Beside the fact there is no 2GHz Athlon, you forget one very important thing: memory bandwidth.
A usual Athlon has a theoretical memory performance of 2.1GB/s. Now do 8 gigaops on 32 bit float numbers. That would translate to 32GB/s. So 8 gigaops is not sustainable. Just a short burst.
And don't forget that that SX-6 has 2048 memory banks. Best Athlon chipsets I know have 1 (in words: one). Best Xeon chipsets have 2.
So while the raw power of supercomputers and PCs look similar on a sheet of paper (peak performance, AKA speed you can never exceed) supercomputers are built to get most of that performance not only for a short period of time.
Another topic is price/performance. Here a plain PC cluster might be better. But if you cannot parallelize a problem that much, one fast computer solves a problem faster.
The webpage of FirstView Connect 2.0 clearly states that it includes a browser, with Flash and Java and JavaScript.
And about the modem and recovery thingy: I hope it includes a LAN connection with PPPoE/DHCP/fixed IP addresses. Otherwise I would have problems to connect to anywhere.
Of course, if it's more an information appliance, then typically a ISP will hand yout those, and it will be adopted to the ISPs networking standards.
To name this BIOS of a PC is a bit far fetched.
The term embedded OS with browser capabilities seems to fit much better.
From the web page of them it seems to be more a "Net appliance" thing. Maybe it can boot another OS, but that seems to be optional. After all, if you can browse the web with Flash/Java/JavaScript, what else do many people need?
So this small "BIOS" might have a market in small devices, so you can skip the HDD completely and still have something useable. Nothing any other embeddedable OS cannot do (Linux, WindowsCE, QNX, you name it).
If my heatsink fell off on a server, I would not want the system turning off, I would want it staying on. I mean, it won't do too much good being on in that state, but at least there is no data loss in that situation.
If a heatsink falls off the CPU, I would prefer my system to turn off the power as soon as possible. Know what a copper/aluminium piece can do to the many Amperes running in a mainboard? don't want to find out.
And after all, those server cases (CPU temperature more than 85 degrees celsius, or CPU fan falling off) are extreme cases, which should never happen. If this happens, then something else want wrong. If you check larger servers, you'd find lots of fans, all being redundant, so even if 1 fan stops working, there's still plenty air being push-pulled through. If 2 fans stop, then the machine should do what it wants to do (slow down or turn off), as this is a very, very rare case.
Sorry, but do you think mankind will move to another pleace in peace and harmony when Earth is polluted and overcrowded? I would say, if someone is going to survive that desaster, the problem will move along with those people. Mankind somehow has the tendency to fight, sometimes for stupid reasons. (I know what Darwinism means, so I don't expect us to change within 10 or 100 years.)
I honestly don't believe we can solve this kind of problem anywhere, if we cannot solve it here, on this one Earth we have.
24 bit (16 million colors) are a lot, and I certainly have difficulties to find the difference between color #70e0e0 and #70e1e0, but when you want to have a nice background, top is plain blue (#0000ff) and botton is black (#000000), then there are only 254 levels between those. And I can clearly see those lines where the blue color value changes.
And that's where the more colors shine. Just using 10 instead of 8 bits reduces those color bands by a factor of 4.
Instead of not using those alpha bits at all (in 32 bit color mode), one might as well use them for nicer colors. Now which OS supports that mode? X11?
We used several ICP controllers with 2 to 7 disks
(RAID-1, RAID-5, with and without hot spare) and they worked well. Mostly using Windows NT, but I built one with Linux and an Oracle DB (several GB of data) on Linux (2.2 at that time) andwe did some stress tests (about 10 users connecting doing full table scans, updating large amounts of data) and while the RAID array was working really hard, the box was entirely stable. Even simulating a drive failure did not cause data loss. And the Linux support is great, aswell as the support in general (but that was before Intel bought them, so now it might be either worse or asgood as it was before).
Although it was flaws. No digital input for example. And it's pricy compared to the usual stuff they sell.
But then, where else can you get these many pixels for that much money?;-)
I am not sure what model and what brand I got (that was about 4 years ago). The one I had was grey, large (about 300mm x 300mm), had a 25 pin sub-D connector and no description for anything.
After opening it I found out which lines of this "serial connector" have power and which ones transmitted the RS232 signal.
I found some informations of how to initialize the board so it would send out some data (without initializing I always got the same data whenever and whereever I touched the pad with the pen).
In a simple terminal program I could see data packets coming in then I moved the pen.
That was the easy part.
The part I tried to solve but did not succeed, was to get something useful out of it, something which I can decode into coordinates.
I never found any documentation on the Internet about the protocol.
For a comparison, I had a "Spaceball" from Spacetec which acted as a 3D controller connected to the serial port. Took me some days to find out the protocol. Shortly later I was able to move 3D things. So I expected to solve the "tablet puzzle" fast. Only 2D after all. But I was wrong...
Japanese like to have gifts an decorations on Chrismas, but it's work as usual.
24th was only a holiday, because the current emperor's birthday was on Sunday (then this would-be-public-holiday is shifted to the next working day).
25th and 26th is no change from other days. Maybe 20% less people on the subway in the morning.
Some time ago, when I saw an ad about the SanCube
I thought "That would be nice to have." and then "That should be possible to make!" especially since Firewire supports multiple masters and it's fast enough to make sense for a (albeit cheap) SAN.
Having one SAN storage which can me expanded and then you can assign partitions to a certain host just is much more flexible than anything else a standard computer uses. LVM and netblock devices help though.
Anyway, the point is, while USB has masters and slaves, Firewire does not distinguish between those, so every Firewire card can be host and slave, which makes it much easier from a hardware point of view to do, what the original poster wants to do.
Now the software is a different thing. While USB is cheap and simple (the master controls and polls the slaves, the slaves just respond), Firewire is much more like SCSI: everyone can start to talk suddenly. Since I am not a device driver programmer, this is too much for me. But then, I am not the one who has to program the device drivers...
IMHO the courses are for those, who need to have those exams in a very short time. And who don't need to care about money.
Every one else should get real life experience and then pass most tests without any problems. I think that's what it should be: Prove your knowledge by having that exam, not learn to pass the exam.
What I did in the case of CCNA: get myself a small Cisco router with a real IOS (800 series) and use it at home. Configure like crazy and test out all features and software you can get for Cisco things. (This was not cheap, but I needed an ISDN router anyway. There were other cheaper models (it's not difficult to beat a Cisco in price), but I wanted to have something useful for later.)
This way you get a lot of knowledge on things like IP routing, SNMP, firewall, access lists filtering, upgrading the IOS, resetting the superuser password etc. Just what you need to pass CCNA.
For the Solaris exam I chose a similar approach: get Solaris (for Intel, it's basically free), use it as the main server at home, install all kind of software like Samba, NFS, JumpStart, NIS, NIS+ etc. and then pass the Sun exam without much more learning.
I do know people who learn solely from books or (even worse) from braindumps and similar sources. While they pass the test sometimes, it takes less than some days in real life situations to find out they have no real knowledge.
To come back to the topic: in no way courses are needed. The exams themself are quite cheap (in a way): US$100-150 for most.
Since you don't intend to have one exam in a week, for most people that should be manageable.
The tags the airlines put on your bag already have barcodes- if getting them to point in the right direction for the laser scanner is just too difficult, they can easily use RFID (who says they don't already?). There's no reason to have the tag carry a battery unless it's going to display and update information in realtime.
I read some articles about RFID tags and air lines use them already. It's after all faster to read them in a tunnel then pointing a laser at them. Those tags turn and bend and RF is much better at reading the ID.
The benefit of a passive RFID tag is it's cheap.
The drawback is, the maximum reading distance is rather small (some meters).
Active, power driven ID tagscan send out their ID much further away. Given enough power, several hundred meters.
Now that makes it useless for air lines (at least I cannot see a reason why they would like to do that), but for other services it might be useful. Containers in a harbour/shipping station come into my mind. They are too big to put into a tunnel, but they can carry a small battery without any problems.
This small printed battery thing now makes this battery small, flat, flexible and cheap, which means this active RFID tags can be deployed in more articles.
After all, you don't have to use them and passive ones will be cheaper anyway, so it's just one more choice you have.
There are devices for USB 2.0
Lots of them. Everywhere here in Akihabara in Tokyo.
Check out this webpage:
Tsukumos CD RW etc. page
and you will find (currently) 4 external CD-RW & Co
for USB 2.0/1.1, including brand names like Plextor and Yamaha.
But I have yet to see a USB 2.0 hub.
Maybe it might be interresting for some of you of the situation here in Japan. Even here there are dot bombs, some of them customers of the company I work for. (We do IT service in general, from cable installing, any kind of consulting, to installing network equipment, servers etc., just what most small companies need, when they cannot afford their own IT staff.)
Since everyone says there's a recession in Japan, when I heard one of our larger clients (about 50 employees some monthes ago) will close due to high expenses and low income, I thought "Oh my, I wonder if they will find a job.". They were doing kind of advertising and consulting for advertising on the web, make nice web pages, including Java stuff, DB connections etc. They were doing well until they got too greedy, expanding too fast...you know. Typical dot bomb.
Anyway, when I asked some what about gettig new jobs, the programmers, DB people, and generally all those, who were able to do something useful, got a new job. Either here in Japan or in US, since most were coming from US anyway. I don't know about the non-technical staff though.
Some of the more bright people are currently setting up a new company.
So, all in all even here in a country where everyone will tell you there is a recession, and beside all the unemployment and the many dot coms who failed, no one has to keep out of work for a long time. As long as you want to work and as long as you have experience in your job.
Of course being a CEO who drove a company into the ground, is a different matter. But that's their fault having not learned something useful...
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Beside the fact there is no 2GHz Athlon, you forget one very important thing: memory bandwidth.
A usual Athlon has a theoretical memory performance of 2.1GB/s. Now do 8 gigaops on 32 bit float numbers. That would translate to 32GB/s. So 8 gigaops is not sustainable. Just a short burst.
And don't forget that that SX-6 has 2048 memory banks. Best Athlon chipsets I know have 1 (in words: one). Best Xeon chipsets have 2.
So while the raw power of supercomputers and PCs look similar on a sheet of paper (peak performance, AKA speed you can never exceed) supercomputers are built to get most of that performance not only for a short period of time.
Another topic is price/performance. Here a plain PC cluster might be better. But if you cannot parallelize a problem that much, one fast computer solves a problem faster.
The webpage of FirstView Connect 2.0 clearly states that it includes a browser, with Flash and Java and JavaScript.
And about the modem and recovery thingy: I hope it includes a LAN connection with PPPoE/DHCP/fixed IP addresses. Otherwise I would have problems to connect to anywhere.
Of course, if it's more an information appliance, then typically a ISP will hand yout those, and it will be adopted to the ISPs networking standards.
To name this BIOS of a PC is a bit far fetched. The term embedded OS with browser capabilities seems to fit much better. From the web page of them it seems to be more a "Net appliance" thing. Maybe it can boot another OS, but that seems to be optional. After all, if you can browse the web with Flash/Java/JavaScript, what else do many people need?
So this small "BIOS" might have a market in small devices, so you can skip the HDD completely and still have something useable. Nothing any other embeddedable OS cannot do (Linux, WindowsCE, QNX, you name it).
If my heatsink fell off on a server, I would not want the system turning off, I would want it staying on. I mean, it won't do too much good being on in that state, but at least there is no data loss in that situation.
If a heatsink falls off the CPU, I would prefer my system to turn off the power as soon as possible. Know what a copper/aluminium piece can do to the many Amperes running in a mainboard? don't want to find out.
And after all, those server cases (CPU temperature more than 85 degrees celsius, or CPU fan falling off) are extreme cases, which should never happen. If this happens, then something else want wrong. If you check larger servers, you'd find lots of fans, all being redundant, so even if 1 fan stops working, there's still plenty air being push-pulled through. If 2 fans stop, then the machine should do what it wants to do (slow down or turn off), as this is a very, very rare case.
Sorry, but do you think mankind will move to another pleace in peace and harmony when Earth is polluted and overcrowded? I would say, if someone is going to survive that desaster, the problem will move along with those people. Mankind somehow has the tendency to fight, sometimes for stupid reasons. (I know what Darwinism means, so I don't expect us to change within 10 or 100 years.)
I honestly don't believe we can solve this kind of problem anywhere, if we cannot solve it here, on this one Earth we have.
24 bit (16 million colors) are a lot, and I certainly have difficulties to find the difference between color #70e0e0 and #70e1e0, but when you want to have a nice background, top is plain blue (#0000ff) and botton is black (#000000), then there are only 254 levels between those. And I can clearly see those lines where the blue color value changes.
And that's where the more colors shine. Just using 10 instead of 8 bits reduces those color bands by a factor of 4.
Instead of not using those alpha bits at all (in 32 bit color mode), one might as well use them for nicer colors. Now which OS supports that mode? X11?
HaraldLike this
And yes, it looks like a handle and it's designed to be used as one. It's not only decoration. Harald
I can second this too.
We used several ICP controllers with 2 to 7 disks (RAID-1, RAID-5, with and without hot spare) and they worked well. Mostly using Windows NT, but I built one with Linux and an Oracle DB (several GB of data) on Linux (2.2 at that time) andwe did some stress tests (about 10 users connecting doing full table scans, updating large amounts of data) and while the RAID array was working really hard, the box was entirely stable. Even simulating a drive failure did not cause data loss. And the Linux support is great, aswell as the support in general (but that was before Intel bought them, so now it might be either worse or asgood as it was before).
Not true. See here.
Although it was flaws. No digital input for example. And it's pricy compared to the usual stuff they sell. But then, where else can you get these many pixels for that much money? ;-)
I am not sure what model and what brand I got (that was about 4 years ago). The one I had was grey, large (about 300mm x 300mm), had a 25 pin sub-D connector and no description for anything.
After opening it I found out which lines of this "serial connector" have power and which ones transmitted the RS232 signal.
I found some informations of how to initialize the board so it would send out some data (without initializing I always got the same data whenever and whereever I touched the pad with the pen). In a simple terminal program I could see data packets coming in then I moved the pen.
That was the easy part.
The part I tried to solve but did not succeed, was to get something useful out of it, something which I can decode into coordinates. I never found any documentation on the Internet about the protocol.
For a comparison, I had a "Spaceball" from Spacetec which acted as a 3D controller connected to the serial port. Took me some days to find out the protocol. Shortly later I was able to move 3D things. So I expected to solve the "tablet puzzle" fast. Only 2D after all. But I was wrong...
Japanese like to have gifts an decorations on Chrismas, but it's work as usual. 24th was only a holiday, because the current emperor's birthday was on Sunday (then this would-be-public-holiday is shifted to the next working day).
25th and 26th is no change from other days. Maybe 20% less people on the subway in the morning.
Harald (from Tokyo)
Some time ago, when I saw an ad about the SanCube I thought "That would be nice to have." and then "That should be possible to make!" especially since Firewire supports multiple masters and it's fast enough to make sense for a (albeit cheap) SAN.
Having one SAN storage which can me expanded and then you can assign partitions to a certain host just is much more flexible than anything else a standard computer uses. LVM and netblock devices help though.
Anyway, the point is, while USB has masters and slaves, Firewire does not distinguish between those, so every Firewire card can be host and slave, which makes it much easier from a hardware point of view to do, what the original poster wants to do.
Now the software is a different thing. While USB is cheap and simple (the master controls and polls the slaves, the slaves just respond), Firewire is much more like SCSI: everyone can start to talk suddenly. Since I am not a device driver programmer, this is too much for me. But then, I am not the one who has to program the device drivers...
What do you mean "who pays the courses"?
IMHO the courses are for those, who need to have those exams in a very short time. And who don't need to care about money.
Every one else should get real life experience and then pass most tests without any problems. I think that's what it should be: Prove your knowledge by having that exam, not learn to pass the exam.
What I did in the case of CCNA: get myself a small Cisco router with a real IOS (800 series) and use it at home. Configure like crazy and test out all features and software you can get for Cisco things. (This was not cheap, but I needed an ISDN router anyway. There were other cheaper models (it's not difficult to beat a Cisco in price), but I wanted to have something useful for later.)
This way you get a lot of knowledge on things like IP routing, SNMP, firewall, access lists filtering, upgrading the IOS, resetting the superuser password etc. Just what you need to pass CCNA.
For the Solaris exam I chose a similar approach: get Solaris (for Intel, it's basically free), use it as the main server at home, install all kind of software like Samba, NFS, JumpStart, NIS, NIS+ etc. and then pass the Sun exam without much more learning.
I do know people who learn solely from books or (even worse) from braindumps and similar sources. While they pass the test sometimes, it takes less than some days in real life situations to find out they have no real knowledge.
To come back to the topic: in no way courses are needed. The exams themself are quite cheap (in a way): US$100-150 for most.
Since you don't intend to have one exam in a week, for most people that should be manageable.
I read some articles about RFID tags and air lines use them already. It's after all faster to read them in a tunnel then pointing a laser at them. Those tags turn and bend and RF is much better at reading the ID.
The benefit of a passive RFID tag is it's cheap. The drawback is, the maximum reading distance is rather small (some meters).
Active, power driven ID tagscan send out their ID much further away. Given enough power, several hundred meters.
Now that makes it useless for air lines (at least I cannot see a reason why they would like to do that), but for other services it might be useful. Containers in a harbour/shipping station come into my mind. They are too big to put into a tunnel, but they can carry a small battery without any problems.
This small printed battery thing now makes this battery small, flat, flexible and cheap, which means this active RFID tags can be deployed in more articles.
After all, you don't have to use them and passive ones will be cheaper anyway, so it's just one more choice you have.
Sounds ok for me.
There are devices for USB 2.0 Lots of them. Everywhere here in Akihabara in Tokyo. Check out this webpage: Tsukumos CD RW etc. page and you will find (currently) 4 external CD-RW & Co for USB 2.0/1.1, including brand names like Plextor and Yamaha. But I have yet to see a USB 2.0 hub.
Maybe it might be interresting for some of you of the situation here in Japan. Even here there are dot bombs, some of them customers of the company I work for. (We do IT service in general, from cable installing, any kind of consulting, to installing network equipment, servers etc., just what most small companies need, when they cannot afford their own IT staff.)
Since everyone says there's a recession in Japan, when I heard one of our larger clients (about 50 employees some monthes ago) will close due to high expenses and low income, I thought "Oh my, I wonder if they will find a job.". They were doing kind of advertising and consulting for advertising on the web, make nice web pages, including Java stuff, DB connections etc. They were doing well until they got too greedy, expanding too fast...you know. Typical dot bomb.
Anyway, when I asked some what about gettig new jobs, the programmers, DB people, and generally all those, who were able to do something useful, got a new job. Either here in Japan or in US, since most were coming from US anyway. I don't know about the non-technical staff though.
Some of the more bright people are currently setting up a new company.
So, all in all even here in a country where everyone will tell you there is a recession, and beside all the unemployment and the many dot coms who failed, no one has to keep out of work for a long time. As long as you want to work and as long as you have experience in your job.
Of course being a CEO who drove a company into the ground, is a different matter. But that's their fault having not learned something useful...