> "Make the text on your screen larger or smaller"
You are not running many applications, I guess? Dreamweaver becomes useless with fonts set on large, as is our corporate update system, or many applications written in VB. Usually I can somehow get it to work, but for now Dreamweaver forces me to stay with small fonts.
Yes, that is the lethal combination: a complicated process (especially if you do without packaging and do flip chip) and a new material.
But what can you do? Environmentalists have complaint for ages that less than half of all electronic devices are disposed of properly (and even those are often melted down in China over an open fire to recover the lead!), while most end up in the bin. If they are incinerated, the lead is distributed in the environment, slowly poisoning the whole area.
That being said, there are quite good replacements. While not identical in all properties, a good lead free solder can certainly sustain typical use (without fracturing or electromigration), if you have your process set up correctly. Because the process was the real problem.
In many cases, people simply don't care what's being sent to Microsoft, as there's a sense of implicit trust in large corporations. I have no idea where this trust comes from, but it's definitely real.
And rightly so. If you don't trust Microsoft, you should not run their software - not WGA, and not Windows. Once you run Windows, you may just as well run WGA - they own you anyway.
> No, using an SSN(or something like it) is necessary because you need some number which identifies someone uniquely so that you can cross match records and all the things a PK does in a database.
Funny statement - because here in Europe, the SSN is only every to be used by the employer, and businesses still work fine. Name plus date of birth works quite well, but as the SSN, it is not 100% reliable.
> and I verified that their system is so old and antiquated, that they cannot put anything in the computer without it.
Does that mean you cannot get water without a SSN? What about foreigners? They are legitimate scenarios where you would not have a SSN. Does that make you an un-person?
Sounds like 1984, doesn't it? Funny, it is coming true on both sides of the pond in different ways. On one side, it is the government doing the snooping, on the other the companies.
I have seen this before - what is it about saying 0.02 cent when you mean 2 cent or 0.02 dollar? Does not make the least bit of sense to me - although I can at least see why you would do it there (0 dollor and 2 cent...). But with fractional cent that does not explain it, so why do people do it?
Which can be kind of funny. You would think that milk is pretty much a commodity product, so how do you fill a complete aisle with it? Easy: you have 1 pint (sorry: 568 ml), 1 liter, 2 pint (blabla ml), 2 liter, 4 pint, 6 pint. Everything in 0, 2 and 4% fat, some with 1% fat, some organic, some local, some filtered, some UHT. And bingo: you have successfully differentiated a simple product to fill many shelves. Bless the imperial system!
There is no good news for VIA. The main problem with VIA is VIA - most of the chips a full of bugs and generally suck. Anyone can have a bad day, but consistently bad quality is not something that the market will tolerate indefinitely.
> How are you going to develop any antibodies if you never are exposed to this stuff?
Good point. The way it looks now, the flu is going round next winter. So everybody (or maybe 90%) will get it eventually. Having it during the summer may actually be better than during the winter...
This would also explain the ago profile: if a similar flu was going on 40 years ago, everybody above the ago of 40 would have some level of immunity.
Nor is fsync() what you want - you want an atomic file replace operation. Rename is atomic, and it used to work, but with delayed allocation it may happen before the file is written. So what you want is an atomic file replace operation that does not happen before the data write. Rename may not be the best option for that - a special file write mode may actually be better. In any case the issue affects both sides - kernel and user space.
> or that they don't visit the top several hundred most popular web sites
Did they ever check that these sites are actually Linux accessible? If not, they would hardly register any Linux connections even if the world was being taken over by Linux...
I am just saying that because some IT sites come to a very different conclusion - maybe Linux users are more selective about their information sources, and avoid the mainstream. Somehow that would make sense:-)
I think the point of the study is that the market share is still small, probably in the single digits.
> It's not that FPS drops to half, like you'd expect.... It drops disproportionately more when dual-boxing on the same computer.
That could also be caused by cache contention. After all, most consumer systems have preciously little cache, and are not at all designed for multi-tasking. For this workload, a server CPU may perform much better...
And for the OP: forget it. It is possible with certain OS if you have low demands, but I think 3D acceleration never works on both monitors. Getting a slightly oldish PC and adding a cheap mid range graphics card would be a better approach.
> The AMD64 architecture is a bit of a misnomer, nowadays.
No more so than i386:-). There is some irony in the fact that the leading supplier of PC CPUs did not get a feasible 64bit architecture together, but that is a different issue. So for me, it will always be AMD64.
> I have a winmodem supported under 32 bit linux but not 64
Winmodems blow - and that is just one of the reasons.
> google gears has been out for HOW long now with no 64 bit release
True, but you can always install a 32bit version of firefox, and it works. That's what Windows does, BTW.
> I've even run into 3D java programs with 32 bit linux support but no 64 bit.
Java has been incredibly late to the 64bit party - even Flash was faster, and it worked fine with ndiswrapper before. How they can still claim "run anywhere" is beyond me.
> As for 64bit distros it is still hard to find a real use for them. At least in my environment.
That is odd, because I am running it on a bog standard Athlon X2 4800 with 2*2GB of RAM. It may not be essential, but it gives me access to the last 0.5 GB of RAM, and slightly faster execution of most programs. Is that not a good use?
Talking standard DDR2, yes. But what about DDR1, or DDR3?
Next issue: the 3GB limit. If Windows uses 1 now, that only leaves 2 for the applications. If you were using 2 GB before, you would install 4 GB, and lose another GB because of the limit.
Corporations want to use older PCs, too. Getting an engineer out to replace 1 GB with 2 GB of DDR1 can be quite expensive.
> Since the dollar amount truly is not significant to alter intel's behavior this just becomes and embedded tax.
I don't know. It is quite a lot of money, and I am sure it hurts in the balance sheet. Sure, they also paid bribe money ("discounts") for the anti-competitive behavior, but that would be in the tens of millions, I guess. The gain may have been hundreds of millions, but probably not worth it in the end.
So I think this is fine. Intel showed a text book case of anti-competitive behavior, and they got a text book example of an anti-trust investigation, resulting in a text book fine that hurts. Seems fair to me:-)
> The vast majority of those start booting in text mode.
That is not even a point, that is just a fact. The point is whether you want your PC to start booting in text mode. I can see no reason why, and I certainly see no reason why you would want to spend silicon on it.
The BIOS is a terrible bunch of legacy code that should be eliminated rather sooner than later. Linux switches into a graphics mode as soon as possible, and from there on it is pretty independent of the BIOS.
> I'd place Vista 64-bit as having a compatibility between 99%-99.9%
You must be joking. IÂtried Windows 7 Beta in 64bit, and I have a surprising amount of applications with 16bit installers around. Yes, they are a few years older, but they would still do the job, and still work, if it was not for the installer.
I know that Microsoft is doing some fudging by automatically replacing the installer binary with a 32bit version in recognised cases. But obviously that did not work for some applications, or I would not report this problem.
From this perspective, including XPM is probably not a bad idea. Although I fail to see why "the seamless integration between Windows 7 and XP proved confusing". Either it is seamless, or it confusing, hm?
If you start with a clean slate, why would you bother with VGA emulation? Could you not just go for a sane solution, such as a flat frame buffer? Any other architecture does that, why does the PC architecture have to drag along legacy modes such as CGA with a number of 4 colors palettes?
A flat 8bit RGB buffer would make a lot more sense, and I am sure Linux would boot faster on it, too.
> If this was just a program on Windows, everyone would be pointing out how incredibly insecure Windows is to even allow this behavior.
Good point. Now that "the web is the OS", maybe we have to think about additional security measures such as compartmentisation within the browser. But it is hard to see how you can separate plugins and still have them work together on rendering the page.
Slashdot Mirror
> "Make the text on your screen larger or smaller"
You are not running many applications, I guess? Dreamweaver becomes useless with fonts set on large, as is our corporate update system, or many applications written in VB. Usually I can somehow get it to work, but for now Dreamweaver forces me to stay with small fonts.
I can see that they changed a lot. Especially the kernel video mode setting is a big change, although arguable long overdue.
It is better to have these problems now than with the next LTS version.
> RoHS ...
> BGA packages
Yes, that is the lethal combination: a complicated process (especially if you do without packaging and do flip chip) and a new material.
But what can you do? Environmentalists have complaint for ages that less than half of all electronic devices are disposed of properly (and even those are often melted down in China over an open fire to recover the lead!), while most end up in the bin. If they are incinerated, the lead is distributed in the environment, slowly poisoning the whole area.
That being said, there are quite good replacements. While not identical in all properties, a good lead free solder can certainly sustain typical use (without fracturing or electromigration), if you have your process set up correctly. Because the process was the real problem.
In many cases, people simply don't care what's being sent to Microsoft, as there's a sense of implicit trust in large corporations. I have no idea where this trust comes from, but it's definitely real.
And rightly so. If you don't trust Microsoft, you should not run their software - not WGA, and not Windows. Once you run Windows, you may just as well run WGA - they own you anyway.
> No, using an SSN(or something like it) is necessary because you need some number which identifies someone uniquely so that you can cross match records and all the things a PK does in a database.
Funny statement - because here in Europe, the SSN is only every to be used by the employer, and businesses still work fine. Name plus date of birth works quite well, but as the SSN, it is not 100% reliable.
> and I verified that their system is so old and antiquated, that they cannot put anything in the computer without it.
Does that mean you cannot get water without a SSN? What about foreigners? They are legitimate scenarios where you would not have a SSN. Does that make you an un-person?
Sounds like 1984, doesn't it? Funny, it is coming true on both sides of the pond in different ways. On one side, it is the government doing the snooping, on the other the companies.
I have seen this before - what is it about saying 0.02 cent when you mean 2 cent or 0.02 dollar? Does not make the least bit of sense to me - although I can at least see why you would do it there (0 dollor and 2 cent...). But with fractional cent that does not explain it, so why do people do it?
> in the UK you see a lot of both
Which can be kind of funny. You would think that milk is pretty much a commodity product, so how do you fill a complete aisle with it? Easy: you have 1 pint (sorry: 568 ml), 1 liter, 2 pint (blabla ml), 2 liter, 4 pint, 6 pint. Everything in 0, 2 and 4% fat, some with 1% fat, some organic, some local, some filtered, some UHT. And bingo: you have successfully differentiated a simple product to fill many shelves. Bless the imperial system!
> Good news for VIA
There is no good news for VIA. The main problem with VIA is VIA - most of the chips a full of bugs and generally suck. Anyone can have a bad day, but consistently bad quality is not something that the market will tolerate indefinitely.
> How are you going to develop any antibodies if you never are exposed to this stuff?
Good point. The way it looks now, the flu is going round next winter. So everybody (or maybe 90%) will get it eventually. Having it during the summer may actually be better than during the winter...
This would also explain the ago profile: if a similar flu was going on 40 years ago, everybody above the ago of 40 would have some level of immunity.
Exactly my thought. Just make your games so compelling that nobody wants to sell it, then there is no second hand market. Simple! Next problem please.
Nor is fsync() what you want - you want an atomic file replace operation. Rename is atomic, and it used to work, but with delayed allocation it may happen before the file is written. So what you want is an atomic file replace operation that does not happen before the data write. Rename may not be the best option for that - a special file write mode may actually be better. In any case the issue affects both sides - kernel and user space.
> or that they don't visit the top several hundred most popular web sites
Did they ever check that these sites are actually Linux accessible? If not, they would hardly register any Linux connections even if the world was being taken over by Linux...
I am just saying that because some IT sites come to a very different conclusion - maybe Linux users are more selective about their information sources, and avoid the mainstream. Somehow that would make sense :-)
I think the point of the study is that the market share is still small, probably in the single digits.
> It's not that FPS drops to half, like you'd expect. ... It drops disproportionately more when dual-boxing on the same computer.
That could also be caused by cache contention. After all, most consumer systems have preciously little cache, and are not at all designed for multi-tasking. For this workload, a server CPU may perform much better...
> because Slashdot eats my unicode for breakfast.
In theory, the accent should get mapped to ISO8859-1 - no need for unicode. Let' see: é.
And for the OP: forget it. It is possible with certain OS if you have low demands, but I think 3D acceleration never works on both monitors. Getting a slightly oldish PC and adding a cheap mid range graphics card would be a better approach.
> The AMD64 architecture is a bit of a misnomer, nowadays.
No more so than i386 :-). There is some irony in the fact that the leading supplier of PC CPUs did not get a feasible 64bit architecture together, but that is a different issue. So for me, it will always be AMD64.
> I have a winmodem supported under 32 bit linux but not 64
Winmodems blow - and that is just one of the reasons.
> google gears has been out for HOW long now with no 64 bit release
True, but you can always install a 32bit version of firefox, and it works. That's what Windows does, BTW.
> I've even run into 3D java programs with 32 bit linux support but no 64 bit.
Java has been incredibly late to the 64bit party - even Flash was faster, and it worked fine with ndiswrapper before. How they can still claim "run anywhere" is beyond me.
> As for 64bit distros it is still hard to find a real use for them. At least in my environment.
That is odd, because I am running it on a bog standard Athlon X2 4800 with 2*2GB of RAM. It may not be essential, but it gives me access to the last 0.5 GB of RAM, and slightly faster execution of most programs. Is that not a good use?
Is LaTeX 3 out yet? Lack of support for hyperlinks is annoying.
Waiting for LaTeX 3 is certainly optimistic. I think they are still working out the syntax of the language...
But hyperlinks are working, and working well, for quite a while now.
> What's 1GB of RAM these days? $12?
Talking standard DDR2, yes. But what about DDR1, or DDR3?
Next issue: the 3GB limit. If Windows uses 1 now, that only leaves 2 for the applications. If you were using 2 GB before, you would install 4 GB, and lose another GB because of the limit.
Corporations want to use older PCs, too. Getting an engineer out to replace 1 GB with 2 GB of DDR1 can be quite expensive.
> Since the dollar amount truly is not significant to alter intel's behavior this just becomes and embedded tax.
I don't know. It is quite a lot of money, and I am sure it hurts in the balance sheet. Sure, they also paid bribe money ("discounts") for the anti-competitive behavior, but that would be in the tens of millions, I guess. The gain may have been hundreds of millions, but probably not worth it in the end.
So I think this is fine. Intel showed a text book case of anti-competitive behavior, and they got a text book example of an anti-trust investigation, resulting in a text book fine that hurts. Seems fair to me :-)
> Again, you seem to be missing my point. ...
> The vast majority of those start booting in text mode.
That is not even a point, that is just a fact. The point is whether you want your PC to start booting in text mode. I can see no reason why, and I certainly see no reason why you would want to spend silicon on it.
The BIOS is a terrible bunch of legacy code that should be eliminated rather sooner than later. Linux switches into a graphics mode as soon as possible, and from there on it is pretty independent of the BIOS.
> I'd place Vista 64-bit as having a compatibility between 99%-99.9%
You must be joking. IÂtried Windows 7 Beta in 64bit, and I have a surprising amount of applications with 16bit installers around. Yes, they are a few years older, but they would still do the job, and still work, if it was not for the installer.
I know that Microsoft is doing some fudging by automatically replacing the installer binary with a 32bit version in recognised cases. But obviously that did not work for some applications, or I would not report this problem.
From this perspective, including XPM is probably not a bad idea. Although I fail to see why "the seamless integration between Windows 7 and XP proved confusing". Either it is seamless, or it confusing, hm?
Cool, yes. Useful - hardly.
If you start with a clean slate, why would you bother with VGA emulation? Could you not just go for a sane solution, such as a flat frame buffer? Any other architecture does that, why does the PC architecture have to drag along legacy modes such as CGA with a number of 4 colors palettes?
A flat 8bit RGB buffer would make a lot more sense, and I am sure Linux would boot faster on it, too.
> If this was just a program on Windows, everyone would be pointing out how incredibly insecure Windows is to even allow this behavior.
Good point. Now that "the web is the OS", maybe we have to think about additional security measures such as compartmentisation within the browser. But it is hard to see how you can separate plugins and still have them work together on rendering the page.