And x86_64 is not the only 64-bit platform; what about Sparc and Itanic users, for example?
Seriously? +5 Insightful? Exactly how many Itanic & Sparc systems do you supposed are being used for browsing (Flash sites in particular)? Maybe you should research it, and after you identify all those users, you can call them (all dozens of them) and ask "WHY?".
Also, friggin hell froze over and we have 64bit Flash. Now you expect Adobe to help open source implementations of Flash... where do you get these ideas, are you driving around in the Heart of Gold?
Or, they could buy & revive the Buran program. It wouldn't even need a crew for routine missions (including rescue missions), how safer can you go than that?
Eh, you missed most of the point of my post. And no, I do not base anything on canned benchmarks. Neither should anyone. I take the exact code that will run daily on the intended machine and I time it. The perl & C code that we run at work (on Suse 64bit) is about 10% faster at the same clock speed on AMD than on current intel. Thus, the latest workstation I bought was an intel E8600 running at 3.8GHz, since I would not be able to get an AMD to 3.4GHz (on stock air cooling) that would provide similar performance (for our workload). A typical run of our pipeline takes 10h+ so I can probably save a couple of hours over the fastest AMD. However, the point of my post was that AMD processors are still relevant, they are not a generation behind, they can't compete only in the upper segment (that brings back some pre-2000 memories). You can say Intel has "won the CPU wars", but AMD is not trailing by much and it is a good choise for cheaper PC's. Now, I gave the examle of compiling a project with Visual Studio on a VM over linux. The particular project takes less than 10 seconds on an Athlon 64 @ 2.2 GHz, almost the same time on a C2D @ 2.66GHz and about A MINUTE on a P4 @ 3GHz (bought about the same time as the Athlon 64). Most of the difference I guess comes from 64bit vs 32bit host, however the fact is that Intel was a whole generation behind which made the Core seem an even bigger leap forward.
Think of it this way, the current AMD's are not much behind in similar clock speeds, but are a bit behind at top clock speeds (well, ok, more than a bit if you OC). Even if I buy C2D when I want fast workstations, I would definitely say AMD is withing the same performance "generation" and they are very competitive at the mid-low segment. So, your perception that Intel is improving very fast is based on the fact that they were running on a laughable (PR dept driven) architecture for years. From P3 -> P4 they went BACK in performance (not just IPC, the first P4's were actually slower than existing P3's). What I also find utterly ridiculous is how most (fortunately not all) of the publications etc of the era found the P4 as a great architecture and some even compared it favorably to the Athlon. I was pulling my hair as I was seeing our daily tasks (e.g. building a symbian app on a VM running over linux) running over 5 TIMES FASTER on a 64bit AMD machine compared to a (more expensive) P4 that was its "competitor" (and "faster" in several 32bit windows "canned" benchmarks). Intel eventually adopted AMD64, went back to the P3 arch to evolve it into Core and now everyone and their mom admit P4 is crap, while AMD with a not much changed architecture since the first Athlon 64 so many years ago, has indeed fallen behind, but not by that much.
They just didn't their idea far enough. If their studs were some sort of "Lego" monogram instead of simply circular then others would have to "print" their trademark on their products to make them compatible, breaking the law. What? At least it is a better idea than installing rootkits on customers etc...
I live in the US, so I think you are referring to a whole different country. I won't even attempt to describe what I see/hear every day to which you seem oblivious, maybe I will just post a link to yesterday's news
their brand new airplanes that can fire a laser at a top secret satellite to have it bounce back and kill a target half way around the world.
Not only you don't have a clue at what is going on with the US government, you also watch too much (bad) sci-fi.
What a lame comparison. Open Office is a huge (as in bloated) and slow software suite that makes me cry when I have to use it for something serious. I prefer to use Koffice even though it lacks some features I'd like. The fact that using MS Excel on a VM on my linux machine is several orders more productive than running OO natively, should be a good indication. Notice I did not mention MS Word and "productive" in the same sentence, for Word processing I resort to Abiword (or Kword if I want more DTP style). So, in summary, OO compares (IMO) badly to its real competitors. Google Apps are a whole different paradigm, targeting completely different usage scenarios. It is not either Google or OO (or Koffice etc). You first decide if your needs require web or local applications and then you decide among the available software for the platform. The web apps will probably never have the same feature set as the local apps for probably good reasons. Lame, lame article. Next week on/.: PS3 vs MAME, MS Flight Simulator vs Hot air Balloons, Mars Rover vs RAV4.
"the drivers provided by ATI" are available on their website and contain no third party software. ATI has not made graphics cards for a few years now, so there is no "CD Version". The CD you have is provided by your card manufacturer and should have the official ATI distribution plus extra software the card manufacturer is offering. Generally, a manufacturer would not "stealth" install Java when it is not needed for the driver, unless you selected some sort of "express install" that adds bundled software and some of it might have required java. In any case, saying "I installed drivers provided by ATI and Java popped up" is indeed trolling;)
What kind of Troll are you? Catalyst drivers require the.Net framework for their control center and that's it. And even that, YOU have to install it yourself before running the control center. They don't install anything else, and certainly not Java.
Do you realize that for computers 12+ years is several GENERATIONS? I had always been using ATI for Windows boxes and laptops, since my main concern was almost always video performance and TV-Out capability and I could not even get a video overlay work over TV-out with nVidia cards for years. Of course, when I had problems with linux drivers I built nVidia (I admit, even intel) linux boxes. But that is a thing of the past, I am back to ATI for linux, they are good and even getting better with each release. Anyway, long term loyalties is pretty silly. I bought my K6 233 at the same price my friend bought his MMX 166, in retrospect we all know how those two compare. I kept on buying Athlons when others were paying more for their crap P4's (they weren't called crap back when it was the best intel had to offer). But, hey, I am now buying Core 2 for non-low end systems, until AMD can come up with something better. Fanboyism gets you bad deals at least half of the time. You buy hardware, you don't marry it. Ok, I know this is slashdot and the last statement might generate some debate, but anyway you get the point.
The whole idea of having to develop an entire infrastructure and spend so much effort (e.g. writing software, following changes in policies, synchronizing between different DST zones, even manually correcting clocks) just to supposedly save a little energy thanks to "using more sunlight" is beyond idiotic. I won't even touch the fact that to me it is kind of obvious that the DST could never work as intended. But even if we were certain it would work, the CHANGE twice a year add such an overhead that would wipe out any potential gain.
Indeed a paradox. Throw in half the female police force scantily clad pretending to be selling fucking and you get the US situation ( except LV;) ). Selling fucking is legal in most countries since the dawn of mankind. The faux morality in the US prevents if from being legal, however you can always go around that limitation if you have a camera. Fucking becomes acting, and all is well...
I had been using D-Link and Linksys for years, the former being cheaper but the latter sometimes having better products. However, after I tried out Zyxel (per the recommendation network admin friends in Europe) I have not gone back. I had never realized you can have an ssh connection stay up for weeks over a wi-fi network... So, apart from a Linksys pcmcia card on my fiancee's laptop that has never given me reason to replace it, everything else (routers, access points, adapters...) are Zyxel.
You seem to know what 110A means (huge current indeed), yet you haven't put 2 and 2 together and realize how you get a 130W TDP (pretty average for a modern CPU) out of 1.16V;)
You made me RTFA. The same ad-laden FA I was complaining about. Thanks. So, from the article.
Because the Core i7 Extreme 965 has its overspeed protection removed--i.e. its multipliers are unlocked--we overclocked the processor by raising its multiplier to 25 and also experimented with an increased QPI speed.
My 4GHz Core 2 is not a $1000 *Extreme* part. Humanly priced i7s will have overspeed protection.
I have the feeling you knew this was the case anyway, but had me read TFA just for kicks... shame on you!
Link to the middle of an ad-laden article and to the Cinebench of all pages - because, you know, that is what the average/. reader is running...
Also, add a nice touch: forget to mention that while the i7 is faster clock for clock with the Core 2, it currently tops out at 3.2GHz and has some sort of overclock protection (lowers clock when it goes over 110A or 130w).
My cheap Core 2 is running at 4GHz on just the stock fan, I don't see myself upgrading to the i7 anytime soon.
What did you say?... What do you mean Cinebench would still run faster?
Excuse the slight off-topic ( still on-summary though;) )
Ubuntu 8.10 with Compiz Fusion is certainly prettier on my Eee than the Windows XP that it came with.
WHY would you even buy Eee with XP? You like paying for MS licenses you are not using? In any case I cannot stress how great I find the work ASUS has done on the Linux distro the Eee comes with. Granted, out of the box is perfect only for casual users - I had to add the Etch repository since I am a developer (and switched to "advanced" gui). I only found one small glitch: on the 900 at least you could not set ext2/3 sd cards auto mount without the sync option, so I had to add a small script that remounts correctly. Otherwise it is a joy to use, everybody with an Eee should try it before resorting to Win or even Ubuntu etc.
- Obama's lack of experience -- if he is elected, the 4 year presidential term will be the longest job he's ever held -- he's a talented Senator, but he's never actually run anything
I hear this all the time, yet it is the argument I "get" the least. In my opinion, a career in the army makes a person the worst possible candidate for most civilian positions. I would certainly not call McCain "more experienced" when most of his experience is pretty bad for the position in question. Hmm... unless we are becoming a totalitarian state. An army man is the optimal dictator. Now that I think about it, it kind of creeps me out every time I am in the NYC subway and hear those messages about how my belongings are subject to search - I get the feeling I am in a 1984 type movie... Yeah, go McCain for dictator!
- I'm quite certain America's enemies in the middle east will be routing for an Obama victory -- say what you like about Dubya, but those bad guys are scared pissly of him because he's a cowboy that'll bomb the crap out them without blinking -- Obama appears to be more of a lefty peace-nik. I hope him winning doesn't rally the spirits of the bad guys for another attack; and if they do attack, I hope Obama's up to it (maybe he'll make Powell his secretary of defence?)
You certainly have digested well all the FUD Bush has been feeding his flock for years. What, you think Iraqi's would have attacked the US with their "WMD's" if Bush did not go in first? And this notion of "bad guys" out there waiting to attack at the first sign of weakness? Are you for real? I might be modded a troll but I consider Bush (well perhaps not the mentally challenged president himself, but his administration that makes the decisions) a worse killer than Bin Ladden, since he is responsible for more dead Americans (4000 vs 3000), along with a million Iraqi's. They both ordered for people to die, Bush in a much larger scale. And don't tell me that apart from the "unfortunate" Iraqi civilians, the US servicemen signed up for it. The recruiters go to lengths to convince them there is such a small chance for them to be shipped to Iraq... Also, don't forget that Al Qaeda: 1) Was most likely funded by the US (yeah, Osama was a hero when he was fighting the bad Commies) 2) would not have succeeded in their 9/11 attack had the Bush administration be more competent and actually read the intelligence reports.
If you think that the Wii uses accelerometers for the pointer function, you are mistaken. It just uses the IR sensor bar as a technology that improves the old style light guns. It is actually not a great improvement though, as it works frustratingly bad on my 120" screen (it feels like it assumes I have a 40-50" TV, so I am still pointing to the middle of the screen when the pointer has already run off the top).
The same goes for the games that do not have a pointer - the sensor bar is useless for them, no "recalibrating" of any sort for the accelerometers. Try unplugging it for example and there is no effect.
So how do you feel about McCoy looking like "Joey" from "Friends". I mean seriously, I just saw the photos with my fiancee (no, I am not making this up) and we both looked at each other "so that's where that Joey character went...". And then we have Spock angry as hell (yeah, good job not showing emotions), I am trembling with fear for this movie:(
I would rather have a funded, supported binary blob that works over a bunch of unsupported unfunded drivers and open specifications any day.
What are you doing using Linux in the first place then? And okay, now it is working great even as a desktop OS, but a while back it was the epitome of "unsupported, unfunded, open spec" and not "working" that great. We should have stuck to windows, huh?;)
Slashdot Mirror
Seriously? +5 Insightful?
Exactly how many Itanic & Sparc systems do you supposed are being used for browsing (Flash sites in particular)?
Maybe you should research it, and after you identify all those users, you can call them (all dozens of them) and ask "WHY?".
Also, friggin hell froze over and we have 64bit Flash. Now you expect Adobe to help open source implementations of Flash... where do you get these ideas, are you driving around in the Heart of Gold?
Or, they could buy & revive the Buran program. It wouldn't even need a crew for routine missions (including rescue missions), how safer can you go than that?
My bad. I guess not many /.ers would like to read about lesbians rather than debian... ;)
I would swear there would be Ubuntu & Opensuse fans here
Ok, am I the only one who read Lesbian Denny?
I should cease my attempts at speed reading...
Eh, you missed most of the point of my post.
And no, I do not base anything on canned benchmarks. Neither should anyone. I take the exact code that will run daily on the intended machine and I time it. The perl & C code that we run at work (on Suse 64bit) is about 10% faster at the same clock speed on AMD than on current intel. Thus, the latest workstation I bought was an intel E8600 running at 3.8GHz, since I would not be able to get an AMD to 3.4GHz (on stock air cooling) that would provide similar performance (for our workload). A typical run of our pipeline takes 10h+ so I can probably save a couple of hours over the fastest AMD. However, the point of my post was that AMD processors are still relevant, they are not a generation behind, they can't compete only in the upper segment (that brings back some pre-2000 memories). You can say Intel has "won the CPU wars", but AMD is not trailing by much and it is a good choise for cheaper PC's.
Now, I gave the examle of compiling a project with Visual Studio on a VM over linux. The particular project takes less than 10 seconds on an Athlon 64 @ 2.2 GHz, almost the same time on a C2D @ 2.66GHz and about A MINUTE on a P4 @ 3GHz (bought about the same time as the Athlon 64). Most of the difference I guess comes from 64bit vs 32bit host, however the fact is that Intel was a whole generation behind which made the Core seem an even bigger leap forward.
Think of it this way, the current AMD's are not much behind in similar clock speeds, but are a bit behind at top clock speeds (well, ok, more than a bit if you OC). Even if I buy C2D when I want fast workstations, I would definitely say AMD is withing the same performance "generation" and they are very competitive at the mid-low segment.
So, your perception that Intel is improving very fast is based on the fact that they were running on a laughable (PR dept driven) architecture for years. From P3 -> P4 they went BACK in performance (not just IPC, the first P4's were actually slower than existing P3's).
What I also find utterly ridiculous is how most (fortunately not all) of the publications etc of the era found the P4 as a great architecture and some even compared it favorably to the Athlon. I was pulling my hair as I was seeing our daily tasks (e.g. building a symbian app on a VM running over linux) running over 5 TIMES FASTER on a 64bit AMD machine compared to a (more expensive) P4 that was its "competitor" (and "faster" in several 32bit windows "canned" benchmarks). Intel eventually adopted AMD64, went back to the P3 arch to evolve it into Core and now everyone and their mom admit P4 is crap, while AMD with a not much changed architecture since the first Athlon 64 so many years ago, has indeed fallen behind, but not by that much.
They just didn't their idea far enough. If their studs were some sort of "Lego" monogram instead of simply circular then others would have to "print" their trademark on their products to make them compatible, breaking the law.
What? At least it is a better idea than installing rootkits on customers etc...
I live in the US, so I think you are referring to a whole different country. I won't even attempt to describe what I see/hear every day to which you seem oblivious, maybe I will just post a link to yesterday's news
their brand new airplanes that can fire a laser at a top secret satellite to have it bounce back and kill a target half way around the world.
Not only you don't have a clue at what is going on with the US government, you also watch too much (bad) sci-fi.
What a lame comparison. Open Office is a huge (as in bloated) and slow software suite that makes me cry when I have to use it for something serious. I prefer to use Koffice even though it lacks some features I'd like. The fact that using MS Excel on a VM on my linux machine is several orders more productive than running OO natively, should be a good indication. Notice I did not mention MS Word and "productive" in the same sentence, for Word processing I resort to Abiword (or Kword if I want more DTP style). /.: PS3 vs MAME, MS Flight Simulator vs Hot air Balloons, Mars Rover vs RAV4.
So, in summary, OO compares (IMO) badly to its real competitors. Google Apps are a whole different paradigm, targeting completely different usage scenarios. It is not either Google or OO (or Koffice etc). You first decide if your needs require web or local applications and then you decide among the available software for the platform. The web apps will probably never have the same feature set as the local apps for probably good reasons.
Lame, lame article.
Next week on
"the drivers provided by ATI" are available on their website and contain no third party software. ATI has not made graphics cards for a few years now, so there is no "CD Version". The CD you have is provided by your card manufacturer and should have the official ATI distribution plus extra software the card manufacturer is offering. Generally, a manufacturer would not "stealth" install Java when it is not needed for the driver, unless you selected some sort of "express install" that adds bundled software and some of it might have required java. ;)
In any case, saying "I installed drivers provided by ATI and Java popped up" is indeed trolling
What kind of Troll are you? Catalyst drivers require the .Net framework for their control center and that's it. And even that, YOU have to install it yourself before running the control center. They don't install anything else, and certainly not Java.
Do you realize that for computers 12+ years is several GENERATIONS?
I had always been using ATI for Windows boxes and laptops, since my main concern was almost always video performance and TV-Out capability and I could not even get a video overlay work over TV-out with nVidia cards for years.
Of course, when I had problems with linux drivers I built nVidia (I admit, even intel) linux boxes. But that is a thing of the past, I am back to ATI for linux, they are good and even getting better with each release.
Anyway, long term loyalties is pretty silly. I bought my K6 233 at the same price my friend bought his MMX 166, in retrospect we all know how those two compare. I kept on buying Athlons when others were paying more for their crap P4's (they weren't called crap back when it was the best intel had to offer). But, hey, I am now buying Core 2 for non-low end systems, until AMD can come up with something better.
Fanboyism gets you bad deals at least half of the time. You buy hardware, you don't marry it. Ok, I know this is slashdot and the last statement might generate some debate, but anyway you get the point.
The whole idea of having to develop an entire infrastructure and spend so much effort (e.g. writing software, following changes in policies, synchronizing between different DST zones, even manually correcting clocks) just to supposedly save a little energy thanks to "using more sunlight" is beyond idiotic. I won't even touch the fact that to me it is kind of obvious that the DST could never work as intended. But even if we were certain it would work, the CHANGE twice a year add such an overhead that would wipe out any potential gain.
Well, duh, thet can run their Core 2 @ 4.5GHz on stock air cooling, silly!
Shanghai can still be faster clock for clock as they promised ;)
Seriously now, a CPU % utilization of a VM running WMP is no indication of anything.
Indeed a paradox. Throw in half the female police force scantily clad pretending to be selling fucking and you get the US situation ( except LV ;) ).
Selling fucking is legal in most countries since the dawn of mankind.
The faux morality in the US prevents if from being legal, however you can always go around that limitation if you have a camera. Fucking becomes acting, and all is well...
Now that we know who is behind putting up all these signs, apparently without permission, won't there be some huge fines coming up?
I had been using D-Link and Linksys for years, the former being cheaper but the latter sometimes having better products.
However, after I tried out Zyxel (per the recommendation network admin friends in Europe) I have not gone back. I had never realized you can have an ssh connection stay up for weeks over a wi-fi network...
So, apart from a Linksys pcmcia card on my fiancee's laptop that has never given me reason to replace it, everything else (routers, access points, adapters...) are Zyxel.
You seem to know what 110A means (huge current indeed), yet you haven't put 2 and 2 together and realize how you get a 130W TDP (pretty average for a modern CPU) out of 1.16V ;)
You made me RTFA. The same ad-laden FA I was complaining about. Thanks. So, from the article.
Because the Core i7 Extreme 965 has its overspeed protection removed--i.e. its multipliers are unlocked--we overclocked the processor by raising its multiplier to 25 and also experimented with an increased QPI speed.
My 4GHz Core 2 is not a $1000 *Extreme* part. Humanly priced i7s will have overspeed protection.
I have the feeling you knew this was the case anyway, but had me read TFA just for kicks... shame on you!
Link to the middle of an ad-laden article and to the Cinebench of all pages - because, you know, that is what the average /. reader is running...
Also, add a nice touch: forget to mention that while the i7 is faster clock for clock with the Core 2, it currently tops out at 3.2GHz and has some sort of overclock protection (lowers clock when it goes over 110A or 130w).
My cheap Core 2 is running at 4GHz on just the stock fan, I don't see myself upgrading to the i7 anytime soon.
What did you say? ... What do you mean Cinebench would still run faster?
Excuse the slight off-topic ( still on-summary though ;) )
Ubuntu 8.10 with Compiz Fusion is certainly prettier on my Eee than the Windows XP that it came with.
WHY would you even buy Eee with XP? You like paying for MS licenses you are not using?
In any case I cannot stress how great I find the work ASUS has done on the Linux distro the Eee comes with. Granted, out of the box is perfect only for casual users - I had to add the Etch repository since I am a developer (and switched to "advanced" gui). I only found one small glitch: on the 900 at least you could not set ext2/3 sd cards auto mount without the sync option, so I had to add a small script that remounts correctly. Otherwise it is a joy to use, everybody with an Eee should try it before resorting to Win or even Ubuntu etc.
- Obama's lack of experience -- if he is elected, the 4 year presidential term will be the longest job he's ever held -- he's a talented Senator, but he's never actually run anything
I hear this all the time, yet it is the argument I "get" the least. In my opinion, a career in the army makes a person the worst possible candidate for most civilian positions. I would certainly not call McCain "more experienced" when most of his experience is pretty bad for the position in question. Hmm... unless we are becoming a totalitarian state. An army man is the optimal dictator. Now that I think about it, it kind of creeps me out every time I am in the NYC subway and hear those messages about how my belongings are subject to search - I get the feeling I am in a 1984 type movie... Yeah, go McCain for dictator!
- I'm quite certain America's enemies in the middle east will be routing for an Obama victory -- say what you like about Dubya, but those bad guys are scared pissly of him because he's a cowboy that'll bomb the crap out them without blinking -- Obama appears to be more of a lefty peace-nik. I hope him winning doesn't rally the spirits of the bad guys for another attack; and if they do attack, I hope Obama's up to it (maybe he'll make Powell his secretary of defence?)
You certainly have digested well all the FUD Bush has been feeding his flock for years. What, you think Iraqi's would have attacked the US with their "WMD's" if Bush did not go in first? And this notion of "bad guys" out there waiting to attack at the first sign of weakness? Are you for real? I might be modded a troll but I consider Bush (well perhaps not the mentally challenged president himself, but his administration that makes the decisions) a worse killer than Bin Ladden, since he is responsible for more dead Americans (4000 vs 3000), along with a million Iraqi's. They both ordered for people to die, Bush in a much larger scale. And don't tell me that apart from the "unfortunate" Iraqi civilians, the US servicemen signed up for it. The recruiters go to lengths to convince them there is such a small chance for them to be shipped to Iraq... Also, don't forget that Al Qaeda: 1) Was most likely funded by the US (yeah, Osama was a hero when he was fighting the bad Commies) 2) would not have succeeded in their 9/11 attack had the Bush administration be more competent and actually read the intelligence reports.
If you think that the Wii uses accelerometers for the pointer function, you are mistaken. It just uses the IR sensor bar as a technology that improves the old style light guns. It is actually not a great improvement though, as it works frustratingly bad on my 120" screen (it feels like it assumes I have a 40-50" TV, so I am still pointing to the middle of the screen when the pointer has already run off the top).
The same goes for the games that do not have a pointer - the sensor bar is useless for them, no "recalibrating" of any sort for the accelerometers. Try unplugging it for example and there is no effect.
So how do you feel about McCoy looking like "Joey" from "Friends". I mean seriously, I just saw the photos with my fiancee (no, I am not making this up) and we both looked at each other "so that's where that Joey character went...". :(
And then we have Spock angry as hell (yeah, good job not showing emotions), I am trembling with fear for this movie
I would rather have a funded, supported binary blob that works over a bunch of unsupported unfunded drivers and open specifications any day.
What are you doing using Linux in the first place then? And okay, now it is working great even as a desktop OS, but a while back it was the epitome of "unsupported, unfunded, open spec" and not "working" that great. We should have stuck to windows, huh? ;)