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Comment Re:Seems like a push from Apple (Score 1) 63

by dfn_deux (#29032849) Attached to: Intel Licenses NVIDIA SLI Technology For P55 Chips
While I basically agree with the premise of what you are saying, doesn't the SLI bus provide for having a shared memory segment between all the cards? I'm not 100% sure that is a feature of that specific interconnect; but I've always assumed it was. The difference being that if n cards with x memory would have a single (n*x) memory pool local to the processors plus the overhead of whatever locking semantics that would require. v.s. having n spearate x sized pools plus whatever work predivision overhead and/or synchronization overhead and/or lock semantic overhead.

I could be, and likely am, wrong; please correct me me if I am. I don't see any clear indication in the SLI wikipedia article and I'm not motivated enough to dig much deeper than that.

Comment Re:*gag* (Score 1) 227

by dfn_deux (#28746477) Attached to: Building a 10 TB Array For Around $1,000
I do have lots of netapp gear and access to the now.netapp.com site. The entirity of the "zfs support" that netapp provides on their site is a single document from 2007 which is basically a reformatted zfs whitepaper showing that you can zfs format iscsi luns exported from a netapp... There isn't even a single line of netapp specific information in the entire document except for the format command output on page 5 has "NETAPP-LUN-0.2-8.01GB" as the friendly name for the disk...
As for your claim that netapp is more than a SAN/NAS, I'll agree there is a bit more in the way of features, but not much. I've yet to see a netapp used for much more than CIFS/NFS/ISCSI and maybe some light http/ftp work. Clustering, failover, remote mirroring, etc are neat but they are essentially just enterprise frosting on top of the basic nas/san functionality.

Comment Re:Index funds (Score 3, Insightful) 128

by dfn_deux (#28743253) Attached to: Red Hat Is Now Part of the S&P 500
Also, being included in the S&P500 means that the increase in demand created by the associated index fund inclusion will (or should in theory) increase the per share value which has the resultant effect of increasing the over all value of the company as represented as the market capitalization. Larger market caps allow for much more leverage when negotiating financing on large business deals; not only by giving a greater perceived value but also by providing for more favorable rates on direct equity exchange deals.

P.S. I am not an economist and what I've posted above may be completely wrong... I'm working from very old memories of a 100 level econ course I took a long long long time ago.

Comment Re:*gag* (Score 1) 227

by dfn_deux (#28685857) Attached to: Building a 10 TB Array For Around $1,000

NetApp does a much better job of this even going so far as to support ZFS.

Are you pot high? In what way does NetApp support ZFS? ZFS is not a NAS protocol... ZFS on SAN luns isn't a feature that needs to be explicitly supported and is the only way I can think you'd even sort of have a NA filer with ZFS on it. Also the continuing litigation by NetApp with regards to ZFS's purported infringement on NA's WAFL file system would be a pretty good reason to not believe that "Netapp [supports] ZFS".

If I missing something exceedingly obvious please reply...

Comment Re:Hell yeah! (Score 1) 790

by dfn_deux (#28601193) Attached to: Bugatti's Latest Veyron, Most Ridiculous Car on the Planet?
The weight difference only matters for acceleration. Top speed is purely a function of max rpm, gear train reduction, aerodynamics (coefficient of drag and frontal area) and road/tire traction. Early top speed attempts with the SSC Aero hit a traction limitation near 200MPH where increased RPM only resulted in increased tire slip.
Spam

The Imminent Demise of SORBS 290

Posted by kdawson from the don't-let-it-be-bought-by-a-spammer dept.
An anonymous reader lets us know about the dire straits the SORBS anti-spam blacklist finds itself in. According to a notice posted on the top page, long-time host the University of Queensland has "decided not to honor their agreement with... SORBS and terminate the hosting contract." The post, signed "Michelle Sullivan (Previously known as Matthew Sullivan)," says that the project needs either to "find alternative hosting for a 42RU rack in the Brisbane area of Queensland Australia" or to find a buyer. Offers are solicited for the assets of SORBS as an ongoing anti-spam service — it's now handling over 30 billion DNS queries per day. An update to the post says "A number of offers have already been made, we are evaluating each on their own merits." Failing a successful resolution, SORBS will cease operations on July 20, 2009 at 12 noon Brisbane time. Such a shutdown could slow or disrupt anti-spam efforts for large numbers of mail hosts worldwide.

Comment Re:Holidy Weekend. (Score 1) 273

by dfn_deux (#27521589) Attached to: Conficker Downloads Payload
This is actually the explanation which I've read/heard is the one that Alanis Morisette herself offers with regards to the apparent incongruity between the lyrics and the title. As to whether or not she developed that response before or after writing the song is anyone's guess.

Comment Re:I inherited a $10,000 PC in 1999... (Score 1) 495

by dfn_deux (#27191043) Attached to: What Does a $16,000+ PC Look Like, Anyway?

Lack of 48-bit LBA support -- couldn't stick a drive larger than 137 gig on it, which in this day and age, just doesn't quite cut it for a desktop.

You could still do this with linux though, if its an option

Not if it's a BIOS limitation.

Linux hasn't depended on the bios for handling drive geometry for ages... Sometime before the 2.2 kernel iirc.
Data Storage

Can SSDs Be Used For Software Development? 480

Posted by timothy from the real-world-odds dept.
hackingbear writes "I'm considering buying a current-generation SSD to replace my external hard disk drive for use in my day-to-day software development, especially to boost the IDE's performance. Size is not a great concern: 120GB is enough for me. Price is not much of a concern either, as my boss will pay. I do have concerns on the limitations of write cycles as well as write speeds. As I understand, the current SSDs overcome it by heuristically placing the writes randomly. That would be good enough for regular users, but in software development, one may have to update 10-30% of the source files from Subversion and recompile the whole project, several times a day. I wonder how SSDs will do in this usage pattern. What's your experience developing on SSDs?"

Comment Re:Frog, pot, increased heat (Score 4, Informative) 575

by dfn_deux (#27043369) Attached to: Uproar Over Netflix's New Instant Viewer
There are a few "hdmi repeaters" on the market which do a decent job of stripping hdcp, however they do not advertise this feature widely for fear of having their hdcp keys revoked. The repeater functionality defined by the hdcp standard requires that repeaters decrypt and then encrypt the output stream. Some devices just skip the whole re-encryption part of the spec though. Poke around on AVS forums or similar hometheater websites for reviews which may indicate if a particular device is usable for this purpose.

Comment Re:no shit? (Score 1) 394

by dfn_deux (#27007577) Attached to: Are Windows 7 Testers Going Unheard?
There is no such thing as too much data... If they asked for feedback and they got a greater response than they expected that makes numerical analysis easier and more accurate. Trends pop and outliers become clear when you have a huge body of data.

Comment Re:compilers? (Score 2, Informative) 173

by dfn_deux (#27007117) Attached to: High Performance Linux Kernel Project — LinuxDNA

The GCC team has to work on ARM/MIPS/SPARC/whatever while ICC only need to work on x86.

ICC supports IA-32, Itanium 1 & 2, x86-64, and xscale. Not that it kicks too much of a leg from your argument, but if you are going to argue the point you should at least make it accurate. Ah yeah almost forgot to mention all the extended instruction sets too... SSE, SSE2, SSE3, MMX, MMX2, etc...

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