Does anyone else find it amusing that on the RH site,
they're announcing RH7.0 while at the same time, they're running a
sidebar ad urging "Get Red Hat Linux 6.2"?
What is all this obsession with chip power usage? I would think the rest of the
computer--hard drive, fan, monitor--would consume the lion's share of the battery.
Indeed, but if you can get the chip to run cool enough,
you won't need a fan. A traditional CRT monitor uses so much power
that there's no point using a low power chip on such a system.
But that's not their market. They're being aimed at the portable market -- notebooks
and webpad type devices. Yes, LCD screens still suck large amounts of power, but advances are being
made in this area (hopefully LEP screens will have low power requirements).
Also, consider the CPU in a set top box (e.g., a satellite or cable decoder box). How many people would put up with them if they needed a noisy fan in them? With its low power requirements, a Crusoe is ideal here, a market that's inaccessable to Intel and AMD (with their current offerings).
xv isn't free software, and it's not even the best of its kind.
Really? Then please tell me what's better. Sure,
Electric Eyes and kview are OK, and I'm sure Eye Of Gnome is going
to be OK too. But for me, xv lets me get the job done quicker. Please don't suggest gimp. It's an awesome program that I use almost daily, but it fills a different niche to xv. Were KImageShop ready, that would fall into the same category too. xv is not without
its faults (displaying images larger than the screen being a particular weak spot),
but the end user interface is better than the alternatives (that I've seen, anyway).
Re:DG's still around? Wazzup with them?
on
Hackers
·
· Score: 2
Uh, no offense or trolling, but DG still exists?!
It's been eons since I've seen a DG system or even their Aviion storage products
Sort of, but not for much longer. They were bought out by EMC last year,
and the DG name is slowly being retired (much like you don't see any
new products from DEC these days). AViiON is the name of the server products.
The storage products are called CLARiiON, and are what EMC were primarily
after when they bought DG. They haven't become a complete service company -- more yet another Microsoft lackey, although it's amusing that they still have to resort to Unix for their higher end servers, because although NT can run on them, it can't scale to use all the processors, unlike DG/UX.
Although it's a bit spartan in places, DG/UX is one of my favourite Unices, particularly from
a programming point of view. Although originally a SystemV variant, the DG/UX kernel was completely rewritten in house, and contains some nice goodies, like dg_xtrace(2), and of course ccNUMA supoprt.
Re:Another good, old book, Soul of a New Machine
on
Hackers
·
· Score: 2
If you ever get the chance, Soul of A New Machine by Tracy Kidder if a fascinating read.
Indeed, and it gives a great insight into the
corporate culture at DG (where I'm currently working).
Was it you a year ago crying that there was no market for 1GHz chips? You'd be foolish to
say that now.
Would I? I'll never claim that there's no market for
high performance chips, but I still can't see a mass market
demand for 1GHz CPUs. Yes, Intel/AMD's marketing
depts may be able to convince the world that there's a need, and thus artifically create a demand, but
in reality, very few people have a need for chips that fast.
Actually, you're right -- I hadn't thought of that one. But still, the
number of corporate PCs sold each year dwarfs the number of home PCs sold,
and not too many offices have a need for video editing...
Of all the people I know
who own/use RaQ's, they all know the CPU type. Don't assume your lack of knowledge holds
true for everyone.
Similarly, don't assume that my comments indicate what I would do.
If I were to buy a RaQ, you can be assured that I'd find out exactly
what CPU it contained. However, neither you or I are in Cobalt's
target market, and that market doesn't care.
I'd guess that well over 95% of their customers will do the 15 minute setup, and then never touch anything else
on the box again. To those users, why does the CPU matter?
Yep, so they do. That illustrates just my point perfectly, though.
The earlier RaQ2s didn't have an Intel compatible CPU.
They made the change for the RaQ3. The user doesn't know (or care) what
CPU it contains.
Where is that market for a 2GHz desktop chip? Sure, there
will always be people that need more power, but hardcore gamers, CAD/CAM modellers and other extreme power freaks account for a tiny
proportion of the market. The vast majority just want to be able to run
a word processor, an email applciation and maybe a web browser or spreadsheet.
You can do that with a 300MHz CPU. Even allowing for W2K's bloat,
and animated helpers and CPU-consuming fluff all over the place, I can't see where the
need for that much CPU horsepower is going to be coming from.
Intel's marketing department are going to have their work cut out.
PS. Note that I'm talking about desktop CPUs here (which is what the roadmap is about). Servers are an entirely different matter.
I wonder if Sun plans to migrate this to Intel Solaris
Extremely unlikely, given that IIRC, Cobalt boxen
are MIPS based. That said, it wouldn't surprise me to see
that change in the future. With few people adding
additional software to their Cobalt servers, the CPU becomes increasingly irrelevant. Sun could
quite conceivably bring out a new range based on embedded UltraSPARC processors (or StrongARM or whatever -- even Intel,
though that's unlikely). End users wouldn't notice any difference
(people don't notice when they're using my Sparc Linux box
instead of the normal Intel ones, for example). An UltraSPARC based Cobalt would be capable of running both Linux and Solaris, and it'd be interesting to see which one they picked -- my guess is they'd stick with Linux. A few years ago, they all but admitted Linux was faster on low end machines -- at the time, they were aiming for the high end anyway, so they weren't too bothered about letting little things like that slip out. I doubt we'd hear such an admission now, though.
This is much better!!! http://www.emc.com/products/systems/symmetrix.jsp
Yep, sure is... if you need that much storage.
However, neither Symmetrix or CLARiiON come in a convenient 1U (or even 2U or 4U) rack
mountable form. If you're a small ISP with limited rack
space, the Maxtor option would be a much better solution
(as would the VA storage options, but they're very pricy,
and not particularly dense, storage wise).
Now, I don't understand why Apple's customers would want one click shopping.
Indeed. The whole concept of 1-click ordering only works
for repeat orders. How many people are going to be making
frequent orders from Apple's online store? It's great for Amazon, because
they typically sell low value goods, and so people order
more often. I just can't see this being the case for Apple.
This patent was granted for a process that ties together a cookie, a
button, and a database in such a way that has been done countless times before!!!!
My understanding was that the patent was granted for the
business method, not for the actual implementation.
It's not even, AFAIK, a software patent. It just happens to
be trivially implemented using a cookie and a database, an implementation
that's blindingly obvious to anyone in the industry. But, until Amazon,
no one had thought of doing one click ordering. Amazon did, and so patented that.
As it happens, I'd say that business method patents are just as bogus (if not more so) than software patents, and this one should have been thrown out by the patent examiner on its first reading. But then, I'm not a patent lawyer that gets paid for eah approved patent...
I also enjoyed the reference to "National Corporation".
Yikes, and I've just finished rolling up a character
for a Cyberpunk 2020 campaign. The similarities are quite
evident. Gotta love those corporate governments...
Apart from anything else, I'm very wary of the wording in
the open letter:
If you can
remove the watermark or defeat the other technology on our proposed copyright protection
system, you
may earn up to $10,000.
So it looks like they trick people into checking their security for them, and
then don't have to give them the cash anyway. Personally, I'd like to
see someone remove the watermark and not tell them how it was done. Sure, they'd be forfeiting the
possible prize money, but they'd also be delaying the introduction of SDMI. Like Don Marti, I don't copy music from others. And yes, protecting my fair use copying is worth more than $10K to me anyway.
Linux = Great on non-Ultra
Solaris = Great on Ultra
Actually, I'd say that Linux is great on UltraSPARCs too.
It's just that on large SMP machines, Solaris currently scales better.
On a single CPU UltraSPARC, Linux has always been faster than Solaris for me.
I suspect that up to 4 CPUs, Linux will hold its own quite well,
but above that, Solaris rules (for now).
I don't think anybody's going to be installing SuSE on an E10K anytime soon, though..
I don't see why not. I used to run Red Hat on an Ultra Enterprise 4000
at work a while back. The E10K has a different internal architecture
to the rest of the Sun Ultra Enterprise line, but the
support's already there in the Linux kernel. See
arch/sparc64/kernel/starfire.c.
It's a simple question of how to get a parcel sent reasonably safely and resonably
frugally to East Podunk, Russia (or Paraguay, or rural Vietnam, or Sierra Leone, or
Uzbekistan, for that matter).
My girlfriend works for an international courier, and one of
the places they occasionally deliver to is a small island in the South Pacific (I forget which one).
The official delivery method is to dump a box on the beach.
At some point in the next week or so, a local "postman" will come and
pick it up, and take it to the intended recipient.
You'll find that even technologically backwards countries have evolved reasonable efficient processes for getting things done, even if they sound unbelievable to the western world.
Ok, this is a short guide for those people who actually want to get a
running system, not just look at the pretty source code:-). You'll
certainly need minix for most of the steps.
Hmmm. I guess that must have been out of date even then, because
I certainly didn't need Minix when I installed Linux. IIRC, my
first install was done with a boot/root disk from Linus (0.12?), but it wasn't really useful enough to do anything other than play around with. The first full Linux install I did
was the MCC distribution, which I got on 4 high-density 5.25" floppies. I didn't have enough hard drive space for the "huge" SLS distribution at the time (it was 65MB, I think).
No trace of Minix anywhere...
I say we keep this elitism out of the
judicial system, and stick with what we know works.
The problem is that not only does the law not work, it never has done.
Law and justice are very different things. The law is just
an approximation to justice, that has been, for the most part, close enough that we can pretend it works. As techonology is progressing faster
than law, though, that approximation is becoming less and less accurate.
Whether separate tech courts are a solution to this problem is
debatable, and we may indeed be better off sticking with
the current system. But that system most definitely does not work. It's just that it may be less broken than the alternatives.
For example a
bar (in Illinois I know laws differ) can not have a happy "hour" and then raise there
prices after everyone is in and drinking. Isn't it really the same thing.
No, they're different -- witha happy hour, everyone wins. I's more of a problem with the drinking laws in Illinois than
with anything else. Can you explain what's wrong with a happy hour?
It's a business model that benefits everyone. The customer gets
cheaper drinks for a limited time, and the establishment gets
to sell more drinks (with a reduced profit margin, but gambling
that the increased sales make up for that loss). Who loses here?
Is this real? If so, what sort of scanner do they have that can
test for a particular piece of DNA is a small, portable unit (which is certainly what they're
implying)? Or do they just confiscate a sample, and
analyse it in a lab at a later date?
players would "rather run around in short shorts
raiding tombs than experience real stories..."
I fall into both camps. I enjoy the sort of mindless doom/quake/unreal
type violence, but I prefer such games *not* to have an intricate plot.
Too often, publishers insist on writing a story, and weaving the game into that, at the expense of gameplay.
I'd much rather have a doom-style "you're a marine in hell -- kill everything" type plot, but with buckets of playability.
On the other hand, I also enjoy adventure games. Real ones, that is, not the nasty Sierra-style ones.
I can't count how many hours I lost playing the classics like Snowball, Lords Of Time
and Kentilla. The sad fact is not that adventure games comitted suicide, just that the demographics of the gameplaying market changed. With computers (and consoles) gaining mass acceptance, the proportion of gamers with half a brain has naturally decreased. It's just not good business sense to develop an interesting (but low selling) adventure game, when a mindless action game will sell many times as many copies.
Can anyone explain why you'd need such a tall base station?
The only reason I can think of is that gravitational effects
are so much smaller at 50km up... Is that the only reason?
Slashdot Mirror
Does anyone else find it amusing that on the RH site, they're announcing RH7.0 while at the same time, they're running a sidebar ad urging "Get Red Hat Linux 6.2"?
Indeed, but if you can get the chip to run cool enough, you won't need a fan. A traditional CRT monitor uses so much power that there's no point using a low power chip on such a system. But that's not their market. They're being aimed at the portable market -- notebooks and webpad type devices. Yes, LCD screens still suck large amounts of power, but advances are being made in this area (hopefully LEP screens will have low power requirements). Also, consider the CPU in a set top box (e.g., a satellite or cable decoder box). How many people would put up with them if they needed a noisy fan in them? With its low power requirements, a Crusoe is ideal here, a market that's inaccessable to Intel and AMD (with their current offerings).
Really? Then please tell me what's better. Sure, Electric Eyes and kview are OK, and I'm sure Eye Of Gnome is going to be OK too. But for me, xv lets me get the job done quicker. Please don't suggest gimp. It's an awesome program that I use almost daily, but it fills a different niche to xv. Were KImageShop ready, that would fall into the same category too. xv is not without its faults (displaying images larger than the screen being a particular weak spot), but the end user interface is better than the alternatives (that I've seen, anyway).
Sort of, but not for much longer. They were bought out by EMC last year, and the DG name is slowly being retired (much like you don't see any new products from DEC these days). AViiON is the name of the server products. The storage products are called CLARiiON, and are what EMC were primarily after when they bought DG. They haven't become a complete service company -- more yet another Microsoft lackey, although it's amusing that they still have to resort to Unix for their higher end servers, because although NT can run on them, it can't scale to use all the processors, unlike DG/UX. Although it's a bit spartan in places, DG/UX is one of my favourite Unices, particularly from a programming point of view. Although originally a SystemV variant, the DG/UX kernel was completely rewritten in house, and contains some nice goodies, like dg_xtrace(2), and of course ccNUMA supoprt.
Indeed, and it gives a great insight into the corporate culture at DG (where I'm currently working).
Would I? I'll never claim that there's no market for high performance chips, but I still can't see a mass market demand for 1GHz CPUs. Yes, Intel/AMD's marketing depts may be able to convince the world that there's a need, and thus artifically create a demand, but in reality, very few people have a need for chips that fast.
Actually, you're right -- I hadn't thought of that one. But still, the number of corporate PCs sold each year dwarfs the number of home PCs sold, and not too many offices have a need for video editing...
Similarly, don't assume that my comments indicate what I would do. If I were to buy a RaQ, you can be assured that I'd find out exactly what CPU it contained. However, neither you or I are in Cobalt's target market, and that market doesn't care. I'd guess that well over 95% of their customers will do the 15 minute setup, and then never touch anything else on the box again. To those users, why does the CPU matter?
Yep, so they do. That illustrates just my point perfectly, though. The earlier RaQ2s didn't have an Intel compatible CPU. They made the change for the RaQ3. The user doesn't know (or care) what CPU it contains.
PS. Note that I'm talking about desktop CPUs here (which is what the roadmap is about). Servers are an entirely different matter.
Extremely unlikely, given that IIRC, Cobalt boxen are MIPS based. That said, it wouldn't surprise me to see that change in the future. With few people adding additional software to their Cobalt servers, the CPU becomes increasingly irrelevant. Sun could quite conceivably bring out a new range based on embedded UltraSPARC processors (or StrongARM or whatever -- even Intel, though that's unlikely). End users wouldn't notice any difference (people don't notice when they're using my Sparc Linux box instead of the normal Intel ones, for example). An UltraSPARC based Cobalt would be capable of running both Linux and Solaris, and it'd be interesting to see which one they picked -- my guess is they'd stick with Linux. A few years ago, they all but admitted Linux was faster on low end machines -- at the time, they were aiming for the high end anyway, so they weren't too bothered about letting little things like that slip out. I doubt we'd hear such an admission now, though.
Yep, sure is... if you need that much storage. However, neither Symmetrix or CLARiiON come in a convenient 1U (or even 2U or 4U) rack mountable form. If you're a small ISP with limited rack space, the Maxtor option would be a much better solution (as would the VA storage options, but they're very pricy, and not particularly dense, storage wise).
Indeed. The whole concept of 1-click ordering only works for repeat orders. How many people are going to be making frequent orders from Apple's online store? It's great for Amazon, because they typically sell low value goods, and so people order more often. I just can't see this being the case for Apple.
My understanding was that the patent was granted for the business method, not for the actual implementation. It's not even, AFAIK, a software patent. It just happens to be trivially implemented using a cookie and a database, an implementation that's blindingly obvious to anyone in the industry. But, until Amazon, no one had thought of doing one click ordering. Amazon did, and so patented that. As it happens, I'd say that business method patents are just as bogus (if not more so) than software patents, and this one should have been thrown out by the patent examiner on its first reading. But then, I'm not a patent lawyer that gets paid for eah approved patent...
Yikes, and I've just finished rolling up a character for a Cyberpunk 2020 campaign. The similarities are quite evident. Gotta love those corporate governments...
So it looks like they trick people into checking their security for them, and then don't have to give them the cash anyway. Personally, I'd like to see someone remove the watermark and not tell them how it was done. Sure, they'd be forfeiting the possible prize money, but they'd also be delaying the introduction of SDMI. Like Don Marti, I don't copy music from others. And yes, protecting my fair use copying is worth more than $10K to me anyway.
Solaris = Great on Ultra
Actually, I'd say that Linux is great on UltraSPARCs too. It's just that on large SMP machines, Solaris currently scales better. On a single CPU UltraSPARC, Linux has always been faster than Solaris for me. I suspect that up to 4 CPUs, Linux will hold its own quite well, but above that, Solaris rules (for now).
I don't see why not. I used to run Red Hat on an Ultra Enterprise 4000 at work a while back. The E10K has a different internal architecture to the rest of the Sun Ultra Enterprise line, but the support's already there in the Linux kernel. See arch/sparc64/kernel/starfire.c.
My girlfriend works for an international courier, and one of the places they occasionally deliver to is a small island in the South Pacific (I forget which one). The official delivery method is to dump a box on the beach. At some point in the next week or so, a local "postman" will come and pick it up, and take it to the intended recipient. You'll find that even technologically backwards countries have evolved reasonable efficient processes for getting things done, even if they sound unbelievable to the western world.
Hmmm. I guess that must have been out of date even then, because I certainly didn't need Minix when I installed Linux. IIRC, my first install was done with a boot/root disk from Linus (0.12?), but it wasn't really useful enough to do anything other than play around with. The first full Linux install I did was the MCC distribution, which I got on 4 high-density 5.25" floppies. I didn't have enough hard drive space for the "huge" SLS distribution at the time (it was 65MB, I think). No trace of Minix anywhere...
The problem is that not only does the law not work, it never has done. Law and justice are very different things. The law is just an approximation to justice, that has been, for the most part, close enough that we can pretend it works. As techonology is progressing faster than law, though, that approximation is becoming less and less accurate. Whether separate tech courts are a solution to this problem is debatable, and we may indeed be better off sticking with the current system. But that system most definitely does not work. It's just that it may be less broken than the alternatives.
No, they're different -- witha happy hour, everyone wins. I's more of a problem with the drinking laws in Illinois than with anything else. Can you explain what's wrong with a happy hour? It's a business model that benefits everyone. The customer gets cheaper drinks for a limited time, and the establishment gets to sell more drinks (with a reduced profit margin, but gambling that the increased sales make up for that loss). Who loses here?
Is this real? If so, what sort of scanner do they have that can test for a particular piece of DNA is a small, portable unit (which is certainly what they're implying)? Or do they just confiscate a sample, and analyse it in a lab at a later date?
I fall into both camps. I enjoy the sort of mindless doom/quake/unreal type violence, but I prefer such games *not* to have an intricate plot. Too often, publishers insist on writing a story, and weaving the game into that, at the expense of gameplay. I'd much rather have a doom-style "you're a marine in hell -- kill everything" type plot, but with buckets of playability.
On the other hand, I also enjoy adventure games. Real ones, that is, not the nasty Sierra-style ones. I can't count how many hours I lost playing the classics like Snowball, Lords Of Time and Kentilla. The sad fact is not that adventure games comitted suicide, just that the demographics of the gameplaying market changed. With computers (and consoles) gaining mass acceptance, the proportion of gamers with half a brain has naturally decreased. It's just not good business sense to develop an interesting (but low selling) adventure game, when a mindless action game will sell many times as many copies.
Can anyone explain why you'd need such a tall base station? The only reason I can think of is that gravitational effects are so much smaller at 50km up... Is that the only reason?