Working with Pournelle
on
Ask Larry Niven
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· Score: 4, Interesting
One of my favourite books is "The Mote in God's Eye" (written by you and Jerry Pournelle). . I'm very interested in knowing how do you and Pournelle split the work (no only in this book but in general). Is anybody in charge of the dialogs ? Do you have a preference to create certain situations that he doesn't like (or viceversa) ? How do you decide the course of a story, etc.
At work we've been using for a couple of years ACE with excellent results. It's prepared from the ground up to deal with networking, multithreading, concurrency, etc, it's extensively cross-platform, open-source, cost-free, there's QT support ( although I've never used that part ), etc.
I don't agree with some of the comments that say that it's cumbersome and difficult. It's extremely simple to use, and because of the massive use of patternas, you can concentrate in what is your application supposed to do instead of "How can I spawn three thread that communicates with each other, one services a FIFO queue, the other connects t a server and the last one serves a TCP socket?". ACE handles all of that for you.
We work with Solaris, pSOS, Win32 and vxWorks, and our code compiles in each one of these platforms without a glitch.
There's a very good book called "The Grid: blueprint for a new computing infrastructure" that describes the grid concept, its future and many of its possibles application. It's basically a collection of papers written by the main people behind this. I don't have a link at hand, but I'm sure Amazon has it. Is a very expensive book, so I borrowed it from my university library.
I remember a seminar that I attended at the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center regarding Globus and the Grid, and thinking "uau, THIS is the future of computing". It was presented by people from NCSA ( National Center for Supercomputing Applications ) who were extremely knowledgeable and open to all kind of questions. Among other things ( 3 days of seminar ) they showed how they connected multiple Crays and SGI Origin computer across the world that were running Globus ( one from Germany, one from PSC and I believe one from UCSD or NCSA ) for a real-time calculation for a phyical experiment.
The Cray T3E at PSC that was installed after "Mario" is called "Jaromir", like Jaromir Jagr, the current Penguin's star. I'm wondering which name are they gonna put to the new Compaq machine ( "Straka" maybe ? ).
Care to give more information ? I'm flying tomorrow to Chicago to find an apartment ( I'll begin worjking there very soon ) and I'd like to get an apartment with a high-speed connection.
So, the article says that SGI did a demonstration with Itanium chips. Is this true ? I thought that Itanium was only available in simulators ( that's how they're developing Linux/IA-64 ), no silicone yet.
1 - the SGi hardware is amazing. They make some of the finest machines available ( Octane 2000, O2 ), and they achieve a level of parallelism that Linux still dreams about ( in an allways undervalued Irix machine )
2 - their contributions to Linux have been very good and well received. KDBG is a very useful tool, and coupled with LKCD will make kernel and driver development a lot easier. GLX iwill be used in XFree86 4.0, they're working in the Linux for Merced port, etc.
3 - OS scalability: have you ever heard of IRIX and its support of more than 64 CPUs ?
4 - PROVEN fact that Linux never crashes is bullshit. It's just an OS like any other that can also crash, in partiuclar during development releases. I'm doing multiprocessor research on it and today I made it crash twice. I like Linux very much, but I try to keep my eyes open.
Finally, what have you done for Linux lately ? SGI has been supporting Linux constantly during this last year, and they don't deserve to be treated this way ( remember, there're people hard working there that contributes their code under the GPL )
Enough, you don't even deserve my time answering your stupid post. Go back to your perl scripts ( or was it VB ? ).
Last time that I heard of, the "debug" portion of the IDE was accomplished by launching DDD ( an excellent debugger by the way ); I don't count that as "integrated debugger". In fact, after exchanging a couple of e-mails with s Metrowerks technician, and finding that there wasn't even a symbol browser or reference cross-indexing, I decided not to purchase it. Have they finally at least integrate a debugger ?
And last: what the hell are these ads about "girls eating scorpions" doing in Slashdot. Rob, I though that you were *still* in control. What's next, porn ads ?
Poll: which is OSC best book ?
on
Ender's Shadow
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· Score: 1
OK, maybe best is too much ( who am I to decide ) , but my favorite OSC book is "Red Prophet", the second in the Alvin Maker saga ( even more than "Ender's Game" and "Speaker of the Dead" ). I think that the way he manages to tells the story and presents the characters is superb. Another very close second could be "Songbird", the story of a boy who grows up destined to be the singer in the court of an emperor. There's something almost magical in that story. Snif !! I think I'm going to Barnes&Noble and get a couple of OSC books to pass this weekend.
I've used QNX for more than 3 years, and it's exceptionally good ( very, very fast, and more important, predictably ). However, plan-9 and QNX are totally unrelated. QNX is from a canadian company, QNX Software ( formerly QSL or Quantum Systems ), while plan-9 is from Lucent Labs ( the child of Ken Thompson, who created UNIX some time ago:-). QNX is the child of Dan Hildebrand, who recently passed away. On the other side, a former professor of mine who's now living in Canada told me that everybody is ditching out microkernels ( seems that in a message passing microkernel like QNX there's a HUGE amount of overhead ). Me, I don't know, I have enough problems modifying the SMP part in Linux right now. I've also worked with RT-Mach, and yes, it's a microkernel ( with a UX-server on top of it ).
Now, that depends on your provider. I have ADSL from Bell Atlantic ( they ran a promotion last month ), and including ISP, they're charging me 50 u$s per month. They charge 50 u$s for the modem but they have a 50 $ rebate ( so it's 0$ ). The only catch is that you must agree to one year service ( you have a 30 day-trial period though). Now, I don;t know if other Bell Atlantic customer is reading this, but up to now I'm very happy with the service. And yes, I also hope that they'll not try to change my modem at the end of the year for the new ones.
I preferred from all the moveis the first one, the concept of "V'ger" ( a lost Voyager probe ) coming back without remembering its human origins, was superb. Saying that, I think one of the most laughable moments in STIV ( Voyage home ) was when Scottie asked a computer on Earth ( I think it was a Mac ) to get some records. Of course, he talked to the computer but the computer NIL. Then, I think it was Kirk, pointed to the mouse, and Scottie said "Oh, yes !" or similar, grabbed it, and using it as a microphone, asked again for the records:-)
Hi, maybe somebody in slashdot could answer me this. I've suscribed recently to Bell Atlantic DSL service, and as part of that, they gave me a static IP address. Now, I would like to register my own domain ( lets say hugui.org ) and I don't know exactly what are the steps. I know that I have to check I think in that place called NSI, pay like 70+ u$s for 2 years, etc, but then they ask me which DNS is going to resolve my name, etc, and I have no idea how to deal with this. Anybody knows what is required ?
Slashdot Mirror
One of my favourite books is "The Mote in God's Eye" (written by you and Jerry Pournelle). . I'm very interested in knowing how do you and Pournelle split the work (no only in this book but in general). Is anybody in charge of the dialogs ? Do you have a preference to create certain situations that he doesn't like (or viceversa) ? How do you decide the course of a story, etc.
At work we've been using for a couple of years ACE with excellent results. It's prepared from the ground up to deal with networking, multithreading, concurrency, etc, it's extensively cross-platform, open-source, cost-free, there's QT support ( although I've never used that part ), etc.
I don't agree with some of the comments that say that it's cumbersome and difficult. It's extremely simple to use, and because of the massive use of patternas, you can concentrate in what is your application supposed to do instead of "How can I spawn three thread that communicates with each other, one services a FIFO queue, the other connects t a server and the last one serves a TCP socket?". ACE handles all of that for you.
We work with Solaris, pSOS, Win32 and vxWorks, and our code compiles in each one of these platforms without a glitch.
http://www.cs.wustl.edu/~schmidt/ACE.html
There's a very good book called "The Grid: blueprint for a new computing infrastructure" that describes the grid concept, its future and many of its possibles application. It's basically a collection of papers written by the main people behind this. I don't have a link at hand, but I'm sure Amazon has it. Is a very expensive book, so I borrowed it from my university library.
I remember a seminar that I attended at the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center regarding Globus and the Grid, and thinking "uau, THIS is the future of computing". It was presented by people from NCSA ( National Center for Supercomputing Applications ) who were extremely knowledgeable and open to all kind of questions. Among other things ( 3 days of seminar ) they showed how they connected multiple Crays and SGI Origin computer across the world that were running Globus ( one from Germany, one from PSC and I believe one from UCSD or NCSA ) for a real-time calculation for a phyical experiment.
The Cray T3E at PSC that was installed after "Mario" is called "Jaromir", like Jaromir Jagr, the current Penguin's star. I'm wondering which name are they gonna put to the new Compaq machine ( "Straka" maybe ? ).
Care to give more information ? I'm flying tomorrow to Chicago to find an apartment ( I'll begin worjking there very soon ) and I'd like to get an apartment with a high-speed connection.
Thanks
So, the article says that SGI did a demonstration with Itanium chips. Is this true ? I thought that Itanium was only available in simulators ( that's how they're developing Linux/IA-64 ), no silicone yet.
Anybody care to elaborate ?
Oh boy, are you the same AC of yesterday ? Why do I have to allways catch your comments ( and so late in the night ) ?
Stop dreaming, stop smoking, and above all, please stop criticizing if you have no idea what you're talking about.
sheessh, I have so many experiments to run and I'm wasting my time on you ( bad, bad boy ).
Hey AC, why don't you get your facts right ?
1 - the SGi hardware is amazing. They make some of the finest machines available ( Octane 2000, O2 ), and they achieve a level of parallelism that Linux still dreams about ( in an allways undervalued Irix machine )
2 - their contributions to Linux have been very good and well received. KDBG is a very useful tool, and coupled with LKCD will make kernel and driver development a lot easier. GLX iwill be used in XFree86 4.0, they're working in the Linux for Merced port, etc.
3 - OS scalability: have you ever heard of IRIX and its support of more than 64 CPUs ?
4 - PROVEN fact that Linux never crashes is bullshit. It's just an OS like any other that can also crash, in partiuclar during development releases. I'm doing multiprocessor research on it and today I made it crash twice. I like Linux very much, but I try to keep my eyes open.
Finally, what have you done for Linux lately ? SGI has been supporting Linux constantly during this last year, and they don't deserve to be treated this way ( remember, there're people hard working there that contributes their code under the GPL )
Enough, you don't even deserve my time answering your stupid post. Go back to your perl scripts ( or was it VB ? ).
and acording to NASA's Goldin, it's "faster, better, cheaper", although I doubt that a Pentium III will go to space in the near future ;-)
Last time that I heard of, the "debug" portion of the IDE was accomplished by launching DDD ( an excellent debugger by the way ); I don't count that as "integrated debugger". In fact, after exchanging a couple of e-mails with s Metrowerks technician, and finding that there wasn't even a symbol browser or reference cross-indexing, I decided not to purchase it.
Have they finally at least integrate a debugger ?
And last: what the hell are these ads about "girls eating scorpions" doing in Slashdot. Rob, I though that you were *still* in control. What's next, porn ads ?
OK, maybe best is too much ( who am I to decide ) , but my favorite OSC book is "Red Prophet", the second in the Alvin Maker saga ( even more than "Ender's Game" and "Speaker of the Dead" ). I think that the way he manages to tells the story and presents the characters is superb.
Another very close second could be "Songbird", the story of a boy who grows up destined to be the singer in the court of an emperor. There's something almost magical in that story.
Snif !! I think I'm going to Barnes&Noble and get a couple of OSC books to pass this weekend.
I've used QNX for more than 3 years, and it's exceptionally good ( very, very fast, and more important, predictably ). However, plan-9 and QNX are totally unrelated. QNX is from a canadian company, QNX Software ( formerly QSL or Quantum Systems ), while plan-9 is from Lucent Labs ( the child of Ken Thompson, who created UNIX some time ago :-). QNX is the child of Dan Hildebrand, who recently passed away.
On the other side, a former professor of mine who's now living in Canada told me that everybody is ditching out microkernels ( seems that in a message passing microkernel like QNX there's a HUGE amount of overhead ).
Me, I don't know, I have enough problems modifying the SMP part in Linux right now.
I've also worked with RT-Mach, and yes, it's a microkernel ( with a UX-server on top of it ).
Now, that depends on your provider. I have ADSL from Bell Atlantic ( they ran a promotion last month ), and including ISP, they're charging me 50 u$s per month. They charge 50 u$s for the modem but they have a 50 $ rebate ( so it's 0$ ). The only catch is that you must agree to one year service ( you have a 30 day-trial period though).
Now, I don;t know if other Bell Atlantic customer is reading this, but up to now I'm very happy with the service. And yes, I also hope that they'll not try to change my modem at the end of the year for the new ones.
I preferred from all the moveis the first one, the concept of "V'ger" ( a lost Voyager probe ) coming back without remembering its human origins, was superb. :-)
Saying that, I think one of the most laughable moments in STIV ( Voyage home ) was when Scottie asked a computer on Earth ( I think it was a Mac ) to get some records. Of course, he talked to the computer but the computer NIL. Then, I think it was Kirk, pointed to the mouse, and Scottie said "Oh, yes !" or similar, grabbed it, and using it as a microphone, asked again for the records
Hi, maybe somebody in slashdot could answer me this. I've suscribed recently to Bell Atlantic DSL service, and as part of that, they gave me a static IP address. Now, I would like to register my own domain ( lets say hugui.org ) and I don't know exactly what are the steps. I know that I have to check I think in that place called NSI, pay like 70+ u$s for 2 years, etc, but then they ask me which DNS is going to resolve my name, etc, and I have no idea how to deal with this.
Anybody knows what is required ?