This is all about timely and focused execution. The speed at which this project was realized is important. Consider: from the initial concept in late December of 2003 to assembling the computer in Madrid took less than a year. Normally, this kind of supercomputer projects take years.
Lame!
SGI had NASA AMES' Columbia online in 120 days, and landed #2 on the Top500.
You'll spend years fooling around with RCS and CVS for configuration versioning before realizing that what you really need is cfengine. CVS or svn for source code, cfengine for configuration. Cut to the chase:
When receiving the first of two shipments of our SGI Origin 2400 (64-way machine in 4 racks) one of the crates began to tip on its way down the hydraulic lift on the back of the truck. My boss nearly took one for the team. As he saw it beginning to tip he let loose a flurry of obscenities not often associated with respected professors of Biochemistry, and proceeded to lunge forward and throw his weight against the half-ton SGI crate, successfully averting the disaster. The next thing out of his mouth was "What just happened?". Some sort of genetic geek reflex I guess. =)
I've never been able to get down wit' Quark. I don't do a lot of DTP, but at one time I did and at that time I was all about some Aldus PageMaker 5.0. The first couple of revisions after Adobe bought it were okay as well. Nowadays whenever I want to do any DTP I find myself staring at the same battered old copy of Aldus PageMaker 5.0 running under Wine's excellent Win16 support on my FreeBSD box. =P
Why would you waste your time hacking a car that fights you every step of the way (physically, electronically, and financially)? I only own and drive open sourced cars. My daily driver is a 1974 Volkswagen Beetle. There is not a single part for this car I couldn't write a check to replace. I also haven't paid a mechanic since I bought it. There're no computer diagnositics I have to pay some guy with his name on his shirt to run for me. All I need is a good chest full of Craftsman metric tools and my ears. Your stock Beetle not fast enough for you? $2000 worth of NEW parts will build a complete engine to your specifications that will propel that 870kg car to speeds you'd never thought possible. Countless books have been written that detail every system in the Beetle inside and out. Why would you buy a car that tries to keep you out with complex computerized systems? Want to modify the ignition timing? All you need is a 10mm socket. Ferdinand Porsche designed my car. Who designed yours?
If you're looking for good, portable, cross platform GUI development it's hard to go wrong with SpecTCL. It is a Tcl/Tk visual development environment which can generate code in Tcl, Perl, Python, Ruby, and Java. There are versions of SpecTCL available on Windows, Mac, UNIX and any other platform on which you can get a working Tcl/Tk environment. There is a related project SpecTix which appears to provide a more complete IDE, but I've not used it. I'm also really (really!) impressed with Apple's new IDE, Project Builder. If you've not seen a demo, you need to ask someone with a Mac running OS X to pop in the developer CD and try it for yourself. It allows you to do rapid application development to the Cocoa APIs in C, C++, Objective C and Java. What's cool about writing to the Cocoa APIs is that they're not only available on OS X, they're available on most UNIXes via the GNUstep implementation. I'd really love to get some time to find out just how portable Project Builder's resulting code is to other OpenStep implementations.
I'm surprised nobody has mentioned the German made PCIII yet. This is the ultimate lunchbox PC complete with a built in LCD screen and snap in keyboard/touchpad combo. They're standard PC cases on the inside as well, making them quite upgradeable. A friend had the original AT PCIII and upgraded it to the fastest Super Socket7 kit on the market and it's been great. I believe it began life as a low end P54C Pentium. Go check it out!
PA-RISC needed to die. It sucked. It's a damn shame Alpha's going away, but that's all water under the bridge. The important thing is that IBM is still quite alive and have produced a processor which is currently giving Intel one helluva run for their money. The Power4 chip's characteristics are nothing short of incredible. For more info check out this page at IBM Research.
Unfortunately SciFi felt the need to produce a lukewarm rendition of what is one of the most complex and emotionally charged science fiction series ever written. They concentrated so fiercely on the razzle-dazzle effects they completely missed the point. Dune is in very select company among science fiction series. It's not just about what the future may hold, it's not just about technological advancement, it's about the human condition. Dune speaks to mankind's ultimate questions. While the Lynch movie receives a lot of criticism from my fellow Dune fanatics, it at least succeeds in capturing the mysticism that is so central to Herbert's world. I get no sense of religious or emotional depth out of this miniseries. The scene where the Reverend Mother tests Paul was the most unimpressively flat scene I've seen in my life. Where did the mysticism go? And most importantly where are the feints within feints within feints?
Boy does this paragraph now strike me as ironic as I just got around to reading the CNN article. Witness this quote from John Harrison: "It's a complex story of revenge and larger destiny: It's a romance -- a 'romance' in the epic sense of the word. This is a story about the human condition." If he truly believes that then he is one of the worst filmmakers I have yet seen, and I can understand how he could be working in the television movie industry. No wonder, look at his *cough* *sarcasm* impressive record: http://us.imdb.com/Name?Harrison,+John+(I). He's a bloody TV horror flick director. He specializes in flat, stock characters with predicatable behaviors. I'm now even more disappointed with SciFi for picking up this guy. --
As with the vast majority of the SciFi-produced shows I've seen, I am sorely disappointed with this interpretation of Dune. As someone who's read the books multiple times, I'm intimately familiar with the plot. I'm also familiar with what does and does not work onstage and onscreen; I'm an actor. I think Herbert's original literary decisions make outstanding screen decisions too.
Unfortunately SciFi felt the need to produce a lukewarm rendition of what is one of the most complex and emotionally charged science fiction series ever written. They concentrated so fiercely on the razzle-dazzle effects they completely missed the point. Dune is in very select company among science fiction series. It's not just about what the future may hold, it's not just about technological advancement, it's about the human condition. Dune speaks to mankind's ultimate questions. While the Lynch movie receives a lot of criticism from my fellow Dune fanatics, it at least succeeds in capturing the mysticism that is so central to Herbert's world. I get no sense of religious or emotional depth out of this miniseries. The scene where the Reverend Mother tests Paul was the most unimpressively flat scene I've seen in my life. Where did the mysticism go? And most importantly where are the feints within feints within feints?
I was also entirely disgusted with the butchering of decades of accepted pronunciation. Did they consult noone? Who is Duke "Lay-dow"? I only know of a Duke "Lee-tow" in that story. And the "Hark-a-nins"? I only remember "Har-kon-ins". And the Fremen have the most ridiculously inaccurate accent I've ever heard. They're desert people, they don't speak English with a British accent. If they speak it at all it's with a middle eastern accent. They should have listened to an Israeli Jew speak English.
If you'll excuse me I have to go read the books again to cleanse myself.
Nobody seems to have commented on the fact that John Markoff is guilty of ridiculously libelous reporting with regard to the case of Kevin Mitnick. Whether one supports Kevin Mitnick's case or not he should never support fraudulent reporting. I do not believe/. should in any way, shape, or form give him any journalistic credit. If he is too proud to admit the hand he played in distorting the public's perception of Kevin Mitnick, he will earn no respect from me. For more information on his libelous actions see the following URL:
http://www.freekevin.com/news-release.ht ml --
I would assume that every platform you would conceivably want to access the database frontend from has a web browser available to the user. The correct way to create a portable database frontend is to make it web-based. You can place the frontend on a unix server stowed away somewhere convenient and users from any platform can point their web browser to the correct address and manipulate the database from there. The benefits are multifold. For starters, you can upgrade the code to a newer version without reinstalling the client on multiple machines. Any sysadmin appreciates the import of that feature. Your users are also not tied to a particular machine or location. You can allow access to your application from properly authenticated external sources and when users go on the road they can easily access the database. With the ease of use and rapid development qualities of Perl DBI or PHP as advanced as they are, there is little reason to ever write another database frontend application framework. --
I would recommend starting your kids off on a functional languages as most universities now do with incoming freshmen. Scheme is the language of choice and I think it's an excellent starting point for any programmer to use to learn algorithmic thinking processes. It also forces a programmer to think very carefully about his boolean statements, a skill that will come in handy later. Furthermore, the time it takes to develop working code in Scheme is substantially lower than the time it would take in a language like C due to Scheme's abstraction. Your kids may have attentions spans even shorter than most nerds! They will appreciate the fact than an idea can become a working model very quickly once they have learned the Scheme primitives. Good luck with them. If they're asking to program, you've done a good job raising them. =) --
I have recently become gainfully employed in a capacity which will require me to administer a Beowulf cluster. My question, Mr. Lindahl, is how you feel about the various competing technologies for distribution of computation. In particular, do you feel there is much to be gained from the work of the MOSIX project at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem? Traditionally tasks for Beowulf style supercomputers have required specific programming in MPI or PVM calls. MOSIX endeavors to provide adaptive load-balancing with process migration. Essentially this allows the programmer to forgo the hassle of parallelizing his code. Rather, he can now simply fork() or create SMP threads and the OS will automatically handle distribution of those processes over the cluster. Do you feel that this is a worthwhile avenue to pursue for scientific computation or are there issues which make MPI or PVM still a substantially better choice? Thank you for your time. --
You have asked why MacOS X will use a Mach microkernel: Quite simply, choice (a). The core Darwin OS is designed such that it can be shared among many divergent platforms simply by replacing the microkernel. Open source developers already have Darwin running on ix86 hardware using the ix86 version of CMU Mach 3.0. This will allow Apple the option of licensing versions of MacOS X for Intel based-PCs. In fact, rumour has it that Apple has discussed licensing it to OEM PC builders. You also ask, if you're going to use Mach, why bother with a BSD server. Why reinvent the wheel? Apple decided that rather than spend countless manhours writing a new userland they would use the existing userland from FreeBSD 3.3-RELEASE. In order to facilitate running all of this code, it was necessary to write a BSD Mach server. It is also likely that Apple didn't have too terribly much work to do on the BSD Mach server thanks to the BSD-Lites project which already had implemented a 4.4BSD Mach server. Yes, it is true that in the past Microkernels have involved significant reductions in performance; however, that gap is rapidly closing. On older, slower processors the extra latency involved in two sets of kernel calls could pose a problem. Not anymore. Now we're seeing processors running above 1GHz routinely. At this point the performance difference is negligible and soon will be completely beyond the ability of human senses to notice. In my opinion, the choice of a Mach microkernel architecture for OS X will not hurt Apple in the slightest. Cheers. --
Slashdot Mirror
This is all about timely and focused execution. The speed at which this project was realized is important. Consider: from the initial concept in late December of 2003 to assembling the computer in Madrid took less than a year. Normally, this kind of supercomputer projects take years.
Lame!
SGI had NASA AMES' Columbia online in 120 days, and landed #2 on the Top500.
Alan Turning, Alan Turing's little known revolutionary (pun intended) contemporary.
You'll spend years fooling around with RCS and CVS for configuration versioning before realizing that what you really need is cfengine. CVS or svn for source code, cfengine for configuration. Cut to the chase:
http://www.cfengine.org/
When receiving the first of two shipments of our SGI Origin 2400 (64-way machine in 4 racks) one of the crates began to tip on its way down the hydraulic lift on the back of the truck. My boss nearly took one for the team. As he saw it beginning to tip he let loose a flurry of obscenities not often associated with respected professors of Biochemistry, and proceeded to lunge forward and throw his weight against the half-ton SGI crate, successfully averting the disaster. The next thing out of his mouth was "What just happened?". Some sort of genetic geek reflex I guess. =)
I've never been able to get down wit' Quark. I don't do a lot of DTP, but at one time I did and at that time I was all about some Aldus PageMaker 5.0. The first couple of revisions after Adobe bought it were okay as well. Nowadays whenever I want to do any DTP I find myself staring at the same battered old copy of Aldus PageMaker 5.0 running under Wine's excellent Win16 support on my FreeBSD box. =P
Why would you waste your time hacking a car that fights you every step of the way (physically, electronically, and financially)? I only own and drive open sourced cars. My daily driver is a 1974 Volkswagen Beetle. There is not a single part for this car I couldn't write a check to replace. I also haven't paid a mechanic since I bought it. There're no computer diagnositics I have to pay some guy with his name on his shirt to run for me. All I need is a good chest full of Craftsman metric tools and my ears. Your stock Beetle not fast enough for you? $2000 worth of NEW parts will build a complete engine to your specifications that will propel that 870kg car to speeds you'd never thought possible. Countless books have been written that detail every system in the Beetle inside and out. Why would you buy a car that tries to keep you out with complex computerized systems? Want to modify the ignition timing? All you need is a 10mm socket. Ferdinand Porsche designed my car. Who designed yours?
How JPL will overcome the time delay isn't mentioned but it's an interesting read nonetheless.
Why with the ansible of course! ;-)
This sounds like the killer app for DVD. The original and the MST3K audio track on the same disc.
If you're looking for good, portable, cross platform GUI development it's hard to go wrong with SpecTCL. It is a Tcl/Tk visual development environment which can generate code in Tcl, Perl, Python, Ruby, and Java. There are versions of SpecTCL available on Windows, Mac, UNIX and any other platform on which you can get a working Tcl/Tk environment. There is a related project SpecTix which appears to provide a more complete IDE, but I've not used it. I'm also really (really!) impressed with Apple's new IDE, Project Builder. If you've not seen a demo, you need to ask someone with a Mac running OS X to pop in the developer CD and try it for yourself. It allows you to do rapid application development to the Cocoa APIs in C, C++, Objective C and Java. What's cool about writing to the Cocoa APIs is that they're not only available on OS X, they're available on most UNIXes via the GNUstep implementation. I'd really love to get some time to find out just how portable Project Builder's resulting code is to other OpenStep implementations.
I'm surprised nobody has mentioned the German made PCIII yet. This is the ultimate lunchbox PC complete with a built in LCD screen and snap in keyboard/touchpad combo. They're standard PC cases on the inside as well, making them quite upgradeable. A friend had the original AT PCIII and upgraded it to the fastest Super Socket7 kit on the market and it's been great. I believe it began life as a low end P54C Pentium. Go check it out!
PA-RISC needed to die. It sucked. It's a damn shame Alpha's going away, but that's all water under the bridge. The important thing is that IBM is still quite alive and have produced a processor which is currently giving Intel one helluva run for their money. The Power4 chip's characteristics are nothing short of incredible. For more info check out this page at IBM Research.
Boy does this paragraph now strike me as ironic as I just got around to reading the CNN article. Witness this quote from John Harrison: "It's a complex story of revenge and larger destiny: It's a romance -- a 'romance' in the epic sense of the word. This is a story about the human condition." If he truly believes that then he is one of the worst filmmakers I have yet seen, and I can understand how he could be working in the television movie industry. No wonder, look at his *cough* *sarcasm* impressive record: http://us.imdb.com/Name?Harrison,+John+(I). He's a bloody TV horror flick director. He specializes in flat, stock characters with predicatable behaviors. I'm now even more disappointed with SciFi for picking up this guy.
--
As with the vast majority of the SciFi-produced shows I've seen, I am sorely disappointed with this interpretation of Dune. As someone who's read the books multiple times, I'm intimately familiar with the plot. I'm also familiar with what does and does not work onstage and onscreen; I'm an actor. I think Herbert's original literary decisions make outstanding screen decisions too.
Unfortunately SciFi felt the need to produce a lukewarm rendition of what is one of the most complex and emotionally charged science fiction series ever written. They concentrated so fiercely on the razzle-dazzle effects they completely missed the point. Dune is in very select company among science fiction series. It's not just about what the future may hold, it's not just about technological advancement, it's about the human condition. Dune speaks to mankind's ultimate questions. While the Lynch movie receives a lot of criticism from my fellow Dune fanatics, it at least succeeds in capturing the mysticism that is so central to Herbert's world. I get no sense of religious or emotional depth out of this miniseries. The scene where the Reverend Mother tests Paul was the most unimpressively flat scene I've seen in my life. Where did the mysticism go? And most importantly where are the feints within feints within feints?
I was also entirely disgusted with the butchering of decades of accepted pronunciation. Did they consult noone? Who is Duke "Lay-dow"? I only know of a Duke "Lee-tow" in that story. And the "Hark-a-nins"? I only remember "Har-kon-ins". And the Fremen have the most ridiculously inaccurate accent I've ever heard. They're desert people, they don't speak English with a British accent. If they speak it at all it's with a middle eastern accent. They should have listened to an Israeli Jew speak English.
If you'll excuse me I have to go read the books again to cleanse myself.
--
Nobody seems to have commented on the fact that John Markoff is guilty of ridiculously libelous reporting with regard to the case of Kevin Mitnick. Whether one supports Kevin Mitnick's case or not he should never support fraudulent reporting. I do not believe /. should in any way, shape, or form give him any journalistic credit. If he is too proud to admit the hand he played in distorting the public's perception of Kevin Mitnick, he will earn no respect from me. For more information on his libelous actions see the following URL:
http://www.freekevin.com/news-release.ht ml
--
I would assume that every platform you would conceivably want to access the database frontend from has a web browser available to the user. The correct way to create a portable database frontend is to make it web-based. You can place the frontend on a unix server stowed away somewhere convenient and users from any platform can point their web browser to the correct address and manipulate the database from there. The benefits are multifold. For starters, you can upgrade the code to a newer version without reinstalling the client on multiple machines. Any sysadmin appreciates the import of that feature. Your users are also not tied to a particular machine or location. You can allow access to your application from properly authenticated external sources and when users go on the road they can easily access the database. With the ease of use and rapid development qualities of Perl DBI or PHP as advanced as they are, there is little reason to ever write another database frontend application framework.
--
I would recommend starting your kids off on a functional languages as most universities now do with incoming freshmen. Scheme is the language of choice and I think it's an excellent starting point for any programmer to use to learn algorithmic thinking processes. It also forces a programmer to think very carefully about his boolean statements, a skill that will come in handy later. Furthermore, the time it takes to develop working code in Scheme is substantially lower than the time it would take in a language like C due to Scheme's abstraction. Your kids may have attentions spans even shorter than most nerds! They will appreciate the fact than an idea can become a working model very quickly once they have learned the Scheme primitives. Good luck with them. If they're asking to program, you've done a good job raising them. =)
--
I have recently become gainfully employed in a capacity which will require me to administer a Beowulf cluster. My question, Mr. Lindahl, is how you feel about the various competing technologies for distribution of computation. In particular, do you feel there is much to be gained from the work of the MOSIX project at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem? Traditionally tasks for Beowulf style supercomputers have required specific programming in MPI or PVM calls. MOSIX endeavors to provide adaptive load-balancing with process migration. Essentially this allows the programmer to forgo the hassle of parallelizing his code. Rather, he can now simply fork() or create SMP threads and the OS will automatically handle distribution of those processes over the cluster. Do you feel that this is a worthwhile avenue to pursue for scientific computation or are there issues which make MPI or PVM still a substantially better choice? Thank you for your time.
--
You have asked why MacOS X will use a Mach microkernel: Quite simply, choice (a). The core Darwin OS is designed such that it can be shared among many divergent platforms simply by replacing the microkernel. Open source developers already have Darwin running on ix86 hardware using the ix86 version of CMU Mach 3.0. This will allow Apple the option of licensing versions of MacOS X for Intel based-PCs. In fact, rumour has it that Apple has discussed licensing it to OEM PC builders. You also ask, if you're going to use Mach, why bother with a BSD server. Why reinvent the wheel? Apple decided that rather than spend countless manhours writing a new userland they would use the existing userland from FreeBSD 3.3-RELEASE. In order to facilitate running all of this code, it was necessary to write a BSD Mach server. It is also likely that Apple didn't have too terribly much work to do on the BSD Mach server thanks to the BSD-Lites project which already had implemented a 4.4BSD Mach server. Yes, it is true that in the past Microkernels have involved significant reductions in performance; however, that gap is rapidly closing. On older, slower processors the extra latency involved in two sets of kernel calls could pose a problem. Not anymore. Now we're seeing processors running above 1GHz routinely. At this point the performance difference is negligible and soon will be completely beyond the ability of human senses to notice. In my opinion, the choice of a Mach microkernel architecture for OS X will not hurt Apple in the slightest. Cheers.
--