I want multicast that just works regardless of whether an ISP supports it or not, and if the ISP wants to reduce bandwidth usage on their network, the implement it.
Well you can get a tunnel from anyone, not just your ISP. It is in the ISP's best intrest to be the one to provide it, unless they charge you per bandwidth used.
Last I checked UUNET gave free multicast to any leased line cust's. That was quite a while ago though, it may have changed. I also know they can do multicast to dial-ups (anyone using Ascend boxes there should be able to do it), but I don't know what the deal on that is.
The screen is not 'lame'. It's obviously not what suits your needs. But that doesn't mean it lame.
Actually it is lame if you use Windows, too many dialog boxes don't fit on the screen, and you need (as far as I know) 3rd party software to let you drag (some of) them so you can fill 'em out!
Oddly enough, under Unix way fewer things didn't fit, and virtual desktops took care of the not fitting problem (plus the window manager can be instructed to let you drag any non-override redirect window anyway).
The larger Viao 505PCG-JS was far more usable, and didn't weigh much different (it did cost a lot different though). The even larger and heftier PowerBook G3 works out even better for me, but YMMV, esp if you want a built in video cam.
Note: this was with the older Intel powered version, and I assume a older version of Windows. The new CPU won't change any of this, a newer Windows may.
Now, they are going to get into the handheld-portable market, which has yet to turn a dime for anyone.
PDA's didn't make a dime for anyone until the Palm. Of corse I already have a nice 802.11 laptop, so I'm not going to buy this unless it is dirt cheep and can run my OS of choice.
Just because nobody else has made that market niche pay off doesn't mean MS can't. It also doesn't mean they can.
All of this is to support their hopes for a Microsoft OS dominated world, which is completely ludicrus in a networking environment and is garaunteed to fail, because no one in their right mind is going to shell out $ for Microsoft servers that are twice as hard and twice as slow as free unix ones that work with everything. Microsoft is digging its grave. What idiots.
I hate to break this to you, but there are lots and lots of places that do go for WinNT or 2000 on servers. Maybe they are insane. Maybe NT/2000 really is better for their task (probably because MS has kept the protocol closed). Maybe both.
Think of the most conservative, narrow-minded person you know. Now think of the silliest, stupidest show you really enjoy (we all have one or a dozen of those). now imagine that the narrowminded one is using your viewing data to make a decision about you (job, loan, college, whatever). Do you still feel comfortable?
So they know someone in 22032 watches Sopranos, and Buffy, and Nova, and... They don't know it is me. If they did, and it influenced a hiring choice, then I wouldn't have wanted to work for or with them anyway. I'm done with collage, so that leaves me with just the home loan to worry about. I doubt knowing that someone in my zipcode watches a show is going to change that.
If it is a big deal to you, call 1-877-FOR-TIVO (se page 72 of your manual) and opt-out. Now it really is a small deal isn't it?
Correct me if I'm wrong, but if TiVo allows you to skip advertising,
You can only skip commercials if you are watching far enough behind real time (i.e. if an hour of TV has 15 min of commercials, and I start 10 minutes late, I can only skip over 10 minutes of commercials). Plus some commercials are actually entertaining, or for things you might want to see (like a commercial for a new TV show, or movie, or maybe you like the new VW or Apple commercials).
I watch most of my TV long after it has stopped being live (TiVo catches 3 or 4 Star Treks overnight, and I delete most of them because I have seen them, but some are ones I have missed and watch...it catches 3 or 4 ERs a day too, if I'm in the mood I watch, otherwise they get autodeleted, it picks up all my primetime TV too, most I'm not in a big hurry to watch).
A few shows I end up watching close to live because I "can't wait", like Buffy, or the new showings of ER. When I catch up to live I either watch commercials (while surfing on my 802.11 connected laptop), or I have the TiVo show me something it recorded before until I think I have "enough slack", or I'm sucked into the old show (a 30min commercial TV show can be watched in about 18min, so it provides enough slack for a 1hour commercial TV show...). Plus I like the VW ads, and some of the Apple ads, and...
According to the article on MSNBC concerning this, TiVo claims that there is an 800# subscribers can call to have all data, even anonymous data, removed from their database and have no further data taken. Anyone know what this # is?
Chapter 7 "Privacy and Service" starts on page 71 of my manual, page 73 lists the "1-877-FOR-TIVO (1-877-367-8486)" number as the one to call to review the data TiVo has sent, or to have it all deleted and your TiVo to not send more.
It defanalty isn't hidden. The print isn't even any smaller then the rest of the plain text in the manual.
If you opt-out, you pay the $10/month fee or whatever it is.
Two problems:
They already decided they need the $10/month from people that opt'ed-in (or really just failed to opt-out), so the "opt-out" payment would have to be on top of that
Making people pay for privacy seems to be a bad PR move, so it is generally a good idea to give it away for free.
Tivo makes this clear in their user manual. It may be close to the back, but it is in fairly large print, and pretty clear about what they do and don't do.
You can opt out (800 number call, also covered in the manual).
People that have poked around on the TiVo itself (it runs Linux, and makes it trivial to get a shell) have verified that systems set to not report back don't.
Oh, yeah, and I would rather the broadcasters knew what shows I watch so they can put more like them on the air. I would rather they know what commercials I watch, and what I skip over so they can get more entertaining ones. But that's just my opinion, you can always opt-out, it's an 800 number, and I hear it only takes a few minutes.
P.S. slashdot covered this quite a while ago, when they contrasted this with ReplayTV's policy. I didn't own either box at the time, so I didn't pay all that much attention...
If easy to program, easy to implement multicast were available, gnutella would've used it and not been nearly as poor in the scalability department.
Multicast is pretty easy to program, not much harder then UDP. Or at least the system interface is almost exactly the same (you have to manually set the TTL, that's about the only difference I remember).
Getting a multicast feed is harder, but not really harder then NNTP, you find someone who has one and request a tunnel (unless your ISP magically gives you multicast, which is quite rare).
Mind you this was the state of affairs about 8 years ago, when I did the multicast news software in 1993~1994. Well, you also frequently needed kernel patches then too, but I don't think that is needed in modern unix-like systems.
It is quite hard doing something with multicast that doesn't suffer congestion problems, it is like doing normal UDP work where the protocall doens't help you with packet loss or congestion, except it is far harder to get replies from all receivers (in fact if you want to scale forever you can't ever accept any replies from anyone). It's a big old pain, but people do UDP based systems, and they could do multicast ones as well with more work.
If you maintain a fault tolerant line, then that line is generally up and running between two routers which are exchanging sync info. Otherwise when your main line went down it would take a disproportionate amount of time to set up a link on a backup line.
If it is a L3 backup then it is connected to an IP router and some sort of routing info is going over it. If it is a L2 backup it is connected to an ATM or Frame Relay switch and some sort of L2 protocall is running over it exchanging whatever it exchanges. If it is a L1 backup it is dark until it is needed.
However not all backup circuits are dedicated. People will pay for a circuit that isn't there all the time. They don't pay nearly as much as they pay for one that is there (almost) all the time.
Lastly not all that dark fibre is in use. It is very very expensave to dig up ground and run cable (or fibre), copper is cheep, and fibre is way more expensave then copper, but a lot cheeper then putting it in the ground. So when you get the right to lay fibre and the equiptmenr lined up, and the folks there digging (or running the flow mole) you put way way more fibre then you need.
Sometimes that way more then you need is more then anyone needs. A fibre from DC to NY is going to have a lot of demand. One from Ohio to, well, some other part of Ohio may not get nearly enough demand to fill it. Since it only costs (say) 20% more to get 5000% bandwidth, it is worth it on the off chance that those two remote parts of Ohio become boom towns sometime.
Other fibre may be held back to keep prices up, but I expect that is rare (I have no evidence one way or another). Some there may even be demand for, but nobody realises it is cheep enough, or they can't find the right part of the right compony to buy it from. Big busness may have effencies of scale, but they also have ineffencies of scale.
Itanic to McKinley is a harder comparison to make because the people who know how many functional units McKinley has, aren't allowed to post that information here on Slashdot due to signing NDAs, but it would be really messed up if McKinley had less units than Itanic does...
"Only" about twice as many if you beleve comp.arch leaks. I think those were mostly baised off of some parts of the IA64 compiler (mostly done by SGI). At least that was the roumor six months ago. Havn't seen anything else since.
In this case, comparing Itanic to current RISC cpus on a frequency basis is pretty valid for floating-point (SGI's market) as almost all current RISC cpus have the same number of functional units as Itanic does (2 FP).
Yes, but it also has way more registers, and modulo addressing of those registers so software pipelining can be used. If you look on comp.arch there are some really impressave code snippits that can make great use of those features. There is also a lot of head scratching about how to get compilers to do a good job cranking them out.
Worse yet there are a lot of code sequences shown where a IA64 follow-on with more functional units runs slower then the existing one because of how the explicit stops work.
I haven't seen Stunt Drivin', but if it's by Atari, then it's the same thing with different maps, essentially.
Stunt Drivin' had some very diffrent tracks indeed. I distinctly remember a corkscrew, it is the only time I have driven upside down. A pity it didn't have decent force feedback.
Handsprings attempt is very nice and all that but you lose the good looks and the lightness.
What's wrong with the Visor Edge? It is extreamly similar to the Palm V in size and weight (it does need the strap on expand-o-slot if you want to use a springbord though).
SGI has been working on NUMA support for Linux for quite a while now. They've been the ones doing the discontiguous memory patches and a bunch of other related things.
Rock on! That's cool.
It is missing things needed to make NUMA systems useful (as opposed to "can boot and run"). For example:
Phsycally coping shared pages. 500ns is a long time to wait for memory, it is common for NUMA kernels to be able to copy pages from one memory board to another. Very useful for code, also useful for read-only data, sometimes useful for infrequently-written data.
Physacally moving pages from one memory board to another. If one thread is doing a lot of writes to a page, it can be very useful to move the data page closer.
User level hints to the kernel about when to do these things.
A scheme to let sysadmins partition up a big machine (letting a compony/university pool money from multiple departments), allowing unused boards to be used by non-owers is good, or at least allowing something like a cron job to change it...
Support for draining and pulling boards, as well as plugging in new ones to a running system.
I have no doubt SGI can add those things to Linux, IRIX does (almost) all of that allready.
What seems odd to me is that it is pretty clear that Itanic will not be cost nor performance competitive when it finally ships - all the other big boys have said they aren't going to bother with Itanic for anything but 1-4 way type boxes. McKinley (the successor to Itanic) is looking pretty good, recent reports say that it will debut at 1.4GHz around the end of the year (whereas Itanic can barely do 800MHz today).
Normally when being told one CPU only runs at 800Mhz and another runs at 1.4Ghz, so the 800Mhz one is crap, I have a lot of objections. Like "the 800Mhz one may do a lot more work per cycle", or "they could be designed for diffrent markets". However in this case both are for the same market, and McKinley is likely to do more work per cycle. The Itanic is a shammbling disaster, if anyone but Intel was behind it, they probbably would be bankrupt by now.
That said, there is a good chance that both IA64 systems have the same memory interface, making it a useful test run to design multi-way systems around this. It also has probbably been in the works a lot longer then it has been known that the Itanic is a dog.
There is also the chance that Intel is subsidising (or outright funding!) this thing. That makes it less of a risk to build.
[Let's all hope that..]
they do a better job with these then with the Intel based workstations they sell now.
Well the current Intel boxes don't have any more CPUs then you can get elsewhere (they do have more memory bandwidth, by a factor of around 3). The O3000 supports 100s of CPUs, if the O3000 IA64 does as well they will at least have a nice story to sell people on. I don't know if it something people are willing to pay a lot for, but time will tell that.
It is interesting that they will port Linux to it. As far as I know Linux isn't tuned to work in a large NUMA (Non-Uniform Memory Access -- local memory in maybe 5ns, memory from a few racks away at 500ns) with 100s of CPUs. It will be interesting to see what they change to make it happy. Esp if they don't go the simple route (treating it as a bunch of total different machines with a fast network).
What I would really like to see is a port of Linux to the MIPS based machines though. If SGI tweaked it all out that would be sweet.
I don't really see why they don't do that either. It isn't like there is anything special about the IA64 or MIPS that makes Linux or IRIX better on one or the other. Even if they think putting Linux on the MIPS boxes will scare off existing IRIX users, won't porting Linux to the IA64 O3000, but not porting IRIX to it will be even worse?
SGI does lots of good and interesting stuff, but they really are inscrutable sometimes.
Uhhh ok so what protocol do you seggest the entire internet use instead then? and when can you start migrating everything to this new "better than sucky old IP" protocol?
Well delta-t seemed pretty cool, and it isn't all that complex if you drop the parts designed to handle non-8-bit-bytes and assume NTP will be used to sync time. It was one of the proposals that TCP bested last time around. Delta-t also has the cool property that it can find the right rate to minimize loss on non-garenteed connections (so you could get something like UDP with TCPs auto dampening properties). Regretabally I think that only works of symertrical links (so satalite forward link with dial-back won't work, and ADSL might be a problem as well, but I think not).
As for deployment, well it'll face the same problems IPv6 has. It'll be better, but not enough better to get anywhere real fast. Of corse it may not actually even be better, I never saw an implmentation, and it hasn't had the decades of tweeking TCP has (things like delayed ACK, and nagel, and some of the recovery algos).
To say initial ISN is redundant; to talk about subsequent ISNs is wrong, as there are no such things.
The initial ISN is the first ISN a TCP stack uses after it boots. The subsequent ISNs are ones it makes for the second and subsequent TCP connections.
If the first ISN is chosen totally at random, but the rest of the ISNs are chisen by adding three to the old ones, or even by calling bad_PRNG()&0x07, then you are screwed after a few connections...
One of the wrinkles is you can't just do "ISN = good_PRNG()" because you have to avoid reusing ISNs within some time limit (I think it is something like four times the maximum segment lifetime, but it could be longer).
The easy approach is to pick as random an ISN as you can the first time, and then just add a random number the other times. However if the random addition is too large you can wrap the ISN space too quickly and reuse ISNs before the 4*MSL timer expires. If the random addition is too small even a good PRNG (or a real RNG!) is operating in too small a space to be safe.
One could have two 64Kbit (~8K byte) arrays ISNcur, and ISNprev, make a random ISN (using the best PRNG, or a RRNG) and if it's bit is set in either array make a new one, if the bit is clear set it's bit in ISNcur. Every 4*MSL copy ISNcur to ISNprev, and clear ISNcur (which you could do by moving pointers, and clearing one array, but it still sucks to screw with 8K of data, not good for the cache).
Or one could just come up with a decent distance for ISNs, gennerate the random number in that space, and live with the possibility of wraps, and the somewhat reduced "keyspace". Seems a lot easier and faster:-)
Vouchers do offer choices for education, but only to a subset of the population. Nearly every implementation of vouchers that I read about would give, no questions asked, about $2500/yr per student. Most private schools, however, are asking for at least $5000/yr, if not up to $10,000/yr for tuition.
So is your complaint that vouchers don't give enough?
I don't think "only the rich" would find this useful. When I was growing up we middle class, and my parents sent my sister to a private school (possably as a result of seeing how screwed up the public school I went to was). My patents managed to do this pretty much by not buying a new car from 1979 through the early 1990s (and only two or three used ones, all under about $1000).
I expect even if vouchers are "half off" it will at least help the middle class, and maybe the upper lower class. Not just the rich.
Vouchers only give choices to the rich.
Vouchers don't do squat for the rich. The rich are, after all, rich. If they want to send thsir kids to private school, they allready do. If they want to give their kids cars that cost more then my whole family made in a year, they do. Vouchers help the middle class, the not-rich, yet not-poor.
There is no recourse except to find another school.
Oh dear God, we would be allowed to find a school with policies we agree with! This dredful choice must be stomped out! Free us from the need to use our minds, oh I beg of you!
Why is choice in school bad while choice in OS, CPU, and car are all wonderful? Why is it a bad thing to be allowd to find a school that teaches the way you want?
I have NO DOUBT that if I was at a private school, I would have been screwed. Why? The dean wanted me gone.
Why? What makes you think your parents would have found a private school with a dean that crappy? Or that switching from one private school with a crappy dean to another would have been "screwed" rather then leaving one sucky place for a less sucky place?
Believe it or not, the law and public schools are actually designed to protect people like us, when it comes down to the wire.
They might have been designed to do it, but judging from the Hellmouth stories, they arn't doing such a hot job of it. Why not give something else a chance?
Private entities are far more dangerous to people, simply because they only have to answer to their shareholders, and that people have been proven again and again that greediness will not stop people from hurting other people.
Private entities are gennerally less dangerous because you have choices. If these folks can pay for one privte school, they can probbably pay for a diffrent one. If they are sending their children to a public school they are probbably screwed if they need to send them elsewhere.
It is time for the americans to extend their much beloved constitution to the private sector!!!!
Ok, just remember you are part of the private sector. If I'm given the right to make a contract with the school to not mock them, and then mock them anyway, I'll have the right to break contracts with you. Perhapse I'll agree to buy your car, and then once I get it forget about the part where I actually have to pay you.
We allready have tons of laws for the private sector. Maybe too many, maybe too few. Mostly too many. Look at all the slashdot headlines, far more complain about bad stupid unjust laws then the lack of good just needed ones.
that's why you'll never see wood panelings in a console
Never? Ever? Howabout allready. Ever seen the vintage Atari 2600, aka Atari VCS? It had wood paneling. It was my first console. It was one of the first consoles (at least one of the first that could play games that didn't come with it!).
and transparent orange plastic in a high-end stereo equipment
I'll be on the lookout for transparent orange plastic stereo, but I'll note there is allready a lot of transparent plastic in high-end audio, and sometimes some disgustingly colored neon lights. Actually I don't mind the color so much as them being lights. Doesn't anyone else listen to music and try to sleep at the same time?
Dual-Booting will not be a big issue for me to watch a DVD because watching a DVD is not a regular application -- meaning, you don't just up-and-run it.
Why not? Why don't you up and run it? Take a break from coding to watch the "smash the FAX machine" bit of Office Space? Or if you are making a comercial rewatch bits of the movie you are imitationg?
And even if it isn't a breif run of the player, why should you have to log out of five servers, bookmarke half a dozen web pages and tie up other work and play bits just so you can reboot and run the DVD player? That sucks.
And as someone said, maybe it will be sitting there on our idisks on the 24th - who knows?
I hope so. I'm allready sick of OS9. It makes my skin crawl to to have to boot it to do anything.
If you need DVD playback that badly, then don't upgrade on March 24. Let the rest of us be the Guinea pigs.
No thanks. I'm allready running OSX. It is way way more stable then OS9. I have no use for an OS that crashes multiple times a day. I'm not thrilled that OSX panic'ed or otherwise hung three times in two months (as opposed to FreeBSD, zero times in the same time span), but that isn't too bad.
The API for MP is part of Carbon, so go back into you hole. Another thing it is user friendly, just as much as pthreads is.
Carbon has a MP API, or Carbon has the MP API that Classic did? It was my understanding that a MP OS9 porgam had things that ran on the "not the main CPU", and those things could NOT talk to the filesystem, and they could NOT talk to quickdraw and in fact could NOT a whole lot of stuff.
Am I wrong? Is this some other past Mac MP API? Is this some wretched API I dreamed up on my own?
I'm totally willing to beleve that OSX has a MP API. I would be shocked if it didn't at least have the mach MP API, which was both better and worse then the POSIX one. I was talking about the OS9 API.
Apple was putting the burden on Epson, etc. to write their own drivers, it didn't happen and doesn't seem real likely to happen quickly, particularly for older inkjets.
OH! Well, yeah. I guess if there is no OSX driver they should rasterise the PDF stuff on their own (the existing Preview app can turn PDF into TIFF files -- which it can screw up about as badly as ghostscript) and hand it off to the print driver in Classic....
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Well you can get a tunnel from anyone, not just your ISP. It is in the ISP's best intrest to be the one to provide it, unless they charge you per bandwidth used.
Last I checked UUNET gave free multicast to any leased line cust's. That was quite a while ago though, it may have changed. I also know they can do multicast to dial-ups (anyone using Ascend boxes there should be able to do it), but I don't know what the deal on that is.
Actually it is lame if you use Windows, too many dialog boxes don't fit on the screen, and you need (as far as I know) 3rd party software to let you drag (some of) them so you can fill 'em out!
Oddly enough, under Unix way fewer things didn't fit, and virtual desktops took care of the not fitting problem (plus the window manager can be instructed to let you drag any non-override redirect window anyway).
The larger Viao 505PCG-JS was far more usable, and didn't weigh much different (it did cost a lot different though). The even larger and heftier PowerBook G3 works out even better for me, but YMMV, esp if you want a built in video cam.
Note: this was with the older Intel powered version, and I assume a older version of Windows. The new CPU won't change any of this, a newer Windows may.
PDA's didn't make a dime for anyone until the Palm. Of corse I already have a nice 802.11 laptop, so I'm not going to buy this unless it is dirt cheep and can run my OS of choice.
Just because nobody else has made that market niche pay off doesn't mean MS can't. It also doesn't mean they can.
I hate to break this to you, but there are lots and lots of places that do go for WinNT or 2000 on servers. Maybe they are insane. Maybe NT/2000 really is better for their task (probably because MS has kept the protocol closed). Maybe both.
So they know someone in 22032 watches Sopranos, and Buffy, and Nova, and... They don't know it is me. If they did, and it influenced a hiring choice, then I wouldn't have wanted to work for or with them anyway. I'm done with collage, so that leaves me with just the home loan to worry about. I doubt knowing that someone in my zipcode watches a show is going to change that.
If it is a big deal to you, call 1-877-FOR-TIVO (se page 72 of your manual) and opt-out. Now it really is a small deal isn't it?
You can only skip commercials if you are watching far enough behind real time (i.e. if an hour of TV has 15 min of commercials, and I start 10 minutes late, I can only skip over 10 minutes of commercials). Plus some commercials are actually entertaining, or for things you might want to see (like a commercial for a new TV show, or movie, or maybe you like the new VW or Apple commercials).
I watch most of my TV long after it has stopped being live (TiVo catches 3 or 4 Star Treks overnight, and I delete most of them because I have seen them, but some are ones I have missed and watch...it catches 3 or 4 ERs a day too, if I'm in the mood I watch, otherwise they get autodeleted, it picks up all my primetime TV too, most I'm not in a big hurry to watch).
A few shows I end up watching close to live because I "can't wait", like Buffy, or the new showings of ER. When I catch up to live I either watch commercials (while surfing on my 802.11 connected laptop), or I have the TiVo show me something it recorded before until I think I have "enough slack", or I'm sucked into the old show (a 30min commercial TV show can be watched in about 18min, so it provides enough slack for a 1hour commercial TV show...). Plus I like the VW ads, and some of the Apple ads, and...
Chapter 7 "Privacy and Service" starts on page 71 of my manual, page 73 lists the "1-877-FOR-TIVO (1-877-367-8486)" number as the one to call to review the data TiVo has sent, or to have it all deleted and your TiVo to not send more.
It defanalty isn't hidden. The print isn't even any smaller then the rest of the plain text in the manual.
Two problems:
Oh, yeah, and I would rather the broadcasters knew what shows I watch so they can put more like them on the air. I would rather they know what commercials I watch, and what I skip over so they can get more entertaining ones. But that's just my opinion, you can always opt-out, it's an 800 number, and I hear it only takes a few minutes.
P.S. slashdot covered this quite a while ago, when they contrasted this with ReplayTV's policy. I didn't own either box at the time, so I didn't pay all that much attention...
Multicast is pretty easy to program, not much harder then UDP. Or at least the system interface is almost exactly the same (you have to manually set the TTL, that's about the only difference I remember).
Getting a multicast feed is harder, but not really harder then NNTP, you find someone who has one and request a tunnel (unless your ISP magically gives you multicast, which is quite rare).
Mind you this was the state of affairs about 8 years ago, when I did the multicast news software in 1993~1994. Well, you also frequently needed kernel patches then too, but I don't think that is needed in modern unix-like systems.
It is quite hard doing something with multicast that doesn't suffer congestion problems, it is like doing normal UDP work where the protocall doens't help you with packet loss or congestion, except it is far harder to get replies from all receivers (in fact if you want to scale forever you can't ever accept any replies from anyone). It's a big old pain, but people do UDP based systems, and they could do multicast ones as well with more work.
If it is a L3 backup then it is connected to an IP router and some sort of routing info is going over it. If it is a L2 backup it is connected to an ATM or Frame Relay switch and some sort of L2 protocall is running over it exchanging whatever it exchanges. If it is a L1 backup it is dark until it is needed.
However not all backup circuits are dedicated. People will pay for a circuit that isn't there all the time. They don't pay nearly as much as they pay for one that is there (almost) all the time.
Lastly not all that dark fibre is in use. It is very very expensave to dig up ground and run cable (or fibre), copper is cheep, and fibre is way more expensave then copper, but a lot cheeper then putting it in the ground. So when you get the right to lay fibre and the equiptmenr lined up, and the folks there digging (or running the flow mole) you put way way more fibre then you need.
Sometimes that way more then you need is more then anyone needs. A fibre from DC to NY is going to have a lot of demand. One from Ohio to, well, some other part of Ohio may not get nearly enough demand to fill it. Since it only costs (say) 20% more to get 5000% bandwidth, it is worth it on the off chance that those two remote parts of Ohio become boom towns sometime.
Other fibre may be held back to keep prices up, but I expect that is rare (I have no evidence one way or another). Some there may even be demand for, but nobody realises it is cheep enough, or they can't find the right part of the right compony to buy it from. Big busness may have effencies of scale, but they also have ineffencies of scale.
"Only" about twice as many if you beleve comp.arch leaks. I think those were mostly baised off of some parts of the IA64 compiler (mostly done by SGI). At least that was the roumor six months ago. Havn't seen anything else since.
Yes, but it also has way more registers, and modulo addressing of those registers so software pipelining can be used. If you look on comp.arch there are some really impressave code snippits that can make great use of those features. There is also a lot of head scratching about how to get compilers to do a good job cranking them out.
Worse yet there are a lot of code sequences shown where a IA64 follow-on with more functional units runs slower then the existing one because of how the explicit stops work.
Stunt Drivin' had some very diffrent tracks indeed. I distinctly remember a corkscrew, it is the only time I have driven upside down. A pity it didn't have decent force feedback.
What's wrong with the Visor Edge? It is extreamly similar to the Palm V in size and weight (it does need the strap on expand-o-slot if you want to use a springbord though).
Rock on! That's cool.
It is missing things needed to make NUMA systems useful (as opposed to "can boot and run"). For example:
I have no doubt SGI can add those things to Linux, IRIX does (almost) all of that allready.
Normally when being told one CPU only runs at 800Mhz and another runs at 1.4Ghz, so the 800Mhz one is crap, I have a lot of objections. Like "the 800Mhz one may do a lot more work per cycle", or "they could be designed for diffrent markets". However in this case both are for the same market, and McKinley is likely to do more work per cycle. The Itanic is a shammbling disaster, if anyone but Intel was behind it, they probbably would be bankrupt by now.
That said, there is a good chance that both IA64 systems have the same memory interface, making it a useful test run to design multi-way systems around this. It also has probbably been in the works a lot longer then it has been known that the Itanic is a dog.
There is also the chance that Intel is subsidising (or outright funding!) this thing. That makes it less of a risk to build.
Well the current Intel boxes don't have any more CPUs then you can get elsewhere (they do have more memory bandwidth, by a factor of around 3). The O3000 supports 100s of CPUs, if the O3000 IA64 does as well they will at least have a nice story to sell people on. I don't know if it something people are willing to pay a lot for, but time will tell that.
It is interesting that they will port Linux to it. As far as I know Linux isn't tuned to work in a large NUMA (Non-Uniform Memory Access -- local memory in maybe 5ns, memory from a few racks away at 500ns) with 100s of CPUs. It will be interesting to see what they change to make it happy. Esp if they don't go the simple route (treating it as a bunch of total different machines with a fast network).
I don't really see why they don't do that either. It isn't like there is anything special about the IA64 or MIPS that makes Linux or IRIX better on one or the other. Even if they think putting Linux on the MIPS boxes will scare off existing IRIX users, won't porting Linux to the IA64 O3000, but not porting IRIX to it will be even worse?
SGI does lots of good and interesting stuff, but they really are inscrutable sometimes.
Well delta-t seemed pretty cool, and it isn't all that complex if you drop the parts designed to handle non-8-bit-bytes and assume NTP will be used to sync time. It was one of the proposals that TCP bested last time around. Delta-t also has the cool property that it can find the right rate to minimize loss on non-garenteed connections (so you could get something like UDP with TCPs auto dampening properties). Regretabally I think that only works of symertrical links (so satalite forward link with dial-back won't work, and ADSL might be a problem as well, but I think not).
As for deployment, well it'll face the same problems IPv6 has. It'll be better, but not enough better to get anywhere real fast. Of corse it may not actually even be better, I never saw an implmentation, and it hasn't had the decades of tweeking TCP has (things like delayed ACK, and nagel, and some of the recovery algos).
The initial ISN is the first ISN a TCP stack uses after it boots. The subsequent ISNs are ones it makes for the second and subsequent TCP connections.
If the first ISN is chosen totally at random, but the rest of the ISNs are chisen by adding three to the old ones, or even by calling bad_PRNG()&0x07, then you are screwed after a few connections...
One of the wrinkles is you can't just do "ISN = good_PRNG()" because you have to avoid reusing ISNs within some time limit (I think it is something like four times the maximum segment lifetime, but it could be longer).
The easy approach is to pick as random an ISN as you can the first time, and then just add a random number the other times. However if the random addition is too large you can wrap the ISN space too quickly and reuse ISNs before the 4*MSL timer expires. If the random addition is too small even a good PRNG (or a real RNG!) is operating in too small a space to be safe.
One could have two 64Kbit (~8K byte) arrays ISNcur, and ISNprev, make a random ISN (using the best PRNG, or a RRNG) and if it's bit is set in either array make a new one, if the bit is clear set it's bit in ISNcur. Every 4*MSL copy ISNcur to ISNprev, and clear ISNcur (which you could do by moving pointers, and clearing one array, but it still sucks to screw with 8K of data, not good for the cache).
Or one could just come up with a decent distance for ISNs, gennerate the random number in that space, and live with the possibility of wraps, and the somewhat reduced "keyspace". Seems a lot easier and faster :-)
So is your complaint that vouchers don't give enough?
I don't think "only the rich" would find this useful. When I was growing up we middle class, and my parents sent my sister to a private school (possably as a result of seeing how screwed up the public school I went to was). My patents managed to do this pretty much by not buying a new car from 1979 through the early 1990s (and only two or three used ones, all under about $1000).
I expect even if vouchers are "half off" it will at least help the middle class, and maybe the upper lower class. Not just the rich.
Vouchers don't do squat for the rich. The rich are, after all, rich. If they want to send thsir kids to private school, they allready do. If they want to give their kids cars that cost more then my whole family made in a year, they do. Vouchers help the middle class, the not-rich, yet not-poor.
Oh dear God, we would be allowed to find a school with policies we agree with! This dredful choice must be stomped out! Free us from the need to use our minds, oh I beg of you!
Why is choice in school bad while choice in OS, CPU, and car are all wonderful? Why is it a bad thing to be allowd to find a school that teaches the way you want?
Why? What makes you think your parents would have found a private school with a dean that crappy? Or that switching from one private school with a crappy dean to another would have been "screwed" rather then leaving one sucky place for a less sucky place?
They might have been designed to do it, but judging from the Hellmouth stories, they arn't doing such a hot job of it. Why not give something else a chance?
Private entities are gennerally less dangerous because you have choices. If these folks can pay for one privte school, they can probbably pay for a diffrent one. If they are sending their children to a public school they are probbably screwed if they need to send them elsewhere.
Ok, just remember you are part of the private sector. If I'm given the right to make a contract with the school to not mock them, and then mock them anyway, I'll have the right to break contracts with you. Perhapse I'll agree to buy your car, and then once I get it forget about the part where I actually have to pay you.
We allready have tons of laws for the private sector. Maybe too many, maybe too few. Mostly too many. Look at all the slashdot headlines, far more complain about bad stupid unjust laws then the lack of good just needed ones.
Never? Ever? Howabout allready. Ever seen the vintage Atari 2600, aka Atari VCS? It had wood paneling. It was my first console. It was one of the first consoles (at least one of the first that could play games that didn't come with it!).
I'll be on the lookout for transparent orange plastic stereo, but I'll note there is allready a lot of transparent plastic in high-end audio, and sometimes some disgustingly colored neon lights. Actually I don't mind the color so much as them being lights. Doesn't anyone else listen to music and try to sleep at the same time?
Why not? Why don't you up and run it? Take a break from coding to watch the "smash the FAX machine" bit of Office Space? Or if you are making a comercial rewatch bits of the movie you are imitationg?
And even if it isn't a breif run of the player, why should you have to log out of five servers, bookmarke half a dozen web pages and tie up other work and play bits just so you can reboot and run the DVD player? That sucks.
I hope so. I'm allready sick of OS9. It makes my skin crawl to to have to boot it to do anything.
No thanks. I'm allready running OSX. It is way way more stable then OS9. I have no use for an OS that crashes multiple times a day. I'm not thrilled that OSX panic'ed or otherwise hung three times in two months (as opposed to FreeBSD, zero times in the same time span), but that isn't too bad.
Carbon has a MP API, or Carbon has the MP API that Classic did? It was my understanding that a MP OS9 porgam had things that ran on the "not the main CPU", and those things could NOT talk to the filesystem, and they could NOT talk to quickdraw and in fact could NOT a whole lot of stuff.
Am I wrong? Is this some other past Mac MP API? Is this some wretched API I dreamed up on my own?
I'm totally willing to beleve that OSX has a MP API. I would be shocked if it didn't at least have the mach MP API, which was both better and worse then the POSIX one. I was talking about the OS9 API.
OH! Well, yeah. I guess if there is no OSX driver they should rasterise the PDF stuff on their own (the existing Preview app can turn PDF into TIFF files -- which it can screw up about as badly as ghostscript) and hand it off to the print driver in Classic....