It depends on what your simulation code is doing. (Surprise !)
If you look at the SPEC CPU2000[1] scores for AMD vs. Intel you'll see that for, say, an XP2000 vs a 2G P4, the AMD is faster at integer work and the Intel is faster for floating point. Note though, that the Intel scores are with the Intel Reference Compiler, which will probably be generating SSE code. If you're running non-SSE code, then Intel stuff is considerably weaker for floating point work.
The second thing to consider is how the pipeline length affects the execution of your code. The longer pipeline in the P4 means that, roughly speaking, the P4 is faster in a straight line, but Athlons corner better.
For the simulation stuff I'm doing, which involves huge amounts of conditional integer and bit-twiddling operations and next-to-no floating point, I use a dual MP1800 box[2]. Getting the equivalent performance - for my code - would have cost a huge amount more with a P4-based solution and may not even be possible with the current P4 range.
[1] If you're doing real computing rather than fragging folks, SPEC is probably a better place to get your information from than Tom's Hardware.
Causal relationships are (strictly speaking) impossible to prove, for anything. What you can do is evaluate probabilities.
Some people say CO2 is a problem, some people say it isn't a problem. Given that more research says that it does cause global warming than says that it has no effect, and that more research says that it does nothing than says it causes global cooling, then - given the knowledge we have now - it is reasonable to believe that it is likely to cause global warming.
You can choose to wait for more concrete proof, but doing so reduces the time you have to act, possibly to zero. It's a balancing act, agreed, but the majority of countries feel that the time to act is now.
"Poison" was a poor choice of word for a discussion about CO2, I agree - I was thinking in more general terms about all pollution when posting.
More generally, my point about "poison coming over the fence" was to highlight the fact that "rights" and "freedoms" don't exist in isolation - something that a lot of people (specifically the person who I was responding to) seem to forget. Every "right" has an obligation attached to it, if only that of granting the same rights to others, and every "freedom" has a limitation attached to it, if only that of not encroaching on the freedom of others.
I'm still using an original Psion 5 - lower clock than the Mako/Revo, but bigger screen and a much better keyboard. It's the only PDA that I can touch-type on, which, for me is a big big plus.
I'm not quite sure from your phrasing whether you're agreeing with me or not, but, just to clarify, I was talking about net consumption, not trying to say that everything that the US makes stays in the US.
You are free to sit in your wind powered house and enjoy your enviroment friendly life. I will enjoy mine and if you try to come accros forcing me to abide by your view of how things should be I will kill your ass. Fair enough ?
Yup.
As the saying goes "your right to wave your fist stops at the place where my nose starts."
As long as the pollution from your lifestyle stays on your property, then that's fine by me.
If you send poison across the fence to my house, forcing me to abide by your view of how things should be, do I have the right to "kill your ass" to stop you messing with my lifestyle ?
You forgot to mention 25% of the world's total GDP. It's not exactly surprising that the country that makes a quarter of the world's stuff also makes a quarter of its emissions, is it?
Makes and consumes a quarter of the world's stuff. It's not like the US is doing the rest of the world a favour.
All my working data lives on the server and is available to the other machines via Samba, NFS or netatalk. Backup via DDS3 on the server using afbackup, "minimal restore information" encrypted and mailed to a free webmail account so I can get to it if, say, the server catches fire.
Laptop has a directory under my ~ called "mirrored" which contains my current working set of stuff from the server. This is synced using unison whenever I come back from / head off on a trip to the office (I work from home 3 days a week).
GF has a home dir on the server which is visible on the mac desktop and has been told "put stuff here, it gets backed up, put stuff anywhere else, it's your problem."
Dev box and laptop are dual-boot linux/W2K, with a VMWare install running inside linux set up to boot from the physical W2K install, which can see both ~ on the host machine and on the server (if connected).
PDA syncs with Outlook (no email, just calendar and tasks) on the dev box - VMWare or real hardware, works just the same and the data is visible in both as it's the same physical drive.
Everything works very smoothly, except for:
- Unison which dies if it tries to use more than 64M of RAM to do the sync. This has only happened to me once, when trying to sync about 40-50,000 files in one go. For normal day-to-day jobs, I've never had a problem with it.
- The W2K VMWare session on the dev box losing the serial port occasionally, which means I need to reinstall the port or boot into native W2K before I can sync the PDA. Not really a problem as it only happens very occasionally.
Unlike the World Series, the World Cup actually contains teams from around the world.
I think the best version of this comment was given by John Cleese on US TV in an interview around the Clinton/Lewinsky newsfest. It went something like "There are three differences between the English and Americans. 1) We speak English, you don't. 2) When we host a world championship, we invite other countries to join in, and 3) When you meet our head of state, you only have to go down on one knee, not two."
Heh. The year I started uni, one of the other universities in town handed out safe sex leaflets to all the freshers, complete with a condom... *stapled* to the front.
(For the non-Brits amongst you, that's a compressed form of the phrase "you don't know your arse from your elbow" - i.e. "you haven't got the faintest idea what you're talking about, so STFU."
Actually, being a Brit who moved to the US, I pay about the same % overall here as I did in the UK if you include basic healthcare costs and the suchlike. YMMV of course.
Fine-pitch stuff is pretty easy if the PCB has solder-resist. Dump a blob of solder on, then use solder-wick or a sucker to pull the excess back off again. It'll stick to where you want it and come off cleanly from the gaps inbetween the tracks.
Re:the beauty of credit cards
on
Disconnecting
·
· Score: 2
Send a written complaint to your state's Public Utilities Commission. After months of hassle with MCI, I wrote one letter to the CPUC with a copy of all the communications. A week later, I got a written apology from MCI together with a full refund, *and* an additional $25 to sweeten the apology.
I agree. This is a government subsidy that comes out of the pockets of non-users. That's fine for essential services (fire stations, schools,...) but not for what is, basically, production of luxury goods.
Try looking at this analogy. Imagine how you'd react if M$ started getting $1 out of your ISP fees to compensate them for all the illegal copies of Windows out there ?
I *really* don't like the idea of having a dollar - or five - transferred from my pocket every month to pay Kazaa's bills.
Sorry. this makes absolutely no sense. It brings everything back to the elitist idea that normal people should not install their own software. It's like buying a car and finding a disclaimer that says "everything this car can do can be determined by examining the engine." I mean, a car is an open source system, all you need is a wrench.
Well, as someone who codes for a living and restores old cars as a hobby, I would question the approprateness of your analogy on several grounds (relative complexity, production methods, equipment requirements,...) but let's run with it for now:
From the Free-as-in-speech angle, source code is a means for programmers to communicate with each other and with computers. If you're neither a computer nor a programmer then the communication is obviously not intended for you, so why complain if you can't understand it ? Stretching your car metaphor to the extreme, this would be like saying it was wrong to receive a set of car blueprints (source code) you couldn't understand - if you can't understand them, you should be buying your car ready-made (binary), like "normal" people do.
I'm guessing though that you're more referring to software that is distributed as binaries, where the Free-as-in-speech issues aren't really relevant other than to ensure that the source is available to you to use if you have or choose to acquire the skills to interpret it. If you buy your car ready-built, you have several options:
(a) you can buy one with a warranty from a dealer at a higher price that reflects that warranty
(b) you can buy one from a private party and rely on your own skills to evaluate it.
(c) you can buy one from a private party and get someone who has the appropriate skills (your friendly mechanic) to check it out for you.
(a) would be buying commercial software, (b) would be a programmer downloading source and figuring out what it does before building and installing it, (c) would be your "whole new market for people just to read source code."
It does already work that way in the car world - or as close as a bad metaphor will allow, anyway - why is it so wrong in the world of software ? People who don't know how to change their oil have to pay someone else to do it for them. Is that really "elitist" ?
I think publishing the source should allow the disclaimers to be in force. MS does publish the source to some customers, and GNU to everybody. With the source you can (in principle) verify the functionality and absence of backdoors, and you can (in real life) fix problems yourself instead of having to wait for a Service Pack or other official upgrade.
This is pretty much the key. All that is needed to get OSS off the hook is the line in the documentation "This product does exactly the source code says it does. All other documentation is purely opinion."
I would suggest putting them in prison, with the words "I put something where it didn't belong without asking, please do the same to me" tattooed on their foreheads.
Slashdot Mirror
How long does it take to listen to each of 2.8M CDRs to find out that they contain copyrighted material ? Or are they just guessing...
It depends on what your simulation code is doing. (Surprise !)
If you look at the SPEC CPU2000[1] scores for AMD vs. Intel you'll see that for, say, an XP2000 vs a 2G P4, the AMD is faster at integer work and the Intel is faster for floating point. Note though, that the Intel scores are with the Intel Reference Compiler, which will probably be generating SSE code. If you're running non-SSE code, then Intel stuff is considerably weaker for floating point work.
The second thing to consider is how the pipeline length affects the execution of your code. The longer pipeline in the P4 means that, roughly speaking, the P4 is faster in a straight line, but Athlons corner better.
For the simulation stuff I'm doing, which involves huge amounts of conditional integer and bit-twiddling operations and next-to-no floating point, I use a dual MP1800 box[2]. Getting the equivalent performance - for my code - would have cost a huge amount more with a P4-based solution and may not even be possible with the current P4 range.
[1] If you're doing real computing rather than fragging folks, SPEC is probably a better place to get your information from than Tom's Hardware.
[2] One SETI work unit every 80 minutes. Yummy.
Causal relationships are (strictly speaking) impossible to prove, for anything. What you can do is evaluate probabilities.
Some people say CO2 is a problem, some people say it isn't a problem. Given that more research says that it does cause global warming than says that it has no effect, and that more research says that it does nothing than says it causes global cooling, then - given the knowledge we have now - it is reasonable to believe that it is likely to cause global warming.
You can choose to wait for more concrete proof, but doing so reduces the time you have to act, possibly to zero. It's a balancing act, agreed, but the majority of countries feel that the time to act is now.
"Poison" was a poor choice of word for a discussion about CO2, I agree - I was thinking in more general terms about all pollution when posting.
More generally, my point about "poison coming over the fence" was to highlight the fact that "rights" and "freedoms" don't exist in isolation - something that a lot of people (specifically the person who I was responding to) seem to forget. Every "right" has an obligation attached to it, if only that of granting the same rights to others, and every "freedom" has a limitation attached to it, if only that of not encroaching on the freedom of others.
I'm still using an original Psion 5 - lower clock than the Mako/Revo, but bigger screen and a much better keyboard. It's the only PDA that I can touch-type on, which, for me is a big big plus.
Well, I never said it was the same 25%, but you're right, I could have been clearer in my phrasing. The essential point still stands though.
I'm not quite sure from your phrasing whether you're agreeing with me or not, but, just to clarify, I was talking about net consumption, not trying to say that everything that the US makes stays in the US.
You are free to sit in your wind powered house and enjoy your enviroment friendly life. I will enjoy mine and if you try to come accros forcing me to abide by your view of how things should be I will kill your ass.
Fair enough ?
Yup.
As the saying goes "your right to wave your fist stops at the place where my nose starts."
As long as the pollution from your lifestyle stays on your property, then that's fine by me.
If you send poison across the fence to my house, forcing me to abide by your view of how things should be, do I have the right to "kill your ass" to stop you messing with my lifestyle ?
You forgot to mention 25% of the world's total GDP. It's not exactly surprising that the country that makes a quarter of the world's stuff also makes a quarter of its emissions, is it?
Makes and consumes a quarter of the world's stuff. It's not like the US is doing the rest of the world a favour.
"A bong makers best friend is an empty bic pen tube."
Because you can put a refill back in the pen, and suck on it whilst looking for inspiration whilst doing your finals. At least I did.
Machines:
Dev box (PC - W2K/Linux)
Server (PC - Linux)
Firewall (PC - Linux)
Laptop (PC - W2K/Linux)
GF's machine (old Mac)
PDA (Psion 5)
All my working data lives on the server and is available to the other machines via Samba, NFS or netatalk. Backup via DDS3 on the server using afbackup, "minimal restore information" encrypted and mailed to a free webmail account so I can get to it if, say, the server catches fire.
Laptop has a directory under my ~ called "mirrored" which contains my current working set of stuff from the server. This is synced using unison whenever I come back from / head off on a trip to the office (I work from home 3 days a week).
GF has a home dir on the server which is visible on the mac desktop and has been told "put stuff here, it gets backed up, put stuff anywhere else, it's your problem."
Dev box and laptop are dual-boot linux/W2K, with a VMWare install running inside linux set up to boot from the physical W2K install, which can see both ~ on the host machine and on the server (if connected).
PDA syncs with Outlook (no email, just calendar and tasks) on the dev box - VMWare or real hardware, works just the same and the data is visible in both as it's the same physical drive.
Everything works very smoothly, except for:
- Unison which dies if it tries to use more than 64M of RAM to do the sync. This has only happened to me once, when trying to sync about 40-50,000 files in one go. For normal day-to-day jobs, I've never had a problem with it.
- The W2K VMWare session on the dev box losing the serial port occasionally, which means I need to reinstall the port or boot into native W2K before I can sync the PDA. Not really a problem as it only happens very occasionally.
"Yup, noone in the US gives to shits about soccer."
;-)
Yup, you folks still haven't realised that you're supposed to play football with your *feet*
Unlike the World Series, the World Cup actually contains teams from around the world.
I think the best version of this comment was given by John Cleese on US TV in an interview around the Clinton/Lewinsky newsfest. It went something like "There are three differences between the English and Americans. 1) We speak English, you don't. 2) When we host a world championship, we invite other countries to join in, and 3) When you meet our head of state, you only have to go down on one knee, not two."
Heh. The year I started uni, one of the other universities in town handed out safe sex leaflets to all the freshers, complete with a condom ... *stapled* to the front.
"Arse, elbow. Nuff said."
(For the non-Brits amongst you, that's a compressed form of the phrase "you don't know your arse from your elbow" - i.e. "you haven't got the faintest idea what you're talking about, so STFU."
I heartily concur.
Actually, being a Brit who moved to the US, I pay about the same % overall here as I did in the UK if you include basic healthcare costs and the suchlike. YMMV of course.
63 years ? The first BBC television transmission was in 1929, which makes it 73 years by my arithmetic.
But you're right about there still being nothing worth watching.
Fine-pitch stuff is pretty easy if the PCB has solder-resist. Dump a blob of solder on, then use solder-wick or a sucker to pull the excess back off again. It'll stick to where you want it and come off cleanly from the gaps inbetween the tracks.
Send a written complaint to your state's Public Utilities Commission. After months of hassle with MCI, I wrote one letter to the CPUC with a copy of all the communications. A week later, I got a written apology from MCI together with a full refund, *and* an additional $25 to sweeten the apology.
I agree. This is a government subsidy that comes out of the pockets of non-users. ...) but not for what is, basically,
That's fine for essential services (fire stations, schools,
production of luxury goods.
Try looking at this analogy. Imagine how you'd react if M$ started getting $1 out of your ISP
fees to compensate them for all the illegal copies of Windows out there ?
I *really* don't like the idea of having a dollar - or five - transferred from my pocket every month to pay Kazaa's bills.
When you hand a check to a cashier at the supermarket do they ever check to see if your signature looks like all of your other ones? Nope.
Nope, but you can challenge the charge later by asking them to show the cheque with your signature on it.
14 years TV-less here. NPR, real life and well-stocked bookshelves more than compensate for the lack of TV in my life. (Plus Slasdot, of course...)
Sorry. this makes absolutely no sense. It brings everything back to the elitist idea that normal people should not install their own software. It's like buying a car and finding a disclaimer that says "everything this car can do can be determined by examining the engine." I mean, a car is an open source system, all you need is a wrench.
Well, as someone who codes for a living and restores old cars as a hobby, I would question the approprateness of your analogy on several grounds (relative complexity, production methods, equipment requirements, ...) but let's run with it for now:
From the Free-as-in-speech angle, source code is a means for programmers to communicate with each other and with computers. If you're neither a computer nor a programmer then the communication is obviously not intended for you, so why complain if you can't understand it ? Stretching your car metaphor to the extreme, this would be like saying it was wrong to receive a set of car blueprints (source code) you couldn't understand - if you can't understand them, you should be buying your car ready-made (binary), like "normal" people do.
I'm guessing though that you're more referring to software that is distributed as binaries, where the Free-as-in-speech issues aren't really relevant other than to ensure that the source is available to you to use if you have or choose to acquire the skills to interpret it. If you buy your car ready-built, you have several options:
(a) you can buy one with a warranty from a dealer at a higher price that reflects that warranty
(b) you can buy one from a private party and rely on your own skills to evaluate it.
(c) you can buy one from a private party and get someone who has the appropriate skills (your friendly mechanic) to check it out for you.
(a) would be buying commercial software, (b) would be a programmer downloading source and figuring out what it does before building and installing it, (c) would be your "whole new market for people just to read source code."
It does already work that way in the car world - or as close as a bad metaphor will allow, anyway - why is it so wrong in the world of software ? People who don't know how to change their oil have to pay someone else to do it for them. Is that really "elitist" ?
Bah, my first +5 in ages and I have a brain fart whilst typing. If you're going to rip it, insert the missing "what".
I think publishing the source should allow the disclaimers to be in force. MS does publish the source to some customers, and GNU to everybody. With the source you can (in principle) verify the functionality and absence of backdoors, and you can (in real life) fix problems yourself instead of having to wait for a Service Pack or other official upgrade.
This is pretty much the key. All that is needed to get OSS off the hook is the line in the documentation "This product does exactly the source code says it does. All other documentation is purely opinion."
By "put away," what methods are you suggesting?
I would suggest putting them in prison, with the words "I put something where it didn't belong without asking, please do the same to me" tattooed on their foreheads.