There are loads and loads of scientists/students who still prefer [La]TeX to a graphical word processor any day. There's something about expressing your ideas straight away in a fast and light editor, and producing professional quality documents without any graphical tweaks, rather than wasting memory and processing power for a glorified Paint while praying it not to crash.
Let me clarify. I mentioned that FLAC is optimized for playback, so it takes much less power to decode than encode. Then I mentioned that realtime encoding is possible with a low-end laptop (a couple of hundred of MHz). Thus you can imagine that decoding FLAC is pretty light on resources.
Actually, I just throttled my CPU back to 75 MHz, and played a CD-quality FLAC with about 20...25 % of CPU utilization.
In my impression, C is how a single-processor computer thinks. The way we're currently getting more CPU power is via multiple processors and SIMD.
My pet peeve is the idea of autovectorizing compilers; they are necessary because people are using a sequential language to solve parallel problems. When you write up a matrix multiplication in C, you are throwing away essential information about the calculation. A parallelizing compiler will try to recover this information by guesswork. It's a silly state of things, because you could use a more suitable language and retain that information all the time.
One decent argument for switching back to WAV is the simplicity of handling uncompressed data. No complicated transforms are calculated because uncompressed signals need not be decoded; simple, energy efficient processors can play back WAV using less power than complex, optimized routines on advanced hardware would use to play back FLAC.
FLAC is optimized for decoding on low-end hardware, unlike many other codecs. Then again, CPU power seems to be increasing much more than storage capacity and speed. For example, TuxOnIce achieves much faster suspend and resume with compression, because of limited hard drive speed. FLAC is also pretty light when encoding, I often record straight to FLAC without taxing my Pentium M over the minimum of 600 MHz.
I also don't like the idea of wasting space just for the heck of it. WAV contains redundancy, but it's not the most useful kind of redundancy. Instead of WAV I'd rather use FLAC with RAID to use the extra space.
IMHO, the enemy is the notion of using a glorified Paint for making structured documents. While I can't imagine everyone using TeX instead, there must be ways of promoting logical structure (e.g. with a TeX frontend like LyX) as opposed to WYSIWYG.
I think the problem of format X being tied to program Y is a symptom of this problem. Word processing has become monstrously complex, and while new features creep into the structure, people still expect a perfect preservation and control of the looks. Thus the logic of using the program becomes increasingly entangled with the storage format, as witnessed by Word documents being memory dumps.
Of course, a needless focus on the looks takes time and energy from the writing itself. It doesn't help that some universities here have ridiculously precise specifications for the looks of your final thesis.
The whole shared cache thing kind of messes that up.
Not to mention the whole shared memory thing. For true multiprocessing you need something like NUMA;)
The cache is arguably part of the memory subsystem, though for efficiency it's often placed on the same die with the CPUs. A processor is the thing that does processing. Besides, all multi-CPU chips that I know of have dedicated L1 caches for each CPU, and many even have dedicated L2 caches.
I agree completely. I currently use Audacious, which is a successor of XMMS, so none of this library mess. (Another reason for the choice of Audacious was that I had written a frontend for XMMS, and I could use it with Audacious with little change.)
I often wonder about fancy metadata solutions to the problem of organizing lots of files. If people can't organize the files themselves (e.g./Artist/Album/Tracknumber.Songname) I don't see why they would organize the equivalent metadata.
One problem I have with library-based players is that I have lots of music burned on DVDs. Most of the library-players assume a single directory that contains all your music files, so obviously it won't work. I keep a simple database of the file on the discs, so I can find the disc I need.
Seconded. I'm a big fan of classic, hard SF in the style of Clarke, and this series is one of my favourites. Besides, the ending makes it pretty clear that the Christian explanation is just one of the possible interpretations. IIRC, each of the characters in the book receives an ending they believe in.
However, Gentry Lee wrote another series of books in the Rama universe, namely Bright Messengers and Double Full Moon Night, which was mostly a disappointment to me. For one thing, the Christian references were way too strong.
On the other hand, I strongly recommend a single novel by Clarke and Lee that I think started their collaboration in the first place, the aptly named Cradle.
While I am sure that is true for the older generation,for the younger they pretty much think music=MP3. A few weeks ago I went to pick up the oldest from school and all you saw was MP3 players everywhere. Some of his buddies were talking up how they had all gotten these cool speaker docks to play their iPods at home. They started to laugh at how my nephew plays his tunes at home on his PC until he said "Well my uncle gave me his huge super powerful '80s Pioneer home stereo which he wired into my PC so all my games and tunes ROCK!" Needless to say they were impressed,LOL
I get this a lot. I mention to someone that I'm listening to this and that on my computer, and they assume it means some crappy plastic speakers. People seem to think in terms of different appliances for different jobs, even though you can do everything sound and video related on a single computer, with a proper amplifier and speakers. I also think it saves energy and environment, as well as money and space, not having all those separate widgets.
No, MS is just licensing in a way that scales with hardware which is the pro-consumer method of doing things.
It would be even more pro-consumer if the licensing didn't depend on the number of CPUs/cores/sockets at all. Or if they just released everything as free software;)
Of course, you can get more work done with 2 CPUs instead of one. You can do this either by using two single-core dies on two sockets, or with a dual core die on one socket. Depending on the details of the workload, one of these may be better than the other, but it's not always obvious which way. For CPU-bound processes the difference should be marginal.
It's understandable that they want to charge more if you double your CPU-bound performance. Why they choose drastically different licensing for marginally different techniques is beyond me.
Besides there is a technical reason for doing so, in the x86 architecture there is an identifier that reports back the CPU socket number which is what MS has always used for licensing within the Windows OS.
In other words, it's technically easy to distinguish between CPUs on the same die, or on separate dies. What does this have to do with the licensing policy?
Microsoft has been very good on that and while most other companies have been calling each core a separate processor Microsoft has not.
IMHO, the other companies are right. A CPU is a CPU, whether they are on the same piece of silicon or not. Perhaps MS is catering to the buzzword crowd that cannot associate the new and shiny multicore with oldschool multiprocessing, even though they are mostly the same thing.
That analog port is invaluable for a traveling businessman that needs to hook up their netbook to a VGA projector to make a presentation.
Most projectors and displays have digital internals, but they still include VGA, just in case you want to connect something from the 1980s. VGA is rarely the only possible input.
On the other hand, we have shiny new laptops with multicore processors etc, but they output VGA only, just in case your projector happens to be from the 1980s. The problem here seems to be that there's no room for multiple video outputs. So we're stuck with the lowest common denominator.
One solution for the video outputs would be DVI-I, as it includes VGA signals along with a relatively modern digital signal. It's slightly larger than a VGA connector though, and dealing with adapters is probably too much to ask from most people.
But if adapters are OK, you could just as well use HDMI or Displayport, both of which have smaller connectors than VGA. And a modern projector should have one of these connectors anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
And when we said Beta, we meant Beta.
I've used Linux from 1999 until July this year when I finally gave up and bought myself a Macbook
No one asked if there's another operating system, the OP only mentioned that Ubuntu 8.10 is slower than previous versions.
There are loads and loads of scientists/students who still prefer [La]TeX to a graphical word processor any day. There's something about expressing your ideas straight away in a fast and light editor, and producing professional quality documents without any graphical tweaks, rather than wasting memory and processing power for a glorified Paint while praying it not to crash.
Let me clarify. I mentioned that FLAC is optimized for playback, so it takes much less power to decode than encode. Then I mentioned that realtime encoding is possible with a low-end laptop (a couple of hundred of MHz). Thus you can imagine that decoding FLAC is pretty light on resources.
Actually, I just throttled my CPU back to 75 MHz, and played a CD-quality FLAC with about 20...25 % of CPU utilization.
In my impression, C is how a single-processor computer thinks. The way we're currently getting more CPU power is via multiple processors and SIMD.
My pet peeve is the idea of autovectorizing compilers; they are necessary because people are using a sequential language to solve parallel problems. When you write up a matrix multiplication in C, you are throwing away essential information about the calculation. A parallelizing compiler will try to recover this information by guesswork. It's a silly state of things, because you could use a more suitable language and retain that information all the time.
One decent argument for switching back to WAV is the simplicity of handling uncompressed data. No complicated transforms are calculated because uncompressed signals need not be decoded; simple, energy efficient processors can play back WAV using less power than complex, optimized routines on advanced hardware would use to play back FLAC.
FLAC is optimized for decoding on low-end hardware, unlike many other codecs. Then again, CPU power seems to be increasing much more than storage capacity and speed. For example, TuxOnIce achieves much faster suspend and resume with compression, because of limited hard drive speed. FLAC is also pretty light when encoding, I often record straight to FLAC without taxing my Pentium M over the minimum of 600 MHz.
I also don't like the idea of wasting space just for the heck of it. WAV contains redundancy, but it's not the most useful kind of redundancy. Instead of WAV I'd rather use FLAC with RAID to use the extra space.
Burma-Shave
IMHO, the enemy is the notion of using a glorified Paint for making structured documents. While I can't imagine everyone using TeX instead, there must be ways of promoting logical structure (e.g. with a TeX frontend like LyX) as opposed to WYSIWYG.
I think the problem of format X being tied to program Y is a symptom of this problem. Word processing has become monstrously complex, and while new features creep into the structure, people still expect a perfect preservation and control of the looks. Thus the logic of using the program becomes increasingly entangled with the storage format, as witnessed by Word documents being memory dumps.
Of course, a needless focus on the looks takes time and energy from the writing itself. It doesn't help that some universities here have ridiculously precise specifications for the looks of your final thesis.
The whole shared cache thing kind of messes that up.
Not to mention the whole shared memory thing. For true multiprocessing you need something like NUMA ;)
The cache is arguably part of the memory subsystem, though for efficiency it's often placed on the same die with the CPUs. A processor is the thing that does processing. Besides, all multi-CPU chips that I know of have dedicated L1 caches for each CPU, and many even have dedicated L2 caches.
Two cores == two processors on the same piece of silicon
I agree completely. I currently use Audacious, which is a successor of XMMS, so none of this library mess. (Another reason for the choice of Audacious was that I had written a frontend for XMMS, and I could use it with Audacious with little change.)
I often wonder about fancy metadata solutions to the problem of organizing lots of files. If people can't organize the files themselves (e.g. /Artist/Album/Tracknumber.Songname) I don't see why they would organize the equivalent metadata.
One problem I have with library-based players is that I have lots of music burned on DVDs. Most of the library-players assume a single directory that contains all your music files, so obviously it won't work. I keep a simple database of the file on the discs, so I can find the disc I need.
XMMS is dead, but it has a successor (fork of a fork) called Audacious that's under active development, while retaining a similar style of operation.
So, when making backups of my data, I should have them mass produced instead?
Python (and not just because of the reference in my GGP post)
Seconded. I'm a big fan of classic, hard SF in the style of Clarke, and this series is one of my favourites. Besides, the ending makes it pretty clear that the Christian explanation is just one of the possible interpretations. IIRC, each of the characters in the book receives an ending they believe in.
However, Gentry Lee wrote another series of books in the Rama universe, namely Bright Messengers and Double Full Moon Night, which was mostly a disappointment to me. For one thing, the Christian references were way too strong.
On the other hand, I strongly recommend a single novel by Clarke and Lee that I think started their collaboration in the first place, the aptly named Cradle.
I've had it with these mother fucking eels on this mother fucking hovercraft!
While I am sure that is true for the older generation,for the younger they pretty much think music=MP3. A few weeks ago I went to pick up the oldest from school and all you saw was MP3 players everywhere. Some of his buddies were talking up how they had all gotten these cool speaker docks to play their iPods at home. They started to laugh at how my nephew plays his tunes at home on his PC until he said "Well my uncle gave me his huge super powerful '80s Pioneer home stereo which he wired into my PC so all my games and tunes ROCK!" Needless to say they were impressed,LOL
I get this a lot. I mention to someone that I'm listening to this and that on my computer, and they assume it means some crappy plastic speakers. People seem to think in terms of different appliances for different jobs, even though you can do everything sound and video related on a single computer, with a proper amplifier and speakers. I also think it saves energy and environment, as well as money and space, not having all those separate widgets.
Just my molning election, nothing to wolly about.
http://hothardware.com/printarticle.aspx?articleid=1232
I'm starting to get more and more into asymptotic anger.
Linux is only at 2.6.27.4, as if we're back in the 1980s. Though unix-like systems in general are relics from the 1970s.
No, MS is just licensing in a way that scales with hardware which is the pro-consumer method of doing things.
It would be even more pro-consumer if the licensing didn't depend on the number of CPUs/cores/sockets at all. Or if they just released everything as free software ;)
Of course, you can get more work done with 2 CPUs instead of one. You can do this either by using two single-core dies on two sockets, or with a dual core die on one socket. Depending on the details of the workload, one of these may be better than the other, but it's not always obvious which way. For CPU-bound processes the difference should be marginal.
It's understandable that they want to charge more if you double your CPU-bound performance. Why they choose drastically different licensing for marginally different techniques is beyond me.
Besides there is a technical reason for doing so, in the x86 architecture there is an identifier that reports back the CPU socket number which is what MS has always used for licensing within the Windows OS.
In other words, it's technically easy to distinguish between CPUs on the same die, or on separate dies. What does this have to do with the licensing policy?
Microsoft has been very good on that and while most other companies have been calling each core a separate processor Microsoft has not.
IMHO, the other companies are right. A CPU is a CPU, whether they are on the same piece of silicon or not. Perhaps MS is catering to the buzzword crowd that cannot associate the new and shiny multicore with oldschool multiprocessing, even though they are mostly the same thing.
The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.
That analog port is invaluable for a traveling businessman that needs to hook up their netbook to a VGA projector to make a presentation.
Most projectors and displays have digital internals, but they still include VGA, just in case you want to connect something from the 1980s. VGA is rarely the only possible input.
On the other hand, we have shiny new laptops with multicore processors etc, but they output VGA only, just in case your projector happens to be from the 1980s. The problem here seems to be that there's no room for multiple video outputs. So we're stuck with the lowest common denominator.
One solution for the video outputs would be DVI-I, as it includes VGA signals along with a relatively modern digital signal. It's slightly larger than a VGA connector though, and dealing with adapters is probably too much to ask from most people.
But if adapters are OK, you could just as well use HDMI or Displayport, both of which have smaller connectors than VGA. And a modern projector should have one of these connectors anyway.