An EATX board tends to be nearly square. There's no way it would fit in to a normal case.
There are quite a few big boards around now which are ATX with extra bits sticking out from the lower part to go behind/under drive bays, where there is space to spare in a typical case.
For AMD's more modern Opteron line, there are ATX and EATX boards available, and the difference tends to be that the ATX ones don't have a full set of ram slots attached to both cpu sockets. Some have no ram slots at all for one cpu. The EATX ones, on the other hand, let you use nearly ludicrous amounts of ram.
I have an ATX dual-Athlon MP machine. It used to be more powerful than my pc, but now it's more of a 200W+ room heater.
I use an Arctic Cooling "Freezer" cooler, which is a big copper heatpipe cooler, on an AMD X2 cpu. The motherboard is set to automatically adjust the speed of the cpu fan. I had to turn off the motherboard's "slow/stopped cpu fan" warning, because the cpu ran so cool that the motherboard intentionally ran the fan below the lowest warning level.
I could probably run this without the cpu fan even on a hot day.
Multi-Threading is more efficient than Multi-Processing (as in running multiple processes, not processors) precisely because it has shared memory. Programs can be that much more efficient if they don't have to be copying large buffers around all the time. Multi-Processing's advantage is that it DOESN'T have shared memory, it's much tighter from a security, and reliability point of view.
They're different approaches for different uses. Neither is better than the other overall.
As for an automatic/manual choke, my current car has an automatic choke, and in the current cold weather it uses it. It's really nice to not have to figure out how much choke you need in order to start the car. However, if I push the accelerator down too slowly when pulling off, the choke disengages automatically too early and the car stalls. A manual choke doesn't have this problem.;) (Obviously this last paragraph isn't serious, it likely just needs adjusting a little)
You could get the GB/s bandwidth for $2500 using i-RAMs, but the 400GB storage you decided to use as an example in your earlier post would be $12,500. Of course, finding a motherboard that could take 100 i-RAMs is a tad impossible, so you'd need probably 8 rack machines, for a few thousand dollars each again. That would be with gigabit ethernet instead of Infiniband, so you'd need whatever infiniband modules cost on top of that. And then there's battery backup (a redundant interruptible power supply for a rack isn't cheap), disk backup, and cooling.
All in all you could probably make one yourself a 400GB ram storage system for a few hundred thousand dollars.
Btw, a Tera Ramsan (the 1TB (8x128GB) version) costs nigh on $1,000,000.
No, no, "Real people" don't even know that there's a difference based on context. They probably don't even know that "1GB" is a HUGE number.
Also, it isn't always "1000-based" for hard-disks, some are "1GB = 1,000,000 kB, 1kB = 1024 bytes". It's also only 1000-based when talking about the total size; filesizes, used/free space, partition size etc. are shown as 1024-based in all OSs I've used.
"Total disk size" is the only use of base-1000 measures of bytes. Disk being hard-disk, floppy-disk, cd, dvd or whatever else. Some people point out "connection speeds" (eg 1Mbps), but those are kilo/mega/giga "bits per second" not bytes.
I'm honestly surprised they haven't tried to sell disks measured in "bits" yet. Get your 2Tb hard-disk here!
While it may work that way on *nix (which strikes me as quite prone to fragmentation problems), it's not like that on Windows. On Windows, malloc and co call Windows api functions to request Virtual Memory pages. These can be anywhere in your program's address space (and using the api yourself you can request specific addresses if you want). Free and co (or you) can only return whole pages to the OS, but you're not limited to only returning the last one, you can return any.
So on Windows at least, there's quite a large minimum on memory you can return to the OS, 1 page (which is 1kB IIRC, and is why the Windows task manager reports all memory stats in kB).
Even better, IIRC, is that if you bulk-allocate pages then they must all be returned to the OS at the same time. No allocating 40 pages to load a file, and putting a small memory pool in the extra space, because you wouldn't be able to free any of the 40 pages until the single 4-byte alloc in your memory pool was gone.
It depends on the work you're doing. If you're working on a common set of data, threads are far more efficient. If there's very little in common, processes give you a bit more safety and more memory space.
In general, Windows programs tend to use threads because starting processes is expensive. On Linux, starting processes is trivial, so it gets used a lot more often. There are exceptions however, e.g. Microsoft Visual C++ 2005 spawns multiple processes to do parallel compilation.
I'd have thought that if the Wii was messing up a laptop's WiFi connection, it would also have been messing up its OWN WiFi connection. Coupled with the fact that it uses an international standard (bluetooth) for its wireless controllers, which is used by millions of other devices without problem, it seems unlikely that it's messing up WiFi signals.
The 360, on the other hand, doesn't have WiFi, and has wireless controllers that use a proprietary (I think) wireless system, on the same frequency spectrum as WiFi. There's every chance that it interferes.
The "smog", presumably, is a lack of a catalytic converter? Or less-than-optimal combustion, meaning that half-burnt fuel makes it out of the exhaust, but that can generally be tuned.
I use the kind with no filter light (where you're expected to pull on to the junction and wait for traffic to stop going the other way) all the time (though they typically only have one lane up to the junction, not two) one like that is part of my journey home from work each day.
I'd just never encountered that wierd hybrid of the "turn right when the light is green" and "pull forward and turn right when you can" that that one seemed to be.
Just being in the turn-right lane should be enough for what? For it to "intelligently" change the lights so that cars coming the other way were stopped and the green turn right light was on. Stupid intelligent junction.
Basically, it was like this: Two lanes leading up to the intersection. Left is explicitly straight-on only, right is turn-right-only (there was no left turn). One set of lights on your side of the intersection, one opposite (pretty normal). The lights had a main set and a "right" filter light. The intersection did have markings _in_ it for an area one car could wait to turn right when traffic was going both ways (which I didn't notice at first, and I'd only previously seen on intersections without a filter light). You had to be in these markings, in the intersection, for the "turn right" light to go green (no signs warning that it was an "intelligent" light either). The idea, presumably, was to not disrupt traffic going the other way if no-one was turning right.
My confusion, I suppose, was from my assumption that because there _was_ a turn-right filter light, that I couldn't enter the intersection at all until it went green, regardless of the state of the main light (which I presumed was for straight-on only). Normally it wouldn't make a difference, because it would go green by itself later, but this light was "intelligent".
The highway code is being unusually vague about filter lights. It only says that if they're green then you can turn that way (regardless of the main light), it doesn't say whether you can't when they are off but the main light is on.
In case people don't know why the parent made that post - you can't make any sort of turn on red in the UK. Red means stop, and stop is what it means. No wiggle room. I had an encounter with an odd set of lights (in the UK), that didn't seem to work like that. It was one of the normal sets with an extra "turn right allowed" green light added to the side. Apparently, at THIS intersection, it had been set up so that the green "turn right" light only comes on if someone actually enters the intersection from the turn-right lane. If they don't (e.g. because the light isn't on), then the light never comes on. Surely just being in the turn-right lane should have been enough? I can understand that its a moderately busy road, and so they tried to make the lights vaguely intelligent about when they change, but it just didn't work intuitively.
He must have been talking about Slashdot, because that Australian site is most definitely NOT in a panic over this. It's just reporting it. They don't even once mention supercomputers' usefulness in atomic explosion simulation.
Ok, so "circumstantial evidence" is more encompassing than I thought.
To the layman it means "evidence that is only tenuously connected to the crime". The example you gave was so close to direct evidence as to be considered so by the layman. But this is a law case, so we'll use the legal definition.
Still, its use in copyright infringement cases is dubious. In a traditional case (eg murder), a crime is known to have happened, and you're trying to convict someone of it. For the RIAA's copyright infringement cases, they instead have someone and are trying to prove whether or not a crime has even happened. You shouldn't be able to convict someone when there isn't any evidence of the crime itself, let alone that they committed it. That's what I was referring to.
It goes something like this: 9V battery Relay (naturally-on or 2-way variety) Button Couple of wires. Wired like this: Battery->Button->relay coil->relay switch->battery
The dangerous points are the connections either side of the coil on the relay.
Because it's a naturally-on switch, that will be a circuit. It will power the relay's coil, causing it to flip the switch, breaking the circuit. The coil is now charged, but can't discharge because the circuit is broken. If something ELSE is connected across the coil (eg a couple of spikes stuck in a person (or at least a volunteer holding wires)) it'll discharge through them instead, giving them a small shock (up to 200V, according to tests, but so few amps and so short that it's not as dangerous as the number suggests). With the coil discharged, the relay switch snaps back shut and repeats the process. Quite a few times a second.
Essentially, this design uses one easy-to-get-hold-of component as a DC-AC converter (if a crude one) AND a voltage amplifier (essentially it's an inductor).
Warning, don't connect it to a 12V school science lab power-supply. Then it really is dangerous.
Slashdot Mirror
An EATX board tends to be nearly square. There's no way it would fit in to a normal case.
There are quite a few big boards around now which are ATX with extra bits sticking out from the lower part to go behind/under drive bays, where there is space to spare in a typical case.
For AMD's more modern Opteron line, there are ATX and EATX boards available, and the difference tends to be that the ATX ones don't have a full set of ram slots attached to both cpu sockets. Some have no ram slots at all for one cpu. The EATX ones, on the other hand, let you use nearly ludicrous amounts of ram.
I have an ATX dual-Athlon MP machine. It used to be more powerful than my pc, but now it's more of a 200W+ room heater.
I use an Arctic Cooling "Freezer" cooler, which is a big copper heatpipe cooler, on an AMD X2 cpu. The motherboard is set to automatically adjust the speed of the cpu fan. I had to turn off the motherboard's "slow/stopped cpu fan" warning, because the cpu ran so cool that the motherboard intentionally ran the fan below the lowest warning level.
I could probably run this without the cpu fan even on a hot day.
Multi-Threading is more efficient than Multi-Processing (as in running multiple processes, not processors) precisely because it has shared memory. Programs can be that much more efficient if they don't have to be copying large buffers around all the time. Multi-Processing's advantage is that it DOESN'T have shared memory, it's much tighter from a security, and reliability point of view.
;)
They're different approaches for different uses. Neither is better than the other overall.
As for an automatic/manual choke, my current car has an automatic choke, and in the current cold weather it uses it. It's really nice to not have to figure out how much choke you need in order to start the car. However, if I push the accelerator down too slowly when pulling off, the choke disengages automatically too early and the car stalls. A manual choke doesn't have this problem.
(Obviously this last paragraph isn't serious, it likely just needs adjusting a little)
You could get the GB/s bandwidth for $2500 using i-RAMs, but the 400GB storage you decided to use as an example in your earlier post would be $12,500. Of course, finding a motherboard that could take 100 i-RAMs is a tad impossible, so you'd need probably 8 rack machines, for a few thousand dollars each again. That would be with gigabit ethernet instead of Infiniband, so you'd need whatever infiniband modules cost on top of that. And then there's battery backup (a redundant interruptible power supply for a rack isn't cheap), disk backup, and cooling.
All in all you could probably make one yourself a 400GB ram storage system for a few hundred thousand dollars.
Btw, a Tera Ramsan (the 1TB (8x128GB) version) costs nigh on $1,000,000.
400GB ramdisk?
Sounds a lot like a ramsan: http://www.superssd.com/products/tera-ramsan/
Can you really afford it?
32-bit Flash and Java work perfectly well on 64-bit Windows.
The problem is game DRM that uses 32-bit "device" drivers, which simply doesn't work.
No, no, "Real people" don't even know that there's a difference based on context. They probably don't even know that "1GB" is a HUGE number.
Also, it isn't always "1000-based" for hard-disks, some are "1GB = 1,000,000 kB, 1kB = 1024 bytes". It's also only 1000-based when talking about the total size; filesizes, used/free space, partition size etc. are shown as 1024-based in all OSs I've used.
"Total disk size" is the only use of base-1000 measures of bytes. Disk being hard-disk, floppy-disk, cd, dvd or whatever else. Some people point out "connection speeds" (eg 1Mbps), but those are kilo/mega/giga "bits per second" not bytes.
I'm honestly surprised they haven't tried to sell disks measured in "bits" yet. Get your 2Tb hard-disk here!
Apparently PAE support was disabled in 32-bit XP (but not server) because it required all drivers to be PAE compatible, and they just weren't.
For Windows Server, IIRC one of the requirements for MS to sign drivers is PAE compatibility.
You would take your pc to be repaired by someone who hated you enough to frame you for a serious crime?
What?
While it may work that way on *nix (which strikes me as quite prone to fragmentation problems), it's not like that on Windows. On Windows, malloc and co call Windows api functions to request Virtual Memory pages. These can be anywhere in your program's address space (and using the api yourself you can request specific addresses if you want). Free and co (or you) can only return whole pages to the OS, but you're not limited to only returning the last one, you can return any.
So on Windows at least, there's quite a large minimum on memory you can return to the OS, 1 page (which is 1kB IIRC, and is why the Windows task manager reports all memory stats in kB).
Even better, IIRC, is that if you bulk-allocate pages then they must all be returned to the OS at the same time. No allocating 40 pages to load a file, and putting a small memory pool in the extra space, because you wouldn't be able to free any of the 40 pages until the single 4-byte alloc in your memory pool was gone.
Yeah, but its not the water molecules that are the problem. It's the other molecules mixed in with the water...
I bet you can find some 4-dimensional or higher objects described as tubes.
It depends on the work you're doing. If you're working on a common set of data, threads are far more efficient. If there's very little in common, processes give you a bit more safety and more memory space.
In general, Windows programs tend to use threads because starting processes is expensive. On Linux, starting processes is trivial, so it gets used a lot more often. There are exceptions however, e.g. Microsoft Visual C++ 2005 spawns multiple processes to do parallel compilation.
I'd have thought that if the Wii was messing up a laptop's WiFi connection, it would also have been messing up its OWN WiFi connection. Coupled with the fact that it uses an international standard (bluetooth) for its wireless controllers, which is used by millions of other devices without problem, it seems unlikely that it's messing up WiFi signals.
The 360, on the other hand, doesn't have WiFi, and has wireless controllers that use a proprietary (I think) wireless system, on the same frequency spectrum as WiFi. There's every chance that it interferes.
I figured it wouldn't be an easy thing to add.
The "smog", presumably, is a lack of a catalytic converter? Or less-than-optimal combustion, meaning that half-burnt fuel makes it out of the exhaust, but that can generally be tuned.
I am a native driver ;)
I use the kind with no filter light (where you're expected to pull on to the junction and wait for traffic to stop going the other way) all the time (though they typically only have one lane up to the junction, not two) one like that is part of my journey home from work each day.
I'd just never encountered that wierd hybrid of the "turn right when the light is green" and "pull forward and turn right when you can" that that one seemed to be.
Basically, it was like this:
Two lanes leading up to the intersection. Left is explicitly straight-on only, right is turn-right-only (there was no left turn). One set of lights on your side of the intersection, one opposite (pretty normal). The lights had a main set and a "right" filter light. The intersection did have markings _in_ it for an area one car could wait to turn right when traffic was going both ways (which I didn't notice at first, and I'd only previously seen on intersections without a filter light). You had to be in these markings, in the intersection, for the "turn right" light to go green (no signs warning that it was an "intelligent" light either). The idea, presumably, was to not disrupt traffic going the other way if no-one was turning right.
My confusion, I suppose, was from my assumption that because there _was_ a turn-right filter light, that I couldn't enter the intersection at all until it went green, regardless of the state of the main light (which I presumed was for straight-on only). Normally it wouldn't make a difference, because it would go green by itself later, but this light was "intelligent".
The highway code is being unusually vague about filter lights. It only says that if they're green then you can turn that way (regardless of the main light), it doesn't say whether you can't when they are off but the main light is on.
Yeah, normally on setups like that the light comes on by itself, before or after the main one.
In this case though, it didn't come on AT ALL unless you pulled on to the junction.
It was one of the normal sets with an extra "turn right allowed" green light added to the side. Apparently, at THIS intersection, it had been set up so that the green "turn right" light only comes on if someone actually enters the intersection from the turn-right lane. If they don't (e.g. because the light isn't on), then the light never comes on. Surely just being in the turn-right lane should have been enough?
I can understand that its a moderately busy road, and so they tried to make the lights vaguely intelligent about when they change, but it just didn't work intuitively.
It's great to see "+1, Troll" as the moderation :)
Seriously though mods, this isn't a troll.
He must have been talking about Slashdot, because that Australian site is most definitely NOT in a panic over this. It's just reporting it. They don't even once mention supercomputers' usefulness in atomic explosion simulation.
Ok, so "circumstantial evidence" is more encompassing than I thought.
To the layman it means "evidence that is only tenuously connected to the crime". The example you gave was so close to direct evidence as to be considered so by the layman. But this is a law case, so we'll use the legal definition.
Still, its use in copyright infringement cases is dubious. In a traditional case (eg murder), a crime is known to have happened, and you're trying to convict someone of it. For the RIAA's copyright infringement cases, they instead have someone and are trying to prove whether or not a crime has even happened. You shouldn't be able to convict someone when there isn't any evidence of the crime itself, let alone that they committed it. That's what I was referring to.
I made a simple "tazer" at school.
It goes something like this:
9V battery
Relay (naturally-on or 2-way variety)
Button
Couple of wires.
Wired like this: Battery->Button->relay coil->relay switch->battery
The dangerous points are the connections either side of the coil on the relay.
Because it's a naturally-on switch, that will be a circuit. It will power the relay's coil, causing it to flip the switch, breaking the circuit. The coil is now charged, but can't discharge because the circuit is broken. If something ELSE is connected across the coil (eg a couple of spikes stuck in a person (or at least a volunteer holding wires)) it'll discharge through them instead, giving them a small shock (up to 200V, according to tests, but so few amps and so short that it's not as dangerous as the number suggests). With the coil discharged, the relay switch snaps back shut and repeats the process. Quite a few times a second.
Essentially, this design uses one easy-to-get-hold-of component as a DC-AC converter (if a crude one) AND a voltage amplifier (essentially it's an inductor).
Warning, don't connect it to a 12V school science lab power-supply. Then it really is dangerous.