You mention that you would like to work for the Bell-labs of old. What makes you think you need a CS degree?
In my limited experience, research labs for technology companies (like IBM, HP and Sun) employ a very diverse group of people from multiple disciplines. The common trait of these people is that they are interested in researching computers, without necessarily having a CS degree. In some ways having a CS degree might not help if you want to do radically innovative stuff (one never knows). I cannot comment on the likes of Google, Ebay or Amazon, but I am sure they have a lot of smart people working on their computing problems that do not have CS degrees. Consider this, if you work for Amazon and research interface design to guide customer decision making, I would *hope* you don't have a CS degree...
If your engineering degree will give you access to any of the research labs, I don't know. Part of it is luck of the draw - having some skills they want. The other part is pure brain power, e.g. are you smart enough to cope and flexible enough to adapt.
If you want to work at a research lab, be prepared to present yourself as a capable candidate.
The Itanium has horrible price/performance for web-serving... the ad-hoc nature of web-serving does not do the architecture justice. The new dual-core x64 Conroe offering would be a much better choice.
Has anybody noticed that the Conroe effectively kills Itanium for most workloads?
Sorry, but you're only partially correct. Most '32-way' advantages actually come from memory waits. The core will move to the next thread if the current thread is in a wait state. When you miss in the caches and have to get the data from main memory, the next thread gets executed. Since memory delay is the main inhibitor to performance there is a significant total gain. Not just branch delays or I/O waits.
The Niagara will seriously whip the Turion64 for a workload like SPECweb2005. As far as the remark goes on the 'missing' FP-units. Sun recommends that you not consider Niagara if you have more than 3% floating point instructions. For less than 1% FP the unit will not be a delay. Most webserving tasks are well under the 3% threshold.
ad 1: Compilers can improve easily, with a recompile. this remark I consider extremely naive and it really, really hurts your credibility. The fact that a compiler can be recompiled does not mean it also automatically improves its logic. The problem with all the compilers for Itanium is in the logic, not in the execution. Recompiling the compiler without improving the logic might give you a faster compiler, certainly not a better one. In order to improve compilers for Itanium the prefetch and scheduling logic in the compilers and assemblers needs to be vastly improved. Especially optimization for data-dependent branches requires a lot of additional work.
ad.2 A... each clock cycle could allow the execution of up to 3 concurrent operations. Not if the compiler does a bad job, as many of them do now. Look at Itaniums performance on data dependent branches, it is underwhelming... B huh? Are you mixing up RISC and VLIW (EPIC) designs?
ad.3 The only reason Itanium has good SPEC performance is because the benchmark is completely deterministic in its execution. Itanium greatly (like: insanely) benefits from repeated compile-execute-profile iterations of the benchmark. Real world performance doesn't come close. Only numerical codes with very well understood branches can hope to approach those SPEC rates.
ad.4 I suggest the following literature first: Hennesey and Patterson, Computer Architecture (Morgan Kaufmann); Patterson and Hennesey, Computer Organization and Design (Morgan Kaufmann); Sima and Fountain and Kacsuk, Advanced Computer Architectures (Addison Wesley); Lilja, Measuring computer performance (cambridge); Jain, the art of computer systems performance analysis (wiley)
While the Itanic is a nice piece of engineering, please consider the following. The EPIC (or VLIW) architecture employed in the Itanic really puts the burden of optimization at the compiler level. The current generation of compilers is really not good enough to fully leverage the Itanic's computing resources.
While the SPEC and TPC-C numbers are impressive, please consider this: those numbers are the result of several compile-execute-profile iterations. These iterations provided the compilers with the information needed for their optimization decisions.
SPEC reflects workloads that are in general repetitive in nature and are therefore correctly optimized using compile-execute-profile iterations. SPECfp accurately reflects the behavior of number crunching codes and various other flavors of scientific computing. However, the ad-hoc nature of OLTP and Datawharehousing workloads as seen in the real world cannot be as optimized as TPC-C. Workloads that have many data dependent execution paths cannot be efficiently optimized for the EPIC instruction set (other than through speculative branching). Therefore these ad-hoc workloads never reach the performance levels boasted by TPC-C results.
The reason the Power5 edges out the Itanium on TPC-C is exactly for that reason. The RISC architecture allows easier optimization of data dependent execution paths.
While the Itanic is indeed a decent scientific computing chip, price-performance wise it is not better than the AMD Opteron. The main reasons for Itanics high performance are the many parallel execution units combined with the large caches. Both are expensive, substantially decreasing the price-performance.
According to some estimations (too lazy to find the link), it will take maybe two generations of compilers before the EPIC instruction set can really shine. Optimizing code at compilation time on the fly is hard and a lot of investment is needed into optimization routines to get that done properly. Great performance improvements are seen using compile-execute-profile, but currently (afaik) the best running code on Itanium is still hand tweaked. (Checkout: Itanium - A system implementor's tale, Charles Gray et.al. USENIX 2005)
BTW, your last comment was uncalled for, Intel originally did market the Itanic as the be-all, end-all of computing. Although I would be interested to see pictures of a 16+ core Itanium 2+. My latest count of Itanium cores stopped at two. Did you mean 8+ dual core Itanium 2?
You are correct, the name is indeed Trusted Solaris, my mistake. And yes, I am aware that Linux has achieved PL4+. My posts are not intended to be negative about Linux' capabilities. My posts are intended to point out that some of the reasoning presented by the original poster is flawed.
Beowulf can mean cheap hardware. Cheap hardware is not were most of the money is spent. (You imply that Sun doesn't make cheap hardware, I state that you haven't brought yourself up to speed with Sun's current offering. The Opteron servers with Infiniband interconnects make quite a nice clustered environment.)
Programmer productivity is were the money is. Getting a program to work for a clustered environment requires a lot of skill. Often the code is hand-tuned to work over the particular configuration of a cluster. What we lack from the original poster is information on what environment the customer currently runs on and what their needs are. My post is merely pointing out that it is an oft perpetuated myth that cheaper hardware equals more bang for the buck. It doesn't, the additional cost in developer time spent to make those applications suitable for a new cluster is usually equal or greater than the cost savings.
There are many issues related to programming for- and executing in- clusters. Only when you are using really large clusters on programs that are well understood does it make sense to make transitions (as in the ASCI red and blue) to benefit from new hardware. Usually program improvement is the best way to improve performance.
You might consider Sun a losing company, I don't have that feeling. Sun certainly has it warts and we haven't done the best job in market perception. However, do you really want a world without Sun? Sun is still a powerhouse of innovation, we are open source friendly and in our core we are still geeks that enjoy technology.
(Disclosure: I work for Sun and work with Linux since 1994).
Why would you move the modelers to Linux from Solaris? There is no real advantage.... Sure a Beowulf cluster is a nice piece of hardware, but hardware can only compensate a bit for programmer productivity... If their code is written using MPI or OpenMP or some other standard clustering environment then there shouldn't be a need to move the developers, should there? Just recompile and go. It is really much more efficient to shove faster hardware under a programmer then to force the programmer to adapt to a different programming environment. Programming for a cluster is hard enough without having to take into account the details of the operating system, forcing them from Solaris to Linux might improve the execution part (on a side note, have you considered Sun's clustering tools?). But it *will* set them back in productivity while they move to different compilers and adapt the execution of the program to the Beowulf environment.
In my opinion you have forced your customer to make a move on questionable grounds.
Now to the matter of security. As you are aware, Solaris has the highest level rating for security. Secure Solaris is the defacto operating system at a number of government agencies. Linux cannot hold a candle to the multiple access levels of the Secure Solaris operating system. You state that you are frustrated at needing the helpdesk for file permission changes. What is your point? Are you using the fact that YOU don't like the limitations to change a customer from Solaris to Linux? Or are you complaining that the customer's environment did not deploy secure solaris with its multiple access layers? In Secure Solaris there is no need to muck with sudo. Each file can be managed properly from a security point of view (come to think of it, much of that can be done with Linux too).
Before I answer your question, let me state that I understand your point of view. When I joined the navy as a UNIX project manager, the admins gave me absolutely no rights whatsoever on the production systems. Their reasoning: '.. he can do things I don't understand, can't control or prevent.' There will always be a tension between the lockdown desired by the admins to keep their environment safe and secure and the users who want total freedom....
In my mind there is NO good reason to give ANY user root access in a secure environment. Period. If you have frustrated in the past by having to interface with the helpdesk, then the helpdesk needs to be improved. At the same time, I assume, any user has full access to their files. You mention that you have convinced modelers to move to a Beowulf environment, then why the issue anyway. If they run cluster code then they run as user. All the need are basic user access rights, nothing more...
Solaris might be open source soon it already is, thank you very much. Check out OpenSolaris.
...but the CDDL is not compatible with the GPL, and thus, is not free-as-in-speech software... luckily not everybody subscribes to the dim point of view that only GPL is worthy of the name OpenSource. (and what was your definition of FUD again...?).
...Sun regularly has some shady remarks about the GPL... how would a company, in your worldview, express criticism of the GPL, without being shady?
....Novell and RedHat on the other side, who fights SCO, open sources Netscape directory server, shows me that I can trust them.... and the meek shall inherit the earth...
C'mon JonJ, the world has moved on, time to move along with them. Sun, Novell and RedHat are in the business of making money, they have to act on what is good for the company.
We just went through a two day outage at the university here because of a worm that infected a series of Windows systems. My question to IT guy#1 was: "Dude, why did you guys switch from Solaris to Windows?" His reply was that "the Windows solution was cheaper"
That little outage probably blew away most of the anticipated cost savings.... When are PHBs going to realize that hardware and its maintenance rarely exceeds 15% of the total lifetime cost... (even when the maintenance is considered expensive). Software licensing and administrative costs are much larger contributers to the total lifetime cost..
While the North Sea does not get 200 MPH gusts, or even 165 MPH sustained winds, the North Sea has one nasty aspect. In essence the North Sea is a funnel, open at the north end and constricted at the south (the channel). South of the channel high and low water tides can actually be more than 10m apart (33ft). In the Netherlands, the height of the dykes has been determined based on the requirement to withstand a superstorm coinciding with high tide (the lunar type, not the daily ones). Therefore, depending where you are in the Netherlands, the height of those dykes is between 5m (16ft) and 10m (33ft) above sea level, depending on the probability of being breached (must be less than 1:10000 years).
So, if New Orleans had followed a similar approach, it would have been clear that their defenses were woefully inadequate given the level of the risk.
Global warming has nothing to do with it, this is pure risk management and making informed choices. I do pity the folks in New Orleans and the general area and wish them good fortune in getting their lives back together.
they might have asked about pumping, but the dutch could surely have told them something about interconnected systems of dykes so that one or two failures would NOT lead to complete flooding. If you have ever visited both the dutch polders and New Orleans, that would have been an obvious observation. However, those interconnected systems cost a lot of money to build and maintain.
My use of the terminology is not wrong it is sloppy. The point I was trying to get across is that there are less stages for deployment for PHP (which is parsed by the environment and then cached), while Java and C# are compiled first and their bytecode is deployed and executed in the JVM, and C/C++ are fully functional after compilation. From a productivity point of view Java and C# are compiled languages because they require compilation before deployment.
Your point about the necessity of communicating precisely what is meant by using the correct terminology is well taken and I stand corrected. You however could benefit by including elements of civil discourse in your postings.
In my original posting I refer to the design aspect of the system at least for times! IF the web-app is well designed THEN they can add hardware to compensate for performance issues. Also I say should be as opposed to is, again referring to the design problem. I sympathize with your pain, I have the scar tissue too, but I have found that every hour spent in the design cycles saves at least ten hours down the road.
They might not be earning it, but they certainly can cost that much. Cost of an developer to a company is on average twice the salary he takes home. This is due to insurance, equipment, (healthcare) and expenses. I have found that with developers you get what you pay for, therefore I admit to a biased view.
Java compiles byte codes and is deployed as byte codes, PHP is deployed as a script and C/C++ can only be deployed as a program to the webserver. From a developers point of view PHP is probably much easier than C/C++ in the develop-test-debug cycle. That is why I chose to name PHP interpreted.
While I agree that C# compilation and C++ compilation are completely different, I state in my posting that Java and C# are in-between compiled languages like C/C++ and interpreted languages like PHP. My original posting is therefore correct and we are in agreement on the issue of their compilation.
What you are asking is a dilemma that has been around since the invention of different programming languages. My personal opinion is that the best investment of your time is designing the web-app itself. Once you understand the feature set you require/desire then it makes sense to start looking at how the feature set requirements map to the available languages from a development and performance point of view.
Most people tend to forget to take a productivity point of view and let themselves be guided by whatever is available or what's cool. If you follow a productivity approach it will help you make the trade-off decisions between interpreted languages like PHP and compiled languages like C/C++, with ASP and Java somewhere in between.
There is a balance between development and production, when you go live and your web-app is well-designed it should be easy to add additional hardware to compensate for performance issues (server is about US$ 2000,- , or the equivalent of 10-20 hours of developer time.)
The single most important piece of advice after recommending that you spend more time on designing the app: don't get married to the language. Be prepared to use PHP to develop quickly and understand what works and what doesn't for your web-app. Once you have solved the usability bugs, investigate how you can drive efficiency by choosing a different language or not.
There is no template for what is the best environment, only your common sense, and oh... did I mention that you should spend more time designing your app?
You buy a newspaper and you pay for the destruction and waste collection, why should it be any different for consumer goods?
Primarily the burden on the manufacturer should be to use components that are easy to recycle. If more than 30% of the product is not recycable, give the manufacturer a penalty. The burden on the consumer should be that he pays for the removal and destruction up-front, that way there is no incentive to leave it at the side of the road or dispose of it in other non-ecological ways.
When the CEOs of companies complain of lack of education and skills, what they are saying is that they cannot find people that have the right mix of skills for the job. Having worked for a large IT company for nearly ten years I have been involved in many interviews. When you enter an interview with a specific skillset in mind, most of the candidates will not be a good match, however, if you are willing to dig deeper and actually look at the way they think and approach problems, you will find people that could exceed your expectation. Turning towards universities so that they can provide IT level classes to their graduates is nice for product placement and breeding familiarity. It is however totally useless if you want to teach them the specific skills that are so in demand. Most companies work under operational constraints that limit the amount of time and money they can invest in training people so they are looking for the dark horse out there that has all the skills and is willing to work for a lower salary. Unfortunately, most all those companies are finding it extremely tough to (a) find the people and (b) keep them. Once a company has found a person that can do trick A, they will make him do trick A all the time. Whenhe discusses his career development he will be limited to performing trick A over and over again. Not many people I know will stick around.
Having worked with the folks of IBM services, I have seen a large spectrum of people, some very good, some abysmal. Yet, in those projects no college graduate would have been any use with skills advertised in the article.. Why, because real IT problems are caused by real IT needs and are usually the result of decisions made a few years back, therefore an understanding of that type of environment is a requirement to being effective.
If universities really want to train their graduates on IT skills, then they should take all the money RH and IBM are willing to spend but also open a consultancy service for small and medium companies. That will expose students to the realities of IT, not some class. As we say in the group I work for, 'we are looking for the people with the scar tissue in the right places'. And yes, we do hire out of university, but mostly PhDs
You might want to check your facts before making bold statements.
It is undeniable that Seoul is within artillery and missile range of the PRK, doing extensive damage to Seoul would literaly be a matter of minutes after the start of a conflict. It is impossible for an aggressor to destroy all the PRK artillery or missiles in a first strike. As proof look at the difficulties discovering the SCUD missiles in the first Gulf war, and they were in the desert.
Why are the PRK weak? Where is your proof for that assertion?
Their army might be a lot stronger than you think. For example, according to the CIA factbook, PRK feeds its army before it feeds its people. Therefore the army is well fed while the people are starving.
Your point of decisive actions is empty words. The Clinton administration is not the only administration to blame, why not start with the total lack of coherent foreign policy in the US with PRK since the end of the Korean war? How is the current administration any better? PRK knows that decisive action would imply an act of war and make the US or any other country the aggressor. In the international community PRK would have to behave stupidly and be seen as a clear and present danger to world peace before they would agree to action.
Your assessment of von Clausewitz is rather limited. 'War is the continuation of diplomacy with other means'. Just refering to Lenin's rule disregards the insight Lenin (and the Soviets) had in the applicability of von Clausewitz theorem.
Arguing for the overwhelming application of military force against a nation that has had over fifty years of paranoia to build its defences is as stupid as asking for a frontal charge by light infantry against dug-in defenders in a bunker complex. It shows total disregard for the elements of the Ancient Art of War: Surprise, Adaptation, Patience. The use of strategic nuclear weapons is unacceptable in the current world climate and would create a very dangerous precedent indeed, but more importantly, where is the proof that SNW's actually work against hardened targets deep in mountains?
In your world view of every generation repeating the mistakes of the previous generation you endow those generations with some sort of prescience... How COULD the previous generations have known that Napoleon/Washington/Bismark/Lenin/Hitler/Stalin (take your pick) would have become such a trouble maker? It is human nature to wait until a threat becomes real before we act.
Anyway, you argue that we have no choice with the PRK but to fight, to which I say 'bullshit'. Diplomacy has a long way to go before any shots are fired in anger at the PRK. Take a queue from the Soviet Union, it collapsed due to the inefficiencies of its economic process and could not sustain an arms race, so how can the PRK be any different?
You might want to get your facts straight. 1. Sun was not loosing One Billion Dollars a quarter, they were taking a write-off. The actual loss was much less. 2. The last two quarters were the first in 30 quarters where Sun had negative cash flow. 3. Sun still has an excess of 5 billion dollars in marketable equities.
Also, the value of the deal is less than 50M dollars because (as reported in the press-release) they did give a discount. Furthermore the goal is not just 1M users, its 200M users. A little discount now sure won't hurt them.
I agree that the deal won't make any impact this quarter, lets see how it evolves. It certainly is a good start.
Slashdot Mirror
52 million dollars over a couple of years.... Not much to keep a high-end computer company running on.
You mention that you would like to work for the Bell-labs of old. What makes you think you need a CS degree?
In my limited experience, research labs for technology companies (like IBM, HP and Sun) employ a very diverse group of people from multiple disciplines. The common trait of these people is that they are interested in researching computers, without necessarily having a CS degree. In some ways having a CS degree might not help if you want to do radically innovative stuff (one never knows). I cannot comment on the likes of Google, Ebay or Amazon, but I am sure they have a lot of smart people working on their computing problems that do not have CS degrees. Consider this, if you work for Amazon and research interface design to guide customer decision making, I would *hope* you don't have a CS degree...
If your engineering degree will give you access to any of the research labs, I don't know. Part of it is luck of the draw - having some skills they want. The other part is pure brain power, e.g. are you smart enough to cope and flexible enough to adapt.
If you want to work at a research lab, be prepared to present yourself as a capable candidate.
The Itanium has horrible price/performance for web-serving... the ad-hoc nature of web-serving does not do the architecture justice. The new dual-core x64 Conroe offering would be a much better choice.
Has anybody noticed that the Conroe effectively kills Itanium for most workloads?
Sorry, but you're only partially correct. Most '32-way' advantages actually come from memory waits. The core will move to the next thread if the current thread is in a wait state. When you miss in the caches and have to get the data from main memory, the next thread gets executed. Since memory delay is the main inhibitor to performance there is a significant total gain. Not just branch delays or I/O waits.
The Niagara will seriously whip the Turion64 for a workload like SPECweb2005. As far as the remark goes on the 'missing' FP-units. Sun recommends that you not consider Niagara if you have more than 3% floating point instructions. For less than 1% FP the unit will not be a delay. Most webserving tasks are well under the 3% threshold.
Let me disagree with you on a few points:
... each clock cycle could allow the execution of up to 3 concurrent operations. Not if the compiler does a bad job, as many of them do now. Look at Itaniums performance on data dependent branches, it is underwhelming...
ad 1: Compilers can improve easily, with a recompile. this remark I consider extremely naive and it really, really hurts your credibility. The fact that a compiler can be recompiled does not mean it also automatically improves its logic. The problem with all the compilers for Itanium is in the logic, not in the execution. Recompiling the compiler without improving the logic might give you a faster compiler, certainly not a better one.
In order to improve compilers for Itanium the prefetch and scheduling logic in the compilers and assemblers needs to be vastly improved. Especially optimization for data-dependent branches requires a lot of additional work.
ad.2
A
B huh? Are you mixing up RISC and VLIW (EPIC) designs?
ad.3 The only reason Itanium has good SPEC performance is because the benchmark is completely deterministic in its execution. Itanium greatly (like: insanely) benefits from repeated compile-execute-profile iterations of the benchmark. Real world performance doesn't come close. Only numerical codes with very well understood branches can hope to approach those SPEC rates.
ad.4 I suggest the following literature first: Hennesey and Patterson, Computer Architecture (Morgan Kaufmann); Patterson and Hennesey, Computer Organization and Design (Morgan Kaufmann); Sima and Fountain and Kacsuk, Advanced Computer Architectures (Addison Wesley); Lilja, Measuring computer performance (cambridge); Jain, the art of computer systems performance analysis (wiley)
While the Itanic is a nice piece of engineering, please consider the following. The EPIC (or VLIW) architecture employed in the Itanic really puts the burden of optimization at the compiler level. The current generation of compilers is really not good enough to fully leverage the Itanic's computing resources.
While the SPEC and TPC-C numbers are impressive, please consider this: those numbers are the result of several compile-execute-profile iterations. These iterations provided the compilers with the information needed for their optimization decisions.
SPEC reflects workloads that are in general repetitive in nature and are therefore correctly optimized using compile-execute-profile iterations. SPECfp accurately reflects the behavior of number crunching codes and various other flavors of scientific computing. However, the ad-hoc nature of OLTP and Datawharehousing workloads as seen in the real world cannot be as optimized as TPC-C. Workloads that have many data dependent execution paths cannot be efficiently optimized for the EPIC instruction set (other than through speculative branching). Therefore these ad-hoc workloads never reach the performance levels boasted by TPC-C results.
The reason the Power5 edges out the Itanium on TPC-C is exactly for that reason. The RISC architecture allows easier optimization of data dependent execution paths.
While the Itanic is indeed a decent scientific computing chip, price-performance wise it is not better than the AMD Opteron. The main reasons for Itanics high performance are the many parallel execution units combined with the large caches. Both are expensive, substantially decreasing the price-performance.
According to some estimations (too lazy to find the link), it will take maybe two generations of compilers before the EPIC instruction set can really shine. Optimizing code at compilation time on the fly is hard and a lot of investment is needed into optimization routines to get that done properly. Great performance improvements are seen using compile-execute-profile, but currently (afaik) the best running code on Itanium is still hand tweaked. (Checkout: Itanium - A system implementor's tale, Charles Gray et.al. USENIX 2005)
BTW, your last comment was uncalled for, Intel originally did market the Itanic as the be-all, end-all of computing. Although I would be interested to see pictures of a 16+ core Itanium 2+. My latest count of Itanium cores stopped at two. Did you mean 8+ dual core Itanium 2?
just my 2 cents
You are correct, the name is indeed Trusted Solaris, my mistake.
And yes, I am aware that Linux has achieved PL4+. My posts are not intended to be negative about Linux' capabilities. My posts are intended to point out that some of the reasoning presented by the original poster is flawed.
Beowulf can mean cheap hardware. Cheap hardware is not were most of the money is spent.
(You imply that Sun doesn't make cheap hardware, I state that you haven't brought yourself up to speed with Sun's current offering. The Opteron servers with Infiniband interconnects make quite a nice clustered environment.)
Programmer productivity is were the money is. Getting a program to work for a clustered environment requires a lot of skill. Often the code is hand-tuned to work over the particular configuration of a cluster. What we lack from the original poster is information on what environment the customer currently runs on and what their needs are.
My post is merely pointing out that it is an oft perpetuated myth that cheaper hardware equals more bang for the buck. It doesn't, the additional cost in developer time spent to make those applications suitable for a new cluster is usually equal or greater than the cost savings.
There are many issues related to programming for- and executing in- clusters. Only when you are using really large clusters on programs that are well understood does it make sense to make transitions (as in the ASCI red and blue) to benefit from new hardware. Usually program improvement is the best way to improve performance.
You might consider Sun a losing company, I don't have that feeling. Sun certainly has it warts and we haven't done the best job in market perception. However, do you really want a world without Sun? Sun is still a powerhouse of innovation, we are open source friendly and in our core we are still geeks that enjoy technology.
(Disclosure: I work for Sun and work with Linux since 1994).
Why would you move the modelers to Linux from Solaris? There is no real advantage....
Sure a Beowulf cluster is a nice piece of hardware, but hardware can only compensate a bit for programmer productivity... If their code is written using MPI or OpenMP or some other standard clustering environment then there shouldn't be a need to move the developers, should there? Just recompile and go.
It is really much more efficient to shove faster hardware under a programmer then to force the programmer to adapt to a different programming environment. Programming for a cluster is hard enough without having to take into account the details of the operating system, forcing them from Solaris to Linux might improve the execution part (on a side note, have you considered Sun's clustering tools?). But it *will* set them back in productivity while they move to different compilers and adapt the execution of the program to the Beowulf environment.
In my opinion you have forced your customer to make a move on questionable grounds.
Now to the matter of security. As you are aware, Solaris has the highest level rating for security. Secure Solaris is the defacto operating system at a number of government agencies. Linux cannot hold a candle to the multiple access levels of the Secure Solaris operating system. You state that you are frustrated at needing the helpdesk for file permission changes. What is your point? Are you using the fact that YOU don't like the limitations to change a customer from Solaris to Linux? Or are you complaining that the customer's environment did not deploy secure solaris with its multiple access layers? In Secure Solaris there is no need to muck with sudo. Each file can be managed properly from a security point of view (come to think of it, much of that can be done with Linux too).
Before I answer your question, let me state that I understand your point of view. When I joined the navy as a UNIX project manager, the admins gave me absolutely no rights whatsoever on the production systems. Their reasoning: '.. he can do things I don't understand, can't control or prevent.' There will always be a tension between the lockdown desired by the admins to keep their environment safe and secure and the users who want total freedom....
In my mind there is NO good reason to give ANY user root access in a secure environment. Period. If you have frustrated in the past by having to interface with the helpdesk, then the helpdesk needs to be improved. At the same time, I assume, any user has full access to their files.
You mention that you have convinced modelers to move to a Beowulf environment, then why the issue anyway. If they run cluster code then they run as user. All the need are basic user access rights, nothing more...
Maybe I don't understand your point....
Solaris might be open source soon it already is, thank you very much. Check out OpenSolaris.
C'mon JonJ, the world has moved on, time to move along with them. Sun, Novell and RedHat are in the business of making money, they have to act on what is good for the company.
That little outage probably blew away most of the anticipated cost savings.... When are PHBs going to realize that hardware and its maintenance rarely exceeds 15% of the total lifetime cost... (even when the maintenance is considered expensive). Software licensing and administrative costs are much larger contributers to the total lifetime cost..
While the North Sea does not get 200 MPH gusts, or even 165 MPH sustained winds, the North Sea has one nasty aspect. In essence the North Sea is a funnel, open at the north end and constricted at the south (the channel). South of the channel high and low water tides can actually be more than 10m apart (33ft).
In the Netherlands, the height of the dykes has been determined based on the requirement to withstand a superstorm coinciding with high tide (the lunar type, not the daily ones). Therefore, depending where you are in the Netherlands, the height of those dykes is between 5m (16ft) and 10m (33ft) above sea level, depending on the probability of being breached (must be less than 1:10000 years).
So, if New Orleans had followed a similar approach, it would have been clear that their defenses were woefully inadequate given the level of the risk.
Global warming has nothing to do with it, this is pure risk management and making informed choices. I do pity the folks in New Orleans and the general area and wish them good fortune in getting their lives back together.
Yes,
they might have asked about pumping, but the dutch could surely have told them something about interconnected systems of dykes so that one or two failures would NOT lead to complete flooding. If you have ever visited both the dutch polders and New Orleans, that would have been an obvious observation. However, those interconnected systems cost a lot of money to build and maintain.
Your point about the necessity of communicating precisely what is meant by using the correct terminology is well taken and I stand corrected. You however could benefit by including elements of civil discourse in your postings.
In my original posting I refer to the design aspect of the system at least for times! IF the web-app is well designed THEN they can add hardware to compensate for performance issues.
Also I say should be as opposed to is, again referring to the design problem. I sympathize with your pain, I have the scar tissue too, but I have found that every hour spent in the design cycles saves at least ten hours down the road.
They might not be earning it, but they certainly can cost that much. Cost of an developer to a company is on average twice the salary he takes home. This is due to insurance, equipment, (healthcare) and expenses. I have found that with developers you get what you pay for, therefore I admit to a biased view.
Java compiles byte codes and is deployed as byte codes, PHP is deployed as a script and C/C++ can only be deployed as a program to the webserver. From a developers point of view PHP is probably much easier than C/C++ in the develop-test-debug cycle. That is why I chose to name PHP interpreted.
While I agree that C# compilation and C++ compilation are completely different, I state in my posting that Java and C# are in-between compiled languages like C/C++ and interpreted languages like PHP. My original posting is therefore correct and we are in agreement on the issue of their compilation.
Most people tend to forget to take a productivity point of view and let themselves be guided by whatever is available or what's cool. If you follow a productivity approach it will help you make the trade-off decisions between interpreted languages like PHP and compiled languages like C/C++, with ASP and Java somewhere in between.
There is a balance between development and production, when you go live and your web-app is well-designed it should be easy to add additional hardware to compensate for performance issues (server is about US$ 2000,- , or the equivalent of 10-20 hours of developer time.)
The single most important piece of advice after recommending that you spend more time on designing the app: don't get married to the language. Be prepared to use PHP to develop quickly and understand what works and what doesn't for your web-app. Once you have solved the usability bugs, investigate how you can drive efficiency by choosing a different language or not.
There is no template for what is the best environment, only your common sense, and oh... did I mention that you should spend more time designing your app?
Primarily the burden on the manufacturer should be to use components that are easy to recycle. If more than 30% of the product is not recycable, give the manufacturer a penalty. The burden on the consumer should be that he pays for the removal and destruction up-front, that way there is no incentive to leave it at the side of the road or dispose of it in other non-ecological ways.
When the CEOs of companies complain of lack of education and skills, what they are saying is that they cannot find people that have the right mix of skills for the job. Having worked for a large IT company for nearly ten years I have been involved in many interviews. When you enter an interview with a specific skillset in mind, most of the candidates will not be a good match, however, if you are willing to dig deeper and actually look at the way they think and approach problems, you will find people that could exceed your expectation.
Turning towards universities so that they can provide IT level classes to their graduates is nice for product placement and breeding familiarity. It is however totally useless if you want to teach them the specific skills that are so in demand.
Most companies work under operational constraints that limit the amount of time and money they can invest in training people so they are looking for the dark horse out there that has all the skills and is willing to work for a lower salary. Unfortunately, most all those companies are finding it extremely tough to (a) find the people and (b) keep them.
Once a company has found a person that can do trick A, they will make him do trick A all the time. Whenhe discusses his career development he will be limited to performing trick A over and over again. Not many people I know will stick around.
Having worked with the folks of IBM services, I have seen a large spectrum of people, some very good, some abysmal. Yet, in those projects no college graduate would have been any use with skills advertised in the article.. Why, because real IT problems are caused by real IT needs and are usually the result of decisions made a few years back, therefore an understanding of that type of environment is a requirement to being effective.
If universities really want to train their graduates on IT skills, then they should take all the money RH and IBM are willing to spend but also open a consultancy service for small and medium companies. That will expose students to the realities of IT, not some class. As we say in the group I work for, 'we are looking for the people with the scar tissue in the right places'.
And yes, we do hire out of university, but mostly PhDs
Strictly speaking:
Up my ass, a greased up Yoda doll, I have.
Just some facts:
Sun's revenue Q3: $2.625 billion
Net loss for the third quarter of fiscal 2005 on a GAAP basis was $9 million
The cash and marketable debt securities balance at the end of the quarter was $7.357 billion.
http://www.sun.com/aboutsun/investor/earnings_rele ases/pr/2005-q3.html
So, your remark should be modded Troll....
This comment tripped over its own beard, hit its head on a hard rock and died.... more than a year ago.
You are repeating a position that is devoid of fact, just a rotting corps of dissent.
Get over it, Sun is a big contributor to the community while they try to do the right thing while making money.
And don't forget: beer != speech
You might want to check your facts before making bold statements.
It is undeniable that Seoul is within artillery and missile range of the PRK, doing extensive damage to Seoul would literaly be a matter of minutes after the start of a conflict. It is impossible for an aggressor to destroy all the PRK artillery or missiles in a first strike. As proof look at the difficulties discovering the SCUD missiles in the first Gulf war, and they were in the desert.
Why are the PRK weak? Where is your proof for that assertion?
Their army might be a lot stronger than you think. For example, according to the CIA factbook, PRK feeds its army before it feeds its people. Therefore the army is well fed while the people are starving.
Your point of decisive actions is empty words. The Clinton administration is not the only administration to blame, why not start with the total lack of coherent foreign policy in the US with PRK since the end of the Korean war? How is the current administration any better? PRK knows that decisive action would imply an act of war and make the US or any other country the aggressor. In the international community PRK would have to behave stupidly and be seen as a clear and present danger to world peace before they would agree to action.
Your assessment of von Clausewitz is rather limited. 'War is the continuation of diplomacy with other means'. Just refering to Lenin's rule disregards the insight Lenin (and the Soviets) had in the applicability of von Clausewitz theorem.
Arguing for the overwhelming application of military force against a nation that has had over fifty years of paranoia to build its defences is as stupid as asking for a frontal charge by light infantry against dug-in defenders in a bunker complex. It shows total disregard for the elements of the Ancient Art of War: Surprise, Adaptation, Patience.
The use of strategic nuclear weapons is unacceptable in the current world climate and would create a very dangerous precedent indeed, but more importantly, where is the proof that SNW's actually work against hardened targets deep in mountains?
In your world view of every generation repeating the mistakes of the previous generation you endow those generations with some sort of prescience... How COULD the previous generations have known that Napoleon/Washington/Bismark/Lenin/Hitler/Stalin (take your pick) would have become such a trouble maker? It is human nature to wait until a threat becomes real before we act.
Anyway, you argue that we have no choice with the PRK but to fight, to which I say 'bullshit'. Diplomacy has a long way to go before any shots are fired in anger at the PRK. Take a queue from the Soviet Union, it collapsed due to the inefficiencies of its economic process and could not sustain an arms race, so how can the PRK be any different?
You might want to get your facts straight.
1. Sun was not loosing One Billion Dollars a quarter, they were taking a write-off. The actual loss was much less.
2. The last two quarters were the first in 30 quarters where Sun had negative cash flow.
3. Sun still has an excess of 5 billion dollars in marketable equities.
Also, the value of the deal is less than 50M dollars because (as reported in the press-release) they did give a discount. Furthermore the goal is not just 1M users, its 200M users. A little discount now sure won't hurt them.
I agree that the deal won't make any impact this quarter, lets see how it evolves. It certainly is a good start.