I think it is good that someone comes up with an idea that seems so outrageous and so far fetched that it is really challenging to aim for.
We need another "We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too. "
Some switches seem to have a multicast problem: we've downed very fancy cisco switches recently (can't recall the number right now) with igmp/multicast traffic.
We've had a couple of hundred embedded systems that were announcing themselves on the network with mdns. That in itself is only a very low amount of traffic.
Probably some management software triggered a slight increase in reporting, but with a couple hundred embedded systems, this was enough.
mc traffic/igmp does not seem to be hardware accelerated; being routed to the main switch CPU -> maxed out.
Let me spell it out: because *corporate* IT is fully Windows based; if it's not windows, most of them don't understand it (and don't support it, but that's fine). That's what is sad about the situation:(
I thought it was obvious, but I have that problem some times.
The choice for java would depend on the future of the audience. If you are taking about desktop and/or an introduction (and it will never go much further than that), Java might be a good option. If it is for engineering in general, Java is IMHO not the way to go.
Still, I would like to place a big BUT here. I realise that, over the last decade, the hype of Java has made it the de facto introduction language in many universities.
After a decade, those people have graduated and have been working in industry for a number of years.
We are working in an electronics environment and are mainly working on embedded software and PCB design. We cannot get accross to those Java ppl that memory does not come for free (What! only 32 MB) in terms of money and board space, nor does processor speeds (money, space and energy dissipation)(What! only 66 or 300 MHz, why can't you put a 1GB processor on the board).
Next to this, Java (and any other automatic memory management based system) obfuscates memory/time (physical) concept, context switches, stack usage, heap,... Again, on an embedded system with limited memory and now way of swapping, a bad idea.
Java is said to have no pointers, and this should be a good thing! In general, pointers can be hell for inexperienced programmers, but they do leave a link to the physical realm. After a while, they become second nature and they prove to be very useful for optimisations (memory, speed,...).
For programmes aimed at these kinds of jobs, C/C++ would be perfect, but it is not really needed, but at the very least, Pascal is IMHO still a good option (it is said to be a good educational language).
In SW I, a queen did not seem to be the same as we would understand it: it seemed to be something what you were assigned to do or more likely, elected.
IIRC, there were several references along those lines.
Maybe the term 'queen' was kept for historical reasons, but they were in fact elected. Something like Zaphod being President of the Imperial Galactic Government in H2G2:)
With the emperor being almost dead for generations and all...
For the rest I agree that those locations might very well have been the most obvious locations (next to the Death Star itself), but maybe this is exactly the reason: the Sith would never look in those locations, it would be TOO obvious >:)
Perhaps you should have a look at Wikipedia. It is the base for a lot of processor architectures, including PowerPC. A lot of embedded architectures use a PowerPC instead of an Intel or other uC.
Considering the spread, I for one am interested very interested in the article and esp. in order to see what kind of improvements gcc can still obtain. This gives me a very strong incentive to keep a close eye on the development and re-create my crosscompilation environment with major and mid gcc releases.
I guess it depends on what you're doing; for embedded development on battery dependent platforms; I would not suggest or rely on Java. This is even more the case with embedded algorithms. A small example I came across last week:
AES energy efficiency:
(in Gb/s/W) C: 0.0011 Java: 0.0000037
There were more figures on the slide I got this from; but since they were done on different architectures, they do not really compare. There are valid reasons not to rely on Java for everything; just try to explain this to the latest generation of engineers:-/
Re:i'm having horrible flashbacks...
on
GCC 4.0.0 Released
·
· Score: 2, Funny
Which results in..... cows:-)
I'm hoping for a mutation into GNUs:-P
Re:i'm having horrible flashbacks...
on
GCC 4.0.0 Released
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Ah things no longer compiling:) True, it was very annoying and made you go through an extra code review while porting your code forward.
In the long term, I think it was a very good thing: coding C (and C++, but didn't have that much experience on that) got much more stickt and in my experience, removes a lot of possible problems later on.
If someone had a lot of problems porting 2.95 to 3.2, his code needed to be reveiwed anyway. It kind of removes the "boy" from "cowboys" in coders (experience is drawn from not-so-embedded systems).
Based on the remarks obtained from the compiler for embedded code (they made a lot of sense) during the switch and gcc becoming more strict, we now even compile everything with -Werror.
In our deeply embedded networking code, we got a speed improvement of 20% just switching to 3.4 (from 3.3):) I am going to try to compile a new PowerPC toolchain one of these...
I joined a team working on functionality running on an embedded Linux distribution about a year ago. After doing major cleanup in the sources, including an upgrade to the newest release of the embedded distribution; I started looking under the hood.
Several portions of the distributions were replaced by busybox, uclibc and a gcc-3.4 based toolchain. In the process, we built our own Perl based build system (with CVS): we check in/out only the modified files (basically only platform files) and use the original tarballs (tar xkfj).
As a result, we were able to decrease the embedded compressed filesystem to less than 33%, our code is much closer to the upstream developments (e.g. for network drivers, this can be an issue) and our system is modular and flexible. (btw, size does matter in production and for field upgrades): smaller, faster and cleaner...
I am currently in the process of cleaning up the platform dependent files for release and inclusion into the upstream projects (hopefully they get accepted).
We moved away and have not looked back and saved over 25,000 Euros per year (and rising) in the process. Yes, the embedded distributions are terribly expensive. If you have money to spare, consider hiring teams from the companies selling expertise and releasing the code like http://www.denx.de/, http://www.codepoet.org/, http://www.pengutronix.de/, http://www.mind.be/,...
First off, nothing Mark said surprised me. Yes, he was fired from Google. It was directly related to his blog. He was employed there for just a couple of weeks.
It would by highly unlikely that he was not, considering the timing.
I personally don't think SCO has a very strong case, but watching IBM's actions, it seems that IBM is the one with the lack of firm ground.
I just had a presentation on patent law and practices (not that I pretend to be an expert, I think I just got a bit less clue-less). There seem to be a number of striking similarities here.
It is surprising to see that a very little number of patent cases are won on the grounds of the cases, most of them on technical details.
It seemed to me that this started out as an extortion racket, hoping that IBM would just cough up and pay. They didn't, and now IBM is striking back by bleeding them: they have far more resources to continue this than SCO has. I don't think that IBM will stop by simply winning, they will continue this until SCO is dead and in this respect, this approach makes sense:
When going to the ground of the matter, they might have a remote chance (how minute ever) that they might loose. In that case, they have made their opponent stronger. By first bleeding them, and hopefully killing them, they are just playing out all their cards, without risking anything at the moment.
Strange, I've never heard this question before, perhaps most of my friends and collegues took the answer for granted.
To my experience, there are a number of reasons a prospective employer would hire you:
1. You have specific knowledge, difficult to come by and often (or not) a result of your PhD work. Considering that PhDs are often high level research and often not ready for direct use in industry in the next few years (typical planning of management), you might be out of luck here.
2. He has confidence in your abilities to take in a lot of information in a short period of time and use it: you are able to learn fast. This should indeed be true;) In normal cases, you should be able to be dropped in a project and absorb what has been done and be a constructive member faster.
All my collegues that I know of that have graduated over the last years, me and from what I know, the collegues that already have a job and will graduate in the coming months; are all employed in the same industry working on the hardware/software boundary.
This is a particular area where you need a deep insight on several hardware components, memory usage, power consumption, clocks, busses,... We're all working on software optimisation for speed and power consumption, conception of new devices and implementation of OS's on these devices,...
Part of e.g. designing new platforms is being able to absorb existing devices compare them and make a good choice in this large number of possibilities (quickly); see point 2;)
To my experience, this is a particular area where PhDs in EE have a much higher added value when compared to CS PhDs (granted, they have a much higher competence in high level modelling; I guess this difference is exactly what explains their affinity to Java and ours to C).
And yes, there are exceptions of course; I at least know one CS PhD who has done _a lot_ of linux kernel work:) I just tried to abstract a rule from the bulk of the ppl I know in CS and EE.
Those are the ID cards, not passports (which are international).
but yep,
the IDs are one of those things that government forgot to abolish after 1945 and everybody has to have with him in Europe. Except the UK of course, they still have to carry their passport whenever they go abroad.
We on the other hand have a double system, a European standardised (more or less) ID card and a passport for extra-european travel.
Our drivers license is some piece of paper, and it's funny that some places in the US only accept that easily duplicated paper thingie over the ID cards with counterfeit safegaurds:)
It seems to me that the situatin is a bit different in North America, in Europe, you need a Masters' in order to do a Ph.D. (It's actually a bit more complicated than that, but with the reform, it should be this simple from now on).
Even if you want to stay at the university, you have to consider that a lot has to do with politics and the chance if you get a professorship depends on this.
I would think you need to do a Ms before starting on a Ph.D., just to get the 'practical' and 'theoretical' background required.
You have to consider that, once you have a Ph.D., the expectations in industry are also larger: if you just want to 'score', go right to industry; if you like a challenge, get the degree (challenge 1) and next fulfill the high expectations of your employers... (challenge 2..n).
And most importantly, don't do it for the money (in any case): do it because you are interested in the field and have a passion for it; you like to dig into a problem where little is known of and you don't get to sleep easily unless you figured out the problem... If you have this, you will not mind the pushing around that much and still love what you are doing and work with collegues with the same passion.
I mainly keep it this way not to get bugged by the braindead corporate website that blocks me everywhere I turn, because they have "standardised on a M$ platform".
talk about a contradiction in terms...And even then, I am willing to bet the proxy does something similar (but then again, it's a windows proxy).
Like so often, the underdog masks itself to be part of the crowd... In my case, I like it much better than being part of the crowd (I would need to use that wretched OS and my productivity would be cut in half).
I have seen such screens on a daily basis, I do not see what is so interesting about this "research"... This is just a new player trying to play catchup, that's all...
If you go to the site, you can even see some existing installations (network video and all).
Hm, you are right with this comment, but I thought we were talking about sysadmins in the article.
If we are talking about user programs that everyone needs to use, documentation is a must; but IMHO we are then talking about a completely different type of program for a completely different target audience.
I would find it troublesome that sysadmins need the same level of documentation of other users (that do not focus on IT).
If I would have read this story about a year ago, I guess I would have thought the guy to be a complete idiot. I still think this to be the case, but at least I can now see the reality of things.
I've changed from doing research at the university to a international company and to my regret and complete surprise, the sysadmins from that company are far from, euh, gifted.
The comporate policy seems to be that anything that costs lots of money must be fine while something which you can download from the internet cannot be anything but bad, inferior and buggy software.
Who cares if e.g. lots of money are spent re-routing corporate e-mail to off-shore server (for a spam solution) instead of installing spamassassin and clamav. But one of the most unfortunate things I have had the bad luck to witness, was an official meeting to evaluate two software packets. One was completely open source and collaborate project while the other one was a commercially branched solution. The meeting had 8 engineers attending a 3 hour meeting evaluating the packet presented by the sysadmins, who had obviously already made up their minds, since the column of the free solution was not even filled out. Finally it boiled down to
The commercial product has more options. This was completely false, but in any case irrelevant: the packet needed to be trimmed down to basic functionality for user friendliness
But, a commercial packet must have good documentation and good support (yes, this is especially required for a package that any 3 year old can operate).
The software costed only 250 Euros...
Some (esp *cough* power users *cough* of some commercial *cough* operating system *cough*) users simply cannot grasp the concept that skimming through headers and comments in sources is the best documentation there is. All other documentation is out of date and is certainly not that reliable and often in contradiction with the program and functionality.
This kind of corporate complete braindead reasoning is ubiquitions. Unfortunately, this is corporate IT, not always done by the best and brightest. At least, it really made me to appreciate those good admins out there and you can praise yourselves lucky if you have them...
Slashdot Mirror
I think it is good that someone comes up with an idea that seems so outrageous and so far fetched that it is really challenging to aim for.
We need another "We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too. "
Some switches seem to have a multicast problem: we've downed very fancy cisco switches recently (can't recall the number right now) with igmp/multicast traffic.
We've had a couple of hundred embedded systems that were announcing themselves on the network with mdns. That in itself is only a very low amount of traffic.
Probably some management software triggered a slight increase in reporting, but with a couple hundred embedded systems, this was enough.
mc traffic/igmp does not seem to be hardware accelerated; being routed to the main switch CPU -> maxed out.
Disabling mdns 'solves' the problem.
Let me spell it out: because *corporate* IT is fully Windows based; if it's not windows, most of them don't understand it (and don't support it, but that's fine). That's what is sad about the situation :(
I thought it was obvious, but I have that problem some times.
Simple, I use Linux and set up a number of Linux servers
With any other topic, this would just have been sad,
The choice for java would depend on the future of the audience. If you are taking about desktop and/or an introduction (and it will never go much further than that), Java might be a good option. If it is for engineering in general, Java is IMHO not the way to go.
... Again, on an embedded system with limited memory and now way of swapping, a bad idea.
...).
Still, I would like to place a big BUT here. I realise that, over the last decade, the hype of Java has made it the de facto introduction language in many universities.
After a decade, those people have graduated and have been working in industry for a number of years.
We are working in an electronics environment and are mainly working on embedded software and PCB design. We cannot get accross to those Java ppl that memory does not come for free (What! only 32 MB) in terms of money and board space, nor does processor speeds (money, space and energy dissipation)(What! only 66 or 300 MHz, why can't you put a 1GB processor on the board).
Next to this, Java (and any other automatic memory management based system) obfuscates memory/time (physical) concept, context switches, stack usage, heap,
Java is said to have no pointers, and this should be a good thing! In general, pointers can be hell for inexperienced programmers, but they do leave a link to the physical realm. After a while, they become second nature and they prove to be very useful for optimisations (memory, speed,
For programmes aimed at these kinds of jobs, C/C++ would be perfect, but it is not really needed, but at the very least, Pascal is IMHO still a good option (it is said to be a good educational language).
Oh god, that's the vitamine B complex and porteins that Roosta was talking about to Zaphod.
Gives a whole new meaning to "Every man should know where his towel is".
Ah, the Cardassian system.
In SW I, a queen did not seem to be the same as we would understand it: it seemed to be something what you were assigned to do or more likely, elected.
:)
...
IIRC, there were several references along those lines.
Maybe the term 'queen' was kept for historical reasons, but they were in fact elected. Something like Zaphod being President of the Imperial Galactic Government in H2G2
With the emperor being almost dead for generations and all
For the rest I agree that those locations might very well have been the most obvious locations (next to the Death Star itself), but maybe this is exactly the reason: the Sith would never look in those locations, it would be TOO obvious >:)
Perhaps you should have a look at Wikipedia. It is the base for a lot of processor architectures, including PowerPC. A lot of embedded architectures use a PowerPC instead of an Intel or other uC.
Considering the spread, I for one am interested very interested in the article and esp. in order to see what kind of improvements gcc can still obtain. This gives me a very strong incentive to keep a close eye on the development and re-create my crosscompilation environment with major and mid gcc releases.
There were more figures on the slide I got this from; but since they were done on different architectures, they do not really compare. There are valid reasons not to rely on Java for everything; just try to explain this to the latest generation of engineers
Which results in..... cows :-)
:-P
I'm hoping for a mutation into GNUs
Ah things no longer compiling :) True, it was very annoying and made you go through an extra code review while porting your code forward.
:) I am going to try to compile a new PowerPC toolchain one of these...
In the long term, I think it was a very good thing: coding C (and C++, but didn't have that much experience on that) got much more stickt and in my experience, removes a lot of possible problems later on.
If someone had a lot of problems porting 2.95 to 3.2, his code needed to be reveiwed anyway. It kind of removes the "boy" from "cowboys" in coders (experience is drawn from not-so-embedded systems).
Based on the remarks obtained from the compiler for embedded code (they made a lot of sense) during the switch and gcc becoming more strict, we now even compile everything with -Werror.
In our deeply embedded networking code, we got a speed improvement of 20% just switching to 3.4 (from 3.3)
Go GCC!
Same here.
...
I joined a team working on functionality running on an embedded Linux distribution about a year ago. After doing major cleanup in the sources, including an upgrade to the newest release of the embedded distribution; I started looking under the hood.
Several portions of the distributions were replaced by busybox, uclibc and a gcc-3.4 based toolchain. In the process, we built our own Perl based build system (with CVS): we check in/out only the modified files (basically only platform files) and use the original tarballs (tar xkfj).
As a result, we were able to decrease the embedded compressed filesystem to less than 33%, our code is much closer to the upstream developments (e.g. for network drivers, this can be an issue) and our system is modular and flexible. (btw, size does matter in production and for field upgrades): smaller, faster and cleaner...
I am currently in the process of cleaning up the platform dependent files for release and inclusion into the upstream projects (hopefully they get accepted).
We moved away and have not looked back and saved over 25,000 Euros per year (and rising) in the process. Yes, the embedded distributions are terribly expensive. If you have money to spare, consider hiring teams from the companies selling expertise and releasing the code like http://www.denx.de/, http://www.codepoet.org/, http://www.pengutronix.de/, http://www.mind.be/,
http://jeremy.zawodny.com/blog/archives/004157.ht
It would by highly unlikely that he was not, considering the timing.
I personally don't think SCO has a very strong case, but watching IBM's actions, it seems that IBM is the one with the lack of firm ground.
I just had a presentation on patent law and practices (not that I pretend to be an expert, I think I just got a bit less clue-less). There seem to be a number of striking similarities here.
It is surprising to see that a very little number of patent cases are won on the grounds of the cases, most of them on technical details.
It seemed to me that this started out as an extortion racket, hoping that IBM would just cough up and pay. They didn't, and now IBM is striking back by bleeding them: they have far more resources to continue this than SCO has. I don't think that IBM will stop by simply winning, they will continue this until SCO is dead and in this respect, this approach makes sense:
When going to the ground of the matter, they might have a remote chance (how minute ever) that they might loose. In that case, they have made their opponent stronger. By first bleeding them, and hopefully killing them, they are just playing out all their cards, without risking anything at the moment.
Go IBM!
Strange, I've never heard this question before, perhaps most of my friends and collegues took the answer for granted.
;) In normal cases, you should be able to be dropped in a project and absorb what has been done and be a constructive member faster.
... We're all working on software optimisation for speed and power consumption, conception of new devices and implementation of OS's on these devices, ...
;)
:) I just tried to abstract a rule from the bulk of the ppl I know in CS and EE.
To my experience, there are a number of reasons a prospective employer would hire you:
1. You have specific knowledge, difficult to come by and often (or not) a result of your PhD work. Considering that PhDs are often high level research and often not ready for direct use in industry in the next few years (typical planning of management), you might be out of luck here.
2. He has confidence in your abilities to take in a lot of information in a short period of time and use it: you are able to learn fast. This should indeed be true
All my collegues that I know of that have graduated over the last years, me and from what I know, the collegues that already have a job and will graduate in the coming months; are all employed in the same industry working on the hardware/software boundary.
This is a particular area where you need a deep insight on several hardware components, memory usage, power consumption, clocks, busses,
Part of e.g. designing new platforms is being able to absorb existing devices compare them and make a good choice in this large number of possibilities (quickly); see point 2
To my experience, this is a particular area where PhDs in EE have a much higher added value when compared to CS PhDs (granted, they have a much higher competence in high level modelling; I guess this difference is exactly what explains their affinity to Java and ours to C).
And yes, there are exceptions of course; I at least know one CS PhD who has done _a lot_ of linux kernel work
Those are the ID cards, not passports (which are international).
:)
but yep,
the IDs are one of those things that government forgot to abolish after 1945 and everybody has to have with him in Europe. Except the UK of course, they still have to carry their passport whenever they go abroad.
We on the other hand have a double system, a European standardised (more or less) ID card and a passport for extra-european travel.
Our drivers license is some piece of paper, and it's funny that some places in the US only accept that easily duplicated paper thingie over the ID cards with counterfeit safegaurds
It seems to me that the situatin is a bit different in North America, in Europe, you need a Masters' in order to do a Ph.D. (It's actually a bit more complicated than that, but with the reform, it should be this simple from now on).
Even if you want to stay at the university, you have to consider that a lot has to do with politics and the chance if you get a professorship depends on this.
I would think you need to do a Ms before starting on a Ph.D., just to get the 'practical' and 'theoretical' background required.
You have to consider that, once you have a Ph.D., the expectations in industry are also larger: if you just want to 'score', go right to industry; if you like a challenge, get the degree (challenge 1) and next fulfill the high expectations of your employers... (challenge 2..n).
And most importantly, don't do it for the money (in any case): do it because you are interested in the field and have a passion for it; you like to dig into a problem where little is known of and you don't get to sleep easily unless you figured out the problem... If you have this, you will not mind the pushing around that much and still love what you are doing and work with collegues with the same passion.
Hm, you're right. I guess it is the habit of piping. I use grep more with xargs:
$ find . -type f -name '*.h' | xargs grep CONFIG_MTD_PHYSMAP_LEN
or something along those lines.
Dude, the identification of the browser based on the headers is skewed to say the least:
/etc/ntlmaps/server.cfg |grep User-Agent
[den_erpel@scorpius den_erpel]$ cat
User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.5; Windows 98)
I mainly keep it this way not to get bugged by the braindead corporate website that blocks me everywhere I turn, because they have "standardised on a M$ platform".
talk about a contradiction in terms...And even then, I am willing to bet the proxy does something similar (but then again, it's a windows proxy).
Like so often, the underdog masks itself to be part of the crowd... In my case, I like it much better than being part of the crowd (I would need to use that wretched OS and my productivity would be cut in half).
I have seen such screens on a daily basis, I do not see what is so interesting about this "research"... This is just a new player trying to play catchup, that's all...
If you go to the site, you can even see some existing installations (network video and all).
Nothing to see, move along...
Hm, you are right with this comment, but I thought we were talking about sysadmins in the article.
If we are talking about user programs that everyone needs to use, documentation is a must; but IMHO we are then talking about a completely different type of program for a completely different target audience.
I would find it troublesome that sysadmins need the same level of documentation of other users (that do not focus on IT).
I've changed from doing research at the university to a international company and to my regret and complete surprise, the sysadmins from that company are far from, euh, gifted.
The comporate policy seems to be that anything that costs lots of money must be fine while something which you can download from the internet cannot be anything but bad, inferior and buggy software.
Who cares if e.g. lots of money are spent re-routing corporate e-mail to off-shore server (for a spam solution) instead of installing spamassassin and clamav. But one of the most unfortunate things I have had the bad luck to witness, was an official meeting to evaluate two software packets. One was completely open source and collaborate project while the other one was a commercially branched solution. The meeting had 8 engineers attending a 3 hour meeting evaluating the packet presented by the sysadmins, who had obviously already made up their minds, since the column of the free solution was not even filled out. Finally it boiled down to
The software costed only 250 Euros...
Some (esp *cough* power users *cough* of some commercial *cough* operating system *cough*) users simply cannot grasp the concept that skimming through headers and comments in sources is the best documentation there is. All other documentation is out of date and is certainly not that reliable and often in contradiction with the program and functionality.
This kind of corporate complete braindead reasoning is ubiquitions. Unfortunately, this is corporate IT, not always done by the best and brightest. At least, it really made me to appreciate those good admins out there and you can praise yourselves lucky if you have them...
$2.00 per gallon of gas
I really don't know what people are complaining about, $2 dollars per gallon is not that expensive.
This is $0.46 per litre.
This morning, I payed 1.1 Euro per litre, or $1.46 or $6.30 per gallon; a surplus of $4.32 per gallon.
OK, I admit that this is expensive, but the world does not stop and our economy is running pretty smoothly (could always go better, I admit).
Just put those $2 measly dollars per gallon into perspective and perhaps, just perhaps, consider other (alternative) means of transportation...