Basically, Gordon Gow (of McIntosh audio, nothing to do with the computer company) built a system to demo at trade shows whereby 50 feet of his "mistery" speaker cable could be A/B compared against the "high-end" cables from companies like Monster. Nobody could tell the difference.
Gordon's cable was two pairs of heavy-gauge Radio Shack lamp cord twisted together, at something like $0.18/foot. Basically, he proved that if the speaker cable is heavy enough to handle the power & impedance, and non-corrosive so it doesn't turn nasty colors after sitting in a humid basement for 6 months, then it is really all that is necessary for any audio setup....and this is in the analog domain. Denon sells a farking "audiophile" ethernet cable for $2500. The product reviews are hilarious BTW.
This is the gazillionth story I've heard of Maryland cops wantonly abusing their power.
The most blatant one I've heard happened to a coworker of mine from Bethesda in about '98. His car had been stolen and was reported to the police about a month prior to the incident. The police had actually recovered his vehicle and he had picked it up at the city impound lot earlier in the week.
On a Friday night, he was pulled over while riding with a friend. The cops ran to his car with guns drawn, pulled the doors open, dragged them out of the car, forced them to the ground, and kicked the crap out of them. All the while they were both of course shouting that this was their car and trying to show ID etc.
After they were both beaten into submission, the cops did eventually look at the car papers and ID, and then verified with their dispatcher that the car had been recovered that week, after which they simply drove away. I believe there were exchanges of something along the lines of "you have no proof of anything".
Now, my friend should have gotten a lawyer, but where he messed up was that he & his dad went to the police station to complain, which got them basically nowhere. Actually this was also about the time he left our mutual employer and we haven't really discussed it since, so I'm not sure how it turned out in the end.
Being somewhat of a firearms geek, I've been reading up a lot on ballistics lately.
Rather than using airplane-like control surfaces & gliding wings that are basically dead weight until it comes time to use them as a huge airbrake & then as wings for an airplane-like landing after re-entry, what would be the feasibility of a vehicle shaped like a bullet with an extremely low coefficient of drag that would re-enter gradually through a series of ever-lower orbits through the upper atmosphere until it slowed down enough to open a parachute (or a series of parachutes gradually increasing in drag)? Incidentally, the low CD would also enable it to maintain LEO with fewer orbit maintenance burns as there would be less drag on it from the upper atmosphere (see also the ISS...).
Has anything like that been tried before? Is such a trajectory even possible? Is that what the space shuttle does already, and the stall speed is so high that it has to conventionally re-enter anyway?
Some doodling shows that the trick to this would be to optimize the design of the vehicle to be able to "fly" at a trajectory that would trade speed for altitude until it stalls & drops like a stone, at which point the parachutes take over. Basically, it would be shaped to shed its orbital velocity by "surfing" on the top of the atmosphere until it "sinks".
The same cocaine-addled financial industry that brought you the mortgage crisis is busy fighting a little undeclared network latency war as each trading house tries to get the lowest-latency network path to various financial exchanges around the world. Carriers with shorter fibre optic paths have been able to command price premiums upwards of $500/month per millisecond of decreased latency vs. their competition. Eventually the exchanges will just host trading houses' servers locally, everyone will be on a level playing field, and this fiasco will end.
Incidentally, the RIPE's RIS routing information & network latency measurement project also requires precision beyond what NTP can provide. Each of the 200 or so RIS servers has a physically attached GPS receiver in order to provide accurate sub-millisecond network latency measurements.
The answer will be specific to each implementation.
But in general, it should be pretty obvious to anyone that understands basic thermodynamics: get the "cold" into the servers without mixing it with the ambient or letting it touch any hot metal, and get the heat out of the servers without mixing it with the ambient or letting it heat up any other metal.
It should be pretty obvious that air is not really the best way to do this; air goes all over the place, and is not a very good thermal conductor (relatively speaking).
There are entire 10k+ machine datacenters in France that use only liquid cooling circuits, right up to the servers. Energy costs for running the external condensers are a small fraction of what it would cost to do the same thing with air. Of course, it helps if you only have your own machines in such an environment, but if APC, Emerson, etc were serious about efficient cooling then they'd partner with HP, Dell, etc. to make standardized systems that would allow this...
Personally, if it's too complex to type out on the command line, I do it in Perl. I haven't written any shell scrips more complex than "do this, then do that" in close to a decade. The text & regex processing is more straightforward, and if you're trying to do something complicated, chances are there's already someone out there that's written a module for it.
First, I want you to write a work that tops TAOCP. Or at the very least show your check from Knuth for finding an error. Oh, wait, I highly doubt you've done either.
The tutorial that explains what all this does is here. They've also added a nice feature called expiretables that keeps the "bruteforce" table small & efficient by expiring entries that haven't seen any hits after a definable period of time.
The US's invasion of Iraq removed a huge thorn in Iran's side. Saddam was Iran's Public Enemy #1. Now it's the US & Britain. It continually frustrates me that no mainstream media outlet has acknowledged this in light of current Iranian events.
At this level of parallelism, it seems to me that the routing/switching and data management between the cores will become far more important than the raw number of cores or how fast each core is. Very similar to cluster computing in that the topology of the cluster (and the interconnect bandwidth & latency) is just as important as the power of each individual node.
Projects like Grand Central Dispatch are a good step in the right direction to making general-purpose computing reasonably multithreaded, but the chip itsself still has to deal with shuffling all that data around. If there's any hope of keeping the pin count within modern package limitations (e.g. socket 1366) then either a solid percentage of the die's real estate will be have to be devoted to interconnect & routing logic, or some serious compromises will have to be made.
BTW, can anyone explain how this architecture is substantially different from Larabee, which is also a whole mess of x86 cores on one die?
BTW, there's no media-and-popcorn festival behind it so it doesn't get a lot of press, but on Linux, the most mature, stable, and enterprise-grade advanced filesystem is XFS. It's been well supported in the kernel for a really long time, still has an active developer community after all these years, and basically just sits there & works without getting in your way. Kind of like HAMMER minus the maturity:-).
What makes you want to blow away something you're already running & comfortable with? You give no reason for switching away from Debian.
Suggestions:
- For Linux, Debian is pretty much the granddaddy, and can likely be wrangled to do whatever you want. You seem the explorative type. If you're comfortable with Debian, figure out how to do whatever it is you're interested in on Debian and get on with it. Changing distros won't change your life.
- For other OSs, you're blessed to live in the age where you can just grab virtualbox, fire up a VM of whatever it is you wan to play with, and fiddle with it. When I was messing with all this I had 5 crappy old noisy minitower PCs around my desk (and a NeXT on top of it, which was what I actually used as my workstation becuase it Just Worked). If you're really really impressed by something that you've monkeyed with in your VMs for a while, switch to it if you really want to, but honestly in ISP and hosting type shops Debian is what I see most.
- It sounds like you want slowlaris or FreeBSD just to get ZFS, presumably because you have an ever-expanding collection of media, pr0n, und w4r3z and want to be able to just add disks to your storage pool on the fly and all the other spiffy stuff that ZFS does. If you want to kick the tires on a new filesystem technology, may I suggest that you grab the latest iso release of DragonFlyBSD and check out HAMMER? It's really a lot simpler to use than ZFS, and personally I feel it's really designed The Right Way.
- If you really want a challenge, get a Mac (or buy yourself Snow Leopard and make yourself a hackintosh) and learn how to use the powerful and complicated tools that make Mac OS X Server work. Things are very different from the way other unixen do things, and I find messing with them and learning how they work to be very satisfying.
Folks are making a big deal about this as though it were an OS. It's not.
It's a browser appliance.
When all you need is a browser that will boot from a little bit of flash memory, it's just the ticket. This is perfect for just about any public terminal. Also nice to have around so that when a family member's old windows machine gets all virused up or the hard drive dies you can just plug this in and get them back online.
It is very, very easy to use. Just log in with your google account, and you're in business. It boots and loads the browser from a read-only partition and is thus uncrashable and incorruptable. Embedding this on ARM daughtercard notebooks like Dell's Latitude ON machines could easily give somewhere north of 10 hours of wifi browsing time.
It's still very alpha at the moment (not too hard to freeze it), but it's got a lot of potential. I can see myself carrying this around on a USB key.
Everyone would almost certainly be better off if the distributor just dumped it on Amazon EC2 or some other big hosting service and let interested parties pay the per-megabyte download costs directly(saving themselves the upload bandwidth and power costs). Since that isn't really viable(particularly, though not exclusively, if what is being distributed isn't wholly legal), bittorrent's easy sharing of hosting duties among downloaders is the next best thing.
What percentage of people that use torrents (and I'm talking about both "as in speech" and "as in beer" uses of torrent here) do you think actually give a crap about how much the power and bandwidth they're using costs? There certainly exists such a population of users (I'm one of them) but I'd guess it's somewhere around 5% of the total.
Slashdot Mirror
IMHO one of the best articles explaining the audiophile consumer phenomenon of flushing money down the toilet is the following:
http://www.roger-russell.com/wire/wire.htm#gordongow
Basically, Gordon Gow (of McIntosh audio, nothing to do with the computer company) built a system to demo at trade shows whereby 50 feet of his "mistery" speaker cable could be A/B compared against the "high-end" cables from companies like Monster. Nobody could tell the difference.
Gordon's cable was two pairs of heavy-gauge Radio Shack lamp cord twisted together, at something like $0.18/foot. Basically, he proved that if the speaker cable is heavy enough to handle the power & impedance, and non-corrosive so it doesn't turn nasty colors after sitting in a humid basement for 6 months, then it is really all that is necessary for any audio setup. ...and this is in the analog domain. Denon sells a farking "audiophile" ethernet cable for $2500. The product reviews are hilarious BTW.
This is the gazillionth story I've heard of Maryland cops wantonly abusing their power.
The most blatant one I've heard happened to a coworker of mine from Bethesda in about '98. His car had been stolen and was reported to the police about a month prior to the incident. The police had actually recovered his vehicle and he had picked it up at the city impound lot earlier in the week.
On a Friday night, he was pulled over while riding with a friend. The cops ran to his car with guns drawn, pulled the doors open, dragged them out of the car, forced them to the ground, and kicked the crap out of them. All the while they were both of course shouting that this was their car and trying to show ID etc.
After they were both beaten into submission, the cops did eventually look at the car papers and ID, and then verified with their dispatcher that the car had been recovered that week, after which they simply drove away. I believe there were exchanges of something along the lines of "you have no proof of anything".
Now, my friend should have gotten a lawyer, but where he messed up was that he & his dad went to the police station to complain, which got them basically nowhere. Actually this was also about the time he left our mutual employer and we haven't really discussed it since, so I'm not sure how it turned out in the end.
Thanks :-). Any idea what the highest number of "re-entry skips" that's been attempted is?
Being somewhat of a firearms geek, I've been reading up a lot on ballistics lately.
Rather than using airplane-like control surfaces & gliding wings that are basically dead weight until it comes time to use them as a huge airbrake & then as wings for an airplane-like landing after re-entry, what would be the feasibility of a vehicle shaped like a bullet with an extremely low coefficient of drag that would re-enter gradually through a series of ever-lower orbits through the upper atmosphere until it slowed down enough to open a parachute (or a series of parachutes gradually increasing in drag)? Incidentally, the low CD would also enable it to maintain LEO with fewer orbit maintenance burns as there would be less drag on it from the upper atmosphere (see also the ISS...).
Has anything like that been tried before? Is such a trajectory even possible? Is that what the space shuttle does already, and the stall speed is so high that it has to conventionally re-enter anyway?
Some doodling shows that the trick to this would be to optimize the design of the vehicle to be able to "fly" at a trajectory that would trade speed for altitude until it stalls & drops like a stone, at which point the parachutes take over. Basically, it would be shaped to shed its orbital velocity by "surfing" on the top of the atmosphere until it "sinks".
Dude,
you forgot the beard
and the thick glasses
and the flannel
and the ripped jeans
and the manga in your cube
and demanding two of the largest monitors that can possibly fit on your desk
They still have to file with SEC every year, so I don't think they can really hide any such thing.
So did Enron.
BTW, the specific RIPE project doing this is test traffic measurements
10ms is not enough.
The same cocaine-addled financial industry that brought you the mortgage crisis is busy fighting a little undeclared network latency war as each trading house tries to get the lowest-latency network path to various financial exchanges around the world. Carriers with shorter fibre optic paths have been able to command price premiums upwards of $500/month per millisecond of decreased latency vs. their competition. Eventually the exchanges will just host trading houses' servers locally, everyone will be on a level playing field, and this fiasco will end.
Incidentally, the RIPE's RIS routing information & network latency measurement project also requires precision beyond what NTP can provide. Each of the 200 or so RIS servers has a physically attached GPS receiver in order to provide accurate sub-millisecond network latency measurements.
The answer will be specific to each implementation.
But in general, it should be pretty obvious to anyone that understands basic thermodynamics: get the "cold" into the servers without mixing it with the ambient or letting it touch any hot metal, and get the heat out of the servers without mixing it with the ambient or letting it heat up any other metal.
It should be pretty obvious that air is not really the best way to do this; air goes all over the place, and is not a very good thermal conductor (relatively speaking).
There are entire 10k+ machine datacenters in France that use only liquid cooling circuits, right up to the servers. Energy costs for running the external condensers are a small fraction of what it would cost to do the same thing with air. Of course, it helps if you only have your own machines in such an environment, but if APC, Emerson, etc were serious about efficient cooling then they'd partner with HP, Dell, etc. to make standardized systems that would allow this...
Personally, if it's too complex to type out on the command line, I do it in Perl. I haven't written any shell scrips more complex than "do this, then do that" in close to a decade. The text & regex processing is more straightforward, and if you're trying to do something complicated, chances are there's already someone out there that's written a module for it.
"When viewed at an angle, the carpets don't hide objects at all."
Sounds to me like a real-life SEP field...
far as I knew, they were 1s & 0s...
"Knuth had his day."
Wow. Just wow.
First, I want you to write a work that tops TAOCP. Or at the very least show your check from Knuth for finding an error. Oh, wait, I highly doubt you've done either.
I'm betting 0x$5.00 that he doesn't have one.
The tutorial that explains what all this does is here. They've also added a nice feature called expiretables that keeps the "bruteforce" table small & efficient by expiring entries that haven't seen any hits after a definable period of time.
FWIW, there's also an entry in the official PF FAQ on this...
sadly, the guy that introduced the "don't be evil" slogan, is long gone from the company...
Last I checked, Sergei Brin was still president of Google...
IT DOESN'T MATTER WHO IS PRESIDENT OF IRAN.
Wrong. It didn't matter in 1979. It sure as hell does now.
There is absolutely no evidence that the election was rigged.
Just because you haven't googled for it doesn't mean it's not there.
The US's invasion of Iraq removed a huge thorn in Iran's side. Saddam was Iran's Public Enemy #1. Now it's the US & Britain. It continually frustrates me that no mainstream media outlet has acknowledged this in light of current Iranian events.
How much does your bandwidth cost for it to be worth your time to do all this?
At this level of parallelism, it seems to me that the routing/switching and data management between the cores will become far more important than the raw number of cores or how fast each core is. Very similar to cluster computing in that the topology of the cluster (and the interconnect bandwidth & latency) is just as important as the power of each individual node.
Projects like Grand Central Dispatch are a good step in the right direction to making general-purpose computing reasonably multithreaded, but the chip itsself still has to deal with shuffling all that data around. If there's any hope of keeping the pin count within modern package limitations (e.g. socket 1366) then either a solid percentage of the die's real estate will be have to be devoted to interconnect & routing logic, or some serious compromises will have to be made.
BTW, can anyone explain how this architecture is substantially different from Larabee, which is also a whole mess of x86 cores on one die?
BTW, there's no media-and-popcorn festival behind it so it doesn't get a lot of press, but on Linux, the most mature, stable, and enterprise-grade advanced filesystem is XFS. It's been well supported in the kernel for a really long time, still has an active developer community after all these years, and basically just sits there & works without getting in your way. Kind of like HAMMER minus the maturity :-).
What makes you want to blow away something you're already running & comfortable with? You give no reason for switching away from Debian.
Suggestions:
- For Linux, Debian is pretty much the granddaddy, and can likely be wrangled to do whatever you want. You seem the explorative type. If you're comfortable with Debian, figure out how to do whatever it is you're interested in on Debian and get on with it. Changing distros won't change your life.
- For other OSs, you're blessed to live in the age where you can just grab virtualbox, fire up a VM of whatever it is you wan to play with, and fiddle with it. When I was messing with all this I had 5 crappy old noisy minitower PCs around my desk (and a NeXT on top of it, which was what I actually used as my workstation becuase it Just Worked). If you're really really impressed by something that you've monkeyed with in your VMs for a while, switch to it if you really want to, but honestly in ISP and hosting type shops Debian is what I see most.
- It sounds like you want slowlaris or FreeBSD just to get ZFS, presumably because you have an ever-expanding collection of media, pr0n, und w4r3z and want to be able to just add disks to your storage pool on the fly and all the other spiffy stuff that ZFS does. If you want to kick the tires on a new filesystem technology, may I suggest that you grab the latest iso release of DragonFlyBSD and check out HAMMER? It's really a lot simpler to use than ZFS, and personally I feel it's really designed The Right Way.
- If you really want a challenge, get a Mac (or buy yourself Snow Leopard and make yourself a hackintosh) and learn how to use the powerful and complicated tools that make Mac OS X Server work. Things are very different from the way other unixen do things, and I find messing with them and learning how they work to be very satisfying.
Easy enough to make it go in VirtualBox
Folks are making a big deal about this as though it were an OS. It's not.
It's a browser appliance.
When all you need is a browser that will boot from a little bit of flash memory, it's just the ticket. This is perfect for just about any public terminal. Also nice to have around so that when a family member's old windows machine gets all virused up or the hard drive dies you can just plug this in and get them back online.
It is very, very easy to use. Just log in with your google account, and you're in business. It boots and loads the browser from a read-only partition and is thus uncrashable and incorruptable. Embedding this on ARM daughtercard notebooks like Dell's Latitude ON machines could easily give somewhere north of 10 hours of wifi browsing time.
It's still very alpha at the moment (not too hard to freeze it), but it's got a lot of potential. I can see myself carrying this around on a USB key.
aside from killing the client-server application, the Internet really hasn't caused any major change in platform.
Please explain how Google Docs in a web browser is not client-server.
Everyone would almost certainly be better off if the distributor just dumped it on Amazon EC2 or some other big hosting service and let interested parties pay the per-megabyte download costs directly(saving themselves the upload bandwidth and power costs). Since that isn't really viable(particularly, though not exclusively, if what is being distributed isn't wholly legal), bittorrent's easy sharing of hosting duties among downloaders is the next best thing.
What percentage of people that use torrents (and I'm talking about both "as in speech" and "as in beer" uses of torrent here) do you think actually give a crap about how much the power and bandwidth they're using costs? There certainly exists such a population of users (I'm one of them) but I'd guess it's somewhere around 5% of the total.