Personally I think that you can get better get 5 updates for a $100 card or 2.5 updates of a $200 dollar card instead of a single $500 one. After 5 years, you're still rather up to date, and if you buy a new motherboard or computer in that time, you can buy cards that use those new interfaces. And you can sell the old cards, or give them to friends. The chances that that $500 card is still usable for high res new games or your new rig after 5 years is not that big.
IMHO the only reason to buy a top of the line CPU or GPU is when you really need (or, if it's about gaming: want) high performance at that particular time. Don't forget that it is not only the cards that you will be paying for. The high end PSU and sometimes high end motherboard play a role too.
PS I had a busy day so my response may be grammatically, uh, weak.
"Sun seems to get upset if you package up less-than-all of Java so "most" doesn't seem good enough."
Only if you actually *call* it Java. And with good reason. That's not protecting the source, that's protecting a trade name. You see this in many OS projects, e.g. X.org, and the many Firefox derivatives.
Microsoft happily used J# for their Java derivate product on.NET . Of course, anyone thinking that they actually were going to support that got screwed. Sun didn't do a thing about that, even after the law suit won by Sun.
"So, Java isn't "really" open source. It's "going to be" at some point in the future - or at least it was. With Oracle in control, who knows."
I've just downloaded and compiled 1.7 (which is still rather far from being completed, but I needed the cryptographic changes such as no crypto provider signing). There was indeed a binary plugin needed with: a few classes that did SNMP). That's it. The rest is fully open sourced.
For those trying the same thing: Compiling delivered 1.3 GB by the way (the delivered JDK and JRE are much smaller of course), and is not for the faint of heart. Use a RAM-disk to write to makes it go pretty fast (some tens of minutes in all on Linux). Try and use C++ caching or your compile will crawl through the C/C++ code.
You'll have to get her to smoke and you have to stay off the cigarettes for this to work.
Or you'll die nicely at approximately the same time. That was the idea of the canary. It was prone to fall over rather quickly.
Come to think of it, it might be tricky to get your wife to sit on a stick all of the time. If she sits down you might not notice it when she starts to keel over.
Well, somebody is going to have to dig the trenches and put down the cables and all. I presume that this is exactly what they are doing. This way people earn money and you get something in return. This is typical behavior for governments during this particular economic crisis.
Besides, for many remote places the cost will be prohibitive (of putting cables down) for an individual or group of individuals. So the government will have to put the infrastructure there for them. Otherwise they may face even more people moving from the countryside into the already crowded cities.
Having an always on connection that is fast enough to do reasonable software updates for a fair price would be the main thing. Always on lets people use the internet in an entirely different way than modem dial in. This kind of service can make sure that residents can keep their setup at home secure. And it helps people to start using private and government internet services.
2Mbit is plenty for such use. Unless Microsoft is going to ask people to download even more than the 1.5 GB update once you buy a computer with Vista installed of course. Of course it is not enough for hi-res media, but that's a lot less important in my opinion.
Personally I'm running at 4 Mbit/sec and for now, that's plenty (I even downgraded from 6.7 Mbit/sec). Of course if I can have a much higher bandwidth for a reasonable price I'll be the first to jump.
Thank you. That saved me reading the article. Nowadays, when in a hurry, I read Slashdot comments backwards:) Saves me reading the initial thread (which always becomes too long) and the funny comments.
"I'd think that root can access EVERYTHING incredibly easily. Isn't that kind of the whole point of root? "
I don't know. In many cases I just want to be able to install applications, not have access to each and everything in the OS, let alone have direct access to hardware.
For many administrative tasks, you should not have to use root. It's good that you can have full access, but only in extreme cases.
Yes, they netted only 1 billion in total after becoming popular and selling off to Sun. Gosh, I wish I could make such a bad choice once in a while. And now they can do very interesting things with the money they've made. With 1 billion you can control an awful lot of applications.
Interesting stuff indeed, and the 50K/150K is of course interesting. But still only if you need the performance of that 150K server, otherwise other project may be less expensive.
My X2 Phenom CPU may also not beat many others in price/performance, but it does what I need using not too much power. I probably could buy a 150$ CPU instead, but I would loose 75$ dollars doing it...
Yes, but then you are back to the 50K pricepoint. OK, that's INCLUDING the application server, but it might still be a bit steep for many applications. And you'd have to port/reconfigure the applications to run on the T2 server.
One of the advantages of an SSL-offloader is that you only have to remove the SSL from the port running SSL. Hmm, maybe the T2 is not such a good idea if you're having other deadlines pending. System admin time and knowledge is a costly thing.
32 cores at 300 MHz? Only if you really don't understand the difference. And it seems you don't.
I am self-educated in basic processor design, and that's just plain wrong if you look at the hardware. If you look at it from the OS, you will indeed see 32 cores, but if you are using 8 threads you will get higher speeds than a single core running at 300 MHz. The reason Sun uses 4 threads per core is to optimize the use of the ALU's of the core.
That's the theory, but I was wondering if you could buy a T2 and easily configure it for SSL acceleration. It does have the 8 (EIGHT) cores including crypto accelleration and 2 x 10 GBit eithernet connections, so in theory it should be great. However, theory != practice. For instance I don't know how much you'd have to spend after the initial 15K, and if there are any easy to install/free SSL-proxies available.
"How does this reduce the number of certificates required? It might reduce the number of copies of the certificate, but you still need either one certificate per subdomain, or one wildcard certificate per domain."
I think that would be because in some instances you could serve multiple applications from the same server (with the same certificate). This does of course not work for internet store applications and such, but for many business communications, it might well work. The proxy can then create a connection to a specific server depending on the URL. I understand this is what many offloaders do.
In any case, you would only have to setup keys and certificate stores on the one or two off-loaders instead of all the application servers out there, which simplifies management, even when multiple keys/certificates are required.
It doesn't cost 50K to buy a T2 based server from Sun (more like 15K at entry-level prices). This would give you 8 crypto-accelerated cores with 2x 10GBit ports straight into the processor. They are also not that power hungry. You could use this to both accelerate your web server as well as your SSL. Wouldn't this be a better solution than building two servers?
Just thinking out loud, maybe I've overlooked something as I'm not a network engineer or anything.
OK, no Swing, no Corba etc. But I cannot see what part is missing for cloud computing (or any other algorithm. The collections classes (even the thread safe ones), all cryptographic stuff etc. The only thing that really seems to be missing is graphics (images). But for most cloud computing needs, this should be sufficient.
Anything else you may be able to import using the classes from the open source JDK anyway. As long as you don't create files etc. of course, thanks to the sandbox. And we're not talking about a release of another JDK or anything like that, in that case it would be a problem not to include the default functionality.
This seems to be a bit of a cheap shot. He should well know that you cannot display any personal opinions that are directly in his line of work, and then claim that they are not the opinions of his employer. Not in his position.
It's rather a different thing to compare speed and memory use for *algorithms*. Of course Java uses more memory for the same structures because of overhead, but the 10x to 30x that you see here are of course not something you see when running any reasonably sized application. And I presume they run only one VM per machine - Java applications may safely run in the same memory space, so the initial overhead just stays a couple of MB.
That said, for smaller applications that have to run on many processors, it may make sense to go for C/C++. This is a place where you may put a *lot* of effort to code a rather limited program. Then again, with C/C++ you have a higher risk messing things up, so you would have to use static code analyzers and unit tests before distributing your app over XXX processors (unless you are that superb C/C++ application programmer everybody keeps talking about).
I would not call an OCZ Vertex drive enterprise level, but you can already see that changes in the controllers can make massive differences. Just compare the random write speeds in this article with those in the latest reviews of Anandtech. Once new controllers start coming out and compete (both in performance and price), the landscape will be entirely rewritten by SSD.
And although the Memoright is still very expensive, in general you see a massive change in price for SSD's. Currently they seem temporarily *more* expensive, but I presume that's because of strong demand. A price reduction of 10x (or an order of magnitude, in the authors words) when you start off with ~770 dollar for 32 GB is completely possible.
Things like boot times (for those people needing restarts and high availability) and latency, both highly in favor for SSD are missing entirely from the article.
I don't know if this is FUD, but I would definitely not call it accurate - the reviews of Anandtech seem much more precise and much more valid. And Anand reaches an entirely different conclusion.
I'm running ATI now (Ubuntu 8-10 @ 64 bit), but with my on-board I have fewer options than with nVidia, the options pane looks just horrible, I cannot tilt my screen and (biggest point) I cannot do any 3D while having Compiz (desktop acceleration) enabled. It pretty much sucks and I am thinking of buying nVidia again. I moved to ATI because of the promises of better drivers, but IMHO they haven't really delivered.
OTOH, it's a fast, fan-less GPU with dedicated memory for an on-board and my machine is mainly for browsing and development. The VGA out is pretty good as well, which is surprising for a cheap GPU.
Slashdot Mirror
Personally I think that you can get better get 5 updates for a $100 card or 2.5 updates of a $200 dollar card instead of a single $500 one. After 5 years, you're still rather up to date, and if you buy a new motherboard or computer in that time, you can buy cards that use those new interfaces. And you can sell the old cards, or give them to friends. The chances that that $500 card is still usable for high res new games or your new rig after 5 years is not that big.
IMHO the only reason to buy a top of the line CPU or GPU is when you really need (or, if it's about gaming: want) high performance at that particular time. Don't forget that it is not only the cards that you will be paying for. The high end PSU and sometimes high end motherboard play a role too.
PS I had a busy day so my response may be grammatically, uh, weak.
"Sun seems to get upset if you package up less-than-all of Java so "most" doesn't seem good enough."
Only if you actually *call* it Java. And with good reason. That's not protecting the source, that's protecting a trade name. You see this in many OS projects, e.g. X.org, and the many Firefox derivatives.
Microsoft happily used J# for their Java derivate product on .NET . Of course, anyone thinking that they actually were going to support that got screwed. Sun didn't do a thing about that, even after the law suit won by Sun.
"So, Java isn't "really" open source. It's "going to be" at some point in the future - or at least it was. With Oracle in control, who knows."
I've just downloaded and compiled 1.7 (which is still rather far from being completed, but I needed the cryptographic changes such as no crypto provider signing). There was indeed a binary plugin needed with: a few classes that did SNMP). That's it. The rest is fully open sourced.
For those trying the same thing:
Compiling delivered 1.3 GB by the way (the delivered JDK and JRE are much smaller of course), and is not for the faint of heart. Use a RAM-disk to write to makes it go pretty fast (some tens of minutes in all on Linux). Try and use C++ caching or your compile will crawl through the C/C++ code.
"Again, the cars are literally the only inherent problem [of cities]"
Could you please post me the intergalactic coordinates of the world you are living on? I'd like to give it a visit.
You'll have to get her to smoke and you have to stay off the cigarettes for this to work.
Or you'll die nicely at approximately the same time. That was the idea of the canary. It was prone to fall over rather quickly.
Come to think of it, it might be tricky to get your wife to sit on a stick all of the time. If she sits down you might not notice it when she starts to keel over.
I won't go into feeding and lavatory problems.
Well, somebody is going to have to dig the trenches and put down the cables and all. I presume that this is exactly what they are doing. This way people earn money and you get something in return. This is typical behavior for governments during this particular economic crisis.
Besides, for many remote places the cost will be prohibitive (of putting cables down) for an individual or group of individuals. So the government will have to put the infrastructure there for them. Otherwise they may face even more people moving from the countryside into the already crowded cities.
Having an always on connection that is fast enough to do reasonable software updates for a fair price would be the main thing. Always on lets people use the internet in an entirely different way than modem dial in. This kind of service can make sure that residents can keep their setup at home secure. And it helps people to start using private and government internet services.
2Mbit is plenty for such use. Unless Microsoft is going to ask people to download even more than the 1.5 GB update once you buy a computer with Vista installed of course. Of course it is not enough for hi-res media, but that's a lot less important in my opinion.
Personally I'm running at 4 Mbit/sec and for now, that's plenty (I even downgraded from 6.7 Mbit/sec). Of course if I can have a much higher bandwidth for a reasonable price I'll be the first to jump.
Thank you. That saved me reading the article. Nowadays, when in a hurry, I read Slashdot comments backwards :) Saves me reading the initial thread (which always becomes too long) and the funny comments.
"I'd think that root can access EVERYTHING incredibly easily. Isn't that kind of the whole point of root? "
I don't know. In many cases I just want to be able to install applications, not have access to each and everything in the OS, let alone have direct access to hardware.
For many administrative tasks, you should not have to use root. It's good that you can have full access, but only in extreme cases.
"I moved to Japan to get away from skandinavian girls. Forget it."
Seriously, ?????
All the known issues? You don't work in software dev... Dang, didn't notice your ID. Troll alert.
Whoops, got that wrong:
Misspelling Milipede of course :)
What about Misspelled Milipede instead?
Yes, they netted only 1 billion in total after becoming popular and selling off to Sun. Gosh, I wish I could make such a bad choice once in a while. And now they can do very interesting things with the money they've made. With 1 billion you can control an awful lot of applications.
Interesting stuff indeed, and the 50K/150K is of course interesting. But still only if you need the performance of that 150K server, otherwise other project may be less expensive.
My X2 Phenom CPU may also not beat many others in price/performance, but it does what I need using not too much power. I probably could buy a 150$ CPU instead, but I would loose 75$ dollars doing it...
Yes, but then you are back to the 50K pricepoint. OK, that's INCLUDING the application server, but it might still be a bit steep for many applications. And you'd have to port/reconfigure the applications to run on the T2 server.
One of the advantages of an SSL-offloader is that you only have to remove the SSL from the port running SSL. Hmm, maybe the T2 is not such a good idea if you're having other deadlines pending. System admin time and knowledge is a costly thing.
32 cores at 300 MHz? Only if you really don't understand the difference. And it seems you don't.
I am self-educated in basic processor design, and that's just plain wrong if you look at the hardware. If you look at it from the OS, you will indeed see 32 cores, but if you are using 8 threads you will get higher speeds than a single core running at 300 MHz. The reason Sun uses 4 threads per core is to optimize the use of the ALU's of the core.
That's the theory, but I was wondering if you could buy a T2 and easily configure it for SSL acceleration. It does have the 8 (EIGHT) cores including crypto accelleration and 2 x 10 GBit eithernet connections, so in theory it should be great. However, theory != practice. For instance I don't know how much you'd have to spend after the initial 15K, and if there are any easy to install/free SSL-proxies available.
"How does this reduce the number of certificates required? It might reduce the number of copies of the certificate, but you still need either one certificate per subdomain, or one wildcard certificate per domain."
I think that would be because in some instances you could serve multiple applications from the same server (with the same certificate). This does of course not work for internet store applications and such, but for many business communications, it might well work. The proxy can then create a connection to a specific server depending on the URL. I understand this is what many offloaders do.
In any case, you would only have to setup keys and certificate stores on the one or two off-loaders instead of all the application servers out there, which simplifies management, even when multiple keys/certificates are required.
It doesn't cost 50K to buy a T2 based server from Sun (more like 15K at entry-level prices). This would give you 8 crypto-accelerated cores with 2x 10GBit ports straight into the processor. They are also not that power hungry. You could use this to both accelerate your web server as well as your SSL. Wouldn't this be a better solution than building two servers?
Just thinking out loud, maybe I've overlooked something as I'm not a network engineer or anything.
OK, no Swing, no Corba etc. But I cannot see what part is missing for cloud computing (or any other algorithm. The collections classes (even the thread safe ones), all cryptographic stuff etc. The only thing that really seems to be missing is graphics (images). But for most cloud computing needs, this should be sufficient.
Anything else you may be able to import using the classes from the open source JDK anyway. As long as you don't create files etc. of course, thanks to the sandbox. And we're not talking about a release of another JDK or anything like that, in that case it would be a problem not to include the default functionality.
This seems to be a bit of a cheap shot. He should well know that you cannot display any personal opinions that are directly in his line of work, and then claim that they are not the opinions of his employer. Not in his position.
It's rather a different thing to compare speed and memory use for *algorithms*. Of course Java uses more memory for the same structures because of overhead, but the 10x to 30x that you see here are of course not something you see when running any reasonably sized application. And I presume they run only one VM per machine - Java applications may safely run in the same memory space, so the initial overhead just stays a couple of MB.
That said, for smaller applications that have to run on many processors, it may make sense to go for C/C++. This is a place where you may put a *lot* of effort to code a rather limited program. Then again, with C/C++ you have a higher risk messing things up, so you would have to use static code analyzers and unit tests before distributing your app over XXX processors (unless you are that superb C/C++ application programmer everybody keeps talking about).
I would not call an OCZ Vertex drive enterprise level, but you can already see that changes in the controllers can make massive differences. Just compare the random write speeds in this article with those in the latest reviews of Anandtech. Once new controllers start coming out and compete (both in performance and price), the landscape will be entirely rewritten by SSD.
And although the Memoright is still very expensive, in general you see a massive change in price for SSD's. Currently they seem temporarily *more* expensive, but I presume that's because of strong demand. A price reduction of 10x (or an order of magnitude, in the authors words) when you start off with ~770 dollar for 32 GB is completely possible.
Things like boot times (for those people needing restarts and high availability) and latency, both highly in favor for SSD are missing entirely from the article.
I don't know if this is FUD, but I would definitely not call it accurate - the reviews of Anandtech seem much more precise and much more valid. And Anand reaches an entirely different conclusion.
BIOS open and/or closures not locked down -> shoot admin.
"If he had reported "due to global warming, an earthquake is coming...", then he would currently be regarded as an international hero."
How is this not flamebait? Mods? Anyone home?
I'm running ATI now (Ubuntu 8-10 @ 64 bit), but with my on-board I have fewer options than with nVidia, the options pane looks just horrible, I cannot tilt my screen and (biggest point) I cannot do any 3D while having Compiz (desktop acceleration) enabled. It pretty much sucks and I am thinking of buying nVidia again. I moved to ATI because of the promises of better drivers, but IMHO they haven't really delivered.
OTOH, it's a fast, fan-less GPU with dedicated memory for an on-board and my machine is mainly for browsing and development. The VGA out is pretty good as well, which is surprising for a cheap GPU.