If i had mod points today, i'd mod you down as "stupid, read the fucking article, and also, please get a fucking clue"
It is a 100% perfectly documented beahvior of the car, extremely unlikely to be done "by accident", and the M3 is _not_ a normal BMW, it is street legal track car with a/c, leather, and a radio. People that buy these are hard core driving enthusiasts, or rich people that want to seem like driving enthusiasts.
Here's a hint: to engage this, you need to leave the gas pedal floored for a few seconds, while doing a few other things simultaneously. Do you often just lleave the gas pedal floored at a standstill ?
BTW, if you're already moving, i dont beleive this feature even works. It is ONLY for doing perfectly controlled maximum-acceleration launches. I.e. you want to drag race from a standing start.
actually in current formula 1 cars the driver isn't even hitting the paddles anymore, the computer is selecting gears up and down at the appropriate times.
indy car still has manual gear selection by the driver, afaik.
First off, the SMG gearbox is NOT an automatic. It is an improvement upon a manual gearbox (the computer automatically double-clutches downshifts, etc etc)
secondly, C&D is not known for spectacularly reproducible test conditions or scientific thoroughness.
Finally, the only thing that would make a standard gearbox faster than this one would be less weight, or different gear ratios. I suspect the SMG box is slightly heavier, but do not know that to be the case.
Lets put it this way. On the ferrari SMG gearbox, schumacher had a faster laptime than on the 6 speed in the exact same car. Schumacher is also about the only person who gets a better laptime with ferrari's traction control turned off.
You are correct, however the BMW M3 doesn't have an automatic. It is a manual gearbox, with a proper cltuch, and normal gears.
Except the clutch is opened/closed by computer, much faster than any human could do so. It is _exactly_ like the gearbox in a formula 1 car, it's most similar counterpart in production automobiles is in the ferrarri 360 and f355.
It is a well advertised, well documented feature of the SMG II transmission. It's called "launch control". It's not tricky to do, and it requires you to be in S6 mode to do it at all, afaik.
Re:Actually, this ties in w/some stuff for me...
on
Itanium Problems
·
· Score: 2
the best sun can do is gain share in a market whos overall size is decreasing. however, i think even those days are numbered, as apart from platform lockin people can switch to linux and immediately save money. the articles about company x replacing sun boxes with linux boxes and saving oodles of money and time are coming out more and more frequently now.
look at it this way. sun hardware is more expensive, and in the small to medium range, simply not as powerful as x86 counterparts. price parity is completely out of the question.
when you consider that most people couldn't even tell you what advantages solaris has over linux, its dwindling list of "extras" is a moot point when doing a comparative analysis between the two. people see that x86 hardware is cheaper _and_ faster, and linux is "good enough" and freee, and their existing unix knowledge is 90% or more transferrable.
sun doesn't know what to do with linux. their ongoing struggle to come up with a position on linux makes this pretty clear. Their financials also make it pretty clear that the marketplace and investors are catching on.
Once upon a time, sun was the internet. Once upon a time, if you wanted money from venture capitalists, you had to demonstrate your sun+oracle+bigip serverroom.
those days are gone, and unless sun does something interesting, sun will start looking like sgi.
Re:Actually, this ties in w/some stuff for me...
on
Itanium Problems
·
· Score: 2
sun makes a deal out of low power consumption because they happen to be unable to compete on any other merit w.r.t. processors.
also, low power is nice for running off of 48vdc power, as is required for telco gear. as it turns out, one of the last major industries to still be paying too much money for underperforming sun hardware is the telco/carrier industry (they still move at the same glacial pace they always have and haven't caught onto the fact that sun is a sinking ship )
so in review: low power consumoption is good for sun becase 1) some of their chips exhibit it 2) the only market they're still relevant in needs it
The biggest source of anxiety in my daily life is other people that don't meet the bar for existance. You often see them on America's motorways talking on their cell phones, doing their makeup, and the like.
You see them leaning out the windows of pickup trucks yelling at people on the sidewalk. You see them standing on scaffolding at construction sites, turned towards the streets whistling at any thing that looks like it could be female from a distanec of 4 stories up.
You see them at your office wearing glasses that don't have a perscription and suspenders that dont actually hold anything up, asking female employees to make them coffee they don't even like drinking, all the while badmouthing how stupid everyone around them is and talking about how they aren't getting paid enough to show up late to work in their leased porsche with the smallest engine and steptronic transmission.
This problem is worse when you're a youth, as the people that grow up to be the people that don't meet the bar start learning through trial and error how to grow into those people in the middle and highshcool years.
People that won't get the fuck out of my way and insist on fucking with my life in an unwarranted manner cause me anger, anxiety, and aggression.
Video games cost $50 a peice. You can do a lifetime's worth of "retaliation" and "anger redirection" in a few short minutes.
Running one fucking moron off the road for the betterment of humanity costs you life in prison.
Lets look at the acquisitions history of a few other companies.
Redhat Cisco
Cisco is doing alright. They've acquired technology instead of developing it for a few reasonably big items (with more down the road payoffs).
Redhat, well, i have no idea if they're even afloat, but they swapped market cap for warm bodies at a pretty stagering pace.
I dont think theres any evidence that doing strategic acquisitions is a bad thing.
I also think you'll find that Rare cost ms less than 1% of its cash reserves.
A company with no debt, record revenues (in a recession no less), and > 40b in cash cant be struggling all that badly. Or do you know something about economics i dont ?
The differentiation that started in NT4 between Workstation and Server SKUs continued with W2k and continues with XP and the XP-based server SKUs.
While the binaries may be the same, the run time operation is not. several scheduler and worker threads defaults are sku-specific.
In the XP server timeframe, the server will be a differentiated enough offering that the average warez kid that always runs whatever the "most expensive sku" pirated copy of windows is, will NOT want to run it on their home machine. It simply wont be any fun for them to use as a desktop machine (unless they just want to look at logs and perf counters from their server-class apps)
You're right though. It's currently too difficult to be a good NT administrator. That is an ongoing goal for MS - to lower the bar to proper administration for being an NT admin.
The reality of the situation is this. IT is a cost center. Lowering that cost by making the software "run it self" or easier to manage when intervention is required is the entire goal of MS. Paying any sum of money for a windows server license is a paltry sum compared to paying $40k for a junior unix admin to run a free OS. If windows could self administer, ask yourself how many windows boxes you could afford with what you're paying for that one junior admin ?
Slashdot is perhaps a skewed market segment, but ask yourself - of all the businesses that use computers, and have an IT department, is that businesses primary focus IT, or something else ? Should my insurance company be spending money supporing their email system, or should they be lowering my premiums because they can afford to do so and still cover their costs and be profitable ?
Naturally, the IT and system administrator "guilds" abhor the idea that they'll be replaced by a click-through Wizard at some point in the future.
The Guilds have got it coming. Evolve or drown. That's how it works in the job market, and the tech sector is not ${DEITY}'s chosen profession - the.com crash showed us all that.
However, there were over 40 different rev's of the PS1, and 30 or so were "security" fixes. (security in the same sense of the word as its being used in this article)
THe point is to raise the barrier of hacking so high, and to go after people selling devices to those that cant meet the barrier, so as to make piracy not worthwhile.
_Everyone_ pirated PS1 games. I'd say 99% of PS1 owners i know had cd-cases full of cdr'd playstation games. Dreamcast is similar.
Xbox is trying to avoid that. They've got a few advantages - one, the DVD format (for now). Two, the barrier to the home user hacking a box without buying a commercial product.
Additionally, raising the _cost_ for a skilled person to produce the hack once, and raising the cost to distribute that hack as a product, may be disincentive enough to make the modchipping industry viable.
If the xbox hacking community remains a marginalized few that are mostly interested in hacking and not game piracy, then Microsoft will have achieved its goals in the matter.
oh ? i have a CE device with not only a cursor, but a mouse pointer.
It's an IBM Z50. It runs Windows CE HandheldPC edition, 2.11. It has a 640x480 screen, is in a micro-laptop form factor. It has no moving parts. It has 48mb of ram. Its instant on, instant of. It has a type 2 CF slot, and a type 2 PCMCIA slot.
Cisco makes Aironet 352 drivers for it.
It gets 8 hours of battery life.
Microsoft makes a Windows Terminal Server client for it.
Add all that up ? I have an instant on, WiFi with wep 640x480 client with a usable keyboard and usable mouse (the ibm thinkpad eraser), that lets me terminal serve into my windows server at home and run IE 6 or any other app i want.
I get better batttery life than ANY laptop, it synchronizes with Exchange at work out of hte box, and it cost me $250 on ebay.
There isn't a better wireless web browsing experience.
maybe on linux - and maybe now. so does this announcement now mean that you can fork 100,000 processes in a matter of seconds as well ?
(and what linux kernel lets you have 100k simultaneous processes ?)
and given what i remember about fork, isn't it the case that you memcopy the entire address space of the forking process for each fork() (barring optimizations such as perhaps shared text segments) ?
are you telling me that pthread_create() on _Every_ platform copies the entire process address space ? i dont think this is the case. a large orchestrated memcpy of course is a perf hit - one that afaik, forking required, and threading does not.
Note that im not very well versed in how _linux_ threads work - i only know that they've always been " a bit different ".
Cache synchronization in MT apps is hardly on the same scale as reading/writing to shared memory (or mmap()ed regions?!) If you demonstrate that your forked app works faster via mmap than a single-address space process with multiple threads writing to shared non-thread-local storage, on a platform that has a reasonable threads implementation (not necessarily linux, but i haven't followed linux's threading at all, honestly), i'll be pleasantly surprised.
fork() has advantages. however, dismissing threading outright by claiming that fork() is equal or superior makes anything you claim dubious.
re: thread switching vs process switching:
this argument seems totally ridiculous. i can't possibly fathom how _any_ cache coherency solution that is thread-specific is time-comparative with flushing and reloading the tlb, flushing and reloading _all_ caches, and so on. and cache coherency has been well attacked in designs like the SGI O3k. Are you telling me that a cache-line or two is going to be _less_ efficient than dumping all caches and tlbs ?
Locking isn't as bad as you claim. And the same fundamental problem(s) exist w.r.t. sharing resources wether your talking threads or processes.
of course the penalty you pay for this is that fork() is expensive, and shared memory is a finite system resource. try the command "ipcs" on a sys-v type box.
It is also generally the case that switching between processes is more expensive than switching between threads.
to the parent poster : 1 thread per connection is a pretty naive way to do it, but its got advantages - simplicity. It's a moot point since on a stock OS you'd run out of socket descriptors long before you'd run into a thread-count maximum.
Two nitpicks:
you can address 3GB with the/3GB switch:)
you can address significantly more with AWE/PAE, but i dont know that you can use that additional memory for thread stacks.
Just FYI, Yesterday i had SQL server 2k running with 1914 threads ( in AWE mode)
none of the things you mention "enhance" steering feel. They piss me off.
Im talking more about things like feeling the texture of the road, when the steering gets "light", etc etc. Some of these are pretty subtle, and i dont know how you'd come up with a good system of sensors and actuators that duplicate it. Especially since much of it is tire dependant (tire transmits feel to wheel / linkage / steering wheel )
Where do you put sensors ? do they need to be tuned for the wheel ? Any scheme where you're adding instruments to the wheel/suspensino assembly will increase unsprung weight (maybe not much) and potentially create imbalanced spots on the rotating components (bigger issue)
This are crappy issues to work though.
Going fully steer-by-wire has some packaging advantages (no more steering column/box/rack/pump ) but no failsafe (except for lots of redundancy)
Engineering in the "feel" (most brands wont do this - expect BMW to), and the reliability will be quite expensive, IMO.
The reason BMW went to all this expense is because unless there is a direct mechanical link between the wheel and the wheels, the steering feel is shit.
Many power steering systems get this completely wrong. BMW has always been a driver's car, and they aren't willing to sacrifice the "experience" for anything. This is their approach to making an active steering system - you get good road feel, but electronics can step in and assist if necessary.
I dont thinkt he BMW system should be considered "interim". Until they can accurately recreate the subtle road-feel transmitted to the steering wheel that is required for road confidence, there will be mechanical connection between driver and wheels.
id rather work with someone that knew 10% about 10 subjects than 100% about one subject. I want co-workers that are adaptable, that know just enough to get the job done well, and who know that there's more to learn if necessary, and how to learn it.
the number one problem i have with people at work is _not_ that they dont know enough about a particular thing. its that they dont see the whole picture. they dont have what knuth calls the fundamental difference between compsci and other sciences - the ability to shift layers of abstraction quickly and often when analyzing a problem.
that whole "well rounded person" thing they were pushing at college ? turns out its important after all:)
I love VB.NET. On the scale of most flexible to least flexible, you've got managed c++, C#, and VB.NET, however, the difference in capabilities between C# and VB.NET is so miniscule that i suspect that if i were in a situation that vb.net didn't address, i'd do it in MC++ and expose it to VB.NET anyhow.
So for me C# is the niche language - its for people that are too snobby to use VB, and does't really have any day-to-day benefits over C#.
I happen to love the case-insensitivity, and the code-block autocompletion. Finally, the background IDE-mode compiler is fantastic.
VB.NET is easily the most productive development tool i've ever used. For grins, I loaded up one of my old unix C++ apps in xemacs and hacked around on it. c++ on solaris with xemacs and ddd is nowhere CLOSE to the ease of use and quick turnaround from idea to debugged code, for me anyway:)
Altivec isn't worth keeping if you'r emoving to x86.
Case in point ? Photoshop on a run of the mill athlon xp smokes the fastest hardware apple makes. Photoshop is supposed to be "the altivec macintosh app".
PPC hardware, altivec or not, is slower.
Incidentally, iMovie and all that other stuff runs on G3 macs with no altivec at all.
Your good observation is that classic and carbon apps wouldn't run well/at all on an x86 port.
Regarding coca / nextstep on x86, that problem was solved 15 years ago. nextSTEP 3.3 ran on x86 quite well. It was succeeded by OpenSTEP 4.x, which also ran on x86 hardware quite nicely.
Infact, apple didn't throw away 100% x86 compat until they did their quartz +aqua UI peice, and then grafted the legacy mac os 9 shit into the OS.
You be sure and let me know when the price for IE goes up.
btw, IE was made for solaris and HPUX, and is still made for Mac OS (and osX). was that leveraging microsoft's "monopoly" in those areas ?
I make no argument one way or the other on what economic darwinism leads to. I don't however think you've adequately shown that it prevents a competitive marketplace.
Incidentally, the link you posted is useless. Wading through the bias isn't worth my time.
If these are your own original thoughts, then you are distinctly the most intelligent person to post a comment to slashdot in a long time.
Bravo.
There are a million different jobs that can challenge the mind, provide financial security, and be enjoyable. Compared to a good home life, a career is trivial.
Don't get in a situation where you've finally made it to the top and are earning the big check, only to find there's no one at home to appreciate it, because you didn't appreciate them.
You dont. You just said the other choice was better. And it was priced better.
No company has the right to survival. If netscape were the better browser, people would use netscape. Until IE was a decent browser, nobody used IE. Some people still dont use IE because they're just used to netscape and its "good enough".
Monopoly/bundling/whatever has/had nothing to do with it. IE kept getting better, netscape didn't. Netscape was punished appropriately.
Slashdot Mirror
If i had mod points today, i'd mod you down as "stupid, read the fucking article, and also, please get a fucking clue"
It is a 100% perfectly documented beahvior of the car, extremely unlikely to be done "by accident", and the M3 is _not_ a normal BMW, it is street legal track car with a/c, leather, and a radio. People that buy these are hard core driving enthusiasts, or rich people that want to seem like driving enthusiasts.
Here's a hint: to engage this, you need to leave the gas pedal floored for a few seconds, while doing a few other things simultaneously. Do you often just lleave the gas pedal floored at a standstill ?
BTW, if you're already moving, i dont beleive this feature even works. It is ONLY for doing perfectly controlled maximum-acceleration launches. I.e. you want to drag race from a standing start.
actually in current formula 1 cars the driver isn't even hitting the paddles anymore, the computer is selecting gears up and down at the appropriate times.
indy car still has manual gear selection by the driver, afaik.
First off, the SMG gearbox is NOT an automatic. It is an improvement upon a manual gearbox (the computer automatically double-clutches downshifts, etc etc)
secondly, C&D is not known for spectacularly reproducible test conditions or scientific thoroughness.
Finally, the only thing that would make a standard gearbox faster than this one would be less weight, or different gear ratios. I suspect the SMG box is slightly heavier, but do not know that to be the case.
Lets put it this way. On the ferrari SMG gearbox, schumacher had a faster laptime than on the 6 speed in the exact same car. Schumacher is also about the only person who gets a better laptime with ferrari's traction control turned off.
You are correct, however the BMW M3 doesn't have an automatic. It is a manual gearbox, with a proper cltuch, and normal gears.
Except the clutch is opened/closed by computer, much faster than any human could do so.
It is _exactly_ like the gearbox in a formula 1 car, it's most similar counterpart in production automobiles is in the ferrarri 360 and f355.
It is a well advertised, well documented feature of the SMG II transmission. It's called "launch control". It's not tricky to do, and it requires you to be in S6 mode to do it at all, afaik.
the best sun can do is gain share in a market whos overall size is decreasing. however, i think even those days are numbered, as apart from platform lockin people can switch to linux and immediately save money. the articles about company x replacing sun boxes with linux boxes and saving oodles of money and time are coming out more and more frequently now.
look at it this way. sun hardware is more expensive, and in the small to medium range, simply not as powerful as x86 counterparts. price parity is completely out of the question.
when you consider that most people couldn't even tell you what advantages solaris has over linux, its dwindling list of "extras" is a moot point when doing a comparative analysis between the two. people see that x86 hardware is cheaper _and_ faster, and linux is "good enough" and freee, and their existing unix knowledge is 90% or more transferrable.
sun doesn't know what to do with linux. their ongoing struggle to come up with a position on linux makes this pretty clear. Their financials also make it pretty clear that the marketplace and investors are catching on.
Once upon a time, sun was the internet. Once upon a time, if you wanted money from venture capitalists, you had to demonstrate your sun+oracle+bigip serverroom.
those days are gone, and unless sun does something interesting, sun will start looking like sgi.
sun makes a deal out of low power consumption because they happen to be unable to compete on any other merit w.r.t. processors.
also, low power is nice for running off of 48vdc power, as is required for telco gear. as it turns out, one of the last major industries to still be paying too much money for underperforming sun hardware is the telco/carrier industry (they still move at the same glacial pace they always have and haven't caught onto the fact that sun is a sinking ship )
so in review: low power consumoption is good for sun becase 1) some of their chips exhibit it 2) the only market they're still relevant in needs it
Well, as long as you weren't driving drunk (i.e. you meant to run them off the road) and they "deserved it",
:)
You're my hero
No.
The biggest source of anxiety in my daily life is other people that don't meet the bar for existance. You often see them on America's motorways talking on their cell phones, doing their makeup, and the like.
You see them leaning out the windows of pickup trucks yelling at people on the sidewalk. You see them standing on scaffolding at construction sites, turned towards the streets whistling at any thing that looks like it could be female from a distanec of 4 stories up.
You see them at your office wearing glasses that don't have a perscription and suspenders that dont actually hold anything up, asking female employees to make them coffee they don't even like drinking, all the while badmouthing how stupid everyone around them is and talking about how they aren't getting paid enough to show up late to work in their leased porsche with the smallest engine and steptronic transmission.
This problem is worse when you're a youth, as the people that grow up to be the people that don't meet the bar start learning through trial and error how to grow into those people in the middle and highshcool years.
People that won't get the fuck out of my way and insist on fucking with my life in an unwarranted manner cause me anger, anxiety, and aggression.
Video games cost $50 a peice. You can do a lifetime's worth of "retaliation" and "anger redirection" in a few short minutes.
Running one fucking moron off the road for the betterment of humanity costs you life in prison.
Hrmm.
Lets look at the acquisitions history of a few other companies.
Redhat
Cisco
Cisco is doing alright. They've acquired technology instead of developing it for a few reasonably big items (with more down the road payoffs).
Redhat, well, i have no idea if they're even afloat, but they swapped market cap for warm bodies at a pretty stagering pace.
I dont think theres any evidence that doing strategic acquisitions is a bad thing.
I also think you'll find that Rare cost ms less than 1% of its cash reserves.
A company with no debt, record revenues (in a recession no less), and > 40b in cash cant be struggling all that badly. Or do you know something about economics i dont ?
The differentiation that started in NT4 between Workstation and Server SKUs continued with W2k and continues with XP and the XP-based server SKUs.
.com crash showed us all that.
While the binaries may be the same, the run time operation is not. several scheduler and worker threads defaults are sku-specific.
In the XP server timeframe, the server will be a differentiated enough offering that the average warez kid that always runs whatever the "most expensive sku" pirated copy of windows is, will NOT want to run it on their home machine. It simply wont be any fun for them to use as a desktop machine (unless they just want to look at logs and perf counters from their server-class apps)
You're right though. It's currently too difficult to be a good NT administrator. That is an ongoing goal for MS - to lower the bar to proper administration for being an NT admin.
The reality of the situation is this. IT is a cost center. Lowering that cost by making the software "run it self" or easier to manage when intervention is required is the entire goal of MS. Paying any sum of money for a windows server license is a paltry sum compared to paying $40k for a junior unix admin to run a free OS. If windows could self administer, ask yourself how many windows boxes you could afford with what you're paying for that one junior admin ?
Slashdot is perhaps a skewed market segment, but ask yourself - of all the businesses that use computers, and have an IT department, is that businesses primary focus IT, or something else ?
Should my insurance company be spending money supporing their email system, or should they be lowering my premiums because they can afford to do so and still cover their costs and be profitable ?
Naturally, the IT and system administrator "guilds" abhor the idea that they'll be replaced by a click-through Wizard at some point in the future.
The Guilds have got it coming. Evolve or drown. That's how it works in the job market, and the tech sector is not ${DEITY}'s chosen profession - the
You're probably right.
However, there were over 40 different rev's of the PS1, and 30 or so were "security" fixes. (security in the same sense of the word as its being used in this article)
THe point is to raise the barrier of hacking so high, and to go after people selling devices to those that cant meet the barrier, so as to make piracy not worthwhile.
_Everyone_ pirated PS1 games. I'd say 99% of PS1 owners i know had cd-cases full of cdr'd playstation games. Dreamcast is similar.
Xbox is trying to avoid that. They've got a few advantages - one, the DVD format (for now). Two, the barrier to the home user hacking a box without buying a commercial product.
Additionally, raising the _cost_ for a skilled person to produce the hack once, and raising the cost to distribute that hack as a product, may be disincentive enough to make the modchipping industry viable.
If the xbox hacking community remains a marginalized few that are mostly interested in hacking and not game piracy, then Microsoft will have achieved its goals in the matter.
oh ?
i have a CE device with not only a cursor, but a mouse pointer.
It's an IBM Z50. It runs Windows CE HandheldPC edition, 2.11. It has a 640x480 screen, is in a micro-laptop form factor. It has no moving parts. It has 48mb of ram. Its instant on, instant of. It has a type 2 CF slot, and a type 2 PCMCIA slot.
Cisco makes Aironet 352 drivers for it.
It gets 8 hours of battery life.
Microsoft makes a Windows Terminal Server client for it.
Add all that up ? I have an instant on, WiFi with wep 640x480 client with a usable keyboard and usable mouse (the ibm thinkpad eraser), that lets me terminal serve into my windows server at home and run IE 6 or any other app i want.
I get better batttery life than ANY laptop, it synchronizes with Exchange at work out of hte box, and it cost me $250 on ebay.
There isn't a better wireless web browsing experience.
maybe on linux - and maybe now. so does this announcement now mean that you can fork 100,000 processes in a matter of seconds as well ?
(and what linux kernel lets you have 100k simultaneous processes ?)
and given what i remember about fork, isn't it the case that you memcopy the entire address space of the forking process for each fork() (barring optimizations such as perhaps shared text segments) ?
are you telling me that pthread_create() on _Every_ platform copies the entire process address space ? i dont think this is the case. a large orchestrated memcpy of course is a perf hit - one that afaik, forking required, and threading does not.
Note that im not very well versed in how _linux_ threads work - i only know that they've always been " a bit different ".
Cache synchronization in MT apps is hardly on the same scale as reading/writing to shared memory (or mmap()ed regions?!) If you demonstrate that your forked app works faster via mmap than a single-address space process with multiple threads writing to shared non-thread-local storage, on a platform that has a reasonable threads implementation (not necessarily linux, but i haven't followed linux's threading at all, honestly), i'll be pleasantly surprised.
fork() has advantages. however, dismissing threading outright by claiming that fork() is equal or superior makes anything you claim dubious.
re: thread switching vs process switching:
this argument seems totally ridiculous. i can't possibly fathom how _any_ cache coherency solution that is thread-specific is time-comparative with flushing and reloading the tlb, flushing and reloading _all_ caches, and so on. and cache coherency has been well attacked in designs like the SGI O3k. Are you telling me that a cache-line or two is going to be _less_ efficient than dumping all caches and tlbs ?
Locking isn't as bad as you claim. And the same fundamental problem(s) exist w.r.t. sharing resources wether your talking threads or processes.
of course the penalty you pay for this is that fork() is expensive, and shared memory is a finite system resource. try the command "ipcs" on a sys-v type box.
It is also generally the case that switching between processes is more expensive than switching between threads.
to the parent poster : 1 thread per connection is a pretty naive way to do it, but its got advantages - simplicity. It's a moot point since on a stock OS you'd run out of socket descriptors long before you'd run into a thread-count maximum.
Two nitpicks: /3GB switch :)
you can address 3GB with the
you can address significantly more with AWE/PAE, but i dont know that you can use that additional memory for thread stacks.
Just FYI, Yesterday i had SQL server 2k running with 1914 threads ( in AWE mode)
heh.
none of the things you mention "enhance" steering feel. They piss me off.
Im talking more about things like feeling the texture of the road, when the steering gets "light", etc etc. Some of these are pretty subtle, and i dont know how you'd come up with a good system of sensors and actuators that duplicate it. Especially since much of it is tire dependant (tire transmits feel to wheel / linkage / steering wheel )
Where do you put sensors ? do they need to be tuned for the wheel ? Any scheme where you're adding instruments to the wheel/suspensino assembly will increase unsprung weight (maybe not much) and potentially create imbalanced spots on the rotating components (bigger issue)
This are crappy issues to work though.
Going fully steer-by-wire has some packaging advantages (no more steering column/box/rack/pump ) but no failsafe (except for lots of redundancy)
Engineering in the "feel" (most brands wont do this - expect BMW to), and the reliability will be quite expensive, IMO.
Im glad you brought this up.
The reason BMW went to all this expense is because unless there is a direct mechanical link between the wheel and the wheels, the steering feel is shit.
Many power steering systems get this completely wrong. BMW has always been a driver's car, and they aren't willing to sacrifice the "experience" for anything. This is their approach to making an active steering system - you get good road feel, but electronics can step in and assist if necessary.
I dont thinkt he BMW system should be considered "interim". Until they can accurately recreate the subtle road-feel transmitted to the steering wheel that is required for road confidence, there will be mechanical connection between driver and wheels.
specialization is for insects.
:)
id rather work with someone that knew 10% about 10 subjects than 100% about one subject. I want co-workers that are adaptable, that know just enough to get the job done well, and who know that there's more to learn if necessary, and how to learn it.
the number one problem i have with people at work is _not_ that they dont know enough about a particular thing. its that they dont see the whole picture. they dont have what knuth calls the fundamental difference between compsci and other sciences - the ability to shift layers of abstraction quickly and often when analyzing a problem.
that whole "well rounded person" thing they were pushing at college ? turns out its important after all
I can quite honestly say that you are wrong.
:)
I love VB.NET. On the scale of most flexible to least flexible, you've got managed c++, C#, and VB.NET, however, the difference in capabilities between C# and VB.NET is so miniscule that i suspect that if i were in a situation that vb.net didn't address, i'd do it in MC++ and expose it to VB.NET anyhow.
So for me C# is the niche language - its for people that are too snobby to use VB, and does't really have any day-to-day benefits over C#.
I happen to love the case-insensitivity, and the code-block autocompletion. Finally, the background IDE-mode compiler is fantastic.
VB.NET is easily the most productive development tool i've ever used. For grins, I loaded up one of my old unix C++ apps in xemacs and hacked around on it. c++ on solaris with xemacs and ddd is nowhere CLOSE to the ease of use and quick turnaround from idea to debugged code, for me anyway
Yeah. She is totally delicious. I "discovered" her after my wife convinced me to watch "Bring it On".
Altivec isn't worth keeping if you'r emoving to x86.
Case in point ? Photoshop on a run of the mill athlon xp smokes the fastest hardware apple makes. Photoshop is supposed to be "the altivec macintosh app".
PPC hardware, altivec or not, is slower.
Incidentally, iMovie and all that other stuff runs on G3 macs with no altivec at all.
Your good observation is that classic and carbon apps wouldn't run well/at all on an x86 port.
Regarding coca / nextstep on x86, that problem was solved 15 years ago. nextSTEP 3.3 ran on x86 quite well. It was succeeded by OpenSTEP 4.x, which also ran on x86 hardware quite nicely.
Infact, apple didn't throw away 100% x86 compat until they did their quartz +aqua UI peice, and then grafted the legacy mac os 9 shit into the OS.
You be sure and let me know when the price for IE goes up.
btw, IE was made for solaris and HPUX, and is still made for Mac OS (and osX). was that leveraging microsoft's "monopoly" in those areas ?
I make no argument one way or the other on what economic darwinism leads to. I don't however think you've adequately shown that it prevents a competitive marketplace.
Incidentally, the link you posted is useless. Wading through the bias isn't worth my time.
Is redhat guilty of dumping ?
If these are your own original thoughts, then you are distinctly the most intelligent person to post a comment to slashdot in a long time.
Bravo.
There are a million different jobs that can challenge the mind, provide financial security, and be enjoyable. Compared to a good home life, a career is trivial.
Don't get in a situation where you've finally made it to the top and are earning the big check, only to find there's no one at home to appreciate it, because you didn't appreciate them.
Microsoft spent millions making a better one
How do you survive?
You dont. You just said the other choice was better. And it was priced better.
No company has the right to survival. If netscape were the better browser, people would use netscape. Until IE was a decent browser, nobody used IE. Some people still dont use IE because they're just used to netscape and its "good enough".
Monopoly/bundling/whatever has/had nothing to do with it. IE kept getting better, netscape didn't. Netscape was punished appropriately.