Root Access

@@JourneymanGeek I really have managed to ward him off ;). It took another hour to get him to tell me he had all his files to robocopy in a subdirectory and needed to add /s to the command. Sigh.

Bob

it'll probably be easier

Recycle Bin

3:25 PM

I could try vista again

Bob

...assuming XP has drivers for that

which isn't even guaranteed

Journeyman Geek

the USB NIC is a smart idea if you want to do passthrough

@Bob if its usb 2.0, plausible

Bob

@JourneymanGeek 2002, who knows

I don't think they were particularly common back then

Journeyman Geek

lol

Bob

though I guess 100Mbit would've been a decent upgrade over on-board 10Mbit?

Journeyman Geek

3:26 PM

I had one on a 98 machine

Recycle Bin

I could get s USB NIC I guess

Journeyman Geek

before ethernet cards were common

was an unreliable thing, and we ended up replacing it with a proper NIC after 2 died

Bob

XP also doesn't run particularly well on multicore systems

Recycle Bin

but incase, does vista support sata unlike XP

Bob

It wasn't until 7 that they finally got rid of the giant kernel dispatcher lock

Journeyman Geek

3:27 PM

s/multicore systems/anything.

Bob

@RecycleBin probably. I can't remember now.

IIRC AHCI was 2004 and Vista was 2007.

Journeyman Geek

(I've got 10 running well on a vista era machine)

Bob

also, IIRC, XP doesn't properly schedule for Hyper-Threading

Recycle Bin

google says it can apparently

Bob

@RecycleBin It "works" with HT but it wasn't designed with multicore HT systems in mind.

A smart scheduler will avoid putting two tasks on the same physical core.

e.g. if cores 0 and 1 were two HT virtual cores on one physical core, 2 and 3 on another physical core.

Journeyman Geek

3:30 PM

@RecycleBin: I've had XP, 7 and 10 on the same hardware.

DavidPostill

@JourneymanGeek Please can you now nuke all the comments on superuser.com/a/989217/337631 ?

Bob

Given two tasks, a smart scheduler would distribute them across 0 and 2.

XP... I don't know. It might well put them on 0 and 1

Journeyman Geek

of the three 10's the most responsive

Bob

Leaving you with contention on one physical core and another core completely unused.

Recycle Bin

I could either get an XP compatable NIC or use a USB nic or use VISTA

Bob

3:30 PM

@JourneymanGeek Depends entirely on the hardware.

Journeyman Geek

@Bob: the R61 in question

Bob

I think the one advantage XP has over 7 and 10, apart from lower memory and instruction set requirements, is the lower graphics requirements.

Journeyman Geek

its really quite usable

allquixotic

I'm back

Bob

XP will happily run with an old onboard GPU (which were slower than software render on a modern CPU)

Recycle Bin

3:31 PM

honestly I have an XP installed on a 288mb VDI and it is fast!

Bob

7... not so much

8... dead.

Recycle Bin

but thats not real hardware

Journeyman Geek

@Bob: x3100 seems fine ;p

@RecycleBin: probably as a single core.

allquixotic

@Bob on any of the Vista+ OSes (except, I think, 10, maybe?), you can kill DWM (or set the group policy flag, or a number of other options) to kick it back to basically the same rendering mode as XP.

DavidPostill

Thanks.

allquixotic

3:32 PM

or just don't install a WDDM-compatible graphics driver and it'll be forced not to use DWM

Journeyman Geek

@allquixotic: which is supposedly slowr.

@DavidPostill: nuking all the comments is easy ;p

Bob

> The Windows CPU scheduler as of Windows XP is supposed to be able to distinguish hyperthreaded (virtual) cores from real cores. You might imagine then that in this perfect world it handles them 'just right' and it is not an issue. You would be wrong.

heh.

DavidPostill

@JourneymanGeek I know, that's why I asked you ;)

Journeyman Geek

hm

Bob

> This issue occurs because Windows XP does not have the functionality to detect hyperthreading processors and multicore processors. This functionality was introduced in Windows Vista by using the Win32_ComputerSystem class and the Win32_Processor class in Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI).

...yea, XP support for multicore is patchy at best.

Journeyman Geek

3:34 PM

@Bob: now I'm wondering if I can grab a trial download of windows 10 and see how badly it barfs on the R60 ;p

Bob

Yup, confirmed:

> With the Dual-Core Hyperthreaded CPU coming, it now seems that the current
Windows XP threads scheduler have a big problem dealing with 2 physicals
cores, both supporting 2 logicals units. In some case, it handles logical
and physical CPUs in the same way, causing troubles if, for example, two
threads are set on two logical CPUs located on the same physical CPU.

On a standard 2/4 threads software, I noticed a performance boost if I set
the CPU affinity within the software than if I let windows XP dealing with

programdoc.com/37_3273_1.htm

XP is stupid in the face of multicore + HT.

To the point where you're probably better turning off HT.

Recycle Bin

is there some technology that allows several CPUs to be seen as one, ki0dna like RAID but with CPUs

allquixotic

R60 would have the same IGP as the X60, and the X60 had the 945GM, which I think Intel eventually released a DWM-compatible WDDM 1.0 driver for after a lot of community whining

Recycle Bin

as an unrelated question

allquixotic

even though it doesn't support certain hardware-accel functions that'd be needed, they do it in software

Bob

3:35 PM

@RecycleBin Nope.

That's not how CPUs work.

Journeyman Geek

@allquixotic: its the shittiest system I currently have running.

Recycle Bin

ah

Journeyman Geek

'running'

Bob

@RecycleBin There is a very clear distinction between sequential and parallel processing.

Journeyman Geek

it has no real OS at the moment

DavidPostill

3:36 PM

@JourneymanGeek I can only nuke mine not the others :/

Bob

Software that isn't explicitly designed for parallel processing cannot be forced to do so.

You'd introduce all kinds of funny corruption.

DavidPostill

I just found this

150

Q: Flack Overstow - Generate spam from Stack Exchange posts

Online demo courtesy of Nathan Osman: http://quickmediasolutions.com/flack Note: this tool now works with all Stack Exchange sites. Just paste the URL of your profile and the app will take care of the rest. Screenshot / Code Snippet $ python flack.py 126042 Before 'if' s...

Journeyman Geek

@DavidPostill: oh, I mean, its 2 clicks to nuke all the comments, or move them to chat

DavidPostill

LOL

Bob

Basically, with parallel processing you have to be very careful about what memory is shared and how you pass data between threads.

allquixotic

3:36 PM

You can virtualize X number of CPU cores into "even more" cores using VMware, though, which makes the guest think you have more cores than you actually do, and just interleaves the separate "cores" on the host

@DavidPostill we've known about that for a while, but yeah, it's lovely

DavidPostill

@allquixotic How did you mange to reply so quickly? ;)

Bob

@allquixotic Ya. You can emulate multiple parallel threads on a single core (basically how all multitasking worked before real multicore), but you can't emulate a faster single thread on multiple cores.

At best your single thread will run at the same speed as on a single core.

allquixotic

I remember in ~2002-2003 a professor said that until dual core machines are common for consumers, we can't necessarily reliably test our multithreaded software on a single-core box, so we could use the Sun server cluster with like 8 CPUs to test it

Bob

More realistically, if you force it to swap between multiple physical cores, you'll slow it down due to cache misses and register read/writing.

Recycle Bin

oh virtual cores

allquixotic

3:38 PM

I was one of the only people who had a dual-core at that time

it was a Pentium D, IIRC

Bob

@allquixotic You can't reliably test multithreaded software, period.

allquixotic

@Bob Well, you can, but it'll break due to all the data dependencies, etc. :P

Bob

Testing on a single core system will be less likely to run into race conditions, true.

But even on a proper multicore system you might never encounter a race condition in testing.

allquixotic

@Bob one of our professors worked with Sun on techniques for evaluating the safety of multithreaded code, and on tightening up some flaws in Java's memory model

was neat to take a class with him

Bob

@allquixotic What was his name?

allquixotic

3:40 PM

William Pugh

the inventor of the Skip List, a novel data structure

Bob

Ah, don't recognise

@allquixotic Hm. Must've forgotten his name.

Went over that in an advanced algos class.

allquixotic

I had him explain after class (in about 15 minutes, so I didn't get the full run-down, but got the concept) the implementation of the ConcurrentSkipListMap and ConcurrentSkipListSet in the JRE

he helped Sun design the algorithm for those

HackToHell

There's actually an Asus rep on xda

forum.xda-developers.com/zenfone2/general/…

Bob

@allquixotic I know there's formal techniques for verifying multithreaded code

went through a few of them in a concurrency class

I could happily go my whole life never having to see a transition diagram again

allquixotic

it's pretty hard to prove the run time of a multithreaded system, though, unless you have a deterministic scheduler with fixed deadlines, and probably a bunch of other stuff -- basically a RTOS

imagine writing an ECU with multiple threads or processes and having to prove it could complete certain operations within a certain time period... that's scary

Bob

3:46 PM

Promela was kinda fun though.

@allquixotic Hello, lock-free code :P

Fair sharing, and all that fun stuff too.

I still haven't quite figured out the difference between strong and weak fairness.

allquixotic

I really want to learn Rust. I know that has nothing to do with thread safety (maybe it does, based on the way Rust is designed....) but it's looking like it could be a replacement for C that's plenty fast for system software, considerably faster than stuff like Ruby and Java, and much harder to create bugs with than most low-level languages like C/C++

fast, programmer-friendly, and a compiler that loves to beat you over the head with a lead pipe when you do something stupid that'd otherwise crash your program... I like it.

Bob

@allquixotic How's the standard library?

I'd only consider it programmer-friendly if that's fairly complete.

I hate reinventing the wheel for what should be fairly basic data structures.

Hello, C.

allquixotic

@Bob growing, but relatively decent so far... not as extensive as .NET or Java, but they have great bindings to a lot of C/C++ open source libs to accomplish most tasks, and the bindings are designed in such a way that you can use them "safely" from Rust without running into the same problems as normal C code.

(the bindings have detailed knowledge about who owns pointers, object lifecycle, etc. - to the extent that the binding author can find this information and "document" it for the Rust compiler to know about)

I'm still naturally drawn to write software in Java or C# whenever possible because so many layers of usable, high-level libraries are freely available (either built-in or third-party) for me to take and pile on as building blocks, and no other runtime matches that... second best after .NET/Java would be Ruby, or Python, but beyond that? no one else really compares.

DragonLord

4:43 PM

Python is almost as good. Loads of modules to choose from.

allquixotic

@DragonLord I think the big difference is that Python, Ruby, and (it's looking like) Rust, in many cases, rather than implementing stuff "natively" themselves, they just link to an existing FOSS C/C++ library and create bindings. Not true of everything, but big pieces of work are avoided, while also unfortunately inheriting all the bugs of the software they include.

Bob

@DragonLord But the IDEs are also relatively crap :P

allquixotic

Java and C# do a lot of stuff written in the "pure" language of the runtime, rather than going through an FFI / PInvoke / etc

so much so that in certain enterprise contexts (e.g. SOAP with WSS) you actually want to use the pure Java code available for certain things because there's really no other implementation that equals it in quality

which sucks if you aren't using Java

DragonLord

Not much attention is given to IDEs in Python, you're right.

PyCharm seems to be the best (commercial) solution.

Bob

I find Python decent for small projects, but as the application grows developing in Python gets more painful.

allquixotic

4:48 PM

agree with Bob ^

DragonLord

NetBeans has limited community support for Python.

allquixotic

Ruby isn't much better for large projects, either, but I've done some non-trivial stuff in Ruby and it was alright... not great, just alright

the most sophisticated and complex software I've written to date has been in Java, C# or C++

Bob

@allquixotic I've done some heavy stuff in JS. Pre-ES6 a lot of the structure comes from whichever framework you end up using, so could be anywhere from "acceptable" to "kill me now".

With JS you tend to get pretty good debuggers and decent IDEs, but not on the level of C#/Java.

DragonLord

JS is better supported. Browsers come with some pretty sophisticated dev tools these days. NetBeans does a good job handling JS code.

Bob

I don't think I've seen any dynamically-typed language with a great IDE, actually.

@DragonLord NetBeans can handle JS in a single file and with the most basic structure.

DragonLord

4:52 PM

JS is duck-typed and this is pretty tricky to correctly handle.

Bob

Once you branch out into multiple files and follow whichever OO-emulation provided by your framework, the IDE is lost.

DragonLord

I believe NetBeans supports jQuery, but I've never worked with it.

Bob

ES6 might help, but of course we won't be seeing that in common use for years.

@DragonLord jQuery is a helper library, not a framework.

When I say framework, I mean something like Ext.JS, React, AngularJS, etc.

DragonLord

Yeah. I'm just a relative neophyte at programming without any very little real-world code experience just yet.

Five years of university education doesn't really prepare you for a programming job, sadly.

Bob

@allquixotic Didn't you end up doing some COM stuff in Ruby?

allquixotic

4:55 PM

@Bob Yeah. And in VBScript.

DragonLord

You get to learn how to use the key features of one or two major languages (C++ in my case), but you never get to work in a major project with 10k+ lines of code.

We went up to basic STL and templates, but that's pretty much it.

allquixotic

Don't even remind me about gfjmrfkfifkmkfffrlmmgmhmnlulkmfmgkgj (my favorite "cat typing" string that's an actual legitimate string passed to a piece of code in VBScript)

that's the actual string, I just looked it up

Bob

@allquixotic You sure? That message is literally the only result on Google.

DragonLord

We never learned about template specializations, lambda functions, RAII, or anything like that, even though knowing this is necessary to work on larger real-world programs which use these features.

Bob

Also, it's scary how quickly chat is indexed.

Oh wait, not that message. A previous one.

Still a recent one. Could've sworn you said it dozens of times (some exaggeration in this message).

DragonLord

4:59 PM

Stack Exchange is crawled and indexed very, very frequently.

It's a top site and gets very high priority from Googlebot.

Bob

@DragonLord University is there to teach concepts.

Sometimes, it's just not worth teaching language-specific features.

DragonLord

We did spend time on data structures (linked lists, binary trees, hash tables, etc.).

I had to hand-code a binary tree implementation at one point.

Bob

Aug 1 '13 at 14:55, by somequixotic

gfjmrfkfifkmkfffrlmmgmhmnlulkmfmqkqj

allquixotic

Oh. q instead of g for the last 2

Bob

Weird. I'm reasonably sure the two are identical. Yet that message does not appear on Google.

allquixotic

5:02 PM

qkqj vs. gkgj

Bob

o.O

how did I miss that

allquixotic

I typoed it

Bob

You TYPED it?!

allquixotic

yes, because it's only on my customer box

this is my company box

Bob

@DragonLord Not more than that? o.O

djsmiley2k

5:04 PM

hum de dum

sl;ow slow scripts.

boss says 'run as many as possible'

yeah fine I can do that.

So far one has completed :/

Recycle Bin

5:52 PM

XP supports HT but not multiprocessing

Bob

6:06 PM

@RecycleBin It technically supports both but treats HT as if it were really independent cores.

That's fine on a single physical core with HT.

That's not fine on multiple physical cores with HT, as I've already explained above.

Recycle Bin

yeah

Bob

Thing is, when XP was released I don't think dual-core with HT even existed.

Now? that's about the minimum you get. You also have quad-core with HT being fairly common, and it goes up to hexa-core and maybe octa-core (?).

XP won't cope particularly well with that.

At a minimum you'd want to turn off HT via the firmware settings.

Even then who knows how well XP handles the SMP. Probably decent-ish considering NT and 2000 were designed as server/workstation OSes, but also probably not as well as a more modern OS.

Recycle Bin

is it the virtualization setting in the bios for HT

right now its enabled to get more RAM for virtuabox VMs but it was probably disabled when I had XP on the second SSD

Bob

@RecycleBin No, virtualisation would be VT-x.

Actually, that's a good point... does modern firmware even have HT options anymore? o.O

Probably yes.

Recycle Bin

oh, theres no setting to disable it

Bob

6:17 PM

Huh. TIL.

Maybe only on enthusiast motherboards.

Recycle Bin

my bios is not the best

it is fine to hotswap internal laptop AHCI sata drives right

Bob

uh

only if the firmware has hotswap enabled

with a laptop, you never know

Recycle Bin

how do I check that

Bob

I mean, it probably won't physically damage anything, but there's also a good chance it simply won't work.

@RecycleBin You don't.

Recycle Bin

I have not pulled anything out yet so

Bob

6:19 PM

I don't think I've ever seen the option on laptop firmware settings.

I've seen it on some desktop motherboards.

Laptops tend not to expose the more advanced settings, so you're stuck with whatever the default is.

So whether the firmware has it permanently enabled or disabled is the question.

I'd guess disabled. Not many people needing hotswap with laptops.

Michael Frank

9:08 PM

-1

Q: First ever Contribution deleted?

First time post and provided what I thought was a very much valid and relevant answer to a question. I then took the time to register and validated my email address in the hope that I could become a valued member of the community. With 20 years experience in computing and building PC's I thought ...

support user-accounts

Ouch.

DavidPostill

Are ruby scripts on topic for SU?

allquixotic

sure

DavidPostill

Thx

Michael Frank

@DavidPostill Quality Sound Engineering!

DavidPostill

seems to be more on topic on SO. There are 145,503 questions. SU has 326 questions tagged [ruby]

@MichaelFrank Quality Sound Engineering???

Michael Frank

9:21 PM

THX

THX Ltd. is an American high-fidelity audio/visual reproduction standard for movie theaters, screening rooms, home theaters, computer speakers, gaming consoles, and car audio systems. They have certified video games as well. The current THX was created in 2002 when it spun off from Lucasfilm Ltd. THX was developed by Tomlinson Holman at George Lucas' company, Lucasfilm, in 1983 to ensure that the soundtrack for the third Star Wars film, Return of the Jedi, would be accurately reproduced in the best venues. THX was named after Holman, with the "X" standing for "crossover" as well as in homage to...

There we go...

DavidPostill

@MichaelFrank Ah. I was using Thx as short for Thanks ;)

Michael Frank

@DavidPostill I know :P

Journeyman Geek

11:16 PM

@Bob: Where did you order your pistons from?

Bob

@JourneymanGeek ibuygou

@JourneymanGeek do they sell them directly to sg?

Journeyman Geek

@Bob: answering a HR question

got a link?

Bob

banggood and geekbuying are also relatively trustworthy iirc but ibuygou specifically is listed as trusted elsewhere

@JourneymanGeek O_O

@JourneymanGeek which one? v2, v3?

v2.1 I originally got => ibuygou.com/…

v3 => ibuygou.com/…

Journeyman Geek

lol

not looking at the v3 yet

Bob

I'm so confused now

HR question

O_O

Journeyman Geek

11:24 PM

0

A: Cheap yet good quality headphones

The xiaomi piston 2.0/2.1 (there's a 3.0 model out at the moment) out but I've never used it before. I know folks have ordered a pair into australia, and ordered it off ibuygou. The cliff's notes version Price: 20-30 usd depending. Got mine for 20 singapore dollars. Good sound quality - Good...

0_0

geekbuying.com/item/…

Bob

@JourneymanGeek Ohhhhhhh hardware rec

not human resources

Journeyman Geek

ahh, its a plastic model

Bob

@JourneymanGeek yea, "youth edition" and "paperback" are the cheapo versions

Canadian Luke

@Bob I thought he meant Human Resources too

Do we have a hardware recs site too now?

Bob

these are noise isolating, not cancelling

@CanadianLuke I knew about the rec site, but I thought HR at some place he applied for asked :S

Journeyman Geek

11:28 PM

yup

@Bob: No responses yet

Bob

@JourneymanGeek :(

DavidPostill

@JourneymanGeek No response at all is common for job applications. I would say I only get a real reply 10% of the time. It's very depressing :/ I've even had email confirmations that say something like we will only contact you if we want to interview. And you are just left waiting ...

I've sent around 40 in the 6 months I've been back in the UK. No responses at all. It was better when I was in Holland. At least I got some interviews...

Journeyman Geek

yup

tech firms seem to at least send you a confirmation