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I'm surprised DNA Computing doesn't seem to be mentioned anywhere in the discussion. It's still in its infancy, but I think it shows great potential, especially for parallelizable computations.

"Update: Some posters in the discussion thread point out this report may not be valid. One said that booting from a 2K CD did ask them for an administrator password and didnt let them in without it. Unfortunately, I dont have XP installed here to test it out before I posted."

Either way I don't find this to be terribly upsetting because a) root access can be gained in a similar manner with Linux and b) if one is worried about security, they shouldn't being using Windows to begin with.

I know there's no way I'm the first to think this, but does anyone else think that this could become the next goatse pic?

...And the one pointing to the article is labelled "arstechnica". This is confusing.

I propose a standard system whereby the name of the article be a very long link, such as what I just made, so that it can be easily identified, and that it include the word "article". I propose doing away with the word "here" as a link, because it just makes you scan the rest of the sentence for the context.

Finally, I propose that homepages be included in parentheses, such as those of Arstechnica (home) -- there are few times that we are interested in the homepage of the company where the article is to be found.

Thank you.

...And the one pointing to the article is labelled "arstechnica". This is confusing.

I propose a standard system whereby the name of the article be a very long link, such as what I just made, so that it can be easily identified, and that it include the word "article". I propose doing away with the word "here" as a link, because it just makes you scan the rest of the sentence for the context.

Finally, I propose that homepages be included in parentheses, such as those of Arstechnica (home) -- there are few times that we are interested in the homepage of the company where the article is to be found.

Thank you.

given the G4's that sit inside the box are easily out-performed by Intel/AMD these days.
G4s still have one of the best vector units in town (far better than MMX/SSE, see Ars Technica for more details), and the kind of stuff Pixar is going to be using them for (ray tracing I assume) is perfectly suited to opperation on an AltiVec unit. I wouldn't be surprised if, with properly optimised code, a G4 couldn't replace 2-3 Xeons in this particular application. (No, I'm not saying that a 1GHz G4 Mac is faster than a 3THz P7 before I get any flames)

You might recall this notebook from a while back. Now, if your make an honest assessment of the features, you may find that at ~$1400 after rebate, this notebook, from a price/performance point of view, might compare favorably with these. Now I'm not talking about originality or color schemes. I'm talking about what you get in terms of functionality for the money that you paid.

Now, the BestBuy notebook has a significant weak point in terms of battery performance. The Pentium-4M processor that it uses consumes more power than Motorola G4s found on PowerBooks but runs somewhat faster. Depending what you want to do, you can still, therefore, make a good case for a PowerBook.

However, you take the Pentium-4M, and replace it with a chip that's this much faster, with as good battery performance as the G4 (notice the fpu performance at 600 MHz, for example), and the remaining advantage of the PowerBooks evaporates.

People may still buy PowerBooks because of style and OS X, but in terms of overall functionality, a Centino notebook will blow away a PowerBook. I'm looking forward to getting my widescreen one six months down the line (and no, I'm not affiliated in anyway with any of the companies involved, I've just been looking into purchasing a notebook lately since lots of my colleagues have gotten PowerBooks).

PowerBooks are GREAT devices, but the Wintel world is fast over taking them due to their reliance on Motorola's G4 processor. Let's hope that Apple gets one of those other processors into their product line real soon.

You mean aside from AMD's announcement of the "Barton" rev (Athlon 3000+, 3100+, 3200+)?

I suppose the announcement of Opteron's April release doesn't count as "Athlon news", in this context.

TOKYO, March 2, 1999 -- Sony Computer Entertainment Inc. is pleased to announce the co-development with Toshiba Corp. of the 128 bit CPU ("EE", or "Emotion Engine ") for use in the next generation of PlayStation . In order to process massive multi-media information at the fastest possible speeds, data bus, cache memory as well as all registers are 128 bits; this is integrated on a single chip LSI together with the state of the art 0.18 micron process technology. The development of a full 128-bit CPU is the first of its kind in the world.

not that i don't like arstechnica - but you're getting a bit spammy. anyway, try a different news source, like this.

i know you're too busy being productive to play games on your mac, but according to these results using real world productivity apps (photoshop and after effects), you're going to be waiting twice as long for your mac to finish the job (and paying $600 more to boot).

apple makes some great software and some great looking machines, but they're hamstrung by motorola's inability to compete with intel and amd on research, development, and manufacturing. until they find themselves a new core cpu architecture or motorola somehow figures out how to build a cpu that can clock into the stratosphere apple will never be able to produce a machine that can run as fast as a wintel (or lintel :) system.

and apple was right, megahertz don't matter - but gigahertz do...

"My 4 THz Intel Pentium IIIVIXXX is father then your 16 KHz G101"

For those of you who have not read ALL of the CPU articles at ArsTechnica. Go there now and do so. Before posting any of your inane babble about clock speed and processor power.

It IS true that Motorola has fallen behind Intel - sort of.

There are other advantages to hardware other then Intel based systems.

Since this is an Apple thread I'll focus there - One of the most note worthy (My opinion) Is apple's System controller.

Go READ the articles at ArsTechnica!

Rather than re-writing I'll simply cut & paste.

The PCI bus is what really impressed me.

Direct PCI bus: In another example of superior architecture, the Power Mac G4 optimizes PCI performance by connecting the PCI bus directly to the system controller. In a typical PC architecture, PCI devices connect to the I/O controller through a bridge, a bottleneck in the data path where all connected PCI devices are slowed down to avoid overloading the system controller. Going through this bridge constrains PCI throughput to 133Mbps (the bus speed on Pentium 4 systems), even with otherwise fast PCI devices. This slowdown of data to and from PCI devices results in greater overall system latency. The Power Mac G4, on the other hand, features a direct 266-MBps bus to the PCI slots to guarantee high throughput and low congestion ? in effect, lowering latency. The Power Mac G4 also supports write combining, which allows write instructions to be grouped into one large instruction, further increasing data throughput.

Then Apple oficially slams PC architecture.

On the Power Mac G4, FireWire, Gigabit Ethernet and even the ATA/100 bus are built into the system and integrated directly into the system controller. (The ATA/66 bus has its own controller.) This dedicated connection reduces PCI congestion and guarantees low latency, resulting in optimal FireWire, Ethernet and hard drive performance. And as a side benefit, it also keeps the computer?s PCI slots free for your specialized audio and video cards instead of using them to provide basic technologies.

I got this info here.

Go READ the articles at ArsTechnica!

Apple is not the end all - be all of systems. Two of the greated systems are made by DEC & H/P. The UltraSparc kicks the crap out of anything Motorola & Intel have to offer.

And let's not forget the Alpha. The Pentium - Pentium III architectures were based on technology stolen from DEC. Technology that Intel is still paying for today.

It basically falls down to system preference. Mac users DO NOT CARE if you can build a PC for $400. Mac users DO NOT CARE if only a few of the best selling game titles are ported to the system.

Having more game titles available is a Good Thing - naturally -but I find myself being... PRODUCTIVE instead of having my time eaten away by games - Linux users also what I'm talking about - unless they've downloaded BZFlag or Crack Attack.

Go READ the articles at ArsTechnica!

"My 4 THz Intel Pentium IIIVIXXX is father then your 16 KHz G101"

For those of you who have not read ALL of the CPU articles at ArsTechnica. Go there now and do so. Before posting any of your inane babble about clock speed and processor power.

It IS true that Motorola has fallen behind Intel - sort of.

There are other advantages to hardware other then Intel based systems.

Since this is an Apple thread I'll focus there - One of the most note worthy (My opinion) Is apple's System controller.

Go READ the articles at ArsTechnica!

Rather than re-writing I'll simply cut & paste.

The PCI bus is what really impressed me.

Direct PCI bus: In another example of superior architecture, the Power Mac G4 optimizes PCI performance by connecting the PCI bus directly to the system controller. In a typical PC architecture, PCI devices connect to the I/O controller through a bridge, a bottleneck in the data path where all connected PCI devices are slowed down to avoid overloading the system controller. Going through this bridge constrains PCI throughput to 133Mbps (the bus speed on Pentium 4 systems), even with otherwise fast PCI devices. This slowdown of data to and from PCI devices results in greater overall system latency. The Power Mac G4, on the other hand, features a direct 266-MBps bus to the PCI slots to guarantee high throughput and low congestion ? in effect, lowering latency. The Power Mac G4 also supports write combining, which allows write instructions to be grouped into one large instruction, further increasing data throughput.

Then Apple oficially slams PC architecture.

On the Power Mac G4, FireWire, Gigabit Ethernet and even the ATA/100 bus are built into the system and integrated directly into the system controller. (The ATA/66 bus has its own controller.) This dedicated connection reduces PCI congestion and guarantees low latency, resulting in optimal FireWire, Ethernet and hard drive performance. And as a side benefit, it also keeps the computer?s PCI slots free for your specialized audio and video cards instead of using them to provide basic technologies.

I got this info here.

Go READ the articles at ArsTechnica!

Apple is not the end all - be all of systems. Two of the greated systems are made by DEC & H/P. The UltraSparc kicks the crap out of anything Motorola & Intel have to offer.

And let's not forget the Alpha. The Pentium - Pentium III architectures were based on technology stolen from DEC. Technology that Intel is still paying for today.

It basically falls down to system preference. Mac users DO NOT CARE if you can build a PC for $400. Mac users DO NOT CARE if only a few of the best selling game titles are ported to the system.

Having more game titles available is a Good Thing - naturally -but I find myself being... PRODUCTIVE instead of having my time eaten away by games - Linux users also what I'm talking about - unless they've downloaded BZFlag or Crack Attack.

Go READ the articles at ArsTechnica!

"My 4 THz Intel Pentium IIIVIXXX is father then your 16 KHz G101"

For those of you who have not read ALL of the CPU articles at ArsTechnica. Go there now and do so. Before posting any of your inane babble about clock speed and processor power.

It IS true that Motorola has fallen behind Intel - sort of.

There are other advantages to hardware other then Intel based systems.

Since this is an Apple thread I'll focus there - One of the most note worthy (My opinion) Is apple's System controller.

Go READ the articles at ArsTechnica!

Rather than re-writing I'll simply cut & paste.

The PCI bus is what really impressed me.

Direct PCI bus: In another example of superior architecture, the Power Mac G4 optimizes PCI performance by connecting the PCI bus directly to the system controller. In a typical PC architecture, PCI devices connect to the I/O controller through a bridge, a bottleneck in the data path where all connected PCI devices are slowed down to avoid overloading the system controller. Going through this bridge constrains PCI throughput to 133Mbps (the bus speed on Pentium 4 systems), even with otherwise fast PCI devices. This slowdown of data to and from PCI devices results in greater overall system latency. The Power Mac G4, on the other hand, features a direct 266-MBps bus to the PCI slots to guarantee high throughput and low congestion ? in effect, lowering latency. The Power Mac G4 also supports write combining, which allows write instructions to be grouped into one large instruction, further increasing data throughput.

Then Apple oficially slams PC architecture.

On the Power Mac G4, FireWire, Gigabit Ethernet and even the ATA/100 bus are built into the system and integrated directly into the system controller. (The ATA/66 bus has its own controller.) This dedicated connection reduces PCI congestion and guarantees low latency, resulting in optimal FireWire, Ethernet and hard drive performance. And as a side benefit, it also keeps the computer?s PCI slots free for your specialized audio and video cards instead of using them to provide basic technologies.

I got this info here.

Go READ the articles at ArsTechnica!

Apple is not the end all - be all of systems. Two of the greated systems are made by DEC & H/P. The UltraSparc kicks the crap out of anything Motorola & Intel have to offer.

And let's not forget the Alpha. The Pentium - Pentium III architectures were based on technology stolen from DEC. Technology that Intel is still paying for today.

It basically falls down to system preference. Mac users DO NOT CARE if you can build a PC for $400. Mac users DO NOT CARE if only a few of the best selling game titles are ported to the system.

Having more game titles available is a Good Thing - naturally -but I find myself being... PRODUCTIVE instead of having my time eaten away by games - Linux users also what I'm talking about - unless they've downloaded BZFlag or Crack Attack.

Go READ the articles at ArsTechnica!

"My 4 THz Intel Pentium IIIVIXXX is father then your 16 KHz G101"

For those of you who have not read ALL of the CPU articles at ArsTechnica. Go there now and do so. Before posting any of your inane babble about clock speed and processor power.

It IS true that Motorola has fallen behind Intel - sort of.

There are other advantages to hardware other then Intel based systems.

Since this is an Apple thread I'll focus there - One of the most note worthy (My opinion) Is apple's System controller.

Go READ the articles at ArsTechnica!

Rather than re-writing I'll simply cut & paste.

The PCI bus is what really impressed me.

Direct PCI bus: In another example of superior architecture, the Power Mac G4 optimizes PCI performance by connecting the PCI bus directly to the system controller. In a typical PC architecture, PCI devices connect to the I/O controller through a bridge, a bottleneck in the data path where all connected PCI devices are slowed down to avoid overloading the system controller. Going through this bridge constrains PCI throughput to 133Mbps (the bus speed on Pentium 4 systems), even with otherwise fast PCI devices. This slowdown of data to and from PCI devices results in greater overall system latency. The Power Mac G4, on the other hand, features a direct 266-MBps bus to the PCI slots to guarantee high throughput and low congestion ? in effect, lowering latency. The Power Mac G4 also supports write combining, which allows write instructions to be grouped into one large instruction, further increasing data throughput.

Then Apple oficially slams PC architecture.

On the Power Mac G4, FireWire, Gigabit Ethernet and even the ATA/100 bus are built into the system and integrated directly into the system controller. (The ATA/66 bus has its own controller.) This dedicated connection reduces PCI congestion and guarantees low latency, resulting in optimal FireWire, Ethernet and hard drive performance. And as a side benefit, it also keeps the computer?s PCI slots free for your specialized audio and video cards instead of using them to provide basic technologies.

I got this info here.

Go READ the articles at ArsTechnica!

Apple is not the end all - be all of systems. Two of the greated systems are made by DEC & H/P. The UltraSparc kicks the crap out of anything Motorola & Intel have to offer.

And let's not forget the Alpha. The Pentium - Pentium III architectures were based on technology stolen from DEC. Technology that Intel is still paying for today.

It basically falls down to system preference. Mac users DO NOT CARE if you can build a PC for $400. Mac users DO NOT CARE if only a few of the best selling game titles are ported to the system.

Having more game titles available is a Good Thing - naturally -but I find myself being... PRODUCTIVE instead of having my time eaten away by games - Linux users also what I'm talking about - unless they've downloaded BZFlag or Crack Attack.

Go READ the articles at ArsTechnica!

Can be found at http://arstechnica.com/reviews/02q2/qualcomm/1xEV- 1.html .

DNA code also has high redundancy, which allows error-correcting transcription and other hacks ( see Parity Code And DNA or DNA's Error Detecting Code)

In both cases factors yielding robust DNA code are found to indicate bad digital computer code.

flip

(background: Ars Technica's Computational DNA primer

For a good analysis, read this article over at Ars. In particular, it does point out that the likely cause of slowdowns in some apps is down to cache contention. Near the end, it also says:

With the wrong mix of code, hyper-threading decreases performance, just like it can increase performance with the right mix of code

Finally, you don't need multithreaded apps to take advantage of SMP/HT; if you're running a cpu intensive application on one CPU, the other is free for interactive stuff. You do, however, get much more benefit in a multi-threaded application.

Also check out AMD Rumors which covered the topic pretty well in 1999. Also Ars Technica carried a good story about it in 2000.

Really great CPU. I gather the fact that Hammer was more capable and that the best performance they could manage out of a 333MHz TwoStone running in Intel mode was equivalent to a 266MHz Pentium II, sank the chip.

IBM's new chips (Power4) actually have two CPUs on one die. I believe the version that Apple is rumored to be considering (PPC 970) will be a single-CPU version, though.

The pretty detailed (for me anyway) article on Ars Technica concludes that performance on a HyperThreaded CPU will be very much dependant on the application mix. While research like this is useful it will probably always be a try and see scenario.

Riiiiight.

As noted above, Honda have had both the Insight and Civic on sale for quite a while. There's a good review of the hybrid Civic on arstechnica.

I see many "What is .NET" posts here. The best single whitepaper I've seen on .NET is by the Ars Technica folks:

Microsoft .NET at Ars Technica

cheers.

Because they renamed the product? I wish everyone who pretended to know anything about .NET would read the excellent article over at Ars Technica. At the same time, maybe the Microsoft marketing machine should read it as well. I'm sick of hearing people say that .NET is "software as a service", "Hailstorm", or the server technology. Other than having the classes loaded, the server is as much .NET as Solaris is Java. If Microsoft can get off of the buzzwords, .NET developers will have be able to establish their identity - currently, ".NET programmer" is about as specific as "GNU programmer".

Hey! He's a .NET/GNU programmer, he can do _____________ (insert one of the many technologies associated with .NET/GNU here)

A thought occurs re .NET: I understand from an informative Ars Technica article that applications targeted to .NET are compiled to an intermediary bytecode format, a la Java. Now, I've heard from many sources that compiled Java class bytecode can be easily decompiled to source. Is this not fundamentally the case with any bytecode mechanism?

Surely this will be a big concern for Microsoft. Ignoring their anti-OSS FUD, fact is most companies considering .NET probably don't want a sixteen year old kid publishing their top secret eternal life algorithm on the net. How are they (by which I mean Microsoft) going to stop this happening?

1. in the web development circles, it's used for next-generation tools and services for writing web applications. for example, ASP.NET, SOAP RPC, and various other web- and XML-based services
   
   
2. in the web customer services domain, it was going to be a secure roaming account scheme, a.k.a. the Passport .NET
   
   
3. most interestingly, in the windows application development domain, .NET is also used to describe the .NET Framework, a new set of libraries that's meant to slowly replace the standard Win32/64 libraries (see articles at ars technica for really detailed info). the framework is basically a cleaned-up, garbage-collected, language-agnostic version of Win32. it's great. but hardly anyone thinks about it when they hear .NET-this or .NET-that. :)
   

check out The Ars article on .NET

It would be nice to have a link to the actual article instead of the frontpage of the site. Granted, the article is currently on the frontpage but won't be for long. Here is a permalink to the actual article.

I want is a little Cappuccino PC with WiFi(54MBps, please), a TV-OUT(RCA preferably) and something to hook it up to my speakers(Again, RCA preferably). Oh, and NFS support. Then I want to use a pre-programmed (or program one myself) interface, hook it up to the X10 remote(the silver bullet I think they call it, one of their nice ones, err, their only nice one), and be done with it.

That way, I can watch MPEGs, AVI, and whatever else Mplayer supports. I can listen to my MP3's, My OGG's, and whatever else. I can get on my computer and add favorite streams to the box. That way I can listen to Absolute Pitch downstairs, every Sunday. That way I can listen to other streams. I need Real Audio on it so I can listen to NPR every now and then. Hell, set up Hourly News as a favorite button or something. That'd be nice.

That's all I really want for Christmas.

Yellowstone

The PS3 Cell Processor

In any case, there are two things that you worry about on interprocessor communication: speed and latency. Obviously, the dual-gig-E + triple Firewire is going to be faster than a single Myrinet card in terms of bandwidth (though I'd be surprised if a Mac or PC could come even close to driving all that gear at full speed), but it may not be in terms of latency. Depending on the application, this can have a huge impact on performance.

320k only beats 6 million if it's good enough to get the job you need done at the speed you need it done at. For some jobs, the $320k machine will work fine. For other jobs it won't. This is why there's still a market for big-iron Cray's, SGI's, Sun's, etc.

As for large address spaces and inter-processor communication speed, they are most certainly both necessary if you have a monster NUMA or SMP machine.

Given the lame performance of the Itanium, AMD shouldn't have much trouble. Plus, the Itanium doesn't run 32-bit code natively, so unless someone ships an emulation layer, you'll not only have to buy a new CPU & mobo, you'll have to shell out for replacement apps (which may not even exist for some time). And if you're going to run under an emulation layer, IBM's new 970 chips run faster than an Itanium...

Some facts missing from this discussion:

1. MIPS is a wholly owned subsidiary of SGI. This happened a few years back.

2. Strangely enough, MIPS is not the only company making MIPS processors (witness the PMC/Sierra RM7000A and others). MIPS is still a profitable company on their own due mostly to the ubitquity of their CPUs in embedded devices (they still sell a great deal of them for things like refridgeration controllers and bomb guidance "brains").

3. IRIX 6.5 is only as insecure as you are stupid. If you choose to run it in an "out of box" configuration then you are an idiot. You'd be an idiot to do that with many other Unix OS's as well. It's not a hard concept to grasp. Just apply your latest patches, turn off all the services you don't need and use ipfilterd for the rest (IRIX's not Darren Reed's which doesn't work under 6.5.x). You can also do things like turn on RFC1948 ISN support in your TCP stack.

4. What is the point of blathering on about the N64 versus the Playstation? They both used MIPS CPU's. Also, whoever said the PS2 uses MIPS needs to go look at the console specs again. It uses a custom set of ASICs and the "core" CPU (the "Emotion Engine") is NOT of MIPS make. It's a very unique hybrid. Check out this link for more info: Ars Technica - emotion engine

5. Your gawdy Las Vegas style PeeCee might kick my Indy's butt in terms of performance, but my Indy has a 100% Stainless steel case with a brushed finish. No blinky lights, no loud obnoxious jet-engine fans, no pink and blue Chinese pieces of plastic hanging off, and no brightly colored wires glaring through some plexiglass window illuminated by eye-murdering UV cold-cathode lights. See, I view all that PeeCee "modding" crap as the same garbage that pimps try to throw on their Brougham to try and front some style. The thing is, quality never goes out of style; to a C-coding gentleman, there is no substitute for some real class.

I'm one of those sentimental fools from the old school. I still write most of my code on "slow" old machines (because even though you might have a 3Ghz machine, you are still a punk ass fake if you can't code in C - sorry if the truth hurts). I stopped caring what happened to SGI after they made NT machines, ditched the cube logo, and hired a CEO who was a M$ spy-drone (Belluzo). However, I'll always respect their years of old (mainly the Indy & Indigo days). All that is gold does not glitter, and deep roots are not reached from the frost.

aliver

Unforunately, branch prediction requires cache which takes away from the cache your programs need.

This notes that the branch prediction unit has some cache that is separate from the other cache. It also notes that the PIII BPU has the "eerily accurate" prediction success you describe.

I dropped $2200 on my refurbished TiBook, though, and never looked back. If this can get someone to try out the OS, it's worth it. Anyone languishing in Windows really needs to investigate OS X as an alternative--especially if they think Linux is daunting.

Hint of the post: The TiBook lid can be closed and the computer swung to-and-fro to fend off the chicks that will surround your sexy computer.

I've been looking for a "do everything" DVD drive for a while. Still haven't found it. But I have found a couple of good spots on the net for DVD comparisons and info:
Extremetech DVD page

Extremetech dvd/cd page

arstechnica dvd a04 review with a great comparison table down the bottom.

--

nich

how bout a link to the actual article?

ArsTechnica.com on .NET

Start here

So, how's this smaller, better looking or more efficient than the cappuccinopc reviewed by Ars Technica almost 18 months ago?

You're comparing apples to oranges.

"The Rhapsody system [precursor to OS X] has been in development since Apple bought Next Computer in December 1996" [1]

"So I started the GNOME project at that point in August 1997" [Miguel De Icaza, 2]

So not only was OS X started well before GNOME, it was based on NextStep, arguable a more solid foundation for a desktop than Linux and X. Of course, Mac OS X was released on March 24th, 2001 [3], nearly 5 years after it was allegedly begun, not "A couple of years."

I don't see why you're so quick to write off OSS.

Erik

[1] http://www.aessf.org/newsletters/may98.pdf
[2] http://primates.ximian.com/~miguel/gnome-history.h tml
[3] http://www.arstechnica.com/reviews/01q2/macos-x-fi nal/macos-x-1.html

On the other hand, I found this one pretty confusing.

Nomination for Best Diagram Ever. I really wish my "Introduction to MicroProcessors" had had something like that; instead we were drowned in the whiteboard handwavings of a man with an accent I could hardly understand. Maybe this guy should spin this off into a book, make a killing selling it to Undergrad CS students lost in space...

This person speaks the truth - Ars Technica is well worth your time.

Anti-Leech claims that the only way that a webmaster can make money off a site is banners and pop-ups, and all this time I was under the impression the there were alternaive models such as Arstechnica's and /.'s subscriptions or K5's text-ads.

Anyway, the problem with what anti-leech wants to do is that it's unfeasable given that the presentation of content and the presentation of ads still has a degree of seperation. as long as there is that seperation any sufficiantly intelligent person/perl script/browser feature/whatever is going to be able to seperate the two.

Anti-leech gives me the impression of naivety, they don't seem to know the first thing about how web technologies actually work. I'll bet they have a single programer who just bought himself those 'learn javascript in x hours' and did the same with php.

I think you miss the point. Where are all the other GUIs from the early 90's (Windows 3.0/3.1 NT 3.51 Gui, the OS/2 gui, DRDos gui...?). All of these GUIs were not designed around a very open and abstract hardware process and thus were tied to very specific notions of how hardware would work. Aqua has the same problem. X conversely does not. X can easily support a 3D virtual reality GUI served up to 10,000 way parellel subsystems... if such things existed. Unix technologies tend to be designed to scale both up to faster system and into the future.

1.3.2 Is GNUstep following Changes to OpenStep and MacOSX?

Yes, gnustep-base already contains the documented changes in the Foundation library. GNUstep aims to be compatible with both the OpenStep specification and with MacOS-X. It should be easy to write an application that compiles cleanly under both GNUstep and Cocoa.

there is only so many times in a day you can "go make coffee" or "check your email".

Geek Slack List

• http://www.subgenius.com/
• http://www.slackersguild.com/
• BBC News
• http://www.memepool.com/
• http://www.plastic.com/
• http://www.arstechnica.com/
• http://www.metafilter.com/
• http://www.techdirt.com/
• http://www.bottomquark.com/ (Science News)
• http://newsforge.com/
• http://www.theregister.co.uk/
• http://www.anandtech.com/
• http://www.bjorn3d.com/
• http://cellar.org - Image of the Day
• http://www.collegehumor.com/
• http://www.everything2.com/
• http://www.kuro5hin.org/
• http://www.theonion.com/
• NASA - Astronomy Picutre of the Day
• http://www.majorgeeks.com - Windows Shareware / Freeware
• http://www.advogato.org/
• http://www.sweetcode.org/
• http://www.disinfo.com/ - Disinformation
• http://www.somethingawful.com/
• http://www.astronomynow.com/ - Astronomy News
• http://www.aip.org/ - American Institue of Physics - News
• http://www.adequacy.org/

• The Effects of Moore's Law and Slacking 1 on Large Computations

Hope this helps =)

Crap? Wrong? Its my experience, that's all. If you read back my posting then you'll see that I'm telling you _my_ experience with ext2 and ntfs, not yours. Perhaps I've been unlucky with ntfs and lucky with ext2, or perhaps it's the other way around for you.

AFAIK, the 'journaling' in NTFS isn't ordered journaling. It keeps a metadata file which get a log of the file actions to allow rollback. But, acording to this page, that file gets written to only once every few seconds. So when you crash, the log may be a few seconds old, so you may end up after reboot with an apparently 'clean' filesystem but some files will be old, missing their latest modifications. ext3 has a mode like that too, 'writeback', but also has the 'journal' and 'ordered' modes that don't have that problem.

The choking of NT for the fab was a result of fragmentation in the filesystem... Another article about the same fab mentioned that (sorry, have no link, but others are reporting it too). That's not what I what I call reliable and robust: Eventually it will fragment too much to perform, resulting in more downtime. It doesn't stay as fast as it was when I built and benchmarked the system... Plus things in the past like this and this don't help at all on the confidence front.

I had many hardware failures on active loaded linux boxes, failing power supplies, mainboards, etc, never lost data as the result (except when a disk completely died without raid, and the disk wouldn't spinup...). The boxes just keep going until the hardware dies. That's what I call reliability and robustness.

About the 'stays fast under any load', I mean cases like the 100% CPU load on fragmented ntfs volumes, as reported here, which cause the system to be unresponsive, resulting in network timeouts... Or things like this, where the given workaround basically means you can't have a lot of small files on your disk...

I keep a bunch of "classic" bookmarks around. Some are undisputed gems, others are, well, to my taste. Bytes being cheap here's a batch.

• Ars Technica: The PC enthusiast's resource
• AmbySoft Inc. White Papers: Scott Ambler's Online Writings
• windows.oreilly.com -- Deep Inside C#: An Interview with Microsoft Chief Architect Anders Hejlsberg
• TQ
• The Rise of ``Worse is Better''
  
• A Whirlwind Tutorial on Creating Really Teensy ELF Executables for Linux
  
• Theist Hall of Shame
• Internetworking Technology Overview
  
• Software Technology Review
  Eric Weisstein's World of Mathematics
• P.S.: More Than Just Words
• Welcome to the On-Line Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences
• John McCarthy
  
• Slashdot | Net Translations of Dead-Tree IT Classics
  
• advICE
  
• 0xdeadbeef archives
  

Ars Technica has a review of MovieLink on its front page today. Looks like a big HO-HUM for Mac users if the disadvantages to its PC customers are accurately portrayed.