Not sure they really see themselves as a photo site for the masses. Ok the grannies and babies are there but most of the people who make it a community rather than a posting site (and the subscribers) are actually interested in photography per se. Check out the discussions on black and white filom development, HDR, vintage cameras and so on.
Generally (there are exceptions) high end comnsumer products are just shiny packages on fairly junky stuff. Low end (or used) Professional stuff is generalyl much better, often cheaper, and usually much better built. Go to a good professional catering shop for pans that will outlast you and are better designed and cheaper than anything in consumer shops. Not available in a range of colours though. Same with audio equipment, cameras and so on. Things that people use every day are just better made.
Cheap disposable consumer products are great if you want something cheap. But there is no point in Bang and Olufson.
Suggests that the lowest power ones are initially dual core (presumably the single core ones are failed duals and the yields are coming out ok or something).
I am sure I was counted, as I said I hadnt had a Mac for 10 years. But I didnt switch from Windows, having used Linux for years. I bought the G5 as a silentdual processor system, but it is a pain running Linux on it (no dual head support for graphics, 64 bit Gentoo problematic). Once you install firefox and all the open source software its pretty usable as a Unix box (forced me to learn autoconf though...)
There is a very different ethos with Solaris. Its about bugs. Maybe it comes from the hardware side of the business, but the deal is that if it breaks they will fix it. If you ever get a kernel panic, thats a problem. With Linux thats not the case, lots of the stuff in the kernel is buggy, really buggy. But hey, it runs on PC hardware (which is buggy anyway, those BIOS updates are just workarounds for all the shit buggy hardware). Not sure the Solaris people have realised how shit the hardware is - but they arent going to directly support most of it, they are going to support what they ship anyway, not your laptop which will be community supported not much differetn from Linux.
So the selling point is Solaris is very reliable (and works at all) on a subset of PC hardware (basically a bunch of Opteron boxen). Its probably the less buggy hardware. At the moment its not that compelling to me as that hardware is not problematic under Linux either. What is intersting to me is when Solaris supports SATA hardware natively (they Linux code will oops on bad sectors on the drive) or Sun supports nvidia drivers (which no Linux distro will), as Sun have ability to support binary drivers as vendors will give them source. Either of those and it will be worth it.
But there isnt a lot in it that you probably dont already know if you have any performance concerns. It is very dominated (unsurprisingly) by database workloads. Its ok, but doesnt say anything that important about tuning - it assumes you dont have source code access so it doesnt address the intersting questions like should I rewrite my application to use AIO.
The website they mention appears to have never existed. Havent tried all the spelling variations. However it was the case that several websites of an al-Queda supporting nature were hosted in the UK at various times (indeed London in particular is the home of many middle eastern dissidents of one sort or another, including pro-democracy activists as well - my local butcher was assassinated by (probably) Libyans having been involved in an attempt to kill Gaddafi years earlier, and many Iraqi opposition figures, all sorts). The story seems like rubbish though. If they could point to a real site and it on wayback or a convincing archive copy I might believe them. It could be true. On the other hand people might have pulled the sites to keep out of the police sights as well.
The main reason for buying Xeons was the range of motherboards available. This is finally beginning to change and there is a lot more AMD stuff, from 1 way to 8 way. And with things like SCSI and SATA RAID cards turning up in PCI express things are looking even better as workstation and server chipsets become interchangeable.
OS X could be ported to another Unix. There are rumours that Apple code is being made more portable (well, things like iTunes need to run on Windows too). NetBSD has an almost finished Mach emulation layer; when OS X is mainly an Intel platform other Unixes will probably do this too.
Apple are also making the non-Mach parts entirely FreeBSD compatible, rather than the slightly partial compatibility there is now.
OS X on Solaris might be an option but probably too much work. Migrating to FreeBSD is more likely.
Most apps dont address the Mach layer directly anyway, only the core system libraries.
Having had both editions of Unix network programming (gives me one to lend out...)
Glad it has been updated, it seems superficially dated which might put people off, although there is actually lots of stuff thats still completely valid.
It is certainly the case that many upstream maintainers really dont care about old versions of their software (and if different distros are using different old versions so much the worse). The problem is if it is something that other packages depend on and you end up in a hell of many twisty interfaces all different.
I wouldnt support packages in stable that cannot guarantee to keep their interfaces stable for a reasonable period. They could be available as addons with no guarantees of secutity fixes.
I think the situation is a bit better than it was as interfaces in things like gnome stabilise and people work out how to manage very big very distributed projects like that.
Yes I thought the weather thing was great until I doscovered that "London" is somewhere in the US of A (no idea where, was previously only aware of London Ontario). Apart from thinking this is odd the weather is always rainy today and sunny tomorrow it took me a while before realising that it was just not internationalised. Despite buying the machine in London England...
I am not sure how much of a market this is, the enterprise Unix desktop. Sun's announcement said they were going to concentrate on developers desktops, which makes sense, and they want developers to develop for Solaris. After all the alternative is simply to use any other Linux solution. Sun probably realised that they ont really have the expertise to really support Gnome and stuff, it isnt their core market.
Apple are junking 64 bit. I thought it would be 64 bit only. No wonder they havent gone AMD64. Presumably 64 bit pentium M isnt out in time, and they dont want ultrafat binaries, but a 32 bit platform for 2006...
Also no open firmware. That means EFI (possible, unlikely though) or PC Bios (which sucks).
How can they do 32 bit? Its ok for laptops, but not a G5 equivalent. And the instruction set sucks.
They could shift again in a year or so, but I cant see that..
I wonder if it isnt using kqueue on Darwin (and is using epoll on Linux) and it is a poll/select scaling issue rather than a thread issue. The performance dropped off so drastically as load increased that it could be something like this.
"Pursuant to the terms and conditions of this License, you are granted a nonexclusive license to use the Specification for the sole purposes of developing Products that output SWF."
last time I looked (and I think it changed from before) it was only a published standard if you agreed to only produce authoring tools, but not players. They charge quite a lot if you want to make a player for a new platform.
It depends on 2 things, your application and how much software development you can do. Google trades off a lot of software development against the lower hardware costs, and their application is well suited to the piles of cheap stuff as they mostly just want lots of RAM. Other applications are not so suitable and some people are severely constrained in the amount of development time they have (and need the application to run now, not when a new redundant version has been tested in several months time).
I do believe in doing a good amount of burn-in and testing of machines. I dont want to debug stuff that is failing because of memory errors for example so will always do memory tests. Clearly this is not "necessary" but I think 99% of people dont want memory errors affecting their applications. Also hardware drivers may have bugs - if the etherenet cards on your whitebox machines lock up every now and again with hundreds of them it will happen too often to be useful.
But other than that, its really a question of whether your application is IO bound, CPU bound, memory bandwidth bound and so on.
If your tracker requires large quantities of RAM and CPU time its just coded badly. Its not even that much bandwidth unless you are hosting hundreds of popular torrents at once.
Slashdot Mirror
Not sure they really see themselves as a photo site for the masses. Ok the grannies and babies are there but most of the people who make it a community rather than a posting site (and the subscribers) are actually interested in photography per se. Check out the discussions on black and white filom development, HDR, vintage cameras and so on.
Yes I am really interested in trying this out, and seeing what its really like.
Whens it shipping?
Generally (there are exceptions) high end comnsumer products are just shiny packages on fairly junky stuff. Low end (or used) Professional stuff is generalyl much better, often cheaper, and usually much better built. Go to a good professional catering shop for pans that will outlast you and are better designed and cheaper than anything in consumer shops. Not available in a range of colours though. Same with audio equipment, cameras and so on. Things that people use every day are just better made.
Cheap disposable consumer products are great if you want something cheap. But there is no point in Bang and Olufson.
http://www.theinquirer.org/?article=27770
Suggests that the lowest power ones are initially dual core (presumably the single core ones are failed duals and the yields are coming out ok or something).
So more likely to be dual.
I am sure I was counted, as I said I hadnt had a Mac for 10 years. But I didnt switch from Windows, having used Linux for years. I bought the G5 as a silentdual processor system, but it is a pain running Linux on it (no dual head support for graphics, 64 bit Gentoo problematic). Once you install firefox and all the open source software its pretty usable as a Unix box (forced me to learn autoconf though...)
There is a very different ethos with Solaris. Its about bugs. Maybe it comes from the hardware side of the business, but the deal is that if it breaks they will fix it. If you ever get a kernel panic, thats a problem. With Linux thats not the case, lots of the stuff in the kernel is buggy, really buggy. But hey, it runs on PC hardware (which is buggy anyway, those BIOS updates are just workarounds for all the shit buggy hardware). Not sure the Solaris people have realised how shit the hardware is - but they arent going to directly support most of it, they are going to support what they ship anyway, not your laptop which will be community supported not much differetn from Linux.
So the selling point is Solaris is very reliable (and works at all) on a subset of PC hardware (basically a bunch of Opteron boxen). Its probably the less buggy hardware. At the moment its not that compelling to me as that hardware is not problematic under Linux either. What is intersting to me is when Solaris supports SATA hardware natively (they Linux code will oops on bad sectors on the drive) or Sun supports nvidia drivers (which no Linux distro will), as Sun have ability to support binary drivers as vendors will give them source. Either of those and it will be worth it.
But there isnt a lot in it that you probably dont already know if you have any performance concerns. It is very dominated (unsurprisingly) by database workloads. Its ok, but doesnt say anything that important about tuning - it assumes you dont have source code access so it doesnt address the intersting questions like should I rewrite my application to use AIO.
If you run Oracle you shoould buy it on expenses.
er no wasnt the Soviet recruiting station in Cambridge not London?
Not the army the spies....
And they got quite annoyed with Blunt, Philby, Maclean and co...
The website they mention appears to have never existed. Havent tried all the spelling variations. However it was the case that several websites of an al-Queda supporting nature were hosted in the UK at various times (indeed London in particular is the home of many middle eastern dissidents of one sort or another, including pro-democracy activists as well - my local butcher was assassinated by (probably) Libyans having been involved in an attempt to kill Gaddafi years earlier, and many Iraqi opposition figures, all sorts). The story seems like rubbish though. If they could point to a real site and it on wayback or a convincing archive copy I might believe them. It could be true. On the other hand people might have pulled the sites to keep out of the police sights as well.
Whats happened to decent journalism.
The main reason for buying Xeons was the range of motherboards available. This is finally beginning to change and there is a lot more AMD stuff, from 1 way to 8 way. And with things like SCSI and SATA RAID cards turning up in PCI express things are looking even better as workstation and server chipsets become interchangeable.
OS X could be ported to another Unix. There are rumours that Apple code is being made more portable (well, things like iTunes need to run on Windows too). NetBSD has an almost finished Mach emulation layer; when OS X is mainly an Intel platform other Unixes will probably do this too.
Apple are also making the non-Mach parts entirely FreeBSD compatible, rather than the slightly partial compatibility there is now.
OS X on Solaris might be an option but probably too much work. Migrating to FreeBSD is more likely.
Most apps dont address the Mach layer directly anyway, only the core system libraries.
suggested that this drive get very hot indeed, as it is 4 platters not 3. Didnt really seem worthwhile to me, as heat is a major cause of HD failure.
Is SATA electrically safe to hot-plug?
Only with a proper sata backplane.
Pulling the data cable for testing is I guess probably ok, wouldnt pull the power cable though...
Having had both editions of Unix network programming (gives me one to lend out...)
Glad it has been updated, it seems superficially dated which might put people off, although there is actually lots of stuff thats still completely valid.
It is certainly the case that many upstream maintainers really dont care about old versions of their software (and if different distros are using different old versions so much the worse). The problem is if it is something that other packages depend on and you end up in a hell of many twisty interfaces all different.
I wouldnt support packages in stable that cannot guarantee to keep their interfaces stable for a reasonable period. They could be available as addons with no guarantees of secutity fixes.
I think the situation is a bit better than it was as interfaces in things like gnome stabilise and people work out how to manage very big very distributed projects like that.
Yes I thought the weather thing was great until I doscovered that "London" is somewhere in the US of A (no idea where, was previously only aware of London Ontario). Apart from thinking this is odd the weather is always rainy today and sunny tomorrow it took me a while before realising that it was just not internationalised. Despite buying the machine in London England...
I am not sure how much of a market this is, the enterprise Unix desktop. Sun's announcement said they were going to concentrate on developers desktops, which makes sense, and they want developers to develop for Solaris. After all the alternative is simply to use any other Linux solution. Sun probably realised that they ont really have the expertise to really support Gnome and stuff, it isnt their core market.
er, but the only "Java CPU" made by Sun (who should know) was scrapped pretty quickly. Performance is an important issue.
http://developer.apple.com/documentation/MacOSX/Co nceptual/universal_binary/universal_binary.pdf
Hidden (slightly) in the docs:
Its 32 bit Intel only. Not x86_64.
Apple are junking 64 bit. I thought it would be 64 bit only. No wonder they havent gone AMD64. Presumably 64 bit pentium M isnt out in time, and they dont want ultrafat binaries, but a 32 bit platform for 2006...
Also no open firmware. That means EFI (possible, unlikely though) or PC Bios (which sucks).
How can they do 32 bit? Its ok for laptops, but not a G5 equivalent. And the instruction set sucks.
They could shift again in a year or so, but I cant see that..
I wonder if it isnt using kqueue on Darwin (and is using epoll on Linux) and it is a poll/select scaling issue rather than a thread issue. The performance dropped off so drastically as load increased that it could be something like this.
http://www.macromedia.com/software/flash/open/lice nsing/fileformat/license2.html
"Pursuant to the terms and conditions of this License, you are granted a nonexclusive license to use the Specification for the sole purposes of developing Products that output SWF."
No license to make a player there...
last time I looked (and I think it changed from before) it was only a published standard if you agreed to only produce authoring tools, but not players. They charge quite a lot if you want to make a player for a new platform.
It depends on 2 things, your application and how much software development you can do. Google trades off a lot of software development against the lower hardware costs, and their application is well suited to the piles of cheap stuff as they mostly just want lots of RAM. Other applications are not so suitable and some people are severely constrained in the amount of development time they have (and need the application to run now, not when a new redundant version has been tested in several months time).
I do believe in doing a good amount of burn-in and testing of machines. I dont want to debug stuff that is failing because of memory errors for example so will always do memory tests. Clearly this is not "necessary" but I think 99% of people dont want memory errors affecting their applications. Also hardware drivers may have bugs - if the etherenet cards on your whitebox machines lock up every now and again with hundreds of them it will happen too often to be useful.
But other than that, its really a question of whether your application is IO bound, CPU bound, memory bandwidth bound and so on.
er, because Bram doesnt care about anyone else's implementation, and Azureus did it first. And neither have bothered to write specs yet.
I do wonder how well this implementation will work for big torrents. There are often problems with large amounts of churn when using DHTs.
If your tracker requires large quantities of RAM and CPU time its just coded badly. Its not even that much bandwidth unless you are hosting hundreds of popular torrents at once.