Joke as you will, but there are standards and guidelines put out by governments around the World regarding disk sanitization. Some private companies then adhere to them and some don't. It is not just governments which make mistakes. Governments do actually have some very smart people working for them.
I used to work for city government here in SoCal, USA. In contrast to our Aussie friends, they were super paranoid about data leakage.
This does not, in any way, reflect on "Aussies" or their awareness of the importance of media sanitization.
When there was actually a situation where the red tape was momentarily pierced and we were authorized to give away outdated equipment to schools, they made us do a multiple-pass low-level format on each and every HDD that left the building.
Are you sure you were "low level" formatting those drives? That is a term that gets used often when it should not. Modern IDE drives cannot be low level formatted outside the factory and this has been the case for many years. A true low level format actually re-writes tracks, aligning them again as it goes.
Unfortunately, this term has become so misused, that even hard drive manufacturers are now providing zero-fill utilities labeled as low-level-format utilities.
I have worked for the Australian Government in sanitizing machines prior to them being decommisioned. Luckily, I am a contractor who takes his contracts, customers and their needs seriously and I did not have anything to do with this case. I don't think this reflects on Australia in any way. I'm sure I could dig up similar stories regarding US or UK blunders.
peril lies that way for no gain, so I just did what should have been done and repartitioned the thing.
What should have been done at an absolute minimum, is have the entire drive(s) zeroed out. If the drives held extremely sensitive data then multiple passes of random data and then zeroes, would be better.
Actually, that is not quite correct. The calculation along those lines is:
With a dotted decimal notation IP address of a.b.c.d:
(a * 16,777,216) + (b * 65,563) + (c * 256) + d = decimal IP address.
As you could imagine, with an IP address being a 32bit binary number, 2^32-1 is 4,294,967,295 and 255.255.255.255 equals (255 * 16,777,216) + (255 * 65,563) + (255 * 256) + 255 = 4,294,967,295.
Your calculation incorrectly comes out to 261,120 and does not consider the correct significance of each individual DDN byte.
I figured this out a few months ago, so that I could perform reduction of many individual subnets into largest possible contiguous groups to allow bounds checking from within a shell script. The script breaks down subnets assigned to various countries into a smaller list of larger blocks.
For example,
10.0.0.0 - 10.0.1.255 US 10.0.2.0 - 10.0.4.255 US 10.0.5.0 - 10.0.5.255 UK 10.0.6.0 - 10.0.6.255 US 10.0.7.0 - 10.0.7.255 US
Would become:
10.0.0.0 - 10.0.4.255 US 10.0.5.0 - 10.0.5.255 UK 10.0.6.0 - 10.0.7.255 US
Although the actual numbers were converted to decimal to allow easy bounds checking within a script:
167772160 167773439 US 167773440 167773695 UK 167773696 167774207 US
Interestingly, NetBSD allows pinging of decimal IP addresses. Is this common amongst the free UNIX like OS'?
Anyone know an easy way to calculate the dotted decimal notation IP address if given the full decimal IP address? With simple on-paper calculations like these? I was trying to figure it out, but then cheated by just pinging the decimal IP, forcing ping to timeout in near 0 seconds and then used "cut" to extract the DDN IP from the output. A bit dodgy, but I was in a hurry.
Re:The Dumbing-Down of America...part XXVII
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VoIP Security
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· Score: 1
If you can think of a case where errors would be something that you can divide up, such that you might end up with five eighths of an error, then I'll withdraw my statement. Otherwise, you're wrong: it's improper English.
Actually, I can. I worked with analogue computers with mostly US Navy documentation. With those and generically in measurement, there is a component, which is in error. An amount of error, which would have to remain within a certain tolerance to provide an acceptable signal or measurement. The error in that case is an amount. "The amount of error involved should be within acceptable limits".
Yeah because it's so much easier to pick the correct pair of wires out of several dozen or hundred on the local loop then it is to setup a router rule to capture VoIP packets.
If you are a man in the middle at a Telco, then you probably have the knowledge of what pair to listen to. That assumes someone who is specifically targetted. You could just be unlucky enough to be the one which is randomly listened to at the Telco.
Unless they are hanging off the pole outside your house (which would be rather brazen) I don't worry myself too much with MIM attacks on POTS. In fact unauthorized bugs on POTS can usually be detected fairly easy (they cause a voltage drop) if you are that paranoid about them.
A good powered tap can cause no measurable voltage drop, since they have extremely high input resistance.
Of course you can't do anything about central office taps (law enforcement) or the other end of the line -- but no matter which technology you use I don't think you can ever trust the remote end of the conversation to be secure.
I personally have suffered MIM from my Telco twice. I was in the middle of a conversation with a friend, telling him how crap the local Telco is which I worked for and someone joined in and abused me!
BTW, for someone who has worked at a Telco, choosing the right pair is trivial. Whether it is at the local telco or a junction box in the street or block of appartments.
Re:The Dumbing-Down of America...part XXVII
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VoIP Security
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· Score: 1
I can't tell if you're joking, but I find it a little ironic that you used "amount" where "number" is more appropriate (you can't have a partial error).
amount (-mount') pronunciation n.
1. The total of two or more quantities; the aggregate. 2. A number; a sum.
3. A principal plus its interest, as in a loan.
4. The full effect or meaning; import.
5. Quantity: a great amount of intelligence.
If Apple is making most of their money in hardware. I would have thought that the move to Apple Intel would allow them to more easily provide a compatiblity layer for running Windows software within OSX at near native speeds. To get more people to want to use OSX to enjoy all the other benefits (no viruses, spyware, worms, etc). All these new people wanting to use OSX will have to use it on Apple hardware.... $$$$
I still think Apple would be silly to release OSX for generic Intel machines. They would suddenly find much less need for their computer hardware and they would also be in direct head-to-head competition with Microsoft's core industry controlling software.
I realise that OSX for Intel would probably sell like hotcakes, but Apple would have to support so much more hardware and they might find that the interest dies down after the hype when people find that the initial versions are not as fast or as compatible as they like. They'd be risking their cash cow (Apple hardware) on a gamble of competing against the dirtiest scoundrels in town at their own game.
What they are doing is best. If they release Intel machines which run Mac software and Wintel software, they may become bigger than Microsoft have ever been. Apple has been so popular over the last few years, being "cool" that they may take Microsoft down. Imagine if all of a sudden you didn't need Microsoft for anything because Apple was a better option.
Microsoft would become an applications company, writing for OSX and the likes of Dell would have to start building machines under contract from Apple.
On a tangent, where have you seen AMD64 MBs that support 64GB of RAM ? I've been thinking about using something like that for getting really good performance for a relatively big DB app, but all MBs I've seen have just 4 banks, and the biggest chips are 4MB. I guess a dual proc would double that:)
I have not seen any Opteron system which would require less than four processors to go to 64GB. Most bare motherboard makers I have seen have a max of 32GB even with their quad Opteron boards.
One thing I have noticed with boards that can take lots of RAM (32GB+), is that the higher you go, the slower the speed of the RAM is run at. It is very apparent with that HP. I guess there are so many memory modules in a 64GB system that they can't be reliably powered at full speed. Or maybe they put so much load on each of their busses that they bring the signals down closer to the noise and thus can't run at highest frequencies. Might be something to consider if you can get away with 16GB. Otherwise, regardless of this a 60 something GB ramdisk for a db is going to scream. You'll want a super reliable system with redundant power supplies! I guess at least the Gigabyte ramdisk card won't have trouble there, being battery backed.
Also on a related note, anyone know if it is possible in a disk mirroring setup, to use a ramdisk and a real disk in such a way that reads and writes are done only to the ramdisk and the real hard disk is merely written to to keep up to date at a lower priority? Super speed and redundancy. I have been wanting to do this with software mirroring between a software ramdisk and a real disk. Probably would be good for an SMP system, since ramdisks are heavy on CPU when they're in use (with software mirroring adding to that).
Actually, here is a 4-way (optional 8-way) Tyan Opteron board that will go to 128GB! It seems that it will go to 64GB with 4 procs.
I don't agree. I record music on at least 8 tracks at a time into a single cpu. I NEED higher transfer rates. If it's 4 gigs, thats enough to keep it recording without a drop in an entire days worth of recording. Then I can dump all that data to a slower, larger drive. It may not fit everyone's needs.. but this is PERFECT for me.
I would rather put the cost of this card towards an AMD64 motherboard which supports a crap load of RAM and then just use a software ramdisk. I use mfs under OpenBSD, NetBSD and FreeBSD. From memory on my AMD XP2800+ with 2GB DDR RAM, with a 1GB mfs ramdisk, I get 800MB/s read and write. A heck of a lot faster than the 150MB/s SATA bottleneck of this card. What's more, I've seen AMD64 motherboards go to 64GB and I imagine they'd probably do a lot better than a GB per second. A disk controller and a hardware ramdisk processor would add latency over a software ramdisk also.
These sorts of cards have been around for a long while. The differences between this card and the cards I have seen are that this emulates a SATA drive and requires a SATA controller (whereas most others have a SCSI controller on the card and emulate a SCSI drive), it is internally battery backed, bootable and cheap.
If you need a super fast battery backed bootable drive, then this might be a good option. But if all you need is super fast storage which you can later commit to permanent disk, then a software ramdisk may be better.
That benchmark is old now. But did you look at the updates regarding NetBSD? They made dramatic improvements very very quickly.
There are other benchmarks out there which show opposite outcomes where BSD's are faster, so...
I think the most important thing to do is test the systems against the applications you run most. I perform certain memory intensive data mining on large datasets. For me FreeBSD and NetBSD are by far the fastest at what I do in that respect.
If I had a bias, it would be with OpenBSD, which I most enjoy using. Linux, including 2.6, is nowhere near as quick as FreeBSD or NetBSD for my specific application. So treat these benchmarks with interest and build on that interest if it takes your fancy. But don't live by these numbers and settle on some OS because of them. Chances are that you are doing yourself a disservice if you interpret the specific benchmarks as being more wide reaching.
Benchmarks are useful when people understand how specific their results are. Interpretting results further should always be backed up with either benchmarks which cover that extension or otherwise the real desired application.
1) Get slaughtered in head to head comparisions - overpriced six month old x86 Macs are going to be compared constantly to the lastest low to no-margin Dell boxes and it is going to be ugly
People don't buy Macs for raw performance. Most Mac users I know, buy a new Mac when the old one no longer runs the latest software very well. They don't go "corrr..!" when CPU speeds are incremented a notch. They buy Macs for the overall eXPerience. In a computing environment where viruses, worms and spyware are almost unheard of, where the system is easy to use and works very well... these people wouldn't care if their computer was 10% slower and 10% more expensive.
What good is it having the absolute fastest machine on the block if all it does for you is mostly burn idle cycles a bit faster and have you fight with it because it is poorly made hardware with a cludge of an operating system to go with it?
What price can you put on a complete system which works well with people? That is the value which Apple markets and if the performance differences and prices come down to small percentages, then the choice should be easy. When I compare high-end Powerbook prices to high-end Thinkpad prices, I would normally rather take the Powerbook. Just recently I purchased a Sony VAIO, but I specifically needed a notebook with fast RAM and the G4 can't cut it there. My needs are quite specialized at the moment. Thankfully FreeBSD runs on my VAIO pretty well. If the Powerbook had a decent memory system, then I would have bought a Powerbook, which I had planned to do for some time. When Powerbooks have Intel processors and fast memory, I'll buy one. I'll probably wait till 2007-2008.
As a guy who has been using Microsoft products since MS-DOS 3.3 and Apple products since the Apple IIe, I see very many problems still with Microsoft even in Windows XP. I find OSX a lot better when it comes to usability, consistency and integration between OS and applications.
I like PPC, but I also like the fact that Apple will be able to buy from the same source which the competition is buying from to keep them close to a level playing field. This move can only be ultimately good for Apple and its users.
will continue to be produced for both platforms...it's just good business.
You can say that again. Providing software which your target market can actually run is pretty important! It will probably be a while between the time Mactels hit the streets and when the ratio between Mactel and MacPPC are even 50:50. I'm sure developers would keep going right to 90:10 if Mac development plays a big role in their profits.
The small time devs might leave the PPC earlier, but if Apple makes it so easy to make a fat binary, then why wouldn't people choose to do that? Hell, the fact that you could make a fat binary suggests that cross compiling would be employed, in which case keeping your old Mac around might only be needed for testing and no to minimal actual development. Development could mostly be done on the faster new Intel Macs.
Plenty of people with decent iBooks, Powerbooks and Powermacs are going to want to keep using their investment.
Regardless. Troll you need to learn to spell, realise that zealots and reasonable people are in all camps and that you should replace "Apple user" with "Apple zealot" and then realise that you could replace "Apple" with any other name like Linux, Wintel, etc.
The Newton had the best handwriting recognition I have ever seen, even for cursive. Practically speaking it was too bulky and heavy. Every Mac user I know avoided OSX until it was thrust upon them when they bought a new Mac. So it was hardly suddenly the bees-knees in their eyes. The Mac mini is a cheap Mac for basic computing that introduces people to OSX. The real legally acceptable meaning of UNIX is not very meaningful when people just want to get stuff done. I use Solaris, OSX and the BSD's, but at the end of the day I prefer to use FreeBSD on x86 to get stuff done fast. Oh, FreeBSD is not UNIX (R) so therefore FreeBSD is suddenly much less useful to me. When UNIX-like OS users refer to their working environment as "UNIX", they know what each other means in the practical sense. I like PPC. I wish it would ramp up as fast or faster than x86. I am disappointed. I will continue to use Apple products where they shine.
The OS X GUI... To many, many people the OS X GUI is just to much to bare. To many people it just doesn't look professinal the way windows 2000 or Gnome do
Okay, now I know you are completely off the planet.
The Mac user just belly up more cash not realising Apple is doing this things because they have no long term plan for their computers or software
Actually, the truth is the complete opposite. Apple made drastic changes to go back to the beginning and lay long-term foundations. Microsoft on the other hand has massive inertia in massive code bases. Their software is completely covered in bandages because of a lack for long term planning. Apple is now at a stage where they pretty much have a good foundation OS for the future, which runs on an architecture which will keep them competitive in the long term (x86). If Apple introduces a Wintel compatibility layer when they switch to x86, Microsoft might suddenly find themselves very much up "shit creek" without a paddle.
PS, the iPod Shuffle is excellent for exercise. I am actually considering complementing my iRiver with a Shuffle because it is light, durable and easy to keep rainproof. Which is perfect for that niche and cheap enough to fit it.
If you are going to troll effectively, please improve your spelling, grammar and arguments.
I forgot to mention that at least slut A always comes with at least 3 ports. The others come with a maximum of 2, but usually only come with 1 unreliable port which is hard to get working. These common units tend to be expensive to run and also come with an output only port which is very noisy.
I fixed an engine (LN2000), later discovered the principle had been (sort of) used previously: http://tinyurl.com/c4ua4 . So my idea was original & wasn't that original at the same time! I think our inventions are starting to overlap.
In 1989, while playing with some JK flip-flops configured as a ripple counter, with variable resistors connected to the outputs, I discovered Digital to Analog Conversion. Having never heard of DAC's at that point.
I'm done. Guess it was a 50 dollar lesson in waiting a few months after release of a new game. EA should be ashamed of themselves releasing this bug-ridden crap. I may just go back and play the demo as that wasn't as bad.
I like waiting until you can get games with all their expansion packs for half the price of the game alone when it was new. They tend to be nice and stable too.
Normally I don't mind waiting. But the demo of BF2 reaalllyy has me wanting the full game and a better video card. My laptops X600 plays it well if I turn down the detail, but looking at the screenshots I don't want to turn it down.
The real question is, can we trust the weapon operators to use this responsibly?
I have video footage from a USAF HUD which depicts the bombing of a crowd of civilians walking in the streets of Iraq. The pilot states what he sees and asks if he should bomb them and with NO JUSTIFICATION OR IDENTIFICATION GIVEN OR SOUGHT, the group of people were blown away. A US voice could be heard saying, "Oh dude".
I have video footage from a US Army AH64 Apache gun camera which depicts an unarmed and wounded iraqi being shot dead. The pilot orders the gunner to shoot the iraqi after both can see he is flailing around on the ground in pain. You can hear the gunner disbelievingly state that a nearby vehicle should be shot, when the pilot re-affirms that the wounded unarmed person should be shot. The gunner carries out the order.
I have seen pictures of a woman being pack raped in an Iraqi prison.
The answer to your question, is a resounding NO!
When some European people commit such war crimes, they get brought to justice when they are caught. Will GWB ever be tried for his war crimes?
The USA, Briton, Australia and others in this illegal war, will NEVER EVER be free again. Terrorism will carry on forever because of some greedy power hungry piece of shit and some gutless followers.
How can we expect these people to feel liberated when we rape and kill the innocent men, women and children?
Nothing. The penetration depth is next to nothing, and 95GHz is too low of an energy to cause mutations.
GHz is not a measure of energy. It may describe an attribute of electromagnetically radiated energy but it does not resolve the amount of energy. I agree that at that frequency the penetration depth should be very low. That is not to say that the energy converted to heat won't go deeper into the skin though.
So is 95GHz the resonant frequency of dead skin or perhaps the natural oils on our skin?
It's genius really, but unfortunately companies are already considering buying their idea. I'd suggest they patent the idea and sell the patent rights of it -- instead of being stupid and selling such valuable idea in full to some company.
I would not call it genius. It is just an obvious application of something which is very interesting (Peltier's). So obvious I thought it up all by myself many years ago. I realise many patents are as ridiculous as this, but they offend me and should not be possible. I mean this is what peltiers are for! Move heat from one place to another. It is up to you, the person applying the peltier, as to what medium you want the heat moved from and to.
I was going to do this years ago to see if I could cool my small computer room (at home). I don't know how well their patent application will go when this is already done in portable refridgerators (A fan-heatsink-peltier-heatsink-fan sandwich. With the hot heatsink outside and the cold heatsink inside).
The genius is the peltier, not the crud bolted to it.
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Ahh, so it does! Appologies mikiN.
I was failing to enter every equals when I tested it.
I thought to do this easily in C I would simply have to read the 32bit number four bytes at a time?
o wait, this is the goverment, nevermind
Joke as you will, but there are standards and guidelines put out by governments around the World regarding disk sanitization. Some private companies then adhere to them and some don't. It is not just governments which make mistakes. Governments do actually have some very smart people working for them.
I used to work for city government here in SoCal, USA. In contrast to our Aussie friends, they were super paranoid about data leakage.
This does not, in any way, reflect on "Aussies" or their awareness of the importance of media sanitization.
When there was actually a situation where the red tape was momentarily pierced and we were authorized to give away outdated equipment to schools, they made us do a multiple-pass low-level format on each and every HDD that left the building.
Are you sure you were "low level" formatting those drives? That is a term that gets used often when it should not. Modern IDE drives cannot be low level formatted outside the factory and this has been the case for many years. A true low level format actually re-writes tracks, aligning them again as it goes.
"all modern hard disks are low-level formatted at the factory for the life of the drive. There's no way for the PC to do an LLF on a modern IDE/ATA or SCSI hard disk, and there's no reason to try to do so."
Unfortunately, this term has become so misused, that even hard drive manufacturers are now providing zero-fill utilities labeled as low-level-format utilities.
I have worked for the Australian Government in sanitizing machines prior to them being decommisioned. Luckily, I am a contractor who takes his contracts, customers and their needs seriously and I did not have anything to do with this case. I don't think this reflects on Australia in any way. I'm sure I could dig up similar stories regarding US or UK blunders.
peril lies that way for no gain, so I just did what should have been done and repartitioned the thing.
What should have been done at an absolute minimum, is have the entire drive(s) zeroed out. If the drives held extremely sensitive data then multiple passes of random data and then zeroes, would be better.
Hi mikiN,
Actually, that is not quite correct. The calculation along those lines is:
With a dotted decimal notation IP address of a.b.c.d:
(a * 16,777,216) + (b * 65,563) + (c * 256) + d = decimal IP address.
As you could imagine, with an IP address being a 32bit binary number, 2^32-1 is 4,294,967,295 and 255.255.255.255 equals (255 * 16,777,216) + (255 * 65,563) + (255 * 256) + 255 = 4,294,967,295.
Your calculation incorrectly comes out to 261,120 and does not consider the correct significance of each individual DDN byte.
I figured this out a few months ago, so that I could perform reduction of many individual subnets into largest possible contiguous groups to allow bounds checking from within a shell script. The script breaks down subnets assigned to various countries into a smaller list of larger blocks.
For example,
10.0.0.0 - 10.0.1.255 US
10.0.2.0 - 10.0.4.255 US
10.0.5.0 - 10.0.5.255 UK
10.0.6.0 - 10.0.6.255 US
10.0.7.0 - 10.0.7.255 US
Would become:
10.0.0.0 - 10.0.4.255 US
10.0.5.0 - 10.0.5.255 UK
10.0.6.0 - 10.0.7.255 US
Although the actual numbers were converted to decimal to allow easy bounds checking within a script:
167772160 167773439 US
167773440 167773695 UK
167773696 167774207 US
Interestingly, NetBSD allows pinging of decimal IP addresses. Is this common amongst the free UNIX like OS'?
Anyone know an easy way to calculate the dotted decimal notation IP address if given the full decimal IP address? With simple on-paper calculations like these? I was trying to figure it out, but then cheated by just pinging the decimal IP, forcing ping to timeout in near 0 seconds and then used "cut" to extract the DDN IP from the output. A bit dodgy, but I was in a hurry.
If you can think of a case where errors would be something that you can divide up, such that you might end up with five eighths of an error, then I'll withdraw my statement. Otherwise, you're wrong: it's improper English.
Actually, I can. I worked with analogue computers with mostly US Navy documentation. With those and generically in measurement, there is a component, which is in error. An amount of error, which would have to remain within a certain tolerance to provide an acceptable signal or measurement. The error in that case is an amount. "The amount of error involved should be within acceptable limits".
Interesting page by the way.
Yeah because it's so much easier to pick the correct pair of wires out of several dozen or hundred on the local loop then it is to setup a router rule to capture VoIP packets.
If you are a man in the middle at a Telco, then you probably have the knowledge of what pair to listen to. That assumes someone who is specifically targetted. You could just be unlucky enough to be the one which is randomly listened to at the Telco.
Unless they are hanging off the pole outside your house (which would be rather brazen) I don't worry myself too much with MIM attacks on POTS. In fact unauthorized bugs on POTS can usually be detected fairly easy (they cause a voltage drop) if you are that paranoid about them.
A good powered tap can cause no measurable voltage drop, since they have extremely high input resistance.
Of course you can't do anything about central office taps (law enforcement) or the other end of the line -- but no matter which technology you use I don't think you can ever trust the remote end of the conversation to be secure.
I personally have suffered MIM from my Telco twice. I was in the middle of a conversation with a friend, telling him how crap the local Telco is which I worked for and someone joined in and abused me!
BTW, for someone who has worked at a Telco, choosing the right pair is trivial. Whether it is at the local telco or a junction box in the street or block of appartments.
I can't tell if you're joking, but I find it a little ironic that you used "amount" where "number" is more appropriate (you can't have a partial error).
amount (-mount') pronunciation
n.
1. The total of two or more quantities; the aggregate.
2. A number; a sum.
3. A principal plus its interest, as in a loan.
4. The full effect or meaning; import.
5. Quantity: a great amount of intelligence.
I don't find that use of "amount" to be uncommon.
Read his question again.
If Apple is making most of their money in hardware. I would have thought that the move to Apple Intel would allow them to more easily provide a compatiblity layer for running Windows software within OSX at near native speeds. To get more people to want to use OSX to enjoy all the other benefits (no viruses, spyware, worms, etc). All these new people wanting to use OSX will have to use it on Apple hardware.... $$$$
I still think Apple would be silly to release OSX for generic Intel machines. They would suddenly find much less need for their computer hardware and they would also be in direct head-to-head competition with Microsoft's core industry controlling software.
I realise that OSX for Intel would probably sell like hotcakes, but Apple would have to support so much more hardware and they might find that the interest dies down after the hype when people find that the initial versions are not as fast or as compatible as they like. They'd be risking their cash cow (Apple hardware) on a gamble of competing against the dirtiest scoundrels in town at their own game.
What they are doing is best. If they release Intel machines which run Mac software and Wintel software, they may become bigger than Microsoft have ever been. Apple has been so popular over the last few years, being "cool" that they may take Microsoft down. Imagine if all of a sudden you didn't need Microsoft for anything because Apple was a better option.
Microsoft would become an applications company, writing for OSX and the likes of Dell would have to start building machines under contract from Apple.
A man can dream can't he?
On a tangent, where have you seen AMD64 MBs that support 64GB of RAM ? I've been thinking about using something like that for getting really good performance for a relatively big DB app, but all MBs I've seen have just 4 banks, and the biggest chips are 4MB. I guess a dual proc would double that :)
I have not seen any Opteron system which would require less than four processors to go to 64GB. Most bare motherboard makers I have seen have a max of 32GB even with their quad Opteron boards.
Here is a HP Proliant which will go to 64GB.
One thing I have noticed with boards that can take lots of RAM (32GB+), is that the higher you go, the slower the speed of the RAM is run at. It is very apparent with that HP. I guess there are so many memory modules in a 64GB system that they can't be reliably powered at full speed. Or maybe they put so much load on each of their busses that they bring the signals down closer to the noise and thus can't run at highest frequencies. Might be something to consider if you can get away with 16GB. Otherwise, regardless of this a 60 something GB ramdisk for a db is going to scream. You'll want a super reliable system with redundant power supplies! I guess at least the Gigabyte ramdisk card won't have trouble there, being battery backed.
Also on a related note, anyone know if it is possible in a disk mirroring setup, to use a ramdisk and a real disk in such a way that reads and writes are done only to the ramdisk and the real hard disk is merely written to to keep up to date at a lower priority? Super speed and redundancy. I have been wanting to do this with software mirroring between a software ramdisk and a real disk. Probably would be good for an SMP system, since ramdisks are heavy on CPU when they're in use (with software mirroring adding to that).
Actually, here is a 4-way (optional 8-way) Tyan Opteron board that will go to 128GB! It seems that it will go to 64GB with 4 procs.
I don't agree. I record music on at least 8 tracks at a time into a single cpu. I NEED higher transfer rates. If it's 4 gigs, thats enough to keep it recording without a drop in an entire days worth of recording. Then I can dump all that data to a slower, larger drive. It may not fit everyone's needs.. but this is PERFECT for me.
I would rather put the cost of this card towards an AMD64 motherboard which supports a crap load of RAM and then just use a software ramdisk. I use mfs under OpenBSD, NetBSD and FreeBSD. From memory on my AMD XP2800+ with 2GB DDR RAM, with a 1GB mfs ramdisk, I get 800MB/s read and write. A heck of a lot faster than the 150MB/s SATA bottleneck of this card. What's more, I've seen AMD64 motherboards go to 64GB and I imagine they'd probably do a lot better than a GB per second. A disk controller and a hardware ramdisk processor would add latency over a software ramdisk also.
These sorts of cards have been around for a long while. The differences between this card and the cards I have seen are that this emulates a SATA drive and requires a SATA controller (whereas most others have a SCSI controller on the card and emulate a SCSI drive), it is internally battery backed, bootable and cheap.
If you need a super fast battery backed bootable drive, then this might be a good option. But if all you need is super fast storage which you can later commit to permanent disk, then a software ramdisk may be better.
That benchmark is old now. But did you look at the updates regarding NetBSD? They made dramatic improvements very very quickly.
There are other benchmarks out there which show opposite outcomes where BSD's are faster, so...
I think the most important thing to do is test the systems against the applications you run most. I perform certain memory intensive data mining on large datasets. For me FreeBSD and NetBSD are by far the fastest at what I do in that respect.
If I had a bias, it would be with OpenBSD, which I most enjoy using. Linux, including 2.6, is nowhere near as quick as FreeBSD or NetBSD for my specific application. So treat these benchmarks with interest and build on that interest if it takes your fancy. But don't live by these numbers and settle on some OS because of them. Chances are that you are doing yourself a disservice if you interpret the specific benchmarks as being more wide reaching.
Benchmarks are useful when people understand how specific their results are. Interpretting results further should always be backed up with either benchmarks which cover that extension or otherwise the real desired application.
1) Get slaughtered in head to head comparisions - overpriced six month old x86 Macs are going to be compared constantly to the lastest low to no-margin Dell boxes and it is going to be ugly
People don't buy Macs for raw performance. Most Mac users I know, buy a new Mac when the old one no longer runs the latest software very well. They don't go "corrr..!" when CPU speeds are incremented a notch. They buy Macs for the overall eXPerience. In a computing environment where viruses, worms and spyware are almost unheard of, where the system is easy to use and works very well... these people wouldn't care if their computer was 10% slower and 10% more expensive.
What good is it having the absolute fastest machine on the block if all it does for you is mostly burn idle cycles a bit faster and have you fight with it because it is poorly made hardware with a cludge of an operating system to go with it?
What price can you put on a complete system which works well with people? That is the value which Apple markets and if the performance differences and prices come down to small percentages, then the choice should be easy. When I compare high-end Powerbook prices to high-end Thinkpad prices, I would normally rather take the Powerbook. Just recently I purchased a Sony VAIO, but I specifically needed a notebook with fast RAM and the G4 can't cut it there. My needs are quite specialized at the moment. Thankfully FreeBSD runs on my VAIO pretty well. If the Powerbook had a decent memory system, then I would have bought a Powerbook, which I had planned to do for some time. When Powerbooks have Intel processors and fast memory, I'll buy one. I'll probably wait till 2007-2008.
As a guy who has been using Microsoft products since MS-DOS 3.3 and Apple products since the Apple IIe, I see very many problems still with Microsoft even in Windows XP. I find OSX a lot better when it comes to usability, consistency and integration between OS and applications.
I like PPC, but I also like the fact that Apple will be able to buy from the same source which the competition is buying from to keep them close to a level playing field. This move can only be ultimately good for Apple and its users.
will continue to be produced for both platforms...it's just good business.
You can say that again. Providing software which your target market can actually run is pretty important! It will probably be a while between the time Mactels hit the streets and when the ratio between Mactel and MacPPC are even 50:50. I'm sure developers would keep going right to 90:10 if Mac development plays a big role in their profits.
The small time devs might leave the PPC earlier, but if Apple makes it so easy to make a fat binary, then why wouldn't people choose to do that? Hell, the fact that you could make a fat binary suggests that cross compiling would be employed, in which case keeping your old Mac around might only be needed for testing and no to minimal actual development. Development could mostly be done on the faster new Intel Macs.
Plenty of people with decent iBooks, Powerbooks and Powermacs are going to want to keep using their investment.
"If fooled, you can't get fooled again."
You beat me to it. I was going to quote that because it cracks me up.
I can't believe the President of the Worlds most powerful nation, is such a fucktard.
Shame on you USA.
Wow, is this a new troll?
Regardless. Troll you need to learn to spell, realise that zealots and reasonable people are in all camps and that you should replace "Apple user" with "Apple zealot" and then realise that you could replace "Apple" with any other name like Linux, Wintel, etc.
The Newton had the best handwriting recognition I have ever seen, even for cursive. Practically speaking it was too bulky and heavy. Every Mac user I know avoided OSX until it was thrust upon them when they bought a new Mac. So it was hardly suddenly the bees-knees in their eyes. The Mac mini is a cheap Mac for basic computing that introduces people to OSX. The real legally acceptable meaning of UNIX is not very meaningful when people just want to get stuff done. I use Solaris, OSX and the BSD's, but at the end of the day I prefer to use FreeBSD on x86 to get stuff done fast. Oh, FreeBSD is not UNIX (R) so therefore FreeBSD is suddenly much less useful to me. When UNIX-like OS users refer to their working environment as "UNIX", they know what each other means in the practical sense. I like PPC. I wish it would ramp up as fast or faster than x86. I am disappointed. I will continue to use Apple products where they shine.
The OS X GUI... To many, many people the OS X GUI is just to much to bare. To many people it just doesn't look professinal the way windows 2000 or Gnome do
Okay, now I know you are completely off the planet.
The Mac user just belly up more cash not realising Apple is doing this things because they have no long term plan for their computers or software
Actually, the truth is the complete opposite. Apple made drastic changes to go back to the beginning and lay long-term foundations. Microsoft on the other hand has massive inertia in massive code bases. Their software is completely covered in bandages because of a lack for long term planning. Apple is now at a stage where they pretty much have a good foundation OS for the future, which runs on an architecture which will keep them competitive in the long term (x86). If Apple introduces a Wintel compatibility layer when they switch to x86, Microsoft might suddenly find themselves very much up "shit creek" without a paddle.
PS, the iPod Shuffle is excellent for exercise. I am actually considering complementing my iRiver with a Shuffle because it is light, durable and easy to keep rainproof. Which is perfect for that niche and cheap enough to fit it.
If you are going to troll effectively, please improve your spelling, grammar and arguments.
I forgot to mention that at least slut A always comes with at least 3 ports. The others come with a maximum of 2, but usually only come with 1 unreliable port which is hard to get working. These common units tend to be expensive to run and also come with an output only port which is very noisy.
Remember that before socket A there was slut A, a CPU package that lasted about as long as 754.
I thought slut A would only do things for you for a little while and then move on to the next guy?
I fixed an engine (LN2000), later discovered the principle had been (sort of) used previously: http://tinyurl.com/c4ua4 . So my idea was original & wasn't that original at the same time! I think our inventions are starting to overlap.
In 1989, while playing with some JK flip-flops configured as a ripple counter, with variable resistors connected to the outputs, I discovered Digital to Analog Conversion. Having never heard of DAC's at that point.
That was pretty cool.
That f11 key sure is hard to hit, isn't it?
Yes and in real life, US Tankers in Iraq thank God and Country every day for the F11 key.
I'm done. Guess it was a 50 dollar lesson in waiting a few months after release of a new game. EA should be ashamed of themselves releasing this bug-ridden crap. I may just go back and play the demo as that wasn't as bad.
I like waiting until you can get games with all their expansion packs for half the price of the game alone when it was new. They tend to be nice and stable too.
Normally I don't mind waiting. But the demo of BF2 reaalllyy has me wanting the full game and a better video card. My laptops X600 plays it well if I turn down the detail, but looking at the screenshots I don't want to turn it down.
The real question is, can we trust the weapon operators to use this responsibly?
I have video footage from a USAF HUD which depicts the bombing of a crowd of civilians walking in the streets of Iraq. The pilot states what he sees and asks if he should bomb them and with NO JUSTIFICATION OR IDENTIFICATION GIVEN OR SOUGHT, the group of people were blown away. A US voice could be heard saying, "Oh dude".
I have video footage from a US Army AH64 Apache gun camera which depicts an unarmed and wounded iraqi being shot dead. The pilot orders the gunner to shoot the iraqi after both can see he is flailing around on the ground in pain. You can hear the gunner disbelievingly state that a nearby vehicle should be shot, when the pilot re-affirms that the wounded unarmed person should be shot. The gunner carries out the order.
I have seen pictures of a woman being pack raped in an Iraqi prison.
The answer to your question, is a resounding NO!
When some European people commit such war crimes, they get brought to justice when they are caught. Will GWB ever be tried for his war crimes?
The USA, Briton, Australia and others in this illegal war, will NEVER EVER be free again. Terrorism will carry on forever because of some greedy power hungry piece of shit and some gutless followers.
How can we expect these people to feel liberated when we rape and kill the innocent men, women and children?
Nothing. The penetration depth is next to nothing, and 95GHz is too low of an energy to cause mutations.
GHz is not a measure of energy. It may describe an attribute of electromagnetically radiated energy but it does not resolve the amount of energy. I agree that at that frequency the penetration depth should be very low. That is not to say that the energy converted to heat won't go deeper into the skin though.
So is 95GHz the resonant frequency of dead skin or perhaps the natural oils on our skin?
It's genius really, but unfortunately companies are already considering buying their idea. I'd suggest they patent the idea and sell the patent rights of it -- instead of being stupid and selling such valuable idea in full to some company.
I would not call it genius. It is just an obvious application of something which is very interesting (Peltier's). So obvious I thought it up all by myself many years ago. I realise many patents are as ridiculous as this, but they offend me and should not be possible. I mean this is what peltiers are for! Move heat from one place to another. It is up to you, the person applying the peltier, as to what medium you want the heat moved from and to.
I was going to do this years ago to see if I could cool my small computer room (at home). I don't know how well their patent application will go when this is already done in portable refridgerators (A fan-heatsink-peltier-heatsink-fan sandwich. With the hot heatsink outside and the cold heatsink inside).
The genius is the peltier, not the crud bolted to it.