Oh, yeah -- I can be more absurd than you. Since all computers are based on transistors, we should scrap them all. They are, after all, based on technology designed in the 1940s and absolutely must be obsolete.
Nyah, nyah.
interesting footnote I learned something while looking in Wikipedia to find out when the "Univac" (there were more than one, of course) was released so I could compare it to the IBM System/360 (from which design, eventually, came the Shuttle CPUs). UNIVAC I, from 1951, used tanks of liquid mercury for memory. UNIVAC II (1958) had core memory. Wow!
The shuttle used hand woven magnetic core memory until 1990.
Yep. Stable, information-retaining (unfortunately, it even retains info after immersion in seawater), and basically immune to cosmic ray disruptions. Which doesn't require a lot of error-correction circuitry.... Not terribly data-dense or fast compared to semiconductor (part of the reason to replace it, after all) but it works.
It was designed in the 60s...
Actually, the computers themselves were designed the 70s, with updates in the 80s; core memory (I don't think you meant that) was actually from the 40s & 50s, with significant updates afterwards. You know, of course, that it took years of system integration testing after the new HW was finished before the new semi-conductor memory (along with the upgraded CPUs, etc.) were flown? Some silly idea NASA has about trying to make sure stuff that keeps people alive isn't broken in any way....the only reason it wasn't decomissioned 3 decades ago....
Right. If it flew in 90 (might have actually been 1991 iirc, but maybe not) it's still only been flying for 17 years. How do you decommission something 13 years before it first flew?
Just because something's old doesn't mean it's not useful. There are also cost/benefit factors in replacement; in this case (probably; I don't pretend to know all of the reasons) external requirements that have nothing to do with HW (like testing regulations) greatly increase the cost of replacement. Plus, you have the whole anytime-you-change-you-increase-risk problem; there's a reason that "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" is an adage.
The guy has done something that even einstein couldn't do: He made serious physics breakthroughs accessible to and understandable for the little guys, those of us who DON'T get it and need someone to not talk down to us while we try.
Have you actually read any of Einstein's work? Try reading "The evolution of physics : from early concepts to relativity and Quanta"; it's very understandable and doesn't talk down to anyone in the slightest. True, it's now outdated (but wasn't at one point) but I had far less trouble reading it than "A Brief History of Time", which I also enjoyed.
I haven't read it, but "Relativity: The Special and the General Theory" looks good, too. Comments on Amazon seem to put it on the "understandable" side of the line, too.
I know it's stupid of me to expect this, but from the FA:
"To do so, Gass employs a compressed spring, held back by a 10 thousandths of an inch fuse wire. When the DSP recognizes flesh, it signals a capacitor to send a surge of electrical current, vaporizing the fuse wire in approximately 15 millionths of a second. When the fuse wire vaporizes, it releases the spring brake, stopping the blade."
I knew lots of people that had 5150s at home, in the early 80s.
Of course, I lived in Endicott, NY(1), at the time.:-)
I still had my Apple ][+ which I felt was superior.
(1) For those that don't know, IBM started in Endicott, NY and employed, in the early 80s, somewhere in the neighborhood of 5% of the *total* population (not working population) of the area.
While I suspect you're right for a large number, or even a majority, of cases, there are companies that will pay extra to prove they won't bow to extortion. Hopefully XM is one of those.
Prime/.-relevant example: IBM probably could have bought out SCO a long time ago for less than they're going to end up paying in legal fees, time & materials, etc.
I failed to notice my insurance premiums or taxes being lowered as a result of this safety measure saving money for us all.
Right. How many US governments -- federal, state, county, town/city, other -- give money back? That's fairly laughable, even if we're not talking about one of the more "interesting" state governments around.
I say let people take responsibility for their lives and safety...
I agree. That's why I keep wearing a helmet, after my previous one kept my skull from getting crushed. I feel responsible to my wife & children.
Hospital workers probably prefer to work on young people than old people
I was thinking more of the emotional impact of having to clean up vital organs that used to be inside someone's skin and are now on the outside. Not being a medical professional of any kind, I may be wrong in thinking that even those that have "seen it all" are adversely affected by accident remains. But I doubt it.
As for the monetary argument, this is/. You think I actually researched anything before I posted?:-)
Insurance is much higher than it ever was before this era of ultra-safety-conciousness, before airbags, seatbelt laws, childrestraints, amber alerts, etc. So that's wrong.
I submit that both the safety devices & laws, and the higher insurance premiums, are related as symptoms of the same problem, not as a cause-and-effect (either way). So I don't buy the "safety laws drive insurance up" implication.
As far as I'm concerned as long as an act can only adversely affects the person or persons who are performing it then it should be completely and totally legal.
While I agree with you to a certain extent, there is a problem. Define "only". Are the EMTs, Police, etc. that respond to the accident scene affected? Hospital workers, MEs, etc.? Taxpayers that have to pay for all those folks? Other people that pay insurance premiums?
Someone who splashes his or her brains across the highway during a helmetless motorcycle wreck does NOT only adversely affect themselves....
Your impact on family member is less impacting to society as a whole, but there's probably an effect there, too. So I'll leave that part alone; that's betwen you & your relatives.
Absolutely Dr. Mario. Back in the day, that was the only game I could play with my (young) kids and with my wife that we could be competitive together, and have fun.
Now that my kids are older, they kick my butt at everything, so let's not go there. The original Nintendo's broken.:-(
I'm a second-generation geek (although Dad's Botany, not computers), but I doubt my current grandchildren will be geeks; maybe some later ones will carry on the tradition. So it is possible; you just have to find the right member of the opposite sex that will put up with you long enough to reproduce.
I strongly suspect that there are more women than 2 in the world that can deal with geekiness. I've no idea how to find them, though; my wife found me. And after 20 years (in May) I still have no idea what she sees in me. So good luck.
As for turning in *my* geek card, you can pry it out of my cold, dead, fingers.
I think that it was this last thing, the Federation interconnect, that they were pushing the data over in this test, since it forms the backbone of the machine...
The Federation switch is just the last incarnation of IBM's SP switch, which was the high-speed, low-latency, redundant, leaps-tall-buildings-in-a-single-bound, interconnect between the nodes of their Scalable Processor (SP) systems. Said systems were the basis for a bunch of the "we're at the top of the Supercomputing 500 list" IBM systems in the 90s, and probably into the current decade.
SPs were useful for highly parallel scientific processing, and were also great for some commercial applications like Oracle parallel (when you could get it to stay up). The high-speed switch beat the crap out of hooking systems together with Ethernet...
Originally, SP nodes were modified RS/6000 systems; they had the switch hardware tied very closely to the CPU/memory bus, and therefore had pretty fast data transfer around the system. Later, IBM started building cards to put into more normal HW, and (here's were I stopped playing with them) started to be able to connect other systems into a SP complex.
SPs used proprietary racks (called "frames") that had power distribution & the switch HW in the bottom, and up to 16 nodes in the frame. Part of the switch connections could go to other frames, so you could hook a bunch of them together. IBM officially supported some number of nodes (128? 256?) but you could go higher; that's what some of the high-end stuff in Sandia, etc., was.
Each node had up to 4 paths through the switch to get to any other node, so you had a lot of bandwidth on a continuous basis. You could run either TCP/IP or some other (don't remember what it was called) protocol over the switch.
GPFS was originally designed to handle multi-media files (video). When I used it (5 years ago) it was an additional layer that allowed SP nodes to access data from disks attached to other nodes with only a 7-instruction penalty. All of the communication between nodes went over the switch, so you really didn't care which node the data actually was on.
Of course all of this is from ancient memory, but it's probably close, and I don't feel like doing the research (this is/. after all...) http://www.ibm.com/ if you want.
You forgot part of the article. You need to include "People said one thing, but we think the pretty lights mean something else".
So the "winners" seemed to be the researchers' preconcieved notions, not what the people *said* when interviewed. The whole experiment must have been done by middle management....
Should be as good or better than the AIX products IMHO as Veritas have proven themselves to produce good enterprise quality software...
Yeah, that IBM company is such a newcomer at producing enterprise-class software, as compared to Veritas. I wonder if they'll ever be able to last long enough to start producing Real Software Products(tm).
Not that all of IBM's SW is great (it is SW after all) but to try and claim bolting Veritas on top of Linux might be a better solution than a fully-integrated AIX solution because Veritas produces enterprise quality software strikes me as a bit silly, at best.
Given that there *is* no such thing as an "AIX mainframe", probably not. But according to the OP, it was an poorly-performing AIX box.
What I wonder is if the (possibly old) slow, poorly-performing AIX box could have been replaced with 1 or 2 newer AIX (or Solaris, or HP-UX) boxes for less overall cost than 10 Linux servers? We'll most likely never know....
Maybe small, private, colleges are different, but my experience was the opposite -- there were a few ego-maniacal tenured professors, but they were the exception. The majority of my professors were genuinely caring and compassionate.
Requiring an ID is considered to be a form of a poll-tax (since you have to pay for the ID), which is illegal.
Interesting, but not necessarily the case. I have to show an ID (my "Permanent voter ID card"), for which I paid nothing. It's issued by my county's board of elections, and is a result of my registering to vote. A flimsy little bit of paper sent to my home, with my name & address, an ID number, and a bunch of numbers showing my precinct, township, etc. printed on it.
The card has to be signed. They compare that signature to the one I put on the voting list, then they give me a ballot card (off the top of the stack) to put in the machine. No way to identify me & my vote, but it'd be pretty tough for someone else to pretend to be me to vote.
I guess it wouldn't be that tough to keep track of who voted in what order, and somehow encode a sequence on the ballots, and later be able to cross-reference them. But this scheme doesn't appear to do that, and I'm reasonably confident that it's not happening.
Slashdot Mirror
Nyah, nyah.
interesting footnote
I learned something while looking in Wikipedia to find out when the "Univac" (there were more than one, of course) was released so I could compare it to the IBM System/360 (from which design, eventually, came the Shuttle CPUs). UNIVAC I, from 1951, used tanks of liquid mercury for memory. UNIVAC II (1958) had core memory. Wow!
The shuttle used hand woven magnetic core memory until 1990.
...the only reason it wasn't decomissioned 3 decades ago....
Yep. Stable, information-retaining (unfortunately, it even retains info after immersion in seawater), and basically immune to cosmic ray disruptions. Which doesn't require a lot of error-correction circuitry.... Not terribly data-dense or fast compared to semiconductor (part of the reason to replace it, after all) but it works.
It was designed in the 60s...
Actually, the computers themselves were designed the 70s, with updates in the 80s; core memory (I don't think you meant that) was actually from the 40s & 50s, with significant updates afterwards. You know, of course, that it took years of system integration testing after the new HW was finished before the new semi-conductor memory (along with the upgraded CPUs, etc.) were flown? Some silly idea NASA has about trying to make sure stuff that keeps people alive isn't broken in any way.
Right. If it flew in 90 (might have actually been 1991 iirc, but maybe not) it's still only been flying for 17 years. How do you decommission something 13 years before it first flew?
Just because something's old doesn't mean it's not useful. There are also cost/benefit factors in replacement; in this case (probably; I don't pretend to know all of the reasons) external requirements that have nothing to do with HW (like testing regulations) greatly increase the cost of replacement. Plus, you have the whole anytime-you-change-you-increase-risk problem; there's a reason that "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" is an adage.
The guy has done something that even einstein couldn't do: He made serious physics breakthroughs accessible to and understandable for the little guys, those of us who DON'T get it and need someone to not talk down to us while we try.
Have you actually read any of Einstein's work? Try reading "The evolution of physics : from early concepts to relativity and Quanta"; it's very understandable and doesn't talk down to anyone in the slightest. True, it's now outdated (but wasn't at one point) but I had far less trouble reading it than "A Brief History of Time", which I also enjoyed.
I haven't read it, but "Relativity: The Special and the General Theory" looks good, too. Comments on Amazon seem to put it on the "understandable" side of the line, too.
I know it's stupid of me to expect this, but from the FA:
"To do so, Gass employs a compressed spring, held back by a 10 thousandths of an inch fuse wire. When the DSP recognizes flesh, it signals a capacitor to send a surge of electrical current, vaporizing the fuse wire in approximately 15 millionths of a second. When the fuse wire vaporizes, it releases the spring brake, stopping the blade."
No explosives required....
I knew lots of people that had 5150s at home, in the early 80s.
:-)
Of course, I lived in Endicott, NY(1), at the time.
I still had my Apple ][+ which I felt was superior.
(1) For those that don't know, IBM started in Endicott, NY and employed, in the early 80s, somewhere in the neighborhood of 5% of the *total* population (not working population) of the area.
While I suspect you're right for a large number, or even a majority, of cases, there are companies that will pay extra to prove they won't bow to extortion. Hopefully XM is one of those.
/.-relevant example: IBM probably could have bought out SCO a long time ago for less than they're going to end up paying in legal fees, time & materials, etc.
Prime
Last I heard they'd only use 486s. But this was in 2000.
r s/Ch4-3.html or http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/shuttle/reference/shut ref/orbiter/avionics/dps/gpc.html or even
No, not 486s. The CPUs in the 5 shuttle computers are AP-101S, which are upgrades from the AP-101B. iirc, the upgrades were circa 1991.
This CPU has its lineage in IBM 360 mainframes. See http://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/pao/History/compute
I failed to notice my insurance premiums or taxes being lowered as a result of this safety measure saving money for us all.
Right. How many US governments -- federal, state, county, town/city, other -- give money back? That's fairly laughable, even if we're not talking about one of the more "interesting" state governments around.
I say let people take responsibility for their lives and safety...
I agree. That's why I keep wearing a helmet, after my previous one kept my skull from getting crushed. I feel responsible to my wife & children.
Hospital workers probably prefer to work on young people than old people
/. You think I actually researched anything before I posted? :-)
I was thinking more of the emotional impact of having to clean up vital organs that used to be inside someone's skin and are now on the outside. Not being a medical professional of any kind, I may be wrong in thinking that even those that have "seen it all" are adversely affected by accident remains. But I doubt it.
As for the monetary argument, this is
Insurance is much higher than it ever was before this era of ultra-safety-conciousness, before airbags, seatbelt laws, childrestraints, amber alerts, etc. So that's wrong.
I submit that both the safety devices & laws, and the higher insurance premiums, are related as symptoms of the same problem, not as a cause-and-effect (either way). So I don't buy the "safety laws drive insurance up" implication.
Hopefully she already knows all about the dimensions & length of your pole.
As far as I'm concerned as long as an act can only adversely affects the person or persons who are performing it then it should be completely and totally legal.
While I agree with you to a certain extent, there is a problem. Define "only". Are the EMTs, Police, etc. that respond to the accident scene affected? Hospital workers, MEs, etc.? Taxpayers that have to pay for all those folks? Other people that pay insurance premiums?
Someone who splashes his or her brains across the highway during a helmetless motorcycle wreck does NOT only adversely affect themselves....
Your impact on family member is less impacting to society as a whole, but there's probably an effect there, too. So I'll leave that part alone; that's betwen you & your relatives.
Yes, I do see the resemblance:
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http://images.google.com/images?q=disney%20pluto&
http://images.google.com/images?svnum=10&hl=en&lr
I'm new to UNIX/Linux, I've only been using it since 1993....
/. population wasn't even reading in 1993, I think that allows you to drop your "new" classification.
Considering that half of the
Just because someone in favor of doing something puts a catchy slogan together doesn't make it the truth.
We were in a "War on Drugs" for years during Ronnie's Reign....
Did you forget that it requires an act of Congress to declare war....
_ Authorize_the_Use_of_United_States_Armed_Forces_Ag ainst_Iraq); the one that says "A state of war now exists between...."
y _the_United_States
Please provide a reference for that act of Congress that declared a state of war to exist between the US & Iraq. Not the 2002 resolution that authorized force to enforce UN resolutions (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint_Resolution_to
Good luck.
Also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Declaration_of_war_b
And that's different from any large company in what way?
Absolutely Dr. Mario. Back in the day, that was the only game I could play with my (young) kids and with my wife that we could be competitive together, and have fun.
:-(
Now that my kids are older, they kick my butt at everything, so let's not go there. The original Nintendo's broken.
I'm a second-generation geek (although Dad's Botany, not computers), but I doubt my current grandchildren will be geeks; maybe some later ones will carry on the tradition. So it is possible; you just have to find the right member of the opposite sex that will put up with you long enough to reproduce.
I strongly suspect that there are more women than 2 in the world that can deal with geekiness. I've no idea how to find them, though; my wife found me. And after 20 years (in May) I still have no idea what she sees in me. So good luck.
As for turning in *my* geek card, you can pry it out of my cold, dead, fingers.
I think that it was this last thing, the Federation interconnect, that they were pushing the data over in this test, since it forms the backbone of the machine...
/. after all...) http://www.ibm.com/ if you want.
The Federation switch is just the last incarnation of IBM's SP switch, which was the high-speed, low-latency, redundant, leaps-tall-buildings-in-a-single-bound, interconnect between the nodes of their Scalable Processor (SP) systems. Said systems were the basis for a bunch of the "we're at the top of the Supercomputing 500 list" IBM systems in the 90s, and probably into the current decade.
SPs were useful for highly parallel scientific processing, and were also great for some commercial applications like Oracle parallel (when you could get it to stay up). The high-speed switch beat the crap out of hooking systems together with Ethernet...
Originally, SP nodes were modified RS/6000 systems; they had the switch hardware tied very closely to the CPU/memory bus, and therefore had pretty fast data transfer around the system. Later, IBM started building cards to put into more normal HW, and (here's were I stopped playing with them) started to be able to connect other systems into a SP complex.
SPs used proprietary racks (called "frames") that had power distribution & the switch HW in the bottom, and up to 16 nodes in the frame. Part of the switch connections could go to other frames, so you could hook a bunch of them together. IBM officially supported some number of nodes (128? 256?) but you could go higher; that's what some of the high-end stuff in Sandia, etc., was.
Each node had up to 4 paths through the switch to get to any other node, so you had a lot of bandwidth on a continuous basis. You could run either TCP/IP or some other (don't remember what it was called) protocol over the switch.
GPFS was originally designed to handle multi-media files (video). When I used it (5 years ago) it was an additional layer that allowed SP nodes to access data from disks attached to other nodes with only a 7-instruction penalty. All of the communication between nodes went over the switch, so you really didn't care which node the data actually was on.
Of course all of this is from ancient memory, but it's probably close, and I don't feel like doing the research (this is
So the "winners" seemed to be the researchers' preconcieved notions, not what the people *said* when interviewed. The whole experiment must have been done by middle management....
My grandmother was Grace Hopper, you insensitive cad.
Yeah, that IBM company is such a newcomer at producing enterprise-class software, as compared to Veritas. I wonder if they'll ever be able to last long enough to start producing Real Software Products(tm).
Not that all of IBM's SW is great (it is SW after all) but to try and claim bolting Veritas on top of Linux might be a better solution than a fully-integrated AIX solution because Veritas produces enterprise quality software strikes me as a bit silly, at best.
Given that there *is* no such thing as an "AIX mainframe", probably not. But according to the OP, it was an poorly-performing AIX box.
What I wonder is if the (possibly old) slow, poorly-performing AIX box could have been replaced with 1 or 2 newer AIX (or Solaris, or HP-UX) boxes for less overall cost than 10 Linux servers? We'll most likely never know....
Maybe small, private, colleges are different, but my experience was the opposite -- there were a few ego-maniacal tenured professors, but they were the exception. The majority of my professors were genuinely caring and compassionate.
Interesting, but not necessarily the case. I have to show an ID (my "Permanent voter ID card"), for which I paid nothing. It's issued by my county's board of elections, and is a result of my registering to vote. A flimsy little bit of paper sent to my home, with my name & address, an ID number, and a bunch of numbers showing my precinct, township, etc. printed on it.
The card has to be signed. They compare that signature to the one I put on the voting list, then they give me a ballot card (off the top of the stack) to put in the machine. No way to identify me & my vote, but it'd be pretty tough for someone else to pretend to be me to vote.
I guess it wouldn't be that tough to keep track of who voted in what order, and somehow encode a sequence on the ballots, and later be able to cross-reference them. But this scheme doesn't appear to do that, and I'm reasonably confident that it's not happening.