not everyone who reads or posts to/. is in the US... so, in this context at least, the contents of our constitution are not an absolute
Re:Are 5% speedup noticable ?
on
KDE 2.2.2
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· Score: 2
I'd agree - any years ago when people were just starting to build 2d graphics accelerators I was architecting them for one of the Mac companies... one of the things that became obvious pretty soon was that subjective and objective performance is very different - objective stuff like mega-pixels/sec is great for marketing people to argue about but subjective stuff is in many ways more important.
I became convinced that subjective speed sort of lived on an S-shaped curve - on the left the curve is flat, things are terrilbly slow and making stuff faster doesn't much reduce the user's frustration level, at some point you hit the middle of the curve, this seems to be a log-based region - you need to make the accelerator roughly 10x faster for the user to experience a perceptualy better increase in performance (this is the area where you can compete for accelerator performance in the marketplace), eventually you hit another flat region where the user experience is 'fast enough' and they don't much care or notice if they are faster (this is the region where marketting people argue about pixel-rates or triangles/sec etc).
Things are a little different for the 3d world - the top-end flat region exists for any particular game - for example it doesn't do quake much good to do 100fps if the display hardware can only do 85 or 75. On the other hand you can trade off frame rate for quality (but remember there's a relatively fixed number of pixels on the screen you only have to get them right to do a 'perfect' rendering.
At what point does this top being Microsofts fault and start being the fault of the millions of users? If people didn't buy the software or use the software, a monopoly would not exist!
Have you not been reading the case? at least one of the points at issue is that M$ has been forcing hardware vewndors who sell its product to not carry competing products (ie. if you want to make a PC with Windows on it you can't sell PCs with Linux or Be, or etc on it).
The result - I couldn't buy a laptop with Linux, or even a blank one to put Linux on myself - now because of the DoJ suit things have changed (a little). That's called "leveraging a monopoly" it's illegal
So long as a customer goes to buy a PC at a brand leader like Dell, or Compaq, or Gateway and they don't have a choice of a non-M$ OS, or of one without an OS (at a lower price of course) then we don't have a choice.
PS: you want to buy all the old copies of Windows I was forced to buy with my last few computers? oh wait I'm not allowed to sell them - I was forced to pay for them, declined to accept the license but seemingly am still bound by conditions in the license I didn't accept that bar me from selling it
Yup - think of it as M$ being able to print $900M in money and then using it to pay their fine (and unlike when the govt prints real money - the effect of giving this to schools that wouldn't be buying M$ stuff anyway there's little 'inflation').
But to top this off - after doing this not only is M$ off the hook for all the court trouble it's in but then it can also write off the $900M it created on their corporate income taxes.
That's right they do this transaction that costs them almost nothing, we say "you've learned your lesson for abusing your monopoly" and THEN we (the tax payers) PAY THEM a rebate
I found myself at my local CompUSA this morning looking for inkjet cartridges when it opened.... they were handing out numbers at the door nd when they ran out people were pissed....
ok - as a one-time algol programmer, and user of Unix V6 (god I'm dating myself:-) - I think Steve had Algol68, not Algol itself on the brain.
Circa 1971 Algol68 was a 'state of the art launguage', mind you it was one that proved to be a bit too hard to implement well. Most of the easy stuff ended up in Pascal (and some in pascal).
C's 'struct' and 'union' keywords for example almost surely came from (or via) algol68
just like you can't tell whether someone's talking on a phone, or just to their own personal daemons in the street these days.... pretty soon on the bus you wont be able to tell whether they guy next to you is working.... or having a good time
no two 'identical' chips will run at the same rate - just like the overclockers people will fight over 'known good batch numbers'.
Or more likely Intel (by then the only CPU company left of course) will start binning by actualy performance - look for "runs Win 95 fast enough", "runs NT fast enough" and the expensive "runs XP a bit" speed grades
The best technologo doesn't ALWAYS win (think Windows Media...), but more often than not, and that gives time to sort out the better from the good. Right now, though, we do live with a lot of different, competing standards that are quite frustrating.
That's why anti-monopoly laws are great - they let competition occur on a fair playing field - you don't get a platform owner freezing out better standards for their own gain.
You failed the SAT analogies thingy didn't you.... he didn't compare Gates to bin Laden - he compared a real statement by Gates to one that bin Laden might have made in some parallel universe and then tried to point out that both would be equally absurd
You then totally misread his posting and used it as an excuse to attack "linux zealots" - maybe you come from that parallel universe
I'm one of PacBell's first DSL customers, and unlike others I've had wonderfull service from them (maybe 1 hour down time in a couple of years).... well I did untill a couple of weeks ago... my line went down, I was patient and waited a day to let them get their act together.... when nothing happened I called the hell known as "telephone support"... after chasing thru voicemail who when told I had a Linux system told me that she could not EVER fix my problem.
By this time I'd already debugged the problem, both from inside and outside and knew exactly which of their routers was misconfigured... I have a fixed IP, hadn't rebooted my Linux firewall for over a year so it shouldn't matter which machine I run. No amount of persuasion would convince her that she should get beyond "you have Linux we won't fix your problem".
Eventually I bit my lip and borrowed a windows box - went thru voicemail hell, then had to be handheld through "are you sure you typed in you IP address correctly" "but I tell you your router needs it's tables fixed" proccess at least 3-4 times before we got to "I'll refer you to my 2nd tier support - they'll call you on monday" (they didn't - in the end I was down 6 days, up a day down 4 more days before they fixed the problem - I did the telephone hell thing 7 times before stuff came back)
Anyway one thing I realised - the people you call at the phone company when your line goes down know NOTHING about networking... they're not trained to fix networking problems... they are trained to fix M$ system setup problems, nothing else - not only that but they are pretty obviously under great pressure to fix ALL tech support problems this way - when I finally got through to the 2nd level people who actually know what they were doing things came back in under 5 minutes. However it's also pretty obvious that these people don't work weekends.
It's pretty sad when your only usefull options for net connection consist of "the phone company" and "the cable company" - remember when you used to have a local ISP - and you could talk to someone who actually knows what they are doing
"I am so sick of Linux geeks that make unsubstantiated claims without any preexisting evidence"
Boy are you in the wrong place.... I think M$ has this little place called msn.com just for you... I hear they're even makeing progress with their technical means of keep the Linux geeks out
actually my connectivity options seem to have been reduced to "the phone company" ("we don't support Linux - I don't care if your DSL is broken if you have Linux on it we wont fix it") and "the cable company" ("don't even think about putting your personal server on it").
I'm starting to miss the heady days when anyone could start an ISP in their garage and they attracted customers by actually responding to their needs, not some lowest common denominator.
Oh well, I bet next month I'll get that "you'll have to sign up with MSN if you want to send outgoing mail" message from PacBell just like the Qwest people have gotten....
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not everyone who reads or posts to /. is in the US ... so, in this context at least, the contents of our constitution are not an absolute
I became convinced that subjective speed sort of lived on an S-shaped curve - on the left the curve is flat, things are terrilbly slow and making stuff faster doesn't much reduce the user's frustration level, at some point you hit the middle of the curve, this seems to be a log-based region - you need to make the accelerator roughly 10x faster for the user to experience a perceptualy better increase in performance (this is the area where you can compete for accelerator performance in the marketplace), eventually you hit another flat region where the user experience is 'fast enough' and they don't much care or notice if they are faster (this is the region where marketting people argue about pixel-rates or triangles/sec etc).
Things are a little different for the 3d world - the top-end flat region exists for any particular game - for example it doesn't do quake much good to do 100fps if the display hardware can only do 85 or 75. On the other hand you can trade off frame rate for quality (but remember there's a relatively fixed number of pixels on the screen you only have to get them right to do a 'perfect' rendering.
And I did a V6 port to the vax
read the findings of fact in the case
Have you not been reading the case? at least one of the points at issue is that M$ has been forcing hardware vewndors who sell its product to not carry competing products (ie. if you want to make a PC with Windows on it you can't sell PCs with Linux or Be, or etc on it).
The result - I couldn't buy a laptop with Linux, or even a blank one to put Linux on myself - now because of the DoJ suit things have changed (a little). That's called "leveraging a monopoly" it's illegal
So long as a customer goes to buy a PC at a brand leader like Dell, or Compaq, or Gateway and they don't have a choice of a non-M$ OS, or of one without an OS (at a lower price of course) then we don't have a choice.
PS: you want to buy all the old copies of Windows I was forced to buy with my last few computers? oh wait I'm not allowed to sell them - I was forced to pay for them, declined to accept the license but seemingly am still bound by conditions in the license I didn't accept that bar me from selling it
But to top this off - after doing this not only is M$ off the hook for all the court trouble it's in but then it can also write off the $900M it created on their corporate income taxes.
That's right they do this transaction that costs them almost nothing, we say "you've learned your lesson for abusing your monopoly" and THEN we (the tax payers) PAY THEM a rebate
I found myself at my local CompUSA this morning looking for inkjet cartridges when it opened .... they were handing out numbers at the door nd when they ran out people were pissed ....
Circa 1971 Algol68 was a 'state of the art launguage', mind you it was one that proved to be a bit too hard to implement well. Most of the easy stuff ended up in Pascal (and some in pascal).
C's 'struct' and 'union' keywords for example almost surely came from (or via) algol68
3,s company, all in the family, sanford & son, .... there's a million
:-)
KDE on a 1600x1200 latop screen is lovely, especially if you turn on anti-aliasing in the latest builds
just like you can't tell whether someone's talking on a phone, or just to their own personal daemons in the street these days .... pretty soon on the bus you wont be able to tell whether they guy next to you is working .... or having a good time
Or more likely Intel (by then the only CPU company left of course) will start binning by actualy performance - look for "runs Win 95 fast enough", "runs NT fast enough" and the expensive "runs XP a bit" speed grades
gotta race up there and set up that tux-tattoo-on-the butt parlor franchise in Redmond ....
nah ... if you want quake you need that beaker full of nano-monkeys with nano-typewriters ....
That's why anti-monopoly laws are great - they let competition occur on a fair playing field - you don't get a platform owner freezing out better standards for their own gain.
You then totally misread his posting and used it as an excuse to attack "linux zealots" - maybe you come from that parallel universe
yup, I'm from NZ - I moved to the US long before the ozone hole was noticed - the sun back there definitely has (had) a bite that it doesn;t in the US
By this time I'd already debugged the problem, both from inside and outside and knew exactly which of their routers was misconfigured
Eventually I bit my lip and borrowed a windows box - went thru voicemail hell, then had to be handheld through "are you sure you typed in you IP address correctly" "but I tell you your router needs it's tables fixed" proccess at least 3-4 times before we got to "I'll refer you to my 2nd tier support - they'll call you on monday" (they didn't - in the end I was down 6 days, up a day down 4 more days before they fixed the problem - I did the telephone hell thing 7 times before stuff came back)
Anyway one thing I realised - the people you call at the phone company when your line goes down know NOTHING about networking
It's pretty sad when your only usefull options for net connection consist of "the phone company" and "the cable company" - remember when you used to have a local ISP - and you could talk to someone who actually knows what they are doing
Oh
Boy are you in the wrong place
tie it on the roof :-)
I know Linus's been talking NUMA for 2.5 - looks like there's more and more reason for it ... still historically it's been a hard nut to crack well
I'm starting to miss the heady days when anyone could start an ISP in their garage and they attracted customers by actually responding to their needs, not some lowest common denominator.
Oh well, I bet next month I'll get that "you'll have to sign up with MSN if you want to send outgoing mail" message from PacBell just like the Qwest people have gotten
didn't you post exactly this same text yesterday in another thread - someone please mod this 'redundant'