I use my virtual desktops on a task basis. I start in the first one doing Task X (the windows/apps associated with that task are there), then if another task comes up not related to that, I jump to a clean virtual desktop and start on the new task (opening whatever windows/apps are necessary). Repeat as necessary. I can switch between tasks if needed and have all the context where I left off contained in the single virtual desktop without having to wander around looking for stuff. When I finish a task, I clear off the desktop then go to another task already in progress or start a new task.
Not that complicated of a methodology but it works for me.
Yet another move that is probably older than your grandfather's grandfather. This sort of thing has been going on for a long time. Look up the other links in the threads to see when the word was coined.
Seems I first learned this term in middle-school civics class (over 20 years ago).
In the past(5+ years ago, I would say), console games sold well compared to personal computers (to home users). This definitely isn't the case anymore as the popularity of the web has caused more computers to be sold to home users. So, the tables have turned in the past 5 years or so I think. Five years ago, how many families do you know who had PlayStations or some form of Nintendo compared with those who had PCs?
Anyway, just from recent years showing the PCs winning over the consoles, a quick web search showed these:
http://www.psreporter.com/playstation_2_sales.ht ml
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003/07/17/tech/m ai n563772.shtml
The first is a link showing worldwide Playstation2 sales (didn't look for other consoles) as of May 5, 2002 (~30M units) since the release of the PS2. The second shows worldwide PC sales (total: business and home) of 33M for the quarter ending June 30, 2003. I couldn't quickly find a breakdown on home vs. business only. So yeah, the past few years I'd say that PCs are beating the consoles handily. However, in the past, especially 10 years ago, I think it wasn't much of a contest. Practically every family I knew had a Playstation or a Nintendo (Super Nintendo) when very few had PCs. We'd have to dig around some more to find figures for them. Also, remember to include the hand-held game consoles like GameBoy and such.
The other advantage is that OSS helps to close the gap between the haves and the have nots.
Good point, but you didn't exactly qualify which side was doing the most movement toward which direction. "Bringing technology" to someone in itself is not necessarily a good thing - nuclear and chemical weapons are technologies but I don't think many people would support that bringing these technologies to everyone is a good idea.
They have to understand that free software is better because its quality is superior
This does not hold. I can write a program that I claim to be "all that and a bag of chips" but it simply SEGVs and then GPL it and put it out for people to download. No one uses it because it's just a SEGV maker and no one cares to fix it because it really doesn't do anything. So, we have some "free" software that is junk now.
Because it is "free software", does not imply that it is superior quality to anything.
I have a large number of NCD terminals I bought for my side business. 20 of these run off ONE dual P-III server. now you dont have to use ncd terminals, old Pentium 100 computers work great for this.
now I can have one server act as 20 workstations AND a server. no extra cvosts per workstation, and cince I can use throw away hardware for workstations my costs are even lower. [...]
this is only possible with linux+OSS.
Wrong. This is absolutely nothing new. Time-shared servers have been around *long*, *long* before Linux and OSS, even before I was born (I'm 35 now). Early computing was this model (big mainframes with many cheap ttys - ever wonder where VT100 terminal emulation came from, for example?). You put all your compute type resources in one expensive node and then hang cheap terminals off it for folks to input into the server. From there, folks started making minis and eventually the personal computer. The model you talk about here is just the wheel on its second revolution around. Also, I've seen 100s of cheap terminals hang off a machine that had less than 1/100th of the processing power of your PIII box. Nothing new here.
as with windows the same thing would cost many thousands as I would need 2 more servers and 2 licenses per workstation for the OS and apps to do the same thing with the same performance.
Not that I necessarily disagree with you here, but given the rest of your post, I'd like to see the numbers and report that you made that prove this assertion. What I do disagree with is someone just blabing out garbage like this as fact when there is no evidence to support it.
OSS promotes learning about how a computer actually works. This is diametrically opposed to what the MegaCorps want.
It isn't necessarily about "what the MegaCorps want". Are you sure that everyone must know how a computer works in order to use one? Are you sure that they even care how the thing works? Why do PlayStations and such outsell PCs historically by orders of magnitude?
The "common" person just wants the thing to work. The thing is magic to them as far as they are concerned. Do they know how their TV works or even their automobile? I would bet that the vast majority of folks could care less. They just want it to work and work reliably. To them, these are tools, not hobbies or even lifestyles. Look at the Sci-Fi envisioning of computers in the future... voice responsive, human interactive, natural language processing machines. Not something you see Captain Kirk opening the side of a beige case dorking with jumpers and graphics cards unless the ship is being blown out from under him.
So, I would disagree with you a bit on what the MegaCrops are doing. I think the MegaCorps are doing what they think that people want.
Now of course if a closed source shop is succesful they will also enjoy greater revenue, but their is less incentive to plow this back into development once they become succesful - in fact, the more succesful the product is, the less need there is to improve it, if it weren't good, people wouldn't buy it, would they? Contrast this to open source, where more users equals more itching, and thus, more scratching.
Itching/scratching means that there is something lacking that needs to be fixed/added. a) this implies that there is no single solution that will solve everyone's problem, b) you can never approach convergence on a solution because the more people there are that use the software, the more "itch" there is, which means that the software diverges from the solution. Commercial software has the opposite idea... that you can eventually solve all the problems (or at least a large subset of the details of the problem) with a single application, and c) since there will always be more itching/scratching that needs to be done, your OSS app will never solve your problem completely and is inherently less good because there is always the need to improve/fix it. Now... that means a few things... bloat, feature creep, and/or large numbers of variants (versions).
I guess the other problem you have to combat is actually getting money for your services. The nature of most people is to take what they can get for free. Basically what it forces seems to be the commoditization of programming labor. However, what it will turn out to be is that labor wages will drop to a point where few people can make a living on it, fewer people will choose to enter into the field, and most programming effort will take place after-hours by folks who have to maintain a "real" job to pay the bills and spend what off-time they want to spend maintaining your code. Because you can't make a living at programming, fewer people will want to try it. In the end, you'll have few full-time programmers (and those who do this will probably be paid low wages but will require lots of knowledge/experience to differentiate them from other programmers to the point of someone wanting to pay them for their services - but you can't afford schooling because you couldn't afford it), and more and more software being maintained as pet projects or hobbies by those who will fix your problem when they find the time to get around to it, because they can't afford to dedicate their time to the problems of the software and still put food on their family's table.
Funny... I didn't read his comment as any sort of put down.
All he did was use an example of a language only available on one platform (a popular language and platform at that) and say you should look at other stuff sometimes. And I agree with him. Looking at how other languages/systems handle things may give you ideas on how to do them better in whatever language/system of your choice. I happen to agree with him. I'm confident that my knowledge/experience with assembly on various platforms helps me write better C code, for example.
Interestingly enough, I think OSS will eventually drive the market on people who are programmers by trade to be an elitist group (even more than now). People go into computers for a variety of reasons, one of them is because they think they can make money at it. Since OSS will drive down the wages that one can get in the field, fewer people will enter because they can't make money at it anymore. This will, in turn, make it so that there will be fewer paid programmers, who all make low wages but will require a lot of knowledge to keep the advantage they have so that they can get more jobs. This leads to paid programmers by trade being a smaller group of people who have higher qualifications to enter. Of course, there will still be the tinkerers who do it for fun but really don't have the time to invest in really writing software and the folks who installed Linux and maybe looked at some C code once or twice who now go around thinking they are l337 h4x0rz.
Yeah, especially when you realize that "Moore's Law" is a guide in economics at least as much (probably more than) a "law" in technology. The market and costs of development can bear an upgrade every two years. Any slower and the competition will beat you. Any faster and you won't sell chips while you spend lots more money to accelerate the rate.
Plants don't have central nervous systems. Plants don't feel harm.
Your supposition doesn't necessarily lead to your conclusion. Many organisms do not have central nervous systems but do respond to stimuli that are harmful to them.
YOU are starving your fellow man.
Are you accusing me of eating someone else's steak?
A quick look at the human physiology (eye placement for binocular vision, types of teeth in the jaw - canines and incisors as well as molars and bicuspids, etc.) all indicate that humans are omnivorous by design. That means that humans were designed to eat both "meat" and "veggies". The choice of whether or not to eat from either classification of food is just that - a choice - because you *are* designed to take from both categories of foods, regardless if you like that fact or not.
I wonder what the vegetarian community thinks of the Atkins Diet:)
Yeah... typical/. crap these days. Unless the RIAA were monitoring sales before and after in the UF geographic area, I doubt whether or not a few hundred students buying more of a particular CD would show up as anything at all. It'd probably just be lost in the noise of random consumer buying. OR... students could just be doing without the music. It isn't like air or food.
Also, as the previous poster said... the network and cabling is owned by the UF so they can say what it can be used for and what it can't. People do not have a "right" to do whatever they want over their network, regardless of how confused some people are on what are "rights", what are "privileges", and what is simply doing what you want to do.
If the students don't like it, they can always move off campus and go with an ISP who will let them do what they want to do.
On paper an itanium processors should be 5 times faster than the old mpis processors. At the moment we are lucky to see 2 or 3 speedup. And that is AFTER you have tuned the damn things for itaniums. It seems to be quite normal for code to run slower on the new machine than the old... So you have a tough porting job to do...
Is this speedup per processor or overall on your application? In any case, any time you move to a new system, you may have to do some tuning of your software for the new machine. For example, the Sun E10K+ has memory latencies very similar across the system. You can write code that works fine there, but when you move to a NUMA machine it may run very poorly because of memory access patterns and memory locality to the processor. You'll need to tune your software to make it run better.
The problem with the itaniums is that all the hard optimisation stuff has been moved from the hardware to the compiler. Plus the compiler is buggy as hell at the moment...
So... since it's "easy" to be done in hardware and "hard" to be done in software, hardware engineers are better at software optimization than software guys?;) Buggy compilers are always a pain, but ignoring that, there's no reason why the compilers can't get better over time to produce better code. I know that doesn't help you right now though:)
The article offers up this question: might there be other metrics that might be important to supercomputing, rather than relying solely on processing speed?
Embedded systems (and I'm not just talking about microcontrollers in your phones or microwaves - I'm talking about 100s of processors connected together in VME cages and the like - see Mercury, CSPI, Sky for examples) have always had the metrics FLOPS/W (FLOPS per Watt) and FLOPS/m^3 (FLOPS per volume) metrics. These were critical measurements because applications required certain performance and the machines themselves had to meet size/weight requirements depending on where they were being deployed. Jamming many processors in the space of a microwave oven to meet performance requirements (like 64+ processors), being less than a certain weight, having power consumption constraints, and requiring high performance without melting down because of the heat has always been an issue in certain sectors.
In the past, the embedded systems were typically special purpose - ran "special" OSs and were basically big set-top boxes that did only the one thing they were programmed to do. However, a few years back (like 5+), companies like CSPI started doing things like running Linux (or a realtime Linux variant) on their nodes instead of VxWorks and such, turning the box into a general purpose machine. I guess it just takes a while for some things to get enough attention to where someone would post it on/.
Developers get what they want (income from doing something cool).
In the context above, I haven't seen this happen so much. What I've mostly seen is that, yes, developers get paid, but the company they work for doesn't, and eventuall goes belly-up and the developers are no longer paid until they find another job.
Actually, according to things that they've (MS) said in the past, they were supposed to be thinking about remote management, more powerful scripting, and the like for quite a while now (I remember stuff about a new CLI from MS over 2 years ago). The goal was supposedly to ease remote administration as well as make administration of a local machine more "powerful" by making a more powerful CLI and writing many of the tools so that they can be invoked via CLI as well as graphically. Whether that is the current vision, I haven't a clue.
Slashdot Mirror
I use my virtual desktops on a task basis. I start in the first one doing Task X (the windows/apps associated with that task are there), then if another task comes up not related to that, I jump to a clean virtual desktop and start on the new task (opening whatever windows/apps are necessary). Repeat as necessary. I can switch between tasks if needed and have all the context where I left off contained in the single virtual desktop without having to wander around looking for stuff. When I finish a task, I clear off the desktop then go to another task already in progress or start a new task.
Not that complicated of a methodology but it works for me.
I hope JBuilder is 10X better than it was one year ago, then, because back then it was a horrid IDE. Man was it slow, but at least it was buggy.
Yet another move that is probably older than your grandfather's grandfather. This sort of thing has been going on for a long time. Look up the other links in the threads to see when the word was coined.
Seems I first learned this term in middle-school civics class (over 20 years ago).
...and in the engineering building:
The limit as GPA approaches 0 of an engineering major = business major.
In the past(5+ years ago, I would say), console games sold well compared to personal computers (to home users). This definitely isn't the case anymore as the popularity of the web has caused more computers to be sold to home users. So, the tables have turned in the past 5 years or so I think. Five years ago, how many families do you know who had PlayStations or some form of Nintendo compared with those who had PCs?
t ml
m ai n563772.shtml
Anyway, just from recent years showing the PCs winning over the consoles, a quick web search showed these:
http://www.psreporter.com/playstation_2_sales.h
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003/07/17/tech/
The first is a link showing worldwide Playstation2 sales (didn't look for other consoles) as of May 5, 2002 (~30M units) since the release of the PS2. The second shows worldwide PC sales (total: business and home) of 33M for the quarter ending June 30, 2003. I couldn't quickly find a breakdown on home vs. business only. So yeah, the past few years I'd say that PCs are beating the consoles handily. However, in the past, especially 10 years ago, I think it wasn't much of a contest. Practically every family I knew had a Playstation or a Nintendo (Super Nintendo) when very few had PCs. We'd have to dig around some more to find figures for them. Also, remember to include the hand-held game consoles like GameBoy and such.
The other advantage is that OSS helps to close the gap between the haves and the have nots.
Good point, but you didn't exactly qualify which side was doing the most movement toward which direction. "Bringing technology" to someone in itself is not necessarily a good thing - nuclear and chemical weapons are technologies but I don't think many people would support that bringing these technologies to everyone is a good idea.
They have to understand that free software is better because its quality is superior
This does not hold. I can write a program that I claim to be "all that and a bag of chips" but it simply SEGVs and then GPL it and put it out for people to download. No one uses it because it's just a SEGV maker and no one cares to fix it because it really doesn't do anything. So, we have some "free" software that is junk now.
Because it is "free software", does not imply that it is superior quality to anything.
I have a large number of NCD terminals I bought for my side business. 20 of these run off ONE dual P-III server. now you dont have to use ncd terminals, old Pentium 100 computers work great for this.
now I can have one server act as 20 workstations AND a server. no extra cvosts per workstation, and cince I can use throw away hardware for workstations my costs are even lower. [...]
this is only possible with linux+OSS.
Wrong. This is absolutely nothing new. Time-shared servers have been around *long*, *long* before Linux and OSS, even before I was born (I'm 35 now). Early computing was this model (big mainframes with many cheap ttys - ever wonder where VT100 terminal emulation came from, for example?). You put all your compute type resources in one expensive node and then hang cheap terminals off it for folks to input into the server. From there, folks started making minis and eventually the personal computer. The model you talk about here is just the wheel on its second revolution around. Also, I've seen 100s of cheap terminals hang off a machine that had less than 1/100th of the processing power of your PIII box. Nothing new here.
as with windows the same thing would cost many thousands as I would need 2 more servers and 2 licenses per workstation for the OS and apps to do the same thing with the same performance.
Not that I necessarily disagree with you here, but given the rest of your post, I'd like to see the numbers and report that you made that prove this assertion. What I do disagree with is someone just blabing out garbage like this as fact when there is no evidence to support it.
OSS promotes learning about how a computer actually works. This is diametrically opposed to what the MegaCorps want.
It isn't necessarily about "what the MegaCorps want". Are you sure that everyone must know how a computer works in order to use one? Are you sure that they even care how the thing works? Why do PlayStations and such outsell PCs historically by orders of magnitude?
The "common" person just wants the thing to work. The thing is magic to them as far as they are concerned. Do they know how their TV works or even their automobile? I would bet that the vast majority of folks could care less. They just want it to work and work reliably. To them, these are tools, not hobbies or even lifestyles. Look at the Sci-Fi envisioning of computers in the future... voice responsive, human interactive, natural language processing machines. Not something you see Captain Kirk opening the side of a beige case dorking with jumpers and graphics cards unless the ship is being blown out from under him.
So, I would disagree with you a bit on what the MegaCrops are doing. I think the MegaCorps are doing what they think that people want.
I think he was joking.
Now of course if a closed source shop is succesful they will also enjoy greater revenue, but their is less incentive to plow this back into development once they become succesful - in fact, the more succesful the product is, the less need there is to improve it, if it weren't good, people wouldn't buy it, would they? Contrast this to open source, where more users equals more itching, and thus, more scratching.
Itching/scratching means that there is something lacking that needs to be fixed/added. a) this implies that there is no single solution that will solve everyone's problem, b) you can never approach convergence on a solution because the more people there are that use the software, the more "itch" there is, which means that the software diverges from the solution. Commercial software has the opposite idea... that you can eventually solve all the problems (or at least a large subset of the details of the problem) with a single application, and c) since there will always be more itching/scratching that needs to be done, your OSS app will never solve your problem completely and is inherently less good because there is always the need to improve/fix it. Now... that means a few things... bloat, feature creep, and/or large numbers of variants (versions).
I guess the other problem you have to combat is actually getting money for your services. The nature of most people is to take what they can get for free. Basically what it forces seems to be the commoditization of programming labor. However, what it will turn out to be is that labor wages will drop to a point where few people can make a living on it, fewer people will choose to enter into the field, and most programming effort will take place after-hours by folks who have to maintain a "real" job to pay the bills and spend what off-time they want to spend maintaining your code. Because you can't make a living at programming, fewer people will want to try it. In the end, you'll have few full-time programmers (and those who do this will probably be paid low wages but will require lots of knowledge/experience to differentiate them from other programmers to the point of someone wanting to pay them for their services - but you can't afford schooling because you couldn't afford it), and more and more software being maintained as pet projects or hobbies by those who will fix your problem when they find the time to get around to it, because they can't afford to dedicate their time to the problems of the software and still put food on their family's table.
Funny... I didn't read his comment as any sort of put down.
All he did was use an example of a language only available on one platform (a popular language and platform at that) and say you should look at other stuff sometimes. And I agree with him. Looking at how other languages/systems handle things may give you ideas on how to do them better in whatever language/system of your choice. I happen to agree with him. I'm confident that my knowledge/experience with assembly on various platforms helps me write better C code, for example.
Interestingly enough, I think OSS will eventually drive the market on people who are programmers by trade to be an elitist group (even more than now). People go into computers for a variety of reasons, one of them is because they think they can make money at it. Since OSS will drive down the wages that one can get in the field, fewer people will enter because they can't make money at it anymore. This will, in turn, make it so that there will be fewer paid programmers, who all make low wages but will require a lot of knowledge to keep the advantage they have so that they can get more jobs. This leads to paid programmers by trade being a smaller group of people who have higher qualifications to enter. Of course, there will still be the tinkerers who do it for fun but really don't have the time to invest in really writing software and the folks who installed Linux and maybe looked at some C code once or twice who now go around thinking they are l337 h4x0rz.
Yeah, especially when you realize that "Moore's Law" is a guide in economics at least as much (probably more than) a "law" in technology. The market and costs of development can bear an upgrade every two years. Any slower and the competition will beat you. Any faster and you won't sell chips while you spend lots more money to accelerate the rate.
Plants don't have central nervous systems. Plants don't feel harm.
:)
Your supposition doesn't necessarily lead to your conclusion. Many organisms do not have central nervous systems but do respond to stimuli that are harmful to them.
YOU are starving your fellow man.
Are you accusing me of eating someone else's steak?
A quick look at the human physiology (eye placement for binocular vision, types of teeth in the jaw - canines and incisors as well as molars and bicuspids, etc.) all indicate that humans are omnivorous by design. That means that humans were designed to eat both "meat" and "veggies". The choice of whether or not to eat from either classification of food is just that - a choice - because you *are* designed to take from both categories of foods, regardless if you like that fact or not.
I wonder what the vegetarian community thinks of the Atkins Diet
Yeah... typical /. crap these days. Unless the RIAA were monitoring sales before and after in the UF geographic area, I doubt whether or not a few hundred students buying more of a particular CD would show up as anything at all. It'd probably just be lost in the noise of random consumer buying. OR... students could just be doing without the music. It isn't like air or food.
Also, as the previous poster said... the network and cabling is owned by the UF so they can say what it can be used for and what it can't. People do not have a "right" to do whatever they want over their network, regardless of how confused some people are on what are "rights", what are "privileges", and what is simply doing what you want to do.
If the students don't like it, they can always move off campus and go with an ISP who will let them do what they want to do.
So... we finally know what the 2. ???? is...
I see some folks left work early today to head to the bars...
either that or the sarcasm is a little too subtle in this one...
On paper an itanium processors should be 5 times faster than the old mpis processors. At the moment we are lucky to see 2 or 3 speedup. And that is AFTER you have tuned the damn things for itaniums.
;) Buggy compilers are always a pain, but ignoring that, there's no reason why :)
It seems to be quite normal for code to run slower on the new machine than the old... So you have a tough porting job to do...
Is this speedup per processor or overall on your application? In any case, any time you move to a new system, you may have to do some tuning of your software for the new machine. For example, the Sun E10K+ has memory latencies very similar across the system. You can write code that works fine there, but when you move to a NUMA machine it may run very poorly because of memory access patterns and memory locality to the processor. You'll need to tune your software to make it run better.
The problem with the itaniums is that all the hard optimisation stuff has been moved from the hardware to the compiler. Plus the compiler is buggy as hell at the moment...
So... since it's "easy" to be done in hardware and "hard" to be done in software, hardware engineers are better at software optimization than software guys?
the compilers can't get better over time to produce better code. I know that doesn't help you right now though
I'm experiencing an outtage at the moment. I just fired up the XBox/PS2/GameCube and caught up on some games that I hadn't played.
The article offers up this question: might there be other metrics that might be important to supercomputing, rather than relying solely on processing speed?
/.
Embedded systems (and I'm not just talking about microcontrollers in your phones or microwaves - I'm talking about 100s of processors connected together in VME cages and the like - see Mercury, CSPI, Sky for examples) have always had the metrics FLOPS/W (FLOPS per Watt) and FLOPS/m^3 (FLOPS per volume) metrics. These were critical measurements because applications required certain performance and the machines themselves had to meet size/weight requirements depending on where they were being deployed. Jamming many processors in the space of a microwave oven to meet performance requirements (like 64+ processors), being less than a certain weight, having power consumption constraints, and requiring high performance without melting down because of the heat has always been an issue in certain sectors.
In the past, the embedded systems were typically special purpose - ran "special" OSs and were basically big set-top boxes that did only the one thing they were programmed to do. However, a few years back (like 5+), companies like CSPI started doing things like running Linux (or a realtime Linux variant) on their nodes instead of VxWorks and such, turning the box into a general purpose machine. I guess it just takes a while for some things to get enough attention to where someone would post it on
Developers get what they want (income from doing something cool).
In the context above, I haven't seen this happen so much. What I've mostly seen is that, yes, developers get paid, but the company they work for doesn't, and eventuall goes belly-up and the developers are no longer paid until they find another job.
Interesting, this statement:
Without some form of income, I'll soon have to cut back my work on Free Software to work on flipping burgers.
Team leader Bruce Campbell
Did he vanquish the Mooninites, too?
Actually, according to things that they've (MS) said in the past, they were supposed to be thinking about remote management, more powerful scripting, and the like for quite a while now (I remember stuff about a new CLI from MS over 2 years ago). The goal was supposedly to ease remote administration as well as make administration of a local machine more "powerful" by making a more powerful CLI and writing many of the tools so that they can be invoked via CLI as well as graphically. Whether that is the current vision, I haven't a clue.