[geeks] Dual Core Rules: your bugs will run twice as fast

[Joshua Boyd]

On Tue, Feb 13, 2007 at 01:57:10PM -0500, Charles Shannon Hendrix wrote:

> I keep having problems with flash menus popping up under other elements.
> 
> The whole idea of a site dependent on Flash, or anything like it, is pretty
> stupid anyway.

Yes, but sometimes you want to be able to look at the site anyway.
 
> I was impressed with the speed of 64-bit Linux, but kept finding things that
> wouldn't work well, and gave up on it.

I haven't been impressed with the speed.  The few things were it would
really matter don't seem to be as well optimized.  For instance, mplayer
and ffmpeg don't really seem to be any faster on a 1.8ghz C2D in 64 bit
mode compared to a 1.7ghz P-M, and I suspect it is because of less hand
assembly tuning.  I might appreciate the compile speed, but I can't use
64bit mode for compiling (unless I set up 32bit cross compilers, a step
that I just haven't had the time for).

And alas I haven't had the time, and might never have the time to reload
to go back.

In the short term, I tried using a 32bit chroot, but while it works for
a few applications, and it doesn't seem to work well for development, so
in the very near future, I'm going to install VMWare server and run
32bit linux inside that for doing builds for the target hardware.

On a side note, I can't get Wings (a free 3D modeller) to work under
64bits or 32bit chroot.  

But the most annoying thing is that I can't get democracy to work
correctly.  There are known bugs with AMD64 and certain file formats
within that program.
 
> It's not really the fault of Linux, but rather that so much software is not
> 64-bit ready, and you have the closed software that is 32-bit only.
> 
> I will say though, that I could use 64-bit Linux if I had to, while I found
> 64-bit Windows impossible to live with.

My boss found the same thing.  He hasn't been able to find the time to
spare his laptop for IT to reload it with 32bit XP, so I hear about the
inadequacies frequently (I was mistakenly the guy who suggested he try
XP64 thinking that it would just work and would boost VMWare performance
considerably.  Turns out that the VT bit is disabled by the BIOS anyway,
so 64bit VMWare doesn't work on that machine either).

-- 
Joshua D. Boyd
jdboyd at jdboyd.net
http://www.jdboyd.net/
http://www.joshuaboyd.org/