Why do we see so many disparaging opinions of the Itanium processor (all those 'Itanic' jokes, etc.)?
The jokes are not about Intel's processor so much as they are about Intel the company. Intel nearly bet the farm on the Itanium and for a while, it looked like that bet might sink the company. Too many folks have too much invested in x86 software and the Itanic had a bad rep for running those x86 apps compared with AMD's 64 bit x86 style CPUs. A new processor family can't expect to succeed based only on its speed. You have to consider the (warning, buzzword) ecosystem based around that processor. Itanium has the failed to become a mass market CPU for the same reason that sparc, mips, alpha, and others have. PPC seems to have done a better job by grabbing a large chunk of the game console market to complement or even overshadow its use in servers.
I like the mods on the parent. It is both insightful and flamebait. Speaking from the left, I agree that Hussein was a homocidal maniac who needed to be taken out sooner or later. But the way Bush started the war was probably illegal according to Intl law and Bush's prosecution of the war has been incredibly incompetent. I'm also not convinced that Bush is responsible for the fact that there have been no major terrorist attacks on US soil since 9/11. I think we've just been lucky. Those are the views that polls show the US electorate is starting to catch on to.
OTOH neanderthal mithocondrial DNA is sampled and found to be singificantly different from Homo Sapiens'. That means we have no neanderthal grandmothers, which makes interbreeding theory *very* unlikely.
No, mithocondrial DNA is passed along exclusively from mother to child. All that has to happen for Neanderthal mithocondrial DNA to disapear from the HS line is for Neanderthal women to have had only sons. The sons can't pass on the Neanderthal m-DNA. This process can happen over generations. For example, a Neanderthal mother and HS father have a daughter and a son. The daughter has a daughter and a son with a HS father. The granddaughter has only sons. No more Neanderthal m-DNA.
Re:What is with java people and groovy?
on
James Gosling on Java
·
· Score: 2, Informative
We considered Jython and Groovy when we were adding scripting to an app, since they were the only two scripting languages that came with licenses that were found to be acceptable by our legal department.
Why choose at all? Why not use the Bean Scripting Framework (originally from IBM's Alpha Works, IIRC) and let the customer choose whichever language they prefer? BSF lets you embed any scripting language that has a conforming wrapper. BSF wrappers are available for Groovy, Jython, BeanShell, Rhino, JRuby, Tcl, NetRexx, XSLT, and perl among others (although it's been my experience that some of these aren't all there yet).
btw. the US has a banned books list too, as I found when googling writing this post... surprised me.
The US banned books list is a list compiled by the ALA. The books are not banned by the US Gov't. Instead, they are typically books that some local yocal (think of the children!) found offensive and persuaded their local public library or school to ban.
Right now healthcare is the field to get into. Get a nursing degree and you'll be set.
Don't count on it. I've seen at least two recent 60 Minutes type stories on how Westerners are going abroad to clinics in Thailand and India for operations such as knee replacements. It is a lot cheaper, the MDs are typically locals who have returned home after training and working in US/Euro hospitals for years, and the locations have a luxury resort/spa atmosphere instead of a sterile hospital feel.
And that x-ray you had yesterday? How do you know it wasn't shipped via the internet to be read by a radiologist in Bangalore?
Why do people feel the need to pin the blame 100% on someone, it's dumb.
Because if the a-holes who do the break-ins quit trying to break in, this whole discussion would be unnecessary. I live 2 miles from the downtown of a metro area of >1M people. Crime is very low. Last summer I left town for a long weekend and came home to discover that I'd left the front door open all weekend. I try not to do that as a habit, but it sure is nice to know that I live where I can get away with it occasionally.
There is a practical reason for not purchasing closed source hardware. Sooner or later, the manufacturer will quit supporting the driver as they move to newer generations of their product. Not all of us care to own the latest and greatest hardware. We just want our stuff to work and keep on working long after the manufacturer has declared our system obsolete.
Don't be such an idealistic ass. It's people like YOU that destroy the core value of Linux.
Its better than just being a plain ass. Its people like YOU that destroy the core value of respect for other people.
I gave them the address of their own store. None of the cashiers seem to recognize that either.
MicroCenter has a decent collection of older editions of tech books for between $1 and $10. I've amassed a large book shelf cheaply by buying these. Often the penultimate ed of say, an O'Reilly, is plenty good for learning the basics while reading the current docs online to see what's new.
They also have a decent hardware return policy (30 days, no restock fee, no questions asked) and I have used it liberally on occasion when I needed some known-good hardware to diagnose a problem in one of my systems. It is very helpful to have a warehouse where I can borrow test parts 5 minutes down the road from where I live.
I grew up in OR and my reaction to the announcements in 1980s of what had been done was similar to yours. But since I knew many of the people responsible, let me offer up their defense:
Mercury comes in many forms, some are deadly, some fairly inert. The stuff in the creek in OR is the inert sort.
It is lying on the bottom. Often it is even worse for the environment to dig it up than to just let it be. Similar problems are found in the Hudson River in NY and many other places with PCBs. Just let it get covered over with sediment and monitor it rather than stirring it up during a cleanup.
No one cared about the environment in the 1950s. How many superfund sites are there in the US dating from that era? Remember, Rachel Carson's Silent Spring that is regarded as the start of modern environmentalism wasn't published until 1962.
The creek in OR with the mercury is basically just a drainage ditch at its Y-12 head. It has many miles to go before it hits the Clinch River. The amount of mercury being discharged from Y-12 is a very different amount from what is making its way into the Clinch River. And there aren't any eadible fish in the creek, just minnows, IIRC.
Sure, it could be cleaned up. But at what cost? Maybe there are more dangerous things being emmited into the environment and we should be spending our money cleaning those first. Which is more dangerous, the mercury in the creek in OR, or the lead, arsenic, and mercury being discharged from 100s of abandoned mines and piles of tailings in Colorado?
I've had pizza in many local spots between LA and NYC. Big Ed's makes the best. Buddy's, OTOH, is OK, but most any little dive in the South can do better.
Unlike most ChemE, where research leads to pilot plant which leads to production plant (step 4, profit), the Manhattan Project often skipped the pilot plant stage and went directly from research to production facility. Small pilot plants allow you to determine which of several alternatives might be the most economically feasible. The Manhattan Project did not have the time to figure out which way was best, so they simply built all of the alternatives as full scale production plants (OK, they also had nearly unlimited funds). In the end, IIRC, the calutrons were used as a first stage feeder plant to the K-25 gaseous diffusion plant. Today, the ORNL Fusion Energy Division is physically located in Y-12 since it needs huge amounts of electricity for its experiments and Y-12 was wired for it in order to run the calutrons.
As to the pollution, John Googin used to argue that the arsenic coming out of the coal mines in the Cumberland Mountains above Oak Ridge was probably a greater threat than the what was escaping from Oak Ridge.
Just MHO but his would be one of the LAST places on Earth I'd care to visit.
I grew up in OR. It has a 1st rate school system and very reasonably priced housing (a home that might cost 3/4 mil in the Bay Raea can be had for <150K in OR). Within an hour of OR in almost any direction is some of the best backpacking, climbing, caving, canoeing, and mt biking in the Eastern US. If there were any jobs, I'd move my family back there in a heartbeat.
On my home XP Pro box, freshly after a reboot, I currently have 15 distinct processes running, with FireFox as the only obviously user-interactive one.
Cool. Yet another stat where Linux beats MS. Gosh, I've got 40+ processes running just to surf the web:
Looks awful. All that just to surf the web. Except that the load avg is 0.12 on a 2x1Ghz PIII box. The number of background processes running tells you very little about whether you need more cores or not.
I'm more interested in hearing how they plan to increase the bandwidth between cpu, memory, and I/O devices to keep up with 32 processors.
I'm sitting here reading/. because I fucking can't remember the fucking root password to a server that I'm supposed to administer as a favor to a friend. I changed it two months ago, haven't needed to get on the fucking machine since and now, when I need to fix it, I can't remember what the fuck I changed it to. And no, I can't just stick a rescue boot disk in because I don't know what fucking city the server is in.
Note to self: Next time, write down the fucking password and put it in the fucking file cabinet.
Note to poster: Did you ask this fucking question just to fuck with my mind or was it pure coincidence?
By contrast, the chips I.B.M. makes for Apple represent less than 2 percent of chip production at its largest factory in East Fishkill, N.Y. And while the microelectronics business as a whole is strategically important for I.B.M., it is a small part of the revenue of a company that increasingly focuses on services and software. A. M. Sacconaghi, an analyst for Sanford C. Bernstein & Company, estimates that the company's technology group - mostly microelectronics - will account for less than 3 percent of I.B.M.'s revenues and 2 percent of its pretax income this year.
For years, according to industry analysts, the work for Apple has been barely a break-even business for I.B.M. When the two companies were negotiating a new contract recently, Mr. Jobs pushed for price discounts that I.B.M. refused to offer. For I.B.M., "the economics just didn't work," said one industry executive who was briefed on the negotiations. "And Apple is not so important a customer that you would take the financial hit to hold onto the relationship."
However, [Apple Senior Vice President Phil] Schiller said the company does not plan to let people run Mac OS X on other computer makers' hardware. "We will not allow running Mac OS X on anything other than an Apple Mac."
Too bad. I'd like to run OS X w/out having to pay an Apple hardware premium.
And mom and dad will go out and buy a New and Enhanced and Compatible computer just to get the damn *FREE* CD to play and shut the kid up.
You must not be a parent. Those of us who are know that the only correct response to this kind of whinning is to tell the kid to STFU and finish eating their gruel before you decide to sell them off for medical experiments.
DeLay represents the TX 22nd Congressional District. The district is largely in the Houston suburbs. NASA has a large presence in Houston. His press release is really just the standard Congressional release:
We will provide whatever funding is required to support $PROGRAM of $AGENCY in order to bring Federal Government cash and jobs to my district.
Are you saying that the Middle Ages lasted into the 19th Century? No, the Church has been responsible for very little science and is well known for its persecution of real scientists like Galileo. Check out the list of books which Catholics were forbidden to read (which included works by Francis Bacon, the father of the modern scientific method) until Pope Paul VI finally dropped it in 1966.
And of course science in the mediaeval period was kept alive by the Church, but why inject facts into one's bigotry?
Science was not kept alive by the Mediaeval Church. Quite the contrary. The Church sought to supress anyone who dared experiment with ideas that differed from the Church's orthodoxy. What the Church did was to preserve a portion (we don't know how large a portion) of the discoveries of the Greeks and Romans and other earlier civilizations. But mere knowledge preservation is not at all the same as science.
OK, awareness should be amended to mean self-awareness. It is nearly possible now to build a little robot that emulates a bee's behavior w/out requiring a supercomputer to drive it. So a supercomputer is therefore no less aware than a bee.
It's not just HP/UX. I've had similar experiences with patch requirements for many other unix vendors and enterprise software. I worked for a small workflow tools vendor at one point where a genius salesman told a potential customer "sure our tools run on Solaris with the Iona Orbix ORB" even though no one had ever tried that combo. Took me a weekend just to patch the solaris box to meet the Iona requirements but only 20 minutes to compile our tools.
One thing I did notice about HP/UX was that many kernel config params that can be changed on Linux by a simple echo 1 >/proc/sys/some/param/or/other required a kernel re-link and reboot or something similar on HP/UX.
This made it a real pain to do simple things like uping the max amount of memory that a user's process could have.
If the FSF, GPL's guys get really pissing then instead of an API I would use a TCP socket communication protocol, or whatever is needed, of course I WILL have to donate/open the code for the communication mechanism, but, I will be able to have my closed source program intact because they are 2 different programs.
I do not know why any company has thought about it...
This has been discussed many times (along with the "I'll just create a plug-in protocol and distribute the GPL'd code with a wrapper that implements the plug-in protocol"). IIRC, MySQL has a GPL license that strictly forbids this in non-GPL'd applications. It is also, I believe, going to be addressed in the next version of the GPL.
Oh, brother. In the olden days, O'Gara would have been given a medal for generating readership.
To which olden days do you refer, Mr. Dvorak? Perhaps you mean those olden days of yellow journalism. Sorry, but I prefer a more ethical style of online writing. Dan Gillmor says it best: Be honorable.
Slashdot Mirror
Why do we see so many disparaging opinions of the Itanium processor (all those 'Itanic' jokes, etc.)?
The jokes are not about Intel's processor so much as they are about Intel the company. Intel nearly bet the farm on the Itanium and for a while, it looked like that bet might sink the company. Too many folks have too much invested in x86 software and the Itanic had a bad rep for running those x86 apps compared with AMD's 64 bit x86 style CPUs. A new processor family can't expect to succeed based only on its speed. You have to consider the (warning, buzzword) ecosystem based around that processor. Itanium has the failed to become a mass market CPU for the same reason that sparc, mips, alpha, and others have. PPC seems to have done a better job by grabbing a large chunk of the game console market to complement or even overshadow its use in servers.
I like the mods on the parent. It is both insightful and flamebait. Speaking from the left, I agree that Hussein was a homocidal maniac who needed to be taken out sooner or later. But the way Bush started the war was probably illegal according to Intl law and Bush's prosecution of the war has been incredibly incompetent. I'm also not convinced that Bush is responsible for the fact that there have been no major terrorist attacks on US soil since 9/11. I think we've just been lucky. Those are the views that polls show the US electorate is starting to catch on to.
OTOH neanderthal mithocondrial DNA is sampled and found to be singificantly different from Homo Sapiens'. That means we have no neanderthal grandmothers, which makes interbreeding theory *very* unlikely.
No, mithocondrial DNA is passed along exclusively from mother to child. All that has to happen for Neanderthal mithocondrial DNA to disapear from the HS line is for Neanderthal women to have had only sons. The sons can't pass on the Neanderthal m-DNA. This process can happen over generations. For example, a Neanderthal mother and HS father have a daughter and a son. The daughter has a daughter and a son with a HS father. The granddaughter has only sons. No more Neanderthal m-DNA.
We considered Jython and Groovy when we were adding scripting to an app, since they were the only two scripting languages that came with licenses that were found to be acceptable by our legal department.
Why choose at all? Why not use the Bean Scripting Framework (originally from IBM's Alpha Works, IIRC) and let the customer choose whichever language they prefer? BSF lets you embed any scripting language that has a conforming wrapper. BSF wrappers are available for Groovy, Jython, BeanShell, Rhino, JRuby, Tcl, NetRexx, XSLT, and perl among others (although it's been my experience that some of these aren't all there yet).
btw. the US has a banned books list too, as I found when googling writing this post... surprised me.
The US banned books list is a list compiled by the ALA. The books are not banned by the US Gov't. Instead, they are typically books that some local yocal (think of the children!) found offensive and persuaded their local public library or school to ban.
Right now healthcare is the field to get into. Get a nursing degree and you'll be set.
Don't count on it. I've seen at least two recent 60 Minutes type stories on how Westerners are going abroad to clinics in Thailand and India for operations such as knee replacements. It is a lot cheaper, the MDs are typically locals who have returned home after training and working in US/Euro hospitals for years, and the locations have a luxury resort/spa atmosphere instead of a sterile hospital feel.
And that x-ray you had yesterday? How do you know it wasn't shipped via the internet to be read by a radiologist in Bangalore?
Why do people feel the need to pin the blame 100% on someone, it's dumb.
Because if the a-holes who do the break-ins quit trying to break in, this whole discussion would be unnecessary. I live 2 miles from the downtown of a metro area of >1M people. Crime is very low. Last summer I left town for a long weekend and came home to discover that I'd left the front door open all weekend. I try not to do that as a habit, but it sure is nice to know that I live where I can get away with it occasionally.
There is a practical reason for not purchasing closed source hardware. Sooner or later, the manufacturer will quit supporting the driver as they move to newer generations of their product. Not all of us care to own the latest and greatest hardware. We just want our stuff to work and keep on working long after the manufacturer has declared our system obsolete.
Don't be such an idealistic ass. It's people like YOU that destroy the core value of Linux.
Its better than just being a plain ass. Its people like YOU that destroy the core value of respect for other people.
I gave them the address of their own store. None of the cashiers seem to recognize that either.
MicroCenter has a decent collection of older editions of tech books for between $1 and $10. I've amassed a large book shelf cheaply by buying these. Often the penultimate ed of say, an O'Reilly, is plenty good for learning the basics while reading the current docs online to see what's new.
They also have a decent hardware return policy (30 days, no restock fee, no questions asked) and I have used it liberally on occasion when I needed some known-good hardware to diagnose a problem in one of my systems. It is very helpful to have a warehouse where I can borrow test parts 5 minutes down the road from where I live.
I've had pizza in many local spots between LA and NYC. Big Ed's makes the best. Buddy's, OTOH, is OK, but most any little dive in the South can do better.
The calutrons were basically a FAILURE ...
Unlike most ChemE, where research leads to pilot plant which leads to production plant (step 4, profit), the Manhattan Project often skipped the pilot plant stage and went directly from research to production facility. Small pilot plants allow you to determine which of several alternatives might be the most economically feasible. The Manhattan Project did not have the time to figure out which way was best, so they simply built all of the alternatives as full scale production plants (OK, they also had nearly unlimited funds). In the end, IIRC, the calutrons were used as a first stage feeder plant to the K-25 gaseous diffusion plant. Today, the ORNL Fusion Energy Division is physically located in Y-12 since it needs huge amounts of electricity for its experiments and Y-12 was wired for it in order to run the calutrons.
As to the pollution, John Googin used to argue that the arsenic coming out of the coal mines in the Cumberland Mountains above Oak Ridge was probably a greater threat than the what was escaping from Oak Ridge.
Just MHO but his would be one of the LAST places on Earth I'd care to visit.
I grew up in OR. It has a 1st rate school system and very reasonably priced housing (a home that might cost 3/4 mil in the Bay Raea can be had for <150K in OR). Within an hour of OR in almost any direction is some of the best backpacking, climbing, caving, canoeing, and mt biking in the Eastern US. If there were any jobs, I'd move my family back there in a heartbeat.
Cool. Yet another stat where Linux beats MS. Gosh, I've got 40+ processes running just to surf the web:
Looks awful. All that just to surf the web. Except that the load avg is 0.12 on a 2x1Ghz PIII box. The number of background processes running tells you very little about whether you need more cores or not.
I'm more interested in hearing how they plan to increase the bandwidth between cpu, memory, and I/O devices to keep up with 32 processors.
In many countries a basic quantity of food is available for free to those who can't afford to pay for it.
Still not free. As Heinlein once noted, they have to charge extra for the beer to cover the cost.
I'm sitting here reading /. because I fucking can't remember the fucking root password to a server that I'm supposed to administer as a favor to a friend. I changed it two months ago, haven't needed to get on the fucking machine since and now, when I need to fix it, I can't remember what the fuck I changed it to. And no, I can't just stick a rescue boot disk in because I don't know what fucking city the server is in.
Note to self: Next time, write down the fucking password and put it in the fucking file cabinet.
Note to poster: Did you ask this fucking question just to fuck with my mind or was it pure coincidence?
This is a huge blow to PowerPC's credibility, though.
Not according to the NYT.
By contrast, the chips I.B.M. makes for Apple represent less than 2 percent of chip production at its largest factory in East Fishkill, N.Y. And while the microelectronics business as a whole is strategically important for I.B.M., it is a small part of the revenue of a company that increasingly focuses on services and software. A. M. Sacconaghi, an analyst for Sanford C. Bernstein & Company, estimates that the company's technology group - mostly microelectronics - will account for less than 3 percent of I.B.M.'s revenues and 2 percent of its pretax income this year.
For years, according to industry analysts, the work for Apple has been barely a break-even business for I.B.M. When the two companies were negotiating a new contract recently, Mr. Jobs pushed for price discounts that I.B.M. refused to offer. For I.B.M., "the economics just didn't work," said one industry executive who was briefed on the negotiations. "And Apple is not so important a customer that you would take the financial hit to hold onto the relationship."
I'm more interested in this quote:
However, [Apple Senior Vice President Phil] Schiller said the company does not plan to let people run Mac OS X on other computer makers' hardware. "We will not allow running Mac OS X on anything other than an Apple Mac."
Too bad. I'd like to run OS X w/out having to pay an Apple hardware premium.
And mom and dad will go out and buy a New and Enhanced and Compatible computer just to get the damn *FREE* CD to play and shut the kid up.
You must not be a parent. Those of us who are know that the only correct response to this kind of whinning is to tell the kid to STFU and finish eating their gruel before you decide to sell them off for medical experiments.
DeLay represents the TX 22nd Congressional District. The district is largely in the Houston suburbs. NASA has a large presence in Houston. His press release is really just the standard Congressional release:
We will provide whatever funding is required to support $PROGRAM of $AGENCY in order to bring Federal Government cash and jobs to my district.
Are you saying that the Middle Ages lasted into the 19th Century? No, the Church has been responsible for very little science and is well known for its persecution of real scientists like Galileo. Check out the list of books which Catholics were forbidden to read (which included works by Francis Bacon, the father of the modern scientific method) until Pope Paul VI finally dropped it in 1966.
And of course science in the mediaeval period was kept alive by the Church, but why inject facts into one's bigotry?
Science was not kept alive by the Mediaeval Church. Quite the contrary. The Church sought to supress anyone who dared experiment with ideas that differed from the Church's orthodoxy. What the Church did was to preserve a portion (we don't know how large a portion) of the discoveries of the Greeks and Romans and other earlier civilizations. But mere knowledge preservation is not at all the same as science.
OK, awareness should be amended to mean self-awareness. It is nearly possible now to build a little robot that emulates a bee's behavior w/out requiring a supercomputer to drive it. So a supercomputer is therefore no less aware than a bee.
After all, the most complex supercomputers already have the complexity of invertabrates , but have all the awareness of a rock.
Most invertabrates probably also have all the awareness of a rock.
It's not just HP/UX. I've had similar experiences with patch requirements for many other unix vendors and enterprise software. I worked for a small workflow tools vendor at one point where a genius salesman told a potential customer "sure our tools run on Solaris with the Iona Orbix ORB" even though no one had ever tried that combo. Took me a weekend just to patch the solaris box to meet the Iona requirements but only 20 minutes to compile our tools.
/proc/sys/some/param/or/other required a kernel re-link and reboot or something similar on HP/UX.
This made it a real pain to do simple things like uping the max amount of memory that a user's process could have.
One thing I did notice about HP/UX was that many kernel config params that can be changed on Linux by a simple echo 1 >
If the FSF, GPL's guys get really pissing then instead of an API I would use a TCP socket communication protocol, or whatever is needed, of course I WILL have to donate/open the code for the communication mechanism, but, I will be able to have my closed source program intact because they are 2 different programs.
I do not know why any company has thought about it...
This has been discussed many times (along with the "I'll just create a plug-in protocol and distribute the GPL'd code with a wrapper that implements the plug-in protocol"). IIRC, MySQL has a GPL license that strictly forbids this in non-GPL'd applications. It is also, I believe, going to be addressed in the next version of the GPL.
Oh, brother. In the olden days, O'Gara would have been given a medal for generating readership.
To which olden days do you refer, Mr. Dvorak? Perhaps you mean those olden days of yellow journalism. Sorry, but I prefer a more ethical style of online writing. Dan Gillmor says it best: Be honorable.