I think this would be great, althoug I'd worry about the implementation details. How would you test servers to see if they were up or not? How would you find out what was wrong, exactly, with one of them? If anyone ever makes a web site like this, it would be difficult.
However, if it was done right, ISPs could install a package that sort of "mirrored" the test results, so that their customers could see how things looked at the ISP's offices.
Barclay family motto:
Aut agere aut mori.
(Either action or death.)
The massive bandwidth requirements come from his example; Napster. Would you like to volunteer to pay for the bandwidth of hundreds of thousands of users downloads MP3s at ~700Kbps?:) Thought not.
Dave
Barclay family motto:
Aut agere aut mori.
(Either action or death.)
Palms are great - I really love them. But they're not perfect. I don't know a whole lot about them, but do they have a TCP/IP stack? I don't think so, but I could be wrong.
The reason why Linux is being ported to these small devices is FLEXIBILITY.
Never, and I repeat NEVER doubt the usefullness of flexibility. If you want a personal organizer, sure you can buy one on the cheap from Palm. But what if you want something with a similar form-factory, but you need it to run only one application? And you can't get license a la Handspring from 3Com(makes of the Palm)? Well, you've got to invest millions in R&D, software, hardware, fabrication plants, etc., etc..
With a Linux-based portable unit, you have a great deal of flexibility. All of a sudden, instead of paying millions of dollars. you only have to pay(at most) a few hundred thousand for a good development team to write the appropriate Linux-based apps. Plus, you can make them portable. Have you tried to compile a Palm app to run under Linux? Yeah, thought so.
Dave 'Round the firewall,
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The PSX2 has *many* great games for it already available - PS1 games. I know that isn't what you meant, but I think Sony did The Right Thing when they added backwards-compatibility with their last console. I hope they keep it up, and others emulate them(keeping backwards compatibility with the *last* console the company made - no need to make another x86).
Dave 'Round the firewall,
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Despite my various comments here defending Intel, I agree wholeheatedly with your conclusions, especially about the "little or no sense to buy part."
I'd be more harsh - buying a P4 right now is a serious waste of money. By the time a majority of applications have been re-compiled to take advantage of P4's features(thereby making the P4 a decent buy if you're looking for performance), a new P4-based platform(much improved over the current offerings) will be available.
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Only half-way. A lot of silicon is devoted to SSE2, which if memory serves, is 64-bit. As soon as you see how fast programs are(when they're compiled with a SSE2-aware compiler), you'll start to wonder if maybe Intel processors arn't really x86 any more...:)
The Pentium was a major leap forward from the 486, bringing forward major speed advancements...
The real "speed advancement" for the pentium was its pipeline - sure, not much - but it allowed the Pentium to increase its clock speed dramatically(4-5 times), which ended up making computers faster. The P4 is expected to end at around 7 times its current speed. Not too shabby.
Again, the P4 and P3/Athlon are all 32bit...
See my first argument - the P4 can no longer truely be called "32-bit". And the P4 actually runs strictly 32-bit floating-point ops slower than the PIII(significantly slower), but those nice SSE2 instructions are supposed to be absolutely blazing.
before Intel actually brings something worthwhile out...
What do you think that "worthwhile" processor will be? Yup, you guessed it! The P4, with a different package and maybe a slightly tweaked core. This core is expected to go up to 10GHz. You think going from 1.4(actually, they'll be releasing a 1.2GHz version too) to 10GHz is just a "short-term filler"? What Tom was referring to was the chipset/socket combo as short-term. The P4 is going to be around for quite a while - they build their processors with longevity these days.
Dave
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The Pentium Pro DID ramp to higher clocks - that's what the PII/Celeron/PIII are based on(with modification, of course).
Now, the chips might have seemed faster than their predecessors, but I'm betting you only bought them after a lot of code had been re-compiled. The Pentium Pro was slower, clock-for-clock, then the Pentium. It ran 16-bit code REALLY slowly, compared to Pentiums(which is why PPros never really entered the home-PC market).
Anyways, it all depends, there are a lot of factors. But the P4 is most definetly, without a doubt, not the first Intel architecture that is "slower" than the one it replaces.
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Well, the idea of high clock speeds isn't just marketing. It's a technological desicion. Intel started designing this processor when AMD was still selling to third-rate, third-tier OEMs. They didn't make this processor just to counter AMD - it's a logical succession to the PPro core.
Incidentally, the P4 is most *definetly* not based on the PPro, although it does use some of the concepts(deep pipeline, on-die L2 cache, etc., etc.).
Dave 'Round the firewall,
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First, a disclaimer: I never intend on buying this revision of the P4 - too expensive, not enough performance, etc., etc.. My next computer is probably going to be a dual-processor T-Bird/Duron.
Now, on to the meat.:)
-It's slower clock for clock than a P3 or an Athlon... In fact, a 1.2 GHz Athlon is probably a bit faster than the 1.4 GHz P4.
Read the article. A 1.2 GHz Athlon IS faster than a 1.4GHz P4.
-You are stuck with RAMBUS and the buggy Intel RAMBUS chipsets.
So far, Intel's RAMBUS chipset are only buggy when you use SDRAM with them.
after all, hasn't every Intel chip since the 8088 out performed the prevtious generation at the same clock?
Quite the opposite - in most cases, Intel's newest CPU architecture doesn't perform as well as what it replaces - at least for a while, until the compilers have been modified.
and probably can end up at higher clock rates than the Thunderbird Athlon
Intel engineers, and most people who understand these things, feel that the P4 should be able to ramp up to somewhere in between 7-10GHz, given appropriate die shrinks.
But the P4 is like a school bus racing against a Porsche, it's got to have a much bigger engine running at a much higher RPM to equal the speed.
You've got it backwards - in this analogy, the P4 is the small engine that can rev to extremely high RPMs(incidentally, Formula-1 racers can only go so fast because the engines can take extremely high RPMs - for a given size of engine, the only way to get more horsepower[at a certain point] is to increase RPMs). The T-Bird/Durons are the ones that have engine size(high IPC), but can't rev high. P4's have small engines(low IPC), but can rev to extremely high RPMs.
the P4 can't do SMP yet, and likely won't be able to before the Thunderbird Athlon (and the upcoming new core) can.
The P4 won't be able to do SMP(as far as Intel is concerned) until it has been switched to the next socket format.
The P4, like the Celeron, would have to run considerably FASTER than 900 Mhz to equal a 900 Mhz Athlon.
That's exactly the point. Intel will be able to get massive MHz out of this core, and it'll leave Athlons in the dust(unfortunatly). Athlons will only be able to clock so high, and then that's it. They won't get any faster, without staying an Athlon. The P4 will increase its clock rate very quickly - and with that, you'll get a lot of performance. Sure, on a clock-for-clock basis, the Athlon can do more, but if the P4 has twice, even three times the clock rate, it'll be faster. That's what Intel plans on doing.
Dave
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Yeah, I should have been more specific. It's already legal that people get mechanical replacements for defective organs and such - I can imagine, though, that doctors wouldn't be allowed to do what you call "vanity" replacements.
All in all, I think it's a good position - if I want to augment something, I want it to be done through genetics so it's permanent, and inherited(Yeah, I realize I wouldn't benefit, just my kids - but you get the idea).
Dave 'Round the firewall,
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I wonder if eventually far in the future, some people will have perfectly good hands or arms replaced for the added speed and strength of a robot equivalent.
I don't think it'll happen. Here's what I think will, though:
1. It becomes possible to get robotic body parts which improve greatly on what you are born with.
2. Athletes and a few crazy rich people try them out. Rich people are left alone, athletes never compete professionaly again, unless it's for people's entertainment.
3. Robotic parts become cheaper, for whatever reason.
4. More people get robotic parts, and society in general reacts badly(ie: freak!, you're taking my job, etc., etc.).
5. Current laws pertaining to self-mutilation, where someone can be forced into psychological treatment, are amended to include the removal of body parts to be replaced by robotic equivalents. Aside from psychological treatment, fines and jail terms are now possible punishments.
6. No doctors ever replace people's body-parts, because they could lose their license.
Of course, I'm probably completely wrong. Just one thought, though.
Dave
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Every time you hear about these arguments, it seems the people claiming the bacteria are from space base their claim solely upon the observation that the bacteria could survive in outer space. This is a logical fallacy on more than one ground(induction, as opposed to the logically sound deduction for starters). Just because my computer could hurl through space and still be functional, does not mean it necessarily comes from space.
Yeah, but calculate the odds of your computer leaving the surface of the Earth, going around for a while, and landing on some other planet. Pretty bloody unlikely. Now, calculate the odds that all that would happen *naturally*, with no man-made forces at work. Yeah, damn near impossible now.
Okay, now visualize for a second microbes/organic material that can survive for millions, even billions of years encased in rock(if the organism is simple enough, and it's kept cold enough, it could last indefinetly). All of a sudden, it's very possible that at some time in the distant past, a primitive(or maybe not so primitive) planet/moon was struck by a large meteorite, throwing up huge clouds of dust, full of organic materials(and maybe even primitive life, that survived the blast). A comet passes through the cloud, and carries said organic material all through the solar system.
Calculate the odds on THAT. When you're dealing in time scales of billions of years, it's not so far fetched.
I don't think that the people who believe this is possible base their belief on the fact that bacteria can survive in space. I think it's much more than that. Personally, I don't know. I'll need hard evidence before I'm convinced. For instance, if a probe was built in absolutely sterile conditions(and I mean *absolutely* sterile conditions), and it came back with mold growth, then I'd start to wonder...;)
Speaking of probes, what about the Galileo probes? I'm sure they must have some form of Earth-life on them. If it ever falls to another planet, not only is it possible that life has travelled between planets, but it's fact.
Dave
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However the question I have is... is either company looking into and/or developing something not based on x86 architecture?
Well, let's look at the P4's biggest weapon: SSE2. That is NOT x86. Sure, it's ostensibly x86 because it's in an x86 chip, but that's it. SSE2 will require completely new compilers. The way I see it, when you have to re-write significant portions of a compiler, you've just made a serious architecture change.
And pay more attention - Intel's Itanium is most *DEFINETLY* not an x86 processor.
Isn't there going to be some point where the developers have to sit back and realize that they've done all they can with it?
Okay, most developers won't give a crap - 90% of them don't write compilers or use ASM, they use something on top of that. All you *might* need to worry about is performance. So, to sum up, most developers won't care if their stuff is running on x86 or ia64 or x86-64; so long as they can simply re-compile their application.
Good lord, don't talk about what you don't know about. And don't insult anybody/anything unless you're damned sure that you're right.
Dave
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Compression speed DOES matter. First of all, many things on the web are compressed on the fly - you just don't see it. gzip is used, as far as I know, for most of it. Partly due to its modest processor usage. You try serving up a million pages all compressed using something like bzip2 on a rackmount server with only two processors - you'll quickly melt the metal.
Dave 'Round the firewall,
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I wouldn't say we're all really touchy. (From here on in, when I say "we" or "us", I mean myself and most of the people I know - not most Canadians, even though my group of friends is a pretty good cross-section of Canada)
The thing is, most of us have a fine line. We're very nice and polite, up until that line - then we usually get mad and throw a fit.
I imagine that particular poster is simply sick and tired of being grouped with the US and Mexico. Many TV ads and shows poke fun at Canadians, and in some cases, that's a big part of the show(look into: "South Park - Bigger, Longer, Uncut" and John Candy's last movie).
Yet we recently had a big problem with a Molson(beer) commercial. A fellow on stage was getting all worked up about how Canadians are generally thought of. We all thought it was hilarious as hell, and it made us damned proud. But then a whole shitload of US media said we were "hitting the people of America below the belt." America being, of course, the US.
I happened to run into an American(yeah, I'll use it too - it's just too easy) in the middle of the brou-ha, and I asked him, "So, what do you think of that commercial?" And he said, quite seriously, "I hope someone gets fired - they might as well have been burning the star-spangled banner!"
I mean, honestly. Many people in the US outright make fun of Canadians. We put out a commercial meant to inspire a fierce pride in out country, and everyone thinks we're attacking the U.S. I mean, sure, if you twisted the words in the right way, and read too much into it, you might think someone was trying to make fun of the U.S. But arn't we allowed?
Ugh. There I go ranting again. Well, you get the idea. We're not touchy, we just don't like being jerked around. Americans are the only people who ever lump Canada and Mexico with the U.S., and it gets on our nerves.
Dave 'Round the firewall,
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I think it was a joke...:) But I understand, sometimes too much coffee can make anything seem like a personal slight worthy of a gunfight.:)
Dave 'Round the firewall,
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Re:Tidal generators are the stuff dreams are made
on
Wave Driven Generators
·
· Score: 1
Homes getting bigger is actually a good thing. Soon, within the next few decades, very efficient, environmentally-friendly cars will be available. So, you don't need to worry so much about people having to travel further due to sprawl. Now, if you lower the population density, you have ultimately less expenditure of energy. What produces more energy? 10sq miles with 10,000 people, or 10sq miles with 10 people?:)
Thought so.
Dave 'Round the firewall,
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Yeah, there's a pretty common misconception that nerves can't repair themselves. There's also another misconception that a human brain can't/doesn't repair/grow after a certain age.
Both are wrong. Brain development slows to an absolute crawl, comparitively speaking, after youth. But it still grows and changes.
Now, nerve cells in the rest of the body generally don't repair themselves, but that's not a hard and fast rule. For instance, pain receptors are hooked up by nerve cells, and when you loose a chunk of skin(including muscule beneath it), you can still feel pain afterwards.
Dave
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I'm afraid I pretty much completely disagree with the idea of "elections."
Imagine there's a very serious issue at hand; let's say whether or not to sacrifice limited-resource(ie: desktop) platform performance with the idea of improving near-unlimited-resource platform(ie: 100s of CPUs, terabytes of memory) performance.
Chances are, a large number of voters(I think they should be developers) would vote to keep good desktop performance; after all, that's what most of them will be programming for.
Next thing you know, someone is in charge for a year or two, making horrible technical decisions. Sure, they kept good desktop performance, but also initiated rewrites of major subsystems. They became over-zealous in their removal of cruft, and we thereby lose a lot of backward-compatibility(hardware-wise). You get the idea.
Elections are far too often based on a very few rather important issues, but the result is a net loss in quality. Issues that are very big(ie: Big Iron support) should be resolved through compromise(if a compromise is technically feasible), as opposed to "this way" or "that way".
I actually agree with your idea of a fork; but not with the concept of elections. There is far too much room for error.
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I don't think it's a bad idea, really. As a model, it's actually fairly good - most industries have a nice market where you don't own what you buy; you just "lease" it;)
What most slashdotters feel is that Microsoft will use this, down the line, to force people to either pay absurd(read: *high*) fees, or force them to comply with draconian contract obligations.
And, honestly, Microsoft has been *extremely* unethical in the past - doing ANYTHING to keep their dominance, short of killing people(and even then, I imagine there have been quite a few Microsoft-induced suicides). It isn't the revenue model people are getting upset about - it's that revenue model that might make people wholly under Microsoft's very unethical thumb.
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Troll. I started this thread, explaining(simply) what the differences between WINE and plex86 are. I got my first computer when I was four; my first programming language was 16-bit X86 assembly.
I haven't kept up the skill, and my memory has degraded, but I certainly know what I was talking about. Stop being such an asswipe.
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In short, Windows has a GUI display control panel, MacOS has a GUI display control panel, so why doesn't Linux have one yet? They've only had about five years to make one, so there's no excuse.
Shut up. Yeah, you heard me. Shut your bloody mouth before you learn the hard way that there's always someone willing to shut it for you.
What the hell do you mean by "there's no excuse"?!? Nobody had developed one yet(actually, there are several GUI XFree86 config tools, so that's not entirely true), because no-one has WANTED one. "Linux" meaning the whole complete operating system, including apps, is for the most part GIVEN to you. Stop sniveling, you dolt. If you want something, do it yourself, stop demanding that others do it for you.
Damn it, I hate this type of "newbie".
Dave
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Well, if you utilize the PROMPT_COMMAND environment variable, you could do something like:
if [ x"$PWD" = x"/home/$USER/public_html" ]; then
umask <wanted umask here>
else
umask <default umask here>
fi
However, that is not transparent; you must be running in a shell that supports $PROMPT_COMMAND. 'Round the firewall,
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Slashdot Mirror
I think this would be great, althoug I'd worry about the implementation details. How would you test servers to see if they were up or not? How would you find out what was wrong, exactly, with one of them? If anyone ever makes a web site like this, it would be difficult.
However, if it was done right, ISPs could install a package that sort of "mirrored" the test results, so that their customers could see how things looked at the ISP's offices.
Barclay family motto:
Aut agere aut mori.
(Either action or death.)
The massive bandwidth requirements come from his example; Napster. Would you like to volunteer to pay for the bandwidth of hundreds of thousands of users downloads MP3s at ~700Kbps? :) Thought not.
Dave
Barclay family motto:
Aut agere aut mori.
(Either action or death.)
Palms are great - I really love them. But they're not perfect. I don't know a whole lot about them, but do they have a TCP/IP stack? I don't think so, but I could be wrong.
The reason why Linux is being ported to these small devices is FLEXIBILITY.
Never, and I repeat NEVER doubt the usefullness of flexibility. If you want a personal organizer, sure you can buy one on the cheap from Palm. But what if you want something with a similar form-factory, but you need it to run only one application? And you can't get license a la Handspring from 3Com(makes of the Palm)? Well, you've got to invest millions in R&D, software, hardware, fabrication plants, etc., etc..
With a Linux-based portable unit, you have a great deal of flexibility. All of a sudden, instead of paying millions of dollars. you only have to pay(at most) a few hundred thousand for a good development team to write the appropriate Linux-based apps. Plus, you can make them portable. Have you tried to compile a Palm app to run under Linux? Yeah, thought so.
Dave
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The PSX2 has *many* great games for it already available - PS1 games. I know that isn't what you meant, but I think Sony did The Right Thing when they added backwards-compatibility with their last console. I hope they keep it up, and others emulate them(keeping backwards compatibility with the *last* console the company made - no need to make another x86).
Dave
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Despite my various comments here defending Intel, I agree wholeheatedly with your conclusions, especially about the "little or no sense to buy part."
I'd be more harsh - buying a P4 right now is a serious waste of money. By the time a majority of applications have been re-compiled to take advantage of P4's features(thereby making the P4 a decent buy if you're looking for performance), a new P4-based platform(much improved over the current offerings) will be available.
Dave
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And, uh, P4 is still 32bit...
... :)
Only half-way. A lot of silicon is devoted to SSE2, which if memory serves, is 64-bit. As soon as you see how fast programs are(when they're compiled with a SSE2-aware compiler), you'll start to wonder if maybe Intel processors arn't really x86 any more
The Pentium was a major leap forward from the 486, bringing forward major speed advancements...
The real "speed advancement" for the pentium was its pipeline - sure, not much - but it allowed the Pentium to increase its clock speed dramatically(4-5 times), which ended up making computers faster. The P4 is expected to end at around 7 times its current speed. Not too shabby.
Again, the P4 and P3/Athlon are all 32bit...
See my first argument - the P4 can no longer truely be called "32-bit". And the P4 actually runs strictly 32-bit floating-point ops slower than the PIII(significantly slower), but those nice SSE2 instructions are supposed to be absolutely blazing.
before Intel actually brings something worthwhile out...
What do you think that "worthwhile" processor will be? Yup, you guessed it! The P4, with a different package and maybe a slightly tweaked core. This core is expected to go up to 10GHz. You think going from 1.4(actually, they'll be releasing a 1.2GHz version too) to 10GHz is just a "short-term filler"? What Tom was referring to was the chipset/socket combo as short-term. The P4 is going to be around for quite a while - they build their processors with longevity these days.
Dave
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The Pentium Pro DID ramp to higher clocks - that's what the PII/Celeron/PIII are based on(with modification, of course).
Now, the chips might have seemed faster than their predecessors, but I'm betting you only bought them after a lot of code had been re-compiled. The Pentium Pro was slower, clock-for-clock, then the Pentium. It ran 16-bit code REALLY slowly, compared to Pentiums(which is why PPros never really entered the home-PC market).
Anyways, it all depends, there are a lot of factors. But the P4 is most definetly, without a doubt, not the first Intel architecture that is "slower" than the one it replaces.
Dave
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Well, the idea of high clock speeds isn't just marketing. It's a technological desicion. Intel started designing this processor when AMD was still selling to third-rate, third-tier OEMs. They didn't make this processor just to counter AMD - it's a logical succession to the PPro core.
Incidentally, the P4 is most *definetly* not based on the PPro, although it does use some of the concepts(deep pipeline, on-die L2 cache, etc., etc.).
Dave
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First, a disclaimer: I never intend on buying this revision of the P4 - too expensive, not enough performance, etc., etc.. My next computer is probably going to be a dual-processor T-Bird/Duron.
:)
Now, on to the meat.
-It's slower clock for clock than a P3 or an Athlon... In fact, a 1.2 GHz Athlon is probably a bit faster than the 1.4 GHz P4.
Read the article. A 1.2 GHz Athlon IS faster than a 1.4GHz P4.
-You are stuck with RAMBUS and the buggy Intel RAMBUS chipsets.
So far, Intel's RAMBUS chipset are only buggy when you use SDRAM with them.
after all, hasn't every Intel chip since the 8088 out performed the prevtious generation at the same clock?
Quite the opposite - in most cases, Intel's newest CPU architecture doesn't perform as well as what it replaces - at least for a while, until the compilers have been modified.
and probably can end up at higher clock rates than the Thunderbird Athlon
Intel engineers, and most people who understand these things, feel that the P4 should be able to ramp up to somewhere in between 7-10GHz, given appropriate die shrinks.
But the P4 is like a school bus racing against a Porsche, it's got to have a much bigger engine running at a much higher RPM to equal the speed.
You've got it backwards - in this analogy, the P4 is the small engine that can rev to extremely high RPMs(incidentally, Formula-1 racers can only go so fast because the engines can take extremely high RPMs - for a given size of engine, the only way to get more horsepower[at a certain point] is to increase RPMs). The T-Bird/Durons are the ones that have engine size(high IPC), but can't rev high. P4's have small engines(low IPC), but can rev to extremely high RPMs.
the P4 can't do SMP yet, and likely won't be able to before the Thunderbird Athlon (and the upcoming new core) can.
The P4 won't be able to do SMP(as far as Intel is concerned) until it has been switched to the next socket format.
The P4, like the Celeron, would have to run considerably FASTER than 900 Mhz to equal a 900 Mhz Athlon.
That's exactly the point. Intel will be able to get massive MHz out of this core, and it'll leave Athlons in the dust(unfortunatly). Athlons will only be able to clock so high, and then that's it. They won't get any faster, without staying an Athlon. The P4 will increase its clock rate very quickly - and with that, you'll get a lot of performance. Sure, on a clock-for-clock basis, the Athlon can do more, but if the P4 has twice, even three times the clock rate, it'll be faster. That's what Intel plans on doing.
Dave
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Yeah, I should have been more specific. It's already legal that people get mechanical replacements for defective organs and such - I can imagine, though, that doctors wouldn't be allowed to do what you call "vanity" replacements.
All in all, I think it's a good position - if I want to augment something, I want it to be done through genetics so it's permanent, and inherited(Yeah, I realize I wouldn't benefit, just my kids - but you get the idea).
Dave
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I wonder if eventually far in the future, some people will have perfectly good hands or arms replaced for the added speed and strength of a robot equivalent.
I don't think it'll happen. Here's what I think will, though:
1. It becomes possible to get robotic body parts which improve greatly on what you are born with.
2. Athletes and a few crazy rich people try them out. Rich people are left alone, athletes never compete professionaly again, unless it's for people's entertainment.
3. Robotic parts become cheaper, for whatever reason.
4. More people get robotic parts, and society in general reacts badly(ie: freak!, you're taking my job, etc., etc.).
5. Current laws pertaining to self-mutilation, where someone can be forced into psychological treatment, are amended to include the removal of body parts to be replaced by robotic equivalents. Aside from psychological treatment, fines and jail terms are now possible punishments.
6. No doctors ever replace people's body-parts, because they could lose their license.
Of course, I'm probably completely wrong. Just one thought, though.
Dave
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Yeah, but calculate the odds of your computer leaving the surface of the Earth, going around for a while, and landing on some other planet. Pretty bloody unlikely. Now, calculate the odds that all that would happen *naturally*, with no man-made forces at work. Yeah, damn near impossible now.
Okay, now visualize for a second microbes/organic material that can survive for millions, even billions of years encased in rock(if the organism is simple enough, and it's kept cold enough, it could last indefinetly). All of a sudden, it's very possible that at some time in the distant past, a primitive(or maybe not so primitive) planet/moon was struck by a large meteorite, throwing up huge clouds of dust, full of organic materials(and maybe even primitive life, that survived the blast). A comet passes through the cloud, and carries said organic material all through the solar system.
Calculate the odds on THAT. When you're dealing in time scales of billions of years, it's not so far fetched.
I don't think that the people who believe this is possible base their belief on the fact that bacteria can survive in space. I think it's much more than that. Personally, I don't know. I'll need hard evidence before I'm convinced. For instance, if a probe was built in absolutely sterile conditions(and I mean *absolutely* sterile conditions), and it came back with mold growth, then I'd start to wonder
Speaking of probes, what about the Galileo probes? I'm sure they must have some form of Earth-life on them. If it ever falls to another planet, not only is it possible that life has travelled between planets, but it's fact.
Dave
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However the question I have is... is either company looking into and/or developing something not based on x86 architecture?
Well, let's look at the P4's biggest weapon: SSE2. That is NOT x86. Sure, it's ostensibly x86 because it's in an x86 chip, but that's it. SSE2 will require completely new compilers. The way I see it, when you have to re-write significant portions of a compiler, you've just made a serious architecture change.
And pay more attention - Intel's Itanium is most *DEFINETLY* not an x86 processor.
Isn't there going to be some point where the developers have to sit back and realize that they've done all they can with it?
Okay, most developers won't give a crap - 90% of them don't write compilers or use ASM, they use something on top of that. All you *might* need to worry about is performance. So, to sum up, most developers won't care if their stuff is running on x86 or ia64 or x86-64; so long as they can simply re-compile their application.
Good lord, don't talk about what you don't know about. And don't insult anybody/anything unless you're damned sure that you're right.
Dave
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Compression speed DOES matter. First of all, many things on the web are compressed on the fly - you just don't see it. gzip is used, as far as I know, for most of it. Partly due to its modest processor usage. You try serving up a million pages all compressed using something like bzip2 on a rackmount server with only two processors - you'll quickly melt the metal.
Dave
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I wouldn't say we're all really touchy. (From here on in, when I say "we" or "us", I mean myself and most of the people I know - not most Canadians, even though my group of friends is a pretty good cross-section of Canada)
The thing is, most of us have a fine line. We're very nice and polite, up until that line - then we usually get mad and throw a fit.
I imagine that particular poster is simply sick and tired of being grouped with the US and Mexico. Many TV ads and shows poke fun at Canadians, and in some cases, that's a big part of the show(look into: "South Park - Bigger, Longer, Uncut" and John Candy's last movie).
Yet we recently had a big problem with a Molson(beer) commercial. A fellow on stage was getting all worked up about how Canadians are generally thought of. We all thought it was hilarious as hell, and it made us damned proud. But then a whole shitload of US media said we were "hitting the people of America below the belt." America being, of course, the US.
I happened to run into an American(yeah, I'll use it too - it's just too easy) in the middle of the brou-ha, and I asked him, "So, what do you think of that commercial?" And he said, quite seriously, "I hope someone gets fired - they might as well have been burning the star-spangled banner!"
I mean, honestly. Many people in the US outright make fun of Canadians. We put out a commercial meant to inspire a fierce pride in out country, and everyone thinks we're attacking the U.S. I mean, sure, if you twisted the words in the right way, and read too much into it, you might think someone was trying to make fun of the U.S. But arn't we allowed?
Ugh. There I go ranting again. Well, you get the idea. We're not touchy, we just don't like being jerked around. Americans are the only people who ever lump Canada and Mexico with the U.S., and it gets on our nerves.
Dave
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I think it was a joke ... :) But I understand, sometimes too much coffee can make anything seem like a personal slight worthy of a gunfight. :)
Dave
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Homes getting bigger is actually a good thing. Soon, within the next few decades, very efficient, environmentally-friendly cars will be available. So, you don't need to worry so much about people having to travel further due to sprawl. Now, if you lower the population density, you have ultimately less expenditure of energy. What produces more energy? 10sq miles with 10,000 people, or 10sq miles with 10 people? :)
Thought so.
Dave
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Yeah, there's a pretty common misconception that nerves can't repair themselves. There's also another misconception that a human brain can't/doesn't repair/grow after a certain age.
Both are wrong. Brain development slows to an absolute crawl, comparitively speaking, after youth. But it still grows and changes.
Now, nerve cells in the rest of the body generally don't repair themselves, but that's not a hard and fast rule. For instance, pain receptors are hooked up by nerve cells, and when you loose a chunk of skin(including muscule beneath it), you can still feel pain afterwards.
Dave
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I'm afraid I pretty much completely disagree with the idea of "elections."
Imagine there's a very serious issue at hand; let's say whether or not to sacrifice limited-resource(ie: desktop) platform performance with the idea of improving near-unlimited-resource platform(ie: 100s of CPUs, terabytes of memory) performance.
Chances are, a large number of voters(I think they should be developers) would vote to keep good desktop performance; after all, that's what most of them will be programming for.
Next thing you know, someone is in charge for a year or two, making horrible technical decisions. Sure, they kept good desktop performance, but also initiated rewrites of major subsystems. They became over-zealous in their removal of cruft, and we thereby lose a lot of backward-compatibility(hardware-wise). You get the idea.
Elections are far too often based on a very few rather important issues, but the result is a net loss in quality. Issues that are very big(ie: Big Iron support) should be resolved through compromise(if a compromise is technically feasible), as opposed to "this way" or "that way".
I actually agree with your idea of a fork; but not with the concept of elections. There is far too much room for error.
Dave
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I don't think it's a bad idea, really. As a model, it's actually fairly good - most industries have a nice market where you don't own what you buy; you just "lease" it ;)
What most slashdotters feel is that Microsoft will use this, down the line, to force people to either pay absurd(read: *high*) fees, or force them to comply with draconian contract obligations.
And, honestly, Microsoft has been *extremely* unethical in the past - doing ANYTHING to keep their dominance, short of killing people(and even then, I imagine there have been quite a few Microsoft-induced suicides). It isn't the revenue model people are getting upset about - it's that revenue model that might make people wholly under Microsoft's very unethical thumb.
Dave
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Troll. I started this thread, explaining(simply) what the differences between WINE and plex86 are. I got my first computer when I was four; my first programming language was 16-bit X86 assembly.
I haven't kept up the skill, and my memory has degraded, but I certainly know what I was talking about. Stop being such an asswipe.
Dave
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I might be mistaken, but the "Big Iron" optimizations are available in the kernel under the BIGMEM options; but I might be mistaked.
Dave
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In short, Windows has a GUI display control panel, MacOS has a GUI display control panel, so why doesn't Linux have one yet? They've only had about five years to make one, so there's no excuse.
Shut up. Yeah, you heard me. Shut your bloody mouth before you learn the hard way that there's always someone willing to shut it for you.
What the hell do you mean by "there's no excuse"?!? Nobody had developed one yet(actually, there are several GUI XFree86 config tools, so that's not entirely true), because no-one has WANTED one. "Linux" meaning the whole complete operating system, including apps, is for the most part GIVEN to you. Stop sniveling, you dolt. If you want something, do it yourself, stop demanding that others do it for you.
Damn it, I hate this type of "newbie".
Dave
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Or, more compactly;
[ x"$PWD" = x"/home/$USER/public_html" ] && umask <html umask here> || umask <default umask here>
Dave
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Well, if you utilize the PROMPT_COMMAND environment variable, you could do something like:
if [ x"$PWD" = x"/home/$USER/public_html" ]; then
umask <wanted umask here>
else
umask <default umask here>
fi
However, that is not transparent; you must be running in a shell that supports $PROMPT_COMMAND.
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