69% of the UK population in favour of 42 days detention without charge - if you believe the results of a YouGov Poll (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/2107480/42-day-terror-detention-British-public-overwhelmingly-in-favour-,-poll-shows.html)
Which brings us back to the point that one of the benefits of the House of Lords is that it's populated by people who don't listen to public opinion.
Niagara-II will have a floating-point unit for each core. Sun's Rock is expected to have 16 cores when it arrives in 2008. Intel is working on CPUs with 64+ cores, etc. etc. Sun would be somewhat stupid to embark on designing a new programming language targetted at only the chips which are available today.
Multicore does bring new challenges. In terms of parallel programming you might get more performance from a dual socket, dual core system if you treat it as 2 SMP machines connected by a high speed interconnect. Once you get to 8 core CPUs which each have 4 independant memory controllers which communicate over a switched interconnect in each node of a parallel cluster it gets even more complex and so someone is going to have to build the primitives into a programming language to help you deal with such situations.
Fortress is just one of a number of parallel languages which are under development.
Probably not. The machines which were due to get UltraSPARC-IIIi+ chips are better replaced by Sun's Opteron range (at least until Niagara 2 arrives) which are already cheaper, faster and more power efficient than the UltraSPARC-IIIi based systems.
There isn't a direct competitor for the v440 (4 CPU sockets, 4U chassis) but it's so expensive you could buy a small x4600 for the same money.
The concentration of R&D on the high end and then deriving a cheap version of the chip is what has been causing Sun trouble for a while. Intel tried the same thing with Itanium and it didn't work for them either.
Sun's current method, introduce the low end chip - Niagara - first and then build up to the high end stuff (the Rock CPU) seems to be a much better idea. Produce the high volume stuff first and use the revenue from that to produce the high end, high margin stuff.
I know what you mean on the disk front. I'm disappointed that Sun haven't got a Niagra system based on the x4100 design so that you can have a 1U box with mirrored disks. But I think Sun might have something else in mind.
There are rumours floating around of a new Sun storage box called Thumper and iSCSI support is starting to appear in Solaris (including boot support). So why not take the model a bit further and have your 1U boxes with no disks at all talking to a storage box which provides access to disks (or virtual disks) over iSCSI? (There's also Honeycomb, another storage server which is rumoured to be 3U high and hold 16 disks which might be pressed into service in the same way.)
[...] There's no such thing as "intuitive". There's only things which are "consistant with previous experience."
The internal consistency of OpenLook/OpenWindows was really useful, one of the reasons why many of our users still prefer it.
Left mouse: select, Middle mouse: adjust selection, Right mouse: menu.
I've not seen a system which does text selection as well, Single click, place cursor. Double click select word, triple click select sentence, quad click select paragraph - and before you complain how difficult it must be to do that many remember that OpenWindows uses the time between button up and button down to measure a repeat click.
The feature I miss most from OpenLook is the Push Pins on menus. Who needs toolbars on applications when you can simply pin a menu on the desktop if you use it a lot?
Slashdot Mirror
69% of the UK population in favour of 42 days detention without charge - if you believe the results of a YouGov Poll (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/2107480/42-day-terror-detention-British-public-overwhelmingly-in-favour-,-poll-shows.html)
Which brings us back to the point that one of the benefits of the House of Lords is that it's populated by people who don't listen to public opinion.
Niagara-II will have a floating-point unit for each core. Sun's Rock is expected to have 16 cores when it arrives in 2008. Intel is working on CPUs with 64+ cores, etc. etc. Sun would be somewhat stupid to embark on designing a new programming language targetted at only the chips which are available today.
Multicore does bring new challenges. In terms of parallel programming you might get more performance from a dual socket, dual core system if you treat it as 2 SMP machines connected by a high speed interconnect. Once you get to 8 core CPUs which each have 4 independant memory controllers which communicate over a switched interconnect in each node of a parallel cluster it gets even more complex and so someone is going to have to build the primitives into a programming language to help you deal with such situations.
Fortress is just one of a number of parallel languages which are under development.
Probably not. The machines which were due to get UltraSPARC-IIIi+ chips are better replaced by Sun's Opteron range (at least until Niagara 2 arrives) which are already cheaper, faster and more power efficient than the UltraSPARC-IIIi based systems.
There isn't a direct competitor for the v440 (4 CPU sockets, 4U chassis) but it's so expensive you could buy a small x4600 for the same money.
The concentration of R&D on the high end and then deriving a cheap version of the chip is what has been causing Sun trouble for a while. Intel tried the same thing with Itanium and it didn't work for them either.
Sun's current method, introduce the low end chip - Niagara - first and then build up to the high end stuff (the Rock CPU) seems to be a much better idea. Produce the high volume stuff first and use the revenue from that to produce the high end, high margin stuff.
I know what you mean on the disk front. I'm disappointed that Sun haven't got a Niagra system based on the x4100 design so that you can have a 1U box with mirrored disks. But I think Sun might have something else in mind.
There are rumours floating around of a new Sun storage box called Thumper and iSCSI support is starting to appear in Solaris (including boot support). So why not take the model a bit further and have your 1U boxes with no disks at all talking to a storage box which provides access to disks (or virtual disks) over iSCSI? (There's also Honeycomb, another storage server which is rumoured to be 3U high and hold 16 disks which might be pressed into service in the same way.)
[...] There's no such thing as "intuitive". There's only things which are "consistant with previous experience."
The internal consistency of OpenLook/OpenWindows was really useful, one of the reasons why many of our users still prefer it.
Left mouse: select, Middle mouse: adjust selection, Right mouse: menu.
I've not seen a system which does text selection as well, Single click, place cursor. Double click select word, triple click select sentence, quad click select paragraph - and before you complain how difficult it must be to do that many remember that OpenWindows uses the time between button up and button down to measure a repeat click.
The feature I miss most from OpenLook is the Push Pins on menus. Who needs toolbars on applications when you can simply pin a menu on the desktop if you use it a lot?