The use of *nix became prevelant when it became important to describe the platform of software ran on not just "Unix (TM)" but also Linux, Minix, and Irix. (for example, Apache).
It strengthens' the Open Groups case that in fact people distinguish Unix vs. unix or unix-like OSs.
I think Apple should pay up; it's not much money to pay vs. having to change all their marketing material to soften the varying degrees "OSX is Unix" claims. (as an aside, is anyone aware of any efforts by RedHat or United Linux to pursue a Unix cert from the OpenGroup recently? Many software vendors say Unix and mean Linux these days; someone has got to step up and make it official, to take one for the team, so to speak.)
...no child will "stumble" onto a BDSM castration mpeg, or some guy getting it on with a donkey.
That stuff costs money to obtain, or you have to know someone who has it. If they find it, it's because they wanted to. That kind of weird shit doesn't fall in your lap.
My baby brother uses the net unsupervised, and unfiltered, and he mostly uses kazaa to download Simpsons episodes and visits Strongbad.
Linux support on laptops was pretty bad 3 years ago. Today, we have RedHat 9 on the Thinkpad X30. Works like a charm. Only thing missing is undocking... but I like having two batteries so it's usually a non-issue anyway! If you stay away from the absolutely latest-models, you are likely to get decent laptop support with modern distros, esp. mandrake and redhat. Dell Latitudes, Toshibas, and thinkpads are all pretty well understood cases.
Let's say the OS takes 3 gigs, your home directory is 1. Do you REALLY think something is going to create 68 gigs of temporary files. Use your brain. I've been around engineers for too long. They tend to assume there'll be 40+GB of space to untar a AIT3 tape or whatever before they start chewing on it. Go see what a 72 gig SCSI disk costs and you'll see why they can "spare" you one hippie.
A 73GB 10K RPM low-profile SCSI drive costs $175 in bulk, $350 retail (Fujitsu, Seagate, Maxtor, take your pick). If you get a 36 gig 10K RPM from Sun it's $480. The manufacturer varies, depending on market prices. How can they justify that? And I'm not a hippie, faggot.;P Let's not degrade to name calling.
More Slashdot speculation. I think, maybe, perhaps or things stated as fact when they are, in fact, not. The only large company that I know for sure is VeriSign. They've also got contracts with more than 80 of the Fortune 100. There is a large presence in the FBI and the Pentagon, and it is popular with the DoD in general (that's how I found out about them). Also, I understand something like 30-40% of the US internet backbone uses their servers (for what specific purposes I know not, as they don't make for cost-effective routers).
Hah, great choice. Shitty hardware and good support or good hardware and shitty support. You know with Sun you get both good hardware and good support, but I'm sure you would rather choose the half assed solution.
I agree. Sun's hardware is rock solid (but arguably too conservative), and the support is decent. That being said, I haven't had any issues with any of the penguin boxes either. My only hardware-related snafu was when some memory went bad, but they shipped the replacement that same day. I don't think I've even had a faulty Dell. Out of the 30-someodd I've owned or been responsible for, I've never had to RMA or call the help line. In fact, we had an issue with Sun trying to add a DVD-ROM which turned out to be due to a bad cable issue. That was the most difficult-to-resolve problem that I faced with all THREE vendors. So by what evidence do you claim that ANY of the aforementioned hardware is shitty? If you buy a "server-class" x86 box and don't fuck with it, keep it air-conditioned, etc., you should have zero problems no matter which of the 3 you buy it from.
You get Linux either way
I thought you were comparing a V2x0 (SPARC) to the similarly equipped Dell, in which case its Solaris vs. Linux/NT... after reviewing details appears the V6x0 (topic of the article) line is also competatively priced with Dell (hence the confusion); in that case I would choose Sun in that case unless I wanted some other specialty hardware on the same P.O. Dell does a good job of letting you buy everything you ultimately want at the same time, and making sure it all works. But I would get the Sun just for the support otherwise.
Unless you want Solaris x86 in which case both you and I would agree the person is insane.
Heh... hehe... muwahahahaa. Made the mistake of letting a friend waste a partition to play with that once. Never again.
It's too slow for doing mathmatical simulations. MATLAB runs lethargically. Did I forget to mention the meager memory bandwidth? 75-MHz SDRAM? It's not so bad when you have upwards of 3 layers of cache, but christ.
Re: 72GB of space... local storage is important if you create lots of temporary files, for various reasons. I'm not advocating spreading your storage out across the network. It's also useful for the purpose of comparison (what do I get for my money). They couldn't spare two 72GB disks?
I think a few large companies (incl. ours) have already trusted some of their data and processing to penguin computing. I wouldn't put them at the same level as Dell, but their technical support is about 10 times more helpful.
You're right, I said Enterprise when I meant Fire. SPARCstation, Ultra, Enterprise, Fire, it's all bullshit marketing tripe. give me a break. And they do still configure and sell enterprise 4xx lines with big e.o.l. support notices.
Dell and Sun do come out about even on their servers. That said, I also don't like Dell's midrange offerings either. Their Poweredge servers are only worth getting in the 4 and 8-way configs.
There are cases when the midrange Sun and Dell equipment are neccessary, in which case the question becomes, what OE do you need.
Unfortunately, the Sun Fire 2x0 are the only SPARCs with DDR.
The 440 and 880s use quad-interleaved SDRAM at (!) 75 MHz. I think they could ramp up that a wee bit... considering the RAM itself costs an arm and a leg.
Right-o, because belief in the invisible man upstairs and everywhere is going to bring us into a new golden age. Exactly what knowledge does atheism suppress? It doesn't mean you can't read the bible.
neither Linux and Windows know how to fuck with your memory timings; that's the boot ROM's domain. They'd have to have motherboard specific code to manage that. If any OS is liable to adjust memory timings, it's Windows, with whatever crappy mobo drivers they bundled with your purple monster.
but you have to buy 60% more to get the same performance scaling, then I think it's a reasonable inefficiency to live with.
Latency is a different beast, but the Opteron is looking might delicious in this area right about now. We've got some test systems coming in soon so we can compare and contrast.
While it is a very cool system... (incl. the 4 network interfaces), 1 GHz UltraSparc IIIis are slow, and they don't have the extra benefit of tons of cache compared to the regular US3. The RAM is only SDRAM (still), and 72GB of space is paltry.
So, if you absolutely need a SPARCv9 architecture rackmount, this is the way to go. But featurewise it falls short of say an Altus 140 from Penguin Computing, or even a 1000E if you want 64-bit. And Peng. Comp. is expensive as far as that kind of thing goes.
That being said, the small Enterprises are quite cool, but they aren't as cost effective. It helps if your organization has a pre-existing agreement, and can get you a break.
That's right, it's the fuck-you cyclical redundancy check. It makes sure you're legit by fucking you in the ass, and then taking a spectral fingerprint of the resulting high-pitched yelp.
I used to think linux wouldn't be a good choice for my multimedia cravings. Then I found the holy grail....mplayer
If you have mplayer, then you have an entertainment center. You have a VHS and DVD player and ripper. You have a DivX, 3viX, and XviD encoder. etc.etc.
It is quite impressive.
Of course, the gas plasma display will be supported if it's DVI. Your all-in-blunder is supported by gatos, but unfortunately the Acoustic Edge will never be supported because Phillips==ghey and they don't want their precious (crappy sounding) QSound IP to get out in the open.
Right, they aren't. But you could market an FPGA containing a bunch of configurable image processing and DSP cores as a GPU provided you've got the right magic interface, software, packaging. A driver might be responsible for reconfiguring it to respond to the rendering load.
Call it NV50, and Anandtech will call it a GPU. Then there's no argument.
You could spend $400 for a new video card, or $400 to buy a motherboard an additional CPU (I assume you add the magic trace to the existing one).
Didn't read the article, but it doesn't matter.
on
Future of 3d Graphics
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
You keep hearing this logic every once in awhile.
Look, for the same price of a $400 graphics engine you can get yourself a dual CPU machine, a cheap graphic card with AGP, and do it in "software" with about the same efficiency, if you know what you're doing.
Because the extra CPU isn't inheritly multi-core like most modern GPUs, you need to compensate with a higher clock speed, and use whatever multimedia instructions it has to the fullest extent (ie altivec, mmx2, etc.)
But of course, the GPU is better suited to the actual drudge work of getting your screen to light up. If there's stuff to be computed and forgotten by it (i.e. particle physics), its probably better left decoupled to exploit parallism in that abstraction.
As you get to a limit in computational efficiency, you start adding on DSPs, and this is where FPGAs and grid computing start looking interesting.
So it shouldn't be considered suprising that these companies will say that; they can see that trend and they want a piece of that aux. processor/FPGA action. The nForce is a step in the right direction. They don't want to be relegated to just making graphic accelerators when they have the unique position to make pluggable accelerators for anything.
But to plan on packaging an FPGA designed for game augmentation and calling it a uber-cool GPU is just a marketing trick. This technology is becoming commercial viable, it seems.
XviD on a PIII 1.2GHz encodes (striaght from the VOBs) at 1/3rd realtime in 2-pass mode. While it's not blistering fast, its easy to queue up overnight.
The assumption I thought they were making is that Google hasn't improved on page-rank since 1998, which is what they based their comparison (25-300% speedup) upon.
I further speculated google may have already discovered some of these techniques independantly, perhaps by reading the same papers these students did.
The other stuff was a pie-in-the-sky idea of mine that I thought was a way of combining both techniques, which I suspected google may have used part of. But that's just my opinion, I'm probably wrong. ^o^
Slashdot Mirror
It's got unlink AND rename. Booyah... /usr/src/linux/arch/i386/kernel/entry.S | grep \\\(unlink\\\|rename\\\)
.long SYMBOL_NAME(sys_unlink) /* 10 */ .long SYMBOL_NAME(sys_rename)
::shrugs::
# cat -n
444
472
Syscalls 10 and 38.
The use of *nix became prevelant when it became important to describe the platform of software ran on not just "Unix (TM)" but also Linux, Minix, and Irix. (for example, Apache).
It strengthens' the Open Groups case that in fact people distinguish Unix vs. unix or unix-like OSs.
I think Apple should pay up; it's not much money to pay vs. having to change all their marketing material to soften the varying degrees "OSX is Unix" claims.
(as an aside, is anyone aware of any efforts by RedHat or United Linux to pursue a Unix cert from the OpenGroup recently? Many software vendors say Unix and mean Linux these days; someone has got to step up and make it official, to take one for the team, so to speak.)
I use it to scan whole servers in a SCIF, where it's a requirement (albeit somewhat ham-fisted)
:-)
It takes like 20-30 minutes to scan 4 gigs of operating system and home directory data a day. This is on not-special Sun Ultras and Athlons.
Scanning single attachments could take milliseconds, and if you get less than 1 per second, I think your mail server will survive!
Their lead developers left; Microsoft picked up the pieces and the IP. I'm sure you can google for the details.
You can have:
a) webshield proxy server
b) email SMTP gateway filter
c) command line scanner (uses same DAT files as personal/enterprise version for windows)
The command line scanner is VERY flexible, like the "find" command.
http://www.mcafeeb2b.com/products/virusscan-cl/def ault-virusscan-cl.asp
This can be combined with qmail's filters to scan individual mails as they enter the queuing system, even if it isn't exactly a "mail scanner".
What's nice is this product provides essentially free updates (via ftp://ftp.mcafee.com).
Such is the flexibiltiy of unix, no?
[n/t]
That's quite a clever signature, jinxie. The irony is not wasted.
...no child will "stumble" onto a BDSM castration mpeg, or some guy getting it on with a donkey.
That stuff costs money to obtain, or you have to know someone who has it. If they find it, it's because they wanted to. That kind of weird shit doesn't fall in your lap.
My baby brother uses the net unsupervised, and unfiltered, and he mostly uses kazaa to download Simpsons episodes and visits Strongbad.
I've checked... (logs).
Sometimes there aren't monsters under the bed.
Linux support on laptops was pretty bad 3 years ago. Today, we have RedHat 9 on the Thinkpad X30. Works like a charm. Only thing missing is undocking... but I like having two batteries so it's usually a non-issue anyway! If you stay away from the absolutely latest-models, you are likely to get decent laptop support with modern distros, esp. mandrake and redhat. Dell Latitudes, Toshibas, and thinkpads are all pretty well understood cases.
Let's say the OS takes 3 gigs, your home directory is 1. Do you REALLY think something is going to create 68 gigs of temporary files. Use your brain.
;P Let's not degrade to name calling.
I've been around engineers for too long. They tend to assume there'll be 40+GB of space to untar a AIT3 tape or whatever before they start chewing on it.
Go see what a 72 gig SCSI disk costs and you'll see why they can "spare" you one hippie.
A 73GB 10K RPM low-profile SCSI drive costs $175 in bulk, $350 retail (Fujitsu, Seagate, Maxtor, take your pick). If you get a 36 gig 10K RPM from Sun it's $480. The manufacturer varies, depending on market prices. How can they justify that?
And I'm not a hippie, faggot.
More Slashdot speculation. I think, maybe, perhaps or things stated as fact when they are, in fact, not.
The only large company that I know for sure is VeriSign. They've also got contracts with more than 80 of the Fortune 100. There is a large presence in the FBI and the Pentagon, and it is popular with the DoD in general (that's how I found out about them). Also, I understand something like 30-40% of the US internet backbone uses their servers (for what specific purposes I know not, as they don't make for cost-effective routers).
Hah, great choice. Shitty hardware and good support or good hardware and shitty support. You know with Sun you get both good hardware and good support, but I'm sure you would rather choose the half assed solution.
I agree. Sun's hardware is rock solid (but arguably too conservative), and the support is decent.
That being said, I haven't had any issues with any of the penguin boxes either. My only hardware-related snafu was when some memory went bad, but they shipped the replacement that same day. I don't think I've even had a faulty Dell. Out of the 30-someodd I've owned or been responsible for, I've never had to RMA or call the help line. In fact, we had an issue with Sun trying to add a DVD-ROM which turned out to be due to a bad cable issue. That was the most difficult-to-resolve problem that I faced with all THREE vendors. So by what evidence do you claim that ANY of the aforementioned hardware is shitty?
If you buy a "server-class" x86 box and don't fuck with it, keep it air-conditioned, etc., you should have zero problems no matter which of the 3 you buy it from.
You get Linux either way
I thought you were comparing a V2x0 (SPARC) to the similarly equipped Dell, in which case its Solaris vs. Linux/NT... after reviewing details appears the V6x0 (topic of the article) line is also competatively priced with Dell (hence the confusion); in that case I would choose Sun in that case unless I wanted some other specialty hardware on the same P.O. Dell does a good job of letting you buy everything you ultimately want at the same time, and making sure it all works. But I would get the Sun just for the support otherwise.
Unless you want Solaris x86 in which case both you and I would agree the person is insane.
Heh... hehe... muwahahahaa. Made the mistake of letting a friend waste a partition to play with that once. Never again.
It's too slow for doing mathmatical simulations. MATLAB runs lethargically.
Did I forget to mention the meager memory bandwidth? 75-MHz SDRAM? It's not so bad when you have upwards of 3 layers of cache, but christ.
Re: 72GB of space... local storage is important if you create lots of temporary files, for various reasons. I'm not advocating spreading your storage out across the network. It's also useful for the purpose of comparison (what do I get for my money). They couldn't spare two 72GB disks?
I think a few large companies (incl. ours) have already trusted some of their data and processing to penguin computing. I wouldn't put them at the same level as Dell, but their technical support is about 10 times more helpful.
You're right, I said Enterprise when I meant Fire. SPARCstation, Ultra, Enterprise, Fire, it's all bullshit marketing tripe. give me a break. And they do still configure and sell enterprise 4xx lines with big e.o.l. support notices.
Dell and Sun do come out about even on their servers. That said, I also don't like Dell's midrange offerings either. Their Poweredge servers are only worth getting in the 4 and 8-way configs.
There are cases when the midrange Sun and Dell equipment are neccessary, in which case the question becomes, what OE do you need.
Unfortunately, the Sun Fire 2x0 are the only SPARCs with DDR.
The 440 and 880s use quad-interleaved SDRAM at (!) 75 MHz. I think they could ramp up that a wee bit... considering the RAM itself costs an arm and a leg.
Don't you mean HULAGHUGLAHULAGHGLUH my god how do you suck 10 cocks at once??!?!
Right-o, because belief in the invisible man upstairs and everywhere is going to bring us into a new golden age. Exactly what knowledge does atheism suppress? It doesn't mean you can't read the bible.
Feh indeed.
neither Linux and Windows know how to fuck with your memory timings; that's the boot ROM's domain. They'd have to have motherboard specific code to manage that. If any OS is liable to adjust memory timings, it's Windows, with whatever crappy mobo drivers they bundled with your purple monster.
but you have to buy 60% more to get the same performance scaling, then I think it's a reasonable inefficiency to live with.
Latency is a different beast, but the Opteron is looking might delicious in this area right about now. We've got some test systems coming in soon so we can compare and contrast.
While it is a very cool system... (incl. the 4 network interfaces), 1 GHz UltraSparc IIIis are slow, and they don't have the extra benefit of tons of cache compared to the regular US3. The RAM is only SDRAM (still), and 72GB of space is paltry.
So, if you absolutely need a SPARCv9 architecture rackmount, this is the way to go. But featurewise it falls short of say an Altus 140 from Penguin Computing, or even a 1000E if you want 64-bit. And Peng. Comp. is expensive as far as that kind of thing goes.
That being said, the small Enterprises are quite cool, but they aren't as cost effective. It helps if your organization has a pre-existing agreement, and can get you a break.
That's right, it's the fuck-you cyclical redundancy check. It makes sure you're legit by fucking you in the ass, and then taking a spectral fingerprint of the resulting high-pitched yelp.
Then they take your lunch money.
I used to think linux wouldn't be a good choice for my multimedia cravings. Then I found the holy grail....mplayer
If you have mplayer, then you have an entertainment center. You have a VHS and DVD player and ripper. You have a DivX, 3viX, and XviD encoder. etc.etc.
It is quite impressive.
Of course, the gas plasma display will be supported if it's DVI. Your all-in-blunder is supported by gatos, but unfortunately the Acoustic Edge will never be supported because Phillips==ghey and they don't want their precious (crappy sounding) QSound IP to get out in the open.
Right, they aren't. But you could market an FPGA containing a bunch of configurable image processing and DSP cores as a GPU provided you've got the right magic interface, software, packaging. A driver might be responsible for reconfiguring it to respond to the rendering load.
Call it NV50, and Anandtech will call it a GPU. Then there's no argument.
You could spend $400 for a new video card, or $400 to buy a motherboard an additional CPU (I assume you add the magic trace to the existing one).
You keep hearing this logic every once in awhile.
Look, for the same price of a $400 graphics engine you can get yourself a dual CPU machine, a cheap graphic card with AGP, and do it in "software" with about the same efficiency, if you know what you're doing.
Because the extra CPU isn't inheritly multi-core like most modern GPUs, you need to compensate with a higher clock speed, and use whatever multimedia instructions it has to the fullest extent (ie altivec, mmx2, etc.)
But of course, the GPU is better suited to the actual drudge work of getting your screen to light up. If there's stuff to be computed and forgotten by it (i.e. particle physics), its probably better left decoupled to exploit parallism in that abstraction.
As you get to a limit in computational efficiency, you start adding on DSPs, and this is where FPGAs and grid computing start looking interesting.
So it shouldn't be considered suprising that these companies will say that; they can see that trend and they want a piece of that aux. processor/FPGA action. The nForce is a step in the right direction. They don't want to be relegated to just making graphic accelerators when they have the unique position to make pluggable accelerators for anything.
But to plan on packaging an FPGA designed for game augmentation and calling it a uber-cool GPU is just a marketing trick. This technology is becoming commercial viable, it seems.
XviD on a PIII 1.2GHz encodes (striaght from the VOBs) at 1/3rd realtime in 2-pass mode. While it's not blistering fast, its easy to queue up overnight.
The assumption I thought they were making is that Google hasn't improved on page-rank since 1998, which is what they based their comparison (25-300% speedup) upon.
I further speculated google may have already discovered some of these techniques independantly, perhaps by reading the same papers these students did.
The other stuff was a pie-in-the-sky idea of mine that I thought was a way of combining both techniques, which I suspected google may have used part of. But that's just my opinion, I'm probably wrong. ^o^