I don't know why, but one reason could be that their cluster might not scale well with more cpus. They are using Infiniband, perhaps that's close to maxed out when they get their 10teraflop sustained performance. There is a reason you can't just keep hooking up more cpus, it's called the law of diminishing returns.
RMS still doesn't get it (Score:2)
by IGnatius T Foobar [SNIP]
Software is a tool to get a job done. People do not turn on their computers to experience freedom. They turn on their computers to write, communicate, calculate, or whatever.
[SNIP]
Free speech thrives at UNCENSORED! BBS - http://uncensored.citadel.org [citadel.org]
Tell me, then, why should we care about Free Speech but not Free Software? I can buy perfectly good outlets for my speech, as long as I'm rich, what's the problem? I don't want to say things to "experience freedom" either, I just want to get my message to other people.
I had a stage where I was abusing caffeine. I would drink 5 or 6 mugs of strong filter coffee during office hours, and I would also make a coffee or two before bed, especially if I'd had a drink. So I would be wrecked every morning and need more stimulation to get going.
But after some health problems, I cut down. I don't enjoy my day as much with no coffee at all, and 1-2 coffees before mid-day seems to be tolerable, so my natural level is about 2 coffees before noon on average, with special dispensation for Friday and Saturday if I will be able to stay up as late as feels good, and then (and just as importantly) sleep in to make up.
Maybe absolutely zero coffee would be best taking the strict view, but, you know what, we'll still die anyway.
Sun Fire V440 Server
4 1.28-GHz UltraSPARC IIIi Processors
1-MB Internal Cache
16-GB Memory
4 36-GB Ultra320 SCSI 10000RPM Disk Drives
1 DVD-ROM Drive
2 10/100/1000 Mb/s Ethernet Ports
1 DB9 (ttyb), 1 RJ45 (Console) Serial Ports
4 USB Ports
2 (1+1) Power Supplies
Solaris 8 HW 07/03 Operating System Server License
Ships Within: 10 business days
List Price: $25,995.00
The only question in my mind is: Will you be able to run the IA-64 port of Solaris 10 on a home-built Athlon 64 box, or will it require Sun hardware to run?
Oh, that's easy! IA-64 refers to the Itanium processor family, so the answer to your question is "No, in fact Solaris 10 will not run on any IA-64 box, no matter who makes it".
Now, if you mean AMD x86-64 - the AMD specified 64-bit superset of IA-32, then that is an interesting question. I bet it will be at least as possible as sunning Solaris x86 on a random home-brew PC - either easy in some cases, or completely impossible in others depending on the driver situation. I can't see them putting 'slugs' into the O/S to prevent it working on non-Sun-assembled boxes, that's more of an IBM style trick
5 years from now, the "extended" DVDs will be all that counts in anyone's book.
So far i think the cinematic cut of FotR works better than the extended DVD, and for TTT it's the other way around (for me).
Sure I love the extras on the first extended edition, but in a lot of cases I thought the essential story still shined through in the leaner cut.
The extra length of the extended editions is a big problem. Balanced against all the extras is the issue of attention span and logistics - for example even at home I tend to not watch the entire extended version of either film in one sitting or even in one day.
Whether or not the current action was a good idea is a very valid current topic.
National publications censoring their own previous publications in an apparent attempt NOT to embarrass the current president regarding this issue is definitely News, and Stuff that Matters.
It's the removal that makes it interesting - in a sense, THEY BROUGHT UP THE ISSUE FIRST
I find Peter Jackson's approach singularly appropriate given Tolkien's own approach. The Lord of the Rings is sort of an unusally detailed chapter from the real history of Middle Earth, which he worked on most of his life and never finished.
To give another example, the book published as "The Silmarillion" is a distillation of some of the best and most complete narratives, but far from complete or definitive. For that you'd have to also read the Book of Lost Tales, Unfinished Tales, LOTR appendices and so on and so forth.
In the biography of Tolkien, Humphrey Carpenter quotes the great man as saying that the extra depth is there to give the reader the impression of huge unexplored vistas (I'm misquoting his eloquent way of putting it) but that they were not essential.
So to sum up, the author himself was fine with people appreciating it to whatever level of detail they needed. There was no "true story" in his mind, because he came to think of it as historical, not fictional, and of course there could be no complete account of so much time and so many entities.
Fujitsu doesn't have the hardware range that Sun has. Plus the Solaris installed base wouldn't necessarily follow along with a move to Linux. Sure Sun has problems, but it seems to me that standardising the bus interface across ultrasparc and sparc64 would be a good hedge and save costs across the two companies. Don't forget that Sun sells a lot of equipment below the level of Fujitsu's range. Without that breeding ground, where would ne E15k or Primepower customers come from?
Running Solaris on X86 is like going back in time to the 1980s with all the ancient Unix utilities -- [SNIP] it doesn't ship with perl (last time I checked).
So, it's been a long time since you checked then, eh?
I'm talking about the book review as posted on slashdot. Here is the first bit of it (emphasis mine):
The Previous Extreme - What XP Set out to Fix
It had previously been accepted practice to spend months (years, even, on large-scale projects) gathering requirements, then another year or two on design, before a single line of production code had been written. The infamous "big bang delivery" occurred when this gigantic monolith of a software system was finally delivered to the customer, only for the customer to retort that this was nothing like what he wanted.
It was also accepted practice to divide the system into separate subsystems, and attempt to integrate them after several months. By this time, each subsystem would have taken on a life of its own, and integrating these disparate monoliths together gave a whole new meaning to "plug and pray."
How XP "Fixes" It
These statements about "accepted practice" are factually wrong since at least the mid-80s, probably earlier. XP follows on and improves upon from several, probably dozens of earlier fads all of which attempted to get away from the monolithic system design disasters.
Now, if the reviewer had said "a common mistake is" I wouldn't have had a problem!
How many systems has written and/or designed Ian Sommerville?. Sure, he may have written books and articles, but, is he anything more than a theorist?.
I think this doesn't matter - as I remember, this was backed up with a lot of supporting material in the references, so it wasn't just him and it wasn't just academic sources.
The practical development is very different than the theoretical. Linux kernel is developed in a special flavour of XP, and it works fine, is very modular, scalable,... though it has it flaws. The fact is XP works in a lot of cases.
I'm not saying anything against XP. I'm just saying that the review starts off by saying that the status quo before XP was big-bang/waterfall development model. My response is : no it wasn't!!
Sommerville is just a quotable, checkable source. If you want something from personal experience in industry, I worked on a submarine command system for the UK Royal Navy. This project started in the 80s some time, and was designed in phased releases of working systems with increasing capabilities and performance. Sure it's not XP, but it's not a big bang nor waterfall either.
The Previous Extreme is pure fantasy. It has been well known for a long time that big bang or waterfall models don't work well. For example see the Ian Sommerville Software Engineering book - it's mentioned the 'spiral' model (iterating out from the core of a small well understood system) for at least ten years. I couldn't read any more of this "book review" after such a bunch of nonsense.
What good is it for Transmeta to advertise like Intel does when unlike Intel you probably can't go to your local store and buy a machine with a Transmeta cpu in it?
Actually, I can go to my local store and buy such a machine, a Sony, last time I looked. Maybe you need a better store.
I've had sun boxes on my desk for years, and from what I've seen, this hasn't been true for quite some time. If you opened up a Sun Ultra5 you'd find that it was made almost entirely out of low-end commodity components. The drive was a Seagate IDE drive, the power supply was relatively cheap, the graphics chipset was ATI/rage, and although the RAM was nonstandard it wasn't ECC and it wasn't superior in quality.
I think this bit is wrong, Ultra 5s take 50ns 168-pin JEDEC DIMMs, ECC error-correction. In fact I'll stick my neck out and say all Sun machines take ECC RAM only.
Perhaps what threw you was that they don't even take SDRAM (it's what I used to call EDO FPRAM I think).
This is ridiculous. Parity is cheap now, any decent PC vendor can sell you a machine using ECC SDRAM.
Meanwhile, of the three Sun machines I've had from new at work in my current job, the Ultra 10 blew a disk, the Blade 1000 had a fp bug (US-III 750Mhz) and blew a disk, and my v240 has both an ethernet bug in all four NICs, and had to have the power supply replaced before it would boot for the first time as a brand new machine.
I don't buy the hardware quality theory for Sun any more. Sure, the metalwork on my Blade 1000 is very nice, but then VAXes were built like tanks too.
Perhaps the throughput computing stuff will be great, but until then, Sun has a bit of a problem in their traditional markets, because their cpus don't deliver competitive bang for the buck in the workstation and small server markets any more. This is where they grew all the mindshare which got them a lot of success. Since they announced US-IIIi at 1GHz, Apple/IBM came back with 2GHz G5. I am fairly confident a dual 2GHZ G5 Powermac is a better unix workstation for many uses, especially for the money. Sun does not ship AGP graphics cards, and hence is cut off from the majority of high-end graphics solutions. My job involves a product which uses fast 2d graphics on both Windows and Solaris, and it's just a dismal comparison between any Sun desktop product and the competition. Even their "high-end" workstation is very disappointing (fiber channel disks are a waste in a desktop, firewire support virtually absent, poor 2d graphics performance, hell, mediocre outright cpu performance).
Crap FM compression, the US leads the way as usual
on
Is Louder Better?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I used to live in Britain, and travel to the US frequently. Now it's the opposite way around. In all this time I have had the strong impression that US FM and TV audio is horribly compressed and disgusting compared to Britain. (This is by no means a more general point about the two countries. I'm not trying to stir up anything.)
Anyway, I recently watched the Foo Fighters DVD single of "times like these" and it has US and UK versions of the video. To my ears, the mix for the UK video was quite different and much better. It had more punch... so I wonder now if engineers perhaps pre-crappify video soundtracks for the US market. Perhaps the Foo Fighters engineer thought he could compress the signal to broadcast standards and achieve a better result than if it was left to the TV stations.
My theory is that the BBC lead the way with reasonable dynamic range in the UK, because if they needed more powerful transmitters the taxpayer picked up the bill, and so commercial TV had to follow their lead. (But it's all pure speculation!)
Larry has an ulcer, poor health insurance and low income. Perl6 is large, complicated and not done yet. But they'd like to, you know, just include a little universal scripting language engine in there, as well as all the actual Perl stuff. It's A Beautiful Mind all over again. Perl 6 is the Riemann Hypothesis. Larry Wall is John Nash, except there may never be a Nobel prize for scripting languages. It's going to kill him or drive him mad. Forget about killing Microsoft, how do we keep Larry alive and sane?
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know why, but one reason could be that their cluster might not scale well with more cpus. They are using Infiniband, perhaps that's close to maxed out when they get their 10teraflop sustained performance. There is a reason you can't just keep hooking up more cpus, it's called the law of diminishing returns.
Software is a tool to get a job done. People do not turn on their computers to experience freedom. They turn on their computers to write, communicate, calculate, or whatever.
[SNIP]
Free speech thrives at UNCENSORED! BBS - http://uncensored.citadel.org [citadel.org]
Tell me, then, why should we care about Free Speech but not Free Software? I can buy perfectly good outlets for my speech, as long as I'm rich, what's the problem? I don't want to say things to "experience freedom" either, I just want to get my message to other people.
I had a stage where I was abusing caffeine. I would drink 5 or 6 mugs of strong filter coffee during office hours, and I would also make a coffee or two before bed, especially if I'd had a drink. So I would be wrecked every morning and need more stimulation to get going.
But after some health problems, I cut down. I don't enjoy my day as much with no coffee at all, and 1-2 coffees before mid-day seems to be tolerable, so my natural level is about 2 coffees before noon on average, with special dispensation for Friday and Saturday if I will be able to stay up as late as feels good, and then (and just as importantly) sleep in to make up.
Maybe absolutely zero coffee would be best taking the strict view, but, you know what, we'll still die anyway.
ISP pretends to sell unlimited bandwidth
Users pretend to pay for unlimited bandwidth
You forgot one : In "The Mousetrap", the butler did it.
$150k? That's an exaggeration.
Sun Fire V440 Server 4 1.28-GHz UltraSPARC IIIi Processors 1-MB Internal Cache 16-GB Memory 4 36-GB Ultra320 SCSI 10000RPM Disk Drives 1 DVD-ROM Drive 2 10/100/1000 Mb/s Ethernet Ports 1 DB9 (ttyb), 1 RJ45 (Console) Serial Ports 4 USB Ports 2 (1+1) Power Supplies Solaris 8 HW 07/03 Operating System Server License Ships Within: 10 business days List Price: $25,995.00
Looks pretty nice to me.
Oh come on!
It's way worse than that.
Dtrace, a new monitoring tool ? Sheesh, these things are already implemented by most sysadmins.
I think you should give dtrace a bit more credit that this. It looks very cool to me
The only question in my mind is: Will you be able to run the IA-64 port of Solaris 10 on a home-built Athlon 64 box, or will it require Sun hardware to run?
Oh, that's easy! IA-64 refers to the Itanium processor family, so the answer to your question is "No, in fact Solaris 10 will not run on any IA-64 box, no matter who makes it".
Now, if you mean AMD x86-64 - the AMD specified 64-bit superset of IA-32, then that is an interesting question. I bet it will be at least as possible as sunning Solaris x86 on a random home-brew PC - either easy in some cases, or completely impossible in others depending on the driver situation. I can't see them putting 'slugs' into the O/S to prevent it working on non-Sun-assembled boxes, that's more of an IBM style trick
5 years from now, the "extended" DVDs will be all that counts in anyone's book.
So far i think the cinematic cut of FotR works better than the extended DVD, and for TTT it's the other way around (for me).
Sure I love the extras on the first extended edition, but in a lot of cases I thought the essential story still shined through in the leaner cut.
The extra length of the extended editions is a big problem. Balanced against all the extras is the issue of attention span and logistics - for example even at home I tend to not watch the entire extended version of either film in one sitting or even in one day.
You're not addressing the key point.
Whether or not the current action was a good idea is a very valid current topic.
National publications censoring their own previous publications in an apparent attempt NOT to embarrass the current president regarding this issue is definitely News, and Stuff that Matters.
It's the removal that makes it interesting - in a sense, THEY BROUGHT UP THE ISSUE FIRST
I find Peter Jackson's approach singularly appropriate given Tolkien's own approach. The Lord of the Rings is sort of an unusally detailed chapter from the real history of Middle Earth, which he worked on most of his life and never finished.
To give another example, the book published as "The Silmarillion" is a distillation of some of the best and most complete narratives, but far from complete or definitive. For that you'd have to also read the Book of Lost Tales, Unfinished Tales, LOTR appendices and so on and so forth.
In the biography of Tolkien, Humphrey Carpenter quotes the great man as saying that the extra depth is there to give the reader the impression of huge unexplored vistas (I'm misquoting his eloquent way of putting it) but that they were not essential.
So to sum up, the author himself was fine with people appreciating it to whatever level of detail they needed. There was no "true story" in his mind, because he came to think of it as historical, not fictional, and of course there could be no complete account of so much time and so many entities.
Chris
The only thing I can think of is perhaps, maybe it's something to do with them being a partially Intel-owned hotbed of pro-Intel and Microsoft spin?
It would have been better expressed as "Earth Attacked by Mars, 65 years ago". Maybe I'm just picky.
Fujitsu doesn't have the hardware range that Sun has. Plus the Solaris installed base wouldn't necessarily follow along with a move to Linux. Sure Sun has problems, but it seems to me that standardising the bus interface across ultrasparc and sparc64 would be a good hedge and save costs across the two companies. Don't forget that Sun sells a lot of equipment below the level of Fujitsu's range. Without that breeding ground, where would ne E15k or Primepower customers come from?
Chris
So, it's been a long time since you checked then, eh?
The Previous Extreme - What XP Set out to Fix
It had previously been accepted practice to spend months (years, even, on large-scale projects) gathering requirements, then another year or two on design, before a single line of production code had been written. The infamous "big bang delivery" occurred when this gigantic monolith of a software system was finally delivered to the customer, only for the customer to retort that this was nothing like what he wanted.
It was also accepted practice to divide the system into separate subsystems, and attempt to integrate them after several months. By this time, each subsystem would have taken on a life of its own, and integrating these disparate monoliths together gave a whole new meaning to "plug and pray."
How XP "Fixes" It
These statements about "accepted practice" are factually wrong since at least the mid-80s, probably earlier. XP follows on and improves upon from several, probably dozens of earlier fads all of which attempted to get away from the monolithic system design disasters.
Now, if the reviewer had said "a common mistake is" I wouldn't have had a problem!
How many systems has written and/or designed Ian Sommerville?. Sure, he may have written books and articles, but, is he anything more than a theorist?. I think this doesn't matter - as I remember, this was backed up with a lot of supporting material in the references, so it wasn't just him and it wasn't just academic sources.
The practical development is very different than the theoretical. Linux kernel is developed in a special flavour of XP, and it works fine, is very modular, scalable,... though it has it flaws. The fact is XP works in a lot of cases.
I'm not saying anything against XP. I'm just saying that the review starts off by saying that the status quo before XP was big-bang/waterfall development model. My response is : no it wasn't!!
Sommerville is just a quotable, checkable source. If you want something from personal experience in industry, I worked on a submarine command system for the UK Royal Navy. This project started in the 80s some time, and was designed in phased releases of working systems with increasing capabilities and performance. Sure it's not XP, but it's not a big bang nor waterfall either.
The Previous Extreme is pure fantasy. It has been well known for a long time that big bang or waterfall models don't work well. For example see the Ian Sommerville Software Engineering book - it's mentioned the 'spiral' model (iterating out from the core of a small well understood system) for at least ten years. I couldn't read any more of this "book review" after such a bunch of nonsense.
What good is it for Transmeta to advertise like Intel does when unlike Intel you probably can't go to your local store and buy a machine with a Transmeta cpu in it?
Actually, I can go to my local store and buy such a machine, a Sony, last time I looked. Maybe you need a better store.
Chris
I've had sun boxes on my desk for years, and from what I've seen, this hasn't been true for quite some time. If you opened up a Sun Ultra5 you'd find that it was made almost entirely out of low-end commodity components. The drive was a Seagate IDE drive, the power supply was relatively cheap, the graphics chipset was ATI/rage, and although the RAM was nonstandard it wasn't ECC and it wasn't superior in quality.
I think this bit is wrong, Ultra 5s take 50ns 168-pin JEDEC DIMMs, ECC error-correction. In fact I'll stick my neck out and say all Sun machines take ECC RAM only.
Perhaps what threw you was that they don't even take SDRAM (it's what I used to call EDO FPRAM I think).
See Ultra[tm] 5 Workstation: Hardware Specifications
This is ridiculous. Parity is cheap now, any decent PC vendor can sell you a machine using ECC SDRAM.
Meanwhile, of the three Sun machines I've had from new at work in my current job, the Ultra 10 blew a disk, the Blade 1000 had a fp bug (US-III 750Mhz) and blew a disk, and my v240 has both an ethernet bug in all four NICs, and had to have the power supply replaced before it would boot for the first time as a brand new machine.
I don't buy the hardware quality theory for Sun any more. Sure, the metalwork on my Blade 1000 is very nice, but then VAXes were built like tanks too.
heir hardware may soon fill the performance gap
Perhaps the throughput computing stuff will be great, but until then, Sun has a bit of a problem in their traditional markets, because their cpus don't deliver competitive bang for the buck in the workstation and small server markets any more. This is where they grew all the mindshare which got them a lot of success. Since they announced US-IIIi at 1GHz, Apple/IBM came back with 2GHz G5. I am fairly confident a dual 2GHZ G5 Powermac is a better unix workstation for many uses, especially for the money. Sun does not ship AGP graphics cards, and hence is cut off from the majority of high-end graphics solutions. My job involves a product which uses fast 2d graphics on both Windows and Solaris, and it's just a dismal comparison between any Sun desktop product and the competition. Even their "high-end" workstation is very disappointing (fiber channel disks are a waste in a desktop, firewire support virtually absent, poor 2d graphics performance, hell, mediocre outright cpu performance).
I used to live in Britain, and travel to the US frequently. Now it's the opposite way around. In all this time I have had the strong impression that US FM and TV audio is horribly compressed and disgusting compared to Britain. (This is by no means a more general point about the two countries. I'm not trying to stir up anything.)
Anyway, I recently watched the Foo Fighters DVD single of "times like these" and it has US and UK versions of the video. To my ears, the mix for the UK video was quite different and much better. It had more punch... so I wonder now if engineers perhaps pre-crappify video soundtracks for the US market. Perhaps the Foo Fighters engineer thought he could compress the signal to broadcast standards and achieve a better result than if it was left to the TV stations.
My theory is that the BBC lead the way with reasonable dynamic range in the UK, because if they needed more powerful transmitters the taxpayer picked up the bill, and so commercial TV had to follow their lead. (But it's all pure speculation!)
Larry has an ulcer, poor health insurance and low income. Perl6 is large, complicated and not done yet. But they'd like to, you know, just include a little universal scripting language engine in there, as well as all the actual Perl stuff.
It's A Beautiful Mind all over again. Perl 6 is the Riemann Hypothesis. Larry Wall is John Nash, except there may never be a Nobel prize for scripting languages. It's going to kill him or drive him mad. Forget about killing Microsoft, how do we keep Larry alive and sane?