Europe coins are a joke!
on
Making Change
·
· Score: 1
I know in Europe I always tend to collect pocketsful of 20-eurocent and 50-eurocent pieces. The 1-euro and 2-euro coins are scourge -- as soon as you break a 5 you've got a pocketful of change. I always ended up trying to spend 20 euros of coins at some restaurant.
Hmm, I wonder what people put in strippers g-strings in Europe.
Your antecedent isn't valid for me. It's cheesey, but that's what MS is selling when they talk about the "agile business" -- for knowledge workers. What you say is valid for things like IDEs, but in a document-centric world URLS and docs are the permanent thing, apps should be invisible.
Or one that has at least modularized widget wrappers, print services, and font services so that every app doesn't have to "build the world." It's not as if IE and Office completely implement all that and just launch at startup as a hidden process.
And that doesn't explain the CPU hogging. (Although to be fair IE and Office are CPU hogs -- just trace the system calls in Word when you press a keystroke to see). But If I'm watching a DVD in Windows and want to surf IMDB without skipping frames, I'd always choose IE, Moz makes the DVD skip. And that's a fact.
There's nothing stopping OSS from designing the OS around it's apps either. Certainly they can read each other's code!
The main problem for me with Mozilla and OpenOffice is not their performance -- both are "fast enough" once they are running. The biggest difference between those and the Microsoft equivalents is (1) load time [especially on windows] and CPU-hogging. IE and Office load really fast, and remain zippy as the system incurs load. OpenOffice is worse than Moz for chewing up resources, but both are bad.
Linux in general "feels" like it's serializing tasks (except consoles), but maybe that's me not tweaking the kernel (I run Debian's 2.4.20+patches, plus CK low-latency patches, but maybe it's misconfigured?)
Open Source should not be "required". I can just imagine how some mid-level government manager would feel being forced to consider OpenOffice (for example) when he just wants to buy Office and be done with it -- word would start to circulate about his crappy experience, Open Source in general would suffer, and anti-OSS camp has more ammo.
I get really scared when I start hearing people who believe in freedom so much they are going to force you to be free (at a metaphorical gunpoint). Just because *I* like that I can get workalike functionality of thousands of $$s of software, doesn't mean I should force people to use it. Free will rules. Of course, government should *want* to use free software anyway, to save our money. But don't force them.
I just wasn't patient enough to love Gentoo. Is compiling the whole world with my own switches a noticeable perf improvment (on a P4, not an Athlon)?
It seems like it takes *hours* to do gentoo truly from scratch, if you cheat and use the prebuilt Gnome, OpenOffice, X why bother? Is the ports packages richer than say Debian?
Heh, I can sneak in a reply to this without being too offtopic:
A friend of mine wants to see a web server with an HTML form where you can just paste in some assembley code and the server will just execute it. The ultimate killer app! "Just give me some code and I'll just run it."
I build phoenix from source (for XFT support) every week or so. I have some questions:
(1) What changes will I have to make to.mozconfig to build Firebird? Will I just stop defining MOZ_PHOENIX and then moz will build like phoenix?
(2) What additional (cough bloat) features will Phoenix acquire when it becomes the main branch? I don't want Firebird to bloat up at all! If anything, it should go *more* in the faster/smaller direction, not the other way!
You're being all general and practing ethical relativism, but I'm talking about something specific. People in general who use Winders all the time do not use other stuff; it is factually incorrect to say people in general who use Linux or Macs don't use Winders. It's absurd to argue with that; otherwise the numbers wouldn't be what they are.
Now go ahead and say your thing and be all uppity.
Being hooked on Windows is like being hooked on a drug. You're so trapped in your worldview that you just cannot imagine anything else. Doesn't mean you're evil, but it does mean sometimes you become a fiend:-)
I just recently cancelled all my cable movie channels and got two library cards (this town and the next town over). I check one or two DVDs out from the library every other day. Sure, they are crappy old movies, but it sounds like that's the bulk of what you get on Netflix and on most of the cable channels anyway. Your taxes already pay for it. Be an old fogey and use the library! It's civic!
I said way back at the beginning that MS is better for business for the reason you described:-) (And wasn't an intern for three years!) I haven't even attempted to use Linux in a business setting, it's way to immature for that. And you're right, SQL Server's and NT's "self-tuning" beats the total hell out of Oracle and Unix's endless tuning knobs.
However... I spent all my time at MS convincing people that shit it doesn't do well is really grounds for writing a "best practice whitepaper" on how you didn't really want to do that shit anyway. I constantly faced 700-step non-reversable processes which could fail silently at step 2 and you couldn tell till the end, and it really only made sense to start over. And the natural response for others to these complaints is to smile, implement the 10% the technology allows you to, and redefine that as what you really wanted to do!, and seem effective. Linux doesn't make me feel like that as much. That makes me happy. Linux has other problems (usability wise) -- which you point out. But overall I'm confident that the culture fostering Linux will allow it to grow faster than Windows.
While i was there I evangelized using I/O Completion ports, Overlappped Async I/O, Scatter/gather APIs, Interlocked Linked Lists (newly documented in XP/2K3), &c. the "MS-specific razor's edge" that IIS and SQL and any high-perf app on Win32 uses. It is a true statement that if you follow *exactly* that set of techniques you get world-class perf. It is also true that if you do anything the way the rest of the world does it you get shitty perf. It is also true that every ISV I worked with had huge perf problems because they didn't "walk the razor's edge."
Example: a guy in the kernel team was bitching that WaitForMultipleObjects has a 64-handle wait limit. Dave Cutler stepped in and gave historical reasons for why the limit was set, and argued eloquently (as you did) that the Unix way of select() on thousands of sockets was inferior to using I/O completion ports. His argument was compelling, as is yours. But the original guy said: "I cannnot go to a large ISV and tell them REPENT! and use I/O Completion ports! as does IIS!" The MS-attitude is IIS is a great socket-listener, and MS wants people to write web services using ASP.NET, so why reinvent the wheel?
So that's why I switched. It's not that MS technology is inferior. It's just that it's myopic. Linux is out there letting a thousand flowers bloom. It's more fun!
My personal opinion is that, in the early days of Windows, there was a vibrant shareware community. I always used to supplement my Windows desktop with this or that little highly useful bit of shareware. In the last few years, it has become "all Microsoft." While I was there, I would naturally run W2K Advanced Server, SQL Enterprise, VS Enterprise, and Office Pro and my desktop, because the licenses were free to me! (Probably $20,000 worth of software on all my PCs). I was always depressed that my desktop was "Microsoft-pure," and wondered what it is about such a system of events that this is so.
If I bear a personal grudge, it is rooted in wonderment as to why such a situation came to pass, and why the vibrant shareware community experience is now to be found in open source. I dunno. If I seem "mad at Micrsoft," that is a human failing of mine, I apologize, but it is rooted in a real experience I lived.
Because threads have to go to sleep sometimes. If a thread blocks on I/O, that's a context switch, which is less efficient than letting a thread run to the the end of its Quantum. "Cache thrashing." Of course, you have to do some I/O, but all things being equal, it's better (in Windows) if that doesn't happen.
The "ideal # of threads is 1 per processor" is a quote straight from the Windows kernel perf team, but you have to take it in context.
The "NT kernel series" sucks when you try to port Unix-style thread or process per client model server software to it, because of the process limit I discussed and the VMS-like heaviweight processes. The ideal # of concurrent executing threads on 2K3 is one per processor, SQL Server and Exchange are modeled on this.
windows performance is like walking on a razor's edge: stray but a little and fall in the wayside. The amount of investment required to get performance is not commensurate with the payoff. This does not imply that I have found another kernel which doesn't suck!
I guess all my pro-Microsoft / Linux sucks posts got scrolled off the list. All of the information I listed is public knowledge, read the literature.
It's accurate that I'm anti-MS now. I always thought they were evil but hell I'm evil too, so you go where the winners go. I think Linux is a winner now, that's why I'm in this camp for a while. Later it will be something else...
I stopped working at Microsoft in January, after being there from June 2000. I was there during the whole "Whistler" cycle
Kernel improvements:
* Low-Fragmentation Heap: People use SmartHeap because NT heap serializes and sucks. LFH heap uses heap-per-processor on SMP. * Desktop Limit: Remember "running out of resources" before running out of memory in Win 3.1? The 32-bit analog of that limit (higher but still there) is STILL in Windows, even in XP. This keeps you from spawning thousands of processes IF those processes use any functions from user32.dll. They did some lazy registering of U/I threads vs. kernel threads that makes the limit less painful. * Gigabit ethernet, zero-copy networking stuff. Don't know as much about this but that it's much better. * Unisys ES7000 32-way blows f'ing chunks on W2K. It doesn't suck as much on 2K3 (NUMA API). * Tons of other perf tuning adjustments, mostly to make SQL Server run better. All SQL Server-TPC-winning numbers have been on 2K3 betas for the last year or more. * Junk like that. Dumb-ass bug fixes. It really is a better kernel, but it still sucks. As someone who now loves Linux, my honest assessment of the situation is, at best, the whole Linux (in its current state, mostly usability drawbacks) vs. Microsoft (usable as hell but stagnant due to lack of competition) is a draw. But Linux has more promise because its fresher and interesting. MS wins in business because business likes staid "comfortable" not necessarily better technology.
I don't know about that. I've been using Linux for 3 months, Debian the entire time, I'm a freak and have probably installed my system from scratch 40 times in that period. I'm a neat freak on my computer.
I used to add unstable main contrib non-free, and realized all the non-free crap is just useless ttf fonts and a bunch of crapola. All I need is in main. The only thing I need from contrib is openoffice.org.
Of course, I have to build the non-free fglrx packages for my ATI!
Search for: prb office 2000 activation
and you'll find several hits which discuss problems where Activation pops up again and again. Granted, this particular one doesn't come up!
MS KB lingo for bug is prb, that's the magic word!
[Warning: I'm long out of school and not a physics major, this might be bullshit.]
I have a favorite fuck-with-your-head pop science story I tell to wig people out, I read it in The Illusion of Technique by William Barrett:
Okay, you know about the Heisenburg uncertainty principle -- can't know a particle's position and velocity simultaneously. But, Einstein, the clever fellow, asked "what if there are two particles?" and proceeded to construct an equation that would simulatenously tell you the relative distance between the two particles, plus the sum of their velocities, the two uncertainties cancelling each other out (superposition).
Therefore, the act of focusing your attention on something instantly causes all other particles to be exactly measurable, instantly, a faster-than-light phenomonon. So, all the quantum waves become exactly measurable everywhere when you look anywhere. Therefore, YOU (yes YOU!) are the only thing that exists in the universe, and the rest of us are figments of YOUR imagination!!
I always thought that kid was being a smarmy jackass when he said that. From dictionary.com:
http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=potatos
potato ( P ) Pronunciation Key (p-tt) n. pl. potatoes
I swear when I was in 2nd grade in the 70s my first spelling book told me either spelling was acceptable. It stuck with me because I remembered thinking, "that's wierd, either was is right!"
This has damned ominous ovetones. You guys better watch out, or they're gonna take the ball away from you just like they snatched it away from Borland, Lotus, Novell, &c. &c.
Ah, well, in fifteen years Gates & Balmer will retire and then the world can make some progress, until then bend over and smile!
Slashdot Mirror
I know in Europe I always tend to collect pocketsful of 20-eurocent and 50-eurocent pieces. The 1-euro and 2-euro coins are scourge -- as soon as you break a 5 you've got a pocketful of change. I always ended up trying to spend 20 euros of coins at some restaurant.
Hmm, I wonder what people put in strippers g-strings in Europe.
You're a looney!
since I'm going to spend hours using the package
Your antecedent isn't valid for me. It's cheesey, but that's what MS is selling when they talk about the "agile business" -- for knowledge workers. What you say is valid for things like IDEs, but in a document-centric world URLS and docs are the permanent thing, apps should be invisible.
Or one that has at least modularized widget wrappers, print services, and font services so that every app doesn't have to "build the world." It's not as if IE and Office completely implement all that and just launch at startup as a hidden process.
And that doesn't explain the CPU hogging. (Although to be fair IE and Office are CPU hogs -- just trace the system calls in Word when you press a keystroke to see). But If I'm watching a DVD in Windows and want to surf IMDB without skipping frames, I'd always choose IE, Moz makes the DVD skip. And that's a fact.
There's nothing stopping OSS from designing the OS around it's apps either. Certainly they can read each other's code!
The main problem for me with Mozilla and OpenOffice is not their performance -- both are "fast enough" once they are running. The biggest difference between those and the Microsoft equivalents is (1) load time [especially on windows] and CPU-hogging. IE and Office load really fast, and remain zippy as the system incurs load. OpenOffice is worse than Moz for chewing up resources, but both are bad.
Linux in general "feels" like it's serializing tasks (except consoles), but maybe that's me not tweaking the kernel (I run Debian's 2.4.20+patches, plus CK low-latency patches, but maybe it's misconfigured?)
Open Source should not be "required". I can just imagine how some mid-level government manager would feel being forced to consider OpenOffice (for example) when he just wants to buy Office and be done with it -- word would start to circulate about his crappy experience, Open Source in general would suffer, and anti-OSS camp has more ammo.
I get really scared when I start hearing people who believe in freedom so much they are going to force you to be free (at a metaphorical gunpoint). Just because *I* like that I can get workalike functionality of thousands of $$s of software, doesn't mean I should force people to use it. Free will rules. Of course, government should *want* to use free software anyway, to save our money. But don't force them.
I read it differently, but it's a little stilted:
I think he meant GPL is at top, and the "lowly" renter is at bottom.
I just wasn't patient enough to love Gentoo. Is compiling the whole world with my own switches a noticeable perf improvment (on a P4, not an Athlon)?
It seems like it takes *hours* to do gentoo truly from scratch, if you cheat and use the prebuilt Gnome, OpenOffice, X why bother? Is the ports packages richer than say Debian?
Heh, I can sneak in a reply to this without being too offtopic:
A friend of mine wants to see a web server with an HTML form where you can just paste in some assembley code and the server will just execute it. The ultimate killer app! "Just give me some code and I'll just run it."
I build phoenix from source (for XFT support) every week or so. I have some questions:
.mozconfig to build Firebird? Will I just stop defining MOZ_PHOENIX and then moz will build like phoenix?
(1) What changes will I have to make to
(2) What additional (cough bloat) features will Phoenix acquire when it becomes the main branch? I don't want Firebird to bloat up at all! If anything, it should go *more* in the faster/smaller direction, not the other way!
You're being all general and practing ethical relativism, but I'm talking about something specific. People in general who use Winders all the time do not use other stuff; it is factually incorrect to say people in general who use Linux or Macs don't use Winders. It's absurd to argue with that; otherwise the numbers wouldn't be what they are.
Now go ahead and say your thing and be all uppity.
Being hooked on Windows is like being hooked on a drug. You're so trapped in your worldview that you just cannot imagine anything else. Doesn't mean you're evil, but it does mean sometimes you become a fiend :-)
I just recently cancelled all my cable movie channels and got two library cards (this town and the next town over). I check one or two DVDs out from the library every other day. Sure, they are crappy old movies, but it sounds like that's the bulk of what you get on Netflix and on most of the cable channels anyway. Your taxes already pay for it. Be an old fogey and use the library! It's civic!
I said way back at the beginning that MS is better for business for the reason you described :-) (And wasn't an intern for three years!) I haven't even attempted to use Linux in a business setting, it's way to immature for that. And you're right, SQL Server's and NT's "self-tuning" beats the total hell out of Oracle and Unix's endless tuning knobs.
However...
I spent all my time at MS convincing people that shit it doesn't do well is really grounds for writing a "best practice whitepaper" on how you didn't really want to do that shit anyway. I constantly faced 700-step non-reversable processes which could fail silently at step 2 and you couldn tell till the end, and it really only made sense to start over. And the natural response for others to these complaints is to smile, implement the 10% the technology allows you to, and redefine that as what you really wanted to do!, and seem effective. Linux doesn't make me feel like that as much. That makes me happy. Linux has other problems (usability wise) -- which you point out. But overall I'm confident that the culture fostering Linux will allow it to grow faster than Windows.
While i was there I evangelized using I/O Completion ports, Overlappped Async I/O, Scatter/gather APIs, Interlocked Linked Lists (newly documented in XP/2K3), &c. the "MS-specific razor's edge" that IIS and SQL and any high-perf app on Win32 uses. It is a true statement that if you follow *exactly* that set of techniques you get world-class perf. It is also true that if you do anything the way the rest of the world does it you get shitty perf. It is also true that every ISV I worked with had huge perf problems because they didn't "walk the razor's edge."
Example: a guy in the kernel team was bitching that WaitForMultipleObjects has a 64-handle wait limit. Dave Cutler stepped in and gave historical reasons for why the limit was set, and argued eloquently (as you did) that the Unix way of select() on thousands of sockets was inferior to using I/O completion ports. His argument was compelling, as is yours. But the original guy said: "I cannnot go to a large ISV and tell them REPENT! and use I/O Completion ports! as does IIS!" The MS-attitude is IIS is a great socket-listener, and MS wants people to write web services using ASP.NET, so why reinvent the wheel?
So that's why I switched. It's not that MS technology is inferior. It's just that it's myopic. Linux is out there letting a thousand flowers bloom. It's more fun!
My personal opinion is that, in the early days of Windows, there was a vibrant shareware community. I always used to supplement my Windows desktop with this or that little highly useful bit of shareware. In the last few years, it has become "all Microsoft." While I was there, I would naturally run W2K Advanced Server, SQL Enterprise, VS Enterprise, and Office Pro and my desktop, because the licenses were free to me! (Probably $20,000 worth of software on all my PCs). I was always depressed that my desktop was "Microsoft-pure," and wondered what it is about such a system of events that this is so.
If I bear a personal grudge, it is rooted in wonderment as to why such a situation came to pass, and why the vibrant shareware community experience is now to be found in open source. I dunno. If I seem "mad at Micrsoft," that is a human failing of mine, I apologize, but it is rooted in a real experience I lived.
Because threads have to go to sleep sometimes. If a thread blocks on I/O, that's a context switch, which is less efficient than letting a thread run to the the end of its Quantum. "Cache thrashing." Of course, you have to do some I/O, but all things being equal, it's better (in Windows) if that doesn't happen.
The "ideal # of threads is 1 per processor" is a quote straight from the Windows kernel perf team, but you have to take it in context.
I forgot to answer your other question:
The "NT kernel series" sucks when you try to port Unix-style thread or process per client model server software to it, because of the process limit I discussed and the VMS-like heaviweight processes. The ideal # of concurrent executing threads on 2K3 is one per processor, SQL Server and Exchange are modeled on this.
windows performance is like walking on a razor's edge: stray but a little and fall in the wayside. The amount of investment required to get performance is not commensurate with the payoff. This does not imply that I have found another kernel which doesn't suck!
I guess all my pro-Microsoft / Linux sucks posts got scrolled off the list. All of the information I listed is public knowledge, read the literature.
It's accurate that I'm anti-MS now. I always thought they were evil but hell I'm evil too, so you go where the winners go. I think Linux is a winner now, that's why I'm in this camp for a while. Later it will be something else...
I stopped working at Microsoft in January, after being there from June 2000. I was there during the whole "Whistler" cycle
Kernel improvements:
* Low-Fragmentation Heap: People use SmartHeap because NT heap serializes and sucks. LFH heap uses heap-per-processor on SMP.
* Desktop Limit: Remember "running out of resources" before running out of memory in Win 3.1? The 32-bit analog of that limit (higher but still there) is STILL in Windows, even in XP. This keeps you from spawning thousands of processes IF those processes use any functions from user32.dll. They did some lazy registering of U/I threads vs. kernel threads that makes the limit less painful.
* Gigabit ethernet, zero-copy networking stuff. Don't know as much about this but that it's much better.
* Unisys ES7000 32-way blows f'ing chunks on W2K. It doesn't suck as much on 2K3 (NUMA API).
* Tons of other perf tuning adjustments, mostly to make SQL Server run better. All SQL Server-TPC-winning numbers have been on 2K3 betas for the last year or more.
* Junk like that. Dumb-ass bug fixes. It really is a better kernel, but it still sucks. As someone who now loves Linux, my honest assessment of the situation is, at best, the whole Linux (in its current state, mostly usability drawbacks) vs. Microsoft (usable as hell but stagnant due to lack of competition) is a draw. But Linux has more promise because its fresher and interesting. MS wins in business because business likes staid "comfortable" not necessarily better technology.
I don't know about that. I've been using Linux for 3 months, Debian the entire time, I'm a freak and have probably installed my system from scratch 40 times in that period. I'm a neat freak on my computer.
I used to add unstable main contrib non-free, and realized all the non-free crap is just useless ttf fonts and a bunch of crapola. All I need is in main. The only thing I need from contrib is openoffice.org.
Of course, I have to build the non-free fglrx packages for my ATI!
Debian rocks.
You didn't use the correct lingo:
Search for: prb office 2000 activation
and you'll find several hits which discuss problems where Activation pops up again and again. Granted, this particular one doesn't come up!
MS KB lingo for bug is prb, that's the magic word!
[Warning: I'm long out of school and not a physics major, this might be bullshit.]
I have a favorite fuck-with-your-head pop science story I tell to wig people out, I read it in The Illusion of Technique by William Barrett:
Okay, you know about the Heisenburg uncertainty principle -- can't know a particle's position and velocity simultaneously. But, Einstein, the clever fellow, asked "what if there are two particles?" and proceeded to construct an equation that would simulatenously tell you the relative distance between the two particles, plus the sum of their velocities, the two uncertainties cancelling each other out (superposition).
Therefore, the act of focusing your attention on something instantly causes all other particles to be exactly measurable, instantly, a faster-than-light phenomonon. So, all the quantum waves become exactly measurable everywhere when you look anywhere. Therefore, YOU (yes YOU!) are the only thing that exists in the universe, and the rest of us are figments of YOUR imagination!!
Bwahh hah hah pass the joint....
I always thought that kid was being a smarmy jackass when he said that. From dictionary.com:
s
http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=potato
potato ( P ) Pronunciation Key (p-tt)
n. pl. potatoes
I swear when I was in 2nd grade in the 70s my first spelling book told me either spelling was acceptable. It stuck with me because I remembered thinking, "that's wierd, either was is right!"
"The PC isn't done until Linux won't run."
This has damned ominous ovetones. You guys better watch out, or they're gonna take the ball away from you just like they snatched it away from Borland, Lotus, Novell, &c. &c.
Ah, well, in fifteen years Gates & Balmer will retire and then the world can make some progress, until then bend over and smile!