Yes that would be a bad assumption since the iPhone screensize has always been 320x480.
It doesn't take tablet to change that either. I expect future iPhone displays to increase the resolution even if the physical phone does not get bigger. Competitor phones are already at 360x640 and 480x854.
A smaller pixel size can be a competitive selling feature by providing a better user experience, especially as these devices are increasingly used for viewing detailed images such as maps or even rendering realistic 3D.
Based on that logic, the DoJ cleared the merger simply because neither Oracle nor Sun sells "consumer" products. Generally, consumers are considered to be real people that purchase goods or services for personal consumption. It would be hard to show harm to consumers since the impact on them by this merger would be so indirect.
When is the last time little Suzie wanted better support for her Sun laptop? When has your spouse ever called out "Honey! The Oracle man is here to setup our media center!"
The EU looking at how competition is affected expands the scope to include B2B trade as well as B2C. I'd say this is worthwhile, since improved competition for B2B trade has an indirect benefit to consumers.
That is a mess of wires obscuring the Cray 3 CPUs to which they are connected. It cost $300 million to develop the first functional system for NCAR before Cray Computer Corp, Seymore Cray's last start-up company, folded. (Not to be confused with Cray Inc. which is still producing new systems.)
This machine required 90,000 watts of power and gave off 310,000 British thermal units of heat per hour â" enough to warm six 2,000-square-foot homes. Getting the heat out of the data center would have been a serious problem. I'm sure the whole NCAR building was designed to do just that.
Well... My netbook has 2 GB of memory, 160 GB of storage, gigabit networking and thinks it has two 32 bit cores. It's a veritable late 80's, early 90's supercomputer that fits in my backpack.
Even in the mid 90's, GHz processors, and gigs of RAM/hard disk were still largely uncommon. I think you're talking late 90's before that started to become relatively common.
He did say supercomputer. I was once sysop for a 1993 vintage Cray T3D that had 896 * 150 MHz Dec Alpha CPUs configured in parallel, hooked up to a HIPPI (0.8 GB/s) network interface with over a terabyte of available disk. His laptop is less powerful than that, so I'm sure it matches the performance of a state-of-the-art supercomputer from some year before 1993.
How do you give a post a (Score 10, Enlightening)?
This is what I got from your post: I can define a role that allows its members to access defined sets of resources (files/directories/IP addresses+ports), where access is limited to those operations permitted for each resource, but only when using the application and protocol proscribed for each set.
One meter, two meters... One petaflop, two petaflops One mph, two mph One flops, two flops (not two flopss) One petaflops, two petaflops
The single trailing 's' cannot be dropped since that is the unit of time over which the work is performed.
I'm not learning much about a computer that is capabile of performing a quadrillion floating point operations. My laptop can do that in 90 minutes. Doing that in a second? Now that's something!
I ran into a close friend while walking downtown last week. I waved to him. By the time he crossed the street (1/4 block), I had already found an Indian restaurant close to our location, called them and reserved a seat for the two of us. As he asked if I wanted to have lunch together, I showed him the restaurant's menu, saying we already have reservations.
Because many (most?) software packages for z/OS charge the customer based directly on the MIPS capacity of each LPAR under which software is running. LPAR is a logical partition of the hardware resources, kind of like a VM.
So the more MIPS you have, the more you must pay in license fees to the software vendors. Some customers do not use the full capacity of the CPUs for this reason. IBM lets you unlock MIPS in your hardware as you need more performance, without a CPU upgrade.
There's another advantage to being orignal too - Dos and Windows ran for ages on hardware that wasn't really up to running Unix - e.g. 8086 and 80286s with no MMU, horrible graphics facilities and only a few megabytes of RAM. You'd be hard pressed to run X Windows and a Unix like kernel on that but Microsoft stuff was designed to only run on it, totally ignoring high end workstations. Which is another lock in producing situation - once people started to use Windows and bought Windows only applications, it was hard for them to move to Unix later.
This is all wrong. I'm sure you are aware that X-Windows is optional on a UNIX system. I was using an AT&T 8086 system in a production environment as recently as 1998 and it was running UNIX. It was the operator workstation for a Cray 2. We also had an 80286 in production, as a print server, that was running Microsoft's own UNIX called XENIX.
On top of that, my desktop systems were old Sun 3/50s which we ran as diskless workstations. They were fast enough to run X clients efficiently on their 20-inch monitors. I usually had 20-40 xterms and widgets running at a time in 4 virtual desktops. Microsoft didn't have anything that could do this in the mid-80s. Even Sun didn't know their earliest hardware would be this useful and used into the late 90's
The Cray 1M was the first commercial system that I'm aware of that had an SSD option.
I was a sysop in the 1990s on a Cray Y-MP C916/12 512. Its SSD was a $2M option (guessing).
Here's a great photo of a Cray C90 with an SSD. The SSD is the smaller cabinet to the back of the girl. Both cabinets were liquid cooled, hence their small size.
Our Cray C90 had twelve central processing units (custom vector silicon) with a clock speed of 230 MHz and contained 512 megawords (4096 megabytes) of shared memory. It also had a 512 megaword Solid State storage Device (SSD). Its I/O subsystem also connected to a Cray 2 to handle all access to real disk - making that Cray 2 one of the most expensive disk controllers ever.
Though the vector CPUs were outmatched by newer systems, we continued to use the C90 into 1999 for oil exploration because of its incredible I/O throughput and ability to handle very large datasets (1GB) efficiently.
Also found inside the car, according to police, was a roll of trash bags, masking tape, a siphon pump, absorbent towels and two books: "Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets," by David Simon, about the Baltimore police homicide squad, and "Masterpieces of Murder," by Jonathan Goodman, about notorious murder cases.
Lastly, a box containing the first two drafts of "How I did it," by Hans Reiser.
And I'm more than a little worried that managers will perceive Joel's article as an endorsement of such yanking.
My experience tells me that managers don't need any outside endorsements to feel entitled to yank one of their staff onto an urgent assignment. Besides, managers don't read Joel on Software. If they read anything, it is more likely the article at "Intelligent Enterprise" on A Primer on Metrics.
I agree with Joel. Any professional should be able to manage their time and make themselves available for consultation on issues that only they are qualified to address.
Scenario: A customer has just promoted an update of your product to their production environment and it is failing to authenticate users to Active Directory. Problem didn't exist in customer's Dev, IT or UAT environments. Customer's Domain Admins see no problem. Microsoft Support works the case and found no problem. Your Tier 1 and Tier 2 support determined that your product has been installed and configured correctly.
Would you, as the programmer of the authentication component, prefer to:
A. Let the dev team noob take a stab at it.
B. Have the customer just wait until you have a free 3-4 hours sometime this or next week.
C. Pause what you are doing to get to the bottom of this paying customer's problem - a problem which by now appears to be closely related to your piece of the code. Heck, you may even learn something useful, like how the ADS_SECURE_AUTHENTICATION flag you used on AdsOpenObject somehow worked in Windows 2000 when the username field was a distinguished name, but sometimes does not work with DN in Windows 2003 SP2. But hey, the noob could figure that out, right?
You get paid big bucks to write software. Those big bucks ultimately come from customers. They also pay for the support of that software. On top of that, just think of all of the good karma you accumulate by personally supporting the code you wrote.
Let me just say this again in a more direct fashion. Customers are paying money for you to create software for them. This is what you wanted! You have your dream job!
Do right by your customers and you just may get to keep that job. (ed: What's second prize?)
Pretty impressive, considering NASA's original press release came out just 36 hours before this submission was accepted by a./ editor as fiting the criteria of news for nerds. All of the other news sites reporting this story are referencing that same press release.
Ha. Not every cool technology from SGI came from Cray. Numalink was created by Cray or SGI?
Numalink was called CrayLink on some Origin2000 systems. But the Origin and its NUMALink was designed well before the Cray acquisition took place. It was just a marketing ploy when they put the revered Cray name on the linkage for the Origin systems.
A 64 node Origin2000 was delivered to my site at Cray right after we were acquired by SGI. The name CrayLink was printed in large letters on the horizontal bar in the middle of the O2K rack.
I hope Microsoft becomes more like Apple too... and build a decent OS on a solid Unix core.
Again? They already did that when they created Xenix. It was pretty good at the time and moderately popular. My work had a Xenix print server that ran faithfully until 1997.
Microsoft just didn't want to be an also-ran along with the other UNIX variants. It's pretty hard to lock-in your customers when your base platform is founded on standards and portability.
Moreati, it appears that you have found it! The CompuSonics product was indeed a technology for using 5.25 magnetic disk media to store compressed audio recordings.
In the preferred embodiment of this invention the storage medium is a 5.25" magnetic disk commonly in use for digital magnetic storage and retrieval. These disks have a storage capacity of about 1 megabyte (1 million bytes or 8 million bits) and are anticipated to reach 10 megabytes in the near future. For purposes of illustration, a 5 megabyte disk will be assumed.
Also, there is a picture of the 1985 era recording device itself in the history section of CompuSonics' current web site.
Actually, you're right. I have zero understanding of Linux. And obtuse names do not help people like me that are curious about Linux but can't differentiate between products.
Ah, but obtuse names were created just for people like you.
Sarcasm aside, unique, or obtuse, names are indeed about branding. In this case, Ubuntu is taking friendly sounding names for its releases (hoary hedghog, how huggable) to repeat the message that is in their tagline "Linux for Human Beings".
The Ubuntu brand represents to me that the products that are easy to install and friendly to use for the average computer user. That the brand is an african word tells me where they are based. That the releases are named after african animals tells me that they are targeting regular consumers, not businesses. If they used a name like XTM Linux(tm), I would figure that the product is marketed for medium to large businesses, only to be installed by trained professionals.
"iPod" is obtuse in that it doesn't tell you at all what kind of product it is - but you all bought plenty of them.
Dr. McCoy - - Captain, I wish to register a complaint... Hello? Miss?
Capt. Kirk - - What do you mean, miss?
Dr. McCoy - - Sorry Captain, I have a cold. I wish to make a complaint.
Capt. Kirk - - Not now Bones, we're closing for launch.
Dr. McCoy - - Never mind that, I wish to make a complaint about this tribble that I purchased not half an hour ago from this very bridge.
Capt. Kirk - - Oh yes, the Bajoran Blue. What's wrong with it?
Dr. McCoy - - I'll tell you what's wrong with it. It's dead, Jim, that's what wrong with it.
I'm not going to disagree with you. The poster could have used the full name at the start of the post, especially for a two-letter acronym since they typically signify countries or states.
But, to defend the poster, I would hope that a self-respecting news reading nerd would know CA as one of the 5 largest (by revenue) software vendors in the world, right after Microsoft, Oracle and SAP.
The company is identified as simply "CA" more commonly than as "Computer Associates International". I guess a valid excuse for not knowing this may be that CA does not offer a wide variety of consumer products beyond desktop security controls - as opposed to EA (sixth largest software vendor) or Id (not Idaho) who sell only entertainment software. Then again, Oracle has no consumer products and I hope you've heard of them.
Biometric fingerprint readers have been hacked by copying a fingerprint impression from a plastic-like mold and even by just lifting the fingerprint off of a glass and manipulating that image into a physical mold.
Something you have, something you know.
'Something you are' is just another form of 'something you have'. The limitation of biometrics is that 'something you are' cannot easily be decommissioned and reissued if it has been compromised.
The key to good security is to have the strength and number of controls increase as the value of the protected contents increases. A password alone may be perfectly appropriate to protect low value content.
So I guess you didn't know there is a FREE shuttle to Mystic Lake Casino from the Mall of America, i.e. the termination of Hiawatha Line.
That pretty much nullifies the need for a casino at the Mall, though one has been proposed. But, I figure leaving all of the casino revenue to the Native American tribes is finally fair compensation for their land.
Slashdot Mirror
Dont assume the screensize is 320x240.
Yes that would be a bad assumption since the iPhone screensize has always been 320x480.
It doesn't take tablet to change that either. I expect future iPhone displays to increase the resolution even if the physical phone does not get bigger. Competitor phones are already at 360x640 and 480x854.
A smaller pixel size can be a competitive selling feature by providing a better user experience, especially as these devices are increasingly used for viewing detailed images such as maps or even rendering realistic 3D.
I think the U.S. Senators dismissed the idea that citizens would be be harmed by the Oracle & Sun merger. Neither company makes consumer products.
Based on that logic, the DoJ cleared the merger simply because neither Oracle nor Sun sells "consumer" products. Generally, consumers are considered to be real people that purchase goods or services for personal consumption. It would be hard to show harm to consumers since the impact on them by this merger would be so indirect.
When is the last time little Suzie wanted better support for her Sun laptop? When has your spouse ever called out "Honey! The Oracle man is here to setup our media center!"
The EU looking at how competition is affected expands the scope to include B2B trade as well as B2C. I'd say this is worthwhile, since improved competition for B2B trade has an indirect benefit to consumers.
That is a mess of wires obscuring the Cray 3 CPUs to which they are connected. It cost $300 million to develop the first functional system for NCAR before Cray Computer Corp, Seymore Cray's last start-up company, folded. (Not to be confused with Cray Inc. which is still producing new systems.)
This machine required 90,000 watts of power and gave off 310,000 British thermal units of heat per hour â" enough to warm six 2,000-square-foot homes. Getting the heat out of the data center would have been a serious problem. I'm sure the whole NCAR building was designed to do just that.
DigiBarn has more pictures of the Cray 3 CPUs.
Even in the mid 90's, GHz processors, and gigs of RAM/hard disk were still largely uncommon. I think you're talking late 90's before that started to become relatively common.
He did say supercomputer. I was once sysop for a 1993 vintage Cray T3D that had 896 * 150 MHz Dec Alpha CPUs configured in parallel, hooked up to a HIPPI (0.8 GB/s) network interface with over a terabyte of available disk. His laptop is less powerful than that, so I'm sure it matches the performance of a state-of-the-art supercomputer from some year before 1993.
My only rule on Software Versions: Do not release a product version number with a lower number than an earlier release.
How do you give a post a (Score 10, Enlightening)?
This is what I got from your post: I can define a role that allows its members to access defined sets of resources (files/directories/IP addresses+ports), where access is limited to those operations permitted for each resource, but only when using the application and protocol proscribed for each set.
This will be very useful to my work. Thank you.
One petaflop, two petaflops One mph, two mph
One flops, two flops (not two flopss)
One petaflops, two petaflops
The single trailing 's' cannot be dropped since that is the unit of time over which the work is performed.
I'm not learning much about a computer that is capabile of performing a quadrillion floating point operations. My laptop can do that in 90 minutes. Doing that in a second? Now that's something!
Does this article actually suggest "Terrorist" as an alternate career path for Engineers?
Pro:
Outsource proof. You have to physically be there to get the job done!
Con:
You think you'll suddenly know how to talk to 72 virgins in the hereafter? Yeah right, get a life..er nm.
I ran into a close friend while walking downtown last week. I waved to him. By the time he crossed the street (1/4 block), I had already found an Indian restaurant close to our location, called them and reserved a seat for the two of us. As he asked if I wanted to have lunch together, I showed him the restaurant's menu, saying we already have reservations.
iPhone. Not even with GPS yet.
Because many (most?) software packages for z/OS charge the customer based directly on the MIPS capacity of each LPAR under which software is running. LPAR is a logical partition of the hardware resources, kind of like a VM.
So the more MIPS you have, the more you must pay in license fees to the software vendors. Some customers do not use the full capacity of the CPUs for this reason. IBM lets you unlock MIPS in your hardware as you need more performance, without a CPU upgrade.
This is all wrong. I'm sure you are aware that X-Windows is optional on a UNIX system. I was using an AT&T 8086 system in a production environment as recently as 1998 and it was running UNIX. It was the operator workstation for a Cray 2. We also had an 80286 in production, as a print server, that was running Microsoft's own UNIX called XENIX.
On top of that, my desktop systems were old Sun 3/50s which we ran as diskless workstations. They were fast enough to run X clients efficiently on their 20-inch monitors. I usually had 20-40 xterms and widgets running at a time in 4 virtual desktops. Microsoft didn't have anything that could do this in the mid-80s. Even Sun didn't know their earliest hardware would be this useful and used into the late 90's
The Cray 1M was the first commercial system that I'm aware of that had an SSD option.
I was a sysop in the 1990s on a Cray Y-MP C916/12 512. Its SSD was a $2M option (guessing).
Here's a great photo of a Cray C90 with an SSD. The SSD is the smaller cabinet to the back of the girl. Both cabinets were liquid cooled, hence their small size.
Our Cray C90 had twelve central processing units (custom vector silicon) with a clock speed of 230 MHz and contained 512 megawords (4096 megabytes) of shared memory. It also had a 512 megaword Solid State storage Device (SSD). Its I/O subsystem also connected to a Cray 2 to handle all access to real disk - making that Cray 2 one of the most expensive disk controllers ever.
Though the vector CPUs were outmatched by newer systems, we continued to use the C90 into 1999 for oil exploration because of its incredible I/O throughput and ability to handle very large datasets (1GB) efficiently.
The DEC PDP 11 was not a mainframe. It is a mini computer.
Lastly, a box containing the first two drafts of "How I did it," by Hans Reiser.
My experience tells me that managers don't need any outside endorsements to feel entitled to yank one of their staff onto an urgent assignment. Besides, managers don't read Joel on Software. If they read anything, it is more likely the article at "Intelligent Enterprise" on A Primer on Metrics.
I agree with Joel. Any professional should be able to manage their time and make themselves available for consultation on issues that only they are qualified to address.
Scenario:
A customer has just promoted an update of your product to their production environment and it is failing to authenticate users to Active Directory. Problem didn't exist in customer's Dev, IT or UAT environments. Customer's Domain Admins see no problem. Microsoft Support works the case and found no problem. Your Tier 1 and Tier 2 support determined that your product has been installed and configured correctly.
Would you, as the programmer of the authentication component, prefer to:
A. Let the dev team noob take a stab at it.
B. Have the customer just wait until you have a free 3-4 hours sometime this or next week.
C. Pause what you are doing to get to the bottom of this paying customer's problem - a problem which by now appears to be closely related to your piece of the code. Heck, you may even learn something useful, like how the ADS_SECURE_AUTHENTICATION flag you used on AdsOpenObject somehow worked in Windows 2000 when the username field was a distinguished name, but sometimes does not work with DN in Windows 2003 SP2. But hey, the noob could figure that out, right?
You get paid big bucks to write software. Those big bucks ultimately come from customers. They also pay for the support of that software. On top of that, just think of all of the good karma you accumulate by personally supporting the code you wrote.
Let me just say this again in a more direct fashion. Customers are paying money for you to create software for them. This is what you wanted! You have your dream job!
Do right by your customers and you just may get to keep that job. (ed: What's second prize?)
Pretty impressive, considering NASA's original press release came out just 36 hours before this submission was accepted by a ./ editor as fiting the criteria of news for nerds. All of the other news sites reporting this story are referencing that same press release.
Where on the 17th did you read about this?
Numalink was called CrayLink on some Origin2000 systems. But the Origin and its NUMALink was designed well before the Cray acquisition took place. It was just a marketing ploy when they put the revered Cray name on the linkage for the Origin systems.
A 64 node Origin2000 was delivered to my site at Cray right after we were acquired by SGI. The name CrayLink was printed in large letters on the horizontal bar in the middle of the O2K rack.
I thought it was cute, but odd.
Again? They already did that when they created Xenix. It was pretty good at the time and moderately popular. My work had a Xenix print server that ran faithfully until 1997.
Microsoft just didn't want to be an also-ran along with the other UNIX variants. It's pretty hard to lock-in your customers when your base platform is founded on standards and portability.
The patent refers to the media in question.
In the preferred embodiment of this invention the storage medium is a 5.25" magnetic disk commonly in use for digital magnetic storage and retrieval. These disks have a storage capacity of about 1 megabyte (1 million bytes or 8 million bits) and are anticipated to reach 10 megabytes in the near future. For purposes of illustration, a 5 megabyte disk will be assumed.
Also, there is a picture of the 1985 era recording device itself in the history section of CompuSonics' current web site.
Ah, but obtuse names were created just for people like you.
Sarcasm aside, unique, or obtuse, names are indeed about branding. In this case, Ubuntu is taking friendly sounding names for its releases (hoary hedghog, how huggable) to repeat the message that is in their tagline "Linux for Human Beings".
The Ubuntu brand represents to me that the products that are easy to install and friendly to use for the average computer user. That the brand is an african word tells me where they are based. That the releases are named after african animals tells me that they are targeting regular consumers, not businesses. If they used a name like XTM Linux(tm), I would figure that the product is marketed for medium to large businesses, only to be installed by trained professionals.
"iPod" is obtuse in that it doesn't tell you at all what kind of product it is - but you all bought plenty of them.
Dr. McCoy - - Captain, I wish to register a complaint... Hello? Miss?
Capt. Kirk - - What do you mean, miss?
Dr. McCoy - - Sorry Captain, I have a cold. I wish to make a complaint.
Capt. Kirk - - Not now Bones, we're closing for launch.
Dr. McCoy - - Never mind that, I wish to make a complaint about this tribble that I purchased not half an hour ago from this very bridge.
Capt. Kirk - - Oh yes, the Bajoran Blue. What's wrong with it?
Dr. McCoy - - I'll tell you what's wrong with it. It's dead, Jim, that's what wrong with it.
But, to defend the poster, I would hope that a self-respecting news reading nerd would know CA as one of the 5 largest (by revenue) software vendors in the world, right after Microsoft, Oracle and SAP.
The company is identified as simply "CA" more commonly than as "Computer Associates International". I guess a valid excuse for not knowing this may be that CA does not offer a wide variety of consumer products beyond desktop security controls - as opposed to EA (sixth largest software vendor) or Id (not Idaho) who sell only entertainment software. Then again, Oracle has no consumer products and I hope you've heard of them.
Something you have, something you know.
'Something you are' is just another form of 'something you have'. The limitation of biometrics is that 'something you are' cannot easily be decommissioned and reissued if it has been compromised.
The key to good security is to have the strength and number of controls increase as the value of the protected contents increases. A password alone may be perfectly appropriate to protect low value content.
So I guess you didn't know there is a FREE shuttle to Mystic Lake Casino from the Mall of America, i.e. the termination of Hiawatha Line.
That pretty much nullifies the need for a casino at the Mall, though one has been proposed. But, I figure leaving all of the casino revenue to the Native American tribes is finally fair compensation for their land.