Actually, why aren't BSD NVIDIA drivers availabe? The X module is platform independent (by design, unless NVIDIA uses calls that are Linux-specific) and the kernel driver is extremely easy to port (its fully abstracts the kernel through a platform-wrapper layer).
You have no idea. There are all sorts of psychological issues dealing with countries all over the world. For example, (not to sterotype, but an observation) there is a latent dislike on the Indian sub-continent of dark skin. Then there is the fact that Russian and Turkey both strongly insist they are European, even though their population makeup would put them in border/mixed groupings at best. Leave it to history to screw up people's perceptions...
Typical American. No knowledge of geography;) The proper name for Mexico is United Mexican States, not United States of Mexico (subtle semantic difference, not just word order difference). Calling it the United States of Mexico is like calling the United Arab Emirates the United Emirates of Arabia. Under your logic, citizens of the United States of America and Americans, and citizens of the United Mexican States are Statesians.
PS> I think the 'american' moniker is fine. It's not like anybody else wants it anyway...
PS> Sorry for that crack. I couldn't help myself. I was on a roll. You know you were thinking it!
Frankly, as anybody from the Indian subcontinent knows, every single "race" box in the U.S. lumps Indians under "Asian or Pacific Islander." As if the whole Red-Indian Brown-Indian thing wasn't bad enough. If Americans have to take a little semantic pain, then they should get used to it. It happens to everybody else all the time. If the Irish people in the UK can deal with everybody calling their country England all the time, than anyone can live with slightly inaccurate moniker.
If you won't eat it, we'll force it down your throat! Some guy at Time-Warner recently said that the average American would pay $250 a year to get the kind of programming they do now for free without the adds. That's a little over $20 a month, about the same as an AOL account. Where do I sign up?
Re:Why two ethernet controllers?
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Actually, OHCI chipsets (mainly SiS, ALi, and some others) are a lot smarter than UHCI chipsets (Intel and VIA). Performance with OHCI chipsets is significantly better too. In fact, OHCI is the programming model for computer firewire interfaces as well.
While this bill is very worrying, given the increased power it gives to the DOJ (and that maniac Ashcroft...), it's not as bad as its made out to be. Basically, the extreme penalties are for those who knowingly commit acts that result in death or serious bodily injury. That only makes sense. Killing somebody by hacking into an important computer is just as bad as killing him any other way. Also, it increases the penalties for illegally intercepting electronic communications, which is a good thing. Maybe that clause can be used against the FBI and DOJ when they get a little too snoopy.
How *NIX grognards always complain about multi-threading, but don't find signals (and their nasty interrupt-driven nature) to be the least bit unsettling!
But what happens whe the program files overnight, and the poor user comes in in the morning to find that he doesn't have enough time to run the program again before the deadline? I bet at that piont, he'd appreciate the well-coded, well-designed version...
Nobody cares about optimizing a user dialog. >>>>>>>>> Wouldn't this sentence be fun taken out of context? Seriously, though, I think what the original poster was getting at was the fact that a lot of powerful interactive programs (3D modelers for example) can really make the user cry if they run computations and UI code in the same thread. In those cases, splitting off the calculation code to a seperate thread and giving it a lower priority than the UI thread ensures that the user-interface stays responsive, no matter what's going on in the background.
(which is true on some broken OSes but not meaningfully true on Linux) >>>>>> Not so. Have you ever compared the time between a thread-switch and a process-switch? The only difference on Linux is changing the MMU context. Yet, on x86, changing the MMU context is the slowest operation you can perform.
fork() alternative--it conflates fork() and exec() into CreateProcess*()) >>>> Umm, fork() is the one that's braindead. Who the hell dreamed up a system where creating a new process would copy the entire state of an existing one only to have it wiped out when the other process did an exec()? fork() requires all sorts of nasty stuff (like copy-on write in the VM) that is ditched if the OS follows a process/thread model. Windows might be braindead, but CreateProcess() makes a hell of a lot more sense than fork().
First, the idea was to write in ASM to squeeze every drop of performance from the hardware. Then, the idea was to write in a high-level language, but always be careful about performance. Then, the idea was to develop apps quickly, then profile to optimize the important parts. Now, screw optimization, let the user buy more hardware! I think this attitude sucks. Even my 1.5Ghz Athlon-XP is slower running KDE 3.x (or any version of gnome for that matter) than my old 300Mhz PII was running Win98. And it doesn't do a hell of a lot of stuff that my old machine couldn't. I switched to Linux and took the performance hit because I hated Microsoft. I keep upgrading KDE (and my hardware) because the latest apps only work on the latest version. I don't expect more complex software to get faster, but I'd expect that as I upgrade my hardware, software should stay relatively the same speed. Yet, it seems as if software is getting slower more quickly than system bottlenecks (specifically RAM and hard-drive speed) can keep up. That means that the end-user experience is deteriorating, even as users pump more money into their hardware to get usable performance.
The cool thing is, (in SPEC fp scores at least, which are decent benchmarks) Alphas at 1 GHz are just about even (10% either way in different tests) with a 2.53GHz P4. And its only about 40% slower on integer code. Clock-speed is nice, but the Alpha had one mad FP architecture!
Is this a good thing? I think it's a stupid relic of the days when $PATH and $LD_LIBRARY_PATH were the best way people could come up with of taking individual software applications and importing them into a common environment. These days, a database mapping command and.so names to binaries and libraries that live in their own application directories would be a far cleaner solution. It could even be automatically managed by RPM or DPKG, with something like 'menu' on Debian.
Let's see: Computer software vs TV's, audio products, and movies? I don't know. I think the U.S. govenment would have more interest in protecting the latter, especially given how cozy they are with Hollywood.
GPU's are designed to render, rotate, etc. polygon models with bitmap skins, "tactile" textures, light, shadow and fog in real time. I'm not sure offhand if you can actually get the results of their mathematical calculations directly. >>>>>>>>> Not any more. These newfangled GPUs are programmable, so you can write some code for the vertex and pixel shaders that does arbitrary calculations.
I presume the XBox BIOS is flashable. You need a replacement BIOS because software that "links" to the BIOS code would be using Microsoft software, and thus might be illegal.
It doesn't have to be a committe drivern standard initially. Neither C nor C++ were. As for the "if you don't like it don't use it" mentality I don't buy it. First, if I don't like it, I can bitch about it all I want. Second, even if I don't use it, people who don't have any foresight will, and we might be back at another Microsoft monopoly.
I pointed out C# and Java in the same sentence. Sun doesn't have a history of pulling crap like Microsoft does (in fact, they've always been quite open about their technologies, particularly those in Solaris) but its still dangerous that they control a language as widely used as Java.
Not just the fact that Win32 is ugly (though it is significantly more ugly than your other examples, which at least didn't change 1000 times in their evolution) but also what Microsoft pulled with IBM when they were trying to offer Win32 compatibility. Win32 is not just ugly, but a mess of hidden, constantly changing, poorly documented APIs. That's what I'm really worried about.
Here's the dillema. I'm seeing this move from nice, open standards (C/C++) to languages that have strings attached, like Java and C$^H#. Even if C# is an ECMA standard, there is no getting around the fact that Microsoft is the one guiding its development and evolution. I don't know about the rest of you, but after what MS has done with Win32, I really don't trust them to come up with good API and language standards. And even if they do, I'd rather not have their hands on the riens. Why is there no truly open project (I'm talking ISO C/C++ open) trying to take on C# and Java instead of merely copying them?
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Actually, why aren't BSD NVIDIA drivers availabe? The X module is platform independent (by design, unless NVIDIA uses calls that are Linux-specific) and the kernel driver is extremely easy to port (its fully abstracts the kernel through a platform-wrapper layer).
You have no idea. There are all sorts of psychological issues dealing with countries all over the world. For example, (not to sterotype, but an observation) there is a latent dislike on the Indian sub-continent of dark skin. Then there is the fact that Russian and Turkey both strongly insist they are European, even though their population makeup would put them in border/mixed groupings at best. Leave it to history to screw up people's perceptions...
Typical American. No knowledge of geography ;) The proper name for Mexico is United Mexican States, not United States of Mexico (subtle semantic difference, not just word order difference). Calling it the United States of Mexico is like calling the United Arab Emirates the United Emirates of Arabia. Under your logic, citizens of the United States of America and Americans, and citizens of the United Mexican States are Statesians.
PS> I think the 'american' moniker is fine. It's not like anybody else wants it anyway...
PS> Sorry for that crack. I couldn't help myself. I was on a roll. You know you were thinking it!
Frankly, as anybody from the Indian subcontinent knows, every single "race" box in the U.S. lumps Indians under "Asian or Pacific Islander." As if the whole Red-Indian Brown-Indian thing wasn't bad enough. If Americans have to take a little semantic pain, then they should get used to it. It happens to everybody else all the time. If the Irish people in the UK can deal with everybody calling their country England all the time, than anyone can live with slightly inaccurate moniker.
If you won't eat it, we'll force it down your throat! Some guy at Time-Warner recently said that the average American would pay $250 a year to get the kind of programming they do now for free without the adds. That's a little over $20 a month, about the same as an AOL account. Where do I sign up?
Actually, OHCI chipsets (mainly SiS, ALi, and some others) are a lot smarter than UHCI chipsets (Intel and VIA). Performance with OHCI chipsets is significantly better too. In fact, OHCI is the programming model for computer firewire interfaces as well.
While this bill is very worrying, given the increased power it gives to the DOJ (and that maniac Ashcroft...), it's not as bad as its made out to be. Basically, the extreme penalties are for those who knowingly commit acts that result in death or serious bodily injury. That only makes sense. Killing somebody by hacking into an important computer is just as bad as killing him any other way. Also, it increases the penalties for illegally intercepting electronic communications, which is a good thing. Maybe that clause can be used against the FBI and DOJ when they get a little too snoopy.
Wow. I'm impressed. For the record, a photo-flash doesn't actually erase flash-ROMs. That's not what flash-ROM means...
How *NIX grognards always complain about multi-threading, but don't find signals (and their nasty interrupt-driven nature) to be the least bit unsettling!
But what happens whe the program files overnight, and the poor user comes in in the morning to find that he doesn't have enough time to run the program again before the deadline? I bet at that piont, he'd appreciate the well-coded, well-designed version...
Nobody cares about optimizing a user dialog.
>>>>>>>>>
Wouldn't this sentence be fun taken out of context? Seriously, though, I think what the original poster was getting at was the fact that a lot of powerful interactive programs (3D modelers for example) can really make the user cry if they run computations and UI code in the same thread. In those cases, splitting off the calculation code to a seperate thread and giving it a lower priority than the UI thread ensures that the user-interface stays responsive, no matter what's going on in the background.
(which is true on some broken OSes but not meaningfully true on Linux)
>>>>>>
Not so. Have you ever compared the time between a thread-switch and a process-switch? The only difference on Linux is changing the MMU context. Yet, on x86, changing the MMU context is the slowest operation you can perform.
fork() alternative--it conflates fork() and exec() into CreateProcess*())
>>>>
Umm, fork() is the one that's braindead. Who the hell dreamed up a system where creating a new process would copy the entire state of an existing one only to have it wiped out when the other process did an exec()? fork() requires all sorts of nasty stuff (like copy-on write in the VM) that is ditched if the OS follows a process/thread model. Windows might be braindead, but CreateProcess() makes a hell of a lot more sense than fork().
First, the idea was to write in ASM to squeeze every drop of performance from the hardware.
Then, the idea was to write in a high-level language, but always be careful about performance.
Then, the idea was to develop apps quickly, then profile to optimize the important parts.
Now, screw optimization, let the user buy more hardware!
I think this attitude sucks. Even my 1.5Ghz Athlon-XP is slower running KDE 3.x (or any version of gnome for that matter) than my old 300Mhz PII was running Win98. And it doesn't do a hell of a lot of stuff that my old machine couldn't. I switched to Linux and took the performance hit because I hated Microsoft. I keep upgrading KDE (and my hardware) because the latest apps only work on the latest version. I don't expect more complex software to get faster, but I'd expect that as I upgrade my hardware, software should stay relatively the same speed. Yet, it seems as if software is getting slower more quickly than system bottlenecks (specifically RAM and hard-drive speed) can keep up. That means that the end-user experience is deteriorating, even as users pump more money into their hardware to get usable performance.
The funny thing is that this story was posted on Slashdot a year ago!
Actually, the EV7 is limited to 128 processors per node. Not chicken-feed, but not 200 ;)
The cool thing is, (in SPEC fp scores at least, which are decent benchmarks) Alphas at 1 GHz are just about even (10% either way in different tests) with a 2.53GHz P4. And its only about 40% slower on integer code. Clock-speed is nice, but the Alpha had one mad FP architecture!
Is this a good thing? I think it's a stupid relic of the days when $PATH and $LD_LIBRARY_PATH were the best way people could come up with of taking individual software applications and importing them into a common environment. These days, a database mapping command and .so names to binaries and libraries that live in their own application directories would be a far cleaner solution. It could even be automatically managed by RPM or DPKG, with something like 'menu' on Debian.
Wow. Kinky. Or did you mean fallacy? Anyway, it's not a fallacy.
According to Forbes loss on the Gamecube is $180.
According to MoreDeals initial losses on the PS2 was $188.
Hell, for each N64 sold, Nintendo spent more than $50 just on advertising the unit.
Let's see: Computer software vs TV's, audio products, and movies? I don't know. I think the U.S. govenment would have more interest in protecting the latter, especially given how cozy they are with Hollywood.
GPU's are designed to render, rotate, etc. polygon models with bitmap skins, "tactile" textures, light, shadow and fog in real time. I'm not sure offhand if you can actually get the results of their mathematical calculations directly.
>>>>>>>>>
Not any more. These newfangled GPUs are programmable, so you can write some code for the vertex and pixel shaders that does arbitrary calculations.
I presume the XBox BIOS is flashable. You need a replacement BIOS because software that "links" to the BIOS code would be using Microsoft software, and thus might be illegal.
It doesn't have to be a committe drivern standard initially. Neither C nor C++ were. As for the "if you don't like it don't use it" mentality I don't buy it. First, if I don't like it, I can bitch about it all I want. Second, even if I don't use it, people who don't have any foresight will, and we might be back at another Microsoft monopoly.
I pointed out C# and Java in the same sentence. Sun doesn't have a history of pulling crap like Microsoft does (in fact, they've always been quite open about their technologies, particularly those in Solaris) but its still dangerous that they control a language as widely used as Java.
Not just the fact that Win32 is ugly (though it is significantly more ugly than your other examples, which at least didn't change 1000 times in their evolution) but also what Microsoft pulled with IBM when they were trying to offer Win32 compatibility. Win32 is not just ugly, but a mess of hidden, constantly changing, poorly documented APIs. That's what I'm really worried about.
Here's the dillema. I'm seeing this move from nice, open standards (C/C++) to languages that have strings attached, like Java and C$^H#. Even if C# is an ECMA standard, there is no getting around the fact that Microsoft is the one guiding its development and evolution. I don't know about the rest of you, but after what MS has done with Win32, I really don't trust them to come up with good API and language standards. And even if they do, I'd rather not have their hands on the riens. Why is there no truly open project (I'm talking ISO C/C++ open) trying to take on C# and Java instead of merely copying them?