i should quickly add to this, i in no way condone the pork-barrel slop that occurs in common governments... i just wanted to try to defend folks that do "odd" experiments. sometimes they really do have worth:)
isn't comparing the objectively observable behaviours of nature (minus the heisenberg principle) a far cry from observing the behaviours of mammals with very unique personalities?
observing one person's personality does not necessarily lend you insight into the next person's, and the same can be said for groups. the same thing goes with "physical" phenomenon. both diciplines require good analytical skills to find the relationships.
once you find things that appear to be static in nature, you can begin to find relationships with much more objective a set of experiments than you could with examining human behavious, but in both cases you can draw conclusions eventually (but, again, humans are just a bit more unpredictable to most observers).
this, imho, is exactly why studying human behaviour is both infuriating and intensely amazing all at the same time... ususally because it's so baffling. (take, for example, the mass phychology of the typical stock market)
i don't think either type of observation is really ever a waste (given that the data isn't destroyed)...
i am a *conservative*, but i don't think that there's any direct correlation between conservative and republican any longer. those days seem to be behind us, but clearly, the stigma lives on.
this entire thread is a great example of journalistic embellishment. there are far too many people who know better than to let what you're discussing happen actually take place, imho of course.
please, try not to inflame the masses to further *your* cause. you're just like them if that's your goal. they inflame the masses with influence, you're inflaming the masses with knowledge. in the end, it's really the same tactic.
of course, there are those CS schooled (myself) that would *LOVE* to do exactly what they're describing, and would be quite capable of it.
for years i've been saying to myself that i need to break out of this terribly boring business mold and go toward the scientific or manufacturing side of the spectrum. (the problem is that in the city i live, these are quite rare)
i had lots of math, physics, chemistry, biology, materials sciences, etc. i want to use those skills again. it's a shame to have those diluted by typical business problem-solving:(
yes, the term plastic at its original definition certainly was an adjective, not a noun, but as in all things, meanings become overloaded or change as society changes.
i think it's safe to say that at this time in our culture in the *united states* (i make no claims to understand any other culture), plastic is both an adjective AND a noun, like it or not. (it's not like you'll ever change the masses on this one anyway)
actually, if anyone remembers, the key to this whole challenge was a very subtle detail (and this is very important evidence to the contrary for the person that stated "if they'd open it up to informix, sybase, etc, they'd have lost".
oracle was the ***only*** RDBMS at the time that supported materialized views (the ability to take a physical snapshot of a particular query's result set and have the optimizer *automatically* decide when to use it to speed up the retrieval of the result set without a change in the query). this little detail made it such that NOT A ONE of the other database vendors could even come close to outperforming oracle's solution. oracle just performed a temporal shift of the i/o and computing horsepower necessary to solve the query.
it was simply rigged from the very beginning.
would you expect any less from larry? he is the #2 man in hell (wishing he were #1) after all.
i'm assuming that someone would eventually insist that i backed up my statements with some sources.
the sources i can provide with 5 minutes of research are, sadly, weak, but here goes:
Brocade, a very highly respected manufacturer of FC switching products, has a discussion about this very topic here.
also, as someone else already mentioned in another post under this article, a counterpoint as researched by SGI is here.
keep in mind that this is still a research project and probably can't be considered ready for prime-time yet, but it shows tremendous promise and validates the counterpoints made almost 10 years ago now quite well.
whether you agree with these sources or not, the prevailing opinions for years have been both what brocade *AND* sgi state.
half the camp said "FC is designed for high-bandwidth streaming, ethernet is too laden with baggage", while the other half said "but if we are smart (maybe even tricky) about the way we implement a,b and c, we should be able to make it a moot point."
i'm going to assume that you were just trolling, but for the masses that are sure to follow you into the depths of ignorance which need an education:
(and no, i'm not british)
and, to add to your statement, gigabit ethernet and its successors are being driven by entities very interested in *PACKET SWITCHING*, but not necessarily STREAM switching.
one of the primary design tenets of fibre-channel was to excel at the streaming of data. the consortium's design philosophy was: stream efficiently first, worry about packet-switching later.
given that, fibre channel is generally considered NOT THE BEST at doing general-purpose packet switching (say IP / (FC-SF or FC-AL)). it's just simply not what it was designed to do.
saying gigabit ethernet (and all other CSMA/CD over fiber derivatives) are dead is either very ignorant, or is a beautiful example of FUD, and thus quite misleading.
i started thinking back to my "post-college" days when i:
1) had sufficient money (no different than today)
2) had little time (no different than today)
3) didn't have a p2p facility.
i bought about 5 cds between 1993 and 1999.
between 1999 and 2001 i've purchased probably 30.
the difference is that between 1999 and 2001 i've had the luxury to very conveniently try before i buy without hassle (say, waiting for it on the radio, wasting my time buying a single. hate those)
i can *NOT* be that much in the minority. every person i work with is in identically the same category. granted, we're still in the minority in that our demographics are slightly askew from the "typical" worldwide, but i refuse to believe there's not crossover into other demographical strata.
there has got to be some legitimate studies that have been performed to illustrate once and for all that they (RIAA members) are NOT in any way hurting from this.
think back to the days when 3dfx was at the apex of its business.
they chose to worry more about some guy building a glide->direct3d wrapper (and thus harassed & attempted litigation) rather than focusing their efforts on innovating their product line and building in more VALUE that would entice customers to purchase. in the process, they alienated a large percentage of their "enthusiast" customer base.
sadly, another competitor in the video card business is gone because they were too focused on the tactical here-and-now instead of worrying about what *really* needed their attention.
imho, the same thing will happen (again. the first round was in the early 90's if i remember correcly) in the memory business, it'll just take a good deal more time because product release cycles are quite a bit longer.
litigation is a procedural necessity when you've got aggressive third parties taking bites out of your company (especially if actually done fraudulently, not imho the case with rambus), but if you can't back up that litigation with further innovation, clearly, you're in for serious trouble.
Peter
Re:I still think the DSL companies are a conspirac
on
DSL Woes
·
· Score: 1
i'm also in columbus and must concur, the service is generally good.
HOWEVER
in the last few months, their deplorable peering agreements have started to rear their ugly heads...
has anyone else noticed that their peering through AT&T is absolutely terrible?
randomly at least 3 times a day at&t's infrastructure starts black-hole'ing packets...
don't know why, and unfortunately, most AS'es i'm trying to route packets through choose at&t (and twc drops source-routed frames...:)
i've had this identical thing happen 5 times with time warner...
of course, you can predict the reason: all because i happened to have a non-microsoft-or-apple operating system directly attached to the cable-modem. (linux, openbsd, whatever instead)
in the end, i found a mole in time warner's administration ranks that actually understood that i was only calling when i was absolutely positive there was nothing wrong with my own equipment (and this guy was partial to the open-source operating systems). once i got that guy to trust me, i kept asking to speak to him every time (a problem because he was in 3rd tier support).
of course, that guy is long gone (everyone good is long-gone from time warner, it appears).:(
i can comment on this, as my situation is similar.
i have two of the panasonic phones you discussed, as well as a compaq WL400 802.11u wireless transceiver. i can't use either phone simultaneously with the wireless lan (even after multiple attempts to change channels, etc, etc).
out of curiousity, what were the bottlenecks in the linux kernel when you were poking with the performance and scalability tests?
i have found smb on solaris/sparc to outperform smb on linux/i686 with approximately equal horsepower (333 ultrasparc2 vs. pentium 2 450).
i think it was the case that the memory bus and i/o bus were less latent AND had higher bandwidth on the sun than on the intel, but i never really got down to profiling it... (not to mention level 2 cache latency differences) all this aside, i had a feeling that it was actually none of these things (but rather the very efficient network stack in solaris 8) to blame...
the *very* first time i tried them on an older (half-baked JIT) virtual machine, it was deathly slow.
since the v.m.'s have begun to differentiate client from server v.m. implementations (namely implemented with generational garbage collection, hotspot instead of a JIT, etc), all of my arguments just disappeared. the same thing happened back in the days of evolving smalltalk v.m.'s. the first were icky. the later implementations were great.
i tried the swing demos on a pentium 133 with 64 MB memory with the 1.3 jdk. i was shocked at how useable it actually was.
as always, times change. the bashing of anything non-perl-python-or-otherwise-gpl'ed here on slashdot NEVER will.
have i missed something or does GPL really not allow me to link to a non-gpl library even though it's just using it as a client? are you sure you don't mean "include" as opposed to "linked"?
some people provide public-domain headers but closed implementations. take, for example, a private proprietary implementation of malloc/calloc/realloc for heap corruption detection (just an example). are you telling me that even after all the code is compiled and i decide to link-edit it, i wouldn't be able to link to someone's (proprietary) implementation of malloc/calloc/realloc for example by just changing the linker's command line switches to include a new implementation of malloc? even if i intend never to distribute this binary and it's only for my own use?
that doesn't seem to compute...
i thought the problem is in the rights on the *SOURCE*, not the rights on the binary. is it both? how can this actually be enforced?
don't listen to the drivel of all the trolls that post on slashdot.
most are just insecure in some way or another and behave like the bullies at a gradeschool playground.
canada & the u.s. each have very serious assets and neither diminishes the other's. there certainly isn't anything wrong with any country being "better" at something than another; it's perfectly natural and healthy. once you're the "best", you get lazy, and we all know how well that motivates the human spirit...
i'd have to guess that the plans to upgrade this entire plant were on the table a year and a half (at a minimum) before the merger.
but, as things usually happen, it took a long time for them to justify that it needed done. finally, once justification was complete, the merger happened around the bend. in order to make the merger seem plausible, they most likely shelved it until after the whole thing was over with...
i believe you're giving credit to the wrong people... at&t probably caused your cable plant's upgrade to actually be *DELAYED*:)
just a thought...
(that's the way things go elsewhere in the world of US telco companies:)
Slashdot Mirror
i should quickly add to this, i in no way condone the pork-barrel slop that occurs in common governments... i just wanted to try to defend folks that do "odd" experiments. sometimes they really do have worth :)
ok, i'll bite.
isn't comparing the objectively observable behaviours of nature (minus the heisenberg principle) a far cry from observing the behaviours of mammals with very unique personalities?
observing one person's personality does not necessarily lend you insight into the next person's, and the same can be said for groups. the same thing goes with "physical" phenomenon. both diciplines require good analytical skills to find the relationships.
once you find things that appear to be static in nature, you can begin to find relationships with much more objective a set of experiments than you could with examining human behavious, but in both cases you can draw conclusions eventually (but, again, humans are just a bit more unpredictable to most observers).
this, imho, is exactly why studying human behaviour is both infuriating and intensely amazing all at the same time... ususally because it's so baffling. (take, for example, the mass phychology of the typical stock market)
i don't think either type of observation is really ever a waste (given that the data isn't destroyed)...
Peter
i am a *conservative*, but i don't think that there's any direct correlation between conservative and republican any longer. those days seem to be behind us, but clearly, the stigma lives on.
this entire thread is a great example of journalistic embellishment. there are far too many people who know better than to let what you're discussing happen actually take place, imho of course.
please, try not to inflame the masses to further *your* cause. you're just like them if that's your goal. they inflame the masses with influence, you're inflaming the masses with knowledge. in the end, it's really the same tactic.
Peter
of course, there are those CS schooled (myself) that would *LOVE* to do exactly what they're describing, and would be quite capable of it.
:(
for years i've been saying to myself that i need to break out of this terribly boring business mold and go toward the scientific or manufacturing side of the spectrum. (the problem is that in the city i live, these are quite rare)
i had lots of math, physics, chemistry, biology, materials sciences, etc. i want to use those skills again. it's a shame to have those diluted by typical business problem-solving
Peter
precisely.
:)
i wasted a lot of time on populous, and i don't really see the need to repeat that at this time in my life...
guess i'll be passing this one by.
cheers.
Peter
i agree.
:)
we use w2k advanced + metaframe at work quite freqently.
even over a ds-1 over 1200 miles long, its totally completely useable.
better than having windows on my desktop, really
Peter
i'll bite on this.
yes, the term plastic at its original definition certainly was an adjective, not a noun, but as in all things, meanings become overloaded or change as society changes.
i think it's safe to say that at this time in our culture in the *united states* (i make no claims to understand any other culture), plastic is both an adjective AND a noun, like it or not. (it's not like you'll ever change the masses on this one anyway)
just my 0.02.
Peter
it's my understanding that at&t built their own labs division again....
is this not the case?
Peter
actually, if anyone remembers, the key to this whole challenge was a very subtle detail (and this is very important evidence to the contrary for the person that stated "if they'd open it up to informix, sybase, etc, they'd have lost".
oracle was the ***only*** RDBMS at the time that supported materialized views (the ability to take a physical snapshot of a particular query's result set and have the optimizer *automatically* decide when to use it to speed up the retrieval of the result set without a change in the query). this little detail made it such that NOT A ONE of the other database vendors could even come close to outperforming oracle's solution. oracle just performed a temporal shift of the i/o and computing horsepower necessary to solve the query.
it was simply rigged from the very beginning.
would you expect any less from larry? he is the #2 man in hell (wishing he were #1) after all.
Peter
why should anyone HAVE to do this?
sounds to me more like a self fulfilling prophesy dreamt into existance by those that love the art of lying, err, i mean, law.
Peter
oh, i'll easily chime in here.
:)
i own a table and am still bad.
i understand the physics, i understand the intended means to execute that physics.
i just can't make the two meet
Peter
excellent information.
:)
:)
thanks for adding it
all my information came from contacts that were at best third hand.
hearing it from the horses mouth is the deal
cheers.
Peter
i'm assuming that someone would eventually insist that i backed up my statements with some sources.
:)
the sources i can provide with 5 minutes of research are, sadly, weak, but here goes:
Brocade, a very highly respected manufacturer of FC switching products, has a discussion about this very topic here.
also, as someone else already mentioned in another post under this article, a counterpoint as researched by SGI is here.
keep in mind that this is still a research project and probably can't be considered ready for prime-time yet, but it shows tremendous promise and validates the counterpoints made almost 10 years ago now quite well.
whether you agree with these sources or not, the prevailing opinions for years have been both what brocade *AND* sgi state.
half the camp said "FC is designed for high-bandwidth streaming, ethernet is too laden with baggage", while the other half said "but if we are smart (maybe even tricky) about the way we implement a,b and c, we should be able to make it a moot point."
so, be your own judge
Peter
i'm going to assume that you were just trolling, but for the masses that are sure to follow you into the depths of ignorance which need an education:
(and no, i'm not british)
try here for some self-help.
and, to add to your statement, gigabit ethernet and its successors are being driven by entities very interested in *PACKET SWITCHING*, but not necessarily STREAM switching.
one of the primary design tenets of fibre-channel was to excel at the streaming of data. the consortium's design philosophy was: stream efficiently first, worry about packet-switching later.
given that, fibre channel is generally considered NOT THE BEST at doing general-purpose packet switching (say IP / (FC-SF or FC-AL)). it's just simply not what it was designed to do.
saying gigabit ethernet (and all other CSMA/CD over fiber derivatives) are dead is either very ignorant, or is a beautiful example of FUD, and thus quite misleading.
Peter
i started thinking back to my "post-college" days when i:
1) had sufficient money (no different than today)
2) had little time (no different than today)
3) didn't have a p2p facility.
i bought about 5 cds between 1993 and 1999.
between 1999 and 2001 i've purchased probably 30.
the difference is that between 1999 and 2001 i've had the luxury to very conveniently try before i buy without hassle (say, waiting for it on the radio, wasting my time buying a single. hate those)
i can *NOT* be that much in the minority. every person i work with is in identically the same category. granted, we're still in the minority in that our demographics are slightly askew from the "typical" worldwide, but i refuse to believe there's not crossover into other demographical strata.
there has got to be some legitimate studies that have been performed to illustrate once and for all that they (RIAA members) are NOT in any way hurting from this.
just my 0.02.
Peter
think back to the days when 3dfx was at the apex of its business.
they chose to worry more about some guy building a glide->direct3d wrapper (and thus harassed & attempted litigation) rather than focusing their efforts on innovating their product line and building in more VALUE that would entice customers to purchase. in the process, they alienated a large percentage of their "enthusiast" customer base.
sadly, another competitor in the video card business is gone because they were too focused on the tactical here-and-now instead of worrying about what *really* needed their attention.
imho, the same thing will happen (again. the first round was in the early 90's if i remember correcly) in the memory business, it'll just take a good deal more time because product release cycles are quite a bit longer.
litigation is a procedural necessity when you've got aggressive third parties taking bites out of your company (especially if actually done fraudulently, not imho the case with rambus), but if you can't back up that litigation with further innovation, clearly, you're in for serious trouble.
Peter
i'm also in columbus and must concur, the service is generally good.
:)
HOWEVER
in the last few months, their deplorable peering agreements have started to rear their ugly heads...
has anyone else noticed that their peering through AT&T is absolutely terrible?
randomly at least 3 times a day at&t's infrastructure starts black-hole'ing packets...
don't know why, and unfortunately, most AS'es i'm trying to route packets through choose at&t (and twc drops source-routed frames...
cheers.
Peter
i've had this identical thing happen 5 times with time warner...
:(
of course, you can predict the reason: all because i happened to have a non-microsoft-or-apple operating system directly attached to the cable-modem. (linux, openbsd, whatever instead)
in the end, i found a mole in time warner's administration ranks that actually understood that i was only calling when i was absolutely positive there was nothing wrong with my own equipment (and this guy was partial to the open-source operating systems). once i got that guy to trust me, i kept asking to speak to him every time (a problem because he was in 3rd tier support).
of course, that guy is long gone (everyone good is long-gone from time warner, it appears).
Peter
i can comment on this, as my situation is similar.
i have two of the panasonic phones you discussed, as well as a compaq WL400 802.11u wireless transceiver. i can't use either phone simultaneously with the wireless lan (even after multiple attempts to change channels, etc, etc).
just my 0.02.
Peter
out of curiousity, what were the bottlenecks in the linux kernel when you were poking with the performance and scalability tests?
:)
i have found smb on solaris/sparc to outperform smb on linux/i686 with approximately equal horsepower (333 ultrasparc2 vs. pentium 2 450).
i think it was the case that the memory bus and i/o bus were less latent AND had higher bandwidth on the sun than on the intel, but i never really got down to profiling it... (not to mention level 2 cache latency differences) all this aside, i had a feeling that it was actually none of these things (but rather the very efficient network stack in solaris 8) to blame...
i'm very curious to see your assessment
Peter
i concur.
the *very* first time i tried them on an older (half-baked JIT) virtual machine, it was deathly slow.
since the v.m.'s have begun to differentiate client from server v.m. implementations (namely implemented with generational garbage collection, hotspot instead of a JIT, etc), all of my arguments just disappeared. the same thing happened back in the days of evolving smalltalk v.m.'s. the first were icky. the later implementations were great.
i tried the swing demos on a pentium 133 with 64 MB memory with the 1.3 jdk. i was shocked at how useable it actually was.
as always, times change. the bashing of anything non-perl-python-or-otherwise-gpl'ed here on slashdot NEVER will.
Peter
have i missed something or does GPL really not allow me to link to a non-gpl library even though it's just using it as a client? are you sure you don't mean "include" as opposed to "linked"?
:)
some people provide public-domain headers but closed implementations. take, for example, a private proprietary implementation of malloc/calloc/realloc for heap corruption detection (just an example). are you telling me that even after all the code is compiled and i decide to link-edit it, i wouldn't be able to link to someone's (proprietary) implementation of malloc/calloc/realloc for example by just changing the linker's command line switches to include a new implementation of malloc? even if i intend never to distribute this binary and it's only for my own use?
that doesn't seem to compute...
i thought the problem is in the rights on the *SOURCE*, not the rights on the binary. is it both? how can this actually be enforced?
educate me
Peter
correct me if i'm wrong, but you seem bitter.
don't listen to the drivel of all the trolls that post on slashdot.
most are just insecure in some way or another and behave like the bullies at a gradeschool playground.
canada & the u.s. each have very serious assets and neither diminishes the other's. there certainly isn't anything wrong with any country being "better" at something than another; it's perfectly natural and healthy. once you're the "best", you get lazy, and we all know how well that motivates the human spirit...
cheers.
Peter
hm...
:)
:)
i'd have to guess that the plans to upgrade this entire plant were on the table a year and a half (at a minimum) before the merger.
but, as things usually happen, it took a long time for them to justify that it needed done. finally, once justification was complete, the merger happened around the bend. in order to make the merger seem plausible, they most likely shelved it until after the whole thing was over with...
i believe you're giving credit to the wrong people... at&t probably caused your cable plant's upgrade to actually be *DELAYED*
just a thought...
(that's the way things go elsewhere in the world of US telco companies