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I said they were supportive. Discussions on mailing lists, blog entries, that sort of thing. Encouraging.

Please note that Macromedia is being supportive to their own developer community. Also every tool (open source or not) that has a chance to provide added value to their own platform while not being a competitive threat to their own product line is likely to get some (little) support as well. That does not even compare to what other companies do, by really embracing the free software / open source movement. IBM offered a couple of dozzens of programs to the open source community (list) one of them being an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) for Laszlo. Sun open sourced Star Office, Netbeans and will soon open source Solaris. Laszlo Systems open sourced their RIA Platform (OpenLaszlo). These and others are companies being supportive to the open source community. Macromedia however is not one of these companies. On a greed scale they would be somewhere very close to Microsoft.

Flash (which, btw, costs half of what you said)

I don't know where you live but in Germany the half cripple Macromedia Flash MX 2004 costs 694.84 euro (=855.926701 US$) and the full Macromedia Flash MX Professional 2004 costs 973.24 euro (=1,198.868952 US$).

If you don't like it -- don't buy it.

You can bet I won't. I already told about OpenLaszlo. That is what I would use, should I ever consider writing Flash applications again. For now I am a lot better off using SVG and JavaScript for the open source projects to which I contribute. SVG and JavaScript are both open standards while Macromedia's technologies are proprietary. Supporting Macromedia's technologies would help Macromedia more than anybody else, and would surely hurt web standards and interoperability.

I said they were supportive. Discussions on mailing lists, blog entries, that sort of thing. Encouraging.

Please note that Macromedia is being supportive to their own developer community. Also every tool (open source or not) that has a chance to provide added value to their own platform while not being a competitive threat to their own product line is likely to get some (little) support as well. That does not even compare to what other companies do, by really embracing the free software / open source movement. IBM offered a couple of dozzens of programs to the open source community (list) one of them being an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) for Laszlo. Sun open sourced Star Office, Netbeans and will soon open source Solaris. Laszlo Systems open sourced their RIA Platform (OpenLaszlo). These and others are companies being supportive to the open source community. Macromedia however is not one of these companies. On a greed scale they would be somewhere very close to Microsoft.

Flash (which, btw, costs half of what you said)

I don't know where you live but in Germany the half cripple Macromedia Flash MX 2004 costs 694.84 euro (=855.926701 US$) and the full Macromedia Flash MX Professional 2004 costs 973.24 euro (=1,198.868952 US$).

If you don't like it -- don't buy it.

You can bet I won't. I already told about OpenLaszlo. That is what I would use, should I ever consider writing Flash applications again. For now I am a lot better off using SVG and JavaScript for the open source projects to which I contribute. SVG and JavaScript are both open standards while Macromedia's technologies are proprietary. Supporting Macromedia's technologies would help Macromedia more than anybody else, and would surely hurt web standards and interoperability.

I said they were supportive. Discussions on mailing lists, blog entries, that sort of thing. Encouraging.

Please note that Macromedia is being supportive to their own developer community. Also every tool (open source or not) that has a chance to provide added value to their own platform while not being a competitive threat to their own product line is likely to get some (little) support as well. That does not even compare to what other companies do, by really embracing the free software / open source movement. IBM offered a couple of dozzens of programs to the open source community (list) one of them being an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) for Laszlo. Sun open sourced Star Office, Netbeans and will soon open source Solaris. Laszlo Systems open sourced their RIA Platform (OpenLaszlo). These and others are companies being supportive to the open source community. Macromedia however is not one of these companies. On a greed scale they would be somewhere very close to Microsoft.

Flash (which, btw, costs half of what you said)

I don't know where you live but in Germany the half cripple Macromedia Flash MX 2004 costs 694.84 euro (=855.926701 US$) and the full Macromedia Flash MX Professional 2004 costs 973.24 euro (=1,198.868952 US$).

If you don't like it -- don't buy it.

You can bet I won't. I already told about OpenLaszlo. That is what I would use, should I ever consider writing Flash applications again. For now I am a lot better off using SVG and JavaScript for the open source projects to which I contribute. SVG and JavaScript are both open standards while Macromedia's technologies are proprietary. Supporting Macromedia's technologies would help Macromedia more than anybody else, and would surely hurt web standards and interoperability.

Many of the comments on this article leave the distinct impression that the writers have not bothered to learn anything about the beast on their own, and are either reading between the lines of the original press release, or blindly accepting whatever they find in one or more response threads. For those who care about getting their facts at least a little straight, there's a link in the "Related Links" slashbox that points at a number of IBM articles on various aspects of the hardware architecture of Cell: http://www.research.ibm.com/cell/ . With a little more digging on Google, you can find the following presentation slides shown by some Sony engineers: http://www.research.scea.com/research/html/CellGDC 05/index.html/ which includes a presentation on programming models for the Cell SPEs.

I gave up on mice years ago and switched over to a trackpoint (IBM makes keyboards with the trackpoint built in). I love it on laptops so I figured I would love it on the desktop. Like this:

http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site.wss/documen t.do?lndocid=MIGR-4WKSWX

It's great because I don't have to remove my fingers from the keyboard, don't have to find some mouse that has shifted who-knows-where, and with a bit of practice becomes extremely accurate. I also have a mouse attached to it for the normies.

On the down side, I have yet to find an ergonomic versionish keyboard with a trackpoint -- which would be great.

Plus it always takes me a few seconds if I use someone elses keyboard when I want to move the mouse. You can see me just staring at it for a few seconds until I grasp the fact I have to find a mouse to use.

And beware -- some of the trackpoint keyboards are
laptop keyboards with some packaging that doesn't give them that great of feel or depth. Others are full size (I even have an old-white ibm uber-click keyboard with a trackpoint) and work much, much better.

The way I use the English language, when I quote someone and then say this is completely wrong it means all parts of the quoted text are incorrect. If I meant the conclusion was wrong, or some individual premise was wrong, I'd use the word partly instead of completely. That is why your post confused me.

As for OSX performance, I suggest you look at some tables of actual measurements (such as these from IBM. In the real world, the numbers work out just like I said they would - although I admit I made my statements based on my own experience compiling the same code on a G4 and a Pentium PC running Red Hat linux, without any rigorous benchmarking.

Macromedia announced that it is joining the Eclipse Foundation and plans to deliver a next-generation rich Internet application (RIA) development tool code-named Zorn based on the popular open-source IDE."

I suppose you could wait for that. Or you could be using Eclipse today to build rich Internet apps to be delivered via Flash by getting into OpenLaszlo.

OpenLaszlo is here today, it's free, it's open source (CPL), and there's a free IDE on the Eclipse platform courtesy of IBM.

But, you know, if you'd rather wait an indefinite amount of time and pay Adobe/Macromedia an unspecified amount of money to get essentially the same stuff, "Zorn" is probably just what you've been waiting for...

Flash is excellent for developing rich web applications, which are entirely different than home page "flash intros" that you want a button to skip, or flying hamburgers that pop up on top of yahoo's home page.

By "rich web application", I mean the entire interactive client side of the application runs in the Flash player. Well written Flash based applications are high quality, responsive, uniform across platforms, and much better than anything that is possible with html/ajax.

There are several different approaches to writing Flash based rich web applications. The worst proprietary way is using Macromedia's Flash tool. The most expensive and legally restricted way is using Macromedia's Flex server. The best and free way is using OpenLaszlo, which is open source, and IBM's Laszlo IDE for Eclipse, which is also open source.

It would be interesting to compare Macromedia/Adobe's Zorn Eclipse plug-in, with IBM's Laszlo Eclipse plug-in. I wonder who better understands how to write plug-in IDE's for Eclipse: IBM or Macromedia/Adobe? And who better understands Open Source software?

-Don

Take a look at top500.org This is the top 500 supercomputers benchmarked on linpack. I use it because it is one of the fairest benchmarks, since everyone on the list is optimised to the max. Now take the Rmax number and divide by number of procs. You'll find from system to system using the same proc that they're very consistant.

I gave the ibm paper before. Look at the power curve (second graph down), follow the speed down to 1.6 GHz, now what is its power? ~22Watts.

Now from the curve you can see that cranking the GHz on the 970 makes the power increase exponentially (like all processors). So at 2.7 GHz it really is hot, not P4 hot, but very hot.

The reason for water cooling is low noise, not that it is sucks more heat than a P4. The reason no G5 in a laptop is??? If you look at the same power curve the G5 at 1.25 GHz is around 15 watts not much different than a G4. Perhaps Apple thinks paying more for a G5 without a really big performance or GHz boost isn't worth it.

Googling for G5 power consumption specs isn't leading me to numbers like the ones you've posted. This pdf from IBM has the 970 running at between 65 and 75 Watts. I'm just not finding the numbers that can buttress your claim that the 970 does the most work for the least amount of current. What I'm finding is that 970 is a touch better than A64 with the amps (at least for pre-Winchester), A64 is a touch better than 970 with IPC, and that Dothan beats them soundly on both accounts but is unscaled and chokes on certain applications. Dothan apparently can run at 2.6+ GHz right now with a P3 class heatsink if you want to break pins on your $250 processor and take a soldering iron to a $300 motherboard. Is that not a harbinger of the future? A fivefold difference in bogomips per watt may sound extreme but it isn't beyond plausibility. I wouldn't argue that the G5 sucks. I just wouldn't claim it's flat out superior to any other consumer CPU or that it's impossible for Yonah/Merom to leave it behind.

On-chip hardware in support of security system for intellectual property protection.

Each Cell is given a GUID, a global identifier.

Some will no doubt be turned off by the fact that DRM is built into the Cell hardware.

on-chip hardware DRM support

It also has built-in on-chip digital rights management (DRM)

It seems that details on this DRM system are still secret, but I would wager strong odds that is it exactly compliant with the Trusted Computing Group specification. Exactly compliant with the Intel La Grande DRM system, exactly compliant with the AMD Presidio DRM system, exactly compliant with the Transmeta Security eXtensions DRM system.

One DRM to rule them all, One DRM to find them,
One DRM to bring them all and in the darkness bind them.

One Trusted Computing system to bind a network of software running on different CPUs.

-

"Then IBM ran into trouble with G5 production."

Did they run into trouble or did they pull resources away from G5 to start making the version for the next generation consoles?

Speaking of wild speculation, with three platforms coming out based upon the Power PC, then wouldn't it make sense for IBM to start pushing a common PC hardware platform based on the new processor to go along with their linux push. Something along the lines of an updated version of their old CHRP (Common Hardware Reference Platform). The processors that power the next generation of consoles should be very competitive with Intel processors, especially with multi cpu capabilities. A generic box based upon multiple cell processors and running linux would be very competitive for both desktop PCs and servers.

Most of the derogatory comments by Apple users about the supposed shortcomings of SSE2 are ill informed, they seem to confuse SSE2 with MMX.

More recent efforts, such as SSE2, are somewhat better. SSE2 provides eight registers, which are not shared with the floating point unit. SSE2 does have 64-bit floating point types, which is a plus. However, AltiVec's selection of instructions is more complete, and most of them work from two registers into a third, letting the processor perform moderately complicated vector operations entirely in registers, without touching memory until the final data is ready to come out. This, and the larger pool of registers, favors deeply pipelined operations that can come close to saturating the processor's multiple execution units. AltiVec still wins.

XBox and playstation do. The proof is here in applications were cost REALLY counts. Where are ALL the game systems? Thats right PPC.

As for the notebook/power issue lets take a look:
P4 3.2 GHz = 6.3 GFLOPS (82 watts)
Pentium M 1.6 GHz = 3.6 GFLOPS (24 watts)
PPC970FX 1.6 GHz = 6.3 GFLOPS (22 Watts)

P4 and 970 benchs from Top500.com. Pentium M from scaled comparison with P4.

So what is apple talking about? Well Pentium M Speedstep probably has better power management to turn the clock down dynamically during occational use (like a word processor). Other than this add-on feature the pentium family has NO advantage other than market clout. The PPC gets P4 performance with pentium M power draw.

Lots of good tech has died because of stronger competitors with weaker products.

The 360's CPU appears not to exist at this point in time, or at least, not in a form that can be shown to people. The Cell certainly exists, and 'in lab' runs at 4+ GHz, but the few Cells in the wild have all been sporting gigantic heat sinks, even though IBM 's published papers describe a cool chip.

IBM promised the same thing to Jobs. This time they have a new fab, new designs, one lost customer and three new ones who all stand to sell more units than Apple ever did.

I really hope IBM delivers, but Apple just did something amazingly ballsy, that I certainly didn't expect, and I'm sure they had reasons.

If you are a fan of Linux on PPC, fear not, IBM still sells relatively low cost PPC machines that run Linux quite well.

My guess is that the Business Week article linked in the parent comment is better than the New Scientist article at explaining the researcher's intentions. Here's a quote from the Business Week article: "The Blue Brain Project will search for novel insights into how humans think and remember."

If you've been around scientific research, it is not difficult to understand that this research has little chance of producing anything valuable.

There are several reasons:

1) The research is equivalent to trying to understand how a computer operates without understanding the programming of the computer.

2) The quote from the Business Week article above is probably unintentionally accurate. Probably the Business Week writer interviewed someone from the lab, and that person, not being as skilled as the New Scientist writer at hiding the truth, revealed what they actually are doing. Probably the Business Week writer did not understand the significance of what he wrote, but just thought it was an interesting quote.

The significance of "search for novel insights" is that they do not intend to do theory-driven science. In theory-driven science, you have novel insights before you do an experiment. Otherwise, as thousands of years of human history have proven, investigation is mostly a waste of time.

Instead, the researchers will just do the "scientific" equivalent of playing.

3) Researchers found in the early 70's that research proposals that promised a better understanding of the brain or intelligence would get funded. The research that is actually done is research that is funded, not necessarily research that is useful.

They found that brain and intelligence research would be funded, but there was a problem. It was, and is, extremely difficult to do useful research, or even to think of a direction for research that would be useful in finding new understanding.

To be more certain of funding, researchers began wildly over-estimating the value of their proposed research, and thereby taking advantage of any ignorance on the part of grant-givers. Partly this was because the researchers deliberately lied. Partly it was because the researchers would discuss their research in a way that would encourage others to over-estimate. The researchers take advantage of a social weakness; people want to believe there is progress in understanding ourselves.

Thomas J. Watson, Jr., former CEO of IBM came to the conclusion that the talk of artificial intelligence was not to be believed, and said so publically. I was not able to find the quote. Mr. Watson was expressing a low opinion of the research in intelligence at the time.

4) Research about the brain and intelligence is far more difficult than other research. That's partly because the architecture of the brain is far more complicated than that of a computer.

Digital computers use binary. Biological computers use many more levels than two, and we are far from fully understanding the architecture.

This (poorly edited) PDF file from UCSD has some basic facts about the brain: Levels of neurophysiological description. From page 2: "100 billion neurons in the brain; 1/20th [of] 1 hair width in diameter; Speed transmission 2-120 metres/sec; each neuron has about 10,000 contacts with other neurons.

From page 17: "Each neuron [of the 30 billion neurons] has about 10,000 connections with other neurons. These connections use many different neurotransmitters. These neurotransmitters differ in their strength, timing, and whether they excite or inhibit the postsynaptic neuron. If excitatory + inhibitory = threshold the postsynaptic neuron fires!" [slight editing for clarity]

Sure, IBM might be in it on the Intel side, but they do make other non-crippled systems (Unless you count trying to run AIX as crippled wrt OpenPower) that start at the $3600 mark. If Apple does switch, that doesnt mean it's the end of using a well-known alternative to Intel/AMD based hardware.

The only thing is that it wont help in a network made to only accept and trust "DMCA Compliant nodes".

Sure, IBM might be in it on the Intel side, but they do make other non-crippled systems (Unless you count trying to run AIX as crippled wrt OpenPower) that start at the $3600 mark. If Apple does switch, that doesnt mean it's the end of using a well-known alternative to Intel/AMD based hardware.

The only thing is that it wont help in a network made to only accept and trust "DMCA Compliant nodes".

What it means is that a new copy of sshd is exec'ed for each connection after the master sshd fork()s to handle the connection. Previously, the forked sshd would just handle the whole session. It starts off as a literal copy of the address space of the parent and stays very similar throughout its life.

Now should there be some kind of vulnerability in sshd, an attacker can connect, get a new fork()ed copy of the master sshd and attempt to guess whatever they need to successfully exploit it. Should they guess wrong, their sshd will likely crash, but they can just connect, get another (identical) copy and try again.

Some systems (eg OpenBSD and PAX-based Linuxes like Adamantix) shuffle various things up (library offsets, stack location, ProPolice canaries, whatever) at exec() time. In the case of sshd, re-execing after the fork() means that instead of being able to linearly scan through the possible values needed to conduct the attack, the attacker has to guess the right ones for their current connection. Basically, instead of multiple shots at a stationary target, the attacker is now faced with an environment with lots of moving targets, all of which must be hit in order to conduct a successful attack. This should make it much harder to conduct the exploit.

For a look at those moving targets, see Theo de Raadt's Exploit Mitigation Techniques paper.

Why wouldn't they announce it, though? They could spin it like IBM does for ESS 2.0... (which is "TCG-compliant" - which means that it does EVERYTHING that the Trusted Computing Group wants. If I had an IBM laptop with it, I'd bring out my soldering iron (it's a separate chip, unlike this technology would be)...

Luckily, the X21 that I'm getting doesn't have one... They didn't debut it until the X30 or X31, IIRC...

at least IBM says it is. Intel has enough chops that they could probably put out a decent PPC core.

The cracks about "why not just sell it on ebay" aside, this is a very good program.

Manufacturing computers and consumer electronics is a messy process, and the rapid speed of upgrades ensures that many tons of computer equipment are entering landfills regularly. Many of the components in computers are quite toxic. On a smaller scale, I'm sure the same is true of the iPod.

Apple's recycling program is probably worded as broadly as it is so as to avoid confusion, but the important part is that they don't exclude iPods that are utterly broken and irreperably from the program. That means that assuming you can get it to them, they'll put it in the recycling program no matter how badly bashed up it is.

Incidentally, Apple, IBM, and probably a few other manufacturers have recycling programs in place for computers. Many of them require you to pay the company to take your old, beat up jonx.

there's a reason why IBM started making PPCs after Motorla.

No, no, no. I'm sorry. This is going to sound a bit harsh. Perhaps it's because I've had a couple beers, or because I've had a stressful month. But, IBM did most definitely not in any way shape or form start making PowerPCs after Motorola did. If you know anything, anything at all about the PowerPC architecture, you should know that the PowerPC is based on IBM's POWER architecture. It is a slightly simpler version with a few minor instructions missing, but basically the PowerPC is an offshoot of the POWER architecture.

In fact, the IBM RS/6000 workstation market was around for years and years before the first PowerPC machine existed. IBM transitioned the low end of the RS/6000 line to the PowerPC, but they kept the high end on POWER. If I recall correctly, the first PowerPC RS/6000 was the RS/6000 Model 250, which had a 66 MHz PowerPC back in 1994. It was pretty cool stuff for its day. (But, the Model 590 was a based on a POWER chip and was a metric shitload faster. Of course it wasn't even from the same line (nor was the 590 top of the line even!), but you get the point.)

Anyway, you may be technically correct that IBM started making PowerPC chips after Motorola did -- I'm not sure of the specifics of who made what when. But certainly IBM didn't have much of a learning curve, having been the inventor of the POWER architecture in the first place, and having been a totally integral part of the Somerset Design Center (the consortium where both Motorola and IBM employees worked side by side on PowerPC projects).

Anyway, I'm sad to see the parent modded up as informative (although this is par for the course on Slashdot), but just in case someone wants to know the history of POWER (which very clearly predates the existence of PowerPC), here is a handy link.

Does linux have fine-grained locking in its kernel?

Does linux have or support Access Control Lists?

Your Linux on G5 performance figures are here

An why do it?

More performance? No.

Lower cost? No. Look at the specs The PPC 970FX is on par with what Intel is making while using 3 TIMES fewer transistors. Transistor count = die size = cost. Why do you think playstation/Xbox/nintendo are ALL using PowerPC? Because it is the best cost&performance around!

Lower Power? No. This is one of the myths of the G5. It is a very low power device for the performance. Why is apple not making a G5 laptop? because unlike their windows counterparts who make big clunky laptops to accomodate a P4, Apple is more concerned about sleak design. Why water cooling? Cause they want quiet computers. Get this: at the same clock speed the G5 uses less power than the G4. There is no reason for apple to switch. These are dumb rumors.

In this article, benchmarks seem to show that performance problems seem to come from Mac OS X more than the G5 CPU: though with altivec-optimized applications, OS X + G5 do very well, the combination is just plain horrid compared to their rivals with almost anything else. There is also this older benchmark which showed OS X and Linux on the same G5 system, the upper hand going generally going to linux.

Bear in mind that the above only measure performance, not usability or software availability. However, if OS X does indeed have serious performance issues and that when it does well, it is often because of Altivec, would a change to an x86 CPU really help?

Before you say anything, I started using Macs in late 1984 (and Apple ]['s before then), so you can count me as someone who usually views Apple in a favourable light. However, I didn't drink the kool-aid, so I often question logic of certain decisions made in Cupertino. This one is just an example. We'll see, maybe it will be for the best.

(from my original post) Garbage collection

Garbage collection is generally used to refer to algorithms that (1) determine which objects are still needed by starting from a set of roots and finding all objects reachable from those objects and (2) returning all remaining objects to the heap. The roots include things like global variables and variables on the current call stack. Mozilla's JavaScript engine uses one of the most common garbage collection algorithms, mark and sweep, in which the garbage collector clears the mark bit on each object, sets the mark bits on all roots and all objects reachable from them, and then finalizes all objects not marked and returns the memory they used to the heap.

Garbage collection (at least when the term is not used to refer to lesser algorithms like reference counting) is pretty good at freeing memory that should be freed. However, in a fully garbage-collected system the programmer can still create leaks by leaving objects reachable that are no longer needed. For example, if an object's constructor adds the object to a list that is reachable from a global variable and nothing ever removes it from the list, the object will never be destroyed since it is always reachable from the list.

And if you still don't believe me, read this IBM article on memory leaks in Java applications. The garbage collector does NOT always collect uneeded objects that bad coding leaves accessable.

Memory leaks are caused by application programming. They happen when the programmer tells the program to ask for memory from the system, but doesn't return it to the system when done with it. In 'C' (malloc) and 'C++' (new) etc., the request for memory is explicit, and the programmer is responsible for having the program tell the operating system that it no longer needs the memory (e.g. 'free' for 'C', 'delete' for 'C++'... with C++ the implicit destructors can do some of the work, but it doesn't always let the programmer off the hook). The operating system is not responsible for reclaiming memory. It is told by the program, and not only that, the program tells it what block of memory to free up. If it doesn't and the program ends, then there is that much memory tied up that the operating system doesn't have access to any more.

Java's GC is supposed to overcome that by collecting any unreferenced memory during a program's lifetime and before it exits. But if the programmer codes in a way that keeps open references to unused/unreachable objects, then the application will be said to leak. Granted it will 'leak' in the JVM (asking the JVM for more memory), but the JVM will in turn ask the O/S for more memory until it reaches some predefined maximum, at which time it will crash. In the meantime, it sucks up resources and slows things down on the box that the JVM is running on. If this happens in an enterprise application running in a J2EE container (which presumably is supposed to provide a stable application environment 24/7, which means little leaks will add up over time), this can cause very unhappy customers. If it happens in a web browser because the JavaScript code is leaking, then you also have unhappy customers. Any time you lose system memory to a leak (even if it will be returned once the runtime environment is shut down), you will have performance impact and unhappy customers.

I would rather have seen them benchmark Linux running on a real POWER system. The POWER5 CPU's that these systems from IBM use would benchmark significantly faster than the older generation CPUs used in Apple products.

As does IBM. It'd be mighty hard to sell a chip without documentation on it... From a hardware point of view, the Mac is pretty much a standard piece of PowerPC kit, with Open Firmware and a mostly standard motherboard (standard in the PPC world, PReP). The Mac isn't the black box it used to be. Linux runs quite well on it, and it's pretty easily (well, relatively) emulated with PearPC.

http://www-306.ibm.com/chips/techlib/techlib.nsf/p roducts/PowerPC_970_and_970FX_Microprocessors

I will point out that this is hardly relevant for a desktop OS, and that I am more than happy with my dual G5/1.8GHz. Getting things done faster and neater due to elegant interaction design is much more important to me than being able to spawn threads quickly ;)

Hate to say it, but this sounds like a pipedream. They want to 'take the proteins and tweak them' an dthen have a computer program spit out the DNA required to make that protein.

Well whoop-de-do. I'd like to make a computer that can generate wormholes. Doesn't mean it's going to happen.

Firstly, protein modelling is notoriously complex. Remember folding@home? http://folding.stanford.edu/
That's right - hundreds of thousands of computers cracking the problem of 12 amino acid chains. That's an oligopeptide, sort of like a 'protein lite'. Real proteins are hundreds to thousands of amino acids long.

IBM's Blue Gene supercomputers were even specifically designed with protein folding simulations in mind - read http://www.research.ibm.com/bluegene/.

So this company seems to be doing the following

1 Come up with nifty, but blindingly obvious, idea
2 Crack the age-old problem of accurately simulating protein folding
3 Profit!!!

It's just that step one is literally so obvious that you could ask a kid. And step 2 is so notoriously complex that I don't expect this company to amount to anything more than a plughole for research grants.

-Nano.

IBM mainframes can and do run UNIX (even Linux).

You can even run several OSs at once on the mainframe hardware due to logical partitioning (see http://www-1.ibm.com/servers/eserver/iseries/lpar/ ).

While z/OS (the current incarnation of MVS) is probably the most popular choice, there is also VM, DOS/VSE and yes, various *NIX flavours.

Hahahahaha.. Good one.

Okay, so the hard drive is made of pixie dust.. Next thing you'll be telling me they have a genie in there too.

Fuck. Maybe I should have thought this through first.

What do you think they run, pixie dust?

Well, actually... yes.

As does IBM

the results show that Java server performance is competitive with legacy environments

Java servlets outperform CGI, and the Java platform is competitive with C or C++

Jvm optimizations such as efficient monitor and object allocation implementations have led to significant performance improvements, including better scalability that is vital for server workloads

-Don

DRM tech is NOT what you need to secure your server. If it was, YOU would hold the chip's root secret key, but the TCG will NOT give you that! DRM exists to allow companies to [try to] secure "your" computer against YOU.

But in my mind binary vs 'decimal' is pretty much the same.

Then you are misinformed.

I think we're talking about binary/fixed point VS floating point arithmetic.

Floating point is fine, just as long as it's decimal floating point, not binary floating point. I think IBM's Decimal Arithmetic FAQ might help you understand this better. You can represent any decimal number exactly in decimal floating point, so it is in fact better than fixed point, which can represent a smaller set of numbers limited by the precision you set in advance.

Now you might notice that the FAQ was created by Mike Cowlishaw, the inventor of REXX. He is the expert in the industry on decimal floating point arithmetic precisely because of his experience with REXX (and now with BigDecimal in Java). When the Python developers wanted to add decimal floating point to the language, he's who they turned to.

Decimal floating point is frequently a "best practice," but you just don't know it yet. Educate yourself.

As shiny and pretty 3D as this new one is, it doesn't really provide what the majority of users need. The users being the viewing public, and what they need being the ability to see at a glance what the weather will be like. This means that less, not more detail is needed. We (on the whole) don't need to see each individual rain drop, nor see the whole thing in a pretty 3D display. The simplicity of the older system provided this at-a-glance representation. It seems to me that whoever designed the new system didn't use a User Centered Design approach. see: http://www-3.ibm.com/ibm/easy/eou_ext.nsf/Publish/ 570

Also you would need VOIP and Video conferencing from CISCO or an implementing Partners.

Also you would need VOIP and Video conferencing from CISCO or an implementing Partners.

Cell is a normal PPC chip with 8 SIMDs. Last time I checked, MMX didn't revolutionize PC chips. Being MMX is Simd instructions for pentiums. Cell is nothing new, they just call the simds,a Synergistic Processor Unit. Gotta love marketing speak.

http://www-306.ibm.com/software/tivoli/resource-ce nter/security/code-directory-server.jsp

You have to register (free) in order to download the code. Though it's under the "trial & beta" heading, the directory server is licensed free. You can use it for any purpose for any length of time.

The caveat is that it's unsupported. If you want a support contract for your use of the LDAP server, that's where the $10k comes in. Or, if you have a current support license for any software that includes the LDAP server (AIX, Websphere, Tivoli security stuff), you're supported without any additional license fees.

Why is this even newsworthy?

IBM has licensed its enterprise-class LDAP directory server software free of charge for over 5 years now.

Yep, free. Go to ibm.com and download it for yourself. Anyone. For any purpose.

http://www-306.ibm.com/software/tivoli/products/di rectory-server/

It's currently under the Tivoli brand, going as the IBM Tivoli Directory Server v6.0.

Not only does it pack all the bells and whistles of other enterprise LDAP directories, such as multimaster and cascaded replication models, but instead of flat files it *includes* IBM DB2 UDB enterprise edition database (also licensed free of charge) for its data storage. I've seen the comparative test results, and nothing touches this solution for performance and scalability.

It runs on just about anything, too...including Linux on non-x86 hardware.

And they've always GIVEN it away. Free download.

So, someone explain again WHY any company of any size would PAY for an LDAP solution, or why RedHat giving away Netscape Directory is big news?

Well, I can see how my post was worded a bit weird ... I was trying to find a picture of one of those sleek T40-type keyboards, not the 10-pound indestructible old-school ones. :o)

This was what I was not able to find an image for:
http://www-131.ibm.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/P roductDisplay?catalogId=-840&langId=-1&partNumber= 31P8950&storeId=10000001

Well, some years ago a famous picture came out of IBM's labs showing "IBM" spelled out with xenon atoms on a nickel substrate, produced with a scanning tunneling microscope. It was one of the first demonstrations of the new found ability to push atoms around, one by one.

IBM/Lenovo actually make pc keyboards like that
http://www.pc.ibm.com/us/accessories/keyboards.htm l
Check out the keyboards with "Ultranav," they have the pointing nipple and touchpad which makes the keyboard kind of big. There are a couple of older models with just the pointing stick but i think you can only find those on ebay now. Search for "trackpoint space saver"

I would like to recommend an IBM keyboard, but it turns out they're apparently quite hard to find a picture of. A couple of my colleagues use them with great delight; I myself prefer full-height keys.

I don't know what ThinkPad you have, but you can get a "framed external" T40-series keyboard with pointer stick and touchpad and everything.