She didnt sink the Bismarck. Rather the Fairy Swordfish torpedo bombers she carried torpedoed the Bismarck, scoring 2 hits, one of which caused no damage however the other caused her rudder to jam. 4 other battleships, HMS Rodney, King George, Dorsetshire and Norfolk closed in and pounded the Bismarck till it sank.
http://www.bismarck-class.dk/bismarck/history/ HMS Ark Royal is also famous for launching several, mostly unsuccesful but daring, raids on Italian warships moored at harbours. Most famously on Taranto.
wrt to hearing: above 30mph wind noise obscures most sounds. I wont ride a bike without ear plugs even, and i find helmet + ear plugs/improve/ hearing as low-sounds (ie engines) still make it through without being obscured by wind noise. However, hearing is still a very limited sense to warn you of impending danger. Cars these days are ultra-quiet. And even if you/can/ hear them, its very hard to know/where/ something is precisely. (from experience on track, first you'll know of a faster bike is the rumble of the engine - but often you cant tell which side they're coming from).
wrt to vision: well, its limited slightly, but to be honest, modern helmets have excellent fields of view. You do have to make more of an effort when looking over your shoulder though, but that's a matter of building up your technique through habit.
Don't buy into the helmet propaganda, they aren't ALWAYS a good idea
living in europe, i find this attitude amazing. I just cant imagine not wearing a helmet. If i try it, i feel naked and just cant go above 30mph, 20mph even.
good for perpendicular ~10MPh
well, actually they tend to be rated to absorb a certain force. So speed is kind of immaterial. A helmet can make the difference between life and death irregardless of speed. You can walk away from 160+MPH crashes with the right gear and you can die from a little fall at 30MPH, depends on the circumstances. I've crashed at 70+MPH and walked away, and i know someone who crashed at 110MPH and/drove/ his bike away afterwards (admittedly a track day). I also know of someone who took a little fall driving at very low-speed (20MPHish) through a housing estate and died from head injuries.
In the case of high-speed crashes that you walk away from, without a helmet you probably wont, or at least you're unlikely to have much of a face left.
they aren't ALWAYS a good idea
what crafty language you anti-helmet people use.:)
what you really mean, at least the arguments you use to back this up, is "in a lot of cases they wont save your life" while ignoring the fact that in many cases they will, or at least save you extensive facial surgery. and that makes them worth it, as there are far fewer down-sides to wearing them.
It doesnt take much of a knock to the head to kill, you can kill yourself when the bike is/stationary/ if you're not wearing a helmet. (ie you fall sideways and your head happens to be the one to break the fall).
iirc from a report on Dainese's work on this jacket from quite a while ago, the jacket has a safety interlock, a key (attached to the jacket) which you need to plug into a receptle on the bike in order for it to be active. They might have changed the mechanism since then, (or i might not have iirc), but you can bet there will be some kind of interlock precisely because of the reasons you give.
Its definitely not a publicity stunt though. Dainese have been working on this jacket for quite a long while (many years). They're also one of the biggest names in protective motorcycle apparel.
Why dont you take him up on his suggestion and go search on his name. I'll bet he's been part of the 'community' since before you were on solids (at least judging from some of your other posts i found in your userinfo).
Is he a prick? definitely..:) However, I can categorically refute, indeed i know the truth to be the opposite in the extreme, your statement that he has done:
"more harm to the reputation of the community through this attitude than a whole truckloads of Microsofts could ever do"
as I have first-hand experience of the work he's done.
To a significant degree due to him, a certain small multi-national runs its business on linux, makes decent amount of money running linux, approaching hundreds of thousands of european consumers make use of linux every week (without knowing it) and a reasonable number of people make their living working on developing for and maintaining linux based systems. Finally, and most importantly, a fair number of high-level management/boardroom types now think "linux == good".
So he might be grumpy, he might not tolerate fools, but he has done plenty for the 'community'. Perhaps you should retract your comment of "judgmental prick", as from here it appears quite a hypocritical accusation.
--paulj
Re:You know, Fresco...doesn't ring a bell?
on
Fresco M1 Released
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· Score: 2
X came out with dri for much better performance.
Errmm.. DRI is not used for X.
Berlin is no longer needed except on older systems or pda's.
Rather ironically, it seems that Berlin is also too slow for PDAs due to very heavy use of floating point. (see the text beside the screenshot of berlin on the Zaurus).
Re:Make that "old skool BSD license"
on
Ghost for Unix
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· Score: 2
hmm.. no..
the FSF could quite easily task their lawyers to help GPL copyright owners pursue cases irrespective of whether the copyright owner is FSF or original author. I cant think of an actual valid reason why FSF would require copyright assigned, other than the idealogical reason that if copyright is held by FSF the original author can not dual-licence the code anymore and develop a proprietary version.
You're right to not be a big fan of Intel as XScale, afaik, is simply another iteration of StrongARM, the rights to which Intel acquired from DEC as part of settlement of lawsuit (DEC won - Intel got rights to all of DEC Semiconductors IC designs!). Digital did the work on designing StrongARM for low-power.
There's a Digital Tech Journal article on the StrongARM, archive copy at:
yes.. it is good i noticed that mistake. i'm sure you'd have been merciless in your reply otherwise.:) There must have been yet another shift in strategy at SGI, because the Origin3k's were originally supposed to be IA-64. So now it seems SGI have decided to continue with their MIPS commitment. Which is a very good thing. Also, its a pretty safe bet that MIPS are working on an R20000 - judging by the fact that a developer accidently posted about R20k issues to the linux-mips list.
I've no experience of large single image machines or the applications one might run on them, other than 3rd and 4th hand. Eg, Larry McVoy doesnt seem keen on single image, and he's got a few ideas, eg:
Looking closely, Origin3k is/still/ MIPS (R14k). Strange, as last i heard SGI were supposed to be releasing the R3k as IA-64. And they have built and tested Origin3ks with IA-64.
anyway, they must have changed their mind at some stage.
You do realise that the Origin3000 is IA64? IA -> "Intel Architecture"?
Further, are you aware that Origin's are NUMA machines, and that the figure of 716GB/sec internal bandwidth is of/aggregrated/ bandwidth? I could build a beowulf cluster of a couple of thousand PC's with FC2 links and similarly claim it had 500GB/sec internal bandwidth.
The Origin is essentially a cluster of 'nodes' interconnected by NUMALink (which is essentially a really really hardcore network that carries inter-node bus traffic and deals with cache coherency iirc). The figure quoted is the sum of the bandwidth of all links in the system, specifically, 716GB/sec would refer to to a very fully specc'ed Origin3k.
Finally, your last comments:
SGI workstations Vs PCs: "which indeed do not have a large technical superiority over PCs nowadays."
Sorry, the point is not that SGIs do not have a large superiority, the point is they are actually way/behind/ PCs. The only thing an SGI might still have over a PC is that an SGI can do 48bit RGBA, and PC graphics generally dont go past 32bit, and 48bit RGBA is essential for high-fidelity image processing (film work) i've been led to believe. But that will change too - 48bit RGBA cards for PCs will be commonly available within a year or two i'll bet.
"SGI's focus shifted from graphical stations to supercomputers"
Indeed, they've retreated to this niche, but even in this stratified sector of computing they're being eaten by PCs -> Beowulf. Very few applications actually demand high IO-throughput / low IO-latency that Origin would excel in. Further for the applications that do, it can still often be more cost effective to try rewrite the application to be 'beowulf-friendly' and install a cluster of PCs than get an Origin3k. Because if you can cope with the high-latencies of a PC cluster, then a PC cluster of Athlons or P4s will eat an Origin's breakfast, lunch and dinner on CPU crunching power. ($ for $).
hmm.. PAM is available for SGI - look on the freeware site. Though to get things like login and the xdm login widget to work with PAM, you'd need to recompile freeware versions of them and replace the system versions with the freeware versions. Eg, take XFree86, compile it with PAM support and replace the IRIX xdm with your own PAM-enabled xdm.
Its all a bit of a bags though, and a pain that SGI wont go do it themselves and make the standard install support PAM, pain to maintain boxes with non-standard system software.
However, IRIX 6.5.x does support LDAP - and it works fine. So, one option that works out of the box is to use LDAP for authentication. Works fine across both Linux and SGI. (cant remember if IRIX supports anything other than {crypt} passwords though).
"SGI architecture has a huge internal bandwidth. Intel comes nowhere near that."
This unfortunately is no longer true. As with many things related to SGI vs Intel performance it was true about 6 years ago and SGI have rested on their laurels since then while PCs have progressed and progressed.
5/6 years ago PCs were using 66MHz memory, 32bits@66MHz => 264MB/s, while SGI Octane had a 1.6GB/s IO crossbar, with 1GB/s going to the processor board, and then 800MB/s to 1GB/s to the CPU(s). Ie the SGI truely did have ungodly fast IO compared to the PC in those days.
However, since then generic RAM used on PCs has steadily gotten faster, 100MHz (for 400MB/s peak) then 133MHz (532MB/s peak), then DDR doubled the peak rates even further, DDR200 (800MB/s) DDR266 (1GB/s) and now, iirc, we're at DDR333 and 1.3GB/s of host bus IO bandwidth being cheaply available on PCs.
So what about the SGIs? Well, SGI released an updated version of the Octane recently (year ago?), the Octane2. The differences between Octane and Octane2 are, as is symptomatic of SGIs stagnation, very little. The IO architecture is unchanged from the original. Same 1GB/s CPU board peak bandwidth, plugged into the same 1.6GB/s peak IO crossbar. The only real upgrade was a slight update to the graphics (VPro), but a good modern PC graphics card will easily beat that too for performance. SGIs new high-end workstation is little more than a very modest upgrade of their existing 5odd year old high-end workstation.
So:
"SGIs have huge internal bandwidth"
Myth: PCs have caught up, even surpassed the top-end SGI workstations.
"SGIs have superior graphics"
Myth: A good GeForce or Radeon will stomp on any SGI workstation. Indeed, they are now almost on a par with SGIs InfiniteReality2 graphics engine. (ie simulation class).
However, they're still beautiful machines, and as an all-in "package" they still are wonderful. But SGI has literally done/nothing/ in the last 6 years to keep themselves ahead of PCs, and in the last 2 years they've actually fallen behind PCs.
But who in their right mind is going to pay more than 5x the price of a good PC for performance lower than last years PCs?
Minix is a very simple monolithic kernel designed to be easy to understand while still being functionally useful, ie a very light, simple, traditional *nix like kernel that a student could play with.
Tanenbaum's love of micro-kernel's manifested itself in his other main OS project, Ameoba. (least other than minix and ameoba i dont know of any large OS projects he's well-known for).
why is this mod'ed as insightful? its absolute waffle. Poster hasnt a breeze about how inter domain routing works.
"With a heirarchical routing system like what TCP/IP uses, it can pretty much only go upstream to the backbone."
Eh? Since when is TCP/IP hierarchical? For that matter, wtf has TCP got to do it? (other than that some routing protocols use TCP). backbone? what backbone? Show me where the internet has a backbone. (hint: it doesnt).
"It is possible for a network to be designed so that there's no backbone, and the data can be routed wherever there are open connections"
no sh$t sherlock. What an amazing idea. I wonder if the guys that came up with BGP thought of it before you. And I wonder if anyone actually uses it. (hint: the entire internet).
"Such a system would have higher latency, because it would have more hops"
oooh.. ok.. why's that then?
"but the bandwidth could be okay, if _everybody_ runs fiber to the house nextdoor."
ah... so if everyone used fibre things'd go faster? Damn you should work for an ISP, mine are still trying to persevere with RFC2549 links to all their peers.
"TCP/IP won't work, because it can't do routing in that kind of environment;some kind of routing protocol would have to be devised that understood the topology of such a network"
gosh good point, and may i refer you the BGP link above again?
"The really major problem with such a system is, how much do you charge your neighbors to route their data, and what about the people whose data your neighbors are routing (through you), and so on?"
Hmm.. tricky one that. I believe some people are though trying their best to solve that one. (namely the lawyers who draw up contracts, and the accounts dept. of ISPs). Ie, yes, you pay the people you connect to depending on your comparitive standing (ie customers and traffic carried). If one is small and the other big, well why the small one generally pays the bigger one. Why one would almost call the smaller one a customer of the larger one. (there's a thought, you could run a business along these lines!). If the two are of equal comparitive standing, and can both agree they are, then they might peer with each other for free. For further discussion on this i really should direct you to the legal and accounting depts. of any decent sized (guess what?) ISP.
In fairness, what you describe is actually generally how the internet works if you substitute your neighbours for ISPs / v. large organisations, its just i'm in a sarcastic mood, and you have a lot of reading up to do. sorry.
Re:why does it hurt when i do this...
on
Unionfs for Linux?
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· Score: 3, Informative
what he's saying is that unionfs is not the way to do it here.
what he wants can easily be done with regular old mounts, eg he could sort his mp3s into 'classical', 'jazz' etc.. and have each one in a seperate dir and on a seperate disk. or he could symlink into the various disks. finally the most transparent way to merge the disks into one is LVM.
Saying the fate of unix lies in desktop doesn't make sense when unix has never been geared for mainstream desktop use.
this statement is just so wrong. What do you think the desktops of the internet looked like before Win9x and NT3.5 were in widespread use?
Also, the rise in use of MS for servers has corresponded pretty well with their takeover of the 'desktop' / 'workstation' market and hence the decline in use of Unix as a workstation.
Further, if one would care to consider a VT as a desktop of sorts - one that is unix if connected to a unix host, it becomes even more true that the fate, and late 90s decline, of unix is tied to the desktop and the decline of use of Unix on the desktop.
If you have a bunch of Sun machines as your workstations, you're likely to have a Sun as your server, (substitute Sun with SGI or DEC Alpha, etc..)
well, if you have zero knowledge of the legal situation then how in gods name can you go and post a comment to say it is legal? in reply to a poster who stated that despite the evident tolerant attitude towards drugs, they remain illegal? Evidently, this poster must have some reason to make such a statement, could you not have questioned him as to his reasons for making this statement, instead of posting completely incorrect speculation as statement of fact?
If you dont know its true, then at least make it clear your assertion is speculative.
If i called you a name, i sort of apologise, but i just sometimes suffer from flare-ups of annoyance by people who post things to places when they evidently have no real clue of what they are talking about.. i get even more annoyed when they deliberately contradict someone who evidently/does/ know.
In a nutshell: By statute drugs are illegal. However, by policy the regional prosecuting authorities do not prosecute cases of personal drug use or small-scale commercial trade in soft-drugs, and hence neither do the police take action. BTW: cases of large scale dealers/makers/growers of both soft and hard drugs *are* pursued by the dutch police and legal authorities.
The previous poster is correct, yet you contradict him without any evidence or rationale as to why.
Marijuana is *illegal* across the Netherlands - including Amsterdam. However, many city councils have decided they will not prosecute offenses involving soft drugs, and they have published the guidelines by which they decide whether to prosecute or not. If the local "DA" has a policy of not prosecuting, then the police arent going to waste their time arresting people for these offences either.
However, the fact remains that cannabis is illegal in the Netherlands.
Slashdot Mirror
It's HMS Ark Royal (not Arc).
She didnt sink the Bismarck. Rather the Fairy Swordfish torpedo bombers she carried torpedoed the Bismarck, scoring 2 hits, one of which caused no damage however the other caused her rudder to jam. 4 other battleships, HMS Rodney, King George, Dorsetshire and Norfolk closed in and pounded the Bismarck till it sank.
http://www.bismarck-class.dk/bismarck/history/
HMS Ark Royal is also famous for launching several, mostly unsuccesful but daring, raids on Italian warships moored at harbours. Most famously on Taranto.
How exactly are helmets a risk though?
/improve/ hearing as low-sounds (ie engines) still make it through without being obscured by wind noise. However, hearing is still a very limited sense to warn you of impending danger. Cars these days are ultra-quiet. And even if you /can/ hear them, its very hard to know /where/ something is precisely. (from experience on track, first you'll know of a faster bike is the rumble of the engine - but often you cant tell which side they're coming from).
:)
wrt to hearing: above 30mph wind noise obscures most sounds. I wont ride a bike without ear plugs even, and i find helmet + ear plugs
wrt to vision: well, its limited slightly, but to be honest, modern helmets have excellent fields of view. You do have to make more of an effort when looking over your shoulder though, but that's a matter of building up your technique through habit.
I'm not sure how helmets are a risk.
Don't buy into the helmet propaganda, they aren't ALWAYS a good idea
/drove/ his bike away afterwards (admittedly a track day). I also know of someone who took a little fall driving at very low-speed (20MPHish) through a housing estate and died from head injuries.
:)
living in europe, i find this attitude amazing. I just cant imagine not wearing a helmet. If i try it, i feel naked and just cant go above 30mph, 20mph even.
good for perpendicular ~10MPh
well, actually they tend to be rated to absorb a certain force. So speed is kind of immaterial. A helmet can make the difference between life and death irregardless of speed. You can walk away from 160+MPH crashes with the right gear and you can die from a little fall at 30MPH, depends on the circumstances. I've crashed at 70+MPH and walked away, and i know someone who crashed at 110MPH and
In the case of high-speed crashes that you walk away from, without a helmet you probably wont, or at least you're unlikely to have much of a face left.
they aren't ALWAYS a good idea
what crafty language you anti-helmet people use.
what you really mean, at least the arguments you use to back this up, is "in a lot of cases they wont save your life" while ignoring the fact that in many cases they will, or at least save you extensive facial surgery. and that makes them worth it, as there are far fewer down-sides to wearing them.
Not wearing a helmet on a bike is /insane/.
/stationary/ if you're not wearing a helmet. (ie you fall sideways and your head happens to be the one to break the fall).
It doesnt take much of a knock to the head to kill, you can kill yourself when the bike is
iirc from a report on Dainese's work on this jacket from quite a while ago, the jacket has a safety interlock, a key (attached to the jacket) which you need to plug into a receptle on the bike in order for it to be active. They might have changed the mechanism since then, (or i might not have iirc), but you can bet there will be some kind of interlock precisely because of the reasons you give.
Its definitely not a publicity stunt though. Dainese have been working on this jacket for quite a long while (many years). They're also one of the biggest names in protective motorcycle apparel.
Why dont you take him up on his suggestion and go search on his name. I'll bet he's been part of the 'community' since before you were on solids (at least judging from some of your other posts i found in your userinfo).
:) However, I can categorically refute, indeed i know the truth to be the opposite in the extreme, your statement that he has done:
Is he a prick? definitely..
"more harm to the reputation of the community through this attitude than a whole truckloads of Microsofts could ever do"
as I have first-hand experience of the work he's done.
To a significant degree due to him, a certain small multi-national runs its business on linux, makes decent amount of money running linux, approaching hundreds of thousands of european consumers make use of linux every week (without knowing it) and a reasonable number of people make their living working on developing for and maintaining linux based systems. Finally, and most importantly, a fair number of high-level management/boardroom types now think "linux == good".
So he might be grumpy, he might not tolerate fools, but he has done plenty for the 'community'. Perhaps you should retract your comment of "judgmental prick", as from here it appears quite a hypocritical accusation.
--paulj
X came out with dri for much better performance.
Errmm.. DRI is not used for X.
Berlin is no longer needed except on older systems or pda's.
Rather ironically, it seems that Berlin is also too slow for PDAs due to very heavy use of floating point. (see the text beside the screenshot of berlin on the Zaurus).
hmm.. no..
the FSF could quite easily task their lawyers to help GPL copyright owners pursue cases irrespective of whether the copyright owner is FSF or original author. I cant think of an actual valid reason why FSF would require copyright assigned, other than the idealogical reason that if copyright is held by FSF the original author can not dual-licence the code anymore and develop a proprietary version.
You're right to not be a big fan of Intel as XScale, afaik, is simply another iteration of StrongARM, the rights to which Intel acquired from DEC as part of settlement of lawsuit (DEC won - Intel got rights to all of DEC Semiconductors IC designs!). Digital did the work on designing StrongARM for low-power.
D TJ /DTJP05/DTJP05HM.HTM
There's a Digital Tech Journal article on the StrongARM, archive copy at:
http://www.research.compaq.com/wrl/DECarchives/
hmm.. but that 32 bit might just be internal precision. can the card actually be passed 128bit RGBA values?
someone mod parent up.
Cat 7 *does not* exist. Anyone who pays extra money to have "Cat7" installed has been hood-winked or is a fool.
yes.. it is good i noticed that mistake. i'm sure you'd have been merciless in your reply otherwise. :) There must have been yet another shift in strategy at SGI, because the Origin3k's were originally supposed to be IA-64. So now it seems SGI have decided to continue with their MIPS commitment. Which is a very good thing. Also, its a pretty safe bet that MIPS are working on an R20000 - judging by the fact that a developer accidently posted about R20k issues to the linux-mips list.
0 01 .2/1172.html
I've no experience of large single image machines or the applications one might run on them, other than 3rd and 4th hand. Eg, Larry McVoy doesnt seem keen on single image, and he's got a few ideas, eg:
http://www.uwsg.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0
and read his papers.
Anyway, SGI arent what they used to be, even if they do manage to survive off of very high-end NUMA cluster institutional contracts.
--paulj
Oops..
/still/ MIPS (R14k). Strange, as last i heard SGI were supposed to be releasing the R3k as IA-64. And they have built and tested Origin3ks with IA-64.
Looking closely, Origin3k is
anyway, they must have changed their mind at some stage.
sigh....
/aggregrated/ bandwidth? I could build a beowulf cluster of a couple of thousand PC's with FC2 links and similarly claim it had 500GB/sec internal bandwidth.
/behind/ PCs. The only thing an SGI might still have over a PC is that an SGI can do 48bit RGBA, and PC graphics generally dont go past 32bit, and 48bit RGBA is essential for high-fidelity image processing (film work) i've been led to believe. But that will change too - 48bit RGBA cards for PCs will be commonly available within a year or two i'll bet.
You do realise that the Origin3000 is IA64? IA -> "Intel Architecture"?
Further, are you aware that Origin's are NUMA machines, and that the figure of 716GB/sec internal bandwidth is of
The Origin is essentially a cluster of 'nodes' interconnected by NUMALink (which is essentially a really really hardcore network that carries inter-node bus traffic and deals with cache coherency iirc). The figure quoted is the sum of the bandwidth of all links in the system, specifically, 716GB/sec would refer to to a very fully specc'ed Origin3k.
Finally, your last comments:
SGI workstations Vs PCs: "which indeed do not have a large technical superiority over PCs nowadays."
Sorry, the point is not that SGIs do not have a large superiority, the point is they are actually way
"SGI's focus shifted from graphical stations to supercomputers"
Indeed, they've retreated to this niche, but even in this stratified sector of computing they're being eaten by PCs -> Beowulf. Very few applications actually demand high IO-throughput / low IO-latency that Origin would excel in. Further for the applications that do, it can still often be more cost effective to try rewrite the application to be 'beowulf-friendly' and install a cluster of PCs than get an Origin3k. Because if you can cope with the high-latencies of a PC cluster, then a PC cluster of Athlons or P4s will eat an Origin's breakfast, lunch and dinner on CPU crunching power. ($ for $).
anyway, SGI, RIP..
PS: I own 2 SGIs, an Indy and an R10k O2.
hmm.. PAM is available for SGI - look on the freeware site. Though to get things like login and the xdm login widget to work with PAM, you'd need to recompile freeware versions of them and replace the system versions with the freeware versions. Eg, take XFree86, compile it with PAM support and replace the IRIX xdm with your own PAM-enabled xdm.
Its all a bit of a bags though, and a pain that SGI wont go do it themselves and make the standard install support PAM, pain to maintain boxes with non-standard system software.
However, IRIX 6.5.x does support LDAP - and it works fine. So, one option that works out of the box is to use LDAP for authentication. Works fine across both Linux and SGI. (cant remember if IRIX supports anything other than {crypt} passwords though).
Well, actually, you're wrong.
/nothing/ in the last 6 years to keep themselves ahead of PCs, and in the last 2 years they've actually fallen behind PCs.
"SGI architecture has a huge internal bandwidth. Intel comes nowhere near that."
This unfortunately is no longer true. As with many things related to SGI vs Intel performance it was true about 6 years ago and SGI have rested on their laurels since then while PCs have progressed and progressed.
5/6 years ago PCs were using 66MHz memory,
32bits@66MHz => 264MB/s, while SGI Octane had a 1.6GB/s IO crossbar, with 1GB/s going to the processor board, and then 800MB/s to 1GB/s to the CPU(s). Ie the SGI truely did have ungodly fast IO compared to the PC in those days.
However, since then generic RAM used on PCs has steadily gotten faster, 100MHz (for 400MB/s peak) then 133MHz (532MB/s peak), then DDR doubled the peak rates even further, DDR200 (800MB/s) DDR266 (1GB/s) and now, iirc, we're at DDR333 and 1.3GB/s of host bus IO bandwidth being cheaply available on PCs.
So what about the SGIs? Well, SGI released an updated version of the Octane recently (year ago?), the Octane2. The differences between Octane and Octane2 are, as is symptomatic of SGIs stagnation, very little. The IO architecture is unchanged from the original. Same 1GB/s CPU board peak bandwidth, plugged into the same 1.6GB/s peak IO crossbar. The only real upgrade was a slight update to the graphics (VPro), but a good modern PC graphics card will easily beat that too for performance. SGIs new high-end workstation is little more than a very modest upgrade of their existing 5odd year old high-end workstation.
So:
"SGIs have huge internal bandwidth"
Myth: PCs have caught up, even surpassed the top-end SGI workstations.
"SGIs have superior graphics"
Myth: A good GeForce or Radeon will stomp on any SGI workstation. Indeed, they are now almost on a par with SGIs InfiniteReality2 graphics engine. (ie simulation class).
However, they're still beautiful machines, and as an all-in "package" they still are wonderful. But SGI has literally done
But who in their right mind is going to pay more than 5x the price of a good PC for performance lower than last years PCs?
"He's dead Jim!"
- SGI, Oct 1997, RIP
well colour me wrong..
i always thought amoeba was his grand distributed and micro-kernelised OS dream..
ta.
errmmmm... absolutely wrong.
Minix is a very simple monolithic kernel designed to be easy to understand while still being functionally useful, ie a very light, simple, traditional *nix like kernel that a student could play with.
Tanenbaum's love of micro-kernel's manifested itself in his other main OS project, Ameoba. (least other than minix and ameoba i dont know of any large OS projects he's well-known for).
arg..
why is this mod'ed as insightful? its absolute waffle. Poster hasnt a breeze about how inter domain routing works.
"With a heirarchical routing system like what TCP/IP uses, it can pretty much only go upstream to the backbone."
Eh? Since when is TCP/IP hierarchical? For that matter, wtf has TCP got to do it? (other than that some routing protocols use TCP). backbone? what backbone? Show me where the internet has a backbone. (hint: it doesnt).
"It is possible for a network to be designed so that there's no backbone, and the data can be routed wherever there are open connections"
no sh$t sherlock. What an amazing idea. I wonder if the guys that came up with BGP thought of it before you. And I wonder if anyone actually uses it. (hint: the entire internet).
"Such a system would have higher latency, because it would have more hops"
oooh.. ok.. why's that then?
"but the bandwidth could be okay, if _everybody_ runs fiber to the house nextdoor."
ah... so if everyone used fibre things'd go faster? Damn you should work for an ISP, mine are still trying to persevere with RFC2549 links to all their peers.
"TCP/IP won't work, because it can't
do routing in that kind of environment;some kind of routing protocol would have to be devised that understood the topology of such a network"
gosh good point, and may i refer you the BGP link above again?
"The really major problem with such a system is, how much do you charge your neighbors to
route their data, and what about the people whose data your neighbors are routing (through you), and so on?"
Hmm.. tricky one that. I believe some people are though trying their best to solve that one. (namely the lawyers who draw up contracts, and the accounts dept. of ISPs). Ie, yes, you pay the people you connect to depending on your comparitive standing (ie customers and traffic carried). If one is small and the other big, well why the small one generally pays the bigger one. Why one would almost call the smaller one a customer of the larger one. (there's a thought, you could run a business along these lines!). If the two are of equal comparitive standing, and can both agree they are, then they might peer with each other for free. For further discussion on this i really should direct you to the legal and accounting depts. of any decent sized (guess what?) ISP.
In fairness, what you describe is actually generally how the internet works if you substitute your neighbours for ISPs / v. large organisations, its just i'm in a sarcastic mood, and you have a lot of reading up to do. sorry.
what he's saying is that unionfs is not the way to do it here.
what he wants can easily be done with regular old mounts, eg he could sort his mp3s into 'classical', 'jazz' etc.. and have each one in a seperate dir and on a seperate disk. or he could symlink into the various disks. finally the most transparent way to merge the disks into one is LVM.
--paulj
Saying the fate of unix lies in desktop doesn't make sense when unix has never been geared for mainstream desktop use.
this statement is just so wrong. What do you think the desktops of the internet looked like before Win9x and NT3.5 were in widespread use?
Also, the rise in use of MS for servers has corresponded pretty well with their takeover of the 'desktop' / 'workstation' market and hence the decline in use of Unix as a workstation.
Further, if one would care to consider a VT as a desktop of sorts - one that is unix if connected to a unix host, it becomes even more true that the fate, and late 90s decline, of unix is tied to the desktop and the decline of use of Unix on the desktop.
If you have a bunch of Sun machines as your workstations, you're likely to have a Sun as your server, (substitute Sun with SGI or DEC Alpha, etc..)
--paulj
well, if you have zero knowledge of the legal situation then how in gods name can you go and post a comment to say it is legal? in reply to a poster who stated that despite the evident tolerant attitude towards drugs, they remain illegal? Evidently, this poster must have some reason to make such a statement, could you not have questioned him as to his reasons for making this statement, instead of posting completely incorrect speculation as statement of fact?
/does/ know.
If you dont know its true, then at least make it clear your assertion is speculative.
If i called you a name, i sort of apologise, but i just sometimes suffer from flare-ups of annoyance by people who post things to places when they evidently have no real clue of what they are talking about.. i get even more annoyed when they deliberately contradict someone who evidently
In a nutshell: By statute drugs are illegal. However, by policy the regional prosecuting authorities do not prosecute cases of personal drug use or small-scale commercial trade in soft-drugs, and hence neither do the police take action. BTW: cases of large scale dealers/makers/growers of both soft and hard drugs *are* pursued by the dutch police and legal authorities.
God you're a f$ckwit.
The previous poster is correct, yet you contradict him without any evidence or rationale as to why.
Marijuana is *illegal* across the Netherlands - including Amsterdam. However, many city councils have decided they will not prosecute offenses involving soft drugs, and they have published the guidelines by which they decide whether to prosecute or not. If the local "DA" has a policy of not prosecuting, then the police arent going to waste their time arresting people for these offences either.
However, the fact remains that cannabis is illegal in the Netherlands.
real timezone? We're either IST (Irish Summer Time) or Zulu / UTC here. neither are named after a part of england. :)
did you read his post?
he points out ntpd already supports GPS reference clocks, that nothing special is required bar buying the right hardware.
sheesh...