A 1000 processor Cray T3E 1200 would smoke your pathetic little mainframe:). And you wouldn't have to use crap like JCL. However, there's this little problem called cost of ownership. If supercomputers and mainframes were cost-effective there wouldn't be the huge push for commodity clusters, blade servers, and so on. There are probably applications where mainframes are cost-effective, but there are problems like almost nobody coming out of college with mainframe knowledge.
As usual, old tech gets posted to Slashdot and
a slew of stupid comments follows. Is this not a tech site?
All this (SMT) is is basically another
identical set of registers so overhead due to context switching can be moved to the CPU. Now
the CPU can keep some of the state of
a running task instead of the OS. Intel
is not the only company using it -- Sun has
similar technology in their MAJC processor which
was announced a long time ago.
There's
a little more to it since you can run two seperate processes in the pipeline at once, but it's still not like having two actual CPU cores on a single
die.
Believe it or not...freedom of information is not a human right in most places. There are many other things that are true human rights violations. I'm afraid censorship just doesn't fall into the same category as, say, genocide.
I disagree. Speech and information are fundamental. They are so fundamental that The First Amendment of the Bill of Rights in the United States Constitution is Freedom of Expression. Not the second, not the tenth.
If you don't have freedom of speech
and of the press, how can you spread information about corruption and violence that is taking place under the auspices of the government? Preventing that information from getting out is just a shelter for other human rights violations to continue. Speech is a fundamental and important human right that people must have in order to protect themselves from the tyranny of evil governments.
>The PPro when considered alone, was a dismal retail failure
Does anyone have real numbers? My guess is since
the PPro was so high priced, it made money in the
server/workstation market, but not the desktop market.
In the writer's outline section he has a few bullet-points that scream "XML!"
I'd agree that XML is a good basis, but "XML" really doesn't provide much by itself. It's just a file format that is human readable. If you just
use XML with a bunch of proprietary tags, your
own XML language so to speak, you really don't
gain much over the existing different syntax config files.
An
automated tool has no clue what your ipaddress
(or whatever) tag means at all. You need
to provide additional context for tools to
understand the semantics of the configuration
data. To make configuration files
understandable in a more intelligent sense,
you need to either restrict
the tags you use to your own configuration language, or you
need to provide metadata of some sort.
Why is this intelligence necessary? Well there
are all sorts of dependencies and relationships
in configuration files. You might want a GUI
to let you know if you change something that
may break another setting, and so on. Plus
ideally you would only allow legal values
to be set. Data typing could be done with
W3C XML Schema Definition Language, or RELAX
NG schemas.
Which brings me to RDF, which I think would be
better suited to this task than XML alone.
If you use RDF
(see http://www.w3.org/RDF/ ) you make it much easier to have a self-describing format that tools can do more intelligent things with than raw XML. While
I don't think RDF, DAML+OIL, et al is enough
to create a Semantic Web as Tim Berners-Lee is
hoping, it _is_ a step in a higher-level direction
that will support more intelligence in processing
data.
Mozilla already uses RDF for various configuration files and I'm sure there are other applications
that do too. Mozilla has a whole bunch of stuff about their RDF here.
XML is just a tree of "stuff" in human-readable format. RDF lets you set up properties and relationships in the data in
a standardized way. I don't have a brilliant example
to prove this to skeptics, but really it is
a better way to represent a lot of types of data you want to be able to query. There are many knowledge bases, expert systems and other
query engines already out there using RDF and
even higher-level languages like DAML+OIL.
Cleaner source code!? How about compile-time type safety?
Yes, obviously, but I've never had much of an issue with it. Have you? That seems like more of a purist argument to me. You can always subclass your own collections for that. Sure it would be good and more convenient, and I'm not disagreeing that compile-time safety should be there, but an invalid Java cast will throw a ClassCastException. It's not like casting a C pointer where you will probably segfault.
My issue is just that generics only address part of the issue. Casting and using wrapper classes like Integer is slow. Once you have fixed the
class types at compile time via generics, why must you take the cast hit at runtime? It's a hack.
If you build your own collections for specific types, you have compile time type safety -and- performance.
The 1.5 Java generics are merely syntactic sugar.
Since the casts still occur, there is no performance benefit, only cleaner source code.
There is no way to parameterize primitive types
like int.
I do not consider the proposed generics to be adequate. You are still better off, performance wise, generating your own custom collections for specific types. This is what GNU trove does.
Hilarious. Basically a reader-friendly translation of "We hardcoded what was previously a free parameter because people were too st00pid to use it properly."
And probablePrime() was there before, they just
changed it from private to public.
A Sun e450 is a nice box for a reasonable price. A dual config is less than $30k now for a nice workgroup server.
Yes, definitely. You can even buy a low end v880 for 30k. I was teasing a bit. We still have 220s, 250s and 420s and 450s that are more reasonably priced boxes, though I personally don't like the 2xx machines. The bigger machines are used for applications where memory and/or processing requirements are really high.
We'll
probably be getting more 880s though because they are pretty expandable and hold a lot of memory.
They go up to 8 processors / 32 GB.
These Suns, while not the fastest in town (see IBM Power4), are a proven 64 bit architecture that has been around and doing real work longer than the Itanium hype. It bugs me to see so much attention given to the Intel machines. I understand the desire for good commodity machines, but these
things are going to be pricey anyway. And I could
give a rip about running Windows on servers.
Look at any commercial server available today. They're priced around $15000 - $20000
Heh. Maybe if by "server" you mean high-end Windows workstation. A midrange Sun server
like a sunfire 4800 is around $350k list, say $300k. And that's just a test machine where
I work - the
production stuff runs on a combination of 4500s and 6500s, soon 4800s/6800s. 6500s are over a million IIRC.
But anyway, your point is still right on, and
even more valid with datacenter-class servers,
disk arrays, and so on. Paying $2k for the
processor is nothing.
It is a privacy violation and a nuisance to have
online registration. What if my network connection is down?
When I buy a book, I don't have to call the publisher when I get it to have them tell me a
combination for a lock so I can open and read it. Likewise I didn't have to call Charmin to tell them that
I am wiping my butt with their toilet tissue and
I am, in fact, the original owner.
I don't want time-limited registration or regular
fees to use software. This is the path online
registration is going towards. It's all about
the benjamins, maintaining an ongoing revenue stream, ensuring that software is "legitimate" while inconveniencing people who aren't pirates.
I know people are going to counter that the companies have a right to do this, blah blah blah.
Well, frankly, companies have too many damned "rights" already and people have too few.
I stopped watching television regularly several
years ago. I go for months without it. I'm sure part of it is that I have a hard time just sitting there, though I do enjoy watching movies.
I haven't noticed any decrease in my ability to attract beautiful buxom blondes with my beverage choice or to buy the toys and clothes that will make my children love me. Okay, I don't have any blonde friends or children, but I didn't before either...
Should the editors silently correct misspellings and questionable grammar?
I'd like it if the Slashdot editors at least
spellchecked the submissions. I personally have a
hard time reading some of them. I don't recall
Slashdot editors ever doing much editing though.
You know, I have seen "42" posted probably on the order of thousands of times, dating back to
BBSes. Do you know what all of the posts had in common? They weren't funny.
I enjoyed Douglas Adams when I was young, but really this "42" thing
was totally beaten to death a long time ago.
Get a new joke or something, please. You might even want to consider creating your own.
If you do that (naively use ps2pdf), your document will probably look like crap on the screen due to using nonstandard fonts. To produce a decent looking PDF document for online viewing you have to use the standard PDF fonts.
>PDF is an open standard. It is NOT controlled by a single company interest
I don't think you know what you're talking about!
I'm not an expert by any stretch of the imagination, but I think there a few things to consider. My understanding is that it's "Adobe PDF" and it's a de facto published "standard" controlled by Adobe. PDF is a derivative of PostScript Level 2. It is
most definitely proprietary even though the format specification is available. Usually when people say "open standard", they mean that it is a "de jure" standard controlled by a recognized standards body like ISO, and Adobe Systems is a single interest, not a standards body. Another usage of "open standard" with respect to Adobe PDF refers to the fact that it's published and royalty-free. If Microsoft publishes the Word document format, it is still a proprietary format.
The problem with proprietary formats like PDF is that a company who wants to influence the standard cannot join the controlling standards body. So basically if you don't like the direction Adobe Systems is taking with their format, you're screwed unless you have clout with the company. If you're concerned with archiving information for a long period of time or choosing an interoperable format, the proprietary nature of PDF is discouraging.
Don't get me wrong, I like using the PDF format
and have produced some nice documents using pdflatex, ebnf2ps, and other free PostScript tools. I just think it's important to understand the limitations of PDF which are primarily that it is 1) a publishing format more than an editing format and 2) Adobe controls it. At work, for example, documents are stored and passed through an editing and publishing workflow as XML, archived as XML, and only rendered to PDF on demand at the end.
I hate to ramble on, but there seems to be a lot of misunderstanding on this topic. Some other people have made the analogy between the JPEG graphics format and a format with layer information like Photoshop's proprietary format.
PDF is not designed to carry the types of metadata
you might want in a document workflow as well as XML (or SGML), just like JPEG only represents the final rendered and flattened ("published") image from what may have been a multilayer graphic in the editing process. In other words, PDF is not a universal document format when you are concerned with editting or automation which relies on metadata that is not part of the document displayed to a user.
Slashdot Mirror
>Incidentally, OpenGL's role as defining the long-term goal for hardware has now been usurped, not by OpenGL2.0 or D3D but by Renderman.
I thought Renderman stuff was done primarily in software using render farms. Could you explain what you mean? I'm curious.
-Kevin
A 1000 processor Cray T3E 1200 would smoke your pathetic little mainframe :). And you wouldn't have to use crap like JCL. However, there's this little problem called cost of ownership. If supercomputers and mainframes were cost-effective there wouldn't be the huge push for commodity clusters, blade servers, and so on. There are probably applications where mainframes are cost-effective, but there are problems like almost nobody coming out of college with mainframe knowledge.
-Kevin
You may be in luck - I heard that eventually Power and PowerPC will be consolidated to the Power architecture.
-Kevin
All this (SMT) is is basically another identical set of registers so overhead due to context switching can be moved to the CPU. Now the CPU can keep some of the state of a running task instead of the OS. Intel is not the only company using it -- Sun has similar technology in their MAJC processor which was announced a long time ago.
There's a little more to it since you can run two seperate processes in the pipeline at once, but it's still not like having two actual CPU cores on a single die.
-Kevin
They just forgot to tell the cast and crew.
Or at least it was so bad I stopped watching it.
-Kevin
I disagree. Speech and information are fundamental. They are so fundamental that The First Amendment of the Bill of Rights in the United States Constitution is Freedom of Expression. Not the second, not the tenth.
If you don't have freedom of speech and of the press, how can you spread information about corruption and violence that is taking place under the auspices of the government? Preventing that information from getting out is just a shelter for other human rights violations to continue. Speech is a fundamental and important human right that people must have in order to protect themselves from the tyranny of evil governments.
-Kevin
>The PPro when considered alone, was a dismal retail failure
Does anyone have real numbers? My guess is since
the PPro was so high priced, it made money in the
server/workstation market, but not the desktop market.
-Kevin
I'd agree that XML is a good basis, but "XML" really doesn't provide much by itself. It's just a file format that is human readable. If you just use XML with a bunch of proprietary tags, your own XML language so to speak, you really don't gain much over the existing different syntax config files.
An automated tool has no clue what your ipaddress (or whatever) tag means at all. You need to provide additional context for tools to understand the semantics of the configuration data. To make configuration files understandable in a more intelligent sense, you need to either restrict the tags you use to your own configuration language, or you need to provide metadata of some sort.
Why is this intelligence necessary? Well there are all sorts of dependencies and relationships in configuration files. You might want a GUI to let you know if you change something that may break another setting, and so on. Plus ideally you would only allow legal values to be set. Data typing could be done with W3C XML Schema Definition Language, or RELAX NG schemas.
Which brings me to RDF, which I think would be better suited to this task than XML alone. If you use RDF (see http://www.w3.org/RDF/ ) you make it much easier to have a self-describing format that tools can do more intelligent things with than raw XML. While I don't think RDF, DAML+OIL, et al is enough to create a Semantic Web as Tim Berners-Lee is hoping, it _is_ a step in a higher-level direction that will support more intelligence in processing data.
Mozilla already uses RDF for various configuration files and I'm sure there are other applications that do too. Mozilla has a whole bunch of stuff about their RDF here.
XML is just a tree of "stuff" in human-readable format. RDF lets you set up properties and relationships in the data in a standardized way. I don't have a brilliant example to prove this to skeptics, but really it is a better way to represent a lot of types of data you want to be able to query. There are many knowledge bases, expert systems and other query engines already out there using RDF and even higher-level languages like DAML+OIL.
-Kevin
Yes, obviously, but I've never had much of an issue with it. Have you? That seems like more of a purist argument to me. You can always subclass your own collections for that. Sure it would be good and more convenient, and I'm not disagreeing that compile-time safety should be there, but an invalid Java cast will throw a ClassCastException. It's not like casting a C pointer where you will probably segfault.
My issue is just that generics only address part of the issue. Casting and using wrapper classes like Integer is slow. Once you have fixed the class types at compile time via generics, why must you take the cast hit at runtime? It's a hack. If you build your own collections for specific types, you have compile time type safety -and- performance.
-KevinThe 1.5 Java generics are merely syntactic sugar. Since the casts still occur, there is no performance benefit, only cleaner source code. There is no way to parameterize primitive types like int.
I do not consider the proposed generics to be adequate. You are still better off, performance wise, generating your own custom collections for specific types. This is what GNU trove does.
-Kevin
And probablePrime() was there before, they just changed it from private to public.
-Kevin
"infrared line-of-sight infrared lasers" All products are approved by our Department of Redundancy Department. -Kevin
Yes, definitely. You can even buy a low end v880 for 30k. I was teasing a bit. We still have 220s, 250s and 420s and 450s that are more reasonably priced boxes, though I personally don't like the 2xx machines. The bigger machines are used for applications where memory and/or processing requirements are really high.
We'll probably be getting more 880s though because they are pretty expandable and hold a lot of memory. They go up to 8 processors / 32 GB.
These Suns, while not the fastest in town (see IBM Power4), are a proven 64 bit architecture that has been around and doing real work longer than the Itanium hype. It bugs me to see so much attention given to the Intel machines. I understand the desire for good commodity machines, but these things are going to be pricey anyway. And I could give a rip about running Windows on servers.
-Kevin
Heh. Maybe if by "server" you mean high-end Windows workstation. A midrange Sun server like a sunfire 4800 is around $350k list, say $300k. And that's just a test machine where I work - the production stuff runs on a combination of 4500s and 6500s, soon 4800s/6800s. 6500s are over a million IIRC.
But anyway, your point is still right on, and even more valid with datacenter-class servers, disk arrays, and so on. Paying $2k for the processor is nothing.
-Kevin
When I buy a book, I don't have to call the publisher when I get it to have them tell me a combination for a lock so I can open and read it. Likewise I didn't have to call Charmin to tell them that I am wiping my butt with their toilet tissue and I am, in fact, the original owner.
I don't want time-limited registration or regular fees to use software. This is the path online registration is going towards. It's all about the benjamins, maintaining an ongoing revenue stream, ensuring that software is "legitimate" while inconveniencing people who aren't pirates.
I know people are going to counter that the companies have a right to do this, blah blah blah. Well, frankly, companies have too many damned "rights" already and people have too few.
-Kevin
-Kevin
I haven't noticed any decrease in my ability to attract beautiful buxom blondes with my beverage choice or to buy the toys and clothes that will make my children love me. Okay, I don't have any blonde friends or children, but I didn't before either...
-Kevin
I'd like it if the Slashdot editors at least
spellchecked the submissions. I personally have a
hard time reading some of them. I don't recall
Slashdot editors ever doing much editing though.
-Kevin
You probably meant "great arbiter", not "great arbitrator". I guess it means the same thing, but it doesn't sound right.
Carry on.
-Kevin
>Why can't people that lost their domain names just fight their own battles?
United we stand, divided we fall?
-Kevin
Ahh. Thank you for the correction about PDF allowing metadata! That's good news.
-Kevin
I enjoyed Douglas Adams when I was young, but really this "42" thing was totally beaten to death a long time ago.
Get a new joke or something, please. You might even want to consider creating your own.
-Kevin
Exactly - go to your nearest McDonald's and destroy all the Happy Meal toys ASAP.
-Kevin
-Kevin
I don't think you know what you're talking about! I'm not an expert by any stretch of the imagination, but I think there a few things to consider. My understanding is that it's "Adobe PDF" and it's a de facto published "standard" controlled by Adobe. PDF is a derivative of PostScript Level 2. It is most definitely proprietary even though the format specification is available. Usually when people say "open standard", they mean that it is a "de jure" standard controlled by a recognized standards body like ISO, and Adobe Systems is a single interest, not a standards body. Another usage of "open standard" with respect to Adobe PDF refers to the fact that it's published and royalty-free. If Microsoft publishes the Word document format, it is still a proprietary format.
The problem with proprietary formats like PDF is that a company who wants to influence the standard cannot join the controlling standards body. So basically if you don't like the direction Adobe Systems is taking with their format, you're screwed unless you have clout with the company. If you're concerned with archiving information for a long period of time or choosing an interoperable format, the proprietary nature of PDF is discouraging.
Don't get me wrong, I like using the PDF format and have produced some nice documents using pdflatex, ebnf2ps, and other free PostScript tools. I just think it's important to understand the limitations of PDF which are primarily that it is 1) a publishing format more than an editing format and 2) Adobe controls it. At work, for example, documents are stored and passed through an editing and publishing workflow as XML, archived as XML, and only rendered to PDF on demand at the end.
I hate to ramble on, but there seems to be a lot of misunderstanding on this topic. Some other people have made the analogy between the JPEG graphics format and a format with layer information like Photoshop's proprietary format. PDF is not designed to carry the types of metadata you might want in a document workflow as well as XML (or SGML), just like JPEG only represents the final rendered and flattened ("published") image from what may have been a multilayer graphic in the editing process. In other words, PDF is not a universal document format when you are concerned with editting or automation which relies on metadata that is not part of the document displayed to a user.
-Kevin