Unix again does it wrong by keeping system time in UTC rather than TAI.
Actually, that's not what POSIX does, for any definition of "keeping system time in UTC" corresponding to the ITU-R specification, as the POSIX definition of "seconds since the Epoch" and its mapping to a struct tm doesn't allow the seconds value to be 60, which it will be during a positive leap second.
I.e., it's even more wrong - a POSIX-compliant time_t isn't something that corresponds to TAI (as it doesn't tick forward by 1 every second of elapsed time) and you can't generate valid UTC labels (YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS) from it.
UTC is useful for humans
...but I suspect few clocks used by humans give a local time corresponding to UTC - most of the digital ones won't show "60" in the seconds section one second after June 30, 2015 at 23:59:59 UTC, and I don't know what the right thing to do for the second hand on an analog clock would be (for an analog clock without a second hand, presumably the minute hand should move two seconds after June 30, 2015 23:59:59 UTC).
but difficult for machines, it should be handled by the human interface libraries, just like time zones. Kernel time should be TAI of course.
I.e., "seconds since the Epoch" should actually be a count of the number of seconds that have elapsed since the Epoch, rather than being, well, what it is.
When leap seconds are inserted, systems must be updated,
...and whatever data structures are used to keep tract of future scheduled events might have to be updated to reflect that, for example, July 1, 2015, 00:00:00 UTC is going to be one more second later than was expected at the time an event was scheduled for that date and time.
However, having system time tick ahead one second every second means that events scheduled to occur N seconds from now, rather than scheduled to occur at YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS UTC, won't have their time messed up by leap seconds; it's not as if the POSIX solution doesn't screw up anything.
but that is not particularly harder than keeping the time zone files up-to-date is already.
Especially given that leap seconds are part of the Olson^WIANA time zone source files.
Umm... The very definition of a minute is that it *IS* always 60 seconds. Why would I be wrong if I wrote software based on that? That's like saying I shouldn't "assume" that a mile is 5280 feet. Its not really an "assumption" if that's its very definition.
In any case - as long as a disease don't have 100% lethality there will be survivors with better genes improving the genetic stock.
Or, at least, improving its ability to work in an environment where the disease in question is sufficiently prevalent. If there's a cost to the allele that improves survival rates, then, if the disease isn't so common, maybe it's no longer an improvement. (Were we to reduce malaria incidence to the level of an extremely rare nuisance, people with sickle-cell anemia might not consider the sickle-cell trait their parents had an improvement.)
Besides, you do realize that your pharmacy sells your prescription information to mining companies
For the benefit of those who might wonder why companies such as Freeport-McMoRan would care that you picked up some Augmentin at the pharmacy, that's "data mining companies".
I had some opportunity to work with HP-UX (built GnuMake on it for a in-company build/QA system), it was always an interesting and very different beast. Is it still around in any form?
Solaris has their own init deamon, SMF. *BSD has their own, in fact Linux is the only one who have used SysVinit for several years now.
Yes, I'm aware of SMF. However, *BSD's init isn't different from traditional init - in fact, it's arguably closer to traditional init than is SysVinit, given that *BSD init is modeled after Research UNIX init, which predates the AT&T run-level-/etc/inittab-based init. They both use rc scripts to launch non-Internet system services, unlike launchd and systemd.
That launches IP-based services, but I'm thinking of daemons that 1) run as process 1 and 2) launch most if not all services on-demand, rather than having stuff run from rc scripts.
Desktops and servers are hardly the entirety of the world. They don't even dominate it. Ever heard of ARM?
Yes, but I don't see any support for it, or any non-x86 architecture, in the DragonFly BSD source tree, so I don't think DragonFly BSD is that interested in embedded systems.
If Linus felt that way about 32-bit, there would be no Android, or it would have to develop its own kernel. Sheesh. FreeBSD and linux are found in routers and such with very weak CPUs.
So they've made different choices than DragonFly BSD.
What does Unix have to do with the Linux kernel? *nix is used for various "Unixes"
What's a "Unix"?
Is it a system based on AT&T code? If so, how much AT&T code has to still be in it.
Is it a system that passes the Single UNIX Specification test suite and whose supplier is thus allowed to license the "Unix" trademark?
Is it a system with a Unix-compatible API?
formerly also because of possible trademark issues. Linux is not one of them.
Linux is not one of the first types of OS in that list (if there are any bits of code AT&T made publicly available that are in Linux userlands, they're probably small enough not to count), and I know of no Linux distribution that's passed the SUS test suite (unless K-UX is a Linux distribution), so no Linux distribution I know of is one of the second types of OS in that list.
Linux is (or, rather, most Linux distribution are) most definitely one of the third types of OS, and people do speak of those OSes as "Un*xes", at least, even if "*nix" is used only for the first type of OS.
I can't verify the source, but this article suggests the machines will be Power8 based. Assuming these are the machines in question.
No, those machines are being built for the Department of Energy (DoE); NOAA, for whom the machines being discussed in this thread are being built, is part of the Department of Commerce.
I hear ya buddy. We've got a President who doesn't want to do things democratically and we had a major, society-altering law passed whose authors have nothing but contempt for us, the American people.
Yes, a law such as this one, as passed in the GP's country, would have done a better job than the law in question.
The computer in question wouldn't be made using x86
If the computer in question is the same one mentioned in IBM's 2012 press release, not correct - that speaks of "IBM iDataPlex servers", which are x86 servers, not Power Architecture servers.
Amnesty International has a terrible track record of attacking Western Democracies disproportionately more so than Dictatorships. I guess they like picking on easy targets, instead of actually trying to make a difference. When is the last time we heard them lobby government action in Africa or the Middle-East?
As TFA mentions, IBM just sold its supercomputer division to a Chinese company (Lenovo).
What TFA says is:
IBM's decision to sell its x86 server business to Lenovo will turn the China-based company, in short order, into one of the largest HPC vendors in the world, according to IDC.
"Lenovo may become the number two HPC provider literally by the end of this year," said Earl Joseph, an analyst at IDC. Hewlett-Packard is number one. If not in the second position, Lenovo will be close to it.
The linked article says:
As a result of the deal, Lenovo is receiving a host of IBM products including its System x, BladeCenter and Flex System blade servers and switches, along with its NeXtScale and iDataPlex servers and associated software.
IBM, however, will still hold on to its System z mainframes, Power Systems, Storage Systems, Power-based Flex servers, PureApplication and PureData appliances.
However, at least in 2012, they spoke of iDataPlex servers for NOAA, so they sold that part of their supercomputer efforts to Lenovo. Whether they'll push for Power Architecture HPC systems for NOAA instead is another matter.
Slashdot Mirror
Unix again does it wrong by keeping system time in UTC rather than TAI.
Actually, that's not what POSIX does, for any definition of "keeping system time in UTC" corresponding to the ITU-R specification, as the POSIX definition of "seconds since the Epoch" and its mapping to a struct tm doesn't allow the seconds value to be 60, which it will be during a positive leap second.
I.e., it's even more wrong - a POSIX-compliant time_t isn't something that corresponds to TAI (as it doesn't tick forward by 1 every second of elapsed time) and you can't generate valid UTC labels (YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS) from it.
UTC is useful for humans
...but I suspect few clocks used by humans give a local time corresponding to UTC - most of the digital ones won't show "60" in the seconds section one second after June 30, 2015 at 23:59:59 UTC, and I don't know what the right thing to do for the second hand on an analog clock would be (for an analog clock without a second hand, presumably the minute hand should move two seconds after June 30, 2015 23:59:59 UTC).
but difficult for machines, it should be handled by the human interface libraries, just like time zones. Kernel time should be TAI of course.
I.e., "seconds since the Epoch" should actually be a count of the number of seconds that have elapsed since the Epoch, rather than being, well, what it is.
When leap seconds are inserted, systems must be updated,
...and whatever data structures are used to keep tract of future scheduled events might have to be updated to reflect that, for example, July 1, 2015, 00:00:00 UTC is going to be one more second later than was expected at the time an event was scheduled for that date and time.
However, having system time tick ahead one second every second means that events scheduled to occur N seconds from now, rather than scheduled to occur at YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS UTC, won't have their time messed up by leap seconds; it's not as if the POSIX solution doesn't screw up anything.
but that is not particularly harder than keeping the time zone files up-to-date is already.
Especially given that leap seconds are part of the Olson^WIANA time zone source files.
Umm... The very definition of a minute is that it *IS* always 60 seconds. Why would I be wrong if I wrote software based on that? That's like saying I shouldn't "assume" that a mile is 5280 feet. Its not really an "assumption" if that's its very definition.
Nevertheless, according to the definition of UTC, the clock goes from 23:59:59 to 23:59:60 if there's a positive leap second.
How about instead of setting the time to 23:59:60, the value 23:59:59 happens twice.
Because that would be extremely broken as 00:00:00 - 23:59:59 is _one_ second, not two.
Broken, but POSIX-compliant.
In any case - as long as a disease don't have 100% lethality there will be survivors with better genes improving the genetic stock.
Or, at least, improving its ability to work in an environment where the disease in question is sufficiently prevalent. If there's a cost to the allele that improves survival rates, then, if the disease isn't so common, maybe it's no longer an improvement. (Were we to reduce malaria incidence to the level of an extremely rare nuisance, people with sickle-cell anemia might not consider the sickle-cell trait their parents had an improvement.)
The only people who position Christmas as a purported anniversary of Jesus's birth (aka "Jesus's birthday") are dullards and freaks.
You just called Issac Newton a dullard or a freak, or both.
Newton claimed December 25th to be the date of Jesus's birth? Apparently he did try to determine the date of his crucifixion , but that's a different matter.
Besides, you do realize that your pharmacy sells your prescription information to mining companies
For the benefit of those who might wonder why companies such as Freeport-McMoRan would care that you picked up some Augmentin at the pharmacy, that's "data mining companies".
t has never done an automatic REBOOT during OS update
Lol.. that just means it replaced the files on disk.
You've been running with the vulnerable libraries/executable loaded in memory until you restarted the OS or whatever program loaded those files.
At least on the machines in our household (Mountain Lion and Mavericks), NTPD was restarted as part of the update process, without an OS reboot.
There goes three years of catholic school out the window!
Presumably pre-1996 years.
Let's not forget this statement of Momma Merkel comes from the same woman who stated that the "Internet is virgin territory"
In no-longer-Soviet Russia, Internet is Virgin territory!
Well you are very racist!
Methinks somebody is alluding to a certain movie and a certain other movie about the country currently ruled by the son of the character who sung a certain song in that other movie.
I had some opportunity to work with HP-UX (built GnuMake on it for a in-company build/QA system), it was always an interesting and very different beast. Is it still around in any form?
Yes.
Solaris has their own init deamon, SMF. *BSD has their own, in fact Linux is the only one who have used SysVinit for several years now.
Yes, I'm aware of SMF. However, *BSD's init isn't different from traditional init - in fact, it's arguably closer to traditional init than is SysVinit, given that *BSD init is modeled after Research UNIX init, which predates the AT&T run-level-/etc/inittab-based init. They both use rc scripts to launch non-Internet system services, unlike launchd and systemd.
They all do if you count inetd(3).
That launches IP-based services, but I'm thinking of daemons that 1) run as process 1 and 2) launch most if not all services on-demand, rather than having stuff run from rc scripts.
Desktops and servers are hardly the entirety of the world. They don't even dominate it. Ever heard of ARM?
Yes, but I don't see any support for it, or any non-x86 architecture, in the DragonFly BSD source tree, so I don't think DragonFly BSD is that interested in embedded systems.
If Linus felt that way about 32-bit, there would be no Android, or it would have to develop its own kernel. Sheesh. FreeBSD and linux are found in routers and such with very weak CPUs.
So they've made different choices than DragonFly BSD.
Hey, now that the systemd nutters have broken Linux we can go back to calling Unix Unix instead of *nix.
At least one trademarked Unix uses a launch-on-demand-based init daemon, so it's not clear that the use of systemd-the-daemon is sufficient to make Linux not be a Un*x. Maybe systemd-the-software-bundle is sufficient.
What does Unix have to do with the Linux kernel? *nix is used for various "Unixes"
What's a "Unix"?
Is it a system based on AT&T code? If so, how much AT&T code has to still be in it.
Is it a system that passes the Single UNIX Specification test suite and whose supplier is thus allowed to license the "Unix" trademark?
Is it a system with a Unix-compatible API?
formerly also because of possible trademark issues. Linux is not one of them.
Linux is not one of the first types of OS in that list (if there are any bits of code AT&T made publicly available that are in Linux userlands, they're probably small enough not to count), and I know of no Linux distribution that's passed the SUS test suite (unless K-UX is a Linux distribution), so no Linux distribution I know of is one of the second types of OS in that list.
Linux is (or, rather, most Linux distribution are) most definitely one of the third types of OS, and people do speak of those OSes as "Un*xes", at least, even if "*nix" is used only for the first type of OS.
I can't verify the source, but this article suggests the machines will be Power8 based. Assuming these are the machines in question.
No, those machines are being built for the Department of Energy (DoE); NOAA, for whom the machines being discussed in this thread are being built, is part of the Department of Commerce.
I hear ya buddy. We've got a President who doesn't want to do things democratically and we had a major, society-altering law passed whose authors have nothing but contempt for us, the American people.
Yes, a law such as this one, as passed in the GP's country, would have done a better job than the law in question.
The Europeans, that's who. So it's not surprising to find the US in second place...
Behind China, but ahead of Japan and European countries.
So much wrong in just a few sentences.
First, IBM didn't sell it's HPC group, or its Power Systems group.
Correct.
The computer in question wouldn't be made using x86
If the computer in question is the same one mentioned in IBM's 2012 press release, not correct - that speaks of "IBM iDataPlex servers", which are x86 servers, not Power Architecture servers.
Amnesty International has a terrible track record of attacking Western Democracies disproportionately more so than Dictatorships. I guess they like picking on easy targets, instead of actually trying to make a difference. When is the last time we heard them lobby government action in Africa or the Middle-East?
You mean like this, for Syria, or this, for Iraq, and archived campaigns such as this, for South Sudan, and this, for the Central African Republic?
As TFA mentions, IBM just sold its supercomputer division to a Chinese company (Lenovo).
What TFA says is:
The linked article says:
I don't know what "[IBM's] supercomputer division" is, but it's not a division that solely develops and sells x86 servers; they also sell Power Architecture HPC systems.
However, at least in 2012, they spoke of iDataPlex servers for NOAA, so they sold that part of their supercomputer efforts to Lenovo. Whether they'll push for Power Architecture HPC systems for NOAA instead is another matter.
You wouldn't guess from the summary that the article title is "Going up! Cosmic elevator could reach space on a cable made of diamonds".
Breaking news: Slashdot submission headline less hyperbolic than TFA's headline.
In other news, Satan cuts ribbon to celebrate the opening of a new ski resort. Film at 11.
Headline seems a little misleading
That's science "journalism" for you.
since when does the govt issue virus alerts?
Since at least 2009,, possibly earlier.