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A 2nd Core to Keep Windows Chugging Along?
Eh-Wire writes "Almost every hardware junkie I know would give most anything to take a spin in the new dual core hot rods from Dell or one of the custom system builders. But what if you actually needed that second core to run your anti-virus, spyware detection software and firewall just to get a little gaming or Internet surfing done on the first core. Would that really be a good reason to bring home a shiny new machine? I can think of a couple of different things I could use a second core for but running an iron lung on it just to keep the machine chugging along just isn't one of them. Curiously enough, PCMag thinks that's a perfectly good reason."
It's not news. It's a plug for his website. That first link belongs to the submitter.
That was my thought when I saw the first mention of using the second core for a virus scan. However, a little later in the article, the author devotes a paragraph to the subject:
One of the complaints we've heard from readers is that "protection" programs, like Norton Internet Security, are useful for safeguarding their systems. but slow their computers to a crawl. Dual-core Hyper-Threaded processors, such as the Pentium EE 840, can help, improving your computing experience because the processor's dual cores can process tasks simultaneously. While most of the system is "concentrating" on making sure your Internet or gaming experience is fulfilled in the foreground, the reserve power that the dual cores provide protects you in the background, running Norton or other antivirus or firewall programs.
This looks to me as a little bit more substantial than a mere example. The article doesn't devote a paragraph to any other specific application.
Not saying this is worth putting up on Slashdot's front page, mind you. It's just somebody's article; it might be conversation fodder, but it's not news.
According to the article linked to higher in the thread, the upcoming IBM chip will have two cores, each with a separate cache. It also opined that to the OS, it will appear as if the machine has two processors. (Actually the example was discussing two multicored procs appearing as four processors, but you get the idea.)
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Sounds like something that could actually get .net apps running in the near vicinity of fast, as opposed to downright hang-dog slow.
As I've seen over the years, the more CPU(s) you throw at developers (myself included) the more difficult tasts suddenly fall into the realm of 'possible' because you simply couldn't without the extra resources. However... tools which were absolutely hideously slow suddenly look acceptable (where PHB's are concerned) because they're blind to how much faster and requiring less resources something actually developed efficiently could run.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Funny you should say that on today of all days. I spent a big chunk of the afternoon finalizing some of the documentation for launchd.
The traditional UNIX startup model calls for a lot of tasks to be fired off at boot time, one after the other. Whether you use init scripts or rc scripts or whatever, the model is the same.
In Panther, we created a fairly sophisticated system for firing off these tasks in parallel instead of serially. The net result was a decrease in cold-start times of about 100%.
Now we've got launchd. The idea now is that instead of making the user wait for a bunch of services to start, we let launchd fire them both in parallel and asynchronously.
I don't want to get extremely specific here for reasons I hope are obvious, but on modern (i.e., dual-G5) hardware, the time from the end of power-on tests and the initialization of Open Firmware to the menu bar and dock appearing and the system accepting user input is as little as four seconds.
Four seconds to cold-boot the operating system.
Pretty impressive, no? All it takes is a willingness to look at the traditional way of doing things, recognize massive stupidity, and correct it.
In fact, Windows XP SP1 with AVG *and* a software firewall ran office and home apps faster on my old C433/256 than Mandrake 9.2 *or* FreeBSD 4.3 with no A/V or firewall. But, since I dare say so on Slashdot, I'm either a liar or a paid Microsoft shill.
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Inventor of the term 'pardon my French'.
Rather than bitching, why not spend a little time figuring it out? It's pretty obvious, if you think about it. Here we go. First, choose the Tools menu, because Tools always contains configuration menu options. Next, choose Customize under tools, because Customize in is where you customize menus and toolbars in Office applications (and many other Microsoft apps as well). Click over to the Options tab, because you're looking for options (the other two, Toolbars and Commands, are obviously not what you want). Looky there! I see a checkbox for "Always show full menus"! I wonder what that could do?
Yes, it's "buried", but it's buried in a logical place if you're familiar with Office products. (disclaimer: The above steps are for Word 2003. They may be different on older versions, but probably not.)
The 244 watts figure is the power consumption of the entire system, not the chip itself.
See CSS Zen Garden for proof of that...
(and for the web illiterates out there: there are no tables in CSSZG, and the only thing that changes between two designs is the stylesheet associated with the page, the HTML file doesn't change anywhere but where it links the aforementioned stylesheets)
"The way we can tell it's C# instead of Haskell is because it's nine lines instead of two." -- wadler
Adblock already has that functionality on its own.
Jan
As for spreadsheets, I see them more as a rapid prototyping tool (if even that). When I want to get anything done that involves large lists of data, I write a Perl script to do the job. Mind you, Perl is a lot more powerful than spreadsheet programs, and it, too, takes a lot less system resources than any given contemporary spreadsheet program.
Of course, every (wo)man has his/her own preferences, and I don't write this to encourage everyone to use emacs/LaTeX/perl, but rather to spread the fact that you don't need even a 350 MHz PII or even 64 MBs of RAM to be productive, and that it is most certainly program design that makes Open/Microsoft Office take much more resources than really necessary. While you may not need a 2 GHz machine like the GP said, you do certainly need a lot more because of the fancy GUIs and stuff.