from merriam webster online Main Entry: encyclopedia Variant(s): also encyclopaedia/in-"sI-kl&-'pE-dE-&/ Function: noun Etymology: Medieval Latin encyclopaedia course of general education, from Greek enkyklios + paideia education, child rearing, from paid-, pais child -- more at FEW : a work that contains information on all branches of knowledge or treats comprehensively a particular branch of knowledge usually in articles arranged alphabetically often by subject
Britannica always knew their (traditional, dead tree) encyclopedia was aimed at kids, which is why it was always sold to parents AS A RESOURCE FOR THEIR CHILDREN.
The real problem here is using the same word, encyclopedia, to describe three utterly different things... a/ traditional dead tree encyclopedia b/ electronic (hyperlinked) encyclopedia on read only media c/ wikipedia
Traditional dead tree stuff was of course read only, and absolute accuracy depended on many things, including cultural background and editorial integrity, as well as actual facts (where said facts were ascertainable) for example the traditional dead tree encyclopedias (that were all there was when I was attending school) would talk about a Christopher Columbus discovering America for our (English) Queen... no mention of him actually hailing from a smelly mediterrenean port or indeed Culumbia (or later New Amsterdam, etc (NY to you young punks)) and any entries about the East India Company will have similar cultural and editorial bias, non mention whatsoever will be made of the facts, that our (English) early trade envoy's gifts and personal manners were treated with richly deserved scorn... the silk brocade wearing maharaji using the proferred gifts of fine english tweed as animal blankets. Being read only media, and being "authoritative" these complete fallacies presented as impartial facts.
Electronic encyclopedia such as Encarta are similarly read only, and similarly in the throes of cultural and editorial filtering, laid on top of any basic factual errors (such as the location of the normal locker observatory, to quote something close to home)
Wikipedia is completely different, it is not read only, it is not hampered by editorial policies or cultural prejudices.
Sure, this means assholes are free to enter bullshit as fact, but in just the same fashion as we are free to spoof an IP address or send out forged SYN packets, only the pond scum does it. Of course the pond scum will have every exuse in the book ranging from "I'm only doing it to test how good this is." to "Serves them right for not being as leet as me." however the underlying fact is the same, it is pond scum behaviour.
Pond scum behaviour is an inevitable part of the internet, it is never going to be stopped and it never should be attempted, because the co-operation of the sensible majority (especially the sensible majority with some real clout like sysadmins) have enough momentum and enough existing weapons of mass co-operation (eg usenet death threats for maladministered nntp servers) to keep the pond scum in the place that they themselves elect to live.
To blame wikipedia because some pond scum has the ability to make erroneous entries that are uncorrected in five whole days (wow, encarta still has errors that are fucking years old) in a FREE FUCKING RESOURCE is directly akin to blaming Tim B-L, Scott N, and the INN nntp server coding crew for usenet spam.
In short, such accusations are ONLY EVER MADE BY THE POND SCUM THEMSELVES.
There is of course a direct parallel to the rules of spammers (subscribe to the usenet abuse groups nanae etc if you don't know what I mean) which are
http://bruce.pennypacker.org/spamrules.html
No, the real test of the validity of Wikipedia is to choose a hot potato and compare the content with the "respected" outlets such as encarta and britannica, and see which one is actually living up to the TRUE ideal of an ENCYCLOpedia, which is to EDUCATE,
he was a motorcyclist who suffered a brachial plexus injury and subsequently had his arm amputated at the shoulder.
he plays IL2 sturmovik forgotten battles (which has a LOT of real commercial and military pilots playing head to head with the "civvies" like him) and his rankings are REAL good.
he swears by it.
I believe he uses it for cockpit (view from) viewing angles rather than actual rudder / aelieron control.
Edison was a P T Barnum IMHO, he wasn't fit to sweep the workshop floor of a man like Tesla, and from all accounts both of them knew this too, hence the mutual emnity.
even assuming for the sake of argument that post september 11th (I refuse to use 9/11, it is a meaningless fraction) it really was harder for a hijacker to take control of a commercial passenger aeroplane... which is making a MJOR assumption on bugger all empirical evidence, everyone is making a fundamental mistake here....
commercial passenger aircraft and analagous to buses, requiring ID and stripsearching people before they board a greyhound might well limit the ability of passenger to take control of the vehicle and drive it into a hospital lobby with the pedal to the metal.
so your crazed terrorist simply hijacks an articulated truck instead, fuck it weighs more so more kinetic energy anyway....
the skies are FULL of cargo planes with absolutely sod all security, many of whom routinely have company staff or crew family and friends dead heading for free with nary a ticket or boarding pass in sight...
hell, 2 minutes with google and lets see what a multimillionaire international terrorist can do...
Hmm, 250,000 US dollars buys me one of these http://www.airliners.net/Airliners_net_imag e.file? filename=3/2/6/640623.jpg&ZyXtCe=MTQ1NjI2&id=64062 3&ViD=big an antonov 26 from here http://www.aviatorsale.com/aix2279/ max payload 6300 Kgs, no problem lets fill the bitch up with a fertiliser bomb, eg "Anfo"
Remember a couple of hundred pounds of this stuff blew a 20 foot x 40 foot hole (http://www.tldm.org/news2/753887.jpg) in the USS Cole.
What? Can't fly planes into skyscrapers? USAF will shoot them down?
No problem, power dive into a handy VLCC, I'm sure a few million barrels of burning fuel oil spread across new york harbour will have a suitable effect.
What? just given this good idea up? Never mind, there's thousand more and you can bet those who want to do this shit have already thought them up.
It's about time you lot learned the lesson we in the Uk learned bloody years ago when your NORAID donation supported bombs (hey, that makes the USA on a par with Libya, let's invade) were going off in our capital cities, that lesson is you CANNOT prevent terrorist attacks, it simply is not possible, no matter how much money and effort you are willing to spend.. in fact such effort soon becomes counter productive and breeds a whole new generation of malcontents.
What's the betting this non USA viewpoint gets modded troll within ten minutes?
because the vast majority of science fiction has always been "lets take present day concious and subconcious fears and talk about them in metaphors set into a future so that we can discuss them without censorship or fear"
On the other hand there is a minority of good, hard, scientific science fiction like Larry Niven.
In the year 3004 (assuming humans still exist) the vast majority of the human race will still be assholes, and if their personalities are downloaded into sugar cube sized computers they will be assholes with even less grip on reality that todays breed of assholes.
I think I am going to patent a method for inflicting virtual pain / beatings / torture / death on these future embedded personalities, because it will be the only way to keep the bastards in line.
A E Van Vogt wrote a great novel, The Anarchistic Colossus, which dealt with the issues of advancing technology vs human minds extremely well, thoroughly recommended, despite the fact that it is 20 or 30 years old there are many things in there that todays slashdot reasers will recognise as current actual concerns.
I submitted this story an hour or two ago, but thinking about it it will be rejected just like everything else, and then pop up under someone else's name.
This document details the procedure for performing microcode updates on the AMD K8 processors. It also gives background information on the K8 microcode design and provides information on altering the microcode and loading the altered update for those who are interested in microcode hacking.
Source code is included for a simple Linux microcode update driver for those who want to update their K8's microcode without waiting for the motherboard vendor to add it to the BIOS. The latest microcode update blocks are included in the driver.
Background
Modern x86 microprocessors from Intel and AMD contain a feature known as "microcode update", or as the vendors prefer to call it, "BIOS update". Essentially the processor can reconfigure parts of its own hardware to fix bugs ("errata") in the silicon that would normally require a recall.
This is done by loading a block of "patch data" created by the CPU vendor into the processor using special control registers. Microcode updates essentially override hardware features with sequences of the internal RISC-like micro-ops (uops) actually executed by the processor. They can also replace the implementations of microcoded instructions already handled by hard-wired sequences in an on-die microcode ROM.
AMD's U.S. Patent 6438664 ("Microcode patch device and method for patching microcode using match registers and patch routines") goes into substantial detail on this.
Typically microcode update blocks are stored in the BIOS flash ROM and loaded into the processor as the system boots. They can also be loaded by the operating system; for instance, Linux contains a microcode device driver for Intel chips.
AMD recently released a "BIOS fix" to motherboard makers to address Errata 109, in which REP MOVS instructions caused subsequent instructions to be skipped under specific pipeline conditions.
Previously it was not clear if and how AMD even supported microcode updates in the K8 family until this announcement. After analyzing a number of BIOS images, it appears that AMD has secretly used the microcode update facility on several occasions over the past few years, but obviously avoided publicly disclosing that it actually had bugs patchable in this manner.
Early K7 (Athlon) cores initially supported microcode updates as well, until ironically the microcode update mechanism itself was found to be broken and subsequently listed as an errata!
The following sections describe the microcode update procedure, obtained by clean room reverse engineering various vendors' BIOS code. The actual microcode update blocks are embedded in the BIOS image; the most recent updates (created June 2004) have been included in the Linux driver source code attached to this description.
Microcode Update Procedure
The update procedure expects the 64-bit virtual address of the update data, including the 64 byte header, to be in edx:eax:
edx = high 32 bits of 64-bit virtual address eax = low 32 bits of 64-bit virtual address ecx = 0xc0010020 (MSR to trigger update)
Execute wrmsr with these register values. If the address and update block data are valid, wrmsr completes successfully. Otherwise, a GP fault is taken.
The microcode does not appear to update MSR 0x8B with the new update signature as it does on Intel processors, despite the fact that some BIOS code I have analyzed does seem to check this field. It is possible the MSR is only updated under certain conditions, for instance when microcode is loaded before initializing the cache controller. Nonetheless, as we shall see below, the processor is clearly doing something internally when it claims to accept an update in this manner.
All this talk of CO2 emissions is no more than a martial arts type feint to distract you from the real action....
Yes, CO2 emissions *are* high, but then again oceanic absorbtion of CO2 is double what people have been predicting / expecting, and you'll find fuck all comment or investigation into that fact in the meedja, interesting when you are talking about by far the single largest CO2 absorbtion system on the planet.
The other thing everyone forgets is "recent human history" eg "the last hundred years" = "fuck all" on a global timescale.... or do you propose that the MASSIVE global warming at the end of the last ice age was caused by mammoths driving around in CFC leaving 25 litre V16 cars?
There are hippo bones buried in and around the Thames in the London area, something again caused that climate change, and it wasn't the hippos creating an extended nuclear winter.
You driving a biodiesel harley or a itchyfanny fuel cell smart car isn't going to alter sunspot activity.
No, the real issues here is per capita energy consumption, and per capita energy efficiency and per capita energy by products.
There is quite simply only one way forwards for the human race, and it is this.
In the short term, for the next 50 years, MASSIVE investment in traditional nuke plants to vastly increase electricity production. Just as a huge proportion of Abu Dhabi's (United Arab Emirates) energy budget has gone for 30+ years into desalination of water to turn AD from a dusty desert town into a green and verdant city (human consumption of desalinated water is minute compared to the amounts used to water everything daily) then huge proportions of this future nuclear capacity will need to be used to recharge traditional traction type lead acid cells, crack water into hydrogen for new fuel cells, and power tram style over head power cables for urban heavies stuff.
In the meantime everyone needs to make a JFK style "do in within ten years, that's an order" style push to commercially viable fusion plants.
From the inidivdual's point of view we can reduce energy consumption (and therefore all the by-products of energy use) by running lighter and lower performance vehicles, ceiling fans instead of air-con in hot climates, reverse air-con instead of simple radiant electrical resistors in colder climates, and generally look at the overall efficiency of everything we use...
Simply switching all urban one person in a vehicle journeys to little 150 mpg (must be 4 stroke motors though) scooter would have a huge positive overall benefit, of which the total fuel saved would be only a small part, but you aren't going to get this or anything else when the total media output is pumping out the message that your big performance vehicle is a symbol of the size of your genitals.
And that brings us to the real problem, and it is by definition a greater problem in countries with a higher per capita energy use, so the US is the top of the pile.
The real problem is the profit motive inextricably bound to every joule of energy you use... there is no problem with there being a profit motive in there, but when the profit motive becomes the single over-riding force you have severe problems.
_EVERYTHING_ is geared to making you a larger net consumer of energy next year than this, because more energy = more product shifted = more profit.
In europe we have issues similar to these, but nowhere near as bad as america, which is literally a society built around the concept of universally available personal transport, the car is god, many americans simply do not have the option to live even as I do, motorcycle only, because the motorcycle will not carry the shopping etc etc etc, plus of course I can simply leave the bike parked, and walk the mile and half in the the centre of town, get my shopping and if I'm lazy get the (overpriced and expensive) every 15 minutes bus back for 3 bucks.
Americans (and I mean the United states, not south americans etc) like to
Although the ancient Olympic games were first recorded in 776 BC, they originated at least a century before that and possibly as early as the 13th century BC.
One Greek legend said that the great Herakles (Hercules, in the Roman form) won a race at Olympia, a plain in the small state of Elis, and then decreed that the race should be re-enacted every four years. Another said that Zeus himself had originated the festival after defeating Cronus for the sovereignty of heaven.
The more likely story is that the Olympic festival was a local religious event until 884 BC, when Iphitus, the king of Elis, decided to turn it into a broader, pan-Hellenic festival. To accomplish that, he entered into a temporary truce with other rulers, allowing athletes and others to travel peacefully to Olympia while the festival was going on.
The Greeks based their chronology on four-year periods called Olympiads, and the Olympic festival marked the beginning of each Olympiad. Evidently, the festival was reorganized in 776 BC, which was considered the start of the first Olympiad. Ruins of the Olympic Paleastra
The festival was basically a religious gathering to celebrate the gods worshipped in common by all Hellenes, primarily Zeus. There were three other major pan-Hellenic festivals, the Pythian, the Nemean, and the Isthmian, all of which included fairs, but the festival at Olympia became pre-eminent by 572 BC, when Elis and Sparta entered into an alliance under which Elis was in charge of the event itself while Sparta enforced the sacred truce.
A single foot race was the only athletic event until the fifteenth Olympiad. The race was the length of the stadium, approximately 200 yards. As time went on, the games associated with the festival expanded and became increasingly important. A race of two stadium lengths was added in 724 and a long-distance race of 24 stadium lengths (about 2.5 miles) was added in 720.
Other types of sports followed quickly: Wrestling and the pentathlon in 708, boxing in 688, chariot racing in 680, and the pancratium, a combination of boxing and wrestling, in 748. At one time or another, there were 23 Olympic sports events, although they were never all held at the same festival.
A branch of wild olive was the only official prize for an Olympic winner, but there were also usually some unofficial prizes awarded by his city-state. For example, Athens allowed an Olympic champion to live free of charge in the Pyrtaneum, a special hall set aside for distinguished citizens. Other city-states exempted winners from taxes for an Olympiad, and in some cases citizens contributed to a cash award.
Athletes had to arrive in Elis a month before the games to undergo spiritual, moral, and physical training under the supervision of the judges, who then decided which of them were genuinely qualified to compete. Each competitor had to swear an oath that he was a free-born Greek who had committed no sacrilege against the gods.
At first, the games took up only one day of the festival. That was extended to two days in 680, with the addition of chariot racing, and to five days in 632. However, only three of those days were actually devoted to competition. The first day was devoted to religious sacrifices, the registration of athletes, and the taking of the Olympic oath. Prizes were awarded and thanksgiving sacrifices were offered on the fifth day.
Athletes usually competed nude. They originally wore shorts but, according to one ancient writer, Pausanias, a competitor deliberately lost his shorts so that he could run more freely during the race in 720 BC, and clothing was then abolished.
Women were not allowed to watch the games, but that had nothing to do with the nudity of the male athletes. Rather, it was because Olympia was dedicated to Zeus and was therefore a sacred area for men. The chariot races, which were held outside the sacred precinct, were open to women spectators. (Women had their own sacred festivals from which men were banned, most notabl
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apache, dunno, a patchy something or other...
firefox, the clint eastwood browser.. "I know what you're thinking punk, did I install 5 IE updates or all six?"
thunderbird, international rescue data recovery
mono, a budget sb16 sound card, new for linux
bittorrent, modem accelerator
grep, the prequel to shrek
putty, (easy one) what you use to stop (memory) leaks in windows.
script-fu, I am still meditating and seeking enlightenment on that one.
no you want silly, try these
microsoft autoroute, nope, won't even route simple single layer pcb with a dozen components
adobe acrobat, doesn't even do the parallel bars
nero burning rom(e), doesn't combust anything
teleport pro, doesn't move my coffee cup an inch
etc
The smallish (windows) app that you downloaded and in made an index of everything on your PC?
(or was it from altavista?)
from merriam webster online /in-"sI-kl&-'pE-dE-&/
Main Entry: encyclopedia
Variant(s): also encyclopaedia
Function: noun
Etymology: Medieval Latin encyclopaedia course of general education, from Greek enkyklios + paideia education, child rearing, from paid-, pais child -- more at FEW
: a work that contains information on all branches of knowledge or treats comprehensively a particular branch of knowledge usually in articles arranged alphabetically often by subject
Britannica always knew their (traditional, dead tree) encyclopedia was aimed at kids, which is why it was always sold to parents AS A RESOURCE FOR THEIR CHILDREN.
The real problem here is using the same word, encyclopedia, to describe three utterly different things...
a/ traditional dead tree encyclopedia
b/ electronic (hyperlinked) encyclopedia on read only media
c/ wikipedia
Traditional dead tree stuff was of course read only, and absolute accuracy depended on many things, including cultural background and editorial integrity, as well as actual facts (where said facts were ascertainable) for example the traditional dead tree encyclopedias (that were all there was when I was attending school) would talk about a Christopher Columbus discovering America for our (English) Queen... no mention of him actually hailing from a smelly mediterrenean port or indeed Culumbia (or later New Amsterdam, etc (NY to you young punks)) and any entries about the East India Company will have similar cultural and editorial bias, non mention whatsoever will be made of the facts, that our (English) early trade envoy's gifts and personal manners were treated with richly deserved scorn... the silk brocade wearing maharaji using the proferred gifts of fine english tweed as animal blankets.
Being read only media, and being "authoritative" these complete fallacies presented as impartial facts.
Electronic encyclopedia such as Encarta are similarly read only, and similarly in the throes of cultural and editorial filtering, laid on top of any basic factual errors (such as the location of the normal locker observatory, to quote something close to home)
Wikipedia is completely different, it is not read only, it is not hampered by editorial policies or cultural prejudices.
Sure, this means assholes are free to enter bullshit as fact, but in just the same fashion as we are free to spoof an IP address or send out forged SYN packets, only the pond scum does it. Of course the pond scum will have every exuse in the book ranging from "I'm only doing it to test how good this is." to "Serves them right for not being as leet as me." however the underlying fact is the same, it is pond scum behaviour.
Pond scum behaviour is an inevitable part of the internet, it is never going to be stopped and it never should be attempted, because the co-operation of the sensible majority (especially the sensible majority with some real clout like sysadmins) have enough momentum and enough existing weapons of mass co-operation (eg usenet death threats for maladministered nntp servers) to keep the pond scum in the place that they themselves elect to live.
To blame wikipedia because some pond scum has the ability to make erroneous entries that are uncorrected in five whole days (wow, encarta still has errors that are fucking years old) in a FREE FUCKING RESOURCE is directly akin to blaming Tim B-L, Scott N, and the INN nntp server coding crew for usenet spam.
In short, such accusations are ONLY EVER MADE BY THE POND SCUM THEMSELVES.
There is of course a direct parallel to the rules of spammers (subscribe to the usenet abuse groups nanae etc if you don't know what I mean) which are
http://bruce.pennypacker.org/spamrules.html
No, the real test of the validity of Wikipedia is to choose a hot potato and compare the content with the "respected" outlets such as encarta and britannica, and see which one is actually living up to the TRUE ideal of an ENCYCLOpedia, which is to EDUCATE,
My friends can do this anytime they please, only caveat is they bend it they fix it, and it is returned in a similar condition.
It's called friendship.
car / bike / disk full of multimedia, who cares, not me.
... and the mac fanboys that constitute slashdot start ejaculating all over their keyboards....
watch this post get modded troll before you can find a spare memory slot or hard drive bay on this over hyped over priced over rated piece of shit.
http://www.corestore.org/turbine.htm
and the obligatory
http://marineturbine.com/motorsports.
FFS
as subject
quote
Does anyone know why they would persist with allowing XP to be insecure on purpose?
end quote
yes, EVERYONE knows why.
it is because security = time spent by the users doing something (and learning to do it) they would not have to do with no security.
it's a no brainer, no security wins every time.
always has, always will
he was a motorcyclist who suffered a brachial plexus injury and subsequently had his arm amputated at the shoulder.
he plays IL2 sturmovik forgotten battles (which has a LOT of real commercial and military pilots playing head to head with the "civvies" like him) and his rankings are REAL good.
he swears by it.
I believe he uses it for cockpit (view from) viewing angles rather than actual rudder / aelieron control.
Edison was a P T Barnum IMHO, he wasn't fit to sweep the workshop floor of a man like Tesla, and from all accounts both of them knew this too, hence the mutual emnity.
Because it is the one area where MS completely and utterly destroys Linux and the one are where Linux really needs to grow up.
Course, it won't happen, ever.
Thomas Edison didn't do dick because he was a Direct Current freak, Tesla was the man.
Such an apalling and fundamental error tells you everything you need to know about stephenson's ability as an SF writer.
I chose this handle for internet use many mnay moons ago, because the (true) story of guy fawkes is a salutary lesson in human nature.
even assuming for the sake of argument that post september 11th (I refuse to use 9/11, it is a meaningless fraction) it really was harder for a hijacker to take control of a commercial passenger aeroplane... which is making a MJOR assumption on bugger all empirical evidence, everyone is making a fundamental mistake here....
commercial passenger aircraft and analagous to buses, requiring ID and stripsearching people before they board a greyhound might well limit the ability of passenger to take control of the vehicle and drive it into a hospital lobby with the pedal to the metal.
so your crazed terrorist simply hijacks an articulated truck instead, fuck it weighs more so more kinetic energy anyway....
the skies are FULL of cargo planes with absolutely sod all security, many of whom routinely have company staff or crew family and friends dead heading for free with nary a ticket or boarding pass in sight...
hell, 2 minutes with google and lets see what a multimillionaire international terrorist can do...
Hmm, 250,000 US dollars buys me one of these
http://www.airliners.net/Airliners_net_ima
an antonov 26 from here
http://www.aviatorsale.com/aix2279/
max payload 6300 Kgs, no problem lets fill the bitch up with a fertiliser bomb, eg "Anfo"
Remember a couple of hundred pounds of this stuff blew a 20 foot x 40 foot hole (http://www.tldm.org/news2/753887.jpg) in the USS Cole.
What? Can't fly planes into skyscrapers? USAF will shoot them down?
No problem, power dive into a handy VLCC, I'm sure a few million barrels of burning fuel oil spread across new york harbour will have a suitable effect.
What? just given this good idea up? Never mind, there's thousand more and you can bet those who want to do this shit have already thought them up.
It's about time you lot learned the lesson we in the Uk learned bloody years ago when your NORAID donation supported bombs (hey, that makes the USA on a par with Libya, let's invade) were going off in our capital cities, that lesson is you CANNOT prevent terrorist attacks, it simply is not possible, no matter how much money and effort you are willing to spend.. in fact such effort soon becomes counter productive and breeds a whole new generation of malcontents.
What's the betting this non USA viewpoint gets modded troll within ten minutes?
which means you can pick up telly signals almost anywhere simply by plugging an aerial into it.... way cool.....
well seeing as he and we are giant, sentient, ultra violent monkeys I don't see that as a stretch.
because the vast majority of science fiction has always been "lets take present day concious and subconcious fears and talk about them in metaphors set into a future so that we can discuss them without censorship or fear"
On the other hand there is a minority of good, hard, scientific science fiction like Larry Niven.
In the year 3004 (assuming humans still exist) the vast majority of the human race will still be assholes, and if their personalities are downloaded into sugar cube sized computers they will be assholes with even less grip on reality that todays breed of assholes.
I think I am going to patent a method for inflicting virtual pain / beatings / torture / death on these future embedded personalities, because it will be the only way to keep the bastards in line.
A E Van Vogt wrote a great novel, The Anarchistic Colossus, which dealt with the issues of advancing technology vs human minds extremely well, thoroughly recommended, despite the fact that it is 20 or 30 years old there are many things in there that todays slashdot reasers will recognise as current actual concerns.
Original discussion at
c ti on=detail&PostNum=2527&Thread=1&entryID=35446&room ID=11
http://www.realworldtech.com/forums/index.cfm?a
I only saw it because bruce scheiner pointed it out.
quoted in the submissionn dex.cfm?acti on=detail&PostNum=2527&Thread=1&entryID=35446&room ID=11
http://www.realworldtech.com/forums/i
hasn't been rejected yet, still pending, but no doubt will be.
I submitted this story an hour or two ago, but thinking about it it will be rejected just like everything else, and then pop up under someone else's name.
so what the hell.
Opteron Exposed: Reverse Engineering AMD K8 Microcode Updates
Summary
This document details the procedure for performing microcode updates on the AMD K8 processors. It also gives background information on the K8 microcode design and provides information on altering the microcode and loading the altered update for those who are interested in microcode hacking.
Source code is included for a simple Linux microcode update driver for those who want to update their K8's microcode without waiting for the motherboard vendor to add it to the BIOS. The latest microcode update blocks are included in the driver.
Background
Modern x86 microprocessors from Intel and AMD contain a feature known as "microcode update", or as the vendors prefer to call it, "BIOS update". Essentially the processor can reconfigure parts of its own hardware to fix bugs ("errata") in the silicon that would normally require a recall.
This is done by loading a block of "patch data" created by the CPU vendor into the processor using special control registers. Microcode updates essentially override hardware features with sequences of the internal RISC-like micro-ops (uops) actually executed by the processor. They can also replace the implementations of microcoded instructions already handled by hard-wired sequences in an on-die microcode ROM.
AMD's U.S. Patent 6438664 ("Microcode patch device and method for patching microcode using match registers and patch routines") goes into substantial detail on this.
Typically microcode update blocks are stored in the BIOS flash ROM and loaded into the processor as the system boots. They can also be loaded by the operating system; for instance, Linux contains a microcode device driver for Intel chips.
AMD recently released a "BIOS fix" to motherboard makers to address Errata 109, in which REP MOVS instructions caused subsequent instructions to be skipped under specific pipeline conditions.
Previously it was not clear if and how AMD even supported microcode updates in the K8 family until this announcement. After analyzing a number of BIOS images, it appears that AMD has secretly used the microcode update facility on several occasions over the past few years, but obviously avoided publicly disclosing that it actually had bugs patchable in this manner.
Early K7 (Athlon) cores initially supported microcode updates as well, until ironically the microcode update mechanism itself was found to be broken and subsequently listed as an errata!
The following sections describe the microcode update procedure, obtained by clean room reverse engineering various vendors' BIOS code. The actual microcode update blocks are embedded in the BIOS image; the most recent updates (created June 2004) have been included in the Linux driver source code attached to this description.
Microcode Update Procedure
The update procedure expects the 64-bit virtual address of the update data, including the 64 byte header, to be in edx:eax:
edx = high 32 bits of 64-bit virtual address
eax = low 32 bits of 64-bit virtual address
ecx = 0xc0010020 (MSR to trigger update)
Execute wrmsr with these register values. If the address and update block data are valid, wrmsr completes successfully. Otherwise, a GP fault is taken.
The microcode does not appear to update MSR 0x8B with the new update signature as it does on Intel processors, despite the fact that some BIOS code I have analyzed does seem to check this field. It is possible the MSR is only updated under certain conditions, for instance when microcode is loaded before initializing the cache controller. Nonetheless, as we shall see below, the processor is clearly doing something internally when it claims to accept an update in this manner.
The update generally takes around 5500 clock
LMFAO
the slashdot hit squad is now on its way to your door.....
All this talk of CO2 emissions is no more than a martial arts type feint to distract you from the real action....
Yes, CO2 emissions *are* high, but then again oceanic absorbtion of CO2 is double what people have been predicting / expecting, and you'll find fuck all comment or investigation into that fact in the meedja, interesting when you are talking about by far the single largest CO2 absorbtion system on the planet.
The other thing everyone forgets is "recent human history" eg "the last hundred years" = "fuck all" on a global timescale.... or do you propose that the MASSIVE global warming at the end of the last ice age was caused by mammoths driving around in CFC leaving 25 litre V16 cars?
There are hippo bones buried in and around the Thames in the London area, something again caused that climate change, and it wasn't the hippos creating an extended nuclear winter.
You driving a biodiesel harley or a itchyfanny fuel cell smart car isn't going to alter sunspot activity.
No, the real issues here is per capita energy consumption, and per capita energy efficiency and per capita energy by products.
There is quite simply only one way forwards for the human race, and it is this.
In the short term, for the next 50 years, MASSIVE investment in traditional nuke plants to vastly increase electricity production.
Just as a huge proportion of Abu Dhabi's (United Arab Emirates) energy budget has gone for 30+ years into desalination of water to turn AD from a dusty desert town into a green and verdant city (human consumption of desalinated water is minute compared to the amounts used to water everything daily) then huge proportions of this future nuclear capacity will need to be used to recharge traditional traction type lead acid cells, crack water into hydrogen for new fuel cells, and power tram style over head power cables for urban heavies stuff.
In the meantime everyone needs to make a JFK style "do in within ten years, that's an order" style push to commercially viable fusion plants.
From the inidivdual's point of view we can reduce energy consumption (and therefore all the by-products of energy use) by running lighter and lower performance vehicles, ceiling fans instead of air-con in hot climates, reverse air-con instead of simple radiant electrical resistors in colder climates, and generally look at the overall efficiency of everything we use...
Simply switching all urban one person in a vehicle journeys to little 150 mpg (must be 4 stroke motors though) scooter would have a huge positive overall benefit, of which the total fuel saved would be only a small part, but you aren't going to get this or anything else when the total media output is pumping out the message that your big performance vehicle is a symbol of the size of your genitals.
And that brings us to the real problem, and it is by definition a greater problem in countries with a higher per capita energy use, so the US is the top of the pile.
The real problem is the profit motive inextricably bound to every joule of energy you use... there is no problem with there being a profit motive in there, but when the profit motive becomes the single over-riding force you have severe problems.
_EVERYTHING_ is geared to making you a larger net consumer of energy next year than this, because more energy = more product shifted = more profit.
In europe we have issues similar to these, but nowhere near as bad as america, which is literally a society built around the concept of universally available personal transport, the car is god, many americans simply do not have the option to live even as I do, motorcycle only, because the motorcycle will not carry the shopping etc etc etc, plus of course I can simply leave the bike parked, and walk the mile and half in the the centre of town, get my shopping and if I'm lazy get the (overpriced and expensive) every 15 minutes bus back for 3 bucks.
Americans (and I mean the United states, not south americans etc) like to
Although the ancient Olympic games were first recorded in 776 BC, they originated at least a century before that and possibly as early as the 13th century BC.
One Greek legend said that the great Herakles (Hercules, in the Roman form) won a race at Olympia, a plain in the small state of Elis, and then decreed that the race should be re-enacted every four years. Another said that Zeus himself had originated the festival after defeating Cronus for the sovereignty of heaven.
The more likely story is that the Olympic festival was a local religious event until 884 BC, when Iphitus, the king of Elis, decided to turn it into a broader, pan-Hellenic festival. To accomplish that, he entered into a temporary truce with other rulers, allowing athletes and others to travel peacefully to Olympia while the festival was going on.
The Greeks based their chronology on four-year periods called Olympiads, and the Olympic festival marked the beginning of each Olympiad. Evidently, the festival was reorganized in 776 BC, which was considered the start of the first Olympiad.
Ruins of the Olympic Paleastra
The festival was basically a religious gathering to celebrate the gods worshipped in common by all Hellenes, primarily Zeus. There were three other major pan-Hellenic festivals, the Pythian, the Nemean, and the Isthmian, all of which included fairs, but the festival at Olympia became pre-eminent by 572 BC, when Elis and Sparta entered into an alliance under which Elis was in charge of the event itself while Sparta enforced the sacred truce.
A single foot race was the only athletic event until the fifteenth Olympiad. The race was the length of the stadium, approximately 200 yards. As time went on, the games associated with the festival expanded and became increasingly important. A race of two stadium lengths was added in 724 and a long-distance race of 24 stadium lengths (about 2.5 miles) was added in 720.
Other types of sports followed quickly: Wrestling and the pentathlon in 708, boxing in 688, chariot racing in 680, and the pancratium, a combination of boxing and wrestling, in 748. At one time or another, there were 23 Olympic sports events, although they were never all held at the same festival.
A branch of wild olive was the only official prize for an Olympic winner, but there were also usually some unofficial prizes awarded by his city-state. For example, Athens allowed an Olympic champion to live free of charge in the Pyrtaneum, a special hall set aside for distinguished citizens. Other city-states exempted winners from taxes for an Olympiad, and in some cases citizens contributed to a cash award.
Athletes had to arrive in Elis a month before the games to undergo spiritual, moral, and physical training under the supervision of the judges, who then decided which of them were genuinely qualified to compete. Each competitor had to swear an oath that he was a free-born Greek who had committed no sacrilege against the gods.
At first, the games took up only one day of the festival. That was extended to two days in 680, with the addition of chariot racing, and to five days in 632. However, only three of those days were actually devoted to competition. The first day was devoted to religious sacrifices, the registration of athletes, and the taking of the Olympic oath. Prizes were awarded and thanksgiving sacrifices were offered on the fifth day.
Athletes usually competed nude. They originally wore shorts but, according to one ancient writer, Pausanias, a competitor deliberately lost his shorts so that he could run more freely during the race in 720 BC, and clothing was then abolished.
Women were not allowed to watch the games, but that had nothing to do with the nudity of the male athletes. Rather, it was because Olympia was dedicated to Zeus and was therefore a sacred area for men. The chariot races, which were held outside the sacred precinct, were open to women spectators. (Women had their own sacred festivals from which men were banned, most notabl
...olympic games, which was pretty much anything goes and to the winner go the spoils.....