BUT... when properly done, you can gain a LOT of performance you could't get any other way.
As far as I'm concerned, there are three best places to multithread. First is in user interface. I can't tell you how many times I've cursed Internet Explorer because Microsoft programmers didn't bother to launch a separate thread when IE connects to an FTP server. If it's down, the program is unresponsive until the attempted FTP control connection times out. It can't even paint itself.
Second is when you write a server. You either multithread or multiprocess. Otherwise, when it gets busy, connections start to time out.
Of course, those have nothing to do with performance. The performance part comes in when you have two process you need to complete, and both are independent of each other and tie up different resources. For example, if you have a big disk read or write and a bunch of calculations to do, if they're independent, thread one of them.
Other than in those situations, I'm hard-pressed to think of a time when threading is actually worth the context switch and the synchronization headaches. Can some ultra-smart person here tell me if I've left something out?
No, idiot. Just find and compile radeon.o in the XFree86 source tree. Copy radeon.o (which is version 1.1.0) into/lib/modules/2.4.x/kernel/drivers/char/drm over the top of the existing one (which is version 1.0.0).
That worked. Greetz, grats, and thanx to all in the XFree86 team and their DRI buddies that made this work so well. Quake III is beautiful on my Radeon.
By the way, if you dual-boot, you can use a Win32 install of Quake III to play on Linux. Download the latest Linux point release from www.quake3arena.com. Change directories to one directory above your "Quake III Arena" directory on your Windows partition. Change its name to "quake3". Untar the point release. Change the directory name back to "Quake III Arena". Run quake3.x86. Isn't that spiffy?
1) First, this is great news for Radeon users. IIRC, though, when I tried the Radeon DRI from Sourceforge, I had to recompile my kernel without its DRI modules and use their modified X's. I already know that I'm going to have to download the source tarball to use the DRI in XFree86 4.1.0. Do I have to recompile my kernel too? (Not that it's hard - just wondering.)
2) There was a bug in DRI that would freeze up the entire system. I could always reproduce it by playing a few minutes of Quake III. Does anybody know the status of this?
3) (Stupid luser question) Where can I find info on how to do AA fonts on XFree86?
Nice straw man. Really, it's a good one, if not obvious. Show parents who would like to actually parent as brutal, uneducated, discriminating idiots. Better yet, make 'em rednecks. That's an easy straw man to break down.
Then, post about how we should leave them alone. We should all believe you now, since you've shown us how stupid actual interested parents are.
I believe this is called a "logical fallacy." (More specifically, the straw man fallacy.)
Now that that's out of the way, I've got a question for you regarding this comment: Other than that, leave them alone, and let them discover the good and the bad the way the rest of us did.
The rest of us? Who's that? I suppose I'm not in that group, since my parents actually bothered to tell me about that stuff. Heck, they even told me if I held a firecracker in my hands, it would blow up and hurt A LOT. I think I'll let my daughter discover how HOT that stove can get all by herself. She'll never do that again.
Microsoft does have a defense - they can say that it's only part of how Internet Explorer displays the web page. They don't have to change the HTML (which is implicitly copyrighted) to add this feature. The makers of a web page cannot possibly copyright the finished, displayed product.
That doesn't keep it from being highly annoying, though. I hope they make good on their promises and keep it turned off by default. Heck, Microsoft, just rip out the code. It doesn't do anybody any good.
It seems as though you're right - the makers of the web site retain their exclusive rights, and they don't usually give them up. This includes the right to make derivative works. There's an implied license in deploying a web site - that it will be copied into memory and displayed in a browser.
Of course, what if this is just Microsoft's method of "display?" And then, what about proxies like Proxomitron, that can alter a page to remove unwanted Javascript? It all gets so weird...
I have lots of money. It doesn't physically exist, but it's "in" all kinds of accounts. Really, they're just bits in some databases somewhere. Those bits aren't my money. There are hardcopies of the database information, but those hardcopies aren't my money either. The only thing that makes it my money is that everyone agrees that it's mine, whatever it is. It's an idea that floats around in people's neurons.
The notion of property has nothing to do with physical posession. The thing that defines property is the right to exclude. I own that money because I, by default, exclude other people from doing certain things with it. I decide what is lawful and what is not in regards to that money. When I deposit it in the bank, I license the bank to play stocks with it and invest it in other ways. In the same vein, the reason it is illegal to enter your house and take your book is that society has decided that you have exclusive rights over your house, and you can decide (though this is the default) that my entering your house without an invitation is against the law.
There really is no concrete difference, under the law. (Morally, you may have something different to say about it.) That society has decided to give exclusive rights over ideas to the originators of them is just an extension of the idea of property.
about the technical aspects of the GNU/Linux kernel development.
So you know - you don't have to call it "GNU/Linux" to appease RMS when you're talking about just the kernel. GNU/Linux refers to an entire system - with the Linux kernel and GNU libraries and utilities.
Re:My title of choice...
on
Just For Fun
·
· Score: 2
Nah. It'd have to be GNU/Linus Torvalds: The Info Page.
...barring children under 18 from playing "point-and-shoot" video games in public places.
Yep, and next they'll outlaw Cowboys and Indians (but only secondly because of shooting - it's very politically incorrect nowadays), and after that, it's making a pointing gesture that resembles shooting a gun at another person.
Rocks that pass through the atmosphere, enter at high temperatures, so any life that might have survived the space flight would unlikely survive the re-entry. On the other hand a probe visiting Mars would not put its rock samples through such conditions, so life would have a better chance of surviving.
How about non-life? Even assuming that the probe put the samples through nasty conditions, non-life could survive. We already know of dangerous non-life here on Earth: Mad Cow Disease. It's a renegade protein, more or less, that you can't kill with any amount of heat or deprivation.
DeCSS itself has no non-speech elements. It is a set of instructions written in a specific professional language that expresses ideas to those who can read that language. Computer programmers and scientists communicate using programming languages because these languages are an unambiguous mode of expression... That a person might use a computer program to do something does not by itself add "nonspeech" elements to the text.
That a person "might?" Where does "might" come from? I'm not sure where these EFF guys have been, but most programs actually get run much more frequently than they are used for interpersonal communication. I'm not saying that programs aren't used for communication - they are. It's just not their primary purpose.
Now, copyright law recognizes software as expressive content. Heck, even a COMPILED EXECUTABLE is recognized as expressive. They may have better luck pointing out that ambiguity than in trying to say that the main purpose of source code is to communicate with another human being.
Actually, I would LOVE to see this in a game like Diablo II. You learn spells, and then you cast them by making gestures with your mouse over your enemies. Being a magic user might actually take some talent then.
Lag time is an extremely important consideration for bandwidth. The TCP window (basically the amount of data a host will send another in one go) grows and shrinks based on the timeliness of the acknowledgements it gets from the other hosts on the packets it sends.
For example: I have Sprint wireless. The download speed is phenomenal - I've seen 3.5Mb/sec. The upload speed is somewhere around 256Kb/sec. The upload latency isn't all that grand either. I downloaded a kernel to one of my computers (I'm behind a masq'd firewall) from kernel.org at 160KB/sec, and from another computer at exactly the same time at 30KB/sec. Why was the first one faster? It had a 100Mb PCI ethernet card with low latency, and the other had a 10Mb PCI ethernet card with high latency. (You can check your latency by sending large ping packets, and yes, a 100 card has much better latency than a 10 card.) The acknowledgements got back to the kernel.org server faster, which opened the TCP window. It wasn't just this one test, either - the computer with the 10Mb card got consistenly slower downloads.
Yes, it's strange that TCP judges bandwidth by latency, but it generally works well. We wouldn't want our bandwidth to be capped by high-latency connections, would we?
However, today's kids aren't writing basic and Z80 assembly programs. They're playing shoot-em-up games and chatting to friends on the internet.
I really don't believe that the percentage of children interested in programming has changed. It's just that computers are more common. Instead of playing cowboys and Indians or romping around outside and chatting with the neighborhood kids, the normal kids will be playing shoot-em-up games and chatting to friends on the Internet. The same kids that forsook the former will forsake the latter, in favor of the joy of original creation, the feeling of power, or the satisfaction of finishing something cool. They'll be the programmers.
Applications written on top of the kernel do not have any restrictions imposed on them.
Sorry, just had to pick a nit. (The rest of your comment is great.) Applications written on top of the kernel DO have to have restrictions placed on them - they have to be released under the GPL or LGPL. The term "link" has very broad meaning, and it includes making direct system calls to the kernel.
That's the reason that libc is released under the LGPL - so you can link to it without restriction. It serves as a technical buffer (to simplify and standardize OS calls), and also a legal buffer to people who want to write non-GPL software.
Maybe they just wanted to show people that getting big, nasty, high-end chips for their office applications is a stupid idea? That's what I got from it - the right tool for the job. Gimme an Athlon for my desktop, and a dual P4 Xeon system for my database server.
Who said? I come here to get links to stories on legit sites, to read anti-[corporation|government|censorship|Republican ] rants, to have a good laugh at the Katz's latest soapbox, and to get a good idea of what teenage nerds think these days. Every once in a while I read a technical gem from somebody that knows what he's talking about. I never thought it was legit.
I hardly ever expect the stories to be right. Of course, my user number is horrendously high - you might remember when it was different. Was it ever?
Kinda reminds me of that ASCII filter I heard about a while back.
You can find it here. I've tried it and it worked pretty well, but even on a dual PIII-500 it crawled on any resolution I tried to set it to that gave me enough detail to play. I'm not sure why. It probably has something to do with the fact that it doesn't write directly to the hardware, but it uses a terminal device.
I tried it first, to see how it looked (not like real ASCII art, since it converts colors to characters using aalib), and second, because I thought it would be extremely cool to play Quake through a telnet session...
Slashdot Mirror
...hack into our computers.
I suppose they'd do that with Macs.
BUT... when properly done, you can gain a LOT of performance you could't get any other way.
As far as I'm concerned, there are three best places to multithread. First is in user interface. I can't tell you how many times I've cursed Internet Explorer because Microsoft programmers didn't bother to launch a separate thread when IE connects to an FTP server. If it's down, the program is unresponsive until the attempted FTP control connection times out. It can't even paint itself.
Second is when you write a server. You either multithread or multiprocess. Otherwise, when it gets busy, connections start to time out.
Of course, those have nothing to do with performance. The performance part comes in when you have two process you need to complete, and both are independent of each other and tie up different resources. For example, if you have a big disk read or write and a bunch of calculations to do, if they're independent, thread one of them.
Other than in those situations, I'm hard-pressed to think of a time when threading is actually worth the context switch and the synchronization headaches. Can some ultra-smart person here tell me if I've left something out?
SELF-REPLY ALERT!
/lib/modules/2.4.x/kernel/drivers/char/drm over the top of the existing one (which is version 1.0.0).
Do I have to recompile my kernel too?
No, idiot. Just find and compile radeon.o in the XFree86 source tree. Copy radeon.o (which is version 1.1.0) into
That worked. Greetz, grats, and thanx to all in the XFree86 team and their DRI buddies that made this work so well. Quake III is beautiful on my Radeon.
By the way, if you dual-boot, you can use a Win32 install of Quake III to play on Linux. Download the latest Linux point release from www.quake3arena.com. Change directories to one directory above your "Quake III Arena" directory on your Windows partition. Change its name to "quake3". Untar the point release. Change the directory name back to "Quake III Arena". Run quake3.x86. Isn't that spiffy?
1) First, this is great news for Radeon users. IIRC, though, when I tried the Radeon DRI from Sourceforge, I had to recompile my kernel without its DRI modules and use their modified X's. I already know that I'm going to have to download the source tarball to use the DRI in XFree86 4.1.0. Do I have to recompile my kernel too? (Not that it's hard - just wondering.)
2) There was a bug in DRI that would freeze up the entire system. I could always reproduce it by playing a few minutes of Quake III. Does anybody know the status of this?
3) (Stupid luser question) Where can I find info on how to do AA fonts on XFree86?
Thanks in advance for any good answers.
Nice straw man. Really, it's a good one, if not obvious. Show parents who would like to actually parent as brutal, uneducated, discriminating idiots. Better yet, make 'em rednecks. That's an easy straw man to break down.
Then, post about how we should leave them alone. We should all believe you now, since you've shown us how stupid actual interested parents are.
I believe this is called a "logical fallacy." (More specifically, the straw man fallacy.)
Now that that's out of the way, I've got a question for you regarding this comment: Other than that, leave them alone, and let them discover the good and the bad the way the rest of us did.
The rest of us? Who's that? I suppose I'm not in that group, since my parents actually bothered to tell me about that stuff. Heck, they even told me if I held a firecracker in my hands, it would blow up and hurt A LOT. I think I'll let my daughter discover how HOT that stove can get all by herself. She'll never do that again.
Microsoft does have a defense - they can say that it's only part of how Internet Explorer displays the web page. They don't have to change the HTML (which is implicitly copyrighted) to add this feature. The makers of a web page cannot possibly copyright the finished, displayed product.
That doesn't keep it from being highly annoying, though. I hope they make good on their promises and keep it turned off by default. Heck, Microsoft, just rip out the code. It doesn't do anybody any good.
It seems like this is a copyright infringement.
It seems as though you're right - the makers of the web site retain their exclusive rights, and they don't usually give them up. This includes the right to make derivative works. There's an implied license in deploying a web site - that it will be copied into memory and displayed in a browser.
Of course, what if this is just Microsoft's method of "display?" And then, what about proxies like Proxomitron, that can alter a page to remove unwanted Javascript? It all gets so weird...
I have lots of money. It doesn't physically exist, but it's "in" all kinds of accounts. Really, they're just bits in some databases somewhere. Those bits aren't my money. There are hardcopies of the database information, but those hardcopies aren't my money either. The only thing that makes it my money is that everyone agrees that it's mine, whatever it is. It's an idea that floats around in people's neurons.
The notion of property has nothing to do with physical posession. The thing that defines property is the right to exclude. I own that money because I, by default, exclude other people from doing certain things with it. I decide what is lawful and what is not in regards to that money. When I deposit it in the bank, I license the bank to play stocks with it and invest it in other ways. In the same vein, the reason it is illegal to enter your house and take your book is that society has decided that you have exclusive rights over your house, and you can decide (though this is the default) that my entering your house without an invitation is against the law.
There really is no concrete difference, under the law. (Morally, you may have something different to say about it.) That society has decided to give exclusive rights over ideas to the originators of them is just an extension of the idea of property.
about the technical aspects of the GNU/Linux kernel development.
So you know - you don't have to call it "GNU/Linux" to appease RMS when you're talking about just the kernel. GNU/Linux refers to an entire system - with the Linux kernel and GNU libraries and utilities.
Nah. It'd have to be GNU/Linus Torvalds: The Info Page.
How am I supposed to know within 90 days if the immortality ring works?
Easy. Put one on and stab yourself.
...barring children under 18 from playing "point-and-shoot" video games in public places.
Yep, and next they'll outlaw Cowboys and Indians (but only secondly because of shooting - it's very politically incorrect nowadays), and after that, it's making a pointing gesture that resembles shooting a gun at another person.
Rocks that pass through the atmosphere, enter at high temperatures, so any life that might have survived the space flight would unlikely survive the re-entry. On the other hand a probe visiting Mars would not put its rock samples through such conditions, so life would have a better chance of surviving.
How about non-life? Even assuming that the probe put the samples through nasty conditions, non-life could survive. We already know of dangerous non-life here on Earth: Mad Cow Disease. It's a renegade protein, more or less, that you can't kill with any amount of heat or deprivation.
From the brief:
DeCSS itself has no non-speech elements. It is a set of instructions written in a specific professional language that expresses ideas to those who can read that language. Computer programmers and scientists communicate using programming languages because these languages are an unambiguous mode of expression... That a person might use a computer program to do something does not by itself add "nonspeech" elements to the text.
That a person "might?" Where does "might" come from? I'm not sure where these EFF guys have been, but most programs actually get run much more frequently than they are used for interpersonal communication. I'm not saying that programs aren't used for communication - they are. It's just not their primary purpose.
Now, copyright law recognizes software as expressive content. Heck, even a COMPILED EXECUTABLE is recognized as expressive. They may have better luck pointing out that ambiguity than in trying to say that the main purpose of source code is to communicate with another human being.
Ugh. Next time, keep it to yourself. I used to love those things.
UCE is people! PEOPLE!!!!!!!!!!
Oh, come ON moderators. Have you never seen Soylent Green? This is absolutely hilarious!
Of course, most Slashdotters these days are under 21...
Now I can cast miracles...
Actually, I would LOVE to see this in a game like Diablo II. You learn spells, and then you cast them by making gestures with your mouse over your enemies. Being a magic user might actually take some talent then.
Lag time is an extremely important consideration for bandwidth. The TCP window (basically the amount of data a host will send another in one go) grows and shrinks based on the timeliness of the acknowledgements it gets from the other hosts on the packets it sends.
For example: I have Sprint wireless. The download speed is phenomenal - I've seen 3.5Mb/sec. The upload speed is somewhere around 256Kb/sec. The upload latency isn't all that grand either. I downloaded a kernel to one of my computers (I'm behind a masq'd firewall) from kernel.org at 160KB/sec, and from another computer at exactly the same time at 30KB/sec. Why was the first one faster? It had a 100Mb PCI ethernet card with low latency, and the other had a 10Mb PCI ethernet card with high latency. (You can check your latency by sending large ping packets, and yes, a 100 card has much better latency than a 10 card.) The acknowledgements got back to the kernel.org server faster, which opened the TCP window. It wasn't just this one test, either - the computer with the 10Mb card got consistenly slower downloads.
Yes, it's strange that TCP judges bandwidth by latency, but it generally works well. We wouldn't want our bandwidth to be capped by high-latency connections, would we?
As open source projects get more mature I really think that more work should be put into porting them to windows and macos.
Yes, and especially since people run an OS mostly for the apps that are available on it.
However, today's kids aren't writing basic and Z80 assembly programs. They're playing shoot-em-up games and chatting to friends on the internet.
I really don't believe that the percentage of children interested in programming has changed. It's just that computers are more common. Instead of playing cowboys and Indians or romping around outside and chatting with the neighborhood kids, the normal kids will be playing shoot-em-up games and chatting to friends on the Internet. The same kids that forsook the former will forsake the latter, in favor of the joy of original creation, the feeling of power, or the satisfaction of finishing something cool. They'll be the programmers.
Applications written on top of the kernel do not have any restrictions imposed on them.
Sorry, just had to pick a nit. (The rest of your comment is great.) Applications written on top of the kernel DO have to have restrictions placed on them - they have to be released under the GPL or LGPL. The term "link" has very broad meaning, and it includes making direct system calls to the kernel.
That's the reason that libc is released under the LGPL - so you can link to it without restriction. It serves as a technical buffer (to simplify and standardize OS calls), and also a legal buffer to people who want to write non-GPL software.
Maybe they just wanted to show people that getting big, nasty, high-end chips for their office applications is a stupid idea? That's what I got from it - the right tool for the job. Gimme an Athlon for my desktop, and a dual P4 Xeon system for my database server.
...but this is supposed to be a legit site...
n ] rants, to have a good laugh at the Katz's latest soapbox, and to get a good idea of what teenage nerds think these days. Every once in a while I read a technical gem from somebody that knows what he's talking about. I never thought it was legit.
Who said? I come here to get links to stories on legit sites, to read anti-[corporation|government|censorship|Republica
I hardly ever expect the stories to be right. Of course, my user number is horrendously high - you might remember when it was different. Was it ever?
I already unconciously close popups before they've even finished loading.
I like to use Konqueror so I can disable that particular Javascript "feature." I don't ever expect to see that ability in a commercial web browser.
Kinda reminds me of that ASCII filter I heard about a while back.
You can find it here. I've tried it and it worked pretty well, but even on a dual PIII-500 it crawled on any resolution I tried to set it to that gave me enough detail to play. I'm not sure why. It probably has something to do with the fact that it doesn't write directly to the hardware, but it uses a terminal device.
I tried it first, to see how it looked (not like real ASCII art, since it converts colors to characters using aalib), and second, because I thought it would be extremely cool to play Quake through a telnet session...