Of course the Socket A one must be based on the Athlon XP core. It would be very difficult to modify a Socket 754 processor (with built-in memory controller) to work in Socket A (where it's in the northbridge), not to mention the fact that the Athlon XP uses the EV6 bus, descended from the DEC Alpha, whereas the Opteron-derived processors have Hypertransport (a descendent of the technology in the Sun E10k) and all sorts of other fancy stuff.
A Sempron is an Athlon 64/Opteron with the 64-bit goodness disabled, so you get most of the performance benefits of the new architecture, except the 64-bitness and extra registers, on a package that fits into a Socket A, AFAIK. Some Semprons fit in Socket 754, perhaps to appeal to the silly people out there who are either scared of proper 64-bit processors (because intel hasn't done it properly yet) or who go around saying, "you don't need 64 bits for anything."
I would doubt it. To most people the bios output is just a bunch of text, as long as there is text and it doesn't stop, the system is working. Most people don't look at what it says.
Some people think that lots of text scrolling past at boot time is the mark of a shoddy or "old-fashioned" system. I put Linux on an old PC for my neighbour a couple of weeks ago. He was most distressed by all the messages scrolling past before X and kdm started up.
I also later made the mistake of using a command-line to do something quicky. "This is going back to the old DOS days," he said despondantly.
They could have refitted it with more modern, efficient engines to make it a bit quieter and extend the range. There was also a plan for a successor to Concorde that would have much better range, efficiency, capacity and noise:-) Like everything else, it never went anywhere, due to politics.
How can I shut down if I can't click on the Start button?
If you close your eyes and wish really, really hard....
What's with all this Direct X for Linux nonsense?
on
Does Linux Have Game?
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· Score: 1
Loki Games, back in the day, had a product called SDL which was used to help port Windows games to other (i.e. Linux) platforms.
Back in Loki's day, the Linux market was a heck of a lot smaller. The economics have changed now. Linux is a much bigger phenomenon. Apple now has OS X, which is BSD.
Supercomputers are so powerful that they don't need cables. They have super powers and come to life once they get above a certain power. They use nucular X-ray beams to see through walls (and your clothes), they can speak directly to God and space aliens and can predict the lottery numbers. Oh, and they also have telepathy so you don't even need to touch the mouse or click on the Start button.
I agree that linux memory management is actually pretty decent, however, if you are doing real-time processes you really want the real-time extensions for Linux. Or, make sure you don't have amatuers on your software engineering team.
If you're doing Real Time work, wouldn't it be better to use a proper Real Time OS, such as VxWorks or QNX? Why would you choose Linux?
What really amazes me is that these articles always get posted to/. I mean, how ofter do you get similar articles from HP, SGI, Cray, Sun etc. posted as headline news here? The Developers section is terrible for frequent half-witted, thinly disguised IBM marketing fluff posing as technical writing.
That article has a great deal of IBM bias, as one might expect. Great Microprocessors of the Past and Present is a much more detailed, comprehensive and informative look at microprocessor history. It deals with some very strange and innovative designs that the IBM article doesn't mention.
1) Mono (.NET) for non-Windows applications is just as viable as Java for multi-platform use. You could do.NET AND Mono deployments (or just pick one).
Are you sure?
Last I heard, Mono was an incomplete, slow and buggy implementation if small parts of.NET.
Please don't kid yourself that writing in.NET or Mono will allow you to produce secure, reliable, effective cross-platform software. You might be able to write something that runs on most modern versions of Windows, and providing you don't use to many of Microsoft's classes, it might run after a fashion under Linux.
It would be much more sensible to choose Java. It may appear to be a little slow in some cases, but it's mature, stable, reliable and secure. It comes with huge amounts of free classes for all kinds of purposes. If you're scared about it coming from just one vendor, fear not. There are Java implementations from many renowned companies, including IBM (currently a favourite of/.). There are free, Free and Open Source implementations.
In terms of portability, you don't have to choose between one complete implementation on one OS and a half-done one on one other (i.e..NET on Windows and Mono on "Linux").
Contrary to what people will tell you here, the standard Sun JVM compiles to native machine code on the fly by default (you can turn it off with a simple switch), and gcc comes with a Java compiler which generates native binaries from Java source without requiring the JVM.
I think you'll find that if you choose Java, there will be fewer nasty surprises due to its maturity, and much more Open Source available to use in your project.
The best graphics card I ever bought was my Creative Labs nVidia TNT2 Ultra, almost exactly 5 years ago. It's still running, in my second PC, minus 2 or 3 blades on the cooling fan. It's in a K6-2/500 on a TMC TI5VGF motherboard with 512M RAM and Linux 2.4.x running a fairly recent nVidia binary driver.
18 months ago I tried a cheap, no-name GeForce MX440 in that machine which had terrible image quality. It was very fast in comparison (CPU usage went to 0% on 3d stuff:-) and Quake III was achieving 3x the frame rate i.e. 75-80fps) but after 10 months it broke and dabs wouldn't give me my money back.
Last year, I upgraded to an Athlon XP2000+ and after a while decided to buy a Creative Labs GeForce 5600. It mostly works, except AGP doesn't, so I might have well bought something half the price. Allegedly there are incompatibilities between the 5600 and the KT400a chipset. Anyway, in recent months, I have had terribly stability problems with it. I've tried all the recent nVidia drivers (and the Xorg ones too) but every so often , when doing normal 2D stuff, when the screen gets very busy, it locks up. They mouse still works but the keyboard doesn't.
If you ssh in over the network from another machine, the X server appears to be taking up all the CPU time. If you're quick, you can get it before it reaches 100%, and run startx to regain keyboard control and get the screen back (the screen is otherwise completely blank and the keyboard is dead).
Unfortunately, I've been way to busy to submit a proper bug report to nVidia due to work, but it's really damn annoyong when you log in to work and start of a few builds and the build log causes your screen to freeze.:-(
After reading the comments here, I doubt I'll be buying an ATI for my main box. I might try one to get some more performance out of the old machine for a approx. UKP25, but I think I might get a low-end nVidia for the main machine for about UKP40.
I'm getting an Acer Ferrari 3400+ laptop soon. That has 128M ATi graphics on board. I'll be running Solaris 10 on that. We'll see how Sun's Xorg server copes...
I also believe in Jesus Christ because of what you may call the scientific method: many repeated experiences of the power of God. Note that I do not take Scientology on faith. In it I've seen many repeated examples of corporate abuse of people.
And therein lies your fundamental flaw.
Religion is not supposed to be "tested". "God will not be tested."
You misunderstand the Scientific Method. These "personal experiences" are not reproducible, not testable, (not measureable), can not be independently observed and verified, do not make predictions which produce results etc. etc.
Many people go around shouting, "I'm a Cristian!"
Many people also go around shouting, "I'm a Scientist."
People may believe things if you shout about them enough, however that does not make them true or false.
Indeed. And this is still the situation today. Try to buy a PeeCee compatible to run a different OS and "they" will not sell you one either with the different (Free) OS or with no OS.
In fact, if you threaten to send back the Windows licenses unopened for a refund you will usually be offered a very big discount to save you the trouble. This tactic works with several big-name companies and resellers.
They'd better ban maps and send out intense magnetic fields to subvert the earth's own. Wouldn't want those pesky terrorists finding their way about using traditional measns...
And I tell you what, why not bomb the roads to make travel harder? After all, in times of terror, only terrorists would want to drive, or ride a bicycle.
In Canada I even pay my blank recording media levvy, so I already know that all artists are being compensated
Are they really?
IIRC, here in the UK, we don't pay a levy on blank media (or there'd be hell to pay, Jlo and Brittany Spires ain't getting a penny out of me when I back up my computer) but we do have things such as the Performers Rights Society for collecting a fee for music paid in pubs, restaurants, shops etc.
The thing is, the society gets the money which then goes to the record company cartel. Too bad if your record label isn't in the cartel. I think they take the money and keep it.
That's how it used to be. Maybe things are different now...
And don't get me started on my TV license, which goes to fund BBC Radio 1 which pays record companies to advertise their wares on the public airwaves. Talk about a racket (and I don't just mean the affected whinging coming out of the radio).
What they're going to argue is that the tracker sites are designed and operated specifically for the distribution of copyrighted materials.
Slackware Linux is copyrighted. It is also freely redistributable (sp?). I downloaded Slackware 9.1 and Slackware 10.0 from Bittorrent.
I wish people would get this straight: "copyrighted" does not mean I can't (legally) freely copy something.
I wish someone high-profile, respected and in posession of a clue, would stand up and shout loudly in public about this, and make the MPAA (and RIAA) look liek the bunch of vindictive, greedy, incompetent morons that they are.
I should also add that the main reason that the card reader is so much faster is because it uses USB2.0 (480Mb/s IIRC) compared to the USB1.1 cradle that I was using before that comes with the Palm Tungsten T3, which is, what, 10-12Mb/s?
Also, rememeber that with VFS, we're going through several protocol layers (dlp being one of them), so the transfer IS going to be slow. Getting a card reader is always going to be faster, because you're dealing with real filesystems, not virtual filesytems through abstraction like PalmOS does.
I didn't mean to sound ungrateful. pilot-link is a superb piece of software. From what I've seen if the source, it's very well written by people who know what they're doing. It's immensely useful, and the Palm people should thank the developers for making their devices accessable to almost everyone who doesn't have a Windows PeeCee or a Mac.
I recently upgraded from a Palm m100 to a Tungsten T3. I'm a Linux user at home, and I also found this sort of thing frustrating.
I eventually found out from talking to the developers that version 0.12.0, currently in CVS, supports the uploading of arbitrary files to the memory card on the palm.
I downloaded 0.12.0-rc4 from CVS and it compiled cleanly. There's a new option to pilot-xfer, -D, to install arbitrary files to the filesystem on the memory card.
This worked perfectly, but I found it a bit slow for transferring lots of MP3 files, so I bought a cheap USB2 card readed, which I can mount like a drive, and use cp to copy the files across. The card readed only cost UKP9.95+VAT and is really worh it for convenience and ease of use.
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Of course the Socket A one must be based on the Athlon XP core. It would be very difficult to modify a Socket 754 processor (with built-in memory controller) to work in Socket A (where it's in the northbridge), not to mention the fact that the Athlon XP uses the EV6 bus, descended from the DEC Alpha, whereas the Opteron-derived processors have Hypertransport (a descendent of the technology in the Sun E10k) and all sorts of other fancy stuff.
Silly me :-)
A Sempron is an Athlon 64/Opteron with the 64-bit goodness disabled, so you get most of the performance benefits of the new architecture, except the 64-bitness and extra registers, on a package that fits into a Socket A, AFAIK. Some Semprons fit in Socket 754, perhaps to appeal to the silly people out there who are either scared of proper 64-bit processors (because intel hasn't done it properly yet) or who go around saying, "you don't need 64 bits for anything."
Some people think that lots of text scrolling past at boot time is the mark of a shoddy or "old-fashioned" system. I put Linux on an old PC for my neighbour a couple of weeks ago. He was most distressed by all the messages scrolling past before X and kdm started up.
I also later made the mistake of using a command-line to do something quicky. "This is going back to the old DOS days," he said despondantly.
They could have refitted it with more modern, efficient engines to make it a bit quieter and extend the range. There was also a plan for a successor to Concorde that would have much better range, efficiency, capacity and noise :-) Like everything else, it never went anywhere, due to politics.
I think, however, we might miss out supersonic altogether now, and go for hypersonic sub-orbital or even orbital craft.
If you close your eyes and wish really, really hard....
Back in Loki's day, the Linux market was a heck of a lot smaller. The economics have changed now. Linux is a much bigger phenomenon. Apple now has OS X, which is BSD.
It's time to try again. This time it will work.
Supercomputers are so powerful that they don't need cables. They have super powers and come to life once they get above a certain power. They use nucular X-ray beams to see through walls (and your clothes), they can speak directly to God and space aliens and can predict the lottery numbers. Oh, and they also have telepathy so you don't even need to touch the mouse or click on the Start button.
That's the attitude that got us the Windows monopoly.
If you're doing Real Time work, wouldn't it be better to use a proper Real Time OS, such as VxWorks or QNX? Why would you choose Linux?
Or XFce, or GNUstep, or ... ? :-)
What really amazes me is that these articles always get posted to /. I mean, how ofter do you get similar articles from HP, SGI, Cray, Sun etc. posted as headline news here? The Developers section is terrible for frequent half-witted, thinly disguised IBM marketing fluff posing as technical writing.
That article has a great deal of IBM bias, as one might expect. Great Microprocessors of the Past and Present is a much more detailed, comprehensive and informative look at microprocessor history. It deals with some very strange and innovative designs that the IBM article doesn't mention.
Are you sure?
Last I heard, Mono was an incomplete, slow and buggy implementation if small parts of .NET.
Please don't kid yourself that writing in .NET or Mono will allow you to produce secure, reliable, effective cross-platform software. You might be able to write something that runs on most modern versions of Windows, and providing you don't use to many of Microsoft's classes, it might run after a fashion under Linux.
It would be much more sensible to choose Java. It may appear to be a little slow in some cases, but it's mature, stable, reliable and secure. It comes with huge amounts of free classes for all kinds of purposes. If you're scared about it coming from just one vendor, fear not. There are Java implementations from many renowned companies, including IBM (currently a favourite of /.). There are free, Free and Open Source implementations.
In terms of portability, you don't have to choose between one complete implementation on one OS and a half-done one on one other (i.e. .NET on Windows and Mono on "Linux").
Contrary to what people will tell you here, the standard Sun JVM compiles to native machine code on the fly by default (you can turn it off with a simple switch), and gcc comes with a Java compiler which generates native binaries from Java source without requiring the JVM.
I think you'll find that if you choose Java, there will be fewer nasty surprises due to its maturity, and much more Open Source available to use in your project.
It will if you buy it from Apple. :-)
/me ducks
Quite. Having open source drivers has something to be said for it.
18 months ago I tried a cheap, no-name GeForce MX440 in that machine which had terrible image quality. It was very fast in comparison (CPU usage went to 0% on 3d stuff :-) and Quake III was achieving 3x the frame rate i.e. 75-80fps) but after 10 months it broke and dabs wouldn't give me my money back.
Last year, I upgraded to an Athlon XP2000+ and after a while decided to buy a Creative Labs GeForce 5600. It mostly works, except AGP doesn't, so I might have well bought something half the price. Allegedly there are incompatibilities between the 5600 and the KT400a chipset. Anyway, in recent months, I have had terribly stability problems with it. I've tried all the recent nVidia drivers (and the Xorg ones too) but every so often , when doing normal 2D stuff, when the screen gets very busy, it locks up. They mouse still works but the keyboard doesn't.
If you ssh in over the network from another machine, the X server appears to be taking up all the CPU time. If you're quick, you can get it before it reaches 100%, and run startx to regain keyboard control and get the screen back (the screen is otherwise completely blank and the keyboard is dead).
Unfortunately, I've been way to busy to submit a proper bug report to nVidia due to work, but it's really damn annoyong when you log in to work and start of a few builds and the build log causes your screen to freeze. :-(
After reading the comments here, I doubt I'll be buying an ATI for my main box. I might try one to get some more performance out of the old machine for a approx. UKP25, but I think I might get a low-end nVidia for the main machine for about UKP40.
I'm getting an Acer Ferrari 3400+ laptop soon. That has 128M ATi graphics on board. I'll be running Solaris 10 on that. We'll see how Sun's Xorg server copes...
And therein lies your fundamental flaw.
Religion is not supposed to be "tested". "God will not be tested."
You misunderstand the Scientific Method. These "personal experiences" are not reproducible, not testable, (not measureable), can not be independently observed and verified, do not make predictions which produce results etc. etc.
Many people go around shouting, "I'm a Cristian!"
Many people also go around shouting, "I'm a Scientist."
People may believe things if you shout about them enough, however that does not make them true or false.
In fact, if you threaten to send back the Windows licenses unopened for a refund you will usually be offered a very big discount to save you the trouble. This tactic works with several big-name companies and resellers.
And I tell you what, why not bomb the roads to make travel harder? After all, in times of terror, only terrorists would want to drive, or ride a bicycle.
Are they really?
IIRC, here in the UK, we don't pay a levy on blank media (or there'd be hell to pay, Jlo and Brittany Spires ain't getting a penny out of me when I back up my computer) but we do have things such as the Performers Rights Society for collecting a fee for music paid in pubs, restaurants, shops etc.
The thing is, the society gets the money which then goes to the record company cartel. Too bad if your record label isn't in the cartel. I think they take the money and keep it.
That's how it used to be. Maybe things are different now...
And don't get me started on my TV license, which goes to fund BBC Radio 1 which pays record companies to advertise their wares on the public airwaves. Talk about a racket (and I don't just mean the affected whinging coming out of the radio).
Slackware Linux is copyrighted. It is also freely redistributable (sp?). I downloaded Slackware 9.1 and Slackware 10.0 from Bittorrent.
I wish people would get this straight: "copyrighted" does not mean I can't (legally) freely copy something.
I wish someone high-profile, respected and in posession of a clue, would stand up and shout loudly in public about this, and make the MPAA (and RIAA) look liek the bunch of vindictive, greedy, incompetent morons that they are.
I should also add that the main reason that the card reader is so much faster is because it uses USB2.0 (480Mb/s IIRC) compared to the USB1.1 cradle that I was using before that comes with the Palm Tungsten T3, which is, what, 10-12Mb/s?
I didn't mean to sound ungrateful. pilot-link is a superb piece of software. From what I've seen if the source, it's very well written by people who know what they're doing. It's immensely useful, and the Palm people should thank the developers for making their devices accessable to almost everyone who doesn't have a Windows PeeCee or a Mac.
I eventually found out from talking to the developers that version 0.12.0, currently in CVS, supports the uploading of arbitrary files to the memory card on the palm.
I downloaded 0.12.0-rc4 from CVS and it compiled cleanly. There's a new option to pilot-xfer, -D, to install arbitrary files to the filesystem on the memory card.
This worked perfectly, but I found it a bit slow for transferring lots of MP3 files, so I bought a cheap USB2 card readed, which I can mount like a drive, and use cp to copy the files across. The card readed only cost UKP9.95+VAT and is really worh it for convenience and ease of use.