eferencing her preference for younger men. This isn't exactly sexual harassment, however, as he hasn't said 'No, and please stop asking.'
Let me get this straight: she asked him out, he didn't say yes, he didn't say no either. So how exactly is she supposed to interpret this? For all she knows, he's playing hard to get, and his vague answers are attempts at flirting. There is no point in getting all passive-aggressive about this - your friend is quite frankly an idiot if he thinks that he can string someone along without them getting the wrong idea. There is nothing to complain about here, this manager has done nothing wrong. Your friend's problem is that he has no social skills.
The problem is that if he says the above, there won't be any more work for him there.
Why, does this manager have a history of firing anyone who does sleep with her? No? Then what's the problem? Tell your friend to just politely decline. Everyone has been asked out by someone they didn't fancy at some point, a polite "thanks but no thanks" is simple enough. If she's as mature as you say, she'll have both asked out someone who wasn't interested and been asked out by someone she wasn't interested in (it's called "life") and is unlikely to take offense.
syslogd wrote a panic message to/var/log/messages as the system went down, and you'll find this message (as well as the rest of its 4k block) in/etc/passwd, while your changed password file may be found at the end of/var/log/messages. This is a feature of ReiserFS, not a bug.
Care to explain that? How is corrupting one of the files essential to the normal operation of your system not a bug? The whole point of a modern filesystem is to recover cleanly; even fsck can run unattended (mostly) but what you're saying here is that after an unplanned reboot, you might or might not need a sysadmin to manually intervene.
Re:Incompatibilities with another system
on
State Of The Filesystem
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Windows support for metadata has always sucked, recognised by every Mac user who moved to a PC and discovered that you had to tell the system what a file did by appending a clumsy tla to the end, and passing gently over the inconsistencies of the support for long and short filenames.
Actually, NTFS support for "metadata" is impressive; you can have 255 streams per file. A stream in NTFS is what Mac users call a fork, but Macs are limited to 2, data and resource. You can happily make every file on NTFS an OLE server too and do away with file extensions altogether, if you want to. Oh, and NTFS has reparse points too - think like a trigger on a database table, but attached to a file. And NTFS has journalled from day 1, whereas Linux filesystems are only just discovering this.
So why are file extensions still in common use? Largely because people who don't know NTFS come out with statements like "windows support for metadata has always sucked" without bothering to read the documentation, so few apps take advantage of this NTFS feature.
Up to 4 700 MHZ MIPS R4000 processors in the rackmount
I think you mean R14000 or R16000 - the R4000 was released in 1991! Incidentally, the R4000 was fully 64-bit, MIPS had mastered this tech over a decade before Intel.
SGI's were once the pinnacle of graphics performance, but one has to wonder with the predeominance of cheaper Wintel or Lintel boxes that have practically comparable performance, how relevant are these boxes still?
2 things the SGIs have that PCs don't: bandwidth and precision. The SGIs are built to shift data around at phenominal speed internally 3.2Gb/s point to point with no contention. These really are desktop supercomputers, because SGI feed their mainframe tech back down into workstations. The bus speed means you can use one CPU to page textures in and out of the cache while another traverses huge structures in main memory, with no slowdown.
Not only that, but SGI graphics is precise. A PC card oriented towards gamers will sacrifice precision for speed. In a game it doesn't matter - if you're redrawing 60 times a second, it doesn't matter if a few things are a few pixels off from frame to frame. In CAD you can't afford to have any artifacts, because the risk of an engineer deciding that his assembly really does align when it doesn't is too high. That's why, on paper, SGIs are sometimes slower - they're doing more work, and that's what serious workstations users pay for.
Though its worth bearing in mind that you can still pick up some half decent SGI workstations on eBay.. seen some SGI Octane / 20" Monitor / 768MB RAM bundles on UK eBay for around £350 which is a superb deal.. these things might be getting on a bit, but they certainly do shift.
I used to own both an old Indy and an Indigo2, both of which would be the equivilant of an 8086 in PeeCee computing terms.. but they still cruised along even on the latest version of Irix, and were surprisingly usable:)
A PC is a general purpose device that is designed not to suck too badly at anything in particular. A workstation is a specialist device that is designed to retain some general purpose capability. Back in its day, the Indigo2 IMPACT was an impressive machine... you couldn't buy a PC that could do what it could do at any price. Even now, they can hold their own in solid modelling and CAD.
I have an Octane SE here, 1997 vintage, and my 2002-issue Dell beats it for small CPU bound jobs... but for anything involving a lot of memory accesses, or disk I/O the Octane wins hands down every time. And if I'm not using textures, SE graphics can easily beat a GeForce2.
General rule of thumb: if they prefer Windows, they don't know what they're doing.
Correction: people who make blanket statements about operating systems don't know what they're doing. We call it "golden hammer" syndrome, when you pick (or exclude) a particular solution in advance, then adapt your requirements to suit the capability of the tool. OS zealotry and professional competence are mutually exclusive.
A competent engineer looks at the big picture. It's not just about technology, it's about people. If the client has a hundred experienced Win32 developers and sysadmins, and has spent 15 years developing their applications, and you tell them that they don't know what they're doing, you won't get the job. In that situation, the right tool is Windows, simply because that's what the organization knows.
And oh yeah, forget backwards compatibility -- just go look at the history of WinCE, PPC, whatever-they-call-the-Microsoft-handheld-OS-du-jo ur...
Let's also look at the history of Linux shall we, with the kernel ABI and libc changing with every release? Of course, some people recompile everything so often that it's not an issue, but then again, some people don't. You can't criticize MS for something the Linux community is even more guilty of. Even Linus himself says he'd rather sacrifice backwards compatibility for features.
Incidentally, Microsoft have a frankly amazing record on backwards compatibility - you can still run 16-bit Windows 3.1 applications on Windows XP, for example. This is because corporate customers don't want to throw all their code away everytime MS releases a new OS.
The NY Times enjoys being a reputable news outlet and if they were to lower their readership and more imporantly not allow everyone to read their articles.
I don't think it's about readership numbers. The NY Times is paranoid - and rightfully so - that they have more Jayson Blairs in the ranks. They know that they are under scrutiny, from everyone from rival newspapers to Slashdot journals. They have a strong vested interest in members of the public being unable to compare "before" and "after" articles. If another one of their reporters is caught out - whether it's Jayson Blair simply making stories up, or Maureen Dowd misquoting her sources - they want to be able to brush it under the carpet as quietly as possible.
It's good that someone is finally trying to do something along the lines of Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics. He took it for granted that AI would be designed from the ground up to consider the wellbeing of humans first and foremost. Unfortunately, he didn't foresee today's profit-driven marketplace
You're missing the point of a marketplace. A market exists so that people who want things can express that want by offering a token of exchange, and people who have stuff that people want can provide it for said tokens (then spend the tokens on what they want themselves).
If people want AI that obeys Asimov's 3 laws, then the market is the best way for them to get it. If people do not want AIs with those laws, or want AIs with different laws, then that's what the market will do.
A market has no ethical or moral system beyond that of its participants. But then, neither does any human construct. In fact, such a thing is impossible.
Also it's worth noting that Asimov was not a computer scientist - his 3 laws were invented to help him sell novels, and that's the only reason. In other words, Asimov invented the 3 laws to make money.
The only thing GSM encryption prevents is eavesdropping on GSM calls with radio receivers. Law enforcement can still wiretap where the GSM call hits the copper, after all the call has to be decrypted by the phone network
How does GSM work - does it decrypt at the cell tower, send plain traffic over the relays, then reencrypt at the cell tower your counterparty is on? Or does it create a tunnel between your handset and theirs, all encrypted on the way?
Do US cell phones even use encryption? I few years ago I worked at a company that made high-speed A/D and D/A converters.
A few years, you were probably listening to analogue signals. More modern networks like GSM are all-digital. There were a few cases of the British tabloids revealing details of mobile phone conversations (I think it was the royals or some other minor celebrities), and after that, everyone here got a digital handset.
You can be absolutely certain that if intelligent life were discovered tomorrow, on Earth or anywhere else the scriptures of most of the major religions would prove flexible enough to accomodate it.
In fact, Catholic scholars as far back as the 13th Century proved to their satisfaction that life being discovered elsewhere would prove no problem for their doctrine. The only part of the debate left open was, would an alien civilization require an alien "instantiation" of Jesus, or could they use ours?
Yes, because Microsoft's commercial competitors (Apple with the Mac, IBM with OS/2) were so disdainful of the common man. Give me a freakin' break.
Apple and IBM are almost irrelevant here. The "common man" uses MS Windows. What's Apple's market share, 3%? And OS/2 has even less. So, my point stands. Apple has a more user friendly interface, sure, but Apple kit is expensive relative to PCs. OS/2 was powerful, but it had few applications. It was Windows that gained mass-market acceptance.
? People who say things like "Guns don't kill people. People kill people." may be right but having no guns makes it a hell of a lot harder for these would be killers to go on killing sprees.
It's strange, then, that every year in the UK we have tighter firearms control laws, and every year, there are more firearms related killings.
You see, the only people who obey laws are the sort of folk that generally don't go round shooting people anyway. The people who ignore laws - we call these "criminals" - don't pay any attention to bans on firearms when they are planning to commit worse crimes anyway.
All "gun control" serves to do, by definition, is disarm law-abiding citizens.
Rendevous will be used in 10.3 with Xcode to discover resources and distribute software builds across available 10.3 machines. If there's a perceived benefit to Apple, do you honestly think there's anything preventing the next version 10.4 from having distributed capabilities?
Back in the day, on the old black NeXT hardware running NeXTStep 3.3, there was an app called Zilla that could be used to distribute compute intensive jobs around a network of NeXT machines. They said that 100 NeXT Turbos was an even match for a Cray 1. It's funny when I look at OSX today... it's got a lot of bells and whistles, but a lot of the stuff that was in NeXTStep has actually been taken out!
The trick to make your program "parallel" is to use special programming libraries that will spawn instances of your program across the cluster and let them communicate between each other.
If you're compiler is smart, it can parallelize ordinary code too. Just as a trivial example, consider:
for (i = 0; i < 1000000; i++) {
doSomeCalculations(i); }
A smart compiler would notice that you had 2 CPUs and would break that into two concurrent loops at compile time:
for (i = 0; i < 500000; i++) {
doSomeCalculations(i); } for (i = 500000; i < 1000000; i++) {
doSomeCalculations(i); }
And at runtime, the OS would run it on 2 processors. The really smart compilers like SGI's place wrapper code around it, and check at runtime to see how many processors are available, then break the loop into parallel threads on the fly.
The truth is probably that the blame for this is squarely on the head of Microsoft for trying to make the PC ubiquitous, like a toaster, when it's really an extremely complicated technology which the common man should not even try to understand, let alone use to it's full potential.
There were probably people like you saying the same thing about the toaster when it was first invented. And the car, noooo, what could the general public want with cars? Or phones? Or televisions?
Technology isn't just for the "high priests". It's a product, plain and simple. Self-proclaimed "geeks" need to get off their high horses. You think you could afford that fancy computer if it wasn't a mass-market commodity?
Ultimately, it's about power. Microsoft's only crime was that it brought computing to the "common man", bypassing the high priests of tech. Those people hate MS for undermining them. They'd like nothing more than for the "common man" to worship them. Instead, the average employee just wonders where the geek who's supposed to be replacing the printer cartridge is.
burn the DVDs and send them through an international package service vs send it over the T1s. I think with all but the largest businesses this is probably still true for larger (Gigabytes) amounts of data.
Yes, I believe that's how SETI@Home gets the raw data from the radio telescope to the data centre, they write it to tape then fly it.
This article makes the assumption that Microsoft is currently or has in the past somehow inhibited hardware vendors.
You want to know what's really funny? Without Microsoft, and their "bloated" applications there wouldn't have been a mass market for the 80386, with its features such as protected memory and pre-emptive multitasking. Sure, you can do those on a 286 if you really have to, but it's not easy. Without the 386, there would be no Linux, since Linus could never have afforded a "professional" workstation (if he had been able to, he'd never have written Linux, remember).
Microsoft is the best friend the hardware industry ever had, but Red Hat isn't far behind:-)
To be fair, the computer world in general has bennifited tremendously from open source. Don't get me wrong: I love linux, gcc, bash, etc. NetBSD has been a huge win for appliance vendors looking for instant-OS.
Software that makes obsolete hardware useful again is directly against the interests of the hardware industry. Plenty of people (including me) have got an old P133 running a free OS for just those miscellaneous network tasks, like DNS, firewall and the like. You think the hardware industry wouldn't prefer we all bought modern machines rather than reusing what they doubtless class as "junk"?
My experience with every hardware vendor that I've worked with is that Linux and open source is their #1 pain in the butt.
Why do you make so many accommodations for the failures of the OS? Isn't the OS supposed to work for you, instead of you working for it? How many features do you have to shut off before it's not worth the considerable cash you paid for it?
Clearly you lack an understanding of the issue. This is nothing to do with OS. The issue is one of users running executables they are sent via email. If (insert your favourite Linux email package here) allowed a user to double-click an attached.sh file, then the problem would also exist on Linux.
Outlook was designed to be scripted so you could use it to build your own workflow . If you don't need this feature, switch it off! Complaining about exposed but unused functionality being abused is that same as complaining that it's Linux's fault of all the daemons are started at boot and someone roots you though BIND.
Really? Oil is big money. Big money gets things done in this country.
But there is no such thing as Big Oil, really - there is only Big Energy. People don't want oil, it's nasty stuff, they want to be able to move people and goods from A to B, heat homes, power electrical devices and so on. Energy companies should be racing to see who gets to fusion first, because whoever does will make a fortune.
As for the military - this is about research, right? And we people of the internet believe in freedom of information - especially when it comes to scientific information. The army should be thrown out, simply - they don't believe in openness and sharing information.
Umm, you do know that the Internet was actually invented by the military, right? Go look up DARPA on your favourite search engine.
Fusion is not likely to be within easy reach in the near future.
The breakeven point was reached recently, the point at which a fusion reaction outputs as much power as is needed to sustain it. The science is done; the rest is all engineering. But at present it is starved of resources.
The government should have a program that helps and directs corporations getting into space directly, and showing them how a profit could be made... that's where the real ticket is
I think you might like Robert Zubrin's books. He's an engineer by profession who advocates colonization of Mars, and as an engineer he has some pretty realistic ideas about how to do it. But one of his other proposals is mining He3 on the moon. We know it's there. A fusion reactor running on He3 would be far more efficient than one running on D-T, because you could extract the power by inductance directly into electricity rather than by heating steam to turn a generator. He does some calculations of how much the substance is worth at current electricity prices (I don't have my copy here son I can't quote the numbers, but they are large), and once fusion is demonstrated as being usable with D-T, it should be straightforward enough to raise capital for mining He3 on the moon commercially.
I hope China will work with NASA and ESO in a co-operative level instead of with a competitive nature.
It's a historic fact: humans get more done faster when competing against someone or something.
It's just the way we are. Our minds are hardwired by evolution to be motivated by competitive challenges.
shameful waste of Earth's, humans' and economic resources to duplicate what NASA has done
Is it a shameful waste of resources to teach this year's class the same as what last year's class were taught? No, of course not. The fact that it has been done before is irrelevant - it needs to be done again so more people can have the experience, and then they can use that experience in the "real world", which is doing new science.
why is it spending such insane sums of money in an area that will not bring tangible benefits to its people ans standard of living?
Because China understands that if it wants to feed its people it's going to have to automate food production more, which means fewer people in the fields, which means they have to be found new jobs to do. From fields to factories to offices - we did that in the West, now China must do it too.
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eferencing her preference for younger men. This isn't exactly sexual harassment, however, as he hasn't said 'No, and please stop asking.'
Let me get this straight: she asked him out, he didn't say yes, he didn't say no either. So how exactly is she supposed to interpret this? For all she knows, he's playing hard to get, and his vague answers are attempts at flirting. There is no point in getting all passive-aggressive about this - your friend is quite frankly an idiot if he thinks that he can string someone along without them getting the wrong idea. There is nothing to complain about here, this manager has done nothing wrong. Your friend's problem is that he has no social skills.
The problem is that if he says the above, there won't be any more work for him there.
Why, does this manager have a history of firing anyone who does sleep with her? No? Then what's the problem? Tell your friend to just politely decline. Everyone has been asked out by someone they didn't fancy at some point, a polite "thanks but no thanks" is simple enough. If she's as mature as you say, she'll have both asked out someone who wasn't interested and been asked out by someone she wasn't interested in (it's called "life") and is unlikely to take offense.
syslogd wrote a panic message to /var/log/messages as the system went down, and you'll find this message (as well as the rest of its 4k block) in /etc/passwd, while your changed password file may be found at the end of /var/log/messages. This is a feature of ReiserFS, not a bug.
Care to explain that? How is corrupting one of the files essential to the normal operation of your system not a bug? The whole point of a modern filesystem is to recover cleanly; even fsck can run unattended (mostly) but what you're saying here is that after an unplanned reboot, you might or might not need a sysadmin to manually intervene.
Windows support for metadata has always sucked, recognised by every Mac user who moved to a PC and discovered that you had to tell the system what a file did by appending a clumsy tla to the end, and passing gently over the inconsistencies of the support for long and short filenames.
Actually, NTFS support for "metadata" is impressive; you can have 255 streams per file. A stream in NTFS is what Mac users call a fork, but Macs are limited to 2, data and resource. You can happily make every file on NTFS an OLE server too and do away with file extensions altogether, if you want to. Oh, and NTFS has reparse points too - think like a trigger on a database table, but attached to a file. And NTFS has journalled from day 1, whereas Linux filesystems are only just discovering this.
So why are file extensions still in common use? Largely because people who don't know NTFS come out with statements like "windows support for metadata has always sucked" without bothering to read the documentation, so few apps take advantage of this NTFS feature.
Up to 4 700 MHZ MIPS R4000 processors in the rackmount
I think you mean R14000 or R16000 - the R4000 was released in 1991! Incidentally, the R4000 was fully 64-bit, MIPS had mastered this tech over a decade before Intel.
SGI's were once the pinnacle of graphics performance, but one has to wonder with the predeominance of cheaper Wintel or Lintel boxes that have practically comparable performance, how relevant are these boxes still?
2 things the SGIs have that PCs don't: bandwidth and precision. The SGIs are built to shift data around at phenominal speed internally 3.2Gb/s point to point with no contention. These really are desktop supercomputers, because SGI feed their mainframe tech back down into workstations. The bus speed means you can use one CPU to page textures in and out of the cache while another traverses huge structures in main memory, with no slowdown.
Not only that, but SGI graphics is precise. A PC card oriented towards gamers will sacrifice precision for speed. In a game it doesn't matter - if you're redrawing 60 times a second, it doesn't matter if a few things are a few pixels off from frame to frame. In CAD you can't afford to have any artifacts, because the risk of an engineer deciding that his assembly really does align when it doesn't is too high. That's why, on paper, SGIs are sometimes slower - they're doing more work, and that's what serious workstations users pay for.
Though its worth bearing in mind that you can still pick up some half decent SGI workstations on eBay.. seen some SGI Octane / 20" Monitor / 768MB RAM bundles on UK eBay for around £350 which is a superb deal.. these things might be getting on a bit, but they certainly do shift.
:)
Try here or here.
I used to own both an old Indy and an Indigo2, both of which would be the equivilant of an 8086 in PeeCee computing terms.. but they still cruised along even on the latest version of Irix, and were surprisingly usable
A PC is a general purpose device that is designed not to suck too badly at anything in particular. A workstation is a specialist device that is designed to retain some general purpose capability. Back in its day, the Indigo2 IMPACT was an impressive machine... you couldn't buy a PC that could do what it could do at any price. Even now, they can hold their own in solid modelling and CAD.
I have an Octane SE here, 1997 vintage, and my 2002-issue Dell beats it for small CPU bound jobs... but for anything involving a lot of memory accesses, or disk I/O the Octane wins hands down every time. And if I'm not using textures, SE graphics can easily beat a GeForce2.
General rule of thumb: if they prefer Windows, they don't know what they're doing.
Correction: people who make blanket statements about operating systems don't know what they're doing. We call it "golden hammer" syndrome, when you pick (or exclude) a particular solution in advance, then adapt your requirements to suit the capability of the tool. OS zealotry and professional competence are mutually exclusive.
A competent engineer looks at the big picture. It's not just about technology, it's about people. If the client has a hundred experienced Win32 developers and sysadmins, and has spent 15 years developing their applications, and you tell them that they don't know what they're doing, you won't get the job. In that situation, the right tool is Windows, simply because that's what the organization knows.
And oh yeah, forget backwards compatibility -- just go look at the history of WinCE, PPC, whatever-they-call-the-Microsoft-handheld-OS-du-jo ur...
Let's also look at the history of Linux shall we, with the kernel ABI and libc changing with every release? Of course, some people recompile everything so often that it's not an issue, but then again, some people don't. You can't criticize MS for something the Linux community is even more guilty of. Even Linus himself says he'd rather sacrifice backwards compatibility for features.
Incidentally, Microsoft have a frankly amazing record on backwards compatibility - you can still run 16-bit Windows 3.1 applications on Windows XP, for example. This is because corporate customers don't want to throw all their code away everytime MS releases a new OS.
The NY Times enjoys being a reputable news outlet and if they were to lower their readership and more imporantly not allow everyone to read their articles.
I don't think it's about readership numbers. The NY Times is paranoid - and rightfully so - that they have more Jayson Blairs in the ranks. They know that they are under scrutiny, from everyone from rival newspapers to Slashdot journals. They have a strong vested interest in members of the public being unable to compare "before" and "after" articles. If another one of their reporters is caught out - whether it's Jayson Blair simply making stories up, or Maureen Dowd misquoting her sources - they want to be able to brush it under the carpet as quietly as possible.
It's good that someone is finally trying to do something along the lines of Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics. He took it for granted that AI would be designed from the ground up to consider the wellbeing of humans first and foremost. Unfortunately, he didn't foresee today's profit-driven marketplace
You're missing the point of a marketplace. A market exists so that people who want things can express that want by offering a token of exchange, and people who have stuff that people want can provide it for said tokens (then spend the tokens on what they want themselves).
If people want AI that obeys Asimov's 3 laws, then the market is the best way for them to get it. If people do not want AIs with those laws, or want AIs with different laws, then that's what the market will do.
A market has no ethical or moral system beyond that of its participants. But then, neither does any human construct. In fact, such a thing is impossible.
Also it's worth noting that Asimov was not a computer scientist - his 3 laws were invented to help him sell novels, and that's the only reason. In other words, Asimov invented the 3 laws to make money.
The only thing GSM encryption prevents is eavesdropping on GSM calls with radio receivers. Law enforcement can still wiretap where the GSM call hits the copper, after all the call has to be decrypted by the phone network
How does GSM work - does it decrypt at the cell tower, send plain traffic over the relays, then reencrypt at the cell tower your counterparty is on? Or does it create a tunnel between your handset and theirs, all encrypted on the way?
Do US cell phones even use encryption? I few years ago I worked at a company that made high-speed A/D and D/A converters.
A few years, you were probably listening to analogue signals. More modern networks like GSM are all-digital. There were a few cases of the British tabloids revealing details of mobile phone conversations (I think it was the royals or some other minor celebrities), and after that, everyone here got a digital handset.
You can be absolutely certain that if intelligent life were discovered tomorrow, on Earth or anywhere else the scriptures of most of the major religions would prove flexible enough to accomodate it.
In fact, Catholic scholars as far back as the 13th Century proved to their satisfaction that life being discovered elsewhere would prove no problem for their doctrine. The only part of the debate left open was, would an alien civilization require an alien "instantiation" of Jesus, or could they use ours?
Yes, because Microsoft's commercial competitors (Apple with the Mac, IBM with OS/2) were so disdainful of the common man. Give me a freakin' break.
Apple and IBM are almost irrelevant here. The "common man" uses MS Windows. What's Apple's market share, 3%? And OS/2 has even less. So, my point stands. Apple has a more user friendly interface, sure, but Apple kit is expensive relative to PCs. OS/2 was powerful, but it had few applications. It was Windows that gained mass-market acceptance.
? People who say things like "Guns don't kill people. People kill people." may be right but having no guns makes it a hell of a lot harder for these would be killers to go on killing sprees.
It's strange, then, that every year in the UK we have tighter firearms control laws, and every year, there are more firearms related killings.
You see, the only people who obey laws are the sort of folk that generally don't go round shooting people anyway. The people who ignore laws - we call these "criminals" - don't pay any attention to bans on firearms when they are planning to commit worse crimes anyway.
All "gun control" serves to do, by definition, is disarm law-abiding citizens.
I've never seen a "smart" compiler as you put it, though there are systems where the programmers can explicitely parallelize a loop.
Oh, because you've never seen it, it can't exist? Great logic there, I hate to think what your code is like. See here and here and here.
Rendevous will be used in 10.3 with Xcode to discover resources and distribute software builds across available 10.3 machines. If there's a perceived benefit to Apple, do you honestly think there's anything preventing the next version 10.4 from having distributed capabilities?
Back in the day, on the old black NeXT hardware running NeXTStep 3.3, there was an app called Zilla that could be used to distribute compute intensive jobs around a network of NeXT machines. They said that 100 NeXT Turbos was an even match for a Cray 1. It's funny when I look at OSX today... it's got a lot of bells and whistles, but a lot of the stuff that was in NeXTStep has actually been taken out!
If you're compiler is smart, it can parallelize ordinary code too. Just as a trivial example, consider:A smart compiler would notice that you had 2 CPUs and would break that into two concurrent loops at compile time:And at runtime, the OS would run it on 2 processors. The really smart compilers like SGI's place wrapper code around it, and check at runtime to see how many processors are available, then break the loop into parallel threads on the fly.
The truth is probably that the blame for this is squarely on the head of Microsoft for trying to make the PC ubiquitous, like a toaster, when it's really an extremely complicated technology which the common man should not even try to understand, let alone use to it's full potential.
There were probably people like you saying the same thing about the toaster when it was first invented. And the car, noooo, what could the general public want with cars? Or phones? Or televisions?
Technology isn't just for the "high priests". It's a product, plain and simple. Self-proclaimed "geeks" need to get off their high horses. You think you could afford that fancy computer if it wasn't a mass-market commodity?
Ultimately, it's about power. Microsoft's only crime was that it brought computing to the "common man", bypassing the high priests of tech. Those people hate MS for undermining them. They'd like nothing more than for the "common man" to worship them. Instead, the average employee just wonders where the geek who's supposed to be replacing the printer cartridge is.
burn the DVDs and send them through an international package service vs send it over the T1s. I think with all but the largest businesses this is probably still true for larger (Gigabytes) amounts of data.
Yes, I believe that's how SETI@Home gets the raw data from the radio telescope to the data centre, they write it to tape then fly it.
This article makes the assumption that Microsoft is currently or has in the past somehow inhibited hardware vendors.
:-)
You want to know what's really funny? Without Microsoft, and their "bloated" applications there wouldn't have been a mass market for the 80386, with its features such as protected memory and pre-emptive multitasking. Sure, you can do those on a 286 if you really have to, but it's not easy. Without the 386, there would be no Linux, since Linus could never have afforded a "professional" workstation (if he had been able to, he'd never have written Linux, remember).
Microsoft is the best friend the hardware industry ever had, but Red Hat isn't far behind
To be fair, the computer world in general has bennifited tremendously from open source. Don't get me wrong: I love linux, gcc, bash, etc. NetBSD has been a huge win for appliance vendors looking for instant-OS.
Software that makes obsolete hardware useful again is directly against the interests of the hardware industry. Plenty of people (including me) have got an old P133 running a free OS for just those miscellaneous network tasks, like DNS, firewall and the like. You think the hardware industry wouldn't prefer we all bought modern machines rather than reusing what they doubtless class as "junk"?
My experience with every hardware vendor that I've worked with is that Linux and open source is their #1 pain in the butt.
You're right, but it's not the old reason.
Why do you make so many accommodations for the failures of the OS? Isn't the OS supposed to work for you, instead of you working for it? How many features do you have to shut off before it's not worth the considerable cash you paid for it?
.sh file, then the problem would also exist on Linux.
Clearly you lack an understanding of the issue. This is nothing to do with OS. The issue is one of users running executables they are sent via email. If (insert your favourite Linux email package here) allowed a user to double-click an attached
Outlook was designed to be scripted so you could use it to build your own workflow . If you don't need this feature, switch it off! Complaining about exposed but unused functionality being abused is that same as complaining that it's Linux's fault of all the daemons are started at boot and someone roots you though BIND.
Really? Oil is big money. Big money gets things done in this country.
But there is no such thing as Big Oil, really - there is only Big Energy. People don't want oil, it's nasty stuff, they want to be able to move people and goods from A to B, heat homes, power electrical devices and so on. Energy companies should be racing to see who gets to fusion first, because whoever does will make a fortune.
As for the military - this is about research, right? And we people of the internet believe in freedom of information - especially when it comes to scientific information. The army should be thrown out, simply - they don't believe in openness and sharing information.
Umm, you do know that the Internet was actually invented by the military, right? Go look up DARPA on your favourite search engine.
Fusion is not likely to be within easy reach in the near future.
The breakeven point was reached recently, the point at which a fusion reaction outputs as much power as is needed to sustain it. The science is done; the rest is all engineering. But at present it is starved of resources.
The government should have a program that helps and directs corporations getting into space directly, and showing them how a profit could be made... that's where the real ticket is
I think you might like Robert Zubrin's books. He's an engineer by profession who advocates colonization of Mars, and as an engineer he has some pretty realistic ideas about how to do it. But one of his other proposals is mining He3 on the moon. We know it's there. A fusion reactor running on He3 would be far more efficient than one running on D-T, because you could extract the power by inductance directly into electricity rather than by heating steam to turn a generator. He does some calculations of how much the substance is worth at current electricity prices (I don't have my copy here son I can't quote the numbers, but they are large), and once fusion is demonstrated as being usable with D-T, it should be straightforward enough to raise capital for mining He3 on the moon commercially.
I hope China will work with NASA and ESO in a co-operative level instead of with a competitive nature.
It's a historic fact: humans get more done faster when competing against someone or something.
It's just the way we are. Our minds are hardwired by evolution to be motivated by competitive challenges.
shameful waste of Earth's, humans' and economic resources to duplicate what NASA has done
Is it a shameful waste of resources to teach this year's class the same as what last year's class were taught? No, of course not. The fact that it has been done before is irrelevant - it needs to be done again so more people can have the experience, and then they can use that experience in the "real world", which is doing new science.
why is it spending such insane sums of money in an area that will not bring tangible benefits to its people ans standard of living?
Because China understands that if it wants to feed its people it's going to have to automate food production more, which means fewer people in the fields, which means they have to be found new jobs to do. From fields to factories to offices - we did that in the West, now China must do it too.