Re:XML is NOT just text!
on
XML and Perl
·
· Score: 1
Heh. It's actually randomly generated text from a disassociating web crawler I wrote once. I used to run all kinds of dot.com press releases through it, just for kicks.
'jfb
Re:XML is NOT just text!
on
XML and Perl
·
· Score: 1
> I'm not sure that "human-readible" is a primary > argument for XML...
Sure it is. It's the entire justification for having a text-based protocol -- otherwise, why waste the cycles?
'jfb
Re:XML is NOT just text!
on
XML and Perl
·
· Score: 1
... which of course kicks the chair out from under of one of the primary arguments of the XML snakeoil salesmen, that XML is "human-readable", to say nothing of "human-editable".
Because -- pace, Arianna Huffington -- there's actual utility to SUVs? Whereas there's no additional utility to riding your 75lb retardmobile on the sidewalk to offset the radically increased threat to public safety that such behavior causes?
I think it's safe to say that someone who actually likes Piers Anthony would find Vance baffling.
He is, IMHO, the one true stylist that the science fiction genre ever produced. His books represent the very pinnacle of American genre fiction, along with Chandler.
The Segway might be safer for the rider than a skateboard et. al., but it sure as shit isn't safer for the other people on the sidewalk. It's an extra 70lbs -- on top of who knows how much tofu- and sprout-fed mealy Californian -- moving at up to 15mph. Given how godawfully bad San Francisco drivers are, I shudder to think how many pedestrians would get plowed over by yuppie asshats with their new $8,000 toy.
I have no problem with keeping these things off our sidewalks, for the same reasons that I have no problem with bicycles being confined to the street.
Info on SpecOMP, just in case anyone's interested. Also, here's a snippet from the FAQ:
Q3: What components does SPEC OMP measure? A3: Since the benchmarks are designed to reflect applications requiring compute-intensive parallel processing, they measure performance of the computer's processors, memory architecture, operating system, and compiler. It is important to remember the contribution of the latter three components.
Note that this is not a pure CPU test (like SpecINT/FP), but rather a test of SMP performance. Looks like the tin-foil hat "Wait 'til EV8!" brigade might have been on to something...
Well, naturally a 15,000rpm UltraIII and a 5400rpm EIDE are going to have different mechanisms. The point is that a 7200rpm 2mb buffer SCSI disk and a 7200rpm 2mb buffer IDE drive will be the/exact/ same drive, modulo the (bolt-on) interface logic.
Buy SCSI for all the right reasons (superior performance at the top end, hot-pluggability, device bus density), not because the drives themselves are "better" than IDE ones. That there's a pricing differential is entirely due to the willingness of the marketplace to spend more on SCSI than IDE. It's soak, pure and simple.
Completely incorrect. The differences between, say, a SCSI Barracuda and an IDE one are exclusively the interface logic. The drive mechanisms are identical.
Please stop using "Rendezvous" in this context. I do not think it means what you think it means.
The name "Rendezvous" is just Apple's Nifty New Name for ZeroConf, an IETF blessed slicker-than-shit-through-a-goose service discovery protocol. It's not a p2p network, or a commercial product, or a plugin for iTunes.
Err, I think that that (poorly written) sentence refers to the SmartDisk drive itself, not the Firewire 800 interface. In other words, the drive will have both USB2 and FW800 interfaces.
Ok, how about this: PC hardware is a commodity business. Unless and until you can demonstrate that there's a market for "stripped down" motherboards, you aren't going to find any. There are no "boutique" PC hardware manufacturers, because it's not in the economic interest of the companies who produce motherboards. The number of people who demand that unnecessary hardware be left off is smaller even than the number of Slashdot editors who can spell.
If the original poster is incapable of turning off the built in sound (!) on a PC motherboard, perhaps (s)he ought to be looking at purchasing hardware from an OEM, like Dell?
I don't necessarily disagree with you, but it's important to remember that the argument that the Second Amendment confers an individual right to gun ownership is in itself a completely subjective interpretation of the language of the Constitution.
The problem with the question as asked is that there *isn't* an objective argument to be made one way or the other. That's why it's such an intractable problem.
... when you let people with grant money and "big ideas" near a concept that they don't understand. They hijack it and produce mountains of meaningless buzzword babble, trying to puff up their own particular snake-oil prescription.
"Ontologies" indeed. I bet David Hume would loooooove this.
... if you don't have a plan for the software in place already? Why'd they select your bid? What benefit to the children would replacing the systems possibly have?
I'm sorry, but classroom time, especially for third graders, is way too valuable to be wasted on computers. You're not going to find educational software on Linux that in any way replicates the software that they were using on their Apples, no teacher is going to want to spend class time teaching eight year olds about the tedious minutiae of futzing with shells and program invocation and KDE's ass-backwards menuing systems and the zillion other counter-intuitive tasks that dealing with computers entails -- to say nothing of learning it all themselves.
These systems will be gathering dust before the school year's out, in all likelihood. Now, that's not your fault, really, still less Linux's, but the situation is basically pointless. You might as well leave them in console for all the good that they'll do.
"Ahem. 128MB L3 cache (on the POWER4 in the benchmark)? Daaaamn. I'm not saying that a fat L3 cache has anything to do with SPEC benchmarks (I'm guessing it doesn't), I'm just making an observation: that's a lot of cache!"
In fact, it absolutely does have an effect on the SPEC benchmarks. You'll note that IBM's world beating POWER4 SPEC scores were recorded on a *dual core* module -- in other words, they cut the number of active cores in half, but the shared cache architecture meant that the L3 for each active core was thus doubled. Coincidentally, the SPEC working set will fit within the 64mb of cache per processor.
It's still hellaciously fast, but that monster cache IS there for a reason.
Slashdot Mirror
Heh. It's actually randomly generated text from a disassociating web crawler I wrote once. I used to run all kinds of dot.com press releases through it, just for kicks.
'jfb
> I'm not sure that "human-readible" is a primary ...
> argument for XML
Sure it is. It's the entire justification for having a text-based protocol -- otherwise, why waste the cycles?
'jfb
... which of course kicks the chair out from under of one of the primary arguments of the XML snakeoil salesmen, that XML is "human-readable", to say nothing of "human-editable".
'jfb
The EV7 isn't SMT. That was the plan for the EV8.
'jfb
Because -- pace, Arianna Huffington -- there's actual utility to SUVs? Whereas there's no additional utility to riding your 75lb retardmobile on the sidewalk to offset the radically increased threat to public safety that such behavior causes?
'jfb
Keep reading ...
The machine was configured such that thread count equalled active CPU count.
'jfb
I think it's safe to say that someone who actually likes Piers Anthony would find Vance baffling.
He is, IMHO, the one true stylist that the science fiction genre ever produced. His books represent the very pinnacle of American genre fiction, along with Chandler.
'jfb
The world doesn't need one Piers Anthony.
'jfb
The Segway might be safer for the rider than a skateboard et. al., but it sure as shit isn't safer for the other people on the sidewalk. It's an extra 70lbs -- on top of who knows how much tofu- and sprout-fed mealy Californian -- moving at up to 15mph. Given how godawfully bad San Francisco drivers are, I shudder to think how many pedestrians would get plowed over by yuppie asshats with their new $8,000 toy.
I have no problem with keeping these things off our sidewalks, for the same reasons that I have no problem with bicycles being confined to the street.
'jfb
Info on SpecOMP, just in case anyone's interested. Also, here's a snippet from the FAQ:
Q3: What components does SPEC OMP measure?
A3: Since the benchmarks are designed to reflect applications requiring compute-intensive parallel processing, they measure performance of the computer's processors, memory architecture, operating system, and compiler. It is important to remember the contribution of the latter three components.
'jfb
... at least on OpenMP type applications. Cribbed shamelessly from realworldtech.com:
...
SPECOMP2001 results, base/peak:
4 cpu:
EV7/1150: 6027/6824
I2/1000: 3762/4091
8 cpu:
EV7/1150: 10349/11929
POWER4+/1450: 9458/ 9694
PA8700+/875: 4375/ 4541
16 cpu:
EV7/1150: 17724/20637
PA8700+/875: 7763/ 8788
R14k/600: 7265/ 7726
Note that this is not a pure CPU test (like SpecINT/FP), but rather a test of SMP performance. Looks like the tin-foil hat "Wait 'til EV8!" brigade might have been on to something
'jfb
I'm seeing it too. And it only appears to be recent comments that are being incorrectly displayed.
'jfb
Well, naturally a 15,000rpm UltraIII and a 5400rpm EIDE are going to have different mechanisms. The point is that a 7200rpm 2mb buffer SCSI disk and a 7200rpm 2mb buffer IDE drive will be the /exact/ same drive, modulo the (bolt-on) interface logic.
Buy SCSI for all the right reasons (superior performance at the top end, hot-pluggability, device bus density), not because the drives themselves are "better" than IDE ones. That there's a pricing differential is entirely due to the willingness of the marketplace to spend more on SCSI than IDE. It's soak, pure and simple.
'jfb
Completely incorrect. The differences between, say, a SCSI Barracuda and an IDE one are exclusively the interface logic. The drive mechanisms are identical.
'jfb
Please stop using "Rendezvous" in this context. I do not think it means what you think it means.
The name "Rendezvous" is just Apple's Nifty New Name for ZeroConf, an IETF blessed slicker-than-shit-through-a-goose service discovery protocol. It's not a p2p network, or a commercial product, or a plugin for iTunes.
'jfb
Err, I think that that (poorly written) sentence refers to the SmartDisk drive itself, not the Firewire 800 interface. In other words, the drive will have both USB2 and FW800 interfaces.
'jfb
Ok, how about this: PC hardware is a commodity business. Unless and until you can demonstrate that there's a market for "stripped down" motherboards, you aren't going to find any. There are no "boutique" PC hardware manufacturers, because it's not in the economic interest of the companies who produce motherboards. The number of people who demand that unnecessary hardware be left off is smaller even than the number of Slashdot editors who can spell.
If the original poster is incapable of turning off the built in sound (!) on a PC motherboard, perhaps (s)he ought to be looking at purchasing hardware from an OEM, like Dell?
'jfb
PC crap is PC crap. That you get some of it for free and some you pay extra for does not make up for the essential commodity status of the hardware.
'jfb
Just so. Thanks for the pointer to that paper, by the way -- it's brilliant.
'jfb
I don't necessarily disagree with you, but it's important to remember that the argument that the Second Amendment confers an individual right to gun ownership is in itself a completely subjective interpretation of the language of the Constitution.
The problem with the question as asked is that there *isn't* an objective argument to be made one way or the other. That's why it's such an intractable problem.
'jfb
Not being smart enough to appreciate something is no reason to bad-mouth it, hoss.
'jfb
... when you let people with grant money and "big ideas" near a concept that they don't understand. They hijack it and produce mountains of meaningless buzzword babble, trying to puff up their own particular snake-oil prescription.
"Ontologies" indeed. I bet David Hume would loooooove this.
'jfb
Remind me to stay out of Northern British Columbia. As if the man eating grizzlies and cougars weren't enough.
'jfb
... if you don't have a plan for the software in place already? Why'd they select your bid? What benefit to the children would replacing the systems possibly have?
I'm sorry, but classroom time, especially for third graders, is way too valuable to be wasted on computers. You're not going to find educational software on Linux that in any way replicates the software that they were using on their Apples, no teacher is going to want to spend class time teaching eight year olds about the tedious minutiae of futzing with shells and program invocation and KDE's ass-backwards menuing systems and the zillion other counter-intuitive tasks that dealing with computers entails -- to say nothing of learning it all themselves.
These systems will be gathering dust before the school year's out, in all likelihood. Now, that's not your fault, really, still less Linux's, but the situation is basically pointless. You might as well leave them in console for all the good that they'll do.
'jfb
"Ahem. 128MB L3 cache (on the POWER4 in the benchmark)? Daaaamn. I'm not saying that a fat L3 cache has anything to do with SPEC benchmarks (I'm guessing it doesn't), I'm just making an observation: that's a lot of cache!"
In fact, it absolutely does have an effect on the SPEC benchmarks. You'll note that IBM's world beating POWER4 SPEC scores were recorded on a *dual core* module -- in other words, they cut the number of active cores in half, but the shared cache architecture meant that the L3 for each active core was thus doubled. Coincidentally, the SPEC working set will fit within the 64mb of cache per processor.
It's still hellaciously fast, but that monster cache IS there for a reason.
'jfb