Definintely. Microsoft could find a way to write it off as a tax donation, and they could actually cash in profit in the long run in future licensing/upgrading deals.
to think about the children in underdevelopment countries. I'm sure my nephew in China will dump his PS2 once he could have given chance to taste the power of.....an old Nintendo. The Nintendo emulator on his dual Athlon-MP 2600 definitely can't compare to a real one. However Mr. Iwata must take into consideration whether there's enough electricity to power up one Nintendo there, because people are still using dynamo to power up lightblubs.
Exactly what parallel universe is Mr. Satoru Iwata living in?
First answer your question on kernel - the kernel optimization by default is good enough, e.g. it uses -Os instead of -O3 because some program like kernel usually run faster with less memory trace. You might want to optimize individual modules, though.
For the rest of the packages(I know you didn't ask, but it doesn't stop me.:), you could try some crazy optimization. The hardest thing to decide is that which optimization flags in gcc work best for your system. Should you use all optimization flags? Will these flags break your system?
Inspired by rocklinux, I've tried to benchmark individual optimization flag, i.e. test each flag and discard those flags which don't give your system performance gain. Of course, the script used in link above is pretty old and you must modify for gcc3.2+. Thanks to lameass filter I won't post my script here.
That sound like wasting of time but the result is satisfying. The max. yield I could gain is as much as 19% in comparing to plain -O3 optimization. Here are the result:
vendor_id : GenuineIntel
model name : Mobile Pentium MMX
flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr mce cx8 mmx
gcc version 3.2 (i586-pc-linux-gnu)
Result: '-O3 -march=pentium-mmx -fomit-frame-pointer -finline-functions-fcse-follow-jumps -funroll-loops -frerun-cse-after-loop - frerun-loop-opt -fno-cprop-registers -funroll-all-loops -maccumulate-outgoing-args -fschedule-insns'
Performance gain(compare to -O3 only) ~ 9.9%
vendor_id : GenuineIntel
model name : Pentium III (Coppermine)
flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 mmx fxsr sse
gcc version 3.2 (i686-pc-linux-gnu)
Result: '-O3 -march=pentium3 -fomit-frame-pointer -finline-functions -funroll-loops'
Performance gain(compare to -O3 only) ~ 13.7%
vendor_id : AuthenticAMD
model name : AMD Athlon(TM) MP 2000+ (a dual CPU system)
flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 mmx fxsr sse syscall mmxext 3dnowext 3dnow
vendor_id : AuthenticAMD
model name : AMD Athlon(TM) MP 2000+
flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 mmx fxsr sse syscall mmxext 3dnowext 3dnow
gcc version 3.2 (i686-pc-linux-gnu)
Result: '-O3 -march=athlon-mp -fomit-frame-pointer -finline-functions -fforce-mem -s -funroll-loops -frerun-loop-opt -fdelete- null-pointer-checks -fprefetch-loop-arrays -ffast-math -maccumulate-outgoing-args -fschedule-insns'
Performance gain(compare to -O3 only) ~ 19.6%
19.6%!! If you asked me, it worths it to optimize your desktop; but to the server, you'd like to have it running stable than to have it running 19% faster, you can trust me on that.:)
PS. In the processing of testing, I found some flags are dangerous and better use with care: -fmove-all-movables, -frename-registers and -malign-double. I suspected that they broke my file-util, which corrupted my entire fs. Just be careful.
1) Seeing that applying patches is inevitable when security vulnerablities surface a couple of time every couple of days, management finally accepted to evaluate the necessity of a security assessment for their vast network of Windows boxens.
2) The report revealed that enomous amount of money has to be spent for software distribution system(aka SAM, software Assessment Management), management resorted to rely on human intervention - have a very handful of us to go around the organization to apply patches
3) The problem is, by the time we finished patching less than one-half of the boxens, new patches/vulnerabilities fixes released. There is 1000+ users we are talking about...
4) Having seen too much human resources has to be spent on apply patches, they get down to the basic and distribute patches files by email and CD and requires individual user to apply the patches.
5) as normal users do not understand the need of apply patches, or do not understand the whole thing about the patching things, end up only less than 20% of the boxens have applied the patches in time and new system vulnerabilities break-out every two week
6) Management sees the necessity to perform a new security assessment
7) Goto step 2)
Now management blames us for spending too much money to maintain organization network. They don't seem to remember it was them who believe Windows has low maintenance cost.
Nice move Bruce. Do you think they'd publish opensource book for other languages, like this one? Can I submit those opensource document even I'm not the author, provided that we credit where its due?
I always find Intel C++ shines in all benchmarks. I wondered if anyone has ever tried to compile linux out of it? I know it might hurt your ideology but just for the fun of it.:)
she finds old-fashioned mechanical typewriters much easier on her fingers because they offer gradual resistance rather than the feeling of moving through air then hitting a wall
It's true that mechanical one has better feedback than those you find in computers, but don't ignore the extra straint that would be exerted after prolong use.
Your wife need a better keyboard. Some serious manufactured computer keyboards offer proper resistance and a 'click' feedback before you hit the button so that after some use your fingers can change key when feeling the 'click'. All old keyboards you found in IBM terminals offer such mechanism. Very old Acer keyboard, like one I'm using, has similar design. They are much better than mechanical one, as they've less resistance and no chance of jamming.
However, in order to lower cost, most newer keyboard behave just as you described. Not even Microsoft's Natural keyboard could offer the same feeling as in terminal keyboards.
happened for Linux in 2002 was that our boss put himself into this situation:
PHB: "It's a well known fact that Linux is developed by a bunch of ameutars, a toy.", in a meeting with big Boss and many others, "There's no proof in saying that Windows server is unstable! Look at our file server, it hasn't had a single downtime since it started!"
another non-PHB: "but sir, but your staffs told me that it's actually a Linux running Samba service."
PHB: "Is it?!...."
Thanks! Now tell me the secret keys sequence to bring up the secret character iJob, who can be used to fight beat secret character eBill.:)
Seriously, for those who thought they stole the concept out of games industry, big corps have always used this to hide and bring up hidden admin menu. I blieve I saw a HP engineer bring a password-prompted admin menu in a HP server with some strange key sequences. (any HP engineer could tell me how?:)
It's not just as simple as translation from English to some-other-language. It involves new character set, input method and association helpers, language-specific formatting etc. In the case of Chinese version, they even have to deal with different encoding methods support in one product.
As a developer I always find merely I18N support in Linux not enough to deal with all the language-specific problems. We've very little choice here. I can understand that without commercial drive it's very difficult to develop a language-specific product. E.g. majority of the fontset we need are not free.:(
Have you seen the ad saying that some oil companies hires environmentists while researching new area of oil-mine?
This is rather a beer-talk with my friends, they told me that some of those people actually hired for helping oil companies to cover up any valuable palaeontological discovery from the public. They'd just destory any such evidence before announcing the discovery of a new oil-mine, so that they could avoid being interfered by local government and (real)environmentists during mass production.
Ever wonder why there's always annoucement of new oil-mines but not a trace of any palaeontological discovery in them?:)
No links for this rumor, just like there're very little online information on price-setting in diamond(do you realize the world-wide high price of diamond are fake? Diamond is very abundant resource comparing to other gems).
Years ago we already have voice chatting by either textspeech software or digitized voice transmission protocol for Internet chatting. You can always bring this kind of things to your car as you put your Linux MP3 jukebox into your car.
What makes this project so special is that geeky looking glove. I don't know other place but in my area people could sue you for dangerous driving, under same consideration as in watching TV or talking to mobile phone while driving.
truth it is. I live in Hong Kong and Linksys is the most popular brandname here. Not because it's a big corporation, but they sell good stuffs at pretty low price. Only Buffalo could barely beat them in this regard. At first, seeing such prices, I thought it's a local company. They are doing pretty good at local retailing for an international company.
Not only ebook, almost all major software out there for Palm are released with per machine licenses. I've just bought a Tungsten/T, and I got to send a signature generated by reading my palm's configuration to request a key generated from it in order to register a rather essential software. I'm almost sure that this key cannot be used when I buy a new palm.
I miss the opensource community spirit while programming for handheld devices...man it's like programming in a lockup closet.:(
Thank you for bring up the good points that everything has changed since Bush elected...:(
Yes Clinton sucks(or be sucked, whatever), but you can't refuse to accept the fact that economy boomed during his time. Things has changed, in the wrong way, like you forementioned. *sigh*
Slashdot Mirror
And start out by figuring out which species CmdrTaco, Hemos, and CowboyNeal are.
Trolls?
What else could have thought of making slashdot anyway?
Definintely. Microsoft could find a way to write it off as a tax donation, and they could actually cash in profit in the long run in future licensing/upgrading deals.
However, this is not the worst part of this settlement. Apple's big stake in the educational market could be jeopardized by Microsoft pouring in millions of dollars of free software.. The sounds crazy, the settlement is doing exactly the thing that Micosoft was being sued for.
Where is justice?
to think about the children in underdevelopment countries. I'm sure my nephew in China will dump his PS2 once he could have given chance to taste the power of.....an old Nintendo. The Nintendo emulator on his dual Athlon-MP 2600 definitely can't compare to a real one. However Mr. Iwata must take into consideration whether there's enough electricity to power up one Nintendo there, because people are still using dynamo to power up lightblubs.
Exactly what parallel universe is Mr. Satoru Iwata living in?
First answer your question on kernel - the kernel optimization by default is good enough, e.g. it uses -Os instead of -O3 because some program like kernel usually run faster with less memory trace. You might want to optimize individual modules, though.
:), you could try some crazy optimization. The hardest thing to decide is that which optimization flags in gcc work best for your system. Should you use all optimization flags? Will these flags break your system?
:)
For the rest of the packages(I know you didn't ask, but it doesn't stop me.
Inspired by rocklinux, I've tried to benchmark individual optimization flag, i.e. test each flag and discard those flags which don't give your system performance gain. Of course, the script used in link above is pretty old and you must modify for gcc3.2+. Thanks to lameass filter I won't post my script here.
That sound like wasting of time but the result is satisfying. The max. yield I could gain is as much as 19% in comparing to plain -O3 optimization. Here are the result:
vendor_id : GenuineIntel
model name : Mobile Pentium MMX
flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr mce cx8 mmx
gcc version 3.2 (i586-pc-linux-gnu)
Result: '-O3 -march=pentium-mmx -fomit-frame-pointer -finline-functions-fcse-follow-jumps -funroll-loops -frerun-cse-after-loop - frerun-loop-opt -fno-cprop-registers -funroll-all-loops -maccumulate-outgoing-args -fschedule-insns'
Performance gain(compare to -O3 only) ~ 9.9%
vendor_id : GenuineIntel
model name : Pentium III (Coppermine)
flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 mmx fxsr sse
gcc version 3.2 (i686-pc-linux-gnu)
Result: '-O3 -march=pentium3 -fomit-frame-pointer -finline-functions -funroll-loops'
Performance gain(compare to -O3 only) ~ 13.7%
vendor_id : AuthenticAMD
model name : AMD Athlon(TM) MP 2000+ (a dual CPU system)
flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 mmx fxsr sse syscall mmxext 3dnowext 3dnow
vendor_id : AuthenticAMD
model name : AMD Athlon(TM) MP 2000+
flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 mmx fxsr sse syscall mmxext 3dnowext 3dnow
gcc version 3.2 (i686-pc-linux-gnu)
Result: '-O3 -march=athlon-mp -fomit-frame-pointer -finline-functions -fforce-mem -s -funroll-loops -frerun-loop-opt -fdelete- null-pointer-checks -fprefetch-loop-arrays -ffast-math -maccumulate-outgoing-args -fschedule-insns'
Performance gain(compare to -O3 only) ~ 19.6%
19.6%!! If you asked me, it worths it to optimize your desktop; but to the server, you'd like to have it running stable than to have it running 19% faster, you can trust me on that.
PS. In the processing of testing, I found some flags are dangerous and better use with care: -fmove-all-movables, -frename-registers and -malign-double. I suspected that they broke my file-util, which corrupted my entire fs. Just be careful.
Utopia
I can tell you my experience.
1) Seeing that applying patches is inevitable when security vulnerablities surface a couple of time every couple of days, management finally accepted to evaluate the necessity of a security assessment for their vast network of Windows boxens.
2) The report revealed that enomous amount of money has to be spent for software distribution system(aka SAM, software Assessment Management), management resorted to rely on human intervention - have a very handful of us to go around the organization to apply patches
3) The problem is, by the time we finished patching less than one-half of the boxens, new patches/vulnerabilities fixes released. There is 1000+ users we are talking about...
4) Having seen too much human resources has to be spent on apply patches, they get down to the basic and distribute patches files by email and CD and requires individual user to apply the patches.
5) as normal users do not understand the need of apply patches, or do not understand the whole thing about the patching things, end up only less than 20% of the boxens have applied the patches in time and new system vulnerabilities break-out every two week
6) Management sees the necessity to perform a new security assessment
7) Goto step 2)
Now management blames us for spending too much money to maintain organization network. They don't seem to remember it was them who believe Windows has low maintenance cost.
"Ask Bruce Perens" section, or icon for Bruce. :)
Nice move Bruce. Do you think they'd publish opensource book for other languages, like this one? Can I submit those opensource document even I'm not the author, provided that we credit where its due?
The guy funding the Linux XBOX project is a direct competitor of MS. Kinda cheapens the whole thing, duddn't it?
:)
:)
Who else do you think would sponsor such contest?
Frankly I was a bit shock to know that the man behind is not Larry Ellison.
The extra $3000 for each box sold is to make up for the loss in recovering meltdowned servers as a result of slashdot effect.
:)
That cost you to attempt to advertise in Slashdot.
You probably don't do much of the following:
:(
1) Games
2) MS Office files
These are two things and force us to upgrade.
(You probably argue Office 97 running just fine...until you need to read somebody else's document, which mostly likely in Office XP format)
I always find Intel C++ shines in all benchmarks. I wondered if anyone has ever tried to compile linux out of it? I know it might hurt your ideology but just for the fun of it. :)
It'd be sad when one day your computer will be telling you, "I'm not in the mood, I have a headache."
"What a minute Doris, we can talk...."
*Doris-B11 ejects the pilot into the air*
Argh...sorry I checked Tungsten/T uses Texas Instruments OMAP1510 processor (an enhanced ARM-based processor), not StrongArm sorry.
Not so sure about the clock speed, but you can check here.
Darn, I wouldn't buy Palm Tungsten/T if I knew it. :)
But Tungsten runs on StrongArm too. Anyone starts a Debian project on it? Gotta check...
what does "PHB" mean?
Pointy-Haired-Boss, as in Dilbert. Refers to dumb bosses who don't know how to manage their people
she finds old-fashioned mechanical typewriters much easier on her fingers because they offer gradual resistance rather than the feeling of moving through air then hitting a wall
It's true that mechanical one has better feedback than those you find in computers, but don't ignore the extra straint that would be exerted after prolong use.
Your wife need a better keyboard. Some serious manufactured computer keyboards offer proper resistance and a 'click' feedback before you hit the button so that after some use your fingers can change key when feeling the 'click'. All old keyboards you found in IBM terminals offer such mechanism. Very old Acer keyboard, like one I'm using, has similar design. They are much better than mechanical one, as they've less resistance and no chance of jamming.
However, in order to lower cost, most newer keyboard behave just as you described. Not even Microsoft's Natural keyboard could offer the same feeling as in terminal keyboards.
happened for Linux in 2002 was that our boss put himself into this situation:
PHB: "It's a well known fact that Linux is developed by a bunch of ameutars, a toy.", in a meeting with big Boss and many others, "There's no proof in saying that Windows server is unstable! Look at our file server, it hasn't had a single downtime since it started!"
another non-PHB: "but sir, but your staffs told me that it's actually a Linux running Samba service."
PHB: "Is it?!...."
He should have talked to us more.
Thanks! Now tell me the secret keys sequence to bring up the secret character iJob, who can be used to fight beat secret character eBill. :)
:)
Seriously, for those who thought they stole the concept out of games industry, big corps have always used this to hide and bring up hidden admin menu. I blieve I saw a HP engineer bring a password-prompted admin menu in a HP server with some strange key sequences. (any HP engineer could tell me how?
What's involved in translating programs?
:(
It's not just as simple as translation from English to some-other-language. It involves new character set, input method and association helpers, language-specific formatting etc. In the case of Chinese version, they even have to deal with different encoding methods support in one product.
As a developer I always find merely I18N support in Linux not enough to deal with all the language-specific problems. We've very little choice here. I can understand that without commercial drive it's very difficult to develop a language-specific product. E.g. majority of the fontset we need are not free.
Have you seen the ad saying that some oil companies hires environmentists while researching new area of oil-mine?
:)
This is rather a beer-talk with my friends, they told me that some of those people actually hired for helping oil companies to cover up any valuable palaeontological discovery from the public. They'd just destory any such evidence before announcing the discovery of a new oil-mine, so that they could avoid being interfered by local government and (real)environmentists during mass production.
Ever wonder why there's always annoucement of new oil-mines but not a trace of any palaeontological discovery in them?
No links for this rumor, just like there're very little online information on price-setting in diamond(do you realize the world-wide high price of diamond are fake? Diamond is very abundant resource comparing to other gems).
Years ago we already have voice chatting by either textspeech software or digitized voice transmission protocol for Internet chatting. You can always bring this kind of things to your car as you put your Linux MP3 jukebox into your car.
What makes this project so special is that geeky looking glove. I don't know other place but in my area people could sue you for dangerous driving, under same consideration as in watching TV or talking to mobile phone while driving.
truth it is. I live in Hong Kong and Linksys is the most popular brandname here. Not because it's a big corporation, but they sell good stuffs at pretty low price. Only Buffalo could barely beat them in this regard. At first, seeing such prices, I thought it's a local company. They are doing pretty good at local retailing for an international company.
Not only ebook, almost all major software out there for Palm are released with per machine licenses. I've just bought a Tungsten/T, and I got to send a signature generated by reading my palm's configuration to request a key generated from it in order to register a rather essential software. I'm almost sure that this key cannot be used when I buy a new palm.
:(
I miss the opensource community spirit while programming for handheld devices...man it's like programming in a lockup closet.
Average users wouldn't care.
No, I don't believe in that myth neither. :)
:(
Thank you for bring up the good points that everything has changed since Bush elected...
Yes Clinton sucks(or be sucked, whatever), but you can't refuse to accept the fact that economy boomed during his time. Things has changed, in the wrong way, like you forementioned. *sigh*