Personally I consider Linux on the mainframe to be on par with running Linux on an iPhone. Sure you probably can, but does it actually do anything uniquely useful for the business?
Is it really linux on the mainframe that was the problem, or rather virtualization and IBM pricing? In other words, if you ran one instance of linux hosting 1,000 server processes, might it not work well?
If so, linux might have advantages over a special-purpose mainframe OS. Presumably there are more apps for linux and mainframe developers are harder to come by. (Or does Java make the host OS irrelevant anyways?)
if you don't like one of the low-buck airlines you were dissing, you are welcome to pay a little more you cheap bastard and get good service.
Some of the low-buck airlines (like Southwest) that have been maintaining a modicum of reliability and thus gaining market share hand over fist. The biggies do cost more but that doesn't mean you get what you pay for, not when it comes to arriving on time. Besides, most of the problems are overcrowded airports and inefficient air traffic control (FAA).
I'd say the speed of human motor activity is an even greater limiting factor.
I wouldn't bet on that. The command line is not just a human/computer interface, but also a computer/computer interface. It's very common for one script to fire off many others.
That said, I agree with the grandparent that it's hard to imagine a program where command line processing is a significant runtime expense.
I'm not sure that anyone has ever reached the "storage capacity" of his brain, or that there is any confirmation that such a thing exists.
If the brain can't reach its capacity within a lifetime, it's because it's so horribly slow at learning. I can copy Wikipedia onto my PocketPC in 5 minutes, how long would it take to memorize Wikipedia? There's no comparison.
Since it won't be ingrained like natural memory, I am very curious to see how we'll perceive I/O with these devices. Will we feel it, hear it, or see some sort of pattern in our visual field? Might it become a new sense that no person has ever experienced before?
Anyways, I think it will be a while before healthy people receive direct implants. You could go a long way with nothing but a blue tooth headset small enough to fit invisibly in your ear canal. And maybe a shirt button camera so it can recognize people and invisibly remind me of their names.
You've hit the nail on the head. It's consumers who have the final say on the average selling price of a game (as opposed to the asking price which sellers determine). Me, I'm holding out with the PS2. Thousands of games for between $1 and $15 each.
ATI has completely dropped support for the Radeon Mobility in my T40 Thinkpad. It sucks, I don't need to play the latest 3d games but I would like to use google earth and a few other OpenGL apps. And since the drivers only work with certain versions of X, I can't use an old driver unless I want to set my whole system back to RHEL3 or something like that.
he didn't think we'd need to have an actual PLAN for the occupation.
Beyond that, there wasn't even going to be an occupation. Go back to the buildup for war (and even several months into it!), words like "invasion" and "occupation" simply were not used in America to describe the situation. It was heresy to use those words, just as it tooks many months for us to aknowledge that there was an insurgency, and then a civil war.
It was a simple matter of "Saddam bad -> removing Saddam good." I don't think the general public or the administration got much beyond that until it was too late. I do remember a little concern among the press that another, equally bad guy, perhaps a son of Saddam, might rise up to take his place and we'd be back where we started. There was no general understanding of the fact that we were going to tear down the entire Iraqi government, and therefore limited concern about what would arise in its place.
I'm guess you're being sarcastic, but taking out incoming mortar, artillery, and rockets really would be a boon in most forseeable conflicts including Iraq. For instance: "BAGHDAD, July 10 -- More than two dozen mortar shells pounded the Green Zone on Tuesday, killing three people, including a U.S. military member, and injuring 18, among them five Americans, U.S. officials said."
There will always be businesses who need the fastest, highest powered hardware available.
Actually, I think things can change and have changed. From the late 80s to about 2000, the average computer price remained seemed to remain pretty steady at around $2500. Then, about the time computers got "fast enough" (about 400 MHz), the average selling price of computers plummeted. In addition to average price, people are also upgrading less often now. This shows there is not constant perpetual demand for the latest and greatest. How much more advanced would computers be now if it were still common to drop $700 on the CPU alone? There's no way to know, but certainly more advanced than they are today. Of course we still call the best of whatever is available "high end" by definition, but that doesn't mean it's high end compared to what would now be available if money were still flowing like it did.
What do you think you're debunking? Comparative broadband adoption rates aren't opinion, they're fact. Maybe the fact that it costs over $1200/year in the US (by your numbers) has something to do with it? But then, some people felt guilty about the big bad government breaking up AT&T and Standard Oil, too.
I think that's the whole point - not that Wikipedia contains fewer errors than Britannica (the idea you're debunking), but that finding an error here or there in something doesn't prove anything, much less negate the value of the whole collection. It's simply to blunt accusations against Wikipedia, not bring down Britannica.
However, to me and most people Wikipedia really is far more valuable than Britannica - simply because we have no access to Britannica. And I also think the vast majority of wikipedia pages are quite good - at least the ones anybody is interested in. Certainly a much higher S/N ratio than the Internet at large. I even have a downloaded copy of wikipedia on my PocketPC, it's amazing how rarely I can not settle issues or questions that arise by consulting it.
"I think it would be nice if you could just throw 2+ gigs of RAM in one of these things, and disable the swap space, so as not to tax your harddrive."
Absolutely you can. I'm writing this on a system with no swap for the last year, running VMWare (with 750 megs of ram allocated to the guest), developing a large software app in NetBeans, running firefox (with about 20 tabs open), gimp, etc. etc... Under linux it's as simple as not putting any swap entries in/etc/fstab. Here's the output of "free" - Note the zeroes on the Swap line:
I agree with you, 2G is still a pretty ridiculous amount of RAM for 99% of applications. Just because it's now cheap doesn't mean it's necessary. 1G is ample for mainstream applications.
Africa has 200 million cellphone users (about the same as the number of US cell phone users, and 10x the number of fixed phone lines in Africa). To me that seems like the obvious answer for last mile connectivity. Some might hook those phones up to computers with bluetooth, but maybe they should just skip that step and use smartphones without computers. Already Africa is using cellphones to increase productivity, such as cell phone banking.
Maybe Microsoft is just over-ambitious. What's with all the rewrites? Linux seems to progress much more smoothly. But I'd guess this is because Linux (1) breaks backwards compatibility more, and (2) doesn't have to build hype by releasing a "whole new" OS all at once. With Vista, Microsoft tried to keep backwards compatibility with everything while rewriting everything. I think they pulled it off as well as anybody could have - not very.
Yup, the Linux kernel itself - the actual OS - is still very sleek. Less than two years ago I was running it on a 486 with, I think, 24 MB of RAM. The newer kernels actually ran better than the old ones, due to kernel preemption, a better scheduler, etc. Of course this wasn't a default install, I prefer to start minimal then "yum install XX" as needed. (Though I must be getting old and lazy because increasingly I don't feel optimization is worth my time anymore...)
For some reason I read "myspace" in the title as "youtube," since it seems a more natural comparison. Anyways, in repsonse to your comment, I do think the Interent with disrupt TV, but I don't think laptops will have much to do with. Not until more people have broadband-connected PVRs in their livingrooms can the revolution be televised (I just had to say that). But it will happen.
Virtualisation as I understand it, is basically an abstraction of the hardware that is performed in software. Should not all operating systems be designed to work with standard instruction sets, interrupts, registers and memory?
Ideally. My impression is it doesn't actally work very well without some "cheating" (optimization). For instance VMWare works a lot better if you use the special VMWare video driver on the guest instead of sticking with generic VESA or whatever. Also some timing related issues, which result in problems like the mouse moving at weird speeds, require peeking behind the curtain.
Parallels is supposedly going to have 3d acceleration soon. My guess is here again this will require specific guest support and some sort of snooping or rewriting of guest programs.
One optimization I think would be great is sharing read-only memory between guests. This could save tons of memory when you're hosting N guests with the same software versions on them.
I have not seen any clusters that achieve consistently high utilization (though this is often a goal and sometimes inflated by whoever is backing the cluster to prove its worth). I don't have direct experience with render farms, but I'd imagine it's the same; there are "crunch times" when they're saturated for a few days (or up to a few months) on end, but then that project ends and there's less load for a while. Anyways I agree efficiency under load is important, too.
The savings from consolidating a number of server workloads on a smaller number of machines using something like Xen...
The problem with that is you often don't have a steady load 24/7. At 3am, you need 1 server; at 8:30am, you need 40. Since virtualization has overhead, the total amount of hardware required to support your max load using virtualization is actually more.
Agreed virtualization could be good for pooling services that each consistently takes less than 1 server though.
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If so, linux might have advantages over a special-purpose mainframe OS. Presumably there are more apps for linux and mainframe developers are harder to come by. (Or does Java make the host OS irrelevant anyways?)
Quit trying to steal my energy. I'm fat on purpose, you insensitive clod!
I wouldn't bet on that. The command line is not just a human/computer interface, but also a computer/computer interface. It's very common for one script to fire off many others.
That said, I agree with the grandparent that it's hard to imagine a program where command line processing is a significant runtime expense.
Since it won't be ingrained like natural memory, I am very curious to see how we'll perceive I/O with these devices. Will we feel it, hear it, or see some sort of pattern in our visual field? Might it become a new sense that no person has ever experienced before?
Anyways, I think it will be a while before healthy people receive direct implants. You could go a long way with nothing but a blue tooth headset small enough to fit invisibly in your ear canal. And maybe a shirt button camera so it can recognize people and invisibly remind me of their names.
You've hit the nail on the head. It's consumers who have the final say on the average selling price of a game (as opposed to the asking price which sellers determine). Me, I'm holding out with the PS2. Thousands of games for between $1 and $15 each.
Thanks for the tip, I'll try the OSS Radeon driver. I remember having troubles with it years ago, but it's time for another look.
ATI has completely dropped support for the Radeon Mobility in my T40 Thinkpad. It sucks, I don't need to play the latest 3d games but I would like to use google earth and a few other OpenGL apps. And since the drivers only work with certain versions of X, I can't use an old driver unless I want to set my whole system back to RHEL3 or something like that.
It was a simple matter of "Saddam bad -> removing Saddam good." I don't think the general public or the administration got much beyond that until it was too late. I do remember a little concern among the press that another, equally bad guy, perhaps a son of Saddam, might rise up to take his place and we'd be back where we started. There was no general understanding of the fact that we were going to tear down the entire Iraqi government, and therefore limited concern about what would arise in its place.
I'm guess you're being sarcastic, but taking out incoming mortar, artillery, and rockets really would be a boon in most forseeable conflicts including Iraq. For instance: "BAGHDAD, July 10 -- More than two dozen mortar shells pounded the Green Zone on Tuesday, killing three people, including a U.S. military member, and injuring 18, among them five Americans, U.S. officials said."
OK, so where's the link detailing edit wars at Britannica, or Fox? Or would you simply prefer not to known what goes into the sausage?
What do you think you're debunking? Comparative broadband adoption rates aren't opinion, they're fact. Maybe the fact that it costs over $1200/year in the US (by your numbers) has something to do with it? But then, some people felt guilty about the big bad government breaking up AT&T and Standard Oil, too.
However, to me and most people Wikipedia really is far more valuable than Britannica - simply because we have no access to Britannica. And I also think the vast majority of wikipedia pages are quite good - at least the ones anybody is interested in. Certainly a much higher S/N ratio than the Internet at large. I even have a downloaded copy of wikipedia on my PocketPC, it's amazing how rarely I can not settle issues or questions that arise by consulting it.
"I think it would be nice if you could just throw 2+ gigs of RAM in one of these things, and disable the swap space, so as not to tax your harddrive."
/etc/fstab. Here's the output of "free" - Note the zeroes on the Swap line:
Absolutely you can. I'm writing this on a system with no swap for the last year, running VMWare (with 750 megs of ram allocated to the guest), developing a large software app in NetBeans, running firefox (with about 20 tabs open), gimp, etc. etc... Under linux it's as simple as not putting any swap entries in
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 2074016 2010732 63284 0 117184 1473496
-/+ buffers/cache: 420052 1653964
Swap: 0 0 0
I agree with you, 2G is still a pretty ridiculous amount of RAM for 99% of applications. Just because it's now cheap doesn't mean it's necessary. 1G is ample for mainstream applications.
I honestly think you could make good money on an implant that does nothing but burn calories.
Africa has 200 million cellphone users (about the same as the number of US cell phone users, and 10x the number of fixed phone lines in Africa). To me that seems like the obvious answer for last mile connectivity. Some might hook those phones up to computers with bluetooth, but maybe they should just skip that step and use smartphones without computers. Already Africa is using cellphones to increase productivity, such as cell phone banking.
Maybe Microsoft is just over-ambitious. What's with all the rewrites? Linux seems to progress much more smoothly. But I'd guess this is because Linux (1) breaks backwards compatibility more, and (2) doesn't have to build hype by releasing a "whole new" OS all at once. With Vista, Microsoft tried to keep backwards compatibility with everything while rewriting everything. I think they pulled it off as well as anybody could have - not very.
Yup, the Linux kernel itself - the actual OS - is still very sleek. Less than two years ago I was running it on a 486 with, I think, 24 MB of RAM. The newer kernels actually ran better than the old ones, due to kernel preemption, a better scheduler, etc. Of course this wasn't a default install, I prefer to start minimal then "yum install XX" as needed. (Though I must be getting old and lazy because increasingly I don't feel optimization is worth my time anymore...)
For some reason I read "myspace" in the title as "youtube," since it seems a more natural comparison. Anyways, in repsonse to your comment, I do think the Interent with disrupt TV, but I don't think laptops will have much to do with. Not until more people have broadband-connected PVRs in their livingrooms can the revolution be televised (I just had to say that). But it will happen.
Parallels is supposedly going to have 3d acceleration soon. My guess is here again this will require specific guest support and some sort of snooping or rewriting of guest programs.
One optimization I think would be great is sharing read-only memory between guests. This could save tons of memory when you're hosting N guests with the same software versions on them.
I have not seen any clusters that achieve consistently high utilization (though this is often a goal and sometimes inflated by whoever is backing the cluster to prove its worth). I don't have direct experience with render farms, but I'd imagine it's the same; there are "crunch times" when they're saturated for a few days (or up to a few months) on end, but then that project ends and there's less load for a while. Anyways I agree efficiency under load is important, too.
Agreed virtualization could be good for pooling services that each consistently takes less than 1 server though.