Adolescence sucks for pretty much everyone at one time or another. Some people have an easier time of it than others.
From the perspective of 10 yers I realize that I wrote a lot of people off in highschool because they happened to keep company with certain egregious assholes.
At the time I may have justified this prejudice on my part by telling myself that if these people deserved my harsh judgement because they were sanctioning these assholes by associating with them. What I realize now is that I spent time in the company of some real assholes too.
This is good news, but I won't be satisfied until Dell and their Ilk provide complete Linux support for their hardware, including RAID controllers and some of the self-diagnositic and hardware management features they build into their boxes.
Until then, Linux will be a second class citizen on these boxes when compaired to NT, Netware and perhaps some of the commercial UNIXs.
Whether the Specs are real or not. The graphical output of the things is truly jawdropping. The unbeleivable screen captures people have circulated actually understate the effect.
You overgeneralize. There are all sorts of topologies for clusters.
Fast ethernet to a non-blocking network switch (not router) can easily apporximate the advantages of a number of them with low cost and complexity. This has been used in some of the larger beowulf clusters to date, such as Avalon.
Honey, part of the point of beowulf is that all the nodes are dedicated to the cluster. Makes them easier to manage, simplifies partitioning the workload,etc.
This isn't to say that you couldn't do something like you are talking about. Interestingly, the parallel APIs used in beowulf also run on NT...
It all depends on the application, doesn't it. If most intranode communication is local then switched 100MBit could work just fine. Global communication is another story.
Well, VA is backed, in part, by Intel. Intel motherboards ave 4 megabit flash memory for the firmware.
That is certainly enough room for a decent boot loader, some diagnostics and some decent remote boot firmware. Not quite enough for a compressed kernel, I don't think, but an 8 megabit flash might be.
Your classification devalues the practice and effort it takes to write solid documentation and in doing so, reduces non-monetary incentives to people contemplating this goal. This is counterproductive.
You remind me of a father who kicks his son down whenever the son threatens to eclipse him.
I don't see how improving the GUI-useability of Linux systems precludes you from doing what you have always done, yet you damn ordinary users to a world of Microsoft products anyway.
Consider this, a well thoughtout method of interapplication communication can improve execution and programmer efficiency of even command line apps. It reduces the programmer overhead of having to write code to parse STDIN into a useable format and the execution overhead of doing the parsing.
I disagree, the machine that set the standard for useability, the Mac, arrived with many fundamental usability features and principals already fully formed, newer innovations have been added on to the framework. It has evolved, but much of its evolution really built on the strong framework that was laid down at inception.
As a counter example, I give you Windows. If anything, the evolution of Windows is much more obvious than the evolution of the Mac. The problem is, they started with shit, and dispite the willingness to throw alot out and start over (forcing users to relearn things) what they have now is still misses some very fundamental usabilty standards.
I would say that a strong first implementation is really important when talking about user interfaces
Sure, there will be a market for something other than appliances, but that doesn't mean that there won't be a market for appliances.
Answer honestly. How many people do you think would be well served by an appliance that did nothing but run an e-mail program, with HTML formatting, a good web browser, a news program, a chat client, and a streaming media client which supported the major formats? This appliance would just work, it would be available in less than 15 seconds, it would not crash. New functionality would be added seamlessly without user interaction.
Such a device could even keep me happy for weeks at a time.
What about a similar device that could also play playstation games and open and create Microsoft Office documents?
I think that these features would satisfy most low end computer buyers, which could have repurcussions for the hardware market.
Certainly these appliances would create greater need for servers and network equipment, but what would happen to the low to mid-range PC market. Would it whither and die, or would it survive as the back pasture for technologies originally developed for the high end.
How about a couple orders of magnitude performance difference with the LRP as the looser.
Don't get me wrong, LRP is absolutely great!
It meets the needs of millions of people, businesses and organizations who need a reasonably flexible packet handling device running at T1 to ethernet speeds but there are plenty of applications for purpose-built hardware solutions.
mmm, for the same reason we don't all live and commute in an RV? For the same reason that people touring the contry in RVs sometimes tow cars with them. For the same reason that more people are watching DVDs on DVD players hooked to televisions than are watching them on their computers. For the same reason Zenith didn't take the world by storm with their combo TV/Speaker phone. For the same reason we are using a bunch of personal computers rather than a single mainframe.
There are a lot of good reasons but I think the biggest one is Concurrancy. This allows one person to do multiple things at once or multiple people to do many different things. It means that I can enter information into my palm pilot at the same time I am talking on my Cell phone. Having both functions in a single device is a compromise. It means that I can play video games while my wife shops for our next vaction on travelocity while keeping an eye on the TV for futurama to get back from commercial.
Compactness is another issue. Even if being able to use a PalmIII and a cellphone at the same time weren't an issue, having the two integrated means than when I just have a cellphone I still have something as big as a palmIII because it has to be big enough for the screen.
Even so, given the right set of compromises, I think we will see multifunction appliances such as a DVD-player/cable-box/Internet access/video game/video recorder. A home could probably have two or three of these hooked up to HDTV sets and it would provide for the entire households information and entertainment needs at a reasonable level of concurrancy.
We will see what this really is, but it is already clear that this is not the equivalent of a 486 with a couple of ethernet cards running IP forwarding code.
Dig it?
Does ANYONE use Windows NT to do this sort of thin
on
Linux Based Router
·
· Score: 1
I expect that this would be a target market for the embedded version of NT that MS is working to bring out.
I was going to say that this would be pretty expensive, but given that this router lists at $300,000, the I2O route could be quite practical.
The I/O processor would forward packets based on a local flow cache. Packets not matching the flow cache would generate an event which would be handled by a module running on the linux OS.
Incoming HTTP requests could be forwarded to a linux module which would spoof the handshake to get URL information. It would then open a connection to the apppropriate web server, populate the flow tables with the appropriate entries and then hand the flow back to the IOPs. The IOPs would forward packets and rewrite headers as needed.
A reasonably priced switching fabric under the control of open source code which and have modules added to it could be very cool.
Existing Linux based routers are great for the low end, but they can only scale to a certain point because the CPU is involved in all packet forwarding.
In something like this, I/O porcessors, or some specialized ASICs do the scut work of moving data around making low level routing decisions. The OS and CPU only deal with managing the switching fabric. They generally only get involved when things change, such as when a packet comes in for a new destination, or when a route to a destination changes, etc.
Having this management layer available for manipuation could enable linux developers to bring out a new class or network applications.
For example, if this hardware is cheap enough and presents clear interfaces, it should be relatively easy to implement a high performance URL aware HTTP load balancer which could eclipse the performance of any sort of software/general-purpose hardware solution by multiple orders of magnitude.
1. Maybe they are talking about file system journaling. Maybe they are talking about extensive file (and object) access logging for auditing purposes. Either way, Linux doesn't have it.
2. The latest WinNT magazine has a good article compairing the NT and the Linux Kernel. It may be biased, and it may be making mountains out of molehills, but it does contain a reasoned and supported compairison of the two OSs and it would be good to have a linux person post an equally well supported rebuttal.
JWZs departure, and his explanation of it, give me pause. I have been wondering when the hell netscape would ship 5.0 and it was very disheartening to learn that they didn't expect to have a beta out until July. JWZ's revalations just confirm my fears.
(It seems to me that have a good, modern, browser is very important to the success of Linux and I hope that this will motivate people to chip in to the project.)
On the other hand, the news in this latest article isn't nearly as significant and I think the author should be given 50 lashes for trying to play up this new information.
JWZ was an early employee of the company. This other "key" developer sounds like a johny-come-lately, perhaps the sort of fair weather friend that JWZ seems to deplore.
JWZ, in addition to whatever he did in the early days, made (by his own assesment, at least) a real effort at making the open source Mozilla fly free. This other guy lead the development of a privacy invasion feature. The sort of tail-fin feature that netscape wasted their effort on when they should have been cleaning up the core of their browser and building in standards support.
As for the other layoffs, big woop. A sad symbol and no doubt stressful to those involved, but they don't sound like they are core to the developent of any products.
1. What does Carmack have to do with writing a Merced compiler? He is an excellent 3-D game programmer, but most of the hand coded parellel-executions tweaks in quake were written by x86 assembly guru Michael Abrash, not Carmack.
2. As other people have pointed out, he doesn't know what he is talking about.
3. If I were looking for analysis on the Merced delays, I would dig around on www.mdronline.com for an excellent article by one of their staff on the subject rather than listen to this bozo. Synopsis of the MDR online article. Intel is leading the design of the Merced and they are using their standard massively parallel design approach (lots of engineers). Problem is, this approach works fine for successive iterations of an existing, well understood ISA & implementation, it is not working well for a brand new, cutting edge ISA and chip. His predection is that the Merced will have a very short life before it is superceeded by the second generation chip in the family, one being designed methodically and inexorably by a small HP led design team.
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One point of a monument is that it it has presence and permenance. 110 $500 computers are far from permenant.
This resonates for me.
Adolescence sucks for pretty much everyone at one time or another. Some people have an easier time of it than others.
From the perspective of 10 yers I realize that I wrote a lot of people off in highschool because they happened to keep company with certain egregious assholes.
At the time I may have justified this prejudice on my part by telling myself that if these people deserved my harsh judgement because they were sanctioning these assholes by associating with them. What I realize now is that I spent time in the company of some real assholes too.
This is good news, but I won't be satisfied until Dell and their Ilk provide complete Linux support for their hardware, including RAID controllers and some of the self-diagnositic and hardware management features they build into their boxes.
Until then, Linux will be a second class citizen on these boxes when compaired to NT, Netware and perhaps some of the commercial UNIXs.
Whether the Specs are real or not. The graphical output of the things is truly jawdropping. The unbeleivable screen captures people have circulated actually understate the effect.
You overgeneralize. There are all sorts of topologies for clusters.
Fast ethernet to a non-blocking network switch (not router) can easily apporximate the advantages of a number of them with low cost and complexity. This has been used in some of the larger beowulf clusters to date, such as Avalon.
Honey, part of the point of beowulf is that all the nodes are dedicated to the cluster. Makes them easier to manage, simplifies partitioning the workload,etc.
This isn't to say that you couldn't do something like you are talking about. Interestingly, the parallel APIs used in beowulf also run on NT...
It all depends on the application, doesn't it. If most intranode communication is local then switched 100MBit could work just fine. Global communication is another story.
Well, VA is backed, in part, by Intel. Intel motherboards ave 4 megabit flash memory for the firmware.
That is certainly enough room for a decent boot loader, some diagnostics and some decent remote boot firmware. Not quite enough for a compressed kernel, I don't think, but an 8 megabit flash might be.
Right on!
And before people start bitching about modern autmobiles, I would like to remind people of a few of the benifits to everyone:
1. Greater fuel efficiency.
2. Less Polution.
3. More free time to spend poking around with our computers.
Your classification devalues the practice and effort it takes to write solid documentation and in doing so, reduces non-monetary incentives to people contemplating this goal. This is counterproductive.
You remind me of a father who kicks his son down whenever the son threatens to eclipse him.
I don't see how improving the GUI-useability of Linux systems precludes you from doing what you have always done, yet you damn ordinary users to a world of Microsoft products anyway.
Consider this, a well thoughtout method of interapplication communication can improve execution and programmer efficiency of even command line apps. It reduces the programmer overhead of having to write code to parse STDIN into a useable format and the execution overhead of doing the parsing.
I disagree, the machine that set the standard for useability, the Mac, arrived with many fundamental usability features and principals already fully formed, newer innovations have been added on to the framework. It has evolved, but much of its evolution really built on the strong framework that was laid down at inception.
As a counter example, I give you Windows. If anything, the evolution of Windows is much more obvious than the evolution of the Mac. The problem is, they started with shit, and dispite the willingness to throw alot out and start over (forcing users to relearn things) what they have now is still misses some very fundamental usabilty standards.
I would say that a strong first implementation is really important when talking about user interfaces
I really doubt it was Alpha.
Sorry buddy, I know more than one Mac user with AOL accounts. You can pat yourself on the back all your want, doesn't mean that you are right.
Sure, there will be a market for something other than appliances, but that doesn't mean that there won't be a market for appliances.
Answer honestly. How many people do you think would be well served by an appliance that did nothing but run an e-mail program, with HTML formatting, a good web browser, a news program, a chat client, and a streaming media client which supported the major formats? This appliance would just work, it would be available in less than 15 seconds, it would not crash. New functionality would be added seamlessly without user interaction.
Such a device could even keep me happy for weeks at a time.
What about a similar device that could also play playstation games and open and create Microsoft Office documents?
I think that these features would satisfy most low end computer buyers, which could have repurcussions for the hardware market.
Certainly these appliances would create greater need for servers and network equipment, but what would happen to the low to mid-range PC market. Would it whither and die, or would it survive as the back pasture for technologies originally developed for the high end.
How about a couple orders of magnitude performance difference with the LRP as the looser.
Don't get me wrong, LRP is absolutely great!
It meets the needs of millions of people, businesses and organizations who need a reasonably flexible packet handling device running at T1 to ethernet speeds but there are plenty of applications for purpose-built hardware solutions.
mmm, for the same reason we don't all live and commute in an RV? For the same reason that people touring the contry in RVs sometimes tow cars with them. For the same reason that more people are watching DVDs on DVD players hooked to televisions than are watching them on their computers. For the same reason Zenith didn't take the world by storm with their combo TV/Speaker phone. For the same reason we are using a bunch of personal computers rather than a single mainframe.
There are a lot of good reasons but I think the biggest one is Concurrancy. This allows one person to do multiple things at once or multiple people to do many different things. It means that I can enter information into my palm pilot at the same time I am talking on my Cell phone. Having both functions in a single device is a compromise. It means that I can play video games while my wife shops for our next vaction on travelocity while keeping an eye on the TV for futurama to get back from commercial.
Compactness is another issue. Even if being able to use a PalmIII and a cellphone at the same time weren't an issue, having the two integrated means than when I just have a cellphone I still have something as big as a palmIII because it has to be big enough for the screen.
Even so, given the right set of compromises, I think we will see multifunction appliances such as a DVD-player/cable-box/Internet access/video game/video recorder. A home could probably have two or three of these hooked up to HDTV sets and it would provide for the entire households information and entertainment needs at a reasonable level of concurrancy.
We will see what this really is, but it is already clear that this is not the equivalent of a 486 with a couple of ethernet cards running IP forwarding code.
Dig it?
I expect that this would be a target market for the embedded version of NT that MS is working to bring out.
I was going to say that this would be pretty expensive, but given that this router lists at $300,000, the I2O route could be quite practical.
The I/O processor would forward packets based on a local flow cache. Packets not matching the flow cache would generate an event which would be handled by a module running on the linux OS.
Incoming HTTP requests could be forwarded to a linux module which would spoof the handshake to get URL information. It would then open a connection to the apppropriate web server, populate the flow tables with the appropriate entries and then hand the flow back to the IOPs. The IOPs would forward packets and rewrite headers as needed.
A reasonably priced switching fabric under the control of open source code which and have modules added to it could be very cool.
Existing Linux based routers are great for the low end, but they can only scale to a certain point because the CPU is involved in all packet forwarding.
In something like this, I/O porcessors, or some specialized ASICs do the scut work of moving data around making low level routing decisions. The OS and CPU only deal with managing the switching fabric. They generally only get involved when things change, such as when a packet comes in for a new destination, or when a route to a destination changes, etc.
Having this management layer available for manipuation could enable linux developers to bring out a new class or network applications.
For example, if this hardware is cheap enough and presents clear interfaces, it should be relatively easy to implement a high performance URL aware HTTP load balancer which could eclipse the performance of any sort of software/general-purpose hardware solution by multiple orders of magnitude.
1. Maybe they are talking about file system journaling. Maybe they are talking about extensive file (and object) access logging for auditing purposes. Either way, Linux doesn't have it.
2. The latest WinNT magazine has a good article compairing the NT and the Linux Kernel. It may be biased, and it may be making mountains out of molehills, but it does contain a reasoned and supported compairison of the two OSs and it would be good to have a linux person post an equally well supported rebuttal.
JWZs departure, and his explanation of it, give me pause. I have been wondering when the hell netscape would ship 5.0 and it was very disheartening to learn that they didn't expect to have a beta out until July. JWZ's revalations just confirm my fears.
(It seems to me that have a good, modern, browser is very important to the success of Linux and I hope that this will motivate people to chip in to the project.)
On the other hand, the news in this latest article isn't nearly as significant and I think the author should be given 50 lashes for trying to play up this new information.
JWZ was an early employee of the company. This other "key" developer sounds like a johny-come-lately, perhaps the sort of fair weather friend that JWZ seems to deplore.
JWZ, in addition to whatever he did in the early days, made (by his own assesment, at least) a real effort at making the open source Mozilla fly free. This other guy lead the development of a privacy invasion feature. The sort of tail-fin feature that netscape wasted their effort on when they should have been cleaning up the core of their browser and building in standards support.
As for the other layoffs, big woop. A sad symbol and no doubt stressful to those involved, but they don't sound like they are core to the developent of any products.
1. What does Carmack have to do with writing a Merced compiler? He is an excellent 3-D game programmer, but most of the hand coded parellel-executions tweaks in quake were written by x86 assembly guru Michael Abrash, not Carmack.
2. As other people have pointed out, he doesn't know what he is talking about.
3. If I were looking for analysis on the Merced delays, I would dig around on www.mdronline.com for an excellent article by one of their staff on the subject rather than listen to this bozo. Synopsis of the MDR online article. Intel is leading the design of the Merced and they are using their standard massively parallel design approach (lots of engineers). Problem is, this approach works fine for successive iterations of an existing, well understood ISA & implementation, it is not working well for a brand new, cutting edge ISA and chip. His predection is that the Merced will have a very short life before it is superceeded by the second generation chip in the family, one being designed methodically and inexorably by a small HP led design team.