Once again, we have a columnist with the most superficial understanding of a technology and a marketplace trying to spin the deepest implications. Won't work. We talking a specialized device here: a "field-force management" app for truck drivers!
I guess a big part of this is GM/Nextel spin. The device has a lot of PDA functionality. But a smart phone is "less threatening", so they call it that even if drivers mostly use it to access the network and run Java apps. Though I seem to recall that Nextel's network is CDMA, and my experiences with data over that kind of network is not positive.
Contrast this with UPS's deployment of a super-connectable PDA.
Not to mention the recent release of bunch of new PalmOS devices. Some of which, yes, are smart phones. But when you base a smart phone on PalmOS or Symbian, do you have a phone with PDA functions or a PDA that makes phone calls? Not that I like either -- I want two separate devices, connected by Bluetooth.
Well, existing services have also had the handicap of a limited selection of material. Still, I like to think you're right -- because I really hate subscription services.
Not just for music. Why should I have to pay a monthly fee to HBO or Showtime just to watch the one or two programs they have that I like? Why should I have to pay a subscription fee just to WSJ.com to read the odd article? And I'm certainly not going to swith to AOL just to read the content on ew.com!
Not that I object to paying for content. Content creators have to pay the rent. (Perhaps RMS would understand that if he lost his McArthur pension!) Voluntary payments, help, but not enough. Same goes for advertising, and besides, advertisers like to control the content they pay for.
Thing is, there's this huge establisment that controls the creation and distribution of that content, and they don't want to give up that control. So they hassle anybody with an alternative distribution model, and lobby for ever-restrictive IP laws, even as technology makes those laws irrelevent. And of course they attempt to offer feeble substitutes, such as online "subscriptions".
I used to assume that the internet would simply make this issue irrelevent. But the content establishment has done a good job of maintaining its control. It's lost a little ground, but not nearly enough to satisfy me. Maybe things will change when everybody has cheap, portable bandwidth. Remains to be seen.
Well, now that I think about it, it's not suprising that IRIX and/or XFS would be good at that sort of thing. They were originally written for video workstations after all.
But that still doesn't boil down to a general "IRIX is better than Solaris". You have a special situation: no budget for off-the-shelf messaging, and (I assume) you already have SGI hardware lying around. It would not make a lot of sense to buy SGI hardware just because the open-source app you plan to use needs to create 100,000 files at a time. Better to identify a reasonably priced app, then identify the most cost-effective hardware for running it.
Or if you were developing the app yourself, it might make sense to get SGI hardware just so you could have IRIX. Or maybe there's a DBMS that could handle 100,000 messages at least as efficiently as IRIX, and the most cost effective way to run that DBMS is another platform. Hard to say.
Bottom line: you can't take one extremely special situation where IRIX worked better than the alternatives and extrapolate that to the assertion that IRIX is better, period.
This is yet another venture by Stelios Haji-Ioannou, the seventh of his easy* ventures. One of these is easyJet, but he's no longer involved with the management of that company.
Alcohol is promoted as a "renewable fuel", but only by people with an economic interest in its increased consumption. Describing it this way conceals the fact that producing alcohol itself has a heavy ecological impact. Most of this is because farming is very energy and chemical intensive. But there's also the cost of taking the resulting biomass, fermenting it, distilling it, and disposing of the resulting waste. I don't have decent figures, but this does not strike me as an efficient process. Probably more eco-friendly that burning our finite supply of fossil fuels, but not exceedingly so.
Technically correct, but still misleading. It suggests there's a new stable element heavier than Bismuth. (Yeah, chemistry/math geeks know the stable part of the periodic table is full. But most people don't. Certainly not the writers at Stargate SG-1.) How about, "Bismuth not stable; Polonium now heaviest stable element."
Bismuth-209 is not an element. Bismuth is the element -- Bismuth-209 is one of its isotopes. So the headline should read, "Bismuth no longer the heaviest element with a stable isotope". Except that's misleading too -- it sounds like they've found one even heavier. How about... oh, never mind.
Incidentally, all elements have unstable isotopes. Bismuth's are pretty rare, but they do exist!
Well, you obviously have more experience with programming than I do. But is the file system really the best place for a queue with thousands of messages? What about some kind of persistent storage manager? Even a simple RDBMS might be more efficient for what you're doing.
So basically you're saying that IRIX scales (and scales and scales) better than Solaris. Simple enough, though few of us will ever need to create 100,000 files...
Speaking of the IRIX files system: you do know that it's gone open source, right?
Or it might be that I don't want to violate professional ethics (and maybe federal law) by discussing confidential data. But I don't think I'm giving away any secrets when I suggest that the NSA could continue all its intrusive activities quite easily if SGI went out of business tomorrow.
Anyway, you were talking about the Los Alamos site, which is why I mentioned the list.
The acid issue with paper comes from compounds in the paper forming acid when the paper is stored for a long period of time -- like decades. This is more of a problem for a book on shelf than a loose piece of paper, because a tightly close book doesn't allow the acid to disperse in the air. Possibly old comic books degrade faster because they were made with pulp paper, which isn't as strong. Come to think of it, the common practice of keeping collectible comic books in plastic sleeves would accelerate this process. More here.
In order for a paper covering to generate enough acid to damage anything, you'd have to keep your CDs tightly stacked for months, maybe years. And even then, damage to the paper would be noticable long before damage to the CDs.
OK, you are directed and required to continue that train of thought. Exactly how is IRIX better than Solaris? More to the point, how is it better than Linux?
You tell an interesting tale. I've heard of clusters (imagine a...) being used for offline rendering, and I know this has cut into SGI's sales to Hollywood studios. But CAVE applications? I would have thought that'd be hard to do with a cluster.
People keep telling me that SGI boxes are unique because they allow hundreds of processors to share memory. Apparently that's no longer that big an advantage.
I actually used to work with ThePythonicCow at SGI (Dude, where did you get that handle?) and he knows whereof he speaks. A company like SGI has many irons in the fire, and it's not at all suprising that they'd be hiring and firing at the same time. Bear in mind that mass layoffs is one tactic for getting rid of of techno-unsavvy deadwood. Which in this case, might well mean, "doesn't grok linux". Though I doubt if they'll hire as many people as they fire.
Hey, TPC, have they shut down the cafeteria yet? Excuse me, "campus restaurant." That's the one thing I really miss about SGI -- being able to have a first-rate meal every day.
I just looked at the Top500 Supercomputer list, something I haven't done since I left SGI. The big machines at Los Alamos are now HP! In fact, HP seems to dominate a lot of the list. When I left SGi in 1999, Compaq (which owned the Alphaserver business then) was much less prominent on the chart..
If you look at the 1999 chart carefully, you'll notice that all the SGI machines in the top 150 are Cray vector computers. SGI got out of the vector supercomputer business a few months after this chart was compiled, selling all its Cray IP to Tera Computer. So even if this line of computers had managed to maintain its dominance of the Supercomputer market, it wouldn't matter to SGI.
You're talking about CrayLink, which is the memory sharing technology in SGI MIPS supers. Supposedly SGI bought Cray just to get the patent--a purchase that cost them a lot of money, very little of which they got back when they sold Cray off again. But IBM and Sun have similar technologies. Whether they're as good as CrayLink, I couldn't say. Still, SGI Origin series no longer dominates the supercomputer market.
Sure. But how often does anybody buy a $100,000,000 supercomputer? I think there are like 6 or so in the whole federal government. The spooks are only dependent on SGI for support, and they can get that elsewhere if SGI folds. And when they need more hardware, they'll get it somewhere else. You can simulate an atomic explosion on an IBM as easily as you can any SGI box.
Maybe commercial ethernet cable was different. But in that paper I pointed to, they described their experimental ethernet as using off-the-shelf CATV cable.
So nobody's buying Unix boxes because Linux boxes are cheaper? That's a pretty narrow picture of the industry. Many of SGI's customers spend hundreds of thousands of dollars for a single system. Do you think a hundred-dollar software license fee is likely to be a deal-breaker?
SGI's problem is not commodity software, it's commodity hardware. All the movie and CAD/CAM and scientific people who used to buy SGI workstations are buying ordinary PCs instead. And if they need to crunch numbers or crank out their graphics, they don't buy SGI supers, they buy Beowulf clusters.
Of course, Linux is important to this change, because people who want to sell commodity systems for high-end applications can use Linux, instead of developing a new OS, or waiting for Microsoft to get its server act together. Not that this is universally popular -- a lot of SGI customers would like them to port IRIX to the Itanium. But that'd be expensive.
Why is why SGI does sell Linux boxes. But people who buy them don't buy them because they run Linux. They buy them because they're Itanium-based supercomputers.
Good lord, what have you been smoking? The government owns a few SGI supercomputers. Big deal. If SGI went away, they'd switch to IBM, like everybody else already has.
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I guess a big part of this is GM/Nextel spin. The device has a lot of PDA functionality. But a smart phone is "less threatening", so they call it that even if drivers mostly use it to access the network and run Java apps. Though I seem to recall that Nextel's network is CDMA, and my experiences with data over that kind of network is not positive.
Contrast this with UPS's deployment of a super-connectable PDA. Not to mention the recent release of bunch of new PalmOS devices. Some of which, yes, are smart phones. But when you base a smart phone on PalmOS or Symbian, do you have a phone with PDA functions or a PDA that makes phone calls? Not that I like either -- I want two separate devices, connected by Bluetooth.
Not just for music. Why should I have to pay a monthly fee to HBO or Showtime just to watch the one or two programs they have that I like? Why should I have to pay a subscription fee just to WSJ.com to read the odd article? And I'm certainly not going to swith to AOL just to read the content on ew.com!
Not that I object to paying for content. Content creators have to pay the rent. (Perhaps RMS would understand that if he lost his McArthur pension!) Voluntary payments, help, but not enough. Same goes for advertising, and besides, advertisers like to control the content they pay for.
Thing is, there's this huge establisment that controls the creation and distribution of that content, and they don't want to give up that control. So they hassle anybody with an alternative distribution model, and lobby for ever-restrictive IP laws, even as technology makes those laws irrelevent. And of course they attempt to offer feeble substitutes, such as online "subscriptions".
I also suspect them (and/or the financial industry) of stifling the development of technologies that would support a pay-as-you-read model, but I don't really have any evidence.
I used to assume that the internet would simply make this issue irrelevent. But the content establishment has done a good job of maintaining its control. It's lost a little ground, but not nearly enough to satisfy me. Maybe things will change when everybody has cheap, portable bandwidth. Remains to be seen.
But that still doesn't boil down to a general "IRIX is better than Solaris". You have a special situation: no budget for off-the-shelf messaging, and (I assume) you already have SGI hardware lying around. It would not make a lot of sense to buy SGI hardware just because the open-source app you plan to use needs to create 100,000 files at a time. Better to identify a reasonably priced app, then identify the most cost-effective hardware for running it.
Or if you were developing the app yourself, it might make sense to get SGI hardware just so you could have IRIX. Or maybe there's a DBMS that could handle 100,000 messages at least as efficiently as IRIX, and the most cost effective way to run that DBMS is another platform. Hard to say.
Bottom line: you can't take one extremely special situation where IRIX worked better than the alternatives and extrapolate that to the assertion that IRIX is better, period.
This is yet another venture by Stelios Haji-Ioannou, the seventh of his easy* ventures. One of these is easyJet, but he's no longer involved with the management of that company.
Ok, not only did you catch me in a dyslexism, you came up with a better headline. For that you will suffer!
Alcohol is promoted as a "renewable fuel", but only by people with an economic interest in its increased consumption. Describing it this way conceals the fact that producing alcohol itself has a heavy ecological impact. Most of this is because farming is very energy and chemical intensive. But there's also the cost of taking the resulting biomass, fermenting it, distilling it, and disposing of the resulting waste. I don't have decent figures, but this does not strike me as an efficient process. Probably more eco-friendly that burning our finite supply of fossil fuels, but not exceedingly so.
...Pepto Bismal will be in short supply. And just when people really need it!
Technically correct, but still misleading. It suggests there's a new stable element heavier than Bismuth. (Yeah, chemistry/math geeks know the stable part of the periodic table is full. But most people don't. Certainly not the writers at Stargate SG-1.) How about, "Bismuth not stable; Polonium now heaviest stable element."
Anyway, all my sarcasm was directed at you.
My God, he's from the NSA! They're everywhere!
Incidentally, all elements have unstable isotopes. Bismuth's are pretty rare, but they do exist!
Bismuth obsessive will rejoice in the web site of the Bismuth Producers Association.
I prefer Tums, myself.
Well, you obviously have more experience with programming than I do. But is the file system really the best place for a queue with thousands of messages? What about some kind of persistent storage manager? Even a simple RDBMS might be more efficient for what you're doing.
Peanut butter? So that's what my girlfriend was talking about!
Have you considered the possibility you're a stupid asshole who won't admit when he's got his facts wrong? No? Well, give it some thought.
Speaking of the IRIX files system: you do know that it's gone open source, right?
Anyway, you were talking about the Los Alamos site, which is why I mentioned the list.
If you see Elvis, say hello for me.
In order for a paper covering to generate enough acid to damage anything, you'd have to keep your CDs tightly stacked for months, maybe years. And even then, damage to the paper would be noticable long before damage to the CDs.
OK, you are directed and required to continue that train of thought. Exactly how is IRIX better than Solaris? More to the point, how is it better than Linux?
People keep telling me that SGI boxes are unique because they allow hundreds of processors to share memory. Apparently that's no longer that big an advantage.
Hey, TPC, have they shut down the cafeteria yet? Excuse me, "campus restaurant." That's the one thing I really miss about SGI -- being able to have a first-rate meal every day.
If you look at the 1999 chart carefully, you'll notice that all the SGI machines in the top 150 are Cray vector computers. SGI got out of the vector supercomputer business a few months after this chart was compiled, selling all its Cray IP to Tera Computer. So even if this line of computers had managed to maintain its dominance of the Supercomputer market, it wouldn't matter to SGI.
So much for your big conspiracy theory.
You're talking about CrayLink, which is the memory sharing technology in SGI MIPS supers. Supposedly SGI bought Cray just to get the patent--a purchase that cost them a lot of money, very little of which they got back when they sold Cray off again. But IBM and Sun have similar technologies. Whether they're as good as CrayLink, I couldn't say. Still, SGI Origin series no longer dominates the supercomputer market.
Sure. But how often does anybody buy a $100,000,000 supercomputer? I think there are like 6 or so in the whole federal government. The spooks are only dependent on SGI for support, and they can get that elsewhere if SGI folds. And when they need more hardware, they'll get it somewhere else. You can simulate an atomic explosion on an IBM as easily as you can any SGI box.
Maybe commercial ethernet cable was different. But in that paper I pointed to, they described their experimental ethernet as using off-the-shelf CATV cable.
SGI's problem is not commodity software, it's commodity hardware. All the movie and CAD/CAM and scientific people who used to buy SGI workstations are buying ordinary PCs instead. And if they need to crunch numbers or crank out their graphics, they don't buy SGI supers, they buy Beowulf clusters.
Of course, Linux is important to this change, because people who want to sell commodity systems for high-end applications can use Linux, instead of developing a new OS, or waiting for Microsoft to get its server act together. Not that this is universally popular -- a lot of SGI customers would like them to port IRIX to the Itanium. But that'd be expensive.
Why is why SGI does sell Linux boxes. But people who buy them don't buy them because they run Linux. They buy them because they're Itanium-based supercomputers.
Good lord, what have you been smoking? The government owns a few SGI supercomputers. Big deal. If SGI went away, they'd switch to IBM, like everybody else already has.