3 seconds is with a pretty minimal set of services. I've booted a four-node BProc (Beowulf, sorta) cluster made out of miniature biscuit boards based off the National Semiconductor Geode NX-1 in about 4.5 seconds. However, there's no SSH, no FTP, no XFS, no system logger, etc. but only bpslave. After that, I can use commands from the master node on the slave node through bpsh.
Don't get me wrong, LinuxBIOS is still a great idea for a wide variety of systems since you can still use a bootloader such as ADLO to boot Windows or FreeBSD and other OSes as well as Linux. However, LinuxBIOS only gets you so far as to initialize your hardware. From there, the bootloader or ELF loader or whatever you have starts the kernel, and from there you start your services. For a desktop system or server, you need tons of services.
LinuxBIOS is just that, a BIOS replacement that utilizes Linux. Here's Linus' take on BIOSes from boot/setup.S: # Well, that certainly wasn't fun:-(. Hopefully it works, and we don't # need no steenking BIOS anyway (except for the initial loading:-). # The BIOS-routine wants lots of unnecessary data, and it's less # "interesting" anyway. LinuxBIOS does that initial loading, ie initializing the CPU(s), memory, IRQ routing, etc, but without gathering the 'unnecessary data' that makes legacy BIOSes compatible with DOS and consequently very slow.
I'm very interested in this idea from IBM (Or more specifically, James Hunt). Combined with LinuxBIOS, the parallel system services stuff could make Linux and similar OSes boot much, much faster to a fully usable state.
An interesting proposition, but much of the spam we recieved either originates or is relayed through routers in other nations, not respect US law. So who foots the bill for spam that comes from countries that lie outside US Jurisdiction?
What happens when spam kingpins in America outsource to people in other countries that do not respect US law to take the blame for spamming?
Somehow, I'm more willing to believe that the whole protection of privacy thing is a PR hoax and that they are really worried about the extra operational overhead necessary to hand the RIAA the information it needs. I mean, figuring out who had which IP and when in an ISP as big as SBC probably isn't a trivial task.
However, I think SBC is doing the right thing for the wrong reason. Painting the RIAA as the evil organization trying to invade your privacy is definitely a good thing, since that's what they're trying to do.
And heck, who doesn't love the irony of using one underhanded business tactic to undermine another underhanded business tactic? RIAA wanted to get lawyers involved, and now they find themselves fighting 800lb gorillas rather than poor students.
The experiment proving that the Itanium really doesn't suck.
>>Wallace began winning contests - local, state, national - culminating in second place in the International Intel Science and Engineering Fair last May in Cleveland.
>>And if you choose StarOffice just because "Money means better" to the management, you're just as bad as MS.
Unfortunately, it seems that many management types look up to MS management. A friend of mine worked for an ISP which ran Windows server software. In spite of my friend colocating a Linux server which had no problems to speak of, a mail system superior to NTMail, and trying his darndest to get his boss to switch to free software, his boss still insisted on equating free with crap. PHB's (Pointy-haired bosses) don't know the meaning of the word "free," and are willing to piss away enormous amounts of money for a warrenty card and tech support number even if the product itself is inferior.
That's where StarOffice comes in. OpenOffice is great, no question about that. Only problem is that it doesn't come with any sort of liability. Sun calls their version of OpenOffice StarOffice and fills this gap, maybe even going a little further to make the migration from MS to non-MS a little easier.
In the spirit of promoting the Slashdot effect, I decided to visit cnet.com after having dismissed their site as rubbish. Well, as it turns out, I found an interesting article where an EFF attorny suggests that universities obfuscate student IP addresses by shuffling them to fend off the the RIAA. Any site that posts that sort of content is okay by me! So to you, cnet.com, may you grow in our dismal economy!
>>Any hardcore gamers like to give their opinions? I'm very curious why people would drop SO MUCH money for cards like this...
RTFA, this is not a gaming card, it's a workstation card and the drivers are tweaked for such apps as 3DSMax and Photoshop rather than Quake and UT. It's NOT for the average gamer and it's NOT for the average desktop user. It's for a very niche market, nothing more. That question is sort of like asking why people drop $10k+ into an SGI workstation that is clocked lower and performs worse in everyday apps than white box x86 computers.
Now, why nVidia jacked up the cost of the Quadro when they've historically been known for solid-performing value cards in this segment (As opposed to exotic multi-GPU solutions from 3DLabs, for example), I don't know.
>>So what you're saying is that you don't think McBride is an asshat?
Dude, that's the perfect name for SCO's software. Henceforth, let Unixware and all that other SCO crap be known as "Asshat Linux," seeing as to how they claim it contains Linux code. Or was that the other way around? Whatever.
>> No wonder MS has the word procsessing industry in a kung-fu grip.
Whoops, that should be word processing. So much for my efforts to make Slashcode the new standard in office production suits--MS does have one hell of a spell checker!
Next person to say something like "They made very sure that Office has these features that nobody else has" without specifying a single damn feature is getting slapped upside the head with a wet trout.
Whenever I ask people why they choose MSWord over a competing product, I always get the same answer: "It has more features." Feature like what? Ten different versions of "Clippy?" No wonder MS has the word procsessing industry in a kung-fu grip.
Interestingly enough, if you did it wouldn't be a very big success because the internal PCI or PCI-X bus in the system would bottleneck the interconnects. The NICs would need on-board processors to scale with their enormous bandwidth potential so that they could solve problems like matching checksums and other package management tasks and not have to pound on the system bus so hard.
It wasn't long ago that we really started exploiting video chipsets for rendering graphics, either...
Just want to remind everyone that a lot of the rankings are quite subjective: "The rankings are based solely on the judgments of deans and senior faculty who rated each program they are familiar with on a scale from 1 (marginal) to 5 (distinguished)."
Personally, I'm more interested in which universities have good industry and job opportunities surrounding them, since my first job after getting a degree will likely be close to wherever I graduate from.
...is that AMD opened their platform well enough to the LinuxBIOS developers while Intel basically told them to screw off and live with EFI. Here is what Ron Minnich had to say earlier on the LinuxBIOS mailing list.
Earth Simulator is impressive in its own reguard, but in no way is the majority of clustering apps going toward these 'specialized' systems. Governments, research labs, etc. want powerful computers that are dirt cheap. Los Alamos's ASCI Q (Installment 1, the Alpha servers) cost over $100,000,000 to build, while their Pink cluster cost about $6,000,000 in hardware. On paper, Pink and ASCI Q are both around 10 teraflops. ASCI Q runs Quadrics on 64-bit 66MHz PCI, Pink is getting an ugprade to Myrinet Lanai 10 on PCI-X (From Lanai 9 on 64/66PCI). Not only that, but Pink runs the open-source, 100% GPL'd Clustermatic software and can be booted in a matter of seconds rather than hours like ASCI Q.
The fact is, systems like ASCI Q and the Earth Simulator just aren't practical. They may look great on paper, but there's not much that they can do that can't be done on x86. Given the choice between paying over a hundred million for a proprietary cluster that might not even be all that reliable (*cough*Q*cough*) and requires expensive software and maintenance contracts, we see companies like Linux Networx offering high-power clusters on common hardware and free software that are a fraction as expensive.
As far as reliability goes, don't get suckered into thinking that proprietary and expensive mean quality. Q's failure rate is almost as high as my old Windows '98 machine hahaha. With the exception of a few missing chillers, Pink seems relatively healthy with only a few minor failures.
If CRAY and NEC want to get into a pissing contest in specs, that's fine. If they offer something that Intel can't, more power to them. Otherwise, the five organizations in the world that own their systems can be proud that they have the most powerful computer on paper for a year or two before someone builds a cheaper x86 cluster that matches or out-performs them.
We believe that one or more of your users is violating Microsoft(C) copyright by using the word "start" in his name. This is obviously an IP infringement on the Microsoft(C) Windows(C) Start Menu(C). We ask that you remove the word "start(C)" from all user accounts, webpages, and files hosted on any domain owned by the Open Source Developers Network. Failure to comply will result in fines of up to $75,000 per infraction and possible jailtime and / or vaporization.
If you're modifying or adding to someone else's code, use whatever convention they used so you don't screw up references to header files or functions or whatever sort of like what Gene Heskett described. If you're creating something from scratch, then use whatever convention you prefer, or whatever convention your included files use.
Suddenly, telemarketing doesn't seem so bad. At least my household never got phone calls from perverts offering pics of underaged teens, unlicensed pharmacy ads, etc. And to top it off, telemarketing is a manpower intensive operation whereas one guy can send out a billion e-mail letters on his own. At least telemarketing provides jobs.
I think it's mostly a matter of choosing the right icons. Relatively few people know what the default Mozilla icon is supposed to mean, but when it's replaced with a globe and labled "Web Browser" or something like that, people can instantly recognize it as such.
Once in a program, people just can't really tell the difference between IE and Netscape. Or Outlook and Mozilla Mail. Remember, I'm talking about normal people here. I know IE and Mozilla are apples and oranges to many of us here on Slashdot, but to norms they're practically the same thing.
My example was just with internet browser. I believe the same holds true for mail programs, office applications, instant messengers, etc. This is all assuming, of course, that an internet connection, mail, etc. are being set up for the user. Most buy their computer with an internet / mail connection already configured, or they use an ISP that bundles software that sets up their mail / net connectino for them. Setup for the end-user is a whole other beast.
Whoops, my bad! You're correct, they say it averages 36 seconds per flight now, not per reboot.
LinuxBIOS in flight computers
on
In-Flight Reboot?
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
This is an ideal application for LinuxBIOS. The article says an average of 14 minutes per flight were spent rebooting computers. Even 36 seconds per reboot is too much, and would be totally unacceptable if it were say, a navigation computer on a 737 with a hundred civilians on-board.
Nasa has an interesting project called FlightLinux specifically geared for this sort of application. Unfortunately, they have yet to release code (export restrictions), but they supposedly use LinuxBIOS for their system.
Of course, having software that never crashes (no pun intended) would be best, but it never hurts to have a system that can boot up in just a couple seconds anyway.
I'm a fan of the heavy metal genre and I've seen (or heard, more like) many songs that would be absolutely great if they weren't subjected to the same LOUDER IS BETTER butcher job Rush's Vapor Trails went through. One example is the song "Here Comes the Pain" on Slayer's latest album. I can barely make it past the intro because it simply sounds so terrible. Or if I really want to listen to it, I turn my volume down so my speakers don't peak or bottom out. Turning metal DOWN??? That just ain't right. Damn their sound engineers to hell.
On the other hand, In Flames' latest album entitled Reroute to Remain sounds absolutely beautiful on any speakers I play it on. Same holds true for other Nuclearblast artists such as Old Man's Child and Dimmu Borgir. Kudos to foreign audio engineers!
The shipping date is coming up in a few months for Doom 3. Any ideas on whether it will be using OpenGL 1.5, or is Carmack still intent on pushing the industry forward by implementing draft standards?
Slashdot Mirror
3 seconds is with a pretty minimal set of services. I've booted a four-node BProc (Beowulf, sorta) cluster made out of miniature biscuit boards based off the National Semiconductor Geode NX-1 in about 4.5 seconds. However, there's no SSH, no FTP, no XFS, no system logger, etc. but only bpslave. After that, I can use commands from the master node on the slave node through bpsh.
:-(. Hopefully it works, and we don't :-).
Don't get me wrong, LinuxBIOS is still a great idea for a wide variety of systems since you can still use a bootloader such as ADLO to boot Windows or FreeBSD and other OSes as well as Linux. However, LinuxBIOS only gets you so far as to initialize your hardware. From there, the bootloader or ELF loader or whatever you have starts the kernel, and from there you start your services. For a desktop system or server, you need tons of services.
LinuxBIOS is just that, a BIOS replacement that utilizes Linux. Here's Linus' take on BIOSes from boot/setup.S:
# Well, that certainly wasn't fun
# need no steenking BIOS anyway (except for the initial loading
# The BIOS-routine wants lots of unnecessary data, and it's less
# "interesting" anyway.
LinuxBIOS does that initial loading, ie initializing the CPU(s), memory, IRQ routing, etc, but without gathering the 'unnecessary data' that makes legacy BIOSes compatible with DOS and consequently very slow.
I'm very interested in this idea from IBM (Or more specifically, James Hunt). Combined with LinuxBIOS, the parallel system services stuff could make Linux and similar OSes boot much, much faster to a fully usable state.
An interesting proposition, but much of the spam we recieved either originates or is relayed through routers in other nations, not respect US law. So who foots the bill for spam that comes from countries that lie outside US Jurisdiction?
What happens when spam kingpins in America outsource to people in other countries that do not respect US law to take the blame for spamming?
By buying Doom 3 and running the native client in Linux.
Somehow, I'm more willing to believe that the whole protection of privacy thing is a PR hoax and that they are really worried about the extra operational overhead necessary to hand the RIAA the information it needs. I mean, figuring out who had which IP and when in an ISP as big as SBC probably isn't a trivial task.
However, I think SBC is doing the right thing for the wrong reason. Painting the RIAA as the evil organization trying to invade your privacy is definitely a good thing, since that's what they're trying to do.
And heck, who doesn't love the irony of using one underhanded business tactic to undermine another underhanded business tactic? RIAA wanted to get lawyers involved, and now they find themselves fighting 800lb gorillas rather than poor students.
The experiment proving that the Itanium really doesn't suck.
>>Wallace began winning contests - local, state, national - culminating in second place in the International Intel Science and Engineering Fair last May in Cleveland.
Kidding...
>>And if you choose StarOffice just because "Money means better" to the management, you're just as bad as MS.
Unfortunately, it seems that many management types look up to MS management. A friend of mine worked for an ISP which ran Windows server software. In spite of my friend colocating a Linux server which had no problems to speak of, a mail system superior to NTMail, and trying his darndest to get his boss to switch to free software, his boss still insisted on equating free with crap. PHB's (Pointy-haired bosses) don't know the meaning of the word "free," and are willing to piss away enormous amounts of money for a warrenty card and tech support number even if the product itself is inferior.
That's where StarOffice comes in. OpenOffice is great, no question about that. Only problem is that it doesn't come with any sort of liability. Sun calls their version of OpenOffice StarOffice and fills this gap, maybe even going a little further to make the migration from MS to non-MS a little easier.
In the spirit of promoting the Slashdot effect, I decided to visit cnet.com after having dismissed their site as rubbish. Well, as it turns out, I found an interesting article where an EFF attorny suggests that universities obfuscate student IP addresses by shuffling them to fend off the the RIAA. Any site that posts that sort of content is okay by me! So to you, cnet.com, may you grow in our dismal economy!
>>Any hardcore gamers like to give their opinions? I'm very curious why people would drop SO MUCH money for cards like this...
RTFA, this is not a gaming card, it's a workstation card and the drivers are tweaked for such apps as 3DSMax and Photoshop rather than Quake and UT. It's NOT for the average gamer and it's NOT for the average desktop user. It's for a very niche market, nothing more. That question is sort of like asking why people drop $10k+ into an SGI workstation that is clocked lower and performs worse in everyday apps than white box x86 computers.
Now, why nVidia jacked up the cost of the Quadro when they've historically been known for solid-performing value cards in this segment (As opposed to exotic multi-GPU solutions from 3DLabs, for example), I don't know.
>>So what you're saying is that you don't think McBride is an asshat?
Dude, that's the perfect name for SCO's software. Henceforth, let Unixware and all that other SCO crap be known as "Asshat Linux," seeing as to how they claim it contains Linux code. Or was that the other way around? Whatever.
>> No wonder MS has the word procsessing industry in a kung-fu grip.
Whoops, that should be word processing. So much for my efforts to make Slashcode the new standard in office production suits--MS does have one hell of a spell checker!
Next person to say something like "They made very sure that Office has these features that nobody else has" without specifying a single damn feature is getting slapped upside the head with a wet trout.
Whenever I ask people why they choose MSWord over a competing product, I always get the same answer: "It has more features." Feature like what? Ten different versions of "Clippy?" No wonder MS has the word procsessing industry in a kung-fu grip.
Interestingly enough, if you did it wouldn't be a very big success because the internal PCI or PCI-X bus in the system would bottleneck the interconnects. The NICs would need on-board processors to scale with their enormous bandwidth potential so that they could solve problems like matching checksums and other package management tasks and not have to pound on the system bus so hard.
It wasn't long ago that we really started exploiting video chipsets for rendering graphics, either...
Just want to remind everyone that a lot of the rankings are quite subjective: "The rankings are based solely on the judgments of deans and senior faculty who rated each program they are familiar with on a scale from 1 (marginal) to 5 (distinguished)."
Personally, I'm more interested in which universities have good industry and job opportunities surrounding them, since my first job after getting a degree will likely be close to wherever I graduate from.
...is that AMD opened their platform well enough to the LinuxBIOS developers while Intel basically told them to screw off and live with EFI. Here is what Ron Minnich had to say earlier on the LinuxBIOS mailing list.
Earth Simulator is impressive in its own reguard, but in no way is the majority of clustering apps going toward these 'specialized' systems. Governments, research labs, etc. want powerful computers that are dirt cheap. Los Alamos's ASCI Q (Installment 1, the Alpha servers) cost over $100,000,000 to build, while their Pink cluster cost about $6,000,000 in hardware. On paper, Pink and ASCI Q are both around 10 teraflops. ASCI Q runs Quadrics on 64-bit 66MHz PCI, Pink is getting an ugprade to Myrinet Lanai 10 on PCI-X (From Lanai 9 on 64/66PCI). Not only that, but Pink runs the open-source, 100% GPL'd Clustermatic software and can be booted in a matter of seconds rather than hours like ASCI Q.
The fact is, systems like ASCI Q and the Earth Simulator just aren't practical. They may look great on paper, but there's not much that they can do that can't be done on x86. Given the choice between paying over a hundred million for a proprietary cluster that might not even be all that reliable (*cough*Q*cough*) and requires expensive software and maintenance contracts, we see companies like Linux Networx offering high-power clusters on common hardware and free software that are a fraction as expensive.
As far as reliability goes, don't get suckered into thinking that proprietary and expensive mean quality. Q's failure rate is almost as high as my old Windows '98 machine hahaha. With the exception of a few missing chillers, Pink seems relatively healthy with only a few minor failures.
If CRAY and NEC want to get into a pissing contest in specs, that's fine. If they offer something that Intel can't, more power to them. Otherwise, the five organizations in the world that own their systems can be proud that they have the most powerful computer on paper for a year or two before someone builds a cheaper x86 cluster that matches or out-performs them.
Dear Slashdot,
We believe that one or more of your users is violating Microsoft(C) copyright by using the word "start" in his name. This is obviously an IP infringement on the Microsoft(C) Windows(C) Start Menu(C). We ask that you remove the word "start(C)" from all user accounts, webpages, and files hosted on any domain owned by the Open Source Developers Network. Failure to comply will result in fines of up to $75,000 per infraction and possible jailtime and / or vaporization.
--Microsoft(C) DMCANazi(C) Deptartment(C)
Does this mean that the Redhat Package Manager violates the DMCA? If so, I'm glad I use Portage :)
I kid because I love...
If you're modifying or adding to someone else's code, use whatever convention they used so you don't screw up references to header files or functions or whatever sort of like what Gene Heskett described. If you're creating something from scratch, then use whatever convention you prefer, or whatever convention your included files use.
Done with an average of around 95KB/sec. That oughtta fix his wagon!
Suddenly, telemarketing doesn't seem so bad. At least my household never got phone calls from perverts offering pics of underaged teens, unlicensed pharmacy ads, etc. And to top it off, telemarketing is a manpower intensive operation whereas one guy can send out a billion e-mail letters on his own. At least telemarketing provides jobs.
I think it's mostly a matter of choosing the right icons. Relatively few people know what the default Mozilla icon is supposed to mean, but when it's replaced with a globe and labled "Web Browser" or something like that, people can instantly recognize it as such.
Once in a program, people just can't really tell the difference between IE and Netscape. Or Outlook and Mozilla Mail. Remember, I'm talking about normal people here. I know IE and Mozilla are apples and oranges to many of us here on Slashdot, but to norms they're practically the same thing.
My example was just with internet browser. I believe the same holds true for mail programs, office applications, instant messengers, etc. This is all assuming, of course, that an internet connection, mail, etc. are being set up for the user. Most buy their computer with an internet / mail connection already configured, or they use an ISP that bundles software that sets up their mail / net connectino for them. Setup for the end-user is a whole other beast.
Whoops, my bad! You're correct, they say it averages 36 seconds per flight now, not per reboot.
This is an ideal application for LinuxBIOS. The article says an average of 14 minutes per flight were spent rebooting computers. Even 36 seconds per reboot is too much, and would be totally unacceptable if it were say, a navigation computer on a 737 with a hundred civilians on-board.
Nasa has an interesting project called FlightLinux specifically geared for this sort of application. Unfortunately, they have yet to release code (export restrictions), but they supposedly use LinuxBIOS for their system.
Of course, having software that never crashes (no pun intended) would be best, but it never hurts to have a system that can boot up in just a couple seconds anyway.
I'm a fan of the heavy metal genre and I've seen (or heard, more like) many songs that would be absolutely great if they weren't subjected
to the same LOUDER IS BETTER butcher job Rush's Vapor Trails went through. One example is the song "Here Comes the Pain" on Slayer's latest album. I can barely make it past the intro because it simply sounds so terrible. Or if I really want to listen to it, I turn my volume down so my speakers don't peak or bottom out. Turning metal DOWN??? That just ain't right. Damn their sound engineers to hell.
On the other hand, In Flames' latest album entitled Reroute to Remain sounds absolutely beautiful on any speakers I play it on. Same holds true for other Nuclearblast artists such as Old Man's Child and Dimmu Borgir. Kudos to foreign audio engineers!
The shipping date is coming up in a few months for Doom 3. Any ideas on whether it will be using OpenGL 1.5, or is Carmack still intent on pushing the industry forward by implementing draft standards?