One example - which I run into at work all the time: parsing large HTML (or XML, same thing really) files. Web browsers are multithreaded in the sense that they use threads for connections to the server to get different files; it's still (as far as I know) single-threaded per file as far as parsing is concerned.
OK, fair enough. But in a lot of (almost all?) workloads, it's not really the time required to process a single file that's the problem, so much as the time required to process a whole bunch at once.
Compiling is similar--sure, gcc isn't multithreaded, but you can keep a lot of cores busy by running make on a kernel tree....
... one thread to maintain the gameworld state, another for AI, another for physics, another to push polygons to the GPU... But since these are different tasks, rather than one task that's being computed in parallel, it's very unlikely that the threads are going to be using the CPU cores (or multiple CPUs) equally
Is that really a problem? As long as you've broken things up small enough so that there isn't, say, one huge task that needs well more than half the CPU time, then just start up all those threads and let the operating system figure out how to balance them between CPUs.... Sure, they'll never be exactly balanced, but that doesn't mean you can't get a lot of benefit.
Linux is far ahead in the server arena, an pure number cruncher stakes
What difference does Linux make? I tend to think "pure number cruncher" is equivalent to "process that uses the operating system as little as possible".
When I taught in graduate school I had a *lot* of trouble preparing--sometimes I felt like I worked really hard and then lead a class that was a fiasco, other times I spent much less time and it all seemed to go OK. It was intensely frustrating.
Somebody else on the faculty told me their most important goal was always to have one or two really good examples. It sounds simple, but I think that was the best advice I ever got. If I walk into a room with a really meaty example--something that I can present a couple different ways, something that raises all the issues I want to talk about, something that (in the case of classroom teaching) I could vary a little to produce an in-class exercise or two--then I feel prepared.
I tend to approach visual aids the same way--I want to come up with stuff to look at that will be interesting to the audience, that will raise good questions, and that'll illustrate the points I make. It doesn't have to be much--maybe just a couple big slides--if it's good.
None of that's a substitute for having an outline, but the audience doesn't need to be shown that (and often it needs to be kept flexible, since unexpected time constraints, odd questions, assumptions about the audience that turn out to be wrong, etc., can mean you'll need to do a bit of editing on the fly...).
Technically, it's best if your slides have NO BULLET POINTS. They are a visual aid, designed to allow you to display visual information.
Yeah, "show and tell" beats "tell and tell" any day: graphs, maps, photographs, formulas, code, physical objects sometimes if appropriate--anything that's interesting to look at and talk about. And there doesn't have to be a 1-to-1 correspondence between what's on the slides and what you say--as long as you have some sort of organization and preparation, it's fine to do stuff like talk for a minute without any slides, then flip through a few slides quickly to provide some examples, then leave up one important slide up for a few minutes while you talk about something else, then go back to an earlier slide that illustrates your conclusion.
.. everyone who wanted DRM-free music put your money where your mouth is!
Most of us have been all along. You've beeen able to get high-quality uncompressed digital audio at reasonable prices for over 20 years. They'll even throw in backup media and a little commemorative booklet and a case to put it all in, at no extra price! And, if that isn't enough, you can buy these things at normal websites that work with any browser, or even at physical stores that exist in every mall and every downtown--no need to install some special proprietary software just for the privilege of buying from each particular store.
(That said, I think this great news. I'll buy something from them, if only just to try it once for fun, as soon as somebody'll show me how to do it with free/open source software....)
For such a device, they sure are wanting to not release it - when that could be a good way to fund such devices.
Maybe, maybe not. I imagine a lot of geeks are in the same boat as me--I listen to the neat stuff they're doing with it, look at the pictures, and say "OMG it's adorable! I MUST HAVE one!" But when it came time to actually plop down my $200 (or whatever) I might take a closer look at the specs, listen to what other users had to say about it, and say: ya know, this doesn't really make sense for me.
So I wonder if a project so targetted at a particular audience would really be as succesfull with the geek market as the Slashdot comments would suggest.
And then there's all the trouble of distributing the thing, and heck, it isn't even done yet, is it? Aren't they still just working with the first sample units and gearing up pilots and stuff?
Well, it'll be interesting to watch what happens in any case.
Its all well and good if they don't want to support Linux (well, imo its wrong, but still legal), but if they don't say "Changing the OS on this system voids the warranty" then what HP/Compaq is doing is fraud. You can't arbitrarily void the warranty.
If you read carefully you'll see they didn't claim that installing linux "voids the warranty" (though the article, confusingly, suggests that they did). At least not as I understand the term. I thought it referred to something unreversible--like dropping it off a tall building.
They asked her to wipe the system and restore the original OS before returning the laptop.
Which is still annoying--it shouldn't be that hard for them just to boot the thing from a diagnostic disk if they want to test with a known software configuration. I'd think the sensible thing would be to say "ship it to us, but back it up first; if we suspect a software problem we reserve the right to return the disk to its original state before returning it, but we'll try not to do that unless it's necessary."
Yeah, I've only had to use the tech support a couple times, but they've been competent and polite. Which means Speakeasy has been spending money to recruit, train, and keep pretty good staff. I hope they can continue to afford to do that....
Yeah, I don't run Windows myself, but what I hear from people that do is--sure, it comes with all these security features (like ability to run as a user without root-like privileges), but in practice the software they want doesn't run unless they turn that stuff off.
So in theory it sounds like a good thing to have a major customer like the federal government telling vendors that they won't put up with that.
(But then, a windows expert would have to say whether the particular restrictions they're suggesting are actually reasonable ones.)
Of course bootchart is there not as a solution in and of itself (though it's fine if people want to use it that way), but as a tool to help testers and developers understand where the time goes during boot, so that hopefully the collective understanding gained as a result will allow future improvements that will keep boot times down without requiring manual tweaks.
Buying a PC with preinstalled Ubuntu OS at least makes sure that your PC contains Linux-compatible hardware.
You'd think. So why does every seller of pre-installed linux desktops that I've found sell them with a video card that requires proprietary drivers?
In fact, with a few minutes of googling around I couldn't find a single pre-installed linux box that advertised integrated intel video--despite the fact that it's more than adequate for non-gaming use, and it's the only current option I know of that is fully supported out of the box by X.org.
All I want is hardware that's supported by a completely free/open source operating system....
You really think the "nagware" is paying for your copy of Windows? As in, Dell (or whoever) doesn't have to pay Microsoft a dime for Windows?
The second doesn't follow from the first--they could be paying Microsoft but still coming out ahead in total (after taking into account income for the various ISP-advertising icons, etc.).
But I wouldn't be at all suprised if Microsoft was close to giving away the OS on a low-end PC ("Home" Edition, Microsoft Works,...). The advantages they get from such complete dominance of the low-end desktop are just too valuable, and there's so many other ways they have to make money off them (selling upgrades, driving traffic to their websites, etc.), that it wouldn't be worth charging license fees that would make a significant difference to the cost of the cheapest machines.
Ever seen a (dell/HP/Compaq/etc) straight out of the box? There are like 50 programs installed... each vendor pays the computer manufacturer to put these things on their PC's. So the cost of windows gets paid for, mostly or even in excess, by these vendors.
Yeah, I suspect it's true that the installed software is largely advertising-supported.
If linux caught on on the desktop, though, I'd be really surprised if they didn't figure out how to do the same thing--want the default firefox bookmarks to mention your site? Want some tie-in to your music site whenever something's played on rhythmbox? Want a "set up Speakeasy DSL now!" icon on the desktop? We can arrange that for you for a fee....
A truly open system, with free drivers, free software only installed, etc., limits somewhat how obnoxious they can get, since the user isn't as dependent on them for the install image that works on their particular machine. But the vendor can still get a lot of eyeballs.
For some reason, it wasn't intuitive to me that the really good memories revolve around interesting people, not interesting things.
Also, you can already get 1 billion photographs of Notre Dame from google images, flickr, your public library,.... Most of them will be better too. Don't bother.
I think the biggest complaint the OSS community has is not that we can't buy a preconfigured Linux box from a major vendor, but that we are forced to buy an OS we don't want.
No, actually, I don't care. Really. That's between Microsoft, the vendor, and maybe the government if there's something anticompetitive going on.
*My* complaint is that every time I buy a computer I have to identify, for each machine, the exact model of graphics card, wireless card, etc., etc., and verify (by extensive googling) that each one works with free drivers. It's a big pain in the butt.
I want to be able to go to Dell (or HP or newegg or whoever), check the "open source drivers for all hardware included in mainline linux kernel" checkbox in their advanced search, and not have to think about it any more. I'd happily pay extra for the privelege.
(And I don't care about distributions either--if it comes with one installed, great, I'll probably use it, whatever it is--but if it *depends* on that particular version of that particular distribution, that's a warning sign to me that they're depending on some wacky proprietary drivers that may not be there for me any more in two years. No thanks.)
Anti-competitive pressure is what this ever boils down to. It will go away as hardware prices drop below $200 or so, because there's no room for software costs at that price point.
Yes, but if I were microsoft, I'd be more or less giving away the software on any machine under $200. It costs them nothing, and it means they'll probably get some percentage of those customers to come back to them for more full-featured versions of the preinstalled software, and maintaining dominance of low-end desktop computing will help them sell higher-end desktops, servers, etc.
Why are you still doing your taxes by hand? Isn't it worth the $38 to buy TurboTax or TaxCut and have it whip through your taxes in 25 minutes?
It takes me more than 25 minutes just to dig up all the numbers I need, so I assume you're just counting the time required to work through the forms themselves. I'll admit that takes me longer (maybe over an hour), but it's not necessarily the biggest part.
I don't have any Windows or OSX machines. I suppose I could borrow one from someone else, but it hasn't seemed worth it.
Normally I use free software for literally everything. Every now and then I'll have to deal with proprietary stuff at my parents' place or whatever, and I'm reminded of why I don't miss it.
I also don't (yet) have a mortage or kids, I'm not self-employed, etc.--but my taxes get a little complicated each year, and I could see there might come a point when it would be useful to have more help.
Slashdot Mirror
OK, fair enough. But in a lot of (almost all?) workloads, it's not really the time required to process a single file that's the problem, so much as the time required to process a whole bunch at once.
Compiling is similar--sure, gcc isn't multithreaded, but you can keep a lot of cores busy by running make on a kernel tree....
Is that really a problem? As long as you've broken things up small enough so that there isn't, say, one huge task that needs well more than half the CPU time, then just start up all those threads and let the operating system figure out how to balance them between CPUs.... Sure, they'll never be exactly balanced, but that doesn't mean you can't get a lot of benefit.
For example?
Which software is that?
What difference does Linux make? I tend to think "pure number cruncher" is equivalent to "process that uses the operating system as little as possible".
Well, the main one I care about is "make". See the -j option.
When I taught in graduate school I had a *lot* of trouble preparing--sometimes I felt like I worked really hard and then lead a class that was a fiasco, other times I spent much less time and it all seemed to go OK. It was intensely frustrating.
Somebody else on the faculty told me their most important goal was always to have one or two really good examples. It sounds simple, but I think that was the best advice I ever got. If I walk into a room with a really meaty example--something that I can present a couple different ways, something that raises all the issues I want to talk about, something that (in the case of classroom teaching) I could vary a little to produce an in-class exercise or two--then I feel prepared.
I tend to approach visual aids the same way--I want to come up with stuff to look at that will be interesting to the audience, that will raise good questions, and that'll illustrate the points I make. It doesn't have to be much--maybe just a couple big slides--if it's good.
None of that's a substitute for having an outline, but the audience doesn't need to be shown that (and often it needs to be kept flexible, since unexpected time constraints, odd questions, assumptions about the audience that turn out to be wrong, etc., can mean you'll need to do a bit of editing on the fly...).
Yeah, "show and tell" beats "tell and tell" any day: graphs, maps, photographs, formulas, code, physical objects sometimes if appropriate--anything that's interesting to look at and talk about. And there doesn't have to be a 1-to-1 correspondence between what's on the slides and what you say--as long as you have some sort of organization and preparation, it's fine to do stuff like talk for a minute without any slides, then flip through a few slides quickly to provide some examples, then leave up one important slide up for a few minutes while you talk about something else, then go back to an earlier slide that illustrates your conclusion.
Yeah, actually. I never did get the whole "let's pay money to watch *somebody else* play a game" thing.
Fortunately, that is not a prerequisite for having fun (really) playing music....
Most of us have been all along. You've beeen able to get high-quality uncompressed digital audio at reasonable prices for over 20 years. They'll even throw in backup media and a little commemorative booklet and a case to put it all in, at no extra price! And, if that isn't enough, you can buy these things at normal websites that work with any browser, or even at physical stores that exist in every mall and every downtown--no need to install some special proprietary software just for the privilege of buying from each particular store.
(That said, I think this great news. I'll buy something from them, if only just to try it once for fun, as soon as somebody'll show me how to do it with free/open source software....)
Yeah, normally Slashdot is useful--nay, indispensible--to my daily work.
Maybe, maybe not. I imagine a lot of geeks are in the same boat as me--I listen to the neat stuff they're doing with it, look at the pictures, and say "OMG it's adorable! I MUST HAVE one!" But when it came time to actually plop down my $200 (or whatever) I might take a closer look at the specs, listen to what other users had to say about it, and say: ya know, this doesn't really make sense for me.
So I wonder if a project so targetted at a particular audience would really be as succesfull with the geek market as the Slashdot comments would suggest.
And then there's all the trouble of distributing the thing, and heck, it isn't even done yet, is it? Aren't they still just working with the first sample units and gearing up pilots and stuff?
Well, it'll be interesting to watch what happens in any case.
If you read carefully you'll see they didn't claim that installing linux "voids the warranty" (though the article, confusingly, suggests that they did). At least not as I understand the term. I thought it referred to something unreversible--like dropping it off a tall building.
They asked her to wipe the system and restore the original OS before returning the laptop.
Which is still annoying--it shouldn't be that hard for them just to boot the thing from a diagnostic disk if they want to test with a known software configuration. I'd think the sensible thing would be to say "ship it to us, but back it up first; if we suspect a software problem we reserve the right to return the disk to its original state before returning it, but we'll try not to do that unless it's necessary."
Yeah, I've only had to use the tech support a couple times, but they've been competent and polite. Which means Speakeasy has been spending money to recruit, train, and keep pretty good staff. I hope they can continue to afford to do that....
Yeah, I don't run Windows myself, but what I hear from people that do is--sure, it comes with all these security features (like ability to run as a user without root-like privileges), but in practice the software they want doesn't run unless they turn that stuff off.
So in theory it sounds like a good thing to have a major customer like the federal government telling vendors that they won't put up with that.
(But then, a windows expert would have to say whether the particular restrictions they're suggesting are actually reasonable ones.)
Of course bootchart is there not as a solution in and of itself (though it's fine if people want to use it that way), but as a tool to help testers and developers understand where the time goes during boot, so that hopefully the collective understanding gained as a result will allow future improvements that will keep boot times down without requiring manual tweaks.
Yep. Thanks for the tip! Those are cute. The 1G memory limitation is a bit of a bother for my purpose, though. Hm.
You'd think. So why does every seller of pre-installed linux desktops that I've found sell them with a video card that requires proprietary drivers?
In fact, with a few minutes of googling around I couldn't find a single pre-installed linux box that advertised integrated intel video--despite the fact that it's more than adequate for non-gaming use, and it's the only current option I know of that is fully supported out of the box by X.org.
All I want is hardware that's supported by a completely free/open source operating system....
The second doesn't follow from the first--they could be paying Microsoft but still coming out ahead in total (after taking into account income for the various ISP-advertising icons, etc.).
But I wouldn't be at all suprised if Microsoft was close to giving away the OS on a low-end PC ("Home" Edition, Microsoft Works, ...). The advantages they get from such complete dominance of the low-end desktop are just too valuable, and there's so many other ways they have to make money off them (selling upgrades, driving traffic to their websites, etc.), that it wouldn't be worth charging license fees that would make a significant difference to the cost of the cheapest machines.
"You must be signed in and a member of this group to view its content."
And the "sign in and apply for membership" thing doesn't make it sound like joining is a trivial thing either.
Yeah, I suspect it's true that the installed software is largely advertising-supported.
If linux caught on on the desktop, though, I'd be really surprised if they didn't figure out how to do the same thing--want the default firefox bookmarks to mention your site? Want some tie-in to your music site whenever something's played on rhythmbox? Want a "set up Speakeasy DSL now!" icon on the desktop? We can arrange that for you for a fee....
A truly open system, with free drivers, free software only installed, etc., limits somewhat how obnoxious they can get, since the user isn't as dependent on them for the install image that works on their particular machine. But the vendor can still get a lot of eyeballs.
Also, you can already get 1 billion photographs of Notre Dame from google images, flickr, your public library,.... Most of them will be better too. Don't bother.
No, actually, I don't care. Really. That's between Microsoft, the vendor, and maybe the government if there's something anticompetitive going on.
*My* complaint is that every time I buy a computer I have to identify, for each machine, the exact model of graphics card, wireless card, etc., etc., and verify (by extensive googling) that each one works with free drivers. It's a big pain in the butt.
I want to be able to go to Dell (or HP or newegg or whoever), check the "open source drivers for all hardware included in mainline linux kernel" checkbox in their advanced search, and not have to think about it any more. I'd happily pay extra for the privelege.
(And I don't care about distributions either--if it comes with one installed, great, I'll probably use it, whatever it is--but if it *depends* on that particular version of that particular distribution, that's a warning sign to me that they're depending on some wacky proprietary drivers that may not be there for me any more in two years. No thanks.)
Yes, but if I were microsoft, I'd be more or less giving away the software on any machine under $200. It costs them nothing, and it means they'll probably get some percentage of those customers to come back to them for more full-featured versions of the preinstalled software, and maintaining dominance of low-end desktop computing will help them sell higher-end desktops, servers, etc.
I also don't (yet) have a mortage or kids, I'm not self-employed, etc.--but my taxes get a little complicated each year, and I could see there might come a point when it would be useful to have more help.