I'm not sure if this is a troll or not, but in regards to the "flies off their eyes" comment, I believe that the reason you see many children in certain Third World countries with flies on them is that it is considered bad luck to remove them. This is why many children grow up either visually impaired, or completely blind. There have been efforts to educate people about this as well, but I haven't the faintest clue how well it has worked.
While I understand that these systems may help to educate the citizens of Third World Countries, does anyone else feel that perhaps there are more important things to focus on before addressing the "digital divide?" Things like clean water, stricter environmental regulations and general health and sanitation? A Playstion running Linux is a great toy, but it won't do you much good if you have no food because your farmland has extremely high levels of toxic chemicals in the soil, or if easily curable diseases (in First World countries, anyway) are killing off most of the population.
This will not be a popular opinion. Before I begin, let me say that I do not in any way advocate Microsoft's whole "Smart Tags" idea. With that said, how is what you folks are doing different? The advertisements (banners at least) are a _part_ of the web page. I bet that the people who were most vehement in their arguments against smart tags because they "change the content" of a webpage are also the ones who are altering pages by filtering out ad images. Those ads could be considered a part of the authors "presentation" of the page, and thus the way that the page should look is indeed changed. It may indeed be more pleasant, but it is not the intended result!
Ok, let the flames start rolling in... I just had to get that off my chest.
We've been lower priced copycats for sometime, and now they get to play catch-up to us by offering something already around for a higer price (why the hell would you change to tah?)
Whenever I see something like this, my hopes for the Open Source movement and community are dashed. How is this different from the "lower priced copycatting" that occurs now? Why does everyone feel the need to take a Microsoft idea and "implement it better"? What the community really needs is a NEW idea that Microsoft hasn't had! Not until this occurs will you see Linux and the other open source packages making inroads into corporate America. An example of this is Apache; it didn't start out to "emulate" Microsoft, they just wanted to build the best damn web-serving software around. And, for the most part, they succeeded. We need more new ideas and fewer "Outlook/.NET/etc..." clones.
One thing that I will concede is that Linux and the other Unices are in desperate need of a fully-featured productivity suite (Wordprocessing, presentations, spreadsheet, etc). Yes, yes, I know about StarOffice and Open Office and Abiword and Gnumeric... these are all decent packages, and I have real hope for OpenOffice. But the problem is that right now this is what is keeping many people from adopting Linux on the desktop.
I agree, I would never use GCC for a performance critical application. For every-day userland-type stuff, it's fine. For large-scale data processing it certainly isn't the way to go.
Regarding the whole sig thing, I can see where you're coming from, but just because he's using Win2k on a desktop doesn't mean he doesn't use GCC for development at work or on personal projects... At any rate, there is definitely a need for a more optimized compiler under Linux. With Intel releasing their compiler for Linux, this is a small step in the right direction. Unfortnuately, GCC will probably never reach the optimization level that the vendor compilers are at. I would love to see someone write a specialized x86-optimized Linux compiler; maybe use the parsing code from GCC, but redo the code generation. Maybe someone like IBM could get the ball rolling on this in order to show some real support for commercial applications on Linux.
Because GCC is certainly available for Win2K - one of it's strengths is availability on so many platforms! Sheesh... jumping down someone's throat because of their.sig is pretty lame. At any rate, to answer the original question, GCC's strength is definitely not speed and/or optimizations. I believe that the GCC team concentrates on having solid support for many different processors, at the expense of speed. I doubt that this will change in the forseeable future, but honestly, anything I've ever needed to compile with GCC has run just fine. Given the current speed of desktop processors, the difference isn't even noticeable.
The point it that while more instructions are thrown away, this is only because more have been issued, and therefore the fact that you have more pipelines in a new generation does not lead to that processor running slower than previous versions. The increased branch misprediction penalty can only diminish the amount of increased performance that the extra pipelines give you, and not lead to an overall speed decrease, right?
I'm not sure, but I don't think that this is the case. Let's use the numbers that the original poster gave, because I am not familiar with the specifics of the P3/P4 pipelines.
Pentium 4 - 20 stage pipeline (x9)
Pentium 3 - 10 stage pipeline (x6)
So, we have both processors running along, merrily decoding instructions into micro-ops, and executing them. A branch instruction is executed, and the processors both proceed to implement their respective branch prediction algorithms. Upon guessing, they immediately begin executing the branched-to instructions.
Ok, now assume that the results of the branch calculation are available 2 cycles before the end of the pipeline (via data forwarding). 8 cycles later, the P-III realizes that it guessed wrong, and flushes the pipelines (10 cycles). So, 18 cycles later, the P-III is executing the proper code.
Now, look at the P-IV. It is at cycle 18 that the branch calculation is available. Whoops, it's wrong! Now, we have to flush that 20 stage pipeline. 38 stages later, we begin executing the proper code.
Keep in mind that this assumes the same branch prediction probability for both processors, which certainly isn't the case. So even though there are MORE pipelines, that just means that more instructions get thrown out.
I would love someone to check this for accuracy, because it has been a long while since I dealt with CPU architecture. Take everything I say with a grain of salt.
On a side note, I always thought that the P-III only had 3 pipelines, one of which could execute any micro-op, and the other two of which could only execute the simpler micro-ops.
I love how someone can post a comment stating that they didn't read the article, and yet it gets posted up to "3 Funny"... this is ridiculous. At any rate, Microsoft is a large corporation with lots of money and lawyers. They could probably litigate the FSF into the ground if they try to defend the GPL. This is a very, very bad thing, and certainly says something about the current state of our legal system here in the US.
Yes, I did read the paper. I was simply pointing it out as an additional resource. I agree that Linux threads work "fine", but that doesn't mean that they are as good as they could be. I think that the GNU/IBM attempt at threads is meant to simply increase performance and stability, and they appear to have done a great job of it. I'm currently downloading the package and will try to see what the differences are. Sorry if I came off as antagonistic, but I'm sick of people asking questions who haven't even read the material that is linked to. Apparently you did, so accept my apology.
Are you referring to the Lotus Notes client or server? I believe that the server (Lotus Domino) has been available for Linux for quite some time. The client, AFAIK, is only available for Windows, so the existence of an AIX-class file system and threads library is completely irrelevant.
-Dio
From what I understand, this library greatly increases the POSIX compliance of the threads under Linux. As of now, they are not fully compliant, especially in regards to SMP platforms. BTW, this information is all available if one actually bothers to follow the links and read the available information. Also, this whitepaper may be of some assistance (PostScript).
This is probably a troll, but in what way is a micro-op the "antithesis of RISC philosophy?" I would argue that this is the backbone of RISC philosophy - small, simple instructions as opposed to fewer but more complex instructions. The x86 instructions themselves are CISC-like, but the micro-ops are most definitely RISC-style instructions.
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Re:similar book for CS people?
on
Bioinformatics
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· Score: 1
Heh, I replied to your previous post and recommended that book... glad I'm not the only one to like it. I think it gives a stronger theoretical background than Gusfield's book.
Another good book is Krogh's "Biological Sequence Analysis". You'll need a strong background in probability, though; he goes into quite a bit of depth on Markov Models and HMMs. The down-side to this book is that all of the theory is presented very well, but you'll have to write your own code for the algorithms. So it's definitely not a book for the "cut-and-paste" programmers of which there seem to be so many nowadays.
I bought the rights to wear these boots. As soon as they wear out I should be entitled to a new pair. The same should apply to light bulbs and beer bottles.
Do BMW give you a new car when your old one starts to wear out...? Moron.
Perhaps you don't quite understand the point of this discussion. When you purchase a pair of boots, you have purchased a PHYSICAL OBJECT (ditto with the car). When you purchase a CD or DVD, the RIAA/MPAA is saying that you have only purchased the right to listen to the intellectual property contained on that object. Your example is irrelevant and ill-conceived. Pay attention to the discussion next time before you spout off.
"If you don't vote, you really have NO right to complain about what you get".
This is slightly OT, but this reminds of a Dilbert where he's telling Dogbert that he was raised to believe "No vote means no right to complain", and Dogbert says, "Really? You were raised by bumper stickers?"
I've never quite understood or accepted the fascist idea that having served time in the army somehow makes you a better and more useful citizen.
I never said that I thought that military service SHOULD be mandatory, or even that making people join to vote was a good idea. I just said that it would be interesting to see the effect that it had, and to check out the % of military and ex military personnel who vote compared to the % of the general population. In general, it would seem to me that people who voluntarily join the military care more about the direction that the country is headed than your average Joe Sixpack.
I for one am stuanchly opposed to "voter advocacy/empowerment" groups who solicit neighborhoods to get people to vote
I agree 100% with this. On my University Campus, there are constantly at least 5 or 6 different groups soliciting people to register HERE to vote; this means that they cannot vote for local candidates in their home state, but often they are not told this until they register up here. If someone is trying to talk you into voting, they almost always have an agenda (i.e., they believe that if they are the ones who convince you to vote that you will end up voting for them). AFAIC, this is bullshit, plain and simple. If people want to vote, they will. Otherwise, don't force people who know nothing about the issues to go out and make a completely uninformed decision.
Robert Heinlein's book Starship Troopers (which was nothing like the godawful movie). Rather than competance though, it was military service which granted you full citizenship and the right to vote (other types of service might also have been valid, its been awhile since I read this).
As far as I remember, it was only military service. The basic concept was that those who care enough about community as a whole are the ones who will risk their lives defending it in the military, and thus, they are the ones who deserve to have a say in how things are run. The book raises many moral and ethical issues about politics; it is one of the greatest SF books of all time. Imagine what would happen in the US if they required military service in order to vote? I'm willing to bet that the percentage of military/ex-military personnel who vote is far higher than the national average anyway. I might be way out in left field on this one, though. Are there any mil/ex-mil out there who feel like commenting on this?
Nor are those POS Labtec speakers in the same league as a proper set of Bose speakers
Unfortunately, you just showed that you really don't know what you're talking about. In the high-end audio market, Bose speakers are considered over-priced, and their sound quality is consistently worse than most other high-end speakers. Other than that, I agree with you that mp3s just don't sound the same, regardless of bitrate... although variable bitrate encoding sounds better than most.
There is most assuredly a difference in quality between CDs and most mp3s available today; and there is definitely a difference between 128 kps and the mp3s encoded at a higher rate. If you don't have the equipment to tell the difference, then you can be happy with lower quality files. If you can't hear the difference, good for you. Some of us can.
Why don't you just try X-Win32? It's not as full-featured as exceed, but it'll let you open XDMCP sessions to other unix boxen on campus.
To keep this on-topic, my University (University of Vermont) requires computers for all Engineering and Math students, but they haven't had the balls to require laptops only. I know that the School of Business here required all of their students to have laptops because the entire building is wired to allow access in all of the classrooms, etc. Personally, I don't see what this really adds, but administrators aren't reknowned for their good sense and practical ideas.
I've been using RedHat for quite a while now, and I'm more and more disappointed, both with the quality of their products and the direction and attitude of the company. This is the last straw for me; Debian is going on _tonight_... (screw that 8:00 am exam).
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not sure if this is a troll or not, but in regards to the "flies off their eyes" comment, I believe that the reason you see many children in certain Third World countries with flies on them is that it is considered bad luck to remove them. This is why many children grow up either visually impaired, or completely blind. There have been efforts to educate people about this as well, but I haven't the faintest clue how well it has worked.
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Heh, that's just what every Third World country needs. A whole generation of children addicted to Doom.
Come, son, it's time to fetch water from the stream and hunt a wildebeest!
Sorry, dad, but I've almost killed the Cyber-Demon...
They'll all end up starving to death. Way to go, Western Civilization!
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While I understand that these systems may help to educate the citizens of Third World Countries, does anyone else feel that perhaps there are more important things to focus on before addressing the "digital divide?" Things like clean water, stricter environmental regulations and general health and sanitation? A Playstion running Linux is a great toy, but it won't do you much good if you have no food because your farmland has extremely high levels of toxic chemicals in the soil, or if easily curable diseases (in First World countries, anyway) are killing off most of the population.
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This will not be a popular opinion. Before I begin, let me say that I do not in any way advocate Microsoft's whole "Smart Tags" idea. With that said, how is what you folks are doing different? The advertisements (banners at least) are a _part_ of the web page. I bet that the people who were most vehement in their arguments against smart tags because they "change the content" of a webpage are also the ones who are altering pages by filtering out ad images. Those ads could be considered a part of the authors "presentation" of the page, and thus the way that the page should look is indeed changed. It may indeed be more pleasant, but it is not the intended result!
Ok, let the flames start rolling in... I just had to get that off my chest.
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One thing that I will concede is that Linux and the other Unices are in desperate need of a fully-featured productivity suite (Wordprocessing, presentations, spreadsheet, etc). Yes, yes, I know about StarOffice and Open Office and Abiword and Gnumeric... these are all decent packages, and I have real hope for OpenOffice. But the problem is that right now this is what is keeping many people from adopting Linux on the desktop.
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I agree, I would never use GCC for a performance critical application. For every-day userland-type stuff, it's fine. For large-scale data processing it certainly isn't the way to go.
Regarding the whole sig thing, I can see where you're coming from, but just because he's using Win2k on a desktop doesn't mean he doesn't use GCC for development at work or on personal projects...
At any rate, there is definitely a need for a more optimized compiler under Linux. With Intel releasing their compiler for Linux, this is a small step in the right direction. Unfortnuately, GCC will probably never reach the optimization level that the vendor compilers are at. I would love to see someone write a specialized x86-optimized Linux compiler; maybe use the parsing code from GCC, but redo the code generation. Maybe someone like IBM could get the ball rolling on this in order to show some real support for commercial applications on Linux.
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Because GCC is certainly available for Win2K - one of it's strengths is availability on so many platforms! Sheesh... jumping down someone's throat because of their .sig is pretty lame. At any rate, to answer the original question, GCC's strength is definitely not speed and/or optimizations. I believe that the GCC team concentrates on having solid support for many different processors, at the expense of speed. I doubt that this will change in the forseeable future, but honestly, anything I've ever needed to compile with GCC has run just fine. Given the current speed of desktop processors, the difference isn't even noticeable.
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I'm not sure, but I don't think that this is the case. Let's use the numbers that the original poster gave, because I am not familiar with the specifics of the P3/P4 pipelines.
Pentium 4 - 20 stage pipeline (x9)
Pentium 3 - 10 stage pipeline (x6)
So, we have both processors running along, merrily decoding instructions into micro-ops, and executing them. A branch instruction is executed, and the processors both proceed to implement their respective branch prediction algorithms. Upon guessing, they immediately begin executing the branched-to instructions.
Ok, now assume that the results of the branch calculation are available 2 cycles before the end of the pipeline (via data forwarding). 8 cycles later, the P-III realizes that it guessed wrong, and flushes the pipelines (10 cycles). So, 18 cycles later, the P-III is executing the proper code.
Now, look at the P-IV. It is at cycle 18 that the branch calculation is available. Whoops, it's wrong! Now, we have to flush that 20 stage pipeline. 38 stages later, we begin executing the proper code.
Keep in mind that this assumes the same branch prediction probability for both processors, which certainly isn't the case. So even though there are MORE pipelines, that just means that more instructions get thrown out.
I would love someone to check this for accuracy, because it has been a long while since I dealt with CPU architecture. Take everything I say with a grain of salt.
On a side note, I always thought that the P-III only had 3 pipelines, one of which could execute any micro-op, and the other two of which could only execute the simpler micro-ops.
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I love how someone can post a comment stating that they didn't read the article, and yet it gets posted up to "3 Funny"... this is ridiculous. At any rate, Microsoft is a large corporation with lots of money and lawyers. They could probably litigate the FSF into the ground if they try to defend the GPL. This is a very, very bad thing, and certainly says something about the current state of our legal system here in the US.
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Yes, I did read the paper. I was simply pointing it out as an additional resource. I agree that Linux threads work "fine", but that doesn't mean that they are as good as they could be. I think that the GNU/IBM attempt at threads is meant to simply increase performance and stability, and they appear to have done a great job of it. I'm currently downloading the package and will try to see what the differences are. Sorry if I came off as antagonistic, but I'm sick of people asking questions who haven't even read the material that is linked to. Apparently you did, so accept my apology.
-------
Are you referring to the Lotus Notes client or server? I believe that the server (Lotus Domino) has been available for Linux for quite some time. The client, AFAIK, is only available for Windows, so the existence of an AIX-class file system and threads library is completely irrelevant. -Dio
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From what I understand, this library greatly increases the POSIX compliance of the threads under Linux. As of now, they are not fully compliant, especially in regards to SMP platforms. BTW, this information is all available if one actually bothers to follow the links and read the available information. Also, this whitepaper may be of some assistance (PostScript).
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This is probably a troll, but in what way is a micro-op the "antithesis of RISC philosophy?" I would argue that this is the backbone of RISC philosophy - small, simple instructions as opposed to fewer but more complex instructions. The x86 instructions themselves are CISC-like, but the micro-ops are most definitely RISC-style instructions.
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Heh, I replied to your previous post and recommended that book... glad I'm not the only one to like it. I think it gives a stronger theoretical background than Gusfield's book.
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Another good book is Krogh's "Biological Sequence Analysis". You'll need a strong background in probability, though; he goes into quite a bit of depth on Markov Models and HMMs. The down-side to this book is that all of the theory is presented very well, but you'll have to write your own code for the algorithms. So it's definitely not a book for the "cut-and-paste" programmers of which there seem to be so many nowadays.
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Perhaps you don't quite understand the point of this discussion. When you purchase a pair of boots, you have purchased a PHYSICAL OBJECT (ditto with the car). When you purchase a CD or DVD, the RIAA/MPAA is saying that you have only purchased the right to listen to the intellectual property contained on that object. Your example is irrelevant and ill-conceived. Pay attention to the discussion next time before you spout off.
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Unfortunately, you just showed that you really don't know what you're talking about. In the high-end audio market, Bose speakers are considered over-priced, and their sound quality is consistently worse than most other high-end speakers. Other than that, I agree with you that mp3s just don't sound the same, regardless of bitrate... although variable bitrate encoding sounds better than most.
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There is most assuredly a difference in quality between CDs and most mp3s available today; and there is definitely a difference between 128 kps and the mp3s encoded at a higher rate. If you don't have the equipment to tell the difference, then you can be happy with lower quality files. If you can't hear the difference, good for you. Some of us can.
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Why don't you just try X-Win32? It's not as full-featured as exceed, but it'll let you open XDMCP sessions to other unix boxen on campus.
To keep this on-topic, my University (University of Vermont) requires computers for all Engineering and Math students, but they haven't had the balls to require laptops only. I know that the School of Business here required all of their students to have laptops because the entire building is wired to allow access in all of the classrooms, etc. Personally, I don't see what this really adds, but administrators aren't reknowned for their good sense and practical ideas.
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Obviously "Puff the Magic Dragon"... sheesh.
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I've been using RedHat for quite a while now, and I'm more and more disappointed, both with the quality of their products and the direction and attitude of the company. This is the last straw for me; Debian is going on _tonight_... (screw that 8:00 am exam).
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