BTW, I don't know about windoze, but in the Linux world going from 32 bits to 64 bits almost always seems to produce a performance gain of 10->20%. I personally tried a simulator I'm using with 64 bits (recompiled with gcc), and got a speedup of 12%.
This depends a lot on how the code was written.... plus gcc is kinda... not that good for optimization so there are any number of things that could be going on.
Anecdotal evidence is garbage. All of the code I write at home I test in 32-bit and 64-bit modes on an Athlon64. Depending on what the code is, I can see anywhere from up to a 20% increase in performance to a 20% decrease in performance.
For example, if the (C) code you are compiling code that has longs all over the place, you've just doubled your cache pressure going to 32-bit. Did your code really mean to use 64-bit ints there? You'd have to look at the code to be sure but many times, C coders just use longs because they are used to it and this will have a possibly unexpected behaviour in 64-bit mode.
the Intel dual core hasn't been released yet so we don't know whether they are
Actually, it was released a while back and you can buy them from Dell. And don't follow up this post with some fanboi crap about not being "true" dual core. There are two cores on the single piece of silicon for both the AMD and Intel dual core parts. That is all that is required to be "dual core". Anything else is just fanbois trying to somehow diffrentiate AMD and Intel and make themselves feel proud (while showing their complete ignorance to anyone who knows anything about CPUs).
For the record, I have a friend who has a Dell dual core machine. I plan to buy an AMD dual core machine (in upgrade parts) for Christmas.
If the cache is shared then dual core will suffer the same problems as hyperthreading - actually making the processor slower for many tasks.
And making some other tasks a bit faster... multithreaded/multiprocess apps that share data heavily won't have to pay as high a penalty with all the MOESI traffic.
Also, a shared L2 cache when only one CPU is really doing much means that most of the L2 can be used by it exclusively. Instead of two 1M L2 caches, for example, with one of those being almost not used at all, then you have one shared 2M L2 cache. Also, in the case of more agressive power management, one of the cores may be shut down and then you actually have one core with a 2M L2 cache instead of one core with a 1M L2 cache and the other one being asleep.
There are many advantages to having shared L2 cache as well as some penalties. On the whole, a shared L2 among the cores is considered the superior solution over seperate L2s per core.
Taking the theoretical classes gives you a deeper insight into the how/why of the field. Taking vocational classes simply shows you how to do something.
The difference is this: Knowing the theory and being able to think in that 'way' allows you to adapt to new situations that you haven't seen before quicker than just being a 'doer'. You will also have broader exposure to problem solving tools and ideas. Where a vocationally trained programmer may start coding the instant that he is given a new task, a more theoretically trained programmer may tend to analyze the problem first and weigh a number of designs before deciding on one that he thinks is "better" for whatever the design criteria are.
Vocational programming is: I want a function that does this and returns this, you go write it. Having a broader background makes it easier to move towards more software architecture and making decisions based on issues in the design and being the one to decide that you need a 'function that does this and returns this' and which one to create.
[quote] That is one of the main objections against Linux voiced by computer illiterate Joe Sixpack on Slashdot. "I'm confused. Which ditribution should I use? I don't like to think. I fear choice. Please don't make me read or use my brain. Don't ask me questions like, "What do you want to name your computer?""[/quote]
No... there is a difference... Joe Sixpack says: "I don't care which one it uses, why are you bothering me with all the choices? I just want one that works and runs everything that I want to run. Stop babbling about how each 'distribution' is different and why. Just put one on that works and does what I want to do, when I want to do it. Computers are a tool and not a religion to me. I want to invest as little time as possible into it and have it running and doing what I want it to do instead of my having to answer all these technical questions that I have no idea what they mean."
Probably one of the funniest things I've seen regarding ST:TNG was that the whole series was obviously illogical. Given what we know about humans (ourselves), the instant that the HoloDeck was created, all work and socializing would cease and the human race would be doomed to die off within a (very) few generations:)
Different servers must be different population makeups, I guess. I've played both Horde and Alliance and it seems to me that the Alliance (which is something like 2x the Horde population overall) tends to have lots of kids playing. Kids play both sides, but Alliance just seems to be almost nothing but kids playing.
Folks who game a lot will easily spend $50/month on a new game every month, sometimes more, because most single-player/non-online games get boring fast. I used to do that.
Queue the release of EverQuest. I paid $50 up front and $15/month for five (yes, five) years. During that time, I bought almost no other games - BF is the only one I can think of. If I had only one account, you could argue that I actually "saved" $35/month over my normal purchasing habits so that's almost a $2000 "savings" over that time period. However, I actually had three accounts so my spending was the same (about $45/month for all three accounts).
Now I'm playing WoW and have been for about six months. My wife and I have an account each so that's $30/month subscription. Compare this to going to the movies where the ticket costs alone during matinee times are $14 and we spend about the same as going to two movies per month (4 hours of entertainment) vs. as much time each month that we want to play WoW for entertainment (usually at least 2 hours per night, so say at least 60 hours (really more like 80 hours or more) of entertainment per month for each of us.
When you put costs into perspective of typical entertainment budgets, MMORPGs actually tend to be much better cost/hour of entertainment that many other forms of entertainment. Putting MMORPGs into perspective of just computer gaming budgets, they still win because many gamers spend less money on computer games each month playing MMORPGs than playing the single player games of the past.
Continuing user lock-in to the Windows monopoly while maintaining a very painful barrier to anyone else who wants to write for the platform.
Actually, Microsoft development tools for Windows are considered some of the best out there. In fact, it's one of the reasons why some people are saying that the XBox360 will eventually "win"... because that platform will have an excellent development suite where, in the past, most/all consoles had pretty crappy development suites.
My friends and I thought it was fun until we realized early on that the winning solution was to buy as many health/mana potions as you could carry and use them instead of anyone actually developing any support roles. We soon were able to get so much money in the game that we all had godlike equipment. After that, it wasn't so interesting.
Actually, I think Intel moved up Yonah a month to be in January now (that's just 5 months).
I imagine Turion laptops aren't around as much because it's just a CPU. Intel puts out the whole kit for Centrinos (one stop shopping) so a company can get just about the whole thing easily.
I would like to have one of the 64-bit AMD laptops as well (I run 64-bit Linux when I can). I bought an Intel Banias laptop several years ago and have been very pleased with it, though. I haven't been impressed with the (very few) Turion benchmarks/reviews I've seen but that doesn't particularly matter to me as the 64-bit feature is more important to me right now (I write software that has to work and interoperate on 32-bit and 64-bit platforms). Unfortunately, I'm doing OK with the laptop I have now and won't be upgrading any time soon.
As far as advantages in design, I think I'll have to wait for Yonah and see how it turns out.
How about this. They are trying to make sure that the money they collected from you is actually spent on they thing they collected it for instead of paying for over-priced software package. It also saves you money since you won't have to but this over-priced software package also to read/work with the state documentation.
You base your argument on your beliefs. You believe that software should cost no money but this is purely opinion. The government IS spending money on things they collect it for. If they pay for software, they use that software to communicate and/or perform tasks (hopefully) more efficiently than they can without it. Whether it is "over priced" or not is not so clear. If a $10000 piece of software speeds up a process so that it only takes 1 hour to perform it instead of 1,000 hours that it requires without the software, is it overpriced? It depends... How much is having your results in an hour instead of six months from now worth to you? How much is it worth having to pay for one person one hour to perform a task instead of paying for 1000 hours of work?
In short... Even IF equivalent software is $0 (and equivalent is much more than just performing a task... it also includes interoperability with everyone else, etc.), that does not mean that the software is "over priced". OSS is great in that people have gathered together to give their services for free and to give their products away for free. That is their right and it's nice that they do it. However, because someone donates their time/money does not devalue anything else. Many doctors donate time/effort, especially in crisis situations because their specializations are needed and not everyone has the knowledge. Does this mean that all medical expenses are "over priced"? I could probably find someone, somewhere to do YOUR job for free (donating their time). Does that mean that you are overpriced?
every week we see a report claiming one or the other is "Lower TCO!!11one"... I'm pretty much numb to it now and don't pay attention to them anymore. I/we use what we need to get our job done efficiently and move on. Besides, I haven't seen a "study" yet that comes close to what we need to do here so they are largely irrelevant to us anyway.
Plenty of time for Microsoft to add any number of open formats to the MSOffice suite (not like there aren't already some in there... pure text, for example, or csv, etc.)
However, I agree that all public government documents should be stored in open formats, regardless of the software used to generate the them.
Any time they're spending less money, you should be happy, because it's your money they're saving.
You must be new here...
Whenever they "save" money in one budget, they put that into another budget, they don't give it back. This means that they spend the same amount of money, spending less on one thing and more on something else. If they spent "less" money, then they would be able to lower taxes which means they get less money into the coffers and that is not allowed.
Yeah, I was thinking the same thing... It's not like there isn't tons of stuff up there already... and adding lots of small (read: harder to track) devices will only make the problem worse, I think.
For starters having to download security updates doesn't really have that much to do with what the guy you are answering wrote and with ease of setting an OS up. Second, this has been discussed right here on/. about a million times, but as you don't seem to be aware of it: Comparing Suse, which comes with thousands of programs with Windows, which comes with barely anything and then pointing out that you also have to download updates for Suse is pretty dumb, as you compare Apples and Oranges here.
Yeah, this is where Linux users have their cake and eat it, too. Microsoft can't put "thousands of programs" with Windows... by judicial decree. In fact, Microsoft has had to debundle several of its applications in the recent past. Sure, this is a part of their being declared a monopoly and found guilty of anticompetitive monopolistic practices, but the end result is the same.
Linux does not have this limitation and is free to bundle everything the distribution providers want to bundle with it.
So, complaining about something (Microsoft's lack of bundled software) that has been forbidden is quite unfair.
Disclaimer: I use Linux 99.5% of the time at work and run Linux at home as well.
Yeah... but Microsoft is already having to de-bundle several things that are considered "basic functionality" of a platform now (a way to play music/video, a way to surf the web, etc). You think the cries of "monopoly" are bad now... just let them try to bundle MSOffice with it.
This is one advantage of Linux distributions... they can bundle all they want and not get in trouble for it.
OpenOffice also supports all of the major features of MS Office (and a few of its own) except for the grammar check.
My experiences with OpenOffice's Impress (equivalent to PowerPoint) and Calc (equivalent to Excel) are more limited and more mixed.
That said, I still prefer PowerPoint for making professional-looking presentations because of all the predefined design backgrounds and clip art.
Calc is the other OpenOffice program that I've gotten mixed results with. It works perfectly by itself, but I've had multiple problems in the past with compatibility between it and Excel that have led me to generally stay away from it.
Overall, I've found OpenOffice to be a fine MS Office replacement for my needs. OpenOffice's word processor is more than ready for prime time. As for the other components, I generally wouldn't recommend using them in an environment where it was important to maintain compatibility with Microsoft products. Granted, most of my experience with OpenOffice's compatibility is from 1.0-1.1.4, it has shaken me enough to be wary of relying on it for any serious work with Excel. Impress is the one place where OpenOffice could use the most improvement. I would highly recommend you stick with Excel unless you don't need MS's built-in clip art or their well-made design backgrounds. When it comes down to it, OpenOffice is worth looking at. If most of what you do is word processing, I think you'll be very pleasantly surprised and you can't beat the price.
These are all from TFA... So.... the title of "Open Office 2.0 Kicks MS Office Around the Block" is obviously just an attention getter....
Article summary:
I haven't used much of OpenOffice and several areas I've had mixed experiences with. The lack of things like grammar checkers, lack of clip art and the like, and a number of compatibility problems with MS products make me use the MS products instead sometimes. And although I can buy MSOffice for $25, the price is still better for the OpenOffice suite. If you need to do anything other than vanilla word processing, use the Microsoft products instead. However.... Open Office 2.0 Kicks MS Office Around the Block!!!
The article, minus the title, was an OK read. However, throw the title into the mix and it is garbage.
Alice Hill... a name to remember so that I won't read anything else by this person.
Slashdot Mirror
"cache pressure going to 64-bit from 32-bit" is how that's supposed to read.
BTW, I don't know about windoze, but in the Linux world going from 32 bits to 64 bits almost always seems to produce a performance gain of 10->20%. I personally tried a simulator I'm using with 64 bits (recompiled with gcc), and got a speedup of 12%.
This depends a lot on how the code was written.... plus gcc is kinda... not that good for optimization so there are any number of things that could be going on.
Anecdotal evidence is garbage. All of the code I write at home I test in 32-bit and 64-bit modes on an Athlon64. Depending on what the code is, I can see anywhere from up to a 20% increase in performance to a 20% decrease in performance.
For example, if the (C) code you are compiling code that has longs all over the place, you've just doubled your cache pressure going to 32-bit. Did your code really mean to use 64-bit ints there? You'd have to look at the code to be sure but many times, C coders just use longs because they are used to it and this will have a possibly unexpected behaviour in 64-bit mode.
the Intel dual core hasn't been released yet so we don't know whether they are
Actually, it was released a while back and you can buy them from Dell. And don't follow up this post with some fanboi crap about not being "true" dual core. There are two cores on the single piece of silicon for both the AMD and Intel dual core parts. That is all that is required to be "dual core". Anything else is just fanbois trying to somehow diffrentiate AMD and Intel and make themselves feel proud (while showing their complete ignorance to anyone who knows anything about CPUs).
For the record, I have a friend who has a Dell dual core machine. I plan to buy an AMD dual core machine (in upgrade parts) for Christmas.
If the cache is shared then dual core will suffer the same problems as hyperthreading - actually making the processor slower for many tasks.
And making some other tasks a bit faster... multithreaded/multiprocess apps that share data heavily won't have to pay as high a penalty with all the MOESI traffic.
Also, a shared L2 cache when only one CPU is really doing much means that most of the L2 can be used by it exclusively. Instead of two 1M L2 caches, for example, with one of those being almost not used at all, then you have one shared 2M L2 cache. Also, in the case of more agressive power management, one of the cores may be shut down and then you actually have one core with a 2M L2 cache instead of one core with a 1M L2 cache and the other one being asleep.
There are many advantages to having shared L2 cache as well as some penalties. On the whole, a shared L2 among the cores is considered the superior solution over seperate L2s per core.
Yes...
It's basically like this:
Taking the theoretical classes gives you a deeper insight into the how/why of the field. Taking vocational classes simply shows you how to do something.
The difference is this: Knowing the theory and being able to think in that 'way' allows you to adapt to new situations that you haven't seen before quicker than just being a 'doer'. You will also have broader exposure to problem solving tools and ideas. Where a vocationally trained programmer may start coding the instant that he is given a new task, a more theoretically trained programmer may tend to analyze the problem first and weigh a number of designs before deciding on one that he thinks is "better" for whatever the design criteria are.
Vocational programming is: I want a function that does this and returns this, you go write it.
Having a broader background makes it easier to move towards more software architecture and making decisions based on issues in the design and being the one to decide that you need a 'function that does this and returns this' and which one to create.
[quote] That is one of the main objections against Linux voiced by computer illiterate Joe Sixpack on Slashdot. "I'm confused. Which ditribution should I use? I don't like to think. I fear choice. Please don't make me read or use my brain. Don't ask me questions like, "What do you want to name your computer?""[/quote]
No... there is a difference... Joe Sixpack says: "I don't care which one it uses, why are you bothering me with all the choices? I just want one that works and runs everything that I want to run. Stop babbling about how each 'distribution' is different and why. Just put one on that works and does what I want to do, when I want to do it. Computers are a tool and not a religion to me. I want to invest as little time as possible into it and have it running and doing what I want it to do instead of my having to answer all these technical questions that I have no idea what they mean."
No kidding...
:)
Probably one of the funniest things I've seen regarding ST:TNG was that the whole series was obviously illogical. Given what we know about humans (ourselves), the instant that the HoloDeck was created, all work and socializing would cease and the human race would be doomed to die off within a (very) few generations
Different servers must be different population makeups, I guess. I've played both Horde and Alliance and it seems to me that the Alliance (which is something like 2x the Horde population overall) tends to have lots of kids playing. Kids play both sides, but Alliance just seems to be almost nothing but kids playing.
As others have said...
Folks who game a lot will easily spend $50/month on a new game every month, sometimes more, because most single-player/non-online games get boring fast. I used to do that.
Queue the release of EverQuest. I paid $50 up front and $15/month for five (yes, five) years. During that time, I bought almost no other games - BF is the only one I can think of. If I had only one account, you could argue that I actually "saved" $35/month over my normal purchasing habits so that's almost a $2000 "savings" over that time period. However, I actually had three accounts so my spending was the same (about $45/month for all three accounts).
Now I'm playing WoW and have been for about six months. My wife and I have an account each so that's $30/month subscription. Compare this to going to the movies where the ticket costs alone during matinee times are $14 and we spend about the same as going to two movies per month (4 hours of entertainment) vs. as much time each month that we want to play WoW for entertainment (usually at least 2 hours per night, so say at least 60 hours (really more like 80 hours or more) of entertainment per month for each of us.
When you put costs into perspective of typical entertainment budgets, MMORPGs actually tend to be much better cost/hour of entertainment that many other forms of entertainment. Putting MMORPGs into perspective of just computer gaming budgets, they still win because many gamers spend less money on computer games each month playing MMORPGs than playing the single player games of the past.
It seems to be telling me what I can do with other software as well, not just the GPL software that I might be using.
Continuing user lock-in to the Windows monopoly while maintaining a very painful barrier to anyone else who wants to write for the platform.
Actually, Microsoft development tools for Windows are considered some of the best out there. In fact, it's one of the reasons why some people are saying that the XBox360 will eventually "win"... because that platform will have an excellent development suite where, in the past, most/all consoles had pretty crappy development suites.
My friends and I thought it was fun until we realized early on that the winning solution was to buy as many health/mana potions as you could carry and use them instead of anyone actually developing any support roles. We soon were able to get so much money in the game that we all had godlike equipment. After that, it wasn't so interesting.
Actually, I think Intel moved up Yonah a month to be in January now (that's just 5 months).
I imagine Turion laptops aren't around as much because it's just a CPU. Intel puts out the whole kit for Centrinos (one stop shopping) so a company can get just about the whole thing easily.
I would like to have one of the 64-bit AMD laptops as well (I run 64-bit Linux when I can). I bought an Intel Banias laptop several years ago and have been very pleased with it, though. I haven't been impressed with the (very few) Turion benchmarks/reviews I've seen but that doesn't particularly matter to me as the 64-bit feature is more important to me right now (I write software that has to work and interoperate on 32-bit and 64-bit platforms). Unfortunately, I'm doing OK with the laptop I have now and won't be upgrading any time soon.
As far as advantages in design, I think I'll have to wait for Yonah and see how it turns out.
And one day, folks will understand that IPC is a design parameter, not a relative measure of... well... anything else.
AMD does have the better CPU right now, though, but IPC is just a parameter, not the story.
move along.
Nothing said here hasn't been said hundreds of times over the past 20 years or so.
How about this. They are trying to make sure that the money they collected from you is actually spent on they thing they collected it for instead of paying for over-priced software package. It also saves you money since you won't have to but this over-priced software package also to read/work with the state documentation.
You base your argument on your beliefs. You believe that software should cost no money but this is purely opinion. The government IS spending money on things they collect it for. If they pay for software, they use that software to communicate and/or perform tasks (hopefully) more efficiently than they can without it. Whether it is "over priced" or not is not so clear. If a $10000 piece of software speeds up a process so that it only takes 1 hour to perform it instead of 1,000 hours that it requires without the software, is it overpriced? It depends... How much is having your results in an hour instead of six months from now worth to you? How much is it worth having to pay for one person one hour to perform a task instead of paying for 1000 hours of work?
In short... Even IF equivalent software is $0 (and equivalent is much more than just performing a task... it also includes interoperability with everyone else, etc.), that does not mean that the software is "over priced". OSS is great in that people have gathered together to give their services for free and to give their products away for free. That is their right and it's nice that they do it. However, because someone donates their time/money does not devalue anything else. Many doctors donate time/effort, especially in crisis situations because their specializations are needed and not everyone has the knowledge. Does this mean that all medical expenses are "over priced"? I could probably find someone, somewhere to do YOUR job for free (donating their time). Does that mean that you are overpriced?
every week we see a report claiming one or the other is "Lower TCO!!11one"... I'm pretty much numb to it now and don't pay attention to them anymore. I/we use what we need to get our job done efficiently and move on. Besides, I haven't seen a "study" yet that comes close to what we need to do here so they are largely irrelevant to us anyway.
All these "studies" are just hot air now.
Plenty of time for Microsoft to add any number of open formats to the MSOffice suite (not like there aren't already some in there... pure text, for example, or csv, etc.)
However, I agree that all public government documents should be stored in open formats, regardless of the software used to generate the them.
Any time they're spending less money, you should be happy, because it's your money they're saving.
You must be new here...
Whenever they "save" money in one budget, they put that into another budget, they don't give it back. This means that they spend the same amount of money, spending less on one thing and more on something else. If they spent "less" money, then they would be able to lower taxes which means they get less money into the coffers and that is not allowed.
Yeah, I was thinking the same thing... It's not like there isn't tons of stuff up there already... and adding lots of small (read: harder to track) devices will only make the problem worse, I think.
For starters having to download security updates doesn't really have that much to do with what the guy you are answering wrote and with ease of setting an OS up. /. about a million times, but as you don't seem to be aware of it:
Second, this has been discussed right here on
Comparing Suse, which comes with thousands of programs with Windows, which comes with barely anything and then pointing out that you also have to download updates for Suse is pretty dumb, as you compare Apples and Oranges here.
Yeah, this is where Linux users have their cake and eat it, too. Microsoft can't put "thousands of programs" with Windows... by judicial decree. In fact, Microsoft has had to debundle several of its applications in the recent past. Sure, this is a part of their being declared a monopoly and found guilty of anticompetitive monopolistic practices, but the end result is the same.
Linux does not have this limitation and is free to bundle everything the distribution providers want to bundle with it.
So, complaining about something (Microsoft's lack of bundled software) that has been forbidden is quite unfair.
Disclaimer: I use Linux 99.5% of the time at work and run Linux at home as well.
Yeah... but Microsoft is already having to de-bundle several things that are considered "basic functionality" of a platform now (a way to play music/video, a way to surf the web, etc). You think the cries of "monopoly" are bad now... just let them try to bundle MSOffice with it.
This is one advantage of Linux distributions... they can bundle all they want and not get in trouble for it.
And all of this:
OpenOffice also supports all of the major features of MS Office (and a few of its own) except for the grammar check.
My experiences with OpenOffice's Impress (equivalent to PowerPoint) and Calc (equivalent to Excel) are more limited and more mixed.
That said, I still prefer PowerPoint for making professional-looking presentations because of all the predefined design backgrounds and clip art.
Calc is the other OpenOffice program that I've gotten mixed results with. It works perfectly by itself, but I've had multiple problems in the past with compatibility between it and Excel that have led me to generally stay away from it.
Overall, I've found OpenOffice to be a fine MS Office replacement for my needs. OpenOffice's word processor is more than ready for prime time. As for the other components, I generally wouldn't recommend using them in an environment where it was important to maintain compatibility with Microsoft products. Granted, most of my experience with OpenOffice's compatibility is from 1.0-1.1.4, it has shaken me enough to be wary of relying on it for any serious work with Excel. Impress is the one place where OpenOffice could use the most improvement. I would highly recommend you stick with Excel unless you don't need MS's built-in clip art or their well-made design backgrounds. When it comes down to it, OpenOffice is worth looking at. If most of what you do is word processing, I think you'll be very pleasantly surprised and you can't beat the price.
These are all from TFA... So.... the title of "Open Office 2.0 Kicks MS Office Around the Block" is obviously just an attention getter....
Article summary:
I haven't used much of OpenOffice and several areas I've had mixed experiences with. The lack of things like grammar checkers, lack of clip art and the like, and a number of compatibility problems with MS products make me use the MS products instead sometimes. And although I can buy MSOffice for $25, the price is still better for the OpenOffice suite. If you need to do anything other than vanilla word processing, use the Microsoft products instead. However.... Open Office 2.0 Kicks MS Office Around the Block!!!
The article, minus the title, was an OK read. However, throw the title into the mix and it is garbage.
Alice Hill... a name to remember so that I won't read anything else by this person.
emotional reasoning
Isn't this considered an oxymoron?