So what happens when congress passes a law defining the police bursting into your house in the middle of the night and taking everything you own without a whit of judicial oversight (i.e., a warrant) as a 'reasonable search'? Riiight.
This is a constitutional argument. Congress may enact laws within the framework of the constitution, but is not responsible for interpreting the constitution itself. In the example above, it isn't congress' responsability to interpret the constitution; the law would still be unconstitutional.
Your point is moot. It is the supreme court which makes the determination about how the militia clause in the second amendment should affect the amendment's interpretation, not Congress.
Part of the problem with security with respect to SMP isn't just the kernel. Many subtle race conditions that could result in security flaws are more likely to be exploitable in a truely parallel environment than they are in just a concurrent uniprocessing environment.
In addition to just making sure the kernel has it right, you've got to make sure that it's not going to open up any holes in the userspace too.
Your comment is amusing since as a UW CS student, I don't have a Windows account. In fact, last I checked as an upper year student I'm not allowed to have Windows account, unless it's required by a specific course (statistics courses sometimes require windows accounts for matlab, for example).
Introductory programming courses are taught on Macs and Windows boxes, but almost everybody I know participates (as time allows) in free software projects; hell, half of the people I know are Debian developers.
So why don't you stick to things you know (i.e., nothing) and take some of this shut the fuck up.
The problem with nuclear power is it will probably take more energy to safely contain the radioactive waste than you'll get out of the plant. In the long-run, building nuclear plants is just a net energy loss.
Uh, 64-bitness is due to the size of integers and the memory addressing that the chip supports.
Numerical approximation of differential equations is a floating point problem, and you wouldn't use fixed-point math (integers) to do it (unless you were nuts). The P4 (and the Athlons) support 80-bit extended double precision floating point math, and with SSE2, it's damn fast. If they want really insane performance, they should consider grabbing one of the Itanium2 systems from HP. Intel are floating point gods; wwhy do you think SGI is planning to migrate their supercomputer lines to IA64?
64-bit CPUs have been around for years. Linux and Windows both run fine on 64-bit platforms. There is more to computing than PCs and Macs.
Re: Skip to the last page for the most interesting
on
AMD's 64-bit Plot
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· Score: 3, Insightful
The flaw in your logic is that Intel's actually making a profit, while AMD is still, I believe, in the red. Seeing as how it tends to be difficult to turn a profit when your primary product is sold at a loss, I'll take a stab in the dark and guess that they're not actually selling any chips for below the production cost.
Also, don't forget that Intel's manafacturing technology is about three years ahead of AMD. Their production costs are half of AMD's per unit.
A big problem with AMD chips, and something that I suspect is a not insignificant factor when it comes to the big OEMs, is that AMD builds fragile chips! If I need to build and ship x thousands of computers per day, if half the chips I buy get cracked during installation, I'm effectively paying double the unit cost.
I'd say Intel's strategy of 'consumers don't need 64-bit platforms yet' makes more sense. Why try to sell people an expensive chip that they don't need? They're just going to focus on the very-high-end for a few years.
Of course, that's not to say people won't need to switch eventually... and if you look at Intel's roadmap, they're planning to start weaning people off of x86 and trying to get them to shift to IA64 on the desktop in a couple of years, which considering the current spate of applications and hardware, makes a lot more sense.
Remember, the only real need for 64-bit is larger address spaces, and half of/. was bitching a 18 months ago when WindowsXP came out that it needed at least 128mb of RAM. So it seems to me that we're still a few years away from needing the extra bits of address space.
And until then, Intel will bide their time selling the chip to people who actually have a use for it.
Coolness? Damn, there's far better reasons than that for quantum computers. I don't care how fast the latest and greatest pentium or athlon is, there's still thousands of incredibly useful problems that a quantum computer can solve in moments, but will take your classical computer until the end of the universe to solve.
There's a reason why we don't see software that uses these. Because, well, um, I mentioned that it'd take until the end of the universe, right? Same reason you didn't see a lot of realtime 3d games being sold in the 70s.
Really, they just shouldn't have reported on the robot until the investigation had been cleared up.
But, the investigation is currently underway. While a number of people associated with the situation have stated that the robot wasn't at fault, we'll just have to wait and see what the result is. So, what should be done in the meantime?
If you report that somebody died under the robot without knowing the full facts and filling our your article with speculation, you're just going to scare people. Now, perhaps the robot needs to go back for redesign, but if the investigation shows up an issues, it'll probably get its FDA approval removed (don't forget, it is approved for use by the people empowered to keep your surgeon from using something dangerous on you) -- and then you can report to your heart's content and scare people rightly... although it'll be moot since it'll have its approval revoked anyway.
But what if it wasn't the robot's fault, and you just created a scare? People who would have been operated on by the robot now refuse, end up elect for something that's actually more dangerous and you get more people dying due to complications.
So why don't we all just sit and wait for the results to come out before making judgements?
Until this technology is perfected and absolutely error-free/failsafe/100% accurate, I'll opt for the human to do the surgery.
These 'scalpel' things are too dangerous. Until the technology is perfect and nobody dies from them (because we know the doctor never makes a mistake), I'll stick to my leeches.
Somedays I wonder how these attitudes survive evolution...
Dude, you do realise it's possible to write reliable software, right? It's just hard,
which is why you don't usually directly interact with extremely reliable systems on a day to day basis.
Think about the computer systems that control fly-by-wire planes in flight, the space shuttles, or nuclear weapon control systems.
Why should Microsoft be worried? Almost nobody (except for a few crazy Crossover users;) runs MS software on non-MS operating systems.
I have to wonder how valid it is to seperate a lot of software MS sells into seperate categories.
When you look at MS' expensive server versions of Windows, you're not really getting a lot more over the non-server versions. What you're paying for is the ability to use things like Exchange, or SQL Server.
If MS sells you a license for SQL Server, are they losing money on that sale? Well, with respect to the SQL Server division, they are, technically. But chances are they just sold you an expensive Windows server license too.
A lot of Microsoft products get sold together as complete systems. While it might be required legally, I question whether it really makes sense to consider the profitability of many of the product divisions independently.
It's like three blind men trying to figure out what an elephant is - one grabs the trunk, one grabs a leg, and one grabs the tail; do they know what the elephant looks like? No. And if you try to consider Microsoft's business by looking at each of their business units in seperation, do you get a clear picture of how Microsoft runs? No! It might be okay with IBM, but Microsoft as a company has always thrived on tight integration of their products. I'd have thought the readers of/. would realise this, of all people. Isn't that what the whole anti-trust lawsuit was about in the first place?
I wonder how many of Sony's customers actually call Sony up and ask for Linux to be pre-installed on their laptop... I'm sure there are a few, but not all that many. 'But Linux doesn't cost Sony anything! Why shouldn't they?' you cry.
Well, let's get back to reality now. If Sony wants to ship a desktop with Linux pre-installed, they've got to hire people to put together a pre-installed Linux distribution to use. People with experience building OEM Windows distributions aren't rare, and the tools to help this process are relatively common. Also, you've suddenly got to make sure all your hardware is completely supported in Linux. So you have to go out to your component suppliers.
So after you've done all this, you start selling pre-installed Linux on your computers... and suddenly somebody has a problem! Uh oh, I hope you have some people on hand for technical support! And you can't just outsource your technical support to a specialist company, like you can with Windows.
Let's face it. There simply isn't enough consumer interest to support pre-installed Linux on the desktop. Sure, you're going to save about $100 per computer (OEM license cost), but how many do you have to ship to make up for initial setup cost in the first place? The cost of the Windows license simply isn't a big enough on most computers being sold these days to make up for the pathetic level of general consumer interest (I don't consider the 0.5% of desktop users using Linux to be significant).
Now, the server market is different. Lots of people want Linux preinstalled on x86 servers and *gasp* I can buy it preinstalled! I've been able to for years! But there's appreciable demand, so that's no big surprise.
For the record, I use Debian GNU/Linux, and have for years. When I bought this computer (it's not worth my time to hunt down parts at OEM prices and build it myself), I just went to a local store, specced it out and asked for it without a Windows license. Easy as pie. But I didn't expect the guy running the store to preinstall Debian on it for me.
Ah, so I suppose all the research they do into voice and handwriting recognition haven't contributed in the slightest to the development of the TabletPC?
And I suspect the MS SQL guys ignore all the research they do into databases.
Junk mail filtering? Pshaw. They'll never use that.
Compiler technology and programming language research? They'll never use any of that!
Ubiquitous computing? Who has ever heard of MS being interested in that!
While MSR doesn't appear to be working on anything directly related to the NT internals, almost every research project they list looks pretty related to things MS is working on in some capacity.
The EU fears that mobile phones will become like IBM-compatible PCs - commodity hardware all running the same software.
You mean comparatively cheap, commodity items? I can imagine how that might trouble a number of the large European mobile phone manafacturers! Got to keep the systems proprietary, custom, and expensive. Won't please someone think of the profit margins...err...children!
Perhaps the recent American innovation of a corporation's right to profit has been taken up by the EU too?
Linux 2.4 supports it in theory. However, the dynamics of scheduling virtual CPUs are slightly different from scheduling real CPUs. With real CPUs, putting a task on one CPU isn't going to directly effect the performance of another CPU.
Until the scheduling logic in Linux improves to better support HyperThreading you're not going to see a lot of direct benefit out of it unless you understand some of the subtleties of hyperthreading and use your system to take advantage of them. But, 2.5 is supposed to be much better.
Why are you running make -j5 on a system with 2 CPUs? That seems a bit ridiculous to me.
Hyperthreading presents two CPUs to the operating system to provide certain performance benefits. That doesn't mean it's magically two CPUs - you've still only got the computational resources of one.
make -j2 will tax out the CPUs resouces as much as possible, and the two 'unused' virtual CPUs can be used by the OS kernel to do its housekeeping without interrupting the processes running in the foreground as much. Hyperthreading is a subtle technology. Beating it with a sledgehammer isn't the way to achieve the best results.
I believe Apple is the "first" to start making use of the video card's GPU for day-to-day stuff.
You are completely wrong. Did you actually bother to check this 'fact'? That's like claiming Apple was the 'first' to ship protected memory and preemptive multitasking in an operating system.
Hardcore systems produced by the likes of SGI have done this for years. WindowsXP supported this from its release, introducing it to consumer operating systems a year before Apple shipped their hardware accelerated Quartz in Jaguar.
For Christ's sake, even Berlin had this before Apple. And you know, that's just sad.
I think AMD realizes that multiprocessing is not something the average user will ever benefit from.
If you think that, you've obviously never used a dual processor box. A multiprocessor against a uniprocessor (but with the CPU twice as fast) may not outperform the uniprocessor at Quake3, but it'll feel far more responsive and quicker in most things you do. It's just the way modern operating systems work.
Are you talking about the P4, or the AthlonXP? It's not clear.
If you're talking about the Athlon, the problem is much more fundamental than heat, it's a signal distribution problem. Basically, the chip is running so fast that the time it takes for a signal to get from one component to another is more than a clock cycle. This is why with the latest release of the AthlonXP, AMD had to add more layers and do more wiring optimisation to shrink the effective distances between components (closer = faster signal propagation, obviously).
The P4 is capable of handling much higher clock rates than the AthlonXP, since the NetBurst architecture isn't designed with the assumption that all signals will propagate within a single clock cycle. My rough calculations show that the P4 could probably be clocked up to about 30ghz before you hit the same signal propagation issues the Athlon is having now. Of course, there are more traditional overclocking concerns between 3ghz and 30ghz.:P
Slashdot Mirror
So what happens when congress passes a law defining the police bursting into your house in the middle of the night and taking everything you own without a whit of judicial oversight (i.e., a warrant) as a 'reasonable search'? Riiight.
This is a constitutional argument. Congress may enact laws within the framework of the constitution, but is not responsible for interpreting the constitution itself. In the example above, it isn't congress' responsability to interpret the constitution; the law would still be unconstitutional.
Your point is moot. It is the supreme court which makes the determination about how the militia clause in the second amendment should affect the amendment's interpretation, not Congress.
What, you mean I don't get to decide who deserves to die and who doesn't?
See, that's where your argument breaks down.
In addition to just making sure the kernel has it right, you've got to make sure that it's not going to open up any holes in the userspace too.
Sounds like you've got some issues, dude.
Your comment is amusing since as a UW CS student, I don't have a Windows account. In fact, last I checked as an upper year student I'm not allowed to have Windows account, unless it's required by a specific course (statistics courses sometimes require windows accounts for matlab, for example).
Introductory programming courses are taught on Macs and Windows boxes, but almost everybody I know participates (as time allows) in free software projects; hell, half of the people I know are Debian developers.
So why don't you stick to things you know (i.e., nothing) and take some of this shut the fuck up.
The problem with nuclear power is it will probably take more energy to safely contain the radioactive waste than you'll get out of the plant. In the long-run, building nuclear plants is just a net energy loss.
Uh, 64-bitness is due to the size of integers and the memory addressing that the chip supports.
Numerical approximation of differential equations is a floating point problem, and you wouldn't use fixed-point math (integers) to do it (unless you were nuts). The P4 (and the Athlons) support 80-bit extended double precision floating point math, and with SSE2, it's damn fast. If they want really insane performance, they should consider grabbing one of the Itanium2 systems from HP. Intel are floating point gods; wwhy do you think SGI is planning to migrate their supercomputer lines to IA64?
Who moderated this up?
64-bit CPUs have been around for years. Linux and Windows both run fine on 64-bit platforms. There is more to computing than PCs and Macs.
The flaw in your logic is that Intel's actually making a profit, while AMD is still, I believe, in the red. Seeing as how it tends to be difficult to turn a profit when your primary product is sold at a loss, I'll take a stab in the dark and guess that they're not actually selling any chips for below the production cost.
Also, don't forget that Intel's manafacturing technology is about three years ahead of AMD. Their production costs are half of AMD's per unit.
A big problem with AMD chips, and something that I suspect is a not insignificant factor when it comes to the big OEMs, is that AMD builds fragile chips! If I need to build and ship x thousands of computers per day, if half the chips I buy get cracked during installation, I'm effectively paying double the unit cost.
I'd say Intel's strategy of 'consumers don't need 64-bit platforms yet' makes more sense. Why try to sell people an expensive chip that they don't need? They're just going to focus on the very-high-end for a few years.
Of course, that's not to say people won't need to switch eventually... and if you look at Intel's roadmap, they're planning to start weaning people off of x86 and trying to get them to shift to IA64 on the desktop in a couple of years, which considering the current spate of applications and hardware, makes a lot more sense.
Remember, the only real need for 64-bit is larger address spaces, and half of /. was bitching a 18 months ago when WindowsXP came out that it needed at least 128mb of RAM. So it seems to me that we're still a few years away from needing the extra bits of address space.
And until then, Intel will bide their time selling the chip to people who actually have a use for it.
AMD isn't up to 3ghz yet. Perhaps that's part of the reason why they're interested in becoming more independent of the desktop market?
There's a reason why we don't see software that uses these. Because, well, um, I mentioned that it'd take until the end of the universe, right? Same reason you didn't see a lot of realtime 3d games being sold in the 70s.
*innocent whistle*
But, the investigation is currently underway. While a number of people associated with the situation have stated that the robot wasn't at fault, we'll just have to wait and see what the result is. So, what should be done in the meantime?
If you report that somebody died under the robot without knowing the full facts and filling our your article with speculation, you're just going to scare people. Now, perhaps the robot needs to go back for redesign, but if the investigation shows up an issues, it'll probably get its FDA approval removed (don't forget, it is approved for use by the people empowered to keep your surgeon from using something dangerous on you) -- and then you can report to your heart's content and scare people rightly... although it'll be moot since it'll have its approval revoked anyway.
But what if it wasn't the robot's fault, and you just created a scare? People who would have been operated on by the robot now refuse, end up elect for something that's actually more dangerous and you get more people dying due to complications.
So why don't we all just sit and wait for the results to come out before making judgements?
These 'scalpel' things are too dangerous. Until the technology is perfect and nobody dies from them (because we know the doctor never makes a mistake), I'll stick to my leeches.
Somedays I wonder how these attitudes survive evolution...
Think about the computer systems that control fly-by-wire planes in flight, the space shuttles, or nuclear weapon control systems.
Actually, OS X uses Darwin, which is based off of Mach. It's the userspace that comes from FreeBSD, not the kernel.
I have to wonder how valid it is to seperate a lot of software MS sells into seperate categories.
When you look at MS' expensive server versions of Windows, you're not really getting a lot more over the non-server versions. What you're paying for is the ability to use things like Exchange, or SQL Server.
If MS sells you a license for SQL Server, are they losing money on that sale? Well, with respect to the SQL Server division, they are, technically. But chances are they just sold you an expensive Windows server license too.
A lot of Microsoft products get sold together as complete systems. While it might be required legally, I question whether it really makes sense to consider the profitability of many of the product divisions independently.
It's like three blind men trying to figure out what an elephant is - one grabs the trunk, one grabs a leg, and one grabs the tail; do they know what the elephant looks like? No. And if you try to consider Microsoft's business by looking at each of their business units in seperation, do you get a clear picture of how Microsoft runs? No! It might be okay with IBM, but Microsoft as a company has always thrived on tight integration of their products. I'd have thought the readers of /. would realise this, of all people. Isn't that what the whole anti-trust lawsuit was about in the first place?
I wonder how many of Sony's customers actually call Sony up and ask for Linux to be pre-installed on their laptop... I'm sure there are a few, but not all that many. 'But Linux doesn't cost Sony anything! Why shouldn't they?' you cry.
Well, let's get back to reality now. If Sony wants to ship a desktop with Linux pre-installed, they've got to hire people to put together a pre-installed Linux distribution to use. People with experience building OEM Windows distributions aren't rare, and the tools to help this process are relatively common. Also, you've suddenly got to make sure all your hardware is completely supported in Linux. So you have to go out to your component suppliers.
So after you've done all this, you start selling pre-installed Linux on your computers... and suddenly somebody has a problem! Uh oh, I hope you have some people on hand for technical support! And you can't just outsource your technical support to a specialist company, like you can with Windows.
Let's face it. There simply isn't enough consumer interest to support pre-installed Linux on the desktop. Sure, you're going to save about $100 per computer (OEM license cost), but how many do you have to ship to make up for initial setup cost in the first place? The cost of the Windows license simply isn't a big enough on most computers being sold these days to make up for the pathetic level of general consumer interest (I don't consider the 0.5% of desktop users using Linux to be significant).
Now, the server market is different. Lots of people want Linux preinstalled on x86 servers and *gasp* I can buy it preinstalled! I've been able to for years! But there's appreciable demand, so that's no big surprise.
For the record, I use Debian GNU/Linux, and have for years. When I bought this computer (it's not worth my time to hunt down parts at OEM prices and build it myself), I just went to a local store, specced it out and asked for it without a Windows license. Easy as pie. But I didn't expect the guy running the store to preinstall Debian on it for me.
Ah, so I suppose all the research they do into voice and handwriting recognition haven't contributed in the slightest to the development of the TabletPC?
And I suspect the MS SQL guys ignore all the research they do into databases.
Junk mail filtering? Pshaw. They'll never use that.
Compiler technology and programming language research? They'll never use any of that!
Ubiquitous computing? Who has ever heard of MS being interested in that!
While MSR doesn't appear to be working on anything directly related to the NT internals, almost every research project they list looks pretty related to things MS is working on in some capacity.
You mean comparatively cheap, commodity items? I can imagine how that might trouble a number of the large European mobile phone manafacturers! Got to keep the systems proprietary, custom, and expensive. Won't please someone think of the profit margins...err...children!
Perhaps the recent American innovation of a corporation's right to profit has been taken up by the EU too?
Until the scheduling logic in Linux improves to better support HyperThreading you're not going to see a lot of direct benefit out of it unless you understand some of the subtleties of hyperthreading and use your system to take advantage of them. But, 2.5 is supposed to be much better.
Why are you running make -j5 on a system with 2 CPUs? That seems a bit ridiculous to me.
Hyperthreading presents two CPUs to the operating system to provide certain performance benefits. That doesn't mean it's magically two CPUs - you've still only got the computational resources of one.
make -j2 will tax out the CPUs resouces as much as possible, and the two 'unused' virtual CPUs can be used by the OS kernel to do its housekeeping without interrupting the processes running in the foreground as much. Hyperthreading is a subtle technology. Beating it with a sledgehammer isn't the way to achieve the best results.
You are completely wrong. Did you actually bother to check this 'fact'? That's like claiming Apple was the 'first' to ship protected memory and preemptive multitasking in an operating system.
Hardcore systems produced by the likes of SGI have done this for years. WindowsXP supported this from its release, introducing it to consumer operating systems a year before Apple shipped their hardware accelerated Quartz in Jaguar.
For Christ's sake, even Berlin had this before Apple. And you know, that's just sad.
If you think that, you've obviously never used a dual processor box. A multiprocessor against a uniprocessor (but with the CPU twice as fast) may not outperform the uniprocessor at Quake3, but it'll feel far more responsive and quicker in most things you do. It's just the way modern operating systems work.
If you're talking about the Athlon, the problem is much more fundamental than heat, it's a signal distribution problem. Basically, the chip is running so fast that the time it takes for a signal to get from one component to another is more than a clock cycle. This is why with the latest release of the AthlonXP, AMD had to add more layers and do more wiring optimisation to shrink the effective distances between components (closer = faster signal propagation, obviously).
The P4 is capable of handling much higher clock rates than the AthlonXP, since the NetBurst architecture isn't designed with the assumption that all signals will propagate within a single clock cycle. My rough calculations show that the P4 could probably be clocked up to about 30ghz before you hit the same signal propagation issues the Athlon is having now. Of course, there are more traditional overclocking concerns between 3ghz and 30ghz. :P