There is only one way you can get a "fair" test in a situation like this:
Let Microsoft come up with a set of tests to be applied.
Let RedHat come up with a set of tests to be applied.
Compute the union of the two sets of tests.
Let Microsoft specify the target cost of the hardware they want to benchmark on (C1).
Let Redhat specify the target cost of the hardware they want to benchmark on (C2).
Take the geometric mean of the two hardware costs (C=sqrt(C1*C2))
Given C, let Microsoft determine the hardware to be benchmarked on, given the assumption that the purchaser of the hardware will be a third party buying from standard sources (e.g. NewEgg, Dell, IBM, whatever - but not eBay or the like - new hardware only).
Again, given C, let RedHat determine the hardware to be purchased - new hardware only from recognized sources.
Third party buys both sets of hardware and delivers it to RedHat and Microsoft.
Microsoft provides detailed setup and configuration instructions for the test. Microsoft may have access to the hardware for the purposes of determining these settings. Setups are NOT allowed to use non-publicly available code (i.e. applying released service packs is OK, applying custom service packs is NOT allowed).
RedHat provides detailed setup and configuration instructions. RedHat may have access to the hardware for the purposes of determining these settings. Setups are NOT allowed to use non-publicly available code (i.e. released updates via up2date are allowed, but custom code is NOT allowed.)
Both sides return the hardware to the third party, who then verifies the hardware had not been modified (alternatively, the third party purchases 2 sets of hardware for each side, keeping one set.)
Third party performs the installs as per the instructions for both sides.
Third party performs the tests.
Test results, hardware spec, and setup instructions are posted.
This way, each side may tweak their setup to the max, using all specialized knowledge, to get maximum performance. Since each side may run the optimal hardware configuration (given price restrictions), the practice of hobbling the other side by picking ill-supported hardware is prevented.
This test best conforms to the sort of thing an end user would do - pick the best bang for the buck for the budget and task at hand.
Now, this might result in a dual Itanium server (Windows) being benchmarked against a dual Power server (Linux) (or some other comparison), but that is "fair" in that both sides are running on the same COST hardware.
True, each side might "release" a new (service pack|set of RPMs) for the purposes of the test, but as long as those releases are publicly available, who cares? We all benefit from the improvement of the code.
5 WPM is the limit. You have to copy a sample message sent, and then answer 10 questions on the content of the message (e.g. "What was the sender's name? What type of radio were they using?")
You need EITHER:
One minute (25 characters) of solid copy OR
7 out of 10 of the questions right.
I just passed my General (element 1 Morse and element 3 General theory) a week ago last Thursday.
The resolution of this bird is 300 meters, in many more wavelengths than just visible - multiple longband IR, optical, synthetic apeture millimeter radar.
It's like the difference between a 1920x1080 one bit per pixel image and a 640x480 Truecolor image.
Extorting a gambling site? That strikes me as a LLM (life limiting move, c.f. career limiting move).
Many gambling sites still have connections to, shall we say, respectible businessmen of the Italian or Asian pursuasion, who are used to handling such matters extra-legally.
You might just wake up one day with your computer's monitor (cables severed with an ax) in bed with you.
Or Guido and Nunzio standing over you, giving you tips on the finer points of extortion while they wait for the concrete to set.
Don't forget that you need to have depth buffers (so double the memory consumption for the windows).
You also want to have storage for pixmaps that are not necessarily mapped at this instant but could be (e.g. other tabs in Mozilla, icons, etc.) font rendering caches, etc.
Also, one of the goals is to be able to iconify a running app, and have the running app still happily rendering to a full-size pixmap, with the icon in the (TaskBar|Dock|Panel) being a reduced image of that pixmap.
Then you have guys like me who have multiple virtual desktops at full res per desktop....
Several of the graphics card vendors are talking about how to add virtualization to the VRAM already.
Many people have asked "What the @#$%$# would you USE 512M of Video RAM for?"
Others have responded with various games as the killer app.
And perhaps, today, they are the driver for this much VRAM.
However, there is a use for a card with that much VRAM that isn't gaming - compositing window managers.
Apple's MacOS, Microsoft's Longhorn, and *nix's various compositing WMs all operate by giving each active window its own chunk of memory sufficent to hold the whole window, and then treating that memory as a texture for a polygon and letting the 3D hardware do the final compositing onto the display. This allows for effects like translucent windows, smooth window movement, quick resizing of windows, simplified backing store (handling windows overlapping other windows), and many other useful items - these aren't just "eye candy", but things that make the system much more useful.
Now, think about how many windows you have open right now. Think about how many windows a power user may have open. Think about how much memory that can burn to give all those windows their own space.
512M of VRAM isn't overkill for such situations - it's barely enough, and video card vendors are starting to look to supporting virtualization for the card's memory needs (especially in PCI Express cards where the card can have a decent amount of bandwidth to system memory.)
The "Edison Effect" upon which vacuum tubes rely was indeed discovered by Edison - he was attempting to lengthen the life of a light bulb by putting a second wire next to the filament. This did not succeed in lengthening the life of the bulb, but Edison did note there was a small current from the filament to the extra wire. He noted it, patented it, but had no idea of how to make money from it.
It was later that Fleming then discovered the ability to rectify current via this effect. Later, DeForest developed the first triode which could modulate the current via a grid control.
Hence why it is called "The Edison Effect" even though Edison didn't capitalize upon it.
If the ham is leasing the tower, I'm sure that it would in some way violate the non-commercial clause of his license....
Not at all. The ham's use of the airwaves is not being performed for profit, and that is all that matters. Having a piece of equipment that is being used for amateur use and for commercial use is no problem as long as the use of the amateur frequencies is not done for commercial gain.
For example, I can have test equipment that is used both for commercial service work and for amateur service work with no conflict. I can lease space on a tower I own for commercial use with no conflict.
I cannot use 146.52MHz for commercial use. I cannot accept money to relay a message via a traffic net.
In no way does leasing tower space out violate either the letter of the law or the spirit of amateur operation - it is the AIRWAVES that are a public trust, not my tower!
There is a piece of FCC regulation called PRB-1 - it states that a municipality cannot place "onerous" regulations that needlessly restrict an amateur radio operator from erecting antennas sufficient to perform his duties.
This doesn't mean that I can erect a 1000' tower on my property building-codes-be-damned, but it does mean that the county cannot flat-out deny me the right to construct a reasonable tower.
This is being used by some cell companies to set up towers in areas they otherwise cannot - the gameplan goes something like this:
Cell company tries to get permission to erect tower normally.
Company is denied by BANANA's and NIMBY's.
Company looks up all hams in area.
Company checks public records, finds all hams who own property in area, and locates hams near where they need a tower.
Company approaches ham - "You apply for tower. We fund it. We build it. You own it. We lease it. You can put your stuff on it."
Crack of thunder as ham exceeds Mach 1 to get building permit.
NIMBY's and BANANA's oppose.
Ham invokes PRB-1. Ham gets permit.
Ham has nifty tower, a nice little side income, and great cell reception.
PoE can use either the extra leads, or can impress power by placing a DC potential between the standards TX and RX pairs, which is then recovered by the powered device by using a center tap on each of the RX and TX transformers.
Telephones are VERY limited in the amount of power they are allowed to draw - only a few milliamps of current (and that only for ringing, which gets a nominal 90VAC applied at the telco end), and they are to operate over a very wide voltage range.
Off-hook they are only allowed to pull a miniscule amount of power.
PoE is just another kludge being standardized because the industry is too lazy and stupid to define a proper standard.
Ethernet cables were designed to carry DATA, not power. Running a 12W computer off PoE with any kind of distance to the power providing hub is going to require about 20W of input to make it work - with the 8W difference going to heat the cables.
With all the concern over the leakage current of wall warts, this is an improvement?
Consider the history of bad decisions like this:
"Power Points" in cars. Lighter sockets were designed for lighters, not laptops. They have poor mechanical retention (because the lighter needs to be able to pop out when hot), high contact resistance (so what if the contacts get hot? They are SUPPOSED to get hot!), and a really nasty failure mode (Lil' Billy dropping a penny in them while he waits for mommy to get out of the store). But rather than defining a sensible power connection, the automobile industry lazily continue to push lighter sockets as a power point.
Now we have this stupid idea. "But Ethernet is standard world-wide, and power jacks aren't!"
So? How about coming up with a standard power/data services jack and deploying it? It's not like Ethernet jacks were a natural phenominon - they were a standard which was created and deployed.
A nice standard power/data jack, with a standardized supply voltage high enough to move a reasonable amount of power through reasonably sized wires, and a data services jack designed to *move data* would be so much nicer in the end.
Also, consider this: You have your plant with a bunch of these PoE computer terminals, each tapping power from your central hub. Each computer will inject a small amount of noise onto the line - that's just a fact of life. How much will that noise start to degrade the network signal - especially when you start talking about gigabit Ethernet?
What if we just standardize on, say, a pair of Anderson Power Pole connectors supplying 24VDC at 2A max, right under a standard RJ-45 Ethernet jack. Devices which want to pull power and data have a combined plug which mates to both sets of connectors, standard Ethernet devices use the top port only. Standardize on using 14 gauge wire for power.
Now you have a sensible standard power port that can be used internationally, still requires the user to just plug one thing in, and isn't a kludge!
(O.T. What is with/. suddenly deciding to replace </li> elements with </li><li> ? It screws up making proper HTML lists!)
Since Safari has nothing to do with Firefox, Mozilla, or the Gecko HTML engine, being instead based upon the KHTML engine from KDE, I would say "When can we expect the code to flow out and make Firefox/Mozilla pass the Acid2 test? Never."
If you show me a login prompt, you'd damn well better be ready for me to log in.
I don't like the statement "We can allow the user to input their name and password, so long as we don't process it until the system is stable."
BZZZT! WRONG ANSWER!
I don't mind bringing up X, and showing the boot process info, but do NOT give me a prompt for my username until you are ready for me to log in.
Personally, I think the whole way init works needs to be revisted - it would be better if you could start all the init processes at once, with each having its standard input, output, and error going into init. If startup script FOO requires service BAR to be active before it proceeds, then BAR ought to provide a means for FOO to check if BAR is ready (and block if not).
init would then display the different output streams "as needed" (if an init script runs to a successful completion then who cares to see the output - ideally only if anything appears on stderr would init show the messages from a script), and would allow the administrator to interact with a failing init script as needed.
Trusted computing is OK, ifyou can trust the OS, and the OS trusts YOU.
I have no problem with Linux supporting the TPA, as I can trust Linux to do what I want it to do. I can trust Linux to not lock out apps that aren't signed by somebody I don't control (e.g. Microsoft) - in other words I can trust Linux to allow ME to specify who may/must sign my apps.
In such a situation, the acceleration provided by having hardware encryption routines is great!
Now, if I cannot trust the OS to trust me (*cough*Longhorn*cough*), then I definitely do not trust Trusted Computing.
There are three things the poor maintainance programmer who has to maintain your code needs to know: The What, the Why, and the How.
The What: What is this code trying to do. This is where your design documents come in, as they tell what the overall goal of the program is.
The Why: Why are you doing what you are doing? Why are you writing to this hardware register twice? Why do you divide this value by 1800 here? This is where comments are needed - to explain that the hardware sometimes doesn't take the value on the read, or that the nominal deviation of this signal is 1800 Hz.
The How: How are you getting the work done. This is where well written code with well chosen variable names comes in.
Slashdot Mirror
This way, each side may tweak their setup to the max, using all specialized knowledge, to get maximum performance. Since each side may run the optimal hardware configuration (given price restrictions), the practice of hobbling the other side by picking ill-supported hardware is prevented.
This test best conforms to the sort of thing an end user would do - pick the best bang for the buck for the budget and task at hand.
Now, this might result in a dual Itanium server (Windows) being benchmarked against a dual Power server (Linux) (or some other comparison), but that is "fair" in that both sides are running on the same COST hardware.
True, each side might "release" a new (service pack|set of RPMs) for the purposes of the test, but as long as those releases are publicly available, who cares? We all benefit from the improvement of the code.
Aye, that's the rub - do I get a $400 mobile 10M rig, or do I get the $1200 SDR-2000 that I can really play with (since I do SDR for a living)?
Or do I just run QRP on my COM-120B or 2975....
You need EITHER:
OR
I just passed my General (element 1 Morse and element 3 General theory) a week ago last Thursday.
(Now I have to bone up for my Extra...)
You are missing something.
The resolution of this bird is 300 meters, in many more wavelengths than just visible - multiple longband IR, optical, synthetic apeture millimeter radar.
It's like the difference between a 1920x1080 one bit per pixel image and a 640x480 Truecolor image.
An analogy sure to piss off the Microshills around here:
"Oh, so what you thought was crack cocaine was really just baking soda and Pop-Rocks? Sorry - here's some real coke so you don't stop being addicted."
Extorting a gambling site? That strikes me as a LLM (life limiting move, c.f. career limiting move).
Many gambling sites still have connections to, shall we say, respectible businessmen of the Italian or Asian pursuasion, who are used to handling such matters extra-legally.
You might just wake up one day with your computer's monitor (cables severed with an ax) in bed with you.
Or Guido and Nunzio standing over you, giving you tips on the finer points of extortion while they wait for the concrete to set.
Don't forget that you need to have depth buffers (so double the memory consumption for the windows).
You also want to have storage for pixmaps that are not necessarily mapped at this instant but could be (e.g. other tabs in Mozilla, icons, etc.) font rendering caches, etc.
Also, one of the goals is to be able to iconify a running app, and have the running app still happily rendering to a full-size pixmap, with the icon in the (TaskBar|Dock|Panel) being a reduced image of that pixmap.
Then you have guys like me who have multiple virtual desktops at full res per desktop....
Several of the graphics card vendors are talking about how to add virtualization to the VRAM already.
Many people have asked "What the @#$%$# would you USE 512M of Video RAM for?"
Others have responded with various games as the killer app.
And perhaps, today, they are the driver for this much VRAM.
However, there is a use for a card with that much VRAM that isn't gaming - compositing window managers.
Apple's MacOS, Microsoft's Longhorn, and *nix's various compositing WMs all operate by giving each active window its own chunk of memory sufficent to hold the whole window, and then treating that memory as a texture for a polygon and letting the 3D hardware do the final compositing onto the display. This allows for effects like translucent windows, smooth window movement, quick resizing of windows, simplified backing store (handling windows overlapping other windows), and many other useful items - these aren't just "eye candy", but things that make the system much more useful.
Now, think about how many windows you have open right now. Think about how many windows a power user may have open. Think about how much memory that can burn to give all those windows their own space.
512M of VRAM isn't overkill for such situations - it's barely enough, and video card vendors are starting to look to supporting virtualization for the card's memory needs (especially in PCI Express cards where the card can have a decent amount of bandwidth to system memory.)
Just create some dummy accounts, and mark the people you don't like as foes of those accounts.
Then make those accounts friends of your main account, and set your "Foes of friends" modifier appropriately.
To be even more precise:
The "Edison Effect" upon which vacuum tubes rely was indeed discovered by Edison - he was attempting to lengthen the life of a light bulb by putting a second wire next to the filament. This did not succeed in lengthening the life of the bulb, but Edison did note there was a small current from the filament to the extra wire. He noted it, patented it, but had no idea of how to make money from it.
It was later that Fleming then discovered the ability to rectify current via this effect. Later, DeForest developed the first triode which could modulate the current via a grid control.
Hence why it is called "The Edison Effect" even though Edison didn't capitalize upon it.
Not at all. The ham's use of the airwaves is not being performed for profit, and that is all that matters. Having a piece of equipment that is being used for amateur use and for commercial use is no problem as long as the use of the amateur frequencies is not done for commercial gain.
For example, I can have test equipment that is used both for commercial service work and for amateur service work with no conflict. I can lease space on a tower I own for commercial use with no conflict.
I cannot use 146.52MHz for commercial use. I cannot accept money to relay a message via a traffic net.
In no way does leasing tower space out violate either the letter of the law or the spirit of amateur operation - it is the AIRWAVES that are a public trust, not my tower!
This doesn't mean that I can erect a 1000' tower on my property building-codes-be-damned, but it does mean that the county cannot flat-out deny me the right to construct a reasonable tower.
This is being used by some cell companies to set up towers in areas they otherwise cannot - the gameplan goes something like this:
PoE can use either the extra leads, or can impress power by placing a DC potential between the standards TX and RX pairs, which is then recovered by the powered device by using a center tap on each of the RX and TX transformers.
So you CAN run PoE on GigE.
Sooooo....
What is the trust rank of CBS? Of 60 Minutes?
Telephones are VERY limited in the amount of power they are allowed to draw - only a few milliamps of current (and that only for ringing, which gets a nominal 90VAC applied at the telco end), and they are to operate over a very wide voltage range.
Off-hook they are only allowed to pull a miniscule amount of power.
I'm not saying "Change the power lines" - you may notice that I specifically stated the power supplied would be DC, not AC.
So, instead of changing all the infrastructure to supply power on Ethernet, change all the infrastructure to supply proper power.
Ethernet cables were designed to carry DATA, not power. Running a 12W computer off PoE with any kind of distance to the power providing hub is going to require about 20W of input to make it work - with the 8W difference going to heat the cables.
With all the concern over the leakage current of wall warts, this is an improvement?
Consider the history of bad decisions like this:
Now we have this stupid idea. "But Ethernet is standard world-wide, and power jacks aren't!"
So? How about coming up with a standard power/data services jack and deploying it? It's not like Ethernet jacks were a natural phenominon - they were a standard which was created and deployed.
A nice standard power/data jack, with a standardized supply voltage high enough to move a reasonable amount of power through reasonably sized wires, and a data services jack designed to *move data* would be so much nicer in the end.
Also, consider this: You have your plant with a bunch of these PoE computer terminals, each tapping power from your central hub. Each computer will inject a small amount of noise onto the line - that's just a fact of life. How much will that noise start to degrade the network signal - especially when you start talking about gigabit Ethernet?
What if we just standardize on, say, a pair of Anderson Power Pole connectors supplying 24VDC at 2A max, right under a standard RJ-45 Ethernet jack. Devices which want to pull power and data have a combined plug which mates to both sets of connectors, standard Ethernet devices use the top port only. Standardize on using 14 gauge wire for power.
Now you have a sensible standard power port that can be used internationally, still requires the user to just plug one thing in, and isn't a kludge!
(O.T. What is with
Since Safari has nothing to do with Firefox, Mozilla, or the Gecko HTML engine, being instead based upon the KHTML engine from KDE, I would say "When can we expect the code to flow out and make Firefox/Mozilla pass the Acid2 test? Never."
Just so long as they hold to this one principle:
If you show me a login prompt, you'd damn well better be ready for me to log in.
I don't like the statement "We can allow the user to input their name and password, so long as we don't process it until the system is stable."
BZZZT! WRONG ANSWER!
I don't mind bringing up X, and showing the boot process info, but do NOT give me a prompt for my username until you are ready for me to log in.
Personally, I think the whole way init works needs to be revisted - it would be better if you could start all the init processes at once, with each having its standard input, output, and error going into init. If startup script FOO requires service BAR to be active before it proceeds, then BAR ought to provide a means for FOO to check if BAR is ready (and block if not).
init would then display the different output streams "as needed" (if an init script runs to a successful completion then who cares to see the output - ideally only if anything appears on stderr would init show the messages from a script), and would allow the administrator to interact with a failing init script as needed.
I could argue that, since only one mission used the Salyut 1, it was not a *true* space station - unlike Skylab and Mir.
However, I'll concede your point - which does little to negate my main point that Mir was NOT the first space station by any means.
Both Skylab and Mir were deorbited at the end of their missions, after quite a long time in orbit.
So, what would the difference be again?
Excuse me?
MIR was launched February 20, 1986.
Skylab was launched 28 July 1973.
I am all for giving the Russians their due for their many firsts, but "first space station" is NOT among them.
Trusted computing is OK, if you can trust the OS, and the OS trusts YOU.
I have no problem with Linux supporting the TPA, as I can trust Linux to do what I want it to do. I can trust Linux to not lock out apps that aren't signed by somebody I don't control (e.g. Microsoft) - in other words I can trust Linux to allow ME to specify who may/must sign my apps.
In such a situation, the acceleration provided by having hardware encryption routines is great!
Now, if I cannot trust the OS to trust me (*cough*Longhorn*cough*), then I definitely do not trust Trusted Computing.
There are three things the poor maintainance programmer who has to maintain your code needs to know: The What, the Why, and the How.
The What: What is this code trying to do. This is where your design documents come in, as they tell what the overall goal of the program is.
The Why: Why are you doing what you are doing? Why are you writing to this hardware register twice? Why do you divide this value by 1800 here? This is where comments are needed - to explain that the hardware sometimes doesn't take the value on the read, or that the nominal deviation of this signal is 1800 Hz.
The How: How are you getting the work done. This is where well written code with well chosen variable names comes in.
Sorry, but I only insult intelligent life forms.
Arthur Dent was about as low as I go.
(this also explains why I don't waste my time on most of the posters here.)