If M$ losses the Israeli government as a client, the problem to them will not be that other big clients will immidiately follow, since at first those clients will have no incentive to follow suite.
The problem will be that, once it chooses OSS, the Israeli government will then give a large push to the translation effort of OSS to Hebrew and to the support of bidi writing. _This_ will enable other Israeli clients to finally move to OSS and will cost M$ a lot in Israel...
Or, if they prefer, they can call the helldesk... All submissions are routed via the helldesk anyway,...
Ah yes, the well-known "helldesk" method. That's where the support department has a cute little sign that says "All hope abandon, ye who enter here", and service requests must be submitted on 100 page forms which make IRS forms look simple... Good method to solve those pesky support requests:-)
Q.: What's the difference between God and Larry Ellison?
A: God doesn't think he's Larry Ellison
Lets face it- Allison likes to needle MS and make outrageous claim. He can afford to, since he is one of the richest men on Earth.
But before we all stand and cheer "MS is dead! Long live Linux!", let's remember that Apache is one of very few open-source projects which can compete with MS products in terms of market share. And you can bet your pants that in any of those areas, including web servers, MS is doing all it can to reverse that situation.
So don't applaud Ellison's high words- they may do your ego good, but what the open-source world needs is better software, better marketing and less fragmentation. We are still a long long way from beating MS, so don't rest on your laurels just yet...
"I, Robot" is as much a philosophical discussion as it is a Sci-Fi book.
I doubt Holywood will do it justice.
With Will Smith starring, the movie will probably turn out to be a comedy-action flick, and will not do justice to the original.
There is a way to protect it from radiation though
Actualy, all solid state memory experiences errors due to cosmic ray particles, against which you CAN'T shield- eventually, some of these high-energy suckers will get through- and the problem gets worse the higher you go.
The chance for a given memory to fail due to this reason is called MTBF- Mean Time between Failures (actually, there's a broader definition, but I'm using the one related specifically to memory).
In addition, the more memory you have, the more errors you will have for the same MTBF- for example, if the MTBF is 1000 years for a single MB of your ultra-shielded memory. For 1000 MB, that means almost certain failure once a year! and you are talking about MUCH larger memory sizes!!
To conclude- in space, no one can hear you scream...;-)
To Probe further: Cosmic Rays An article called "Can Hardware Be Trusted"
Despite everything I said above, there has been research on fault-tolerance in space, which might help you. You can look at the homepage of the Stanford REE project for more details
You might also be interested in these slides (PDF document) of a research project called Fault-Tolerant Computing for Radiation Environments.
Gnashes his teeth and tears his hear out...
Aaarrrggghhhh, only 3 months after I bought my latest and greatest GC, yet another one comes out which is better. I'm becoming obsolete... Sinking into oblivion... Nnnnnnnoooooo......! ;-)
1. According to your bio, you like science fiction. How much did sci-fi books/movies influence your career choices? Which particular book/movie did you like the most / had the most influence on you?
2. For a 'net link between here and Mars to exist, we would first need some kind of human presence there. How soon do you see this happening? As far as I know from popular press, we are still MANY MANY years away from such a goal. Do you have some inside info that we don't?;-)
Why, it even had MSNBC talking about Lindows 2.0 as "AOL's new Netscape OS."
So this wasn't just a case of Lindows stretching the truth- it was also a case of bad reporting by MSNBC, without whom the "AOL-Lindows" link would never have been brought up (or at least, it would not have been as hyped as it was).
But what if it wasn't just "sloppy reporting"? You have to wonder- why would a site associated with MS hint at a non-existant connection between Lindows and AOL?
Even here, AMD rocks- did you read the part where they say: "The most recent AMD processors have better hardware rotate support than the most recent Intel ones...
Isn't there some more readable way to generate an IRC log?
Sure there is- just whip up a quick Perl script that HTMLzies it, including color coding and whatever. Even I could write such a script fairly quickly, and I'm not a very good Perl coder...:-)
Reading the posts so far, it seems that very few people understand the issues involved. An exception is a reply titled "Don't confuse DTV with HDTV", look it up above. Here are some more facts to set matters straight:
1. The FCC says that analog transmissions will shut down on 2007 only if 85 percent of the population will have DTV receivers.
2. Rather than replacing your TV set, you can use a Set Top Box that receives digital transmissions and converts them to either NTSC or AV signals.
3. You could use a DVD to do the same job.
In addition, I believe that by 2007 DTV prices will drastically go down- even today, you can get a large DTV screen for $1600.
So don't panic, things are not as bad as you think;)
To read more, check out:
http://www.oren.com/knowledge.html
Quote from the first site given:
"The wings make actually look small for the mass of the dragon, but all dragons have an innate magic ability to help them fly. This magic helps keep dragons from straining themselves during long flights".
Yep, I can just see the scientists now, looking desperatly for that "magical flight" gene:-)
A lot of posts have noted that the article doesn't actually give benchmarks, and for various reasons the Itanium-2 may not perform as well as claimed. But consider if it does...
Most scientific heavy-duty work, such as EDA (chip design, etc.) is done on Sun and HP stations running their brand of Unix. Now, if an Intel processor based station starts to perform better than a comparable Sun station, at a much lower price, PLUS you run Linux instead of SunOS or HP-UX, a solution that costs a fraction of a price, and you get the same or better performance- well, you now have a VERY good reason for companies to start using Linux based workstations.
So cheer Intel and AMD on- because it's good for Linux!:-)
To appreciate the nice pictures taken by Cassini, check out its website gallery. I especially liked the artwork section. While nor real pictures, they are still very nice...:-)
For those of you who have actually read the article, note that it talks about two main issues- the problems with scaling CMOS below 10nm, and the rising costs of masks.
But even the article repeatedly says that the mask cost issue is a problem for the little guys, not the large ones like Intel. They can and will cheerfully swallow $600k respin costs, and more, to tapeout a successful new processor. So this aspect won't hurt processor development at all.
As for the CMOS scaling issue, the processor companies- i.e. Intel and AMD, have the pockets AND the incentive to find work-arounds. I promise you all that processors will continue to advance well beyond the year 2012. It may not be CMOS, and it may not be pretty:-), but it will work.
So for all of you who posted asking "what will we do when processors no longer advance", let me set your mind at ease- THAT won't happen for a long while yet.
Finally, while the subject of my post is "the end of processor advancement", I'll say a few words regarding other types of chips. I work as a hardware engineer for an ASIC house, and we produce at TSMC using the 0.18u process. The point is, that for our chips there is NO incentive to go to 0.13u or below. Nor will there be a reason for quite a while. The same is more or less true for MANY MANY other ASIC companies. So while the cutting edge- processors, Flash and graphic-chips companies will probably need to switch from CMOS to some other technology around 2012, that will in no way spell the end of CMOS, not for a VERY large segment of the ASICs market, and not for a VERY long time.
Commercial availability of the chips is expected within three years...
So in other words, this is not something you're going to be seeing anytime soon. And by the time it is ready as a product, who knows what kind of memory/HD technology we'll be using, or what the price of these chips will be compared to the mainstream stuff...
I understand that the component part of this project adds a lot, and agree with previous posts (like the first post) that this is an important advance.
However, I fail to see the motivation for KVim as a standalone app. What would I, a user, benefit from using this, as opposed to, say, using gvim? Does gvim not run well under DKE?
This humble user greatfully awaits your awesome input...:-)
While you are correct that the Pauli's EP holds only for fermions, this has no bearing on the original question, and your conclusion is false.
A neutron star is NOT a condensate, the atoms comprising it DO NOT share energy states, thus there is no way the E.P. affects them- the E.P. only talks about particles sharing energy states, for example electrons trapped in an energy well, etc.
What holds the neutron star from further collapsing is a "force cancellation"- the gravitational inward force is counteracted by another force. I admit I don't know which, but I tend to think of it like trying to squeeze marbles together- you just CAN'T!
Slashdot Mirror
If M$ losses the Israeli government as a client, the problem to them will not be that other big clients will immidiately follow, since at first those clients will have no incentive to follow suite.
The problem will be that, once it chooses OSS, the Israeli government will then give a large push to the translation effort of OSS to Hebrew and to the support of bidi writing. _This_ will enable other Israeli clients to finally move to OSS and will cost M$ a lot in Israel...
Or, if they prefer, they can call the helldesk... All submissions are routed via the helldesk anyway, ...
:-)
Ah yes, the well-known "helldesk" method. That's where the support department has a cute little sign that says "All hope abandon, ye who enter here", and service requests must be submitted on 100 page forms which make IRS forms look simple... Good method to solve those pesky support requests
Penguin Beer- Quite possibly the Best Beer in the World! ;-)
Q.: What's the difference between God and Larry Ellison?
A: God doesn't think he's Larry Ellison
Lets face it- Allison likes to needle MS and make outrageous claim. He can afford to, since he is one of the richest men on Earth. But before we all stand and cheer "MS is dead! Long live Linux!", let's remember that Apache is one of very few open-source projects which can compete with MS products in terms of market share. And you can bet your pants that in any of those areas, including web servers, MS is doing all it can to reverse that situation.
So don't applaud Ellison's high words- they may do your ego good, but what the open-source world needs is better software, better marketing and less fragmentation. We are still a long long way from beating MS, so don't rest on your laurels just yet...
Just my 2 cents worth...
Try setting the background to black and the text to a low intensity shade of white...
/. doesn't do the same for the site itself- it would help in reading the site, no?
I wonder why
Imagine, this is on "FASTS"'s top ten issues for 2003. I guess one of the other issues is: what to do when you have too much spare time.
:-)
The answer, obvioiusly, is "go read Slashdot and post funny comments..."
"I, Robot" is as much a philosophical discussion as it is a Sci-Fi book.
I doubt Holywood will do it justice.
With Will Smith starring, the movie will probably turn out to be a comedy-action flick, and will not do justice to the original.
Oh, well, we'll see...
As nice as seeing the movie is, if you still haven't, read the book! It's worth it :-)
:-)
Signed: an old-fashioned geek
There is a way to protect it from radiation though
;-)
:-)
Actualy, all solid state memory experiences errors due to cosmic ray particles, against which you CAN'T shield- eventually, some of these high-energy suckers will get through- and the problem gets worse the higher you go.
The chance for a given memory to fail due to this reason is called MTBF- Mean Time between Failures (actually, there's a broader definition, but I'm using the one related specifically to memory).
In addition, the more memory you have, the more errors you will have for the same MTBF- for example, if the MTBF is 1000 years for a single MB of your ultra-shielded memory. For 1000 MB, that means almost certain failure once a year! and you are talking about MUCH larger memory sizes!!
To conclude- in space, no one can hear you scream...
To Probe further:
Cosmic Rays
An article called "Can Hardware Be Trusted"
Despite everything I said above, there has been research on fault-tolerance in space, which might help you. You can look at the homepage of the Stanford REE project for more details
You might also be interested in these slides (PDF document) of a research project called Fault-Tolerant Computing for Radiation Environments.
Hope this helps
Astromage
Gnashes his teeth and tears his hear out...
;-)
Aaarrrggghhhh, only 3 months after I bought my latest and greatest GC, yet another one comes out which is better. I'm becoming obsolete... Sinking into oblivion... Nnnnnnnoooooo......!
Dr. Cerf,
;-)
1. According to your bio, you like science fiction. How much did sci-fi books/movies influence your career choices? Which particular book/movie did you like the most / had the most influence on you?
2. For a 'net link between here and Mars to exist, we would first need some kind of human presence there. How soon do you see this happening? As far as I know from popular press, we are still MANY MANY years away from such a goal. Do you have some inside info that we don't?
Why, it even had MSNBC talking about Lindows 2.0 as "AOL's new Netscape OS."
;-)
So this wasn't just a case of Lindows stretching the truth- it was also a case of bad reporting by MSNBC, without whom the "AOL-Lindows" link would never have been brought up (or at least, it would not have been as hyped as it was).
But what if it wasn't just "sloppy reporting"? You have to wonder- why would a site associated with MS hint at a non-existant connection between Lindows and AOL?
I smell a conspiracy here...
Even here, AMD rocks- did you read the part where they say: "The most recent AMD processors have better hardware rotate support than the most recent Intel ones...
:-)
I just LOVE my AMD...
Isn't there some more readable way to generate an IRC log?
Sure there is- just whip up a quick Perl script that HTMLzies it, including color coding and whatever. Even I could write such a script fairly quickly, and I'm not a very good Perl coder...
Reading the posts so far, it seems that very few people understand the issues involved. An exception is a reply titled "Don't confuse DTV with HDTV", look it up above. Here are some more facts to set matters straight:
;)
:-)
1. The FCC says that analog transmissions will shut down on 2007 only if 85 percent of the population will have DTV receivers.
2. Rather than replacing your TV set, you can use a Set Top Box that receives digital transmissions and converts them to either NTSC or AV signals.
3. You could use a DVD to do the same job.
In addition, I believe that by 2007 DTV prices will drastically go down- even today, you can get a large DTV screen for $1600.
So don't panic, things are not as bad as you think
To read more, check out: http://www.oren.com/knowledge.html
Hope this helps
Astromage
"The wings make actually look small for the mass of the dragon, but all dragons have an innate magic ability to help them fly. This magic helps keep dragons from straining themselves during long flights".
Yep, I can just see the scientists now, looking desperatly for that "magical flight" gene :-)
Most scientific heavy-duty work, such as EDA (chip design, etc.) is done on Sun and HP stations running their brand of Unix. Now, if an Intel processor based station starts to perform better than a comparable Sun station, at a much lower price, PLUS you run Linux instead of SunOS or HP-UX, a solution that costs a fraction of a price, and you get the same or better performance- well, you now have a VERY good reason for companies to start using Linux based workstations.
So cheer Intel and AMD on- because it's good for Linux! :-)
That is, if you are interested in the dry, technical details... ;-)
To appreciate the nice pictures taken by Cassini, check out its website gallery. I especially liked the artwork section. While nor real pictures, they are still very nice... :-)
Heh, heh... ;-)
But even the article repeatedly says that the mask cost issue is a problem for the little guys, not the large ones like Intel. They can and will cheerfully swallow $600k respin costs, and more, to tapeout a successful new processor. So this aspect won't hurt processor development at all.
As for the CMOS scaling issue, the processor companies- i.e. Intel and AMD, have the pockets AND the incentive to find work-arounds. I promise you all that processors will continue to advance well beyond the year 2012. It may not be CMOS, and it may not be pretty :-), but it will work.
So for all of you who posted asking "what will we do when processors no longer advance", let me set your mind at ease- THAT won't happen for a long while yet.
Finally, while the subject of my post is "the end of processor advancement", I'll say a few words regarding other types of chips. I work as a hardware engineer for an ASIC house, and we produce at TSMC using the 0.18u process. The point is, that for our chips there is NO incentive to go to 0.13u or below. Nor will there be a reason for quite a while. The same is more or less true for MANY MANY other ASIC companies. So while the cutting edge- processors, Flash and graphic-chips companies will probably need to switch from CMOS to some other technology around 2012, that will in no way spell the end of CMOS, not for a VERY large segment of the ASICs market, and not for a VERY long time.
So in other words, this is not something you're going to be seeing anytime soon. And by the time it is ready as a product, who knows what kind of memory/HD technology we'll be using, or what the price of these chips will be compared to the mainstream stuff...
However, I fail to see the motivation for KVim as a standalone app. What would I, a user, benefit from using this, as opposed to, say, using gvim? Does gvim not run well under DKE?
This humble user greatfully awaits your awesome input... :-)
Definitly worth waiting for the prices to come down... :-)
A neutron star is NOT a condensate, the atoms comprising it DO NOT share energy states, thus there is no way the E.P. affects them- the E.P. only talks about particles sharing energy states, for example electrons trapped in an energy well, etc.
What holds the neutron star from further collapsing is a "force cancellation"- the gravitational inward force is counteracted by another force. I admit I don't know which, but I tend to think of it like trying to squeeze marbles together- you just CAN'T!
Hope this helps :-)