Unfortunately, free Solaris is gratis and not libre. Sigh. I just hope that Sun can wake up and understand that the gratis part is just a pleasant attribute and nothing more, while Open Source or Software Libre is everything. Congrats to GMontag for finding a way to get an important story posted!
It seems intuitively obvious that parallel communications should be faster than serial, but actual real-world implementations are showing that the opposite is the case.
This is undoubtably a gross oversimplification, but parallel communication systems must ensure that the signals from the many channels arrive synchronized, whereas serial systems get this for free. Maybe some EE's can provide a more rigorous explanation of this, or at least some good links.
Single mode fibre optics, where there is one and only one path along the fibre, can provide throughput which is not physically achievable by other means. C Novom Godom.
Intel discussed SIO at Linux University Road Tour
on
Future I/O Standards
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· Score: 1
Two months ago I attended the Linux University Road Tour, sponsored by Silicon Graphics. One of the presentations was made by Intel, who emphasized their support for Linux, and presented a road map for the next few years. The Intel presenter briefly spoke about SIOSystem I/O, showing a slide which showed how SIO was at least partly inspired by the IBM System/390 I/O architecture.
As we all know, processor speeds have been going through the roof year after year. I/O performance, on the other hand, has improved at a slower pace. Perhaps now we can look forward to an increased rate of I/O performance improvement.
By the way, Intel said that 2003 would be the earliest that a "cheap" version of the Itanium would be available, cheap enough for desktop or home use. Deerfield is the name of this home version of Itanium. 2003 is a long way off; perhaps that will give Compaq enough time to produce an equivalent Alpha.
If you live in an area where it snows a lot, why run around with bald tires? A lot of idiots do, but that's because they're idiots. There really are alternatives to clunkers which shouldn't be on the road.
People like Bruce probably drive around in 4-wheel drives with studded snow tires in the winter, and smile knowingly as they drive by someone who's muffler side up after a little black ice and too much speed.
If your data center is running a POS (Persnickety Operating System), then maybe you are justified by staying home, all curled up on a snowy day. Stay home, read a book. For punishment, I recommend "Under the Radar".
I manage the computer control system for a nuclear research facility. Needless to say, our systems will be UP tonight and this weekend. They have been thoroughly checked out, and we have complete confidence in them.
On the other hand, the administrative systems (e-mail, file and print serving) were taken down by the administrative IS managers. Why? Because "they want to be safe". Well, I believe that e-mail is a mission-critical function, but the servers are down nonetheless.
There is one file and print server on our site which will remain up, but only because its my box and it doesn't belong to the "Lets reboot and see if that fixes it" group. That one lone administrative server is running RH 6.0 and Samba. And, of course, I can still send out e-mail from any of my Linux boxen. I had to re-direct my incoming worksite e-mail to my commercial ISP (fire-wall issues made it hard to re-direct to my personal Linux box).
I'm looking forward to the New Year, when I can get more customers to say "I didn't know that there was a NT Server 4.2", which is how the Samba Server appears.
I just got off the phone with my parents, who live in St. Petersburg, and they are unhappy, worried, and disappointed with the Yeltsin resignation. Although Putin is currently very popular, he is also an unknown.
I had to address a Y2K-like problem back in 1997. I had inherited a large custom software system written in the early eighties for a ten-year project. The project went past the projected end of life, and in early 1997, I was horrified to discover that the system would stop working on 27 November 1997 at 1600. The system timestamps used two 16-bit signed integers. One of the signed shorts contained the number of 8-hour time periods since 0000 on 1 January 1968 (this was not a Unix system). Well, the number of 1/3 days since 1 Jan 1968 becomes greater than 31767 on the meltdown date. And, it was not a simple matter of making all the time stamps unsigned integers, since a lot of legacy code assumed that the data could only be signed data. Needless to say, I had some work to do in the summer of '97.
The point of the above discussion is that even "sophisticated" systems (it was all written in C), can have Y2K-type bugs, especially if the original programmers wrote with the idea that "this software will only be used for a few years".
By the way, the solution I chose was extremely inelegant, but it works. The system times were set back 16 years. This gets the leap year right, but the day of the week is off by one. But none of the applications cared about the day of the week, except that the automatic spring-ahead and fall-back for savings and standard time occur on Saturday when the systems think its Sunday. The applications were modified to add back the 16 years appropriately. And since these old OS's are NOT Y2K ready, my systems will gracefully transition from 1983 to 1984 tomorrow night, just like they did 16 years ago. I chose 16 years, versus 28 years for a "time bridge" (28 years would get the day of the week right), because the legacy systems also interface to some old 486 PC's running DOS 5.0, and their BIOS cannot be set back before 1980, nor can they go beyond 12/31/1999. So, these systems are also running 16 years in the past. And no, these 486's cannot be simply upgraded for a bunch of other legacy hardware issues.
The only systems which I have running without the time bridge kludge are my Linux boxes, some of which have been running almost continuously since 1994 with the 0.99 (now 2.2.10) kernel.
Slashdot Mirror
Blue Screen of Death and DLL Hell!
Unfortunately, free Solaris is gratis and not libre. Sigh.
I just hope that Sun can wake up and understand that the gratis part is just a pleasant attribute and nothing more, while Open Source or Software Libre is everything.
Congrats to GMontag for finding a way to get an important story posted!
Al Gore's website at www.algore2000.com
is running Apache/1.3.9 (Unix) secured_by_Raven/1.4.2 PHP/4.0b3 on Linux.
Bill Bradley's website at www.billbradley.com
is running Apache/1.3.9 (Unix) mod_perl/1.21 on Solaris.
George W. Bush's website at www.georgewbush.com
is running Microsoft-IIS/4.0 on NT4 or Windows 98
John McCain's website at www.mccain2000.com
is running Rapidsite/Apa-1.3.4 FrontPage on IRIX
This is undoubtably a gross oversimplification, but parallel communication systems must ensure that the signals from the many channels arrive synchronized, whereas serial systems get this for free. Maybe some EE's can provide a more rigorous explanation of this, or at least some good links.
Single mode fibre optics, where there is one and only one path along the fibre, can provide throughput which is not physically achievable by other means. C Novom Godom.
As we all know, processor speeds have been going through the roof year after year. I/O performance, on the other hand, has improved at a slower pace. Perhaps now we can look forward to an increased rate of I/O performance improvement.
By the way, Intel said that 2003 would be the earliest that a "cheap" version of the Itanium would be available, cheap enough for desktop or home use. Deerfield is the name of this home version of Itanium. 2003 is a long way off; perhaps that will give Compaq enough time to produce an equivalent Alpha.
People like Bruce probably drive around in 4-wheel drives with studded snow tires in the winter, and smile knowingly as they drive by someone who's muffler side up after a little black ice and too much speed.
If your data center is running a POS (Persnickety Operating System), then maybe you are justified by staying home, all curled up on a snowy day. Stay home, read a book. For punishment, I recommend "Under the Radar".
On the other hand, the administrative systems (e-mail, file and print serving) were taken down by the administrative IS managers. Why? Because "they want to be safe". Well, I believe that e-mail is a mission-critical function, but the servers are down nonetheless.
There is one file and print server on our site which will remain up, but only because its my box and it doesn't belong to the "Lets reboot and see if that fixes it" group. That one lone administrative server is running RH 6.0 and Samba. And, of course, I can still send out e-mail from any of my Linux boxen. I had to re-direct my incoming worksite e-mail to my commercial ISP (fire-wall issues made it hard to re-direct to my personal Linux box).
I'm looking forward to the New Year, when I can get more customers to say "I didn't know that there was a NT Server 4.2", which is how the Samba Server appears.
Happy New Year to All, C Novom Godom!
I just got off the phone with my parents, who live in St. Petersburg, and they are unhappy, worried, and disappointed with the Yeltsin resignation. Although Putin is currently very popular, he is also an unknown.
The point of the above discussion is that even "sophisticated" systems (it was all written in C), can have Y2K-type bugs, especially if the original programmers wrote with the idea that "this software will only be used for a few years".
By the way, the solution I chose was extremely inelegant, but it works. The system times were set back 16 years. This gets the leap year right, but the day of the week is off by one. But none of the applications cared about the day of the week, except that the automatic spring-ahead and fall-back for savings and standard time occur on Saturday when the systems think its Sunday. The applications were modified to add back the 16 years appropriately. And since these old OS's are NOT Y2K ready, my systems will gracefully transition from 1983 to 1984 tomorrow night, just like they did 16 years ago. I chose 16 years, versus 28 years for a "time bridge" (28 years would get the day of the week right), because the legacy systems also interface to some old 486 PC's running DOS 5.0, and their BIOS cannot be set back before 1980, nor can they go beyond 12/31/1999. So, these systems are also running 16 years in the past. And no, these 486's cannot be simply upgraded for a bunch of other legacy hardware issues.
The only systems which I have running without the time bridge kludge are my Linux boxes, some of which have been running almost continuously since 1994 with the 0.99 (now 2.2.10) kernel.
1.5 Billion (with a B) transistors on a 127x127 mm Multi Chip Module! Wow!