Agreed-- that level of DC voltage is actively dangerous, and I wonder why they are running that high a voltage when most of the equipment in the racks is gonna want +5VDC & +12VDC rails. Perhaps they are using it to power big DC motors in fans and AC/cooling/dehumidifying equipment, but it would seem to make more sense to feed those with 3-phase AC and use a more sensible VDC delivery at, say, 48V, which is a telco standard...
Remember that just getting data to or from userland requires a copyin()/copyout() or equivalent, and a context switch between user and kernel mode-- just because a program in userspace sends data (whether via read()/write() or whatever), that doesn't mean that the system actually immediately goes into the kernel and dispatches the packet; because of that, it's quite possible to send many packets worth of data from userland and bust the cache before the system does a context-switch and runs the kernel's side of the networking code.
In high performance apps, you might even use things like sendfile() to push your data out, which means that you're using DMA between RAM and the disk controller to fetch the data into mbuf chains, and then you have the NIC driver adding these chains to the NIC's list of Tx descriptors; when ready, the NIC performs DMA to move the data in the mbufs to it for checksumming and then transmission. The CPU will be used in generating the packet's protocol headers, but the contents of the packet are never seen by the CPU and thus never reside in cache.
That doesn't mean that your point is completely wrong-- yes, doing TCP/IP on the CPU is relatively efficient and yes, it is relatively common for the packet data to still be resident in the CPU's cache, but as the load goes up, or if you have an SMP system where the CPU running the stack and the CPU running the userland program may not be the same and may not share an L2 or L3 cache, having the NIC around to offload the gruntwork of checksums matters more.
Under low traffic volumes, sure, the packets being sent out are likely to still be in cache, but as your traffic load goes up, especially with jumbo frames, that's less likely to be the case-- and obviously, incoming packets aren't going to be resident in the CPU cache. Just like interrupt mitigation, which is not needed for low-to-moderate traffic volumes, but becomes quite valuable under greater loads...
why can't manufacturers make hardware (esp NICs) with basic 9x/xp/*nx drivers on a ROM chip?
Oh, they could, only it's exceptionally rare to find a NIC which actually has on-board ROM, and even then it's more likely to be used for PXE booting then for providing a driver when Windows already ships with generic drivers for the common chipsets. However, there were NICs made for OpenFirmware-based systems (Suns, Macs) which contained basic drivers and hardware diagnostic code.
> Can you really reprioritize your packets coming from your desktop in such a way that you make a significant gain after it hits your ISP?
Doubtful. It's almost never the case that you get out-of-order packets on your LAN; that happens upstream between ISPs when routers flap routes as a result of an outage or topology/config change.
If you can't afford to wait a few seconds for reassembly or a retransmit, the game or application is better off using UDP and timestamps or a sequence # to provide ordering without the guaranteed in-order delivery provided by TCP.
Yeah, only you can get a decent NIC from Intel, Broadcom, maybe 3com, which offloads most of the IP stack into hardware *AND* get a HiFN 79xx-based SSL/RSA/DSA/AES cryptoaccelerator card from Soerkis for about $100. I guess the extra $200 or so these people want covers the heatsink and a couple of pretty LEDs.
It's not exactly news that the Linux kernel contains GCC-specific idioms. Do you regard this as a feature or evidence of poor portability?
Besides, if you want to talk about Linux as an entire OS, others have pointed out that Gentoo is actively working to integrate installing either a Linux kernel with a more BSD-derived userland, or installing a FreeBSD kernel with a Linux/glibc userland. In which case, the ability to compile a working kernel using icc or other compilers is entirely relevant to "Linux as OS".
Okay, and pretending that I'm Dude-From-ID, what is my motivation for giving you a game that you will buy from me once and then enjoy for years? If you are enjoying it for years, how are you going to come back and keep giving me money over and over?
The way this works, if you write a great game which I play for years at a time, I will quite happily buy an expansion pack from you, or a sequel, or perhaps other games you make if they seem decent and interesting.
Origin Systems, Bullfrog, Blizzard, LookingGlass Studios, Maxis, Sid Meier, are all developers that have been in this category for me.
For what it's worth, using something like Nero DriveSpeed to slow down fast CD/DVD drives seems to make the Starforce protection much happier. X3 has absolutely beautiful graphics if you've got a decent card (DX 9/SM 2 or better) and is enjoyable but hard to play...it can also be a major time-suck, although probably nothing like WoW.
If I could convert my CD-based version to being used via Steam and get rid of Starforce, I would be overjoyed. Still, the publishers released a no-CD patch for X2 after a while, and rumor has it that a no-CD patch for X3 will be coming out towards the end of this year, so you might want to check on this in a few months...
Not really-- according to Wikipedia, the FDA has approved low concentrations of H2O2 as being "food grade" safe, and it can be found in mouthwash and so forth. You wouldn't want to drink a lot of it or at full strength concentration because it is a bleaching agent & oxidizer.
> As for other salts than table salt--maybe. I've had some 'low-sodium' salts that were just plain nasty.
Agreed, I'd rather use a small amount of real salt rather than a larger amount of some low-sodium replacement.
There is-- XMPP, which is used by Jabber and EJabber to do, well, chat-related things like registering users, chatting between users, MUC (Multi-User Chat), etc. iChat.app works fine with Jabber, although obviously it also works with AOL chat protocol (which I gather was reverse-engineered and not a public standard, but I could be wrong). Goto www.xmpp.org...
False. All "open source" means is that you can see the source code.
As I just replied to the GP, the Open Source Definition from the OSI absolutely requires that the software MUST permit users to freely modify and redistribute the software to other people without paying a license fee, royalty, or anything else. What Microsoft offers is commonly described as "source available", and isn't identical to OSI "Open Source Software" by any stretch of the imagination.
The license shall not restrict any party from selling or giving away the software as a component of an aggregate software distribution containing programs from several different sources. The license shall not require a royalty or other fee for such sale.
If you're crossing a border and get stopped, maybe. If you're just walking down the street, the cops can't hold you at the station unless they arrest you...and they can't arrest you simply for not having ID...
I would guess your computer plays CoD1 well but is chugging on CoD2; run-and-gun works on some maps, but on others (especially Brecourt), rifles like the Garand, KAR, or Springfield sniper rule and short-range SMG's aren't useful.
I would agree that crappy products and tired remakes of the same old thing (hey, EA, I'm talking about you!) are killing the gaming industry. Piracy doesn't help matters, but it's not the major problem from where I stand...
Of course, both X2 and X3 were originally protected with Starforce, which is one of the most intrusive forms of copy-protection available on the market; fortunately, they can be gotten via Steam without Starforce now. And I believe Oblivion is protected by SecuROM, although I can check later.
I will agree that downloading the GalCiv 2 updates manually requires either a serial # or the email address you used to register the game. I don't think this qualifies as DRM in the same sense as Starforce or SecuROM, any more than needing to enter a password to read your email from your ISP qualifies as DRM.
Have you tried running Oblivion without the game CD in the drive?
As for GalCiv 2, they do use a serial # with the online auto-update system and to gain access to beta patches and so forth, but you can download the production-release patches manually, as far as I can tell.
The SCOTUS already upheld that I do indeed have to provide ID to a police officer even if I am not suspected of any wrong doing, at their whim.
The SCOTUS said that it was reasonable for a cop to require you to show ID, agreed, but nothing requires you to carry ID with you if you don't want to do so. If a cop isn't polite about it, and the circumstances are such that you want to push back (ie, if you have done something wrong, keeping your mouth shut until you see your lawyer is in your best interest, but in the case that you haven't done anything), insist that the cop provide you with name, rank, and badge #, and immediately ask to speak with that cops' lieutenant or supervisor.
Being a sysadmin nowadays has more in common with being a plumber than an engineer: it's amazing just how much crap appears when something goes wrong with them "pipes".:-)
Heh...although if you ask a chemist, potassium chloride is just as much a salt as sodium chloride is; but a doctor might want you to eat the former rather the latter if you have hypertension, high blood pressure and so forth.
As for low-hydogren water, you can get that by adding a little baking soda or similar to normal water. Another candidate might be peroxide, H2O2.
Agreed. It's very common for systems to run the fans at full speed when they first power up, and then slow down once the system boots far enough for the "smart" fan control software to take control.
It's not uncommon to need to provide about half of the fan's rated power before it will spin up when stopped, so providing an initial full-power jolt to the fans helps make sure that they are really spinning; once they are, it's OK to slow them down even below the point where they wouldn't be able to start from a standstill.
Slashdot Mirror
Agreed-- that level of DC voltage is actively dangerous, and I wonder why they are running that high a voltage when most of the equipment in the racks is gonna want +5VDC & +12VDC rails. Perhaps they are using it to power big DC motors in fans and AC/cooling/dehumidifying equipment, but it would seem to make more sense to feed those with 3-phase AC and use a more sensible VDC delivery at, say, 48V, which is a telco standard...
Kudos. Please mod Slashdot prisoner #639203 up.
Remember that just getting data to or from userland requires a copyin()/copyout() or equivalent, and a context switch between user and kernel mode-- just because a program in userspace sends data (whether via read()/write() or whatever), that doesn't mean that the system actually immediately goes into the kernel and dispatches the packet; because of that, it's quite possible to send many packets worth of data from userland and bust the cache before the system does a context-switch and runs the kernel's side of the networking code.
In high performance apps, you might even use things like sendfile() to push your data out, which means that you're using DMA between RAM and the disk controller to fetch the data into mbuf chains, and then you have the NIC driver adding these chains to the NIC's list of Tx descriptors; when ready, the NIC performs DMA to move the data in the mbufs to it for checksumming and then transmission. The CPU will be used in generating the packet's protocol headers, but the contents of the packet are never seen by the CPU and thus never reside in cache.
That doesn't mean that your point is completely wrong-- yes, doing TCP/IP on the CPU is relatively efficient and yes, it is relatively common for the packet data to still be resident in the CPU's cache, but as the load goes up, or if you have an SMP system where the CPU running the stack and the CPU running the userland program may not be the same and may not share an L2 or L3 cache, having the NIC around to offload the gruntwork of checksums matters more.
Under low traffic volumes, sure, the packets being sent out are likely to still be in cache, but as your traffic load goes up, especially with jumbo frames, that's less likely to be the case-- and obviously, incoming packets aren't going to be resident in the CPU cache. Just like interrupt mitigation, which is not needed for low-to-moderate traffic volumes, but becomes quite valuable under greater loads...
Oh, they could, only it's exceptionally rare to find a NIC which actually has on-board ROM, and even then it's more likely to be used for PXE booting then for providing a driver when Windows already ships with generic drivers for the common chipsets. However, there were NICs made for OpenFirmware-based systems (Suns, Macs) which contained basic drivers and hardware diagnostic code.
> Can you really reprioritize your packets coming from your desktop in such a way that you make a significant gain after it hits your ISP?
Doubtful. It's almost never the case that you get out-of-order packets on your LAN; that happens upstream between ISPs when routers flap routes as a result of an outage or topology/config change.
If you can't afford to wait a few seconds for reassembly or a retransmit, the game or application is better off using UDP and timestamps or a sequence # to provide ordering without the guaranteed in-order delivery provided by TCP.
Yeah, only you can get a decent NIC from Intel, Broadcom, maybe 3com, which offloads most of the IP stack into hardware *AND* get a HiFN 79xx-based SSL/RSA/DSA/AES cryptoaccelerator card from Soerkis for about $100. I guess the extra $200 or so these people want covers the heatsink and a couple of pretty LEDs.
I'd mod this product +5 snakeoil.
It's not exactly news that the Linux kernel contains GCC-specific idioms.
Do you regard this as a feature or evidence of poor portability?
Besides, if you want to talk about Linux as an entire OS, others have pointed out that Gentoo is actively working to integrate installing either a Linux kernel with a more BSD-derived userland, or installing a FreeBSD kernel with a Linux/glibc userland. In which case, the ability to compile a working kernel using icc or other compilers is entirely relevant to "Linux as OS".
The way this works, if you write a great game which I play for years at a time, I will quite happily buy an expansion pack from you, or a sequel, or perhaps other games you make if they seem decent and interesting.
Origin Systems, Bullfrog, Blizzard, LookingGlass Studios, Maxis, Sid Meier, are all developers that have been in this category for me.
Huh-- most of the games coming out now have a downloadable playable demo...? There's been dozens released over the past few months here, for example:
GameSpot demos
For what it's worth, using something like Nero DriveSpeed to slow down fast CD/DVD drives seems to make the Starforce protection much happier. X3 has absolutely beautiful graphics if you've got a decent card (DX 9/SM 2 or better) and is enjoyable but hard to play...it can also be a major time-suck, although probably nothing like WoW.
If I could convert my CD-based version to being used via Steam and get rid of Starforce, I would be overjoyed. Still, the publishers released a no-CD patch for X2 after a while, and rumor has it that a no-CD patch for X3 will be coming out towards the end of this year, so you might want to check on this in a few months...
> Can you drink H2O2? Isn't it poisonous?
Not really-- according to Wikipedia, the FDA has approved low concentrations of H2O2 as being "food grade" safe, and it can be found in mouthwash and so forth. You wouldn't want to drink a lot of it or at full strength concentration because it is a bleaching agent & oxidizer.
> As for other salts than table salt--maybe. I've had some 'low-sodium' salts that were just plain nasty.
Agreed, I'd rather use a small amount of real salt rather than a larger amount of some low-sodium replacement.
Thanks for the info. Yeah, I thought I remembered that Apple and AOL made a deal, but the more specific info you've provided is good...
There is-- XMPP, which is used by Jabber and EJabber to do, well, chat-related things like registering users, chatting between users, MUC (Multi-User Chat), etc. iChat.app works fine with Jabber, although obviously it also works with AOL chat protocol (which I gather was reverse-engineered and not a public standard, but I could be wrong). Goto www.xmpp.org...
Agreed. This seems to be a relatively straightfoward contract dispute...
As I just replied to the GP, the Open Source Definition from the OSI absolutely requires that the software MUST permit users to freely modify and redistribute the software to other people without paying a license fee, royalty, or anything else. What Microsoft offers is commonly described as "source available", and isn't identical to OSI "Open Source Software" by any stretch of the imagination.
No.
And if you fail to pay, you lose your right to use the software, no?
No.
See OSD #1, right here http://www.opensource.org/docs/definition.php:
If you're crossing a border and get stopped, maybe. If you're just walking down the street, the cops can't hold you at the station unless they arrest you...and they can't arrest you simply for not having ID...
I would guess your computer plays CoD1 well but is chugging on CoD2; run-and-gun works on some maps, but on others (especially Brecourt), rifles like the Garand, KAR, or Springfield sniper rule and short-range SMG's aren't useful.
I would agree that crappy products and tired remakes of the same old thing (hey, EA, I'm talking about you!) are killing the gaming industry. Piracy doesn't help matters, but it's not the major problem from where I stand...
Of course, both X2 and X3 were originally protected with Starforce, which is one of the most intrusive forms of copy-protection available on the market; fortunately, they can be gotten via Steam without Starforce now. And I believe Oblivion is protected by SecuROM, although I can check later.
I will agree that downloading the GalCiv 2 updates manually requires either a serial # or the email address you used to register the game. I don't think this qualifies as DRM in the same sense as Starforce or SecuROM, any more than needing to enter a password to read your email from your ISP qualifies as DRM.
Have you tried running Oblivion without the game CD in the drive?
As for GalCiv 2, they do use a serial # with the online auto-update system and to gain access to beta patches and so forth, but you can download the production-release patches manually, as far as I can tell.
The SCOTUS said that it was reasonable for a cop to require you to show ID, agreed, but nothing requires you to carry ID with you if you don't want to do so. If a cop isn't polite about it, and the circumstances are such that you want to push back (ie, if you have done something wrong, keeping your mouth shut until you see your lawyer is in your best interest, but in the case that you haven't done anything), insist that the cop provide you with name, rank, and badge #, and immediately ask to speak with that cops' lieutenant or supervisor.
Being a sysadmin nowadays has more in common with being a plumber than an engineer: it's amazing just how much crap appears when something goes wrong with them "pipes". :-)
Heh...although if you ask a chemist, potassium chloride is just as much a salt as sodium chloride is; but a doctor might want you to eat the former rather the latter if you have hypertension, high blood pressure and so forth.
As for low-hydogren water, you can get that by adding a little baking soda or similar to normal water. Another candidate might be peroxide, H2O2.
Agreed. It's very common for systems to run the fans at full speed when they first power up, and then slow down once the system boots far enough for the "smart" fan control software to take control.
It's not uncommon to need to provide about half of the fan's rated power before it will spin up when stopped, so providing an initial full-power jolt to the fans helps make sure that they are really spinning; once they are, it's OK to slow them down even below the point where they wouldn't be able to start from a standstill.