Not a 9.2 review, but a recent experience with Mandrake...
I installed 9.1 over the weekend. Yesterday a big storm hit and the machine shut down without a hint of grace once my UPS ran out.
I booted it up, and my ext3 partition was missing all sorts of files. This surprised the hell out of me, because I've never seen a filesystem actually lose files it wasn't currently altering during a power failure.
Maybe Mandrake 9.2 will come with "NOW, %50 FASTER FILE LOSS" feature;)
Yes, I know it's not Mandrake's fault that ext3 fucked me over. As for me, I got to practice reinstalling, and am giving ReiserFS a shot. Fuck ext3, even FAT is more forgiving, and hopefully I will be able to say the same for ReiserFS.
Funny you mention BJTs, I believe FETs were originally chosen for chip development because of their lower operating power:)
But yes, I do believe you have an excellent suggestion there, but I would suggest you only make this change for logic circuitry and registers. You really shouldn't use BJT for on-chip cache, since cache actually sees very little state change compared to the pipelines of the processor itself.
I don't mention the Pentium IV because I truely believe it is a step backwards, and that eventually it will be replaced by the Pentium M ( Banias ).
What I was trying to say is the most efficient processors we have today are much more efficient than a 486 ( partially attributable to die shrinks, but also due to advances like pipelining, branch prediction and OOOE to reduce wasted cycles, and dynamic power across the die on moden chips like the Pentium M ). If manufacturers could actually sell on efficiency instead of pure power, we'd see more of these architectures. Unfortunately, "cheap performance" rules an early market.
Think about it this way: back in the early 1900s Ford sought to give everyone a car with the Model T. Eventually, they saturated the market and nobody wanted the rough but cheap Model T anymore. People wanted stylish cars, more areodynamic cars, larget engines, more efficiency etc...
I believe the market is only beginning to realize that the desktop market is saturated, and is now replacement-only. The only reason we havn't seen a wide pickup of purchases for more efficient computers or more stylish computers is because manufacturers are ignoring the desktop market saturation and bleeding production over to laptops.
Once the laptop market crashes in a few years, I expect manufacturers to finally 'get it' just nlike car makers in the 1920s did, and offer a wider range than just "cheap performance".
Actually, I've never considered the earth to moon scenes to be slow, tedious and boring.
I actually consider it to be deliberate and mechanical to emphasize the relationship of man versus machine. The beginning of the movie ( yes, the apes ) shows man controlling machine, but the end of the movie shows machine controlling man.
The completely machine-controlled flight to the moons is a mechanical ballet dedicated to this concept.
This is all secondary to the concept that mankind itself is dancing a ballet instituted and pre-determined by some unknown power.
I remember my 486 DX/2 50 could run with only a passive heatsink.
So could your Athlon XP if you clocked it at 50MHz. In fact, it would probably outperform your 486 by many times
The only reason we need high-wattage powersupplies and advanced cooling is because the market keeps pushing performance levels. The CPU architectures themselves have actually gotten more efficient.
Don't be a fool and get caught up in propoganda. I'm only posting this because I'm so sick of people spreading this crap.
The Eden chip runs extremely cool because it doesn't DO ANYTHING. It is a brute-force, simple yet inefficient processor design.
It has no branch prediction, no out-of-order-execution, no register renaming, and a half-speed FPU. These are the exact same specs the Winchip had when Via bought it, they have simply shrunk the die to.18 and.13 microns. Of course it uses 1/4 as much power as a classic Winchip, so would anything with that much shrinkage.
This means you have to wait forever in CPU time to get anything done, which means you get real-world performance in the PII 300 range. Sure, each cycle wastes a tiny bit of power, but when you take 3x as long to do something, you use 3x as much real-time power.
This is what I am referring to when I say it's an inefficnent design. Sure, it's low-power, but you have to compare it to OTHER architectures to get a feel for how good it really is.
Consider that an Intel Pentium III Tualatin LV clocked at 733MHz would have only %50 higher max thermal power than the Eden chip, and you start to get the point. You could clock the Tualatain at 500MHz and match the Eden's max thermal power, and have significantly higher performance.
Consider that an 800MHz Pentium M would have ONLY 2 WATTS higher max thermal power, and it smacks you upside the forehead. Here we have a chip with roughly 2.5x the efficiency of the Eden ( processing power to power consumption ratio ), thanks to the fact that it has been DESIGNED FROM THE START to be efficient.
The Eden is only "low power" because it is inefficient, and it didn't sell well when it was sold as a normal desktop processor. The whole small form-factor ITX is the only thing the platform has going for it, and as soon as small systems with low-clocked Pentium Ms come into play, VIA's market will evaporate.
You could make the most inefficient core in the world run extremely cool, even say a Pentium IV, so long as you throttled the clock speed and shrunk the process. This is all VIA has done with the Winchip core used for Eden.
Incidentally, VIA finally released a new Winchip core, the Nemiah, with 6th-generation features like OOOE, branch-prediction, full-speed FPU.
GUESS WHAT? It performs better, but the power consumption is up too. Sadly, even Nemiah wasn't designed as efficiently as CPUs already out there.
Companies like SGI and 3dlabs had been making dedicated graphics hardware with this particular feature for years, even for consumers ( N64 and Permedia predate the Voodoo Graphics ).
Even so, you forget that the Rendition Verite graphics chip ( with a similar feature set ) was released at the same time as the Voodoo Graphics, and even had the first 3D-accelerated version of Quake.
Hell, if Intel hadn't been stupid enough to reuse the floating-point registers to implement MMX, there's no telling what would have happened to the graphics accelerator market. Bilinear Filtering in software was one of the target applications of MMX, but the combined registers meant you couldn't render the 3D scene and use your integer MMX unit to filter it at the same time.
Now THAT's useless info.
Think about the features that people usually associate with a face: eyes, eyebrows, hair, nose, lips...
All of these features are soft, that is to say that there's very little chance you can extrapolate them from the skull's bone structure.
Yes, you can get the basic size of the lips and eyes, and the basic width of the nose. But you cannot tell the eye color, or the lip hue, or the actual shape of the nose or eyebrows.
You would need to extract such things from DNA, if that's even possible today.
Your math seems sound, but you forget that there is a human aspect in deciding which door is opened.
Your probability calculations are usaeless when you throw the cunning of another human mind into the mix.
Now, instead of asking yourself "what is the probability", you ask yourself "hey, does the guy who removed the door know the probability, trying to trip me up?"
Unfortunately, the probability of that depends entirely on the person, and is thus probably best represented as 50/50. Maybe the person is leading you on to force a switch, or maybe it really is the prize door.
So your chance of willing, thanks to the person involved in the loop, is still 50/50.
There was an article here on those, like $500 i think, about two months ago. I am just leary of VIA so far, and haven't seen much info on reliability. I have seen that performance is ~= a celeron at the same mhz.
You're thinking of the new Nemiah core VIA released a few months ago.
You see, VIA has been playing a BS war with this miniITX fad: their processors are inefficient, so they clock them extremely low and sell them as low-powered systems. Their 1GHz C3 produces the same amount of heat as a Pentium III Tualatin 800, with HALF the performance. The only reason VIA's offerings sell is because Intel won't offer you a LV Tualatin at a reasonable pricepoint, they stick them in Blade servers and jack up the price.
The C3 / Eden processor lacked such modern technology as OOOE and register renaming, or advanced branch predicition or a full-speed FPU. These were advertised as "features" that allowed the core to be simple and tiny, but what they didn't tell you was it was also very inefficient.
Recently, VIA announced the Nemiah core, which included sixth-generation features like a branch-prediction unit, OOOE and register renaming, plus a full-speed FPU. Sure, now it performs nearly as well as a Celeron, but WHAT A SURPRISE, POWER USAGE HAS CLIMED AS WELL. The fact is, it's still just a normal microprocessor architecture with no specific optimizations for power usage, and they can only sell it as "low power usage" because it delivers such low processing power
Honestly, if I were to point to the future of miniaturized computing, I would definitely say innovative designs like the Pentium M are the way to go. Compared to the Pentium M's highly-efficient design, VIA's Winchip-derrived "low-power" core is a dodgy hack.
Now all we need are system integrators to realize that stylish, small and cool-running desktops could be the key to restarting falling desktop sales, and we's see a whole slew of Pentium M offerings for the desktop. We don't have to be chained to space heaters, I wish Intel and integrators would figure this out.
How long is development going to take? Robably at least 2 years before this sucker hits the streets. And then it has 5 years of market viability.
Are you honestly telling me you don't expect 1/3-1/2 or more of all US households to have an HDTV before 2010? The prices keep falling dramatically every year, and this year the things could actually be termed "affordable" ( 2x the price of a decent 480i set or less ).
You're bitching about a card released 7 years ago, during the "ohhh, let's add some crappy 3D features and not support them properly, or only support them in our proprietary graphics renderer" phase of the 3D market?
You are sad.
I suppose you've never considered buying an Nvidia card because the Edge3D sucked so much ass. And I guess you'll never buy another Matrox or NEC/PowerVR card because the Mystique AND PCX1 didn't support bilinear filtering. I suppose you passed up the whole 3dfx craze because the Voodoo Rush had such incredible compatibility problems and performance issues. I suppose you never even considered purchasing S3's Savage3D line solely because the ViRGE had poor D3D performance, and no OpenGL ICD. And I suppose you never contemplated a 3dlabs chipset card just because the Permedia 2 didn't support colored lighting...
You can make an excuse like this for any company ever to make a graphics chip. If you havn't used an ATI card in the last 2 years on a modern operating system, you have no basis for judgement.
He wrote "Time Enough For Love" in the early seventies, and it has quite a detailed look at the genetic methods for long life, and the consequences long life brings.
A bit optimistic, but a must-read for Heinlien fans.
Is the quoted bandwidth ( 200Kbps ) WITH ENCRYPTION TURNED ON? Or are we going to have to sacrifice tons of bandwidth to secure our connection, just like 802.11b?
Do you honestly believe 200Kbit/s is going to be enough bandwidth for a USB soundcard ( think USB 1.1 high-speed 12Mbit/s ) ?
200Kbps is down in the range of low-speed USB. I severly doubt the application you envision is possible with that strangle point in your communication stream.
They have 16-bit internal registers ( and utilize one 16-bit page register and another offset register to acheive 20-bit memory space ). The data bus is insignificant to the definition.
The REASON "8-bit" is associated with the x86 architecture is BECAUSE the 8086 and 8088 are backward-compatible with the 8080, an 8-bit processor with a 16-bit address space.
Remember folks, the general definition of the "bits" attribute of a processor is how many bits wide the main instruction path(s) is / are.
Can you imagine fifty people a day singin' a bar of The Free Software Song and walkin' out?
Why then friends, they'll think it's a movement, and that's what it is: The Free Software Anti-Taxation movement, and all you gotta do to join is sing a bar when it comes around on the guitar.
Slashdot Mirror
Not a 9.2 review, but a recent experience with Mandrake...
;)
I installed 9.1 over the weekend. Yesterday a big storm hit and the machine shut down without a hint of grace once my UPS ran out.
I booted it up, and my ext3 partition was missing all sorts of files. This surprised the hell out of me, because I've never seen a filesystem actually lose files it wasn't currently altering during a power failure.
Maybe Mandrake 9.2 will come with "NOW, %50 FASTER FILE LOSS" feature
Yes, I know it's not Mandrake's fault that ext3 fucked me over. As for me, I got to practice reinstalling, and am giving ReiserFS a shot. Fuck ext3, even FAT is more forgiving, and hopefully I will be able to say the same for ReiserFS.
Funny you mention BJTs, I believe FETs were originally chosen for chip development because of their lower operating power :)
But yes, I do believe you have an excellent suggestion there, but I would suggest you only make this change for logic circuitry and registers. You really shouldn't use BJT for on-chip cache, since cache actually sees very little state change compared to the pipelines of the processor itself.
I don't mention the Pentium IV because I truely believe it is a step backwards, and that eventually it will be replaced by the Pentium M ( Banias ).
What I was trying to say is the most efficient processors we have today are much more efficient than a 486 ( partially attributable to die shrinks, but also due to advances like pipelining, branch prediction and OOOE to reduce wasted cycles, and dynamic power across the die on moden chips like the Pentium M ). If manufacturers could actually sell on efficiency instead of pure power, we'd see more of these architectures. Unfortunately, "cheap performance" rules an early market.
Think about it this way: back in the early 1900s Ford sought to give everyone a car with the Model T. Eventually, they saturated the market and nobody wanted the rough but cheap Model T anymore. People wanted stylish cars, more areodynamic cars, larget engines, more efficiency etc...
I believe the market is only beginning to realize that the desktop market is saturated, and is now replacement-only. The only reason we havn't seen a wide pickup of purchases for more efficient computers or more stylish computers is because manufacturers are ignoring the desktop market saturation and bleeding production over to laptops.
Once the laptop market crashes in a few years, I expect manufacturers to finally 'get it' just nlike car makers in the 1920s did, and offer a wider range than just "cheap performance".
Actually, I've never considered the earth to moon scenes to be slow, tedious and boring.
I actually consider it to be deliberate and mechanical to emphasize the relationship of man versus machine. The beginning of the movie ( yes, the apes ) shows man controlling machine, but the end of the movie shows machine controlling man.
The completely machine-controlled flight to the moons is a mechanical ballet dedicated to this concept.
This is all secondary to the concept that mankind itself is dancing a ballet instituted and pre-determined by some unknown power.
Remember when 486 chips were really cool?
I remember my 486 DX/2 50 could run with only a passive heatsink.
So could your Athlon XP if you clocked it at 50MHz. In fact, it would probably outperform your 486 by many times
The only reason we need high-wattage powersupplies and advanced cooling is because the market keeps pushing performance levels. The CPU architectures themselves have actually gotten more efficient.
Don't be a fool and get caught up in propoganda. I'm only posting this because I'm so sick of people spreading this crap.
.18 and .13 microns. Of course it uses 1/4 as much power as a classic Winchip, so would anything with that much shrinkage.
The Eden chip runs extremely cool because it doesn't DO ANYTHING. It is a brute-force, simple yet inefficient processor design.
It has no branch prediction, no out-of-order-execution, no register renaming, and a half-speed FPU. These are the exact same specs the Winchip had when Via bought it, they have simply shrunk the die to
This means you have to wait forever in CPU time to get anything done, which means you get real-world performance in the PII 300 range. Sure, each cycle wastes a tiny bit of power, but when you take 3x as long to do something, you use 3x as much real-time power.
This is what I am referring to when I say it's an inefficnent design. Sure, it's low-power, but you have to compare it to OTHER architectures to get a feel for how good it really is.
Consider that an Intel Pentium III Tualatin LV clocked at 733MHz would have only %50 higher max thermal power than the Eden chip, and you start to get the point. You could clock the Tualatain at 500MHz and match the Eden's max thermal power, and have significantly higher performance.
Consider that an 800MHz Pentium M would have ONLY 2 WATTS higher max thermal power, and it smacks you upside the forehead. Here we have a chip with roughly 2.5x the efficiency of the Eden ( processing power to power consumption ratio ), thanks to the fact that it has been DESIGNED FROM THE START to be efficient.
The Eden is only "low power" because it is inefficient, and it didn't sell well when it was sold as a normal desktop processor. The whole small form-factor ITX is the only thing the platform has going for it, and as soon as small systems with low-clocked Pentium Ms come into play, VIA's market will evaporate.
You could make the most inefficient core in the world run extremely cool, even say a Pentium IV, so long as you throttled the clock speed and shrunk the process. This is all VIA has done with the Winchip core used for Eden.
Incidentally, VIA finally released a new Winchip core, the Nemiah, with 6th-generation features like OOOE, branch-prediction, full-speed FPU.
GUESS WHAT? It performs better, but the power consumption is up too. Sadly, even Nemiah wasn't designed as efficiently as CPUs already out there.
EFFICIENT != LOW POWER.
Not quite true useless info.
Companies like SGI and 3dlabs had been making dedicated graphics hardware with this particular feature for years, even for consumers ( N64 and Permedia predate the Voodoo Graphics ).
Even so, you forget that the Rendition Verite graphics chip ( with a similar feature set ) was released at the same time as the Voodoo Graphics, and even had the first 3D-accelerated version of Quake.
Hell, if Intel hadn't been stupid enough to reuse the floating-point registers to implement MMX, there's no telling what would have happened to the graphics accelerator market. Bilinear Filtering in software was one of the target applications of MMX, but the combined registers meant you couldn't render the 3D scene and use your integer MMX unit to filter it at the same time. Now THAT's useless info.
Think about the features that people usually associate with a face: eyes, eyebrows, hair, nose, lips...
All of these features are soft, that is to say that there's very little chance you can extrapolate them from the skull's bone structure.
Yes, you can get the basic size of the lips and eyes, and the basic width of the nose. But you cannot tell the eye color, or the lip hue, or the actual shape of the nose or eyebrows.
You would need to extract such things from DNA, if that's even possible today.
All standards will revert to the following names:
PCMCIA: Newcard Low Speed
CardBus: Newcard Full speed
Newcard: Newcard High Speed
Thank you for your time.
Excuse me, did you say "two 'utes'"?
Your math seems sound, but you forget that there is a human aspect in deciding which door is opened.
Your probability calculations are usaeless when you throw the cunning of another human mind into the mix.
Now, instead of asking yourself "what is the probability", you ask yourself "hey, does the guy who removed the door know the probability, trying to trip me up?"
Unfortunately, the probability of that depends entirely on the person, and is thus probably best represented as 50/50. Maybe the person is leading you on to force a switch, or maybe it really is the prize door.
So your chance of willing, thanks to the person involved in the loop, is still 50/50.
There was an article here on those, like $500 i think, about two months ago. I am just leary of VIA so far, and haven't seen much info on reliability. I have seen that performance is ~= a celeron at the same mhz.
You're thinking of the new Nemiah core VIA released a few months ago.
You see, VIA has been playing a BS war with this miniITX fad: their processors are inefficient, so they clock them extremely low and sell them as low-powered systems. Their 1GHz C3 produces the same amount of heat as a Pentium III Tualatin 800, with HALF the performance. The only reason VIA's offerings sell is because Intel won't offer you a LV Tualatin at a reasonable pricepoint, they stick them in Blade servers and jack up the price.
The C3 / Eden processor lacked such modern technology as OOOE and register renaming, or advanced branch predicition or a full-speed FPU. These were advertised as "features" that allowed the core to be simple and tiny, but what they didn't tell you was it was also very inefficient.
Recently, VIA announced the Nemiah core, which included sixth-generation features like a branch-prediction unit, OOOE and register renaming, plus a full-speed FPU. Sure, now it performs nearly as well as a Celeron, but WHAT A SURPRISE, POWER USAGE HAS CLIMED AS WELL. The fact is, it's still just a normal microprocessor architecture with no specific optimizations for power usage, and they can only sell it as "low power usage" because it delivers such low processing power
Honestly, if I were to point to the future of miniaturized computing, I would definitely say innovative designs like the Pentium M are the way to go. Compared to the Pentium M's highly-efficient design, VIA's Winchip-derrived "low-power" core is a dodgy hack.
Now all we need are system integrators to realize that stylish, small and cool-running desktops could be the key to restarting falling desktop sales, and we's see a whole slew of Pentium M offerings for the desktop. We don't have to be chained to space heaters, I wish Intel and integrators would figure this out.
Something to do with the fact that real roadrunners hardly resemble the cartoon version:
Real Roadrunner
How long is development going to take? Robably at least 2 years before this sucker hits the streets. And then it has 5 years of market viability.
Are you honestly telling me you don't expect 1/3-1/2 or more of all US households to have an HDTV before 2010? The prices keep falling dramatically every year, and this year the things could actually be termed "affordable" ( 2x the price of a decent 480i set or less ).
You're bitching about a card released 7 years ago, during the "ohhh, let's add some crappy 3D features and not support them properly, or only support them in our proprietary graphics renderer" phase of the 3D market?
You are sad.
I suppose you've never considered buying an Nvidia card because the Edge3D sucked so much ass. And I guess you'll never buy another Matrox or NEC/PowerVR card because the Mystique AND PCX1 didn't support bilinear filtering. I suppose you passed up the whole 3dfx craze because the Voodoo Rush had such incredible compatibility problems and performance issues. I suppose you never even considered purchasing S3's Savage3D line solely because the ViRGE had poor D3D performance, and no OpenGL ICD. And I suppose you never contemplated a 3dlabs chipset card just because the Permedia 2 didn't support colored lighting...
You can make an excuse like this for any company ever to make a graphics chip. If you havn't used an ATI card in the last 2 years on a modern operating system, you have no basis for judgement.
Thanks to the power of modern genetics, we can provide something the world really needs. ...like a monkey with five asses!
How about Conan The Librarian?
This week, it's on U-62!
BE THERE!
He wrote "Time Enough For Love" in the early seventies, and it has quite a detailed look at the genetic methods for long life, and the consequences long life brings.
A bit optimistic, but a must-read for Heinlien fans.
Is the quoted bandwidth ( 200Kbps ) WITH ENCRYPTION TURNED ON? Or are we going to have to sacrifice tons of bandwidth to secure our connection, just like 802.11b?
Do you honestly believe 200Kbit/s is going to be enough bandwidth for a USB soundcard ( think USB 1.1 high-speed 12Mbit/s ) ?
200Kbps is down in the range of low-speed USB. I severly doubt the application you envision is possible with that strangle point in your communication stream.
Either 4k or 8k, like all normal Atari ROMS.
The 8086 and 8088 are both 16-bit processors.
They have 16-bit internal registers ( and utilize one 16-bit page register and another offset register to acheive 20-bit memory space ). The data bus is insignificant to the definition.
The REASON "8-bit" is associated with the x86 architecture is BECAUSE the 8086 and 8088 are backward-compatible with the 8080, an 8-bit processor with a 16-bit address space.
Remember folks, the general definition of the "bits" attribute of a processor is how many bits wide the main instruction path(s) is / are.
Example: 80286: 16-bit registers, 24-bit address space, 16-bit memory bus.
Example: 80386SX: 32-bit registers, 24-bit address space, 16-bit memory bus.
Address space, memory bus width and instruction path width do not have to be the same. Do not assume they are tied together.
He is referring to the resolution of the LOUDNESS of the signal.
20 * log( 2^16 ) = 96dB.
This is the amount of room we have to describe dead silence to the loudest thing you can record.
For those who only bothered to see the movie...
In the movie, marines are delivered to target using piloted dropships.
In the book, marines are delivered from space to the planet in individual drop shells.
And if fifty people do it...
Can you imagine fifty people a day singin' a bar of The Free Software Song and walkin' out?
Why then friends, they'll think it's a movement, and that's what it is: The Free Software Anti-Taxation movement, and all you gotta do to join is sing a bar when it comes around on the guitar.