I have an AMD64 system, but I'm on the 32-bit Debian because the AMD64 Debian is a pure 64-bit system. I need 32-bit binaries sometimes and I don't fancy setting up a chroot with 32-bit libraries just so I can use them.
Does the AMD64 Fedora handle 32-bit and 64-bit libraries in parallel? Does yum?
"Windows is the only OS with critical mass high enough to achieve this. Symbian for mobile devices. This is why you won't see any Windows CE worms unless if it gains in terms of marketshare."
The Witty worm could only infect Windows machines running a specific version of specific firewall software. The vulnerable population was about 12000 machines worldwide. It infected virtually the entire vulnerable population in under an hour.
If/when there's a worm for MacOS X or Linux, there will be more than enough machines to spread it far and wide.
I had a problem that was messing up my connection (random packet loss), and after a month of not having it fixed they basically told me they didn't expect me to pay for the service until they had it fixed. It was annoying, but the price was right.
They're in it for the long haul. They know that making me happy is going to be paying off for years when Telus won't offer the same quality of service.
You should try Shaw if you ever find yourself in Canada. They are, in my experience, awesome.
It took approximately 17 hours from when I first contacted them to when I was up and running. I hadn't even started unpacking yet, it was just me on a mattress on the floor with my little iBook, a modem in the wall, and piles of stuff everywhere.
Shaw's business tech support people were a breath of fresh air. Long experience has taught me that you've gotta go through the script on a supported OS before you can make them believe it's their fault. No sense in complaining, the support people don't make policy. Just do it with a minimum of fuss and you can talk to someone in a position to do something about it sooner.
I was ready to connect my iBook instead of my firewall box (obviously this problem occured after I unpacked), but they understood what I had done to diagnose the problem and agreed with my assesment (I imagine they confirmed my results on their end). Also they had heard of OpenBSD, which is probably the only time that has happened to me.
Telus on the other hand... After what it took to get the bloody phone connected, I'm not touching their Internet service.
It should be noted that Red Hat has now backported several interactivity improvements from 2.5/2.6
My first attempt at having a Linux desktop machine was on a PII-400, with a version of Slackware that I don't recall (I do recall that it had a 2.2 kernel with the option of a 2.4 kernel circa 2.4.10, I used 2.4). I didn't care about throughput, but I wanted a system that was responsive. I define responsiveness as the ability to respond to me and programs I care about (like XMMS) with a small delay. I'm not sure we're talking about the same thing, because you seem to be talking about thoughput in CPU-bound tasks.
For example, if I was browsing slashdot while compiling the kernel, the mouse might stop updating for a few seconds, and XMMS would start skipping. Because of that, I went back to Windows as my desktop machine and telnetted to the Linux machine. The cause of this was the scheduler. It didn't give enough priority to processes and threads that the user would notice if they were delayed even a few milliseconds. That's why dual-CPU systems were more responsive, they had a greater probability of being able to run a thread when it needed to be run.
2.6 is much better about this. Threads and processes that consistently sleep before their CPU time is used up (either through sleep calls or system calls that block) are run as soon as they become runnable.
2.6 does have more overhead, but it's faster in the one way that matters to me: it remains capable of responding to me with very little delay no matter what is going on in the background. It might have slightly lower throughput, but if I can use the computer while it's busy doing other things, it doesn't matter to me.
I've used it on Pentium 4 systems with hyperthreading, which has most of the same responsiveness advantages. I can tell the difference on Windows, but not on Linux.
If you do anything that is capable of using more than one flow-of-control, you stand to benefit.
For developers, or (shudder) Gentoo users, compile times will go way down. Graphics people will benefit because those applications are already optimized for dual-CPU or hyperthreading systems most of the time.
It's a chip targetted at the "prosumer". The people that stand to benefit already know they will benefit, and don't need to be sold on the concept. If you don't stand to benefit, you'll be able to save a lot of money getting the single-core version.
"I hope dual core provides the same interactivity."
I imagine it will, but I don't have any interactivity complaints on Linux 2.6.
I had a Pentium 4 with HT, I noticed a big interactivity boost on Windows but on Linux I couldn't really tell the difference between HT enabled and disabled. I often ran with HT disabled because it was faster for the stuff I was doing. I can't stand it when stuff happens like music skipping (the reason I never used Linux on the desktop pre-2.6), so I'd notice if it happened and it's been fine.
My P4 motherboard kicked it and I'm now on an Athlon64 3000+, and it's also fine for interactivity purposes.
Everything pre-2.5 was pretty bad for interactivity, but 2.6 is excellent. That's why I put up with bugginess. I'm no Linux zealot, I bitch about the buginess of 2.6 a lot more than I praise its interactivity, but it just happens to do that one thing really well.
Obviously not everyone can use Linux and this is a big win for them, and it's a big win for Linux users in plenty of other ways. But it's really amazing how terrible Windows is at providing a responsive system.
"I believe Linux actually is truly desktop ready -- and this is coming from a former Mac guy who relishes his ease-of-use more than anything. If I can use Ubuntu daily, anyone can. And I'm sure Dell has seen Linux's progress as well as anybody else here and is betting on it continuing. He's getting in on the "ground floor", so to speak."
I've been hearing this for years, but simply don't think it is the case, for any Linux distro that I've used. The installation has improved greatly, but unless the computer is absolutely average and nothing goes wrong, you still have to know a thing or two. You still have to pick your hardware carefully. You still have to live without a lot of software. You still need the command line.
I use Linux as a desktop because Windows simply doesn't meet my needs, but I know what I'm doing. It still manages to piss me off though, because something always goes wrong. Usually due to a lack of testing on the part of the distro, and Ubuntu is no saint in this regard. The 2.6 kernel has not done anyone any favors here.
My setup at home makes it easy for me to try different OSes and distros (NFS home directory, so I can do a ground-up whenever I please) and I've tried quite a few, but I've yet to see one that I'd expect an inexperienced user to deal with. I have to know too many things.
It's fair to note that by my definition of "ready for the desktop", Windows doesn't qualify either. But Windows was there already. To beat Windows, Linux has to reach a Mac-like level of transparency.
Intel has vast resources. Even with their penchant for backing the wrong technological horse time after time (after time), they're not simply going to go away because they will have a lot of money and they still make a lot of money.
The whole NetBurst architechture has reached the end of its life. You can see this because Intel has stopped selling the chips by their clock speed. Their alternative, the Pentium M, is a match for the Athlon64 in many ways, and if they re-engineer it as a dekstop chip without quite as many power constraints it's quite possible they can pull ahead again. It will be a rough year or two for them, but they're not going anywhere.
It's true that the chip will have to be changed to accomodate DDR2 technology, but AMD isn't delaying the change because the change would be inconvenient (at least not entirely).
It would not yet improve the performance for them in most cases. Having the memory controller on the CPU die cuts their latency down far enough that it's better for them to stick with DDR until DDR2 clock speeds are competitive. Ultimately DDR2 will prevail, but it doesn't make sense to change until it makes the computer faster.
DDR2 won't catch up in terms of latency until it gets to 800 mhz or so, and I believe AMD is planning to update their chips somewhat after that happens (as it will cost a fortune for a while).
I honestly don't understand Intel sometimes. AMD didn't catch up because they did everything right (they didn't), but because Intel kept dropping the ball. Intel's execution has usually been pretty good, but they always seem to end up backing the wrong horse technologically, or backing the right horse at the wrong time.
"Onboard video is usually pretty terrible (unless you're buying an nForce board), and if you are an audiophile like me, you'll want the 500$ sound card with the 120db DNR:) But in reality, it almost doesn't matter who made your NIC, your USB transcever, etc etc."
Well that's just the thing. Onboard audio is good enough for me, but my home directory is an NFS mount so I do care about the NIC (crappy ones eat a lot of CPU). I'm sure someone out there cares about the USB hardware as well.
But hey, it's cheaper to dump all this stuff on the board and then let people replace whatever they need to. IMO it's a pretty benign practice. It makes the boards more capable without compromising your ability to upgrade them later.
Also, having it all on one chip means there's less to go wrong. A computer with 3-4 cards in it has a lot more that can fail.
It's cheaper for chipset and motherboard makers to make a limited number of models, and that means extra features even if you're not going to use them.
Even if your motherboard doesn't have a network port, it's probably supported by the chipset and there's probably traces on the motherboard for one to be soldered on. I imagine it costs more to make different models that don't include hardware already supported by the chipset, as that makes inventory much more complicated for the manufacturor and the various retailers.
Also... if you tried to support everything needed these days with PCI cards, you'd run out of space pretty quick, and you'd have bus contention issues. Network, USB/Firewire, sound, etc. Doesn't leave a lot of room for expansion. If all the basics are sitting on the chipset, it's pretty hard to get a solution that's enough better to be worth the money.
That's a Javascript thing. Links on Fark don't go directly to the site, they go through Fark so they can count hits. Firefox by default does not allow sites to set the text in the status bar, which is what is done by Fark to display the URL.
Apache was never optimized for serving lots of small, static files so I can easily believe it falling behind in some benchmarks, but not 300%.
It doesn't take much computer to saturate a lot of bandwidth, which is why most people don't care, but big sites will often have a Zeus (or similar) server set up for serving images precisely because Apache isn't as good for that. But you've got to be huge before you get to that point.
Dynamic content put Apache where it is. It has the support, the tools, the libraries, and the widespread expertise to do dynamic content pretty damn well. It's not better than everyone at everything there either, but it's a very good solution for most cases.
The problem is that their competition can no longer be bled dry through attrition.
Companies like Google, IBM, Apple, Sony can't match Microsoft dollar for dollar individually, but Microsoft cannot simply wear them all down simultaneously by undercutting them until they're gone.
Something I find hilarious about online music is that Microsoft actually has to rely on 3rd parties now, while Apple is vertically integrated. The 3rd parties don't have billions of dollars of cash lying around like Microsoft (or Apple), and Apple is vertically intergrated.
I was annoyed that Apple was artificially restricting the performance of iMacs with 100 mb ethernet, as gigabit chipsets don't cost much more than the others these days. Doing anything serious with network drives requires gigabit and an iMac can't be upgraded. Now that that's fixed, they're a computer I would consider buying.
The video chipset seems a bit weak, but it's enough for anything I'll do with it.
One thing I'd like to see is a laptop card slot for upgrades, but I know that'll never happen.
"-Parallel data structure supporting up to 215 simultaneous in-flight instructions -Simultaneous issue of up to 10 out-of-order operations -Dual-pipeline Velocity Engine for 128-bit single-instruction, multiple-data (SIMD) processing -Two independent double-precision floating-point units -Advanced three-stage branch-prediction logic"
All on the G5 iMcs.
"-Point-to-point system controller"
Without more information I don't know what this means. If it means what I suspect it does there's no point on having this on a single-CPU system.
"-128-bit data paths for up to 6.4-GBps memory throughput"
Only for the dual-processor PowerMacs. And you have to have pairs of DIMMs to take advantage of this anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
"I can't say that I fully comprehend how all this works with ld.so, LD_LIBRARY_PATH,. etc."
:)
ewwwwwww
I can think of a few ways, but they all make my head hurt.
Well, I don't need to mess with the library paths so whatever hack they have will work.
Thanks you.
My search didn't turn that up. Thank you. :)
I can't go through the system and nice anything that might potentially consume lots of CPU. That's just not practical.
I have an AMD64 system, but I'm on the 32-bit Debian because the AMD64 Debian is a pure 64-bit system. I need 32-bit binaries sometimes and I don't fancy setting up a chroot with 32-bit libraries just so I can use them.
Does the AMD64 Fedora handle 32-bit and 64-bit libraries in parallel? Does yum?
"Windows is the only OS with critical mass high enough to achieve this. Symbian for mobile devices. This is why you won't see any Windows CE worms unless if it gains in terms of marketshare."
The Witty worm could only infect Windows machines running a specific version of specific firewall software. The vulnerable population was about 12000 machines worldwide. It infected virtually the entire vulnerable population in under an hour.
If/when there's a worm for MacOS X or Linux, there will be more than enough machines to spread it far and wide.
Indeed.
I had a problem that was messing up my connection (random packet loss), and after a month of not having it fixed they basically told me they didn't expect me to pay for the service until they had it fixed. It was annoying, but the price was right.
They're in it for the long haul. They know that making me happy is going to be paying off for years when Telus won't offer the same quality of service.
You should try Shaw if you ever find yourself in Canada. They are, in my experience, awesome.
It took approximately 17 hours from when I first contacted them to when I was up and running. I hadn't even started unpacking yet, it was just me on a mattress on the floor with my little iBook, a modem in the wall, and piles of stuff everywhere.
Shaw's business tech support people were a breath of fresh air. Long experience has taught me that you've gotta go through the script on a supported OS before you can make them believe it's their fault. No sense in complaining, the support people don't make policy. Just do it with a minimum of fuss and you can talk to someone in a position to do something about it sooner.
I was ready to connect my iBook instead of my firewall box (obviously this problem occured after I unpacked), but they understood what I had done to diagnose the problem and agreed with my assesment (I imagine they confirmed my results on their end). Also they had heard of OpenBSD, which is probably the only time that has happened to me.
Telus on the other hand... After what it took to get the bloody phone connected, I'm not touching their Internet service.
"Don't really share your user experience."
It should be noted that Red Hat has now backported several interactivity improvements from 2.5/2.6
My first attempt at having a Linux desktop machine was on a PII-400, with a version of Slackware that I don't recall (I do recall that it had a 2.2 kernel with the option of a 2.4 kernel circa 2.4.10, I used 2.4). I didn't care about throughput, but I wanted a system that was responsive. I define responsiveness as the ability to respond to me and programs I care about (like XMMS) with a small delay. I'm not sure we're talking about the same thing, because you seem to be talking about thoughput in CPU-bound tasks.
For example, if I was browsing slashdot while compiling the kernel, the mouse might stop updating for a few seconds, and XMMS would start skipping. Because of that, I went back to Windows as my desktop machine and telnetted to the Linux machine. The cause of this was the scheduler. It didn't give enough priority to processes and threads that the user would notice if they were delayed even a few milliseconds. That's why dual-CPU systems were more responsive, they had a greater probability of being able to run a thread when it needed to be run.
2.6 is much better about this. Threads and processes that consistently sleep before their CPU time is used up (either through sleep calls or system calls that block) are run as soon as they become runnable.
2.6 does have more overhead, but it's faster in the one way that matters to me: it remains capable of responding to me with very little delay no matter what is going on in the background. It might have slightly lower throughput, but if I can use the computer while it's busy doing other things, it doesn't matter to me.
I've used it on Pentium 4 systems with hyperthreading, which has most of the same responsiveness advantages. I can tell the difference on Windows, but not on Linux.
If you do anything that is capable of using more than one flow-of-control, you stand to benefit.
For developers, or (shudder) Gentoo users, compile times will go way down. Graphics people will benefit because those applications are already optimized for dual-CPU or hyperthreading systems most of the time.
It's a chip targetted at the "prosumer". The people that stand to benefit already know they will benefit, and don't need to be sold on the concept. If you don't stand to benefit, you'll be able to save a lot of money getting the single-core version.
"I hope dual core provides the same interactivity."
I imagine it will, but I don't have any interactivity complaints on Linux 2.6.
I had a Pentium 4 with HT, I noticed a big interactivity boost on Windows but on Linux I couldn't really tell the difference between HT enabled and disabled. I often ran with HT disabled because it was faster for the stuff I was doing. I can't stand it when stuff happens like music skipping (the reason I never used Linux on the desktop pre-2.6), so I'd notice if it happened and it's been fine.
My P4 motherboard kicked it and I'm now on an Athlon64 3000+, and it's also fine for interactivity purposes.
Everything pre-2.5 was pretty bad for interactivity, but 2.6 is excellent. That's why I put up with bugginess. I'm no Linux zealot, I bitch about the buginess of 2.6 a lot more than I praise its interactivity, but it just happens to do that one thing really well.
Obviously not everyone can use Linux and this is a big win for them, and it's a big win for Linux users in plenty of other ways. But it's really amazing how terrible Windows is at providing a responsive system.
"I believe Linux actually is truly desktop ready -- and this is coming from a former Mac guy who relishes his ease-of-use more than anything. If I can use Ubuntu daily, anyone can. And I'm sure Dell has seen Linux's progress as well as anybody else here and is betting on it continuing. He's getting in on the "ground floor", so to speak."
I've been hearing this for years, but simply don't think it is the case, for any Linux distro that I've used. The installation has improved greatly, but unless the computer is absolutely average and nothing goes wrong, you still have to know a thing or two. You still have to pick your hardware carefully. You still have to live without a lot of software. You still need the command line.
I use Linux as a desktop because Windows simply doesn't meet my needs, but I know what I'm doing. It still manages to piss me off though, because something always goes wrong. Usually due to a lack of testing on the part of the distro, and Ubuntu is no saint in this regard. The 2.6 kernel has not done anyone any favors here.
My setup at home makes it easy for me to try different OSes and distros (NFS home directory, so I can do a ground-up whenever I please) and I've tried quite a few, but I've yet to see one that I'd expect an inexperienced user to deal with. I have to know too many things.
It's fair to note that by my definition of "ready for the desktop", Windows doesn't qualify either. But Windows was there already. To beat Windows, Linux has to reach a Mac-like level of transparency.
Intel has vast resources. Even with their penchant for backing the wrong technological horse time after time (after time), they're not simply going to go away because they will have a lot of money and they still make a lot of money.
The whole NetBurst architechture has reached the end of its life. You can see this because Intel has stopped selling the chips by their clock speed. Their alternative, the Pentium M, is a match for the Athlon64 in many ways, and if they re-engineer it as a dekstop chip without quite as many power constraints it's quite possible they can pull ahead again. It will be a rough year or two for them, but they're not going anywhere.
Don't do that.
Moral high ground only works if you're better than the other guy.
It's true that the chip will have to be changed to accomodate DDR2 technology, but AMD isn't delaying the change because the change would be inconvenient (at least not entirely).
It would not yet improve the performance for them in most cases. Having the memory controller on the CPU die cuts their latency down far enough that it's better for them to stick with DDR until DDR2 clock speeds are competitive. Ultimately DDR2 will prevail, but it doesn't make sense to change until it makes the computer faster.
DDR2 won't catch up in terms of latency until it gets to 800 mhz or so, and I believe AMD is planning to update their chips somewhat after that happens (as it will cost a fortune for a while).
I honestly don't understand Intel sometimes. AMD didn't catch up because they did everything right (they didn't), but because Intel kept dropping the ball. Intel's execution has usually been pretty good, but they always seem to end up backing the wrong horse technologically, or backing the right horse at the wrong time.
"Onboard video is usually pretty terrible (unless you're buying an nForce board), and if you are an audiophile like me, you'll want the 500$ sound card with the 120db DNR:) But in reality, it almost doesn't matter who made your NIC, your USB transcever, etc etc."
Well that's just the thing. Onboard audio is good enough for me, but my home directory is an NFS mount so I do care about the NIC (crappy ones eat a lot of CPU). I'm sure someone out there cares about the USB hardware as well.
But hey, it's cheaper to dump all this stuff on the board and then let people replace whatever they need to. IMO it's a pretty benign practice. It makes the boards more capable without compromising your ability to upgrade them later.
Also, having it all on one chip means there's less to go wrong. A computer with 3-4 cards in it has a lot more that can fail.
I'm expected to do better than that with command line tools, and it's not that hard.
The error codes used might work in strerror(3), but it can't be that hard to add a similar function to handle Apple codes.
It's cheaper for chipset and motherboard makers to make a limited number of models, and that means extra features even if you're not going to use them.
Even if your motherboard doesn't have a network port, it's probably supported by the chipset and there's probably traces on the motherboard for one to be soldered on. I imagine it costs more to make different models that don't include hardware already supported by the chipset, as that makes inventory much more complicated for the manufacturor and the various retailers.
Also... if you tried to support everything needed these days with PCI cards, you'd run out of space pretty quick, and you'd have bus contention issues. Network, USB/Firewire, sound, etc. Doesn't leave a lot of room for expansion. If all the basics are sitting on the chipset, it's pretty hard to get a solution that's enough better to be worth the money.
That's a Javascript thing. Links on Fark don't go directly to the site, they go through Fark so they can count hits. Firefox by default does not allow sites to set the text in the status bar, which is what is done by Fark to display the URL.
You must change the settings to fix this.
Yes.
X11 can use shared memory to accelerate communication between processes.
I have no idea how it's counted on which implementations though. It might be reported twice, it might not.
300% is pretty hard to believe.
Apache was never optimized for serving lots of small, static files so I can easily believe it falling behind in some benchmarks, but not 300%.
It doesn't take much computer to saturate a lot of bandwidth, which is why most people don't care, but big sites will often have a Zeus (or similar) server set up for serving images precisely because Apache isn't as good for that. But you've got to be huge before you get to that point.
Dynamic content put Apache where it is. It has the support, the tools, the libraries, and the widespread expertise to do dynamic content pretty damn well. It's not better than everyone at everything there either, but it's a very good solution for most cases.
The problem is that their competition can no longer be bled dry through attrition.
Companies like Google, IBM, Apple, Sony can't match Microsoft dollar for dollar individually, but Microsoft cannot simply wear them all down simultaneously by undercutting them until they're gone.
Something I find hilarious about online music is that Microsoft actually has to rely on 3rd parties now, while Apple is vertically integrated. The 3rd parties don't have billions of dollars of cash lying around like Microsoft (or Apple), and Apple is vertically intergrated.
Indeed. Changing e-mail addresses is a lot of work.
I got gmail because my current account was going to be shut off and I didn't want to go through the same thing when that inevitably happened again.
"Having gig ethernet is a selling point, and not having it could be like the floppy issue was. For what it costs them, I think it's a wise move."
I would say "not having it was an unwise move".
I was annoyed that Apple was artificially restricting the performance of iMacs with 100 mb ethernet, as gigabit chipsets don't cost much more than the others these days. Doing anything serious with network drives requires gigabit and an iMac can't be upgraded. Now that that's fixed, they're a computer I would consider buying.
The video chipset seems a bit weak, but it's enough for anything I'll do with it.
One thing I'd like to see is a laptop card slot for upgrades, but I know that'll never happen.
"PowerMacs have 64-bit processors"
So do G5 iMacs...
"-Parallel data structure supporting up to 215 simultaneous in-flight instructions
-Simultaneous issue of up to 10 out-of-order operations
-Dual-pipeline Velocity Engine for 128-bit single-instruction, multiple-data (SIMD) processing
-Two independent double-precision floating-point units
-Advanced three-stage branch-prediction logic"
All on the G5 iMcs.
"-Point-to-point system controller"
Without more information I don't know what this means. If it means what I suspect it does there's no point on having this on a single-CPU system.
"-128-bit data paths for up to 6.4-GBps memory throughput"
Only for the dual-processor PowerMacs. And you have to have pairs of DIMMs to take advantage of this anyway.