Berkeley CSUA MOTD:Entry 18585
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2025/07/08 [General] UID:1000 Activity:popular
7/8     

2000/7/5-6 [Computer/HW/Memory, Computer/HW/Drives] UID:18585 Activity:high
7/4     I want an Ultra 5.  Should I pay the SunStore price or get a used one?
        \_ Whichever way you go, check out the processor specs - some come
           with CPU's with 256k L2 cache, others with 2mb L2 cache.  There
           is a huge difference in performance between the two.
        \_ LOTS of people i know are getting ultra-5s. I'd be worried that
           they are gonna run out of them. Buy now before it's too late!
           \_ Weren't workstations with the UltraSPARC-III coming out
              or something?  I want my cheap, previous-generation Ultra 5.
        \_ I'd rather wait for the next generation Ultra5s with UltraSparcIII
           processors. The current model is a lemon, just like it was three
                \_ You'll be waiting a long time.  The US-III is going into
                   servers & higher end machines, too expensive for U5's right
                   now.
                   \_ Don't be too sure about that.
           years ago. Performance is bogged down by some cheap-ass parts that
           SUN is using, some of which are obsolete even by PC laptop standards
           You get only 4Megs of video memory. The disks on the "cheap" low-end
           models are 5400 RPM IDE disks. In addition to the slow IDE disks
           they don't have a UDMA/33 or UDMA/66 capable IDE controller.
           Their IDE controllers only support DMA mode 2 interface (capable of
           16.6MB/s data transfers). I'd like to find the engineer who designed
           \_ Unfortunately "cheap" is still $2.5K.  Any idea when the new
              ones will be out so I can get my discounted Sun?
           the Ultra5 and 10s and beat him with one of those.
                \_ you can't beat anyone with an ultra 5, they're cheaply
                   constructed and would fall apart.  Beat him with a 3/50
           \_ When are the UltraSPARC III's coming out?
                   instead.  -tom
                   \_ You can beat 'em once before it breaks and that's the
                      one that counts.
        \_ So ... new, not used, I guess?
        \_ Looks like my offer got deleted. I've got a Ultra Enterpise 2
           (256 MB Ram, 2 x 200 MHz USII, Creator 3D) that I'm not using
           and would be willing to sell/trade it to you. ----ranga
                \_ Does it play Quake 3?  How many FPS?
                \_ Can you beat the U-5 price? Then i'd be interested
                   in upgrading from the U-1 i have at home.
2025/07/08 [General] UID:1000 Activity:popular
7/8     

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2008/5/2-8 [Computer/SW/Compilers] UID:49874 Activity:low
5/2     How do I get the L1/L2 cache size and cache line size on my machine?
        Can I find this stuff out at compile time somehow?
        \_ You aren't planning on running your code on any other processors?
        \_ May I ask what it is you want to achieve ultimately? If you don't
           know your architecture and want to find out dynamically, there are
           tools that can peek/poke to give you definitive answers, plus you get
	...
2006/7/24-28 [Computer/HW/CPU] UID:43781 Activity:nil
7/24    http://csua.org/u/gin (amd.com)
        AMD releases new price list, effective today
        FYI, Conroe is launching Thursday, but it's unclear when inventory
        can satisfy demand, especially for the E6600 "sweet spot".
        \_ I want the E6600, bitch, hands off!  It's the nerd equivalent of
           "tickle-me-Elmo"
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2006/3/1-2 [Computer/HW/CPU] UID:42039 Activity:high
2/28    So this new Intel Mac Mini... didn't the old one have better
        graphics and also cost less?
        \_ I think Apple is overcharging for it, since the new model is $100
           more from the last base priced model.  As components go down in
           price, so should the unit, or the specs should go up with a flat
           price.  However, keep in mind you do get 256MB more ram ($75),
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2005/3/15-16 [Computer/HW/CPU] UID:36695 Activity:high
3/15    It's been a while since I bought a notebook. Is there any reason to
        pay extra $100 to upgrade from XP Home to XP Professional? How about
        Intel Pentium M Processor 7x5, do they run at decent speed relative
        to say, P4? And what's the difference between 1) Crystal View XGA TFT
        and 2) SXGA+ non-crystal view TFT? ok thx
        \_ You definitely want a Pentium M for the power savings.
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2001/3/20-21 [Industry/Jobs, Computer/SW/Database, Computer/Networking] UID:20861 Activity:low
3/20    Of all the dot coms and mega corporations, which one do you want
        the most with a massive layoff?
        M$:     ..
        Oracle: ...
        Intel:  .
        Cisco:  ..
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2000/4/23-24 [Computer/HW/CPU] UID:18086 Activity:insanely high
4/22  Ultra 10 440Mhz UltraSparc-IIi, 256MB DRAM, 2MB L2 Cache, 9GB disk,
        floppy,cdrom,Creator3D Graphics,keybd/mouse/etc. for $3200 brand new
        from Sun. Thinking of buying one, for personal use. What do you think?
      \_  I'm so pleased that you asked.  This machine gets 18.1 SPECint95,
          22.7 SPECfp95.  For $3500, you could get a dual
          Pentium-III/750E, which gets something like 36 SPECint95 per CPU,
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1999/11/20-22 [Computer/HW/CPU] UID:16930 Activity:moderate
11/19   Anyone have a link to a description of where the cache is on the
        celeron vs. where it is on the pentium ][? A friend of mine is
        trying to argue that the celeron's is not on the CPU, but is for the
        pentium. That's just wrong, but I want definitive proof to fuck him up.
        \_ I believe in early editions of the celeron, your friend is right.
                However, in later editions of the celeron, they added a
	...
1999/9/8 [Computer/HW/Memory] UID:16482 Activity:moderate
9/7     As a general rule, do mobile celerons outperform mobile pentium 2s?
        \_ I wouldn't think so, since the general appeal of celerons seems
           to be their ability to take massive overclocking, and in a
           laptop you probably won't be able to fit the requisite cooling.
        \_ mobile celery has 128k L2 on die, mobile p2 has 256k L2 on die,
           and are pretty much the same else where, which do u think is
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1999/8/19-20 [Computer/SW/Security] UID:16348 Activity:high
8/19    Is it possible to disrupt GPS signal? Can Russians/Chinese send
        a satellite that sends false signal?
        \-well i guess i am now the gps "expert". well, yes, of course
        the system/signal can be disrupted. whether it can be spoofed
        is a trickier question ... because that is a detection-evasion
        issue. the answer depends on what scenario you are looking at.
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1999/7/5-6 [Computer/HW/CPU] UID:16071 Activity:very high
7/4     Does anyone know how processor-intensive MP3 decoding generally is?
        My Celeron 300 is claiming to consume only 0.1% of the CPU according
        to top but my PentiumMMX 150 could barely keep up.
        \_ this doesn't answer the question, but I bet FPU, MMX, OS, and
           player all could have contributed to your results
           \_ pMMX150 256k L2 win95 winamp 3 >50% CPU vs.
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1999/4/28 [Computer/HW/Memory] UID:15712 Activity:high
4/27    Is the cache expansion port on different brands of PC motherboards
        compatible? ie, can i take a cache module from one motherboard and
        plug it into another to increase cache memory to 512k?
        \_ Absolutely yes, unless the modules are not compatible.
           \_ how many computers have you built?? there's no place to
              add the L2 cache on most MBs. Plus most pentium/I/II (non-xeon)
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1998/10/5-6 [Computer/HW/Memory, Computer/HW/CPU] UID:14734 Activity:insanely high
10/5    overclocked my Celeron 300A to 450 MHz. ~jctwu/pub/mendocino.
        \_ YouGo Girl
        \_ Hey, and I put nitrous in my Yugo!
           \_ the new Celerons are very well-engineered and -fab'd. My bet
              is that Intel had to cripple them to 66 MHz bus speed so as
              not to compete with the Pentium 2. -jctwu
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2012/1/4-2/6 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:54281 Activity:nil
1/4     I want to test how my servers behave during a disk failure and
        a RAID reconstruction so I want to simulate a hardware failure.
        How can I do this in Linux without having to physically pull
        a drive? These disks are behind a RAID card and run Linux. -ausman
        \_ According to the Linux RAID wiki, you might be able to use mdadm
           to do this with something like the following:
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2011/9/14-10/25 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:54173 Activity:nil
9/13    Thanks to Jordan, our disk server is no longer virtualized. Our long
        nightmare of poor IO performance should hopefully be over. Prepare for
        another long nightmare of poor hardware reliability!
        ...
        Just kidding! (I hope)
        In any case, this means that cooler was taken out back and shot, and
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2011/2/18-4/20 [Computer/SW/Unix] UID:54044 Activity:nil
2/18    Why does the system seem so sluggish lately?
        \_ Slow NFS is basically always the answer. --toulouse
        \_ Any truth to the rumor that soda will be decommissioned this summer?
           \_ Absolutely none. Soda might go down temporarily while disks are
              reorganized and stuff so soda doesn't suffer from such shitty
              performance nearly as much, but no, we've gotta maintain NFS and
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2009/7/28-8/6 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:53216 Activity:nil
7/28    Does it make sense to defragment disks on VMWare? My 80GB disk
        on VMWare isn't really using 80GB, it just uses what it needs.
        Will defragment do anything to it?
        \_ If you want to speed up disk operation in your VM, it's best to
           defragment the disks in your VM, then defragment the disk on your
           host machine where the VM files are.
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2009/5/11-18 [Computer/SW/Security, Computer/HW/Drives] UID:52982 Activity:nil
5/10  I have large spare disks on several machines, all on same net.
      How can I combine them into one big visible network file system?
      \_ you want either a clustered file system (eww expensive) or look into
         smoething like a distributed file system (afs, global fs).
      \_ The startup I work for makes a distributed NAS product that's free
         for the first four terabytes if you'd like to try it.
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2009/5/2-6 [Computer/HW/Laptop, Computer/HW/Drives] UID:52933 Activity:kinda low
5/2     I have a 1Gbps switch. It is connected to a SANS RAID-1 with
        two WD Green 1T that takes 1Gbps connection, as well as a laptop
        that is also 1Gbps. Online benchmarks show *sustained* transfer
        rate of about 1/2 of 1Gbps with the WD Green... cool!!! But
        in practice, I'm only getting 68Mbps (read SANS->PC file transfer),
        far below what I expected. The switch says both devices are using
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2008/12/10-16 [Computer/HW/CPU, Computer/HW/Drives] UID:52220 Activity:moderate
12/9    Another idea for the CSUA that lets you spend money and maybe get some
    cool toys. Instead of buying a beefy server (like say, a massive server
    with 20 386DX processors), buy a few cheap machines (like the ones
    mentioned below) that have good disks and work on failover / load
    balancing. A netscaler or other piece of hardware is complete overkill,
    but maybe hacking an OpenBSD box could do the trick. The idea is that
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2008/12/3-8 [Computer/HW/CPU] UID:52157 Activity:kinda low
12/3    Are any of you CSUA alums working at Intel?  Is it possible that we
        might be able to hit Intel up for donated/partially donated (reduced
        price) Core i7 Xeons when they come out?  Who would be a good person
        to contact about something like that?  We're of course willing to put
        out for them - perhaps we'll tattoo an Intel logo on toulouse if that's
        what they want :-p  -- steven
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2008/11/29-12/6 [Computer/SW/OS/FreeBSD, Computer/SW/OS/VM] UID:52129 Activity:moderate
11/29   I'm experimenting with virtualization, and as a poor college student
        I'm wondering what the best alternatives for virtualization are, and
        how best to cut my teeth on messing with non-linux platforms (or I
        guess interesting stuff on Linux would work too). Right now I've got
        FreeBSD7 running on KVM on my home computer (on a Core 2 Quad), and am
        somewhat at a loss as to how to use it. (More details: bridged
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2008/11/11-26 [Computer/Domains, Computer/HW/Drives] UID:51909 Activity:nil
11/11   I want a home nas so my laptops aren't always running out of space,
        what's a good buy?
        \_ I did a bunch of research and ended up with Dlink DNS-321. It
           is newer than DNS-323 with less problems. It doesn't have as
           much buffer as DNS-323, but if you're transfer files bigger
           than 32 megs, the sustained rate for both are equivalent. I
	...