Microsoft Security Bulletin Advance Notification Updated: February 13, 2007 Security Bulletin Advance Notification
The next security bulletin advance notification is scheduled for March 8, 2007, and will outline information for the March 13, 2007 security bulletin release.
The average human is good for 10,000 to 1,000,000 hours. That's surprisingly accurate: 10,000 hours = Roughly 1 year, 50 days 1,000,000 hours = Roughly 114 years Most people do die in that timespan, even if it is a little broad.
Anyway, back to flash: Those numbers aren't from the same variety of flash, they might be using one that averages say 800,000 erase/write cycles, with 99.999% of devices being within 50,000 of the average. I certainly wouldn't mind knowing how long I was going to live that precisely, and I definitely wouldn't mind living 800,000 hours (I'd be 91!).
I'd expect the drive to have a normal (2-32MB) cache as well, which it will use to buffer the data before writing it to the flash, especially as flash can only write data in blocks.
I'd also hope that in heavy usage it disables writing to the flash and behaves like a normal disk to avoid wearing the flash out.
Wikipedia says that NOR flash is good for "10,000 to 1,000,000 erase cycles" and NAND flash has "ten times the endurance". Lets hope they've used the good stuff.
Who cares? I'll take a wild guess and assume people who run linux might care. I'll take an even wilder guess and assume that the poster who asked the question cares.
It's also a pain to find information on using a search engine. Both "A*" and "A-Star" return completely unrelated results in google. I used to have problems searching for C++ as well, but I'm not sure that wasn't an ie bug (all spaces in the search are submitted as +s, but the +s weren't url-encoded so google decoded the query as C-space-space)
Wow, #4 is really out of date. I mean come on, complaining about having to buy Windows 95 to have multiple user support? It's more than ten years old! You're unlikely to find a computer that still works that doesn't have a multi-user OS on it.
Also my car (also about 10 years old coincidentally) does have a general fault light. It's marked "STOP". Though it doesn't replace the oil etc lights and I have absolutely no idea why it comes on or goes off.
Partially correct there. Linux DOES have the option to run the hardware clock on local time, but you are right in saying that that means it doesn't know whether the clock has been adjusted for DST, instead it always assumes that it's correct. As I said before, this option is only provided for dual-boot compatibility with windows, which uses a local-time hardware clock.
Linux tries to use the hardware clock as UTC by default, but has the option to use a local-time hardware clock for compatibility with Windows. Linux normally would only uses the DST and timezone settings for the displayed time.
That link made me understand it. I especially like how if you put a break in the beam then the superluminal pulse disappears when it gets to the break and then re-appears on the other side, proving without a doubt that it can't be used for data transfer.
The way I see it is that the hybrid cpu+gpu chips would be about the same size and thermal output as a modern dual-core chip, and the gpu-in-a-cpu-socket would be about the same thermal power as a normal cpu for that socket, so would take the same heatsink.
So one is replacing one core of a dual-core cpu with a gpu and the other is replacing one cpu of a dual-cpu machine with a bigger gpu, with little change in power or cooling requirements in either case.
It's a cost and feasibility thing. The original FPUs were separate because they were expensive, not everyone needed them, and it was impractical to integrate them into the cpu because it would make the die too large and result in large numbers of failed chips. They became part of the chip later once the design was refined and scaled down.
The same applies to trying to integrate GPUs into the CPU, at the moment a top-end GPU is too large and expensive to integrate, and not everyone needs one. The move to having a GPU in a CPU socket should cut a lot of cost because the GPU manufacturers won't have to create an add-in-card to go with the GPU, they can just design the chip to plug straight into a standardised socket.
At the same time low-end GPUs are small and cheap enough that they are being integrated into motherboards, integrating a basic GPU into the CPU seems like a good next move, and the major cpu manufacturers seem to agree. IIRC Via's smallest boards integrate a basic cpu, northbridge and gpu into one chip? AMD are definitely planning it with their aptly named "Fusion". *Checks wikipedia* Yeah, Via's is called "CoreFusion".
Still, you are right, all-in-one cpus are the future, we're just not quite there yet.
Actually there's no reason why a computer couldn't just display the numbers using the base 10 prefix, and just use base 2 internally. But I don't think it's ever going to get changed.
It has always been that when dealing with bytes k was 1024 and when dealing with anything else it was 1000. Network speeds are in bits per second, which is not bytes, therefore it uses k=1000. Hard drives are in bytes, so k=1024.
And I refer you to a previous post I made where I mentioned having two "Maxtor 160GB" hard-disks, one which used the definition GB=1,000,000 kB (with k=1024) and the other which used the definition GB=1,000,000,000 Bytes. That's just plain being confusing on purpose. http://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=22297 8&cid=18059026
Windows XP / 2003 supports PAE (paging address extensions IIRC) which allows a 32-bit OS to access ram through a 64-bit ram controller. It can still only use 2GB for the OS and give 2GB to each process, but you'd need a 64-bit OS to get around that.
Windows seems to have a problem with the ram hole though, because this machine I'm using now has 4GB of ram, with PAE enabled, and windows can still only access 3.25GB (roughly). Memtest32 (32-bit linux-based ram test) successfully accessed the rest of the ram by testing 0.0-3.25GB and then 4.0-4.75GB (where it had been remapped to by the bios).
I've run Windows Server 2003 on a pc with two different speed cpus.
You read that right.
One of the Athlon MP 2400s in my box died, and I didn't have a spare. I did have a spare Athlon XP-m 2400, so I decided to try it. Unfortunately mobile cpus boot at their lowest speed, so my server had one 2GHz cpu and one 600MHz cpu in MP...
It worked perfectly, except for programs that tried to use cpu cycle counters to measure time. Eg. I started my Counter-Strike server and it was confused as to whether it had been on for 1 minute or 2 hours.
The X2 names are double the clock speed (in MHz) for 1MB cache parts, 200 less than that for 512kB cache parts, and 400 less for the 256kB cache part. It seems they've stopped looking at them as Intel cpu performance equivalence numbers. The single-core chips still seem to be named pretty much arbitrarily.
I was just trying to be clear. Personally I hate the GiB MiB and so on abbreviations, but until everyone uses the same definition of "MB" and "GB" it pays to be clear. Especially as the discussion was about three different definitions of GB, making the two 160 Maxtor GB come out as 152GB and 149GB using the real definition.
It's still stupid that they have two differently sized "160GB" hard-disks. It caused me more than a little trouble when I tried to enlarge my raid-array, as it was the newer drives which were smaller...
I have a five year old 20GB Maxtor that's still going strong. My newer 250s and 300s are also running well.
I can't say much for the 80s and 160s I've had though. Especially as there's two different sizes of Maxtor 160s, a 152GiB and a 149GiB, just to confuse matters (160,000,000 KiB and 160,000,000,000 Bytes).
As only the 20GB's an IDE, I suspect that it's just Maxtor's early sata drives that weren't reliable.
Except that you're talking to someone who uses the Unreal 3 Engine at work, and your point misfires.
Halo 1 required a higher spec pc than the xbox partly because of the resolution it runs at on the xbox (i.e. 640x480 interlaced) vs. the resolution that most people run pc games at, partly because it doesn't get direct access to the hardware and has to go through drivers, and partly because it has to give some cpu cycles to other programs in order to play nice with windows.
The unreal engine requires all game data to be "cooked" to run the console build, which takes quite a bit of time, which means that it's generally simpler for developers to just run the pc version (which runs on uncooked data). The whole engine is designed to be platform independent, so very little extra work is needed for a releasable pc version.
In fact the only areas I can think of that would need work is copy protection and multiplayer.
"Many people" I assume refers to Americans, because almost all UK driving lessons are in cars with manual gears. It's not something you have to take extra time to learn, after already having learnt in an automatic (like some of the replies to your post suggested) instead nearly everyone learns to drive in a manual from the start.
Slashdot Mirror
I clicked on the no new security updates planned link and I got this, which doesn't actually say anything at all:
Microsoft Security Bulletin Advance Notification
Updated: February 13, 2007
Security Bulletin Advance Notification
The next security bulletin advance notification is scheduled for March 8, 2007, and will outline information for the March 13, 2007 security bulletin release.
It should be "Higher Pay for American Math and Science Teachers". Not every Slashdot visitor is American.
The average human is good for 10,000 to 1,000,000 hours. That's surprisingly accurate:
10,000 hours = Roughly 1 year, 50 days
1,000,000 hours = Roughly 114 years
Most people do die in that timespan, even if it is a little broad.
Anyway, back to flash: Those numbers aren't from the same variety of flash, they might be using one that averages say 800,000 erase/write cycles, with 99.999% of devices being within 50,000 of the average. I certainly wouldn't mind knowing how long I was going to live that precisely, and I definitely wouldn't mind living 800,000 hours (I'd be 91!).
I'd expect the drive to have a normal (2-32MB) cache as well, which it will use to buffer the data before writing it to the flash, especially as flash can only write data in blocks.
I'd also hope that in heavy usage it disables writing to the flash and behaves like a normal disk to avoid wearing the flash out.
Wikipedia says that NOR flash is good for "10,000 to 1,000,000 erase cycles" and NAND flash has "ten times the endurance". Lets hope they've used the good stuff.
It's also a pain to find information on using a search engine. Both "A*" and "A-Star" return completely unrelated results in google. I used to have problems searching for C++ as well, but I'm not sure that wasn't an ie bug (all spaces in the search are submitted as +s, but the +s weren't url-encoded so google decoded the query as C-space-space)
Wow, #4 is really out of date. I mean come on, complaining about having to buy Windows 95 to have multiple user support? It's more than ten years old! You're unlikely to find a computer that still works that doesn't have a multi-user OS on it.
Also my car (also about 10 years old coincidentally) does have a general fault light. It's marked "STOP". Though it doesn't replace the oil etc lights and I have absolutely no idea why it comes on or goes off.
Partially correct there. Linux DOES have the option to run the hardware clock on local time, but you are right in saying that that means it doesn't know whether the clock has been adjusted for DST, instead it always assumes that it's correct. As I said before, this option is only provided for dual-boot compatibility with windows, which uses a local-time hardware clock.
Linux tries to use the hardware clock as UTC by default, but has the option to use a local-time hardware clock for compatibility with Windows. Linux normally would only uses the DST and timezone settings for the displayed time.
That link made me understand it. I especially like how if you put a break in the beam then the superluminal pulse disappears when it gets to the break and then re-appears on the other side, proving without a doubt that it can't be used for data transfer.
Your links don't work. 404 not found error.
The way I see it is that the hybrid cpu+gpu chips would be about the same size and thermal output as a modern dual-core chip, and the gpu-in-a-cpu-socket would be about the same thermal power as a normal cpu for that socket, so would take the same heatsink.
So one is replacing one core of a dual-core cpu with a gpu and the other is replacing one cpu of a dual-cpu machine with a bigger gpu, with little change in power or cooling requirements in either case.
It's a cost and feasibility thing. The original FPUs were separate because they were expensive, not everyone needed them, and it was impractical to integrate them into the cpu because it would make the die too large and result in large numbers of failed chips. They became part of the chip later once the design was refined and scaled down.
The same applies to trying to integrate GPUs into the CPU, at the moment a top-end GPU is too large and expensive to integrate, and not everyone needs one. The move to having a GPU in a CPU socket should cut a lot of cost because the GPU manufacturers won't have to create an add-in-card to go with the GPU, they can just design the chip to plug straight into a standardised socket.
At the same time low-end GPUs are small and cheap enough that they are being integrated into motherboards, integrating a basic GPU into the CPU seems like a good next move, and the major cpu manufacturers seem to agree. IIRC Via's smallest boards integrate a basic cpu, northbridge and gpu into one chip? AMD are definitely planning it with their aptly named "Fusion". *Checks wikipedia* Yeah, Via's is called "CoreFusion".
Still, you are right, all-in-one cpus are the future, we're just not quite there yet.
Actually there's no reason why a computer couldn't just display the numbers using the base 10 prefix, and just use base 2 internally. But I don't think it's ever going to get changed.
It has always been that when dealing with bytes k was 1024 and when dealing with anything else it was 1000. Network speeds are in bits per second, which is not bytes, therefore it uses k=1000. Hard drives are in bytes, so k=1024.
7 8&cid=18059026
And I refer you to a previous post I made where I mentioned having two "Maxtor 160GB" hard-disks, one which used the definition GB=1,000,000 kB (with k=1024) and the other which used the definition GB=1,000,000,000 Bytes. That's just plain being confusing on purpose.
http://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2229
Windows XP / 2003 supports PAE (paging address extensions IIRC) which allows a 32-bit OS to access ram through a 64-bit ram controller. It can still only use 2GB for the OS and give 2GB to each process, but you'd need a 64-bit OS to get around that.
Windows seems to have a problem with the ram hole though, because this machine I'm using now has 4GB of ram, with PAE enabled, and windows can still only access 3.25GB (roughly). Memtest32 (32-bit linux-based ram test) successfully accessed the rest of the ram by testing 0.0-3.25GB and then 4.0-4.75GB (where it had been remapped to by the bios).
I've run Windows Server 2003 on a pc with two different speed cpus.
You read that right.
One of the Athlon MP 2400s in my box died, and I didn't have a spare. I did have a spare Athlon XP-m 2400, so I decided to try it. Unfortunately mobile cpus boot at their lowest speed, so my server had one 2GHz cpu and one 600MHz cpu in MP...
It worked perfectly, except for programs that tried to use cpu cycle counters to measure time. Eg. I started my Counter-Strike server and it was confused as to whether it had been on for 1 minute or 2 hours.
I still have a dreamcast, and even better it still works!
Well, I have to hit it a bit first.
The X2 names are double the clock speed (in MHz) for 1MB cache parts, 200 less than that for 512kB cache parts, and 400 less for the 256kB cache part. It seems they've stopped looking at them as Intel cpu performance equivalence numbers. The single-core chips still seem to be named pretty much arbitrarily.
Complete list:
3000MHz dual-core 1MB = 3000x2 = 6000
2800MHz dual-core 1MB = 2800x2 = 5600
2800MHz dual-core 512kB = 2800x2 - 200 = 5400
2600MHz dual-core 1MB = 2600x2 = 5200
2600MHz dual-core 512kB = 2600x2 - 200 = 5000
2500MHz dual-core 512kB = 2500x2 - 200 = 4800
2400MHz dual-core 1MB = 2400x2 = 4800
2400MHz dual-core 512kB = 2400x2 - 200 = 4600
2300MHz dual-core 512kB = 2300x2 - 200 = 4400
2200MHz dual-core 1MB = 2200x2 = 4400
2200MHz dual-core 512kB = 2200x2 - 200 = 4200
2100MHz dual-core 512kB = 2100x2 - 200 = 4000
2000MHz dual-core 1MB = 2000x2 = 4000
2000MHz dual-core 512kB = 2000x2 - 200 = 3800
2000MHz dual-core 256kB = 2000x2 - 400 = 3600
1900MHz dual-core 512kB = 1900x2 - 200 = 3600
Just to be completely clear, I've only had trouble with the 80GB and 160GB maxtors, the earlier 20GB and later 250GB and 300GB are all fine.
I was just trying to be clear. Personally I hate the GiB MiB and so on abbreviations, but until everyone uses the same definition of "MB" and "GB" it pays to be clear. Especially as the discussion was about three different definitions of GB, making the two 160 Maxtor GB come out as 152GB and 149GB using the real definition.
It's still stupid that they have two differently sized "160GB" hard-disks. It caused me more than a little trouble when I tried to enlarge my raid-array, as it was the newer drives which were smaller...
I have a five year old 20GB Maxtor that's still going strong. My newer 250s and 300s are also running well.
I can't say much for the 80s and 160s I've had though. Especially as there's two different sizes of Maxtor 160s, a 152GiB and a 149GiB, just to confuse matters (160,000,000 KiB and 160,000,000,000 Bytes).
As only the 20GB's an IDE, I suspect that it's just Maxtor's early sata drives that weren't reliable.
Except that you're talking to someone who uses the Unreal 3 Engine at work, and your point misfires.
Halo 1 required a higher spec pc than the xbox partly because of the resolution it runs at on the xbox (i.e. 640x480 interlaced) vs. the resolution that most people run pc games at, partly because it doesn't get direct access to the hardware and has to go through drivers, and partly because it has to give some cpu cycles to other programs in order to play nice with windows.
The unreal engine requires all game data to be "cooked" to run the console build, which takes quite a bit of time, which means that it's generally simpler for developers to just run the pc version (which runs on uncooked data). The whole engine is designed to be platform independent, so very little extra work is needed for a releasable pc version.
In fact the only areas I can think of that would need work is copy protection and multiplayer.
"Many people" I assume refers to Americans, because almost all UK driving lessons are in cars with manual gears. It's not something you have to take extra time to learn, after already having learnt in an automatic (like some of the replies to your post suggested) instead nearly everyone learns to drive in a manual from the start.