Re:I'm with Tannebaum about microkernels
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More From Tanenbaum
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Hello? 1992 called, they want your version of Linux back. Fast-forward to 2004, and my SuSE 9.1 install has a 1.4MB kernel with its 53MB of driver modules sitting in a seperate directory.
Please, respond when you know what you are talking about.
Someone in an academic environment supposed to be open to idea's and non baised. Most though have ego's including Tanenbaum which blind them. Who said academics are supposed to be biased? Most are very biased towards their own ideas, and push them whenever possible. Its a natural part of the competitive system that allows academia to advance.
Funny, Linux, Solaris, FreeBSD, and As/400 have uptimes that measure in years if you do not include security patching. Even funnier is the fact that, with a microkernel OS, lots of downtime due to security-patching is unnecessary, because critical services run as easily restarted userspace tasks. There is no doubt that Linux, Solaris, *BSD, etc, are highly stable, but they are something you trust your server to --- a microkernel like QNX is what you trust your nuclear reactor to!
MacOSX is less stable than a macrokernels like Linux according to those who use it as a server. MacOS X has a monolithic kernel. Mach and BSD both run in kernel-space, with messaging replaced by direct function calls wherever possible. That was one of the chief changes between NeXTStep and OS X.
Ugh. Autoconf is such an ugly piece of shit. Its nearly impossible, for example, to create a KDE application without copying the autoconf/automake mess of an existing setup. And you're hosed if you need to do anything moderately unusual in your build procedure. In the end, 'make' is really just a one-off, hackish, single-purpose programming language. Its much better to replace it with a real, general programming language.
I think you just don't notice the crappy icons as much in Windows because Windows icons tend to be smaller and simpler. KDE, especially, has very lush, big icons, so crappy icons tend to stick out very badly.
It really depends on what sort of things you need to do. You might not do business internationally, but everyone I know does. Nobody I know ever has to deal with decades old paper (anything archived is bound). Paper is only really used for printouts of electronic documents. So who's right? I don't have any statistics (and neither do you), but our economy is being more globalized, not less.
Actually, this is a wrapper over Win32. Its about as much a GUI library as MFC is a GUI library. There is no actual logical code in there, just interface glue to make Win32 less vomit-worthy.
.(Incidentally, this is of course why one of the older civilizations used base 60 - it's divisible by 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6, and it's the reason we have 60 seconds in a minute, 60 minutes in an hour The Babylonians did that, and they inherited from the Sumerians. But it should be noted that neither culture had a base-60 equivalent of our decimal system (complex fractions were represented as a series of simple fractions). Our decimal system makes handling a base-10 measurement system much more practical than their system would have, while making things like unit conversions and multiplying/dividing much easier.
It should also be noted that there is no reason to lose precision for the common cases of dividing by 2, 3, 4, and 6. 10 / 2 = 5. 10 / 3 = 3 1/3. 10 / 4 = 2 1/2. 10/6 = 1 2/3. Doing math with simple fractions isn't very complicated if you're used to it (just as you have to get used to multiplying by 12, etc, to handle the English system).
There is no possibility for rounding error for splitting into fourths. So the only thing left is thirds, and I don't see why thirds would be any more common than fifths.
Actually, the rest of the world uses A4. My dad works for a US government contractor (the US government wants everything in 8.5x11 paper), and often the production people for his company have to take 8.5x11 paper with them overseas, because US-size paper is hard to find elsewhere.
You'd also be surprised how much money you'd save. People overseas send documents formatted for A4, and if you print without adjusting the format, you have to throw away your results. When you have to integrate these A4 documents into the 8.5x11 documents you have to send to the US government, then you have to bother with changing the format, and then deal with changes in pagination (strict page limits!) as a result.
Its the same thing with engineers who have to deal with old tables in English units. They spend a lot of time translating between English and metric (because modern science and overseas engineering is all done in metric).
1. Is anyone except Apple trying to leverage the GPU for non-3D tasks? Apple has been doing Quartz Extreme for a while but I have not heard if anyone else is doing it. Microsoft, for Longhorn, and freedesktop.org, for X11. Both go quite a bit beyond Quartz Extreme by using D3D/OpenGL for all drawing, not just compositing.
3. How come GPU makers are not trying to make a CPU by themselves? GPUs are very different from CPUs. Graphics is almost infinitely parallizable, so you are really just limited by how many execution units you can stick on the CPU. Assuming enough memory bandwidth, you get nearly a linear increase with increasing numbers of execution units. CPUs, on the other hand, deal with general-purpose code that has an inherent parallelism of about 3-way to 4-way at most. So CPU manufacturers have to do clever things like SMT to take advantage of increased execution resources, but mainly must concentrate on ramping up clock speed and memory bandwidth.
Interestingly enough, GPU makers wouldn't be very good at making CPUs. GPUs are designed using high-level software, like VHDL. This has a big impact on their maximum clock speed, but that doesn't really matter, because they can always double the number of pipelines and get a nearly 2x increase in performance. Meanwhile, CPUs are designed by hand, and tweeked to get every last MHz, because throwing twice as many execution units on the CPU wouldn't help performance much at all.
Since when is that a fundemental principle? It's a good design rule of thumb, but when you can get better characteristics from some other configuration, then its a good engineering decision to use that other configuration.
I believe it for this reason that the GPU designers specifically did not include a branch instruction. On NV40-based architectures, you get a branch instruction as well as a 65536 instruction program limit.
You've got things quite a bit confused. The reason that engineers are going dual core is not because its appreciably easier to design a dual 4-way CPU than an 8-way CPU. The reason they are going dual core is because there is not enough inherent parallelism in code (3-way is about the limit for most code) to feed an 8-way core. The reason for going dual core rather than 8-way SMT is because bigger CPUs are harder to scale to higher clock speeds.
Synchronization has absolutely nothing to do with anything. Dual-core CPUs will *only* work with multithreaded code, not just "run best" with multithreaded code. Neither CPU will run anywhere near twice as fast as a single core. In the face of multithreaded code with low parallelism, an dual 4-way CPU will be faster (but nowhere near as fast as a single 4-way CPU at twice the clock), while on non-multithreaded high-parallelism code, a single 8-way will be faster.
You're remembering wrong. The Pentium-M was designed in Israel. Intel did recently set up a design team in India, and they are investing a lot of money ($130 million) into their operations there.
Yes? Given that the Playstation2 is more popular than the other XBox and Gamecube combined? You forget that its the little kids that are spelling out precisely what the parents should buy!
Have you ever tried to run or at least taken the time to look at the way businesses are managed? You go and you say, "well street corner X will give me direct access to Y # of people at a cost of Z. I estimate A% of them will walk in just off the street. I will be able to reach B% more people because of my location". That's marketing. I'm looking at things not from the perspective of the businessman, but from the perspective of the consumer (me). I don't go to a mall because I saw an ad. I go to the mall because I need a new pair of jeans. I'm not denying that people aren't susceptible to marketing, but rather stating that things would be better if they weren't, and we could do away with marketing entirely.
That's how you know the mall exists. I don't know about you, but I hadn't seen an ad for our local mall (Tysons Corner in Northern Virginia) until years after I started going there. Tysons almost never advertises, simply because its presence is immediately obvious (giant complex of buildings in a central location) to anybody who lives here. The same is true for my local supermarkets. The ads never say where they are --- I know where they are because I drove around the area when we were looking for a house. Also, all of the speciality food shops I go to I learned about from word of mouth --- they never advertise.
A phonebook is marketing. Especially the yellow pages, even without the half-page ads. Even getting listed AT ALL in the yellow pages costs a bit of money, because it is marketing. Being listed in the white pages is not marketing, because someone would already have to know who you are to find you. But to be listed by category in the yellow pages is marketing, and is sold as such. I think you've got a looser definition of marketing than I do. I see a phonebook as informational rather than promotional. You can choose to see marketing as encompassing both, in which case I'd say that I've got no problem with purely informational marketing. However, most of the marketing these days is not informational, rather promotional. Back to the supermarket example --- most supermarkets these days are chains, so their ads never tell you their location. They just try to get you to go to your local store. Or take ads for stuff like razor blades or shampoo. I can't believe that anybody needs an advertisement to be made aware of the fact that razor blades and shampoo exist. If they are at their local drug-store (which again, is a chain, so its advertisements don't tell you where it is), they'll see shampoo and razor blades in the aisles. So overall, promotional marketing has no value to the consumer, only to the seller.
Nope. Not homebrewed at all. This is the standard install for Debian's sid branch. I installed from Debian Installer beta4, and it grabbed whatever happened to be in sid at the time. The only remotely customized bit is the kernel, because 2.4 and 2.6 were both an option in the installer.
It depends on the branch of Debian you are using. A lot of desktop users use sid, which tends to be very up-to-date. Right now, I'm using kernel 2.6.5, glibc 2.3.2, and kde 3.2.2, all of which are in the repository.
How is being in a mall marketing decision? And why do you have to go to a mall because of marketing? Can't you go because you need something? And online directories can contain marketing, but not necessarily. They are simply informational, just like a phonebook.
We have these things called malls. If you want to buy something, you go to the mall, and *gasp* they have these things called stores where you can *gasp* buy exactly what you want. Online directories are a natural extension of malls. Like in a mall, you can compare numerous different products and pick the one you want. Except with online directories, you can do this much faster. With both, if you've got something to sell, you get a store in the mall and people (if they want your stuff) will buy from you.
Trim that to: "hate all forms of marketing." I honestly believe the world would be a better place if all marketing was eliminated from the face of the earth. Anybody who doesn't agree with that sentiment is probably in advertising.
I think a lot of anti-SPAM pundits on/. are actually anti-marketing pundits. Meaning they consider ALL email selling ANYTHING to be SPAM. There is a difference? I consider trying to sell me anything to be offensive. If I want to buy something, I'll go out and buy it. Until then, leave me alone.
I grew up with publications that were, essentially, advertisements. Remember Computer Shopper? You never read the articles, did you? I never bought the 'magazine'. It was a waste of $4.95. Well, any ZD rags are a waste of their purchase cost, but that's beside the point.
Nowadays, I get all sorts of cool publications and catalogues in the mail...VW Trends, Road Runner Sports, JC Whitney for Volkswagens, Crutchfield, Campmor, Victoria's Secret...and you know what You read catalogs, voluntarily? For god's sake! It's people like you who let marketers exist to bother people like me!
Does it really make sense to patent a particular XML Schema? I mean, that'd be ridiculous! It'd be like patenting a newspaper article. Copyright, maybe, but a patent?
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Hello? 1992 called, they want your version of Linux back. Fast-forward to 2004, and my SuSE 9.1 install has a 1.4MB kernel with its 53MB of driver modules sitting in a seperate directory.
Please, respond when you know what you are talking about.
Someone in an academic environment supposed to be open to idea's and non baised. Most though have ego's including Tanenbaum which blind them.
Who said academics are supposed to be biased? Most are very biased towards their own ideas, and push them whenever possible. Its a natural part of the competitive system that allows academia to advance.
Funny, Linux, Solaris, FreeBSD, and As/400 have uptimes that measure in years if you do not include security patching.
Even funnier is the fact that, with a microkernel OS, lots of downtime due to security-patching is unnecessary, because critical services run as easily restarted userspace tasks. There is no doubt that Linux, Solaris, *BSD, etc, are highly stable, but they are something you trust your server to --- a microkernel like QNX is what you trust your nuclear reactor to!
MacOSX is less stable than a macrokernels like Linux according to those who use it as a server.
MacOS X has a monolithic kernel. Mach and BSD both run in kernel-space, with messaging replaced by direct function calls wherever possible. That was one of the chief changes between NeXTStep and OS X.
Every big commercial software company these days likes to show they're into the marginal platforms when they're in last place.
Oh, last-place companies like Softimage, Alias | Wavefront, Pixar, Oracle, IBM, etc?
Ugh. Autoconf is such an ugly piece of shit. Its nearly impossible, for example, to create a KDE application without copying the autoconf/automake mess of an existing setup. And you're hosed if you need to do anything moderately unusual in your build procedure. In the end, 'make' is really just a one-off, hackish, single-purpose programming language. Its much better to replace it with a real, general programming language.
I think you just don't notice the crappy icons as much in Windows because Windows icons tend to be smaller and simpler. KDE, especially, has very lush, big icons, so crappy icons tend to stick out very badly.
It really depends on what sort of things you need to do. You might not do business internationally, but everyone I know does. Nobody I know ever has to deal with decades old paper (anything archived is bound). Paper is only really used for printouts of electronic documents. So who's right? I don't have any statistics (and neither do you), but our economy is being more globalized, not less.
Actually, this is a wrapper over Win32. Its about as much a GUI library as MFC is a GUI library. There is no actual logical code in there, just interface glue to make Win32 less vomit-worthy.
.(Incidentally, this is of course why one of the older civilizations used base 60 - it's divisible by 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6, and it's the reason we have 60 seconds in a minute, 60 minutes in an hour
/6 = 1 2/3. Doing math with simple fractions isn't very complicated if you're used to it (just as you have to get used to multiplying by 12, etc, to handle the English system).
The Babylonians did that, and they inherited from the Sumerians. But it should be noted that neither culture had a base-60 equivalent of our decimal system (complex fractions were represented as a series of simple fractions). Our decimal system makes handling a base-10 measurement system much more practical than their system would have, while making things like unit conversions and multiplying/dividing much easier.
It should also be noted that there is no reason to lose precision for the common cases of dividing by 2, 3, 4, and 6. 10 / 2 = 5. 10 / 3 = 3 1/3. 10 / 4 = 2 1/2. 10
There is no possibility for rounding error for splitting into fourths. So the only thing left is thirds, and I don't see why thirds would be any more common than fifths.
Actually, the rest of the world uses A4. My dad works for a US government contractor (the US government wants everything in 8.5x11 paper), and often the production people for his company have to take 8.5x11 paper with them overseas, because US-size paper is hard to find elsewhere.
You'd also be surprised how much money you'd save. People overseas send documents formatted for A4, and if you print without adjusting the format, you have to throw away your results. When you have to integrate these A4 documents into the 8.5x11 documents you have to send to the US government, then you have to bother with changing the format, and then deal with changes in pagination (strict page limits!) as a result.
Its the same thing with engineers who have to deal with old tables in English units. They spend a lot of time translating between English and metric (because modern science and overseas engineering is all done in metric).
1. Is anyone except Apple trying to leverage the GPU for non-3D tasks? Apple has been doing Quartz Extreme for a while but I have not heard if anyone else is doing it.
Microsoft, for Longhorn, and freedesktop.org, for X11. Both go quite a bit beyond Quartz Extreme by using D3D/OpenGL for all drawing, not just compositing.
3. How come GPU makers are not trying to make a CPU by themselves?
GPUs are very different from CPUs. Graphics is almost infinitely parallizable, so you are really just limited by how many execution units you can stick on the CPU. Assuming enough memory bandwidth, you get nearly a linear increase with increasing numbers of execution units. CPUs, on the other hand, deal with general-purpose code that has an inherent parallelism of about 3-way to 4-way at most. So CPU manufacturers have to do clever things like SMT to take advantage of increased execution resources, but mainly must concentrate on ramping up clock speed and memory bandwidth.
Interestingly enough, GPU makers wouldn't be very good at making CPUs. GPUs are designed using high-level software, like VHDL. This has a big impact on their maximum clock speed, but that doesn't really matter, because they can always double the number of pipelines and get a nearly 2x increase in performance. Meanwhile, CPUs are designed by hand, and tweeked to get every last MHz, because throwing twice as many execution units on the CPU wouldn't help performance much at all.
Since when is that a fundemental principle? It's a good design rule of thumb, but when you can get better characteristics from some other configuration, then its a good engineering decision to use that other configuration.
I believe it for this reason that the GPU designers specifically did not include a branch instruction.
On NV40-based architectures, you get a branch instruction as well as a 65536 instruction program limit.
Dual core explained fuzzily...
You've got things quite a bit confused. The reason that engineers are going dual core is not because its appreciably easier to design a dual 4-way CPU than an 8-way CPU. The reason they are going dual core is because there is not enough inherent parallelism in code (3-way is about the limit for most code) to feed an 8-way core. The reason for going dual core rather than 8-way SMT is because bigger CPUs are harder to scale to higher clock speeds.
Synchronization has absolutely nothing to do with anything. Dual-core CPUs will *only* work with multithreaded code, not just "run best" with multithreaded code. Neither CPU will run anywhere near twice as fast as a single core. In the face of multithreaded code with low parallelism, an dual 4-way CPU will be faster (but nowhere near as fast as a single 4-way CPU at twice the clock), while on non-multithreaded high-parallelism code, a single 8-way will be faster.
You're remembering wrong. The Pentium-M was designed in Israel. Intel did recently set up a design team in India, and they are investing a lot of money ($130 million) into their operations there.
Yes? Given that the Playstation2 is more popular than the other XBox and Gamecube combined? You forget that its the little kids that are spelling out precisely what the parents should buy!
Have you ever tried to run or at least taken the time to look at the way businesses are managed? You go and you say, "well street corner X will give me direct access to Y # of people at a cost of Z. I estimate A% of them will walk in just off the street. I will be able to reach B% more people because of my location". That's marketing.
I'm looking at things not from the perspective of the businessman, but from the perspective of the consumer (me). I don't go to a mall because I saw an ad. I go to the mall because I need a new pair of jeans. I'm not denying that people aren't susceptible to marketing, but rather stating that things would be better if they weren't, and we could do away with marketing entirely.
That's how you know the mall exists.
I don't know about you, but I hadn't seen an ad for our local mall (Tysons Corner in Northern Virginia) until years after I started going there. Tysons almost never advertises, simply because its presence is immediately obvious (giant complex of buildings in a central location) to anybody who lives here. The same is true for my local supermarkets. The ads never say where they are --- I know where they are because I drove around the area when we were looking for a house. Also, all of the speciality food shops I go to I learned about from word of mouth --- they never advertise.
A phonebook is marketing. Especially the yellow pages, even without the half-page ads. Even getting listed AT ALL in the yellow pages costs a bit of money, because it is marketing. Being listed in the white pages is not marketing, because someone would already have to know who you are to find you. But to be listed by category in the yellow pages is marketing, and is sold as such.
I think you've got a looser definition of marketing than I do. I see a phonebook as informational rather than promotional. You can choose to see marketing as encompassing both, in which case I'd say that I've got no problem with purely informational marketing. However, most of the marketing these days is not informational, rather promotional. Back to the supermarket example --- most supermarkets these days are chains, so their ads never tell you their location. They just try to get you to go to your local store. Or take ads for stuff like razor blades or shampoo. I can't believe that anybody needs an advertisement to be made aware of the fact that razor blades and shampoo exist. If they are at their local drug-store (which again, is a chain, so its advertisements don't tell you where it is), they'll see shampoo and razor blades in the aisles. So overall, promotional marketing has no value to the consumer, only to the seller.
Nope. Not homebrewed at all. This is the standard install for Debian's sid branch. I installed from Debian Installer beta4, and it grabbed whatever happened to be in sid at the time. The only remotely customized bit is the kernel, because 2.4 and 2.6 were both an option in the installer.
It depends on the branch of Debian you are using. A lot of desktop users use sid, which tends to be very up-to-date. Right now, I'm using kernel 2.6.5, glibc 2.3.2, and kde 3.2.2, all of which are in the repository.
How is being in a mall marketing decision? And why do you have to go to a mall because of marketing? Can't you go because you need something? And online directories can contain marketing, but not necessarily. They are simply informational, just like a phonebook.
We have these things called malls. If you want to buy something, you go to the mall, and *gasp* they have these things called stores where you can *gasp* buy exactly what you want. Online directories are a natural extension of malls. Like in a mall, you can compare numerous different products and pick the one you want. Except with online directories, you can do this much faster. With both, if you've got something to sell, you get a store in the mall and people (if they want your stuff) will buy from you.
Trim that to: "hate all forms of marketing." I honestly believe the world would be a better place if all marketing was eliminated from the face of the earth. Anybody who doesn't agree with that sentiment is probably in advertising.
I think a lot of anti-SPAM pundits on /. are actually anti-marketing pundits. Meaning they consider ALL email selling ANYTHING to be SPAM.
There is a difference? I consider trying to sell me anything to be offensive. If I want to buy something, I'll go out and buy it. Until then, leave me alone.
I grew up with publications that were, essentially, advertisements. Remember Computer Shopper? You never read the articles, did you?
I never bought the 'magazine'. It was a waste of $4.95. Well, any ZD rags are a waste of their purchase cost, but that's beside the point.
Nowadays, I get all sorts of cool publications and catalogues in the mail...VW Trends, Road Runner Sports, JC Whitney for Volkswagens, Crutchfield, Campmor, Victoria's Secret...and you know what
You read catalogs, voluntarily? For god's sake! It's people like you who let marketers exist to bother people like me!
Does it really make sense to patent a particular XML Schema? I mean, that'd be ridiculous! It'd be like patenting a newspaper article. Copyright, maybe, but a patent?
Actually, QE only offloads a small portion of the graphics --- the compositing. Everything else si still done on the CPU.