The kernel may be great and uber-stable, but the user-space utilities shipped with the OS are ancient and full of bugs long ago resolved in *BSD or Linux offerings.
I am talking about awk, grep, diff (still no unified diffs!) and the like. The default shells -- sh and csh -- do not even allow for command line editing. make is outdated. vi borks if you extend your xterm too wide.
Sure, you change the login shell to bash or tcsh, you can install the GNU utilities. Or BSD, for that matter (I ported FreeBSD's make(1) myself to use the bsd.*.mk files). But then, hey. you can even customize Windows to be almost like Un*x...
The "out of the box" installation should be -- and can be -- much better...
To bring this back on topic, it seems to me, the major thrust of the Solaris development is on kernel. The user space side -- including the passwd(1) -- is neglected.
You don't understand enough. Sorry, this will sound arrogant, but you'll need to learn more about this things before participating. I don't even know, where to begin explaining.
I don't think they check content type. More likely, they simply redirect port 80 traffic to their transparent proxy. Since you did not speak HTTP, the proxy hung up.
If they did check content-type, you'd be much better off using pop3s (normally on port 995), which they wouldn't be able to parse anyway. You should use that anyway, since otherwise your e-mail and, possibly, your POP3 password travels in clear text.
I dunno. To me, who never used ham-radio, it seems, you are missing the difference between "being used" and "being sanctioned". It may give ham-enthusiasts an ego-boost and braggin rights, but I think, having cheap broadband everyday (it can be used for emergency communications as well) is better than an additional backup of "emergency service".
Do you know, when anyone in an urban area last had to resort to ham radio, because other emergency communication services failed?
Besides, when/if it is bad enough for such need to arise, the broad-band Internet will be down already and not interfere...
More than a million residents of Ohio, Kentucky, and Indiana will have a new broadband option this month in the first large-scale rollout of broadband over power line (BPL) service, despite concerns that the new BPL technology interferes with other radio frequency devices, including ham radios.
I personally, think the ham-radio should yield. An enthusiast-only hobby (admittedly, not one of mine) vs. cheap Internet access for the masses? Sorry...
Now the 'monopolizing' company has to cut costs again.
If they stayed in business through all this time, it is much easier for them to cut the cost again temporarily, than for the competitor to appear out of the ashes of the past bancrupcies. And -- you are right -- they can simply sell closer to their the cost for a while, because the newcomer's costs will almost always be higher. It takes a newcomer a lot more guts and ingenuity to fight off the incumbent. Ideally, we'd like companies (and people) to continue showing such qualities forever, by preventing any of them from becoming the "king of the hill" for too long. It is just that there is no easy and efficient prevention mechanism in existence...
I would have a source but no company has ever gotten past step two: Jacking up the price once there are no more competetitors.
What about Standard Oil? I thought, they were accused/found guilty of doing just that, no?
Re:Floating point performance
on
Mini-ITX Clustering
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Think of FP as a lossy compression algorithm. It allows the use of orders of magnitude less number of bits because it alters the density distribution of the representable numbers to meet the above specificiations.
This makes sense. With integers the density is uniform, which is impediment in some cases, but of help in others. [Any attempt to quantify the number of cases in each group is silly and will reveal nothing, but the attempter's personal bias. With my bias, I'll insist you are underestimating the number of cases, where such uniform distribution of density is useful and desirable.]
However, unless you carefully choose the basic unit, you don't have control over the precision distribution. If most of your computations involve quantities on far edges of (you claimed 20 orders of (decimal?) magnitude) -- you are less precise than you may realize and the (carefull) use of integers may improve your results.
Also you should note that many applications do not have a "basic unit".
Of course, they all have basic units! Usually, it will depend on the application's desired precision.
For instance, what is the "basic unit" of length?
Depends on the application. In yours, it is, probably, some fraction of light year.
What if your "basic unit" of length is of a radicaly different exponent than your "basic unit" of energy or "basic unit" of time?
Who cares? Even if my program operates internally on units as horrible as, say "pounds per square inch" (a.k.a. PSI) -- so be it. If 4.5 Newtons is my basic unit of force I want and the 0.025 meter is as precise as I want the length to be -- fine.
I'll leave the problem of how many bits it takes to achieve multiplication of four numbers of values from 0 to 10^30, base unit 1.
Wait, we started with 20 orders of magnitude. Is it 30 now? Fine, the 128 integers (long long) will be able to store that. But I don't believe, the tasks where so wide-ranging amounts of the same thing are common place (my bias?). Whether you are using floating or fixed point, you are not going to do this easily -- you'll risk losing precision dramaticly, or overflowing. Whichever it is, it is, probably, better to consider modifying the algorithm.
Also, the modern processors (at least -- Intel's) "cheat". Their FPU's internal precision is 80 bit by default (64 significant bits) -- if I'm reading ``icc -help'' output correctly. So they can "promote" the numbers to higher precision when applying precision-losing operations. So, floating point might win.:-)
In most cases it is the *relative* error that is important, not the absolute.
Very valid point. However, sometimes (often?) carefully picking the basic unit and the number of bits it is possible to avoid all computational imprecisions, simply by having more bits left at your disposal, whereas the blind use of the floating will mask them and further compound all other sources of errors (measurements, estimates, &c.)
And I don't even want to think about fixed point division by numbers very close to 0.
You don't need to think about it, because 1 is as close as you can get to zero with integers...
it requires that the basic unit be no larger than the smallest representable number in the floating point system
No it just has to match the smallest reasonably needed by the application -- something, it'll never need a half of. And I urge you to pick such units carefully even if you stick with floating point, because otherwise, even the smallest number in the floating point system might not be small enough at some point, and you will waste a few teracents of taxpayers' money:-)
That being said, I don't think, anyone else reads this, but us. It is hard to justify continuing the thread. Thanks for your input!
But as soon as they stop innovating, what's to stop that 30% from rapidly gaining strength?
If none of the remaining 30% has above 5% (or even if they do), they can also be aquired by the monopoly. Or, the monopoly may choose to price the product/service below the cost and wait for the competition to go under. Or whatever.
Think about it as, say, a rocking chair. As long as it is rocked within a certain range, it is safe and will come back to the right position. But tilting it too far will flip it over. Likewise, a market for a particular service/product may lose stability when one participant becomes too big. The (inherently stupid and inefficient) government is the only force available, that can prevent the chair from falling or lift it up once it falls.
One can argue, that it is better to let some chairs fall once in a while, than to constantly impede the rocking of all chairs by the threat of government interference. I'm not sure, what I prefer, to be honest. But it is, certainly, not as simple, as the anonymous starter of this thread puts it.
most numerical algorithms are sensitive even to Floating Point error enough that degrading it even further would be quite disasterous.
You did not get it. You are looking at the bit (and byte, and word) as a number. I suggest you look at it as a unit of information. With 64 bits you can only have 2^64 distinct possibilities. If you choose to treat them as numbers -- fine, you only have 2^64 distinct numbers.
You may split the 64 bits to use some of them to represent the mantissa and some as the exponent. Or -- use all of them to represent the integer number of the smallest units in your application's domain.
The second method, actually, gives you better precision in a controllable (by you) fashion. If the difference between the smallest and the biggest quantity of those minimal units in your application exceeds 64 orders of binary magnitude, than 64 bits is not enough for you -- regardless of whether you use floating or fixed point. You either lose precision (FP) or overflow (int).
The reason to use FP may be because it is more convenient to think in terms of standard units, rather than the minimal units of the application (its precision). Also, many CPUs have special features allowing to do FP computations really quickly. But it is possible to go without them.
Or maybe you are still thinking about adding dollars and cents?
That was just an example. If 1/10 of a cent is the precision you require, than treat the integer number 361 as 36.1 cents or $0.361. Likewise in (almost?) any other domain, the minimal unit can be taken as the integer 1 and other quantities can also be integers.
By buying the competitor?.. If a company which grew to have 40% market share by honestly offering better product/service/value wants to buy a competitor with 30% market share, it threatens to become the monopoly, which will no longer need to put as much effort on honestly better product/service/value.
The law does not give the government an authority to break an existing monopoly, that grew by itself, but it seems sensible for the government to try to block mergers, that would lead to such a monopoly. Of course, the original poster is right about most of the things, a government does, getting done poorly...
The Post office IS a monopoly.
Yes. Another monopoly protected by numerous laws is a trade union. If workers are selling their labor, their attempts at price-fixing should certainly be prosecuted by trust-busters... The deals many unions have with customers (employers) about only hiring union members are no better than the contracts Microsoft wrestles from its customers (PC manufacturers) -- about using any other vendor's OS or other software.
btw: tell me just HOW you would compress a huge file with this cluster?
My humble inability to tell you this woudn't allow a person so skilled in "math and algorithms" as to point out others' ignorance of the subjects to conclude, that such compressions are impossible. But, for the sake of argument, I can offer the following thoughts...
Both libz and libbz2 require some initialization and then expect blocks after blocks of data to be compressed and return the results of compression.
It seems quite possible to -- after the initialization completes once -- send the result of initialization to all of the cluster members, and tell them to pick different parts of a file being compressed (over NFS) and send back (or write down over NFS) the results. The results will be out of order (possibly), so the "main" process will have to assemble them at the end. But it is doable. The only potential roadblock is that the library(ies) preserve some state of the stream between invocations. But my -- admittedly quick -- glimpse of the bzip2 suggests, the state is only altered at the beginning, end, or in case of an error.
over 100mbit?
100mbit is often faster than a harddrive. It is not neccessarily the bottleneck at all. If the controlling program does not read the whole file, each block of it will only be read once by a particular cluster member tasked with compressing that block.
20 orders of magnitude, hardly reasonable to do with fixed point arithmetic.
You only have so many bits to work with (and to store the numbers). So you can only have so many distinct numbers -- however you choose to represent them (as integers, or as FP). A 128-bit integer will cover the variations of densities you mention comfortably. Just as you are probably using "long double" currently for these to have precision. If you don't care for the precision of mantissa (sp?), you may as well adopt logarithmic scale and use "short" integers for exponent values only:-)
the idea that any floating point algorithm can be converted to fixed point could not be more wrong.
I only claimed that almost any algorithm. In some others it just does not make sense, because it is inconvenient and unnatural. My point was simply, that it is possible (and even desirable) in more cases than many realize...
It works, except for the kernel modules. Currently, you need to compile everything you need into the kernel. kldload-ing does not work yet.
The 32-bit emulation is supported and turned on by default, although some 32-bit binaries, may have problems controlling some hardware with ioctl-s, because the sizes of structures are often different.
I wouldn't recommend it as a workstation, because too much stuff out there (open source and not) is poorly written and thus unportable and will break during compile time (at best) or at run-time (at worst). Think about all the foolish assumptions, that sizeof(int) == sizeof(void *) and shudder.... I don't think NVidia offers their drivers for amd64 either, and so on.
Makes a (very) nice server, though...
Re:Floating point performance
on
Mini-ITX Clustering
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Mars is not made any closer to Earth by the revelation, that Alpha Centauri is really far...
How about scientific computing?
This is why you might need the FP performance. I was answering a totally different question -- what would you do without the good floating point performance.
The other stuff shows your lack of knowledge of other disciplines by the fact that you think these are computationally expensive tasks.
Thank you, thank you.
Would you, please, demonstrate, how I can rebuild a project of 3000+ files, modified by 100+ developers (ccache helps, but still)? Or compress a 32Gb database dump? Granted, these tasks are nothing compared with, say, protein folding, but they are computationally expensive still.
Re:Floating point performance
on
Mini-ITX Clustering
·
· Score: 5, Informative
the floating point performance (why else would you build a cluster?)
To crack encryption?
To compile big projects?
To compress huge files?
The floating point is just a convenience. Almost any algorithm can be modified to work with fixed point precision -- and without loss of performance.
Of course, many people will insist, they need FP to be able count dollars and cents -- they don't even think of counting cents (or any other fractions of the dollar) with integers, for example.
These are, usually, the same people, who have troubles definingbit...
Not only does the photoshop job count as libel (since Kerry and Fonda never spoke at the same anti-war event)
My impression from the article was that they did speak at the same anti-war events -- just not at the one alleged by the forgery.
Kerry certainly gave speeches at other such events, and did throw the ribbons from his medals to the Capitol's stairs (other participants threw the medals themselves, BTW).
There is no denying, Kerry actively participated in the anti-war movement, so the forgery is only lying about a minor thing -- about a particular and event in the anti-war history.
Lastly, I wouldn't be surprised if it was someone on the Democratic side to make the forgery and "leak" it. Republicans did not need it -- there is plenty of genuine material. But by leaking the forgery to the press and then "discovering" it, Kerry's campaing artfully switches attention from the real issue (Kerry's past pacifism) to the forgery.
Even though their browser sucked, people stopped downloading Netscape. Now it is the RealPlayer's turn. Tomorrow it will be the anti-viruses, &c.
They wrestled the exception to allow themselves to add enhancements to the OS, and that is what they are doing. Other firms know, they are doomed and are trying to delay it...
There are three, actually: best performance, lowest price, and best ratio of price to performance. (Sometimes a product is mistakenly praised for offering the highest price/performance ratio, when the lowest is meant.) There is also the convenience factor, but, this being SlashDot, we wouldn't consider that.
A good dedicated hardware RAID may be offering the best performance, which is not, what this person needs -- a good (low) price/performance, or even simply, the lowest price. Because his/her application -- serving video to, at most, 4 destinations in parallel, while ripping, at most one or two DVDs can be handled nicely by almost any RAID offering.
The article also confirms, that he did attend other antiwar rallies/meetings, including those, where Jane Fonda was also present -- if if there is no real photo of them standing next to each other. Whether that hurts or benefits his campaing is another question.
It was done by the Repugnantcans (tm) to discredit him.
How do you know, who did it, BTW?
Truth is, he did go there, participated, and gave speeches. If you believe, that discredits a man, you should thank the Republicans (or whoever) for bringing it up to your attention. If you don't see anything wrong with his past behavior (30 years ago), than the Republicans failed to discredit him in your eyes.
I'm intentionally witholding my own judgement here as irrelevant, BTW.
That being said, I would not put it past someone on the Democratic side to make the forgery and "leak" it out to move attention from Kerry's past (mis)deeds to the forgery seemingly attributable to the Republicans.
How fast can the fastest DVD drive read? I'd estimate, that a software RAID's write performance -- 10-16 Mb/sec seems quite achievable on modern hardware -- will never be saturated by the paltry input from the DVD reader.
The controllers the Infortrend stuff uses is a PPC G3 to give you an idea...
I'd rather have the other processor available for other tasks, when I'm not writing to the RAID. For the price difference of Infotrend vs. software RAID I can buy a dual vs. a single CPU machine with more memory. The second processor will handle the load of the software RAID and have plenty of cycles left to be useful for other things.
Time and time again resource sharing is demonstrated to be more cost efficient than resource dedication, only to have someone state that the opposite is "generally recommended". It is not.
It only makes sense when you wish to maximise performance -- at any price, and your particular specialized application will not be able to take advantage of the extra resources in any other way. Such as, for example, a database server, which are notoriously hard to scale "sideways", so you try to improve them "vertically".
I'll tend to dismiss claims, that it can do anything a business can do "cheaper, faster, and better".
Why would you do that? The Army is exempt from all of the work rules, salary requirements, public safety requirements, union requirements, EIS reports, public participation requirements and, all of the rest that makes government work so expensive.
Businesses are bound by kilometers of the similar red-tape, actually. The reason for government's inefficiency is lack of competition. Corporations love to get into such a position, because, of course, they exist to make money, not to deliver fuel or whatever. But it is, usually, easy to switch from one corporation to another. Like installing a different application. Much easier than changing (or even fixing) a part of government, which definetly requires a reboot, and sometimes a reinstall.
I'd hate to see army (or any government branch) baking the bread I eat, providing my Internet service, building my house, or, indeed, filling up my gas-tank. So should you... Unless you like to run an FTP-service in kernel, so to speak.
I don't see anything in your post but knee-jerk Gubernmint Bad doctrine.
It is bad. And evil. A neccessary evil, but the less of it the better. Every once in a while, giving some new role to the government seems like a good idea, but it is not -- years of growing up in the Soviet Union certainly make my belief in this deeply entrenched.
This thread seems of interest only to you and me, and you are anonymous. I will, probably, choose ignore it in the future.
Slashdot Mirror
The kernel may be great and uber-stable, but the user-space utilities shipped with the OS are ancient and full of bugs long ago resolved in *BSD or Linux offerings.
I am talking about awk, grep, diff (still no unified diffs!) and the like. The default shells -- sh and csh -- do not even allow for command line editing. make is outdated. vi borks if you extend your xterm too wide.
Sure, you change the login shell to bash or tcsh, you can install the GNU utilities. Or BSD, for that matter (I ported FreeBSD's make(1) myself to use the bsd.*.mk files). But then, hey. you can even customize Windows to be almost like Un*x...
The "out of the box" installation should be -- and can be -- much better...
To bring this back on topic, it seems to me, the major thrust of the Solaris development is on kernel. The user space side -- including the passwd(1) -- is neglected.
You don't understand enough. Sorry, this will sound arrogant, but you'll need to learn more about this things before participating. I don't even know, where to begin explaining.
I don't think they check content type. More likely, they simply redirect port 80 traffic to their transparent proxy. Since you did not speak HTTP, the proxy hung up.
If they did check content-type, you'd be much better off using pop3s (normally on port 995), which they wouldn't be able to parse anyway. You should use that anyway, since otherwise your e-mail and, possibly, your POP3 password travels in clear text.
Perfect! And all interference from the power-lines stopped completely...
I dunno. To me, who never used ham-radio, it seems, you are missing the difference between "being used" and "being sanctioned". It may give ham-enthusiasts an ego-boost and braggin rights, but I think, having cheap broadband everyday (it can be used for emergency communications as well) is better than an additional backup of "emergency service".
Do you know, when anyone in an urban area last had to resort to ham radio, because other emergency communication services failed?
Besides, when/if it is bad enough for such need to arise, the broad-band Internet will be down already and not interfere...
I personally, think the ham-radio should yield. An enthusiast-only hobby (admittedly, not one of mine) vs. cheap Internet access for the masses? Sorry...
These groups are very much distinct, although both like to steer laws/rules in their favor :-) Which one are you suspecting here?
Ever timed bzip2? It is certainly CPU bound -- even on the fastest processors...
If they stayed in business through all this time, it is much easier for them to cut the cost again temporarily, than for the competitor to appear out of the ashes of the past bancrupcies. And -- you are right -- they can simply sell closer to their the cost for a while, because the newcomer's costs will almost always be higher. It takes a newcomer a lot more guts and ingenuity to fight off the incumbent. Ideally, we'd like companies (and people) to continue showing such qualities forever, by preventing any of them from becoming the "king of the hill" for too long. It is just that there is no easy and efficient prevention mechanism in existence...
What about Standard Oil? I thought, they were accused/found guilty of doing just that, no?
This makes sense. With integers the density is uniform, which is impediment in some cases, but of help in others. [Any attempt to quantify the number of cases in each group is silly and will reveal nothing, but the attempter's personal bias. With my bias, I'll insist you are underestimating the number of cases, where such uniform distribution of density is useful and desirable.]
However, unless you carefully choose the basic unit, you don't have control over the precision distribution. If most of your computations involve quantities on far edges of (you claimed 20 orders of (decimal?) magnitude) -- you are less precise than you may realize and the (carefull) use of integers may improve your results.
Of course, they all have basic units! Usually, it will depend on the application's desired precision.
Depends on the application. In yours, it is, probably, some fraction of light year.
Who cares? Even if my program operates internally on units as horrible as, say "pounds per square inch" (a.k.a. PSI) -- so be it. If 4.5 Newtons is my basic unit of force I want and the 0.025 meter is as precise as I want the length to be -- fine.
Wait, we started with 20 orders of magnitude. Is it 30 now? Fine, the 128 integers (long long) will be able to store that. But I don't believe, the tasks where so wide-ranging amounts of the same thing are common place (my bias?). Whether you are using floating or fixed point, you are not going to do this easily -- you'll risk losing precision dramaticly, or overflowing. Whichever it is, it is, probably, better to consider modifying the algorithm.
Also, the modern processors (at least -- Intel's) "cheat". Their FPU's internal precision is 80 bit by default (64 significant bits) -- if I'm reading ``icc -help'' output correctly. So they can "promote" the numbers to higher precision when applying precision-losing operations. So, floating point might win. :-)
Very valid point. However, sometimes (often?) carefully picking the basic unit and the number of bits it is possible to avoid all computational imprecisions, simply by having more bits left at your disposal, whereas the blind use of the floating will mask them and further compound all other sources of errors (measurements, estimates, &c.)
You don't need to think about it, because 1 is as close as you can get to zero with integers...
No it just has to match the smallest reasonably needed by the application -- something, it'll never need a half of. And I urge you to pick such units carefully even if you stick with floating point, because otherwise, even the smallest number in the floating point system might not be small enough at some point, and you will waste a few teracents of taxpayers' money :-)
That being said, I don't think, anyone else reads this, but us. It is hard to justify continuing the thread. Thanks for your input!
If none of the remaining 30% has above 5% (or even if they do), they can also be aquired by the monopoly. Or, the monopoly may choose to price the product/service below the cost and wait for the competition to go under. Or whatever.
Think about it as, say, a rocking chair. As long as it is rocked within a certain range, it is safe and will come back to the right position. But tilting it too far will flip it over. Likewise, a market for a particular service/product may lose stability when one participant becomes too big. The (inherently stupid and inefficient) government is the only force available, that can prevent the chair from falling or lift it up once it falls.
One can argue, that it is better to let some chairs fall once in a while, than to constantly impede the rocking of all chairs by the threat of government interference. I'm not sure, what I prefer, to be honest. But it is, certainly, not as simple, as the anonymous starter of this thread puts it.
You did not get it. You are looking at the bit (and byte, and word) as a number. I suggest you look at it as a unit of information. With 64 bits you can only have 2^64 distinct possibilities. If you choose to treat them as numbers -- fine, you only have 2^64 distinct numbers.
You may split the 64 bits to use some of them to represent the mantissa and some as the exponent. Or -- use all of them to represent the integer number of the smallest units in your application's domain.
The second method, actually, gives you better precision in a controllable (by you) fashion. If the difference between the smallest and the biggest quantity of those minimal units in your application exceeds 64 orders of binary magnitude, than 64 bits is not enough for you -- regardless of whether you use floating or fixed point. You either lose precision (FP) or overflow (int).
The reason to use FP may be because it is more convenient to think in terms of standard units, rather than the minimal units of the application (its precision). Also, many CPUs have special features allowing to do FP computations really quickly. But it is possible to go without them.
That was just an example. If 1/10 of a cent is the precision you require, than treat the integer number 361 as 36.1 cents or $0.361. Likewise in (almost?) any other domain, the minimal unit can be taken as the integer 1 and other quantities can also be integers.
By buying the competitor?.. If a company which grew to have 40% market share by honestly offering better product/service/value wants to buy a competitor with 30% market share, it threatens to become the monopoly, which will no longer need to put as much effort on honestly better product/service/value.
The law does not give the government an authority to break an existing monopoly, that grew by itself, but it seems sensible for the government to try to block mergers, that would lead to such a monopoly. Of course, the original poster is right about most of the things, a government does, getting done poorly...
Yes. Another monopoly protected by numerous laws is a trade union. If workers are selling their labor, their attempts at price-fixing should certainly be prosecuted by trust-busters... The deals many unions have with customers (employers) about only hiring union members are no better than the contracts Microsoft wrestles from its customers (PC manufacturers) -- about using any other vendor's OS or other software.
:-)
My humble inability to tell you this woudn't allow a person so skilled in "math and algorithms" as to point out others' ignorance of the subjects to conclude, that such compressions are impossible. But, for the sake of argument, I can offer the following thoughts...
Both libz and libbz2 require some initialization and then expect blocks after blocks of data to be compressed and return the results of compression.
It seems quite possible to -- after the initialization completes once -- send the result of initialization to all of the cluster members, and tell them to pick different parts of a file being compressed (over NFS) and send back (or write down over NFS) the results. The results will be out of order (possibly), so the "main" process will have to assemble them at the end. But it is doable. The only potential roadblock is that the library(ies) preserve some state of the stream between invocations. But my -- admittedly quick -- glimpse of the bzip2 suggests, the state is only altered at the beginning, end, or in case of an error.
100mbit is often faster than a harddrive. It is not neccessarily the bottleneck at all. If the controlling program does not read the whole file, each block of it will only be read once by a particular cluster member tasked with compressing that block.
You only have so many bits to work with (and to store the numbers). So you can only have so many distinct numbers -- however you choose to represent them (as integers, or as FP). A 128-bit integer will cover the variations of densities you mention comfortably. Just as you are probably using "long double" currently for these to have precision. If you don't care for the precision of mantissa (sp?), you may as well adopt logarithmic scale and use "short" integers for exponent values only :-)
I only claimed that almost any algorithm. In some others it just does not make sense, because it is inconvenient and unnatural. My point was simply, that it is possible (and even desirable) in more cases than many realize...It works, except for the kernel modules. Currently, you need to compile everything you need into the kernel. kldload-ing does not work yet.
The 32-bit emulation is supported and turned on by default, although some 32-bit binaries, may have problems controlling some hardware with ioctl-s, because the sizes of structures are often different.
I wouldn't recommend it as a workstation, because too much stuff out there (open source and not) is poorly written and thus unportable and will break during compile time (at best) or at run-time (at worst). Think about all the foolish assumptions, that sizeof(int) == sizeof(void *) and shudder.... I don't think NVidia offers their drivers for amd64 either, and so on.
Makes a (very) nice server, though...
Mars is not made any closer to Earth by the revelation, that Alpha Centauri is really far...
This is why you might need the FP performance. I was answering a totally different question -- what would you do without the good floating point performance.
Thank you, thank you.
Would you, please, demonstrate, how I can rebuild a project of 3000+ files, modified by 100+ developers (ccache helps, but still)? Or compress a 32Gb database dump? Granted, these tasks are nothing compared with, say, protein folding, but they are computationally expensive still.
The floating point is just a convenience. Almost any algorithm can be modified to work with fixed point precision -- and without loss of performance.
Of course, many people will insist, they need FP to be able count dollars and cents -- they don't even think of counting cents (or any other fractions of the dollar) with integers, for example.
These are, usually, the same people, who have troubles defining bit...
My impression from the article was that they did speak at the same anti-war events -- just not at the one alleged by the forgery.
Kerry certainly gave speeches at other such events, and did throw the ribbons from his medals to the Capitol's stairs (other participants threw the medals themselves, BTW).
There is no denying, Kerry actively participated in the anti-war movement, so the forgery is only lying about a minor thing -- about a particular and event in the anti-war history.
Lastly, I wouldn't be surprised if it was someone on the Democratic side to make the forgery and "leak" it. Republicans did not need it -- there is plenty of genuine material. But by leaking the forgery to the press and then "discovering" it, Kerry's campaing artfully switches attention from the real issue (Kerry's past pacifism) to the forgery.
Even though their browser sucked, people stopped downloading Netscape. Now it is the RealPlayer's turn. Tomorrow it will be the anti-viruses, &c.
They wrestled the exception to allow themselves to add enhancements to the OS, and that is what they are doing. Other firms know, they are doomed and are trying to delay it...
Heh, define best...
There are three, actually: best performance, lowest price, and best ratio of price to performance. (Sometimes a product is mistakenly praised for offering the highest price/performance ratio, when the lowest is meant.) There is also the convenience factor, but, this being SlashDot, we wouldn't consider that.
A good dedicated hardware RAID may be offering the best performance, which is not, what this person needs -- a good (low) price/performance, or even simply, the lowest price. Because his/her application -- serving video to, at most, 4 destinations in parallel, while ripping, at most one or two DVDs can be handled nicely by almost any RAID offering.
The article also confirms, that he did attend other antiwar rallies/meetings, including those, where Jane Fonda was also present -- if if there is no real photo of them standing next to each other. Whether that hurts or benefits his campaing is another question.
How do you know, who did it, BTW?
Truth is, he did go there, participated, and gave speeches. If you believe, that discredits a man, you should thank the Republicans (or whoever) for bringing it up to your attention. If you don't see anything wrong with his past behavior (30 years ago), than the Republicans failed to discredit him in your eyes.
I'm intentionally witholding my own judgement here as irrelevant, BTW.
That being said, I would not put it past someone on the Democratic side to make the forgery and "leak" it out to move attention from Kerry's past (mis)deeds to the forgery seemingly attributable to the Republicans.
Kerry really did participate in the same rallies as Jane Fonda -- read the article.
If there was nothing wrong in such participations, than these forgeries are definetly not libels:
So, this forgery is inlikely to be criminal...
How fast can the fastest DVD drive read? I'd estimate, that a software RAID's write performance -- 10-16 Mb/sec seems quite achievable on modern hardware -- will never be saturated by the paltry input from the DVD reader.
I'd rather have the other processor available for other tasks, when I'm not writing to the RAID. For the price difference of Infotrend vs. software RAID I can buy a dual vs. a single CPU machine with more memory. The second processor will handle the load of the software RAID and have plenty of cycles left to be useful for other things.
Time and time again resource sharing is demonstrated to be more cost efficient than resource dedication, only to have someone state that the opposite is "generally recommended". It is not.
It only makes sense when you wish to maximise performance -- at any price, and your particular specialized application will not be able to take advantage of the extra resources in any other way. Such as, for example, a database server, which are notoriously hard to scale "sideways", so you try to improve them "vertically".
Businesses are bound by kilometers of the similar red-tape, actually. The reason for government's inefficiency is lack of competition. Corporations love to get into such a position, because, of course, they exist to make money, not to deliver fuel or whatever. But it is, usually, easy to switch from one corporation to another. Like installing a different application. Much easier than changing (or even fixing) a part of government, which definetly requires a reboot, and sometimes a reinstall.
I'd hate to see army (or any government branch) baking the bread I eat, providing my Internet service, building my house, or, indeed, filling up my gas-tank. So should you... Unless you like to run an FTP-service in kernel, so to speak.
It is bad. And evil. A neccessary evil, but the less of it the better. Every once in a while, giving some new role to the government seems like a good idea, but it is not -- years of growing up in the Soviet Union certainly make my belief in this deeply entrenched.
This thread seems of interest only to you and me, and you are anonymous. I will, probably, choose ignore it in the future.