I use a cluster everyday. The task, the backend part of a large client-server system uses cluster technology for performance and reliability. If a cluster node fails, others take over.
Unfortunately, it isn't Linux, it is OpenVMS running on AXP. Clusters are great, but resource sharing and management become an issue. In our case, we make a lot of use of a clustered filesystem (we ensure that the data is available to multiple nodes for load sharing) and also the OpenVMS Distributed Lock Manager. Linux doesn't have this yet. Linux clusters are, as you suggest, mainly for compute bound problems at the moment.
Gordon Bell was a hardware architect and was responsible for the PDP-11 amongst others. Dave Cutler left Digital and joined NT where he was involved with architecting the NT 3.5 Kernel.
I know Cutler's designs from RSX-11M and VAX/VMS days. He likes clean code but he is probably less than satisfied with what happened later with NT, the amount of code that ended up running in the same space as the kernel. The original NT design was quite clean and based a lot of its ideas on Mach. Unfortunately, MS are relatively undisciplined as a company (just look at their version control problems), and eventually lots of compromises had to be built in.
Re:Germany�s two approaches: Zeppelin vs. Cargolif
on
Zeppelins on Patrol?
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· Score: 1
Regrettably Cargolifter is currently in trouble. They never planned to start production until 2005, but it seems the banks didn't want to give them money. It seems that they may get some state help now.
Perosnally I like the concept, but it isn't going to make money for the shareholders anytime soon. However it can move serious loads, almost anywhere.
In a dictatorship, the dictator carries all responsibility for the country's actions. In a democracy, we all carry that responsibility with us to the polls.
I guess you won't like it but that means that it is more correct for the Palestinians to attack Israelis (anyway, most are in the reserves) or for whoever that attacked the WTC than it was to bomb Afghanistan or whatever.
I'm always careful about any anti-terrorism law, as to where would it leave say the WWII resistance forces? The point of the article here is that who is right and who is wrong depends entirely on your viewpoint. This is why we must be very careful about who we brand as terrorists and why.
This article and the other one about the Day-care Center on the Death-star are satire, but very appropriate for current times.
It is an interesting comparison to look what Digital did to get people from the VAX to the Alpha. The had a sophisticated binary translator and for low level code where you the source, VAX Assembler can be compiled.
The end result is that it easn't to difficult to move architectures, even though the Alpha does not know the VAX instruction set and no interpreter was provided.
The only gotcha is that Digital had to provide some special extra instructions to implement some primitives used by the OS, such as interlocked queues.
Intel is primarily a hardware company so they would tend to ignore software solutions, but the one-architecture approach kept the Alpha from getting too complicated.
I have Red Hat which others have mentioned. It is easy to update.
On another system, I have a Ximian desktop (Ximian Gnome). That updates not only the desttop but also the RH 7.2 system there.
On yet another system, I have Gentoo, there a short rsynch does it. The RH and Gentoo systems could be completely automated (except for Kernel updates), but frankly I haven't bothered. The Ximian thing isn't quite so automatic but it is about as good as Windows Update, but with more information. I don't even buy the premium service as I'm outside the US and the times I connect, I always get a good response.
In short, I am very comfortable with the updates methods available on Linux. I don't object to patches from RH, Ximian or even Microsoft (I even welcome them), but what I *do* object to is that IE security remains broken despite MS's much vaunted security initiative and these holes have been around since last year.
Also at one stage the GNU C Library was also GPL before the LGPL was introduced, which meant that prectically anything compiled with GCC during the early days was covered.
It is these little gotchas that make the GPL confusing (although less so than many commercial End-User agreements). Sometimes although they may be clear for us, they may be less so for management.
It isn't just the GPL, the other licenses make it even more confusing (Perl-Artistic, MIT and so-on). We need to make the explanation of OS licenses as userfriendly as possible, whilst keeping the actual text as lawyer-proof as possible.
If I use a GPL tool to develop a program, what are my rights? What happens if part of that tool becomes embedded in my work? Is it distribution if third-parties use the s/w on my system (think a telephone exchange, for example)?
Buy a 'Put' option giving you a right to sell at a specified price, say in about six to 9 months. Even if the merger eventually does pan out, HPAQ will lose a bucket before it comes round.
Same ideas Boeing and everyone else, use the military to give state funded R&D which can be reused for the next generation of civillian components. The joke is that given the length of time it takes to get staff through the Pentagon, the civillians will probably have it first and cheaper.
Remember during the Gulf war, the US ended up buying civillian receivers and thus having to disable Selective Availability.
More British soldiers were killed during the Gulf War due to 'friendly-fire' than by Iraqi action. The Canadian problem was not the first time and don't worry, they even inflict casualties on themselves. Their action isn't even restricted to war-time (remember that cable-car that was knocked down whilst the pilot was 'hot-dogging').
The military has its own share of idiots like any organisation, particularly a government one. As the US is one of the largest military forces in the world, it is likely that they have a larger number of idiots.
The use of hi-tech equipment actually frightens me because at some point the soldier/airman/sailor has to question his/her instruments and say "Is this reasonable?" and know when to ignore the information. Look at the incidnt tht happened during the battery replacement in a GPS.
A while back, I installed a version of Morpheus on my system. It presented ads which I tolerated because I had freeware. Then they started to do pop-ups, and it got more annoying.
Eventually, they screwed up their ad Javascript to the point where IEW kept crashing. At tha6t point, I figured they had lost their 'right' to do things on my machine.
I started with the hosts file fix and then eventually, after the Kazaa debacle I have no guilt about nobbling Cydoor and blocking all ads.
Ad supported software is one thing, but when it starts causing s/w problems then, sorry, I will use the cracked version only.
Believe in an economy, invest in it
on
Globalism Post 9/11
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· Score: 2, Insightful
The point here is that if you believe in an economy, you will invest there. If you don't you will put your money elsewhere. If you already have money there, you want to be able to get it out if conditions change. If you can't get your money out, do you really want to invest there?
This is where the Hong-Kong story is wrong, it doesn't matter what the British Government do or say, it is the markets themselves that will judge. A significant factor in the case of Hong Kong would have been the Bank of China that was putting most of its Forex transactions through Hong Kong. They would also have advised retaining the status quo, even though it would cost some face.
The issue though is the trans-national corp. Who regulates it? This is a separate issue to capital flow. Here the corporate HQ gravitates to the best tax/regulatory environment. Is that really correct?
In Russia in 1999 an enterprising company "Darya" decided to differentiate its products (meat balls wrapped in a kind of dough) as being from real meat. They used the Intel logo with "Meat Inside". Intel got upset.
However, perhaps the logo could be adapted for Intel "Dead Meat Inside".
As a side note, when companies start agressively protecting their name, it is usually a sign that their name is overvalued relative to their product. Analysts please note.
Re:A mainframe for 700 users?
on
Linux On Big Iron
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· Score: 3, Interesting
You are doing what MS normally recommend I guess and you have a couple of systems (at least) just for E2K server, you did remember that second system to replicate on did you?
In the end you have a couple of boxes that runs E2K.
Yes, that was a full stop.What these guys are doing is running Linux under a single VM instance. It will cost them serious money because Linux for these boxes isn't cheap. However, they pay only for the first instance at their shop.
I have gone through the price options on W2K Enterprise Server, Advanced Server and Professional with Exchange Server and so on. There is *no* way that we are not talking serious cash here and that is for s/w alone. MS recommends that you dedicate particular systems for certain functionality like E2K - which is great but this costs.
The end result here is that you say that your company is planning to purchase. Come back when everything is working and tell us how much it really cost.
On a similar theme, I have noticed some new ads for high end servers from Dell etc., emphasizing that their servers are very reliable (they are) and thus ideal for running stuff like Exchange Server 2000.
I once has the misfortune to play with an Exchange Server 2000 system that had run out of disk space. The much vaunted storage system for the Exchange Server database was dead and unrestorable without hitting the last full backup.
Yes, you need good hardware to run a Win 2K enterprise system because if it goes down, you can easily stand to lose a lot. On open source systems, you at least have a chance of fixi ng things.MSDN is a great resource but it comes nothing as good as the support that you get with having source code so you can hunt around datastructures.
Methinks MS/Unisys are getting worried!!!!
Re:14 years - ok for an artist - big suckage for c
on
When Elephants Dance
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· Score: 1
Actually I'm not sure about that because the CGI isn't finished for the TT and ROTK. Hints were dropped if part 1 did well, the CGI budget would be expanded for parts 2 and 3.
I can't see them spending a lot more though.
The thing is I don't begrudge them the profit so much as with MIB 2 or whatever. With the LOTR, New-Line took a risk. There are far too many "just another action-flick" moview or part n of a proven theme.
If you are trying to receive random bits, are you really sure they are random? Is the other guy getting the same random bits? I can squirt some stuff to you that will pass your entropy tests but is 100% predictable to me.
From this point on getting your selection algorithm becomes a trivial exercise.
Vernam ciphers only work if you both share a secure source of truly random numbers, and the key is the same length as the plaintext.
14 years - ok for an artist - big suckage for corp
on
When Elephants Dance
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Artists generally keep on creating. Fourteen years is a long time for many of them. You are not obliged to spend your gains on coke, etc and can set aside money like the rest of us try to do.
The corp is different, it doesn't create. It is just a very large self-perpetuating overhead. At the same time a corporation is a useful way that large projects get financed, allowing the risk and losses to be split. Companies started as ways of financing risky projects such as a ship of trade goods on a single return journey.
Keep the corporate rights holder, after all we want films like LOTR financed, don't we? However, I agree wholeheartedly with the idea of limiting the length of the rights to 14 years.
Optical prints are produced in other ways, which makes it very easy to watermark. I don't think it would stop dupes being made from other media though.
Preview copies on DVD would come off a normal DVD production line, I would guess as writeable DVDs have capacity problems. There may be a stamp on each DVD, but that won't touch the VOB.
Frustration leads to extension of claws and attempt to take out such feelings on any suitable soft furnishings in vicinity. The more expensive the better (cats have an instinct for cost).
Normally to get a bird into Geosynch orbit takes a PAM (Payload Assist Module). It is a lot further out. I understand that this sats motor quit someway up so retrieval/repair may be very difficult.
Slashdot Mirror
Unfortunately, it isn't Linux, it is OpenVMS running on AXP. Clusters are great, but resource sharing and management become an issue. In our case, we make a lot of use of a clustered filesystem (we ensure that the data is available to multiple nodes for load sharing) and also the OpenVMS Distributed Lock Manager. Linux doesn't have this yet. Linux clusters are, as you suggest, mainly for compute bound problems at the moment.
I know Cutler's designs from RSX-11M and VAX/VMS days. He likes clean code but he is probably less than satisfied with what happened later with NT, the amount of code that ended up running in the same space as the kernel. The original NT design was quite clean and based a lot of its ideas on Mach. Unfortunately, MS are relatively undisciplined as a company (just look at their version control problems), and eventually lots of compromises had to be built in.
Perosnally I like the concept, but it isn't going to make money for the shareholders anytime soon. However it can move serious loads, almost anywhere.
I guess you won't like it but that means that it is more correct for the Palestinians to attack Israelis (anyway, most are in the reserves) or for whoever that attacked the WTC than it was to bomb Afghanistan or whatever.
I'm always careful about any anti-terrorism law, as to where would it leave say the WWII resistance forces? The point of the article here is that who is right and who is wrong depends entirely on your viewpoint. This is why we must be very careful about who we brand as terrorists and why.
This article and the other one about the Day-care Center on the Death-star are satire, but very appropriate for current times.
The end result is that it easn't to difficult to move architectures, even though the Alpha does not know the VAX instruction set and no interpreter was provided.
The only gotcha is that Digital had to provide some special extra instructions to implement some primitives used by the OS, such as interlocked queues.
Intel is primarily a hardware company so they would tend to ignore software solutions, but the one-architecture approach kept the Alpha from getting too complicated.
On another system, I have a Ximian desktop (Ximian Gnome). That updates not only the desttop but also the RH 7.2 system there.
On yet another system, I have Gentoo, there a short rsynch does it. The RH and Gentoo systems could be completely automated (except for Kernel updates), but frankly I haven't bothered. The Ximian thing isn't quite so automatic but it is about as good as Windows Update, but with more information. I don't even buy the premium service as I'm outside the US and the times I connect, I always get a good response.
In short, I am very comfortable with the updates methods available on Linux. I don't object to patches from RH, Ximian or even Microsoft (I even welcome them), but what I *do* object to is that IE security remains broken despite MS's much vaunted security initiative and these holes have been around since last year.
Is the thing assembled using pressurised dry nitrogen or something?
I thought that even in the US, the scientific establishment uses either Kelvin or Celsius, so why do I see Farenheit in the bottom right?
It is these little gotchas that make the GPL confusing (although less so than many commercial End-User agreements). Sometimes although they may be clear for us, they may be less so for management.
It isn't just the GPL, the other licenses make it even more confusing (Perl-Artistic, MIT and so-on). We need to make the explanation of OS licenses as userfriendly as possible, whilst keeping the actual text as lawyer-proof as possible.
It isn't quite so simple as that sentance seems.
Buy a 'Put' option giving you a right to sell at a specified price, say in about six to 9 months. Even if the merger eventually does pan out, HPAQ will lose a bucket before it comes round.
Deutsche Bank were the ones that swung the vote.
Remember during the Gulf war, the US ended up buying civillian receivers and thus having to disable Selective Availability.
The military has its own share of idiots like any organisation, particularly a government one. As the US is one of the largest military forces in the world, it is likely that they have a larger number of idiots.
The use of hi-tech equipment actually frightens me because at some point the soldier/airman/sailor has to question his/her instruments and say "Is this reasonable?" and know when to ignore the information. Look at the incidnt tht happened during the battery replacement in a GPS.
Eventually, they screwed up their ad Javascript to the point where IEW kept crashing. At tha6t point, I figured they had lost their 'right' to do things on my machine.
I started with the hosts file fix and then eventually, after the Kazaa debacle I have no guilt about nobbling Cydoor and blocking all ads.
Ad supported software is one thing, but when it starts causing s/w problems then, sorry, I will use the cracked version only.
This is where the Hong-Kong story is wrong, it doesn't matter what the British Government do or say, it is the markets themselves that will judge. A significant factor in the case of Hong Kong would have been the Bank of China that was putting most of its Forex transactions through Hong Kong. They would also have advised retaining the status quo, even though it would cost some face.
The issue though is the trans-national corp. Who regulates it? This is a separate issue to capital flow. Here the corporate HQ gravitates to the best tax/regulatory environment. Is that really correct?
However, perhaps the logo could be adapted for Intel "Dead Meat Inside".
As a side note, when companies start agressively protecting their name, it is usually a sign that their name is overvalued relative to their product. Analysts please note.
In the end you have a couple of boxes that runs E2K.
Yes, that was a full stop.What these guys are doing is running Linux under a single VM instance. It will cost them serious money because Linux for these boxes isn't cheap. However, they pay only for the first instance at their shop.
I have gone through the price options on W2K Enterprise Server, Advanced Server and Professional with Exchange Server and so on. There is *no* way that we are not talking serious cash here and that is for s/w alone. MS recommends that you dedicate particular systems for certain functionality like E2K - which is great but this costs.
The end result here is that you say that your company is planning to purchase. Come back when everything is working and tell us how much it really cost.
I once has the misfortune to play with an Exchange Server 2000 system that had run out of disk space. The much vaunted storage system for the Exchange Server database was dead and unrestorable without hitting the last full backup.
Yes, you need good hardware to run a Win 2K enterprise system because if it goes down, you can easily stand to lose a lot. On open source systems, you at least have a chance of fixi ng things.MSDN is a great resource but it comes nothing as good as the support that you get with having source code so you can hunt around datastructures.
Methinks MS/Unisys are getting worried!!!!
I can't see them spending a lot more though.
The thing is I don't begrudge them the profit so much as with MIB 2 or whatever. With the LOTR, New-Line took a risk. There are far too many "just another action-flick" moview or part n of a proven theme.
From this point on getting your selection algorithm becomes a trivial exercise.
Vernam ciphers only work if you both share a secure source of truly random numbers, and the key is the same length as the plaintext.
The corp is different, it doesn't create. It is just a very large self-perpetuating overhead. At the same time a corporation is a useful way that large projects get financed, allowing the risk and losses to be split. Companies started as ways of financing risky projects such as a ship of trade goods on a single return journey.
Keep the corporate rights holder, after all we want films like LOTR financed, don't we? However, I agree wholeheartedly with the idea of limiting the length of the rights to 14 years.
Preview copies on DVD would come off a normal DVD production line, I would guess as writeable DVDs have capacity problems. There may be a stamp on each DVD, but that won't touch the VOB.
Frustration leads to extension of claws and attempt to take out such feelings on any suitable soft furnishings in vicinity. The more expensive the better (cats have an instinct for cost).
Normally to get a bird into Geosynch orbit takes a PAM (Payload Assist Module). It is a lot further out. I understand that this sats motor quit someway up so retrieval/repair may be very difficult.