Recently, a friend asked me to look for a cheap NAS solution. One of his (many) requirements was native interoperability with MacOS 9. Most NAS solutions integrate well in an environment with modern OS versions, but don't play nice with older SMB or AFP versions.
I looked for weeks, until I found this goodie from Lacie (a french company known for its MAC products): http://www.lacie.com/products/product.htm?pid=1059 4
compatibility: Windows® 98SE*; Windows® 2000*; Windows® Me*; Windows® XP (SP1 & SP2); Mac® OS 9*/X, Linux 2.4 & higher* * Only on the Ethernet network
It has everything he wished for, it's cheap and easy to use.
always forget to refer to my sources: http://www.ataricommunity.com/forums/showthread.ph p?s=d9cc8b2fb7f30464c464300cdb8d5f43&threadid=4084 92
quickly scanned the forum for more info... but they seem reluctant to comment on users wishes for Civ4. Thanks Sid for the great games, been playing them ever since Civ1 was released.
There truly is a Civ 4, but we are not announcing anything definitive about it just yet. The majority of Firaxis's programmers at this point are focused on the Sid Meier's Pirates! release this November. But a team has been working on Civ 4 for sometime already.
We'll have more information available in 2005, including features, screenshots, and some sort of launch date.
On some easy-to-guess emailadresses, I get that much already. I even filter out email on that adress, so it's of no use to me.
Makes me wonder what the actual value of email will be. If the signal to noise ratio drops that heavily, will we switch to another means of messaging? Will IM become more widespread and accepted in bussiness or will we switch to a different mail format?
Definately something to think about...
Well, I guess we won't know until they retire the Aurora design. The US gov wouldn't allow them to make it public unless you have the ideal circumstances like this Bird of Prey:
1. Design itself is retired.
2. No special technology on display (the bird of prey doesn't even have a computer and uses a bussines jet engine).
3. Only early prototypes (the bird of prey is a minimalistic design).
So I wouldn't expect an early announcement of the existence of a spaceplane...
What compilers do Mandrake 8.0 and SuSE use?
They both use gcc 2.96
I downgrade to 2.95 immediately after installation. compiling KDE2 with 2.96 = funny errors, Mplayer = corrupt video, avifile= no synchro between sound and video,...
2.96-85 seems OK though, but I prefer to stick with good old 2.95
BTW, the problem occurs on ALL platforms.
First of all: we (Belgians) have a liberal-socialist government. Modern socialism has learned to walk the line between democratic values and equality. Our prime minister is a liberal democrat.
Your comparison with minitel isn't valid. Linux on the belgian desktops will provide them with everything they can possibly hope for, access to exactly the same information sources everyone else has (OK, maybe not WMV:D). Only problem: tech support. However, the belgian government is currently working on a call center for schools which need technical assistance. How hard could it be to train the staff with KDE or Gnome or xxWM instead of Windows? 99% of the targeted users will never see the console anyway. Just provide them with a preconfigured PC, which boots into runlevel 5 and XWindow automatically, they'll get used to the "different" GUI.
Re:Interesting to note...
on
The Euro
·
· Score: 1
Maybe you're right, only the future will tell us. Maybe it's just a prudent move, and the change to a large internal market (i.e. comparable to the USA) has unpredictable consequences.
The Euro would definately benefit from Britains participation in terms of monetary stability and credibility as a worldwide accepted monetary unit. "Germany and France and Italy" as one economy They're all interdependent. E.g. Belgiums primary economical system is entirely based upon the transit and trade of goods from and to the economical superpowers it's surrounded by (i.e. UK, France and Germany). Although they all do have an internal market, it's almost insignificant in a broader perspective. The transition to the Euro is, form my point of view, nothing more than a logical next step to a true unification of the internal markets. quite a lot are anti-Federal Europe, where we give up our parliment for one held in Belgium. I agree, we won't see this happen in the near future. However, if I recall Adam Smiths writings correctly (some of his theories are still valid), and if I may take the liberty of oversimplifying them, a governments policy is little more than a means of providing the best possible environment for economical activities. If this environment is far bigger than its political borders, does it still have the necessary credibility? In my opinion, the introduction of the Euro may have long-term consequences which are not so obvious today.
Re:Interesting to note...
on
The Euro
·
· Score: 1
And how many people already have change (in Euro)? Until the end of february, the local currency can still be used.
FWIW, some more or less interesting opinions:
1) The Independent (a british newspaper) describes the transition as a loss of identity, a loss of our ability to determine our own political and economic policy.
2) The Sun claims it's the dawn of a huge mistake. The Euro is born and thank God, the UK is not part of it. Uhum.
3) The transition not only has a profound impact on Europeans; e.g. a lot of women in Kinshasa (Congo) make a living out of the exchange rates dollars-Congos currency-belgian francs. They haven't got any information whatsoever about the Euro, except what they hear from tourists.
4) Scandinavia (certainly Sweden) now doesn't debate about if they'll introduce the Euro, their governments are no debating when they'll make the transition.
5) Despite the quite negative attitude of some newspapers in the UK, they can't avoid it. The tourism industry has to accept Euros. It will be quite interesting to see WHEN the somewhat negative attitude will change. They can't ignore the fact the Euro will make the European market more competitive and coherent. Expect some major changes in the balance of power, and my personal feeling is that Britains isolation will weaken their position. I wonder if or when Tony Blair (pro-Euro, IIRC) can make the Euro debatable.
you mean something like this?my desktop
This is my desktop, with modified iKons.
check out KDE-Look for the complete, unedited iKons icon set. You will also notice a poll on the comments page, the author asked if iKons should be the default icon set for KDE3...
anyway; a lot of independent graphic artists are creating stylish, cartoonish and photo-realistic icons.
Regarding your other observations, you can turn launch feedback off if you don't want it. KDE will never be finished, as more and more users demand more and more features. I hope they keep implementing them as optional features. Eye candy is great, as long as it doesn't get in the way. Just turn some of it off, enjoy the speed gains. Try KDE with the preemptible patches from e.g. Texstar if you want more speed. Stability has never been an issue on my box.
No spectacular sights for us, I'm afraid. Here in Belgium, it won't be dark enough when the major outburst (18 nov, 6pm-8pm GMT+1) can be witnessed. I guess western europe is out of luck this time. A local astronomy club decided to take the next plane to China, apparently the best location to witness the event.
Back in '92 when I first started working with Linux it was kind of cool.
No it wasn't. As a home/semi-professional user, it was your only chance of running a monolithic kernel with mutithreading. Minix was great as an academical OS, but lacked multithreading and 32bit support. MS-DOS and DR-DOS did everything a user hoped for, but nothing the way it should be in terms of efficiency (remember taskswitching?). MS/DR-DOS and minix were not too expensive: about $170, exactly the price difference between a 8086 and a 386sx in the early 1990's. So, for many early adopters on a budget, it was an easy choice. Linux was cool, but there were also a lot of rational reasons to turn to linux. The interviewer EXPECTS Linus to bring this up, as a response to Hailstorm and.NET, but Linus is wise enough not to engage in mindless "mine is bigger than yours"-conversations. At least, that's the way I see it.
Then sometime in '97, shortly after the OS/2 regime was destroyed, Linux took on this holy jihad. Not by choice, I heard noone actually talking about taking on anyone else. This nonsense started with Win95 look alike window managers and some people more interested in political/marketing statements. Again, in this interview, Linus refuses to make such statements. I respect his humble and open nature. Linux was, and still is, fun to use. The community has changed, but if some of us keep the spirit alive and pass it on...
interesting... but some people are screaming for some faster number crunching CPU. As a (amateur) developer, most of my CPU cycles are wasted on compiling code or running sanity checks. That's quite unproductive, don't you think?
That's where a i845 comes in handy. Really, I don't mind people calling me an idiot, I just need a reliable, cheap and relatively fast machine and I couldn't care less about memory bandwith. Since I don't have that much cash to burn, I'm delighted these kinds of chipsets exist.
I can replace my desktop machine for considerably less and upgrade more often.
Unless there's a comparatively reliable and cheap solution on the market, I consider myself a stupid. Chipset for the stupid? Chipset for the cheap bastards who don't need a mean lean machine.
Any properly administrated linux box has a decent iptables / ipchains script. If not, it's about time to read the docs.
From what I've read in the article, tripwire should be able to detect an infection. Not so much to worry about, I guess. ... and of course nmap to scan for open 5503 ports (damn, it's now illegal to do so here at our university).
How hard can it be? Trojan writers will have to come up with something a little more intelligent to bring down the majority of the linux servers out there.
I just tried them all out, here are my 2 cents.
1) They all try to distinguish themselves by stating "we're not just another search engine...". Basically, they are.
2) Wisenut is by far the least bloated, and it shows in terms of speed.
3) Lasoo combines "white pages" with a web directory. Clever, but putting it all on one page is a bit overkill IMHO.
4) None of them is as configurable as google.
However, it will be nice to see how they develop. They all need an innovative feature though, something to make the switch from google worthwhile.
Googles cached page http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&q=cach e%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.testdrive.compaq.com&btnG=Goo gle+Search for those who like goats but still have doubts about their orientation.
Thank you Google
If you want a measure of raw CPU performance, check www.spec.org; currently, the fastest single CPU systems are Intel P4's
Errr, the spec benchmarks aren't that good for comparison. It gives you a general idea of a CPUs performance, I agree, but there are a few issues you have to keep in mind when interpreting those figures.
First of all, all major CPU / chips manufacturers provide their own compiler. The compiler is heavily tweaked to get the last.00001% of spec-performance out of a chip, at least if the manufacturer has the time and money to invest in such a costly procedure. Not all of these manufacturers can afford to do this, which has certainly some impact on the figures.
Second remark: CPU manufacturers only make the figures public if they're good enough. Otherwise they claim it doesn't do the CPU justice and one should look at the real world performance (and we all know there are three kinds of lies, and benchmarks are one of these).
Last thing I want to point out: most spec benchmarks are mathematical algorithms, stressing specific issues (fp or int performance, memory bandwith,...). It doesn't give the complete picture.
IMHO, one should use the right tool for the job. The itanium will have its favourite playground, the SPARC will certainly be used a lot more in mission-critical database applications.
The Atlhon doesn't scale very well with clockspeed over about 1.1ghz with only SDR mem so why should the P4 be different.
It's even worse. The P4 relies heavily on memory bandwith and is expected to perform VERY poor with SD-RAM. The northbridge has a 3.2GB/s data transfer rate, but the memory bandwith will be seriously crippled. It's like having a Nascar engine under the hood and 155/70/R14 tires on your car (OK, that's when the fun really starts...).
No thank you until DDR chipset/boards arive.
Intel has a deal with Rambus 'til 2002. So one might expect to see a brand new Intel P4 DDR-board under the christmas tree (I hope you have a geeky girlfriend / boyfriend / spouse / husband / parents , if not, turn them to the dark side).
Correction: only 44% voted without the usual red pencil in Belgium (08/10/1999).
It didn't go that smoothly. There were numerous delays because of hardware problems, software errors, power surges,... Especially elderly people ran into trouble, despite the fact most cities and villages organized a few courses to teach them how to use the computer. And you have to admit, navigating around was time-consuming. The software was crap. The screen resolution was so poor (640x480 I guess) only 10 candidates could be listed on each page. On several computers, the "nationalists" (some people prefer to call them fascists) were not listed. However, I have to admit it wasn't that bad after all. The first results came in really fast (3 hours after closing time). I hope they get it right down under. Learn from the mistakes made over here. Here are my thoughts on how to improve on our system:
1) Konqueror (or any other user-friendly browser) would do very nicely as a browser to navigate through all candidates. A Java-based program would benefit those who are already comfortable with a PC.
2) Use a screen resolution which is easy on the eyes, with smooth large fonts.
3) 3 words: uninterruptable power supply.
4) The voting-training was a very good idea to get everyone comfortable with electronic voting. 5) append "goatse.cx 127.0.0.1" to/etc/hosts;)
I'm not flaming my government, it's a great system which needs some minor tweaking. Now, if the AU government uses GPL-ed code, will they publish their voting software under the GPL so we can use (and improve on) it here too?
Except the PIII is a PII with a faster clock.
what about SSE-instructions? what about on-die cache running at the same speed the CPU does? what about... The PIII should of been a lot faster on the same opimizations, since the core did not change at all. Guess what, it was faster. Indeed, it compiles a 2.2.14 kernel an average 1.5% faster, if I remember my initial benchmarks correctly (comparing a PII450 and a PIII450). The Coppermine core, and the increase in bus speed from 100 -> 133MHz, was a bigger step forward, despite the fact the Katmai version proudly got a PIII label, while the Coppermine was announced as a "evolution of the PIII". Oh well, it's all about marketing I guess.
The P4 actually is a completely different architecture. Comparing it to a PIII does it no justice whatsoever. The marketing guys have one major advantage: the increase in speed is a real bonus.
Errr, I tend to disagree on this.
1) First of all, the Pentium4 is indeed slower according to some benchmarks. And indeed, it doesn't perform as well as you might have expected. Why? Because of its "revolutionary" design. It's a completely different architecture, you may want to go to the specs on intels website for more detailed info on this (I did).
2) The P4 outperforms the P3 when it comes to memory-intensive applications. Using the Intel850 chipset, it has far superior memory bandwith. A Intel845 chipset is in the making, which will be able to use more common SDRAM instead of Rambus. Although this solution might be less expensive, it will seriously hurt performance. Intel has finished the design of a similar board using DDR-chips. This will by far be the most cost-effective solution. Don't expect it before christmas though, since they have a deal with Rambus until 2002.
3) Bandwith from CPU -> northbridge: a stunning 3.2Gb
4) If you're running an open-source OS, noone's gonna stop you from recompiling the source and optimize programs for your architecture. I would.
5) The P4 currently sold, as well as the mainboards, don't offer an upgrade path. If you upgrade regularly, I'd stick with AMD for a while. Intel will soon release a different chipset and a new version of the P4.
6) Needing a little more beef than a uniprocessor platform? I would wait a little. Since AMD designed their multiprocessor chipset to scale beautifully (2 CPUs / northbridge), one would expect some mainboard manufacturer to design a "hot rod" with at least 4 or 8 CPUs in the near future. The P4s future is uncertain. I really don't know what kind of rabbit Intel will pull out of their hat to counter AMD.
Nothing unites people like working together to recover from Armageddon, eh?
I hope I hear some irony in your words.
The western world succesfully integrated millons of immigrants into "their" society, immigrants from all walks of life. Making abstraction of some social problems, it worked. Actually, there are two ways to accomplish this. A cultural melting pot and a cultural mosaic. The first means integration, the latter coexistance. The melting pot is arrogance from the point of view of the immigrants, but leads to a more permanent solution. The dominance of one culture in one particular state feeds the feeling of belonging and a positive sense of nationalism. The cultural mosaic is the opposite, and is only implementable if both parties have more or less moderated nationalistic feelings. Since both the Jews and the Arabs can't work out a solution based upon one of these schemes, this matter won't be resolved easily. Fundamentalism strongly feeds nationalistic feelings, but it also goes the other way though.
It's not a very uncommon practice to ban freedom of speech and freedom of the press in totalitarian nations. The Taliban can get away with this because of the support from an important part of the population. And the western world should respect this, no matter how we feel about this. Our dogmas are not the one and only truth.
Read it once more. I fear the way some demagogues misinterpret the islam for their own political interests. I fear the xenophobia of a whole population. I fear nationalism taken to the extreme. I feel bad about the way some preachers abuse the freedom of speech in my country, but they are entitled to do this. I'm not in favour of taking away this freedom, but I have moral objections. Do you call others dogs?
If that makes me a xenophobe from your point of view, I don't really have a problem with that. But I feel sad about the way you interpret my statement.
Slashdot Mirror
Recently, a friend asked me to look for a cheap NAS solution. One of his (many) requirements was native interoperability with MacOS 9. Most NAS solutions integrate well in an environment with modern OS versions, but don't play nice with older SMB or AFP versions.9 4
i ndex.php
I looked for weeks, until I found this goodie from Lacie (a french company known for its MAC products): http://www.lacie.com/products/product.htm?pid=105
compatibility:
Windows® 98SE*; Windows® 2000*; Windows® Me*; Windows® XP (SP1 & SP2); Mac® OS 9*/X, Linux 2.4 & higher*
* Only on the Ethernet network
It has everything he wished for, it's cheap and easy to use.
If compatibility isn't an issue, just google around for some reviews. If I remember correctly, most of the reviewers were quite impressed with the solutions from SimpleTech: http://www.simpletech.com/commercial/simpleshare/
always forget to refer to my sources: http://www.ataricommunity.com/forums/showthread.ph p?s=d9cc8b2fb7f30464c464300cdb8d5f43&threadid=4084 92
quickly scanned the forum for more info... but they seem reluctant to comment on users wishes for Civ4.
Thanks Sid for the great games, been playing them ever since Civ1 was released.
There truly is a Civ 4, but we are not announcing anything definitive about it just yet. The majority of Firaxis's programmers at this point are focused on the Sid Meier's Pirates! release this November. But a team has been working on Civ 4 for sometime already.
We'll have more information available in 2005, including features, screenshots, and some sort of launch date.
Best,
Jeff Foley
Sr. Brand Manager
Atari
On some easy-to-guess emailadresses, I get that much already. I even filter out email on that adress, so it's of no use to me.
Makes me wonder what the actual value of email will be. If the signal to noise ratio drops that heavily, will we switch to another means of messaging? Will IM become more widespread and accepted in bussiness or will we switch to a different mail format? Definately something to think about...
Well, I guess we won't know until they retire the Aurora design. The US gov wouldn't allow them to make it public unless you have the ideal circumstances like this Bird of Prey:
1. Design itself is retired.
2. No special technology on display (the bird of prey doesn't even have a computer and uses a bussines jet engine).
3. Only early prototypes (the bird of prey is a minimalistic design).
So I wouldn't expect an early announcement of the existence of a spaceplane...
What compilers do Mandrake 8.0 and SuSE use?
They both use gcc 2.96
I downgrade to 2.95 immediately after installation. compiling KDE2 with 2.96 = funny errors, Mplayer = corrupt video, avifile= no synchro between sound and video,...
2.96-85 seems OK though, but I prefer to stick with good old 2.95
BTW, the problem occurs on ALL platforms.
First of all: we (Belgians) have a liberal-socialist government. Modern socialism has learned to walk the line between democratic values and equality. Our prime minister is a liberal democrat. :D). Only problem: tech support. However, the belgian government is currently working on a call center for schools which need technical assistance. How hard could it be to train the staff with KDE or Gnome or xxWM instead of Windows? 99% of the targeted users will never see the console anyway. Just provide them with a preconfigured PC, which boots into runlevel 5 and XWindow automatically, they'll get used to the "different" GUI.
Your comparison with minitel isn't valid. Linux on the belgian desktops will provide them with everything they can possibly hope for, access to exactly the same information sources everyone else has (OK, maybe not WMV
Maybe you're right, only the future will tell us. Maybe it's just a prudent move, and the change to a large internal market (i.e. comparable to the USA) has unpredictable consequences.
The Euro would definately benefit from Britains participation in terms of monetary stability and credibility as a worldwide accepted monetary unit.
"Germany and France and Italy" as one economy They're all interdependent. E.g. Belgiums primary economical system is entirely based upon the transit and trade of goods from and to the economical superpowers it's surrounded by (i.e. UK, France and Germany). Although they all do have an internal market, it's almost insignificant in a broader perspective. The transition to the Euro is, form my point of view, nothing more than a logical next step to a true unification of the internal markets.
quite a lot are anti-Federal Europe, where we give up our parliment for one held in Belgium. I agree, we won't see this happen in the near future. However, if I recall Adam Smiths writings correctly (some of his theories are still valid), and if I may take the liberty of oversimplifying them, a governments policy is little more than a means of providing the best possible environment for economical activities. If this environment is far bigger than its political borders, does it still have the necessary credibility? In my opinion, the introduction of the Euro may have long-term consequences which are not so obvious today.
And how many people already have change (in Euro)? Until the end of february, the local currency can still be used. .
FWIW, some more or less interesting opinions:
1) The Independent (a british newspaper) describes the transition as a loss of identity, a loss of our ability to determine our own political and economic policy
2) The Sun claims it's the dawn of a huge mistake. The Euro is born and thank God, the UK is not part of it. Uhum.
3) The transition not only has a profound impact on Europeans; e.g. a lot of women in Kinshasa (Congo) make a living out of the exchange rates dollars-Congos currency-belgian francs. They haven't got any information whatsoever about the Euro, except what they hear from tourists.
4) Scandinavia (certainly Sweden) now doesn't debate about if they'll introduce the Euro, their governments are no debating when they'll make the transition.
5) Despite the quite negative attitude of some newspapers in the UK, they can't avoid it. The tourism industry has to accept Euros. It will be quite interesting to see WHEN the somewhat negative attitude will change. They can't ignore the fact the Euro will make the European market more competitive and coherent. Expect some major changes in the balance of power, and my personal feeling is that Britains isolation will weaken their position. I wonder if or when Tony Blair (pro-Euro, IIRC) can make the Euro debatable.
you mean something like this?my desktop
This is my desktop, with modified iKons. check out KDE-Look for the complete, unedited iKons icon set. You will also notice a poll on the comments page, the author asked if iKons should be the default icon set for KDE3...
anyway; a lot of independent graphic artists are creating stylish, cartoonish and photo-realistic icons.
Regarding your other observations, you can turn launch feedback off if you don't want it. KDE will never be finished, as more and more users demand more and more features. I hope they keep implementing them as optional features. Eye candy is great, as long as it doesn't get in the way. Just turn some of it off, enjoy the speed gains. Try KDE with the preemptible patches from e.g. Texstar if you want more speed. Stability has never been an issue on my box.
No spectacular sights for us, I'm afraid. Here in Belgium, it won't be dark enough when the major outburst (18 nov, 6pm-8pm GMT+1) can be witnessed. I guess western europe is out of luck this time. A local astronomy club decided to take the next plane to China, apparently the best location to witness the event.
Isn't that the point of firewalls ... you trust everything inside and distrust everything outside.
Errr.. no. Every competent network administrator distrusts the inside as much as the outside (except for the DMZ).
Back in '92 when I first started working with Linux it was kind of cool. .NET, but Linus is wise enough not to engage in mindless "mine is bigger than yours"-conversations. At least, that's the way I see it.
No it wasn't. As a home/semi-professional user, it was your only chance of running a monolithic kernel with mutithreading. Minix was great as an academical OS, but lacked multithreading and 32bit support. MS-DOS and DR-DOS did everything a user hoped for, but nothing the way it should be in terms of efficiency (remember taskswitching?). MS/DR-DOS and minix were not too expensive: about $170, exactly the price difference between a 8086 and a 386sx in the early 1990's. So, for many early adopters on a budget, it was an easy choice. Linux was cool, but there were also a lot of rational reasons to turn to linux. The interviewer EXPECTS Linus to bring this up, as a response to Hailstorm and
Then sometime in '97, shortly after the OS/2 regime was destroyed, Linux took on this holy jihad.
Not by choice, I heard noone actually talking about taking on anyone else. This nonsense started with Win95 look alike window managers and some people more interested in political/marketing statements. Again, in this interview, Linus refuses to make such statements. I respect his humble and open nature.
Linux was, and still is, fun to use. The community has changed, but if some of us keep the spirit alive and pass it on...
interesting... but some people are screaming for some faster number crunching CPU. As a (amateur) developer, most of my CPU cycles are wasted on compiling code or running sanity checks. That's quite unproductive, don't you think?
That's where a i845 comes in handy. Really, I don't mind people calling me an idiot, I just need a reliable, cheap and relatively fast machine and I couldn't care less about memory bandwith. Since I don't have that much cash to burn, I'm delighted these kinds of chipsets exist.
I can replace my desktop machine for considerably less and upgrade more often.
Unless there's a comparatively reliable and cheap solution on the market, I consider myself a stupid. Chipset for the stupid? Chipset for the cheap bastards who don't need a mean lean machine.
Any properly administrated linux box has a decent iptables / ipchains script. If not, it's about time to read the docs.
... and of course nmap to scan for open 5503 ports (damn, it's now illegal to do so here at our university).
From what I've read in the article, tripwire should be able to detect an infection. Not so much to worry about, I guess.
How hard can it be? Trojan writers will have to come up with something a little more intelligent to bring down the majority of the linux servers out there.
Never complain about a site being slashdotted as long as we have google...
Atheos homepage
the FAQ
Atheos links
Screenshots are here
the parrots
I just tried them all out, here are my 2 cents.
1) They all try to distinguish themselves by stating "we're not just another search engine...". Basically, they are.
2) Wisenut is by far the least bloated, and it shows in terms of speed.
3) Lasoo combines "white pages" with a web directory. Clever, but putting it all on one page is a bit overkill IMHO.
4) None of them is as configurable as google.
However, it will be nice to see how they develop. They all need an innovative feature though, something to make the switch from google worthwhile.
Googles cached page http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&q=cach e%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.testdrive.compaq.com&btnG=Goo gle+Search for those who like goats but still have doubts about their orientation.
Thank you Google
If you want a measure of raw CPU performance, check www.spec.org; currently, the fastest single CPU systems are Intel P4's .00001% of spec-performance out of a chip, at least if the manufacturer has the time and money to invest in such a costly procedure. Not all of these manufacturers can afford to do this, which has certainly some impact on the figures.
Errr, the spec benchmarks aren't that good for comparison. It gives you a general idea of a CPUs performance, I agree, but there are a few issues you have to keep in mind when interpreting those figures.
First of all, all major CPU / chips manufacturers provide their own compiler. The compiler is heavily tweaked to get the last
Second remark: CPU manufacturers only make the figures public if they're good enough. Otherwise they claim it doesn't do the CPU justice and one should look at the real world performance (and we all know there are three kinds of lies, and benchmarks are one of these).
Last thing I want to point out: most spec benchmarks are mathematical algorithms, stressing specific issues (fp or int performance, memory bandwith,...). It doesn't give the complete picture.
IMHO, one should use the right tool for the job. The itanium will have its favourite playground, the SPARC will certainly be used a lot more in mission-critical database applications.
The Atlhon doesn't scale very well with clockspeed over about 1.1ghz with only SDR mem so why should the P4 be different.
It's even worse. The P4 relies heavily on memory bandwith and is expected to perform VERY poor with SD-RAM. The northbridge has a 3.2GB/s data transfer rate, but the memory bandwith will be seriously crippled. It's like having a Nascar engine under the hood and 155/70/R14 tires on your car (OK, that's when the fun really starts...).
No thank you until DDR chipset/boards arive. Intel has a deal with Rambus 'til 2002. So one might expect to see a brand new Intel P4 DDR-board under the christmas tree (I hope you have a geeky girlfriend / boyfriend / spouse / husband / parents , if not, turn them to the dark side).
Correction: only 44% voted without the usual red pencil in Belgium (08/10/1999). /etc/hosts ;)
It didn't go that smoothly. There were numerous delays because of hardware problems, software errors, power surges,... Especially elderly people ran into trouble, despite the fact most cities and villages organized a few courses to teach them how to use the computer. And you have to admit, navigating around was time-consuming. The software was crap. The screen resolution was so poor (640x480 I guess) only 10 candidates could be listed on each page. On several computers, the "nationalists" (some people prefer to call them fascists) were not listed. However, I have to admit it wasn't that bad after all. The first results came in really fast (3 hours after closing time).
I hope they get it right down under. Learn from the mistakes made over here. Here are my thoughts on how to improve on our system:
1) Konqueror (or any other user-friendly browser) would do very nicely as a browser to navigate through all candidates. A Java-based program would benefit those who are already comfortable with a PC.
2) Use a screen resolution which is easy on the eyes, with smooth large fonts.
3) 3 words: uninterruptable power supply.
4) The voting-training was a very good idea to get everyone comfortable with electronic voting.
5) append "goatse.cx 127.0.0.1" to
I'm not flaming my government, it's a great system which needs some minor tweaking. Now, if the AU government uses GPL-ed code, will they publish their voting software under the GPL so we can use (and improve on) it here too?
Except the PIII is a PII with a faster clock.
what about SSE-instructions? what about on-die cache running at the same speed the CPU does? what about...
The PIII should of been a lot faster on the same opimizations, since the core did not change at all. Guess what, it was faster. Indeed, it compiles a 2.2.14 kernel an average 1.5% faster, if I remember my initial benchmarks correctly (comparing a PII450 and a PIII450). The Coppermine core, and the increase in bus speed from 100 -> 133MHz, was a bigger step forward, despite the fact the Katmai version proudly got a PIII label, while the Coppermine was announced as a "evolution of the PIII". Oh well, it's all about marketing I guess.
The P4 actually is a completely different architecture. Comparing it to a PIII does it no justice whatsoever. The marketing guys have one major advantage: the increase in speed is a real bonus.
Errr, I tend to disagree on this.
1) First of all, the Pentium4 is indeed slower according to some benchmarks. And indeed, it doesn't perform as well as you might have expected. Why? Because of its "revolutionary" design. It's a completely different architecture, you may want to go to the specs on intels website for more detailed info on this (I did).
2) The P4 outperforms the P3 when it comes to memory-intensive applications. Using the Intel850 chipset, it has far superior memory bandwith. A Intel845 chipset is in the making, which will be able to use more common SDRAM instead of Rambus. Although this solution might be less expensive, it will seriously hurt performance. Intel has finished the design of a similar board using DDR-chips. This will by far be the most cost-effective solution. Don't expect it before christmas though, since they have a deal with Rambus until 2002.
3) Bandwith from CPU -> northbridge: a stunning 3.2Gb
4) If you're running an open-source OS, noone's gonna stop you from recompiling the source and optimize programs for your architecture. I would.
5) The P4 currently sold, as well as the mainboards, don't offer an upgrade path. If you upgrade regularly, I'd stick with AMD for a while. Intel will soon release a different chipset and a new version of the P4.
6) Needing a little more beef than a uniprocessor platform? I would wait a little. Since AMD designed their multiprocessor chipset to scale beautifully (2 CPUs / northbridge), one would expect some mainboard manufacturer to design a "hot rod" with at least 4 or 8 CPUs in the near future. The P4s future is uncertain. I really don't know what kind of rabbit Intel will pull out of their hat to counter AMD.
Nothing unites people like working together to recover from Armageddon, eh?
I hope I hear some irony in your words.
The western world succesfully integrated millons of immigrants into "their" society, immigrants from all walks of life. Making abstraction of some social problems, it worked. Actually, there are two ways to accomplish this. A cultural melting pot and a cultural mosaic. The first means integration, the latter coexistance. The melting pot is arrogance from the point of view of the immigrants, but leads to a more permanent solution. The dominance of one culture in one particular state feeds the feeling of belonging and a positive sense of nationalism. The cultural mosaic is the opposite, and is only implementable if both parties have more or less moderated nationalistic feelings. Since both the Jews and the Arabs can't work out a solution based upon one of these schemes, this matter won't be resolved easily. Fundamentalism strongly feeds nationalistic feelings, but it also goes the other way though.
It's not a very uncommon practice to ban freedom of speech and freedom of the press in totalitarian nations. The Taliban can get away with this because of the support from an important part of the population. And the western world should respect this, no matter how we feel about this. Our dogmas are not the one and only truth.
Read it once more. I fear the way some demagogues misinterpret the islam for their own political interests. I fear the xenophobia of a whole population. I fear nationalism taken to the extreme. I feel bad about the way some preachers abuse the freedom of speech in my country, but they are entitled to do this. I'm not in favour of taking away this freedom, but I have moral objections. Do you call others dogs?
If that makes me a xenophobe from your point of view, I don't really have a problem with that. But I feel sad about the way you interpret my statement.