Slashback: Grids, Netscape, AMD

Slashback tonight (is this number 200 already?) brings a few updates and amplifications on grid computing and AMD's plans vis a vis Intel. Also, it seems that some of the best features of Mozilla have finally infiltrated the world of Netscape. Read on the for the details.

And Campbell's puts glass marbles in their soup pictures. Roland Piquepaille writes "We saw several grid computing announcements in the last couple of days.Of course, Gateway stole the show. In 'Gateway makes store PCs work overtime,' you can read that 'Gateway's network of 8,000 PCs can deliver 14 teraflops.' This is plain wrong. You all know that this number of 14 teraflops is meaningless. It's just the addition of the peak speed of all the PCs -- never reached anyway on individual PCs. You need specialized software to work efficiently with a grid. And two companies are releasing new products to power grids. Avaki rolled out what it believes is the first Java-based data grid software for enterprise-class IT environments. Kontiki, for its part, on Monday released a grid server that brings its content delivery system into the server realm, whereas previously it was only available for PCs. Check this column for a summary, or this article for more details."

Why aren't those things called 'stick-up' ads, anyhow? Internet Ninja writes "Netscape today released version 7.01 of Netscape based on Mozilla 1.0.2. Back in is popup blocking which they got a lashing for in 7.0 as well as tabs as home pages just like Mozilla. Release notes here and there's a couple articles on Netscape devedge which may be of interest to developers."

And they will continue to have produced my Athlon, too. schnoz writes "And you thought AMD was quitting the PC chip market? Then check out this article on Business Week. Not only are they releasing new chips and plan to continue to do so, they're also still very active research wise, working on new transistor making techniques such as the double gate design as well as metal-rather-than-silicon design. Keep going at it AMD!!"

Comments

Netscape 7.01 blocks popups. Next will be IE?

[dagg]

It makes sense that Netscape 7.01 has the pop-up-disabling feature in it. Once that ad came out on TV that showed that guy closing pop up windows (while some type of space invader music was playing in the background), it was only a matter of time. At this point... only non-web-savvy folks still have to deal with the popups. You don't want to look like the guy in that ad.

I bet the next version of IE will have a popup blocking feature.

Re:Netscape 7.01 blocks popups. Next will be IE?

[greechneb]

It sure wouldn't suprise me if they did include some form of popup blocking, or for that matter tabbed browsing. Microsoft will proclaim their wonderful "innovations" and how they will change the internet. Which is what they have done consistantly...

I would imagine we will start to see a IE 6.5 beta hit the net shortly, possibly incorporating the popup blocking, but my guess is that IE 7 will be the version to really grab mozilla(and opera for that matter) innovations.

Same old, same old

Re:Netscape 7.0 Speed, Mozilla, Phoenix

[billstewart]

Netscape 6 was bad, bad, mindbogglingly amazingly bad, at least on a machine with only 24MB of RAM. 6.1 or 6.2 was much closer to usable, at least on my machines with 64MB, but by then Mozilla was working adequately. If Netscape 7.0 is fast, a large part of it is probably from using lots of memory to accelerate other functions.

I'm now using Phoenix 0.5, which came out just recently, and it's quite toasty - I think it's ready to replace Mozilla as my main browser. The main plugins work (I'd had trouble getting them installed on 0.3 and 0.4) and it's very very fast, especially since I set the startup delay to 0 (default is 1200ms, which lets it recover from slow-loading graphics that would otherwise force redraws.) The Google-search-bar extension is really convenient, though I gather than newer Mozillas also have it. I'm normally no fan of themes (why clutter up the GUI at the cost of making it larger and slower?), but the "LittlePhoenix 1.3" theme has icons that are enough smaller that I can reclaim significant screen space, and the "Linky" extension has been a good way to handle pages with lots of links (e.g. letting you leech all the pictures into a separate window or tab, or examine a page by grabbing all the URLs on it into a tab, which can be cleaner than View Source for some ugly web pages.)

Re:The way I'd like to see popup blocking done...

[distributed.karma]

Downloading the contents, even in the background, goes against one basic reason for ad blocking: I pay for the bandwidth, so I decide what goes through.

Your Definition?

[VoidEngineer]

I'm skeptical about your definition.

I attended a colloquim and seminar by Ian Foster, one of the authors of the Globus Toolkit, who was visiting down from Argonne Nat'l Labs. From what I gathered, grid computing is more about having the right kind of network negotiation and protocols between resources. Supper-efficient and superfast are second order derivatives; that is, they are a bonus and nice touch, but I don't think that is exactly what grid computing is about.

Specifically, as I understand it, its about global resource management, across distributed, world-wide systems. Joe, who runs a Particle Collider in Europe, can share information and network resources with Jane, who runs a MRI in America, who can share info and resources with Charlie, who runs a radio telescope in Antartica. I may be mistaken, but I understood grid computing to be sort-of the opposite of clustering.

Now, don't get me wrong... I'm not trying to start any kind of crusade. However, I do know a number of people who swear by Java, and I think that Java may actually be the protocol of choice for a lot of Grid Computing applications (such as sharing of astronomical data, genomic data, and magnetic resonance imaging data). These kinds of applications can greatly benefit by the sandbox architecture, garbage collection, security infrastructure, and virtual machines which Java supports. Sure it adds overhead, but I think that there are millions of programmers and scientists around the world who would gladly take the overhead costs, if it means that they can concentrate on chemistry, astronomy, genetics, or whatever, rather than having to worry about memory pointers, memory leaks, hardware support, and so forth.

But I only attended a couple of lectures by one of the authors of the Globus Toolkit. I'm not an expert or anything, so I could certainly be mistaken.