I've seen kernel.org fill up. I think it did sometime late last week, in fact. But they do have a 100Mbit/sec connection, which is pretty darn fast. 27kb/sec is kind of slow for them; they usually max out my DSL link at around 650kbit/s or 700kbit/s (== about 84kbyte/sec).
It is worth knowing that Microway will continue producing the 264DP motherboard that API dropped a while back. Thus Samsung isn't the only source for Alpha motherboards. And the 264DP rocks:
*) Dual capable
*) Dual memory busses, *each* with 2.6 GB/sec
*) 4GB memory max (I wish this were higher)
*) Dual 64bit PCI busses, don't know the speed
*) Built-in Adaptec SCSI, usb, etc. FWIW, Microway seems to prefer adding an Intraserver PCI SCSI controller (Symbios based) and avoiding the Adaptec controller.
These motherboards can really push data. Systems at 500MHz and 667MHz built around these boards crush x86 cpus at twice or thrice their clock speed. These systems are somewhat expensive, but they're worth every penny. You just can't get similar floating point performance or memory bandwidth from x86 machines, even with the new ServerWorks chipsets.
Because the Alphas are a 64 bit architecture, your per-process memory space is huge. You won't get above 3GB virtual memory per process on x86 under linux, I believe NT has a similar or lower limit and SCO has (had?;-) an 8GB per process vm limit. If you want more virtual memory (don't think swap, just virtual memory), you need to fiddle with your own segment/offset layer or similar.
For what it is worth, we do in-memory data mining and number crunching in our lab. We regularly have processes with 15GB of virtual memory allocated (of course we're not swapping that much; we may be crazy but we're not stupid =-). For these purposes I love the Alphas. I have no knowledge about web serving, database serving, etc, from Alphas.
Well, with 9 virtual desktops I usually have at least a little room between windows.;-) Also, the "click-to-focus" modes I've seen usually focus for a click anywhere in the window. For X copy-n-paste, this gives focus to the window you're copying from.
In the end, of course, it's a personal thing. I started with click-to-focus in Windows 3.0, but once I found focus-follows-mouse I never went back.
In case you aren't aware of it, window managers supporting focus-follows-mouse typically support "sloppy-focus", a.k.a. "enter-only". This is like focus-follows-mouse, but allows you to move the mouse cursor out of the focused window without the window losing focus -- as long as you don't move the mouse to a new window!
As a mathematician and computer scientist (interdisciplinary doctoral program), I would prefer that mathematical algorithms were *not* patentable. As a rule, mathematicians seem to feel that they are *discovering* truth, not *creating* something (besides publications;-). The algorithms, which are simply the answers to certain questions, already exist; we're just trying to *find* them.
So many answers in this thread talk about wanting overlapping windows. I'd like to point out that the utility of overlapping windows comes partially from "focus-follows-mouse" behavior (without "autoraise"). You can look at both logs at once, while scrolling through both without changing which is in front.
If you don't have focus-follows-mouse, the bottom window is less useful because it is static.
Incidently, I don't think it was Thompson or Ritchie who came up with the modern pipe. But I may be confused. At the very least, someone besides these two suggested infix notation -- for pipes or for command args, I'm not sure -- and Ritchie claims that niether he nor Thompson saw the light until much later.
As far as WIMP interfaces versus command lines, I think there is an easy explanation for why power users prefer command lines. Think of WIMP interfaces as akin to heiroglyphics or other picture-writing, and command lines as an approximation to natural language.
There's a reason nobody uses picture-writing today, including lack of flexibility and power and inefficiency. I'm not sure that we'll ever want a real "natural language interface", because I don't think the natural language facilities in humans are really up to casually conversing precise ideas. In the end, you might as well have a specialized command language. Of course, "smart" computers could make assumptions about what we mean to say, but we hate it when humans do that.
"Heck including the browser with the OS was such an incredible leap in usefulness of the OS that it threatened to shake the very foundations of the computer software world."
That's one of the funniest things I've read on slashdot. How is including the browser with the OS an incredible leap in usefulness? Even MS execs testified under oath that this gained nothing for the users. Why is an OS with a "built-in" browser more useful than an OS on which you can install a browser with the same features?
I can only think of one way in which this bundling might "shake the very foundations of the computer software world": everyone laughing so hard when MS tried to keep a straight face about how this benefited their customers.
To shake the foundations of the computer software world, you make something like Emacs before there are graphical windowing systems; you develop fast polynomial linear program solvers; you try a new approach at OS design like UNIX or microkernels.
Unnecessarily selling the browser with the OS doesn't make anything shake except heads.
Dang, I was really hoping someone would reply to you with instructions on preventing those damn drive icons from appearing. Other than that, Gnome does stay out of the way for me.
I don't watch sitcoms. I have no idea what "The West Wing" is. I hate turtlenecks and tweed, and am lousy at chess. I prefer t-shirts, jeans, and sweatshirts, and I play Quake3, Alpha Centauri, Kohan, and Tribes 2 (among others). In my spare time, I'm a graduate student.;-)
I don't wait for the evening news when something breaks. I get the info on the 'net, or from public radio stations. On Sept. 11th, PBS did as good of job as anyone else. What I really don't need is more "talking heads" news shows and their "Attack on America" logos. I prefer intelligent and informed discourse, both of which are usually missing on commercial television. The old McNeil-Leherer news hour, and whatever they call the current version without McNeil, are the best news shows I've seen on television. Still, I prefer BBC news for worldwide events -- as with CNN, they've got their biases; but there are no banner ads, and they do a better job of covering international events.
I forgot about Animal Planet, though. It is a decent show, and that reptile-guy rocks. I like to watch it at Christmas time when at the in-laws. They have cable. They also get Fox Sports, and I can watch some soccer that way. But Animal Planet isn't enough to make me buy cable.
Heck, there isn't a TV show out there that would make me buy a new TV if our current TV broke. However, our N64 is a good enough reason to buy a new TV (or frame grabber).
*My* PBS only argument isn't bull. I only watch PBS (except for Animal Planet and some soccer at Christmas). Believe it or not, one doesn't even need to watch TV! And I still call myself an American *gasp*. At any rate, my argument was that the previous posts suggested only PBS had a business model that wasn't affected by the "commercial skip" button on the ReplayTV.
Since I pay for the one TV station I watch, this would amount to roughly the same thing for me. More to the point, however, the BBC isn't a subscription service. It's a social service provided by the government. The complication is that they only levy the "BBC tax" on people who use televisions, and hence they've got a complicated monitoring scheme. In the US, I think it would be pretty safe to tax everyone above a certain income level, and avoid having unmarked vans roming the neighborhoods, noting who is watching television.
I could be completely wrong about all the BBC stuff, though.
On the other hand, you might argue that we have more time than money, and that's why open source software has so many contributors.;-) At least among graduate students, that is...
Better instructions, for what I think the parent post intended.
1) Below the chart, put SUNW,MSFT in the leftmost entry widget.
2) Select 2-years from the select-widget-thingy labeled "Duration".
3) Hit "draw chart".
You can also do SUN,MSFT in the entry widget, but comparing Sunoco to Microsoft on this particular chart doesn't make much sense (unless you're just looking for trends).
-Paul Komarek
I don't trust Jobs, and really wouldn't want Larry Ellison on this panel (or Michael Dell, or Mike Cappelas, or...). However, I have an idea of my own for one member of the panel: Monte Davidoff.
Monte was one of the three authors of the famous Altair Basic that Gates and Allen get credit for. Monte evidently wrote the math routines. He's now a software and systems consultant (Alluvial Software). It appears he does works on several platforms, including Multics.;-) Furthermore, Monte actually finished his mathematics degree at Harvard, unlike Bill Gates.
He knows the business, and more importantly, he knows Bill.
Heh, looks like the public networks are the only ones with the "right" business model. Since they're also the only stations I bother to watch, and especially since I am already donating to my public radio and TV stations, I'm plenty happy to watch the commercial networks go down the tubes.
-Paul Komarek
Re:The original Article mentioned this.
on
AMD And THG update
·
· Score: 2
Thankfully, many motherboards for AMD cpus have the alternative heat sink mounting holes. More and more commodity heatsinks are enlarging their base to take advantage of these holes. It appears you need an 80mm square base in order to use the holes.
-Paul Komarek
Re:and in the end it doesn't really matter
on
AMD And THG update
·
· Score: 2
"This, as far as I can see, is one of the main things keeping AMD processors out of higher end systems."
I don't believe this. When I've heard the purchasing complain about buying AMD-based machines, it was because they were scared of breaking with history.
*) "We've always ordered from Dell"
*) "How do you know it doesn't have incompatibilities with Intel's chips?"
*) "Aren't AMD's chips slow?"
That's the kind of stuff I've heard. I've never heard "well, we have to plan for the case that the heat sink spontaneously falls off". It seems to me that if it's in you're economic interest to plan for that, you probably shouldn't be using comodity equipment anyway. These people should buy a big Tangent, SGI, Sun, or IBM box with good failover and hot-swap (at the cpu or node level) features.
"Thats probably one of the reasons why Dell doesn't do AMD"
I don't believe this at all. Lots of manufacturers ship AMD, and there's never been a big noise about heat sinks falling off. There's been lots of noise about an article that discusses what happens when a heat sink falls off, but that's it.
Dell doesn't ship AMD cpus because they've got a cushy deal with Intel on pricing, and a long-standing relationship with Intel that makes them comfortable single-sourcing cpus. They might also like it that Intel makes motherboards, and can tests their cpus against their chipsets. Of course, Intel proved over the last year that this isn't really an advantage, because their chipset divinsion seems to have taken their eye off the ball.
There was a Star Trek (original) episode about this. Strangely, the societies voluntarily killed their own citizens in accordance with the simulation. But at least there was no property destruction! This didn't make any sense. Thank goodness Captain Kirk was there to point that out!
I believe that later studies showed no useful increase in eye-hand coordination. So you were right to laugh at that!
What I think is interesting are ways in which video games are being used socially and professionally. This is just the opposite of predictions that video games would isolate and marginalize players.
One thing the games miss, though, is cardiovascular conditioning, risk of hypothermia, etc. Maybe that's why we're pusing robotic technology so hard.
You got hardware from Microsoft? Lucky. We just got "licenses" at Western Washington University (about 90 miles north of Redmond). Considering that at David "It aint done 'till DRDOS won't run" Cole comes from Western, you'd think Western get better treatment. Maybe they have by now. Or maybe Microsoft targets influential schools instead of needy schools?
Slashdot Mirror
I've seen kernel.org fill up. I think it did sometime late last week, in fact. But they do have a 100Mbit/sec connection, which is pretty darn fast. 27kb/sec is kind of slow for them; they usually max out my DSL link at around 650kbit/s or 700kbit/s (== about 84kbyte/sec).
-Paul Komarek
It is worth knowing that Microway will continue producing the 264DP motherboard that API dropped a while back. Thus Samsung isn't the only source for Alpha motherboards. And the 264DP rocks:
;-) an 8GB per process vm limit. If you want more virtual memory (don't think swap, just virtual memory), you need to fiddle with your own segment/offset layer or similar.
*) Dual capable
*) Dual memory busses, *each* with 2.6 GB/sec
*) 4GB memory max (I wish this were higher)
*) Dual 64bit PCI busses, don't know the speed
*) Built-in Adaptec SCSI, usb, etc. FWIW, Microway seems to prefer adding an Intraserver PCI SCSI controller (Symbios based) and avoiding the Adaptec controller.
These motherboards can really push data. Systems at 500MHz and 667MHz built around these boards crush x86 cpus at twice or thrice their clock speed. These systems are somewhat expensive, but they're worth every penny. You just can't get similar floating point performance or memory bandwidth from x86 machines, even with the new ServerWorks chipsets.
Because the Alphas are a 64 bit architecture, your per-process memory space is huge. You won't get above 3GB virtual memory per process on x86 under linux, I believe NT has a similar or lower limit and SCO has (had?
For what it is worth, we do in-memory data mining and number crunching in our lab. We regularly have processes with 15GB of virtual memory allocated (of course we're not swapping that much; we may be crazy but we're not stupid =-). For these purposes I love the Alphas. I have no knowledge about web serving, database serving, etc, from Alphas.
-Paul Komarek
Thanks! That is the best article on the proposed settlement!
-Paul Komarek
Well, with 9 virtual desktops I usually have at least a little room between windows. ;-) Also, the "click-to-focus" modes I've seen usually focus for a click anywhere in the window. For X copy-n-paste, this gives focus to the window you're copying from.
In the end, of course, it's a personal thing. I started with click-to-focus in Windows 3.0, but once I found focus-follows-mouse I never went back.
-Paul Komarek
In case you aren't aware of it, window managers supporting focus-follows-mouse typically support "sloppy-focus", a.k.a. "enter-only". This is like focus-follows-mouse, but allows you to move the mouse cursor out of the focused window without the window losing focus -- as long as you don't move the mouse to a new window!
-Paul Komarek
As a mathematician and computer scientist (interdisciplinary doctoral program), I would prefer that mathematical algorithms were *not* patentable. As a rule, mathematicians seem to feel that they are *discovering* truth, not *creating* something (besides publications ;-). The algorithms, which are simply the answers to certain questions, already exist; we're just trying to *find* them.
-Paul Komarek
I'd be tempted to agree if "technical age" was changed to "industrial age".
-Paul Komarek
So many answers in this thread talk about wanting overlapping windows. I'd like to point out that the utility of overlapping windows comes partially from "focus-follows-mouse" behavior (without "autoraise"). You can look at both logs at once, while scrolling through both without changing which is in front.
If you don't have focus-follows-mouse, the bottom window is less useful because it is static.
-Paul Komarek
Incidently, I don't think it was Thompson or Ritchie who came up with the modern pipe. But I may be confused. At the very least, someone besides these two suggested infix notation -- for pipes or for command args, I'm not sure -- and Ritchie claims that niether he nor Thompson saw the light until much later.
As far as WIMP interfaces versus command lines, I think there is an easy explanation for why power users prefer command lines. Think of WIMP interfaces as akin to heiroglyphics or other picture-writing, and command lines as an approximation to natural language.
There's a reason nobody uses picture-writing today, including lack of flexibility and power and inefficiency. I'm not sure that we'll ever want a real "natural language interface", because I don't think the natural language facilities in humans are really up to casually conversing precise ideas. In the end, you might as well have a specialized command language. Of course, "smart" computers could make assumptions about what we mean to say, but we hate it when humans do that.
-Paul Komarek
Happy Birthday! =-)
-Paul Komarek
"Heck including the browser with the OS was such an incredible leap in usefulness of the OS that it threatened to shake the very foundations of the computer software world."
That's one of the funniest things I've read on slashdot. How is including the browser with the OS an incredible leap in usefulness? Even MS execs testified under oath that this gained nothing for the users. Why is an OS with a "built-in" browser more useful than an OS on which you can install a browser with the same features?
I can only think of one way in which this bundling might "shake the very foundations of the computer software world": everyone laughing so hard when MS tried to keep a straight face about how this benefited their customers.
To shake the foundations of the computer software world, you make something like Emacs before there are graphical windowing systems; you develop fast polynomial linear program solvers; you try a new approach at OS design like UNIX or microkernels.
Unnecessarily selling the browser with the OS doesn't make anything shake except heads.
-Paul Komarek
"But I think it's a fair guess that NT and 9x had completely different VM subsystems..."
I believe these operating systems have completely different *kernels*. The chance of them having the same VM subsystems seems slim.
-Paul Komarek
Dang, I was really hoping someone would reply to you with instructions on preventing those damn drive icons from appearing. Other than that, Gnome does stay out of the way for me.
-Paul Komarek
I don't watch sitcoms. I have no idea what "The West Wing" is. I hate turtlenecks and tweed, and am lousy at chess. I prefer t-shirts, jeans, and sweatshirts, and I play Quake3, Alpha Centauri, Kohan, and Tribes 2 (among others). In my spare time, I'm a graduate student. ;-)
I don't wait for the evening news when something breaks. I get the info on the 'net, or from public radio stations. On Sept. 11th, PBS did as good of job as anyone else. What I really don't need is more "talking heads" news shows and their "Attack on America" logos. I prefer intelligent and informed discourse, both of which are usually missing on commercial television. The old McNeil-Leherer news hour, and whatever they call the current version without McNeil, are the best news shows I've seen on television. Still, I prefer BBC news for worldwide events -- as with CNN, they've got their biases; but there are no banner ads, and they do a better job of covering international events.
I forgot about Animal Planet, though. It is a decent show, and that reptile-guy rocks. I like to watch it at Christmas time when at the in-laws. They have cable. They also get Fox Sports, and I can watch some soccer that way. But Animal Planet isn't enough to make me buy cable.
Heck, there isn't a TV show out there that would make me buy a new TV if our current TV broke. However, our N64 is a good enough reason to buy a new TV (or frame grabber).
*My* PBS only argument isn't bull. I only watch PBS (except for Animal Planet and some soccer at Christmas). Believe it or not, one doesn't even need to watch TV! And I still call myself an American *gasp*. At any rate, my argument was that the previous posts suggested only PBS had a business model that wasn't affected by the "commercial skip" button on the ReplayTV.
-Paul Komarek
Since I pay for the one TV station I watch, this would amount to roughly the same thing for me. More to the point, however, the BBC isn't a subscription service. It's a social service provided by the government. The complication is that they only levy the "BBC tax" on people who use televisions, and hence they've got a complicated monitoring scheme. In the US, I think it would be pretty safe to tax everyone above a certain income level, and avoid having unmarked vans roming the neighborhoods, noting who is watching television.
I could be completely wrong about all the BBC stuff, though.
-Paul
On the other hand, you might argue that we have more time than money, and that's why open source software has so many contributors. ;-) At least among graduate students, that is...
-Paul Komarek
Better instructions, for what I think the parent post intended.
1) Below the chart, put SUNW,MSFT in the leftmost entry widget.
2) Select 2-years from the select-widget-thingy labeled "Duration".
3) Hit "draw chart".
You can also do SUN,MSFT in the entry widget, but comparing Sunoco to Microsoft on this particular chart doesn't make much sense (unless you're just looking for trends).
-Paul Komarek
I don't trust Jobs, and really wouldn't want Larry Ellison on this panel (or Michael Dell, or Mike Cappelas, or ...). However, I have an idea of my own for one member of the panel: Monte Davidoff.
;-) Furthermore, Monte actually finished his mathematics degree at Harvard, unlike Bill Gates.
Monte was one of the three authors of the famous Altair Basic that Gates and Allen get credit for. Monte evidently wrote the math routines. He's now a software and systems consultant (Alluvial Software). It appears he does works on several platforms, including Multics.
He knows the business, and more importantly, he knows Bill.
-Paul Komarek
Heh, looks like the public networks are the only ones with the "right" business model. Since they're also the only stations I bother to watch, and especially since I am already donating to my public radio and TV stations, I'm plenty happy to watch the commercial networks go down the tubes.
-Paul Komarek
Thankfully, many motherboards for AMD cpus have the alternative heat sink mounting holes. More and more commodity heatsinks are enlarging their base to take advantage of these holes. It appears you need an 80mm square base in order to use the holes.
-Paul Komarek
"This, as far as I can see, is one of the main things keeping AMD processors out of higher end systems."
I don't believe this. When I've heard the purchasing complain about buying AMD-based machines, it was because they were scared of breaking with history.
*) "We've always ordered from Dell"
*) "How do you know it doesn't have incompatibilities with Intel's chips?"
*) "Aren't AMD's chips slow?"
That's the kind of stuff I've heard. I've never heard "well, we have to plan for the case that the heat sink spontaneously falls off". It seems to me that if it's in you're economic interest to plan for that, you probably shouldn't be using comodity equipment anyway. These people should buy a big Tangent, SGI, Sun, or IBM box with good failover and hot-swap (at the cpu or node level) features.
-Paul Komarek
"Thats probably one of the reasons why Dell doesn't do AMD"
I don't believe this at all. Lots of manufacturers ship AMD, and there's never been a big noise about heat sinks falling off. There's been lots of noise about an article that discusses what happens when a heat sink falls off, but that's it.
Dell doesn't ship AMD cpus because they've got a cushy deal with Intel on pricing, and a long-standing relationship with Intel that makes them comfortable single-sourcing cpus. They might also like it that Intel makes motherboards, and can tests their cpus against their chipsets. Of course, Intel proved over the last year that this isn't really an advantage, because their chipset divinsion seems to have taken their eye off the ball.
-Paul Komarek
There was a Star Trek (original) episode about this. Strangely, the societies voluntarily killed their own citizens in accordance with the simulation. But at least there was no property destruction! This didn't make any sense. Thank goodness Captain Kirk was there to point that out!
-Paul Komarek
I believe that later studies showed no useful increase in eye-hand coordination. So you were right to laugh at that!
What I think is interesting are ways in which video games are being used socially and professionally. This is just the opposite of predictions that video games would isolate and marginalize players.
One thing the games miss, though, is cardiovascular conditioning, risk of hypothermia, etc. Maybe that's why we're pusing robotic technology so hard.
-Paul Komarek
You got hardware from Microsoft? Lucky. We just got "licenses" at Western Washington University (about 90 miles north of Redmond). Considering that at David "It aint done 'till DRDOS won't run" Cole comes from Western, you'd think Western get better treatment. Maybe they have by now. Or maybe Microsoft targets influential schools instead of needy schools?
-Paul Komarek