So who would buy dual PowerPC CPU now, knowing a major shift is happening in less than a year's time?
Anyone who is smart.
If you wait a year, not only have you gone without a new machine for that whole year, but you're also going to be getting a brand-new system, with less software available for it, many bugs yet to be found/worked-out, etc.
Same reason I bought an x86 PC about 6 months before Opterons were scheduled to be released... People that want things to work (which sounds almost like Apple's slogan) want to be as unadventurous as possible, and allow other people to do all the beta testing...
it introduces an average HZ/2 latency to each packet in low load situations
You can raise the clock interrupt frequency to get the latency reasonably low.
However, that's the inherent trade-off you have to make. In general, a system cannot switch methods quickly enough for polling to be effective after an interrupt.
and it doesn't work on SMP.
It works in SMP systems, though it would only use a single processor.
From what papers I've found with a quick search, it seems NAPI doesn't get much benefit from additional processors anyhow.
What I wrote follows directly, logically, from what you wrote.
It's mind boggling to think that you might actually believe that. If it's true, and you're not just trolling (as I've said before) you must have the comprehension of a child.
I can see only two ways to have less rich people:
Really? That's all you can think of? So you can't think of YOUR OWN statement that all this started from: Placing a heavy tax burden on extra income makes people ask themselves, "Why bother?"
It seems to me that the economies that have tried to prevent rich people (communist states and those with very high marginal tax rates) underperform those that allow them.
Once again, you're going completely off on a tagent. Communism is not simply a method to prevent people from becomming rich... The communist system would not have been more successful if it allowed people to get rich... And more than that, we are not talking about changing entire economies to prevent people from getting rich. In fact, this is all entirely off the topic, based on a minor observation that I made, and I see no point in continuing it, especially since you seem to time and time again fail to comprehend the simpliest statements I've made.
Actually, if you re-read your post, you did. You also mentioned fees and interest, but you specifically said that "easy credit" is a problem.
No, I didn't specifically say that. Your out-of-context exerpt of what I said might give someone that impression, but it's still not what I said.
The problem is the easy credit, with outrageous late fees, incredibly high interest rates that people can't get out from.
"easy" has no more emphasis than anything else in that sentence, though you keep saying it does.
Didn't they have the option to save up and buy their car outright?
Well, depending on the situation, some people do not. However, this is once again besides the point. The fact of the matter (and the main issue at hand) is that people aren't getting into financial trouble through straigh-forward means. The issue is that people who have had medical problems make up the majority of bankruptcy cases. The issue is that taxing them less will not solve all their problems. The issue is that taxing the VERY RICH significantly less won't help anyone solve any of their problems.
You say so, but you don't say why
Actually, I've said why over and over again. You just ignore all of my points.
If you have significant assets, you can use them to generate much more money.
And money is only as valuable as what you can buy with it.
There is no way you can agree with what I've said, and still believe the sentence you've typed. It's a direct contradiction to believe that assets have value, and can be used to generate more money, and still believe that money is only valuable when you spend it.
Ding ding ding. I forget who said it (maybe Alan Cox, but I'm REALLY not sure about that), but the opinion was along the lines that it would always be more benefitial to throw the money at a faster processor (or a second processor etc), because you'd get a performance boost everywhere.
Interrupts are the one place where it's not remotely true. A faster processor will allow your system to handle significantly more interrupts. The whole interrupt model needs to be thrown out and replaced with something much better.
And while I'm at it, there are many cases where it's not true. Wherever you have a significant bottleneck, hardware acceleration helps tremendously. Tasks like encryption and (HighDef) video playback can max-out the highest-end systems available, while a $50 card can handle those tasks easily.
I don't think purpose-built hardware everywhere is the answer, but I do think having an FPIC/ASIC as a standard computer component could make for incredible speed improvements in most/all of the tasks that are hard for CPUs to perform.
This tends to create a hell of a lot more interrupts for the processor to handle (a condition made worse by the deeper pipelines in processors like the P4). If you can offload the processing of the frames a bit, just enough to give a processor a chance to get something done, you could dramatically improve performance.
Actually, FreeBSD is far ahead of the curve here. They have device polling support for select cards (dc, fxp, sis) which means they eliminated NIC interrupts entirely.
The chart on the linked page gives quite an impressive example of the difference.
I agree with you. Most people here just don't seem to realize $500 cards wouldn't just be competing with $10 Realtek cards.
Besides the clustering technologies, this could potentially get into the SAN market. Fibre Channel and the like are quite expensive, and could be removed if NICs could provide the same throughput with little resources.
I give Realtek 6 months tops to make thier own knock-off of the card for $24.95.
Are you kidding? This card is extremely low CPU utilization, low latency, etc. That's the exact opposite of everything Realtek has ever made.
3com might make a similar card (they already have NICs with hardware encoding/IPSec chipsets on them) but it would surely cost just as much.
The only possibilities I see are Linksys and Intel (who really make good NICs that don't drag your machine down), and neither is going to be nearly that cheap.
but if their only reply is "RTFM n00b!" then I wouldn't exactly call that volunteering their time.
If that's their only answer, then no. However, I'm operating under the asumption that they do help people, and just find your question to be too frequently asked, too simple, etc.
Of course you could find the answer to just about every question in a book somewhere or another, but then why have teachers?
I don't know what kind of teachers you had, but every teacher I've ever had DO tell you to go read a chapter out of a book. They only help after you've read the material, and still have a question/problem.
You're so right! Education is pointless!
Teachers have a purpose. However, that purpose is NOT to give you the answer to every question you ask. Math teachers in particular:-)
Also, I find the "troll" moderation on my post above insulting. It's seems silly to me, but disregarding that, I find it ridiculous that people automatically moderate "troll" apparently just for speaking any nice things about Intel.
You seem to be a bit paraoid. If anything, I'd say the troll mods are because there's no "-1 uniformed" or "-1 Wrong" mod options.
It's easy to consider a post a troll, though, when the incorrect/wrong by omission/biased info all seems in-favor of one side, even if it was AMD instead of Intel.
Even on this post, you seem to think you know what you are talking about, but get it wrong most of the time, and always in-favor of Intel somehow.
Because they can FAR more easily afford it. The rich typically benefit far more from government services, etc.
You're missing the point completely. If you don't spend that money, it's not taxed at all.
No, I'm not missing the point. People don't save money just for the hell of it, they save money so they can earn interest, and so they can spend it later. Saving money is discouraged primarily by the problem of inflation, and this will only help to increase that problem.
If people like you put as much effort into CREATING YOUR OWN WEALTH, as you do trying to take it from others, there would be no need for your petter class warfare.
I make plenty of money actually. So quit trolling.
You are a fool if you believe we should have incredibly small taxes, and practically no public services. You're an even bigger fool if you believe the poor should have just as much of their income taxed as the very wealthy.
you can also look at alpha systems (in this matter any "real workstation design") how to fix this, e.g. with memory interleaving. With 64 memory dimms supplying data to the CPU, it will be the memory running circles around your CPU.:-)
Actually, just about all Pentium-4 motherboards already utilize dual banks of RAM, hence the 800MHz bus speed (2x400). And as you can see from the benchmarks, it's not running circles around the competition.
Becase the signal is scrambled by the stations from their uplink to the cable company's head end to prevent people with TVRO dishes from watching it for free.
Okay, it goes through some form of encryption, but the end product (I buy) is unencrypted, so why should it matter to me?
The problem here is that you don't understand what Theo is saying, and are just making straw-men.
I tried really hard to make BSD work on our hardware. I finally gave up and tried Linux at another friend's suggestion. It just worked.
Theo didn't say BSD was better than Linux early on, he said the lawsuit scared developers away from BSD, and onto Linux, which is really quite accurate. Linux got a lot of developers who would have been developing BSD instead (if not for the AT&T lawsuit) which helped Linux progess much faster, and it too the BSD quite a while to catch-up as far as drivers/hardware support.
I'm not sure if Theo is merely ignorant of history, or is simply choosing to ignore it.
No, it seems you are ignorant of history, and are acting as if what you experienced in your tiny corner of the world is the history, and nothing else actually happened there.
Remember folks, UNIX was fragmented and dying before Linux became mainstream.
Complete bullshit. You must be the "BSD is dying" troll.
If you'd even read the article, DeRaadt clearly explains the situation. The AT&T lawsuit against BSD was scaring developers away from developing the BSD code, and sent them to Linux. If not for that lawsuit, I wouldn't be surprised if FreeBSD was the mainstream free OS.
BSD and GNU were nothing but obscure academic projects.
BSD was not obscure in the slightest, it was a popular commercial Unix distro, and when it was open sourced, it started gaining popularity very quickly.
GNU, though not an OS, had plenty of popularity. Linux was started because of people upset that they couldn't get GNU tools working on Minix. Many Unix vendors were including the GNU tools in their OS before Linux came along.
The popularity of Linux brought UNIX to a whole new generation of users,
Of course, the queston is, if Linux wasn't the one to go mainstream, wouldn't FreeBSD be in it's place, and just as popular?
Do you have cable? Or Dish Network/DirecTV/whatever? All of those distribution channels are encrypted and copy protected, just like the distribution channel of a copy-protected CD.
I have cable, but I can't find any way you could possibly consider it copy protected. There's no macrovision, nothing. I can capture it with any capture card, and make as many copies as I want to.
This is a tacit admission by Sony that copying the song from the CD to another device falls within the realm of fair use
Not true. They could just as easily turn around and say they were specifically allowing you that freedom, but they did not have to, and it did not fall under fair use.
That's the exact same tactic Hillary Rosen was using to claim fair used doesn't actually exist... Something along the lines of The Grateful Dead gave people explicit permission to do that with their music, and now everyone thinks it's their legal right to do so.
I only speak from experience, cause that's the response I get when I need linux help.
Yes, because unpaid individuals volunteering their time should be FORCED to give you the exact answer you want, and not DARE to try and point you to the references you need to find an answer.
The summary is completely wrong, and the story is rather Fox News-esque, using words like "may" to put this stuff out there that they have NO EVIDENCE of at all.
The summary:
Linux retailers like Wal-Mart, CompUSA, Fry's and Best Buy are being timid and waiting to see how a small, Midwest-based chain called Micro Center fares in selling Linux software.
Sorry, wrong. The story doesn't say this is the case. The only place anything similar is mentioned is this line:
Major electronics and PC retailers, such as Fry's and Wal-Mart, may be ready to do the same, based on the success or failure of new Linux sections and staff in stores of the smaller, Midwest-based chain Micro Center.
That's right, "may be". Just like Microsoft "may be" ready to sell Linux versions of Office and Windows Media Player, if the groundhog sees his shadow this year... Just like Apple "may be" allowing OS X to be pirated... etc.
There are more extremely wealthy people in the US than anywhere else in the world. By your logic, our economy should be the worst in the world.
No, you're twisting everything I've said.
Our economy would be better with fewer rich people, all other things being equal. This isn't my own personal theory either. Go read some economics texts.
You just contridicted yourself.
If you think so, you must have the comprehension of a child.
You admit that the easy credit is a problem, a problem because people are using it and using credit is, by definition, buying things you can't afford
That's ridiculous. I didn't say credit is the problem, I said the exorbant fees that people can't ever pay off is the problem.
Besides, most people could afford to buy a car outright if they hadn't gotten their LAST CAR on credit and cost them so much of their money. The interest you have to pay on every loan is what makes people exceed their means, not the price of the object directly.
Are you actually saying that the US tax system is perfect? Because if it's not, well, it's part of the problem.
No, it's not perfect, but it is FAR, FAR better than a flat consumption tax could ever hope to be.
However, the current tax system takes such a small ammount of money from lower/middle class workers that it cannot be considered part of the problem. If you gave ever in-debt family 10% of their income back (which is more than you could possibly hope for in the best flat tax system) they still wouldn't be able to get out of debt. So the tax system is NOT part of the problem, even though it's not ideal.
Assets are simply a promise of goods and services to be delivered in the future, and promises are worth nothing until they are fulfilled.
That is patently untrue. Go look at the stock market some time. It's all about the assets of a company, and potential value, even though people aren't buying stocks with the intention of liquidating the company.
Assets are insurance, and backing. If you have significant assets, you can use them to generate much more money. In other words, it's unbelievable how vastly wrong you are, that I can only assume you are just trolling.
See, using "people" would imply every last person on the planet, and a lot of people don't consume movies at all. "Consumers" makes it clear that we're only talking about those who consume the product in question.
Yes, they HAVE TO call the public "consumers", they couldn't possibly call them "customers", as has been the accepted term for the past several centuries.
Slashdot Mirror
Anyone who is smart.
If you wait a year, not only have you gone without a new machine for that whole year, but you're also going to be getting a brand-new system, with less software available for it, many bugs yet to be found/worked-out, etc.
Same reason I bought an x86 PC about 6 months before Opterons were scheduled to be released... People that want things to work (which sounds almost like Apple's slogan) want to be as unadventurous as possible, and allow other people to do all the beta testing...
You can raise the clock interrupt frequency to get the latency reasonably low.
However, that's the inherent trade-off you have to make. In general, a system cannot switch methods quickly enough for polling to be effective after an interrupt.
It works in SMP systems, though it would only use a single processor.
From what papers I've found with a quick search, it seems NAPI doesn't get much benefit from additional processors anyhow.
Well, if Intel was to grant me a few million dollars for research, I'm sure I could come up with some ideal system within 12 months...
Off the top of my head, I'd say some type of hybrid approach, using both polling and interrupts would reduce the problem immensely.
Alternatively, you could stick to the old tried and true method of having a seperate chip in the system that does nothing else but service interrupts.
Ah hah... It was the "Insightful" mod and the lack of humor in the post that confused me... ;-)
It's mind boggling to think that you might actually believe that. If it's true, and you're not just trolling (as I've said before) you must have the comprehension of a child.
Really? That's all you can think of? So you can't think of YOUR OWN statement that all this started from: Placing a heavy tax burden on extra income makes people ask themselves, "Why bother?"
Once again, you're going completely off on a tagent. Communism is not simply a method to prevent people from becomming rich... The communist system would not have been more successful if it allowed people to get rich... And more than that, we are not talking about changing entire economies to prevent people from getting rich. In fact, this is all entirely off the topic, based on a minor observation that I made, and I see no point in continuing it, especially since you seem to time and time again fail to comprehend the simpliest statements I've made.
No, I didn't specifically say that. Your out-of-context exerpt of what I said might give someone that impression, but it's still not what I said.
The problem is the easy credit, with outrageous late fees, incredibly high interest rates that people can't get out from.
"easy" has no more emphasis than anything else in that sentence, though you keep saying it does.
Well, depending on the situation, some people do not. However, this is once again besides the point. The fact of the matter (and the main issue at hand) is that people aren't getting into financial trouble through straigh-forward means. The issue is that people who have had medical problems make up the majority of bankruptcy cases. The issue is that taxing them less will not solve all their problems. The issue is that taxing the VERY RICH significantly less won't help anyone solve any of their problems.
Actually, I've said why over and over again. You just ignore all of my points.
There is no way you can agree with what I've said, and still believe the sentence you've typed. It's a direct contradiction to believe that assets have value, and can be used to generate more money, and still believe that money is only valuable when you spend it.
Interrupts are the one place where it's not remotely true. A faster processor will allow your system to handle significantly more interrupts. The whole interrupt model needs to be thrown out and replaced with something much better.
And while I'm at it, there are many cases where it's not true. Wherever you have a significant bottleneck, hardware acceleration helps tremendously. Tasks like encryption and (HighDef) video playback can max-out the highest-end systems available, while a $50 card can handle those tasks easily.
I don't think purpose-built hardware everywhere is the answer, but I do think having an FPIC/ASIC as a standard computer component could make for incredible speed improvements in most/all of the tasks that are hard for CPUs to perform.
Actually, FreeBSD is far ahead of the curve here. They have device polling support for select cards (dc, fxp, sis) which means they eliminated NIC interrupts entirely.
The chart on the linked page gives quite an impressive example of the difference.
I agree with you. Most people here just don't seem to realize $500 cards wouldn't just be competing with $10 Realtek cards.
Besides the clustering technologies, this could potentially get into the SAN market. Fibre Channel and the like are quite expensive, and could be removed if NICs could provide the same throughput with little resources.
Are you kidding? This card is extremely low CPU utilization, low latency, etc. That's the exact opposite of everything Realtek has ever made.
3com might make a similar card (they already have NICs with hardware encoding/IPSec chipsets on them) but it would surely cost just as much.
The only possibilities I see are Linksys and Intel (who really make good NICs that don't drag your machine down), and neither is going to be nearly that cheap.
If that's their only answer, then no. However, I'm operating under the asumption that they do help people, and just find your question to be too frequently asked, too simple, etc.
I don't know what kind of teachers you had, but every teacher I've ever had DO tell you to go read a chapter out of a book. They only help after you've read the material, and still have a question/problem.
Teachers have a purpose. However, that purpose is NOT to give you the answer to every question you ask. Math teachers in particular
You seem to be a bit paraoid. If anything, I'd say the troll mods are because there's no "-1 uniformed" or "-1 Wrong" mod options.
It's easy to consider a post a troll, though, when the incorrect/wrong by omission/biased info all seems in-favor of one side, even if it was AMD instead of Intel.
Even on this post, you seem to think you know what you are talking about, but get it wrong most of the time, and always in-favor of Intel somehow.
Because they can FAR more easily afford it. The rich typically benefit far more from government services, etc.
No, I'm not missing the point. People don't save money just for the hell of it, they save money so they can earn interest, and so they can spend it later. Saving money is discouraged primarily by the problem of inflation, and this will only help to increase that problem.
I make plenty of money actually. So quit trolling.
You are a fool if you believe we should have incredibly small taxes, and practically no public services. You're an even bigger fool if you believe the poor should have just as much of their income taxed as the very wealthy.
Actually, just about all Pentium-4 motherboards already utilize dual banks of RAM, hence the 800MHz bus speed (2x400). And as you can see from the benchmarks, it's not running circles around the competition.
Since the cable TV signal you get is not copy-protected, that would not be buying a copy protected thing.
The fact that it was encrypted at one time makes little difference, when what you get is completely unencrypted, and not hindered by copy protection.
Okay, it goes through some form of encryption, but the end product (I buy) is unencrypted, so why should it matter to me?
Theo didn't say BSD was better than Linux early on, he said the lawsuit scared developers away from BSD, and onto Linux, which is really quite accurate. Linux got a lot of developers who would have been developing BSD instead (if not for the AT&T lawsuit) which helped Linux progess much faster, and it too the BSD quite a while to catch-up as far as drivers/hardware support.
No, it seems you are ignorant of history, and are acting as if what you experienced in your tiny corner of the world is the history, and nothing else actually happened there.
Complete bullshit. You must be the "BSD is dying" troll.
If you'd even read the article, DeRaadt clearly explains the situation. The AT&T lawsuit against BSD was scaring developers away from developing the BSD code, and sent them to Linux. If not for that lawsuit, I wouldn't be surprised if FreeBSD was the mainstream free OS.
BSD was not obscure in the slightest, it was a popular commercial Unix distro, and when it was open sourced, it started gaining popularity very quickly.
GNU, though not an OS, had plenty of popularity. Linux was started because of people upset that they couldn't get GNU tools working on Minix. Many Unix vendors were including the GNU tools in their OS before Linux came along.
Of course, the queston is, if Linux wasn't the one to go mainstream, wouldn't FreeBSD be in it's place, and just as popular?
I have cable, but I can't find any way you could possibly consider it copy protected. There's no macrovision, nothing. I can capture it with any capture card, and make as many copies as I want to.
How, exactly, is cable TV copy-protected?
Not true. They could just as easily turn around and say they were specifically allowing you that freedom, but they did not have to, and it did not fall under fair use.
That's the exact same tactic Hillary Rosen was using to claim fair used doesn't actually exist... Something along the lines of The Grateful Dead gave people explicit permission to do that with their music, and now everyone thinks it's their legal right to do so.
Yes, because unpaid individuals volunteering their time should be FORCED to give you the exact answer you want, and not DARE to try and point you to the references you need to find an answer.
The quote in the story:
..."
..."
"It's designed to stop casual piracy
Should actually read:
"It's designed to stop fair use
That's much better. Now it makes sense.
The summary:
Sorry, wrong. The story doesn't say this is the case. The only place anything similar is mentioned is this line:
That's right, "may be". Just like Microsoft "may be" ready to sell Linux versions of Office and Windows Media Player, if the groundhog sees his shadow this year... Just like Apple "may be" allowing OS X to be pirated... etc.
No, you're twisting everything I've said.
Our economy would be better with fewer rich people, all other things being equal. This isn't my own personal theory either. Go read some economics texts.
If you think so, you must have the comprehension of a child.
That's ridiculous. I didn't say credit is the problem, I said the exorbant fees that people can't ever pay off is the problem.
Besides, most people could afford to buy a car outright if they hadn't gotten their LAST CAR on credit and cost them so much of their money. The interest you have to pay on every loan is what makes people exceed their means, not the price of the object directly.
No, it's not perfect, but it is FAR, FAR better than a flat consumption tax could ever hope to be.
However, the current tax system takes such a small ammount of money from lower/middle class workers that it cannot be considered part of the problem. If you gave ever in-debt family 10% of their income back (which is more than you could possibly hope for in the best flat tax system) they still wouldn't be able to get out of debt. So the tax system is NOT part of the problem, even though it's not ideal.
That is patently untrue. Go look at the stock market some time. It's all about the assets of a company, and potential value, even though people aren't buying stocks with the intention of liquidating the company.
Assets are insurance, and backing. If you have significant assets, you can use them to generate much more money. In other words, it's unbelievable how vastly wrong you are, that I can only assume you are just trolling.
Yes, they HAVE TO call the public "consumers", they couldn't possibly call them "customers", as has been the accepted term for the past several centuries.