Ironically, I installed Ubuntu, and found that most apps there used the windows keys (I know this must be an editable setting, but I haven't looked yet). So, as a hardcore Emacs user I'm actually much more comfortable on Windows than Ubuntu!
For most GTK+ apps (which is probably the majority in the default install of Ubuntu), you can get Emacs keybindings by adding the following line to your ~/.gtkrc-2.0:
gtk-key-theme-name = "Emacs"
This used to be the default in GTK+ 1.x, but then the GTK+/GNOME people decided to change this as part of the quest to make GNOME more "user-friendly". Ironically, the users they strive to befriend are Windows users rather than long-time Unix / GNU users...
Am I the only one that read the last part of the article as "Let's hope others begin to take his head?" Now that would be an interesting (if overly cruel) approach for spammers.:^)
One quick point about the article: I don't think commands such as make clean or even make mrproper (as the article states) are actually required any more for a proper kernel build of 2.6. In the best case, they'll have no effect, because everything will be rebuilt after patching anyway. In the worst case, they'll even remove some files that wouldn't be rebuilt because they and their dependencies haven't been modified by the patch.
The fact that it's 64-bit will only help you (double the speed, actually) if you're operating on 64-bit variables, which don't come up in general software very much, but are very good for scientific research, simulations, etc.
This is a common argument, and I get to see it all the time. I.e., that 64-bit calculations are not going to benefit a lot of people, because not many people are using them right now. On the other hand, people aren't using them now because they can be painfully slow on their 32-bit computers, so what's the conclusion?
Anyway, I've been thinking about this lately, and I've come up with a case that you might be able to get a lot of speed improvement from the 64-bit processor: fixed point calculations. I mean, floating point has always been slow compared to integer math, but if you need it, what's the alternative? Fixed point math with 32-bit integers is very inaccurate for most tasks, so you're stuck with the slow FP ops. Or are you?
The 64-bit integers that AMD64 provides give the programmer a lot of room for fixed point math. With a 32-32 split, for example, you get the all-so-familiar 2 billion range for the integral part, plus a reasonable amount of accuracy for the fractional part. And you can always work with uneven splits, so the possibilities are endless.
So, how is this going to benefit programmers and users? Take video processing as an example. You often see in DVD backup programs, choices for a given task like "integer - fast" vs. "floating point - accurate". Well, with the AMD64 processors, you'll probably have a third option as well: "fixed point - fast *and* accurate". Or it might not even be an option, but the only default. So the user gets all the eggs in one basket, and the programmer gets to write less code. w00t!
Re:32 compatibility mode vs. true 64 bit apps...
on
AMD Opteron Due In April
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Blockquoth the poster:
The problem is that, sure, everything is compiled into 64-bit mode. Fine. But can the compiler optimize the 64-bit code as well as it can optimize the older 32-bit code? Will the compiler make good use of the extra registers? I'm willing to bet that, for the first while, 64-bit AMD compilers will generate slower code than their 32-bit counterpart. (For 99% of all applications -- those which do NOT need more than 2 GB of memory).
Your caution in this is reasonable, but don't forget that the GNU community is using GCC, which supports a gazillion of architectures, so:
It already supports 64-bit architectures.
It already supports architectures with a lot of registers available. x86-64 has still got few registers, compared to some.
It has already been targeted to x86-64.
So I would expect that the code GCC produces for x86-64 will be comparable to that produced for i386, and probably faster from the beginning, because of the extra registers. The extra size might affect some cache critical programs, but with the default integer size still being 32 bit, I wouldn't worry too much about that.
I think using sugar cane to make alcohol fuel is the wrong fuel to make.
The Brazilians should make biodiesel fuel from sugar cane instead; that means the entire sugar cane plant can be use to make the fuel.
Actually, that would make no sense at all and would clearly be the wrong thing.
The Brazilians don't cultivate sugar cane to make alcohol from it. They cultivate it to make sugar. It's a very profitable product, so much that Brazil ends up importing other products that could easily be cultivated on its lands, only because everyone plants sugar canes.
Of course, apart from extracting the sugar, they've done their best to make full use of the plant, so there are a few byproducts. The most important of them is alcohol; there results to be so much of it that they ended up finding new uses for it (alcohol-powered cars, now planes). But it's still a byproduct, very unimportant compared to the sugar produced. So destroying the sugar production (and the other byproducts) only to produce biodiesel instead of alcohol would simply be absurd.
Although I don't have a lot of VRAM to spare, this gave me an idea I might play with...
I have an old 486DX4 system, with one of those cool AMD 486 processors with double L1 cache and Write-Back (WB) cache mode. (Trust me, these 486's are much faster than the rest of the pack). There's only one problem though: the motherboard has very few L2 cache (256k), which makes it unable to cache more than 32MB of RAM in WB mode. So, to put in more memory, I would either have to switch to Write-Through (WT), which would be slow, or have a mix of cacheable and non-cacheable memory, which is even slower.
What does all this have to do with the mentioned article, you might wonder? Well, it immediately gave me the idea that I might be able to add more RAM to that PC, use the lowest (cacheable) part for the system, and use the above as a Memory Technology Device (MTD), perhaps putting some swap space on it. Weird, huh? Still, if it works, it'll probably be somewhat better than leaving the extra memory in a drawer gathering dust...
Too bad I'll be travelling in a few days, so my spare time right now is next to zero. *sigh* But I'll have to try it sometime.
But O'Reilly isn't arguing against the virtues of Open Source, he's arguing that the mandatory use of it is both contrary to Open Source/Free Software principles, and bad strategy to boot.
Still, note that no-one is advocating that open source become mandatory for everyone. I would strongly disagree with such a move. I (and many others) are supporting the mandatory use of free software in the government, which is a totally different and far more specific case. However, O'Reilly blurs this distinction to present his point, which is one of the things that Michael observed in his comment.
In addition, my arguments were about the virtues of open source specifically when used by the government, not in general. We do agree here that the generic issue of open source vs. commercial is somewhat beyond the scope of this discussion.
He decries the "radicalization" of Open Source because he thinks it will hurt the movement in the long run.
(Free Software advocate mode on) The Free Sofware movement has always been radical from its inception, otherwise it probably wouldn't have happened at all. And neither would have happened the Open Source movement. This is one of the key differences of the two, as Open Source advocates prefer to highlight the technical value of free software, and leave aside the social value, because it would (supposedly) sound bad to businessmen. Still, there is a great social value in free software as well, and my feeling is that it should be promoted for that too (for helping people live better), even if it seems "radical" to some.
I'll have to agree with Michael on this. There are quite a few reasons that the citizens of a country would benefit if their government made the use of open-source mandatory for itself:
Accessibility. Open source implies open formats (more or less). This means that people can more easily access the information that the government stores for them. Moreover, it gives a better chance that government documents will continue to remain usable over the course of time.
Transparency. As the citizens have access to the source of administrative software, they can acquire a good knowledge about the ways the government information systems work. This way it becomes much harder for an agency to use its computing equipment in ways inacceptable for the constitution / laws / whatever.
Security. Bugs in the software can be spotted and fixed more openly, even if the company that produced it has long been gone. In addition, open source greatly reduces the possibility of back-doors, and that itself is extremely important if we're talking about the government.
If you want to just let the government do its job (whatever that is) and not bother much, then this "right tool for the job" mentality might be useful. But I think that the government should serve the citizens (me and everyone else), that I cannot implicitly trust it, and also that it cannot implicitly trust the corporations that provide it with software. For all the above reasons, I hope the adoption, and even requirement, of open source for government operation becomes a reality as soon as possible.
Assembly is a great event. Apart from being the most important gathering of the demo scene, where all big groups try to bring their best productions to compete, it's a dream for a lot of us to be there someday. Just imagine:
Hundrends of computers connected to the local LAN, for gaming, massive access to the Internet (have a look at their sponsors and you'll know why), and even some good old leeching. *sigh*
Hanging out with other scene people, and in general with countless cool people with similar interests
Watching the demo compo on the massive main screen and soundsystem, and feeling what religious awe must be like.
The rest of us that won't be able to attend will be melting away on AsmTV. I'm sure Assembly will rock for one more year!
Yes, the thingy uses GPRS, but have you seen what it costs to get the service? At least here in DK, it's a subscription of 300 DKr/quarter (ca €40), plus a not-so-nominal fee per kb. It racks up quite fast.
Yeap, I can confirm that. Around here in.gr, the prices vary depending on the mobile company you're with, but mine, which is really the best in pricing, asks for €30 per month for GPRS, with a 40MB limit. That's completely out of my economical reach.
I just got myself an Ericsson T68, but without getting the GPRS service - I'm just not out of reach of a real internet connection often enough for it to be viable. Keep in mind that you always can use the normal internet my phone company offers: you can get the odd email on the phone even with 9.6kbps!
Same here, but with an Ericsson T39m. Speaking of which, I've been wondering lately: why would anyone prefer to buy T68 over T39m, apart from the bigger/color monitor? This is not a flamebait, I'm genuinely curious here.
Oh, and as a sidenote, it's interesting to notice that the mobile phone - PDA convergence happens in the US from the PDA side, while in Europe it happens from the phone side. What I mean to say is that, here in/. we see all the articles about new shiny PDAs in the US that can make phone calls as well, and now use GPRS (where were you all this time?), while around here in Europe we have phones like mine, that also have full contacts list, a calendar, password file, e-mail support, and tons of other features. And trust me, there are much more powerful phones around compared to mine.
The worst terrorist attacks occurred less than three weeks ago, and you people are discussing the latest survey which is out and ready for reading from Netcraft, containing some interesting commentary in regards to Code Red, and its effects on web usage? My *god* people, GET SOME PRIORITIES!
I was really tempted to flame you down as troll, but I'd rather reply instead.
OK, so there was a big terrorist attack and many people died. So what? Should everyone just give up their everything they're doing and mourn for the lost souls? Life goes on, in case you hadn't noticed.
(Although I must admit that, for some people, it simply doesn't;-).)
OK, so I read this entire story, and in the end I still didn't have a clue of what it was talking about. I haven't been watching the news these days, so a small explanation (or at least a link, dammit!) would have been nice.
Well, I think you're a bit confused here. RMS isn't trying to protect the whole "Open Source" idea; he's all about free software. It's not about the price, the openness, the quality, or whatever; it's about the freedom. RMS is not fighting for programs that are better because they are reviewed by many people, but for programs that are free to use, modify and distribute. And I respect him highly for that.
Oh, and by the way, we do need extremists like RMS. If he hadn't been so persistent in his views, then perhaps he wouldn't have carried so many people along with him. We'll always need RMS to show us the way.
Vasilis Vasaitis
signature? i don't need no stinkin' signature
A moment of victory for me was about four
months after I got hit; I was back at home, and
still was able to use vi. I'm not sure what that
says about the effects of a brain injury.;-D
Well, the obvious. That vi is already a brain damage, so it can't really be affected by other damages of the same nature...;-)
Hey, couldn't this have been posted a bit earlier, like the previous day? I mean, I happen to be staying in England this time of year, but didn't find out until the next morning. Doh!
Slashdot Mirror
For most GTK+ apps (which is probably the majority in the default install of Ubuntu), you can get Emacs keybindings by adding the following line to your ~/.gtkrc-2.0:
This used to be the default in GTK+ 1.x, but then the GTK+/GNOME people decided to change this as part of the quest to make GNOME more "user-friendly". Ironically, the users they strive to befriend are Windows users rather than long-time Unix / GNU users...
Am I the only one that read the last part of the article as "Let's hope others begin to take his head?" Now that would be an interesting (if overly cruel) approach for spammers. :^)
One quick point about the article: I don't think commands such as make clean or even make mrproper (as the article states) are actually required any more for a proper kernel build of 2.6. In the best case, they'll have no effect, because everything will be rebuilt after patching anyway. In the worst case, they'll even remove some files that wouldn't be rebuilt because they and their dependencies haven't been modified by the patch.
Just my 0,02 euros.
This is a common argument, and I get to see it all the time. I.e., that 64-bit calculations are not going to benefit a lot of people, because not many people are using them right now. On the other hand, people aren't using them now because they can be painfully slow on their 32-bit computers, so what's the conclusion?
Anyway, I've been thinking about this lately, and I've come up with a case that you might be able to get a lot of speed improvement from the 64-bit processor: fixed point calculations. I mean, floating point has always been slow compared to integer math, but if you need it, what's the alternative? Fixed point math with 32-bit integers is very inaccurate for most tasks, so you're stuck with the slow FP ops. Or are you?
The 64-bit integers that AMD64 provides give the programmer a lot of room for fixed point math. With a 32-32 split, for example, you get the all-so-familiar 2 billion range for the integral part, plus a reasonable amount of accuracy for the fractional part. And you can always work with uneven splits, so the possibilities are endless.
So, how is this going to benefit programmers and users? Take video processing as an example. You often see in DVD backup programs, choices for a given task like "integer - fast" vs. "floating point - accurate". Well, with the AMD64 processors, you'll probably have a third option as well: "fixed point - fast *and* accurate". Or it might not even be an option, but the only default. So the user gets all the eggs in one basket, and the programmer gets to write less code. w00t!
Blockquoth the poster:
Your caution in this is reasonable, but don't forget that the GNU community is using GCC, which supports a gazillion of architectures, so:
So I would expect that the code GCC produces for x86-64 will be comparable to that produced for i386, and probably faster from the beginning, because of the extra registers. The extra size might affect some cache critical programs, but with the default integer size still being 32 bit, I wouldn't worry too much about that.
Actually, that would make no sense at all and would clearly be the wrong thing.
The Brazilians don't cultivate sugar cane to make alcohol from it. They cultivate it to make sugar. It's a very profitable product, so much that Brazil ends up importing other products that could easily be cultivated on its lands, only because everyone plants sugar canes.
Of course, apart from extracting the sugar, they've done their best to make full use of the plant, so there are a few byproducts. The most important of them is alcohol; there results to be so much of it that they ended up finding new uses for it (alcohol-powered cars, now planes). But it's still a byproduct, very unimportant compared to the sugar produced. So destroying the sugar production (and the other byproducts) only to produce biodiesel instead of alcohol would simply be absurd.
Although I don't have a lot of VRAM to spare, this gave me an idea I might play with...
I have an old 486DX4 system, with one of those cool AMD 486 processors with double L1 cache and Write-Back (WB) cache mode. (Trust me, these 486's are much faster than the rest of the pack). There's only one problem though: the motherboard has very few L2 cache (256k), which makes it unable to cache more than 32MB of RAM in WB mode. So, to put in more memory, I would either have to switch to Write-Through (WT), which would be slow, or have a mix of cacheable and non-cacheable memory, which is even slower.
What does all this have to do with the mentioned article, you might wonder? Well, it immediately gave me the idea that I might be able to add more RAM to that PC, use the lowest (cacheable) part for the system, and use the above as a Memory Technology Device (MTD), perhaps putting some swap space on it. Weird, huh? Still, if it works, it'll probably be somewhat better than leaving the extra memory in a drawer gathering dust...
Too bad I'll be travelling in a few days, so my spare time right now is next to zero. *sigh* But I'll have to try it sometime.
...when you can get com.sex?
Still, note that no-one is advocating that open source become mandatory for everyone. I would strongly disagree with such a move. I (and many others) are supporting the mandatory use of free software in the government, which is a totally different and far more specific case. However, O'Reilly blurs this distinction to present his point, which is one of the things that Michael observed in his comment.
In addition, my arguments were about the virtues of open source specifically when used by the government, not in general. We do agree here that the generic issue of open source vs. commercial is somewhat beyond the scope of this discussion.
(Free Software advocate mode on) The Free Sofware movement has always been radical from its inception, otherwise it probably wouldn't have happened at all. And neither would have happened the Open Source movement. This is one of the key differences of the two, as Open Source advocates prefer to highlight the technical value of free software, and leave aside the social value, because it would (supposedly) sound bad to businessmen. Still, there is a great social value in free software as well, and my feeling is that it should be promoted for that too (for helping people live better), even if it seems "radical" to some.
I'll have to agree with Michael on this. There are quite a few reasons that the citizens of a country would benefit if their government made the use of open-source mandatory for itself:
If you want to just let the government do its job (whatever that is) and not bother much, then this "right tool for the job" mentality might be useful. But I think that the government should serve the citizens (me and everyone else), that I cannot implicitly trust it, and also that it cannot implicitly trust the corporations that provide it with software. For all the above reasons, I hope the adoption, and even requirement, of open source for government operation becomes a reality as soon as possible.
Assembly is a great event. Apart from being the most important gathering of the demo scene, where all big groups try to bring their best productions to compete, it's a dream for a lot of us to be there someday. Just imagine:
The rest of us that won't be able to attend will be melting away on AsmTV. I'm sure Assembly will rock for one more year!
Yeap, I can confirm that. Around here in .gr, the prices vary depending on the mobile company you're with, but mine, which is really the best in pricing, asks for €30 per month for GPRS, with a 40MB limit. That's completely out of my economical reach.
Same here, but with an Ericsson T39m. Speaking of which, I've been wondering lately: why would anyone prefer to buy T68 over T39m, apart from the bigger/color monitor? This is not a flamebait, I'm genuinely curious here.
Oh, and as a sidenote, it's interesting to notice that the mobile phone - PDA convergence happens in the US from the PDA side, while in Europe it happens from the phone side. What I mean to say is that, here in /. we see all the articles about new shiny PDAs in the US that can make phone calls as well, and now use GPRS (where were you all this time?), while around here in Europe we have phones like mine, that also have full contacts list, a calendar, password file, e-mail support, and tons of other features. And trust me, there are much more powerful phones around compared to mine.
I was really tempted to flame you down as troll, but I'd rather reply instead.
OK, so there was a big terrorist attack and many people died. So what? Should everyone just give up their everything they're doing and mourn for the lost souls? Life goes on, in case you hadn't noticed.
(Although I must admit that, for some people, it simply doesn't ;-).)
Vasilis Vasaitis
still looking for a decent sig
Vasilis
still looking for a signature...
Well, I think you're a bit confused here. RMS isn't trying to protect the whole "Open Source" idea; he's all about free software. It's not about the price, the openness, the quality, or whatever; it's about the freedom. RMS is not fighting for programs that are better because they are reviewed by many people, but for programs that are free to use, modify and distribute. And I respect him highly for that.
Oh, and by the way, we do need extremists like RMS. If he hadn't been so persistent in his views, then perhaps he wouldn't have carried so many people along with him. We'll always need RMS to show us the way.
Vasilis Vasaitis
signature? i don't need no stinkin' signature
Well, the obvious. That vi is already a brain damage, so it can't really be affected by other damages of the same nature... ;-)
VasilisHey, the Catholic church people aren't the only ones filtering the web. Check out Ask Jesus.
--Vasilis
Hey, couldn't this have been posted a bit earlier, like the previous day? I mean, I happen to be staying in England this time of year, but didn't find out until the next morning. Doh!