Re:without HyperTransport, AMD would be dead
on
IBM Opts for AMD
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· Score: 3, Informative
Intel mitigates its lack of a modern bus by giving each 771 socket its own FSB to the northbridge (making the northbridge much more complicated as a side effect), upping the frequencey of that FSB to 1333 MHz, and implementing a very clever memory prefetch algorithm to hide resulting northbridge latency. Plus, of course, tons of cache to help limit the amount of data you need to send over the bus. As a result, a dual Woodcrest will still kick a dual Opteron's ass, although Woodcrest on HyperTransport would have been much faster. Of course, all these tricks don't really scale to more than 2 sockets, which is why Intel is pushing so hard for 4-core chips.
Re:without HyperTransport, AMD would be dead
on
IBM Opts for AMD
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· Score: 1
Yeah. That's either +5 funny or -1 confused. Your "correct url" is for ASUS's K8N motherboard. I'm talking about AMD's K8L processor core, which they plan to release in 2007, and which might allow them to catch up to Intel.
without HyperTransport, AMD would be dead
on
IBM Opts for AMD
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Intel dead? Have you people been living in a cave for the past few months?
Look at somebenchmarks. The new 5100 series Xeons with the Woodcrest core have been out since June, and a dual Woodcrests crush dual Opterons in almost every test. AMD's only hope at the moment is HyperTransport, with which they rule the market for 4-socket servers (Intel's old-fashioned FSB doesn't really scale to 4 sockets). But thanks to Core2 (Conroe and Woodcrest), Intel has taken over the 1-socket and 2-socket market. Prepare to see AMD's market share take a nosedive.
I am generally an AMD fanboy, but my next system will use Intel chips. Now that Core2 is here, I am simply not interested in an antiquated AMD chip which can only complete an SSE2 operation once every two cycles. Until the K8L comes out, it's Intel Inside for me.
Thank you, Tony Blair. Having created a crime-free paradise (by American standards), the British government has proceeded to outlaw merely unpleasant behaviour.
First, why is the parent flamebait? There many cities with a racist police force all around the world. Race and ethnicity are important factors in one's interaction with the criminal justice system, as you would quickly realize if you ever have to deal with cops or courts...
In this case, the photograph shows three white kids. The race of the officers who arrested them was not reported.
See, the first website you should be hacking is Hizbullah. They are the terrorist fuckers whose little cross-border kidnapping raid led to the deaths of hundreds of their fellow Lebanese.
Second, you should be hacking Ehud Olmert's site -- the first non-military Israeli prime minister in ages, who decides to prove his miltary virility by bombing Lebanese children.
Then, the IDF, the Knesset, the Mossad.
Then, the Arab League, for being pussies and not helping Lebanon.
Then, the White House and US Congress, for not pressuring Israel to stop. Maybe the Pentagon if you are so inclined
Then, don't forget to hack your own government's site, for not sending humanitarian aid to Lebanese refugees.
And you do NOT hack NASA, not unless a space shuttle fuel tank falls on Beirut.
(10^15)/4808 = 207 986 688 852, i.e. ~208 billion flops, i.e. if the chip executed only 1 instruction per clock, it would be 208GHz (not THz as you imply). Except of course the chip does more than 1 instruction per clock. Modern x86 chips do multiple flops per cycle. A Cell should be able to do at least 9 per cycle. I imagine that a dedicated vector processor, of the sort that NEC used to make, can do tens of flops per cycle.
Furthermore, many processor architectures have instructions to do several basic floating point instruction in one step. For instance, PowerPC has a one-cycle multiply-accumulate instruction (multiply and add in one step), so for marketing purposes, a PowerPC has twice the flops. Now, imagine if you have a vector processor that has a highly-optimized instruction for taking square roots or doing trig in one cycle. A square root operation will translate into dozens of basic flops (add, multiply, subtract). Such a processor might therefore be rated at 208 gigaflops even though its operating frequency is <1GHz.
Actually, it's just the Maple Global server that is IE-only. For some reason it seems to be the crappiest of them all (MapleSEA [South East Asia], MapleJapan, MapleKorea) - they support Firefox and always have. In other words, try the MapleSea server http://www.maplesea.com/ for a better experience.
Hot damn. When I click on Maple Story, I see a pixelated chibi girl whoring herself out to Microsoft. Without IE, I can't even go to an "about" or "screenshots" section and figure out if their game is worth playing. Well, too bad there isn't a single copy of Windows in the building where I am sitting right now. Congratulations, Maple, you've just lost yourself a potential customer.
If you had been reading Ars Technica for any length of time, you would be aware of its incessant and strident criticism of DRM and **AA stupidity. This article is no exception, although perhaps it's not anti-hollywood enough for your tastes.
"The force of law (and the risk of lawsuits) combined with the obscurity of most cracking tools means that even DRM solutions which are easily cracked can be effective at preventing casual piracy"
This devious little term, causal piracy, actually refers to what should be our legally protected rights to fair use, and our rights under the AHRA for reproduction on recording devices.
No, "casual piracy" refers to "widespread small-scale copyright infringement by average users", like making half a dozen copies of a copyrighted audio cassette (remember those?) for your friends. Lawsuits and DMCA-protected ass-broken encryption are indeed effective enough to deter casual copyright infringement. Hence the fact that itunes is more popular than allofmp3.
DRM's not going away anytime soon, and newer techniques such as BD+ promise to make future technologies even more difficult to hack for long periods of time.
hollywood to hackers..."naa naa-na-naa naa".
Unless you've been living in a cave for the past 10 years, you know that DRM is not going away any time soon. Bluray, HDDVD, this- and next-gen console games, Valve's Steam, itunes, etc. are all covered with DRM. In fact, US is using its economic power to push **AA-designed pro-DRM laws onto the rest of the planet. DRM is wrong and evil, but it's here to stay, at least until we can out-bribe music executives.
Not to mention it goes against every point made in the "if you can't use the door, find an open window" argument that cracking the cypher is not necessarily necessary.
As the article says, even broken DRM still discourages the average luser from pirating, and the average luser is all the studios care about.
Um, no. For those who can't be bothered to google, the Dnepr is a joint Russian-Ukrainian venture to make a profit out of disposing of expired ballistic missiles. Russia has lots of old SS-18 "Satan" ICBM's sitting around, which are expensive to maintain, many of which are past expiration date, and which it anyway has to get rid of thanks to the START treaty. The Satan was originally designed by OKB Yuzhnoe, which is located in Dnepropetrovsk, Ukraine. Yuzhnoe therefore gets the job of converting the old ICBM into a civilian launch vehicle. The converted rocket, now known as Dnepr, then gets shipped to a brand-new launch facility in Orenburg, Russia, and the launch generally utilizes Russian Space Agency's infrastructure.
So, in conclusion: old Soviet missile, refurbished in Ukraine, launched from Russia.
1 second in 400 million years is an impressive number for the journalists. What they really mean is that (I am assuming here that clock drift behaves like a random walk function) that the clock is expected to drift by less than 15 microseconds per month.
fyi, pretty much every Linux media library is a frequent subject of security advisories. Ffmpeg, mplayer, xine-lib, vlc, mad... Not all distros are diligent in fixing these issues and removing vulnerable versions. Gentoo in my experience is pretty fast, but some others are too lax. Chances are, there is a sploit for at least one multimedia application you use. And if someone wants to pwn you, all they need to do is know what version of what media player you use, and then have you open a special video file. Oh, you think that nobody knows what media player you use? Are you sure that you've never told a Linux n00b in a forum what media player you prefer? Are you sure you've never commented on a bug report in a publically accessible bugzilla? Or asked for advice on irc or a mailing list? Or mentioned in your blog that that you've just compiled that sweet beta version of libFoo-3.14?
Remember, paranoia is a survival trait, no matter what your OS.
What most forget (i.e. dont know) is that a modern IDE drive collects alot of
information (number of recycles, hours used, errors, bla bla), at least
if S.M.A.R.T is enabled.
Indeed, SMART collects information about the number of powercycles. However, unless the VA employees kept a record of the number of times they powercycled their machines, this information is pretty much useless for forensics.
In any case, booting from CD and copy files from the harddisk may very well
leave traces that this maight have happened, contrary to what people believe.
Say what? Just do dd if=/dev/hda of=/mnt/nfs/stolen-hard-drive.diskimg Since dd will be reading the raw bytes of the hard drive, it's not going to modify any filesystem data structures. The only way dd will leave any traces is the hard drive has a flash-memory cache -- but at the moment, hard drives with a flash-memory cache are extremely rare and expensive, and it is extraordinarily unlikely that the VA laptop was equipped with one.
What population? The were white settlers hunted the Tasmanians down like animals, then herded the last few survivors to a Christian-themed labor camp on a desert island where they succumbed to starvation and disease. The last pure-blooded Tasmanian died in 1876. Her skeleton was put on display in the Tasmanian Museum (as an example of "primitive human") and was finally cremated, over the museum's vehement objections, in 1976.
Re:Well, how does a Honda Civic ...
on
EXT4 Is Coming
·
· Score: 1
ZFS is not just for big iron. It's strongest feature is perhaps the melding of the volume manager and raid into one single unit greatly simplifies administration. Not to mention other nice features, either new os greatly simplified from their past versions, such as pooling, dynamic striping, CoW, instant snapshots and cloning, fault tolerance, etc.
Yes, ZFS has awesome volume-management features. If you have a big fileserver with a dozen drives, ZFS is a godsend. However, considering that most laptops, desktop, and small servers only have only 1-2 hard drives, ZFS is a total overkill for the average user. Which was precisely my point.
Well, how does a Honda Civic ...
on
EXT4 Is Coming
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
compare to a Liebherr T282? These are two projects with vastly different goals. Ext4 is basically Ext3 with better performance and a much larger maximum capacity; it's still a typical traditional Unix filesystem, a safe default choice for desktops and small servers. ZFS is an exotic beast with a totally ridiculous maximum capacity and tons of advanced of features that do not exist in any other Unix filesystem, but are only useful for Big Iron.
If I understand things right, it is a very fundamental part of the architecture, so it's not likely to go away any time soon.
You understand things wrong. GNOME never made much use of Corba; the average GNOME developer tended to regard the Corba parts as unnecessary and over-engineered boilerplate. Thus, most GNOME apps had no IPC interface of any consequence. As a result, GNOME for the past several years has been moving from Corba to DBus, which is, frankly, much easier to use and much better suited for desktop IPC. Today, GNOME developers recommend that new applications do not use Corba, and in fact, the only GNOME application that still uses Corba in a non-trivial fashion is Gnumeric. According to developer blogs, GNOME3 will drop the Corba dependency entirely.
When the revolution comes, the people whos necks have been stamped on one too many times won't be too sympathetic and Ms Hu and her ilk are going to get their heads blown clean off
Oh, come on. If she is unlucky and gets caught in the first year of the new regime, sure. After that, she could just continue in her line of work: as an informer for the new government's secret police. Being an ideologue is not a job requirement for an informer. A lack of morals is.
...were originally funded by DARPA. Quick, unplug the network cable! Don't you realize They are controlling your mind via subliminal messages in Google Ads???
Is it really worth it to be an AMD processor with a DDR2 memory controller?
Yes, if you care about the price of memory in your new machine. The price of DDR2 is generally expected to drop below DDR1 during this year, as manufacturers convert DDR1 production lines to DDR2. The performance won't change by more than a couple percent though (because the higher bandwidth of DDR2 is almost exactly cancelled out by its worse latency).
Admittedly the lag time is down to hours or even minutes rather than days
Uhm. Hours? The last time I had to wait hours for my email was back in 1997. Perhaps you should retire that MicroVAX and get some modern hardware for your mail server?
...it is a match made in heaven. Almost as good as the upcoming merger between "Avian Flu Soft" and "Mad Scientists with Genetic Engineering Equipment Game Design Studio".
On a serious note though, Bioware was always one of the best independent studios. I hope that the alliance and going public won't bring down the quality of their games -- but I am not counting on it.
You are confusing math and science books with textbooks.
Textbook prices for all subjects are quite high. The reason is fairly simple: the guy who chooses the book (the professor, the TA, the instructor) isn't the guy who pays for it (the student, the parents, the scholarship administrator). Thus, there is absolutely no pressure to pick a $10 textbook (yes, I've had a college math class with a $10 textbook) over a $150 one, even if they have pretty much the same content. After a while, this leads to a general elevation of prices. It's the same reason why medical costs are spiraling out of control...
On the other hand, math and science books targeted towards actual professionals tend to be cheap. Most of the books I used in my graduate classes were free (a pdf file) or under $40 (dead tree form).
Slashdot Mirror
Intel mitigates its lack of a modern bus by giving each 771 socket its own FSB to the northbridge (making the northbridge much more complicated as a side effect), upping the frequencey of that FSB to 1333 MHz, and implementing a very clever memory prefetch algorithm to hide resulting northbridge latency. Plus, of course, tons of cache to help limit the amount of data you need to send over the bus. As a result, a dual Woodcrest will still kick a dual Opteron's ass, although Woodcrest on HyperTransport would have been much faster. Of course, all these tricks don't really scale to more than 2 sockets, which is why Intel is pushing so hard for 4-core chips.
Yeah. That's either +5 funny or -1 confused. Your "correct url" is for ASUS's K8N motherboard. I'm talking about AMD's K8L processor core, which they plan to release in 2007, and which might allow them to catch up to Intel.
Intel dead? Have you people been living in a cave for the past few months?
Look at some benchmarks. The new 5100 series Xeons with the Woodcrest core have been out since June, and a dual Woodcrests crush dual Opterons in almost every test. AMD's only hope at the moment is HyperTransport, with which they rule the market for 4-socket servers (Intel's old-fashioned FSB doesn't really scale to 4 sockets). But thanks to Core2 (Conroe and Woodcrest), Intel has taken over the 1-socket and 2-socket market. Prepare to see AMD's market share take a nosedive.
I am generally an AMD fanboy, but my next system will use Intel chips. Now that Core2 is here, I am simply not interested in an antiquated AMD chip which can only complete an SSE2 operation once every two cycles. Until the K8L comes out, it's Intel Inside for me.
Thank you, Tony Blair. Having created a crime-free paradise (by American standards), the British government has proceeded to outlaw merely unpleasant behaviour.
First, why is the parent flamebait? There many cities with a racist police force all around the world. Race and ethnicity are important factors in one's interaction with the criminal justice system, as you would quickly realize if you ever have to deal with cops or courts...
In this case, the photograph shows three white kids. The race of the officers who arrested them was not reported.
See, the first website you should be hacking is Hizbullah. They are the terrorist fuckers whose little cross-border kidnapping raid led to the deaths of hundreds of their fellow Lebanese.
Second, you should be hacking Ehud Olmert's site -- the first non-military Israeli prime minister in ages, who decides to prove his miltary virility by bombing Lebanese children.
Then, the IDF, the Knesset, the Mossad.
Then, the Arab League, for being pussies and not helping Lebanon.
Then, the White House and US Congress, for not pressuring Israel to stop. Maybe the Pentagon if you are so inclined
Then, don't forget to hack your own government's site, for not sending humanitarian aid to Lebanese refugees.
And you do NOT hack NASA, not unless a space shuttle fuel tank falls on Beirut.
(10^15)/4808 = 207 986 688 852, i.e. ~208 billion flops, i.e. if the chip executed only 1 instruction per clock, it would be 208GHz (not THz as you imply). Except of course the chip does more than 1 instruction per clock. Modern x86 chips do multiple flops per cycle. A Cell should be able to do at least 9 per cycle. I imagine that a dedicated vector processor, of the sort that NEC used to make, can do tens of flops per cycle.
Furthermore, many processor architectures have instructions to do several basic floating point instruction in one step. For instance, PowerPC has a one-cycle multiply-accumulate instruction (multiply and add in one step), so for marketing purposes, a PowerPC has twice the flops. Now, imagine if you have a vector processor that has a highly-optimized instruction for taking square roots or doing trig in one cycle. A square root operation will translate into dozens of basic flops (add, multiply, subtract). Such a processor might therefore be rated at 208 gigaflops even though its operating frequency is <1GHz.
Mod up the AC!
Hot damn. When I click on Maple Story, I see a pixelated chibi girl whoring herself out to Microsoft. Without IE, I can't even go to an "about" or "screenshots" section and figure out if their game is worth playing. Well, too bad there isn't a single copy of Windows in the building where I am sitting right now. Congratulations, Maple, you've just lost yourself a potential customer.
Unless you've been living in a cave for the past 10 years, you know that DRM is not going away any time soon. Bluray, HDDVD, this- and next-gen console games, Valve's Steam, itunes, etc. are all covered with DRM. In fact, US is using its economic power to push **AA-designed pro-DRM laws onto the rest of the planet. DRM is wrong and evil, but it's here to stay, at least until we can out-bribe music executives.
As the article says, even broken DRM still discourages the average luser from pirating, and the average luser is all the studios care about.
They have most of the responsibility for the launch vehicle.
Um, no. For those who can't be bothered to google, the Dnepr is a joint Russian-Ukrainian venture to make a profit out of disposing of expired ballistic missiles. Russia has lots of old SS-18 "Satan" ICBM's sitting around, which are expensive to maintain, many of which are past expiration date, and which it anyway has to get rid of thanks to the START treaty. The Satan was originally designed by OKB Yuzhnoe, which is located in Dnepropetrovsk, Ukraine. Yuzhnoe therefore gets the job of converting the old ICBM into a civilian launch vehicle. The converted rocket, now known as Dnepr, then gets shipped to a brand-new launch facility in Orenburg, Russia, and the launch generally utilizes Russian Space Agency's infrastructure.
So, in conclusion: old Soviet missile, refurbished in Ukraine, launched from Russia.
1 second in 400 million years is an impressive number for the journalists. What they really mean is that (I am assuming here that clock drift behaves like a random walk function) that the clock is expected to drift by less than 15 microseconds per month.
fyi, pretty much every Linux media library is a frequent subject of security advisories. Ffmpeg, mplayer, xine-lib, vlc, mad... Not all distros are diligent in fixing these issues and removing vulnerable versions. Gentoo in my experience is pretty fast, but some others are too lax. Chances are, there is a sploit for at least one multimedia application you use. And if someone wants to pwn you, all they need to do is know what version of what media player you use, and then have you open a special video file. Oh, you think that nobody knows what media player you use? Are you sure that you've never told a Linux n00b in a forum what media player you prefer? Are you sure you've never commented on a bug report in a publically accessible bugzilla? Or asked for advice on irc or a mailing list? Or mentioned in your blog that that you've just compiled that sweet beta version of libFoo-3.14?
Remember, paranoia is a survival trait, no matter what your OS.
Indeed, SMART collects information about the number of powercycles. However, unless the VA employees kept a record of the number of times they powercycled their machines, this information is pretty much useless for forensics.
Say what? Just do dd if=/dev/hda of=/mnt/nfs/stolen-hard-drive.diskimg Since dd will be reading the raw bytes of the hard drive, it's not going to modify any filesystem data structures. The only way dd will leave any traces is the hard drive has a flash-memory cache -- but at the moment, hard drives with a flash-memory cache are extremely rare and expensive, and it is extraordinarily unlikely that the VA laptop was equipped with one.
What population? The were white settlers hunted the Tasmanians down like animals, then herded the last few survivors to a Christian-themed labor camp on a desert island where they succumbed to starvation and disease. The last pure-blooded Tasmanian died in 1876. Her skeleton was put on display in the Tasmanian Museum (as an example of "primitive human") and was finally cremated, over the museum's vehement objections, in 1976.
Yes, ZFS has awesome volume-management features. If you have a big fileserver with a dozen drives, ZFS is a godsend. However, considering that most laptops, desktop, and small servers only have only 1-2 hard drives, ZFS is a total overkill for the average user. Which was precisely my point.
compare to a Liebherr T282? These are two projects with vastly different goals. Ext4 is basically Ext3 with better performance and a much larger maximum capacity; it's still a typical traditional Unix filesystem, a safe default choice for desktops and small servers. ZFS is an exotic beast with a totally ridiculous maximum capacity and tons of advanced of features that do not exist in any other Unix filesystem, but are only useful for Big Iron.
If I understand things right, it is a very fundamental part of the architecture, so it's not likely to go away any time soon.
You understand things wrong. GNOME never made much use of Corba; the average GNOME developer tended to regard the Corba parts as unnecessary and over-engineered boilerplate. Thus, most GNOME apps had no IPC interface of any consequence. As a result, GNOME for the past several years has been moving from Corba to DBus, which is, frankly, much easier to use and much better suited for desktop IPC. Today, GNOME developers recommend that new applications do not use Corba, and in fact, the only GNOME application that still uses Corba in a non-trivial fashion is Gnumeric. According to developer blogs, GNOME3 will drop the Corba dependency entirely.
When the revolution comes, the people whos necks have been stamped on one too many times won't be too sympathetic and Ms Hu and her ilk are going to get their heads blown clean off
Oh, come on. If she is unlucky and gets caught in the first year of the new regime, sure. After that, she could just continue in her line of work: as an informer for the new government's secret police. Being an ideologue is not a job requirement for an informer. A lack of morals is.
...were originally funded by DARPA. Quick, unplug the network cable! Don't you realize They are controlling your mind via subliminal messages in Google Ads???
Is it really worth it to be an AMD processor with a DDR2 memory controller?
Yes, if you care about the price of memory in your new machine. The price of DDR2 is generally expected to drop below DDR1 during this year, as manufacturers convert DDR1 production lines to DDR2. The performance won't change by more than a couple percent though (because the higher bandwidth of DDR2 is almost exactly cancelled out by its worse latency).
Admittedly the lag time is down to hours or even minutes rather than days
Uhm. Hours? The last time I had to wait hours for my email was back in 1997. Perhaps you should retire that MicroVAX and get some modern hardware for your mail server?
...it is a match made in heaven. Almost as good as the upcoming merger between "Avian Flu Soft" and "Mad Scientists with Genetic Engineering Equipment Game Design Studio". On a serious note though, Bioware was always one of the best independent studios. I hope that the alliance and going public won't bring down the quality of their games -- but I am not counting on it.
You are confusing math and science books with textbooks.
Textbook prices for all subjects are quite high. The reason is fairly simple: the guy who chooses the book (the professor, the TA, the instructor) isn't the guy who pays for it (the student, the parents, the scholarship administrator). Thus, there is absolutely no pressure to pick a $10 textbook (yes, I've had a college math class with a $10 textbook) over a $150 one, even if they have pretty much the same content. After a while, this leads to a general elevation of prices. It's the same reason why medical costs are spiraling out of control...
On the other hand, math and science books targeted towards actual professionals tend to be cheap. Most of the books I used in my graduate classes were free (a pdf file) or under $40 (dead tree form).