That's a fascinating theory. It may well be correct for such "addictions" as gambling, internet surfing, porn, or sex. It is emphatically incorrect for biochemical addictions like speed or crack or horse.
Yeah, they made a movie called I Robot. It wasn't Asimov's story, and it wasn't Ellison's magnificent screenplay--it was typical hollywood dreck eye-candy, and it was a total waste of time, money, and resources.
Someone show me an intelligent, dramatic movie of I, Robot or in fact ANY SF story, and I'll be happy.
(Note: "Intelligent" does not mean bullshit pseudoscience, and "dramatic" does not mean blowing shit up)
Well for cold processing, you should look at Sun's new T1-based systems. Eight cores on a single die, four threads per core, and all in 72W maximum.
"Proper motherboard designs also can allow multi-proc systems which will mitigate the fact that you need multiple cores on a die."
The problem with that idea is that as soon as you have a multi-socket motherboard, you can put multi-core CPUs in each socket. In actual fact, multiple cores make a lot of sense over discrete processors, depending on the bus architecture, but multicore is where things are going to go.
As for silent computers, that is finally getting the attention it deserves, thanks primarily to the HTPC craze. I would love to see limited power CPUs with no active cooling systems in them.
1) Don't make it profitable to sell spyware blockers, disinfectants, etc. 2) NAIL the fuckers who use this stuff in their products. The CEO of Gator should have been thrown in jail for the rest of his natural life back when this sort of behaviour started. Unfortunately, no one listens to the warnings when the thin edge of the wedge is pressed against our throats. No one took spam seriously when we were telling the world that Cantor and Seigel should be disbarred, no one worried about browser pop-ups and crappy adware, and now we see that no one expected spyware to be a virulent menace.
All I can say about is this: Suck it up folks. Through inaction, you've made your own bed.
For whatever reason, Abunadh hasn't grabbed me much as many others. Springbank and (pre-Glenmorangie buy-out) Ardbeg are my current favorites. I'd cheerfully auction off my coworkers for a bottle of Mortlach though.:-)
I'm curious about the SparcIV+ benchmarks. IBM claims that Sun only does well when comparing a (dual-core) IV+ against a single core Power5 (or 5+). Any thoughts on this?
Call Sun. They're pushing some extremely nice Opteron-based kit right now. Also, if cooling/power issues are a primary concern, the new T1000/T2000 servers may astonish you. (Note, however, that these chips are very workload-dependent; If you're doing heavy FP work, then this is NOT the system for you. Conversely, if you're serving up web pages, this might make people gasp at the performance/BTU)
HP is apparently selling nice Opterons, but they have very clearly stated that they'll never support HP-UX on them, so why bother?
"Vendors such as IBM, Apple, blackdown etc ALL license Java code from Sun and hence are subject to RMS's Java Trap."
Wah wah wah. According to RMS hisself, "We do have free implementations of Java, such as the GNU Compiler for Java (GCJ) and GNU Classpath, but they don't support all the features yet. We are still catching up."
So the reason that programming in Java is a 'closed-source trap' is because OpenSource(tm) hasn't caught up yet! Cry me a bloody river--the specification IS there (despite RMS's convoluted logic), you're free to implement it. If you're not good enough to write the code from the spec, then it's not Sun's fault, it's yours. THIS is what Open Source was supposed to be about.
"There are apps that just won't run on Solaris out of the box."
Just to clarify here...
Most apps that won't run on Solaris out of the box fail because of poor coding. I'm not saying that it's GOOD, but there's simply an enormous amount of poorly written software out there that is platform/tool/version specific when it doesn't need to be.
At any rate, I don't know enough about GPL3 yet to know how well it will fit in with Sun's world. The GPL2 was clearly broken from a commercial OS point of view, which is why Sun worked towards the CDDL license. If they can use GPL3, then it probably means that the license has been fixed.
Sadly, $120mill isn't a lot against a company like MS. The most efficient thing you could do with it would be to take out contracts on various execs, and I'm not sure that you should lower yourself to that level. Yet.
...for a certain subset of users, and a given meaning of spam, problem, and solved.
Microsoft has "solved" spam by:
1) Redefining spam so that big businesses can send out spam and not call it spam. 2) Redefining solved to mean that end-users don't see it 3) Only considering a solution in terms of that group of users who sit in front of a PC, and use MS tools. 4) Redefining problem to mean "profit-making potential."
Spam is not solved by blocking it on the recipient side. There are THOUSANDS of people who have to design, implement, update, manage, and babysit the antispam "solutions" that are in place today, and the problem isn't going away because too many people running the big IT companies can't afford to let it go away. The "solution" that Bill Gates has proclaimed is to take the problem, and find a way of profiting from fighting it but not actually eliminating it.
One of my clients is a moderate sized company, about 3500 employees. They have about $100k of hardware, probably $25k in software, and about 2.5FTE of senior admin people to deal with spam. Actually ELIMINATING spam would destroy one of the biggest growth industries in IT right now.
I'm not saying that it doesn't happen--I know it does, and does all too often. However, there's also a strong tendency on the part of some people to see a slight when none exists. One such example was the American government's total screwup after Hurricane Katrina. Instantly screams of racism started showing up. "Bush hates black people!" read some headlines. It wasn't acknowledged that it was just as likely to be: a) total incompetence b) hatred of poor people, regardless of colour c) general lack of interest in New Orleans
Or any of a number of other scenarios.
Basically, what I'm saying is that it can (and does) go both ways, and again I'll repeat that the idea of thought police is something that is against freedom for both students and profs. If a prof is marking someone *unfairly* because they're espousing a contradictory point of view (AND expressing it well, with supporting facts, etc.) then the solution is to discipline the teacher--regardless of their bent and the student's.
You compare a few different things here, which aren't exactly comparable. Diamonds, for instance, are expensive primarily because DeBeers has spent over a century ruthlessly restricting supply, and creating artificial demand. The cultured diamonds are here, available, and cheap. However, the companies are facing threatening behaviour from DeBeers, legal sanctions (mostly brought about by DeBeers), and bad publicity (from...well, you know).
Wine and spirits are another matter. The market is unfortunately filled with speculators who ultimately do nothing but drive up the price of rare wines, as well as insecure rich people who buy the "right" wines with no appreciation for them. However, good wines _do_ cost more because they come from lower producing vinyards, take more care to make, and require more _real_ aging which leads to evaporation. If this device could eliminate the aging and evaporation, then it might irritate some insecure twits, but most wine lovers would be ecstatic at being able to buy world-class wine for under a hundred bucks.
Unfortunately, it's pseudoscience at its worst. Pity, really.
Tannins can be polymerised, compounds can be oxidised, but a large part of what makes a good wine good is what it absorbs from and loses to the barrel. Furthermore, oxidatisation doesn't occur evenly through a wine (tends to be more surface area effect than all the way through) which means that different parts of the wine in the barrel are different, and blending them adds complexity.
This (a) can't work well, and (b) doesn't work. I've got some audiophile toys which I could write/. articles about too, but that doesn't make them effective.
It's been my experience that nobody gets 'shouted down' in a class unless they're pretty strident themselves. Maybe things are different where you go to class than where (and when) I did. The statement, "you pay for your focus" is legitimate, to some degree - extraordinary (or unpopular) claims demand extraordinary proof. You will have to work harder and make your arguments stronger than someone who repeats the standard belief, in any field and any subject. This may be good or bad, depending on the circumstances, but fighting against it it mere tilting at windmills.
I would question whether your Excessive Use of Capital Letters has gotten any Marks docked from your Papers. However, I'm more curious about how you worked your point of view on Israel and the region into this article. You should be able to see that censorship (implicit or explicit) of professors is not the way to fix censorship (again, implicit or explicit) of students; and your experiences, valid as they may be, don't really have much bearing on the article in question.
All you say is true, but "replace" doesn't necessarily describe what happens with old hardware. We have a lot of old decaying junk around, some of which is used for spare parts, some of which is used for dev/test, or workstations. Also, the timeline shouldn't (and generally isn't) an absolute rule, but a reminder to take a look at what the vendor costs are. One of the major reasons that the three-year rule exists is that service contracts usually go up horribly after three years.
As for cost of repairs, I don't know when I last saw a fan go on anything other than a crappy PC. Hard drives are of course the most common to go (and 73GB FCAL drives are a lot more than $10! No spares on hand for those, though--everything is mirrored, and the vendor can provide replacements in two hours), but CPUs are usually the second most common failure in enterprise servers. Sparc, Power, and Itanium chips aren't generally something you might have a few spares on hand for, either.
Three or four year replacement cycle is pretty much the norm in business. After three years, it's rare for a server to be worth repairing vs. putting the money towards a new machine with much more capacity (especially if you consider cooling and power concerns).
It may seem extravagant, but it's actually financially responsible when you crunch the numbers properly.
Slashdot Mirror
That's a fascinating theory. It may well be correct for such "addictions" as gambling, internet surfing, porn, or sex. It is emphatically incorrect for biochemical addictions like speed or crack or horse.
Oh yeah, right.
THAT'S why I never finished Cryptonomicon. No editing.
Yeah, they made a movie called I Robot. It wasn't Asimov's story, and it wasn't Ellison's magnificent screenplay--it was typical hollywood dreck eye-candy, and it was a total waste of time, money, and resources.
Someone show me an intelligent, dramatic movie of I, Robot or in fact ANY SF story, and I'll be happy.
(Note: "Intelligent" does not mean bullshit pseudoscience, and "dramatic" does not mean blowing shit up)
Well for cold processing, you should look at Sun's new T1-based systems. Eight cores on a single die, four threads per core, and all in 72W maximum.
"Proper motherboard designs also can allow multi-proc systems which will mitigate the fact that you need multiple cores on a die."
The problem with that idea is that as soon as you have a multi-socket motherboard, you can put multi-core CPUs in each socket. In actual fact, multiple cores make a lot of sense over discrete processors, depending on the bus architecture, but multicore is where things are going to go.
As for silent computers, that is finally getting the attention it deserves, thanks primarily to the HTPC craze. I would love to see limited power CPUs with no active cooling systems in them.
1) Don't make it profitable to sell spyware blockers, disinfectants, etc.
2) NAIL the fuckers who use this stuff in their products. The CEO of Gator should have been thrown in jail for the rest of his natural life back when this sort of behaviour started. Unfortunately, no one listens to the warnings when the thin edge of the wedge is pressed against our throats. No one took spam seriously when we were telling the world that Cantor and Seigel should be disbarred, no one worried about browser pop-ups and crappy adware, and now we see that no one expected spyware to be a virulent menace.
All I can say about is this: Suck it up folks. Through inaction, you've made your own bed.
I'm ALREADY taking pay cuts, so why not make the #$@*() job worthwhile?
For whatever reason, Abunadh hasn't grabbed me much as many others. Springbank and (pre-Glenmorangie buy-out) Ardbeg are my current favorites. I'd cheerfully auction off my coworkers for a bottle of Mortlach though. :-)
I'm curious about the SparcIV+ benchmarks. IBM claims that Sun only does well when comparing a (dual-core) IV+ against a single core Power5 (or 5+). Any thoughts on this?
Call Sun. They're pushing some extremely nice Opteron-based kit right now. Also, if cooling/power issues are a primary concern, the new T1000/T2000 servers may astonish you. (Note, however, that these chips are very workload-dependent; If you're doing heavy FP work, then this is NOT the system for you. Conversely, if you're serving up web pages, this might make people gasp at the performance/BTU)
HP is apparently selling nice Opterons, but they have very clearly stated that they'll never support HP-UX on them, so why bother?
OK, it's not THAT bad, but it's a long long long ways from what I'd call a "whisky lover's whisky."
Then again, at least you're not going to regret cutting into such a bottle.
"Vendors such as IBM, Apple, blackdown etc ALL license Java code from Sun and hence are subject to RMS's Java Trap."
Wah wah wah. According to RMS hisself, "We do have free implementations of Java, such as the GNU Compiler for Java (GCJ) and GNU Classpath, but they don't support all the features yet. We are still catching up."
So the reason that programming in Java is a 'closed-source trap' is because OpenSource(tm) hasn't caught up yet! Cry me a bloody river--the specification IS there (despite RMS's convoluted logic), you're free to implement it. If you're not good enough to write the code from the spec, then it's not Sun's fault, it's yours. THIS is what Open Source was supposed to be about.
"There are apps that just won't run on Solaris out of the box."
Just to clarify here...
Most apps that won't run on Solaris out of the box fail because of poor coding. I'm not saying that it's GOOD, but there's simply an enormous amount of poorly written software out there that is platform/tool/version specific when it doesn't need to be.
At any rate, I don't know enough about GPL3 yet to know how well it will fit in with Sun's world. The GPL2 was clearly broken from a commercial OS point of view, which is why Sun worked towards the CDDL license. If they can use GPL3, then it probably means that the license has been fixed.
"Actually I was "lowered" to that level years ago"
So you're an admitted murderer? Interesting.
Sadly, $120mill isn't a lot against a company like MS. The most efficient thing you could do with it would be to take out contracts on various execs, and I'm not sure that you should lower yourself to that level. Yet.
...for a certain subset of users, and a given meaning of spam, problem, and solved.
Microsoft has "solved" spam by:
1) Redefining spam so that big businesses can send out spam and not call it spam.
2) Redefining solved to mean that end-users don't see it
3) Only considering a solution in terms of that group of users who sit in front of a PC, and use MS tools.
4) Redefining problem to mean "profit-making potential."
Spam is not solved by blocking it on the recipient side. There are THOUSANDS of people who have to design, implement, update, manage, and babysit the antispam "solutions" that are in place today, and the problem isn't going away because too many people running the big IT companies can't afford to let it go away. The "solution" that Bill Gates has proclaimed is to take the problem, and find a way of profiting from fighting it but not actually eliminating it.
One of my clients is a moderate sized company, about 3500 employees. They have about $100k of hardware, probably $25k in software, and about 2.5FTE of senior admin people to deal with spam. Actually ELIMINATING spam would destroy one of the biggest growth industries in IT right now.
I'm not saying that it doesn't happen--I know it does, and does all too often. However, there's also a strong tendency on the part of some people to see a slight when none exists. One such example was the American government's total screwup after Hurricane Katrina. Instantly screams of racism started showing up. "Bush hates black people!" read some headlines. It wasn't acknowledged that it was just as likely to be:
a) total incompetence
b) hatred of poor people, regardless of colour
c) general lack of interest in New Orleans
Or any of a number of other scenarios.
Basically, what I'm saying is that it can (and does) go both ways, and again I'll repeat that the idea of thought police is something that is against freedom for both students and profs. If a prof is marking someone *unfairly* because they're espousing a contradictory point of view (AND expressing it well, with supporting facts, etc.) then the solution is to discipline the teacher--regardless of their bent and the student's.
Agreed. I'd also suggest...
3) Burn to the ground any companies who hire spammers
You compare a few different things here, which aren't exactly comparable. Diamonds, for instance, are expensive primarily because DeBeers has spent over a century ruthlessly restricting supply, and creating artificial demand. The cultured diamonds are here, available, and cheap. However, the companies are facing threatening behaviour from DeBeers, legal sanctions (mostly brought about by DeBeers), and bad publicity (from...well, you know).
Wine and spirits are another matter. The market is unfortunately filled with speculators who ultimately do nothing but drive up the price of rare wines, as well as insecure rich people who buy the "right" wines with no appreciation for them. However, good wines _do_ cost more because they come from lower producing vinyards, take more care to make, and require more _real_ aging which leads to evaporation. If this device could eliminate the aging and evaporation, then it might irritate some insecure twits, but most wine lovers would be ecstatic at being able to buy world-class wine for under a hundred bucks.
Unfortunately, it's pseudoscience at its worst. Pity, really.
Hmm.
/. articles about too, but that doesn't make them effective.
Tannins can be polymerised, compounds can be oxidised, but a large part of what makes a good wine good is what it absorbs from and loses to the barrel. Furthermore, oxidatisation doesn't occur evenly through a wine (tends to be more surface area effect than all the way through) which means that different parts of the wine in the barrel are different, and blending them adds complexity.
This (a) can't work well, and (b) doesn't work. I've got some audiophile toys which I could write
Interesting comments.
It's been my experience that nobody gets 'shouted down' in a class unless they're pretty strident themselves. Maybe things are different where you go to class than where (and when) I did. The statement, "you pay for your focus" is legitimate, to some degree - extraordinary (or unpopular) claims demand extraordinary proof. You will have to work harder and make your arguments stronger than someone who repeats the standard belief, in any field and any subject. This may be good or bad, depending on the circumstances, but fighting against it it mere tilting at windmills.
I would question whether your Excessive Use of Capital Letters has gotten any Marks docked from your Papers. However, I'm more curious about how you worked your point of view on Israel and the region into this article. You should be able to see that censorship (implicit or explicit) of professors is not the way to fix censorship (again, implicit or explicit) of students; and your experiences, valid as they may be, don't really have much bearing on the article in question.
Or could it be that you have an axe to grind?
...and our business is to crush the competition beneath our heels.
Badly.
That's how they do it.
All you say is true, but "replace" doesn't necessarily describe what happens with old hardware. We have a lot of old decaying junk around, some of which is used for spare parts, some of which is used for dev/test, or workstations. Also, the timeline shouldn't (and generally isn't) an absolute rule, but a reminder to take a look at what the vendor costs are. One of the major reasons that the three-year rule exists is that service contracts usually go up horribly after three years.
As for cost of repairs, I don't know when I last saw a fan go on anything other than a crappy PC. Hard drives are of course the most common to go (and 73GB FCAL drives are a lot more than $10! No spares on hand for those, though--everything is mirrored, and the vendor can provide replacements in two hours), but CPUs are usually the second most common failure in enterprise servers. Sparc, Power, and Itanium chips aren't generally something you might have a few spares on hand for, either.
Ooh, Sony has a new toy! Let's all buy it, regardless of what we said last week about their rootkit CDs!
Honestly, is anyone else who claimed to boycott Sony going to pass this up _because_of_the_boycott?
Three or four year replacement cycle is pretty much the norm in business. After three years, it's rare for a server to be worth repairing vs. putting the money towards a new machine with much more capacity (especially if you consider cooling and power concerns).
It may seem extravagant, but it's actually financially responsible when you crunch the numbers properly.