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64-bit computing is as prevalent today as multicore computing. Almost any new processor from Intel or AMD has the AMD long mode extensions, allowing the processor to use 64-bit registers. While 32-bit processors can address 4 gigabytes of RAM, a 64-bit processor can address 16 exabytes, or almost 17.2 billion gigabytes, of RAM.
Many researchers who are doing performance evaluation and benchmarking need to capture the values of the CPU and the RAM. Others might need to capture the throughput as well. In this short tutorial I will show how I capture the CPU and RAM values from “top” and then extract them in one line command.
Saturday, January 19th, 2008, marked the 30-year countdown to the Y2K38 wraparound of regular 32-bit UNIX time. UNIX internal time is stored in a data structure using a long int, containing the number of seconds since 1970. On a 32-bit machine this value is sufficient to store time up to the 18th of January 2038. After this date, 32-bit clocks will overflow and return false values.
"Twenty five years ago , on September 27 1983, Richard Stallman announced his plans to 'write a complete Unix-compatible software system called GNU (for Gnu’s Not Unix), and give it away free to everyone who can use it'..."
"...With all this depressing talk you might be discouraged from trying Perl. Don’t be. I could now sit here and enumerate a great list of reasons for you to use Perl today, but, if I did, as though I was the holder of a religious-like truth, it might cause too much controversy. And I don’t want that. Therefore, here are the reasons why I personally use Perl.
"...The first thing we see is that the organization ducks the issue of users' freedom; it uses the term "open source" and does not speak of "free software". These two terms stand for different philosophies which are based on different values: free software's values are freedom and social solidarity, whereas open source cites only practical convenience values such as powerful, reliable software..."