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Any other blade? Oi - no IBM Bladeservers for them!

Then somobody better tell IBM to update their documentation. Quote from PowerPC 970 AltiVec(TM) PEM

Quote from page 26:
The Altivec technology defines the following: Fixed 128-bit whide vector length that can be subdivider into sixteen 8-bit bytes, eight 16-bit half words or for 32-bit words --End of quote

Or you can look at page 10-14 which list all the supported instruction. And they are all 8,16 or 32bit.

Yes, but 4 xserves will be far more powerful.

With current systems, ray traced images can take upto 30 minutes for 1 frame. If you could get that frame in 30 seconds, how much could that help? Ya' know?

Also, in the case of a Database. There is no replacing a single box with 72 64bit processors @ 1.2GHz and 600GB of ram or 32 64bit processors @ 1.9GHz with 1TB of memory. Do you really think Sun and IBM would offer those types of configurations if nobody bought it or thought it was important to have everything consolidated vs distributed? You can cluster databases and make smaller nodes with fragmented databases, but not all cases have that option. Sometimes you just need a big bad-ol' box.

Also for math (especially floating point) calculations, the G5 (PPC970) is much superior to the Intel IA-32 (not really a big thing if all you do is run Word, of course).

That's a VERY broad statement there, and not really backed by much fact. For certain applications I'm quite certain that the PowerPC 970 is quite a bit faster than any x86 chips, but in other applications it's probably quite a bit slower, while overall they would seem to be fairly close.

Probably the most comprehensive cross-platform CPU benchmark we've got is SPEC CPU2000. It's far from perfect, but at least it's widely used. The best numbers I've seen for the PPC 970 is 937 CINT_base and 1051 CFP_base at 1.8GHz (numbers available in this product overview from IBM). Very respectible performance, and the 2.0GHz PPC 970 should be a bit higher, but it's not quite class-leading.

For comparison, a top-end Opteron system (Opteron 148, 2.2GHz) managed 1304 CINT and 1505 CFP. The Xeons in the same basic range with a score of 1532 CINT and 1338 CFP. And before anyone goes crying foul because of unfair compilers or anything like that, the Opteron numbers are achieved using GCC.

According to a talk by "Dr. BigMac" (from VA Tech) the only other high-volume CPU approaching it was the Intel Itanium, and here (quite an irony) Intel was under-clocked! (The G5, last year, was shipping at 2Gh, the Itanium less than that).

Ol' Dr. BigMac was basing his decision only on the specific performance tests he felt were important. In this case, that test was Linpack, where the PPC does very well. Linpack is certainly not the only measure of processor performance, it's actually a VERY limited test, albeit one that is applicable to many types scientific computing.

As for the Itanium it's likely more an issue of price rather than clock speed. When you look at the real-world performance of the Itanium2 1.5GHz vs. PPC 970 2.0GHz in Linpack, they're pretty close (probably within 5%). However a "cheap" dual-Itanium node will set you back a cool $15,000 or so, while a similarly equipped dual-G5 system from Apple will only cost you about $5000.

As for Pixar themselves. It's quite possible that they went through some benchmarks and found that the PowerPC 970 offered better performance for their particular work than any x86 chips. As mentioned above, there are some areas where the PPC970 does excel. However, I suspect that there was a STRONG incentive to find the PPC970 fastest regardless of what the actual performance was.

Why didn't they just use WebSphere Translation Server? This performs exactly what is needed and can be easily implemented by each party and is already available.

(scratching head) What exactly is a top-of-the-line laptop these days anyway? I have to ask because all the laptops I've req'd for work and friends have purchased in the past 6 months have had firewire on the motherboard. The most expensive was $1500.

Seeing how top-of-the-line in dollar amounts comes out to around $3300 by my informal search, I don't think any of those laptops count. If $1500 is a top-of-the-line laptop in your world, may I suggest finding a new job? I know McJobs don't pay well, but you should've known that going in.

Couple this with the fact that Firewire consistently transfers data at a faster rate than USB 2.0 (USB 2.0 being massively CPU bound, one hiccup and the transfer rate drops), and this isn't just a piddling little feature.

As for Ogg - okay, great, so you save your music in Ogg. Glad to meet you. I'm sure you'll find some friends at Slashdot. Too bad none of the people you'll come in contact with on any given day will even know what Ogg Vorbis is, much less have stored their music in that format. Given this, a company investing millions in order to have their hardware play that format is a dubious business plan at best. Very reminicent of a DotBomb business plan.

The point is that whatever sales Rio ends up with is more likely to be from geeks gutting it for the memory card than because it plays Ogg. And, hey, who knows, there might be a few wacky people running around with one who don't even stick a single Ogg or WMA on there - MP3 is here to stay, it's about time that you remove your head from your rectum and get used to the fact.

Any company that has a hyperlink marked "Investor Information" above-the-fold (shown without a need to scroll down on a typical 800x600 setup) is automatically a bit suspect.

IBM published a book, "Accessing the Internet", in August 1995. About 230 pages long. Very quaint in parts ("150,000 new users every month") but still has many (at this point) timeless truths about working with the internet.

Find it at this IBM search site or get the PDF file here.

IBM published a book, "Accessing the Internet", in August 1995. About 230 pages long. Very quaint in parts ("150,000 new users every month") but still has many (at this point) timeless truths about working with the internet.

Find it at this IBM search site or get the PDF file here.

*ducks*

I also agree; this list is "current generation", not "next generation". The IBM/Lotus team has shown some truly innovative work with Remail. Take a look at the screenshots. FOSS email developers should take a look at this instead of Outlook when adding features to their email clients...

Here's the US link. It's surprisingly expensive, compared to their other keyboards.. ($155).

Check out the 28L3644, but beware of sticker shock. If it's the compact keyboard idea that attracts you, check out any of the Happy Hacker keyboards, which used to be at www.pfuca.com but now appears to be dead.

Try this link; it's the same as the CDW link, but for a few bucks less (not sure about shipping $$), and it's straight from IBM:

IBM UltraNav Kbd.

Notice that there's no spec for weight. It should be about two, maybe three pounds, just enough to stay firmly anchored to your desk. I use one at my part-time job all the time, and it's absolutely one of the finest keyboard I've ever used. It feels just like the keyboard on T40 and T41. Only a slight variation on the keyboard from my laptop, an old 600x. It feels excellent.

Of course, I imagine you know how good IBM Thinkpad keyboards feel, given that you're trying to mod this one into a desktop kbd.

Available from IBM:
88-Key Space Saver II Keyboard (Business Black)

Link is to the danish model.

Well, maybe not linux, but IBM certainly does alot with nanotubes. If NEC is feeling especialy masochistic, they might sue them.

Reading the certification results (example), I found that the internal WLAN card wasn't supported. Not to be deterred, I searched IBM's web site and found this, along with several other documents, that puts me right on the path.

Unfortunately, a lot of research is required to find info when doing something like this. Don't be deterred by just one source.

I'm waiting for the release of the new IBM Thinkpad X40
2.6 pounds and %20 smaller (with the same full size thinkpad keyboard) than my already tiny X22, 8 hours on 8cell lion batt with the Ultra Low Voltage Pentium M 1.0 Ghz proc.

It's all I need to run some Debian goodness.

BTW, prices start at $1499, and Intel should be releasing the centrino drivers soon.

Umm.... how about most of them? Or better yet, maybe their desktops workstations out-perform their server. There are a variety of different office environments, with varying levels of technical support.

That said, I still think this notebook would be overkill for less tech-savy environments. Note: We have a rather low-end iSeries, so I recognize my shot was rather cheap.

But these days days with all the virtualization getting hot(vmware etc), a server architecture with a single memory bus/controller is getting old.
I'd like to see some test on servers like the IBM x445 with NUMA.

• Are we spending thirty times as many man-hours to develop this software as really required?

These Principles Watson was very specific about how the company should behave.

• Apple - Darwin and Safari
• IBM - Linux kernel
• Novell - Netware, NDS, eDirectory
• Trolltech - creators of Qt
• MySQL - major SQL database
• IndexData - networked information retreival
• RedHat
• Sleepycat - dbms
• Google

So if you want to know how to make money, look at the experts.

It is Linux beyond doubt.

I HAVE one of those "circa-97 brick[s] of a 7lb laptop", you insensitive clod!

That's funny... I see a JDK 1.4 for AIX on IBM's website.

There is already an open source java compiler (...) It does not support awt or Swing yet. This should be the obvious starting point for IBM

Kaffe supports AWT and limited portions of Swing. And it works great.

Oh, and there's this Jikes stuff, written by a little company called, well, IBM. Yes, it's free and libre. If Sun collaborate with IBM towards an open source Java, this will be the implementation they will use - not Sun's, and certainly not gcj !

GCJ is a great project but it's still pretty much that - a project. Kaffe is usable, Jikes is production-stable.

Thomas Miconi

I don't know about "parallel implementation", unless you mean this : AIX JDK
or this : Linux JDK
or this : OS/390 JDK
or... heck, they even have a separate IBM Windows JDK... probably others...
Let's just say IBM has licensed Java for years and leave it at that, OK ? You can download so many versions of the JDK and JRE from IBM it makes your head spin. Nobody has done as many JVM implementations and research as IBM, probably not even Sun. In doing so, they have likely re-written the JDK several times.

I don't know about "parallel implementation", unless you mean this : AIX JDK
or this : Linux JDK
or this : OS/390 JDK
or... heck, they even have a separate IBM Windows JDK... probably others...
Let's just say IBM has licensed Java for years and leave it at that, OK ? You can download so many versions of the JDK and JRE from IBM it makes your head spin. Nobody has done as many JVM implementations and research as IBM, probably not even Sun. In doing so, they have likely re-written the JDK several times.

I don't know about "parallel implementation", unless you mean this : AIX JDK
or this : Linux JDK
or this : OS/390 JDK
or... heck, they even have a separate IBM Windows JDK... probably others...
Let's just say IBM has licensed Java for years and leave it at that, OK ? You can download so many versions of the JDK and JRE from IBM it makes your head spin. Nobody has done as many JVM implementations and research as IBM, probably not even Sun. In doing so, they have likely re-written the JDK several times.

IBM would be better off working on an existing open source VM and slowly moving Java-the-language to another VM that is not controlled by a rival. Hell, maybe even parrot.

Or you know, IBM could work on their own virtual machine. :)

Wouldn't it be smarter if IBM started with their own SDK/JVM? If IBM wants open-source Java so bad, let them open their SDK and JVM.

See the following link for the mwave modem in IBM thinkpads. Also for the T23

More than a year old, but still a good guide to interface design.

modem

hanger

ibm makes something that may work

caveat; the last modem i used was in my ibook.

Not to mention IBM has its own JDK. Why don't they put their money where their mouth is? Forgive me if its here, and I'm just not seeing it. But Sun's JDK is already open source, but its not free. Where do I get the source to IBM's JDK?

IBM could do as you suggest. Then again, they have already written their own Java compiler (Jikes), at least one of their own JVMs, their own servlet container (Jakarta), etc...

I'd recommend looking at this page for more info on IBM + Java + OSS.

IBM has already written at least one high-quality JVM implementation which is not OSS because of contracts that IBM has with Sun. Of course, suggesting that IBM work on GCJ and Classpath has some merit in and of itself. But realize that IBM has sunk untold man-hours and dolars into developing its own JVM - resources that they now wish to contribute to the community at-large as OSS. I personally can't blame them if they didn't wish to spend a similar amount of resources on GCJ and Classpath when what they've got works.

Perhaps with this Open Letter IBM is looking for permission to open up the code. Perhaps they are looking to collaborate with Sun to create an even better project. Perhaps this is all just marketing/PR bs. Time will tell.

Dom

IBM could do as you suggest. Then again, they have already written their own Java compiler (Jikes), at least one of their own JVMs, their own servlet container (Jakarta), etc...

I'd recommend looking at this page for more info on IBM + Java + OSS.

IBM has already written at least one high-quality JVM implementation which is not OSS because of contracts that IBM has with Sun. Of course, suggesting that IBM work on GCJ and Classpath has some merit in and of itself. But realize that IBM has sunk untold man-hours and dolars into developing its own JVM - resources that they now wish to contribute to the community at-large as OSS. I personally can't blame them if they didn't wish to spend a similar amount of resources on GCJ and Classpath when what they've got works.

Perhaps with this Open Letter IBM is looking for permission to open up the code. Perhaps they are looking to collaborate with Sun to create an even better project. Perhaps this is all just marketing/PR bs. Time will tell.

Dom

IBM could do as you suggest. Then again, they have already written their own Java compiler (Jikes), at least one of their own JVMs, their own servlet container (Jakarta), etc...

I'd recommend looking at this page for more info on IBM + Java + OSS.

IBM has already written at least one high-quality JVM implementation which is not OSS because of contracts that IBM has with Sun. Of course, suggesting that IBM work on GCJ and Classpath has some merit in and of itself. But realize that IBM has sunk untold man-hours and dolars into developing its own JVM - resources that they now wish to contribute to the community at-large as OSS. I personally can't blame them if they didn't wish to spend a similar amount of resources on GCJ and Classpath when what they've got works.

Perhaps with this Open Letter IBM is looking for permission to open up the code. Perhaps they are looking to collaborate with Sun to create an even better project. Perhaps this is all just marketing/PR bs. Time will tell.

Dom

see the commercial]

meaning something like esr could have said:

"The republic will not be dominated"

Intel has brought us a lot of real inventions. I'm thinking of HyperThreading, and even Itanium ...

Not to nitpick, but Hyperthreading is not an Intel "innovation." It is actually based off of DEC Alpha technology that they bought when Compaq sold their CPU business off. If Alpha had survived another iteration, we'd have seen Symmetric Multi-Threading (SMT) labeled with much less marketing spin than we currently have.

Even IA-64, Intel's incarnation of Very Long Instruction Word (VLIW) technology, was not new when Intel decided to base Itanium on it.

As a side note, I always wished AMD had named the Opteron/Athlon64 series Atinum (as in pl-Atinum) or Alladium (as in p-Alladium). Either metal is more precious than t-Itanium, which is only considered a minor metal in the markets. Besides being a great play on words, they start with 'A', fitting in with the whole AuthenticAMD theme... although they probably would have gotten sued like Lindows was.. *sigh*

I'm still waiting to see AMD cross-license and make use of SMT technology in the Hammer line. *drool*

There are a whole bunch of interesting optimizations you can can do once the program is already running in the JVM. For instance, the IBM Jikes RVM will periodically queue methods for recompilation/reoptimization (with profiling information) after executing the method a certain number of times.

http://www.trl.ibm.com/projects/security/ssp/

Gentoo-specific info here.

http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/hardened/propolice.x ml

Your apache install probably already has python enabled for cgi. You might consider modpython, which adds the interpreter in for quicker load times.

Share and Enjoy!

Since I'm running Debian GNU/Linux stable (yes, that's right, I'm on woody), I had to install a newer version of iwconfig and modify my /etc/network/interfaces file to make it work well:

iface wlan0 inet dhcp
pre-up modprobe wlan0 || true
pre-up /usr/local/sbin/iwconfig wlan0 mode managed
pre-up /usr/local/sbin/iwconfig wlan0 enc 1234-789A-EF
pre-up /usr/local/sbin/iwconfig wlan0 essid WIRELESS

This space is reserved.

If I understand your requirements correctly, you may want to investigate the use of Python (in the form of Apache's mod_python) along with the ReportLab tools.
You can find a nice article detailing its usage here

since I doubt he runs Linux or any OS that doesn't support speech-to-text software.)


One should always be careful of making bold statements in public forums that
are glaringly wrong.

See for yourself.
Festival

ViaVoice

SealBeater

Depends on Sun? You don't want JRE from Sun? Download it from IBM (http://alphaworks.ibm.com/java).

Still wrong? Try Blackdown (http://www.blackdown.org/.

Still not satisfied? You could try running it with GCJ (licensed GPL, http://gcc.gnu.org/java/, and probably succeed after some tweaking.

--Coder

I discovered this short story by Clarke through a previous /. posting concerning chess. I really enjoyed it so here it is again.

Btw, I remember in that posting someone saying there are more possible games of chess than atom's in the universe. How is that possible? And how do you calculate # of games, with pieces moving back and forth ad infinitum?

Download the 'Identification Utility for Deskstar hard disk drives'. This will tell you the firmware revision of your Deskstar.

Based on the firmware revision of your drive, match it to one of the following patterns:
If "xxxIxxxx" (or your system is on this list), download this firmware update.
If "xxxOxxxx", download this firmware update.

Disclaimer: Read the directions. Having a backup of your disk drive before proceeding is encouraged.