My roomate and I have 2 audio setups. The HT is his, a Yamaha 5.1 reciever and Panasonic DVD player with a bunch of random speakers and a 150W 12" sub.
The pure music system is mine:
* Music Hall MMF-5 Turntable (yes you read that right)
* Marantz CD63 cd player
* Conrad-Johnson PV-7 Preamp (all vacuum tube circa 1986)
* McIntosh MC-240 Power Amp (all tubes, circa 1965)
* NHT bookshelf speakers
Before you say it, yes I get lots of comments about how old it is. That is of course until I warm it up and put on a clean record, at which point most peoples jaw drops at the sound.
BTW, If there are any mp3/digital junkies out there with "old" lp's they want to get rid of, drop me a line:)
Audiophiles lament the passing of vinyl, which they perceive as having a richer sound than the compact disc.
Vinyl isn't completely gone. Its just been relegated to a bit of a niche industry amongst audiophiles, collectors and DJ's. I listen to vinyl all the time (on vaccuum tube equipment to boot!) and I still on occasion buy brand new records (I buy mostly used records).
Vinyl left the mainstream because cd's were more convenient, not because they sound better.
If I can get a genuine Athlon 700 for ~$150 now, why would I want to buy a Duron? Not a winner on performance; not a winner on price; not a winner, period. Pity.
True, you can get a K75 700 real cheap now but that wont last. AFAIK they stopped making them a while ago. The reason that K7/K75's are so cheap is that its all leftover inventory being sold off to make room for Durons and T-birds. In a few months the Duron will be the only AMD chip avalable at 700MHz, at which point its price should come down alot.
Just as massive, old companies can't change, people who have paid off their mortage are unlikely to move.
Not necessarily. In some cases its easier to move if you've paid off your mortgage: You sell the house and buy the new place cash.
The point is that as long as you rent you are just throwing money away. When you own you are building value. Value that you can get back when you sell to put into the new house/car/whatever. Value that can appreciate. Value that you can borrow against (in the case of a home). Not too mention the fact that mortgage interest is tax detuctable, where rent is not in most cases.
Cool, not only is Slashdot moving to better servers, but they will be in the same town as my office rather than 600+ miles away. Now if they would just start proofing the stories for grammar and authenticity before posting all would be well in the world.
Speaking of which, did anyone else notice that that ridiculous idOS story from the other day seems to be completely gone now? Hmmm, do I sense some revisionist history editing on Slashdot?...
Not everyone will want to overclock a 440BX board to 133 MHz, but since so little hardware is actually overclocked, and even then only by 30%, you stand little chance of ruining anything. Just make sure you use a CPU and SDRAM rated for 133 MHz FSB.
The cpu and ram may handle it, but remember that on a BX board to go 133 means running the AGP at 87MHz, a speed which has been known to fry some video cards.
... This is ancient news. These guys got shut down by public safety (and one got expelled) in 93. When I was a frosh there(94), this was already old news. Why is it on slashdot now?
$15M for 276 nodes. That works out to 54,347.83 per node (including networking, storage,etc...). Not exactly cheap. However looking at their site (which has a lot of missing pages) it looks like this thing is composed of Alpha boxes connected with fiber channel and some other goodies (like a big raid array data center). Alphas and fiber are not cheap so the price might not be so far off for (their claim) 3-4 Teraflops.
The real question is this: If the same money were spent on, say, Athlon nodes connected with channel bonded fast ethernet (or even myrinet); could you get even more performance? I figure that you could build a cluster of stripped down Athlon-700's on channel bonded ether for around $2k per node including switches, etc. That would allow up to 7500 nodes (though I imagine that network bandwidth/latency would kill your performance at that scale). Hmmm...
Through ULTRA, the US knew about the planned attack on Pearl Harbour.
I think you are mistaken on this point. I'm fairly certain that the US information on Japanese war plans came from the US Navy's breaking of the Japanese diplomatic code machine, "Purple."
I leave the PIII completely out of the list because without SSE its a piece of shit. And SSE is probably not much use in dedicated mathematical computations (nor are MMX and 3DNow, but the Athlons FP unit beats the PIII even without 3DNow help)
Also, to really get good mathematical performance, you will need really efficient code. ie. Assembler or FORTRAN compiled with a well optimized commercial compiler like portland
I wonder why they chose to make him drive a stick shift as opposed to an automatic. He could have one less leg!
But wouldn't designing the robot to hande a stick shift make it platform independent? ie. You would only have one robot design that could then be fitted to practically any car regardless of transmission type (Of yourse you might need different shift arm designs for floor vs colum shifters).
Why do we need a festival to be proud of being geeks? Seems to me that there must be a lot of insecure people around here if they really feel the need to have a "geek pride" festival. (And yes, by "around here" I mean that I live near Boston)
Too me this whole thing is just another reminder that as a society we are still way too hung up on labeling people. I'll use myself as an example. I've got 7 pc's in my apartment, I work for a software company, and I like to play quake and run linux in my spare time. So does that make me a geek? But wait, my degree is in mechanical engineering. Oh no, I must be a nerd. And by the way I fix my own car and regularly go to classic car shows. We'll I guess I'm a gearhead now. But then again I also have a vacuum tube stereo and am looking into vinyl. So I must actually be an audiophile. But then again I also like to hike and backpack. We'll damn, I must be an outdoorsy hippie. Oh and I also like target shooting. Oops, looks like I'm actually a right-wing gun nut. Labels, labels labels...
You can have your "geek party," but I think I'll go to the bar down the street for a few beers with friends instead. I'd invite the whole Slashdot crowd, but I'm going to leave my "Hello I'm a geek" nametag at home so you'll never find me.
I think LINUX might take out some UNIX versions, but stuff like IRIX i don't see dieing anytime soon. LINUX may kill versions like SOLARIS and DIGITAL.
You really think so? I'd think that of all the big commercial nix'es that Solaris would be one of the survivors. IRIX is nice (I use 6.5.5 full time at work on an old Octane) but I think it will go sooner. SGI as a company is hurting and they have made some noises about a move to linux. Sun, on the other hand still cant build systems as fast as they sell (plus Solaris is avalable on x86 as well as Suns native SPARC architecture).
As for Digital UNIX, who knows? The Alpha is a phenominal processor wich I hope dowsn't go away, but DEC Unix tends to be flaky in my experience. Also there is no way to know what compaq's plans for the platform are long term...
. . . It just has to be said. I'm only 23 but I already feel ancient reading this. When I was in HS, we had a lab full of MS-Dos 286 & 386 boxes. There was one 486 box that had a soundcard and modem but you really had to fight to get access to it. The only courses offered were an intro to pc's class and a programming class in QBasic.
Point of the story is that at the time I felt that this situation was a significant improvement, as most other high schools around me still used Apple II's (or original Macs if really lucky); and had even fewer courses. So just be patient and keep fighting, linux may come eventually...
Yeah I do have the diamond:( Last vid card Im going to buy from them. I am using the detonator drivers (have to, the diamond drivers don't support openGL right). Oh well, guess I've got the excuse to blow some more cash on a GeForce now...
Wherehave you been??? I hate to burst your bubble but don't seem to fully understand what you are talking about.
. . . This became a serious speed limiter and newer processors added a back-side bus strictly for cache (one reason that the CPU modules appeared.) Back-side bus cache runs around 400 MHz plus three or so bus cycles added latency. At 800 MHz this starts to get ugly.
Sorry, wrong. Backside bus was implemented to run the cache at a speed faster than the memory bus, but in pc architectures its not fixed at 400MHz. Like every other clock rate in the system, the backside L2 is run at a multiplier of the FSB. In all P-II's, non-CuMine P-III's and Athlons up to 700MHz this is set to 1/2 the CPU multiplier (Athlon 750 is set to 2/5 of cpu because AMD's cache yields are not yet good enough to handle 375MHz). i.e. for a P-II 450 the setup would be:
memory clock= FSBx1 = 100MHz
CPU = FSBx4.5 = 450MHz
L2 cache = CPU/2 = FSBx2.25 = 225MHz
AGP = FSBx2/3 = 66MHz
PCI = FSBx1/3 = 33 MHz
For an old P-II 266, the setup would be:
memory clock= FSB = 66 MHz
CPU = FSBx4 = 266MHz
L2 cache = CPU/2 = memoryx2 = 133MHz
AGP = FSBx1 = 66MHz
PCI = FSBx1/2 = 33 MHz
Moving the L2 cache on-chip may not let it run much faster (typically CPU/2 or CPU/2.5) but it cuts the pipeline latency, and latency reduction is what cache is all about. Also, being on-chip makes it much less expensive to use wide busses so the L2 could, for instance, transfer an entire cache line to the L1 in a single cycle.
Again, wrong. Here you are actually thinking about backside bus setups. Moving the cache on-die allows it to be run at the same clock speed as the cpu, just like L1. This is the setup used in Celerons, P-III Coppermines, K6-III/K6-2+'s, and Athlon Thunderbird's.
Yeah I would have thought so as well, but that is all I get. One possible cause is that my mobo is a sd-11 and the chipset is stepping 4, no super-bypass. Do you have super bypass on? Also, that score (as I said) is with sound and music on, and I have a diamond mx300 (Aureal Vortex 2.0) which is move of a cpu hog than the sblive (especially with A3D on - I gain 5fps just by turning it off, which is no big deal because id screwed up the A3D code in Q3 anyway)
Might it be that the junk mailers are getting your fake company name from your whois entry? I get junk mail for my domain name all the time (registered thru NSI) but I'm pretty sure they just do a whois lookup on the domain and get my address off my whois handle.
Slashdot Mirror
My roomate and I have 2 audio setups. The HT is his, a Yamaha 5.1 reciever and Panasonic DVD player with a bunch of random speakers and a 150W 12" sub.
:)
The pure music system is mine:
* Music Hall MMF-5 Turntable (yes you read that right)
* Marantz CD63 cd player
* Conrad-Johnson PV-7 Preamp (all vacuum tube circa 1986)
* McIntosh MC-240 Power Amp (all tubes, circa 1965)
* NHT bookshelf speakers
Before you say it, yes I get lots of comments about how old it is. That is of course until I warm it up and put on a clean record, at which point most peoples jaw drops at the sound.
BTW, If there are any mp3/digital junkies out there with "old" lp's they want to get rid of, drop me a line
Audiophiles lament the passing of vinyl, which they perceive as having a richer sound than the compact disc.
Vinyl isn't completely gone. Its just been relegated to a bit of a niche industry amongst audiophiles, collectors and DJ's. I listen to vinyl all the time (on vaccuum tube equipment to boot!) and I still on occasion buy brand new records (I buy mostly used records). Vinyl left the mainstream because cd's were more convenient, not because they sound better.
Not to mention that on a good system, vinyl sounds even better than CD, much less MP3...
True, you can get a K75 700 real cheap now but that wont last. AFAIK they stopped making them a while ago. The reason that K7/K75's are so cheap is that its all leftover inventory being sold off to make room for Durons and T-birds. In a few months the Duron will be the only AMD chip avalable at 700MHz, at which point its price should come down alot.
Not necessarily. In some cases its easier to move if you've paid off your mortgage: You sell the house and buy the new place cash.
The point is that as long as you rent you are just throwing money away. When you own you are building value. Value that you can get back when you sell to put into the new house/car/whatever. Value that can appreciate. Value that you can borrow against (in the case of a home). Not too mention the fact that mortgage interest is tax detuctable, where rent is not in most cases.
Somebody correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm pretty sure that the ENIAC was used for calculating artillery tables, not ballistic missile paths...
... but now it happened to me. I submitted the Onion story on Wednesday but it got rejected.
Cool, not only is Slashdot moving to better servers, but they will be in the same town as my office rather than 600+ miles away. Now if they would just start proofing the stories for grammar and authenticity before posting all would be well in the world.
Speaking of which, did anyone else notice that that ridiculous idOS story from the other day seems to be completely gone now? Hmmm, do I sense some revisionist history editing on Slashdot? ...
The cpu and ram may handle it, but remember that on a BX board to go 133 means running the AGP at 87MHz, a speed which has been known to fry some video cards.
... This is ancient news. These guys got shut down by public safety (and one got expelled) in 93. When I was a frosh there(94), this was already old news. Why is it on slashdot now?
$15M for 276 nodes. That works out to 54,347.83 per node (including networking, storage,etc...). Not exactly cheap. However looking at their site (which has a lot of missing pages) it looks like this thing is composed of Alpha boxes connected with fiber channel and some other goodies (like a big raid array data center). Alphas and fiber are not cheap so the price might not be so far off for (their claim) 3-4 Teraflops.
The real question is this: If the same money were spent on, say, Athlon nodes connected with channel bonded fast ethernet (or even myrinet); could you get even more performance? I figure that you could build a cluster of stripped down Athlon-700's on channel bonded ether for around $2k per node including switches, etc. That would allow up to 7500 nodes (though I imagine that network bandwidth/latency would kill your performance at that scale). Hmmm...
Did anyone else notice that the rifle in the CNN graphic is a Russian made K alashnikov (either AK-47 or AK-74)?
800 MHz RDRAM? Where can you get that? If your thinking of PC800 RDRAM, remember that it is actually clocked at 400MHz...
I think you are mistaken on this point. I'm fairly certain that the US information on Japanese war plans came from the US Navy's breaking of the Japanese diplomatic code machine, "Purple."
I would say, in order of preference:
1. Alpha2. Ultra SPARC II
3. Athlon or G4 PPC
I leave the PIII completely out of the list because without SSE its a piece of shit. And SSE is probably not much use in dedicated mathematical computations (nor are MMX and 3DNow, but the Athlons FP unit beats the PIII even without 3DNow help)
Also, to really get good mathematical performance, you will need really efficient code. ie. Assembler or FORTRAN compiled with a well optimized commercial compiler like portland
But wouldn't designing the robot to hande a stick shift make it platform independent? ie. You would only have one robot design that could then be fitted to practically any car regardless of transmission type (Of yourse you might need different shift arm designs for floor vs colum shifters).
Why do we need a festival to be proud of being geeks? Seems to me that there must be a lot of insecure people around here if they really feel the need to have a "geek pride" festival. (And yes, by "around here" I mean that I live near Boston)
Too me this whole thing is just another reminder that as a society we are still way too hung up on labeling people. I'll use myself as an example. I've got 7 pc's in my apartment, I work for a software company, and I like to play quake and run linux in my spare time. So does that make me a geek? But wait, my degree is in mechanical engineering. Oh no, I must be a nerd. And by the way I fix my own car and regularly go to classic car shows. We'll I guess I'm a gearhead now. But then again I also have a vacuum tube stereo and am looking into vinyl. So I must actually be an audiophile. But then again I also like to hike and backpack. We'll damn, I must be an outdoorsy hippie. Oh and I also like target shooting. Oops, looks like I'm actually a right-wing gun nut. Labels, labels labels...
You can have your "geek party," but I think I'll go to the bar down the street for a few beers with friends instead. I'd invite the whole Slashdot crowd, but I'm going to leave my "Hello I'm a geek" nametag at home so you'll never find me.
Now I'm not reccomending spam here, but if anyone wants to voice their opinion directly to wave, try one of these:
From www.waveamerica.com/contactus/co ntactus.htm
Interesting that the Wired article claims that the machine has 64 nodes but that UNM press release says 256. I wonder what else Wired got wrong...
You really think so? I'd think that of all the big commercial nix'es that Solaris would be one of the survivors. IRIX is nice (I use 6.5.5 full time at work on an old Octane) but I think it will go sooner. SGI as a company is hurting and they have made some noises about a move to linux. Sun, on the other hand still cant build systems as fast as they sell (plus Solaris is avalable on x86 as well as Suns native SPARC architecture).
As for Digital UNIX, who knows? The Alpha is a phenominal processor wich I hope dowsn't go away, but DEC Unix tends to be flaky in my experience. Also there is no way to know what compaq's plans for the platform are long term...
. . . It just has to be said. I'm only 23 but I already feel ancient reading this. When I was in HS, we had a lab full of MS-Dos 286 & 386 boxes. There was one 486 box that had a soundcard and modem but you really had to fight to get access to it. The only courses offered were an intro to pc's class and a programming class in QBasic.
Point of the story is that at the time I felt that this situation was a significant improvement, as most other high schools around me still used Apple II's (or original Macs if really lucky); and had even fewer courses. So just be patient and keep fighting, linux may come eventually...
Yeah I do have the diamond :( Last vid card Im going to buy from them. I am using the detonator drivers (have to, the diamond drivers don't support openGL right). Oh well, guess I've got the excuse to blow some more cash on a GeForce now...
Wherehave you been??? I hate to burst your bubble but don't seem to fully understand what you are talking about.
. . . This became a serious speed limiter and newer processors added a back-side bus strictly for cache (one reason that the CPU modules appeared.) Back-side bus cache runs around 400 MHz plus three or so bus cycles added latency. At 800 MHz this starts to get ugly.Sorry, wrong. Backside bus was implemented to run the cache at a speed faster than the memory bus, but in pc architectures its not fixed at 400MHz. Like every other clock rate in the system, the backside L2 is run at a multiplier of the FSB. In all P-II's, non-CuMine P-III's and Athlons up to 700MHz this is set to 1/2 the CPU multiplier (Athlon 750 is set to 2/5 of cpu because AMD's cache yields are not yet good enough to handle 375MHz). i.e. for a P-II 450 the setup would be:
For an old P-II 266, the setup would be:
- memory clock= FSB = 66 MHz
- CPU = FSBx4 = 266MHz
- L2 cache = CPU/2 = memoryx2 = 133MHz
- AGP = FSBx1 = 66MHz
- PCI = FSBx1/2 = 33 MHz
Moving the L2 cache on-chip may not let it run much faster (typically CPU/2 or CPU/2.5) but it cuts the pipeline latency, and latency reduction is what cache is all about. Also, being on-chip makes it much less expensive to use wide busses so the L2 could, for instance, transfer an entire cache line to the L1 in a single cycle.Again, wrong. Here you are actually thinking about backside bus setups. Moving the cache on-die allows it to be run at the same clock speed as the cpu, just like L1. This is the setup used in Celerons, P-III Coppermines, K6-III/K6-2+'s, and Athlon Thunderbird's.
Yeah I would have thought so as well, but that is all I get. One possible cause is that my mobo is a sd-11 and the chipset is stepping 4, no super-bypass. Do you have super bypass on? Also, that score (as I said) is with sound and music on, and I have a diamond mx300 (Aureal Vortex 2.0) which is move of a cpu hog than the sblive (especially with A3D on - I gain 5fps just by turning it off, which is no big deal because id screwed up the A3D code in Q3 anyway)
Might it be that the junk mailers are getting your fake company name from your whois entry? I get junk mail for my domain name all the time (registered thru NSI) but I'm pretty sure they just do a whois lookup on the domain and get my address off my whois handle.