Each week and every week, more people are killed in the United States by tobacco than were killed in all of 9/11.
Each month and every month, more people are killed in the United States by car accidents than were killed in all of 9/11.
In response to 9/11, we invaded two countries and spent tens of billions of dollars and decades of accumulated political goodwill.
I'm curious why I don't see this kind of same action regarding seatbelt research, given that cars pose a threat many times greater than terrorists.
I guess seatbelts are harder to use to siphon tax money off into defense contractor wallets....("Why do we need the unbelivably expensive DINGLEBOPPER 9000?" "The terrrirsts!" "Oh, okay. I sure do hate them terrrirsts!" ) versus ("Why do we need the unbelivably expensive SeatLabs, Inc?" "Car wrecks!" "Screw that! I'm not paying for that!")
First, you must install a virus scanner. For the majority of users, this *is* a must, because they really aren't savvy about e-mail attachements, message spoofing, and shady-looking websites.
Fair enough. I have *never* had a passive virus scanner on my computer (and used an active one only briefly, the free Disinfectant from the Mac's glory days), but I can see this being plausible.
Then you need at least a software firewall, which pops up a prompt the first time each app request a network connection -- and the prompts aren't always very informative.
Bullshit. You do *not* need a personal firewall. The fact that AV companies managed to sell this nonsense to consumers always amazed me. Those things are more a source of problems than a fix, anyway, and they cause all kinds of interesting breakage in network applications. I'm comfortable playing with IPTables on my router, because I know enough to be able to diagnose any problems that I introduce on my network. The typical home user is the *last* person who should be screwing with the functioning of their network.
I think that most people, even self-proclaimed techies, still treat the firewall (especially the useless "personal firewall") as sort of a magic black box that brings safety. It can be a useful tool in particular situations, but it is *vastly* overused.
It's like me doing EE. I don't know much about EE, so when I build a circuit, I buy really fancy parts. They make me feel better, because they are higher quality. Now, in reality, there's no way that an audio circuit needs 1% accuracy in resistance or that a cap capable of sucking MHz-range noise out of a signal will be at all useful in such a circuit. However, it "feels better". The same applies to most computer users WRT utility software. Someone tells them that they need it, so they get it and feel happier. The herbal medicine industry is entirely based upon this premise.
When you aren't aware of the importance of shrinking down that huge "jpeg" you took with your digital camera before mass mailing it to all your friends and family who have email addresses
And the funny thing is that I *do* happily email those enormous high-resolution JPEGs out to family and friends (even those on modems). They aren't pulling this down over ZMODEM -- they can be doing other things while downloading it.
"Shit, my ABS, O/D, and OIL lights are on... what do they mean, and are any important?"
But you can go to a mechanic and he can reasonably reliably fix it for a small chunk of the cost of the car. Cars don't change that fast, they're (relatively) simple, and the industry is well understood.
With a computer, you've got enough yahoos who have no idea what they're doing running computer repair shops to fill a football stadium (sorry, folks on here that *do* know that they're talking about). And you get problems on a much more frequent basis. I use a Linux box, but simply from Firefox, I probably see an error dialog of one sort or another at *least* on an every-other-day basis. Maybe I don't have Flash installed, or maybe I needed to not reload a page in the middle of a website. I see error dialogs *far* more often at work on Windows machines. If my car started flashing new warning lights several times a day, yes, I'd be intimidated.
kilobytes - gigabytes : anyone sending snail mail knows that heavier things are harder to send. Analogies sometimes do work.
Do they know what "KB" or "kB" or "KiB" stand for when they show up in dialogs, though?
I kind of agree, though. Maybe you don't really know what data is or how computers work at all, but you should be able to at least know what the common SI prefixes are. To be fair, I think that "giga-" probably doesn't come up much in everyday life.
Javascript -- websites bring up errors saying that it needs to be enabled, and Javascript scripts frequently bring up error dialogs themselves.
Cars are built and then tested to kingdom come by competent engineers. There isn't *that* much change each year. There are a lot of people without much competence (and companies, sometimes quite large) writing bad software. I'll bet not a tenth of a percent of the "C++ programers" out there would be able to give coherent, correct answers in comp.lang.c++. Perl -- *maybe* Larry Wall knows all of perl's secrets. Win32? Yeah, right. And the more high-level the language and API, the more likely that a developer in it can kinda-sorta use it, but fails to understand lots of the details and implications of what he's doing (exception: many functional languages are high level, and you get lots of language freaks using them.)
When it comes down to it, computers are expensive, unreliable, changing at an incredible rate, frequently misunderstood, only recently supplied to the public at large, and absolutely, entirely essential. That's a heck of a combination.
Keep in mind that while Usenet is phenomenally valuable from an anthropological view, only the past few years are usually really useful -- it's rare that I find a greater-than-five-year-old post that is really useful, and I frequently use Google Groups.
If someone started up a new Usenet archiver, they could be a player in a couple of years -- and it really doesn't take much to archive Usenet other than the money to fund bandwidth and storage media.
You know, $30M to work on this problem is not actually that much.
This initiative may sound like some sort of new, high-tech-and-damaging-to-copyright-infringement-m ove, but the reality is that there has been vast amounts of money poured into research on ways to inhibit copyright infringement by many companies for a long, *long* time. Lots of these folks aren't even content providers, but would profit handsomely if their R&D division could produce a device/algorithm/whatever that could be used to stop piracy.
I remember speaking to one gentleman working in this area on watermarking. I pointed out some problems in his approach, and he sighed and said something along the lines of how everyone involved with working on copyright infringement knows that there isn't going to be any magic bullet. Companies will keep throwing money at this area, though, because of the potential sums of money involved.
The MPAA is mostly notable because they are willing to take more aggressive tactics than have been used in the past -- instead of simply defensive work, they have funded companies that disrupt P2P communication and the like. I still doubt very much that they are going to be able to release information in a viewable, audible form, yet keep that information from being replicated and spread.
With Allchin being superseded by a marketing/sales guy
Or they're switching into the mode that so many big tech companies have of "we aren't going to grow much more -- let's see how much we can squeeze our existing customers that are locked in?"
Gcc doesn't pick this up with an unreachable code warning, but it really should, since the test will always fail (since the uid-setting expression is always false).
Gcc's sanity-check-for-use-of-assignments-for-equality-t ests-in-loops doesn't pick it up either (I think that only handles very simple cases, anyway.)
Splint flags it as a boolean expression containing a non-boolean value, but unless you are an exceedingly anal coder, you probably have this warning off.
Yes, the large number of extremely stupid Berkeley college students who *are in the business of reselling laptops* and buy a laptop at fifteen cents on the dollar.
Don't get me wrong -- I'd be willing to believe that he wouldn't have purchased the thing if it had a big "I'm Stolen!" sign on the thing, but at some point, you're just working to get yourself some iota of justification to be able to buy the thing.
Also, keep in mind the number of people that buy laptops on eBay. You *know* that a hell of a lot of the laptops on there are stolen ones being fenced, but you buy anyway...because, hey, why do you care whether the thing was stolen?
I've pretty consistently found that people sticking the phrase "technologies" in random places are either trying to market something to me or don't know what they're talking about or both.
Are they using DHTML or not? Yes? Then why stick "technologies" at the end?
While I am fine with anyone who wants to be a transvestite taking that route, I have to say that this is the first time that I've seen someone called out for having problems for *not wanting* to be one.
I've heard (can't verify) that some of the "it's too loud" sensation comes from the distortion in the system. Buy a nice pair of headphones, no distortion, you don't get as much of the "it's too loud" sensation.
Me, I don't carry a mobile audio device. When I'm at my computer, I use Beyerdynamics DT770s (~$180 so a bit pricy, but comfortable and sturdy) and then just start at zero and turn the volume up until the sound is sufficient.
If I wanted to slap the face of the USA ___PEOPLE___ I'd fly a jet into the Statue of Liberty, the one true global symbol of all that is american.....
Actually, the Statue of Liberty was designed by and given to the US by the French (and the US wouldn't even pay for delivery initially, until Hearst and some others got in the act). I was kind of depressed watching the post-9/11 "Freedom Fries" debacle and lots of shots of politicians insulting the French while being interespersed with shots of the Statute of Liberty "still standing tall, despite the terrorists".
I guess it makes sense. Most people in this country have damn little education, and the Statue of Liberty makes a good rabble-rouser, but seriously, it was damn depressing.
If you *do* want to do high priority stuff on your box, both (regular) Linux and (regular Windows, without getting RTX or any Windows RTLinux equivalents) have "realtime" scheduling options (see the "Realtime" option in Windows Task Manager, or the sched_setscheduler(2) man page under Linux). These aren't actually hard realtime, but give you all the fun of being able to lock up your box (as per realtime systems do) without losing the ability to still run general-purpose applications. You won't get single-digit microsecond latency, but you won't be worrying about audio dropout either, and you get to do fun things like use general-purpose libraries, use sockets, use virtual memory and all the other stuff that you can't do in real-time code under RTLinux.
Okay, I'm going to clear this up near the top of the article.
RTLinux is a *Real Time Operating System*, a tiny kernel that runs the Linux kernel. It has a rather sexy interfact that allows you to write the non-RT code that interacts with it in the regular, Linux way. You also don't need to hassle with Wind River salesmen to use it. This makes it good.
There seems to be a significant misperception here as to what an RTOS is, and the extremely misleading article summary makes it worse.
An RTOS is an extremely specific tool designed to allow someone to write code with very harsh restrictions on it with very low latency. This is almost always used for control applications (telling servos when to fire accurately). You can't "run Quake in RTLinux" and just get more accurate times -- code running as real-time in RTLinux can do very little besides memory manipulation, basic computation, and some extremely limited I/O. RTOSes are powerful tools for solving a very limited set of problems which very few people on Slashdot have.
RTLinux lets you write very simple, limited code that runs in a real-time mode, and run it on the same machine as regular Linux applications. And communicate with them. That's it. Doesn't do anything to improve the regular ol' Linux applications.
RTOSes give very low latency to the code they run -- something happens, code to handle it gets fired off very quickly. Microsecond latency (*not* millisecond) is completely overkill for the kind of general-purpose video or whatever work that people here are thinking of, unless you're trying to build some sort of specialized embedded system that does something to a real-time feed -- and your hardware's going to be very specially designed for this.
There's a good reason that we don't use RTOSes in day-to-day work. They have bad throughput, and you can't *do* very much with them in real-time. They're good if you specifically have a latency constraint from the time one sensor triggers to the time I/O goes out to another device. They aren't going to avoid audio dropouts on your GNOME desktop. Real-time is a *bad thing* from most people's standpoint -- oh, and they're really easy to accidentally hang.
If you want something to get excited about for general purpose use, look at the preempt patches for 2.6. 2.6 Linux has better latency than Windows XP (2.4 had worse). This is not RTLinux, this is regular-ol-Linux-which-can-run-Quake. My understanding is that ALSA and JACK represent improvements in the general-purpose latency area.
Unless you are designing application logic for robotic control systems, or are interfacing with PLCs, RTLinux really doesn't benefit you (okay, I'm sure there's someone out there that has a different application, but Joe Hacker with his Gentoo box doesn't benefit directly from this).
Every time realtime systems come up on Slashdot, misperceptions of 'em seem to get worse.
* Single-digit microsecond latency is completely overkill for the general-purpose application stuff he's talking about. * Much as I like RTLinux (and much as I dislike Windows), RTLinux is a *real-time extension* for Linux. It is not stock Linux. It is most comparable to something like RTX, a real-time extension for Windows. * Many people here seem to have a "real time systems are like regular systems, just *better*!" impression. Real time systems (and this *includes* RTLinux) make *serious* sacrifices to gain in one particular area -- latency. There is a reason that people don't use real-time systems on a day-to-day basis. They generally impact throughput greatly. They have very tough constraints on what you can do -- you can't just "run Quake as a real-time task under RTLinux" -- you're limited to doing not much else besides memory manipulations and some very limited forms of I/O in real-time. Real-time systems exist to do things like control work, where you don't give a damn about much of anything but the latency in telling a servo to change speed. They suck for most other things. * Linux (not RTLinux, totally different applications) *is* arguably better in the latency department. My co-worker at work is doing some simulation work that depends on something that someone else wrote that really should have been done using real-time code. He's working in a truly real-time environment (with PLCs and high-speed motors involved). He's using Windows XP, and sees worst cases of something like 20 millisecond latency even with realtime scheduling on a high-speed box -- IIRC, Linux 2.6 can currently get around a quarter that. (FWIW, 2.4 had significantly worse latency than Windows.)
The editor should have edited out the stupid Windows XP comment or replace it with something meaningful. Not having done that, he hasn't done his job and I can only pass to him same compliments that I had for the submitter.
My concern is that it leads to even more misperception of real-time systems.
Remember, people. The preempt patches for Linux are a good thing for pretty much everyone -- 2.6 impacts general-purpose application latency at a level that a humany might pick it up (audio, video games, whatever). RTLinux is a completely different beast, and is a toolkit for designing highly specalized systems. There are damn few people on here who need to use RTLinux, and those who do know who they are.
Unless the second one is for redundancy, I confess to being deeply impressed that you have printing needs that exceed the max output rate of these printers.
We just need some print spooling software to distribute one print job over 1,000 printer servers (doable) and find some way for the printed pages to end up in the right order.
I suspect that if you are going to go to the trouble of buying a thousand printers (and I disagree with the grandparent post that this is a cost-effective idea), that you probably have print jobs that are large enough that you can send it in unit increments to the printer. If you're printing 10,000 500 page books, then you send one book at a time to each printer.
My guess is that the headline (which is in the mass media too, not just Slashdot) came from some conservative types who hope to foster enough outrage to get this practice banned before people become informed about it.
Slashdot Mirror
Each week and every week, more people are killed in the United States by tobacco than were killed in all of 9/11.
Each month and every month, more people are killed in the United States by car accidents than were killed in all of 9/11.
In response to 9/11, we invaded two countries and spent tens of billions of dollars and decades of accumulated political goodwill.
I'm curious why I don't see this kind of same action regarding seatbelt research, given that cars pose a threat many times greater than terrorists.
I guess seatbelts are harder to use to siphon tax money off into defense contractor wallets....("Why do we need the unbelivably expensive DINGLEBOPPER 9000?" "The terrrirsts!" "Oh, okay. I sure do hate them terrrirsts!" ) versus ("Why do we need the unbelivably expensive SeatLabs, Inc?" "Car wrecks!" "Screw that! I'm not paying for that!")
First, you must install a virus scanner. For the majority of users, this *is* a must, because they really aren't savvy about e-mail attachements, message spoofing, and shady-looking websites.
Fair enough. I have *never* had a passive virus scanner on my computer (and used an active one only briefly, the free Disinfectant from the Mac's glory days), but I can see this being plausible.
Then you need at least a software firewall, which pops up a prompt the first time each app request a network connection -- and the prompts aren't always very informative.
Bullshit. You do *not* need a personal firewall. The fact that AV companies managed to sell this nonsense to consumers always amazed me. Those things are more a source of problems than a fix, anyway, and they cause all kinds of interesting breakage in network applications. I'm comfortable playing with IPTables on my router, because I know enough to be able to diagnose any problems that I introduce on my network. The typical home user is the *last* person who should be screwing with the functioning of their network.
I think that most people, even self-proclaimed techies, still treat the firewall (especially the useless "personal firewall") as sort of a magic black box that brings safety. It can be a useful tool in particular situations, but it is *vastly* overused.
It's like me doing EE. I don't know much about EE, so when I build a circuit, I buy really fancy parts. They make me feel better, because they are higher quality. Now, in reality, there's no way that an audio circuit needs 1% accuracy in resistance or that a cap capable of sucking MHz-range noise out of a signal will be at all useful in such a circuit. However, it "feels better". The same applies to most computer users WRT utility software. Someone tells them that they need it, so they get it and feel happier. The herbal medicine industry is entirely based upon this premise.
When you aren't aware of the importance of shrinking down that huge "jpeg" you took with your digital camera before mass mailing it to all your friends and family who have email addresses
And the funny thing is that I *do* happily email those enormous high-resolution JPEGs out to family and friends (even those on modems). They aren't pulling this down over ZMODEM -- they can be doing other things while downloading it.
"Shit, my ABS, O/D, and OIL lights are on... what do they mean, and are any important?"
But you can go to a mechanic and he can reasonably reliably fix it for a small chunk of the cost of the car. Cars don't change that fast, they're (relatively) simple, and the industry is well understood.
With a computer, you've got enough yahoos who have no idea what they're doing running computer repair shops to fill a football stadium (sorry, folks on here that *do* know that they're talking about). And you get problems on a much more frequent basis. I use a Linux box, but simply from Firefox, I probably see an error dialog of one sort or another at *least* on an every-other-day basis. Maybe I don't have Flash installed, or maybe I needed to not reload a page in the middle of a website. I see error dialogs *far* more often at work on Windows machines. If my car started flashing new warning lights several times a day, yes, I'd be intimidated.
kilobytes - gigabytes : anyone sending snail mail knows that heavier things are harder to send. Analogies sometimes do work.
Do they know what "KB" or "kB" or "KiB" stand for when they show up in dialogs, though?
I kind of agree, though. Maybe you don't really know what data is or how computers work at all, but you should be able to at least know what the common SI prefixes are. To be fair, I think that "giga-" probably doesn't come up much in everyday life.
Javascript -- websites bring up errors saying that it needs to be enabled, and Javascript scripts frequently bring up error dialogs themselves.
Cars are built and then tested to kingdom come by competent engineers. There isn't *that* much change each year. There are a lot of people without much competence (and companies, sometimes quite large) writing bad software. I'll bet not a tenth of a percent of the "C++ programers" out there would be able to give coherent, correct answers in comp.lang.c++. Perl -- *maybe* Larry Wall knows all of perl's secrets. Win32? Yeah, right. And the more high-level the language and API, the more likely that a developer in it can kinda-sorta use it, but fails to understand lots of the details and implications of what he's doing (exception: many functional languages are high level, and you get lots of language freaks using them.)
When it comes down to it, computers are expensive, unreliable, changing at an incredible rate, frequently misunderstood, only recently supplied to the public at large, and absolutely, entirely essential. That's a heck of a combination.
You know, there are some folks out there with a patent on eliptic curve encryption -- the stuff that the folks in our military use products based on.
Sure would be fun for a lot of folks to make a product based on it, sell it to the government, and give the patentholders the finger.
"Damn kids, always sneaking onto my property at night..."
Keep in mind that while Usenet is phenomenally valuable from an anthropological view, only the past few years are usually really useful -- it's rare that I find a greater-than-five-year-old post that is really useful, and I frequently use Google Groups.
If someone started up a new Usenet archiver, they could be a player in a couple of years -- and it really doesn't take much to archive Usenet other than the money to fund bandwidth and storage media.
You know, $30M to work on this problem is not actually that much.
m ove, but the reality is that there has been vast amounts of money poured into research on ways to inhibit copyright infringement by many companies for a long, *long* time. Lots of these folks aren't even content providers, but would profit handsomely if their R&D division could produce a device/algorithm/whatever that could be used to stop piracy.
This initiative may sound like some sort of new, high-tech-and-damaging-to-copyright-infringement-
I remember speaking to one gentleman working in this area on watermarking. I pointed out some problems in his approach, and he sighed and said something along the lines of how everyone involved with working on copyright infringement knows that there isn't going to be any magic bullet. Companies will keep throwing money at this area, though, because of the potential sums of money involved.
The MPAA is mostly notable because they are willing to take more aggressive tactics than have been used in the past -- instead of simply defensive work, they have funded companies that disrupt P2P communication and the like. I still doubt very much that they are going to be able to release information in a viewable, audible form, yet keep that information from being replicated and spread.
With Allchin being superseded by a marketing/sales guy
Or they're switching into the mode that so many big tech companies have of "we aren't going to grow much more -- let's see how much we can squeeze our existing customers that are locked in?"
Gcc doesn't pick this up with an unreachable code warning, but it really should, since the test will always fail (since the uid-setting expression is always false).
t ests-in-loops doesn't pick it up either (I think that only handles very simple cases, anyway.)
Gcc's sanity-check-for-use-of-assignments-for-equality-
Splint flags it as a boolean expression containing a non-boolean value, but unless you are an exceedingly anal coder, you probably have this warning off.
Only in Japan would Linux be a Japanese schoolgirl.
Java runs everywhere, but it makes more money for IBM and Oracle than it does for Sun ;-)
A slow, RAM-hungry, but "scalable" language doesn't make money for a hardware vendor?
You've got to be kidding.
Yes, the large number of extremely stupid Berkeley college students who *are in the business of reselling laptops* and buy a laptop at fifteen cents on the dollar.
Don't get me wrong -- I'd be willing to believe that he wouldn't have purchased the thing if it had a big "I'm Stolen!" sign on the thing, but at some point, you're just working to get yourself some iota of justification to be able to buy the thing.
Also, keep in mind the number of people that buy laptops on eBay. You *know* that a hell of a lot of the laptops on there are stolen ones being fenced, but you buy anyway...because, hey, why do you care whether the thing was stolen?
I've pretty consistently found that people sticking the phrase "technologies" in random places are either trying to market something to me or don't know what they're talking about or both.
Are they using DHTML or not? Yes? Then why stick "technologies" at the end?
Dell can go back to selling their overpriced PCs at Christmas
Okay, I have my share of gripes with Dell...but *overpriced*? You'd have to be a pretty ept system builder to beat Dell on price.
While I am fine with anyone who wants to be a transvestite taking that route, I have to say that this is the first time that I've seen someone called out for having problems for *not wanting* to be one.
I've heard (can't verify) that some of the "it's too loud" sensation comes from the distortion in the system. Buy a nice pair of headphones, no distortion, you don't get as much of the "it's too loud" sensation.
Me, I don't carry a mobile audio device. When I'm at my computer, I use Beyerdynamics DT770s (~$180 so a bit pricy, but comfortable and sturdy) and then just start at zero and turn the volume up until the sound is sufficient.
If I wanted to slap the face of the USA ___PEOPLE___ I'd fly a jet into the Statue of Liberty, the one true global symbol of all that is american.....
Actually, the Statue of Liberty was designed by and given to the US by the French (and the US wouldn't even pay for delivery initially, until Hearst and some others got in the act). I was kind of depressed watching the post-9/11 "Freedom Fries" debacle and lots of shots of politicians insulting the French while being interespersed with shots of the Statute of Liberty "still standing tall, despite the terrorists".
I guess it makes sense. Most people in this country have damn little education, and the Statue of Liberty makes a good rabble-rouser, but seriously, it was damn depressing.
If you *do* want to do high priority stuff on your box, both (regular) Linux and (regular Windows, without getting RTX or any Windows RTLinux equivalents) have "realtime" scheduling options (see the "Realtime" option in Windows Task Manager, or the sched_setscheduler(2) man page under Linux). These aren't actually hard realtime, but give you all the fun of being able to lock up your box (as per realtime systems do) without losing the ability to still run general-purpose applications. You won't get single-digit microsecond latency, but you won't be worrying about audio dropout either, and you get to do fun things like use general-purpose libraries, use sockets, use virtual memory and all the other stuff that you can't do in real-time code under RTLinux.
Okay, I'm going to clear this up near the top of the article.
RTLinux is a *Real Time Operating System*, a tiny kernel that runs the Linux kernel. It has a rather sexy interfact that allows you to write the non-RT code that interacts with it in the regular, Linux way. You also don't need to hassle with Wind River salesmen to use it. This makes it good.
There seems to be a significant misperception here as to what an RTOS is, and the extremely misleading article summary makes it worse.
An RTOS is an extremely specific tool designed to allow someone to write code with very harsh restrictions on it with very low latency. This is almost always used for control applications (telling servos when to fire accurately). You can't "run Quake in RTLinux" and just get more accurate times -- code running as real-time in RTLinux can do very little besides memory manipulation, basic computation, and some extremely limited I/O. RTOSes are powerful tools for solving a very limited set of problems which very few people on Slashdot have.
RTLinux lets you write very simple, limited code that runs in a real-time mode, and run it on the same machine as regular Linux applications. And communicate with them. That's it. Doesn't do anything to improve the regular ol' Linux applications.
RTOSes give very low latency to the code they run -- something happens, code to handle it gets fired off very quickly. Microsecond latency (*not* millisecond) is completely overkill for the kind of general-purpose video or whatever work that people here are thinking of, unless you're trying to build some sort of specialized embedded system that does something to a real-time feed -- and your hardware's going to be very specially designed for this.
There's a good reason that we don't use RTOSes in day-to-day work. They have bad throughput, and you can't *do* very much with them in real-time. They're good if you specifically have a latency constraint from the time one sensor triggers to the time I/O goes out to another device. They aren't going to avoid audio dropouts on your GNOME desktop. Real-time is a *bad thing* from most people's standpoint -- oh, and they're really easy to accidentally hang.
If you want something to get excited about for general purpose use, look at the preempt patches for 2.6. 2.6 Linux has better latency than Windows XP (2.4 had worse). This is not RTLinux, this is regular-ol-Linux-which-can-run-Quake. My understanding is that ALSA and JACK represent improvements in the general-purpose latency area.
Unless you are designing application logic for robotic control systems, or are interfacing with PLCs, RTLinux really doesn't benefit you (okay, I'm sure there's someone out there that has a different application, but Joe Hacker with his Gentoo box doesn't benefit directly from this).
Every time realtime systems come up on Slashdot, misperceptions of 'em seem to get worse.
A couple more points:
* Single-digit microsecond latency is completely overkill for the general-purpose application stuff he's talking about.
* Much as I like RTLinux (and much as I dislike Windows), RTLinux is a *real-time extension* for Linux. It is not stock Linux. It is most comparable to something like RTX, a real-time extension for Windows.
* Many people here seem to have a "real time systems are like regular systems, just *better*!" impression. Real time systems (and this *includes* RTLinux) make *serious* sacrifices to gain in one particular area -- latency. There is a reason that people don't use real-time systems on a day-to-day basis. They generally impact throughput greatly. They have very tough constraints on what you can do -- you can't just "run Quake as a real-time task under RTLinux" -- you're limited to doing not much else besides memory manipulations and some very limited forms of I/O in real-time. Real-time systems exist to do things like control work, where you don't give a damn about much of anything but the latency in telling a servo to change speed. They suck for most other things.
* Linux (not RTLinux, totally different applications) *is* arguably better in the latency department. My co-worker at work is doing some simulation work that depends on something that someone else wrote that really should have been done using real-time code. He's working in a truly real-time environment (with PLCs and high-speed motors involved). He's using Windows XP, and sees worst cases of something like 20 millisecond latency even with realtime scheduling on a high-speed box -- IIRC, Linux 2.6 can currently get around a quarter that. (FWIW, 2.4 had significantly worse latency than Windows.)
The editor should have edited out the stupid Windows XP comment or replace it with something meaningful. Not having done that, he hasn't done his job and I can only pass to him same compliments that I had for the submitter.
My concern is that it leads to even more misperception of real-time systems.
Remember, people. The preempt patches for Linux are a good thing for pretty much everyone -- 2.6 impacts general-purpose application latency at a level that a humany might pick it up (audio, video games, whatever). RTLinux is a completely different beast, and is a toolkit for designing highly specalized systems. There are damn few people on here who need to use RTLinux, and those who do know who they are.
Unless the second one is for redundancy, I confess to being deeply impressed that you have printing needs that exceed the max output rate of these printers.
We just need some print spooling software to distribute one print job over 1,000 printer servers (doable) and find some way for the printed pages to end up in the right order.
I suspect that if you are going to go to the trouble of buying a thousand printers (and I disagree with the grandparent post that this is a cost-effective idea), that you probably have print jobs that are large enough that you can send it in unit increments to the printer. If you're printing 10,000 500 page books, then you send one book at a time to each printer.
I don't see why it should be considered part of the cost of the incident. It's something that had to be done either before or after.
My guess is that the headline (which is in the mass media too, not just Slashdot) came from some conservative types who hope to foster enough outrage to get this practice banned before people become informed about it.
I don't know about you but that sounds kind sick to me.
Why, because it's different?