The other challenge they will face is getting content to their player.
It's amazing how quickly people have forgotten about ripping CDs. Just a few years ago, all portable MP3 players were (supposedly) sold for the purpose of playing music ripped from CDs, but today the common assumption is that all music is either legally downloaded and DRM-encrusted or illegally downloaded.
The biggest help would be a power-saving feature for the CPUs that when idle they go into a sort of sleep mode and turn off some parts to save power, but I don't recall ever seeing this option...
It's called C1 (or HLT), and you don't hear about it because it's been in every x86 CPU for over 5 years. Modern CPUs can also save power when lightly loaded using dynamic voltage scaling, but servers rarely use it (yet).
Sun just wants about 5x what the market rate is for a CPU-year.
Not too surprising IMO. In order to keep latency low they may have to keep utilization low, which means they have to overcharge to make up for it. In general, renting something at small granularity is more expensive than renting at large granularity.
Supporting Lawful intercept is just like e911, its trivial to do. Good networks (in terms of business logic, closely comparable with pstn networks etc) will accept calls at an edge device, and then proxy them through their network. This however has a cost as transporting sip+rtp == bandwidth.
Translation: If your VoIP network is so inefficient and expensive that it offers no advantage over the PSTN, CALEA compliance is easy. But then why even build it in the first place?
The rule is that if any part of the system (Skype) touches the PSTN, then every call (e.g. Skype-to-Skype) must be tappable. It sounds like this would totally sabotage Skype, FWD, Gizmo, SIPPhone, etc.
The old POWER instruction set is dead; no one uses it any more. These days Power Architecture is PowerPC. And this new processor does have AltiVec. Pinouts are irrelevant since they were never standardized in the first place.
A hard drive only uses about 10W, and a typical PC only has one. IIRC, fans use about 1/3 as much power as the components they're cooling. So processors are still using a large fraction of a computer's power.
Commodity supercomputing arrived a few years ago with Beowulf clusters, which happen to be much cheaper than ccNUMA machines. I'm sure SGI and Newisys would be happy to see the HPC world suddenly drop MPI and switch to OpenMP, but I don't think it's going to happen. I see Horus being used for commercial servers (e.g. databases, server consolidation, etc.), not supercomputing.
BTW, Horus doesn't use Infiniband. Maybe it uses IB cables.
The polished and feature-rich Azureus rules the Bittorrent sphere.
That says a lot about the current population of the BitTorrent sphere. I suspect that an "invisible" BitTorrent client built in to popular browsers (e.g. Opera) would have lots more users than Azureus.
This gives me a thought: Which has more users, Azureus or World of Warcraft? How "feature-rich" is the WoW updater?
Slashdot Mirror
The other challenge they will face is getting content to their player.
It's amazing how quickly people have forgotten about ripping CDs. Just a few years ago, all portable MP3 players were (supposedly) sold for the purpose of playing music ripped from CDs, but today the common assumption is that all music is either legally downloaded and DRM-encrusted or illegally downloaded.
Sunbird is just the calendar. The combination of Thunderbird and Sunbird is a complete PIM called Lightning.
What if the killer cross-platform PIM comes from the browser suite instead of the office suite?
The biggest help would be a power-saving feature for the CPUs that when idle they go into a sort of sleep mode and turn off some parts to save power, but I don't recall ever seeing this option...
It's called C1 (or HLT), and you don't hear about it because it's been in every x86 CPU for over 5 years. Modern CPUs can also save power when lightly loaded using dynamic voltage scaling, but servers rarely use it (yet).
I agree. Obviously an Energy Star program for servers should concentrate on active power, not sleep modes.
It's called Energy Star, but it doesn't (yet) apply to servers.
Sun just wants about 5x what the market rate is for a CPU-year.
Not too surprising IMO. In order to keep latency low they may have to keep utilization low, which means they have to overcharge to make up for it. In general, renting something at small granularity is more expensive than renting at large granularity.
Try running an MPI app on BOINC and let us know how it goes. Or an app that requires 4GB RAM and 10GB of disk space on each node.
Also consider that big companies tend to already have their own grids. Sun Grid sounds like it would mostly benefit smaller customers.
Silly AC, this is politics. There's no logic allowed.
Supporting Lawful intercept is just like e911, its trivial to do. Good networks (in terms of business logic, closely comparable with pstn networks etc) will accept calls at an edge device, and then proxy them through their network. This however has a cost as transporting sip+rtp == bandwidth.
Translation: If your VoIP network is so inefficient and expensive that it offers no advantage over the PSTN, CALEA compliance is easy. But then why even build it in the first place?
The rule is that if any part of the system (Skype) touches the PSTN, then every call (e.g. Skype-to-Skype) must be tappable. It sounds like this would totally sabotage Skype, FWD, Gizmo, SIPPhone, etc.
Why do people keep talking about GoogleFS, given that it doesn't exist outside Google?
The old POWER instruction set is dead; no one uses it any more. These days Power Architecture is PowerPC. And this new processor does have AltiVec. Pinouts are irrelevant since they were never standardized in the first place.
According to the Web site it has AltiVec. By 2007 I think Apple will have switched completely to Intel, never to look back.
A hard drive only uses about 10W, and a typical PC only has one. IIRC, fans use about 1/3 as much power as the components they're cooling. So processors are still using a large fraction of a computer's power.
Film at 11! Is there really any news here?
Where's the fourth horseman? There are supposed to be four!
Then they'll just buy new laws that suit them better.
Quick question: will a dual-core CPU perform worse than, as well as, or better than two independent CPUs of the same speed?
About the same.
Apple monitors use DVI. But be careful; the 30" is only compatible with a handful of video cards.
Probably they'll eventually offer a "light" version of Aperture
Isn't that iPhoto? Is there really room for a third product in between iPhoto and Aperture?
Commodity supercomputing arrived a few years ago with Beowulf clusters, which happen to be much cheaper than ccNUMA machines. I'm sure SGI and Newisys would be happy to see the HPC world suddenly drop MPI and switch to OpenMP, but I don't think it's going to happen. I see Horus being used for commercial servers (e.g. databases, server consolidation, etc.), not supercomputing.
BTW, Horus doesn't use Infiniband. Maybe it uses IB cables.
Dell is locked into Intel and they really needed dual core, so there it is.
The polished and feature-rich Azureus rules the Bittorrent sphere.
That says a lot about the current population of the BitTorrent sphere. I suspect that an "invisible" BitTorrent client built in to popular browsers (e.g. Opera) would have lots more users than Azureus.
This gives me a thought: Which has more users, Azureus or World of Warcraft? How "feature-rich" is the WoW updater?