I'm not really qualified to make an opinion on this, but my guess is that these instructions will prove increasingly useful as AMD integrates the GPU and CPU. To me, it looks like they plan to make accessing what was traditionally part of the GPU a simple process (relative to accessing a GPU directly through their own pseudo CPU api's).
It'll take a couple years for "SSE5" to show up in AMD chips... which happens to coincide nicely with their Fusion (combined CPU+GPU) product line plans.
Will Intel pick up on these instructions? Maybe not. Does that mean they die? No, the performance benefits for those areas where this will make the most difference will make it worthwhile. At the very least, AMD can sponsor patches to the most popular bits of OSS to earn a few PR points (and benchmark points).
I don't mind Flash in general either, actually, I developed a few little things for Flash (not ads). I often have a lot of tabs open in FF... like 20. It all works perfectly fine until one ad decides to choke the system. Bleah... time to get a dual core laptop I guess.
FWIW, I wish Firefox had a way to throttle each tab to some max % of CPU.
Yeah, I actually prefer light text on dark backgrounds too.
Actually, more precisely, I don't like staring into light bulbs much, and similarly, I don't like staring at screens that are outputting a similar quantity of lumens at me. IIRC, my old 19 inch CRT produced about as much light as a 100 watt light bulb, and it sat about two feet from my face for hours on end.
Yes, I did try messing with color schemes in Windows several years ago, but inevitably legibility issues show up with some random application or another. The whole system is based on the assumption of black text on white backgrounds now.
I'm largely guessing here, but I think we can blame Apple for this. Back when I was in elementary school and DOS was the only thing out there, white text on black was the standard. But bright screens are eye-catching -- just the thing to give a brand spanking new Mac OS GUI an extra marketing edge.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but wouldn't OLEDs use less power with less white? I think those are supposed to spit out light directly from the pixels, which I assume means black would not be powered at all. In a decade or two, those will actually replace LCDs.
I think it would reduce power in plasma screens too. But, those aren't used much for computers.
There have been several times when I've wanted to try some high-level OSS package for a quick test run. Some "Exchange Killers" come to mind, but never I've gotten beyond the install docs because there are literally 50 dependencies and who knows how many config changes required just to install the entire stack of software. Now, thanks largely to VMWare's free VMWare Server, there are tons of pre-configured builds for all of the major OSS applications.
It really brings down the knowledge and time required for these things. Even backups become a simple task that can be handed down to a non-techie -- just create a VM snapshot and copy it like any other file that is backed up.
Is this Containerization? Yeah, kind of. I've always thought of it as abstracting away the OS and drivers. Many people would freak out if I tried to install a Linux box in their office. But a Linux "application" in a VM on a Windows box? Not scary at all.
I've got a couple VMWare VMs on my laptop. I'm running Windows XP (boo hiss, I know...).
The first is Linux system, Ubuntu, for running tools that aren't available for Windows and web site testing. Technically the OSS DBs, PHP, and Apache have Windows builds, but the pathing and other differences are bothersome, especially if the ultimate goal is to run the site on a Linux server.
The second is a bare bones Windows partition where I test suspect websites or software. Clients ask me to quickly evaluate a program that they want to buy. I'm not about to use my computer as a guinea pig (any more) now that VMWare is free and the hardware requirements are low enough (by todays standards).
Well, I can't comment on the gmane thread re: squirrelmail.
But about bounces, I don't expect them anymore. The huge volumes of SPAM have made me disable bounces for at least one domain that I manage - the NDR bounces were piling up in the queue by the thousand.
Even if I do get bounce backs from messages that I send, I wouldn't normally notice them since all of the NDRs get filtered straight to junk box at my end. Again, this is because of all the joe-job spam runs with spammers using my domains in the from line.
The real moral of the story is that spammers suck and they have ruined any concept of reliable email delivery. And the hotmail guys face the same issues as me, except 1 million times worse - literally.
Someone would have noticed if 80% of emails with attachments were not delivered! Really, there are millions of hotmail.com users. At least a few of them get email attachments once in a while.
I'm guessing this "test" used emails that looked like spam. It would help to know which ISPs were used and how the messages were sent.
Or maybe there wasn't really a test and this is all just Slashdot spam.
Anyway, I expect that a hundred people are sending each other hotmail attachments right now, so we'll have better data in a few hours...
With DOS, 3.1, 95, 98, and maybe NT4, TCP/IP and networking in general weren't rock solid. USB was pretty hokey in those OS's too.
Windows 2000's USB and TCP/IP networking are pretty much as good as any new operating system. I think it will stick around for a lot longer than any previous OS.
AMD and Intel have cross-licensing deals that handle the instructions that each company creates... these deals go way back to the mists of x86 time. So, for AMD to implement SSEn there is no legal problem. Ditto for the reverse. Except, the "problem" is that Intel w/80% of the market can pretty much dictate what instructions will survive in the market -- with the big exception of x86-64, and potentially some of the new virtualization stuff.
Now, about releasing chips in a timely manner... the trick is Intel doesn't have to tell anyone about the new instructions until they are well on their way to being in Intel CPUs. AMD finds out about these things at the same time as software developers get the promotional material from Intel. There's no way for AMD to release chips with these functions at the same time as Intel - they have to wait until the next moderate chip revision.
Does it matter? Usually not. Most software lags instruction changes by years. The exceptions are typically where performance really counts. For example, video encoders picked up on SSE2 pretty quick, since it provided dramatic improvements for their code.
I've thought about this in the past. The biggest problem is keystroke loggers -- software ones. Hardware ones are practically impossible to stop (at least, on PS/2 connectors... never thought about USB).
We're worried about programs intercepting passwords. The only way to do that is a keystroke logger, or somehow faking the bank login. A VWMware image won't do anything for keyloggers.
What would do it is a bootable CD -- but trying to get drivers to work for a broad range of users makes this practically impossible. I have an infrequently used Linux install in VMWare because the last time I tried to get WiFi to work I failed miserably on my laptop...
Don't get too worked up. AMD will be outsourcing bits of production, that's public knowledge. They've contracted with Charter for CPUs, and ATI, which AMD bought in 2006, has always been fabless. So, yes, more outsourcing is in the cards.
Will AMD go completely fabless? I highly doubt it. IMHO, top-end chips pretty much require in-house fabs. That extra 10% of control and 10% of benefit to tweaking a fab to your own specific needs and 10% benefit to setting your own time lines can make the difference between being competitive in the high-end and not. (Yeah, I'm making those numbers up, but you get the idea).
Sure, AMD is having a tough year, but hopefully things will get on track. When they do, having at least one in-house fab is pretty much crucial to being competitive in the top-end... and the top-end counts because the margins are incredible there.
The mid-range chips and lower end stuff can probably be pushed off to a 3rd party... and I think we might see something like that from AMD.
Ditto. I've been using pdfcreator for a few years now. Big bonus being that it's open source. It's also got a network server version that you can share with Windows and it can put the resulting PDF in each users home folder. Quite nice.
What's to stop Google from using the Google Toolbar to do basic scanning of incoming web pages? If anything looks suspicious in the initial scan, they can push the URL to "Googlenet" to have the URL fully analyzed.
As much as I hate giving so much power to a single company... a Google web antivirus system is actually a pretty good idea.
Years ago, before I had to worry about deployment issues personally, I'd have to watch all kinds of weird stuff happen in the login script.
Like others have sort of alluded, it's the Windows 98 that makes life hard. Getting rid of those and then using more standard deployment tools would be the best answer. It might even be the cheapest in the long run, but that depends on how many Win 9x boxes are kicking around. If it's a handful out of 180, IMHO, toss 'em.
Back to the point, the Adobe Flash and PDF Reader plugins, and the other common programs are easy to push via things like login scripts. For Flash, a simple one line MSI install command run under local admin priv's works fine. Installing custom tools? Just copy files around, or build little installers. Stick them in the login script.
Windows 9x has no concept of admin, so permissions won't be an issue. For the NT+ boxes, you can create a local admin account that's only used for software installs and use "RunAs".
I've been wondering if it's technically possible for newer 10K or 7.2K HDD's to slow down during quiet periods. It bugs me that the drive in my little home server has to run 24/7 at full speed just to receive the odd email or web page hit every 5-10 minutes.
Maybe there isn't a big enough power difference to make it worthwhile, I dunno.
Anyway, with flash is getting so cheap, sooner or later I'll find a way to delegate those things to flash and let the HDD actually go into sleep mode at night.
Ugly, ugly, quarter for AMD. The problem is that Intel is more than competitive again. Core 2 Duo's are generally better than Athlon X2's. And Quad core, even in Intel's glue-two-chips-together hack job, far outperforms a dual core.
So, AMD has lost the high end. And in chips, the high end is incredibly profitable. An Opteron costs only marginally more to manufacture than a $50 Sempron, but retails for 10X more. This time last year, AMD was on the good side of the chip pricing world... right now, it's not.
Fortunately, the next generation chip is around the corner, and things should be a little bit more even at the top end. The key question to AMD investors at this time, is WHEN will the chip be released?!
I don't really know how many data centres RIM has. Two doesn't really sound right to me, but that's what has been frequently quoted in the media lately. Maybe people, including myself, are mixing up data centres and NOCs in the RIM world.
Encrypted transit makes sense. However, that still leaves a fairly important point of failure significantly outside of US control. I hate to say it, if RIM use continues to grow in the government, eventually, those NOCs become strategic targets.
I can understand smaller countries having to accept that as a part of life, but lets face it, America has a few bucks to toss around. I'm quite surprised that the government hasn't forced RIM to put a NOC on American ground.
RIM is not a regular company. They have specifically created a centralized system where the email for millions of people depend on the uptime of their two (?!?!) data centres. Delivering email is literally their business and uptime is a critical part of that. IMHO, a half an hour of system wide downtime is pushing RIM's luck.
Several hours of email downtime is "OKish" if you are talking about a medium sized company that only has a handful of servers and a few IT guys. This is not the same at all.
Prior to this, I never realized that the RIM system was THIS centralized. It's kind of concerning really. And I don't quite understand why so many US gov't users are allowed to route their email through a NOC in Canada (disclosure: I'm Canadian).
I don't have the link handy, but I recall reading about one of the other TLD managers implementing a maximum return ratio before they stop refunding the fee. Something like 10% or so.
If it's technically possible to choose either a web based app or a desktop app, I would pick the web every time.
Tech support sucks big time. It's far, far, far easier to maintain, upgrade, distribute a web application than it is to manage a desktop application. A couple major web browsers and a couple major plugins pretty much covers every testing and support situation that you will face -- especially for intranet type situations.
For desktop situations there are a million variables: installers, bugs, spyware, permissions, operating systems and versions of OSs, non-existent user backups, differing service pack and patch levels... the list goes on. Most of these really aren't your problem as a software developer or publisher, but in reality, they often become your problem. That's in addition to the nightmare of supporting different versions of your program.
If the web can be applied to a situation, there should be no surprise that people will develop for the web.
OK, so now that Google has admitted to copying the sohu.com pinyin database... exactly how did they get a copy in the first place? Is there a publicly available file for personal use or was there some sort of web scraping or what?
I suspect that there's more to this story that we're not hearing.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not really qualified to make an opinion on this, but my guess is that these instructions will prove increasingly useful as AMD integrates the GPU and CPU. To me, it looks like they plan to make accessing what was traditionally part of the GPU a simple process (relative to accessing a GPU directly through their own pseudo CPU api's).
It'll take a couple years for "SSE5" to show up in AMD chips... which happens to coincide nicely with their Fusion (combined CPU+GPU) product line plans.
Will Intel pick up on these instructions? Maybe not. Does that mean they die? No, the performance benefits for those areas where this will make the most difference will make it worthwhile. At the very least, AMD can sponsor patches to the most popular bits of OSS to earn a few PR points (and benchmark points).
I don't mind Flash in general either, actually, I developed a few little things for Flash (not ads). I often have a lot of tabs open in FF... like 20. It all works perfectly fine until one ad decides to choke the system. Bleah... time to get a dual core laptop I guess.
FWIW, I wish Firefox had a way to throttle each tab to some max % of CPU.
I don't recall ever seeing so many 3 and 4 digit /. IDs post. Kind of an odd feeling in a geeky way.
Yeah, I actually prefer light text on dark backgrounds too.
Actually, more precisely, I don't like staring into light bulbs much, and similarly, I don't like staring at screens that are outputting a similar quantity of lumens at me. IIRC, my old 19 inch CRT produced about as much light as a 100 watt light bulb, and it sat about two feet from my face for hours on end.
Yes, I did try messing with color schemes in Windows several years ago, but inevitably legibility issues show up with some random application or another. The whole system is based on the assumption of black text on white backgrounds now.
I'm largely guessing here, but I think we can blame Apple for this. Back when I was in elementary school and DOS was the only thing out there, white text on black was the standard. But bright screens are eye-catching -- just the thing to give a brand spanking new Mac OS GUI an extra marketing edge.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but wouldn't OLEDs use less power with less white? I think those are supposed to spit out light directly from the pixels, which I assume means black would not be powered at all. In a decade or two, those will actually replace LCDs.
I think it would reduce power in plasma screens too. But, those aren't used much for computers.
There have been several times when I've wanted to try some high-level OSS package for a quick test run. Some "Exchange Killers" come to mind, but never I've gotten beyond the install docs because there are literally 50 dependencies and who knows how many config changes required just to install the entire stack of software. Now, thanks largely to VMWare's free VMWare Server, there are tons of pre-configured builds for all of the major OSS applications.
It really brings down the knowledge and time required for these things. Even backups become a simple task that can be handed down to a non-techie -- just create a VM snapshot and copy it like any other file that is backed up.
Is this Containerization? Yeah, kind of. I've always thought of it as abstracting away the OS and drivers. Many people would freak out if I tried to install a Linux box in their office. But a Linux "application" in a VM on a Windows box? Not scary at all.
I've got a couple VMWare VMs on my laptop. I'm running Windows XP (boo hiss, I know...).
The first is Linux system, Ubuntu, for running tools that aren't available for Windows and web site testing. Technically the OSS DBs, PHP, and Apache have Windows builds, but the pathing and other differences are bothersome, especially if the ultimate goal is to run the site on a Linux server.
The second is a bare bones Windows partition where I test suspect websites or software. Clients ask me to quickly evaluate a program that they want to buy. I'm not about to use my computer as a guinea pig (any more) now that VMWare is free and the hardware requirements are low enough (by todays standards).
Well, I can't comment on the gmane thread re: squirrelmail.
But about bounces, I don't expect them anymore. The huge volumes of SPAM have made me disable bounces for at least one domain that I manage - the NDR bounces were piling up in the queue by the thousand.
Even if I do get bounce backs from messages that I send, I wouldn't normally notice them since all of the NDRs get filtered straight to junk box at my end. Again, this is because of all the joe-job spam runs with spammers using my domains in the from line.
The real moral of the story is that spammers suck and they have ruined any concept of reliable email delivery. And the hotmail guys face the same issues as me, except 1 million times worse - literally.
Someone would have noticed if 80% of emails with attachments were not delivered! Really, there are millions of hotmail.com users. At least a few of them get email attachments once in a while.
I'm guessing this "test" used emails that looked like spam. It would help to know which ISPs were used and how the messages were sent.
Or maybe there wasn't really a test and this is all just Slashdot spam.
Anyway, I expect that a hundred people are sending each other hotmail attachments right now, so we'll have better data in a few hours...
With DOS, 3.1, 95, 98, and maybe NT4, TCP/IP and networking in general weren't rock solid. USB was pretty hokey in those OS's too.
Windows 2000's USB and TCP/IP networking are pretty much as good as any new operating system. I think it will stick around for a lot longer than any previous OS.
AMD and Intel have cross-licensing deals that handle the instructions that each company creates... these deals go way back to the mists of x86 time. So, for AMD to implement SSEn there is no legal problem. Ditto for the reverse. Except, the "problem" is that Intel w/80% of the market can pretty much dictate what instructions will survive in the market -- with the big exception of x86-64, and potentially some of the new virtualization stuff.
Now, about releasing chips in a timely manner... the trick is Intel doesn't have to tell anyone about the new instructions until they are well on their way to being in Intel CPUs. AMD finds out about these things at the same time as software developers get the promotional material from Intel. There's no way for AMD to release chips with these functions at the same time as Intel - they have to wait until the next moderate chip revision.
Does it matter? Usually not. Most software lags instruction changes by years. The exceptions are typically where performance really counts. For example, video encoders picked up on SSE2 pretty quick, since it provided dramatic improvements for their code.
I've thought about this in the past. The biggest problem is keystroke loggers -- software ones. Hardware ones are practically impossible to stop (at least, on PS/2 connectors... never thought about USB).
We're worried about programs intercepting passwords. The only way to do that is a keystroke logger, or somehow faking the bank login. A VWMware image won't do anything for keyloggers.
What would do it is a bootable CD -- but trying to get drivers to work for a broad range of users makes this practically impossible. I have an infrequently used Linux install in VMWare because the last time I tried to get WiFi to work I failed miserably on my laptop...
Don't get too worked up. AMD will be outsourcing bits of production, that's public knowledge. They've contracted with Charter for CPUs, and ATI, which AMD bought in 2006, has always been fabless. So, yes, more outsourcing is in the cards.
Will AMD go completely fabless? I highly doubt it. IMHO, top-end chips pretty much require in-house fabs. That extra 10% of control and 10% of benefit to tweaking a fab to your own specific needs and 10% benefit to setting your own time lines can make the difference between being competitive in the high-end and not. (Yeah, I'm making those numbers up, but you get the idea).
Sure, AMD is having a tough year, but hopefully things will get on track. When they do, having at least one in-house fab is pretty much crucial to being competitive in the top-end... and the top-end counts because the margins are incredible there.
The mid-range chips and lower end stuff can probably be pushed off to a 3rd party... and I think we might see something like that from AMD.
Hmmm... one terabyte at an optimistic 2 Mbps is...
1 terabyte = 8.79609302 × 10^12 bits
(8.79609302 × (10^12)) / 2 000 000 = 4 398 046.51 seconds.
4 398 046.51 / 3 600 = 1 221.67959 hours.
(thanks google)
Well, maybe it'd be quicker if I just browse the site online.
Ditto. I've been using pdfcreator for a few years now. Big bonus being that it's open source. It's also got a network server version that you can share with Windows and it can put the resulting PDF in each users home folder. Quite nice.
What's to stop Google from using the Google Toolbar to do basic scanning of incoming web pages? If anything looks suspicious in the initial scan, they can push the URL to "Googlenet" to have the URL fully analyzed.
As much as I hate giving so much power to a single company... a Google web antivirus system is actually a pretty good idea.
Years ago, before I had to worry about deployment issues personally, I'd have to watch all kinds of weird stuff happen in the login script.
Like others have sort of alluded, it's the Windows 98 that makes life hard. Getting rid of those and then using more standard deployment tools would be the best answer. It might even be the cheapest in the long run, but that depends on how many Win 9x boxes are kicking around. If it's a handful out of 180, IMHO, toss 'em.
Back to the point, the Adobe Flash and PDF Reader plugins, and the other common programs are easy to push via things like login scripts. For Flash, a simple one line MSI install command run under local admin priv's works fine. Installing custom tools? Just copy files around, or build little installers. Stick them in the login script.
Windows 9x has no concept of admin, so permissions won't be an issue. For the NT+ boxes, you can create a local admin account that's only used for software installs and use "RunAs".
I've been wondering if it's technically possible for newer 10K or 7.2K HDD's to slow down during quiet periods. It bugs me that the drive in my little home server has to run 24/7 at full speed just to receive the odd email or web page hit every 5-10 minutes.
Maybe there isn't a big enough power difference to make it worthwhile, I dunno.
Anyway, with flash is getting so cheap, sooner or later I'll find a way to delegate those things to flash and let the HDD actually go into sleep mode at night.
Ugly, ugly, quarter for AMD. The problem is that Intel is more than competitive again. Core 2 Duo's are generally better than Athlon X2's. And Quad core, even in Intel's glue-two-chips-together hack job, far outperforms a dual core.
So, AMD has lost the high end. And in chips, the high end is incredibly profitable. An Opteron costs only marginally more to manufacture than a $50 Sempron, but retails for 10X more. This time last year, AMD was on the good side of the chip pricing world... right now, it's not.
Fortunately, the next generation chip is around the corner, and things should be a little bit more even at the top end. The key question to AMD investors at this time, is WHEN will the chip be released?!
I don't really know how many data centres RIM has. Two doesn't really sound right to me, but that's what has been frequently quoted in the media lately. Maybe people, including myself, are mixing up data centres and NOCs in the RIM world.
E.g. http://news.zdnet.com/2100-1035_22-6177829.html
Encrypted transit makes sense. However, that still leaves a fairly important point of failure significantly outside of US control. I hate to say it, if RIM use continues to grow in the government, eventually, those NOCs become strategic targets.
I can understand smaller countries having to accept that as a part of life, but lets face it, America has a few bucks to toss around. I'm quite surprised that the government hasn't forced RIM to put a NOC on American ground.
RIM is not a regular company. They have specifically created a centralized system where the email for millions of people depend on the uptime of their two (?!?!) data centres. Delivering email is literally their business and uptime is a critical part of that. IMHO, a half an hour of system wide downtime is pushing RIM's luck.
Several hours of email downtime is "OKish" if you are talking about a medium sized company that only has a handful of servers and a few IT guys. This is not the same at all.
Prior to this, I never realized that the RIM system was THIS centralized. It's kind of concerning really. And I don't quite understand why so many US gov't users are allowed to route their email through a NOC in Canada (disclosure: I'm Canadian).
I don't have the link handy, but I recall reading about one of the other TLD managers implementing a maximum return ratio before they stop refunding the fee. Something like 10% or so.
- MayKiting.html
FWIW, the Godaddy.com CEO has blogged about this topic a few times, the numbers are staggering.
http://www.bobparsons.com/index.php?/archives/118
If it's technically possible to choose either a web based app or a desktop app, I would pick the web every time.
Tech support sucks big time. It's far, far, far easier to maintain, upgrade, distribute a web application than it is to manage a desktop application. A couple major web browsers and a couple major plugins pretty much covers every testing and support situation that you will face -- especially for intranet type situations.
For desktop situations there are a million variables: installers, bugs, spyware, permissions, operating systems and versions of OSs, non-existent user backups, differing service pack and patch levels... the list goes on. Most of these really aren't your problem as a software developer or publisher, but in reality, they often become your problem. That's in addition to the nightmare of supporting different versions of your program.
If the web can be applied to a situation, there should be no surprise that people will develop for the web.
OK, so now that Google has admitted to copying the sohu.com pinyin database... exactly how did they get a copy in the first place? Is there a publicly available file for personal use or was there some sort of web scraping or what?
I suspect that there's more to this story that we're not hearing.