I don't agree. This is clearly a knee-jerk reaction. Did they have *any* evidence that this kid was doing anything more than visiting the Disney web site? Come on!
I know it's been beaten to death, but there is NO evidence ANY OF THIS had any more to do with the Internet than any other good or bad thing that goes on in society. It's no more logical than taking away a kid's chemistry set after the Oklahoma City bombing.
If that's how this kid's parents are going to react, they better make sure that they (the kid) never have a puppy or a cat, or a bicycle, or a chemistry set. What a bleak existence. I can't imagine how he/she must feel right now.
I'm sorry, but the last letter in Katz' article just broke my heart, both for the young boy or girl who had their computer confiscated, and for the parents, who obviously don't have an active relationship with them. And that, I think, is the heart of the problem.:-(.
A corporate reorganization has nothing to do with splitting themselves up. They're just reorganizing divisions and who reports to whom, not forming separate companies.
You must excuse the corporate hubris on the part of GTE. GTE now owns BBN, the company that DID do the initial work on the ARPANET. Yeah, yeah, it's a bit of a reach, I know...
Yeah, I got a better idea (Jim Kinney, are you listening)? If you're so damn worried about recouping the money for the servers and staff, etc etc etc ad nauseum, why not turn the database back into the public domain (like it was to begin with) and I'm sure you'll get tons of people willing to maintain distributed copies.
The two ain't hardly equivalent. The job of the file system is to provide you with files, pure and simple. If you're going to start down that road, why not put all the baggage into the filesystem that Windows has? You could certainly make an argument for it. Why not put a C compiler in there as well? The philosophy of Unix has always been "keep it simple".
I would also add that while it might not be a problem vis a vis Linux, supporting Clearcase with commercial *nix systems (Solaris and Irix) is a royal pain in the patoot. You are STUCK at whatever rev of the OS that Clearcase currently supports, and until they release a new version, you CAN NOT MOVE FORWARD. And heaven forbid you let your support contract lapse. I think you get the picture.
I'm sorry, but any source code control/configuration management system that requires KERNEL MODS to run is right out in my book. That kind of stuff DOES NOT belong in the filesystem/kernel. CVS all the way!
In fact, without going into details, the company is a competitor of Quickturn, and they did indeed get 1000Hz emulating a Pentium (that would be a VANILLA pentium, of course, not a MMX or P-II). It played Doom veeeeerrryyyyy sloooooowwwllly:-)
The real trick in systems like this is getting the advertised performance out of them. Yes, if you managed to pack those FPGAs to their theoretical maximum with multipliers, run them at their theoretical maximum clock rate, and do ABSOLUTELY NO COMMUNICATION, you might beat IBM's blue supercomputer. Maybe.
But you don't EVER get real-world performance like that, for several reasons. One, you have a very complex piece of software that "compiles" the program for that sea of FPGAs, and your utilization is only as good as that software (and complex doesn't begin to describe it). Second, once you introduce communication into your computational model, everything goes to hell. You have to include room to route data (and hence "wires") between the chips, and that just eats up everything.
Just for the record, I contracted for a company that built a virtually identical box, used for chip emulation. It had ~300 Xilinx chips, and had a VHDL->Xilinx compiler and router. You COULD run Win95 AND DOOM at a clock rate of about 1000 HZ (i.e. VERY SLOW). But companies bought them. The price was about $750k to $1M, and that included a BIG profit margin. This thing is way overpriced. If you need more convincing of that, look up how much the EFF built Deep Crack for, and that was a one-of-a-kind box.
Yourdon has pretty much been discredited in the software engineering community. The irony of this is that "Decline and Fall" was 50% right! In fact, there *are* many software engineering jobs moving to places like India. I know of several American companies that have opened operations there, or purchased pre-existing Indian subsidiaries.
The difference is that high-tech jobs have grown at a much higher rate in the US, and despite the fact that the Internet makes the US->India system possible, there is still a lot of value in physical location (e.g. Silicon Valley/Alley/Route 128).
One problem with many of these "sky-is-falling" types of predictions is that while they argue vociferously FOR their prediction, they fail to consider the another alternative -- that both systems prosper.
...what you can and can't take into NSA's buildings... The Furby thing seems totally understandable to me! Most stuff -- if you take it in, well... you can't take it out...!
If Stallman et al lie awake at night worrying about things like this, they must not get a lot of sleep. Think about all the *other* computers that they come in contact with that use proprietary software!
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I don't agree. This is clearly a knee-jerk reaction. Did they have *any* evidence that this kid was doing anything more than visiting the Disney web site? Come on!
I know it's been beaten to death, but there is NO evidence ANY OF THIS had any more to do with the Internet than any other good or bad thing that goes on in society. It's no more logical than taking away a kid's chemistry set after the Oklahoma City bombing.
If that's how this kid's parents are going to react, they better make sure that they (the kid) never have a puppy or a cat, or a bicycle, or a chemistry set. What a bleak existence. I can't imagine how he/she must feel right now.
I'm sorry, but the last letter in Katz' article just broke my heart, both for the young boy or girl who had their computer confiscated, and for the parents, who obviously don't have an active relationship with them. And that, I think, is the heart of the problem. :-(.
A corporate reorganization has nothing to do with splitting themselves up. They're just reorganizing divisions and who reports to whom, not forming separate companies.
You must excuse the corporate hubris on the part of GTE. GTE now owns BBN, the company that DID do the initial work on the ARPANET. Yeah, yeah, it's a bit of a reach, I know...
What branch of the U.S. Government do you think DARPA is a part of?
Yeah, I got a better idea (Jim Kinney, are you listening)? If you're so damn worried about recouping the money for the servers and staff, etc etc etc ad nauseum, why not turn the database back into the public domain (like it was to begin with) and I'm sure you'll get tons of people willing to maintain distributed copies.
Why don't you give me back all the disks I typed into "your" database then?
The two ain't hardly equivalent. The job of the file system is to provide you with files, pure and simple. If you're going to start down that road, why not put all the baggage into the filesystem that Windows has? You could certainly make an argument for it. Why not put a C compiler in there as well? The philosophy of Unix has always been "keep it simple".
I would also add that while it might not be a problem vis a vis Linux, supporting Clearcase with commercial *nix systems (Solaris and Irix) is a royal pain in the patoot. You are STUCK at whatever rev of the OS that Clearcase currently supports, and until they release a new version, you CAN NOT MOVE FORWARD. And heaven forbid you let your support contract lapse. I think you get the picture.
I'm sorry, but any source code control/configuration management system that requires KERNEL MODS to run is right out in my book. That kind of stuff DOES NOT belong in the filesystem/kernel. CVS all the way!
In fact, without going into details, the company is a competitor of Quickturn, and they did indeed get 1000Hz emulating a Pentium (that would be a VANILLA pentium, of course, not a MMX or P-II). It played Doom veeeeerrryyyyy sloooooowwwllly :-)
The real trick in systems like this is getting the advertised performance out of them. Yes, if you managed to pack those FPGAs to their theoretical maximum with multipliers, run them at their theoretical maximum clock rate, and do ABSOLUTELY NO COMMUNICATION, you might beat IBM's blue supercomputer. Maybe.
But you don't EVER get real-world performance like that, for several reasons. One, you have a very complex piece of software that "compiles" the program for that sea of FPGAs, and your utilization is only as good as that software (and complex doesn't begin to describe it). Second, once you introduce communication into your computational model, everything goes to hell. You have to include room to route data (and hence "wires") between the chips, and that just eats up everything.
Just for the record, I contracted for a company that built a virtually identical box, used for chip emulation. It had ~300 Xilinx chips, and had a VHDL->Xilinx compiler and router. You COULD run Win95 AND DOOM at a clock rate of about 1000 HZ (i.e. VERY SLOW). But companies bought them. The price was about $750k to $1M, and that included a BIG profit margin. This thing is way overpriced. If you need more convincing of that, look up how much the EFF built Deep Crack for, and that was a one-of-a-kind box.
Yourdon has pretty much been discredited in the software engineering community. The irony of this is that "Decline and Fall" was 50% right! In fact, there *are* many software engineering jobs moving to places like India. I know of several American companies that have opened operations there, or purchased pre-existing Indian subsidiaries.
The difference is that high-tech jobs have grown at a much higher rate in the US, and despite the fact that the Internet makes the US->India system possible, there is still a lot of value in physical location (e.g. Silicon Valley/Alley/Route 128).
One problem with many of these "sky-is-falling" types of predictions is that while they argue vociferously FOR their prediction, they fail to consider the another alternative -- that both systems prosper.
...what you can and can't take into NSA's buildings... The Furby thing seems totally understandable to me! Most stuff -- if you take it in, well... you can't take it out...!
What do you mean "in three years' time"? I thought that was supposed to be the outcome as soon as the deal closed!
If Stallman et al lie awake at night worrying about things like this, they must not get a lot of sleep. Think about all the *other* computers that they come in contact with that use proprietary software!