I got the point about half the mem being actually free (paged out). Thanks, that clears up the issue somewhat. The point is, before I tried java apps, I was fine on a 256MB system and never needed to enable swap space. So I never did. Then suddenly I got this whooping app loading up all my 512 RAM and then thrashing like hell - so, naturally I said WTF. It is kind of tricky - without swap space that RAM was actually wasted.
D'oh. Thanks for clearing up one misunderstanding about Java. Still, Java GUIs seem kind of slow to respond, compared to native stuff. Oh well.
Please, stop talking to me like I am some kind of moron:). Maybe I look like one, *shrug*.
I haven't tried a desktop java app that wasn't slow. What comes to mind now: azureus and Oracle developer. Having both Azureus and mozilla open in my usual browsing mode (lots of pics) loads up my system to a crawl. Why? Azureus takes 400mb of RAM and firefox uses the rest. Same thing with Mozilla + Oracle Developer. I cannot even imagine running the three of them together. (I have 512mb RAM on my computer).
I know what a java server app is. It is fast. I do not say it is not, on a dual xeon with 1Mb of CPU cache and 2Gb of RAM. This is not the point. I was talking about desktop apps on desktop computers.
I know about RSS and paged-out memory, I assure you this is not the case. Gkrellm monitor shows me RSS usage so I am sure of my numbers. As a C developer I probably know more about RSS than you.
The only reason I do not like Java on my desktop is memory footprint. That's all. I understand many developers are just lazy and don't give a fuck about RAM, but Java developers are the worst, and their attitude 'programmer time is expensive - hardware is cheap' just does not fly. And the GC is encouraging them to continue to ignore memory issues.
Now, you can continue to ignore what I am saying, but most java apps I've seen are extremely memory hungry and I would not touch them with a ten foot pole.
As to the guy who knows so much about garbage collection, can you tell me this: Since all your Java objects are dynamically allocated, the GC will eventually run into the problem of memory fragmentation, and will have to defragment memory. Why do you think I have the luxury of a free CPU to copy the objects around?
below is a reference on gc techniques wrt: memory fragmentation. One of them basically keeps HALF of available RAM UNUSED. HALF!!!
Compacting collectors Garbage collectors of JVMs will likely have a strategy to combat heap fragmentation. Two strategies commonly used by mark and sweep collectors are compacting and copying. Both of these approaches move objects on the fly to reduce heap fragmentation. Compacting collectors slide live objects over free memory space toward one end of the heap. In the process the other end of the heap becomes one large contiguous free area. All references to the moved objects are updated to refer to the new location.
Updating references to moved objects is sometimes made simpler by adding a level of indirection to object references. Instead of referring directly to objects on the heap, object references refer to a table of object handles. The object handles refer to the actual objects on the heap. When an object is moved, only the object handle must be updated with the new location. All references to the object in the executing program will still refer to the updated handle, which did not move. While this approach simplifies the job of heap defragmentation, it adds a performance overhead to every object access.
Copying collectors Copying garbage collectors move all live objects to a new area. As the objects are moved to the new area, they are placed side by side, thus eliminating any free spaces that may have separated them in the old area. The old area is then known to be all free space. The advantage of this approach is that objects can be copied as they are discovered by the traversal from the root nodes. There are no separate mark and sweep phases. Objects are copied to the new area on the fly, and forwarding pointers are left in their old locations. The forwarding pointers allow objects encountered later in the traversal that refer to already copied objects to know the new location of the copied objects.
A common copying collector is called stop and copy. In this scheme, the heap is divided into two regions. Only one of the two regions is used at any time. Objects are allocated from one of the regions until all the space in that region has been exhausted. At that point program execution
Thank you for the ad hominem attack. And next time my computer slows to a complete crawl, I will remember that this is just a "perceived" problem. I take it your precious eclipse IDE runs on 64MB of RAM just perfectly too.
What do I know, maybe the problem with the Java GC is not technical. It could be lazy incompetent programmers churning out crappy code that requires a supercomputer to run:)
As a good programmer, it is a sane practice to check your app under some sort of leak detector. These things make it very easy to spot and fix memory leaks under various test cases. It does not take a "super programmer" to remove 99% of memory leaks in a fairly complex program.
I do not know what exactly the problem is under the hood, but every desktop java app I used, tries to hog all my RAM regardless of how much I got, or what other programs are out there. That's why my (Linux) desktop is java-free. And considering the huge amount of open source code written in C/C++, I do not miss java apps one bit.
If I could point the reason, I would probably say lazy collection is the problem. On the other hand, I would not want my CPU be busy with collection most of the time. So, there.
memory allocation is not an issue for 99% of software projects.
Well, it should not be, unless it is poorly implemented (I hope). The Java GC leaves java apps out of my desktop, and will probably keep so for the next 5 years.
Hmm, on the second thought, I think programmers are to blame for some of it, too. The fact that you can easily allocate stuff on the heap does not mean you should do it ALL the time, in an app that would be running for days (like azureus). You would be better off allocating a buffer once, and pass it down many times, instead of allocating stuff ad-hoc and returning it up the call chain. It may (gasp!) use more memory, but will perform better in the long run. From what I have seen, defragmentating memory is a cpu-consuming task; it would be stupid to rely on an expensive maintenance process to keep your program running.
In C you get to deal with memory issues directly, and that has a huge benefit: you have the chance to spot the patterns that fragment memory over time, early. Unfortunately, Java lets you do whatever you want. In this regard, it is worse than C.
any app? Not really - only apps that have "The handle must have the PROCESS_CREATE_THREAD, PROCESS_QUERY_INFORMATION, PROCESS_VM_OPERATION, PROCESS_VM_WRITE, and PROCESS_VM_READ access rights"
So you have to let it have that access. I don't think these flags are set by default, so you have to explicitly ask for them, and to change the ccess flags for the creating app, the user you run as needs to have the SeDebugPriviliege privilege. (ie admin)
From what I heard, Windows pre-loads the HTML rendering engine. IE is just a wrapper. Windows could have 'another' application that could call the IE DLLs, sure, but they are NO MORE PRELOADED than FIREFOX. As they would BE IN A DIFFERENT process that IE DOES NOT HAVE ACCESS TO.
This makes no sense. Please go study computer science and come back later. It would be like saying that because Windows has Fonts, that if Firefox uses the same fonts as the shell, then Windows is pre-loading Firefox as well. It is called process isolation. IE has to re-load all of its DLL even if another application has already loaded the Windows HTML rendering engine. So the memory reported in TaskMgr for IE is WHAT IE IS USING. Get it?
Wrong again. Memory is NOT duplicated for CODE and CONSTANT DATA. That would include fonts, too. What Taskmgr is reporting is the IE wrapper, plus internal page representation (DOM) of each open web page. Any half bright developer would know all of this, yet it is repeated on Slashdot almost Daily.
Windows could have 'another' application that could call the IE DLLs, sure, but they are NO MORE PRELOADED than FIREFOX. As they would BE IN A DIFFERENT process that IE DOES NOT HAVE ACCESS TO.
IE has to re-load all of its DLL even if another application has already loaded the Windows HTML rendering engine. So the memory reported in TaskMgr for IE is WHAT IE IS USING. Get it?
Um... what did the above just mean? If I remember my CS courses correctly, the reason DLL's exist is to REUSE the CODE by putting it ONCE in MEMORY and then allowing ACCESS from (gasp) DIFFERENT applications. Perhaps you are talking about DATA. There, you will have separate pages copied. That does no mean that CODE does not take space. If I am correct in assuming the HTML rendering engine code IS provided as a DLL, and the IE is just a wrapper around it, the rendering CODE could easily take 5-10MB of RAM, because rendering engines ARE COMPLEX.
Moreover, in Windows, fonts are bundled into the DLLs, making them shared as well. This means that IE can re-use fonts loaded into the HTML rendering engine, while Firefox probably cannot (It would make no point to write a browser that depends on another rendering engine, IMHO).
That's what I think the parent meant.
If you need substantiation for these claims, here you go (wikipedia):
The shared library term is slightly ambiguous, because it covers at least two different concepts. First, it is the sharing of code located on disk by unrelated programs. The second concept is the sharing of code in memory, when programs execute the same physical page of RAM, mapped into different address spaces. It would seem that the latter would be preferable, and indeed it has a number of advantages. For instance on the OpenStep system, applications were often only a few hundred kilobytes in size and loaded almost instantly; the vast majority of their code was located in libraries that had already been loaded for other purposes by the operating system.
In Windows, the concept was taken one step further, with even system resources such as fonts being bundled in the DLL file format. The same is true under OpenStep, where the universal "bundle" format is used for almost all system resources.
And, BTW, you're wrong about denied access. There is a function in the Windows API that allows any process run a thread in another process. Yep, any app can do that. From the Phrack magazine, issue 62:
The CreateRemoteThread function creates a thread that
runs in the address space of another process.
give us the power to inject our own arbitrary code to the
address space of another process - and once it is there, we can
create a thread remotely to execute it. .. but that's a whole different can of worms.
Now that ATI is part of the AMD, the worst case is ATI division is given little attention, developers move to CPU core development, NVidia remains the only serious GPU vendor, and things go downfall from there.
A second worst outcome is Intel enters a pact with NVidia, so next gen NVidia cards are so integrated with Intel chipsets that they do not run well on AMD. If you buy an AMD platform, you can only buy an ATI video card. If you buy an Intel platform, you are bound to NVidia. This would suck bad as well.
I do not see good outcomes from this merger. Possibly better integration with AMD products is not something I as a customer would care about. ATI being focussed on GPUs only sounds much better for the customers than a division of a large computing devices company. At the very least, ATI is now somewhat concerned about Linux gamers, because it needs them. Who is to say that as part of a large and much more stable company, the ATI division will still give a rat's ass about Linux?
The best outcome possible - With the backing of AMD's large patent portfolio, ATI division opens up the specs to all of their GPUs. Programming manuals. Device driver instructions. Linux drivers improve in leaps and bounds. Linux users switch to AMD+ATI. Windows gamers switch to Linux. Microsoft crumbles under its own weight and withers. Sightings of Belzebub trying on skates are reported.
Well, TA-DA! (win.3.11 bootup chime) Welcome to The 9th Circle Of Hell!! That means you're dead. Don't worry, this is a gentle introduction, to the, *hrm*, DEEPER levels of HELL. A short list of what we have on this level: your computer is owned by Microsoft, pervasive DRM, random lawsuits by the RIAA, general doomsday prophecies, pervasive bad spelling, corrupt representatives, and, Bush Jr. as President of the United States. Now, please do make yourself comfortable while I go greet another visitor (disappears with a puff of smoke and smell of sulphur)
Old man: Take this doll, but beware; it carries a terrible curse. Homer: Ooo, that's bad. Old man: But it comes with a free serving of frozen yogurt! Homer: That's good! Old man: The frozen yogurt is also cursed. Homer: That's bad. Old man: But it comes with your choice of toppings! Homer: That's good! Old man: The toppings contain potassium benzoate... Homer: (confused look) Old man: That's bad. Homer: Can I go now?
I don't know anything about Linux... nothing at all. before I'd even get started I'd have to do research into what the best distribution for me is. before I even do that I need to find outlets online that I trust to provide me with a useful comparison of the different distributions as well as making sure it's up-to-date, unbiased, and complete.
dude, locate a Linux User Group in your area and attend one of ther installfests. This should bootstrap you pretty nice and comfy.
Consider this: if Microsoft does not comply, and raises prices, the EU could simply forbid the sale of ANY computer with Windows pre-installed, for, say, a period of 5 years or so. This would effectively leave the customer decide between paying $150 for Windows in addition to a $300 PC, and using a free OS, or installing a pirated copy of Windows. Effectively, the EU does nothing radical (like seizing Microsoft copyrights), it actively and officially encourages switching to Linux, and leaves its citizens to widely pirate Windows, thus harming Microsoft financially. It could take years, but it would be a steady migration path, and a situation much more healthy than currently.
It would remove one pillar of Microsoft dominance: the mass-distribution of windows with new computers, while promoting alternatives, and reducing profits for Microsoft at the same time.
Well, as someone already pointed out in another reply somewhere above, this is a FUCKING API. APIs should be designed NOT TO CHANGE when the internals change. So, either Microsoft still hasn't learned how to write a proper API, or they DELIBERATELY CHOSE to make it incompatible.
Both cases suck lame ass. How the fuck would a stable and open API like OpenGL be superseeded by an inferior/crippled/unstable API like DirectX?
Please enumerate the countries that are making pressure on Sweden. Are they Mexico? Canada? Brazil? Russia? Ukraine? China? India? Japan? Who are these mythical international countries that are forcing Sweden to comply with the so-called consensus?
So, write a polite complain to the manufacturer of your machine for not providing linux drivers on CD. This would help a lot of other people as well. Bitching on slasdot won't.
The scientific question is: if there were no copyright protection for creative works, would creative output increase or decrease?
Depends on what you mean by 'creative output'. If it is shit like Britney Spears, then I say - let them burn. What I would name 'creative output' is doing very well, thank you. I just went to a jazz concert sponsored by the Embassy of Germany, and the ticket was $2. That is less than 1/4 of a decent meal in town, for you to compare. The band (5 people) looked very well fed and happy, too....The auditorium was half full though, which was a bit sad. Come to think of it, original, live music, for $2 a seat, and there were so few to attend. But I digress...
First, there is software that must run as root. Second, sometimes that software has exploits. Third, sometimes those exploits are not known at the time the software is installed. In this way, sometimes people manage to exploit a machine and get root. Why is that such a hard concept to grasp?
That is what chroot is for. You do not run untrusted services listening to the internet, except within a chroot. Period. If the program has exploitable weaknesses, the attacker will find itself in an isolated directory with a few binaries and hopefully it will be much harder to break the chroot jail. It is still possible, but orders of magnitude less likely.
Judging by your posts, someone in your company failed to secure the systems and you jumped to the conclusion that Linux sucks. This is sad.
I just don't know what I'm missing not using an IDE. There must be something, but I'm not feeling the lack of it.
You are missing the wait between pressing Ctrl+F and the bloody find dialog coming up on screen, I'd say:)
But seriously, once you are set with vi and ctags, there is not much missing from a modern ide that 6 workspaces + open xterms can't do. That comes from coding C. I know a few Java guys would would probably miss the refactoring options that modern IDEs offer.
Another thing that comes to mind is code completion, but I never missed that. Command line made me a fast typer and code completion would actually slow me down - reading up a lot data from disk can be slow, you know.
On a final note, nothing beats VI when working over ssh to distant machines, for a local patch or quick configuration fix.
... How is the location selected? The article said that marrow cells are sent to a location. By some chemicals generated by the tumor cells. How does a chemical select a precise location in the body? I am confused.
Could it be that a certain combination of chemicals sends the bone marrow cells into a specific location? The body must use the same technique to send them to places needed for new organs I guess. So the cancer cells just hijack that technique to use it themselves? If that is so, could they be manipulated to set the address to a non-existing place? Like a loopback address perhaps?
You know... I would LOVE to see Korea barring windows sales altogether - and any windows derivatives/modifications - for a period of until 20 years after the death of the author(s).
That would balance the nonsense with copyright extensions. A bit.
Slashdot Mirror
I got the point about half the mem being actually free (paged out). Thanks, that clears up the issue somewhat.
The point is, before I tried java apps, I was fine on a 256MB system and never needed to enable swap space. So I never did. Then suddenly I got this whooping app loading up all my 512 RAM and then thrashing like hell - so, naturally I said WTF. It is kind of tricky - without swap space that RAM was actually wasted.
D'oh. Thanks for clearing up one misunderstanding about Java. Still, Java GUIs seem kind of slow to respond, compared to native stuff. Oh well.
Please, stop talking to me like I am some kind of moron :). Maybe I look like one, *shrug*.
I haven't tried a desktop java app that wasn't slow. What comes to mind now: azureus and Oracle developer. Having both Azureus and mozilla open in my usual browsing mode (lots of pics) loads up my system to a crawl. Why? Azureus takes 400mb of RAM and firefox uses the rest. Same thing with Mozilla + Oracle Developer. I cannot even imagine running the three of them together. (I have 512mb RAM on my computer).
I know what a java server app is. It is fast. I do not say it is not, on a dual xeon with 1Mb of CPU cache and 2Gb of RAM. This is not the point. I was talking about desktop apps on desktop computers.
I know about RSS and paged-out memory, I assure you this is not the case. Gkrellm monitor shows me RSS usage so I am sure of my numbers. As a C developer I probably know more about RSS than you.
The only reason I do not like Java on my desktop is memory footprint. That's all. I understand many developers are just lazy and don't give a fuck about RAM, but Java developers are the worst, and their attitude 'programmer time is expensive - hardware is cheap' just does not fly. And the GC is encouraging them to continue to ignore memory issues.
Now, you can continue to ignore what I am saying, but most java apps I've seen are extremely memory hungry and I would not touch them with a ten foot pole.
As to the guy who knows so much about garbage collection, can you tell me this:
Since all your Java objects are dynamically allocated, the GC will eventually run into the problem of memory fragmentation, and will have to defragment memory. Why do you think I have the luxury of a free CPU to copy the objects around?
below is a reference on gc techniques wrt: memory fragmentation. One of them basically keeps HALF of available RAM UNUSED. HALF!!!
Compacting collectors
Garbage collectors of JVMs will likely have a strategy to combat heap fragmentation. Two strategies commonly used by mark and sweep collectors are compacting and copying. Both of these approaches move objects on the fly to reduce heap fragmentation. Compacting collectors slide live objects over free memory space toward one end of the heap. In the process the other end of the heap becomes one large contiguous free area. All references to the moved objects are updated to refer to the new location.
Updating references to moved objects is sometimes made simpler by adding a level of indirection to object references. Instead of referring directly to objects on the heap, object references refer to a table of object handles. The object handles refer to the actual objects on the heap. When an object is moved, only the object handle must be updated with the new location. All references to the object in the executing program will still refer to the updated handle, which did not move. While this approach simplifies the job of heap defragmentation, it adds a performance overhead to every object access.
Copying collectors
Copying garbage collectors move all live objects to a new area. As the objects are moved to the new area, they are placed side by side, thus eliminating any free spaces that may have separated them in the old area. The old area is then known to be all free space. The advantage of this approach is that objects can be copied as they are discovered by the traversal from the root nodes. There are no separate mark and sweep phases. Objects are copied to the new area on the fly, and forwarding pointers are left in their old locations. The forwarding pointers allow objects encountered later in the traversal that refer to already copied objects to know the new location of the copied objects.
A common copying collector is called stop and copy. In this scheme, the heap is divided into two regions. Only one of the two regions is used at any time. Objects are allocated from one of the regions until all the space in that region has been exhausted. At that point program execution
Thank you for the ad hominem attack. And next time my computer slows to a complete crawl, I will remember that this is just a "perceived" problem. I take it your precious eclipse IDE runs on 64MB of RAM just perfectly too.
:)
What do I know, maybe the problem with the Java GC is not technical. It could be lazy incompetent programmers churning out crappy code that requires a supercomputer to run
As a good programmer, it is a sane practice to check your app under some sort of leak detector. These things make it very easy to spot and fix memory leaks under various test cases. It does not take a "super programmer" to remove 99% of memory leaks in a fairly complex program.
I do not know what exactly the problem is under the hood, but every desktop java app I used, tries to hog all my RAM regardless of how much I got, or what other programs are out there. That's why my (Linux) desktop is java-free. And considering the huge amount of open source code written in C/C++, I do not miss java apps one bit.
If I could point the reason, I would probably say lazy collection is the problem. On the other hand, I would not want my CPU be busy with collection most of the time. So, there.
memory allocation is not an issue for 99% of software projects.
:).
Well, it should not be, unless it is poorly implemented (I hope). The Java GC leaves java apps out of my desktop, and will probably keep so for the next 5 years.
Hmm, on the second thought, I think programmers are to blame for some of it, too. The fact that you can easily allocate stuff on the heap does not mean you should do it ALL the time, in an app that would be running for days (like azureus). You would be better off allocating a buffer once, and pass it down many times, instead of allocating stuff ad-hoc and returning it up the call chain. It may (gasp!) use more memory, but will perform better in the long run. From what I have seen, defragmentating memory is a cpu-consuming task; it would be stupid to rely on an expensive maintenance process to keep your program running.
In C you get to deal with memory issues directly, and that has a huge benefit: you have the chance to spot the patterns that fragment memory over time, early. Unfortunately, Java lets you do whatever you want. In this regard, it is worse than C.
Get with the new century dude.
Thanks, but no, thanks
Does it run on Linux? Because if it doesn't, MS Office is not worth 1 cent to me.
any app? Not really - only apps that have "The handle must have the PROCESS_CREATE_THREAD, PROCESS_QUERY_INFORMATION, PROCESS_VM_OPERATION, PROCESS_VM_WRITE, and PROCESS_VM_READ access rights"
So you have to let it have that access. I don't think these flags are set by default, so you have to explicitly ask for them, and to change the ccess flags for the creating app, the user you run as needs to have the SeDebugPriviliege privilege. (ie admin)
Thanks - I did not know that.
Short rebuttal:
Windows DOES NOT preload IE, PERIOD... Get it?
From what I heard, Windows pre-loads the HTML rendering engine. IE is just a wrapper.
Windows could have 'another' application that could call the IE DLLs, sure, but they are NO MORE PRELOADED than FIREFOX. As they would BE IN A DIFFERENT process that IE DOES NOT HAVE ACCESS TO.
This makes no sense. Please go study computer science and come back later.
It would be like saying that because Windows has Fonts, that if Firefox uses the same fonts as the shell, then Windows is pre-loading Firefox as well. It is called process isolation. IE has to re-load all of its DLL even if another application has already loaded the Windows HTML rendering engine. So the memory reported in TaskMgr for IE is WHAT IE IS USING. Get it?
Wrong again. Memory is NOT duplicated for CODE and CONSTANT DATA. That would include fonts, too. What Taskmgr is reporting is the IE wrapper, plus internal page representation (DOM) of each open web page.
Any half bright developer would know all of this, yet it is repeated on Slashdot almost Daily.
No comment.
Windows could have 'another' application that could call the IE DLLs, sure, but they are NO MORE PRELOADED than FIREFOX. As they would BE IN A DIFFERENT process that IE DOES NOT HAVE ACCESS TO.
.. but that's a whole different can of worms.
IE has to re-load all of its DLL even if another application has already loaded the Windows HTML rendering engine. So the memory reported in TaskMgr for IE is WHAT IE IS USING. Get it?
Um... what did the above just mean? If I remember my CS courses correctly, the reason DLL's exist is to REUSE the CODE by putting it ONCE in MEMORY and then allowing ACCESS from (gasp) DIFFERENT applications. Perhaps you are talking about DATA. There, you will have separate pages copied. That does no mean that CODE does not take space. If I am correct in assuming the HTML rendering engine code IS provided as a DLL, and the IE is just a wrapper around it, the rendering CODE could easily take 5-10MB of RAM, because rendering engines ARE COMPLEX.
Moreover, in Windows, fonts are bundled into the DLLs, making them shared as well. This means that IE can re-use fonts loaded into the HTML rendering engine, while Firefox probably cannot (It would make no point to write a browser that depends on another rendering engine, IMHO).
That's what I think the parent meant.
If you need substantiation for these claims, here you go (wikipedia):
The shared library term is slightly ambiguous, because it covers at least two different concepts. First, it is the sharing of code located on disk by unrelated programs. The second concept is the sharing of code in memory, when programs execute the same physical page of RAM, mapped into different address spaces. It would seem that the latter would be preferable, and indeed it has a number of advantages. For instance on the OpenStep system, applications were often only a few hundred kilobytes in size and loaded almost instantly; the vast majority of their code was located in libraries that had already been loaded for other purposes by the operating system.
In Windows, the concept was taken one step further, with even system resources such as fonts being bundled in the DLL file format. The same is true under OpenStep, where the universal "bundle" format is used for almost all system resources.
And, BTW, you're wrong about denied access. There is a function in the Windows API that allows any process run a thread in another process. Yep, any app can do that. From the Phrack magazine, issue 62:
The CreateRemoteThread function creates a thread that
runs in the address space of another process.
HANDLE CreateRemoteThread(
HANDLE hProcess,
LPSECURITY_ATTRIBUTES lpThreadAttributes,
DWORD dwStackSize,
LPTHREAD_START_ROUTINE lpStartAddress,
LPVOID lpParameter,
DWORD dwCreationFlags,
LPDWORD lpThreadId
);
Two more functions:
VirtualAllocEx()
WriteProcessMemory()
give us the power to inject our own arbitrary code to the
address space of another process - and once it is there, we can
create a thread remotely to execute it.
Now that ATI is part of the AMD, the worst case is ATI division is given little attention, developers move to CPU core development, NVidia remains the only serious GPU vendor, and things go downfall from there.
A second worst outcome is Intel enters a pact with NVidia, so next gen NVidia cards are so integrated with Intel chipsets that they do not run well on AMD. If you buy an AMD platform, you can only buy an ATI video card. If you buy an Intel platform, you are bound to NVidia. This would suck bad as well.
I do not see good outcomes from this merger. Possibly better integration with AMD products is not something I as a customer would care about. ATI being focussed on GPUs only sounds much better for the customers than a division of a large computing devices company. At the very least, ATI is now somewhat concerned about Linux gamers, because it needs them. Who is to say that as part of a large and much more stable company, the ATI division will still give a rat's ass about Linux?
The best outcome possible - With the backing of AMD's large patent portfolio, ATI division opens up the specs to all of their GPUs. Programming manuals. Device driver instructions. Linux drivers improve in leaps and bounds. Linux users switch to AMD+ATI. Windows gamers switch to Linux. Microsoft crumbles under its own weight and withers. Sightings of Belzebub trying on skates are reported.
How are they all getting it so very wrong?
Well, TA-DA! (win.3.11 bootup chime) Welcome to The 9th Circle Of Hell!! That means you're dead. Don't worry, this is a gentle introduction, to the, *hrm*, DEEPER levels of HELL. A short list of what we have on this level: your computer is owned by Microsoft, pervasive DRM, random lawsuits by the RIAA, general doomsday prophecies, pervasive bad spelling, corrupt representatives, and, Bush Jr. as President of the United States. Now, please do make yourself comfortable while I go greet another visitor (disappears with a puff of smoke and smell of sulphur)
This reminds me of a Simpson quote:
Old man: Take this doll, but beware; it carries a terrible curse.
Homer: Ooo, that's bad.
Old man: But it comes with a free serving of frozen yogurt!
Homer: That's good!
Old man: The frozen yogurt is also cursed.
Homer: That's bad.
Old man: But it comes with your choice of toppings!
Homer: That's good!
Old man: The toppings contain potassium benzoate...
Homer: (confused look)
Old man: That's bad.
Homer: Can I go now?
I don't know anything about Linux... nothing at all. before I'd even get started I'd have to do research into what the best distribution for me is. before I even do that I need to find outlets online that I trust to provide me with a useful comparison of the different distributions as well as making sure it's up-to-date, unbiased, and complete.
dude, locate a Linux User Group in your area and attend one of ther installfests. This should bootstrap you pretty nice and comfy.
Cheers.
Consider this: if Microsoft does not comply, and raises prices, the EU could simply forbid the sale of ANY computer with Windows pre-installed, for, say, a period of 5 years or so. This would effectively leave the customer decide between paying $150 for Windows in addition to a $300 PC, and using a free OS, or installing a pirated copy of Windows. Effectively, the EU does nothing radical (like seizing Microsoft copyrights), it actively and officially encourages switching to Linux, and leaves its citizens to widely pirate Windows, thus harming Microsoft financially. It could take years, but it would be a steady migration path, and a situation much more healthy than currently.
It would remove one pillar of Microsoft dominance: the mass-distribution of windows with new computers, while promoting alternatives, and reducing profits for Microsoft at the same time.
Well, as someone already pointed out in another reply somewhere above, this is a FUCKING API. APIs should be designed NOT TO CHANGE when the internals change. So, either Microsoft still hasn't learned how to write a proper API, or they DELIBERATELY CHOSE to make it incompatible.
Both cases suck lame ass. How the fuck would a stable and open API like OpenGL be superseeded by an inferior/crippled/unstable API like DirectX?
Ummm.... Pratchett : ))) I totally loved the 'Good Omens book' with Neil Gailman. Do you, per chance, remember the title of the tentacled book?
Please enumerate the countries that are making pressure on Sweden. Are they Mexico? Canada? Brazil? Russia? Ukraine? China? India? Japan? Who are these mythical international countries that are forcing Sweden to comply with the so-called consensus?
So far I see only the U S of A.
So, write a polite complain to the manufacturer of your machine for not providing linux drivers on CD. This would help a lot of other people as well. Bitching on slasdot won't.
The scientific question is: if there were no copyright protection for creative works, would creative output increase or decrease?
...The auditorium was half full though, which was a bit sad. Come to think of it, original, live music, for $2 a seat, and there were so few to attend. But I digress...
Depends on what you mean by 'creative output'. If it is shit like Britney Spears, then I say - let them burn.
What I would name 'creative output' is doing very well, thank you. I just went to a jazz concert sponsored by the Embassy of Germany, and the ticket was $2. That is less than 1/4 of a decent meal in town, for you to compare. The band (5 people) looked very well fed and happy, too.
That is what chroot is for. You do not run untrusted services listening to the internet, except within a chroot. Period. If the program has exploitable weaknesses, the attacker will find itself in an isolated directory with a few binaries and hopefully it will be much harder to break the chroot jail. It is still possible, but orders of magnitude less likely.
Judging by your posts, someone in your company failed to secure the systems and you jumped to the conclusion that Linux sucks. This is sad.
I just don't know what I'm missing not using an IDE. There must be something, but I'm not feeling the lack of it.
:)
You are missing the wait between pressing Ctrl+F and the bloody find dialog coming up on screen, I'd say
But seriously, once you are set with vi and ctags, there is not much missing from a modern ide that 6 workspaces + open xterms can't do. That comes from coding C. I know a few Java guys would would probably miss the refactoring options that modern IDEs offer.
Another thing that comes to mind is code completion, but I never missed that. Command line made me a fast typer and code completion would actually slow me down - reading up a lot data from disk can be slow, you know.
On a final note, nothing beats VI when working over ssh to distant machines, for a local patch or quick configuration fix.
... How is the location selected? The article said that marrow cells are sent to a location. By some chemicals generated by the tumor cells. How does a chemical select a precise location in the body? I am confused.
Could it be that a certain combination of chemicals sends the bone marrow cells into a specific location? The body must use the same technique to send them to places needed for new organs I guess. So the cancer cells just hijack that technique to use it themselves? If that is so, could they be manipulated to set the address to a non-existing place? Like a loopback address perhaps?
You mean pegasus is still alive?
<gasp>
That would balance the nonsense with copyright extensions. A bit.