if you want super-reliable and high throughput, why even bother with commodity 32 bit Wintel crap? Get on eBay and buy a nice 64 bit "real computer" with maybe 1/3 the cpu speed of an Intel PC with comparable throughput, ultra-SCSI & 100Mbit networking built in, the ability to boot form any partition on the hard disk (or boot from tape or the network if need be), ability to support multiple graphics cards, industrial grade power supplies, and disks that can (usually, knock on wood) spin for 7+ years with no problems.
If the applications are being used and are useful, they aren't obsolete. I don't WANT my bank to be using a J2EE app on a Windows 2000 Wintel box to compute my bank balance, I want code that's been refined and documented for the last 20 years! And I want it run on an OS with system calls that have at least 20 years of backward compatibility (VMS, VM, etc.) !!
This trendy business of designing an Enterprise application backward from a pretty GUI as the main anchor point using IDE code wizards (by dumb-ass morons who don't even know basic algorithms or design patterns), coupled with "software engineering tools" like Rational Rose to let even computer illiterate ignoramuses participate in the early design process, is producing a pile of muck that is 10x the size of what is needed to do a given job with 100x the bugs.
baked clay seems to do pretty well, too, as long as it isn't broken by earthquake or shattered by uneven heating in fire. Perhaps we should all etch our deepest thoughts into our toilet bowls.
or more properly, Windows admins are "reboot/reinstall monkeys". Funny that when the major healthcare insurance software company I worked for wanted to deploy NT in their all-Unix datacenter, they asked ME, the Windows-hater, to do it, rather than the incompetent click/point IT department. Those morons never bothered to learn how to secure Windows, and couldn't configure software environments of the companies own new products for anything but the default install. Windows admins are by and large a lazy bunch of underachievers with Certification. And ditto for the "code wizard weenie" dumb-asses who need a high-powered IDE to write software or they can't even function, who are totally ignorant of fundamental algorithms and design patterns.
Is there a cult of metric haters that I'm not aware of?
yes, the inhabitants of the U.S. of A. I remember being taught the metric system (but the non-ISO version with centimeters and liters) in the 70's, because we'd (we as in U.S.A) would all be using it by 1980. But we stubbornly stick to the length of the kings thumb on extended arm to his nose for length (gerd....now pronounced yard) and work a horse could do in 1 second, etc.etc..
that's very cool - I wonder if Motorola, TI, NatSem, and company still do that? I had to throw away my databooks as they became brittle yellow silverfish food. Makes me wonder about my Intel and AMD databooks.......hope they're at least acid-free paper....
That book was written using black ink made from tree fungus and red ink from lead on sheepskin parchment. I don't think your Bic or Parker on Hammermill paper is going to even cut 300 years.
Only problem is that devices can age and wear out just sitting on the shelf - electrolytic capacitors can dry out, transformers can leak PCB's, metals can corrode, etc.
A schematic does not contain all of the information needed to build a device, either. Seeing, for example, that a 2N2222 bipolar NPN transistor is required for an amplifier isn't going to be too useful in the year 2100, I would bet. And the paper those semiconductor companies use for those big thick spec books? that crap turns yellow and falls apart in 10 years!
Matt Dillon, of FreeBSD kernel/VM: "There is constant borrowing going on between the BSDs and even between BSD and Linux, especially in regards to driver code." http://www.osnews.com/printer.php?news_id=153
Stealing or copying code or even algorithms (without proper credit) would be wrong, but it seems these developers don't think it is wrong to look to learn, like say learn additional new SCSI command a newer model controller might support.
Would it be wrong to look at Sun's code to see how atomicity on SMP UltraSparcIII system is done? I wouldn't think so, as long as one didn't cut & paste their code
The educational value of Open Source of whatever licensing should be open to all, to use for whatever constructive purpose.
P.S. Exuberqnce of last post due to 2nd day of Thanksgiving celebration, was feeling fine. And it may happen again sometime!
Yes, the Pentium IV PCs certainly look good compared to high end Unix workstations.....found some nice charts here
Still, I prefer to admin and work with Unix workstations over Wintel PC's (and by the way, the Sun Ultra 5 and 10 and other PC-architecture machines are crap, avoid them!)
As to what is cool about them? one cool thing is that the boot PROM will let you boot into any partition or from any mass storage device.....ever boot your PC (with empty hard disk) from a tape? Or booted and installed a system from another over network with no boot media on new virgin machine? Also, can hook terminal or PC to serial port and have full console access to boot PROM. How about dual 3D graphics cards for CADD or scientific visualization? No problems getting device drivers for native OS. No need to buy seperate SCSI card because built in (except in PC-type crap systems)! And Linux and *BSD support most of devices because there just aren't as many (admins like this). Also, end user has much more difficult time bringing game CD or floppies or other such crap from home to screw up system!
haha! You're saying they can't look at source of similar projects to learn and then write very own implentation of something. I have news for you, the BSD people often look at Linux device drivers (GPL or similar non-BSD) and write THEIR VERY OWN IMPLEMENTATION of device driversfor same device for NetBSD, OpenBSD, FreeBSD, etc.etc. And other things too! Should those people should have thrown up their hands and cried "I'm TAINTED.....TAAAAAINTEEEEEED! "...kind of like lepers in Old Testament yelling "UNCLEAN, UNCLEAN!" ??? Get Real!
In a vacuum, I would believe laser could be undetectable (given proper focusing AND columnation to eliminate off-axis radiation), but if someone is shooting a beam at a sattelite, there's going to be dust and vapor scattering and even flourescing atmospheric gas to contend with.....
By the way, they really don't "triangulate", they "hyperbolate"....the difference in receive times of two aircraft to a field radio's signal gives a hyperbola on a map - the signal could have originated anywhere on the hyperbola (remember from high school math, the locus of all points whose difference in distance from two points is a constant). Adding a third aircraft or a second measurement a sufficient time period later, and you have two hyperbolas. Dump bomb on the poor bastard at intersection of hyperbolas.
You misunderstand what happens in a good encryption system - ENTROPY is added to the information, so any patterns (even encoding the same information multiple times) are not discernable in reasonable amount of time by hacker. And voice will have small variations from one recording to the next, which will result in great chaotic variations in output, so I'll take a well-encrypted VOICE pattern over a TEXT one if I knew text or message was very likely to be similar from one transmission to the next.
Sorry, in the mid 90's Sun switched from BSD with System VR4 extensions (a.k.a. SunOS) to a microthreaded System V R4 with BSD extensions (Solaris 2.5 & up). Of course, Solaris 2.5, 2.6, 7 and 8 are also called SunOS 5.5, 5.6, 5.7 (which is also Solaris 2.7), and 5.8 (which is also Solaris 2.8). Gotta love the way Sun's marketing power adds that zing by skipping version numbers. And they also do it with hardware, the Sparc 3 actually sold as the Sparc 5, and then the Sparc 4 introduced after the 5 (which should have been 3) And the marketing department ran out of steam after having Sparc, Hypersparc, and Ultrasparc and couldn't think of any more names so they just then went UltraSparc II, IIi, III
*pop* the overfed BSD troll explodes and gooey troll glop drips from the ceiling - wasn't that fun!
Alas, Sun is not doing that anymore, but over 2,000 people took advantage of the ability to download the source code to Solaris 8 about 18 months ago (required Sun's compiler to actually COMPILE the thing, of course).
Unless....you're asking *me* to put it in a public place...sorry, had to give my written word I wouldn't do that to get access to it.
And yes, I did send e-mail to "Denasse" at Sun in the linked discussion thread, mentioning my over $700K procurement of Sun server and workstation gear at places I've worked in the past 11 years, and my desire to see Sun give some support to the Open Source BSD's as they have with Linux for the UltraSparc III processor line.
I can certainly understand why Theo would want Sun to show support to the BSD world as they have been for Linux, but....as a practical matter, couldn't the OpenBSD kernel developers look at the Solaris 8 source (which Sun was allowing download of) and the Linux code to get a pretty good idea of how to do UltraSparc-III specific kernel space optimizations?
As an aside, it'll be awhile before I get to run OpenBSD on an Ultra-III, my 70MHz Sparc 5 is doing just fine serving my domain with OpenBSD 3.1....you could almost here it breath a sigh of relief when the slow, load-heavy Solaris 2.6 was removed
VT300's to access legacy VAX/VMS databases that NOBODY knows exactly how to port to a newer platform
Oh, there's still plenty of us former VAX VMS admin/system/application programmers around (who now do Unix based solutions) that would be DELIGHTED to do this.....anyone with legacy systems that need integration/conversion/migration is welcomed to visit my website, read my resume, and contact me.
we call them lawyers, and if they're really twisted power hungry megalomaniacs in addition to being greedy money grubbing scum, we promote them to be judges
What benefits would you expect from a microthreaded kernel?
I switched from a monolithic one (SunOS 4.1.1B) to a microthreaded one (Solaris 2.5) on a Sparc 2 and my software ran at least 25% slower. I had a similar SPEEDUP switching from Solaris 2.6 to OpenBSD 2.9 on my Sparc 5
I could just imagine the benefits of all that kewl message passing on a constipated Intel architecture......do we hear 30% slowdown? 35%?
Slashdot Mirror
if you want super-reliable and high throughput, why even bother with commodity 32 bit Wintel crap? Get on eBay and buy a nice 64 bit "real computer" with maybe 1/3 the cpu speed of an Intel PC with comparable throughput, ultra-SCSI & 100Mbit networking built in, the ability to boot form any partition on the hard disk (or boot from tape or the network if need be), ability to support multiple graphics cards, industrial grade power supplies, and disks that can (usually, knock on wood) spin for 7+ years with no problems.
hey, I like that! Like the good old BSD days when you did sync;sync;sync;halt; right after kicking all the (l)users off!
If the applications are being used and are useful, they aren't obsolete. I don't WANT my bank to be using a J2EE app on a Windows 2000 Wintel box to compute my bank balance, I want code that's been refined and documented for the last 20 years! And I want it run on an OS with system calls that have at least 20 years of backward compatibility (VMS, VM, etc.) !!
This trendy business of designing an Enterprise application backward from a pretty GUI as the main anchor point using IDE code wizards (by dumb-ass morons who don't even know basic algorithms or design patterns), coupled with "software engineering tools" like Rational Rose to let even computer illiterate ignoramuses participate in the early design process, is producing a pile of muck that is 10x the size of what is needed to do a given job with 100x the bugs.
...and graphite particles and wood shavings are a good thing to be floating around inside a spacecraft?
baked clay seems to do pretty well, too, as long as it isn't broken by earthquake or shattered by uneven heating in fire. Perhaps we should all etch our deepest thoughts into our toilet bowls.
or more properly, Windows admins are "reboot/reinstall monkeys". Funny that when the major healthcare insurance software company I worked for wanted to deploy NT in their all-Unix datacenter, they asked ME, the Windows-hater, to do it, rather than the incompetent click/point IT department. Those morons never bothered to learn how to secure Windows, and couldn't configure software environments of the companies own new products for anything but the default install. Windows admins are by and large a lazy bunch of underachievers with Certification. And ditto for the "code wizard weenie" dumb-asses who need a high-powered IDE to write software or they can't even function, who are totally ignorant of fundamental algorithms and design patterns.
you mean, the SI meter is the distance light travels in 1/299792458 of a second. And we could argue that *that* number was chosen arbitrarily....
Is there a cult of metric haters that I'm not aware of?
yes, the inhabitants of the U.S. of A. I remember being taught the metric system (but the non-ISO version with centimeters and liters) in the 70's, because we'd (we as in U.S.A) would all be using it by 1980. But we stubbornly stick to the length of the kings thumb on extended arm to his nose for length (gerd....now pronounced yard) and work a horse could do in 1 second, etc.etc..
not your modern desktop system, but in the big-ass monster power suppies of the past
that's very cool - I wonder if Motorola, TI, NatSem, and company still do that? I had to throw away my databooks as they became brittle yellow silverfish food. Makes me wonder about my Intel and AMD databooks.......hope they're at least acid-free paper....
Not paper, parchment (kill a sheep, not a tree!) is what they used! Paper turns yellow then black as it oxidizes into dust, usually in 300-400 years.
That book was written using black ink made from tree fungus and red ink from lead on sheepskin parchment. I don't think your Bic or Parker on Hammermill paper is going to even cut 300 years.
Only problem is that devices can age and wear out just sitting on the shelf - electrolytic capacitors can dry out, transformers can leak PCB's, metals can corrode, etc.
A schematic does not contain all of the information needed to build a device, either. Seeing, for example, that a 2N2222 bipolar NPN transistor is required for an amplifier isn't going to be too useful in the year 2100, I would bet. And the paper those semiconductor companies use for those big thick spec books? that crap turns yellow and falls apart in 10 years!
The BBC wanted a computer for its "Computer Literacy Project", and the Acorn was chosen as exceeding specs. http://www.nvg.ntnu.no/bbc/history.php3
Matt Dillon, of FreeBSD kernel/VM: "There is constant borrowing going on between the BSDs and even between BSD and Linux, especially in regards to driver code." http://www.osnews.com/printer.php?news_id=153
Stealing or copying code or even algorithms (without proper credit) would be wrong, but it seems these developers don't think it is wrong to look to learn, like say learn additional new SCSI command a newer model controller might support.
Would it be wrong to look at Sun's code to see how atomicity on SMP UltraSparcIII system is done? I wouldn't think so, as long as one didn't cut & paste their code
The educational value of Open Source of whatever licensing should be open to all, to use for whatever constructive purpose.
P.S. Exuberqnce of last post due to 2nd day of Thanksgiving celebration, was feeling fine. And it may happen again sometime!
Yes, the Pentium IV PCs certainly look good compared to high end Unix workstations.....found some nice charts here Still, I prefer to admin and work with Unix workstations over Wintel PC's (and by the way, the Sun Ultra 5 and 10 and other PC-architecture machines are crap, avoid them!) As to what is cool about them? one cool thing is that the boot PROM will let you boot into any partition or from any mass storage device.....ever boot your PC (with empty hard disk) from a tape? Or booted and installed a system from another over network with no boot media on new virgin machine? Also, can hook terminal or PC to serial port and have full console access to boot PROM. How about dual 3D graphics cards for CADD or scientific visualization? No problems getting device drivers for native OS. No need to buy seperate SCSI card because built in (except in PC-type crap systems)! And Linux and *BSD support most of devices because there just aren't as many (admins like this). Also, end user has much more difficult time bringing game CD or floppies or other such crap from home to screw up system!
haha! You're saying they can't look at source of similar projects to learn and then write very own implentation of something. I have news for you, the BSD people often look at Linux device drivers (GPL or similar non-BSD) and write THEIR VERY OWN IMPLEMENTATION of device driversfor same device for NetBSD, OpenBSD, FreeBSD, etc.etc. And other things too! Should those people should have thrown up their hands and cried "I'm TAINTED.....TAAAAAINTEEEEEED! "...kind of like lepers in Old Testament yelling "UNCLEAN, UNCLEAN!" ??? Get Real!
In a vacuum, I would believe laser could be undetectable (given proper focusing AND columnation to eliminate off-axis radiation), but if someone is shooting a beam at a sattelite, there's going to be dust and vapor scattering and even flourescing atmospheric gas to contend with.....
By the way, they really don't "triangulate", they "hyperbolate"....the difference in receive times of two aircraft to a field radio's signal gives a hyperbola on a map - the signal could have originated anywhere on the hyperbola (remember from high school math, the locus of all points whose difference in distance from two points is a constant). Adding a third aircraft or a second measurement a sufficient time period later, and you have two hyperbolas. Dump bomb on the poor bastard at intersection of hyperbolas.
You misunderstand what happens in a good encryption system - ENTROPY is added to the information, so any patterns (even encoding the same information multiple times) are not discernable in reasonable amount of time by hacker. And voice will have small variations from one recording to the next, which will result in great chaotic variations in output, so I'll take a well-encrypted VOICE pattern over a TEXT one if I knew text or message was very likely to be similar from one transmission to the next.
Sorry, in the mid 90's Sun switched from BSD with System VR4 extensions (a.k.a. SunOS) to a microthreaded System V R4 with BSD extensions (Solaris 2.5 & up). Of course, Solaris 2.5, 2.6, 7 and 8 are also called SunOS 5.5, 5.6, 5.7 (which is also Solaris 2.7), and 5.8 (which is also Solaris 2.8). Gotta love the way Sun's marketing power adds that zing by skipping version numbers. And they also do it with hardware, the Sparc 3 actually sold as the Sparc 5, and then the Sparc 4 introduced after the 5 (which should have been 3) And the marketing department ran out of steam after having Sparc, Hypersparc, and Ultrasparc and couldn't think of any more names so they just then went UltraSparc II, IIi, III
*pop* the overfed BSD troll explodes and gooey troll glop drips from the ceiling - wasn't that fun!
Alas, Sun is not doing that anymore, but over 2,000 people took advantage of the ability to download the source code to Solaris 8 about 18 months ago (required Sun's compiler to actually COMPILE the thing, of course).
/
http://www.itworld.com/Comp/2377/IDG010628solaris
Unless....you're asking *me* to put it in a public place...sorry, had to give my written word I wouldn't do that to get access to it.
And yes, I did send e-mail to "Denasse" at Sun in the linked discussion thread, mentioning my over $700K procurement of Sun server and workstation gear at places I've worked in the past 11 years, and my desire to see Sun give some support to the Open Source BSD's as they have with Linux for the UltraSparc III processor line.
I can certainly understand why Theo would want Sun to show support to the BSD world as they have been for Linux, but....as a practical matter, couldn't the OpenBSD kernel developers look at the Solaris 8 source (which Sun was allowing download of) and the Linux code to get a pretty good idea of how to do UltraSparc-III specific kernel space optimizations?
As an aside, it'll be awhile before I get to run OpenBSD on an Ultra-III, my 70MHz Sparc 5 is doing just fine serving my domain with OpenBSD 3.1....you could almost here it breath a sigh of relief when the slow, load-heavy Solaris 2.6 was removed
VT300's to access legacy VAX/VMS databases that NOBODY knows exactly how to port to a newer platform
Oh, there's still plenty of us former VAX VMS admin/system/application programmers around (who now do Unix based solutions) that would be DELIGHTED to do this.....anyone with legacy systems that need integration/conversion/migration is welcomed to visit my website, read my resume, and contact me.
another greedy bastard has found a way
we call them lawyers, and if they're really twisted power hungry megalomaniacs in addition to being greedy money grubbing scum, we promote them to be judges
What benefits would you expect from a microthreaded kernel?
I switched from a monolithic one (SunOS 4.1.1B) to a microthreaded one (Solaris 2.5) on a Sparc 2 and my software ran at least 25% slower. I had a similar SPEEDUP switching from Solaris 2.6 to OpenBSD 2.9 on my Sparc 5
I could just imagine the benefits of all that kewl message passing on a constipated Intel architecture......do we hear 30% slowdown? 35%?