Windows NT (and therefore W2K) are not real microkernels. The last true microkernal WinNT was 3.51 as far as I know. They had to start moving to a macro-kernel architecture because they couldn't get good enough graphics performance.
Allright, let's go through the math, 9 platforms, actually 10 according to their web page. 5 of these are 680x0 machines, so let's really call it 6 ports. Of these 6 ports, alpha and pmax are currently without maintainers, and 680x0 is a dead platform (unless you're into antique computers, which is definitely cool, or you're trying to run on a palm pilot). That leaves us with 3 ports. The powerpc port seems to be fairly new, so the only ones I'd trust are i386 and sparc (which incidently doesn't cover ultrasparcs, only sparcs). In my head, that means openbsd has two solid ports. By my reasoning, Linux also only has 4-5 solid ports (alpha, i386, sparc, ultrasparc, powerpc), although there are many more you could include (680x0 ports, ia64, s390) which I would regard as well supported.
Not to rag on openbsd, I'm sure it's a great system, but be careful saying what's actually a supported platform. That's like saying netbsd runs on almost anything. Sure it does, but you may have to netboot the machine, run the file system off a better supported computer over NFS, and use a serial login. So basically you're using the CPU on your machine and the network card, while the Hard drive, video, keyboard, and mouse go to waste.
Also, 99% of the code within different Linux distributions is the same. Instead of just borrowing code between different distributions (or forks, in the *BSD case), the different distributions actually use exactly the same code, it's just the packaging which is different.
One Caveat, with the change of license of OpenBSD such that they can directly incorporate NetBSD code, I expect the code between these two forks to become more and more conserved.
Which BSD, the more secure one, the more portable one, or the more powerful one. You don't get all three, cause they're different forks.
Or you can choose Linux, which is powerful, portable, and secure (well, depends on whose distribution you're using, you can make any OS as insecure as you like).
Plus, Linux is GPL, which I imagine is the real reason any sane person would go with Linux. If IBM went with BSD, any contributions they made they'd have to keep proprietary, for fear that if they turned around and gave their code back to the community, their competitors (HP, Sun, etc.) would turn around and use their code in their own proprietary products to gain a competitive edge. Hey, guess what, we've just stepped back a decade and the UNIX wars are raging again.
The biggest beauty of Linux (or it's biggest problem, depending on your perspective) is the GPL. Although with the GPL IBM is required to release any improvements/additions it makes back to the community, IBM can also rest assured that any other company that uses or expands on these changes will have to also release those changes back to the community (and therefore to IBM).
MUMPS is the king of unmaintainability. I interned at a VA medical center for a summer (don't ask), and ran into this bastard child of an OS+Programming Language. Here's my problems with Mumps.
1) It's an Interpretive Language. Yeah,you say it runs on old hardware, but that doesn't giv any indication of the speed it runs at on old hardware.
2) All lines are 256 Characters long. And remeber, you said it runs on old computers, with very little memory. Guess what that means? Yep, you try to cram as many commands on each line as possible. You can have loops within a line, etc. Reading code is a headache. Plus, since memory is at such a premium, and it's interpretive, you use variables with such sensible names as "A", "F", "W", and "Ii".
In my opinion, MUMPS should be allowed to die a quick death.
yeah, my school also supplies a LaTeX thesis style, makes for a very nice looking thesis, and you don't have to waste any time reading the thesis specs.
Hmmm, from your needs, it looks to me like you've just completely decribed LaTeX!
Just remember, in engineering/computer science/etc., most problems have already been solved. The solution to document processing (at least in my subjective mind) was already solved in the 80's with TeX/LaTeX
Two year ago, my two roommates and I were all finishing off our EE Master Theses. Two of us had gone with LaTeX. I went with LaTeX because, well, why would you ever want to write a thesis in anything else (especially when your school is cool enough to provide their own latex thesis style)? Roommate #1 went with LaTeX 'cause he had a PC at home, and a Mac in the lab, and had already seen the damage that the Word 97/Word 98 switcheroo could do.
Roommate #2, however, choose to go with Word 97, which provided much amusement for the rest of us, as he spent the last three days before his thesis due date moving pictures and text around trying to get his thesis to look as good as those produced by LaTeX.
Even hooking up a regular NTSC TV to a digitial receiver should give you an image quality improvement. There's two reasons for this. One, you don't have as many noise problems 'cause the broadcast signal is digital (no more ghosting, yeah!). Two, now analog resolution losses. Imagine having all your broadcast stations at better then DVD quality.
Now, for the average Joe, they just need to start making cheap digital receivers, or including digital receiving abilities in current low quality (i.e. NTSC) sets, and everyone should be able to switch over to the new system.
And they'll keep dropping (Redhat, VA Res^H^H^HLinux, etc.).
I wouldn't say these companies are doing badly, yeah they're still bleading money, but remember it takes most startups 5,10, even 15 years to start turning a profit. Can you name a.com company which has turned a profit? I'm sure there are a couple, but I can't think of any.
It's not that the Linux IPO's were of bad companies. They were just the subject of rampant hype and speculation, fueled by a public which knows Linux is the next thing but without any companies to invest in. I would expect these companies share prices to bottom out below $20 a share (which is still probably overvalued), and then slowly rise as they expand.
Well, when the Athlon came out, people were really looking forward to an SMP board. The slot A architecture (same one used as the dec alpha) looks like it should perform much better then intel's Slot 1, and scale well up to 8 processors (if I recall correctly).
As far as I know, the Athlon chips are SMP capable. The problem is nobody has yet produced a chipset which supports multiprocessing Athlons.
I think AMD is currently concentrating on the desktop market (where few people go for SMP) which is why the haven't been as aggressive as I'd like them to be getting out an SMP motherboard.
Initially (last summer), AMD's faq said to expect a SMP board Q1 of this year, obviously that hasn't shown up yet, but the last I've read is that the AMD SMP chipset (and MB) is due sometime in Q3.
A hope they hurry, not being able to by an SMP Athlon is the only reason I haven't upgraded my system yet.
Well, 5 years ago would be 1995, at which time I had already been using Linux almost exclusively for two years. I didn't even hear about *BSD until 1996....
B&W tv's (at least originally) don't understand the color signals at all, it's just that in Color NTSC encoding, the lower portion of the bandwidth (and most of it I must add) is used for intensity encoding (i.e. the B&W signal). B&W tv's don't decode the other two bands of the orthogonal color set (hue and saturation, I believe), and these higher frequency encoded signals just end up as high frequency noise which isn't noticeable in the final picture on the B&W set.
And remember, one of the 2 X chromosomes is silenced and never used fairly early in embryogenesis (i.e. it's wrapped up into a little ball and tucked into the side of the nucleus). So females effectively have as much X chromosomal material as men.
This is incidently how you get calico cats (and why all calico cats are female). The two X chromosomes have different color genes, they turn off at random in the early embryo (well not really at random, but imprinting is a a whole 'nother field), and you get areas of the skin containing homogenous or heterogenous populations of the X chromosomes being expressed (i.e. light spots, dark spots, and inbetween spots).
So, you have a chip running at 900 MHz, that means the clock is putting out a pulse waveform which looks something like a 900 MHz square wave, with a good number of the transistors changing state with the clock edge. Now, let's do a quick fourier series of our friendly 900 MHz square wave, and what's the base frequency, you know, the frequency with the most energy, looks like 900 MHz to me.
Granted, you're not coupling the clock chip to an antenna, so you're not going to have the most efficient transfer of our friendly 900 MHz electrical signal to an EM (Radio) Wave, but it's still going to happen, and could well mess up other electronics running at 900 MHz if it wasn't for the nice metal case acting as a faraday cage.
Remember, at some level, every digital abstraction layer has an analog underpinning.
Re:Combat Armor isn't that far off, after all...
on
Project Grizzly
·
· Score: 1
ahh, but the beauty of napalm ain't just the heat, it's also that it sucks up all the oxygen in the air. I'm not seeing an air tank in the current version of this suit.....
> This has made the system popular at places like MIT and NASA, > both of which have large menageries of computer systems from a multitude of > vendors.
Umm, after spending 5 years at MIT, I can only recall seeing 1 *BSD box, although there certainly might be more....
The campus computers these days are almost entirely Sun's and SGI's (running their respective commercial unices). Over the last five years, the campus computers that have been phased out have been IBM RS6000's (AIX), Sparc Classics (Solaris), DEC 5000's (ultrix), and VAX Station 3100's (ultrix). None of them *BSD.
I worked in both CS and EE labs, the CS lab was a SUN shop, the EE lab used Linux for the main server, and a combo of Solaris/Linux/95 for everything else.
Residential computers are a mix of 95/98/NT/and Linux, with a couple macs thrown in for good measure. Most of the technically orientated people I knew, if they weren't running Linux, had a second box running Linux under there desk. (The place I lived at had ~1.3 computers/person, which was fairly common).
So, does anyone have an idea of when we can expect to start seeing dual/quad/etc. processor motherboards for the K7^H^HAthalon?
I'd like to get an Athalon system, but my next computer needs to be a MP system (doing threaded 3D image reconstruction programming type stuff). Since I can't wait forever, do I need to get a cheapy dual celeron to tide me over?
Slashdot Mirror
Kudos to Andrew Howard (my former roomate)! You know you've hit it big when your thesis work is getting written up on slashdot.
Then again, he's making the rest of us researchers look like a bunch of slack-jawed yokels.....
Loening
Windows NT (and therefore W2K) are not real microkernels. The last true microkernal WinNT was 3.51 as far as I know. They had to start moving to a macro-kernel architecture because they couldn't get good enough graphics performance.
Allright, let's go through the math, 9 platforms, actually 10 according to their web page. 5 of these are 680x0 machines, so let's really call it 6 ports. Of these 6 ports, alpha and pmax are currently without maintainers, and 680x0 is a dead platform (unless you're into antique computers, which is definitely cool, or you're trying to run on a palm pilot). That leaves us with 3 ports. The powerpc port seems to be fairly new, so the only ones I'd trust are i386 and sparc (which incidently doesn't cover ultrasparcs, only sparcs). In my head, that means openbsd has two solid ports. By my reasoning, Linux also only has 4-5 solid ports (alpha, i386, sparc, ultrasparc, powerpc), although there are many more you could include (680x0 ports, ia64, s390) which I would regard as well supported.
Not to rag on openbsd, I'm sure it's a great system, but be careful saying what's actually a supported platform. That's like saying netbsd runs on almost anything. Sure it does, but you may have to netboot the machine, run the file system off a better supported computer over NFS, and use a serial login. So basically you're using the CPU on your machine and the network card, while the Hard drive, video, keyboard, and mouse go to waste.
Also, 99% of the code within different Linux distributions is the same. Instead of just borrowing code between different distributions (or forks, in the *BSD case), the different distributions actually use exactly the same code, it's just the packaging which is different.
One Caveat, with the change of license of OpenBSD such that they can directly incorporate NetBSD code, I expect the code between these two forks to become more and more conserved.
Well, I'm obviously not smart enough to realize what the heck point you're trying to make here.
And you seem to have carelessly left out the most important line in the paragraph....
Which BSD, the more secure one, the more portable one, or the more powerful one. You don't get all three, cause they're different forks.
Or you can choose Linux, which is powerful, portable, and secure (well, depends on whose distribution you're using, you can make any OS as insecure as you like).
Plus, Linux is GPL, which I imagine is the real reason any sane person would go with Linux. If IBM went with BSD, any contributions they made they'd have to keep proprietary, for fear that if they turned around and gave their code back to the community, their competitors (HP, Sun, etc.) would turn around and use their code in their own proprietary products to gain a competitive edge. Hey, guess what, we've just stepped back a decade and the UNIX wars are raging again.
The biggest beauty of Linux (or it's biggest problem, depending on your perspective) is the GPL. Although with the GPL IBM is required to release any improvements/additions it makes back to the community, IBM can also rest assured that any other company that uses or expands on these changes will have to also release those changes back to the community (and therefore to IBM).
Viral, I like it.
Have you ever worked on a MUMPS system?
,you say it runs on old hardware, but that doesn't giv any indication of the speed it runs at on old hardware.
MUMPS is the king of unmaintainability. I interned at a VA medical center for a summer (don't ask), and ran into this bastard child of an OS+Programming Language. Here's my problems with Mumps.
1) It's an Interpretive Language. Yeah
2) All lines are 256 Characters long. And remeber, you said it runs on old computers, with very little memory. Guess what that means? Yep, you try to cram as many commands on each line as possible. You can have loops within a line, etc. Reading code is a headache. Plus, since memory is at such a premium, and it's interpretive, you use variables with such sensible names as "A", "F", "W", and "Ii".
In my opinion, MUMPS should be allowed to die a quick death.
Yeah, but can I use CODA now?
I've been wanting to set up a centralized, non NFS based file system for my lab for years, and CODA has been "almost there" for a while.
Is anyone seriously using CODA in small production deployments yet? I'd love to know, 'cause I'd love to use it....
yes, but it sucks less
yeah, my school also supplies a LaTeX thesis style, makes for a very nice looking thesis, and you don't have to waste any time reading the thesis specs.
Hmmm, from your needs, it looks to me like you've just completely decribed LaTeX!
Just remember, in engineering/computer science/etc., most problems have already been solved. The solution to document processing (at least in my subjective mind) was already solved in the 80's with TeX/LaTeX
Heh heh heh
Two year ago, my two roommates and I were all finishing off our EE Master Theses. Two of us had gone with LaTeX. I went with LaTeX because, well, why would you ever want to write a thesis in anything else (especially when your school is cool enough to provide their own latex thesis style)? Roommate #1 went with LaTeX 'cause he had a PC at home, and a Mac in the lab, and had already seen the damage that the Word 97/Word 98 switcheroo could do.
Roommate #2, however, choose to go with Word 97, which provided much amusement for the rest of us, as he spent the last three days before his thesis due date moving pictures and text around trying to get his thesis to look as good as those produced by LaTeX.
closer to two years between 2.0 and 2.2,
and even then, 2.2 wasn't quite were it should have been until around 2.2.5
Even hooking up a regular NTSC TV to a digitial receiver should give you an image quality improvement. There's two reasons for this. One, you don't have as many noise problems 'cause the broadcast signal is digital (no more ghosting, yeah!). Two, now analog resolution losses. Imagine having all your broadcast stations at better then DVD quality.
Now, for the average Joe, they just need to start making cheap digital receivers, or including digital receiving abilities in current low quality (i.e. NTSC) sets, and everyone should be able to switch over to the new system.
And they'll keep dropping (Redhat, VA Res^H^H^HLinux, etc.).
.com company which has turned a profit? I'm sure there are a couple, but I can't think of any.
I wouldn't say these companies are doing badly, yeah they're still bleading money, but remember it takes most startups 5,10, even 15 years to start turning a profit. Can you name a
It's not that the Linux IPO's were of bad companies. They were just the subject of rampant hype and speculation, fueled by a public which knows Linux is the next thing but without any companies to invest in. I would expect these companies share prices to bottom out below $20 a share (which is still probably overvalued), and then slowly rise as they expand.
Well, when the Athlon came out, people were really looking forward to an SMP board. The slot A architecture (same one used as the dec alpha) looks like it should perform much better then intel's Slot 1, and scale well up to 8 processors (if I recall correctly).
As far as I know, the Athlon chips are SMP capable. The problem is nobody has yet produced a chipset which supports multiprocessing Athlons.
I think AMD is currently concentrating on the desktop market (where few people go for SMP) which is why the haven't been as aggressive as I'd like them to be getting out an SMP motherboard.
Initially (last summer), AMD's faq said to expect a SMP board Q1 of this year, obviously that hasn't shown up yet, but the last I've read is that the AMD SMP chipset (and MB) is due sometime in Q3.
A hope they hurry, not being able to by an SMP Athlon is the only reason I haven't upgraded my system yet.
The hospital I work at (UCLA) uses them too.
They're used to connect the cyclotrons (radio-isotope produces) to the PET scanners (radio-isotope consumers).
When some of the stuff used has a half life of 2 minutes, it's quite useful to have something fast.
Well, 5 years ago would be 1995, at which time I had already been using Linux almost exclusively for two years. I didn't even hear about *BSD until 1996....
not quite,
B&W tv's (at least originally) don't understand the color signals at all, it's just that in Color NTSC encoding, the lower portion of the bandwidth (and most of it I must add) is used for intensity encoding (i.e. the B&W signal). B&W tv's don't decode the other two bands of the orthogonal color set (hue and saturation, I believe), and these higher frequency encoded signals just end up as high frequency noise which isn't noticeable in the final picture on the B&W set.
And remember, one of the 2 X chromosomes is silenced and never used fairly early in embryogenesis (i.e. it's wrapped up into a little ball and tucked into the side of the nucleus). So females effectively have as much X chromosomal material as men.
This is incidently how you get calico cats (and why all calico cats are female). The two X chromosomes have different color genes, they turn off at random in the early embryo (well not really at random, but imprinting is a a whole 'nother field), and you get areas of the skin containing homogenous or heterogenous populations of the X chromosomes being expressed (i.e. light spots, dark spots, and inbetween spots).
1 is odd.....
Anonymous Coward's always start with a score of 0
As the signal to noise ratio of AC's is fairly low, it makes sense to penalize AC's initially so that people can filter them out.
Uh, I think you're the one who's confused.
So, you have a chip running at 900 MHz, that means the clock is putting out a pulse waveform which looks something like a 900 MHz square wave, with a good number of the transistors changing state with the clock edge. Now, let's do a quick fourier series of our friendly 900 MHz square wave, and what's the base frequency, you know, the frequency with the most energy, looks like 900 MHz to me.
Granted, you're not coupling the clock chip to an antenna, so you're not going to have the most efficient transfer of our friendly 900 MHz electrical signal to an EM (Radio) Wave, but it's still going to happen, and could well mess up other electronics running at 900 MHz if it wasn't for the nice metal case acting as a faraday cage.
Remember, at some level, every digital abstraction layer has an analog underpinning.
ahh, but the beauty of napalm ain't just the heat, it's also that it sucks up all the oxygen in the air. I'm not seeing an air tank in the current version of this suit.....
> This has made the system popular at places like MIT and NASA,
> both of which have large menageries of computer systems from a multitude of
> vendors.
Umm, after spending 5 years at MIT, I can only recall seeing 1 *BSD box, although there certainly might be more....
The campus computers these days are almost entirely Sun's and SGI's (running their respective commercial unices). Over the last five years, the campus computers that have been phased out have been IBM RS6000's (AIX), Sparc Classics (Solaris), DEC 5000's (ultrix), and VAX Station 3100's (ultrix). None of them *BSD.
I worked in both CS and EE labs, the CS lab was a SUN shop, the EE lab used Linux for the main server, and a combo of Solaris/Linux/95 for everything else.
Residential computers are a mix of 95/98/NT/and Linux, with a couple macs thrown in for good measure. Most of the technically orientated people I knew, if they weren't running Linux, had a second box running Linux under there desk. (The place I lived at had ~1.3 computers/person, which was fairly common).
If anyone had a different experience, pipe in.
So, does anyone have an idea of when we can expect to start seeing dual/quad/etc. processor motherboards for the K7^H^HAthalon?
I'd like to get an Athalon system, but my next computer needs to be a MP system (doing threaded 3D image reconstruction programming type stuff). Since I can't wait forever, do I need to get a cheapy dual celeron to tide me over?