I worked with a guy once who had legally changed his name from Ryan to Ry4an. He apparently did it in high school to screw with the standardized test forms.
In case you're wondering: 1. The 4 was silent 2. Yes, he was a programmer 3. He didn't seem any stranger than your run of the mill, non-numerically named programmers 4. He did express a bit of regret for all of the hassle it had led to.
In all seriousness it comes form the fact that many Mac users toss around apple marketing terms (like Velocity Engine) without understanding what they mean (it's a floating point vector math unit, like 3dnow or SSE2). They just assume it makes things better since that's what the hype claims.
Thanks for your response. I don't suggest rebuilding the towers for the sake of posturing, arrogance and American machismo. I'd like to see them rebuilt so that having gone through the suffering and the grief, we can know that who we are and our way of life, imperfect though it may be, will not be broken and will not be dictated to us.
I certainly support the idea of a memorial (park or otherwise). Put it between the towers, though, don't make it an either or.
I was about 10 blocks away when the first tower went down (was downtown for jury duty) and the whole experience has been a difficult one to process. How we as a nation choose to respond will play itself out over the days to come, but there is one thing that I know I would like to see happen:
Rebuild the towers
Put a memorial in between, but build them back up and make them even bigger this time. Send a clear message both the citizens of this country and to the terrorists who would threaten us. You can knock them down, but we'll build them right back. We won't be broken and we will not live in fear.
My sympathies victims, their families and all those affected by today's tragedies.
Actually Sun provides deprecates Solaris versions for a fairly long period of time. A release is kept active for about 4 years (2 additional versions + 6 months) and then supported for another 5 years after that.
They even document the Solaris lifecycle model on their site. (http://www.sun.com/software/solaris/2.6/lifecycle.html).
*ouch*. I can't remember the last time I laughed that hard at something on the net. If only I had moderation points. Well, here's a symbolic (+1, Funny).
The size/time ratio would make showing the movie in real-time very difficult and expensive.
First, they would need more bandwidth. The movie is 90 minutes long and 50GB (or 400Gb), so they'd need to be able to pull in about 4.5Gb/min or 75Mb/s. To keep the display from lagging, they would need to be able to maintain that as that as a *minimum* bandwidth for the whole duration (assuming no caching which is, admittedly, overly simplistic). Otherwise, they fall behind and the PR stunt looks a lot less impressive. Now, the quoted "800x analogue modem speed" means they're running on a T3 (56kb/s * 800 = 44800kb/s ~ 45Mb/s), which puts they short by about 30Mb/s. (And they wouldn't be able to pull 100% max. bandwidth anyway).
Second, providing guaranteed minimum bandwidth (more than 0) is difficult and very expensive. A high maximum bandwidth doesn't necessarily guarantee average or minimum throughput. I find it's tough trying to get a consistent lag-free 14kb/s RealAudio connection over a 1.5Mb/s T1. Sure it's being shared, but the problem really isn't available bandwidth. It is that all of the hops between me and the point of origin need to provide consistent throughput, which they generally don't. After all, they're all servicing thousands of other requests as well. Even over a private network, any of the hops between the studio and the theatre could get fail to provide the necessary throughput. For the amount of bandwidth in question, they would probably need a major provider to dedicate fiber and around a dozen hops between LA and Atlanta to just their traffic which isn't going to happen for less than a bajillion dollars. The impact on the rest of their network of trying to reroute all their regular traffic would be a nightmare.
Third, there are server resources utilization issues on the receiving end. Your average Gigabit NIC will eat up a lot of CPU doing 75Mb/s. Plus, if they've got the stream encrypted, then decrypting that volume of data real time would require a very big chunk of hardware. Once you're done with that, you've still got to be able to display the movie.
Could it be done? Probably, but it would be very expensive in terms of setup, money and expertise. They could end up spending more on the stunt than the movie ever ends up making.
Actually, the article indicates cache sizes of 1MB and 2MB, which seems more reasonable for a server CPU than 256KB. Still smaller than your average SPARC, though.
The article seemed poorly worded. I believe that the previous Xeons were not Pentium II based. So, the differences, in addition to the speed bump are going from.25 micron to.18 and going from half-speed, off-die cache to full-speed, on-die.
Now maybe my memory is fault, but I'm pretty sure that Apple II's had color monitors available before DOS-based PCs. And there were plenty of games for them. Apple's biggest failure has always been the corporate workspace, not the home user.
I would argue that the average user will get a home computer based on what they have at work or school, because that is where most people learn to use computers. So, if they learned and have been primarily exposed to a Windows PC at work, then that is what they will probably get for home. That's an oversimplification, but I think that it is largely true.
>>Let's face it, the measure of viability of an OS as an end-user client is the games it can play. Since the dawn of IBM PC-compatibles (measured by how well they could run MS >> FlightSimulator), games have measured the success of the PC. Even before that, Commodore and Atari won the early markets for home PCs by offering games. Apple and TRS >> never had a chance with their monochrome monitors.
It has been my experience in hiring staff that the work visa for Canadians is very different (because of NAFTA?) than for citizens of other countries.
I believe that it simply requires:<BR> 1. A letter of employment provided by the employer<BR> 2. the employee to return to Canada and recross the border (with the letter) once per year.<P>
I love their work, but Blizzard has longer development cycles than Microsoft. I can't believe that NT 5 (err, sorry, Windows 2000) is going to beat Diablo II out the door... Then again, there's nothing worse than a game with great potential being ruined by a rushed and flawed release.
Kudos to Blizzard for all their great work and here's hoping that they decide to support Linux gaming.
Interestingly there was an artic le in today's New York Times Science section that bears some relevance. (Actually there was another related article in last Saturday's (?) Times, but I can't find a link to it. Oh well).
The article more or less says that there is mounting evidence that the Universe is expanding at an increasing rate. If this is true, then it seems to indicate that there won't be a Big Crunch. The source of the increasing speed of expansion is presumably some unknown repulsive force. There is speculation that this is the result of elementary particles popping into and out of existence (compliments of quantum mechanics and Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, if memory serves).
Correction and/or additional insights from those with a better grasp of astrophyics?
I'm surprised that I didn't see anyone else mention this one (maybe I just missed it). Anyway, wonderful names and lots to choose from. Even a number of nice sub-groups:
Got a pair on NT domain controllers - Tweedledee and Tweedledum.
A small web server farm - madhatter, marchhare, dormouse.
For that finicky Oracle database server that seems to look at you distainfully no matter how you tune it - caterpiller. And so on...
----- Another one that we started using at my current company - constellations that aren't astrological signs. (That Oracle server becomes the vain Cassiopeia).
I've done some fairly extensive research into many of the commercial players (Apple WebObjects, ATG Dynamo, BEA WebLogic, Bluestone Sapphire/Web, Gemstone/J, IBM WebSphere, Persistence PowerTier, Sun NetDynamics, Sybase EA Server) with a focus on their viability as a platform for Java development and here are a few (perhaps not very insightful) thoughts: 0. What is an "application server"? The way that I've come to use the term is a middlware product that provides a development framework; addresses functionality like failover/redundancy, database connectivity and connection pooling, and state and session management; provides reporting and management tools and generally a development tools and wizards. That's pretty generic and different people definitely us the term to mean different things. 1. There aren't any astoundingly bad products in the bunch, though some are obviously better than others. 2. They've got different strengths so there isn't a single product that is best for everyone in every situation. (Examples to follow) 3. They are also all quite pricy. 10K-30K/CPU + 2K-10K/developer seat tends to be the range.
My observations about some of the specific products: 1. WebObjects has a very complete, well-thought out development environment, however, its Java support is somewhat incomplete (e.g, no EJB support) and it pretty much restricts you to doing development under NT. I also have reservations about whether Apple, much as I love it, is serious about and capable of playing in the enterprise computing market. It's certainly a proven technology, though somewhat proprietary. Good for RAD development, if you don't have to worry about migrating an existing code base or about potentially migrating to another platform later on. 2. Dynamo is probably best suited if you're interested in using their whole suite of products (personalization, ad serving, etc.). It's really only suited for web sites, so if you are looking for a more generic middleware product for non-web applications, it's not a good fit. It does have reasonably good support of Java standards. Since they are a smaller company, as the app server market consolidates they might get squeezed out or acquired. 3. WebLogic is the product that was the best fit for us. A pure Java product with the most complete support for Java standards, including a comparatively robust EJB implementation. It doesn't come with a development environment although it does have some nice hooks into third-party IDEs and a nice EJB wizard. Whether you prefer this approach to the included IDE route is pretty subjective. 4. Sapphire/Web has an elegant, robust architecture and has the added benefit of also being an XML server. Java support is pretty complete. I really didn't like their development environment or the way that pregenerated code and custom code live together. Same concerns about market consolidation. 5. I didn't get a very good feel for Gemstone/J although it seems to be most similar to Sapphire/Web. Fairly complete Java support, some oddities in actual development. Those familiar (and happy) with their SmallTalk product might want to go with this. 6. WebSphere seems very much like a work in progress. IBM is certainly making progress, but it still feels incomplete. I really can't recommend it yet, but it's worth keeping an eye on. It inherits IBM's heavy Java focus. 7. PowerTier is another product that I don't have as much of a feel for. Pretty complete Java support and with some interesting database stuff going on. It's not a Java product itself though, for better and worse. 8. I looked at NetDynamics a generation back and it seemed to be distinctly behind the curve in Java support - ironic, huh? They seem to have made strides towards addressing that, but I don't think anyone really knows what's going to happen with NetDynamics and Netscape Application Server now that Sun owns them both. I'd be inclined to stay away from both until the picture becomes more clear. 9. Sybase EA is much improved from it's earlier incarnation (Jaguar), but it about a generation away. Probably a good fit for shops looking to go Sybase across all tiers.
A bit of background - perhaps this should have gone at the beginning - I've used PHP fairly extensively and while I like it as a product, it doesn't really provide the facilities for stateful sessions which is important to the work we do. For the last year we've been using servlets+JServ and a custom built Java app server, with the servlets talking to the app server via RMI. For those following along at home, building an app server is a serious undertaking...
JServ is a nice servlet engine as are commercial competitors like JRun and ServletExpress. If you're just looking to do servlet work, this should be fine. If you're looking to build EJBs and server side Java objects beyond servlets, you'll want something more.
I should also point out that there are obviously lots of other languages that work perfectly well for building database driven, dynamic content sites.
Finally a couple thoughts on EJBs - It's worth noting that EJBs in general are very much a work in progress, so it behooves you to know the issues before selecting them as a development route. It is really a different way of doing things. Tools for EJB development aren't very mature. Also, entity EJBs really don't span multiple tables well and stored procedures are basically out of the picture if you use container managed beans. So, it means that you lose database transparency and distribution of load, both of which are good things in my mind. There are some products in the works to address this (e.g., TopLink for WebLogic), but this is a very new market. Don't work on the cutting edge if you aren't willing to lose some blood...
Finally run out of things to say. Hope this helps...
Slashdot Mirror
City of Heroes
I worked with a guy once who had legally changed his name from Ryan to Ry4an. He apparently did it in high school to screw with the standardized test forms.
In case you're wondering:
1. The 4 was silent
2. Yes, he was a programmer
3. He didn't seem any stranger than your run of the mill, non-numerically named programmers
4. He did express a bit of regret for all of the hassle it had led to.
Ry4an if you're out there, Hi!
And that would be different from PC users how?
Perhaps so. Thanks for your thoughts.
I certainly support the idea of a memorial (park or otherwise). Put it between the towers, though, don't make it an either or.
Rebuild the towers
Put a memorial in between, but build them back up and make them even bigger this time. Send a clear message both the citizens of this country and to the terrorists who would threaten us. You can knock them down, but we'll build them right back. We won't be broken and we will not live in fear.
My sympathies victims, their families and all those affected by today's tragedies.
They even document the Solaris lifecycle model on their site. (http://www.sun.com/software/solaris/2.6/lifecycle .html).
*ouch*. I can't remember the last time I laughed that hard at something on the net. If only I had moderation points. Well, here's a symbolic (+1, Funny).
First, they would need more bandwidth. The movie is 90 minutes long and 50GB (or 400Gb), so they'd need to be able to pull in about 4.5Gb/min or 75Mb/s. To keep the display from lagging, they would need to be able to maintain that as that as a *minimum* bandwidth for the whole duration (assuming no caching which is, admittedly, overly simplistic). Otherwise, they fall behind and the PR stunt looks a lot less impressive. Now, the quoted "800x analogue modem speed" means they're running on a T3 (56kb/s * 800 = 44800kb/s ~ 45Mb/s), which puts they short by about 30Mb/s. (And they wouldn't be able to pull 100% max. bandwidth anyway).
Second, providing guaranteed minimum bandwidth (more than 0) is difficult and very expensive. A high maximum bandwidth doesn't necessarily guarantee average or minimum throughput. I find it's tough trying to get a consistent lag-free 14kb/s RealAudio connection over a 1.5Mb/s T1. Sure it's being shared, but the problem really isn't available bandwidth. It is that all of the hops between me and the point of origin need to provide consistent throughput, which they generally don't. After all, they're all servicing thousands of other requests as well. Even over a private network, any of the hops between the studio and the theatre could get fail to provide the necessary throughput. For the amount of bandwidth in question, they would probably need a major provider to dedicate fiber and around a dozen hops between LA and Atlanta to just their traffic which isn't going to happen for less than a bajillion dollars. The impact on the rest of their network of trying to reroute all their regular traffic would be a nightmare.
Third, there are server resources utilization issues on the receiving end. Your average Gigabit NIC will eat up a lot of CPU doing 75Mb/s. Plus, if they've got the stream encrypted, then decrypting that volume of data real time would require a very big chunk of hardware. Once you're done with that, you've still got to be able to display the movie.
Could it be done? Probably, but it would be very expensive in terms of setup, money and expertise. They could end up spending more on the stunt than the movie ever ends up making.
Actually, the article indicates cache sizes of 1MB and 2MB, which seems more reasonable for a server CPU than 256KB. Still smaller than your average SPARC, though.
doh. Meant to say "I believe that the previous Xeons were Pentium II based."
The article seemed poorly worded. I believe that the previous Xeons were not Pentium II based. So, the differences, in addition to the speed bump are going from .25 micron to .18 and going from half-speed, off-die cache to full-speed, on-die.
Now maybe my memory is fault, but I'm pretty sure that Apple II's had color monitors available before DOS-based PCs. And there were plenty of games for them. Apple's biggest failure has always been the corporate workspace, not the home user.
I would argue that the average user will get a home computer based on what they have at work or school, because that is where most people learn to use computers. So, if they learned and have been primarily exposed to a Windows PC at work, then that is what they will probably get for home.
That's an oversimplification, but I think that it is largely true.
>>Let's face it, the measure of viability of an OS as an end-user client is the games it can play. Since the dawn of IBM PC-compatibles (measured by how well they could run MS
>> FlightSimulator), games have measured the success of the PC. Even before that, Commodore and Atari won the early markets for home PCs by offering games. Apple and TRS
>> never had a chance with their monochrome monitors.
I believe that it simply requires:<BR>
1. A letter of employment provided by the employer<BR>
2. the employee to return to Canada and recross the border (with the letter) once per year.<P>
Can anyone provide additional information?
Kudos to Blizzard for all their great work and here's hoping that they decide to support Linux gaming.
Interestingly there was an artic le in today's New York Times Science section that bears some relevance. (Actually there was another related article in last Saturday's (?) Times, but I can't find a link to it. Oh well).
The article more or less says that there is mounting evidence that the Universe is expanding at an increasing rate. If this is true, then it seems to indicate that there won't be a Big Crunch. The source of the increasing speed of expansion is presumably some unknown repulsive force. There is speculation that this is the result of elementary particles popping into and out of existence (compliments of quantum mechanics and Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, if memory serves).
Correction and/or additional insights from those with a better grasp of astrophyics?
Got a pair on NT domain controllers - Tweedledee and Tweedledum.
A small web server farm - madhatter, marchhare, dormouse.
For that finicky Oracle database server that seems to look at you distainfully no matter how you tune it - caterpiller.
And so on...
-----
Another one that we started using at my current company - constellations that aren't astrological signs. (That Oracle server becomes the vain Cassiopeia).
Server naming: fun for the whole family!
-a
This segues nicely into one of my favorite naming conventions - Dr. Suess characters. Scales just about forever, too (he wrote ~50 books).
-a
I've done some fairly extensive research into many of the commercial players (Apple WebObjects, ATG Dynamo, BEA WebLogic, Bluestone Sapphire/Web, Gemstone/J, IBM WebSphere, Persistence PowerTier, Sun NetDynamics, Sybase EA Server) with a focus on their viability as a platform for Java development and here are a few (perhaps not very insightful) thoughts:
0. What is an "application server"? The way that I've come to use the term is a middlware product that provides a development framework; addresses functionality like failover/redundancy, database connectivity and connection pooling, and state and session management; provides reporting and management tools and generally a development tools and wizards. That's pretty generic and different people definitely us the term to mean different things.
1. There aren't any astoundingly bad products in the bunch, though some are obviously better than others.
2. They've got different strengths so there isn't a single product that is best for everyone in every situation. (Examples to follow)
3. They are also all quite pricy. 10K-30K/CPU + 2K-10K/developer seat tends to be the range.
My observations about some of the specific products:
1. WebObjects has a very complete, well-thought out development environment, however, its Java support is somewhat incomplete (e.g, no EJB support) and it pretty much restricts you to doing development under NT. I also have reservations about whether Apple, much as I love it, is serious about and capable of playing in the enterprise computing market. It's certainly a proven technology, though somewhat proprietary. Good for RAD development, if you don't have to worry about migrating an existing code base or about potentially migrating to another platform later on.
2. Dynamo is probably best suited if you're interested in using their whole suite of products (personalization, ad serving, etc.). It's really only suited for web sites, so if you are looking for a more generic middleware product for non-web applications, it's not a good fit. It does have reasonably good support of Java standards. Since they are a smaller company, as the app server market consolidates they might get squeezed out or acquired.
3. WebLogic is the product that was the best fit for us. A pure Java product with the most complete support for Java standards, including a comparatively robust EJB implementation. It doesn't come with a development environment although it does have some nice hooks into third-party IDEs and a nice EJB wizard. Whether you prefer this approach to the included IDE route is pretty subjective.
4. Sapphire/Web has an elegant, robust architecture and has the added benefit of also being an XML server. Java support is pretty complete. I really didn't like their development environment or the way that pregenerated code and custom code live together. Same concerns about market consolidation.
5. I didn't get a very good feel for Gemstone/J although it seems to be most similar to Sapphire/Web. Fairly complete Java support, some oddities in actual development. Those familiar (and happy) with their SmallTalk product might want to go with this.
6. WebSphere seems very much like a work in progress. IBM is certainly making progress, but it still feels incomplete. I really can't recommend it yet, but it's worth keeping an eye on. It inherits IBM's heavy Java focus.
7. PowerTier is another product that I don't have as much of a feel for. Pretty complete Java support and with some interesting database stuff going on. It's not a Java product itself though, for better and worse.
8. I looked at NetDynamics a generation back and it seemed to be distinctly behind the curve in Java support - ironic, huh? They seem to have made strides towards addressing that, but I don't think anyone really knows what's going to happen with NetDynamics and Netscape Application Server now that Sun owns them both. I'd be inclined to stay away from both until the picture becomes more clear.
9. Sybase EA is much improved from it's earlier incarnation (Jaguar), but it about a generation away. Probably a good fit for shops looking to go Sybase across all tiers.
A bit of background - perhaps this should have gone at the beginning - I've used PHP fairly extensively and while I like it as a product, it doesn't really provide the facilities for stateful sessions which is important to the work we do. For the last year we've been using servlets+JServ and a custom built Java app server, with the servlets talking to the app server via RMI. For those following along at home, building an app server is a serious undertaking...
JServ is a nice servlet engine as are commercial competitors like JRun and ServletExpress. If you're just looking to do servlet work, this should be fine. If you're looking to build EJBs and server side Java objects beyond servlets, you'll want something more.
I should also point out that there are obviously lots of other languages that work perfectly well for building database driven, dynamic content sites.
Finally a couple thoughts on EJBs - It's worth noting that EJBs in general are very much a work in progress, so it behooves you to know the issues before selecting them as a development route. It is really a different way of doing things. Tools for EJB development aren't very mature. Also, entity EJBs really don't span multiple tables well and stored procedures are basically out of the picture if you use container managed beans. So, it means that you lose database transparency and distribution of load, both of which are good things in my mind. There are some products in the works to address this (e.g., TopLink for WebLogic), but this is a very new market. Don't work on the cutting edge if you aren't willing to lose some blood...
Finally run out of things to say. Hope this helps...