No, lets stick to base 10 (which is what disk manufacturers tend to use anyway).
1 GB = 1,000,000,000 Bytes
1TB = 1000 GB
1PB = 1000 TB
650MB/s (ATLAS/CMS/LHCb/ALICE detectors) * 60 sec * 60 mins * 24 hours * approx 100 days = 5,616,000,000MB = 5.6PB / year
Unfortunately the LHC needs a nuclear power station (and a hydroelectric one for the computers 8)). I'm not joking, it really does. Running for more than 100 days a year + 30 for some other stuff is not practical unless you want Geneva to freeze during the winter. To put this in perspective the Computing farm is going to use 7 MegaWatts of power and is classed as a small power user
Has anyone every stopped to think this might be too fast for its own good?
No, this isn't a car, it doesn't need human intelligence after the code has been developed to keep it from turning into a wreck.
Isn't there a point when we've reached a speed where rather than deciding what to send from one place to another, we become lazy and start sending everything?
This data transfer was part of the ramp up for the start of the LHC which will be taking data at 40TB/sec, recording approx 750MB/sec data to disk - which totals about 6 Petabytes of data a year. Added to this the simulation data which may produce 12PB/year of data (based on really conservative estimates - the BaBar experiment at SLAC produced upto 6x as much simulation data as recored each year). Since all this data needs to be copied off site then no, its unlikely we could get the network to a point where everything could be sent - processing still increases faster than network bandwidth.
And won't that just lead to massive researcher mp3 swaps?
I got my pass for the Edinburgh visit in the post the other day - should slashdot run the story again after the roadshow is over to see whether it was the same everywhere?
The SLAC database is only data from the last 4 years - the BaBar project is due to last for a decade at least so the data size is likely to get upto about 3PB by the time its over.
Arecibo doesn't have large amounts of data, astrophysics is only in the TB range mainly because observatories are in out of the way places so you have to physically ship the data about by truck. Satellites download speeds suck compared to a nice fat fibre optic cable.
The really interesting databases are going to be when the LHC comes online at CERN in 2007 sa they are expecting 3PB a year at least from the 4 main experiments which will be stored in databases.
I have no idea why academia isn't better represented here, but do remember these academic databases usually only have 100s - low 1000s of users - not quite as many as google etc.
I'm doing my PhD on it at the moment. While there is a lot of hype there is a lot more substance to it than there was 2 years ago.
For example we now have a single sign on system spread over more than a dozen countries (never easy when the gov wants to know why other countries scientists are using their machines.)
Loads of work has been done on integrating data resources into the network, large scale systems configuration, data discover etc.
As ever the BBC is a bit behind on the news - this is just a new releases of the software. And there had better be substance when LHC comes on line in 2007/8 as it will be generating 15, 000 TB of data to be stored a year and we need some way to deal with this.
No, seti is a distributed application - 3 million instances of the same program. The grid is a distributed environment - an operating system if you like, which programmers can write their own applications to run on top of.
Like the OS for your desktop the Grid's middleware software deals with things like I/O, resource allocation, security etc.
So, seti@home could run on the grid, but is not a grid in its own right.
I've been running climateprediction.net as a beta tester for the last couple of months. My experiences with it so far have been good, running it on a PIII-733 and a AMD 1GHz Duron laptop. No major crashes or faults.
Compared to SETI each work unit takes forever. None of this one unit every 8 hours business, when they say it takes a committment they mean it, 90 days of 24/7 operation to finish one unit on the Duron, so I guess there is unlikely to be anyone hitting the 100,000 unit mark any time soon!
A bit about the program - The work unit itself is broken down into 3 segments. There's an upload of results so far at the end of each one and a daily connection to confirm how much cpu time you've used in the last day and what checkpoint you've reached. If you don't do this it doesn't ask, it just checks if you have a connection and if not waits until you do. The program check points every couple of minuutes but can roll back a bit if you reboot (not a huge amount but its not as frequent as SETI).
Overall I've had no problems with it apart from it crashing out of virtual memory once when I'd left it running without a network connection for 2 weeks.
I'm going into the final year of my PhD in the Uk at the moment (in Grid Computing / Particle Physics applications) and the last few students to leave have had little difficulty in getting $80,000 start salaries.
I know this is a bit less than the US PhD's seem to get (at Stanford it was about $105-120k) however it only takes 3-4 years to do your PhD in the UK compared to 6-8 in the US, which means you're only 25 when you start in industry.
From what I've seen its more age than qualifications which are the problem. The guys who stay on as post-docs until their 30s have problems as they're starting to have families and wanting to settle down while the younger guys are still willing to work long hours and go where work sends them.
Rubbish. I work in the field and 2000 Windows licences is only likely to cost about $20,000. Big deal on a $90 million contract. The cost is in the system admin - 2000 nodes need some fairly advanced remote management or a huge team (no you can't have 100 sys admins).
Yes, but by every few miles they are talking about the main highways. This is not something which is being set up to record everyone going down the road to the shops. So long as its the main roads you can still go down the rural country roads (if you are really not in a rush) and avoid them.
And the other comment about the Data Protection act doesn't count - the police are excempt, but cannot give it out to commercial orgs or individuals and have their own code of practice.
Scientists don't
learn science by doing it, but by doing labs and problem
sets. Scientists start out doing work that's perfect, in the
sense that they're just trying to reproduce work someone else
has already done for them. Eventually, they get to the point
where they can do original work. Whereas hackers, from the
start, are doing original work; it's just very bad. So hackers
start original, and get good, and scientists start good, and get
original.
Then what are hello world programs?
You should figure out programs as you're
writing them, just as writers and painters and architects do.
If this man ever comes near a real product shoot him! Schetches are fine for a small program, 1 MLOG+ programs you want a design for.
I get the impression this guy has never been near a serious product. Or at least not one I'd pay money for. His assumptions on the role of coding is all wrong for anything but the most basic of projects. It would be interesting to see what he makes of a proper project which has a 20+ year life span, has a couple of hundred people involved and needs coherancy.
Programming is to Computer Science as plumbing is to hydrodynamics
AI typically starts with the question "What is intelligence?". This should lead to psychology, philosophy, theology, language, symbolic logic, information theory, game theory and so on.
Design. Yes it leads to a program, it can also lead to virtually anything else. Its supposed to teach people how they can look at projects in a variety of different ways, bottom up, top down, rapid protoyping, methedology, methedology design. And if CS undergrads could please spend more time with the civil engineers, architects, structual engineers etc (side bonus, larger number of females in these fields than CS) they may learn something.
Testing. Again doesn't doesn't have to be for programming could be compliance, risk assessment etc.
Formal Specification - "I have proved the above to be true but haven't tested it" Donald Knuth. Rigours of maths. Useful for the few who go into chip design, satellite code etc. Gives me a slightly better feeling when getting in a plane to know that all the critical code has been proved to work and then tested properly.
When I was an undergrad we were told that if we spent more than 10% of our time coding we were doing something wrong. It's true (for computer scientist, pro programmers are obviously different). Programming is an incidental thing you do to provide a real world interface to your work. But if you don't know all the other stuff the ability to program is worthless.
I generally feel that CS is the ultimate general knowledge degree. It need you to have a passing familiarity with so many other subjects as by itself it just kinda sits there. CS's need the problems of others to stimulate them - the Web for example was because of a physics problem, despite multimedia systems having been researched for decades before.
The reality is, the kids are going to need to know how to use Microsoft tools once they graduate in order to be successful in the real world.
Um, just because MS is the dominant system at the moment doesn't mean it will be in 5, 10, 20 years time. If we followed that logic we'd all still be programming for IBM/360's in Cobol & Fortran
CS should not be about programming! Programming is a tool and, with no disrespect to the hard core coders it is a minor part of a CS. If they are learning project management, design, testing, formal specifications, AI, etc these will stand them in better stead in their careers than "just" knowing all the C++/Java/Perl... libraries. So why worry about learning all about MS when its likely to be out of date when they graduate anyway. Teach the basics and let them adapt to change.
Plus, imagine all the chaos as non-computer science majors try to struggle with Linux on the desktop in computer labs and so on. It will indeed probably cost a lot more than $2.4 million in the end.
Why? Most students need to learn new packages when they get to college anyway - is there really a huge difference between learning OpenOffice vs MSOffice? Is Gnome or KDE really harder to figure out than the windows desktop? And these are students. If they're not smart enough to figure out how to use a software package what are they doing there in the first place?
The Grid is supposed to bring together various concepts from High Performance Computing (HPC), distributed computing and peer to peer computing (these two have different aims despite being similar).
The thing which is new and good about the Grid is that it has tied together areas such as single sign on systems, Certificated Public Private Key cryptography and various other things.
Fron the/. crowds perspective this may not seem to interesting, but when you have a 650 Terabyte database which is being partially replicated in 5 countries and with new data being generated at 100MB/sec which also needs to be processed, analysed and played with, the Grid is "a good thing".
Yes the Grid sounds like the arpanet concept, but its easy to have concepts - getting them to work is hard! Just because something 30 years ago had similar aims simply shows that it was overly ambitious then, and hopefully now we've learnt enough to actually do it.
Stanford had a guest lecture a couple of weeks ago from a group setting up a wireless network in Laos.
It's intended to connect about 5 villages with a town (the town has telephone lines to the rest of the world) on the other side of a hill/mountain. It allows them video conferencing with the rest of the world as they are using a verbal only language - so keyboards aren't much use. The gear is all battery powered, recharged using a modified exercise bike. They installed it a couple of weeks ago and are getting a couple of miles with it.
I seem to remember a couple of articles a few months ago about some academics managing to get about 20-50 miles with wireless over water - this of course is an idealised example as there are few areas that flat on land. And of course rain can screw up your signals a lot.
Physicists are more than thinking about the Grid, I should know as they're funding my PhD in Data Grid Computing 8*).
The main reason for this is the Large Hadron Collider, which is due to go into production at CERN in about 2007. For the younger members of the audience, CERN was where Tim Berners-Lee developed the World Wide Web in the early 1990's
When it goes online it has 4 major experiments, each of which stores data at 100-400MB/sec, and I stress stores data at 100+ MB/sec, the first level is processing 40Terabytes a second. This equals a few petabytes a year (1PB = 1000TB = 1000000GB) which then has to be shipped to sites around Europe and the US.
All this is going to have data, processing and network requirements which make most techies gasp, i.e. Google only has a 20TB database, current physics ones are at 650TB+. At this level 14TFlops is kinda a cute little toy.
And yes, most of it's open source and based on the Globus Toolkit.
I'd disagree - I'm on a long term contract in the US from the UK and have found that the number of extra charges etc which get included raise the US prices to about the same in Europe. The prices quoted in the UK are the total cost, the ones in the US don't take into account taxes etc.
Because, for whatever reason it is, people in europe have traditionally let companies, big and small, walk all over them. Or so it seems to a Canadian who has made various trips to the UK.
Your joking! Compared to the US?
Taxes aren't necessarily higher in Europe than the US but the level of labour rights is far higher and for most places even minimum wage provides a high enough income to live. Contrast this with the US where minimum wage is a joke.
Cars are a special case - old cars cost more to run than new cars, new cars tend to be more fuel efficient (which with gas prices in Europe is a good thing). And if you're from the UK the level of rain and salty rain especially means cars just don't last as long as ones in places like California.
Or more realistically, the majority of work in the area at the moment is in Unix for security, features, ease of programming etc. There's no major reason not to use Windows - its just harder, its easier for the users to screw it up and most of the current work is connecting up serious computing installations (128+ processor machines, each with a few TB of disk with 2.5Gb fibre etc) which don't use Windows.
What IBM has said is that it hasn't got anything new to report but that its still here. If you look at their figures $10Bn works out at 3.5bm for the consultancy firm they purchased, a few billion for Grid computing, and I guess a couple of billion for linux. With a bit of spare change for research.
Why are they doing this? My guess is that CFO's keep complaining about the cost of computing resources. A multinational with 10,000 desktops still has to ask for clusters and supercomputers for serious work while TFlops of processing are sitting idle on the secretarys desktops. Hard Disks, which used to be able to just about hold the OS, Office suite and files now have 10's of GBs of wasted storage.
If you're serious about using computers you want to use resources efficently. And from IBM's perspective so how does this idea sound...
IBM sells computers to a firm, it then sells the software to turn all their hard disks into a P2P file storage system so that you never lose that important document ever again. Instead of a new cluster - set all the desktops to process data overnight as a massivly distributed system. (using IBM software), installed by IBM engineers under the direction of their new consultants. And of course the only real option for this is Linux.
A single, nice, neat package. A single point of contact and massive economies of scale. Now assume that their contract allows them to use/sell spare cycles and their revenue stream suddenly improves a lot.
This Wired Article by Neal Stephenson back in 1996 is all about the underseas fibre, the major players and what the world was like at the start of the web revolution. It weighs in at 56 pages (link to first page only).
In it he charts a new cable as it goes 28,000km around the world. Its well worth a read if you have time.
DVD piracy and movie "sharing" groups will only speed up the cycle, and that they'll be putting Hollywood out of business, possibly within the next three years."
Don't they always say this? Wasn't it said about videos, CD Video, cable? Who produces the DVD's? OK, so if people stop going to theatres then thats a revenue stream down but more income from DVD rentals, sales, airlines, pay per view, airlines....
I really wish they'd just see that technology opens up new revenue streams faster than it closes them down.
Unfortunately that idea wouldn't work with their current setup. SETI@home isn't a real distributed system its a multiple node application - it can only run the single program and to adapt it to aything else would require users to download a new application.
If they were to use something like a securely sandboxed virtual machine (and there are several groups I know about doing this with funding in Europe) then it may be an idea.
Of course at that point both the user and seti start having to worry far more about security than someone just changing their processing times or returning incorrectly processed units due to mods to the software which used to happen.
Of course if people want to contribute then they can go to The SETI Donor page and contribute there.
Tried it - lets just say trying to shut it down under Linux is not the easiest of things. It has a habit of replicating itself to prevent you accidently deleting it. Not good if you want to free up disk space.
The Register has this story about the EU planning on investigating MS if it does decide to implement Palladium. Of course since Germany is already considering switching the Governments computers to Linux we can hope that the EU follows the Peruvian example and make all software purchases open source.
No, we didn't say you couldn't bid. We said you have to give us the source and let us modify it.
Slashdot Mirror
No, lets stick to base 10 (which is what disk manufacturers tend to use anyway).
1 GB = 1,000,000,000 Bytes
1TB = 1000 GB
1PB = 1000 TB
650MB/s (ATLAS/CMS/LHCb/ALICE detectors) * 60 sec * 60 mins * 24 hours * approx 100 days = 5,616,000,000MB = 5.6PB / year
Unfortunately the LHC needs a nuclear power station (and a hydroelectric one for the computers 8)). I'm not joking, it really does. Running for more than 100 days a year + 30 for some other stuff is not practical unless you want Geneva to freeze during the winter. To put this in perspective the Computing farm is going to use 7 MegaWatts of power and is classed as a small power user
Has anyone every stopped to think this might be too fast for its own good?
No, this isn't a car, it doesn't need human intelligence after the code has been developed to keep it from turning into a wreck.
Isn't there a point when we've reached a speed where rather than deciding what to send from one place to another, we become lazy and start sending everything?
This data transfer was part of the ramp up for the start of the LHC which will be taking data at 40TB/sec, recording approx 750MB/sec data to disk - which totals about 6 Petabytes of data a year. Added to this the simulation data which may produce 12PB/year of data (based on really conservative estimates - the BaBar experiment at SLAC produced upto 6x as much simulation data as recored each year). Since all this data needs to be copied off site then no, its unlikely we could get the network to a point where everything could be sent - processing still increases faster than network bandwidth.
And won't that just lead to massive researcher mp3 swaps?
Not if they want tenure ...
I got my pass for the Edinburgh visit in the post the other day - should slashdot run the story again after the roadshow is over to see whether it was the same everywhere?
The SLAC database is only data from the last 4 years - the BaBar project is due to last for a decade at least so the data size is likely to get upto about 3PB by the time its over.
Arecibo doesn't have large amounts of data, astrophysics is only in the TB range mainly because observatories are in out of the way places so you have to physically ship the data about by truck. Satellites download speeds suck compared to a nice fat fibre optic cable.
The really interesting databases are going to be when the LHC comes online at CERN in 2007 sa they are expecting 3PB a year at least from the 4 main experiments which will be stored in databases.
I have no idea why academia isn't better represented here, but do remember these academic databases usually only have 100s - low 1000s of users - not quite as many as google etc.
I'm doing my PhD on it at the moment. While there is a lot of hype there is a lot more substance to it than there was 2 years ago.
For example we now have a single sign on system spread over more than a dozen countries (never easy when the gov wants to know why other countries scientists are using their machines.)
Loads of work has been done on integrating data resources into the network, large scale systems configuration, data discover etc.
As ever the BBC is a bit behind on the news - this is just a new releases of the software. And there had better be substance when LHC comes on line in 2007/8 as it will be generating 15, 000 TB of data to be stored a year and we need some way to deal with this.
No, seti is a distributed application - 3 million instances of the same program. The grid is a distributed environment - an operating system if you like, which programmers can write their own applications to run on top of.
Like the OS for your desktop the Grid's middleware software deals with things like I/O, resource allocation, security etc.
So, seti@home could run on the grid, but is not a grid in its own right.
I've been running climateprediction.net as a beta tester for the last couple of months. My experiences with it so far have been good, running it on a PIII-733 and a AMD 1GHz Duron laptop. No major crashes or faults.
Compared to SETI each work unit takes forever. None of this one unit every 8 hours business, when they say it takes a committment they mean it, 90 days of 24/7 operation to finish one unit on the Duron, so I guess there is unlikely to be anyone hitting the 100,000 unit mark any time soon!
A bit about the program - The work unit itself is broken down into 3 segments. There's an upload of results so far at the end of each one and a daily connection to confirm how much cpu time you've used in the last day and what checkpoint you've reached. If you don't do this it doesn't ask, it just checks if you have a connection and if not waits until you do. The program check points every couple of minuutes but can roll back a bit if you reboot (not a huge amount but its not as frequent as SETI).
Overall I've had no problems with it apart from it crashing out of virtual memory once when I'd left it running without a network connection for 2 weeks.
I'm going into the final year of my PhD in the Uk at the moment (in Grid Computing / Particle Physics applications) and the last few students to leave have had little difficulty in getting $80,000 start salaries.
I know this is a bit less than the US PhD's seem to get (at Stanford it was about $105-120k) however it only takes 3-4 years to do your PhD in the UK compared to 6-8 in the US, which means you're only 25 when you start in industry.
From what I've seen its more age than qualifications which are the problem. The guys who stay on as post-docs until their 30s have problems as they're starting to have families and wanting to settle down while the younger guys are still willing to work long hours and go where work sends them.
Rubbish. I work in the field and 2000 Windows licences is only likely to cost about $20,000. Big deal on a $90 million contract. The cost is in the system admin - 2000 nodes need some fairly advanced remote management or a huge team (no you can't have 100 sys admins).
Yes, but by every few miles they are talking about the main highways. This is not something which is being set up to record everyone going down the road to the shops. So long as its the main roads you can still go down the rural country roads (if you are really not in a rush) and avoid them.
And the other comment about the Data Protection act doesn't count - the police are excempt, but cannot give it out to commercial orgs or individuals and have their own code of practice.
Then what are hello world programs?
You should figure out programs as you're writing them, just as writers and painters and architects do.
If this man ever comes near a real product shoot him! Schetches are fine for a small program, 1 MLOG+ programs you want a design for.
I get the impression this guy has never been near a serious product. Or at least not one I'd pay money for. His assumptions on the role of coding is all wrong for anything but the most basic of projects. It would be interesting to see what he makes of a proper project which has a 20+ year life span, has a couple of hundred people involved and needs coherancy.
Programming is to Computer Science as plumbing is to hydrodynamics
AI typically starts with the question "What is intelligence?". This should lead to psychology, philosophy, theology, language, symbolic logic, information theory, game theory and so on.
Design. Yes it leads to a program, it can also lead to virtually anything else. Its supposed to teach people how they can look at projects in a variety of different ways, bottom up, top down, rapid protoyping, methedology, methedology design. And if CS undergrads could please spend more time with the civil engineers, architects, structual engineers etc (side bonus, larger number of females in these fields than CS) they may learn something.
Testing. Again doesn't doesn't have to be for programming could be compliance, risk assessment etc.
Formal Specification - "I have proved the above to be true but haven't tested it" Donald Knuth. Rigours of maths. Useful for the few who go into chip design, satellite code etc. Gives me a slightly better feeling when getting in a plane to know that all the critical code has been proved to work and then tested properly.
When I was an undergrad we were told that if we spent more than 10% of our time coding we were doing something wrong. It's true (for computer scientist, pro programmers are obviously different). Programming is an incidental thing you do to provide a real world interface to your work. But if you don't know all the other stuff the ability to program is worthless.
I generally feel that CS is the ultimate general knowledge degree. It need you to have a passing familiarity with so many other subjects as by itself it just kinda sits there. CS's need the problems of others to stimulate them - the Web for example was because of a physics problem, despite multimedia systems having been researched for decades before.
The reality is, the kids are going to need to know how to use Microsoft tools once they graduate in order to be successful in the real world.
Um, just because MS is the dominant system at the moment doesn't mean it will be in 5, 10, 20 years time. If we followed that logic we'd all still be programming for IBM/360's in Cobol & Fortran
CS should not be about programming! Programming is a tool and, with no disrespect to the hard core coders it is a minor part of a CS. If they are learning project management, design, testing, formal specifications, AI, etc these will stand them in better stead in their careers than "just" knowing all the C++/Java/Perl ... libraries. So why worry about learning all about MS when its likely to be out of date when they graduate anyway. Teach the basics and let them adapt to change.
Plus, imagine all the chaos as non-computer science majors try to struggle with Linux on the desktop in computer labs and so on. It will indeed probably cost a lot more than $2.4 million in the end.
Why? Most students need to learn new packages when they get to college anyway - is there really a huge difference between learning OpenOffice vs MSOffice? Is Gnome or KDE really harder to figure out than the windows desktop? And these are students. If they're not smart enough to figure out how to use a software package what are they doing there in the first place?
The Grid is supposed to bring together various concepts from High Performance Computing (HPC), distributed computing and peer to peer computing (these two have different aims despite being similar).
The thing which is new and good about the Grid is that it has tied together areas such as single sign on systems, Certificated Public Private Key cryptography and various other things.
Fron the /. crowds perspective this may not seem to interesting, but when you have a 650 Terabyte database which is being partially replicated in 5 countries and with new data being generated at 100MB/sec which also needs to be processed, analysed and played with, the Grid is "a good thing".
Yes the Grid sounds like the arpanet concept, but its easy to have concepts - getting them to work is hard! Just because something 30 years ago had similar aims simply shows that it was overly ambitious then, and hopefully now we've learnt enough to actually do it.
Stanford had a guest lecture a couple of weeks ago from a group setting up a wireless network in Laos.
It's intended to connect about 5 villages with a town (the town has telephone lines to the rest of the world) on the other side of a hill/mountain. It allows them video conferencing with the rest of the world as they are using a verbal only language - so keyboards aren't much use. The gear is all battery powered, recharged using a modified exercise bike. They installed it a couple of weeks ago and are getting a couple of miles with it.
I seem to remember a couple of articles a few months ago about some academics managing to get about 20-50 miles with wireless over water - this of course is an idealised example as there are few areas that flat on land. And of course rain can screw up your signals a lot.
Some of the UK academic network has started an experimental IPv6 network for researchers to play with.
Physicists are more than thinking about the Grid, I should know as they're funding my PhD in Data Grid Computing 8*).
The main reason for this is the Large Hadron Collider, which is due to go into production at CERN in about 2007. For the younger members of the audience, CERN was where Tim Berners-Lee developed the World Wide Web in the early 1990's
When it goes online it has 4 major experiments, each of which stores data at 100-400MB/sec, and I stress stores data at 100+ MB/sec, the first level is processing 40Terabytes a second. This equals a few petabytes a year (1PB = 1000TB = 1000000GB) which then has to be shipped to sites around Europe and the US.
All this is going to have data, processing and network requirements which make most techies gasp, i.e. Google only has a 20TB database, current physics ones are at 650TB+. At this level 14TFlops is kinda a cute little toy.
And yes, most of it's open source and based on the Globus Toolkit.
I'd disagree - I'm on a long term contract in the US from the UK and have found that the number of extra charges etc which get included raise the US prices to about the same in Europe. The prices quoted in the UK are the total cost, the ones in the US don't take into account taxes etc.
Because, for whatever reason it is, people in europe have traditionally let companies, big and small, walk all over them. Or so it seems to a Canadian who has made various trips to the UK.
Your joking! Compared to the US?
Taxes aren't necessarily higher in Europe than the US but the level of labour rights is far higher and for most places even minimum wage provides a high enough income to live. Contrast this with the US where minimum wage is a joke.
Cars are a special case - old cars cost more to run than new cars, new cars tend to be more fuel efficient (which with gas prices in Europe is a good thing). And if you're from the UK the level of rain and salty rain especially means cars just don't last as long as ones in places like California.
Personal bias 8*)
Or more realistically, the majority of work in the area at the moment is in Unix for security, features, ease of programming etc. There's no major reason not to use Windows - its just harder, its easier for the users to screw it up and most of the current work is connecting up serious computing installations (128+ processor machines, each with a few TB of disk with 2.5Gb fibre etc) which don't use Windows.
What IBM has said is that it hasn't got anything new to report but that its still here. If you look at their figures $10Bn works out at 3.5bm for the consultancy firm they purchased, a few billion for Grid computing, and I guess a couple of billion for linux. With a bit of spare change for research.
Why are they doing this? My guess is that CFO's keep complaining about the cost of computing resources. A multinational with 10,000 desktops still has to ask for clusters and supercomputers for serious work while TFlops of processing are sitting idle on the secretarys desktops. Hard Disks, which used to be able to just about hold the OS, Office suite and files now have 10's of GBs of wasted storage.
If you're serious about using computers you want to use resources efficently. And from IBM's perspective so how does this idea sound ...
IBM sells computers to a firm, it then sells the software to turn all their hard disks into a P2P file storage system so that you never lose that important document ever again. Instead of a new cluster - set all the desktops to process data overnight as a massivly distributed system. (using IBM software), installed by IBM engineers under the direction of their new consultants. And of course the only real option for this is Linux.
A single, nice, neat package. A single point of contact and massive economies of scale. Now assume that their contract allows them to use/sell spare cycles and their revenue stream suddenly improves a lot.
This Wired Article by Neal Stephenson back in 1996 is all about the underseas fibre, the major players and what the world was like at the start of the web revolution. It weighs in at 56 pages (link to first page only).
In it he charts a new cable as it goes 28,000km around the world. Its well worth a read if you have time.
Don't they always say this? Wasn't it said about videos, CD Video, cable? Who produces the DVD's? OK, so if people stop going to theatres then thats a revenue stream down but more income from DVD rentals, sales, airlines, pay per view, airlines ....
I really wish they'd just see that technology opens up new revenue streams faster than it closes them down.
If they were to use something like a securely sandboxed virtual machine (and there are several groups I know about doing this with funding in Europe) then it may be an idea.
Of course at that point both the user and seti start having to worry far more about security than someone just changing their processing times or returning incorrectly processed units due to mods to the software which used to happen.
Of course if people want to contribute then they can go to The SETI Donor page and contribute there.
Tried it - lets just say trying to shut it down under Linux is not the easiest of things. It has a habit of replicating itself to prevent you accidently deleting it. Not good if you want to free up disk space.
No, we didn't say you couldn't bid. We said you have to give us the source and let us modify it.
Thats Un-American!
Possibly. Fortunately, this is Europe.