Yeah they are... unless there's actually two of these at UNM... which would be nice, but little selfish.
I can see posting "IBM to announce (newfangled technology) whis year" then a month or three later "IBM released (newfangled technology)". But two days of the same announcement is a little tough...
The athlon is SMP capable, there's just not a cheap commerical memory controller that implements it yet. It's the same bus, same SMP structure as the Alphas, and they have done it, but AMD isn't producing chipsets (you'll have to ask VIA).
True enough, but it was asked for - the Linux changelogs aren't nearly that interesting, either, but they still get linked.
(Guess I'm trying to burn off some of that excess karma today)
(OT) Crusading against stupid moderators...
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Perl 5.6.0 Out
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· Score: 0
Article is about new version of Perl. Taco asks for link to Changelog. Comment provides link to changelog. Gets moderated at Offtopic. Huh??
(OT) Moderation is whack (comma yo)
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Perl 5.6.0 Out
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· Score: 1
Hmmm, more great use of the 'Flaimbait' tag in the pull-down. I hope the moderator just missed, and will reply to the thread to remove that... M2 should help take care of it, I'd think.
Like I said, I have some reservations about the way the program is currently constructed, but I think that it could be a good thing in the future...
I did a CompSys Engineering degree, and came close to the dual-major with CS (which wasn't an option until later in my junior year, otherwise I probably would have that, too...
Understand how computers work and how computers work together. And take NetProg with Dave Hollinger. One of the best instructors I've had on the CS side of things. Real IT skills can only be learned through experience (like, ohmygodtheAIX/Novell/NT/whateverserverjustcrasheda ndnowitwontrebootandIdontknowwhatthatlit tleyellownumbermeansAHHH!) and how to deal with users and their everyday problems. If you are interested in gaining even more experience on campus, the student union has student sysadmins (used to do that, along with a few other things).
I'd reccomend the dual CS/CSYS, but if you aren't into the lower level hardware end of things, it might not be for you (though the requirements seem to change every year).
Initiative and curiosity help you learn to think, and that's what it's all about. There are different paths for different people, and I wasn't trying to say that everyone *has* to go through a CS program, just that it can help refine the thought process (without brainwashing, of course) and hone those problem solving skills. I've always been a hardware guy at heart, and my engineering education has biased me to believe that if you can thrive in any engineering field, you have the abilities you need to adapt to any other field (I liked O-Chem... figure that one). Undergraduate educations are meant to teach you how to think and give you a base of knowledge that you can apply to the _real world_ when you get there. Graduate school is where you focus in on a particular area, and start to learn more recent things. I did hardware development on a uVax and PDP-11 in wirewrap, but the design process is essentially the same in VHDL (with which I am now rather well acquanted). Again, learning how to attack problems is the key. Some people are ready without extra schooling, and some people need that extra few years. Some, like myself, tried to take as much advantage of the opportunities that schools offer. I got a nice job as a multi-platform sysadmin at school (which was also a little extra cash), the reputation of the school helped me get summmer internships, and college was critical in my social developement, which I would have missed out on if I went straight to work - besides, where else can you get a good game of Descent going, and just taunt people verbally from down the hall (or Warcraft 2, Q-II...) 8^)
Since I've strayed from my original point (I tend to do that on an empty stomach), I'll recap: You were right 8^) So was I 8^) LAN games are fun 8^)
I agree...Sorry 'bout that - I should have probably mentioned that some of that abstract design does lead to real code 8^D In Operating Systems, you would code up a multi-level scheduler, with several inputs, and you would have to use different methods, such as FIFO, Priority Queue, SJF, etc, test your code, and see what works best for the situation at hand. Concepts + real code = some understanding, hopefully. The same way that in a Models of Computation class, you'd have to explore the best methods for, say, parsing input and fetching it later - so, you code up a neat system in Lex/Yacc and try to get some performance out of it... In a few classes I've taken, and several others I know of, you need to achieve certain peformance results (whether sorting, gathering, parsing). I can't think of a better way of trying to teach things than making you think about it and then implement it... and do it *well*. Not good enough that it just compiles, get it to run *fast* and without errors. I probably glossed over the internship/co-op/undergrad research thing a little too quickly before - I've got a friend that is current working with a professor doing some neat things with the Linux kernel - not bad experience for a resume.
I completely agree that you can't just learn theory, but a good curriculum will show you how to apply that theory and knowledge, throwing different tools in front of you to show you that, as I said before, there are many different tools (languages) out there, and you can be sucessful with any of them, given the right strategy.
The university system (however one defines that) *is* well poised to teach Computer Science, but not programming... learning *how* to program is more important than knowing a language. A school that teaches you a language or a skill is a trade school. A school that teaches you how to think and adapt is a college/university (at least, that's the way it's supposed to be). As I told all of my prospective employers during interviews when they asked (what I think are) dumb questions about what languages I knew - A language is just a means to an end, a set of syntax that can one can adapt their thoughts and methods to. If you can learn one language, you can learn any language (most people won't believe this, and it is a great stumbling block to them).
People who are out to 'learn Java' or 'learn Perl' to get a job are shorting themselves. Granted, languages do take more than a day to become efficient in (like C++ multiple inheritance/polymorphism, if you go for that), but if you know *what you want to do* and plan it out, you can make fairly elegant code in almost any language (picking the right language for the job should be part of the planning, too).
Courses in Models of Computation, AI, Compiler Theory, Operating Systems (meaning scheduling, mm, kernel/library structure - not UNIX, NT, DOS), and Data Structures/Algorithms tend to separate the specific skill schools from the real thing. A semester of nothing but pseudo code can be the most elightening thing for some, because it focuses on the process, not the syntax. Too many programmers get hung up on 'I know how to do these seven things in C' and try to do everything with them... Curriculums that teach languages should only use them as a vehicle for teaching the real constructs of programming. Computer Science has less to do with the language than it does with processing that language.
I agree that many recent grads may leave without a whole lot of experience or cluefulness. Experience does count - that what internship / co-ops are for, and independant projects. I was bored and was programming BASIC when I was about 7, and by the time I graduated high school, I was proficient in a number of things, and could have gotten work straight out (IMHO). The point is, I went to school, refined my thoughts, processes, and really learned a heck of a lot that, to be perfectly honest, you can't always get from a book (when was the last time your book looked at your code and told you it was ugly? How do you know?). I'm an engineer, not a CS major, so pretty code isn't always as important to me;-) School is an opportunity to tune, refine, and expand your work, and should be taken advantage of, but just going doesn't guarantee anything. It's all about the work you decide to put into it.
Some of them are from Mars, though... at least, I wouldn't doubt it...
>I'd also like to see some non-programmer oriented IT degrees. The skills that lead to good Programmer/Analystsare not the same as the skills that lead to great sysadmins. Why can't we train them differently?
RPI, for example, has introduced a new 'IT' major. While I have my doubts about the current form of this program, the idea is sound, and could help with people who want to learn programming (style, etc), but are focused on something other than being a programmer...
I'm starting to feel old, and I'm not even 25 yet...
That's just it... I know a few people who I graduated with who had degrees in Biomed or other semi-random fields, but had taken two or three CS courses, and a 1 credit Java intro, and made their way into work that way... Some of these people probably couldn't code their way out of a paper bag, while others were actually fairly competent. By the time I graduated, I had a few years of experience doing admin on various platforms (AIX/Solaris/Linux/NT/etc), and had enough of a clue to land myself just about whatever IT job I really wanted (one company even asked me if another offer was binding - wanted to raise my $$$ - of course, I had a tech interview with them 8^D) If you have the (some/any real) experience, are a quick learner, and aren't just faking your way through, you can land a lot of jobs... Heck, 1 credit of Java was all I took and one company wanted me to do that (no thanks!). It's a scramble to find semi-qualified people, but there are a lot who try to get by with less...
Of course, I went into hardware and microcode... figure that one;-)
"The National Computational Science Alliance (Alliance) will take delivery of a 512-processor Linux supercluster within the next month - a move that will give this nationwide partnership the largest open production Linux supercluster aimed at the research community. The new supercluster, called LosLobos, will be located at the University of New Mexico's (UNM) Albuquerque High Performance Computing Center (AHPCC), one of the Alliance Partners for Advanced Computational Resources sites."
Fine, don't consider the whole post... This was not the base argument, which was regarding the advanes that come out of these programs. It was also mentioning that, for the most part, the tax dollars that are used to pay these people stay around, and aren't sent off to random places... we're not putting $180 million of raw materials or dollar bills in a crate and heaving it into space. A great deal of the cost is paying people to think and be creative, and society gains from this. Your argument would imply that building large buildings(digging holes), such as the Metropolitan Museum, and stocking it (filling them in) with art and maintaining it with public dollars is detrimental to society. Fine. You are entitled to your opinion, and I'm entitled to mine. Please don't take my points out of context and priority...
By the way, if one (Bob) were to hire someone (Jim) to dig holes, and someone else (Fred) to fill them up, society would benefit, since there would be two smart people with money (Fred & Jim), and one dumb one (Bob) without it 8^)
The point was not paying people for the sake of paying them, it was about the value that we do get out of that work.
> Ever heard of the creation of value? Ever heard of considering the whole post, instead of one line?
Well, I think the new Netfinity boxes should have some 64/66 slots, as well as some 64/33 slots... the 66MHz would buy you a good bit of performance, since you can transfer the data just that much faster (sometimes you have to wait for the bus, after all...)
Well, if you can keep most of your working set in the 2MB L2, you can stay off of the bus more often, so there won't be so much holdoff or contention with the other proc... but a switched fabric is better for SMP than a bus... far more costly, though. Can't wait for a nice dual athlon board my self... Where's the 70 from? Looks like you are referencing the Alphas there (which use the same bus as the Althlons)... the IBM cluster is 256 boxes, so if they are SMP, you have 512 procs, and like I said, if your software is designed properly, you shouldn't be heading to memory constantly anyway (though this *is* unavoidable sometimes).
You think humanity will last for a billion years or more? I'm a fairly optimistic person, but I'd guess not, at least not in our present state. "The end of sunlight" will not be for a few billion years, but long before that our sun will bake us anyway (when it heads to red giant stage)... We'll have destroyed ourselves long before that ever becomes a problem. We've only been around a paltry few thousand years, and we're already, at any given moment, less than an hour from worldwide destruction of life. Another thousand years, and someone's finger will slip.
The money going into NASA and other programs is more useful than a lot of people realize. Technical advancements need to be pushed somehow. War is great for this, and exploration / outer space travel pushes this along also. Mnay good technologies come out of these things, which end up making much of our lives more convenient and, believe or not, cheaper on a day-to-day basis. Plus a great portion of this money goes to the workers (high costs are due to large amounts of person-years). These are people with familys. They need jobs. They support their local economies with their food/housing/etc dollars. Their children go to schools. It's a part of the society, and not a detrimental one. Many things have gained from the work that goes into these projects. Even the garbage trucks that pick up your trash have benefited from the space program. If all you are considering is 'millions of dollars to try to look at some microbes in rocks', then you are taking a very short-sighted view of things.
Darn barrell shifters are so expensive in hardware (and so rarely used, aside from some specialized apps). The processors are Xeons, nothing special there (aside from full speed L2). So the RC5 speed would be ~the same as any group of machines with this proc/speed (since it isn't a network intensive computing project). Grab and crunch... crunching takes far more time (several orders of magnitude if done right) than grabbing, so it's not really a situation where beowulf clustering even helps... a second or two to d/l a new keychunck, and, depending on the size of that chunk, anywhere from a few minutes to a few weeks to finish it (even with mighty Xeons)... nice as a distributed app, no gain from a cluster.
Of course, it's a little more technical than just "a bunch of computers hooked up via high speed links (i.e. fast/gigabit ethernet) to provide a parallel solution for complex calculations", but there is a lot of info...
If you need it, get Ultra3 SCSI with solid-state drives. Sure it'll cost you an entire lifetime's salary, but hey, they're great.
Really though, using a solid state drive as a cache for a disk subsystem is an easy way to enhance performance, and is already being sold. You perform a write - instant gratification, and wiht proper caching algorithms, you can get the same thing for reads. A multi-gig SS Drive can easily max out a bus. Multi-level caching is a necessity as speeds increase in systems.
In this sort of system, the interconnect fabric (as fast as it is) can still be a little bit of a bottleneck, too... A good cached RAID disk system on the one end can really keep things smoking, though.
The only thing I could think of is that the moderator was an SMP designer and took offense to the "SMP is going to run out of steam" comment. Otherwise, I can't see any there either...
Ummm.... it ended up at $80 after coming out at what.. $14? If you were expecting it (or Redhat, or any new stock) to stay that far overvalued, you have even less sense than the investors that were paying $200-$300/share for this. A rapid rise and bubble is normal, especially in this overvalued tech-heavy market now. The fact that is is settling at 70-80 (still overvalued, IMHO) is more a statement of people realizing that they get a little bit too excited sometimes, but it's still a massive gain since the IPO. That's what should be considered. Yes,/. is slanted in its views. It always has been, and it always will be. That's the beauty of a community. Different people, different ideas. What this community generally thinks is vastly different than other more pro-MS sites would tend to agree upon.
If VA only uses/. as a PR tool, and it degrades, people will leave. The code is out there. I'm running it for a small-scale test site, there are others running it. There's also PHP-Slash and Squishdot, so just about anyone can fire up a similar site. Won't take long for people to find it if they want to go. You are free to not visit, not read, and not be angered by what you read here, just as your are free to complain about what you see as wrong. Do what you like, but realize that people here, as much as some of them delude themslelves, will eventually see through things, get fed up and leave if the situation warrants. All journalism includes a healthy chunk of FUD, whether it be a school board election, tech review, wars, etc... take it with a grain of salt and work against it, if thats what you like.
disclaimer: I don't own any VA stock, have any professional ties to VAndover/. (or any other Linux co.) nor am I a professional stock trader - I just fool myself into thinking that I might have some common sense every now and then.
I was actually making a fairly obscure Garfield (the cat) reference - he said that whoever invented diets should be 'drug out into the street and shot'. Extreme words to make an otherwise boring point.
coke(1) n. & v. --n. 1 a solid substance left after the gases have been extracted from coal. 2 a residue left after the incomplete combustion of petrol etc. --v.tr. convert (coal) into coke. [prob. f. N.Engl. dial. colk core, of unkn. orig.]
coke(2) n. sl. cocaine. [abbr.]
Trademarks are only really effective against items in the same genre, or other things that are trying to profit from use of an established name... If I had a kids show, and trademarked the characters names (say Ham Sandwich (ham is an uncommon but real first name, and Sandwich is a valid surname), then tried to enforce my copyright on Oscar Meyer for use of 'Ham Sandwich' on little lunchpacks, I should be drug out into the street and shot. Similarly, if this isn't just a case of domain squatting to gain money, and there is a historical non-soda related use for it, Coca-cola's lawyers (or all lawyers) should be drug out into the street and shot (maybe with a snurf gun).
Slashdot Mirror
What is that +1 limit at now? Has it changed any?
Yeah they are... unless there's actually two of these at UNM... which would be nice, but little selfish.
I can see posting "IBM to announce (newfangled technology) whis year" then a month or three later "IBM released (newfangled technology)". But two days of the same announcement is a little tough...
The athlon is SMP capable, there's just not a cheap commerical memory controller that implements it yet. It's the same bus, same SMP structure as the Alphas, and they have done it, but AMD isn't producing chipsets (you'll have to ask VIA).
True enough, but it was asked for - the Linux changelogs aren't nearly that interesting, either, but they still get linked.
(Guess I'm trying to burn off some of that excess karma today)
Article is about new version of Perl. Taco asks for link to Changelog. Comment provides link to changelog. Gets moderated at Offtopic. Huh??
Hmmm, more great use of the 'Flaimbait' tag in the pull-down. I hope the moderator just missed, and will reply to the thread to remove that... M2 should help take care of it, I'd think.
Like I said, I have some reservations about the way the program is currently constructed, but I think that it could be a good thing in the future...
a ndnowitwontrebootandIdontknowwhatthatlit tleyellownumbermeansAHHH!) and how to deal with users and their everyday problems. If you are interested in gaining even more experience on campus, the student union has student sysadmins (used to do that, along with a few other things).
I did a CompSys Engineering degree, and came close to the dual-major with CS (which wasn't an option until later in my junior year, otherwise I probably would have that, too...
Understand how computers work and how computers work together. And take NetProg with Dave Hollinger. One of the best instructors I've had on the CS side of things. Real IT skills can only be learned through experience (like, ohmygodtheAIX/Novell/NT/whateverserverjustcrashed
I'd reccomend the dual CS/CSYS, but if you aren't into the lower level hardware end of things, it might not be for you (though the requirements seem to change every year).
--
tower@alum.rpi.edu
Initiative and curiosity help you learn to think, and that's what it's all about. There are different paths for different people, and I wasn't trying to say that everyone *has* to go through a CS program, just that it can help refine the thought process (without brainwashing, of course) and hone those problem solving skills. I've always been a hardware guy at heart, and my engineering education has biased me to believe that if you can thrive in any engineering field, you have the abilities you need to adapt to any other field (I liked O-Chem... figure that one). Undergraduate educations are meant to teach you how to think and give you a base of knowledge that you can apply to the _real world_ when you get there. Graduate school is where you focus in on a particular area, and start to learn more recent things. I did hardware development on a uVax and PDP-11 in wirewrap, but the design process is essentially the same in VHDL (with which I am now rather well acquanted). Again, learning how to attack problems is the key. Some people are ready without extra schooling, and some people need that extra few years. Some, like myself, tried to take as much advantage of the opportunities that schools offer. I got a nice job as a multi-platform sysadmin at school (which was also a little extra cash), the reputation of the school helped me get summmer internships, and college was critical in my social developement, which I would have missed out on if I went straight to work - besides, where else can you get a good game of Descent going, and just taunt people verbally from down the hall (or Warcraft 2, Q-II...) 8^)
Since I've strayed from my original point (I tend to do that on an empty stomach), I'll recap:
You were right 8^)
So was I 8^)
LAN games are fun 8^)
I agree...Sorry 'bout that - I should have probably mentioned that some of that abstract design does lead to real code 8^D In Operating Systems, you would code up a multi-level scheduler, with several inputs, and you would have to use different methods, such as FIFO, Priority Queue, SJF, etc, test your code, and see what works best for the situation at hand. Concepts + real code = some understanding, hopefully. The same way that in a Models of Computation class, you'd have to explore the best methods for, say, parsing input and fetching it later - so, you code up a neat system in Lex/Yacc and try to get some performance out of it... In a few classes I've taken, and several others I know of, you need to achieve certain peformance results (whether sorting, gathering, parsing). I can't think of a better way of trying to teach things than making you think about it and then implement it... and do it *well*. Not good enough that it just compiles, get it to run *fast* and without errors. I probably glossed over the internship/co-op/undergrad research thing a little too quickly before - I've got a friend that is current working with a professor doing some neat things with the Linux kernel - not bad experience for a resume.
I completely agree that you can't just learn theory, but a good curriculum will show you how to apply that theory and knowledge, throwing different tools in front of you to show you that, as I said before, there are many different tools (languages) out there, and you can be sucessful with any of them, given the right strategy.
The university system (however one defines that) *is* well poised to teach Computer Science, but not programming... learning *how* to program is more important than knowing a language. A school that teaches you a language or a skill is a trade school. A school that teaches you how to think and adapt is a college/university (at least, that's the way it's supposed to be). As I told all of my prospective employers during interviews when they asked (what I think are) dumb questions about what languages I knew - A language is just a means to an end, a set of syntax that can one can adapt their thoughts and methods to. If you can learn one language, you can learn any language (most people won't believe this, and it is a great stumbling block to them).
;-) School is an opportunity to tune, refine, and expand your work, and should be taken advantage of, but just going doesn't guarantee anything. It's all about the work you decide to put into it.
People who are out to 'learn Java' or 'learn Perl' to get a job are shorting themselves. Granted, languages do take more than a day to become efficient in (like C++ multiple inheritance/polymorphism, if you go for that), but if you know *what you want to do* and plan it out, you can make fairly elegant code in almost any language (picking the right language for the job should be part of the planning, too).
Courses in Models of Computation, AI, Compiler Theory, Operating Systems (meaning scheduling, mm, kernel/library structure - not UNIX, NT, DOS), and Data Structures/Algorithms tend to separate the specific skill schools from the real thing. A semester of nothing but pseudo code can be the most elightening thing for some, because it focuses on the process, not the syntax. Too many programmers get hung up on 'I know how to do these seven things in C' and try to do everything with them... Curriculums that teach languages should only use them as a vehicle for teaching the real constructs of programming. Computer Science has less to do with the language than it does with processing that language.
I agree that many recent grads may leave without a whole lot of experience or cluefulness. Experience does count - that what internship / co-ops are for, and independant projects. I was bored and was programming BASIC when I was about 7, and by the time I graduated high school, I was proficient in a number of things, and could have gotten work straight out (IMHO). The point is, I went to school, refined my thoughts, processes, and really learned a heck of a lot that, to be perfectly honest, you can't always get from a book (when was the last time your book looked at your code and told you it was ugly? How do you know?). I'm an engineer, not a CS major, so pretty code isn't always as important to me
Some of them are from Mars, though... at least, I wouldn't doubt it...
>I'd also like to see some non-programmer oriented IT degrees. The skills that lead to good Programmer/Analystsare not the same as the skills that lead to great sysadmins. Why can't we train them differently?
RPI, for example, has introduced a new 'IT' major. While I have my doubts about the current form of this program, the idea is sound, and could help with people who want to learn programming (style, etc), but are focused on something other than being a programmer...
I'm starting to feel old, and I'm not even 25 yet...
That's just it... I know a few people who I graduated with who had degrees in Biomed or other semi-random fields, but had taken two or three CS courses, and a 1 credit Java intro, and made their way into work that way... Some of these people probably couldn't code their way out of a paper bag, while others were actually fairly competent. By the time I graduated, I had a few years of experience doing admin on various platforms (AIX/Solaris/Linux/NT/etc), and had enough of a clue to land myself just about whatever IT job I really wanted (one company even asked me if another offer was binding - wanted to raise my $$$ - of course, I had a tech interview with them 8^D) If you have the (some/any real) experience, are a quick learner, and aren't just faking your way through, you can land a lot of jobs... Heck, 1 credit of Java was all I took and one company wanted me to do that (no thanks!). It's a scramble to find semi-qualified people, but there are a lot who try to get by with less...
;-)
Of course, I went into hardware and microcode... figure that one
True, but they are using 2-way boxen...
e s/Mar21hpcc.html
http://www.unm.edu/~paaffair/news/news%20releas
"The National Computational Science Alliance (Alliance) will take delivery of a 512-processor Linux supercluster within the next month - a move that will give this nationwide partnership the largest open production Linux supercluster aimed at the research community. The new supercluster, called LosLobos, will be located at the University of New Mexico's (UNM) Albuquerque High Performance Computing Center (AHPCC), one of the Alliance Partners for Advanced Computational Resources sites."
Fine, don't consider the whole post... This was not the base argument, which was regarding the advanes that come out of these programs. It was also mentioning that, for the most part, the tax dollars that are used to pay these people stay around, and aren't sent off to random places... we're not putting $180 million of raw materials or dollar bills in a crate and heaving it into space. A great deal of the cost is paying people to think and be creative, and society gains from this. Your argument would imply that building large buildings(digging holes), such as the Metropolitan Museum, and stocking it (filling them in) with art and maintaining it with public dollars is detrimental to society. Fine. You are entitled to your opinion, and I'm entitled to mine. Please don't take my points out of context and priority...
By the way, if one (Bob) were to hire someone (Jim) to dig holes, and someone else (Fred) to fill them up, society would benefit, since there would be two smart people with money (Fred & Jim), and one dumb one (Bob) without it 8^)
The point was not paying people for the sake of paying them, it was about the value that we do get out of that work.
> Ever heard of the creation of value?
Ever heard of considering the whole post, instead of one line?
Well, I think the new Netfinity boxes should have some 64/66 slots, as well as some 64/33 slots... the 66MHz would buy you a good bit of performance, since you can transfer the data just that much faster (sometimes you have to wait for the bus, after all...)
Well, if you can keep most of your working set in the 2MB L2, you can stay off of the bus more often, so there won't be so much holdoff or contention with the other proc... but a switched fabric is better for SMP than a bus... far more costly, though. Can't wait for a nice dual athlon board my self... Where's the 70 from? Looks like you are referencing the Alphas there (which use the same bus as the Althlons)... the IBM cluster is 256 boxes, so if they are SMP, you have 512 procs, and like I said, if your software is designed properly, you shouldn't be heading to memory constantly anyway (though this *is* unavoidable sometimes).
You think humanity will last for a billion years or more? I'm a fairly optimistic person, but I'd guess not, at least not in our present state. "The end of sunlight" will not be for a few billion years, but long before that our sun will bake us anyway (when it heads to red giant stage)... We'll have destroyed ourselves long before that ever becomes a problem. We've only been around a paltry few thousand years, and we're already, at any given moment, less than an hour from worldwide destruction of life. Another thousand years, and someone's finger will slip.
The money going into NASA and other programs is more useful than a lot of people realize. Technical advancements need to be pushed somehow. War is great for this, and exploration / outer space travel pushes this along also. Mnay good technologies come out of these things, which end up making much of our lives more convenient and, believe or not, cheaper on a day-to-day basis. Plus a great portion of this money goes to the workers (high costs are due to large amounts of person-years). These are people with familys. They need jobs. They support their local economies with their food/housing/etc dollars. Their children go to schools. It's a part of the society, and not a detrimental one. Many things have gained from the work that goes into these projects. Even the garbage trucks that pick up your trash have benefited from the space program. If all you are considering is 'millions of dollars to try to look at some microbes in rocks', then you are taking a very short-sighted view of things.
Darn barrell shifters are so expensive in hardware (and so rarely used, aside from some specialized apps). The processors are Xeons, nothing special there (aside from full speed L2). So the RC5 speed would be ~the same as any group of machines with this proc/speed (since it isn't a network intensive computing project). Grab and crunch... crunching takes far more time (several orders of magnitude if done right) than grabbing, so it's not really a situation where beowulf clustering even helps... a second or two to d/l a new keychunck, and, depending on the size of that chunk, anywhere from a few minutes to a few weeks to finish it (even with mighty Xeons)... nice as a distributed app, no gain from a cluster.
Just point him at http://www.beowulf.org
Of course, it's a little more technical than just "a bunch of computers hooked up via high speed links (i.e. fast/gigabit ethernet) to provide a parallel solution for complex calculations", but there is a lot of info...
http://www.unm.edu /~paaffair/news/news%20releases/Mar21hpcc.html
If you need it, get Ultra3 SCSI with solid-state drives. Sure it'll cost you an entire lifetime's salary, but hey, they're great.
Really though, using a solid state drive as a cache for a disk subsystem is an easy way to enhance performance, and is already being sold. You perform a write - instant gratification, and wiht proper caching algorithms, you can get the same thing for reads. A multi-gig SS Drive can easily max out a bus. Multi-level caching is a necessity as speeds increase in systems.
In this sort of system, the interconnect fabric (as fast as it is) can still be a little bit of a bottleneck, too... A good cached RAID disk system on the one end can really keep things smoking, though.
The only thing I could think of is that the moderator was an SMP designer and took offense to the "SMP is going to run out of steam" comment. Otherwise, I can't see any there either...
Ummm.... it ended up at $80 after coming out at what.. $14? If you were expecting it (or Redhat, or any new stock) to stay that far overvalued, you have even less sense than the investors that were paying $200-$300/share for this. A rapid rise and bubble is normal, especially in this overvalued tech-heavy market now. The fact that is is settling at 70-80 (still overvalued, IMHO) is more a statement of people realizing that they get a little bit too excited sometimes, but it's still a massive gain since the IPO. That's what should be considered. Yes, /. is slanted in its views. It always has been, and it always will be. That's the beauty of a community. Different people, different ideas. What this community generally thinks is vastly different than other more pro-MS sites would tend to agree upon.
/. as a PR tool, and it degrades, people will leave. The code is out there. I'm running it for a small-scale test site, there are others running it. There's also PHP-Slash and Squishdot, so just about anyone can fire up a similar site. Won't take long for people to find it if they want to go. You are free to not visit, not read, and not be angered by what you read here, just as your are free to complain about what you see as wrong. Do what you like, but realize that people here, as much as some of them delude themslelves, will eventually see through things, get fed up and leave if the situation warrants. All journalism includes a healthy chunk of FUD, whether it be a school board election, tech review, wars, etc... take it with a grain of salt and work against it, if thats what you like.
If VA only uses
disclaimer: I don't own any VA stock, have any professional ties to VAndover/. (or any other Linux co.) nor am I a professional stock trader - I just fool myself into thinking that I might have some common sense every now and then.
I was actually making a fairly obscure Garfield (the cat) reference - he said that whoever invented diets should be 'drug out into the street and shot'. Extreme words to make an otherwise boring point.
coke(1) n. & v. --n. 1 a solid substance left after the gases have been extracted from coal. 2 a residue left after the incomplete combustion of petrol etc. --v.tr. convert (coal) into coke. [prob. f. N.Engl. dial. colk core, of unkn. orig.]
coke(2) n. sl. cocaine. [abbr.]
Trademarks are only really effective against items in the same genre, or other things that are trying to profit from use of an established name... If I had a kids show, and trademarked the characters names (say Ham Sandwich (ham is an uncommon but real first name, and Sandwich is a valid surname), then tried to enforce my copyright on Oscar Meyer for use of 'Ham Sandwich' on little lunchpacks, I should be drug out into the street and shot. Similarly, if this isn't just a case of domain squatting to gain money, and there is a historical non-soda related use for it, Coca-cola's lawyers (or all lawyers) should be drug out into the street and shot (maybe with a snurf gun).
And I mean that is the kindest way.