I was a Xenix 386 and later a SCO ODT developer. Frankly, their stuff had all the problems of bad open source stuff but without the source code to allow you to repair/rebuild. The Microsoft/Lattice C compiler sucked big time and it was the devil's own job getting gcc up. It was easier to get it up under VAX/VMS (without all the posix support that it had in later years).
is at the front-end, because seriously, it spends most of its time waiting for the user and people don't worry so much when their PC crashes.
At the back end you want fast and reliable code that easily model your business processes.
The world's largest electronic excahnge for the trading of derivatives Eurex runs on a cluster of four Alphas running VMS. The backend is written partly in C but mostly in COBOL. The language is very good for file I/O with ISAM support embedded in the language. New stuff continues to be written in it because it really makes programming easier (a lot more transparent) and it is extremely fast.
Regrettably, the thing that ruins it is that we couldn't use MOVE CORRESPONDING because Accidenture were responsible for much of the original stuff and they had sucky coding conventions.
An 11/750, I would hate to see your utilities bill!!! To think that we used to run multiplayer trek battles on a 750, and in just 8MB of memory. My Vaxen have been relegated to the basement by the wife because of the noise. I do want to get the Alpha out again though.
There have been some attempts at EVE/EDT style versions of Emacs. Not particulary wonderful though and really for the character mode terminal (or Xterm).
Some people were selling TPU workalikes for Unix, but I don't know what happened there. Certainly, there hasn't been any open source versions.
The PDP-11 was a mini, but the VAX started as a "Departmental Computer" or midi even though there were also microVaxen. By the time you got on to the 6000 or bigger, they were clearly mainframes. I once worked with a 9000, and that was definitely mainframe material.
An 11/40 ran with a cycle time of around 1us. This is kind of comparable to a 6502 based machine. Instructions were very much CISC, so they could take many cycles to execute (up to around ten or so for many instructions and more for stuff like integer divide). However, the PDP 11 instruction set (devised by Gordon Bell) was much richer than the 6502. The machine could be easily single stepped and boasted a real front panel with lots of flashing lights and rows of switches.
The processor was on three or four boards, but then you had memory and peripheral controllers on additional boards. Subsequent models were faster and often smaller.
A fairly minimal 11/40 installation would occupy a medium sized rack. With a second hard disk you had to have a second or use a full-sized rack.
When the FT decided to produce a German language edition, they kept the distinctive colour, but made a much more interesting paper, presenting complex information simply.
When they did the web site for the German edition, they carried on with the new graphic design producing one that seems better than their English language site. Even if you are a non German-language speaker, I would reccomend a visit just to look at the design. As a side note, the FT as a newspaper is never big on pictures and the web site carries on with that tradition.
Interestingly enough, the site remains free for the time being.
Yes, local water can upset foreign stomachs but most locals can tolerate it. However, not the young, the old nor the very ill.
Fun thing is that juts stick the water into a clear polythene container (not too large), leave it for eight hour in the sunshine and the UV kills most of the bacterial spores
Once you have the runs, it is nasty as you dehydrate and it kills the vulnerable, again, easy to fix with the right sugar/salt ration in soime relative clean water (see above).
All of this, plus many other things are factoids that exist on the web. You can teach some of these things but not all. This is where literacy is important and access to information.
First, GPS doesn't like shielding and wants to look upwards. Surrounding it with a salty wet sponge isn't going to help reception. GPS needs to orientate to a horizon, otherwise it won't see enough satellites.
Something embedded transmitting vital signs and GPS will use a reasonable amount of power. Batteries can't hack it because rechargeables need replacement after one to two years. Its no problem if it is something to help you live (i.e., a pacemaker), otherwise would you really want the thing replaced so often?
Personally, I think this is just a project to get Homeland Insecurity money and VC funding.
On the whole, I find the Lords rather better than the senate. Unlike the Senate, and more like the US Supreme Court, appointees to the House of Lords can be refreshingly independent of their party. The greatest threat that can be applied is the withdrawal of the party whip - which doesn't mean a lot unless you hold a post.
and put it next to your ISP connection. Run Squid, DNS and a POP Email server from there. Run a secure SMTP relay as well. Firewalling the community is also possible at this point, which can reduce problems dur to misconfigured downstream computers.
A T1 isn't really that fast, especially if everyone starts hitting it at the same time. However, you can significantly reduce your bandwidth requirements to the rest of the world by using a buffer. A linux box isn't that expensive to buy or to run compared with the other hardware.
Whilst it seems strange to talk about this in response to a question about the last-mile, it is very important to optimise upstream bandwidth use.
As for downstream connectivity, it really does depend upon the distances and terrain. If you lay it yourself, remember you said this was an agricultural community. Don't bury it under worked land. Try to keep clear of overhead copper, otherwise ensure that both ends are well protected against lightning surges.
If you can find a good line of sight then wireless LAN is still interesting (an antenna on top of a pole is still typically cheaper than a buried cable).
I hope you are only blocking the word, not the string.
In the UK, there are the counties of Essex, Middlesex and Sussex. There is also the region of Wessex. There are a number of organisations that have *sex in their domain name, including, I would guess, the police force.
My problem with military procurement is that there is a progression from the military and government to the companies selling the hardware. This smells of potential corruption. Bringing more air in the form of publicity tends to reduce this.
If a fraction of the amount of money was spent in the state department that is wasted in defence, then it becomes much less likely that wars would have to be fought. Forget the SDIs, the main danger is asymmetric warfare and no ABM, SDI or whatever will ever help against that.
I disagree with you about the Soviet Union though. The main factors that allowed the fall, was the downing of flight KL007, and the landing of Mathias Rust in Red Square. These two incidents helped Gorbachov initiate a reform within the military which allowed political change to happen.
Unfortunately, the reform did not continue and the Russian military machine remains incredibly corrupt.
I really don't mind a military, but I don't like one that is to big and in bed with the manufacturers. The last time this happened, it was Germany in the thirties. I don't mind government sponsored projects, but lets try to keep them in the open as much as possible, so we can be sure that the best bid really does win and that contractors are properly evaluated on performance.
Some projects such as the original US space program started off secret, but that was the time of the cold war. Afterwards, almost any design detail was made available. Even better are projects where government aid helps other countries through American companies. Such projects are invaluable for fostering good relations and helps open the door to real commercial deals in the future.
I am aware that some technology does trickle down out of the military (and of the origins of some technologies), but many more come about through open commercial competition and international cooperation/competition.
If the military contractors want something new to do, there are plenty of other ways of spending our dollars that could address real problems.
I have sat down and talk with some military about the technology they use. It is generally somewhat behind the times, because of the extensive test procedure it has to go through.
However, never underestimate the stupidity of a tired/bored person in the middle of the night - whether civillian or military. Procedures help, but they don't address all problems especially when in a hurry. Think of the accidental destruction of civillian flights. Most technology in the field requires extensive modifications, simply because the designers couldn't forsee how it would be used.
The thing is that we know that Patriot doesn't work very well in the field (except against friendly aircraft). We know also that the collateral damage from the enemy missle being destroyed is also quite bad.
SDI is only really effective against ballistic missles in their boost phase. They are more difficult to destroy in their extra-atmosphere and reentry phases. If not completely destroyed during the boost phase (likely), they are more likely to go off course and go somewhere unintended.
You talk about the probability of the thing working and compare it with an ICBM. Well, no ICBMs were launched in anger, but enough test firings took place to ensure a high probability of success. Not so with SDI.
The moon program was civil and everything about it was public knowledge. SDI is military and classified. We know that tests have been falsified, we don't know the payola between the gun pushers and those involved with promoting the program within the Government. Any technology spin-offs will start out as classified and remain so. Mostly to prevent people finding out who was paid, how much and for what.
It is interesting that some encoders tend to do bad things with the sound. What does this have to do with the video playback quality, well if the player has to seek between the video stream and the sound stream, then video (requiring the higher bandwdth) suffers. Playing from a fast HD masks some of this out, but usually not from CD.
For whatever reason, some programs mess up the spacing of the video and sound streams, for example, Variable Bit-Rate Audio often gives problems. The thing is that it isn't the video codec itself, just the delays getting sound and vision to run concurrently.
I remember those BSD-style credits. It took ages for the system to display them all during boot. If someone wants to build a 'click-here for developer credits' into an app then its fine by me. What I don't want is involuntary scrolling credits, particularly on app startup. If this leaked into the kernel, we would be in dead trouble - wait three days for a boot!!!!
PDP's were relatively low tech but had some excellent software such as MUMPS (a database-RAD system, much loved in the health sector) and RSX-11S/M/M+ which seemed to do well for real time. At one stage you would find these boxes hidden away in all kinds of control systems. Although Digital later produced true microprocessors, which were PDPs on a chip, they were too expensive and too late.
If you want real fun, look at the +5v bus-bars inside a VAX 6000 through 9000. They were big and exposed. Engineers must remove wrist watches etc. whilst working inside the thing.
Not just uClibc, but anything that is LGPL, Actually, that includes quite a lot. Even with GPL s/w, it isn't a problem if your app is decoupled from the GPL part, i.e., not linked against. It can still be part of a system where a GPL'ed program feeds data to a propietary one or vice versa.
I think the ICL 1900 series were less related to Leo and more to Atlas. I used George 3 a few times, and it could handle multiple interactive users.
Slowly.
Still it had rather less memory than my mobile phone.
However it had quite a nice file system which featured an automatic archiver (filesweeper) that ensured that anything you wanted was sitting on tape and a day's restore away! Still it came with ISAM by default, and had some useful features. Command processing was also a lot easier than with IBM.
I also had a chance to use an Atlas running the Titan 2 operating system. That, despite IBM's advertising, was the first paged memory machine and operating system in the world. In performance terms, it too was hardly outstanding but I was using it for graphics programming in Fortran and displaying on a Tek4010 and 4014.
There were a variety of other machines and producers knocking around, but somehow, amidst all that rationalisation and despite a lot of innovations, the industry lost itself. I suppose with a somewhat small local market and the lack of a language barrier for the US to come in, meant that the UK manufacturers could only survie for a limited time.
However some of the technology lives on. The ARM architecture, so-loved in portable low power devices came from the UK.
I have lost track of who owns Lyons now, but I believe it could be the Tata group from India. I wonder how many there know that at one time, they led the world in techical innnovation.
The MS SQL Server just spreads the data around. It is very primitive reallz, but then MS Clustering has no clustered file system.
The problem is that you need a lot of cooperation between the RDBMS and the host OS. It is very hard even for Oracle as they have to solve the problem for eash host OS that they support except for Oracle/RDB, which only supports OpenVMS and Tru64. Oracle/RDB was bought from Digital whilst iit was having financial problems. It was engineered to work well on Digital's cluster technology. Oracle attempoted to strip mine Oracle/RDB for the technology and the customers but this seem not to have worked. The technology was too specific to the OS and many of the customers didn't want to move.
What does this mean here. Well, with Linux we have OS source. We have the source code of MySQL and Postgress, so it would be relatively easy to build some cluster services into the OS and to build the support in to the RDMBS.
What Digital did was to build a cluster wide file-system, where storage could be attached to any node (or more than one node and would be served transparently to the rest of the cluster). For this, you needed a distributed lock manager to synchronize access..
This is also pretty vital for the relational database management system and Digital created an OS level 2PC service as well, again kernel integration helped speed up the prepare-to-commit/commit type transactions. Fast cluster comms are also useful, but these alreadz exist for Linux from a number of vendors.
It *will* happen for the opensource databases, people have the sources and eventually because of the ability to integrate the kernel support, it will probably work better than with 3P databases.
My apologies. I wasn't suggesting that you were Microtrolling as I agree other sites have put something up about this. However, I do feel that this seems a little like a marketing-lead disinformation rumor. Sony would be very stupid to blow the favourable view that the PS has in the gaming/hacking community by doing this.
Re:An earlier Difference Engine....
on
Krawtchouk's Mind
·
· Score: 1
Ada Byron was also a gambler and was interested in a means of calculating odds.
Slashdot Mirror
I was a Xenix 386 and later a SCO ODT developer. Frankly, their stuff had all the problems of bad open source stuff but without the source code to allow you to repair/rebuild. The Microsoft/Lattice C compiler sucked big time and it was the devil's own job getting gcc up. It was easier to get it up under VAX/VMS (without all the posix support that it had in later years).
At the back end you want fast and reliable code that easily model your business processes.
The world's largest electronic excahnge for the trading of derivatives Eurex runs on a cluster of four Alphas running VMS. The backend is written partly in C but mostly in COBOL. The language is very good for file I/O with ISAM support embedded in the language. New stuff continues to be written in it because it really makes programming easier (a lot more transparent) and it is extremely fast.
Regrettably, the thing that ruins it is that we couldn't use MOVE CORRESPONDING because Accidenture were responsible for much of the original stuff and they had sucky coding conventions.
An 11/750, I would hate to see your utilities bill!!! To think that we used to run multiplayer trek battles on a 750, and in just 8MB of memory. My Vaxen have been relegated to the basement by the wife because of the noise. I do want to get the Alpha out again though.
Some people were selling TPU workalikes for Unix, but I don't know what happened there. Certainly, there hasn't been any open source versions.
The PDP-11 was a mini, but the VAX started as a "Departmental Computer" or midi even though there were also microVaxen. By the time you got on to the 6000 or bigger, they were clearly mainframes. I once worked with a 9000, and that was definitely mainframe material.
You really don't want to do the other RPG, especially the earlier releases (RPGII/III).
The processor was on three or four boards, but then you had memory and peripheral controllers on additional boards. Subsequent models were faster and often smaller.
A fairly minimal 11/40 installation would occupy a medium sized rack. With a second hard disk you had to have a second or use a full-sized rack.
Jumping to to the next message, pdp-11 style:
(Used by threaded code compilers like Fortran)
When they did the web site for the German edition, they carried on with the new graphic design producing one that seems better than their English language site. Even if you are a non German-language speaker, I would reccomend a visit just to look at the design. As a side note, the FT as a newspaper is never big on pictures and the web site carries on with that tradition.
Interestingly enough, the site remains free for the time being.
on water cooling??? Sorry!!!!!
Fun thing is that juts stick the water into a clear polythene container (not too large), leave it for eight hour in the sunshine and the UV kills most of the bacterial spores
Once you have the runs, it is nasty as you dehydrate and it kills the vulnerable, again, easy to fix with the right sugar/salt ration in soime relative clean water (see above).
All of this, plus many other things are factoids that exist on the web. You can teach some of these things but not all. This is where literacy is important and access to information.
Something embedded transmitting vital signs and GPS will use a reasonable amount of power. Batteries can't hack it because rechargeables need replacement after one to two years. Its no problem if it is something to help you live (i.e., a pacemaker), otherwise would you really want the thing replaced so often?
Personally, I think this is just a project to get Homeland Insecurity money and VC funding.
On the whole, I find the Lords rather better than the senate. Unlike the Senate, and more like the US Supreme Court, appointees to the House of Lords can be refreshingly independent of their party. The greatest threat that can be applied is the withdrawal of the party whip - which doesn't mean a lot unless you hold a post.
A T1 isn't really that fast, especially if everyone starts hitting it at the same time. However, you can significantly reduce your bandwidth requirements to the rest of the world by using a buffer. A linux box isn't that expensive to buy or to run compared with the other hardware.
Whilst it seems strange to talk about this in response to a question about the last-mile, it is very important to optimise upstream bandwidth use.
As for downstream connectivity, it really does depend upon the distances and terrain. If you lay it yourself, remember you said this was an agricultural community. Don't bury it under worked land. Try to keep clear of overhead copper, otherwise ensure that both ends are well protected against lightning surges.
If you can find a good line of sight then wireless LAN is still interesting (an antenna on top of a pole is still typically cheaper than a buried cable).
In the UK, there are the counties of Essex, Middlesex and Sussex. There is also the region of Wessex. There are a number of organisations that have *sex in their domain name, including, I would guess, the police force.
If a fraction of the amount of money was spent in the state department that is wasted in defence, then it becomes much less likely that wars would have to be fought. Forget the SDIs, the main danger is asymmetric warfare and no ABM, SDI or whatever will ever help against that.
I disagree with you about the Soviet Union though. The main factors that allowed the fall, was the downing of flight KL007, and the landing of Mathias Rust in Red Square. These two incidents helped Gorbachov initiate a reform within the military which allowed political change to happen. Unfortunately, the reform did not continue and the Russian military machine remains incredibly corrupt.
I really don't mind a military, but I don't like one that is to big and in bed with the manufacturers. The last time this happened, it was Germany in the thirties. I don't mind government sponsored projects, but lets try to keep them in the open as much as possible, so we can be sure that the best bid really does win and that contractors are properly evaluated on performance.
Some projects such as the original US space program started off secret, but that was the time of the cold war. Afterwards, almost any design detail was made available. Even better are projects where government aid helps other countries through American companies. Such projects are invaluable for fostering good relations and helps open the door to real commercial deals in the future.
I am aware that some technology does trickle down out of the military (and of the origins of some technologies), but many more come about through open commercial competition and international cooperation/competition.
If the military contractors want something new to do, there are plenty of other ways of spending our dollars that could address real problems.
The thing is that we know that Patriot doesn't work very well in the field (except against friendly aircraft). We know also that the collateral damage from the enemy missle being destroyed is also quite bad.
SDI is only really effective against ballistic missles in their boost phase. They are more difficult to destroy in their extra-atmosphere and reentry phases. If not completely destroyed during the boost phase (likely), they are more likely to go off course and go somewhere unintended.
You talk about the probability of the thing working and compare it with an ICBM. Well, no ICBMs were launched in anger, but enough test firings took place to ensure a high probability of success. Not so with SDI.
The moon program was civil and everything about it was public knowledge. SDI is military and classified. We know that tests have been falsified, we don't know the payola between the gun pushers and those involved with promoting the program within the Government. Any technology spin-offs will start out as classified and remain so. Mostly to prevent people finding out who was paid, how much and for what.
For whatever reason, some programs mess up the spacing of the video and sound streams, for example, Variable Bit-Rate Audio often gives problems. The thing is that it isn't the video codec itself, just the delays getting sound and vision to run concurrently.
I remember those BSD-style credits. It took ages for the system to display them all during boot. If someone wants to build a 'click-here for developer credits' into an app then its fine by me. What I don't want is involuntary scrolling credits, particularly on app startup. If this leaked into the kernel, we would be in dead trouble - wait three days for a boot!!!!
If you want real fun, look at the +5v bus-bars inside a VAX 6000 through 9000. They were big and exposed. Engineers must remove wrist watches etc. whilst working inside the thing.
Not just uClibc, but anything that is LGPL, Actually, that includes quite a lot. Even with GPL s/w, it isn't a problem if your app is decoupled from the GPL part, i.e., not linked against. It can still be part of a system where a GPL'ed program feeds data to a propietary one or vice versa.
Slowly.
Still it had rather less memory than my mobile phone.
However it had quite a nice file system which featured an automatic archiver (filesweeper) that ensured that anything you wanted was sitting on tape and a day's restore away! Still it came with ISAM by default, and had some useful features. Command processing was also a lot easier than with IBM.
I also had a chance to use an Atlas running the Titan 2 operating system. That, despite IBM's advertising, was the first paged memory machine and operating system in the world. In performance terms, it too was hardly outstanding but I was using it for graphics programming in Fortran and displaying on a Tek4010 and 4014.
There were a variety of other machines and producers knocking around, but somehow, amidst all that rationalisation and despite a lot of innovations, the industry lost itself. I suppose with a somewhat small local market and the lack of a language barrier for the US to come in, meant that the UK manufacturers could only survie for a limited time.
However some of the technology lives on. The ARM architecture, so-loved in portable low power devices came from the UK.
I have lost track of who owns Lyons now, but I believe it could be the Tata group from India. I wonder how many there know that at one time, they led the world in techical innnovation.
apt4rpm works very nicely for RH. It will not auto update kernels (I regard this as a feature) but it will pull them down if you ask specifically.
The problem is that you need a lot of cooperation between the RDBMS and the host OS. It is very hard even for Oracle as they have to solve the problem for eash host OS that they support except for Oracle/RDB, which only supports OpenVMS and Tru64. Oracle/RDB was bought from Digital whilst iit was having financial problems. It was engineered to work well on Digital's cluster technology. Oracle attempoted to strip mine Oracle/RDB for the technology and the customers but this seem not to have worked. The technology was too specific to the OS and many of the customers didn't want to move.
What does this mean here. Well, with Linux we have OS source. We have the source code of MySQL and Postgress, so it would be relatively easy to build some cluster services into the OS and to build the support in to the RDMBS.
What Digital did was to build a cluster wide file-system, where storage could be attached to any node (or more than one node and would be served transparently to the rest of the cluster). For this, you needed a distributed lock manager to synchronize access.. This is also pretty vital for the relational database management system and Digital created an OS level 2PC service as well, again kernel integration helped speed up the prepare-to-commit/commit type transactions. Fast cluster comms are also useful, but these alreadz exist for Linux from a number of vendors.
It *will* happen for the opensource databases, people have the sources and eventually because of the ability to integrate the kernel support, it will probably work better than with 3P databases.
My apologies. I wasn't suggesting that you were Microtrolling as I agree other sites have put something up about this. However, I do feel that this seems a little like a marketing-lead disinformation rumor. Sony would be very stupid to blow the favourable view that the PS has in the gaming/hacking community by doing this.
Ada Byron was also a gambler and was interested in a means of calculating odds.