Of course, the end-user experience with DSL isn't quite as polished, easy or complete as it is with a 700MB Ubuntu CD. Don't get me wrong - I love DSL and have used it for a lot of things (you need a 1GB usb stick to fit Ubuntu on...) - but it's really not the right thing to recommend for non-technical people to try linux with.
What's even more impressive is the hoops that Dell will jump through to avoid even admitting there is a problem with an nVidia driver. It still hasn't been updated, I don't think it ever will.
C is just a thin veneer on top of assembler. Thin, and deliciously cripsy! (I love C, really, I do - but as a tutor I see students write these sorts of things accidentally all the time, which really adds to the "plausible deniability" aspect of the comp).
These sort of concurrency issues are bad enough when they're bug in your *own* code. When it's stuff in other apps producing what appears to be strange behaviour in your own (perfectly fine) code, that's a BIG problem.
This sort of issue wouldn't survive for a week on Linux.
I have a Billion 7404-VGPM. They're a pretty popular brand here in Australia (at least among tech-savvy customers) as they offer a lot of high-end features (VoIP, QoS, etc) for budget prices. It's actually cheaper in most cases to pick up a Billion than to grab a Linksys and run DD-WRT on it (which was my last setup).
symbolic manipulation within formally defined systems I find myself using Maple for that all the time these days. I find my skills at finding derivatives and integrals are weaker than they were 18 or so months ago. It's just a matter of laziness on my part: I could spend a few billion clock cycles on my laptop, or a I find a pen and paper and do it myself. The laptop is quicker and requires less effort on my part...
ISDN is only 128kbps (and that's dual-channel!) though. This proposed solution is much faster.
A lot of people I know refer to ISDN as the "Incredibly Slow Digital Network".
Re:fuel costs still not high enough priority
on
Big Rigs Go High Tech
·
· Score: 1, Insightful
Aluminum is popular in flatbed trailers that can be upward of 100% aluminum and many trailers are of a mixed construction of both aluminum and steel. Upward of 100% aluminum? I'm sure there are some chemists who'd love to heard about how they do that!
You do realise they're not capping you to dialup speeds, more like 1mbit down I think you need a reminder of just how slow dialup is. Even counting dual-channel ISDN as dialup you're still too fast by a factor of 8.
I know three people who've purchased the 4G Linux eeePC. Not one is running the default Xandros any more - two of them are now running XP, and the other Ubuntu 8.04.
Hardy runs really well on the eeePC once you've got it installed (compiz works perfectly out-of-the-box too). Installing it requires either a USB CD-ROM drive or DD'ing an image onto a USB stick but it's worth it because you end up with a much more usable machine. Only downside is that some of the Fn keys (e.g. volume) don't work (apparently there's some asus ACPI module you can build and modprobe that fixes that though).
If you live anywhere else in Australia, hit staticICE and search for the lowest price. I just wish they had an option for like eBay's "Sort by lowest price + shipping".
I don't think you do, because just before that you said "newValue does not alwasy equal value.. even though it should".
Perhaps you read up on how floating point numbers work, and what you're asking the computer for when you use syntax like that. Unsurprisingly, it has the same behaviour in C, with gcc on my Athlon64 running linux:
#include// Why does slashdot eat my less-than stdio.h greater-than when I'm in plain-old-text mode?
I know you've been modded funny, but some people are probably wondering - when talking about transistors, "length" is how far electrons have to travel through the transistor, and "width" is the other dimension (effectively how many electrons can travel through the transistor at the same time). Resistance is proportional to length and inversely proportional to width.
I'm currently doing a course with VHDL which I'm told borrows most of its syntax from Ada, and I can't stand it.
It's not the whole "you're designing hardware, everything happens at once, concurrency-gone-mad" aspect, I got my head properly around that in the first couple of weeks. It's just the utterly horrible syntax and the ridiculous hoops it forces you to jump through.
Want to declare an array of bits? Sure, that's one line. Want an array of arrays of bits? Now you have to declare a new type first.
Adding two numbers, and want to know if there's an overflow? You have to pad out the numbers to include the extra bit.
There's absolutely no consistency in when you need brackets, semicolons, commas or something else.
You have to do *two* casts if you want to use a string of bits as an index to an array. (There's heaps of really stupid type incompatibility stuff).
One thing that's specific to VHDL: Ok, you've given us the ability to create arrays which are indexed backwards - why on FSM's good Earth can't we slice an array backwards?
Your plan sounds a lot like the a few Australian ISPs tried a few years ago: have everyone in a priority queue, and your packets have a lower priority the more you download. It obviously didn't work out - I think it was only offered for a couple of months, and only by a couple of ISPs. IIRC the problem was network latency went to hell because the links were always saturated - even if your packet got bumped to the top of the queue it still had to be in the queue for a moment and that added latency. That, and it totally screwed with the normal practise of trying to ensure the network was NEVER saturated (which is the whole reason why I'm not with a budget ISP to start with).
I have to second that - if you're using it as a monitor, a 720p display is a 17" 4:3 LCD with the top and the bottom cut off. Also, many HDTV have really wacky resolutions. They'll claim to support "Full HD" a.k.a. 1080p but really the resolution of the panel will be 1024x768 anamorphic (I guess the logic works something like "it's more than 720 lines of resolution -> it's 1080! no-one cares about horizontal resolution!").
Not here (Australia) they don't. For some reason the alternatives are all ridiculously much more expensive.
Creative X-Fi Audio: $85 M-Audio Revolution 5.1: $180, and only available in a handful of shops nation-wide (and only in one state at that). ASUS XONAR D2X: $200, but much more widely available than the m-audio. Razer Barracuda AC-1: $195. (Prices from http://staticice.com.au/ )
Add to that the fact that most people think spending $80 on a sound card is a lot (and well, that's what my Revolution 5.1 cost me when I got a friend of mine to buy one in the US) and that Creative is the only brand that people recognize for sound cards... it's pretty easy to see why they have the market cornered.
Ignoring that the fastest DDR timings were 2-2-2-5, and 2-2-2-6 was likely to get you better performance, you're forgetting that timings are measured in clock cycles.
Seeing as modern RAM runs much, much faster than 400MHz (where DDR topped out), in terms of actual time spent waiting, that 3-4-4 DDR2 (assuming it's at least DDR2-800 a.k.a PC-6400) has lower latency than your precious 2-2-2 DDR. Of course if you really care about memory latency, you'll want your memory controller to be on-die with your CPU, which for now means AMD. Strangely enough, Intel systems seem to be a lot faster and AMD ones right now... methinks memory latency isn't the giant issue you're making it out to be.
I'm currently doing a digital logic design course doing VHDL, and I keep thinking the software engineers should have to learn this stuff. It really makes you think about concurrent processes properly - everything happens at the same time. Aren't we headed for excessive numbers of CPU cores and a dearth of people capable of writing code that will actually use them?
The Dell 2407 HC has a viewing angle of 178 degrees, both horizontal and vertical. I have one sitting on my desk right now. I haven't used a good CRT in years so I can't really respond to your comments about black levels, but there is no angle you can look at this thing and have the colours appear different - the bezel gets in the way first.
My LG L1730B sitting next to it though... that has some viewing angle problems.
Slashdot Mirror
Not too soon - just tasteless and done to death already.
Of course, the end-user experience with DSL isn't quite as polished, easy or complete as it is with a 700MB Ubuntu CD. Don't get me wrong - I love DSL and have used it for a lot of things (you need a 1GB usb stick to fit Ubuntu on...) - but it's really not the right thing to recommend for non-technical people to try linux with.
What's even more impressive is the hoops that Dell will jump through to avoid even admitting there is a problem with an nVidia driver. It still hasn't been updated, I don't think it ever will.
These sort of concurrency issues are bad enough when they're bug in your *own* code. When it's stuff in other apps producing what appears to be strange behaviour in your own (perfectly fine) code, that's a BIG problem.
This sort of issue wouldn't survive for a week on Linux.
I have a Billion 7404-VGPM. They're a pretty popular brand here in Australia (at least among tech-savvy customers) as they offer a lot of high-end features (VoIP, QoS, etc) for budget prices. It's actually cheaper in most cases to pick up a Billion than to grab a Linksys and run DD-WRT on it (which was my last setup).
ISDN is only 128kbps (and that's dual-channel!) though. This proposed solution is much faster.
A lot of people I know refer to ISDN as the "Incredibly Slow Digital Network".
Feel free to mod me redundant though, thank $DEITY we have an option for that!
I know three people who've purchased the 4G Linux eeePC. Not one is running the default Xandros any more - two of them are now running XP, and the other Ubuntu 8.04.
Hardy runs really well on the eeePC once you've got it installed (compiz works perfectly out-of-the-box too). Installing it requires either a USB CD-ROM drive or DD'ing an image onto a USB stick but it's worth it because you end up with a much more usable machine. Only downside is that some of the Fn keys (e.g. volume) don't work (apparently there's some asus ACPI module you can build and modprobe that fixes that though).
If you live anywhere else in Australia, hit staticICE and search for the lowest price. I just wish they had an option for like eBay's "Sort by lowest price + shipping".
"i understand floating point errors"
// Why does slashdot eat my less-than stdio.h greater-than when I'm in plain-old-text mode?
./a.out
I don't think you do, because just before that you said "newValue does not alwasy equal value.. even though it should".
Perhaps you read up on how floating point numbers work, and what you're asking the computer for when you use syntax like that. Unsurprisingly, it has the same behaviour in C, with gcc on my Athlon64 running linux:
#include
int main() {
double value = 8.12;
int upper = (int) (value * 100.0);
double newVal = ((double)upper) / 100.0;
printf("value: %g\n", value);
printf("upper: %d\n", upper);
printf("newVal: %g\n", newVal);
return 0;
}
cibyr@ciserv ~ $ gcc test.c
cibyr@ciserv ~ $
value: 8.12
upper: 811
newVal: 8.11
But picking 8.12 * 100 as your test case makes me think you're maybe not such an idiot... anyone else see the interesting properties of that?
I know you've been modded funny, but some people are probably wondering - when talking about transistors, "length" is how far electrons have to travel through the transistor, and "width" is the other dimension (effectively how many electrons can travel through the transistor at the same time). Resistance is proportional to length and inversely proportional to width.
You joke, but two years ago I kept my college room warm by running distributed climate prediction on all my boxes.
I'm currently doing a course with VHDL which I'm told borrows most of its syntax from Ada, and I can't stand it.
It's not the whole "you're designing hardware, everything happens at once, concurrency-gone-mad" aspect, I got my head properly around that in the first couple of weeks. It's just the utterly horrible syntax and the ridiculous hoops it forces you to jump through.
Want to declare an array of bits? Sure, that's one line. Want an array of arrays of bits? Now you have to declare a new type first.
Adding two numbers, and want to know if there's an overflow? You have to pad out the numbers to include the extra bit.
There's absolutely no consistency in when you need brackets, semicolons, commas or something else.
You have to do *two* casts if you want to use a string of bits as an index to an array. (There's heaps of really stupid type incompatibility stuff).
One thing that's specific to VHDL: Ok, you've given us the ability to create arrays which are indexed backwards - why on FSM's good Earth can't we slice an array backwards?
Your plan sounds a lot like the a few Australian ISPs tried a few years ago: have everyone in a priority queue, and your packets have a lower priority the more you download. It obviously didn't work out - I think it was only offered for a couple of months, and only by a couple of ISPs. IIRC the problem was network latency went to hell because the links were always saturated - even if your packet got bumped to the top of the queue it still had to be in the queue for a moment and that added latency. That, and it totally screwed with the normal practise of trying to ensure the network was NEVER saturated (which is the whole reason why I'm not with a budget ISP to start with).
I have to second that - if you're using it as a monitor, a 720p display is a 17" 4:3 LCD with the top and the bottom cut off. Also, many HDTV have really wacky resolutions. They'll claim to support "Full HD" a.k.a. 1080p but really the resolution of the panel will be 1024x768 anamorphic (I guess the logic works something like "it's more than 720 lines of resolution -> it's 1080! no-one cares about horizontal resolution!").
Not here (Australia) they don't. For some reason the alternatives are all ridiculously much more expensive.
Creative X-Fi Audio: $85
M-Audio Revolution 5.1: $180, and only available in a handful of shops nation-wide (and only in one state at that).
ASUS XONAR D2X: $200, but much more widely available than the m-audio.
Razer Barracuda AC-1: $195.
(Prices from http://staticice.com.au/ )
Add to that the fact that most people think spending $80 on a sound card is a lot (and well, that's what my Revolution 5.1 cost me when I got a friend of mine to buy one in the US) and that Creative is the only brand that people recognize for sound cards... it's pretty easy to see why they have the market cornered.
Ignoring that the fastest DDR timings were 2-2-2-5, and 2-2-2-6 was likely to get you better performance, you're forgetting that timings are measured in clock cycles.
Seeing as modern RAM runs much, much faster than 400MHz (where DDR topped out), in terms of actual time spent waiting, that 3-4-4 DDR2 (assuming it's at least DDR2-800 a.k.a PC-6400) has lower latency than your precious 2-2-2 DDR. Of course if you really care about memory latency, you'll want your memory controller to be on-die with your CPU, which for now means AMD. Strangely enough, Intel systems seem to be a lot faster and AMD ones right now... methinks memory latency isn't the giant issue you're making it out to be.
I'm currently doing a digital logic design course doing VHDL, and I keep thinking the software engineers should have to learn this stuff. It really makes you think about concurrent processes properly - everything happens at the same time. Aren't we headed for excessive numbers of CPU cores and a dearth of people capable of writing code that will actually use them?
The Dell 2407 HC has a viewing angle of 178 degrees, both horizontal and vertical. I have one sitting on my desk right now. I haven't used a good CRT in years so I can't really respond to your comments about black levels, but there is no angle you can look at this thing and have the colours appear different - the bezel gets in the way first.
My LG L1730B sitting next to it though... that has some viewing angle problems.
"The only secure computer is one that's not connected to the Internet. That's why I recommend Telstra Bigpond(TM)."
Anyone else find it interesting that they had screenshots from Wireshark (previously known as Ethereal) on the page?