Setup with failover in mind one PC could be yanked out and the other taking over the load in a fraction of a second without notice to users.
How do you managed the automatic transfer of active sessions on the failed PC to the other one?
Availability clusters only work either for non-critical things, like web serving, or where the servers effectively maintain redundancy through some RAID-like scheme for database serving. Otherwise, there is only an illusion of reliability, when active sessions are lost requiring people to log in again and re-do some work, for example.
Sun x86 boxes come out of the same factory as Dell servers...:|
This says nothing about which piece of the statistical pie goes to Sun and which piece goes to Dell. Manufacturing is a non-deterministic process, where some pieces spec out better than others. This is why CPUs vary in speed, why some ball bearings cost more, and is why you should never paint a room using separate cans of paint on the same wall.
Untrue. Don't forget the larger caches and better aggregating bandwidth these systems have. The hardware allows the scaling, the OS makes it available to the end user.
Fujitsu SPARC has instruction retry in hardware, Sun doesn't. Out of order execution, Fujitsu yes, Sun "coming soon".
Fujitsu's customers pay for it, too. On a ladder, with IBM mainframes at the top, Fujitsu is not far below, Sun/HP/IBM pSeries/SGI is below Fujitsu, and the PC manufacturers near the bottom.
Even though I've never used an Alpha, everything I've ever read about it reeks of "WTF is this Itanium crap, when the Alpha cleans the competition already and has done so for years!"
why does a $2000 Opteron system outperform a $10000 Sun system?
Actually, if you price out comparable systems (yes, you have to get that 3DLabs card for your Opteron for $1200+ and at least an Ultra160 SCSI controller and disks), the Opteron system will be $6000 to $8000 and the Sun will be $12000 to $15000 (I don't remember the exact numbers). The Sun prices will come more in line with the Opterons when the Blade 2500 workstation is released.
So, Sun is more expensive, but not by the five times you claim. Also, don't forget the Blade 2000 comes with FibreChannel built in, if you need to hook up with some terabyte madness.
Further, if you are planning to run Windows on the Opteron, you should really be ashamed of yourself (it's sort of like putting shag bench seats into a Fararri...).
So, are you going to repeat this analysis with numbers for the UltraSparcIV and Gemini chips when they hit the streets?
Estimates for the performance of these chips are already out based on Sun's announcements. Their performance will be okay. The real selling points of these chips will be having acceptable performance with good reliability, good scalability, and guaranteed binary compatibility. Single-thread performance is no longer a real marketing strength for Sun.
I have an OLD Ultra 60 with 360 Mhz CPUs in it that smoke my Athlon 2000+ for most tasks.
Er, if you give the Athlon system 10,000RPM SCSI disks, UPA-equivalent graphics bus, etc. to make it spec out the same as the Ultra 60 in nearly every way save the CPU, then the Ultra 60 won't look so stellar anymore. You really need to accept that the Ultra 60 was top of the line four to five years ago. Granted, that doesn't equate to happiness, as I have an Ultra workstation for my own gratification and enjoy using it, but this aspect of the argument is already way past SPEC numbers.
As for your SPEC citations, I'll ignore this especially trollific portion of your post.
(except that Sun took time to debug the buggy firmware that Intel shipped for months and Sun ships with faster RAM to get an edge in some benchmarks)
Er, it sounds like Sun actually did something new...
Based on their reputation, which I hope they are choosing to hold on to, I would at least expect that Sun's x86 servers go through more integration testing that those from other vendors (which is indicated by the buggy firmware fix you mentioned). Also, for a price, of course, it is easier to get matched sets of components, which is helpful for configuring RAIDs.
With computer hardware, it is all about the odds, and Sun's bet is that people will find their hardware more reliable, on average. For big deployments, this is their added value in the commodity markets.
I don't see where the hell you're getting the idea that socialism is inherently incompatable with Constitutional freedoms, or that Democrats are socialists.
Government policies regarding health, home, and family are inherently religous in nature. The fine-grained data inevitably required by socialist programs are collected without a warrant and not complying is punishable by imprisonment or fines. All the attempts to sate each and every sub-group, sub-culture, and special interest create terrible inequity under the law, leaving a government who is essentially as bigoted as the KKK.
Socialism is hell to people who realize just how much it takes away.
BTW, Republicans are just as bad as Democrats (war on terror, fake free trade, so your rant against the GOP is just the typical knee-jerk zealotry that is so common in an entrenched and self-fortifying two-party system.
In a capitalist system it's the corporations bending everyone over
Not really. The main problem is a corrupt government allowing corporations to act without fear of liability. It is a game where one team can get away with every foul but the other cannot. It is not really capitalism. In socialism, the advantaged team is the government itself.
What's the difference between socialism and communism?
Americans won't seem to have a problem voting for socialism when they select a Democratic canidate in 2004. They will seem to miss the fact that they will be voting away the freedoms protected explicitly by the US Constitution. They will probably still bitch when the resulting government mess they voted for comes back and makes their life worse making them all look like a bunch of spoiled children.
Americans will never vote for communism, because they still want to lease a used Lexus to drive to and from the government hospital and to park outside their HUD apartment.
Sun, IBM, Transmeta, VIA, etc. have been producing sub-20-watt CPUs for years. Even the once top-of-the-line UltraSPARC II burns only 19 watts, yet has the FP power of a Pentium III at twice the clock.
Intel's marketing machine is really quite sad, considering the cumulative megawatt/hours of electricity wasted in the quest for more MHz. Hell, I'd bet all the well-designed "enterprize" CPUs out there (sans Itanic) all are more efficient than any Intel offering for their performance and reliability, simply because they are marketed to a smarter audience who actually cares about BTUs and kilowatts and such.
the next 50 years will see such an explosion in human population that we will be standing shoulder to shoulder stacked five high.
Why do so many humans think that just having gonads gives them a license to procreate without limit? We have a brain, so why don't we use it to realize that having four kids while living in trash isn't a good idea? Legislating families like China is most certainly a bad idea, but I think humans have some serious cultural issues to work out (the Catholics telling people to fill the world with human flesh isn't helping, either--it almost makes me think God is breeding an ultimate slave race and using their dogma as a front).
It's rude, because he knows that the publishers know that he will still dish out too much money for every edition of LOTR published in the next 25 years. Then, the 25th anniversary edition will come out only starting the madness, yet again. He will be living in a rusted-out trailer in a flood zone with anemic kids, but still be proud of his 100% complete mint collection of all the LOTR stuff marketed since the first edition of the book was published way back when. When a hurricane wipes out his trailer taking his collection to the museum in the sky, he'll be the one on camera crying about how his whole life was destroyed, in spite of the fact that his wife and kids are fine and standing right next to him.
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scientific computing
A market where selling the image of knowing what one is doing isn't as good as actually knowing what one is doing. No wonder Microsoft fails there.
Setup with failover in mind one PC could be yanked out and the other taking over the load in a fraction of a second without notice to users.
How do you managed the automatic transfer of active sessions on the failed PC to the other one?
Availability clusters only work either for non-critical things, like web serving, or where the servers effectively maintain redundancy through some RAID-like scheme for database serving. Otherwise, there is only an illusion of reliability, when active sessions are lost requiring people to log in again and re-do some work, for example.
Mainframes, however, are seen as the proprietary means of locking folks in, not .NET.
Not just ironic, but very very sad. These people should know better, but they don't.
80x86 (AFAIK) does not have this kind of checking built into the chip.
It all depends on the outcome. If the 31st bit gets flipped, I'm very happy. If the 30th bit gets flipped, I'm pissed.
Halogens are the exception, but the explaination is a bit too complex for a quick post...
Geez, too lazy to explain black-body physics. What has Slashdot come to?
I noticed your Slashdot alias (Motherfucking Shit). As a southerner, were you born like that, or did the cultural malaise do that to you gradually?
Sun x86 boxes come out of the same factory as Dell servers... :|
This says nothing about which piece of the statistical pie goes to Sun and which piece goes to Dell. Manufacturing is a non-deterministic process, where some pieces spec out better than others. This is why CPUs vary in speed, why some ball bearings cost more, and is why you should never paint a room using separate cans of paint on the same wall.
Woops, lost it. OS, not CPU, is the key here.
Untrue. Don't forget the larger caches and better aggregating bandwidth these systems have. The hardware allows the scaling, the OS makes it available to the end user.
They say "utterly tryable", but it tastes like crap.
Fujitsu SPARC has instruction retry in hardware, Sun doesn't. Out of order execution, Fujitsu yes, Sun "coming soon".
Fujitsu's customers pay for it, too. On a ladder, with IBM mainframes at the top, Fujitsu is not far below, Sun/HP/IBM pSeries/SGI is below Fujitsu, and the PC manufacturers near the bottom.
Even though I've never used an Alpha, everything I've ever read about it reeks of "WTF is this Itanium crap, when the Alpha cleans the competition already and has done so for years!"
why does a $2000 Opteron system outperform a $10000 Sun system?
Actually, if you price out comparable systems (yes, you have to get that 3DLabs card for your Opteron for $1200+ and at least an Ultra160 SCSI controller and disks), the Opteron system will be $6000 to $8000 and the Sun will be $12000 to $15000 (I don't remember the exact numbers). The Sun prices will come more in line with the Opterons when the Blade 2500 workstation is released.
So, Sun is more expensive, but not by the five times you claim. Also, don't forget the Blade 2000 comes with FibreChannel built in, if you need to hook up with some terabyte madness.
Further, if you are planning to run Windows on the Opteron, you should really be ashamed of yourself (it's sort of like putting shag bench seats into a Fararri...).
So, are you going to repeat this analysis with numbers for the UltraSparcIV and Gemini chips when they hit the streets?
Estimates for the performance of these chips are already out based on Sun's announcements. Their performance will be okay. The real selling points of these chips will be having acceptable performance with good reliability, good scalability, and guaranteed binary compatibility. Single-thread performance is no longer a real marketing strength for Sun.
I have an OLD Ultra 60 with 360 Mhz CPUs in it
that smoke my Athlon 2000+ for most tasks.
Er, if you give the Athlon system 10,000RPM SCSI disks, UPA-equivalent graphics bus, etc. to make it spec out the same as the Ultra 60 in nearly every way save the CPU, then the Ultra 60 won't look so stellar anymore. You really need to accept that the Ultra 60 was top of the line four to five years ago. Granted, that doesn't equate to happiness, as I have an Ultra workstation for my own gratification and enjoy using it, but this aspect of the argument is already way past SPEC numbers.
As for your SPEC citations, I'll ignore this especially trollific portion of your post.
Hang on... you're trying to say x86 or IA64 is *MORE* closed than apple's PPC?
Of course. Hold on to your hat, because both SPARC and PPC are more open/less proprietary than x86.
For example, I just pulled this off of sparc.org: "The SPARC instruction set is published as IEEE Standard 1754-1994"
Try getting that from intel.com!
(except that Sun took time to debug the buggy firmware that Intel shipped for months and Sun ships with faster RAM to get an edge in some benchmarks)
Er, it sounds like Sun actually did something new...
Based on their reputation, which I hope they are choosing to hold on to, I would at least expect that Sun's x86 servers go through more integration testing that those from other vendors (which is indicated by the buggy firmware fix you mentioned). Also, for a price, of course, it is easier to get matched sets of components, which is helpful for configuring RAIDs.
With computer hardware, it is all about the odds, and Sun's bet is that people will find their hardware more reliable, on average. For big deployments, this is their added value in the commodity markets.
I don't see where the hell you're getting the idea that socialism is inherently incompatable with Constitutional freedoms, or that Democrats are socialists.
Government policies regarding health, home, and family are inherently religous in nature. The fine-grained data inevitably required by socialist programs are collected without a warrant and not complying is punishable by imprisonment or fines. All the attempts to sate each and every sub-group, sub-culture, and special interest create terrible inequity under the law, leaving a government who is essentially as bigoted as the KKK.
Socialism is hell to people who realize just how much it takes away.
BTW, Republicans are just as bad as Democrats (war on terror, fake free trade, so your rant against the GOP is just the typical knee-jerk zealotry that is so common in an entrenched and self-fortifying two-party system.
In a capitalist system it's the corporations bending everyone over
Not really. The main problem is a corrupt government allowing corporations to act without fear of liability. It is a game where one team can get away with every foul but the other cannot. It is not really capitalism. In socialism, the advantaged team is the government itself.
"can of air"
This is probably referring to the photographer.
What's the difference between socialism and communism?
Americans won't seem to have a problem voting for socialism when they select a Democratic canidate in 2004. They will seem to miss the fact that they will be voting away the freedoms protected explicitly by the US Constitution. They will probably still bitch when the resulting government mess they voted for comes back and makes their life worse making them all look like a bunch of spoiled children.
Americans will never vote for communism, because they still want to lease a used Lexus to drive to and from the government hospital and to park outside their HUD apartment.
Is that enough of an answer for you?
look how much food (energy) we use up each day. It's just spread over a lot of surface area so the peak temperature isn't as high.
Er, I don't quite get it. I used up a whole can of peanut butter, and I just feel sticky. The temperature hasn't changed a bit.
there's no sign of it happening.
Sun, IBM, Transmeta, VIA, etc. have been producing sub-20-watt CPUs for years. Even the once top-of-the-line UltraSPARC II burns only 19 watts, yet has the FP power of a Pentium III at twice the clock.
Intel's marketing machine is really quite sad, considering the cumulative megawatt/hours of electricity wasted in the quest for more MHz. Hell, I'd bet all the well-designed "enterprize" CPUs out there (sans Itanic) all are more efficient than any Intel offering for their performance and reliability, simply because they are marketed to a smarter audience who actually cares about BTUs and kilowatts and such.
the next 50 years will see such an explosion in human population that we will be standing shoulder to shoulder stacked five high.
Why do so many humans think that just having gonads gives them a license to procreate without limit? We have a brain, so why don't we use it to realize that having four kids while living in trash isn't a good idea? Legislating families like China is most certainly a bad idea, but I think humans have some serious cultural issues to work out (the Catholics telling people to fill the world with human flesh isn't helping, either--it almost makes me think God is breeding an ultimate slave race and using their dogma as a front).
Why do they care that every sentence ends with "eh?"?
It's rude, because he knows that the publishers know that he will still dish out too much money for every edition of LOTR published in the next 25 years. Then, the 25th anniversary edition will come out only starting the madness, yet again. He will be living in a rusted-out trailer in a flood zone with anemic kids, but still be proud of his 100% complete mint collection of all the LOTR stuff marketed since the first edition of the book was published way back when. When a hurricane wipes out his trailer taking his collection to the museum in the sky, he'll be the one on camera crying about how his whole life was destroyed, in spite of the fact that his wife and kids are fine and standing right next to him.
The Matrix doesn't really do anything new.
What? It is the first movie created for the sole purpose of being badly parodied in a bad movie, such as Scary Movie.