dserpell - Slashdot User

Comment Re:Fractint (Score 1) 131

by dserpell on Saturday October 16, 2010 @12:33PM (#33918236) Attached to: Benoit Mandelbrot Dies At 85

Is there anything better than Fractint now? I too played with it for ages on a clunky old IBM PC with clicky keyboard and Windows 2 (although Fractint ran in DOS though, I think, and necessitated misc tweaking with graphics drivers to make it work, you kids don't know how lucky you are...)

You have the open-source "xaos" http://xaos.sf.net/ for a fast interactive fractal exploring and "Fraqtive", http://fraqtive.mimec.org/ for a beautiful view generator. Also, there are new versions of fractint, but the UI is really outdated. Wikipedia has a list with a few more, at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractal-generating_software

Comment Re:Turbo Boost technology? (Score 5, Informative) 196

by dserpell on Saturday September 19, 2009 @08:42PM (#29479995) Attached to: Intel Core I7 For Laptops — First Benchmarks

Seriously, couldn't the marketing droids come up with a better name?

Sadly, this technology was called "Intel Dynamic Acceleration" (IDA) in Core-2 CPU's, but nobody noticed it. So, Intel tried with "Dual Dynamic Acceleration" (DDA), but again, nobody noticed. At last, renamed it to "Turbo Boost" and now everybody thinks it's something new.

So, after three attempts, it seems that the current name is the best.

Comment Re:/tmp and /var/tmp (Score 3, Interesting) 303

by dserpell on Monday September 14, 2009 @09:16PM (#29421361) Attached to: OpenSolaris vs. Linux, For Linux Users

-- but they failed to point out that Solaris also has a /tmp, and that, by default /tmp is actually partially backed by RAM, which is extremely convenient and useful from time to time, when you want a little piece of lightning-fast filesystem space, or want to eliminate disk as a variable in some sort of timing test.

In any new Linux distribution, /dev/shm is also backed by ram, so you can do:

$ dd if=/dev/zero of=/var/tmp/foo bs=1024k count=512 512+0 records in 512+0 records out 536870912 bytes (537 MB) copied, 1.12253 s, 478 MB/s
$ dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/shm/foo bs=1024k count=512 512+0 records in 512+0 records out 536870912 bytes (537 MB) copied, 0.754747 s, 711 MB/s

Obviously, I had to copy four times the data to reach the slowness of Solaris :-)

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