Take a look at the success of the iPod. The Slashdot community may not get the "lame iPod", but you can't argue with its success and market penetration. Nearly all my friends have one. I have one and I love it. Now how on earth are we possibly going to consider a switch to Ubuntu without having iTunes available?
I was a long-time flier of Northwest Airlines. I'm done with them after my experiences this summer. They've canceled too many flights on me due to not having enough pilots. If you don't have enough pilots, don't schedule the fvcking flight.
Ok, try sitting in a quiet room that has good cellular reception with your good quad-band cellular phone. Now call up some kind of number that plays music while you are on hold. Compare the difference between a landline and the GSM codec. Ok, so you may claim that the GSM codec is designed for speech instead of music. Of course it is. However personally I have a much easier time hearing voice with whatever the landline codec is (which I thought was 56 kb/s). Chopping the frequency response for "typical" speech doesn't cut it for me. Maybe you have super hearing comprehension. I don't. I'm not the only one who believes this. There was an article in the Wall Street Journal making a similar claim about the superior voice quality of landlines.
I may be wrong on the details of data rates, but in my experience, voice clarity on a landline is completely superior. Maybe its personal...I've always had a hard time picking up people's voices in a crowded room even when the person is right in front of me. Sometimes I can hardly have a conversation on a cell phone. It is really that bad for me. Like I said, it makes no difference what phone I use. A landline I can hear a pin drop just like the Spring commercials. The GSM voice codec would just remove that pin-drop in the compression.
I hate talking on my cell phone with voice data compressed down to 9.6 kb/s. The POTS copper lines devote 56 kb/s to voice data. I can actually have a conversation without straining to pick up overly compressed speech. Yup, the U.S. has a well-developed copper telephone system and I prefer to use it whenever I'm in my home or office.
I can't stand talking on a cellphone and will keep my landline as long as possible. Cellular phones compress your voice down to typically 9.6 kb/s. I really have a hard time listening and processing this overly compressed speech. It doesn't make a difference whether I use my cheap pay-as-you-go $20 Kyocera phone or my friends $400 super-duper Nokia.
Landlines devote 56 kb/s for voice data and it makes a huge difference. I can actually have a nice conversation with someone as long as they aren't on their own cellphone.
The U.S. is not a trustworthy ally?! Western Europe would have fallen under communism after WWII if it weren't for the U.S. Perhaps you might have been ok with that outcome.
When the U.S. was a fledgling power in the world, it tried to isolate itself from the dominate European powers at the time. The isolationist strategy ultimately failed. I suggest you re-consider history.
I bought Vista, have been using it for a few months, and I am happy. I like the UI better and the little touches make a difference for me. The things they "moved around" make logical sense to me. Have you tried Office 2007? Everything is moved around, but the UI is a fantastic improvement.
PS-- I've used Linux since 1995. I use it all day at work for the last 7 years. I've tried it on a home PC several times in the last decade. I prefer Windows. Shoot me. In fact, I prefer Windows to OS/X which I've also tried.
The parent makes several good points. The Democratic takeover of congress put the large Bush-backed boost in NSF funding on hold. This was a big blow to many of us relying on a large boost in NSF funding to carry on our research. I'm going to greatly generalize here, but the Democrats prefer funding life sciences (i.e. finding a cure for cancer) whereas Republicans generally prefer non-life-sciences funding in areas of physics, mathematics, computing, etc.
Do you have the right to shout "nigger faggot wetback chink" on the street corner?
Yes we do. Just like the Klu Klux Klan still has the right to congregate.
How about the freedom to smoke dope? They have that in Amsterdam, among other places. Not here.
LOL! Yes, freedom is defined by our right to use drugs.
How about the right to a fair trial? An American born citizen named Jose Padilla is in prison without trial, years after his detention.
You are pulling one example in muddied times of our "war on terrorism". Things aren't perfect, but yes, the majority of all suspects have the right to a fair trial.
I'm not gonna bother refuting your other examples. Sounds like your Springfield police department broke the law. Things aren't perfect in the U.S., but they are a hell of a lot better than most places in the world.
What, I was modded troll for giving an example of non-freedom in a European country? LOL! The typical Slashdotter has no idea how much freedom the U.S. citizens really have compared to the rest of the world. No, its not perfect and some smaller countries may be better. But compare to Britian, Eastern Europe, China, India, the Middle-East, Germany, etc.
I'd like to know how you've achieved that conclusion given the fact that you and just about everyone outside of Microsoft lacks meaningful information as to what *is* being sent, in what form, and how.
Oh for cripes sake. Just fire up tcpdump and have a look at what is being sent. It is all clear-text.
X-ray machines, Jet engines, and more all report operating conditions and usage information back to the manufacturer. Microsoft is doing this anonymously to improve the products. I have no problem with this. They aren't sending back any "personal information" like credit card numbers or even identification information.
I'm not surprised to see that 64-bit helps something like OpenSSL. I am very surprised that the non-hand-optimized code does so poorly. Hand-optimizing sections of code is asking quite a bit out of most coders. I also suspect that 64-bit code could even increase the I-cache miss rate since instructions are 64-bit, right? I-cache misses are not an issue for things like SPEC or OpenSSL, but they are a huge deal when running Oracle/DB2/Sybase/etc.
Not sure what kind of benchmarking you suggest on our cluster. It doesn't matter how much faster/slower 32-bit code would be because we need to access ~ 8GB of DRAM in a single process with our simulations.
What are 'most apps' and do they do crypto, compression, media [trans|en]coding...?
Web serving, business processing, database, any GUI interactive application, game engines (not rendering), etc. I doubt any of these use-cases would see more than 10% gain from 64-bit compilation.
Hardly. I've been running AMD64 native Gentoo for 3 years, being able to address over 4GB of RAM isn't of any benefit to me but the extra registers are.
I doubt the extra registers makes a big difference in most apps. Out-of-order superscalars have far more physical registers than architectural registers. Sure, extra registers allows the compiler to reduce the fills/spills from the stack, but really, performance nowadays often depends on eliminating costly L2 misses (1 L2 miss ~= > 300 opportunities to retire instructions).
Furthermore, narrower datapaths can be faster. Thus if you don't need the addressability of 64-bit and you aren't using 64-bit data types, then in theory 32-bit processors can be far faster.
That said, advances in computing require > 4GB of addressability and 64-bit is the future. However personally, the gain of a 64-bit OS does not outweigh the hassle of compatability issue.
PS-- I use and operate a cluster of 100 machines running 64-bit Linux. Yes, I see the hassle of compatability issues with this cluster but they all have 8GB of DRAM. The 64-bit Linux kernel also seems more unreliable than its 32-bit counterpart. No, I have no data to back this up besides my personal observations.
Slashdot Mirror
Take a look at the success of the iPod. The Slashdot community may not get the "lame iPod", but you can't argue with its success and market penetration. Nearly all my friends have one. I have one and I love it. Now how on earth are we possibly going to consider a switch to Ubuntu without having iTunes available?
I was a long-time flier of Northwest Airlines. I'm done with them after my experiences this summer. They've canceled too many flights on me due to not having enough pilots. If you don't have enough pilots, don't schedule the fvcking flight.
Why would you want to replace OS/X with Linux? Thats like replacing a shiny new Mercedez-Benz with a rebuilt Chevy.
Ok, try sitting in a quiet room that has good cellular reception with your good quad-band cellular phone. Now call up some kind of number that plays music while you are on hold. Compare the difference between a landline and the GSM codec. Ok, so you may claim that the GSM codec is designed for speech instead of music. Of course it is. However personally I have a much easier time hearing voice with whatever the landline codec is (which I thought was 56 kb/s). Chopping the frequency response for "typical" speech doesn't cut it for me. Maybe you have super hearing comprehension. I don't. I'm not the only one who believes this. There was an article in the Wall Street Journal making a similar claim about the superior voice quality of landlines.
I may be wrong on the details of data rates, but in my experience, voice clarity on a landline is completely superior. Maybe its personal...I've always had a hard time picking up people's voices in a crowded room even when the person is right in front of me. Sometimes I can hardly have a conversation on a cell phone. It is really that bad for me. Like I said, it makes no difference what phone I use. A landline I can hear a pin drop just like the Spring commercials. The GSM voice codec would just remove that pin-drop in the compression.
I hate talking on my cell phone with voice data compressed down to 9.6 kb/s. The POTS copper lines devote 56 kb/s to voice data. I can actually have a conversation without straining to pick up overly compressed speech. Yup, the U.S. has a well-developed copper telephone system and I prefer to use it whenever I'm in my home or office.
I can't stand talking on a cellphone and will keep my landline as long as possible. Cellular phones compress your voice down to typically 9.6 kb/s. I really have a hard time listening and processing this overly compressed speech. It doesn't make a difference whether I use my cheap pay-as-you-go $20 Kyocera phone or my friends $400 super-duper Nokia.
Landlines devote 56 kb/s for voice data and it makes a huge difference. I can actually have a nice conversation with someone as long as they aren't on their own cellphone.
lol! At least I know the difference between your and you're. I make typos...I know my basic grammar.
When did Slashdot become a political blog?
As others have pointed out, I'm had enough of Slashdot's anti-US headlines.
The U.S. is not a trustworthy ally?! Western Europe would have fallen under communism after WWII if it weren't for the U.S. Perhaps you might have been ok with that outcome.
When the U.S. was a fledgling power in the world, it tried to isolate itself from the dominate European powers at the time. The isolationist strategy ultimately failed. I suggest you re-consider history.
I bought Vista, have been using it for a few months, and I am happy. I like the UI better and the little touches make a difference for me. The things they "moved around" make logical sense to me. Have you tried Office 2007? Everything is moved around, but the UI is a fantastic improvement.
PS-- I've used Linux since 1995. I use it all day at work for the last 7 years. I've tried it on a home PC several times in the last decade. I prefer Windows. Shoot me. In fact, I prefer Windows to OS/X which I've also tried.
The parent makes several good points. The Democratic takeover of congress put the large Bush-backed boost in NSF funding on hold. This was a big blow to many of us relying on a large boost in NSF funding to carry on our research. I'm going to greatly generalize here, but the Democrats prefer funding life sciences (i.e. finding a cure for cancer) whereas Republicans generally prefer non-life-sciences funding in areas of physics, mathematics, computing, etc.
How about minding their own business and letting consumers choose not to buy a certain format?
I agree. Germany is generally a pretty nice place IMHO.
Do you have the right to shout "nigger faggot wetback chink" on the street corner?
Yes we do. Just like the Klu Klux Klan still has the right to congregate.
How about the freedom to smoke dope? They have that in Amsterdam, among other places. Not here.
LOL! Yes, freedom is defined by our right to use drugs.
How about the right to a fair trial? An American born citizen named Jose Padilla is in prison without trial, years after his detention.
You are pulling one example in muddied times of our "war on terrorism". Things aren't perfect, but yes, the majority of all suspects have the right to a fair trial.
I'm not gonna bother refuting your other examples. Sounds like your Springfield police department broke the law. Things aren't perfect in the U.S., but they are a hell of a lot better than most places in the world.
I was in London about 8 weeks ago and couldn't believe all the security cameras. How's that for freedom?
What, I was modded troll for giving an example of non-freedom in a European country? LOL! The typical Slashdotter has no idea how much freedom the U.S. citizens really have compared to the rest of the world. No, its not perfect and some smaller countries may be better. But compare to Britian, Eastern Europe, China, India, the Middle-East, Germany, etc.
In Germany you go to jail if you speak the words "the holocaust never happened".
I'd like to know how you've achieved that conclusion given the fact that you and just about everyone outside of Microsoft lacks meaningful information as to what *is* being sent, in what form, and how.
Oh for cripes sake. Just fire up tcpdump and have a look at what is being sent. It is all clear-text.
X-ray machines, Jet engines, and more all report operating conditions and usage information back to the manufacturer. Microsoft is doing this anonymously to improve the products. I have no problem with this. They aren't sending back any "personal information" like credit card numbers or even identification information.
I'm not surprised to see that 64-bit helps something like OpenSSL. I am very surprised that the non-hand-optimized code does so poorly. Hand-optimizing sections of code is asking quite a bit out of most coders. I also suspect that 64-bit code could even increase the I-cache miss rate since instructions are 64-bit, right? I-cache misses are not an issue for things like SPEC or OpenSSL, but they are a huge deal when running Oracle/DB2/Sybase/etc.
Not sure what kind of benchmarking you suggest on our cluster. It doesn't matter how much faster/slower 32-bit code would be because we need to access ~ 8GB of DRAM in a single process with our simulations.
What are 'most apps' and do they do crypto, compression, media [trans|en]coding...?
Web serving, business processing, database, any GUI interactive application, game engines (not rendering), etc. I doubt any of these use-cases would see more than 10% gain from 64-bit compilation.
Hardly. I've been running AMD64 native Gentoo for 3 years, being able to address over 4GB of RAM isn't of any benefit to me but the extra registers are.
I doubt the extra registers makes a big difference in most apps. Out-of-order superscalars have far more physical registers than architectural registers. Sure, extra registers allows the compiler to reduce the fills/spills from the stack, but really, performance nowadays often depends on eliminating costly L2 misses (1 L2 miss ~= > 300 opportunities to retire instructions).
Furthermore, narrower datapaths can be faster. Thus if you don't need the addressability of 64-bit and you aren't using 64-bit data types, then in theory 32-bit processors can be far faster.
That said, advances in computing require > 4GB of addressability and 64-bit is the future. However personally, the gain of a 64-bit OS does not outweigh the hassle of compatability issue.
PS-- I use and operate a cluster of 100 machines running 64-bit Linux. Yes, I see the hassle of compatability issues with this cluster but they all have 8GB of DRAM. The 64-bit Linux kernel also seems more unreliable than its 32-bit counterpart. No, I have no data to back this up besides my personal observations.
There are probably environmental factors going on here. I'm not a gamer, but several friends who are have had no problems with their Xbox360 hardware.