People who would hate you for it are already looking for a reason to hate you, so it doesn't matter if race or sexual orientation is the answer they find.
Preposterous. Bigotry is often directed toward groups of people, an individual of which the bigot has never met. It's much harder to hate gay/les/bi/trans people when you take the time to meet your gay neighbor and get to know them as an individual and not just as a faceless member of a group you've heard bad things about.
Race is probably harder to hide, but sexual orientation doesn't have to be obvious to these people.
Minority groups are under no obligation to hide their identities to escape the prejudices of other people. Nobody should be forced into the closet just so that others won't have to confront their own preconceptions.
so if "gay" means "bad" it's not homophobia, it's evolution.
Of course it's homophobia. The fact that a slur is unfortunately trendy doesn't make it less of a slur. Would you argue that to "jew someone down" isn't anti-Semitic merely because the expression was in common use?
The expression "that's so gay" is considered the universal insult in American schools, something that would be readily rejected as vulgar if applied to any demographic besides gays.
What do you care if something is offered in Buy-It-Now format? If it's available in your price range from a reputable seller, then go ahead and buy it. And if not, then you couldn't afford it. BIN items are generally priced around market value, as otherwise the seller just loses money by paying listing fees for something which languishes unsold.
Also, if you lose an auction to a higher bidder then it's totally irrelevant whether that higher bidder is a dealer or not. If you were willing to pay more, then why didn't you bid higher? eBay's proxy bidding system means the final selling price is one bid increment above the second place bidder, which is generally lower than the value entered by the winner.
The secret to winning items on eBay is no secret at all: Bid once, bid late, bid your max. If you end up as the winner, then by definition you'll have won it at a price you're willing to pay (and you won't have participated in or encouraged nibbling battles). And if you don't win a given auction, it's because someone else was willing to pay more for it.
All of the original Opteron 1xx and some of the current ones are Socket 940. ISTR reading something about AMD phasing out or increasing prices on 939 Opterons to discourage overclockers.
Excellent info about the PCI Express slots and lanes. It can be confusing that certain motherboard slots will physically accommodate lane configurations that they don't actually support.
Linux, SunOS, and some other systems offer a tmpfs facility which can provide performance benefits similar to the i-RAM, depending on how it's configured.
It's like a ramdisk, but has the advantage that it starts tiny and can grow and shrink depending on current contents to make efficient use of available RAM. It also spills over into swap space using the normal virtual memory mechanism.
My/etc/fstab contains a line:
tmpfs/tmp tmpfs size=3072m,mode=1777 0 0
which creates an empty/tmp directory (with appropriate permissions) in a virtual partition of up to 3GB but never actually touches disk unless my system RAM fills up.
I was thinking that a [for example] 4% average boost from SMT with a single-core K8 might not be worth the investment of transistors and design complexity, but an 8% boost with a dual-core K8 could be. Of course that presumes you have at least four threads runnable at the same time, which might only be true on a server.
But as you said, if dual-core isn't much slower than SMP then I guess there isn't any point to SMT. Maybe the situation changes when we hit quad-core!
As I understand it, initial dual-core AMD64 chips will have dual caches feeding off the same single or dual RAM channels previously accommodating a single-core chip. With half as much memory bandwidth available per core, does that imply more frequent pipeline stalls and therefore more benefit from SMT?
AMD processors will soon have SSE3 and don't have much need for HyperThreading to make use of idle execution units as does Pentium 4. The highly efficient Pentium M doesn't need it either.
AMD had a 1+ year head-start distributing reference materials and winning developer mind-share. They're not likely to lose their advantage anytime soon, especially as Athlon64 is faster than current EMT64 chips in 64-bit mode, is cheaper, and runs cooler.
You can expect developers to write code that works on both architectures, it'd be unwise to release something which didn't run well on AMD's chips.
Realistically it can probably hit 220mph or so. Motorcycles are very unaerodynamic and that's all that matters at high speeds. But yeah, it would make a colorful way to go out.
I once attended a contentious school district meeting in Newton, MA where Judith Reisman was a speaker advocating against our sex ed curriculum. At one point she called for "all those parents willing to die for their children [to] stand up!" In the midst of an evening filled with virulent anti-gay rhetoric, it was a horrifying implication that if you really love your children then you'll join her in hating gay people.
At the same meeting conservative commentator Don Feder was asked how he would react if he found that one of his sons was gay. He replied that he would immediately find out who molested his child, utterly oblivious to the reality that gayness is simply a natural and healthy state for many people.
I left the meeting hoping for their sakes that the Feder kids turned out straight, but also wondering whether his narrow view of the world might be challenged if he were forced to deal with the humanity of a gay child.
[Sorry for the late reply.] Yeah, cycling through extra hard drives stored away securely can be an economical medium-term backup solution, especially until higher capacity DVDs become available. If you're backing up 200GB+ of data, it's a helluva lot faster to mirror a hard drive than to burn dozens of optical media.
You're right that photos aren't permanent. A safe deposit box could be a good solution for valuable or treasured negatives.
My point was just that data loss due to operator mistake or malicious intrusion happen much more often than fire or flood, and synchronizing your data with an offsite medium will likely just propagate the loss.
This doesn't protect your data from user error or malicious deletion or corruption of data any more than a RAID setup does. Once you rsync it, you just have two copies of corrupted data and no way to recover the original. There's no substitute for a true offsite backup.
Mod parent up, this is great advice. I've had superb performance and reliability from software RAID 0 and 5 under Linux 2.4 and 2.6 for the last two years using a fast/wide PCI bus.
Hardware is a trio of Seagate X15-36LP Cheetahs connected to a Tekram U160 card running in a 64bit/66MHz slot of a dual Athlon XP 2000+ Tyan Tiger MPX motherboard [currently $215].
When I moved this controller and drive setup to the standard 32bit/33MHz slot of a dual P3/450MHz machine, disk performance was drastically cut while CPU usage wasn't much affected.
Modern hard drives are pushing 70MB/s transfer rates, so even two of them can saturate the classic PCI bus. PATA, SATA, and SCSI can all support high RAID transfer rates if their controllers are connected to the system by wide-enough / fast-enough interfaces and smart choices are made about [not] sharing channels.
BTW, at least a few of the common Linux filesystems are smart enough to automatically configure themselves efficiently when formatted on top of a RAIDed partition.
This is a fascinating approach. One thing I didn't see mentioned at all in the documents is the possible change in performance characteristics by changing instructions which have the same effect but which have different pipeline, execution unit, or cache properties.
Modern optimizing compilers spend an awful lot of effort generating efficient combinations of instructions which try to make the most out of CPUs having complicated rules. For example, add eax,eax and shl eax,1 might both produce the same desired effect but yield significantly different runtimes depending on the presence / absence of barrel shifters or the ability of particular instructions to pair in a given CPU.
Naturally the above would only matter if the modified code is in an inner loop, but it could happen.
Speed may not be the only consideration. Some removable media formats [maybe SmartMedia?] are designed to provide data transport but aren't robust enough for high duty cycle writes which would be needed to function as swap space.
Can't give you a solid example, but I remember reading warnings about certain kinds of media which could only be reliably written a few hundred or thousand times.
Slashdot Mirror
Preposterous. Bigotry is often directed toward groups of people, an individual of which the bigot has never met. It's much harder to hate gay/les/bi/trans people when you take the time to meet your gay neighbor and get to know them as an individual and not just as a faceless member of a group you've heard bad things about.
Minority groups are under no obligation to hide their identities to escape the prejudices of other people. Nobody should be forced into the closet just so that others won't have to confront their own preconceptions.
Of course it's homophobia. The fact that a slur is unfortunately trendy doesn't make it less of a slur. Would you argue that to "jew someone down" isn't anti-Semitic merely because the expression was in common use?
The expression "that's so gay" is considered the universal insult in American schools, something that would be readily rejected as vulgar if applied to any demographic besides gays.
Parent wasn't off-topic, it was a reference to Badfinger's song Come And Get It (originally written by Paul McCartney).
What do you care if something is offered in Buy-It-Now format? If it's available in your price range from a reputable seller, then go ahead and buy it. And if not, then you couldn't afford it. BIN items are generally priced around market value, as otherwise the seller just loses money by paying listing fees for something which languishes unsold.
Also, if you lose an auction to a higher bidder then it's totally irrelevant whether that higher bidder is a dealer or not. If you were willing to pay more, then why didn't you bid higher? eBay's proxy bidding system means the final selling price is one bid increment above the second place bidder, which is generally lower than the value entered by the winner.
The secret to winning items on eBay is no secret at all: Bid once, bid late, bid your max. If you end up as the winner, then by definition you'll have won it at a price you're willing to pay (and you won't have participated in or encouraged nibbling battles). And if you don't win a given auction, it's because someone else was willing to pay more for it.
All of the original Opteron 1xx and some of the current ones are Socket 940. ISTR reading something about AMD phasing out or increasing prices on 939 Opterons to discourage overclockers.
Excellent info about the PCI Express slots and lanes. It can be confusing that certain motherboard slots will physically accommodate lane configurations that they don't actually support.
here
It's like a ramdisk, but has the advantage that it starts tiny and can grow and shrink depending on current contents to make efficient use of available RAM. It also spills over into swap space using the normal virtual memory mechanism.
My
which creates an empty
Example of how to speed up Gentoo's portage with tmpfs.
No text!
I was thinking that a [for example] 4% average boost from SMT with a single-core K8 might not be worth the investment of transistors and design complexity, but an 8% boost with a dual-core K8 could be. Of course that presumes you have at least four threads runnable at the same time, which might only be true on a server.
But as you said, if dual-core isn't much slower than SMP then I guess there isn't any point to SMT. Maybe the situation changes when we hit quad-core!
As I understand it, initial dual-core AMD64 chips will have dual caches feeding off the same single or dual RAM channels previously accommodating a single-core chip. With half as much memory bandwidth available per core, does that imply more frequent pipeline stalls and therefore more benefit from SMT?
AMD processors will soon have SSE3 and don't have much need for HyperThreading to make use of idle execution units as does Pentium 4. The highly efficient Pentium M doesn't need it either.
AMD had a 1+ year head-start distributing reference materials and winning developer mind-share. They're not likely to lose their advantage anytime soon, especially as Athlon64 is faster than current EMT64 chips in 64-bit mode, is cheaper, and runs cooler.
You can expect developers to write code that works on both architectures, it'd be unwise to release something which didn't run well on AMD's chips.
Realistically it can probably hit 220mph or so. Motorcycles are very unaerodynamic and that's all that matters at high speeds. But yeah, it would make a colorful way to go out.
It probably handles like a Tomahawk.
I once attended a contentious school district meeting in Newton, MA where Judith Reisman was a speaker advocating against our sex ed curriculum. At one point she called for "all those parents willing to die for their children [to] stand up!" In the midst of an evening filled with virulent anti-gay rhetoric, it was a horrifying implication that if you really love your children then you'll join her in hating gay people.
At the same meeting conservative commentator Don Feder was asked how he would react if he found that one of his sons was gay. He replied that he would immediately find out who molested his child, utterly oblivious to the reality that gayness is simply a natural and healthy state for many people.
I left the meeting hoping for their sakes that the Feder kids turned out straight, but also wondering whether his narrow view of the world might be challenged if he were forced to deal with the humanity of a gay child.
Parents, Families and Friends of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgendered Persons
most scientific research suggests that homosexuals aren't any more disordered than normal individuals
Gays are normal individuals.
I'd hope this would bolster their ability to supply the larger OEMs.
[Sorry for the late reply.] Yeah, cycling through extra hard drives stored away securely can be an economical medium-term backup solution, especially until higher capacity DVDs become available. If you're backing up 200GB+ of data, it's a helluva lot faster to mirror a hard drive than to burn dozens of optical media.
You're right that photos aren't permanent. A safe deposit box could be a good solution for valuable or treasured negatives.
My point was just that data loss due to operator mistake or malicious intrusion happen much more often than fire or flood, and synchronizing your data with an offsite medium will likely just propagate the loss.
This doesn't protect your data from user error or malicious deletion or corruption of data any more than a RAID setup does. Once you rsync it, you just have two copies of corrupted data and no way to recover the original. There's no substitute for a true offsite backup.
Mod parent up, this is great advice. I've had superb performance and reliability from software RAID 0 and 5 under Linux 2.4 and 2.6 for the last two years using a fast/wide PCI bus.
Hardware is a trio of Seagate X15-36LP Cheetahs connected to a Tekram U160 card running in a 64bit/66MHz slot of a dual Athlon XP 2000+ Tyan Tiger MPX motherboard [currently $215].
When I moved this controller and drive setup to the standard 32bit/33MHz slot of a dual P3/450MHz machine, disk performance was drastically cut while CPU usage wasn't much affected.
Modern hard drives are pushing 70MB/s transfer rates, so even two of them can saturate the classic PCI bus. PATA, SATA, and SCSI can all support high RAID transfer rates if their controllers are connected to the system by wide-enough / fast-enough interfaces and smart choices are made about [not] sharing channels.
BTW, at least a few of the common Linux filesystems are smart enough to automatically configure themselves efficiently when formatted on top of a RAIDed partition.
This is a fascinating approach. One thing I didn't see mentioned at all in the documents is the possible change in performance characteristics by changing instructions which have the same effect but which have different pipeline, execution unit, or cache properties.
Modern optimizing compilers spend an awful lot of effort generating efficient combinations of instructions which try to make the most out of CPUs having complicated rules. For example, add eax,eax and shl eax,1 might both produce the same desired effect but yield significantly different runtimes depending on the presence / absence of barrel shifters or the ability of particular instructions to pair in a given CPU.
Naturally the above would only matter if the modified code is in an inner loop, but it could happen.
Those are valid points. RAID 1 [or 10 or 01] might make an even better choice for these areas which need fast write speeds.
In case nobody's yet posted the link, Storage Review has a wonderfully detailed section on RAID performance.
Sounds like a very nice system. But RAID 5 is a waste of both space and performance for swap and usually /tmp areas.
Must be what happened to the phalanges.
Speed may not be the only consideration. Some removable media formats [maybe SmartMedia?] are designed to provide data transport but aren't robust enough for high duty cycle writes which would be needed to function as swap space.
Can't give you a solid example, but I remember reading warnings about certain kinds of media which could only be reliably written a few hundred or thousand times.