Granted, I don't have formal benchmarks to show you, but, suffice it to say, my own workstation runs NT 4.0 just fine, and any modern flavor of Linux utterly dies.
NT is stable, fast, and very decently priced these days. If I'm an office manager, what's my incentive for trying to go to Linux?
That's part of the catch-22. I love icewm, or fvwm, or twm, but most office users would rather use Windows 3.1. They stare at it with that "deer in the headlights" look.
Gnome they can understand. KDE they can understand. And I try to run them on a PII-333 with 128MB of RAM, and the whole system grinds to a halt. And that's before they even start up Abi-word.
1996: Linux was really fast on cheap hardware. But it wasn't ready for unclued office users.
2001: Most Linuxes have a very friendly desktop, with lots of productivity apps, but I swear to Linus, it's about twice as slow as Win2K/XP on the same hardware.
I'd love to have Linux running everywhere if it didn't require massive hardware to run smoothly.
I heard that the EM radiation from Intel's new 3GIO bus interferes with 3G wireless devices. Intel has therefore been blocking the introduction of 3G wireless in the US.
Is there any truth to this rumour? thanks ok bye
Re:Please try to keep posts on topic. (In Italian)
on
Evolution 1.0 Released
·
· Score: 0, Offtopic
What are you smoking, and where can i score some? Translation:
That is most excellent!
Hour a sure text from which the great pleasure it will be induced in the reader...
The tide obtains more soil from your laundry.
The cheese on the pavement is on fire.
Your pants have said me to go to the warehouse and to take some eggs. It is this correcting?
How one increases the page on this card of the message of Web?
Something is died within, or is that hardly your ass here?
Actually, you don't need any fancy-pants space-bending tricks to travel FTL. You can go as fast as you damn well please (if you have enough propulsion energy). But the rest of the universe will then speed up relative to you.
I can travel to Vega and back in 10 days. Unfortunately, it will be the year 2042 on earth when I get back.
"As WE know it" are four important words. For something to exist as life, it needs to be able to metabolize matter and energy from its environment, self-replicate, adapt, and pass those adaptations to its progeny. There are other, very basic assumptions about life, such as the need for a boundry between lifeform and environment. When you set these simple restrictions, the candidates for possible lifeforms built out of matter as we understand it become very small. The only good system we can conceive of at the moment is the protein-RNA/DNA life that we know of. And that list of criteria for a life-sustaining planet applies to any protien-DNA-based lifeform of decent complexity (remember, we're not just talking about life, we're talking about life that is capable of building a radio transmitter).
So 8% in one galaxy time billions of galaxies...sound like good odds to me, even by your broken assumptions.
Sounds like REAL good odds.
Sure. But the closest galaxy to our own (not counting the Magellenic Clouds) is 3 million light-years away. 3 million. That means that IF we were able to pick up a signal from Andromeda, and IF we were able to distinguish it from all of the background noise between there and here, the folks who sent it are long gone. The message would have originated at the time when the highest lifeform on Earth was the autralopithecus.
That's our closest neighbor. Expand your search radius to the closest 100 galaxies, and you're talking about messages that were sent at the time dinosaurs walked the earth. Of course, it would be monumental to have solid evidence of ET life; we just wouldn't be able to say "Hi" back.
Any response to a question like this is bound to upset someone. I'll
answer with the caveat that this is my opinion that developed over the
past three years following them both as well as other commercial OSs.
Those of you offended in any way by this, please cat flames >/dev/null.
That said -- the differences between FreeBSD and Linux can best be
understood in the context of American politics. There are essentially two
philosophies: Republican (FreeBSD) and Democrat (Linux).
The FreeBSD organization is a republican structure -- we have our say as
users, but the final decisions devolve to the core team who take the final
responsibility for their decisions. FreeBSD takes a conservative approach.
In other words, better things should work correctly at the expense of a
minorities desires, than to please all of the people all of the time and
have unexpected components of the OS breaking on a regular basis. We are
free to vote our approval or disapproval by changing our OS.
Linux is a democratic group. There is no single authority to accept final
responsibility except for Linus as it relates to the kernel. Linux adopted
early on a consensus approach (POSIX, etc.). In a sense, Linux is much
like current Democratic politics -- the mob pretty much rules. The end
result is that there is really no such thing as Linux -- there are
distributions that use the Linux kernel and from then on you have
essentially different operating systems. Slackware, for example, doesn't
look at all like Red Hat. Describing Linux is much like describing Mach.
(There isn't much - both are just micro kernels. _Anything_ can be
implemented over them.)
So as I see it, it comes down to this: vote for the philosophy that
appeals to you. I use FreeBSD because I rely on my machine for many other
uses besides tinkering with operating systems. FreeBSD doesn't change the
world on me every 6 months. Linux is in constant change. New things are
showing up all the time. If you like tinkering with operating systems and
having things that used to work break, Linux may be your answer. If you
don't know Unix -- pick one and get started. You'll learn how to pick the
best choice. No matter which one you pick, it will be infinitely better
that Micros**t anything.
Though synchronous design has enabled great strides to be taken in the design and performance of computers, there is evidence that it is beginning to hit some fundamental limitations. A circuit can only operate synchronously if all parts of it see the clock at the same time, at least to a reasonable approximation. However clocks are electrical signals, and when they propagate down wires they are subject to the same delays as other signals. If the delay to particular part of the circuit takes a significant part of a clock cycle-time, that part of the circuit cannot be viewed as being in step with other parts.
For some time now it has been difficult to sustain the synchronous framework from chip to chip at maximum clock rates. On-chip phase-locked loops help compensate for chip-to-chip tolerances, but above about 50MHz even this isn't enough.
Building the complete CPU on a single chip avoids inter-chip skew, as the highest clock rates are only used for processor-MMU-cache transactions. However, even on a single chip, clock skew is becoming a problem. High-performance processors must dedicate increasing proportions of their silicon area to the clock drivers to achieve acceptable skew, and clearly there is a limit to how much further this proportion can increase. Electrical signals travel on chips at a fraction of the speed of light; as the tracks get thinner, the chips get bigger and the clocks get faster, the skew problem gets worse. Perhaps the clock could be injected optically to avoid the wire delays, but the signals which are issued as a result of the clock still have to propagate along wires in time for the next pulse, so a similar problem remains.
Even more urgent than the physical limitation of clock distribution is the problem of heat. CMOS is a good technology for low power as gates only dissipate energy when they are switching. Normally this should correspond to the gate doing useful work, but unfortunately in a synchronous circuit this is not always the case. Many gates switch because they are connected to the clock, not because they have new inputs to process. The biggest gate of all is the clock driver, and it must switch all the time to provide the timing reference even if only a small part of the chip has anything useful to do. Often it will switch when none of the chip has anything to do, because stopping and starting a high-speed clock is not easy.
Early CMOS devices were very low power, but as process rules have shrunk CMOS has become faster and denser, and today's high-performance CMOS processors can dissipate 20 or 30 watts. Furthermore there is evidence that the trend towards higher power will continue. Process rules have at least another order of magnitude to shrink, leading directly to two orders of magnitude increase in dissipation for a maximum performance chip. (The power for a given function and performance is reduced by process shrinking, but the smaller capacitances allow the clock rate to increase. A typical function therefore delivers more performance at the same power. However you can get more functions onto a single chip, so the total chip power goes up.) Whilst a reduction in the power supply voltage helps reduce the dissipation (by a factor of 3 for 3 Volt operation and a factor of 6 for 2 Volt operation, relative to a 5 Volt norm in both cases), the end result is still a chip with an increasing thermal problem. Processors which dissipate several hundred watts are clearly no use in battery powered equipment, and even on the desktop they impose difficulties because they require water cooling or similar costly heat-removal technology.
As feature sizes reduce and chips encompass more functionality it is likely that the average proportion of the chip which is doing something useful at any time will shrink. Therefore the global clock is becoming increasingly inefficient.
The GPL license offers a very beautiful dream, free, unrestricted access to software for the people of the world. No doubt this would be great, free technology for people in the third world countries (including me) and no more gigantic monopolistic companies telling you where to go today. I also believed in that dream, however I tried FreeBSD because I wanted to see how the traditional UNIX was. I could have tried NetBSD but I simply had a contact with FreeBSD first. FreeBSD has only one distribution and, of course, includes many GPL'd programs, something that shows without doubt that BSD hackers don't "hate" the GPL as a general rule, in fact, there is a sense of respect towards of the code written by the FSF and any comment against the GPL starts a never ending flame war in the lists.
I then decided to follow my ideals, and some years ago I pursued some email with Richard Stallman (RMS for short) on three issues:
1) The Free Software Foundation should support the efforts against crypto export restrictions in the US. It was suspected some linux distributions were exporting this code but there was no official statement on this.
He (RMS) agreed that such restrictions were against the spirit of free software redistribution. He included a link to the Electronic Frontier Foundation in the Free Software Foundation's site.
2)During our email, he insisted I should use the term GNU/Linux, something that sounded perfectly logical although somewhat uncomfortable. I then asked if I could use the term GNU/FreeBSD and GNU/AIX (I used AIX with a complete GNU development system since those parts were unbundled by IBM) since I was using GNU components that were much bigger and equally important (at least to me) as the kernel.
RMS responded on both cases with a clear " no".
3) I commented that, given the FSF's objectives, FreeBSD was doing a better job than Linux.
He (and no doubt many readers) was surprised by this affirmation and asked for an explanation. I reasoned that since the objective behind the FSF was providing free software, and Linux was being heavily commercialized while FreeBSD was not, FreeBSD was nearer to the objectives. In those days, the newly born Caldera's distribution had a lot of commercial goodies and their base distribution couldn't be downloaded anywhere, I also commented that no one could stop the companies like Caldera from gradually replacing free parts of GNU/Linux with commercial elements until they would effectively replace the complete OS (I also mentioned the linux emulation in BSD in another context). To this final point, RMS responded that the only thing we could do was write more free software.
Nowadays I personally think that Richard Stallman is a good person but he is confused (I hope he thinks the same of me when he finishes reading this article:), and I am not going to analyze the answers RMS gave because that is not the objective of this article. I arrived, however, to two important conclusions:
the GNU Public License will not save the world,
there shouldn't be a universal license; different situations require different licenses.
On July 17, 2001, the FBI arrested Dmitry Sklyarov, a Russian computer science student for an alleged violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). He delivered a speech in a Las Vegas hotel regarding Adobe eBooks entitled:
"eBook Security: Theory and Practice"
The application addressed in the speech bypasses Adobe eBooks security only if you have previously purchased the eBook. Furthermore, it allows the purchaser to backup their eBook, read the eBook on a platform other than Windows and is useful to the Blind. Adobe had him arrested.
Since when are people arrested for pointing out a flaw? We believe this law, which enforces a WTO Treaty, should be reviewed and challenged. Free Speech allows someone to critize and/or demonstrate flaws within corporate products.
Programmers speak in Code.
The intimidation has already begun. The Public Libraries are next.
When did they transistion from code-naming their CPU cores after cars (Thunderbird, Mustang), to using names of horses (Mustang, Palomino, Thoroughbred)?
Have to say I like horses better than rivers in No-Cal and Oregon.
Slashdot Mirror
NT is stable, fast, and very decently priced these days. If I'm an office manager, what's my incentive for trying to go to Linux?
Gnome they can understand. KDE they can understand. And I try to run them on a PII-333 with 128MB of RAM, and the whole system grinds to a halt. And that's before they even start up Abi-word.
2001: Most Linuxes have a very friendly desktop, with lots of productivity apps, but I swear to Linus, it's about twice as slow as Win2K/XP on the same hardware.
I'd love to have Linux running everywhere if it didn't require massive hardware to run smoothly.
After listening to the hard drive grind constantly for 4 hours I said "screw it" and booted back into NT 4.0
Some of us don't have 1GHz/256MB computers.
Is there any truth to this rumour? thanks ok bye
That is most excellent!
Hour a sure text from which the great pleasure it will be induced in the reader...
The tide obtains more soil from your laundry.
The cheese on the pavement is on fire.
Your pants have said me to go to the warehouse and to take some eggs. It is this correcting?
How one increases the page on this card of the message of Web?
Something is died within, or is that hardly your ass here?
I had always thought that PKB stood for "Pot, Kettle, Black."
I can travel to Vega and back in 10 days. Unfortunately, it will be the year 2042 on earth when I get back.
"As WE know it" are four important words. For something to exist as life, it needs to be able to metabolize matter and energy from its environment, self-replicate, adapt, and pass those adaptations to its progeny. There are other, very basic assumptions about life, such as the need for a boundry between lifeform and environment. When you set these simple restrictions, the candidates for possible lifeforms built out of matter as we understand it become very small. The only good system we can conceive of at the moment is the protein-RNA/DNA life that we know of. And that list of criteria for a life-sustaining planet applies to any protien-DNA-based lifeform of decent complexity (remember, we're not just talking about life, we're talking about life that is capable of building a radio transmitter).
Sounds like REAL good odds.
Sure. But the closest galaxy to our own (not counting the Magellenic Clouds) is 3 million light-years away. 3 million. That means that IF we were able to pick up a signal from Andromeda, and IF we were able to distinguish it from all of the background noise between there and here, the folks who sent it are long gone. The message would have originated at the time when the highest lifeform on Earth was the autralopithecus.
That's our closest neighbor. Expand your search radius to the closest 100 galaxies, and you're talking about messages that were sent at the time dinosaurs walked the earth. Of course, it would be monumental to have solid evidence of ET life; we just wouldn't be able to say "Hi" back.
Any response to a question like this is bound to upset someone. I'll /dev/null.
answer with the caveat that this is my opinion that developed over the
past three years following them both as well as other commercial OSs.
Those of you offended in any way by this, please cat flames >
That said -- the differences between FreeBSD and Linux can best be
understood in the context of American politics. There are essentially two
philosophies: Republican (FreeBSD) and Democrat (Linux).
The FreeBSD organization is a republican structure -- we have our say as
users, but the final decisions devolve to the core team who take the final
responsibility for their decisions. FreeBSD takes a conservative approach.
In other words, better things should work correctly at the expense of a
minorities desires, than to please all of the people all of the time and
have unexpected components of the OS breaking on a regular basis. We are
free to vote our approval or disapproval by changing our OS.
Linux is a democratic group. There is no single authority to accept final
responsibility except for Linus as it relates to the kernel. Linux adopted
early on a consensus approach (POSIX, etc.). In a sense, Linux is much
like current Democratic politics -- the mob pretty much rules. The end
result is that there is really no such thing as Linux -- there are
distributions that use the Linux kernel and from then on you have
essentially different operating systems. Slackware, for example, doesn't
look at all like Red Hat. Describing Linux is much like describing Mach.
(There isn't much - both are just micro kernels. _Anything_ can be
implemented over them.)
So as I see it, it comes down to this: vote for the philosophy that
appeals to you. I use FreeBSD because I rely on my machine for many other
uses besides tinkering with operating systems. FreeBSD doesn't change the
world on me every 6 months. Linux is in constant change. New things are
showing up all the time. If you like tinkering with operating systems and
having things that used to work break, Linux may be your answer. If you
don't know Unix -- pick one and get started. You'll learn how to pick the
best choice. No matter which one you pick, it will be infinitely better
that Micros**t anything.
There are some compelling reasons:
Though synchronous design has enabled great strides to be taken in the design and performance of computers, there is evidence that it is beginning to hit some fundamental limitations. A circuit can only operate synchronously if all parts of it see the clock at the same time, at least to a reasonable approximation. However clocks are electrical signals, and when they propagate down wires they are subject to the same delays as other signals. If the delay to particular part of the circuit takes a significant part of a clock cycle-time, that part of the circuit cannot be viewed as being in step with other parts.
For some time now it has been difficult to sustain the synchronous framework from chip to chip at maximum clock rates. On-chip phase-locked loops help compensate for chip-to-chip tolerances, but above about 50MHz even this isn't enough.
Building the complete CPU on a single chip avoids inter-chip skew, as the highest clock rates are only used for processor-MMU-cache transactions. However, even on a single chip, clock skew is becoming a problem. High-performance processors must dedicate increasing proportions of their silicon area to the clock drivers to achieve acceptable skew, and clearly there is a limit to how much further this proportion can increase. Electrical signals travel on chips at a fraction of the speed of light; as the tracks get thinner, the chips get bigger and the clocks get faster, the skew problem gets worse. Perhaps the clock could be injected optically to avoid the wire delays, but the signals which are issued as a result of the clock still have to propagate along wires in time for the next pulse, so a similar problem remains.
Even more urgent than the physical limitation of clock distribution is the problem of heat. CMOS is a good technology for low power as gates only dissipate energy when they are switching. Normally this should correspond to the gate doing useful work, but unfortunately in a synchronous circuit this is not always the case. Many gates switch because they are connected to the clock, not because they have new inputs to process. The biggest gate of all is the clock driver, and it must switch all the time to provide the timing reference even if only a small part of the chip has anything useful to do. Often it will switch when none of the chip has anything to do, because stopping and starting a high-speed clock is not easy.
Early CMOS devices were very low power, but as process rules have shrunk CMOS has become faster and denser, and today's high-performance CMOS processors can dissipate 20 or 30 watts. Furthermore there is evidence that the trend towards higher power will continue. Process rules have at least another order of magnitude to shrink, leading directly to two orders of magnitude increase in dissipation for a maximum performance chip. (The power for a given function and performance is reduced by process shrinking, but the smaller capacitances allow the clock rate to increase. A typical function therefore delivers more performance at the same power. However you can get more functions onto a single chip, so the total chip power goes up.) Whilst a reduction in the power supply voltage helps reduce the dissipation (by a factor of 3 for 3 Volt operation and a factor of 6 for 2 Volt operation, relative to a 5 Volt norm in both cases), the end result is still a chip with an increasing thermal problem. Processors which dissipate several hundred watts are clearly no use in battery powered equipment, and even on the desktop they impose difficulties because they require water cooling or similar costly heat-removal technology.
As feature sizes reduce and chips encompass more functionality it is likely that the average proportion of the chip which is doing something useful at any time will shrink. Therefore the global clock is becoming increasingly inefficient.
The GPL license offers a very beautiful dream, free, unrestricted access to software for the people of the world. No doubt this would be great, free technology for people in the third world countries (including me) and no more gigantic monopolistic companies telling you where to go today. I also believed in that dream, however I tried FreeBSD because I wanted to see how the traditional UNIX was. I could have tried NetBSD but I simply had a contact with FreeBSD first. FreeBSD has only one distribution and, of course, includes many GPL'd programs, something that shows without doubt that BSD hackers don't "hate" the GPL as a general rule, in fact, there is a sense of respect towards of the code written by the FSF and any comment against the GPL starts a never ending flame war in the lists.
:), and I am not going to analyze the answers RMS gave because that is not the objective of this article. I arrived, however, to two important conclusions:
I then decided to follow my ideals, and some years ago I pursued some email with Richard Stallman (RMS for short) on three issues:
1) The Free Software Foundation should support the efforts against crypto export restrictions in the US. It was suspected some linux distributions were exporting this code but there was no official statement on this.
He (RMS) agreed that such restrictions were against the spirit of free software redistribution. He included a link to the Electronic Frontier Foundation in the Free Software Foundation's site.
2)During our email, he insisted I should use the term GNU/Linux, something that sounded perfectly logical although somewhat uncomfortable. I then asked if I could use the term GNU/FreeBSD and GNU/AIX (I used AIX with a complete GNU development system since those parts were unbundled by IBM) since I was using GNU components that were much bigger and equally important (at least to me) as the kernel.
RMS responded on both cases with a clear " no".
3) I commented that, given the FSF's objectives, FreeBSD was doing a better job than Linux.
He (and no doubt many readers) was surprised by this affirmation and asked for an explanation. I reasoned that since the objective behind the FSF was providing free software, and Linux was being heavily commercialized while FreeBSD was not, FreeBSD was nearer to the objectives. In those days, the newly born Caldera's distribution had a lot of commercial goodies and their base distribution couldn't be downloaded anywhere, I also commented that no one could stop the companies like Caldera from gradually replacing free parts of GNU/Linux with commercial elements until they would effectively replace the complete OS (I also mentioned the linux emulation in BSD in another context). To this final point, RMS responded that the only thing we could do was write more free software.
Nowadays I personally think that Richard Stallman is a good person but he is confused (I hope he thinks the same of me when he finishes reading this article
the GNU Public License will not save the world,
there shouldn't be a universal license; different situations require different licenses.
Vsyah basha osnoba - preenadpyehzhat nam.
On July 17, 2001, the FBI arrested Dmitry Sklyarov, a Russian computer science student for an alleged violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). He delivered a speech in a Las Vegas hotel regarding Adobe eBooks entitled:
"eBook Security: Theory and Practice" The application addressed in the speech bypasses Adobe eBooks security only if you have previously purchased the eBook. Furthermore, it allows the purchaser to backup their eBook, read the eBook on a platform other than Windows and is useful to the Blind. Adobe had him arrested.
Since when are people arrested for pointing out a flaw? We believe this law, which enforces a WTO Treaty, should be reviewed and challenged. Free Speech allows someone to critize and/or demonstrate flaws within corporate products.
Programmers speak in Code.
The intimidation has already begun. The Public Libraries are next.
Yes. The day Congress repeals it or the Supreme Court strikes it down.
HTH.
Have to say I like horses better than rivers in No-Cal and Oregon.