[Nottingham] [Talk] *TODAY* Thurs 03/12/2009 Moblin, Netbooks, Files & RAID

[Martin]

Martin wrote:
>>> Moblin, Netbooks, Files & RAID
> 
> 'twas a good and select evening and the Nav seems to be recovering also :-)
> 
> Thanks to Pete for the Christmas crisps and pies. Good to see Jim from
> The Caves, and also a good welcome to James.
> 
> Various bits 'n' pieces were discussed and there was a brief Acer Aspire
> One head-head to contest the the very poor speed of the 8GByte SSDs in
> them. Judicious use of tmpfs on an upgraded memory of 1.5GByte, and
> possibly help also from the partition alignment to the 1MByte erase
> blocks, did seem to show a speedup over a default install.
> 
> We played a little with Moblin and then KDE4...
> 
> So what has improved for the Human - Computer Interface over the last
> two decades? Our conclusion was that apart for the eye-candy
> improvements afforded by the phenomenally faster hardware of recent
> years, there has been *NO IMPROVEMENT* ... Nothing. Zilch. We may as
> well still be languishing with a Windows95 desktop!
> 
> 
> And when might HURD arise? And might that be helped by the recent
> announcements of CPU chips boasting many tens of CPU cores for massively
> parallel (and "cloud") computing in 2010 and thereafter?

Two other bits:

There are claims of 3 hours battery life for the Acer Aspire One with
WinXP-Home. I get about 2 hours with Mandriva 2010 Linux. Better power
management with WinXP?...

And for comparing transistor counts to Human neuron counts, see:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transistor_count

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neurons#Neurons_in_the_brain

That lists about 1.5 billion transistors for current CPUs and GPUs, with
the latest CPU, GPU and FPGA chips soon to reach 2.5 billion
transistors. Likely about the same again for RAM chips, except that you
have more of those in a system! (Anyone with transistor counts for RAM
chips?)

For the wet logic stuff:

"The number of neurons in the brain varies dramatically from species to
species. One estimate puts the human brain at about 100 billion (10^11)
neurons and 100 trillion (10^14) synapses (connections). ... By
contrast, the nematode worm Caenorhabditis elegans has just 302 neurons."

... And beer drinkers I guess will count somewhere in between.

That does suggest that present day supercomputers have more transistors
than a Human has neurons.

Perhaps we just need to get HURD working!


> Next meet up proposed (and the last for this year) is for Tuesday
> 15/12/09 for a Big Wok session.
> 
> Any takers?

One so far (Jim), likely two others also. Any more?


Cheers All,

And Merry Christmas!

Martin


-- 
----------------
Martin Lomas
martin at ml1.co.uk
----------------