... are you seriously maintaining that the release of a white paper (ie: "We plan for our next generation of computers to be EVEN FASTER, woo!") detailing a series of products with no ship dates attached is much more important than a product that has actually shipped?
I guess I should have included news sources in my links, because there sure are a lotofthem.
All sarcasm aside, your point is well taken. I like the article on the Sun site because it explains more about how the technology works than any of the news sites, but it seems that Slashdot editors are much more likely to accept a story if the link points to an "impartial" news source rather than a press release. Thanks for the tip.
The Efficeon (god, what an awful name) and the new Eden are both real products that I can now order in batches of 1 or more.
Actually, neither one of those products have shipped:
... the Efficeon processor family will be competitive with, or outperform competing microprocessors operating within critical thermal limits such as the 7W limit for typical fanless notebook designs. Systems based on the processor are expected to begin shipping in the fourth quarter.
Sun also announced Monday that it is increasing an allowance it had made for its deferred tax assets, resulting in a $1 billion noncash charge in the fourth quarter, which ended June 30. As a result, the company said it is revising its fourth-quarter results to a loss of $1.04 billion, or 32 cents per share.
Thanks for the link; that article was an interesting read. I agree with what you say about parallelism vs. serialism. If you have a single-threaded application it will probably run slower on a CPU with lots of cores. But Sun's primary market is large database servers that have hundreds or thousands of users accessing them at once, thus, many threads, and the perfect candidate for lots of cores.
(and this is from someone who likes sun gear. this week i tried to propose a V440 as a VLM server for my department and lost out to a pile of 8GB dual G5s on price/performance. the difference in serial performance at this point is just ridiculous.)
Price/performance the G5 probably wins hands down against the V480 (I think that's what you meant), but did you take into account support? I hope you don't have a hardware failure at 2:00 am on a production G5... Good luck getting Apple to fix the hardware for you at that hour.
According to Sun's press release, they will release hardware in "2005/2006" that is "expected" to increase throughput by 15 times for "Web, application serving, simple databases".
The 2005 number I took from this other link, which you might want to check out. The goal is 2 years to produce a CPU with 16 cores on its die, which would give you the "15 times current performance" figure (you probably lose a little performance due to scheduler overhead). That would be right around October 2005, but you're right, the other page says 2005/2006, so who knows? If they can offer half that increase in performance in two years I think there will be a sea change in the industry. Those little blade servers would be pretty amazing if each blade had the equivelant of 16 CPUs in it and the power/cooling requirements of only 1.
>> Vaporware
"You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."
Touche... I must admit that the Ultrasparc IV chips aren't released yet and are technically vaporware, but Sun hasn't really been known to wildly miss ship dates and I think it's fairly certain that they will at least hit the first couple of milestones.
Today we have two stories that about new processors that are about to be released. The Transmeta processor, while an incremental improvement, is nothing to really get excited about. The Clearspeed chip is simply vaporware.
Yet the one real story that is actually interesting "News for Nerds" was rejected by the Slashdot editors.
Sun Microsystems today announced it's roadmap for Throughput Computing. Remember how Sun has been talking about putting multiple cores on a single chip? Well, systems will be shipping in early 2004 that offer twice the performance of current top-of-the-line Ultrasparc IIIi chips. By late 2004, they will offer three times the performance. Coming in 2005, the second generation of this technology will offer 15 times the performance of current Ultrasparc IIIi technology. The roadmap extends to generation 3 (no date yet), which will offer 30 times the current performance.
This is way beyond Moore's Law and actually news that I want to read insightful Slashdot comments on.
With the anti-Sun bias the Slashdot editors show I guess I shouldn't be surprised...
[sarcasm] Vaporware and anything having to do with Linus Torvalds' old employer are ever so more important than something that will radically change the computing landscape over the next few years. [/sarcasm]
If I understand the article correctly, it looks like they're implementing a much more powerful version of Apple's Altivec SIMD technology. My question is, if computing power increases 500x using this technology, doesn't memory bandwidth and system bus speed have to increase exponentially as well just to realize any gains?
It seems like putting one of these cards in a PC with today's technology would be like sticking a mainframe behind a 300 baud connection: sure it can handle millions of transactions a second, but you'll never actually see that kind of throughput because memory is so slow.
For a distribution that claims to have the "latest and most up-to-date" software, I'm very unimpressed with some of the software that's included. Here's a couple of examples:
Our long wait is nearly over... On November 4th Rockstar Games is releasing both GTA3 and GTA:Vice City for Xbox. I think they are bundled together for something like $40.
Anyway, I'm excited to get a copy and play GTA:Vice City on a decent platform... PS2 graphics suck compared to Xbox.
Part of the company's system is 0% interest loans to employees to buy their own computers, which encourages them to buy their own stuff and use it for work (such as my Powerbook, or my Pen-Tester's BSD laptop, and so on).
Where can I send my resume? This 0% interest loan for computers is just what my crack^H^H^H^Homputer addiction needs.
Nah, Sun already payed their Linux tax (second largest 'contributer', next to Microsoft). They're maybe not buddy-buddy with SCO, but SCO won't mess with them.
Get your facts straight. Sun bought a perpetual Unix license which gives them the right to do whatever they want with the Unix System V code. They are legally the only company that can sell a Linux distro right now, according to SCO.
Re:Stupidest prediction EVER!
on
TV's Tipping Point
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
You know, I think a lot of us in the Slashdot crowd don't appreciate the dynamic of this because we're just not young enough.
This seems like it should be a no-brainer because here we are on Slashdot, commenting on stories that come from thousands of different places on the internet, and generally organizing and re-ordering content the way we want.
How is this any different whether we are commenting on video streams or web pages? I think she is amazingly insightful about the future of television. I predict more and more Slashdot-like comment and moderation systems being used by TV viewers to comment and interact with their programs in real-time, even posting their own video comments (ugh, goatse.cx links just got a lot more painful) after each show.
I'd say this is just the opposite, not the Stupidest prediction ever, but one of the more brilliant.
That's after you've removed your optical drive and fitted a second battery. Then, you get a theoretical maximum of 10 hours battery life. Real world I would only expect 6 hours tops with both batteries (3 hours per battery).
Yes, and there is an even bigger problem with trusting ICMP: It's a UDP protocol, so there are no guarantees that your data will ever get to the other host, much less get back to you.
Have you ever tried doing a traceroute and then pinging every hop along the way? Usually once I get about 5 or 6 hops out I start getting about 2-3% packet loss on pings.
Also, another problem is that many backbone providers may decide to drop UDP traffic (especially ICMP since it's only supposed to be there for troubleshooting) if their links get overloaded. UDP is simply best effort, and if push comes to shove, the TCP traffic is more important.
Your comment displays a remarkable ignorance of Sun's strategy. Sun is actually one of the few tech companies that has been continuing to spend a large amount of cash on R&D throughout the economic downturn. Scott Mcnealy even stated that Sun's strategy was to "innovate through the downturn" which would pay off after the economy turned back around.
I think you are completely misinformed because Sun still spends and has been spending roughly $2 billion a year on R&D. How is this not innovating?
having have made 5 albums by recording into my video camera, running that into the vcr, that into the tv card, and doing a sound capture, I can tell you that home-based recording will never take the place of studio recording, simply because the hardware isn't up to par.
Speak for yourself buddy. That is the most god-awful recording setup I have ever heard of. Frankly, I'm surprised you get anything through that other than static. You would be better off recording from a PC microphone directly into an original SoundBlaster 16 sound card's mic input. Who modded this shit "insightful"?
Try recording through a decent microphone into a USB or Firewire external sound card in 24 bit 96 khz. and you tell me if you can tell the difference between that and a professional studio. There really isn't any difference because that's the same equipment a professional studio would use. Now it's available to a home studio for about $1000.
I would highly recommend the V240 as a great Samba box. Dual UltraSparc IIIi procs up to 1050 mhz.; 4 gigabit ether on copper interfaces should be enough to direct connect it to three segments, plus have one interface free for your heartbeat between nodes on the cluster.
My favorite Word Processor was and still is Wordstar on an Osborne Executive running CP/M... Aahh those were the days... Two 5.25" disk drives each storing a whopping 180k. The amber glow of a 5" screen filled with text staring back at you...
But you sure could work fast with Wordstar, and the control key method of executing commands was genius.
you should be able to plug a bluetooth adapter in the expansion slot
Yes, but what if I want to use the SD card slot for what it was intended: an SD memory card, and still use my Bluetooth wireless headset. I can't understand why they try to sell a $550 to $600 piece of kit that doesn't have a $5 Bluetooth interface in it.
I own a Treo 300 though and this is the best phone I've ever used. I'm sure the Treo 600 with Palm OS 5 and longer battery life is much better.
I have a 30GB iPod with about 29.5GB used. It is, for all intents and purposes, 100% full. I've just reached the point where now I need to pick music that I don't listen to as often and remove it to fit more music, but I don't want to do that. The 40GB model would be perfect for me.
It can emulate proprietary in-house apps with VirtualPC.
Uhh... You had everything right up until there. Currently, the G5 cannot run VirtualPC at all. Hopefully a software update will fix this. Other than that one significant flaw, they are great machines.
Slashdot Mirror
... are you seriously maintaining that the release of a white paper (ie: "We plan for our next generation of computers to be EVEN FASTER, woo!") detailing a series of products with no ship dates attached is much more important than a product that has actually shipped?
... the Efficeon processor family will be competitive with, or outperform competing microprocessors operating within critical thermal limits such as the 7W limit for typical fanless notebook designs. Systems based on the processor are expected to begin shipping in the fourth quarter.
I guess I should have included news sources in my links, because there sure are a lot of them.
All sarcasm aside, your point is well taken. I like the article on the Sun site because it explains more about how the technology works than any of the news sites, but it seems that Slashdot editors are much more likely to accept a story if the link points to an "impartial" news source rather than a press release. Thanks for the tip.
The Efficeon (god, what an awful name) and the new Eden are both real products that I can now order in batches of 1 or more.
Actually, neither one of those products have shipped:
From Via's press release:
The VIA Eden-N processor is sampling now and is expected to start appearing in secure networking, entertainment and communication devices in Q1, 2004.
From Transmeta's press release:
Wasn't it $5+ billion before they lost that $1+ billion last quarter ?
It was a non-cash loss, as shown in this excerpt:
Sun also announced Monday that it is increasing an allowance it had made for its deferred tax assets, resulting in a $1 billion noncash charge in the fourth quarter, which ended June 30. As a result, the company said it is revising its fourth-quarter results to a loss of $1.04 billion, or 32 cents per share.
Thanks for the link; that article was an interesting read. I agree with what you say about parallelism vs. serialism. If you have a single-threaded application it will probably run slower on a CPU with lots of cores. But Sun's primary market is large database servers that have hundreds or thousands of users accessing them at once, thus, many threads, and the perfect candidate for lots of cores.
(and this is from someone who likes sun gear. this week i tried to propose a V440 as a VLM server for my department and lost out to a pile of 8GB dual G5s on price/performance. the difference in serial performance at this point is just ridiculous.)
Price/performance the G5 probably wins hands down against the V480 (I think that's what you meant), but did you take into account support? I hope you don't have a hardware failure at 2:00 am on a production G5... Good luck getting Apple to fix the hardware for you at that hour.
According to Sun's press release, they will release hardware in "2005/2006" that is "expected" to increase throughput by 15 times for "Web, application serving, simple databases".
The 2005 number I took from this other link, which you might want to check out. The goal is 2 years to produce a CPU with 16 cores on its die, which would give you the "15 times current performance" figure (you probably lose a little performance due to scheduler overhead). That would be right around October 2005, but you're right, the other page says 2005/2006, so who knows? If they can offer half that increase in performance in two years I think there will be a sea change in the industry. Those little blade servers would be pretty amazing if each blade had the equivelant of 16 CPUs in it and the power/cooling requirements of only 1.
>> Vaporware
"You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."
Touche... I must admit that the Ultrasparc IV chips aren't released yet and are technically vaporware, but Sun hasn't really been known to wildly miss ship dates and I think it's fairly certain that they will at least hit the first couple of milestones.
With $5 billion in the bank they will be here for a very long time.
Today we have two stories that about new processors that are about to be released. The Transmeta processor, while an incremental improvement, is nothing to really get excited about. The Clearspeed chip is simply vaporware.
Yet the one real story that is actually interesting "News for Nerds" was rejected by the Slashdot editors.
Sun Microsystems today announced it's roadmap for Throughput Computing. Remember how Sun has been talking about putting multiple cores on a single chip? Well, systems will be shipping in early 2004 that offer twice the performance of current top-of-the-line Ultrasparc IIIi chips. By late 2004, they will offer three times the performance. Coming in 2005, the second generation of this technology will offer 15 times the performance of current Ultrasparc IIIi technology. The roadmap extends to generation 3 (no date yet), which will offer 30 times the current performance.
This is way beyond Moore's Law and actually news that I want to read insightful Slashdot comments on.
With the anti-Sun bias the Slashdot editors show I guess I shouldn't be surprised...
[sarcasm]
Vaporware and anything having to do with Linus Torvalds' old employer are ever so more important than something that will radically change the computing landscape over the next few years.
[/sarcasm]
If I understand the article correctly, it looks like they're implementing a much more powerful version of Apple's Altivec SIMD technology. My question is, if computing power increases 500x using this technology, doesn't memory bandwidth and system bus speed have to increase exponentially as well just to realize any gains?
It seems like putting one of these cards in a PC with today's technology would be like sticking a mainframe behind a 300 baud connection: sure it can handle millions of transactions a second, but you'll never actually see that kind of throughput because memory is so slow.
My bad... I thought it was released already.
For a distribution that claims to have the "latest and most up-to-date" software, I'm very unimpressed with some of the software that's included. Here's a couple of examples:
No Samba 3.0.
No KDE 3.2.
You do realize that it's a direct port, right? Don't start expecting improved graphics.
AFAIK, it's a direct port from the PC version, which should definitely improve the graphics. Correct me if I'm wrong.
well, i'd still like a ps2 also, if only for gt3.
Our long wait is nearly over... On November 4th Rockstar Games is releasing both GTA3 and GTA:Vice City for Xbox. I think they are bundled together for something like $40.
Anyway, I'm excited to get a copy and play GTA:Vice City on a decent platform... PS2 graphics suck compared to Xbox.
Part of the company's system is 0% interest loans to employees to buy their own computers, which encourages them to buy their own stuff and use it for work (such as my Powerbook, or my Pen-Tester's BSD laptop, and so on).
Where can I send my resume? This 0% interest loan for computers is just what my crack^H^H^H^Homputer addiction needs.
Nah, Sun already payed their Linux tax (second largest 'contributer', next to Microsoft). They're maybe not buddy-buddy with SCO, but SCO won't mess with them.
Get your facts straight. Sun bought a perpetual Unix license which gives them the right to do whatever they want with the Unix System V code. They are legally the only company that can sell a Linux distro right now, according to SCO.
You know, I think a lot of us in the Slashdot crowd don't appreciate the dynamic of this because we're just not young enough.
This seems like it should be a no-brainer because here we are on Slashdot, commenting on stories that come from thousands of different places on the internet, and generally organizing and re-ordering content the way we want.
How is this any different whether we are commenting on video streams or web pages? I think she is amazingly insightful about the future of television. I predict more and more Slashdot-like comment and moderation systems being used by TV viewers to comment and interact with their programs in real-time, even posting their own video comments (ugh, goatse.cx links just got a lot more painful) after each show.
I'd say this is just the opposite, not the Stupidest prediction ever, but one of the more brilliant.
That's after you've removed your optical drive and fitted a second battery. Then, you get a theoretical maximum of 10 hours battery life. Real world I would only expect 6 hours tops with both batteries (3 hours per battery).
Yes, and there is an even bigger problem with trusting ICMP: It's a UDP protocol, so there are no guarantees that your data will ever get to the other host, much less get back to you.
Have you ever tried doing a traceroute and then pinging every hop along the way? Usually once I get about 5 or 6 hops out I start getting about 2-3% packet loss on pings.
Also, another problem is that many backbone providers may decide to drop UDP traffic (especially ICMP since it's only supposed to be there for troubleshooting) if their links get overloaded. UDP is simply best effort, and if push comes to shove, the TCP traffic is more important.
Your comment displays a remarkable ignorance of Sun's strategy. Sun is actually one of the few tech companies that has been continuing to spend a large amount of cash on R&D throughout the economic downturn. Scott Mcnealy even stated that Sun's strategy was to "innovate through the downturn" which would pay off after the economy turned back around.
I think you are completely misinformed because Sun still spends and has been spending roughly $2 billion a year on R&D. How is this not innovating?
having have made 5 albums by recording into my video camera, running that into the vcr, that into the tv card, and doing a sound capture, I can tell you that home-based recording will never take the place of studio recording, simply because the hardware isn't up to par.
Speak for yourself buddy. That is the most god-awful recording setup I have ever heard of. Frankly, I'm surprised you get anything through that other than static. You would be better off recording from a PC microphone directly into an original SoundBlaster 16 sound card's mic input. Who modded this shit "insightful"?
Try recording through a decent microphone into a USB or Firewire external sound card in 24 bit 96 khz. and you tell me if you can tell the difference between that and a professional studio. There really isn't any difference because that's the same equipment a professional studio would use. Now it's available to a home studio for about $1000.
I would highly recommend the V240 as a great Samba box. Dual UltraSparc IIIi procs up to 1050 mhz.; 4 gigabit ether on copper interfaces should be enough to direct connect it to three segments, plus have one interface free for your heartbeat between nodes on the cluster.
Did anyone notice that one of the recommendations made in the .PDF file was to "discontinue use of an FTP server for distributing ballots."
Incredible... I can't believe any state would use an FTP server to distribute a ballot.
Don't come crying to us next election when all of the candidates are mysteriously replaced by either:
1. Cowboy Neal
2. I'm using a Diebold automatic democracy stifling machine, you insensitive clod!
3. Cowboy Neal
4. Cowboy Neal
or 5. Cowboy Neal
My favorite Word Processor was and still is Wordstar on an Osborne Executive running CP/M... Aahh those were the days... Two 5.25" disk drives each storing a whopping 180k. The amber glow of a 5" screen filled with text staring back at you...
But you sure could work fast with Wordstar, and the control key method of executing commands was genius.
So the Treo 600 only has a 160x160 screen? Wow, that's not so great, especially for a Palm OS 5 device.
you should be able to plug a bluetooth adapter in the expansion slot
Yes, but what if I want to use the SD card slot for what it was intended: an SD memory card, and still use my Bluetooth wireless headset. I can't understand why they try to sell a $550 to $600 piece of kit that doesn't have a $5 Bluetooth interface in it.
I own a Treo 300 though and this is the best phone I've ever used. I'm sure the Treo 600 with Palm OS 5 and longer battery life is much better.
I have a 30GB iPod with about 29.5GB used. It is, for all intents and purposes, 100% full. I've just reached the point where now I need to pick music that I don't listen to as often and remove it to fit more music, but I don't want to do that. The 40GB model would be perfect for me.
It can emulate proprietary in-house apps with VirtualPC.
Uhh... You had everything right up until there. Currently, the G5 cannot run VirtualPC at all. Hopefully a software update will fix this. Other than that one significant flaw, they are great machines.