You mean it smelt ewe?

From what (little) I know, that's exactly what data warehouse appliances like Netezza and Teradata do. They have custom built FPGAs to do the SQL execution significantly faster than what a CPU can do.

I don't know enough about sword history, but I do know that the Indian swords or "talwars" during that time period were also damascus pattern swords. I also know that they were commonly made in India at that time. However, I'm not contradicting your point per se, I'm only adding to it. Sword making in itself is a highly evolved and nuanced art form.

To my knowledge, the real tricky part was in making the steel ingots which were made exclusively in India, and were exported by Arabian traders to the rest of the world. It is worth noting that the mystery behind wootz steel has been a topic of constant research for hundreds of years and has remained a mystery until a few years ago despite constant and repeated attempts to crack the puzzle. The first microscopic analysis of steel was done on wootz steel.

How utterly loverly. I hope they are not planning to charge people for not filling gas at all.

Reminds me of the old joke. The opera was so good, they charged me 100 bucks to sit in the balcony and 200 for not attending.

Not that it matters, but just to set the record straight, "damascus" steel, just like the "Arabic" numeral system, was neither invented in Damascus nor in Arabia nor in Spain. Both the numeral system and the steel was invented in India. It should be more accurately called Wootz steel. This steel making technique technique was mastered and perfected by ironsmiths in South India around 300BC. The original technique also died with the ironsmiths over time, and has was only recently replicated with success some years ago.

References:
http://www.tms.org/pubs/journals/jom/9809/verhoeven-9809.html
http://archaeology.about.com/od/wterms/g/wootz.htm
http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/647868/wootz-steel

The first article is the most informative and comprehensive of all.

To quote from the articles linked above,
"Wootz is the name given to an exceptional grade of iron ore steel first made in southern and south central India and Sri Lanka perhaps as early as 300 BC. Wootz is formed using a crucible to melt, burn away impurities and add important ingredients, and it contains a high carbon content (nearly 1.5%).

Although iron making was part of Indian culture by as early as 1100 BC (at sites such as Hallur), the earliest evidence for the processing of iron in a crucible has been identified at the site of Kodumanal in Tamil Nadu province, and possibly also at Andhra Pradesh. The term 'wootz' appears in English in the late 18th century, and is probably derived from ukku, the word for crucible steel in the Indian language Kannada, and possibly from 'ekku' in old Tamil.

Wootz steel is the primary component of Damascan steel. Syrian blacksmiths used wootz ingots to produce extraordinary steel weaponry throughout the middle ages. "

For the record, I'm not a steel expert by any stretch, but I do love Japanese cooking knives, especially AS sandwitched core ones, and was really disappointed to learn that my first flashy "Damascus" pattern knife was only chemically etched and not a true damascus pattern.

How biased do have to be to post this? You keep saying over and over again that the connector was not announced when the project was announced. So what? The connector exists today. Apple denied them a license because they do want their connector to coexist with another connector because in their special universe, only apple products exist.

This level of arrogance is staggering. On top of it, you are not only supporting their arrogance but also trashing a bunch of guys that just wanted to make a simple combo connector. Dude that is pathetic. Apple is a company that makes some great products but are also filled with hubris, and I don't know why you can't let these two thoughts coexist in your head.

Its them damn cosmic rays, I tell ya.

The death of Moore's law, they will be.

I can't make head or tail of what you are trying to say.

For the record, I'm not trying to be snarky *at* you or asking you to be - my comment was about the OP's comment being lame - which it was.

Yes, I agree with what you are saying about AMD, and definitely, AMD offers and has always offered better value for money than Intel. That is indeed their USP and how they compete. And it is a good thing for average customers like you and me.

My point was that this is a dedicated server CPU so ECC is to be expected. In fact, a snarky comment would have been appropriate if Intel had *not* supported ECC.

As far as the price goes, I simply searched Google for 8GB ECC RAM and 8GB RAM, and verified that Newegg price which was the first search result.
If you really don't want to believe, here are the links:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820139262
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820231297

And yes, I know Intel doesn't make RAM, and neither did I claim that they did. So your comment above is quite puzzling and I don't understand what I need to re-read *carefully*. It was in response to your previous comment, "It is quite significant that the Atom CPUs support ECC memory, and Intel do make you pay for a lot for it."

I was trying to say that paying an extra 12 bucks for ECC RAM isn't much, so what's your point?

Man, you are clutching at straws, just like the OP did with his snarky comment about ECC. The title itself says that this chip is targeted towards high density servers and you compare this to AMD's desktop CPUs?? By what stretch of the imagination is ECC not relevant to a server CPU? In fact, it would have been noteworthy if Intel had cut corners and just rebranded their mobile Atom CPU and not even added ECC support.

And Newegg sells 8GB ECC RAM for 52 bucks vs 40 bucks for non-ECC RAM. Even if you put aside the fact that this is supposed to be server RAM, an extra 12 bucks sounds a "hefty premium" to you?

And yes, for the record, the comment was not just biased (which is okay since this is /.) but was pathetically lame. You at least expect a certain standard when it comes to snarkiness. I mean, OP could have pointed out that this chip only supports up to 8GB memory which is actually a significant drawback considering this is a 64bit chip.

That's a great question. You start to need a concept of transactions and rollback in more places. Databases already have this. Journaling filesystems already do this to an extent. (Btrfs actually COWs, so you theoretically could roll back to an older version also.)

I'm not saying you can do this everywhere, but I think it's a strategy that can find a home many places.