This reminds me of the time I was talking to a co-worker about how a particular piece of software didn't take advantage of the "SMP-ness" of our 4-processor system. Whoops!
With all of that, you'd think I was truly enamored with GCC. Let's just say that when I'm developing software with GCC and my wife walks into the room, I feel a little uncomfortable.
There are very few (if any) parents who specifically "don't care if their kids get an education."
My wife taught English at an inner-city high school where most of the students had parents who didn't care. They sent their kids to school to get them out of the house while they did house cleaning, construction, sold crack, or gave $5 handjobs. Parent/Teacher conference nights had maybe one or two sets of parents attending from each 30+ student class.
Often times the parents were living in Mexico, and the kids were living with other relatives in the USA "to get an education." The problem is, those kids rarely spoke English, and many couldn't even read or write Spanish. They could stay in ESL classes for a couple years, but then they had to go to the regular classes. I don't know if it was a law or a school policy, but the teachers were not allowed to report the kids who were illegal immigrants.
My favorite story from that school was about the time when the principal had a meeting with the mother of one of her students. The principal started off by explaining to the woman that he believed her son was involved in a gang. The mother then smiled and moved her hand to cover the gang tattoo between her thumb and index finger. She didn't give a crap. It was all a joke to her.
From: patl@athena.mit.edu (Patrick J. LoPresti) Message-ID: Sender: news@athena.mit.edu (News system) Subject: The True Path (long) Date: 11 Jul 91 03:17:31 GMT Path: ai-lab!mintaka!olivea!samsung!zaphod.mps.ohio-stat e.edu!think.com!snorkelwacker.mit.edu!bloom-picayu ne.mit.edu!athena.mit.edu!patl Newsgroups: alt.religion.emacs,alt.slack Organization: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Lines: 95 Xref: ai-lab alt.religion.emacs:244 alt.slack:1935
When I log into my Xenix system with my 110 baud teletype, both vi *and* Emacs are just too damn slow. They print useless messages like, 'C-h for help' and '"foo" File is read only'. So I use the editor that doesn't waste my VALUABLE time.
Ed, man! !man ed
ED(1) UNIX Programmer's Manual ED(1)
NAME
ed - text editor
SYNOPSIS
ed [ - ] [ -x ] [ name ] DESCRIPTION
Ed is the standard text editor. ---
Computer Scientists love ed, not just because it comes first alphabetically, but because it's the standard. Everyone else loves ed because it's ED!
"Ed is the standard text editor."
And ed doesn't waste space on my Timex Sinclair. Just look:
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root 24 Oct 29 1929/bin/ed -rwxr-xr-t 4 root 1310720 Jan 1 1970/usr/ucb/vi -rwxr-xr-x 1 root 5.89824e37 Oct 22 1990/usr/bin/emacs
Of course, on the system *I* administrate, vi is symlinked to ed. Emacs has been replaced by a shell script which 1) Generates a syslog message at level LOG_EMERG; 2) reduces the user's disk quota by 100K; and 3) RUNS ED!!!!!!
"Ed is the standard text editor."
Let's look at a typical novice's session with the mighty ed:
golem> ed
? help ? quit ? exit ? bye ? hello? ? eat flaming death ?
Note the consistent user interface and error reportage. Ed is generous enough to flag errors, yet prudent enough not to overwhelm the novice with verbosity.
"Ed is the standard text editor." Ed, the greatest WYGIWYG editor of all.
ED IS THE TRUE PATH TO NIRVANA! ED HAS BEEN THE CHOICE OF EDUCATED AND IGNORANT ALIKE FOR CENTURIES! ED WILL NOT CORRUPT YOUR PRECIOUS BODILY FLUIDS!! ED IS THE STANDARD TEXT EDITOR! ED MAKES THE SUN SHINE AND THE BIRDS SING AND THE GRASS GREEN!!
When I use an editor, I don't want eight extra KILOBYTES of worthless help screens and cursor positioning code! I just want an EDitor!! Not a "viitor". Not a "emacsitor". Those aren't even WORDS!!!! ED! ED! ED IS THE STANDARD!!!
TEXT EDITOR.
When IBM, in its ever-present omnipotence, needed to base their "edlin" on a UNIX standard, did they mimic vi? No. Emacs? Surely you jest. They chose the most karmic editor of all. The standard.
Ed is for those who can *remember* what they are working on. If you are an idiot, you should use Emacs. If you are an Emacs, you should not be vi. If you use ED, you are on THE PATH TO REDEMPTION. THE SO-CALLED "VISUAL" EDITORS HAVE BEEN PLACED HERE BY ED TO TEMPT THE FAITHLESS. DO NOT GIVE IN!!! THE MIGHTY ED HAS SPOKEN!!!
Yes, this blog posting is interesting, but it still leaves some important details out.
Linux and *BSD have a/dev/mem device interface for accessing physical memory from user space. Usually, this device only allows access from a priviledged user:
crw-r----- 1 root root 1, 1 Dec 6 12:34/dev/mem
Using/dev/mem, it should be possible to access the address range assigned to system management RAM. However, the CPU has a Model-Specific Register (MSR) for enabling and disabling accesses to SM RAM. The instructions that are used to read and write MSRs (RDMSR and WRMSR) must be executed from ring-0 (kernel level) or else a GPF occurs. However, the Linux kernel can be configured to provide a user level interface to MSRs via:
crw-rw---- 1 root root 202, 0 Feb 24 09:18/dev/cpu/0/msr
Again, you'll probably need root priviledges to access the device.
From reading the article, it sounds like the hardware component of this hack only involves pulling some signal high or low to tell the system management controller in the southbridge that that the system is overheating.
The article does NOT explain how the hacker is able to replace the "emergency-response software" in System Management RAM. Normal applications, running at priviledge level 3, don't have direct access to SM RAM. Only code running at priviledge level 0, such as kernels and device drivers, can directly access SM RAM. But, if you can manage to run code at priviledge level 0 to access SM RAM, you don't need to replace the code in SM RAM to take over the system.
As was inferred by at least one other comment, the article describes a "Rube Goldberg" approach to hacking a system. While potentially entertaining, the method is overly and unnecessarily complicated to achieve the end result.
The NEA as a whole won't do anything, but the local NEA representative will. The trick is to know your local rep (every school should have one) and involve that person as soon as a problem is identified. I have seen this system work very well for family members and their co-workers.
- signed
husband of a middle school teacher
son of a community college teacher
son-in-law of a middle school teacher
brother of a university professor
My father was threatened with being fired for not promoting a kid to the 9th grade after failing his social studies class. The reason? The principal "wanted to get rid of the troublemaker".
You're either a liar or the offspring of an idiot. If your father really was threatened as you described, he should have contacted his local NEA or teacher's union representative. The NEA will intervene in situations like this and fight such cases of mismanagement and corruption.
It'll probably happen when it is most cost effective, not when Intel decides to do it.
IMHO AMD needs to start acting like a leader instead of a follower...
AMD is acting like a leader instead of a follower. They announced their plans to support dual cores at day one. They introduced the AMD64 technology long before Intel followed them. They were the first to design an x86 processor with an on-die memory controller. They introduced Hypertransport, a technology for directly connecting processors together.
A READER WRITES to bring our attention to latest issue of German magazine, c't.
According to the magazine's own tests, a new Intel V8 compiler can give a boost to the performance of applications running on Intel platforms by between 5 and 10 per cent.
The chipmaker may be miffed to learn, however, that its compiler can help boost the same apps by a similar margin on rival AMD's Athlon64 platform, when suitably tweaked.
According to our correspondent, the compiler switch -QxN produces x86 code which runs only on P4 CPUs, not on AMD CPUs. However, the boffins at c't used the -QxN to produce code, patched out the CPU type inquiry and so managed to get the code to run on the Athlon64.
As a result the chip notched up a record-breaking Spec score.
According to the tests, under Windows, the P4 3200 gets a SPECint2000base value of 1286 while the Athlon64 3400+ scores 1404. Although, in SPECfp2000base, the P4 3200 scores 1257, against the Athlon64 3400+'s score of 1227.
Hmmm.
Here's a link to c't where you'll find no mention of these shenanigans whatsoever.
I don't know about any price warring, but I've certainly seen a sharp increase in the number of advertisements for cell networks. In the past week, I've received at least one advertisement in the mail from every major provider. I don't remember seeing more than one per month before then.
I might be way wrong here, but I thought the SMP machines had cache-coherence so that this sort of problem shouldn't occur?
Consider a 2-processor system with no caches where both CPUs simultaneously execute a read-modify-write instruction (for example, OR) on the same location in memory. Without bus locking (the LOCK prefix in the x86 instruction set) you have no guarantee that both processors execute the RMW operation atomically.
Let's say CPU0 executes "orl $1, ptr" and CPU1 executes "orl $2, ptr". If the 32-bit value at ptr is initially 0, you would expect the resulting value to be 3.
CPU0 reads ptr and sees 0
CPU1 reads ptr and sees 0
CPU0 ORs the 0 with 1 and gets 1
CPU1 ORs the 0 with 2 and gets 2
CPU0 writes its result (1) to ptr
CPU1 writes its result (2) to ptr
In the above situation, ptr ends up with an incorrect value because the operations did not complete atomically.
Slashdot Mirror
This reminds me of the time I was talking to a co-worker about how a particular piece of software didn't take advantage of the "SMP-ness" of our 4-processor system. Whoops!
The lesser-known Hijinks Ensue reference: A Crisis of Faith
Seriously! From TFA:
I have these hanging from my walls: http://lemonodor.com/archives/2007/10/youre_doing_it_wrong.html
My wife taught English at an inner-city high school where most of the students had parents who didn't care. They sent their kids to school to get them out of the house while they did house cleaning, construction, sold crack, or gave $5 handjobs. Parent/Teacher conference nights had maybe one or two sets of parents attending from each 30+ student class.
Often times the parents were living in Mexico, and the kids were living with other relatives in the USA "to get an education." The problem is, those kids rarely spoke English, and many couldn't even read or write Spanish. They could stay in ESL classes for a couple years, but then they had to go to the regular classes. I don't know if it was a law or a school policy, but the teachers were not allowed to report the kids who were illegal immigrants.
My favorite story from that school was about the time when the principal had a meeting with the mother of one of her students. The principal started off by explaining to the woman that he believed her son was involved in a gang. The mother then smiled and moved her hand to cover the gang tattoo between her thumb and index finger. She didn't give a crap. It was all a joke to her.
Based on what's currently shown at this page, I wouldn't count on it.
Maybe Apple is just taking its sweet time to update the page.
From: patl@athena.mit.edu (Patrick J. LoPresti)t e.edu!think.com!snorkelwacker.mit.edu!bloom-picayu ne.mit.edu!athena.mit.edu!patl
/bin/ed /usr/ucb/vi /usr/bin/emacs
Message-ID:
Sender: news@athena.mit.edu (News system)
Subject: The True Path (long)
Date: 11 Jul 91 03:17:31 GMT
Path: ai-lab!mintaka!olivea!samsung!zaphod.mps.ohio-sta
Newsgroups: alt.religion.emacs,alt.slack
Organization: Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Lines: 95
Xref: ai-lab alt.religion.emacs:244 alt.slack:1935
When I log into my Xenix system with my 110 baud teletype, both vi *and* Emacs are just too damn slow. They print useless messages like, 'C-h for help' and '"foo" File is read only'. So I use the editor that doesn't waste my VALUABLE time.
Ed, man! !man ed
ED(1) UNIX Programmer's Manual ED(1)
NAME
ed - text editor
SYNOPSIS
ed [ - ] [ -x ] [ name ]
DESCRIPTION
Ed is the standard text editor.
---
Computer Scientists love ed, not just because it comes first alphabetically, but because it's the standard. Everyone else loves ed because it's ED!
"Ed is the standard text editor."
And ed doesn't waste space on my Timex Sinclair. Just look:
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root 24 Oct 29 1929
-rwxr-xr-t 4 root 1310720 Jan 1 1970
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root 5.89824e37 Oct 22 1990
Of course, on the system *I* administrate, vi is symlinked to ed. Emacs has been replaced by a shell script which 1) Generates a syslog message at level LOG_EMERG; 2) reduces the user's disk quota by 100K; and 3) RUNS ED!!!!!!
"Ed is the standard text editor."
Let's look at a typical novice's session with the mighty ed:
golem> ed
?
help
?
quit
?
exit
?
bye
?
hello?
?
eat flaming death
?
Note the consistent user interface and error reportage. Ed is generous enough to flag errors, yet prudent enough not to overwhelm the novice with verbosity.
"Ed is the standard text editor." Ed, the greatest WYGIWYG editor of all.
ED IS THE TRUE PATH TO NIRVANA! ED HAS BEEN THE CHOICE OF EDUCATED AND IGNORANT ALIKE FOR CENTURIES! ED WILL NOT CORRUPT YOUR PRECIOUS BODILY FLUIDS!! ED IS THE STANDARD TEXT EDITOR! ED MAKES THE SUN SHINE AND THE BIRDS SING AND THE GRASS GREEN!!
When I use an editor, I don't want eight extra KILOBYTES of worthless help screens and cursor positioning code! I just want an EDitor!! Not a "viitor". Not a "emacsitor". Those aren't even WORDS!!!! ED! ED! ED IS THE STANDARD!!!
TEXT EDITOR.
When IBM, in its ever-present omnipotence, needed to base their "edlin" on a UNIX standard, did they mimic vi? No. Emacs? Surely you jest. They chose the most karmic editor of all. The standard.
Ed is for those who can *remember* what they are working on. If you are an idiot, you should use Emacs. If you are an Emacs, you should not be vi. If you use ED, you are on THE PATH TO REDEMPTION. THE SO-CALLED "VISUAL" EDITORS HAVE BEEN PLACED HERE BY ED TO TEMPT THE FAITHLESS. DO NOT GIVE IN!!! THE MIGHTY ED HAS SPOKEN!!!
BTW, the revolver, shotguns, and crossbow were all very capable of single-shot kills.
See this comment for how a priviledged user can access SM RAM.
Linux and *BSD have a /dev/mem device interface for accessing physical memory from user space. Usually, this device only allows access from a priviledged user:
Using /dev/mem, it should be possible to access the address range assigned to system management RAM. However, the CPU has a Model-Specific Register (MSR) for enabling and disabling accesses to SM RAM. The instructions that are used to read and write MSRs (RDMSR and WRMSR) must be executed from ring-0 (kernel level) or else a GPF occurs. However, the Linux kernel can be configured to provide a user level interface to MSRs via:
Again, you'll probably need root priviledges to access the device.
The article does NOT explain how the hacker is able to replace the "emergency-response software" in System Management RAM. Normal applications, running at priviledge level 3, don't have direct access to SM RAM. Only code running at priviledge level 0, such as kernels and device drivers, can directly access SM RAM. But, if you can manage to run code at priviledge level 0 to access SM RAM, you don't need to replace the code in SM RAM to take over the system.
As was inferred by at least one other comment, the article describes a "Rube Goldberg" approach to hacking a system. While potentially entertaining, the method is overly and unnecessarily complicated to achieve the end result.
So, all of my AMD systems are still running fine, but both of the Intel boxes malfunctioned. robpoe is a schmuck.
The NEA as a whole won't do anything, but the local NEA representative will. The trick is to know your local rep (every school should have one) and involve that person as soon as a problem is identified. I have seen this system work very well for family members and their co-workers.
- signed
husband of a middle school teacher
son of a community college teacher
son-in-law of a middle school teacher
brother of a university professor
No, the original Pentium "FDIV" bug is just a figment of your imagination.
Which part of your ass did you pull those numbers from?
According to IDC, AMD has only 10% of the CPU market.
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=19972
I don't know about any price warring, but I've certainly seen a sharp increase in the number of advertisements for cell networks. In the past week, I've received at least one advertisement in the mail from every major provider. I don't remember seeing more than one per month before then.
- Having taken a system architecture and currently taking a compiler course, I found out that the x86's low number of register is such a drag.
The AMD64 architecture solves this issue by adding 8 more general-purpose registers and 8 more SSE registers. - ...AA requires you to register with the army so they can send you spam and try to recruit you...
I registered over a year ago and have yet to be spammed by the army or sent recruiting letters, etc. A little paranoid, are we?The chips are fabricated in Dresden and packaged in Malaysia.
- I might be way wrong here, but I thought the SMP machines had cache-coherence so that this sort of problem shouldn't occur?
Consider a 2-processor system with no caches where both CPUs simultaneously execute a read-modify-write instruction (for example, OR) on the same location in memory. Without bus locking (the LOCK prefix in the x86 instruction set) you have no guarantee that both processors execute the RMW operation atomically.Let's say CPU0 executes "orl $1, ptr" and CPU1 executes "orl $2, ptr". If the 32-bit value at ptr is initially 0, you would expect the resulting value to be 3.
- CPU0 reads ptr and sees 0
- CPU1 reads ptr and sees 0
- CPU0 ORs the 0 with 1 and gets 1
- CPU1 ORs the 0 with 2 and gets 2
- CPU0 writes its result (1) to ptr
- CPU1 writes its result (2) to ptr
In the above situation, ptr ends up with an incorrect value because the operations did not complete atomically.