The plots in chapter 2, The Past, are somewhat misleading in that they suggest a steeper growth rate lately that is actually true:
The time scale (x axis) is nonlinear!
The year 1996 is listed twice (thus making 1996 a particulary long year:-), while the year 2001 is missing (making the latest growth seem exponential).
Let's stick to our desire for innovation and truely stand behind the company willing to shed the baggage: Intel.
Or rather trade it against even more ugly baggage called "EPIC". Explicit parallelism is soooo '80. Putting all the intelligence in the compiler and still requiring enourmous amounts of silicon isn't really that great.
Now I'm all for a neater instruction set, but IMHO "EPIC" is all but neat. It's having software developers (compiler backend writers) do all the work. Since I'm a software developer (albeit no compilers) I don't find this idea good.
Oh, and the x86 is actually more than two decades old, not just one, and I agree it's quite ugly and should be replaced by something more beautiful - emphasis on beautiful.
My guess is that most people pushing x86-64 have yet to write a program more complicated than "hello world!".
That's worth a +1, Funny.
Re:they will be less affected than is thought
on
The Last Place
·
· Score: 2
At one time poets were well paid and could achieve a certain amount of fame and occaisional hefty profits for their work.
Uhm... when exactly was that?
Historically, only a few poets, who happened to be favoured by their respective sovereign (and had to write in support or at least not in opposition to them) could make a decend living off their art. Otherwise they would die as a pauper. This goes back till the dark ages. Walther von der Vogelweide, medvial "rock star", was paid by souvereigns (several of them, depending who paid the most; and naturally, he would write poems in their favour), because the poor people hanging around on the city's market place - his main audience - could never affort to pay this guy.
Same goes for music. Haendel was a merchenary of the British crown; Mozart, who wasn't, died a pauper (albeit a famous one).
Bottom line: at any time and age, only a very few artists could survive by their art alone and make a decend living. This has nothing to do with expensive or cheap distribution channels.
Otherwise, pre-printing press authors would all have been insanely rich, because copying (manually!) was an enourmously expensive and time-consuming effort. Or just think about the pre-record musicians - they must have been like Rockefeller (or Gates:-) since there were actually NO "pirated" copies! Yeah, right!
(BTW calling copyright infringement "piracy" is a quite tasteless belittlement of actual piracy, which is accompanied by bloodshed and murder. For copyright infringement, even "theft" is technically incorrect since the producer isn't actually lacking anything they formerly posessed - they lost the chance of one more sell, so in a sense, it's "virtual theft" or "potential theft".)
if there is *serious damage* [...] you will get asked to make some decisions about what happens
Precisely. And who besides Ted T'so, Stephen Tweedie or Hans Reiser can actually make the right decisions here? A *very* small minority, that's for sure, and a minority that knows perfectly well (I suppose) how to switch the prompt back on.
All the rest of us, when faced with these questions, just go "y" (please fix) and pray that the last backup worked. I think it's damn well fine to make a fsck -y the default.
A journalling filesystem does not need to run fsck.
I guess/sbin/reiserfsck is just a softlink to/bin/true, then?
Sure, you need it very rarely, but when you need it, most users have to completely trust it, anyway.
Perhaps *you* don't like it, but for some of us that have special needs, having a dumbed down printing system would be incredibly frusterating
Sure, I would indeed find that utterly frustrating, esp. in networked environments (banner pages comes to mind). But what's wrong with a simple, Windowish config dialog that creates a printcap for you? With an expert button, maybe. After all, printcap is just another text file, I can still edit it by hand.
The original article said:
When an app has no windows open (Emphasis mine)
You write: Not all apps have a window.
I think this is just a misunderstanding. You think of daemons as apps, the original author thinks of daemons as part of the system.
Netscape used to continue hogging the CPU after all windows were shut. This was a major annoyance on out cluster at the univ. where netscapes going berserk ate up CPU needed for actual calculations. And guess what - our users rarely figured this out.
On easy way of sharing files:
Sounds like a KDE flaw. [...] This has nothing to do with Linux.
It has indeed nothing to do with Linux the kernel. It has *much* to do with Linux the user experience, and that's what the article is all about. I mean, really, the browser thing doesn't have to do anything with Linux the kernel either.
And I agree, the idea of a KDE daemon with root priv doesn't help my blood pressure.
It's terribly easy to change resolution on the fly in X -- ctrl alt kp+ and ctrl alt kp-.
Absolutely right... if you actually know this, and if you have configured X accordingly, i.e. more than one mode. Which is next to trivial with modern Linux distros if your monitor happens to be detected correctly. And don't tell me you can still configure it manually - while I know my monitor does 95kHz most people don't, and why the heck should they? I mean, they're users. They're not interested in that.
Re:Linux/Windows Texas Cage Match
on
Draw!
·
· Score: 1
Additional chess pieces added by Microsoft include a thimble, race car [...]
Businesses and the government don't realize how much long-term savings they could have if they abolished coin currency altogether
One disadvantage of the Octopus card, and in fact all similar cards (in Germany there a similar card, the Geldkarte, which you can charge to some hundred Euro, and many stores accept them; at our University in Karlsruhe, you can (must, actually) even pay your meal with a similar card, anonymously) is that you don't see when they're gonna be "empty". The fscking cards won't tell you. You end up standing at the cashier, five people pushing behind you, and the bloody thing's empty.
With coins this problem simply does not exist, assuming that one can actually count:-)
Of course there are credit cards (and at least in Europe, there is the EC card which directly deposits from your bank account) but these have no privacy whatsoever.
Coins (and banknotes) are the only way to pay anonymously *and* know exactly how much money you have at hand.
Now the geek inside of me fantasizes about cards with a built-in ultra-thin display, powered by the thermal energy of your thumb pressed against the card, or by piezo elements on the card. THAT would be handy.
wouldn't the picture show just a long blur of your car
In Germany, we have this kind of cameras (both for speeding and at traffic lights) for over a decade and unfortunately, they work pretty much as designed. Even in excess of 120 mph, the picture will be clear enough to identify your face.
That said, the automated speeding control has inaccuracies in the single-digit percent level, especially when the radar device wasn't properly aligned with the lanes, as the ADAC (German version of AAA) found out.
And at least in Germany, it is illegal to muck with your number plates in order to avoid being identified. If the police catches you, you will be screwed. Seriously.
The best way to avoid being photographed is, of course, to stick with the speed limit. (Which IMHO is easier in Germany than for example in Illinois with its suppressive speed limits.)
Gross overgeneralization. Since 1000BastT switch ports are still pretty expensive, you will most likely only equip servers with Gigabit/copper. And servers don't usually boot off the net.
stay away from [...] 3Com cards
Our 3com 996T worked pretty well with Redhat 7.1. Just get the driver from 3com, the vanilla kernel sources and off you go.
Even more comfortable with D-Link DGE-550T which has a driver in current kernels.
BUT BEWARE: both 3com and D-Link won't work on at least the early Dual Athlon Tyan ThunderK7 boards.
Since the subject somewhat changed from Readhat 7.3 to submarines...
a group of Poles stole the machine and gave it to the Brits
May have been true for the first version of the Enigma (the one with 3 barrels), but the version used my the Reichsmarine (navy) had indeed four barrels and it was not until the British captured U-110 (Kptlt. Lemp) before they could crack the German sub's code. The Polish secret service provided a great deal of mathematical background for cracking the Enigma code. Computing power came from specialized machines called "bombs".
let's see. 1 GB in 10 ms works out to 100 GB per second. how recently did GB ethernet come about? and what would the average bandwidth of users be? i would guess much less, but let us assume 100KB per second.
Well 100 GB per second is the raw data rate, as read out (heavily parallel) from the detector, i.e. the data rate the DAQ (Data AQuisition) system has to keep up with. That's pretty difficult really, but done completely in hardware: the readout chips have relatively large on-chip buffers for each read-out channel. NOST OF THIS DATA IS DISCARDED RIGHT AWAY from the so-called Level 1 Trigger, whose purpose is to throw away the most obviously uninteresting collisions.
Since the data rate after L1 is still WAY too large to be all stored, another trigger, unimaginatively called Level 2 Trigger, sorts out even more crap. Since the data rate is lower than for L1, L2 can use more sophisticated algorithms to figure out which event is crap and which is an ever-famous Higgs decay:-)
One more trigger, Level 3 (you guessed it), is used to even further reduce the amount of data, again with more sophisticated means.
Still, the required bandwidth is quite impressive. At CDF II, the data rate after Level 3 will be about 75 events per second, at half a meg each, summing up to 30-40 MB per second (well enough to saturate Gbit ethernet), which are all reconstructed right away.Note that for the LHC experiments (CMS, ATLAS) the amount of data is more than an order of magnitude larger than for CDF and D0 (at Fermilab).
The LHC data will be spread all over the world, using a multi-tier architecture with CERN being Tier 0, and national computing centers as Tier 1 centers, universities being Tier 2, etc. No national computing center will be able to store ALL data, so the idea is that e.g. your Higgs search will be conducted on the U.S. Tier 1 center, B physics on the German Tier 1 center and so on. Obviously not only US scientists will search for the Higgs, so others will also submit analysis jobs on the US Tier 1 and vice versa. To get this working, the GRID is designed. A current implementation is GLOBUS.
Having said this, it is important to note that right now, the GRID is nowhere near this goal. To submit jobs in this "fire and forget" way is not possible yet. There is a shitload of problems to yet solve, the most important ones: trust and horsepower.
Trust: you must allow complete strangers to utilize your multi-million dollar cluster, and they haven't even signed a term-of-use form.
Horsepower: everybody expects to get more CPU cycles out of the GRID than he/she contributes. Obviously, this will not work. (Albeit the load levveling might improve the overall performance.)
Apparently everyone here believes that companies' R&D is the only way to invent drugs, thus assuming that there would be no more drugs once companies don't get their return on invest.
Can you say "University", anyone? There is still very active public research in many countries. We aren't doomed just because a company stops making a certain drug.
But instead of educating and changing killer lifestyle habits, their government steals IP.
Where exactly does it say that the Brasilian govt. does not educate their people? This is not about either/or, but about doing both, educating those for whom are not infected, and caring for those who are already infected.
Life isn't that simple and one-dimensional.
should make sick every one of you that has a Free* bone in their body [...] *as in Libertarian free, not social-welfare-state free.
It will take the detectors on the Tevatron beam, CDF and D0, years with full luminosity to collect the statistics for a five-sigma discovery, and only in a very limited range of the Higgs mass (details). (The Higgs mass is unknown, but the latest limits from the LEP Higgs working group suggest that it's heavier that 110 GeV.)
Chances for LHC aren't really that bad. Their luminosity will be way higher than Tevatron's.
That is of course, if the Higgs exists. If not... well, particle physics will have a very interesting time then:)
Slashdot Mirror
multi-posts of stories on slashdot are due to a quirk matter
I think you mean dork matter...
the Hurd has an object-oriented structure [...] And you guys are wondering why it's taken 19 years???
:-)
Says it all
The plots in chapter 2, The Past, are somewhat misleading in that they suggest a steeper growth rate lately that is actually true:
:-), while the year 2001 is missing (making the latest growth seem exponential).
The time scale (x axis) is nonlinear!
The year 1996 is listed twice (thus making 1996 a particulary long year
Debian does grow rapidly, but not *that* rapidly.
(16-1)*4+1 = 31
Uh... according to xcalc, (16-1)*4+1 is more like 61.
(16-1)*2+1 = 15
Likewise, 31. Would be bad to dither 16 real colors into only 15 dithered colors... I mean, you would actually *loose* one.
Let's stick to our desire for innovation and truely stand behind the company willing to shed the baggage: Intel.
Or rather trade it against even more ugly baggage called "EPIC". Explicit parallelism is soooo '80. Putting all the intelligence in the compiler and still requiring enourmous amounts of silicon isn't really that great.
Now I'm all for a neater instruction set, but IMHO "EPIC" is all but neat. It's having software developers (compiler backend writers) do all the work. Since I'm a software developer (albeit no compilers) I don't find this idea good.
Oh, and the x86 is actually more than two decades old, not just one, and I agree it's quite ugly and should be replaced by something more beautiful - emphasis on beautiful.
My guess is that most people pushing x86-64 have yet to write a program more complicated than "hello world!".
That's worth a +1, Funny.
American "culture" ? is that an oxymoron ?
:-)
Well for sure it's not a tautology
At one time poets were well paid and could achieve a certain amount of fame and occaisional hefty profits for their work.
:-) since there were actually NO "pirated" copies! Yeah, right!
Uhm... when exactly was that?
Historically, only a few poets, who happened to be favoured by their respective sovereign (and had to write in support or at least not in opposition to them) could make a decend living off their art. Otherwise they would die as a pauper. This goes back till the dark ages. Walther von der Vogelweide, medvial "rock star", was paid by souvereigns (several of them, depending who paid the most; and naturally, he would write poems in their favour), because the poor people hanging around on the city's market place - his main audience - could never affort to pay this guy.
Same goes for music. Haendel was a merchenary of the British crown; Mozart, who wasn't, died a pauper (albeit a famous one).
Bottom line: at any time and age, only a very few artists could survive by their art alone and make a decend living. This has nothing to do with expensive or cheap distribution channels.
Otherwise, pre-printing press authors would all have been insanely rich, because copying (manually!) was an enourmously expensive and time-consuming effort. Or just think about the pre-record musicians - they must have been like Rockefeller (or Gates
(BTW calling copyright infringement "piracy" is a quite tasteless belittlement of actual piracy, which is accompanied by bloodshed and murder. For copyright infringement, even "theft" is technically incorrect since the producer isn't actually lacking anything they formerly posessed - they lost the chance of one more sell, so in a sense, it's "virtual theft" or "potential theft".)
On filesystem checks:
/sbin/reiserfsck is just a softlink to /bin/true, then?
if there is *serious damage* [...] you will get asked to make some decisions about what happens
Precisely. And who besides Ted T'so, Stephen Tweedie or Hans Reiser can actually make the right decisions here? A *very* small minority, that's for sure, and a minority that knows perfectly well (I suppose) how to switch the prompt back on.
All the rest of us, when faced with these questions, just go "y" (please fix) and pray that the last backup worked. I think it's damn well fine to make a fsck -y the default.
A journalling filesystem does not need to run fsck.
I guess
Sure, you need it very rarely, but when you need it, most users have to completely trust it, anyway.
Perhaps *you* don't like it, but for some of us that have special needs, having a dumbed down printing system would be incredibly frusterating
Sure, I would indeed find that utterly frustrating, esp. in networked environments (banner pages comes to mind). But what's wrong with a simple, Windowish config dialog that creates a printcap for you? With an expert button, maybe. After all, printcap is just another text file, I can still edit it by hand.
The original article said:
When an app has no windows open
(Emphasis mine)
You write:
Not all apps have a window.
I think this is just a misunderstanding. You think of daemons as apps, the original author thinks of daemons as part of the system.
Netscape used to continue hogging the CPU after all windows were shut. This was a major annoyance on out cluster at the univ. where netscapes going berserk ate up CPU needed for actual calculations. And guess what - our users rarely figured this out.
On easy way of sharing files:
Sounds like a KDE flaw. [...] This has nothing to do with Linux.
It has indeed nothing to do with Linux the kernel. It has *much* to do with Linux the user experience, and that's what the article is all about. I mean, really, the browser thing doesn't have to do anything with Linux the kernel either.
And I agree, the idea of a KDE daemon with root priv doesn't help my blood pressure.
It's terribly easy to change resolution on the fly in X -- ctrl alt kp+ and ctrl alt kp-.
Absolutely right... if you actually know this, and if you have configured X accordingly, i.e. more than one mode. Which is next to trivial with modern Linux distros if your monitor happens to be detected correctly. And don't tell me you can still configure it manually - while I know my monitor does 95kHz most people don't, and why the heck should they? I mean, they're users. They're not interested in that.
Additional chess pieces added by Microsoft include a thimble, race car [...]
... and the paperclip!
No-one who has used dselect will ever go back to RPM.
That would be because they can't figure out how to quit the damn thing!
Businesses and the government don't realize how much long-term savings they could have if they abolished coin currency altogether
:-)
One disadvantage of the Octopus card, and in fact all similar cards (in Germany there a similar card, the Geldkarte, which you can charge to some hundred Euro, and many stores accept them; at our University in Karlsruhe, you can (must, actually) even pay your meal with a similar card, anonymously) is that you don't see when they're gonna be "empty". The fscking cards won't tell you. You end up standing at the cashier, five people pushing behind you, and the bloody thing's empty.
With coins this problem simply does not exist, assuming that one can actually count
Of course there are credit cards (and at least in Europe, there is the EC card which directly deposits from your bank account) but these have no privacy whatsoever.
Coins (and banknotes) are the only way to pay anonymously *and* know exactly how much money you have at hand.
Now the geek inside of me fantasizes about cards with a built-in ultra-thin display, powered by the thermal energy of your thumb pressed against the card, or by piezo elements on the card. THAT would be handy.
My daughter (10) is currently working on learning BASIC on my old PCjr
:-)
(Emphasis mine.)
Does Dijkstra know about this?
(Sorry, couldn't resist. I started programming in BASIC, too, so his crushing statement hits me just as well...)
wouldn't the picture show just a long blur of your car
:-)
In Germany, we have this kind of cameras (both for speeding and at traffic lights) for over a decade and unfortunately, they work pretty much as designed. Even in excess of 120 mph, the picture will be clear enough to identify your face.
That said, the automated speeding control has inaccuracies in the single-digit percent level, especially when the radar device wasn't properly aligned with the lanes, as the ADAC (German version of AAA) found out.
And at least in Germany, it is illegal to muck with your number plates in order to avoid being identified. If the police catches you, you will be screwed. Seriously.
The best way to avoid being photographed is, of course, to stick with the speed limit. (Which IMHO is easier in Germany than for example in Illinois with its suppressive speed limits.)
And this is my favorite traffic sign
(The sign invalidates speed limit, interdiction of overtaking etc. Best viewed on the Autobahn!)
Ha! Now that's an aim for the G++ guys to shoot at... :-)
:-)
(Yes, yes I know the GNU C++ compiler isn't ten years old yet, but that's the least of hindrance
Stay away from cards that don't have PXE
Gross overgeneralization. Since 1000BastT switch ports are still pretty expensive, you will most likely only equip servers with Gigabit/copper. And servers don't usually boot off the net.
stay away from [...] 3Com cards
Our 3com 996T worked pretty well with Redhat 7.1. Just get the driver from 3com, the vanilla kernel
sources and off you go.
Even more comfortable with D-Link DGE-550T which has a driver in current kernels.
BUT BEWARE: both 3com and D-Link won't work on at least the early Dual Athlon Tyan ThunderK7 boards.
Since the subject somewhat changed from Readhat 7.3 to submarines...
a group of Poles stole the machine and gave it to the Brits
May have been true for the first version of the Enigma (the one with 3 barrels), but the version used my the Reichsmarine (navy) had indeed four barrels and it was not until the British captured U-110 (Kptlt. Lemp) before they could crack the German sub's code. The Polish secret service provided a great deal of mathematical background for cracking the Enigma code. Computing power came from specialized machines called "bombs".
They probably had 40000+ terracotta soldiers on the oars...
... and needs its own top level directory...
let's see. 1 GB in 10 ms works out to 100 GB per second. how recently did GB ethernet come about? and what would the average bandwidth of users be? i would guess much less, but let us assume 100KB per second.
:-)
Well 100 GB per second is the raw data rate, as read out (heavily parallel) from the detector, i.e. the data rate the DAQ (Data AQuisition) system has to keep up with. That's pretty difficult really, but done completely in hardware: the readout chips have relatively large on-chip buffers for each read-out channel. NOST OF THIS DATA IS DISCARDED RIGHT AWAY from the so-called Level 1 Trigger, whose purpose is to throw away the most obviously uninteresting collisions.
Since the data rate after L1 is still WAY too large to be all stored, another trigger, unimaginatively called Level 2 Trigger, sorts out even more crap. Since the data rate is lower than for L1, L2 can use more sophisticated algorithms to figure out which event is crap and which is an ever-famous Higgs decay
One more trigger, Level 3 (you guessed it), is used to even further reduce the amount of data, again with more sophisticated means.
Still, the required bandwidth is quite impressive. At CDF II, the data rate after Level 3 will be about 75 events per second, at half a meg each, summing up to 30-40 MB per second (well enough to saturate Gbit ethernet), which are all reconstructed right away.Note that for the LHC experiments (CMS, ATLAS) the amount of data is more than an order of magnitude larger than for CDF and D0 (at Fermilab).
The LHC data will be spread all over the world, using a multi-tier architecture with CERN being Tier 0, and national computing centers as Tier 1 centers, universities being Tier 2, etc. No national computing center will be able to store ALL data, so the idea is that e.g. your Higgs search will be conducted on the U.S. Tier 1 center, B physics on the German Tier 1 center and so on. Obviously not only US scientists will search for the Higgs, so others will also submit analysis jobs on the US Tier 1 and vice versa. To get this working, the GRID is designed. A current implementation is GLOBUS.
Having said this, it is important to note that right now, the GRID is nowhere near this goal. To submit jobs in this "fire and forget" way is not possible yet. There is a shitload of problems to yet solve, the most important ones: trust and horsepower.
Trust: you must allow complete strangers to utilize your multi-million dollar cluster, and they haven't even signed a term-of-use form.
Horsepower: everybody expects to get more CPU cycles out of the GRID than he/she contributes. Obviously, this will not work. (Albeit the load levveling might improve the overall performance.)
I wouldn't be surprised if someone were to patent IP addresses.
You're infringing my copyright on 127.0.0.1! Surrender all your bases to me!
What will happen if I try to open my Physics Thesis or my Business Plan word file in KOffice
:-)
No Real Physicist(tm) would use Word for their thesis. Only professors have to use Word - for appropriation requests
Besides, I agree with your actual point, features do indeed matter.
Apparently everyone here believes that companies' R&D is the only way to invent drugs, thus assuming that there would be no more drugs once companies don't get their return on invest.
Can you say "University", anyone? There is still very active public research in many countries. We aren't doomed just because a company stops making a certain drug.
But instead of educating and changing killer lifestyle habits, their government steals IP.
Where exactly does it say that the Brasilian govt. does not educate their people? This is not about either/or, but about doing both, educating those for whom are not infected, and caring for those who are already infected.
Life isn't that simple and one-dimensional.
should make sick every one of you that has a Free* bone in their body [...] *as in Libertarian free, not social-welfare-state free.
Frankly, my Libertarian bones hurt the most.
It will take the detectors on the Tevatron beam, CDF and D0, years with full luminosity to collect the statistics for a five-sigma discovery, and only in a very limited range of the Higgs mass (details). (The Higgs mass is unknown, but the latest limits from the LEP Higgs working group suggest that it's heavier that 110 GeV.)
:)
Chances for LHC aren't really that bad. Their luminosity will be way higher than Tevatron's.
That is of course, if the Higgs exists. If not... well, particle physics will have a very interesting time then
Right now they have a pair of legs powered by a chain saw engine.
Woah! Bet that's handy when you sneak up to some enemy snipers:
Soldier: Tuktuktuktuktuktuk... ARGH!
displays 9.2 million pixels [...] needs [...] and 2 GB of ram
:-)
With a colour depth of 24 bit/pixel, 9.2 Mpixel require below 28 MB. In 32 bit mode, it's well below 40 MB.
So the conclusion would be that this beast must have something like 1780 bits per pixel - WOW, that's a hell of a lot colours
(Yes I know what e.g. texture memory is good for.)