RAM is certainly not my problem. 2GB of RAM, 150M free, 250m of swap out of 1GB used. Swapping isn't an issue... Disk IO might be. Then again, I've always had issues burning CD's with my distro, and haven't tried others to see if it's any better... I know that XP seems to be a LOT more responsive when I do use it to burn things...:-/
And I think you underestimate the ability of Microsoft to turn an MS Windows into a formidable product. The problem is, for Microsoft, it is pointless.
The true value in Windows is the WIN32API. By providing a Windows personality for Linux, they would have to increase their support costs exponentially to support dozens of kernel versions and patches, versus a tightly coupled kernel. There's no value in that for Microsoft. Their device support is NOT what has led Microsoft to domination. It's OEM preloading and the application support.
No, I'm afraid Dvorak is blowing smoke. Microsoft will NOT release a version of Linux. Ever.
Two reasons, and one is directly related to the other:
1) No serious TV / Radio advertising, unlike Dell, and Gateway and others. 2) Limited manufacturing capability.
Back in the days when they allowed/encouraged clones, and through the iMac fiasco, there were production issues that hurt them in the media. They likely would continue to have these problems again if they tried to expand their marketing efforts. But Dell has a commercial on TV every half hour, if not every 15 minutes. It's SCARY the amount of advertising they do, and it explains their market penetration more than price alone could.
But price is another reason Macs are traditionally passed over for PCs. The Mac Mini might alter this in the future... this has yet to be seen.
Branches my ass. The only ones the vast majority of people care about are Linus' and Morton's.
Linux is a far way from being king of the desktop, but it is one of the most COMPREHENSIVE Free Unixes out there. Don't blame the fact that the rest of the Free Software space doesn't get it on Linux. It's only a kernel. It can only do so much. It's one piece of a very big puzzle, hence the whole GNU/Linux bitchfrenzy.
I'd like to know what crack he's smoking. My Free desktop/workstation is more than just Linux. It's a collection of XFree, Apache, Tigris products, with OpenOffice, the Gimp and a variety of other smaller subsets of software.
I've been running SuSE 7.2 & 8.2 fault free for nearly 3 years now. Well, the only fault I seem to have is an XFree86 issue with my KVM, and my RAID controller set to halt on failure when a drive dies (oops).
SuSE has given out free.iso's of their Personal edition for some time, at least since 8.2. Since the personal edition is missing some software I use, I tend to stick to the boxed version.
I can. You look at services like Microsoft Live and Outlook web for hotmail, and put enough of those services together delivered via akamai over broadband, and all of a sudden the only thing you need to do if your computer gets corrupted is push a combination of two buttons to reload from a ROM image. Your data gets stored on number USB keychains or external drives, and the apps are served and cached ala Java Web Start.
Sun and Microsoft and others jumped the appliance idea about 5 years too early. Broadband is almost ubiquitous now in large metro and suburban areas, and WiMax threatens to bring it to rural areas. It's now just a matter of time before the average computer is a window onto someone elses computers where the management and operation is done for you.
When we have HDTV on demand over broadband, that's when we'll start to see a massive shift in consumer computing. More people are already using Yahoo or Hotmail for email and contact management and scheduling than Outlook or Outlook express or Netscape. This trend will continue to accelerate when Word and various other desktop offerings can be delivered via broadband.
Look at how Valve has simplified software delivery with Steam?
I just don't understand it. Even with RAMPANT piracy, Microsft still has high profit margins than most of the Fortune 100... I just don't get it. This is pointless and futile. They should just be happy that most of their shit is preloaded by OEMs kowtowed by their licensing agreements.
64 bit is USELESS for graphics cards. Twice the data space for zero payoff. 512MB is less than 1/8th the addressable value of a 32bit pointer. We're further away from 64 bit graphics cards than we are from 64bit home desktops.
Also, I can tell you from experience, that a simple port of 32 bit software to 64 bits on a single generation (AMD64, for instance) often results in a performance LOSS. (PTC had this issue with Pro/ENGINEER on DEC OSF in 1994)
For applications which shuffle data in and out of memory because 32 bits is not enough, you are correct that 64 bits will speed things up, just as moving from 16bit segmented memory sped things up on 32bit platforms. Not having to deal with complex memory management certainly speeds things up.
not necessarily. If the AI was running on one CPU and the rendering engine on the other, than no, he wasn't losing performance at all. Context switching kills you when one thread needs results, but you have to pause it to go run the results on another thread. On two CPU's, if threadA's results are ready when threadB requires them, the period of time that Threadb is suspended is less than if threadA had to go generate those results because it didn't have time before it last got preempted.
In the best case, ThreadB returns within a few hundred CPU cycles. In the worst case, it's still waiting for ThreadA. Reality will place the scenario somewhere between these two extremes.
Really? Practically every benchmark I've seen of P4 and it's hyperthreading goodness gives a modest 20-30% performance benefit in certain use cases. That's FAR from 80% of "true SMP".
SMT has it's place. It's not a panacea, and it's not SMP.
Properly designed database schemas will prevent such from happening, since (in all the models I've worked on), changes happen to a small subset of data per user, mostly not the same data, but sometimes overlapping, and most database accesses are read, not write.
Decent databases have row-level locking and opportunistic locks which help prevent most of these problems. Not all, most.
But you are 100% correct. You can never have 100%*Ncpu concurrency. There's always going to be some loss
Ever here of these things called timers? Yeah, every so often, in millisecond resolution, they fire, releasing a waiting thread for executing to prosecute it's chosen task. If you spend even a small amount of time doing setup you can make presumptions that two timer threads on separate CPUS will be released at nearly the same time (within milliseconds).
But you're right. Without communication, no amount of work gets done. Threads, or no threads. Single threaded functions can block for any number of reasons. Only more so when you have to assure responsiveness by switching tasks at random periods. There's a reason preemptive multitasking kicked cooperative multitaskings ass, and this is it.
Yup, try burning a DVD and a CDROM at 8x and 52x respectively, while copying a 6.5GB disk image over the network via Samba, browsing on firefox reading up on all the latest w3c Xml craziness trying to reeducate oneself, do a disk ghosting on one of my vmware hosts, and intermittently typing on gaim, or building and testing my latest Java craftiness.
That's an awfully small number for a very big universe.
Your source: <quote>
Other star enumerators we located on the Web offer numbers ranging from more than 200 billion stars in our galaxy to 3 thousand million billion stars (3 followed by 16 zeroes), in the universe. NASA alleges there are zillions of uncountable stars. </quote>
Since the child source document for your 3*10^16 is missing, I can't refute their calculation logic.
I paraphrase Carl Sagan a little here, but I'd be awfully disappointed in a God who created this Universe only for us... It seems very selfish of us to think we're unique in his eye...
Slashdot Mirror
Twenty-two MY ASS.
RAM is certainly not my problem. 2GB of RAM, 150M free, 250m of swap out of 1GB used. Swapping isn't an issue... Disk IO might be. Then again, I've always had issues burning CD's with my distro, and haven't tried others to see if it's any better... I know that XP seems to be a LOT more responsive when I do use it to burn things... :-/
And I think you underestimate the ability of Microsoft to turn an MS Windows into a formidable product. The problem is, for Microsoft, it is pointless.
The true value in Windows is the WIN32API. By providing a Windows personality for Linux, they would have to increase their support costs exponentially to support dozens of kernel versions and patches, versus a tightly coupled kernel. There's no value in that for Microsoft. Their device support is NOT what has led Microsoft to domination. It's OEM preloading and the application support.
No, I'm afraid Dvorak is blowing smoke. Microsoft will NOT release a version of Linux. Ever.
Two reasons, and one is directly related to the other:
:-)
1) No serious TV / Radio advertising, unlike Dell, and Gateway and others.
2) Limited manufacturing capability.
Back in the days when they allowed/encouraged clones, and through the iMac fiasco, there were production issues that hurt them in the media. They likely would continue to have these problems again if they tried to expand their marketing efforts. But Dell has a commercial on TV every half hour, if not every 15 minutes. It's SCARY the amount of advertising they do, and it explains their market penetration more than price alone could.
But price is another reason Macs are traditionally passed over for PCs. The Mac Mini might alter this in the future... this has yet to be seen.
My guesses...
Branches my ass. The only ones the vast majority of people care about are Linus' and Morton's.
Linux is a far way from being king of the desktop, but it is one of the most COMPREHENSIVE Free Unixes out there. Don't blame the fact that the rest of the Free Software space doesn't get it on Linux. It's only a kernel. It can only do so much. It's one piece of a very big puzzle, hence the whole GNU/Linux bitchfrenzy.
If you want IDE raid the promise supertrak works just fine.
I'd like to know what crack he's smoking. My Free desktop/workstation is more than just Linux. It's a collection of XFree, Apache, Tigris products, with OpenOffice, the Gimp and a variety of other smaller subsets of software.
I've been running SuSE 7.2 & 8.2 fault free for nearly 3 years now. Well, the only fault I seem to have is an XFree86 issue with my KVM, and my RAID controller set to halt on failure when a drive dies (oops).
.iso's of their Personal edition for some time, at least since 8.2. Since the personal edition is missing some software I use, I tend to stick to the boxed version.
SuSE has given out free
I can. You look at services like Microsoft Live and Outlook web for hotmail, and put enough of those services together delivered via akamai over broadband, and all of a sudden the only thing you need to do if your computer gets corrupted is push a combination of two buttons to reload from a ROM image. Your data gets stored on number USB keychains or external drives, and the apps are served and cached ala Java Web Start.
Sun and Microsoft and others jumped the appliance idea about 5 years too early. Broadband is almost ubiquitous now in large metro and suburban areas, and WiMax threatens to bring it to rural areas. It's now just a matter of time before the average computer is a window onto someone elses computers where the management and operation is done for you.
When we have HDTV on demand over broadband, that's when we'll start to see a massive shift in consumer computing. More people are already using Yahoo or Hotmail for email and contact management and scheduling than Outlook or Outlook express or Netscape. This trend will continue to accelerate when Word and various other desktop offerings can be delivered via broadband.
Look at how Valve has simplified software delivery with Steam?
What are you talking about. I run a Free computer. Dozens in fact...
I just don't understand it. Even with RAMPANT piracy, Microsft still has high profit margins than most of the Fortune 100... I just don't get it. This is pointless and futile. They should just be happy that most of their shit is preloaded by OEMs kowtowed by their licensing agreements.
I'll be happy when everyone's using fscking Unicode so these little problems can go away...
Is that why all the chain restaurants sing cheesy campy versions of happy-happy?
You actually HAVE dual core XEONs?
Multicore is a stop gap to keep increasing overall computing power while taking extra time to flesh out these design issues in faster CPUs.
Thanks for a great post.
There used to be a program on the resource kit called UP2MP that would do this upgrade without reinstalling the OS.
:-/
Not sure how this works with XP, since I have yet to use XP on anything other than a VMware guest session or a laptop.
64 bit is USELESS for graphics cards. Twice the data space for zero payoff. 512MB is less than 1/8th the addressable value of a 32bit pointer. We're further away from 64 bit graphics cards than we are from 64bit home desktops.
:-)
Also, I can tell you from experience, that a simple port of 32 bit software to 64 bits on a single generation (AMD64, for instance) often results in a performance LOSS. (PTC had this issue with Pro/ENGINEER on DEC OSF in 1994)
For applications which shuffle data in and out of memory because 32 bits is not enough, you are correct that 64 bits will speed things up, just as moving from 16bit segmented memory sped things up on 32bit platforms. Not having to deal with complex memory management certainly speeds things up.
Why wait? I can have Linux today.
Regards
not necessarily. If the AI was running on one CPU and the rendering engine on the other, than no, he wasn't losing performance at all. Context switching kills you when one thread needs results, but you have to pause it to go run the results on another thread. On two CPU's, if threadA's results are ready when threadB requires them, the period of time that Threadb is suspended is less than if threadA had to go generate those results because it didn't have time before it last got preempted.
In the best case, ThreadB returns within a few hundred CPU cycles. In the worst case, it's still waiting for ThreadA. Reality will place the scenario somewhere between these two extremes.
Really? Practically every benchmark I've seen of P4 and it's hyperthreading goodness gives a modest 20-30% performance benefit in certain use cases. That's FAR from 80% of "true SMP".
SMT has it's place. It's not a panacea, and it's not SMP.
Um, the PPro came into production use in ~1995, so no more than 10 years.
Properly designed database schemas will prevent such from happening, since (in all the models I've worked on), changes happen to a small subset of data per user, mostly not the same data, but sometimes overlapping, and most database accesses are read, not write.
Decent databases have row-level locking and opportunistic locks which help prevent most of these problems. Not all, most.
But you are 100% correct. You can never have 100%*Ncpu concurrency. There's always going to be some loss
Ever here of these things called timers? Yeah, every so often, in millisecond resolution, they fire, releasing a waiting thread for executing to prosecute it's chosen task. If you spend even a small amount of time doing setup you can make presumptions that two timer threads on separate CPUS will be released at nearly the same time (within milliseconds).
But you're right. Without communication, no amount of work gets done. Threads, or no threads.
Single threaded functions can block for any number of reasons. Only more so when you have to assure responsiveness by switching tasks at random periods. There's a reason preemptive multitasking kicked cooperative multitaskings ass, and this is it.
Yup, try burning a DVD and a CDROM at 8x and 52x respectively, while copying a 6.5GB disk image over the network via Samba, browsing on firefox reading up on all the latest w3c Xml craziness trying to reeducate oneself, do a disk ghosting on one of my vmware hosts, and intermittently typing on gaim, or building and testing my latest Java craftiness.
I could definitely use another core or three.
3* 1,000,000,000,000,000
That's an awfully small number for a very big universe.
Your source:
<quote>
Other star enumerators we located on the Web offer numbers ranging from more than 200 billion stars in our galaxy to 3 thousand million billion stars (3 followed by 16 zeroes), in the universe. NASA alleges there are zillions of uncountable stars.
</quote>
Since the child source document for your 3*10^16 is missing, I can't refute their calculation logic.
I paraphrase Carl Sagan a little here, but I'd be awfully disappointed in a God who created this Universe only for us... It seems very selfish of us to think we're unique in his eye...