Not only does AMD have the only desktop 64-bit offering right now, but their chips are much faster than Intel's at the same clockspeed, even in 32-bit mode. Whereas Intel's engineers are just running their chips at insane clockspeeds, AMD's are actually designing better processors. For the price of a 3.4GHz "800"MHz FSB P4EE ($989 on pricewatch right now), you could buy two Opteron 246s ($441 each) with cash to spare. If you want to talk raw, meaningless numbers, the Opterons still beat the P4EE (4GHz and 2MB cache total). Of course, SMP isn't simply additive like that, but consider the advantages of 64-bit and multiprocessing, and the fact that AMD chips are/much/ faster than Intel's at the same clockspeed (even on 32-bit code), and there's no contest. All halfway-modern Windows versions and Linux kernels can support SMP, and the latest support amd64, too.
Actually, I was joking about PearPC on Linux/PPC, but now that I think about it, this might be the only software-only way to run apps/OSes that require a G3 on pre-G3 PowerMacs. If someone writes a just-in-time compiler/mostly-virtualizer for ppc, it might not be/horrendously/ slow. Maybe this could be merged with Mac on Linux, like bochs was with plex86?
Then again, maybe only three people would use it anyway.
The "500 times slower" figure quoted was for the generic CPU emulator, too. The x86 just-in-time recompiler should be much faster, and if there's enough demand it might get ported to other host architectures (x86_64 perhaps?).
Not if your compiler optimizes tail recursion, which many do. Still, it's not exactly good practice. I always see 8th graders doing this in TI83-Basic.
But if your motherboard NIC dies, you can still replace it with a PCI NIC. Unless motherboards actually start dropping PCI slots, reliability is a non-issue.
Only on Slashdot can people not understand negative numbers.
Game sales > Game sales + X-Box sales
Please try to understand what it means to lose money. a > a + b when b is NEGATIVE. And as for X-Boxes sitting at the store, every one of those that isn't bought is one more that doesn't have to be manufactured at a loss. Just because there's a buffer doesn't mean that the sale rate and supply rate aren't related.
Do you seriously believe that Democrats will automatically uphold free speech any more than Republicans will? Consider which president signed the Communications Decency Act (which was ruled to be in violation of the 1st Ammendment). Hint: his last name starts with a C.
Sure, the Republicans are doing a great job fucking us all over right now, but that doesn't mean you have to run to the Other Guy like a docile, trusting sheep. At least the militant "Anyone But Bush" types tend to focus on the issues/performance of the specific men involved, rather than some party doublethink that usually turns out to be exactly the same on both sides.
And that relies on the assumption that your VM securely isolates the virtual machine from the real one. This turns out to be false in practice -- there have been several exploits for Sun's Java VM, and there's no reason to think that Microsoft's.NET runtime will be any better. High-level scripting languages help against low-level stack-smashing attacks, but it's far too easy to write a script that doesn't properly prevent exploitation of the dynamic features of the language (improper filtering of commands to Perl's system(), PHP's remote-fetching include(), etc). Features like Perl's taint-checking can help a lot, but don't take the place of careful coding.
As for the issue of the underlying OS providing security features, it's not entirely a moot point. Linux provides some stack/heap protection and other binary runtime security through the grsecurity patches; OpenBSD has W^X and other security features built into the kernel. Still, expecting the OS to protect binaries at runtime is a completely ass-backwards way of approaching security. Ultimately, application developers have to bear most of the burden for writing secure code.
Mac OS uses the Hierarchial File System (HFS), which has been extended to HFS+ for OS X and (I think) OS 9 and above (anyone care to confirm that?). Recent versions of Mac OS can also handle ISO9660 and FAT, and I think OS X can do BSD UFS.
The original macintosh has no MMU, so don't bother to suggest Linux
Anyone know if uClinux runs on mac68k? I know there's a 68k port, but I think it's focused more on ColdFire and other more modern stuff. An original Macintosh running a modern UNIX would be awesome. Or you could try to get A/UX to work on it...
Linux is a kernel. It takes very little time to boot up (it's done when you see INIT: Version such-and-such booting). On a modern PC, Linux will boot in a few seconds or less. From there, everything is in userland, and boot speed thus depends on what your distro chooses to initialize at startup. So if you're unhappy with bootup times, use a distro that loads less stuff, or cut yours down. For the network thing, I would suspect a failed attempt to get a DHCP lease.
More address space than physical RAM: Swap space, memory-mapped files, shared memory/IPC, or any other use of virtual memory that doesn't map onto physical memory. This is why 64-bit address space is good even for desktop machines that have less than 4GB of RAM.
More physical RAM than address space: Ten processes, each using a single 4GB memory space, can consume 40GB of physical RAM. This is how and why you can put more than 4GB of memory in an x86 machine -- the processor maps from (I believe) 36-bit physical addresses to the 32-bit addresses that processes see.
How is Rockstar supporting the open source world? They've re-released a closed-source game (unless I missed the source download link somewhere) and ported it to a more modern closed-source platform.
Don't forget about Debian, either. Debian GNU/Linux has a PowerPC version as well. Of course, there are pros and cons to using Debian (please, let's not have a Debian vs. Gentoo pissing match here), but more options are always good. No matter what distro you choose, be sure to check if there are any pitfalls or tricks with your specific hardware configuration, and with the dual boot.
Now, for my opinion: I try to avoid RedHat-based distributions as much as possible, so I'd go for Debian (if I just want it to work) or Gentoo (if I'm feeling adventurous).
Why bother with 802.11b? There's already existing phone wire from the mountain to the lodge; just run some cat5 cable alongside. Since GSM is slow anyway, 10 megabits would be plenty and thus the maximum distance would be something around 300 meters -- not too bad. If that's not enough, add some repeters and power them with Power over Ethernet -- the cost is still likely to be less than two 802.11b cards and two good directional antennae.
Besides, you don't want to be victimized by remote North British Columbian wardrivers, do you?;-)
Can't we have a (modern) console that just stays as a gaming machine?
The GameCube is now under $100. It has a fairly fast processor, Ethernet capabilities, and a very small case. Put these together, and you have a serious option for cluster nodes. Of course, real benchmarks would be needed to tell if the price/performance is good.
That said, I do tend to agree with you -- a single GameCube, hacked to run Linux, is pretty much useless.
Re:Hosting IRC is asking for a BSA 'investigation'
on
IRC in the Dog House?
·
· Score: 1
Hosting an IRC server is not like running an illegal music swapping site in the open.
No, it's exactly like running a service like the old Napster that uses central servers for searching, but transfers files peer-to-peer. It's not like that saved Napster. In fact, look at Direct Connect -- it's a deliberate combination of IRC and peer-to-peer filesharing.
It's not because of the botnets directly, but rather beacuse IRC servers tend to attract massive amounts of abuse (DDoS attacks, etc) that can be a huge pain for hosting companies.
Wow, way to take a sensible comment body and completely nullify it with a retarded title. I just love how people assume that every problem boils down to a left-right issue. Just check the box next to the correct letter, and you're free from having to think at all. Government by the people doesn't work when the people's behaviour can be adequately modeled with strcmp()*.
Slashdot Mirror
Not only does AMD have the only desktop 64-bit offering right now, but their chips are much faster than Intel's at the same clockspeed, even in 32-bit mode. Whereas Intel's engineers are just running their chips at insane clockspeeds, AMD's are actually designing better processors. For the price of a 3.4GHz "800"MHz FSB P4EE ($989 on pricewatch right now), you could buy two Opteron 246s ($441 each) with cash to spare. If you want to talk raw, meaningless numbers, the Opterons still beat the P4EE (4GHz and 2MB cache total). Of course, SMP isn't simply additive like that, but consider the advantages of 64-bit and multiprocessing, and the fact that AMD chips are /much/ faster than Intel's at the same clockspeed (even on 32-bit code), and there's no contest. All halfway-modern Windows versions and Linux kernels can support SMP, and the latest support amd64, too.
Then again, maybe only three people would use it anyway.
Hey, since PearPC is a true emulator, shouldn't it be able to run itself? I eagerly await the OS X version. ;-)
The "500 times slower" figure quoted was for the generic CPU emulator, too. The x86 just-in-time recompiler should be much faster, and if there's enough demand it might get ported to other host architectures (x86_64 perhaps?).
No, it's due to the fact that anything from Japan is automatically totally super awesome wicked fucking super awesome. Duh.
Now if you'll excuse me, it's 6:00 AM... time to eat Pocky and rock out to J-Pop.
Not if your compiler optimizes tail recursion, which many do. Still, it's not exactly good practice. I always see 8th graders doing this in TI83-Basic.
But if your motherboard NIC dies, you can still replace it with a PCI NIC. Unless motherboards actually start dropping PCI slots, reliability is a non-issue.
Game sales > Game sales + X-Box sales
Please try to understand what it means to lose money. a > a + b when b is NEGATIVE. And as for X-Boxes sitting at the store, every one of those that isn't bought is one more that doesn't have to be manufactured at a loss. Just because there's a buffer doesn't mean that the sale rate and supply rate aren't related.
Completely insane and depressing.
Do not trust the pusher robot. Shoving will protect you.
Do you seriously believe that Democrats will automatically uphold free speech any more than Republicans will? Consider which president signed the Communications Decency Act (which was ruled to be in violation of the 1st Ammendment). Hint: his last name starts with a C.
Sure, the Republicans are doing a great job fucking us all over right now, but that doesn't mean you have to run to the Other Guy like a docile, trusting sheep. At least the militant "Anyone But Bush" types tend to focus on the issues/performance of the specific men involved, rather than some party doublethink that usually turns out to be exactly the same on both sides.
As for the issue of the underlying OS providing security features, it's not entirely a moot point. Linux provides some stack/heap protection and other binary runtime security through the grsecurity patches; OpenBSD has W^X and other security features built into the kernel. Still, expecting the OS to protect binaries at runtime is a completely ass-backwards way of approaching security. Ultimately, application developers have to bear most of the burden for writing secure code.
In other news, the Slashdot effect causes a 500-lightyear radius of spacetime to disappear into an Infinite Improbability Field.
We could call it KaZaA.
It would be great if you could link it to Referer: headers to see how many people lie.
Mac OS uses the Hierarchial File System (HFS), which has been extended to HFS+ for OS X and (I think) OS 9 and above (anyone care to confirm that?). Recent versions of Mac OS can also handle ISO9660 and FAT, and I think OS X can do BSD UFS.
Anyone know if uClinux runs on mac68k? I know there's a 68k port, but I think it's focused more on ColdFire and other more modern stuff. An original Macintosh running a modern UNIX would be awesome. Or you could try to get A/UX to work on it...
Linux is a kernel. It takes very little time to boot up (it's done when you see INIT: Version such-and-such booting). On a modern PC, Linux will boot in a few seconds or less. From there, everything is in userland, and boot speed thus depends on what your distro chooses to initialize at startup. So if you're unhappy with bootup times, use a distro that loads less stuff, or cut yours down. For the network thing, I would suspect a failed attempt to get a DHCP lease.
Or, if that's not enough of a computer, try the Sony U101 Yes, it does fit in a pocket.
How is Rockstar supporting the open source world? They've re-released a closed-source game (unless I missed the source download link somewhere) and ported it to a more modern closed-source platform.
Now, for my opinion: I try to avoid RedHat-based distributions as much as possible, so I'd go for Debian (if I just want it to work) or Gentoo (if I'm feeling adventurous).
Besides, you don't want to be victimized by remote North British Columbian wardrivers, do you? ;-)
The GameCube is now under $100. It has a fairly fast processor, Ethernet capabilities, and a very small case. Put these together, and you have a serious option for cluster nodes. Of course, real benchmarks would be needed to tell if the price/performance is good.
That said, I do tend to agree with you -- a single GameCube, hacked to run Linux, is pretty much useless.
No, it's exactly like running a service like the old Napster that uses central servers for searching, but transfers files peer-to-peer. It's not like that saved Napster. In fact, look at Direct Connect -- it's a deliberate combination of IRC and peer-to-peer filesharing.
It's not because of the botnets directly, but rather beacuse IRC servers tend to attract massive amounts of abuse (DDoS attacks, etc) that can be a huge pain for hosting companies.
* I for one welcome our new C Library overlords.