You can get them at lots of places. Even Wal-Mart has started carrying rope lights in the lighting section. But there is something you have to be careful about on these.
Before making a BIG purchase of rope lights for my gameroom, I bought two brands. I wanted the color blue. One strand was, indeed blue. The other strand said blue, but its color (unlit) was obviously purple!
You know what? When lit, the purple one actually was blue and looked great. But the blue one? Turns out that in low lighting, it looked more like white lights with a faint blue glow from the tube.
So be careful, if you do use rope lights, to determine the quality of the color produced by them before you use them.
BTW, Wal-Mart also has automotive neon lights for cheap. But I noticed something. A few months after being on display, running 24x7, all of their demo tubes have started experiencing problems. They don't glow anymore. Kind of arc around like one of those balls you put your hand on and see the sparks inside the glass sphere.
This happens already. Go watch Phenomenon and tell me that it is not pushing Scientology.
What? And let them implant body thetans in me AGAIN? No thanks! (I'll give it a critical eye. Thanks.)
I just hope this will become wonderfully self-destructive behavior (in general). Show start whoring themselves in more and more annoying ways to make money. It sounds like a great way for "free" programming to become extinct. (The obvious retort would be that the only things that matter would be shows that are "free" to have control of their content, even if it is paid for.)
I have one of these in my datacenter. But I'd have to say that the Tempest upright is far more popular. Of course, it IS set on free play mode.;)
PS: It is so strange that Atari could embrace such great products and ideas, but have the most spectacular failures when it comes to the business side of things.
PS: Which system play more like 'real basketball'? Was it the Atari 2600, or the Intellivision?;)
I've been watching Big Brother 3. The product placement is very bold and obvious. (Liquor, doughnuts, etc.) It is clearly in-your-face. However, I really don't think this is the final step. This is obviously going to go further in the future.
How? Well, imagine Greenpeace sponsoring some episode of some Star Trek series. But instead of having Greenpeace play some sort of force protecting a planet, they pay for a plot that shows the evil of commercialism and the Great Truth in environmentalism. That is, manipulation of the underlying message to support the organization's goal, rather than pushing the organization itself.
So, a company/organization can pay $XX for their name to be integrated into some part of the show, or they can pay $XXX to have creative control and send the message that they want as well. (Probably more important for political groups than anything.)
But do you see where this will go? They've opened the door for products to pay to become part of the plot. How long until they cross the line to pay for a plot which meets their goals?
1] This has been done from time to time and nobody probably ever noticed. 2] You can also break the speed of sound using off-the-shelf components. But it isn't much of a miracle if you are beating it in a different form (electricity, light, etc).
so, I quess this will be a competitor to the Texas Instruments' OMAP chip?
Quess again! Lets start running these stories through a spell-checker before we promote them to the front page.;)
On a related note, this story is a little interesting, but there isn't a lot of meat to grab onto, IMHO. Yay! We can have digital and analog circuits on the same chip. Actually, I'm a little surprised that wasn't being done already if it is that much of an advantage.
No, not the travel back to earth in the past kind. Those really suck. But I really like the paradox and causality loop kind of things. Reaction being observed before the action and throwing everyone for a loop (pardon the pun). That last episode of STTNG, I really liked. I also liked some of the Voyager ones (and Janeway saying that she swore she'd never wanted to be in one). That 'Year of Hell' was a good one, too. Time Travel can be fun, as long as it isn't going back and revisiting a known past.
I agree with you. And where Alton said he was rambling, I think he made something that barely passed as a minimum answer. I didn't like the volcano answer very much. I'm just guessing that he didn't give this a best effort.:(
For me, it's exactly the opposite. I will not purchase a CD that I haven't heard at least 2-3 tracks of...
I think you're in the mainstream there. Most people don't blindly buy a new CD without any idea of what the songs sound like, unless they're a die-hard fan of the performer.
I can certainly see your position how MP3s augment the current 'free advertisement system' in a positive way.
> Most people will pay a fair price for good service.
I would be willing to purchase music with some frequency if the price point was way lower than it current is, and doesn't have DRM weighing it down like a sandbag.
I would expand on what you pointed out and say that different people DO want different things from music. There are benefits to owning CDs, yes. There are also benefits to not owning CDs.
Myself, I'm interested in the music itself. Not the benefits of having a large CD collection. Or hyper-fidelity of the sound. In my case, having a random and immediate access to of 100s of songs on my hard drive beats the hell out of a pile of CDs.
But I think the point I was trying to make is that, to a small degree, it displaces the actual purchase of music. If someone "might" have purchased something, they may be more content to do without if they have an electronic copy. (Or they already have a good selection of downloaded music and feel less of a need to add more to their library.)
You do, however, raise some good points. Personally, I only buy a cassette (now CD) if I really really like a musical group. I think my purchases average 1 per year. But come to think of it, I think I've slipped down to no CD purchases at all anymore. I'll be damned if I put that on a survey, though.
I very much enjoyed your response, and you've echoed what is probably my greatest question/concern, which is the obvious bias that anyone would have in answering a survey. (Along with the lack of precision focus in observing their own habits.) Also about the correlation/causation -- there are a LOT of factors at play here which I don't think anyone is bound to get their arms around in one particular survey.
If the opportunity presented itself where I could legally give a swift kick to the behind of everyone behind the current dominate music distribution model, I would. That given, I thought I would give a take on this whole downloadable music thing that I haven't read before.
This article makes a little inroads in the direction, but I want to point out that just like music downloaders are in various categories, you have a whole continuum of music PURCHASERS. And it isn't a descrete category that people fall into... it is a continuum.
On one side, you have the people who compulsively buy buy buy everything music. On the other side, you have people who don't buy any music at all. In between, there are all sorts of levels of music purchase. And somewhere in between, is the "sweet spot" of consumers which can be swayed one direction or another to buy or not buy CDs.
Now, you have a disruptive technology like online music distribution. Some people like it for the convenience. Some people like it for the cost. Whatever. It doesn't matter except that in most cases, it slightly pushes them down the continuum towards not being as big of a music purchaser. (However, yes, there are counter-trends, like someone getting more excited about music and finding a new favorite group, and supporting them.)
But whenever someone downloads music, in general terms, it pushes them down the continuum towards being a non-purchaser. The effect on an individual level is probably quite small, and difficult to measure. However, when aggregated across a large population, the impact is dramatic.
I think the problem with surveys of how downloading CDs have affected music purchasing decisions is that it is too focused on the individual level. From their point of view, their behavior may not have changed significantly. Or they may not be aware of any change. But a slight change has occured.
That slight change is enough to push some people out of the sweet spot and into becoming a non-purchaser. Or the aggregate of a large number of people sliding down the continuum has an affect on sales figures.
So, this is the basic guts of the theory that I have when it comes to online music downloading vs consumer purchasing.
No, I don't. I really can't emphasize this enough: read. I said, "SPEC is synthetic and irrelvant." Big difference.
No. You said... "CPU benchmarks (like SPEC) are synthetic and irrelevant, because they fit in cache." You also said "Memory-to-CPU bandwidth is probably the only real indicator of the ability of the system to handle real-world workloads." I'd call that even more synthetic and irrelevant than SPEC.
The TPCs measure aggregate systems, including hardware, storage, OS, database software, and so on.
No argument there. But I was saying that it was MORE relevant than SPEC. And extremely more relevant than that STREAM TRIAD test they're pushing.
The whole point of this discussion is that the SGI system can outperform virtually everything else on STREAM TRIAD because it has no memory bus.
Really? I don't recall reading that in the story introduction or SGI's Press Release. Only the link to the STREAM TRIAD itself pointed out that it was talking about memory bandwidth. IIn fact, that is what my original message was trying to point out.
So they've got a machine that gets great ratings on this synthetic benchmark? Who cares. It doesn't mean much if you've bolted a kernel on top of it which isn't mature in a large CPU environment. (And other hardware issues, as you mentioned which the TPCs would bring into play.)
Obviously you missed the boat here cheif. The system SGI is selling is for 3D Rendering.. not to run amazon.com
I don't think I've missed the boat. Okay. Let's take rendering. On a pure economic level, they're going to be hard pressed to sell this configuration vs 64 single processor (perhaps even blade) servers.
On a technical level, let's see how well performance ramps up when you go from 32 to 33 processors. (Hint: you won't be getting a full CPU's worth of extra performance.) Actually, it can get even worse with lock contention and kernel issues so where you can LOSE performance by adding a CPU.
The point I was trying to make is they're touting superiority based on a single benchmark which measures memory bandwidth. Great. The company who produced the box picked a single benchmark which puts the best shine on the hardware/os combination.
CPU benchmarks (like SPEC) are synthetic and irrelevant, because they fit in cache. Virtually no real application fits in cache, and the sort of applications you run on a machine this big deal with data sets no the order of tens or even hundreds of gigabytes. Memory-to-CPU bandwidth is probably the only real indicator of the ability of the system to handle real-world workloads.
You say that synthetic benchmarks are irrelevant. Then you go on to say that this particular synthetic benchmark is highly relevant. It can't be both. I'd like to see this run a TPC variant, which is closer to real-world than it is synthetic.
The Origin 3000 architecture, on which this prototype system was based, has no memory bus at all. It uses a fabric of switched multi-gigabyte-per-second interconnects to attach CPUs to RAM and to other CPU nodes.
What, do I have to explicitly call out the components and subcomponents? It is a memory bus, for the purpose of this discussion.
I think it is pretty interesting that the benchmark that they used measured memory throughput, as opposed to, say, an actual workload. In other words, this is a synthetic benchmark, versus a real-world benchmark. They say, "Look! We can do memory transfers really really fast!"
Unfortunately, memory transfers are not the world when it comes to large multiprocessor boxes. The overhead comes in when you're trying to synchronize a large number of threads/CPUs to do a large task. For example, an Oracle database.
Sun has proven that it scales up the tree very well with large numbers of processors. But from my understanding, Linux is more efficient with a low processor count, and less and less efficient with more processors.
I question its ability to do anything with a real workload. And I've even more suspicious because they use a benchmark I've never heard of (STREAM TRIAD) to push its superiority on a single-aspect synthetic benchmark.
Good. The machine looks like it has a decent memory bus, and memory modules with a good configuration and speed rating. Now, what can the machine actually do well that makes it a real winner?
I really liked the concept of the Ximian desktop and their easy installer and what not. I really appealed to me because I was using the *Solaris* distro that Ximian generates.
However, after a few magic rides on the Red Carpet, I decided that I wasn't all that trusting of full service. Everything worked great until I started doing the red carpet updates. Then Red Carpet would break. The icons on my desktop would break. The Evolution mailer would break.
I stopped doing updates in order to preserve something which passes as a workstation. Mind you, my case probably is extreme (but only because I tried to use Ximian for a reliable Solaris desktop), but I hope it illustrates a point.
Care to be responsible for a slew of desktops when you don't do your own quality control and bless updates which are placed onto systems you support?
I'm very happy with my job as a Systems Administrator for a major IT outsourcing company. Because there is an on-site hardware group, there is no reason for us to be in the office at all. My coworkers and I work from home (with new management having just created a less nazi-like policy than my former management) under very reasonable terms. In short, if I get my work done, and I respond quickly to requests, they don't care if I am at the beach or on the moon.
So, a Systems Administrator role that is not tied to performing the on-site hardware maintenance is a very nice work-from-home job. Of course, FINDING a position like that is tough!
I've done a bit of writing at SegFault. (The majority of it right before it went belly up.) It'd be nice if SatireWire would accept submissions now that their main contributor is going onto other things. (Well, main contributor, editor, publisher, errand boy...)
Is there *decent* website we can go to in order to publish our own faux tech news?
I'm probably not adding too much to the conversation, but I'll have to tell you, getting a computer to work on a HDTV monitor at high resolutions really is a nice luxury.
My Sun workstation in the office, has a 24" HDTV screen. It is a good 'ole CRT with an analog input. 1920x1200 resolution. Lots of real estate for opening up lots of windows. It really is a nice perk, so I don't blame you one bit for trying to get this to work!
Although, to be honest, I haven't done very much in the way of digital video playback on it, so I really don't know what I am (or am not) missing by an LCD screen with DVI. Maybe it is time I take that television screen home and seeing what a PC can do with it.
On a related note... anyone know how to hook up a mid-priced DVD player to an analog or DVI HDTV aspect ratio computer monitor? I'm wondering just how crisp it can be.
As far as my classes with Sun Microsystems, it has been almost rock-solid. The more advanced the course, the more advanced the teacher. It really has been a good experience.
My employer also offers a huge library of online training materials. Sometimes these take the form of flash or HTML documents and quizzes. Kind of good. But I like the "get it yourself whenever you want it" kind of thing. I can take any online course at any subject at any time.
One of the more progressive things they have done is signed us up with a membership at Books24x7. Basically, they've got a huge library of technical books (and management books, and basic office books) that you can read online, at your own pace. It'd be better if you could print it out.
But the "chase your own training" so really good for the kinds of people who will take advantage. But I think instructor based courses are the best. But since I don't live in a primary city, I almost always have to travel somewhere for training. And since travel costs more, the company is less eager to do it...
> I work for a large multi-national company that has > offices all over the world. I met a guy from our > Singapore office who said that they were looking > for transfers. So I applied and worked there for > over a year. We had a great time, and our standard > of living was much better than "washing dishes to > pay for the trip".
And on the other hand, some of my coworkers took an opportunity that the company offered to work in London for a few months. (Their IT shop wasn't in good shape.)
Actually, it turned out to be pretty great, and their jobs were there went they got back. But they were paid in pounds during their tour. (And they have come back with some strange mental ailment where they find a pub to be some strange sort of center of culture.)
My complaint wasn't about the quality of the Old tranny, rather, how the gearing ratios probably wouldn't be quite right with a muscle car engine driving it. You know, put the hot rod engine in a family sedan and blow all the way through the range of your first gear in a second or two, then get another three seconds out of your second gear before you red-line your engine...;)
At least given my experience with 64 bit SPARC chips, and the 64 bit Solaris operating system, 64 bits hardly made a difference either way. And I'm not slamming Sun, either.
IANAKE. (I am not a kernel expert, but this is my understanding of the situation.)
Sun incrementally worked its way up to 64 bits in the operating system. I believe first they offered 64 bit OS calls, then later moved the OS itself to 64 bits. Solaris 7 was, at least, the most visible transition, when you had a choice of installing a 32 bit OS, or a 64 bit OS.
What will surprise some people (and be intuitive to others) is that many applications actually ran a bit SLOWER with the OS in 64 bit mode. What? Yup. And for good reason, too.
The problem was that you had the overhead of a 64 bit operating system to run 32 bit applications. More overhead means less application performance. More work was required to do the same tasks.
And many applications are hard pressed to take advantage of 64 bit features. Its like putting a hot-rod engine into your daddy's Oldsmobile and keeping the original tranny. But yes, it works.
Mind you, there are applications which can take some more advantage of 64 bits, and the future in operating systems isn't 32 bits. So it is still good to have an operating system go that direction. It is just that for most people, there isn't a big WOW FACTOR when you go 64.
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You can get them at lots of places. Even Wal-Mart has started carrying rope lights in the lighting section. But there is something you have to be careful about on these.
Before making a BIG purchase of rope lights for my gameroom, I bought two brands. I wanted the color blue. One strand was, indeed blue. The other strand said blue, but its color (unlit) was obviously purple!
You know what? When lit, the purple one actually was blue and looked great. But the blue one? Turns out that in low lighting, it looked more like white lights with a faint blue glow from the tube.
So be careful, if you do use rope lights, to determine the quality of the color produced by them before you use them.
BTW, Wal-Mart also has automotive neon lights for cheap. But I noticed something. A few months after being on display, running 24x7, all of their demo tubes have started experiencing problems. They don't glow anymore. Kind of arc around like one of those balls you put your hand on and see the sparks inside the glass sphere.
This happens already. Go watch Phenomenon and tell me that it is not pushing Scientology.
What? And let them implant body thetans in me AGAIN? No thanks! (I'll give it a critical eye. Thanks.)
I just hope this will become wonderfully self-destructive behavior (in general). Show start whoring themselves in more and more annoying ways to make money. It sounds like a great way for "free" programming to become extinct. (The obvious retort would be that the only things that matter would be shows that are "free" to have control of their content, even if it is paid for.)
Anyhow, nice reply. Thanks. I'll look at that.
I have one of these in my datacenter. But I'd have to say that the Tempest upright is far more popular. Of course, it IS set on free play mode. ;)
;)
PS: It is so strange that Atari could embrace such great products and ideas, but have the most spectacular failures when it comes to the business side of things.
PS: Which system play more like 'real basketball'? Was it the Atari 2600, or the Intellivision?
I've been watching Big Brother 3. The product placement is very bold and obvious. (Liquor, doughnuts, etc.) It is clearly in-your-face. However, I really don't think this is the final step. This is obviously going to go further in the future.
How? Well, imagine Greenpeace sponsoring some episode of some Star Trek series. But instead of having Greenpeace play some sort of force protecting a planet, they pay for a plot that shows the evil of commercialism and the Great Truth in environmentalism. That is, manipulation of the underlying message to support the organization's goal, rather than pushing the organization itself.
So, a company/organization can pay $XX for their name to be integrated into some part of the show, or they can pay $XXX to have creative control and send the message that they want as well. (Probably more important for political groups than anything.)
But do you see where this will go? They've opened the door for products to pay to become part of the plot. How long until they cross the line to pay for a plot which meets their goals?
This really says two things:
1] This has been done from time to time and nobody probably ever noticed.
2] You can also break the speed of sound using off-the-shelf components. But it isn't much of a miracle if you are beating it in a different form (electricity, light, etc).
so, I quess this will be a competitor to the Texas Instruments' OMAP chip?
;)
Quess again! Lets start running these stories through a spell-checker before we promote them to the front page.
On a related note, this story is a little interesting, but there isn't a lot of meat to grab onto, IMHO. Yay! We can have digital and analog circuits on the same chip. Actually, I'm a little surprised that wasn't being done already if it is that much of an advantage.
No, not the travel back to earth in the past kind. Those really suck. But I really like the paradox and causality loop kind of things. Reaction being observed before the action and throwing everyone for a loop (pardon the pun). That last episode of STTNG, I really liked. I also liked some of the Voyager ones (and Janeway saying that she swore she'd never wanted to be in one). That 'Year of Hell' was a good one, too. Time Travel can be fun, as long as it isn't going back and revisiting a known past.
I agree with you. And where Alton said he was rambling, I think he made something that barely passed as a minimum answer. I didn't like the volcano answer very much. I'm just guessing that he didn't give this a best effort. :(
For me, it's exactly the opposite. I will not purchase a CD that I haven't heard at least 2-3 tracks of...
I think you're in the mainstream there. Most people don't blindly buy a new CD without any idea of what the songs sound like, unless they're a die-hard fan of the performer.
I can certainly see your position how MP3s augment the current 'free advertisement system' in a positive way.
> Most people will pay a fair price for good service.
I would be willing to purchase music with some frequency if the price point was way lower than it current is, and doesn't have DRM weighing it down like a sandbag.
I would expand on what you pointed out and say that different people DO want different things from music. There are benefits to owning CDs, yes. There are also benefits to not owning CDs.
Myself, I'm interested in the music itself. Not the benefits of having a large CD collection. Or hyper-fidelity of the sound. In my case, having a random and immediate access to of 100s of songs on my hard drive beats the hell out of a pile of CDs.
But I think the point I was trying to make is that, to a small degree, it displaces the actual purchase of music. If someone "might" have purchased something, they may be more content to do without if they have an electronic copy. (Or they already have a good selection of downloaded music and feel less of a need to add more to their library.)
You do, however, raise some good points. Personally, I only buy a cassette (now CD) if I really really like a musical group. I think my purchases average 1 per year. But come to think of it, I think I've slipped down to no CD purchases at all anymore. I'll be damned if I put that on a survey, though.
I very much enjoyed your response, and you've echoed what is probably my greatest question/concern, which is the obvious bias that anyone would have in answering a survey. (Along with the lack of precision focus in observing their own habits.) Also about the correlation/causation -- there are a LOT of factors at play here which I don't think anyone is bound to get their arms around in one particular survey.
Nice reply!
If the opportunity presented itself where I could legally give a swift kick to the behind of everyone behind the current dominate music distribution model, I would. That given, I thought I would give a take on this whole downloadable music thing that I haven't read before.
This article makes a little inroads in the direction, but I want to point out that just like music downloaders are in various categories, you have a whole continuum of music PURCHASERS. And it isn't a descrete category that people fall into... it is a continuum.
On one side, you have the people who compulsively buy buy buy everything music. On the other side, you have people who don't buy any music at all. In between, there are all sorts of levels of music purchase. And somewhere in between, is the "sweet spot" of consumers which can be swayed one direction or another to buy or not buy CDs.
Now, you have a disruptive technology like online music distribution. Some people like it for the convenience. Some people like it for the cost. Whatever. It doesn't matter except that in most cases, it slightly pushes them down the continuum towards not being as big of a music purchaser. (However, yes, there are counter-trends, like someone getting more excited about music and finding a new favorite group, and supporting them.)
But whenever someone downloads music, in general terms, it pushes them down the continuum towards being a non-purchaser. The effect on an individual level is probably quite small, and difficult to measure. However, when aggregated across a large population, the impact is dramatic.
I think the problem with surveys of how downloading CDs have affected music purchasing decisions is that it is too focused on the individual level. From their point of view, their behavior may not have changed significantly. Or they may not be aware of any change. But a slight change has occured.
That slight change is enough to push some people out of the sweet spot and into becoming a non-purchaser. Or the aggregate of a large number of people sliding down the continuum has an affect on sales figures.
So, this is the basic guts of the theory that I have when it comes to online music downloading vs consumer purchasing.
Comments? Questions? Criticisms?
No, I don't. I really can't emphasize this enough: read. I said, "SPEC is synthetic and irrelvant." Big difference.
No. You said... "CPU benchmarks (like SPEC) are synthetic and irrelevant, because they fit in cache." You also said "Memory-to-CPU bandwidth is probably the only real indicator of the ability of the system to handle real-world workloads." I'd call that even more synthetic and irrelevant than SPEC.
The TPCs measure aggregate systems, including hardware, storage, OS, database software, and so on.
No argument there. But I was saying that it was MORE relevant than SPEC. And extremely more relevant than that STREAM TRIAD test they're pushing.
The whole point of this discussion is that the SGI system can outperform virtually everything else on STREAM TRIAD because it has no memory bus.
Really? I don't recall reading that in the story introduction or SGI's Press Release. Only the link to the STREAM TRIAD itself pointed out that it was talking about memory bandwidth. IIn fact, that is what my original message was trying to point out.
So they've got a machine that gets great ratings on this synthetic benchmark? Who cares. It doesn't mean much if you've bolted a kernel on top of it which isn't mature in a large CPU environment. (And other hardware issues, as you mentioned which the TPCs would bring into play.)
Obviously you missed the boat here cheif. The system SGI is selling is for 3D Rendering.. not to run amazon.com
I don't think I've missed the boat. Okay. Let's take rendering. On a pure economic level, they're going to be hard pressed to sell this configuration vs 64 single processor (perhaps even blade) servers.
On a technical level, let's see how well performance ramps up when you go from 32 to 33 processors. (Hint: you won't be getting a full CPU's worth of extra performance.) Actually, it can get even worse with lock contention and kernel issues so where you can LOSE performance by adding a CPU.
The point I was trying to make is they're touting superiority based on a single benchmark which measures memory bandwidth. Great. The company who produced the box picked a single benchmark which puts the best shine on the hardware/os combination.
Now, what does the box really crank?
CPU benchmarks (like SPEC) are synthetic and irrelevant, because they fit in cache. Virtually no real application fits in cache, and the sort of applications you run on a machine this big deal with data sets no the order of tens or even hundreds of gigabytes. Memory-to-CPU bandwidth is probably the only real indicator of the ability of the system to handle real-world workloads.
You say that synthetic benchmarks are irrelevant. Then you go on to say that this particular synthetic benchmark is highly relevant. It can't be both. I'd like to see this run a TPC variant, which is closer to real-world than it is synthetic.
The Origin 3000 architecture, on which this prototype system was based, has no memory bus at all. It uses a fabric of switched multi-gigabyte-per-second interconnects to attach CPUs to RAM and to other CPU nodes.
What, do I have to explicitly call out the components and subcomponents? It is a memory bus, for the purpose of this discussion.
I think it is pretty interesting that the benchmark that they used measured memory throughput, as opposed to, say, an actual workload. In other words, this is a synthetic benchmark, versus a real-world benchmark. They say, "Look! We can do memory transfers really really fast!"
Unfortunately, memory transfers are not the world when it comes to large multiprocessor boxes. The overhead comes in when you're trying to synchronize a large number of threads/CPUs to do a large task. For example, an Oracle database.
Sun has proven that it scales up the tree very well with large numbers of processors. But from my understanding, Linux is more efficient with a low processor count, and less and less efficient with more processors.
I question its ability to do anything with a real workload. And I've even more suspicious because they use a benchmark I've never heard of (STREAM TRIAD) to push its superiority on a single-aspect synthetic benchmark.
Good. The machine looks like it has a decent memory bus, and memory modules with a good configuration and speed rating. Now, what can the machine actually do well that makes it a real winner?
I really liked the concept of the Ximian desktop and their easy installer and what not. I really appealed to me because I was using the *Solaris* distro that Ximian generates.
However, after a few magic rides on the Red Carpet, I decided that I wasn't all that trusting of full service. Everything worked great until I started doing the red carpet updates. Then Red Carpet would break. The icons on my desktop would break. The Evolution mailer would break.
I stopped doing updates in order to preserve something which passes as a workstation. Mind you, my case probably is extreme (but only because I tried to use Ximian for a reliable Solaris desktop), but I hope it illustrates a point.
Care to be responsible for a slew of desktops when you don't do your own quality control and bless updates which are placed onto systems you support?
I'm very happy with my job as a Systems Administrator for a major IT outsourcing company. Because there is an on-site hardware group, there is no reason for us to be in the office at all. My coworkers and I work from home (with new management having just created a less nazi-like policy than my former management) under very reasonable terms. In short, if I get my work done, and I respond quickly to requests, they don't care if I am at the beach or on the moon.
So, a Systems Administrator role that is not tied to performing the on-site hardware maintenance is a very nice work-from-home job. Of course, FINDING a position like that is tough!
I've done a bit of writing at SegFault. (The majority of it right before it went belly up.) It'd be nice if SatireWire would accept submissions now that their main contributor is going onto other things. (Well, main contributor, editor, publisher, errand boy...)
Is there *decent* website we can go to in order to publish our own faux tech news?
I'm probably not adding too much to the conversation, but I'll have to tell you, getting a computer to work on a HDTV monitor at high resolutions really is a nice luxury.
My Sun workstation in the office, has a 24" HDTV screen. It is a good 'ole CRT with an analog input. 1920x1200 resolution. Lots of real estate for opening up lots of windows. It really is a nice perk, so I don't blame you one bit for trying to get this to work!
Although, to be honest, I haven't done very much in the way of digital video playback on it, so I really don't know what I am (or am not) missing by an LCD screen with DVI. Maybe it is time I take that television screen home and seeing what a PC can do with it.
On a related note... anyone know how to hook up a mid-priced DVD player to an analog or DVI HDTV aspect ratio computer monitor? I'm wondering just how crisp it can be.
As far as my classes with Sun Microsystems, it has been almost rock-solid. The more advanced the course, the more advanced the teacher. It really has been a good experience.
My employer also offers a huge library of online training materials. Sometimes these take the form of flash or HTML documents and quizzes. Kind of good. But I like the "get it yourself whenever you want it" kind of thing. I can take any online course at any subject at any time.
One of the more progressive things they have done is signed us up with a membership at Books24x7. Basically, they've got a huge library of technical books (and management books, and basic office books) that you can read online, at your own pace. It'd be better if you could print it out.
But the "chase your own training" so really good for the kinds of people who will take advantage. But I think instructor based courses are the best. But since I don't live in a primary city, I almost always have to travel somewhere for training. And since travel costs more, the company is less eager to do it...
> I work for a large multi-national company that has
> offices all over the world. I met a guy from our
> Singapore office who said that they were looking
> for transfers. So I applied and worked there for
> over a year. We had a great time, and our standard
> of living was much better than "washing dishes to
> pay for the trip".
And on the other hand, some of my coworkers took an opportunity that the company offered to work in London for a few months. (Their IT shop wasn't in good shape.)
Actually, it turned out to be pretty great, and their jobs were there went they got back. But they were paid in pounds during their tour. (And they have come back with some strange mental ailment where they find a pub to be some strange sort of center of culture.)
> ...good Olds trannys....
;)
My complaint wasn't about the quality of the Old tranny, rather, how the gearing ratios probably wouldn't be quite right with a muscle car engine driving it. You know, put the hot rod engine in a family sedan and blow all the way through the range of your first gear in a second or two, then get another three seconds out of your second gear before you red-line your engine...
At least given my experience with 64 bit SPARC chips, and the 64 bit Solaris operating system, 64 bits hardly made a difference either way. And I'm not slamming Sun, either.
IANAKE. (I am not a kernel expert, but this is my understanding of the situation.)
Sun incrementally worked its way up to 64 bits in the operating system. I believe first they offered 64 bit OS calls, then later moved the OS itself to 64 bits. Solaris 7 was, at least, the most visible transition, when you had a choice of installing a 32 bit OS, or a 64 bit OS.
What will surprise some people (and be intuitive to others) is that many applications actually ran a bit SLOWER with the OS in 64 bit mode. What? Yup. And for good reason, too.
The problem was that you had the overhead of a 64 bit operating system to run 32 bit applications. More overhead means less application performance. More work was required to do the same tasks.
And many applications are hard pressed to take advantage of 64 bit features. Its like putting a hot-rod engine into your daddy's Oldsmobile and keeping the original tranny. But yes, it works.
Mind you, there are applications which can take some more advantage of 64 bits, and the future in operating systems isn't 32 bits. So it is still good to have an operating system go that direction. It is just that for most people, there isn't a big WOW FACTOR when you go 64.