The two cores on a Core 2 Duo *do* in fact share a cache- the Pentium Ds have two chip-exclusive (but L1-inclusive) L2 caches. Maybe you are on to something.
1. The Core 2's pipeline is 14 stages- Intel's love affair with long pipelines has at least taken a hiatus. 2. SSE2 calculations can be and are used for RAID 5 and 6, at least in the Linux MD kernel RAID. When I boot, MD does a short CPU benchmark of how fast different SSE and SSE2 algorithms do RAID 5 and 6 checksumming and then picks the fastest one to use. (I do not have MD set up, but it is included in the later kernel versions and runs its little test at boot.)
Your case certainly happens with small hometown makers- but just try to buy an OS-less consumer-grade machine from HP or Dell. That's why I'd support smaller vendors and mom 'n pops if I needed a laptop or other machine I couldn't build- the choice in OS and software is more than worth the small extra price.
People don't complain because they never see the real cost:
1. Office comes preinstalled on their computer and the price of the software is absorbed into the price of the computer as a whole. Also, OEMs get a little cheaper version of Office to tie to a new computer (Office 2003 Basic OEM is generally $99-150 instead of $250 for the full version in a store.) Some OEMs also check that Office box by default, so you won't necessarily even see that cost as extra...
2. They borrow Office CDs from friends who got them from work or they get it from their kid that got it from BitTorrent- so they pay nothing at all.
3. They share their kid's educational version that was $67, $100, or $119 instead of $250. The resultant $33-$60 a seat does not sound bad, but it's not 100% in accordance with the EULA either in most cases.
Only a handful of people actually go out and buy shrink-wrapped, boxed MSFT products- MSFT even says so themselves. They even mulled over not selling Vista in boxes- only on new computers.
Uh, unless you happen to be billions of consumers all rolled into one person posting AC, then the only person that you can vouch for how they pick a computer is YOURSELF. And I did say why there is a platform that is more dominant than others.
And as for the second part, Rosy and her daughters are calling you...
1. Exactly hat kind of computer do I need to fill the task at hand? Would a laptop, a desktop, or perhaps a workstation be the best fit? How much RAM, how many processors and how fast do they need to be, what's my budget, etc.
2. Once I know what kind of machine I need, then I look at prices and capabilities of different units. I tend to build my own but compare the prices on parts to OEMs to see what's the better deal.
3. Then I find an appropriate Linux distribution for the architecture and hardware and install it on the new machine.
Since I run Linux and almost all of my applications are gotten as source and compiled, whether I use an x86, PowerPC, SPARC, MIPS, or Itanium box is pretty much inconsequential. I tend to get x86 (lately x86_64) machines as they are less expensive and more powerful than the other arches except for larger servers. Often, it is very hard to find anything but x86 machines in the desktop/laptop/workstation segment except for the occasional overpriced Macintosh PowerPC unit or the woefully underpowered Pegasos PPC unit. That's why I get x86 "PCs" and probably why most of you here do- although I probably have more leeway in picking a less-common arch as my software runs on it while most peoples' software is 32-bit x86 only.
The only Linux distribution that didn't work 100% pretty much right off the bat was Debian. SuSE and Ubuntu worked fine with nary a device not working perfectly on my Gateway 600 notebook. Wireless, hotkeys, sound, CPU freq scaling, suspend- it all worked. I run Gentoo and of course there is no "out of the box" with Gentoo, but again, the laptop works fully and perfectly.
Exactly- that's what I meant. MacOS doesn't ship with the bash shell by default anyway (it's xterm.) However, you could likely install bash on a Mac if you wanted to.
I was hoping that they could get Linux on my little WRT54GC as the firmware on the 54GC is okay- miles better than the old D-Link 802.11b unit I had that bricked, but still could use some more stability and speed.
It works in KDE Konqueror 3.5.3 under Gentoo GNU/Linux. You just have to left-click and not middle-click, but Konq was smart enough to not let a middle click do anything when a window is a JavaScript-inited one and pops up a new window.
Well, you could use Linux From Scratch or Gentoo to simply compile and install anything you want exactly how you want to have it. Or you could install a Linux distribution in terminal-only "server" mode and then add from there with binary distributions that don't just dump a standard set of stuff upon install. Everybody is never going to be 100% pleased with any certain distribution's default setup because people have different needs. But the ability to pick and choose not only packages and programs but entire distributions is really Linux's strength. If somebody doesn't like Mandriva's setup but likes Slackware's, then they install Slack because it fits them and it works for them. At least we Linux users get the opportunity to choose the setup, default packages, and distribution of the OS we run. So the moral of the story is if you're the Slack user before, sure, say how and why you like Slack but DON'T go start a flamewar on/. about how Mandriva sucks because as long as a distribution is still being made, it must work for somebody and be their right tool for the job. If there was only one distro, that would literally make Linux just another Windows or MacOS X take-it-or-leave-it OS.
I have a 74GB Raptor and hdparm pegs its read speed at 69 MB/sec. My Caviar SE16 250GB has a 61 MB/sec read speed according to the same program, and my laptop's Hitachi 5K100 ATA/100 does 39 MB/sec. The difference between the Raptor and Caviar is 13%, and the Raptor was about 50% more expensive. The Hitachi and Raptor were both about $150, and the Raptor is 77% faster.
4x my butt.I don't buy that- and I even run Gentoo...
I used to live in such an area, and we only lived 6 miles away from the CO and no DSL for us. It conveniently stopped two miles away at the city limits (pop ~ 15,000.) You need to be within 20,000 feet (maximum) to get DSL at even crappy speeds, 15,000 feet to get anywhere near decent ones. I am betting that your "repeater" is really another CO, just fed with a fiber line from the other one that's 8 miles away, and the closer CO is 3 mi. away.
So we had the dish and crappy dialup that you were lucky if it was 30 kbps.
The university that I attend, the University of Missouri, has two new clusters for their bioinfomatics analyses. One is an SGI Altix 3700 Bx2 that has 64 Itanic 2 processors and 128GB RAM. It runs Suse Linux Eneterprise Server 9.0 Server, which is just the Novell-supported version of plain old SuSE Linux. The other is a 128-node Dell Xeon DC+DP cluster with 512 cores and 640GB RAM. It runs Rocks Linux 4.0, which is a specially-tweaked cluster version. The university is SO pro-Microsoft that it's not even funny, and yet they still use Linux or FBSD on all of their servers and HPCs except for the 36 Windows 2003 servers that run Exchange (there's one server per every 1000 e-mail addresses.) I think that says something about the limited viability of Windows in a server role except to run Microsoft programs and very small terminal and file servers.
The reason that the frequency scaling on the desktop came about is for two reasons:
1. When the TDP of chips hit over about 80W, heat became a problem and frequency scaling helped abate that. 2. The tech is needed in laptop chips. With the exception of the Pentium 4, all notebook chips are just modified desktop parts. So the manufacturers made one core and saw no reason to disable that feature, especially since #1 is true.
So frequency scaling just piggybacked its way onto the desktop. What's good for the goose (notebook) is good for the gander (desktop) and I am surprised that this hadn't shown up before.
And if anybody else wants to get into the game, such as a fiber or wireless provider, the telco and cable co sue. It happened here in Columbia, MO when the University of Missouri paid for and laid a big 160Mbit fiber loop from the campus to the backbone server a couple of miles away and was going to sell excess bandwidth to the residents to The local telephone monopoly, CenturyTel, sued them for "unfair competition" (sic) and won. They also made the university quit selling DSL to off-campus students, staff, and faculty. I guess $2M in contributions goes a long way in a town of 85,000...
Heh, don't think that Intel is the only one that tries to optimize SPEC scores, although if you WRITE SPEC to favor your chip... I have an AMD manual on compiler options and switches to use for best performance with AMD64 applications, and on the last pages, it has the GCC switches to compile SPEC2000 with to give the highest scores possible with the chip.
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It isn't the *lawyer's* blood in those pens...
The two cores on a Core 2 Duo *do* in fact share a cache- the Pentium Ds have two chip-exclusive (but L1-inclusive) L2 caches. Maybe you are on to something.
A few things:
1. The Core 2's pipeline is 14 stages- Intel's love affair with long pipelines has at least taken a hiatus.
2. SSE2 calculations can be and are used for RAID 5 and 6, at least in the Linux MD kernel RAID. When I boot, MD does a short CPU benchmark of how fast different SSE and SSE2 algorithms do RAID 5 and 6 checksumming and then picks the fastest one to use. (I do not have MD set up, but it is included in the later kernel versions and runs its little test at boot.)
Your case certainly happens with small hometown makers- but just try to buy an OS-less consumer-grade machine from HP or Dell. That's why I'd support smaller vendors and mom 'n pops if I needed a laptop or other machine I couldn't build- the choice in OS and software is more than worth the small extra price.
People don't complain because they never see the real cost:
1. Office comes preinstalled on their computer and the price of the software is absorbed into the price of the computer as a whole. Also, OEMs get a little cheaper version of Office to tie to a new computer (Office 2003 Basic OEM is generally $99-150 instead of $250 for the full version in a store.) Some OEMs also check that Office box by default, so you won't necessarily even see that cost as extra...
2. They borrow Office CDs from friends who got them from work or they get it from their kid that got it from BitTorrent- so they pay nothing at all.
3. They share their kid's educational version that was $67, $100, or $119 instead of $250. The resultant $33-$60 a seat does not sound bad, but it's not 100% in accordance with the EULA either in most cases.
Only a handful of people actually go out and buy shrink-wrapped, boxed MSFT products- MSFT even says so themselves. They even mulled over not selling Vista in boxes- only on new computers.
Uh, unless you happen to be billions of consumers all rolled into one person posting AC, then the only person that you can vouch for how they pick a computer is YOURSELF. And I did say why there is a platform that is more dominant than others.
And as for the second part, Rosy and her daughters are calling you...
What goes through my mind when I buy a computer:
1. Exactly hat kind of computer do I need to fill the task at hand? Would a laptop, a desktop, or perhaps a workstation be the best fit? How much RAM, how many processors and how fast do they need to be, what's my budget, etc.
2. Once I know what kind of machine I need, then I look at prices and capabilities of different units. I tend to build my own but compare the prices on parts to OEMs to see what's the better deal.
3. Then I find an appropriate Linux distribution for the architecture and hardware and install it on the new machine.
Since I run Linux and almost all of my applications are gotten as source and compiled, whether I use an x86, PowerPC, SPARC, MIPS, or Itanium box is pretty much inconsequential. I tend to get x86 (lately x86_64) machines as they are less expensive and more powerful than the other arches except for larger servers. Often, it is very hard to find anything but x86 machines in the desktop/laptop/workstation segment except for the occasional overpriced Macintosh PowerPC unit or the woefully underpowered Pegasos PPC unit. That's why I get x86 "PCs" and probably why most of you here do- although I probably have more leeway in picking a less-common arch as my software runs on it while most peoples' software is 32-bit x86 only.
The only Linux distribution that didn't work 100% pretty much right off the bat was Debian. SuSE and Ubuntu worked fine with nary a device not working perfectly on my Gateway 600 notebook. Wireless, hotkeys, sound, CPU freq scaling, suspend- it all worked. I run Gentoo and of course there is no "out of the box" with Gentoo, but again, the laptop works fully and perfectly.
Exactly- that's what I meant. MacOS doesn't ship with the bash shell by default anyway (it's xterm.) However, you could likely install bash on a Mac if you wanted to.
If you run Windows on a computer that needs to be secure...you have enough problems already and this will be just another in a LOOOOONG line of them.
The/magic Slash-dot sla\sh - and \hyphen/ generat-or.
People who do SERIOUS work can turn off the GUI and enjoy the speed and stability of a bash shell.
I was hoping that they could get Linux on my little WRT54GC as the firmware on the 54GC is okay- miles better than the old D-Link 802.11b unit I had that bricked, but still could use some more stability and speed.
It works in KDE Konqueror 3.5.3 under Gentoo GNU/Linux. You just have to left-click and not middle-click, but Konq was smart enough to not let a middle click do anything when a window is a JavaScript-inited one and pops up a new window.
Well, you could use Linux From Scratch or Gentoo to simply compile and install anything you want exactly how you want to have it. Or you could install a Linux distribution in terminal-only "server" mode and then add from there with binary distributions that don't just dump a standard set of stuff upon install. Everybody is never going to be 100% pleased with any certain distribution's default setup because people have different needs. But the ability to pick and choose not only packages and programs but entire distributions is really Linux's strength. If somebody doesn't like Mandriva's setup but likes Slackware's, then they install Slack because it fits them and it works for them. At least we Linux users get the opportunity to choose the setup, default packages, and distribution of the OS we run. So the moral of the story is if you're the Slack user before, sure, say how and why you like Slack but DON'T go start a flamewar on /. about how Mandriva sucks because as long as a distribution is still being made, it must work for somebody and be their right tool for the job. If there was only one distro, that would literally make Linux just another Windows or MacOS X take-it-or-leave-it OS.
I think Nano would be a better fit for Damn Small Linux, wouldn't it?
I have a 74GB Raptor and hdparm pegs its read speed at 69 MB/sec. My Caviar SE16 250GB has a 61 MB/sec read speed according to the same program, and my laptop's Hitachi 5K100 ATA/100 does 39 MB/sec. The difference between the Raptor and Caviar is 13%, and the Raptor was about 50% more expensive. The Hitachi and Raptor were both about $150, and the Raptor is 77% faster.
4x my butt.I don't buy that- and I even run Gentoo...
I used to live in such an area, and we only lived 6 miles away from the CO and no DSL for us. It conveniently stopped two miles away at the city limits (pop ~ 15,000.) You need to be within 20,000 feet (maximum) to get DSL at even crappy speeds, 15,000 feet to get anywhere near decent ones. I am betting that your "repeater" is really another CO, just fed with a fiber line from the other one that's 8 miles away, and the closer CO is 3 mi. away.
So we had the dish and crappy dialup that you were lucky if it was 30 kbps.
The SGI machines did have the ProPack installed, you are correct.
The university that I attend, the University of Missouri, has two new clusters for their bioinfomatics analyses. One is an SGI Altix 3700 Bx2 that has 64 Itanic 2 processors and 128GB RAM. It runs Suse Linux Eneterprise Server 9.0 Server, which is just the Novell-supported version of plain old SuSE Linux. The other is a 128-node Dell Xeon DC+DP cluster with 512 cores and 640GB RAM. It runs Rocks Linux 4.0, which is a specially-tweaked cluster version. The university is SO pro-Microsoft that it's not even funny, and yet they still use Linux or FBSD on all of their servers and HPCs except for the 36 Windows 2003 servers that run Exchange (there's one server per every 1000 e-mail addresses.) I think that says something about the limited viability of Windows in a server role except to run Microsoft programs and very small terminal and file servers.
Konqueror 3.5.3 on Gentoo 2006.0 AMD64 works fine except for the sidebar links.
The reason that the frequency scaling on the desktop came about is for two reasons:
1. When the TDP of chips hit over about 80W, heat became a problem and frequency scaling helped abate that.
2. The tech is needed in laptop chips. With the exception of the Pentium 4, all notebook chips are just modified desktop parts. So the manufacturers made one core and saw no reason to disable that feature, especially since #1 is true.
So frequency scaling just piggybacked its way onto the desktop. What's good for the goose (notebook) is good for the gander (desktop) and I am surprised that this hadn't shown up before.
And if anybody else wants to get into the game, such as a fiber or wireless provider, the telco and cable co sue. It happened here in Columbia, MO when the University of Missouri paid for and laid a big 160Mbit fiber loop from the campus to the backbone server a couple of miles away and was going to sell excess bandwidth to the residents to The local telephone monopoly, CenturyTel, sued them for "unfair competition" (sic) and won. They also made the university quit selling DSL to off-campus students, staff, and faculty. I guess $2M in contributions goes a long way in a town of 85,000...
Why isn't it reasonable that if a company is making money by using someone else's resources- they should have to pay for it?
Like the government bought-and-paid-for telecom networks, Internet, and the public radio spectrum?
Heh, don't think that Intel is the only one that tries to optimize SPEC scores, although if you WRITE SPEC to favor your chip... I have an AMD manual on compiler options and switches to use for best performance with AMD64 applications, and on the last pages, it has the GCC switches to compile SPEC2000 with to give the highest scores possible with the chip.