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106
Off-Topic / Re: They killed GNOME
« on: October 04, 2009, 01:03:05 pm »
That doesn't look too bad actually (still prefer 3 menus but I could live with the change). So is the one you linked how it will look in, say, Ubuntu?
Their intention is to lock out replacing bits of Gnome though - the Gnome shell and window manager will be tightly integrated so you can't replace one without deconstructing Gnome itsef. In such an environment it will be hard to maintain the old panel setup.
Their intention is to lock out replacing bits of Gnome though - the Gnome shell and window manager will be tightly integrated so you can't replace one without deconstructing Gnome itsef. In such an environment it will be hard to maintain the old panel setup.
107
Off-Topic / Re: They killed GNOME
« on: October 04, 2009, 09:13:55 am »
Yes. Tried the Win7 beta for 6 months, and the only changes they made that affected me were the ribbon-ised Paint, ribbon-ised Movie Maker, the removal of the Classic view of the Control Panel and the horrible horrible taskbar. All of which I dislike. Meanwhile they dropped support for my graphics card [it was only 2 and a half years since they released it, it's not fair].
Vista isn't bad, it only BSODs and requires a reinstall once a year. While I do prefer Ubuntu both philosophically and user interface wise, Vista has four things Linux doesn't: Paint, Game Maker, fast search and Flash that doesn't use 100% CPU.
Vista isn't bad, it only BSODs and requires a reinstall once a year. While I do prefer Ubuntu both philosophically and user interface wise, Vista has four things Linux doesn't: Paint, Game Maker, fast search and Flash that doesn't use 100% CPU.
108
Off-Topic / They killed GNOME
« on: October 04, 2009, 04:54:46 am »
http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2009/09/gnome-3-quick-visual-tour.html
They got rid of the Applications/Places/System menu in GNOME 3. They replaced it with a stupid launcher mashup thing which is crowded and complicated. I'm not a "power user" - I hate launchers and never used Gnome-Do or similar. I just liked that programs were under Applications, files were under Places and settings were under System. They also killed the bottom taskbar, I hope I don't have to go onto the mashup thing just to switch windows.
Because of how Linux works, if you don't upgrade to the new version you'll find it hard get new versions of any other app after a while, such as Firefox or OpenOffice. I don't like the 'feel' of KDE (or Win7, it's the same not-quite-right feeling) so I can't exactly switch to Kubuntu. Maybe I'm stuck with 9.10 [which is great, by the way] and Vista.
They got rid of the Applications/Places/System menu in GNOME 3. They replaced it with a stupid launcher mashup thing which is crowded and complicated. I'm not a "power user" - I hate launchers and never used Gnome-Do or similar. I just liked that programs were under Applications, files were under Places and settings were under System. They also killed the bottom taskbar, I hope I don't have to go onto the mashup thing just to switch windows.
Because of how Linux works, if you don't upgrade to the new version you'll find it hard get new versions of any other app after a while, such as Firefox or OpenOffice. I don't like the 'feel' of KDE (or Win7, it's the same not-quite-right feeling) so I can't exactly switch to Kubuntu. Maybe I'm stuck with 9.10 [which is great, by the way] and Vista.
109
General ENIGMA / Re: Enigma IDE (written in C++ using wxWidgets)
« on: September 20, 2009, 07:43:43 am »Also, why do we from the UK still talk about "colour" yet when we're talking about a dialog box, we don't call it a "dialogue box"?
I do...
110
Announcements / Re: I'm bookmarking this day
« on: September 20, 2009, 07:42:55 am »
Yes, but it's usual to take four at AS and three for A2.
Where are you applying for university and what for, by the way?
Where are you applying for university and what for, by the way?
111
Announcements / Re: I'm bookmarking this day
« on: September 20, 2009, 04:02:36 am »
Ah, right. I don't know if its comparable, but in UK Sixth Form (A-level) you take 4 subjects and I do two Maths, Physics and Chemistry. No writing and almost no work outside of class unless you need to revise something.
112
Announcements / Re: I'm bookmarking this day
« on: September 19, 2009, 10:27:38 am »
Why did you take English? I'm not sure how US colleges work, but couldn't you just take maths and sciences?
113
Announcements / Re: I'm bookmarking this day
« on: September 19, 2009, 03:41:07 am »
Great explanation of GCD:
http://arstechnica.com/apple/reviews/2009/08/mac-os-x-10-6.ars/12
http://arstechnica.com/apple/reviews/2009/08/mac-os-x-10-6.ars/13
Too bad the license is incompatible with the Linux kernel.
http://arstechnica.com/apple/reviews/2009/08/mac-os-x-10-6.ars/12
http://arstechnica.com/apple/reviews/2009/08/mac-os-x-10-6.ars/13
Too bad the license is incompatible with the Linux kernel.
114
Announcements / Re: I'm bookmarking this day
« on: September 18, 2009, 02:55:20 pm »Look. You can only split threads across cores if there *ARE* multiple threads to split.
I know that, I was just thrown by the wording.
115
Announcements / Re: I'm bookmarking this day
« on: September 18, 2009, 11:34:11 am »That's the programs making the threads, not Windows. :/
And yes, it is. However, it's nice to have threads split across cores, and normally, they do not.
Is that because they can't? Are there two kinds of threads or something?
116
Announcements / Re: I'm bookmarking this day
« on: September 17, 2009, 11:24:43 am »I don't know; you could be right. Intel's Larrabee [GPU that runs x86 instructions] will have up to 48 cores, and they demoed a (non-x86, proof-of-concept only) chip with 80 cores a few years ago.I've never heard of a 48-core processor, and, to be honest, it sounds pretty pointless in my opinion unless you have 48 things you want to do at once.
It's a GPU. That means it runs graphics. Rendering 3D graphics is highly parallelisable - though shaders aren't enirely like cores, modern graphics cards have up to 1600 of them per chip. So Larrabee will use all 48 cores.
117
Announcements / Re: I'm bookmarking this day
« on: September 16, 2009, 02:38:10 pm »Well, I thought one individual processor was limited to 32 cores. Or do you mean multiple processors? I thought I read it somewhere, but I forgot. :/
I don't know; you could be right. Intel's Larrabee [GPU that runs x86 instructions] will have up to 48 cores, and they demoed a (non-x86, proof-of-concept only) chip with 80 cores a few years ago.
118
Announcements / Re: I'm bookmarking this day
« on: September 16, 2009, 11:41:30 am »And chances are you'll never use more than 4 cores.
That's why it's a server chip; they can usually scale to any number of threads.
But we'll never use more than 640k of memory...
--
@Retro
Where did you hear that? Cray uses tens of thousands of x86 cores in its more recent supercomputers.
119
Announcements / Re: I'm bookmarking this day
« on: September 15, 2009, 10:33:55 am »
Yeah, threads are useful to run code in parallel even on single-core hardware, but the real use for the future is multi-core. AMD's launching a 12-core server chip in a few months for example, and even on the desktop it's clear the future contains more cores.
120
Announcements / Re: I'm bookmarking this day
« on: September 13, 2009, 01:23:30 pm »Multithreading is also great on multi-core machines.Threading between cores is called hyperthreading, not multi-threading. Multi-threading is within one core.
No. Hyperthreading (HTT) is Intel's proprietary brand of Simultaneous Multithreading (SMT) which is a CPU feature that allows you to run two threads at once on one core at the same time (as opposed to slicing CPU time into segments and using some cycles on each thread). It allows you to use idle execution units when a CPU is waiting for a memory request on the other thread at the cost of increased die size.
Multithreading is running two threads at all, whether on one core or many.