Apparently she's racked up more than half a dozen divorces
That's par for the course, in Hollywood:o(
as well as a minor criminal record
Imagine her as a sad lonely old lady. It's not that surprising really. There have been quite a few cases of faded stars getting caught shoplifting. Some say it's a subconsciously-driven attempt to get attention.
So besides being well over 50 years my senior and dead, she's probably not this geek guy's type
Yeah, but a decent geek husband might have saved her from all that.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is Thought exists only as an abstraction
I have no doubt that you yourself are beyond reproach. There are still many active Slashdot community members who are intelligent and/or experienced enough to tell the difference between sense and nonsense. So I've no argument to make against your reply.
But I have noticed a subtle trend in the apparent demographics of Slashdot lately; a significant rise in the number of anti-Linux, anti-open-source posters with an agenda.
These newcomers sometimes claim to be "balanced" users of both Linux and Windows. One of their main tactics involves blank denial of the existence of any sort of significant problems with Windows. They also denounce all complaints about such problems as outright lies propagated by Linux zealots.
I have also discovered that they seem to have begun visiting in groups, in order to support each other in flame wars should any of us dare to offer resistance. Or, possibly some of them have multiple identities. Many of them are ACs so it's difficult to tell. But the rate of their postings in a given flame war implies a group. Once they have you outnumbered they quickly shift the debate away from the real issues towards personal attacks on your competence and integrity.
I was cornered by a bunch of them just the other day, in an abandoned thread at the tail end of one story's "active" period. I thought I spied a bogus post from a Microsoft employee and attempted to "out" him. What happened next was pretty ugly. I was forced to withdraw in the end as I'd no chance of defending myself against so many. I can only post just so many rebuttals per hour and no more!
Be warned; if you go posting by yourself in abandoned threads a day or two after most people have moved on, you may find yourself suddenly surrounded - with no chance of anyone coming to assist you. If that happens to you, don't try to be a hero - just get out of there quickly if you want to avoid a beating!
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is Thought exists only as an abstraction
a 20% speedup isn't significant. I'm not saying we should abandon all speedups that don't affect asymptotic complexity; I'm just saying that I'm looking for speedups of at least 2x-10x before I'm impressed with anything. 20% is small stuff.
I think you're being unrealistic about this. This is 20% across the board for modern server apps after all, and 20% is a pretty good improvement for a single kernel tweak. You have to consider the cumulative effect of a number of such tweaks. I have substantial difficulty even imagining a single tweak that could double performance let alone multiply it by ten times!
The cost of a context switch is high given current processor designs, and is not likely to get lower. Even assuming that on a thread switch, since you're dealing with the same data as the previous thread was using, the TLB and code/data caches remain useful (on a process switch in general they don't, and refilling the caches is very expensive), you still have to store a whole bunch of stuff to memory for the old thread and bring a whole bunch of stuff of stuff out of memory for the new thread. And you've got to leave userland for a bit to do that. Slow slow slow slow.
As I understand it, threads on Linux are implemented via lightweight processes, using the clone() syscall which basically does a fork without copying the majority of the execution environment. i.e. it runs within the original environment and only copies those bits which have to be unique to each thread. The overhead isn't nearly what it is to do a traditional process fork.
I'm pretty sure threads are here to stay. They do make it a lot easier to design real time applications and scalable server applications.
It seems to me that in general we need to reconsider the approach of relying on the operating system to schedule and share resources (in the case of chatservers and ftpservers and especially webservers, where we see the real performance hits for massive thread/process expenses). Right now all this stuff is based on the Berkeley sockets API, a high level network API (i.e. one that doesn't at all consider what the transport will be).
Sockets do help to keep interfaces simple and standardised. Doesn't the modern Unix "streams" design (which IIRC standard Linux doesn't support yet) rely on something similar? Admittedly it's not very fast compared to other IPC methods available on a single machine.
But the fact remains that your ethernet card is fundamentally a serial device. I have to wonder if it wouldnt' be possible to write a webserver which does know about the transport for a change, and which could in only one process sit there putting packets onto the wire at a level much closer to the hardware, and therefore save a lot of expense in making the operating system arbitrate all these zillions of threads that want to share the connection.
There are enough wacky people out there looking for something unique to do, that somebody will no doubt have a go. But I'm certain it will enjoy only limited popularity. It's just not the Unix Way, and the Unix Way is a pretty important reason for the success of Unix and Unix-alikes.
Apart from anything else, it ties the application to a particular hardware configuration, effectively making the server it runs on into a proprietary piece of kit. For that reason, it seems to me that the most likely people to try it would be a hardware firm, maybe a server vendor like IBM.
Or maybe one of the network card manufacturers. If they designed a special NIC with the IP stack implemented in hardware or firmware, then the OS kernel wouldn't need any modification other than a simplified device driver module. I think that would eliminate the bottleneck you're referring to.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is Thought exists only as an abstraction
Hedy Lamarr must be about the closest thing to a geek guy's ideal woman. She was certainly a hot chick in her day. Just look at that Corel Draw picture of her that Corel uses for their. But before today I'd *no* idea she was an engineering genius.
The orginal Techno-Talking Babe!(TM)
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is Thought exists only as an abstraction
Fortunately for those of us who like a drink, the human body is quite efficient at metabolizing ethanol. The first step involves partial oxidation of the ethanol into the equivalent aldehyde ethanal (CH3CHO). This is removed by further enzymic reactions eventually culminating in carbon dioxide and water as waste products.
As it is chemically similar to ethanol, methanol is initially acted upon by the same enzymes, partially oxidizing it to form the equivalent aldyhyde methanal (CH2O). That's the IUPAC name for it; you may be more familiar with the "trivial" name formaldehyde.
So if you drink wood alcohol you get formaldehyde as a metabolite byproduct. Now, anyone who has done biology at school will at some point have seen preserved specimens of animal tissue floating in a jar of liquid. That liquid is formaldehyde.
It's used for specimen preservation because it pickles animal tissue, toughening it in the process. As it's readily absorbed by (and quickly reacts with) soft tissues, it helps to preserve delicate structures that would break up in most other cheap preserving media.
Unfortunately two notable soft tissue structures in the human body are the retina and the brain.
So, to summarize: the reason why wood alcohol causes blindness and insanity is that the metabolic byproduct, formaldehyde, literally pickles the brain and retina. Cool, eh?
Since the congeners present in most alcoholic beverages include a small amount of methanol, if you're a heavy enough drinker you will obtain the same tissue deterioration to some extent. Though your liver will probably pack up first. And you'll be too pissed to notice anyway.
Cheers!
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is Thought exists only as an abstraction
I haven't been able to find any way to play.rm and.ram files retrieved from cache. They require an rtsp server or something. I think that's the whole point; with other stream formats you can capture and replay to your heart's content but with Real Audio/Video you can only play it as a live stream, so the owner retains complete control of it. That's why it sucks.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is Thought exists only as an abstraction
I have been pleasantly surprised in the past when posts derrogatory towards Linux or open source have been moderated up, especially when the poster was intelligent and thoughtful.
Yes, I'm already seeing evidence that the pendulum of the slashdot community ethos is now swinging back the way it came. Beware, that way lies danger.
Already it has reached the point where any sort of anti-Linux or anti-open source post which doesn't employ swear words or "hackerspeak", is almost guaranteed to get moderated up, for the sake of political correctness.
Don't you people learn? If you *overdo* the tolerance thing you end up losing everything you once dared to believe in. Because you can bet your bottom dollar that the particular minority concerned (in this place, that'd be the pro-Microsoft faction) who are benefiting from your studied and increasing tolerance, will push their agenda until they have won. You won't see *them* exercising tolerance.
If you think it doesn't matter, if you think this war of words is ultimately harmless, or if you think that no price is too much for complete and untrammelled freedom of speech...then just remember this:
The expanded world of open source we enjoy today *only* became possible *after* its community woke up to the importance of propaganda and began taking on the media and the big software producers by using their own tactics against them.
In case you hadn't noticed, the war isn't over yet. Think DeCSS, think Quicktime4, and think what Microsoft is going to try to do with Windows2000.
There *must* be rational and open debate, but there also has to be a line drawn somewhere between acceptable discourse about relative shortcomings of open source vs proprietary products...and sponsored propaganda attacks from disguised Microsoft employees.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is Thought exists only as an abstraction
Despite the name, RISC (Reduced Instruction Set Computing) doesn't actually just refer to the number of instructions implemented. It also implies a certain class of chip architecture comprising, for example, orthogonal instruction set. AFAIK, Crusoe has no instruction set at all in the traditional sense.
As to other RISC features such as superscalar architecture, multiple execution units with pipelining etc which have recently also been incorporated in modern CISC designs such as the latest Intel processors...I don't know if Crusoe has these but it ought to otherwise I don't think it could compete in performance terms.
Overall, Crusoe's architecture is radically different from both CISC and RISC. It really deserves a new category of its own.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is Thought exists only as an abstraction
That's sort of the point of it. These need not be x86, and in the case of Crusoe they're not. But there MUST necessarily be native instructions on this chip. It is these instructions that the x86 instructions (mapping in software) are morphed into.
I don't know the details about Crusoe's architecture, but in a general sense what you're saying isn't right.
In microprocessors, the instruction set is implemented on the chip in a kind of firmware called "microcode". Directly underneath the microcode is just bazillions of logic gates, which possess no instruction set other than "gimme a 1" and "gimme a 0".
So the microcode provides an interface between the software instructions arriving at the chip's pins as a set of electrical voltages, and the underlying low-level hardware.
It sounds to me as if what Transmeta have done (and shoot me down if I'm wrong) is to replace the upper layer of the static firmware with dynamic software which can be reprogrammed on the fly. Whether or not the chip can meaningfully be termed as having an "instruction" set depends on how much is still implemented in firmware.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is Thought exists only as an abstraction
I should have checked freshmeat before posting that. There are indeed quite a few open source MPEG players with audio now, even stereo. And there are libraries to support streaming too (even RTSP).
So why *don't* we see more streaaming MPEG stereo material out there? Maybe it's just because they're not promoting it.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is Thought exists only as an abstraction
However, that covers sound only (obviously) and works at the phonetic level rather than with an audio stream, so it's not really related in any strong way to the Virtual Newscaster thread.
Duh, sorry! I didn't read your post properly. You're really talking about the streaming protocol that the sound output is piped through.
With regard to your point about MPEG1+MPEG3...I'm admittedly ignorant about the technical issues but since there are already open source encoders and decoders for both of these formats, surely they only need to be wrapped up with some form of synchronization "heartbeat" and we'd have a new open source streaming format.
A well-publicized open source project to create a new streaming protocol out of these two existing standards would probably attract quite a bit of support. Admittedly it's not Quicktime4 but IMO MPEG video quality is quite good.
It might even encourage Apple and Sorensen to let minority OS users get access to their Quicktime4 codec.
I wonder exactly what the technical difficulties are. They must be substantial; to date, AFAIK, not one open source MPEG player has included support for a synchronised sound track.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is Thought exists only as an abstraction
You can get tarballs for source and binaries and last time I looked there was a Red Hat rpm available too.
Festival can be used with a range of supplied voice patterns, accents and languages and is completely configurable. I particularly recommend the MBROLA voices. Not as smooth as the AT&T TTS example, but pretty close.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is Thought exists only as an abstraction
I must love abuse, but I can't resist knocking this down: ...
Thanks for the history lecture. 90% of it is nitpicking, neither more nor less true than what I said in just three short sentences. If I could have been bothered to write a book about it I might well have raised many of the same points. But an ounce of falsehood saves a ton of explanation without substantially changing the meaning. And that's the point, isn't it? Because the revised history you offer doesn't change things one iota: Microsoft's position in the market has everything to do with precedence and manipulation of the market, and nothing to do with usability or reliability or any other kind of technical superiority.
It seems like you feel obliged to try (sometimes unsuccessfully) and take up a contrary position on everything I say. If that's your motivation, rather than (for example) disseminating empirical facts, then your position is hardly credible.
...it's comforting to believe that all these issues have such simple answers... I think you'll learn something if you stop being so blind from hatred, and try to learn from Microsoft instead.
The arrogance! You assume far too much. You are not dealing with some resentful snot-nosed kid hacker here - I have 15 years experience in the IT business, in the beginning as a developer and support technician, but for the majority of it as an Information Systems consultant and IT manager. A "suit", if you like. I am not "blind from hatred" - I am a commercially-oriented business manager, a realist, a pragmatist. I am fed up with being shafted by Microsoft. I am fed up with paying inflated prices for bugware and having to pay again and again for upgrades that only end up making things worse. Most of all I am fed up with the lies and the propaganda, especially the sort of sycophantic denial exhibited by hangers-on like yourself.
The fundamental difference between you and I is plain. I have run many different applications on all versions of Windows, on a wide range of hardware configurations and the empirical evidence shows that relatively few combinations are mostly trouble-free. If you are telling the truth about your own experience then you have obviously encountered only reltively few limited configurations, probably among the few hardware combinations Microsoft has bothered to test their software on. What *you* have to learn is that *your* experience isn't necessarily comprehensive or authoritative. The same would be true for me even notwithstanding my extensive direct experience, except that I wouldn't have spoken out in the first place if I didn't already have copious evidence from Usenet, Slashdot and various mailing lists that severe problems with Windows are commonplace. Nor would I have come down on you so hard if I didn't already know that most posts taking a position similar to yours are completely bogus.
OK, this is my last post on this thread - I've better things to do than getting verbally kicked to death by a gang of pro-MS ideologues. Flame away all you like.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is Thought exists only as an abstraction
. Here, of all places. You're weird. Have you never heard the expression "preaching to the converted?" You dont express opinions to those who are bound to agree, there is no point. Saying challenging things about Linux on a Linux dominated forum makes sense.
Valid point.
Anyway, correct me if I'm wrong, but isnt Slashdot the site that keeps banging on about democracy, freedom of speech, etc? You seem to want every visitor and every poster to comply with One True Point Of View (tm)... preferable *your* true point of view.
Not very nice, really, eh?
You couldn't be more wrong. Did you even read any of my original assertions? I'm not fighting for ideology, I'm fighting against lies and propaganda intended to suppress the established facts that Windows is unstable and unreliable and that users care about this when they know it doesn't have to be like that.
However to my extreme incredulity I've found myself surrounded on this occasion by MS fanboys and those whose orientation might best be described as "uninformed". Suddenly, there's not a Linux advocate to be seen.
It's very difficult to appear cool and rational when you're surrounded and outnumbered by critics, several of them openly hostile, uninterested in the point you tried to make but determined to defeat you by any means.
I've been accused of ad hominem arguments. But if you look back through the threads I've posted to on this article you'll see that I've been the *victim* of ad hominem vilification on far more numerous occasions.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is Thought exists only as an abstraction
FYI:I have a SuSE Linux 6.1 box I use as a gateway and firewall (and for for development and for surfing occasionally),a Win98SE PC for use as a workstation and a Win95OSR2 PC for the kids. The two Windows boxes have caused no end of problems. On average I'm having to reinstall the OS on the two Win PCs once every two months-that's after having arrived at a "stable" configuration; I had to reinstall Win98SE 9 or 10 times before I could get it even remotely usable. Last time it crashed I lost the "special" icons from my desktop. Since then, some(but not all audio applications have lost access to the audio device. It'll soon be necessary to reinstall again.
Though the Linux box has seen a comparable amount of interactive use(and is kept running 24/7 because of its server duties) it has never faltered. The only problem I ever have on it is Netscape crashing.
So I try to take claims about Windows being reliable and easy to use in good humour,but under the circumstances it can be rather difficult. And people claiming that I am lying or incompetent - just because they cling dogmatically to the notion that all Linux advocates are unreliable witnesses - tend to get me a bit riled.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is Thought exists only as an abstraction
If users cared about os stabilitiy, Microsoft would not be in the position it is now.
It simply does not follow.
Microsoft is in the position it is now because: (i)it appeared first (ii)the company uses clever marketing to woo the public (iii)the company variously destroyed/bought out all the competition
Macs didn't gain mass market appeal because the hardware was too expensive(and Apple were having some difficulties of their own when the PC market started to mushroom a couple of years ago). Linux isn't even on Joe Public's radar yet.
Most computer buyers aren't even aware there is a choice. It has absolutely nothing to do with relative merit, and everything to do with Microsoft's pursuit of an effective monopoly. So sayeth Judge Jackson anyway.
You are a blip compared to the rest of the computing population.
Really. So what are you? Are you really more qualified than I to speak for the world's users? Or is Mr Behrendsen?
And one more thing, calling someone a Microsoft drone because you disagree with their opinion is a step below calling someone a Nazi.
I don't agree that accusing somone of working for Microsoft is like calling them a Nazi. Microsoft might be guilty of questionable business practices but it's hardly Nazism.
It just makes your argument look weak when you stoop to that level.
I referred to him in that way because it seemed the only possible explanation for the strength of his pro-MS stance (here, of all places). After all he implied that Windows only ever fails due to faulty hardware or incompetent users. When this rather extreme POV has been expressed before, the culprit has often been exposed in the end as a Microsoft employee. And it's common knowledge that Microsoft encourages their employees to get onto public fora like Slashdot and spread the company propaganda.
So the nomenclature I used is hardly unjustified.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is Thought exists only as an abstraction
I can just see how that argument would play to a frustrated Photoshop user with a production deadline who's just lost a day's work because his Windows fell over and trashed the file system in the process.
You are getting more and more shrill. Settle down.
I'm not sure I know what you mean by "shrill". I always thought it referred to a sort of shrieking or at least whining sort of sound. Yet reading back my own quote, I can't detect any such tone. I'm certain it would sound perfectly reasonable to anyone thus affected.
As for "trashing the filesystem", now I know you hardly ever use Windows. I can't remember the last time I had a trashed filesystem. Your credibility is taken a beating. If you want to be taken seriously, then don't make silly exaggerations.
I take exception to that.
I use Windows 98 every single day (I have to because of my work). If I say I've had completely trashed file systems - which I will swear to, it has happened twice on my own machine since I installed Win98SE back in October, and I've written about it publicly both here and elsewhere - then calling me a liar without any grounds on which to do so only makes you look like an impertinent fool. My credibility isn't taking a beating just because you say it is. In any case it is not I but you who is making extravagant and unsubstantiated claims.
We can all see you have an agenda here. In this place at least, unless Slashdot is about to be invaded wholesale by MS fanboys (perish the thought), you're wasting your breath. Give it up.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is Thought exists only as an abstraction
What I will tell you is that operating system stability is not a high priority to the average user.
LOL!!!
Now I *know* you must be working for Microsoft:o)
I can just see how that argument would play to a frustrated Photoshop user with a production deadline who's just lost a day's work because his Windows fell over and trashed the file system in the process.
Oh yeah... and don't insult our intelligence by saying "that doesn't happen" or "it's the hardware. Most of us here are experienced enough to be able to tell the difference (after a little investigation) between a hardware problem and an OS problem. It's a matter of repeated personal experience for too many of us...one of the main reasons many of us turned to Linux in the first place.
Fly away home, Microsoft drone!
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is Thought exists only as an abstraction
Hardly. In my (somewhat extensive) experience supporting Win9x users, Windows does this all the time. It's not usually the hardware that's faulty, as the drive will usually work fine on another box and indeed on the same box after Windows has been reinstalled.
You'd have to be pretty inexperienced to be unaware of this. But it seems to me that either you just don't know what you're talking about or else you are *deliberately* attempting to mislead people about the true state of affairs here. Maybe you're on the MS payroll...or you just spent a packet on your MCSE?
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is Thought exists only as an abstraction
Bullshit. Apps on Linux don't have to be better...just good enough.
Linux has enough going for it in terms of reliability, stability and usability that people won't give a fig if the office suites aren't loaded with useless bloat that noone ever uses anyway.
I can hardly believe your troll of a post was moderated up to a five...here, of all places. Seems to me you must've brought your friends with you. Either that or you've found out how to hack Slashdot.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is Thought exists only as an abstraction
One way this has been dealt with in the past is to store everything (source, source deltas, compiled objects and linked executables) in a source code management system along similar lines to SCCS or CVS. I cite as an example the CMS tools on OpenVMS. OpenVMS compilers and the linker can be invoked to operate on CMS objects without having to pre-fetch anything first.
I'm not sure exactly how stuff is stored in CMS (apart from the obvious fact that source deltas are stored as diffs) but I'd guess that there must be some sort of efficient indexing involved since access to such a store doesn't have to be quite as flexible as a general purpose file system.
If we were to implement something like this for ourselves I'd say the first thing to do is to find a lightweight, fast and efficient implementation of an object repository. Does anyone know of such?
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is Thought exists only as an abstraction
Tidying up confusion (Score:1) by kojak on 14:22 15th January, 2000 BST (#130) (User Info) I meant *in schools*, sorry for the confusion. In terms of method at UK universities, I have no real complaints. I was doing three things at once when I tpyed it, and it was late.
Getting back to the whinge - I just don't see that the current state of GCSE actually promotes public understanding of science. It kind of hero-worships these geeks-as-gods "scientists", somewhat unhelpfully I feel.
...etc.
Well, it appears I completely misunderstood what you were trying to say.
As regards your point about GCSE-level education, I can only agree. It's clear that high school education in the UK isn't what it used to be. In particular, any attempt to teach science without the maths to support it is doomed to failure. Unless we can understand the maths we can assess neither experimental results nor theory, and the whole subject is indistinguishable from philisophy or religion. No wonder so many young people today lack faith in science and think it's "just another way of looking at things" no better than voodooism UFOlogy.
FYI, my high school education in the late 1970's employed the Nuffield syllabus for the three science subjects and consequently placed a very high emphasis on hands-on experimentation and analysis. I understand the "traditional" science syllabus used in most UK schools at the time tended more towards historical discourse and the handing down of received knowledge. The benefits of the Nuffield syllabuses (syllabi?) were even more pronounced at 'A' level. You can easily imagine that 6th-form Nuffield science would have been equivalent to University freshman science in most other countries, including the US. That's what our teachers at the time told us anyway.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is Thought exists only as an abstraction
I suggest you come and get a tech job in the UK. I guarantee you'll have guys lining up (not stinky scraggly ones, they wouldn't have the nerve and you don't see many of them in decent workplaces anyway).
Hmm. Scraggly. I like that word!
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is Thought exists only as an abstraction
That substitution technique usually seems to work but not in this case because there is a very obvious asymmetry. The pro-abortionists aren't anti-life, but the anti-abortionists are certainly anti-choice.
I'm not saying a case against abortion can't be made (and I myself have mixed feelings about it) but in this particular instance the mistake you've made is in attempting to reason backwards from a given conclusion (that abortion is wrong). We all tend to do that on occasion if we forget to challenge our own assumptions from time to time.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is Thought exists only as an abstraction
Slashdot Mirror
Apparently she's racked up more than half a dozen divorces
:o(
That's par for the course, in Hollywood
as well as a minor criminal record
Imagine her as a sad lonely old lady. It's not that surprising really. There have been quite a few cases of faded stars getting caught shoplifting. Some say it's a subconsciously-driven attempt to get attention.
So besides being well over 50 years my senior and dead, she's probably not this geek guy's type
Yeah, but a decent geek husband might have saved her from all that.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
I have no doubt that you yourself are beyond reproach. There are still many active Slashdot community members who are intelligent and/or experienced enough to tell the difference between sense and nonsense. So I've no argument to make against your reply.
But I have noticed a subtle trend in the apparent demographics of Slashdot lately; a significant rise in the number of anti-Linux, anti-open-source posters with an agenda.
These newcomers sometimes claim to be "balanced" users of both Linux and Windows. One of their main tactics involves blank denial of the existence of any sort of significant problems with Windows. They also denounce all complaints about such problems as outright lies propagated by Linux zealots.
I have also discovered that they seem to have begun visiting in groups, in order to support each other in flame wars should any of us dare to offer resistance. Or, possibly some of them have multiple identities. Many of them are ACs so it's difficult to tell. But the rate of their postings in a given flame war implies a group. Once they have you outnumbered they quickly shift the debate away from the real issues towards personal attacks on your competence and integrity.
I was cornered by a bunch of them just the other day, in an abandoned thread at the tail end of one story's "active" period. I thought I spied a bogus post from a Microsoft employee and attempted to "out" him. What happened next was pretty ugly. I was forced to withdraw in the end as I'd no chance of defending myself against so many. I can only post just so many rebuttals per hour and no more!
Be warned; if you go posting by yourself in abandoned threads a day or two after most people have moved on, you may find yourself suddenly surrounded - with no chance of anyone coming to assist you. If that happens to you, don't try to be a hero - just get out of there quickly if you want to avoid a beating!
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
a 20% speedup isn't significant. I'm not saying we should abandon all speedups that don't affect asymptotic complexity; I'm just saying that I'm looking for speedups of at least 2x-10x before I'm impressed with anything. 20% is small stuff.
I think you're being unrealistic about this. This is 20% across the board for modern server apps after all, and 20% is a pretty good improvement for a single kernel tweak. You have to consider the cumulative effect of a number of such tweaks. I have substantial difficulty even imagining a single tweak that could double performance let alone multiply it by ten times!
The cost of a context switch is high given current processor designs, and is not likely to get lower. Even assuming that on a thread switch, since you're dealing with the same data as the previous thread was using, the TLB and code/data caches remain useful (on a process switch in general they don't, and refilling the caches is very expensive), you still have to store a whole bunch of stuff to memory for the old thread and bring a whole bunch of stuff of stuff out of memory for the new thread. And you've got to leave userland for a bit to do that. Slow slow slow slow.
As I understand it, threads on Linux are implemented via lightweight processes, using the clone() syscall which basically does a fork without copying the majority of the execution environment. i.e. it runs within the original environment and only copies those bits which have to be unique to each thread. The overhead isn't nearly what it is to do a traditional process fork.
I'm pretty sure threads are here to stay. They do make it a lot easier to design real time applications and scalable server applications.
It seems to me that in general we need to reconsider the approach of relying on the operating system to schedule and share resources (in the case of chatservers and ftpservers and especially webservers, where we see the real performance hits for massive thread/process expenses). Right now all this stuff is based on the Berkeley sockets API, a high level network API (i.e. one that doesn't at all consider what the transport will be).
Sockets do help to keep interfaces simple and standardised. Doesn't the modern Unix "streams" design (which IIRC standard Linux doesn't support yet) rely on something similar? Admittedly it's not very fast compared to other IPC methods available on a single machine.
But the fact remains that your ethernet card is fundamentally a serial device. I have to wonder if it wouldnt' be possible to write a webserver which does know about the transport for a change, and which could in only one process sit there putting packets onto the wire at a level much closer to the hardware, and therefore save a lot of expense in making the operating system arbitrate all these zillions of threads that want to share the connection.
There are enough wacky people out there looking for something unique to do, that somebody will no doubt have a go. But I'm certain it will enjoy only limited popularity. It's just not the Unix Way, and the Unix Way is a pretty important reason for the success of Unix and Unix-alikes.
Apart from anything else, it ties the application to a particular hardware configuration, effectively making the server it runs on into a proprietary piece of kit. For that reason, it seems to me that the most likely people to try it would be a hardware firm, maybe a server vendor like IBM.
Or maybe one of the network card manufacturers. If they designed a special NIC with the IP stack implemented in hardware or firmware, then the OS kernel wouldn't need any modification other than a simplified device driver module. I think that would eliminate the bottleneck you're referring to.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
Hedy Lamarr must be about the closest thing to a geek guy's ideal woman. She was certainly a hot chick in her day. Just look at that Corel Draw picture of her that Corel uses for their. But before today I'd *no* idea she was an engineering genius.
The orginal Techno-Talking Babe!(TM)
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
Fortunately for those of us who like a drink, the human body is quite efficient at metabolizing ethanol. The first step involves partial oxidation of the ethanol into the equivalent aldehyde ethanal (CH3CHO). This is removed by further enzymic reactions eventually culminating in carbon dioxide and water as waste products.
As it is chemically similar to ethanol, methanol is initially acted upon by the same enzymes, partially oxidizing it to form the equivalent aldyhyde methanal (CH2O). That's the IUPAC name for it; you may be more familiar with the "trivial" name formaldehyde.
So if you drink wood alcohol you get formaldehyde as a metabolite byproduct. Now, anyone who has done biology at school will at some point have seen preserved specimens of animal tissue floating in a jar of liquid. That liquid is formaldehyde.
It's used for specimen preservation because it pickles animal tissue, toughening it in the process. As it's readily absorbed by (and quickly reacts with) soft tissues, it helps to preserve delicate structures that would break up in most other cheap preserving media.
Unfortunately two notable soft tissue structures in the human body are the retina and the brain.
So, to summarize: the reason why wood alcohol causes blindness and insanity is that the metabolic byproduct, formaldehyde, literally pickles the brain and retina. Cool, eh?
Since the congeners present in most alcoholic beverages include a small amount of methanol, if you're a heavy enough drinker you will obtain the same tissue deterioration to some extent. Though your liver will probably pack up first. And you'll be too pissed to notice anyway.
Cheers!
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
there is a rather nominal fee(*)
Damn, he's mooning at us again. Cut it out, Torvalds!
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
I haven't been able to find any way to play .rm and .ram files retrieved from cache. They require an rtsp server or something. I think that's the whole point; with other stream formats you can capture and replay to your heart's content but with Real Audio/Video you can only play it as a live stream, so the owner retains complete control of it. That's why it sucks.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
I have been pleasantly surprised in the past when posts derrogatory towards Linux or open source have been moderated up, especially when the poster was intelligent and thoughtful.
Yes, I'm already seeing evidence that the pendulum of the slashdot community ethos is now swinging back the way it came. Beware, that way lies danger.
Already it has reached the point where any sort of anti-Linux or anti-open source post which doesn't employ swear words or "hackerspeak", is almost guaranteed to get moderated up, for the sake of political correctness.
Don't you people learn? If you *overdo* the tolerance thing you end up losing everything you once dared to believe in. Because you can bet your bottom dollar that the particular minority concerned (in this place, that'd be the pro-Microsoft faction) who are benefiting from your studied and increasing tolerance, will push their agenda until they have won. You won't see *them* exercising tolerance.
If you think it doesn't matter, if you think this war of words is ultimately harmless, or if you think that no price is too much for complete and untrammelled freedom of speech...then just remember this:
The expanded world of open source we enjoy today *only* became possible *after* its community woke up to the importance of propaganda and began taking on the media and the big software producers by using their own tactics against them.
In case you hadn't noticed, the war isn't over yet. Think DeCSS, think Quicktime4, and think what Microsoft is going to try to do with Windows2000.
There *must* be rational and open debate, but there also has to be a line drawn somewhere between acceptable discourse about relative shortcomings of open source vs proprietary products...and sponsored propaganda attacks from disguised Microsoft employees.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
Despite the name, RISC (Reduced Instruction Set Computing) doesn't actually just refer to the number of instructions implemented. It also implies a certain class of chip architecture comprising, for example, orthogonal instruction set. AFAIK, Crusoe has no instruction set at all in the traditional sense.
As to other RISC features such as superscalar architecture, multiple execution units with pipelining etc which have recently also been incorporated in modern CISC designs such as the latest Intel processors...I don't know if Crusoe has these but it ought to otherwise I don't think it could compete in performance terms.
Overall, Crusoe's architecture is radically different from both CISC and RISC. It really deserves a new category of its own.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
That's sort of the point of it. These need not be x86, and in the case of Crusoe they're not. But there MUST necessarily be native instructions on this chip. It is these instructions that the x86 instructions (mapping in software) are morphed into.
I don't know the details about Crusoe's architecture, but in a general sense what you're saying isn't right.
In microprocessors, the instruction set is implemented on the chip in a kind of firmware called "microcode". Directly underneath the microcode is just bazillions of logic gates, which possess no instruction set other than "gimme a 1" and "gimme a 0".
So the microcode provides an interface between the software instructions arriving at the chip's pins as a set of electrical voltages, and the underlying low-level hardware.
It sounds to me as if what Transmeta have done (and shoot me down if I'm wrong) is to replace the upper layer of the static firmware with dynamic software which can be reprogrammed on the fly. Whether or not the chip can meaningfully be termed as having an "instruction" set depends on how much is still implemented in firmware.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
I should have checked freshmeat before posting that. There are indeed quite a few open source MPEG players with audio now, even stereo. And there are libraries to support streaming too (even RTSP).
So why *don't* we see more streaaming MPEG stereo material out there? Maybe it's just because they're not promoting it.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
However, that covers sound only (obviously) and works at the phonetic level rather than with an audio stream, so it's not really related in any strong way to the Virtual Newscaster thread.
Duh, sorry! I didn't read your post properly. You're really talking about the streaming protocol that the sound output is piped through.
With regard to your point about MPEG1+MPEG3...I'm admittedly ignorant about the technical issues but since there are already open source encoders and decoders for both of these formats, surely they only need to be wrapped up with some form of synchronization "heartbeat" and we'd have a new open source streaming format.
A well-publicized open source project to create a new streaming protocol out of these two existing standards would probably attract quite a bit of support. Admittedly it's not Quicktime4 but IMO MPEG video quality is quite good.
It might even encourage Apple and Sorensen to let minority OS users get access to their Quicktime4 codec.
I wonder exactly what the technical difficulties are. They must be substantial; to date, AFAIK, not one open source MPEG player has included support for a synchronised sound track.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
If you want decent speech sythesis for Linux, try the open sourced "Festival Speech Synthesis System" from Edinburgh University.
You can get tarballs for source and binaries and last time I looked there was a Red Hat rpm available too.
Festival can be used with a range of supplied voice patterns, accents and languages and is completely configurable. I particularly recommend the MBROLA voices. Not as smooth as the AT&T TTS example, but pretty close.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
I must love abuse, but I can't resist knocking this down:
...it's comforting to believe that all these issues have such simple answers... I think you'll learn something if you stop being so blind from hatred, and try to learn from Microsoft instead.
...
Thanks for the history lecture. 90% of it is nitpicking, neither more nor less true than what I said in just three short sentences. If I could have been bothered to write a book about it I might well have raised many of the same points. But an ounce of falsehood saves a ton of explanation without substantially changing the meaning. And that's the point, isn't it? Because the revised history you offer doesn't change things one iota: Microsoft's position in the market has everything to do with precedence and manipulation of the market, and nothing to do with usability or reliability or any other kind of technical superiority.
It seems like you feel obliged to try (sometimes unsuccessfully) and take up a contrary position on everything I say. If that's your motivation, rather than (for example) disseminating empirical facts, then your position is hardly credible.
The arrogance! You assume far too much. You are not dealing with some resentful snot-nosed kid hacker here - I have 15 years experience in the IT business, in the beginning as a developer and support technician, but for the majority of it as an Information Systems consultant and IT manager. A "suit", if you like. I am not "blind from hatred" - I am a commercially-oriented business manager, a realist, a pragmatist. I am fed up with being shafted by Microsoft. I am fed up with paying inflated prices for bugware and having to pay again and again for upgrades that only end up making things worse. Most of all I am fed up with the lies and the propaganda, especially the sort of sycophantic denial exhibited by hangers-on like yourself.
The fundamental difference between you and I is plain. I have run many different applications on all versions of Windows, on a wide range of hardware configurations and the empirical evidence shows that relatively few combinations are mostly trouble-free. If you are telling the truth about your own experience then you have obviously encountered only reltively few limited configurations, probably among the few hardware combinations Microsoft has bothered to test their software on. What *you* have to learn is that *your* experience isn't necessarily comprehensive or authoritative. The same would be true for me even notwithstanding my extensive direct experience, except that I wouldn't have spoken out in the first place if I didn't already have copious evidence from Usenet, Slashdot and various mailing lists that severe problems with Windows are commonplace. Nor would I have come down on you so hard if I didn't already know that most posts taking a position similar to yours are completely bogus.
OK, this is my last post on this thread - I've better things to do than getting verbally kicked to death by a gang of pro-MS ideologues. Flame away all you like.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
. Here, of all places. You're weird. Have you never heard the expression "preaching to the converted?" You dont express opinions to those who are bound to agree, there is no point. Saying challenging things about Linux on a Linux dominated forum makes sense.
Valid point.
Anyway, correct me if I'm wrong, but isnt Slashdot the site that keeps banging on about democracy, freedom of speech, etc? You seem to want every visitor and every poster to comply with One True Point Of View (tm)... preferable *your* true point of view.
Not very nice, really, eh?
You couldn't be more wrong. Did you even read any of my original assertions? I'm not fighting for ideology, I'm fighting against lies and propaganda intended to suppress the established facts that Windows is unstable and unreliable and that users care about this when they know it doesn't have to be like that.
However to my extreme incredulity I've found myself surrounded on this occasion by MS fanboys and those whose orientation might best be described as "uninformed". Suddenly, there's not a Linux advocate to be seen.
It's very difficult to appear cool and rational when you're surrounded and outnumbered by critics, several of them openly hostile, uninterested in the point you tried to make but determined to defeat you by any means.
I've been accused of ad hominem arguments. But if you look back through the threads I've posted to on this article you'll see that I've been the *victim* of ad hominem vilification on far more numerous occasions.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
FYI:I have a SuSE Linux 6.1 box I use as a gateway and firewall (and for for development and for surfing occasionally),a Win98SE PC for use as a workstation and a Win95OSR2 PC for the kids. The two Windows boxes have caused no end of problems. On average I'm having to reinstall the OS on the two Win PCs once every two months-that's after having arrived at a "stable" configuration; I had to reinstall Win98SE 9 or 10 times before I could get it even remotely usable.
Last time it crashed I lost the "special" icons from my desktop. Since then, some(but not all audio applications have lost access to the audio device. It'll soon be necessary to reinstall again.
Though the Linux box has seen a comparable amount of interactive use(and is kept running 24/7 because of its server duties) it has never faltered. The only problem I ever have on it is Netscape crashing.
So I try to take claims about Windows being reliable and easy to use in good humour,but under the circumstances it can be rather difficult. And people claiming that I am lying or incompetent - just because they cling dogmatically to the notion that all Linux advocates are unreliable witnesses - tend to get me a bit riled.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
If users cared about os stabilitiy, Microsoft would not be in the position it is now.
It simply does not follow.
Microsoft is in the position it is now because:
(i)it appeared first
(ii)the company uses clever marketing to woo the public
(iii)the company variously destroyed/bought out all the competition
Macs didn't gain mass market appeal because the hardware was too expensive(and Apple were having some difficulties of their own when the PC market started to mushroom a couple of years ago). Linux isn't even on Joe Public's radar yet.
Most computer buyers aren't even aware there is a choice. It has absolutely nothing to do with relative merit, and everything to do with Microsoft's pursuit of an effective monopoly. So sayeth Judge Jackson anyway.
You are a blip compared to the rest of the computing population.
Really. So what are you? Are you really more qualified than I to speak for the world's users? Or is Mr Behrendsen?
And one more thing, calling someone a Microsoft drone because you disagree with their opinion is a step below calling someone a Nazi.
I don't agree that accusing somone of working for Microsoft is like calling them a Nazi. Microsoft might be guilty of questionable business practices but it's hardly Nazism.
It just makes your argument look weak when you stoop to that level.
I referred to him in that way because it seemed the only possible explanation for the strength of his pro-MS stance (here, of all places). After all he implied that Windows only ever fails due to faulty hardware or incompetent users. When this rather extreme POV has been expressed before, the culprit has often been exposed in the end as a Microsoft employee. And it's common knowledge that Microsoft encourages their employees to get onto public fora like Slashdot and spread the company propaganda.
So the nomenclature I used is hardly unjustified.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
You are getting more and more shrill. Settle down.
I'm not sure I know what you mean by "shrill". I always thought it referred to a sort of shrieking or at least whining sort of sound. Yet reading back my own quote, I can't detect any such tone. I'm certain it would sound perfectly reasonable to anyone thus affected.
As for "trashing the filesystem", now I know you hardly ever use Windows. I can't remember the last time I had a trashed filesystem. Your credibility is taken a beating. If you want to be taken seriously, then don't make silly exaggerations.
I take exception to that.
I use Windows 98 every single day (I have to because of my work). If I say I've had completely trashed file systems - which I will swear to, it has happened twice on my own machine since I installed Win98SE back in October, and I've written about it publicly both here and elsewhere - then calling me a liar without any grounds on which to do so only makes you look like an impertinent fool. My credibility isn't taking a beating just because you say it is. In any case it is not I but you who is making extravagant and unsubstantiated claims.
We can all see you have an agenda here. In this place at least, unless Slashdot is about to be invaded wholesale by MS fanboys (perish the thought), you're wasting your breath. Give it up.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
What I will tell you is that operating system stability is not a high priority to the average user.
:o)
LOL!!!
Now I *know* you must be working for Microsoft
I can just see how that argument would play to a frustrated Photoshop user with a production deadline who's just lost a day's work because his Windows fell over and trashed the file system in the process.
Oh yeah... and don't insult our intelligence by saying "that doesn't happen" or "it's the hardware. Most of us here are experienced enough to be able to tell the difference (after a little investigation) between a hardware problem and an OS problem. It's a matter of repeated personal experience for too many of us...one of the main reasons many of us turned to Linux in the first place.
Fly away home, Microsoft drone!
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
So fix it. You have a hardware problem.
Hardly. In my (somewhat extensive) experience supporting Win9x users, Windows does this all the time. It's not usually the hardware that's faulty, as the drive will usually work fine on another box and indeed on the same box after Windows has been reinstalled.
You'd have to be pretty inexperienced to be unaware of this. But it seems to me that either you just don't know what you're talking about or else you are *deliberately* attempting to mislead people about the true state of affairs here. Maybe you're on the MS payroll...or you just spent a packet on your MCSE?
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
Bullshit. Apps on Linux don't have to be better...just good enough.
Linux has enough going for it in terms of reliability, stability and usability that people won't give a fig if the office suites aren't loaded with useless bloat that noone ever uses anyway.
I can hardly believe your troll of a post was moderated up to a five...here, of all places. Seems to me you must've brought your friends with you. Either that or you've found out how to hack Slashdot.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
One way this has been dealt with in the past is to store everything (source, source deltas, compiled objects and linked executables) in a source code management system along similar lines to SCCS or CVS. I cite as an example the CMS tools on OpenVMS. OpenVMS compilers and the linker can be invoked to operate on CMS objects without having to pre-fetch anything first.
I'm not sure exactly how stuff is stored in CMS (apart from the obvious fact that source deltas are stored as diffs) but I'd guess that there must be some sort of efficient indexing involved since access to such a store doesn't have to be quite as flexible as a general purpose file system.
If we were to implement something like this for ourselves I'd say the first thing to do is to find a lightweight, fast and efficient implementation of an object repository. Does anyone know of such?
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
Tidying up confusion (Score:1)
by kojak on 14:22 15th January, 2000 BST (#130)
(User Info)
I meant *in schools*, sorry for the confusion. In terms of method at UK universities, I have no real complaints. I was doing three things at once when I tpyed it, and it was late.
Getting back to the whinge - I just don't see that the current state of GCSE actually promotes public understanding of science. It kind of hero-worships these geeks-as-gods "scientists", somewhat unhelpfully I feel.
...etc.
Well, it appears I completely misunderstood what you were trying to say.
As regards your point about GCSE-level education, I can only agree. It's clear that
high school education in the UK isn't what it used to be. In particular, any attempt
to teach science without the maths to support it is doomed to failure. Unless we can
understand the maths we can assess neither experimental results nor theory, and
the whole subject is indistinguishable from philisophy or religion. No wonder so
many young people today lack faith in science and think it's "just another way of
looking at things" no better than voodooism UFOlogy.
FYI, my high school education in the late 1970's employed the Nuffield syllabus for
the three science subjects and consequently placed a very high emphasis on
hands-on experimentation and analysis. I understand the "traditional" science
syllabus used in most UK schools at the time tended more towards historical
discourse and the handing down of received knowledge. The benefits of the Nuffield
syllabuses (syllabi?) were even more pronounced at 'A' level. You can easily imagine
that 6th-form Nuffield science would have been equivalent to University freshman
science in most other countries, including the US. That's what our teachers at the
time told us anyway.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
I suggest you come and get a tech job in the UK. I guarantee you'll have guys lining up (not stinky scraggly ones, they wouldn't have the nerve and you don't see many of them in decent workplaces anyway).
Hmm. Scraggly. I like that word!
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
That substitution technique usually seems to work but not in this case because there is a very obvious asymmetry. The pro-abortionists aren't anti-life, but the anti-abortionists are certainly anti-choice.
I'm not saying a case against abortion can't be made (and I myself have mixed feelings about it) but in this particular instance the mistake you've made is in attempting to reason backwards from a given conclusion (that abortion is wrong). We all tend to do that on occasion if we forget to challenge our own assumptions from time to time.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction