Wonderful: three pointers to Apple's web site, pointing to pages with slick corporate "interviews". Do you actually work for Apple or are you just insanely zealous?
There are an awful lot of scientists using Macs for their research and work. I use them almost exclusively now after retiring my SGI's in favor of the OS X boxes and judging from the meetings I attend, I would say Macs have anywhere from 10-40% penetrance in science depending upon the subfield. For instance the last vision meeting I attended (ARVO, the big one for the vision research community), there were Powerbooks and iBooks everywhere. Probably a good 33% of the laptops I saw.
multibanked ram is nothing new. it's been around since the 486 days for consumers (iirc), and much earlier in big machines, i'm sure. afaik, most mobosthese days are at least 128bits wide.
Yep, my old Macintosh 9600 had a 128-bit wide memory bus if you used identical ram in each of the 12!! RAM slots.
Does anyone know who else was considered for this contract? I'd love to see the arguments for the different platforms!
Well, considering that the G5 has many of the architectural features of those $40k SGI Octanes that I purchased a few years ago, I would consider that pretty impressive. In short, Apple designed the G5 machines with completely independent busses, so that saturating say an I/O bus will not have any effect on the throughput of say memory to CPU. They are pretty impressive and I can see why many folks who are currently using the Octanes etc... would want new G5's.
So, you have a UNIX box with true plug and play, 64-bit, nice GUI, full CLI access, Firewire, USB, REALLY nice archetecture etc...etc...etc... All that makes for a pretty convincing argument for clusters moving to the G5's
I wonder what this will do for companies such as Apple who are building in MS office document readability/writeability into their applications/operating systems? Right now I can read and write.ppt files in Keynote, and.doc files with, ahem other bits of software on my OS X boxes. So, is this simply an attempt at providing a more secure environment or is Microsoft doing an end run around other folks to make it a federal crime in the name of security to compete with them?
As for the article, it's short, lightweight filler.
This is Slashdot after all. If you look at the statistics and logs after a Slashdotting, (I've had two such instances on my servers) the vast majority of people only look at the most superficial information and rarely take time (interpreted from logs) to actually read the content. Furthermore, if there is linked material, almost nobody ever goes any deeper than the initial layer. It's very sad.
I agree with you, but I was pleasantly surprised to find that a lot of users actually cancel Windows auto updates when they become available because they think they're viruses attacking their computer...
No, actually many users disable auto update because Microsoft has a history of releasing updates that break other functionality. When your business or work relies on computer uptime, having this broken functionality happen is unacceptable. Therefore many folks 1) test the updates on non-essential systems which may take time given the extent or number of systems affected and 2) wait for bugs to come out or problems that others report because of the updates. The other issue is that many folks that use computers use them to get work accomplished and not to "be using computers". Their needs may be such that spending lots of time managing the computers is time not spent accomplishing their goals and yet they are not big enough operations to hire dedicated IT folks.
I still have some needs that are being met by Microsoft products and most likely will have for years, but I have been moving as many essential tasks as possible onto other operating systems (OS X) because of the security issues, reliability issues, management issues and others.
iSCSI bascially takes native SCSI commands, wraps it up (encapsulates it), and sends it over the wire. In other words, you could use a SCSI scanner over a network without having to resort to PC Anywhere or something.
I believe the same concept is possible with Firewire. In fact, the Firewire protocol allows for use completely independently of any computer or CPU.
Meh, the article already appears to be slashdotted, but from a first read I have to wonder if I am missing something here with iSCSI. Is not this simply a different protocol that Firewire already takes care of, especially with faster iterations? Firewire is already a subset of SCSI, but hot plug and play and you can also TCP/IP over Firewire.
This is why I have always enjoyed going to the local punk and bluegrass concerts. Much of the scene is about playing the music in the moment. Granted this is not an excuse for mastery of your art, rather it is about being honest and supporting your local musicians.
However, unlike the RIAA, DeBeers never promised that the prices of their diamonds would come down when market forces and economies of scale entered. Remember when CD's first became available? I can remember saving my change so I could afford some of the first CD's that came onto the market at what.....$15-20? Did the price on those ever come down? No.
Why can't people just take a movie for what it is? These aren't documentaries, you know.
No, but the reality is that often sci-fi feeds from science fact (albeit with pushed boundaries) when for instance atomic power became reality, movies about atomic energy and its effects on biological tissues became all the rage. Now it is genetics that has inspired movies and there are those directors that want to portray their subject matter as real or potentially believeable to allow for suspension of disbelief, thus making the movie more fun or the statement the director is trying to make more powerful.
I have been consulted a bit from science topics from sleep and sleep disorders to retinal vision and artificial means to rescue vision for a few writers and directors, and routinely the authors want as much as possible to stick close to reality even if it is sci-fi.
That's my plan. Just pull the plug on the Wintel stuff, toss em in the trash and replace them with Macs running OS X.:-)
I was being a little glib there, but it should be pointed out that the labor costs associated with managing all of this crap are pretty serious. Overtime charges, benefits and basic salary for an $74k employee for the last three days are running what? At least $1000k per employee. With eight IT dudes running around fixing all of the Wintel systems that's eight grand worth of new Macs that will have much better uptime and lower costs just from the last three days alone. Now, consider how many of these little virus and worm issues there have been in the past year.
Hrmmmm. From your sig "I'm gonna drink 'till I reboot! - Bender, Futurama" I would also have to add that given the media consolidation happening with large corporations owning music, movie, television, newspaper and internet companies, you might have to swear off your Futurama as well.
spam is becoming a problem like pollution.... we can not get rid of it, so we will just have to live with it
No, most spam is distributed by a few known individuals. Make laws against distributing spam with harsh penalties (especially for porn spam that kids can be exposed to) and the problem will go away. After all, after the do not call registry went into effect, we have had almost zero telephone calls in the evening from people looking to sell us stuff.
Bottom line, idiot, is that humankind has absolutely no effect on the ocean compared to what the earth itself and the sun dish out.
Oh, boy.....here we go.
Imagine the sun flared. Just a little one. What could happen to the earth?
The sun flares all the time. Our atmosphere and the ozone layer protect us.
Why, the entire atmosphere could be blown away, and the oceans could dry up. The deserts would turn to glass. All from a small solar flare.
*Sigh.......* No. This is not correct. See above comment for clarification.
What about a volcano? How many megatons of carbon dioxide and other noxious chemicals does that dump into the atmosphere, not to mention the pollution in the oceans?
CO2 release into the oceans is common and the CO2 flux is truly massive. However, what we need to worry about are some of the non-naturally occurring chemicals such as estrogens and chemicals found in fertilizers and run off from mining such as cyanides. We also have to worry about what is happening from all of the nuclear reactors that the former Soviet union has dumped into the sea among other things.
The algae blooms are there because the sun put them there. We had nothing to do with it.
Wrong. Human intervention most likely primarily from excess nitrogens are at the root of many of these. Other causes are world wide shipping, which carries algae to new homes in water contained in ballast tanks, global warming, and pollution draining into the oceans from coastal development and farmland, which provides again nitrogenous compounds essential for algae metabolism.
You are an idiot. spouting out half-truths and whining about it.
There is no call for that sort of treatment. Lighten up, eh?
Go crack a real science book, not the pseudo-crap they are passing off in high school today.
Your credentials are what?
Go take a look at how much water there is in the ocean, and try and figure out how much pollution we could actually dump in there if we really tried. You'll see that we would have barely any effect at all.
Many, many studies are being performed on just this and the results are sobering.
And how do you pillage the ocean? The natural resources in the ocean are going to die anyway. Rather than allowing the fish to float to the bottom of the ocean and rot and pollute the ocean, we are harvesting the excess every year so that we can feed a starving world. How is that pillaging?
With a comment like this, I am not even sure where to start. Is this a troll? You can't be serious.......:-[
Now, this is the sort of thing that makes you wonder why we spend so little effort studying our oceans. While I am all for space exploration and research, we should also spend considerably more effort to understand what is in our oceans, how they work and what effects we are having on them.
Moore's law, bah! Thinking about it, DARPA should get Steve Jobs on board to study his Reality Distortion Field. Think of the military aspects of.......oh, wait. We already have that.
Well, given the very pro Microsoft stances that many folks have here in response to anything critical of Microsoft, I have wondered if they are paying attention to Slashdot as well. Especially considering that many of the rabidly pro-MS posts are posted as AC.
Modded as Offtopic and flamebait? Oh, no. It's worse than I feared. Not only are they paying attention to Slashdot, they have infiltrated the ranks of moderators!:-)
Well, given the very pro Microsoft stances that many folks have here in response to anything critical of Microsoft, I have wondered if they are paying attention to Slashdot as well. Especially considering that many of the rabidly pro-MS posts are posted as AC.
So they are saying that communication is the reason for movie's failure? They should get rid of free speech.
Not only communication, but they are blaming the free market. In other words, consumers are voting with their dollars and when their friends and critics say the show stinks, they spend their $$'s elsewhere. Lesson? Make decent movies and people (who think for themselves) will go see them.
A Ph D (in engineering and science) is a certification in the ability to do research.
It most certainly goes beyond that. It shows an ability to think independently, organize your thoughts, and accomplish a goal while contributing significantly to the knowledge base. Companies and organizations like that sort of thing.
Generally theory based, and often without a "real world" product in sight.
I know many Ph.D's and grad students whose projects were driven by real world problems. (my dissertation project certainly was).
Read lots of papers, write some papers, get published.
True, true, true.
If you want a career in research -- either in an academic institution or a semi-private or private lab (think Bell Labs or Lawrence Livermore Lab), then get a Ph D. If you want to "do" computer engineering, than a Ph D won't likely help you.
I have a few friends at Silicon Wave, Apple, IBM and the CIA who might dissagree with you here. Their Ph.D.'s were crucial in obtaining the computer engineering jobs they currently have.
It is certainly not likely to result in a pay differential from a master's degree equivalent to the time lost earning the Ph D (4 - 6 years generally).
That may or may not be true. Most Ph.D. programs I am aware of give you a stipend in addition to a tuition waver. Granted it's not a lot of money, but we did quite well living spartanly and investing what we could in the stock market. Plus. having a Ph.D. certainly gives you more respect when obtaining VC funding and makes getting meetings and contacts much easier when it comes time to collaborate, spin the company off or sell it. This can pay for lots of things and rapidly narrow the delta for those years when you are studying, so you can either invest even more in savings/stock market or buy yourself that Porsche you've always wanted.:-)
to help figure out why California's Redwoods are dying off at an alarming rate.
Umm, last time I was in the area a few months ago, given the amount of pollution and traffic in the Bay area and north of the Bay area, I am not surprised the redwoods are dying off.
Slashdot Mirror
And going to the *as yet unannounced* 2U just makes the cooling problem worse...
:-)
"He's gonna smoke a turd in Hell for that one."
-Steve
Hrmmm.
Wonderful: three pointers to Apple's web site, pointing to pages with slick corporate "interviews". Do you actually work for Apple or are you just insanely zealous?
There are an awful lot of scientists using Macs for their research and work. I use them almost exclusively now after retiring my SGI's in favor of the OS X boxes and judging from the meetings I attend, I would say Macs have anywhere from 10-40% penetrance in science depending upon the subfield. For instance the last vision meeting I attended (ARVO, the big one for the vision research community), there were Powerbooks and iBooks everywhere. Probably a good 33% of the laptops I saw.
multibanked ram is nothing new. it's been around since the 486 days for consumers (iirc), and much earlier in big machines, i'm sure. afaik, most mobosthese days are at least 128bits wide.
Yep, my old Macintosh 9600 had a 128-bit wide memory bus if you used identical ram in each of the 12!! RAM slots.
Does anyone know who else was considered for this contract? I'd love to see the arguments for the different platforms!
Well, considering that the G5 has many of the architectural features of those $40k SGI Octanes that I purchased a few years ago, I would consider that pretty impressive. In short, Apple designed the G5 machines with completely independent busses, so that saturating say an I/O bus will not have any effect on the throughput of say memory to CPU. They are pretty impressive and I can see why many folks who are currently using the Octanes etc... would want new G5's.
So, you have a UNIX box with true plug and play, 64-bit, nice GUI, full CLI access, Firewire, USB, REALLY nice archetecture etc...etc...etc... All that makes for a pretty convincing argument for clusters moving to the G5's
I wonder what this will do for companies such as Apple who are building in MS office document readability/writeability into their applications/operating systems? Right now I can read and write .ppt files in Keynote, and .doc files with, ahem other bits of software on my OS X boxes. So, is this simply an attempt at providing a more secure environment or is Microsoft doing an end run around other folks to make it a federal crime in the name of security to compete with them?
As for the article, it's short, lightweight filler.
This is Slashdot after all. If you look at the statistics and logs after a Slashdotting, (I've had two such instances on my servers) the vast majority of people only look at the most superficial information and rarely take time (interpreted from logs) to actually read the content. Furthermore, if there is linked material, almost nobody ever goes any deeper than the initial layer. It's very sad.
I agree with you, but I was pleasantly surprised to find that a lot of users actually cancel Windows auto updates when they become available because they think they're viruses attacking their computer...
No, actually many users disable auto update because Microsoft has a history of releasing updates that break other functionality. When your business or work relies on computer uptime, having this broken functionality happen is unacceptable. Therefore many folks 1) test the updates on non-essential systems which may take time given the extent or number of systems affected and 2) wait for bugs to come out or problems that others report because of the updates. The other issue is that many folks that use computers use them to get work accomplished and not to "be using computers". Their needs may be such that spending lots of time managing the computers is time not spent accomplishing their goals and yet they are not big enough operations to hire dedicated IT folks.
I still have some needs that are being met by Microsoft products and most likely will have for years, but I have been moving as many essential tasks as possible onto other operating systems (OS X) because of the security issues, reliability issues, management issues and others.
it's just as likely that they're attacking themselves in their continued attempt to pump up their stock price
Given their past behaviour, I would not doubt it.
iSCSI bascially takes native SCSI commands, wraps it up (encapsulates it), and sends it over the wire. In other words, you could use a SCSI scanner over a network without having to resort to PC Anywhere or something.
I believe the same concept is possible with Firewire. In fact, the Firewire protocol allows for use completely independently of any computer or CPU.
Meh, the article already appears to be slashdotted, but from a first read I have to wonder if I am missing something here with iSCSI. Is not this simply a different protocol that Firewire already takes care of, especially with faster iterations? Firewire is already a subset of SCSI, but hot plug and play and you can also TCP/IP over Firewire.
This is why I have always enjoyed going to the local punk and bluegrass concerts. Much of the scene is about playing the music in the moment. Granted this is not an excuse for mastery of your art, rather it is about being honest and supporting your local musicians.
P.S. Don't steal music.
However, unlike the RIAA, DeBeers never promised that the prices of their diamonds would come down when market forces and economies of scale entered. Remember when CD's first became available? I can remember saving my change so I could afford some of the first CD's that came onto the market at what.....$15-20? Did the price on those ever come down? No.
Why can't people just take a movie for what it is? These aren't documentaries, you know.
No, but the reality is that often sci-fi feeds from science fact (albeit with pushed boundaries) when for instance atomic power became reality, movies about atomic energy and its effects on biological tissues became all the rage. Now it is genetics that has inspired movies and there are those directors that want to portray their subject matter as real or potentially believeable to allow for suspension of disbelief, thus making the movie more fun or the statement the director is trying to make more powerful.
I have been consulted a bit from science topics from sleep and sleep disorders to retinal vision and artificial means to rescue vision for a few writers and directors, and routinely the authors want as much as possible to stick close to reality even if it is sci-fi.
That's my plan. Just pull the plug on the Wintel stuff, toss em in the trash and replace them with Macs running OS X. :-)
I was being a little glib there, but it should be pointed out that the labor costs associated with managing all of this crap are pretty serious. Overtime charges, benefits and basic salary for an $74k employee for the last three days are running what? At least $1000k per employee. With eight IT dudes running around fixing all of the Wintel systems that's eight grand worth of new Macs that will have much better uptime and lower costs just from the last three days alone. Now, consider how many of these little virus and worm issues there have been in the past year.
If the majority of the cost comes from cleaning the system, I would recommend (in my professional opinion) simply letting the systems remain infected.
:-)
That's my plan. Just pull the plug on the Wintel stuff, toss em in the trash and replace them with Macs running OS X.
Hrmmmm. From your sig " I'm gonna drink 'till I reboot! - Bender, Futurama" I would also have to add that given the media consolidation happening with large corporations owning music, movie, television, newspaper and internet companies, you might have to swear off your Futurama as well.
spam is becoming a problem like pollution.... we can not get rid of it, so we will just have to live with it
No, most spam is distributed by a few known individuals. Make laws against distributing spam with harsh penalties (especially for porn spam that kids can be exposed to) and the problem will go away. After all, after the do not call registry went into effect, we have had almost zero telephone calls in the evening from people looking to sell us stuff.
Bottom line, idiot, is that humankind has absolutely no effect on the ocean compared to what the earth itself and the sun dish out.
:-[
Oh, boy.....here we go.
Imagine the sun flared. Just a little one. What could happen to the earth?
The sun flares all the time. Our atmosphere and the ozone layer protect us.
Why, the entire atmosphere could be blown away, and the oceans could dry up. The deserts would turn to glass. All from a small solar flare.
*Sigh.......* No. This is not correct. See above comment for clarification.
What about a volcano? How many megatons of carbon dioxide and other noxious chemicals does that dump into the atmosphere, not to mention the pollution in the oceans?
CO2 release into the oceans is common and the CO2 flux is truly massive. However, what we need to worry about are some of the non-naturally occurring chemicals such as estrogens and chemicals found in fertilizers and run off from mining such as cyanides. We also have to worry about what is happening from all of the nuclear reactors that the former Soviet union has dumped into the sea among other things.
The algae blooms are there because the sun put them there. We had nothing to do with it.
Wrong. Human intervention most likely primarily from excess nitrogens are at the root of many of these. Other causes are world wide shipping, which carries algae to new homes in water contained in ballast tanks, global warming, and pollution draining into the oceans from coastal development and farmland, which provides again nitrogenous compounds essential for algae metabolism.
You are an idiot. spouting out half-truths and whining about it.
There is no call for that sort of treatment. Lighten up, eh?
Go crack a real science book, not the pseudo-crap they are passing off in high school today.
Your credentials are what?
Go take a look at how much water there is in the ocean, and try and figure out how much pollution we could actually dump in there if we really tried. You'll see that we would have barely any effect at all.
Many, many studies are being performed on just this and the results are sobering.
And how do you pillage the ocean? The natural resources in the ocean are going to die anyway. Rather than allowing the fish to float to the bottom of the ocean and rot and pollute the ocean, we are harvesting the excess every year so that we can feed a starving world. How is that pillaging?
With a comment like this, I am not even sure where to start. Is this a troll? You can't be serious.......
Now, this is the sort of thing that makes you wonder why we spend so little effort studying our oceans. While I am all for space exploration and research, we should also spend considerably more effort to understand what is in our oceans, how they work and what effects we are having on them.
Moore's law, bah! Thinking about it, DARPA should get Steve Jobs on board to study his Reality Distortion Field. Think of the military aspects of.......oh, wait. We already have that.
Well, given the very pro Microsoft stances that many folks have here in response to anything critical of Microsoft, I have wondered if they are paying attention to Slashdot as well. Especially considering that many of the rabidly pro-MS posts are posted as AC.
:-)
Modded as Offtopic and flamebait? Oh, no. It's worse than I feared. Not only are they paying attention to Slashdot, they have infiltrated the ranks of moderators!
Well, given the very pro Microsoft stances that many folks have here in response to anything critical of Microsoft, I have wondered if they are paying attention to Slashdot as well. Especially considering that many of the rabidly pro-MS posts are posted as AC.
So they are saying that communication is the reason for movie's failure? They should get rid of free speech.
Not only communication, but they are blaming the free market. In other words, consumers are voting with their dollars and when their friends and critics say the show stinks, they spend their $$'s elsewhere. Lesson? Make decent movies and people (who think for themselves) will go see them.
A Ph D (in engineering and science) is a certification in the ability to do research.
:-)
It most certainly goes beyond that. It shows an ability to think independently, organize your thoughts, and accomplish a goal while contributing significantly to the knowledge base. Companies and organizations like that sort of thing.
Generally theory based, and often without a "real world" product in sight.
I know many Ph.D's and grad students whose projects were driven by real world problems. (my dissertation project certainly was).
Read lots of papers, write some papers, get published.
True, true, true.
If you want a career in research -- either in an academic institution or a semi-private or private lab (think Bell Labs or Lawrence Livermore Lab), then get a Ph D. If you want to "do" computer engineering, than a Ph D won't likely help you.
I have a few friends at Silicon Wave, Apple, IBM and the CIA who might dissagree with you here. Their Ph.D.'s were crucial in obtaining the computer engineering jobs they currently have.
It is certainly not likely to result in a pay differential from a master's degree equivalent to the time lost earning the Ph D (4 - 6 years generally).
That may or may not be true. Most Ph.D. programs I am aware of give you a stipend in addition to a tuition waver. Granted it's not a lot of money, but we did quite well living spartanly and investing what we could in the stock market. Plus. having a Ph.D. certainly gives you more respect when obtaining VC funding and makes getting meetings and contacts much easier when it comes time to collaborate, spin the company off or sell it. This can pay for lots of things and rapidly narrow the delta for those years when you are studying, so you can either invest even more in savings/stock market or buy yourself that Porsche you've always wanted.
to help figure out why California's Redwoods are dying off at an alarming rate.
Umm, last time I was in the area a few months ago, given the amount of pollution and traffic in the Bay area and north of the Bay area, I am not surprised the redwoods are dying off.