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So how is this supposed to work? Saudi Arabia continues to suck their life’s blood out of the earth until they hear that sucking sound when you reach the end of a coke. The following day, I go back to riding my bicycle to work, and the Saudis revert to sheep herding bedouins? Obviously, this...

Surely you know enough about market forces to recognize that we don't have to make a fast dwindling resource expensive. If you truly believe that it is fast dwindling, let it run out. The market will ensure that all of your alternative energy fantasies come true.

This is not strictly true. More recent versions of NT have received C2 certification, nevertheless Mercutio makes a valid point. Certifications are valid only for specific configurations. Even so, it is important to understand that the granting of C2 certification for any version of NT...

Finland, right? Can't you just open a window, and disconnect the fan ? ;)

I write software for Windows all of the time, but I almost never write software that pumps messages. Only interactive software, which creates visible windows should work this way. NT services should not create windows at all. Even if they did, you would not be able to hook their messages...

Since the VirusScan Console runs on my desktop as LocalSystem… Will is off base when he suggests that programs can send arbitrary messages to any window. In NT, Windows are secured by sandboxes called Window Stations. These stations are protected by standard ACLs. You may have noticed the...

You could also use debug. It seems there is no end to the number of things you can do with debug.

In fairness to Clocker’s employers, my first job in a frigid, raised floor room, was working with a Wang VS-100. Our maintenance contract, which included full-time, on site personnel, was exorbitant. If it wasn’t bad enough with our users enjoying Wang ‘office’ applications, it got much worse...

Even if your applications are not presently available for XP, I suspect splitting the $16,000 delta would offer a pretty decent incentive to port the code.

I tend to tear down misconceptions about supposed ‘big iron’ or ‘high end’ workstations with regularity, and I seem to remember doing the same with your machine. Since I can’t find the link just now, I will assume it was before the loss of SR’s archives. HP’s PA-8600 @ 552 MHz should turn in a...

New machines are much more complex. Whether that means they are more difficult depends on whether that complexity is working for or against you. Plug and Play is an excellent idea. Novice users should not be expected to understand what IRQ lines, DMA slave channels, and IO base addresses are...

Re: 386-486 Those were the days???? Haaa! I used to repair(and build) systems in '91, when the described 386 and 486 machines were brand new. At that time, a large percentage of the repairs/upgrades were for original IBM 5150s, which were ten years old at that time. While I question the...

You bet.

The 'missing' ram is not being used at all. It is simply inaccessable. You may want to take a look at this post.

The large L3 cache really won't help. Even proper PC133 implementations offer higher measured performance than the L3 cache of a K6-III system.

If I am not mistaken, all four of the above links, point to 0.25µ K6-IIIs, rather than the 0.18µ K6-III+. The 0.18µ parts were not really intended for desktop use, and were pretty scarce, even when new.

If you are interested in the K6-III(+), you may want to take a look at this recent thread.

It's not that sad. Completely new, general purpose operating systems are pretty rare.

Nope. Is is just me, or are cross-platform apps the worst offenders? "The Hurd has always been on the cutting edge of not being good for anything." -Hurd kernel hacker "In short: just say NO TO DRUGS, and maybe you won't end up like the Hurd people." -Linus Torvalds Neither the Hurd, nor...

The only reason I have not commented on your specific problem, is because I can't reproduce it. I don't own Acrobat, and my machine never freezes for 5-20 seconds as you describe. I do of course, make regular use of the Acrobat reader. It is the single buggiest application I use with...

I used to design real time operating systems for a living. More recently, I have worked on general purpose operating systems as well. These days I am working on a low cost storage networking technology.

Certainly, you wouldn't want a system that limited threads in some arbitrary way, but I hope most readers realize what an absurd number even 40,000 threads is. The ideal number of threads for a process in a 4-way machine is exactly 4.

Even in the case of applications with careful SMP support, this metric is very application specific. Certainly, very low common resource contention would be required to maintain an SMP penalty below 5% for an arbitrary number of CPUs. Any lower, and it would seem that multiple individual...

By the nature of your question, you seem to realize that what I admire as an operating system designer is not the same as what an IT manager or even a user would find admirable. I recognize that middleware, available applications, price and so forth must be considered when comparing two real...

There are bright posters like Sivar on StorageReview, who are not members here. Because of its more public nature, SR also has a number of knowledgable posters who drop in on occasion like honold, Proteus, and the developers of TotalCopy. Of course, it also has hordes of newbies, and a much...

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I hope you will excuse the new thread, but smp and threading issues have little to do with the way I look. ( Ok, maybe a little. Think geek. ) NT thread scheduling in a uniprocessor system is actually pretty simple. The highest priority thread, which is ready to run, gets the processor. If...

Tannin has been well schooled. He seems to be confused about a number of related issues, which makes it difficult for him to articulate a strong position on this matter.

One man's kludge is another man's masterpiece. I will admit that a proper filesystem implementation is they way to go when you have a choice. Nevertheless, for those who recognize the depth of the problem, Dr. Russinovich's solution is breathtaking.

I see, Xeons don’t count because they are not aimed at the “mass market”, but Itanium 2s do? It’s probably best to leave it right there for now.

My comment was about processors, not complete machines. Regardless of the processors used, enterprise level servers will always ship with RAS and other features demanded by enterprise customers. Like the mainframe vendors before them, high end server and workstation vendors work very hard to...

It does. If you really want to get a sense of how poorly today’s multi-thousand dollar 64bit cpus perform on integer apps (which includes most business computing), consider that a Pentium 4 @ 2.53GHz scores 922 SPECint2000. More than any other processor, ever.

My first real job in the “computer industry” was as a technician. All day, I worked on IBM 5150s, and sold ISA ram cards. I understand that as a technician it is your job to look backwards at your installed base. As an engineer, it’s my job to look forward. The last machine I designed had...

...does not mean...

I disagree. The technology is here, now. Just because there is an installed base of IBM 9020es running on vacuum tubes, does mean that they have not outlived their usefulness. If the FAA finds themselves having to purchase new tubes, it is their fault, and that of their suppliers. That NRG...

NRG, If you really don't want to config the drive in another machine, you could probably create a disk image, set up DHCP/TFTP, and boot to a PXE ram disk over the network. I have always thought this process was a bit of a hassle, but it should work.

Although I remained excited for years after migrating to floppy disks from cassette tape, the device has outlived its usefulness. In PCs, a traditional floppy controller uses slave DMA over the ISA bridge. The media sense mechanism is broken, and the reliability of the underlying technology is...

I noticed you used Opera 6.03 on Windows 2000 to read my post. I am feeling better already. BTW The P5A is running sync with a 100MHz SDRAM clock. The A7V is async with a 133MHz SDRAM clock. Both modules are cas 2.

There is no question that the K6-III was a fast processor for its day. At a time when its chief competition used an off chip L2 cache at one half the core speed, the K6-III was equipped with 256K of full speed, on die L2 cache. Even when compared with Xeons, featuring very expensive SRAMs on...

If by simple database server, you mean a file server, I agree ( dir cas* is a query, right? ). With sufficient ram a real RDBMS will quickly become compute for many types of operations. This is true of servers other than MS SQL as well ;) To answer Coug’s original question, I used a dual...

Actually, the GC-SL is designed for SMP, but outfitted with a single cpu in on the TYAN board. This doesn't really count. (Same could be done with i860, AMD762, etc...) I guess that just leaves VIA. Does anybody know if any of VIA's customers have bothered to build a VPX-64 board?

The challenge isn’t so much building a board with 64bit slots, it’s building one with 64bit slots and an AGP slot. The upcoming Tyan Trinity GC-SL is a single cpu board with two PCI-X slots. Of course, the Grand Champion SL doesn’t support AGP. You could build a low cost board with 64/66 PCI...

That is incorrect. Grammatically, a puppet is an inanimate object.

“The Grammar Police” – A sock puppet ostensibly created for the purpose of identifying grammatical mistakes, which lacks understanding of the Advanced Configuration and Power Interface. Operating System state is maintained across an “Instant On” cycle. If indeed memory leaks or other problems...

The only change that would be required to Windows, is the ability to hibernate to a non-system disk. Otherwise the functionality is there now, even if the economics are not. Then again, between suspend to ram, and traditional hibernate, I would be hard pressed to pay extra for this functionality.

Thank you. We were hardly targeting the HD noise when we set out, but the elimination of that noise has certainly turned out to be popular in some circles. I don’t want to highjack time’s thread, so I will now return you to your regularly scheduled programming. :)

Storage Review certainly appears to have a larger number of inexperienced members than in the past. Some of these members do seem unable to follow a serious technical discussion. To a certain extent, they may also erode the sense of community. That said, russofris, Trinary, and others have...

I can't provide you with a comprehensive list of applications which use ASPI. The reason you have never missed it however, is that the commands for fixed disk devices are well defined. As I mentioned before, your programs can interact with the device through the disk class driver. I suspect...

Generally speaking, your programs access the SCSI devices interfaced to your HBA through SCSI class drivers. These drivers issue SCSI commands and expose the sematics of a standard hard drive, cdrom, scanner, or whatever. If an application program would like to issue SCSI commands directly...

One has to be careful when comparing embedded operating systems to general purpose operating systems on the basis of simple metrics. In particular, I suspect that it would surprise some to learn that embedded operating systems sacrifice throughput to reduce interrupt latency jitter. For...