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This is from news.com

One machine, ASCI Purple for nuclear weapons research, will be three times faster than the world's current top-ranked supercomputer, NEC's Earth Simulator, which has been clocked at 35 trillion calculations per second, or "teraflops." The other machine, the Linux-powered Blue Gene/L for civilian research, will be 10 times faster than Earth Simulator, with a speed of 360 teraflops, according to IBM

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This is from news.com

One machine, ASCI Purple for nuclear weapons research, will be three times faster than the world's current top-ranked supercomputer, NEC's Earth Simulator, which has been clocked at 35 trillion calculations per second, or "teraflops." The other machine, the Linux-powered Blue Gene/L for civilian research, will be 10 times faster than Earth Simulator, with a speed of 360 teraflops, according to IBM

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..rejected by Taco lamer and brought to you by the hacker underground.

News.com is reporting that IBM has won a $290 million contract with the federal government to build what are expected to be the world's two fastest supercomputers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. The other machine, the Linux powered Blue Gene/L will be 10 times faster than the current #1 , NEC's Earth Simulator with a speed of 360 teraflops, according to IBM.

..rejected by Taco lamer and brought to you by the hacker underground.

News.com is reporting that IBM has won a $290 million contract with the federal government to build what are expected to be the world's two fastest supercomputers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. The other machine, the Linux powered Blue Gene/L will be 10 times faster than the current #1 , NEC's Earth Simulator with a speed of 360 teraflops, according to IBM.

It'll be interesting to see how it does, like it or hate it.

I remember reading a while back about how people who were shown IT/Ginger in it's development have basically said Segway is not it. ZDNet has the story.

I was curious why Steve Jobs was getting all excited about something like this, doesn't seem like him.

..rejected by Taco fucker and brought to you by the hacker underground.

News.com is reporting that IBM has won a $290 million contract with the federal government to build what are expected to be the world's two fastest supercomputers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. The other machine, the Linux powered Blue Gene/L will be 10 times faster than the current #1 , NEC's Earth Simulator with a speed of 360 teraflops, according to IBM.

..rejected by Taco fucker and brought to you by the hacker underground.

News.com is reporting that IBM has won a $290 million contract with the federal government to build what are expected to be the world's two fastest supercomputers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. The other machine, the Linux powered Blue Gene/L will be 10 times faster than the current #1 , NEC's Earth Simulator with a speed of 360 teraflops, according to IBM.

AFAIK it's only available pre-installed on the special "Media Center PCs" at least that's what M$'s blurb says. There's more info on this OS (and some of the HP machines it was first announced to be used on) here [that's news.com.com ;)]. To be honest I can't see how anyone would really want to splash out on one of these considering the high cost and restrictions placed upon it's use (can you say DRM). I'd rather use some of the Multimedia-centric Linux distribs out there. Then again, I've seen stranger things happen... especially in the mass consumer market.

All those topics and more would make great, interesting Slashdot headlines. But no, instead we get "MAME adds support for yet-another-coin-op-arcade-game". What world do you slashdot editors live in??

Aparently, he sold'em and later got some more, when the company was doing better....

Part of the reason why this isn't exactly true is because Microsoft announced [techcentralstation.com] it is completely dropping UltimateTV

I noticed that when you said "Microsoft announced..." you pointed to a news article on another site, rather than a press release on UltimateTV's site. So I read that article, and sure enough, the author of that article says "Already, Microsoft has announced that they're discontinuing their UltimateTV set-top box,". So then I clicked his link to UltimateTV's site, and found absolutely no mention of any supposed discontinuation.

The Press Releases section bears no mention of any discontinuation. You can still buy it. If the company discontinued the product, it wouldn't make much sense that they'd still be promoting it.

This ZDNet article mentions some restructuring:

But UltimateTV didn't take off as Microsoft had hoped, and the company recently announced it was restructuring that division and laying off some workers.

So I found that article.

And then what may be the source of this rumor. A ZDNet "Story" by David Coursey entitled, "Why UltimateTV was an ultimate failure." From the piece: "If you call Microsoft, as I did, you will find the company disagrees will [sic] my assessment that it is getting out of the DVR business."

So as near as I can tell, some guy thinks Microsoft is getting out of the market because they cut their staff from 500 to 160. I dunno, maybe they are, but my point is that there was never a "Microsoft announced..." moment. At this point, it's still rumor. So let's keep the facts-to-speculation ratio as high as possible on slashdot. You too, moderators.

Paul may piss off the people working on the X-Box, but he's not going to affect UltimateTV one iota.

If your speculation is what you were basing your conclusion on, then I must disagree. I doubt Microsoft is really all that happy that a founder's company is using Linux on anything, regardless of their relative strength in that market.

Part of the reason why this isn't exactly true is because Microsoft announced [techcentralstation.com] it is completely dropping UltimateTV

I noticed that when you said "Microsoft announced..." you pointed to a news article on another site, rather than a press release on UltimateTV's site. So I read that article, and sure enough, the author of that article says "Already, Microsoft has announced that they're discontinuing their UltimateTV set-top box,". So then I clicked his link to UltimateTV's site, and found absolutely no mention of any supposed discontinuation.

The Press Releases section bears no mention of any discontinuation. You can still buy it. If the company discontinued the product, it wouldn't make much sense that they'd still be promoting it.

This ZDNet article mentions some restructuring:

But UltimateTV didn't take off as Microsoft had hoped, and the company recently announced it was restructuring that division and laying off some workers.

So I found that article.

And then what may be the source of this rumor. A ZDNet "Story" by David Coursey entitled, "Why UltimateTV was an ultimate failure." From the piece: "If you call Microsoft, as I did, you will find the company disagrees will [sic] my assessment that it is getting out of the DVR business."

So as near as I can tell, some guy thinks Microsoft is getting out of the market because they cut their staff from 500 to 160. I dunno, maybe they are, but my point is that there was never a "Microsoft announced..." moment. At this point, it's still rumor. So let's keep the facts-to-speculation ratio as high as possible on slashdot. You too, moderators.

Paul may piss off the people working on the X-Box, but he's not going to affect UltimateTV one iota.

If your speculation is what you were basing your conclusion on, then I must disagree. I doubt Microsoft is really all that happy that a founder's company is using Linux on anything, regardless of their relative strength in that market.

A: We have a constant problem with people who are trying to break our system for no other purpose than they have nothing better to do--like their bosses haven't assigned them enough to do at work today, or that their mom hasn't made them mow the lawn, in most cases!

A: We have a constant problem with people who are trying to break our system for no other purpose than they have nothing better to do--like their bosses haven't assigned them enough to do at work today, or that their mom hasn't made them mow the lawn, in most cases!

on a related note:

http://news.com.com/2100-1001-965916.html CNET reports hackers infest tcpdump distribution with trojan.

This just goes to show that Windows is just as vulnerable as Linux.

Well, check out Gord's page on the subject. It's just a little bit more factual than something you heard somewhere. Also check this out. Finally, note that it would probably be illegal for sony, sega, or nintendo to sell consoles below cost.

Here's a recent (November 13, 2002) news story:

"The PCI Special Interest Group (PCI-SIG), an industry consortium that includes representatives from Intel, Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard and other PC giants, said it has begun initial work to develop specifications for PCI-X 1066, the successor to the recent PCI-X 266 and PCI-X 533 specifications.

"The newest standard will allow PC components to exchange data at bandwidths of up to 8.5 gigabytes per second, compared with less than 1 gigabyte per second for current versions."

PCI connections to put in double duty

You're damn right I did. If by 'seti@home-like' you mean distributed computing. It was widely reported by many.

I expect that they will scale back their marketing a LOT as soon as they proliferate a base number of boxes, which was their entire objective anyways.

Besides, Microsoft was already planning for first year loses so it isn't like that this wasn't forseen.

I wonder how well this chip would do overclocked, as it's the first chip to rely on hyperthreading.

If you overclock the chip I would assume the results would be pretty much in-line with what you could expect to see from any other chip, but I do see the possibility that the hyperthreading (which is supposed to make the chip perform roughly 25% better) could cause the overclocking to give an even larger increase in performance, or it might cause the overclocking to give a smaller performance gain that would be expected.

Either way hyperthreading is an idea whose time has come.

"I might be threatening to write code."

It bothers me more than I can say - that the whole spam debate has now been hijacked by spammers. I've even seen the DMA described as 'legitimate marketers'. God help us.

But even that isn't as disturbing as the fact that erstwhile
real spam-haters are accepting this redefinition of what spam is, and what is objectionable about it.

For me the issue is really very simple. There is speech by humans, meant for humans, and there is speech by machines, just trying to shout loud enough to make a human hear them, and one type really is worth more than the other. The Internet has become the scene of that great battle described in The Terminator, between robots and humans.

And currently the robots are winning.

A case which does not substantiate that the flaw had anything to do with the nature of "closed source" software

With in a few months of the code being open sourced, the back door was found. It stayed in closed source code for six years. Whether or not Borland could have done things to find it is irrelevant - they didn't and I bet many other vendors work the same way.

it was a rumour.

I guess it's easier to accuse me of spreading rumors then to enter "Borland database backdoor" into google and get stuff like a ZDNet article detailing the history of the bug or the CERT vulnerability note.

WarGames was one of the most accurate theatrical portrayals of hacking ever.

I'm not sure whethor to mod this +5 Funny or -1 Clueless. I really hope you were joking.

Why? He didn't fly through a 3d-cyberspace, nor did he jump through 5 layers of military-grade security in a couple minutes. He didn't have access to anything and everything controlled by computer.

He snagged the password to the teacher's computer off a Post-it note, and dug up information on the programmer of WOPR to take guesses at what the password might be, both of which are real hacking tools. He used hardware that existed and that he could realistically own. He wardialed, a habit of real hackers. I can't think of any other movie that comes close.

There are minor plot-neccessary exaggerations -- no, WOPR wouldn't have an outside line to it, and yes, the cops would have been at the door long before he got in -- but they don't mar the fact that it was fundamentally right.

Modded down by the zealots, so I'll post it again:

How much is Apple paying you Slashdot folks to keep posting this shit?

Slashdot, if not VA Linu^H^H^H^HSoftware wants to be bought out by Apple. Think about it: How many Apple articles do you see on a daily basis? Why does Apple have its own section, customized to look like Apple's website? Why does Apple have eleven (count them yourself) different topic categories? (Compared to one for Sun, one for Microsoft, one for IBM, one for Compaq, and *none* for Dell, whose market share is nearly six times that of Apple)

How much is Apple paying you Slashdot folks to keep posting this shit?

Seriously, that's my question. My theory is, Slashdot, if not VA Li^H^HSoftware wants to be bought out by Apple. Think about it: How many Apple articles do you see on a daily basis? Why does Apple have its own section, customized to look like Apple's website? Why does Apple have eleven (count them yourself) different topic categories? (Compared to one for Sun, one for Microsoft, one for IBM, one for Compaq, and *none* for Dell, whose market share is nearly six times that of Apple)

Are there really that many companies using Java?

Yes. Lots.

Java just passed Visual Basic as the most widely used language, defined in terms of employees doing it, which is different from the number of job postings right now. Perl is now third, followed by C and C++.

I tried to find the market share study I'd seen that said this, but I couldn't find it. I did find this story however.

On a whim, I tried looking at the number of keyword hits at jobsearch.monster.com . Here are the hit counts for job postings in the last 60 days. I think this is pretty telling, actually.

1307 SQL
1140 Unix or Linux
1063 Windows
1062 Access
1029 Unix
1023 J2EE or Java
1005 C
976 Java
888 Oracle
821 C++
763 network
621 Visual Basic
595 Web Services
570 XML
464 HTML
457 Computer Security
385 ASP
288 .net
281 J2EE
254 Linux
225 Javascript
214 TCP/IP
210 Perl
206 DB2
204 JSP
188 SAP
141 IIS
138 Peoplesoft
134 Exchange
131 WebSphere
110 Cobol
85 MCSE
70 Apache
70 SOAP
60 SAS
44 Delphi
42 DNS
28 MySQL
20 JUnit
19 Python
10 Pascal

And according to my economics textbook, in perfect competition, no company ever makes a profit. After all, if one company was selling their goods at a price that brought them a profit, than some other company should be able to sell for less, and naturally everyone would buy from the cheaper company.

You economics textbook is wrong. Theoretically, one company could always undercut the other, eventually selling everything at, or even below, cost, but this never happens unless a large company is dumping the market.

Basically, it goes like this: if you can sell a widget for $5.00, companies will be willing to produce 100 of them. If you can sell a widget for $10.00, companies will be willing to produce 1,000 of them. If you can sell a widget for $15.00, companies will be willing to produce 1,000,000. (Just example numbers). Now, if a widget sells for $5.00, comsumers will be willing to purchase 1,000,000 of them. If a widget sells for $10.00, comsumers will be willing to purchase 1,000 of them. If widgets sell for $15.00, consumers will be willing to buy 100 of them.

Because supply meets demand at $10.00, that is what the average market price for a widget will be. If you try to sell them for more, you are going to have left-over stock, and if you try to buy them for less, companies are not going to bother producing them.

In perfect competition, therefore, every company makes a profit, but not a profit so great that it hurts the consumer. Unfortunatly, perfect competition is, for the most part,a pipe dream. Fortunatly, the good people running state governments are trying to tax internet sales again, which, as we all know, will make the market much better for everyone.

I was remembering back in the day of Wordstar, lo and behold it is a add-on for Word 97/2000! We are talking functionality of those classic keystrokes!

Another interesting page.

Using linux, I prefer joe over vi. Any idiot (that would be me) can use joe.

Yes, those things are cool.

I'm not DB expert, so I'm curious:

What about this 10.7 desupport problem?

Is Oracle being reasonable about the cost of supporting old software, or are they doing an MS-style push of their customers into an upgrade many feel they don't need?

Is that old news as it was posted in July on CNET, here which reportedly had 962 nodes and was/is an "Evolocity" cluster.

Is this one for the sister lab(LANL):
A powerful new 2,048-processor, $6 million Linux supercomputer is being built for the Los Alamos National Laboratory to run unclassified analyses and ... (NetworX built it with 959 nodes and 2050 processors) in-addition-to "Pink" named after "Pink"
-or- it it "Pink"
-or- is the post about another one that going to LLNL and has nothing to do with "Pink"?

Is that 2, 3 or 4 this year?

This is getting strange.

Extreme Linux at http://www.extremelinux.org/ seems to have vaporized (behind the LANL firewall, I suppose).

It also seems kind of odd that LinuxBIOS is not mentioned in these articles and is, IMO, a critical part of the builds as well as being an outstandingly innovative use of the Linux kernel.

I think I need a Beowulf cluster to figure this out and tell me ?WHY? LLNL and LANL are suddenly in need of more SC's that are in addition to the ones that they already have. :?)

The article says
"Credits: These vulnerabilities were discovered and researched by Neel Mehta of the ISS X-Force..."
Neel Mehta = Indian
Also, if you missed it, Microsoft to invest another $400 million in India.
Here it is: http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1106-965378.html

We should free him? Why? He doesn't need us. He's doing such a marvelous job of freeing himself that he shouldn't need our help.

Hey, if I let someone crack into my machine after I commit really incriminating and expensive online crimes, do I get a "Get Out Of Responsibility" card too?

What a load...

-B

We should free him? Why? He doesn't need us. He's doing such a marvelous job of freeing himself that he shouldn't need our help.

Hey, if I let someone crack into my machine after I commit really incriminating and expensive online crimes, do I get a "Get Out Of Responsibility" card too?

What a load...

-B

By the way, it was the ZDNet article.

All of the others correctly say 64GB. :-)

No, actually our main company is on top on both on then, just like we are in most search engines I could care about, since 1995. We just happen to be following a number of keywords to track how Google is behaving. As a hosting company, we have a interest on traffic fluctuations, and Google is a key factor there. Any how, if you chose not to believe me, you may want to know what other critics are saying: just check out this news.com article about the Google Gods, or this Wired aricle about Google degraded cuality

>See, Google is a really unique entity. Most
>successful companies are driven by business
>types, suits. Google is a big collection of
>computer scientists doing research, and taking a
>no-compromises approach to product quality...

Ok, that is enough. You have a very idealistic view of Google, the marketing brand, and you are failing to see how Google, the real world company, is actually behaving. I think that you need a realty check, my friend.

Do you love Google? Good, many people do. It is a nice company, a very nice company. But it IS a company. It has been financed by venture capitals, it has professional managers, and it is expecting a return.

Google is not a community driven effort, no since they left Stanford. Everything else is just propaganda: They sold out, just like the rest. They ARE a profit driven company. Is that bad? Well, not at all, or, unless, no necessarily.

But, problem is, they hold 90% of the no-MSN queries, and that is not healthy at all for the rest of the market. Power may corrupt anybody, and excessive power certainly does corrupt any company. That is why America and the EU both have antimonopoly laws.

Sometimes speech is criminal, e.g., you can't shout "Fire!" ina crowded theater; and web sites are a form of speech.

The "Nuremberg Files" anti-abortion site case in the example I think of. This is not to say legal action was successful -- here's the latest version of the site -- but note they are heeded the 9th Circuit's "hysterical" decision.

Even if this case was wrongly decided, it's not hard to imagine more dire circumstances such as someone publishing American troop movements during wartime. If, for example, Al Queda were posting its marching orders on a web site, that act would be a crime and the web site could be suppressed. There's plenty of case law on this at the Supreme Court level, and note these are examples of applying the 1st. A. rather than ignoring it.

Much more intelligent discussions of this can be found from sources such as EFF and of course the ACLU. These organizations argue for the more expansive interpretations of the 1st A. and their views do not necessarily represent the current state of the law.

Microsoft has argued in the past that "Internet Explorer" was a generic term and hence can't be trademarked, while at the same time arguing that "Windows" is not generic and hence can be trademarked.

Don't expect Microsoft to roll over and play dead. They'll just file a 1000 lawsuits in a 100 different jurisdictions against Eolas, and eventually bankrupt them.

LOL ... I'm flattered that you'd do so much research on me to try to figure out who I am and what I do, and I can understand why you'd think so, but I can't help but to combat a lot of the ignorance on this board. I don't want to come off as somebody that says, "you're wrong ... this MS product rules!" I presented actual arguments with as much fact as I could find to try to counter a lot of the straight-up biases. You and I both know that Slashdot is known for a lot of its biases and I'm just trying to offer a different view. I am surely not a Microsoft employee and while I use a lot of Microsoft products, I don't think that they're a panacea. Their produts are touch and go at best, but they shouldn't be totally discounted. I'm advocating informed decision about products, and I think you'll find a lot of my comments support that. I'm a programmer for a consulting company and use whatever product gets the job done. I use both Linux and Windows XP at home. I use Java and Perl as much as C# and VB.

As for the individual comments that you quoted and would like addressed, I posted a lot of stuff for the Tablet PC because it was something that I found was a lot more useful than my first look. I found lots of comments that were the obvious round of jokes, but honestly, a lot of people sounded like they didn't really read much about it. Read the comments that I responded to -- a lot of people think that the keyboard is gone! That's what I thought, that's why I dismissed it originally, and that's why I was wrong. I think it's definitely worth a second look as a result, and after reading a bunch of articles online and finding real pictures of the product being used, I can see how it might be useful to some people. I haven't used the handwriting recognition system yet -- I'm only hearing from people that saw the demo that it worked very well, from what they could see while the guy doing the demo wrote on the screen. It scans at 133 times per second as opposed to the typical 40 that a mouse does. Each scan cycle adds data to the handwriting recognition system. I don't know the details of how effectively it uses that data.

Regarding the other companies, yeah, I think that MS has had some very seriously reprehensible business tactics. I also think that people are singling out MS when there are other companies that doing things just as bad. Articles make Slashdot headlines simply because it's Microsoft whereas if it was another company, it wouldn't have. This article from the other day is a good example, I think. People are trashing MS just because a vendor cancelled an agreement with them. I didn't think it was that big of a deal, but I could be wrong.

Anyway, I could spend all day defending my posts. I will say that many of my posts are in response to something that I feel is an unjustified bias -- against TiVo, MS, the US govt, whatever. I only respond to articles that I feel I know something about. Thanks for the well-documented post, though. Seriously, I've been called a lot worse than a shill and it was just a one-liner. Supporting your argument with links, quotes, and valid conclusions. I gotta say that if I were in your shoes, I can't help but to think that I would have come to the same conclusion.

This may not be so secure after all, if it includes Bluetooth. Read here for more.

-Kaos

Next on Slashdot, a complete HOWTO on adding those leftover red LEDs to your car's window washer nozzles.

I mean, really. I know that we've been getting sillier lately, but this? Not exactly News for Nerds. Stuff that matters. Is it?

In unrelated news, a Japanese study shows another link between computer use and health problems. But hey, that sort of thing just isn't as k3wl....

Not just iDVD, but a patched version of it. No wonder Apple were pissed off ....

I cant wait for someone to examine that patch a little more closely. Its probably sneaking on some DRM stuff, huh? And can you turn off the "eject copyrighted CD" feature?

We know how cozy apple is with the DMCA.

The real answer is these "tablet PCs" probably aren't all that useful to "true geeks", as we're far too keyboard dependent, but could be quite useful to people ranging from graphics artists to grandmothers.

Which begs the question, why is it when Microsoft announces products like this, is it "hyping" them, but when Apple announces slightly faster laptops (note, nothing actually *new*, just *slightly faster*), they get a front page story written like it came out of the mouth of a PR drone?

Honestly, it seems to me that Slashdot is really trying to pimp itself to Apple. Look at the evidence: How many Apple articles do you see on a daily basis? Why does Apple have its own section, customized to look like Apple's website? Why does Apple have eleven (count them yourself) different topic categories? (Compared to one for Sun, one for Microsoft, one for IBM, one for Compaq, and *none* for Dell, whose market share is nearly six times that of Apple

See the CNET article, Key Internet server moved for security, tho Verisign claims that the timing was coincidental.

Then there is every possibility that Microsoft might try and stop the sale of your car because you can't transfer the license to the software. They'd need the buyer to buy a new Microsoft Windows CE for Automotive license. They've done it before.

The press release from Microsoft and a discussion at news.com.

Here is an interesting article on ZDnet about Microsoft's Longhorn which exactly does this.

I don't know. I might just be old fashioned and keep different types of information in different places/files/stores. E.g. paper bank statements is seperate from dates of friends' birthdays.

Just my 2 eurocents.

AMD is also planing lay offs. They have to cut US$ 350 million in costs, and some of these will come from lost jobs.

It is nice that they'll get a user base from the deals with Gateway, Dell, et al., but what kind of user base is it? The people choosing Corel Office are people that don't want to pay for a productivity suite. How does that translate into customers later on when Sun's giving away OpenOffice? It's not like Corel Office has proprietary document formats that lock users in.

Yesterday, C-Net wrote a very good article explaining why Corel Office bundling will be a failure. I'd suggest reading it if you're interested in the subject.