RMS may be a brilliant programmer but he's a complete idiot when it comes to anything else other than maybe playing that flute of his. If it weren't for commercial software, we'd still be in the comparative stone age of computing as to what we have today. What do you think fuels the industry? It's money. Money encourages development in both software and hardware. More software encourages more hardware and vice versa.
I've switched completely over to OOo because of price. However, it still annoys me that on my 2GHz Athlon64 w/ 1GB memory and 7200RPM HDD that OOo seems to take eons to load before I can get started on doing what I want to do.
I have OOo installed on all our Windows machines at home (including my wife's laptop). She and her professor were working on a presentation just last week (given one week ago today) where OOo's PowerPoint clone would not display some things properly (nor save them properly) to interact with MS PowerPoint fully. Since my wife was working at home and the professor was at the school, this was a problem. Eventually, my wife had to drive in to school to complete the presentation.
and because of the FSB arch of intel; it's not really a way to turn 2-way designs into a 4-way. the bus design makes it really hard (that's why 4-way Xeon MBs are so expensive!)
Technically, Intel's multiprocessor bus design/architecture is pretty much the oldest and most simple out there. Quads are expensive because they simply can be. If someone feels they must have a quad processor machine (there are few folks who *really* need them and must have them) then vendors can charge a premium for those since they aren't produced in the scales that the other CPUs are produced and because people who feel they must have one will pay such a premium to get one.
In the x86 world, up until the Opterons, all the CPUs shared the same bus (Athlons, Pentiums, Pentium Pros, Pentium II Xeons, Pentium III Xeons, and Pentium 4 Xeons). There is nothing "true" or "untrue" about this architecture. It just is an old architecture but it is inexpensive (comparatively, which is why it is done this way. Unfortunately, it is also far from optimal. It works and typical speedups are in the 1.5X to 1.7X range in good cases. More "exotic" methods can give more efficient architectures (crossbars, NUMA, etc.).
Dual CPU system is simply a system with two CPUs in it. It either has two CPUs or it doesn't. There is no "true" or "false" dual CPU system.
Similarly with dual-core. Some designs may be better than others, but dual-core means that there are two cores on one piece of contiguous silicon. If this is present, it is dual-core. If it isn't, then it isn't dual-core. Efficiency of design is not a part of that definition.
This is ancient scheduling rules. Way back (get in your Way-Back machines), multiprocessor machines weren't necessarily SMPs ("S" stands for Symmetric, meaning that any one is equivalent to any other one). Early on, Apple machines had accelerator boards that were similar (just to show some consumer relevance). In both of these cases, one CPU ran a scheduler and farmed out tasks to the other CPUs in the machine. The other CPUs were told when/if to switch tasks and everything. Typically, the "main" CPU also handled all I/O as well. This simplified the kernel somewhat (no need for elaborate locking schemes, for example) because essentially, the OS was single-threaded.
Among the problems with this design is that there is still a point of contention in the kernel. What if 10 processes all wanted to do I/O at the same time? What if they were all I/O to different devices? Well... you had a bottleneck because only the one "special" CPU could handle any I/O requests, even if the I/O requests had nothing to do with each other (different devices, different data).
Anyway, even in an SMP system, the scheduler should attempt to schedule threads on the last CPU they ran on (benefits of caching effects, etc.). However, in case of things such as I/O (which must be serviced *now*), it may be better to schedule the task on any available CPU, for example. So, modern SMP OSs tend to try to offer the best of both worlds (especially NUMA ones). Schedule a thread on the last CPU it ran on, but if it can't and the thread really, really needs to run, schedule it on any available CPU. Remember also that SMP is Symmetric. Any thread (even any OS thread) can run on any CPU. That means that the scheduler, interrupts, I/O, whatever can be handled by any CPU in the system, not just one special one which may be a bottleneck.
While that's true, these dual core chips (especially Intel's lame single-memory bus design) really seem targeted towards the desktop market where the impact is greatest, yet cost differential is realativly small (in relation to the total price of a system including software.)
I hate to break it to you, but AMD's dual core processors only have one memory bus coming out of them, too. It isn't until you get to Opterons where you can have memory hanging off each dual-core CPU.
Has nothing to do with affording parts... maybe labor. Review sites are shipped units to test on loan and the site has to ship it back. If Anand only got shipped two chips, then, that's all they can review.
I imagine most folks are like me and want to know how two cores stack against each other when in the two single core vs. the single dual-core flavors. This lets me know which has more performance and gives a little insight into how well the integration of the dual cores was done. Basically, these numbers would tell whether I should buy a dual socket motherboard with a single core in each or a single socket motherboard with a dual core in it. Comparing the performance of 8 cores (four dual cores) vs. a quad single-core machine isn't too interesting other than to just see bigger/smaller numbers.
It's not cheaper initially, that's for sure for AMD parts:( Check out AnandTech's review. Dual core Opterons cost 3.5X as much as single cores at the same speed. Dual core A64s are going to cost 2X as much as the single core speed equivalents. Intel's parts costs 1.5X as much (at the entry level) as the single core speed equivalents.
No. You won't see a 4GHz Pentium 4 in production because it produces too much heat to be cooled reasonably well (read: cheap/reliable/easy enough for mass consumers). There is nothing magical about the number 4GHz. Portions of Pentium 4 chips run at 2X core speed (which is more than 4GHz on any part over 2GHz core speed), for example.
Yeah... why would developers want a standard platform to write against... what a burden that is!
LSB *is* a major thing that Linux developers cannot agree on. Want to see another major issue that will cause good disagreement... say that there shall be only one distribution from this day forward and then try to pick one.
Bubba SixPack is *not* going to want to hear that he cannot run DeerHunter26 on his DistroX because that's what it will work on but he is running DistroY especially if BassFishin'16 runs on DistroY and not on DistroX. LSB is a step toward that direction and until situations like this are fixed, there will never be a year of "LotD".
Many places I've been also have *HP for the local highway patrol phones. I've actually used this twice in the past so I know it works. Plus, you can see highway signs occassionally saying this.
Yup. Why go to a risky place (up until now, Ebay and IGE) when you can get *guaranteed* exchanges through Sony. Ebay and the like were always risky... buy something and either you don't get it or get scammed somehow. Sony will insure your transaction for in-game stuff which is no risk. There'd be no reason to not use Sony's system. Of course, they haven't addressed selling accounts yet, so that will still be Ebay I guess.
Crippled how? Other than dual processor support and domain support (Pro has but Home doesn't, neither of which the average consumer will use), there isn't any real difference.
Old movies showed giant lizards tearing up Tokyo while breathing radioactive rays. Also, another showed events that happened a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.
The system should warn you, ask, and then do what you damn well tell it to do. There are situations where you may WANT to unmount the device in the middle of an I/O operation - for example, to prevent further harmful operations and salvage as much data as possible.
I agree. That's why simply unmounting it unquestioningly is "bad". Plus, if the situation is as you describe... why not just pull the device out? It would probably be faster (as long as your computer is sitting beside you, which I assume would be since you are using such a device) than typing the command to unmount it and definitely faster that grabbing the mouse and navigating some UI to unmount it.
As the other poster said, you can upgrade to Windows XP from just about anything. Since most/all x86 PCs come with *some* form of Windows OS, and you can upgrade to XP from an upgrade product (like Windows 98 Upgrade from Windows 95 Upgrade, etc.), just about everyone can legally upgrade to Windows XP for less than $100.
Windows through to WinXPSP2 _still_ does not have TRUE pre-emptive multitasking.
Witness the trials of "program not responding."...
Hit 'X'. Nothing.
Hit Ctrl-Alt-Delete...wait LONG time for task manager to get a time slice and run. (under TRUE pre-emption everything else would get blocked on Ctrl-Alt-Delete, but it doesn't)
Kind of stepped on your own point there (basically said preemptive multitasking doesn't exist and then said it did).
Preemptive multitasking has nothing to do with the policies regarding how some keys on the keyboard are interpreted. You may wish the policies were different, but that does not mean that it isn't "true" preemptive multitasking (which it is).
Take unmounting USB drives; Windows will refuse if it thinks the drive is in use - OSX will just unmount the drive when told to, I assume linux is suitably obedient too...
Yeah... who cares about data corruption? I would argue that both OSX and Linux are in the wrong there. If my USB drive is in use, I had better not unmount it in the middle of an IO operation. That could, at the minimum do nothing, probably corrupt the file I was writing, and at worst, corrupt the whole thing. There are times when the system shouldn't do what the user wants when the user wants. I would imagine that your argument stems from never having dealt with real systems in the past. The data on a system are magnitudes more important than any piece of hardware you can put into it. If the system lets you do things that are potentially harmful to data without even warning you, that is a faulty system.
It's more complicated than that. Labeling the party as "liberal" or "conservative" implies that all of the party's views are in that camp. It's quite possible to be economically conservative at the same time as being socially liberal, for example.
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RMS may be a brilliant programmer but he's a complete idiot when it comes to anything else other than maybe playing that flute of his. If it weren't for commercial software, we'd still be in the comparative stone age of computing as to what we have today. What do you think fuels the industry? It's money. Money encourages development in both software and hardware. More software encourages more hardware and vice versa.
I made a script that downloaded it 999,999 times!
The magic word is Google desktop search.
Scripting has *always* needed internal support to use system functions in scripting.
I've switched completely over to OOo because of price. However, it still annoys me that on my 2GHz Athlon64 w/ 1GB memory and 7200RPM HDD that OOo seems to take eons to load before I can get started on doing what I want to do.
Agree. More data:
I have OOo installed on all our Windows machines at home (including my wife's laptop). She and her professor were working on a presentation just last week (given one week ago today) where OOo's PowerPoint clone would not display some things properly (nor save them properly) to interact with MS PowerPoint fully. Since my wife was working at home and the professor was at the school, this was a problem. Eventually, my wife had to drive in to school to complete the presentation.
and because of the FSB arch of intel; it's not really a way to turn 2-way designs into a 4-way. the bus design makes it really hard (that's why 4-way Xeon MBs are so expensive!)
Technically, Intel's multiprocessor bus design/architecture is pretty much the oldest and most simple out there. Quads are expensive because they simply can be. If someone feels they must have a quad processor machine (there are few folks who *really* need them and must have them) then vendors can charge a premium for those since they aren't produced in the scales that the other CPUs are produced and because people who feel they must have one will pay such a premium to get one.
In the x86 world, up until the Opterons, all the CPUs shared the same bus (Athlons, Pentiums, Pentium Pros, Pentium II Xeons, Pentium III Xeons, and Pentium 4 Xeons). There is nothing "true" or "untrue" about this architecture. It just is an old architecture but it is inexpensive (comparatively, which is why it is done this way. Unfortunately, it is also far from optimal. It works and typical speedups are in the 1.5X to 1.7X range in good cases. More "exotic" methods can give more efficient architectures (crossbars, NUMA, etc.).
Dual CPU system is simply a system with two CPUs in it. It either has two CPUs or it doesn't. There is no "true" or "false" dual CPU system.
Similarly with dual-core. Some designs may be better than others, but dual-core means that there are two cores on one piece of contiguous silicon. If this is present, it is dual-core. If it isn't, then it isn't dual-core. Efficiency of design is not a part of that definition.
I prefer my cores to not fight each other (duel) but to cooperate instead (dual). I tend to get more work done that way.
This is ancient scheduling rules. Way back (get in your Way-Back machines), multiprocessor machines weren't necessarily SMPs ("S" stands for Symmetric, meaning that any one is equivalent to any other one). Early on, Apple machines had accelerator boards that were similar (just to show some consumer relevance). In both of these cases, one CPU ran a scheduler and farmed out tasks to the other CPUs in the machine. The other CPUs were told when/if to switch tasks and everything. Typically, the "main" CPU also handled all I/O as well. This simplified the kernel somewhat (no need for elaborate locking schemes, for example) because essentially, the OS was single-threaded.
Among the problems with this design is that there is still a point of contention in the kernel. What if 10 processes all wanted to do I/O at the same time? What if they were all I/O to different devices? Well... you had a bottleneck because only the one "special" CPU could handle any I/O requests, even if the I/O requests had nothing to do with each other (different devices, different data).
Anyway, even in an SMP system, the scheduler should attempt to schedule threads on the last CPU they ran on (benefits of caching effects, etc.). However, in case of things such as I/O (which must be serviced *now*), it may be better to schedule the task on any available CPU, for example. So, modern SMP OSs tend to try to offer the best of both worlds (especially NUMA ones). Schedule a thread on the last CPU it ran on, but if it can't and the thread really, really needs to run, schedule it on any available CPU. Remember also that SMP is Symmetric. Any thread (even any OS thread) can run on any CPU. That means that the scheduler, interrupts, I/O, whatever can be handled by any CPU in the system, not just one special one which may be a bottleneck.
While that's true, these dual core chips (especially Intel's lame single-memory bus design) really seem targeted towards the desktop market where the impact is greatest, yet cost differential is realativly small (in relation to the total price of a system including software.)
I hate to break it to you, but AMD's dual core processors only have one memory bus coming out of them, too. It isn't until you get to Opterons where you can have memory hanging off each dual-core CPU.
Those aren't clock speed equivalent. Look at the prices for single-core 2.2GHz vs. dual-core 2.2GHz, both with 512K L2.
Has nothing to do with affording parts... maybe labor. Review sites are shipped units to test on loan and the site has to ship it back. If Anand only got shipped two chips, then, that's all they can review.
I imagine most folks are like me and want to know how two cores stack against each other when in the two single core vs. the single dual-core flavors. This lets me know which has more performance and gives a little insight into how well the integration of the dual cores was done. Basically, these numbers would tell whether I should buy a dual socket motherboard with a single core in each or a single socket motherboard with a dual core in it. Comparing the performance of 8 cores (four dual cores) vs. a quad single-core machine isn't too interesting other than to just see bigger/smaller numbers.
It's not cheaper initially, that's for sure for AMD parts :( Check out AnandTech's review. Dual core Opterons cost 3.5X as much as single cores at the same speed. Dual core A64s are going to cost 2X as much as the single core speed equivalents. Intel's parts costs 1.5X as much (at the entry level) as the single core speed equivalents.
No. You won't see a 4GHz Pentium 4 in production because it produces too much heat to be cooled reasonably well (read: cheap/reliable/easy enough for mass consumers). There is nothing magical about the number 4GHz. Portions of Pentium 4 chips run at 2X core speed (which is more than 4GHz on any part over 2GHz core speed), for example.
Yeah... why would developers want a standard platform to write against... what a burden that is!
LSB *is* a major thing that Linux developers cannot agree on. Want to see another major issue that will cause good disagreement... say that there shall be only one distribution from this day forward and then try to pick one.
Bubba SixPack is *not* going to want to hear that he cannot run DeerHunter26 on his DistroX because that's what it will work on but he is running DistroY especially if BassFishin'16 runs on DistroY and not on DistroX. LSB is a step toward that direction and until situations like this are fixed, there will never be a year of "LotD".
Many places I've been also have *HP for the local highway patrol phones. I've actually used this twice in the past so I know it works. Plus, you can see highway signs occassionally saying this.
Yup. Why go to a risky place (up until now, Ebay and IGE) when you can get *guaranteed* exchanges through Sony. Ebay and the like were always risky... buy something and either you don't get it or get scammed somehow. Sony will insure your transaction for in-game stuff which is no risk. There'd be no reason to not use Sony's system. Of course, they haven't addressed selling accounts yet, so that will still be Ebay I guess.
Crippled how? Other than dual processor support and domain support (Pro has but Home doesn't, neither of which the average consumer will use), there isn't any real difference.
Old movies showed giant lizards tearing up Tokyo while breathing radioactive rays. Also, another showed events that happened a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.
The system should warn you, ask, and then do what you damn well tell it to do. There are situations where you may WANT to unmount the device in the middle of an I/O operation - for example, to prevent further harmful operations and salvage as much data as possible.
I agree. That's why simply unmounting it unquestioningly is "bad". Plus, if the situation is as you describe... why not just pull the device out? It would probably be faster (as long as your computer is sitting beside you, which I assume would be since you are using such a device) than typing the command to unmount it and definitely faster that grabbing the mouse and navigating some UI to unmount it.
Heh... I'm not in denial :) And yes... "leave me alone!" :)
As the other poster said, you can upgrade to Windows XP from just about anything. Since most/all x86 PCs come with *some* form of Windows OS, and you can upgrade to XP from an upgrade product (like Windows 98 Upgrade from Windows 95 Upgrade, etc.), just about everyone can legally upgrade to Windows XP for less than $100.
Windows through to WinXPSP2 _still_ does not have TRUE pre-emptive multitasking.
Witness the trials of "program not responding."...
Hit 'X'. Nothing.
Hit Ctrl-Alt-Delete...wait LONG time for task manager to get a time slice and run.
(under TRUE pre-emption everything else would get blocked on Ctrl-Alt-Delete, but it doesn't)
Kind of stepped on your own point there (basically said preemptive multitasking doesn't exist and then said it did).
Preemptive multitasking has nothing to do with the policies regarding how some keys on the keyboard are interpreted. You may wish the policies were different, but that does not mean that it isn't "true" preemptive multitasking (which it is).
Take unmounting USB drives; Windows will refuse if it thinks the drive is in use - OSX will just unmount the drive when told to, I assume linux is suitably obedient too...
Yeah... who cares about data corruption? I would argue that both OSX and Linux are in the wrong there. If my USB drive is in use, I had better not unmount it in the middle of an IO operation. That could, at the minimum do nothing, probably corrupt the file I was writing, and at worst, corrupt the whole thing. There are times when the system shouldn't do what the user wants when the user wants. I would imagine that your argument stems from never having dealt with real systems in the past. The data on a system are magnitudes more important than any piece of hardware you can put into it. If the system lets you do things that are potentially harmful to data without even warning you, that is a faulty system.
Just because you are a fan of a team, company, or some other entity does not mean you should blindly overlook their faults.
Exactly... doing that pushes you over into fanboi and/or zealot status. It's when you think that can do no wrong that you're over the edge.
It's more complicated than that. Labeling the party as "liberal" or "conservative" implies that all of the party's views are in that camp. It's quite possible to be economically conservative at the same time as being socially liberal, for example.