Would it be possible to add a few firewire cards to the master node, and connect each node to the master pc?
I only mention this, because IEEE 1394 was created with networking in mind, as it (should) work fundamentally the same as ethernet. It runs at 400mbps (which is really what most copper gigabits are limited to).
In addition, once you pass the 400mbps mark, you also have to factor in the bus speed limitation of the nodes in the cluster. THE 32-BIT PCI BUS CANNOT TRANSFER HUGE AMOUNTS OF DATA. 64-bit pci is availible on newer expensive workstation boards, but as far as costs are concerned, it's almost as impractical as myrinet (for which a NIC will set you back about $1500, and require pci-64 as well)
A final suggestion: Why not put 3-4 100mbps ethernet cards in eaach node? I believe this is possible, and has been done before... Since 100mbps cards cost under $10, this seems like a very attractive solution. For even more speed, it might be possible to put each nic on a different subnet, and use 3-4 switches - but I don't know if this would be possible or even help.
This looks like a worthwile release (unfortunately, I still don't have the cash to afford jaguar, so I am thus excluded from this update)
FTP: I suppose this means that apple will be intergraiting FTP into the finder gui, and possibly improving the built-in FTP server. On a side note: why can't we all use FTP for file sharing with some common locator/naming service... FTP seems to be the only file sharing protocol properly implimented into every major OS. SMB is a great protocol, but has lots of room for improvement.
NFS: Who uses THAT? Honestly, people... SMB is much more widely supported, no matter how poorly implemented.
Print Services - Apple needs more of a unified printer driver architecture similar to the one used in windows. The one in OSX now is good, but not quite there yet.
File system - Journaling FS is niice, even though HFS+ already maintains data integrity quite well without a journal.
All in all, this one looks like a winner. Had Jaguar included these enhancements to begin with, chaces are that apple would have sold many more copies (although I admire apple's policy of incremental updates that add functionality, as well as fixing bugs. No other OS offers that. Not linux, not windows, nothing.)
You've also got to remember, the Earth Simulator was COMPLETED in early 2000. This beast was only released today. In addition, a supercomputer requires a good deal of time to design and build.
Think about it. 60 years ago, we could have built a unit this size with less power than a pocket calculator. Why didn't they use Hitachi's 9.84 GFlop processors....
Technology advances over time. Today that's more the case than ever (even with the economic slump). Remember Moore's law.
Quite frankly, I'm suprised that either of you actually successfullly installed Linux on either of those machines.
The IBM 755,760 series was quite well known for its proprietary hardware. I owned a 755c and 760c (both were used and over 3 years old when I got them).
The 755 is a 486/66, had no CD-rom, no networking, etc without the need for a PC card (which required a proprietary driver)
The 760 is a Pentium/90 with an optional cdrom (which I didnt have), but still no networking.
I had no desire to use debian, as I had little linux experience a the time, and had no other choice but 3 cd-based distros. I eventually gave up.
But I digress. Most people don't realize that their needs for a server could probably be fufilled with a base install of debian or gentoo with all of the extra crap cut out which they don't need (does a fileserver really need http, ftp, and mail daemons running?)
I've seen this happen on a shuttle motherboard. Extremely frustrating (put motherboard in case, press power button, and nothing happens, take motherboard out of case, put on table, assemble there, press power button, and system works. put back in case, press button, nothing happens. scream. yell. rinse and repeat)
The trick is to make sure that the holes line up perfectly, use as few mounting points as possible (4 is usually the magic number), put rubber washers on the screws, or use plastic screws and mounting points. Otherwise, certain boards won't work. Some better quality boards have several screwholes with no traces nearby.
Also, Charlie Ergan (the CEO of Echostar, the owner of Dish Network), has done a number of things to piss off the FCC (like challenging the law that says if a provider carries any number of local channels from a city, it must carry all of the channels for that city, regardless of how popular the station is). After he lost the appeal for this law, he tried to do an end-run around the law, and put the most popular networks (the big four plus WB and UPN and in some cases PBS) on the main satellites, and require users to put up a second dish for the smaller stations. The FCC got pissed and told Echostar to do a number of remedies to fix the situation. They have come into compliance of the recomendations, but its still very iffy.
And he did it with good reason too. When that law went in to effect, Dish had to essentially double the number of channels it carried which had an adverse effect upon their service, as it simply couldn't supply that much bandwidth. As a result, Dish was forced to resample all of its broadcasts to a lower quality. The decline in quality was highly noticible, and for severeal months, Dish's signal looked like a crappy low bitrate mpeg (which it was). They did this just to carry extra channels which were all essentially identical to one another.
If you can imagine, HD will only make this worse. As stated above, an HD channel requires 4-6x the bandwidth of a SD channel. If the companies are already having trouble meeting bandwidth quotas, how will they be able to handle the HD mandate in 2005?
The article said that engineers and autistic children shared various characteristics including strong visualisation skills, strong affinity with physical objects and being "less interested in social activities and communication.
So the article's basically saying that every single slashdot reader is autistic?
I'm not sure that you all are understanding this correctly.
Apple is giving away OSX to TEACHERS, not schools. There is quite a big difference here; the teachers get a copy of it, and can do whatever the heck they want to with it.
This does NOT mean that Apple is giving OSX to schools for the use in classrooms, labs, etc. Microsoft's products for K-12 teachers/students are licensed so that they are for (educational) use by the teacher or student, but not the school, as sepearate (more expensive) versions exist for schools. The copy of the software belongs to the teacher, and unless it's being installed on a computer which is property of the teacher, it's a copyright violation (and rightfully so - the school is essentially "stealing" the software from the teacher). I'm sure apple has a similar clause in their agreement. Still, I think it's a great offer.
Besides, isn't product placement one of the most effective forms of advertising?
When will we just give up and replace the X windowing system alltogether? Is faults seeem to overshadow its many features. Needless to say, most of X's "faults" are user usability issues.
Currently,.su domains cost $15,000 (.ru cost less than $30), so there are only about 28,000 registered.
That sentence is simply insane. $15,000 dollars per domain times 28,000 domains is nearly a half billion dollars. I simply can't imagine anyone buying even one of the oh-so-valuable.su domains for $15,000, much less any economy absorbing a half billion dollars worth of them.
I don't understand the constant hypocracy taking place at slashdot. When asking taco why he uses.GIFs for all of the graphics on slashdot, as the majority of the./ crowd favors PNGs over GIFs for numerous reasons, he told me not to confuse HIS interests with the interests of the readers. Hmmph
Tell me why journaling is exactly good for OSX and HFS+. As long as i've used it, i've never experienced any huge amount of data corruption on it. I've used the same HFS+ partition for about 4 years without a problem (needless to say, i'm abusive of it, and frequently cut the power without properly shutting down).
Most of the comments here are refrencing journaling to Ext2, and other unix filesystems which DO have data-loss problems in the absence of journaling. But, for the most part, I've never seen massive data loss with HFS+ and FAT32.
It also has been brought up that storing the journal on another disk can eliminate the performance decrease. Personally, I could see apple moving to standardize RAID on its high(er) end systems and servers(they've already standardized SMP); or even possibly adding like 256mb of non-volitile memory to store the journal (a small hard disk would also work).
It seems quite obvious how this must work: Simply mount powerful infared lights are mounted around the screen, and place some in the projection booth aimed at the screen. While humans can't see infared light, camcorders can (press some buttons on a remote control and videotape it). The light will cause the whole movie to be blurry, have a red tint, as well as having an awful glare from the lights around the screen.
Seems like a pretty low-tech solution to me. Only problem is that it'll probably make all the cats in the theatre go crazy:-)
Correct me if i'm wrong, but aren't most laptop batteries flammable - most seem to have all sorts of warnings plastered over them warning not to dispose by fire, etc...
Then again, my laptop gets hot enough to fry an egg, but has yet to burst into flames... Speaking of which,it's time to pour more liquid nitrogen over the CPU......
Slashdot Mirror
what about descent 4?
the earlier descent games were fabulous
Of course... it's been there for millions of years without changing, and probably never will
Since this isn't practical to the high-end server market with the insane amount of heat it gives off, where IS it practical?
Buying JUST THE CPU will cost more than buying 2 athlon MP 2200s and a decent motherboard with it.
I'll stay with my athlon 750 which is treating me very nicely right now (although I may take the plunge and get an athlon xp)
Would it be possible to add a few firewire cards to the master node, and connect each node to the master pc?
I only mention this, because IEEE 1394 was created with networking in mind, as it (should) work fundamentally the same as ethernet. It runs at 400mbps (which is really what most copper gigabits are limited to).
In addition, once you pass the 400mbps mark, you also have to factor in the bus speed limitation of the nodes in the cluster. THE 32-BIT PCI BUS CANNOT TRANSFER HUGE AMOUNTS OF DATA. 64-bit pci is availible on newer expensive workstation boards, but as far as costs are concerned, it's almost as impractical as myrinet (for which a NIC will set you back about $1500, and require pci-64 as well)
A final suggestion: Why not put 3-4 100mbps ethernet cards in eaach node? I believe this is possible, and has been done before... Since 100mbps cards cost under $10, this seems like a very attractive solution. For even more speed, it might be possible to put each nic on a different subnet, and use 3-4 switches - but I don't know if this would be possible or even help.
So what happens when slashdot posts a link to a laptop powered by one of these things?
Kaboom!
I've got 6 monitors in my cube. What is a little radiation in my laptop? I'm probably already sterile. Woo Hoo!!!!!
Sadly enough, those of us with 6 monitors have no way of testing that...
This looks like a worthwile release (unfortunately, I still don't have the cash to afford jaguar, so I am thus excluded from this update)
FTP: I suppose this means that apple will be intergraiting FTP into the finder gui, and possibly improving the built-in FTP server. On a side note: why can't we all use FTP for file sharing with some common locator/naming service... FTP seems to be the only file sharing protocol properly implimented into every major OS. SMB is a great protocol, but has lots of room for improvement.
NFS: Who uses THAT? Honestly, people... SMB is much more widely supported, no matter how poorly implemented.
Print Services - Apple needs more of a unified printer driver architecture similar to the one used in windows. The one in OSX now is good, but not quite there yet.
File system - Journaling FS is niice, even though HFS+ already maintains data integrity quite well without a journal.
All in all, this one looks like a winner. Had Jaguar included these enhancements to begin with, chaces are that apple would have sold many more copies (although I admire apple's policy of incremental updates that add functionality, as well as fixing bugs. No other OS offers that. Not linux, not windows, nothing.)
You've also got to remember, the Earth Simulator was COMPLETED in early 2000. This beast was only released today. In addition, a supercomputer requires a good deal of time to design and build.
Think about it. 60 years ago, we could have built a unit this size with less power than a pocket calculator. Why didn't they use Hitachi's 9.84 GFlop processors....
Technology advances over time. Today that's more the case than ever (even with the economic slump). Remember Moore's law.
Of course, they could just buy a HAL9000
Quite frankly, I'm suprised that either of you actually successfullly installed Linux on either of those machines.
The IBM 755,760 series was quite well known for its proprietary hardware. I owned a 755c and 760c (both were used and over 3 years old when I got them).
The 755 is a 486/66, had no CD-rom, no networking, etc without the need for a PC card (which required a proprietary driver)
The 760 is a Pentium/90 with an optional cdrom (which I didnt have), but still no networking.
I had no desire to use debian, as I had little linux experience a the time, and had no other choice but 3 cd-based distros. I eventually gave up.
But I digress. Most people don't realize that their needs for a server could probably be fufilled with a base install of debian or gentoo with all of the extra crap cut out which they don't need (does a fileserver really need http, ftp, and mail daemons running?)
I've seen this happen on a shuttle motherboard. Extremely frustrating (put motherboard in case, press power button, and nothing happens, take motherboard out of case, put on table, assemble there, press power button, and system works. put back in case, press button, nothing happens. scream. yell. rinse and repeat)
The trick is to make sure that the holes line up perfectly, use as few mounting points as possible (4 is usually the magic number), put rubber washers on the screws, or use plastic screws and mounting points. Otherwise, certain boards won't work. Some better quality boards have several screwholes with no traces nearby.
Somehow, tying the slashdot effect into medicine over the internet seems like a bad idea....
Just post your email address, and we'll be happy to tell you.
Also, Charlie Ergan (the CEO of Echostar, the owner of Dish Network), has done a number of things to piss off the FCC (like challenging the law that says if a provider carries any number of local channels from a city, it must carry all of the channels for that city, regardless of how popular the station is). After he lost the appeal for this law, he tried to do an end-run around the law, and put the most popular networks (the big four plus WB and UPN and in some cases PBS) on the main satellites, and require users to put up a second dish for the smaller stations. The FCC got pissed and told Echostar to do a number of remedies to fix the situation. They have come into compliance of the recomendations, but its still very iffy.
And he did it with good reason too. When that law went in to effect, Dish had to essentially double the number of channels it carried which had an adverse effect upon their service, as it simply couldn't supply that much bandwidth. As a result, Dish was forced to resample all of its broadcasts to a lower quality. The decline in quality was highly noticible, and for severeal months, Dish's signal looked like a crappy low bitrate mpeg (which it was). They did this just to carry extra channels which were all essentially identical to one another.
If you can imagine, HD will only make this worse. As stated above, an HD channel requires 4-6x the bandwidth of a SD channel. If the companies are already having trouble meeting bandwidth quotas, how will they be able to handle the HD mandate in 2005?
Of course, you know the picture of the bomb represents his mail server after being slashdotted :-)
In other news, Slashdot posted a story about the internet yesterday. as a result, the internet had been completely obliterated within 5 minutes.
I'm not sure that you all are understanding this correctly.
Apple is giving away OSX to TEACHERS, not schools. There is quite a big difference here; the teachers get a copy of it, and can do whatever the heck they want to with it.
This does NOT mean that Apple is giving OSX to schools for the use in classrooms, labs, etc. Microsoft's products for K-12 teachers/students are licensed so that they are for (educational) use by the teacher or student, but not the school, as sepearate (more expensive) versions exist for schools. The copy of the software belongs to the teacher, and unless it's being installed on a computer which is property of the teacher, it's a copyright violation (and rightfully so - the school is essentially "stealing" the software from the teacher). I'm sure apple has a similar clause in their agreement. Still, I think it's a great offer.
Besides, isn't product placement one of the most effective forms of advertising?
When will we just give up and replace the X windowing system alltogether? Is faults seeem to overshadow its many features. Needless to say, most of X's "faults" are user usability issues.
Remember.... this is $15,000 PER YEAR
I don't understand the constant hypocracy taking place at slashdot. When asking taco why he uses .GIFs for all of the graphics on slashdot, as the majority of the ./ crowd favors PNGs over GIFs for numerous reasons, he told me not to confuse HIS interests with the interests of the readers. Hmmph
The REAL question is how your comment is ranked as Score:5,Troll
Tell me why journaling is exactly good for OSX and HFS+. As long as i've used it, i've never experienced any huge amount of data corruption on it. I've used the same HFS+ partition for about 4 years without a problem (needless to say, i'm abusive of it, and frequently cut the power without properly shutting down).
Most of the comments here are refrencing journaling to Ext2, and other unix filesystems which DO have data-loss problems in the absence of journaling. But, for the most part, I've never seen massive data loss with HFS+ and FAT32.
It also has been brought up that storing the journal on another disk can eliminate the performance decrease. Personally, I could see apple moving to standardize RAID on its high(er) end systems and servers(they've already standardized SMP); or even possibly adding like 256mb of non-volitile memory to store the journal (a small hard disk would also work).
It seems quite obvious how this must work: Simply mount powerful infared lights are mounted around the screen, and place some in the projection booth aimed at the screen. While humans can't see infared light, camcorders can (press some buttons on a remote control and videotape it). The light will cause the whole movie to be blurry, have a red tint, as well as having an awful glare from the lights around the screen.
:-)
Seems like a pretty low-tech solution to me. Only problem is that it'll probably make all the cats in the theatre go crazy
Correct me if i'm wrong, but aren't most laptop batteries flammable - most seem to have all sorts of warnings plastered over them warning not to dispose by fire, etc...
,it's time to pour more liquid nitrogen over the CPU......
Then again, my laptop gets hot enough to fry an egg, but has yet to burst into flames... Speaking of which
If I were to record a digital sample of my voice at 10MBps, wouldn't I be transferring data at 10MBps by using my body?