For those of you who are into paper stuff, there was a very complete article on this in Business 2.0 last week. Well written, and also talks a lot about McMaster's history.
Pretty advanced language for a court document
on
Brian West Update
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· Score: 3, Interesting
That's the first government document I've ever seen discuss various programming languages like perl and PHP... you don't see court orders talking specifically about perl scripts very often...
Two quad boxes would theoretically outperform 4 duals, because you have more bandwidth between the processors. Of course, if it's not a parallel task in the first place, extra processors won't give you anything.
You're wrong about the price though. Two quad boxes would be _much_ more expensive than four duals, because you can no longer use your traditional PIII/Athlon processors. You have to up it to an Alpha or Xeon. Both those processors and their respective motherboards cost 1.5-3x the price of PIII's, for the equivalent number of processors.
The point of Beowulf clusters is to be able to put bunches of computers that are not very powerful in and of themselves together to make something really powerful, so using quad processor boxes kinda defeats the purpose. The ideal price/performance balance is two processors per box, and this is easy to see by looking at the commercially available solutions.
Perhaps we won't be able to find the ones from the planes that hit the WTC, but we should be able to get the pentagon and at least the Penn. recorders.
I think that really what this signals is that the government has recognized Mircosoft (specifically Windows) as a product/service essential to the operation of the country, so they need to control it. This is the same thing that happened with telephone and power industries earlier in the century.
I think this is a legitimate decision on their part, since Windows in some form or another runs on all government computers (minus a few thousand Linux boxen in the DoD, and all of the Apple PowerBooks on the West Wing).
I also think that this will have some clear and distinct effect on the market share of Windows and other Microsoft products in the future, but I'm not sure which way it will go. It could go up, if people think "Oh, now that it's in the hands of the government, it must be stable and OK" (that's not stable as in not crashing stable, but stable as in the company's future). It could also go down, if people see this as the government trying to get more control (which they are).
Seeing as how there's at least one precedent set for this type of thing so far (Bell), I think everyone challenging the constitutionality of this should go read up on their American history.
I only saw Jobs make 3 blunders during the presentation (although none were his fault): the DVD player crashed the first time, the camera wouldn't turn on so he threw it at one of his helpers, and something with iDVD, although I don't remember exactly what.
The other I noticed happened during IBM's presentation... the guy demonstrating it couldn't get the "Double Size" command to work while playing a quicktime movie.
Yeah, but the problem was that large, enterprise-scale ISP's (eg. Earthlink) decided it would be a good idea for them to block mail from these IP's, so then people who were incorrectly added to the list could no longer send mail to 3% of the internet. That blows.
I think that in general, for-profit companies should not be asking for donations (or at least they shouldn't expect to recieve any). For example, if Shell Oil placed donation bins beside all the gas pumps, so rich people could help those less fortunate to have cheaper gas, that would be stupid (not because it's a bad idea, but because nobody would put any money in).
I do think it's OK for RedHat and the likes to as for donations though, since they are providing a salary to many of the hackers that have made Linux what it is today. It's more or less essential to the Linux community that RedHat and others stay afloat; if they need donations to do it, so be it.
I also like Mandrake's concept of specifying where you want your donation to go, but I don't think this is always a good thing. We'd all agree that support for obscenely powerful systems with 1.2 skjaterrabytes of memory is important to Linux on a grand scale, but how many people do you really think are going to check that box instead of '3d graphics acceleration' or 'GNOME'? Maybe I'm being unfair in saying that Linux should be a server OS first, then a desktop, but this is my post damnit!
In any case, I don't think there's any problem with donations and such they way they are now, and everyone just needs to STOP BITCHING!!!
I really just posted that to see if there were still any moderators lame enough to mod it up... sure enough, there were!p.
I'm sorry you guys all had to suffer through my little experiment... stop whining like babies though.
I imagine that if you wrapped it in bubble wrap (or maybe foam padding that doesn't melt) it would absorb the little shocks... most modern CD players take care of the big ones by using read-ahead buffering, which it's impossible to make these drives do (without a comptuer to drive it).
Unless you want to use a network card, SCSI card, IDE controller, sound card, CD or DVD drive, floppy drive, internal hard drive, external hard drive, modem, external FPU, RAM, or that light on the front of the case that tells you when you're accessing the hard drive (that isn't supported anyway).
I thought the whole world was black and white in the past!
Yes, this is a fairly stupid comment, but it does make some sense. Since the only photographical records we have of the past are in black and white, it is difficult to imagine anything before the ~1960's in color. If you showed some of his pictures from ~WW1 to the average person, and told them they were from 1915, they wouldn't believe you.
I wonder if sometime, 50 years from now, we'll look at 2-dimensional still images as a thing of the past, having 3d holographic displays. Interesting to think about.
Slashdot Mirror
For those of you who are into paper stuff, there was a very complete article on this in Business 2.0 last week. Well written, and also talks a lot about McMaster's history.
That's the first government document I've ever seen discuss various programming languages like perl and PHP... you don't see court orders talking specifically about perl scripts very often...
Two quad boxes would theoretically outperform 4 duals, because you have more bandwidth between the processors. Of course, if it's not a parallel task in the first place, extra processors won't give you anything.
You're wrong about the price though. Two quad boxes would be _much_ more expensive than four duals, because you can no longer use your traditional PIII/Athlon processors. You have to up it to an Alpha or Xeon. Both those processors and their respective motherboards cost 1.5-3x the price of PIII's, for the equivalent number of processors.
The point of Beowulf clusters is to be able to put bunches of computers that are not very powerful in and of themselves together to make something really powerful, so using quad processor boxes kinda defeats the purpose. The ideal price/performance balance is two processors per box, and this is easy to see by looking at the commercially available solutions.
Is it a man or a woman?
Perhaps we won't be able to find the ones from the planes that hit the WTC, but we should be able to get the pentagon and at least the Penn. recorders.
Sorry 'bout that.
I think this is a legitimate decision on their part, since Windows in some form or another runs on all government computers (minus a few thousand Linux boxen in the DoD, and all of the Apple PowerBooks on the West Wing).
I also think that this will have some clear and distinct effect on the market share of Windows and other Microsoft products in the future, but I'm not sure which way it will go. It could go up, if people think "Oh, now that it's in the hands of the government, it must be stable and OK" (that's not stable as in not crashing stable, but stable as in the company's future). It could also go down, if people see this as the government trying to get more control (which they are).
Seeing as how there's at least one precedent set for this type of thing so far (Bell), I think everyone challenging the constitutionality of this should go read up on their American history.
I guess what goes around comes around... slashdot has finally slashdotted itself!
The other I noticed happened during IBM's presentation... the guy demonstrating it couldn't get the "Double Size" command to work while playing a quicktime movie.
Did anyone else catch any others?
You can get instructions for putting Linux on that here. It works great for me.
Yeah, but the problem was that large, enterprise-scale ISP's (eg. Earthlink) decided it would be a good idea for them to block mail from these IP's, so then people who were incorrectly added to the list could no longer send mail to 3% of the internet. That blows.
Everything else on /. is redundant--the stories, comments, lame jokes--so why don't we have redundant hardware too?
the 50th anniversary of ASCII pr0n.
I do think it's OK for RedHat and the likes to as for donations though, since they are providing a salary to many of the hackers that have made Linux what it is today. It's more or less essential to the Linux community that RedHat and others stay afloat; if they need donations to do it, so be it.
I also like Mandrake's concept of specifying where you want your donation to go, but I don't think this is always a good thing. We'd all agree that support for obscenely powerful systems with 1.2 skjaterrabytes of memory is important to Linux on a grand scale, but how many people do you really think are going to check that box instead of '3d graphics acceleration' or 'GNOME'? Maybe I'm being unfair in saying that Linux should be a server OS first, then a desktop, but this is my post damnit!
In any case, I don't think there's any problem with donations and such they way they are now, and everyone just needs to STOP BITCHING!!!
I really just posted that to see if there were still any moderators lame enough to mod it up... sure enough, there were!p. I'm sorry you guys all had to suffer through my little experiment... stop whining like babies though.
Sorry guys, it was just way too tempting.
This repetition is getting old...
Calm down, take the 2-foot steel rod out of your ass, and try to appreciate THE JOKE!!!
I imagine that if you wrapped it in bubble wrap (or maybe foam padding that doesn't melt) it would absorb the little shocks... most modern CD players take care of the big ones by using read-ahead buffering, which it's impossible to make these drives do (without a comptuer to drive it).
It's even got the fans pre-installed, all you need to do is aim it in the right direction!
For future reference though, I don't use Outlook on Windows, I use Mozilla on Linux.
I'm glaad you're proud to be an OS/2 user =)
Unless you want to use a network card, SCSI card, IDE controller, sound card, CD or DVD drive, floppy drive, internal hard drive, external hard drive, modem, external FPU, RAM, or that light on the front of the case that tells you when you're accessing the hard drive (that isn't supported anyway).
Yes, this is a fairly stupid comment, but it does make some sense. Since the only photographical records we have of the past are in black and white, it is difficult to imagine anything before the ~1960's in color. If you showed some of his pictures from ~WW1 to the average person, and told them they were from 1915, they wouldn't believe you.
I wonder if sometime, 50 years from now, we'll look at 2-dimensional still images as a thing of the past, having 3d holographic displays. Interesting to think about.
They're certainly not "responsible" for XFree86 or X.org, but they arep "Premier Members".