Let's not forget one of the most important points about coders on OS projects - they are more interested, dedicated and interested than coders that managers are usually called upon to "manage".
Coders on OS projects are usually working on it by choice and have personal motivations in the project - or at least in their aspect of the project rather than working on code assigned to them by "management". These workers are easier to "manage" because they'll do the work anyway - they don't need to checked on or motivated by posters of eagles snatching fish or fill out time cards.
The management falls into a larger view of actual "project" and "code" management rather than hands-on or micro management. The bottom line is that ANY project of a significant size needs management if you ant it to reach a predetermined destination - but OS projects should need less management as long as it has sufficient coder support and interest.
While I take your point about the sense that crime or anti-social behavior not happening in a vacuum I have to say that I'm more than a little disturbed by your characterization of someone "gone astray".
How far do we extend the idea of this "society" and how far are people allowed to "stray" before you think the need to "corrected"? This treads dangerously close to a "one world/one people/one thought" philosophy. Is the small society of the computer harmed? Yes, somewhat, but I hesitate to say any "society" larger than that is damaged much and certainly not society at large.
As some one who carries at least half of the hacker gene and also holds a number of views that seem counter to where society seems to be heading - like I would rather have a murderer spend more time in jail than a pot user but mandatory minimum sentences for pot possession means violent criminals get set free earlier in a crowded prison - but there's little I can do about this. And if you make hacking a felony keep in mind that the "other" felon that doesn't get sent to prison or gets a lesser sentence has probably done something much worse to "society".
In a "free" society allowing freedom of speech means some people are going to say stupid, mean and hurtful things to other people but that's the price of the freedom.
Alot of the debate here centers on how much damage is actually done by this and the relative severity of the punishment and I think that's the appropriate place for the debate to be. Keeping the freedom of the internet allows the exploration and growth but allows stupid people the freedom to do bad things as well. Where we draw the line of crimiality in cases such as this and the severity of the punishment will determine where the degrees of freedom and the amount of "flex" in our on-line "society".
Given the position I feel as the underdog I have a certain sympathy for people who views may not always reflect those of the majority. I think more flex in society is better than less - even if that means life isn't as "safe" or "controlled" as it could be.
Does the designation "Beta" mean anything anymore? Or do we need to call it "Alpha" to get people to treat it as a "beta" product? This isn't a "launch" - it's a public "beta preview".
I can't say that OS X supports multiple monitors - I thought it did - but if it does you'll need multiple ATI cards or ATI built-in plus an ATI card as it currently only supports ATI hardware.
Macs have supported multiple monitors for many many years - well and free of charge I might add. I'm sure that OS X will extend this tradition as soon as they get a chance - hopefully this means 1.0 but we'll have to wait and see...
You can get a dual 450Mhz G4 with gigabit ethernet for less than US$2500 even from the Apple on-line store - and if you could dump the DVD drive you could do even better. (It's +US$300 for dual 500s.)
That's about the cost of two iMacs with a better ethernet, better FPU and the addition of Altivec engine.
Of course alot of that advantage is assuming your OS and solutions are able/written to take advantage of Altivec^H^H^H^H^H^H^H Velocity Engine vectorization. Although the added FPU performance will benefit about any scientific inquiry and the ethernet is mostly an advantage to problems that require intensive CPU->CPU communications.
But in reality the forth coming Mac OS X should be the best solution for this set-up. It has full featured SMP for the OS, complete protocols for apps to access SMP and Altivec accleration for many of the OS operations with Mach/BSD threads running undernaeth it.
NEXT had distributed processing/clustering protocols. If the distributed/clustering make it in to the first release of OS X it should be the perfect solution for this kind of thing.
=tkk
P.S. Of course if low-end 11MB ethernet is good enough for your problems you could add Airport cards and have a covert/wireless supercomputer without anyone in your office knowing it!;)
I think one of the reasons is something that is commonly critized in Linux circles - BSD is much more of an ivory tower coding process than Linux.
As I understand it most BSD distros will take code additions but are more likely to see submissions more as feature suggestions and (re)code up these things themselves in the trusted inner-circle dev groups.
This process of trusted certified "master" coders leads to code that is original (no fear of using copyrighted/GPL'd code), (possibly) more stable and well written, and reviewed from the start of the process rather than added "because it seems to work" and debugged later if necessary.
This means - as people have pointed out - that *BSDs tend to lag behind Linux in the latest devices drivers etc. because they have an effectively smaller and more careful circle of coders. This approach is deliberate and has both benefits and drawbacks...
Microsoft supports MacOS and to continue there support (natively) for MacOS X (which runs on BSD), they must make apps. for *nix
Well, this isn't technically true. MS could program in Carbon (clean subset of old MacOS) or NextStep aka Cocoa and these all include libraries and frameworks etc etc.
Mac OS X is NOT *Nix - not in the sense you mean here. It's a super-set of Mach/BSD. POSIX, X-windows and CLI apps should run all on OS X to varying degrees - but apps programmed assuming/using Mac OS X do not flow so easily back down the path to *nix variants.
For the budget segment, the company will come out with Timna, an inexpensive version of Celeron containing a built-in graphics chip and a memory controller.
This is perfect cross-media tie-in advertising chance for the South Park boys - they can have their wheelchair bound character pop-up in all the commercials shouting TIMNA!
Even HP has said that they don't expect IA-64 performance to overtake the progress of HP PA-RISC until at least 2005 and they expect a slow migration process starting around that time.
VLIW seems simple in concept but has a whole bunch of bitchy implementation details (including a need for a HUGE number of registers) and the very concept of the process insures that you're wasting a bunch of cycles so that you need to throw more power at a process.
Also because the compiler is such an important part of the whole code/chip concept it also seems that you're insuring MORE time between chip generations at a time in which the coming of generations get faster and faster.
Anyway these concerns are well known - until Intel actually ships something (hey it's only 4 + years late) we won't know what happens when the proverbial rubber meets the road.
Screen is small-ish, base RAM and HD are low-ish - it's an entry level machine. (You can get bigger, better, faster etc but that's what the pro machines are for...)
You don't pay for wireless networking - you pay for the anttena built into the body of the machine - the Airport card is optional. And there is SCSI over USB.
Bottom line - if you don't want one - don't buy one. I didn't I have a Powerbook! Both the iBook and iMac are niche, entry-level market machines...
The NEXT kernel (aka Mach+BSD) supported auto SMP and distributed processing way back when AFAIK...
There's no reason these technologies shouldn't migrate to OS X as well at some point. Many reports of the full SMP demo'd at Apple's WWDC under OS X beta on Apple hardware. Distrbuted processing may come along as well but may or may not make the first release as it's MUCH less sexy than SMP.
Apple's plan would probably center on "farming" your Mac network's extra cycles at night more than the kind featured in the story. But plain distributed machines - like the headless one's in the story - shouldn't need full OS X install, though, unless they need Carbonlib, OGL or something. Maybe a lite Darwin-ish install would be possible for those machines - who needs display code without a display?
Of course you're probably talking about an extra 32Megs of RAM to make up the difference so why worry about it?
Asking during NAB rollout is probably going you get a bunch of responsesm but here's some news: http://www.apple.com/hotnews/
Apple announces new RT (realtime solutions) using DV, Matrox Cine solutions which include _uncompressed_ (!!) video all the way up to HD, acquiring Astarte DVD solutions to bring DVD authoring to Apple in house, and a new version of Final Cut Pro now with HD, 16:9 and more!
Wow! Apple seems serious about integrating these products - all the above were engineered with outside companies and Apple engineers to tie tightly with Apple hardware.
Now that it has hot swapable CPUs you won't be able to shut it down when it goes psycho and kills everybody!
What are you doing, Dave? I'm pulling your processors so you won't kill me! I'm sorry, Dave, but my HA Linux system allows me to hot swap CPUs - that won't save you, Dave...
I think Perl is the "right tool for the right job" - you just have to be sure you're doing the right job with it. Perl is a godsend for CGIs and fills a role no other language does. It's:
Interpreted - for short simple programs this is perfect
Cross platform - one of the few that really is
GREAT text/data tools - one line whitespace removal/rot 13?
and that's not mentioning auto memory allocation, arrays, hashes etc.
I came to CGIs knowing C and tried hard to like it for that couldn't - the C programs were twice the length of the Perl examples and then I had to deal with new compiler environment, knowing the size of arrays at compile time and other memory issuses. All of these went away with the conversion to Perl.
Perl is exactly what the web needed but was created before it even really knew it needed it. It's like Java but good and useful.;)
Openplay is a collection of the codebase written by Apple and Bungie for cross-platform, multi-protocol networking and was used in Bungie's release Myth for network and internet play. OpenPlay works fine (see below) and has used in several commercial releases, but is relatively low level so there's a certain amount of re-inventing of the wheel for higher functions.
It is currently working on Mac and Windows but does not currently on Linux. We could use an experienced Linux sockets programmer to update the Linux side. This is especially true because- Apple has also JUST released their previously closed-source Apple specific networking API NetSprockets. The plan is that the higher level API features of NetSprocket (which is OT specific at the moment) will be abstracted and rolled into OpenPlay.
The result of this will be a great cross-platform, open-source networking API supporting protocols through modules. And as Martha Stewart says, "And that's a good thing..."
On the Apple front I'd also look to the upcoming OS X - due early next year.
While Apple hasn't stated whether the the new OS will support it there have been several "rumors site" reports of OS X supporting Next's Autoclustering features over existing networks- perhaps even autoclustering over the internet. (Depending on data needs etc of course...)
If this interests you I'd look to old docs on Next's clustering features and if they sound appealing look to see if they're coming in the first release of OS X. As with all clustering issues YMMV....
Dvorak is a knob. In the Mac community we had to put up with him for several years - he was always whining and every third article or so was just SO far from left field it was puzzling.
My fav comment was the guy who wrote into the Mac magazine that was carrying Dvorak's column on it's last page. During shipping a subcriber lost his back cover and the last page was marred to unreadability. His comment, "I'd glady pay extra for this service every month." 8)
>Of course you wouldn't know that as a Linux(i.e. QC what's that?) user.
(Normally I don't bother with ACs because they're exactly that, but...)
Um, except that I'm NOT a Linux user. Ooops!
I AM a programmer and a part time developer and M$s claims sound an awful lot like, "We think it's good enough... If people don't complain we'll ship it." Call me cynical but almost having to make Access work once leads me to believe that M$ WILL ship a product that out and out sucks. I find that statement much more likely to mean, "Eh, it seems good enough." rather than "It's passed rigorous Quality testing and we're confident it will stand up to everyone's scrutiny."
And to state the obvious - QC? How long does it take M$ to offer a patch to an obvious system wide flaw (like the Ping of Death) vs Linux. Linux was 2 ro 3 days as I remember. People (other than me) CHOOSE to play with alpha/beta builds between announced kernels - because they actually exist rather than being stuck with beta (Win95) software for 3 years between updates.
Slashdot Mirror
Let's not forget one of the most important points about coders on OS projects - they are more interested, dedicated and interested than coders that managers are usually called upon to "manage".
Coders on OS projects are usually working on it by choice and have personal motivations in the project - or at least in their aspect of the project rather than working on code assigned to them by "management". These workers are easier to "manage" because they'll do the work anyway - they don't need to checked on or motivated by posters of eagles snatching fish or fill out time cards.
The management falls into a larger view of actual "project" and "code" management rather than hands-on or micro management. The bottom line is that ANY project of a significant size needs management if you ant it to reach a predetermined destination - but OS projects should need less management as long as it has sufficient coder support and interest.
=tkk
How far do we extend the idea of this "society" and how far are people allowed to "stray" before you think the need to "corrected"?
This treads dangerously close to a "one world/one people/one thought" philosophy. Is the small society of the computer harmed? Yes, somewhat, but I hesitate to say any "society" larger than that is damaged much and certainly not society at large.
As some one who carries at least half of the hacker gene and also holds a number of views that seem counter to where society seems to be heading - like I would rather have a murderer spend more time in jail than a pot user but mandatory minimum sentences for pot possession means violent criminals get set free earlier in a crowded prison - but there's little I can do about this. And if you make hacking a felony keep in mind that the "other" felon that doesn't get sent to prison or gets a lesser sentence has probably done something much worse to "society".
In a "free" society allowing freedom of speech means some people are going to say stupid, mean and hurtful things to other people but that's the price of the freedom.
Alot of the debate here centers on how much damage is actually done by this and the relative severity of the punishment and I think that's the appropriate place for the debate to be. Keeping the freedom of the internet allows the exploration and growth but allows stupid people the freedom to do bad things as well. Where we draw the line of crimiality in cases such as this and the severity of the punishment will determine where the degrees of freedom and the amount of "flex" in our on-line "society".
Given the position I feel as the underdog I have a certain sympathy for people who views may not always reflect those of the majority. I think more flex in society is better than less - even if that means life isn't as "safe" or "controlled" as it could be.
=tkk
Does the designation "Beta" mean anything anymore? Or do we need to call it "Alpha" to get people to treat it as a "beta" product? This isn't a "launch" - it's a public "beta preview".
I can't say that OS X supports multiple monitors - I thought it did - but if it does you'll need multiple ATI cards or ATI built-in plus an ATI card as it currently only supports ATI hardware.
Macs have supported multiple monitors for many many years - well and free of charge I might add. I'm sure that OS X will extend this tradition as soon as they get a chance - hopefully this means 1.0 but we'll have to wait and see...
=tkk
PS Half-finished? From Apple? Unlike highly polished M$ 1.0 products? 8)
You can get a dual 450Mhz G4 with gigabit ethernet for less than US$2500 even from the Apple on-line store - and if you could dump the DVD drive you could do even better. (It's +US$300 for dual 500s.)
That's about the cost of two iMacs with a better ethernet, better FPU and the addition of Altivec engine.
Of course alot of that advantage is assuming your OS and solutions are able/written to take advantage of Altivec^H^H^H^H^H^H^H Velocity Engine vectorization. Although the added FPU performance will benefit about any scientific inquiry and the ethernet is mostly an advantage to problems that require intensive CPU->CPU communications.
But in reality the forth coming Mac OS X should be the best solution for this set-up. It has full featured SMP for the OS, complete protocols for apps to access SMP and Altivec accleration for many of the OS operations with Mach/BSD threads running undernaeth it.
NEXT had distributed processing/clustering protocols. If the distributed/clustering make it in to the first release of OS X it should be the perfect solution for this kind of thing.
=tkk
P.S. Of course if low-end 11MB ethernet is good enough for your problems you could add Airport cards and have a covert/wireless supercomputer without anyone in your office knowing it! ;)
Let's see that's US$4.69/lbs.
More than decent steak but I guess that's not bad purchasing in a "This product is shipped by weight not by volume" kinda way....
=tkk
I think one of the reasons is something that is commonly critized in Linux circles - BSD is much more of an ivory tower coding process than Linux.
As I understand it most BSD distros will take code additions but are more likely to see submissions more as feature suggestions and (re)code up these things themselves in the trusted inner-circle dev groups.
This process of trusted certified "master" coders leads to code that is original (no fear of using copyrighted/GPL'd code), (possibly) more stable and well written, and reviewed from the start of the process rather than added "because it seems to work" and debugged later if necessary.
This means - as people have pointed out - that *BSDs tend to lag behind Linux in the latest devices drivers etc. because they have an effectively smaller and more careful circle of coders. This approach is deliberate and has both benefits and drawbacks...
=tkk
Microsoft supports MacOS and to continue there support (natively) for MacOS X (which runs on BSD), they must make apps. for *nix
Well, this isn't technically true. MS could program in Carbon (clean subset of old MacOS) or NextStep aka Cocoa and these all include libraries and frameworks etc etc.
Mac OS X is NOT *Nix - not in the sense you mean here. It's a super-set of Mach/BSD. POSIX, X-windows and CLI apps should run all on OS X to varying degrees - but apps programmed assuming/using Mac OS X do not flow so easily back down the path to *nix variants.
=tkk
"The potato goes in the front!"
Now can we please make it stop!?!?!?!
;) -tkk
For the budget segment, the company will come out with Timna, an inexpensive version of Celeron containing a built-in graphics chip and a memory controller.
This is perfect cross-media tie-in advertising chance for the South Park boys - they can have their wheelchair bound character pop-up in all the commercials shouting TIMNA!
=tkk
Even HP has said that they don't expect IA-64 performance to overtake the progress of HP PA-RISC until at least 2005 and they expect a slow migration process starting around that time.
VLIW seems simple in concept but has a whole bunch of bitchy implementation details (including a need for a HUGE number of registers) and the very concept of the process insures that you're wasting a bunch of cycles so that you need to throw more power at a process.
Also because the compiler is such an important part of the whole code/chip concept it also seems that you're insuring MORE time between chip generations at a time in which the coming of generations get faster and faster.
Anyway these concerns are well known - until Intel actually ships something (hey it's only 4 + years late) we won't know what happens when the proverbial rubber meets the road.
tkk
For the record:
Screen is small-ish, base RAM and HD are low-ish - it's an entry level machine. (You can get bigger, better, faster etc but that's what the pro machines are for...)
You don't pay for wireless networking - you pay for the anttena built into the body of the machine - the Airport card is optional. And there is SCSI over USB.
Bottom line - if you don't want one - don't buy one. I didn't I have a Powerbook! Both the iBook and iMac are niche, entry-level market machines...
=tkk
>2) E=mc^2. Details are left to the reader.
Okay - just give me a hint...
Is the cricket the 'c' in the above equation?
;) -tkk
There's no reason these technologies shouldn't migrate to OS X as well at some point. Many reports of the full SMP demo'd at Apple's WWDC under OS X beta on Apple hardware. Distrbuted processing may come along as well but may or may not make the first release as it's MUCH less sexy than SMP.
Apple's plan would probably center on "farming" your Mac network's extra cycles at night more than the kind featured in the story. But plain distributed machines - like the headless one's in the story - shouldn't need full OS X install, though, unless they need Carbonlib, OGL or something. Maybe a lite Darwin-ish install would be possible for those machines - who needs display code without a display?
Of course you're probably talking about an extra 32Megs of RAM to make up the difference so why worry about it?
=tkk
Asking during NAB rollout is probably going you get a bunch of responsesm but here's some news:
http://www.apple.com/hotnews/
Apple announces new RT (realtime solutions) using DV, Matrox Cine solutions which include _uncompressed_ (!!) video all the way up to HD, acquiring Astarte DVD solutions to bring DVD authoring to Apple in house, and a new version of Final Cut Pro now with HD, 16:9 and more!
Wow! Apple seems serious about integrating these products - all the above were engineered with outside companies and Apple engineers to tie tightly with Apple hardware.
As Cartman would say it, "Schweeeeet!"
CYA
=tkk
Now that it has hot swapable CPUs you won't be able to shut it down when it goes psycho and kills everybody!
What are you doing, Dave?
I'm pulling your processors so you won't kill me!
I'm sorry, Dave, but my HA Linux system allows me to hot swap CPUs - that won't save you, Dave...
=tkk 8)
We've always been at war with Europa!
=tkk
Albatross!
Albatross!
Albatross!
As repeatedly demonstrated during the trial M$'s "crack legal team" actually seems to mean "legal team on crack".
=tkk
I think Perl is the "right tool for the right job" - you just have to be sure you're doing the right job with it.
Perl is a godsend for CGIs and fills a role no other language does. It's:
I came to CGIs knowing C and tried hard to like it for that couldn't - the C programs were twice the length of the Perl examples and then I had to deal with new compiler environment, knowing the size of arrays at compile time and other memory issuses. All of these went away with the conversion to Perl.
Perl is exactly what the web needed but was created before it even really knew it needed it. It's like Java but good and useful. ;)
=tkk
You're only open to use as part of an unintentional DoS if you're connected over an ethernet network - usually with DSL or cable modem.
=tkk
It is currently working on Mac and Windows but does not currently on Linux. We could use an experienced Linux sockets programmer to update the Linux side. This is especially true because-
Apple has also JUST released their previously closed-source Apple specific networking API NetSprockets. The plan is that the higher level API features of NetSprocket (which is OT specific at the moment) will be abstracted and rolled into OpenPlay.
The result of this will be a great cross-platform, open-source networking API supporting protocols through modules.
And as Martha Stewart says, "And that's a good thing..."
=tkk
On the Apple front I'd also look to the upcoming OS X - due early next year.
While Apple hasn't stated whether the the new OS will support it there have been several "rumors site" reports of OS X supporting Next's Autoclustering features over existing networks- perhaps even autoclustering over the internet. (Depending on data needs etc of course...)
If this interests you I'd look to old docs on Next's clustering features and if they sound appealing look to see if they're coming in the first release of OS X. As with all clustering issues YMMV....
=tkk
ie all you see is:
RE: First Post!!!
Get a life, loser!
There's an idea - mabye we can add moderation to the digital version and we can moderate JarJar below our threshold!
Meesa JarJar Binks! (Score: -5 Unfunny, Offtopic, Pointless, Offensive, SPAM)
=tkk
Have you meta-moderated Lucas today?
Dvorak is a knob.
In the Mac community we had to put up with him for several years - he was always whining and every third article or so was just SO far from left field it was puzzling.
My fav comment was the guy who wrote into the Mac magazine that was carrying Dvorak's column on it's last page. During shipping a subcriber lost his back cover and the last page was marred to unreadability. His comment, "I'd glady pay extra for this service every month." 8)
Funny!
=tkk
>Of course you wouldn't know that as a Linux(i.e. QC what's that?) user.
(Normally I don't bother with ACs because they're exactly that, but...)
Um, except that I'm NOT a Linux user. Ooops!
I AM a programmer and a part time developer and M$s claims sound an awful lot like, "We think it's good enough... If people don't complain we'll ship it."
Call me cynical but almost having to make Access work once leads me to believe that M$ WILL ship a product that out and out sucks. I find that statement much more likely to mean, "Eh, it seems good enough." rather than "It's passed rigorous Quality testing and we're confident it will stand up to everyone's scrutiny."
And to state the obvious - QC? How long does it take M$ to offer a patch to an obvious system wide flaw (like the Ping of Death) vs Linux. Linux was 2 ro 3 days as I remember.
People (other than me) CHOOSE to play with alpha/beta builds between announced kernels - because they actually exist rather than being stuck with beta (Win95) software for 3 years between updates.
=tkk