I don't believe I claimed that. I was responding to the claim "The PS2 does not run any form of Linux.", which had somehow got a +3 informative (!) rating...
What is interesting is that the Linux kit supports all the major devices on the PS2 - including the vector units (see http://www.ps2linux.com/dmesg.html:-) There's essentially no reason why you couldn't run a game under PS2 linux...
Whereas I agree with you on the AMD front, I strongly disagree regarding SCSI vs IDE in a server environment.
SCSI drives have disconnect abilities, which means they can have commands sent to them, and the bus is then disconnected (free for other use) while the drive is seeking to the sectors required and buffering in the internal drive RAM. This means that other drives can be instructed in this 'dead' time. On a single-drive system, this is irrelevant, but even on a small server (say 0.5Tb disk array) it is crucial.
IDE drives hog the channel - which is why you can't get much more speed out of a RAID-0 array with 3 or 4 drives than one with 2 (masters) on a standard PC. There are only 2 channels, so only 2 drives can be accessed at once. Contrast this to a SCSI system, where anything up to ~64 disks might be attached to a single channel, but using disconnect to manage that channel amongst them.
To see why disconnect works so well, remember that the time it takes to seek the disk head is measured in milliseconds - this is several orders of magnitude slower than the time to send the commands/data over the bus to the host computer.
Also remember that the ATA-100 is (AFAIK) a burst-speed, ie: it can transfer at that speed when the source data is in the cache - it cannot read the data at that speed... The latest SCSI standard is 320MBytes/sec (Seagate, I believe) although I think 160 MBytes/sec is the highest widely available standard. Given the architecture underlying both technologies, which do you think will have the best chance of filling it's cache more often in a RAID array? (Hint: it starts with an 'S':-)
The only company I have seen to make large-scale IDE RAID arrays work as fast as SCSI ones uses an IDE controller *per drive*, and attaches a SCSI/Fibrechannel front-end via custom hardware. It's still cheaper than SCSI, but not by that much, and getting people who know about it is more difficult when it goes wrong...
Mixed platforms on the server side are the norm rather than the exception, in the market where JBoss is trying to position itself.
Consider that JBoss is (will be, in some respects) a J2EE-compliant system, in everything except name. The purpose of J2EE is to deploy in large-scale environments... where you potentially have PC/W2K, Solaris, IBM S390, and God knows what else already providing a business solution.
You will not get a contract to replace the business systems from top to bottom, so take the view that you'll integrate into them instead. Now you're talking multi-tier Facades and Interfaces in order to get these things talking to each other.
You'll want to design things so that there is as little interdependence on co-operating subsystems as possible. Read 'Design Patterns'. Have a serious *think* about XML. Look at the Java libraries and the J2EE designs. Understand.
Have you ever noticed that it "just seems easier" to do things in Java than C/C++/VB(spit!) when there's any degree of complexity ? (I'm not talking about a couple of days' hacking, I'm talking about a designed system). There's a good reason why Java works so well - it's been designed well from the bottom up.
J2EE (and hence JBoss) take that elegance to a higher level of abstraction, but what they're doing is to continue the excellent design principles of the class libraries.
With no prior knowledge of verilog, I followed Jan Gray's articles in Circuit Cellar and extended the design on my own. Verilog is superficially similar to 'C', so long as you remember that each "function" will operate in parallel.
Boards are cheap (approx $110 US for a 200k gate chip that could easily hold 4 processors and a lot more).
My own direction is interfacing stuff to my own processor that is based heavily on Jan's design. It's for purely personal use, and saying that you are running code (assembly language only:-) on your own processor rates up there, as far as geekdom is concerned. At least to me, but maybe I'm biased:-))
Jan's site is at fpgacpu.org if you're interested. There are lots of details about all sorts of issues on the site. Some technical, some not so technical. Have a look under GR CPU's or XSOC:-)
There are several FPGA cpu's available already. For loadsadetails, go to http://www.fpgacpu.org/ and see just how easy it is to create a CPU. I've even managed to (starting with Jan's work) build my own without any prior knowledge of verilog.
The main drawback is always going to be speed though - it's simply far and away more complex to have reconfigurable hardware than static h/w. The current "hot" CPU of any generation will almost certainly never be reconfigurable!
No, they're not the only option, but they are amazingly good at storing electrical charge. Most of the other caps have lower capacitance, which would lead to larger unit size, which would be deemed "unacceptable" by the market.
Consider going back to the 'luggable' portable computer, or the 'breeze-block' mobile phone, for example.
OTOH, if something new came along that did have such useful dielectric properties, and didn't screw the environment/people, the 'market' would move pretty quickly, I reckon.
On top of that a lot of them spit out the most childish and unprofessional messages, indicating that they were created by 14-year olds with too much time, no talent and a bad attitude.
... as written by a 14 year-old with a bad attitude
Alternatively by someone with a poor grasp of the subtleties and nuances of written prose, not to mention the day-to-day costs of a professional environment.
My, my, aren't we on a high horse today? Before you go out and trash some other Joe, remember that not all of the herd out there are programmers or have the background to be one.
And your point is ?
Frankly I see no (nada, zero, zilch) right for people who don't contribute to a project to have a say in it. That's all there is to it.
If joe-not-a-programmer wants to have a say in how something should develop, (s)he should be doing something equally useful for the project. Documentation. Testing. Bug reports and feedback. Implementation issues. There's a ton of useful non-programming tasks that any project can benefit from.
OTOH, nothing gets a programmers back up faster than some idiot (a technical term for those not working on the project, but also non-constructively criticising it:-) comes along and adopts the moral high ground with their antagonistic "position" on it all.
At the end of the day, if joe-programmer is working on s/w to instantly convert christians to devil worship, it is up to him/her. Frightening if the s/w works (would we notice?:-), but it's the programmers choice how (s)he spends any personal time.
Personally I think Mono is an excellent idea - it's win-win. On the one hand, Microsoft could lose control of their life-blood of applications, or the licence will turn out to be prohibitive, and they get exposed manipulating standards once again... Where's the downside ?
SGI see themselves primarily as a solutions/hardware company. IRIX, for all it's good points, is a cost to them in selling their hardware to high-end customers.
By high-end, I mean mainly the government, defence, and video/film markets. There may be others, but those are the ones I've worked in.
Linux, on the other hand, is mainly maintained for free - they get a "cool" OS (SGI's markets are very image-conscious) with minimal effort, and it works on commodity hardware to boot. (No pun intended:-)
SGI's technical expertise lies mainly in h/w. Their graphics abilities have always been well ahead of the curve - Discreet Logic capitalised on the flexibility of the graphics array when Gary wrote 'flame'... It did all the matrix ops on the framebuffer itself, leading to realtime effects on almost every operation. Wowed everyone. With Linux, they get the flexibility to play with their hardware, and simply integrate the drivers for that hardware into the OS - no maintenance of all the surrounding tools, or management of requests for new technologies (PPP took ages to appear under IRIX) etc.
Seems like a good move to me. What's even nicer is their apparent willingness to donate some of their s/w intellectual property to the common cause (XFS, CC-NUMA etc.) All round, I don't see we (or they) come off any worse than before, In fact I'd rate it win-win.
Once the "faith" in a program has gone, everything else just fades away, at least in terms of wanting to use it.
Let me put it in other terms. Assume I want to write a letter. I open 'nedit', and start typing. I'm reasonably ok at typing (I've been doing it for years) and I bang out my letter without any fuss.
As soon as word has realised I'm writing a letter, all sorts of things interrupt me. What the fuck is happening here - I lose the flow, I start to worry about *layout* for God's sake! This is in itself a reason to dump the OS. If I want help, I'm not too proud to ask the computer (I've been doing that for close on 15 years!), but I don't want it to stop me and ask if I want help. Man! that's annoying!
The point I was making was (for once - I don't agree with your gun laws either:-) that it was a manageable cost, easily defendable to a concerned public, and certainly not in the realm of "It won't happen here".
Politicians are to a (wo)man weasels. Almost the definition of a good politician is one who can understand and manipulate public fervour to make his/her viewpoint actioned. Do you think the jingoism in wartime is an accident ? Do you ever see a politician attacking a wrong but popular idea when (s)he's up for election ?
Guns were just one (convenient) example. Any semi-competent politician will measure public mood for the latest "all-bad-thing", then concoct a story illustrating how his/her pet project will be society's saviour. Get used to it. The issue here is larger though. You *are* at risk. Complacency is *not* the answer. Don't let what happened to us happen to you.
It may or may not happen in the US. Certainly the size is not the issue.
You're making the mistake of assuming a consistent average population density throughout the US. Sure, hicksville Nevada will not get mandated cameras any time soon, but major cities (where the majority of the US population lives!) are not immune.
Britain has a population of ~60Million. The US has a population of ~300Million. According to US Gov figures, the top 20 cities by pop. in the country housed 40Million people in 1990. The cost of coverage of only these 20 cities would be on the same order of magnitude as Britain's spying network, and would probably cost less than the individual cities garbage collection bills...
Seems pretty simple to get it through to me, especially with all those kids killing themselves and others in schools. Just put the argument "We'd see the guns before they got to the school, don't you think your child's life is worth more than your garbage ?"
BTW, I'm not in favour of CCTV everywhere (see www.domesday.org for my views!)
The last outbreak of F&M (back in the Sixties) taught some hard lessons. One of these was that F&M afflicted beasts should be destroyed immediately then buried. There was no alternative to this "solution". Burning the dead animals was specifically rejected.
Britain is a member of the EU. There are rules and regulations that GB *must* follow under these sort of circumstances. One of those is that the number of infected animals must be available for inspection up to 1 week later by "officials". Another is that the destruction should take place by burning if possible. GB unfortunately has been following these rules to the letter. It will almost certainly be the downfall of the livestock industry in this country.
It seems that "Foolish Youngster" is living up to his (her?) name. The Brits are not being stupid, they're just (for once) adhering to the law. Perhaps we have too high a respect for an (obviously stupid) law, but that's not to say we agree with it, it's just that we adhere to it. There is a common saying in GB: "The law is an ass". What it means is that there is always a circumstance where the law is obviously stupid.
Show me the farmer brave enough to step out of line during this crisis though and tell the law where to go. Lose your insurance. Lose your farm. Destroy your livelihood. Would you ? If you would, it's not just the law that's an ass. The press would have a field day...
I recently bought (http://www.burchEd.com.au) a spartan-2 development board for $120. It has roughly half the gates (and is of the same architecture) of the virtex chip used in the article - some 200,000. This is an enormous number of gates!
The s/w to program it is available free from Xilinx, and is actually rather good. Far better than the (non-free) Atmel s/w, IMHO. It's called WebPack ISE and is downloadable from the xilinx website (for those of us with broadband, anyway:-) You also get it on CD with the BurchEd kit...
The costs of quantity-1 XC2S200 chips is ~$35 from various providers. This is cheap enough to let the home user actually start playing with h/w as well as s/w. If you've ever looked at verilog, it's actually quite similar to 'C'. Granted there are extra things and it's an inherently parallel language, but it's still reasonably familiar.
To give an idea of what can be done on an XC2S200 chip, go to http://www.fpgacpu.org/ and read about the gr0040 design from Jan Gray - a 16-bit RISC cpu optimised for Spartan-2/Virtex FPGAs. You should be able to fit 14 or so into the chip! So now you can start to play with SMP on your own hardware...
If you go to the Xilinx site, you'll find WEBpack ISE. This contains everything you need to do very complex FPGA designs. It's not open source, but it is free. I've not yet found any (intentional) limitations in the package:-)
So if you have 3 bits per spot, and you're using greyscale coding, surely you have 8x the data capacity, assuming the spots are still the same size. I'm assuming they are since the article says it is a s/w upgrade not a h/w upgrade...
Slashdot Mirror
I don't believe I claimed that. I was responding to the claim "The PS2 does not run any form of Linux.", which had somehow got a +3 informative (!) rating ...
What is interesting is that the Linux kit supports all the major devices on the PS2 - including the vector units (see http://www.ps2linux.com/dmesg.html :-) There's essentially no reason why you couldn't run a game under PS2 linux...
... but only in Japanese for now (see http://www.ps2linux.com/)
Simon.
Whereas I agree with you on the AMD front, I strongly disagree regarding SCSI vs IDE in a server environment.
:-)
SCSI drives have disconnect abilities, which means they can have commands sent to them, and the bus is then disconnected (free for other use) while the drive is seeking to the sectors required and buffering in the internal drive RAM. This means that other drives can be instructed in this 'dead' time. On a single-drive system, this is irrelevant, but even on a small server (say 0.5Tb disk array) it is crucial.
IDE drives hog the channel - which is why you can't get much more speed out of a RAID-0 array with 3 or 4 drives than one with 2 (masters) on a standard PC. There are only 2 channels, so only 2 drives can be accessed at once. Contrast this to a SCSI system, where anything up to ~64 disks might be attached to a single channel, but using disconnect to manage that channel amongst them.
To see why disconnect works so well, remember that the time it takes to seek the disk head is measured in milliseconds - this is several orders of magnitude slower than the time to send the commands/data over the bus to the host computer.
Also remember that the ATA-100 is (AFAIK) a burst-speed, ie: it can transfer at that speed when the source data is in the cache - it cannot read the data at that speed... The latest SCSI standard is 320MBytes/sec (Seagate, I believe) although I think 160 MBytes/sec is the highest widely available standard. Given the architecture underlying both technologies, which do you think will have the best chance of filling it's cache more often in a RAID array? (Hint: it starts with an 'S'
The only company I have seen to make large-scale IDE RAID arrays work as fast as SCSI ones uses an IDE controller *per drive*, and attaches a SCSI/Fibrechannel front-end via custom hardware. It's still cheaper than SCSI, but not by that much, and getting people who know about it is more difficult when it goes wrong...
Simon.
Mixed platforms on the server side are the norm rather than the exception, in the market where JBoss is trying to position itself.
Consider that JBoss is (will be, in some respects) a J2EE-compliant system, in everything except name. The purpose of J2EE is to deploy in large-scale environments... where you potentially have PC/W2K, Solaris, IBM S390, and God knows what else already providing a business solution.
You will not get a contract to replace the business systems from top to bottom, so take the view that you'll integrate into them instead. Now you're talking multi-tier Facades and Interfaces in order to get these things talking to each other.
You'll want to design things so that there is as little interdependence on co-operating subsystems as possible. Read 'Design Patterns'. Have a serious *think* about XML. Look at the Java libraries and the J2EE designs. Understand.
Have you ever noticed that it "just seems easier" to do things in Java than C/C++/VB(spit!) when there's any degree of complexity ? (I'm not talking about a couple of days' hacking, I'm talking about a designed system). There's a good reason why Java works so well - it's been designed well from the bottom up.
J2EE (and hence JBoss) take that elegance to a higher level of abstraction, but what they're doing is to continue the excellent design principles of the class libraries.
A happy JBoss user.
Simon.
With no prior knowledge of verilog, I followed Jan Gray's articles in Circuit Cellar and extended the design on my own. Verilog is superficially similar to 'C', so long as you remember that each "function" will operate in parallel.
:-) on your own processor rates up there, as far as geekdom is concerned. At least to me, but maybe I'm biased :-))
:-)
Boards are cheap (approx $110 US for a 200k gate chip that could easily hold 4 processors and a lot more).
My own direction is interfacing stuff to my own processor that is based heavily on Jan's design. It's for purely personal use, and saying that you are running code (assembly language only
Jan's site is at fpgacpu.org if you're interested. There are lots of details about all sorts of issues on the site. Some technical, some not so technical. Have a look under GR CPU's or XSOC
Simon.
There are several FPGA cpu's available already. For loadsadetails, go to http://www.fpgacpu.org/ and see just how easy it is to create a CPU. I've even managed to (starting with Jan's work) build my own without any prior knowledge of verilog.
The main drawback is always going to be speed though - it's simply far and away more complex to have reconfigurable hardware than static h/w. The current "hot" CPU of any generation will almost certainly never be reconfigurable!
Simon.
If you have an executable that clocks in at ~500MB, you have problems indeed, only one of which will be the VM system!
What on earth does it do? Or perhaps the question should be "what doesn't it do?"
Simon.
Not much more than half a brain.
Take image source A
Calculate Signal To Noise ratio SNR(A)
Insert Steg data into A within 1 std dev of SNR(A)
You're done.
No, they're not the only option, but they are amazingly good at storing electrical charge. Most of the other caps have lower capacitance, which would lead to larger unit size, which would be deemed "unacceptable" by the market.
Consider going back to the 'luggable' portable computer, or the 'breeze-block' mobile phone, for example.
OTOH, if something new came along that did have such useful dielectric properties, and didn't screw the environment/people, the 'market' would move pretty quickly, I reckon.
Simon
Alternatively by someone with a poor grasp of the subtleties and nuances of written prose, not to mention the day-to-day costs of a professional environment.
I think it's only organised religion that one should be very wary of. Personal belief in a/some God(s) can, I'm told, be very satisfying.
:-)
Organised religion is simply one more power structure erected by those at the top to control those at the bottom (and those halfway up
Commercial organised religion is simply sickening.
Simon.
And your point is ?
Frankly I see no (nada, zero, zilch) right for people who don't contribute to a project to have a say in it. That's all there is to it.
If joe-not-a-programmer wants to have a say in how something should develop, (s)he should be doing something equally useful for the project. Documentation. Testing. Bug reports and feedback. Implementation issues. There's a ton of useful non-programming tasks that any project can benefit from.
OTOH, nothing gets a programmers back up faster than some idiot (a technical term for those not working on the project, but also non-constructively criticising it
At the end of the day, if joe-programmer is working on s/w to instantly convert christians to devil worship, it is up to him/her. Frightening if the s/w works (would we notice?
Personally I think Mono is an excellent idea - it's win-win. On the one hand, Microsoft could lose control of their life-blood of applications, or the licence will turn out to be prohibitive, and they get exposed manipulating standards once again... Where's the downside ?
Simon
SGI see themselves primarily as a solutions/hardware company. IRIX, for all it's good points, is a cost to them in selling their hardware to high-end customers.
:-)
By high-end, I mean mainly the government, defence, and video/film markets. There may be others, but those are the ones I've worked in.
Linux, on the other hand, is mainly maintained for free - they get a "cool" OS (SGI's markets are very image-conscious) with minimal effort, and it works on commodity hardware to boot. (No pun intended
SGI's technical expertise lies mainly in h/w. Their graphics abilities have always been well ahead of the curve - Discreet Logic capitalised on the flexibility of the graphics array when Gary wrote 'flame'... It did all the matrix ops on the framebuffer itself, leading to realtime effects on almost every operation. Wowed everyone. With Linux, they get the flexibility to play with their hardware, and simply integrate the drivers for that hardware into the OS - no maintenance of all the surrounding tools, or management of requests for new technologies (PPP took ages to appear under IRIX) etc.
Seems like a good move to me. What's even nicer is their apparent willingness to donate some of their s/w intellectual property to the common cause (XFS, CC-NUMA etc.) All round, I don't see we (or they) come off any worse than before, In fact I'd rate it win-win.
Simon.
Once the "faith" in a program has gone, everything else just fades away, at least in terms of wanting to use it.
Let me put it in other terms. Assume I want to write a letter. I open 'nedit', and start typing. I'm reasonably ok at typing (I've been doing it for years) and I bang out my letter without any fuss.
As soon as word has realised I'm writing a letter, all sorts of things interrupt me. What the fuck is happening here - I lose the flow, I start to worry about *layout* for God's sake! This is in itself a reason to dump the OS. If I want help, I'm not too proud to ask the computer (I've been doing that for close on 15 years!), but I don't want it to stop me and ask if I want help. Man! that's annoying!
Simon.
The point I was making was (for once - I don't agree with your gun laws either :-) that it was a manageable cost, easily defendable to a concerned public, and certainly not in the realm of "It won't happen here".
Politicians are to a (wo)man weasels. Almost the definition of a good politician is one who can understand and manipulate public fervour to make his/her viewpoint actioned. Do you think the jingoism in wartime is an accident ? Do you ever see a politician attacking a wrong but popular idea when (s)he's up for election ?
Guns were just one (convenient) example. Any semi-competent politician will measure public mood for the latest "all-bad-thing", then concoct a story illustrating how his/her pet project will be society's saviour. Get used to it. The issue here is larger though. You *are* at risk. Complacency is *not* the answer. Don't let what happened to us happen to you.
Simon.
It may or may not happen in the US. Certainly the size is not the issue.
You're making the mistake of assuming a consistent average population density throughout the US. Sure, hicksville Nevada will not get mandated cameras any time soon, but major cities (where the majority of the US population lives!) are not immune.
Britain has a population of ~60Million. The US has a population of ~300Million. According to US Gov figures, the top 20 cities by pop. in the country housed 40Million people in 1990. The cost of coverage of only these 20 cities would be on the same order of magnitude as Britain's spying network, and would probably cost less than the individual cities garbage collection bills...
Seems pretty simple to get it through to me, especially with all those kids killing themselves and others in schools. Just put the argument "We'd see the guns before they got to the school, don't you think your child's life is worth more than your garbage ?"
BTW, I'm not in favour of CCTV everywhere (see www.domesday.org for my views!)
Simon
The last outbreak of F&M (back in the Sixties) taught some hard lessons. One of these was that F&M afflicted beasts should be destroyed immediately then buried. There was no alternative to this "solution". Burning the dead animals was specifically rejected.
Britain is a member of the EU. There are rules and regulations that GB *must* follow under these sort of circumstances. One of those is that the number of infected animals must be available for inspection up to 1 week later by "officials". Another is that the destruction should take place by burning if possible. GB unfortunately has been following these rules to the letter. It will almost certainly be the downfall of the livestock industry in this country.
It seems that "Foolish Youngster" is living up to his (her?) name. The Brits are not being stupid, they're just (for once) adhering to the law. Perhaps we have too high a respect for an (obviously stupid) law, but that's not to say we agree with it, it's just that we adhere to it. There is a common saying in GB: "The law is an ass". What it means is that there is always a circumstance where the law is obviously stupid.
Show me the farmer brave enough to step out of line during this crisis though and tell the law where to go. Lose your insurance. Lose your farm. Destroy your livelihood. Would you ? If you would, it's not just the law that's an ass. The press would have a field day...
Simon.
Again, not to push Xilinx or anything, but Webpack ISE comes with Modelsim XE. This seems perfectly adequate for my needs :-)
This is very misleading.
:-) You also get it on CD with the BurchEd kit...
:-)
I recently bought (http://www.burchEd.com.au) a spartan-2 development board for $120. It has roughly half the gates (and is of the same architecture) of the virtex chip used in the article - some 200,000. This is an enormous number of gates!
The s/w to program it is available free from Xilinx, and is actually rather good. Far better than the (non-free) Atmel s/w, IMHO. It's called WebPack ISE and is downloadable from the xilinx website (for those of us with broadband, anyway
The costs of quantity-1 XC2S200 chips is ~$35 from various providers. This is cheap enough to let the home user actually start playing with h/w as well as s/w. If you've ever looked at verilog, it's actually quite similar to 'C'. Granted there are extra things and it's an inherently parallel language, but it's still reasonably familiar.
To give an idea of what can be done on an XC2S200 chip, go to http://www.fpgacpu.org/ and read about the gr0040 design from Jan Gray - a 16-bit RISC cpu optimised for Spartan-2/Virtex FPGAs. You should be able to fit 14 or so into the chip! So now you can start to play with SMP on your own hardware...
Well, I think it's cool anyway
If you go to the Xilinx site, you'll find WEBpack ISE. This contains everything you need to do very complex FPGA designs. It's not open source, but it is free. I've not yet found any (intentional) limitations in the package :-)
Simon.
Maybe there *are* some rocket scientists working at NASA :-)
> Same people that gave us Mad Cow Desease
Looks like someone's been eating british beef then...
Doh!
So if you have 3 bits per spot, and you're using greyscale coding, surely you have 8x the data capacity, assuming the spots are still the same size. I'm assuming they are since the article says it is a s/w upgrade not a h/w upgrade...
:-)
Confused. Of course 3x is good. 8x is better
> Their actions in India and Packistan are not forgotten.
Mmm. A pity the grammar and spelling were, though.
Simon.