... from the very early days where there was a new version sometimes more than once a day, it's dropped off as the major things that needed to be done get done.
There is a lot of new stuff happening, but it's in the main not specific to the kernel. New things the kernels needs to do are thin on the ground now. Not to say it'll ever be finished as such, just that there aren't any needed big new features. It'll take a major new shift in computing to do that, I suspect. Something way bigger than extensions or tweaks to x86/SPARC/PPC/ARM etc. I'm not holding my breath.
I may be stating the obvious, but the site is slashdotted, so I can't see what Linus has apparently said.
It's already been said, but that's a big glossy load of poop.
The quads from Intel provide four physical cores per socket. That is the definition of a quad in this context. The exact workings of how many bits of silicon there are, how they talk to each other and to the rest of the system is, to 99.999% of users and computer buyers, background fluff.
This was the same as when Intel put two single-core chips into a package to release a 'dual core'. Lots of people like you jumped up and down and pointed out it wan't *real* dual core, and how the FSB issue would cripple performance. Amazingly, it wasn't the case - they sold in droves, and real-world performance was good enough to carry Intel through to the 'true' dual core, the Core 2 Duo.
If the competition had anything out that was the same cost and performed significantly better than the 'fake' quad cores, you would have an argument. But they haven't and you don't. Bear in mind I'm talking about the huge x86/x64 market, not the relatively low volume non-x86 server market.
What Intel did back then and again now is perfectly sensible. They have millions of high yield, robust dual core chips being churned out, and they have built into the infrastructure the ability to put two into a package, lower the speed a bit to drop the per-core heat output, and sell reasonably priced (now) quad core chips. When the drop to 45nm happens, they will release their 'real' quad cores, and pretty quickly put two of those into a package to start selling oct-core (whatever we're going to call them). And so it goes.
What's the alternative? Not sell quads until 45nm comes out? Not working out too well for AMD is it? I've asked the question before here and on realworldtech.com - at what point will the FSB problem actually become a painful problem for the Intel chips? Well, not yet (4 core) is the answer, despite dire predictions from the AMD camp for years. My gues is that, shock of shocks, Intel have actually thought it through - and that's why CSI is coming. When the number of cores gets to the point where FSB will actually hurt performance relative to the AMD architecture, that's when CSI will kick in. Maybe at 8 cores, maybe at 16.
What, you don't need quad core yet? Fine, stop your bitching and choose what's right for you. Vive la difference, and 3 cheers for a market that gives us the choice.
...I don't think the iPhone is going to be big at all.
The ipod was/is huge becuase it was a relatively early entrant in a market that was just on the verge of exploding in size, and it was hugely advertised and hyped, and there wasn't any real competition for at least a couple of years. The tie-in with iTunes helped too.
The mobile phone market is completely different to this. Completely. There is an enormous existing market which has already been through most of its rapid-growth phase. There are huge, competent companies churning out amazingly sophisticated models of all types (just this quarter, the SonyEricsson W880 and the Nokia N95 are great examples), and they are refreshing those models at a furious pace.
The mobile markets differ around the world, but the Western European model essentially removes the purchase price from the end-user. I haven't paid more than $100 US for a new phone in eight years, and I'm a technophile who upgrades every year, ususally to a high-end just-released model.
Apple have no experience at making phones. They make stuff which can be good to use, but that's hard in the phone world. Above all, phones have to be good phones first, then be good ipods, then have other stuff they do well. My SonyEricsson W850 is a very good phone, a great walkman, and also lets me browse the Internet at broadband speeds in a decent way, has good Java games available, a decent-enough camera, a torch, alarm clock and so on. It's very hard to get right the phone bit, and nothign of what I've read about the iPhone tells me it'll be any good at that. It's not 3G which rules it out for many technophiles including myself, too.
Apple might talk about a low-cost verion in 2009, but the others will have cheaper phones that do far more in 2007, let alone 2008 or 2009.
They might be moderately successful in a niche in the USA, (and in the mobile pheon world, the US is a niche), but I cannot see it becoming widely successful elsewhere. I might be wrong - it might have a neat feature that'll make it a must-have - but I'll be very surprised if they do - and the second it's out, the competitors will be throwing together better competing phones.
Lord knows anyone who uses Linux or free and open source software is dedicated to spreading the gospel of St. Linus Torvalds and St. Richard Stallman.
Once again I've been goaded into responding to a lazy, trollish offhand article comment. Speaking as someone who's used Linux and a lot of GNU software for over 12 years, bullshit. There are people who use Linux who are fanatical, but most of the people who use Linux and/or FOSS I know are not. They use it, like I do, because it does the job they need doing, and the purchase cost is as good as it gets.
Richard Stallman is a man deeply committed to his principles, who has produced a large ecosystem of extremely useful software, and Linus produced a massively important component of that ecosystem. I respect them both for their technical skills, and also for their passion for their causes, but there is much that both (but especially Richard Stallman) have said which I disagree with.
I know people who are fanatically positive and negative about Linux, Microsoft, Apple, Sony, America, the EU, you name it. I have good arguments with them all. Why? The world isn't black and white (well, mine is a bit as I'm a Newcastle United fan). Deal with it.
They're not going to orbit or orbital velocity. They're doing 30-minute trips, not putting satellites in stable orbits. They just need to be near a lot of rich potential passengers, and Western Europe has quite a few.
I, for one, am getting pretty tired of people whining that Microsoft gets unfairly bashed here on Slashdot too often. I regularly read plenty of responses that defend Microsoft that get modded +5 Insightful.
It's incredible, it's almost as if some people have a different viewpoint to your own! How could that be?
What?! Microsoft's CEO basically threatens companies that use Linux, and Microsoft isn't at fault?!
And I suppose if Guido says, "Bad things might happen to your family, Mr. Anonymous Coward, unless you pay me some 'protection' money...", then it isn't Guido's fault if you pay him for protection you don't actually need???
Bravo, another way-overblown analogy. Microsoft's 'threats', as you put them. Where are they, and how seriously has anyone taken them? Me, my boss and his boss keep our eyes open for potential problems - technical, legal and practical. We have seen nothing which give us anything whatsoever to worry about on this front. At my work, we have servers running AIX, Solaris, assorted RedHats, but mainly Windows. Can you seriously point me to anything which actually points to a legal problem we may have running what we run? Something concrete I can take to my boss, not some whiny blog or impractical philosophical rant?
As to the why-still-use-Windows people, my philosophy is to use the best hardware and software tools for each job - and 'best' is a hazy function of suitability for the task, purchase cost, maintenance cost, admin training cost, user training cost, support quality, compatibility with other systems, industry reputation... the list goes on. And as long as the license for whatever it is allows us to do what we intend, that's all I care about. I have problems to solve and solutions to provide, and I need to solve them today. Some of what I need is best served by Windows. Some isn't. It would be good from some aspects to use all-OSS software, but I can't do everything I need to do with it, and neither can my users, and neither can my customers. Meanwhile, there are 'closed' or 'non-free' systems that do deliver what we need, and fit the other criteria above. I'm sure a couple of dozen talented programmers and a couple of years would be able to remedy that, but that is completely impractical from a cost and timescale point of view. Live with it. I do.
In my business, we're completely 32-bit right now, and we will stay the same for a while. We've decided to stay with 32-bit XP until there are compelling reasons to move to 64-bit, at which point we'll go 64-bit Vista.
On the server side we'll go 64-bit when the apps demand it (Exchange 2007 for instance).
The commandment is unconditional. As a matter of simple, hard logic, no killing means "no killing", period, and there is no escaping this fact. As a matter of pure logic and fact, you cannot weasel your way out of it, no matter how hard you try, and to attempt to do so is to attempt to dodge the word of God (or so Christians claim) out of lazy convenience.
Well put. It's very easy for me to 'weasel out' of that on two fronts. The first and easiest is that I'm not a christian, and that commandment is not the word of god. It's also a silly blanket-rule - not kill what? What christian has never stepped on an ant, killed a fly, eaten meat or eaten a previously-living plant? The second and more important to what I said before is that killing within a computer game IS NOT KILLING. For it to be killing, something alive has to be caused to die. Graphical depictions of a theoretical death is not the same.
Christian hypocrisy is unfortunately everywhere to see in our modern world, and it's a damn shame. Normally I let it wash over me as a minor annoyance, a confusing anomaly in otherwise apparently intelligent people. But when as now it starts to drive laws and wars, it becomes something more, something actively destructive.
When did freedom ever come from a burning of the books?
When the Iron Curtain and the Berlin Wall came down, a huge amount of books were burned - books which the Soviet secret police had put together, detailing people's thoughts, words and deeds which were deemed a threat to that twisted state. Burning those books definitely freed many innocent people from the threat of someone using those records against them.
Burning some Disney DVDs is surely within the rights of the owner of those DVDs. Their choice. And from then on their choice to not indoctrinate their children with that stuff, to not buy that stuff, and to tell others why they think they should stop buying it too. No problem there, just consumers exercising their rights of choice in the marketplace and free speech. And it would be easy to argue it's a healthy and positive step, given the kind of stuff that companies like Disney have been doing recently.
There are people who believe there is something inherenly 'evil' about burning books - not at all. As another submitter has mentioned, people using violence to *force* others to burn books is a completely different matter - but even then there are still far worse things to worry about.
Think about the alternatives... Given the 1+ million strong army north of the border, and the questionable sanity of the leader controlling it, that border must be defended.
I see what you're saying - the Mexican government is going to be *really* interested in this!
GROWN ? Boy, if we are talking about the 'web', it is on the brink of ascending into supernatural dimensions, growth and 'lore' wise.
It has become a connection that binds us who are all over the world, it has become a revealer of truth that uncovers the hiddens in the doings of wrongdoers, it has become a place that chinese and canadian and namesoever teenagers come play in, it has become a place where we can find anything in, it is reshaping politics, nations, lives, even inner thoughts of people.
'It' is actually 'us'. We are the web.
Welcome to utopia being realized
And on the flipside, we have www.brownlove.com (not linking at it's really NSFW).
Hang on, Great Britain (just the biggest island of the British Isles, the country is the United Kingdom) has the Human Rights Act, an EU-wide declaration of human rights, which explicitly includes freedom of expression, thought, conscience and religion.
Oh and please, USA, put your own house in order before spreading it around - things like industry lobby groups buying laws (Disney, RIAA, oil), unsafe elections (Diebold et al), massive religious interference in policies and laws, etc.
Hell, I never even agreed to be any citizen of any country. Show me a signature where I did. So therefore, how do any laws apply to him, or me? As far as I'm concerned, if you have no say so in the making of a law, then you have no obligation whatsoever to have to abide by it.
You'll find it on your birth cerificate, which was signed on your behalf by your parent(s) as your were incapable of holding a pen at the time.
That is odd the current projections by the UN's Population Division, based on the 2004 revision of the World Population Prospects database shows that the population of the world is decreasing and this one claims that the US population is increasing. Seems that while we have fewer people in the world, those that are born head to the US.
What? No. The source you point to has instances of text, a table and a graph all showing world population growing fast. The only time the world's population has fallen IIRC was during the Black Death, a good few hundred years ago. I'm not even sure it went down during the Spanish flu outbreak after the First World War.
Oh and as to the oil usage, So what! Look at what we give the world back for the oil we use. Agricultural products (soybeans, fruit, corn), industrial supplies (organic chemicals), capital goods (transistors, aircraft, motor vehicle parts, computers, telecommunications equipment), and consumer goods (automobiles, medicines) (In order of quantity)
You *sell* the world this stuff. Sometimes exploititively and illegally (pharmaceuticals, genetically-modified food and software being the obvious examples). Others have already mentioned the more negative exports of america - the guns, bombs, mines, Guantanamo, McDonalds... and as for american cars - please keep them to yourselves.
Is the rest of the world perfect? No, of course not. But that doesn't excuse bad behaviour (wasting energy, polluting more than neccessary, starting wars to prop it all up) in any way.
As well as the ear and most of the face of the thief? Seems a little harsh.
/insert standard Sony laptop battery joke here/
Actually it reminded me of something I was talking about just yesterday, a funny scene from the BBC series from the 1980s, 'The New Statesman'. The main star (Rik Mayall) is held up at knifepoint, and quickly hands over his wallet when it's demanded. The theif runs off, at which point the star smiles, pulls out a little remote from his breast pocket, flips a switch and presses the red button. You hear an explosion and a scream in the distance. Great stuff!
Good call, and it'll be interesting to see how it pans out. The Ultrasparc T1 did have it's weaknesses (anything single-threaded, anything involving floating point maths or anything involving multimedia/vector calculations), but is very good at other things (like the Orcale example you gave).
I think with modern Desktop OSes there's just too much FP and SSE(1,2,3) going on now and soon (OS X now, Vista soon) for lots of simple cores to be much use in PCs. Geeks running Gentoo would disagree, I'm sure. Thinking about it, I wonder if Gentoo is actually useable in a reasonable amount of time on a Ultrasparc T1?
I think the market will diverge - there'll be the few-but-complex core chips for desktops and workstations, like Core 2 Duo/Quad, Athlon 64 X2/K8L, and similar chips will be in many servers - but some like database and email servers, the many-but-simple core chips will become more useful and more widespread.
Bring it on! It's the most interesting the CPU market has been for years!
If the Intel Core 2 Duos are good (generally agreed I think) , and this chip - their first quad-core - is looking so good, at what point will the apparent advantage of the AMD platform (no FSB, just Hypertransport links) kick in? If not at four cores, at eight? 16? More to the point, before Intel gets round to releasing CSI?
I know on the face of it this chip is a kludge (two dual-cores connected to one FSB in a single-socket package, as opposed to AMD's forthcoming 'true' quad-core CPU), but if it performs well, so what?
Slashdot Mirror
There is a lot of new stuff happening, but it's in the main not specific to the kernel. New things the kernels needs to do are thin on the ground now. Not to say it'll ever be finished as such, just that there aren't any needed big new features. It'll take a major new shift in computing to do that, I suspect. Something way bigger than extensions or tweaks to x86/SPARC/PPC/ARM etc. I'm not holding my breath.
I may be stating the obvious, but the site is slashdotted, so I can't see what Linus has apparently said.
The quads from Intel provide four physical cores per socket. That is the definition of a quad in this context. The exact workings of how many bits of silicon there are, how they talk to each other and to the rest of the system is, to 99.999% of users and computer buyers, background fluff.
This was the same as when Intel put two single-core chips into a package to release a 'dual core'. Lots of people like you jumped up and down and pointed out it wan't *real* dual core, and how the FSB issue would cripple performance. Amazingly, it wasn't the case - they sold in droves, and real-world performance was good enough to carry Intel through to the 'true' dual core, the Core 2 Duo.
If the competition had anything out that was the same cost and performed significantly better than the 'fake' quad cores, you would have an argument. But they haven't and you don't. Bear in mind I'm talking about the huge x86/x64 market, not the relatively low volume non-x86 server market.
What Intel did back then and again now is perfectly sensible. They have millions of high yield, robust dual core chips being churned out, and they have built into the infrastructure the ability to put two into a package, lower the speed a bit to drop the per-core heat output, and sell reasonably priced (now) quad core chips. When the drop to 45nm happens, they will release their 'real' quad cores, and pretty quickly put two of those into a package to start selling oct-core (whatever we're going to call them). And so it goes.
What's the alternative? Not sell quads until 45nm comes out? Not working out too well for AMD is it? I've asked the question before here and on realworldtech.com - at what point will the FSB problem actually become a painful problem for the Intel chips? Well, not yet (4 core) is the answer, despite dire predictions from the AMD camp for years. My gues is that, shock of shocks, Intel have actually thought it through - and that's why CSI is coming. When the number of cores gets to the point where FSB will actually hurt performance relative to the AMD architecture, that's when CSI will kick in. Maybe at 8 cores, maybe at 16.
What, you don't need quad core yet? Fine, stop your bitching and choose what's right for you. Vive la difference, and 3 cheers for a market that gives us the choice.
...I don't think the iPhone is going to be big at all.
The ipod was/is huge becuase it was a relatively early entrant in a market that was just on the verge of exploding in size, and it was hugely advertised and hyped, and there wasn't any real competition for at least a couple of years. The tie-in with iTunes helped too.
The mobile phone market is completely different to this. Completely. There is an enormous existing market which has already been through most of its rapid-growth phase. There are huge, competent companies churning out amazingly sophisticated models of all types (just this quarter, the SonyEricsson W880 and the Nokia N95 are great examples), and they are refreshing those models at a furious pace.
The mobile markets differ around the world, but the Western European model essentially removes the purchase price from the end-user. I haven't paid more than $100 US for a new phone in eight years, and I'm a technophile who upgrades every year, ususally to a high-end just-released model.
Apple have no experience at making phones. They make stuff which can be good to use, but that's hard in the phone world. Above all, phones have to be good phones first, then be good ipods, then have other stuff they do well. My SonyEricsson W850 is a very good phone, a great walkman, and also lets me browse the Internet at broadband speeds in a decent way, has good Java games available, a decent-enough camera, a torch, alarm clock and so on. It's very hard to get right the phone bit, and nothign of what I've read about the iPhone tells me it'll be any good at that. It's not 3G which rules it out for many technophiles including myself, too.
Apple might talk about a low-cost verion in 2009, but the others will have cheaper phones that do far more in 2007, let alone 2008 or 2009.
They might be moderately successful in a niche in the USA, (and in the mobile pheon world, the US is a niche), but I cannot see it becoming widely successful elsewhere. I might be wrong - it might have a neat feature that'll make it a must-have - but I'll be very surprised if they do - and the second it's out, the competitors will be throwing together better competing phones.
The warmest spot is 927 C, on the equivalent of Jupiter's Great Red Spot, and the coolest region is 'only' 649 C.
Richard Stallman is a man deeply committed to his principles, who has produced a large ecosystem of extremely useful software, and Linus produced a massively important component of that ecosystem. I respect them both for their technical skills, and also for their passion for their causes, but there is much that both (but especially Richard Stallman) have said which I disagree with.
I know people who are fanatically positive and negative about Linux, Microsoft, Apple, Sony, America, the EU, you name it. I have good arguments with them all. Why? The world isn't black and white (well, mine is a bit as I'm a Newcastle United fan). Deal with it.
That's what I get for hitting Slashdot before the first morning coffee. Once I have that buzz I might be able to think of a punchline.
They're not going to orbit or orbital velocity. They're doing 30-minute trips, not putting satellites in stable orbits. They just need to be near a lot of rich potential passengers, and Western Europe has quite a few.
As to the why-still-use-Windows people, my philosophy is to use the best hardware and software tools for each job - and 'best' is a hazy function of suitability for the task, purchase cost, maintenance cost, admin training cost, user training cost, support quality, compatibility with other systems, industry reputation... the list goes on. And as long as the license for whatever it is allows us to do what we intend, that's all I care about. I have problems to solve and solutions to provide, and I need to solve them today. Some of what I need is best served by Windows. Some isn't. It would be good from some aspects to use all-OSS software, but I can't do everything I need to do with it, and neither can my users, and neither can my customers. Meanwhile, there are 'closed' or 'non-free' systems that do deliver what we need, and fit the other criteria above. I'm sure a couple of dozen talented programmers and a couple of years would be able to remedy that, but that is completely impractical from a cost and timescale point of view. Live with it. I do.
On the server side we'll go 64-bit when the apps demand it (Exchange 2007 for instance).
Christian hypocrisy is unfortunately everywhere to see in our modern world, and it's a damn shame. Normally I let it wash over me as a minor annoyance, a confusing anomaly in otherwise apparently intelligent people. But when as now it starts to drive laws and wars, it becomes something more, something actively destructive.
Burning some Disney DVDs is surely within the rights of the owner of those DVDs. Their choice. And from then on their choice to not indoctrinate their children with that stuff, to not buy that stuff, and to tell others why they think they should stop buying it too. No problem there, just consumers exercising their rights of choice in the marketplace and free speech. And it would be easy to argue it's a healthy and positive step, given the kind of stuff that companies like Disney have been doing recently.
There are people who believe there is something inherenly 'evil' about burning books - not at all. As another submitter has mentioned, people using violence to *force* others to burn books is a completely different matter - but even then there are still far worse things to worry about.
It's even better than that... Exchange 2007 is also being released, possibly that same day!
Oh and please, USA, put your own house in order before spreading it around - things like industry lobby groups buying laws (Disney, RIAA, oil), unsafe elections (Diebold et al), massive religious interference in policies and laws, etc.
Is the rest of the world perfect? No, of course not. But that doesn't excuse bad behaviour (wasting energy, polluting more than neccessary, starting wars to prop it all up) in any way.
Actually it reminded me of something I was talking about just yesterday, a funny scene from the BBC series from the 1980s, 'The New Statesman'. The main star (Rik Mayall) is held up at knifepoint, and quickly hands over his wallet when it's demanded. The theif runs off, at which point the star smiles, pulls out a little remote from his breast pocket, flips a switch and presses the red button. You hear an explosion and a scream in the distance. Great stuff!
I think with modern Desktop OSes there's just too much FP and SSE(1,2,3) going on now and soon (OS X now, Vista soon) for lots of simple cores to be much use in PCs. Geeks running Gentoo would disagree, I'm sure. Thinking about it, I wonder if Gentoo is actually useable in a reasonable amount of time on a Ultrasparc T1?
I think the market will diverge - there'll be the few-but-complex core chips for desktops and workstations, like Core 2 Duo/Quad, Athlon 64 X2/K8L, and similar chips will be in many servers - but some like database and email servers, the many-but-simple core chips will become more useful and more widespread.
Bring it on! It's the most interesting the CPU market has been for years!
I know on the face of it this chip is a kludge (two dual-cores connected to one FSB in a single-socket package, as opposed to AMD's forthcoming 'true' quad-core CPU), but if it performs well, so what?
See the BT homepage for more.