OT: redhat

[Bill Vermillion]

It was Sun, Nov 07 17:53  when Fairlight said "Mia kusenveturilo estas
plena da angiloj. And continued:

> With neither thought nor caution, Bill Vermillion blurted:

> > And X seems to grow larger faster than the base OS :-)

> Debatable, but close.

Did I forget to mention Xorg?

...

> > That latter approach is why we have to have 3Ghz CPUs with
> > 2GB of RAM in many of todays systems to keep the performance
> > as expected levels.

> Speaking of which, I've officially had my first outing with
> WinXP. Setting up a system for my in-laws. Dear me. The system
> is a Celeron 2.66GHz. We have a Celeron 2.4GHz with Win2K. The
> main difference is probably that we have 512MB and they have
> 256MB of RAM, but XP -is- slower on the "faster" system.

>From my observation 512MB is not enough and I'm going to bump
mine to 1GB.  I need to pull the RAM and replace it even though I
have room foe one more stick that would take it to a gig.

That's because with 3 stick it wont access memory in parallel
and will drop the RAM access speed to 4GB/sec from 8GB/sec.

The Celeron is not the fastest chip on the block and since you
didn't spec the model number there is no way to tell which you
have. One 2.6Ghz version comes with 128K of L2 while the other
comes with 256K L2 cache.

I'm running a 2.4Ghz P4 and it has either 512K or 1GB cache - I
think the former.  Then you have the motherboard and the speed of
the glue chips and how the memory is laid out.  All can have major
effects on performance.

So you are almost saying that the red Chevrolet is faster than the
yellow Chevrolet without mention the red on is a brand new 'Vette
and the other is an Aveo.  The former has 400HP and the latter 103.

> That new massively parallel computer that Spain just installed
> (the one that surpasses the Earth Model supercomputer) might
> actually be able to boot Longhorn in under 10min whenever
> Longhorn materialises, at this rate.

I think you misread that.  The MareNostrum is hoped to be the 10th
fastest computer in the world with 4564 PowerPC chips.  It will
clock at out 31 Tflops when fully populated.   It have a footprint
of 160 square meters, 22 times SMALLER than the Earth computer.
And besides being that much smaller - though still large compared
to a Palm :-) - it doesn't require water cooling.

> To say I am underwhelmed by XP is an understatement. It's
> -marginally- bearable -if- you tone down the interface to
> classic mode.

By only specing CPU speed and not mentioning how fast the FSB is
and if it runs interleaved memory you are comparing Apples to
Oranges.  Of course comparing those can be done.  See the tests
in The Annals of Improbable Research and you will find they are
remarkable similar. You just have to choose the tests you are going
to run :-)

> There is more clutter, cruft, and utter crap on the screen
> at any given time in the later versions that I can believe.
> It seems that in trying to make things more user friendly,
> they've only suceeded in creating something that will probably
> overwhelm most anyone who's at all technophobic.

I've not noticed that.  But I installed it from an OEM distribution
and so I did not see what might be in a standard included dist.
I've gotten to like it actually.

....

> Aside from the added clutter onscreen, "It's just another
> 'doze."

It surely doesn't act like it.  If you have programs stuck the
ctl-alt-del will bring up the task manager so you can kill
individual pieces.  It's starting to act more like a Unix system.
You need to get more familiar with it before you say it's just
another Windows.  

> But yeah, XP feels like "a piece of wood" inasfar as any
> benefit over win2k. I'd take win2k over XP any day of the week.
> Not impressed. And I surely notice the resource/speed hit. No
> bang for the buck improvement AFAICT.

You would need to test it on the same machine that your Win2K is
running upon to make an legitimate claim.   You don't know how fast
the disk to buffer interface is in the HD, you don't know the
interface speed and what mode it is running under.  Every one of
those does make a difference.  Even having a wrong IDE cable
can cut the speed by 1/2 or more.

And as I recall until you got W2K you felt that you never needed
anything better than Win95!!

And as I recall the SFU with Perl, GCC, KSH, awk, and about 100
other Unix tools is only available on XP or W3K. You are missing
a few things.

> What's more absurd is that when my wife went with her dad to buy the
> system, 

So what's the brand of the system anyway.  That might help figure
out what's inside.

Bill
-- 
Bill Vermillion - bv @ wjv . com