A big bunch of ram for high speed and flash for permanent storage. Just use a super cap for a power backup and have it copy the ram to flash on power down.
They already have this device (although it uses a battery rather than a supercap) in the form of the HyperDrive 4 and the RamSan. Supercaps are pretty darn huge (and expensive) compared to batteries for the same amount of energy storage and since the drain is relatively stable during the backup operation, there's no reason to use one over a battery. Both of the devices are rediculously expensive though (between $250 to $2000 per GB).
2 GB for $15 isn't the best deal at 7.50/GB. I just got a 8GB usb key at under $4/GB. You can pick up an A-DATA 8GB usb key for just over $30 -- just search on A-DATA to get the details.
I actually picked one of these drives up at MicroCenter for $29.99 after rebate.
Pros: big storage for a usb key, waterproof case.
Cons: slow data rates compared to many other usb key devices
I realize that AutoUpdates installs something nearly daily from Microsoft but how many of those OS "updates" are the weekly MS Genuine Advantage, MS Malicious Software Removal Tool, MS 'Windows Update' Update, MS Windows Defender Definitions (new almost daily), etc -- none of which actually fix any bugs.
The parent poster here has a history of telling people they are wrong when he personally has no clue what is going on.
On another thread he was telling me that 160mA is less than 1W but he forgot that to get WATTS (a completely different measurement than mA) you multiply amperage by voltage and 160mA * 12 V = 1.92 W which is much greater than 1 W. The funny thing is that he provided the amperage number in his post attempting to refute me which actually showed that he was completely wrong.
Oh well, this is slashdot and it's fun to randomly disagree with people even if you don't know what the fuck you're talking about.
So, good news, people will start using what they need, and not the professional (and expensive) tool for home stuff. And that usually means open source.
In general, people want to use Photoshop and Office at home or a completely transparent replacement. The open source software may be free but there's a big price in time to learn two software packages and they are trained on the commercial packages at work. Not to mention that if they occasionally bring work home, they need a compatible package to open and edit the files.
"Good enough for home" might work for hobbyist software and special case needs but when you are taking on giants in established fields like Spreadsheets, Word Processing, Image Editing, the "good enough for home" just isn't good enough. Who wants to learn how to do the same thing twice with an inferior tool?
Apple holds #2, #3, #4, #6, #7, #8, #10, #11, #12, #13 or 10 of the top 15 spots. That's a bit better than 4 out of 100. Plus 3 of those are really the same model -- 8 GB Nanos -- just in different colors. I bet if we discounted color, the Zune 30GB model sales would be behind the 8GB Nano's at Amazon.
I strongly suspect that you made that up because I've never come across a relay that requires 1 *WATT* to work.
I guess it's obvious you've never turned the key to start your car then. The starter solenoid that acts as a relay used to control current to the electric starter motor uses considerably more than 1 W.
This reminds me so much of the story of someone I know who back in the mid-90s had a shrink wrapping machine. He bought a CD-ROM drive from some department store, took it home, took the CD-ROM drive out. Then he took a brick and placed it back in the CD-ROM box, srinkwrapped the box and then returned it to the store like it was unopened.
This is one of the reasons why most high end video cards are in boxes that have a clear plastic "window" that let you see all the way to the card and it's serial number. Consumer HD's used to be packaged in transparent plastic a lot but with ROHS in style, getting rid of plastic and going to paper / cardboard packing with no shrinkwrap (just a sticker) seems to be more common.
If you have any more Sony press releases you'd like to post, please don't hesitate. Oh wait, I just checked your post history and it seems you already have.
Dude take the stick out of your ass. I don't have a preference for PS3's. To be honest, I program both the XBOX 360 and the PS3 and the 360 is a lot more pleasant to work with in many cases.
My posts on the PS3 are usually to correct other posts which are completely incorrect. As a PS3 (and 360) developer, I know quite a bit personally about these systems that your average slashdot poster doesn't know so I'm in a position to clarify some of the incorrect garbage that gets posted (such as your claim the PS3 uses emulation for Double Precision). Also, while much of my info comes from personal knowledge of actually programming these systems, I never post anything that isn't public knowledge or that would violate an NDA though so you can verify all the info through other reliable public sources.
The CELL supports Double Precision in hardware. However, the SPU vector instructions only run on Single Precision which allows for up to 8 SP ops (4 X Multiply+Add's) per cycle. Double Precision is scalar (non-vectored) and also not pipelined so the throughput is much slower since DP operations can cause stalls until they complete (there are rumors that IBM is working on a CELL that pipelines DP which will help immensely). Properly pipelined and vectorized Single Precision work can be 30-50 times faster than the scalar non-pipelined DP but the CELL still has true DP hardware which is much faster than emulation by orders of magnitude.
I'd like to know more details about his code, because a PS3 only has 256MB of RAM. That's a serious performance obstacle, since most high performance applications that do anything interesting need much more than that.
Almost all problems that are processed on supercomputers have been segmented to fit into smaller amounts of memory. Divide and conquer is the key to performance in the parallel processing world.
Even on a PC-based multicore single computer most high-performance algorithms will be tuned to fit the working dataset into L1 cache if possibly which is usually 64-512K (on the same order of the 256K for SPU local memory). With multi-GB data sets stored on HD, prioritizing algorithms to properly access volatile storage (by data-chunk size) in the order of first to L1, then L2, then RAM, then HD or network can make orders of magnitude difference in the final performance numbers. An algorithm that segments datasets into chunks that fit into L1 may run 5 to 10 times faster than the same algorithm working on L2 sized chunks.
256MB should not be the primary limitation for most supercomputing problems. No matter how much RAM you have right now, you can probably find a dataset orders of magnitude larger than RAM. Indeed, the primary limitation in a lot of supercomputing applications is properly segmenting your problem domain to the available processors/memory (nodes) and intercommunication between nodes.
Ooops minor correction on (#3). Since only 6 cores are available to the USER, he actually is running on 48 SPU's - not 56. 7 of the 8 SPU cores are functional on a PS3 Cell but one is reserved by Sony for it's OS/Hypervisor.
Everything else in my post still holds true though.
If you read the article and followed the link to his PS3 Gravity Grid site, you'd know a couple things about the cost (FREE) for this computational power:
#1) The total cost of purchasing an entire "PS3 Gravity Grid" supercomputer for yourself is less than the cost of a single simulation run on a BlueGene. In other words, you can buy the cow, the pasture, and a barn for the price of a gallon of milk.
#2) Sony *DONATED* his 8-node cluster (albeit with 20GB PS3's which they were closing out at the time) so he actually got a "supercomputer" for nearly free.
#3) The power of the 8-node PS3 cluster is roughly the same as a 200 node partition on a BlueGene SuperComputer (1 PS3 = 25 Blue Gene nodes). With 8 Cell CPUs, he has 56 SPU's running at ~3GHz to crank through his computations. This would mean a single CELL SPU is roughly 4X more powerful than a single BlueGene node which isn't unreasonable considering that it runs at a higher clockspeed (the supercomputer has to worry more about heat dissipation with hundreds or thousands of cores).
#4) I believe that by the US Gov't's somewhat outdated standards, a PS2 qualifies as a supercomputer. The FPU power in a PS3 is on ther order of 200 times higher than that of the PS2 for single precision and considerably more for double precision (which is emulated in software on the PS2).
$30/Gb is $2400 for the 80 Gb drive. That's a lot of money. Then again, I paid a similar amount of money for 64MB of RAM back around 1993 which is pretty hard to believe. The price will eventually come down but for right now, it's not terribly practical until they can get it to under $500 for your 80Gb super-fast drive. Then again, think how fast you could boot/sleep/swap at 600-800MB/s with almost no penalty for seeks.
$2.49 translates (for a 12-song album) into around $30 for a CD. Are you prepared to pay $30 for a music CD?
The better question is are you willing to pay $30 for the *MUSIC* on a CD without any of the positives (uncompressed data format, physical media, liner notes, widely available sales outlets, etc) and with the negativity of DRM-restricted content, lossy data compression with lower data rates, and limited points of sales distribution?
What are you going on about? Most detonators are simply small bits of wire that heat up when you pass current through, covered in something like phosphorus. Building an inverter or a boost converter is ridiculously unnecessary. Connecting the detonator straight across the 9V battery is more than sufficient for most detonators. I'd expect far better from the geeks of slashdot.
And here is where you're completely wrong about plastic explosives. Plastic explosives require both heat *AND* pressure to detonate. You can take a block of C4 and repeated shoot it with a gun. You can also try burning it but that won't cause detonation. A simple wire coated in phosphorous hooked up to a 9V battery will do little other than burn the wire next to the explosive since the burning phosporus provides neither enough heat or pressure. You could wrap a brick of C4 in an entire bale of your proposed wire and it'd be only dangerous because of the burning bale of wire. The C4 would remain as inert as play-doh.
The stability of most plastic explosives are one of the reasons they're attractive as an explosive -- the other two reasons are that 1) it's very malleable and easily shaped and 2) the ratio of energy released to starting material is higher than many conventional explosives. Typically a specialized detonation device (blasting cap) called an exploding bridgewire is used. This device REQUIRES building a high voltage charge. The rapid release of the high voltage charge results in the electrical vaporization of metal in a wire and the resulting shaped shockwave powers these specialized detonators.
Slashdot Mirror
64GB Solid State Drive [Add $999]
That's pretty clost the current going price for a 64 GB SSD.
The cheapest 64 GB SSD I've seen so far is $949 from Dell
In Early 2007, a 32GB SSD could set you back over $2,000 so the price per GB has already dropped by a factor of four in the past year.
However, like all technology, SSD's are getting cheaper and cheaper as component prices are falling and the mass production is picking up.
A big bunch of ram for high speed and flash for permanent storage. Just use a super cap for a power backup and have it copy the ram to flash on power down.
They already have this device (although it uses a battery rather than a supercap) in the form of the HyperDrive 4 and the RamSan. Supercaps are pretty darn huge (and expensive) compared to batteries for the same amount of energy storage and since the drain is relatively stable during the backup operation, there's no reason to use one over a battery. Both of the devices are rediculously expensive though (between $250 to $2000 per GB).
The key part about a presidential candidate to me is that most of their role is to give speeches, and represent us to the world.
Just for the sake of curiosity, what do you think of George Bush as an orator and a representative of our nation to the rest of the world?
2 GB for $15 isn't the best deal at 7.50/GB. I just got a 8GB usb key at under $4/GB. You can pick up an A-DATA 8GB usb key for just over $30 -- just search on A-DATA to get the details.
I actually picked one of these drives up at MicroCenter for $29.99 after rebate.
Pros: big storage for a usb key, waterproof case.
Cons: slow data rates compared to many other usb key devices
Both HDMI and DisplayPort support content encryption. DisplayPort has 128-bit AES DisplayPort Content Protection (DPCP) support and support for 40-bit High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection (HDCP) from version 1.1 onwards.
So you should be able to watch DRM'd content at the highest available resolution on this monitor assuming the rest of your system is DRM compliant.
I realize that AutoUpdates installs something nearly daily from Microsoft but how many of those OS "updates" are the weekly MS Genuine Advantage, MS Malicious Software Removal Tool, MS 'Windows Update' Update, MS Windows Defender Definitions (new almost daily), etc -- none of which actually fix any bugs.
Would you say the same if the teacher had ordered to use a fountain pen instead of a ball point?
More like using a pen instead of a #2 pencil on the scantron so the teacher has to grade it by hand.
The parent poster here has a history of telling people they are wrong when he personally has no clue what is going on.
On another thread he was telling me that 160mA is less than 1W but he forgot that to get WATTS (a completely different measurement than mA) you multiply amperage by voltage and 160mA * 12 V = 1.92 W which is much greater than 1 W. The funny thing is that he provided the amperage number in his post attempting to refute me which actually showed that he was completely wrong.
Oh well, this is slashdot and it's fun to randomly disagree with people even if you don't know what the fuck you're talking about.
Yup and you can buy two 8GB 266X CF cards for about $280 and get 16GB of notebook storage in one drive slot with the Addonics adapter.
So, good news, people will start using what they need, and not the professional (and expensive) tool for home stuff. And that usually means open source.
In general, people want to use Photoshop and Office at home or a completely transparent replacement. The open source software may be free but there's a big price in time to learn two software packages and they are trained on the commercial packages at work. Not to mention that if they occasionally bring work home, they need a compatible package to open and edit the files.
"Good enough for home" might work for hobbyist software and special case needs but when you are taking on giants in established fields like Spreadsheets, Word Processing, Image Editing, the "good enough for home" just isn't good enough. Who wants to learn how to do the same thing twice with an inferior tool?
Apple holds #2, #3, #4, #6, #7, #8, #10, #11, #12, #13 or 10 of the top 15 spots. That's a bit better than 4 out of 100. Plus 3 of those are really the same model -- 8 GB Nanos -- just in different colors. I bet if we discounted color, the Zune 30GB model sales would be behind the 8GB Nano's at Amazon.
I strongly suspect that you made that up because I've never come across a relay that requires 1 *WATT* to work.
I guess it's obvious you've never turned the key to start your car then. The starter solenoid that acts as a relay used to control current to the electric starter motor uses considerably more than 1 W.
Technically, the human-powered battery charger is now a pull-string, not a hand-crank.
This reminds me so much of the story of someone I know who back in the mid-90s had a shrink wrapping machine. He bought a CD-ROM drive from some department store, took it home, took the CD-ROM drive out. Then he took a brick and placed it back in the CD-ROM box, srinkwrapped the box and then returned it to the store like it was unopened.
This is one of the reasons why most high end video cards are in boxes that have a clear plastic "window" that let you see all the way to the card and it's serial number. Consumer HD's used to be packaged in transparent plastic a lot but with ROHS in style, getting rid of plastic and going to paper / cardboard packing with no shrinkwrap (just a sticker) seems to be more common.
If you have any more Sony press releases you'd like to post, please don't hesitate. Oh wait, I just checked your post history and it seems you already have.
Dude take the stick out of your ass. I don't have a preference for PS3's. To be honest, I program both the XBOX 360 and the PS3 and the 360 is a lot more pleasant to work with in many cases.
My posts on the PS3 are usually to correct other posts which are completely incorrect. As a PS3 (and 360) developer, I know quite a bit personally about these systems that your average slashdot poster doesn't know so I'm in a position to clarify some of the incorrect garbage that gets posted (such as your claim the PS3 uses emulation for Double Precision). Also, while much of my info comes from personal knowledge of actually programming these systems, I never post anything that isn't public knowledge or that would violate an NDA though so you can verify all the info through other reliable public sources.
Double precision floating point is emulated in software on the PS3 as well.
As a professional programmer working in the games industry (on both XBOX 360 and PS3), I can tell you that's completely untrue. You can verify this easily with information available to the general public on the CELL microprocessor.
The CELL supports Double Precision in hardware. However, the SPU vector instructions only run on Single Precision which allows for up to 8 SP ops (4 X Multiply+Add's) per cycle. Double Precision is scalar (non-vectored) and also not pipelined so the throughput is much slower since DP operations can cause stalls until they complete (there are rumors that IBM is working on a CELL that pipelines DP which will help immensely). Properly pipelined and vectorized Single Precision work can be 30-50 times faster than the scalar non-pipelined DP but the CELL still has true DP hardware which is much faster than emulation by orders of magnitude.
I'd like to know more details about his code, because a PS3 only has 256MB of RAM. That's a serious performance obstacle, since most high performance applications that do anything interesting need much more than that.
Almost all problems that are processed on supercomputers have been segmented to fit into smaller amounts of memory. Divide and conquer is the key to performance in the parallel processing world.
Even on a PC-based multicore single computer most high-performance algorithms will be tuned to fit the working dataset into L1 cache if possibly which is usually 64-512K (on the same order of the 256K for SPU local memory). With multi-GB data sets stored on HD, prioritizing algorithms to properly access volatile storage (by data-chunk size) in the order of first to L1, then L2, then RAM, then HD or network can make orders of magnitude difference in the final performance numbers. An algorithm that segments datasets into chunks that fit into L1 may run 5 to 10 times faster than the same algorithm working on L2 sized chunks.
256MB should not be the primary limitation for most supercomputing problems. No matter how much RAM you have right now, you can probably find a dataset orders of magnitude larger than RAM. Indeed, the primary limitation in a lot of supercomputing applications is properly segmenting your problem domain to the available processors/memory (nodes) and intercommunication between nodes.
If he's using the PPU core (hyperthreaded-not multicore) and 6 SPU cores, he is using 7 of 9 (1 disabled and 1 reserved of the 8 SPU's + 1 PPU) :-)
Ooops minor correction on (#3). Since only 6 cores are available to the USER, he actually is running on 48 SPU's - not 56. 7 of the 8 SPU cores are functional on a PS3 Cell but one is reserved by Sony for it's OS/Hypervisor.
Everything else in my post still holds true though.
It would've been cheaper to just buy a Cray.
If you read the article and followed the link to his PS3 Gravity Grid site, you'd know a couple things about the cost (FREE) for this computational power:
#1) The total cost of purchasing an entire "PS3 Gravity Grid" supercomputer for yourself is less than the cost of a single simulation run on a BlueGene. In other words, you can buy the cow, the pasture, and a barn for the price of a gallon of milk.
#2) Sony *DONATED* his 8-node cluster (albeit with 20GB PS3's which they were closing out at the time) so he actually got a "supercomputer" for nearly free.
#3) The power of the 8-node PS3 cluster is roughly the same as a 200 node partition on a BlueGene SuperComputer (1 PS3 = 25 Blue Gene nodes). With 8 Cell CPUs, he has 56 SPU's running at ~3GHz to crank through his computations. This would mean a single CELL SPU is roughly 4X more powerful than a single BlueGene node which isn't unreasonable considering that it runs at a higher clockspeed (the supercomputer has to worry more about heat dissipation with hundreds or thousands of cores).
#4) I believe that by the US Gov't's somewhat outdated standards, a PS2 qualifies as a supercomputer. The FPU power in a PS3 is on ther order of 200 times higher than that of the PS2 for single precision and considerably more for double precision (which is emulated in software on the PS2).
I don't think mechanical love will hurt human marriage. In fact, mechanical love has been making human marriages work better since at least the 1880's and possibly as early as 1653. And just a point in fact, the early ancestors of loving robots have been more common than toasters since 1917.
Lifespan is approx 30,000 hours. Or 8 hours a day for ten years. If you leave it on 24/7 you'll get a bit more than three years.
$30/Gb is $2400 for the 80 Gb drive. That's a lot of money. Then again, I paid a similar amount of money for 64MB of RAM back around 1993 which is pretty hard to believe. The price will eventually come down but for right now, it's not terribly practical until they can get it to under $500 for your 80Gb super-fast drive. Then again, think how fast you could boot/sleep/swap at 600-800MB/s with almost no penalty for seeks.
$2.49 translates (for a 12-song album) into around $30 for a CD. Are you prepared to pay $30 for a music CD?
The better question is are you willing to pay $30 for the *MUSIC* on a CD without any of the positives (uncompressed data format, physical media, liner notes, widely available sales outlets, etc) and with the negativity of DRM-restricted content, lossy data compression with lower data rates, and limited points of sales distribution?
What are you going on about? Most detonators are simply small bits of wire that heat up when you pass current through, covered in something like phosphorus. Building an inverter or a boost converter is ridiculously unnecessary. Connecting the detonator straight across the 9V battery is more than sufficient for most detonators. I'd expect far better from the geeks of slashdot.
And here is where you're completely wrong about plastic explosives. Plastic explosives require both heat *AND* pressure to detonate. You can take a block of C4 and repeated shoot it with a gun. You can also try burning it but that won't cause detonation. A simple wire coated in phosphorous hooked up to a 9V battery will do little other than burn the wire next to the explosive since the burning phosporus provides neither enough heat or pressure. You could wrap a brick of C4 in an entire bale of your proposed wire and it'd be only dangerous because of the burning bale of wire. The C4 would remain as inert as play-doh.
The stability of most plastic explosives are one of the reasons they're attractive as an explosive -- the other two reasons are that 1) it's very malleable and easily shaped and 2) the ratio of energy released to starting material is higher than many conventional explosives. Typically a specialized detonation device (blasting cap) called an exploding bridgewire is used. This device REQUIRES building a high voltage charge. The rapid release of the high voltage charge results in the electrical vaporization of metal in a wire and the resulting shaped shockwave powers these specialized detonators.