I wouldn't be surprised if the network was based on some sort of serial communications, but that's just a guess (I was headed towards the C= machines by then, and we could only dream of networks on that platform... even doing serial to analog comms was a pretty serious hassle.)
Days go by that I wish Pascal had taken off - nobody remembers the Pascal vs. C holy wars, but let's just say I started early on the wrong side. In an undergrad C course I actually wrote a Pascal to C compiler that evolved over the course of the semester, did all the projects in Pascal and just ran the working code through my compiler to convert it to C. If the resulting C code didn't work, I tweaked my compiler until I got working C code as output.
Pretty neat trick, esp since I'm not aware there ever was a Pascal compiler for the TRS-80 Model II.
Maybe you fondly rememberingthe UCSD Pascal compiler for the Apple II series of computers, or maybe Borland's Pascal compiler on the IBM PC/XT or AT class machines - but best of my memory the (dare I call it this, lovingly of course) Trash80 booted directly into a ROM based BASIC in a fashion similar to that of the Commodore machines of the time (the Vic-20, the C=64) with the ability to store data streams and poke the values directly into memory lest you felt spunky and wanted to code in machine language.
And yes, I feel dirty for knowing all of the above.
It's an extension of computer language theory that leverages the concepts surrounding deterministic / finite state machines and asserts some of the theory in the transform from non-deterministic to deterministic.
It was painfully obvious to me when I saw it, and I honestly couldn't believe that the end of the semester didn't bring it all together to show that software can be provably correct - meaning I may need to actually draw the line to connect the dots for the rest of the world to see. If that's the case, I'm going to have a slam-dunk doctoral thesis.
There are a few videos on youtube of guys that RAID'ed iRAM's showing just insane performance.
If it weren't for the cost of adding four of these (plus four 1G sticks of pc3200 on each) I would have already scored a similar rig - but right now I'm working on a limited R&D budget. Maybe next year.
That said - these are really, really sweet - but I have to ask whether the RAID'ed iRAM or the new Micron SSD can hold a candle to a ramdisk ( see also : http://www.ramdisk.tk/ ) - I figure on a machine that can actually address 8G or more of memory (likely : Windows 2003 Server based) and use a massive chunk of it as a ramdrive - which is going to come out ahead?
Actually, RAID can work EXACTLY in this way. Set up a RAID 0 array of 250Mb/s devices and if the host controller can handle it - bingo, Gigabit throughput from the array. There's a guy out there that RAID'ed six of the Gigabyte iRAM cards on some high end RAID card a year ago - and he managed somewhere in the neighborhood of 800MB/s - surely a year later we can do better than that. The only limitations his rig encountered were the limited space available, and of course the volatile nature of the iRAM cards.
The things by Micron appears to have handled the issue of volatile memory when the memory goes down, and getting all the bandwidth through a single channel bus. When it becomes commercially available - count me in for one (when the price comes down enough for me to afford it.)
On the off chance that the kid IS a prodigy, I'm thinking skip the laptop and get the kid working with cryptography. Just think of the possibilities that would be open for a kid that can crack 256-bit encryption in real time in his head, the way some of us can tell what speed a modem connects by listening to it, or the way some of us can tell which numbers were pushed on the phone by hearing the tones. That kid would be the Golden Child of computers if the NSA didn't off him first.
I wouldn't be surprised to read that the jetpack he is using is based strongly on the engine that powered the ME-163. The 'fuel tank' consisted of two bladders - one full of concentrated hydrogen peroxide and the other full of high grade methanol.
Actually wikipedia says that the first component wasn't H202 but N2H4 - but I'm skeptical. I've always heard it was concentrated peroxide, and lab experiments I've seen support that theory.
Regardless - back in WWII the biggest threat to the ME163 pilots wasn't getting shot down by other planes, it was having their fuel cells leak this stuff into the plane (which would dissolve the pilot - nasty stuff.)
Me : Well there's the Pythagorean Proof... Interviewer : That's the Pythagorean Theorem, it hasn't actually been proven. Me : Hand me that pencil and a piece of paper.
(No joke. Solved it on the back of a napkin at a restaurant in Portland Maine, eating prime rib, in early 2000.)
Oh man - I love fresh graduates. No mistakes - that's awesome.
I've made mistakes. Hell, I've probably destroyed more computer hardware (dollar value) than most people will ever own.
Best lessons I ever learned? 1. If you are going to take a machine apart piece by piece (for example to replace a toner fuser roller).. unplug it first. 2. If you on the phone are walking someone through replacing a video card, don't assume they unplugged it. Or even turned it off. 3. Netware will run until the hardware dies. Bring the server down once in a while to blow out the dust-bunnies. 4. If you are ever called to disassemble an IBM System 32, leave your regular computer toolkit at the office. Bring a hacksaw, vice grips, a four foot crowbar, and a four pound sledge. 5. Computer hard drives are not full of 'magic air' and even if you take off the cover and watch the disk spin and the heads move it will continue to operate. For a while. 6. A CRT monitor that has been turned off and unplugged still has a LOT of electricity hiding under the case. 7. The PS/2 mouse and keyboard connectors are physically identical and on some machines you can plug then in either socket. If you plug your keyboard into the mouse hole and smoke comes out of the back, your computer is not one of machines. 8. A CGA monitor with a flyback that is going out will make a very high pitch whine for a very long time (weeks, months.) Then it will catch on fire. 9. Verify your business requirements. There is a big difference between 'seven transactions per second' and 'one transaction every seven seconds'. Submit a sustained load of the first against an environment that can only handle the second and you can cause a TON of damage.
That phrase is from a text only adventure game (likely from before you were born.) The proper response is 'You are likely to be eaten by a Grue' at which point you both laugh and go on to the next question.
The next answer, of course, is (assuming the punch cards were numbered sequentially) to toss the first one (1 isn't defined for 'prime-ness'), keep the second one. Now flip through the deck putting an X on every second card. Pick the next one that doesn't have an X (in this case, the third card - thus X = 3.) Now flip through the deck and every 3rd card put an X. Go back to the front of the deck and pick the next card without an X (in this case, the 5 card, thus X = 5) Flip through the deck and every 5th card put an X. Some cards will have more than one X, that's fine. When you get done all the cards without an X are prime numbers.
Or you could simply code your function one line at a time onto the punch cards, feed them into the reader and have the 9370 in the back room run your program and spit out a list of prime numbers on the line printer. Simple.
Biggest difference between experienced developers and newbie developers : the accuracy their time estimates.
Experienced professional developers quote you a time that includes the initial imagination, design, write the application and at the same time keep the documentation accurate, write the traceability documentation, deployment package creation, creating test plans, testing the code with unit and integration testing, get it ready for client acceptance testing - all while working around the SLAs of external contributing parties.
Newbies will tell you how long it would take them to actually crank out the source code in their favorite IDE while they are hopped up on caffeine, assuming they were able to hack away at it without interruption for 10 hours each day until the code will compile and run.
Same task - Old Timer Estimate : two weeks. Newbie Estimate : two days.
I actually wrote code that was self-modifying, managed to crank a four page pyramid of nested if-then-else blocks of code into one amazing twelve line chunk of code that modified itself at runtime based on the evolution of the data as it was being processed.
Think further down the road. Five years from now you and I will be using machines this powerful to prop open doors. Five years after that we won't even be able to give them away on Craigslist.
The 1280x800 screen is also pretty nifty.
I envision a bunch of these getting back-fitted with XP, and once done I am guessing they will run pretty nicely. Vista on this thing - well I've heard stupider things, but not today.
In your honest opinion - how's it fare as a sub $600 12" laptop that's 1" thick and about 1 kilo in weight?
Someone else said it better than I : Netbooks are brand new used laptops. This is basically priced about the same as a nice high-end used 12" ultra-light laptop, but is new in the box.
I paid $400 for a nice used Dell e1505 about a year ago, paid another $100 to upgrade the memory to 2G - current specs are 1.66GHz Core2Duo, 120G drive, 2G of RAM, Wifi, and a 15.4" 1280x800 screen. Battery lasts about 3 hours and it weighs about 5 or 6 lbs. Too big to carry under my jacket but it does have a CD-RW/DVD and a good sound system (well, good enough to watch DVDs on in a hotel.) Would this machine be a better buy, given a year warranty - it would be close. At $500 (exactly what I paid for my used one) it would be a no-brainer.
But seriously - two things to remember about the new netbook : the price at $600 (which someone else calculated above) assumes that the Australian price is the same price it will have in the USA (which is generally not the case - Aussies pay a pretty serious markup on cool toys, enough that it's worth buying them here when they come visit), and this one finally delivers a screen resolution is finally high enough to get some real work done. The 320x240 (or even the high dollar 640x480) resolution iPaqs - not even big enough to see most dialog boxes in Windows when doing a Termserver connection. 800x600 isn't much better - what is this, 1995? Life begins at 1024x768 and the real juice starts about one notch higher than that.
They figure how to ship these in the $400 range in the States and I see them selling a TON of them. At $500 it is competing with $500 laptops and a bit of a toss up. At $600 it is a yuppy toy - which means I might get lucky and buy one used a year from now for half that.
This is sooo close to the overall truth to why Windows (and Linux) take so long to boot.
The systems in the DOS world were hard-coded via boot / initialization files to load exactly the hardware drivers for the hardware configured in the machine. Hardware was hand configured by a person, set to IRQ/DMA/Memory addresses that were generally accepted as appropriate, and conflicts were reconfigured manually. The autoexec.bat and config.sys files were manually tweaked by hand to reflect the different cards - and Boom! it all loaded lightning fast because it was simply following instructions - computers do this very well.
Current OSs have a gazillion different permutations of hardware that could present when they boot each time and they have the drivers for all the hardware present. They interrogate the hardware, every subsystem they can find on the different places that could have hardware and then one by one they load the different drivers for the cards, dynamically allocate the hardware (Plug n Play) with IRQs and DMAs and Memory locations and try it out to see if it works, try again if it doesn't. But it's a matter of 'Hello PCI slot #1 - what kind of card are you?' and then negotiating the drivers, hardware allcations, etc. That's why you can install the drivers for two different video cards, and each time you shut down / restart the system you can swap the video card for the other one and - the system boots up and works nicely - that's one nice benefit, the other benefit being that it's "easier" for the common user to get a system up and running.
The above is the reason that ultra-fast hard drives don't really make much difference in boot times, why stripping out processes make some but not a ton of difference - because the hardware interrogation / allocation / driver load process is not a particularly quick endeavor.
If we had a way to hard-code the list of hardware, and even the resource allocation (IRQ / DMA / Memory locations / etc) that the computer is running and guarantee to the OS that it is the same each time the system boots - that OS could boot a LOT faster than current systems boot. It might possibly be a way to boots that are faster than restoring a 'hibernate to disk' session because a 'hibernate to disk' session has to restore the complete system state regardless of system state, meaning it actually has to populate the entire system state including swap file, etc. A hardware boot with a predefined system configuration can configure the system and load the drivers for the base OS, leave the rest of the system basically uninitialized for use by programs as they allocate the memory once the user logs in and starts running programs.
It's one step backwards, and three steps forwards. Worth it? If someone decides so - go for it (just give me credit for the idea - that's how GPL works, right?)
Raytracing is also very cluster friendly. One of my favorite cluster benchmarks / demos is showing how the Persistence of Vision Raytracer runs on a single node, two nodes, three, four... (my cluster is only four nodes, so I don't know how well it scales after that.)
For what it's worth, based on that benchmark my current cluster would have placed in the Top 100 in 1993.
Sorry - brain no worky today. 486DX-33MHz vs 486DX/2-66MHz. The Pentium example was going to be the 60MHz vs 66MHz (and yea, those extra 6MHz were pretty damn expensive on the first generation boxes.) Merge the two, add a glass of scotch and what I wrote is what you read.
I've been building / hacking together machines since shortly after the words IBM and AT were used together in one breath. What I've seen, over generations of building machines with the intent of upgrading them was that if you build it using a good upgradable motherboard and power supply, you might get lucky and the machine will be good for a single generation of upgrade after 12-18 months.
- Meaning maybe roughly 12 months later it's cost effective to upgrade : - - to a same generation CPU that is quite a bit faster (think Pentium 33MHz to Pentium 133MHz, or PII-300 to PIII-900MHz) - - the amount of memory can generally be doubled (although given the current cost of RAM and the limit of 32 bit OS, it's almost cost effective to max it out at purchase - but with 64 bit OSs I think this will still hold) - - a second hard drive that is twice as large as the one you bought a year earlier (effectively tripling the space) - - maybe adding a video card that is twice as fast as the first one you had in it.
About a year after you build your ultra-upgradable machine, the architecture changes (chipsets, video card platform, memory sockets, memory type, CPU sockets, hard drive interfaces) so the upgrade options taper off fast. Six months after that you can still upgrade to faster hardware at a premium price, but in very short order it's cheaper to replace the machine w/ current generation architecture than to upgrade 2 or more sub-systems. About a year after that, the machine is relegated to door-stop duty.
The problem is - the year over year increases are so steep that this happens no matter where on the curve you are when you buy. Think back - the premium for the DX2-66 was about $400 over the DX2-50, the premium for 16M of 72-pin SIMM memory was about $800 over 4M of 72-pin SIMM memory - but two years later it really didn't matter because with the P2-300MHz machines coming with 64M of PC100 memory - your two year old box wasn't fast enough regardless of whether you payed the $1,200 premium to get those two bumps or not. You could always pay another $1,200 premium for that next machine and get the P2-500MHz w/ 192M of memory, but two years later when the P4 based machines running 1.8GHz and 512M of memory - it really didn't matter whether you splurged for the extra umph or not - the box needed to be upgraded.
Is $11k out of line for a machine that's going to be on-par with the next generation of hardware, and obsolete in three years regardless? Probably. Unless you have a business reason for it, I'd say yes. I said the same thing about LCDs when IBM was selling their 16" LCD for $1,600, and SSDs were $100 per Gig. Today - both are reasonably priced, and maybe these guys will pioneer the path towards the next revolution in hardware platforms. Have to admit this much - of the $11k, how much is actual material cost and how much is 'OMFG 1337 haxor' premium? That's the margin that these machines will come down in about three years, making the platform affordable (or not.)
In my opinion there are two places that this machine makes sense - high end CAD where a company is paying $30k per seat to license the software and $125k per year for the guy behind the keyboard (25% faster machine = 1/4 fewer seats) or working on hard-duration projects (finish designing the next Space Shuttle by June 1st and get a $5M bonus.) Other than that - and the obvious rich gamer - I'd say a given day's task set would be better served by a couple three or four desktops all coming through to a single multi-LCD machine that rdesktop's to all the others, allowing the user 1 machine per LCD and the ability to mouse from machine to machine and control all of them from a single keyboard / mouse. RAIC - redundant array of inexpensive computers - it gets normal multi-tasking 'work' done faster.
Generally the database data would reside on a commercial grade SAN on real disks, not in a virtual disk.
Given that, and the server software running in a VM, you get :
100% uptime even in the face of hardware upgrades. VMware lets you migrate a running VM from one physical machine to a different physical machine without bringing down the running virtual machine.
Even if you're ok with bringing down the virtual machine, the ability to move the VM from one box to a new box without changing / reinstalling / doing ANYTHING - upgrade hardware to much faster hardware in about an hour with very little effort - and if you go from a single CPU box to a much faster single CPU box, you don't even pay licensing upgrade fees for 'per CPU licensing'.
Snapshots make replicating the environment to use in your DEV / TEST / PERF environments... a snap. Just rename the server and use different data.
Ditto for Disaster Recovery.
Ability to provision multiple servers on a single physical box, effectively minimizing the impact of adding each additional machine on your environment (heat, space, electricity).
Ability to bring different virtual servers up / down on the same hardware, giving you much more flexibility on how you use your existing hardware.
Because it's FUN! (Yea I know - I need to get out more.)
Never attribute to 'lazy and arrogant' that which is adequately explained by 'stupid'.
I'll give Gnome another try. The only reason I switched from Gnome to KDE was because the option to make icons line up to a grid was either hidden or broken - it's been a while, I forget which.
And I didn't say obfuscating the user interface behind esoteric names with personality was bad - I just said that as long as it's happening Linux is going to be rejected by the mouth breathing common populace. The scotch I drink tastes like someone snuffed a cigar out in a glass of salt water - personally I like it but I will admit it's pretty nasty, and it doesn't surprise me that it's fairly uncommon at the restaurants / bars I frequent. If the distillery wants to sell scotch to the mass public, they have to bottle something that doesn't taste like ass (those of you that have a bottle of Oban or Lagavulin in your liquor cabinet know what I'm talking about.)
Without going into many details, I'm not exactly a n00b. Given that my first interaction with a keyboard was on a new Commodore PET, there's a strong possibility I've been doing this longer than many of the people in this thread have been alive.
Want to know why I spend 2/3rds of my time in Windows (the rest in SuSE 10.3 on KDE 3.x)
1) The games I play, play in Windows. I have no inclination to fumble-fuck around with emulators or what have you trying to get MS Flight Simulator 2004 or STALKER or Team Fortress 2 running on Linux, not sure it's even possible. 2) The fonts in Windows have been optimized at the per-pixel level to match up with LCD monitors. In KDE 3.x the fonts are about where they were in the Windows 3.1 world, circa 1995. Big pudgy letters that my eyes have to fight to glom. Especially in FireFox on Linux. 3) For fucks sake - where's the calculator? It's bad enough that I can't hover over the different parts of the start menu (or what ever it's called) and just see what's under there, drill down without it hiding all the other stuff because it 'page flipped' - but the calculator isn't called 'calculator'. It's called kcalc. And the movie player isn't called 'movie player'. It's called ICEwigga or something. And the music player isn't called 'music player' - it's called kude or some shit like that.
I can get past the games, because - I understand. I can get past the fonts, because - it's only a matter of time before they get better. But if we don't start naming the applications a little better in Linux, there's NO WAY it's going mainstream. If someone with 25+ years software engineering experience can't play movies because the movie player is hidden behind the name ICEwigga or whatever, what does that mean for the regular people? It means they are going to use Windows - simple as that.
All that useless ranting aside - I am totally looking forward to picking up a 'refurb' Linux based netbook for 1/3rd off retail.
Slashdot Mirror
I learn something new every day - props for that.
I wouldn't be surprised if the network was based on some sort of serial communications, but that's just a guess (I was headed towards the C= machines by then, and we could only dream of networks on that platform ... even doing serial to analog comms was a pretty serious hassle.)
Days go by that I wish Pascal had taken off - nobody remembers the Pascal vs. C holy wars, but let's just say I started early on the wrong side. In an undergrad C course I actually wrote a Pascal to C compiler that evolved over the course of the semester, did all the projects in Pascal and just ran the working code through my compiler to convert it to C. If the resulting C code didn't work, I tweaked my compiler until I got working C code as output.
Pretty neat trick, esp since I'm not aware there ever was a Pascal compiler for the TRS-80 Model II.
Maybe you fondly rememberingthe UCSD Pascal compiler for the Apple II series of computers, or maybe Borland's Pascal compiler on the IBM PC/XT or AT class machines - but best of my memory the (dare I call it this, lovingly of course) Trash80 booted directly into a ROM based BASIC in a fashion similar to that of the Commodore machines of the time (the Vic-20, the C=64) with the ability to store data streams and poke the values directly into memory lest you felt spunky and wanted to code in machine language.
And yes, I feel dirty for knowing all of the above.
Actually software can be proved correct.
It's an extension of computer language theory that leverages the concepts surrounding deterministic / finite state machines and asserts some of the theory in the transform from non-deterministic to deterministic.
It was painfully obvious to me when I saw it, and I honestly couldn't believe that the end of the semester didn't bring it all together to show that software can be provably correct - meaning I may need to actually draw the line to connect the dots for the rest of the world to see. If that's the case, I'm going to have a slam-dunk doctoral thesis.
There are a few videos on youtube of guys that RAID'ed iRAM's showing just insane performance.
If it weren't for the cost of adding four of these (plus four 1G sticks of pc3200 on each) I would have already scored a similar rig - but right now I'm working on a limited R&D budget. Maybe next year.
That said - these are really, really sweet - but I have to ask whether the RAID'ed iRAM or the new Micron SSD can hold a candle to a ramdisk ( see also : http://www.ramdisk.tk/ ) - I figure on a machine that can actually address 8G or more of memory (likely : Windows 2003 Server based) and use a massive chunk of it as a ramdrive - which is going to come out ahead?
Say what?
Actually, RAID can work EXACTLY in this way. Set up a RAID 0 array of 250Mb/s devices and if the host controller can handle it - bingo, Gigabit throughput from the array. There's a guy out there that RAID'ed six of the Gigabyte iRAM cards on some high end RAID card a year ago - and he managed somewhere in the neighborhood of 800MB/s - surely a year later we can do better than that. The only limitations his rig encountered were the limited space available, and of course the volatile nature of the iRAM cards.
The things by Micron appears to have handled the issue of volatile memory when the memory goes down, and getting all the bandwidth through a single channel bus. When it becomes commercially available - count me in for one (when the price comes down enough for me to afford it.)
On the off chance that the kid IS a prodigy, I'm thinking skip the laptop and get the kid working with cryptography. Just think of the possibilities that would be open for a kid that can crack 256-bit encryption in real time in his head, the way some of us can tell what speed a modem connects by listening to it, or the way some of us can tell which numbers were pushed on the phone by hearing the tones. That kid would be the Golden Child of computers if the NSA didn't off him first.
I wouldn't be surprised to read that the jetpack he is using is based strongly on the engine that powered the ME-163. The 'fuel tank' consisted of two bladders - one full of concentrated hydrogen peroxide and the other full of high grade methanol.
Actually wikipedia says that the first component wasn't H202 but N2H4 - but I'm skeptical. I've always heard it was concentrated peroxide, and lab experiments I've seen support that theory.
Regardless - back in WWII the biggest threat to the ME163 pilots wasn't getting shot down by other planes, it was having their fuel cells leak this stuff into the plane (which would dissolve the pilot - nasty stuff.)
Me : Well there's the Pythagorean Proof ...
Interviewer : That's the Pythagorean Theorem, it hasn't actually been proven.
Me : Hand me that pencil and a piece of paper.
(No joke. Solved it on the back of a napkin at a restaurant in Portland Maine, eating prime rib, in early 2000.)
Oh man - I love fresh graduates. No mistakes - that's awesome.
I've made mistakes. Hell, I've probably destroyed more computer hardware (dollar value) than most people will ever own.
Best lessons I ever learned? .. unplug it first.
1. If you are going to take a machine apart piece by piece (for example to replace a toner fuser roller)
2. If you on the phone are walking someone through replacing a video card, don't assume they unplugged it. Or even turned it off.
3. Netware will run until the hardware dies. Bring the server down once in a while to blow out the dust-bunnies.
4. If you are ever called to disassemble an IBM System 32, leave your regular computer toolkit at the office. Bring a hacksaw, vice grips, a four foot crowbar, and a four pound sledge.
5. Computer hard drives are not full of 'magic air' and even if you take off the cover and watch the disk spin and the heads move it will continue to operate. For a while.
6. A CRT monitor that has been turned off and unplugged still has a LOT of electricity hiding under the case.
7. The PS/2 mouse and keyboard connectors are physically identical and on some machines you can plug then in either socket. If you plug your keyboard into the mouse hole and smoke comes out of the back, your computer is not one of machines.
8. A CGA monitor with a flyback that is going out will make a very high pitch whine for a very long time (weeks, months.) Then it will catch on fire.
9. Verify your business requirements. There is a big difference between 'seven transactions per second' and 'one transaction every seven seconds'. Submit a sustained load of the first against an environment that can only handle the second and you can cause a TON of damage.
That phrase is from a text only adventure game (likely from before you were born.) The proper response is 'You are likely to be eaten by a Grue' at which point you both laugh and go on to the next question.
The next answer, of course, is (assuming the punch cards were numbered sequentially) to toss the first one (1 isn't defined for 'prime-ness'), keep the second one. Now flip through the deck putting an X on every second card. Pick the next one that doesn't have an X (in this case, the third card - thus X = 3.) Now flip through the deck and every 3rd card put an X. Go back to the front of the deck and pick the next card without an X (in this case, the 5 card, thus X = 5) Flip through the deck and every 5th card put an X. Some cards will have more than one X, that's fine.
When you get done all the cards without an X are prime numbers.
Or you could simply code your function one line at a time onto the punch cards, feed them into the reader and have the 9370 in the back room run your program and spit out a list of prime numbers on the line printer. Simple.
No, I assure you - you are likely to be eaten by a Grue.
Biggest difference between experienced developers and newbie developers : the accuracy their time estimates.
Experienced professional developers quote you a time that includes the initial imagination, design, write the application and at the same time keep the documentation accurate, write the traceability documentation, deployment package creation, creating test plans, testing the code with unit and integration testing, get it ready for client acceptance testing - all while working around the SLAs of external contributing parties.
Newbies will tell you how long it would take them to actually crank out the source code in their favorite IDE while they are hopped up on caffeine, assuming they were able to hack away at it without interruption for 10 hours each day until the code will compile and run.
Same task -
Old Timer Estimate : two weeks.
Newbie Estimate : two days.
Guess how long it actually takes ...
I like that last one.
I actually wrote code that was self-modifying, managed to crank a four page pyramid of nested if-then-else blocks of code into one amazing twelve line chunk of code that modified itself at runtime based on the evolution of the data as it was being processed.
When I was young.
And stupid.
Think further down the road. Five years from now you and I will be using machines this powerful to prop open doors. Five years after that we won't even be able to give them away on Craigslist.
The 1280x800 screen is also pretty nifty. I envision a bunch of these getting back-fitted with XP, and once done I am guessing they will run pretty nicely. Vista on this thing - well I've heard stupider things, but not today.
In your honest opinion - how's it fare as a sub $600 12" laptop that's 1" thick and about 1 kilo in weight?
Someone else said it better than I : Netbooks are brand new used laptops.
This is basically priced about the same as a nice high-end used 12" ultra-light laptop, but is new in the box.
I paid $400 for a nice used Dell e1505 about a year ago, paid another $100 to upgrade the memory to 2G - current specs are 1.66GHz Core2Duo, 120G drive, 2G of RAM, Wifi, and a 15.4" 1280x800 screen. Battery lasts about 3 hours and it weighs about 5 or 6 lbs. Too big to carry under my jacket but it does have a CD-RW/DVD and a good sound system (well, good enough to watch DVDs on in a hotel.) Would this machine be a better buy, given a year warranty - it would be close. At $500 (exactly what I paid for my used one) it would be a no-brainer.
Also, tasty cheese.
Fumunda?
But seriously - two things to remember about the new netbook : the price at $600 (which someone else calculated above) assumes that the Australian price is the same price it will have in the USA (which is generally not the case - Aussies pay a pretty serious markup on cool toys, enough that it's worth buying them here when they come visit), and this one finally delivers a screen resolution is finally high enough to get some real work done. The 320x240 (or even the high dollar 640x480) resolution iPaqs - not even big enough to see most dialog boxes in Windows when doing a Termserver connection. 800x600 isn't much better - what is this, 1995? Life begins at 1024x768 and the real juice starts about one notch higher than that.
They figure how to ship these in the $400 range in the States and I see them selling a TON of them. At $500 it is competing with $500 laptops and a bit of a toss up. At $600 it is a yuppy toy - which means I might get lucky and buy one used a year from now for half that.
This is sooo close to the overall truth to why Windows (and Linux) take so long to boot.
The systems in the DOS world were hard-coded via boot / initialization files to load exactly the hardware drivers for the hardware configured in the machine. Hardware was hand configured by a person, set to IRQ/DMA/Memory addresses that were generally accepted as appropriate, and conflicts were reconfigured manually. The autoexec.bat and config.sys files were manually tweaked by hand to reflect the different cards - and Boom! it all loaded lightning fast because it was simply following instructions - computers do this very well.
Current OSs have a gazillion different permutations of hardware that could present when they boot each time and they have the drivers for all the hardware present. They interrogate the hardware, every subsystem they can find on the different places that could have hardware and then one by one they load the different drivers for the cards, dynamically allocate the hardware (Plug n Play) with IRQs and DMAs and Memory locations and try it out to see if it works, try again if it doesn't. But it's a matter of 'Hello PCI slot #1 - what kind of card are you?' and then negotiating the drivers, hardware allcations, etc. That's why you can install the drivers for two different video cards, and each time you shut down / restart the system you can swap the video card for the other one and - the system boots up and works nicely - that's one nice benefit, the other benefit being that it's "easier" for the common user to get a system up and running.
The above is the reason that ultra-fast hard drives don't really make much difference in boot times, why stripping out processes make some but not a ton of difference - because the hardware interrogation / allocation / driver load process is not a particularly quick endeavor.
If we had a way to hard-code the list of hardware, and even the resource allocation (IRQ / DMA / Memory locations / etc) that the computer is running and guarantee to the OS that it is the same each time the system boots - that OS could boot a LOT faster than current systems boot. It might possibly be a way to boots that are faster than restoring a 'hibernate to disk' session because a 'hibernate to disk' session has to restore the complete system state regardless of system state, meaning it actually has to populate the entire system state including swap file, etc. A hardware boot with a predefined system configuration can configure the system and load the drivers for the base OS, leave the rest of the system basically uninitialized for use by programs as they allocate the memory once the user logs in and starts running programs.
It's one step backwards, and three steps forwards. Worth it? If someone decides so - go for it (just give me credit for the idea - that's how GPL works, right?)
Raytracing is also very cluster friendly. One of my favorite cluster benchmarks / demos is showing how the Persistence of Vision Raytracer runs on a single node, two nodes, three, four ... (my cluster is only four nodes, so I don't know how well it scales after that.)
For what it's worth, based on that benchmark my current cluster would have placed in the Top 100 in 1993.
Sorry - brain no worky today.
486DX-33MHz vs 486DX/2-66MHz.
The Pentium example was going to be the 60MHz vs 66MHz (and yea, those extra 6MHz were pretty damn expensive on the first generation boxes.)
Merge the two, add a glass of scotch and what I wrote is what you read.
I've been building / hacking together machines since shortly after the words IBM and AT were used together in one breath. What I've seen, over generations of building machines with the intent of upgrading them was that if you build it using a good upgradable motherboard and power supply, you might get lucky and the machine will be good for a single generation of upgrade after 12-18 months.
- Meaning maybe roughly 12 months later it's cost effective to upgrade :
- - to a same generation CPU that is quite a bit faster (think Pentium 33MHz to Pentium 133MHz, or PII-300 to PIII-900MHz)
- - the amount of memory can generally be doubled (although given the current cost of RAM and the limit of 32 bit OS, it's almost cost effective to max it out at purchase - but with 64 bit OSs I think this will still hold)
- - a second hard drive that is twice as large as the one you bought a year earlier (effectively tripling the space)
- - maybe adding a video card that is twice as fast as the first one you had in it.
About a year after you build your ultra-upgradable machine, the architecture changes (chipsets, video card platform, memory sockets, memory type, CPU sockets, hard drive interfaces) so the upgrade options taper off fast. Six months after that you can still upgrade to faster hardware at a premium price, but in very short order it's cheaper to replace the machine w/ current generation architecture than to upgrade 2 or more sub-systems. About a year after that, the machine is relegated to door-stop duty.
The problem is - the year over year increases are so steep that this happens no matter where on the curve you are when you buy. Think back - the premium for the DX2-66 was about $400 over the DX2-50, the premium for 16M of 72-pin SIMM memory was about $800 over 4M of 72-pin SIMM memory - but two years later it really didn't matter because with the P2-300MHz machines coming with 64M of PC100 memory - your two year old box wasn't fast enough regardless of whether you payed the $1,200 premium to get those two bumps or not. You could always pay another $1,200 premium for that next machine and get the P2-500MHz w/ 192M of memory, but two years later when the P4 based machines running 1.8GHz and 512M of memory - it really didn't matter whether you splurged for the extra umph or not - the box needed to be upgraded.
Is $11k out of line for a machine that's going to be on-par with the next generation of hardware, and obsolete in three years regardless? Probably. Unless you have a business reason for it, I'd say yes. I said the same thing about LCDs when IBM was selling their 16" LCD for $1,600, and SSDs were $100 per Gig. Today - both are reasonably priced, and maybe these guys will pioneer the path towards the next revolution in hardware platforms. Have to admit this much - of the $11k, how much is actual material cost and how much is 'OMFG 1337 haxor' premium? That's the margin that these machines will come down in about three years, making the platform affordable (or not.)
In my opinion there are two places that this machine makes sense - high end CAD where a company is paying $30k per seat to license the software and $125k per year for the guy behind the keyboard (25% faster machine = 1/4 fewer seats) or working on hard-duration projects (finish designing the next Space Shuttle by June 1st and get a $5M bonus.) Other than that - and the obvious rich gamer - I'd say a given day's task set would be better served by a couple three or four desktops all coming through to a single multi-LCD machine that rdesktop's to all the others, allowing the user 1 machine per LCD and the ability to mouse from machine to machine and control all of them from a single keyboard / mouse. RAIC - redundant array of inexpensive computers - it gets normal multi-tasking 'work' done faster.
Also known as 'What are you doing wrong with my bug-free code?'
Generally the database data would reside on a commercial grade SAN on real disks, not in a virtual disk.
Given that, and the server software running in a VM, you get :
100% uptime even in the face of hardware upgrades. VMware lets you migrate a running VM from one physical machine to a different physical machine without bringing down the running virtual machine.
Even if you're ok with bringing down the virtual machine, the ability to move the VM from one box to a new box without changing / reinstalling / doing ANYTHING - upgrade hardware to much faster hardware in about an hour with very little effort - and if you go from a single CPU box to a much faster single CPU box, you don't even pay licensing upgrade fees for 'per CPU licensing'.
Snapshots make replicating the environment to use in your DEV / TEST / PERF environments ... a snap. Just rename the server and use different data.
Ditto for Disaster Recovery.
Ability to provision multiple servers on a single physical box, effectively minimizing the impact of adding each additional machine on your environment (heat, space, electricity).
Ability to bring different virtual servers up / down on the same hardware, giving you much more flexibility on how you use your existing hardware.
Because it's FUN! (Yea I know - I need to get out more.)
Never attribute to 'lazy and arrogant' that which is adequately explained by 'stupid'.
I'll give Gnome another try. The only reason I switched from Gnome to KDE was because the option to make icons line up to a grid was either hidden or broken - it's been a while, I forget which.
And I didn't say obfuscating the user interface behind esoteric names with personality was bad - I just said that as long as it's happening Linux is going to be rejected by the mouth breathing common populace. The scotch I drink tastes like someone snuffed a cigar out in a glass of salt water - personally I like it but I will admit it's pretty nasty, and it doesn't surprise me that it's fairly uncommon at the restaurants / bars I frequent. If the distillery wants to sell scotch to the mass public, they have to bottle something that doesn't taste like ass (those of you that have a bottle of Oban or Lagavulin in your liquor cabinet know what I'm talking about.)
Without going into many details, I'm not exactly a n00b. Given that my first interaction with a keyboard was on a new Commodore PET, there's a strong possibility I've been doing this longer than many of the people in this thread have been alive.
Want to know why I spend 2/3rds of my time in Windows (the rest in SuSE 10.3 on KDE 3.x)
1) The games I play, play in Windows. I have no inclination to fumble-fuck around with emulators or what have you trying to get MS Flight Simulator 2004 or STALKER or Team Fortress 2 running on Linux, not sure it's even possible.
2) The fonts in Windows have been optimized at the per-pixel level to match up with LCD monitors. In KDE 3.x the fonts are about where they were in the Windows 3.1 world, circa 1995. Big pudgy letters that my eyes have to fight to glom. Especially in FireFox on Linux.
3) For fucks sake - where's the calculator? It's bad enough that I can't hover over the different parts of the start menu (or what ever it's called) and just see what's under there, drill down without it hiding all the other stuff because it 'page flipped' - but the calculator isn't called 'calculator'. It's called kcalc. And the movie player isn't called 'movie player'. It's called ICEwigga or something. And the music player isn't called 'music player' - it's called kude or some shit like that.
I can get past the games, because - I understand.
I can get past the fonts, because - it's only a matter of time before they get better.
But if we don't start naming the applications a little better in Linux, there's NO WAY it's going mainstream. If someone with 25+ years software engineering experience can't play movies because the movie player is hidden behind the name ICEwigga or whatever, what does that mean for the regular people? It means they are going to use Windows - simple as that.
All that useless ranting aside - I am totally looking forward to picking up a 'refurb' Linux based netbook for 1/3rd off retail.