Since this was not the focus of your post, you didn't provide enough information about your microphone setup. But if you have a problem with your microphone on Linux, you might need to specifically set your soundcard default to your soundcard. I know it sounds weird or even silly, but even though I only have one soundcard chipset in my computer (Intel board and intel hda sound chipset) the microphone didn't work until I changed the soundcard default from "default" to "HDA Intel". I think I used a program called "setdefaultcard"; it's in the alsa(-tools?) package.
I's really like to check out their site, but it's basically unusable due to excessive traffic, it seems. Using
http://www.freecache.org/http://ubuntulinux.org (sorry, can't get the link working in the preview) it seems to work so:-)
Btw, what's it lately with wordings like the most shiny...? I just don't feel this should be in the description...
Here in Germany you can file for personal bankruptcy. You have to state your financial affairs/possssiohs etc. under oath, and then you have to basically pay about every little bit above a certain amount of basic income to your debtors.
Actually, as it turns out, this is probably the best time in this guy's life to be caught for something as bad as he did (at least in my opinion, virus and worm writers belong to the scum of the net). He's likely going to attend university, and during that time most people over here have very little money anyway, so it won't concern him at all:-)
make it STABLE first, pleeeease! I don't know how some people can work with either GNOME or KDE, but each time there's a new release, I try it out. Then, after a few days/weeks I go back to icewm simply because I am sick of GUI freezing, infighting sound servers, ugly font settings that cannot be changed (hello GNOME! Why don't you accept that there is more than ONE font on my system??).
I have more than 1GB of RAM and my cpu is fast enough as well, I don't care about "bloat" and other disadvantages often cited by others. But give me stability - and not just a nice crash manager! (KDE!)
I am sort of surprised to hear that this is still a problem. I was working at an anti-virus company before and they had a pretty convincing way of dealing with it: 1.) you check for the "compressed" property (not so difficult since most put in their signatures) 2.) decompress it with your specialized routine or use a 386 emulator to do it - slow, but effective, and you need it anyway to weed out those polymorph viruses...
No really, everybody disses this sort of legislative as "dumb" or yells "if you want it to be private, go elsewhere"... Everyone - at least the modded up comments at this point - believes that there will be no problems whatsoever because he is in control, knows what he is doing and so on.
Legislative like that *is* supposed to protect people from their own stupidity. Google's plan may not look that big a threat to you, but maybe you're overlooking something? Just because this is a field most users of slashdot are experienced in they diss this initiative. Well, did you also say the same about food regulations? Privacy bills? Wat about laws like the PATRIOT act most people get hyped up about? "You shouldn't worry, after all you're no terrorists, right?" would be the same rebuttal...
Too tired to make more sense. This thing is important, you'll understand it in 5-10 years from now...
I have been using AntiVirus Personal Edition happily for the last 2 years. It's not free as in speech, but for personal/privat use it's free as in beer:-)
I am sorry, but I have to strongly disagree with you. I really like CSS and use it (combined with strict XHTML) whereever I can, but there is ONE area where this has shown to be pretty much impossible:
table layouts equally vertically and horizontally aligned when the data is dynamic
The nice thing about tables is that they look like tables. When I try using CSS and want all of them to be aligned properly, I have to fix the width - which may be too small or too large for some data. But of course, if you know some way around that problem...
Hidden campaign to strengthen Linux?
on
SCO SCO SCO!
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
This may seem very strange, but I recently had an (admittedly very weird) idea: What if this whole thing was no attack against Linux but in reality a covert operation by, let's say IBM or anyone else who plans to profit from Linux in the long run, to strengthen Linux's stance?
I mean, c'mon, look at what we have here:
a company that apparently has nothing to back up it's claims
a company which carries out their actions rather in a slapstick sort of way (blunders all over the place)
a company that screwed up in any way you can imagine: distributing the allegedly infringing code 2 months after they knew about it, bullying their business partners (United Linux), taking on the "gorillas" (IBM, Novell)
Now imagine, someone like, let's say Mr. X, wants to make sure it cannot be harrassed in the future by anyone in the way it is happening right now. Think of all those who want to check whether the GPL is valid, all those who want to bet their business on Linux only if they have security that noone can attack this platform later on and ruin everything.
Now Mr.X decides to, covertly, establish a pro-Linux-case. One sunny day he chats with the guys at SCO and says: "Look, your company is almost dead, and you know it. How about this: You make some unsupportable claims against Linux. I make sure nobody will bother you for some time, so since your stocks will rise you can make some money. After I decide it's enough, I will crush SCO in a way that noone ever dares to attack Linux again without having some REALLY good reason for it. Although it will be a problem for the Linux business for a brief time, afterwards everybody can be happy."
OK, OK, sounds weird I know. But what would the world be without conspiracy theories?;-)
Probably there is a very simple reason for that which I just cannot think of right now, but why don't the 3dmark's/[fill in your favourite benchmark] people not have a radomizing function create an arbitrary filename at install time?
For example, they could use only alphanumeric characters, maybe with some rules to make it look more natural and plausible, choose the timerticks as the seed, set just the start menu entry to the right file and there - off you go. It should be very hard for drivers to work out a detection scheme for that.
Of course, if a driver detects this sort of stuff by checking for special sequences, this won't work. But I think it would be very difficult and decrease the actual performance considerably, so it would just not be worth it.
I hate to break it to you, but as far as I know bzip2 uses the Wheel-Burrow-Transform which is vastly different from the LZ77-Scheme that gzip uses. Unless I am utterly mistaken, your checks don't mean anything:-)
...that he is so often portrayed to be. Just recently, I picked up this in a news forum. Read for yourself, but basically Jon bashed Linux and hence most certainly did NOT want to watch DVDs on his Linux box
Now while I was not able to verify whether or not these accusations hold true, he would not really deserve much pity and support if it was.
But of course - the basic idea behind this trial (circumvention, CSS, MPAA's politics and monopoly,...) still sort of demands attention...
You can have them in XP. Install powertoys, and turn them on.
There are plenty free programs available for all windows versions from Win95 onwards. Do a quick search on cnet or google.
Fair enough, but then that doesn't solve the problem of having duplicate local copies of my email, one on the Linux partition and one on the Windows partition. I don't want to keep two copies and I don't want my server space to be overloaded by keeping the mail there. Then it just becomes a question of choice, and I'd rather keep my email on the Linux partition because that's where I spend my time.
Well, why do you not configure it to use the same data on both partitions? I did so, and have been using it for more than 1 year this way without any problems. Why do you not configure your Linux to do so?
You misunderstood me. Here, take a look at pwm [cs.tut.fi]. Imagine having tabs on all your windows, and then things might start to be clearer for you.
This is a nice feature, I agree. But you can basically do the same thing in Windows, you just have to write an add-on (and yes, this is possible, just look at other desktop managers such as Talisman - though this is not the best example, I can't recall of the other ones I tried before, but there are some).
OK, I usually don't answer to stupid OS war threads as this, but I really gotta yell at this:
"Man, if I only had a bunch of virtual desktops so I could have an uncluttered screen."
There are plenty of free applications for windows available that let you do that. "Wow, what I wouldn't give for grep right now."
Available for Windows as well, build it yourself, download it from other web sites or use cygwin. "Hell, why is it that the registry is so incomprehensible? I wish I had a manpage or a README describing this crap."
This point I'll grant. However, I am rather frustrated by either super-short or neverending man-pages that may or may not give an answer to your problem. But I want to stress that this is a valid point. "Stupid spam. I'd love to have procmail running here. Ah well, I guess I'll wait until I reboot to Linux to read my non-web email."
I am using Mozilla-Mail and set it up so that both my Windows-version and my Linux-Version use the same data-file, so I can use "Non-Web Mail". You can do similar things with other mail clients (mutt, pine, portable GUI clients, etc.) "It's so great that I've got tabs in Mozilla. Why can't I have them on my windows too like I do in Linux?"
Now that is probably the MOST STUPID thing you've said! Why on earth do you download/install Mozilla for Linux, but not for Windows? Or do you just not know that there is always a Windows build as well??
I just don't get it: There are many reasons to bash Windows, be it weird errors, spy apps, dialers or company policies. But if some people put the same effort in finding suitable apps for Windows as they do with finding and configuring them for Linux, there would be a lot less stupid posts like this. My WINDOWS runs completely on free software, except for the OS which I bought. I have found freeware replacements (which even mostly come with source code, for the OpenSource purists - although, beware! it sometimes is the "non-free" BSD license!) for all of them.
BTW: I am a Linux user, have been for more than 6 years - but all those people outrightly denying that there was no room for opinions except "Linux is great, I never need to boot into Windows, because Linux can do anything!" just annoy me. -_-
Sorry, I cannot agree with this position. I am a strong supporter of OpenSource and Public Domain Software, however, I do not like the GPL. Why?
Because it is not really free. You put the restriction on it, that it may only be used in a certain way (distribute source, make your changes available again). Furthermore, I detest the virus-like effect the GPL has. For example, someone can just insert a snippet of GPLd code into your code (this person doesn't need to necessarily know about that), you don't realize it and keep improving your code - and after some years some retarded guys come and think they can bash at you if you (and the other persons who worked on the code) decide to make it closed source (which is the right of the coders to decide, IMHO).
Think about bzip2 - the guy wanted his code to be actually usable by companies in their closed-source apps so that the best possible compression technique can be used more widely. But initially - without really understanding what GPL really meant - he barred that way. When he changed the license to BSD/OpenSource (which is also my favourite) he got flamed over and over.
So if you want to make something truly free, if you are really ready to give up all your rights on it, the GPL is not the right license.
Just my opinion - you don't need to agree on it, but think about it for a moment, ok?
P.S.: Wonder if I will get flamed, troll-modded... for this?;-)
I meant that a "journal" has to be locked when you insert or retrieve something from it.
You're right on that point, and I guess I didn't make myself clear enough with the previous posts (though I *did* post something about it somewhere). I will comment on it after your "batch" entries: The only way I see to reduce locks is to "batch" journals entries into a block
This was exactly what I was referring to when I wrote about "the journal checks whether update is necessary". By setting a limit like, let's say, 5 atomic operations, you can still have all the advantages and yet have consistent and clean data access. Besides, I don't feal that you generate much overhead with those multithreaded models I talked about; e.g. the Scheme48 Implementation I was talking about uses less than a 100bytes per thread (so I was told), and I had no trouble in holding more than 30000 (thirty thousand) threads in a test case on my system without it noticably suffering.
Also, the GUI system (ToyWindow) implementation referenced to by the link I supplied shows how this sort of threading can be used to create lightweight multithreaded GUIs which do *not* interfere with the calculation.
You don't have to take accept everything I write you; it's just that I wrote some apps using this way and it provided lots of advantages. It worked well for me and I can understand the theory behind it, therefore I like it. But you do have to relearn everything about threading from scratch.
Though you do bring up a lot of good points, I would like to point out, that most of your problems can be avoided, mostly by clean design.
I cannot tell all the details because it's too far back now and I wasn't the one who did all the hard work, but maybe you should check out this link, they implemented GUI and threads and all the stuff I was talking about, so it *can* be done. If you have trouble with German (which I assume most on this site have), this is the link where you can download it directly.
One final note on your In any case I cannot see any way a journal can avoid locks: To a certain extent this probably depends on how you define a lock. The traditional locking system I was talking about differs from the journal approach in the respect that you don't need locks because you pass the atomic operations to the journal-thread which deals with putting it in the right order. Since only this journal-thread is allowed to update/read data nothing else can interfere and the data stays consistent.
announce the atomic operation you would like to do (read/write/...)
your app has to wait now
The journal now contains the ops you want to do. It checks whether they have to be carried out (e.g. you wanted to update a structure which another thread tries to read from now) now or can be postponed (nothing else depends on it).
control is returned to your app
As of what I know, this is much faster than the traditional way of locking everything, and much easier to keep consistent. You mentioned the linux-kernel: Usually systems that were originally designed to work on a single processor gain multiprocessor-functionality by locking the kernel for each processor sequentially. However, this is very inefficient (and I suppose you understand why;-)).
If it uses journals though, there is no need to lock all of the kernel; the journal will take care of keeping your data structures consistent and - I am sure about this - you will receive a considerable speed-up.
As for the overhead of copying: Does not exist since you don't need to maintain an old datastructure, copy it, work on the new one and then erase the old one. Instead, since the journal carries out only atomical operations and only the journal has direct access to those structures, there can never be any interfering of other threads, and thus the structures are kept data-consistent.
Hmm - I am late with this reply - will anyone read this, I wonder?;-)
You are talking about mulththreading the calculations along with a SINGLE thread that does the GUI, which can make sense. However it seems the original poster kept saying "multihtreaded GUI" which implies to me some scheme like having each widget have it's own thread. This serves no purpose except MicroSoft uses it so that COM objects can be closed-source.
I agree with the original poster, multithreading gui makes sense because if each widget has its own thread you don't need to have one giant message-transpose-loop which has to do the work for all of them.
Other possibility is that you are assumming it is inexpensive to build a new data structure while keeping the old one in memory
Hmm, I don't really think I understand what you mean by "building a new data structure...". New data? A completele structurally different data-component? I was referring to the possibility of changing data without it harming - unless the other threat depends on certain values stored in it, of course - the other threat.
Although I don't know what "journal" vs "log" are but they both sound like communication pipes
I am sorry, typo on my part:-). I meant to say "journal" vs. "lock". Journal means that you enter atomic operations to do in a journal and update the structures when necessary, that is you flush the journal. It works pretty much like journaling filesystems. And, I did not mean to say pipes - that is something completely different, and this way of doing things is at best one year old, that I know for sure.
I have no idea why you think GUI should be multi-threaded. GUI has no reason to be fast
Yes, it does: If you multithread it, you can e.g. show debug output, update controls and enable the user to still use the GUI. In many unix-apps your gui sort of freezes while the processes/threads are running in the background (doxygen had/still has this problem, if I remember correctly).
the GUI cannot modify ANY structure being used by the parallel thread, instead it must kill the threads, wait for them to stop, modify the structure, and start them again
This is not correct. It only happens when you don't know how to correctly implement a threading model, e.g. if you use journal-based threads instead of log-based you won't have any of those problems whatsoever. For example, the folks using Scheme48 implemented this, and it made a lot of their problems just vanish.
I don't think you know of the newer approaches to threading technology. For starters, you can check out the scheme48 site. They implemented threads not by using locks but by using logging facilities, that is to say, journals. I just spent 6 months working with this way of doing things, and I can assure you one this:
you cannot get deadlocks
you can hardly produce lifelocks
it is much faster than using shared memory
the main system always has access to the memory, no need to unlock/lock/...
There are a LOT of good reasons to use this sort of multi-threading, especially since - if correctly implemented - it requires much less memory, cpu and debugging efforts than processes or the old sort of threading model.
Slashdot Mirror
Since this was not the focus of your post, you didn't provide enough information about your microphone setup. But if you have a problem with your microphone on Linux, you might need to specifically set your soundcard default to your soundcard. I know it sounds weird or even silly, but even though I only have one soundcard chipset in my computer (Intel board and intel hda sound chipset) the microphone didn't work until I changed the soundcard default from "default" to "HDA Intel". I think I used a program called "setdefaultcard"; it's in the alsa(-tools?) package.
After that, everything worked, including Skype.
... thousands of geeks lined up to buy every shred of yellow paper :-)
Seriously, it would be interesting to check if using different paper colors made it more difficult to discern the numbers.
for non-plugin-users...: http://movies.apple.com/movies/independent/farscap e/farscape-peacekeeper_m480.mov/
I's really like to check out their site, but it's basically unusable due to excessive traffic, it seems. Using http://www.freecache.org/http://ubuntulinux.org (sorry, can't get the link working in the preview) it seems to work so :-) ...? I just don't feel this should be in the description...
Btw, what's it lately with wordings like the most shiny
Here in Germany you can file for personal bankruptcy. You have to state your financial affairs/possssiohs etc. under oath, and then you have to basically pay about every little bit above a certain amount of basic income to your debtors.
:-)
Actually, as it turns out, this is probably the best time in this guy's life to be caught for something as bad as he did (at least in my opinion, virus and worm writers belong to the scum of the net). He's likely going to attend university, and during that time most people over here have very little money anyway, so it won't concern him at all
make it STABLE first, pleeeease! I don't know how some people can work with either GNOME or KDE, but each time there's a new release, I try it out. Then, after a few days/weeks I go back to icewm simply because I am sick of GUI freezing, infighting sound servers, ugly font settings that cannot be changed (hello GNOME! Why don't you accept that there is more than ONE font on my system??).
I have more than 1GB of RAM and my cpu is fast enough as well, I don't care about "bloat" and other disadvantages often cited by others. But give me stability - and not just a nice crash manager! (KDE!)
I am sort of surprised to hear that this is still a problem. I was working at an anti-virus company before and they had a pretty convincing way of dealing with it: 1.) you check for the "compressed" property (not so difficult since most put in their signatures) 2.) decompress it with your specialized routine or use a 386 emulator to do it - slow, but effective, and you need it anyway to weed out those polymorph viruses...
No really, everybody disses this sort of legislative as "dumb" or yells "if you want it to be private, go elsewhere"... Everyone - at least the modded up comments at this point - believes that there will be no problems whatsoever because he is in control, knows what he is doing and so on.
Legislative like that *is* supposed to protect people from their own stupidity. Google's plan may not look that big a threat to you, but maybe you're overlooking something? Just because this is a field most users of slashdot are experienced in they diss this initiative. Well, did you also say the same about food regulations? Privacy bills? Wat about laws like the PATRIOT act most people get hyped up about? "You shouldn't worry, after all you're no terrorists, right?" would be the same rebuttal...
Too tired to make more sense. This thing is important, you'll understand it in 5-10 years from now...
I have been using AntiVirus Personal Edition happily for the last 2 years. It's not free as in speech, but for personal/privat use it's free as in beer :-)
I am sorry, but I have to strongly disagree with you. I really like CSS and use it (combined with strict XHTML) whereever I can, but there is ONE area where this has shown to be pretty much impossible:
table layouts equally vertically and horizontally aligned when the data is dynamic
The nice thing about tables is that they look like tables. When I try using CSS and want all of them to be aligned properly, I have to fix the width - which may be too small or too large for some data. But of course, if you know some way around that problem...
I mean, c'mon, look at what we have here:
Now imagine, someone like, let's say Mr. X, wants to make sure it cannot be harrassed in the future by anyone in the way it is happening right now. Think of all those who want to check whether the GPL is valid, all those who want to bet their business on Linux only if they have security that noone can attack this platform later on and ruin everything.
Now Mr.X decides to, covertly, establish a pro-Linux-case. One sunny day he chats with the guys at SCO and says: "Look, your company is almost dead, and you know it. How about this: You make some unsupportable claims against Linux. I make sure nobody will bother you for some time, so since your stocks will rise you can make some money. After I decide it's enough, I will crush SCO in a way that noone ever dares to attack Linux again without having some REALLY good reason for it. Although it will be a problem for the Linux business for a brief time, afterwards everybody can be happy."
OK, OK, sounds weird I know. But what would the world be without conspiracy theories?
Probably there is a very simple reason for that which I just cannot think of right now, but why don't the 3dmark's/[fill in your favourite benchmark] people not have a radomizing function create an arbitrary filename at install time?
For example, they could use only alphanumeric characters, maybe with some rules to make it look more natural and plausible, choose the timerticks as the seed, set just the start menu entry to the right file and there - off you go. It should be very hard for drivers to work out a detection scheme for that.
Of course, if a driver detects this sort of stuff by checking for special sequences, this won't work. But I think it would be very difficult and decrease the actual performance considerably, so it would just not be worth it.
I hate to break it to you, but as far as I know bzip2 uses the Wheel-Burrow-Transform which is vastly different from the LZ77-Scheme that gzip uses. Unless I am utterly mistaken, your checks don't mean anything :-)
...that he is so often portrayed to be. Just recently, I picked up this in a news forum. Read for yourself, but basically Jon bashed Linux and hence most certainly did NOT want to watch DVDs on his Linux box
...) still sort of demands attention...
Now while I was not able to verify whether or not these accusations hold true, he would not really deserve much pity and support if it was.
But of course - the basic idea behind this trial (circumvention, CSS, MPAA's politics and monopoly,
Actually, if I remember correctly, there was something stated about the talkback not included in the releases. I wasn't able to find it again though.
However, if that was the case it would easily explain the different file sizes.
You can have them in XP. Install powertoys, and turn them on.
There are plenty free programs available for all windows versions from Win95 onwards. Do a quick search on cnet or google.
Fair enough, but then that doesn't solve the problem of having duplicate local copies of my email, one on the Linux partition and one on the Windows partition. I don't want to keep two copies and I don't want my server space to be overloaded by keeping the mail there. Then it just becomes a question of choice, and I'd rather keep my email on the Linux partition because that's where I spend my time.
Well, why do you not configure it to use the same data on both partitions? I did so, and have been using it for more than 1 year this way without any problems. Why do you not configure your Linux to do so?
You misunderstood me. Here, take a look at pwm [cs.tut.fi]. Imagine having tabs on all your windows, and then things might start to be clearer for you.
This is a nice feature, I agree. But you can basically do the same thing in Windows, you just have to write an add-on (and yes, this is possible, just look at other desktop managers such as Talisman - though this is not the best example, I can't recall of the other ones I tried before, but there are some).
OK, I usually don't answer to stupid OS war threads as this, but I really gotta yell at this:
"Man, if I only had a bunch of virtual desktops so I could have an uncluttered screen."
There are plenty of free applications for windows available that let you do that.
"Wow, what I wouldn't give for grep right now."
Available for Windows as well, build it yourself, download it from other web sites or use cygwin.
"Hell, why is it that the registry is so incomprehensible? I wish I had a manpage or a README describing this crap."
This point I'll grant. However, I am rather frustrated by either super-short or neverending man-pages that may or may not give an answer to your problem. But I want to stress that this is a valid point.
"Stupid spam. I'd love to have procmail running here. Ah well, I guess I'll wait until I reboot to Linux to read my non-web email."
I am using Mozilla-Mail and set it up so that both my Windows-version and my Linux-Version use the same data-file, so I can use "Non-Web Mail". You can do similar things with other mail clients (mutt, pine, portable GUI clients, etc.)
"It's so great that I've got tabs in Mozilla. Why can't I have them on my windows too like I do in Linux?"
Now that is probably the MOST STUPID thing you've said! Why on earth do you download/install Mozilla for Linux, but not for Windows? Or do you just not know that there is always a Windows build as well??
I just don't get it: There are many reasons to bash Windows, be it weird errors, spy apps, dialers or company policies. But if some people put the same effort in finding suitable apps for Windows as they do with finding and configuring them for Linux, there would be a lot less stupid posts like this. My WINDOWS runs completely on free software, except for the OS which I bought. I have found freeware replacements (which even mostly come with source code, for the OpenSource purists - although, beware! it sometimes is the "non-free" BSD license!) for all of them.
BTW: I am a Linux user, have been for more than 6 years - but all those people outrightly denying that there was no room for opinions except "Linux is great, I never need to boot into Windows, because Linux can do anything!" just annoy me. -_-
Sorry, I cannot agree with this position. I am a strong supporter of OpenSource and Public Domain Software, however, I do not like the GPL. Why?
;-)
Because it is not really free. You put the restriction on it, that it may only be used in a certain way (distribute source, make your changes available again). Furthermore, I detest the virus-like effect the GPL has. For example, someone can just insert a snippet of GPLd code into your code (this person doesn't need to necessarily know about that), you don't realize it and keep improving your code - and after some years some retarded guys come and think they can bash at you if you (and the other persons who worked on the code) decide to make it closed source (which is the right of the coders to decide, IMHO).
Think about bzip2 - the guy wanted his code to be actually usable by companies in their closed-source apps so that the best possible compression technique can be used more widely. But initially - without really understanding what GPL really meant - he barred that way. When he changed the license to BSD/OpenSource (which is also my favourite) he got flamed over and over.
So if you want to make something truly free, if you are really ready to give up all your rights on it, the GPL is not the right license.
Just my opinion - you don't need to agree on it, but think about it for a moment, ok?
P.S.: Wonder if I will get flamed, troll-modded... for this?
After moving a mail, the program crashed with the following error:
You asked for it, you got it!
I meant that a "journal" has to be locked when you insert or retrieve something from it.
You're right on that point, and I guess I didn't make myself clear enough with the previous posts (though I *did* post something about it somewhere). I will comment on it after your "batch" entries:
The only way I see to reduce locks is to "batch" journals entries into a block
This was exactly what I was referring to when I wrote about "the journal checks whether update is necessary". By setting a limit like, let's say, 5 atomic operations, you can still have all the advantages and yet have consistent and clean data access. Besides, I don't feal that you generate much overhead with those multithreaded models I talked about; e.g. the Scheme48 Implementation I was talking about uses less than a 100bytes per thread (so I was told), and I had no trouble in holding more than 30000 (thirty thousand) threads in a test case on my system without it noticably suffering.
Also, the GUI system (ToyWindow) implementation referenced to by the link I supplied shows how this sort of threading can be used to create lightweight multithreaded GUIs which do *not* interfere with the calculation.
You don't have to take accept everything I write you; it's just that I wrote some apps using this way and it provided lots of advantages. It worked well for me and I can understand the theory behind it, therefore I like it. But you do have to relearn everything about threading from scratch.
Though you do bring up a lot of good points, I would like to point out, that most of your problems can be avoided, mostly by clean design.
I cannot tell all the details because it's too far back now and I wasn't the one who did all the hard work, but maybe you should check out this link, they implemented GUI and threads and all the stuff I was talking about, so it *can* be done. If you have trouble with German (which I assume most on this site have), this is the link where you can download it directly.
One final note on your In any case I cannot see any way a journal can avoid locks: To a certain extent this probably depends on how you define a lock. The traditional locking system I was talking about differs from the journal approach in the respect that you don't need locks because you pass the atomic operations to the journal-thread which deals with putting it in the right order. Since only this journal-thread is allowed to update/read data nothing else can interfere and the data stays consistent.
- announce the atomic operation you would like to do (read/write/...)
- your app has to wait now
- The journal now contains the ops you want to do. It checks whether they have to be carried out (e.g. you wanted to update a structure which another thread tries to read from now) now or can be postponed (nothing else depends on it).
- control is returned to your app
As of what I know, this is much faster than the traditional way of locking everything, and much easier to keep consistent. You mentioned the linux-kernel: Usually systems that were originally designed to work on a single processor gain multiprocessor-functionality by locking the kernel for each processor sequentially. However, this is very inefficient (and I suppose you understand whyIf it uses journals though, there is no need to lock all of the kernel; the journal will take care of keeping your data structures consistent and - I am sure about this - you will receive a considerable speed-up.
As for the overhead of copying: Does not exist since you don't need to maintain an old datastructure, copy it, work on the new one and then erase the old one. Instead, since the journal carries out only atomical operations and only the journal has direct access to those structures, there can never be any interfering of other threads, and thus the structures are kept data-consistent.
Hmm - I am late with this reply - will anyone read this, I wonder?
You are talking about mulththreading the calculations along with a SINGLE thread that does the GUI, which can make sense. However it seems the original poster kept saying "multihtreaded GUI" which implies to me some scheme like having each widget have it's own thread. This serves no purpose except MicroSoft uses it so that COM objects can be closed-source.
:-). I meant to say "journal" vs. "lock". Journal means that you enter atomic operations to do in a journal and update the structures when necessary, that is you flush the journal. It works pretty much like journaling filesystems. And, I did not mean to say pipes - that is something completely different, and this way of doing things is at best one year old, that I know for sure.
I agree with the original poster, multithreading gui makes sense because if each widget has its own thread you don't need to have one giant message-transpose-loop which has to do the work for all of them.
Other possibility is that you are assumming it is inexpensive to build a new data structure while keeping the old one in memory
Hmm, I don't really think I understand what you mean by "building a new data structure...". New data? A completele structurally different data-component? I was referring to the possibility of changing data without it harming - unless the other threat depends on certain values stored in it, of course - the other threat.
Although I don't know what "journal" vs "log" are but they both sound like communication pipes
I am sorry, typo on my part
I have no idea why you think GUI should be multi-threaded. GUI has no reason to be fast
Yes, it does: If you multithread it, you can e.g. show debug output, update controls and enable the user to still use the GUI. In many unix-apps your gui sort of freezes while the processes/threads are running in the background (doxygen had/still has this problem, if I remember correctly).
the GUI cannot modify ANY structure being used by the parallel thread, instead it must kill the threads, wait for them to stop, modify the structure, and start them again
This is not correct. It only happens when you don't know how to correctly implement a threading model, e.g. if you use journal-based threads instead of log-based you won't have any of those problems whatsoever. For example, the folks using Scheme48 implemented this, and it made a lot of their problems just vanish.
There are a LOT of good reasons to use this sort of multi-threading, especially since - if correctly implemented - it requires much less memory, cpu and debugging efforts than processes or the old sort of threading model.