For what it's worth, I still disagree with the guy but there's got to be some advantage to your youth, if nothing else, think of all the abysmal 1980s technology you skipped right over!
Bugger that! Think of all the abysmal 1980s music you skipped over. (...)
Sometimes it feels I'm the only one who liked the 1980s...
Those were the times of Cindy Lauper, (young) Madonna, A-Ha and pop-things alike.
Those were the golden years of 8-bit computing. Machines like Amiga, Mac etc were created in that decade.
Those were the years of Gorbachev, Thatcher, Khomeini... The video of Genesis' "Land of Confusion" was hilarious.
The girls were colorful and with crazy hairs...
It was shamelessly stupid and joyful.
The 1970s OTOH, were overrated IMO (I'm glad I was too young to experience that).
Bell pants? Afro-power microphone-like hair? Beatles gone? Progressive rock? Hippies getting older?
Aarrrgh...
The article basically says: children with Asperger-like behavior are bullied (so it's their own fault).
In the real world, bullying and social isolation do not necessarily happen together. The article seems to present both as unseparable facts though.
The article fails to address other factors like: What about the bully kid? Why does he/she does that? How some bullies are able to form mobs? Why not all kids behave like bullies when in contact with such child?
Apparently it's too hard and boring to research properly on that subject so:
- Blame the bullied kid.
- Say he/she needs treatment.
- Push tons of pills in order to fix all his/her social problems.
- Profit.
The reason I remember that engine is that, for ~1 year in 1999-2000, I had an Macintosh (bought it used, the new ones were horribly expensive here).
Well, my knee-jerk reaction was to use Netscape. But the machine ran OS 7.5 and had mere 16MB RAM, and Netscape was - really - slow and unstable (the usual result of software crashes in Macs, back then, was system reset).
Then I tried MSIE "Microsoft - yuck" for Mac. Well, not only it rendered the pages beatifully (it even did a perfect dithering job in order to simulate 24bit colors in a 15bit display), not only it was much faster but it was really stable.
That was the day I realised "man, there _are_ talented people working in Microsoft".
Also strange, it's the fact it was better than contemporary Windows' MSIE. For a couple of years I was puzzled why was that so, until I learned about the fact it used a different engine.
Well, better stopping here before getting beaten, accused of treason. I'm a Linux user, it seems I'm not supposed to say anything positive related to Microsoft.;)
I'm using Chrome under Linux x86-64.
While I like Firefox (well, "Iceweasel"), Chrome runs way faster and it's not performance-held by a single core like Firefox is.
About stability, Chrome crashed (and by "crashed" I mean the whole browser) only once in ~45 days, and my machine runs 24h with the browser always running with lots of tabs active.
Sometimes the Adobe Flash plugin crashes (and when it does, all tabs are affected), but in all cases a page reload solved that.
There are some issues which could improve though:
- Chrome consumes lots of memory. I suspect there's may some memory leakage problems even after closing almost all tabs (weird, considering that each page is an independent process).
- Buggy print function: the resulting printout lacks some characters.
- Text selection renders selected text almost unreadable.
- There's no (AFAIR) option to restore the opened pages when the browser crashes.
- Chrome, by default, does not use the window manager and the title bar is taken by the tabs. Interesting idea in theory, but annoying in practice.
- The "Favourites" works like Firefox, I think it would be better if it just dumped the links as a HTML page, like it does when you display the visited pages (Firefox could do that aswell).
Overall Chrome is a great browser, but I don't think it's mature enough for tasks of the "it shall not crash at this moment" kind (like internet banking, for example).
I don't want to start a holy war here, but what is the deal with you Mac fanatics? I've been sitting here at my freelance gig in front of a Mac (a Mac Pro with two 2.26GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon "Nehalem" processors and 6GB of RAM) for about 20 minutes now while it attempts to copy a 17 Meg file from one folder on the hard drive to another folder. 20 minutes. At home, on my Pentium Pro 200 running NT 4, which by all standards should be a lot slower than this Mac, the same operation would take about 2 minutes. If that.
I'm no Mac fan at all, but there must be something seriously wrong with your Mac, or you forgot to tell us some "little detail".
Mac OS pre-X was rubbish, I remember that Linux ran faster in a Performa 6360 than its native OS.
But a Mac Pro with Mac OS X copying a file slower than 1MB/sec? I find it hard to believe. Even a 7MHz Amiga was faster than this.
It's been said that circumcision reduces the chances of STDs and cancer for both partners.
Have you heard about... how's that called... ah, "basic hygiene"?
Water, soap... Wash it at least once a day.
Now if you're having sex with random women (or men, if that applies) and you do not take the proper precautions, being circumcised won't save you from STDs.
Second, many women prefer cut men because it's "cleaner" when performing fellatio.
I've never heard complaints. I admit, though, that circumcision is rather rare where I live.
Unless the guy is particularly unhygienic, I don't think that women can complain, considering it applies the other way around too.
Third, I've read stories that circumcised men also "last longer" in bed because the feeling isn't as intense for them compared to an uncircumcised man.
If you've got severe problems with premature ejaculation it might sound like a good idea.
As for me, I would rather keep my parts intact and enjoy the moment.
Make it as easy as possible for users to try your software.
Agreed, and here are some tips:
- Provide a decent and updated documentation.
- Provide sensible defaults and (if that applies) pre-configured and commented configuration files.
Take the time to create and maintain packaging for major Linux and BSD distributions. Or at least make it as easy as possible for someone to maintain a distribution package of the current stable version.
Hmm... It depends.
Is your software for non-technical end-users? Then it may be a good idea to provide packages for the most popular OSes.
Is your software for server-like purposes and for a technical audience? If you provide pre-compiled packages, you may end with lots with non-technical people bothering you in your personal e-mail address (no matter how clearly you state that the mailing lists are the proper channel for that).
If your software is desireable, voluntary packagers will appear eventually (BTW thanks for your work, packagers!).
(...)
Of course it has to be useful. Preferably better than the other free (either gratis or open-source / libre) alternatives.
Does the usefulness of the web software itself increase with an increased userbase? Look at marketing that deals with the network effect. In general, look at IT marketing, consider what would work with your target userbase, and try to go with that. How much do you know about your userbase? Market research is vital, even on FLOSS projects.
All those are valid remarks.
If your project is better than the alternatives (or even unique), you have to state that clearly.
Your potential users must be told, clearly, what for is your project and why it is so good.... and it's a good idea to provide snapshots/examples/whatever showing your software in action to "prove" your claims.
Well-known projects do not need such - let's say - advertising, so often their websites presumes you know what is that all about.
But it's not your project's case and you cannot afford such luxury.
The MSN part is troll-ish, some parts are oversimplistic and troll-ish aswell but...
While I'm a supporter of FOSS software, things like that do happen. There's a great deal of truth in that text.
Ironically, it also applies to proprietary software. The difference? We never hear about that.
Again this silly fight between AMD vs Intel.
When people are going to learn performance _depends_ on what you're going to process?
I remember, few years ago, having a server we had with an Athlon XP 2600 (its real clock was 2.1GHz AFAIR). A perfectly speedy machine for desktop usage, but as a server (pure CPU-load in that case, no I/O bottleneck) it was having a real hard time. We eventually replaced that machine and old 4x Xeon (P3-based, 500MHz), and things went to normal.
I already suspected what the problem could be, so I've decided to make a test replacing - temporarily - the Xeon-based server with a Sun Ultra 30 (1xUltrasparc II @ 300MHz).
Well, the Sparc not only survived the test, but also kicked hard the Athlon's ass. Still, as a desktop machine, the Sparc was mediocre.
The difference was that the Sparc had 2MB L2 cache, while the Athlon had only 256kB (even with 2x bandwidth and lower-latency RAM). In _that_ case the L2 cache made all the difference. Per MHz, the Sparc also won, by large margin, the Xeon machine (1MB L2 for each processor).
Athlon's (pre-64) performance compared to P4 (sorry, I don't have an i7 to compare against a X4) varies. For desktop usage the Athlons felt snappier in general, but with some performance "hiccups" when you started to tax the machine more. The P4s felt slower overall, but the performance seemed to be more homogeneous.
Which one was better then? Well, that's a good question. I personally preferred the "slower but smoother" P4, but Athlons were fine and I could recommend both processors for home usage,
You know what really, really suck?
Those benchmarks they publish around.
I mean "XYZ fps in Crysis"? mp3 lame encoding time? Synthetic benchmarks?
Those say nothing to me. Run some database benchmark, or measure the time it takes to compile the Linux kernel using all cores at once... Or move GBs of data in the memory N times etc. Then it might be interesting.
Ok, I guess I can live with Intel graphics (I don't play 3D games neither use fancy desktop effects).
But for that price...
Atom processor? I didn't know that using Linux meant you were a masochist.
Yeah, I know Linux can be quite fast but, honestly, there are much better low-consumption processors there. That's a desktop, not a netbook with battery concerns.
Even the most hardcore shell-only unix guy loves to issue a "make -j 4" and see all the cores working at full load and, soon after, work done.
3GB ram... Why 3GB? Why not 4GB? This is not a PC meant for Windows, that 3GB limit means nothing to Linux even in 32bit versions (yeah yeah, I'm aware of PAE limitations).
160GB HD. That's must be a joke. You only pick such HD when you want to save pennies in order to build the absolutely cheapest desktop.
"250watt power supply". I'm interested to know about the power efficiency of that power supply! You guys put an ATOM as processor, what is pointless unless you put a really, really efficient power supply.
Debian Sid (unstable)?
I'm using Lenny (yeah, I'm quite conservative with the software I use).
I've noticed there are some (I found only one, actually) audio boards (or their drivers) which are unable to simultaneous playback. Not my case though, and I'm using a SB Live 5.1.
Another possibility is that the other software is using OSS (instead of ALSA) for sound output, while Adobe's Flash uses ALSA (OSS is deprecated, as you may know) and that is causing conflicts.
AFAIR Adobe's Flash used to use OSS before Flash 9.
If is that the case, ou should either switch your software to ALSA (the best solution), or use the OSS compatibility library Adobe provides (I've heard such thing exists for Flash 9, but I don't know about Flash 10).
Another possibility is buggy sound driver.
Or even bad quality hardware. Years ago had bad experiences in general with a Live 24bit (awful sound board, also drains too much CPU while playing).
I had no Flash problems with Iceweasel, but sometimes (rarely) it crashes under Chrome (no big deal in that browser, you simply reload the page and it works again).
I have to disagree on a few points from the previous two posts. No offence to your excellent points, but I just don't see it that way.
1. Terrorism is actually a resistance movement? Ok interesting point, but a resistance movement to what? Are they resisting a free society? Rule of Law? Equality? Coming out of the middle ages? The right to be able to post on websites like this about whatever you? What?
"terrorrism" is just a word and is meaningless without a context.
ETA, in Spain, exploded cars and killed people expecting the pressure would make the spanish government allow the independence of the Basque Country.
If you're talking about terrorrism involving muslims against the so-called West, there are a number of reasons and a number of independent groups. Terrorrist acts happen even if by the mere anger of what is perceived by the mid-easterns as colonial interference (that includes imposing western values, such as Democracy).
2. Self righteousness brought 9/11 down on our heads eh? Well in my opinion we earned the right to be a bit self righteous don't you think? We earned it with blood, sweat, and tears. We earned it by fighting fascism, Socialism, Communism, and asshole-ism, I get sorta ticked off when people come off like we're some kinda of shake and bake society, like we haven't been working on this little problem called democracy for a few hundred years and it's still a work in progress. Sure we may not always get it right, but at least we try and not throw our hands up and suck the balls of the nearest warlord or dictator. Point of fact, the yahoo who threw the shoes at Bush was able to do so because he's not living in a dictatorship any longer. He was arrested, had a trial, and did his time. He wasn't dragged to the basement, had the shit beaten out of him, videotaped confessing his sins, and then shot moments later.
The USA deserve nothing in that regard from the point of view of several other countries.
Firstly, there was no "Socialism", you were battling Communism, and that no matter how disgraceful were the consequences.
Korea, Vietnam, 1980s Afghanistan... Do you remember that?
How do you dare to speak about Democracy from a high moral ground?
Every single country in Latin America remembers all the shit your country did there.
Leftist democratically-elected latin-american government? That's sounds communistic. Let's empower the local military, or some paramilitary groups, train them and provide political support.
Ooops... Democracy is gone! They have a brutal capitalistic dictatorship (with censorship, people "disappearing" etc) but hey - Look! - No Communism there!
Thank you very much.
Another funny fact (there are some many), is the USA's support of the Saud clan in Saudi Arabia. They're not democratic at all, and certainly not popular there. But their interests are compatible with the USA's government.
BTW the Iraq's shoe-guy was beaten in prison and the only reason he wasn't killed is because it would generate an international outcry. The case was already under the media's microscope.
3. The only clever critters I see are the ones who are able to exert their twisted will over those who are weaker than themselves. Those people exist in every society, even the US. Former President Bush did more to subvert the constitution than any president in recent memory. However, he was removed from office not by a violent coup, but by Voters. See in our imperfect self righteous society we can do that. We don't have to worry about disappearing in the middle of the night and waking up in a gulag somewhere.
Bush was re-elected after doing all the things he did in his first term. That alone tells me a lot.
There's no need to "disappear" dissents in the USA, your bizarre bi-partisan system and the propaganda takes care of them.
When there's need for violence, you can always count on cooperative foreign governments or Guantanamo so you can do your torture abroad, not tainting your virgin-pure and democratic USA territory.
LOL! Flash works just fine without all of this nonsense in Firefox on Windows 7. Never crashes. Just works.
And I didn't pay a dime for my copy of Windows 7. It was just like downloading a Linux distro that works perfectly.
WTF are you guys torturing yourself with this stuff? Go download a copy of Windows 7 and enjoy. Install Virtual PC (free) or VMWare (free) and muck with your toy OS there when you feel bored.
But my GOD! Stop torturing yourself with this crashing Flash Player nonsense!
Funny, the 64-bit Flash Player 10 works just fine in my Debian Linux machine.
I'm probably doing something wrong, perhaps I should mess around and try to break things (I've simply installed the plug-in and it worked - silly me).
Well, perhaps it's the damned 64-bit Google Chrome for Linux I'm running...
Ohmygosh, I've just realised... ALL my OS and its applications are 64-bit! And it's all working, and fast!:(
Bad, bad Linux!
Oh, and you are also inciting copyright infrigement, that's so cute.
Working for a large corporation depends less on the corporation as a whole, and more on the people you work with or your manager. In my case, I have four kids (7-3). My boss knows my family comes first.
Thanks for the mathematical explanation of how many kids you have. I'm curious as to why you chose that particular explanation -- why not use the simple four kids (2^2) explanation, it would make it a lot easier for those of used to thinking in binary.
Such a talent for twisting the meaning of words which can clearly be understood as originally meant using common sense... pedantically perverting that for your own purposes.
buy a mac homos! or are you too poor to afford a real computer?
To put it bluntly, your beloved Mac is an expensive x86 PC with a fancy case design.
I wouldn't be surprised if the very same chinese Mac factories also produce cheapo generic boards.
Coding in x86 ASM is never fun. Weird and odd and masochistically pleasurable for some, maybe, but not fun. Other architectures, on the other hand (like ARM), can be fun. x86-64 manages to increase the "funness" value somewhat, but I still wouldn't quite qualify it as "fun".
No need to go that far.
68k ASM is pure heaven compared to x86.
It also depends on the compiler. GCC, for example, sucks at auto-vectorization, so it's easy to get 30% or more on loopy scientific code just by using SSE instructions properly.
In contrast, PGI or ICC is much harder to beat using assembly.
ICC does a great work with auto-vectorization.
Yet (perhaps it's no longer true), ~3 years ago I had problems with ICC generating wrong code in certain situations. I went back to GCC.
Let's see this picture.
The guy on the left was the wanted one, the guy on the right is the one who had his brains turned into guacamole by the police.
The brazilian guy did not look like a german or a swedish, but he was perfectly passable as an italian, portuguese or spaniard.
Hey man, I loved the Amiga as much as anybody. We had an A1000 in 1986 and got an A3000 thereafter. Fine computers, if they had had Apple's marketing acumen, they might have ruled the world. However, it really is time to let go now. Mac OS X is superior in just about every respect, and the hardware is lightyears beyond what CBM had. Emulators are great for nostalgia, we'll always have Nuclear War.
What are you talking about? When Amiga was still alive Macintoshes had Mac OS 6,7,8,9, not Mac OS X.
And Mac OS "classic" was not an OS, was a crash-prone, non-multitasking toy.
I worked on the same system for 15 years. More than once I saw some code and said "what idiot wrote this!?"... only to realize it was me, 5 years ago. Yes, that did indeed lead to me becoming a) much less prone to "clever tricks" and b) much much better at explaining what (WHY) I was doing whatever it was.
I see no problem with clever code, as long as:
1) there's a real benefit (usually speed),
2) that part being modular and
3) its behavior being well commented.
IMO some of the "clever tricks" problems are:
1) people overoptimizing code that didn't had much impact in the first place,
2) people doing unnecessary (or even incorrect) optimizations the compiler takes care of (like (! a) instead of (a == 0), or (! some_pointer) instead of (some_pointer == NULL)),
3) people adding tons of mutual dependencies for some (supposed) gain in speed and
4) people who do "optimizations" which do not affect (or barely do) the performance, and the only thing it does is to make the source code tiny and "oh-so-clever" but hard to read and explosive once changes are made.
Slashdot Mirror
For what it's worth, I still disagree with the guy but there's got to be some advantage to your youth, if nothing else, think of all the abysmal 1980s technology you skipped right over!
Bugger that! Think of all the abysmal 1980s music you skipped over. (...)
Sometimes it feels I'm the only one who liked the 1980s...
Those were the times of Cindy Lauper, (young) Madonna, A-Ha and pop-things alike.
Those were the golden years of 8-bit computing. Machines like Amiga, Mac etc were created in that decade.
Those were the years of Gorbachev, Thatcher, Khomeini... The video of Genesis' "Land of Confusion" was hilarious.
The girls were colorful and with crazy hairs...
It was shamelessly stupid and joyful.
The 1970s OTOH, were overrated IMO (I'm glad I was too young to experience that).
Bell pants? Afro-power microphone-like hair? Beatles gone? Progressive rock? Hippies getting older?
Aarrrgh...
That was my impression too.
The article basically says: children with Asperger-like behavior are bullied (so it's their own fault).
In the real world, bullying and social isolation do not necessarily happen together. The article seems to present both as unseparable facts though.
The article fails to address other factors like: What about the bully kid? Why does he/she does that? How some bullies are able to form mobs? Why not all kids behave like bullies when in contact with such child?
Apparently it's too hard and boring to research properly on that subject so:
- Blame the bullied kid.
- Say he/she needs treatment.
- Push tons of pills in order to fix all his/her social problems.
- Profit.
:)
;)
The reason I remember that engine is that, for ~1 year in 1999-2000, I had an Macintosh (bought it used, the new ones were horribly expensive here).
Well, my knee-jerk reaction was to use Netscape. But the machine ran OS 7.5 and had mere 16MB RAM, and Netscape was - really - slow and unstable (the usual result of software crashes in Macs, back then, was system reset).
Then I tried MSIE "Microsoft - yuck" for Mac. Well, not only it rendered the pages beatifully (it even did a perfect dithering job in order to simulate 24bit colors in a 15bit display), not only it was much faster but it was really stable.
That was the day I realised "man, there _are_ talented people working in Microsoft".
Also strange, it's the fact it was better than contemporary Windows' MSIE. For a couple of years I was puzzled why was that so, until I learned about the fact it used a different engine.
Well, better stopping here before getting beaten, accused of treason. I'm a Linux user, it seems I'm not supposed to say anything positive related to Microsoft.
I'm using Chrome under Linux x86-64.
While I like Firefox (well, "Iceweasel"), Chrome runs way faster and it's not performance-held by a single core like Firefox is.
About stability, Chrome crashed (and by "crashed" I mean the whole browser) only once in ~45 days, and my machine runs 24h with the browser always running with lots of tabs active.
Sometimes the Adobe Flash plugin crashes (and when it does, all tabs are affected), but in all cases a page reload solved that.
There are some issues which could improve though:
- Chrome consumes lots of memory. I suspect there's may some memory leakage problems even after closing almost all tabs (weird, considering that each page is an independent process).
- Buggy print function: the resulting printout lacks some characters.
- Text selection renders selected text almost unreadable.
- There's no (AFAIR) option to restore the opened pages when the browser crashes.
- Chrome, by default, does not use the window manager and the title bar is taken by the tabs. Interesting idea in theory, but annoying in practice.
- The "Favourites" works like Firefox, I think it would be better if it just dumped the links as a HTML page, like it does when you display the visited pages (Firefox could do that aswell).
Overall Chrome is a great browser, but I don't think it's mature enough for tasks of the "it shall not crash at this moment" kind (like internet banking, for example).
The be even more pedantic, "Internet Explorer" not necessarily means a Trident engine, it could be Tasman instead.
Nevermind... As someone pointed out here, it's an old meme.
Copy-paste trolls are even lower than the conventional ones.
I don't want to start a holy war here, but what is the deal with you Mac fanatics? I've been sitting here at my freelance gig in front of a Mac (a Mac Pro with two 2.26GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon "Nehalem" processors and 6GB of RAM) for about 20 minutes now while it attempts to copy a 17 Meg file from one folder on the hard drive to another folder. 20 minutes. At home, on my Pentium Pro 200 running NT 4, which by all standards should be a lot slower than this Mac, the same operation would take about 2 minutes. If that.
I'm no Mac fan at all, but there must be something seriously wrong with your Mac, or you forgot to tell us some "little detail".
Mac OS pre-X was rubbish, I remember that Linux ran faster in a Performa 6360 than its native OS.
But a Mac Pro with Mac OS X copying a file slower than 1MB/sec? I find it hard to believe. Even a 7MHz Amiga was faster than this.
It's been said that circumcision reduces the chances of STDs and cancer for both partners.
Have you heard about... how's that called... ah, "basic hygiene"?
Water, soap... Wash it at least once a day.
Now if you're having sex with random women (or men, if that applies) and you do not take the proper precautions, being circumcised won't save you from STDs.
Second, many women prefer cut men because it's "cleaner" when performing fellatio.
I've never heard complaints. I admit, though, that circumcision is rather rare where I live.
Unless the guy is particularly unhygienic, I don't think that women can complain, considering it applies the other way around too.
Third, I've read stories that circumcised men also "last longer" in bed because the feeling isn't as intense for them compared to an uncircumcised man.
If you've got severe problems with premature ejaculation it might sound like a good idea.
As for me, I would rather keep my parts intact and enjoy the moment.
Make it as easy as possible for users to try your software.
Agreed, and here are some tips:
- Provide a decent and updated documentation.
- Provide sensible defaults and (if that applies) pre-configured and commented configuration files.
Take the time to create and maintain packaging for major Linux and BSD distributions. Or at least make it as easy as possible for someone to maintain a distribution package of the current stable version.
Hmm... It depends.
Is your software for non-technical end-users? Then it may be a good idea to provide packages for the most popular OSes.
Is your software for server-like purposes and for a technical audience? If you provide pre-compiled packages, you may end with lots with non-technical people bothering you in your personal e-mail address (no matter how clearly you state that the mailing lists are the proper channel for that).
If your software is desireable, voluntary packagers will appear eventually (BTW thanks for your work, packagers!).
(...)
Of course it has to be useful. Preferably better than the other free (either gratis or open-source / libre) alternatives.
Does the usefulness of the web software itself increase with an increased userbase? Look at marketing that deals with the network effect. In general, look at IT marketing, consider what would work with your target userbase, and try to go with that. How much do you know about your userbase? Market research is vital, even on FLOSS projects.
All those are valid remarks.
If your project is better than the alternatives (or even unique), you have to state that clearly.
Your potential users must be told, clearly, what for is your project and why it is so good.... and it's a good idea to provide snapshots/examples/whatever showing your software in action to "prove" your claims.
Well-known projects do not need such - let's say - advertising, so often their websites presumes you know what is that all about.
But it's not your project's case and you cannot afford such luxury.
The MSN part is troll-ish, some parts are oversimplistic and troll-ish aswell but...
While I'm a supporter of FOSS software, things like that do happen. There's a great deal of truth in that text.
Ironically, it also applies to proprietary software. The difference? We never hear about that.
Again this silly fight between AMD vs Intel.
When people are going to learn performance _depends_ on what you're going to process?
I remember, few years ago, having a server we had with an Athlon XP 2600 (its real clock was 2.1GHz AFAIR). A perfectly speedy machine for desktop usage, but as a server (pure CPU-load in that case, no I/O bottleneck) it was having a real hard time. We eventually replaced that machine and old 4x Xeon (P3-based, 500MHz), and things went to normal.
I already suspected what the problem could be, so I've decided to make a test replacing - temporarily - the Xeon-based server with a Sun Ultra 30 (1xUltrasparc II @ 300MHz).
Well, the Sparc not only survived the test, but also kicked hard the Athlon's ass. Still, as a desktop machine, the Sparc was mediocre.
The difference was that the Sparc had 2MB L2 cache, while the Athlon had only 256kB (even with 2x bandwidth and lower-latency RAM). In _that_ case the L2 cache made all the difference. Per MHz, the Sparc also won, by large margin, the Xeon machine (1MB L2 for each processor).
Athlon's (pre-64) performance compared to P4 (sorry, I don't have an i7 to compare against a X4) varies. For desktop usage the Athlons felt snappier in general, but with some performance "hiccups" when you started to tax the machine more. The P4s felt slower overall, but the performance seemed to be more homogeneous.
Which one was better then? Well, that's a good question. I personally preferred the "slower but smoother" P4, but Athlons were fine and I could recommend both processors for home usage,
You know what really, really suck?
Those benchmarks they publish around.
I mean "XYZ fps in Crysis"? mp3 lame encoding time? Synthetic benchmarks?
Those say nothing to me. Run some database benchmark, or measure the time it takes to compile the Linux kernel using all cores at once... Or move GBs of data in the memory N times etc. Then it might be interesting.
Hewlett-Packard should be leading the way instead remaining the technological laggard.
This HP is not the same old HP we knew from years ago.
How is that 'offtopic'?
Ok, I guess I can live with Intel graphics (I don't play 3D games neither use fancy desktop effects).
But for that price...
Atom processor? I didn't know that using Linux meant you were a masochist.
Yeah, I know Linux can be quite fast but, honestly, there are much better low-consumption processors there. That's a desktop, not a netbook with battery concerns.
Even the most hardcore shell-only unix guy loves to issue a "make -j 4" and see all the cores working at full load and, soon after, work done.
3GB ram... Why 3GB? Why not 4GB? This is not a PC meant for Windows, that 3GB limit means nothing to Linux even in 32bit versions (yeah yeah, I'm aware of PAE limitations).
160GB HD. That's must be a joke. You only pick such HD when you want to save pennies in order to build the absolutely cheapest desktop.
"250watt power supply". I'm interested to know about the power efficiency of that power supply! You guys put an ATOM as processor, what is pointless unless you put a really, really efficient power supply.
Aaarrrgh...
Debian Sid (unstable)?
I'm using Lenny (yeah, I'm quite conservative with the software I use).
I've noticed there are some (I found only one, actually) audio boards (or their drivers) which are unable to simultaneous playback. Not my case though, and I'm using a SB Live 5.1.
Another possibility is that the other software is using OSS (instead of ALSA) for sound output, while Adobe's Flash uses ALSA (OSS is deprecated, as you may know) and that is causing conflicts. AFAIR Adobe's Flash used to use OSS before Flash 9. If is that the case, ou should either switch your software to ALSA (the best solution), or use the OSS compatibility library Adobe provides (I've heard such thing exists for Flash 9, but I don't know about Flash 10).
Another possibility is buggy sound driver. Or even bad quality hardware. Years ago had bad experiences in general with a Live 24bit (awful sound board, also drains too much CPU while playing).
I had no Flash problems with Iceweasel, but sometimes (rarely) it crashes under Chrome (no big deal in that browser, you simply reload the page and it works again).
I have to disagree on a few points from the previous two posts. No offence to your excellent points, but I just don't see it that way.
1. Terrorism is actually a resistance movement? Ok interesting point, but a resistance movement to what? Are they resisting a free society? Rule of Law? Equality? Coming out of the middle ages? The right to be able to post on websites like this about whatever you? What?
"terrorrism" is just a word and is meaningless without a context.
ETA, in Spain, exploded cars and killed people expecting the pressure would make the spanish government allow the independence of the Basque Country.
If you're talking about terrorrism involving muslims against the so-called West, there are a number of reasons and a number of independent groups. Terrorrist acts happen even if by the mere anger of what is perceived by the mid-easterns as colonial interference (that includes imposing western values, such as Democracy).
2. Self righteousness brought 9/11 down on our heads eh? Well in my opinion we earned the right to be a bit self righteous don't you think? We earned it with blood, sweat, and tears. We earned it by fighting fascism, Socialism, Communism, and asshole-ism, I get sorta ticked off when people come off like we're some kinda of shake and bake society, like we haven't been working on this little problem called democracy for a few hundred years and it's still a work in progress. Sure we may not always get it right, but at least we try and not throw our hands up and suck the balls of the nearest warlord or dictator. Point of fact, the yahoo who threw the shoes at Bush was able to do so because he's not living in a dictatorship any longer. He was arrested, had a trial, and did his time. He wasn't dragged to the basement, had the shit beaten out of him, videotaped confessing his sins, and then shot moments later.
The USA deserve nothing in that regard from the point of view of several other countries.
Firstly, there was no "Socialism", you were battling Communism, and that no matter how disgraceful were the consequences.
Korea, Vietnam, 1980s Afghanistan... Do you remember that?
How do you dare to speak about Democracy from a high moral ground?
Every single country in Latin America remembers all the shit your country did there.
Leftist democratically-elected latin-american government? That's sounds communistic. Let's empower the local military, or some paramilitary groups, train them and provide political support.
Ooops... Democracy is gone! They have a brutal capitalistic dictatorship (with censorship, people "disappearing" etc) but hey - Look! - No Communism there!
Thank you very much.
Another funny fact (there are some many), is the USA's support of the Saud clan in Saudi Arabia. They're not democratic at all, and certainly not popular there. But their interests are compatible with the USA's government.
BTW the Iraq's shoe-guy was beaten in prison and the only reason he wasn't killed is because it would generate an international outcry. The case was already under the media's microscope.
3. The only clever critters I see are the ones who are able to exert their twisted will over those who are weaker than themselves. Those people exist in every society, even the US. Former President Bush did more to subvert the constitution than any president in recent memory. However, he was removed from office not by a violent coup, but by Voters. See in our imperfect self righteous society we can do that. We don't have to worry about disappearing in the middle of the night and waking up in a gulag somewhere.
Bush was re-elected after doing all the things he did in his first term. That alone tells me a lot.
There's no need to "disappear" dissents in the USA, your bizarre bi-partisan system and the propaganda takes care of them.
When there's need for violence, you can always count on cooperative foreign governments or Guantanamo so you can do your torture abroad, not tainting your virgin-pure and democratic USA territory.
LOL! Flash works just fine without all of this nonsense in Firefox on Windows 7. Never crashes. Just works.
And I didn't pay a dime for my copy of Windows 7. It was just like downloading a Linux distro that works perfectly.
WTF are you guys torturing yourself with this stuff? Go download a copy of Windows 7 and enjoy. Install Virtual PC (free) or VMWare (free) and muck with your toy OS there when you feel bored.
But my GOD! Stop torturing yourself with this crashing Flash Player nonsense!
Funny, the 64-bit Flash Player 10 works just fine in my Debian Linux machine.
:(
I'm probably doing something wrong, perhaps I should mess around and try to break things (I've simply installed the plug-in and it worked - silly me).
Well, perhaps it's the damned 64-bit Google Chrome for Linux I'm running...
Ohmygosh, I've just realised... ALL my OS and its applications are 64-bit! And it's all working, and fast!
Bad, bad Linux!
Oh, and you are also inciting copyright infrigement, that's so cute.
Oops... It seems that I've forgot to add hints it was an ironic post.
Sorry, it wasn't meant the way you perceived.
Thanks for the mathematical explanation of how many kids you have. I'm curious as to why you chose that particular explanation -- why not use the simple four kids (2^2) explanation, it would make it a lot easier for those of used to thinking in binary.
Such a talent for twisting the meaning of words which can clearly be understood as originally meant using common sense... pedantically perverting that for your own purposes.
You should work as a lawyer instead.
buy a mac homos! or are you too poor to afford a real computer?
To put it bluntly, your beloved Mac is an expensive x86 PC with a fancy case design.
I wouldn't be surprised if the very same chinese Mac factories also produce cheapo generic boards.
Coding in x86 ASM is never fun. Weird and odd and masochistically pleasurable for some, maybe, but not fun. Other architectures, on the other hand (like ARM), can be fun. x86-64 manages to increase the "funness" value somewhat, but I still wouldn't quite qualify it as "fun".
No need to go that far.
68k ASM is pure heaven compared to x86.
It also depends on the compiler. GCC, for example, sucks at auto-vectorization, so it's easy to get 30% or more on loopy scientific code just by using SSE instructions properly.
In contrast, PGI or ICC is much harder to beat using assembly.
ICC does a great work with auto-vectorization.
Yet (perhaps it's no longer true), ~3 years ago I had problems with ICC generating wrong code in certain situations. I went back to GCC.
Wow... Now everything is about racism nowadays?
Let's see this picture.
The guy on the left was the wanted one, the guy on the right is the one who had his brains turned into guacamole by the police.
The brazilian guy did not look like a german or a swedish, but he was perfectly passable as an italian, portuguese or spaniard.
Hey man, I loved the Amiga as much as anybody. We had an A1000 in 1986 and got an A3000 thereafter. Fine computers, if they had had Apple's marketing acumen, they might have ruled the world. However, it really is time to let go now. Mac OS X is superior in just about every respect, and the hardware is lightyears beyond what CBM had. Emulators are great for nostalgia, we'll always have Nuclear War.
What are you talking about? When Amiga was still alive Macintoshes had Mac OS 6,7,8,9, not Mac OS X.
And Mac OS "classic" was not an OS, was a crash-prone, non-multitasking toy.
I worked on the same system for 15 years. More than once I saw some code and said "what idiot wrote this!?" ... only to realize it was me, 5 years ago. Yes, that did indeed lead to me becoming a) much less prone to "clever tricks" and b) much much better at explaining what (WHY) I was doing whatever it was.
I see no problem with clever code, as long as:
1) there's a real benefit (usually speed),
2) that part being modular and
3) its behavior being well commented.
IMO some of the "clever tricks" problems are:
1) people overoptimizing code that didn't had much impact in the first place,
2) people doing unnecessary (or even incorrect) optimizations the compiler takes care of (like (! a) instead of (a == 0), or (! some_pointer) instead of (some_pointer == NULL)),
3) people adding tons of mutual dependencies for some (supposed) gain in speed and
4) people who do "optimizations" which do not affect (or barely do) the performance, and the only thing it does is to make the source code tiny and "oh-so-clever" but hard to read and explosive once changes are made.