Linux has had the standard X cut and paste method since day one. It doesn't need another. The way X works is the way X works. If you don't like it you need to be choosy about the kind of application that your box will run.
To me *n*X doesn't need to emulate whatever Microsoft and Apple have decided cut and paste should be like. The X method works just fine with *every* application because it is enforced by the server, and is actually way more convenient most of the time. It's just a different way of working.
You sure about 100W?
- a P-IV 2GHz consumes 75W by itself
- a single HD consumes 12W when idle
see
Tom's hardware for reference.
The motherboard is not innocuous and neither are the RAM or the video card. You don't have to run 3D for the GPU to run hot. Then there's all these fans.
My guess it that the computer probably consumes at least 150W when running 100% CPU without disk access with recent CPUs from either Intel or AMD.
Now I need to read out on switching PSU like you say. What is their efficiency? They seem to require cooling as well (fans) so it can't be 100%. To me 200-250W seems very reasonable as a consumption starting point when running S@H. Certainly recent PCs are quite good at heating a living room.
And even if you are right (100W) that's still over
$100/y, not an altogether negligible sum. Maybe
you can laugh about it but I don't.
There is no need to shut down your computer, except it consumes 300W of power 24/7 not counting your monitor. If you have a recent Athlon or P-IV it's even more, and worse still if you run SETI@HOME with its screen saver (even with the monitor turned off), as it exercices the CPU and the GPU.
That works out to be 2.7MWh over the whole year. At $.15/kWh this work out to about $400. More if you use A/C to cool down your room. In fact I'd be surprised if your PC power consumption does not account for half of your electricity bill in one way or another.
I did that calculation myself and now I turn my PC off when I don't use it.
I reckon SETI@Home is only worthwhile on computers that have to stay up for some other reason, and I think it should be on all the time but limited to some pre-determined portion of the CPU (10% say).
OK, this is Fermi's well know argument (where are they?)
There are a lot of assumptions in what you are writing, that's fine. The difference between simple assumptions and science is that with science you do check them.
Maybe the aliens are indeed here? maybe they are observing us? maybe interstellar space travel is completely infeasible? maybe each and every civilisation that has even arisen in the galaxy has destroyed itself (we're not far from that ourselves)? Maybe aliens have conquered the whole galaxy and grown bored with it (now they're just having fun in some virtual world)?
There are so many things that may have happened or never happened that it is worth it to check our assumptions. Maybe you are right, but it does not cost much money to check. This is what SETI is all about.
This is correct, my wife tried it with this book:
The Bates Method
You have to be fairly committed especially in the beginning, but it seems to work. If you hate your glasses it is worth a try.
Re:hrm, somethings amiss, me thinks
on
Itanium Problems
·
· Score: 2, Informative
> bear in mind that the orginal 8086 was for a while > supplanted by the 8088 for compatibility reasons
It was just a price decision. The 8088 can do all that the 8086 can, except it's memory bus was only 8 bit wide instead of 16. This made for a much cheaper machine to build (fewer wires). The performance difference was not very significant and the software was 100% compatible.
This is a very cheap card for ~$50, does dual head, nice video out w/ 64MB of DDR. Bit slow for gaming but works for me up to Jedi Knight II.
You can set it up for up to 4 screens (2 VGA, one DVI, one TV out) but you can only have 2 independent displays (some will be duplicated). Well supported under Linux too (everything works, including accelerated 3d).
The day people realize that the NYT is just as biased in the opinions that are expressed in its pages as Pravda in its heydays or The People's Daily or Le Monde or FAZ or the Times or any other world-class newspaper, the world will have progressed a little bit.
No, what you describe is win95, win98 or winMe; but not NT, win2k or winXP. NT/2K/XP has a different kernel, does not load DOS at all in any way shape or form. The GUI is part of the kernel and there is no way to get a full-screen text only command-line interface a la DOS under NT.
The real plough, the one that flips over the topsoil indeed was invented at the end of the middle age. The previous ploughing implements, some of which were even mentionned in Homer, only grated the topsoil. The former is more efficient at getting nitrogen and other plant nutrients at depths that the next generation of plants can best grow from.
Are you actually using EiC for debugging? I mean it's a nice C interpreter with smart pointers, but for complex, multi-file projects I find it's too hard to use (you have to put together a file that #include all the.c files, which looks ugly and causes problems because order can matter).
It's not cristal-clear from the vendor's web page that PurifyPlus is a superset of the well-known purify.
If this is the case then Purify is pretty good at finding memory-related errors, but before you plonk $5k on the table for it, check the free tools first.
These days a combination of memprof, njamd or ElectricFence and valgrind is enough to get me out of trouble in 95% of cases at least.
I haven't tried Purify in a few years (our license expired and we did not renew it) but based on past experience I'm not sure Purify would be helpful in the 5% of cases remaining. I find that one needs to use many different tools as each have their strengths and weaknesses.
The easiest free tools are ElectricFence and memprof (the latter even has a gui). You can enable ElectricFence from within gdb without recompiling, the same goes for njamd. They both impact the memory footprint but have minimal impact on the run time (unless the application uses oodles of memory).
Valgrind is powerful but inevitably slow given the technology is uses and is relatively complex to use, but very powerful.
Purify is very easy to use and has both a nice GUI and text reporting (for regression testing), but you need to recompile (to instrument the executable). From memory an instrumented program is 10-20 times slower than the original version, Valgrind has a similar effect, or possibly worse.
Only 5 years ago there was no replacement for Purify (other than different commercial programs) but these days free tools are catching up. They may not be quite there yet but as stated above they will find at least 95% of your problems. For the rest you'll have to rely on the old methodology of unit testing, varying the inputs, tracing under the debugger, and whatnot.
At the time of the Challenger inquiry, the late physicist Richard Feynman was part of the investigation committee. He found that most of NASA at the time was in full delusional mode about how reliable the Shuttle really was.
The only exception was the computer systems group, in particular the software side. They had metrics, procedures and rigour.At the time of the enquiry the hardware was already old.
It's the attitude that counts, not the hardware, not the methodology of the month. OO is not going to solve NASA's problem, it's going to be difficult. Myself I'd just make sure that the hardware would always be available, and not change a thing.
If you read the article they say if you want to be an FBI agent:
- You have to be fit *and* adhere to their code of morality.
- You need to be prepared to do operational work for 5 years at least before they give you a desk job.
- Their computer systems are utter crap but they hope to improve them to be useful someday.
...for a limited time. Seriously, ask for how long and ask that the manager put it in writing.
Then decide what you want to do. Depending on your age you might be able to pull a few 100h+ weeks like these, anywhere from 2 to 8, but I'll guarantee you that if you don't stop in time you'll hit a BIG wall. All of you. And it will take you double that time to recover, at least.
Seriously more than a few 100h weeks in a row is insane. The range of disease that you *will* get is staggering, from serious depression to heart attack.
Myself I worked (only) an 80h week for about 3-4 months and it wasn't pretty in the end. I didn't work week ends, I was sleeping the whole time, otherwise I would have died, seriously. Eventually I resigned. The engineers who took up my work after I'd gone said later it was utter crap and had to rewrite most of it. Shortly after the owner of the company I was working with got indicted, his company went bankrupt and for a while he was forbidden to head a company. Basically a disaster all around.
I never tought that such a thing would be possible, but the court decision is actually a good read.
If I understand correctly, BT's patent describes an old system whereby `continuous blocks of information' stored in a databased on a central `system' can be accessed remotely via telephone lines. The interface allows for accessing the data on the system by chunks. The users somehow selects a menu or a link when they want to access the next bit.
The court comprehensively dismissed all parts of BT's infringement claims.First the Internet is not a central system, second a central database is not accessed (the judge writes that the Internet is in fact the very antithesis of a central database), next the data on the Internet is not in the form of blocks: HTML is far more flexible than what the BT patent describes, and finally the concept of hyperlink is far more advanced than what BT described in its patent (basically a `give me the next bit' button).
At some point during the trial, BT's expert tried to submit made up web pages that conformed to what the BT patent was describing. The judge found that totally unconvincing, writing `a device does not infringe because it can be made to infringe'.
In conclusion, the jugde writes `In contrast to what BT would have us believe, there are no disputed issues of material fact in this case'.
Don't be so paranoid, even today von Neumann is a whole lot more famous than Nash.
Re:OH WELL! I'm an idiot! I don't know ****!
on
VisionTek Folds
·
· Score: 1
A few things:
Open source video drivers are very good for one thing: awesome stability. When I was running X dual head on a TNT2 + Matrox combo with full open-source drivers on my workstation only 4 months ago I had uptime of more than 50 days. This is not on a back room server doing only one thing, this is on a workstation with several dozens of windows open, 6 desktops, all sort of things going at once.
Now I've `upgraded' (no choice, work policies dictate) to a P-IV with some GF4 card, for which there is no open-source driver available, it's either use the vesa driver or the NVidia closed source one. I use the latter one. So sure I have dual-screen on the one card, accelerated openGL and TV-out (maybe, never tried it), but the stability is way down.
My desktop activities haven't changed much but so far I haven't been able to use this setup more than a couple of weeks at a time without random freezes, weird events such as windows not wanting to show up, bizarrre interation between applications (sometimes I have to close mozilla to get openGL working again, talk about weird) and a general feeling of instability. I hate it.
So it's a great thing that NVidia provides these drivers, and maybe they are great from a Windows user perspective. However talking from an open-source perspective where everything is rock-solid, they are simply not up to par, although they are improving all the time, I must admit (I tried the NVidia drivers only last year with the previous setup and things were atrocious. Couldn't get X working more than a couple of hours at a time).
People want different things. Open source is slower to get there, obviously, due to its process . But when it does get there it's usually better. I look forward to upgrading my home setup with a Radeon 8500 at a very low price when XFree86 supports it. I'm in no hurry.
Slashdot Mirror
Linux has had the standard X cut and paste method since day one. It doesn't need another. The way X works is the way X works. If you don't like it you need to be choosy about the kind of application that your box will run.
To me *n*X doesn't need to emulate whatever Microsoft and Apple have decided cut and paste should be like. The X method works just fine with *every* application because it is enforced by the server, and is actually way more convenient most of the time. It's just a different way of working.
It's good for your brain to be flexible.
You sure about 100W? - a P-IV 2GHz consumes 75W by itself - a single HD consumes 12W when idle see Tom's hardware for reference. The motherboard is not innocuous and neither are the RAM or the video card. You don't have to run 3D for the GPU to run hot. Then there's all these fans. My guess it that the computer probably consumes at least 150W when running 100% CPU without disk access with recent CPUs from either Intel or AMD. Now I need to read out on switching PSU like you say. What is their efficiency? They seem to require cooling as well (fans) so it can't be 100%. To me 200-250W seems very reasonable as a consumption starting point when running S@H. Certainly recent PCs are quite good at heating a living room. And even if you are right (100W) that's still over $100/y, not an altogether negligible sum. Maybe you can laugh about it but I don't.
There is no need to shut down your computer, except it consumes 300W of power 24/7 not counting your monitor. If you have a recent Athlon or P-IV it's
even more, and worse still if you run SETI@HOME with its screen saver (even with the monitor turned off), as it exercices the CPU and the GPU.
That works out to be 2.7MWh over the whole year. At $.15/kWh this work out to about $400. More if you use A/C to cool down your room. In fact I'd be surprised if your PC power consumption does not account for half of your electricity bill in one way or another.
I did that calculation myself and now I turn my PC off when I don't use it.
I reckon SETI@Home is only worthwhile on computers that have to stay up for some other reason, and I think it should be on all the time but limited to some pre-determined portion of the CPU (10% say).
OK, this is Fermi's well know argument (where are they?)
There are a lot of assumptions in what you are writing, that's fine. The difference between simple assumptions and science is that with science you do check them.
Maybe the aliens are indeed here? maybe they are observing us? maybe interstellar space travel is completely infeasible? maybe each and every civilisation that has even arisen in the galaxy has destroyed itself (we're not far from that ourselves)? Maybe aliens have conquered the whole galaxy and grown bored with it (now they're just having fun in some virtual world)?
There are so many things that may have happened or never happened that it is worth it to check our assumptions. Maybe you are right, but it does not cost much money to check. This is what SETI is all about.
Excellent,
The sooner Microsoft & al bring about a DRM-enabled PC, the sooner they bring about their own doom.
People will not buy crippled hardware if they are given a choice. At least one smart manufacturer will see its niche in non-DRM generic PC hardware.
This is correct, my wife tried it with this book: The Bates Method You have to be fairly committed especially in the beginning, but it seems to work. If you hate your glasses it is worth a try.
> bear in mind that the orginal 8086 was for a while > supplanted by the 8088 for compatibility reasons
It was just a price decision. The 8088 can do all that the 8086 can, except it's memory bus was only 8 bit wide instead of 16. This made for a much cheaper machine to build (fewer wires). The performance difference was not very significant and the software was 100% compatible.
That's what you have to do now. It's For Your Own Good (tm).
This is a very cheap card for ~$50, does dual head, nice video out w/ 64MB of DDR. Bit slow for gaming but works for me up to Jedi Knight II.
You can set it up for up to 4 screens (2 VGA, one DVI, one TV out) but you can only have 2 independent displays (some will be duplicated). Well supported under Linux too (everything works, including accelerated 3d).
The day people realize that the NYT is just as biased in the opinions that are expressed in its pages as Pravda in its heydays or The People's Daily or Le Monde or FAZ or the Times or any other world-class newspaper, the world will have progressed a little bit.
In a lot of primitive societies this was fine, as long as the someone was from the ennemy tribe.
No, what you describe is win95, win98 or winMe; but not NT, win2k or winXP. NT/2K/XP has a different kernel, does not load DOS at all in any way shape or form. The GUI is part of the kernel and there is no way to get a full-screen text only command-line interface a la DOS under NT.
No, no,
The real plough, the one that flips over the topsoil indeed was invented at the end of the middle age. The previous ploughing implements, some of which were even mentionned in Homer, only grated the topsoil. The former is more efficient at getting nitrogen and other plant nutrients at depths that the next generation of plants can best grow from.
That technique only works on something that doesn't move too much. Try it with children, say.
Are you actually using EiC for debugging? I mean it's a nice C interpreter with smart pointers, but .c files, which looks ugly and causes problems because order can matter).
for complex, multi-file projects I find it's too hard to use (you have to put together a file that
#include all the
It's not cristal-clear from the vendor's web page that PurifyPlus is a superset of the well-known purify.
If this is the case then Purify is pretty good at finding memory-related errors, but before you plonk $5k on the table for it, check the free tools first.
These days a combination of memprof, njamd or ElectricFence and valgrind is enough to get me out of trouble in 95% of cases at least.
I haven't tried Purify in a few years (our license expired and we did not renew it) but based on past experience I'm not sure Purify would be helpful in the 5% of cases remaining. I find that one needs to use many different tools as each have their strengths and weaknesses.
The easiest free tools are ElectricFence and memprof (the latter even has a gui). You can enable ElectricFence from within gdb without recompiling, the same goes for njamd. They both impact the memory footprint but have minimal impact on the run time (unless the application uses oodles of memory).
Valgrind is powerful but inevitably slow given the technology is uses and is relatively complex to use, but very powerful.
Purify is very easy to use and has both a nice GUI and text reporting (for regression testing), but you need to recompile (to instrument the executable). From memory an instrumented program is 10-20 times slower than the original version, Valgrind has a similar effect, or possibly worse.
Only 5 years ago there was no replacement for Purify (other than different commercial programs) but these days free tools are catching up. They may not be quite there yet but as stated above they will find at least 95% of your problems. For the rest you'll have to rely on the old methodology of unit testing, varying the inputs, tracing under the debugger, and whatnot.
There you go. Sorry, no link, too lazy!
At the time of the Challenger inquiry, the late physicist Richard Feynman was part of the investigation committee. He found that most of NASA at the time was in full delusional mode about how reliable the Shuttle really was.
The only exception was the computer systems group, in particular the software side. They had metrics, procedures and rigour.At the time of the enquiry the hardware was already old.
It's the attitude that counts, not the hardware, not the methodology of the month. OO is not going to solve NASA's problem, it's going to be difficult. Myself I'd just make sure that the hardware would always be available, and not change a thing.
If you read the article they say if you want to be an FBI agent:
- You have to be fit *and* adhere to their code of morality.
- You need to be prepared to do operational work for 5 years at least before they give you a desk job.
- Their computer systems are utter crap but they hope to improve them to be useful someday.
To me that rules out all the geeks.
...for a limited time. Seriously, ask for how long and ask that the manager put it in writing.
Then decide what you want to do. Depending on your age you might be able to pull a few 100h+ weeks like these, anywhere from 2 to 8, but I'll guarantee you that if you don't stop in time you'll hit a BIG wall. All of you. And it will take you double that time to recover, at least.
Seriously more than a few 100h weeks in a row is insane. The range of disease that you *will* get is staggering, from serious depression to heart attack.
Myself I worked (only) an 80h week for about 3-4 months and it wasn't pretty in the end. I didn't work week ends, I was sleeping the whole time, otherwise I would have died, seriously. Eventually I resigned. The engineers who took up my work after I'd gone said later it was utter crap and had to rewrite most of it. Shortly after the owner of the company I was working with got indicted, his company went bankrupt and for a while he was forbidden to head a company. Basically a disaster all around.
I'm not too proud of this episode in my life.
EPR is no longer a thought experiment, Alain Aspect implemented it in the 80's, see:
m en t.htm
http://www.scispirit.com/Resource/aspect_experi
BTW this experiment proves EPR wrong, and is definitely on my list of most beautiful ones.
I never tought that such a thing would be possible, but the court decision is actually a good read.
If I understand correctly, BT's patent describes an old system whereby `continuous blocks of information' stored in a databased on a central `system' can be accessed remotely via telephone lines. The interface allows for accessing the data on the system by chunks. The users somehow selects a menu or a link when they want to access the next bit.
The court comprehensively dismissed all parts of BT's infringement claims.First the Internet is not a central system, second a central database is not accessed (the judge writes that the Internet is in fact the very antithesis of a central database), next the data on the Internet is not in the form of blocks: HTML is far more flexible than what the BT patent describes, and finally the concept of hyperlink is far more advanced than what BT described in its patent (basically a `give me the next bit' button).
At some point during the trial, BT's expert tried to submit made up web pages that conformed to what the BT patent was describing. The judge found that totally unconvincing, writing `a device does not infringe because it can be made to infringe'.
In conclusion, the jugde writes `In contrast to what BT would have us believe, there are no disputed issues of material fact in this case'.
Let's hear it for the court today.
Don't be so paranoid, even today von Neumann is a whole lot more famous than Nash.
A few things:
Open source video drivers are very good for one thing: awesome stability. When I was running X dual head on a TNT2 + Matrox combo with full open-source drivers on my workstation only 4 months ago I had uptime of more than 50 days. This is not on a back room server doing only one thing, this is on a workstation with several dozens of windows open, 6 desktops, all sort of things going at once.
Now I've `upgraded' (no choice, work policies dictate) to a P-IV with some GF4 card, for which there is no open-source driver available, it's either use the vesa driver or the NVidia closed source one. I use the latter one. So sure I have dual-screen on the one card, accelerated openGL and TV-out (maybe, never tried it), but the stability is way down.
My desktop activities haven't changed much but so far I haven't been able to use this setup more than a couple of weeks at a time without random freezes, weird events such as windows not wanting to show up, bizarrre interation between applications (sometimes I have to close mozilla to get openGL working again, talk about weird) and a general feeling of instability. I hate it.
So it's a great thing that NVidia provides these drivers, and maybe they are great from a Windows user perspective. However talking from an open-source perspective where everything is rock-solid, they are simply not up to par, although they are improving all the time, I must admit (I tried the NVidia drivers only last year with the previous setup and things were atrocious. Couldn't get X working more than a couple of hours at a time).
People want different things. Open source is slower to get there, obviously, due to its process . But when it does get there it's usually better. I look forward to upgrading my home setup with a Radeon 8500 at a very low price when XFree86 supports it. I'm in no hurry.
So, is this a justification for the Microsoft trial?
AFAIK, the Alto had a GUI but wasn't WYSIWYG, not
that this is particularly desirable anyway.