software management and amd64

[rlk at alum.mit.edu (Robert L Krawitz)]

   From: Stephen Adler <adler at stephenadler.com>
   Date: Sun, 15 Aug 2004 15:16:22 -0400

   1) What's a good intro book to software management? I'm working for
   a company who's software effort is rather disorganized and those in
   charge is basically hardware folk with no real appreciation for the
   software development process. Anyway, I need to beef up on software
   management concepts and a good intro book would be great.

Do you mean "management of software engineers"?  There are a couple
I've liked: Code Complete by Steve McConnell, and Debugging the
Development Process, by Steve Maguire.  Both of these are published by
Microsoft Press, but they're not Microsoft-specific by any means.

   2) Anyone have any experience with an AMD64 workstation with PC3200
   memory? (Running linux of course.) I'm thinking of upgrading my
   home workstation and thought it would be fun to go 64! What are the
   good motherboards, who makes good memory, etc. (I usually build my
   own desktop basically because I know no better...)

I went that way about a month ago.  I'm running SUSE 9.1.  I have an
Abit KV8 Pro motherboard, which gives you a lot of overclocking
options I'm not using.  It's not a high end motherboard, and at least
right now is limited to 2 GB of memory.  It does have two channels of
serial ATA in addition to the normal ATA, but the performance I'm
getting thus far from a 250 GB SATA drive is disappointing (only 20-30
MB/sec, much less than the 50-60 I'm getting from an older 120 GB UDMA
133 drive).  I've also run memory benchmarks, and I'm not getting the
throughput I would expect from very fast memory (basically the same
numbers, maybe only slightly faster, as I got from an Athlon 1700+ and
PC2100 memory).  That notwithstanding, the system (with a "3000+"
processor that really runs at 2 GHz) is very fast.

Running 64 bit is trickier than you might expect.  SUSE supplies both
32 and 64 bit versions of libraries, but the development libraries are
all 64 bits and are located in /usr/lib64 (or equivalent).  You may or
may not find third party binaries tricky to use in some cases; I'm
having problems with Java that may or may not be related to this.

I only did this because I wanted to upgrade to 9.1, but the 2.6 kernel
doesn't support the Initio SCSI controller I had in my old system.
Since that system was getting close to 3 years old (my normal upgrade
cycle), I didn't have any spare ATA ports, my motherboard had boot
problems, and SCSI controllers are expensive, I decided to do the
upgrade, and went 64 bit.  I'm not entirely convinced that this was
the right thing to do.

-- 
Robert Krawitz                                     <rlk at alum.mit.edu>

Tall Clubs International  --  http://www.tall.org/ or 1-888-IM-TALL-2
Member of the League for Programming Freedom -- mail lpf at uunet.uu.net
Project lead for Gimp Print   --    http://gimp-print.sourceforge.net

"Linux doesn't dictate how I work, I dictate how Linux works."
--Eric Crampton