Fine. Were multi-threaded benchmarks used? If not, the use of hyperthreading wouldn't be reflected in the benchmarks. The benefits wouldn't be measured.
Most of the bad security press (especially recently) has been Outlook (Express) based Worms and this was do to introducing a good idea (feature) that turned sour.
No - it is (continuing - not past tense) due to a fundamental design choice. Microsoft products treat DATA and CODE as one and the same - the result being that there is no seperation between them, and content can be active. In almost all unix systems, the exact opposite choice is made. That's why you don't see it happen on unix/linux systems - design decisions.
Unix has an exec bit. I could just as easily change Evolution/KMail/whatever to make a double-click on a file do the following:
Check the extension or magic-number to identify the file. If it is in the ELF executable format or a Perl script or whatever, change the exec bit and run it.
The Windows NT/XP kernel is quite solid and most, if not all, of the flaws exist in software outside of the kernel.
I don't believe that the benchmarks utilized hyperthreading...which is reasonable given that most people are interested in existing single-threaded apps. However the nice thing about a HT-enabled processor is that your system is still extremely snappy while crunching that MPEG encoding.
If anybody needs anectodal evidence that Sun hardware is more reliable than Dell, read this thread about the problems photo.net is having by switching from Sun to Dell.
Here is a good quote: "The E450 certainly has been, staying up for nearly a year at a time. The Dell has had more crashes in the first month than the E450 has in the last two years."
I think you have a good point. I'm guessing that a FAT32 file system has less seeks because the FAT table is cached. Ext2 on the other hand has to traverse Inodes.
Interesting you say that your hard drive is louder in Linux and silent with Win98. Could that mean that Windows is doing a better job of eliminating noisy seeks (head movement)?
I currently have over 2400 messages in my Inbox and about 10,000 filed away from the last 3 years. Since everything is IMAP-based, I use several e-mail clients ranging from Pine for ssh sessions, Outlook for Windows, and Evolution when at a powerful Linux machine. Most of my messages are legit...my ISP automatically filters viruses. In fact I received my first virus yesterday (the one that sends an encrypted.zip file which seems to defeat the ISP virus scanner). They also have SpamAssassin which automatically puts detected SPAM in my "caughtspam" IMAP folder.
Evolution effectively deals with my massive Inbox. I love the quick-filter feature right above the message list.
I can't sympathize with those who have unmanageable e-mail problems due to spam and viruses. Get a different ISP.
Note that my "ISP" is actually the Computer Science department. They handle over 10,000 accounts (lots of guest accounts), > 2 terrabytes of data, and manage about 500 machines (if not more due to clusters). This is all with less than 6 full-time staff and some part-time students.
I agree. AMD makes good processors but I don't think they have been as forgiving to newbie system builders. My experience is with older Athlon chips...hopefully they've improved since but I'll stick with Intel for now.
Cooling is/was more important, especially for the older T-birds.
You have to be more careful not to crack the chip when putting the heatsink on.
AMD has had software issues. For example, Win2K had to be patched to SP1 because AMD messed up AGP coherence. AMD also never told the Linux developers about this same problem causing numerous people to have system crashes when using nVidia cards/drivers under linux. You'd think they would have sent a fricken e-mail to the kernel-dev lit.
Socket A motherboards always seemed so damn sensitive to power supplies. I've got a Dell 4100, with a PIII 866MHz, filled with 4 drives and a Geforce4 Ti4400. All of this runs fine on the 200Watt power supply. Now maybe my problems with Athlons were related to shoddy motherboards, but I frequently ran into PS issues. Seems that good, high-quality Antec caliber supplies are needed. Yet I've built P4 boxes with 300W generics and have no problems.
Just my 2 cents. Competition is good and I know several people who have had _no_ problems with AMD.
I've taken a few MBA courses as part of my Ph.D. minor requirement. What floored me is how business students and professors treat patents. "Getting a patent" is part of nearly every business plan involving technology...I've asked "what if there isn't anything novel to patent". They treat me as stupid by responding that there is always something to patent...ALWAYS!
And then we went over a case study about a recent technology company that failed. They attributed their failure due to a lack of patent protection. However knowing a bit about the technology and company, it was obvious that this company wasn't doing anything novel...just trying to do it better and cheaper.
>>Kodak 400UC currently is the best ISO 400 color negative film on the market
> Huh?
The original poster said that nobody serious about photography uses Kodak film nowadays because it is inferior to Fuji. I disagree and Kodak Portra 400UC is an example of a Kodak product that is superior to anything else.
>> an entire lineup of negative film that uses the same filtration settings!
> Buh?
One advantage of the Kodak Portra lineup is that I calibrate my enlarger (for making prints) and film scanner (for scanning negatives) once for this entire lineup of film. It saves quite a bit of time. Fuji film is all different. NPS 400 has different filtration, NPC 400 is different, and Reala 100 is different.
>> they discontinued Kodachrome 25
> Zuh?
Kodachrome 25 was considered by many as the finest slide film ever made. Kodak discontinued it several years ago. There is no equivalent.
>> However they brought consumer photography to the masses with the Brownie
> Snuh?
The Kodak Brownie was the very first camera targeted towards the masses. It brought photography into the home 60 years ago. If you have family snapshots from that era, they were likely taken with a Kodak Brownie.
My point is that Kodak has always focused on the home consumer rather than the pros (otherwise they would have never discontinued popular professional products).
> Christ. I have no freakin' idea what you're talking about.
Sorry dude...this is a Slashdot thread about Kodak and I know my stuff about photography.
Kodak 400UC currently is the best ISO 400 color negative film on the market. Combined with 160NC, 160VC, 400NC, and 400VC, I have an entire lineup of negative film that uses the same filtration settings! Fuji films are all different filtrations.
Fuji makes good products...Velvia is still second to none. However Kodak isn't crap. With Tech Pan 35mm, I can still make a 16x20 print that rivals large-format photography. I'll compare my print, in which I used a 30-year old camera bought for $50 on eBay, against that made with a $2000 digital SLR any day of the week in terms of sharpness and grain.
Kodak is hated by many...especially those who were heart-broken when they discontinued Kodachrome 25. However they brought consumer photography to the masses with the Brownie. They've made good products for 80 years. And they haven't ignored digital...they had digital cameras for sale before Nikon. Of course they are going to have problems. They were always a film and paper business. Digital has completely disrupted their business and they saw it coming a long time ago.
Sun is all about throughput (bandwidth). Their biggest customers run heavily threaded workloads such as databases. Hence single CPU performance (latency) isn't as important. You will see Sun be a leader in chip-multiprocessing-- that is, don't be suprised if Sun releases a chip with 8 cores on it in the next 2-4 years.
Probably because most Linux users change their user agent string to report as a windoze variant...
Thats quite an assumption. I took a quick poll of my fellow co-workers who use Linux all day at work, and some at home too. Not one has changed the user agent string. Yes, you should believe my scientific poll;)
The best word processor running on Linux is Microsoft Word.
In OpenOffice, I tried to create a simple numbered list, where I stop the list but then continue it at a later point in the document, but I couldn't figure it out.
MS Office on cross-over Wine is what I use and I am productive.
Sun embraced the internet years before Microsoft and looked out into the future and realized that desktop computing and huge, standalone applications were going to be increasingly replaced by device computing and small, internet downloadable applications would be prevalant.
To that end, they tried to design a language that was simple, that had built-in libraries to handle basic internet protocols and to a large extent, their vision was spot-on and Java was hugely successful.
Yeah, Sun had vision alright. Funny that they designed Java originally for embedded systems...then that whole Internet thing came along...
I can make a closed-source kernel module and a closed-source application that use the services of the Linux kernel. I can't make a closed-source application that uses the UI components of QT. This is a problem if you ask me.
Even in Windows, I can write a GUI without buying Microsoft's widgets. I can even do so using the GCC compiler.
Requiring people to purchase a $1500 license to write a closed-source app is not bad, it just shouldn't be what an OS platform is. For example, my professor would not allow us to write our project software using QT because our University Technology Transfer office didn't want to close the door on possible royalties. The problem with the QT GPL license is that you have to decide whether or not your app is closed source before you start writing it .
Of course there is GTK+ which is LGPL. However having fragmented UIs is bad for several reasons:
1. Common look-n-feel is important
2. Loading GTK and QT/KDE libraries is a waste of memory
If SWT is the future, it would sure be nice for it to show its face. I'm not a dummy, but I can't find any SWT API documentation. I surfed eclipse.org silly without finding anything.
Without hyperthreading, the chip really does sit idle. An instruction window is only so big. You can tolerate an L1 miss, and an L2 miss if the L3 is on-chip, but going off-chip kills you. Your instruction window, typically less than a couple hundred entries, fills up and you are stalled by dependencies.
Since Itanium is an in-order processor, it stalls period. And yet it performs pretty darn good. The reason is that superscaler out-of-order execution is becoming less useful with the increasing memory latency gap.
example of the megahertz myth. The chip with the largest cache won. Hands down, no contest.
Of course. Eliminating a cache miss is huge. Suppose that it takes 300 nanoseconds to get a word from memory.
At 3GHz, that is 900 wasted cycles where each cycle could have potentially retired 3 instructions.
At 6GHz, assuming your memory latency doesn't change, that is 1800 wasted cycles.
It is well known that the memory latency is not keeping up with the clock cycle latency. This is why memory system design is becoming far more important the processor core design, and is also why Itanium SPEC numbers are so good.
Slashdot Mirror
Fine. Were multi-threaded benchmarks used? If not, the use of hyperthreading wouldn't be reflected in the benchmarks. The benefits wouldn't be measured.
Most of the bad security press (especially recently) has been Outlook (Express) based Worms and this was do to introducing a good idea (feature) that turned sour.
No - it is (continuing - not past tense) due to a fundamental design choice. Microsoft products treat DATA and CODE as one and the same - the result being that there is no seperation between them, and content can be active. In almost all unix systems, the exact opposite choice is made.
That's why you don't see it happen on unix/linux systems - design decisions.
Unix has an exec bit. I could just as easily change Evolution/KMail/whatever to make a double-click on a file do the following:
Check the extension or magic-number to identify the file. If it is in the ELF executable format or a Perl script or whatever, change the exec bit and run it.
The Windows NT/XP kernel is quite solid and most, if not all, of the flaws exist in software outside of the kernel.
I don't believe that the benchmarks utilized hyperthreading...which is reasonable given that most people are interested in existing single-threaded apps. However the nice thing about a HT-enabled processor is that your system is still extremely snappy while crunching that MPEG encoding.
If anybody needs anectodal evidence that Sun hardware is more reliable than Dell, read this thread about the problems photo.net is having by switching from Sun to Dell.
Here is a good quote: "The E450 certainly has been, staying up for nearly a year at a time. The Dell has had more crashes in the first month than the E450 has in the last two years."
I think you have a good point. I'm guessing that a FAT32 file system has less seeks because the FAT table is cached. Ext2 on the other hand has to traverse Inodes.
Interesting you say that your hard drive is louder in Linux and silent with Win98. Could that mean that Windows is doing a better job of eliminating noisy seeks (head movement)?
I find that the hard drive noise is much more annoying. At 7200RPM, the noise is higher frequency than a cooling fan operating at 1500rpm or so.
And I just replaced a hard drive simply because the whine got too loud due to the bearings getting old.
I currently have over 2400 messages in my Inbox and about 10,000 filed away from the last 3 years. Since everything is IMAP-based, I use several e-mail clients ranging from Pine for ssh sessions, Outlook for Windows, and Evolution when at a powerful Linux machine. Most of my messages are legit...my ISP automatically filters viruses. In fact I received my first virus yesterday (the one that sends an encrypted .zip file which seems to defeat the ISP virus scanner). They also have SpamAssassin which automatically puts detected SPAM in my "caughtspam" IMAP folder.
Evolution effectively deals with my massive Inbox. I love the quick-filter feature right above the message list.
I can't sympathize with those who have unmanageable e-mail problems due to spam and viruses. Get a different ISP.
Note that my "ISP" is actually the Computer Science department. They handle over 10,000 accounts (lots of guest accounts), > 2 terrabytes of data, and manage about 500 machines (if not more due to clusters). This is all with less than 6 full-time staff and some part-time students.
Cooling is/was more important, especially for the older T-birds.
You have to be more careful not to crack the chip when putting the heatsink on.
AMD has had software issues. For example, Win2K had to be patched to SP1 because AMD messed up AGP coherence. AMD also never told the Linux developers about this same problem causing numerous people to have system crashes when using nVidia cards/drivers under linux. You'd think they would have sent a fricken e-mail to the kernel-dev lit.
Socket A motherboards always seemed so damn sensitive to power supplies. I've got a Dell 4100, with a PIII 866MHz, filled with 4 drives and a Geforce4 Ti4400. All of this runs fine on the 200Watt power supply. Now maybe my problems with Athlons were related to shoddy motherboards, but I frequently ran into PS issues. Seems that good, high-quality Antec caliber supplies are needed. Yet I've built P4 boxes with 300W generics and have no problems.
Just my 2 cents. Competition is good and I know several people who have had _no_ problems with AMD.
Tis the question.
On my cheap Athlon machine, with ECS K7S5A board, the following installers work fine:
Win2k, WinXP, NetBSD 1.5.2, Gentoo 1.4, Slackware 8.0, Redhat 7.2, Redhat 8.0, and some Debian version
The following installers fail by freezing after detecting hard drives:
FreeBSD 4.4, FreeBSD 4.5, and FreeBSD 5.2.1
I've taken a few MBA courses as part of my Ph.D. minor requirement. What floored me is how business students and professors treat patents. "Getting a patent" is part of nearly every business plan involving technology...I've asked "what if there isn't anything novel to patent". They treat me as stupid by responding that there is always something to patent...ALWAYS!
And then we went over a case study about a recent technology company that failed. They attributed their failure due to a lack of patent protection. However knowing a bit about the technology and company, it was obvious that this company wasn't doing anything novel...just trying to do it better and cheaper.
Thanks...I'll have to re-evaluate Gimp.
Gimp still doesn't have a magnetic lasso selection tool nor automatic dust&scratch removal.
These are show-stoppers for me.
>>Kodak 400UC currently is the best ISO 400 color negative film on the market
> Huh?
The original poster said that nobody serious about photography uses Kodak film nowadays because it is inferior to Fuji. I disagree and Kodak Portra 400UC is an example of a Kodak product that is superior to anything else.
>> an entire lineup of negative film that uses the same filtration settings!
> Buh?
One advantage of the Kodak Portra lineup is that I calibrate my enlarger (for making prints) and film scanner (for scanning negatives) once for this entire lineup of film. It saves quite a bit of time. Fuji film is all different. NPS 400 has different filtration, NPC 400 is different, and Reala 100 is different.
>> they discontinued Kodachrome 25
> Zuh?
Kodachrome 25 was considered by many as the finest slide film ever made. Kodak discontinued it several years ago. There is no equivalent.
>> However they brought consumer photography to the masses with the Brownie
> Snuh?
The Kodak Brownie was the very first camera targeted towards the masses. It brought photography into the home 60 years ago. If you have family snapshots from that era, they were likely taken with a Kodak Brownie.
My point is that Kodak has always focused on the home consumer rather than the pros (otherwise they would have never discontinued popular professional products).
> Christ. I have no freakin' idea what you're talking about.
Sorry dude...this is a Slashdot thread about Kodak and I know my stuff about photography.
Kodak 400UC currently is the best ISO 400 color negative film on the market. Combined with 160NC, 160VC, 400NC, and 400VC, I have an entire lineup of negative film that uses the same filtration settings! Fuji films are all different filtrations.
Fuji makes good products...Velvia is still second to none. However Kodak isn't crap. With Tech Pan 35mm, I can still make a 16x20 print that rivals large-format photography. I'll compare my print, in which I used a 30-year old camera bought for $50 on eBay, against that made with a $2000 digital SLR any day of the week in terms of sharpness and grain.
Kodak is hated by many...especially those who were heart-broken when they discontinued Kodachrome 25. However they brought consumer photography to the masses with the Brownie. They've made good products for 80 years. And they haven't ignored digital...they had digital cameras for sale before Nikon. Of course they are going to have problems. They were always a film and paper business. Digital has completely disrupted their business and they saw it coming a long time ago.
Sun is all about throughput (bandwidth). Their biggest customers run heavily threaded workloads such as databases. Hence single CPU performance (latency) isn't as important. You will see Sun be a leader in chip-multiprocessing-- that is, don't be suprised if Sun releases a chip with 8 cores on it in the next 2-4 years.
Someone please tell me why everything should be "GPL compatible"??
Probably because most Linux users change their user agent string to report as a windoze variant...
;)
Thats quite an assumption. I took a quick poll of my fellow co-workers who use Linux all day at work, and some at home too. Not one has changed the user agent string. Yes, you should believe my scientific poll
The best word processor running on Linux is Microsoft Word.
In OpenOffice, I tried to create a simple numbered list, where I stop the list but then continue it at a later point in the document, but I couldn't figure it out.
MS Office on cross-over Wine is what I use and I am productive.
Sun embraced the internet years before Microsoft and looked out into the future and realized that desktop computing and huge, standalone applications were going to be increasingly replaced by device computing and small, internet downloadable applications would be prevalant.
To that end, they tried to design a language that was simple, that had built-in libraries to handle basic internet protocols and to a large extent, their vision was spot-on and Java was hugely successful.
Yeah, Sun had vision alright. Funny that they designed Java originally for embedded systems...then that whole Internet thing came along...
do what the parent says!
I can make a closed-source kernel module and a closed-source application that use the services of the Linux kernel. I can't make a closed-source application that uses the UI components of QT. This is a problem if you ask me.
Even in Windows, I can write a GUI without buying Microsoft's widgets. I can even do so using the GCC compiler.
Requiring people to purchase a $1500 license to write a closed-source app is not bad, it just shouldn't be what an OS platform is. For example, my professor would not allow us to write our project software using QT because our University Technology Transfer office didn't want to close the door on possible royalties. The problem with the QT GPL license is that you have to decide whether or not your app is closed source before you start writing it .
Of course there is GTK+ which is LGPL. However having fragmented UIs is bad for several reasons:
1. Common look-n-feel is important
2. Loading GTK and QT/KDE libraries is a waste of memory
If SWT is the future, it would sure be nice for it to show its face. I'm not a dummy, but I can't find any SWT API documentation. I surfed eclipse.org silly without finding anything.
Without hyperthreading, the chip really does sit idle. An instruction window is only so big. You can tolerate an L1 miss, and an L2 miss if the L3 is on-chip, but going off-chip kills you. Your instruction window, typically less than a couple hundred entries, fills up and you are stalled by dependencies.
Since Itanium is an in-order processor, it stalls period. And yet it performs pretty darn good. The reason is that superscaler out-of-order execution is becoming less useful with the increasing memory latency gap.
example of the megahertz myth. The chip with the largest cache won. Hands down, no contest.
Of course. Eliminating a cache miss is huge. Suppose that it takes 300 nanoseconds to get a word from memory.
At 3GHz, that is 900 wasted cycles where each cycle could have potentially retired 3 instructions.
At 6GHz, assuming your memory latency doesn't change, that is 1800 wasted cycles.
It is well known that the memory latency is not keeping up with the clock cycle latency. This is why memory system design is becoming far more important the processor core design, and is also why Itanium SPEC numbers are so good.