We recently puchased a 13 node dual Opteron cluster from Penguin Computing after evaluating clusters from them, Dell, IBM, HP and single memory image machines from SGI. Penguin provided a solution with the best price/performance as well as ease of use. They let us benchmark our codes on some of their test clusters to determine wheteher the Opteron or Xeon based clusters would be better suited to us. My favorite aspect of their system besides price was the plug-and-play setup. The cluster was shipped fully assembled, configured, and tested to our site. All we had to do was roll it out of the crate, plug in the power and network connections, configure the network settings in the OS, and start running our simulations. All of the solutions from the other vendors would have required significant setup time on our behalf unless we spent a large amount of money for the services. I also really like the Scyld operating system that was included in the cluster. It makes the cluster work almost like a single image memory machine. Scyld on the compute nodes is setup to download the kernel image and necessary libraries from the master node at boot-up, so any changes made to the master node automatically propagate to the compute nodes. After several months of running simulations, the cluster has not given us any problems. It has been very reliable (never needed a reboot). Their technical support has been very responsive about ansering questions we had with the initial startup.
You must be pretty young. In the '80s it seemed that the metric system was going to become the official measurement system in the US. All US schools taught the metric system, gas stations were selling gasoline by the liter, and Coke converted its 64oz bottles to 2L bottles (never changed them back though). People hated gasoline being sold by the liter, because they thought they were being ripped off (in many cases they were because gas stations tried to take advantage of the situation). Once it was obvious that the metric conversion was not going to pass (it would be too expensive to convert all of the US industry from one system to another), schools stopped emphasizing the metric system and gas stations went back to using gallons. As globalization continues, more and more companies use the metric system to reduce the number of SKUs in their inventory.
As a side note, I used to work in package development at Coca-Cola and all bottles world-wide are designed using the metric system. For example, in the U.S. and other non-metric countries, we design a 591ml bottle and place a 20oz label on it.
IBM released a similar capability with its OS/2 Warp 4 product back in '95 or '96. The boxed set even included a head set/microphone. Though not extremely useful, it was nice to be able to sit back and browse without having to use a mouse or keyboard. If I remember correctly, the browser created a list of all of the links from the current page and all you had to do was say the name of the link and it opened up. It's amazing to think that was almost a decade ago.
It seems that IBM has access to the source code of both UNIX SysV (for its AIX product) and Linux. I would think that by now IBM has performed an analysis of both codes to determine what possible infringements, if any, exist. I wonder if IBM will either state that there are no infringements prior to trial or begin submitting patches to rid the Linux source of potential infringements that they have discovered.
It seems that if IBM has access to both the UNIX source code and the Linux source code, they should be analyzing the two to determine if any code was improperly copied into Linux. They could then either use their resources to fix the problem or identify questionable code to the community for rewrite. It would be interesting if IBM starts submitting a bunch of patches changing code, but not functionality.
GTK also has a DirectFB Project
on
Qt On DirectFB
·
· Score: 1
The screenshots look similarly nice, but unfortunatley without any additional eye candy in tight t-shirts.
I had also read a month or so ago that work is underway to port the gnome libraries over to DirectFB. If I remember correctly, because of the extensive use of the gdk library in Gnome, there weren't too many Gnome libraries that still depend on X. However, it still probably won't be trivial to convert the remaining ones, or it would have already been done.
We just got ours installed yesterday. I'm still installing software and am starting benchmarks. It's only the deskside version (12 cpus, 24GB RAM, 1TB disk), but still more powerful than the 4-cpu SGI Origins that we have been using.
It is the first one that the regional SGI reps had actually installed, but since it is almost exactly the same as the MIPS-based origin 3000 servers (with the exception of the obviously different Itanium 2 cpus and supporting chipsets), they ran into almost no problems getting it online. I have also been suprised as to how many commercial codes have already been ported to the platform.
The main reasons we purchased this machine is for the ease in parallelizing code and the floating point performance of the Itaniam 2 cpus. We're computational materials engineers and the less time we have to spend optimizing codes so that the nodes of a cluster are always kept busy and minimizing I/O bottlenecks gives us more time to concentrate on the theoretical issues.
It runs RedHat 7.2 with some tweaks by SGI called SGI ProPack. The Propack modifications come on separate CDs, with the proprietary software on separate CDs from the open source software. So far, from the command line, everything works just like my PC. It's kind of strange running Linux on a >$100K machine, but it sure beats dealing with the annoying differences between IRIX and Linux. Now to see if it performs as well as we expect...
First, wouldn't the total bandwidth available for a device be reduced when relaying other device's network traffic? So if someone else is downloading a movie, would my bandwidth be substantially reduced if I was serving as a relay?
And since the mesh concept would have network traffic re-routed until within range of an access point, wouldn't the devices nearest the access point have their available bandwidth negatively affected since they will have to carry the network load of all of the other devices in the "mesh" for that AP?
While I like all of the typically mentioned benefits of Mozilla (tabbed browsing, pop-up blocking, runs on Linux,...), the one "feature" I rarely see mentioned is the user support and bug tracking (bugzilla) of Mozilla. Everytime I find a bug or a missing capability, it's off to bugzilla. After a quick search, the bug entry can usually be found and with it, you can usually get a good idea of the status of the fix, workarounds, or what can be done to help track down the problem. And if the bug has not yet been reported, it is quite easy to add a usable bug report that you know will actually be considered. I have found the responsiveness of the Mozilla development community to be quite impressive when useful bug reports or feature requests are entered into Bugzilla.
Maybe I'm being naive, but what are the actual negative consequences of an extensive surveillance system? Is it that everyone does stuff deemed illegal by our society every once and a while and don't want to be caught? I'm by no means a perfect citizen, but when I do something "illegal" such as speeding, I am willing to suffer the consequences for my actions. A society is only as good as the laws that govern it and these laws are meaningless if not enforced. I think it goes without question that the majority of people will break laws that they deem inappropriate if they feel that they will not get caught (look at the number of people that exceed the speed limit on highways).
It seems that any of the potential negatives would be outweighed by the positives:
- Potentially higher rate of capturing criminals; therefore a safer environment.
- Potentially higher rate of actual criminal being caught since the surveillance cameras should also help an innocent person's alibi.
- Everyone thinking twice before committing a violation of the law.
It seems that the majority of concerns regarding surveillance and privacy are centered around potential misuse of the information by the government. While I agree that it can be a valid concern, we must remember that the government is made of people like us who were elected by us. If the government does misuse surveillance or any other law enforcement capability, it is our fault for not being involved enough to allow it to happen and our responsibility to change the situation by electing different people to office or voting on different laws. The problem with our government system (in the US at least) is that we have the burden of being involved with the operation of our government and the responsibility to know who we are electing to office.
Remember that NT was originally marketed as a UNIX killer. Then Win2000 was marketed as the UNIX killer. The significance of these switches from UNIX to Linux is that Win2000 was not able to win these UNIX seats in these situations. With the ever shrinking overall growth in the computer industry, grabbing share from competitors is becoming quite important.
I have mostly switched from Mozilla to Galeon. I love the use of tabs and the speed of Galeon. However, Galeon has two quirks tha continually bug me: the lack of a form manager and the download dialog (erases filename when the directory is changed). I never realized how much I used the form manager (double clicking in a blank field and usually getting the correct information filed in, even if I haven't visited the site before), until it wasn't available.
By the way, the Galon interface is somewhat themable. The Icons and spinner can be changed. Doesn't make a huge difference, but it helps a little.
If a collision did occur, especially at the incident angle used in the model, would the resulting body have an asymmetric composition? Or would the amount of energy resulting from the impact and the amount of time since the impact permitted a relatively homogeneous composition?
Driver: Total driving time in minutes by each driver of insured vehicle; number of minutes driving in high/low risk locations (high/low accident areas); number of minutes of driving at high/low risk times (rush hour or Sunday afternoon); safe driving behavior, using seat belts, use of turn signals, observance of speed limits, and observance of traffic control devices; number of sudden braking situations; and number of sudden acceleration situations. Vehicle: Location vehicle is parked at night (in garage, in driveway, on street); and location vehicle is parked at work (high theft locations, etc.).
It will be interesting since this IS happening today.
On the way to work yesterday, our local consumer advocate briefly discussed a similar measure that is being trialed by an insurance company. I don't remember the details, but this company installs a monitor in your car which records speeds, use of turn signals, etc. At the end of each billing period, the data is evaluated and your insurance bill is reduced according to how "well" you have driven. Since insurance increases due to receiving a speeding ticket are typically more than the ticket itself in the long run, this could be just as much of a deterent to speeding as a government installed system. Additionally, it is voluntary and does not affect the drivability of your car. If this trial is successful, I guess people will have a decision of "Do I forfeit some of my privacy for potentially lower rates?"
This is quite a common practice. I was responsible for evaluating and selecting a CAD package for our department a few years back. Once PTC (makers of Pro/Engineer) got wind that I was leaning towards another package, their sales managers contacted my boss to let them know what a mistake we were making. Luckily I had my boss's respect and he practically through the slaes reps out.
Slashdot Mirror
We recently puchased a 13 node dual Opteron cluster from Penguin Computing after evaluating clusters from them, Dell, IBM, HP and single memory image machines from SGI. Penguin provided a solution with the best price/performance as well as ease of use. They let us benchmark our codes on some of their test clusters to determine wheteher the Opteron or Xeon based clusters would be better suited to us. My favorite aspect of their system besides price was the plug-and-play setup. The cluster was shipped fully assembled, configured, and tested to our site. All we had to do was roll it out of the crate, plug in the power and network connections, configure the network settings in the OS, and start running our simulations. All of the solutions from the other vendors would have required significant setup time on our behalf unless we spent a large amount of money for the services. I also really like the Scyld operating system that was included in the cluster. It makes the cluster work almost like a single image memory machine. Scyld on the compute nodes is setup to download the kernel image and necessary libraries from the master node at boot-up, so any changes made to the master node automatically propagate to the compute nodes. After several months of running simulations, the cluster has not given us any problems. It has been very reliable (never needed a reboot). Their technical support has been very responsive about ansering questions we had with the initial startup.
You must be pretty young. In the '80s it seemed that the metric system was going to become the official measurement system in the US. All US schools taught the metric system, gas stations were selling gasoline by the liter, and Coke converted its 64oz bottles to 2L bottles (never changed them back though). People hated gasoline being sold by the liter, because they thought they were being ripped off (in many cases they were because gas stations tried to take advantage of the situation). Once it was obvious that the metric conversion was not going to pass (it would be too expensive to convert all of the US industry from one system to another), schools stopped emphasizing the metric system and gas stations went back to using gallons. As globalization continues, more and more companies use the metric system to reduce the number of SKUs in their inventory.
As a side note, I used to work in package development at Coca-Cola and all bottles world-wide are designed using the metric system. For example, in the U.S. and other non-metric countries, we design a 591ml bottle and place a 20oz label on it.
Exactly what was a lie? In 1996, IBM released OS/2 Warp 4 which included a voice enabled version of Netscape Navigator. Here is the press release.
4 .h tml
http://wp.netscape.com/newsref/pr/newsrelease22
The voice recognition was OK, and it was quite easy to navigate from website to website using bookmarks and links in the page.
-Jim
IBM released a similar capability with its OS/2 Warp 4 product back in '95 or '96. The boxed set even included a head set/microphone. Though not extremely useful, it was nice to be able to sit back and browse without having to use a mouse or keyboard. If I remember correctly, the browser created a list of all of the links from the current page and all you had to do was say the name of the link and it opened up. It's amazing to think that was almost a decade ago.
-Jim
Once again, GNOME is behind KDE by a year. No matter how much effort developers put into GNOME, it well never catch KDE in the annivesary department.
It seems that IBM has access to the source code of both UNIX SysV (for its AIX product) and Linux. I would think that by now IBM has performed an analysis of both codes to determine what possible infringements, if any, exist. I wonder if IBM will either state that there are no infringements prior to trial or begin submitting patches to rid the Linux source of potential infringements that they have discovered.
It seems that if IBM has access to both the UNIX source code and the Linux source code, they should be analyzing the two to determine if any code was improperly copied into Linux. They could then either use their resources to fix the problem or identify questionable code to the community for rewrite. It would be interesting if IBM starts submitting a bunch of patches changing code, but not functionality.
The GTK on DirectFB project can be found at:
www.directfb.org/gtk.xml
The screenshots look similarly nice, but unfortunatley without any additional eye candy in tight t-shirts.
I had also read a month or so ago that work is underway to port the gnome libraries over to DirectFB. If I remember correctly, because of the extensive use of the gdk library in Gnome, there weren't too many Gnome libraries that still depend on X. However, it still probably won't be trivial to convert the remaining ones, or it would have already been done.
We just got ours installed yesterday. I'm still installing software and am starting benchmarks. It's only the deskside version (12 cpus, 24GB RAM, 1TB disk), but still more powerful than the 4-cpu SGI Origins that we have been using.
It is the first one that the regional SGI reps had actually installed, but since it is almost exactly the same as the MIPS-based origin 3000 servers (with the exception of the obviously different Itanium 2 cpus and supporting chipsets), they ran into almost no problems getting it online. I have also been suprised as to how many commercial codes have already been ported to the platform.
The main reasons we purchased this machine is for the ease in parallelizing code and the floating point performance of the Itaniam 2 cpus. We're computational materials engineers and the less time we have to spend optimizing codes so that the nodes of a cluster are always kept busy and minimizing I/O bottlenecks gives us more time to concentrate on the theoretical issues.
It runs RedHat 7.2 with some tweaks by SGI called SGI ProPack. The Propack modifications come on separate CDs, with the proprietary software on separate CDs from the open source software. So far, from the command line, everything works just like my PC. It's kind of strange running Linux on a >$100K machine, but it sure beats dealing with the annoying differences between IRIX and Linux. Now to see if it performs as well as we expect...
Here is a link to the talkorigins.org discussion on the bombardier beetle.
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/bombardier.html
First, wouldn't the total bandwidth available for a device be reduced when relaying other device's network traffic? So if someone else is downloading a movie, would my bandwidth be substantially reduced if I was serving as a relay?
And since the mesh concept would have network traffic re-routed until within range of an access point, wouldn't the devices nearest the access point have their available bandwidth negatively affected since they will have to carry the network load of all of the other devices in the "mesh" for that AP?
While I like all of the typically mentioned benefits of Mozilla (tabbed browsing, pop-up blocking, runs on Linux, ...), the one "feature" I rarely see mentioned is the user support and bug tracking (bugzilla) of Mozilla. Everytime I find a bug or a missing capability, it's off to bugzilla. After a quick search, the bug entry can usually be found and with it, you can usually get a good idea of the status of the fix, workarounds, or what can be done to help track down the problem. And if the bug has not yet been reported, it is quite easy to add a usable bug report that you know will actually be considered. I have found the responsiveness of the Mozilla development community to be quite impressive when useful bug reports or feature requests are entered into Bugzilla.
-Jim Shepherd
Maybe I'm being naive, but what are the actual negative consequences of an extensive surveillance system? Is it that everyone does stuff deemed illegal by our society every once and a while and don't want to be caught? I'm by no means a perfect citizen, but when I do something "illegal" such as speeding, I am willing to suffer the consequences for my actions. A society is only as good as the laws that govern it and these laws are meaningless if not enforced. I think it goes without question that the majority of people will break laws that they deem inappropriate if they feel that they will not get caught (look at the number of people that exceed the speed limit on highways).
It seems that any of the potential negatives would be outweighed by the positives:
- Potentially higher rate of capturing criminals; therefore a safer environment.
- Potentially higher rate of actual criminal being caught since the surveillance cameras should also help an innocent person's alibi.
- Everyone thinking twice before committing a violation of the law.
It seems that the majority of concerns regarding surveillance and privacy are centered around potential misuse of the information by the government. While I agree that it can be a valid concern, we must remember that the government is made of people like us who were elected by us. If the government does misuse surveillance or any other law enforcement capability, it is our fault for not being involved enough to allow it to happen and our responsibility to change the situation by electing different people to office or voting on different laws. The problem with our government system (in the US at least) is that we have the burden of being involved with the operation of our government and the responsibility to know who we are electing to office.
Remember that NT was originally marketed as a UNIX killer. Then Win2000 was marketed as the UNIX killer. The significance of these switches from UNIX to Linux is that Win2000 was not able to win these UNIX seats in these situations. With the ever shrinking overall growth in the computer industry, grabbing share from competitors is becoming quite important.
I have mostly switched from Mozilla to Galeon. I love the use of tabs and the speed of Galeon. However, Galeon has two quirks tha continually bug me: the lack of a form manager and the download dialog (erases filename when the directory is changed). I never realized how much I used the form manager (double clicking in a blank field and usually getting the correct information filed in, even if I haven't visited the site before), until it wasn't available.
By the way, the Galon interface is somewhat themable. The Icons and spinner can be changed. Doesn't make a huge difference, but it helps a little.
If a collision did occur, especially at the incident angle used in the model, would the resulting body have an asymmetric composition? Or would the amount of energy resulting from the impact and the amount of time since the impact permitted a relatively homogeneous composition?
Driver:
Total driving time in minutes by each driver of insured vehicle;
number of minutes driving in high/low risk locations (high/low accident areas);
number of minutes of driving at high/low risk times (rush hour or Sunday afternoon);
safe driving behavior,
using seat belts,
use of turn signals,
observance of speed limits, and
observance of traffic control devices;
number of sudden braking situations; and
number of sudden acceleration situations.
Vehicle:
Location vehicle is parked at night (in garage, in driveway, on street);
and location vehicle is parked at work (high theft locations, etc.).
It will be interesting since this IS happening today.
On the way to work yesterday, our local consumer advocate briefly discussed a similar measure that is being trialed by an insurance company. I don't remember the details, but this company installs a monitor in your car which records speeds, use of turn signals, etc. At the end of each billing period, the data is evaluated and your insurance bill is reduced according to how "well" you have driven. Since insurance increases due to receiving a speeding ticket are typically more than the ticket itself in the long run, this could be just as much of a deterent to speeding as a government installed system. Additionally, it is voluntary and does not affect the drivability of your car. If this trial is successful, I guess people will have a decision of "Do I forfeit some of my privacy for potentially lower rates?"
Jim Shepherd
This is quite a common practice. I was responsible for evaluating and selecting a CAD package for our department a few years back. Once PTC (makers of Pro/Engineer) got wind that I was leaning towards another package, their sales managers contacted my boss to let them know what a mistake we were making. Luckily I had my boss's respect and he practically through the slaes reps out.