It doesn't seem like it would be that difficult to pin the blame down to the particular component: is it the integrated RAID subsystem utilizing the processor inefficiently? Or is it the processor itself, being slow? And if it was the processor, why wouldn't this slowness be exhibited in other situations?
I suspect it's a driver problem: programmed IO instead of DMA. It's a standard gotcha in the cesspool that is commodity computers.
Yeah, i'm sure his death makes the wiping of your retirement savings easier to deal with...
A person who puts all their money into one security isn't investing or saving, they're gambling. Unmitigated greed does not constitute a plan to provide for your old age.
On the other hand, you can't do UV astronomy from the ground. The air is opaque to UV light.
Ah, so what you're saying is we need to thin out the air a bit, in fact just get rid of it.
I can see the War on Air now: "Muslims, Mr. President. Our top scientists have determined that Muslims need air." "There's only one thing to do then..."
Mars is one of the least hospitable and most difficult to reach places you could hope to find.
Mars is the second most hospitable planet we know, after Earth. The only resource we don't know for sure that it has is uranium ore. The only really annoying thing is the giant long-duration dust storms.
The least hospitable places on Earth are still way, way less lethal than Mars.
Humans survive in Antarctica and the deep sea solely by means of a metric buttload of technology. Take it away and they die in seconds or minutes. Mars is different only in degree, not kind.
Contrast with Earth, on whose worst day life still flourished. [big list of mass extinctions]
If by "flourished" you mean "nearly all the big, elaborate organisms were snuffed out".
We've come up with a lot of creative ways to peek around Mars looking for signs of it and the best we've found is the possibility that it was there but died a really, really long time ago. That's a nice big "No Trespassing" sign. Violators are killed on sight.
No. We have done virtually no serious work on discovering Martian life (HPLC-tandem mass spec with chiral columns), and the conditions are within the known acceptable range for Earth-type microbes (sunlight, porous minerals, and temperature and pressure compatible with condensed-phase water).
The exception to this would be a planetary catastrophe that left no room for doubt that Earth would be less habitable than Mars is now--that would result in the total loss of liquid water, the burn up of all atmospheric oxygen, the loss of the Earth's magnetic field, the death and extinction of all life (from microbes on up), and the tipping point of sunlight being blocked from reaching the ground.
Don't be silly. You don't have to completely atomize Earth for the four horsemen to ride. A nice big asteroid coming in at 50 km/s and hitting a nice thick layer of limestone would likely make the human race go extinct. Being caught in a beam from a supernova or similar high-energy event would be very bad. Having some idiots set off a 20 stage thermonuclear bomb, just to see how far down the crust really goes, would give the human race a run for its money.
... there's little that's sensible about martian life as the human-kind "backup plan."
Fuck sensible. It wasn't sensible for people to fill a grave every few yards on the deadly path between London and San Jose, but they did it anyway. Their equally unreasonable descendants will one day do it again, at enormous expense and personal risk.
And, um, it was pretty obviously an attempt at communcation...
No. You admit that your server was sending emails to a spam-trap address on behalf of unauthenticated third-part attackers.
Well, nowadays said spam listing stuff will only *globally* send 5 messages to a single email address before refusing to do (since spammers are so fond of breaking stuff)...
No, the message limit would be 5 multiplied by the number of assholes running similar spam relays. That means an unquenchable flood of tens of thousands of messages for a hapless denial-of-service target.
0 out of 4. Unsolicited messages are useful. There is noncommercial spam. There is non-bulk spam. There is non-email spam.
The sole criterion for spam is the lack of any reasonable attempt at communication. That's why sending mail to a spam-trap address, as you were doing, is taken so seriously. No person or purpose is associated with the address, so sending to it is by definition done without any hope or expectation of communicating. You might as well go around posting flyers that say "I'm an evil spammer, please burn me at the stake."
Some of our users used a white list based spam filtering solution that, if you weren't on the whitelist, would send an email out asking to confirm that your address/email was, in fact, valid.
The From: and Reply-to: lines of a message are easy to forge (and widely forged). By trusting them, you allow anyone to send an unstoppable flood of garbage to any email address. It's only a microscopic fraction less bad than running an open relay.
Well, somehow said emails were going to a spam trap run by spamcop and being marked as spam -- thousands of them a day.
Good heavens! You mean spammers forge the From: and Reply-to: lines?! I'm shocked, shocked!
This is the type of day in, day out bullshit you have to deal with on these blacklists...
... when you are so stupid that you think unsolicited, unwanted messages aren't spam just because your whitelist has good intentions. Good intentions? Ha! The road to hell is paved with 'em.
It seems to me they consider their little infantile vigilante crusade against TW to be more important than anything else, even when it's pointed out to them that they are recommending the blocking of legitimate servers.
Spammers don't have legitimate servers: they use the profits from spam to cut their prices across the board, driving out their ethical competitors. Every part of their business and everything they do is subsidized by spam.
They basically said they didn't care, as my IP address belonged to TW, not to me, and because of that they absolutely were not going to unblock my IP address.
Damn skippy. You don't have any IP addresses. Read up on what an Autonomous System (AS) is. Blocks of IP addresses are granted to an AS. In exchange for taking total responsibility for those addresses, the peers accept the routes published by the AS.
Spam is certainly an annoyance to me (close to 1K every day),...
Now multiply that by 50,000 email addresses and a four-day backlog at an email provider: 200 million spams have to be stored at a given moment. It requires hundreds of extra gigabytes of on-line, high-speed, ultra-reliable mass storage. That costs a great big pile of money.
And that's for a SMALLISH email provider. A big one with half a million users is looking at millions of dollars a year, just to shovel the spam around.
Hall effect sensors can easily measure current with no resistance added or interfering with the circuit.
No resistance? Even a hundred micro-ohms would be significant, and it takes a pretty impressive chunk of copper to get that low. Using a Hall effect sensor in the midst of a 100 amp circuit is tricky, too.
Many IC manufacturers test VERY complex integrated systems every day with NO issues...
NO issues? You mean besides the custom adapters built just for testing, and $250k ATE machines. That's a far cry from the earlier claim that "chip wattage drawn should [not] be difficult to gauge in the slightest."
I agree that creating the benchmark workload is hard. Whether you're measuring time or power, good benchmarks are hard.
True, but looking back up the thread, I was arguing against the claim that measuring the power used by individual chips is utterly trivial. It's fine to say "this has no place in a laptop", but a lot of people would like to know why.
they only tolerate a fraction of a milliohm of added resistance
Say what? They're not [i]that[/i] intolerant.
Yes, they are. Consider a high-end CPU that draws 100 watts at 1.2 volts. That's 83 amps of current. If you add a one milliohm series resistor for measuring the current, you've dropped the CPU voltage by 83 millivolts. By comparison, I just looked up an Opteron and it was only specced for a +/- 50 mV change.
Certainly the measurement is doable. I'm just saying that the cheap and dirty approach where you drop in a current-sense resistor won't cut it.
Normal power supplies would have to be far better, and motherboard power compensators far more expensive.
The CPU power regulators on the motherboard are pretty fancy these days: a percent or so accuracy, multiple output switches clocked out of phase, clocked at 1+ MHz to give fast response to changing loads, capacitors that can survive 50 amp ripple current, etc.
Besides, if your measurement device adds that much resistance, you simply increase the voltage of the rail a smidgen to compensate.
Which causes the chip's power consumption to increase when it's lightly loaded. The increase is 14% for the example above. That is not totally awful, but it isn't very good either.
Uh, actually, watts sucked per hour/minute/etc has been very easy to measure for many decades now. There is no reason why chip wattage drawn should be difficult to gauge in the slightest.
Possible? Sure. Easy? Well, modern CPU power converters have several physically-distributed power outputs that don't share the load equally, they drive multiple load pins that don't share the load equally either, and they only tolerate a fraction of a milliohm of added resistance. There can also be a big question about how much power the chip is receiving due to impedance mismatches on the external buses. Getting truly accurate numbers takes quite a bit of work.
What holds the pocket of plasma together against the wind?
The leading edge of the plasma ball could be defined by the focus of a phased array of microwave emitters, a fancy version of the votive-candle-in-microwave-oven trick.
Even if HP returned to its $11 five year low, the market cap is so large that only a stock swap in a highly inflated market would permit HP's acquisition. Even then, who could buy them without getting shot down by FTC or EEC antitrust regulators.
Analogies aside, explain to me how knowledge in assembly makes a Java-programmer more productive in a significant way?
It doesn't. It is a total waste of the Java programmer's time.
However, it would probably be useful for a software engineer who happens to be working in Java at the moment. There's more in the world than just app servers and office automation, and the average career will last through several business paradigm shifts.
But it is _not_ the most energy efficient way to learn how to program in a modern environment.
But what is a "modern environment"? If you were writing a Java game for, say, the Playstation 3, you'd be crippled to know nothing about the nuts-and-bolts of computers.
Flowing water. Uranium compounds dissolve in ground water in the source rock, the water flows elsewhere to different conditions of acidity and temperature, and a lot of the uranium precipitates at the point where it become less soluble. This drawing shows the complex geography of one of the ore bodies. I presume the water gets loaded up with uranium in the bedrock, escapes through the cracked rock in the fault, then precipitates when it hits the sandstone.
"unusually high" alright, i expected 2 or 3 times higher. but 20? this is just creepy
Scary, ain't it. There was an ore body in Africa (Oklo) that accumulated so much pure uranium oxide that it started "burning" as a fission reactor.
Certainly the development of the networking protocols and early routing hardware that evolved into the Internet was under the auspices of the U.S. military, but the advent of the microprocessor and the personal computer were largely private-sector affairs.
Not exactly. Much of the big expansion of the semiconductor industry was paid for by the Apollo and ballistic missile programs.
I'm not seeing that in either the original post in this thread or the original story.... In both cases, it seems that the receiving servers are refusing to receive the message at SMTP time.
This comment says "I'm never sure if an email that I sent out has actually gotten through, or if it's just been silently eaten by some spam filter somewhere."
The more concessions you expect from all of them, the more problems you'll face.
The complaint here was that certain ISPs are saying "Thank you, esteemed peer, for sending this valuable message which we will now deliver." when what they really mean is "Bugger off, spammy scum. Your message? Ha! We spit in the general direction of your message, which we will delete as soon as we finish wiping our ass with it." The behavior is singularly unhelpful.
The difference between 939 and 940 was pointless and served to segment the market, much like Intel does between P4s and Xeons.
No, there were very good reasons! Socket 940 sacrificed signal return pins (power and ground) for memory ECC pins. ECC made the memory vastly more reliable. However, losing the return pins hurt electrical signal integrity, requiring that higher-latency registered memory modules be used. The ECC capability made AMD a lot of sales in the finance, medical, and industrial markets, where failure is frowned upon. And unlike Intel, AMD charged a reasonable premium for ECC, making Socket 940 machines a slam dunk with the beancounters.
Socket 939 sacrified ECC reliability for extra return pins. This helped signal integrity, which let them get away with cheaper, faster unbuffered memory modules. The speed and cheapness turned in l33t benchmarks and made AMD a lot of sales in the super-gamer market. Intel could only respond by releasing frying pan editions of their top processors.
IMHO 939 versus 940 was good, solid engineering on AMD's part. Upper management didn't latch onto an idea (Rambus, clock speed, EPIC) and try to ram it down everyone's throat. Somebody knew how the technology works and guts and foresight to specialize just enough.
As for the upgrading issues, it's very rare that you'll swap just a CPU, unless you bought a crappy CPU to begin with. Most people who want to future-proof their PC will buy the best kit they can afford and make it last. They won't get a budget CPU that they know will be obsolete within a year or two.
I dunno. I bought a pair of Opteron 240s and a Tyan S2885 motherboard soon after they were released. It cost a pretty penny, and the performance is still good compared to what's on the market now. If I wait until Socket 940 is being phased out, I can pick up a pair of high-clocked dual cores for a couple of hundred bucks, and get a massive performance increase.
CPU upgrading still makes sense if you plan it right.
Slashdot Mirror
I can see the War on Air now: "Muslims, Mr. President. Our top scientists have determined that Muslims need air." "There's only one thing to do then ..."
Ha! I salute you.
The sole criterion for spam is the lack of any reasonable attempt at communication. That's why sending mail to a spam-trap address, as you were doing, is taken so seriously. No person or purpose is associated with the address, so sending to it is by definition done without any hope or expectation of communicating. You might as well go around posting flyers that say "I'm an evil spammer, please burn me at the stake."
And that's for a SMALLISH email provider. A big one with half a million users is looking at millions of dollars a year, just to shovel the spam around.
I agree that creating the benchmark workload is hard. Whether you're measuring time or power, good benchmarks are hard.
True, but looking back up the thread, I was arguing against the claim that measuring the power used by individual chips is utterly trivial. It's fine to say "this has no place in a laptop", but a lot of people would like to know why.
Certainly the measurement is doable. I'm just saying that the cheap and dirty approach where you drop in a current-sense resistor won't cut it.
The CPU power regulators on the motherboard are pretty fancy these days: a percent or so accuracy, multiple output switches clocked out of phase, clocked at 1+ MHz to give fast response to changing loads, capacitors that can survive 50 amp ripple current, etc. Which causes the chip's power consumption to increase when it's lightly loaded. The increase is 14% for the example above. That is not totally awful, but it isn't very good either.However, it would probably be useful for a software engineer who happens to be working in Java at the moment. There's more in the world than just app servers and office automation, and the average career will last through several business paradigm shifts.
But what is a "modern environment"? If you were writing a Java game for, say, the Playstation 3, you'd be crippled to know nothing about the nuts-and-bolts of computers.What we need is to genetically engineer some bombadier beetles so they gather uranium ...
Socket 939 sacrified ECC reliability for extra return pins. This helped signal integrity, which let them get away with cheaper, faster unbuffered memory modules. The speed and cheapness turned in l33t benchmarks and made AMD a lot of sales in the super-gamer market. Intel could only respond by releasing frying pan editions of their top processors.
IMHO 939 versus 940 was good, solid engineering on AMD's part. Upper management didn't latch onto an idea (Rambus, clock speed, EPIC) and try to ram it down everyone's throat. Somebody knew how the technology works and guts and foresight to specialize just enough.
CPU upgrading still makes sense if you plan it right.