So, if you used an angel instead, would they lynch you too for assocaiting something wholesome and all-American with some godless-pinko-commie-un-American-terrorist-lefty-o pen-source stuff?
I'll tell you why you're (inadvertantly) scaremongering. You see, the term critical is used sensationally and wrongly by just about every anti-nuclear zealot and even serious journalist on the planet. And when you watch your chosen industry battered and eroded from all angles, mainly by the scared and ignorant, you get very upset. I have a large chip on my shoulder as you may have guessed. Luckily my interest and experience in computers got me a nice job with a future, but the whole nuclear industry in the western world is in decline because it's not "politically correct" to advocate nulcear energy. As another poster said, it's career suicide for any politician to publically support nuclear power. This needs to change if we are to prosper. I'm writing a book about it.
Well in my experience, it wouldn't recognise my network card, despite being supported (working fine in Slackware) and listed in their options. So then I tried it without a network card, but it got stuck in some loop, and kept asking me for a network card, despite the fact that I wanted to install from CD. I'm glad I'm an experienced Linux user (since '95) because if I was a Windows user and some zealot had told me to install Debian, I'd have gone straight back to Windoze and would have told everyone I could what a steaming pile of excrement Linux is based on this experience. And yet there are people here who can't understand why Windows people hate Linux zealots.
Contrast this to KNOPPIX. It is a delight. And it's based on Debian.
I tried Debian last year and got as far as the installer at which point it would let me proceed no further, despite my best efforts, patience, reading of effing manuals and trying different versions. This further confirmed my commitment to Slackware. If they spent time fixing their installer, they wouldn't need to write a tool to assimilate other boxes.
Here's where education is important. Do you understand what "going critical" is? Very specifically, it's a build up of heat from a "melt-down". (A "melt-down" being when a nuclear reaction gets out of control and produces excessive amounts of heat.)
As a qualified Reactor Physics Engineer with nearly 5 years experience in an operational nuclear power plant I must correct your ignorant trolling and scaremongering.
You have no clue what critical means. A critical reactor is one in which there is a steady, sustained chain reaction of constant power. In other words, the neutron flux is constant: neither increasing or decreasing. Reactors are in this state normally during operation.
sub-critical refers to a reactor in which the neutron flux is decreasing, i.e. power is being reduced.
super-critical is the opposite, i.e. when power is increasing. The neutron flux is increasing.
prompt-critical is what happened at Chernobyl. This is when the reactivity of the reactor becomes too great suchg that the effect of delayed neutrons in the chain reaction is no longer dominating, and the neutron flux (and hence power) increases exponentially on a time scale of miliseconds.
The term critical comes from Enrico Fermi's first public demonstration of his pile, the first man-made nuclear reactor. During his demonstration, when he got to a stage when there was a self-sustaining fission chain reaction with constant neutron flux he said, "Gentlement, we have reached a critical point."
That's all there is to it. There's nothing scary or dangerous about a critical reactor, contrary to what the mad "environmentalists" and ignorant journalists would have us believe.
To make what in my view is a very clever analogy (because I thought of it), it's like turntables - they won't ever stop being produced altogether because of their demand in artistic (i.e. DJ) circles.
Purely mechanical analogue cameras fulfil a very specific engineering niche. In the nuclear industry, digital electronics are completely useless in a neutron flux, therefore reactor internal inspections have to be performed using analogue cameras with film. Even that's not immune, and the neutrons cause fogging of the film if exposed for too long or if used too soon after shutdown. An interesting piece of useless information is that if you do put a digital camera into a reactor, it becomes instantly useless, but if you leave it for 18 months, the neutron damage is reversed by decay and the camera is once again useable. This is also why robots in nuclear reactors must have their digital electronic external to the vessel and outside the shielding.
If I were Ritz Camera (a popular one-hour photo chain the northeastern US), I might be getting rather scared.
Oh, I don't know. If I had a digital camera and was away from the office and needed pictures printing, I'd like to be able to walk into a shop and for a small fee have them printed promptly on good quality paper.
A decayed and rotten Elvis was seen attempting to enter the same conference without a pass. When questioned by security staff, the King was reportedy upset that such a "square" could become such a celebrity. "What is the world ocming to? Where are my fans?" He reportedly sobbed and he was led away by Australian police officers.
Slackware is 2.6.x ready, and 9.1 comes with it as an option.
We will know that it is time to use 2.6.x in anger when Patrick ships his distro with it as the default kernel. This is usually a sure sign that stability and maturity is upon us.
"Left-wing" and "right-wing" are relative terms. The "right wing" is the Establishment and the "left wing" is the anti-Establishment. Therefore in a conventional Western democracy, "right wing" refers to capitalism (and liberalism?) where that is the Establishment, and "left wing" refers to radical alternatives like Communism, Anarchism etc. In SOVIET RUSSIA, by contrast, the Establishment was the Communist Party, and therefore the "right wing" in that particular country. This is completely off-topic but it's something I've been dying to shout about in public for years.
does anyone here know what advances would be necessary to send probes & recover data about nearby star systems?
Would it be possible to use the sun for a gravitational assist to "slingshot" something at realativistic speeds, and out of the solar system, or would practical considerations (tidal forces, acceleration, heat) get in the way?
How about a huge solar sail? Would an RTG be any use for on-board electrical supply, or even a very small fission reactor using plutonium or enriched U, or even used as an ion drive?
Call me old-fashioned if you like, and maybe my geekiness is wearing off, but I just can't understand why a GIU file selector box makes font-page headlines. It's only a damned widget. It's hardly a great breakthrough in mathematics, fundamental physics or the search for extrterrestrial life. I can just see the day when ET is discovered, it'll be relegated to the Science section on slashdot while a piece about new GNOME themeability makes the front page. Foo to the lot of you.
And when it crashes, you'll have to reinstall it, thus deleting all those Digitally Restricted handbag ditties you paid for and weren't allowed to keep backups of. Call me cynical if you like...
I nearly forgot: HP is so desperate to ship itanic systems, that they have a 90-day free trial programme where you can have one on evaluation for free. I think intel's C compiler may be "free as in beer" under some circumstances. You could do your own tests of gcc vs. icc on itanic Linux. I hope you have good air conditioning and 3-phase electricity.:-)
Nevermind that Windows isn't even released for it Real computers don't run Windows.
10000 Opterons in an SMP?? OK, Red Storm isn't SMP, but Opteron has hardware to make it natively scale to 8 way. You can engineer your own glue logic (like intel does with the Xeon which only natively goes to 2 way) to make it scale beyond this. Once you get beyond a few thousand processors, you need a different kind of parallel architecture (regardless of CPU) like NUMA, cc:NUMA, COMA, some kind of low-latency clustering etc.
As for fanboy crap, we'll see.
Intel may come back strongly indeed, but at the cost of billions of dolars, the resigning of itanic to a very small niche (a few thousands of CPUs sold a year) and being forced to adopt their main competitor's (and hitherto underdog) architecture.
By "good enough" I mean that you probably get to within 10-20% of the best compilers available. Today, if you want to exploit the extra FP performance available through vectorisation (using SSE/SSE2/3DNow!) you must hand code that yourself in assembly language. Don't take my word for it. Do some tests yourself. Optimisation is something of a black art.
As for the gcc target specifics, I think you might have to google for some performance tests, look through the mailing lists and ask the developers directly.
gcc is not "good enough" on itanium as I said previously. Instead of being within 10-20% of the intel compiler, it is about 80-90% behind IIRC (it's been a while and intel likes to keep this quiet). Maybe there has been some serious work on gcc for itanium since then? I don't know. you'll have to ask the gcc people.
A lot has changed in gcc in the last few years and the code generator has been much improved on "traditional" architectures, so they say, but this does not apply to itanium because it is so different.
If you want to get an idea of what itanium assembly language looks like, look in the Linux kernel source (2.4.23) at arch/ia64/kernel/gate.S. This is the (platform-specific) code for going from user-land into kernel land. Notice the bundles of instructions followed by ";;". These are the instructions being scheduled to execute (explicityl of course) in parallel. The ";;" tells the assembler "I've no more useful work do to in this instruction bundle, please pad it out with No-Operations." This is itanic's Achille's Heel: The poor compiler (or coder) must schedule the instructions explicitly in these bundles to make full use of the execution units. If the vectoriser isn't good enough, or there insn't enough inherent parallelism in the instruction stream, execution units stay idle and the CPU operates at a fraction of its theoretical peak performance. If you had such a machine, you could disassemble the object code and look to see how well parallelised the code was. You could compare the output from gcc with icc (intel's compiler.)
I could go on, but you've probably fallen asleep by now...:-)
Slashdot Mirror
Aha! It is a joke! I am enlightened.
Proud owner of a Mensa membership card.
I know that in days of yore, MENSA used to support Nazi-style politics and "science", but are you some kind of white supremacist?
However, what you say may turn out to be quite an accurate prediction.
Just wondering.
I'm sure the church has that copyrighted or trademarked or something.
I'll tell you why you're (inadvertantly) scaremongering. You see, the term critical is used sensationally and wrongly by just about every anti-nuclear zealot and even serious journalist on the planet. And when you watch your chosen industry battered and eroded from all angles, mainly by the scared and ignorant, you get very upset. I have a large chip on my shoulder as you may have guessed. Luckily my interest and experience in computers got me a nice job with a future, but the whole nuclear industry in the western world is in decline because it's not "politically correct" to advocate nulcear energy. As another poster said, it's career suicide for any politician to publically support nuclear power. This needs to change if we are to prosper. I'm writing a book about it.
Contrast this to KNOPPIX. It is a delight. And it's based on Debian.
I tried Debian last year and got as far as the installer at which point it would let me proceed no further, despite my best efforts, patience, reading of effing manuals and trying different versions. This further confirmed my commitment to Slackware. If they spent time fixing their installer, they wouldn't need to write a tool to assimilate other boxes.
Thank you very much :-)
As a qualified Reactor Physics Engineer with nearly 5 years experience in an operational nuclear power plant I must correct your ignorant trolling and scaremongering.
You have no clue what critical means. A critical reactor is one in which there is a steady, sustained chain reaction of constant power. In other words, the neutron flux is constant: neither increasing or decreasing. Reactors are in this state normally during operation.
sub-critical refers to a reactor in which the neutron flux is decreasing, i.e. power is being reduced.
super-critical is the opposite, i.e. when power is increasing. The neutron flux is increasing.
prompt-critical is what happened at Chernobyl. This is when the reactivity of the reactor becomes too great suchg that the effect of delayed neutrons in the chain reaction is no longer dominating, and the neutron flux (and hence power) increases exponentially on a time scale of miliseconds.
The term critical comes from Enrico Fermi's first public demonstration of his pile, the first man-made nuclear reactor. During his demonstration, when he got to a stage when there was a self-sustaining fission chain reaction with constant neutron flux he said, "Gentlement, we have reached a critical point."
That's all there is to it. There's nothing scary or dangerous about a critical reactor, contrary to what the mad "environmentalists" and ignorant journalists would have us believe.
Purely mechanical analogue cameras fulfil a very specific engineering niche. In the nuclear industry, digital electronics are completely useless in a neutron flux, therefore reactor internal inspections have to be performed using analogue cameras with film. Even that's not immune, and the neutrons cause fogging of the film if exposed for too long or if used too soon after shutdown. An interesting piece of useless information is that if you do put a digital camera into a reactor, it becomes instantly useless, but if you leave it for 18 months, the neutron damage is reversed by decay and the camera is once again useable. This is also why robots in nuclear reactors must have their digital electronic external to the vessel and outside the shielding.
If I were Ritz Camera (a popular one-hour photo chain the northeastern US), I might be getting rather scared.
Oh, I don't know. If I had a digital camera and was away from the office and needed pictures printing, I'd like to be able to walk into a shop and for a small fee have them printed promptly on good quality paper.
A decayed and rotten Elvis was seen attempting to enter the same conference without a pass. When questioned by security staff, the King was reportedy upset that such a "square" could become such a celebrity. "What is the world ocming to? Where are my fans?" He reportedly sobbed and he was led away by Australian police officers.
We will know that it is time to use 2.6.x in anger when Patrick ships his distro with it as the default kernel. This is usually a sure sign that stability and maturity is upon us.
Dell is coming.
Yipee! Once again slashdot fulfils it's purpose: an anonymous ranting ground for the frustrated and not necessarily well informed :-)
Yes, and not just any old part of the body: he used her armpit. They had very smelly armipts in those days :-( It must have been a labour of love.
"Left-wing" and "right-wing" are relative terms. The "right wing" is the Establishment and the "left wing" is the anti-Establishment. Therefore in a conventional Western democracy, "right wing" refers to capitalism (and liberalism?) where that is the Establishment, and "left wing" refers to radical alternatives like Communism, Anarchism etc. In SOVIET RUSSIA, by contrast, the Establishment was the Communist Party, and therefore the "right wing" in that particular country. This is completely off-topic but it's something I've been dying to shout about in public for years.
Why's that? Will the speed of light be increasing in the future? :-)
Would it be possible to use the sun for a gravitational assist to "slingshot" something at realativistic speeds, and out of the solar system, or would practical considerations (tidal forces, acceleration, heat) get in the way?
How about a huge solar sail? Would an RTG be any use for on-board electrical supply, or even a very small fission reactor using plutonium or enriched U, or even used as an ion drive?
So it is, and it's not all that fast either. Then again, you shouldn't believe all that you read on the Intarweb.
Call me old-fashioned if you like, and maybe my geekiness is wearing off, but I just can't understand why a GIU file selector box makes font-page headlines. It's only a damned widget. It's hardly a great breakthrough in mathematics, fundamental physics or the search for extrterrestrial life. I can just see the day when ET is discovered, it'll be relegated to the Science section on slashdot while a piece about new GNOME themeability makes the front page. Foo to the lot of you.
And when it crashes, you'll have to reinstall it, thus deleting all those Digitally Restricted handbag ditties you paid for and weren't allowed to keep backups of. Call me cynical if you like...
I nearly forgot: HP is so desperate to ship itanic systems, that they have a 90-day free trial programme where you can have one on evaluation for free. I think intel's C compiler may be "free as in beer" under some circumstances. You could do your own tests of gcc vs. icc on itanic Linux. I hope you have good air conditioning and 3-phase electricity. :-)
Real computers don't run Windows.
10000 Opterons in an SMP?? OK, Red Storm isn't SMP, but Opteron has hardware to make it natively scale to 8 way. You can engineer your own glue logic (like intel does with the Xeon which only natively goes to 2 way) to make it scale beyond this. Once you get beyond a few thousand processors, you need a different kind of parallel architecture (regardless of CPU) like NUMA, cc:NUMA, COMA, some kind of low-latency clustering etc.
As for fanboy crap, we'll see.
Intel may come back strongly indeed, but at the cost of billions of dolars, the resigning of itanic to a very small niche (a few thousands of CPUs sold a year) and being forced to adopt their main competitor's (and hitherto underdog) architecture.
As for the gcc target specifics, I think you might have to google for some performance tests, look through the mailing lists and ask the developers directly.
gcc is not "good enough" on itanium as I said previously. Instead of being within 10-20% of the intel compiler, it is about 80-90% behind IIRC (it's been a while and intel likes to keep this quiet). Maybe there has been some serious work on gcc for itanium since then? I don't know. you'll have to ask the gcc people.
A lot has changed in gcc in the last few years and the code generator has been much improved on "traditional" architectures, so they say, but this does not apply to itanium because it is so different.
If you want to get an idea of what itanium assembly language looks like, look in the Linux kernel source (2.4.23) at arch/ia64/kernel/gate.S. This is the (platform-specific) code for going from user-land into kernel land. Notice the bundles of instructions followed by ";;". These are the instructions being scheduled to execute (explicityl of course) in parallel. The ";;" tells the assembler "I've no more useful work do to in this instruction bundle, please pad it out with No-Operations." This is itanic's Achille's Heel: The poor compiler (or coder) must schedule the instructions explicitly in these bundles to make full use of the execution units. If the vectoriser isn't good enough, or there insn't enough inherent parallelism in the instruction stream, execution units stay idle and the CPU operates at a fraction of its theoretical peak performance. If you had such a machine, you could disassemble the object code and look to see how well parallelised the code was. You could compare the output from gcc with icc (intel's compiler.)
I could go on, but you've probably fallen asleep by now... :-)