The intervention of friends, family, professionals, or other community members might sometimes be required for escape. Just as the recently rescued kidnapped boys didn't walk or ride away when they apparently had chances for freedom, similar mental lock-in may very well apply in this case.
Pay attention to even those you know only casually. You could be the one to spot their captivity and take them to freedom.
allegedly mythical (No it's not!) (Yes it is!) (No it's not!) Airport exploit for Macs?
I believe there is a strong possibility it is related. I've used a third-party wireless card with a Broadcom chipset in G3/G4 Macs before, and it was recognized as an Airport Extreme (b/g) card.
I've heard that Broadcom has been less than cooperative in providing specs for others to write drivers. Perhaps if they were more open they'd have a better scrutinized more secure product. (I can't provide specific links, but I believe my information about Broadcom chipsets came from discussions of supporting them in past versions of the wireless utility Kismac)
After being used secretly for years, the RFID chips used by Wal-Mart have leaked from the landfills into the water and from there into our food supply. Now they are in all of our bodies. The current generation of RFIDs has greatly extended range through power derived from use of a coating that functions as a bio-electric fuel cell in the body. RFIDs attached to the optic nerve have been receiving firmware updates from subliminal noise data contained in network television broadcasts and online images. The revolting feeling you get when watching political broadcasts is actually a side-effect of Information Ministry attempts of transmitting viral countermeasures in these broadcasts.
Through vector matrix polymorphic 3D modulation of brain chemistry your messages will come to you in your dreams. Except for some success in recent presidential elections, chemical modulation attempts via tag bits in residual hormones in the milk supply have yet to be completely effective as countermeasures in altering these messages. The next round of bovine tag bits will initialize nested in a broadcast featuring a cow in a space ship.
Encryption keys will be transmitted by use of pheromones which will initialize the proper dream sequence. Those functioning as RFID hubs will receive updates during oral sex.
The only things that natively use 12 Volts at a current high enough to be significant are the drives. I think that misses the point however. Designing a power supply for higher output voltage, and switching regulators for higher input voltage, raises efficiency. (24 or 48 Voltage would likely be better yet, except for the need to come up with 12 Volts too)
It is unfortunate that the article (and the others that I could find) don't link to the white paper for some specifics. Instead I'll have to base my comments more from my understanding of electronics.
Let's say that we start with the usual rectifier/filer off the power line feeding switching transistor(s) that pulse current into a high frequency transformer. That much is fairly basic and efficient if the transistors have a low on-state resistance, fast switching time (to minimize the power-burning partly-on interval during switching where the transistor has significant current flow through it and significant voltage across it), and the switching design is such that current stops before the transformer core saturates. We'll also assume that at the high input voltages involved the resistance losses of the transformer primary are small. The total power capacity of the supply is generally defined by this portion of it. How much can be delivered from individual outputs depends on the design of what follows.
Now we get to to output(s) from the transformer secondary, which is where the article indicates that having a single output, at 12 Volts, improves efficiency. Unfortunately we're given no reasons as to why.
1) By having a single output, the transformer secondary winding for that voltage can be of a heavy guage designed for the full rated power level. It avoids the problem of having to guess which outputs actually need to deliver most of the power.
2) If the power level is developed at a higher output voltage, the current is reduced making resistance losses smaller. That applies to resistance losses in the cables from the supply to the motherboard as well as resistance in the transformer secondary windings. Resistance losses increase with the square of the current.
3) There is a relatively fixed voltage drop (loss) in the rectifier(s) used to convert the transformer output to D.C. The higher the design output voltage is, the smaller a percentage that voltage drop becomes. Less current is required for a given power level at a higher voltage, so the loss in the rectifier(s) is reduced. These losses come closer to varying linearly with the current (over the normal operating range), especially when hefty rectifiers with low series resistance are used, something that is more likely in a well designed single-output power supply.
Is there something magical about 12 Volts? No. In fact designing for a higher output voltage would give even better efficiency, but then there would be the need to add electronics elsewhere to down-convert to make 12 Volts available. If the portions of the machine using 12 Volts could tolerate the voltage variation, direct battery backup operation could be possible.
Since some modern CPUs may even have varying voltage requirements within a product family, and perhaps even unit to unit, there is a need for locally controlled voltage down-conversion on the motherboard. Done properly this can be pretty efficient. Generally the efficiency here is also higher starting with higher voltages. So if a CPU needs something near 2 Volts, it is better to produce that from a 12 Volt supply than from 5 Volts, for example.
The switching regulators on the motherboards can bring their own design issues. The ability to overclock some CPUs on some boards is limited by the available output current. Ability to recognize a new CPU type and generate a different voltage it needs is a more complex power-issue than we used to see. (This kind of thing could limit whether or not a Socket 775 motherboard that handled a Pentium D could handle a Core 2 Duo CPU for instance).
The problem is with the solder joints. After many cycles of heating up and cooling down they just lose contact.
The sad thing about this is that even the units that haven't failed yet have been through excessive thermal stress and cycling and have been compromised. The integrity of even the working units is degraded and they all are likely to experience continued elevated failure rates. Microsoft should provide free replacement/repair if any of these units ever fails. (ever meaning within some reasonable lifetime, say seven years?)
Well designed electronic equipment should be very reliable and few things should deteriorate significantly with age. Of course mechanical devices have wear, flex conductors to heads in hard drives crack, electrolytic capacitors dry out, switch contacts pit and burn from surge currents and arcing (both can be minimized easily). Semiconductors with extremely high current densities may eventually fail from metal-migration, but I have only seen that in some radio-frequency power transistors. But by far the most common failures are from excessive operating temperature which boils down to bad design. Contamination in the materials of some components elevates failure rates but even in that case the failure rate is usually temperature related.
I suspect that you compared an older Dell model with the previous-generation Xeons, not the more powerful Core 2 "Woodcrest" Xeons. Please check that as there is a big difference. The 2.66 GHz Woodcrest Xeon is the 5150. You'll need to select TWO of them (for four cores total).
The default "Suggested Configuration" for the Mac Pro, is $2499 which includes:
Two 2.66GHz Dual-Core Intel Xeon "Woodcrest" 5150 processors 4MB shared L2 cache per processor 1.33GHz dual independent frontside buses 1GB memory (667MHz DDR2 fully-buffered DIMM ECC) NVIDIA GeForce 7300 GT graphics with 256MB memory 250GB Serial ATA 3Gb/s 7200-rpm hard drive1 16x double-layer SuperDrive (DVD+R DL/DVD±RW/CD-RW)
There are many possible configurations of course, pick what you like. All Mac Pro configurations include: two Dual-Core Intel Xeon "Woodcrest" microprocessors, eight fully buffered DIMM slots, one double-wide PCI Express graphics slot, three full-length PCI Express expansion slots, four hard drive bays, two optical drive bays, five USB 2.0 ports, two FireWire 400 ports, two FireWire 800 ports, dual Gigabit Ethernet ports, optical digital audio input and output, analog stereo line-input and line-output, and a headphone minijack.
IIRC you'll have to look at Dell's business machines to find comparable pro hardware (dual Core 2 "Woodcrest" Xeon CPUs - the 5150 chip is 2.66 GHz). I believe Dell has an offering called the Precision 690. The non-Xeon Core 2s cannot be used in pairs of chips. One chip = 2 cores. At 3.7 GHz, it sounds like you're looking at machines with the earlier Pentium IV or D CPUs, much different animals. Note that the Xeon is dual core, so with dual Xeons you're getting four cores.
Using a Mac with a TV tuner is amazingly easy. The Eye TV Hybrid is so small, it'd be no trouble at all to bring it along and use even with a laptop. It is about the size of two fingers held together. The included software is very easy to setup and use, making a Mac into an excellent TV/PVR.
Used with a 24" iMac, you'll get native 1920*1080 (full 1080i resolution), something that very few of the $4000 plasma televisions offer. A recent Apple Event included mention of the upcoming iTV (name subject to change, $269 IIRC) that will allow streaming video wirelessly to the living room for that bigger screen. Think of it as Airport Express for video/audio, with a remote control path back to the server. I think we'll see Apple making a big push into video around the time 10.5 ships.
IIRC even Steve Jobs said something early this year about being surprised at sales being stronger than expected. The PPC to Intel transition is a major one and is an excellent long term move. But it did cause some people to hold off on buying waiting for more native software, and allowing time for the shaking out of any minor glitches in the first products. A few probably also held off on buying when they heard that the Core 2 chips were coming.
It is pretty obvious that the move was a wise choice and that both Macintosh users and Apple will be better off long term. The appeal of the new generation of machines can be expected to increase over time. In addition to new features in the OS, it is reasonable to expect that 10.5 will bring even better performance. It'll likely make better use of multiple CPU cores, use the GPU horsepower for other tasks, use the Core 2 supplemental SSE3 instructions (I've heard them called both SSSE3 and SSE4), and use of the 64-bit capabilities. The software for Windows support will also be more mature (Apple's utility is currently beta).
The release of Vista will likely bring an increase in the number of people pondering new machines instead of just an OS upgrade. With Apple being more visible than in the past some of those people will opt for getting Macs instead (either solely for the Apple experience, or to run Windows too). Some may also be playing wait and see with Vista. If it isn't really, really, wonderful, it'll help Apple.
The approach taken by the security software is assbackwards too. Who would keep a bouncer at the door of a party with a list of who to keep OUT? Such a list wouldn't excluded a whole planetful of potential troublemakers. It would make far more sense to have tight controls on who is allowed IN.
What's funny is that most of the people buying $4000 plasma televisions are getting units that only do 720p (720 pixels tall) instead of the 1080 that full-quality HDTV offers and they don't even realize it.
For what it is worth, most of those buying "widescreen" computer monitors aren't getting enough pixels for the full HDTV resolution either, at least not with the smaller displays. 1080i uses 1920*1080 pixels. The recently-released 24" iMac supports it though, so it looks like my waiting to get rid of that appliance called a television is over.
Perhaps they'll be able to correlate interests through all of this data mining and come up with some new products or combinations of products (along the lines of alcoholic drinks with caffeine for example).
Speaking of memory access, it seem Anandtech showed the Pro in the worst light. They pointed out (fairly) where the higher latency of FB-DIMMs slowed performance, but ran the benchmarks with only a pair of DIMMs instead of four, failing to show the boost in performance from quad-channel memory access. Doubling memory bandwidth could have boosted some of the scores.
It would have been fun to see something better show the potential gains available from additional cores. A utility like Visual Hub can use multiple cores to be simultaneously transcoding multiple.AVIs (mpeg 4 etc) to generate a DVD image (mpeg 2). For a benchmark just give it multiple copies of the same video clip to work with. It isn't cross-platform though.
I'd always wished that DVDs and players had handled letterbox mode differently. Instead of using fewer lines of vertical resolution, all available lines (480?) could have been used for the smaller area, capturing more detail. On current players that would have caused the image to be stretched vertically (no black area), but they could have been designed to see a "letterbox flag" bit to know to reduce the height/resolution for an existing analog television, or better yet provide all of those lines and give the television a signal telling it to reduce the height to get the letterbox effect while retaining the same number of scan lines. The result would have been better detail (and brightness) in letterbox mode.
(Okay, it is really wierd idea, but I'm one of those rare people that was willing modify my television to add D.C. restoration, or even have D.C. video coupling, so the black scenes really would fade to black).
More on topic with the Apple Event, I hope Apple offers all video in a higher quality format. Considering that the new 24" iMac supports full 1080i resolution, I think it is likely. A better video iPod to share content with it makes sense too.
In offering the iMac in a 24" version it didn't just get a bigger screen. It got more pixels. It is 1920*1200, making it able to natively show 1920*1080 (1080i) HDTV at full detail, something most $4000 plasma televisions don't do. They're almost all only supporting 720p natively (720 pixels tall).
Perhaps it is no coincidence that El Gato Systems set the second week of September as the ship date for their Eye TV Hybrid which allows recent Macs to watch, record and play NTSC (analog) and HDTV (off air ATSC and IIRC, Clear-QAM Cable). The combination of the Eye-TV Hybrid or the earlier Eye TV 500 (digital only) and an iMac makes a great platform for HDTV. I expect that Steve will demo the two together. I've used an Eye-TV 500 on a 20" iMac. Good program material is stunning even with some detail being lost to scaling down for the 1680 pixel width of the screen. Getting the full detail and PVR functionality on a 24" iMac will be even better.
A relative near a major US city is getting about 20 digital program channels off-air (free), not counting a bunch of foreign-language and religious offerings. Those in remote areas won't be so lucky. But there are those BT downloads, and perhaps Steve will offer us a few more things from iTMS...
In wanting the highest performance while maintaining a great bang for the buck, I'd agree that the E6600 looks great, performing well as-is, and also being great for overclocking (especially with added cooling). However I wonder if the quad-core chips reportedly coming next year will be drop-in compatible. If that is the case and there is a strong likelihood of upgrading again so soon, going with the low-end E6300 now seems more cost effective. The E6300 is a good overclocker too, but it does have the smaller 2MB cache. IIRC, the low end chips also lack Hyperthreading. I don't know if that is more or less significant than the smaller cache. The cache size might be of more importance to Mac users than Linux users due to the large effect cache has on emulation performance. I haven't seen any studies showing the performance impact for PPC emulation on Intel yet, but cache certainly turned to be very significant during the Mac 68k to PPC transition.
It would be interesting to see a review where the high end chip is run at a reduced multiplier setting to match the clock rate of one of the lower-end (2 MB cache) chips to directly show what is gained from Hyperthreading and the larger cache under several OSes. (since it may not be easy to alter speed settings on Apple hardware, tests with an unauthorized/patched copy of Tiger on generic hardware would be useful). It would also be interesting to see how Linux (and other OS) speeds compare on Conroe machines versus Apple's Mac Pro dual 51xx Xeon systems (four cores).
I suspect that the benchmarks are understating the eventual advantages of the new chips for some uses since it is unlikely that they took advantage of the newly added SSE4 instructions.
Why does every server have it's own transformer/converter/rectifier/power supply (I think you know what I mean, that thing that converts from AC to DC)? It seems to me that it would make more sense for a room of servers to have a DC supply for all the computers.
If the voltage weren't so low and the currents so high, this might be practical, but with the large currents typically flowing on a supply of 5 Volts or less, it wouldn't take much resistance in the cables and connectors to drop the voltage excessively. Since the drop fluctuates with load, additional noise would be introduced on the supply lines also. When only one load is located some distance from the power supply, remote-sensing can greatly improve voltage regulation. That involves shifting the point that the power supply uses for the feedback signal out to the load (using a separate conductor for the signal). Since the ground return path also has a voltage drop, sensing on that side is needed too. If all loads were the same and had equal length cables, sensing feedback on just one would work. There'd still be the noise problem though. The power supply would respond to a spike in load current with a spike in voltage on the source end of the cable. The load with the current spike and feedback would see stabilized voltage, but all other loads would see an (upward) voltage spike.
It's really annoying to see the power figure hyped. Obviously someone thinks 1000 Watts sounds impressive. The figure has the opposite effect on me, as my $1/month per 10 Watts continuous rule of thumb translates that to $100 on the electric bill. If one figures that a 1500 Watt space-heater runs 1/2 the time, a server that really uses 1000 Watts would be generating MORE heat. Put 50 in a rack, and have 10 racks in a room, and we're talking 500,000 Watts. Try and cool that!
Just remember, the next time you Slashdot a site, you've melted another chunk of arctic ice.
Maybe it's time that we phase out traditional servers and move towards some method of serving from unused capacity on user machines.
I've always thought it curious that the operating system is almost always officially refered to as "Mac OS X." As if somewhere down the line it might be bundled with other computers...
People used to speak of System 6, System 7... but in the era of 8 came the licensed Macintosh clones and suddenly the system was called Mac OS. Using OS in the name raised another issue. When Apple moved past Mac OS 8.6 to version 9 in 1999, they were sued by Microware who then owned OS-9. OS-9 was the name of an operating system developed by Digital Research in the 80's. Apple won the suit. Perhaps using Mac in front of OS 9 helped.
There is just a "we want money no matter what" bias.
Yes, and let's not forget that a major factor in our political corruption problems is paid political advertising. Much attention goes to improperly raised funds, but we're failing to address the issue of where the funds are going. Those running for office would have far less incentive to sell their souls for campaign funds if there were no such thing as paid political ads. Commercial broadcasters are failing to act as responsible trustees of the public interest in running such ads. We should should do a few things to fight this:
1) Contact our representatives and the F.C.C. urging an end to paid political ads
2) Write letters to our local stations asking them to end paid political ads. Ask for a reply to all letters. Vist the station and see that the letter is present in the Public Inspection File
3) Get local city and county level representatives to contact stations and ask that political corruption an ending paid political ads be listed in the stations quarterly list of community issues.
4) Challenge stations at license renewal time for failure to address the political corruption issue by if they continue to run paid political ads. Any political time should be provided free and equally for all legitimate candidates / propositions.
There is a secondary effect of paid political advertising. Stations may be less willing to be critical of those who bring them the most ad revenue. In general when there's bad behavior, whether it be a questionable war or problematic political behavior, it is essential to follow the money.
Text of PBS KCET Tavis Smiley Interview with Craig Newmark:
Tavis: Up next on this program, the creator of Craig's List, Craig Newmark. Stay with us.
Tavis: Ten years ago, Craig Newmark started a small Website designed to help his friends and colleagues share information about things like jobs and apartments and events. He just happened to call the site Craig's List. Today, as you well know, (laugh) Craig's List is in 34 countries around the globe, used by some 10 million users a month. Craig Newmark, nice to have you on the program. Craig Newmark: Hey, it's my pleasure.
Tavis: It's a pleasure to meet you. So, I'm sure you've been asked this a thousand times, but not by me. So you could not have had any idea, when you came up with this idea for your friends and coworkers, that Craig's List would be, like, all the rage.
Newmark: You're giving the wrong guy credit. I had one simple idea about telling friends about arts and technology events. People in the community suggested everything else to us, and that's our theme. We're really run by the people who use the site. We just run the infrastructure, and help out with problems.
Tavis: Tell me, you're very modest and I respect that, but tell me how the idea started, though. So you're in your apartment one day, or?
Newmark: (laugh) Well, in '94, I was at Charles Schwab, the discount brokerage? And I was evangelizing the Net there, you know, to use in the business. I saw a lot of people helping each other out, I thought I should do some of that. So in early '95, I started emailing a few friends.
Tavis: And?
Newmark: They suggested more stuff. I did it. They suggested more. When they told me I had to give it a name, they said hey, we already call it Craig's List. And they were right. And that's been pretty good, since when things go wrong, which is not often, but when they go wrong, I take it personally.
Tavis: I would assume you would, given that your name is on it. I wanted to ask you, so I will, I guess, how it feels to have started something. It's one thing to have eBay, which I wanna get to in a second, 'cause they're now your partner in this project. But eBay or Amazon or Google. But yours bears your name. So is that a good thing or a bad thing?
Newmark: It's a mixed blessing. I'm proud of what's happened. But when there's any kind of problem, not often, 'cause we have a really good culture of trust. But I take it all seriously. That's why I do full time customer service. I was doing it minutes ago; I'll be doing it minutes into the future.
Tavis: So when you say customer service, what does Craig do every day?
Newmark: (laugh) I handle specialized cases. Things like moderating our discussion boards. Lightly, very lightly. And also dealing with apartment brokers in New York. That's my biggest project. Because in that market, they've controlled, you know, apartments and rentals too long, and they haven't been very kind. That's changing.
Tavis: Yeah, speaking of apartment rentals, if I got my numbers right here, $20 million, is it $20 million a month that you guys make just off the apartment listings here?
Newmark: That's one estimate for the whole site over the course of a year. And frankly, first I don't know the answer. And secondly, I don't care. Jim Buckmaster cares. He's the guy who really runs things now. He's my CEO. My focus is just on getting customer service done every day. We've left behind a lot of money on the table, we continue to do so. How much does a guy need to earn?
Tavis: Yeah. Why does money not matter to you? You got something that's big, and yet you seem like you don't care whether you make money or not.
Newmark: Well, it does matter. I need to make an okay living. The people who work for us need to. But after you make a comfortable living, how much more do you need? It's like I make a joke about nerd values, 'cause I'm very much in the rich nerd tradition. And (laugh) you know, we say, like, hey, people pay us for this stuff, like program
Slashdot Mirror
The intervention of friends, family, professionals, or other community members might sometimes be required for escape.
Just as the recently rescued kidnapped boys didn't walk or ride away when they apparently had chances for freedom, similar mental lock-in may very well apply in this case.
Pay attention to even those you know only casually.
You could be the one to spot their captivity and take them to freedom.
allegedly mythical (No it's not!) (Yes it is!) (No it's not!) Airport exploit for Macs?
I believe there is a strong possibility it is related. I've used a third-party wireless card with a Broadcom chipset in G3/G4 Macs before, and it was recognized as an Airport Extreme (b/g) card.
I've heard that Broadcom has been less than cooperative in providing specs for others to write drivers. Perhaps if they were more open they'd have a better scrutinized more secure product. (I can't provide specific links, but I believe my information about Broadcom chipsets came from discussions of supporting them in past versions of the wireless utility Kismac)
Buying a version of software for a specific platform and then modifying to work on another platform is NOT fair use.
Perhaps, but additional software/patches have been used to run OS X on unsupported hardware before.
What exactly is 360 supposed to convey in the name XBox 360?
The operating temperature??
After being used secretly for years, the RFID chips used by Wal-Mart have leaked from the landfills into the water and from there into our food supply. Now they are in all of our bodies. The current generation of RFIDs has greatly extended range through power derived from use of a coating that functions as a bio-electric fuel cell in the body. RFIDs attached to the optic nerve have been receiving firmware updates from subliminal noise data contained in network television broadcasts and online images. The revolting feeling you get when watching political broadcasts is actually a side-effect of Information Ministry attempts of transmitting viral countermeasures in these broadcasts.
Through vector matrix polymorphic 3D modulation of brain chemistry your messages will come to you in your dreams. Except for some success in recent presidential elections, chemical modulation attempts via tag bits in residual hormones in the milk supply have yet to be completely effective as countermeasures in altering these messages. The next round of bovine tag bits will initialize nested in a broadcast featuring a cow in a space ship.
Encryption keys will be transmitted by use of pheromones which will initialize the proper dream sequence. Those functioning as RFID hubs will receive updates during oral sex.
The only things that natively use 12 Volts at a current high enough to be significant are the drives.
I think that misses the point however. Designing a power supply for higher output voltage, and switching regulators for higher input voltage, raises efficiency. (24 or 48 Voltage would likely be better yet, except for the need to come up with 12 Volts too)
It is unfortunate that the article (and the others that I could find) don't link to the white paper for some specifics.
Instead I'll have to base my comments more from my understanding of electronics.
Let's say that we start with the usual rectifier/filer off the power line feeding switching transistor(s) that pulse current into a high frequency transformer. That much is fairly basic and efficient if the transistors have a low on-state resistance, fast switching time (to minimize the power-burning partly-on interval during switching where the transistor has significant current flow through it and significant voltage across it), and the switching design is such that current stops before the transformer core saturates. We'll also assume that at the high input voltages involved the resistance losses of the transformer primary are small. The total power capacity of the supply is generally defined by this portion of it. How much can be delivered from individual outputs depends on the design of what follows.
Now we get to to output(s) from the transformer secondary, which is where the article indicates that having a single output, at 12 Volts, improves efficiency. Unfortunately we're given no reasons as to why.
1) By having a single output, the transformer secondary winding for that voltage can be of a heavy guage designed for the full rated power level. It avoids the problem of having to guess which outputs actually need to deliver most of the power.
2) If the power level is developed at a higher output voltage, the current is reduced making resistance losses smaller. That applies to resistance losses in the cables from the supply to the motherboard as well as resistance in the transformer secondary windings. Resistance losses increase with the square of the current.
3) There is a relatively fixed voltage drop (loss) in the rectifier(s) used to convert the transformer output to D.C. The higher the design output voltage is, the smaller a percentage that voltage drop becomes. Less current is required for a given power level at a higher voltage, so the loss in the rectifier(s) is reduced. These losses come closer to varying linearly with the current (over the normal operating range), especially when hefty rectifiers with low series resistance are used, something that is more likely in a well designed single-output power supply.
Is there something magical about 12 Volts? No. In fact designing for a higher output voltage would give even better efficiency, but then there would be the need to add electronics elsewhere to down-convert to make 12 Volts available.
If the portions of the machine using 12 Volts could tolerate the voltage variation, direct battery backup operation could be possible.
Since some modern CPUs may even have varying voltage requirements within a product family, and perhaps even unit to unit, there is a need for locally controlled voltage down-conversion on the motherboard. Done properly this can be pretty efficient. Generally the efficiency here is also higher starting with higher voltages. So if a CPU needs something near 2 Volts, it is better to produce that from a 12 Volt supply than from 5 Volts, for example.
The switching regulators on the motherboards can bring their own design issues. The ability to overclock some CPUs on some boards is limited by the available output current. Ability to recognize a new CPU type and generate a different voltage it needs is a more complex power-issue than we used to see. (This kind of thing could limit whether or not a Socket 775 motherboard that handled a Pentium D could handle a Core 2 Duo CPU for instance).
The problem is with the solder joints. After many cycles of heating up and cooling down they just lose contact.
The sad thing about this is that even the units that haven't failed yet have been through excessive thermal stress and cycling and have been compromised. The integrity of even the working units is degraded and they all are likely to experience continued elevated failure rates. Microsoft should provide free replacement/repair if any of these units ever fails. (ever meaning within some reasonable lifetime, say seven years?)
Well designed electronic equipment should be very reliable and few things should deteriorate significantly with age. Of course mechanical devices have wear, flex conductors to heads in hard drives crack, electrolytic capacitors dry out, switch contacts pit and burn from surge currents and arcing (both can be minimized easily). Semiconductors with extremely high current densities may eventually fail from metal-migration, but I have only seen that in some radio-frequency power transistors.
But by far the most common failures are from excessive operating temperature which boils down to bad design.
Contamination in the materials of some components elevates failure rates but even in that case the failure rate is usually temperature related.
I suspect that you compared an older Dell model with the previous-generation Xeons, not the more powerful Core 2 "Woodcrest" Xeons. Please check that as there is a big difference. The 2.66 GHz Woodcrest Xeon is the 5150.
You'll need to select TWO of them (for four cores total).
The default "Suggested Configuration" for the Mac Pro, is $2499 which includes:
Two 2.66GHz Dual-Core Intel Xeon "Woodcrest" 5150 processors
4MB shared L2 cache per processor
1.33GHz dual independent frontside buses
1GB memory (667MHz DDR2 fully-buffered DIMM ECC)
NVIDIA GeForce 7300 GT graphics with 256MB memory
250GB Serial ATA 3Gb/s 7200-rpm hard drive1
16x double-layer SuperDrive (DVD+R DL/DVD±RW/CD-RW)
There are many possible configurations of course, pick what you like. All Mac Pro configurations include: two Dual-Core Intel Xeon "Woodcrest" microprocessors, eight fully buffered DIMM slots, one double-wide PCI Express graphics slot, three full-length PCI Express expansion slots, four hard drive bays, two optical drive bays, five USB 2.0 ports, two FireWire 400 ports, two FireWire 800 ports, dual Gigabit Ethernet ports, optical digital audio input and output, analog stereo line-input and line-output, and a headphone minijack.
IIRC you'll have to look at Dell's business machines to find comparable pro hardware (dual Core 2 "Woodcrest" Xeon CPUs - the 5150 chip is 2.66 GHz). I believe Dell has an offering called the Precision 690.
The non-Xeon Core 2s cannot be used in pairs of chips. One chip = 2 cores.
At 3.7 GHz, it sounds like you're looking at machines with the earlier Pentium IV or D CPUs, much different animals.
Note that the Xeon is dual core, so with dual Xeons you're getting four cores.
Using a Mac with a TV tuner is amazingly easy. The Eye TV Hybrid is so small, it'd be no trouble at all to bring it along and use even with a laptop. It is about the size of two fingers held together. The included software is very easy to setup and use, making a Mac into an excellent TV/PVR.
Used with a 24" iMac, you'll get native 1920*1080 (full 1080i resolution), something that very few of the $4000 plasma televisions offer. A recent Apple Event included mention of the upcoming iTV (name subject to change, $269 IIRC) that will allow streaming video wirelessly to the living room for that bigger screen. Think of it as Airport Express for video/audio, with a remote control path back to the server. I think we'll see Apple making a big push into video around the time 10.5 ships.
IIRC even Steve Jobs said something early this year about being surprised at sales being stronger than expected. The PPC to Intel transition is a major one and is an excellent long term move. But it did cause some people to hold off on buying waiting for more native software, and allowing time for the shaking out of any minor glitches in the first products. A few probably also held off on buying when they heard that the Core 2 chips were coming.
It is pretty obvious that the move was a wise choice and that both Macintosh users and Apple will be better off long term. The appeal of the new generation of machines can be expected to increase over time. In addition to new features in the OS, it is reasonable to expect that 10.5 will bring even better performance. It'll likely make better use of multiple CPU cores, use the GPU horsepower for other tasks, use the Core 2 supplemental SSE3 instructions (I've heard them called both SSSE3 and SSE4), and use of the 64-bit capabilities. The software for Windows support will also be more mature (Apple's utility is currently beta).
The release of Vista will likely bring an increase in the number of people pondering new machines instead of just an OS upgrade. With Apple being more visible than in the past some of those people will opt for getting Macs instead (either solely for the Apple experience, or to run Windows too). Some may also be playing wait and see with Vista. If it isn't really, really, wonderful, it'll help Apple.
The approach taken by the security software is assbackwards too. Who would keep a bouncer at the door of a party with a list of who to keep OUT? Such a list wouldn't excluded a whole planetful of potential troublemakers.
It would make far more sense to have tight controls on who is allowed IN.
What's funny is that most of the people buying $4000 plasma televisions are getting units that only do 720p (720 pixels tall) instead of the 1080 that full-quality HDTV offers and they don't even realize it.
For what it is worth, most of those buying "widescreen" computer monitors aren't getting enough pixels for the full HDTV resolution either, at least not with the smaller displays. 1080i uses 1920*1080 pixels. The recently-released 24" iMac supports it though, so it looks like my waiting to get rid of that appliance called a television is over.
Gang violence, drunk driving, and terrorism generate jobs in the health care industry
Perhaps they'll be able to correlate interests through all of this data mining and come up with some new products or combinations of products (along the lines of alcoholic drinks with caffeine for example).
Now where's that Blue Gatoraide with Viagra?
Speaking of memory access, it seem Anandtech showed the Pro in the worst light. They pointed out (fairly) where the higher latency of FB-DIMMs slowed performance, but ran the benchmarks with only a pair of DIMMs instead of four, failing to show the boost in performance from quad-channel memory access. Doubling memory bandwidth could have boosted some of the scores.
.AVIs (mpeg 4 etc) to generate a DVD image (mpeg 2). For a benchmark just give it multiple copies of the same video clip to work with. It isn't cross-platform though.
It would have been fun to see something better show the potential gains available from additional cores. A utility like Visual Hub can use multiple cores to be simultaneously transcoding multiple
I'd always wished that DVDs and players had handled letterbox mode differently. Instead of using fewer lines of vertical resolution, all available lines (480?) could have been used for the smaller area, capturing more detail. On current players that would have caused the image to be stretched vertically (no black area), but they could have been designed to see a "letterbox flag" bit to know to reduce the height/resolution for an existing analog television, or better yet provide all of those lines and give the television a signal telling it to reduce the height to get the letterbox effect while retaining the same number of scan lines.
The result would have been better detail (and brightness) in letterbox mode.
(Okay, it is really wierd idea, but I'm one of those rare people that was willing modify my television to add D.C. restoration, or even have D.C. video coupling, so the black scenes really would fade to black).
More on topic with the Apple Event, I hope Apple offers all video in a higher quality format. Considering that the new 24" iMac supports full 1080i resolution, I think it is likely. A better video iPod to share content with it makes sense too.
In offering the iMac in a 24" version it didn't just get a bigger screen. It got more pixels. It is 1920*1200, making it able to natively show 1920*1080 (1080i) HDTV at full detail, something most $4000 plasma televisions don't do. They're almost all only supporting 720p natively (720 pixels tall).
Perhaps it is no coincidence that El Gato Systems set the second week of September as the ship date for their Eye TV Hybrid which allows recent Macs to watch, record and play NTSC (analog) and HDTV (off air ATSC and IIRC, Clear-QAM Cable). The combination of the Eye-TV Hybrid or the earlier Eye TV 500 (digital only) and an iMac makes a great platform for HDTV. I expect that Steve will demo the two together. I've used an Eye-TV 500 on a 20" iMac. Good program material is stunning even with some detail being lost to scaling down for the 1680 pixel width of the screen. Getting the full detail and PVR functionality on a 24" iMac will be even better.
A relative near a major US city is getting about 20 digital program channels off-air (free), not counting a bunch of foreign-language and religious offerings. Those in remote areas won't be so lucky. But there are those BT downloads, and perhaps Steve will offer us a few more things from iTMS...
Maybe they ought to rename those the "September 11, 5th Anniversary Edition"
In wanting the highest performance while maintaining a great bang for the buck, I'd agree that the E6600 looks great, performing well as-is, and also being great for overclocking (especially with added cooling). However I wonder if the quad-core chips reportedly coming next year will be drop-in compatible. If that is the case and there is a strong likelihood of upgrading again so soon, going with the low-end E6300 now seems more cost effective. The E6300 is a good overclocker too, but it does have the smaller 2MB cache. IIRC, the low end chips also lack Hyperthreading. I don't know if that is more or less significant than the smaller cache. The cache size might be of more importance to Mac users than Linux users due to the large effect cache has on emulation performance. I haven't seen any studies showing the performance impact for PPC emulation on Intel yet, but cache certainly turned to be very significant during the Mac 68k to PPC transition.
It would be interesting to see a review where the high end chip is run at a reduced multiplier setting to match the clock rate of one of the lower-end (2 MB cache) chips to directly show what is gained from Hyperthreading and the larger cache under several OSes. (since it may not be easy to alter speed settings on Apple hardware, tests with an unauthorized/patched copy of Tiger on generic hardware would be useful). It would also be interesting to see how Linux (and other OS) speeds compare on Conroe machines versus Apple's Mac Pro dual 51xx Xeon systems (four cores).
I suspect that the benchmarks are understating the eventual advantages of the new chips for some uses since it is unlikely that they took advantage of the newly added SSE4 instructions.
In some ways, Windows Vista actually will exceed Mac OS X and Linux...
I wonder if anyone has ever compared the suicide rates of users of the various OSes.
Why does every server have it's own transformer/converter/rectifier/power supply (I think you know what I mean, that thing that converts from AC to DC)? It seems to me that it would make more sense for a room of servers to have a DC supply for all the computers.
If the voltage weren't so low and the currents so high, this might be practical, but with the large currents typically flowing on a supply of 5 Volts or less, it wouldn't take much resistance in the cables and connectors to drop the voltage excessively. Since the drop fluctuates with load, additional noise would be introduced on the supply lines also. When only one load is located some distance from the power supply, remote-sensing can greatly improve voltage regulation. That involves shifting the point that the power supply uses for the feedback signal out to the load (using a separate conductor for the signal). Since the ground return path also has a voltage drop, sensing on that side is needed too. If all loads were the same and had equal length cables, sensing feedback on just one would work. There'd still be the noise problem though. The power supply would respond to a spike in load current with a spike in voltage on the source end of the cable. The load with the current spike and feedback would see stabilized voltage, but all other loads would see an (upward) voltage spike.
It's really annoying to see the power figure hyped. Obviously someone thinks 1000 Watts sounds impressive.
The figure has the opposite effect on me, as my $1/month per 10 Watts continuous rule of thumb translates that to $100 on the electric bill. If one figures that a 1500 Watt space-heater runs 1/2 the time, a server that really uses 1000 Watts would be generating MORE heat. Put 50 in a rack, and have 10 racks in a room, and we're talking 500,000 Watts. Try and cool that!
Just remember, the next time you Slashdot a site, you've melted another chunk of arctic ice.
Maybe it's time that we phase out traditional servers and move towards some method of serving from unused capacity on user machines.
I've always thought it curious that the operating system is almost always officially refered to as "Mac OS X." As if somewhere down the line it might be bundled with other computers...
People used to speak of System 6, System 7... but in the era of 8 came the licensed Macintosh clones and suddenly the system was called Mac OS. Using OS in the name raised another issue. When Apple moved past Mac OS 8.6 to version 9 in 1999, they were sued by Microware who then owned OS-9. OS-9 was the name of an operating system developed by Digital Research in the 80's. Apple won the suit. Perhaps using Mac in front of OS 9 helped.
There is just a "we want money no matter what" bias.
Yes, and let's not forget that a major factor in our political corruption problems is paid political advertising. Much attention goes to improperly raised funds, but we're failing to address the issue of where the funds are going. Those running for office would have far less incentive to sell their souls for campaign funds if there were no such thing as paid political ads. Commercial broadcasters are failing to act as responsible trustees of the public interest in running such ads. We should should do a few things to fight this:
1) Contact our representatives and the F.C.C. urging an end to paid political ads
2) Write letters to our local stations asking them to end paid political ads. Ask for a reply to all letters. Vist the station and see that the letter is present in the Public Inspection File
3) Get local city and county level representatives to contact stations and ask that political corruption an ending paid political ads be listed in the stations quarterly list of community issues.
4) Challenge stations at license renewal time for failure to address the political corruption issue by if they continue to run paid political ads. Any political time should be provided free and equally for all legitimate candidates / propositions.
There is a secondary effect of paid political advertising. Stations may be less willing to be critical of those who bring them the most ad revenue. In general when there's bad behavior, whether it be a questionable war or problematic political behavior, it is essential to follow the money.
Text of PBS KCET Tavis Smiley Interview with Craig Newmark:
Tavis: Up next on this program, the creator of Craig's List, Craig Newmark. Stay with us.
Tavis: Ten years ago, Craig Newmark started a small Website designed to help his friends and colleagues share information about things like jobs and apartments and events. He just happened to call the site Craig's List. Today, as you well know, (laugh) Craig's List is in 34 countries around the globe, used by some 10 million users a month. Craig Newmark, nice to have you on the program.
Craig Newmark: Hey, it's my pleasure.
Tavis: It's a pleasure to meet you. So, I'm sure you've been asked this a thousand times, but not by me. So you could not have had any idea, when you came up with this idea for your friends and coworkers, that Craig's List would be, like, all the rage.
Newmark: You're giving the wrong guy credit. I had one simple idea about telling friends about arts and technology events. People in the community suggested everything else to us, and that's our theme. We're really run by the people who use the site. We just run the infrastructure, and help out with problems.
Tavis: Tell me, you're very modest and I respect that, but tell me how the idea started, though. So you're in your apartment one day, or?
Newmark: (laugh) Well, in '94, I was at Charles Schwab, the discount brokerage? And I was evangelizing the Net there, you know, to use in the business. I saw a lot of people helping each other out, I thought I should do some of that. So in early '95, I started emailing a few friends.
Tavis: And?
Newmark: They suggested more stuff. I did it. They suggested more. When they told me I had to give it a name, they said hey, we already call it Craig's List. And they were right. And that's been pretty good, since when things go wrong, which is not often, but when they go wrong, I take it personally.
Tavis: I would assume you would, given that your name is on it. I wanted to ask you, so I will, I guess, how it feels to have started something. It's one thing to have eBay, which I wanna get to in a second, 'cause they're now your partner in this project. But eBay or Amazon or Google. But yours bears your name. So is that a good thing or a bad thing?
Newmark: It's a mixed blessing. I'm proud of what's happened. But when there's any kind of problem, not often, 'cause we have a really good culture of trust. But I take it all seriously. That's why I do full time customer service. I was doing it minutes ago; I'll be doing it minutes into the future.
Tavis: So when you say customer service, what does Craig do every day?
Newmark: (laugh) I handle specialized cases. Things like moderating our discussion boards. Lightly, very lightly. And also dealing with apartment brokers in New York. That's my biggest project. Because in that market, they've controlled, you know, apartments and rentals too long, and they haven't been very kind. That's changing.
Tavis: Yeah, speaking of apartment rentals, if I got my numbers right here, $20 million, is it $20 million a month that you guys make just off the apartment listings here?
Newmark: That's one estimate for the whole site over the course of a year. And frankly, first I don't know the answer. And secondly, I don't care. Jim Buckmaster cares. He's the guy who really runs things now. He's my CEO. My focus is just on getting customer service done every day. We've left behind a lot of money on the table, we continue to do so. How much does a guy need to earn?
Tavis: Yeah. Why does money not matter to you? You got something that's big, and yet you seem like you don't care whether you make money or not.
Newmark: Well, it does matter. I need to make an okay living. The people who work for us need to. But after you make a comfortable living, how much more do you need? It's like I make a joke about nerd values, 'cause I'm very much in the rich nerd tradition. And (laugh) you know, we say, like, hey, people pay us for this stuff, like program