Amen brother! I was in charge of designing a new network for my families medical cabinet. The goal was/is to go electronically only. My brother, not being a technical guy, had heard all about that new wireless hype. So I tried hunting down wireless drivers for Linux and that was the first obstacle. Proper WEP encryption wasn't there yet either. The idea of Joe Random Wardriver accessing confidential medical records wasn't all that thrilling. Sharing bandwidth with 15 PCs across two buildings would have been a challenge. So we went completely Cat5 for around 12000 Euros. This included cabling with about 50 Cat5 jacks, 2 Telesyn switches and optical fiber for connecting two buildings across the street. Not a bad deal if you ask me. Haven't looked back since.
Re:The backdoor may be in the hardware
on
No Backdoor in Vista
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
What a bummer! I've got a tale to tell. We've got a small network of aboout 15 PCs, booting via PXE into diskless workstations. Three of them are Dell Dimensions. For the best part of the last 9 months I've been experiencing strange outages of the ENTIRE network, taking the switches (two Telesyns, qualtiy stuff) to a grinding halt. So someday I moved my butt into the cellar when this happened and started to pull the cat5 cables out of the switch, one by one. I had a laptop attached to the switch and pinged the server. When I pulled the cable of one of the Dells, the network was reanimated! The Dell PC in question was turned OFF! Stunned, I called Telesyn, they told me to flash the system (which I actually did, well knowing it wouldn't better the situation). I then proceeded to call Dell, which was, of course, a waste of time. They told me to upgrade the Bios from the actual version to the same version. Which I did (I feel like an idiot now). They then told me if I didn't use a Dell switch along with their PCs there'd be no support, guarantee, etc., yadda, yadda. You may have opened my eyes, thanks....
I know that nobody here ever RTFA, so here's my executive summary: "An exciting opportunity for leveraging our core business strategy and enhancement of our portfolio through technological synergy effects with our premier after-market partners."
* Formula one pilots are usually very good athletes, doing some kind of workout daily. You, the average slashdotter, wouldn't survive three laps of a race. * except for engine and gear box management, no electronic control is allowed: no ABS, no traction control, no adaptive damping, no remote control from the pits (except for data recording) * aerodynamics are indeed very important; no one in his right mind would invest millions of dollars into a computer cluster just for the kick of it. It's an iterative process: find several possible approximations of your aerodynamical setup on the computer; then test it in the wind tunnel, squeezing out the last and most important percentages of lift / drag ratios. * I'd like to see somebody around here doing a lap in less than double the time a formula one driver could do. * current control technologies ("robot drivers") would lose out *big* against even an average driver. This is not my opinion, but those of experts (drivers feeling their car's reaction "in the butt").
Gnuplot, Python, awk, bash, and sometimes even C make your day when analyzing megabytes of data.
I ususally find it more convenient to come up with some hacked-up solution rather than to study Excel or OOo documentation only to realize later that Excel doesn't like the raw ASCII format my data is saved in.
I've just finished downloading 3.5 and burning it on 5 CDs. Guess I NEED the new version though in order to try the new ACPI functonality of kernel 2.6... Sh*t, s*it, shi*!
Ok, so I can't mod this discussion anymore, but it has to be said... Seeing all the stunts that have been pulled by the big lobbyists in the last year or so, in order to pass the software-patent litigati^W legislation (I live in Europe, and followed the debate, more or less), it is not at all unlikely that the Green Party of Munich uses a different tactic now to get a broader audience's attention. Remmeber, the upcoming law might be ratified by the Europeean Parliament in no more than 6 weeks!
Ok, with the risk of being the smart ass of the week... "Mach 10" means: the velocity of sound (a) times 10" under well defined conditions. a in gases depends on the density (rho), temperature (T), isentropic exponent (kappa) and the pressure (p) of the medium, air in this case. a=sqrt(kappa*R*T), with R being the special gas constant for air, or a=sqrt(kappa*p/rho). Where a ("Ma 1") on sea level in standard atmosphere equates to 340 m/s, it decreases to 295 m/s in 20 km attitude. Still kinda fast...
"In 10 years, I've had no tape drives bust on me. A few TAPES, but not the drives." You're lucky then. I had *three* DDS-2 tape-drives break in three months. For the next system I'll be mirroring the complete system/data disk onto identical external harddrives (IEE1394) - one for each working day - via "dd". Much cheaper than a DLT drive and a tape robot, much faster too. If one HD fails, open bin, dispose HD, buy new HD. I've tested that procedure and I admit there are unresolved problems, like making sure the backup actually worked ("dd" copies raw, so no checksum, obviously). I need to work that out. Maybe I'll settle for "tar" eventually.
Run a test case of a Navier-Stokes problem (just one of many which spring to mind; solving the Maxwell equations isn't actually fun either) on both a shared memory versus a clustered machine with poor IO bandwidth. Compare. The shared menory machine will beat the shit out of those nowadays (admittedly) cheap clusters. Comparing bang for bucks is an entirely different issue though...
I recently bought an HP LJ 4plus (around 1995) on ebay for 88 Euros, plus shipping. It has only printed 110000 pages (estimated lifetime: 1M). I got a new cartridge with it for free (some 8000 pages). You could drop it from the Eiffel tower and it'd still work. Perfectly supported under Linux, although you should have at least 16MB of RAM. It actually *does* print the promised 12pages/min. Funny thing though, it was considerably cheaper than any of the crappy "L"-models which yare consistently slower and of poor quality. When buying one, be sure that the seller tells you the total of pages printed (anything under 200000 should be fine). You might also consider HP 5-series.
To answer the question:"What Applications Will Drive System Performance?" Scientists and engineers need *raw* computing power. They need lots of RAM (and even more) and they need GHz, lots of them. They need fast GPUs for 0. Consider Computational Fluid Dynamics. Most problems today are calculated on off the shelf PC hardware. I know this for a fact. Today, you don't buy Indys or Sparcs anymore, they're much too expensive bang-for-bug wise. They're nothing but dead. People use dual Athlons with 3 Gigs or RAM to run their jobs, mostly one job per CPU, because parallel processing in most cases is not there yet (solving the Navier Stokes equations in parallel is still a major PITA). So in short, those people will always buy the fastest PC stuff available, because for them it makes a huge difference whether a solution converges in two or in four days.
Well, "editors" and such... On a more serious note, I probably was fast enough to strike an obvious joke (4MB of RAM, very funny). What I'd actually like to know: Wouldn't these babies, considering *4* FPUs per double core be *screaminggggggggg* on typical tasks like Fluent, Ansys, Abaqus, and in general any fpu-intensive task? Wouldn't these computers be a revolution (in the sense of the word) for companies looking for "the bang for the buck"? Just wondering...
Slashdot Mirror
a relative of Protestnic Vaughan Jeltz?
Amen brother!
I was in charge of designing a new network for my families medical cabinet. The goal was/is to go electronically only. My brother, not being a technical guy, had heard all about that new wireless hype. So I tried hunting down wireless drivers for Linux and that was the first obstacle. Proper WEP encryption wasn't there yet either. The idea of Joe Random Wardriver accessing confidential medical records wasn't all that thrilling. Sharing bandwidth with 15 PCs across two buildings would have been a challenge. So we went completely Cat5 for around 12000 Euros. This included cabling with about 50 Cat5 jacks, 2 Telesyn switches and optical fiber for connecting two buildings across the street. Not a bad deal if you ask me. Haven't looked back since.
What a bummer! I've got a tale to tell. We've got a small network of aboout 15 PCs, booting via PXE into diskless workstations. Three of them are Dell Dimensions. For the best part of the last 9 months I've been experiencing strange outages of the ENTIRE network, taking the switches (two Telesyns, qualtiy stuff) to a grinding halt. So someday I moved my butt into the cellar when this happened and started to pull the cat5 cables out of the switch, one by one. I had a laptop attached to the switch and pinged the server. When I pulled the cable of one of the Dells, the network was reanimated! The Dell PC in question was turned OFF! ....
Stunned, I called Telesyn, they told me to flash the system (which I actually did, well knowing it wouldn't better the situation). I then proceeded to call Dell, which was, of course, a waste of time. They told me to upgrade the Bios from the actual version to the same version. Which I did (I feel like an idiot now). They then told me if I didn't use a Dell switch along with their PCs there'd be no support, guarantee, etc., yadda, yadda.
You may have opened my eyes, thanks
I know that nobody here ever RTFA, so here's my executive summary:
"An exciting opportunity for leveraging our core business strategy and enhancement of our portfolio through technological synergy effects with our premier after-market partners."
Or something.
* Formula one pilots are usually very good athletes, doing some kind of workout daily. You, the average slashdotter, wouldn't survive three laps of a race.
* except for engine and gear box management, no electronic control is allowed: no ABS, no traction control, no adaptive damping, no remote control from the pits (except for data recording)
* aerodynamics are indeed very important; no one in his right mind would invest millions of dollars into a computer cluster just for the kick of it. It's an iterative process: find several possible approximations of your aerodynamical setup on the computer; then test it in the wind tunnel, squeezing out the last and most important percentages of lift / drag ratios.
* I'd like to see somebody around here doing a lap in less than double the time a formula one driver could do.
* current control technologies ("robot drivers") would lose out *big* against even an average driver. This is not my opinion, but those of experts (drivers feeling their car's reaction "in the butt").
Just some thoughts.
Unfortunately my mod points expired yesterday ...
Gnuplot, Python, awk, bash, and sometimes even C make your day when analyzing megabytes of data.
I ususally find it more convenient to come up with some hacked-up solution rather than to study Excel or OOo documentation only to realize later that Excel doesn't like the raw ASCII format my data is saved in.
I've just finished downloading 3.5 and burning it on 5 CDs. Guess I NEED the new version though in order to try the new ACPI functonality of kernel 2.6 ...
Sh*t, s*it, shi*!
Ok, so I can't mod this discussion anymore, but it has to be said ...
Seeing all the stunts that have been pulled by the big lobbyists in the last year or so, in order to pass the software-patent litigati^W legislation (I live in Europe, and followed the debate, more or less), it is not at all unlikely that the Green Party of Munich uses a different tactic now to get a broader audience's attention. Remmeber, the upcoming law might be ratified by the Europeean Parliament in no more than 6 weeks!
Ok, with the risk of being the smart ass of the week ... ...
"Mach 10" means: the velocity of sound (a) times 10" under well defined conditions. a in gases depends on the density (rho), temperature (T), isentropic exponent (kappa) and the pressure (p) of the medium, air in this case. a=sqrt(kappa*R*T), with R being the special gas constant for air, or a=sqrt(kappa*p/rho).
Where a ("Ma 1") on sea level in standard atmosphere equates to 340 m/s, it decreases to 295 m/s in 20 km attitude. Still kinda fast
"In 10 years, I've had no tape drives bust on me. A few TAPES, but not the drives."
You're lucky then. I had *three* DDS-2 tape-drives break in three months.
For the next system I'll be mirroring the complete system/data disk onto identical external harddrives (IEE1394) - one for each working day - via "dd". Much cheaper than a DLT drive and a tape robot, much faster too. If one HD fails, open bin, dispose HD, buy new HD.
I've tested that procedure and I admit there are unresolved problems, like making sure the backup actually worked ("dd" copies raw, so no checksum, obviously). I need to work that out. Maybe I'll settle for "tar" eventually.
Run a test case of a Navier-Stokes problem (just one of many which spring to mind; solving the Maxwell equations isn't actually fun either) on both a shared memory versus a clustered machine with poor IO bandwidth. Compare. ...
The shared menory machine will beat the shit out of those nowadays (admittedly) cheap clusters. Comparing bang for bucks is an entirely different issue though
Just my 0.01Euro.
"I can't get unbiased advice where I am, so perhaps Slashdot can lend me some wisdom?"
/. ;-)
Yes, this is precisely why you should go upon
Where else would you get unbiased advice?
On a totally related note: If I were you, I'd keep my current job. Maybe I'm a little over anxious, though.
Amen, sister/brother!
Mod parent up!
Amen, sister/brother!
'nuff said.
Jitux, which is of course an abbreviation for "Jihad Tux".
I'd mod you up, but I'll rather let you know that from now on you're on my pal-list. Couldn't have said it better and more concisely ..
I recently bought an HP LJ 4plus (around 1995) on ebay for 88 Euros, plus shipping. It has only printed 110000 pages (estimated lifetime: 1M). I got a new cartridge with it for free (some 8000 pages). You could drop it from the Eiffel tower and it'd still work. Perfectly supported under Linux, although you should have at least 16MB of RAM. It actually *does* print the promised 12pages/min. Funny thing though, it was considerably cheaper than any of the crappy "L"-models which yare consistently slower and of poor quality. When buying one, be sure that the seller tells you the total of pages printed (anything under 200000 should be fine). You might also consider HP 5-series.
To answer the question:"What Applications Will Drive System Performance?" Scientists and engineers need *raw* computing power. They need lots of RAM (and even more) and they need GHz, lots of them. They need fast GPUs for 0. Consider Computational Fluid Dynamics. Most problems today are calculated on off the shelf PC hardware. I know this for a fact. Today, you don't buy Indys or Sparcs anymore, they're much too expensive bang-for-bug wise. They're nothing but dead. People use dual Athlons with 3 Gigs or RAM to run their jobs, mostly one job per CPU, because parallel processing in most cases is not there yet (solving the Navier Stokes equations in parallel is still a major PITA). So in
short, those people will always buy the fastest PC stuff available, because for them it makes a huge difference whether a solution converges in two or in four days.
Would you trust your business to an 18 year old hippie with rasta curls, living in a terrorist development country?
Shouldn't that be "Kideon"? ....
*ducks* and runs
Try putting that line in the global section of your lilo.conf: ...
append = "mem=nopentium"
Worked for me
Well, "editors" and such ...
On a more serious note, I probably was fast enough to strike an obvious joke (4MB of RAM, very funny).
What I'd actually like to know:
Wouldn't these babies, considering *4* FPUs per double core be *screaminggggggggg* on typical tasks like Fluent, Ansys, Abaqus, and in general any fpu-intensive task?
Wouldn't these computers be a revolution (in the sense of the word) for companies looking for "the bang for the buck"?
Just wondering...
... those were the times. Ahhh, memories!
# pwd /usr/src/linux-2.6.0-test4 /boot/bzImage-2.6.0-test4 /boot/System.map-2.6.0-test4 /boot
# mv arch/i386/boot/bzImage
# mv System.map
# cd
# rm System.map
# ln -s System.map-2.6.0-test4 System.map
rm system.map doesn't appear to be a very good idea now, does it?
You wouldn't say "alittle", would you?
Yet, you would say "belittle", which is one word.
Not to forget "Arthur dlittle".
*ducks*