Well, maybe. You can't trust most big companies, and it's hard to stay a small, popular chip company.
I started getting annoyed with Intel slightly before the Pentium release, but I loved my 386; I had that thing for years, and it ran great. Well, ok, jpeg decompression was slow, but come on. My Pentium 133 was pretty decent too.
As for AMD, I was satisfied with my K6/300; I got it for the value and the integer performance, but the slow cache definitely hurt.
However, now that I've got an 800Mhz Thunderbird, I'm happy as a clam. It's faster than I need at the moment, and a pleasure to use. And I won't have to worry about slow cache performance for a while yet.
So, yeah; Intel makes decent chips, although they've been messing up lately. AMD has beaten them in the short term. But basically Intel is a sore loser, and has been acting more objectionably for a long time. If Intel dies and AMD takes over, I'll be happy. If AMD starts to abuse their newfound power, well... there's always Transmeta, right?;) --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
What does the timeline look like for Plex86? I can tell it's pretty much alpha-level now...
Also, are there any other GPLed projects that you think could help out, or vice versa? I think DOSEmu could benefit a lot from some Bochs code, for instance. (I know DOSEmu has its own CPU Emulator, but I have yet to see it do a whole lot...)
The last time I tried Plex86 out, it looked like Bochs was actually faster, and that's saying something. Maybe there was a parameter I needed to tweak in the configuration file. I couldn't get Plex86 to boot Win98, although DOS worked.
Oh, and I had a fun time trying to determine how much of my Windows partition consisted of the MBR. (comparing the first chunk of/dev/hda with the first chunk of/dev/hda1; woo...) Could you put whatever tool made a partition for Bochs into Plex86? I swear there was one once; maybe I just can't find it....
And yes, using a bank of hard-drives would be much better than using tapes. Mostly I was objecting to the amazingly slow seek and write times involved...
I'd like to have some sort of IDE-RAID; I'm actually running RAID-0 on one (or two:) of my partitions in linux, but I'd much rather use RAID-5. The thing is, I'd probably end up buying at least another IDE controller for something like that, and I doubt the performance improvement would be worth it. However, I'd like that added safety net in case of drive failure.
And yes, a large distributed filesystem project would be very cool. I guess you could look into Coda; I wouldn't recommend NFS for something like that, though. --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Well, they're pretty different. But fault-tolerance is most of what I want in a backup. If I had that, then I'd only backup the really important stuff.
Also, tape access is really slooow. I'd back up onto actual hard drives before I'd back anything up onto VHS... --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Hell yeah, So obviously NetWare is far superior to Linux.:)
However, if this CORBA stuff is done right, eventually we'll be able to run DOS entirely in kernel-space anyhow!
If they really have as little security as they claim, then this will give us a nice performance boost for some tasks, (no bothersome scheduler or swapper, say) and better backwards-compatibility than DOSEmu! (I can run Cubic! I can run the Second Reality Demo, perhaps with sound! Yay!) --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
The sad thing is, I remember some of the old "performance tricks" we'd do in DOS.
Like, if you've got a tight loop that you want to run quickly, make sure you put some inline assembler around it...
cli
sti
That way, you aren't bothered by those useless "interrupts" that the Operating System is always doing. I mean, really, what good are those?;) --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
I suppose you could just store the low 640k-1MB or so somewhere else (say, the highest 1MB), and just not tell the kernel about it (set memsize to one less whatever is detected). Then, at shutdown, have it try to copy that back.:)
And yes, I try not to use Windows, but I just got a new computer, and I figured I'd test out all my hardware. Playing DVDs under Linux doesn't work yet, at least with my drive. Incidentally, I've heard that one way to solve *that* problem is to try playing them under VMWare...
User-mode Linux sounds cool, but is it that mature already? I might try it sometime, but... not yet. Also, I know Plex86 isn't there yet, because I've tried it. Heck, I couldn't even get Bochs to boot Win98, and that's supposed to emulate everything!:) --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Actually, Linux is a DOS App. I know, because Loadlin is a protected-mode program that runs Linux from DOS! DOS lets the program do whatever it wants. I mean, it's the running program, right?
Like I said, Linux has the framebuffer driver. But you hit upon the key point: "third party". One reason why Linux can be so much more stable than NT is because all the kernel programs are developed together, with source. It's much harder to track down a rogue, third-party, binary-only driver.
Case in point: after removing my TV Card, my SB Live! card doesn't work at all. Under Windows, the card gets detected, and then the system locks. Hard. Under Linux, the drivers try to load, and then fail, but the system keeps going. The same is true for Alsa as well, though, so go figure...
The Hurd looks like it has a lot of potential. But it also has a lot of maturing to do, as well. I like the design of RT-Linux, myself; I think a lot more could be done with a model like that.
And yes, I was joking, and going for first post, *and* I love talking about systems, in general.:) --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Try a telnet BBS. It isn't quite the same, but it's definitely just as cool. I was amazed at the blast of nostalgia I got when I tried to navigate it all again, as if for the first time...
We had lots of BBSes running WWIV, and some Renegade and other stuff. Oblivion was really cool, and I remember one BBS that was run off of OS/2; I don't remember what the software was, but it was pretty impressive.
And yes, there was extra stuff I didn't mention, like "Time Banks". Actually, I wish I could set a daily time limit for slashdot posting; that would be interesting!
And yes, I love my T3... Boy, we're spoiled these days! Even sending Internet E-mail from a BBS was a royal pain! --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Well, who cares? You always see it on BugTraq before it gets back to Microsoft, even when you tell them about it first... --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
I loved BBSes. I loved them even when I had a 14.4 modem, 'cause I'd still connect at 2400 just to chat to the same people all the time...
Maybe slashdot was like this. In the beginning. A little. But I'm sure I could configure a machine to be much more like a BBS, on the web, or not. I think that having a small community of quirky people is a requirement as well...
But if it had to be a web page, then I suppose you'd have to have topics and comment threads (we have those, but the topics are somewhat regulated). You'd also have to "Login" and "Logout", and optionally be able to post silly comments that show up at Login. You'd have a file area, with lots of useful stuff (freshmeat.net?) random text files ("How to get HBO for free" => textfiles.com?) and funny stuff. Of course we always had polls...
So yes, the Internet has elements of the BBS community, and places like slashdot have it more than most, but it still isn't the same, and every BBS feels different, too, with a very unique, ingrown sense of community.
I remember Another World felt very friendly and homey, and Cedar Republic felt more serious, (but it had TWO lines! You could chat with a friend!) and Psychotronic was basically a nest of Trolls...:)
In retrospect, I wouldn't give that up for anything. Maybe not even for the computer I have now instead of my 386 back then... --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Basically, it's all about making the perfect x86 emulator. Bochs and MESS are good examples for supporting slow x86 processor emulation (MESS being more accurate in some instances for game support, but both are pretty bleeding-edge).
I mean, really, what's the point of having the latest 986DX4/2GHz processor if you can't run SPACEWAR without getting a divide by zero error, or the Second Reality demo doesn't work with the SB Emulation, or your Mario game in Assembler is jerky? --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
I just looked it up; the 286 apparently had 24 address bits; 2^24 == 16 MB.
Also, I seem to remember that under normal circumstances (real mode => backwards compatibility) you could only use 20 bits, which would bring you back down to 1 MB. But I could be wrong...
The 386 actually did have 32 address bits, though, which gives us the current 4GB limit... --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Slashdot Mirror
No way!
At least, not if I buy www.letter.com you won't!
In other news, Microsoft Word Charges By The Letter...
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Well, maybe. You can't trust most big companies, and it's hard to stay a small, popular chip company.
;)
I started getting annoyed with Intel slightly before the Pentium release, but I loved my 386; I had that thing for years, and it ran great. Well, ok, jpeg decompression was slow, but come on. My Pentium 133 was pretty decent too.
As for AMD, I was satisfied with my K6/300; I got it for the value and the integer performance, but the slow cache definitely hurt.
However, now that I've got an 800Mhz Thunderbird, I'm happy as a clam. It's faster than I need at the moment, and a pleasure to use. And I won't have to worry about slow cache performance for a while yet.
So, yeah; Intel makes decent chips, although they've been messing up lately. AMD has beaten them in the short term. But basically Intel is a sore loser, and has been acting more objectionably for a long time. If Intel dies and AMD takes over, I'll be happy. If AMD starts to abuse their newfound power, well... there's always Transmeta, right?
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Because they don't know any better.
;)
You also shouldn't buy a computer from Radio Shack, either, but people do...
(well, unless it's a Tandy...
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
It still sounds like a good alternative for people who don't know any better.
In the meantime, the rest of us will be waiting for multiprocessor boards for the Athlon...
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Dude, I'll be 23 on April 25th! You bastards!
Oh well, I guess I won't have to learn German now....
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
What does the timeline look like for Plex86? I can tell it's pretty much alpha-level now...
/dev/hda with the first chunk of /dev/hda1; woo...) Could you put whatever tool made a partition for Bochs into Plex86? I swear there was one once; maybe I just can't find it....
Also, are there any other GPLed projects that you think could help out, or vice versa? I think DOSEmu could benefit a lot from some Bochs code, for instance. (I know DOSEmu has its own CPU Emulator, but I have yet to see it do a whole lot...)
The last time I tried Plex86 out, it looked like Bochs was actually faster, and that's saying something. Maybe there was a parameter I needed to tweak in the configuration file. I couldn't get Plex86 to boot Win98, although DOS worked.
Oh, and I had a fun time trying to determine how much of my Windows partition consisted of the MBR. (comparing the first chunk of
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
I agree. :)
:) of my partitions in linux, but I'd much rather use RAID-5. The thing is, I'd probably end up buying at least another IDE controller for something like that, and I doubt the performance improvement would be worth it. However, I'd like that added safety net in case of drive failure.
And yes, using a bank of hard-drives would be much better than using tapes. Mostly I was objecting to the amazingly slow seek and write times involved...
I'd like to have some sort of IDE-RAID; I'm actually running RAID-0 on one (or two
And yes, a large distributed filesystem project would be very cool. I guess you could look into Coda; I wouldn't recommend NFS for something like that, though.
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Well, they're pretty different. But fault-tolerance is most of what I want in a backup. If I had that, then I'd only backup the really important stuff.
Also, tape access is really slooow. I'd back up onto actual hard drives before I'd back anything up onto VHS...
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
I believe my C64 could do this.
Or you could record an actual modem, like Information Society did.
But if you were sane, you'd just buy backup tapes instead. Or for that matter, use RAID-5.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Hey, that's better than ftp.cs.helsinki.fi!
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Hell yeah, So obviously NetWare is far superior to Linux. :)
However, if this CORBA stuff is done right, eventually we'll be able to run DOS entirely in kernel-space anyhow!
If they really have as little security as they claim, then this will give us a nice performance boost for some tasks, (no bothersome scheduler or swapper, say) and better backwards-compatibility than DOSEmu! (I can run Cubic! I can run the Second Reality Demo, perhaps with sound! Yay!)
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
That actually *is* pretty funny. :)
;)
The sad thing is, I remember some of the old "performance tricks" we'd do in DOS.
Like, if you've got a tight loop that you want to run quickly, make sure you put some inline assembler around it...
cli
sti
That way, you aren't bothered by those useless "interrupts" that the Operating System is always doing. I mean, really, what good are those?
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
I suppose you could just store the low 640k-1MB or so somewhere else (say, the highest 1MB), and just not tell the kernel about it (set memsize to one less whatever is detected). Then, at shutdown, have it try to copy that back. :)
:)
And yes, I try not to use Windows, but I just got a new computer, and I figured I'd test out all my hardware. Playing DVDs under Linux doesn't work yet, at least with my drive. Incidentally, I've heard that one way to solve *that* problem is to try playing them under VMWare...
User-mode Linux sounds cool, but is it that mature already? I might try it sometime, but... not yet. Also, I know Plex86 isn't there yet, because I've tried it. Heck, I couldn't even get Bochs to boot Win98, and that's supposed to emulate everything!
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Actually, Linux is a DOS App. I know, because Loadlin is a protected-mode program that runs Linux from DOS! DOS lets the program do whatever it wants. I mean, it's the running program, right?
:)
Like I said, Linux has the framebuffer driver. But you hit upon the key point: "third party". One reason why Linux can be so much more stable than NT is because all the kernel programs are developed together, with source. It's much harder to track down a rogue, third-party, binary-only driver.
Case in point: after removing my TV Card, my SB Live! card doesn't work at all. Under Windows, the card gets detected, and then the system locks. Hard. Under Linux, the drivers try to load, and then fail, but the system keeps going. The same is true for Alsa as well, though, so go figure...
The Hurd looks like it has a lot of potential. But it also has a lot of maturing to do, as well. I like the design of RT-Linux, myself; I think a lot more could be done with a model like that.
And yes, I was joking, and going for first post, *and* I love talking about systems, in general.
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
That is very cool.
;)
With this, and khttpd and the frame buffer support and just a few other patches, I might not have to run in userland ever again!!
Just like DOS!!!
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Ever heard of the EFF?
Pro Bono?
Better me than them; I don't have much to lose...
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Let them try.
I want to see them sue every library in existence.
(I think we'll have some prior art here.)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Try a telnet BBS. It isn't quite the same, but it's definitely just as cool. I was amazed at the blast of nostalgia I got when I tried to navigate it all again, as if for the first time...
We had lots of BBSes running WWIV, and some Renegade and other stuff. Oblivion was really cool, and I remember one BBS that was run off of OS/2; I don't remember what the software was, but it was pretty impressive.
And yes, there was extra stuff I didn't mention, like "Time Banks". Actually, I wish I could set a daily time limit for slashdot posting; that would be interesting!
And yes, I love my T3... Boy, we're spoiled these days! Even sending Internet E-mail from a BBS was a royal pain!
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
The biggest problem with government websites is government. My personal example is the FCC.
They obviously don't understand the web or the Internet, and probably never will. Frightening, eh?
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
I'll just claim that I was trying to get work done, and cite Windows itself as an "illegal circumvention device".
The DMCA is ludicrous; I hope it gets overturned faster than the CDA did...
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Heh. Build a web cache; tell people to go there.
I'd *love* to see them try to sue over *that*.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
There goes half their traffic.
Well, who cares? You always see it on BugTraq before it gets back to Microsoft, even when you tell them about it first...
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
I loved BBSes. I loved them even when I had a 14.4 modem, 'cause I'd still connect at 2400 just to chat to the same people all the time...
:)
Maybe slashdot was like this. In the beginning. A little. But I'm sure I could configure a machine to be much more like a BBS, on the web, or not. I think that having a small community of quirky people is a requirement as well...
But if it had to be a web page, then I suppose you'd have to have topics and comment threads (we have those, but the topics are somewhat regulated). You'd also have to "Login" and "Logout", and optionally be able to post silly comments that show up at Login. You'd have a file area, with lots of useful stuff (freshmeat.net?) random text files ("How to get HBO for free" => textfiles.com?) and funny stuff. Of course we always had polls...
So yes, the Internet has elements of the BBS community, and places like slashdot have it more than most, but it still isn't the same, and every BBS feels different, too, with a very unique, ingrown sense of community.
I remember Another World felt very friendly and homey, and Cedar Republic felt more serious, (but it had TWO lines! You could chat with a friend!) and Psychotronic was basically a nest of Trolls...
In retrospect, I wouldn't give that up for anything. Maybe not even for the computer I have now instead of my 386 back then...
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
I want to be able to run all my old gamez. ;)
Basically, it's all about making the perfect x86 emulator. Bochs and MESS are good examples for supporting slow x86 processor emulation (MESS being more accurate in some instances for game support, but both are pretty bleeding-edge).
I mean, really, what's the point of having the latest 986DX4/2GHz processor if you can't run SPACEWAR without getting a divide by zero error, or the Second Reality demo doesn't work with the SB Emulation, or your Mario game in Assembler is jerky?
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
No, that doesn't follow at all.
I just looked it up; the 286 apparently had 24 address bits; 2^24 == 16 MB.
Also, I seem to remember that under normal circumstances (real mode => backwards compatibility) you could only use 20 bits, which would bring you back down to 1 MB. But I could be wrong...
The 386 actually did have 32 address bits, though, which gives us the current 4GB limit...
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.