So, what happens when that central framework/infrastructure is cracked? Now, all cracking attempts will redirect to that single point, and when (not if) it's breached, they'll now have access to ALL websites that are signed up to use that. How is that better?
This just reeks of desperation, just their way of trying to save face right before Apple kicks them off from the iPhone main screen. It doesn't matter, 99% of users won't even know about this app, they'll just go with Apple's Maps. Even if Google decides somehow magically to introduce turn by turn directions, it still won't matter. Google shot itself in the gut, and they know it. They could have at least kept feature parity with Android, but the fact that iOS Maps app was neglected for years only made Apple react more strongly. Now, Apple controls every main app on iOS (browser, music, maps, messaging). They control their destiny.
The PR2 robots are capable of performing critical tasks like cleaning rooms and bringing beer from a refrigerator.
Awesome. Didn't know beer is one of a senior's "critical tasks" in order to live. Heck, if it's Starbucks Frappucinno's, I need one NOW, not in 40 years.
Not really. What the XEN wiki is talking about is the virtualization technologies embedded in future processors. This technology is code-named "Vanderpool" for Intel processors, and "Pacifica" for AMD ones. In theory, the first processors with these capabilities will have hardware-level mechanisms to isolate, and work with, several virtual machines running simultaneously. In theory, this will also make them run much faster than is possible today (especially in Xen's case).
No, seriously. The best prize in there is that Home Office makeover, probably worth only around $1,000 to Microsoft, if that. Those $500 of MS software costs Microsoft exactly $0, while they probably get a huge discount on the IKEA furniture and on the $2,000 computer.
So, Microsoft tells me that the best they can come up with is this??!?!?! Heck, if I had their bank account, you can be sure I would be giving away at least $1M in cash as top prize. Now THAT would make people at least consider the move. Google is too ingrained in everyone's brain by now for a measly $3K prize to give it a second thought.
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Ok, I was dubious about this, but at least I said "What the heck, let's give it a try, see how good the search engine is". Getting a "Can't Connect" result in my first try completely confirmed my doubts. I'm not using MSN Search ever again.
As much fun as it is to watch a two-hour-long movie on a 480x272 screen on a battery that might die if you have to rewind too often, it's extremely aggravating to be pigeonholed into a single media viewing system.
These are UMD discs. There is no need to rewind. Of course, there IS the need to rotate the disc, and that still uses a lot of energy, but you definitely don't need to rewind it like a VHS tape. I suppose in the future this could change, if instead of discs we change to a solid-state format, like flash memory or something similar. But for the moment, we're still stuck with optical disks.
P.S. Maybe people would be nicer to prostitutes if they were FREE
That totally cracked me up. But seriously, people have got to lighten up. This is a GAME! Are SWAT unions protesting because they're the main target in CounterStrike? Is Germany demanding that the US stop selling Battlefield 2, because it depicts violence directed to German citizens? I would guess the answers would be "no", and "no".
Not to say that these games will ruffle some feathers (I read recently about some indians threatening to sue a game company because of its 1800's shooter), but they're not supposed to be representations of real life. Anyone stupid enough, or sick enough, to believe that and later try to do it in real life, ought to be locked up anyway.
Cane toads have been a problem in Australia for a very long time now....this is hardly news.
I was also wondering about this. I remember reading about the problem in a magazine about 20 years ago. Thanks for the clarification, and now that you just gave us the gist of the article, I won't have to spend energy reading it (although probably spent more writing this)... but whatever.
Marcos
Sure Oracle understands. They also understand that enterprises want support . Any company can pick up the source code to Berkeley DB and run with it. But that company cannot sell a commercial license, they can only provide support.
That's no problem. Heck, you can have the database source, use it for whatever you want, it's under a GPL license. And yes, if a company spends a couple of months with a team of developers, probably could also give decent support and/or custom development. The ONLY case where I couldn't do anything was if you specifically need a Commercial License, so that you won't have to give away your source code. But that's going to be less than 1% of the cases out there.
What CPU will it be? A 4Mhz 8080? Or a Pentium II? Or a 1.0Ghz UltraSparc V? Or is it only one kind of CPU? If so, which kind, what speed? And will the $1/hour/CPU increase as they upgrade to new processors, or will it stay constant?
Wouldn't it be better to offer, say, $1 for each million MIPS? Would be a lot more straightforward.
UNIX BusinessThe Company plans to release SCO OpenServer 6 on June 22, 2005 at an event for SCO's software and hardware partners, customers, and members of the media and analyst community in New York City.
SCO OpenServer 6 has been a multi-year, multi-million dollar development effort and is the most significant upgrade in the product's history. The product has been designed to provide customers with increased performance and security enhancements, access to numerous applications, and integrates many popular Open Source technologies. The product has been in active pre-release testing since the beginning of the year with many of the Company's leading SCO OpenServer customers and has been favorably received.
Interesting. It seems they somehow figured out that open source could help their pitiful piece of software. What now? Are they gonna sue themselves?
Amazing.
Right now, I label all the large emails I receive with a 'big' tag so that I can easily find them later.
That's a very nice idea. I think I'll go and do that myself.
I would also like a way to strip email of their attachments. There are many cases in which I want to store the email itself for historical and documentation reasons, since it may contain important information, but the attachments are (almost) always copied to my hard disk first. So I don't really need them clogging up my Gmail.
I've reported it already as a suggestion. I'd also love to see a "sort" button and a "size" column, ala Hotmail. If this thing ever goes public, they will have to implement it!
PDFs are the only way to create a completely encased document, and be able to save it, email it, archive it, etc. If you want, you can even encrypt the info so nobody else can modify it (although only with Acrobat 6.0 Security... before that, security was a joke). I prefer to read online stuff in HTML. But for whole documents or books, I much prefer PDF format.
Well, although there have been no specific comments on CPU frequency for dual cores, I'd bet that these babies are running somewhere between 1.8Ghz and 2.2Ghz. Remember, these dual core is from the very first batches of 90nm AMD products out there. It will take some months to squeeze all the bugs out.
OTOH, I fully expect a 2.4Ghz dual-core Opteron available for purchase by July 2005. Meanwhile, Intel has absolutely nothing to throw at this, except for vaporware.
I would love to have a pair of opterons, but the prices are ridiculous. I miss the old AMD...
That's like saying you'd love to have a new BMW 545i, but only want to pay $10K for it. These are one the best price/performance chips out there. Not to mention that they can run anything you're running right now (assuming you're on an x86 machine, as 99% of the population), unlike Itanium. Oh, and don't forget the NX-bit, which will block buffer-overflow viruses, when coupled with WindowsXP SP2.
Even then, if you really want to test dual-Opteron performance, you can get a couple of 240 Opterons for under $200 each. That's very inexpensive, less than the price of a SINGLE Xeon 3.0Ghz.
The budget is a few thousand euros, not over 10 000 (this is comparable in dollars). What would the best bang-for-the-euro be? Single-Dual? Xeon-Opteron-Itanium2? It must at least contain 4 gig of RAM.
Itanium servers are out of your league. A decent 1.5Ghz Itanium chip with 3Mb of on-die cache will set you back around $3,000. Not including memory, hard disks, etc. Just for ONE chip.
Xeon are way cheaper, but in most cases are more expensive than Opterons, do not scale very well when used in 2-way or higher configurations, and can only use 4Gb in flat mode. To access above 4Gb, you need to use PAE, which greatly hampers the performance (PAE is akin to the "high-memory" window trick they used back in the DOS days).
Opterons, on the other hand, are usually cheaper than Xeons, much cheaper than Itanium, almost always have better performance that Xeons, scale much better (in fact, a 2-way server performs better than a 1-way times 2!) and are only beat by Itanium in floating point performance, and then only barely.
There's another thing. Opterons are going to become dual-core in less than 2 years, with the same pinout as today. That means that if you have a lowly 2-way server that you're thinking about dumping, you can buy new dual-core Opterons and instantly get a 4-way out of your old 2-way server. Also, Opterons can access linearly up to 1Tb of physical RAM (that's 1,024 Gb), and up to 256Tb of virtual memory. And, finally, it's the only 64-bit processor you can get today that works with all your 32-bit x86 software. Finally, Opterons consume less energy than equivalent Xeons or Itaniums, and this becomes very important when thinking about A/C, UPS, standby power generators, etc.
I'd recommend you go with Opteron. Check out some well known tier-2 vendors such as Angstrom, Appro or Verari. They all make excellent quality Opteron servers and workstations. If you want brand names (and are willing to pay for it), check out Sun, Hewlett Packard or IBM for 2-way servers, or HP for a 4-way. IBM even has a dual Opteron workstation, if that's what you want.
Basically, they extended the x86 architecture again, like Intel themselves did 15 years ago when going from the 286 to the 386 architecture (16 bits to 32 bits). They maintained the current binary compatibility, while extending the registers to double their size, and make additional registers available. Intel completely ignored this possibility since going to Itanium was going to be "so much better". As we have seen, however, that was simply not true.
Of course, the whole exercise is moot if there is no software available to take advantage of the 64-bitness. Linux, as you mentioned, is already fully ported to 64-bits by several vendors (RedHat, Mandrake and SuSe), and you can compile your own 64-bit kernel yourself, should you so do desire, and if you have the proper hardware:-) Windows XP and 2003 will be available specifically for AMD64 (marketing name for x86-64 architecture) in late 2003. Betas have already been sighted in the wild.
So what's to like? Well, first of all, access to a contiguous 256TB virtual memory space, up to 1Tb of physical RAM, and obviously ability to process up to 64bits at a time inside the CPU. And, you can run all of your current software without a hassle. You can even install your current WindowsXP/Linux/whatever without a problem, and upgrade it later if you need to.
You can get the full gory details by downloading the Programmer's Manual for AMD64 from AMD's website.
Re:Not an Athlon64, but an Opteron
on
AMD64 Preview
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· Score: 2, Interesting
It's not vaporware. You can buy it from a lot of places on the Net. See here for one:
http://tinyurl.com/mhn9
You can also find it in PriceWatch, at least 5 vendors offer it currently.
Tyan and Arima already have dual motherboards out there. The Tyan K8W looks really nice for a workstation or high-end gaming machine. All 4P motherboards are not "available" per se, they're only should as complete systems. Check out Appro, Angstrom Computer or Racksaver for some 4P servers if you're looking for Opteron servers.
Totally agree with your post. I also believe you meant "multitasking" when you said "multi-processing".
The integrated memory controller should do away with any delay there could be because of doubling the registers. Remember that, even if you there are 32 registers at 64bits in the processor, this amounts to only 256 bytes. Granted, a context switch could be done every 10ms, but even then, during those 10ms, the processor has gone through 2 million clocks. This should be enough for copying 256 bytes around. Any additional delay by doubling the size of the registers should be negligible, IMHO.
Slashdot Mirror
So, what happens when that central framework/infrastructure is cracked? Now, all cracking attempts will redirect to that single point, and when (not if) it's breached, they'll now have access to ALL websites that are signed up to use that. How is that better?
(Oh, and it's "to," not "too," not to mention poor grammer
Seriously? You're either joking, or the worst "grammar-nazi/pedant/troll" in the world.
This just reeks of desperation, just their way of trying to save face right before Apple kicks them off from the iPhone main screen. It doesn't matter, 99% of users won't even know about this app, they'll just go with Apple's Maps. Even if Google decides somehow magically to introduce turn by turn directions, it still won't matter. Google shot itself in the gut, and they know it. They could have at least kept feature parity with Android, but the fact that iOS Maps app was neglected for years only made Apple react more strongly. Now, Apple controls every main app on iOS (browser, music, maps, messaging). They control their destiny.
The PR2 robots are capable of performing critical tasks like cleaning rooms and bringing beer from a refrigerator.
Awesome. Didn't know beer is one of a senior's "critical tasks" in order to live. Heck, if it's Starbucks Frappucinno's, I need one NOW, not in 40 years.
So, you'll probably need dual core to run it..
Not really. What the XEN wiki is talking about is the virtualization technologies embedded in future processors. This technology is code-named "Vanderpool" for Intel processors, and "Pacifica" for AMD ones. In theory, the first processors with these capabilities will have hardware-level mechanisms to isolate, and work with, several virtual machines running simultaneously. In theory, this will also make them run much faster than is possible today (especially in Xen's case).
Marcos
No, seriously. The best prize in there is that Home Office makeover, probably worth only around $1,000 to Microsoft, if that. Those $500 of MS software costs Microsoft exactly $0, while they probably get a huge discount on the IKEA furniture and on the $2,000 computer.
So, Microsoft tells me that the best they can come up with is this??!?!?! Heck, if I had their bank account, you can be sure I would be giving away at least $1M in cash as top prize. Now THAT would make people at least consider the move. Google is too ingrained in everyone's brain by now for a measly $3K prize to give it a second thought.
Slashdotted!!
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Ok, I was dubious about this, but at least I said "What the heck, let's give it a try, see how good the search engine is". Getting a "Can't Connect" result in my first try completely confirmed my doubts. I'm not using MSN Search ever again.
Marcos
As much fun as it is to watch a two-hour-long movie on a 480x272 screen on a battery that might die if you have to rewind too often, it's extremely aggravating to be pigeonholed into a single media viewing system.
These are UMD discs. There is no need to rewind. Of course, there IS the need to rotate the disc, and that still uses a lot of energy, but you definitely don't need to rewind it like a VHS tape. I suppose in the future this could change, if instead of discs we change to a solid-state format, like flash memory or something similar. But for the moment, we're still stuck with optical disks.
Marcos
P.S. Maybe people would be nicer to prostitutes if they were FREE
That totally cracked me up. But seriously, people have got to lighten up. This is a GAME! Are SWAT unions protesting because they're the main target in CounterStrike? Is Germany demanding that the US stop selling Battlefield 2, because it depicts violence directed to German citizens? I would guess the answers would be "no", and "no".
Not to say that these games will ruffle some feathers (I read recently about some indians threatening to sue a game company because of its 1800's shooter), but they're not supposed to be representations of real life. Anyone stupid enough, or sick enough, to believe that and later try to do it in real life, ought to be locked up anyway.
Marcos
Cane toads have been a problem in Australia for a very long time now....this is hardly news.
I was also wondering about this. I remember reading about the problem in a magazine about 20 years ago. Thanks for the clarification, and now that you just gave us the gist of the article, I won't have to spend energy reading it (although probably spent more writing this)... but whatever. Marcos
Sure Oracle understands. They also understand that enterprises want support . Any company can pick up the source code to Berkeley DB and run with it. But that company cannot sell a commercial license, they can only provide support.
That's no problem. Heck, you can have the database source, use it for whatever you want, it's under a GPL license. And yes, if a company spends a couple of months with a team of developers, probably could also give decent support and/or custom development. The ONLY case where I couldn't do anything was if you specifically need a Commercial License, so that you won't have to give away your source code. But that's going to be less than 1% of the cases out there.
Marcos
What CPU will it be? A 4Mhz 8080? Or a Pentium II? Or a 1.0Ghz UltraSparc V? Or is it only one kind of CPU? If so, which kind, what speed? And will the $1/hour/CPU increase as they upgrade to new processors, or will it stay constant?
Wouldn't it be better to offer, say, $1 for each million MIPS? Would be a lot more straightforward.
The three database servers are model DL 385, and will come with dual Athlons, 8GB of RAM, and 6x 146GB 15K RPM drives each.
AFAIK, the DL385 is a quad-Opteron model. Athlon64 is only for desktops. Just saying.
Marcos
Right now, I label all the large emails I receive with a 'big' tag so that I can easily find them later.
That's a very nice idea. I think I'll go and do that myself.
I would also like a way to strip email of their attachments. There are many cases in which I want to store the email itself for historical and documentation reasons, since it may contain important information, but the attachments are (almost) always copied to my hard disk first. So I don't really need them clogging up my Gmail.
I've reported it already as a suggestion. I'd also love to see a "sort" button and a "size" column, ala Hotmail. If this thing ever goes public, they will have to implement it!
PDFs are the only way to create a completely encased document, and be able to save it, email it, archive it, etc. If you want, you can even encrypt the info so nobody else can modify it (although only with Acrobat 6.0 Security... before that, security was a joke). I prefer to read online stuff in HTML. But for whole documents or books, I much prefer PDF format.
Well, although there have been no specific comments on CPU frequency for dual cores, I'd bet that these babies are running somewhere between 1.8Ghz and 2.2Ghz. Remember, these dual core is from the very first batches of 90nm AMD products out there. It will take some months to squeeze all the bugs out.
OTOH, I fully expect a 2.4Ghz dual-core Opteron available for purchase by July 2005. Meanwhile, Intel has absolutely nothing to throw at this, except for vaporware.
I'm also waiting for this. If enough of us pester Patrick about it, he just might consider an AMD64 distribution in the future. Maybe at 11.0?
I would love to have a pair of opterons, but the prices are ridiculous. I miss the old AMD...
That's like saying you'd love to have a new BMW 545i, but only want to pay $10K for it. These are one the best price/performance chips out there. Not to mention that they can run anything you're running right now (assuming you're on an x86 machine, as 99% of the population), unlike Itanium. Oh, and don't forget the NX-bit, which will block buffer-overflow viruses, when coupled with WindowsXP SP2.
Even then, if you really want to test dual-Opteron performance, you can get a couple of 240 Opterons for under $200 each. That's very inexpensive, less than the price of a SINGLE Xeon 3.0Ghz.
Marcos
The budget is a few thousand euros, not over 10 000 (this is comparable in dollars). What would the best bang-for-the-euro be? Single-Dual? Xeon-Opteron-Itanium2? It must at least contain 4 gig of RAM.
Itanium servers are out of your league. A decent 1.5Ghz Itanium chip with 3Mb of on-die cache will set you back around $3,000. Not including memory, hard disks, etc. Just for ONE chip.
Xeon are way cheaper, but in most cases are more expensive than Opterons, do not scale very well when used in 2-way or higher configurations, and can only use 4Gb in flat mode. To access above 4Gb, you need to use PAE, which greatly hampers the performance (PAE is akin to the "high-memory" window trick they used back in the DOS days).
Opterons, on the other hand, are usually cheaper than Xeons, much cheaper than Itanium, almost always have better performance that Xeons, scale much better (in fact, a 2-way server performs better than a 1-way times 2!) and are only beat by Itanium in floating point performance, and then only barely.
There's another thing. Opterons are going to become dual-core in less than 2 years, with the same pinout as today. That means that if you have a lowly 2-way server that you're thinking about dumping, you can buy new dual-core Opterons and instantly get a 4-way out of your old 2-way server. Also, Opterons can access linearly up to 1Tb of physical RAM (that's 1,024 Gb), and up to 256Tb of virtual memory. And, finally, it's the only 64-bit processor you can get today that works with all your 32-bit x86 software. Finally, Opterons consume less energy than equivalent Xeons or Itaniums, and this becomes very important when thinking about A/C, UPS, standby power generators, etc.
I'd recommend you go with Opteron. Check out some well known tier-2 vendors such as Angstrom, Appro or Verari. They all make excellent quality Opteron servers and workstations. If you want brand names (and are willing to pay for it), check out Sun, Hewlett Packard or IBM for 2-way servers, or HP for a 4-way. IBM even has a dual Opteron workstation, if that's what you want.
Good Luck,
Marcos
Taken directly from kernel.org: Up since: Wed Apr 16 13:06:45 2003
Load Average: 32.28 31.33 29.03 (1517 processes)
Ram: 5950784KB
Free: 7488KB
Current bandwidth utilization 252.09 Mbit/s
Basically, they extended the x86 architecture again, like Intel themselves did 15 years ago when going from the 286 to the 386 architecture (16 bits to 32 bits). They maintained the current binary compatibility, while extending the registers to double their size, and make additional registers available. Intel completely ignored this possibility since going to Itanium was going to be "so much better". As we have seen, however, that was simply not true.
:-) Windows XP and 2003 will be available specifically for AMD64 (marketing name for x86-64 architecture) in late 2003. Betas have already been sighted in the wild.
Of course, the whole exercise is moot if there is no software available to take advantage of the 64-bitness. Linux, as you mentioned, is already fully ported to 64-bits by several vendors (RedHat, Mandrake and SuSe), and you can compile your own 64-bit kernel yourself, should you so do desire, and if you have the proper hardware
So what's to like? Well, first of all, access to a contiguous 256TB virtual memory space, up to 1Tb of physical RAM, and obviously ability to process up to 64bits at a time inside the CPU. And, you can run all of your current software without a hassle. You can even install your current WindowsXP/Linux/whatever without a problem, and upgrade it later if you need to.
You can get the full gory details by downloading the Programmer's Manual for AMD64 from AMD's website.
It's not vaporware. You can buy it from a lot of places on the Net. See here for one:
http://tinyurl.com/mhn9
You can also find it in PriceWatch, at least 5 vendors offer it currently.
Tyan and Arima already have dual motherboards out there. The Tyan K8W looks really nice for a workstation or high-end gaming machine. All 4P motherboards are not "available" per se, they're only should as complete systems. Check out Appro, Angstrom Computer or Racksaver for some 4P servers if you're looking for Opteron servers.
Totally agree with your post. I also believe you meant "multitasking" when you said "multi-processing".
The integrated memory controller should do away with any delay there could be because of doubling the registers. Remember that, even if you there are 32 registers at 64bits in the processor, this amounts to only 256 bytes. Granted, a context switch could be done every 10ms, but even then, during those 10ms, the processor has gone through 2 million clocks. This should be enough for copying 256 bytes around. Any additional delay by doubling the size of the registers should be negligible, IMHO.