We can say a lot about Americans. That they are stupid egomaniac boars who don't know anything besides their own country, that their education system is horrible beyond repair, that they think with their cruise missiles,...
but we can't blame them for the current government.
It was not voted by the majority of the US voters.
Sheesh, people like you make Linux look more and more like Windows.
"No, we don't need functionality, we need a framework!" (add "distributed", "real-time", "platform-independent" or "byte-code" to enhance the buzziness)
"No, we don't need functionality, we need a pretty GUI!"
"No, we don't need functionality, we need XML support!"
I was able to build an embedded video playing machine using mplayer and Linux on a VIA C3 box in just 8 Megs of boot image size! Forget all that framework and XML and X and GUI and Gtk bullshit. You can stick your GNOME and ORBit where the sun don't shine. I just want to view movies on my machine, without your framework mania forcing me to install 3.1415e926 dependency packages first.
That is the reason why mplayer rules by such a margin: it doesn't need fifty trillion packages which add no real value to the application itself.
another thinly veiled attempt to make money
on
Open Source DRM
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
by limiting other people's freedom and trying to create an artificial scarcity in one of the very few areas of our lives where we live in a world of plenty.
And on top of that they try to create good emotions for their products by basing it on other people's work and calling it "open source". The only catch is that you have to pay them to distribute binaries?! WTF? Neither openssl nor ogg nor vorbis require this, why do they?
Excuse me? Scripting languages don't have memory management?! What the hell are you smoking, man?
By the way, python is legendary for it's bad performance, only Tcl has an even worse reputation. If Java really is outperformed by python, that would be a reason to kill the whole project and shoot the guilty party.
About memory footprint: here is the memory footprint of tcc, which is a tiny C compiler for x86, so you might call it an x86 JIT for C. tcc can also be used to create object files and link them to binaries if you want, so in that respect it actually does more than that Java JRE. It does not have garbage collection or a security manager, but it can do bounds checking.
leitner 6884 0.0 0.1 624 544 pts/0 S 19:21 0:00./tcc../sleep.c
This includes a C parser, a code generator, and a JIT. And it's still just over 600k for a hello world style program.
Also, just because Sun chooses to redefine "minor version" in their newspeak, that does not become the new meaning of the term in English.
Java is a toy language, and always has been. It is a shame to see so much good talent being wasted on in at universities and colleges all over the world. Other languages are also toy languages, but at least they aren't so pretentious.
On my Dell notebook, battery life time halves when I insert the WLAN pcmcia card. That's why I would never buy a notebook where I would have to fiddle with screws to get a mini-pci WLAN card out.
Not being able to disable on-board WLAN would be even worse, obviously.
WLAN is nice, but I don't use it all the time. Just today I spent 5 hours in the train hacking around on my notebook, and with WLAN I would have had to call it quits after 3.5 hours or so.
Wow, Score 4, that's what I call a successful troll!
I don't intend to disturb your rant with facts, but operating systems were initially free as in "you buy our hardware, you get our OS for free". That was not a big deal as that OS only ran on that hardware. On the IBM mainframes, there was even a time where all the applications were free as well, until a court forced IBM to collect money for them because that was anti-competitive.
So it is true that the Unix workstations are being put out of the market by cheap PCs, but Microsoft has nothing to do with it. On the contrary, their workstation software suite (including Office, Visio, Publisher, a database maybe) is more expensive than the workstation. So, and it is you who should get some fresh air here, this happened not because of Microsoft, but in spite of Microsoft.
Also, they were never innovative (MS Word started as demo applet on how a mouse could be used with the first MS Mouse), only layers of bloat upon bloat. The selling point of Linux is not that it's cheap -- or are you seeing people buy PCs with Red Hat by the dozen? No, you are not. So Linux "sells" although you can't actually buy PCs with Linux, that is quite an achievement.
About your crack pipe dreams who is innovating and who is not, I'm not going to waste time with that. Please do get out and get some fresh air.
Both gcc and icc generate code that is not too bad. I don't do Windows, so I wouldn't know MS C. Do they even have a native compiler for ia64? The point is: even if you hand-optimize the code for ia64, it still sucks in comparison to other current architectures. If you consider how many Athlons you could have bought for the money, you don't even want to finish that calculation.
Actually, the IA64 performance is very bad in the real world. True, their benchmarks look impressive, but I haven't been able to reproduce that.
I had the opportunity to log in to an 4-way 900 MHz itanic-2 box, which was outperformed by my lowly 900 MHz Pentium 3 notebook by a factor of 4 (single CPU benchmark). I did some mp3 en- and decoding and compiling on the box.
Also, ia64 is spectectularly bad for MPEG-4. Go ask google for ia64 and xvid and you will find a computer science class in Germany trying to optimize ia64 and they found that after their optimizations (which yielded a big speed-up) ia64 still was handily outperformed by their el-cheapo desktop Athlons.
Take those benchmarks with a grain of salt. I basically think that IA64 is a big flop. Intel needs a miracle to make people buy this crap. But, as they say, your mileage may vary.;)
I contest that. First of all, 5 years of backwards compatibility is not an argument for SPARC, it's an argument for x86. x86 has 20 years of backwards compatibility.
Second of all, there are only so many application that people really buy "server hardware" for, and as soon as you put more than 3 Gigs of memory in the machine, you gain performance from 64-bit hardware.
The performance gain is particularly big for databases and applications like full text search that have a large working set. Also, crypto software can in many cases reap substantial gains from the native 64-bit arithmetic. In layman terms that means: 64-bit is good for databases and web servers. And, believe it or not, those are the applications people buy server hardware for.
Application servers are cheaper and more reliably done using a cluster of el-cheapo off-the-shelf x86 machines than one big iron, independent of the number of bits.
In my experience with Alpha it *is* competitive in Integer performance. You won't notice that if all you do is run gcc all day, because gcc historically does more work on Alpha than on x86.
But on my integer applications Alpha has always been competitive. Caveat: it has been a few years since I had an Alpha at my disposal.
But please read the article you are commenting on. Their stats also show that Alpha integer performance is top notch.
1. x86 has been revamped many times. That's why it is still competitive, although its doom has been predicted numerous times.
2. x86 actually has faster floating point than most RISC CPUs. Why don't you actually read the article and look at the stats they give there? In particular thanks to SSE, x86 not only has directly addressable floating point registers but it has huge performance gains to offer for vectorizable calculations. Did you ever ask yourself why all the movie special effects farms have moved their render farms to x86?
3. "Seeing as how IA64 is based on x86"... Care to pass that crack pipe around or are you going to smoke it all alone?
4. "And with IBM announcing further support of the Intel architecture"... ?! What the fsck are you talking about? The only Intel architecture IBM recently announced support for is IA64. You seem mighty confused, man.
PCs do not even today have lousy I/O. In fact, because the PC architecture has less registers, code needs to store stuff in memory more often, which lead to PCs outperforming RISC machines in memory bandwidth over the years. Sun and IBM in particular have been outperformed in RAM bandwidth for over a decade. They mad up for it in good floating point performance, but now the PCs are catching up there as well.
By the way, AMD's HyperTransport and Hammer memory infrastructure is quite similar to the "perfect scalability" Alpha memory hardware that has been making headlines recently. I expect Hammer to rule the planet here. Madison also has huge memory bandwidth, but it wastes most of it reading NOPs and instructions that are predicated away or otherwise discarded.;-)
Also, if you actually read the article, you will notice that even the PowerPC translates their ugly and complex instruction set to an internal instruction set, which is more RISCy. This is the very thing that RISC afficionados have been using as argument against x86 for years!
It would help if they stopped IRCing from their CVS repository machines. That may not make their code more secure, but it will help keep the back doors and trojans out.
I am constantly amazed that people who commit this kind of beginner's mistake have the gall to call their software "secure". And then they ship sendmail and BIND with it. ROTFL
If the Debian crowd spent one quarter of the time they whine and debate licensing bullshit doing actual productive work on their distribution, they would actually be getting somewhere.
Just look how Knoppix (which is Debian based) blew their installation system completely into pieces, and that's basically one guy doing this on his own.
Debian is well-known for the fanatic zealot followers and the fact that their releases are years behind the competition. People generally agree that the apt system is great. Why don't they do more stuff like apt and less stuff like trampling the mplayer people's nuts over bogus licensing bullshit? If they don't like the mplayer license, then they should not include mplayer in their distribution. End of dicussion. But please stop wasting everyone else's time.
First of all, it pays our bandwidth and the infrastructure. I'm all for that, obviously.
Second of all, it destroys the validity of their statistics about how many files are downloaded. Their statistics on how much cash they lose through this already are bogus, but now they can't even give good numbers on how many files are transferred, because 3/4 of the downloads may be wasted through broken fake files.
Third of all, this will lead to more cool research in cryptography. There will be papers about how to make this kind of attack more difficult and how to build trust metrics between anonymous peers (and that are very interesting problems, you should consider doing research in the area!).
In the short run, this pays for bandwidth with the profits of the record companies. More bandwidth will be used to do more file sharing. One day, RIAA will understand that they are financing the infrastructure of the enemy and shut overpeer down.
In the long run, RIAA will raise the price for CDs even more, to pay for overpeer and the infrastructure of the P2P people. That will cause even more people to not buy their music but download it instead, hastening RIAA's run towards obsolescence.
But TRIED to join but was refuse due to a curvature of the spine. But due to an innate ability for langauge, computers, and native intelligence, was given a chance, and in the end I opted out.
Please excuse my reluctance to be convinced by your obvious native intelligence and innate ability for "langauge". ROTFL
When a teen in the US can build a fucking BREEDER REACTOR in a shed in his neighbors yard. YOU ARE TELLING ME IT IS AT ALL NOT POSSIBLE THE IRAQUIS DO NOT HAVE THE CHANCE TO BUILD A FUCKING BOMB?
I see. So you want to punish them not because they HAVE weapons but because they COULD HAVE weapons.
I hate to be the first to break this news to you, but it's not illegal to be able to have weapons. Germany, for example, could have had the A bomb for decades. But we didn't want it. If you bomb every country that could have the A bomb by now, you have to bomb everyone. I suggest, for practical reasons, that we stick to the people who actually have committed crimes, not to those who could conceivably commit them in the future.
Yes, Saddam has commited crimes. And his country was bombed and chained to the ground for that. It is but a pale shadow of its former glory. It is time to end their suffering (in case you haven't thought about this before: all the suffering Iraqis spend their time hating the USA). Rebuild their country and give them a chance to be peers and they will be peers. Oppress them for another decade and you will breed a whole new generation of people who hate the USA.
Asshole
What an impressive display of "innate ability for langauge". I can understand why the US military would give people with your skill set a second chance to be shot in a foreign country so Mr Bush can make more money by relocating jobs to Mexico. After all, it takes the very brightest to not only be cannon fodder for their exploiters, but be proud of it!
By the way, since you believe what Iraq says about their weapons, do you also believe the inspectors are spies?
Interesting idea. I have never considered this possibility. Why would anyone want to spy on Iraq, when it is so obvious that they are technologically far behind?
No, I don't think the inspectors are spies. I think they are independent, until there is evidence that says otherwise.
I'm suspicious of whether you really care what the inspectors say or find (if you don't trust them, after all)
What makes you think I don't trust them? I think they are the investigative arm of the UNO. I find it very troubling that there are no weapons inspections in all the other countries with weapons of mass destruction (like USA, UK, Israel, France,...) as well. Otherwise it's not fair.
And my opinion here is that we need to give Saddam a real option here. We can still avoid war. So far Saddam has complied with everything, even the most humiliating and degrading stuff. What a sorry dictator he is, I mean look at him! He can't fly around over his own country! Foreigners are conducting unannounced inspections in his industry (what would you say if that happened to industry in your country? I'd shout "industrial espionage!", that's for sure)... If Saddam had a way out, he would take it. He does not care for war. All he wants is rebuild his country. And that's hard enough, given that all the money he makes from the oil he drills out of the earth goes directly to the USA, so how is he supposed to feed his population?
For all we know he might have sold the bio weapons to Afghanistan or some terrorist state. Who cares? He does not have them any more, unless someone proves him guilty. That is by the way the moral standard most western nations adopt for their own citizen. There is no reason to treat nations any different.
You know how long it would take to find biological weapons in the USA? What would you guess? A day? A week? Do you have an idea just how many biological and chemical weapons the USA have?
Oh, I can hear you say, "that does not count!" "We are not using them on our own population!" Actually yes, the USA did test their ABC weapons on their own population. And I'm not only talking about the Anthrax letters (although the "it was a madman acting on his own" defense is always easy. Would you buy it if Saddam used it?).
Would you know whether he sold those bio weapons to the USA? How do you know it hasn't happened? After all, the US government censored the Iraqi weapons papers from 12000 pages to a measly 3500 pages (and now Bush has the chuzpe to claim there is stuff missing! No shit, Sherlock!?). Why would they do that?
There are an awful lot of unanswered questions, and currently most of the smoking guns are in the hands of the US government, not the Iraqis. For example, Bush cited a nonexistant study to "prove" that Iraq is building an A bomb, the fabricated "5 terrorists" that were trying to invade the US through Canada were another recent case,... If we just count the number of lies and deceit, it's not Iraq that needs to be bombed, it's Washington, DC.
Oh, and did you know that Saddam asked Bush Sr. for permission before attacking Kuweit? And that Bush Sr. told him that that he considers that an internal matter of the middle east and would not interfere? No? Why do you think you are well informed enough to have an opinion on the matter, then?
Yes, those questions are unpleasant. But they have to be asked; preferably before you start the bombing.
Oh come on, there are no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. The USA has had a massive surveillance operation running for years, they have spy sattelites and planes, and they bugged the phone lines, and they gave their info to the UN inspectors, and the inspectors conducted 250 unannounced surprise raids on those places and still found nothing!
How much more proof do you need that Iraq does not have weapons of mass destruction?
Spamming them may be a good plan to waste enough of their time to delay their progress, but it sure isn't stopping them from using the ones they have now -- because they don't have any!
By the way: read this poll result in Portugal; more than 70% of the population think that the USA is the biggest threat to world peace today. 3% say it's Iraq, 1% say it's China. 12% say it's Israel.
All this warmongering will only make things worse. First of all, it gave North Korea a legitimate excuse to leave the nuclear proliferation treaty. After all, Bush said he will to preventive strikes against his enemies, and he said North Korea is part of the Axis of Evil, so he actually gave North Korea the only good excuse to build more weapons.
Bush should focus on rebuilding the economy he ruined so thoroughly, not on bombing Iraq and alienating Europe. Do you have any idea how frightened the South Koreans must be now, and all of that just because of a few dumb remarks from Mr. Bush?
I consider GNOME and KDE big failures of open source. They could have epitomized great design, they could have demonstrated how to write reliable, fast software. Instead, they are bug ridden bloat monsters. I'm ready to puke when I see my notebook start to swap when I open konqueror.
And I don't follow your directory service rant. Obviously you have never even looked at the commercial directory services, because they suck even worse than openldap (and we both know that is a feat not easily achieved).
By the way, you invalidate your whole rant by counting as success only software that has been mentioned favourably in the (spectacularly uninformed) mass media, not software that is actually well done. Nautilus, for example, is the slowest piece of file managing software I have ever seen. I always thought it is a parody rather than a file manager, how can anyone use anything this slow in his day to day life? Sure it looks good, if you have the time to wait half an hour for it to draw your home directory.
And about that office stuff: we are using TeX in our office. We write our letters in it and then we put them in CVS so we can work on them collaboratively. Then we can do full-text searches in them. We once trained a secretary to use TeX who only knew Windows before. It took her less than one week to work productively with TeX.
There are lots of great successes in the free software world. Most people are just too badly informed to know them.
Good Software is not about more features! Good Software is about doing it safely, reliably and securely. Good software is about doing it well, not doing more.
Adding more features will only make the software worse. More bloat, less easy to understand and use, needs more hardware, and the documentation usually lags behind as well.
North Korea may not want to take over the world, but they definitely have plans to invade South Korea and Japan.
How do you know that?
We could've ruled the world long ago. After WW II, we were the only real power left on Earth. It would've been easy to establish the first truly global empire and rule the entire planet. Instead, we rebuilt Europe and Japan, then went home.
Actually, the USA did establish what was needed for a world-wide presence of weapons of mass destruction. Why are South Korea and Taiwan not Communist? Because the USA can put troops and aircraft carriers and nuke submarines there if they are not. This in turn can be used to threaten the whole region and give China reason to be worried. But when Russia tried to do the same using Cuba as a base, Kennedy almost blew up the whole world by escalating the situation further and further. I find it most amusing how the USA still managed to let this man be known as a hero in the history books.
And the rebuilding of Germany was done to prevent the Russians from gaining power in Europe. The USA established many military bases in Germany and coincidentally most of these troops are now being moved to Iraqi borders. The USA helped keep Berlin allied because they installed a huge SIGINT listening post and a monster propaganda radio station there to subvert the Soviet Bloc.
Are you kidding, or just ignorant? Russia has more nukes than us,
No. See the numbers from the BBC. Those are from 2001; I couldn't find newer numbers. Feel free to post a link to a source with more recent numbers.
and the only biological and chemical weapons we have left are used for training and research only, not research into new weapons mind you, but how to defend against them.
Funny, that is exactly what Saddam Hussein has saying for years about his biological and chemical weapons.
First, we actually do allow the UN and Russia to inspect our weapons of mass destruction. They ensure compliance with several arms control treaties.
Funny, I thought Bush unilaterally declared that the USA would no longer honour those treaties. Do you have more recent information on this?
Someone else would always rearm and try to assert their power.
I am impressed by the depth of your argument. This should really convince everybody that it's a good idea to spend tax money on weapons of mass destruction instead of feeding the hungry and providing health care to the population.
This is partly what we're seeing now with Al Qaeda, a non-governmental organization waging war across international borders.
You do appear to be amazingly well informed; better even than the US government who could fabrica^Wproduce no proof for this even when expressly asked for it by the UNO. Would you mind telling us your sources?
By the way: war is what countries wage against each other. If it's not a country, it's not war. What Al Quaeda allegedly does is called terrorism, not war. Declaring war on terrorism is about as stupid as declaring war on drugs... uh, never mind.
Your utopia will never exist, and besides, I wouldn't want to live there.
To be hondest, I wouldn't want you to join us there either.
You also have a severe misunderstanding of the Islamic fundamentalist terrorists' mindset.
Wow! You continue to amaze me! You also have a deep understanding of the Islamic fundamentalist terrorists' mindset? I heard the US government is looking for people with your skills and qualifications. Why don't you talk to them? After all the valuable information and deep thoughts you posted here, there are virtually guaranteed to hire you on the spot!
The most he ever did was lob a few cruise missiles at empty training camps and pharmeceutical factories.
Funny you should mention that. Destroying that one pharmaceutical factory killed at least an order of magnitude more people than 9/11 killed. And all of them were civilists, most of them small children. We can only guess at the exact body count and the blood Mr. Clinton has on his hands here, but the order of magnitude is quite breathtaking.
Mr Bush will have to launch a war of epic proportions to come close to the mass destruction his predecessors have caused in the region. But I am confident in him. His decisions seem untroubled by the magnitude of the suffering he is causing to others, that should make it easier for him to launch this war.
By the way: I heard a nice theory about the Iraq war. I heard that Iraq was forced to pay reparations to Kuwait, and they didn't have the money (of course, Bush Sj bombed it all away). So US banks gave the money to Kuwait and now Iraq has to give the proceedings from their oil sales to the US banks to pay off this debt. The theory now states that the banks are afraid that Mr Hussein might declare bankruptcy and that would collapse the US banking system which is already troubled by the recession. I don't know how much of this is true, but it at least sounds plausible.
Slashdot Mirror
We can say a lot about Americans. That they are stupid egomaniac boars who don't know anything besides their own country, that their education system is horrible beyond repair, that they think with their cruise missiles, ...
but we can't blame them for the current government.
It was not voted by the majority of the US voters.
Sheesh, people like you make Linux look more and more like Windows.
"No, we don't need functionality, we need a framework!" (add "distributed", "real-time", "platform-independent" or "byte-code" to enhance the buzziness)
"No, we don't need functionality, we need a pretty GUI!"
"No, we don't need functionality, we need XML support!"
I was able to build an embedded video playing machine using mplayer and Linux on a VIA C3 box in just 8 Megs of boot image size! Forget all that framework and XML and X and GUI and Gtk bullshit. You can stick your GNOME and ORBit where the sun don't shine. I just want to view movies on my machine, without your framework mania forcing me to install 3.1415e926 dependency packages first.
That is the reason why mplayer rules by such a margin: it doesn't need fifty trillion packages which add no real value to the application itself.
by limiting other people's freedom and trying to create an artificial scarcity in one of the very few areas of our lives where we live in a world of plenty.
And on top of that they try to create good emotions for their products by basing it on other people's work and calling it "open source". The only catch is that you have to pay them to distribute binaries?! WTF? Neither openssl nor ogg nor vorbis require this, why do they?
This smells very bad to me.
By the way, python is legendary for it's bad performance, only Tcl has an even worse reputation. If Java really is outperformed by python, that would be a reason to kill the whole project and shoot the guilty party.
About memory footprint: here is the memory footprint of tcc, which is a tiny C compiler for x86, so you might call it an x86 JIT for C. tcc can also be used to create object files and link them to binaries if you want, so in that respect it actually does more than that Java JRE. It does not have garbage collection or a security manager, but it can do bounds checking.This includes a C parser, a code generator, and a JIT. And it's still just over 600k for a hello world style program.
Also, just because Sun chooses to redefine "minor version" in their newspeak, that does not become the new meaning of the term in English.
Java is a toy language, and always has been. It is a shame to see so much good talent being wasted on in at universities and colleges all over the world. Other languages are also toy languages, but at least they aren't so pretentious.
That sounds really stupid to me.
On my Dell notebook, battery life time halves when I insert the WLAN pcmcia card. That's why I would never buy a notebook where I would have to fiddle with screws to get a mini-pci WLAN card out.
Not being able to disable on-board WLAN would be even worse, obviously.
WLAN is nice, but I don't use it all the time. Just today I spent 5 hours in the train hacking around on my notebook, and with WLAN I would have had to call it quits after 3.5 hours or so.
Wow, Score 4, that's what I call a successful troll!
I don't intend to disturb your rant with facts, but operating systems were initially free as in "you buy our hardware, you get our OS for free". That was not a big deal as that OS only ran on that hardware. On the IBM mainframes, there was even a time where all the applications were free as well, until a court forced IBM to collect money for them because that was anti-competitive.
So it is true that the Unix workstations are being put out of the market by cheap PCs, but Microsoft has nothing to do with it. On the contrary, their workstation software suite (including Office, Visio, Publisher, a database maybe) is more expensive than the workstation. So, and it is you who should get some fresh air here, this happened not because of Microsoft, but in spite of Microsoft.
Also, they were never innovative (MS Word started as demo applet on how a mouse could be used with the first MS Mouse), only layers of bloat upon bloat. The selling point of Linux is not that it's cheap -- or are you seeing people buy PCs with Red Hat by the dozen? No, you are not. So Linux "sells" although you can't actually buy PCs with Linux, that is quite an achievement.
About your crack pipe dreams who is innovating and who is not, I'm not going to waste time with that. Please do get out and get some fresh air.
Both gcc and icc generate code that is not too bad. I don't do Windows, so I wouldn't know MS C. Do they even have a native compiler for ia64? The point is: even if you hand-optimize the code for ia64, it still sucks in comparison to other current architectures. If you consider how many Athlons you could have bought for the money, you don't even want to finish that calculation.
I you understand German, feel free to read a few slides I did recently about the subject.
I recompiled it with EPIC, of course.
The x86 emulation mode is so bad, nobody in their right mind will use it. IIRC it is slower than a 200 MHz Pentium Pro.
Only the bus interface was 64-bit.
i860 was very innovative for the time, I'm not disputing that, but a 64-bit CPU it was not.
Actually, the IA64 performance is very bad in the real world. True, their benchmarks look impressive, but I haven't been able to reproduce that.
;)
I had the opportunity to log in to an 4-way 900 MHz itanic-2 box, which was outperformed by my lowly 900 MHz Pentium 3 notebook by a factor of 4 (single CPU benchmark). I did some mp3 en- and decoding and compiling on the box.
Also, ia64 is spectectularly bad for MPEG-4. Go ask google for ia64 and xvid and you will find a computer science class in Germany trying to optimize ia64 and they found that after their optimizations (which yielded a big speed-up) ia64 still was handily outperformed by their el-cheapo desktop Athlons.
Take those benchmarks with a grain of salt. I basically think that IA64 is a big flop. Intel needs a miracle to make people buy this crap. But, as they say, your mileage may vary.
I contest that. First of all, 5 years of backwards compatibility is not an argument for SPARC, it's an argument for x86. x86 has 20 years of backwards compatibility.
Second of all, there are only so many application that people really buy "server hardware" for, and as soon as you put more than 3 Gigs of memory in the machine, you gain performance from 64-bit hardware.
The performance gain is particularly big for databases and applications like full text search that have a large working set. Also, crypto software can in many cases reap substantial gains from the native 64-bit arithmetic. In layman terms that means: 64-bit is good for databases and web servers. And, believe it or not, those are the applications people buy server hardware for.
Application servers are cheaper and more reliably done using a cluster of el-cheapo off-the-shelf x86 machines than one big iron, independent of the number of bits.
In my experience with Alpha it *is* competitive in Integer performance. You won't notice that if all you do is run gcc all day, because gcc historically does more work on Alpha than on x86.
But on my integer applications Alpha has always been competitive. Caveat: it has been a few years since I had an Alpha at my disposal.
But please read the article you are commenting on. Their stats also show that Alpha integer performance is top notch.
1. x86 has been revamped many times. That's why it is still competitive, although its doom has been predicted numerous times.
2. x86 actually has faster floating point than most RISC CPUs. Why don't you actually read the article and look at the stats they give there? In particular thanks to SSE, x86 not only has directly addressable floating point registers but it has huge performance gains to offer for vectorizable calculations. Did you ever ask yourself why all the movie special effects farms have moved their render farms to x86?
3. "Seeing as how IA64 is based on x86"... Care to pass that crack pipe around or are you going to smoke it all alone?
4. "And with IBM announcing further support of the Intel architecture"... ?! What the fsck are you talking about? The only Intel architecture IBM recently announced support for is IA64. You seem mighty confused, man.
PCs do not even today have lousy I/O. In fact, because the PC architecture has less registers, code needs to store stuff in memory more often, which lead to PCs outperforming RISC machines in memory bandwidth over the years. Sun and IBM in particular have been outperformed in RAM bandwidth for over a decade. They mad up for it in good floating point performance, but now the PCs are catching up there as well.
;-)
By the way, AMD's HyperTransport and Hammer memory infrastructure is quite similar to the "perfect scalability" Alpha memory hardware that has been making headlines recently. I expect Hammer to rule the planet here. Madison also has huge memory bandwidth, but it wastes most of it reading NOPs and instructions that are predicated away or otherwise discarded.
Also, if you actually read the article, you will notice that even the PowerPC translates their ugly and complex instruction set to an internal instruction set, which is more RISCy. This is the very thing that RISC afficionados have been using as argument against x86 for years!
The world isn't that black and white.
It would help if they stopped IRCing from their CVS repository machines. That may not make their code more secure, but it will help keep the back doors and trojans out.
I am constantly amazed that people who commit this kind of beginner's mistake have the gall to call their software "secure". And then they ship sendmail and BIND with it. ROTFL
What the hell, I have karma to burn.
If the Debian crowd spent one quarter of the time they whine and debate licensing bullshit doing actual productive work on their distribution, they would actually be getting somewhere.
Just look how Knoppix (which is Debian based) blew their installation system completely into pieces, and that's basically one guy doing this on his own.
Debian is well-known for the fanatic zealot followers and the fact that their releases are years behind the competition. People generally agree that the apt system is great. Why don't they do more stuff like apt and less stuff like trampling the mplayer people's nuts over bogus licensing bullshit? If they don't like the mplayer license, then they should not include mplayer in their distribution. End of dicussion. But please stop wasting everyone else's time.
First of all, it pays our bandwidth and the infrastructure. I'm all for that, obviously.
Second of all, it destroys the validity of their statistics about how many files are downloaded. Their statistics on how much cash they lose through this already are bogus, but now they can't even give good numbers on how many files are transferred, because 3/4 of the downloads may be wasted through broken fake files.
Third of all, this will lead to more cool research in cryptography. There will be papers about how to make this kind of attack more difficult and how to build trust metrics between anonymous peers (and that are very interesting problems, you should consider doing research in the area!).
In the short run, this pays for bandwidth with the profits of the record companies. More bandwidth will be used to do more file sharing. One day, RIAA will understand that they are financing the infrastructure of the enemy and shut overpeer down.
In the long run, RIAA will raise the price for CDs even more, to pay for overpeer and the infrastructure of the P2P people. That will cause even more people to not buy their music but download it instead, hastening RIAA's run towards obsolescence.
But TRIED to join but was refuse due to a curvature of the spine. But due to an innate ability for langauge, computers, and native intelligence, was given a chance, and in the end I opted out.
Please excuse my reluctance to be convinced by your obvious native intelligence and innate ability for "langauge". ROTFL
When a teen in the US can build a fucking BREEDER REACTOR in a shed in his neighbors yard. YOU ARE TELLING ME IT IS AT ALL NOT POSSIBLE THE IRAQUIS DO NOT HAVE THE CHANCE TO BUILD A FUCKING BOMB?
I see. So you want to punish them not because they HAVE weapons but because they COULD HAVE weapons.
I hate to be the first to break this news to you, but it's not illegal to be able to have weapons. Germany, for example, could have had the A bomb for decades. But we didn't want it. If you bomb every country that could have the A bomb by now, you have to bomb everyone. I suggest, for practical reasons, that we stick to the people who actually have committed crimes, not to those who could conceivably commit them in the future.
Yes, Saddam has commited crimes. And his country was bombed and chained to the ground for that. It is but a pale shadow of its former glory. It is time to end their suffering (in case you haven't thought about this before: all the suffering Iraqis spend their time hating the USA). Rebuild their country and give them a chance to be peers and they will be peers. Oppress them for another decade and you will breed a whole new generation of people who hate the USA.
Asshole
What an impressive display of "innate ability for langauge". I can understand why the US military would give people with your skill set a second chance to be shot in a foreign country so Mr Bush can make more money by relocating jobs to Mexico. After all, it takes the very brightest to not only be cannon fodder for their exploiters, but be proud of it!
By the way, since you believe what Iraq says about their weapons, do you also believe the inspectors are spies?
...) as well. Otherwise it's not fair.
Interesting idea. I have never considered this possibility. Why would anyone want to spy on Iraq, when it is so obvious that they are technologically far behind?
No, I don't think the inspectors are spies. I think they are independent, until there is evidence that says otherwise.
I'm suspicious of whether you really care what the inspectors say or find (if you don't trust them, after all)
What makes you think I don't trust them? I think they are the investigative arm of the UNO. I find it very troubling that there are no weapons inspections in all the other countries with weapons of mass destruction (like USA, UK, Israel, France,
And my opinion here is that we need to give Saddam a real option here. We can still avoid war. So far Saddam has complied with everything, even the most humiliating and degrading stuff. What a sorry dictator he is, I mean look at him! He can't fly around over his own country! Foreigners are conducting unannounced inspections in his industry (what would you say if that happened to industry in your country? I'd shout "industrial espionage!", that's for sure)... If Saddam had a way out, he would take it. He does not care for war. All he wants is rebuild his country. And that's hard enough, given that all the money he makes from the oil he drills out of the earth goes directly to the USA, so how is he supposed to feed his population?
For all we know he might have sold the bio weapons to Afghanistan or some terrorist state. Who cares? He does not have them any more, unless someone proves him guilty. That is by the way the moral standard most western nations adopt for their own citizen. There is no reason to treat nations any different.
... If we just count the number of lies and deceit, it's not Iraq that needs to be bombed, it's Washington, DC.
You know how long it would take to find biological weapons in the USA? What would you guess? A day? A week? Do you have an idea just how many biological and chemical weapons the USA have?
Oh, I can hear you say, "that does not count!" "We are not using them on our own population!" Actually yes, the USA did test their ABC weapons on their own population. And I'm not only talking about the Anthrax letters (although the "it was a madman acting on his own" defense is always easy. Would you buy it if Saddam used it?).
Would you know whether he sold those bio weapons to the USA? How do you know it hasn't happened? After all, the US government censored the Iraqi weapons papers from 12000 pages to a measly 3500 pages (and now Bush has the chuzpe to claim there is stuff missing! No shit, Sherlock!?). Why would they do that?
There are an awful lot of unanswered questions, and currently most of the smoking guns are in the hands of the US government, not the Iraqis. For example, Bush cited a nonexistant study to "prove" that Iraq is building an A bomb, the fabricated "5 terrorists" that were trying to invade the US through Canada were another recent case,
Oh, and did you know that Saddam asked Bush Sr. for permission before attacking Kuweit? And that Bush Sr. told him that that he considers that an internal matter of the middle east and would not interfere? No? Why do you think you are well informed enough to have an opinion on the matter, then?
Yes, those questions are unpleasant. But they have to be asked; preferably before you start the bombing.
Oh come on, there are no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. The USA has had a massive surveillance operation running for years, they have spy sattelites and planes, and they bugged the phone lines, and they gave their info to the UN inspectors, and the inspectors conducted 250 unannounced surprise raids on those places and still found nothing!
How much more proof do you need that Iraq does not have weapons of mass destruction?
Spamming them may be a good plan to waste enough of their time to delay their progress, but it sure isn't stopping them from using the ones they have now -- because they don't have any!
By the way: read this poll result in Portugal; more than 70% of the population think that the USA is the biggest threat to world peace today. 3% say it's Iraq, 1% say it's China. 12% say it's Israel.
All this warmongering will only make things worse. First of all, it gave North Korea a legitimate excuse to leave the nuclear proliferation treaty. After all, Bush said he will to preventive strikes against his enemies, and he said North Korea is part of the Axis of Evil, so he actually gave North Korea the only good excuse to build more weapons.
Bush should focus on rebuilding the economy he ruined so thoroughly, not on bombing Iraq and alienating Europe. Do you have any idea how frightened the South Koreans must be now, and all of that just because of a few dumb remarks from Mr. Bush?
Funny how perception can differ.
I consider GNOME and KDE big failures of open source. They could have epitomized great design, they could have demonstrated how to write reliable, fast software. Instead, they are bug ridden bloat monsters. I'm ready to puke when I see my notebook start to swap when I open konqueror.
And I don't follow your directory service rant. Obviously you have never even looked at the commercial directory services, because they suck even worse than openldap (and we both know that is a feat not easily achieved).
By the way, you invalidate your whole rant by counting as success only software that has been mentioned favourably in the (spectacularly uninformed) mass media, not software that is actually well done. Nautilus, for example, is the slowest piece of file managing software I have ever seen. I always thought it is a parody rather than a file manager, how can anyone use anything this slow in his day to day life? Sure it looks good, if you have the time to wait half an hour for it to draw your home directory.
And about that office stuff: we are using TeX in our office. We write our letters in it and then we put them in CVS so we can work on them collaboratively. Then we can do full-text searches in them. We once trained a secretary to use TeX who only knew Windows before. It took her less than one week to work productively with TeX.
There are lots of great successes in the free software world. Most people are just too badly informed to know them.
Good Software is not about more features! Good Software is about doing it safely, reliably and securely. Good software is about doing it well, not doing more.
Adding more features will only make the software worse. More bloat, less easy to understand and use, needs more hardware, and the documentation usually lags behind as well.
Writing software is an art form. It is an exercise in restraint and thinking before you do it, not in gluttony or adding more crap to already crappy software. The world is full of bad software with hundreds of little understood and under-documented features. I'd rather have small, well-documented and reliable software, thank you very much.
Are the security problems less threatening because most hackers are actually peaceful and not interested in destroying other people's property?
I find that hard to believe, especially in the USA where people buy more and more guns although the crime statistics has been going down for years.
Are you leaving your door unlocked because it is not likely someone will try to steal something?
I don't see how this challenges anything. Security bugs need to be fixed ASAP, whether they are exploited or not.
And the rebuilding of Germany was done to prevent the Russians from gaining power in Europe. The USA established many military bases in Germany and coincidentally most of these troops are now being moved to Iraqi borders. The USA helped keep Berlin allied because they installed a huge SIGINT listening post and a monster propaganda radio station there to subvert the Soviet Bloc.
No. See the numbers from the BBC. Those are from 2001; I couldn't find newer numbers. Feel free to post a link to a source with more recent numbers. Funny, that is exactly what Saddam Hussein has saying for years about his biological and chemical weapons. Funny, I thought Bush unilaterally declared that the USA would no longer honour those treaties. Do you have more recent information on this? I am impressed by the depth of your argument. This should really convince everybody that it's a good idea to spend tax money on weapons of mass destruction instead of feeding the hungry and providing health care to the population. You do appear to be amazingly well informed; better even than the US government who could fabrica^Wproduce no proof for this even when expressly asked for it by the UNO. Would you mind telling us your sources?By the way: war is what countries wage against each other. If it's not a country, it's not war. What Al Quaeda allegedly does is called terrorism, not war. Declaring war on terrorism is about as stupid as declaring war on drugs... uh, never mind.
To be hondest, I wouldn't want you to join us there either. Wow! You continue to amaze me! You also have a deep understanding of the Islamic fundamentalist terrorists' mindset? I heard the US government is looking for people with your skills and qualifications. Why don't you talk to them? After all the valuable information and deep thoughts you posted here, there are virtually guaranteed to hire you on the spot! Funny you should mention that. Destroying that one pharmaceutical factory killed at least an order of magnitude more people than 9/11 killed. And all of them were civilists, most of them small children. We can only guess at the exact body count and the blood Mr. Clinton has on his hands here, but the order of magnitude is quite breathtaking.Mr Bush will have to launch a war of epic proportions to come close to the mass destruction his predecessors have caused in the region. But I am confident in him. His decisions seem untroubled by the magnitude of the suffering he is causing to others, that should make it easier for him to launch this war.
By the way: I heard a nice theory about the Iraq war. I heard that Iraq was forced to pay reparations to Kuwait, and they didn't have the money (of course, Bush Sj bombed it all away). So US banks gave the money to Kuwait and now Iraq has to give the proceedings from their oil sales to the US banks to pay off this debt. The theory now states that the banks are afraid that Mr Hussein might declare bankruptcy and that would collapse the US banking system which is already troubled by the recession. I don't know how much of this is true, but it at least sounds plausible.