left click right click middle 'scroll button' volume up volume down volume mute page up page down email IM
usually, I'm like "ONE button does the job", but I can see how for a certain class of users, this mouse is a neat thing. It'd annoy the heck out of me, as it duplicates things my keyboard does, and I just tend to use the keyboard, not the mouse, when I can help it, but... if you just read and write the occasional email, IM or other document... I can see it being useful, I guess. Not my cup of tea, though the auto-sense and sleep features are good, they're not new or special to this mouse... for me, the mail and IM light-up buttons are just gimicky, and although a 'mute' button might be nice, volume up/down seem a bit much, too.
Rumor has it that Nugent's lunch was stolen by her ex-boyfriend who is now with Bird.
Isn't that her cousin, Backhouse?
Seriously the only amusing part of this whole thing seems to have been censored, and that's the enormous quantity of email forward headers and extra info offered in those comments. Oh, and the bit about "Gav BACKHOUSE" which was apparently censored from the papers... and the bit about him being a cousin... that's humorous. Otherwise, it's just a lesson in email forwards... and... am I the only one who trims the forward chain out of these things before sending them on? That's frickin' pages of text to have to forward to the bottom, and really, it's not that juicy, I've read better on Usenet... then again, usenet is pretty well approved for the purpose of flamewars...
Oh, and sorry for linking to a modded-down, unformatted/. post above, it's just that the linked, formatted version has been taken down, and another's not available ( probably because someone pointed out that it includes all sorts of email addresses for top AU law firms, but guess what? I don't care! a simple search/replace on "Subject" made it readable again... ) and it contains what IMHO is the only interesting part of all of this.
As for the notion that this might be a fake story because it's attributable to a guy from a humor magazine... it's a pretty damn good job if he did fake it. Somehow I doubt it. He was just the first press-related guy to get it, likely...
As for running, that's a different story. I had heard that the iPod could do that, and I tried yesterday (I usually run without it). I got about a minute of music before it crashed requiring a hard reset.
Really? That's odd... I know plenty of people who jog or ride bikes with their iPod, and they all say they've never even skipped... interesting... I wonder if all that dropping and whatnot has gotten you a loose connection somewhere or something. Or maybe my friends only claim to jog... but I do see people jogging with their iPod minis all the time, it must usually work...
Heck, it'd not be shocked if fork() on Linux had extra overhead that pthread_create() didn't. It might, for example, be duplicating the address space; fork() is copy-on-write (on most if not all UN*Xes, including OS X and Linux) so that the data in the address space doesn't get copied, but the address space data structures might have to be duplicated, and resident writeable pages would have to get marked non-writeable in the MMU so that an attempt by parent or child to store into them would provoke a copy.
Oh, to be sure! And yet, I'd not be shocked if OS X did even more than all of that, doing stuff like registering the forked application with higher-level message-passing and even application-layer stuff like Finder and Launch Services, causing who-knows-what kind of delays that aren't seen elsewhere.
It's likely that OS X introduces more code in *both* calls, but it'd be nice to see a test that shows where the real bottleneck is. I'm pretty sure the pthread() issues aren't near as bad as the fork() issues, just drawing on some small experiences porting linux apps... but I've not done the test, and I still don't know why AnandTech wouldn't.
Okay, so why don't you install yellowdog, write the test, and check it out yourself?
Yellow Dog costs money last I checked, and I don't really have the time or inclination to do so, frankly. It's all rather academic to me. The XServe and our OS X desktops are more than fast enough to do the work we do, and the convenience of the systems outweighs the cost-savings of Linux. If I had much, much larger data sets to crunch, or was running a large-volume web server, that might be a different matter... but then, especially if I was cost-concious, I'd probably just use Linux from the get-go, and probably not on PPC.
These guys have yellow dog, have the time, have the resources all set up, and are making a big stink about a fork() or MySQL performance problem which I almost don't care too much about unless it's really a serious thread-level OS bottleneck. They should do their job and identify, with reproducable certainty, the source of the problem. Heck, given that they can get both the Darwin and Linux source, they should be able to point out the actual lines of code that are at the heart of the issue. Now *that* would be interesting. If I had the time, I'd do it... but I don't understand why AnandTech wouldn't.
In which case you don't have an IT department. You have people (person) doing IT work.
A very good and valid point. And yet, in the context of the OP's post, it's exactly the case - he's just one guy doing IT work for a shipping company with 85 trucks that they track via GPS, who also supports 25 desktop clients and one server. Which, as you correctly point out, is not an IT department and does not have an IT budget per se.
As for the IT department having to borrow a user's desktop to replace a server? That's just bad planning.
Welcome to the ad-hoc nature of small business. These are the reasons most people prefer larger organizations- the sheer bulk and complexity of such operations requires real planning which smaller businesses ( often incorrectly ) think they can do without.
Therefore, the correct and only conclusion to draw from what Apple has said is that that the nano can't be used with FireWire. That doesn't mean it doesn't, of course, and one reader here already claims that he's tried it and that it DOES work.
But Apple says it doesn't, and if it does, it's clearly unsupported.
Well, it wouldn't be the first time Apple's made a technical error on one of it's web pages that was later revised. If someone out there claims that it does work, I guess there's hope, and I could always ( at some point in the future when these things are more readily available ) wander into an Apple store and get someone to demo for me how it works with Firewire... the web page doesn't give me much hope, though.
Check it out:
Electric Currents and Transmission Lines in Space [lanl.gov]
Immense Flows of Charged Particles Discovered Between the Stars [lanl.gov]
(repeat: I do hope you actually take the time to read some of the pages to which I've linked.)
I have. The first one, while somewhat interesting in it's own way, has not a heck of a lot to do with the claims of the Electric Universe folks. It makes heavy use of analogy to explain large-scale electromagnetic properties of planets, basically. This is the stuff that is actual, fairly solid conventional science... upon which a bit too much is claimed by the Electric Universe crowd. Again, not everything is explained in that manner.
The second link, however, is a press release, and not one from the LANL. Not saying it's conclusions are wrong, just that it might not be what it appears at first blush. It boils down to 'particles in space become ionized when heated by stars'. Again, actually nothing even controversial there, I believe.
The thing is, it's a *huge* jump from knowing something about the nature of electromagnetism to claiming that it's effects are responsible for the phenomena of supernova. Perhaps partly responsible for some of the resulting structures? Sure. Perhaps a large electromagnetic event is associated with the supernova? Possible, though I didn't see where that's measured ( or measurable )... but the cause of the event? You're really saying that article had that evidence somewhere? Because you seem to be the only one... correlation is not causation, here, that's what I'm trying to get across. Electromagnetic properties are valid, but across light-years? Stronger than other properties for masses as large as stars? It just seems unlikely.
Here's a nice link for you. It's not that the Plasma guys aren't being taken seriously, for the most part, they are... until they take things too far, by, say, claiming that electromagnetic forces are responsible for supernova, or that their data refutes fully the big bang theory when it doesn't.
Seriously, Lerner has done a lot to hurt the Electric/Plasma Universe crowd, IMHO. And, really, I'm not entirely sure the two are exactly the same. From what I've read, the Plasma folks are trying to distance themselves from the Electric folks... even they think the Electric Universe guys have taken it too far, and the article in the story you posted is of the Electric variety.
In a practical, layman-scientist's view, over large distances, electrical forces both attract and repel, and that's what's at a fundamental level put the general community off, especially when there are things ( where are the matter/anitmatter collision gamma rays predicted ? ) not explained by the theory, and other, classical, accepted ways to explain things it's proponents attack... like how supernova are triggered. Who knows, maybe later parts of these theories will test out to be true and accepted, but... the story you linked did not 'prove' or 'decode' anything serious about supernova, and generally lacks credibility.
And I do hope you've read the articles I've linked to... and generally absorbed the notions that (a) the general consensus seems to be that the Plasma Universe guys take things a little too far where conventional physics offers reasonable explainations and (b) the Plasma Universe guys think the Electical Universe guys take things WAY too far... so that leaves them way out there... and that's the article you choose to post a story on without any other references to back it up. Sorry, that perhaps shows a lack of critical thinking on your part. Seriously. Think about it. I'm trying to help.
Your IT departments didn't have a presence in upper management?
It sounds like you have chosen your workplaces poorly.
Well, actually, I was being a bit flippant in my response, for which I apologize, but... for the past several years I've worked at a small company, even smaller than the OP's 25-client setup. With a sole proprietorship owner-operated company, *one person* is the "upper management". If a certain IT expense is approved or not can depend on the mood of the owner or the state of the books from month-to-month... and if an owner has decided that a certain type of expense just has 'too much overhead' associated with it, or they don't like company XYZ or product D, you don't get it, rational or not.
And uh, well, I've worked some great jobs, just never really in IT - I'm a programmer, and even here, someone else does almost all of the real 'IT support' work. Incidentally, a small company has some perks- I have a real office, I know my clients, I have some free time, I'm self directed, I don't work in a big, depressing, half-empty dot-com-bust business park cube farm like some folks I know. My point is yea, though IT has a seat at the table ( at most companies ), it's one seat, and their budget is not even really theirs to prioritize. Luckily, the clients ( production, development, marketing ) depend on IT and are *usually* smart enough to give them what they need, but... I think history has shown that when times get tough, IT has it's budget cut as deep as it can be cut, even in a big organization. At a small company, a slow billing month can mean *no* new purchases, no matter how bad it's needed - if the server dies, you're looking for a 'spare' desktop to replace it. IT does not set it's own budget, anywhere that I've seen... at best it has influence, is involved in planning at some level, and can set priorities... but it's overstating things to say that they 'set their own budget', I think.
I believe that since it uses a normal dock connector, if you buy a firewire cable it should work fine (just like new minis only come with usb cable, but firewire cable if you have it works fine...)
I wish that were the case, but unless Apple's posted specs are wrong, that's not the case. Firewire is listed under "Power and Battery" at the bottom, as a method for charging, but under "Mac System Requirements" is
Macintosh computer with USB port (USB 2.0 recommended)
Mac OS X v10.3.4 or later
I actually hadn't noticed the little 10.3.4 gottcha there at the end, either...
It does seem to indicate that I could use USB1.1 to transfer ( unlike the shuffle )... though, yuck, I can see why that would be 'not recommended' for 4GB of data transfer !!!
So, I guess I could update to Tiger, and use USB1.1 to transfer data, and Firewire to charge... but I'm not going to. Flat-panel G4 iMac users are sorta out of luck with this one... unless they're willing to transfer 2-4 gigs at USB1.1 speeds, I guess.
My response was specific to the MDD-owning GP. I wasn't trying to explain Apple's choices, and personally, I'm not happy with their moving away from Firewire at all.
Mmm... yea, sorry about that... didn't mean to take it out on you... didn't really think I was until I went back and read my rant just now... I'm just bummed as I'd like to get one of these but can't afford it, much less a new computer right now grrr... not upset with you there, thanks. Maybe I can get a nano and use it with the G3 I gave my mother-in-law... grr...
Or, looking at the specs, it seems like a nano might transfer ( slooooowwwly ) via USB 1.1, and charge ( only ) via Firewire, but ouch... maybe I'll just save up for a full-size iPod...
That's nice... unless you're like me, and were suckered into buying one of those ( otherwise quite nice ) flat-panel G4 iMacs... at the time it was like "yea, it doesn't have USB2.0, just 1.1, but it has FireWire for my high-speed connectivity needs"...
Now, just try to find a cheap external firewire drive enclosure, and watch in dismay as even Apple's own consumer devices favor USB2.0 over FireWire... this is a sad day for Firewire, though I've seen the shift coming from Apple and can't say I blame them *too* much... except they really should have done a USB2.0 rev of that G4 flat-panel iMac, it was USB1.1 for way, way too long...
Let me ask, would *you* like to transfer 4GB of files over USB1.1 ?? I'm just glad I already got my wife her mini, hopefully it'll keep working until I'm able to afford an Intel-based PowerMac...
But I haven't read even one yet that suggests some simple principles or facts which can be used to debunk the basic claim of the plasma cosmologists and the Electric Universe proponents: that plasma physics (i.e. electrodynamics as embodied in the behavior of plasmas) is not given enough credit when scietific models and theories that attempt to explain stellar and interstellar phenomenon.
I reallly shouldn't answer you, since it looks like everyone else has followed the advice of "don't feed the trolls" here, but... if you haven't read one that suggests some basic facts which can be used to debunk the claims of the article, then you just aren't looking. And I'm sorry, why does your B.S. meter not go off the scale when you read about "interstellar electric transmission lines" ?!? I'm afraid your B.S. meter isn't as good as you think.
Why not just go check out the badastronomer link like everyone says to ? Oh, be cause you're obviously trolling, that's why. Hey, don't get me wrong- especially when looking at some of the more interesting structures, thinking of *magneto*-electric fields involved does help explain those structures... but electric fields aren't the only ones that create some of these structures, and *everything* in cosmology can't be explained in such terms. There's *matter* and *fusion* involved in a lot of it.
Here is an excellent debunking of the "electric sun" theory, which is really a basis for much of the electric universe quackery, erm postulation. Until you can justify the inaccuracies and illogical arguments contained in that theory, everyone else will continue to consider the sum of the 'electric universe' theory to be, as Tim Thompson says, "devoid of merit". We don't reject it out of hand, we reject it because it doesn't fit measurable, observed reality, and reaches to explain things that are more easilty explained.
Peons don't have control over a budget.
IT Departments do.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
What business do *you* work in? Everywhere I've ever been, the upper management controls the budget. Usually, the priorities ( after "lining the pockets of the boss/owner" ) are: Marketing/Sales, Product Development/Production, Support/misc overhead... in that order. Guess which one is IT? Oh, that's right... the *last* one. If you get extra resources thrown your way in IT, it's to support missions in Marketing or Development or Production, not because you "have control over a budget". Your IT allocation is often dependent on managers in other departments bothering to know what they'll need and bothering to ask you what it'll cost. Want to guess how often that actually happens??
Oh, and this guy talking about his 25-person, 1-server operation? He should have at least one other guy helping him out, two if it's a Windows shop, but really, it's a small business, he might not have a choice and is relatively lucky that he doesn't have _more_ responsibilities than he already does. Although he probably is responsible for the phones, lighting, vehicle maintenance, etc... while the boss/owner pulls down high three figures minimum and spends most of his day out of the office...
If he was smart or responsible, he'd point out the low cost and high need for backup server hardware, and work out some sort of assistant position where some low-paid, can't-get-a-better-job-anywhere kid will take his crap work and learn enough that he can at least take a day off without risking the whole company... of course, that would require the boss actually listening to him and caring about his company enough to spend a few thousand on a server and $30-60k on yet another overhead-expense hire ( they HATE those )...
How long did it take them to cut off 680x0 users when they switched to PPC?
A pretty damn long time, really, if you start counting at the first release of the first PPC machine. That was March 1994, according to this timeline. The last Apple OS to support 68k machines was OS 8.1, which was released in 1997.
So, three years, in a sense, although plenty of people used their 68k macs for a whole lot longer than that...
I can't seem to find any record of what kind of hardware service contracts you could get back then, but three years sounds like a long time for computer hardware, and is probably about right...
Any idea when the Mac Mini will hit x86? Everyone else has tried to release a Mac Mini clone at x86 and failed, I want to see if Apple can do it successfully.
Plus I wanna get one.
I'm really just guessing on this, but when Apple puts out an Intel-based mini, I don't think it'll be using current chips. I think it'll be using one of the newer, recently-announced 64-bit chips. The timeframes for the release of these chips and Apple's switch to intel line up perfectly, and I don't think it's coincidence.
Since these are lower-power chips, I don't think they'll have trouble. Besides, Intel ( and others ) can and do squeeze Pentium M chips into all sorts of small enclosures, it's just that they can't do it cheaply and the PC crowd is less interested in cute designs...
Hey, ain't you a tad off-topic ? At least say you don't care about server performance, since clearly you're only interested in single-user desktop... fork() latencies won't affect you! ( See, look, I'm on-topic! Easy, huh? )
Boy, I'd give my left - ah - ear hair maybe? pinkie fingernail clippings? whatever - if Avie Tevanian and/or some of the FreeBSD committee members would get on here and talk about the Carnegie-Mellon/Utah/Whosesoever's microkernel and the FreeBSD threading layer and all the cool stuff that I've always wished I knew more about ever since I cut my teeth on a NeXTstation with Interface Builder and the ObjectiveC compiler.
Stares off into the distance, bats eyelids, and releases big, wistful, teenie-bopper groupie sigh...
You're not the only one... if I had a good x86 machine to compare to my G5, or wanted to mess with installing YDL on it, I'd be writing a pthread() benchmark right now.
As it is, maybe sometime soon I'll put together a system to run Darwinx86, BSD4.9, BSD5.x and Linux, and write a pthread() benchmark for those. Hopefully someone else will do that test before *I* get around to it, though...
If Apple wants to compete in the x86 server space, though, this sounds like something they'd best be working on...
how hard would it be to write an extremely simple program that calls pthread() in a loop, counts the threads, and issues a timestamp?
If you think the bottleneck is in thread creation, test thread creation, not fork(). They're not the same, and OS X does enough odd stuff with processes that I'd not be shocked in fork() had a bunch of extra process-related overhead that pthread() does not.
I'm not saying that thread creation isn't slow on OS X- it likely is... but please, if we suspect that's the problem, *that* is what we want to see tested! This article and AnandTech's testing methodology somehow explicitly misses the point of what they think the problem is... and it doesn't seem like it should be difficult *at all* to write a simple test to address *exactly* that problem.
Write a simple pthread() benchmark. The code could probably fit on one screen. Publish the code, run the test, file a bug with Apple, be done with it. A simple pthread() benchmark will tell us if the problem is in pthread() or fork() at this point, wouldn't that be nice to know *for sure*, so we don't have to speculate?
All this mucking about with MySQL doesn't tell us where the problem is, and I don't understand what's so difficult about coming up with a simple, pure pthread() benchmark... again, I *do* agree with the author and think OS X pthread() is the problem, I'd just like to see a simple, pure test that *shows* that it's *the* problem, so I can file a bug with Apple...
I have a PNY Attache.
I've gone swimming in the lake with it in my bathing suit pocket, worn fuzzy sweaters on thick carpet, and accidentally slammed it against some concrete (swinging it on a cord when the cord broke)
In contrast, I have two coworkers who both had their Lexmark USB memory sticks break after simple, relatively low-velocity drops from 3 feet or so...
Lexmark's quality issues asside, they should be able to engineer these keys tough enough that they'll stand up to most normal use... they won't be quite as sturdy as a simple bit of metal, though, and I'm not sure the actually make the car more secure. It's cute, more than anything... and I'm pretty sure the only new part is that it's a regular USB key... all sorts of cars have electronic starter keys of some form or another.
Saeed says: So, honestly, two operators in a dirty business go at each other, my personal feeling is I hope they both go down. It's kind of like two porn sites arguing which has the sluttiest bitches...
truckaxle says:Nice analogy but I don't think it fully applies. There is nothing inherently evil about search engine optimization.
Whoa there truckaxle... are you saying there's something inherently evil about slutty bitches? You've never met *good* slutty bitches? Trust me, they're out there...
Anyway, the analogy doesn't work because when two porn sites argue about who has the sluttiest bitches, they both win- it's called a publicity stunt. By contrast, when two search engine optimization companies sue, someone's going to end up paying a lawyer. So at least one of them is going to lose. That's how it's different.
Of course, what Saeed is really getting at is that he doesn't care. These guys can go screw each other, that's OK with him...
The closest I've ever come to a functional game is demonstrated by the stunningly cutting edge and innovative game, PigShooter. (I use the worlds "stunningly", "cutting edge", "innovative", and "game" somewhat loosely...)
That's pretty funny. You've clearly a little *creative* ability, which definitely counts for something. The whole "my bullets are flying pigs with wings" bit is pretty inspired at least. Now you just have to work on every single other aspect of the game...
Wow, I didn't know Comic Book Guy lurked on Slashdot.....
You must not be much of a Simpsons fan. Just a few Comic Book Guy quotes:
Rest assured I was on the internet within minutes registering my disgust throughout the world.
CBG: Oh, Captain Janeway. Lace: The Final Brassiere.
Oh hurry up, I'm a busy man. Ugh, this high-speed
modem is intolerably slow. (The download is interrupted
by a banner advertisement) Hey, what the? Huh, the
Internet King. I wonder if he can provide faster nudity.
(scene changes to Homer's office)
Homer: Welcome to the internet my friend, how can I help you?
CBG: I'm interested in upgrading my twenty eight point eight
kilobaud internet connection to a one point five megabit
fibre-optic T-1 line. Will you be able to provide an IP
router that's compatable with my token ring ethernet LAN
configuration?
Homer: (after long pause) Can I have some money now?
and, of course, according to his Wikipedia entry, "Comic Book Guy was once married, in an online fantasy game. He and his Internet wife were thinking of having children, but that would have severely drained his power crystals."
Wow, off-topic *and* I wasted a good 12 minutes of my work time!
um, yes...I have. The point is that the Intel "mobile" chips are an alternative in the Intel world. There is no alternative in the PowerPC world. Which means that they can't make anything other than hot laptops, whereas cool intel or amd based laptops are easily available.
yea, I know, I was partly trying to be funny by linking the guy-burned-his-privates-on-a-laptop story, and although ( to my surprise ) the machine he was using was an Intel® Mobile Pentium® III with 443BX/PIIX4m, if you believe the Inquirer story I linked to. I had just assumed it was one of those nutty Pentium IV laptops of the non-M variety. I don't really understand why you'd make a laptop with a Pentium IV 3.6GHz non-M chip, myself. I guess they just have to prove that battery life and heat issues don't matter to some laptop users. So you can play Doom3 on the coffee table, I guess.
I'm not saying that Apple laptops, especially the smaller-form-factor G4-variety laptops ( which I guess they're all G4s now, aren't they ? ) don't get hot- they do - but compared to these Pentium IV non-M machines, they've got to be downright cool... as cool as the fact that I was going for "funny" and got "interesting";-)
Of course, it's really speculation that Apple is going to use those newer chips, but given that the timeframes for the chips' introduction and Apple's switch, it's not a big stretch...
Apple laptops can get warm, though, especially the newer, higher-clockrate ones. They're clearly pushing those G4s pretty hard. Oddly enough, though, there are no stories of Mac users burning themselves on their laptops...
ouch dude, if that works out to be true... well... sure, at what price point? Will flash memory storage ever become competitive with hard disk storage at some capacities ? It seriously needs an overhaul but my current main computer sports a 60GB drive, if you know what I'm getting at... I can think of a *lot* of uses for a 40GB flash drive. My digital camera needs one, for starters... camcorders... portable video players... GPS receivers... lots and lots of gadgets can use something like that...
Slashdot Mirror
Let's look at what the buttons do :
left click
right click
middle 'scroll button'
volume up
volume down
volume mute
page up
page down
email
IM
usually, I'm like "ONE button does the job", but I can see how for a certain class of users, this mouse is a neat thing. It'd annoy the heck out of me, as it duplicates things my keyboard does, and I just tend to use the keyboard, not the mouse, when I can help it, but... if you just read and write the occasional email, IM or other document... I can see it being useful, I guess. Not my cup of tea, though the auto-sense and sleep features are good, they're not new or special to this mouse... for me, the mail and IM light-up buttons are just gimicky, and although a 'mute' button might be nice, volume up/down seem a bit much, too.
Isn't that her cousin, Backhouse?
Seriously the only amusing part of this whole thing seems to have been censored, and that's the enormous quantity of email forward headers and extra info offered in those comments. Oh, and the bit about "Gav BACKHOUSE" which was apparently censored from the papers... and the bit about him being a cousin... that's humorous. Otherwise, it's just a lesson in email forwards... and... am I the only one who trims the forward chain out of these things before sending them on? That's frickin' pages of text to have to forward to the bottom, and really, it's not that juicy, I've read better on Usenet... then again, usenet is pretty well approved for the purpose of flamewars...
Oh, and sorry for linking to a modded-down, unformatted /. post above, it's just that the linked, formatted version has been taken down, and another's not available ( probably because someone pointed out that it includes all sorts of email addresses for top AU law firms, but guess what? I don't care! a simple search/replace on "Subject" made it readable again... ) and it contains what IMHO is the only interesting part of all of this.
As for the notion that this might be a fake story because it's attributable to a guy from a humor magazine... it's a pretty damn good job if he did fake it. Somehow I doubt it. He was just the first press-related guy to get it, likely...
Really? That's odd... I know plenty of people who jog or ride bikes with their iPod, and they all say they've never even skipped... interesting... I wonder if all that dropping and whatnot has gotten you a loose connection somewhere or something. Or maybe my friends only claim to jog... but I do see people jogging with their iPod minis all the time, it must usually work...
Oh, to be sure! And yet, I'd not be shocked if OS X did even more than all of that, doing stuff like registering the forked application with higher-level message-passing and even application-layer stuff like Finder and Launch Services, causing who-knows-what kind of delays that aren't seen elsewhere.
It's likely that OS X introduces more code in *both* calls, but it'd be nice to see a test that shows where the real bottleneck is. I'm pretty sure the pthread() issues aren't near as bad as the fork() issues, just drawing on some small experiences porting linux apps... but I've not done the test, and I still don't know why AnandTech wouldn't.
Yellow Dog costs money last I checked, and I don't really have the time or inclination to do so, frankly. It's all rather academic to me. The XServe and our OS X desktops are more than fast enough to do the work we do, and the convenience of the systems outweighs the cost-savings of Linux. If I had much, much larger data sets to crunch, or was running a large-volume web server, that might be a different matter... but then, especially if I was cost-concious, I'd probably just use Linux from the get-go, and probably not on PPC.
These guys have yellow dog, have the time, have the resources all set up, and are making a big stink about a fork() or MySQL performance problem which I almost don't care too much about unless it's really a serious thread-level OS bottleneck. They should do their job and identify, with reproducable certainty, the source of the problem. Heck, given that they can get both the Darwin and Linux source, they should be able to point out the actual lines of code that are at the heart of the issue. Now *that* would be interesting. If I had the time, I'd do it... but I don't understand why AnandTech wouldn't.
A very good and valid point. And yet, in the context of the OP's post, it's exactly the case - he's just one guy doing IT work for a shipping company with 85 trucks that they track via GPS, who also supports 25 desktop clients and one server. Which, as you correctly point out, is not an IT department and does not have an IT budget per se.
As for the IT department having to borrow a user's desktop to replace a server? That's just bad planning.
Welcome to the ad-hoc nature of small business. These are the reasons most people prefer larger organizations- the sheer bulk and complexity of such operations requires real planning which smaller businesses ( often incorrectly ) think they can do without.
Well, it wouldn't be the first time Apple's made a technical error on one of it's web pages that was later revised. If someone out there claims that it does work, I guess there's hope, and I could always ( at some point in the future when these things are more readily available ) wander into an Apple store and get someone to demo for me how it works with Firewire... the web page doesn't give me much hope, though.
I have. The first one, while somewhat interesting in it's own way, has not a heck of a lot to do with the claims of the Electric Universe folks. It makes heavy use of analogy to explain large-scale electromagnetic properties of planets, basically. This is the stuff that is actual, fairly solid conventional science... upon which a bit too much is claimed by the Electric Universe crowd. Again, not everything is explained in that manner.
The second link, however, is a press release, and not one from the LANL. Not saying it's conclusions are wrong, just that it might not be what it appears at first blush. It boils down to 'particles in space become ionized when heated by stars'. Again, actually nothing even controversial there, I believe.
The thing is, it's a *huge* jump from knowing something about the nature of electromagnetism to claiming that it's effects are responsible for the phenomena of supernova. Perhaps partly responsible for some of the resulting structures? Sure. Perhaps a large electromagnetic event is associated with the supernova? Possible, though I didn't see where that's measured ( or measurable )... but the cause of the event? You're really saying that article had that evidence somewhere? Because you seem to be the only one... correlation is not causation, here, that's what I'm trying to get across. Electromagnetic properties are valid, but across light-years? Stronger than other properties for masses as large as stars? It just seems unlikely.
Here's a nice link for you. It's not that the Plasma guys aren't being taken seriously, for the most part, they are... until they take things too far, by, say, claiming that electromagnetic forces are responsible for supernova, or that their data refutes fully the big bang theory when it doesn't.
Seriously, Lerner has done a lot to hurt the Electric/Plasma Universe crowd, IMHO. And, really, I'm not entirely sure the two are exactly the same. From what I've read, the Plasma folks are trying to distance themselves from the Electric folks... even they think the Electric Universe guys have taken it too far, and the article in the story you posted is of the Electric variety.
In a practical, layman-scientist's view, over large distances, electrical forces both attract and repel, and that's what's at a fundamental level put the general community off, especially when there are things ( where are the matter/anitmatter collision gamma rays predicted ? ) not explained by the theory, and other, classical, accepted ways to explain things it's proponents attack... like how supernova are triggered. Who knows, maybe later parts of these theories will test out to be true and accepted, but... the story you linked did not 'prove' or 'decode' anything serious about supernova, and generally lacks credibility.
And I do hope you've read the articles I've linked to... and generally absorbed the notions that (a) the general consensus seems to be that the Plasma Universe guys take things a little too far where conventional physics offers reasonable explainations and (b) the Plasma Universe guys think the Electical Universe guys take things WAY too far... so that leaves them way out there... and that's the article you choose to post a story on without any other references to back it up. Sorry, that perhaps shows a lack of critical thinking on your part. Seriously. Think about it. I'm trying to help.
Well, actually, I was being a bit flippant in my response, for which I apologize, but... for the past several years I've worked at a small company, even smaller than the OP's 25-client setup. With a sole proprietorship owner-operated company, *one person* is the "upper management". If a certain IT expense is approved or not can depend on the mood of the owner or the state of the books from month-to-month... and if an owner has decided that a certain type of expense just has 'too much overhead' associated with it, or they don't like company XYZ or product D, you don't get it, rational or not.
And uh, well, I've worked some great jobs, just never really in IT - I'm a programmer, and even here, someone else does almost all of the real 'IT support' work. Incidentally, a small company has some perks- I have a real office, I know my clients, I have some free time, I'm self directed, I don't work in a big, depressing, half-empty dot-com-bust business park cube farm like some folks I know. My point is yea, though IT has a seat at the table ( at most companies ), it's one seat, and their budget is not even really theirs to prioritize. Luckily, the clients ( production, development, marketing ) depend on IT and are *usually* smart enough to give them what they need, but... I think history has shown that when times get tough, IT has it's budget cut as deep as it can be cut, even in a big organization. At a small company, a slow billing month can mean *no* new purchases, no matter how bad it's needed - if the server dies, you're looking for a 'spare' desktop to replace it. IT does not set it's own budget, anywhere that I've seen... at best it has influence, is involved in planning at some level, and can set priorities... but it's overstating things to say that they 'set their own budget', I think.
I wish that were the case, but unless Apple's posted specs are wrong, that's not the case. Firewire is listed under "Power and Battery" at the bottom, as a method for charging, but under "Mac System Requirements" is
I actually hadn't noticed the little 10.3.4 gottcha there at the end, either...It does seem to indicate that I could use USB1.1 to transfer ( unlike the shuffle ) ... though, yuck, I can see why that would be 'not recommended' for 4GB of data transfer !!!
So, I guess I could update to Tiger, and use USB1.1 to transfer data, and Firewire to charge... but I'm not going to. Flat-panel G4 iMac users are sorta out of luck with this one... unless they're willing to transfer 2-4 gigs at USB1.1 speeds, I guess.
Mmm... yea, sorry about that... didn't mean to take it out on you... didn't really think I was until I went back and read my rant just now... I'm just bummed as I'd like to get one of these but can't afford it, much less a new computer right now grrr... not upset with you there, thanks. Maybe I can get a nano and use it with the G3 I gave my mother-in-law... grr...
Or, looking at the specs, it seems like a nano might transfer ( slooooowwwly ) via USB 1.1, and charge ( only ) via Firewire, but ouch... maybe I'll just save up for a full-size iPod...
That's nice... unless you're like me, and were suckered into buying one of those ( otherwise quite nice ) flat-panel G4 iMacs... at the time it was like "yea, it doesn't have USB2.0, just 1.1, but it has FireWire for my high-speed connectivity needs"...
Now, just try to find a cheap external firewire drive enclosure, and watch in dismay as even Apple's own consumer devices favor USB2.0 over FireWire... this is a sad day for Firewire, though I've seen the shift coming from Apple and can't say I blame them *too* much... except they really should have done a USB2.0 rev of that G4 flat-panel iMac, it was USB1.1 for way, way too long...
Let me ask, would *you* like to transfer 4GB of files over USB1.1 ?? I'm just glad I already got my wife her mini, hopefully it'll keep working until I'm able to afford an Intel-based PowerMac...
I reallly shouldn't answer you, since it looks like everyone else has followed the advice of "don't feed the trolls" here, but... if you haven't read one that suggests some basic facts which can be used to debunk the claims of the article, then you just aren't looking. And I'm sorry, why does your B.S. meter not go off the scale when you read about "interstellar electric transmission lines" ?!? I'm afraid your B.S. meter isn't as good as you think.
Why not just go check out the badastronomer link like everyone says to ? Oh, be cause you're obviously trolling, that's why. Hey, don't get me wrong- especially when looking at some of the more interesting structures, thinking of *magneto*-electric fields involved does help explain those structures... but electric fields aren't the only ones that create some of these structures, and *everything* in cosmology can't be explained in such terms. There's *matter* and *fusion* involved in a lot of it.
Here is an excellent debunking of the "electric sun" theory, which is really a basis for much of the electric universe quackery, erm postulation. Until you can justify the inaccuracies and illogical arguments contained in that theory, everyone else will continue to consider the sum of the 'electric universe' theory to be, as Tim Thompson says, "devoid of merit". We don't reject it out of hand, we reject it because it doesn't fit measurable, observed reality, and reaches to explain things that are more easilty explained.
Here is a thread on the topic on the "Bad Astronomy and Universe Today" forum. Have fun trolling, but take it there. Most of us don't think it's worthwhile to debate pseudoscientists looking for publicity.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
What business do *you* work in? Everywhere I've ever been, the upper management controls the budget. Usually, the priorities ( after "lining the pockets of the boss/owner" ) are: Marketing/Sales, Product Development/Production, Support/misc overhead... in that order. Guess which one is IT? Oh, that's right... the *last* one. If you get extra resources thrown your way in IT, it's to support missions in Marketing or Development or Production, not because you "have control over a budget". Your IT allocation is often dependent on managers in other departments bothering to know what they'll need and bothering to ask you what it'll cost. Want to guess how often that actually happens??
Oh, and this guy talking about his 25-person, 1-server operation? He should have at least one other guy helping him out, two if it's a Windows shop, but really, it's a small business, he might not have a choice and is relatively lucky that he doesn't have _more_ responsibilities than he already does. Although he probably is responsible for the phones, lighting, vehicle maintenance, etc... while the boss/owner pulls down high three figures minimum and spends most of his day out of the office...
If he was smart or responsible, he'd point out the low cost and high need for backup server hardware, and work out some sort of assistant position where some low-paid, can't-get-a-better-job-anywhere kid will take his crap work and learn enough that he can at least take a day off without risking the whole company... of course, that would require the boss actually listening to him and caring about his company enough to spend a few thousand on a server and $30-60k on yet another overhead-expense hire ( they HATE those )...
A pretty damn long time, really, if you start counting at the first release of the first PPC machine. That was March 1994, according to this timeline. The last Apple OS to support 68k machines was OS 8.1, which was released in 1997.
So, three years, in a sense, although plenty of people used their 68k macs for a whole lot longer than that...
I can't seem to find any record of what kind of hardware service contracts you could get back then, but three years sounds like a long time for computer hardware, and is probably about right...
I'm really just guessing on this, but when Apple puts out an Intel-based mini, I don't think it'll be using current chips. I think it'll be using one of the newer, recently-announced 64-bit chips. The timeframes for the release of these chips and Apple's switch to intel line up perfectly, and I don't think it's coincidence.
Since these are lower-power chips, I don't think they'll have trouble. Besides, Intel ( and others ) can and do squeeze Pentium M chips into all sorts of small enclosures, it's just that they can't do it cheaply and the PC crowd is less interested in cute designs...
Hey, ain't you a tad off-topic ? At least say you don't care about server performance, since clearly you're only interested in single-user desktop... fork() latencies won't affect you! ( See, look, I'm on-topic! Easy, huh? )
You're not the only one... if I had a good x86 machine to compare to my G5, or wanted to mess with installing YDL on it, I'd be writing a pthread() benchmark right now.
As it is, maybe sometime soon I'll put together a system to run Darwinx86, BSD4.9, BSD5.x and Linux, and write a pthread() benchmark for those. Hopefully someone else will do that test before *I* get around to it, though...
If Apple wants to compete in the x86 server space, though, this sounds like something they'd best be working on...
how hard would it be to write an extremely simple program that calls pthread() in a loop, counts the threads, and issues a timestamp?
If you think the bottleneck is in thread creation, test thread creation, not fork(). They're not the same, and OS X does enough odd stuff with processes that I'd not be shocked in fork() had a bunch of extra process-related overhead that pthread() does not.
I'm not saying that thread creation isn't slow on OS X- it likely is... but please, if we suspect that's the problem, *that* is what we want to see tested! This article and AnandTech's testing methodology somehow explicitly misses the point of what they think the problem is... and it doesn't seem like it should be difficult *at all* to write a simple test to address *exactly* that problem.
Write a simple pthread() benchmark. The code could probably fit on one screen. Publish the code, run the test, file a bug with Apple, be done with it. A simple pthread() benchmark will tell us if the problem is in pthread() or fork() at this point, wouldn't that be nice to know *for sure*, so we don't have to speculate?
All this mucking about with MySQL doesn't tell us where the problem is, and I don't understand what's so difficult about coming up with a simple, pure pthread() benchmark... again, I *do* agree with the author and think OS X pthread() is the problem, I'd just like to see a simple, pure test that *shows* that it's *the* problem, so I can file a bug with Apple...
In contrast, I have two coworkers who both had their Lexmark USB memory sticks break after simple, relatively low-velocity drops from 3 feet or so...
Lexmark's quality issues asside, they should be able to engineer these keys tough enough that they'll stand up to most normal use... they won't be quite as sturdy as a simple bit of metal, though, and I'm not sure the actually make the car more secure. It's cute, more than anything... and I'm pretty sure the only new part is that it's a regular USB key... all sorts of cars have electronic starter keys of some form or another.
So, honestly, two operators in a dirty business go at each other, my personal feeling is I hope they both go down. It's kind of like two porn sites arguing which has the sluttiest bitches...
truckaxle says:Nice analogy but I don't think it fully applies. There is nothing inherently evil about search engine optimization.
Whoa there truckaxle... are you saying there's something inherently evil about slutty bitches? You've never met *good* slutty bitches? Trust me, they're out there...
Anyway, the analogy doesn't work because when two porn sites argue about who has the sluttiest bitches, they both win- it's called a publicity stunt. By contrast, when two search engine optimization companies sue, someone's going to end up paying a lawyer. So at least one of them is going to lose. That's how it's different.
Of course, what Saeed is really getting at is that he doesn't care. These guys can go screw each other, that's OK with him...
That's pretty funny. You've clearly a little *creative* ability, which definitely counts for something. The whole "my bullets are flying pigs with wings" bit is pretty inspired at least. Now you just have to work on every single other aspect of the game...
You must not be much of a Simpsons fan. Just a few Comic Book Guy quotes:
Rest assured I was on the internet within minutes registering my disgust throughout the world.
CBG: Oh, Captain Janeway. Lace: The Final Brassiere. Oh hurry up, I'm a busy man. Ugh, this high-speed modem is intolerably slow. (The download is interrupted by a banner advertisement) Hey, what the? Huh, the Internet King. I wonder if he can provide faster nudity.
(scene changes to Homer's office)
Homer: Welcome to the internet my friend, how can I help you?
CBG: I'm interested in upgrading my twenty eight point eight kilobaud internet connection to a one point five megabit fibre-optic T-1 line. Will you be able to provide an IP router that's compatable with my token ring ethernet LAN configuration?
Homer: (after long pause) Can I have some money now?
and, of course, according to his Wikipedia entry, "Comic Book Guy was once married, in an online fantasy game. He and his Internet wife were thinking of having children, but that would have severely drained his power crystals."
Wow, off-topic *and* I wasted a good 12 minutes of my work time!
yea, I know, I was partly trying to be funny by linking the guy-burned-his-privates-on-a-laptop story, and although ( to my surprise ) the machine he was using was an Intel® Mobile Pentium® III with 443BX/PIIX4m, if you believe the Inquirer story I linked to. I had just assumed it was one of those nutty Pentium IV laptops of the non-M variety. I don't really understand why you'd make a laptop with a Pentium IV 3.6GHz non-M chip, myself. I guess they just have to prove that battery life and heat issues don't matter to some laptop users. So you can play Doom3 on the coffee table, I guess.
I'm not saying that Apple laptops, especially the smaller-form-factor G4-variety laptops ( which I guess they're all G4s now, aren't they ? ) don't get hot- they do - but compared to these Pentium IV non-M machines, they've got to be downright cool... as cool as the fact that I was going for "funny" and got "interesting" ;-)
You've obviously never used a Pentium-based laptop. There is a reason why Apple is going to use the newer, cooler, mobile chips rather than Pentium chips.
Of course, it's really speculation that Apple is going to use those newer chips, but given that the timeframes for the chips' introduction and Apple's switch, it's not a big stretch...
Apple laptops can get warm, though, especially the newer, higher-clockrate ones. They're clearly pushing those G4s pretty hard. Oddly enough, though, there are no stories of Mac users burning themselves on their laptops...
ouch dude, if that works out to be true... well... sure, at what price point? Will flash memory storage ever become competitive with hard disk storage at some capacities ? It seriously needs an overhaul but my current main computer sports a 60GB drive, if you know what I'm getting at... I can think of a *lot* of uses for a 40GB flash drive. My digital camera needs one, for starters... camcorders... portable video players... GPS receivers... lots and lots of gadgets can use something like that...