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You are totally clueless, aren't you? Their software error handling scheme is fine for benchmarks. It wasn't fine for real work. They built it, ran the benchmarks, and then took it apart and sold the parts, and are now building a new one, with hardware that is suitable for doing science.

Here is a clue for you:

"Well with the concept proven we now had to make sure we had a system capable of conducting scientific computation. We needed to upgrade the system to something with error correcting code (ECC) RAM. The Power Macs did not support it and the XServes were coming. So in January we tore the system down and started prepping for the XServes."

Even with a noncompete, they are often unenforcable.

And even without a noncompete agreement written the principals may still apply: "Even though Bill Redmond had no non-compete with Pepsico, for example, an Illinois federal court enjoined him for five months from performing particular kinds of work for the Gatorade/Snapple division of Quaker Oats. ... As the court said in Pepsico, in certain cases, for the employee to function in the new position without using secrets learned in the old, "he would have to have an uncanny ability to compartmentalize information;" otherwise "he would necessarily be making decisions about [the new company's products] by relying on his knowledge of [the former company's] secrets. n4 Use or disclosure of secrets in such cases is "inevitable." "

Regardless of whether the employee under consideration has a non-compete agreement or not, the employee is not entitled to use or disclose the former employer's trade secrets, and the new employer is not entitled to use the employee as a conduit to gain the benefit of the former employer's secrets.

And The link to the article on noncompetes quoted in the previous article.

Bottom line - even WITHOUT a non-compete agremente, they might stop him from working there - conversely, even WITH a non-compete agreement, he may be aloud to work there.

It's really tricky. If there's specialized knowledge involved may matter more than the presense of some silly paperwork. From the link I posted...

MANY EMPLOYERS follow simple rules of thumb when considering hiring an employee of a competitor: If the employee has no non-compete agreement, they can put the employee to work in any capacity, no matter how similar to the former job. If the employee has a non-compete, however, he or she cannot be hired. But as many recent lawsuits have shown, both of these "rules" can be wrong.

Even though Bill Redmond had no non-compete with Pepsico, for example, an Illinois federal court enjoined him for five months from performing particular kinds of work for the Gatorade/Snapple division of Quaker Oats.
...
As the court said in Pepsico, in certain cases, for the employee to function in the new position without using secrets learned in the old, "he would have to have an uncanny ability to compartmentalize information;" otherwise "he would necessarily be making decisions about [the new company's products] by relying on his knowledge of [the former company's] secrets. n4 Use or disclosure of secrets in such cases is "inevitable."

Pepsico, 54 F3d 1269-70.

...
By contrast, even though Walter Slijepcevich had a one-year non-compete agreement with Caremark mail order prescriptions, the same court that had entered an injunction barring Redmond's proposed activities refused to enforce the non-compete, saying "the knowledge Slijepcevich gained at Caremark . . . comes 'within the realm of general skills and knowledge which he was free to take and use in later pursuits.'" n5

Speaking of a radiation therapy machine with software bugs.....

This was posted to /. a while back: An Investigation of the Therac-25 Accidents

The fact that people are installing patches on these machines against recommendations to do so scares the living shit out of me. I know that these people have good intentions but the road to hell is paved with good intentions. They don't know all of the variables. Some patch might introduce a new feature (something that does happen from time to time with MS patches) that causes the software to malfunction. This could cost lives. I really think a $50 firewall box would be a much better idea.

It has happened before. A recent Windows patch broke some of my company's software. Fortunately, our software doesn't control medical equipment, so no-one died.

Von Neumann

Nice to meet someone who has heard of 'Von Neumann'. I have a hard time to immediately connect physical implementation to the architecture though and I doubt that you followed up there --> Dieudonné [1981] is a little more generous with words but appears to confuse the concept of the stored program concept with the wiring of computers: "Dissatisfied with the computing machines available immediately after the war, he was led to examine from its foundations the optimal method that such machines should follow, and he introduced new procedures in the logical organization, the "codes" by which a fixed system of wiring could solve a great variety of problems.".
loc. cit.

CC.

Von Neumann

Nice to meet someone who has heard of 'Von Neumann'. I have a hard time to immediately connect physical implementation to the architecture though and I doubt that you followed up there --> Dieudonné [1981] is a little more generous with words but appears to confuse the concept of the stored program concept with the wiring of computers: "Dissatisfied with the computing machines available immediately after the war, he was led to examine from its foundations the optimal method that such machines should follow, and he introduced new procedures in the logical organization, the "codes" by which a fixed system of wiring could solve a great variety of problems.".
loc. cit.

CC.

Lets see. Start here and get enlightened.

Professor Corbato

I write a trivia column for a newspaper called The Austin Chronicle. Someone has asked me the origin of the word daemon as it applies to computing. Best I can tell based on my research, the word was first used by people on your team at Project MAC using the IBM 7094 in 1963. The first daemon (an abbreviation for Disk And Executive MONitor) was a program that automatically made tape backups of the file system. Does this sound about right? Any corrections or additions? Thank you for your time!

From Fernando J. Corbato: Your explanation of the origin of the word daemon is correct in that my group began using the term around that time frame. However the acronym explanation is a new one on me. Our use of the word daemon was inspired by the Maxwell's daemon of physics and thermodynamics. (My background is Physics.) Maxwell's daemon was an imaginary agent which helped sort molecules of different speeds and worked tirelessly in the background. We fancifully began to use the word daemon to describe background processes which worked tirelessly to perform system chores. I found a very good explanation of all this online at:

http://www.takeourword.com/TOW129/page2.html (Search on "Maxwell" to locate the pertinent paragraph.)

To save you the trouble, I will cut-and-paste it right here. It comes from a web-column entitled "Take Our Word For It" run by Melanie and Mike Crowley, etymology enthusiasts!

- - - - - - - -

From Jan Danilo:

I am interested in the origin of the word daemon. I work in information technology and I have always heard of system processes referred to as daemons. I assumed that it is an older spelling of demon. Can you shed some light on this point?

Why certainly. Someone give us some of those phosphorescent genes that have recently been spliced to mice DNA and we'll shed light like mad. Demon and daemon were once used interchangeably. The former came to English from medieval Latin, while the latter was from classical Latin. The earliest use appears to have been in the phrase daemon of Socrates, which was his "attendant, ministering, or indwelling spirit; genius". That was in the late 14th century. It was a short time later that the term demon came to refer to "an evil spirit" by influence of its usage in various versions of the Bible. The Greek form was used to translate Hebrew words for "lords, idols" and "hairy ones (satyrs)". Wyclif translated it from Greek to English fiend or devil. This is how the evil connotation arose. By the late 16th century, the general supernatural meaning was being distinguished with the spelling daemon, while the evil meaning remained with demon. Today daemon can mean "a supernatural being of a nature intermediate between that of gods and men" or "a guiding spirit".

Everybody should know all about the Therac 25. Interesting reading even if you've never gotten past "hello, world!" in your programming career.

I'd suggest that the coders ask the developers of the Therac-25 how they dealt.

Yeah, that's an easy one! Some professors mark certain sections to be only available from on-campus providers, and since Tech also hosts all other ISPs in the area, it is easy for page admins to only allow Blacksburg accesses. Another (and far beeter) page is by W. McQuain. He has all his stuff available for public, except the grades. And even those are assigned using fake IDs.

Consider this page, which yields that.

Any ideas why?

Here a link to all CS courses at VT for the lazy!

More importantly, I'm curious how other universities will start making their courses available freely online

Virginia Tech CS department has most of the course material availabe for download online. Some courses even have audio streams with them. Best site for CS students everywhere.

No, but it might nuke people.

Going back some years when Java was new there where a lot of ads for developers in the Uk where if you worked at Sun on oak then you might have been able to qualify.

It is defiantly the case that what ever job spec is originally written by the time it's been mangled by HR and an agency the requirements will be stupid.

The first job I had was advertised as needing 4 years 'C' programming. I was a glorified tech support monkey and only wrote a few hundred lines of code in a couple of years. I got the job as I had applied for 3 other jobs at the company and someone in HR gave me an interview during which I got in front of my boss to be who liked me and thought the job spec he had been forced to use by marketing was way over the top.

For IRC, I use irssi. It's neat, small, fast, and does what I need it to. Also, I haven't had the need to change any of its stock options yet - I like it the way it is. Other candidates are BitchX (annoying autoaway etc.), ircII (too much configuring, maybe?), or CenterICQ (don't like the interface for IRC).

CenterICQ is my app of choice for IM. It's quirky sometimes, and once segfaulted, but other than that, I have had 0 problems with it. Also, it supports a variety of protocols.

For web-browsing, I use links. I've tried lynx and w3m, but links just "does it" I guess :). It's got support for more stuff. Also, I find the -g option nice, something the other two don't have IIRC.

I've tried Emacs, Pico, Nano, ed, etc. etc. etc., but so far, nothing has replaced my addiction to Vim. Maybe I'm a masochist, I don't know.

When I'm at home in console mode, I usually use Alt+Fx to switch between different apps, and use screen to keep irssi and centericq running. When over ssh, I use screen. Sometimes, I run out of VTs, so I use screen to group things inside the VTs. When in X, I just keep things in separate rxvt windows.

For entertainment, I have either NetHack, fortune -o, or bash.org (aww shit, slashdotted them, they're down enough as it is!) in links. :)

-- Chris

I was referring to the physical operation of a computer, through software. And I'd like to think I wasn't a cold, calculating automaton until at least the end of puberty; at least my child-brain thoughts and actions were not well analyzed at a concious level.

Fitt's law only says that if one has to to reach a large target nearby, it will be faster and easier than a small target far away. He generated the math to back up what would be and obvious fundamental to anyone who has ever aimed at anything with a gun or bow. Unfortunately, I am seeing many misapplications of this premise on the web, where people feel that the math validates proximity (and linear ony, at that) as the only guidline to a task's interface.

This misapplication reminds me of the office menuing systems. Somebody got the bright idea that smaller menus would be good, and so they implemented the current expando-system. Unfortunately, many users despise this, when it could have been executed much more pleasantly...Why didn't all items apear by default, and then slow disappear after lack of use, instead of being backwords? This would have appeared to many users as an apparent speed up of the interface, as it "learned" what a user actually wanted. This could have been easily combined with a graguated shrinking or lightening of unused options to inform a novice that items were going away. Alas, since it isn't like this, it feels like word is mangled to it's power users.

Interestingly, I do usually perform a task one way. One way for each place I start the task from or seek to end at. I close a document window when I plan on opening another in the same app. I just close hte app and let the automated save dialog come up when I am done with a file and it's application. Imagine if that was not an option in any program. The greater task-in-time is probably the most over looked feature in any web or software interface, on it's initial release. After public release and feedback, designers almost always develop task interface methodology that works in temporally logical groupings, as they learn what people do in what order. Unfortunately, I've seen little on this on the web.

If we are talking mechanical here, then it is usually recognised that Charles Babbage's "Analytical Engine" was the first mechanical computer long before IBM came into existence selling punched card "collators". Babbage's earlier "Difference Engine" was not general purpose, having been designed to calculate mathematical tables. There is an IBM link in how Babbage programmed his computer (rather ADA lovelace did the programming). The Jacquard Mechanical Loom used punched cards to control the pattern woven into the cloth. Babbage decided to use these punched cards as his imput mechanism, an idea later taken up by IBM.

Of course there are those who would say that Babbage got the idea for his computer from examining Thomas Fowler's earlier wooden calculator

Nothing personal, and this is not intended to be an attack on your dad -- but in terms of system reliability (and who I'd want running things if I were in an airplane), those crochety old ATCers and their ad-hoc systems had an incredibly, almost impossibly good safety record. I had some free time and, for fun, ran out to start reading a history of world air disasters. ATC error is almost *never* a factor in air disasters in the United States (things change wildly when you go to other countries). (Actually, if we're speaking about major passenger aircraft (rather than light planes) the US air industry usually suffers problems from mechanical failures -- the rate of pilot error on large aircraft is very low.

Then take a look at the software development world. Reliablity sucks. A lot. Even in systems that we consider to be pretty reliable, like embedded systems, I've seen bad failures (we used to have an HP plotter with flaky firmware that would die, and I've seen occasional issues with other embedded devices, especially workgroup printers). The medical tech industry is better, but still has its share of errors (like the string of disastrous Therac-25 incidents. I will also admit that software in crucial systems in airliners seems to have done well -- but I'm not sure about the equivalent on the ground. I'd be fairly dubious about a shift in the systems.

Secondly, the main benefit of using a consistent interface across applications is intuitiveness. This is not *nearly* as much an issue for specialized applications. Frequently, such general-purpose interfaces can be deterimental to specific applications. For example, the Macintosh HIG states that the menubar shall remain visible at all times. Games violate this, but without doing so, would provide a much less interesting interface. The Macintosh HIG also states that moving the mouse shall have no effect on desktop state. This is not the case with FPSes, where moving the mouse changes the camera angle. If you hand to click to commit a change in camera angle, however, it would be extremely annoying. So, I think that "consistent interfaces above all else" is a wrong-headed idea (though I also will agree that the value of consistent interfaces is frequently underrated).

In the case of ATC software, efficiency at a particular task is important, and training is not an issue. I would be more than willing to believe that ATC folks may know what they are talking about.

There might be some concern in that the ATC union might be trying to do nothing other than ensure job security -- but on the whole, the point of the system is to ensure that airplanes do not collide, and the ATCers have been doing a good job thus far -- their concerns with a radical change in interface would be something that I'm inclined to listen to.

Well, Bill Gates did develop a system to manage traffic flow...

There's several cases where software failure has been fatal.

How about the case of the THERAC-25, where several died or were seriously injured.

This is a typical case study shown in any ethics course involving software design. It turns out the cause of the severe radiation burns was from the operator entering commands and parameters faster than the unit could handle.

Then there's the Soviet pipeline that blew up due to delibrately buggy software stolen from the US.

Then there's the Osprey , had software bugs that killed 30 Marines in 3 accidents.

There's also 2 commercial jet crashes due to software problems with either radar, or just reporting position properly to the pilot, killing over 300 people in the 2 accidents.

This problem is very real. So when people joke about getting a BSOD while driving a car, it's highly plausable.

You remember incorrectly. Bill Gates wrote most of Altair BASIC, with the help of Paul Allen, who was busy writing an Altair emulator for the DEC PDP-10. Some sources, should you like ;-).

Worse, this could have come from the top!

The words "nowhere near" were also used by Steve Jobs when he was quoted as saying that he was "nowhere near as good an engineer as Woz" in this Steve Wozniak biography.

Now, I'm not a conspiracy theorist or anything, but this is pretty damning evidence if you ask me.

Fair point, but by the same token, your argument is equally valid for the OS X cluster at Virginia Tech. Not having eyeballed it personally, and basing my information purely off Steve Jobs keynote speech at MacWorld 2004, they made a point of saying "hey, this is great, we have the same GUI that runs on the cluster as the one that runs on my personal workstation".

It's quite likely that your suggestion of a GUI-less edition of Windows is feasible, and you'd hope that with the BSD core of OS X that it's even easier for Apple to do the same. You'd have to address the question to what extent is it possible to perform all functions through a non-GUI interface.

What about the Big Mac cluster (aka Terascale Cluster) running Mac OS X which hit 9.55 teraflops and with a gui?

IANANS, but I know that the nuclear waste from the Maralinga A-Bomb test site clean up here in australia is being vitrifacted - sealed inside fused glass - and buried. Because it is bound up in a non-reactive form it's very difficult for it to re-enter the biosphere.

I think its worth pointing out that the mouse and keyboard combo looks like an interestingly designed piece of technology. Its shaped so that the entire thing can sit on your lap comfortably. The keyboard appears to be adjustible and the thing itself acts as the mouse mat. I would be slightly concerned that the mouse mat area is too close to the keyboard so perhaps that limits its use. IGN has a CGI mockup of it here and a real once can be seen in the BBC article linked too in the story.

Hardware aside I haven't actually seen any reports of software that runs on the thing. Did anyone who attend E3 get the chance to playtest one? As far as I can tell it was only the box on display and it may of only had a basic running demo.

The last thing I want to mention is about their distribution model. They claim they want to make software downloadable via broadband internet connections. Thats all fair and well but does anyone out there remember The Sega Channel? Long story short it was a cable channel that allowed you to download Genesis games directly onto your console. I don't believe it faired to well but given the popularity of XBox live and PS2 Online it shows that there is more of a likely uptake.

BTW, anyone interested in the Sega channel should have a look here and here.

-- Enditallnow

Unfortunately we haven't heard much from them lately (Notice the "last updated" date). I suspect they're still waiting on their G5 xServes.

IMHO, he invented the first programming language.

Details here

• Monte Davidoff - co-author (along with Gates and Allen) of Microsoft/Altair BASIC
  
  
• Richard Stallman - Pioneer of open software movement/GNU
  
  
• Niklaus Wirth - PARC researcher responsible for Algol, Pascal, Modula-2, Laser Printers, and more
  
  
• Marvin Minsky - Built the first neural net AI in 1951
  
  
• Seymour Papert - Developer of LOGO and another AI pioneer
  
  
• Tommy Flowers - Built one of the earliest electronic computers, with the practical application of codebreaking during WWII
  
  
• Donald Knuth - Regarded by many as the "Father of Computer Science".
  
  
• Edsger Wybe Dijkstra - The guy leading the way to abolish the GOTO statement is surely a hall-of-famer!
  
  
• Konrad Zuse - Another early computer pioneer that due to politics and circumstances beyond his control was never able to be fully-recognized.
  
  
• Jeff Raskin - Creator of the Macintosh and pioneer in computer-human interfaces.
  

Ahh, but radioactive patio furniture is a significantly lower-level source, isn't intentionally lethal, and emits continuously... making it a lot harder to hide and a lot easier to find even if someone doesn't want you to, especially with the growing spread of radiation detectors all over the place.

On the other hand, radiation therapy accelerators are capable of delivering lethal doses in an astonishingly short time while remaining inert the rest of the time-- do a google search on "Therac-25 Accidents" and you'll be pretty terrified.

The incidents in question concerned ionizing radiation doses high enough that the radiation therapy subjects felt a severe burning sensation from the beta radiation flux during a fraction of a second of exposure.

Needless to say, none of them lived more than a month, recieving doses in the >1000rem range.

1000rem in under a second due to mechanical failure. Bad bad bad news.

I don't know how far the electron beam could remain coherent, but a lot of people could die before anyone figured out what was going on if someone hooked a good-sized accelerator up behind a tarp in a public place and fried passersby.

Fix Debian Installation Mistakes

The only time management ever stuck with a process was the medical company that, by law, required governmental oversight that demanded process. And you don't want to know how much we skirted process anyway. (Most of the times we built the product first, then wrote the "planning" documentation second.)

Oh joy.

"Macs have all the downsides of Suns (proprietary, single-vendor, not-Intel), and none of upsides (scalability, software base)."

Uh...yeah....

Someone hasn't heard of the.Terascale Computing Facility. If that's not Scale, I don't know what is.

Also, I kinda have to wonder if what you listed as downsides really matter. In high end computing, people just want the stuff to work. Intel/AMD or Apple(IBM-Moto)/Sun. Are you really gaining any more or less choice? Do corporate customers really care?

And DeBeers ends its apalling treatment of workers.

I got your cluster riiiight HERE

The CS department at Virginia Tech is a part of the MSDN Academic Alliance, so when I was an undergrad there, I could download just about every Microsoft product released for the past 15 years.

However, I don't know what they had to go through to be a part of that. But I did legally download and install Visual Studio .NET 2003 Professional for free.

doesn't this CTO of cray remind you of someone?
"There IS no Linux in high-performance clusters."

"There IS no Americans in Iraq."

OMG! It's the former Iraqi mis-Informed-ation minister!

Especially when 2004 has been dubbed the year of the penguin, it's wreckless to claim that Linux can't be used in HPC's.
Hell, just look at the current top500 list. There's no Cray in the top 10 but there are two Linux based clusters there (and one based on OSX [FreeBSB based]).

Here's a few:
NCSA's IA32 Linux cluster
NCSA's IA32 Linux cluster
Space Simulator Clust at Los Alamos (SS51G based; makes me proud as I have a SS51G too)
Beowulf - used in many Linux clustering projects
Linux clusters at Los Alamos (they seem to have more than one)
Virginia Tech's Supercomputer X

There are two different (valid) definitions of "pop" -- one is the genre of which you speak, the other is the defined best here (normally part of a frameset) as the music of the common people, as opposed to classicial music which is "music conforming to an established form and appealing to critical interest and developed musical taste." As such neither is a genre, though "pop" also refers to a genre within the "popular" category of music. Much the same way, "classical" is the huge category of music, but within it there is also the "classical" period that includes composers such as Mozart. For clarity, this period is usually referred to as the "Viennese classical" period.

Note that "popular music" specifically includes rock, and is implied to include the other genres you mention. (Well, except classical of course.)

I bet this guy and this guy and this guy (etc, etc, etc) never had any problems either.
Good for you that your windows box ownz. We all envy joo and your r0x0ring Dell!
Especially this guy!!!

It appears this "Computer History" attempt overlooks John Vincent Atanasoff, credited by most reliable sources (Smithsonian, etc.) as developer of the first electronic digital computer" years before the ENIAC. In fact, the ENIAC was derived from Atanosoffs's ABC Computer at Iowa State after an ENIAC developer visited Atanasoff (stayed several days in Atanasoff's home), and "stole" his ideas and proposed a larger verssion as the ENIAC to the army. Atanosoff's ABC computer was the first to solve Schroedinger's equation represented by the solution of a 39x39 system of matrix equations. However, time caught up with the ENIAC visitor, and the notebook he kept when he visited Atanasoff was his undoing when the U.S. Court in Minneapolis overturned previous patent rulings for computer developments and ruled they were all derived from Atanasoff's ABC computer. Hopefully, this attempt at a computer museum will soon be updated to accurately reflect the original development of the electronic computer by Atanasoff at Iowa State in 1942.

The impressive fact is not the overall performance of the VT G5 cluster, but that the price-performance ratio was better if they bought G5s at the standard Apple educational price (not some insane 1-time giveaway deal cooked up just for VT) than if they bought systems from HP, IBM, Intel, or AMD.

From How Virginia Tech built a supercomputer:
"Intel, HP, IBM, and AMD were all trying to come up with ways to work with us," says Lockhart."But the prices were out of reach and IBM's 970 chip would not be available in time to allow the new Virginia Tech cluster to be ranked."

From Confessions of the World's Largest Switcher:
He looked at various architecture options and was in the process of buying Dells when the deal fell through. He also worked with IBM and AMD and couldn't get the price to match. The budgets were coming in at $9 to $12 million dollars.

When Dell built a similar cluster for more than half the price ($3M vs. $5.2M for VT's), they got a cluster with less than 1/4 of the performance.

Of course, this "performance" is measured by a benchmark, and all benchmarks lie, and single-computer desktop usage doesn't look like large-scale cluster usage, but the fact is, this was not a matter of somebody deciding to buy Apple and blindly throwing a bunch of cash at it. The Apple offering had better price/performance for their needs.

Actually we have 511 in Virginia as well. I only know this because my university helped develop it.

Actually we have 511 in Virginia as well. I only know this because my university helped develop it.

Also available is a $2,999 DUal 2 GHz cluster node, which can run Xgrid, so you too can feel like Virginia Tech.