What they did was "toy benchmarking". A benchmark is really supposed to be a program that is similar to what people run (to be a good indicator of performance). Is a "dynamic" page that outputs a constant string similar to any normal web application ?
This is as relevant as the MIPS rating of a CPU (null, to be explicit). I'd really suggest them to take a look at some hardware reviews from gaming sites (e.g. firingsquad) to learn some benchmarking methodology.
And yes, pipes are much faster on Linux than on Windoze. Is it a relevant performance measurement ?
Who would use Solaris/x86 ? I mean, as a previous post mentioned, a default install is basically useless, furthermore there are very few apps precompiled for it (and I don't think it does well in terms of hardware support either).
It's usually Linux eating up Solaris' market share, not the other way around.
Really, at ~390$ (Amazon) you get a 320x240 screen, 200 MHz Intel StrongArm processor, 64 MB RAM, and more preinstalled applications (Jeode JVM & Hancom Office are the notable ones). Not to mention that it's powered by Linux/embedix (should it be called GNU/Linux embedix ?), and, as a consequence, there are quite a few opensource applications for it.
I especially enjoyed Mac porn, but hey, if you are under 18, don't click the above link;-)."
I'm pretty sure the authors of Mac porn never ever had sex, therefore have no idea what porn means (and they also have a very bizare sense of humor, which also contributes to their solitude). The material is so "safe" that I would even show it to a 5-year old.
They're doing this for a very simple reason: corporations have a lot more money than domestic users. A trial against Joe User would not get them much, aside from setting an example. A litigation against Big-Company would get them a lot more in terms of money.
RIAA's intent is not to kill on-line music distribution, but to control it (and use it as a cash cow).
Dear slashdotters who either never took or just completely ignored an algorithms/complexity class,
They have shown, by reducing one NP-Complete problem to Tetris with full-lookahead, that optimal Tetris with full-lookahead is NP-hard.
Now, the reducing works by taking any instance (i.e. input) of the original problem and converting it into an instance of the tetris problem, not the other way around. So the conversion won't produce all possible Tetris games, in fact only a very restricted class of them.
This ignores two important aspects of Tetris playing:
The game is not bound by the number of pieces (so suboptimal behaviour is not really a problem)
The game is played with *random* input sets
But, as always, it's very easy to discuss something that you have no idea what it means. And, btw, being NP-complete or NP-hard doesn't mean necessarily exponential complexity (neither P=NP nor PNP have been shown).
Serial is the wave of the future, and it will give ATA hard drives the bandwidth and features
to compete with SCSI.
I don't get it... I quite agree that, as a serial bus, it'll be clocked a lot faster than IDE... but a simple back-of-the-envelope calculation tells us that it has to be at least 8 times as fast as the current devices (it'd have to be 533 MHz to be on par with ATA-66)
It looks like a technology whose main purpose is to make things incompatible, and thus require people upgrade more stuff. And anyway, it's not the speed of the bus the limiting factor (for the vast majority of users), but the mechanics of the harddrive (SCSI hardrives are faster than IDEs because they almost always are top-of-the-line products with higher rotational speeds - anybody saw a 15000 RPM IDE ?)
C'mon, you can't put an equal sign between Microsoft and Symbian, for two main reasons:
EPOC is a great, stable OS. No Microsoft OS has ever come close to the quality/stability of EPOC
bussiness ethics
Please understand, dear marxist slashdotters, that it is not illegal to be a monopoly. What is illegal is to abuse your monopoly, like Microsoft did (e.g. through product bundling)
... is by far the best OS for mobile devices, in terms of stability (I've had a Psion device for more than 2 years now; the OS *never* crashed and trust me, I've tried many things on it), functionality, and even memory consumption (the filesystem/application memory automatic balance is great).
I wish I could say that Sharp Zaurus running embedix Linux is a good match, but in fact it isn't. Not only it crashed on me once, and required cold reboot, but the boundaries of the filesystem and memory are also fixed; this means that if you want more application memory (to play Freeciv for instance) you have to create a swap file (!?!).
The price tag for the deal isn't being released. Cost savings were a major motivator for the project, which was first considered about a year ago.
And how precisely are they going to save money ? And save money relative to what ? The old system ? (I kind of doubt it) The same hardware system with a proprietay OS ? Maintenance costs ?
This article has all the characteristics of a "negative" FUD.
While it's true that quite a few optimizations not only improve the runtime but also reduce the code size, this is not generally true. An important optimization, for instance, is loop unrolling - which more than doubles the codesize of a loop. Its purpose is to reduce the number of branches, as jumps in superscalar out-of-order processors are performance killers.
Small executables are important for machines where the program is stored in flash (like microcontrollers). The compilers for those architectures are optimized to produce small code (as a matter of fact some of them are gcc-based).
When storage is cheap, program size is rather irrelevant (keep in mind that OSs do paging, they only keep a working set of the program in memory).
BTW, 60% of the radiations emitted by a cellphone are absorbed by the brain. Moreover, children are at much higher risk than adults, as their brain is not fully developped. Earlier analog
models (which have higher emissions than the current ones, though) have been shown to interfere with the brain.
I put the access point in my daughter's bedroom on the second floor ...
Don't! The effect of microwaves on the human brain is not well known/researched/documented, so I *wouldn't* do experiments with my own daughter (the more so if she were less than 10 years old).
Cancer, unfortunately, is a disease that you can't link with a cause in most cases. However, it is known that "x" increases the chances of cancer. The question (unanswered yet) is whether microwaves from that domain are a cancer factor or not.
I'd say the reason we have an Open Source movement at the level it is now is really Microsoft's "fault".
More precisely, if the Microsoft platform weren't a prison full of shit for which you have to pay a huge rent (to use a -1 Troll-able anti-euphemism), I really doubt that Linux, for instance, would have so many followers
... that, leaving aside the political debates, flamewars, etc, Minix was the operating system from which Linux was bootstrapped (IIRC the very first Linux versions were compiled under Minix, had the Minix fs "hardcoded" - way before VFS existed, etc.)
So, while it may be dead (some may claim that it wasn't ever really alive), it is still alive through one of its most successful offsprings, our most beloved Linux!
Donating your spare CPU cycles for a good cause seems like a noble thing, and you don't lose anything by doing it (except, maybe, for internet traffic, which might matter if you're in a country where internet access is prohibitive).
However the issue is what is a good cause. Taking it to the extreme, I wouldn't like my spare cycles to be used by a password cracking system. The real problem is that computation can be easily "faked". I.e. multiplication of two large numbers can be done with FFT. So in order to be sure that nothing "funky" is happening, the system should be opensourced.
But opensourcing brings another problem - anybody could just take the source and change it so that it polutes the main system with fake results.
Ok, you could eliminate polution by sending the same thing to multiple users, but that seems to kill the advantage of this kind of distributed computing (the overhead of distribution, comparison, etc, becomes comparable to the computation itself, so why not just do it locally...)
Actually they do. What you're missing is the other component of the speed equation, namely the IPC (instructions per cycle). Intel design favors clockspeed to IPC, for obvious marketing reasons, while AMDs designs are more balanced. That's why they get similar performance with considerably slower (in terms of clockspeed) CPUs
The introduction of this chip should put to rest any speculation that Apple is moving to an Intel platform.
C'mon... Mac OS/X for x86 doesn't really have much to do with Intel, but with Microsoft. A Mac OS/X running on Intel hardware is nothing but Microsoft's worst nightmare in terms of what it can do to its market. So it's just a trumpcard in negotiations with Microsoft (i.e. "If you stop Office/Mac, we drop the atomi^M^M^M^M^M Mac OS/X for x86").
... is the number of playable games under winex (by playable I consider games with ratings of 4 and 5):
transgaming search (you might need to click "show all results" at the bottom of the page)
While those are clearly not as good as native ports, their holistic approach seems to work much from an economical point of view than, for instance, Loki's. Transgaming also has a much better chance of actually creating a Linux gaming market, as it almost "eliminates" the unfair competition between Linux and Windows games (gamers are a very impulsive crowd, very few will actually wait a couple of month for a Linux port)
Slashdot Mirror
This is as relevant as the MIPS rating of a CPU (null, to be explicit). I'd really suggest them to take a look at some hardware reviews from gaming sites (e.g. firingsquad) to learn some benchmarking methodology.
And yes, pipes are much faster on Linux than on Windoze. Is it a relevant performance measurement ?
The Raven
It's usually Linux eating up Solaris' market share, not the other way around.
The Raven
The Raven
Thanks, Vlad
Yeah. Why :) ?
As I was saying, their bizarre, incomprehensible sense of humor contributes to their not having had sex.
I'm pretty sure the authors of Mac porn never ever had sex, therefore have no idea what porn means (and they also have a very bizare sense of humor, which also contributes to their solitude). The material is so "safe" that I would even show it to a 5-year old.
The Raven
RIAA's intent is not to kill on-line music distribution, but to control it (and use it as a cash cow).
The Raven
They have shown, by reducing one NP-Complete problem to Tetris with full-lookahead, that optimal Tetris with full-lookahead is NP-hard.
Now, the reducing works by taking any instance (i.e. input) of the original problem and converting it into an instance of the tetris problem, not the other way around. So the conversion won't produce all possible Tetris games, in fact only a very restricted class of them.
This ignores two important aspects of Tetris playing:
The game is not bound by the number of pieces (so suboptimal behaviour is not really a problem)
The game is played with *random* input sets
But, as always, it's very easy to discuss something that you have no idea what it means. And, btw, being NP-complete or NP-hard doesn't mean necessarily exponential complexity (neither P=NP nor PNP have been shown).
The Raven
I don't get it ... I quite agree that, as a serial bus, it'll be clocked a lot faster than IDE ... but a simple back-of-the-envelope calculation tells us that it has to be at least 8 times as fast as the current devices (it'd have to be 533 MHz to be on par with ATA-66)
It looks like a technology whose main purpose is to make things incompatible, and thus require people upgrade more stuff. And anyway, it's not the speed of the bus the limiting factor (for the vast majority of users), but the mechanics of the harddrive (SCSI hardrives are faster than IDEs because they almost always are top-of-the-line products with higher rotational speeds - anybody saw a 15000 RPM IDE ?)
The Raven
EPOC is a great, stable OS. No Microsoft OS has ever come close to the quality/stability of EPOC
bussiness ethics
Please understand, dear marxist slashdotters, that it is not illegal to be a monopoly. What is illegal is to abuse your monopoly, like Microsoft did (e.g. through product bundling)
The Raven
I wish I could say that Sharp Zaurus running embedix Linux is a good match, but in fact it isn't. Not only it crashed on me once, and required cold reboot, but the boundaries of the filesystem and memory are also fixed; this means that if you want more application memory (to play Freeciv for instance) you have to create a swap file (!?!).
The Raven
And how precisely are they going to save money ? And save money relative to what ? The old system ? (I kind of doubt it) The same hardware system with a proprietay OS ? Maintenance costs ?
This article has all the characteristics of a "negative" FUD.
The Raven.
While it's true that quite a few optimizations not only improve the runtime but also reduce the code size, this is not generally true. An important optimization, for instance, is loop unrolling - which more than doubles the codesize of a loop. Its purpose is to reduce the number of branches, as jumps in superscalar out-of-order processors are performance killers.
Small executables are important for machines where the program is stored in flash (like microcontrollers). The compilers for those architectures are optimized to produce small code (as a matter of fact some of them are gcc-based). When storage is cheap, program size is rather irrelevant (keep in mind that OSs do paging, they only keep a working set of the program in memory).
The Raven.
Seriously, the article jumps too far with conclusions. It almost says that geeks are genetically different than other human beings.
The Raven.
cbsnews
BTW, 60% of the radiations emitted by a cellphone are absorbed by the brain. Moreover, children are at much higher risk than adults, as their brain is not fully developped. Earlier analog models (which have higher emissions than the current ones, though) have been shown to interfere with the brain.
The Raven
Don't! The effect of microwaves on the human brain is not well known/researched/documented, so I *wouldn't* do experiments with my own daughter (the more so if she were less than 10 years old).
Cancer, unfortunately, is a disease that you can't link with a cause in most cases. However, it is known that "x" increases the chances of cancer. The question (unanswered yet) is whether microwaves from that domain are a cancer factor or not.
The Raven
More precisely, if the Microsoft platform weren't a prison full of shit for which you have to pay a huge rent (to use a -1 Troll-able anti-euphemism), I really doubt that Linux, for instance, would have so many followers
The Raven
I'm truly amazed that the security of this country relies indirectly on products "that were not engineered for security".
The Raven
So, while it may be dead (some may claim that it wasn't ever really alive), it is still alive through one of its most successful offsprings, our most beloved Linux!
The Raven.
However the issue is what is a good cause. Taking it to the extreme, I wouldn't like my spare cycles to be used by a password cracking system. The real problem is that computation can be easily "faked". I.e. multiplication of two large numbers can be done with FFT. So in order to be sure that nothing "funky" is happening, the system should be opensourced.
But opensourcing brings another problem - anybody could just take the source and change it so that it polutes the main system with fake results.
Ok, you could eliminate polution by sending the same thing to multiple users, but that seems to kill the advantage of this kind of distributed computing (the overhead of distribution, comparison, etc, becomes comparable to the computation itself, so why not just do it locally ...)
The Raven
Well, the problem is that CPUs are getting a lot faster than RAM, too ... That's why "newer" Alpha processors, for instance, support L3 cache as well.
The Raven.
Actually they do. What you're missing is the other component of the speed equation, namely the IPC (instructions per cycle). Intel design favors clockspeed to IPC, for obvious marketing reasons, while AMDs designs are more balanced. That's why they get similar performance with considerably slower (in terms of clockspeed) CPUs
The Raven
C'mon ... Mac OS/X for x86 doesn't really have much to do with Intel, but with Microsoft. A Mac OS/X running on Intel hardware is nothing but Microsoft's worst nightmare in terms of what it can do to its market. So it's just a trumpcard in negotiations with Microsoft (i.e. "If you stop Office/Mac, we drop the atomi^M^M^M^M^M Mac OS/X for x86").
The Raven
While those are clearly not as good as native ports, their holistic approach seems to work much from an economical point of view than, for instance, Loki's. Transgaming also has a much better chance of actually creating a Linux gaming market, as it almost "eliminates" the unfair competition between Linux and Windows games (gamers are a very impulsive crowd, very few will actually wait a couple of month for a Linux port)
The Raven