hey - if you don't mind me asking: what kind of music do you actually listen to / enjoy, anyway?
Old git music.
Megadeth, Slayer, Voivod, Primus, Les Claypool, REM, Smashing Pumpkins/Zwan, Mastodon, Budgie, Dillinger Escape Plan, Parliament, Black Sabbath (Ozzy era), Ozzy (Randy era), Tori Amos, Yes, Pink Floyd, Police, B-52s, Metallica (pre-Black album), Testament, Bach, Alice in Chains... I have dipped my toe into the wonderful world of Bohlen-Pierce music. This dude called Charles Carpenter did a couple of records called Splat and Frog a la Peche.
Mrs Turgid listens to some other stuff that I can't stand, but most of our tastes share a lot in common. She likes (such dreadful nonsense as) the Cranberries, Muse and New Order. New Order are OK live (saw them in 2001) but their recorded stuff is appalling. The production is terrible.
When you're as old, grumpy and intransigent as me, I assure you, if it ain't Voivod, Megadeth or Slayer, it's techno handbag disco music by definition.
FWIW, I'm still coding in C using vi. No new-fangled IDEs or emacs here!!! And don't get me started on debuggers...
I remember when techno came out and John Peel used to play it all night long on his hitherto good radio show. All of the pieces sounded the same. They all started off with a groovy kind of bass and drum riff and after a few seconds they all had a bit that sounded like a vehicle going passed playing a theme and then there would be a dramatic pause followed by some high-pitched detached female warbling to some kind of crescendo. Then the beat would resume etc.
All of the "songs" were exactly the same format and structure, except the bass riff and funny noises were slightly different.
In the '90s when I was a bright young, single thing, my friends and I often ended up in clubs late at night after the pubs shut. This was exactly the sort of music they played all night long... God, it was awful, but after 6 pints and a few shots of spirits, it was almost ignorable.
"Handbag music" is what Essex girls in white high-heels, with false fingernails and hair extensions dance around their handbags to in Club Zeus in Chelmsford on Friday and Saturday nights.
I hate techno handbag disco music like this, but you've got to give credit where credit's due. This is an excellent idea to highlight these very topical issues. Well done young man.
I might even go out and buy the box of artwork and blank CD-R specifically to support this protest.
Sell, take the money. It's a fantastic opportunity financially and career-wise, since it must look good having your own company bought out by Megacorp.
Leave Megacorp at the earliest opportunity and start another company, or retire if the money you made from the sale to Megacorp was enough:-)
Idealism is a great thing to have, but remember that it's part of you, not your company. You can take it with you wherever you go. You can't guarantee that your company will be here next year let alone in 20 the way business works.
I used to work for Sun too, just about the time they acquired Niagara from Afara (IIRC). Tremblay left Sun to found a startup which designed multi-core, multi-threaded CPUs, and they came up with Niagara, which was basically 8 very simple UltraSPARC cores on a chip, each core capable of holding 4 thread contexts which could be switched in and out to hide memory latency.
This is how things used to work at Sun. Every so often, very clever people with "lunatic fringe" ideas would leave to found startups with VC money to realise the ideas, and Sun would buy them back when it looked like it might work.
Sun's in-house CPU design is pathetic, which is why UltraSPARC started to lose out to x86 in the late '90s. Given the size of AMD's team and their complete lack of funds compared to Sun, Sun should have had much better CPUs than Opteron/AMD64, but look what happened. Fujitsu did much better with SPARC64.
Buying MySQl was a bone-headed decision which finally killed Sun. They tried to buy a name for over $1bn and got nothing. As always happens with these take-overs, the lead developers left. Remember the Cobalt purchase? What about StorageTek? Are any of them left?
There were many opportunities Sun should have taken but didn't. For example, they should have bought AMD right when Opteron came out (but Not Invented Here! - and it took some pretty loud shouting to get the Solaris prima-donnas to get Solaris on Opteron) and given AMD the task of developing UltraSPARC along side Opteron. Heck, some of us wondered, if a 64-bit x86 can be made to go so fast, what would it be like if the x86-translation layer was replaced with a SPARC-V9 translation layer? BIG HINT.
Now, calling GNOME the "Java Desktop System" was suicide. Potential customers were saying, "Why would I want a desktop written in Java?" Marketing PHBs, I hope you have learned a lesson!
Why did they ditch a bunch of the standard applets and rewrite less featured and slower ones in Java? I remember seeing a 1-pager proposing to write an MP3 player in Java for the JDS. Meanwhile we were shipping xmms on the Companion CD!
Java, Java, Java, Java, Java,..... Blah!!!!
PHBs, you may be interested in Java, but that was not Sun's core business, despite what you wanted to think, and all it did was alienate the millions of dedicated Unix people who used Solaris and Sun gear.
So I bought some Sun shares in the employee discount scheme. When the takeover stuff was announce, the shares almost went up enough that if I sold them next year when I don't have to pay any tax on them, I'll only have lost about 25% of my money.
I could have run that company better... Every year, buy some other companies with a few thousand employees, have a RIF and get a write-down against tax. Great strategy guys.
I was just talking to someone who works at GCHQ the other day. Their data storage requirements are so odd it's unreal.
What else did you expect from the British Government? I can guarantee that whatever it is they need, they'll end up buying second-hand stuff that's 10-15 years out of date for twice the price of new stuff that's 100 times as powerful.
If the price of fossil fuel keeps going up, there comes a point where nuclear becomes cheaper, even on very small scales such as these. They'd be crazy not to sell the fossil fuel to paying customers, especially the crazy ones like us Brits who are scared of nuclear power.
The ROM BIOS knows how to bootstrap directly from floppy. That's how MS-DOS used to work and the code is still there.
It is perfectly possible to replace a conventional BIOS with something like OpenBIOS (a Free re-implementation of the standard firmware in SPARC and PowerPC workstations) or Coreboot (formerly LinuxBIOS).
One of my previous projects was a storage appliance, running Linux, which had a custom motherboard with a Peniutm III 1000MHz and 2 250GB SATA disks.
The ROM (c.f. "BIOS" on a PeeCee) contained LinuxBIOS which loaded a Linux kernel directly off of/dev/hda, which happened to be an IDE flash disk on this system. This kernel lived in a region of un-partitioned space between the parition table and the start of the first partition.
They wanted to change the software so that the kernel would be on the first partition of the flash disk, so I found a Protected Mode boot loader called FILO and ported it to our system. It was broken with our LinuxBIOS. The stack segment was not being configured, so it was crashing when it "made the jump to light speed." But with some cunning inline assembly language, I found the bug and fixed it.
FILO didn't need VGA or any "text mode" display either. It could do IO over the serial port, which was ideal for our hardware, since it had no video at all (remember it was a storage appliance). Customers used the system via a web browser over the network.
So the Field Circus engineers had to use a terminal emulator on a laptop to configure the system (when up and running). I did a cool hack in inittab to add an option to run PPP over the serial port instead of the menu, so they could use the web admin interface from their laptops without plugging in to the customers' networks, which ofter was forbidden.
RISC workstations (UltraSPARC, PowerPC, etc) don't have "text mode" when they boot. They have a frame buffer i.e. bitmapped graphics. However, the firmware ("BIOS") knows how to speak serial, so everything can be done over a serial cable with a terminal. This is extremely useful sometimes.
I believe someone even wrote a GUI for OpenFirmware. OpenFirmware code is portable since it's a kind of FORTH and the bytecode interpreter is standard. That means you can run the same firmware code on an UltraSPARC, PowerPC or x86. Pretty cool?
Note that we still call the PeeCee's ROM "the BIOS" because it still holds code compatible with the original IBM PC and AT to provide Basic Input/Output Routines for use with MS-DOS. They provided and extra layer of abstraction between the hardware and MS-DOS, thus making it easier to change the hardware without changing too much of MS-DOS. These were very poorly-designed routines (non-reentrant for a start) which made it very difficult to write a portable multitasking OS for IBM PC, AT and clone hardware.
I've actually got the IBM manual with the ROM BIOS disassembly in it right here...
Intel actually tried to build a different leaner, instruction set. IA64, the market rejected it.
It wasn't lean at all. It it typical over-complicated intel junk. Just look at the implementations: itanic. It's big, hot, expensive, slow...
If you really want cheap small processors with no extra instruction sets, Intel does still make Celerons, I dare you to run Vista on one.
The Celerons have all the same instructions as the equivalent "core" processors, they just have less cache usually.
This Larabee thing doesn't sound much different to what AMD (ATi) and nVidia already have. A friend of mine has done some CUDA programming and, form what he says, it sounds just the same. Just like a vector supercomputer from 10 years ago.
I, for one, will be really unhappy if AMD goes down too. We'll be back to a stagnant processor monopoly. Over the years, I've used intel and AMD multiprocessor systems. AMD scale better and are better value for money.
I remember the early 90s when intel had no competition. You used to have to spend at least $500-equivalent to get a useful processor, and $2000 to get a reasonable one. Nowadays you can get all the horsepower you need for under $200.
I've got one in my shed wrapped up in thick polythene waiting for the day I have a huge house for my evil museum of non-conformist computers which is really a secret plot to take over the world.
It's only got two 333MHz processors and 128MB or RAM but it is dual boot with debian and Solaris 8 IIRC.
I got it from my previous employers. It was going in a skip and I asked nicely.
When I resurrect it, it will have NetBSD or something similar.
Damn, I guess IBM figured that out to. IBM will buy SUN and eliminate the SPARC T1 and T2 processors setting the country back another decade in technology.
Not to mention ROCK, the 16-core floating-point monster that is due out later this year. It will make POWER look like a ZX81, so IBM will have to kill it.
With Solaris on POWER, IBM will migrate people off of SPARC and cancel its development, just like the Alphacide committed by intel and HP.
Solaris will play second fiddle to AIX and Linux.
We will soon live in a world where intel, IBM and Microsoft are the only players left and technology is stagnant. This will be great for the suits and shareholders, and bad news for everyone else.
Slashdot Mirror
We can't - you shipped with symbols stripped.
I had to make it fit on that 360k floppy somehow.
Radio 1 plays it all day long. The rest of the UK aspires to be like the people in South East England.
hey - if you don't mind me asking: what kind of music do you actually listen to / enjoy, anyway?
Old git music.
Megadeth, Slayer, Voivod, Primus, Les Claypool, REM, Smashing Pumpkins/Zwan, Mastodon, Budgie, Dillinger Escape Plan, Parliament, Black Sabbath (Ozzy era), Ozzy (Randy era), Tori Amos, Yes, Pink Floyd, Police, B-52s, Metallica (pre-Black album), Testament, Bach, Alice in Chains... I have dipped my toe into the wonderful world of Bohlen-Pierce music. This dude called Charles Carpenter did a couple of records called Splat and Frog a la Peche.
Mrs Turgid listens to some other stuff that I can't stand, but most of our tastes share a lot in common. She likes (such dreadful nonsense as) the Cranberries, Muse and New Order. New Order are OK live (saw them in 2001) but their recorded stuff is appalling. The production is terrible.
When you're as old, grumpy and intransigent as me, I assure you, if it ain't Voivod, Megadeth or Slayer, it's techno handbag disco music by definition.
FWIW, I'm still coding in C using vi. No new-fangled IDEs or emacs here!!! And don't get me started on debuggers...
No, and I don't care :)
I remember when techno came out and John Peel used to play it all night long on his hitherto good radio show. All of the pieces sounded the same. They all started off with a groovy kind of bass and drum riff and after a few seconds they all had a bit that sounded like a vehicle going passed playing a theme and then there would be a dramatic pause followed by some high-pitched detached female warbling to some kind of crescendo. Then the beat would resume etc.
All of the "songs" were exactly the same format and structure, except the bass riff and funny noises were slightly different.
In the '90s when I was a bright young, single thing, my friends and I often ended up in clubs late at night after the pubs shut. This was exactly the sort of music they played all night long... God, it was awful, but after 6 pints and a few shots of spirits, it was almost ignorable.
Here in the UK we call a purse a "handbag" and a wallet a "purse" if owned by a lady vs. a man when it is still called a "wallet."
So think of it as "purse music."
"Handbag music" is what Essex girls in white high-heels, with false fingernails and hair extensions dance around their handbags to in Club Zeus in Chelmsford on Friday and Saturday nights.
I hate techno handbag disco music like this, but you've got to give credit where credit's due. This is an excellent idea to highlight these very topical issues. Well done young man.
I might even go out and buy the box of artwork and blank CD-R specifically to support this protest.
And what did Stevie Wonder get out of it?
Duh. Sharks can't live in space.
Sharks can live under water. There is no air under water. There is also no air in space. Therefore sharks can live in space.
...can romantic delusion be insightful, and challenging, rational argument be flamebait.
Sell, take the money. It's a fantastic opportunity financially and career-wise, since it must look good having your own company bought out by Megacorp.
Leave Megacorp at the earliest opportunity and start another company, or retire if the money you made from the sale to Megacorp was enough :-)
Idealism is a great thing to have, but remember that it's part of you, not your company. You can take it with you wherever you go. You can't guarantee that your company will be here next year let alone in 20 the way business works.
Sell!
It's nothing poysonal, it's just business.
I used to work for Sun too, just about the time they acquired Niagara from Afara (IIRC). Tremblay left Sun to found a startup which designed multi-core, multi-threaded CPUs, and they came up with Niagara, which was basically 8 very simple UltraSPARC cores on a chip, each core capable of holding 4 thread contexts which could be switched in and out to hide memory latency.
This is how things used to work at Sun. Every so often, very clever people with "lunatic fringe" ideas would leave to found startups with VC money to realise the ideas, and Sun would buy them back when it looked like it might work.
Sun's in-house CPU design is pathetic, which is why UltraSPARC started to lose out to x86 in the late '90s. Given the size of AMD's team and their complete lack of funds compared to Sun, Sun should have had much better CPUs than Opteron/AMD64, but look what happened. Fujitsu did much better with SPARC64.
Buying MySQl was a bone-headed decision which finally killed Sun. They tried to buy a name for over $1bn and got nothing. As always happens with these take-overs, the lead developers left. Remember the Cobalt purchase? What about StorageTek? Are any of them left?
There were many opportunities Sun should have taken but didn't. For example, they should have bought AMD right when Opteron came out (but Not Invented Here! - and it took some pretty loud shouting to get the Solaris prima-donnas to get Solaris on Opteron) and given AMD the task of developing UltraSPARC along side Opteron. Heck, some of us wondered, if a 64-bit x86 can be made to go so fast, what would it be like if the x86-translation layer was replaced with a SPARC-V9 translation layer? BIG HINT.
Now, calling GNOME the "Java Desktop System" was suicide. Potential customers were saying, "Why would I want a desktop written in Java?" Marketing PHBs, I hope you have learned a lesson!
Why did they ditch a bunch of the standard applets and rewrite less featured and slower ones in Java? I remember seeing a 1-pager proposing to write an MP3 player in Java for the JDS. Meanwhile we were shipping xmms on the Companion CD!
Java, Java, Java, Java, Java,..... Blah!!!!
PHBs, you may be interested in Java, but that was not Sun's core business, despite what you wanted to think, and all it did was alienate the millions of dedicated Unix people who used Solaris and Sun gear.
So I bought some Sun shares in the employee discount scheme. When the takeover stuff was announce, the shares almost went up enough that if I sold them next year when I don't have to pay any tax on them, I'll only have lost about 25% of my money.
I could have run that company better... Every year, buy some other companies with a few thousand employees, have a RIF and get a write-down against tax. Great strategy guys.
Phew, I needed that. End of rant.
I was just talking to someone who works at GCHQ the other day. Their data storage requirements are so odd it's unreal.
What else did you expect from the British Government? I can guarantee that whatever it is they need, they'll end up buying second-hand stuff that's 10-15 years out of date for twice the price of new stuff that's 100 times as powerful.
If the price of fossil fuel keeps going up, there comes a point where nuclear becomes cheaper, even on very small scales such as these. They'd be crazy not to sell the fossil fuel to paying customers, especially the crazy ones like us Brits who are scared of nuclear power.
The ROM BIOS knows how to bootstrap directly from floppy. That's how MS-DOS used to work and the code is still there.
It is perfectly possible to replace a conventional BIOS with something like OpenBIOS (a Free re-implementation of the standard firmware in SPARC and PowerPC workstations) or Coreboot (formerly LinuxBIOS).
One of my previous projects was a storage appliance, running Linux, which had a custom motherboard with a Peniutm III 1000MHz and 2 250GB SATA disks.
The ROM (c.f. "BIOS" on a PeeCee) contained LinuxBIOS which loaded a Linux kernel directly off of /dev/hda, which happened to be an IDE flash disk on this system. This kernel lived in a region of un-partitioned space between the parition table and the start of the first partition.
They wanted to change the software so that the kernel would be on the first partition of the flash disk, so I found a Protected Mode boot loader called FILO and ported it to our system. It was broken with our LinuxBIOS. The stack segment was not being configured, so it was crashing when it "made the jump to light speed." But with some cunning inline assembly language, I found the bug and fixed it.
FILO didn't need VGA or any "text mode" display either. It could do IO over the serial port, which was ideal for our hardware, since it had no video at all (remember it was a storage appliance). Customers used the system via a web browser over the network.
So the Field Circus engineers had to use a terminal emulator on a laptop to configure the system (when up and running). I did a cool hack in inittab to add an option to run PPP over the serial port instead of the menu, so they could use the web admin interface from their laptops without plugging in to the customers' networks, which ofter was forbidden.
RISC workstations (UltraSPARC, PowerPC, etc) don't have "text mode" when they boot. They have a frame buffer i.e. bitmapped graphics. However, the firmware ("BIOS") knows how to speak serial, so everything can be done over a serial cable with a terminal. This is extremely useful sometimes.
I believe someone even wrote a GUI for OpenFirmware. OpenFirmware code is portable since it's a kind of FORTH and the bytecode interpreter is standard. That means you can run the same firmware code on an UltraSPARC, PowerPC or x86. Pretty cool?
Note that we still call the PeeCee's ROM "the BIOS" because it still holds code compatible with the original IBM PC and AT to provide Basic Input/Output Routines for use with MS-DOS. They provided and extra layer of abstraction between the hardware and MS-DOS, thus making it easier to change the hardware without changing too much of MS-DOS. These were very poorly-designed routines (non-reentrant for a start) which made it very difficult to write a portable multitasking OS for IBM PC, AT and clone hardware.
I've actually got the IBM manual with the ROM BIOS disassembly in it right here...
The planet Zarg.
Marcus Brigstock said it best.
The Now Show rules!
But this one doesn't involve turnips.
Isn't it about time someone made a COBOL compiler for the JVM/Java platform?
Could you imagine just how excited the PHBs and IBM mainframers would be?
And of course, I want the x86 ISA to die. Having a 64-bit CPU still boot in 16-bit compatibility mode is just madness.
Hear hear. Mind you, it only takes a few instructions to make the jump to (at least) 32-bit protected-mode.
Intel actually tried to build a different leaner, instruction set. IA64, the market rejected it.
It wasn't lean at all. It it typical over-complicated intel junk. Just look at the implementations: itanic. It's big, hot, expensive, slow...
If you really want cheap small processors with no extra instruction sets, Intel does still make Celerons, I dare you to run Vista on one.
The Celerons have all the same instructions as the equivalent "core" processors, they just have less cache usually.
This Larabee thing doesn't sound much different to what AMD (ATi) and nVidia already have. A friend of mine has done some CUDA programming and, form what he says, it sounds just the same. Just like a vector supercomputer from 10 years ago.
I, for one, will be really unhappy if AMD goes down too. We'll be back to a stagnant processor monopoly. Over the years, I've used intel and AMD multiprocessor systems. AMD scale better and are better value for money.
I remember the early 90s when intel had no competition. You used to have to spend at least $500-equivalent to get a useful processor, and $2000 to get a reasonable one. Nowadays you can get all the horsepower you need for under $200.
Please let's not go back to those days.
I've got one in my shed wrapped up in thick polythene waiting for the day I have a huge house for my evil museum of non-conformist computers which is really a secret plot to take over the world.
It's only got two 333MHz processors and 128MB or RAM but it is dual boot with debian and Solaris 8 IIRC.
I got it from my previous employers. It was going in a skip and I asked nicely.
When I resurrect it, it will have NetBSD or something similar.
Damn, I guess IBM figured that out to. IBM will buy SUN and eliminate the SPARC T1 and T2 processors setting the country back another decade in technology.
Not to mention ROCK, the 16-core floating-point monster that is due out later this year. It will make POWER look like a ZX81, so IBM will have to kill it.
With Solaris on POWER, IBM will migrate people off of SPARC and cancel its development, just like the Alphacide committed by intel and HP.
Solaris will play second fiddle to AIX and Linux.
We will soon live in a world where intel, IBM and Microsoft are the only players left and technology is stagnant. This will be great for the suits and shareholders, and bad news for everyone else.