 10 cables once per month.
To be safe(r), label the connectors and each drive in the group clearly (1-5 or A to E etc) to avoid
mess when accessing data in the future...
Hard drives are not so expensive, neither is a solid hardware RAID card, or a few extra (S)ATA cards if you can't afford hardware RAID.
Just watch where your archive is and your data should be relatively safe...
But in essence I guess it all depends on your real needs.
Does someone's life depend on that data ?
Is all that data equally valuable or is there some core portion that is better not to loose and other part that could eventually be lost ?
I see your bollocks and raise another crap.
I have dual Opteron on TYAN K8W with Gentoo Linux & statically linked GRUB bootloader and it doesn't work, while vanilla 2.6.5 kernel works O.K.
It's weird. It dies after loading, without a single comment or a beep. NOthing. Screen just remains blank for a few seconds, when it wakes up, goes through anoteher BIOS power-up checklist, loads and runs GRUB...
Not to mention that support for NTFS doesn't compile. This should be another rc version, not minor version bump...
Besides that mistake, you have made many others.
LCD can musster up to some 120 dpi and it has other problems, too.
Power useage, for example. Good LCD is almost bound to have backlight, but even without it, it cincumes way more than this thing.
This is due to the fact that it has to be periodically refreshed, and this takes power.
eInk bsed stuff needs power jus when changing display constent, not for refresh.
Besides, it uses polarisers, so it can never look wquite lake paper, which is essential for this application...
doesn't that invalidate some patents on CPU caches, like recently mentioned Intergraph's (from their Clipper CPU) patent, which caused significant grief to Intel and AMD ?
>Winged aircraft cannot hover without some form of downward thrust. Basic aerodynamic physics here.
I agree with you on all main issues, except this one. OP talks about winged ballon_like_structure, not an aircraft. Since it is less dense than air or at least it can be less dense, it certainly could hover..
I am still not sure if this is possible (the part with compressed air used to change boyancy), but even if it is, it has a few big problems. First, air is relatively thin medium even at sea level altitude- something around 1.2 kg/m3. At 10 km height it only has around 0.4 kg/m3
So, in order to be able to lift anything, it has to be less dense than that-much less if it aims to reach high altitudes. At 10 km altitude air density is only cca. 0.4 kg/m3 ! In order to have lift capabilities of say 10 tonnes (is this 20.000 lbs non-metric ? ) it would have to have volume of more than 25.000 m3-provided that plain does not have any mass, that would lift only payload.
Since this is outside of technical reality, one can guestimate that needed volume would be at least 3-4 times bigger- 100.000 m3 ! That is equal to a cube with 100m x 100m x 10 m !
That would be some big ass airplane...
Besides, changes of boyancy could be minimal and so the generated energy would be relatively small, so the plane would be dog slooow.
This means that it would be only usefull for carrying cargo, for which we already have cheap and suitable means.
How many of such planes would be needed to replace one supertanker ?
And how would such plane fare in the case of turbulence ?
_That_ would be an interesting sight...
Not true. Until now, AMD have sold immensely more chips with x86_64 technology than Intel, who sold precisely NONE.
Besides that, Prescott is quite a dissapontment for itself. Longer pipeline, larger dissipation, all in all slower chip- at least at current speeds.
Extra hardware for 64-bit operations isn't going to help here, just the opposite...
I thought that whole difference between S939 and S949 was that one pin that is needed for 8xx. After looking at pinout, there seems no reason for rearrangements. HTs get premiere position at the edges, convieninently arranged so they can be routed without fuss and everything else seems to be adapted to this.
I really don't see the issue of having extra 2 layers on board. Since NorthBridge is in the CPU, that should outweight the price difference of the board.
Besides, when one pays quite a price for Opteron, why should extra few bucks for more layers in board make such a difference ?
IMHO no board should have less than 6 layers anyway. Server MBs need them for stability and overclocker MBs need them for speed...
...stop being such assholes and decide to use Socket 940 for all the models, stop charging insane amounts for those extra two HT links on Opterons 8xx and use some smart diferentiating qualities between subfamilies (like amount of L2 cache, for example) instead of number of HT links, Socket models etc crap, this 64-bit idea would have a whole lot more appeal...
My guess is that it got shot down by Martian AAA fire...
I'm using it because: -I need 64 bit integer ops
- I need performance increase due to 1 Mb L2 and much bigger register count than in x86
- I need better scalability than with Athlon MP.
Current Athlon MP offerings are pale compared to Opteron.
With Athlon MP, there is some performance penalty to be paid when going SMP, due to different factors.
One is pure frequency of available CPUs, other is sharing of the bus bandwidth between two CPUs, yet another is relatively old chipsets for SMP Athlon MP systems, compared to uni CPU Athlon boards...
Besides that, poor old Athlon can't even begin to compete with Opteron regarding bus bandwith. Even more, Opteron needs memory bus only for memory comunication. Everything else goes through HT ports, while old AThlon has to scram it all through one bus.
So, even though I only use 2 Gb per system at the moment, 64 bit architecture shows real speed advantage. After prices of RAM fall a bit, I'l probably go to 4 or 8 Gb and/or faster Opteron, but neither is criticall at the moment.
I can certainly wait a year or two with that...
How come I'm using it on my dual Opteron 240 (on Tyan S2885) ?
It's true that many things doesn't work in 64-bit mode (loke OpenOffice, Abiword etc), but system WORKS ! By "system" I mean X, cups, samba, KDE, Gnome etc. It works so well that I have bought two dualCPU machines (update of two aged workstation machines-P4 2 GHz and Tualatin 1.4 Ghz @ 1.7 GHz) and I'm waiting for a third to arrive- that one will replace fileserver/printeserver/firewall/etc machine.... Gentoo on Opteron works, and unpolished details are getting its shine rapidly. I use: Motherboard TYAN Thunder K8W S2885 2x Opteron 240 2 Gb of PC2700 ECC Reg (512 Mb modules) GeForce 4 Ti4200 HDD EIDE 120 Gb WDC
...and that's why I have stopped fooling around with Suse and started using Gentoo...
One simple "emerge" does it all...
And even more, why didn't he publish the CFLAGS and CxxFLAGS used ?
What is a point of using -O2 if one misses the rest ?
I have discovered the Gentoo twoo weeks ago, after trying with just about every Suse and many other distros.
I used "-O3 -pentium3 -msse -mmmx" and I don't need a chronometer to know that this thing runs circles around Suse 8.2 in KDE...
On the whole, out of bazillion or so OS programs, there have to be some "rotten eggs", if nothing else. But if this means that M$ is going to swing its patent stick on OS, it seems that Bill is to loose this fight. Linux is here to stay, just like P2P, period. In one form or another. Besides, this can be an area, where it can also hurt to be big company. Whenever M$ gets the upper hand, it can kill a guy or a small company at best. That is, if the guy is in US- otherwise probably not (so easily). But whenever OS guys find something dirty inside M$ merchandise, they have someone to sue. Someone who can't just evaporate and who has big $$$...
It seems that author forgot one more concept-concept of time in simulation. He says that no simulator could simulate answers faster than they appear in "our universe". But time is a matter of simulation. While I can be simulated, I can not possibly know whether my process is going smoothly or system is swaping like mad (not enough RAM? ;o)
Besides, I can't know anything about the "speed of my time vs. real-time"...
I have seen something like this on our local fair and even got a chance to drive it with my celular phone . Whole thing was done by a few hardware guys, backed by our GSM network operator...
No, but you can make very effective dead portable TV from the dead laptop, providing you have PCI slot for TV-tuner card. Bonus is, that the card can be dead, too ;o)
Don't be stupid. Picture shows 100 MHz square wave. What do you expect at these frequency ? Imperfections might very well be due to impedance mismatch etc and not by fault of signal generator. All in all, nice hack. I wanted to do it myself, but signal generators on the MB these days are very limited to be of real use for me. They offer a few frequencies and that's it. Some older models were much more versatile, having ability to synthesize any frequency from 0 to over 100 MHz with microHerz resolution...
If you piss on people, don't hide. Post your name and credentials. PS: Congrats to Samba team. Your work keeps my network alive. Not that all is perfect, I have a few headaches, but it might be I have misconfigures something. Main thing is, IT WORKS, IT'S STABLE, IT'S FREE !!!