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A 2nd Core to Keep Windows Chugging Along?
Posted by
timothy
on Sat Apr 16, 2005 11:58 PM
from the still-no-spyware-evident-on-fc3 dept.
from the still-no-spyware-evident-on-fc3 dept.
Eh-Wire writes "Almost every hardware junkie I know would give most anything to take a spin in the new dual core hot rods from Dell or one of the custom system builders. But what if you actually needed that second core to run your anti-virus, spyware detection software and firewall just to get a little gaming or Internet surfing done on the first core. Would that really be a good reason to bring home a shiny new machine? I can think of a couple of different things I could use a second core for but running an iron lung on it just to keep the machine chugging along just isn't one of them. Curiously enough, PCMag thinks that's a perfectly good reason."
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Yeah... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Yeah... (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Yeah... (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:Yeah... (Score:5, Interesting)
That's funny. I have a dual processor machine and the one thing I love about them is related to what you said: a misbehaving app that consumes 100% CPU does not make the machine unusable, because the UI can run on the other (which I promptly use to send a SIGKILL). You do not also feel those 100% bursts that some apps do.
Sure, if a two threaded app does that, you're screwed. Then again, an app that misbehaves like that will probably be erased ASAP (programmers that do that should be ahot).
All in all, dual processors (and dual cores I guess) make very "smooth" machines.
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Re:Yeah... (Score:5, Funny)
You're right! And I wasted another 5 seconds reading your meaningless reply, and yet another 20 seconds writing this meaningless reply, in response to your meaningless reply (which clearly took you several minutes to come up with)! ! When will it all end?!?!
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Re:Yeah... (Score:5, Funny)
Programmer: "Why? Why? Muahahha.... BECAUSE I CAN."
Using more resources than necessary to complete a task doesn't demonstrate any sort of talent.
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Re:Yeah... (Score:5, Funny)
You should optimize the time of your optimization so that you optimize the effects of that optimization. Optimizing at an inopportune opportunity will result in an unoptimized optimization. Just remember to use your optimization optimizer to find the best opportunity to optimize!
It's trivial, really. Hierarchial optimization is like SO basic. Don't forget to optimize your optimization optimizer! There's nothing more embarrassing than missing the optimum opportunity to optimize your code because your optimization optimizer took too long to execute!
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Re:Yeah... (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:Yeah... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Yeah... (Score:4, Interesting)
http://www.hitachigst.com/hdd/research/recording_
attacking flash for being useless is like attacking tv for being useless. 90%or so, of the time you are right, but to someone else it's quite important.
I think soap operas are not worth the tape they are recorded on, some people can't live without them. personally I feel most websites would benefit by having little to no advanced formatting, much less flash as, for the most part, I am looking for the information in the page rather than the joy of lookng at it. and I definitely agree that flash should not be used as a place where information should be searchable or bookmarkable.
That said, for those who wish to make pretty moving pictures for their website, flash makes it very easy to create. bearing in mind that the flash is there to attract a different sort of person than you. By all means, avoid that site, or advertiser. there is a flash ad on this site that has a couple of horn blasts, and If I ever meet the marketing manager who thought that was a good idea, I will blast an airhorn in their ear.)
dhtml and css, though possibly more proper, are not easy by comparison, if they were, something like google maps would have arrived sooner.
as for another counter example, I was recently introduced to someone from ben and jerry's, who created thishttp://www.benandjerrys.com/fun_stuff/cow_to_
we who tend to treat the web like an encyclopaedia will rue this, but we are a regrettably small minority. tv has annoying commercials, now movies do, and so will follow, or lead, the web.
one can only hope that there are more instances of things that are really good, (like school house rock) than really bad.
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Re:Yeah... (Score:4, Insightful)
Mini USA Web Site [miniusa.com].
To see the example of Flash where it really added value, click on the models menu and select one of the models. Then pick interior features and there's a very nice thing where you can click on aspects of the interior and read about each feature. You could do this in DHTML as well as Flash but it would be a browser compatibility nightmare.
Of course the lack of any way to link within the content so I could show you what I like directly is a major bummer and a huge disadvantage of the all-Flash approach
D
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Re:Yeah... (Score:5, Interesting)
For all the claims of "Techno luddite" he isn't talking about that scale. If word processors want to add AI to do predictive work (markov chain type prediction ala itap) that is FINE with me, but enough with the translucent flyaways -- it isn't so terrible to have them, but allow us to disable them.
The problem is not when I fire up word/ooo/staroffice, the problem is when I fire them up when I have 123123 other things running -- if they ran like they were on a 300 mhz celeron [i.e. conservative with resources] the system wouldn't bog down when I'm trying to add a note to some documentation.
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Re:Yeah... (Score:4, Informative)
See CSS Zen Garden [csszengarden.com] for proof of that...
(and for the web illiterates out there: there are no tables in CSSZG, and the only thing that changes between two designs is the stylesheet associated with the page, the HTML file doesn't change anywhere but where it links the aforementioned stylesheets)
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so you're a web designer, huh? (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:Yeah... (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:Bloat? What do you know about bloat? (Score:4, Interesting)
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Re:Bloat? What do you know about bloat? (Score:5, Informative)
As for spreadsheets, I see them more as a rapid prototyping tool (if even that). When I want to get anything done that involves large lists of data, I write a Perl script to do the job. Mind you, Perl is a lot more powerful than spreadsheet programs, and it, too, takes a lot less system resources than any given contemporary spreadsheet program.
Of course, every (wo)man has his/her own preferences, and I don't write this to encourage everyone to use emacs/LaTeX/perl, but rather to spread the fact that you don't need even a 350 MHz PII or even 64 MBs of RAM to be productive, and that it is most certainly program design that makes Open/Microsoft Office take much more resources than really necessary. While you may not need a 2 GHz machine like the GP said, you do certainly need a lot more because of the fancy GUIs and stuff.
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Re:Bloat? What do you know about bloat? (Score:5, Insightful)
Why does every coder that writes a Windows app think it has to run at sartup?
The only things that should ever run at startup, in the background, are: AV, mobo, video, sound, and anti spyware. Anything else is a waste of resources.
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Re:Bloat? What do you know about bloat? (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Bloat? What do you know about bloat? (Score:4, Informative)
Rather than bitching, why not spend a little time figuring it out? It's pretty obvious, if you think about it. Here we go. First, choose the Tools menu, because Tools always contains configuration menu options. Next, choose Customize under tools, because Customize in is where you customize menus and toolbars in Office applications (and many other Microsoft apps as well). Click over to the Options tab, because you're looking for options (the other two, Toolbars and Commands, are obviously not what you want). Looky there! I see a checkbox for "Always show full menus"! I wonder what that could do?
Yes, it's "buried", but it's buried in a logical place if you're familiar with Office products. (disclaimer: The above steps are for Word 2003. They may be different on older versions, but probably not.)
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Re:Bloat? What do you know about bloat? (Score:5, Insightful)
I think it's also worth mentioning that one DOES need to learn to use software. It's really strange that people think the computer should know exactly what they need, display it on the screen, and nothing else.
And when they want to change something, they shouldn't need to learn to do it.
What happened there? Everything in life takes some learning, and software is certainly no exception.
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Re:Bloat? What do you know about bloat? (Score:5, Insightful)
As far as I can tell, it's a problem that was created from both sides. Users are always lazy (for anything and everything -- for instance, if you didn't have to pass a test to get a driver's license, nobody would ever take driving lessons and learn how to drive properly), but the industry is just as much to blame for humoring such beliefs. For example, this menu-hiding functionality was spawned directly from the belief that, "The user shouldn't need to learn how to use the software." Menu items that a user never uses, or uses rarely, will get hidden in an attempt to simplify the interface (hide functionality from users that don't use that functionality). Of course, it then pisses off the user the one or two times they do need to use that hidden functionality. I wonder how often this causes a user to believe that the software can't do what they want (when it really can, but the option is hidden), so they switch to a different application? Probably not a big problem with Word or Excel, but if TurboTax hid the option to itemize how many people do you think would switch over to TaxCut? (obligatory tax-related example, given the time of year)
In my opinion, this mind set needs to change. If you don't know how to work on your car, and you don't want to learn, then you go pay a mechanic to do it for you. The same thing should apply to softare. If you don't know how to user Word and you don't want to learn, you should be able to pay someone to do what you need. If you're too cheap to pay, then you'd better be willing to learn.
On a related topic, we geeks need to stop doing free tech support for friends and family simply because we're the people they know who "know computers". If you must help your friends and family with their computer problems, charge them money. Even better, you should refuse to help unless they've exhausted all their options. Otherwise, they'll never learn and just keep coming back every time they get a popup window they don't understand. It's the age old, "Teach a man to fish," problem.
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Re:Bloat? What do you know about bloat? (Score:4, Funny)
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The 1st link (Score:3, Interesting)
Why don't we (Score:3, Funny)
Who wants to waste all that power running virus software? I don't get it.
Re:Why don't we (Score:3, Funny)
Although, if virus writers would limit their CPU usage to just the second core, thus freeing up the first one, maybe people would stop bugging me about their system running so slowly.
Wait for the PPC (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Wait for the PPC (Score:3, Informative)
Wonder what Tiger would be like on a dual core processor......
Re:Wait for the PPC (Score:4, Informative)
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people make jokes about it but (Score:3, Interesting)
http://anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=2
Insane.. 244watts under full load. Should be interesting to see amd's numbers in this regard.. (which should be out very soon, the release date is the 21st IIRC.) This would be an expensive upgrade if you choose Intel's dual-module chip. You'll need a new motherboard & a pretty hefty power supply.
Re:people make jokes about it but (Score:5, Informative)
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Spyware (Score:4, Funny)
Uh... (Score:3, Insightful)
Actually I think this is an excellent idea (Score:3, Interesting)
You know your operating system sucks when... (Score:4, Insightful)
Good god. More seriously, just seeing people put ideas like that out makes me cringe, not because it's not necessary but because it seems to me that thinking like that will only lead companies like Microsoft to dedicate the second core to nothing but fixing problems that shouldn't be there in the first place. I suppose it's inevitable, though. Programming, especially of the bad, lazy or bloated variety, always seems to expand to fill and tax whatever hardware is available to it.
come on... (Score:5, Interesting)
...what? (Score:5, Insightful)
Amazing revelation: dual core processors can do two things at the same time?! You must be kidding me. Any properly threaded application can take advantage of dual cores--there's no need to dream up scenarios where someone could be *gasp* doing multiple things at once.
I don't mean to sound harsh, but I'm confused as to why this is newsworthy.
Re:...what? (Score:5, Insightful)
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People think we're joking about Windows... (Score:3, Interesting)
What's worse, though, is the people who think that kind of fug is inevitable and somehow desirable, and don't believe that other systems are less messed up.
Clearly this is where things are heading (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't do PC's anymore outside of work where we have everyone clamped down pretty tight so I had kind of lost touch with how bad it really was out there. Last week I had one of my users bring in his PC that was locking up on him and doing the usual "strange stuff" that users talk about. I really never did get around to trying to fix anything though.
I sat in awe as the thing, with no programs open and nobody touching it spent most of the day fighting it's own little virus/spyware battle. Between Symantec and the (easily) half a dozen anti-spyware programs he had installed the computer sent a constant stream of pop-up windows coming at me warning me about assorted files and registry keys it thought suspicious and busily scanning it's ass off.
I wondered how he got any work done on the thing with it spending so much in the way of resources on "self defense". This is the answer in Windows world, they're going to eventually sell you a PC that's really two in one with the first one dedicated to just running the OS and all this crap you have to buy to keep from being bent over by the virus writers and the other virus writers who create spyware/adware.
Dead homies (Score:5, Funny)
Download the windows 2nd Core patch here (Score:4, Funny)
Hits the nail on the head (Score:5, Insightful)
Now, we all know that most of our processes are input bound, not compute bound. They spend the vast majority of their time waiting for user input. Game are an exception: they both continually process changing data and wait for user input (that's why they are such good benchmarks). Most everything else, however, is input bound. However, many of the processes that run in the background are compute bound, input has little effect on them.
Now in my mind the best way to use a second core is to a) lump all your input bound processes on one core, and your background compute bound processes on the other (like anti-virus, firewall, maybe music, etc.) or b) run compute bound processes on each at the same time (game on one, factor large prime numbers on the other). Either way, there is almost no point in placing seperating the input bound processes between the two cores. This means that unless you are clever about how you divide the work, you aren't going to get much out of it.
Way of the future? (Score:5, Insightful)
I think the point is that it's not really a choice between clock speed and parallelism. You may still have a choice at the moment, but don't expect that to continue. Developers will have to start learning to deal with parallelism if they don't want to fall off the performance curve. I expect we'll start seeing methods, tools, languages and libraries to help developers manage it easily while avoid the common dangers of deadlock and inconsistency. There's some interesting research in the area and we may start seeing some of that find its way into production systems. And of course once developers start adopting parallelism, consumers will in turn begin to see the benefits of it.
In some ways its an obvious message if you look at supercomputers. No one's running serial code on petahertz machines! They're all just systems with large numbers of fairly pedestrian processors with custom fast, low-latency interconnects. As always, this is just the natural trickling down of that to the desktop level.
What a load of hypocritical garbage, (Score:4, Informative)
In fact, Windows XP SP1 with AVG *and* a software firewall ran office and home apps faster on my old C433/256 than Mandrake 9.2 *or* FreeBSD 4.3 with no A/V or firewall. But, since I dare say so on Slashdot, I'm either a liar or a paid Microsoft shill.
What about I/O? (Score:4, Insightful)
What the PC Mag writer neglected -- or was oblivous to -- is the fact that those other processes occupying the second (or hereafter known as "wasted") core use a hell of a lot of I/O. A virus scanner scans everything going into the secondary storage. Sure, you have effectively two processors, but that doesn't do you any good if one of those processes is constantly scanning stuff on the hard drive. You're not going to be able to run Norton and Half-Life at the same time, no matter how fast the processor.
The point is that you shouldn't have to have all of those I/O bandwidth-hogging "crutches" (such as virus scanners, spyware scanners and the like) stealing your machine's I/O bandwidth. The title of this article has it right: you already do need a more powerful machine just to keep Windows "chugging" along.
Idiocy (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Best protection against random internet assault (Score:5, Insightful)
You can buy a router, and it is a really good idea, but most users will still click "yes" on whatever dialogue pops up on the screen. Your average user doesn't know what a "binary" is...
It might I think if you did devote a second core purely to spyware/virus/babysitting it would only reduce the problem but not remove it.
smarter PC usage is the answer, not more hardware...
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Re:Of course, what they DON'T mention... (Score:4, Insightful)
Microsoft said 6 months or so ago that one socket = one CPU. Other software vendors that license based on CPU did the same
XP Home will take one physical CPU
Similarly, XP Pro will make full use of two sockets
Loose some of your hate for windows, and you might just get to take advantage of all this tasty new technology.
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Re:Oh it's all going to hell... (Score:5, Informative)
The traditional UNIX startup model calls for a lot of tasks to be fired off at boot time, one after the other. Whether you use init scripts or rc scripts or whatever, the model is the same.
In Panther, we created a fairly sophisticated system for firing off these tasks in parallel instead of serially. The net result was a decrease in cold-start times of about 100%.
Now we've got launchd. The idea now is that instead of making the user wait for a bunch of services to start, we let launchd fire them both in parallel and asynchronously.
I don't want to get extremely specific here for reasons I hope are obvious, but on modern (i.e., dual-G5) hardware, the time from the end of power-on tests and the initialization of Open Firmware to the menu bar and dock appearing and the system accepting user input is as little as four seconds.
Four seconds to cold-boot the operating system.
Pretty impressive, no? All it takes is a willingness to look at the traditional way of doing things, recognize massive stupidity, and correct it.
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