Others do worse, it's true. The measure of a moral man isn't that he hurt others better or worse than his peers did. It's that he did the Right Thing of the choices afforded him.
No, it's because between we few honest commenters there are an active few corporate interests. It is what it is, because/. is free and open to all - even shills.
I wouldn't change it. If you like heavily edited well censored pap there are lots of sources for that./. almost stands alone as a place where we can get our troll or truth on - as we prefer. In my experience there's a lot to be learned from both the honest folk and the trolls - and/. is the place to watch to see where the attempts at memes are going.
Way back in 1984 the first professional word processing station with a CRT I used was a CPT with 16:9 aspect ratio. It was the perfect aspect ratio for WYSYWIG documents on legal paper, so of course it could do regular letter paper too. The thing printed on daisy wheel, and you had to tell it which wheel each document was on. I recall the display being crisper and more accurate than the 24" Samsungs I use today, but that was a long time ago and my vision has faded and my recall sharpened beyond credibility since. The response was so instant it almost anticipated the key, the keyboard so excellent I've found none better before or since, and I've tried thousands. The only reason I have almost as good a keyboard today is that I ordered it from the successor to Unicomp who made the original PC keyboard with buckling springs. In the 28 years since there have been a few marginal improvements in spell-checking and grammar checking - and of course you can embed graphics and videos now, not that many of us ever do. Mail merge and forms hasn't gotten any better in 28 years. Footnotes haven't fared as well.
I configure servers with 12-80 cores each operating thousands of times as fast as that processor with terabytes (billions of kilobytes) of RAM now, in clusters of dozens to hundreds because just one of those isn't fast enough, with access to billions of times as much storage as the discs we used then.
And in all this time and technological progress the user experience has gotten worse. It's less responsive to input. At least back then I could make the document be what I wanted it to be.
Even as a programming professional it's difficult to even imagine how they managed to accomplish that with a single processor in the <8 MHz range and individual kilobytes of RAM. They must have been trying a hell of a lot harder than the modern folk are to make the most of what they were given.
Back then I didn't care because the dedicated word processor was a dead end, I would type for money and access but a typist wasn't what I wanted to be, and the exciting thing was the S100-bus Unix SVR-III systems with the 25" X-Windows "terminals" that could dynamically display graphically apps driven by multiple remote machines. I did get to play with them too. Now, after a quarter century, we're coming back to that again and calling the "terminals" "clients" and the servers "clouds".
So basically you agree with me if the normal use distance of this device is 48", and disagree if it's 8". Both of these distances are unlikely outer bounds and the true distance is likely in between these extremes. You have some confidence that at the actual use distance somewhere in between those measures the pixels can be discriminated by a person with normal vision, though you won't state a distance between 8" and 48" that is determinant. Is that right? Can you solve your angle problem for the necessary distance for my assertion to become untrue at this dot pitch? I'm confident Apple has done that math if you can't. I think the normal operating distance of an iPad is between 12 and 14 inches if that helps, judging from my personal measurement with an iPad and a tape measure here and now.
For me the question is irrelevant. I can't make out the pixels on the original ipad without the assistance of a water droplet lens. I've spent too many years squinting at a screen. But the kids would like to know.
Anyway my point wasn't that this new display achieved this goal but that it moved toward it. It's an advance that gives honest quality benefit to the people who might buy it - and I'm not one. I'm not an Apple customer since the 1980's and I'm not likely to be in the future barring some radical change in the company's direction, which I don't anticipate given their meteoric success with their current path. I only benefit from this by Apple setting yet another high bar for my preferred ecosystem to try to match or get over and in this particular case I don't even benefit from that because I already can't make out the pixels on my Asus Transformer either. My kids might care someday though. Approaching the human physical limits is a high goal of technologies.
Just making a good browser isn't going to do it. The current Microsoft strategy involves fragmenting their browser customers across three platforms. IE 6, 7 or 8 for XP users, IE 8 or 9 for Vista and W7 users, IE9 or 10 for Windows Phone / Win 8 / WoA users. And the next version of Windows beyond will probably have a special version of IE all to itself. They will do this to get their OS customers to "move along" to the next version - but it makes the developer side of the problem intractable: these browsers are not compatible with the same types of content and don't even render the same bog-standard HTML4 and CSS the same way let alone execute Javascript compatibly. To make it worse the server-side tools to develop for and serve web apps to these different customers are now mutually incompatible so you need multiple machines to develop on and multiple servers to deliver content to the various IE browsers. By contrast there's essentially only one version of Chrome at any given time, so all Chrome users are the same because Chrome updates itself. And of course this makes app developers prefer Chrome.
This Microsoft strategy is indefensible from a programming point of view. There can be no reason why they can't update their latest browser so that it will run in XP except they don't want to. Waning browser share is the price they pay to encourage people to abandon XP and all the apps and devices that might not be supported in the latest version of Windows. They've done the math obviously and this is the path of most benefit to them and whether or not its good for individual customers is irrelevant. To me it looks like a deliberate attempt to utterly destroy the market for their browser, web development tools, server side infrastructure like IIS and sharepoint, and wean the Enterprise off of their web software on both the client and server side. But that's just me. I'm a dim bulb and I'm probably not seeing things in the right light.
The "Network emulator" is probably a device like the Network Nightmare. These are devices configurable to insert various amounts of lag, jitter, dropped packets and so on. I use one of these now and then.
It would surprise me if they didn't also do some testing with VMs on the real Internet just clicking away at everything - and then take the VM offline and do checksums on all the files to see if they've been compromised. And also run some fuzzing attacks. And also a few teams of grey-hats competing to exploit the browser. It takes all those things and more to make a secure browser any more.
I'm with you there. It takes a lot more processing power than you would think, but once the pixels are too small to see the OS should be able to deal with varying screen aspect ratios without screwing up the icons.
You can get a 4:3 Android tablet. I have one. I also have the Transformer with widescreen and prefer it. Buy what you want. Android is "fragmented" that way so you can choose.
It has to do with the properties of your eye. At the normal viewing range an average human should not be able to discern pixels. With perfect color also you should not be able to tell the difference between a real thing (through glass) and its displayed photo except for the final and most difficult dimension of vision to overcome: parallax binocular depth.
But I digress. The apex of useful resolution is achieved when you can't see pixels any more. Any improvement after that is wasted effort. Eyes are pretty good on most folks, but this resolution on this display should just about do it.
They won't be suing Apple, nor Microsoft out of existence. But at least they've finally brought their gun to the OK Corral. They can probably achieve a Mexican standoff.
It's not a high achievement for off-the-shelf industry standard stuff to beat the mainframe of seven years ago. Those mainframes have some serious reliability, availability and scalability features that your quad-core Android tablet doesn't have. Even though you've got it beat on raw compute, I/O and network performance in a device that fits in your pocket and runs all day without plugging in there are other factors to consider like TCO, ROI and who the hell am I kidding? This stuff is dead as Canasta.
Yeah, the high-end E7's aren't cheap compared to an industry standard dual-socket box. Compared to a mainframe though - oh, yeah youbetcha. Industry Standard Servers go up to 8 sockets with 80 cores and 160 threads, but the 8-socket box is so rare that I don't recommend it without good reason. You can wind up being the beta tester for the OEM, it doesn't have a max RAM advantage, the CPUs are slow, it's huge and burns power, and so on. Maybe the next version will be more sexy.
Let me take a moment for disclaimer and say that I don't work for HP, nor FusionIO, nor Intel, nor anybody else mentioned here. I work in this space as an enterprise architect, but that's not a claim to authority on the subject but a basis for the disclaimers that follow. I know some things about this stuff and am having a personal discussion about these issues unrelated to my work. HP, Dell, IBM, Fujitsu and others offer equivalent solutions to the specific industry standard server architectures mentioned here (or they wouldn't be Industry Standard) and HP systems are only referenced for convenience of the specification links I have to hand. AMD has impressive solutions in this space and I'm fond of those too. There are various available brands of PCIe attached Flash storage with varying performance and reliability metrics, and the referenced FusionIO devices are only specific examples with published performance that can be measured in the field - of many. In this discussion space my opinion is not my employer's opinion and they neither know I do nor encourage me to comment here. This is not a specific recommendation or solution to any specific need, which I would only do under contract with specific terms for performance and pay. I don't own any stock in any of these companies either. This is not a solicitation for employment - I'm good, thanks. Finally, I've taken careful measures to shield my real person from my/. persona these last 7 years for good reason, and this is one - though it's not so hard to find me if you try given the evolution of Google my efforts in this regard provide plausible deniability. I try to be an anonymous commenter and you should not trust me. Validate everything yourself if you've found what I've said interesting or promising enough to do so. End disclaimer. Whew.
You can get a dual socket X5690 box like the HP DL370 G6 and stuff up to eight of the FusionIO cards in it too if you want and maybe still get your 2M IOPS in 5U. Those only go up to 384GB of RAM each these days and 12 cores/24 threads at a nominal 3.4GHz of x64 performance. It depends on what you want to do, where your price/performance/reliability points are, whether the box is strictly a data cruncher or a VMHost too. The E7 box can be a much better deal if you calculate the cost of the rack space pretty high - especially if you only need 512GB of RAM because you can use the price sweet-spot 8GB DIMMS. If your RAM needs are even more modest then the 2 socket box becomes the better deal at 144GB RAM with the 8GB DIMMS. You can't go any lower than that and have a general-purpose data-crunching box, as those FusionIO card drivers require immense buffers. Just one of these least boxes would be more than adequate to handle, for example, peak Twitter at the current rate of growth including acceleration for the next three years including the storage requirements for every tweet ever (though of course, geographic redundancy, geographic latency, and so on...).
Price of the processors and RAM is a fairly big deal in the processing part. Those E7's and 32GB DIMMS are spendy parts. If you can crunch the problem down to chunks of 96-144GB and 512K IOPS you get the best deal - and you can move to 2U servers or blades and put a lot of them (64!) in one rack. That's great if your job requires a lot
No, I do believe that's 2TB of directly addressable RAM as one contiguous chunk in one 4U server like the HP DL580 G7 for example, and 1M IOPS consisting of four devices in one server each capable of 250K 512 byte IOPS, and striping in software to deliver the full 1M IOPS in one server. Specifically for storage the IODrive Duo SLC. You can actually do 2M IOPS in that box with 8 devices, but that seems overkill for most things. There's esoteric stuff out there that uplifts this stuff to 20x even that, but uses flash storage as a sort-of second tier of RAM and it's too experimental to consider for enterprise use - and the box becomes a storage only node rather than a general purpose device. You can do some more traditional SFF SSD storage as well if you like, for a second tier of storage. They're doing memory mapping stuff with Infiniband too now I understand, but I didn't figure that either.
This is commercial, off-the-shelf stuff now. Clustering would give you multiples of this naturally, but not linearly and with the concerns that you mention. The next generation of servers is due out any day and will use Load Reduction DIMMs and PCIe 3 to double up both the installable memory and the storage I/O potentials. Industry standard servers are getting pretty hardcore.
It's really not hard to configure a single rack server with 1M IOPS, 1-2 TB RAM, 40-160Gbit aggregate networking and 40-48 cores these days. They fit 4-8 per rack, storage and switching included. They don't cost as much as you might think, even with the hand-holding support contract. And they run the OpenStack "cloud" platform quite well.
If you don't know who Donald Knuth is, you should find out before trying to participate in this discussion. It seems unlikely to me there exists a software patent that isn't derivative of his work.
And since I'm a Groklaw fan, here's a Groklaw article about the good professor's views on the subject.
As unpleasant as it is for both you and him, social change is not made by people who muddle quietly along the mainstream. Progress is only made by people who test the edge of acceptable behavior.
I know you're projecting cynicism. This issue did engage so many people that over 10 million did something and 100 million were at least impacted. In a country where only 80 million people vote and the difference between winning and losing is often only a few thousand or hundred thousand depending on the office that can sway some significant change. We may see a November surprise.
This seems likely. App compat has been their albatross for a long time, and here's an incremental way to get rid of it. But of course this is going to make a lot of people very... reluctant. Especially people fully committed to the prior toolchain. Professional devs houses will just go with what sells, but individual devs and corporate dev teams will chafe.
Slashdot Mirror
Times have changed. Apple is working with Microsoft to kill Google with patents because they fear the Android.
Others do worse, it's true. The measure of a moral man isn't that he hurt others better or worse than his peers did. It's that he did the Right Thing of the choices afforded him.
In a Mexican Standoff everybody wins, or everybody loses.
No, it's because between we few honest commenters there are an active few corporate interests. It is what it is, because /. is free and open to all - even shills.
I wouldn't change it. If you like heavily edited well censored pap there are lots of sources for that. /. almost stands alone as a place where we can get our troll or truth on - as we prefer. In my experience there's a lot to be learned from both the honest folk and the trolls - and /. is the place to watch to see where the attempts at memes are going.
Way back in 1984 the first professional word processing station with a CRT I used was a CPT with 16:9 aspect ratio. It was the perfect aspect ratio for WYSYWIG documents on legal paper, so of course it could do regular letter paper too. The thing printed on daisy wheel, and you had to tell it which wheel each document was on. I recall the display being crisper and more accurate than the 24" Samsungs I use today, but that was a long time ago and my vision has faded and my recall sharpened beyond credibility since. The response was so instant it almost anticipated the key, the keyboard so excellent I've found none better before or since, and I've tried thousands. The only reason I have almost as good a keyboard today is that I ordered it from the successor to Unicomp who made the original PC keyboard with buckling springs. In the 28 years since there have been a few marginal improvements in spell-checking and grammar checking - and of course you can embed graphics and videos now, not that many of us ever do. Mail merge and forms hasn't gotten any better in 28 years. Footnotes haven't fared as well.
I configure servers with 12-80 cores each operating thousands of times as fast as that processor with terabytes (billions of kilobytes) of RAM now, in clusters of dozens to hundreds because just one of those isn't fast enough, with access to billions of times as much storage as the discs we used then.
And in all this time and technological progress the user experience has gotten worse. It's less responsive to input. At least back then I could make the document be what I wanted it to be.
Even as a programming professional it's difficult to even imagine how they managed to accomplish that with a single processor in the <8 MHz range and individual kilobytes of RAM. They must have been trying a hell of a lot harder than the modern folk are to make the most of what they were given.
Back then I didn't care because the dedicated word processor was a dead end, I would type for money and access but a typist wasn't what I wanted to be, and the exciting thing was the S100-bus Unix SVR-III systems with the 25" X-Windows "terminals" that could dynamically display graphically apps driven by multiple remote machines. I did get to play with them too. Now, after a quarter century, we're coming back to that again and calling the "terminals" "clients" and the servers "clouds".
Bah!
So basically you agree with me if the normal use distance of this device is 48", and disagree if it's 8". Both of these distances are unlikely outer bounds and the true distance is likely in between these extremes. You have some confidence that at the actual use distance somewhere in between those measures the pixels can be discriminated by a person with normal vision, though you won't state a distance between 8" and 48" that is determinant. Is that right? Can you solve your angle problem for the necessary distance for my assertion to become untrue at this dot pitch? I'm confident Apple has done that math if you can't. I think the normal operating distance of an iPad is between 12 and 14 inches if that helps, judging from my personal measurement with an iPad and a tape measure here and now.
For me the question is irrelevant. I can't make out the pixels on the original ipad without the assistance of a water droplet lens. I've spent too many years squinting at a screen. But the kids would like to know.
Anyway my point wasn't that this new display achieved this goal but that it moved toward it. It's an advance that gives honest quality benefit to the people who might buy it - and I'm not one. I'm not an Apple customer since the 1980's and I'm not likely to be in the future barring some radical change in the company's direction, which I don't anticipate given their meteoric success with their current path. I only benefit from this by Apple setting yet another high bar for my preferred ecosystem to try to match or get over and in this particular case I don't even benefit from that because I already can't make out the pixels on my Asus Transformer either. My kids might care someday though. Approaching the human physical limits is a high goal of technologies.
Just making a good browser isn't going to do it. The current Microsoft strategy involves fragmenting their browser customers across three platforms. IE 6, 7 or 8 for XP users, IE 8 or 9 for Vista and W7 users, IE9 or 10 for Windows Phone / Win 8 / WoA users. And the next version of Windows beyond will probably have a special version of IE all to itself. They will do this to get their OS customers to "move along" to the next version - but it makes the developer side of the problem intractable: these browsers are not compatible with the same types of content and don't even render the same bog-standard HTML4 and CSS the same way let alone execute Javascript compatibly. To make it worse the server-side tools to develop for and serve web apps to these different customers are now mutually incompatible so you need multiple machines to develop on and multiple servers to deliver content to the various IE browsers. By contrast there's essentially only one version of Chrome at any given time, so all Chrome users are the same because Chrome updates itself. And of course this makes app developers prefer Chrome.
This Microsoft strategy is indefensible from a programming point of view. There can be no reason why they can't update their latest browser so that it will run in XP except they don't want to. Waning browser share is the price they pay to encourage people to abandon XP and all the apps and devices that might not be supported in the latest version of Windows. They've done the math obviously and this is the path of most benefit to them and whether or not its good for individual customers is irrelevant. To me it looks like a deliberate attempt to utterly destroy the market for their browser, web development tools, server side infrastructure like IIS and sharepoint, and wean the Enterprise off of their web software on both the client and server side. But that's just me. I'm a dim bulb and I'm probably not seeing things in the right light.
The "Network emulator" is probably a device like the Network Nightmare. These are devices configurable to insert various amounts of lag, jitter, dropped packets and so on. I use one of these now and then.
It would surprise me if they didn't also do some testing with VMs on the real Internet just clicking away at everything - and then take the VM offline and do checksums on all the files to see if they've been compromised. And also run some fuzzing attacks. And also a few teams of grey-hats competing to exploit the browser. It takes all those things and more to make a secure browser any more.
I'm with you there. It takes a lot more processing power than you would think, but once the pixels are too small to see the OS should be able to deal with varying screen aspect ratios without screwing up the icons.
You can get a 4:3 Android tablet. I have one. I also have the Transformer with widescreen and prefer it. Buy what you want. Android is "fragmented" that way so you can choose.
It has to do with the properties of your eye. At the normal viewing range an average human should not be able to discern pixels. With perfect color also you should not be able to tell the difference between a real thing (through glass) and its displayed photo except for the final and most difficult dimension of vision to overcome: parallax binocular depth.
But I digress. The apex of useful resolution is achieved when you can't see pixels any more. Any improvement after that is wasted effort. Eyes are pretty good on most folks, but this resolution on this display should just about do it.
"Real work" is code for "virus".
Apple builds devices for money. Lots of it, not tiny bits.
They won't be suing Apple, nor Microsoft out of existence. But at least they've finally brought their gun to the OK Corral. They can probably achieve a Mexican standoff.
Delete the other applications? Was that the answer?
It's not a high achievement for off-the-shelf industry standard stuff to beat the mainframe of seven years ago. Those mainframes have some serious reliability, availability and scalability features that your quad-core Android tablet doesn't have. Even though you've got it beat on raw compute, I/O and network performance in a device that fits in your pocket and runs all day without plugging in there are other factors to consider like TCO, ROI and who the hell am I kidding? This stuff is dead as Canasta.
Yeah, the high-end E7's aren't cheap compared to an industry standard dual-socket box. Compared to a mainframe though - oh, yeah youbetcha. Industry Standard Servers go up to 8 sockets with 80 cores and 160 threads, but the 8-socket box is so rare that I don't recommend it without good reason. You can wind up being the beta tester for the OEM, it doesn't have a max RAM advantage, the CPUs are slow, it's huge and burns power, and so on. Maybe the next version will be more sexy.
Let me take a moment for disclaimer and say that I don't work for HP, nor FusionIO, nor Intel, nor anybody else mentioned here. I work in this space as an enterprise architect, but that's not a claim to authority on the subject but a basis for the disclaimers that follow. I know some things about this stuff and am having a personal discussion about these issues unrelated to my work. HP, Dell, IBM, Fujitsu and others offer equivalent solutions to the specific industry standard server architectures mentioned here (or they wouldn't be Industry Standard) and HP systems are only referenced for convenience of the specification links I have to hand. AMD has impressive solutions in this space and I'm fond of those too. There are various available brands of PCIe attached Flash storage with varying performance and reliability metrics, and the referenced FusionIO devices are only specific examples with published performance that can be measured in the field - of many. In this discussion space my opinion is not my employer's opinion and they neither know I do nor encourage me to comment here. This is not a specific recommendation or solution to any specific need, which I would only do under contract with specific terms for performance and pay. I don't own any stock in any of these companies either. This is not a solicitation for employment - I'm good, thanks. Finally, I've taken careful measures to shield my real person from my /. persona these last 7 years for good reason, and this is one - though it's not so hard to find me if you try given the evolution of Google my efforts in this regard provide plausible deniability. I try to be an anonymous commenter and you should not trust me. Validate everything yourself if you've found what I've said interesting or promising enough to do so. End disclaimer. Whew.
You can get a dual socket X5690 box like the HP DL370 G6 and stuff up to eight of the FusionIO cards in it too if you want and maybe still get your 2M IOPS in 5U. Those only go up to 384GB of RAM each these days and 12 cores/24 threads at a nominal 3.4GHz of x64 performance. It depends on what you want to do, where your price/performance/reliability points are, whether the box is strictly a data cruncher or a VMHost too. The E7 box can be a much better deal if you calculate the cost of the rack space pretty high - especially if you only need 512GB of RAM because you can use the price sweet-spot 8GB DIMMS. If your RAM needs are even more modest then the 2 socket box becomes the better deal at 144GB RAM with the 8GB DIMMS. You can't go any lower than that and have a general-purpose data-crunching box, as those FusionIO card drivers require immense buffers. Just one of these least boxes would be more than adequate to handle, for example, peak Twitter at the current rate of growth including acceleration for the next three years including the storage requirements for every tweet ever (though of course, geographic redundancy, geographic latency, and so on...).
Price of the processors and RAM is a fairly big deal in the processing part. Those E7's and 32GB DIMMS are spendy parts. If you can crunch the problem down to chunks of 96-144GB and 512K IOPS you get the best deal - and you can move to 2U servers or blades and put a lot of them (64!) in one rack. That's great if your job requires a lot
No, I do believe that's 2TB of directly addressable RAM as one contiguous chunk in one 4U server like the HP DL580 G7 for example, and 1M IOPS consisting of four devices in one server each capable of 250K 512 byte IOPS, and striping in software to deliver the full 1M IOPS in one server. Specifically for storage the IODrive Duo SLC. You can actually do 2M IOPS in that box with 8 devices, but that seems overkill for most things. There's esoteric stuff out there that uplifts this stuff to 20x even that, but uses flash storage as a sort-of second tier of RAM and it's too experimental to consider for enterprise use - and the box becomes a storage only node rather than a general purpose device. You can do some more traditional SFF SSD storage as well if you like, for a second tier of storage. They're doing memory mapping stuff with Infiniband too now I understand, but I didn't figure that either.
This is commercial, off-the-shelf stuff now. Clustering would give you multiples of this naturally, but not linearly and with the concerns that you mention. The next generation of servers is due out any day and will use Load Reduction DIMMs and PCIe 3 to double up both the installable memory and the storage I/O potentials. Industry standard servers are getting pretty hardcore.
Microsoft Store India was hacked today. Reportedly they were storing passwords in plain text. report.
Yeah, I know... I just don't feel like submitting the article right now. You do it.
It's really not hard to configure a single rack server with 1M IOPS, 1-2 TB RAM, 40-160Gbit aggregate networking and 40-48 cores these days. They fit 4-8 per rack, storage and switching included. They don't cost as much as you might think, even with the hand-holding support contract. And they run the OpenStack "cloud" platform quite well.
I'm going to go with "argumentum ad verecundiam" here - I know... bad form.
Here's Professor Emeritus Knuth's Letter to the patent office.
Here are a collection of quotes with references.
If you don't know who Donald Knuth is, you should find out before trying to participate in this discussion. It seems unlikely to me there exists a software patent that isn't derivative of his work.
And since I'm a Groklaw fan, here's a Groklaw article about the good professor's views on the subject.
As unpleasant as it is for both you and him, social change is not made by people who muddle quietly along the mainstream. Progress is only made by people who test the edge of acceptable behavior.
I know you're projecting cynicism. This issue did engage so many people that over 10 million did something and 100 million were at least impacted. In a country where only 80 million people vote and the difference between winning and losing is often only a few thousand or hundred thousand depending on the office that can sway some significant change. We may see a November surprise.
I believe when we were having this discussion namecheap was the consensus.
This seems likely. App compat has been their albatross for a long time, and here's an incremental way to get rid of it. But of course this is going to make a lot of people very... reluctant. Especially people fully committed to the prior toolchain. Professional devs houses will just go with what sells, but individual devs and corporate dev teams will chafe.
A bold move.