The article comparing values uses the highest price motherboard available for AMD for a "midrange" system, then claims that the Intel-based total system is a value. If you spend $350 on a 6-core processor, then spending $140 on a high-end motherboard is reasonable. If you're spending $99 for a low end AMD quad, you're probably in the market for more reasonably priced motherboard (~$100) to go with it. The comparison is valid for the high-end AMD cpus, but not their budget stuff, as a $40 drop in price is a big deal for a system with a $100 cpu.

That being said, being able to overclock this thing is directly aimed at the enthusiast market. "I got 6 cores, w00t!" "Yeah, well I'm at 4GHZ on a quad, so there!" It definitely improves the competition between the high end AMD hexa-cores and the midrange Intel quads, and makes the Intel option more appealing to the enthusisast.

The Constellation program was supposed to re-use as many of the space shuttle components to design and build launch system to get us back to the moon. The Program of record was severely flawed in several ways-

1. $20 billion already spent since 2005 with just 1 test flight (and nothing flew on that test that would have flown operationally)
2. $3 billion a year for the next 8 years for more development before the system was ready for a moon shot
3. 2 separate launch vehicles, with completely different stages, engines and boosters, none of which came directly from the Space Shuttle.
4. The Ares 1 didn't have the lift capability to loft the Orion, and the Orion had to lose capability in an attempt to make it lighter
5. The Ares 5 was so heavy and big, that all of the launch equipment (lauch towers, crawlers, VAB, etc) had to be rebuilt, costing billions
6. Most damning was that serious safety issues exist with the crew launch vehicle ARES 1 (dead zones, Thrust Oscillation) which haven't been solved

I'm all for going back to the moon and the US creating a Heavy lift Space program under NASA's guidance. But Constellation is not the right program.

I'd be all for something along the lines of DIRECT heavy lift system to continue the US presence in manned space flight.

From paragraph 0 of the GPL v2, thanks for the link, btw.

"This License applies to any program or other work which contains a notice placed by the copyright holder saying it may be distributed under the terms of this General Public License."

"Activities other than copying, distribution and modification are not covered by this License; they are outside its scope."

So the GPL doesn't limit your rights for things outside of copying, distro and mods.

Section 4 then steps in-

"You may not copy, modify, sublicense, or distribute the Program except as expressly provided under this License.

GPL code doesn't have additional restrictions on it. Once you accept GPL as the basis for your work, you don't get to distribute the modified work with extra terms. So GPL code doesn't have restrictions on things other than copy, distro, and mods. And since it expressly doesn't restrict you in areas other than those 3, you're free to examine and study it to your heart's content.

So there ya go- have fun studying, examining reduplicating the functionality, style and format of the code in question. Just don't copy the code verbatim, or in such as a fashion as to be considered a direct copy.

A reasonable person could see the GPL as encouraging the re-use of ideas, whether by modifying the original code and redistributing it, or by re-implementing those ideas in new code.

It's not about what you need, but what the companies developing computer hardware can do to keep their customers in the hunt for new hardware. If they don't improve their products to the point where you're willing to shell out your hard-earned dollars, they won't make profit. What they can't do at the moment is make faster/more efficient CPU's/GPU's that have a good value. If they build a faster single CPU, the cost goes up. If the CPU is more efficient, the cost to build it goes up. Most people won't buy new hardware unless they 1) have no choice or 2) perceive a real value. As so many people have enough computing power for their needs, option 1 doesn't happen enough to generate real profits for a firm. That leaves option 2, and the technology is at a point where it's not possible create real value in a faster, single CPU now.

What they can do right now is build CPU's and GPUs with more cores, and then make the claim that you, the consumer, need more cores. For a graphics card, that's mostly true, as the computing environment for graphics hardware is already able to use more cores, it's just a matter of whether you already have enough graphics power for your needs. Unfortunately, it's not true that more cores are better for CPU's. Your single user desktop isn't able to effectively use even 4 cores, except in certain specialized cases, let alone the 6, 8 or 12 cores in CPU's that have been recently developed.

The original article is a call for changes to Windows to use those cores, not because you need more cores, but because you will have more cores in the new machines, whether you want them or not. And if you have them, you might as well find a way to use them.

Thanks for the info on VSRM- I wasn't familiar with that acronym, and a google search on it was unenlightening w.r.t. automobile manuals.

I would still ask Zurk where he stops quoting the manual, and starts providing information/opinion not in the manual. I suspect that the last 2 paragraphs:

are not in the manual.

It's OK if the information is a reasoned guess, speculation, or something he's tested personally or just a WAG. I would like to know how he came by it, so I can judge it's usefulness. Even if it's speculation or a WAG, it's a decent theory that can be easily tested. OK, maybe not safely tested, but testable at least.

That's very detailed information. Where are you getting this from? I see that ETCS issues are mentioned in a lawsuit against Toyota, but you're specifying that the unintended acceleration in Toyota's may be the result of a simple short across the 2 APP sensors? That's pretty big news, and if so, it's a hardware issue with a potential software workaround, as you've detailed above.

Is this something you've determined personally, or do you have a source link for it?

Was working on customer's computer last night, and I did the scan of his hard drive on my clean system and it caught a hacked atapi.sys with AVG.

"Object name";"K:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers\atapi.sys"

"Detection name";"Trojan horse Rootkit-Pakes.U"

Swapped it out with the good one from my windows XP SP3 and then did the updates on his system. No issues.

I was just lucky and did this without knowledge of the Blue screen issue.

So, to sum up:

1) yes atapi.sys can be hacked

2) didn't see any blue screens when updating 4 XP systems with known good atapi.sys.

That's just one data point, but it's useful.

The article from the "Orlando Sentinel" is just a bit slanted. Perhaps things aren't as bleak as that article and the summary suggest.

If we lose Constellation, it doesn't follow that the Manned Space Program is gone- just that we can't afford Constellation. See the Augustine Commission's report that claims that Constellation will only work if we give it another $3 billion a year. And this would have been for a program 5 years behind schedule, with no real test flights and several significant safety issues that haven't been resolved as of yet.

So what alternatives does the Obama administration have to look at? Well, as the article notes, Nasa will look at other heavy lift launch designs and come up with a plan to use one of those to replace the Ares V. As the Ares I was for Crew only, Nasa will look at the commercial launch vehicles such as the Dragon that we can use to ferry astronauts to the ISS and back. Nasa will get $200-300 million more a year to look at the new designs. This seems like a reasonable idea. We'll use commercial space services to lift the light stuff, and let NASA design the expensive, heavy lift vehicles.

The other point made in the article is that a new program won't be ready any time soon, implying that the new program would be starting from scratch. Given that Constellation wasn't going to be ready before 2017 at best, I'm not sure that we're going to lose any time we would have made up with Constellation. The other thing is that we won't be starting from scratch. Worst case, we start with the NLS review vehicle that NASA worked on back in 1993. Best case, we let those hard-working NASA engineers start with the DIRECT V3 proposal and get something up by 2015, a full 2 years before Ares would have been ready.

ntfs-3g was updated on nov 14 2009

ntfsmount was last updated in 2008

you do the math.

I've used ntfs-3g for external storage. A lot. ntfs-3g won't fix a corrupted fs or bad block, and you'll need access to the windows box to do that, but since you plan on having access to windows, that shouldn't be an issue. What's nifty is that I haven't seen a large decrease in speed for reads and writes- not as fast on linux as ext3, but 25MB/s isn't out of the question.

At the moment, I trust open source linux drivers for ntfs much more than anything that has to run on a windows box to let it see ext3.

We've had the Lincoln cluster online and offering processing time since February of 2009. 196 computing nodes (dual quad cores) and 96 Tesla units. That being said, congrats to the Aussie's for bringing a powerful new system online.

Someone later in thread asked if these GPU units would actually be useful for scientific computing. We think so. Our users and researchers here have developed implementations of both NAMD, a parallel molecular dynamics simulator and MIMD Lattice Computation (MILC) Collaboration that use the power of the GPU's. Both of these codes are freely available and widely used in the HPC community. We've had no lack of requests for time on the Lincoln cluster.

Are these GPUS for everyone? Nope. To disappoint all you gamers out there, the Tesla units have no graphics out ports. All the communication is done over the the PCIe bus. But for all of you budding scientists out there, these cards use the same freely available CUDA language that runs on all modern (8xxx and above) Nvidia hardware, so you may already have compatible GPU in your desktop now, even if it's just a single unit and slower.

One last note, while these units run really fast with single precision, they are capable of running in double precision, albeit much slower. For some problems, multiple initial runs can be done at the lower precision to localize the solution set, before doing a slower high precision run to find the final solution. This is similar to what Hollywood does when rendering animated movies- they first render a quick lo res version to see if the timing and characters are correct, then they run a hi-res version which takes longer to get a finished product. (Yes, I know, there's a lot more steps to it, but hey, this is just an analogy)

Well, the increase in numbers of cores will surely migrate down to the desktop level. Don't both Nvidia and ATI claim to provide graphics cards with hundreds of cores now? All available to the casual user.

He's got a point, though. Although the current HPC market is mature, and very sensitive to performance, the upcoming market for desktops with 100+ cores (call it hecto-scale) will care less about efficiency, and more about providing an easy way for the users to actually utilize all those cores. Even if the erlang language isn't want today's HPC users want, something like it will be useful for users on those hecto-scale desktops. I want to be able to take advantage of all those cores, but I sure don't want to write MPI or any other of today's options for massively parallel computing.

Maybe OpenCL or CUDA will spawn off some interpretive language that will be useful for us non-parallel programmers. On a system with 100+ cores, a language can afford to be less efficient for scripting or simple computing, but still find a use for all that processing power. We've certainly been willing to accept a loss of efficiency versus an ease of programming once the systems get powerful enough (look at the original assembly programming for the 8 bit home systems and compare it to say, java and an IDE).

Given that this test, while useful, didn't actually use any of the components of a man-rated Ares I, I'm not that excited.

Ares I will use a new 5 segment Solid Rocket Booster (SRB), this was the good old STS 4 segment SRB.
Ares I will use the J2-x powered upper stage, this was a weight equivalent mock-up.
Ares I will use the Orion capsule and it's engine to finish up the orbit, again, just a mock-up with right szie and weight.
Ares I flight control software not built yet, but that's ok, as the hardware it will guide wasn't here either.

You know when the car companies build a clay mock up of that new model? That's about where this Ares I-x test was. Baby steps are ok, but I was hoping for more return on investment.

So I'm annoyed that the test program hasn't progressed further, but in reality, this is rocket science, and at least they got the thing off the ground in a reasonable fashion. The problems here go a lot further than my unease that NCSA isn't that far along for the time and money they've already spent. Here's a list of issues that they still have to face in making this a viable launch system:

What's the lifting capacity of the ARES I? 25mt? That was the declared goal. 24 mt? That was a compromise when other issues crept in. 20 mt? Where the current design is, but Ares I needs 25 mt of lift for an Orion capsule with safety features and lunar capability for 4 crew, and doesn't have it.

Also, when is the Ares I scheduled to fly with the Orion capsule, even in a non-man-rated test? 2013, as NCSA originally planned? 2016 as the Augustine commission recently claimed?? Before the Space shuttle stops flying? Before the ISS is de-orbited? Be nice for NCSA to have a way to get our astronauts to the ISS without "borrowing a Soyuz."

More importantly, how much has NCSA spent on the development of the Ares I to date? 5 billion? 6 billion? They still have to finish the 5 segment SRB design and tests, the J-2x Upper stage engine and tests, the new upper stage and tests and the Orion capsule and tests before any manned flights can take place. That's got to be another $5 billion easy. All this to get the lift capacity of an Atlas V or a Delta IV heavy and a theoretical better safety rating.

Lastly, one reason the Ares I was chosen was that it was supposed to be safer for the crew than any alternative. But there's this- http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/shortsharpscience/2009/07/death-knell-for-nasas-ares-roc.html. I feel sorry for the hard-working engineers at NCSA, and I hope that the new management can get them back on track with a better design.

Wow. Can I have some of whatever it is that you're smoking?

So do you put on your telepathic helmet in order to discern what it is that FSF really wants? Or do they you write secret emails, boasting about their plan to conquer the world? Perhaps they just beam this information directly to your brain.

There's no secret agenda here. The developer writes something and copyrights it, just like everybody else. For whatever reason, the developer then says, "Here, go ahead and use this. Do what whatever you want with as long as you respect my copyright. Here's a copy of the source code as a bonus, so you can see exactly how I did it. You know what? I'm feeling so generous that you can even have a copyright exemption in order to distribute this wonderful code as you see fit. One caveat though. Since I gave you the ability to see how its done with the source code, you need to give others that same ability when you distribute my work. If that's too much to ask, then just don't hand it out."

I do admit that I like your unstated base assumption- that only GPL'd software is worth having, and that by not having access to GPL, no computer would be worth anything. Let me take a moment and savor the thought of a world were anything other than GPL protected software was simply a joke... Ahhh. refreshing. Strangely though, I can't anyone thinking that's the way world is now, nor do see anyone claiming it should be that way.

As for defending freedom, I do believe no one has ever claimed that "Liberty is free", at least, not while sober. In fact, I can easily find many claims to the contrary. Here, try these guys Freedom Monkeys, they have a bunch of quotes. I suspect that those principles apply just as strongly to software liberty as they do for personal liberty. If you want your software to be freely available and usable, then it wouldn't make sense to hand it over to those who will just take it and hide it away. The GPL prevents this. Your way doesn't. Since your goals aren't aligned with those who choose the GPL, then you can simply not use the GPL.

How did you put it?

Here, let's fix that.

See? So much better for all of us.