They need to know what works, and what works now, and what will continue to work in the future.
Aw, hell no. They need to know which vendor is going to take them out to play golf and ply them with meaningless phrases like "industry leader", and "world class", and "enterprise level", and which choice is going to sound best to upper management. "But FooCorp's BarServer is used by 99% of the Fortune 500! It's the only enterprise-level scalable solution, with support for industry standards! Why, Quux Inc does a zillion-dollar-a-year online business based on this platform!"
I wish I were joking, but this really does seem to be the way it is at all too many places, not that I would have any direct experience with THAT *cough*ATGDynamo*cough*.
Sun's pissed that they can't run multiple instances of an OS on their E15K systems.
They might disagree with you. I believe they call it "Dynamic System Domains". I don't think you can run multiple/different/ OSes on them, but I'd be really curious to know how many people care to do that IRL.
From a Linux advocates point of view, there isn't much difference between Sun and Microsoft.
I'm not so sure about that. True, Sun would probably just as happily turn around and bash Linux if they thought that would profit them, but that's not all there is to it. A Solaris shop is probably more likely to support Linux at some point than a Windows shop is, it being a bit less of a switch. Also, it's in Linux suporters' best interest to support the underdog - the more of the market (especially the server market) that MS has, the more they'll control the underlying protocols. Keeping the market fragmented can help keep protocols open, which in turn benefits the underdogs.
A-men. I loved my Tinkertoys, and Erector sets, and Lego Technics, and Capsela! Loved Capsela. Mostly because it was about the only electrical toy you could play with in the bathtub, even though the capsules and connectors tended to get friction-welded together over time.:-) Flunked out of engineering school anyway, though.
"Blame" is what people call "responsibility" when they're trying to make it look bad. Sure, fix the problem at hand. AND THEN FIGURE OUT WHY IT HAPPENED AND MAKE SURE IT DOESN'T HAPPEN AGAIN! Too often I see the immediate problem fixed, and then when I ask why it happened and whether it's going to happen again, I get a lot of mumbling and hand-waving.
(I was going to make this a root-level comment, but it's somewhat relevant to this...)
I'll be interested in Intel chips when Intel stops skimping on cache memory. Intel says the new Xeons have a whopping !!!512K!!! L2 cache! Wow!
Actually, they should be ashamed to sell that as suitable for heavy duty. This is freaking 2002, not 1992. An UltraSparc III has 8 MB of L2 cache. A MIPS R12000 has (or can have) the same amount. IBM Power4s have similar amounts. (USIII has 32K instruction and 64K data L1 cache, and R12k has 32K of L1, for the sake of comparison.)
I admit I don't have any hard data to back this up, but it's my suspicion that it's in large part the large L2 cache that causes Sparcs to thrash Intels at some tasks. There's a good page on some processor design considerations at SETI@UNC.
*sigh* Not this stupid argument again...I should really learn to stop responding to people who think that they and only they have all the facts on the case.
In the McDonalds' case it was too hot - McDonalds served coffee at between 180 and 190 degrees (home coffee is about 135 degrees)* which is too hot for human consumption.
If your coffee at home is 135F, you're making it wrong. The water should be at 195F when it hits the grounds (source: Uncommon Grounds by Mark Pendergrast). Some sources say even higher. It then has to sit there for a couple minutes, but it's still going to be damn hot when it's done.
Coffee is too hot for human consumption when it's freshly made. That's in the nature of coffee. Opening it over your lap falls damn close to the "don't do that, then" category. Do you also complain that your new kitchen knives are sharp enough to cut you and should have been sold pre-dulled?
Over 700 incidents had been reported to McDonalds relating to burns from coffee that was too hot.
Out of how many billion cups of coffee served at thousands of locations over 50-odd years? If the safety nazis had their way, the entire world would be padded so we couldn't bump our widdle shins on anything. The world is dangerous; that's in its nature too. People should accept that fact instead of looking for somebody to blame every time they get hurt.
...even when subsidized, it's still the most expensive way to boil water.
That could well be because there isn't anything like the investment in nuclear infrastructure that there is in most other energy sources. For example, camel dung is used as a fuel by lots of people around the world, but I'll bet you $50 boiling water with camel dung in New York City would be significantly more expensive than using any more common power source, simply because there isn't a large market for it, or a distribution system in place.
Even a small amount of radioactivity, as seen in this story...
The story didn't say how much radioactivity there was. Your prejudices are showing.
I am very skeptical that a SCSI chipset costs $100 more to produce than an IDE chipset.
Of course it doesn't. But it goes like this: Because SCSI is more expensive, so it tends to be bought by businesses, serious enthusiasts, and others with deep pockets. Because SCSI tends to be bought by those with deep pockets, it's priced higher.
I'm not saying there are/no/ real differences between high-end SCSI and IDE - check out some 15k RPM FCAL drives some time - but a lot of it is simply "what the market will bear."
Those blocks would, in general, still be on your local hard drive...
Doesn't this kind of defeat the whole purpose of the scheme? If your files are on your local hard drive, and everybody else's files are on/their/ local hard drive... So they're not/necessarily/ there, perhaps. So it only/maybe/ adds another 30s to Word's startup time, and still imposes a high storage overhead (50k doc x 5 copies = 250k, for example).
Pretty much true. I'm lucky to still have a job, but a lot of good people I know are unemployed. And yet when my current company was reviewing resumes recently, easily 3/4 of what we saw was crap, completely unsuited for the position. I'm not trying to downplay people's suffering here, but they have to realize that the tech job market was severely inflated, and now it's crashed, and so it's glutted with people who think it should be easy to get a job in the field.
You need to read the essay "Who is Daniel Dennett?", by the American philosopher Daniel Dennett. It's a very funny and engaging story, while still raising serious philosophical points.
Damn straight! Just today I warned some of my coworkers (whom I'd caught running inadvisable commands) that if they horked with one of my hosts, I would beat them bloody with a power cable. Not only did no one raise an eyebrow, they rushed to assure me that they'd never touch them again...
Some of what you said is true, and some isn't. There isn't just one company making Sun parts - there's also Fujitsu and Tatung. (OK, if we're being pedantic, only Sun makes "Sun parts", but "Sun compatible", anyway.) A lot of the parts that go into a Sun are commodity anyway - they don't make their own hard drives, for example.
Another factor in pricing is simply "what will the market bear?" People won't pay $10k for a desktop machine, but companies will pay $30k for a small server that's hardly more capable than the desktop, because they can. And the producers then have little incentive to lower prices, because everybody's paying that much already... Then too, there's the issue that price can affect people's impression of quality - everybody like to think they're getting their money's worth, and surely that $30k server must be better than that desktop machine...
Sun hardware really is better than cheap Intel hardware, no doubt about it. You're not going to get four processors, hot-swappable drives, fault isolation, LOM, etc. on a budget. A lot of these factors are becoming available on Intel-based servers, but guess what? You end up paying almost as much for them as you would for a Sparc server.
A thought I just had: perhaps SGI is staying current in the workstation market in order to maintain its visibility and keep others out. If they don't make new workstations, they may lose existing desktop spots to other manufacturers - the way things are going today, probably Wintel. And once you've got Wintel on the desktop and a Wintel vendor whispering in the ears of the PHBs... By making a SGI on the desktop visible and feasible, they keep the all-SGI shop feasible.
Re:And the disturbing thought is...
on
EverQuest and the UN
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Interesting questions you raise. I'd suggest that one of two things will happen: either
a) the ops will introduce some kind of in-game "need", or
b) they won't, in which case the economy becomes driven by non-need items/services...but...I'd point out that this has already occurred to a large degree in the real world. Everywhere, even in countries which aren't "rich" by Western standards, people spend a lot of money on things that aren't necessities. Look at how much gets spent on Hollywood, after all. Luxury is capable of sustaining quite an economy by itself. (But then you need things to make the luxury items...)
Another point to keep in mind is that even if food and clothing and shelter rain from the sky, there's always a shortage of something. Most interestingly, there's always a shortage of you. You can't be everywhere, see everything, and do everything, and neither can anyone else - so you better run and see Eric Clapton now, because there are only so many seats, and he and you won't live forever...
Hey, Jeopardy looks like a PhD thesis defense compared to some of the newer game shows on TV. I don't own a TV anymore, but last night I was over at my girlfriend's, and I figured I'd watch a bit of "The Chamber". It was disgusting. Not so much the "watch the wretched sod in the chamber suffer" part as the questions. The questions were pukable. The entire show was one long questionnaire on how well you absorbed advertising. Actual questions: Who's been named as People magazine's "Sexiest Man Alive"? What flavor is added to Pepsi to make it Pepsi Twist? What fast-food chain uses Joe Schmoe's weight loss in its ad campaigns?
Now I feel nauseated that I've actually wasted brain cells on remembering this stuff.
Some Perl FAQs have mentioned using 'undump' to generate an executable of sorts from a Perl script - you write your script and make it dump core just as it begins, then undump it back into an executable - but this has always been deprecated, I think.
Gone forever (it seems) are the days when people were respected for the work that was done, as opposed to the bottom line, cut-throat corporate world we are living in now.
Let's see, when was that? Sometime back before we got kicked out of the Garden of Eden, I think. Don't kid yourself: some people have always been rotten to each other, and some people are still concerned about "more than the bottom line."
Slashdot Mirror
I wish I were joking, but this really does seem to be the way it is at all too many places, not that I would have any direct experience with THAT *cough*ATGDynamo*cough*.
A-men. I loved my Tinkertoys, and Erector sets, and Lego Technics, and Capsela! Loved Capsela. Mostly because it was about the only electrical toy you could play with in the bathtub, even though the capsules and connectors tended to get friction-welded together over time. :-) Flunked out of engineering school anyway, though.
"Blame" is what people call "responsibility" when they're trying to make it look bad. Sure, fix the problem at hand. AND THEN FIGURE OUT WHY IT HAPPENED AND MAKE SURE IT DOESN'T HAPPEN AGAIN! Too often I see the immediate problem fixed, and then when I ask why it happened and whether it's going to happen again, I get a lot of mumbling and hand-waving.
Actually, they should be ashamed to sell that as suitable for heavy duty. This is freaking 2002, not 1992. An UltraSparc III has 8 MB of L2 cache. A MIPS R12000 has (or can have) the same amount. IBM Power4s have similar amounts. (USIII has 32K instruction and 64K data L1 cache, and R12k has 32K of L1, for the sake of comparison.)
I admit I don't have any hard data to back this up, but it's my suspicion that it's in large part the large L2 cache that causes Sparcs to thrash Intels at some tasks. There's a good page on some processor design considerations at SETI@UNC.
Coffee is too hot for human consumption when it's freshly made. That's in the nature of coffee. Opening it over your lap falls damn close to the "don't do that, then" category. Do you also complain that your new kitchen knives are sharp enough to cut you and should have been sold pre-dulled?
Out of how many billion cups of coffee served at thousands of locations over 50-odd years? If the safety nazis had their way, the entire world would be padded so we couldn't bump our widdle shins on anything. The world is dangerous; that's in its nature too. People should accept that fact instead of looking for somebody to blame every time they get hurt.I'm not saying there are /no/ real differences between high-end SCSI and IDE - check out some 15k RPM FCAL drives some time - but a lot of it is simply "what the market will bear."
Pretty much true. I'm lucky to still have a job, but a lot of good people I know are unemployed. And yet when my current company was reviewing resumes recently, easily 3/4 of what we saw was crap, completely unsuited for the position. I'm not trying to downplay people's suffering here, but they have to realize that the tech job market was severely inflated, and now it's crashed, and so it's glutted with people who think it should be easy to get a job in the field.
You need to read the essay "Who is Daniel Dennett?", by the American philosopher Daniel Dennett. It's a very funny and engaging story, while still raising serious philosophical points.
Hey, it's not entirely implausible. Congress still has the power to issue "letters of marque", which are basically licenses to be a pirate.
Damn straight! Just today I warned some of my coworkers (whom I'd caught running inadvisable commands) that if they horked with one of my hosts, I would beat them bloody with a power cable. Not only did no one raise an eyebrow, they rushed to assure me that they'd never touch them again...
Jesus...I wouldn't have believed it, but here's another article on it. IMO, these people (the chefs) are setting themselves up for lawsuits bigtime. Tobacco is toxic.
Another factor in pricing is simply "what will the market bear?" People won't pay $10k for a desktop machine, but companies will pay $30k for a small server that's hardly more capable than the desktop, because they can. And the producers then have little incentive to lower prices, because everybody's paying that much already... Then too, there's the issue that price can affect people's impression of quality - everybody like to think they're getting their money's worth, and surely that $30k server must be better than that desktop machine...
Sun hardware really is better than cheap Intel hardware, no doubt about it. You're not going to get four processors, hot-swappable drives, fault isolation, LOM, etc. on a budget. A lot of these factors are becoming available on Intel-based servers, but guess what? You end up paying almost as much for them as you would for a Sparc server.
Search the web for "texas old cannon flag come and take it". A bit later than the American Revolution, but you'll get the idea.
a) the ops will introduce some kind of in-game "need", or
b) they won't, in which case the economy becomes driven by non-need items/services...but...I'd point out that this has already occurred to a large degree in the real world. Everywhere, even in countries which aren't "rich" by Western standards, people spend a lot of money on things that aren't necessities. Look at how much gets spent on Hollywood, after all. Luxury is capable of sustaining quite an economy by itself. (But then you need things to make the luxury items...)
Another point to keep in mind is that even if food and clothing and shelter rain from the sky, there's always a shortage of something. Most interestingly, there's always a shortage of you. You can't be everywhere, see everything, and do everything, and neither can anyone else - so you better run and see Eric Clapton now, because there are only so many seats, and he and you won't live forever...
Now I feel nauseated that I've actually wasted brain cells on remembering this stuff.
Some Perl FAQs have mentioned using 'undump' to generate an executable of sorts from a Perl script - you write your script and make it dump core just as it begins, then undump it back into an executable - but this has always been deprecated, I think.