SGI and HP may be the only vendors with shared memory machines this big. Certainly the IBM's are all distributed memory, except for their continuation of the Sequent line that they bought.
Still, for interprocessor communication and memory accesses, nobody can touch SGI's NUMA on massive shared memory machines, whether your code is threaded or MPI.
I think you'll find that the 400MHz R12k's (of which we have 8 in an Origin 2000) kick serious ass. The huge cache and fat pipelines beat 800MHz Pentiums by a factor of at least four in our cursory benchmarks on some of our non-parallel codes.
Uhhh.... Remind me once again what Napster's business model is? Why did VC's throw money at them in the first place? Did you honestly think it would be free forever?
Paying a fee may be distasteful to Napster users (can't say personally since I used it only once as a curiosity) but it is and always has been a business, and even RedHat knows that free software + free service means no revenue.
I can understand it when the l337 posters to Slashdot don't actually read the articles, but I'm beginning to get peeved with how many times Hemos et al. apparently do not read the stories. Had Mr. co-inventor of the mercury telescope read the article, he would see that,
"The concept of LMTs can be mapped back to the 18th century.... The concept was sound, but the technology available was too
crude to make it work.... Following these experiments, LMTs were a curiosity in the history
of physics until the early 1980s. "It was nearly a forgotten concept
that had a bad reputation because past attempts were
unsuccessful," said Borra."
It was, no doubt, due to the technical innovations provided by Hemos and Bill Hall that curiosity was rekindled in the early 1980's.
By the way, the equilibrium shape of liquid in a uniformly rotating container is parabolic. Not that it would matter if it were catenary or spherical (as most glass lenses are due to limitaitons of the grinding process) because these are all approximately paraboloidal in the paraxial approximation.
Why not simply invest in a G3/G4 and install linuxppc or netbsd? You'll get kick ass performance at a much cheaper per unit cost
Noooooo, the per unit cost is not cheaper. $6k for for a four-way parallel 500MHz G4 environment is way cheaper than four G4's, not to mention more useful because of the parallelism.
I'd be curious to know if anybody reading this believes there's much difference between these two exhausted
ideologies, or that the country will be substantially altered if one rather than the other prevails.
Here's the difference, jkatz: on Oprah (sorry for the lame-ish source), Bush stated unequivocally and repeatedly that he believes that government has no soul. Sounds like your thesis here. Given that government has no soul, what do you do next? I believe that taking the [non]existence of a humanity, spirit, or soul of government as an axiom, it does produce a difference in practical ideologies.
Why does the FBI hate open source? Two words: National Security. Imagine if we had the Navy barking out the armaments and capabilities...
Uhhhh.... "Open Source" does not mean "open everything." The companies that produce defense hardware benefit from one of the major selling points of Open Source, in a way. The "many eyes" theory for source code also applies to things like ISO 9001 certification of business practices, etc. Even for non-ISO 9001 companies, anyone working on government contracts is "open source" in the sense that their management, accounting, and manufacturing processes are open to regulatory scrutiny. Even companies not working on government contracts are open to SEC scrutiny, and therefore scrutiny by the public investor as well.
This does not mean that
all information traveling through corporate and/or government channels must be freely available. There are perfectly defensible reasons for keeping secrets. Why do you think Open Source advocates are usually also strong cryptography advocates?
Besides, how do you justify encrypting the "1337 DDoS w4r3z" and goat pr0n you have on your ostensibly "Open" system?
I feel that it is necessary to point out that this is not natural selection. Rather it is selection based on a well-defined fitness function, that is, "the objective was to travel the farthest on a flat surface."
It is a cool thing, and amazing in many ways, but it is hype to overextend the analogy to "natural selection," in which a single fitness criteria (survival until breeding) nominally leads to development of metabolism, perception, locomotion, and self-awareness.
Way to go with the experiment, but watch it with the grand claims.
Can you imagine rooms full of cubicles with everyone reciting, "file menu save as see colon backslash my documents backslash annual report dot doc enter"
I don't even work in cubicles, but I know I would keep my office door closed a lot more often if everyone in the hall was chanting nonsense to their computers all day.
Will people please keep in mind that the size of fonts on screen is in no way proportional to the size of the individual dots on the screen.
Smaller dots means that an individual character of a certain size will be drawn using more pixels, leading to a sharper and more well defined
representation of the character.
OK, you're right. But a lot of "text" on the web these days is actually bitmap graphics. This can be darn hard to read on a 1400x1050 15' laptop screen (like the one I'm using now). If you ask me, web browsers (or HTML rendering engines) need an option to resize graphics, whether in even integer amounts or continuously scaling.
I expect to see this in internet explorer first and later copied by gecko.
I have come to play a lttle game with Slashdot article titles, where I read the title and decide if I think that Katz posted the story, without reading the author's name. I had a 100% success rate until this article.
Hemos, are you trying to capitalize on Katz' hit rate by using such desperately literate article titles?
Of course, the lack of a colon or a "Part IV" in the title should have let me on to that fact that this was not Katz, but we all can't be perfect....
Don't choose based on purchase price alone. Keep in mind that you WILL need service for these systems, unlike most desktops. Go with a company that values you as a customer enought to provide you with real service, even if your order is small by today's dotcom startup standards.
We recently bought a 36 processor system from VA, and we get treated like they're doing us a favor by allowing such a small order.
We haven't bought a rackmount system from SGI, but we have bought Origins from them in the past, and their level of service is excellent. They even use the same mobos as VA, IIRC.
No, I do not work for VA, or SGI, or any hardware manufacturer/reseller/blah blah blah.
...that I've deliberately set my filter to -1, Highest Scores First and gone to the bottom of the page to read the trolls instead of the other posts. What does that tell you about this kind of "Story?"
Admittedly it's not hard to tell the time on an analog watch, but those few milliseconds more it takes, multiplied by the thousands
of times you look at your watch, is a significant productivity hit.
Absolute nonsense. When I look at an analog clock, I know what time it is practially instantly. For me, there is a "significant productivity hit" in reading numbers off of a digital clock, and then translating that to a picture of hour and minute hands in my head. My internal representation (Private data members?) of time is analog.
And, out of curiosity, why do you think the FAA required clocks in airplane cockpits to be analog until just a couple of years ago? You can read an analog clock out of the corner of your eye.
When I can purchase either a hybrid- or fuel cell-powered car and kick V8 ass with the angry whirring of a high-performance electric motor, I will plunk my money down. But not until then. Fuel economy is a plus, but it's not worth trading off the visceral experience of sheer horsepower.
I use extensive redefinitions of key and mouse bindings on my workstation. I work better this way. I have often wished that when I sat down at someone else's terminal, I could temporarily overlay my xmodmap and sawfish (the erstwhile sawmill) key and mouse bindings on their machine.
What I would like to have is a user-defined interface with full customization, riding on top of the underlying data objects to be displayed and manipulated. This in itself is no different than what we have now in any decent wm and skins, but, then make it trivially portable, like with a key that I can carry around and pop it into the front of someone else's terminal. Then I've got MY GUI on their system state.
You won't need to worry about comforatble paradigms then. If you or J. Random User develops the next killer method of menuing, you can use it yourself, wherever you please. If you like someone else's you can borrow from it.
Slashdot Mirror
I think you'll find that the 400MHz R12k's (of which we have 8 in an Origin 2000) kick serious ass. The huge cache and fat pipelines beat 800MHz Pentiums by a factor of at least four in our cursory benchmarks on some of our non-parallel codes.
Bingo Foo
---
You're one of the real Bruce Perens.
Yeah, and that implicit cast from the integer Bruce Perens makes me kind of uncomfortable, too.
real BrucePerens = 3872;
Bingo Foo
---
Paying a fee may be distasteful to Napster users (can't say personally since I used it only once as a curiosity) but it is and always has been a business, and even RedHat knows that free software + free service means no revenue.
Bingo Foo
---
---
It was, no doubt, due to the technical innovations provided by Hemos and Bill Hall that curiosity was rekindled in the early 1980's.
By the way, the equilibrium shape of liquid in a uniformly rotating container is parabolic. Not that it would matter if it were catenary or spherical (as most glass lenses are due to limitaitons of the grinding process) because these are all approximately paraboloidal in the paraxial approximation.
Bingo Foo
---
Noooooo, the per unit cost is not cheaper. $6k for for a four-way parallel 500MHz G4 environment is way cheaper than four G4's, not to mention more useful because of the parallelism.
Bingo Foo
---
Nooooo, they do not sound like the PowerPC cards for Amiga. Apparently, you need to cross-compile and specially execute code on these.
Bingo Foo
---
Here's the difference, jkatz: on Oprah (sorry for the lame-ish source), Bush stated unequivocally and repeatedly that he believes that government has no soul. Sounds like your thesis here. Given that government has no soul, what do you do next? I believe that taking the [non]existence of a humanity, spirit, or soul of government as an axiom, it does produce a difference in practical ideologies.
Bingo Foo
---
Uhhhh.... "Open Source" does not mean "open everything." The companies that produce defense hardware benefit from one of the major selling points of Open Source, in a way. The "many eyes" theory for source code also applies to things like ISO 9001 certification of business practices, etc. Even for non-ISO 9001 companies, anyone working on government contracts is "open source" in the sense that their management, accounting, and manufacturing processes are open to regulatory scrutiny. Even companies not working on government contracts are open to SEC scrutiny, and therefore scrutiny by the public investor as well.
This does not mean that all information traveling through corporate and/or government channels must be freely available. There are perfectly defensible reasons for keeping secrets. Why do you think Open Source advocates are usually also strong cryptography advocates?
Besides, how do you justify encrypting the "1337 DDoS w4r3z" and goat pr0n you have on your ostensibly "Open" system?
Bingo Foo
---
It is a cool thing, and amazing in many ways, but it is hype to overextend the analogy to "natural selection," in which a single fitness criteria (survival until breeding) nominally leads to development of metabolism, perception, locomotion, and self-awareness.
Way to go with the experiment, but watch it with the grand claims.
Bingo Foo
---
I don't even work in cubicles, but I know I would keep my office door closed a lot more often if everyone in the hall was chanting nonsense to their computers all day.
Bingo Foo
---
Smaller dots means that an individual character of a certain size will be drawn using more pixels, leading to a sharper and more well defined representation of the character.
OK, you're right. But a lot of "text" on the web these days is actually bitmap graphics. This can be darn hard to read on a 1400x1050 15' laptop screen (like the one I'm using now). If you ask me, web browsers (or HTML rendering engines) need an option to resize graphics, whether in even integer amounts or continuously scaling.
I expect to see this in internet explorer first and later copied by gecko.
Bingo Foo
---
How about a photo-montage-blend of RMS and ESR, with an Alan Cox patch?
Bingo Foo
---
Hemos, are you trying to capitalize on Katz' hit rate by using such desperately literate article titles?
Of course, the lack of a colon or a "Part IV" in the title should have let me on to that fact that this was not Katz, but we all can't be perfect....
Bingo Foo
---
We recently bought a 36 processor system from VA, and we get treated like they're doing us a favor by allowing such a small order.
We haven't bought a rackmount system from SGI, but we have bought Origins from them in the past, and their level of service is excellent. They even use the same mobos as VA, IIRC.
No, I do not work for VA, or SGI, or any hardware manufacturer/reseller/blah blah blah.
Bingo Foo
---
Bingo Foo
---
Bingo Foo
---
Absolute nonsense. When I look at an analog clock, I know what time it is practially instantly. For me, there is a "significant productivity hit" in reading numbers off of a digital clock, and then translating that to a picture of hour and minute hands in my head. My internal representation (Private data members?) of time is analog.
And, out of curiosity, why do you think the FAA required clocks in airplane cockpits to be analog until just a couple of years ago? You can read an analog clock out of the corner of your eye.
Bingo Foo
---
Bingo Foo
---
Sorry, but I know for a fact that I was more productive as a grad student with no family than I am now with a wife and kids.
The thing is, I'm happier now.
Bingo Foo
---
Try The National Electric Drag Racing Association.
Bingo Foo
---
(PS- Shut up. I know what you're thinking. I'm a physicist.)
Bingo Foo
---
What I would like to have is a user-defined interface with full customization, riding on top of the underlying data objects to be displayed and manipulated. This in itself is no different than what we have now in any decent wm and skins, but, then make it trivially portable, like with a key that I can carry around and pop it into the front of someone else's terminal. Then I've got MY GUI on their system state.
You won't need to worry about comforatble paradigms then. If you or J. Random User develops the next killer method of menuing, you can use it yourself, wherever you please. If you like someone else's you can borrow from it.
---
There now, you have just increased the signal to noise ratio of your life by 10^6.
Bingo Foo
---
Bingo Foo
---