...late '80s/very early '90s there was something called the ACE Consortium.
This was formed by the likes of DEC, Compaq and SCO at the time when IBM had not long brought out the dreadfully underpowered, expensive and proprietary PS/2 line of personal computers running the pathetic MS-DOS and mediocre OS/2.
Most people were running PeeCees which were essentially 16-bit with a single user, single tasking operating system running on dreadfully slow CISC (8086, 80286, 80386) processors will pitifully small amounts of RAM (512k-1MB) and nary a GUI.
The ACE consortium was designing a MIPS-based (32-bit RISC) open specification for a replacement to the IBM-PC and PS/2 architectured which would run a UNIX SYSVR4 derivative and a nice GUI (was it with X?).
The project died a death. I can't remember why.
When I was 15 I longed for a RISC UNIX workstation in the house instead of the 12MHz Compaq SLT/286 we had (for business use).
MIPS lived on in post-VAX pre-Alpha workstations at DEC and then at SGI. itanic Kool Aid all but killed off MIPS. The only two major RISC architectures from the era which survive are SPARC and POWER/PowerPC, and for a couple of years it looked like SPARC was dead too.
The spirit of Alpha lives on in Athlon and Opteron.
As many like to point out, Intel often shows a "Not Invented Here" attitude.
Quite. The crossbar switch came and went (1990's RISC workstations, appeared in the AMD Athlon) and intel's still using a 1970's bus for it's "high-end" pentium processors.
Now we have point-to-point interconnects (1990's supercomputers NUMA architecture) called Hypertransport and intel's still flogging the 1970's bus on the pentium.
Look at how pentium doesn't scale in SMP systems. Itanic is a different matter, but you can buy several equivalently-fast Opterons for a single itanic, which only performs on numerical workloads.
Someone needs to administer the clue bat at intel before it's too late.
Lots of people here have run Linux or a Unix variant on very similar hardware. Surely they knew already the kind of performance they would get out of it, since OS X is basically unix under the covers. I don't think this should really be a surprise to many.
If only 't were so simple.
Unix-like operating systems (Linux, *BSD, Solaris, AIX, HP/UX etc.) present a common standard interface to the world, however the implementation details behind that interface differs radically amongst those platforms, and even between kernel versions with Linux.
As such, while these OSes may be able to run the same software, they do so with very different performance characteristics.
As a starting point, you should consider the differences between System VR4, Linux 2.4, Linux 2.6 and FreeBSD. There are many good books on the subject.
Yesterday I looked around the intel web site to try to determine whether these intel processors in the new Apples are 32- or 64-bit. There was no mention of EM64T, so I figure they're only 32-bit.
They may be 65 nanometre and low power, but if they don't run x86-64 software, they're already obsolete, even at the value end of the market.
You can already buy a 64-bit low-power laptop with a 15 inch screen for less than one of these Apples. The processor is from AMD. OK it comes with Windows, but everyone nowadays deletes that and installs Linux.
Apple just got on the wrong bandwagon. And they were doing so well with that iPod thingy...
Since you're the Good Guys out to Save the World, please can you do us all a favour and remove Robert Mugabe from power when you've finished tidying up the Middle East and North Korea?
So, it's clever, original, political, thought-provoking, and side-splittingly hilarious, in the same way as those great British comedy classics Birds of a Feather, the Jimmy Cricket Show and the Vicar of Dibley.
Father Ted: Now concentrate this time, Dougal. These [he points to some plastic cows on the table] Father Ted: are very small; those [pointing at some cows out of the window] Father Ted: are far away...
The "dangers" of Sellafield have been over-exaggerated by political pressure groups for decades. People fear the nuclear industry like they used to fear witchcraft. (Some people still believe in witchraft in this day and age too. Tells you something about human nature and education.)
Never mind complicated automatic saftey systems. Design your power plant to be intrinsically safe. Design it such that meltdowns, fires and prompt criticalities are not possible by the Laws of Nature themselves. It is possible and it has been done.
Well, if Friends of the Earth had anything to do with energy policy, we'd all be living in mud huts, wearing hemp smocks and gathering nuts and berries from the woods. Forget medicine too. It'd be shamens and healing crystals all the way.
Unfortunately, political pressure groups such as these have had far too much influence over the last 20 years.
The nuclear industry (the R&D part) in the UK is all but dead now as a result, and the generating stations don't have long left.
I also have to note that they might be better off if that $2.5 billion went to hire someone capable of making better processors.
I suspect, with intel, as with many other old, fat, complacent mega-corporations, that it is not the staffers who can't design great processors, but rather it's the PHBs and marketeers who tell them what stupid features to build at the expense of properly engineered solutions.
Perhaps he just wanted to be sure that the deal to put Windows in all the Indian universities (in preference to all other operating systems) went through?
Who founded Microsoft? Who is responsible for its business practices? Who is has made entire economies dependant on inferior, expensive Microsoft software?
Bill's gains are ill-gotten.
Like all the best dictators, Bill's got people looking up to him and eating right out of his hand.
That's bad reasoning,
it's like saying that if this year I buy a house
for $100 000 and only give $33 000 to charity, I'm an evil person for putting my interests before those of people in need.
No it isn't.
Bill Gates got where he is today through ruthlessness, double-crossing, lying, cheating and selling deadful products at over-inflated prices. Microsoft is a convicted monopolist.
Microsoft's strong-arm tactics and draconian licensing policies, high prices coupled with publicity and bribing governments locks whole countries into expensive Microsoft proprietary software, ruining indiginous engineering and leeching billions of dollars out of countries that can ill afford it. M$ then "gives away free" computers and "software licenses" to schools and universities to make sure that the next generation is indoctrinated into the Church of Bill.
Maybe if M$ didn't leech so much money, and productivity (due to poor software), out of these "developing" countries, they'd be better developed and more able to cope with things like AIDS on their own without Bill's pocket change.
Microsoft has ruined the world econonmy in the last 15 years.
What about all the people working their way through college, who still find a way to dro $5 or $10 in their church's collection plate every week?
I know what you're trying to say, but then again, why is contributing to the Priest's/Minister's/Imam's new BMW or Mercedes considered worthy and respectable?
It just goes to show that people are stupid and that the mass media are sycophants.
I am sick and tired of hearing what a great genius and philanthropists Bill Gates is.
Let us not forget that Bill Gates went to India in 2002 and gave $100 million to fight AIDS, which received great press. What the main-stream media failed to report was that $421 million of Microsoft's money at the time went to fight Linux and Free Software.
So make your own conclusions about his priorities.
When you talk about Britain and terrorists, do try to remember that we've kind of been dealing with the terrorist problem for some time, and they're not all from the Middle East. It wasn't all that long ago bomb threats in London were something of a regular occurance, and most of them were coming from the IRA - not the terrorists George Bush puts forward as the enemy everyday.
Quite. My point entirely.
So why is it only now that Tony Blair wnats to make spying on any and all of his political oponents, including anyone he suspects in his own party, routine, expexted and acceptable?
Slashdot Mirror
...late '80s/very early '90s there was something called the ACE Consortium.
This was formed by the likes of DEC, Compaq and SCO at the time when IBM had not long brought out the dreadfully underpowered, expensive and proprietary PS/2 line of personal computers running the pathetic MS-DOS and mediocre OS/2.
Most people were running PeeCees which were essentially 16-bit with a single user, single tasking operating system running on dreadfully slow CISC (8086, 80286, 80386) processors will pitifully small amounts of RAM (512k-1MB) and nary a GUI.
The ACE consortium was designing a MIPS-based (32-bit RISC) open specification for a replacement to the IBM-PC and PS/2 architectured which would run a UNIX SYSVR4 derivative and a nice GUI (was it with X?).
The project died a death. I can't remember why.
When I was 15 I longed for a RISC UNIX workstation in the house instead of the 12MHz Compaq SLT/286 we had (for business use).
MIPS lived on in post-VAX pre-Alpha workstations at DEC and then at SGI. itanic Kool Aid all but killed off MIPS. The only two major RISC architectures from the era which survive are SPARC and POWER/PowerPC, and for a couple of years it looked like SPARC was dead too.
The spirit of Alpha lives on in Athlon and Opteron.
As many like to point out, Intel often shows a "Not Invented Here" attitude.
Quite. The crossbar switch came and went (1990's RISC workstations, appeared in the AMD Athlon) and intel's still using a 1970's bus for it's "high-end" pentium processors.
Now we have point-to-point interconnects (1990's supercomputers NUMA architecture) called Hypertransport and intel's still flogging the 1970's bus on the pentium.
Look at how pentium doesn't scale in SMP systems. Itanic is a different matter, but you can buy several equivalently-fast Opterons for a single itanic, which only performs on numerical workloads.
Someone needs to administer the clue bat at intel before it's too late.
Lots of people here have run Linux or a Unix variant on very similar hardware. Surely they knew already the kind of performance they would get out of it, since OS X is basically unix under the covers. I don't think this should really be a surprise to many.
If only 't were so simple.
Unix-like operating systems (Linux, *BSD, Solaris, AIX, HP/UX etc.) present a common standard interface to the world, however the implementation details behind that interface differs radically amongst those platforms, and even between kernel versions with Linux.
As such, while these OSes may be able to run the same software, they do so with very different performance characteristics.
As a starting point, you should consider the differences between System VR4, Linux 2.4, Linux 2.6 and FreeBSD. There are many good books on the subject.
Yesterday I looked around the intel web site to try to determine whether these intel processors in the new Apples are 32- or 64-bit. There was no mention of EM64T, so I figure they're only 32-bit.
They may be 65 nanometre and low power, but if they don't run x86-64 software, they're already obsolete, even at the value end of the market.
You can already buy a 64-bit low-power laptop with a 15 inch screen for less than one of these Apples. The processor is from AMD. OK it comes with Windows, but everyone nowadays deletes that and installs Linux.
Apple just got on the wrong bandwagon. And they were doing so well with that iPod thingy...
So what'd it say?
"LS" in inverse video, IIRC.
When I was 8, I got a computer for Christmas. My granny said to me, "Ask it who the Prime Minister is!"
Since you're the Good Guys out to Save the World, please can you do us all a favour and remove Robert Mugabe from power when you've finished tidying up the Middle East and North Korea?
Does he get his lad out, Father?
So, it's clever, original, political, thought-provoking, and side-splittingly hilarious, in the same way as those great British comedy classics Birds of a Feather, the Jimmy Cricket Show and the Vicar of Dibley.
I can't wait.
May I refer you to Father Ted:
Father Ted: Now concentrate this time, Dougal. These
[he points to some plastic cows on the table]
Father Ted: are very small; those
[pointing at some cows out of the window]
Father Ted: are far away...
The "dangers" of Sellafield have been over-exaggerated by political pressure groups for decades. People fear the nuclear industry like they used to fear witchcraft. (Some people still believe in witchraft in this day and age too. Tells you something about human nature and education.)
Never mind complicated automatic saftey systems. Design your power plant to be intrinsically safe. Design it such that meltdowns, fires and prompt criticalities are not possible by the Laws of Nature themselves. It is possible and it has been done.
Different designs of reactors have different failure modes.
The laws of physics prohibit certain kinds of faults in certain kinds of reactors.
You cannot have a "meltdown" in an AGR or Magnox. (You can have a fire in a Magnox, though and it has happened.)
You cannot have a "Chernobyl" in a Magnox, AGR, PWR or Candu. It is not physically possible.
You can have a meltdown in a PWR.
It's too complicated to go into details here. Imagine trying to explain it to the General Public. You have no hope.
As far as the General Public is concerned, nuclear power is "Dangerous" and "Evil" and won't somebody think of the children etc.
Well, if Friends of the Earth had anything to do with energy policy, we'd all be living in mud huts, wearing hemp smocks and gathering nuts and berries from the woods. Forget medicine too. It'd be shamens and healing crystals all the way.
Unfortunately, political pressure groups such as these have had far too much influence over the last 20 years.
The nuclear industry (the R&D part) in the UK is all but dead now as a result, and the generating stations don't have long left.
As far as my background, I stayed at a Holiday Inn Express last night.
I assume that this is a USA-specific cultural reference intended as a joke. Can anyone please explain for those of us who are foreigners?
I also have to note that they might be better off if that $2.5 billion went to hire someone capable of making better processors.
I suspect, with intel, as with many other old, fat, complacent mega-corporations, that it is not the staffers who can't design great processors, but rather it's the PHBs and marketeers who tell them what stupid features to build at the expense of properly engineered solutions.
Personally I believe his foundation would use the money more wisely than our government would.
That wouldn't be difficult, now, would it? You guys don't even take care of your sick.
Perhaps he just wanted to be sure that the deal to put Windows in all the Indian universities (in preference to all other operating systems) went through?
People like you make me laugh.
I forgive you. We're not all employed by Bill, after all.
Read some of these. I'm sure there are some that apply.
I, too, clean the bathroom to get my legover once a week.
Who founded Microsoft? Who is responsible for its business practices? Who is has made entire economies dependant on inferior, expensive Microsoft software?
Bill's gains are ill-gotten.
Like all the best dictators, Bill's got people looking up to him and eating right out of his hand.
Usually the ignorant.
That's bad reasoning, it's like saying that if this year I buy a house for $100 000 and only give $33 000 to charity, I'm an evil person for putting my interests before those of people in need.
No it isn't.
Bill Gates got where he is today through ruthlessness, double-crossing, lying, cheating and selling deadful products at over-inflated prices. Microsoft is a convicted monopolist.
Microsoft's strong-arm tactics and draconian licensing policies, high prices coupled with publicity and bribing governments locks whole countries into expensive Microsoft proprietary software, ruining indiginous engineering and leeching billions of dollars out of countries that can ill afford it. M$ then "gives away free" computers and "software licenses" to schools and universities to make sure that the next generation is indoctrinated into the Church of Bill.
Maybe if M$ didn't leech so much money, and productivity (due to poor software), out of these "developing" countries, they'd be better developed and more able to cope with things like AIDS on their own without Bill's pocket change.
Microsoft has ruined the world econonmy in the last 15 years.
What about all the people working their way through college, who still find a way to dro $5 or $10 in their church's collection plate every week?
I know what you're trying to say, but then again, why is contributing to the Priest's/Minister's/Imam's new BMW or Mercedes considered worthy and respectable?
It just goes to show that people are stupid and that the mass media are sycophants.
I am sick and tired of hearing what a great genius and philanthropists Bill Gates is.
Let us not forget that Bill Gates went to India in 2002 and gave $100 million to fight AIDS, which received great press. What the main-stream media failed to report was that $421 million of Microsoft's money at the time went to fight Linux and Free Software.
So make your own conclusions about his priorities.
When you talk about Britain and terrorists, do try to remember that we've kind of been dealing with the terrorist problem for some time, and they're not all from the Middle East. It wasn't all that long ago bomb threats in London were something of a regular occurance, and most of them were coming from the IRA - not the terrorists George Bush puts forward as the enemy everyday.
Quite. My point entirely.
So why is it only now that Tony Blair wnats to make spying on any and all of his political oponents, including anyone he suspects in his own party, routine, expexted and acceptable?