x86 chips in 64 bit mode run quite a bit faster for reasons that have nothing to do with 64 bitness at all. The instruction set has been changed to give access to twice as many registers, and that gives 15 to 20 percent more speed.
You make a good point, but register fills/spills are not the bottleneck in most apps. Amdahl's Law.
Memory copying will be memory-bound. It doesn't matter if the register holds 64-bits or 32-bits. You are bound by the DRAM bandwidth which is completely independent of whether or not the ISA is 32-bit or 64-bit.
32-bit datapaths will always be faster than 64-bit datapaths! If you aren't addressing more than 4GB of RAM and don't need 64-bit arithmetic, then a 32-bit processor can definitely be faster than a 64-bit.
Then there is cache footprints. 32-bit code will pack more tightly into caches resulting in higher performance.
Yes, she must double-click the desktop icon to start AOL. She's been using AOL for 2 years now to send/receive daily emails. Last week, I showed her how to drag something from one folder to another (copying a file to a floppy disk). She had a hard time with grasping the concept of a mouse drag.
MS Word is a disaster. Microsoft really needs to come out with a Office, Senior Edition.
One time she called me up to ask how to bring up a web page. Getting her to click in the address bar via the telephone was a disaster. Couldn't do it...I had to drive over and show her how to click on the address bar, clear what is there, and type in a URL. Was not easy.
She's even taken a 1-day senior citizen computing course.
All I can say is that AOL is probably the only program she can use. She manages email w/ an extensive address book, and she can now view web pages. Email has changed her life (for the better).
AOL has a reputation of being a bad ISP, and also creating bad software for it's users. Will this move help AOL, or hurt Google?
Say what you want about AOL, but its the only software my 70-year old mother-in-law can operate. She still doesn't understand the concept of mouse-dragging and double-clicking an icon is a stretch for her.
Move along. This is a Berkeley research lab funded by various sources. There are plenty of labs with similar funding. My academic research lab is funded by IBM, Sun, and Intel. Whoopee! Absolutely does not mean there is any kind of alliance.
Google "circle of confusion" to learn about how film area size affects depth-of-field. Stitching is only effective for some subjects. It won't work for anything that moves or for light that might change.
The primary difficulty in macro photography is getting enough depth-of-field (DOF), which is totally dependent on the film area size. Although this is a gross simplification, in general, the smaller the film area the more DOF you get. This is where tiny digital sensors shine. If you are serious about Macro, forget about 35mm or larger film formats. And I might even forget about full-frame dSLRs too and instead choose the APS-sized sensor.
And this is coming from someone who shoots 4x5 large-format for most of my photography. Combine a 4x5" negative scanned at a modest 2400dpi gets you over 100 megapixels. However any large-format shooter knows that controlling DOF is much more difficult because of the large film area. In fact this is why our cameras have movements. Instead of fixing the lens completing parallel with the film, we can move it around in order to change the plane of focus. For a nice example, check out this image in which the plane of focus extends from the guys knuckle to his eyes:
Of course you can mimic the effect in Photoshop, but this requires everything to be sharp to start with and sometimes this just isn't possible for the given subject distance and film area size.
Because Apple goes for form on not function. Motorola has always been a leader in the form category-- the StarTac, Vader, v60 with its sweet aluminum shell, the RAZR, and etc.
And to the parent poster, I used to work at Motorola and just because the menus appear the same, it doesn't mean the OS is. The UI software will run on top of many OSes with the right go-between layer.
They have no choice. You cannot expect your customers to pay Trolltech thousands of dollars to develop non-GPL GUI software to is seamless with the desktop environment. I had this issue in acadamia...even though I was developing open-source software, we couldn't license it as GPL for various legal reasons.
If QT was LGPL, Novell would probably stick with KDE.
Sorry, but open-source doesn't mean just GPL. I work in acadamia and everything we write is open-source. But for various reasons I won't get into, we don't license as GPL and we also integrate other non-GPL "open source" libraries. Hence I would need to purchase a $1000+ QT license. This isn't out of the question, but there is a reasonable alternative that is LGPL.
Sorry, but the core libraries of an OS environment cannot be GPL. This is why the LGPL exists. Microsoft doesn't charge money to link with their various GUI toolkit libraries. Yes, the development tools cost money, but you can develop with free compilers and still link to their libraries.
Ok, I usually don't gribe about spelling mistakes, but STANDFORD?!!! First we get Taco's rant about his online gaming debacles and now we get this...Slashdot has stooped to new lows today.
I recently visited SF for the first time in nearly a decade. I was shocked by the lack of free WiFi in downtown. Sure, the hotspots exist but they are all fee-based. On the other hand, it seems everywhere I go in the midwest has free hotspots including places like Mitchell, South Dakota!
To me, the show-stoppers for using Linux/Gimp for my photo work are the following:
* Color management. Not aware of ICC color profiling. Can I calibrate my monitor with nVideo and ATI Linux drivers? Can Gimp load an ICC profile of my output device to proof my print?
* Multi-processor support. Photoshop takes advantage of my dual-core machine.
* Large files. Photoshop loads and processes 1 GB image files much faster than Gimp. With my 4x5" large-format camera and a 2400dpi film scanner, my image files are 100 megapixels.
A Buick Century is one of the best American cars made. This design team knows what they are doing. It consistently gets high marks in quality, and my anecdotal evidence agrees-- my Buick Century got 240,000 miles with no major problems.
The best selling car is a Camry. But Japanese companies also have much less diversity in their line-up which skews the numbers. General Motors has Pontiac, Buick, Chevy, Cadillac, Saab, Oldsmobile (ok, that is now gone), etc. Toyota has their own brand and Lexus. Thats it.
But yes, I agree that in general, GM quality is not up to Toyota standards. My 2000 Nissan Maxima , purchased brand new, hasn't been a dream come true w.r.t. quality though (and the only reason I bought this instead of another Buick Century is that the latter didn't offer a 5-speed manual tranny!!).
Urm, but usually you can sell your house and be debt-free. And you will be making "debt payments" to your own debt if you own, or the possible debt of your landlord.
Slashdot Mirror
Many top game studios I'm familiar with buy Dell computers for game development.
x86 chips in 64 bit mode run quite a bit faster for reasons that have nothing to do with 64 bitness at all. The instruction set has been changed to give access to twice as many registers, and that gives 15 to 20 percent more speed.
You make a good point, but register fills/spills are not the bottleneck in most apps. Amdahl's Law.
Memory copying will be memory-bound. It doesn't matter if the register holds 64-bits or 32-bits. You are bound by the DRAM bandwidth which is completely independent of whether or not the ISA is 32-bit or 64-bit.
32-bit datapaths will always be faster than 64-bit datapaths! If you aren't addressing more than 4GB of RAM and don't need 64-bit arithmetic, then a 32-bit processor can definitely be faster than a 64-bit.
Then there is cache footprints. 32-bit code will pack more tightly into caches resulting in higher performance.
Ask your parents if they would have still bought the Sony knowing what they know now about the whole CD debacle.
Honestly you reach a point in your life (say age 30) where you just don't really care about these things any more.
I think Microsoft should just pull out of the EU market. My guess in that in 3-6 years, the EU will be begging Microsoft to sell their products again.
Right, and nerds who read Slashdot constitute maybe 0.01% of the U.S. population?? And those who really care are probably a fraction of that.
Yes, she must double-click the desktop icon to start AOL. She's been using AOL for 2 years now to send/receive daily emails. Last week, I showed her how to drag something from one folder to another (copying a file to a floppy disk). She had a hard time with grasping the concept of a mouse drag.
MS Word is a disaster. Microsoft really needs to come out with a Office, Senior Edition.
One time she called me up to ask how to bring up a web page. Getting her to click in the address bar via the telephone was a disaster. Couldn't do it...I had to drive over and show her how to click on the address bar, clear what is there, and type in a URL. Was not easy.
She's even taken a 1-day senior citizen computing course.
All I can say is that AOL is probably the only program she can use. She manages email w/ an extensive address book, and she can now view web pages. Email has changed her life (for the better).
AOL has a reputation of being a bad ISP, and also creating bad software for it's users. Will this move help AOL, or hurt Google?
Say what you want about AOL, but its the only software my 70-year old mother-in-law can operate. She still doesn't understand the concept of mouse-dragging and double-clicking an icon is a stretch for her.
Yet she is an e-mail queen with AOL!
Move along. This is a Berkeley research lab funded by various sources. There are plenty of labs with similar funding. My academic research lab is funded by IBM, Sun, and Intel. Whoopee! Absolutely does not mean there is any kind of alliance.
Yup, heard of it but never tried it. One of these days I'm gonna get myself a Speed Graphic...
Google "circle of confusion" to learn about how film area size affects depth-of-field. Stitching is only effective for some subjects. It won't work for anything that moves or for light that might change.
The primary difficulty in macro photography is getting enough depth-of-field (DOF), which is totally dependent on the film area size. Although this is a gross simplification, in general, the smaller the film area the more DOF you get. This is where tiny digital sensors shine. If you are serious about Macro, forget about 35mm or larger film formats. And I might even forget about full-frame dSLRs too and instead choose the APS-sized sensor.
_ gallery/2005/11/29/gallery.boxiing/content.11.html
And this is coming from someone who shoots 4x5 large-format for most of my photography. Combine a 4x5" negative scanned at a modest 2400dpi gets you over 100 megapixels. However any large-format shooter knows that controlling DOF is much more difficult because of the large film area. In fact this is why our cameras have movements. Instead of fixing the lens completing parallel with the film, we can move it around in order to change the plane of focus. For a nice example, check out this image in which the plane of focus extends from the guys knuckle to his eyes:
http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/multimedia/photo
Of course you can mimic the effect in Photoshop, but this requires everything to be sharp to start with and sometimes this just isn't possible for the given subject distance and film area size.
I think Google perpetually labels things "beta" because of arrogance. It can always respond to criticism by saying "but it is beta".
Does big iron still use 3-phase power?
Because Apple goes for form on not function. Motorola has always been a leader in the form category-- the StarTac, Vader, v60 with its sweet aluminum shell, the RAZR, and etc.
And to the parent poster, I used to work at Motorola and just because the menus appear the same, it doesn't mean the OS is. The UI software will run on top of many OSes with the right go-between layer.
They have no choice. You cannot expect your customers to pay Trolltech thousands of dollars to develop non-GPL GUI software to is seamless with the desktop environment. I had this issue in acadamia...even though I was developing open-source software, we couldn't license it as GPL for various legal reasons.
If QT was LGPL, Novell would probably stick with KDE.
Sorry, but open-source doesn't mean just GPL. I work in acadamia and everything we write is open-source. But for various reasons I won't get into, we don't license as GPL and we also integrate other non-GPL "open source" libraries. Hence I would need to purchase a $1000+ QT license. This isn't out of the question, but there is a reasonable alternative that is LGPL.
Sorry, but the core libraries of an OS environment cannot be GPL. This is why the LGPL exists. Microsoft doesn't charge money to link with their various GUI toolkit libraries. Yes, the development tools cost money, but you can develop with free compilers and still link to their libraries.
Ok, I usually don't gribe about spelling mistakes, but STANDFORD?!!! First we get Taco's rant about his online gaming debacles and now we get this...Slashdot has stooped to new lows today.
Gave away your iPod to a co-worker because of size, huh? Was she at least a DD and did you get to touch?
I recently visited SF for the first time in nearly a decade. I was shocked by the lack of free WiFi in downtown. Sure, the hotspots exist but they are all fee-based. On the other hand, it seems everywhere I go in the midwest has free hotspots including places like Mitchell, South Dakota!
Can I calibrate and create an ICC profile for my monitor with the video drivers for nVidia cards?
To me, the show-stoppers for using Linux/Gimp for my photo work are the following:
* Color management. Not aware of ICC color profiling. Can I calibrate my monitor with nVideo and ATI Linux drivers? Can Gimp load an ICC profile of my output device to proof my print?
* Multi-processor support. Photoshop takes advantage of my dual-core machine.
* Large files. Photoshop loads and processes 1 GB image files much faster than Gimp. With my 4x5" large-format camera and a 2400dpi film scanner, my image files are 100 megapixels.
A Buick Century is one of the best American cars made. This design team knows what they are doing. It consistently gets high marks in quality, and my anecdotal evidence agrees-- my Buick Century got 240,000 miles with no major problems.
The best selling car is a Camry. But Japanese companies also have much less diversity in their line-up which skews the numbers. General Motors has Pontiac, Buick, Chevy, Cadillac, Saab, Oldsmobile (ok, that is now gone), etc. Toyota has their own brand and Lexus. Thats it.
But yes, I agree that in general, GM quality is not up to Toyota standards. My 2000 Nissan Maxima , purchased brand new, hasn't been a dream come true w.r.t. quality though (and the only reason I bought this instead of another Buick Century is that the latter didn't offer a 5-speed manual tranny!!).
Urm, a mortgage is debt.
Urm, but usually you can sell your house and be debt-free. And you will be making "debt payments" to your own debt if you own, or the possible debt of your landlord.