deepblueq · HackerTrans

I just ordered parts for a gaming machine the other day, and it'll be running Linux. A surprising number of games run on it directly now, and Wine works for the ones I care about that don't. There's now absolutely nothing I want to do that requires Windows - even two years ago that wasn't at all the case.

deepblueq

13년 전discuss

I suspect that a big limitation in shift speed is often the angular mass of the crankshaft and flywheel - that energy has to go somewhere in an upshift, and doing that quickly on a typical car with wide gearing and a heavy flywheel puts an incredible amount of stress on things. Gear ratios cancel out in the real world, since with close ratios you're also shifting more often.

I would expect something like the GT-R to have much less crank/flywheel angular mass than the average car, as well as beefed up transmission components. Even so, IIRC they had to dial things back a bit because transmissions were blowing up.

DCTs get rid of the delay from matching the input and output shafts of a conventional manual. Very helpful, but not a cure-all. My car (automated manual, non-DCT) spends much more time matching the engine to the input shaft than the input to the output shaft.

deepblueq

13년 전discuss

In my experience (homeschooled from about 7 to 17), there are at least two, both explicitly Christian, but one pretty far out there and one much more moderate. To be fair, this was in Kansas and Nebraska. I get along fine with everyone in the moderate group where I live, despite objectively big differences in beliefs.

deepblueq

13년 전discuss

It probably depends on the school, but where I am it sounds most like a WF - withdraw while failing. For almost all purposes it counts as an F.

deepblueq

13년 전discuss

It looks like it has quite a few more students than it should, and he's using every excuse he can to drop people. This isn't very nice, but I can at least understand his position. Then I saw this bit:

"If you miss a class or are late to a class or section (without prior approval from the instructor) you will be considered to have dropped the class and will receive a failing grade."

It's practically a lottery for bad GPAs.

deepblueq

13년 전discuss

You forgot the best part: not having to deal with javascript.

deepblueq

13년 전discuss

There's now a box in the lower-left informing me that I can view 20 articles in a month before they'll put up a paywall. I don't recall ever seeing anything about a paywall before.

If that's actually new, Bezos sure didn't waste any time monetizing things.

deepblueq

13년 전discuss

Is this really that common an issue? It seems like anyone who's at a level where they're using rm regularly should know that that's a command you think before issuing. If they didn't, then that's exactly why you have backups.

Then, if it was in the backups, the short-term problem is solved, and maybe the experience will scare them into being a bit more careful in the future.

If it wasn't in the backups, the most likely reason would seem to me be that it was created since the last backup (not that I'd know, IANA sysadmin), in which case there wasn't a ridiculous amount of work lost - maybe the experience will make them a bit more careful in the future.

Of course, the above doesn't apply with the sort of user who thinks IT is magic and can do anything, but if they're using rm, you've got bigger problems.

Also, personal opinion, but I hate automatic trash folders - rm is supposed to delete stuff. If I want a recycle bin, I'm happy to mv to a folder I created for the purpose.

deepblueq

13년 전discuss

Last time I tried to use it, it had plenty of options, just not the particular ones I wanted.

I generally like a very minimal interface along the lines of Openbox. Right click for menu, middle click for window list, windows minimize to desktop icons, scroll wheel cycles through virtual desktops. Maximized windows don't cover a few pixels along an edge, so I always have access to the desktop. The only taskbar type stuff visible is a clock and the system tray, which on the computer I'm using right now auto-hide in the upper left. (I optimized for screen space on a netbook that didn't have any, and found I liked it anyway.)

I'm happy to spend a while wading through settings to get this set up as I like, but KDE won't let me (not that I really blame them). However, I do find it annoying when it's billed as the most customizable DE out there. In terms of the color of any particular thingamabob, absolutely. In terms of major differences in overall layout, not so much.

Xfce and LXDE have always worked flawlessly for me.

deepblueq

13년 전discuss

No rev limiter (at least not that I saw), at least one potentially peaky (high-RPM biased) timing parameter (intake valve), lots of parts that aren't built to take high RPM, and a lightweight flywheel. If it were to suddenly start working properly, it could go flying apart with lots of force in very short order.

To be fair, it would take lucky (or unlucky, depending on how you look at it) ignition timings, since with that system they're all over the place.

deepblueq

13년 전discuss

Higher standard, yes, but people will err, and not all errors deserve the same response.

deepblueq

13년 전discuss

It's depressing how short the reformed list is.

deepblueq

13년 전discuss

Why not implement said extremely strong encryption algorithm by default, before it becomes an issue?

deepblueq

13년 전discuss

It's not nearly as nice an interface, though.

deepblueq

13년 전discuss

So much of any comparison like this is about performance, but I really don't think that's as important as it used to be, and that's coming from someone who generally uses slow computers and optimizes software until they run fast.

I'm typing this on a bit of an exceptional example, a 2.6 GHz Northwood Pentium 4 with 1 GB of single-channel DDR-400 RAM. The one saving grace is that it has an SSD, but I put the swap file on the spinning drive (which is modern). It's running Linux Mint 14, Xfce edition, with a handful of minor OS-level optimizations. Firefox 21, with a fairly standard configuration, flawlessly handles a dozen or more tabs on a daily basis. It's even pretty snappy, more limited by my internet connection (1.5 Mb DSL) than by the hardware it's running on.

If this sorry excuse for a computer does that well, are the relatively minor differences in performance between browsers going to be a big deal on modern hardware? There will be edge cases, such as the people who have hundreds of tabs open at a time, but for the average user I'm having trouble envisioning that.

The things that make a difference anymore are very tough to quantify in tests like Tom's Hardware did. I will always have Firefox around because I think Mozilla actually cares about privacy. I use Presto on my phone because it's the only one I've found that renders things how I want. Many people are tied to a browser because of extensions. Standards support doesn't matter until you find a page where a browser doesn't work, and those pages will be different for different people. Browsers can be rock solid on one computer and worthlessly crashy on another.

I don't think a round of benchmarks has meant anything to me in browser selection for a long time, and when it did I did them myself so as to account for the computer they were running on. I choose by trying to use a variety of them for a while, and a winner always emerges quite quickly.

deepblueq

13년 전discuss

I've never used a Google account with mine (Nexus One, Cyanogenmod 7), and I get along just fine. The main trouble is in getting new apps, but I only use 3 that didn't come with the OS anyway, and those were all easy enough to find the APKs for.

deepblueq

13년 전discuss

Of course, that's what they'd say if they had broken it. If they hadn't, then saying this would be counterproductive.

Alternate 1: Since they're keeping encrypted stuff forever, they're somehow OK with not getting access to stuff until moore's law has had a while longer to run / more exploits have been found?

Alternate 2: They want the metadata, and if people didn't trust encryption they wouldn't even get that?

deepblueq

13년 전discuss

Couldn't a 90nm transistor switch at 8 GHz or so in this kind of application? I'm not sure of the exact numbers, but at 1/16th the area occupied, capacitance is much lower, letting it switch far faster.

Just making up some numbers, how about 30% of gates switch on every clock, and 3x the switching speed for modern gates (it's probably much higher, but I'm being conservative here):

NetBurst: (0.3 * 3) / ((0.3 * 3) + (0.7 * 6)) = 17.6% power

Bulldozer: (0.3 * 4.5) / ((0.3 * 4.5) + (0.7 * 18)) = 9.7% power

Sandy Bridge: (0.3 * 3.6) / ((0.3 * 3.6) + (0.7 * 18)) = 7.9% power

So basically, NetBurst is ridiculous, though that shouldn't be news to anyone. Bulldozer doesn't look to be doing so bad as all that, and the numbers improve if the speed is more than 3x.

(I have no idea what the real numbers are, if someone tells me I'll update this.)

deepblueq

13년 전discuss

In that example, CPU B's adder can also be clocked twice as fast. If so, it's getting twice the work done and using twice the power (ignoring cache misses and the like for the moment). If it's clocked the same as A, it's performance and power usage will be almost the same as A.

Roughly speaking, power used = transistors switching per unit time. Performance should also follow that pretty closely, depending on the efficiency of the design. At some level, you should be able to look at any instruction and find a corresponding number of transistors that need to switch for it to execute.

Deep pipelining keeps more silicon active at any given time, increasing both performance and power consumption. Because of cache misses and the like, efficiency will drop somewhat. Double the stages also doesn't quite equal double the switches per time, for various reasons. Therefore, deeper pipelines = worse performance per watt but better performance per dollar (not sure how well that'll hold in ridiculous cases like Prescott).

From what I heard, Bulldozer only has one more stage than Haswell (15 vs. 14, don't quote me on that) - not nearly enough to account for the differences we see between them.

What I'm noting is that there are many, many more factors at play than just pipelining. In the case of Bulldozer, I've been hearing quite a bit about minor parts that they found needed more work, most notably branch prediction. It sounds like they've got lots of things that will improve performance with no power or die size downsides. The number I saw bandied about for Steamroller was a 30% performance increase. I have some trouble believing it's quite that big, but if they pull it off, that will be an amazing chip for being 32nm. It hints to me that the macroscale architecture is A-OK, and they just screwed up some small but important things.

deepblueq

13년 전discuss

The problem is that clock doesn't really mean anything concrete in terms of real world performance. It's strictly a marketing thing.

For an example, what if a chip used a 10 GHz clock for distribution, and divided it down to 5 GHz everywhere it was actually used (not that I know of any reason to do such a thing besides marketing). Would it be marketable as a 10 GHz chip? The manufacturer would certainly be in hot water if enthusiasts ever found out...

Even without such contrived scenarios, CPUs get different amounts of stuff done per clock.

Something I keep seeing, even on Slashdot and Hacker News, is the idea that a CPU that has to clock higher for a given performance will use more power. It seems to me that if you've got double the clock, the likely explanation is that half the transistors are switching per clock, and power consumption should be orthogonal to clock/IPC ratio.

If anyone's got any contrary ideas on that, I'd love to hear them. All I can think of is that higher clocks would correlate with longer pipelines, but bulldozer's pipeline isn't even that long.

comments