Some of us got bitchslapped for arguing too vehemently with "sensible" pro-Microsoft self-styled experts and other pointy-hairs. Now we lead an amazing double life with excellent karma and lots of fans...
Apple's BIOS is an implementation of Open Firmware as used on Sun's and IBM's hardware too. It's a FORTH system, and believe it or not, there's one for the PeeCee and because it's a byte-code interpreter, code is portable across platforms.
Anyway, what does anyone care? This is Slashdot, and the facts are irrelevant.
And why do I post at 0 when my karma is "excellent?"
Someone with a clue (who, incidentally all the slashbots are calling a troll). This is more luike, it, a more relevant question. 32-bit processors are going the way of the dodo on the desktop. I think that if you go to www.spec.org the AMD beats every other 64-bit processor hands down over all, including UltraSPARC, MIPS. PA-RISC, itanic. PowerPC G5 (etc.). SPARC64, Alpha (RIP)....
But don't listen to me. I'm not an IBM fanboy and I've been bitchslapped.
I don't suppose you've ever looked at the ReactOS kernel? Would I get an education into NT's threading model by looking at that, or is it not the same?
An Oxbridge education means nothing but a school tie or a nod towards egalitarianism by taking on a fixed quota of students from state-run comprehensives.
"So you think your second hand account of some unspecified lecturer's opinions on O/S internals gives you the authority to pontificate on the issue?"
Well, from what he said, NT was nearly there, but not quite. It does have an advanced threading model.
"I have first hand experience of VMS, NT and Unix internals. I suspect that either the lecturer was as opinionated as yourself, or more likely you didn't spend very much time listening to him either."
Opinionated is my middle name. However, I have to take his word for it. The guy is very experience in such matters and has written a lot of kernel-level networking code.
"As for being a troll, if as you claim you are at Karma 50 and post at zero it sounds to me if a member of the slashcrew has come to an uncomplimentary opinion of you."
Exactly my point. I have an uncomplementary opinion of them too. I suspect that your mouth is also larger than your brain. I have a new account from which I post non-controversial opinions. I'll keep this one for speaking my mind (what's left of it).
As for hypercubes, we had an old order-7 one (128 processors) and a new order -5 one(32 processors) which was actually faster. It was shared between the maths,physics and engineering departments. Then there was something completely different - the Paramid. It was a pyramid configuration and each node contained an i860 (intel's first 64-bit chip) for the fast maths and a T8000 (transputer) for inter-node communication. But I'm showing my age.
"MIT LCS and AI Labs, if they can't get Solaris to work properly without spending a week doing it the problem is the o/s vendor. "
I don't know, I've seen some Astrophysics professors who can't use a telephone...
"You can't build a hypercube from a device with 4 links, its a geometric fact that you need 2 links per dimension."
Er, um, ncube used to make some. I think they had some additional hardware.
"I did use Transputers, including some of the 1000+ node machines. Perhaps if you had some experience of the machines you are ignorantly blathering about your posts would not get modded down. " My posts get modded down because I am not an IBM sycophant like half the trolls on here. Now you really are flame-baiting!
"Clearly from the tone of your post you don't like Windows, I have great difficulty therefore in believing that you have spent such a great deal of time examining the WNT internals that you can come up with such an assessment."
I spent absolutely zero time studying the NT internals, however my lectured did and he gave us quite a comprehensive description of NT, VMS, Solaris, SysV R3 SysV R4 and some of the really old stuff.
So I reckon you're just a very subtle troll. Sorry you had to result to name-calling and I've got wound up and taken you up on it.
I've been bitch-slapped, so I've got nothing to loose. Karma 50 and still posting at zero! Put that in your pipe and smoke it, lacky boy!
"Slowlaris, oh yes, I had Sun sell me that when it was still a real heap of junk. Took the sysadmin a day each to configure four machines. He never did manage to get the multimedia (sound, video camera) features to work, nor had anyone else in the building."
Get yourself a decent admin.
"You might have heard of it, 545 Technology Square Cambs, Mass."
Nope. Should I?
"Even exotic MIMD machines don't do that when
they are purpose built for the application."
What, like itanic?:-)
"If Intel are right and they can provide 10 times the performance per processor over Sun then Windows need only run on 16 processors to kick Sun's ass."
So, you believe intel's FUD and marketroids. UltraSAPRC isn't the best on sheer processing power but it's a mature 64-bit platform. Intel has managed to hoodwink everyone else into killing off their (working) 64-bit architectures (PA-RISC, Alpha, MIPS) for some vague promise of Jam Tomorrow(TM) with itanic.
As for hypercubes, the ones I saw were Transputer machines. Never wrote any code for them though. They only let me loose on the VAX cluster with 10 lines of FORTRAN *puke*.
"As you will note in my original post I differentiated the architectural contributions of Ken Thomson and co from later developers who just had the misfortune to start from the constraints of their design"
The design is quite old, but, you know, it's all about presenting a POSIX/SUS etc. front end to the world. Internally virtually all moder UNIXes share about 0% in common with the original UNIX.
"It is possible to get a UNIX shell to run on a machine whose internal architecture bears little resemblance to UNIX."
Quite. However, a shell does not an operating system make. A shell is just an application as far as the OS is concerned, and if you're talking about Free and Open SOurce shells, well they've been _designed_ to be portable. You're not surely suggesting that OS/2+bash == UNIX?
Other than that, I fear that you have ben had by Microsoft's FUD too. There is a famous quote : "Those who do not understan UNIX are condemned to reinvent it - poorly." If you study the internal architecture of NT you will find that, despite M$'s continual assertions that UNIX is dead, outmoded etc. etc., they have come up with a kernel that, with every new release, is looking more and more like some of the big commercial UNIX kernels of 5-10 years ago.
I'd rather not drop below 0, as I can't be bothered to trawl through all those "howto to (something rude) for Linux Weenies" and other such posts. And another thing, how do you get to post at > 0?
"To port to a new 64-bit arch. with modern compilers and libs, it's not much more difficult than a recompile.
If you have nice 64 bit clean code that may be the case. The problem is that most people don't start from good code and even if they have tried to keep the code base clean they may not have succeeded."
Well, yes, especially if they have been unfortunate enough to have to develop their code for NT. I'm not talking about desktop apps here, I'm referring to man-size ones like Oracle, SAP, etc.
"But remember that WNT has already been ported to a 64 bit architecture (Alpha)..."
Er, yes, but in the 32-bit mode of the Alpha processor, so it was still a 32-bit OS.
"and although WNT is no longer supported on
Alpha you have to believe that the compiler rules are still in place to detect code that is not 64 bit clean. "
Please refer to my point above. NT never ran 64-bit on Alpha or Mips. These chips had compatibility modes for running legacy 32-bit code, in which NT ran, much the same was as AMD Hammer (Opteron) has a 32-bit compatability mode so you can run your legacy 32-bit OS while you wait for a 64-bit one to come along.
Maybe the real point is it might give us a new, reliable, inexpensive, _compatible_ data storage medium, and higer capacity to boot. How many different DVD "standards" are there?
Anyway, I'm sure this development is "evil, communist, unamerican, only for pirates and terrorists etc."
"When it comes to the 'architectural features' required to make a multiprocessor machine work fast the cards are all with Microsoft. WNT was designed to work well on multiprocessor platforms and the design team were mainly DEC ex-VMS people who had a lot of experience in that area."
So, you've never heard of Solaris, then? Maybe you should study Solaris internals and you would realise that, although WinNT may be better in some respects than many older OSs, Solaris kicks its ass clean out of the arena. Solaris has an extremely sophisticated internal threading model and scales nearly perfectly linearly to over 100 processors. It's lean and clean. Can you say the same of NT? What iron has NT ever run on with more that 16/32 processors? Have you ever seen the performance tests of NT scaling on such hardware? I think the line is, any more that 4 processors and you just bought a load of useless processors.
Solars is _the_ most advanced UNIX.
Yes, I know NT was designed by the VMS guys, but M$ ruined it post NT3.51 by putting a load of crap to appeal to gamers inside the kernel that shouldn't have been there. That sacrificed reliability and portability.
I hear what you say about the IBM mainframe stuff. We used to track our nuclear fuel inventry/fuel cycle on a 360....
Even Linux is catching up in terms of multi-processor scalability.
The point is, NT (2k, XP etc.) still doesn't have the features you want from an enterprise-class OS and it's a good 5 years behind Linux, let alone Solaris.
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Anyone know where I can get a free (or cheap and paid anonymously with cash) shell account overseas where I can SSH in and compile/run TOR?
Why, comrade? Are you a paedophile or a terrorist?
Oh goody. Here in Blighty we could probably get them under the Trades Descriptions Act :-)
Some of us got bitchslapped for arguing too vehemently with "sensible" pro-Microsoft self-styled experts and other pointy-hairs. Now we lead an amazing double life with excellent karma and lots of fans...
Said Henry's cat, what goes round comes around.
Or OK or Hello!
This is a man who is big enough to rise above pettiness. He need not deride Microsoft, for the world already knows.
This is what Apple's BIOS contains.
Anyway, what does anyone care? This is Slashdot, and the facts are irrelevant.
And why do I post at 0 when my karma is "excellent?"
Don't forget this stuff too.
This is humourous and illustrates a point! Well done that man :-)
But don't listen to me. I'm not an IBM fanboy and I've been bitchslapped.
Stephen Fry?! Is that you? My hero! :-)
If only they'd give me mod points! +5 Insightful. I've been bitchslapped
What a lot of bullshit. Some people will believe anything.
Just one more thing:
I don't suppose you've ever looked at the ReactOS kernel? Would I get an education into NT's threading model by looking at that, or is it not the same?
...and another thing, doesn't Microsoft donate substantial amounts of money to the Oxbridge universities, or was it just Cambridge?
An Oxbridge education means nothing but a school tie or a nod towards egalitarianism by taking on a fixed quota of students from state-run comprehensives.
Good, I've got the politics off my chest now.
"So you think your second hand account of some unspecified lecturer's opinions on O/S internals gives you the authority to pontificate on the issue?"
Well, from what he said, NT was nearly there, but not quite. It does have an advanced threading model.
"I have first hand experience of VMS, NT and Unix internals. I suspect that either the lecturer was as opinionated as yourself, or more likely you didn't spend very much time listening to him either."
Opinionated is my middle name. However, I have to take his word for it. The guy is very experience in such matters and has written a lot of kernel-level networking code.
"As for being a troll, if as you claim you are at Karma 50 and post at zero it sounds to me if a member of the slashcrew has come to an uncomplimentary opinion of you."
Exactly my point. I have an uncomplementary opinion of them too. I suspect that your mouth is also larger than your brain. I have a new account from which I post non-controversial opinions. I'll keep this one for speaking my mind (what's left of it).
This correspondence is now closed.
As for hypercubes, we had an old order-7 one (128 processors) and a new order -5 one(32 processors) which was actually faster. It was shared between the maths,physics and engineering departments.
Then there was something completely different - the Paramid. It was a pyramid configuration and each node contained an i860 (intel's first 64-bit chip) for the fast maths and a T8000 (transputer) for inter-node communication.
But I'm showing my age.
"MIT LCS and AI Labs, if they can't get Solaris to work properly without spending a week doing it the problem is the o/s vendor. "
I don't know, I've seen some Astrophysics professors who can't use a telephone...
"You can't build a hypercube from a device with 4 links, its a geometric fact that you need 2 links per dimension."
Er, um, ncube used to make some. I think they had some additional hardware.
"I did use Transputers, including some of the 1000+ node machines. Perhaps if you had some experience of the machines you are ignorantly blathering about your posts would not get modded down. "
My posts get modded down because I am not an IBM sycophant like half the trolls on here. Now you really are flame-baiting!
"Clearly from the tone of your post you don't like Windows, I have great difficulty therefore in believing that you have spent such a great deal of time examining the WNT internals that you can come up with such an assessment."
I spent absolutely zero time studying the NT internals, however my lectured did and he gave us quite a comprehensive description of NT, VMS, Solaris, SysV R3 SysV R4 and some of the really old stuff.
So I reckon you're just a very subtle troll. Sorry you had to result to name-calling and I've got wound up and taken you up on it.
I've been bitch-slapped, so I've got nothing to loose. Karma 50 and still posting at zero!
Put that in your pipe and smoke it, lacky boy!
"Slowlaris, oh yes, I had Sun sell me that when it was still a real heap of junk. Took the sysadmin a day each to configure four machines. He never did manage to get the multimedia (sound, video camera)
:-)
features to work, nor had anyone else in the building."
Get yourself a decent admin.
"You might have heard of it, 545 Technology Square Cambs, Mass."
Nope. Should I?
"Even exotic MIMD machines don't do that when
they are purpose built for the application."
What, like itanic?
"If Intel are right and they can provide 10 times the performance per processor over Sun then Windows need only run on 16 processors to kick Sun's ass."
So, you believe intel's FUD and marketroids. UltraSAPRC isn't the best on sheer processing power but it's a mature 64-bit platform. Intel has managed to hoodwink everyone else into killing off their (working) 64-bit architectures (PA-RISC, Alpha, MIPS) for some vague promise of Jam Tomorrow(TM) with itanic.
As for hypercubes, the ones I saw were Transputer machines. Never wrote any code for them though. They only let me loose on the VAX cluster with 10 lines of FORTRAN *puke*.
"As you will note in my original post I differentiated the architectural contributions of Ken Thomson and co from later developers who just had the misfortune to start from the constraints of their design"
The design is quite old, but, you know, it's all about presenting a POSIX/SUS etc. front end to the world. Internally virtually all moder UNIXes share about 0% in common with the original UNIX.
"It is possible to get a UNIX shell to run on a machine whose internal architecture bears little resemblance to UNIX."
Quite. However, a shell does not an operating system make. A shell is just an application as far as the OS is concerned, and if you're talking about Free and Open SOurce shells, well they've been _designed_ to be portable. You're not surely suggesting that OS/2+bash == UNIX?
Other than that, I fear that you have ben had by Microsoft's FUD too. There is a famous quote : "Those who do not understan UNIX are condemned to reinvent it - poorly." If you study the internal architecture of NT you will find that, despite M$'s continual assertions that UNIX is dead, outmoded etc. etc., they have come up with a kernel that, with every new release, is looking more and more like some of the big commercial UNIX kernels of 5-10 years ago.
I'd rather not drop below 0, as I can't be bothered to trawl through all those "howto to (something rude) for Linux Weenies" and other such posts. And another thing, how do you get to post at > 0?
"To port to a new 64-bit arch. with modern compilers and libs, it's not much more difficult than a recompile.
If you have nice 64 bit clean code that may be the case. The problem is that most people don't start from good code and even if they have tried to keep the code base clean they may not have succeeded."
Well, yes, especially if they have been unfortunate enough to have to develop their code for NT. I'm not talking about desktop apps here, I'm referring to man-size ones like Oracle, SAP, etc.
"But remember that WNT has already been ported to a 64 bit architecture (Alpha)..."
Er, yes, but in the 32-bit mode of the Alpha processor, so it was still a 32-bit OS.
"and although WNT is no longer supported on
Alpha you have to believe that the compiler rules are still in place to detect code that is not 64 bit clean. "
Please refer to my point above.
NT never ran 64-bit on Alpha or Mips. These chips had compatibility modes for running legacy 32-bit code, in which NT ran, much the same was as AMD Hammer (Opteron) has a 32-bit compatability mode so you can run your legacy 32-bit OS while you wait for a 64-bit one to come along.
Maybe the real point is it might give us a new, reliable, inexpensive, _compatible_ data storage medium, and higer capacity to boot. How many different DVD "standards" are there?
Anyway, I'm sure this development is "evil, communist, unamerican, only for pirates and terrorists etc."
Let's see what the RIAA and MPAA have to say...
"When it comes to the 'architectural features' required to make a multiprocessor machine work fast the cards are all with Microsoft. WNT was designed to work well on multiprocessor platforms and the design team were mainly DEC ex-VMS people who had a lot of experience in that area."
So, you've never heard of Solaris, then? Maybe you should study Solaris internals and you would realise that, although WinNT may be better in some respects than many older OSs, Solaris kicks its ass clean out of the arena. Solaris has an extremely sophisticated internal threading model and scales nearly perfectly linearly to over 100 processors. It's lean and clean. Can you say the same of NT? What iron has NT ever run on with more that 16/32 processors? Have you ever seen the performance tests of NT scaling on such hardware? I think the line is, any more that 4 processors and you just bought a load of useless processors.
Solars is _the_ most advanced UNIX.
Yes, I know NT was designed by the VMS guys, but M$ ruined it post NT3.51 by putting a load of crap to appeal to gamers inside the kernel that shouldn't have been there. That sacrificed reliability and portability.
I hear what you say about the IBM mainframe stuff. We used to track our nuclear fuel inventry/fuel cycle on a 360....
Even Linux is catching up in terms of multi-processor scalability.
The point is, NT (2k, XP etc.) still doesn't have the features you want from an enterprise-class OS and it's a good 5 years behind Linux, let alone Solaris.