Funny that. Only the other day, Tony Blair, UK Prime Minister, decided that he'd like to be able to ask the UK intelligence agencies to spy on Members of Parliament.
You never know, those crazy Liberals or Conservatives might be in league with Terrorists(TM).
Can I interest you in some professional-quality archiving harware and media?
Laws like these are stupid, ill-conceived, ineffectual and pointless. They won't work. However, there will be thousands more jobs for government beurocrats and people like me will get rich (hopefully).
I'm getting old enough now just to smile and get on with things.
You darned commie liberals with your anti-God science. You're hot darn diggity dog gonna ruin every All American Holywood storyline and put a mult-eye-billion dollar industry out a busness.
There should be a federal law against that kind a talk.
Git ta Gitmo you commie liberal athiest muslim terrorist scum sucker gay faggot.
As a cyclist I find that the largest regular threat to my life tends to originate from speeding/incompetent motorists
As a motorist, cyclist and pedestrian, I find that the largest threats to the lives of pedestrians and cyclists come from the majority of cyclists who don't think that the Highway Code, Laws of Physics and common courtesy apply to them.
But they like to shout about how bad motorists are.
This is incredibly good news for Sun, and yet another astounding achievement this year.
They open-sourced Solaris (despite the whinging of the nay-sayers and accusations of being in bed with SCO^H^H^HCaldera), they sell Opteron workstations and servers running 64-bit Solaris, 8-core 32-thread Niagara (aka UltraSPARC T1) came out early (the first Sun processor to do so this decade) and now they've pushed out ZFS - the best filesystem ever devised.
If only they can get Project Janus integrated and out in the open...
I'm sure Microsoft will do what it always does, and cheat.
Bill and Steve will see to it that a high-profile research centre (e.g. a university) will get a free supercomputer with a free Supercomputer Edition(TM) of Windows(TM) to play with and there will be much fanfare and positive publicity in the press.
Just like when SGI and intel gave NASA a free 10240-processor Altix (made of itanics).
You should understand that I was just trying to correct anyone from thinking that since Sun has adopted and marketed the Opterons that there was no reason to exclude Solairs for other x86 platforms.
Indeed. Opteron (and hence Athlon 64) are perfectly backwards compatible with earlier x86 chips, that is they pretend to be a 286 when powered up, and switch into 386 protected mode just like any other legacy x86 processor (including Pentium 4).
The 64-bit goodness comes from the extenstions to the architecture which have to be enabled and handled in the OS kernel.
You're 100% correct in saying that Solaris 10 is still also developed for and supported on 32-bit x86 processors as well, and the 32-bit kernel and environment will also run perfectly on AMD64 processors.
Solaris 10 does not have an Operton port. Solaris 10 is available for Sparc and x86. Period. x86 just also happens to include Opterons.
Wrong! There was a specific port of Solaris 10 to Opteron (AMD64). I know some of the very nice people who developed it and I got to do some development on it while it was under development too.
The NUMA code for Opteron and the 64-bit addressing is all in there. Opteron (AMD64) has an extra layer of page tables that aren't there on regular x86, and some subtle but important differences in the ways it handles the TLBs.
Intel EM64T is Opteron-compatible, but they've been trying to play that down becasue it was late, slow, incomplete and competed directly with the itanic.
Because they don't do floating-point in hardware, or at least not to any useful level of performance.
The 8-core Niagara (T1) has 1 floating-point execution unit on only 1 of the 8 cores. Buy a 6- or 4-core Niagara, and do you get a floating-point execution unit at all?
On Niagara (aka UltraSPARC T1) floating-point will mostly be accomplished with software emulation of the SPARC V9 FP instructions.
That's why you wouldn't use Niagara for supercomputing. Web serving, yes, computational fluid dynamics or numerical general relativity, no.
Mrs Turgid has a German friend who was visiting recently. We were talking about all the crazy laws being written these days and the subject of music came up.
In Germany just now, if the police stop you for any reason while you're driving in your car, they peform a "routine search" and if they find any home-made CDs (i.e. not shop-bought ones) they give you the opportunity to invite them to your house to show them the originals (you still have the right to make a personal back-up copy in Germany) before arresting you.
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Funny that. Only the other day, Tony Blair, UK Prime Minister, decided that he'd like to be able to ask the UK intelligence agencies to spy on Members of Parliament.
You never know, those crazy Liberals or Conservatives might be in league with Terrorists(TM).
It's only the commie books that the US has trouble with.
Hitler was a fascist.
Can I interest you in some professional-quality archiving harware and media?
Laws like these are stupid, ill-conceived, ineffectual and pointless. They won't work. However, there will be thousands more jobs for government beurocrats and people like me will get rich (hopefully).
I'm getting old enough now just to smile and get on with things.
...and stick to Church-based social activities in future.
Love from the Central Scruitinizer.
Maybe intel just gave them a few thousand free itanic boxes to get the shipment figures up.
Yeeeeeeeeeee Haaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaw!
You darned commie liberals with your anti-God science. You're hot darn diggity dog gonna ruin every All American Holywood storyline and put a mult-eye-billion dollar industry out a busness.
There should be a federal law against that kind a talk.
Git ta Gitmo you commie liberal athiest muslim terrorist scum sucker gay faggot.
Time for my pills...
Yes, well, revisionist history is all the rage these days amongst self-styled intellectuals.
Also I would like to point out that the pope has stated that the Bible is completely compatable with evolution.
...but the use of artificial contraception is "sinful."
I wouldn't pay too much attention to the Pope.
Does the suffering of Gallileo mean nothing at all to you?
What, you mean like Noah's Ark, and getting gunned down by some farmers from Kansas?
As a cyclist I find that the largest regular threat to my life tends to originate from speeding/incompetent motorists
As a motorist, cyclist and pedestrian, I find that the largest threats to the lives of pedestrians and cyclists come from the majority of cyclists who don't think that the Highway Code, Laws of Physics and common courtesy apply to them.
But they like to shout about how bad motorists are.
This is incredibly good news for Sun, and yet another astounding achievement this year.
They open-sourced Solaris (despite the whinging of the nay-sayers and accusations of being in bed with SCO^H^H^HCaldera), they sell Opteron workstations and servers running 64-bit Solaris, 8-core 32-thread Niagara (aka UltraSPARC T1) came out early (the first Sun processor to do so this decade) and now they've pushed out ZFS - the best filesystem ever devised.
If only they can get Project Janus integrated and out in the open...
Will the astronauts have to put out the papers and the trash as well to get their spendin' cash? Or is that overtime?
Surely it's only a "fix" the second time you take it? :-)
/me ducks.
I'm sure Microsoft will do what it always does, and cheat.
Bill and Steve will see to it that a high-profile research centre (e.g. a university) will get a free supercomputer with a free Supercomputer Edition(TM) of Windows(TM) to play with and there will be much fanfare and positive publicity in the press.
Just like when SGI and intel gave NASA a free 10240-processor Altix (made of itanics).
You should understand that I was just trying to correct anyone from thinking that since Sun has adopted and marketed the Opterons that there was no reason to exclude Solairs for other x86 platforms.
Indeed. Opteron (and hence Athlon 64) are perfectly backwards compatible with earlier x86 chips, that is they pretend to be a 286 when powered up, and switch into 386 protected mode just like any other legacy x86 processor (including Pentium 4).
The 64-bit goodness comes from the extenstions to the architecture which have to be enabled and handled in the OS kernel.
You're 100% correct in saying that Solaris 10 is still also developed for and supported on 32-bit x86 processors as well, and the 32-bit kernel and environment will also run perfectly on AMD64 processors.
Solaris rules (so does Linux).
Solaris 10 does not have an Operton port. Solaris 10 is available for Sparc and x86. Period. x86 just also happens to include Opterons.
Wrong! There was a specific port of Solaris 10 to Opteron (AMD64). I know some of the very nice people who developed it and I got to do some development on it while it was under development too.
The NUMA code for Opteron and the 64-bit addressing is all in there. Opteron (AMD64) has an extra layer of page tables that aren't there on regular x86, and some subtle but important differences in the ways it handles the TLBs.
Intel EM64T is Opteron-compatible, but they've been trying to play that down becasue it was late, slow, incomplete and competed directly with the itanic.
Because they don't do floating-point in hardware, or at least not to any useful level of performance.
The 8-core Niagara (T1) has 1 floating-point execution unit on only 1 of the 8 cores. Buy a 6- or 4-core Niagara, and do you get a floating-point execution unit at all?
On Niagara (aka UltraSPARC T1) floating-point will mostly be accomplished with software emulation of the SPARC V9 FP instructions.
That's why you wouldn't use Niagara for supercomputing. Web serving, yes, computational fluid dynamics or numerical general relativity, no.
This is really just a marketing play on AMD's part.
Sounds like sour grapes from an itanic customer (or an intel or SGI staffer) :-)
Solaris 10 works really well on large NUMA boxes (better than Linux), and it has an Opteron port...
I wonder what the governmnet will do with these cheaper, powerful supercomputers?
Why, decrypt your 66,000ft high stack of SSH traffic in case you're a would-be terrorist, of course! :-)
Mrs Turgid has a German friend who was visiting recently. We were talking about all the crazy laws being written these days and the subject of music came up.
In Germany just now, if the police stop you for any reason while you're driving in your car, they peform a "routine search" and if they find any home-made CDs (i.e. not shop-bought ones) they give you the opportunity to invite them to your house to show them the originals (you still have the right to make a personal back-up copy in Germany) before arresting you.
Anusol eases the pain of digital rectal examinations by soothing haemorrhoids. Time for my pills.
It's more like pr0n pictures of a bra or a bikini, without anyone wearing them... :-(
If someone's wearing them then is isn't pr0n, is it? Maybe I'm missing something...
Why? Do they have oil wells?