They act as though we can save the world before dinner when they want something, and call us miserable worthless slacker bastards the next. They insist we fix their problem in 48 hours when they can't even describe the problem accurately enough to reproduce. They need us and beg us for help and resent every second of it. They treat us like disposeable/interchangeable cogs, then bemoan that we each have unique and difficult-to-replace skillsets.
You want to know why geeks look at most people with utter contempt? Because they spit on us first.
No, it's because you act like a self-important little shite who thinks they should be bowing on their knees and sucking your dick for every line of code you produced.
Which is just wrong. You need to respect your customers, because if they went away, you'd be out of a job, it's that simple. It's not their job to reproduce and diagnose problems, it's YOURS. They need you to help and beg you for it every second BECAUSE THEY ARE PAYING FOR THAT PRIVILEGE.
If you're asking this question here, I think you might have stumbled across slashdot on your way to teamleaderdot. Technical jobs are generally more enjoyable with far less responsibilities outside of your control. ie: In a tech job your responsibility might be: "Write a function that does X", or "Fix this broken server". In a manager job your responsibility might be "Find a way to lower your rework rate for your team of 150 staff by 7% by the end of the quarter."
Or, find a guy or hire a guy that can write a function that does X, or organise the support contract with Y to support the broken server.
If they both paid the same amount, why would you take the job with the harder goals?
Who says management should pay more than tech? You could say that the sourcing of talent is not a hard job - it isn't as physically laborious or mathematical or sheer-programmer-minded to find a programmer and your use of knowledge of code isn't so well flexed, but it IS a chore. I would say management staff who corral tech staff should be paid the same as the tech staff, unless there is also a huge tech component (joining the team and writing the API specs that function X belongs to, or coding function Y and Z in parallel to the tech guys).
There's no reason why a full manager (i.e. the pointy haired boss) should be being paid a great deal more than a guy who implements the products. This is a manager for which there is very little job progression from tech guy into it - because tech guys tend not to want to be managers.
For a project manager, team leader, this is a tech job with middle management responsibility, and this needs to pay more because it's BOTH jobs (less of tech, more of management, but still consisting of considerable tech).
Most of them SHOULD use the clock battery (CR2032) for that.
Of course you can't turn it on without other power, and ATX supplies a 5V trickle for Wake-On-Lan and DRAM self-refresh (ACPI S3) etc., but the actual current draw of a "turned off" PC should be absolutely zero as long as the coin cell battery is alive.
I think this is one of the major flaws of current systems that makes "standby" rather a ridiculous concept. Shouldn't we all be moving to systems with ridiculous amounts of embedded NAND/NOR flash memory for this, so that we don't need to have *ANY* power whatsoever on a system, can turn everything off except the lithium cell trickling the RTC and whatever microcontroller is running it?
I'd rather just not put swathes of electronic gadgets in the bedroom.
Not only does it stop me sleeping (not because of the light but because most of them hum electrically or have fan noise or need to be turned on and off ANYWAY) but it reminds me of living with my parents when I *HAD* to have everything in my bedroom.
Bedrooms are for beds, not watching TV, playing DVDs, loud music, computers and dancing disco lighting.
Marvell are as open as any wireless chipset manufacturer is for one very simple reason: regulatory standards on the transmission and reception of RF data.
Some of the channels on WiFi are illegal to use without a license. In the US, it's channels 12, 13 and 14, which are fine in Europe. Japan seems to only have 2 channels available and in other countries (Spain) there is also some weirdness.
Who gets the knock on the door if a laptop ships which can break these regulations? Who do the FCC raid?
Not Dell, not the driver author, but the chipset supplier. Marvell, Broadcom, Lucent, Intel, whoever it may be.
This is exactly why Intel's wireless driver is only 90% open with a binary userspace daemon, why you don't see Marvel handing documentation out on just how you program the chip to access outside unlicensed 2.4GHz range in your chosen country..
So, to say it is "not open" just because they are enforcing government regulations on RF devices is a little naive. They have to do it, it's the law, and it saves them lawsuits and having to withdraw chipsets or come sue OLPC's ass if it gets misused by some geek who just downloaded a PDF and hacked the driver...
But actually the WHQL don't do all the assurance testing on drivers; that's performed by the manufacturers:)
I really can't find the video and article right now, but there was one online of a Microsoft program manager giving a tour around the build lab - basically a huge cluster of systems builds Windows every night and images it to a farm of test machines and frameworks which assure that things aren't being royally broken at any point for the main install CD.
Anyone remember that thing and can post a link to it?
The "weird driver identifier reporting system" was not the cause of this problem; the presence and severity of a non-essential and completely useless (to the customer) activation system was the cause. The driver update was merely the trigger.
I have a gun, it is loaded with 3 bullets. I aim it at your head and pull the trigger 3 times.
What's the problem here, the fact that I had a loaded gun perfectly capable of killing you, or that I pulled the trigger?
If you take the trigger off the gun, you aren't going to be dead, no matter how many bullets are in there, because I can't fire it. You needn't worry about the gun, or my intent to kill you, because it's *not going to happen without that trigger*.
Fix the drivers, fix the problem. Activation is annoying but it is part of life. As is accepting EULAs, and typing in product keys.. I certainly do know of a lot of GPL software which, despite being free, forces me to accept an "EULA" (be that the GPL) when I install it. I have to ACCEPT the license before it lets me copy files from a packed executable into my system. It's the bloody GPL!!! Am I forced to go through this crap every time I want to install some software?
This annoys the piss out of me (after all, aren't EULAs supposed to be unenforcable?) but, it's LIFE. I click the button and deal with it. Activating Windows is a 2 minute, FREE phone call, and Microsoft have always been nothing but understanding about hardware swaps. Activating Adobe Photoshop is a 2 minute, FREE phone call. And that is if, and ONLY if, it could not be properly done over the internet. I can deal with activation. What I wouldn't want is for the system to spuriously attempt to reactivate itself after a driver update, when it is supposed to be tracking hardware changes.. this is the real problem with the system, that the data collecting that the activation system does to determine if your system is not the same one it was installed on, is too twitchy.
Actually from his little report this flags up an issue; one of quality assurance on driver software.
In order to get around spurious reactivation, drivers should report identity data the same way Microsoft's do - one would have thought this was part of the WHQL testing regime but apparently not.
But, if the hardware change reporting is meant to trigger it, then hardware should not be seen to change - by updating the Intel drivers, why should it change the unique hardware reporting? If it is pushing out PCI chipset IDs, low-level configuration of your drives etc. in a pretty package to the Activation system for checking, then why would something like a driver update like that make such a big deal?
I remember updating the firmware on my DVD burners a couple of times (I did have 3 DVD burners..) and it causing XP to want to reactivate the moment I plugged my graphics card in back from the repair shop. The nice girl on the phone said it was basically because I had installed too many drives; yeah, and Windows spent 10 minutes redetecting them on boot, too. But updating the drive firmware and changing the VERSION NUMBER shouldn't be an activation trigger. Some manufacturers put the version number of the drive in the "model" field and not the "version" field, which would do that, but not these guys.. it is simply overzealous checking.
But we are not talking about updating something low level in the drives or connected peripherals, just the Intel driver for RAID.. so what changed here?
So, is this a "Activation Sucks!!" issue or a "Windows Hardware Quality Labs are a bunch of fucking fakers!?" issue?
I call the latter. Requiring product activation is something you have to do these days with software. Oh well, live with it. If it's not Windows itself, it's Adobe CS3 or CorelDraw or whatever else. Microsoft are not the only culprit here on activation problems, and the problems are not down to the activation concept, but some weird driver identifier reporting system. If Microsoft are so big on driver signing and code quality, they should really be fixing this as a principle of being able to run a signed, managed system with no bluescreening or weird-behaving drivers - not necessarily on the principle of "well having users call a 1-800 number and spend 2 minutes typing in a number 3 times during product lifetime" which is pretty moot at the end of the day.
Intel already has a motherboard specification this size; it's called FlexATX.
I don't see how a 229x191mm board is any different to the new 224x200mm board apart from the fact that it will fit in those stupidly sized ITX cases (where a FlexATX board would be about 3mm too wide).
Isn't the solution to kick all these dumbfuck Chinese manufacturers of ITX cases into supporting just a little MORE than ITX?
Wasn't FlexATX open in the first place, what makes DTX "open"?
I call redundant whoring by AMD trying to get their oar in over VIA and tap their case market.
Well, Bluetooth has a HID specification too, but you can be damn sure they don't use it (Wii remote is a special protocol, XBox controllers require "special" Windows drivers too). USB HID causes problems when you can't predict where the buttons will be.. it means everyone needs to configure their game before they play it (god forbid if they prefer a joystick to a gamepad and you need two analogs...)
Certain things you just can't standardise on:)
Microsoft have the right idea by locking XBox 360 peripherals into a kind of quality-control program. Nintendo have the right idea by letting people use the I2C port to add new controllers, but keeping an officially Nintendo-sanctioned Wii remote as the only reasonable controller-controller on the market. That helps a lot. But since they all use USB, or Bluetooth, why can't you share them?
The same way every Wii owner has to plumb out to buy a remote AND a nunchuck AND a bloody Classic controller (and probably soon some other f**king mindless variant) to get anything done, having a set of controllers different for different batches of games would probably just be a harsh reality of a standardised system.
But, most of the things you mentioned are abstracted by things like OpenGL, TCP/IP, and filesystems.
Shaders are for the most part encapsulated by a compiler and a standard language; you can use any OpenGL shader on any OpenGL card, and the compiler built in to the OpenGL driver handles it (and optimizes it). OpenGL extensions are here nor there; this is a Windows problem in that it only exposes OpenGL 1.1 procedure calls and not the 15 years of development and updates it's had since, it is not so much an OpenGL 2.x or OpenGL 3.0 problem (which barely has any extensions, or conceives a practically entirely unique API respectively).
Why would you need to be "compatible" with dialup? Surely most people have internet, and they have it with.. wow, this standard protocol they invented in the early 1960's. Downloading a couple of files on dialup is not a problem - 8k/s, well, I download torrents at that speed sometimes and if they're a few megabytes, it doesn't take too long to get there (certainly, why not put the code in before dinner, let the system leech off the game DVD and download the necessary files for AFTER dinner?)
As for which media it supports, who cares what media you buy - it may well be console-specific but contain much the same files, even files for every console if they are only very slightly different. If a console supports reading DVD media (the Wii does! It just hasn't got any DVD player *software*) then that's fine. Hell, all of them do that.
As for multithreading and chip differences, this is handled by the software; and usually, the libaries capable of interfacing a console to it's weird and wacky hardware are provided by the console makers (Nintendo, Sony) as binary blobs anyway. You don't think they are hammering the RSX at a register level from documentation, do you? Nintendo and Sony also provide OpenGL, OpenVG and suchlike, and a bunch of audio APIs, and the controller APIs (Wii's remote software is a binary blob too - as is the SD card/internal flash memory interface, as it was on Gamecube).
What they should do is standardise on the level of support for these APIs - and their exposed features. A standard game console operating system (Microsoft would love it to be Windows XP Embedded, I bet) with standard APIs, chips which do much the same things, would work. Why can't you have a set of games which all run roughly the same (maybe some extra shine on some consoles than others)?
What's the difference between running a game in 720x480 on a Wii, and running it in 720x480 on an XBox 360? Well, usually the XBox game can run in 1280x720 and 1900x1080 too! Does it get any new features from running at a higher resolution? Does Halo 3 look all the more awesome with higher resolution textures when you run it in HD? No. It uses the same textures, but it has more pixels and sharper
Oops. I got it mixed up with the NES.. and SNES for that matter. Well, keeping your systems the same chip makes sense, up to a point (the N64 was MIPS - same as Playstation, I think that helped some development like the port of Wipeout 2097 etc.)
The three top-end games consoles currently run PowerPC processors - a change from the last generation where it was x86, PPC and MIPS.
The two major games consoles run MIPS and ARM. But there's no good reason for that other than simple wealth of development talent for those two processors - Gameboy has always run ARM (since moving away from the 6502 in the Gameboy Advance) and Playstation ran MIPS so the PSP runs MIPS. It is always a wrestle to get your entire development community to switch processors. No games console developer wants to do an "Apple to Intel switch" every 3 years and the mindshare problems with it.
PowerPC might be the answer for the CPU - a standard, long-lived architecture which is only going to be going places. Along with a graphics card standard they can all rely on, not necessarily all ATI or all nVidia, but a unified API on top - OpenGL 3.0 (upcoming) and the other OpenML, OpenVG, and so on for accelerating graphics.
The onus on each major console developer would be to produce consoles which fit this format, and they can add and subtract features as they see fit. A differentiator may be the media format for the console - after all, you need some unique features in order to keep the things marketable. If the PS3, XBox and Wii all run a PPC and all have OpenGL-capable graphics chips, isn't the only difference here the media capability - DVD, Blu-Ray, and Gamecube/Matsushita discs? The game development community could then concentrate on something really simple, and the same development costs as a PC game can be entertained. Not the difference between "my console is completely wired up differently and has a wildly different architecture" but the difference between "some people have dual-core chips and some people don't" and "I can use Vertex Shader 3.0 but some people only have Vertex Shader 2.0".
The same game works, but people get to keep their platform loyalty, perhaps buying a Wii-classed console for the kids (so they can play lower graphics-quality games on 14" analog TVs with mono speakers) while the parents have a PS3 downstairs (on the main 42" digital HD plasma TV with the 7.1 THX sound system). The media format matters less if games move into the downloads territory - after all, a game like Half-Life 2 can be played when only 60% of it is on your hard disk (even less, but I think Steam is overzealous). You don't need to download the later levels until you get close to them, after all. Downloading a 7GB file set on an average cable connection would only take a few days anyway..
How about this; you buy a games console. You buy games as "predownload kits" and go online to authorize playing, locked to the console as most XBox Live accounts and Wii Friend Codes etc are now. The DVD is just so you can start playing right away, but the main executable, maybe some first-level data files and obvious extra add-ons are installed as you authorize to stop people pirating games. After all, if you could not play the game without a code key and the special executable and data files and unlock code, piracy is moot; copying game DVDs becomes a useful strategy to get the games to your friends, rather than stealing.
You still haven't proved they did that maliciously.
So, you basically start off by saying that the BBC is biased against Austria and Serbia (wtf, the UK has no major political action against these countries right now) by lumping a list of what could be 20 countries under the banner of "NATO" (to be fair, not all the countries involved are NATO - Austria for example - but the firefighting was organised under the NATO european collaboration thingy banner and the Partnership for Peace, and the NATO Russia agreement, which specifically includes responsibility for "civil emergencies" - flood, fire, hurricane, dogs and cats living together, mass hysteria - in neighbouring countries).
Then you say that the proof point in all this, is actually that they did this and ALSO removed a picture of a Soviet airplane? My god.. what drugs are you on and can I have some? Some days I would love to think as crazy as you do:)
All of the countries above are in the NATO programs for helping neighbouring countries. All of the countries.
France is a full member. It is a founding member. Russia and Serbia are part of the Membership Action Plan and the Euro-Atlantic Partnership Council "Partnership for Peace" program.
You do not have to be planning a war to cooperate with NATO. When all these countries cooperate with or through NATO, it's fairly accurate - at least for brevity of journalistic reporting on one-column websites, page 18 of a newspaper or a 30 second mention on the evening news, that all these countries can be called "NATO".
Greece, Russia, France and Serbia are all NATO members. Serbia maybe not a full member, but they're in the PFP/EAPC which implies both their will to cooperate with NATO and their friendship and service to other NATO members; like for instance putting out fires when Greece starts to burn down.
Is this proof of government lapdogging or just a lack of fact checking on lazy news websites?
The number of BBC news articles that make it online with spelling mistakes, terrible grammar, "think of caption here" under an image just goes to show that it isn't exactly the New York Times. The web news team are probably all interns.
Reuters don't mention Russia, Spain, Netherlands, Turkey, Italy either, in your example. OMG???
It's hardly comprehensive evidence. Come up with a better one, better yet explain WHY a list of countries and numbers is somehow proof?
Make that table and fill it up for me. I can't find any articles that show any stand-out differences between coverage. I don't even know what we're supposed to be looking for. Basically you picked something that is hard to disprove your side, didn't you?
I also can't find any Greeks who are particularly pissed off at the BBC coverage.
The BBC is hardly a government lapdog; yes, they have strong opinions which sometimes are shared by those in power, but more likely than not, they differ just as strongly, and they can fuck things up for the government too - and sometimes, people even die because of it.
PCIe will likely give you performance more in-line with main memory (most implementations now are hitting 1-2 GB/s).
It probably won't simply due to the inefficiency of transferring over the PCI Express bus. Most implementations don't get anywhere near 1GByte/s let alone 2GByte/s, unless you are talking extremely favourable circumstances transferring 100 megabyte blocks of data, in sizes approaching the cache line size.
What is probably slowing down the transfer for his video RAM (if in fact 100MB/s is meant to be slow - I doubt he is getting this from his "aging disk" to be honest) is that slram does plain memcpy() from one location to another. This may actually be very inefficient if you consider that
1) memcpy() may be using a byte-by-byte routine, maybe even memory-based instructions (move with two memory addresses as operands) and PCI/AGP/PCIe are best at transferring data in 32-bit (4 byte) blocks. It depends how his kernel is set up, and if the kernel developers were braindead when they wrote the code. It's more efficient by far to transfer larger units of data, and far, far more efficient to pipeline loads and stores by using registers (however, not much fun on x86 - but the basic principle is load, load, load, load all into registers, then store, store, (load) store (load), store (load):).
2) PCI host buses usually optimize burst transfers and pipelining based on CPU cache line size. Most systems this is 32 bytes or 64 bytes (128 on a Pentium 4).
3) AGP transactions are done by default in FRAME mode, which is basically AGP 1x (66MHz, 32-bit PCI) so don't expect any special performance out of it. Integrated graphics controllers are simply on virtual, internal AGP bus.
4) The page size (minimum amount you will ever send to or fetch from swap) is 4096 bytes or 8192 bytes depending on your system. Doing 4096 seperate byte transfers runs at bus speed, even doing 1024 32-bit transfers is going to run at bus speed, unless you coerce the system into write combining and bursting. Byte transfers in general do not write combine. And write-combining needs cacheable memory.
5) This is an MMIO/PIO transaction if you get the CPU to do it, in which case, you are also soaking up CPU time where on a disk it is handled DMA -> host controller -> RAM at all stages.
6) Video memory is nearly always marked as uncachable (unless you sets an MTRR or MMU page table setting)
Therefore it makes sense to look at;
1) hacking the slram driver to copy data in cache-line sized chunks, especially for swap. Some processors have instructions especially for pulling cache lines or posting them; others have streaming functions which can prefetch entire cache lines of data.
2) hacking the slram driver to copy in a tight loop in such a way that transactions are posted to the PCI bus controller in a way that it can burst them - you need more than one transfer to happen over one PCI cycle. You can do this with SSE (just flood the damn thing with register reads from RAM and then write 4 of them at once, the CPU will pipeline, perform a write-combine and your PCI controller will turn that into the most efficient burst transfer)
3a) doing that transfer using cacheable memory (set your MTRRs!, essential for 1) or 3b) doing that transfer using a DMA controller rather than dicking around with a CPU (IOAT..?)
Those devices with "Linux 2.4 or higher" written in tiny text on the back of the blister pack have been around for a very, very long time. Far more than a year.
Nokia tech support not knowing what Linux is - is really ironic considering they ship a Linux internet tablet (N800).
As for this:
I just met a sparky who was running fedora! I asked why and he said: "I dont get virus. And it auto updates. It just works. Dont know why more dont use it. Windows just gets full of rubbish". His words not mine.
- I could say the very say thing in reverse.
I don't get viruses on Windows.
It auto updates.
It just works.
I don't know why people even bother with Linux. Linux is just as easy to fill with rubbish a Windows is.. many, many packages on Debian, Ubuntu, SuSE and Fedora install startup daemons and clutter my home directory with dotfiles and dotdirectories, sprawl in/usr/share, every functionality you add, kills the system performance somewhat, and outside of the apps deemed okay for the LiveCD (Firefox, Evolution?) most of the tripe that is listed in the package managers is simply not up to normal everyday use.
How is that quantifiably better? Who's words they are don't matter, it is the harsh reality of the world that there isn't an operating system anyone will feel truly comfortable using and has no problems, and using Windows or MacOS and their application base is like pulling teeth sometimes, but Linux is by far and away NOT the solution to those problems.
I'm saying Apple beats on their users regularly, and they enjoy the attention. How many times have you used iPhoto or updated iLife or got an Airport wireless thing, and had something go wrong somewhere, and for Apple to delete all the forum posts relating to it, send a couple injunctions out to websites, and release an update with the single bullet point;
Updates related to stability and bug fixing
Oh yeah am I a bad user? Am I? Hit me harder.. harder... don't tell me if you fixed it or not. I promise to buy the iPhone when it comes out, well before you cut the price, and every new iPod generation, and an Apple TV:D
Windows, on the other hand, you get what you wanted but if it doesn't work out, it makes you wait 5 years, by which time you need a new PC anyway.
That's punishment, isn't it? That wasn't obvious in the analogy, I guess.. but that's what I was on about.
BTW, you started off the last sentence as to why windows and os x win, but only talked up os x.
What does Windows have, really, that OS X doesn't? Windows Desktop Search vs. Spotlight, Aero Glass vs. Quartz Extreme, I dunno.. UPnP device support vs. mDNS/"Bonjour"/"Rendezvous" device support, it's all the same really.
The point is you grab a Linux these days and what do you get; personally when I install Ubuntu or OpenSuSE, I get Open Source drivers and have to update them to the "commercial" version only because "they're not free". If I didn't know better I wouldn't know why the performance didn't rock out of the box.
I get to choose between Beagle and whatever other desktop search system, and neither of them really do the job and they soak performance out of the system far, far more than Spotlight or WDS or Google DS. Compiz is still an asshole to set up. UPnP and mDNS support are woeful. There is still no decent WPA GUI for Linux, I end up hand-editing the damn config file every time (the one in SuSE 10.3 is pretty damn nice though, but it's not anywhere near close to Intel Proset for Wireless).
If I actually NEED any software I have to find it by *NAME*, which is just terrible. Package management is one of the great things about Linux, but cataloguing your software by way of huge lists of software packages with automatic dependency solving.. promotes choice but not functionality. How am I supposed to know what to pick out of a list of 58 packages in the "WWW" category? If I didn't get a desktop search app to begin with and I wanted one, how on EARTH would I know that it's been monickered "Beagle" or if I want an instant messenger, "Pigeon" or "Kopete"?
People who actually think about the issue do tend to use Linux, because it is actually better
But, it isn't, is it? It's not actually quantifiably better in any way, shape or form. It's simply a little bit more "written by guys in basements".
I use Linux for work, I develop on and for Linux for work, but my laptop runs Windows XP. Given the choice of running mail, playing DVDs and occasional web browsing, choice of text editors and a billion other things, despite the fact that I use both operating systems (and multiple distributions), I actually prefer using Windows.
Because it is outright better? I dunno about that, some days I'd feel qualified to judge because I do think about it every day, but you're right; it is a tool and for me, Windows does a somewhat nicer feeling job of my day-to-days than Linux ever did.
I use Thunderbird and Firefox and use an open source media player (Media Player Classic), with open source codecs (ffdshow tryouts). I own a copy of Microsoft Office 2003 (it came with the laptop), but I use Open Office.
So it is not about availability of commercial software vs. Open Source software, because it's all the SAME software, although I do own Photoshop, Flash etc. CS3. There just isn't an equivalent on Linux. But they are not my day-to-days, they are my necessities for getting some job done. I think it is partly down to the fact that if I want to add a new codec to Media Player (or any media player), I simply download that one, single codec. I do not download a codec BUNDLE for gstreamer, or a whole new version of MPlayer as a bundle, and hope they update it to include the latest thing. I hate how ffdshow is monolithic. I hated how Mozilla was so monolithic.. browser and mail and irc all in one! And a full application framework! (Why don't Firefox and Thunderbird share the same Gecko engine etc., either? I have two copies of exactly the same damn browser components installed..). Of all these things I hate I use them because I need them, but at least on Windows, if I was willing, I could use stuff that already exists; Internet Explorer 7, Windows Live Mail (actually a pretty neat mailer), download DivX, and use the H.264 codec that came with my copy of Nero.. and PowerDVD that came with the laptop. The hideous mess of bundled, open source applications that I only have on my system and live with out of choice, is what I am forced to use under Linux. I hate the fact that I am not able due to availability, to use anything else, even if I have to pay for it. What if I *DID* want to pay for something better? Can I do that with Linux?
I think this would be true of the vast majority of people who did not do natively-hosted Linux development. I am seriously considering installing OpenSuSE 10.3 on this laptop at some point though (I need to get a new disk anyway). Maybe I will make the switch.. but probably, I won't.
I guess the analogy gets expanded to, people pay to go to BDSM clubs and be "punished" by someone in a shiny plastic outfit while a guy in a gimp suit watches you and jerks off.
But you can get it for free at home if you can find a furry or two.
It all ends in a mess of blood and spunk regardless of the choice. What do you want out of life?:D
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No, it's because you act like a self-important little shite who thinks they should be bowing on their knees and sucking your dick for every line of code you produced.
Which is just wrong. You need to respect your customers, because if they went away, you'd be out of a job, it's that simple. It's not their job to reproduce and diagnose problems, it's YOURS. They need you to help and beg you for it every second BECAUSE THEY ARE PAYING FOR THAT PRIVILEGE.
Or, find a guy or hire a guy that can write a function that does X, or organise the support contract with Y to support the broken server.
Who says management should pay more than tech? You could say that the sourcing of talent is not a hard job - it isn't as physically laborious or mathematical or sheer-programmer-minded to find a programmer and your use of knowledge of code isn't so well flexed, but it IS a chore. I would say management staff who corral tech staff should be paid the same as the tech staff, unless there is also a huge tech component (joining the team and writing the API specs that function X belongs to, or coding function Y and Z in parallel to the tech guys).
There's no reason why a full manager (i.e. the pointy haired boss) should be being paid a great deal more than a guy who implements the products. This is a manager for which there is very little job progression from tech guy into it - because tech guys tend not to want to be managers.
For a project manager, team leader, this is a tech job with middle management responsibility, and this needs to pay more because it's BOTH jobs (less of tech, more of management, but still consisting of considerable tech).
If only that were true
Most of them SHOULD use the clock battery (CR2032) for that.
Of course you can't turn it on without other power, and ATX supplies a 5V trickle for Wake-On-Lan and DRAM self-refresh (ACPI S3) etc., but the actual current draw of a "turned off" PC should be absolutely zero as long as the coin cell battery is alive.
I think this is one of the major flaws of current systems that makes "standby" rather a ridiculous concept. Shouldn't we all be moving to systems with ridiculous amounts of embedded NAND/NOR flash memory for this, so that we don't need to have *ANY* power whatsoever on a system, can turn everything off except the lithium cell trickling the RTC and whatever microcontroller is running it?
I'd rather just not put swathes of electronic gadgets in the bedroom.
Not only does it stop me sleeping (not because of the light but because most of them hum electrically or have fan noise or need to be turned on and off ANYWAY) but it reminds me of living with my parents when I *HAD* to have everything in my bedroom.
Bedrooms are for beds, not watching TV, playing DVDs, loud music, computers and dancing disco lighting.
Marvell are as open as any wireless chipset manufacturer is for one very simple reason: regulatory standards on the transmission and reception of RF data.
Some of the channels on WiFi are illegal to use without a license. In the US, it's channels 12, 13 and 14, which are fine in Europe. Japan seems to only have 2 channels available and in other countries (Spain) there is also some weirdness.
Who gets the knock on the door if a laptop ships which can break these regulations? Who do the FCC raid?
Not Dell, not the driver author, but the chipset supplier. Marvell, Broadcom, Lucent, Intel, whoever it may be.
This is exactly why Intel's wireless driver is only 90% open with a binary userspace daemon, why you don't see Marvel handing documentation out on just how you program the chip to access outside unlicensed 2.4GHz range in your chosen country..
So, to say it is "not open" just because they are enforcing government regulations on RF devices is a little naive. They have to do it, it's the law, and it saves them lawsuits and having to withdraw chipsets or come sue OLPC's ass if it gets misused by some geek who just downloaded a PDF and hacked the driver...
That's what I said!
:)
But actually the WHQL don't do all the assurance testing on drivers; that's performed by the manufacturers
I really can't find the video and article right now, but there was one online of a Microsoft program manager giving a tour around the build lab - basically a huge cluster of systems builds Windows every night and images it to a farm of test machines and frameworks which assure that things aren't being royally broken at any point for the main install CD.
Anyone remember that thing and can post a link to it?
But they do - at least a very broad range of PC hardware runs every build of Windows they make, for regression testing.
It's not as comprehensive, but they DO bother trying.
I have a gun, it is loaded with 3 bullets. I aim it at your head and pull the trigger 3 times.
What's the problem here, the fact that I had a loaded gun perfectly capable of killing you, or that I pulled the trigger?
If you take the trigger off the gun, you aren't going to be dead, no matter how many bullets are in there, because I can't fire it. You needn't worry about the gun, or my intent to kill you, because it's *not going to happen without that trigger*.
Fix the drivers, fix the problem. Activation is annoying but it is part of life. As is accepting EULAs, and typing in product keys.. I certainly do know of a lot of GPL software which, despite being free, forces me to accept an "EULA" (be that the GPL) when I install it. I have to ACCEPT the license before it lets me copy files from a packed executable into my system. It's the bloody GPL!!! Am I forced to go through this crap every time I want to install some software?
This annoys the piss out of me (after all, aren't EULAs supposed to be unenforcable?) but, it's LIFE. I click the button and deal with it. Activating Windows is a 2 minute, FREE phone call, and Microsoft have always been nothing but understanding about hardware swaps. Activating Adobe Photoshop is a 2 minute, FREE phone call. And that is if, and ONLY if, it could not be properly done over the internet. I can deal with activation. What I wouldn't want is for the system to spuriously attempt to reactivate itself after a driver update, when it is supposed to be tracking hardware changes.. this is the real problem with the system, that the data collecting that the activation system does to determine if your system is not the same one it was installed on, is too twitchy.
Actually from his little report this flags up an issue; one of quality assurance on driver software.
In order to get around spurious reactivation, drivers should report identity data the same way Microsoft's do - one would have thought this was part of the WHQL testing regime but apparently not.
But, if the hardware change reporting is meant to trigger it, then hardware should not be seen to change - by updating the Intel drivers, why should it change the unique hardware reporting? If it is pushing out PCI chipset IDs, low-level configuration of your drives etc. in a pretty package to the Activation system for checking, then why would something like a driver update like that make such a big deal?
I remember updating the firmware on my DVD burners a couple of times (I did have 3 DVD burners..) and it causing XP to want to reactivate the moment I plugged my graphics card in back from the repair shop. The nice girl on the phone said it was basically because I had installed too many drives; yeah, and Windows spent 10 minutes redetecting them on boot, too. But updating the drive firmware and changing the VERSION NUMBER shouldn't be an activation trigger. Some manufacturers put the version number of the drive in the "model" field and not the "version" field, which would do that, but not these guys.. it is simply overzealous checking.
But we are not talking about updating something low level in the drives or connected peripherals, just the Intel driver for RAID.. so what changed here?
So, is this a "Activation Sucks!!" issue or a "Windows Hardware Quality Labs are a bunch of fucking fakers!?" issue?
I call the latter. Requiring product activation is something you have to do these days with software. Oh well, live with it. If it's not Windows itself, it's Adobe CS3 or CorelDraw or whatever else. Microsoft are not the only culprit here on activation problems, and the problems are not down to the activation concept, but some weird driver identifier reporting system. If Microsoft are so big on driver signing and code quality, they should really be fixing this as a principle of being able to run a signed, managed system with no bluescreening or weird-behaving drivers - not necessarily on the principle of "well having users call a 1-800 number and spend 2 minutes typing in a number 3 times during product lifetime" which is pretty moot at the end of the day.
Intel already has a motherboard specification this size; it's called FlexATX.
I don't see how a 229x191mm board is any different to the new 224x200mm board apart from the fact that it will fit in those stupidly sized ITX cases (where a FlexATX board would be about 3mm too wide).
Isn't the solution to kick all these dumbfuck Chinese manufacturers of ITX cases into supporting just a little MORE than ITX?
Wasn't FlexATX open in the first place, what makes DTX "open"?
I call redundant whoring by AMD trying to get their oar in over VIA and tap their case market.
Well, Bluetooth has a HID specification too, but you can be damn sure they don't use it (Wii remote is a special protocol, XBox controllers require "special" Windows drivers too). USB HID causes problems when you can't predict where the buttons will be.. it means everyone needs to configure their game before they play it (god forbid if they prefer a joystick to a gamepad and you need two analogs...)
:)
Certain things you just can't standardise on
Microsoft have the right idea by locking XBox 360 peripherals into a kind of quality-control program. Nintendo have the right idea by letting people use the I2C port to add new controllers, but keeping an officially Nintendo-sanctioned Wii remote as the only reasonable controller-controller on the market. That helps a lot. But since they all use USB, or Bluetooth, why can't you share them?
The same way every Wii owner has to plumb out to buy a remote AND a nunchuck AND a bloody Classic controller (and probably soon some other f**king mindless variant) to get anything done, having a set of controllers different for different batches of games would probably just be a harsh reality of a standardised system.
But, most of the things you mentioned are abstracted by things like OpenGL, TCP/IP, and filesystems.
Shaders are for the most part encapsulated by a compiler and a standard language; you can use any OpenGL shader on any OpenGL card, and the compiler built in to the OpenGL driver handles it (and optimizes it). OpenGL extensions are here nor there; this is a Windows problem in that it only exposes OpenGL 1.1 procedure calls and not the 15 years of development and updates it's had since, it is not so much an OpenGL 2.x or OpenGL 3.0 problem (which barely has any extensions, or conceives a practically entirely unique API respectively).
Why would you need to be "compatible" with dialup? Surely most people have internet, and they have it with.. wow, this standard protocol they invented in the early 1960's. Downloading a couple of files on dialup is not a problem - 8k/s, well, I download torrents at that speed sometimes and if they're a few megabytes, it doesn't take too long to get there (certainly, why not put the code in before dinner, let the system leech off the game DVD and download the necessary files for AFTER dinner?)
As for which media it supports, who cares what media you buy - it may well be console-specific but contain much the same files, even files for every console if they are only very slightly different. If a console supports reading DVD media (the Wii does! It just hasn't got any DVD player *software*) then that's fine. Hell, all of them do that.
As for multithreading and chip differences, this is handled by the software; and usually, the libaries capable of interfacing a console to it's weird and wacky hardware are provided by the console makers (Nintendo, Sony) as binary blobs anyway. You don't think they are hammering the RSX at a register level from documentation, do you? Nintendo and Sony also provide OpenGL, OpenVG and suchlike, and a bunch of audio APIs, and the controller APIs (Wii's remote software is a binary blob too - as is the SD card/internal flash memory interface, as it was on Gamecube).
What they should do is standardise on the level of support for these APIs - and their exposed features. A standard game console operating system (Microsoft would love it to be Windows XP Embedded, I bet) with standard APIs, chips which do much the same things, would work. Why can't you have a set of games which all run roughly the same (maybe some extra shine on some consoles than others)?
What's the difference between running a game in 720x480 on a Wii, and running it in 720x480 on an XBox 360? Well, usually the XBox game can run in 1280x720 and 1900x1080 too! Does it get any new features from running at a higher resolution? Does Halo 3 look all the more awesome with higher resolution textures when you run it in HD? No. It uses the same textures, but it has more pixels and sharper
Oops. I got it mixed up with the NES.. and SNES for that matter. Well, keeping your systems the same chip makes sense, up to a point (the N64 was MIPS - same as Playstation, I think that helped some development like the port of Wipeout 2097 etc.)
The three top-end games consoles currently run PowerPC processors - a change from the last generation where it was x86, PPC and MIPS.
The two major games consoles run MIPS and ARM. But there's no good reason for that other than simple wealth of development talent for those two processors - Gameboy has always run ARM (since moving away from the 6502 in the Gameboy Advance) and Playstation ran MIPS so the PSP runs MIPS. It is always a wrestle to get your entire development community to switch processors. No games console developer wants to do an "Apple to Intel switch" every 3 years and the mindshare problems with it.
PowerPC might be the answer for the CPU - a standard, long-lived architecture which is only going to be going places. Along with a graphics card standard they can all rely on, not necessarily all ATI or all nVidia, but a unified API on top - OpenGL 3.0 (upcoming) and the other OpenML, OpenVG, and so on for accelerating graphics.
The onus on each major console developer would be to produce consoles which fit this format, and they can add and subtract features as they see fit. A differentiator may be the media format for the console - after all, you need some unique features in order to keep the things marketable. If the PS3, XBox and Wii all run a PPC and all have OpenGL-capable graphics chips, isn't the only difference here the media capability - DVD, Blu-Ray, and Gamecube/Matsushita discs? The game development community could then concentrate on something really simple, and the same development costs as a PC game can be entertained. Not the difference between "my console is completely wired up differently and has a wildly different architecture" but the difference between "some people have dual-core chips and some people don't" and "I can use Vertex Shader 3.0 but some people only have Vertex Shader 2.0".
The same game works, but people get to keep their platform loyalty, perhaps buying a Wii-classed console for the kids (so they can play lower graphics-quality games on 14" analog TVs with mono speakers) while the parents have a PS3 downstairs (on the main 42" digital HD plasma TV with the 7.1 THX sound system). The media format matters less if games move into the downloads territory - after all, a game like Half-Life 2 can be played when only 60% of it is on your hard disk (even less, but I think Steam is overzealous). You don't need to download the later levels until you get close to them, after all. Downloading a 7GB file set on an average cable connection would only take a few days anyway..
How about this; you buy a games console. You buy games as "predownload kits" and go online to authorize playing, locked to the console as most XBox Live accounts and Wii Friend Codes etc are now. The DVD is just so you can start playing right away, but the main executable, maybe some first-level data files and obvious extra add-ons are installed as you authorize to stop people pirating games. After all, if you could not play the game without a code key and the special executable and data files and unlock code, piracy is moot; copying game DVDs becomes a useful strategy to get the games to your friends, rather than stealing.
You still haven't proved they did that maliciously.
:)
So, you basically start off by saying that the BBC is biased against Austria and Serbia (wtf, the UK has no major political action against these countries right now) by lumping a list of what could be 20 countries under the banner of "NATO" (to be fair, not all the countries involved are NATO - Austria for example - but the firefighting was organised under the NATO european collaboration thingy banner and the Partnership for Peace, and the NATO Russia agreement, which specifically includes responsibility for "civil emergencies" - flood, fire, hurricane, dogs and cats living together, mass hysteria - in neighbouring countries).
Then you say that the proof point in all this, is actually that they did this and ALSO removed a picture of a Soviet airplane? My god.. what drugs are you on and can I have some? Some days I would love to think as crazy as you do
All of the countries above are in the NATO programs for helping neighbouring countries. All of the countries.
France is a full member. It is a founding member. Russia and Serbia are part of the Membership Action Plan and the Euro-Atlantic Partnership Council "Partnership for Peace" program.
You do not have to be planning a war to cooperate with NATO. When all these countries cooperate with or through NATO, it's fairly accurate - at least for brevity of journalistic reporting on one-column websites, page 18 of a newspaper or a 30 second mention on the evening news, that all these countries can be called "NATO".
It is not a conspiracy.
Greece, Russia, France and Serbia are all NATO members. Serbia maybe not a full member, but they're in the PFP/EAPC which implies both their will to cooperate with NATO and their friendship and service to other NATO members; like for instance putting out fires when Greece starts to burn down.
Beware Greeks bearing statistics :D
Is this proof of government lapdogging or just a lack of fact checking on lazy news websites?
The number of BBC news articles that make it online with spelling mistakes, terrible grammar, "think of caption here" under an image just goes to show that it isn't exactly the New York Times. The web news team are probably all interns.
Reuters don't mention Russia, Spain, Netherlands, Turkey, Italy either, in your example. OMG???
It's hardly comprehensive evidence. Come up with a better one, better yet explain WHY a list of countries and numbers is somehow proof?
I'm both curious and lazy.
Make that table and fill it up for me. I can't find any articles that show any stand-out differences between coverage. I don't even know what we're supposed to be looking for. Basically you picked something that is hard to disprove your side, didn't you?
I also can't find any Greeks who are particularly pissed off at the BBC coverage.
The BBC is hardly a government lapdog; yes, they have strong opinions which sometimes are shared by those in power, but more likely than not, they differ just as strongly, and they can fuck things up for the government too - and sometimes, people even die because of it.
It probably won't simply due to the inefficiency of transferring over the PCI Express bus. Most implementations don't get anywhere near 1GByte/s let alone 2GByte/s, unless you are talking extremely favourable circumstances transferring 100 megabyte blocks of data, in sizes approaching the cache line size.
What is probably slowing down the transfer for his video RAM (if in fact 100MB/s is meant to be slow - I doubt he is getting this from his "aging disk" to be honest) is that slram does plain memcpy() from one location to another. This may actually be very inefficient if you consider that
1) memcpy() may be using a byte-by-byte routine, maybe even memory-based instructions (move with two memory addresses as operands) and PCI/AGP/PCIe are best at transferring data in 32-bit (4 byte) blocks. It depends how his kernel is set up, and if the kernel developers were braindead when they wrote the code. It's more efficient by far to transfer larger units of data, and far, far more efficient to pipeline loads and stores by using registers (however, not much fun on x86 - but the basic principle is load, load, load, load all into registers, then store, store, (load) store (load), store (load)
2) PCI host buses usually optimize burst transfers and pipelining based on CPU cache line size. Most systems this is 32 bytes or
64 bytes (128 on a Pentium 4).
3) AGP transactions are done by default in FRAME mode, which is basically AGP 1x (66MHz, 32-bit PCI) so don't expect any special performance out of it. Integrated graphics controllers are simply on virtual, internal AGP bus.
4) The page size (minimum amount you will ever send to or fetch from swap) is 4096 bytes or 8192 bytes depending on your system. Doing 4096 seperate byte transfers runs at bus speed, even doing 1024 32-bit transfers is going to run at bus speed, unless you coerce the system into write combining and bursting. Byte transfers in general do not write combine. And write-combining needs cacheable memory.
5) This is an MMIO/PIO transaction if you get the CPU to do it, in which case, you are also soaking up CPU time where on a disk it is handled DMA -> host controller -> RAM at all stages.
6) Video memory is nearly always marked as uncachable (unless you sets an MTRR or MMU page table setting)
Therefore it makes sense to look at;
1) hacking the slram driver to copy data in cache-line sized chunks, especially for swap. Some processors have instructions especially for pulling cache lines or posting them; others have streaming functions which can prefetch entire cache lines of data.
2) hacking the slram driver to copy in a tight loop in such a way that transactions are posted to the PCI bus controller in a way that it can burst them - you need more than one transfer to happen over one PCI cycle. You can do this with SSE (just flood the damn thing with register reads from RAM and then write 4 of them at once, the CPU will pipeline, perform a write-combine and your PCI controller will turn that into the most efficient burst transfer)
3a) doing that transfer using cacheable memory (set your MTRRs!, essential for 1)
or
3b) doing that transfer using a DMA controller rather than dicking around with a CPU (IOAT..?)
Some interesting reads:
http://bugs.mysql.com/bug.php?id=19975
Nokia tech support not knowing what Linux is - is really ironic considering they ship a Linux internet tablet (N800).
As for this: - I could say the very say thing in reverse.
I don't get viruses on Windows.
It auto updates.
It just works.
I don't know why people even bother with Linux. Linux is just as easy to fill with rubbish a Windows is.. many, many packages on Debian, Ubuntu, SuSE and Fedora install startup daemons and clutter my home directory with dotfiles and dotdirectories, sprawl in
How is that quantifiably better? Who's words they are don't matter, it is the harsh reality of the world that there isn't an operating system anyone will feel truly comfortable using and has no problems, and using Windows or MacOS and their application base is like pulling teeth sometimes, but Linux is by far and away NOT the solution to those problems.
Oh yeah am I a bad user? Am I? Hit me harder.. harder... don't tell me if you fixed it or not. I promise to buy the iPhone when it comes out, well before you cut the price, and every new iPod generation, and an Apple TV
Windows, on the other hand, you get what you wanted but if it doesn't work out, it makes you wait 5 years, by which time you need a new PC anyway.
That's punishment, isn't it? That wasn't obvious in the analogy, I guess.. but that's what I was on about.
What does Windows have, really, that OS X doesn't? Windows Desktop Search vs. Spotlight, Aero Glass vs. Quartz Extreme, I dunno.. UPnP device support vs. mDNS/"Bonjour"/"Rendezvous" device support, it's all the same really.
The point is you grab a Linux these days and what do you get; personally when I install Ubuntu or OpenSuSE, I get Open Source drivers and have to update them to the "commercial" version only because "they're not free". If I didn't know better I wouldn't know why the performance didn't rock out of the box.
I get to choose between Beagle and whatever other desktop search system, and neither of them really do the job and they soak performance out of the system far, far more than Spotlight or WDS or Google DS. Compiz is still an asshole to set up. UPnP and mDNS support are woeful. There is still no decent WPA GUI for Linux, I end up hand-editing the damn config file every time (the one in SuSE 10.3 is pretty damn nice though, but it's not anywhere near close to Intel Proset for Wireless).
If I actually NEED any software I have to find it by *NAME*, which is just terrible. Package management is one of the great things about Linux, but cataloguing your software by way of huge lists of software packages with automatic dependency solving.. promotes choice but not functionality. How am I supposed to know what to pick out of a list of 58 packages in the "WWW" category? If I didn't get a desktop search app to begin with and I wanted one, how on EARTH would I know that it's been monickered "Beagle" or if I want an instant messenger, "Pigeon" or "Kopete"?
But, it isn't, is it? It's not actually quantifiably better in any way, shape or form. It's simply a little bit more "written by guys in basements".
I use Linux for work, I develop on and for Linux for work, but my laptop runs Windows XP. Given the choice of running mail, playing DVDs and occasional web browsing, choice of text editors and a billion other things, despite the fact that I use both operating systems (and multiple distributions), I actually prefer using Windows.
Because it is outright better? I dunno about that, some days I'd feel qualified to judge because I do think about it every day, but you're right; it is a tool and for me, Windows does a somewhat nicer feeling job of my day-to-days than Linux ever did.
I use Thunderbird and Firefox and use an open source media player (Media Player Classic), with open source codecs (ffdshow tryouts). I own a copy of Microsoft Office 2003 (it came with the laptop), but I use Open Office.
So it is not about availability of commercial software vs. Open Source software, because it's all the SAME software, although I do own Photoshop, Flash etc. CS3. There just isn't an equivalent on Linux. But they are not my day-to-days, they are my necessities for getting some job done. I think it is partly down to the fact that if I want to add a new codec to Media Player (or any media player), I simply download that one, single codec. I do not download a codec BUNDLE for gstreamer, or a whole new version of MPlayer as a bundle, and hope they update it to include the latest thing. I hate how ffdshow is monolithic. I hated how Mozilla was so monolithic.. browser and mail and irc all in one! And a full application framework! (Why don't Firefox and Thunderbird share the same Gecko engine etc., either? I have two copies of exactly the same damn browser components installed..). Of all these things I hate I use them because I need them, but at least on Windows, if I was willing, I could use stuff that already exists; Internet Explorer 7, Windows Live Mail (actually a pretty neat mailer), download DivX, and use the H.264 codec that came with my copy of Nero.. and PowerDVD that came with the laptop. The hideous mess of bundled, open source applications that I only have on my system and live with out of choice, is what I am forced to use under Linux. I hate the fact that I am not able due to availability, to use anything else, even if I have to pay for it. What if I *DID* want to pay for something better? Can I do that with Linux?
I think this would be true of the vast majority of people who did not do natively-hosted Linux development. I am seriously considering installing OpenSuSE 10.3 on this laptop at some point though (I need to get a new disk anyway). Maybe I will make the switch.. but probably, I won't.
I guess the analogy gets expanded to, people pay to go to BDSM clubs and be "punished" by someone in a shiny plastic outfit while a guy in a gimp suit watches you and jerks off.
:D
But you can get it for free at home if you can find a furry or two.
It all ends in a mess of blood and spunk regardless of the choice. What do you want out of life?