The non-double precision floating point enhanced version's (the version in the PS3) strength is further limited to integer and single precision floating point workloads.
BTW, the original Cell can do Double Precision in hardware. The big limitation it had was the DP was not PIPELINED so all DP instructions caused huge stalls in processing. You can use DP on the PS3 just fine and it's still fairly fast (especially compared to software DP) -- it's just not nearly as fast as SP.
The main new features of the PowerXCell 8i Processor are that DP is now fully pipelined and can attain over 100 GFLOPS (about a 5X improvement in DP execution due to stall removal) and that the memory interface now supports industry standard DDR2 memory so 16 GB of RAM per Cell can be used. The memory limitation with XDR was just as bad as the DP in limiting more common use of the Cell since XDR is expensive and hard to come by.
How could he be "Stealing from Banks" when Paypal is not a bank. Google Checkout is not a bank either.
Neither are required to safeguard your money the same way a bank does. Paypal can and often does freeze the deposits in accounts for it's members without warning and your recourse towards unfreezing accounts leaves much to be said. I haven't heard horror stories about Google Checkout but they are not a bank either - they are a payment processor for merchants.
FWIW, there is a new Person-to-Person payment competitor to Paypal that is actually run by a bank and your deposits are FDIC insured. It's called Revolution Money Exchange. It's currently free like Paypal was in the beginning but I'm sure they'll add more fees sooner or later.
Oh, and if you sign up for Revolution, you get a couple pennies deposited to any accounts you link to it, so don't sign up 50,000 times under a fake name or you'll be stealing from a Bank for real!!!
He wasn't "Stealing from Banks". As you know, Paypal is not a bank. Google Checkout is not a bank either.
Neither are required to safeguard your money the same way a bank does. Paypal can and often does freeze the deposits in accounts for it's members without warning and your recourse towards unfreezing accounts leaves much to be said.
FWIW, there is a new Person-to-Person payment competitor to Paypal that is actually run by a bank and your deposits are FDIC insured. It's called Revolution Money Exchange. It's currently free like Paypal was in the beginning but I'm sure they'll add more fees sooner or later.
I meant running XP compared to Vista. Heck if we were talking Solaris, BSD, Linux, etc. we wouldn't be having a discussion on the fact that most major commercial antivirus companies sell a product that is essentially a glorified binary grep.
How about giving the user more choices? You might want to let them run it in a sandbox, or run it without internet access, or chroot it.
If they had a way to express their intent, and actually control how much they give away when they click... it would go a VERY long way towards fixing things, probably 99%.
Both of them use whitelisting / safelists. Anything not whitelisted needs explicit permission from the user before they're able to read/write/delete/create a file or directory or access the internet. These two FREE (as in beer) products literally give you a similar level of control over what runs on your computer.
The Comodo antivirus doesn't work on Vista right now but will soon. Then again, this is Slashdot so we're all running XP right ?!?
For sandboxing, you can use VMWare Server (free as in beer) to generate an image to run in VMPlayer (also free as in beer) which you can then use within Windows. If you get VMWorkstation (not free but well worth it), you can get fine-grained control over snapshotting.
I don't really know much about this device, but let's, for the moment, assume it can't actually hurt anyone, just make them uncomfortable / stun them. Is it really a weapon then?
Let's say someone created a device that could cause an infinite amount of pain for as long as they wanted but didn't cause any actual physical harm (in most cases). Would that be considered a weapon?
Heck you don't even need a theoretical device to state your case. Take waterboarding which is merely a method to simulate the feeling of drowning without actually causing physical damage to the subject. Do you consider it torture if the subject isn't "physically" harmed in the long run?
the technical definition of "insanity" is trying the same thing repeatedly and expecting different results
A bit offtopic but this totally explains why I feel like I'm going insane trying to find heisenbugs on multithreaded CPU code in our latest games. D'Oh!
This is a FAT32 partition, it comes from microsoft.
It has a 4GB limit, in the age of 5GB DVDs why would you ship a product with a 4GB limit?
FWIW, FAT32 actually has a 4GB-minus-one-byte file size limit. But the files on a (video) DVD are 2GB or less in size. You only have to worry about the size if you're making an ISO file which can be larger than the limit.
OK, I severely doubt that. AFAIK, it hasn't happened yet that someone has fired up their pico-dremel, dipped it in a pool of amino acids, and spun a new life form.
- Maybe it was bred. Perhaps using something sexy like DNA splicing.
If splicing DNA isn't creating new (as in previously non-existant) life form what is it? For that matter, breeding can create new lifeforms (mutation, breeding, and natural selection have created nearly all the lifeforms on this planet AFAIK). Breeding is using a directed biological process (selective reproduction) and the other (DNA-splicing) is the equivalent of twiddling around with life using your pico-dremel.
This should be causing the black hole to lose energy then, because you can't accelerate matter to high speeds without putting energy into it, and that energy has to come from somewhere.
I'm a bit distressed that a slashdotter like yourself has never heard of gravity. Did you ever take a physics class in your life?
FWIW, 2.5" HD's generally use between 2 to 3 watts of power during seek and writes and even less during idle. This is about 1/2 to 1/3 the power of the VelociRaptor (6.9W) during a write.
That 9 watt figure is for spinup power which doesn't really contribute to overall heat for the drive considering spinup takes a second or two.
What you want to know is idle and seek power for the VelociRaptor which is 4.2/6.9W. The 3.5" WD GP has an idle power which is lower at 3.8W and a seek power which is higher at 7.6W. What you can see from the charts is that the VelociRaptor is indeed low powered compared to most drives and should only generate marginally more heat than a 3.5 WD GP.
However, that temperature resulting from the power usage in a much more due to the smaller package (2.5" drives take up less than 1/2 the volume of a 3.5" drive which concentrates the heat and they have much less surface area to disperse the heat). You have to consider temperature as well as heat.
FWIW, the Western Union auction payment system that got killed off when EBay aquired PayPal was called BidPay. Apparently EBay still supports escrow services through www.escrow.com but they don't really make it as obvious or as easy to use as PayPal.
Re:Call me when they're going to sell PayPal
on
EBay Mulling Skype Sale
·
· Score: 2, Informative
That's precisely where they were headed before eBay bought them. Astonishingly, eBay turned them around. Which is not to say that this is a good thing. Paypal is a company that really should have gone bankrupt.
EBay was actively fighting PayPal from being used on listings until they realized that it would just be easier to buy PayPal than to fight them and have their own payment service. Perhaps you remember Billpoint (eBay Payments)? EBay also promoted an Escrow service and a Western Union auction payment service as well.
Once EBay acquired PayPal, they were very aggressive about promoting Paypal and killed off Billpoint. They also pretty much shutdown access to their other payment partners and killed them off.
Now EBay not only has PayPal as the major option for payment, they force you to use either a premier or business account for EBay. You can no longer use a personal (free) account on EBay and you can't reject credit card payments. This works out better for buyers probably but it means more fees for sellers. With no more Paypal personal (free) accounts used on EBay, Paypal became a lot more profitable.
BTW, I'm probably crazy in the fact that I use PayPal as a "savings account" since they have high-interest on their money market and it's very liquid / easily accessible. As a bit of protection though, I got the Verisign security key for PayPal which generates a 6-digit number every 30 seconds that is unique for logging in.
While you might not want to replace your entire disk infrastructure with RAM, there's an intermediate level which is to use Flash.
Flash doesn't work for a lot of applications due to speed. With the massive memory, you want the "ram disk" io to be orders of magnitude faster than conventional disk. Flash is typically 3-100 MB per second and usually write much slower than they read (Cheap USB keys write at 3MB/s and the fastest consumer SSDs read at 100MB/s). Often linear reads from a normal hard drive can be faster than linear reads from flash memory. Flash memory usually only beats hard drives due to access times and a fast (Raptor/etc) HD is faster than most flash drives. RAM speeds are currently measured in GB sec and can be a hundreds to thousands of times faster than flash.
In the end, Apple should probably have a "power user" mode on their phones, the activation of which forces you to sign a disclaimer or non-indemnifation agreement that protects them if you screw your iPhone up installing unverified apps
You mean like all the hacks to unlock the iPhone already ? Why would Apple support something that required them to ask you to give up your warrantee protections (which they might not be able to enforce) that would also make them give up the tight control they have over the design and use of their highly engineered product when something out there in the wild already exists and using it clearly relieves Apple of if it's warrantee obligations. It would be a lose-lose situation for Apple - they'd lose the control they want to keep over the device and they'd potentially open themselves up to legally supporting devices their users had bricked.
32G chips and put them in 4 slots on my 64 Bit PC before talking about 'massive memory'
"Massive Memory" refers to memory density where it's appropriate to use memory for applications that used to require a hard drive and then hard drives are used for long term storage only. This isn't meant for your daily PC. The current state of technology typically uses specialized rack-mount clusters of dozens or hundreds thin blades where each blade might have 16-64G of memory on standard 4 GB ECC Dimms with 8 memory slots and the combined memory supports a coherent structure (i.e. an in memory distributed file system). This is great for speeding up disk-based large databases by orders of magnitude.
"Massive Memory" is not just practical. It is here today and chances are that you (a slashdot readers) have benefitted from this development today already -- you see, one great example of using "Massive Memory" as a file system is Google.
Or more likely, the geek who does buy one will end up offsetting the savings by throwing it in his machine with a 750W power supply and monster graphics card(s).
A 750W PS that is "80 plus" certified uses less power at a low load (say 200W) than most 250-300W Power Supplies -- on the order of 20-40 Watts less. Most high-end power supplies you can buy are now "80 plus" certified.
And certain newer video cards (not SLI/ X2 / Crossfire mind you) are more power efficient as well. The process shrink to 65nm for the 9600GT means there is a card out there that gets about 90% the power of the 8800GT with significant power savings -- the power savings are enough that there are a couple passively cooled models of 9600GT's available.
You forgot to mention energy efficient power supply. Typical power supplies waste 30-45% of the power (only 55-70% efficiency).
Buy a power supply with an "80 Plus" certification and you will save quite a bit of power as these PS are required to reach 80% efficiency at 20%,50% and 100% of their rated loads. Some hit 85-86% efficiency at their optimal loads.
On a computer using 200W of power, the "80 Plus" PS will save you 40W right off the bat - or as much as the savings you mentioned from the HD, CPU, chipset, and video card combined. BTW, no one overly concerned about power savings really has a separate soundcard anymore.
While AFR provides higher frame rates, it increases latency which is a big problem for twitch games. With Quad SLI, full AFR requires that you are 5 frames behind. Why five? Because you want all your GPUs rendering all the time (ideally) which means they are rendering the next four frames and the CPU should be building the command list for the fifth frame to be rendered so there will be no stall to start rendering when the most recent GPU becomes free. I'll assume that there is no frame synchronization because that can add yet another frame of latency. Now granted that if you run at 100 FPS, five frames of latency is still only 1/20th of a second.
SFR does get the same frame frates the geometry work much be done once per GPU working on the frame so overall work per frame is a bit higher. However, it does decrease the number of "frames in flight" being rendered and so it has lower latency. This makes for a more responsive game and also can reduce "VR lag".
Another difference is that with AFR rendering, you can't do frame-feedback effects and you have to be careful with render-target as a texture operations. It really depends what you want to do and whether you need faster frame rates or reduced latency. Most of the time AFR and higher framerates are a good thing though -- especially for GFX card manufactures or bragging rights gamers who want the highest FPS possible in their game benchmarks.
If M$ did this there would be a huge uproar and several anti-trust lawsuits.
Google and Yahoo do this as well as Apple. Have you tried to download Adobe Reader only to have it auto-install the Google / Yahoo (whoever's paying them that month) IE toolbar unless you opt out?
Basically, when I install something -- no matter WHAT I'm Installing -- I don't want any other software auto-installed without an opt-in. Heck I even hate all the little auto-update craplets that get installed with every software package out there from Sun Java to iTunes to Reader/etc.
Then again, iTunes is getting particularly crufty on PC's right now. It installs iTunes, QuickTime, AppleMobileDevices, iTunesHelper, iPodService, and finally their autoupdate program.
Slashdot Mirror
The non-double precision floating point enhanced version's (the version in the PS3) strength is further limited to integer and single precision floating point workloads.
BTW, the original Cell can do Double Precision in hardware. The big limitation it had was the DP was not PIPELINED so all DP instructions caused huge stalls in processing. You can use DP on the PS3 just fine and it's still fairly fast (especially compared to software DP) -- it's just not nearly as fast as SP.
The Cell's double precision hardware attains a very respectable 25 Gigaflops per second (peak), but its single precision performance is a phenomenal 256 Gigaflops (also peak).
The main new features of the PowerXCell 8i Processor are that DP is now fully pipelined and can attain over 100 GFLOPS (about a 5X improvement in DP execution due to stall removal) and that the memory interface now supports industry standard DDR2 memory so 16 GB of RAM per Cell can be used. The memory limitation with XDR was just as bad as the DP in limiting more common use of the Cell since XDR is expensive and hard to come by.
How could he be "Stealing from Banks" when Paypal is not a bank. Google Checkout is not a bank either.
Neither are required to safeguard your money the same way a bank does. Paypal can and often does freeze the deposits in accounts for it's members without warning and your recourse towards unfreezing accounts leaves much to be said. I haven't heard horror stories about Google Checkout but they are not a bank either - they are a payment processor for merchants.
FWIW, there is a new Person-to-Person payment competitor to Paypal that is actually run by a bank and your deposits are FDIC insured. It's called Revolution Money Exchange. It's currently free like Paypal was in the beginning but I'm sure they'll add more fees sooner or later.
Oh, and if you sign up for Revolution, you get a couple pennies deposited to any accounts you link to it, so don't sign up 50,000 times under a fake name or you'll be stealing from a Bank for real!!!
He wasn't "Stealing from Banks". As you know, Paypal is not a bank. Google Checkout is not a bank either.
Neither are required to safeguard your money the same way a bank does. Paypal can and often does freeze the deposits in accounts for it's members without warning and your recourse towards unfreezing accounts leaves much to be said.
FWIW, there is a new Person-to-Person payment competitor to Paypal that is actually run by a bank and your deposits are FDIC insured. It's called Revolution Money Exchange. It's currently free like Paypal was in the beginning but I'm sure they'll add more fees sooner or later.
I meant running XP compared to Vista. Heck if we were talking Solaris, BSD, Linux, etc. we wouldn't be having a discussion on the fact that most major commercial antivirus companies sell a product that is essentially a glorified binary grep.
How about giving the user more choices? You might want to let them run it in a sandbox, or run it without internet access, or chroot it.
If they had a way to express their intent, and actually control how much they give away when they click... it would go a VERY long way towards fixing things, probably 99%.
Have you ever tried Comodo's free firewall or free antivirus???
Both of them use whitelisting / safelists. Anything not whitelisted needs explicit permission from the user before they're able to read/write/delete/create a file or directory or access the internet. These two FREE (as in beer) products literally give you a similar level of control over what runs on your computer.
The Comodo antivirus doesn't work on Vista right now but will soon. Then again, this is Slashdot so we're all running XP right ?!?
For sandboxing, you can use VMWare Server (free as in beer) to generate an image to run in VMPlayer (also free as in beer) which you can then use within Windows. If you get VMWorkstation (not free but well worth it), you can get fine-grained control over snapshotting.
I don't really know much about this device, but let's, for the moment, assume it can't actually hurt anyone, just make them uncomfortable / stun them. Is it really a weapon then?
Let's say someone created a device that could cause an infinite amount of pain for as long as they wanted but didn't cause any actual physical harm (in most cases). Would that be considered a weapon?
Heck you don't even need a theoretical device to state your case. Take waterboarding which is merely a method to simulate the feeling of drowning without actually causing physical damage to the subject. Do you consider it torture if the subject isn't "physically" harmed in the long run?
There are people who enjoy getting their nuts stepped on too.
Minor correction: There are people who enjoy paying to get their nuts stepped on.
the technical definition of "insanity" is trying the same thing repeatedly and expecting different results
A bit offtopic but this totally explains why I feel like I'm going insane trying to find heisenbugs on multithreaded CPU code in our latest games. D'Oh!
If BASIC were five years old on this day we could have had
10 PRINT "MISSION ACCOMPLISHED!"
20 GOTO 10
This is a FAT32 partition, it comes from microsoft.
It has a 4GB limit, in the age of 5GB DVDs why would you ship a product with a 4GB limit?
FWIW, FAT32 actually has a 4GB-minus-one-byte file size limit. But the files on a (video) DVD are 2GB or less in size. You only have to worry about the size if you're making an ISO file which can be larger than the limit.
AUSTIN, Texas -- A newly created microbe [...]
OK, I severely doubt that. AFAIK, it hasn't happened yet that someone has fired up their pico-dremel, dipped it in a pool of amino acids, and spun a new life form.
- Maybe it was bred. Perhaps using something sexy like DNA splicing.
If splicing DNA isn't creating new (as in previously non-existant) life form what is it? For that matter, breeding can create new lifeforms (mutation, breeding, and natural selection have created nearly all the lifeforms on this planet AFAIK). Breeding is using a directed biological process (selective reproduction) and the other (DNA-splicing) is the equivalent of twiddling around with life using your pico-dremel.
This should be causing the black hole to lose energy then, because you can't accelerate matter to high speeds without putting energy into it, and that energy has to come from somewhere.
I'm a bit distressed that a slashdotter like yourself has never heard of gravity. Did you ever take a physics class in your life?
FWIW, 2.5" HD's generally use between 2 to 3 watts of power during seek and writes and even less during idle. This is about 1/2 to 1/3 the power of the VelociRaptor (6.9W) during a write.
That 9 watt figure is for spinup power which doesn't really contribute to overall heat for the drive considering spinup takes a second or two.
What you want to know is idle and seek power for the VelociRaptor which is 4.2/6.9W. The 3.5" WD GP has an idle power which is lower at 3.8W and a seek power which is higher at 7.6W. What you can see from the charts is that the VelociRaptor is indeed low powered compared to most drives and should only generate marginally more heat than a 3.5 WD GP.
However, that temperature resulting from the power usage in a much more due to the smaller package (2.5" drives take up less than 1/2 the volume of a 3.5" drive which concentrates the heat and they have much less surface area to disperse the heat). You have to consider temperature as well as heat.
FWIW, the Western Union auction payment system that got killed off when EBay aquired PayPal was called BidPay. Apparently EBay still supports escrow services through www.escrow.com but they don't really make it as obvious or as easy to use as PayPal.
That's precisely where they were headed before eBay bought them. Astonishingly, eBay turned them around. Which is not to say that this is a good thing. Paypal is a company that really should have gone bankrupt.
EBay was actively fighting PayPal from being used on listings until they realized that it would just be easier to buy PayPal than to fight them and have their own payment service. Perhaps you remember Billpoint (eBay Payments)? EBay also promoted an Escrow service and a Western Union auction payment service as well.
Once EBay acquired PayPal, they were very aggressive about promoting Paypal and killed off Billpoint. They also pretty much shutdown access to their other payment partners and killed them off.
Now EBay not only has PayPal as the major option for payment, they force you to use either a premier or business account for EBay. You can no longer use a personal (free) account on EBay and you can't reject credit card payments. This works out better for buyers probably but it means more fees for sellers. With no more Paypal personal (free) accounts used on EBay, Paypal became a lot more profitable.
BTW, I'm probably crazy in the fact that I use PayPal as a "savings account" since they have high-interest on their money market and it's very liquid / easily accessible. As a bit of protection though, I got the Verisign security key for PayPal which generates a 6-digit number every 30 seconds that is unique for logging in.
While you might not want to replace your entire disk infrastructure with RAM, there's an intermediate level which is to use Flash.
Flash doesn't work for a lot of applications due to speed. With the massive memory, you want the "ram disk" io to be orders of magnitude faster than conventional disk. Flash is typically 3-100 MB per second and usually write much slower than they read (Cheap USB keys write at 3MB/s and the fastest consumer SSDs read at 100MB/s). Often linear reads from a normal hard drive can be faster than linear reads from flash memory. Flash memory usually only beats hard drives due to access times and a fast (Raptor/etc) HD is faster than most flash drives. RAM speeds are currently measured in GB sec and can be a hundreds to thousands of times faster than flash.
In the end, Apple should probably have a "power user" mode on their phones, the activation of which forces you to sign a disclaimer or non-indemnifation agreement that protects them if you screw your iPhone up installing unverified apps
You mean like all the hacks to unlock the iPhone already ? Why would Apple support something that required them to ask you to give up your warrantee protections (which they might not be able to enforce) that would also make them give up the tight control they have over the design and use of their highly engineered product when something out there in the wild already exists and using it clearly relieves Apple of if it's warrantee obligations. It would be a lose-lose situation for Apple - they'd lose the control they want to keep over the device and they'd potentially open themselves up to legally supporting devices their users had bricked.
32G chips and put them in 4 slots on my 64 Bit PC before talking about 'massive memory'
"Massive Memory" refers to memory density where it's appropriate to use memory for applications that used to require a hard drive and then hard drives are used for long term storage only. This isn't meant for your daily PC. The current state of technology typically uses specialized rack-mount clusters of dozens or hundreds thin blades where each blade might have 16-64G of memory on standard 4 GB ECC Dimms with 8 memory slots and the combined memory supports a coherent structure (i.e. an in memory distributed file system). This is great for speeding up disk-based large databases by orders of magnitude.
"Massive Memory" is not just practical. It is here today and chances are that you (a slashdot readers) have benefitted from this development today already -- you see, one great example of using "Massive Memory" as a file system is Google.
It's hard to call the end of the reign of silicon when we don't even know who the heir apparent is yet.
That's kinda of like saying the sequel to Duke Nukem Forever is going to be the best game ever.
Or more likely, the geek who does buy one will end up offsetting the savings by throwing it in his machine with a 750W power supply and monster graphics card(s).
A 750W PS that is "80 plus" certified uses less power at a low load (say 200W) than most 250-300W Power Supplies -- on the order of 20-40 Watts less. Most high-end power supplies you can buy are now "80 plus" certified.
And certain newer video cards (not SLI/ X2 / Crossfire mind you) are more power efficient as well. The process shrink to 65nm for the 9600GT means there is a card out there that gets about 90% the power of the 8800GT with significant power savings -- the power savings are enough that there are a couple passively cooled models of 9600GT's available.
You forgot to mention energy efficient power supply. Typical power supplies waste 30-45% of the power (only 55-70% efficiency).
Buy a power supply with an "80 Plus" certification and you will save quite a bit of power as these PS are required to reach 80% efficiency at 20%,50% and 100% of their rated loads. Some hit 85-86% efficiency at their optimal loads.
On a computer using 200W of power, the "80 Plus" PS will save you 40W right off the bat - or as much as the savings you mentioned from the HD, CPU, chipset, and video card combined. BTW, no one overly concerned about power savings really has a separate soundcard anymore.
SFR does get the same frame frates the geometry work much be done once per GPU working on the frame
I botched that a bit... meant to say "SFT does not get the same frame rates as the geometry work must be done once per GPU working on the frame"
While AFR provides higher frame rates, it increases latency which is a big problem for twitch games. With Quad SLI, full AFR requires that you are 5 frames behind. Why five? Because you want all your GPUs rendering all the time (ideally) which means they are rendering the next four frames and the CPU should be building the command list for the fifth frame to be rendered so there will be no stall to start rendering when the most recent GPU becomes free. I'll assume that there is no frame synchronization because that can add yet another frame of latency. Now granted that if you run at 100 FPS, five frames of latency is still only 1/20th of a second.
SFR does get the same frame frates the geometry work much be done once per GPU working on the frame so overall work per frame is a bit higher. However, it does decrease the number of "frames in flight" being rendered and so it has lower latency. This makes for a more responsive game and also can reduce "VR lag".
Another difference is that with AFR rendering, you can't do frame-feedback effects and you have to be careful with render-target as a texture operations. It really depends what you want to do and whether you need faster frame rates or reduced latency. Most of the time AFR and higher framerates are a good thing though -- especially for GFX card manufactures or bragging rights gamers who want the highest FPS possible in their game benchmarks.
If M$ did this there would be a huge uproar and several anti-trust lawsuits.
/etc.
Google and Yahoo do this as well as Apple. Have you tried to download Adobe Reader only to have it auto-install the Google / Yahoo (whoever's paying them that month) IE toolbar unless you opt out?
Basically, when I install something -- no matter WHAT I'm Installing -- I don't want any other software auto-installed without an opt-in. Heck I even hate all the little auto-update craplets that get installed with every software package out there from Sun Java to iTunes to Reader
Then again, iTunes is getting particularly crufty on PC's right now. It installs iTunes, QuickTime, AppleMobileDevices, iTunesHelper, iPodService, and finally their autoupdate program.