This is going to sound like a flame but its not intended as such!
Frankly, I'm pretty scared of it. I found a couple lock bugs in it the other day. I posted workarounds which kept the thing from randomly killing processes. The patches didn't get accepted because I'm not one of the worthy 10 kernel 'gods'. The bug is still there so not only did they reject the workaround they didn't do anything else to fix it. Yet they take bugs from the worthy 10 which often times just make the problems worse. The bugs I discovered are 100x as bad in the releases >2.4.6 because of a schedule() change in one of the vmm code paths.
Its really beginning to get on my nerves. I guess I'm going to switch to some OS other than linux where they actually pay attention to their users/maintainers. What's the point of 10k kernel hackers if they ignore 9.99k of them? How about another example? A few weeks ago someone posted a >3x speed improvement to one of the vmm related paths. This patch was extremely conservative and couldn't have possibly broken anything. Did it get accepted? NO! A couple weeks later someone ese posted a patch that was almost exactly the same thing. Did it get accepted? No. The code is obviously right and a hell of a lot faster but it just can't get changed because the main Linux kernel maintainers don't read the LKML and filter all mail from people they don't know.
Combine this with the standard Linux attitude of 'it can't happen here, we are better than that' and you will soon discover that Linux is about to have some pretty serious problems. The main kernel hackers are getting in over their heads. You can tell this because of the huge bug counts in systems that should be really robust and stable. You can't run a stable system when your vmm has bugs. Then there are the stupid decisions. Instead of fixing the architectural problems in linux that cause the machine to get into states that are unrecoverable they hack in changes like the OOM (out of memory) killer which kills processes when the machine runs out of RAM. For years OS experts have pointed out serious problems in linux that have been ignored because of the 'can't happen here' philosophy. Linus the fearless leader still sounds like an idiot when general OS and software quality topics come up. For instance, the whole kernel debugger issue (linux shouldn't have a kernel debugger, but Linus admits to using one himself), performance related to coding style issues (maintainability be dammed as long as the code is faster combined with a focus on making the system faster by using obscure compiler tweaks rather than writing clean code and using better algorithms), and the fact that there still isn't a 'real' kernel regression test. Every notable piece of software in the world has a regression/test program that is run to test the SW for weird operations and machine stress testing. I've worked for companies that write OS's whenever a bug was found/fixed there was pressure to create a test in a regression/test base that tested for that condition and assured that the bug fix really worked. This group of tests was combined into a huge batch that got run before release to assure that old bugs were still fixed. This sounds silly but it found a lot of problems. Sometimes these problems were 'new' bugs found because the system was stressed in a way the author of the new bug didn't think of.
Its a little more than tool tips. Its more like if your sitting in your word processor without a document open the stupid paper clip popping up and saying "would you like to look at an existing document or create a new one".
However "My Documents" is a good indication that MicroSoft is not studying things much either. In fact "My Documents" is ON one of the disks. Removal of the C: drive will cause "My Documents" to become empty, which would be somewhat confusing to the user who can clearly see from that display that they are NOT on the C: drive!
I'm not sure I understand. "My Documents" has to be somewhere on one of the disks unless you have a dedicated disk. It makes a lot of sense that it is presented to the user as being at the top level in the machine structure. It gives them a quick place to save their work. It helps to solve the problem that newbies tend to save all their work in the root directory. In reality its just an alias to the location pointed to by HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\WindowsNT\CurrentVersion\P rofileList, which is pulled/mangled into the user profile at creation/login ) the profile root for each user. Usually this points at 'primaryroot(c:)/Documents and Settings/userid/My Documents' but it can be changed in the user manager. Personally I have a redundant software mirror setup as my second drive and i've moved all my important stuff to the mirror on 'D:' including my profiles. For networks with a domain/active directory the user profiles can exist on a server somewhere. I think the new version of samba supports a lot of the PDC functionality needed for NT4 support and therefore you could make the "My Documents" directory point at the servers/home/userid.
If someone uses your directory scheme then all the stuff in / needs to be moved to something like/System Folder (sounds like the mac hu?) because as it is you will see/My Documents and/usr (along with/sbin and all the other 'crap' sure to confuse the poor newbie) at the same level. What might make more sense it to leave/home/userid as the home directory and provide links to '/mnt/Floppy' as '/home/userid/3 1/2 Floppy' as well as some premade directories like/home/userid/My Documents and default/home/userid as the desktop. Then you have to hide the fact that/home/userid isn't the root of the machine and hide the '..' all the paths should pop up as 'My Documents' or '3 1/2 Floppy' with the ~/ always hidden. You could provide a.. that only goes to '/home' incase someone wants to look at other users files.
I've messed with that and have them both set to the same scan freq independent of res. Right now I'm running them both at 70Hz. The higher refresh rates put more stress on the ramdac amps, I haven't put it on an O scope but I suspect that much over 1280@70 Hz the NVIDIA gets a little 'noisy' and has a harder time driving a clean signal. NVIDIA sells these cards for the gamer market, the focus is probably at max 3D speed at lower res and the video signal drivers are one area where corners get cut. I should run both cards at the same res/refresh and put them on the O-scope and capture what the signal looks like with my monitors loading the drivers. While im at it I should also check to see how exactly matrox is driving two video signals with the same ramdac.
At work i'm running a G400Max at 2048x1536 side by side (on my dual/triple head, since the matrox can accually handle 2 heads at lower res) with a competitors card outputing to identical monitors. The Matrox looks sharper at 2k than the NVIDIA at 1600x1200. I swapped the monitor cables, the monitors etc. I didn't believe that there could be that much diffrence but there is. The moral of this little story is that 2D image quality does matter since I spend more time at work looking at these two heads in two days then I spend looking at 3d games at home in a week.
You just missed the point of this whole article. When someone is new to computers the idea that the zip disk in their hand shows up at the 'top' of the drive hierarchy right next to the CDROM just makes more sense than having it show up somewhere in a big global file system. Look at the save dialog in 2k. At the top is the desktop, followed by My Documents, My computer (with an open drive list, with drives labeled like '3 1/2 Floppy (A:)' the A: is left around for previous users I suspect it will disappear in some version soon. ), and My network places. Where do you think most people new to computers save their documents? Don't fall into the trap and believe that M$ doesn't do usability studies. They do a lot of usability studies. That is why they are always changing stuff in the UI.
Every time a new version of windows comes out I find the new UI changes annoying, after using a windows version for a few weeks the new changes make sense and I wonder why it took them so long. Personalized Menus got on my nerves for about 4 months. Now I love them. M$ is much more careful with this stuff. If GNOME implemented personalized menu's they would forget the most important usability feature. The most important feature in the personalized menu's is the fact that if a user is looking 'lost' then the menu's open all the way up. Ever watch your grandmother use a computer? When she gets confused she sort of 'locks up' and moves really slow. When this happens a little bubble opens and its says "where are my programs...." explaining what happened to your programs, points at the little '>>' and the menu's pop all the way open. Test it out! You have to act like your grandma for it to work though. I use a computer like I'm on speed so I normally never see this crap but its there, if i slow down for a second it appears. I like linux, but I use a windows box to do linux development because the UI and the tools are much better.
The real problem I see is that the quality 'degrades' faster with these new CD's than the old ones because the error correction has a harder time dealing with scratches and the like.
Whhoo, 19.2 on CDPD!!! Someone must be sitting right under the cell tower. Having used it extensivly I think 9600 or 14.4 would be a more realistic estimate. Silly modem manufactures, they might as well start labeling their products like M$. This here is your CDPD '96 modem. Those data rates are completely misleading, by the time you account for packet loose due to noise etc.
Here in Austin about 2 years ago there was a drink called a blaster, 1/2 can red bull and a shot of Jagermeister, that was pretty popular. Having had a few myself I can tell you that the combination is pretty powerful. One or two an hour can keep you bouncing off the walls for hours. The mix is critical, if you have to much alcohol then it wins and you just end up being an awake drunk which means that you seem to burn out fast. To much red bull and you end up getting 'twitchy'. I never really overindulged with them but I've seen a few people who drank them all night long. About the only side affects I ever saw, caused people to act like drunk coke (not the cola) addicts. I'm sure the combination is bad but the ingredients will kill you by themselves. Alcohol will kill you pretty easily, if not directly from overdose or overuse than indirectly from falling off decks, getting run over or driving. Caffeine will also kill you from overdose.
Its not all that unsafe to eat. If none of it gets absorbed then you might get cancer in 50 years. Of course you might get cancer in 40 years anyway because of the air quality in your city. Some of the products of burning coal in similar concentrations would kill you a lot quicker. That stuff gets spewed into the atmosphere where you breath it on a daily basis. The nuclear waste stays safely concentrated (probably) hundreds of miles away from where you live.
What the author apparently fails to grasp is the only thing which matters is wall clock time. P4 may have a 20 cycle mispredict penalty, higher than G4e's penalty of 7, but it also at about triple the clock speed. 20 cycles @ 1.8 GHz is less than 7 cycles @ 600 MHz.
Yah, what do you want from an 'armchair architect'? Not only that but what all these idiots seem to misunderstand is the cases where that trace cache keeps the whole pipe from flushing. So instead of a full flush it only has to flush from the trace cache down. Now you only need roughly twice the clock rate to match branch mispredicts. Combine that with an incredibly advanced branch predictor, impressive cache prefetch system and a processor designed to scale like mad and you have a processor that will destroy any other 32-bit processor in raw performance for general computing. I love AMD, and the 'RISC' arch's but frankly they are all looking a little weak. In another two shrinks Intel will again have extra die space to play around with to add a bunch of features/optimizations back in that they cut out for this version. At that time i expect an increase of 20%+ at the same clock. The P6 matched the newer chips, the P4 will pass them like they are standing still if intel doesn't screw up to badly.
A couple of years ago I was part of the IBM distributed.net team. I wasn't even working at IBM when I recieved this message.
Folks, if you're no longer part of the IBM distributed.net team,please ignore this.
Folks, my manager just told me some disturbing news and asked me to take some actions so she wouldn't have to reprimand/fire me. Apparently an employee in Raleigh was just fired, and as part of the investigation by an IBM attorney the fact that the employee was involved in running the distributed.net client was discovered. Apparently because the team is NOT approved by IBM management (it never has been, in case you didn't know) and distributed.net offers a cash prize, employees are NOT allowed to use IBM equipment to participate in distributed.net.
Since my name is listed as the team contact, I was asked to do some things. Basically, remove IBM's name from the team information. I've done that. So the team is now called "Team #817" until someone comes up with something better. BTW, if anyone else wants to be the team contact, let me know.
As individuals, I suggest you cover your own butts on this one. If you're using IBM equipment, please don't tell me, just stop.
Traditional BS from a large corp. Idiots, they will pay millions on advertising but the free advertising of being one of the better ranked Distributed.net teams isn't worth violating a twisted interpretation of the 'ethics' policy.
I just don't pay for garbage web content. Sites like slashdot are just a waste of bandwith for the most part. They rarely provide any new and/or useful information.
On the flip side I do pay for access to assorted electronics databook and publication sites as well as buy a lot of books. For instance the IEEE page is worth the money. The Intel Developer site is worth paying for as is the National Semiconductor site but they are free because these sites make their money selling the product. The techical documentation is an aid in use.
There is another type of site that makes money on the internet. Its the type of site that provides a REAL service. These are sites like REALTOR.com, bill payer services, job search services, dating services, etc that work well on the web.
The problem with the web is this pay for bandwith scheme that is kicking everyone in the butt. Take internet radio for instance. You could be part of a band co-op and try to put your music on the web. If your site becomes popular though you could potentially be paying a whole crapload to serve the content. With IPv6 you only pay for a miniscule amount of bandwith required to send a single stream which gets broken up by the multicast routers. Sites like slashdot which are dynamic couldn't benifit from this because they try to tailor their views for every user. A nice idea, but completly useless when you compare the cost of running a site that doesn't provide a useful service and the tons of bandwith required to give ever user a unique experience. Slashdot could provide 99% of the user experience with just static content that could be cached in web caches.
While this may be possible, it sure isn't easy. With the discount card system they scan your card (your identity) with your groceries and a computer can correllate everything. With a check they would have to at least do the footwork manually, and even then they wouldn't have your consent to do it.
I don't know about the how legal it is for them to track me based on my checks (I suspect there arn't any laws stopping them), but it sure isn't hard for them to do it. When I pay for things with checks they take my drivers licence, and type the licence number into the computer to check to see if i have bounced any checks there. Then they usually they run it though one of the automatic check verification services which of course can (and probably is) track all my check purchases.
Either way cash is the way to go, but it gets harder/more inconvient every day to use cash.
..I certainly don't use those grocery store discount keyrings that track my purchases and send me junk-mail based on it. I pay the higher price for the food and am glad to retain what little privacy I have left.
There is another solution to these grocery savings cards, keychains etc. Use another grocery store! Where I live there are 4 grocery store chains and a few assorted small stores, farmers markets and co-ops. The farmers market and the co-op accually have much better prices than any of the chains to begin with. The farmers market also has much better quality food. So its cheaper and better, its just not as convenient. The savings cards don't really save you any money when you compare the 'saved' version with the competitor. They only save you money when you are shopping at that store. I don't shop at Randalls because of the 'savings card' which just appears to be a method for tracking purchases (why not just give me the better price?). On the other hand I do pay for a lot of my groceries using checks which allow them the same tracking ability.
I don't know what study you have been looking at but in the US most accidents occur under 15MPH! There is a nice paper here about the number of fatal traffic accidents in Montana and the the speed limits active at the time. Most traffic accidents also occur at intersections and parking lots. The situation defines the accident more than the speed. This makes a lot of sense when you really think about it. Rather than some bogus claims about speed vs accident rates. In fact what your claiming is accually opposite of the real truth because at these intersection accidents there was usually a pretty significant speed diffrence.
You should take a closer look at those studies your thinking about because I suspect that they only measured small diffrences in speeds around the median speed. For example they might have taken traffic at 50 mph and then checked 5 mph faster and 5mph slower. If your doing 30 in a 50 your pretty much an obstruction rather than part of the traffic flow. You can tell if you are an obstruction because cars comming up behind you will be comming up on you faster than they can merge into another lane. The result will be 1 or more cars following you waiting for a break in traffic so that they can pass.
Lets see, of the 4 accidents my mother has been in (3 rear ends while sitting at a light, and 1 related to a driver not paying attention and running a light) all were at an intersection, 3 involving my mothers vehicle while it was not moving, and one involving it while it was doing less than 5mph. In the case of the three rear ends the cars were under 15mph, in the case of the run light the other auto was doing about 20mph. In my case I have been involved in 4 accidents, two while my car was parked and someone hit it in a parking lot, 1 where where I backed into someone in a parking lot and one where I was tee boned at an intersection of two streets with stop signs.
Sure 'speed kills' but the truth is that its not really 'speed' but accidents and therefore rapid deceleration at speed. The accident rates are much higher in situations where the speeds are significantly lower. The equation is far more complicated than greater speed equals more death. Safe roads are a combination of proper design, skilled drivers and appropriate speeds. Harder driving tests which are more skill oriented than 'law' oriented would do more to save lives and lower accident rates than lowering the speed limits.
I can also recall two cases of 'near misses' which occurred on higher speed roads (50mph or so) one was due to a slow car on a limited sight road in the slow lane causing a driver to dangerously evade into my lane which caused me to have to evade into on coming traffic. The second was a recent wreck in a limited sight situation which was stopped in the slow lane causing me to have to evade quite dangerously. The moral of the story is that the slower drivers where causing massive danger for the people who were going the speed limit. It was all a choice of hitting the slower moving vehicle or possibly hitting a faster moving one. In both cases the gamble paid off, I avoided an accident. The results could have been much different. If everyone is traveling the same speed in the same direction than the danger is significantly less. HItting a guard rail at 50MPH is much safer than hitting an on coming truck doing 30MPH when you are doing 30MPH. Its the relative speeds (and crunchability of the target). 35 on an unsafe road is much more dangerous than 80 on a big wide divided highway.
This history site is pretty good. I too dumped apple for a PC in the early 90's because frankly the PC was closer to the ideals of the Apple I/][ than the mac was. It sill pains me to think that if the PHB's at Apple had recognized the market force that was the Apple ][ and focused on it rather than constantly trying to 1 up it then we would all probably be using Apple ][ derivatives rather than PC clones. Again and again apple tried to change the focus of the company from a hobbyist / home (with a business following) to a business computer. First there was the Apple/// then there was the Lisa then there was the Mac. For 4+ years apple spun its wheels trying to sell everyone new technology while crippling the Apple ][. Apple basically stopped marketing the Apple ][ by 1980 yet it still continued to sell like mad well into the '80s. In fact the site
above has this wonderful quote from the IIc release to the effect that the original Apple ][ sold 50k units in 2.5 years, the PC sold 50k units in 8 months, the mac did the same in 74 days and the IIc took orders for 50k in the first 7 hours. The margins were way higher than the Mac and well into the 1980's the II kept Apple alive from quarter to quarter so they could pour craps loads of R&N into new mac's that would have lukewarm sales.. What was so frustrating for Apple fans is that Apple (unlike every other company, Intel continues to make x86's even though they want to make IA64's(or i860's in the past), MS continues to make windows 9x's even though they want to sell NT, etc) refused to hedge their bets and make decent Apple ][ systems to at least maintain their outrageous market share. Instead they only resurrected new II's when the company needed more money. There was a saying to this effect in the 80's. Something along the lines that when the mac R&D was broke and apple didn't have any money they released a new II to stay alive for a couple more years. Meanwhile PC's ate into the market share one huge bite at a time until apple was left where they are today. A minority player with a single digit market share.
The author of this article failed to mention the only processor in common use that is course grained. That processor would be the POWER/PPC compatible RS64 IV which is used in the iSeries and pSeries(AS400 and RS6000) from IBM. There is a nice write up on its threading capabilities and the performance results here.
The first rule of multithreaded programming is the same as the first rule of optimization: Don't do it
I don't know if this a troll, So I'm responding. Obviously you have never talked to anyone who has written an application designed to run on a machine with more than 1 processor. Sure you can make a bunch of simplifications if your application is single threaded. You don't have to worry about the whole concept of resource contention. On the other hand if you want your application to scale at all then you have to have some form of multithreading or multiprocessing. Running your application as multiple processes you basically have 2 design decisions, do I write my multiprocess application like it was threaded and share big chunks of memory between the processes or do I make a bunch of producers and consumers to solve the problem. In the first case you might just as well use threads because they usually will be faster and the code will be simpler. In the second case you end up generating massive amounts of IPC and complicated queuing systems with fairness algorithms to guarantee that longer jobs can be interrupted by shorter jobs and higher priority jobs finish sooner. The end result of the second choice is far more complicated and usually a LOT slower because of all of the overhead due to the IPC mechanisms. Compare that to the easy to grasp idea that each 'job' runs and locks the data it needs to access before it touches it and unlocks it when its done.
As a beginning programmer you shouldn't try any complicated locking schemes designed to make your code scale you should just make a couple big global locks and pray you don't make any critical mistakes in the design that preclude good MP scalablilty (I call that the Linux solution, because its the way the SMP problem was solved, one big global kernel lock, later versions make it more fine grained) or ask someone more experienced to design and write the parts that require complicated locking schemes.
Optimization also has a purpose, do you think quake would have run as well as it did on an old Pentium without a couple routines being hand optimized?
Of course this whole thread has nothing to do with CPU threading!
Ah.... I have a 60GB hd in a 486... Along with a couple of other large harddrives. Its quite functional. Runs linux and usually has an uptime of over a year. It makes a wonderful file server, print server and X10 controller. I can't imagine why I would need more. The 486 actually has the advantage of only pulling 3 watts of power and since It serves files faster than the internet connection its connected to, and fast enough to stream 4+ channels of mp3's on the local lan what is the point of a faster box?
Oh, and I tend to be one of those people, who pulls out the physics textbook, a couple electronics textbooks and a 4 channel 200mhz O-scope and a frequency generator when I get into a discussion with a stupid idiot who insists that hissing popping LP's sound better when played through a humming, clipping, tube amp than the $150 walmart boom box. I'm an anti-audiophile even though I enjoy good sound reproduction. When it comes to sound reproduction its nearly impossible to beat a cheap little Sony diskman and a pair of $150 Sennheiser headphones.
Thats not really a big deal! There are cars out there that do that. I had an old 4 banger 2.3L mustang with a big tank. That car got around 30mpg, and had about a 15 gallon tank. On long highway trips it sometimes got over 500 miles between stops. 6 hours between stops was always a good number to try for, if the people in the car could stand it.
Disclaimer: (everyone else has one so I figured I should too) I am not a Mac fan, but I do own an old Mac that keeps all my new PeeCee's company.
I've been watching Apple attempts at releasing a new OS for a few years now. I even played around with a copy of raphosdy x86. OS/X appears to be the best thing since sliced bread in the desktop/small server area. I played around with it the other day for a little while and was very impressed. Sweet, sweet sweet. There were a lot of things that impressed me. Now if M$ could come out with something as sweet. On the other hand i did find it to be a bit slow (or maybe it as just the crappy mac HW). I would love to see apple release a copy for x86. If they did then I would be the first in line to buy a copy and second in line to hack it up to support 2 mouse buttons and a wheel!
PS: I think that wheel is M$'s only real inovation and its a piece of HW!
Lineage claims numbers like that for Korea. Here in the US though. They have 2 servers, after they went pay they lost atleast 1/3 of the players. Now at any given time there probably are only about 800+400 players online. Those numbers are a rough gestimate at what the aveage is from the last few days worth of '/who' commands while I was playing.
Slashdot Mirror
It is predictable to anyone who is knowledgeable about these things, that 666 should appear at position 2440, since the world will end in that year!
lol
This is going to sound like a flame but its not intended as such!
Frankly, I'm pretty scared of it. I found a couple lock bugs in it the other day. I posted workarounds which kept the thing from randomly killing processes. The patches didn't get accepted because I'm not one of the worthy 10 kernel 'gods'. The bug is still there so not only did they reject the workaround they didn't do anything else to fix it. Yet they take bugs from the worthy 10 which often times just make the problems worse. The bugs I discovered are 100x as bad in the releases >2.4.6 because of a schedule() change in one of the vmm code paths.
Its really beginning to get on my nerves. I guess I'm going to switch to some OS other than linux where they actually pay attention to their users/maintainers. What's the point of 10k kernel hackers if they ignore 9.99k of them? How about another example? A few weeks ago someone posted a >3x speed improvement to one of the vmm related paths. This patch was extremely conservative and couldn't have possibly broken anything. Did it get accepted? NO! A couple weeks later someone ese posted a patch that was almost exactly the same thing. Did it get accepted? No. The code is obviously right and a hell of a lot faster but it just can't get changed because the main Linux kernel maintainers don't read the LKML and filter all mail from people they don't know.
Combine this with the standard Linux attitude of 'it can't happen here, we are better than that' and you will soon discover that Linux is about to have some pretty serious problems. The main kernel hackers are getting in over their heads. You can tell this because of the huge bug counts in systems that should be really robust and stable. You can't run a stable system when your vmm has bugs. Then there are the stupid decisions. Instead of fixing the architectural problems in linux that cause the machine to get into states that are unrecoverable they hack in changes like the OOM (out of memory) killer which kills processes when the machine runs out of RAM. For years OS experts have pointed out serious problems in linux that have been ignored because of the 'can't happen here' philosophy. Linus the fearless leader still sounds like an idiot when general OS and software quality topics come up. For instance, the whole kernel debugger issue (linux shouldn't have a kernel debugger, but Linus admits to using one himself), performance related to coding style issues (maintainability be dammed as long as the code is faster combined with a focus on making the system faster by using obscure compiler tweaks rather than writing clean code and using better algorithms), and the fact that there still isn't a 'real' kernel regression test. Every notable piece of software in the world has a regression/test program that is run to test the SW for weird operations and machine stress testing. I've worked for companies that write OS's whenever a bug was found/fixed there was pressure to create a test in a regression/test base that tested for that condition and assured that the bug fix really worked. This group of tests was combined into a huge batch that got run before release to assure that old bugs were still fixed. This sounds silly but it found a lot of problems. Sometimes these problems were 'new' bugs found because the system was stressed in a way the author of the new bug didn't think of.
Its a little more than tool tips. Its more like if your sitting in your word processor without a document open the stupid paper clip popping up and saying "would you like to look at an existing document or create a new one".
I'm not sure I understand. "My Documents" has to be somewhere on one of the disks unless you have a dedicated disk. It makes a lot of sense that it is presented to the user as being at the top level in the machine structure. It gives them a quick place to save their work. It helps to solve the problem that newbies tend to save all their work in the root directory. In reality its just an alias to the location pointed to by HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\WindowsNT\CurrentVersion\P rofileList, which is pulled/mangled into the user profile at creation/login ) the profile root for each user. Usually this points at 'primaryroot(c:)/Documents and Settings/userid/My Documents' but it can be changed in the user manager. Personally I have a redundant software mirror setup as my second drive and i've moved all my important stuff to the mirror on 'D:' including my profiles. For networks with a domain/active directory the user profiles can exist on a server somewhere. I think the new version of samba supports a lot of the PDC functionality needed for NT4 support and therefore you could make the "My Documents" directory point at the servers /home/userid.
If someone uses your directory scheme then all the stuff in / needs to be moved to something like /System Folder (sounds like the mac hu?) because as it is you will see /My Documents and /usr (along with /sbin and all the other 'crap' sure to confuse the poor newbie) at the same level. What might make more sense it to leave /home/userid as the home directory and provide links to '/mnt/Floppy' as '/home/userid/3 1/2 Floppy' as well as some premade directories like /home/userid/My Documents and default /home/userid as the desktop. Then you have to hide the fact that /home/userid isn't the root of the machine and hide the '..' all the paths should pop up as 'My Documents' or '3 1/2 Floppy' with the ~/ always hidden. You could provide a .. that only goes to '/home' incase someone wants to look at other users files.
I've messed with that and have them both set to the same scan freq independent of res. Right now I'm running them both at 70Hz. The higher refresh rates put more stress on the ramdac amps, I haven't put it on an O scope but I suspect that much over 1280@70 Hz the NVIDIA gets a little 'noisy' and has a harder time driving a clean signal. NVIDIA sells these cards for the gamer market, the focus is probably at max 3D speed at lower res and the video signal drivers are one area where corners get cut. I should run both cards at the same res/refresh and put them on the O-scope and capture what the signal looks like with my monitors loading the drivers. While im at it I should also check to see how exactly matrox is driving two video signals with the same ramdac.
At work i'm running a G400Max at 2048x1536 side by side (on my dual/triple head, since the matrox can accually handle 2 heads at lower res) with a competitors card outputing to identical monitors. The Matrox looks sharper at 2k than the NVIDIA at 1600x1200. I swapped the monitor cables, the monitors etc. I didn't believe that there could be that much diffrence but there is. The moral of this little story is that 2D image quality does matter since I spend more time at work looking at these two heads in two days then I spend looking at 3d games at home in a week.
You just missed the point of this whole article. When someone is new to computers the idea that the zip disk in their hand shows up at the 'top' of the drive hierarchy right next to the CDROM just makes more sense than having it show up somewhere in a big global file system. Look at the save dialog in 2k. At the top is the desktop, followed by My Documents, My computer (with an open drive list, with drives labeled like '3 1/2 Floppy (A:)' the A: is left around for previous users I suspect it will disappear in some version soon. ), and My network places. Where do you think most people new to computers save their documents? Don't fall into the trap and believe that M$ doesn't do usability studies. They do a lot of usability studies. That is why they are always changing stuff in the UI.
Every time a new version of windows comes out I find the new UI changes annoying, after using a windows version for a few weeks the new changes make sense and I wonder why it took them so long. Personalized Menus got on my nerves for about 4 months. Now I love them. M$ is much more careful with this stuff. If GNOME implemented personalized menu's they would forget the most important usability feature. The most important feature in the personalized menu's is the fact that if a user is looking 'lost' then the menu's open all the way up. Ever watch your grandmother use a computer? When she gets confused she sort of 'locks up' and moves really slow. When this happens a little bubble opens and its says "where are my programs...." explaining what happened to your programs, points at the little '>>' and the menu's pop all the way open. Test it out! You have to act like your grandma for it to work though. I use a computer like I'm on speed so I normally never see this crap but its there, if i slow down for a second it appears. I like linux, but I use a windows box to do linux development because the UI and the tools are much better.
Yup, turning off javascript is a good way to disable this crap too.
The real problem I see is that the quality 'degrades' faster with these new CD's than the old ones because the error correction has a harder time dealing with scratches and the like.
Whhoo, 19.2 on CDPD!!! Someone must be sitting right under the cell tower. Having used it extensivly I think 9600 or 14.4 would be a more realistic estimate. Silly modem manufactures, they might as well start labeling their products like M$. This here is your CDPD '96 modem. Those data rates are completely misleading, by the time you account for packet loose due to noise etc.
Here in Austin about 2 years ago there was a drink called a blaster, 1/2 can red bull and a shot of Jagermeister, that was pretty popular. Having had a few myself I can tell you that the combination is pretty powerful. One or two an hour can keep you bouncing off the walls for hours. The mix is critical, if you have to much alcohol then it wins and you just end up being an awake drunk which means that you seem to burn out fast. To much red bull and you end up getting 'twitchy'. I never really overindulged with them but I've seen a few people who drank them all night long. About the only side affects I ever saw, caused people to act like drunk coke (not the cola) addicts. I'm sure the combination is bad but the ingredients will kill you by themselves. Alcohol will kill you pretty easily, if not directly from overdose or overuse than indirectly from falling off decks, getting run over or driving. Caffeine will also kill you from overdose.
Its not all that unsafe to eat. If none of it gets absorbed then you might get cancer in 50 years. Of course you might get cancer in 40 years anyway because of the air quality in your city. Some of the products of burning coal in similar concentrations would kill you a lot quicker. That stuff gets spewed into the atmosphere where you breath it on a daily basis. The nuclear waste stays safely concentrated (probably) hundreds of miles away from where you live.
What the author apparently fails to grasp is the only thing which matters is wall clock time. P4 may have a 20 cycle mispredict penalty, higher than G4e's penalty of 7, but it also at about triple the clock speed. 20 cycles @ 1.8 GHz is less than 7 cycles @ 600 MHz.
Yah, what do you want from an 'armchair architect'? Not only that but what all these idiots seem to misunderstand is the cases where that trace cache keeps the whole pipe from flushing. So instead of a full flush it only has to flush from the trace cache down. Now you only need roughly twice the clock rate to match branch mispredicts. Combine that with an incredibly advanced branch predictor, impressive cache prefetch system and a processor designed to scale like mad and you have a processor that will destroy any other 32-bit processor in raw performance for general computing. I love AMD, and the 'RISC' arch's but frankly they are all looking a little weak. In another two shrinks Intel will again have extra die space to play around with to add a bunch of features/optimizations back in that they cut out for this version. At that time i expect an increase of 20%+ at the same clock. The P6 matched the newer chips, the P4 will pass them like they are standing still if intel doesn't screw up to badly.
A couple of years ago I was part of the IBM distributed.net team. I wasn't even working at IBM when I recieved this message.
Folks, if you're no longer part of the IBM distributed.net team,please ignore this.
Folks, my manager just told me some disturbing news and asked me to take some actions so she wouldn't have to reprimand/fire me. Apparently an employee in Raleigh was just fired, and as part of the investigation by an IBM attorney the fact that the employee was involved in running the distributed.net client was discovered. Apparently because the team is NOT approved by IBM management (it never has been, in case you didn't know) and distributed.net offers a cash prize, employees are NOT allowed to use IBM equipment to participate in distributed.net.
Since my name is listed as the team contact, I was asked to do some things. Basically, remove IBM's name from the team information. I've done that. So the team is now called "Team #817" until someone comes up with something better. BTW, if anyone else wants to be the team contact, let me know.
As individuals, I suggest you cover your own butts on this one. If you're using IBM equipment, please don't tell me, just stop.
Traditional BS from a large corp. Idiots, they will pay millions on advertising but the free advertising of being one of the better ranked Distributed.net teams isn't worth violating a twisted interpretation of the 'ethics' policy.
I just don't pay for garbage web content. Sites like slashdot are just a waste of bandwith for the most part. They rarely provide any new and/or useful information.
On the flip side I do pay for access to assorted electronics databook and publication sites as well as buy a lot of books. For instance the IEEE page is worth the money. The Intel Developer site is worth paying for as is the National Semiconductor site but they are free because these sites make their money selling the product. The techical documentation is an aid in use.
There is another type of site that makes money on the internet. Its the type of site that provides a REAL service. These are sites like REALTOR.com, bill payer services, job search services, dating services, etc that work well on the web.
The problem with the web is this pay for bandwith scheme that is kicking everyone in the butt. Take internet radio for instance. You could be part of a band co-op and try to put your music on the web. If your site becomes popular though you could potentially be paying a whole crapload to serve the content. With IPv6 you only pay for a miniscule amount of bandwith required to send a single stream which gets broken up by the multicast routers. Sites like slashdot which are dynamic couldn't benifit from this because they try to tailor their views for every user. A nice idea, but completly useless when you compare the cost of running a site that doesn't provide a useful service and the tons of bandwith required to give ever user a unique experience. Slashdot could provide 99% of the user experience with just static content that could be cached in web caches.
While this may be possible, it sure isn't easy. With the discount card system they scan your card (your identity) with your groceries and a computer can correllate everything. With a check they would have to at least do the footwork manually, and even then they wouldn't have your consent to do it.
I don't know about the how legal it is for them to track me based on my checks (I suspect there arn't any laws stopping them), but it sure isn't hard for them to do it. When I pay for things with checks they take my drivers licence, and type the licence number into the computer to check to see if i have bounced any checks there. Then they usually they run it though one of the automatic check verification services which of course can (and probably is) track all my check purchases.
Either way cash is the way to go, but it gets harder/more inconvient every day to use cash.
There is another solution to these grocery savings cards, keychains etc. Use another grocery store! Where I live there are 4 grocery store chains and a few assorted small stores, farmers markets and co-ops. The farmers market and the co-op accually have much better prices than any of the chains to begin with. The farmers market also has much better quality food. So its cheaper and better, its just not as convenient. The savings cards don't really save you any money when you compare the 'saved' version with the competitor. They only save you money when you are shopping at that store. I don't shop at Randalls because of the 'savings card' which just appears to be a method for tracking purchases (why not just give me the better price?). On the other hand I do pay for a lot of my groceries using checks which allow them the same tracking ability.
I don't know what study you have been looking at but in the US most accidents occur under 15MPH! There is a nice paper here about the number of fatal traffic accidents in Montana and the the speed limits active at the time. Most traffic accidents also occur at intersections and parking lots. The situation defines the accident more than the speed. This makes a lot of sense when you really think about it. Rather than some bogus claims about speed vs accident rates. In fact what your claiming is accually opposite of the real truth because at these intersection accidents there was usually a pretty significant speed diffrence.
You should take a closer look at those studies your thinking about because I suspect that they only measured small diffrences in speeds around the median speed. For example they might have taken traffic at 50 mph and then checked 5 mph faster and 5mph slower. If your doing 30 in a 50 your pretty much an obstruction rather than part of the traffic flow. You can tell if you are an obstruction because cars comming up behind you will be comming up on you faster than they can merge into another lane. The result will be 1 or more cars following you waiting for a break in traffic so that they can pass.
Lets see, of the 4 accidents my mother has been in (3 rear ends while sitting at a light, and 1 related to a driver not paying attention and running a light) all were at an intersection, 3 involving my mothers vehicle while it was not moving, and one involving it while it was doing less than 5mph. In the case of the three rear ends the cars were under 15mph, in the case of the run light the other auto was doing about 20mph. In my case I have been involved in 4 accidents, two while my car was parked and someone hit it in a parking lot, 1 where where I backed into someone in a parking lot and one where I was tee boned at an intersection of two streets with stop signs.
Sure 'speed kills' but the truth is that its not really 'speed' but accidents and therefore rapid deceleration at speed. The accident rates are much higher in situations where the speeds are significantly lower. The equation is far more complicated than greater speed equals more death. Safe roads are a combination of proper design, skilled drivers and appropriate speeds. Harder driving tests which are more skill oriented than 'law' oriented would do more to save lives and lower accident rates than lowering the speed limits.
I can also recall two cases of 'near misses' which occurred on higher speed roads (50mph or so) one was due to a slow car on a limited sight road in the slow lane causing a driver to dangerously evade into my lane which caused me to have to evade into on coming traffic. The second was a recent wreck in a limited sight situation which was stopped in the slow lane causing me to have to evade quite dangerously. The moral of the story is that the slower drivers where causing massive danger for the people who were going the speed limit. It was all a choice of hitting the slower moving vehicle or possibly hitting a faster moving one. In both cases the gamble paid off, I avoided an accident. The results could have been much different. If everyone is traveling the same speed in the same direction than the danger is significantly less. HItting a guard rail at 50MPH is much safer than hitting an on coming truck doing 30MPH when you are doing 30MPH. Its the relative speeds (and crunchability of the target). 35 on an unsafe road is much more dangerous than 80 on a big wide divided highway.
This history site is pretty good. I too dumped apple for a PC in the early 90's because frankly the PC was closer to the ideals of the Apple I/][ than the mac was. It sill pains me to think that if the PHB's at Apple had recognized the market force that was the Apple ][ and focused on it rather than constantly trying to 1 up it then we would all probably be using Apple ][ derivatives rather than PC clones. Again and again apple tried to change the focus of the company from a hobbyist / home (with a business following) to a business computer. First there was the Apple /// then there was the Lisa then there was the Mac. For 4+ years apple spun its wheels trying to sell everyone new technology while crippling the Apple ][. Apple basically stopped marketing the Apple ][ by 1980 yet it still continued to sell like mad well into the '80s. In fact the site
above has this wonderful quote from the IIc release to the effect that the original Apple ][ sold 50k units in 2.5 years, the PC sold 50k units in 8 months, the mac did the same in 74 days and the IIc took orders for 50k in the first 7 hours. The margins were way higher than the Mac and well into the 1980's the II kept Apple alive from quarter to quarter so they could pour craps loads of R&N into new mac's that would have lukewarm sales.. What was so frustrating for Apple fans is that Apple (unlike every other company, Intel continues to make x86's even though they want to make IA64's(or i860's in the past), MS continues to make windows 9x's even though they want to sell NT, etc) refused to hedge their bets and make decent Apple ][ systems to at least maintain their outrageous market share. Instead they only resurrected new II's when the company needed more money. There was a saying to this effect in the 80's. Something along the lines that when the mac R&D was broke and apple didn't have any money they released a new II to stay alive for a couple more years. Meanwhile PC's ate into the market share one huge bite at a time until apple was left where they are today. A minority player with a single digit market share.
The author of this article failed to mention the only processor in common use that is course grained. That processor would be the POWER/PPC compatible RS64 IV which is used in the iSeries and pSeries(AS400 and RS6000) from IBM. There is a nice write up on its threading capabilities and the performance results here.
I don't know if this a troll, So I'm responding. Obviously you have never talked to anyone who has written an application designed to run on a machine with more than 1 processor. Sure you can make a bunch of simplifications if your application is single threaded. You don't have to worry about the whole concept of resource contention. On the other hand if you want your application to scale at all then you have to have some form of multithreading or multiprocessing. Running your application as multiple processes you basically have 2 design decisions, do I write my multiprocess application like it was threaded and share big chunks of memory between the processes or do I make a bunch of producers and consumers to solve the problem. In the first case you might just as well use threads because they usually will be faster and the code will be simpler. In the second case you end up generating massive amounts of IPC and complicated queuing systems with fairness algorithms to guarantee that longer jobs can be interrupted by shorter jobs and higher priority jobs finish sooner. The end result of the second choice is far more complicated and usually a LOT slower because of all of the overhead due to the IPC mechanisms. Compare that to the easy to grasp idea that each 'job' runs and locks the data it needs to access before it touches it and unlocks it when its done.
As a beginning programmer you shouldn't try any complicated locking schemes designed to make your code scale you should just make a couple big global locks and pray you don't make any critical mistakes in the design that preclude good MP scalablilty (I call that the Linux solution, because its the way the SMP problem was solved, one big global kernel lock, later versions make it more fine grained) or ask someone more experienced to design and write the parts that require complicated locking schemes.
Optimization also has a purpose, do you think quake would have run as well as it did on an old Pentium without a couple routines being hand optimized?
Of course this whole thread has nothing to do with CPU threading!
Ah.... I have a 60GB hd in a 486... Along with a couple of other large harddrives. Its quite functional. Runs linux and usually has an uptime of over a year. It makes a wonderful file server, print server and X10 controller. I can't imagine why I would need more. The 486 actually has the advantage of only pulling 3 watts of power and since It serves files faster than the internet connection its connected to, and fast enough to stream 4+ channels of mp3's on the local lan what is the point of a faster box?
Oh, and I tend to be one of those people, who pulls out the physics textbook, a couple electronics textbooks and a 4 channel 200mhz O-scope and a frequency generator when I get into a discussion with a stupid idiot who insists that hissing popping LP's sound better when played through a humming, clipping, tube amp than the $150 walmart boom box. I'm an anti-audiophile even though I enjoy good sound reproduction. When it comes to sound reproduction its nearly impossible to beat a cheap little Sony diskman and a pair of $150 Sennheiser headphones.
Thats not really a big deal! There are cars out there that do that. I had an old 4 banger 2.3L mustang with a big tank. That car got around 30mpg, and had about a 15 gallon tank. On long highway trips it sometimes got over 500 miles between stops. 6 hours between stops was always a good number to try for, if the people in the car could stand it.
Disclaimer: (everyone else has one so I figured I should too) I am not a Mac fan, but I do own an old Mac that keeps all my new PeeCee's company.
I've been watching Apple attempts at releasing a new OS for a few years now. I even played around with a copy of raphosdy x86. OS/X appears to be the best thing since sliced bread in the desktop/small server area. I played around with it the other day for a little while and was very impressed. Sweet, sweet sweet. There were a lot of things that impressed me. Now if M$ could come out with something as sweet. On the other hand i did find it to be a bit slow (or maybe it as just the crappy mac HW). I would love to see apple release a copy for x86. If they did then I would be the first in line to buy a copy and second in line to hack it up to support 2 mouse buttons and a wheel!
PS: I think that wheel is M$'s only real inovation and its a piece of HW!
Lineage claims numbers like that for Korea. Here in the US though. They have 2 servers, after they went pay they lost atleast 1/3 of the players. Now at any given time there probably are only about 800+400 players online. Those numbers are a rough gestimate at what the aveage is from the last few days worth of '/who' commands while I was playing.