OK, let me start by stating quite clearly and for the record, I do not know these people personally, I am not any sort of coder or VLSI electronic engineer, I couldn't write a device driver or design an astable timer chip if I had 10 years to do it in.
What I am is an Engineer who was always interested in technology in general and the microcomputers that eventually evolved into the box I am typing this on today. I am old enough to have owned a portable radio that featured "14 transistors" with enough importance that this was written on the case just under the name Hitachi, above the model number and which wavelengths it was good for.
When I was learning my trade as an Engineer it was the sort of apprenticeship where you would literally get a slap if you fucked up or didn't pay sufficient attenton, making a perfect inch cube from a lump of soft copper using nothing more than a file and a vice taught you things you didn't know you had learned until 20 years pass and you meet a University type Engineer who is qualified up the wazoo and yet doesn't know if his own asshole is punched or bored, who will design something that requires the use of a custom bearing that will cost US$ 500.00 per unit to make, and will be an untested design, and he will prefer this to using an off the shelf SKF bearing that is within a few thou of his specs and retails for US$ 5.00 and making a few thou adjustment to his bespoke equipment.
My first computer was based around a Zilog processor and I've owned and run most of the "micro" stuff since, including webservers, and have "designed" (fancy term for sourcing suitable base components and then integrating them into a working whole by designing and building whatever else was required) bespoke industrial computers "done" e-commerce websites since 95 when you had to submit your (perl/cgi) code to the bank for scrutiny before your client's (pron) website could make 1 penny.
I am not any kind of shining or leading light or famous name, sure, I've had my moments but then again it was easier to do something noteworthy way back when when nobody was online, I'm just one of those people who has been around the scene since (pretty much) the early days, and it is those years of experience that makes joe public think I am a computer genius, not any actual noteworthy skills or expertise.
I'm saying all this about me because you have to know what I am to see where I am coming from here, and I do not wish to be misunderstood or misinterpreted.
To quote from the original Tenenbaun vs Linux thread at http://tinyurl.com/2pdn4
Tenenbaum says;-
"My real job is a professor and researcher in the area of operating systems.
As a result of my occupation, I think I know a bit about where operating are going in the next decade or so. Two aspects stand out:"
"1. MICROKERNEL VS MONOLITHIC SYSTEM.........While I could go into a long story here about the relative merits of the two designs, suffice it to say that among the people who actually design operating systems, the debate is essentially over. Microkernels have won."
"In the meantime, RISC chips happened, and some of them are running at over 100 MIPS. Speeds of 200 MIPS and more are likely in the coming years.
These things are not going to suddenly vanish. What is going to happen is that they will gradually take over from the 80x86 line. "
To summarise, Tenebaum says microkernel is best so it will win, Intel can't design a decent CPU, RISC will make CISC obsolete, and Linux and indeed anything that does not share this viewpoint is somehow flawed.
This takes us back to the university "Engineer" who will design a 500 dollar custom bearing instead of using a 5 dollar one from SKF, those sorts of attitudes might fly in the classroom in academia where you work assignments for February 2006 and known and finite and where there is absolutely zero input from areas such as cost accounting / profit / MTBF / marketability / manufacturing / distribution
remember using it must have been about 1992, and the next and only time I heard of it was a couple of years later in encarta. Anyone in the industry know why it didn't take off better?
www.iterated.com is refusing conections from here.
Sorry guys, but all I see here is bleating about jobs going to India, here in the UK that is old hat, almost no jobs are going to India....
Vietnam is the new India, even the Indians are worried....
two thoughts....
1/ maybe the Koreans weren't so dumb (you listening BT you assholes) when they rolled out 10 mbit domestic connections faster than we could roll out so called broadband 256/512 ADSL.
2/ you think the fuckers have forgotten about agent orange and shit? wait till mcdonnel-douglas start outsourcing their IT, lmfao.
you could IN THEORY get into space by climbing at one centimetre a week, but you'd need reaction motors capable of exhausting reaction mass at an appreciable proportion of the speed of light, and I for one would not like you lighting up such a motor in the atmosphere of any planet I was on.
escape velocity is easy enough, think small weight tied to piece of string, swing weight around on piece of string so string is always taut.
if breaking strain of piece of string equates to gravity and therefore escape velocity then when the string breaks (when the weight is travelling fast enough) the weight will fly off
note that firing something at escape velocity at sea level on earth isn't enough, air resistance will slow it down VERY fast, think of bullets from high velocity rifles.
weigh yourself at sea level then weigh yourself again at the top of mount everest
unless you are using *really* accurate scales the two readings will be the same.
now go back to both locations where you weighed yourself and measure the atmospheric pressure in both places.
unlike your weight you'll find the pressure is about a third of what it was at sea level.
pressure in a known and unchanged mixture of gases is another way of counting how many molecules of gas there are in any given cubic meter, or to put it another way, the mass of a given cubic metre.
so your aerofoil (wing) at the top of everest has about one third of the mass of gas to ride on as it does at sea level.... if your aerofoil is a fixed wing then you can always travel three times as fast (hence needing a scramjet) whereas if your aerofoil is a rotary wing (helicopter) you come up against a hard limit when the out edges of the rotors approach the speed of sound, hence the much lower maximum altitude ever recorded in a helicopter as opposed to a swing wing.
NB all of the above is really really simplified and therefore full of errors to a physicist / aerodynamics / bernoulli / etc etc etc
I still miss my old raq2's more than any other techno object I have owned, provided you didn't buy them when new (ouch) then immediately unpack them and open the case to see where your thousand pounds just went (where the fuck is the REST of it??) and suffer heart failure...
OK there was custom PCB work in there and custom BIOS work, but basically it was red hat + apache + few small utils wrapped up in a cute browser based GIU that JUST PLAIN WORKED, and worked flawlessly.
I'm sure it should not be beyond the wit of some of the better coders out there to take via eden boards and off the shelf small profile cases and debian and do something similar and more to the point do it better than plesk, which I found an absolute bloody nightmare to install *properly*.
mmm, I used to live in a hot climate (circa 35 celcius daily) and work in engine rooms for a living where the temperature often exceeded 50 celcius, and old guy turned me on to putting a pinch of salt in everything you drank, including beer or water.
Surprisingly it all tasted good, which just goes to show that like a pregnant woman's "notions" the body often knows best.
I remember one time I went to a gym with a friend (not a gym goes myself) and did a stiff two hour workout, finished, guzzled must have been a litre of bottled spring water, and ten minutes later threw up harder than any other time of my life apart from when we tried to make sprirts by freeze distilling homebrew.
you probably could you most modern cleansing agents, all I know is what I was taught when I grew up, of course blokes always carry a handy supply of piss around with them, unlike bleach or alcohol***.
Yes, Intel IS quieter, as in bog standard intel CPU with bog standard bundled fan and heatsink is quieter than any AMD alternative that will allow a 100% cpu duty cycle, it is also FAR cheaper, intel heatsinks / fans run about 9 quid here, less than everything but the shittiest AMD jobs.
Oh, and I build high end PC kit, loudness is not a feature of "fans, airflow and vibration" as you state, it is about pressure waves in the air (excluding such things as hard drive noise) and even the minutest amount of effort spend designing fan blade profiles and venturi would do absolute bloody wonders.
Fact is hardware review sites and stupid punters are more interested in fan RPM (just like clock cycles) and eye candy anodised / stylised / buck rodgers heatsink designs, nobody gives a fuck how well they ACTUALLY work and I have NEVER EVER EVER seen anything even approaching a decent review of this on any hardware review site.
All these people who can't see past their dicks claiming that advertising is the ONLY way to fund a site.. this is so untrue it is risible.
By definition advertising is the process of trying to convince someone to buy something they neither want nor need, and this becomes ever more true as time passes.
If I want to know about something my first port of call is google or vivissimo, I do not either NEED or WANT some dickless wonder trying to pre-empt this process by trying to influence me with their own horribly biased bullshit.
I run Mozilla Firebird as a browser with the excellent adblock plugin, for the past 5 or six years I ran a custom hosts file with all these advertising bastards routed to 127.0.0.1... does/. have any advertising? I don't know because I'd never see it anyway and the advertisers will never get any useful data from my usage of the internet either.
If you DECIDE to create a site that offers something for free, eg content, then big deal and welcome to the club, there's only a few million of us out here, difference is we limit the content to match the budget for each site, we don't sell our souls and our user's browsing habits and bandwidth to any motherfuckers like doubleclick.
If these site creators like hardocp / toms / etc CANNOT financially sustain what they are doing as a "free" to the user model then change dude, change to a subscription model, say a buck a year, no big deal....
what?
you don't think your users would pay that much?
tough shit, market forces at work.
Remember people, advertising is just the polite form of spam, at the end of the day it does EXACTLY the same thing as spam, it steals users bandwidth without their permission to shove a load of shit they don't want down the pipe and eat those cpu cycles.
If I fucking WANT something ___I___ will go out and find it by myself
Meanwhile all this bullshit about the merits of one hardware review site vs another is EXACTLY akin to comparing the merits of one two dollar whore against another one (and yes you can sue me if you like and run a hardware review site......
At the end of the day you are still arguing about which cheap and dirty fuck is best, well I'm not interested, I want to chase and hunt down my own meat in a competitive darwinian enviornment.
Kill all advertisers / promoters / PR bunnies / reviewers / and the world will be a much better place..... which reminds me of something an americannnnnn buddy said to me once.
"If you have a company that is in financial difficulties, just line up all the staff alphabetically by job title, from A to Z, then start at A and start sacking until the books balance again."
...there sure are one hell of a lot of people placing far far far too much weight on the supposed expertise of Tom's and similar sites....
By and large these hardware sites know absolutely fuck all about anything except advertising revenue and click thru.
I'm sat here typing this on a P4 / 2.6 Ghz / 800 mhz fsb / a-bit box, prior to this is was a xp1900+ / a-bit box, why the switch? Intel is FAR quieter as well as representing a big jump in performance... sure, I could have gotten damn siminal performance from an overclocked xp2500+, at the expense of cpu core MTBF and at the expense of my fucking ears being assaulted by fans whining away.
At the end of the day it makes no odds on the desktop, my cpu, like most of them, spends most of its life and 5% utilisation, and in the server only a fool would use a cpu with a lower standard of thermal management than intel. (I still miss my old cobalt raq2 that didn't even require a bloody CPU heatsink, much less heatsink and fan...)
The Registry is the real difference, and the registry exists solely to protect the property of third party application developers such as Adobe etc.
OK, it's a philosophical and cultural difference as much as a programming one, but the registry just about sums everything that really matters up neatly.
If you're going to carry a knife, carry one that you abso-fucking-lutely KNOW will cut whatever it is you want to cut, in extremis, and not simply break or saw away uselessly....
I've carried Buck 110's for more years than I care to think about now, it is the only knife I'd be prepared to trust my life to, and it has in fact already almost certainly saved my life on two occassions (both times from drowning) when quite simply there was about 5 seconds to cut something or die.
Yes, it is now illegal to carry a knife such as a buck in the UK, doubly so when one's sole method of motorised transport is a motorcycle, but it doesn't stop me, because apart from it's every day uses opening packaging and so on, I know one day I will once again REALLY need to cut something and only uncle buck is good enough for me... http://www.buckknives.com/
Slashdot Mirror
OK, let me start by stating quite clearly and for the record, I do not know these people personally, I am not any sort of coder or VLSI electronic engineer, I couldn't write a device driver or design an astable timer chip if I had 10 years to do it in.
.....While I could go into a long story here about the relative merits of the two designs, suffice it to say that among the people who actually design operating systems, the debate is essentially over. Microkernels have won."
What I am is an Engineer who was always interested in technology in general and the microcomputers that eventually evolved into the box I am typing this on today. I am old enough to have owned a portable radio that featured "14 transistors" with enough importance that this was written on the case just under the name Hitachi, above the model number and which wavelengths it was good for.
When I was learning my trade as an Engineer it was the sort of apprenticeship where you would literally get a slap if you fucked up or didn't pay sufficient attenton, making a perfect inch cube from a lump of soft copper using nothing more than a file and a vice taught you things you didn't know you had learned until 20 years pass and you meet a University type Engineer who is qualified up the wazoo and yet doesn't know if his own asshole is punched or bored, who will design something that requires the use of a custom bearing that will cost US$ 500.00 per unit to make, and will be an untested design, and he will prefer this to using an off the shelf SKF bearing that is within a few thou of his specs and retails for US$ 5.00 and making a few thou adjustment to his bespoke equipment.
My first computer was based around a Zilog processor and I've owned and run most of the "micro" stuff since, including webservers, and have "designed" (fancy term for sourcing suitable base components and then integrating them into a working whole by designing and building whatever else was required) bespoke industrial computers "done" e-commerce websites since 95 when you had to submit your (perl/cgi) code to the bank for scrutiny before your client's (pron) website could make 1 penny.
I am not any kind of shining or leading light or famous name, sure, I've had my moments but then again it was easier to do something noteworthy way back when when nobody was online, I'm just one of those people who has been around the scene since (pretty much) the early days, and it is those years of experience that makes joe public think I am a computer genius, not any actual noteworthy skills or expertise.
I'm saying all this about me because you have to know what I am to see where I am coming from here, and I do not wish to be misunderstood or misinterpreted.
To quote from the original Tenenbaun vs Linux thread at http://tinyurl.com/2pdn4
Tenenbaum says;-
"My real job is a professor and researcher in the area of operating systems.
As a result of my occupation, I think I know a bit about where operating are going in the next decade or so. Two aspects stand out:"
"1. MICROKERNEL VS MONOLITHIC SYSTEM....
"In the meantime, RISC chips happened, and some of them are running at over 100 MIPS. Speeds of 200 MIPS and more are likely in the coming years.
These things are not going to suddenly vanish. What is going to happen is that they will gradually take over from the 80x86 line. "
To summarise, Tenebaum says microkernel is best so it will win, Intel can't design a decent CPU, RISC will make CISC obsolete, and Linux and indeed anything that does not share this viewpoint is somehow flawed.
This takes us back to the university "Engineer" who will design a 500 dollar custom bearing instead of using a 5 dollar one from SKF, those sorts of attitudes might fly in the classroom in academia where you work assignments for February 2006 and known and finite and where there is absolutely zero input from areas such as cost accounting / profit / MTBF / marketability / manufacturing / distribution
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/3732157.stm
didn't it occur to you to do THIS after a virgin install???????????????
remember using it must have been about 1992, and the next and only time I heard of it was a couple of years later in encarta. Anyone in the industry know why it didn't take off better?
www.iterated.com is refusing conections from here.
Anyone?
Sorry guys, but all I see here is bleating about jobs going to India, here in the UK that is old hat, almost no jobs are going to India....
Vietnam is the new India, even the Indians are worried....
two thoughts....
1/ maybe the Koreans weren't so dumb (you listening BT you assholes) when they rolled out 10 mbit domestic connections faster than we could roll out so called broadband 256/512 ADSL.
2/ you think the fuckers have forgotten about agent orange and shit? wait till mcdonnel-douglas start outsourcing their IT, lmfao.
A major volcanic / seismological event is imminent.
Anyone want to make me any bets?
1st april, which means it is....
yes, 1 ton of reaction mass is plenty for 10 tons of payload, IF you can eject the reaction mass at say 0.99 c
(where c = 186,000 miles per second)
you could IN THEORY get into space by climbing at one centimetre a week, but you'd need reaction motors capable of exhausting reaction mass at an appreciable proportion of the speed of light, and I for one would not like you lighting up such a motor in the atmosphere of any planet I was on.
escape velocity is easy enough, think small weight tied to piece of string, swing weight around on piece of string so string is always taut.
if breaking strain of piece of string equates to gravity and therefore escape velocity then when the string breaks (when the weight is travelling fast enough) the weight will fly off
note that firing something at escape velocity at sea level on earth isn't enough, air resistance will slow it down VERY fast, think of bullets from high velocity rifles.
In real layman's terms......
weigh yourself at sea level
then weigh yourself again at the top of mount everest
unless you are using *really* accurate scales the two readings will be the same.
now go back to both locations where you weighed yourself and measure the atmospheric pressure in both places.
unlike your weight you'll find the pressure is about a third of what it was at sea level.
pressure in a known and unchanged mixture of gases is another way of counting how many molecules of gas there are in any given cubic meter, or to put it another way, the mass of a given cubic metre.
so your aerofoil (wing) at the top of everest has about one third of the mass of gas to ride on as it does at sea level.... if your aerofoil is a fixed wing then you can always travel three times as fast (hence needing a scramjet) whereas if your aerofoil is a rotary wing (helicopter) you come up against a hard limit when the out edges of the rotors approach the speed of sound, hence the much lower maximum altitude ever recorded in a helicopter as opposed to a swing wing.
NB all of the above is really really simplified and therefore full of errors to a physicist / aerodynamics / bernoulli / etc etc etc
HTH etc
oh I forget, this is slashdot, so anything that goes (intellectually) over heads gets modded as offtopic, while the banal rates "insightful" comments.
I still miss my old raq2's more than any other techno object I have owned, provided you didn't buy them when new (ouch) then immediately unpack them and open the case to see where your thousand pounds just went (where the fuck is the REST of it??) and suffer heart failure...
OK there was custom PCB work in there and custom BIOS work, but basically it was red hat + apache + few small utils wrapped up in a cute browser based GIU that JUST PLAIN WORKED, and worked flawlessly.
I'm sure it should not be beyond the wit of some of the better coders out there to take via eden boards and off the shelf small profile cases and debian and do something similar and more to the point do it better than plesk, which I found an absolute bloody nightmare to install *properly*.
anybody?
mmm, I used to live in a hot climate (circa 35 celcius daily) and work in engine rooms for a living where the temperature often exceeded 50 celcius, and old guy turned me on to putting a pinch of salt in everything you drank, including beer or water.
Surprisingly it all tasted good, which just goes to show that like a pregnant woman's "notions" the body often knows best.
I remember one time I went to a gym with a friend (not a gym goes myself) and did a stiff two hour workout, finished, guzzled must have been a litre of bottled spring water, and ten minutes later threw up harder than any other time of my life apart from when we tried to make sprirts by freeze distilling homebrew.
you probably could you most modern cleansing agents, all I know is what I was taught when I grew up, of course blokes always carry a handy supply of piss around with them, unlike bleach or alcohol***.
*** I've known a few that did though... lmao
but if you have a clue after milking you piss on your hands, then you don't get warts.
ooo-arrr
unless the bug that is humanity can get out of that petri dish and establish a viable colony on another petri dish we're screwed.
You were going to post out of AC, but you didn't.
You have absolutely ZERO evidence of ANY kind to even HINT that I might be wacko.
So, quite simply, you are an anonymous coward.
nuff sed.
Yes, Intel IS quieter, as in bog standard intel CPU with bog standard bundled fan and heatsink is quieter than any AMD alternative that will allow a 100% cpu duty cycle, it is also FAR cheaper, intel heatsinks / fans run about 9 quid here, less than everything but the shittiest AMD jobs.
Oh, and I build high end PC kit, loudness is not a feature of "fans, airflow and vibration" as you state, it is about pressure waves in the air (excluding such things as hard drive noise) and even the minutest amount of effort spend designing fan blade profiles and venturi would do absolute bloody wonders.
Fact is hardware review sites and stupid punters are more interested in fan RPM (just like clock cycles) and eye candy anodised / stylised / buck rodgers heatsink designs, nobody gives a fuck how well they ACTUALLY work and I have NEVER EVER EVER seen anything even approaching a decent review of this on any hardware review site.
All these people who can't see past their dicks claiming that advertising is the ONLY way to fund a site.. this is so untrue it is risible.
/. have any advertising? I don't know because I'd never see it anyway and the advertisers will never get any useful data from my usage of the internet either.
By definition advertising is the process of trying to convince someone to buy something they neither want nor need, and this becomes ever more true as time passes.
If I want to know about something my first port of call is google or vivissimo, I do not either NEED or WANT some dickless wonder trying to pre-empt this process by trying to influence me with their own horribly biased bullshit.
I run Mozilla Firebird as a browser with the excellent adblock plugin, for the past 5 or six years I ran a custom hosts file with all these advertising bastards routed to 127.0.0.1... does
If you DECIDE to create a site that offers something for free, eg content, then big deal and welcome to the club, there's only a few million of us out here, difference is we limit the content to match the budget for each site, we don't sell our souls and our user's browsing habits and bandwidth to any motherfuckers like doubleclick.
If these site creators like hardocp / toms / etc CANNOT financially sustain what they are doing as a "free" to the user model then change dude, change to a subscription model, say a buck a year, no big deal....
what?
you don't think your users would pay that much?
tough shit, market forces at work.
Remember people, advertising is just the polite form of spam, at the end of the day it does EXACTLY the same thing as spam, it steals users bandwidth without their permission to shove a load of shit they don't want down the pipe and eat those cpu cycles.
If I fucking WANT something ___I___ will go out and find it by myself
Meanwhile all this bullshit about the merits of one hardware review site vs another is EXACTLY akin to comparing the merits of one two dollar whore against another one (and yes you can sue me if you like and run a hardware review site......
At the end of the day you are still arguing about which cheap and dirty fuck is best, well I'm not interested, I want to chase and hunt down my own meat in a competitive darwinian enviornment.
Kill all advertisers / promoters / PR bunnies / reviewers / and the world will be a much better place..... which reminds me of something an americannnnnn buddy said to me once.
"If you have a company that is in financial difficulties, just line up all the staff alphabetically by job title, from A to Z, then start at A and start sacking until the books balance again."
Finally someone who not only "gets" hardware review sites, but can also sum them up in entirely in 3 very short lines.
...there sure are one hell of a lot of people placing far far far too much weight on the supposed expertise of Tom's and similar sites....
By and large these hardware sites know absolutely fuck all about anything except advertising revenue and click thru.
I'm sat here typing this on a P4 / 2.6 Ghz / 800 mhz fsb / a-bit box, prior to this is was a xp1900+ / a-bit box, why the switch? Intel is FAR quieter as well as representing a big jump in performance... sure, I could have gotten damn siminal performance from an overclocked xp2500+, at the expense of cpu core MTBF and at the expense of my fucking ears being assaulted by fans whining away.
At the end of the day it makes no odds on the desktop, my cpu, like most of them, spends most of its life and 5% utilisation, and in the server only a fool would use a cpu with a lower standard of thermal management than intel.
(I still miss my old cobalt raq2 that didn't even require a bloody CPU heatsink, much less heatsink and fan...)
The Registry is the real difference, and the registry exists solely to protect the property of third party application developers such as Adobe etc.
OK, it's a philosophical and cultural difference as much as a programming one, but the registry just about sums everything that really matters up neatly.
If you're going to carry a knife, carry one that you abso-fucking-lutely KNOW will cut whatever it is you want to cut, in extremis, and not simply break or saw away uselessly....
I've carried Buck 110's for more years than I care to think about now, it is the only knife I'd be prepared to trust my life to, and it has in fact already almost certainly saved my life on two occassions (both times from drowning) when quite simply there was about 5 seconds to cut something or die.
Yes, it is now illegal to carry a knife such as a buck in the UK, doubly so when one's sole method of motorised transport is a motorcycle, but it doesn't stop me, because apart from it's every day uses opening packaging and so on, I know one day I will once again REALLY need to cut something and only uncle buck is good enough for me...
http://www.buckknives.com/
peace
screw wind up flashlights, I'm about to launch a new company selling solar powered flashlights, anyone want to invest a couple of million?
Touched a nerve huh?
A "fuck off" from an "anonymous coward" is if anything an endorsement of everything I said.