Sunspots are areas of intense magnetic field concentration that suppress local convection in the area, and are thus are relatively cooler and darker than the surrounding area.
Sunspots correspond to the amount of magnetic activity, which is the major driving force behind activity (flares, CMEs, filament eruptions,...).
We are working on a mission where we will get 2-4 terabytes of data per day. And we are going to keep it... A petabyte a year give or take a few hundred terabytes.
I'm all ears for an "inexpensive" solution to this.:-) You don't want to know how much this stuff costs.
Man, what a drag if that's true.
While I love Linux, UNIX, open source and whatnot and have been using it for a long time, I have to admit that the quality level is sometimes lacking in many areas. I do think that things are getting much better, but we still have a long ways to go.
I know that I am going to get flamed for this, but here goes anyhow.
I have been using unix for over 17 years now and it is my preferred environment (I consider Linux to be yet another flavor of unix).
Here are the things that I feel have set the software/os/apps industry back:
-Microsoft's overbearing presence, huge marketing machine and complete lack of innovation, actually their ability to kill innovation. If M$ weren't around, I think we would be 5+ years ahead of where we are now.
-It has been my belief for a while now that a lot of newbies decide that they want to contribute to existing software.
Now good will and enthusiasm are a great thing to a point, but they cannot overcome certain fundamental language, design, knowledge and wisdom learning curves.
I have written many lines of code in my time, and I'll be the first to admit that a lot of my early, learning-curve code is stuff that I should scrap or rewrite (and I do). However, a lot of the code and ideas that I see out there seem to have the same flavor, and due to the nature of the open source model, they become building blocks for other things. Ugh!
If you're new and don't know the necessary concepts, please do write code and do the necessary learning, but then think about rewriting your code and ideas once you really understand how to do things well.
-Pet/grad-student/research projects becoming mainstream code. I see this a LOT and while I feel that there's a lot of value in the research and algorithms and ideas, I think that a significant amount of cleanup is usually necessary before an idea/app/library/framework/... is ready for primetime.
-lack of focus and cooperation. If you really want to contribute, try to incorporate it into an existing, active project to help make that project better. 1-3 REALLY good projects is WAY better than 50 low-grade "learning" projects. It also gives you exposure to more code and ideas to help you learn.
-the infighting amongst developer camps in unix, open source and other truly innovative forums.
There were/are a LOT of really smart people and good coders and designers. There's also a lot of not-invented-here (TM) syndrome going around, which is really a drag. If people could have swallowed a bit of their ego, come together to make fewer, but more robust toolkits and libraries and whatnot, the rest of the effort could have been invested in making applications. Many of them are very busy writing code to solve applications and may not contribute a lot to the open source community, in general. These are the sorts of folks who you really want overseeing and contributing to projects.
-lack of consistency in user interface. While I hate M$, they have done a great job of keeping a consistent UI, which is good for average users. Geeks are the only people who care about having 10 different GUIs/look-n-feels for doing things. Average users want to be able to recognize a UI element easily.
Consistency is GOOD in UI!!!!!!
Consistency is GOOD in UI!!!!!!
Consistency is GOOD in UI!!!!!!
Consistency is GOOD in UI!!!!!!
Consistency is GOOD in UI!!!!!!
-lack of a good ui toolkit from the X Consortium folks a long time ago. While I agreed initially (when X first came out) that X should specify function and not form, I now believe that the X Consortium should have shipped a much more useful GUI toolkit than Athena, or people should have made Athena more useful and better looking. I've done LOTS of coding in X, Athena, Motif and OpenLook and a dozen other GUI toolkits, and I can tell you now that I wish that I had ONE really good one so I could focus on writing applications that people could use. All these different APIs floating around in my head are eating my brain!
-The current KDE vs GNOME vs... debate is the same old bullshit. Let's take the best of both and drop it and have one really good, really easy to use, really easy to program and prototype and extend GUI and push that forward. It may be painful now, but in the long run it'll be better for the average user AND for us.
-lack of a truly high-level GUI toolkit early on was no good.
-poor fonts. X Logical Font Descriptor (XLFD) is NOT logical at all. Or rather, it is difficult for joe user to figure out. A real type engine early on would have been a good thing.
-Lack of a benevolent dictator or ARB to help oversee some of these things as standards.
-Too much geek/clique/insider mentality. This is no good. It often feels like a lot of code, docs and man pages are written up by people who feel only insiders are worthy of reading it.
-Too many flavors. Too many unixes, too many GUIs,...
While I take an abstracted approach and more or less consider most unixes to be the same, I still have to figure out the various annoying differences between the flavors.
Once again, consistency is good for the user!
-Poor to non-existent documentation.
While I am savvy enough to get around and figure things out, but I know many who are not.
> Its only a matter of time 'til video becomes as
> commonplace as MP3's on our drives. 100 Gigs is
> I don't see my appetite for
> disk space slowing down any time soon.
True enough. I disagree with Cmdr Taco's comment:
"we now have the ability to store anything we reasonably could need"
I used to say the same thing a while back, thinking I could never fill a disk. That was a 5M Sider drive for an Apple II...
I just wish the stupid BIOS and drive manufacturers would get their act together on drive limits...
Nobody will ever need more than 500M...
Nobody will ever need more than 2G...
Nobody will ever need more than 8G...
Nobody will ever need more than 32G...
How many times can you shoot yourself in the same foot with the same gun?
> logfiles that don't roll over - ever; online
That is a terrible architecture for storing log files... Makes them very hard to search, modify,... You'd be better off creating a tool to iterate over a set of files for you.
> network backup... I'm sure to figure out a way
> to fill that terabyte.:)
No problem there.
A terabyte just isn't that much when you start to think of volumetric data, CFD, physics calculations, FEA,...
Personally, I'd really like to stop seeing all of this spinning media and start seeing solid state stuff with much higher densities...
Frustrates me seeing people talk about 500 terabytes in a test tube. Forget that, just get the stuff working and tell me where to place my order for something I can use.:-)
Having worked on SGIs for quite a few years with OpenGL, Performer, Inventor and a number of other toolkits, I'll say that SGI does a great job of bringing together hardware and software to make a compelling product. I've worked mostly on their high end products (Onyx, RE, RE2, IR, IR2, Origin,...), but I've worked on pretty much every workstation they have made.
Render Farm??
Why does everybody think that that's all there is to 3D applications?
If you need to have fast interactive graphics, a render farm isn't going to be what you want to use... Besides, render farms are only a small part of 3D graphics market; there ARE other applications.
SGI/IRIX versus M$ Winblows
I've programmed in both, and I'll tell you that getting a 3D app up and running in IRIX for me has been WAY faster and easier than M$ crap. There is just no comparing the two. Although I do have my share of rants about unix (my preferred os) and especially about open source (I know that I'm going to get flamed by many for saying that open source has its problems).
Don't even ask me about OpenGL compliance...
Stupid M$, they always ruin real standards.
Features
Many of the high end SGI graphics engines have many features that you don't really get with the el cheapo cards.
Rick Beluzzo, the ass
I'm not a conspiracy theorist, but I sometimes think that Rick Beluzzo was in Microsoft's employ the whole time he was at SGI, just to sabotage SGI. talking about a person with a complete lack of vision and direction. He completely hurt SGI by taking them towards a commodity market. Hmmmm.... let's see. We completely rule the realtime 3D market, so let's try to sell PCs instead and make no margins doing so. Talking about a really tough market where it is hard to differentiate yourself. I was completely baffled by SGI spending millions of dollars to change their name to SGI (from Silicon Graphics), when everybody in the universe already referred to them as SGI. Ugh!
The whole Fahrenheit thing made me a bit leary too; I always glaze over when I hear talk of all-encompassing/panacea solutions.
I, for one, hope that SGI pulls ahead again; they were fun to work with.
> The real question is how the Open Source
> community should respond. You can quote me
> on this one, if we simply stand behind
> reliability and laugh at Microsoft's security
> holes and crashes, WE ARE TOAST.
Very well spoken and I agree with your points.
I have been working as a professional unix software dev for over 15 years now.
I love unix and open source, but I feel that, in general, a lot of the open source that is out there is nowhere near prime time.
It has been very frustrating for me, as I think that there are some really smart people working in unix and open source. I think that ego and other stupid not-invented-here (TM) mentalities have REALLY hurt the unix and open source communities in general.
As much as I loathe M$, I have to give them credit for a couple of things:
-consistency of user interface
Yeah, I think skins are cool and everything,
but in the end, most users want a consistent
and useful user interface and could give
a rats ass about the GUI wars that unix has
had forever (one of my major pet peaves).
-more money and effort into producing usable
products.
I'm not trying to defend M$, because they
certainly have more than their fair share
of really evil and stupid bugs, but the
perception on the part of the user is
that of a stable, consistent and
full-featured environment and suite of
software.
-incredible marketing.
Joe User could care less about us thumbing
our noses at M$. They want consistent,
useful and good products.
Some areas that I think unix/linux/open source community requires some major work on:
-consistent user interface
The X guys REALLY dropped the ball here by
saying that they are not specifying a look
and feel.
I think that having a dozen different GUI
toolkits is not only ridiculous, it is
harmful in the end.
If a particular [dominant?] toolkit doesn't
cut the mustard, have a design and revamp
review to get things right rather than
coming up with YAFGT (Yet Another F****ng
GUI Toolkit).
-let's get some good fonts
The standard X font set is pretty bad.
-some good UI designs. I've seen some pretty awful stuff and concepts that seem to go out of their way to make themselves different from what people are used to using. Being different/inconsistent is a BAD idea in UI.
-getting coding standards higher and having better design and code review processes.
There are a lot of newbie programmers out there that contribute a lot of code that is probably not suitable to go into production software...
-It almost seems as though the open source community needs a seasoned and very smart benevolent dictator to say what is ok and what is not.
-better documentation in the unix kernel sources and header sources. Some of it is just awful.
It's not all bad; I've seen lots of wonderful, intuitive and useful tools over the years.
In the end, a lot of the code that is crap will die off anyhow; sometimes it is just a painful ride to get there...
$0.02?
Make certain you teach him a bunch of history of things, the fundamentals; why many things are the way they are. This can be a learning experience for both of you. Writing a compiler or an OS is fun stuff and REALLY gives you a lot to think about.
Finally, make certain that he uses a good OO language to implement his OS, and tell him that putting #ifdefs inside of his code is punishable by death.
> Highly reliable data centers, like those that
> handle email for large national ISPs,
> often cost millions of dollars, are redundantly
> connected to multiple backbone
> providers, are protected against fire, are
> redundantly connected to multiple
> independent power grids, etc.
And still they seem to find ways of going down and being unreliable...
I remember a time when there was Athena (Xaw), Motif (Xm) and OpenLook (Xol) and a smattering of other stuff. There was infighting and other nonsense that didn't help produce ANYTHING USEFUL, despite the fact that there were many very smart, and very productive people on all sides.
Now, who came into the ring and creamed everyone? Micro$loth
There are many excellent, creative people here, let's get something done instead of mudslinging.
There are things to like and dislike about both toolkits, but they can be changed...
I generally agree that X has some deficiencies, I take exception to the original article. It sounded like the rants of folks who really didn't know too much of what they were saying. The things that I _LOVE_ about X that I would want to see in another windowing system: -network transparency -extensibility -Xt has some cool features -platform independence -tools for mapping keys and other events are NICE Some things that are bogus: -the font mechanism is incredibly painful to use. Definitely not meant for human consumption. -The X visual system is not easy either. -X is a pain in the butt to get applications written from scratch (granted, Windows is too...) -X REALLY could have benefitted from a better event model. It feels too cumbersome. Programming X would have been sooo much easier if a better event model had been adopted, as well as using an actual OO language instead of trying to mimic OO in C. -Ralph I disagree with your point about X being tied to a particular GUI. That is a shortcoming of the toolkits that have been developed, rather than the X protocol and interface. It _IS_ possible to write skins GUI toolkits for X, just noone has done much of that work.
Slashdot Mirror
Sunspots are areas of intense magnetic field concentration that suppress local convection in the area, and are thus are relatively cooler and darker than the surrounding area.
...).
Sunspots correspond to the amount of magnetic activity, which is the major driving force behind activity (flares, CMEs, filament eruptions,
(I work in the field)
We are working on a mission where we will get 2-4 terabytes of data per day.
:-)
And we are going to keep it... A petabyte a year give or take a few hundred terabytes.
I'm all ears for an "inexpensive" solution to this.
You don't want to know how much this stuff costs.
Man, what a drag if that's true.
... debate is the same old bullshit. Let's take the best of both and drop it and have one really good, really easy to use, really easy to program and prototype and extend GUI and push that forward. It may be painful now, but in the long run it'll be better for the average user AND for us.
...
While I love Linux, UNIX, open source and whatnot and have been using it for a long time, I have to admit that the quality level is sometimes lacking in many areas. I do think that things are getting much better, but we still have a long ways to go.
I know that I am going to get flamed for this, but here goes anyhow.
I have been using unix for over 17 years now and it is my preferred environment (I consider Linux to be yet another flavor of unix).
Here are the things that I feel have set the software/os/apps industry back:
-Microsoft's overbearing presence, huge marketing machine and complete lack of innovation, actually their ability to kill innovation. If M$ weren't around, I think we would be 5+ years ahead of where we are now.
-It has been my belief for a while now that a lot of newbies decide that they want to contribute to existing software.
Now good will and enthusiasm are a great thing to a point, but they cannot overcome certain fundamental language, design, knowledge and wisdom learning curves.
I have written many lines of code in my time, and I'll be the first to admit that a lot of my early, learning-curve code is stuff that I should scrap or rewrite (and I do). However, a lot of the code and ideas that I see out there seem to have the same flavor, and due to the nature of the open source model, they become building blocks for other things. Ugh!
If you're new and don't know the necessary concepts, please do write code and do the necessary learning, but then think about rewriting your code and ideas once you really understand how to do things well.
-Pet/grad-student/research projects becoming mainstream code. I see this a LOT and while I feel that there's a lot of value in the research and algorithms and ideas, I think that a significant amount of cleanup is usually necessary before an idea/app/library/framework/... is ready for primetime.
-lack of focus and cooperation. If you really want to contribute, try to incorporate it into an existing, active project to help make that project better. 1-3 REALLY good projects is WAY better than 50 low-grade "learning" projects. It also gives you exposure to more code and ideas to help you learn.
-the infighting amongst developer camps in unix, open source and other truly innovative forums.
There were/are a LOT of really smart people and good coders and designers. There's also a lot of not-invented-here (TM) syndrome going around, which is really a drag. If people could have swallowed a bit of their ego, come together to make fewer, but more robust toolkits and libraries and whatnot, the rest of the effort could have been invested in making applications. Many of them are very busy writing code to solve applications and may not contribute a lot to the open source community, in general. These are the sorts of folks who you really want overseeing and contributing to projects.
-lack of consistency in user interface. While I hate M$, they have done a great job of keeping a consistent UI, which is good for average users. Geeks are the only people who care about having 10 different GUIs/look-n-feels for doing things. Average users want to be able to recognize a UI element easily.
Consistency is GOOD in UI!!!!!!
Consistency is GOOD in UI!!!!!!
Consistency is GOOD in UI!!!!!!
Consistency is GOOD in UI!!!!!!
Consistency is GOOD in UI!!!!!!
-lack of a good ui toolkit from the X Consortium folks a long time ago. While I agreed initially (when X first came out) that X should specify function and not form, I now believe that the X Consortium should have shipped a much more useful GUI toolkit than Athena, or people should have made Athena more useful and better looking. I've done LOTS of coding in X, Athena, Motif and OpenLook and a dozen other GUI toolkits, and I can tell you now that I wish that I had ONE really good one so I could focus on writing applications that people could use. All these different APIs floating around in my head are eating my brain!
-The current KDE vs GNOME vs
-lack of a truly high-level GUI toolkit early on was no good.
-poor fonts. X Logical Font Descriptor (XLFD) is NOT logical at all. Or rather, it is difficult for joe user to figure out. A real type engine early on would have been a good thing.
-Lack of a benevolent dictator or ARB to help oversee some of these things as standards.
-Too much geek/clique/insider mentality. This is no good. It often feels like a lot of code, docs and man pages are written up by people who feel only insiders are worthy of reading it.
-Too many flavors. Too many unixes, too many GUIs,
While I take an abstracted approach and more or less consider most unixes to be the same, I still have to figure out the various annoying differences between the flavors.
Once again, consistency is good for the user!
-Poor to non-existent documentation.
While I am savvy enough to get around and figure things out, but I know many who are not.
Thanks!
-Ralph
> Its only a matter of time 'til video becomes as
... You'd be better off creating a tool to iterate over a set of files for you.
:)
...
:-)
> commonplace as MP3's on our drives. 100 Gigs is
> I don't see my appetite for
> disk space slowing down any time soon.
True enough. I disagree with Cmdr Taco's comment:
"we now have the ability to store anything we reasonably could need"
I used to say the same thing a while back, thinking I could never fill a disk. That was a 5M Sider drive for an Apple II...
I just wish the stupid BIOS and drive manufacturers would get their act together on drive limits...
Nobody will ever need more than 500M...
Nobody will ever need more than 2G...
Nobody will ever need more than 8G...
Nobody will ever need more than 32G...
How many times can you shoot yourself in the same foot with the same gun?
> logfiles that don't roll over - ever; online
That is a terrible architecture for storing log files... Makes them very hard to search, modify,
> network backup... I'm sure to figure out a way
> to fill that terabyte.
No problem there.
A terabyte just isn't that much when you start to think of volumetric data, CFD, physics calculations, FEA,
Personally, I'd really like to stop seeing all of this spinning media and start seeing solid state stuff with much higher densities...
Frustrates me seeing people talk about 500 terabytes in a test tube. Forget that, just get the stuff working and tell me where to place my order for something I can use.
Having worked on SGIs for quite a few years with OpenGL, Performer, Inventor and a number of other toolkits, I'll say that SGI does a great job of bringing together hardware and software to make a compelling product. I've worked mostly on their high end products (Onyx, RE, RE2, IR, IR2, Origin, ...), but I've worked on pretty much every workstation they have made.
Render Farm??
Why does everybody think that that's all there is to 3D applications?
If you need to have fast interactive graphics, a render farm isn't going to be what you want to use... Besides, render farms are only a small part of 3D graphics market; there ARE other applications.
SGI/IRIX versus M$ Winblows
I've programmed in both, and I'll tell you that getting a 3D app up and running in IRIX for me has been WAY faster and easier than M$ crap. There is just no comparing the two. Although I do have my share of rants about unix (my preferred os) and especially about open source (I know that I'm going to get flamed by many for saying that open source has its problems).
Don't even ask me about OpenGL compliance...
Stupid M$, they always ruin real standards.
Features
Many of the high end SGI graphics engines have many features that you don't really get with the el cheapo cards.
Rick Beluzzo, the ass
I'm not a conspiracy theorist, but I sometimes think that Rick Beluzzo was in Microsoft's employ the whole time he was at SGI, just to sabotage SGI. talking about a person with a complete lack of vision and direction. He completely hurt SGI by taking them towards a commodity market. Hmmmm.... let's see. We completely rule the realtime 3D market, so let's try to sell PCs instead and make no margins doing so. Talking about a really tough market where it is hard to differentiate yourself. I was completely baffled by SGI spending millions of dollars to change their name to SGI (from Silicon Graphics), when everybody in the universe already referred to them as SGI. Ugh!
The whole Fahrenheit thing made me a bit leary too; I always glaze over when I hear talk of all-encompassing/panacea solutions.
I, for one, hope that SGI pulls ahead again; they were fun to work with.
-Ralph
> The real question is how the Open Source
> community should respond. You can quote me
> on this one, if we simply stand behind
> reliability and laugh at Microsoft's security
> holes and crashes, WE ARE TOAST.
Very well spoken and I agree with your points.
I have been working as a professional unix software dev for over 15 years now.
I love unix and open source, but I feel that, in general, a lot of the open source that is out there is nowhere near prime time.
It has been very frustrating for me, as I think that there are some really smart people working in unix and open source. I think that ego and other stupid not-invented-here (TM) mentalities have REALLY hurt the unix and open source communities in general.
As much as I loathe M$, I have to give them credit for a couple of things:
-consistency of user interface
Yeah, I think skins are cool and everything,
but in the end, most users want a consistent
and useful user interface and could give
a rats ass about the GUI wars that unix has
had forever (one of my major pet peaves).
-more money and effort into producing usable
products.
I'm not trying to defend M$, because they
certainly have more than their fair share
of really evil and stupid bugs, but the
perception on the part of the user is
that of a stable, consistent and
full-featured environment and suite of
software.
-incredible marketing.
Joe User could care less about us thumbing
our noses at M$. They want consistent,
useful and good products.
Some areas that I think unix/linux/open source community requires some major work on:
-consistent user interface
The X guys REALLY dropped the ball here by
saying that they are not specifying a look
and feel.
I think that having a dozen different GUI
toolkits is not only ridiculous, it is
harmful in the end.
If a particular [dominant?] toolkit doesn't
cut the mustard, have a design and revamp
review to get things right rather than
coming up with YAFGT (Yet Another F****ng
GUI Toolkit).
-let's get some good fonts
The standard X font set is pretty bad.
-some good UI designs. I've seen some pretty awful stuff and concepts that seem to go out of their way to make themselves different from what people are used to using. Being different/inconsistent is a BAD idea in UI.
-getting coding standards higher and having better design and code review processes.
There are a lot of newbie programmers out there that contribute a lot of code that is probably not suitable to go into production software...
-It almost seems as though the open source community needs a seasoned and very smart benevolent dictator to say what is ok and what is not.
-better documentation in the unix kernel sources and header sources. Some of it is just awful.
It's not all bad; I've seen lots of wonderful, intuitive and useful tools over the years.
In the end, a lot of the code that is crap will die off anyhow; sometimes it is just a painful ride to get there...
-Ralph
$0.02?
Make certain you teach him a bunch of history of things, the fundamentals; why many things are the way they are. This can be a learning experience for both of you. Writing a compiler or an OS is fun stuff and REALLY gives you a lot to think about.
Finally, make certain that he uses a good OO language to implement his OS, and tell him that putting #ifdefs inside of his code is punishable by death.
/$0.02?
-Ralph
> Highly reliable data centers, like those that
> handle email for large national ISPs,
> often cost millions of dollars, are redundantly
> connected to multiple backbone
> providers, are protected against fire, are
> redundantly connected to multiple
> independent power grids, etc.
And still they seem to find ways of going down and being unreliable...
-Ralph
History is coming back to bite us again...
9 .jpg
I remember a time when there was Athena (Xaw), Motif (Xm) and OpenLook (Xol) and a smattering of other stuff. There was infighting and other nonsense that didn't help produce ANYTHING USEFUL, despite the fact that there were many very smart, and very productive people on all sides.
Now, who came into the ring and creamed everyone? Micro$loth
There are many excellent, creative people here, let's get something done instead of mudslinging.
There are things to like and dislike about both toolkits, but they can be changed...
-Ralph
http://www.mybrain.org/Pics/Fun/.res480/dscn436
I generally agree that X has some deficiencies, I take exception to the original article. It sounded like the rants of folks who really didn't know too much of what they were saying. The things that I _LOVE_ about X that I would want to see in another windowing system: -network transparency -extensibility -Xt has some cool features -platform independence -tools for mapping keys and other events are NICE Some things that are bogus: -the font mechanism is incredibly painful to use. Definitely not meant for human consumption. -The X visual system is not easy either. -X is a pain in the butt to get applications written from scratch (granted, Windows is too...) -X REALLY could have benefitted from a better event model. It feels too cumbersome. Programming X would have been sooo much easier if a better event model had been adopted, as well as using an actual OO language instead of trying to mimic OO in C. -Ralph I disagree with your point about X being tied to a particular GUI. That is a shortcoming of the toolkits that have been developed, rather than the X protocol and interface. It _IS_ possible to write skins GUI toolkits for X, just noone has done much of that work.