Thats cool, the rendering looks really nice, but it also looks a little '90s because there isn't any texture mapping on the pieces. Better yet, since texture mapping is sort of a hack, what you need are some really high polygon detailed chess pieces with individual rocks on the rook, faces on the pawns, or enough detail that the pieces look like they have been hand carved out of some substance.
Wolf5k is a raycasting engine, this is diffrent from a ray tracing engine. Early first person view games used ray casting for hidden surface removal because the number of 'rays' cast were limited to the horizontal resolution of the screen. In other words 320 rays for early games like wolf3d. Many older game books have example raycasting engines. The problem was that extending the concept was difficult without loosing the performace. Later BSP trees pretty much removed the whole raycasting method in favor of just culling enough polygons to make a visually workable engine.
Am I a fool for giving up steady work and good pay
Yes, especially if it was just because you hate M$. If you had stayed there long enough to learn C# and then decided it wasn't in your best long term interest that might have been something different. As it is you just lost a perfect opportunity to learn something new and expand your skill set.
Well as someone who has worked for companies trying to ship linux drivers. It takes about 10x the effort in customer support to keep the linux drivers working. On windows, one compile for 2000->2003 generally suffices. Plus an NT, or 98/ME compile is required depending on HW support.
On linux its basically impossible to ship a driver for even a single version of Suse or Redhat because the damn ABI changes so fast. The result is partially open drivers, where a small kernel module is compiled against the running kernel and linked against the closed source part.
In the end this solution works, but you had better be pepared for the email storms and customer support overload everytime the automatic updates in suse break your driver, or the user cannot figure out how to install gcc or some other stupid shit.
Yes, for "high" bandwidth raid 0 disk subsystems. I haven't tested every SGI kernel but the latest kernel sources on their site (which we build for x86) do a much better job of keeping the CPU at reasonable levels during >200 Meg/second writes and non cached reads to/from the disk subsystem. In our case the CPU consumption on a 2x Xeon box goes from 100% and ~200 Megs/second to ~350 megs/second and about 10-20% CPU. That about 80% of the theoretical max for the disk subsystem we are using. In the near future I expect that we will be buying nicer disk subsystems (>600 Megs/sec) which will make the problem even more noticable on stock linux kernels (SUSE, RH, Fedora, kernel.org).
What makes you think the database is CPU-bound instead of I/O-bound?
Because this is slashdot and he is running linux? Every stock (non SGI kernel) linux box i've run in the last year and a half can't sustain more than ~200megs a second without consuming 100% CPU because there is something wrong with the core VM in linux.
This kind of crap comes out every year or two, the x86 is the target for everything to beat, or at least in the eyes of the/. crowd. For some reason people have these biased ideas about the x86 sucking, or some particular arch with a small benefit in one area or another being able to leverage that benefit to completely take over a whole market. Lets see, x86 killers.. the itanium, the ppc, the cellphone (mostly ARM), java, the PS2, going back further the whole group of chips labeled as "RISC" even though after a generation or two non of the RISC chips were RISC. etc...
The x86 is popular because of a number of reasons, each of which may be more important for a particular customer base. Its more a function of being a generalist. It tends to be "good enough" for most general purpose computing needs and its cheap enough, and well understood. Just because some arch comes along that is lower power, faster, higher bandwidth etc.. doesn't mean that it will be able to leverage that one advantage enough to upset the massive installed base of x86's.
Anyway, in this case, having to rewrite all your OS and software doesn't bode well for the Cell processors in becomming the x86 killer, at least not for the next 5-10 years or so.
Or a certain monitor vendor that ships two monitors that are identical except for the little name tag, and the firmware (yes I opened it up and looked to see if I noticed any component diffrences) which keeps one from accepting higher refresh rates.
from the article "We never had a Windows product that was designed for the unique needs of first time users in developing tech markets,"
I sort of figured that "Windows" and "Windows 3.x" would fit the bill there..... After all the US PC market was just catching on about the time windows was initially released. Maybe this is a case of "we learn from our mistakes" but I find it hard to believe that XP can run on a 286...
Damn, I always thought that the init process in linux was the primary problem. Looking at that graph its going to take a lot of work everywhere to get linux booting as fast as XP. It looks like init hasn't even started in the 15 or so seconds it takes my similar XP machine to boot to the start menu.
Hello!!!, there have been "open source" applications on windows for longer than linux has been around. They were just called public domain applications, or in some cases shareware. Pick up an old copy of DDJ from the 1980's and read it.
While the internet has brought up a number of nice projects, some people use windows because it has commercial applicatons. While everyone is arguing about replacing word, what they don't notice is that people use word because it integrates better with visio, or they are using windows because their favorite CAD program runs on it. They may also be using visual studio because it has reasonable context sensitive help. There are literally hundreds of applications that are either much better in windows, or they don't exist in linux.
A lot of people view this linux vs windows crap like the emacs vs vi arguments. With the same kind of attitudes seen between the honda civic driving ricers when talking to people driving corvettes.
can never get a decent, stable distribution running on their [new] desktops.
Yah, linux hasn't really ever run on any of my new home machines and used all the hardware. I've also had the oposite problem. I've tried to run linux on a number of older laptops. The end result is that i had to downgrade to a distribution two or three years newer than the age of the machine. Newer than that, and the installs wouldn't work (memory issues, pcmcia bridge issues, etc, older than that then video cards don't work, or the nic's don't work). On the other hand I've installed XP on K6,Pentium and other crap based laptops without to many problems other than the fact that it takes a long time to install.
I strongly believe Linux will never work on the desktop unless there is a stable *binary* API for both kernel drivers and X video drivers that companies can target. I hear your pain...
Truthfully, i'm not real sure what your problem is. One of the main advantages to palms is that they arn't laptops. By this I mean that UI is pretty inovative realitive to anything elses in the OS market. If you haven't noticed this its probably because of the fact that it is in may regards a lot better than anything else. One of these diffrences is due to the fact that there arn't any "files" on your palm. This means there isn't even a proper file manager. Think about it.... There are lots of other things that result from this, For example the concept of 'saving' your work doesn't exist on the palm. When you enter something its just there. Enter a phone # and turn the thing off, or switch to a diffrent application, when you come back the phone # is right where you left it.
Anyway, saving files to the thing goes against the whole UI concept that your ebook readers know about the ebooks on the machine but nothing about the mp3s. Its sort of like using a Mac and then running linux and bitching about your inability to do anything without dropping to the command line. The enviroments are just diffrent. Each has its strong point.
Now, while i'm a big fan of what I see as the core PalmOS i'm not sure that the people at palm are even aware of its strong points relitive to its weak points. I say this because lately it seems like they are releaseing devices that just don't make sense in the palmos world. I don't need a 200Mhz ARM in my palm to edit phone numbers, read ebooks, and run a calculator, nor does the palm really need that processing power to play Mp3's. It would have been possible to simply add a hardware decoder for a couple of specific features, like playing mp3s, without changing the whole enviroment. On the other hand those nice new 200Mhz arm based units chew through a battery charge so fast that the device isn't useful for me.
It seems to me that the people at palm don't have any real plan at the higher levels of management. There are a lot of markets they could go after, besides the cell phone market. Which is an excelent market to go after since in the future the idea of a PDA will probably combine with a cell phone, but they need to understand that current cell phone users want a cell phone _FIRST_ after that they may want extra PDA like functions. Making a crappy phone with cool features is a bad way to get into the market. Another market they could eat into quickly is the calculator market. The Palm with just a little work would make a significantly better scientific calculator than anything else on the market. So why does palm continue to ship a crappy calculator, and let TI completly own the educational and engineering markets? Or how about the fact that palm could have given every single palm an audio output by default. With a simple hardware mp3 decoder they could have taken part of the standalone fixed memory mp3 player market. Imagine a PDA with wireless access, a calculator competitive with TI's top of the line devices, and the ability to play MP3's all in a package the size of a palm?
Instead it took palm 5 years to discover that a lot of people would like to be able to optionally replace the bottom of the screen with a keyboard type layout, or just use it for screen real estate in games. Even now, they still ship a lot of palms without this basic feature, while every CE device on the market has been able to do that for years.
If someone cah crack your password in 45 to 60 days then you probably need better security rather than having your users change the password every month. That guy is full of shit, and i hate "experts" who are full of shit. If the average is 45 to 60 days there is a good chance that the password will be found in the month between password changes.
If its accually possible for their system to be broken in 45 days then the real problem is probalby the people who are allowing the password hashes to be published, or who are allowing the failed password attempt timeouts to be to short. Without the password hash, it should be pretty much impossible with a 30 second bad password delay and a 30 minuite delay if entered 3 times incorrectly to break that password any time in the near future using brute force methods. Especially if the user id list isn't published. Not only that if your system admin doesn't notice the constant failed password attempts then its even worse. I would be far more concerned about home users computers being comprimized with key loggers, plaintext internal protocols, and users who are using the same password for intranet as well as internet sites masked as intranet sites (The company I work for uses a number of internet sites masked as intranet sites).
I don't have a clue where that 45 day number came from, sounds like something that got pulled out of someones ass. I have a friend who has a reverse password hash running on his machine with a few hundred gigs of storage, given a standard unix password file with weak passwords it can generally find a few matches in a matter of seconds. The moral of the story is keep the hashes and the user id's secret, changing passwords every month or so just sounds like its inviting more people to write their passwords down.
I suspect that you could accually port NT/W2k/XP to this pretty easy without M$'s help. That is if you have a copy or can get a copy of the NT HAL development kit from M$. The kinds of operations that XEN is requiring OS changes for are already in NT as part of the kernel arch, Page insertions, TLB flushes, etc all go through common linked in routines. Unlike in linux where the routines are compiled into the kernel, NT makes calls to HAL.dll which gets linked by ntldr. Accually it probably wouldn't be to hard to do reverse engineer since the whole process is pretty well documented and the functions are public exports from the.dll.
Hello, "big iron" at this point has very little to do with performance and scalablilty. Those are useful but at this point a large number of customers don't need more performance. What they need is "better" performance. Cue.... RAS. Which stands for Reliability, Availability and Serviceability. The last one tends to be the biggest. When your machine starts to act strangely, you want it to help you figure out the problem, not just hang or return bogus results. You also want to be able to test out patches and hardware upgrades without affecting the Availability of the system.
You also want determinism in the way the machine misbehaves. Say something crashes, you don't want to have to deal with the problem that some other part of the system thinks the transaction has been committed to disk, when in reality its sitting in an OS buffer, or a disk buffer and just got erased. You want your memory and system busses to detect that 1 in 1E40th chance that a bit got accidentally flipped happened.
Now testing this kind of stuff is _HARD_ you need ways to inject errors and see if the machine behaves as expected. This is really sort of a joke on/. I cant imagine taking a "big iron" review here seriously. The majority of the crowd that hangs out on/. thinks a cheap desktop PC running linux and MySQL is a replacement for a high end AIX box running DB2. Just because it may perform the same doesn't mean everything is equal. Hell most linux systems don't even have kernel crash dumping enabled. Very few of these machine have ECC and the ones that do 99% of the time end up having the machine either automatically reboot as the NMI fires or the NMI get ignored, rather than handing uncorrectable errors. So much for Servicablity, and with the linux disk caching schemes you can pretty much kiss your reliability good by one crash and your disk may have come back online, but you can't trust the data vs what you told the other end of your transactional system unless you sent a fsync after every write (which btw causes linux to run so slowly its truely amazing).
It doesn't take a million dollars. I've seen some ads for resorts where the guests have "personal hostess". An extra hostess just costs another few hundred to thousand dollars a night more.
I'm willing to bet you could pay a few thousand and get a nice relaxing vacation as well as a night with multiple women if you spent some time looking on google.
Even if it is all produced by oil-burning power plants, the power plant will get FAR more effeciency out of it than your own car's engine ever could, and pollute far less at the same time.
Which is true of conventional vehicles, the new hybrids are within 10% of power plant efficiencies if I remember the sides correctly. Except the problem, with the power plants is that they loose a lot of power in transmition, and then even more power is lost charging batteries. If we were all driving a modified street car type vehicle (powered directly from a line) it might be worth it but the efficiency losses due to charging batteries pretty much flips the equation back in favor of the conventional vehicles.
Like relational consistancy checks? No wonder its so fast, it doesn't validate anything. Where I work we have a couple dozen tables with foreign keys to each other. Mysql will let you enter completly bogus foreign key information, bogus dates that don't exist. You name it.
Sarin gas is a WMD, and you don't need a supertanker full of it for it to be a threat. A single vial the size of your index finger of this stuff can kill hundreds of people. Is that not enough to qualify it as a WMD? If not, what's the lowest limit of deaths you'd accept for a WMD? A thousand? Ten thousand? A million? How many people have to be dead before you'd consider it to actually be a threat?
This almost proves to me that you didn't pay attention in your chemical warfare training. Proper application of chemical weapons is EXTREMELY difficult. Sure a small vial of might be able to kill hundreds, assuming that you give everyone a little snif of the stuff. The truth is that maintaining high enough concentrations to kill anyone requires either a small enclosed area with good circulation, or massive quantites of the gas. This is terribly difficult to achieve. Check out this link.
Since the link you posted isn't working for me. I couldn't check to see what the estimated date of manufacture on this gas they found is. The point is that the sarin that sadam produced in the late 80's is far to old to still be effective, since the estimated shelf life of that stuff was 2 years!
IBM doesn't allow any personally identifiable tokens in the source code. Their official stance is/was that they often times allow 3rd party companies to look at or purcase the source code. When that happens they don't want those companies hiring the authors of particually spectatular pieces of code away from IBM.
The IBM agreement I signed a few years ago, said something like "We own anything you think of that relates to IBM intrests during the time of your employment"
Of course it took about 3 paragraphs to say that. The bottom line is that IBM is huge and has interests in anything with a CPU and a number of things without. If your idea is even remotely something you think they would be interrested in you have two choices. Quit and wait a few months to develop the idea, or try to get IBM to assign the rights to the idea to you. At the time working on open source software was a big no, no if you worked at IBM. I remember a number of my coworkers contributing linux patches using false names.
Slashdot Mirror
Thats cool, the rendering looks really nice, but it also looks a little '90s because there isn't any texture mapping on the pieces. Better yet, since texture mapping is sort of a hack, what you need are some really high polygon detailed chess pieces with individual rocks on the rook, faces on the pawns, or enough detail that the pieces look like they have been hand carved out of some substance.
Yes, "traditional" ploygon painter engines can be setup to work in quadrants. Hence SLI and similar technologies.
Wolf5k is a raycasting engine, this is diffrent from a ray tracing engine. Early first person view games used ray casting for hidden surface removal because the number of 'rays' cast were limited to the horizontal resolution of the screen. In other words 320 rays for early games like wolf3d. Many older game books have example raycasting engines. The problem was that extending the concept was difficult without loosing the performace. Later BSP trees pretty much removed the whole raycasting method in favor of just culling enough polygons to make a visually workable engine.
Yes, especially if it was just because you hate M$. If you had stayed there long enough to learn C# and then decided it wasn't in your best long term interest that might have been something different. As it is you just lost a perfect opportunity to learn something new and expand your skill set.
Well as someone who has worked for companies trying to ship linux drivers. It takes about 10x the effort in customer support to keep the linux drivers working. On windows, one compile for 2000->2003 generally suffices. Plus an NT, or 98/ME compile is required depending on HW support.
On linux its basically impossible to ship a driver for even a single version of Suse or Redhat because the damn ABI changes so fast. The result is partially open drivers, where a small kernel module is compiled against the running kernel and linked against the closed source part.
In the end this solution works, but you had better be pepared for the email storms and customer support overload everytime the automatic updates in suse break your driver, or the user cannot figure out how to install gcc or some other stupid shit.
Yes, for "high" bandwidth raid 0 disk subsystems. I haven't tested every SGI kernel but the latest kernel sources on their site (which we build for x86) do a much better job of keeping the CPU at reasonable levels during >200 Meg/second writes and non cached reads to/from the disk subsystem. In our case the CPU consumption on a 2x Xeon box goes from 100% and ~200 Megs/second to ~350 megs/second and about 10-20% CPU. That about 80% of the theoretical max for the disk subsystem we are using. In the near future I expect that we will be buying nicer disk subsystems (>600 Megs/sec) which will make the problem even more noticable on stock linux kernels (SUSE, RH, Fedora, kernel.org).
Because this is slashdot and he is running linux? Every stock (non SGI kernel) linux box i've run in the last year and a half can't sustain more than ~200megs a second without consuming 100% CPU because there is something wrong with the core VM in linux.
This kind of crap comes out every year or two, the x86 is the target for everything to beat, or at least in the eyes of the /. crowd. For some reason people have these biased ideas about the x86 sucking, or some particular arch with a small benefit in one area or another being able to leverage that benefit to completely take over a whole market. Lets see, x86 killers.. the itanium, the ppc, the cellphone (mostly ARM), java, the PS2, going back further the whole group of chips labeled as "RISC" even though after a generation or two non of the RISC chips were RISC. etc...
The x86 is popular because of a number of reasons, each of which may be more important for a particular customer base. Its more a function of being a generalist. It tends to be "good enough" for most general purpose computing needs and its cheap enough, and well understood. Just because some arch comes along that is lower power, faster, higher bandwidth etc.. doesn't mean that it will be able to leverage that one advantage enough to upset the massive installed base of x86's.
Anyway, in this case, having to rewrite all your OS and software doesn't bode well for the Cell processors in becomming the x86 killer, at least not for the next 5-10 years or so.
Or a certain monitor vendor that ships two monitors that are identical except for the little name tag, and the firmware (yes I opened it up and looked to see if I noticed any component diffrences) which keeps one from accepting higher refresh rates.
I sort of figured that "Windows" and "Windows 3.x" would fit the bill there..... After all the US PC market was just catching on about the time windows was initially released. Maybe this is a case of "we learn from our mistakes" but I find it hard to believe that XP can run on a 286...
They were bought by via as well. The most recent 'Cyrix' chips are acually ITT designs. That is if I remember my history correctly
Damn, I always thought that the init process in linux was the primary problem. Looking at that graph its going to take a lot of work everywhere to get linux booting as fast as XP. It looks like init hasn't even started in the 15 or so seconds it takes my similar XP machine to boot to the start menu.
Hello!!!, there have been "open source" applications on windows for longer than linux has been around. They were just called public domain applications, or in some cases shareware. Pick up an old copy of DDJ from the 1980's and read it.
While the internet has brought up a number of nice projects, some people use windows because it has commercial applicatons. While everyone is arguing about replacing word, what they don't notice is that people use word because it integrates better with visio, or they are using windows because their favorite CAD program runs on it. They may also be using visual studio because it has reasonable context sensitive help. There are literally hundreds of applications that are either much better in windows, or they don't exist in linux.
A lot of people view this linux vs windows crap like the emacs vs vi arguments. With the same kind of attitudes seen between the honda civic driving ricers when talking to people driving corvettes.
Yah, linux hasn't really ever run on any of my new home machines and used all the hardware. I've also had the oposite problem. I've tried to run linux on a number of older laptops. The end result is that i had to downgrade to a distribution two or three years newer than the age of the machine. Newer than that, and the installs wouldn't work (memory issues, pcmcia bridge issues, etc, older than that then video cards don't work, or the nic's don't work). On the other hand I've installed XP on K6,Pentium and other crap based laptops without to many problems other than the fact that it takes a long time to install.
I strongly believe Linux will never work on the desktop unless there is a stable *binary* API for both kernel drivers and X video drivers that companies can target.
I hear your pain...
Truthfully, i'm not real sure what your problem is. One of the main advantages to palms is that they arn't laptops. By this I mean that UI is pretty inovative realitive to anything elses in the OS market. If you haven't noticed this its probably because of the fact that it is in may regards a lot better than anything else. One of these diffrences is due to the fact that there arn't any "files" on your palm. This means there isn't even a proper file manager. Think about it.... There are lots of other things that result from this, For example the concept of 'saving' your work doesn't exist on the palm. When you enter something its just there. Enter a phone # and turn the thing off, or switch to a diffrent application, when you come back the phone # is right where you left it.
Anyway, saving files to the thing goes against the whole UI concept that your ebook readers know about the ebooks on the machine but nothing about the mp3s. Its sort of like using a Mac and then running linux and bitching about your inability to do anything without dropping to the command line. The enviroments are just diffrent. Each has its strong point.
Now, while i'm a big fan of what I see as the core PalmOS i'm not sure that the people at palm are even aware of its strong points relitive to its weak points. I say this because lately it seems like they are releaseing devices that just don't make sense in the palmos world. I don't need a 200Mhz ARM in my palm to edit phone numbers, read ebooks, and run a calculator, nor does the palm really need that processing power to play Mp3's. It would have been possible to simply add a hardware decoder for a couple of specific features, like playing mp3s, without changing the whole enviroment. On the other hand those nice new 200Mhz arm based units chew through a battery charge so fast that the device isn't useful for me.
It seems to me that the people at palm don't have any real plan at the higher levels of management. There are a lot of markets they could go after, besides the cell phone market. Which is an excelent market to go after since in the future the idea of a PDA will probably combine with a cell phone, but they need to understand that current cell phone users want a cell phone _FIRST_ after that they may want extra PDA like functions. Making a crappy phone with cool features is a bad way to get into the market. Another market they could eat into quickly is the calculator market. The Palm with just a little work would make a significantly better scientific calculator than anything else on the market. So why does palm continue to ship a crappy calculator, and let TI completly own the educational and engineering markets? Or how about the fact that palm could have given every single palm an audio output by default. With a simple hardware mp3 decoder they could have taken part of the standalone fixed memory mp3 player market. Imagine a PDA with wireless access, a calculator competitive with TI's top of the line devices, and the ability to play MP3's all in a package the size of a palm?
Instead it took palm 5 years to discover that a lot of people would like to be able to optionally replace the bottom of the screen with a keyboard type layout, or just use it for screen real estate in games. Even now, they still ship a lot of palms without this basic feature, while every CE device on the market has been able to do that for years.
If someone cah crack your password in 45 to 60 days then you probably need better security rather than having your users change the password every month. That guy is full of shit, and i hate "experts" who are full of shit. If the average is 45 to 60 days there is a good chance that the password will be found in the month between password changes.
If its accually possible for their system to be broken in 45 days then the real problem is probalby the people who are allowing the password hashes to be published, or who are allowing the failed password attempt timeouts to be to short. Without the password hash, it should be pretty much impossible with a 30 second bad password delay and a 30 minuite delay if entered 3 times incorrectly to break that password any time in the near future using brute force methods. Especially if the user id list isn't published. Not only that if your system admin doesn't notice the constant failed password attempts then its even worse. I would be far more concerned about home users computers being comprimized with key loggers, plaintext internal protocols, and users who are using the same password for intranet as well as internet sites masked as intranet sites (The company I work for uses a number of internet sites masked as intranet sites).
I don't have a clue where that 45 day number came from, sounds like something that got pulled out of someones ass. I have a friend who has a reverse password hash running on his machine with a few hundred gigs of storage, given a standard unix password file with weak passwords it can generally find a few matches in a matter of seconds. The moral of the story is keep the hashes and the user id's secret, changing passwords every month or so just sounds like its inviting more people to write their passwords down.
Hmmm glad its not just me. I had an old AdvFs file system eat itself for lunch not more than a couple of months ago...
I suspect that you could accually port NT/W2k/XP to this pretty easy without M$'s help. That is if you have a copy or can get a copy of the NT HAL development kit from M$. The kinds of operations that XEN is requiring OS changes for are already in NT as part of the kernel arch, Page insertions, TLB flushes, etc all go through common linked in routines. Unlike in linux where the routines are compiled into the kernel, NT makes calls to HAL.dll which gets linked by ntldr. Accually it probably wouldn't be to hard to do reverse engineer since the whole process is pretty well documented and the functions are public exports from the .dll.
Hello, "big iron" at this point has very little to do with performance and scalablilty. Those are useful but at this point a large number of customers don't need more performance. What they need is "better" performance. Cue.... RAS. Which stands for Reliability, Availability and Serviceability. The last one tends to be the biggest. When your machine starts to act strangely, you want it to help you figure out the problem, not just hang or return bogus results. You also want to be able to test out patches and hardware upgrades without affecting the Availability of the system.
You also want determinism in the way the machine misbehaves. Say something crashes, you don't want to have to deal with the problem that some other part of the system thinks the transaction has been committed to disk, when in reality its sitting in an OS buffer, or a disk buffer and just got erased. You want your memory and system busses to detect that 1 in 1E40th chance that a bit got accidentally flipped happened.
Now testing this kind of stuff is _HARD_ you need ways to inject errors and see if the machine behaves as expected. This is really sort of a joke on /. I cant imagine taking a "big iron" review here seriously. The majority of the crowd that hangs out on /. thinks a cheap desktop PC running linux and MySQL is a replacement for a high end AIX box running DB2. Just because it may perform the same doesn't mean everything is equal. Hell most linux systems don't even have kernel crash dumping enabled. Very few of these machine have ECC and the ones that do 99% of the time end up having the machine either automatically reboot as the NMI fires or the NMI get ignored, rather than handing uncorrectable errors. So much for Servicablity, and with the linux disk caching schemes you can pretty much kiss your reliability good by one crash and your disk may have come back online, but you can't trust the data vs what you told the other end of your transactional system unless you sent a fsync after every write (which btw causes linux to run so slowly its truely amazing).
It doesn't take a million dollars. I've seen some ads for resorts where the guests have "personal hostess". An extra hostess just costs another few hundred to thousand dollars a night more.
I'm willing to bet you could pay a few thousand and get a nice relaxing vacation as well as a night with multiple women if you spent some time looking on google.
Which is true of conventional vehicles, the new hybrids are within 10% of power plant efficiencies if I remember the sides correctly. Except the problem, with the power plants is that they loose a lot of power in transmition, and then even more power is lost charging batteries. If we were all driving a modified street car type vehicle (powered directly from a line) it might be worth it but the efficiency losses due to charging batteries pretty much flips the equation back in favor of the conventional vehicles.
Like relational consistancy checks? No wonder its so fast, it doesn't validate anything. Where I work we have a couple dozen tables with foreign keys to each other. Mysql will let you enter completly bogus foreign key information, bogus dates that don't exist. You name it.
This almost proves to me that you didn't pay attention in your chemical warfare training. Proper application of chemical weapons is EXTREMELY difficult. Sure a small vial of might be able to kill hundreds, assuming that you give everyone a little snif of the stuff. The truth is that maintaining high enough concentrations to kill anyone requires either a small enclosed area with good circulation, or massive quantites of the gas. This is terribly difficult to achieve. Check out this link.
Since the link you posted isn't working for me. I couldn't check to see what the estimated date of manufacture on this gas they found is. The point is that the sarin that sadam produced in the late 80's is far to old to still be effective, since the estimated shelf life of that stuff was 2 years!
IBM doesn't allow any personally identifiable tokens in the source code. Their official stance is/was that they often times allow 3rd party companies to look at or purcase the source code. When that happens they don't want those companies hiring the authors of particually spectatular pieces of code away from IBM.
The IBM agreement I signed a few years ago, said something like "We own anything you think of that relates to IBM intrests during the time of your employment"
Of course it took about 3 paragraphs to say that. The bottom line is that IBM is huge and has interests in anything with a CPU and a number of things without. If your idea is even remotely something you think they would be interrested in you have two choices. Quit and wait a few months to develop the idea, or try to get IBM to assign the rights to the idea to you. At the time working on open source software was a big no, no if you worked at IBM. I remember a number of my coworkers contributing linux patches using false names.