There can be very good business reasons for going with a distribution (or even OS) which otherwise is a pain to manage. Oracle could be a reason. Local support companies, contracters, consultants etc. could be another. In-house expertise may mean something as well.
I am not saying this is a simple decision. And I am certainly not saying that Debian is necessarily the answer.
All I tried to say was, that for us Debian was the better answer, and RedHat had to go for a number of reasons.
If I had to set up an Oracle box tomorrow, I would of course use whatever distribution Oracle tells me to use. Anything else would be stupid.
All distributions (that I've seen at least) suck in one way or another. In various scenarios, some distributions just suck less than others.
Now I don't mean to sound all negative about this... Claiming that everything sucks. I would still go with RedHat (or Slackware, heaven forbid) any day, rather than most other of the "popular" non-GNU/Linux non-UN*X operating systems out there;)
I'm not saying it's the answer to your problem, I don't know, you'll have to decide.
Now, before we move on I'm going to tell you how Debian sucks. This is not to say that other distributions do not suck, or that Debian sucks more or less than the others - this is just something that you might run in to and should be aware of.
Debian sucks because:
It's a pain to install (no software RAID support, default kernel is 2.2, yadda yadda)
All packages are *old* - it's hopeless for a desktop
Fewer commercial packages available (suckage when you need them)
Yet, we chose Debian because it rocks (and RH sucks) in these areas:
Updates. Usually there are no updates to the stable distribution except for security fixes. This is *very* good when you actually have to maintain your systems.
Updates. "apt-get update; apt-get upgrade", and voila you have a list of security updates available - and you're about to install them. No subscriptions, no fees, no wondering where to get them from. It just works.
Simpler package dependencies - it is actually possible to configure a web server without installing GNOME (ok, this particular setup is *probably* still possible in RedHat) - in general you will find that for dedicated servers, you end up with a 100-200 Meg system where the RH system it is replacing was well over a gig.
Clear roadmap. Who knows where RedHat is going? Debian is going nowhere, or at least they are moving very slowly - this is actually a very *good* thing in this respect.
For a server you put in a data center and don't want to touch again unless absolutely necessary, I think Debian is great. It is extremely easy to stay up to date with security, and that is pretty much all there is to it. I still have nightmares from the days where I was mirroring entire RedHat distribution trees (or at least their massive update directories) in order to keep those systems up.
But really - in the end - it is not a few hundred bucks per server that should make the difference. It is my impression that if you pay for your RedHat, you can have a nice update service as well.
You'll be shelling out thousands of dollars per server for the hardware, an order of magnitude more (over the years) for support (eg. your time), so a RedHat subscription fee really shouldn't stop you from going RH.
On the other hand, if some of the above made you think - I can promise you that Debian certainly is a viable alternative at least for the machines I've dealt with so far.
The article claims that the AF supplier, SRS Technologies, said that technology to provide the materials needed in "gram quantities" would be about five years away (he say they "would exist within five years").
Certainly, for a project such as this, it is completely unbelievable that one of the key entities in the weapon development would give anyone and everyone a remotely precise estimate as to when larger scale production (and real weapon production) could possibly begin.
The true timeline must be years away from that. In one of the two directions possible... Which poses an interesting question: are real weapons based on this technology available today already, and did they agree to participate in the story simply to "prepare" the general public for real-world testing which will happen in the following year or two? Or do they know that others are working on this technology as well, and therefore need to tell their nation that "they're right on it", when some other country launches their tests within the next year or two?
That's speculation. Time will show.
What will be interesting to see, too, is how the real testing will commence. Currently they are working on three possibly viable materials. Most likely they will have different characteristics, and their exact effects in a real-world scenario will be impossible to simulate.
In 1945, there were two materials available for fission weapons - uranium and plutonium. One bomb was made with each, and the two bombs were dropped on each their civilian target. Hiroshima got Uranium, Nagasaki got Plutonium.
Which three cities will this new weapon be tested on? And to raise the bar, which city will get Hafnium, which one will get Thorium, and which one will get Niobium?
Oh, and don't tell me war has gone soft and that the weapon would not be tested on civilian targets this time... A gamma discharge weapon has many of the properties of a neutron weapon - it is extremely useful mostly against people (and electronics - it will kill you *and* your Aibo, oh the wonders of modern civilization;).
On a second note... Did anyone notice how there is no longer anything called a "neutron bomb"? It is, today, called a "low yield" bomb. In the media at least. Because it's blast and heat isn't as great as "real" fusion weapons. Neutron weapons are now almost politically correct - at least, the public wouldn't raise an eye if they were told a low-yield bomb was dropped to stop riots in some third-world city.
So, new machines are built to aid in the development of faster, stronger, bigger and prettier nuclear weapons than we ever had before.
However, soon there will be noone left to bomb. Then, what are the machines good for?
The answer, of course, is seti@home! We need to start donating cycles from these computing monsters as soon as possible, to ensure that we find extraterrestrial life quickly, so that we do not run out of targets for the bombs.
May I propose, that all sub-number-1 machines on the top500 are dedicated to seti@home as quickly as possible, to ensure that the number-1 does not obsolete itself too soon.
Which is handled by several commercial companies - didn't quite read the articles did we?
businesses aren't ready for desktop linux
Bullshit.
It completely depends on the type of company, the company age, management style, and culture. I will agree with you as far as "not all companies are ready for desktop linux", and "most companies are not ready for 100% desktop linux". But that's as far as it goes.
What do companies do? Well, if a company is 100% focused on creating windows desktop software, I agree that it will most likely not need a lot of Linux desktop systems in it's production environment. Still, for a secretary handling e-mail, why the heck not? Such a company may still have a culture that just says "no" - but do remember that the majority of companies out there are not 100% windows desktop software ISVs (and most who are, are in direct competition with MS anyway - good luck folks!).
Don't tell me that a secretary cannot learn to use KMail or Kontact instead of Outlook. I've heard that kind of arguments often enough - it is simply not true for people with an IQ just slightly larger than their shoe size. In general, people may be stupid, but very very few people are *that* stupid (and those who are, can't use Outlook either - you find these people in your MTA logs, when they put street names in the "To:" field).
So everyone needs Outlook on the desktop why? Because you need office there too, and Outlook is the only mail app for windows which again is the only OS which runs office? Come on - I'm in management and I get a word document about once a month - either abiword can read it, or I can make the sucker send me a PDF instead. If I got more documents like that, I might invest in staroffice, but really I don't see it as an issue.
now i have to learn everything all over again
You are fooling yourself. The hard part about e-mail is knowing what an address is, knowing the concept of "CC", "reply", "forward", "attachments", etc. Repeat after me: this stuff doesn't change between MUAs.
it's the illusion of difficulty
Maybe I am just lucky, but I have never met people with that kind of mind-set. If you have a job and your employer tells you "this is your desktop", then that is in fact your desktop. If the "mail" icon happens to pop up "kontact", well then that is the MUA you will be using 8 hours a day, and certainly a four hour investment in getting to know it, will pay itself off quite well (if you expect to keep the job for more than a few days).
When I take over, it will be a requirement that reporters have a friggin' clue.
In case of an accident, the tank will freeze and no fire or explosion would occur.
Oh, is that so? Well, how about an accident which starts out with a fire? Here's news for you: hydrogen doesn't freeze if there is fire and oxygen present. It burns or explodes pretty darn well actually.
I am sure that accidents are possible, where the tank would indeed freeze first. The may even be "likely", if the whole thing is cleverly designed. But accidents with liquid hydrogen are not inherently "safe" by any stretch of imagination.
the power is 2.6 kWh
No no no! God fscking damnit! Watts is "power" or "effect", Watt-hours is "energy" or "work".
The "power" is, as stated in the original article 2.6 kW (which has nothing at all to do with the 2.6kWh as misquoted in the slashdot post) - which corresponds roughly to 3.5 HP (one HP is 736 W).
For a "news for nerds" forum, I am absolutely amazed over the extent of ignorance (from posters and editors) when it comes to correctness in simple matters as above, and the general responsible critical journalistic view. Misprints happen, yes, but claiming that liquid-hydrogen accidents are just "safe" is not a friggin misprint, that's cluelessnes.
What has the world come to? Has slashdot turned into Slashdot?... oh, wait....
Let's say GLONASS was the first thing running and still in service - would you want your military to rely on that? You're friends with Russia now, so how could that hurt? And the Russian taxpayer would foot the bill. Sounds perfect! Or not...
There are very good reasons for creating alternative positioning and time references, for commercial and military use. Not doing so should have you shot for incompetence.
Nobody (except you it seems) cares who pioneered the technology. I don't care if Galileo is a tad more or less accurate than GLONASS or GPS. The whole *point* is to have more than one independent source. It allows you to spot discrepancy, and thus allows you to know that at least one of your sources is no longer trustworthy.
If you want a good laugh over us "Yuropeens", you should rather think about the fact that some countries are trying to cut deals with the U.S. to be included under the protection of the national missile defence system, in exchange for radar space, airforce bases, etc. etc. Now that's fucked up. How would you like (insert: another country far away currently your friends) to protect your skies?
Meanwhile I'll have a good laugh that anyone thinks the NMD is going to matter (9/11 showed nicely how that would have helped - wonder if anyone read "Unrestricted Warfare" recently. Or "Art of War" for that matter).
I personally find KDE to be better than Explorer for me. Of course windows on a whole is still far more user friendly when one considers program instillation, learning curve, and generally things working. However if one were to consider the desktop environment of windows compared to KDE I do find KDE to be superior.
Oh come one... Installation? I installed MS VC++ the other day - it took me four or five reboots (prerequisite components all required reboots after install) - and more than an hour of cd jockying. It was four CDs to get the thing installed. Best thing of it all; I only needed it for the libraries and headers - the compiler itself is so crappy that I must install the Intel compiler afterwards (which unfortunately requires the MS libs and headers from MSVCPP).
Compare that to the 30 second "apt-get install gcc" I also did. And don't give me the "oh, but you got SOOO much more with the MS install" - no I didn't - what I needed was a functional C++ compiler, and that was exactly what I got with my several-hour MS exercise, and it was what I got with my apt-get exercise.
Learning curve? I agree that the windows learning curve is less steep - actually, it's flat. After years of use, you're where you begun. How anyone can see that as a quality, is far beyond me. The boat left and I wasn't on the boat.
First off, disk access time is dominated by actuator movement (seek time). Rotational latency on a 15,000rpm disk is 2ms, not 4. The fastest 15K drives have 3.5-4ms seek time.
Example: Seagate 15krpm drive: average seek time 3.6ms. You are correct that the *average* rotational latency will be 2ms, since the full rotational latency is 4ms. However, 2ms out of 3.6ms is more than half, meaning rotational latency dominates (even though you were right about the average rotational latency being important, not the full rotational latency).
As for slower drives, a seagate 7200rpm disk has a full rotational latency of 8.3ms, meaning average is 4.2ms - the average seek time is 8.5ms - in this case you are correct that actuator movement time dominates. Thus, part of your statement is proven by example: On lower-end disks they use crappier actuators - nice one:)
Seek time on large drives is of no importance. Seek time on small drives is of supreme importance.
I don't know why you think that seek time on large drives is of no importance... Filesystems (and databases) do fragment large "sequential" data files (or tables) - so streaming a 10GiB file will cost you a lot more seeks than just the one needed to go to the beginning of the file. Two (or more) concurrent streams, and you have seek-nightmare. Secondly, not everyone fills their drives with huge files. On one of my data drives, I have more than 100GiB in more than 1 million files.
I agree that some form of hierarchial storage (probably built into the drive) would be a way to go. It's done already, to some degree; cache (RAM) -> disk (and optionally -> tape). The RAM will have to be battery backed, if you want to see write improvements as well - while writes are usually more forgiving than reads, with non-battery-backed RAM you still need to seek+write in order to flush a write to the disk.
Drives today have 10.000 rpm or 15.000 rpm. Eight years ago the high end was 7200 rpm, 5400 before that...
That's approximately a 2X performance increase per EIGHT YEARS. This is very very far from being impressive.
Disk seek time is dominated (today) by rotational latency. The fastest disks have seek times around 4ms, and that is pretty much the rotational latency on a 15000 rpm disk.
In order to improve disk performance (the seek time, not the throughput), disks need to spin faster. This does pose some interesting problems though...
A normal 3.5" drive has a platter with approximately 48mm radius, giving roughly 0.3 meter circumference. At 15000rpm the speed of the circumference is 75.4m/s.
Doing the math, this gives us a centripetal acceleration of v^2/r = 118435 m/s^2, or roughly 12085G. Sure as hell beats most drag racers out there (by more than a factor of 12000;)
The fun part is, that a simple doubling of the rotational speed, will do really interesting things to the acceleration (note the v^2 thing above).
A 30000rpm disk will have a centripetal acceleration of the circumference of approximately 48000G.
A mass-element at the circumference weighing one gram, will have a "pull" corresponding to (F=m*a) 118kg - which again will be approximately half a tonne on the 30000rpm disk.
You need to find a material that will weigh little, not deform under the given stress, and still have the necessary properties for use as a hard drive platter...
Smart displays? Which monopolize the computer when connected? What are they talking about?!?
Tablet PCs serving as ordinary computers, yes, I follow that much. (why on earth someone would try marketing a laptop with a twistable display as the next big thing is beyond me, but never mind that for now).
Can some fellow slashdotter please enlighten me in the mysteries of the smart display?
What is it? And what was the reporter smoking when he wrote that it would monopolize the computer it was hooked up to? (that doesn't ring "smart" in my ears)
If you put an SQL server on the internet, open for the world to see, you deserve what you get.
If you put a windows box on the internet, even more so (not that the system is terribly insecure in theory, but it's difficult to keep secure and there are *very* few competent administrators out there that can do it).
A windows box with MS SQL server, on the net, open for the world - what did they expect?!?
Sue the fuckers! When I take over, people like that will be toiling in the uranium mines (along with a few other selected individuals).
So you know for a fact that the results will not be in the open and free for use?
Can you please elaborate (or provide a link) - it would be great to know a little more about what they will actually do with the information.
I completely share the views of Yama on this one - vaccines/cures for this kind of diseases would be nice to have, but we are not (yet) facing the end of civilization here... I would like to encourage other scientists and researchers to start a project where the work of the "public" will (rightfully, in my book) be made available to the public.
As you state, there is no other project like this available right now. Well, if some research group out there is toying with the idea; you can have my cycles when you promise the results will be made available under reasonable terms (and with the grant money that I have seen flying around for questionable projects, I can't imagine it should be unreasonably hard to run a group on this project).
I don't mind paying for medication at all. But I would mind paying royalties for medication that *I* discovered (or at least helped discover).
If you are in the "axis-of-evil-dictator-dude" biz, building a nuke in your back yard probably is not nearly as much fun if you can't easily move it to someone else's back yard before you set the thing off.
If I was in that business, I'd wrap the thing in a Cobalt shell (add lithium deuteride) and hide it in my own back yard. Call it "deterrence".
Re:Programmers are not engineers, let me explain
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Are Programmers Engineers?
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· Score: 2, Interesting
The Atomic Bomb: the theory can be grasped by a child, what keeps the dictators of the world from having the A-Bomb is the fact that they are devilishly hard to make.
Bzzzt.
What keeps the dictators of the world from officially having nukes is
Larger nations would cut monetary support
The raw material is (for reasons I don't understand) hard to get
The raw material is somewhat hard to properly produce unnoticed, by small nations - and requires natural resources not every nation is "fortunate" enough to have
Take two bricks of weapons grade uranium. Put one on the floor. Step up on your office desk, and drop the other brick on top of the first one, from there. BOOOM - you have successfully set of a home made nuke. Yes, it is this easy - ask any physicist. Once your combined bricks of weapons grade uranium reaches supercritical mass, there is no need for fancy engineering.
It might not be terribly efficient (a little engineering is needed for that), and thus it might also be a little unclean, leaving unpleasent amounts of radioactive downfall around your former office building. But it will work, and any child could do it - given the raw materials.
That's at least how it is for uranium based weapons. Plutonium based weapons are much harder to produce, and would require at least some basic engineering skills. For larger nations they are cheaper to produce in numbers, but that's not really relevant to your average "axis-of-evil-dictator-dude".
Scary fact No.2: You can actually (at least the U.S. managed to) produce a uranium based nuclear weapon from reactor-grade material. It is much less efficient, and no so called great nation would want to do that (just going with plutonium (and a little hydrogen) is cleaner and more effective when you really have that kind of resources). But for your average evil dictator, it's possible. To be honest I don't know how much having lower-grade material complicates the construction of the weapon.
Assuming it is not terribly much harder to produce a weapon on fuel-grade material, this makes up for some pretty scary scenarios. Quite a few countries have nuclear reactors, and therefore fuel-grade material.
With the recent developments legitimizing pre-emptive strikes on "perceived future threats", and the possible legitimization of using small nuclear weapons in common warfare, the above does not get any less scary if you ask me.
Whether you're pro or con the recent developments, the above should give you some food for thought, at least.
I got my master's in computer science from a technical university, where one by definition is an engineer when done.
Oh, and I code 10-16 hours a day for a living;)
The fun part being, I'm actually a "civil engineer". In this country it refers to the fact that I was not educated in the military, but at a civilian university. It has nothing to do with plumbing or building houses, I assure you;)
Considering that a database benchmark would be a pretty obvious test for a 64-bit box, if you want to see speedups over 32-bit boxen...
They had no clue what so ever.
I'm pretty impressed that the 64-bit box didn't suck more at UT than it did - 64-bits suck for applications where cache matters and 32-bits are enough. Not doing "terribly" is pretty impressive:)
I wish they would have run that "some kind of database benchmark" with a 20 GB working set, on the 64-bit box and a similarly configured 4-way P4 (any speed, take the 3G, it won't matter). Stuff 16-32 GB of memory in the machines, and see the 64-bit box wipe the floor with the competition.
Heck, why do people buy 700 MHz Sun UltraSPARC boxes for some of the biggest and busiest databases in the world? The P4 is faster clock-speed wise, and it's one helluwalot cheaper.
Quick answer: because 32-bits don't cut it, and clock speed is irrelevant when you are faced with either missing cache (64-bit) or missing RAM (needing a disk seek - 32-bit), for every single darn operation in your database.
All computers wait at the same speed. 64-bits allows you to stuff enough memory in a box so that you can wait for a L2 cache miss, instead of waiting for a disk seek. That's a few ns of waiting, compared to a few ms. Three orders of magnitude. 700 MHz versus 3GHz is insignificant in this light.
Ok, I'll stop ranting now. I totally agree that the clueless motherfsckers who did that article should be lined up against a wall and shot, for that "some kind of database benchmark" remark. Sigh, talk about not getting it...
Re:Honest comparison between Gnome and KDE?
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Gnome 2.2 Released
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· Score: 1
I used GNOME since the 0.4 days up to and including Ximian GNOME. I've used KDE in between, ever since my homepage was about the only page on the internet that Konqueror could render without crashing.
My first UNIX experience was with Solaris - at that time my home computer ran OS/2 2.1 and NT 3.51 (with me not being completely happy with either).
What I felt was cool about Solaris was that nothing would crash. Nothing would hang. Applications were few (but I had a pretty specific job to do and a pretty specific set of applications for that job) - but they worked perfectly. On the PC scene, applications were many, and virtually everything would crash every now and then - perhaps on a daily basis, perhaps weekly, but applications and OSes would crash.
Starting to run GNU/Linux on my box at home, I rediscovered the stability I had only seen on Solaris (and by then, HP-UX as well). The desktop was ugly compared to OS/2 - but it worked (my "desktop" must have been fvwm by then).
With GNOME and later KDE, some of the coolness of a real desktop environment came to the stable "PC" operating system - wow, the best of two worlds, or?
No. GNOME was looking good, but it crashed. Often. KDE was first unstable and ugly, and later on just ugly. Ugly on a CDE level:)
Both improved rapidly - I switched between them every now and then. In the end I ran Ximian GNOME (because I liked the GNOME panel and didn't like the KDE one), using Konqueror as the browser (because even though it wasn't fast or could render every page - it was still miles ahead of Mozilla 0.X).
Crashes are unacceptable. Even if it's just weekly crashes. I cannot work with a system I cannot count on. This, I think, is the major reason for my choice of desktop today.
Today, I use fluxbox as the window manager. I use Konqueror as my browser. I use a few GNOME apps too. Basically, I have taken the few elements that I need from the two desktop environments, but without any of the two environments in their entirety.
You may not want to do this. In fact, such a desktop may be horrible for you. In my job as a developer, emacs and rxvt take up about 90% of the screen real-estate on my eight 1600x1200 virtual desktops. I have no need for a fancy panel, all I need is hotkeys to switch between the virtual desktops and more free screen real-estate.
And I do not log out. I don't need no fancy session manager - the uptime of my emacs will top most non-UNIX web servers out there. Common themes? Well, my emacs isn't themed anyway, so I don't care.
My impression today of GNOME versus KDE, is that the KDE people have been very productive engineers (and have finally gathered some graphics artists to make the system look good too) - I think the GNOME team may be just as hard working, but I believe that their progress will be slower because of architecture (and programming language) inconveniences.
I see GNOME as an philosophically idealist project, where compromises on the architecture and engineering "soundness" are more acceptable. KDE seems to be a fantastic piece of engineering, where in the beginning the philosophical or ethical concerns were ignored (using non-free QT). Clearly, KDE does not have it's problem anymore - and I do not see an easy way for the GNOME project to suddenly come up with a better (as in robust, documented, well-defined and "sound") infrastructure. It is my impression that the GNOME project are working towards better infrastructure though - and they definitely have both clever and productive people around, so I am sure that they will be moving towards a stable and well defined infrastructure.
Infrastructure is key to gaining application support, and in the end to be able to deliver a stable and usable product.
Today I don't hold my breath for any of the desktop projects. I pick the few applications I need, and fluxbox let's me move them around on my desktop. My desktop does not crash, and I can worry about the things that matter - the job I have to do.
Microsoft:
"See guys, in the old days where you had to put your encryption layers outside of windows, we found that our backdoors were ineffective. So now we will allow you to embed your encryption routines in windows, which in turn will allow for more appropriate layering of the security technology".
Civilian government administration person:
"Doh.. Uuh, ok!" (drools on shoes)
Lucky me, I'm under a government which wouldn't have a clue in the first place, so I doubt they will be worse off with this;)
I pop the CD in my box and play it. The CD is a "dead" media, it's not something that magically comes to life and starts transmitting information.
Seriously, how stupid can people be? Ok, so the CD will buffer-overflow my player, and figure out how to access the outside world by executing it's malicious (processor and OS independent) code... You know what? No it won't!
Shit like that doesn't just happen.
So maybe *some* people run a player that facilitates said information gathering and transmission - that's their problem. Get a life, get a real player, get a real OS.
But CD's magically coming to life and transmitting my listening habits (which I guess it stored in the big secret database facility on the moon, which is by the way run by aliens under contract with the government - which is again why they had to fake the moon landing, but that's another story) - no, please, just forget about it...
Slashdot Mirror
I'm sure that you are right.
;)
There can be very good business reasons for going with a distribution (or even OS) which otherwise is a pain to manage. Oracle could be a reason. Local support companies, contracters, consultants etc. could be another. In-house expertise may mean something as well.
I am not saying this is a simple decision. And I am certainly not saying that Debian is necessarily the answer.
All I tried to say was, that for us Debian was the better answer, and RedHat had to go for a number of reasons.
If I had to set up an Oracle box tomorrow, I would of course use whatever distribution Oracle tells me to use. Anything else would be stupid.
All distributions (that I've seen at least) suck in one way or another. In various scenarios, some distributions just suck less than others.
Now I don't mean to sound all negative about this... Claiming that everything sucks. I would still go with RedHat (or Slackware, heaven forbid) any day, rather than most other of the "popular" non-GNU/Linux non-UN*X operating systems out there
I'm not saying it's the answer to your problem, I don't know, you'll have to decide.
Now, before we move on I'm going to tell you how Debian sucks. This is not to say that other distributions do not suck, or that Debian sucks more or less than the others - this is just something that you might run in to and should be aware of.
Debian sucks because:
Yet, we chose Debian because it rocks (and RH sucks) in these areas:
For a server you put in a data center and don't want to touch again unless absolutely necessary, I think Debian is great. It is extremely easy to stay up to date with security, and that is pretty much all there is to it. I still have nightmares from the days where I was mirroring entire RedHat distribution trees (or at least their massive update directories) in order to keep those systems up.
But really - in the end - it is not a few hundred bucks per server that should make the difference. It is my impression that if you pay for your RedHat, you can have a nice update service as well.
You'll be shelling out thousands of dollars per server for the hardware, an order of magnitude more (over the years) for support (eg. your time), so a RedHat subscription fee really shouldn't stop you from going RH.
On the other hand, if some of the above made you think - I can promise you that Debian certainly is a viable alternative at least for the machines I've dealt with so far.
The article claims that the AF supplier, SRS Technologies, said that technology to provide the materials needed in "gram quantities" would be about five years away (he say they "would exist within five years").
;).
Certainly, for a project such as this, it is completely unbelievable that one of the key entities in the weapon development would give anyone and everyone a remotely precise estimate as to when larger scale production (and real weapon production) could possibly begin.
The true timeline must be years away from that. In one of the two directions possible... Which poses an interesting question: are real weapons based on this technology available today already, and did they agree to participate in the story simply to "prepare" the general public for real-world testing which will happen in the following year or two? Or do they know that others are working on this technology as well, and therefore need to tell their nation that "they're right on it", when some other country launches their tests within the next year or two?
That's speculation. Time will show.
What will be interesting to see, too, is how the real testing will commence. Currently they are working on three possibly viable materials. Most likely they will have different characteristics, and their exact effects in a real-world scenario will be impossible to simulate.
In 1945, there were two materials available for fission weapons - uranium and plutonium. One bomb was made with each, and the two bombs were dropped on each their civilian target. Hiroshima got Uranium, Nagasaki got Plutonium.
Which three cities will this new weapon be tested on? And to raise the bar, which city will get Hafnium, which one will get Thorium, and which one will get Niobium?
Oh, and don't tell me war has gone soft and that the weapon would not be tested on civilian targets this time... A gamma discharge weapon has many of the properties of a neutron weapon - it is extremely useful mostly against people (and electronics - it will kill you *and* your Aibo, oh the wonders of modern civilization
On a second note... Did anyone notice how there is no longer anything called a "neutron bomb"? It is, today, called a "low yield" bomb. In the media at least. Because it's blast and heat isn't as great as "real" fusion weapons. Neutron weapons are now almost politically correct - at least, the public wouldn't raise an eye if they were told a low-yield bomb was dropped to stop riots in some third-world city.
Now, to go find lead coating for my tinfoil hat.
So, new machines are built to aid in the development of faster, stronger, bigger and prettier nuclear weapons than we ever had before.
However, soon there will be noone left to bomb. Then, what are the machines good for?
The answer, of course, is seti@home! We need to start donating cycles from these computing monsters as soon as possible, to ensure that we find extraterrestrial life quickly, so that we do not run out of targets for the bombs.
May I propose, that all sub-number-1 machines on the top500 are dedicated to seti@home as quickly as possible, to ensure that the number-1 does not obsolete itself too soon.
native integration with outlook
Which is handled by several commercial companies - didn't quite read the articles did we?
businesses aren't ready for desktop linux
Bullshit.
It completely depends on the type of company, the company age, management style, and culture. I will agree with you as far as "not all companies are ready for desktop linux", and "most companies are not ready for 100% desktop linux". But that's as far as it goes.
What do companies do? Well, if a company is 100% focused on creating windows desktop software, I agree that it will most likely not need a lot of Linux desktop systems in it's production environment. Still, for a secretary handling e-mail, why the heck not? Such a company may still have a culture that just says "no" - but do remember that the majority of companies out there are not 100% windows desktop software ISVs (and most who are, are in direct competition with MS anyway - good luck folks!).
Don't tell me that a secretary cannot learn to use KMail or Kontact instead of Outlook. I've heard that kind of arguments often enough - it is simply not true for people with an IQ just slightly larger than their shoe size. In general, people may be stupid, but very very few people are *that* stupid (and those who are, can't use Outlook either - you find these people in your MTA logs, when they put street names in the "To:" field).
So everyone needs Outlook on the desktop why? Because you need office there too, and Outlook is the only mail app for windows which again is the only OS which runs office? Come on - I'm in management and I get a word document about once a month - either abiword can read it, or I can make the sucker send me a PDF instead. If I got more documents like that, I might invest in staroffice, but really I don't see it as an issue.
now i have to learn everything all over again
You are fooling yourself. The hard part about e-mail is knowing what an address is, knowing the concept of "CC", "reply", "forward", "attachments", etc. Repeat after me: this stuff doesn't change between MUAs.
it's the illusion of difficulty
Maybe I am just lucky, but I have never met people with that kind of mind-set. If you have a job and your employer tells you "this is your desktop", then that is in fact your desktop. If the "mail" icon happens to pop up "kontact", well then that is the MUA you will be using 8 hours a day, and certainly a four hour investment in getting to know it, will pay itself off quite well (if you expect to keep the job for more than a few days).
When I take over, it will be a requirement that reporters have a friggin' clue.
... oh, wait....
In case of an accident, the tank will freeze and no fire or explosion would occur.
Oh, is that so? Well, how about an accident which starts out with a fire? Here's news for you: hydrogen doesn't freeze if there is fire and oxygen present. It burns or explodes pretty darn well actually.
I am sure that accidents are possible, where the tank would indeed freeze first. The may even be "likely", if the whole thing is cleverly designed. But accidents with liquid hydrogen are not inherently "safe" by any stretch of imagination.
the power is 2.6 kWh
No no no! God fscking damnit! Watts is "power" or "effect", Watt-hours is "energy" or "work".
The "power" is, as stated in the original article 2.6 kW (which has nothing at all to do with the 2.6kWh as misquoted in the slashdot post) - which corresponds roughly to 3.5 HP (one HP is 736 W).
For a "news for nerds" forum, I am absolutely amazed over the extent of ignorance (from posters and editors) when it comes to correctness in simple matters as above, and the general responsible critical journalistic view. Misprints happen, yes, but claiming that liquid-hydrogen accidents are just "safe" is not a friggin misprint, that's cluelessnes.
What has the world come to? Has slashdot turned into Slashdot?
Oh cry me a river will you...
Let's say GLONASS was the first thing running and still in service - would you want your military to rely on that? You're friends with Russia now, so how could that hurt? And the Russian taxpayer would foot the bill. Sounds perfect! Or not...
There are very good reasons for creating alternative positioning and time references, for commercial and military use. Not doing so should have you shot for incompetence.
Nobody (except you it seems) cares who pioneered the technology. I don't care if Galileo is a tad more or less accurate than GLONASS or GPS. The whole *point* is to have more than one independent source. It allows you to spot discrepancy, and thus allows you to know that at least one of your sources is no longer trustworthy.
If you want a good laugh over us "Yuropeens", you should rather think about the fact that some countries are trying to cut deals with the U.S. to be included under the protection of the national missile defence system, in exchange for radar space, airforce bases, etc. etc. Now that's fucked up. How would you like (insert: another country far away currently your friends) to protect your skies?
Meanwhile I'll have a good laugh that anyone thinks the NMD is going to matter (9/11 showed nicely how that would have helped - wonder if anyone read "Unrestricted Warfare" recently. Or "Art of War" for that matter).
How can they be developing concepts like expiring media, and still expect to discourage people from copying (backing up) copyrighted media?
I cannot resist that :)
I personally find KDE to be better than Explorer for me. Of course windows on a whole is still far more user friendly when one considers program instillation, learning curve, and generally things working. However if one were to consider the desktop environment of windows compared to KDE I do find KDE to be superior.
Oh come one... Installation? I installed MS VC++ the other day - it took me four or five reboots (prerequisite components all required reboots after install) - and more than an hour of cd jockying. It was four CDs to get the thing installed. Best thing of it all; I only needed it for the libraries and headers - the compiler itself is so crappy that I must install the Intel compiler afterwards (which unfortunately requires the MS libs and headers from MSVCPP).
Compare that to the 30 second "apt-get install gcc" I also did. And don't give me the "oh, but you got SOOO much more with the MS install" - no I didn't - what I needed was a functional C++ compiler, and that was exactly what I got with my several-hour MS exercise, and it was what I got with my apt-get exercise.
Learning curve? I agree that the windows learning curve is less steep - actually, it's flat. After years of use, you're where you begun. How anyone can see that as a quality, is far beyond me. The boat left and I wasn't on the boat.
My 0.02 Euro on that....
First off, disk access time is dominated by actuator movement (seek time). Rotational latency on a 15,000rpm disk is 2ms, not 4. The fastest 15K drives have 3.5-4ms seek time.
:)
Example: Seagate 15krpm drive: average seek time 3.6ms. You are correct that the *average* rotational latency will be 2ms, since the full rotational latency is 4ms. However, 2ms out of 3.6ms is more than half, meaning rotational latency dominates (even though you were right about the average rotational latency being important, not the full rotational latency).
As for slower drives, a seagate 7200rpm disk has a full rotational latency of 8.3ms, meaning average is 4.2ms - the average seek time is 8.5ms - in this case you are correct that actuator movement time dominates. Thus, part of your statement is proven by example: On lower-end disks they use crappier actuators - nice one
Seek time on large drives is of no importance. Seek time on small drives is of supreme importance.
I don't know why you think that seek time on large drives is of no importance... Filesystems (and databases) do fragment large "sequential" data files (or tables) - so streaming a 10GiB file will cost you a lot more seeks than just the one needed to go to the beginning of the file. Two (or more) concurrent streams, and you have seek-nightmare. Secondly, not everyone fills their drives with huge files. On one of my data drives, I have more than 100GiB in more than 1 million files.
I agree that some form of hierarchial storage (probably built into the drive) would be a way to go. It's done already, to some degree; cache (RAM) -> disk (and optionally -> tape). The RAM will have to be battery backed, if you want to see write improvements as well - while writes are usually more forgiving than reads, with non-battery-backed RAM you still need to seek+write in order to flush a write to the disk.
Drives today have 10.000 rpm or 15.000 rpm. Eight years ago the high end was 7200 rpm, 5400 before that...
;)
That's approximately a 2X performance increase per EIGHT YEARS. This is very very far from being impressive.
Disk seek time is dominated (today) by rotational latency. The fastest disks have seek times around 4ms, and that is pretty much the rotational latency on a 15000 rpm disk.
In order to improve disk performance (the seek time, not the throughput), disks need to spin faster. This does pose some interesting problems though...
A normal 3.5" drive has a platter with approximately 48mm radius, giving roughly 0.3 meter circumference. At 15000rpm the speed of the circumference is 75.4m/s.
Doing the math, this gives us a centripetal acceleration of v^2/r = 118435 m/s^2, or roughly 12085G. Sure as hell beats most drag racers out there (by more than a factor of 12000
The fun part is, that a simple doubling of the rotational speed, will do really interesting things to the acceleration (note the v^2 thing above).
A 30000rpm disk will have a centripetal acceleration of the circumference of approximately 48000G.
A mass-element at the circumference weighing one gram, will have a "pull" corresponding to (F=m*a) 118kg - which again will be approximately half a tonne on the 30000rpm disk.
You need to find a material that will weigh little, not deform under the given stress, and still have the necessary properties for use as a hard drive platter...
Ok, so I must have been living under a rock...
Smart displays? Which monopolize the computer when connected? What are they talking about?!?
Tablet PCs serving as ordinary computers, yes, I follow that much. (why on earth someone would try marketing a laptop with a twistable display as the next big thing is beyond me, but never mind that for now).
Can some fellow slashdotter please enlighten me in the mysteries of the smart display?
What is it? And what was the reporter smoking when he wrote that it would monopolize the computer it was hooked up to? (that doesn't ring "smart" in my ears)
Yours,
The technology ignorant (apparently)
If you put an SQL server on the internet, open for the world to see, you deserve what you get.
If you put a windows box on the internet, even more so (not that the system is terribly insecure in theory, but it's difficult to keep secure and there are *very* few competent administrators out there that can do it).
A windows box with MS SQL server, on the net, open for the world - what did they expect?!?
Sue the fuckers! When I take over, people like that will be toiling in the uranium mines (along with a few other selected individuals).
So you know for a fact that the results will not be in the open and free for use?
Can you please elaborate (or provide a link) - it would be great to know a little more about what they will actually do with the information.
I completely share the views of Yama on this one - vaccines/cures for this kind of diseases would be nice to have, but we are not (yet) facing the end of civilization here... I would like to encourage other scientists and researchers to start a project where the work of the "public" will (rightfully, in my book) be made available to the public.
As you state, there is no other project like this available right now. Well, if some research group out there is toying with the idea; you can have my cycles when you promise the results will be made available under reasonable terms (and with the grant money that I have seen flying around for questionable projects, I can't imagine it should be unreasonably hard to run a group on this project).
I don't mind paying for medication at all. But I would mind paying royalties for medication that *I* discovered (or at least helped discover).
If you are in the "axis-of-evil-dictator-dude" biz, building a nuke in your back yard probably is not nearly as much fun if you can't easily move it to someone else's back yard before you set the thing off.
If I was in that business, I'd wrap the thing in a Cobalt shell (add lithium deuteride) and hide it in my own back yard. Call it "deterrence".
Perl.
And emacs.
Bzzzt.
What keeps the dictators of the world from officially having nukes is
Take two bricks of weapons grade uranium. Put one on the floor. Step up on your office desk, and drop the other brick on top of the first one, from there. BOOOM - you have successfully set of a home made nuke. Yes, it is this easy - ask any physicist. Once your combined bricks of weapons grade uranium reaches supercritical mass, there is no need for fancy engineering.
It might not be terribly efficient (a little engineering is needed for that), and thus it might also be a little unclean, leaving unpleasent amounts of radioactive downfall around your former office building. But it will work, and any child could do it - given the raw materials.
That's at least how it is for uranium based weapons. Plutonium based weapons are much harder to produce, and would require at least some basic engineering skills. For larger nations they are cheaper to produce in numbers, but that's not really relevant to your average "axis-of-evil-dictator-dude".
Scary fact No.2: You can actually (at least the U.S. managed to) produce a uranium based nuclear weapon from reactor-grade material. It is much less efficient, and no so called great nation would want to do that (just going with plutonium (and a little hydrogen) is cleaner and more effective when you really have that kind of resources). But for your average evil dictator, it's possible. To be honest I don't know how much having lower-grade material complicates the construction of the weapon.
Assuming it is not terribly much harder to produce a weapon on fuel-grade material, this makes up for some pretty scary scenarios. Quite a few countries have nuclear reactors, and therefore fuel-grade material.
With the recent developments legitimizing pre-emptive strikes on "perceived future threats", and the possible legitimization of using small nuclear weapons in common warfare, the above does not get any less scary if you ask me.
Whether you're pro or con the recent developments, the above should give you some food for thought, at least.
I got my master's in computer science from a technical university, where one by definition is an engineer when done.
;)
;)
Oh, and I code 10-16 hours a day for a living
The fun part being, I'm actually a "civil engineer". In this country it refers to the fact that I was not educated in the military, but at a civilian university. It has nothing to do with plumbing or building houses, I assure you
Considering that a database benchmark would be a pretty obvious test for a 64-bit box, if you want to see speedups over 32-bit boxen...
:)
They had no clue what so ever.
I'm pretty impressed that the 64-bit box didn't suck more at UT than it did - 64-bits suck for applications where cache matters and 32-bits are enough. Not doing "terribly" is pretty impressive
I wish they would have run that "some kind of database benchmark" with a 20 GB working set, on the 64-bit box and a similarly configured 4-way P4 (any speed, take the 3G, it won't matter). Stuff 16-32 GB of memory in the machines, and see the 64-bit box wipe the floor with the competition.
Heck, why do people buy 700 MHz Sun UltraSPARC boxes for some of the biggest and busiest databases in the world? The P4 is faster clock-speed wise, and it's one helluwalot cheaper.
Quick answer: because 32-bits don't cut it, and clock speed is irrelevant when you are faced with either missing cache (64-bit) or missing RAM (needing a disk seek - 32-bit), for every single darn operation in your database.
All computers wait at the same speed. 64-bits allows you to stuff enough memory in a box so that you can wait for a L2 cache miss, instead of waiting for a disk seek. That's a few ns of waiting, compared to a few ms. Three orders of magnitude. 700 MHz versus 3GHz is insignificant in this light.
Ok, I'll stop ranting now. I totally agree that the clueless motherfsckers who did that article should be lined up against a wall and shot, for that "some kind of database benchmark" remark. Sigh, talk about not getting it...
I used GNOME since the 0.4 days up to and including Ximian GNOME. I've used KDE in between, ever since my homepage was about the only page on the internet that Konqueror could render without crashing.
:)
My first UNIX experience was with Solaris - at that time my home computer ran OS/2 2.1 and NT 3.51 (with me not being completely happy with either).
What I felt was cool about Solaris was that nothing would crash. Nothing would hang. Applications were few (but I had a pretty specific job to do and a pretty specific set of applications for that job) - but they worked perfectly. On the PC scene, applications were many, and virtually everything would crash every now and then - perhaps on a daily basis, perhaps weekly, but applications and OSes would crash.
Starting to run GNU/Linux on my box at home, I rediscovered the stability I had only seen on Solaris (and by then, HP-UX as well). The desktop was ugly compared to OS/2 - but it worked (my "desktop" must have been fvwm by then).
With GNOME and later KDE, some of the coolness of a real desktop environment came to the stable "PC" operating system - wow, the best of two worlds, or?
No. GNOME was looking good, but it crashed. Often. KDE was first unstable and ugly, and later on just ugly. Ugly on a CDE level
Both improved rapidly - I switched between them every now and then. In the end I ran Ximian GNOME (because I liked the GNOME panel and didn't like the KDE one), using Konqueror as the browser (because even though it wasn't fast or could render every page - it was still miles ahead of Mozilla 0.X).
Crashes are unacceptable. Even if it's just weekly crashes. I cannot work with a system I cannot count on. This, I think, is the major reason for my choice of desktop today.
Today, I use fluxbox as the window manager. I use Konqueror as my browser. I use a few GNOME apps too. Basically, I have taken the few elements that I need from the two desktop environments, but without any of the two environments in their entirety.
You may not want to do this. In fact, such a desktop may be horrible for you. In my job as a developer, emacs and rxvt take up about 90% of the screen real-estate on my eight 1600x1200 virtual desktops. I have no need for a fancy panel, all I need is hotkeys to switch between the virtual desktops and more free screen real-estate.
And I do not log out. I don't need no fancy session manager - the uptime of my emacs will top most non-UNIX web servers out there. Common themes? Well, my emacs isn't themed anyway, so I don't care.
My impression today of GNOME versus KDE, is that the KDE people have been very productive engineers (and have finally gathered some graphics artists to make the system look good too) - I think the GNOME team may be just as hard working, but I believe that their progress will be slower because of architecture (and programming language) inconveniences.
I see GNOME as an philosophically idealist project, where compromises on the architecture and engineering "soundness" are more acceptable. KDE seems to be a fantastic piece of engineering, where in the beginning the philosophical or ethical concerns were ignored (using non-free QT). Clearly, KDE does not have it's problem anymore - and I do not see an easy way for the GNOME project to suddenly come up with a better (as in robust, documented, well-defined and "sound") infrastructure. It is my impression that the GNOME project are working towards better infrastructure though - and they definitely have both clever and productive people around, so I am sure that they will be moving towards a stable and well defined infrastructure.
Infrastructure is key to gaining application support, and in the end to be able to deliver a stable and usable product.
Today I don't hold my breath for any of the desktop projects. I pick the few applications I need, and fluxbox let's me move them around on my desktop. My desktop does not crash, and I can worry about the things that matter - the job I have to do.
The developers are not to blame, we just did our jobs...
:)
A soldier is not without guilt.
It even seems that you agree, given that you found quitting was the only honorable thing to do. Cool
Microsoft:
;)
"See guys, in the old days where you had to put your encryption layers outside of windows, we found that our backdoors were ineffective. So now we will allow you to embed your encryption routines in windows, which in turn will allow for more appropriate layering of the security technology".
Civilian government administration person:
"Doh.. Uuh, ok!" (drools on shoes)
Lucky me, I'm under a government which wouldn't have a clue in the first place, so I doubt they will be worse off with this
Wooden shoes and tulips, that's Holland.
;)
We're Lego, Maersk and bacon
reading:
"This is not an exit..."
Have everyone refer to you as "Patrick" or "Mr. Bateman".
I pop the CD in my box and play it. The CD is a "dead" media, it's not something that magically comes to life and starts transmitting information.
Seriously, how stupid can people be? Ok, so the CD will buffer-overflow my player, and figure out how to access the outside world by executing it's malicious (processor and OS independent) code... You know what? No it won't!
Shit like that doesn't just happen.
So maybe *some* people run a player that facilitates said information gathering and transmission - that's their problem. Get a life, get a real player, get a real OS.
But CD's magically coming to life and transmitting my listening habits (which I guess it stored in the big secret database facility on the moon, which is by the way run by aliens under contract with the government - which is again why they had to fake the moon landing, but that's another story) - no, please, just forget about it...