we;;. i got a pair of dual alphas with a gig of ram in rackmount units for $11k a pop from www.harddata.com. they are solid.
But the fact of the matter is, unless you are doing somthing that requires an alpha, or significantly benefits from an alpha, there is little point in having one. Desktop computing does not significantly benefit from an alpha.
Re:Hmm..does it come with Rebecca Romaijn?
on
First Looks At XBox
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· Score: 1
The irony of your reply is that my sister-in-law called me penis-breath...when she was 3 years old. Do your parents know you use a computer?
Mandrake is very up to date, as said above, but another thing that should be noted is that apt-rpm has the ability to only install packages that are signed. this should cut down in the bad quality issue substiantially.
Seriously...do they use some special proprietary ram? 8G of cdram in 512 meg chunks is only a couple of K. Hardly justifies another $24k tacked onto it. Is this another example of "charge what the market will bear"? I understand there are development costs and the like, but _geez_ $26k is _a lot_ of money. Don't give me an answer like "they are not intended for home use, so they charge more", because that's a bullshit reason (even though it's done all the damn time).
I got the chance to use the datahands once. Not bad at all. Took some getting used to, but a touch typist would have little problems at all. Each finger has an up, right, left, down and push in "key" that woudl correspond to the direction you'd go in to create the keystroke as a touch typist. For example, push in on the right index finger is j, left is h, etc...not bad if you are a touch typist.
I think that the distros are not...um.. cohesive enough. Let me give you an example. My wife, who is pretty computer literate, installs Mandrake. She goes to get an editor and promptly is greeted with a dozen!! Wonderful that she has all those choices, but sheesh, do we really need a dozen listed? And on top of that, that didn't include a number of smaller ones that I know were installed (such as vi).
Why can't we just have a distribution that has a cohesive and simple feel. Most users don't care that they can use one of a hundred editors, they only care about using one editor. Maybe two on the outside. Look at windows default install...it's pretty bare, but it does have the basics there.
I think something like helix goes a long ways into this area, but it still needs to be worked on. I've been arguing this on our LUG mailing list for a while. Just a single desktop environment is all that is needed. Don't put in a lot of extra stuff. a word processing app, a little editor, a calculator, a mail app, a spreadsheet app, an icq app, etc. Not 8 mail apps, 3 spreadsheets, 6 icqs, 3 aol aim clients, etc.
While not an email client, I have often thought that icq with encryption would be a good idea, and Licq goes an implements (what looks like) point to point ssl encrypted icq messages. Very nice. I can actually think of uses for this. Too bad I've become a gnomeicu junky;)
Last year, I wrote in about supercomputing in Portland, and was surprised because no one had mentioned it. A lot of cool things go on there. Big Iron in the extreme. Last year, the LAN was wavelength multiplex 10x 192 Mbps fiber. Lots and Lots of big computers large portions of which run [f|F]ree unices. The people at supercomputing are often "the cutting edge". Like for example, the IBM monitor that was mentioned on slashdot the other day. I brought that up a year ago, having seen it at supercomputing. It really deserves a closer look as a whole.
It was really a scary experience for me when I started my job at the national lab. It was like a whole other world of computing. I came from a small school where we cleaned off 10 megabytes of cache to preserve disk space. Here, I had a guy look me in the eye and say, quite honestly, that he needed 10 TB (terabytes) of storage to get his work done "adequately" and he could really use 70 TB. I just could not believe that. We recently purchased a 2TB array, and it's not even remotely enough. Those damn scientists and all their data;)
I will not be seeing a raise like this this year, although I do know a fair chunk of people that will be seeing a larger than average raise. I am probably one of the few people out there who thinks his salary is pretty fair. I don't live in the bay area. The cost of living where I live is low (2 bedroom, 1100 sq ft for $550/month). Granted, it's not a cultural mecca or anything, but my spouse's salary plus mine is way more than enough. The gov't though does have a salary problem. I make the same as a person who is in a much more expensive part of the world and in the same gov't position.
I dunno...Something here doesn't smell quite right. Maybe I am just paranoid, but I usually think of new software companies starting with one app and gettign it out the door before doing 4 at once. I may just pick up one of these to compare it to what's already out there. I am sure there will be an outrage if someone does "diff `strings ` `strings `" and there is not much difference
The irony of this is that any reasonable system administrator knows that you don't use a hammer to screw in something. that is to say, you don't use an inappropriate solution to a problem. Shoehorning in an MS solution when a Linux solution will work just as well, and cost less up front is often important. It also works the other way around, if you have no one who is willing to learn Linux.
Well, from the experiences I ahve had recently, g4's are mean mean mean scientific machines. We have quite a few floating around the national lab where I work. The PC/MAC team is going head to head with the Unix team on Seti@Home. I was holding the top spot with my dual p3's chewing up chunks. Then in comes these G4's..they are averaging about 5 hours per processor on a block. That's really quite good. Of course, we countered with the PA-RISC machine that could do 24 an hour;)
But the fact of the matter is that their performance is prompting us to look at g4 clusters as a scientific computing solution. Go figure. I wonder if Apple will buy into it..their machines as scientific boxes;)
Lots of places in the DOE use linux. A lot of that is scientific computing. Look at Avalong and Loki at Los Alamos. Look at Los Lobos at Sandia. Look at all the clusters all over. It's cheap cycles.
I work as a sysadmin at a DOE facility. We recently decided to include Linux on our unix supported system list, set up a program to buy linux boxes, and started getting a lot of interest. For the stuff we do, a $5k linux box will equal the $30-50k suns and sgis. Before you freak and say I am wrong, it works for us. For our applications. Most of our stuff does not have a 64 bit requirement, so that's not an issue. Basically, we just found what we needed to integrate into our environment (shared filesystems, main applications, etc), made sure our config stuff was cross-platform (PERL is the language of the gods), and put it up. We now have guys who can do work on a $10k machine (including a huge monitor) that would normally have required a $80k machine before.
Linux is breaking the paradigm. Scientists jsut like to see the numbers. You say, "Benchmark this box vs your workstations". They are shocked with the results. For the longest time, sgi and sun (and to a lesser extent hp, but I still love PA-RISC) dominated the market for a reason. Then, more recently they dominated the market because of reputation and past.
Face it, it's hard to beat an x86 cluster for computationally bound tasks for the $$. As a desktop, a $5k x86 box is _insanely_ fast. _INSANELY_. Ask any of my scientists that say "Hey, can I borrow your box to run on? It's just faster than this *insert traditional unix box here*".
Our local LUG has several members that swear by e-smith. They claim on their webpage that they only support pentiums, but it does work on a 486, it jsut needs a little tweaking to get the netcards installed (the isa drivers are not there). You can get it at www.e-smith.net? Another option is the linux router project.
Personally, I am not sure you have to worry about those ports, but then again..;)
I apologize, this is not a flame, but there are a few things you missed. StarOffice will not be open source until october from what I understand. Redhat has never been in the practice of putting beta kernels in their distros, nor any other beta things for that matter. Mandrake, on the other hand, is known for this;)
And don't get me wrong. I would love to see all of these features, but often redhat does not go that cutting edge
The couple my wife and I went with (get that, heh;) were worried that like every other comic movie that it would try to take on too much...and they were pleseantly surprised when it didn't. They LIKE the fact that it didn't go into detail on why cyclops has to use a red visor, or even that it's ruby IIRC.
They enjoyed Ian McKellan and Patrik Stewart (in the role he was born to play;). Personally, I LOVED those two. I though they made great great leaders. You could feel their overwhelming power in their personalities, as well as their mutant power.
As for the secondary characters, I think they actually did a good job. It's been a while, but I don't remember Toad ever being such a bad ass, and so smart with the use of his powers. I don't remember Mystique being a martial arts expert (but it could have been, I am not an Xmen cult member). Sabertooth...well, ok, he grunted a lot, but he's not really supposed to be a man of words. At least I wondered what was going on under his rather hairy furrowed brow.
The movie made wonderful reference to other Xmen still in development, with the obvious one being Rogue, but the not so obvious ones as well. Did anyone else catch the name of the girl walking though walls was Kitty, as in Kitty Pride? Or Bobby, as in Bobby Drake, freezing things? This was the sort of thing that should appeal to the more hard core Xmen fans...you are suppose to feel like you are in the school.
Personally, I liked it. It wasn't the deeply emotional and bloody violence of Gladiator (which I LOVED), but it was fun. I am enough of an Xmen fan to appreciate all the little side jokes (yellow spandex).More importantly, my wife, who has never read a comic book, really had a good time. She didn't feel the need to ask me about cyclops. She saw the love triangle. So, she had fun as well.
It's like I said before, doesn't anyone go to the movies to escape anymore? To have fun and not have to have a deep plot?
Ironically, I had a lot of discussions about alternative fuels when I was out in the midwest last week. Why not ethanol? It can be made from just about anything organic (it seems..I heard mention of garbage, paper, corn, wheat, etc). It burns cleaner. They have 85% ethanol cars now (a few from ford and chrysler) that appear to run jsut as well, good speed, good efficiency. E85 (as they call 85% ethanol) had a 106 octane at the pump when I looked. What's the catch? We have the most farm land of anywhere I can think of in the world. We have a grain surplus. Most importantly, it's renewable. What's the problem here???
I did a search and couldn't come up with it, but this was mentioned before. I know I did once as well, in a report on supercomputing 99 as a comment to a comdex/las vegas 99 report. I played with it a little. The resolution is insane...they showed a map of a 20 mile x 20 mile area of new york as part of the demo. Every single street was displayed. They pointed out the dot on an i of one word and said that was a single pixel. It is really truly nuts, but the graphics head to go along with it is mighty pricy;)
Slashdot Mirror
we;;. i got a pair of dual alphas with a gig of ram in rackmount units for $11k a pop from www.harddata.com. they are solid.
But the fact of the matter is, unless you are doing somthing that requires an alpha, or significantly benefits from an alpha, there is little point in having one. Desktop computing does not significantly benefit from an alpha.
The irony of your reply is that my sister-in-law called me penis-breath...when she was 3 years old. Do your parents know you use a computer?
Seriously..I feel like I am getting a console stamped with Charles Xavier's signature!
Cyclops says, "I have had my eye on this one for a long time!"
Storm says, "A man without an Xbox will never get a blow from me!"
Mandrake is very up to date, as said above, but another thing that should be noted is that apt-rpm has the ability to only install packages that are signed. this should cut down in the bad quality issue substiantially.
Seriously...do they use some special proprietary ram? 8G of cdram in 512 meg chunks is only a couple of K. Hardly justifies another $24k tacked onto it. Is this another example of "charge what the market will bear"? I understand there are development costs and the like, but _geez_ $26k is _a lot_ of money. Don't give me an answer like "they are not intended for home use, so they charge more", because that's a bullshit reason (even though it's done all the damn time).
I got the chance to use the datahands once. Not bad at all. Took some getting used to, but a touch typist would have little problems at all. Each finger has an up, right, left, down and push in "key" that woudl correspond to the direction you'd go in to create the keystroke as a touch typist. For example, push in on the right index finger is j, left is h, etc...not bad if you are a touch typist.
;)
Of course, I am not
I think that the distros are not ...um.. cohesive enough. Let me give you an example. My wife, who is pretty computer literate, installs Mandrake. She goes to get an editor and promptly is greeted with a dozen!! Wonderful that she has all those choices, but sheesh, do we really need a dozen listed? And on top of that, that didn't include a number of smaller ones that I know were installed (such as vi).
Why can't we just have a distribution that has a cohesive and simple feel. Most users don't care that they can use one of a hundred editors, they only care about using one editor. Maybe two on the outside. Look at windows default install...it's pretty bare, but it does have the basics there.
I think something like helix goes a long ways into this area, but it still needs to be worked on. I've been arguing this on our LUG mailing list for a while. Just a single desktop environment is all that is needed. Don't put in a lot of extra stuff. a word processing app, a little editor, a calculator, a mail app, a spreadsheet app, an icq app, etc. Not 8 mail apps, 3 spreadsheets, 6 icqs, 3 aol aim clients, etc.
While not an email client, I have often thought that icq with encryption would be a good idea, and Licq goes an implements (what looks like) point to point ssl encrypted icq messages. Very nice. I can actually think of uses for this. Too bad I've become a gnomeicu junky ;)
Last year, I wrote in about supercomputing in Portland, and was surprised because no one had mentioned it. A lot of cool things go on there. Big Iron in the extreme. Last year, the LAN was wavelength multiplex 10x 192 Mbps fiber. Lots and Lots of big computers large portions of which run [f|F]ree unices. The people at supercomputing are often "the cutting edge". Like for example, the IBM monitor that was mentioned on slashdot the other day. I brought that up a year ago, having seen it at supercomputing. It really deserves a closer look as a whole.
The article mentions the people at linux handhelds have gotten wireless up (I assume on the iPAQ)
It was really a scary experience for me when I started my job at the national lab. It was like a whole other world of computing. I came from a small school where we cleaned off 10 megabytes of cache to preserve disk space. Here, I had a guy look me in the eye and say, quite honestly, that he needed 10 TB (terabytes) of storage to get his work done "adequately" and he could really use 70 TB. I just could not believe that. We recently purchased a 2TB array, and it's not even remotely enough. Those damn scientists and all their data ;)
I will not be seeing a raise like this this year, although I do know a fair chunk of people that will be seeing a larger than average raise. I am probably one of the few people out there who thinks his salary is pretty fair. I don't live in the bay area. The cost of living where I live is low (2 bedroom, 1100 sq ft for $550/month). Granted, it's not a cultural mecca or anything, but my spouse's salary plus mine is way more than enough. The gov't though does have a salary problem. I make the same as a person who is in a much more expensive part of the world and in the same gov't position.
This is not without precident. As I understand it, there are a good many lockpicking devices that you have to be a registered locksmith to get.
I dunno...Something here doesn't smell quite right. Maybe I am just paranoid, but I usually think of new software companies starting with one app and gettign it out the door before doing 4 at once. I may just pick up one of these to compare it to what's already out there. I am sure there will be an outrage if someone does "diff `strings ` `strings `" and there is not much difference
The irony of this is that any reasonable system administrator knows that you don't use a hammer to screw in something. that is to say, you don't use an inappropriate solution to a problem. Shoehorning in an MS solution when a Linux solution will work just as well, and cost less up front is often important. It also works the other way around, if you have no one who is willing to learn Linux.
As I remmeber, slashdot does run on standard time, and I think it's somewhere in Michigan, which means they might not run on daylight savings time ;)
Last I checked gcc did support altivec. Check it out, announced in may
h tml
http://slashdot.org/articles/00/03/24/1918240.s
I'm sorry Taco...I thought this was funny as hell ;)
Well, from the experiences I ahve had recently, g4's are mean mean mean scientific machines. We have quite a few floating around the national lab where I work. The PC/MAC team is going head to head with the Unix team on Seti@Home. I was holding the top spot with my dual p3's chewing up chunks. Then in comes these G4's..they are averaging about 5 hours per processor on a block. That's really quite good. Of course, we countered with the PA-RISC machine that could do 24 an hour ;)
But the fact of the matter is that their performance is prompting us to look at g4 clusters as a scientific computing solution. Go figure. I wonder if Apple will buy into it..their machines as scientific boxes ;)
Lots of places in the DOE use linux. A lot of that is scientific computing. Look at Avalong and Loki at Los Alamos. Look at Los Lobos at Sandia. Look at all the clusters all over. It's cheap cycles.
I work as a sysadmin at a DOE facility. We recently decided to include Linux on our unix supported system list, set up a program to buy linux boxes, and started getting a lot of interest. For the stuff we do, a $5k linux box will equal the $30-50k suns and sgis. Before you freak and say I am wrong, it works for us. For our applications. Most of our stuff does not have a 64 bit requirement, so that's not an issue. Basically, we just found what we needed to integrate into our environment (shared filesystems, main applications, etc), made sure our config stuff was cross-platform (PERL is the language of the gods), and put it up. We now have guys who can do work on a $10k machine (including a huge monitor) that would normally have required a $80k machine before.
Linux is breaking the paradigm. Scientists jsut like to see the numbers. You say, "Benchmark this box vs your workstations". They are shocked with the results. For the longest time, sgi and sun (and to a lesser extent hp, but I still love PA-RISC) dominated the market for a reason. Then, more recently they dominated the market because of reputation and past.
Face it, it's hard to beat an x86 cluster for computationally bound tasks for the $$. As a desktop, a $5k x86 box is _insanely_ fast. _INSANELY_. Ask any of my scientists that say "Hey, can I borrow your box to run on? It's just faster than this *insert traditional unix box here*".
Our local LUG has several members that swear by e-smith. They claim on their webpage that they only support pentiums, but it does work on a 486, it jsut needs a little tweaking to get the netcards installed (the isa drivers are not there). You can get it at www.e-smith.net? Another option is the linux router project.
;)
Personally, I am not sure you have to worry about those ports, but then again..
I apologize, this is not a flame, but there are a few things you missed. StarOffice will not be open source until october from what I understand. Redhat has never been in the practice of putting beta kernels in their distros, nor any other beta things for that matter. Mandrake, on the other hand, is known for this ;)
And don't get me wrong. I would love to see all of these features, but often redhat does not go that cutting edge
The couple my wife and I went with (get that, heh ;) were worried that like every other comic movie that it would try to take on too much...and they were pleseantly surprised when it didn't. They LIKE the fact that it didn't go into detail on why cyclops has to use a red visor, or even that it's ruby IIRC.
;). Personally, I LOVED those two. I though they made great great leaders. You could feel their overwhelming power in their personalities, as well as their mutant power.
They enjoyed Ian McKellan and Patrik Stewart (in the role he was born to play
As for the secondary characters, I think they actually did a good job. It's been a while, but I don't remember Toad ever being such a bad ass, and so smart with the use of his powers. I don't remember Mystique being a martial arts expert (but it could have been, I am not an Xmen cult member). Sabertooth...well, ok, he grunted a lot, but he's not really supposed to be a man of words. At least I wondered what was going on under his rather hairy furrowed brow.
The movie made wonderful reference to other Xmen still in development, with the obvious one being Rogue, but the not so obvious ones as well. Did anyone else catch the name of the girl walking though walls was Kitty, as in Kitty Pride? Or Bobby, as in Bobby Drake, freezing things? This was the sort of thing that should appeal to the more hard core Xmen fans...you are suppose to feel like you are in the school.
Personally, I liked it. It wasn't the deeply emotional and bloody violence of Gladiator (which I LOVED), but it was fun. I am enough of an Xmen fan to appreciate all the little side jokes (yellow spandex).More importantly, my wife, who has never read a comic book, really had a good time. She didn't feel the need to ask me about cyclops. She saw the love triangle. So, she had fun as well.
It's like I said before, doesn't anyone go to the movies to escape anymore? To have fun and not have to have a deep plot?
Ironically, I had a lot of discussions about alternative fuels when I was out in the midwest last week. Why not ethanol? It can be made from just about anything organic (it seems..I heard mention of garbage, paper, corn, wheat, etc). It burns cleaner. They have 85% ethanol cars now (a few from ford and chrysler) that appear to run jsut as well, good speed, good efficiency. E85 (as they call 85% ethanol) had a 106 octane at the pump when I looked. What's the catch? We have the most farm land of anywhere I can think of in the world. We have a grain surplus. Most importantly, it's renewable. What's the problem here???
I did a search and couldn't come up with it, but this was mentioned before. I know I did once as well, in a report on supercomputing 99 as a comment to a comdex/las vegas 99 report. I played with it a little. The resolution is insane...they showed a map of a 20 mile x 20 mile area of new york as part of the demo. Every single street was displayed. They pointed out the dot on an i of one word and said that was a single pixel. It is really truly nuts, but the graphics head to go along with it is mighty pricy ;)