One would hear the difference. I used to be an AMD only guy for more than a decade, but then Core2Duo came out and suddenly I was able to have a fast CPU without a fan. And even now I have a passive cooled i5 - same cooler BTW as the Core2Duo from years ago.
I also had a passive cooled C2D, T7200 to be precise. For a lot of workloads, it was much faster than the Ci5 in my newer laptop. Unfortunately, I needed a better motherboard and more than 3 GB of memory, none of which were available with the suitable chipset and socket.
Intel clearly has the lead in power efficiency, so I generally prefer it for mobile/fanless uses. AMD for everything else -- besides the pricing, they have much less artificial market segmentation.
I sometimes think that AMD's genius isn't what they added, but what they dropped by design. If it had been up to Intel, x86-64 would have a 64-bit "real mode", an even more complicated TSS, and yet another incompatible segmentation type.
This. AMD64 feels cleaner in some sense, though I'm not qualified to comment on the details of memory management. For example, consider the x32 initiative that was floated around the Linux community in the past few years: using the AMD64 ISA with only 32-bit pointers. The idea was that it would speed up a lot of software, and the 4 GB limit per process would not hurt most users. To me this seemed like a step backwards: just as we finally got a nice flat memory space, these guys want to go back to something like segmentation or PAE for a small performance increase.
Do you want to live a life of fun, good food, fun entertainment and hot beverages, then die at 70, or do you want to live a life of measuring everything daily in a state of panic that you might get cancer and then die at 74 - that is, if you don't accidentally walk in front of a bus when you're 40?
The same question always comes up in discussions of health food, smoking, meat eating etc., and it's always a false dichotomy. The way you eat and exercise has an immediate effect on your quality of life, and more so as you get older. Also, you don't have to be a nutrition nazi to enjoy a better life -- think of the big picture instead of worrying about every single bite. The cognitive benefits may even help you avoid the bus accident.
AMD64 was a set of completely obvious extensions to the Intel X86 model. Expand the existing 32 bit registers to 64 bit and add 64 bit versions of the existing 32 bit instructions as necessary. Nothing earth shaking or even novel.
Ideas are a dime a dozen. It's the actual implementation that makes a difference in the real world. If the idea were so obvious, you'd think that Intel would have been in a much better position to bet on the new idea, with all their resources.
It's interesting that after about 14 years of AMD64, we are still haunted by x86-32 in many places with closed binary-only software. For instance, Skype on Linux was only released as a 32-bit binary, so you had to maintain all these ugly compatibility libraries. I wonder how much of this is due to the AMD origins of the architecture, and the subsequent slowness of the Intel and Microsoft camp to adopt it.
Another thing I've discovered is if you have similar hardware and similar configurations you can tell portage to build binary packages. If you share this directory via nfs export you can instruct portage to favour binary packages when all use flags and other build-environment options are the same. This has saved my poor celerons on my MythTV frontends quite some compile time.
Agreed, but even that won't always work out. Recently, a Finnish subway driver wrote
'wish I had a beer'
on the in-car display, and a media shitstorm ensued. The subway operator had the driver scolded, though not fired, and issued a statement on their stance against promoting alcoholic drinks.
In the olden days of/., 'hack' would have been more about technical skill and an inquisitive attitude, rather than legality or authorization. Even with the later, incorrect usage of hacking to mean cracking, I wouldn't say that "doing stuff without a permission" is synonymous with "hacking".
This. Gentoo's Portage is modelled after BSD Ports, and it follows a minimalist unix style in many other ways. At the same time, it uses the GNU userland on the Linux kernel for a much better hardware and software availability. And no, it doesn't use systemd by default. As a side effect of the compilation thing, Gentoo is a nice environment for developers.
How is it Apple's responsibility to get other, non-Apple, OSes to the point that they can mount a new file system? Isn't that the responsibility of the people developing those other OSes?
Developing drivers is tough if you have no documentation.
Every competent OS has had an eject command for removable media. The only way to avoid it is to eliminate read/write buffers. Which means your computer would have to completely freeze and block you from doing anything else with it until the read/write operation completed.
I remember Windows doing exactly this in the age of floppies. It may have been due to the lack of true multitasking, but in any case, there was no "umount" for floppies in Windows 9x. An explicit umount command is the price to pay for a properly multitasking OS, where things like disk I/O can happen in the background.
Not everyone is driven by money. It's simplistic, it's short-sighted, it's hard to believe sometimes... It's also true. An introvert with all basic meeds net will happily stow away a boatload of money if he/she enjoys the other activities they are able to take part in.
Should that be "needs" or "meds"?
Anyway, I can attest to this idea. I generally save up quite a lot during the years when I'm on full-time work, as I like to lead a simple life on a student budget. As a result, I spend long stretches outside working life doing things I like, such as art projects.
This. I remember when Youtube was launched, and it seemed silly that anyone would want to watch small videos within a web page. It looked like a throwback to the early 90s "multimedia" CD-ROMs where you only had tiny video clips due to tech limitations.
The few times I actually want to see a video from the web, I generally need to work around the web stuff with youtube-dl or something, for proper viewing on a native player. So much wasted work, while pre-youtube we just posted raw video links for direct playing.
Now that I have a crap camera to hand at all times, I use it for all sorts of useful things. Sometimes I photograph wired/interesting things I see and want so show people, sometimes I photographs pictures of something I need to show someone who lives in a different country, sometimes it's stood in as an ad-hoc scanner, or simply photographing ID numbers, MAC addresses etc printed on things and so on.
The thing is none of those is up to the standard of a professional with a professional camera, but they are all useful to me and sometimes my work regardless of them not being "professional standard". If I had to rely on "proper" photography, then none of them would be taken.
I guess it's the same with programming.
I guess the programming equivalent would be writing shell one-liners, small macros/scripts etc. only for your personal use. Unfortunately, most people today never see a proper shell. IMHO, the Microsoft and Apple "experience" is all about separating users from developers, by providing special proprietary dev kits as the correct way to programming. Meanwhile, users of free unices will find shells and interpreters all over the OS.
Applications are the software you run on top of an operating system. This was the common terminology I recall from the 80s and 90s, and it still applies (pun intended) to today's "smart"phones.
I love Python (disclaimer). But semicolons in other languages are more about splitting lines, not combining them, in my experience. That's a nice feature about being white space agnostic. Occasionally, like when splitting a string across multiple lines, you have to escape the line break, but you have to do that in Python as well sometimes, so it's a wash.
As I mentioned in another post, most lines in practice won't need splitting. So while the escape in Python (or shell scripts, etc.) is ugly, the total amount of ugly punctuation is still lower. It's also nice that you need to do a little extra work to deal with the exceptionally long lines, and perhaps consider if that part of the code needs cleaning up.
but if you always put a line break between statements then a period is redundant
Not true. It would still be ambiguous whenever a line wrapped to the next line.
True, and this is why linebreak-sensitive languages need an extra character for wrapping long lines. Arguably, it's not very elegant, but it's tolerated in many languages, presumably because it happens so rarely; the total count of line-noise characters is lower than peppering everything with semicolons.
Good point, I was going to mention something about bc or awk, both of which I use in shell scripts, but I thought this discussion was more about interactive use. Though your "calc" might be nice in.bashrc, for example.
I actually prefer awk in shell scripts for a couple of reasons. First, it seems to be more widely available -- minimalistic distros don't include bc by default, but awk is always there. Also, it's a more complete programming language rather than a calculator. For example, linear regression coefficients from a list of x, y pairs:
awk '{n = n + 1 sx = sx + $1 sy = sy + $2 sxy = sxy + $1*$2 sx2 = sx2 + $1**2 sy2 = sy2 + $2**2} END{b = (n*sxy - sx*sy) / (n*sx2 - sx**2) a = (sy - b*sx) / n r = (n*sxy - sx*sy) / ((n*sx2 - sx**2)*(n*sy2 - sy**2))**0.5 print a, b, r}'
What's probably most remarkable here is that Norway is currently one of the world's largest Oil exporters.
They also have plenty of hydroelectric power, so they can basically power themselves sustainably while selling all the oil. Talk about winning the geographic lottery.
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I was going to post the same idea. Now I just keep the mosquitos away with the usual /. whine.
One would hear the difference. I used to be an AMD only guy for more than a decade, but then Core2Duo came out and suddenly I was able to have a fast CPU without a fan. And even now I have a passive cooled i5 - same cooler BTW as the Core2Duo from years ago.
I also had a passive cooled C2D, T7200 to be precise. For a lot of workloads, it was much faster than the Ci5 in my newer laptop. Unfortunately, I needed a better motherboard and more than 3 GB of memory, none of which were available with the suitable chipset and socket.
Intel clearly has the lead in power efficiency, so I generally prefer it for mobile/fanless uses. AMD for everything else -- besides the pricing, they have much less artificial market segmentation.
I sometimes think that AMD's genius isn't what they added, but what they dropped by design. If it had been up to Intel, x86-64 would have a 64-bit "real mode", an even more complicated TSS, and yet another incompatible segmentation type.
This. AMD64 feels cleaner in some sense, though I'm not qualified to comment on the details of memory management. For example, consider the x32 initiative that was floated around the Linux community in the past few years: using the AMD64 ISA with only 32-bit pointers. The idea was that it would speed up a lot of software, and the 4 GB limit per process would not hurt most users. To me this seemed like a step backwards: just as we finally got a nice flat memory space, these guys want to go back to something like segmentation or PAE for a small performance increase.
Here's the really, REALLY big question.
Do you want to live a life of fun, good food, fun entertainment and hot beverages, then die at 70, or do you want to live a life of measuring everything daily in a state of panic that you might get cancer and then die at 74 - that is, if you don't accidentally walk in front of a bus when you're 40?
The same question always comes up in discussions of health food, smoking, meat eating etc., and it's always a false dichotomy. The way you eat and exercise has an immediate effect on your quality of life, and more so as you get older. Also, you don't have to be a nutrition nazi to enjoy a better life -- think of the big picture instead of worrying about every single bite. The cognitive benefits may even help you avoid the bus accident.
AMD64 was a set of completely obvious extensions to the Intel X86 model. Expand the existing 32 bit registers to 64 bit and add 64 bit versions of the existing 32 bit instructions as necessary. Nothing earth shaking or even novel.
Ideas are a dime a dozen. It's the actual implementation that makes a difference in the real world. If the idea were so obvious, you'd think that Intel would have been in a much better position to bet on the new idea, with all their resources.
It's interesting that after about 14 years of AMD64, we are still haunted by x86-32 in many places with closed binary-only software. For instance, Skype on Linux was only released as a 32-bit binary, so you had to maintain all these ugly compatibility libraries. I wonder how much of this is due to the AMD origins of the architecture, and the subsequent slowness of the Intel and Microsoft camp to adopt it.
I think I'm going to shoot a video of the meal I had yesterday.
You know what else would be hot? Trump's PUBIC hair ...
I'm pretty sure all of that reporting is already in the pubic domain.
Another thing I've discovered is if you have similar hardware and similar configurations you can tell portage to build binary packages. If you share this directory via nfs export you can instruct portage to favour binary packages when all use flags and other build-environment options are the same. This has saved my poor celerons on my MythTV frontends quite some compile time.
Also, use distcc if you have multiple machines.
Agreed, but even that won't always work out. Recently, a Finnish subway driver wrote 'wish I had a beer' on the in-car display, and a media shitstorm ensued. The subway operator had the driver scolded, though not fired, and issued a statement on their stance against promoting alcoholic drinks.
In the olden days of /., 'hack' would have been more about technical skill and an inquisitive attitude, rather than legality or authorization. Even with the later, incorrect usage of hacking to mean cracking, I wouldn't say that "doing stuff without a permission" is synonymous with "hacking".
This. Gentoo's Portage is modelled after BSD Ports, and it follows a minimalist unix style in many other ways. At the same time, it uses the GNU userland on the Linux kernel for a much better hardware and software availability. And no, it doesn't use systemd by default. As a side effect of the compilation thing, Gentoo is a nice environment for developers.
How is it Apple's responsibility to get other, non-Apple, OSes to the point that they can mount a new file system? Isn't that the responsibility of the people developing those other OSes?
Developing drivers is tough if you have no documentation.
Every competent OS has had an eject command for removable media. The only way to avoid it is to eliminate read/write buffers. Which means your computer would have to completely freeze and block you from doing anything else with it until the read/write operation completed.
I remember Windows doing exactly this in the age of floppies. It may have been due to the lack of true multitasking, but in any case, there was no "umount" for floppies in Windows 9x. An explicit umount command is the price to pay for a properly multitasking OS, where things like disk I/O can happen in the background.
Actually, his middle name was Danger, but the auto industry hasn't been too keen to adopt it.
Not everyone is driven by money. It's simplistic, it's short-sighted, it's hard to believe sometimes... It's also true. An introvert with all basic meeds net will happily stow away a boatload of money if he/she enjoys the other activities they are able to take part in.
Should that be "needs" or "meds"?
Anyway, I can attest to this idea. I generally save up quite a lot during the years when I'm on full-time work, as I like to lead a simple life on a student budget. As a result, I spend long stretches outside working life doing things I like, such as art projects.
No, people who cannot spell "Bitcoin" is what kills Bitcoin.
This. I remember when Youtube was launched, and it seemed silly that anyone would want to watch small videos within a web page. It looked like a throwback to the early 90s "multimedia" CD-ROMs where you only had tiny video clips due to tech limitations.
The few times I actually want to see a video from the web, I generally need to work around the web stuff with youtube-dl or something, for proper viewing on a native player. So much wasted work, while pre-youtube we just posted raw video links for direct playing.
Now that I have a crap camera to hand at all times, I use it for all sorts of useful things. Sometimes I photograph wired/interesting things I see and want so show people, sometimes I photographs pictures of something I need to show someone who lives in a different country, sometimes it's stood in as an ad-hoc scanner, or simply photographing ID numbers, MAC addresses etc printed on things and so on.
The thing is none of those is up to the standard of a professional with a professional camera, but they are all useful to me and sometimes my work regardless of them not being "professional standard". If I had to rely on "proper" photography, then none of them would be taken.
I guess it's the same with programming.
I guess the programming equivalent would be writing shell one-liners, small macros/scripts etc. only for your personal use. Unfortunately, most people today never see a proper shell. IMHO, the Microsoft and Apple "experience" is all about separating users from developers, by providing special proprietary dev kits as the correct way to programming. Meanwhile, users of free unices will find shells and interpreters all over the OS.
Can we have 3X less reliability though please.
I don't think that phrase means what you think it means.
Applications are the software you run on top of an operating system. This was the common terminology I recall from the 80s and 90s, and it still applies (pun intended) to today's "smart"phones.
I love Python (disclaimer). But semicolons in other languages are more about splitting lines, not combining them, in my experience. That's a nice feature about being white space agnostic. Occasionally, like when splitting a string across multiple lines, you have to escape the line break, but you have to do that in Python as well sometimes, so it's a wash.
As I mentioned in another post, most lines in practice won't need splitting. So while the escape in Python (or shell scripts, etc.) is ugly, the total amount of ugly punctuation is still lower. It's also nice that you need to do a little extra work to deal with the exceptionally long lines, and perhaps consider if that part of the code needs cleaning up.
but if you always put a line break between statements then a period is redundant
Not true. It would still be ambiguous whenever a line wrapped to the next line.
True, and this is why linebreak-sensitive languages need an extra character for wrapping long lines. Arguably, it's not very elegant, but it's tolerated in many languages, presumably because it happens so rarely; the total count of line-noise characters is lower than peppering everything with semicolons.
Good point, I was going to mention something about bc or awk, both of which I use in shell scripts, but I thought this discussion was more about interactive use. Though your "calc" might be nice in .bashrc, for example.
I actually prefer awk in shell scripts for a couple of reasons. First, it seems to be more widely available -- minimalistic distros don't include bc by default, but awk is always there. Also, it's a more complete programming language rather than a calculator. For example, linear regression coefficients from a list of x, y pairs:
What's probably most remarkable here is that Norway is currently one of the world's largest Oil exporters.
They also have plenty of hydroelectric power, so they can basically power themselves sustainably while selling all the oil. Talk about winning the geographic lottery.
I also prefer poetry that places a period at the end of a sentence rather than making me think about where the sentence ends.
good point
but if you always put a line break between statements
then a period is redundant