Other solutions don't even require the compute nodes to have a hard drive (Oscar springs to mind). I'd fully expect the Microsoft solution to be similar.
This brings to mind one of my favourite MS stories.
Circa 1996, the company I worked for was transitioning a customer's LAN from Netware to Win95 (it wasn't our idea.) The clients were all diskless workstations, running from a single file server. The customer didn't want to buy new hardware, and MS told us that it was possible to do diskless booting with 95.
After fighting with their network for over a week, MS decided that it wasn't possible, because the workstations had floppy drives. "That's not a diskless workstation! It's impossible for them to boot if they have a floppy drive!" (ignoring, of course, that the same hardware had been running flawlessly with Netware for the previous three years.)
I can see them selling these cluser 'solution' licenses to some hapless university, then saying "Hey! Your nodes [don't] have hard drives - that's an unsupported configuration. Sorry, no refunds."
Is running gcc and eclipse on windows that much of a nightmare?
Wouldn't know, I've never done it. Perhaps a better question would be "is running VisualBasic on Windows so easy?" And the answer would be "yes, that's exactly what I mean."
"ease of use" isn't exactly going to be a big selling point for the guys putting these kinds of computers together
Excuse me while I find my tinfoil hat...... OK, that's better:
What if MS is doing this so that it can strongarm universities and research institutions? Something like going to the bean counters and saying "hey, we have this great new OS for supercomputers - we'll give you a reduced rate on it, *AND* a reduced rate on the licenses for the rest of your desktops, if you just agree to kick that smelly, communistic, viral, legally-dubious Linux off your clusters! (Did we mention that if you're using Linux, you might have to give up all your precioussss IP?)"
It's not even that - clusters aren't about shiny desktops, they're about custom-written apps.
MS Excels at letting the computer illiterate do whatever MS has envisioned they might. You wanna connect to the internet via DSL? No problem. You wanna write an email to Grandma? No problem. You wanna do something that MS hasn't thought of yet? BIG Problem.
Pretty much *anything* you do with a cluster is gonna be custom, "MS hasn't thought of this" stuff, and so will be harder to use, not easier.
Why do I get the feeling that it will have a little version of Clippy asking "It looks like you're doing climatology variance research. Would you like me to help you model your data?"
I just don't see how a commercial rip-off of bittorrent style technology, with some DRM shoe-horned in (probably very lame weak, encryption) is going to make file-sharing anymore respectable.
Then perhaps you need glasses.
Current P2P is demonized by big media companies - they say it's evil and destroying their profits.
We now have a major media corporation talking about how *wonderful* their P2P app is. The perception amongst those who don't know better *can only* be "hmm, maybe this P2P stuff isn't all that bad after all."
It also brings legality into question for other distribution mechanisms
No, it doesn't.
If Kontiki is legal, how would caching a bittorrent for an episode of "Lost" be any different?
It's different because it's authorized by the copyright holder.
Think about it - if distributing something via means "X" automatically meant that *anyone* could then distribute the same content, then (as WB makes it's shows available via cable networks) it would be legal for you to start your own cable channel consisting of nothing but WB shows, and not have to pay them anything?
Or how about DVDs? WB also sells DVDs of many of its TV shows - does that mean that it's legal for anyone to start making copies of them and selling them?
Ohh- music now - WB has a music division that sells CDs - so because they distrute their own CDs, it's legal for anyone else to sell rips?
In all of these cases, the distribution mechanism is irrelevant - what's relevant is that one way is authorized by the copyright holder, and the other way isn't.
what right did you have before the EULA to keep copies of the CD after you no longer possessed it?
In Canada, this is expressly coded into copyright law. If you make a copy, then give (or even sell!) the original, you are legally entitled to keep the copy (although you are not allowed to make a copy of the copy.)
Can someone explain to me why the rootkit authors aren't being charged with computer crime?
The guys who write viruses (such as Nimda and Code Red) get arrested and sent to the Federal PMITA Prison for creating the viruses - why isn't the FBI making a beeline to First4internet and hauling them away?
Seems like a pretty open-and-shut case - has someone just not thought of it yet?
Is Wikalong broken? For some reason, whenever anyone posts links in the sidebar, I can't follow them in the browser - clicking on them shows the content in the sidebar, and middle-click doesn't work, and there is no context menu.
There's the BeleniX LiveCD which includes a Gnome desktop. Drop it into a typical desktop machine and get a working, Internet-connected workstation.
I might try it if I could download it. Their HTTP link gives me 1.2KB/s, and the torrents are fscked (they tell me 'my client is spoofing' - which it's not.)
Have your lawyer on speed dial, because it's time to stop that pesky public from interfering with your business model by commenting on such silly things as "quality."
OR
"Have your marketing people on speed dial, so that you can try to take advantage of people's opinions and correct your mistakes before they get too big. Instant global feedback from the people who buy your products."
I see this as the same as almost any new technology - it can be used for good or for evil.
Slashdot Mirror
No, it doesn't provide one at all. You even said yourself: How do you replace an in-use executable? Well, you make it not in-use.
Think about it for a minute, maybe it will sink in.
the parenthetical restriction is what makes this hard
Yes, and the first unparenthetical sentence is what makes it impossible.
Because of the brain-dead way that Windows handles file-locking makes it flat-out impossible to delete a file if a process has a lock on it.
Other solutions don't even require the compute nodes to have a hard drive (Oscar springs to mind). I'd fully expect the Microsoft solution to be similar.
This brings to mind one of my favourite MS stories.
Circa 1996, the company I worked for was transitioning a customer's LAN from Netware to Win95 (it wasn't our idea.) The clients were all diskless workstations, running from a single file server. The customer didn't want to buy new hardware, and MS told us that it was possible to do diskless booting with 95.
After fighting with their network for over a week, MS decided that it wasn't possible, because the workstations had floppy drives. "That's not a diskless workstation! It's impossible for them to boot if they have a floppy drive!" (ignoring, of course, that the same hardware had been running flawlessly with Netware for the previous three years.)
I can see them selling these cluser 'solution' licenses to some hapless university, then saying "Hey! Your nodes [don't] have hard drives - that's an unsupported configuration. Sorry, no refunds."
Is running gcc and eclipse on windows that much of a nightmare?
Wouldn't know, I've never done it. Perhaps a better question would be "is running VisualBasic on Windows so easy?" And the answer would be "yes, that's exactly what I mean."
If your admin is truly worth his salt, he won't *NEED* a GUI to work remotely - a shell is more than sufficient.
"ease of use" isn't exactly going to be a big selling point for the guys putting these kinds of computers together
.. OK, that's better:
Excuse me while I find my tinfoil hat....
What if MS is doing this so that it can strongarm universities and research institutions? Something like going to the bean counters and saying "hey, we have this great new OS for supercomputers - we'll give you a reduced rate on it, *AND* a reduced rate on the licenses for the rest of your desktops, if you just agree to kick that smelly, communistic, viral, legally-dubious Linux off your clusters! (Did we mention that if you're using Linux, you might have to give up all your precioussss IP?)"
It's not even that - clusters aren't about shiny desktops, they're about custom-written apps.
MS Excels at letting the computer illiterate do whatever MS has envisioned they might. You wanna connect to the internet via DSL? No problem. You wanna write an email to Grandma? No problem. You wanna do something that MS hasn't thought of yet? BIG Problem.
Pretty much *anything* you do with a cluster is gonna be custom, "MS hasn't thought of this" stuff, and so will be harder to use, not easier.
Why do I get the feeling that it will have a little version of Clippy asking "It looks like you're doing climatology variance research. Would you like me to help you model your data?"
I know that's a typo. The question is, did you mean "world domination project", or "world damnation project"?
:o)
This is MS - is there a difference?
Microsoft will pay Daum $30 million, including $10 million in cash.
So.. the other $20M will be in the form of an NSF cheque?
And when is the drop for the cash going down? Is the $10M going to be in small, non-sequentially numbered, unmarked bills?
I just don't see how a commercial rip-off of bittorrent style technology, with some DRM shoe-horned in (probably very lame weak, encryption) is going to make file-sharing anymore respectable.
Then perhaps you need glasses.
Current P2P is demonized by big media companies - they say it's evil and destroying their profits.
We now have a major media corporation talking about how *wonderful* their P2P app is. The perception amongst those who don't know better *can only* be "hmm, maybe this P2P stuff isn't all that bad after all."
I think the point here is that the Universe is the whole closed system...where'd it get it's energy from?!?
Gee, I have no idea.
let's take Zyrtec, which for a long time ran advertisements consisting of people climbing mountains and shouting out the drug's name
:o)
To be honest though, that was just because nobody but their marketing department knew how the hell to pronounce it.
It also brings legality into question for other distribution mechanisms
No, it doesn't.
If Kontiki is legal, how would caching a bittorrent for an episode of "Lost" be any different?
It's different because it's authorized by the copyright holder.
Think about it - if distributing something via means "X" automatically meant that *anyone* could then distribute the same content, then (as WB makes it's shows available via cable networks) it would be legal for you to start your own cable channel consisting of nothing but WB shows, and not have to pay them anything?
Or how about DVDs? WB also sells DVDs of many of its TV shows - does that mean that it's legal for anyone to start making copies of them and selling them?
Ohh- music now - WB has a music division that sells CDs - so because they distrute their own CDs, it's legal for anyone else to sell rips?
In all of these cases, the distribution mechanism is irrelevant - what's relevant is that one way is authorized by the copyright holder, and the other way isn't.
what right did you have before the EULA to keep copies of the CD after you no longer possessed it?
In Canada, this is expressly coded into copyright law. If you make a copy, then give (or even sell!) the original, you are legally entitled to keep the copy (although you are not allowed to make a copy of the copy.)
Song = lyrics. Scatting != lyrics
Actually, that should be Song = sung lyrics. A rap is not a song either, as the lyrics are spoken, rather than sung.
by this time, it could have been destroyed - perhaps tossed into a star and no longer be composed of even the same elements
Man, and I thought that the shuttle's SRBs were wasteful!
Sex is primarily for producing children, It has NO OTHER purpose.
You're contradicting yourself - if sex has a 'primary' purpose, then (by definition) it must have other, less-important purposes, too.
Ain't Freudian slips a bitch?
Man, I'd never buy a used MP3 - you never know what you're gonna get. If the previous owner(s) didn't take care of it, it might be all scratched.
Unless it was a rare classic, then I might buy it.
Can someone explain to me why the rootkit authors aren't being charged with computer crime?
The guys who write viruses (such as Nimda and Code Red) get arrested and sent to the Federal PMITA Prison for creating the viruses - why isn't the FBI making a beeline to First4internet and hauling them away?
Seems like a pretty open-and-shut case - has someone just not thought of it yet?
Is Wikalong broken? For some reason, whenever anyone posts links in the sidebar, I can't follow them in the browser - clicking on them shows the content in the sidebar, and middle-click doesn't work, and there is no context menu.
You know he already plays, right? :o)
Yeah, seems pretty cool...
There's the BeleniX LiveCD which includes a Gnome desktop. Drop it into a typical desktop machine and get a working, Internet-connected workstation.
I might try it if I could download it. Their HTTP link gives me 1.2KB/s, and the torrents are fscked (they tell me 'my client is spoofing' - which it's not.)
you need proper availability not 100s of days [...] up 2320 day(s)
:o)
How is 2320 not "hundreds" of days? It looks like just over 23 hundred days to me.
Have your lawyer on speed dial, because it's time to stop that pesky public from interfering with your business model by commenting on such silly things as "quality."
OR
"Have your marketing people on speed dial, so that you can try to take advantage of people's opinions and correct your mistakes before they get too big. Instant global feedback from the people who buy your products."
I see this as the same as almost any new technology - it can be used for good or for evil.