I agree. 2008 makes a great workstation. However, the price tag is a bit steep. I get it at work as part of a MSDN subscription. I've also heard you can pick it up free if you go to certain Microsoft marketing events.
It isn't only price, it is freedom of choice. What could be more pro-choice, more about the freedom to control your own body than to pick who you choose to drive you around?
There is always a trade-off between safety and freedom and we should always lean toward freedom. Freedom in this case is allow customers to choose, anywhere between cheap unregulated drivers in a rickshaw to bonded, insured highly trained gun toting bodyguard chauffeurs driving armored Suburbans.
If the customer freely chooses to ride with the 16 year old male in a Pinto with a giant spoiler bolted to the back, and it blows up in a fireball of gasoline and NO2, scarring them for life, ITS THEIR OWN FAULT and NO, the government should NOT DO SOMETHING.
My point was that taxes subsidize all of the things I listed. Very large amounts of Interstate money go to the "red" states, more than they could pay for on their own. Tax money also subsidizes farms and parks.
As for "income redistribution", the GOP is against it because it gets votes. I'm certainly not in favor of giving my tax dollars away in exchange for nothing at all. The deal is that we GET something in exchange for taxes. If I wanted to give my money to some loser begging for it on the corner, I would do that myself. I'm against corporate welfare too.
That is also why "income redistribution" to the rural states in exchange for services is not the same thing as giving it to poor people (hah! If they're not living 12 to an apartment like Mexican illegal immigrants how poor can they be!?) in exchange for nothing at all.
That was the point.
Now, if those people getting paid tax dollars had to *work* for it, out building roads or cleaning city parks, then I'd feel I was getting something for my taxes and it wouldn't leave such a bad taste in my (and many other people's) mouth about "income redistribution."
And what's this crap about the "GOP base?" Are you aware that in many of the "blue" states the margin is very thin? There's nearly as many Republican voters as Democrat in many of them and a little rejiggering of the district lines would shift them into "red". California, for example, has *large* numbers of Republican voters, and we all know about Florida which flipped to Bush by a very thin margin. If you count noses, there are probably more Republican voters in "blue" states than in the "red" states.
I suppose the "blue" states would be happy to do without beef, corn and wheat, never visit a national park like Yellowstone, not have Interstates to move goods, and all the other things the "red" states do for them?
From the SQLite link: "Some historical versions of Linux contain versions of fsync() which are no-ops on some filesystems"
On Linux systems in the last two to three years at least, using ext3, reiserfs, reiser4 or xfs, fsync() is not a no-op and does commit data to disk oxide.
So "Recent versions of Linux contain versions of fsync() which are fully functional on most filesystems." would be a much better way to put it, and it explains why Linux appears slow in database benchmarks against OS X.
It's just that they way you put it made it sound as if Linux routinely uses no-op implementations of fsync().
I do not know where you got the idea that Linux cheats fsync() as a rule. It may, on some less-used file systems, but fsync() on the ext3, reiserfs and reiser4 (those three I know personally) and I believe XFS, does send a special barrier IO into the disk queue.
This barrier IO uses nice SCSI tricks with SCSI and nasty slow tricks with IDE and SATA. With those last two, the barrier flushes the disk buffer, sends the IO and flushes the disk buffer again, waiting to determine if any IO errors occurred.
This is very reliable and guarantees in-order write operations but is slow, slow, slow.
SCSI can generally run a barrier operation as part of the command queuing, so it doesn't slow down as much.
On ext3 the journal is also involved and fsync() generally has to write out and clear the entire journal before completing because ext3 has no way to pick out any particular prerequisite that applies to the file, and the journal must be written in-order.
If Linux didn't do the "real deal" for fsync(), there wouldn't have been so many Firefox 3 bug reports complaining about 30 second pauses on page loads -- caused by ext3 and fsync() being used by SQLite.
Pegging minimum wage to inflation would be insanely stupid.
Minimum wage is one of the things that *causes* inflation. (I have to pay you more to mow my lawn, now you have to pay me more to make your cheeseburger.)
Why are you upset with people who follow the laws as written?
You should be upset with the corrupt politicians who write the laws. A federal tax code should fit into a pamphlet and be readable and applicable by an 8th grader.
Instead we have a tax code that can break a table if carelessly dropped. All so that politicians can "tax the rich" without actually taxing them. They can be "for the people" AND get campaign contributions at the same time.
Two-faced wankers. I spit on them AND the morons who keep electing them by listening to what they say instead of what they actually do.
It could be Michael Flynn's Lodestar or Falling Stars.
As I remember it, one of the characters named Jimmy is a computer genius, hacker, and very wealthy man who doesn't actually think about how much money he has, and he collapses the market accidentally by ordering his computer systems to sell.
I was going to recommend this also. Dynamic code patching is a very powerful tool and can remove the need for thousands of explicit "if(debug) log;" calls.
Yes, and delaying ACK or dropping inbound packets will help...but only for long-running TCP sessions.
UDP or IP protocols do not care at all, and TCP sessions don't slow down until they realize packets are being lost which can take up to 10 packets per connection.
So when remote BT clients hit with 6 incoming TCP sessions, that is at least 60 packets without any rate limit. And BT will do that over and over again.
You can get perfect positional audio with headphones that have a head position tracker. Not otherwise.
See, your brain is always comparing the left and right volume of discrete sounds and knows that when you turn your head left, sounds behind you should get louder. If they do not, then your sound position sense is confused.
Most people will unconciously turn their head when trying to pin down a sound location.
One major change is in our computer displays. Today I'm running a 1920x1200 24" and a 1280x1024 19" monitor at 24-bit color with 8-bit alpha. I've got LCD sub-pixel anti-aliased fonts. Not only that, but Vista is holding the contents of each window in video RAM so it can do effects and doesn't need a repaint. I'm not doing it right now but I often play video as my desktop background.
All of that takes some serious RAM and CPU.
I don't know about you, but I don't want to go back to 8-bit color at 640x480 or even 16-bit at 800x600. If I had to go back that far I'd just take a 132 column green-screen terminal.
And what's slow about Download Manager? As far as I can tell, it downloads there just as quickly as it would on the page. It pops up once, then I click it back under the browser window and it stays under there, happily ignored by me.
Exactly how would you go about debugging a problem that you cannot reproduce, you don't have a clear idea of the environment it was running in, and the report is from software so old (to you as a developer) that you don't even remember how that version works?
One technique is adding debugging logs, but for some reason users also hate programs that run dog-slow and produce a half-gig of log files.
You might be polite and helpful the first dozen times...but it wears off and if you're working for free, the desire to help in a polite fashion disappears in oh, about a week.
Actually, I can say that even if you're getting paid very well for it, you still end up hating your users but you learn how to fake it.
Most web pages seem to have images, which all together add up to more than 100k. Then there's the DOM tree, the Javascript libraries, all the script state with variables, objects, etc. There's IFRAMEs and OBJECTs.
I collect books and keep them for a combination of reasons.
I like to have collections of things. There is pleasure in owning every book Robert Heinlein ever published, the complete Harry Potter set, all of C.J. Cherryh, Robert Jordan, etc.
Opportunity cost. I may not re-read every book on my shelves. But there is the potential that I might want to read any particular book. If it isn't on my shelf, then instead of reading that book at 9 PM I will read a different book, one I might not like as well. I certainly will not get dressed, drive 20 minutes to the library or bookstore and borrow/buy that book.
Most of that goes for housing, food and transportation. A lot of the rest gets spent on entertainment.
For some people it's booze, smokes, movies and 50" widescreen TV's to watch football. For a few, it's books instead.
I myself spend my entire entertainment budget on computer gizmos and books. I probably get a couple books every week, so that's a hundred books a year and maybe $3,000 if they were all hardcover, which they are not.
With a new architecture and a new market niche (mostly embedded systems and mission-critical systems), they would leave Intel in the dirt. So what about that Geode? Not embedded and niche enough?
How about a company like ClearSpeed? Why aren't you using their chips? They're awesomely fast, after all, and completely non-i386.
That's the problem right there. Why aren't you running an Itanium chip? Or Niagra? Because they aren't compatible with your software and they're expensive because they're not mass produced at the same levels.
AMD cannot develop a revolutionary new architecture because it wouldn't do any good. Consumers do not want revolutionary. Intel and HP spent billions on Itanium. It's a great chip, but the money isn't there.
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I agree. 2008 makes a great workstation. However, the price tag is a bit steep. I get it at work as part of a MSDN subscription. I've also heard you can pick it up free if you go to certain Microsoft marketing events.
It isn't only price, it is freedom of choice. What could be more pro-choice, more about the freedom to control your own body than to pick who you choose to drive you around?
There is always a trade-off between safety and freedom and we should always lean toward freedom. Freedom in this case is allow customers to choose, anywhere between cheap unregulated drivers in a rickshaw to bonded, insured highly trained gun toting bodyguard chauffeurs driving armored Suburbans.
If the customer freely chooses to ride with the 16 year old male in a Pinto with a giant spoiler bolted to the back, and it blows up in a fireball of gasoline and NO2, scarring them for life, ITS THEIR OWN FAULT and NO, the government should NOT DO SOMETHING.
My point was that taxes subsidize all of the things I listed. Very large amounts of Interstate money go to the "red" states, more than they could pay for on their own. Tax money also subsidizes farms and parks.
As for "income redistribution", the GOP is against it because it gets votes. I'm certainly not in favor of giving my tax dollars away in exchange for nothing at all. The deal is that we GET something in exchange for taxes. If I wanted to give my money to some loser begging for it on the corner, I would do that myself. I'm against corporate welfare too.
That is also why "income redistribution" to the rural states in exchange for services is not the same thing as giving it to poor people (hah! If they're not living 12 to an apartment like Mexican illegal immigrants how poor can they be!?) in exchange for nothing at all.
That was the point.
Now, if those people getting paid tax dollars had to *work* for it, out building roads or cleaning city parks, then I'd feel I was getting something for my taxes and it wouldn't leave such a bad taste in my (and many other people's) mouth about "income redistribution."
And what's this crap about the "GOP base?" Are you aware that in many of the "blue" states the margin is very thin? There's nearly as many Republican voters as Democrat in many of them and a little rejiggering of the district lines would shift them into "red". California, for example, has *large* numbers of Republican voters, and we all know about Florida which flipped to Bush by a very thin margin. If you count noses, there are probably more Republican voters in "blue" states than in the "red" states.
I suppose the "blue" states would be happy to do without beef, corn and wheat, never visit a national park like Yellowstone, not have Interstates to move goods, and all the other things the "red" states do for them?
From the SQLite link: "Some historical versions of Linux contain versions of fsync() which are no-ops on some filesystems"
On Linux systems in the last two to three years at least, using ext3, reiserfs, reiser4 or xfs, fsync() is not a no-op and does commit data to disk oxide.
So "Recent versions of Linux contain versions of fsync() which are fully functional on most filesystems." would be a much better way to put it, and it explains why Linux appears slow in database benchmarks against OS X.
It's just that they way you put it made it sound as if Linux routinely uses no-op implementations of fsync().
I do not know where you got the idea that Linux cheats fsync() as a rule. It may, on some less-used file systems, but fsync() on the ext3, reiserfs and reiser4 (those three I know personally) and I believe XFS, does send a special barrier IO into the disk queue.
This barrier IO uses nice SCSI tricks with SCSI and nasty slow tricks with IDE and SATA. With those last two, the barrier flushes the disk buffer, sends the IO and flushes the disk buffer again, waiting to determine if any IO errors occurred.
This is very reliable and guarantees in-order write operations but is slow, slow, slow.
SCSI can generally run a barrier operation as part of the command queuing, so it doesn't slow down as much.
On ext3 the journal is also involved and fsync() generally has to write out and clear the entire journal before completing because ext3 has no way to pick out any particular prerequisite that applies to the file, and the journal must be written in-order.
If Linux didn't do the "real deal" for fsync(), there wouldn't have been so many Firefox 3 bug reports complaining about 30 second pauses on page loads -- caused by ext3 and fsync() being used by SQLite.
I am pretty sure Apple cheats on fsync which SQLite uses a lot. To get a real fsync from OS X you have to use the special secret F_FULLFSYNC fcntl.
"Cheat" may be too strong, but Linux fsync sends a command to disk to flush all disk buffers and OS X does not.
Pegging minimum wage to inflation would be insanely stupid.
Minimum wage is one of the things that *causes* inflation. (I have to pay you more to mow my lawn, now you have to pay me more to make your cheeseburger.)
Never create a positive feedback loop.
Why are you upset with people who follow the laws as written?
You should be upset with the corrupt politicians who write the laws. A federal tax code should fit into a pamphlet and be readable and applicable by an 8th grader.
Instead we have a tax code that can break a table if carelessly dropped. All so that politicians can "tax the rich" without actually taxing them. They can be "for the people" AND get campaign contributions at the same time.
Two-faced wankers. I spit on them AND the morons who keep electing them by listening to what they say instead of what they actually do.
It could be Michael Flynn's Lodestar or Falling Stars.
As I remember it, one of the characters named Jimmy is a computer genius, hacker, and very wealthy man who doesn't actually think about how much money he has, and he collapses the market accidentally by ordering his computer systems to sell.
The only way a "clever" person could fool a transparent proxy would be to corrupt the DNS of the proxy.
Or perhaps you're talking about one of those things that uses DNS as a protocol transport?
query TXT GET.www.slashdot.org.proxy.home.server.org
query TXT 0..proxy.home.server.org
query TXT 1..proxy.home.server.org
2,3,4,5,...,session_end.
Like that?
Most of these wireless AP thingies have a DNS proxy included already, it gets used to redirect people to the AP IP for the usage agreement page.
I was going to recommend this also. Dynamic code patching is a very powerful tool and can remove the need for thousands of explicit "if(debug) log;" calls.
Virtual machines like the JVM can do this too.
QoS is the future. Net neutrality has to go or the net will suck forever.
Push for rules on how QoS is allowed to affect traffic, instead of pushing for neutrality.
Not for the ISP to drop packets, but for your QoS router to do it. If you drop packets, TCP will blame it on network congestion and slow down.
Yes, and delaying ACK or dropping inbound packets will help...but only for long-running TCP sessions.
UDP or IP protocols do not care at all, and TCP sessions don't slow down until they realize packets are being lost which can take up to 10 packets per connection.
So when remote BT clients hit with 6 incoming TCP sessions, that is at least 60 packets without any rate limit. And BT will do that over and over again.
It could be pretty useful for the U.S.
I also believe they'd get a lot of takers if they made the client available to install.
Call it CyberWar@Home.
Give it a lot of stats to brag about:
"My system helped DDOS 1,000 Chinese owned bots and helped break over 150 bot-net control keys. Go USA!"
You can get perfect positional audio with headphones that have a head position tracker. Not otherwise.
See, your brain is always comparing the left and right volume of discrete sounds and knows that when you turn your head left, sounds behind you should get louder. If they do not, then your sound position sense is confused.
Most people will unconciously turn their head when trying to pin down a sound location.
One major change is in our computer displays. Today I'm running a 1920x1200 24" and a 1280x1024 19" monitor at 24-bit color with 8-bit alpha. I've got LCD sub-pixel anti-aliased fonts. Not only that, but Vista is holding the contents of each window in video RAM so it can do effects and doesn't need a repaint. I'm not doing it right now but I often play video as my desktop background.
All of that takes some serious RAM and CPU.
I don't know about you, but I don't want to go back to 8-bit color at 640x480 or even 16-bit at 800x600. If I had to go back that far I'd just take a 132 column green-screen terminal.
No.
And what's slow about Download Manager? As far as I can tell, it downloads there just as quickly as it would on the page. It pops up once, then I click it back under the browser window and it stays under there, happily ignored by me.
I would guess you're not a developer?
Exactly how would you go about debugging a problem that you cannot reproduce, you don't have a clear idea of the environment it was running in, and the report is from software so old (to you as a developer) that you don't even remember how that version works?
One technique is adding debugging logs, but for some reason users also hate programs that run dog-slow and produce a half-gig of log files.
You might be polite and helpful the first dozen times...but it wears off and if you're working for free, the desire to help in a polite fashion disappears in oh, about a week.
Actually, I can say that even if you're getting paid very well for it, you still end up hating your users but you learn how to fake it.
100k? You only wish!
Most web pages seem to have images, which all together add up to more than 100k. Then there's the DOM tree, the Javascript libraries, all the script state with variables, objects, etc. There's IFRAMEs and OBJECTs.
Lots more than just the surface.
That'd be with a 8-bit 640x480 screen, not 1920x1200, 24-bit color with 8-bit alpha channel.
I collect books and keep them for a combination of reasons.
I like to have collections of things. There is pleasure in owning every book Robert Heinlein ever published, the complete Harry Potter set, all of C.J. Cherryh, Robert Jordan, etc.
Opportunity cost. I may not re-read every book on my shelves. But there is the potential that I might want to read any particular book. If it isn't on my shelf, then instead of reading that book at 9 PM I will read a different book, one I might not like as well. I certainly will not get dressed, drive 20 minutes to the library or bookstore and borrow/buy that book.
Say you make $30,000 a year after taxes.
Most of that goes for housing, food and transportation. A lot of the rest gets spent on entertainment.
For some people it's booze, smokes, movies and 50" widescreen TV's to watch football. For a few, it's books instead.
I myself spend my entire entertainment budget on computer gizmos and books. I probably get a couple books every week, so that's a hundred books a year and maybe $3,000 if they were all hardcover, which they are not.
Over 10-15 years the books really add up.
How about a company like ClearSpeed? Why aren't you using their chips? They're awesomely fast, after all, and completely non-i386.
That's the problem right there. Why aren't you running an Itanium chip? Or Niagra? Because they aren't compatible with your software and they're expensive because they're not mass produced at the same levels.
AMD cannot develop a revolutionary new architecture because it wouldn't do any good. Consumers do not want revolutionary. Intel and HP spent billions on Itanium. It's a great chip, but the money isn't there.