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Slashback: Letters, Time, Revision
Pardon me, do you have the time? Several months ago, we featured a short piece about investigations into clockless computing. Reader xenophrak writes with an update: "Sun Microsystems announces new technology that lets processors run various components of their internals in an asynchronous fashion. The 'FLEETzero' (warning, PDF) chips do not abide by a global clock pulse, and see lower power requirements and heat due to this new feature.
From the web page: 'At the ASYNC 2001 conference, Sun Microsystems Laboratories described FLEETzero, a prototype chip with raw speed roughly twice that of today's chips. Where today's chips use 'synchronous' circuits with a global clock to manage activity, the new, faster FLEETzero chip uses radical new circuits with low-power, asynchronous logic elements that produce timing signals only where and when needed.'
This could have some good impacts on embedded devices, and total processor throughput."
As usual, not so simple. On Saturday you read about Brian K. West, an ISP employee who claimed to be facing unfair threats of prosecution from the FBI for doing nothing more than accidentally discovering a security hole in a local newspaper. A followup posting at Politech indicates that the story isn't quite that simple. Specifically, the FBI's interest in West seems to stem more from alleged attempts at cracking into the violated site than from a simple "found a problem" report. If what the FBI says is true, it changes the story quite a bit.
Time to get a yardstick near the refrigerator ... f97hs writes "Yepps. Delayed almost a week due to regression bugs, the awaited bug-fix release is finally here. Unfortunately, it seems it still can't compile the KDE ARTS-lib (due to, I think, problems with virtual baseclasses). Worth noting is that in order to speed the compiler up, the default to -finline-limit has been lowered. This sometimes leads to considerably slower resulting code, so use -finline-limit=5000 if you compile something you want to be FAST. The mirrors are here and the official release letter from Mark Mitchell might also be worth a read."
but now there is one.
Leading the partnership for a Slashdot-Free Slashdot, Son of Dog
you stole my 2206133rd post. :(
Leading the partnership for a Slashdot-Free Slashdot, Son of Dog
Imagine a Beowolf Cluster of THESE!!!
Who's going to get the famed #2206666 post? Only 500 more to go!
Larry Wall really loves Jesus. . .
Love you,
Trolly McBean
Yet another crippling bombshell hit the beleaguered *BSD community when last month IDC confirmed that *BSD accounts for less than a fraction of 1 percent of all servers. Coming on the heels of the latest Netcraft survey which plainly states that *BSD has lostmore market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. *BSD is collapsing in complete disarray, as further exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.
You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict *BSD's future. The hand writing is on the wall: *BSD faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for *BSD because *BSD is dying. Things are looking very bad for *BSD. As many of us are already aware, *BSD continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood. FreeBSD is the most endangered of them all.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
OpenBSD leader Theo states that there are 7000 users of OpenBSD. How many users of NetBSD are there? Let's see. The number of OpenBSD versus NetBSD posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 NetBSD users. BSD/OS posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of NetBSD posts. Therefore there are about 700 users of BSD/OS. A recent article put FreeBSD at about 80 percent of the *BSD market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 FreeBSD users. This is consistent with the number of FreeBSD Usenet posts.
Due to the troubles of Walnut Creek, abysmal sales and so on, FreeBSD went out of business and was taken over by BSDI who sell another troubled OS. Now BSDI is also dead, its corpse turned over to another charnel house.
All major surveys show that *BSD has steadily declined in market share. *BSD is very sick nd its long term survival prospects are very dim. If *BSD is to survive at all it will be among OS hobbyist dabblers. *BSD continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For ll practical purposes, *BSD is dead.
*BSD is dying
That was an interesting link. I wonder why previous showed it correctly. Another Slashcode bug, perhaps? *sigh*
yeah it's a bug, it looked broken with the article, but by itself it looks fine
PDF's cause cancer.
It shows up okay under "read the rest of this comment". odd.
Thank you.
--Patrick Bateman, Esq.
Boy, perl code sure isn't pretty.
(Nicely done, by the way.)