IBM is now selling Power5 boxes. Each Power5 chip is dual-cored and dual-threaded meaning 4 CPUs per chip. They will (soon?) be selling machines with Power5 MCMs, which are 4 Power5 chips on a single module. That's right, a sixteen-way in the palm of your hand. (well, hands, really, they're big. Look at the picture.)
Running old distributions is not a great idea. Remember all those security notices that you ignored? Well, they didn't go away. Old (unupdated) Linux distributions make great targets for script kiddies.
TZ
"My conversations with Aubrey are invariably like the ones I have with colleagues after we've spent four hours in a pub," says University of Idaho gerontologist Steven Austad. "But with him you don't have to go to a pub for four hours--you just start from that point."
Oooh, so Mother Nature needs a favor?! Well maybe she should have thought of that when she was besetting us with droughts and floods and poison monkeys! Nature started the fight for survival, and now she wants to quit because she's losing. Well I say, hard cheese
Mandrake's retail releases include proprietary applications (like RealPlayer and nVidia / ATI drivers), but they also provide a 100% GPL "Download Version" for those who don't want/need anything proprietary.
I go with ZoneAlarm first (installed from a CD I burned from a safe computer), and then all the patches. If you're winXP (which you are) I guess you can get away without ZoneAlarm, so long as you configure the built-in firewall first.
But Linux as a desktop environment? I would not want to try and introduce my parents to Linux as a desktop environment in the state any of the current distributions are in. Yah, getting printing working under Linux is certainly doable; install CUPS and the appropriate driver, configure it all, poke at the CUPS internal webserver if you need to check things out, etc. I'm more than willing to take the plunge on that. But I don't want to have to explain CUPS to my parents; they're used to a Windows box where they can go to Best Buy, buy a printer, plug it in, and put in a driver CD. Or the new digicam they just bought; they want to be able to plug the camera into their computer and get their images out into a graphical program where they can e-mail it. They don't want to have to go looking for drivers for digicams for Linux or whatever, they want to just plug it in and put in the CD.
I installed MDK10.0 on my grandmother's computer this weekend. It detected the HP 812C printer automatically and installed appropriate drivers. I do know about cups, but it turns out I didn't even have to. (The weird thing is, the printer wasn't even on - I guess enough of its USB system was powered for it to identify itself.) As for digital cameras, I just plug mine in and an icon shows up on the desktop. Note that in neither case did I actually need a driver CD. IMHO, it's easier to set up hardware in Linux than Windows. Assuming you run a modern distribution anyways.
They're used to Windows Update, where it'll find the critical updates and download them, then prompt them to install. They don't have to worry about it.
I don't think most people are used to Windows Update.
As far as I know if you're deploying a large database it's still advisable to have a big huge IBM mainframe or a Unisys box or a Sun 10k instead of 4,8 or 16 clustered 8 proc machines.
nitpick: These are also not generally considered HPC.
But anyways, where do you draw the cutoff? Would you consider something like this an HPC or an HPCCC? Technically, that's an HPCCC, but I don't see how you could really call it anything but HPC. Clusters (with a good interconnect) are every bit as HPC as Cray.
Now, that doesn't meant that they're always better. There are still jobs that a Cray is more appropriate for, but for a large number of HPC jobs, clusters are very appropriate (and cost-beneficial).
Mandrake's great for more than just newbies. I happened to do things opposite of most people - I started with slack, then went to RedHat (only for two releases or so), and have been pretty faithful to MDK for the past few years. I learned a lot in slack (enough to fix, or muddle through, the occasional MDK GUI tool hiccups) and now I just want a Linux desktop that works right without much hassle. And that's Mandrake.
TZ
DVD burning ain't the same as authoring. I haven't used the new K3b, but it's probably good for backups or burning the DVD video iso images you create via other means (like dvdauthor). I really doubt that K3b has DVD authoring tools built into it.
TZ
Some of the first SF pieces people tend to offer up are Atlantis (1628), Utopia (1516) and even Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1817) though the latter has since fallen moreso into the horror genre.
What about Beowulf, circa 1000AD? I guess I wouldn't really call it SF, but Fantasy, for sure. Though the line is sometimes fuzzy.
TZ
I'd never heard the word "Heisenbug", but instantly understood its meaning. We have them in hardware design too. For instance, sometimes when trying to debug bus signalling errors, attaching a probe to the bus is enough to throw the capacitance / inductance of the bus lines back into spec and make the error go away. Really a pain to deal with.
TZ
The author's confused
on
Digital Fortress
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Doesn't sound like the author really understands cryptography or cryptology. It's the people that do the important work of breaking a code, not the uber machine that just automates the process once the system's been broken.
TZ
I kind of like the way that X calls are low level, and that frees people to build nice widget sets like GTK and QT on top of those base Xlib calls. That's something that X does right, IMHO. And having the network transparency at that level is good too. However, I find Y's idea of a network transparent widget set intriguing, as I don't yet have a high-speed connection at home. I'm not saying get rid of network transparent Xlib, but I think building a network transparent high level widget set could make applications be nicer to run for me over a dial-up modem. Granted, apps would have to be ported to this new widget set, but still, I think it could be worth it. Maybe the X guys could pick up this idea.
TZ
Not to mention the year-long development process before you even get to go to fab. HDL (or schematic capture) design, tons and tons of functional simulation, the preliminary floorplanning of the chip, gate-level simulation, then timing closure all have to be done before you can even make a mask.
TZ
(biased since logic design is what I do)
I've been using MDK since 7.2, and it seems the same every release. There's always updates, that's just how it is with open source. Hell, I've always found it a pain that MS doesn't release updates more often. Also, with MDK, it seems every time they make a release, a bunch of whiners complain about a bunch of bugs, but everything seems just fine to me. Then a couple weeks later, the whiners calm down and everybody realizes the release was pretty good. I've always been happy w/ their products. (There are apparently some issues with their service, I guess, but I've never had problems w/ their store or asked for support from them, so I don't have any personal experience.)
TimeZone
Slashdot Mirror
Smelly Cat
End of Advertisement
TZ
Running old distributions is not a great idea. Remember all those security notices that you ignored? Well, they didn't go away. Old (unupdated) Linux distributions make great targets for script kiddies.
TZ
"My conversations with Aubrey are invariably like the ones I have with colleagues after we've spent four hours in a pub," says University of Idaho gerontologist Steven Austad. "But with him you don't have to go to a pub for four hours--you just start from that point."
Oooh, so Mother Nature needs a favor?! Well maybe she should have thought of that when she was besetting us with droughts and floods and poison monkeys! Nature started the fight for survival, and now she wants to quit because she's losing. Well I say, hard cheese
We're supposed to believe you live and work in Canada, and not East Fishkill NY?
TZ
TZ
TZ
TZ
I installed MDK10.0 on my grandmother's computer this weekend. It detected the HP 812C printer automatically and installed appropriate drivers. I do know about cups, but it turns out I didn't even have to. (The weird thing is, the printer wasn't even on - I guess enough of its USB system was powered for it to identify itself.) As for digital cameras, I just plug mine in and an icon shows up on the desktop. Note that in neither case did I actually need a driver CD. IMHO, it's easier to set up hardware in Linux than Windows. Assuming you run a modern distribution anyways.
They're used to Windows Update, where it'll find the critical updates and download them, then prompt them to install. They don't have to worry about it.
I don't think most people are used to Windows Update.
TZ
nitpick: These are also not generally considered HPC.
But anyways, where do you draw the cutoff? Would you consider something like this an HPC or an HPCCC? Technically, that's an HPCCC, but I don't see how you could really call it anything but HPC. Clusters (with a good interconnect) are every bit as HPC as Cray.
Now, that doesn't meant that they're always better. There are still jobs that a Cray is more appropriate for, but for a large number of HPC jobs, clusters are very appropriate (and cost-beneficial).
TZ
Mandrake's great for more than just newbies. I happened to do things opposite of most people - I started with slack, then went to RedHat (only for two releases or so), and have been pretty faithful to MDK for the past few years. I learned a lot in slack (enough to fix, or muddle through, the occasional MDK GUI tool hiccups) and now I just want a Linux desktop that works right without much hassle. And that's Mandrake.
TZ
DVD burning ain't the same as authoring. I haven't used the new K3b, but it's probably good for backups or burning the DVD video iso images you create via other means (like dvdauthor). I really doubt that K3b has DVD authoring tools built into it.
TZ
Now I have to go regenerate my PGP passphrase. Anybody have a 16-sided die?
TZ
Your theory of a donut shaped universe is intriguing. I may have to steal it.
TZ
No, this one was really RED.
TZ
What about Beowulf, circa 1000AD? I guess I wouldn't really call it SF, but Fantasy, for sure. Though the line is sometimes fuzzy.
TZ
I'd never heard the word "Heisenbug", but instantly understood its meaning. We have them in hardware design too. For instance, sometimes when trying to debug bus signalling errors, attaching a probe to the bus is enough to throw the capacitance / inductance of the bus lines back into spec and make the error go away. Really a pain to deal with.
TZ
Doesn't sound like the author really understands cryptography or cryptology. It's the people that do the important work of breaking a code, not the uber machine that just automates the process once the system's been broken.
TZ
I kind of like the way that X calls are low level, and that frees people to build nice widget sets like GTK and QT on top of those base Xlib calls. That's something that X does right, IMHO. And having the network transparency at that level is good too. However, I find Y's idea of a network transparent widget set intriguing, as I don't yet have a high-speed connection at home. I'm not saying get rid of network transparent Xlib, but I think building a network transparent high level widget set could make applications be nicer to run for me over a dial-up modem. Granted, apps would have to be ported to this new widget set, but still, I think it could be worth it. Maybe the X guys could pick up this idea.
TZ
What about "I think there is a world market for maybe five computers"?
TZ
Don't forget the Adam/Colecovision, man!
TZ
Not to mention the year-long development process before you even get to go to fab. HDL (or schematic capture) design, tons and tons of functional simulation, the preliminary floorplanning of the chip, gate-level simulation, then timing closure all have to be done before you can even make a mask. TZ (biased since logic design is what I do)
I haven't seen anyone mention Aurora yet...
TZ
I've been using MDK since 7.2, and it seems the same every release. There's always updates, that's just how it is with open source. Hell, I've always found it a pain that MS doesn't release updates more often. Also, with MDK, it seems every time they make a release, a bunch of whiners complain about a bunch of bugs, but everything seems just fine to me. Then a couple weeks later, the whiners calm down and everybody realizes the release was pretty good. I've always been happy w/ their products. (There are apparently some issues with their service, I guess, but I've never had problems w/ their store or asked for support from them, so I don't have any personal experience.)
TimeZone