Doesn't it seem that a lengthy eight-step process for an OS upgrade could be one of linux's major pitfalls when it comes to targeting new users?
Isn't having to fix some things by delving into an arcane database noone understands using "regedit" a turnoff for new windows users? New users should just use the kernel that comes with their distro. Theres no reason anyone _has_ to compile their own shiny new 2.6 kernels. Once it's out of the -test phase, the distros will pick it up, and the users will get their shiny new kernels the same way they got their current ones.
In the mean time, new users shouldn't be recompiling their kernels anymore than they play with regedit under windows.
I'll note that roads did in fact exist before there were state-sponsored expenditures for them; like ships, people are willing to pay part of the costs for the benefits of the travel.
Yeah, private roads used to be the norm. Most places have gone over to public funded and constructed roads because on the whole it works quite a bit better for everyone. Governments purpose is to improve the lives of the governed - defending their lives and rights is only one facet of that, albiet an important one.
How do you get the crew back? It's my understanding that after launch there is no recovery method for crews. So all you can do is tell them thay ain't going to survive re-entry. Would you tell them?
They knew this was a problem before the launch. It wasn't something that only happened on this launch - The problems with the foam have existed for some time. They just didn't do anything about it until the thing fell apart on reentry.
Go to nana-e, and they'll tell you that robots from space run SPEWS, and there's no way to get a hold of them.
/me looks at title of story. Gee, I wonder why they might have this sort of policy?
Some of the crazies who post on nana-e even have the whole country of Brazil banned on their private lists.
So what? I don't know anyone in Brazil. I don't speak Portuguese. Nonetheless, I get quite a bit of SPAM from Brazil. Brazilian ISP's almost universally don't respond to SPAM complaints. Why the hell _shouldn't_ I just blacklist the whole country on a private mailserver? I'm not seeing a downside here.
SPEWS had information too on DNS blackholing (i.e. preventing your users from going to internet sites) and on HTTP blocking. If it was anyone else (the government) who was advocating this, people would be outraged.
So what? I don't want to do business with spammers. Why shouldn't I have access to this sort of information? It's my network, my equipment, I'll not talk to whomever the hell I don't want to talk to. Yeah, they'd be outraged if the government were doing it, because then you don't have a choice. With SPEWS, I choose not to accept mail from Spammers and their ISP's. If you want to, then don't use the list.
The concept of intellectual property was created so that people and companies who invest in the creation of new "things" could re-coup their development investment. This is true for writers, artists, inventors, R&D departments, etc. Some, such as trademark laws, were created to protect consumers from unscupulous people providing fraudulent imitations of recognized products (i.e., they are *VERY GOOD* for consumers).
Close, but not quite. These laws were created so that people would create new things - and that after they'ed recouped cost + some profit, those things would flow into the public domain.
A "news that doesn't require discussion" section with comments disabled. Is there really anything worthwhile to say about this article? Apple's doing the right thing, roughly. Sure you can nit-pick details, but what a waste.
How about just not reading the comments if you don't feel theres anything worthwhile to say?
The good old United States of America has WMD than any other country in the world.
Actually, not quite. While good figures for Chem/Bio are a bit harder to find, at least where it comes to Nukes the Russians are well ahead of the US, at least according to the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists. We've built more in total, but dismantled many as they became obselete.
Re:Hold on there !!!!
on
The Diamond Age
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· Score: 4, Informative
There are a bunch of problems that using a diamond substrate for semiconductors would pose. I mean for one thing, not being a metal but instead a crystal, the resistance to currents is magnitudes greater than for silicon. I agree the thermal properties are grea, but can the other issues be resolved? Long way off folks.
Go get a periodic table and a description of how Semiconductors work.
Silicon isn't really a proper metal. Like carbon, silicon is on the borderline between metals and non-metals. Silicon forms crystals, just like carbon. It's because they form crystals that they function as semi-conductors - Silicon conducts quite poorly on it's own. Only when doped does it become a conductor. When doped with the appropriate substances semi-conductors have either extra valence electrons in the crystalline structure or "holes" where there should be, which serve to carry the current. Doping diamond should work the same way - Same column of the table, same number of valence electrons, similar crystalline structures.
Do you mean that Microsoft was that single company? Why not Sun? Microsoft doesn't sell Linux to customers. Sun does. And since the beginning SCO said that Sun is the only company that should not worry about the lawsuit.
The reason Sun doesn't have to worry about a lawsuit is because they paid quite a bit more and are most definitely covered to use all of the relavent IP. I'd think they'd be the last people to pay up.
Why don't corporations have easy legal means for property disposal after "death", just as Last Wills and Testaments offer individuals a convenient means for avoiding probabe and all those complications?
They do. Assets are liquidated. Banks get paid, bond holders get paid, preferred stock holders get paid, and then common stock holders get anything thats left. Theres no "last will and testement" because the company doesn't get to choose who gets paid off when they liquidate - The courts decide which creditors have first pick. Everything gets assigned to someone. The code the original poster asked about undoubtably belongs to _someone_, either creditors or someone who bought it and gave the money to the creditors.
Are bankruptcy proceedings so sloppy that they leave any property unassigned?
Generally not. Creditors tend to fight tooth and nail for anything thats of value.
I'm worried for a friend of mine who runs an informative site on Arab nations. It seems that excersise of First Amendment rights puts a big bullseye for Patriot Act and all sorts of unnecessary national defense matters.
Unless your friend is a dumbass 5kr1p4 k1dd13 wannabe who goes around defacing web sites and claiming credit for it and storing Molotov cocktails in his home, I think he's probably alright here.
Hey, I remember this from last time it was possted
on
Linking Dangerously
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· Score: 2, Insightful
As I recall, last time it was posted there was a great deal of outcry and outrage about how the police had raided him for the content of his website - only it turned out that hey, they raided him for cracking and defacing a number of (government) web sites. And they found explosives. But that wasn't mentioned, in the original story cause that would screw up the image of the government stomping on some poor, innocent anarchist who was only espousing his political beliefs. Lovely how nothings changed.
Um, my employer is a pretty normal engineering and manufacturing company. We had 100 Crays a few years back, tho we are down to a mere 32 now. And to keep the/.ers happy, yes, we have started running our (CFD, non linear dynamics, FEA, etc) programs on Linux clusters instead. It was rather cool to have access to 100 Crays from my desktop, but pointless, since the queue time for the Crays exceeded the solve time on my workstation for my jobs.
My point was, you don't buy them to run business apps.
Also, you're apparently not a particularly normal engineering and manufacturing company - you're a rather _large_ engineering and manufacturing company, as you own own at a minimum a couple hundred million dollars in supercomputing capability. What model would these 100 crays be?
Re:The trick is keeping ahead of the commodity guy
on
Time For A Cray Comeback?
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· Score: 2, Insightful
The new Japanese NEC supercomputer came with a price tag of about $160 million if I remember correctly (some estimates say that it took $1G in research funding) and hits 35 TFlops (sustained). #3 on the Top 500 supercomputers list is a Beowulf cluster with 2304 processors coming in at 7.6 TFlops (sustained). Even figuring $2000/processor + interconnect, that puts the Beowulf cluster at around $5 million or 1/32 of the cost for 1/5th of the performance (roughly speaking).
Number of TFLOPS isn't everything. The move back to vector style processors in super computing has been largely inspired by the fact that beowulf clusters work really well for some problems - and very, very poorly for others. If you've got a problem that divides nicely into discrete chunks that don't require a lot of interprocessor communication, then yeah, sure go with beowulf. But complex simulation problems have a tendancy to leave most of the processors idling while the cluster talks to itself due to network speed issues.
Probably not. Cray made some money back when a supercomputer was something that an ordinary company might need. The capabilities of "normal" computers was much more limited then today, so there was a much higher percentage of the buying public likely to want something more. These days the vast majority of users are happy with something mainstream
Cray has never sold computers that are anything like a normal company would need. Cray machines are made for heavy number crunching - Vector processors are made for simulation tasks. They're very good at them. However they perform abyssmally at most other tasks - buying one for use as say, a database or application server would be stupid.
But, you ask, isn't there a lunatic fringe who wants more power at any price? Well, the lunatic fringe ain't what it used to be. During the heyday of cray you got a damn fine box and nothing else. Cray didn't want to worry about your software--or even an OS.
Last time I checked Cray shipped UNICOS with their machines. It's a fairly BSDish UNIX variant. It's a bit of an oddball, but not all that much more of a PITA than say, IRIX or AIX. Want to port your beowulf apps? No problem! When I spent a summer working on a T3E all of our multi processor apps used MPI. Vectorization of C and FORTRAN apps is largely taken care of by the compiler. So wheres all this programmer investment you're talking about? Most of the kinds of apps that you're going to run on a Cray (Weather models, crash simulations, Gaussian for chemical sims, etc) already run on a Cray, and you're probably going to be modifying them anyway.
I think the long term answer is that cray will be a very small niche player, selling to a very select group of (U.S.) government agencies, with the occasional pro forma business customer thrown in so the company can issue press releases. Even most government facilities aren't in a position to buy a cray anymore. (Research money is fairly tight, recoding costs are prohibative, MTBF's are more of an issue then they used to be, etc.)
Cray isn't in the selling large business systems. Cray is, always has been, and likely always will be a competitor in the scientific computing market. Yeah, this means they're not going to be a Sun or IBM that sell to business customers for business needs, but that's not the sort of company they're trying to be so the comparison is pointless. They're selling machines to people who need to do heavy duty number crunching. This means Universities, government agencies and large companies doing lots of product research. Typically the cost of using these sorts of machines is spread around - frequently instead of buying the machine, you'll go to a company like Network Computing Services and buy time on a machine. It works out well. There will always be a certain number of organizations that need this sort of heavy duty computing power, and Cray will be there to serve them.
Then there's the question of... what do you need a supercomputer for? The applications are pretty limited for a need for a petaflop computer, unless your doing mass storage, cryptography (cracking), or simulations.
Actually, this sort of machine would be a total waste for mass data storage. On the other hand, there are a great many private sector uses for this sort of machine. Ford for instance runs a number of their crash test simulations on Cray vector machines.
You know, I'd totally forgotten that game...Wonder if it'll still run under 2k?
Re:on second thought, pass the lead gloves please.
on
United Nuclear
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· Score: 1
In the former German Democratic Republic, thousands of miners were working with Uranium ore. Twenty years earlier they died than the rest of the people, by average.
That would probably be because they were breathing the crap. If I recall correctly, the GDR was the eastern portion of Germany, so safety precautions probably weren't the greatest, and miners have a way of kicking of early anyway. Alpha particles(the most common product of natural uranium decay) are generally stopped by the skin, and in fact can be sufficiently sheilded by a sheet of paper. Not particularly dangerous to hold, as long as your not keeping it in a pocket next to the family jewels.
That said, you're not going to catch me holding onto a big chuck of it without a damn good reason.:)
I used to own both an old Indy and an Indigo2, both of which would be the equivilant of an 8086 in PeeCee computing terms.. but they still cruised along even on the latest version of Irix, and were surprisingly usable:)
Most of the Indy's I've seen are in the 125 Mhz range...They may have made much slower ones, but these are a lot closer to original pentium than 8086.
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Isn't having to fix some things by delving into an arcane database noone understands using "regedit" a turnoff for new windows users? New users should just use the kernel that comes with their distro. Theres no reason anyone _has_ to compile their own shiny new 2.6 kernels. Once it's out of the -test phase, the distros will pick it up, and the users will get their shiny new kernels the same way they got their current ones.
In the mean time, new users shouldn't be recompiling their kernels anymore than they play with regedit under windows.
Get managed switches. If they're spewing Blaster, turn'm off. Once they've fixed it, let them have their network access back.
Yeah, private roads used to be the norm. Most places have gone over to public funded and constructed roads because on the whole it works quite a bit better for everyone. Governments purpose is to improve the lives of the governed - defending their lives and rights is only one facet of that, albiet an important one.
How do you get the crew back? It's my understanding that after launch there is no recovery method for crews. So all you can do is tell them thay ain't going to survive re-entry. Would you tell them?
They knew this was a problem before the launch. It wasn't something that only happened on this launch - The problems with the foam have existed for some time. They just didn't do anything about it until the thing fell apart on reentry.
Some of the crazies who post on nana-e even have the whole country of Brazil banned on their private lists.
So what? I don't know anyone in Brazil. I don't speak Portuguese. Nonetheless, I get quite a bit of SPAM from Brazil. Brazilian ISP's almost universally don't respond to SPAM complaints. Why the hell _shouldn't_ I just blacklist the whole country on a private mailserver? I'm not seeing a downside here.
SPEWS had information too on DNS blackholing (i.e. preventing your users from going to internet sites) and on HTTP blocking. If it was anyone else (the government) who was advocating this, people would be outraged.
So what? I don't want to do business with spammers. Why shouldn't I have access to this sort of information? It's my network, my equipment, I'll not talk to whomever the hell I don't want to talk to. Yeah, they'd be outraged if the government were doing it, because then you don't have a choice. With SPEWS, I choose not to accept mail from Spammers and their ISP's. If you want to, then don't use the list.
Bourne, Korn, C Shell, zsh, Bash....
Close, but not quite. These laws were created so that people would create new things - and that after they'ed recouped cost + some profit, those things would flow into the public domain.
I don't believe I've ever seen a lead acid battery used in a cell phone. Generally they're using somewhat more advanced technologies like Lithium.
If they've got 100 employees and they're producing 14,000 messages a day, they're a pretty ineffective spamhaus. :)
How about just not reading the comments if you don't feel theres anything worthwhile to say?
Actually, not quite. While good figures for Chem/Bio are a bit harder to find, at least where it comes to Nukes the Russians are well ahead of the US, at least according to the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists. We've built more in total, but dismantled many as they became obselete.
Go get a periodic table and a description of how Semiconductors work.
Silicon isn't really a proper metal. Like carbon, silicon is on the borderline between metals and non-metals. Silicon forms crystals, just like carbon. It's because they form crystals that they function as semi-conductors - Silicon conducts quite poorly on it's own. Only when doped does it become a conductor. When doped with the appropriate substances semi-conductors have either extra valence electrons in the crystalline structure or "holes" where there should be, which serve to carry the current. Doping diamond should work the same way - Same column of the table, same number of valence electrons, similar crystalline structures.
The reason Sun doesn't have to worry about a lawsuit is because they paid quite a bit more and are most definitely covered to use all of the relavent IP. I'd think they'd be the last people to pay up.
You do realize that the character was named after the car, right?
They do. Assets are liquidated. Banks get paid, bond holders get paid, preferred stock holders get paid, and then common stock holders get anything thats left. Theres no "last will and testement" because the company doesn't get to choose who gets paid off when they liquidate - The courts decide which creditors have first pick. Everything gets assigned to someone. The code the original poster asked about undoubtably belongs to _someone_, either creditors or someone who bought it and gave the money to the creditors.
Are bankruptcy proceedings so sloppy that they leave any property unassigned?
Generally not. Creditors tend to fight tooth and nail for anything thats of value.
Unless your friend is a dumbass 5kr1p4 k1dd13 wannabe who goes around defacing web sites and claiming credit for it and storing Molotov cocktails in his home, I think he's probably alright here.
As I recall, last time it was posted there was a great deal of outcry and outrage about how the police had raided him for the content of his website - only it turned out that hey, they raided him for cracking and defacing a number of (government) web sites. And they found explosives. But that wasn't mentioned, in the original story cause that would screw up the image of the government stomping on some poor, innocent anarchist who was only espousing his political beliefs. Lovely how nothings changed.
Crappy old ones at a guess.
I would guess J90's or C90's....
My point was, you don't buy them to run business apps.
Also, you're apparently not a particularly normal engineering and manufacturing company - you're a rather _large_ engineering and manufacturing company, as you own own at a minimum a couple hundred million dollars in supercomputing capability. What model would these 100 crays be?
Number of TFLOPS isn't everything. The move back to vector style processors in super computing has been largely inspired by the fact that beowulf clusters work really well for some problems - and very, very poorly for others. If you've got a problem that divides nicely into discrete chunks that don't require a lot of interprocessor communication, then yeah, sure go with beowulf. But complex simulation problems have a tendancy to leave most of the processors idling while the cluster talks to itself due to network speed issues.
Cray has never sold computers that are anything like a normal company would need. Cray machines are made for heavy number crunching - Vector processors are made for simulation tasks. They're very good at them. However they perform abyssmally at most other tasks - buying one for use as say, a database or application server would be stupid.
But, you ask, isn't there a lunatic fringe who wants more power at any price? Well, the lunatic fringe ain't what it used to be. During the heyday of cray you got a damn fine box and nothing else. Cray didn't want to worry about your software--or even an OS.
Last time I checked Cray shipped UNICOS with their machines. It's a fairly BSDish UNIX variant. It's a bit of an oddball, but not all that much more of a PITA than say, IRIX or AIX. Want to port your beowulf apps? No problem! When I spent a summer working on a T3E all of our multi processor apps used MPI. Vectorization of C and FORTRAN apps is largely taken care of by the compiler. So wheres all this programmer investment you're talking about? Most of the kinds of apps that you're going to run on a Cray (Weather models, crash simulations, Gaussian for chemical sims, etc) already run on a Cray, and you're probably going to be modifying them anyway.
I think the long term answer is that cray will be a very small niche player, selling to a very select group of (U.S.) government agencies, with the occasional pro forma business customer thrown in so the company can issue press releases. Even most government facilities aren't in a position to buy a cray anymore. (Research money is fairly tight, recoding costs are prohibative, MTBF's are more of an issue then they used to be, etc.)
Cray isn't in the selling large business systems. Cray is, always has been, and likely always will be a competitor in the scientific computing market. Yeah, this means they're not going to be a Sun or IBM that sell to business customers for business needs, but that's not the sort of company they're trying to be so the comparison is pointless. They're selling machines to people who need to do heavy duty number crunching. This means Universities, government agencies and large companies doing lots of product research. Typically the cost of using these sorts of machines is spread around - frequently instead of buying the machine, you'll go to a company like Network Computing Services and buy time on a machine. It works out well. There will always be a certain number of organizations that need this sort of heavy duty computing power, and Cray will be there to serve them.
Actually, this sort of machine would be a total waste for mass data storage. On the other hand, there are a great many private sector uses for this sort of machine. Ford for instance runs a number of their crash test simulations on Cray vector machines.
You know, I'd totally forgotten that game...Wonder if it'll still run under 2k?
That would probably be because they were breathing the crap. If I recall correctly, the GDR was the eastern portion of Germany, so safety precautions probably weren't the greatest, and miners have a way of kicking of early anyway. Alpha particles(the most common product of natural uranium decay) are generally stopped by the skin, and in fact can be sufficiently sheilded by a sheet of paper. Not particularly dangerous to hold, as long as your not keeping it in a pocket next to the family jewels.
That said, you're not going to catch me holding onto a big chuck of it without a damn good reason. :)
Most of the Indy's I've seen are in the 125 Mhz range...They may have made much slower ones, but these are a lot closer to original pentium than 8086.