I have been doing an informal count of the number of times "Bush" appears (from a level of 1 or above). Bush appears 12 times. 10 of those times are in posts lamenting the fact that everyone is anti-Bush. Could it be that the anti-Bush-haters have overtaken the Bush-haters? Does that leave anyone who actually like Bush?
Or maybe you're just too sensitive. Different communities have different biases. If you want to participate on slashdot, live wth its biases. The fact that more people are complaining about biases than conforming to said biases is telling. Give it a rest.
It was brilliant how? Because AC-GP supports FBI raids to bring down people with opposing views? Bear in mind that we still don't know why Indymedia was taken down. GP is just ranting because he is a hate-filled idiot who can't stand free speech.
I don't claim to support what Indymedia says but they should be allowed to say it. Anything less would be a police state. GP seems to think police states are fine as long as they police things he doesn't like. He would make a great dictator.
Although I haven't been following the case closely, I did RTFA and it made no mention of point (3). My impression was that Connolly kept his derivative secret, which is perfectly valid under the GPL.
The FA did say that "the code was a derivative of GPL-licensed code, thereby making it a derivative work of the parent code and automatically licensing it under the GNU General Public License." However, this is not correct unless Connolly distributed his code
I agree with the rest of the points, though, and I think the main thrust of the article stands. Is there anyone with evidence that Connolly distributed his modified version?
The real question here is whether "media players" and "web browsers" are significant enough applications in the modern world to justify their own "market"
The battle here isn't about selling media players or web browsers. It's about controlling the content available on these applications. If Microsoft controls all the media players, it can control the media formats too. If it controls the media formats, it can control the streaming of said formats. And people/companies are willing to pay for the ability to stream media that millions of consumers will be able to watch.
As far as web browsers go, every time someone uses the IE search bar, it does a Microsoft-controlled search of sites that Microsoft wants people to read. If people are too (stupid|lazy) to change their home page settings, IE will go to the MSN page every time it is opened. This means more advertising revenue for MSN.
The consumer programs are only the tip of the iceberg here. The web browser/media player market is still very significant.
Although that might be true from a "making sense" perspective, it isn't any legal reason for the EU to require the separation of WXP and WMP. You'd hope that companies (and individuals) would realise that they are paying extra for useless features and refuse to buy it. Unfortunately, that doesn't seem to happen.
However valid your point may be, it isn't the reason that Microsoft may be required to offer a WMP-free version of Windows in Europe.
I've never understood what's wrong with Microsoft having WMP in Windows
Every reply so far has missed the point somewhat, so I'll give it a go. Microsoft has a monopoly on desktop operationg systems (or close enough to one that it makes no difference). There is a body of law that applies only to monopolies in order to prevent them from abusing the power that comes from having a monopoly. One of the things they are not allowed to do is to use their monopoly status to create dominance in a different market.
By bundling WMP with windows, Microsoft is using their monopoly on OSes to dominate the media player market. They have already done this in the web browser market. The relative merits of the players are irrelevant, only that Microsoft is abusing its monopoly powers.
If you RTFA, you'll notice that despite the article's name ("Linux Desktop CPU Roundup"), the article is clearly about workstations, not desktops.
Sorry, I should have explained myself better. By "cheap desktop Athlon64s" I was referring to the distinction between the Athlon64 as a desktop-oriented chip as opposed to the server-oriented Opteron.
Noconas should be compared to Opterons, Athlon64s should be compared to Pentium 4s. It would make perfect sense to compare an EM64T P4 to an Athlon64, but I wasn't aware of the existence of 64-bit P4s. I am sure anandtech will benchmark the 64-bit p4 as soon as they can get one. They've already done the Nocona/Opteron matchup
It is my understanding that EM64T is just an increase in addressable memory; that they don't actaully have the extra registers that AMD64 has. Is this true, or am I talking out of my ass here?
First of all, Anandtech has compared 64-bit Xeons with 64-bit Opterons and Desktop AMD64s. Go to their site and click on the CPU/Chipset thing.
Secondly, EM64T processors are expensive, server-oriented Xeons. It wouldn't make much sense to compared them with cheap desktop Athlon64s. Nocona vs. Opteron is the sensible comparison here and Anandtech has already done it.
Red Hat seems to do ok selling FOSS software. They get their money by selling the support and they invest some of that money back into improving their software.
Alpha also was a clean design, not a 20-year accumulation of legacy crap.
Perhaps I should have explained myself better. I meant that Alpha was a good design that never got the market share it deserved. Similarly, I believe that Itanium has a good design. I feel it is a shame that the high price has kept Itanium from being widespread. I agree that Intel has no reason to keep the price so high.
All the benchmarks I have seen test the Itanium on workstation-style or single-task-sever jobs. The (theoretical) strength of the Itanium is in its multitasking. Its simpler design should reduce the overhead of switching tasks significantly. This makes benchmarking it kind of hard, since benchmarks generally only test one thing at a time.
The purpose of HT is to make up for Intel's crappy super-long pipeline (something like 32 stages!? Someone correct me if I'm wrong). Whenever it does a jump, many instructions are wasted. AMD's pipeline on Barton was something like 12 stages, so there's much less wastage going on. All HT does is allow the wasted cycles to be used for another thread. Since AMD's processors don't waste so many instructions, HT wouldn't really help that much.
and with the new 6600 cards coming out, this is going to be a firm kick to the nether regions of ATI. There just isn't a card on the market that can hold a candle to it
I'm not so sure about that. In DooM3, yes, nvidia kicks ass. And it will be my only choice until ATI comes out with some halfway decent linux drivers. However, the x800 and x600 series don't look half bad. When Half-Life 2 comes out, I think ATI's offerings will start to look more attractive.
I am of the impression that macs only use ATI and that the xbox2 will also use a graphics processor from ATI. So don't be so quick to dismiss them.
I'm actually amazed that quality can win over brand. Maybe there's hope, after all.
While AMD's x86 stuff is better than Intel's x86, its a bit sad that Itanium has lagged so far behind Opteron. Itanium's architecture is vastly superior to Opteron's, as it marks a break from the 20-year accumulation of old designs and legacy crap. It would be nice to see people embracing a new architecture for once.
Or course I can't claim superiority, having purchased Opterons myself. I guess software availability will always win out over good chip designs. Just ask those poor Alpha designers over at Compaq/HP.
We don't get nova in canberra, but I've always been pretty impressed with triplej (http://abc.net.au/triplej/). It's public, so there aren't any ads and they play a pretty diverse selection of music. Which means they play some crap stuff too, but there's probably lees time spent playing crap than most stations spend on ads.
Mac users got used to waiting months or years for native ports to be released. They don't complain paying premium prices for games whose Windows ports are already in bargain bins.
Fortunately, id software has a better solution. By releasing Linux binaries of their engines on the web, linux gamers can just buy the windows games and copy tha data files over from the CD. This makes much more sense than releasing a different boxed game for every port and it is probably easier on the developers too.
Does anyone else think WinFS is a Bad Thing? A filesystem is a low-level, simple, reliable method of storing files on a disk and a database is a method of catologuing and searching through files. If you combine them, it will get hideously complicated. Which means it will probably be buggy and slow. It's almost as bad as putting windowing in a kernel...
There's plenty of research and progress in this direction: flash drives. They're still ridiculously small and expensive compared to normal hard drives but give them some more years. After all, flash, unlike hard drives, is affected by Moore's law.
Re:We need balance back in the system
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And what are the chances of that ever happening? In order to change laws, you need money for big campaign contributions. Who's going to donate to reduce IP rights? Certainly not any big corporations.
Now if there is a single cache, one would be able to get into a cache war for a given line.
How? If the cache has decent bandwidth, it is easy for two cores to read the same line. On the other hand, if one or both of the cores wants to write to the line then the situation for single-cache is much simpler than the double-cache case.
Unless you mean that the cores could keep overwriting each other's line with data read from memory. This is a possibility, but it is offset by the fact that the unified cache could be twice the size of each private cache. And it corresponds to the case where the working set is larger than the cache size, which is an issue even for single processor configurations.
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What with all the wild rants on /. it can be a bit hard to tell what is sarcastic, especially on these politics-related subjects.
please don't take my pr0n...
I have been doing an informal count of the number of times "Bush" appears (from a level of 1 or above). Bush appears 12 times. 10 of those times are in posts lamenting the fact that everyone is anti-Bush. Could it be that the anti-Bush-haters have overtaken the Bush-haters? Does that leave anyone who actually like Bush?
Or maybe you're just too sensitive. Different communities have different biases. If you want to participate on slashdot, live wth its biases. The fact that more people are complaining about biases than conforming to said biases is telling. Give it a rest.
It was brilliant how? Because AC-GP supports FBI raids to bring down people with opposing views? Bear in mind that we still don't know why Indymedia was taken down. GP is just ranting because he is a hate-filled idiot who can't stand free speech.
I don't claim to support what Indymedia says but they should be allowed to say it. Anything less would be a police state. GP seems to think police states are fine as long as they police things he doesn't like. He would make a great dictator.
Newer kernels give you the option of switching to 4k stacks. You can still use 8k stacks, however (I'm still using them).
Although I haven't been following the case closely, I did RTFA and it made no mention of point (3). My impression was that Connolly kept his derivative secret, which is perfectly valid under the GPL.
The FA did say that "the code was a derivative of GPL-licensed code, thereby making it a derivative work of the parent code and automatically licensing it under the GNU General Public License." However, this is not correct unless Connolly distributed his code
I agree with the rest of the points, though, and I think the main thrust of the article stands. Is there anyone with evidence that Connolly distributed his modified version?
The battle here isn't about selling media players or web browsers. It's about controlling the content available on these applications. If Microsoft controls all the media players, it can control the media formats too. If it controls the media formats, it can control the streaming of said formats. And people/companies are willing to pay for the ability to stream media that millions of consumers will be able to watch.
As far as web browsers go, every time someone uses the IE search bar, it does a Microsoft-controlled search of sites that Microsoft wants people to read. If people are too (stupid|lazy) to change their home page settings, IE will go to the MSN page every time it is opened. This means more advertising revenue for MSN.
The consumer programs are only the tip of the iceberg here. The web browser/media player market is still very significant.
Although that might be true from a "making sense" perspective, it isn't any legal reason for the EU to require the separation of WXP and WMP. You'd hope that companies (and individuals) would realise that they are paying extra for useless features and refuse to buy it. Unfortunately, that doesn't seem to happen.
However valid your point may be, it isn't the reason that Microsoft may be required to offer a WMP-free version of Windows in Europe.
Every reply so far has missed the point somewhat, so I'll give it a go. Microsoft has a monopoly on desktop operationg systems (or close enough to one that it makes no difference). There is a body of law that applies only to monopolies in order to prevent them from abusing the power that comes from having a monopoly. One of the things they are not allowed to do is to use their monopoly status to create dominance in a different market.
By bundling WMP with windows, Microsoft is using their monopoly on OSes to dominate the media player market. They have already done this in the web browser market. The relative merits of the players are irrelevant, only that Microsoft is abusing its monopoly powers.
You don't seem to know what "security by obscurity" actually means. This page would be a useful read: http://omniknow.com/scripts/wiki.php?term=Security _by_obscurity
Security by obscurity relates a lot more closely to closed source software like windows than it does to Mandrake.
Sorry, I should have explained myself better. By "cheap desktop Athlon64s" I was referring to the distinction between the Athlon64 as a desktop-oriented chip as opposed to the server-oriented Opteron.
Noconas should be compared to Opterons, Athlon64s should be compared to Pentium 4s. It would make perfect sense to compare an EM64T P4 to an Athlon64, but I wasn't aware of the existence of 64-bit P4s. I am sure anandtech will benchmark the 64-bit p4 as soon as they can get one. They've already done the Nocona/Opteron matchup
It is my understanding that EM64T is just an increase in addressable memory; that they don't actaully have the extra registers that AMD64 has. Is this true, or am I talking out of my ass here?
Yeah, compiles absolutely fly past on my dual Opteron box. Here's a timing of this morning's updates:
keep in mind that only the actual compiling uses both processors. The ./configure and installing only uses one.
However, the FA does mention how long it takes to compile a kernel.
First of all, Anandtech has compared 64-bit Xeons with 64-bit Opterons and Desktop AMD64s. Go to their site and click on the CPU/Chipset thing.
Secondly, EM64T processors are expensive, server-oriented Xeons. It wouldn't make much sense to compared them with cheap desktop Athlon64s. Nocona vs. Opteron is the sensible comparison here and Anandtech has already done it.
Red Hat seems to do ok selling FOSS software. They get their money by selling the support and they invest some of that money back into improving their software.
1) require a ridiculous number of licenses for dual-core HT CPUs 2) ??? 3) I don't think I even need to say it...
But what if I want my penis enlarged?!?
Perhaps I should have explained myself better. I meant that Alpha was a good design that never got the market share it deserved. Similarly, I believe that Itanium has a good design. I feel it is a shame that the high price has kept Itanium from being widespread. I agree that Intel has no reason to keep the price so high.
All the benchmarks I have seen test the Itanium on workstation-style or single-task-sever jobs. The (theoretical) strength of the Itanium is in its multitasking. Its simpler design should reduce the overhead of switching tasks significantly. This makes benchmarking it kind of hard, since benchmarks generally only test one thing at a time.
The purpose of HT is to make up for Intel's crappy super-long pipeline (something like 32 stages!? Someone correct me if I'm wrong). Whenever it does a jump, many instructions are wasted. AMD's pipeline on Barton was something like 12 stages, so there's much less wastage going on. All HT does is allow the wasted cycles to be used for another thread. Since AMD's processors don't waste so many instructions, HT wouldn't really help that much.
I'm not so sure about that. In DooM3, yes, nvidia kicks ass. And it will be my only choice until ATI comes out with some halfway decent linux drivers. However, the x800 and x600 series don't look half bad. When Half-Life 2 comes out, I think ATI's offerings will start to look more attractive.
I am of the impression that macs only use ATI and that the xbox2 will also use a graphics processor from ATI. So don't be so quick to dismiss them.
While AMD's x86 stuff is better than Intel's x86, its a bit sad that Itanium has lagged so far behind Opteron. Itanium's architecture is vastly superior to Opteron's, as it marks a break from the 20-year accumulation of old designs and legacy crap. It would be nice to see people embracing a new architecture for once.
Or course I can't claim superiority, having purchased Opterons myself. I guess software availability will always win out over good chip designs. Just ask those poor Alpha designers over at Compaq/HP.
We don't get nova in canberra, but I've always been pretty impressed with triplej (http://abc.net.au/triplej/). It's public, so there aren't any ads and they play a pretty diverse selection of music. Which means they play some crap stuff too, but there's probably lees time spent playing crap than most stations spend on ads.
Fortunately, id software has a better solution. By releasing Linux binaries of their engines on the web, linux gamers can just buy the windows games and copy tha data files over from the CD. This makes much more sense than releasing a different boxed game for every port and it is probably easier on the developers too.
Does anyone else think WinFS is a Bad Thing? A filesystem is a low-level, simple, reliable method of storing files on a disk and a database is a method of catologuing and searching through files. If you combine them, it will get hideously complicated. Which means it will probably be buggy and slow. It's almost as bad as putting windowing in a kernel...
There's plenty of research and progress in this direction: flash drives. They're still ridiculously small and expensive compared to normal hard drives but give them some more years. After all, flash, unlike hard drives, is affected by Moore's law.
And what are the chances of that ever happening? In order to change laws, you need money for big campaign contributions. Who's going to donate to reduce IP rights? Certainly not any big corporations.
How? If the cache has decent bandwidth, it is easy for two cores to read the same line. On the other hand, if one or both of the cores wants to write to the line then the situation for single-cache is much simpler than the double-cache case.
Unless you mean that the cores could keep overwriting each other's line with data read from memory. This is a possibility, but it is offset by the fact that the unified cache could be twice the size of each private cache. And it corresponds to the case where the working set is larger than the cache size, which is an issue even for single processor configurations.