Even people like Lego (who really fostered creativity a few years back) are now focussing on selling theme toys (Harry Potter etc) that the kids build according to instruction and seldom reassemble in any new way.
When my kids first grew old enough to start playing with Legos I feared this would be the case, and hated the fact that most Legos are now sold as kits.
However, my fears were unfounded, and, at least for the kids I know, your assertion is incorrect. They build whatever it is according to the kit, then tear it apart, combine it with other kits, and create new stuff. Star Wars mixes with Lord of the Rings and dinosaur stuff to become wonderfully bizarre new creations.
I was working at SGI in 1999 when they made their Itanium/Linux move. A lot of customers (and employees for that matter) would have liked SGI to port its version of Unix, Irix, to the Itanium. But that was just too expensive.
uh, maybe they didn't port Irix to the Itanium, but if they didn't it wasn't because it was too expensive, because Irix was definitely ported to their PIII-based Visual Workstation line (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SGI_Visual_Workstati on)
SGI never marketed/sold Visual Workstations running Irix due to fears that they'd cannibalize the sale of Cocktanes
people need to keep in mind that not all the data
and models are in agreement
for example, that article contradicts
this report
which also refers to an article in
the Jan. 1, 2001 issue
of the journal Geophysical Research Letters
TNR is my favorite new/politics mag, but please keep in mind the problems with Glass' articles that brander mentions - ;here is the link to TNR's apology to its readers
Others have mentioned the Alpha option - I wanted to add to that recommendation. Single-proc performance of recent Alphas are 2-3x the performance of the fastest SGI procs.
If you need shared-memory, you'll have to pay the bucks and get one of Compaq's larger systems and run Tru64Unix.
If you can do smaller or distributed-memory (MPI) jobs, get a number of the 1-space DS10L and run either Tru64Unix or Linux. The other great thing about going Alpha/Linux is that Compaq has ported their excellent compilers, so you don't have to give up performance by going with Linux.
(Yes, I know you can run Tru64U-compiled executables on Alpha/Linux by copying the appropriate libs, but strictly-speaking it's a violation of the Tru64U license. Please let's not get into a discussion of how this is a great arg for open source solutions, etc. I agree. Run Linux on your Alpha, use gcc if that's good enough, buy Compaq's compilers if you need performance.)
although off-topic for this bit of news, this
thread is important - this is why I stopped
submitting articles - after submitting several
items and seeing them appear a week or two later
from someone else, I decided it wasn't worth my
time
before this is written off as whining, consider
that the overall effect is to discourage
submissions, reducing the usefulness of \.
of course, I must be a masochist, since this post
itself is most likely a complete waste of time,
since it will do nothing to improve the situation
Alpha still blows both Intel and Athlon out of the water, esp. on floating point. The best benchmark for such things is the SPECmark - see John DiMarco's handy SPECmark table, as well as the SPEC site itself for numbers, but the bottom line is that even a 500 MHz A21264 is about twice as fast on floating point than a 700-750 MHz PIII or Athlon, and DEC, er, Compaq is now shipping 667 MHz A21264's.
Note that there is a new 1U rack version of the DS10, called the DS10L (code-named "Slate"), that is very attractive for highly compute-intensive tasks. There's a picture of a rack full of these in the Linux section of Compaq's web site.
Slashdot Mirror
Even people like Lego (who really fostered creativity a few years back) are now focussing on selling theme toys (Harry Potter etc) that the kids build according to instruction and seldom reassemble in any new way.
When my kids first grew old enough to start playing with Legos I feared this would be the case, and hated the fact that most Legos are now sold as kits.
However, my fears were unfounded, and, at least for the kids I know, your assertion is incorrect. They build whatever it is according to the kit, then tear it apart, combine it with other kits, and create new stuff. Star Wars mixes with Lord of the Rings and dinosaur stuff to become wonderfully bizarre new creations.
-JT
uh, maybe they didn't port Irix to the Itanium, but if they didn't it wasn't because it was too expensive, because Irix was definitely ported to their PIII-based Visual Workstation line (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SGI_Visual_Workstati on)
SGI never marketed/sold Visual Workstations running Irix due to fears that they'd cannibalize the sale of Cocktanes
for example, that article contradicts this report which also refers to an article in the Jan. 1, 2001 issue of the journal Geophysical Research Letters
TNR is my favorite new/politics mag, but please keep in mind the problems with Glass' articles that brander mentions - ;here is the link to TNR's apology to its readers
Compaq has several Alpha options.
(I don't work for Compaq, but I use a big pile of DS10L 's.)
If you need shared-memory, you'll have to pay the bucks and get one of Compaq's larger systems and run Tru64Unix.
If you can do smaller or distributed-memory (MPI) jobs, get a number of the 1-space DS10L and run either Tru64Unix or Linux . The other great thing about going Alpha/Linux is that Compaq has ported their excellent compilers , so you don't have to give up performance by going with Linux.
(Yes, I know you can run Tru64U-compiled executables on Alpha/Linux by copying the appropriate libs, but strictly-speaking it's a violation of the Tru64U license. Please let's not get into a discussion of how this is a great arg for open source solutions, etc. I agree. Run Linux on your Alpha, use gcc if that's good enough, buy Compaq's compilers if you need performance.)
although off-topic for this bit of news, this
thread is important - this is why I stopped
submitting articles - after submitting several
items and seeing them appear a week or two later
from someone else, I decided it wasn't worth my
time
before this is written off as whining, consider
that the overall effect is to discourage
submissions, reducing the usefulness of \.
of course, I must be a masochist, since this post
itself is most likely a complete waste of time,
since it will do nothing to improve the situation
uh, no
OpenLook was NeWS-based - SunView was most definitely not SunView was actually pretty nice - and it was fast, even on old hardware
Note that there is a new 1U rack version of the DS10, called the DS10L (code-named "Slate"), that is very attractive for highly compute-intensive tasks. There's a picture of a rack full of these in the Linux section of Compaq's web site.