I think the most interesting part of this news is less to do with Cobalt running linux than with Sun getting their hands back into the x86 market. Does anyone remember the Sun i386s range which failed a few years back?
Dr. Dobbs Sept 2000 interview
on
The First Mouse
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· Score: 2
See this interview in the Sept 2000 issue of Dr. Dobbs journal. Doug Engelbart has an amazing foresight into the future of computing. Even now he is innovating through his Bootstrap Institute and the items at his site is a must read for anyone interested in the field of computing and man-machine interfaces.
I'm sure Stevie's speeches will be watched very closely for "errors". I remember the time when Apple claimed that theirs were the first desktops with RISC processors, when in everyone outside the US of A knew for a fact that the Archimedes was years ahead. But even today it's bloody difficult to correct this misinformation.
Okay, I've read on LinuxToday that they are moving to Win2000. But no where have I read that it's collapsing under load. A rumour from an "Anonymous Coward" is the last thing that should be posted as fact. Unless there are links to articles, this remains a rumour and it should stay that without getting onto Slashdot.
This is offtopic but I'd just like to know the reason for the large number of anti-Katz postings, so much so it seems to have become an organized movement on Slashdot. I've used Slashdot for some time now but seemed to have missed the article which led to this. Any ideas anybody?
You've hit the problem on the head. That's why Sun has now moved to mices with balls(!). The pad on the Sun's optical mice and the piece of carpet material glued to the bottom of the misc meant that travel wasn't smooth and you could feel the resistance between the two materials.
I quite like the new Sun mice, although it is not kidney shaped it is very ergonomic and because it's not kidney shaped it can be used comfortably by a leftie. Also I still haven't figured out why I've never had to clean my Sun mouse when on the PC with an MS kidney mouse I need to clean it every few months. There's no mechanism for preventing dust and dirt from getting in, so at the moment I think it's the material. Does anyone know for sure?
Emusic.com certainly looks intersting, and I'm going to register. Thanks for the tip.
I think the reason that most people do not use such services is because a. they're not aware of these alternatives b. they're basically scroungers. Internetter, especially students (I was one!) would spend thousands of pounds on beer but when it comes to paying for anything else they tend to back off. I can understand the arguments against the RIAA, but I think that in the long run a replacement is required. Napster is not the solution because in this case artists gets paid zilch. Maybe the answer would be the formation of an FSF like Freedom Music Foundation where artists are backed by consumers instead of record companies.
Now...I wonder what British record companies would think of services like emusic.com which are overseas based, more so when we are paying about 30% more per CD compared to our conterparts in Europe and the US!
The most sensible thing in the article by far is the minimum font size in the web browser ! All web browsers should have this. Tiny fonts suck!
If you're using netscape put the following in your.Xdefaults Netscape*documentFonts.sizeIncrement: 10 This reduces the increment/decrement factor of fonts to 10% from the default 20%, so you don't end up with such tiny fonts.
With Apple claiming the G4 as supercomputer, you will actually need to subtract processors from your Origin to make it meet todays standard of supercomputing.
I think that it is more due to the fact that the word "supercomputer" itself is very ambiguous. Every Tom, Dick and Beowulf user tend to use it these days. Like many people, my colleagues and I prefer the term HPC for High Performance Computer/Computing. According to the comp.sys.super newsgroup FAQ:
What's constitutes a supercomputer? ----------------------------------- What makes a supercomputer? =========================== The fastest, most powerful machine to solve a problem today. Generally credited to Dr. Sid Fernbach, George Michael and and Jack Worlton, and others.
What if I qualify that with "cost?" ----------------------------------- Then, it's not a supercomputer. Period. It might be a minisupercomputer, though. Don't let George know that I said that (he's much more hardline).
Even if Id isn't the one auctioning it, it still is news! I'm surprise to see an Origin2000 being auctioned! This is a very expensive piece of equipment and actually is a shared memory supercomputer, even to today's standard...you may have to add more processors though. Although per-processor wise it is not as fast as the current fastest PIIIs, this is a fine grained shared memory machine, unlike Beowulf clusters which have a distributed memory coarse grained architecture. At 200 Mhz per R10k, it still has got a lot of life in it...look at the Top 500 site for more info. Also the R10000 are 64-bit processors, and SGI's compilers does take advantage of this fact so if you need higher-accuracy computation than this is the way to go. I predict that this system will go for at least 100k+ considering the prices the prices that the four-processor little brother O200 systems are going for at the moment.
According to the 1998 review of a Sun Enterprise 10000 at UnixReview (previously Performance Computing)
Silicon Graphics Inc. (SGI) has published results for its Origin2000, a cache-coherent Non-Uniform Memory Architecture (ccNUMA) system, of 9,478 for SPECfp_rate95 and 5,922 for SPECint_rate95, both for system configurations with 64 195MHz Mips R10000 CPUs. The SGI floating-point score was on a system with 16GB RAM, while the integer score was obtained on a system with 48GB RAM. The SGI machine's floating-point performance is significantly higher than Sun's, while the Origin2000's integer performance is only slightly higher than the Starfire's. Additionally, SGI issued a press release on Feb. 25, 1998 announcing SPECrate scores for its latest 250MHz Mips R10000 CPU of 11,984 for SPECfp_rate95 and 8,021 for SPECint_rate95. At review time, however, those results had not yet been posted on the SPEC Web site, so configuration details of the test systems were not available.
The point that I failed to communicate is that if you have a TV you have to pay a license fee, and it doesn't matter if you watch the BBC or not. I agree that the BBC is an excellant service but the draconian license fee thingy bugs me, and I'm sure it bugs many people too. With Digital there are so many new channels offering very good quality programs, so if you don't want to you don't have to be dependent on the BBC....but just by having a TV your hand is forced!
...unfortunately the BBC isn't a "free" as beer service to people residing in the UK. People here have to pay a TV license which all goes to the various BBC services. They also get a cut from the British government, which in turn comes from public taxes. The plus point is that there aren't any advertisements on the beeb, but I'm not really bothered about a banner which fills up the top 5% of my screen. The beeb is one of those "services" that you can't opt out...that's democracy for ya!
Does anyone know if the MPTrip is available in the UK or Europe, and if so where? I've spent some time looking now but can't seem to find any being sold in the UK. Thanks.
That is a very interesting link. Microsoft/Mindcraft is using a dual processor PIII 800 Mhz system here. Overall hardware wise it has a lower configuration than the Dell/TUX system. But if you look at it another way, it takes 4 of these beasts (8 processors!) to match TUX, and we know that parellisation does not scale linearly so in essence Mindcraft will not be able to use the SPEC benchmark to beat TUX.
I still wonder though if we will fair much better under Redhat/TUX if the original Mindcraft test and the recent ZDNet test was redone, and I'd really like to know Ingo's opinion. But unfortunately my original post isn't being moderated upwards, so I'll be happy to carry on the discussion here.....
Microsoft seems to be doing the "Freedom to Innovate" decoy over and over again. If I remember from the transcripts of Judge Jackson, the rulings was due to breaking the law. For some unknown reason Microsoft lawyers seem unable to explain this to Bill Gates and his subordinates. If the transcript was easy enough to read and understand by most laypersons, one would wonder why it's do difficult for Microsofties. Could it be due to illiteracy in the company?
Can you imagine the cost for upgrade? Remember Win2000 requires not only new software but more memory. Further there's no builtin equivalent to the X Window model if you want to run interactive programs remotely, unless one spends loads more more money on things like terminal server, and even then licensing constraints of individual software is a nightmare in the Windows world.
Also from the opinion I get from sysadmins, Win2000 is still considered a largely untested product. I've been told that in the UK in order for larger educational instituitions to adopt it they will have to evaluate and come to a collective decision which will take 18-24 months! That may be good news for us linux-ers but the current waste in resources due to NT is staggering and honestly beyond belief.
I hope that he isn't implying that remote access should be banned altogether. Nowadays you tend to notice the wasted computing resources in universities, especially during the night and when students are away on holidays, primarily because machines run WinNT which have very limited remote access capability. Imagine the power that researchers can harness from these machines, and the amount that can be saved if only proper remote access facilities were made available on NT. Many people fail to realize that the need for remote access is more than for checking mail and browsing the web.
You're completely wrong. I run all my KDE apps on Blackbox. The apps are wm independent but only kdelibs dependent. In the same way you can run GNOME apps on kwm if you have all the libraries in place.
Everyone seems to be building a Beowulf these days. However many scientific applications are not as easily scaleable to such a coarse grained system. Are there, or rather, are you supporting any efforts to build finer grained and shared memory clusters using linux? Also I find debugging parallel programs terribly time consuming. What kind of tools do you use?
It is based on Kohonen's self-organising-maps (unsupervised neural networks) and Kohonen himself is one of the designers. It's interesting in the sense that it is an unconventional way of storing and finding information.
This could give you some ideas for a project.The idea of chronologically listing search results according to some rankings is a limiting factor, especially so when more and more useful information gets onto the web. Some kind of visualization or ordering technique could be designed which will give the user more control for searching. A better human computer interface (HCI) if you like, for a web search engine would be a useful project. The term "three dimensional" seem to crop up. Who knows, you could be the next Jerry Yang:)
Now if they're expecting to improve their software by open sourcing it then I'm afraid they're going to be very dissapointed. Windows being in a much, much worst state then the original Netscape has to be rewritten from scratch:o
Great! YAWC (Yet Another Windows Clone). When are we going to get a desktop for Linux that doesn't appear to have come from the Microsoft school of GUI design?
Hmmm....how is it that Microsoft came about to invent the GUI? Is it like all the other "inventions" they claim to have. You have been seriously misguided. When I first used Win95 I thought, wow OS/2! I personally feel that Win95 have borrowed a lot of good ideas from their predecessors like OS/2 and NeXTStep. In turn these GUIs have a lot of borrowed ideas from their predecessors (early developers who first looked at twm must have been awed by its looks and feel!). On the PC, during the DOS days there were a number of WIMP based GUIs which weren't by Microsoft (I know it's hard to believe;)). Remember DESQView from Quarterdeck, or GEM from Digital Research? DESQView was in my opinion much more superior to DOS+Win31, but unfortunately even in those days if you're not Microsoft you lose.
Slashdot Mirror
I think the most interesting part of this news is less to do with Cobalt running linux than with Sun getting their hands back into the x86 market. Does anyone remember the Sun i386s range which failed a few years back?
See this interview in the Sept 2000 issue of Dr. Dobbs journal. Doug Engelbart has an amazing foresight into the future of computing. Even now he is innovating through his Bootstrap Institute and the items at his site is a must read for anyone interested in the field of computing and man-machine interfaces.
I'm sure Stevie's speeches will be watched very closely for "errors". I remember the time when Apple claimed that theirs were the first desktops with RISC processors, when in everyone outside the US of A knew for a fact that the Archimedes was years ahead. But even today it's bloody difficult to correct this misinformation.
A typo I guess, but its funny because this typo is exactly the opposite of what RMS preaches ;)
Okay, I've read on LinuxToday that they are moving to Win2000. But no where have I read that it's collapsing under load. A rumour from an "Anonymous Coward" is the last thing that should be posted as fact. Unless there are links to articles, this remains a rumour and it should stay that without getting onto Slashdot.
This is offtopic but I'd just like to know the reason for the large number of anti-Katz postings, so much so it seems to have become an organized movement on Slashdot. I've used Slashdot for some time now but seemed to have missed the article which led to this. Any ideas anybody?
I quite like the new Sun mice, although it is not kidney shaped it is very ergonomic and because it's not kidney shaped it can be used comfortably by a leftie. Also I still haven't figured out why I've never had to clean my Sun mouse when on the PC with an MS kidney mouse I need to clean it every few months. There's no mechanism for preventing dust and dirt from getting in, so at the moment I think it's the material. Does anyone know for sure?
I think the reason that most people do not use such services is because
a. they're not aware of these alternatives
b. they're basically scroungers.
Internetter, especially students (I was one!) would spend thousands of pounds on beer but when it comes to paying for anything else they tend to back off. I can understand the arguments against the RIAA, but I think that in the long run a replacement is required. Napster is not the solution because in this case artists gets paid zilch. Maybe the answer would be the formation of an FSF like Freedom Music Foundation where artists are backed by consumers instead of record companies.
Now...I wonder what British record companies would think of services like emusic.com which are overseas based, more so when we are paying about 30% more per CD compared to our conterparts in Europe and the US!
Netscape*documentFonts.sizeIncrement: 10
This reduces the increment/decrement factor of fonts to 10% from the default 20%, so you don't end up with such tiny fonts.
According to the 1998 review of a Sun Enterprise 10000 at UnixReview (previously Performance Computing)
The point that I failed to communicate is that if you have a TV you have to pay a license fee, and it doesn't matter if you watch the BBC or not. I agree that the BBC is an excellant service but the draconian license fee thingy bugs me, and I'm sure it bugs many people too. With Digital there are so many new channels offering very good quality programs, so if you don't want to you don't have to be dependent on the BBC....but just by having a TV your hand is forced!
...unfortunately the BBC isn't a "free" as beer service to people residing in the UK. People here have to pay a TV license which all goes to the various BBC services. They also get a cut from the British government, which in turn comes from public taxes. The plus point is that there aren't any advertisements on the beeb, but I'm not really bothered about a banner which fills up the top 5% of my screen. The beeb is one of those "services" that you can't opt out...that's democracy for ya!
Hope that this spells the start of fair reporting by ZDNet's publications. First out the door should be Jesse Berst and John Taschek ;)
Does anyone know if the MPTrip is available in the UK or Europe, and if so where? I've spent some time looking now but can't seem to find any being sold in the UK. Thanks.
That is a very interesting link. Microsoft/Mindcraft is using a dual processor PIII 800 Mhz system here. Overall hardware wise it has a lower configuration than the Dell/TUX system. But if you look at it another way, it takes 4 of these beasts (8 processors!) to match TUX, and we know that parellisation does not scale linearly so in essence Mindcraft will not be able to use the SPEC benchmark to beat TUX.
I still wonder though if we will fair much better under Redhat/TUX if the original Mindcraft test and the recent ZDNet test was redone, and I'd really like to know Ingo's opinion. But unfortunately my original post isn't being moderated upwards, so I'll be happy to carry on the discussion here.....
With the advent of Tux would linux win if the Mindcraft test ran again? Or is the Mindcraft test still slanted towards Microsoft's operating systems?
Microsoft seems to be doing the "Freedom to Innovate" decoy over and over again. If I remember from the transcripts of Judge Jackson, the rulings was due to breaking the law. For some unknown reason Microsoft lawyers seem unable to explain this to Bill Gates and his subordinates. If the transcript was easy enough to read and understand by most laypersons, one would wonder why it's do difficult for Microsofties. Could it be due to illiteracy in the company?
Also from the opinion I get from sysadmins, Win2000 is still considered a largely untested product. I've been told that in the UK in order for larger educational instituitions to adopt it they will have to evaluate and come to a collective decision which will take 18-24 months! That may be good news for us linux-ers but the current waste in resources due to NT is staggering and honestly beyond belief.
I hope that he isn't implying that remote access should be banned altogether. Nowadays you tend to notice the wasted computing resources in universities, especially during the night and when students are away on holidays, primarily because machines run WinNT which have very limited remote access capability. Imagine the power that researchers can harness from these machines, and the amount that can be saved if only proper remote access facilities were made available on NT. Many people fail to realize that the need for remote access is more than for checking mail and browsing the web.
You're completely wrong. I run all my KDE apps on Blackbox. The apps are wm independent but only kdelibs dependent. In the same way you can run GNOME apps on kwm if you have all the libraries in place.
Everyone seems to be building a Beowulf these days. However many scientific applications are not as easily scaleable to such a coarse grained system. Are there, or rather, are you supporting any efforts to build finer grained and shared memory clusters using linux? Also I find debugging parallel programs terribly time consuming. What kind of tools do you use?
This could give you some ideas for a project.The idea of chronologically listing search results according to some rankings is a limiting factor, especially so when more and more useful information gets onto the web. Some kind of visualization or ordering technique could be designed which will give the user more control for searching. A better human computer interface (HCI) if you like, for a web search engine would be a useful project. The term "three dimensional" seem to crop up. Who knows, you could be the next Jerry Yang :)
Now if they're expecting to improve their software by open sourcing it then I'm afraid they're going to be very dissapointed. Windows being in a much, much worst state then the original Netscape has to be rewritten from scratch :o