Slashdot Mirror
Slashback: HETE, HP, Regression
The computing equivalent of Area 51? A short while back HP closed its calculator division. Many have thought HP's calculator department was unprofitable. This was not the case. Many have thought they had no innovation. This was not the case. Turns out that management had 4% workforce to kill and they were part of the cut.
This article explains more. It turns out they had designed several Linux based PDA's ready to produce that were killed by management. Sounds interesting? Go check it out.
The biggest expense was the 12 gross of Estes D engines ... Satellite Designer writes: "The topic of low cost satellites having been mooted here recently, I though I'd alert readers to another such project. The HETE-2 satellite recently located a cosmic gamma-ray burst precisely enough that (with a lot of help from friends) an afterglow was detected, identifying its source. HETE-2 cost $26 million, only 1/3 of what a 'small' scientific satellite normally costs.A lot of commercial 'off the shelf' technology went into HETE. Nothing from Radio Shack, but there are quite a few parts from Digi-Key onboard. You can't save money by using cheap parts (but you *can* save money by using easily obtainable parts), and you can't achieve reliability by using expensive parts (but you *can* help reliability by using the parts best suited for your application). The radical thing about HETE's parts selection was that it considered parts in the application context (as one would do in a normal engineering process), rather than restricting selection to a QPL assembled to meet irrelevant requirements.
The real trick to keeping costs down is to do the job with as small a team as possible in the minimum time possible. Rather than employing a large team of specialists, HETE's scientific investigators did much of the engineering and technical work. A small, carefully selected engineering team filled in the knowledge gaps."
Quitting isn't easy, and why bother? dmarsh writes: "This new article from C|Net seems to be a total contradiction to last week's "Dump Broadband, Dig Out Your Modem!" thread's article. I guess the important difference being that this one is backed up by an actual survey by the National Cable and Telecommunications Association."
Goes to show, in a large group of people you can probably find at least some who fit nearly any premise. As always, question the source ;)
but only because I'm moving and the &^%$# phone company isn't offering DSL there yet.
But if people don't need DSL, then dropping back makes sense. After all, it IS money!
I guess the important difference being that this one is backed up by an actual survey by the National Cable and Telecommunications Association
Certainly sounds impartial.
Takahashi Rumiko made beats! DON, taku, DON, taku. . .
.. because I had to. My line provider went bankrupt. How often has that happened lately?
I like how Windows software is described as "two strains," like a virus. Windows really is a virus, and a bad one at that. I heard that people aren't flocking like sheep to buy Windows XP, which is good news if it is true. I saw XP at a Fry's and was not impressed. It contains more graphics and junk, which means that it needs yet more powerful computers than before to accomplish the same tasks. Most folks I ask say they use their computers for email, casual web browsing, word processing and to run one or two other programs (usually custom medical or electronics programs, as most of my friends work in these fields). And the same folks complain that Windows is too expensive and quite frankly sucks, but they can't do anything about it because they have no choice. Face it, no matter how many alternatives there are out there, there is no choice until developers start moving to a better system. It's difficult to make that move, but it's happening slowly but surely. I've blown Windows 98 (the latest one I have and only because it came preinstalled) off my hard drives on five computers and installed FreeBSD and various Linux distros. That's five down and several more to go. I've helped some of my friends get started with alternatives and once it works, they love it. That's the only way to fight the Windows virus. Oh well...
I wonder whether (1) this many people signed up for the service during the period, or (2) this many people finally received their hardware/installation. Everybody knows that the pool of broadband installers is vastly outnumbered by the pool of broadband salespeople. No flamebait here, just wondering if the mass sign-up occurred in 2Q or 3Q...
Also, consider the source of the statistics ("Our research shows that our product is 100% safe...")
My broadband provider starting sticking extra fees into my bill earlier this year. It's only $6/month, but it's still lame as hell. I'm revolting by dusting off my ol' 56K USR at home & taking advantage of that T-1 at work. BellSouth can rip off someone else.
wow, I hadn't heard about HP closing off its calculators division, it's such a shame, as a (still) proud owner of an HP 48sx I'm really saddened by this turn of event.
Maybe some slashdotters don't know it, but before the current palm-craze, HP's calculators were *the* portable thing to program for (at least in my university, I remember being amazed that somebody got pacman working on the HP).
To think that a whole division like that, with great products and a great vision was axed just to get the stock price a few bucks up in the short term seems really backwards, but I guess that's what's happening far too often in this period of stock-price-driven management.
:(
I love the wording. i will start using it around MCSE teachers.
Question the source? I'm shure my telephone/cable company has been hard at work installing that transponder in the box 25' from my house since January. Every month I call...."Yes sir it should be any time now....."
Vote early. Vote often. Vote CowboyNeal.
Yes, HETE did help find one gamma-ray
burst afterglow.
The only thing is that they had initially hoped to
have found rather more than one by now!
Some of their problems have been related to
the fact that their team is very small. So, it
is possible to make things too cheap.
The other difference between the two articles is that the latter one is talking about Cable in particular, rather than "broadband" (i.e. both Cable and DSL).
I used to have DSL. When I moved, I tried a Cable Modem instead. I found the quality of my connection was better, and the service technicians were far more knowledgeable. Of course, that reflects more on the individual companies (Verizon for DSL vs. Charter for Cable) than it does on DSL vs. Cable, but considering the number of people I know who gave up on DSL because of technical problems, I wouldn't be surprised if DSL is losing business to Cable.
Here in Pasadena, Cable is cheaper and they can come install it within a day or two of your order. When I got DSL, I had to wait six weeks for the first visit, and it took them quite a few tries to get it working.
What do people think about government run broadband solutions? In my case, the city government is putting a fiber/cable network throughout the whole city and will offer tv and internet through it.
I have some reservations about this, but at least it should be more stable (i.e., much less chance of bankruptcy) than a lot of these poor companies going out of business.
this [survey] is backed up by an actual survey by the National Cable and Telecommunications Association.
;)
-Slashback
Goes to show, in a large group of people you can probably find at least some who fit nearly any premise. As always, question the source
-Timothy
Well, OK, let's question the source. the National Cable & Telecommmunications Assosciation is "is the principal trade association of the cable television industry in the United States". So basically, they're the RIAA of the cable industry. And they just published a survey that says that consumers are subscribing to broadband in mass quantitites.
Ok, I question the source. This is like Shell Oil publishing a study that concludes that burning gasoline provides valuable fertilizer for wetlands. Why give PR machines free press?
If guns kill people, then CmdrTaco's keyboard misspells words.
Many have thought HP's calculator department was unprofitable. This was not the case.
If their calculator division was making money, then why on earth was it chosen to be closed down? They should have chosen something that was loosing them money. If there were no departments loosing money, then they shouldn't have had to cut *any* departments.
For every post, there is an equal and opposite re-post.
More information about the very new Mandrake Gaming Edition with The Sims seems to be available here and pre-orders seem to be opened at MandrakeStore. Just wanted to let you know because I find this stuff extremely _cool_ :-)
You saw Windows XP at Fry's? I'm assuming you mean you saw a demo computer running XP, and not that you merely saw the box sitting on a shelf. By your logic, I could say "I saw Linux at my friend's house and was not impressed. It was nothing but text and stuff."
I shouldn't have to tell you that the interface isn't the OS. If everyone judged Linux by its interface and nothing else (which, unfortunately, is often the case), people would have an absurdly skewed view of Linux. Think about how many different window managers and themes there are for Linux. Just because one of them looks like shit doesn't mean the underlying OS kernel sucks.
The same holds true for Windows. Sure, the interface may be full of goofy alpha blending and unnecessary menu fade-ins and mouse pointer shadows and other things, but when you replace explorer.exe with a third-party shell (or merely disable the extra eye candy via the Control Panel), all that stuff goes away and you're left with what is without a doubt the most stable version of Windows I've ever seen.
The Linux interfaces show the traditional SVR5 semaphores to be the slowest performers while the pthread mutexes are the fastest.
well duh. Just look at the section of the man pages -- semop is in section 2 (system calls) and pthreads are in section 3 (library calls). As a general rule of thumb, system calls will be slower than library calls (a context switch is involved).
Comment removed based on user account deletion
For the actual data, go here.
In principle, I think it makese sense: bandwidth as a public resource, an essential service.
My reservation is that, if it's government run, a few whiny idiots in the community can turn around and slap filters on it, and start using it to regulate what THEY don't like.
So.. as long as the charter that runs it is about being purely available... it's great.
2. "Goes to show, in a large group of people you can probably find at least some who fit nearly any premise. As always, question the source
q='echo "q=$s$q$s;s=$b$s;b=$b$b;$q"';s=\';b=\\;echo "q=$s$q$s;s=$b$s;b=$b$b;$q"
Obligatory link: http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/librar y/l-rt5/?dwzone=linux
I wonder what the results would have been if he used the non-portable (non-pthread) interfaces to the sync/threading primitives in linux... because Windows gets an extra boost not having to go through a compatibility API. Are there non-pthread abstractions for mutexes and such? I don't know much about low-level threading stuff in linux beyond clone.
Black holes are where the Matrix raised SIGFPE
Wow, this must be the highest-rated pro-Windows post ever to appear on slashdot. ;-)
Empty <a> blocks aren't terribly useful...
I have to admit, I've considered getting away from cable.
Reason: downloads could hit 400+K/s uploads could hit 200K/s (not bits, bytes).
After a year, down ~= 200+K/s upload capped at 128K/s. Ok, fine and dandy.
Insult to injury came when dowload rate varied (no biggie) but a second cap at 128kbits.
When questioning the provider and calling the corporate office I got "Oh, we meant 128kbits not Kbytes".
Uh, huh.
The sad part is no one noticed the drop off in cable revenues at, or shortly after 2 things:
Killing off the *.divx groups and 'capping people off at the knees' as far as uploads.
By capping off uploads and killing off the divx groups @home completely negated the purpose of broadband
Include the caving into the MPAA w/o so much as a defense of its own customers much less adhering to "innocent until proven guilty" therom.
If DSL could provide a 128Kbyte up/down rate and eliminate the install hassles and provide the service for 20 to 25 bucks a month...I'd jump on that in a heartbeat.
If the had a you want faster, you pay more scheme (which @home does not do...WTF?) I'd use it and I'd *recommend* other cable users do it as well.
I can not tell you how many ppl I've recommended cable to because I lost count.
Now I tell them DSL first, cable second if they don't mind "getting less" for the same amount of money.
"once bitten, twice shy"
Ok, in my case it was a nip first then a bite.
Now I am shying away from recommending cable as a first step. Second step getting away especially if the 'veeceedee' groups start disappearing.
Then a lot of us will have absolutely *NO* reasons for sticking with cable.
If it is not on fire, it is a software problem.
the article was about IPC (inter process communication). win critical sections do not provide inter-process facilities. in fact, they don't necessary even work efficiently on SMP systems either. 'nuff said?
QWest is just starting up DSL in my area so I'll be dumping my overpriced ISDN connection as soon as my DSL line is up and running. That should cancel out your DSL retreat.
Of course critical sections are fast - that's what they were designed to be. The tradeoff is that they can't be used for IPC, so the comparision in the article is misleading .
---
http://slashdot.org/moderation.shtml
"I saw XP benchmarks at Tom's Hardware and was not impressed. Damned if I know why, but it gets 25-50% lower 3D framerates at the same games with the same (ATI & NVidia) hardware."
Granted, if it's really as stable as Microsoft promises this time (and about half of the Windows 2000 users I know didn't have any stability problems), then that may be worth it. I get similarly curtailed framerates in Linux by making the same tradeoff, and I think it's worth it... but I'd like to know how many game players who went out to buy XP were making a conscious decision for stability over speed.
It all depends... In my experience (DSL at parent's home, DSL at work, Cable at 3 apartments), DSL lines have generally had much better uptime and more consistent bandwidth. This is not to say that they have never gone down.. they all have. Also, I've had the fastest download speeds on Cable.
My experience is the general case, but other people like yourself have had different results. I think it all comes down to the number of subscribers in your area, and the competency of your provider.
Here in California, Cingular Wireless seems to have the worst service of any cell phone provider. However, I consider GSM (the type of network they use) to be the best network technologically. So why do they have all these problems? It all happened when they made the name-switch from PacBell to Cingular, and I believe the major problem is they have reached capacity. Bad planning? Bad management?
It's a mixed bag wherever you go.
So I can deal with the fact that Linux is (generally) faster. ;)
But I would like to see Solaris benchmarked in the same way...
Hire me...
Actually, critical sections are fast only if there is low contention for them. As soon as threads start contending for them, performance goes out the window. They also don't scale well with the number of threads, and they exhibit horrible performance degradations if the priority of the contending threads is not at a maximum. There is a great summary of the issues at http://world.std.com/~jmhart/csmutx.htm.
I have cable service from @home and maybe this isn't normal but I'm very happy with it. At the slowest point of the day my downloads get down to about 400 Kbps, sometimes, not always. A lot of the time I maintain my average, which is about 650 Kbps. Last night I downloaded a song at 1.4something Mbps. I don't upload all that much so I can't speak to that side of the deal but if I'm consistantly downloading at above 400 Kbps I can't imagine upload rates are all that bad. When I got it early last year the service sucked and went down at least 5-6 times a week or more for varying lengths of time. That's different now, I can't remember the last time that I wasn't able to get online. On the customer service front, I wouldn't know, I have had no reason to call them for a long time now.
I've had Roadrunner access via Time Warner cable for over two years now, and despite various problems, un less they triple the rates I'll never unsubscribe. And so far as I know, the net number of broadband users is still going up on an exponential curve. But I can understand the reasons for the earlier statistics...
The exact determination is that "more people than ever are leaving broadband". Not that the ranks are shrinking, but that a greater number of people are terminating accounts. Obviously, as you increase your customer base, if the same percentage of people unhook every month due to dissatisfaction or because they can't afford it any more, then of course the gross number will increase.
Hmm, hope someone updates, that sounded interesting.
The reason why pthreads 'look pretty good' speed-wise is because the pthread library provides user level threads as opposed to a kernel level threads. User level threads have their own scheduler and are much quicker to swap out--less data to save than during a kernel thread context switch. Meanwhile, pthread semaphores (and condition variables) should also be faster depending on the user-to-kernel thread mapping scheme (windows 2k maps each user thread to a kernel thread, for example; I think linux uses a many-to-many mapping). This'll reflect in how fast threads go through their critical sections because they may have to wait shorter/longer to get access to them.
- - - - - - - -
Don't worry, being eaten by a crocodile is just like going to sleep in a giant blender.
When you steal something, you deprive the owner of that thing. Watching a movie in a time and place YOU decide on instead of the MPAA is not taking anything from them.
Instantly, a thousand of you are now saying "But you're depriving them of income they would otherwise have." To that I say NO! I am not keeping anyone from seeing a movie at a theater.
El Karma: excelente(principalmente la suma de moderación hecha a los comentarios de los usuarios)
But the biggest problem with XP is its rampant commercialism. Windows, other Microsoft applications, and third party applications constantly bug you for personal information, registration information, etc. And who knows what information it's sending out behind my back. And I already spent about $100 on third party utilities.
Altogether, XP is something I could do without: it runs on applications I want to run, and the software I need to run on it is not particularly high quality. The only reason I have it is because Microsoft has managed to monopolize the market so much that there are applications you simply have to use in business and that only run on Windows. Yuck.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Wow, so IBM has compared Windows 2000, xp, and Linux (or, OS that they hate, OS that they hate, OS that they love). I am sure that will be imparcial. If this came from a source that was not particularly bias to one of the OSes I would be more inclined to accept it.
Its a shame.
I don't think I would ever have passed all the number crunching civil engineering classes and the dreaded EIT (engineer licencing test) without my trusty 32s.
I lothe regular calculators now...
When It got stolen with my bookbag (uggg) I got the 42s. even better! 2 lines of stack on the screen!!! I still use it. Durable too.
Maybe its not as big a deal now that calculators can enter equations with parens..
I was thinking of wipping up a desktop calculator that did rpm.... Maybe its time..
Of course no ones really going to send up a satellite with model rocket engines. However, I was very surprised how much model rocketry has changed since I was a kid. In researching model rocketry (for my kid), I discovered that there are engines a lot larger than 'D', and it's possible to fire a (high power) model rocket up to the stratosphere! Check out the records here.
[Insert pithy quote here]
Then you ditch the connection. Just because they raise the price isn't a good reason to dump it.
Hell, my employer hasn't hired anyone or let anyone go from my group in the last year so just to make up for raises and what not our product will cost at least 7% more. If our customers thought like you, we'd be screwed (but so would our competitors).
You know better. He wasn't asking for perfection. He was asking for stability. CS has been around long enough to at least achieve stability in what it can produce. Also remember this is a multi-billion dollar company. A company I might add whos marketing outstrips what the os can deliver. What took them so long?
Technically, "pthreads" ("POSIX threads") is just an API which can be provided by any thread library. And yes, technically, you can get a user-level threads package that implements pthreads.
But I think you were referring to Linuxthreads, the pthreads implementation used by GNU libc on Linux. Linuxthreads is kernel-level, not user-level.
Semaphores and mutexes may be implementation mostly in user space (I don't know for sure) but thread creation/destruction/scheduling is definitely based on real kernel threads.
"How can you claim that you are anti-crack, while still writing a window manager?" — Metacity README
I've had the misfortune to have done some work on Windows NT, and the question that I could not answer from skimming the article was, "Were the installs of Windows uniprocessor or multiprocessor?"
In Windows, the critical section code will become a single bit test and set instruction on an uniprocessor system (which, being a single machine instruction, is very fast), but a much more complicated operation on a mulitprocessor build.
Under Linux, you don't have to explicitly compile your program to support multiprocessor, so I would guess that Linux is using a more SMP friendly implementation of a mutex than a uniprocessor build of Windows.
www.eFax.com are spammers
HP's quality has gone down the shitter. I have a 2 year old HP 20S and half the keys no longer work (the top two rows). I only use the calculator about once a week for 2 minutes. Luckily since university I no longer need fancy schmancy functions like e^X, ln, tan and 1/x. Give me good ol' addition, multiplication, subtraction and division any day. Don't cry too much for HP - they aren't the company they once were - let 'em go bankrupt.
Because coroutines are not native structures of any popular programming languages and are dangerous pieces of hackery not suited for mere mortals. Most of us would rather have multiple processes and critical sections. Moreover, coroutines are an exception to the stack-based nature of many programs, and ruin any chance of debugging code that calls them until those functions have cleared the stack (Knuth himself found himself using assembly to achieve his ends). Finally, it is difficult to make such functions reentrant without making them context based (no local variables if you can help it).
and so on and so on. They are occasionally useful, but when I need them I just end up creating internal states or using "work contexts".
Black holes are where the Matrix raised SIGFPE
The article author also pulls no punches on his opinions of these fine folks.
I think I have some email to send, my self.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
the link is here
Subscribe to external news sources - probably put you down $10/mo. Sure, that's ANOTHER $10 a month out of your pocket. But if you're feeling squirley, consider what that costs the provider.
The traffic used to have a set cost as defined by upkeep of the internal network - call it "internal cost". Now the same traffic has that internal cost as well as the cost associated with increased traffic from the upstream provider. Its possible that the cost of this external traffic is less than the cost of providing better usenet service. Its also very possible this same traffic now has considerably higher cost.
In any case - you get better usenet service.
Thomas Osborne, UW grad, built the first scientific desktop computer and then as an HP employee helped to invent the HP 35, the world's first scientific calculator. For a company that invented these devices and pioneered this market, this is the most disgraceful thing that HP could ever do to themselves, their employees, and their customers.
Then why does it BSOD, and won't accept my V3 every 3 days? huh? And why won't it Log onto my Samba PDC? Huh? And why does it send information to criminal monopolists? Huh? Why does it require a 32mb Vid card just to run 2D? Huh?
Answer these for me.
In 1998, I had ADSL through BCTel. It was great, it was lightning fast, I could even piss out my window and hit the CO.
I went to work for another ISP in 2000, this was after Telus (aka E Slut) and BCTel "merged". I worked in the DSL department, and it was just amazing all of the fuckups that were happening. Granted, I was more 'behind the scenes' now, so I saw alot more of the bad stuff going on, but it just overwhelmed me, the incompitence of that company to provision one thing right.
Now, I work elsewhere, but still, everyone I talk to that does have DSL through them complains about how bad the service has degenerated..its gotten really bad. It was great in 1998, but not now.
When I had cable installed, I had to wait two weeks, no big deal, the cable dude that showed up was quick, compitent and efficient. Have had no complaints.
I don't really get why the great big telco has way more issues than the (so far) null amount of issues my little local cable privider has. Sure they have alot more people going through their system, but when I had to contact them, the left hand didn't know what the right was doing, and the brain didn't have a clue either.
BellsouthSucks.com
BellsouthSucks.net
Bellsouth-sucks.com
www.geocities.com/yi332/bellsouth/
bellsouth.linuxgod.net
www.yahoo.com/litty1841/bellsouth-sucks/
Bellsouth has been mucking with my telocity connection for weeks. Im getting sick of it. I called them several times and explained to them that Im not paying them. Im paying Telocity. Now Telocity is getting mad, and im already pissed, and Bellsouth is a mucking with a line that i am NOT PAYING THEM a DIME for execpt for regular phone service ($15 per month), and don't even have a phone on it. Bellsouth is a monopolizing bitch. How many times should I call them and tell them i am NOT going to use their shitass DSL service, mainly because I hate PPPoE, and Im not paying $45 a month for some dyn IP crap? So they can go bug someone else.
Feedback please.
You got this Ass Backward. The market decides what they will do, Then business live with that. If you raise price on a product that should follow Moore's law or close, expect to see your subscribers jump. Why do you think you need / deserve raises by the way. It that something Moses brought down with the Tablets?
Help fight continental drift.
When I first read this, I thought it said "satellites having been rooted..."
Don't make me laugh! I've seen Charter up here in Northwestern Wisconsin... total crap! They are down a LOT, and mostly because of some pipe problems in the Eau Claire area! Hell, on top of that, the bandwith isn't the greatest compared to our DSL here through the local co-op... no, we refuse to use the DSL coming from CenturyTel and Veri-sux.
Anyway, my $0.02
Karma whorin' since 1999
I very much agree with this. Part of my definition of an operating system is that it is stable. Windows 98 is not stable. Therefore, it cannot be truly called an operating system.
I should not have to pay for junk, especially when it is deliberate junk. If Win XP is stable, then it should be a free upgrade to all those who paid for Windows 95 and 98 and ME, and suffered enormously from the shortcomings that were deliberately left there to try to get us to pay more.
Microsoft is, partly, the enemy of its customers.
Bush's education improvements were
Fire Carleton Fiorino.
Bush's education improvements were
In the few cases I've tried, Qt (the C++ GUI library) has had far better performance than pthread on e.g. starting new threads.
The world will end in 5 minutes. Please log out.
Does anyone else make high quality calculators? Or are there any good math programs for PDAs?
The real problem is entropy.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
As much as I loved my past HP calculators, the recent products left much to be desired. I bought an HP49 when the model was first released and was very disappointed. I understand that the firmware and documentation issues could have been resolved eventually (after two years, these problems persist), but the physical construction of the units in my experience was very poor. After four exchanges at the retailer and with HP under warranty, I gave up.
I convinced Office Depot that I received the 49 as a gift last Christmas, and received store credit towards a PDA. Good riddance, HP
What you've discovered, even if you don't seem to be aware of it, is that delivering high speed connections isn't as simple as selling, say, lettuce. There is no skill in selling, growing, or shipping lettuce. You simply do it. Companies work very hard at doing it as inexpensively as possilbe, which makes them large profits. This same mentality has been applied to the cable television industry for years. Get X number of channels into a viewers home (disregard if they're good or not) and charge enough to make a profit.
Now hop over to cable broadband industry. It takes (gasp) skill to implement a WAN/MAN. The technology isn't so simple that you can just pick random parts off a shelf and expect everything to work brilliantly. We should hope that either companies like yours begin to dominate and spread their philosophy of good engineering or that technology improves to the point that setting up a WAN is as simple as setting up a LAN for a game of Quake.
HP Calculators are backwards. They use Reverse Polish Notation...
Does anyone have any idea where it got that name?
Many of them are infix. Just some of thier high-end calcs are RPN.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
A virus is typically compact, well written, and efficient code. Therefore, Windows is a bug.
Part of my definition of a human is that it is giving me massage.
Since you're not giving me a massage, or even on your knees before me begging to massage my feet, you are not a human.
Bark like a good doggie for me, now please.
I can't believe you people are willing to look like complete idiots in such a feeble attempt to slag Microsoft.
The company, and it's products, surely have problems you could be criticizing point by point. Instead now you're backed into a corner defending the laughable notion that software should be bug free.
Geez.
What I'm wondering is how the synchronization primitives SCALE with number of threads. Really, who uses synchronization for *single-threaded* applications? I'd like to see graphs over thread count and see how operating systems handle higher contention over shared resources. In this test, no blocking was going on whatsoever, because it was just one thread locking and unlocking.
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
Uptime is a measure of how long a system has been running without a reboot. Uptime generally requires stability, assuming the machine in question is actually doing something. But I could boot up a fresh, clean install of Windows 95 and (after patching the 49.7 day registry uptime counter bug) let it sit in a corner doing nothing, and the damn thing would probably keep running till the next Ice Age.
Stability, on the other hand, is a measure of many things. Mostly it is a measure of how well an operating system responds to instability in software. Linux is incredibly good at this; when a program on Linux crashes or has a problem, the OS steps over it and keeps right on going. Windows has been notoriously bad at this, until Windows 2000 and XP.
Now, if you re-read my message, you'll notice that nowhere did I claim that I thought Windows XP was more stable than Linux. I merely claimed that it was more stable than previous versions of Windows. Furthermore, since Windows XP, as you said, has been out for about a month now, it would be impossible (and incredibly stupid) to rate its stability by comparing the uptime of a Windows system with that of a Linux system.
To illustrate my point (that uptime does not always equal stability), back when uptimes.net was running full force, I achieved an uptime of about 155 days from a beta version of Windows 2000 running on a Pentium 166 with 64 megs of RAM, serving up lots of dynamic webpages at wonko.com. In the end, I had to turn the machine off because I moved.
Now, the only reason I achieved that incredible uptime with a beta OS running on inferior hardware was that it wasn't doing a whole lot. It was just running IIS and MSSQL Server, and that was about it. Now, if I had been serving Slashdot off that box, it probably wouldn't have lasted a week. Thus, we see that uptime != stability.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
ET phoned home on the first DSP (from TI's speak and spell) and no one knew cell phones whould be so big back then. Now your precious Soron Calultors get slashed. Hah! And to think they were on their way to making a good PDA for my precious. Figures calculator technology was the way to go(llum). Simple interface (Psychology of computing dictates that a pda must have relatively simple one ring to bind them interface proceedure) A cellphone = a handheld calculator = the ring. One ring. My precious answer was with me all along!
You know the Microsoft destroys the night, Linux devides the day...
the purpose of broadband is for streaming realtime descent quality Video. other things come on as a bonus.
GENERATION 26: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.