Aside from the rather obvious gold mine for Spammers that this would provide (thanks to the knuckleheads in the Treasury Department), this is an example of openness in government which could be good except that the problem is that they are breaking a promise. Most disturbing is this little item "we will post comments received on that notice on our Web site in full, including any street addresses, telephone numbers, or e-mail addresses contained in the comments." It seems that nobody is allowed privacy in this White House administration except GWB and friends.
is there evidence that apple won't honor requests from companies not wanting publicity? i doubt that apple is giong to turn down cash just because they can't turn a large order into a marketing opportunity
Apple will not turn down any requests that it can fill. That would be silly. And yes there is plenty of evidence that Apple will fill contracts from companies/organizations that do not want publicity going back to purchases by Apple computers (and NeXT systems) by a number of government agencies like the CIA and FBI. (I even saw a couple of old TEMPEST sheilded Macs).
My guess is that a number of folks are planning on building them. Especially now that the 1U G5 Xserve is out. Here is the issue though: VTech wanted to publicize this as a means to attract attention to their programs and Apple wanted to publicize this for obvious reasons. However, if I were a company (or a private or government institution), I may not want to advertise the fact that I am building one of these superclusters. Think about it. This could be a serious stealth weapon (so to speak) for a number of industries that have historically spent huge amounts of money on supercomputing infrastructures.
Virginia Tech put together a spectacular number 3 ranked supercomputer for a (comparative) pittance in a (comparative) heartbeat. They did it with Apple's latest/greatest. Is it surprising that Apple wants this story told? I'm just shocked that they aren't filling the airwaves with the story (at the very least on every news program that PHBs watch).
This is especially true given that an equivalent setup could now be put in place in a fraction of the space required by Virginia Tech's setup. The 1U Xserves are decidedly the way to go here. In addition, with Xgrid (and before that, Pooch) it is now possible to have clusters configured from existing machines on peoples desktops that are recruited into the supercomputer cluster.
What ever happened to the notion of treating programmers like respected professionals instead of so-called "resources?"
Programmers in many cases have become commodities. The dumbing down of code along with a complete lack of people who take pride in their code along with date driven rather than product driven applications has taken its toll.
Except for true emergencies, planning for teams to regularly work weekends is simply asking for high employee burnout and high turnover rates.
Agreed. Here is the other deal that many companies practicing this sort of business are missing here: Employee turnover is damned expensive. You lose out on employee knowledge of the intrinsic workings of the system and develop a sort of corporate Alzheimers over time if turnover remains high. This also saps corporate earnings and makes companies less competitive.
It's more like if you did not practice, you were a punk poser. Like one of those guys that dressed up like Johnny Rotten, wore a Union Jack on your jacket and screamed "the Sex Pistols rock man!!!" Ha!
Punk is a mindset or frame of mind as well as a form of music and anything you do worth while requires mastery. Do you think people who made a difference in music like the Talking Heads, TSOL, Black Flag, Husker Du, The Ramones, The Velvet Underground, The New York Dolls and the Dead Kennedys did not practice? Hell, even Iggy Pop and the Stooges practiced. This allowed each band to work through their music and develop their own sound that expressed what they wanted and each contribute a body of work that has influenced music forever. Punk is about doing it yourself, doing things your own way, making a difference and yes.....being damn good at what you do.
the technology behind GarageBand (and its $99 add-on) is NOT cheap
Decidedly not cheap. Probably a project development budget (including purchase of existing code) in the range of $400k-1.5 million. But, I know so many folks who will want to purchase Macs for this program alone, they should probably recoup their investment pretty quick. If I had this app back when I was 13.......my life very well might be very different. Finding folks interested in punk rock in Salt Lake City in 1983 was pretty tough. There was a small crowd and some great shows, but GarageBand could very well have made the difference in communicating to other band mates exactly what I wanted making practice much more efficient.
A pump and dump requires a dump. There certainly has not been one in this case.
This most certainly HAS been the case. Examine SEC filings on Yahoo to see which principals of the company have been selling off significant portions of the stock and you will see what I mean.
Will you Mac users please stop calling PCs "Wintels"?! It sounds dumb. Especially on/. since a lot of people don't run Windows here.
I called them Wintels because for us, that is exactly what they were. Intel based systems running Windows from Microsoft. They were not AMD based machines (though I like AMD hardware), and they were not running any OS other than Microsoft Windows. I did have a Linux box at one time, but I discovered that OS X did everything the Linux box did, only with more convenience, but the Red Hat distro it had on it was quite nice for Linux. At any rate, Wintel is a very useful short descriptive, and I will continue to use it. No offense.
Overall, Microsoft has made a step in the right direction with this service pack. The increased focus on security will be good not only for the average user who does not spend much time thinking about security her system, but also for 'power users' and those who work supporting end users."
We still have a couple of W2k and XP boxes that we'll probably keep, but the damage over the past couple of years with poor security has been done. We have been migrating many of our Wintel systems to OS X for a whole variety of reasons. I really hope that this service pack works as advertised as I still own some Microsoft stock, but I am afraid that Microsoft needs to completely re-engineer the OS like they are doing with Longhorn to resolve the security problems with Windows. Unfortunately that will be in what....2006?
Re:How could you not make jokes?
on
Lonely Planets
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
You're in the planet business, which has a sample size of under a dozen. And most of those remain mysteries. It would be foolish to believe we know anything. Most conclusions have to be educated guesses. This guy seems to have a proper sense of a field that is still mostly mystery.
Ahhh, but the physics of gravity and the math behind formation of bodies in space is well worked out. Biological science (at least here on earth) is also an area of intense study that should provide some insight into how biological mechanisms such as biosynthetic reactions might occur. Chemistry and geological science are also well studied fields here on earth and on other planets that can provide clues as to how processes happen on other worldly bodies.
This is the role of science you know. Make observations, formulate hypothesis and test them. If we took the point of view that mysteries are mysteries and there is no point in examining them, we would still be in the dark ages.
W98. I was so infuriated with W98 performance, I upgraded to W2k as soon as it became available, and upgraded our software and hardware to XP when those systems became available. I have since moved about 80% of our lab from Wintel to OS X though and I am not looking back.
The original '98 release might not have been spectacular, but most people I know found that '98 "Second Edition" was about as good as Windows ever got, before changing to the NT-based design found in 2000 and XP.
I upgraded from W95 to W98 and had an awful time with W98. It was much slower and very unstable compared with W95. (crashed twice as often as W95 on my machines at least) My next Wintel systems were W2k boxes and I missed the whole WME debaucle.
Quite extensively in fact with much of my time in sleep medicine (due to the software's availability on that platform).
Methinks you don't remember the days of Win3.11 and DLL hell, either.
My time with Win 3.11 was mercifully short. I abandoned it as soon as my new Macintosh (at the time) came in.
2000 (when I used it) was buggy and bloated.
I must admit that my W2k box was later on in the OS cycle and I found it to be much more stable than W98. Of course there were still problems with it (no OS is perfect), but W9x OS's crashed on me more than twice a day. W2k would go a week or more before I had to reboot.
That means even if 98 is working well for your needs
Wait......this...is a joke....right? *snicker*, *guffaw!*.
Win98 was the most gawdawful OS I think I've ever used. W95 was more stable, of course W2k was much better and XP is even better still. But they still don't even compare to OS X in terms of stability, usability, security and plug and play compatibility.
The spyware problem is not a Windows security problem so much as an Internet Explorer security problem. While the insecurity of the operating system is a problem that aids malware in general, having a more secure browser would help this.
The point you make is valid, but applications should not have the degree of uncontrolled access to the OS as they currently do in Windows.
The improvements to Internet Explorer due to appear in Service Pack 2 should help stop the spread of spyware somewhat.
However, this is the approach that will continue getting Microsoft into trouble. The current Windows is built on faulty security. They are on a treadmill of security and bug fixes that will always leave them behind the curve. What it will take to fix the problem is what Microsoft is doing with Longhorn (due tenatively in 2006) by starting at the ground up and re-engineering Windows to be a more secure OS.
So, rather than constantly having to update the security by downloading patch after patch that may or may not cause secondary or tertiary problems with other code (which may or may not be immediately apparent), I would much rather have an OS that I can depend upon for security and that will not require me to spend lots of money and time on administration. My computer should be a tool with which to accomplish work easily and efficiently without getting in my way. Right now that means my computer systems are running OS X. When the next version of Windows comes along (Longhorn), I will reconsider my options.
Yes they would be. No operating system security can stop a user from being an admin and installing unintentionally (but intentionally from the perspective of the OS) malware.
No they would not be (and they are not). Operating systems should not allow root access or even administrator access for certain functions (like installing software) without explicitly notifying the user of said installation and requiring an administrative password or phrase.
I think if Windows had better security, it would lose much of its user-friendliness, which is its primary appeal. MS takes a lot of heat over security, but I think they are just delivering what the market wants. If they made Outlook "secure", there would be an immediate uproar by 99.9% of users over the loss of functionality.
You should try OS X and see what you have been missing. You get security with true plug and play compatibility and ease of use.
The new spam law does nothing about the invisible programs that invade our computers as we move from one Web site to the next. These insidious programs -- variously known as adware, spyware and snoopware -- can cause computers to call up aggressive ads or can actually track a user's movements through the Internet for use by marketers later on. The most sinister programs can record everything the user does, whether offline or surfing the Net.
And what the article does not discuss at any length is that we have Microsoft security (or lack thereof) to blame for most of the spyware problems. If Windows had better security, then most of these problems would not be there to the same degree as they currently are.
i'm nitpicking here, and i know what you meant, but you just described dma, not independent busses. for newbies, it's the same difference as between a ethernet hub and a switch.
So, I should have used more specific terminology describing point to point architectures that do not share a common bus, which is decidedly not dma.
The G5 is great technology that takes many aspects of architecture design ideas from other systems such as the SGI Octane. For instance, in the G5 (and the Octane) all of the busses are completely independent from one another. So, this means you can completely saturate say, your hard drive bus while keeping your CPU to memory bus completely untouched. This is hugely important to scientific computing (and other areas such as video editing) making the G5 system a much more cost effective solution that the SGI Octane. My Octanes were about $40-50k each while the dual G5s cost me around $5K each with 4GB of RAM and half a terrabyte of storage. Not too shabby eh?
I guess I am wondering if there are there any users seriously pushing the limits of commodity hardware by overclocking to extremes?
I should have said "I guess I am wondering if there are there any users doing serious work on commodity hardware that has been overclocked to extremes?"
Slashdot Mirror
Aside from the rather obvious gold mine for Spammers that this would provide (thanks to the knuckleheads in the Treasury Department), this is an example of openness in government which could be good except that the problem is that they are breaking a promise. Most disturbing is this little item "we will post comments received on that notice on our Web site in full, including any street addresses, telephone numbers, or e-mail addresses contained in the comments." It seems that nobody is allowed privacy in this White House administration except GWB and friends.
is there evidence that apple won't honor requests from companies not wanting publicity? i doubt that apple is giong to turn down cash just because they can't turn a large order into a marketing opportunity
Apple will not turn down any requests that it can fill. That would be silly. And yes there is plenty of evidence that Apple will fill contracts from companies/organizations that do not want publicity going back to purchases by Apple computers (and NeXT systems) by a number of government agencies like the CIA and FBI. (I even saw a couple of old TEMPEST sheilded Macs).
My guess is that a number of folks are planning on building them. Especially now that the 1U G5 Xserve is out. Here is the issue though: VTech wanted to publicize this as a means to attract attention to their programs and Apple wanted to publicize this for obvious reasons. However, if I were a company (or a private or government institution), I may not want to advertise the fact that I am building one of these superclusters. Think about it. This could be a serious stealth weapon (so to speak) for a number of industries that have historically spent huge amounts of money on supercomputing infrastructures.
Virginia Tech put together a spectacular number 3 ranked supercomputer for a (comparative) pittance in a (comparative) heartbeat. They did it with Apple's latest/greatest. Is it surprising that Apple wants this story told? I'm just shocked that they aren't filling the airwaves with the story (at the very least on every news program that PHBs watch).
This is especially true given that an equivalent setup could now be put in place in a fraction of the space required by Virginia Tech's setup. The 1U Xserves are decidedly the way to go here. In addition, with Xgrid (and before that, Pooch) it is now possible to have clusters configured from existing machines on peoples desktops that are recruited into the supercomputer cluster.
What ever happened to the notion of treating programmers like respected professionals instead of so-called "resources?"
Programmers in many cases have become commodities. The dumbing down of code along with a complete lack of people who take pride in their code along with date driven rather than product driven applications has taken its toll.
Except for true emergencies, planning for teams to regularly work weekends is simply asking for high employee burnout and high turnover rates.
Agreed. Here is the other deal that many companies practicing this sort of business are missing here: Employee turnover is damned expensive. You lose out on employee knowledge of the intrinsic workings of the system and develop a sort of corporate Alzheimers over time if turnover remains high. This also saps corporate earnings and makes companies less competitive.
If you practiced, you weren't punk.
It's more like if you did not practice, you were a punk poser. Like one of those guys that dressed up like Johnny Rotten, wore a Union Jack on your jacket and screamed "the Sex Pistols rock man!!!" Ha!
Punk is a mindset or frame of mind as well as a form of music and anything you do worth while requires mastery. Do you think people who made a difference in music like the Talking Heads, TSOL, Black Flag, Husker Du, The Ramones, The Velvet Underground, The New York Dolls and the Dead Kennedys did not practice? Hell, even Iggy Pop and the Stooges practiced. This allowed each band to work through their music and develop their own sound that expressed what they wanted and each contribute a body of work that has influenced music forever. Punk is about doing it yourself, doing things your own way, making a difference and yes.....being damn good at what you do.
You should check out Pooch from Dean Dauger. He has adopted OS X for obvious reasons but older versions of Pooch ran on MacOS 9.
Pooch was the original easy to use and implement solution for clustering Macs used originally at UCLA for physics modeling.
the technology behind GarageBand (and its $99 add-on) is NOT cheap
Decidedly not cheap. Probably a project development budget (including purchase of existing code) in the range of $400k-1.5 million. But, I know so many folks who will want to purchase Macs for this program alone, they should probably recoup their investment pretty quick. If I had this app back when I was 13.......my life very well might be very different. Finding folks interested in punk rock in Salt Lake City in 1983 was pretty tough. There was a small crowd and some great shows, but GarageBand could very well have made the difference in communicating to other band mates exactly what I wanted making practice much more efficient.
A pump and dump requires a dump. There certainly has not been one in this case.
This most certainly HAS been the case. Examine SEC filings on Yahoo to see which principals of the company have been selling off significant portions of the stock and you will see what I mean.
Will you Mac users please stop calling PCs "Wintels"?! It sounds dumb. Especially on /. since a lot of people don't run Windows here.
I called them Wintels because for us, that is exactly what they were. Intel based systems running Windows from Microsoft. They were not AMD based machines (though I like AMD hardware), and they were not running any OS other than Microsoft Windows. I did have a Linux box at one time, but I discovered that OS X did everything the Linux box did, only with more convenience, but the Red Hat distro it had on it was quite nice for Linux. At any rate, Wintel is a very useful short descriptive, and I will continue to use it. No offense.
Overall, Microsoft has made a step in the right direction with this service pack. The increased focus on security will be good not only for the average user who does not spend much time thinking about security her system, but also for 'power users' and those who work supporting end users."
We still have a couple of W2k and XP boxes that we'll probably keep, but the damage over the past couple of years with poor security has been done. We have been migrating many of our Wintel systems to OS X for a whole variety of reasons. I really hope that this service pack works as advertised as I still own some Microsoft stock, but I am afraid that Microsoft needs to completely re-engineer the OS like they are doing with Longhorn to resolve the security problems with Windows. Unfortunately that will be in what....2006?
You're in the planet business, which has a sample size of under a dozen. And most of those remain mysteries. It would be foolish to believe we know anything. Most conclusions have to be educated guesses. This guy seems to have a proper sense of a field that is still mostly mystery.
Ahhh, but the physics of gravity and the math behind formation of bodies in space is well worked out. Biological science (at least here on earth) is also an area of intense study that should provide some insight into how biological mechanisms such as biosynthetic reactions might occur. Chemistry and geological science are also well studied fields here on earth and on other planets that can provide clues as to how processes happen on other worldly bodies.
This is the role of science you know. Make observations, formulate hypothesis and test them. If we took the point of view that mysteries are mysteries and there is no point in examining them, we would still be in the dark ages.
which did you use, out of curiousity?
W98. I was so infuriated with W98 performance, I upgraded to W2k as soon as it became available, and upgraded our software and hardware to XP when those systems became available. I have since moved about 80% of our lab from Wintel to OS X though and I am not looking back.
The original '98 release might not have been spectacular, but most people I know found that '98 "Second Edition" was about as good as Windows ever got, before changing to the NT-based design found in 2000 and XP.
I upgraded from W95 to W98 and had an awful time with W98. It was much slower and very unstable compared with W95. (crashed twice as often as W95 on my machines at least) My next Wintel systems were W2k boxes and I missed the whole WME debaucle.
Did you actually use Win95 out of the box?
Quite extensively in fact with much of my time in sleep medicine (due to the software's availability on that platform).
Methinks you don't remember the days of Win3.11 and DLL hell, either.
My time with Win 3.11 was mercifully short. I abandoned it as soon as my new Macintosh (at the time) came in.
2000 (when I used it) was buggy and bloated.
I must admit that my W2k box was later on in the OS cycle and I found it to be much more stable than W98. Of course there were still problems with it (no OS is perfect), but W9x OS's crashed on me more than twice a day. W2k would go a week or more before I had to reboot.
That means even if 98 is working well for your needs
Wait......this...is a joke....right? *snicker*, *guffaw!*.
Win98 was the most gawdawful OS I think I've ever used. W95 was more stable, of course W2k was much better and
XP is even better still. But they still don't even compare to OS X in terms of stability, usability, security and plug and play compatibility.
The spyware problem is not a Windows security problem so much as an Internet Explorer security problem. While the insecurity of the operating system is a problem that aids malware in general, having a more secure browser would help this.
The point you make is valid, but applications should not have the degree of uncontrolled access to the OS as they currently do in Windows.
The improvements to Internet Explorer due to appear in Service Pack 2 should help stop the spread of spyware somewhat.
However, this is the approach that will continue getting Microsoft into trouble. The current Windows is built on faulty security. They are on a treadmill of security and bug fixes that will always leave them behind the curve. What it will take to fix the problem is what Microsoft is doing with Longhorn (due tenatively in 2006) by starting at the ground up and re-engineering Windows to be a more secure OS.
So, rather than constantly having to update the security by downloading patch after patch that may or may not cause secondary or tertiary problems with other code (which may or may not be immediately apparent), I would much rather have an OS that I can depend upon for security and that will not require me to spend lots of money and time on administration. My computer should be a tool with which to accomplish work easily and efficiently without getting in my way. Right now that means my computer systems are running OS X. When the next version of Windows comes along (Longhorn), I will reconsider my options.
Yes they would be. No operating system security can stop a user from being an admin and installing unintentionally (but intentionally from the perspective of the OS) malware.
No they would not be (and they are not). Operating systems should not allow root access or even administrator access for certain functions (like installing software) without explicitly notifying the user of said installation and requiring an administrative password or phrase.
I think if Windows had better security, it would lose much of its user-friendliness, which is its primary appeal. MS takes a lot of heat over security, but I think they are just delivering what the market wants. If they made Outlook "secure", there would be an immediate uproar by 99.9% of users over the loss of functionality.
You should try OS X and see what you have been missing. You get security with true plug and play compatibility and ease of use.
The new spam law does nothing about the invisible programs that invade our computers as we move from one Web site to the next. These insidious programs -- variously known as adware, spyware and snoopware -- can cause computers to call up aggressive ads or can actually track a user's movements through the Internet for use by marketers later on. The most sinister programs can record everything the user does, whether offline or surfing the Net.
And what the article does not discuss at any length is that we have Microsoft security (or lack thereof) to blame for most of the spyware problems. If Windows had better security, then most of these problems would not be there to the same degree as they currently are.
i'm nitpicking here, and i know what you meant, but you just described dma, not independent busses. for newbies, it's the same difference as between a ethernet hub and a switch.
So, I should have used more specific terminology describing point to point architectures that do not share a common bus, which is decidedly not dma.
The G5 is great technology that takes many aspects of architecture design ideas from other systems such as the SGI Octane. For instance, in the G5 (and the Octane) all of the busses are completely independent from one another. So, this means you can completely saturate say, your hard drive bus while keeping your CPU to memory bus completely untouched. This is hugely important to scientific computing (and other areas such as video editing) making the G5 system a much more cost effective solution that the SGI Octane. My Octanes were about $40-50k each while the dual G5s cost me around $5K each with 4GB of RAM and half a terrabyte of storage. Not too shabby eh?
Hey, I like some of their nomenclature for the parts. They have got a "Cerebellum board", which I presume controls aspects of stability or movement?
So, I guess the obvious question is: Where can I buy one? Followed up by: Are you going to Open source it?
I guess I am wondering if there are there any users seriously pushing the limits of commodity hardware by overclocking to extremes?
I should have said "I guess I am wondering if there are there any users doing serious work on commodity hardware that has been overclocked to extremes?"