Seriously, that's even cooler. A watch that expresses the time in seconds since 1969..far more fun than a binary watch, and when someone asks you the time your bring out your calculator...
Does it really hurt you that much to see people's names in the Changelog? Is your connection so slow that you think they are a waste of bandwidth?
I don't have a problem with people sticking their names in the Changelog - they've done this voluntarily and without pay, in their own time, when they could have been doing other stuff, don't you think they deserve just a little recognition? They've done a great job.
And it serves a purpose too as already pointed out - it allows you to see who was responsible for a change, so your type can be quick to blame them if feature X related to their change fails to work/crashes/panics/oopses/whatever
Re:BIOSes should not be operating system-specific.
on
LinuxBIOS Gains Steam
·
· Score: 3, Informative
As a side note, it doesn't look like it would be all that hard to get *BSD or The HURD booting from LinuxBIOS
Just want to point out the differences in the BSD and Linux booting process.
Linux has a 16-bit slab of code that does all the BIOS calls in arch/i386/boot/setup.s. This code works out the memory requirements (does the E820 map), gets any paramaters about any hard disks, APM,etc. Some of the information it finds out may or may not be used. Then it does the protected mode setup (GDT, IDT, etc) and jumps into the protected mode code (head.S)
BSD on the otherhand pretty much is entered already in protected mode, and obtains this information by spawning a V86 (Virtual 8086 mode) task that performs any BIOS calls.
I'm not sure if that has any bearing on being able to boot from LinuxBIOS, just wanted to point it out.
A little off topic, but on the lines of Australian Censorship
I live in Australia, and recently visited a newsagent in Melbourne. In the computer section was the official shrink-wrapped Red Hat Linux 7.1 or 7.2 CD with a book, published by Red Hat.
What disturbed me most was a sticker on the front with the Office of Film and Literature Classification logo, with the statement "This product is classified 'G' - it is suitable for all ages"
A little offtopic, but, there is no point having that much RAM if the OS doesnt use it.
Does anyone know if Windows XP has limits on RAM amount?
I know Linux 2.2, since it only directly mapped 1G at 0xc0000000 [by default] could only support 1G. 2.4 can go to 4G (even though it directly maps 1G), with PAE (3 level page tables with 64-bit pde's/pte's) can go to 64G.
BSD can go to 4G, since it does not support PAE (well at least in RELEASEes).
Because you may want to keep the original ISO, but extracting it would waste double the necessary space, as well as possibly lose information ISO-only.
So he wants to be able to access the contents of the ISO without the waste of time and disk space of extracting it.
I hope so, otherwise calculating the time would be much more difficult.
In the picture, there are 5/6/6 binary digits.
It's most likely hhhhhmmmmmmssssss
(maximum values 31,63,63 [24 hour time])
So the time is 01:00:31? Am I correct?
Alright mate I confess - I'm an Intel exec with nothing better to do than sit around trolling Slashdot.
Nah, but seriously, I think you took the post too seriously. Of course I could have used the CMOV instruction in my i386 code, however I was merely highlighting what predication was about - but then it wouldn't be i386 code would it? Hey your the real programmer you tell me.
And for this supposedly being offtopic - well we all interpret things a little differently - I'm sorry if reading my comment wasted so much of your precious time.
SPEC results also speaks for themselves, and louder - a real programmer would take SPEC with perhaps a grain of truthfulness at most.
I am in no way downplaying AMD's efforts at a 64-bit processor. I was pointing out they are in different leagues and should not be compared, as it seems many people are doing.
I really wish to debunk the rest of your points, but I've got better stuff to do
I strongly disagree. My [secondary] school made laptops compulsory the first year I attended, when I was 12, and the benefits were enormous. I've had two notebooks over the past 5 years and I watched people who were not technologically inclined become fairly familiar with the technology in a matter of a couple of weeks, rather than months as would happen with regular computer classes. And this was learnt not with classes, but interactive sessions in large rooms where students just worked at their own pace and openly discussed how to solve various problems, perform tasks, completely defying the critics who accused the program of making the kids "anti-social". In fact it did the opposite.
In a couple of months most of them could touch-type at reasonable speeds, and could get work done much quicker than on pen and paper. This was never meant to be, and still is not a substitute for pen and paper, which is still used, particularly for mathematics.
You are exactly like the critics I mentioned who were too afraid to try anything new; to change the style of learning, which turned out to be one of the best decisions the school made.
Mainly it seems people are talking about the register width, precision, and of course address space.
Keep in mind the first Itaniums have a 64-bit virtual adddress space, while the physical space is limited to 52-bits I think.
The Hammer series processors are really just an x86 extension. They offer no where near the capabilities of Intel's fresh start with IA64.
Here are some of the features of the IA64:
-> Heavy use of ILP (Instruction Level Parallelism) - speaks for itself.
-> Predication - less branches taken and hence stalling. The conditional handling is done through a controlling predicate, rather than jumping. look at this C code:
Previously, you couldn't move c=*ptr2 prior to the start of this code because ptr could overlap the same memory as ptr2.
Now you can - basically the load (using the "advanced load" instruction) is performed anyway, which allocates an entry in an internal table, then the store, and _if_ that store overwrites the load the load is performed again. Hopefully though, this shouldn't happen often. And its more flexible and powerful than this, this was just a simple example.
-> Remappable registers - the registers can be mapped kind of in a way that memory can be paged - that way when calling a new function the stack is not necessarily needed to push and pop various registers.
->"Modulo" loop scheduling
The beginning of the next iteration of a loop before the last one has finished - the remappable registers "rotate" to give each iteration a new set of the virtual registers
->An interesting way of handling paging
Which reduces TLB flushes on task switches by tagging an entry in the page tables with a unique ID specific to a process - I'm not fully sure on the details on this since I've never looked at IA64 system programming.
Sorry I'm sounding like an Intel brochure, but it really is quite amazing if your coming from x86 programming background - IA64 is a lot more than doubling data unit sizes. I suggest if you're familiar with assembly programming read the IA64 manual at developer.intel.com.
Vodafone Australia apparently offers ICQ from phone functionality, they can afford it possibly because they have no customers.
It is rumored that Telstra will be offering free SMS next year, I have no idea if there is any truth to that. In any case it's no good to me because I'm with Optus.
But I agree, 20c, or rather 22c inc GST to send 200 bytes of data across the network is ridiculous, hardly "excellent value" as the telcos describe it. Imagine if your ISP charged with those rates!
In Australia we have one of the lowest population densities in the world - only 19 million people across an area slightly smaller than the US, yet we have some of the best GSM coverage in the world, with some of the best GSM networks.
Take a look at the coverage on Australia's second largest network Optus.
We also have CDMA - but that sucks in buildings.
That throws the whole population-density argument out the window.
The FastTrack network has a very scalable two-level structure. Every computer on the network is initially a 'node', however nodes with significant bandwidth are promoted to 'supernode' status.
The KaZaa/Morpheus servers handle logging in and refer the node to a supernode, where the node sends its list of files it wants to share. These super-nodes store these lists, and search queries are forwarded to the supernodes.
A supernode also gives the lists of some of the clients its connected to, so if the supernode disappears nodes can talk to other nodes about supernodes without getting kicked off the network.
So, effectively the network is controlled by the supernodes, which can be just ordinary PCs with reasonable bandwidth. The KaZaa servers only handle the logging in pretty much, so I doubt the FastTrack network could ever technically be shut down. Unfortunately the FastTrack protocol is very proprietary, and uses some closed-source algorithms. It would be good to see someone create an open-source 'equivalent' of the p2p protocol with the excellent features of FastTrack.
Anyway that's just my understanding of the FastTrack network, correct me if I'm wrong.
I think you have missed what he was trying to say.
I think he was generally speaking about KDE and it's associated applications being less stable and slower than their Windows equivalents. And to be honest, they are [at the moment].
We call all talk about how "stable" the Linux kernel is [ignore recent events], but as long as a lot of programs that run on top of it frequently crash it's not that much use - it just means you have to restart the app, instead of the PC. You still in many cases have lost your work.
And by the way, please stop suggesting that KDE is exclusive to Linux, because it isn't. I run it under FreeBSD, as I'm sure many others do. I must admit, [2.2.1] is much more stable, and it's increasingly getting better.
Best wishes to the KDE developers, they've done a great job.
Might I ask why changing the op-logo is apparently so important?
I know nothing about the TDMA phones, so I can't offer any advice (I live in a GSM country). I have an 8210 (for more than a year now) and change the op-logo via IrDA using the software LogoManager. I have no idea of what the 8260 is like except that it seems to be a *very* primitive version of the (GSM) 8210.
Still, I can't see why you want to rid the logo. I *can* change the logo, but now I no longer bother and just stick with my provider's logo "YES OPTUS". The novelty wears off pretty quickly believe me.
Why on earth would you want a high-performance hard drive in the X-box?
The main purpose of the HDD is to save game data. The included 8G/10G 5400 rpm is more than enough to do this. Compare that to say, the Playstation memory cards and you'll see that its enormously faster.
Wanna play mp3's or WMAs or whatever in the future perhaps? 192kbit/s = 24kB/sec or less.
What exactly would be a good enough disk system for you? A UW SCSI 10Krpm hard disk? A RAID-5 perhaps?
Yeah I sure need a 10Krpm SCSI hard disk that sounds like a jet-engine taking off in my living room, just so I can save my game 2ns faster.
Let's face it - the average person who reads Slashdot is pretty smart - ie that's any of you guys reading this right now.. hence "News for nerds."
So the Slashdot readers have long seen that what Stallman has to say, is, to put it colloquially, a load of shit.
Bill Gates would never receive this kind of attention, so why should Stallman? They are pretty much both the same, except Stallman hides behind a wall of protection - that is something most of us here respect and have many have put a lot of time and effort into - free software, which, he claims to have created, although it hardly would have taken a huge amount of brainstorming to come up with the idea of sharing around code. It's just he set about "properly" documenting a license.
Now he abuses the respect he earned by coming up with outrageous opinions on free software, and has somehow turned the whole thing into a large political debate - exactly what we didn't want.
To be honest, I think he is really enjoying the Slashdot and IT media attention he's been getting so much of, so every few months he'll make another controversial statement/essay to try and boost the attention to free software (specifically GNU).
Why doesn't he use the time (and it would be a lot of time) wasted on these essays doing what he started out to do - *gasp* write free code...
This latest errr "piece" he has written is just another example of his hypocrisy - isn't it just a statement of his power?
No this is not a troll, I am in fact I greatly admire the efforts of the thousands of open-source contributors, but I just think Stallman has got too carried away. But I'm sure most of you can see that... Just my A$0.04
To be honest, although you would think it is a crazy idea and immediately likely to be rejected, New South Wales parliament consist primarily of old-farts who know _nothing_ about the Internet or what they are doing - as long as they are convinced it is protecting people then they will not look any further.
Although stuff like this is probably against the Australian constitution, so if/when it does pass, it will eventually be thrown out.
Slashdot Mirror
Seriously, that's even cooler. A watch that expresses the time in seconds since 1969..far more fun than a binary watch, and when someone asks you the time your bring out your calculator...
Does it really hurt you that much to see people's names in the Changelog? Is your connection so slow that you think they are a waste of bandwidth?
I don't have a problem with people sticking their names in the Changelog - they've done this voluntarily and without pay, in their own time, when they could have been doing other stuff, don't you think they deserve just a little recognition? They've done a great job.
And it serves a purpose too as already pointed out - it allows you to see who was responsible for a change, so your type can be quick to blame them if feature X related to their change fails to work/crashes/panics/oopses/whatever
As a side note, it doesn't look like it would be all that hard to get *BSD or The HURD booting from LinuxBIOS
Just want to point out the differences in the BSD and Linux booting process.
Linux has a 16-bit slab of code that does all the BIOS calls in arch/i386/boot/setup.s. This code works out the memory requirements (does the E820 map), gets any paramaters about any hard disks, APM,etc. Some of the information it finds out may or may not be used. Then it does the protected mode setup (GDT, IDT, etc) and jumps into the protected mode code (head.S)
BSD on the otherhand pretty much is entered already in protected mode, and obtains this information by spawning a V86 (Virtual 8086 mode) task that performs any BIOS calls.
I'm not sure if that has any bearing on being able to boot from LinuxBIOS, just wanted to point it out.
A little off topic, but on the lines of Australian Censorship
I live in Australia, and recently visited a newsagent in Melbourne. In the computer section was the official shrink-wrapped Red Hat Linux 7.1 or 7.2 CD with a book, published by Red Hat.
What disturbed me most was a sticker on the front with the Office of Film and Literature Classification logo, with the statement "This product is classified 'G' - it is suitable for all ages"
A little offtopic, but, there is no point having that much RAM if the OS doesnt use it.
Does anyone know if Windows XP has limits on RAM amount?
I know Linux 2.2, since it only directly mapped 1G at 0xc0000000 [by default] could only support 1G. 2.4 can go to 4G (even though it directly maps 1G), with PAE (3 level page tables with 64-bit pde's/pte's) can go to 64G.
BSD can go to 4G, since it does not support PAE (well at least in RELEASEes).
So does Windows XP use PAE is my question?
Because you may want to keep the original ISO, but extracting it would waste double the necessary space, as well as possibly lose information ISO-only.
So he wants to be able to access the contents of the ISO without the waste of time and disk space of extracting it.
Oops sorry without the link this does look like a troll :-(
/. story
Obviously some of you didnt read that
No, we can't sue them, but we can charge them with hate crimes against stupid people (ie. people who use Windows :-P)
Sorry to nitpick, but the default kernel that came with 4.4-RELEASE does include support for sound, in the form of modules.
:-)
It supported all the hardware out of the box on my notebook, with the exception of APM (and obviously not ACPI).
Still, I agree, to get the most out of FreeBSD you need to build a custom kernel
Just a question, how is the time encoded?
Is it seperately hours, minutes, seconds?
I hope so, otherwise calculating the time would be much more difficult.
In the picture, there are 5/6/6 binary digits.
It's most likely hhhhhmmmmmmssssss
(maximum values 31,63,63 [24 hour time])
So the time is 01:00:31? Am I correct?
Alright mate I confess - I'm an Intel exec with nothing better to do than sit around trolling Slashdot.
Nah, but seriously, I think you took the post too seriously. Of course I could have used the CMOV instruction in my i386 code, however I was merely highlighting what predication was about - but then it wouldn't be i386 code would it? Hey your the real programmer you tell me.
And for this supposedly being offtopic - well we all interpret things a little differently - I'm sorry if reading my comment wasted so much of your precious time.
SPEC results also speaks for themselves, and louder - a real programmer would take SPEC with perhaps a grain of truthfulness at most.
I am in no way downplaying AMD's efforts at a 64-bit processor. I was pointing out they are in different leagues and should not be compared, as it seems many people are doing.
I really wish to debunk the rest of your points, but I've got better stuff to do
umm, yeah
I strongly disagree. My [secondary] school made laptops compulsory the first year I attended, when I was 12, and the benefits were enormous. I've had two notebooks over the past 5 years and I watched people who were not technologically inclined become fairly familiar with the technology in a matter of a couple of weeks, rather than months as would happen with regular computer classes. And this was learnt not with classes, but interactive sessions in large rooms where students just worked at their own pace and openly discussed how to solve various problems, perform tasks, completely defying the critics who accused the program of making the kids "anti-social". In fact it did the opposite.
In a couple of months most of them could touch-type at reasonable speeds, and could get work done much quicker than on pen and paper. This was never meant to be, and still is not a substitute for pen and paper, which is still used, particularly for mathematics.
You are exactly like the critics I mentioned who were too afraid to try anything new; to change the style of learning, which turned out to be one of the best decisions the school made.
Mainly it seems people are talking about the register width, precision, and of course address space.
;;
Keep in mind the first Itaniums have a 64-bit virtual adddress space, while the physical space is limited to 52-bits I think.
The Hammer series processors are really just an x86 extension. They offer no where near the capabilities of Intel's fresh start with IA64.
Here are some of the features of the IA64:
-> Heavy use of ILP (Instruction Level Parallelism) - speaks for itself.
-> Predication - less branches taken and hence stalling. The conditional handling is done through a controlling predicate, rather than jumping. look at this C code:
if (!eax) ebx=VALUEB; else ebx=VALUEA;
Now the i386 code:
testl %eax,%eax
jz 1f
movl $VALUEA,%ebx
jmp 2f
1: movl $VALUEB,%ebx
2:
Now the IA64 code:
p2,p3 = cmp.ne r5,0
(p2)ld8 r4=$VALUEB
(p3)ld8 r4=$VALUEA
/* last two statements run in parallel */
Now whereas the i386 code jumps all over the place, stalling the CPU, the IA64 code uses the controlling predicate registers to decide (p2,p3)
->Huge register sets
r0-r127 are the general 64-bit registers, compare this to eax,ebx,ecx,edx,esi,edi,ebp?
p0-p63 are the predicates
As well as 128 82bit floating registers f0-f127
->Speculation
Normally you can't reschedule a load to run before a store because the addresses can overlap
*ptr=b;
some_code_that_does_not_touch_b_c_ptr_ptr2();
c=*ptr2;
Previously, you couldn't move c=*ptr2 prior to the start of this code because ptr could overlap the same memory as ptr2.
Now you can - basically the load (using the "advanced load" instruction) is performed anyway, which allocates an entry in an internal table, then the store, and _if_ that store overwrites the load the load is performed again. Hopefully though, this shouldn't happen often. And its more flexible and powerful than this, this was just a simple example.
-> Remappable registers - the registers can be mapped kind of in a way that memory can be paged - that way when calling a new function the stack is not necessarily needed to push and pop various registers.
->"Modulo" loop scheduling
The beginning of the next iteration of a loop before the last one has finished - the remappable registers "rotate" to give each iteration a new set of the virtual registers
->An interesting way of handling paging
Which reduces TLB flushes on task switches by tagging an entry in the page tables with a unique ID specific to a process - I'm not fully sure on the details on this since I've never looked at IA64 system programming.
Sorry I'm sounding like an Intel brochure, but it really is quite amazing if your coming from x86 programming background - IA64 is a lot more than doubling data unit sizes. I suggest if you're familiar with assembly programming read the IA64 manual at developer.intel.com.
Vodafone Australia apparently offers ICQ from phone functionality, they can afford it possibly because they have no customers.
It is rumored that Telstra will be offering free SMS next year, I have no idea if there is any truth to that. In any case it's no good to me because I'm with Optus.
But I agree, 20c, or rather 22c inc GST to send 200 bytes of data across the network is ridiculous, hardly "excellent value" as the telcos describe it. Imagine if your ISP charged with those rates!
I Agree.
In Australia we have one of the lowest population densities in the world - only 19 million people across an area slightly smaller than the US, yet we have some of the best GSM coverage in the world, with some of the best GSM networks.
Take a look at the coverage on Australia's second largest network Optus.
We also have CDMA - but that sucks in buildings.
That throws the whole population-density argument out the window.
The FastTrack network has a very scalable two-level structure. Every computer on the network is initially a 'node', however nodes with significant bandwidth are promoted to 'supernode' status.
The KaZaa/Morpheus servers handle logging in and refer the node to a supernode, where the node sends its list of files it wants to share. These super-nodes store these lists, and search queries are forwarded to the supernodes.
A supernode also gives the lists of some of the clients its connected to, so if the supernode disappears nodes can talk to other nodes about supernodes without getting kicked off the network.
So, effectively the network is controlled by the supernodes, which can be just ordinary PCs with reasonable bandwidth. The KaZaa servers only handle the logging in pretty much, so I doubt the FastTrack network could ever technically be shut down. Unfortunately the FastTrack protocol is very proprietary, and uses some closed-source algorithms. It would be good to see someone create an open-source 'equivalent' of the p2p protocol with the excellent features of FastTrack.
Anyway that's just my understanding of the FastTrack network, correct me if I'm wrong.
I think you have missed what he was trying to say.
I think he was generally speaking about KDE and it's associated applications being less stable and slower than their Windows equivalents. And to be honest, they are [at the moment].
We call all talk about how "stable" the Linux kernel is [ignore recent events], but as long as a lot of programs that run on top of it frequently crash it's not that much use - it just means you have to restart the app, instead of the PC. You still in many cases have lost your work.
And by the way, please stop suggesting that KDE is exclusive to Linux, because it isn't. I run it under FreeBSD, as I'm sure many others do. I must admit, [2.2.1] is much more stable, and it's increasingly getting better.
Best wishes to the KDE developers, they've done a great job.
Great. A 10kg rugby ball.
Might I ask why changing the op-logo is apparently so important?
I know nothing about the TDMA phones, so I can't offer any advice (I live in a GSM country). I have an 8210 (for more than a year now) and change the op-logo via IrDA using the software LogoManager. I have no idea of what the 8260 is like except that it seems to be a *very* primitive version of the (GSM) 8210.
Still, I can't see why you want to rid the logo. I *can* change the logo, but now I no longer bother and just stick with my provider's logo "YES OPTUS". The novelty wears off pretty quickly believe me.
What a shame there isn't a way to properly moderate those who ask stupid questions.
I did read the article, and I think boosting the HDD speed is just a quick workaround a more complex problem.
Superior memory-management/caching would be a better solution.
Why on earth would you want a high-performance hard drive in the X-box?
The main purpose of the HDD is to save game data. The included 8G/10G 5400 rpm is more than enough to do this. Compare that to say, the Playstation memory cards and you'll see that its enormously faster.
Wanna play mp3's or WMAs or whatever in the future perhaps? 192kbit/s = 24kB/sec or less.
What exactly would be a good enough disk system for you? A UW SCSI 10Krpm hard disk? A RAID-5 perhaps?
Yeah I sure need a 10Krpm SCSI hard disk that sounds like a jet-engine taking off in my living room, just so I can save my game 2ns faster.
Let's face it - the average person who reads Slashdot is pretty smart - ie that's any of you guys reading this right now.. hence "News for nerds."
So the Slashdot readers have long seen that what Stallman has to say, is, to put it colloquially, a load of shit.
Bill Gates would never receive this kind of attention, so why should Stallman? They are pretty much both the same, except Stallman hides behind a wall of protection - that is something most of us here respect and have many have put a lot of time and effort into - free software, which, he claims to have created, although it hardly would have taken a huge amount of brainstorming to come up with the idea of sharing around code. It's just he set about "properly" documenting a license.
Now he abuses the respect he earned by coming up with outrageous opinions on free software, and has somehow turned the whole thing into a large political debate - exactly what we didn't want.
To be honest, I think he is really enjoying the Slashdot and IT media attention he's been getting so much of, so every few months he'll make another controversial statement/essay to try and boost the attention to free software (specifically GNU).
Why doesn't he use the time (and it would be a lot of time) wasted on these essays doing what he started out to do - *gasp* write free code...
This latest errr "piece" he has written is just another example of his hypocrisy - isn't it just a statement of his power?
No this is not a troll, I am in fact I greatly admire the efforts of the thousands of open-source contributors, but I just think Stallman has got too carried away. But I'm sure most of you can see that... Just my A$0.04
Would you care to explain why it's wrong to deny that to people?
That's just your opinion..
Oh sorry - its not - it sounds like you are just quoting RMS/are RMS.
To be honest, although you would think it is a crazy idea and immediately likely to be rejected, New South Wales parliament consist primarily of old-farts who know _nothing_ about the Internet or what they are doing - as long as they are convinced it is protecting people then they will not look any further.
Although stuff like this is probably against the Australian constitution, so if/when it does pass, it will eventually be thrown out.