Wonder how if differs from Sun's Network Coprocessor, which used an onboard 16 MHz M68000 to offload TCP packet processing from the mighty 40 MHz SPARC processors in an SS690. Sounds like the Level 5 company's product (not Level 3, as the intro implies) also includes "improved" networking protocols that are supposed to be compatible.
Well, remember, for the most part these are the same developers who wrote the all time best bug reports ever:
4256482 Banging on keyboard like a wild monkey during cde startup causes dtwm hang
4338420 cron is vulnerable to murder by its children
and my personal favorite
4110503 as_setprot heuristic gave my process a wedgie.
You beat me to the punch. Even $1.8MM per year per country only represents 20 - 40 people total. That buys you a feasibility study and some really high level designs.
Gotta love the grunts vs. suits comments on the gcc page:
While it would probably be technically possible to provide diffs against the mainline sources, lawyers won't permit us to provide diffs that apply to multiple source files licensed differently, providing further proof that they're thoroughly isolated from any source of real-world knowledge or common sense.
Except, of course, that Intel already produces a line of CPUs that are X86 incompatible - ARM. They started as a "second tier" chip cloner and came to own the market by having access to capital (deep pockets) and technology (lots of know-how from the other lines). Who's to say Intel wouldn't see the PowerPC line the same way - one customer today, all of them next year:-)?
In our experience, the number of cpus per rack is limited by data center cooling. Blades are great to look at, and somewhat easier to provision, but having 60 - 80 cpus in 7U chassis isn't any better than having 60 - 80 dual cpu 1U pizza boxes. Our latest (commercial) cluster is 604 Dell boxes - PESC 1425 for the low-end jobs, 1850's for the heavy lifting (12 GB RAM).
Today, it's not that expensive. Other synthetic diamonds are commonly used as abrasives, selling for next to nothing (think dollars per pound). Even if this process costs a lot in the beginning, if demand is high enough, costs will drop - just like semiconductors.
Conspiracy theorists should read the article. (Oops, this is Slashdot...) Dell's investment management firm bought $99.5MM dollars of debentures out of $600MM offered. Red Hat's market cap is about $2 billion. On top of that, the debentures are convertible to stock at a rate that would give Dell about $42MM worth of stock. It's hard to control a company when you own 2% of the stock. Even then, Dell might make money on the deal:
That's because MSD could have bought Red Hat's debentures using a strategy called "convertible arbitrage," wherein an investment firm buys convertible debt in one bet while short selling the company's common stock at the same time.
Well, Sun pays them, but doesn't actually get any work out of them.
Kinda like around here:-) It's a variant of the Heisenberg principle. You can know exactly what we're doing, but we'll spend all our time preparing status reports and PowerPoint (oops, OpenOffice) presentations and defending our decisions. Or we can actually do productive work, but you'll have no idea what it is until it is done.
Better than my newbie, who wanted tcsh instead of csh, and didn't know how to chsh or passwd. Instead, he put:/usr/local/bin/tcsh in his.cshrc. Yep, no "exec". By the time the system ground to a halt, there were dozens of little tcshes running around. The user earned the nickname "The forking menace".
for the vendor. What this overlooks is that there is a reason designers select proprietary power and data cable connections. It gives that vendor a head start in selling you all the other useful things that plug into that port. The worst offenders are cell phone and pda makers. Notebook vendors are almost as bad.
Commodity players might have a reason to adopt a standard to drive costs down, but lots of others do not.
Of course, you overlook the fact that many programs - Microsoft's included, fail in mysterious ways if you're not administrator and/or the person who installed the program.
On one project I worked, the AF test pilots were required to fly a certain number of hours a month to maintain proficiency. They'd check out a T-38 from Edwards AFB in California to fly to a program review in Texas - and return the same day.
It's not at all hard to transition people off of CDE. The first time you login, Solaris 10 asks which windowing system you prefer to use - CDE or JDS. Either work fine, for both root and ordinary users.
In our case, we have a pretty heavy deployment of HP-UX and Solaris engineering desktops, with lots of custom buttons (actions), preinstalled printer queues, etc. Eventually we'll transition those, but it's nice not having to do it right now.
Canada is a country? Wow, I thought they were a state or territory or something, like Puerto Rico. Do they export anything other than comedians and singers?
No, IBM uses the GPL on software it can't make money on. Stuff that it might be able to make money on remains under other licenses - from DB2 to much of the stuff at AlphaWorks.
So you stay in one of the Suite hotels catering to businesses. Around here, the nicer ones run less than $500 per week, $1500/month, and include free wireless internet and a continental breakfast.
It's not at all hard to transition people off of CDE. The first time you login, Solaris 10 asks which windowing system you prefer to use - CDE or JDS. Either work fine, for both root and ordinary users.
In our case, we have a pretty heavy deployment of HP-UX and Solaris engineering desktops, with lots of custom buttons (actions), preinstalled printer queues, etc. Eventually we'll transition those, but it's nice not having to do it right now.
I dunno, with a cubicle near the bathroom, you'd at least get the amusement value of watching the folks from the top floor running for the john. And think of the fun you'd have with an "Out of Order" sign on beer-bash Fridays.
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Wonder how if differs from Sun's Network Coprocessor, which used an onboard 16 MHz M68000 to offload TCP packet processing from the mighty 40 MHz SPARC processors in an SS690. Sounds like the Level 5 company's product (not Level 3, as the intro implies) also includes "improved" networking protocols that are supposed to be compatible.
RTFA - Ofoto (now Kodak Gallery) bounces photos that look like they were professionally shot as well.
Well, remember, for the most part these are the same developers who wrote the all time best bug reports ever:
4256482 Banging on keyboard like a wild monkey during cde startup causes dtwm hang
4338420 cron is vulnerable to murder by its children
and my personal favorite
4110503 as_setprot heuristic gave my process a wedgie.
You beat me to the punch. Even $1.8MM per year per country only represents 20 - 40 people total. That buys you a feasibility study and some really high level designs.
Except, of course, that Intel already produces a line of CPUs that are X86 incompatible - ARM. They started as a "second tier" chip cloner and came to own the market by having access to capital (deep pockets) and technology (lots of know-how from the other lines). Who's to say Intel wouldn't see the PowerPC line the same way - one customer today, all of them next year :-)?
In our experience, the number of cpus per rack is limited by data center cooling. Blades are great to look at, and somewhat easier to provision, but having 60 - 80 cpus in 7U chassis isn't any better than having 60 - 80 dual cpu 1U pizza boxes. Our latest (commercial) cluster is 604 Dell boxes - PESC 1425 for the low-end jobs, 1850's for the heavy lifting (12 GB RAM).
Today, it's not that expensive. Other synthetic diamonds are commonly used as abrasives, selling for next to nothing (think dollars per pound). Even if this process costs a lot in the beginning, if demand is high enough, costs will drop - just like semiconductors.
Even then, Dell might make money on the deal: .
You forgot the part where he said "BWA HA HA".
Well, Sun pays them, but doesn't actually get any work out of them. :-) It's a variant of the Heisenberg principle. You can know exactly what we're doing, but we'll spend all our time preparing status reports and PowerPoint (oops, OpenOffice) presentations and defending our decisions. Or we can actually do productive work, but you'll have no idea what it is until it is done.
Kinda like around here
Better than my newbie, who wanted tcsh instead of csh, and didn't know how to chsh or passwd. Instead, he put:/usr/local/bin/tcsh in his .cshrc. Yep, no "exec". By the time the system ground to a halt, there were dozens of little tcshes running around. The user earned the nickname "The forking menace".
for the vendor. What this overlooks is that there is a reason designers select proprietary power and data cable connections. It gives that vendor a head start in selling you all the other useful things that plug into that port. The worst offenders are cell phone and pda makers. Notebook vendors are almost as bad. Commodity players might have a reason to adopt a standard to drive costs down, but lots of others do not.
Of course, you overlook the fact that many programs - Microsoft's included, fail in mysterious ways if you're not administrator and/or the person who installed the program.
On one project I worked, the AF test pilots were required to fly a certain number of hours a month to maintain proficiency. They'd check out a T-38 from Edwards AFB in California to fly to a program review in Texas - and return the same day.
Sheep didn't fit under the microscope?
It's not at all hard to transition people off of CDE. The first time you login, Solaris 10 asks which windowing system you prefer to use - CDE or JDS. Either work fine, for both root and ordinary users. In our case, we have a pretty heavy deployment of HP-UX and Solaris engineering desktops, with lots of custom buttons (actions), preinstalled printer queues, etc. Eventually we'll transition those, but it's nice not having to do it right now.
Canada is a country? Wow, I thought they were a state or territory or something, like Puerto Rico. Do they export anything other than comedians and singers?
No, IBM uses the GPL on software it can't make money on. Stuff that it might be able to make money on remains under other licenses - from DB2 to much of the stuff at AlphaWorks.
So you stay in one of the Suite hotels catering to businesses. Around here, the nicer ones run less than $500 per week, $1500/month, and include free wireless internet and a continental breakfast.
Well, considering they were hanging people for such treasonous acts, threating to jail someone wouldn't have been that draconian, would it?
It's not at all hard to transition people off of CDE. The first time you login, Solaris 10 asks which windowing system you prefer to use - CDE or JDS. Either work fine, for both root and ordinary users. In our case, we have a pretty heavy deployment of HP-UX and Solaris engineering desktops, with lots of custom buttons (actions), preinstalled printer queues, etc. Eventually we'll transition those, but it's nice not having to do it right now.
I dunno, with a cubicle near the bathroom, you'd at least get the amusement value of watching the folks from the top floor running for the john. And think of the fun you'd have with an "Out of Order" sign on beer-bash Fridays.