If you already bought the $500 phone with the $70, it would kinda suck to find out you need another phone if you want to make calls you can hear in a crowded area or slightly noisy area.
Because if I buy a $500 phone and pay $70 a month for phone service, I shouldn't need another phone to carry around (with another phone plan) to make my calls.
Yes, it does look innocuous enough to someone who knows something about electronics. It looks like a solderable protoboard with some LEDs and a battery. She was probably using an NE555 or something similar to flash the LEDs. Harmless enough
A circuit with an oscillator (i.e. NE555), mini step-up transformer (about the size of a pea), rectifying diodes (i.e. LEDs), and capacitors that looked nearly exactly like hers can make a voltage ladder that can accumulate a sizeable high voltage spark to set off an explosive material -- for example the putty she was carrying around.
For an example of the circuit, look at Fig 1 on this page. Now imaging the bottom part of the circuit (oscillator) replaced with the simple integrated 555 oscillator and using the blinking LED's inlined with the rectifying LEDs in the high-voltage ladder. Now tell me you couldn't make the device look very much like what she was wearing.
If you Google "555 voltage ladder" you will see a huge array of high-voltage circuits you can make with the simple 555 IC.
With a simple oscilattor circuit, a small step up transformer (the ones in a camera flash can be smaller than the tip of your pinky), and some rectifying diodes (inlined with the LEDS) and capacitors, you can build a device that looks NEARLY EXACTLY like this one which will easy build up enough voltage to set off a small detonation cap.
As a bonus, while the "bomb" circuit is priming, your LED's will blink in a pretty way just like hers were doing.
All you need is a fistfull of explosive putty with small detonation cap embedded in it and to ground the high voltage lead through the detonation cap onece the charge has built up. Oh, and by the way, she was carrying a fistful of (albeit non-explosive) putty around as well.
In the case of a suicide bomber, the act of not complying with police orders may be sufficient cause for police to use lethal force. She's very lucky she listened carefully to the police when they arrested her and remained alive.
Hmmm... she was wearing open circuit board with bare wires, a small circuit, some LEDs, battery, and carrying putty in her hand (which turns out it was playdough). It might be crude but that's enough to actually make a bomb if you have a detonation cap (easily concealed in the small doughball of putty) and some actual explosive material. All you need is for that small circuit to be a simple voltage ladder or other step-up circuit to have with a capacitor (again plausible) to prime the detonation cap and you could have a very lethal device if the playdough was a real explosive.
And she brought all this material to an AIRPORT where you're not even allowed to bring a bottle of WATER past security because it might be "explosive".
She's very lucky to be alive. If she didn't obey police instructions and made any move that looked like she was going to activate a bomb, they would have had a reasonable charge to use deadly force to stop her from activating, modifying, or simply playing around with her device.
As long as terrorists are potentially trying to blow up planes, can't we as nerds just agree it's bad to bring something that has all the visible components necessary to make a bomb into an airport? Come on, they already tear you a new whole if your hair gel and other products won't fit into a 1 qt plastic bag.
I don't want much more either.... oh except for it to work better as an actual phone. Right now the max volume is ridiculously for both the speaker phone and the regular phone speaker. If you're in a crowded place, you won't be able to hear the normal speaker and if you're in your car on a noisy road, the speaker phone is barely loud enough to work. The three most important things for a multi-media phone should be:
#1) Does it work well as a phone ?
#2) Does it work well as a phone ?
#3) Does it work well as a phone ?
Everything else should be second unless you want to carry around a second phone to actually make calls on. My other (much more minor) gripe is that it's way too easy to mistype on the built-in keyboard.
Is there a game, with the exception of Wii Sports, that you've been thrilled that there's no option to go back to a regular d-pad?
Mortal Kombat Armageddon for the Wii is actually easier to control with the WiiMote than the d-pad. You do the special moves with simple gestures rather than memorizing long button combinations. For example, to throw Scorpion's spear, you just press the trigger on the WiiMote and make a small throwing motion towards and away from your opponent.
Game creation IS a science, NOT an art. I'm glad the author recognized such facts.
As a professional game programmer for over twenty years, I will say that Game Programming is a combination of SCIENCE and ART. You can't exclude either. It requires hard science to solve and understand many of the computing challenge required to program games today. At the same time, it's quite often required to cut corners and do approximations. The approximations are sometimes not at all anything like the way you'd do things scientifically but you have to judge them on their ascetics - i.e. is it good enough that the user will know / care about the difference. This is one of the fun parts of the job that requires a lot of creative and "artistic" thought in programming.
The fact is that the MP in (A)SMP stands for Multi-Processing / Multi-Processor and the MA in NUMA/UMA stands for Memory Architecture. I differentiate them based on the clearest interpretation of the acronym.
And again, in my previous post describing game systems, there are real world examples of SMP/UMA, SMP/NUMA, ASMP/UMA, SMP+ASMP/NUMA, etc hybrids out there that can not be defined by a simple categorization of only the memory or the processor architecture alone.
The one thing that I do use in qualifying an SMP system (or a part of a system as SMP) is that the SMP part of the system be able to run a SMP-kernel -- that is identical binaries with a shared memory address space across multiple substantially similar CPUs with little or no need for the SMP-kernel to differentiate between the processors.
FWIW, there's a reason why the acronym (A)SMP stands for (A)Symmetric Multi-Processors -- it has everything to do with the processors. NUMA/UMA as you will note expand to Non-uniform / Unified - Memory Architecture. It is possible to combine (A)SMP with NUMA/UMA in a single system... please see my other reply to your post where I note quite a few hard to categorize real-world examples.
Wikipedia is a freakin' user-defined encyclopedia, and, duh, it can be (and many times is) wrong!
Wikipedia is hardly my only source of information on multiprocessor programming. Perhaps it would be better if I laid out my actual credentials -- I've had plenty of experience as a game programmer working on multiprocessor systems for over 20 years - some are SMP (Symmetric MultiProcessing), some are ASMP (Asymmetric MultiProcessing), some are NUMA (Non-uniform memory architecture), some are UMA (Unified Memory Architecture), some are combinations of SMP/ASMP and UMA/NUMA, some are hard to easily categorize.
I consider SMP / ASMP to refer to processors and NUMA / UMA to refer to memory. In this context a dual-Opteron system would be an SMP NUMA system where a dual Xenon would be SMP UMA from the CPU's point of view.
For example, look at the beast that is the PS3. If you consider the hyper-threads of the PPU alone, it's SMP. If you consider the SPUs alone, it's SMP. If you consider the PPU and SPUs they share the same memory map (UMA) but the SPUs have independantly accessible local store (NUMA). If you consider the GPU memory versus main memory split, again there is NUMA. Here we have one system with SMP, ASMP, UMA, and NUMA characteristics that must be considered depending on which parts of the system you are programming.
Even the (original) XBOX, while much simpler, is hard to categorize. There is a UMA memory architecture shared between the GPU and CPU but it is arranged in banks (NUMA) which can affect access times. Here we have a system with both UNIFIED (single shared address space) and NON-UNIFORM (different banks).
I've worked on games that shipped or are shipping on all of the following multiprocessor platforms (except the M2 which didn't come out but I did work on the system for awhile). On all of these systems there were multiple processors exposed that I had to program and schedule code either directly or with minimal OS/system-library assistance -- often in assembler.
Amiga == 68000 CPU + "Programmable" support chips i.e. COPPER (video coprocessor / list-based coproc) and BLITTER (Block Image Transferrer / register based programmed 2D ROP [Raster Operation] engine) and DMA based audio (Paula) and DMA-based display-DAC (Denise).
Jaguar == 68000 CPU + RISC DSP + RISC GPU + OLP (list-based coproc) + BLITTERSega 32X == Two SH2 RISC cpus + video (DAC / linear framebuffer) and audio coprocessors + Sega Genesis
PS3 == CELL { Single PPU PowerPC Core with 2 "hyper-threads" and 8 SPU Synergistic Processing Units } + GPU
XBOX 360 == Three PowerPC Cores with 2 "hyper-threads" each + GPU
Intel X86 == Hyperthreading and Multicore systems
Note: all the above hardware information is easily available online (see Wikipedia - and yes, it's not always right but it's a good starting point most of the time).
The symmetry in SMP does not refer to the capabilities of the processors. It refers to the relation between the processors and memory.
Wikipedia would disagree with you: "Symmetric multiprocessing, or SMP, is a multiprocessor computer architecture where two or more identical processors are connected to a single shared main memory."
SMP implies that there is a shared memory address space and that the cores can execute similar binaries. NUMA implies separate banks of memory dedicated to specific CPUs -- for example, AMD Opteron. However, most vendors still call the Opteron 'SMP' when used in a multi-CPU configuration because the "independent" banks of memory are mapped into the same memory address space (visible from all CPUs) and there is neglible penalty for executing tasks on either core regardless or location of code or data ***. (*** note: memory banks shouldn't be completely ignored for memory intensive high-performance computing applications and indeed on certain OS's like Vista, it is possible to allocate memory with CPU affinity or to schedule tasks with CPU affinity on an Opteron to alleviate NUMA crosstalk between the CPUs).
ASymmetric MultiProcessing (ASMP) implies dissimilarity in either the processing units (different binary opcodes) or disjoint memory accesses. Using a physics-accelerator or a generic-GPU programming with a main CPU is asymmetric processing even if the accelerator can access the same memory as the CPU (i.e. from cheap "shared-memory" GPU such as those integrated on cheap motherboards or to more powerful ones such as the GPU in the XBOX360). The CELL in the PS3 is not SMP because the PPU and SPU can not execute the same binaries and the cores are asimilar even though all cores have some method of accessing the main memory with a shared address space (although the SPUs also use a DMA read/write to main memory rather than direct access which would doubly qualify them as ASMP - but even without this memory difference, they would still be ASMP processing).
FWIW, the Sony did this with the CELL processor on the PS3. Only 7 of the 8 SPU's are used to allow a higher yield. You can't use the 8th SPU even if it were functioning.
Since the NT kernel is preemptable this would be a problem even on single CPU machines
From the Article (emphasis mine):
"I was able to successfully bypass security in many system call wrappers by creating unmanaged concurrency between the attacking processes and the wrapper/kernel. This was possible on both uniprocessor systems and multiprocessor systems."
this would make sex with attractive people more fun too. As long as they don't complain about the massive stupid looking goggles you have on. Or the massive thing that powers them and keeps hitting your partner in the ribs.
There are so many jokes to make here, I don't even know where to begin.
This is basically the case and you can prove it by looking at any modern airliner. A modern high-bypass turbofan jet engine is really just a turbine-driven ducted propellor, and the propellor geometry is much like what you describe, with a whole ton of blades spinning at a reasonable speed.
You have a pretty much completely wrong idea of jet engines. The blades spin very quickly at thousands of RPM's - in fact the tips of the blades are barely subsonic in speed. They are subjected to such high rotational forces that a small crack in the the blades could cause catastrophic failure (i.e. destruction of the engine as the blade tears apart and rips through anything in it's path).
Also the blades are not used to provide thrust as a jet engine used direct thrust. Instead, they are used to compress air prior to combustion and to power said compression. The blades in the front of a jet engine are there to compress air to get more air into the engine. When combined with jet fuel and ignited, this air expands and the expansion of the air provides the thrust. The expanding air also happens to turn the "turbo" blades near the exhaust that drive the previously mentioned compressor blades as well as powering generators for the electrical and hydraulic needs of the plane.
Until AMD launches the Barcelona, Intel have no reason to start selling 45 nm processors.
Umm, that's not true at all. Here are some reasons:
1) Lower cost - you get more 45nm CPU's per wafer than 65nm CPU's so they cost less if you have similar yield ratios.
2) Lower power systems are attractive now to large purchasers. On a system level, AMD is very competitive with Intel (and sometimes ahead of Intel) on performance per watt. This is very important to companies with huge server farms.
3) Higher single-threaded performance per core. The 45 nm shrink will allow them to run cooler and at higher clock speeds thus producing high-end high-margin CPU's that gamers and performance junkies crave.
4) The way to crush your opponents isn't to let them catch up before you move forward. Have you ever seen someone in a relay race wait for their opponent simply because they know the next runner on their own team is fast? You have to get ahead and stay ahead as far as possible. If you even let them have the appearance of catching up, you won't maintain your image of indomitable superiority.
It works in software, it works in government too. Only slimy bastards hide behind their veil of secrecy to their customers/public.
But the current admistration has held all their policy meetings in secrecy and has failed to provide disclosure of details of it's inner workings to congress even in numerous private sessions due to "executive privilege". Are you calling our great leader a slimy bastard ?
That's great and all, except for one thing. He ain't talkin' about WINDOWS.:P
Yes he was. He was lamenting why the new iMacs didn't come with 4GB like most "normal PCs" which I assumed to mean Windows. My post was correcting his assumption that Windows machines come with 4GB standard. The quote to which I replied:
the specs in one of the pictures showed the iMacs, all the way up to the biggest $1800 version only has 1gig- with all the RAM you get in normal PCs now days (4gigabytes not unusual) is this not a little strange
I don't know about Mac's but it's easy to disable this feature (last access time) on Windows:
"FSUTIL BEHAVIOR SET DISABLELASTACCESS 1"
This tends to speed up removeable drives quite a bit. It's still a speedup but less of one on non-removeable drives.
If you want a bigger speedup on removeable drives, you can also enable write-caching on a drive by performing the following steps: go to explorer "My Computer" and select drive-letter (i.e. "E:") -> select Properties (right-mouse menu) -> click Hardware (tab) -> select drive-hardware-device-name (in list) -> click Properties (button) -> click Policies (tab) -> select "Optimize for Performance" (radio button) -> click OK (button). Note if you do this you have to use the "Safely Remove Hardware" in the task tray to remove the drive or you can get write errors.
with all the RAM you get in normal PCs now days (4gigabytes not unusual) is this not a little strange?
AFAIK, Window's PC manaufacturers usually put in 1 GB now with an option to get 2 GB or more. Usually 2GB costs you an extra $100-200 and 4GB cost you an extra arm, leg, and testicle.
Even if you give up a 'nad for the 4GB, Windows PC's will only use 3 GB when 4 GB is installed unless you're willing to do a lot of extra configuration and you buy the correct hardware. We got a bunch of new Dells at work a couple months ago. All of them came with 4 GB. But when you boot into Windows XP Pro, only 3 GB is visible. I tried all the hacks to get more -- with certain MB and hardware configs, it is possible to get up to 3.5GB with a bit of hacking your OS configuration but 3GB is the most you can get unless you know all your hardware components will memory map into the top 0.5 GB (and unfortunately the Dells we got only do 3GB on 32-bit Windows). There is no way to get an ACTUAL USABLE 4GB in Windows without going to one of the 64-bit versions of Windows and with all the memory and driver issues there, you're not gaining anything on a consumer machine.
Browsing the internet on a phone is like taking a road trip on a moped.
The iPhone is probably one of the first phone devices to actually have a usable web-browser. I played with it in the store for quite a bit and found that their rendering engine is capable of displaying full pages with correct layouy by drawing the webpage at a higher resolution internally and scales down with anti-aliasing. You can see pages as they were designed (for the most part) and very easily zoom in and out. It's better than any other phone or PDA for that matter.
What sucked in my test of the iPhone was the phone. The volume on the phone was too quiet to hear a call in the crowded Apple store even when I turned the loudness all the way up. Same for the speaker phone. I can hear conversations on my three year old samsung phone if I make a call on the Chicago El (our train system). Maybe the iPhone volume works better with the headphones but the volume for the built-in speakers (earphone and speakerphone) are way too low to use except in a quiet environment.
I spent many years with a 50Hz monitor, back in the Amiga days. Now I can`t stand anything less than 80Hz.
60 Hz (or 50Hz PAL) isn't so bad. After all, most people can stare at a TV for several hours a day without noticing any flicker. The problem with the Amiga displays was mainly due to interlace without a vertical interlace filter to reduce high frequency artifacts.
The interlacing meant that a single pixel was only updated at 30Hz (or 25Hz PAL) -- ie. two output fields (60Hz) per frame (30Hz). The lack of a multi-line interlace filter meant that a single-pixel-high line output of white on a black background would flicker horribly since every other field would output a black or white line at that point in the refresh.
As for monitors persistance is as important as refresh rates. If you have slow moving images, a very low refresh rate with rather high persistance works fine (like LCD's at 60 Hz) but for games and moving images, high refresh rates with lower persistance ends up being much better (and avoids trailing artifacts like you'd see on high-persistance CRT's or LCD's).
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If you already bought the $500 phone with the $70, it would kinda suck to find out you need another phone if you want to make calls you can hear in a crowded area or slightly noisy area.
Because if I buy a $500 phone and pay $70 a month for phone service, I shouldn't need another phone to carry around (with another phone plan) to make my calls.
Yes, it does look innocuous enough to someone who knows something about electronics. It looks like a solderable protoboard with some LEDs and a battery. She was probably using an NE555 or something similar to flash the LEDs. Harmless enough
A circuit with an oscillator (i.e. NE555), mini step-up transformer (about the size of a pea), rectifying diodes (i.e. LEDs), and capacitors that looked nearly exactly like hers can make a voltage ladder that can accumulate a sizeable high voltage spark to set off an explosive material -- for example the putty she was carrying around.
For an example of the circuit, look at Fig 1 on this page. Now imaging the bottom part of the circuit (oscillator) replaced with the simple integrated 555 oscillator and using the blinking LED's inlined with the rectifying LEDs in the high-voltage ladder. Now tell me you couldn't make the device look very much like what she was wearing.
If you Google "555 voltage ladder" you will see a huge array of high-voltage circuits you can make with the simple 555 IC.
With a simple oscilattor circuit, a small step up transformer (the ones in a camera flash can be smaller than the tip of your pinky), and some rectifying diodes (inlined with the LEDS) and capacitors, you can build a device that looks NEARLY EXACTLY like this one which will easy build up enough voltage to set off a small detonation cap.
As a bonus, while the "bomb" circuit is priming, your LED's will blink in a pretty way just like hers were doing.
All you need is a fistfull of explosive putty with small detonation cap embedded in it and to ground the high voltage lead through the detonation cap onece the charge has built up. Oh, and by the way, she was carrying a fistful of (albeit non-explosive) putty around as well.
In the case of a suicide bomber, the act of not complying with police orders may be sufficient cause for police to use lethal force. She's very lucky she listened carefully to the police when they arrested her and remained alive.
Hmmm... she was wearing open circuit board with bare wires, a small circuit, some LEDs, battery, and carrying putty in her hand (which turns out it was playdough). It might be crude but that's enough to actually make a bomb if you have a detonation cap (easily concealed in the small doughball of putty) and some actual explosive material. All you need is for that small circuit to be a simple voltage ladder or other step-up circuit to have with a capacitor (again plausible) to prime the detonation cap and you could have a very lethal device if the playdough was a real explosive.
And she brought all this material to an AIRPORT where you're not even allowed to bring a bottle of WATER past security because it might be "explosive".
She's very lucky to be alive. If she didn't obey police instructions and made any move that looked like she was going to activate a bomb, they would have had a reasonable charge to use deadly force to stop her from activating, modifying, or simply playing around with her device.
As long as terrorists are potentially trying to blow up planes, can't we as nerds just agree it's bad to bring something that has all the visible components necessary to make a bomb into an airport? Come on, they already tear you a new whole if your hair gel and other products won't fit into a 1 qt plastic bag.
I don't want much more either.... oh except for it to work better as an actual phone. Right now the max volume is ridiculously for both the speaker phone and the regular phone speaker. If you're in a crowded place, you won't be able to hear the normal speaker and if you're in your car on a noisy road, the speaker phone is barely loud enough to work. The three most important things for a multi-media phone should be:
#1) Does it work well as a phone ?
#2) Does it work well as a phone ?
#3) Does it work well as a phone ?
Everything else should be second unless you want to carry around a second phone to actually make calls on. My other (much more minor) gripe is that it's way too easy to mistype on the built-in keyboard.
Is there a game, with the exception of Wii Sports, that you've been thrilled that there's no option to go back to a regular d-pad?
Mortal Kombat Armageddon for the Wii is actually easier to control with the WiiMote than the d-pad. You do the special moves with simple gestures rather than memorizing long button combinations. For example, to throw Scorpion's spear, you just press the trigger on the WiiMote and make a small throwing motion towards and away from your opponent.
Game creation IS a science, NOT an art. I'm glad the author recognized such facts.
As a professional game programmer for over twenty years, I will say that Game Programming is a combination of SCIENCE and ART. You can't exclude either. It requires hard science to solve and understand many of the computing challenge required to program games today. At the same time, it's quite often required to cut corners and do approximations. The approximations are sometimes not at all anything like the way you'd do things scientifically but you have to judge them on their ascetics - i.e. is it good enough that the user will know / care about the difference. This is one of the fun parts of the job that requires a lot of creative and "artistic" thought in programming.
The fact is that the MP in (A)SMP stands for Multi-Processing / Multi-Processor and the MA in NUMA/UMA stands for Memory Architecture. I differentiate them based on the clearest interpretation of the acronym.
And again, in my previous post describing game systems, there are real world examples of SMP/UMA, SMP/NUMA, ASMP/UMA, SMP+ASMP/NUMA, etc hybrids out there that can not be defined by a simple categorization of only the memory or the processor architecture alone.
The one thing that I do use in qualifying an SMP system (or a part of a system as SMP) is that the SMP part of the system be able to run a SMP-kernel -- that is identical binaries with a shared memory address space across multiple substantially similar CPUs with little or no need for the SMP-kernel to differentiate between the processors.
FWIW, there's a reason why the acronym (A)SMP stands for (A)Symmetric Multi-Processors -- it has everything to do with the processors. NUMA/UMA as you will note expand to Non-uniform / Unified - Memory Architecture. It is possible to combine (A)SMP with NUMA/UMA in a single system... please see my other reply to your post where I note quite a few hard to categorize real-world examples.
Wikipedia is hardly my only source of information on multiprocessor programming. Perhaps it would be better if I laid out my actual credentials -- I've had plenty of experience as a game programmer working on multiprocessor systems for over 20 years - some are SMP (Symmetric MultiProcessing), some are ASMP (Asymmetric MultiProcessing), some are NUMA (Non-uniform memory architecture), some are UMA (Unified Memory Architecture), some are combinations of SMP/ASMP and UMA/NUMA, some are hard to easily categorize.
I consider SMP / ASMP to refer to processors and NUMA / UMA to refer to memory. In this context a dual-Opteron system would be an SMP NUMA system where a dual Xenon would be SMP UMA from the CPU's point of view.
For example, look at the beast that is the PS3. If you consider the hyper-threads of the PPU alone, it's SMP. If you consider the SPUs alone, it's SMP. If you consider the PPU and SPUs they share the same memory map (UMA) but the SPUs have independantly accessible local store (NUMA). If you consider the GPU memory versus main memory split, again there is NUMA. Here we have one system with SMP, ASMP, UMA, and NUMA characteristics that must be considered depending on which parts of the system you are programming.
Even the (original) XBOX, while much simpler, is hard to categorize. There is a UMA memory architecture shared between the GPU and CPU but it is arranged in banks (NUMA) which can affect access times. Here we have a system with both UNIFIED (single shared address space) and NON-UNIFORM (different banks).
I've worked on games that shipped or are shipping on all of the following multiprocessor platforms (except the M2 which didn't come out but I did work on the system for awhile). On all of these systems there were multiple processors exposed that I had to program and schedule code either directly or with minimal OS/system-library assistance -- often in assembler.
Note: all the above hardware information is easily available online (see Wikipedia - and yes, it's not always right but it's a good starting point most of the time).
The symmetry in SMP does not refer to the capabilities of the processors. It refers to the relation between the processors and memory.
Wikipedia would disagree with you: "Symmetric multiprocessing, or SMP, is a multiprocessor computer architecture where two or more identical processors are connected to a single shared main memory."
SMP implies that there is a shared memory address space and that the cores can execute similar binaries. NUMA implies separate banks of memory dedicated to specific CPUs -- for example, AMD Opteron. However, most vendors still call the Opteron 'SMP' when used in a multi-CPU configuration because the "independent" banks of memory are mapped into the same memory address space (visible from all CPUs) and there is neglible penalty for executing tasks on either core regardless or location of code or data ***. (*** note: memory banks shouldn't be completely ignored for memory intensive high-performance computing applications and indeed on certain OS's like Vista, it is possible to allocate memory with CPU affinity or to schedule tasks with CPU affinity on an Opteron to alleviate NUMA crosstalk between the CPUs).
ASymmetric MultiProcessing (ASMP) implies dissimilarity in either the processing units (different binary opcodes) or disjoint memory accesses. Using a physics-accelerator or a generic-GPU programming with a main CPU is asymmetric processing even if the accelerator can access the same memory as the CPU (i.e. from cheap "shared-memory" GPU such as those integrated on cheap motherboards or to more powerful ones such as the GPU in the XBOX360). The CELL in the PS3 is not SMP because the PPU and SPU can not execute the same binaries and the cores are asimilar even though all cores have some method of accessing the main memory with a shared address space (although the SPUs also use a DMA read/write to main memory rather than direct access which would doubly qualify them as ASMP - but even without this memory difference, they would still be ASMP processing).
FWIW, the Sony did this with the CELL processor on the PS3. Only 7 of the 8 SPU's are used to allow a higher yield. You can't use the 8th SPU even if it were functioning.
Since the NT kernel is preemptable this would be a problem even on single CPU machines
From the Article (emphasis mine):
"I was able to successfully bypass security in many system call wrappers by creating unmanaged concurrency between the attacking processes and the wrapper/kernel. This was possible on both uniprocessor systems and multiprocessor systems."
this would make sex with attractive people more fun too. As long as they don't complain about the massive stupid looking goggles you have on. Or the massive thing that powers them and keeps hitting your partner in the ribs.
There are so many jokes to make here, I don't even know where to begin.
This is basically the case and you can prove it by looking at any modern airliner. A modern high-bypass turbofan jet engine is really just a turbine-driven ducted propellor, and the propellor geometry is much like what you describe, with a whole ton of blades spinning at a reasonable speed.
You have a pretty much completely wrong idea of jet engines. The blades spin very quickly at thousands of RPM's - in fact the tips of the blades are barely subsonic in speed. They are subjected to such high rotational forces that a small crack in the the blades could cause catastrophic failure (i.e. destruction of the engine as the blade tears apart and rips through anything in it's path).
Also the blades are not used to provide thrust as a jet engine used direct thrust. Instead, they are used to compress air prior to combustion and to power said compression. The blades in the front of a jet engine are there to compress air to get more air into the engine. When combined with jet fuel and ignited, this air expands and the expansion of the air provides the thrust. The expanding air also happens to turn the "turbo" blades near the exhaust that drive the previously mentioned compressor blades as well as powering generators for the electrical and hydraulic needs of the plane.
From the article:
Until AMD launches the Barcelona, Intel have no reason to start selling 45 nm processors.
Umm, that's not true at all. Here are some reasons:
1) Lower cost - you get more 45nm CPU's per wafer than 65nm CPU's so they cost less if you have similar yield ratios.
2) Lower power systems are attractive now to large purchasers. On a system level, AMD is very competitive with Intel (and sometimes ahead of Intel) on performance per watt. This is very important to companies with huge server farms.
3) Higher single-threaded performance per core. The 45 nm shrink will allow them to run cooler and at higher clock speeds thus producing high-end high-margin CPU's that gamers and performance junkies crave.
4) The way to crush your opponents isn't to let them catch up before you move forward. Have you ever seen someone in a relay race wait for their opponent simply because they know the next runner on their own team is fast? You have to get ahead and stay ahead as far as possible. If you even let them have the appearance of catching up, you won't maintain your image of indomitable superiority.
It works in software, it works in government too. Only slimy bastards hide behind their veil of secrecy to their customers/public.
But the current admistration has held all their policy meetings in secrecy and has failed to provide disclosure of details of it's inner workings to congress even in numerous private sessions due to "executive privilege". Are you calling our great leader a slimy bastard ?
That's great and all, except for one thing. He ain't talkin' about WINDOWS. :P
Yes he was. He was lamenting why the new iMacs didn't come with 4GB like most "normal PCs" which I assumed to mean Windows. My post was correcting his assumption that Windows machines come with 4GB standard. The quote to which I replied:
the specs in one of the pictures showed the iMacs, all the way up to the biggest $1800 version only has 1gig- with all the RAM you get in normal PCs now days (4gigabytes not unusual) is this not a little strange
Oh, and turning off indexing on a drive speeds it up too. It's on the drive properties dialog at the bottom as "Allow Indexing Service to..." .
I don't know about Mac's but it's easy to disable this feature (last access time) on Windows:
"FSUTIL BEHAVIOR SET DISABLELASTACCESS 1"
This tends to speed up removeable drives quite a bit. It's still a speedup but less of one on non-removeable drives.
If you want a bigger speedup on removeable drives, you can also enable write-caching on a drive by performing the following steps: go to explorer "My Computer" and select drive-letter (i.e. "E:") -> select Properties (right-mouse menu) -> click Hardware (tab) -> select drive-hardware-device-name (in list) -> click Properties (button) -> click Policies (tab) -> select "Optimize for Performance" (radio button) -> click OK (button). Note if you do this you have to use the "Safely Remove Hardware" in the task tray to remove the drive or you can get write errors.
I have trouble believing slashdotters are helping the population grow rapidly. After all, wouldn't that require... well... having sex ???
with all the RAM you get in normal PCs now days (4gigabytes not unusual) is this not a little strange?
AFAIK, Window's PC manaufacturers usually put in 1 GB now with an option to get 2 GB or more. Usually 2GB costs you an extra $100-200 and 4GB cost you an extra arm, leg, and testicle.
Even if you give up a 'nad for the 4GB, Windows PC's will only use 3 GB when 4 GB is installed unless you're willing to do a lot of extra configuration and you buy the correct hardware. We got a bunch of new Dells at work a couple months ago. All of them came with 4 GB. But when you boot into Windows XP Pro, only 3 GB is visible. I tried all the hacks to get more -- with certain MB and hardware configs, it is possible to get up to 3.5GB with a bit of hacking your OS configuration but 3GB is the most you can get unless you know all your hardware components will memory map into the top 0.5 GB (and unfortunately the Dells we got only do 3GB on 32-bit Windows). There is no way to get an ACTUAL USABLE 4GB in Windows without going to one of the 64-bit versions of Windows and with all the memory and driver issues there, you're not gaining anything on a consumer machine.
Browsing the internet on a phone is like taking a road trip on a moped.
The iPhone is probably one of the first phone devices to actually have a usable web-browser. I played with it in the store for quite a bit and found that their rendering engine is capable of displaying full pages with correct layouy by drawing the webpage at a higher resolution internally and scales down with anti-aliasing. You can see pages as they were designed (for the most part) and very easily zoom in and out. It's better than any other phone or PDA for that matter.
What sucked in my test of the iPhone was the phone. The volume on the phone was too quiet to hear a call in the crowded Apple store even when I turned the loudness all the way up. Same for the speaker phone. I can hear conversations on my three year old samsung phone if I make a call on the Chicago El (our train system). Maybe the iPhone volume works better with the headphones but the volume for the built-in speakers (earphone and speakerphone) are way too low to use except in a quiet environment.
Welcome to the wonderful world of 50Hz flicker.
I spent many years with a 50Hz monitor, back in the Amiga days. Now I can`t stand anything less than 80Hz.
60 Hz (or 50Hz PAL) isn't so bad. After all, most people can stare at a TV for several hours a day without noticing any flicker. The problem with the Amiga displays was mainly due to interlace without a vertical interlace filter to reduce high frequency artifacts.
The interlacing meant that a single pixel was only updated at 30Hz (or 25Hz PAL) -- ie. two output fields (60Hz) per frame (30Hz). The lack of a multi-line interlace filter meant that a single-pixel-high line output of white on a black background would flicker horribly since every other field would output a black or white line at that point in the refresh.
As for monitors persistance is as important as refresh rates. If you have slow moving images, a very low refresh rate with rather high persistance works fine (like LCD's at 60 Hz) but for games and moving images, high refresh rates with lower persistance ends up being much better (and avoids trailing artifacts like you'd see on high-persistance CRT's or LCD's).