No-one's stopping you from buying a Socket7 board and running a K6-2+ 500 at 100MHz with whatever reduced voltage is possible and still works. Then, a fan should not be necessary at all, and with the right choice of periphery, you might get away with turning off the fan in the power unti, too. But the box won't be very fast.
High performance, low price and low power consumption are conflicting goals; you have to make compromises.
The motivation is that the PCI-internal power lines are too weak to support the card. And I suspect that it is indeed a separately plugged cable. As for video cards getting their own case, they exist and are called "SGI workstations"...
You're wrong. There *was* a new flaw discovered in the key escrow mechanism of PGP that made it vulnerable to *anyone*, not just those with a "legitimate" third party key. Read the post.
The answer seems to be this: If you use GPG for *encryption*, then it's not vulnerable. But if you use if for *decryption*, then it is, since the person who encrypted the mail could have used normal PGP with the vulnerability.
The buyer would either have to shell out the money to keep the satellites up there, or to do away with them in a way such that the remains don't pose a danger (i.e. don't crash down to Earth and reach it, and don't litter the orbit). Apparently, no-one who could ensure this is willing to pay money for the things.
As I see it, this is basically the kingsize version of lighting your cigarette with a $100 bill. I doubt that other companies will be able to top this anytime soon. A shame that stock buyers can't appreciate such displays of financial prowess...
It's true, though. Any amount of radiation can potentially create that one cancarous cell that kills you 30 years later. However, some radiation sources like the sun or medical x-ray examinations are benefricial enough to take the risk.
You're right, I don't think I installed the X development stuff. But now I threw out the kernel and instead managed to squeeze in a full-blown xemacs with Japanese support, Apache and MySQL!
However, you have to take into account that at the C and even the B level, these "Orange Book" criteria are a totally theoretical thing. A System being B1 certified does not mean that there are not security holes - just that it supports audit trails and a lot of other security features/i>.
Also, last time I looked, Windows NT got C2 only under very specific circumstances that have nothing to do with any actual productive environment.
What did you waste so much space on? My laptop has a normal Debian 2.1 installtion in 180MB, and it also had at one point the full kernel source, *and* a minimal X windows system. Or did you keep around teh sources of everything (in which case 250MB are impressive).
What makes it so hard for RedHat or any other company that produces Linux distros to come up with a super secure system like OpenBSD or FreeBSD?
What makes OpenBSD so secure is not the lack of severs that are installed pointlessly. It's the very, very stringent auditing, the "we don't put it in unless we are 100% certain there are no buffer overflows in it" philosophy. And that philosophy is rather incompatible with the demands of your typical Distro's customer base that always wants all the newest gadgets and features to play around with.
I bet for one, most of the governments over there use Linux because they would rather not give money to some American company.
Actually and unfortunately, no. The standard OS for governments is Windows (even 98 in many cases!). This is changing slowly, since they do begin to feel uncomfortable about not having the source of the software that handles all their precious data.
The Jini homepage is here, but you seem to be mistaken about its capabilities: Jini makes it possible to hot-plug devices that offer services into a network and have clients find the servers without being specifically told where they are. Jini has not security features whatsoever.
Well, the Höchstleistungsrechner in Bayern, which is 5th on the top 500 list (and stands about 50m from where I'm typing this:) uses up 600kW. They had to reinforce the floor above it before they could install the cooling systems, before they could install the computer itself.
Well, those machines are most commonly employed to solve numerical problems (as in: huge systems of differential equations). For that kind of work, High Performance Fortran can be used. HPF basically consists of extensions to Fortran that allow you to explicitly divide data (i.e. parts of matrices) between nodes and still use standard operations on it. The compiler takes care of the inter-node communication, and if you divided the data wisely, there hopefully won't be too much of it.
Unless they are data & process partitioned/independent processes.
In that case you don't need a supercomputer and a Beowulf cluster built of off-the-shelf PCs really is a good solution.
This still does not guarantee good performance. An R/S6000SP has a fantastic interconnect, but can still run like a dog if there are too many processes dependent upon each other.
True, but from what I've gathered (no personal experience, admittedly), volume and latency of interprocess communication is much more common as a bottleneck than actual unresolvable dependencies.
but a good app
hopefully does not have too much communication between nodes, or serialized data streams.
I bet that a lot of researchers whish they could choose to only work with "good apps":)
But certain classes of important problems (mostly simulations of chemical of physical processes) tend to be "bad"...
Real supercomputers solve problems that require massive communications between the nodes. So pretty much everything depends on the "switches" they'll use to connect the nodes, and there's no realy information about those at all in the article. At least, they seem to be custom-built by a company the sepcializes on such things.
We had to browse the web on pure text-based browsers that still took five hours to start up! And we had to manually type in our links and we liked it! And when we got to an interesting site, our browser and OS would crash on us and dance about on our desk and sing hallelujah!
Maybe the same thing applies that Piers Anthony said about writer's block: "If you have it, you're not being professional enough". I think that's partially true - if you take coding seriously, self discipline should take you through any block. On the other hand, if there isn't any fun in it anymore that's really bad for your motivation on the long run.
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High performance, low price and low power consumption are conflicting goals; you have to make compromises.
The motivation is that the PCI-internal power lines are too weak to support the card. And I suspect that it is indeed a separately plugged cable. As for video cards getting their own case, they exist and are called "SGI workstations"...
I'm not sure whether this should be the only kind of person involved, bit as part of a mix, it's good to see people from the CCC.
You're wrong. There *was* a new flaw discovered in the key escrow mechanism of PGP that made it vulnerable to *anyone*, not just those with a "legitimate" third party key. Read the post.
The answer seems to be this: If you use GPG for *encryption*, then it's not vulnerable. But if you use if for *decryption*, then it is, since the person who encrypted the mail could have used normal PGP with the vulnerability.
The question is: can you do anything with it that generates enough revenue to justify the enormous costs to keep these buggers up and running?
The buyer would either have to shell out the money to keep the satellites up there, or to do away with them in a way such that the remains don't pose a danger (i.e. don't crash down to Earth and reach it, and don't litter the orbit). Apparently, no-one who could ensure this is willing to pay money for the things.
As I see it, this is basically the kingsize version of lighting your cigarette with a $100 bill. I doubt that other companies will be able to top this anytime soon. A shame that stock buyers can't appreciate such displays of financial prowess...
It's true, though. Any amount of radiation can potentially create that one cancarous cell that kills you 30 years later. However, some radiation sources like the sun or medical x-ray examinations are benefricial enough to take the risk.
You're right, I don't think I installed the X development stuff. But now I threw out the kernel and instead managed to squeeze in a full-blown xemacs with Japanese support, Apache and MySQL!
Also, last time I looked, Windows NT got C2 only under very specific circumstances that have nothing to do with any actual productive environment.
What did you waste so much space on? My laptop has a normal Debian 2.1 installtion in 180MB, and it also had at one point the full kernel source, *and* a minimal X windows system. Or did you keep around teh sources of everything (in which case 250MB are impressive).
These official evaluations are extremely expensive, so who's gonna pay for it?
What makes OpenBSD so secure is not the lack of severs that are installed pointlessly. It's the very, very stringent auditing, the "we don't put it in unless we are 100% certain there are no buffer overflows in it" philosophy. And that philosophy is rather incompatible with the demands of your typical Distro's customer base that always wants all the newest gadgets and features to play around with.
Actually and unfortunately, no. The standard OS for governments is Windows (even 98 in many cases!). This is changing slowly, since they do begin to feel uncomfortable about not having the source of the software that handles all their precious data.
Um... I think that .gov, .mil and .edu are equally "truly American".
The Jini homepage is here, but you seem to be mistaken about its capabilities: Jini makes it possible to hot-plug devices that offer services into a network and have clients find the servers without being specifically told where they are. Jini has not security features whatsoever.
Well, the Höchstleistungsrechner in Bayern, which is 5th on the top 500 list (and stands about 50m from where I'm typing this :) uses up 600kW. They had to reinforce the floor above it before they could install the cooling systems, before they could install the computer itself.
Well, those machines are most commonly employed to solve numerical problems (as in: huge systems of differential equations). For that kind of work, High Performance Fortran can be used. HPF basically consists of extensions to Fortran that allow you to explicitly divide data (i.e. parts of matrices) between nodes and still use standard operations on it. The compiler takes care of the inter-node communication, and if you divided the data wisely, there hopefully won't be too much of it.
In that case you don't need a supercomputer and a Beowulf cluster built of off-the-shelf PCs really is a good solution.
This still does not guarantee good performance. An R/S6000SP has a fantastic interconnect, but can still run like a dog if there are too many processes dependent upon each other.
True, but from what I've gathered (no personal experience, admittedly), volume and latency of interprocess communication is much more common as a bottleneck than actual unresolvable dependencies.
but a good app hopefully does not have too much communication between nodes, or serialized data streams.
I bet that a lot of researchers whish they could choose to only work with "good apps" :)
But certain classes of important problems (mostly simulations of chemical of physical processes) tend to be "bad"...
Latency is much more important than transfer rates in this context.
Not if you compare it with this machine (which is ranked 5th on the top 500 supercomputers list).
Real supercomputers solve problems that require massive communications between the nodes. So pretty much everything depends on the "switches" they'll use to connect the nodes, and there's no realy information about those at all in the article. At least, they seem to be custom-built by a company the sepcializes on such things.
We had to browse the web on pure text-based browsers that still took five hours to start up! And we had to manually type in our links and we liked it! And when we got to an interesting site, our browser and OS would crash on us and dance about on our desk and sing hallelujah!
Maybe the same thing applies that Piers Anthony said about writer's block: "If you have it, you're not being professional enough". I think that's partially true - if you take coding seriously, self discipline should take you through any block. On the other hand, if there isn't any fun in it anymore that's really bad for your motivation on the long run.