Something interesting along those lines is that the XBox2 is rumored to be released in 3 forms... one of which is a "PC".... and it's going to be multiprocessor G5s (from the rumors)... and run a version of Windows XP... There might be some interesting times ahead.
It shouldn't be too much longer until a critical mass of multi-platform software is available (OpenOffice, etc.) but the real kicker is games. As soon as another hardware platform that is cheap and viable for games in addition to all the other work stuff is available, we may see a shift or two:)
Yep... cooler than intels and amds, and far more capable chips.
Funny... I've seen a number of posts of Mac dual G5 2.5GHz owners stating that their CPUs (even with the water cooling) run at 80C under load. Typical Intel and AMD parts with just standard HSF run less than 65C under load (and most of the time less than that -- 60C down to around 50C under load with good HSF and thermal paste).
As far as capable, there are numbers of posts of benchmarks on Ars Technica that show A64s being as fast as G5s, clock for clock, at most things. Because video drivers on the PC platforms are usually better than Macs currently, PCs typically eat G5s even with 6800Us. In fact, my Athlon 64 3000+ (S754) with a BFGTech 6800oc is faster than the Dual G5 2.5GHz with a 6800U at some things.
Okay I guess you have not read that Intel is going to produce a Xeon with x64 extensions.
Not "going to"... "have"... They have been for sale (and actually shipping) for a couple months now.
I have to wonder if we are possibly seeing the end of the X86 ISA?
Well... If one thing has been proven in the past it is that software is the driving force, not hardware. It will still take some time for the near 30 years of x86 software to be replaced by "platform independent" stuff (like Java and.NET).
I mean Microsoft is droping the X86 from the XBoxII that means a port of WindowsXP to the PowerPC.
Yeah... this is really interesting... especially along with the three versions of the XBox2 that will be shipping (one of which is actually called a "PC").
Really kind of funny since WindowsNT was supposed to be multiplatform for the start.
It was. I had PPC, Alpha, and MIPS versions. One major problem for those was that there wasn't a market for them. There were only a few machines of those types of architectures that wanted to run Windows and no one for home would buy them. It just didn't make sense to keep them around (from a making money perspective). Also, some of the work to support those ports were supposed to be done by hardware vendors and they didn't do it (also because of the making money issue) so Microsoft was either left to do it themselves (on a losing money platform) or drop them from the support line.
Will Microsoft support Longhorn on IBMs power cpus?
Very good question... with the XBox2, it certainly seems that it wouldn't be too much of a step farther.
Frankly Intel has really had a dismal record with cpus except for the x86 The 8080 and later 8085 because second string players to the Zilog Z80 a better 8080 much like the Athlons are now. The 432 and 80860 where never hits. Intel even dropped its 890 line of embeded risc cpus to jump on the ARM bandwagon with it's Xscale line it bought from DEC.
Well... some folks would disagree with this. The 8051 (and followons) were huge in the embedded world. The i860 wasn't intended to be a "home PC" type processor and saw good use in the HPC world (Intel Paragons, iPSC860s, etc.) and in the graphics world (high end SGI graphics cards were based on i860s - RealityEngine, etc.) Likewise, the i960 family was huge in embedded systems. They were big in printers and all sorts of other devices. The i960s were phased out for newer/better technology in the XScales. The i960 was getting pretty old:)
From what I've seen at Intel's developer forums, they're working on some radically different architecture. Something that isn't von Neumann at all. They're calling it "massively parallel" but the industry seems to think that this means multiple cores on one chip. I think that it means thousands or millions of "processing elements" on one chip (think really small processing elements). Their claim is that they'll be able to apply this architecture to everything from mobile to high-end servers simply by adding or subtracting elements as power constraints allow.
Actually... the Alpha's design philosophy lived on in the Pentium 4 - higher clock speeds.
The Alpha's approach was simple ISA and high clock speeds. The initial versions didn't even have OOOE or byte addressing. It was the "RISCiest of the RISC". It wasn't until later versions when byte addressing and OOOE were added. The Alpha was a fine chip.
The competitor was the HP PA-RISC line which followed the lower clock speed but lots of execution units design philosophy (sound familiar to the AMD lines?) They found it very difficult to ramp up clock speed and very difficult to add more functional units (it's an x^^2 problem) so it stagnated pretty fast. Initially, the two CPU lines were similar in performance but the Alpha ran off from it readily.
Alphas were designed to be simple and high clock speed first, then add the complex stuff.
Alphas lack of volume was partly because instead of bin sorting the wafer, cores on the wafers were tested to see how fast they would run and sold as such. The high speed parts were only found a couple/few times per wafer so they were rare. In addition, this type of testing is very expensive in terms of time and resources to do (bin sorting is much cheaper) and also kept the cost of the CPUs very high for the time.
Yup. There are lots of small businesses that have a number of Windows desktops that they'd like to use as a compute engine at night. Converting it at night (or whenever) without having to configure all the machines to dual boot and reboot them every night would be beneficial.
As far as Windows clustering, I remember when I first attended the MPI-2 Forum and was asked by a Cray rep what I did, I told them that I was porting MPICH to Windows and studying threading with respect to MPI and she laughed at me and thought I was joking:) (At the time, threading was considered an "evil" thing in the high performance world and no one would seriously look at it.) Eventually, we did get good performance out of Windows boxes in clusters and good performance when using threads along with MPI on our own code base for MPI libraries.
I mentioned that Mac OS X is easy to use, and you made a straw man argument that ease of use isn't important for cluster nodes - obviously I never claimed that it was. Read about straw man arguments - good to know about!
Yes... Straw man arguments are using points that are irrelevant to the topic at hand.... Like "ease of use"... which is unimportant to a cluster. You might as well claim that 32 bit color is a wonderful feature that these clusters have because they use Mac OS X... completely irrelevant because these machines won't have graphic displays.
I mentioned that the availability of commercial software for Mac OS X is a strength, and you made a straw man argument that commercial software is not important for cluster nodes; you are taking a position against something that I did not say, for the second time.
Again, your Straw Man argument that a wealth of commecial software is available for Mac OS X that runs on these clusters is another example of your using some point that is irrelevant to the discussion of clusters because the clusters won't be using these commercial applications.
If you really want to Straw Man it out to the limit by listing irrelevant "features" of Mac OS X as pertaining to the topic at hand, namely cluster environments, we could list:
- The color of the case is pleasing to the eye. - The style of the case gives you the warm fuzzies. - You like the fact that Apple has six characters in its name, whicl Intel only has five. - The processor calculates predominantly in big endian mode. - The distance between the case backing and the motherboard is approximately 1/2". - You saw an elephant at the zoo the other day but you didn't feed it peanuts, but you later looked up "elephants" on Google using your Mac. - The file size of your favorite editor on the Mac is exactly number of bytes. - etc.
Then, when someone says that none of these matter for the subject at hand, you can call those Straw Man arguments as well.
Since you seem to have recently learned what "Straw Man" is and enjoy using it to the limit for anything anyone says to refute what you say, you should also realize that you are perfectly capable of initiating Straw Man arguments as well.
In my original post, I took the position that Mac OS X is strong in a suprising number of ways;
it has top security,
The "top security" designation is arguable. While there have been editorials espousing the security of Mac OS X, there are some who claim that the security is dubious because of a number of factors. The easiest and first argument is that the marketshare of Mac OS X is small enough to make virus/worm writing unproductive to the aims of virus/worm writers.
no known viruses,
This is simply false, as linked and stated by others.
is scalable and stable enough for superclusters,
OK, but this is sort of a weak argument. A supercluster is really just a network of individual nodes. Any OS that is stable and can use a network reasonably efficiently fits this bill. Even Windows, with the right scheduling and communications software, can be used in a supercluster (see Cornell).
yet it is also very easy to use
This is also weak because "easy to use" doesn't normally come into play on a cluster. No user sits at the console of any of these machines, typically. Perhaps if one were to be configuring a new node on a workbench before actually inserting it into the cluster, but typically these things are managed remotely and/or by software designed to manage the cluster as a whole. Usually, a scheduler (perhaps a batch scheduler) controls which applications are run on which nodes and many (if not most) supercomputing type applications are not interactive with a user. Once the initial parameters are provided, the parallel application will be run and it will compute until some predetermined end condition is met. Unless the application is a graphical visualization done in realtime, no user input is required (or desired). Many applications output data into files and those files are what are used by other visualization tools after the application has finished. I have seen a few visualization applications that would render data that was periodically output from a parallel application, but it was a seperate task not included in the application itself and the visualizations were done on timestep data or the like.
and has commercial software available for it.
As with the previous argument, the types of commercial software that were mentioned would rarely, if ever, used on any node in the cluster. Most often, a node in a well run cluster is controlled by a scheduler (perhaps a batch scheduler) and the processes that run on it are written by the scientists/developers who are doing research. The commercial applications that might be run on a cluster are schedulers and possibly inter-process communication libraries, not Word or an MP3 player or something like that.
While the USA does support Israel, it is far from being solely responsible for the creation and support of it. Why is the USA being singled out in this?
Some would say that the Pentium-M is the superior part depending on what features you want... Check out all the latest reviews of the Pentium-M desktop (mATX) motherboards that hit in the last few days.
I wish the US hadn't done such stupid things to get people so angry at us that they feel their only recourse is to blow up buildings.
Sounds good... until you realize that one of the things they are most upset at is "Western Culture" moving into their world and disrupting their control of the people.
McDonald's, Coke, Britney Spears, and Madonna are things they are upset over. It isn't that anyone is getting hurt other than they believe their religious and cultural ideals are getting eroded by Western Ideas and the religious leaders power base gets questioned by a more "enlightened" populace. For these things, they believe that it is OK to kill innocent people (Westerners, and Americans in particular).
Like other posters, when I left high school, I thought I was the shiznit as well. I knew more about computers than anyone else in my school, even the teachers. The first thing that hit me when I arrived at college was that I was *maybe* average compared to some of the friends I made. Over the next few years, I learned a whole lot, mostly I learned how to learn and how to research and how to approach and solve problems. Discipline, technique, and work ethic are also important things to learn.
One of the first things you will learn is that you cannot base decisions on exception cases. While there are some folks who never had formal education in CS and the like, these folks are the exceptions to the rule, not the norm. Of course, we all like to think that we are exceptions to the rules but that is just ego.
I've met many, many more programmers who I consider to be "good" or "great" programmers who were formally educated than those who were self-taught.
C#.NET is very similar to Java. If you know one, you can pick up the other relatively easy. Since C# was created after Java, the claim is that the C# creators learned from some of Java's mistakes and inefficiencies and corrected them in C#. So, C# (and.NET) claim to combat these problems of C/C++ in the same ways (to some degree, not using stack based strings and buffers and having strings and buffers that grow/shrink on demand and automagically rather than having fixed sizes).
In addition to creating C#, Microsoft modified some of their other languages to run using the same VM (CLR) as C#. VB was changed a lot to make it look a lot like C# in structure. Then there is managed C++ which has some benefits from the VM environments such as garbage collection.
There are a number of other languages both from Microsoft and from other third parties that have been modified to run using the CLR -- Java#, Delphi (Pascal variant), and a few others, for example.
Are you keeping track of your expenditures of keeping Win2k/Exchange running over the same period of time as you are doing the labor required by the migration?
Do you know how much you spent (in licenses and labor) over the past year or so on the Windows platform? After a year of Groupwise, do the comparison. Remember to include training and the like.
Issues: I honestly had no clue where he stood on issues. One of the commercials I heard summed it up exactly. Basically, it said that no matter who you were or what you believed, Kerry agreed with you. I had seen plenty of places where Kerry did indeed change his mind on where he stood... many times.
This dropped me down to evaluating past behavior. Kerry has a well documented past of doing one thing, then coming back and saying that what he previously did/believed was wrong (seemingly in response to what he thought voters might like to hear). With this record, how does this reassure me that when he passes or vetos some bit of legislation that two weeks later he won't recant on it? It will be too late then and more legislation would have to be introduced to change what was law.
So, what assurances do I have for what was coming ahead? Well... Kerry and Edwards let us know that they had "plans". Well... they had "plans" for everything, but the problem was that they didn't elaborate much more than that on any of them. What was Kerry's plan for Iraq? I don't know. He said that his plan would get us out quicker but also would also require more troops to be there for a slow withdrawal.... (huh?)
What it came down to, for me, was that I didn't know anything about what Kerry would do or stand for. His track record shows that he is quite comfortable with doing one thing then recanting it the next week. He has plans but the plans are either nebulous or contradictory in places. He definitely told me that he would go about the "Tax and Waste" policy, which I definitely do not like. At the same time he talks about outsourcing out-of-country, his wife's company is a major out-of-country outsourcer. To me, he was full of contradictions and vagueness, seeming to be more than willing to go whichever way he thought the public opinion goes (or in all ways). You can please some of the people all of the time, or all of the people some of the time, but you can't please all of the people all of the time. And this is what it seemed to me that he was trying to do... please all of the people all of the time.
Kerry's campaign seemed to have the core stance of "I'm not Bush" and he seemed to think that this was enough to get him into office. There just didn't seem to be much solid substance (other than male bovine fecal matter possibly;) to him at all.
The *only* things in which Kerry had a solid stance to me were detrimental to my person... more taxation for me and little/no benefit for me and, from what I could tell, no benefit for the USA either. Simply saying that "I won't do things the way Bush did" isn't enough to inspire confidence in me that he will do a better job at anything than Bush did.
This is why I didn't vote for Kerry.
I didn't vote for Bush either, so don't go down that path with me.
Well... I think that if someone wanted to cause mischief then they would write malware that would attack the most prevalent platform out there (so as to cause the most mischief possible). The same thing with greed. With greed, you want the "most" possible so, again, you attack the most market share.
If you dislike something, you are more prone to attack it than something you like. For example, a Linux advocate wouldn't attack Linux in a negative way such as writing a worm. However, if the person wanted to "hurt" Linux's rival, this person would write one that attacks Windows.
Many people who exploit security holes and/or write virii and worms for Windows are typically anti-Microsoft and are pro-non-Microsoft. They want to cause bad PR for Microsoft but not their own favorite platform, that's why we don't see as many for the other OSs.
There are tradeoffs with asynchronous design. One of the main arguments for asynchronous design was the DEC Alpha with 10% of its chip area devoted to a clock driver and transmission pathways. The other side of the coin is that asynchronous designs typically use a comparable amount of chip area for the logic required to control the circuit. It does tend to use less power though, as you say.
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Rumor is that the next pin format for the Opterons will be 1207 pins or something.
Something interesting along those lines is that the XBox2 is rumored to be released in 3 forms... one of which is a "PC".... and it's going to be multiprocessor G5s (from the rumors)... and run a version of Windows XP... There might be some interesting times ahead.
:)
It shouldn't be too much longer until a critical mass of multi-platform software is available (OpenOffice, etc.) but the real kicker is games. As soon as another hardware platform that is cheap and viable for games in addition to all the other work stuff is available, we may see a shift or two
Yep... cooler than intels and amds, and far more capable chips.
Funny... I've seen a number of posts of Mac dual G5 2.5GHz owners stating that their CPUs (even with the water cooling) run at 80C under load. Typical Intel and AMD parts with just standard HSF run less than 65C under load (and most of the time less than that -- 60C down to around 50C under load with good HSF and thermal paste).
As far as capable, there are numbers of posts of benchmarks on Ars Technica that show A64s being as fast as G5s, clock for clock, at most things. Because video drivers on the PC platforms are usually better than Macs currently, PCs typically eat G5s even with 6800Us. In fact, my Athlon 64 3000+ (S754) with a BFGTech 6800oc is faster than the Dual G5 2.5GHz with a 6800U at some things.
Yonah is going to be dual core from the start and has already taped out, IIRC. I don't think Banias or Dothan cores can do SMP though.
Okay I guess you have not read that Intel is going to produce a Xeon with x64 extensions.
.NET).
:)
Not "going to"... "have"... They have been for sale (and actually shipping) for a couple months now.
I have to wonder if we are possibly seeing the end of the X86 ISA?
Well... If one thing has been proven in the past it is that software is the driving force, not hardware. It will still take some time for the near 30 years of x86 software to be replaced by "platform independent" stuff (like Java and
I mean Microsoft is droping the X86 from the XBoxII that means a port of WindowsXP to the PowerPC.
Yeah... this is really interesting... especially along with the three versions of the XBox2 that will be shipping (one of which is actually called a "PC").
Really kind of funny since WindowsNT was supposed to be multiplatform for the start.
It was. I had PPC, Alpha, and MIPS versions. One major problem for those was that there wasn't a market for them. There were only a few machines of those types of architectures that wanted to run Windows and no one for home would buy them. It just didn't make sense to keep them around (from a making money perspective). Also, some of the work to support those ports were supposed to be done by hardware vendors and they didn't do it (also because of the making money issue) so Microsoft was either left to do it themselves (on a losing money platform) or drop them from the support line.
Will Microsoft support Longhorn on IBMs power cpus?
Very good question... with the XBox2, it certainly seems that it wouldn't be too much of a step farther.
Frankly Intel has really had a dismal record with cpus except for the x86 The 8080 and later 8085 because second string players to the Zilog Z80 a better 8080 much like the Athlons are now. The 432 and 80860 where never hits. Intel even dropped its 890 line of embeded risc cpus to jump on the ARM bandwagon with it's Xscale line it bought from DEC.
Well... some folks would disagree with this. The 8051 (and followons) were huge in the embedded world. The i860 wasn't intended to be a "home PC" type processor and saw good use in the HPC world (Intel Paragons, iPSC860s, etc.) and in the graphics world (high end SGI graphics cards were based on i860s - RealityEngine, etc.) Likewise, the i960 family was huge in embedded systems. They were big in printers and all sorts of other devices. The i960s were phased out for newer/better technology in the XScales. The i960 was getting pretty old
From what I've seen at Intel's developer forums, they're working on some radically different architecture. Something that isn't von Neumann at all. They're calling it "massively parallel" but the industry seems to think that this means multiple cores on one chip. I think that it means thousands or millions of "processing elements" on one chip (think really small processing elements). Their claim is that they'll be able to apply this architecture to everything from mobile to high-end servers simply by adding or subtracting elements as power constraints allow.
Sounds kind of like TMC's CM-2...
Actually... the Alpha's design philosophy lived on in the Pentium 4 - higher clock speeds.
The Alpha's approach was simple ISA and high clock speeds. The initial versions didn't even have OOOE or byte addressing. It was the "RISCiest of the RISC". It wasn't until later versions when byte addressing and OOOE were added. The Alpha was a fine chip.
The competitor was the HP PA-RISC line which followed the lower clock speed but lots of execution units design philosophy (sound familiar to the AMD lines?) They found it very difficult to ramp up clock speed and very difficult to add more functional units (it's an x^^2 problem) so it stagnated pretty fast. Initially, the two CPU lines were similar in performance but the Alpha ran off from it readily.
Alphas were designed to be simple and high clock speed first, then add the complex stuff.
Alphas lack of volume was partly because instead of bin sorting the wafer, cores on the wafers were tested to see how fast they would run and sold as such. The high speed parts were only found a couple/few times per wafer so they were rare. In addition, this type of testing is very expensive in terms of time and resources to do (bin sorting is much cheaper) and also kept the cost of the CPUs very high for the time.
MS is going after the small ones.
:) (At the time, threading was considered an "evil" thing in the high performance world and no one would seriously look at it.) Eventually, we did get good performance out of Windows boxes in clusters and good performance when using threads along with MPI on our own code base for MPI libraries.
Yup. There are lots of small businesses that have a number of Windows desktops that they'd like to use as a compute engine at night. Converting it at night (or whenever) without having to configure all the machines to dual boot and reboot them every night would be beneficial.
As far as Windows clustering, I remember when I first attended the MPI-2 Forum and was asked by a Cray rep what I did, I told them that I was porting MPICH to Windows and studying threading with respect to MPI and she laughed at me and thought I was joking
I mentioned that Mac OS X is easy to use, and you made a straw man argument that ease of use isn't important for cluster nodes - obviously I never claimed that it was. Read about straw man arguments - good to know about!
Yes... Straw man arguments are using points that are irrelevant to the topic at hand.... Like "ease of use"... which is unimportant to a cluster. You might as well claim that 32 bit color is a wonderful feature that these clusters have because they use Mac OS X... completely irrelevant because these machines won't have graphic displays.
I mentioned that the availability of commercial software for Mac OS X is a strength, and you made a straw man argument that commercial software is not important for cluster nodes; you are taking a position against something that I did not say, for the second time.
Again, your Straw Man argument that a wealth of commecial software is available for Mac OS X that runs on these clusters is another example of your using some point that is irrelevant to the discussion of clusters because the clusters won't be using these commercial applications.
If you really want to Straw Man it out to the limit by listing irrelevant "features" of Mac OS X as pertaining to the topic at hand, namely cluster environments, we could list:
- The color of the case is pleasing to the eye.
- The style of the case gives you the warm fuzzies.
- You like the fact that Apple has six characters in its name, whicl Intel only has five.
- The processor calculates predominantly in big endian mode.
- The distance between the case backing and the motherboard is approximately 1/2".
- You saw an elephant at the zoo the other day but you didn't feed it peanuts, but you later looked up "elephants" on Google using your Mac.
- The file size of your favorite editor on the Mac is exactly number of bytes.
- etc.
Then, when someone says that none of these matter for the subject at hand, you can call those Straw Man arguments as well.
Since you seem to have recently learned what "Straw Man" is and enjoy using it to the limit for anything anyone says to refute what you say, you should also realize that you are perfectly capable of initiating Straw Man arguments as well.
One step closer to free phone calls, or one step closer to state regulation or taxation of IP networks?
It's hard to get politicians to decrease taxes on anything, and when you do, there are some parties who want to increase them again.
You KNOW that if people start switching over from something taxed to something untaxed that there will be a new tax soon on the untaxed thing.
In my original post, I took the position that Mac OS X is strong in a suprising number of ways;
it has top security,
The "top security" designation is arguable. While there have been editorials espousing the security of Mac OS X, there are some who claim that the security is dubious because of a number of factors. The easiest and first argument is that the marketshare of Mac OS X is small enough to make virus/worm writing unproductive to the aims of virus/worm writers.
no known viruses,
This is simply false, as linked and stated by others.
is scalable and stable enough for superclusters,
OK, but this is sort of a weak argument. A supercluster is really just a network of individual nodes. Any OS that is stable and can use a network reasonably efficiently fits this bill. Even Windows, with the right scheduling and communications software, can be used in a supercluster (see Cornell).
yet it is also very easy to use
This is also weak because "easy to use" doesn't normally come into play on a cluster. No user sits at the console of any of these machines, typically. Perhaps if one were to be configuring a new node on a workbench before actually inserting it into the cluster, but typically these things are managed remotely and/or by software designed to manage the cluster as a whole. Usually, a scheduler (perhaps a batch scheduler) controls which applications are run on which nodes and many (if not most) supercomputing type applications are not interactive with a user. Once the initial parameters are provided, the parallel application will be run and it will compute until some predetermined end condition is met. Unless the application is a graphical visualization done in realtime, no user input is required (or desired). Many applications output data into files and those files are what are used by other visualization tools after the application has finished. I have seen a few visualization applications that would render data that was periodically output from a parallel application, but it was a seperate task not included in the application itself and the visualizations were done on timestep data or the like.
and has commercial software available for it.
As with the previous argument, the types of commercial software that were mentioned would rarely, if ever, used on any node in the cluster. Most often, a node in a well run cluster is controlled by a scheduler (perhaps a batch scheduler) and the processes that run on it are written by the scientists/developers who are doing research. The commercial applications that might be run on a cluster are schedulers and possibly inter-process communication libraries, not Word or an MP3 player or something like that.
"One of the things"...
Anyway, you still see this just last week with the prohibition of soccer players from wearing ponytails and such.
Also, the USA isn't solely responsible for Israel's creation and the support of it, yet the USA is the prime target.
While the USA does support Israel, it is far from being solely responsible for the creation and support of it. Why is the USA being singled out in this?
AMD has the superior product in the Athlon 64
Depends on what you want the CPU for...
Some would say that the Pentium-M is the superior part depending on what features you want... Check out all the latest reviews of the Pentium-M desktop (mATX) motherboards that hit in the last few days.
I wish the US hadn't done such stupid things to get people so angry at us that they feel their only recourse is to blow up buildings.
Sounds good... until you realize that one of the things they are most upset at is "Western Culture" moving into their world and disrupting their control of the people.
McDonald's, Coke, Britney Spears, and Madonna are things they are upset over. It isn't that anyone is getting hurt other than they believe their religious and cultural ideals are getting eroded by Western Ideas and the religious leaders power base gets questioned by a more "enlightened" populace. For these things, they believe that it is OK to kill innocent people (Westerners, and Americans in particular).
Like other posters, when I left high school, I thought I was the shiznit as well. I knew more about computers than anyone else in my school, even the teachers. The first thing that hit me when I arrived at college was that I was *maybe* average compared to some of the friends I made. Over the next few years, I learned a whole lot, mostly I learned how to learn and how to research and how to approach and solve problems. Discipline, technique, and work ethic are also important things to learn.
One of the first things you will learn is that you cannot base decisions on exception cases. While there are some folks who never had formal education in CS and the like, these folks are the exceptions to the rule, not the norm. Of course, we all like to think that we are exceptions to the rules but that is just ego.
I've met many, many more programmers who I consider to be "good" or "great" programmers who were formally educated than those who were self-taught.
C#.NET is very similar to Java. If you know one, you can pick up the other relatively easy. Since C# was created after Java, the claim is that the C# creators learned from some of Java's mistakes and inefficiencies and corrected them in C#. So, C# (and .NET) claim to combat these problems of C/C++ in the same ways (to some degree, not using stack based strings and buffers and having strings and buffers that grow/shrink on demand and automagically rather than having fixed sizes).
In addition to creating C#, Microsoft modified some of their other languages to run using the same VM (CLR) as C#. VB was changed a lot to make it look a lot like C# in structure. Then there is managed C++ which has some benefits from the VM environments such as garbage collection.
There are a number of other languages both from Microsoft and from other third parties that have been modified to run using the CLR -- Java#, Delphi (Pascal variant), and a few others, for example.
Are you keeping track of your expenditures of keeping Win2k/Exchange running over the same period of time as you are doing the labor required by the migration?
Do you know how much you spent (in licenses and labor) over the past year or so on the Windows platform? After a year of Groupwise, do the comparison. Remember to include training and the like.
This would be good information for folks to see.
I was a swing vote.
;) to him at all.
Why I didn't vote for Kerry:
Issues: I honestly had no clue where he stood on issues. One of the commercials I heard summed it up exactly. Basically, it said that no matter who you were or what you believed, Kerry agreed with you. I had seen plenty of places where Kerry did indeed change his mind on where he stood... many times.
This dropped me down to evaluating past behavior. Kerry has a well documented past of doing one thing, then coming back and saying that what he previously did/believed was wrong (seemingly in response to what he thought voters might like to hear). With this record, how does this reassure me that when he passes or vetos some bit of legislation that two weeks later he won't recant on it? It will be too late then and more legislation would have to be introduced to change what was law.
So, what assurances do I have for what was coming ahead? Well... Kerry and Edwards let us know that they had "plans". Well... they had "plans" for everything, but the problem was that they didn't elaborate much more than that on any of them. What was Kerry's plan for Iraq? I don't know. He said that his plan would get us out quicker but also would also require more troops to be there for a slow withdrawal.... (huh?)
What it came down to, for me, was that I didn't know anything about what Kerry would do or stand for. His track record shows that he is quite comfortable with doing one thing then recanting it the next week. He has plans but the plans are either nebulous or contradictory in places. He definitely told me that he would go about the "Tax and Waste" policy, which I definitely do not like. At the same time he talks about outsourcing out-of-country, his wife's company is a major out-of-country outsourcer. To me, he was full of contradictions and vagueness, seeming to be more than willing to go whichever way he thought the public opinion goes (or in all ways). You can please some of the people all of the time, or all of the people some of the time, but you can't please all of the people all of the time. And this is what it seemed to me that he was trying to do... please all of the people all of the time.
Kerry's campaign seemed to have the core stance of "I'm not Bush" and he seemed to think that this was enough to get him into office. There just didn't seem to be much solid substance (other than male bovine fecal matter possibly
The *only* things in which Kerry had a solid stance to me were detrimental to my person... more taxation for me and little/no benefit for me and, from what I could tell, no benefit for the USA either. Simply saying that "I won't do things the way Bush did" isn't enough to inspire confidence in me that he will do a better job at anything than Bush did.
This is why I didn't vote for Kerry.
I didn't vote for Bush either, so don't go down that path with me.
At least there's a silver lining in this, Hillary in '08!
Well... you can already count my vote for anyone other than Hillary, I don't care who it is.
I wonder if Powell will run in '08.
The article talks about displaying 3D objects on a plane. Did they patent the planning or the planing part?
Well... I think that if someone wanted to cause mischief then they would write malware that would attack the most prevalent platform out there (so as to cause the most mischief possible). The same thing with greed. With greed, you want the "most" possible so, again, you attack the most market share.
If you dislike something, you are more prone to attack it than something you like. For example, a Linux advocate wouldn't attack Linux in a negative way such as writing a worm. However, if the person wanted to "hurt" Linux's rival, this person would write one that attacks Windows.
So, how does something like:
Many people who exploit security holes and/or write virii and worms for Windows are typically anti-Microsoft and are pro-non-Microsoft. They want to cause bad PR for Microsoft but not their own favorite platform, that's why we don't see as many for the other OSs.
Fit into your logic?
There are tradeoffs with asynchronous design. One of the main arguments for asynchronous design was the DEC Alpha with 10% of its chip area devoted to a clock driver and transmission pathways. The other side of the coin is that asynchronous designs typically use a comparable amount of chip area for the logic required to control the circuit. It does tend to use less power though, as you say.
True, Doom III runs somewhat slower under Linux. However, it's hard to say why at this point.
Why? I think mostly that compilers are a big issue. GCC's goal is to produce code that runs, not to produce highly optimized code.
Also, I know that most games bypass X, but X is also a hog for those that try to use it.