Technically, all software compiled with CPU optimisations will be faster, when compared with software without those optimisations.
However, the better question to ask is whether the applications in question will be "usefully" faster. For example, if I compiled Firefox with CPU optimisations, which made pages load 0.25 of a second faster, is that going to be useful to me, in particular compared to the time it took to compile ? Probably not - the latency on the Internet is going to be far greater and vary enough such that I'll never be able to usefully benefit from the 0.25 second per page performance increase. Even if I did benefit per page, and say loaded 1000 pages a day, I'm saving 250 seconds per day, which is just over 4 minutes per day. As I mentioned in another post, I spend more time that that in the toilet per day. Does a 4 minute per day saving really matter ? To me, I don't think it does.
Not being a programmer, I have to ask, does this matter that much? I mean, other than the kernel or glibc, it seems that most programs spend their time waiting on an event, be it user input or some type of request from another program or service.
You're on your way to becoming a programmer, because you are rightly questioning "hearsay" regarding across the board CPU optimisations.
While I've come across your argument a lot, regarding lots of little amounts of saved time, I struggle to see any actual value in these "micro" time savings.
How do you collect up all these micro time savings, making up an "new" hour, in which you can usefully do something else ?
The only application you've mentioned where I think these optimisations matter is DVD encoding. More broadly, useful time savings can be gained as these jobs tend to take a lot of time eg. I would consider saving 5 minutes on an hours video processing to be worth it. 5 seconds saving per hour wouldn't be.
I don't see how reducing an SSH connection set up time by 0.25 of a second is going to make me dramatically more productive, even if I do it 1000 times a day. 1000 * 0.25 = 250 seconds, or just over four minutes a day saving. I spend more time in the toilet than that, maybe I should start taking my computer to the toilet with me ?
My point is this - you need to do a cost benefit analysis, to determine whether the actual time saving has any useful value. In a lot of cases, on the typical, relatively high-performance machine, across the board CPU optimisations don't have any useful value.
I think throwing away your TV set would be far more productive than compiling everything from source in most cases.
Just use 4K stacks. Much simpler than always allocating 2 x 4KB adjacent pages, with the associated waste. Sort of like taking two steps forwards all the time, just in case you might want to move that far sometimes.
Your solution is very wasteful just to cater for one or two exception manufacturers who won't release their hardware programming information.
One of the Unix tenents is to "optimise for the common case". Binary modules are not the common case, so always allocating 2 x adjacent 4KB pages wouldn't be following that tenent.
The people I trust with my "hidden" personal email address are also people I trust to run a patch MTA/MUA. Of course, they also have my personal phone number, if they need a different way of contacting me, when email doesn't work.
If I don't trust them to run a patched MTA/MUA, then they'll get one of my "special" ie. sacrificial subdomain email addresses, rather than my actual personal one.
A key point, which I didn't realise when I wrote the original text at the URL, is that nothing is permanent, including my physical address, my phone number or even my name. Once you accept that all these things have different levels of temporalness, you can then, in the specific case of spam, start creating and using email addresses that have differing levels of life expectency. My (current) personal email address isn't ever going to be permanent, as I probably won't have nosense.org as a domain for the rest of my life.
Once you get over the idea of a permanent, rest-of-life email address, you can then start to be a bit more creative with spam mitigation techiques.
Very very few. I've got firefox installed on my family computer. Despite them getting infected with adware and spyware through IE, none of them want to use firefox. I've asked them many times, and even gone to the point of deleting IE, but their resillence to use anything else forced me to put it back on (amongst other reasons).
Do your family also find locks on the house door inconvenient ? Or maybe, if they found out that the locks they had were ineffective, wouldn't change them because they like the colour or shape of the key ?
This just another tradgic example of people always choosing the "easy" option of convenience over the "hard" option of increased security.
Oh well, hopefully your family will learn sooner rather than later that you can't ignore security when connecting to the Internet. Hopefully they will lose all their files so the lesson hurts.
And, to show that you know what you are talking about, after a few days of pain, offer to restore their data from the surrepticious backups you took while they weren't watching.
so how can you make generalisations such as "The problem w/ Software RAID is it depends on the OS, if you OS fails you can loose your data" ?
Have you run software RAID under any other OSes ?
I'm pretty sure that almost immediately after Intel released that "feature", the next Linux kernel was patched to disable it on boot.
On the one occasion I've left it on in my BIOS ( a number of years ago now), in the Linux kernel boot log was a statement that the PID was being disabled.
As what you've said is sort of like saying "I'm giving up on door locks for my house, I think filtering guests as they enter is secure and hassle free."
2 - It's an open-source format, i.e. it reeks of piracy and hackers in the minds of music player manufacturers and of the public
I think you are way off here.
Firstly, a number of portable players support Ogg Vorbis. There is a list of four here, I'm sure the number will increase.
Secondly, I'd doubt that many of the public know about Ogg Vorbis, let alone consider it to "reek[s] of piracy and hackers".
Furthermore, the "success" of P2P music sharing indicates that the public are the last group of people to have morals about the source or the format of the music they listen to.
Ogg isn't as widely used by the public, because it is not known by the public, it is as simple as that. That will change, as more and more players support it, and the public find out that it is a DRM free alternative to the flexibility restricted formats such as AAC.
Re-reading my above paragraph, I realise that it isn't as accurately describing my point as I intended. I'll have another go.
The general public, being law abiding, don't usually care or take that much notice of these changes to detainment laws. Why ? Because as law abiding citizens, they think, these changes won't effect me, I'm never going to be effected as I abide by the law. That is the "face value" judgement that I was trying to describe, and, at face value, as a law abiding citizen, who doesn't ever think they'll be effected by it, it can sound reasonable, as it will only effect "nasty", "evil" "criminals".
Slashdot Mirror
You own the video card, yet they won't let you know how to program it.
Technically, all software compiled with CPU optimisations will be faster, when compared with software without those optimisations.
However, the better question to ask is whether the applications in question will be "usefully" faster. For example, if I compiled Firefox with CPU optimisations, which made pages load 0.25 of a second faster, is that going to be useful to me, in particular compared to the time it took to compile ? Probably not - the latency on the Internet is going to be far greater and vary enough such that I'll never be able to usefully benefit from the 0.25 second per page performance increase. Even if I did benefit per page, and say loaded 1000 pages a day, I'm saving 250 seconds per day, which is just over 4 minutes per day. As I mentioned in another post, I spend more time that that in the toilet per day. Does a 4 minute per day saving really matter ? To me, I don't think it does.
Not being a programmer, I have to ask, does this matter that much? I mean, other than the kernel or glibc, it seems that most programs spend their time waiting on an event, be it user input or some type of request from another program or service.
You're on your way to becoming a programmer, because you are rightly questioning "hearsay" regarding across the board CPU optimisations.
While I've come across your argument a lot, regarding lots of little amounts of saved time, I struggle to see any actual value in these "micro" time savings.
How do you collect up all these micro time savings, making up an "new" hour, in which you can usefully do something else ?
The only application you've mentioned where I think these optimisations matter is DVD encoding. More broadly, useful time savings can be gained as these jobs tend to take a lot of time eg. I would consider saving 5 minutes on an hours video processing to be worth it. 5 seconds saving per hour wouldn't be.
I don't see how reducing an SSH connection set up time by 0.25 of a second is going to make me dramatically more productive, even if I do it 1000 times a day. 1000 * 0.25 = 250 seconds, or just over four minutes a day saving. I spend more time in the toilet than that, maybe I should start taking my computer to the toilet with me ?
My point is this - you need to do a cost benefit analysis, to determine whether the actual time saving has any useful value. In a lot of cases, on the typical, relatively high-performance machine, across the board CPU optimisations don't have any useful value.
I think throwing away your TV set would be far more productive than compiling everything from source in most cases.
Matt Domsch, and the team he leads.
Just use 4K stacks. Much simpler than always allocating 2 x 4KB adjacent pages, with the associated waste. Sort of like taking two steps forwards all the time, just in case you might want to move that far sometimes.
Your solution is very wasteful just to cater for one or two exception manufacturers who won't release their hardware programming information.
One of the Unix tenents is to "optimise for the common case". Binary modules are not the common case, so always allocating 2 x adjacent 4KB pages wouldn't be following that tenent.
The people I trust with my "hidden" personal email address are also people I trust to run a patch MTA/MUA. Of course, they also have my personal phone number, if they need a different way of contacting me, when email doesn't work.
If I don't trust them to run a patched MTA/MUA, then they'll get one of my "special" ie. sacrificial subdomain email addresses, rather than my actual personal one.
A key point, which I didn't realise when I wrote the original text at the URL, is that nothing is permanent, including my physical address, my phone number or even my name. Once you accept that all these things have different levels of temporalness, you can then, in the specific case of spam, start creating and using email addresses that have differing levels of life expectency. My (current) personal email address isn't ever going to be permanent, as I probably won't have nosense.org as a domain for the rest of my life.
Once you get over the idea of a permanent, rest-of-life email address, you can then start to be a bit more creative with spam mitigation techiques.
Not perfect, then again, spam prevention methods never are.
What I do
Should have been
Sadly, security has lost out to "convenience".
Very very few. I've got firefox installed on my family computer. Despite them getting infected with adware and spyware through IE, none of them want to use firefox. I've asked them many times, and even gone to the point of deleting IE, but their resillence to use anything else forced me to put it back on (amongst other reasons).
Do your family also find locks on the house door inconvenient ? Or maybe, if they found out that the locks they had were ineffective, wouldn't change them because they like the colour or shape of the key ?
This just another tradgic example of people always choosing the "easy" option of convenience over the "hard" option of increased security.
Oh well, hopefully your family will learn sooner rather than later that you can't ignore security when connecting to the Internet. Hopefully they will lose all their files so the lesson hurts.
And, to show that you know what you are talking about, after a few days of pain, offer to restore their data from the surrepticious backups you took while they weren't watching.
You might have got away with it in Canada, however you're probably on GWB's watch list now !!
Or have I got the reference to Darleks(sp?) wrong ?
so how can you make generalisations such as "The problem w/ Software RAID is it depends on the OS, if you OS fails you can loose your data" ? Have you run software RAID under any other OSes ?
Please. (Hello from Adelaide, Rusty)
ronco.com
You might be able to bind a key or mouse button in your window manager to run it.
XSel
I'm pretty sure that almost immediately after Intel released that "feature", the next Linux kernel was patched to disable it on boot.
On the one occasion I've left it on in my BIOS ( a number of years ago now), in the Linux kernel boot log was a statement that the PID was being disabled.
As what you've said is sort of like saying "I'm giving up on door locks for my house, I think filtering guests as they enter is secure and hassle free."
The kernel guys will ignore a system with them installed as well. They taint the kernel too.
however, I think the ATI 9200 series meets your requirements.
The http://dri.sf.net project is the place to get the scoop on fully open source supported 3D cards.
I'd say either
usage not in accordance with product instructions
or
improper installation
are the clauses that Intel are using to get out of the warranty.
The question is, in the installation instructions, I'd be sure they specify to use a fan, however, do they specify to use the supplied fan ?
They just don't invent anything.
because the word "innovate" means to introduce changes and new ideas [emphasis mine]. Both HP and Dell are innovators.
What HP supposably does, or used to do, and Dell doesn't do, is invent, which means to design and/or create something which has never been made before .
Innovators will cease to exist if invention or discovery never happens, as there will not be any new idears or changes to introduce.
Mr Dell has made a common mistake, most people aren't aware of the difference between innovate and invent.
I think you are way off here.
Firstly, a number of portable players support Ogg Vorbis. There is a list of four here, I'm sure the number will increase.
Secondly, I'd doubt that many of the public know about Ogg Vorbis, let alone consider it to "reek[s] of piracy and hackers".
Furthermore, the "success" of P2P music sharing indicates that the public are the last group of people to have morals about the source or the format of the music they listen to.
Ogg isn't as widely used by the public, because it is not known by the public, it is as simple as that. That will change, as more and more players support it, and the public find out that it is a DRM free alternative to the flexibility restricted formats such as AAC.
Re-reading my above paragraph, I realise that it isn't as accurately describing my point as I intended. I'll have another go.
The general public, being law abiding, don't usually care or take that much notice of these changes to detainment laws. Why ? Because as law abiding citizens, they think, these changes won't effect me, I'm never going to be effected as I abide by the law. That is the "face value" judgement that I was trying to describe, and, at face value, as a law abiding citizen, who doesn't ever think they'll be effected by it, it can sound reasonable, as it will only effect "nasty", "evil" "criminals".