For an accessable treatment of the expanding universe hypothesis, see "Five Ages of the Universe: Inside the Physics of Eternity" (Fred Adams, Free Press, 1999, ISBN 0743237722).
Fred uses a log scale to break down the history of the universe into five cosmological decades, starting from nanoseconds after the Big Bang, out until a trillion years is but a twitch on the flanks of time. If nothing else, it provides a reference scale to remind you that eternity is indeed a very long time.
Using Redhat 7.1 with jdk 1.3.1, the experience of our project team has been that the Linux jvm defaults to FORKING a new process for each java thread. If that's the behavior of the Linux jvm TMC was using, it could have skewed their results.
What I'd really like to know is why TMC didn't test J2EE on the same Windows OS they tested.NET on. Were they getting paid to bash two opponents at once (Linux, J2EE)? If they really wanted to test J2EE, why not JUST test J2EE?
Did You Intend To "Kill Cray"?
on
Ask Donald Becker
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Your work in making the "piles of PCs" approach to high performance computing a reality with Beowulf has been responsible for vastly expanding the construction and use of massively parallel systems. Now, viturally any high school - never mind college - can afford to construct a system on which students can learn and apply advanced numerical methods.
In retrospect, however, it would seem that the obvious cost benefits of Beowulf very nearly killed the development and use of large SMP and vector processing systems in the US. My understanding of the situation is this: * Before Beowulf, academics had a very hard time getting time on hideously expensive HPC systems. * When Beowulf started to prove itself, particularly with embarrassingly parallel problems using MPI, those academics who happened to sit on DARPA review panels pushed hard to choke off funding for other HPC architectures, promising that they could make distributed memory parallel systems all singing, all dancing, and cheap(er). * They couldn't really deliver, but in the meantime, Federal dollars for large shared memory and vector processing systems vanished, and the product lines and/or vendors with it.... at least in the US. * Eight years later, only Fujitsu and NEC make truly advanced vector systems, and Cray is only now crawling back out of the muck to deliver a new product. Evidently someone near the Beltway needs a better vector machine, and Congress ain't paying for anything made across the pond.
Cutting to the chase, did you advance a "political" stand among your peers within the public-funded HPC community, or were you just trying to get some work done with the budget available at NASA?
During previous police actions, the services issued across the board budget cuts to pay for it, including anything not directly involved in supporting the action. Until Congress got around to issuing more coin, in-service R&D and ongoing contractor development and production took immediate hits.
I agree that pushing the salaried staff into mandatory +40 hour work weeks could be a sign of bad program management.
For a smaller company like yours, it could be worse. If the mgmt doesn't enunciate a plan for eventually backing off the hours, they're either looking to skim short term profits, and/or are desperate to keep their heads above water long enough to ship something that'll pay the bills. Unless you're deeply in love with your projects, it's time to move on. Otherwise, you've just accepted a 50% paycut... provided the checks are still good.
When I worked in aerospace, the embedded s/w effort was habittually in crisis management mode. It was obvious that a previously h/w design centric culture hadn't yet come to grips with managing s/w.
Shortly after GM bought us, they decreed a mandatory extra hour a day from the engineering staff... to which most of the staff replied: Good, I can go home early. Mgmt backed off from the plan before it even went into effect.
>> "...why you...seem to think that such a thing might happen?"
> Maybe because it already happened before but was killed because Apple did not want to sell Mac OS for x86?
Apple makes money because it has differentiated itself as a boutique brand. That brand includes a boxen with noticeable industrial design and the label on the side.
Going software only would be a radical move for a company that's profitable, and stockholders of profitable companies hate radical moves. They rarely suceed, and are a sign of desperation.
No matter what cpu Apple runs with, it will control the form and function of the boxes that go around it, and be the exclusive distributor. You are never, ever going to load OSX into a generic Intel box and expect it to boot.
> The source of this questioning is probably the Darwin 1.4.1 ISO image for x86...
If the original poster had even known to look at the Darwin x86 ISO's, s/he might have focused the original dopey question a bit more. The only thing even closely relevant in the release notes says: "Darwin 1.4.1 should not be installed onto a Mac OS X partition. It is a goal for a future release of Darwin to be easily interchanged into a Mac OS X system."
To then read into this that "Aqua will be easily compiled into a x86 system" is rather a long leap.
What the note is really pointing out is that on a *Mac*, for now you can either compile and run Darwin, or you can run MacOSX, but you can't do both. Copying a Darwin module you've compiled yourself into an OSX system is gonna fsck you up.
1) The kids are filling schools to the bursting point, requiring more support than their parents indirectly paid taxes begin to cover.
2) Since they avoid the medical system as long as possible, they eventually cram the emergency rooms and increase the system's budget deficits.
3) They artificially drive down the going price for labor in an ever expanding sphere of occupations. I don't see many artichokes in bulk mail shops, fast food joints, non-ag warehouses, or janitorial operations, to name a few. They ARE good workers, and that's just the point. Af_Americans were a pretty good labor value when THEY were bought and sold, too. By your logic, if wholesale chattel slavery keeps the lettuce from rotting, it's a good deal.
4) They take pressure away from the fat cats in Mexico and Central America to do much about their own inequities.
5) Sure, if you ripped every last undocumented worker out of their job tomorrow, it'd screw things up. If I ripped every open border apologist out of their job, it'd screw things up too. When's the last time a labor market changed overnight? Right, never. The economy would adjust, probably for the better.
Take your racial bull-baiting somewhere else. You want a reconquesta? Then give Mexico back to los indios.
Biz Plan? Embedded H/w & S/w using Linux
on
Lineo near Death
·
· Score: 1
My recollection is that Lineo is an embedded Linux s/w spinoff from Caldera.
I first paid attention to them a year or so ago when they bought out Rt-Control, a couple of Ryerson U EE's who had developed a non-MMU kernel and a networked microcontroller-on-a-SIMM to go with it.
All of $250 for a complete development kit back in 2000, quite a deal and fun to play with. I hope Jeff Dionne and Michael Durrant remembered to diversify their portfolios! It was a pretty good run for an overgrown master's thesis, eh?
"Certainly this was illegal...", well duh. Naturally, the possibility that at least the employees may not have been paid in a while doesn't end up on a legal pad. The last few months of almost any firm headed for liquidation frequently features a measure of sharp dealings by all involved. So, don't moan just because some half-broke hotdesked schmoh folded up his workstation and walked before you could bid $50 for it.
It'd be neat if the author of "fun_with_the_wap11.txt" could find out just WHAT part of the h/w was being controlled by the power parameter, ie. what amplifiers and/or attenuators.
Since the 802.11b radios are TRANSmitting devices - not just emitting or receiving - we can hope the parameter being mucked with controls the receiver's IF amplifier as well as the emitter amplifier.
In that case, the outbound pulses are stronger, AND the weak-kneed inbound pulses are given a kick in the pants before being passed along to the analog and digital processing stages. This increases the odds for analog signal detection and digital network layer traffic.
Keep in mind that cranking an amp also increases the heat generated inside a cramped pcmcia card, translating into either shorter life or the addition of heat sinks and fans. Those who are serious about longer range go with the two way amps from Hyperlink, et al.
If you look at how the inhabitants of southern Great Britain mangled the language of Chaucer, I think Daniel Webster could be forgiven for chopping off a superfluous 'u', or rearranging the odd 're'.;-)
When living in So. Cal. and Tucson, I resorted to do-not-call requests and hang-ups many a time. Since moving to the 808 area code, it's been bliss.
During the day, the idiots disconnect when they get the machine, and I haven't gotten more than a handful of sales calls during the evening in three years. Could being six hours off of EST make that much difference?
As for the view of Jews by Islam, IMHO there are three main threads:
1) minor conflicts between jewish tribes and Moslems during the Prophet's exile in Medina, told from the Islamic point of view in the Haddiths
2) the Crusades caused a hardening of opinion about the large Jewish and Christian populations under Islamic rule ca. 1000AD,
3) fallout from the collapse of the Ottoman Empire after 1918.
After reading the article: Bin Laden's successors - NY Times Magazine, June 25, 2000, which has been floating around on Usenet lately, it's clear that the basic problem with the Afghans and Jihad is that the vast majority of Afghans (in this case, ethnic Pathans) are barely educated hicks.
It would seem that even those lucky enough to get into a religious school are getting only the sketchiest outline of Islamic theology and jurisprudence. Instead, they spend years phoenetically memorizing the Koran while not being the least bit conversant in Arabic. Filling the void are traditional Afghan cultural biases. Hence, Afghan attitudes regarding Jihad are almost completely uninformed, and molded by almost 20 years of continuous warfare and city-slicker outside opportunists like bin Laden.
An acquaintance from my So. Cal. days took a partner to handle the business end of his company, while he and the coders pumped out C-64 games. Partner used to sell for one dem "get rich on no-down real estate" shops, so it wasn't a surprise that he pocketed the FICA withholding, and left the founder holding the bag.
Same old story, been told *many* times before. I'm guessing Steve didn't bother to have his books auditted at least yearly by an outside CPA, either.
It looked worse the way the languages were ordered in the original article... perhaps the best way to go would have been to replace "...Spanish, and other..." with just "...and...", but alas, my morning hit of crank hadn't kicked in yet.
Based on two samples in our center (1 MacOS Mac/G4, 1 W2K P3), the NPR Quicktime stream is smoother and better sounding than the Real stream on both MacOS and W2K. We've only heard a couple of small pauses in the QT stream, while the Real stream constantly drops out. To be fair, I wouldn't be surprised if NPR's Real server is getting hit a lot harder than the QT. I'd be interested in a technical post mortem from NPR's server admins.
Having an otherwise (at least superficially) sucessful game company bite it suddenly takes me back to the day in the mid '80's. In that case, while the 'tech' partner was banging code with the crew, the 'biz' partner was banging the Social Security Administration and pocketing the FICA witholding. It doesn't take an MBA to guess which one was left holding the bag.
There is no *legal* basis for Apple to muzzle a gossip site. If any of the site owners had the money for legal retainer, they could show Apple the door in minutes. However, Steve Jobs was there (well, down the block) when Adam Osborne killed Osborne I sales and a solid PC firm by showing off the Osborne II before it was anywhere near ready to ship. With this history, there's no point in talking to Steve about "legal merit" or "proportionate response".
Well, at least not yet. Ok, at first glance an SP is a collection of rack-mount RS6000s, connected via Ethernet. So where's the added value? High speed crossbar switches also connect all of those RS6000s, w/ point to point bandwidth of 30 to 130 MB/sec, depending of the model of the switch adapter.
At our center, we're installing a batch of new SMP nodes, so I'll be interested to see just where we place in the standings when we rerun the benchmark.
Re:And the prizes for weirdest number of processor
on
Top 500 Supercomputers
·
· Score: 1
It's dictated by the number of RS6000 nodes we had online on our biggest system on the day the benchmark was run. At the time, we were running with 3 different RS6000 SP systems with 128 or mode processing nodes. Nodes are constantly moved between the different systems as needs change.
You do NOT want MS using some portability library to get their apps onto Linux. Look at the experience with the MacOS. Around about 1990, MS went with a common core code base for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint for Windows and MacOS. It was thought to be a Good Thing, ensuring that MS would continue to keep the mature Mac revs current with the then fresh Windows versions.
Of course, it didn't stop with the core code. Anyone who loaded Office onto their new PPC back in '94 will remember that the GUI looked just like the Win version, and was soooooooo slooooooow. Exactly. MS was running their Win code through compatibility libs to end up with PPC executable. From that moment on, it was obvious MS was just milking the MacOS market with a minimum effort while they drove everyone over to Windows. It wasn't a hard sell, when the apps looked the same, and the native Windows version ran faster.
If MS ever allows one of it's captive licensee's efforts at an honest to God NT API on Linux product to become sucessful, you can COUNT on these things:
* the Linux port of apps built on it will run like molasses;
* those apps will always come out the better part of a year later than the Windows release; * commercial Linux-only apps will be ported to Windows, which will become their primary market; * non-traditional Linux users will blame the platform, not the application, and switch back to Windows; * you'll see lots of MS ads in Linux user, trade, and developer rags to draw money and effort off to Windows API's and applications.... and WINE will be long dead.
Slashdot Mirror
Fred uses a log scale to break down the history of the universe into five cosmological decades, starting from nanoseconds after the Big Bang, out until a trillion years is but a twitch on the flanks of time. If nothing else, it provides a reference scale to remind you that eternity is indeed a very long time.
Yep, it's on Amazon.
What I'd really like to know is why TMC didn't test J2EE on the same Windows OS they tested .NET on. Were they getting paid to bash two opponents at once (Linux, J2EE)? If they really wanted to test J2EE, why not JUST test J2EE?
In retrospect, however, it would seem that the obvious cost benefits of Beowulf very nearly killed the development and use of large SMP and vector processing systems in the US. My understanding of the situation is this:
* Before Beowulf, academics had a very hard time getting time on hideously expensive HPC systems.
* When Beowulf started to prove itself, particularly with embarrassingly parallel problems using MPI, those academics who happened to sit on DARPA review panels pushed hard to choke off funding for other HPC architectures, promising that they could make distributed memory parallel systems all singing, all dancing, and cheap(er).
* They couldn't really deliver, but in the meantime, Federal dollars for large shared memory and vector processing systems vanished, and the product lines and/or vendors with it.... at least in the US.
* Eight years later, only Fujitsu and NEC make truly advanced vector systems, and Cray is only now crawling back out of the muck to deliver a new product. Evidently someone near the Beltway needs a better vector machine, and Congress ain't paying for anything made across the pond.
Cutting to the chase, did you advance a "political" stand among your peers within the public-funded HPC community, or were you just trying to get some work done with the budget available at NASA?
From a former defense contractor...
During previous police actions, the services issued across the board budget cuts to pay for it, including anything not directly involved in supporting the action. Until Congress got around to issuing more coin, in-service R&D and ongoing contractor development and production took immediate hits.
If you're using MacOS 9 or earlier, the potential for buffer overflows is meaningless. It wouldn't be the first time your system bailed, anyway.
For the OS X user, just adjust your browser to make Info-zip the zip file helper, and surf over to Info-zip's site to download the source or binary.
For a smaller company like yours, it could be worse. If the mgmt doesn't enunciate a plan for eventually backing off the hours, they're either looking to skim short term profits, and/or are desperate to keep their heads above water long enough to ship something that'll pay the bills. Unless you're deeply in love with your projects, it's time to move on. Otherwise, you've just accepted a 50% paycut... provided the checks are still good.
When I worked in aerospace, the embedded s/w effort was habittually in crisis management mode. It was obvious that a previously h/w design centric culture hadn't yet come to grips with managing s/w.
Shortly after GM bought us, they decreed a mandatory extra hour a day from the engineering staff... to which most of the staff replied: Good, I can go home early. Mgmt backed off from the plan before it even went into effect.
So Zeroconf is a protocol for letting devices discover that other devices exist -- without requiring a human to explicitly tell each device.
By Jini, I think he's got it.
> Maybe because it already happened before but was killed because Apple did not want to sell Mac OS for x86?
Apple makes money because it has differentiated itself as a boutique brand. That brand includes a boxen with noticeable industrial design and the label on the side.
Going software only would be a radical move for a company that's profitable, and stockholders of profitable companies hate radical moves. They rarely suceed, and are a sign of desperation.
No matter what cpu Apple runs with, it will control the form and function of the boxes that go around it, and be the exclusive distributor. You are never, ever going to load OSX into a generic Intel box and expect it to boot.
If the original poster had even known to look at the Darwin x86 ISO's, s/he might have focused the original dopey question a bit more. The only thing even closely relevant in the release notes says: "Darwin 1.4.1 should not be installed onto a Mac OS X partition. It is a goal for a future release of Darwin to be easily interchanged into a Mac OS X system."
To then read into this that "Aqua will be easily compiled into a x86 system" is rather a long leap.
What the note is really pointing out is that on a *Mac*, for now you can either compile and run Darwin, or you can run MacOSX, but you can't do both. Copying a Darwin module you've compiled yourself into an OSX system is gonna fsck you up.
More facts about illegal aliens:
1) The kids are filling schools to the bursting point, requiring more support than their parents indirectly paid taxes begin to cover.
2) Since they avoid the medical system as long as possible, they eventually cram the emergency rooms and increase the system's budget deficits.
3) They artificially drive down the going price for labor in an ever expanding sphere of occupations. I don't see many artichokes in bulk mail shops, fast food joints, non-ag warehouses, or janitorial operations, to name a few. They ARE good workers, and that's just the point. Af_Americans were a pretty good labor value when THEY were bought and sold, too. By your logic, if wholesale chattel slavery keeps the lettuce from rotting, it's a good deal.
4) They take pressure away from the fat cats in Mexico and Central America to do much about their own inequities.
5) Sure, if you ripped every last undocumented worker out of their job tomorrow, it'd screw things up. If I ripped every open border apologist out of their job, it'd screw things up too. When's the last time a labor market changed overnight? Right, never. The economy would adjust, probably for the better.
Take your racial bull-baiting somewhere else. You want a reconquesta? Then give Mexico back to los indios.
I first paid attention to them a year or so ago when they bought out Rt-Control, a couple of Ryerson U EE's who had developed a non-MMU kernel and a networked microcontroller-on-a-SIMM to go with it.
All of $250 for a complete development kit back in 2000, quite a deal and fun to play with. I hope Jeff Dionne and Michael Durrant remembered to diversify their portfolios! It was a pretty good run for an overgrown master's thesis, eh?
Cloud Nine is based in Basingstoke, UK, out in the Hampshires? It must be those damn Watership Down rabbits gnawing through the cables again!
"Certainly this was illegal...", well duh. Naturally, the possibility that at least the employees may not have been paid in a while doesn't end up on a legal pad. The last few months of almost any firm headed for liquidation frequently features a measure of sharp dealings by all involved. So, don't moan just because some half-broke hotdesked schmoh folded up his workstation and walked before you could bid $50 for it.
It'd be neat if the author of "fun_with_the_wap11.txt" could find out just WHAT part of the h/w was being controlled by the power parameter, ie. what amplifiers and/or attenuators.
Since the 802.11b radios are TRANSmitting devices - not just emitting or receiving - we can hope the parameter being mucked with controls the receiver's IF amplifier as well as the emitter amplifier.
In that case, the outbound pulses are stronger, AND the weak-kneed inbound pulses are given a kick in the pants before being passed along to the analog and digital processing stages. This increases the odds for analog signal detection and digital network layer traffic.
Keep in mind that cranking an amp also increases the heat generated inside a cramped pcmcia card, translating into either shorter life or the addition of heat sinks and fans. Those who are serious about longer range go with the two way amps from Hyperlink, et al.
If you look at how the inhabitants of southern Great Britain mangled the language of Chaucer, I think Daniel Webster could be forgiven for chopping off a superfluous 'u', or rearranging the odd 're'. ;-)
When living in So. Cal. and Tucson, I resorted to do-not-call requests and hang-ups many a time. Since moving to the 808 area code, it's been bliss.
During the day, the idiots disconnect when they get the machine, and I haven't gotten more than a handful of sales calls during the evening in three years. Could being six hours off of EST make that much difference?
1) minor conflicts between jewish tribes and Moslems during the Prophet's exile in Medina, told from the Islamic point of view in the Haddiths
2) the Crusades caused a hardening of opinion about the large Jewish and Christian populations under Islamic rule ca. 1000AD,
3) fallout from the collapse of the Ottoman Empire after 1918.
After reading the article: Bin Laden's successors - NY Times Magazine, June 25, 2000, which has been floating around on Usenet lately, it's clear that the basic problem with the Afghans and Jihad is that the vast majority of Afghans (in this case, ethnic Pathans) are barely educated hicks.
It would seem that even those lucky enough to get into a religious school are getting only the sketchiest outline of Islamic theology and jurisprudence. Instead, they spend years phoenetically memorizing the Koran while not being the least bit conversant in Arabic. Filling the void are traditional Afghan cultural biases. Hence, Afghan attitudes regarding Jihad are almost completely uninformed, and molded by almost 20 years of continuous warfare and city-slicker outside opportunists like bin Laden.
An acquaintance from my So. Cal. days took a partner to handle the business end of his company, while he and the coders pumped out C-64 games. Partner used to sell for one dem "get rich on no-down real estate" shops, so it wasn't a surprise that he pocketed the FICA withholding, and left the founder holding the bag.
Same old story, been told *many* times before. I'm guessing Steve didn't bother to have his books auditted at least yearly by an outside CPA, either.
It looked worse the way the languages were ordered in the original article... perhaps the best way to go would have been to replace "...Spanish, and other..." with just "...and...", but alas, my morning hit of crank hadn't kicked in yet.
Based on two samples in our center (1 MacOS Mac/G4, 1 W2K P3), the NPR Quicktime stream is smoother and better sounding than the Real stream on both MacOS and W2K. We've only heard a couple of small pauses in the QT stream, while the Real stream constantly drops out. To be fair, I wouldn't be surprised if NPR's Real server is getting hit a lot harder than the QT. I'd be interested in a technical post mortem from NPR's server admins.
Having an otherwise (at least superficially) sucessful game company bite it suddenly takes me back to the day in the mid '80's. In that case, while the 'tech' partner was banging code with the crew, the 'biz' partner was banging the Social Security Administration and pocketing the FICA witholding. It doesn't take an MBA to guess which one was left holding the bag.
There is no *legal* basis for Apple to muzzle a gossip site. If any of the site owners had the money for legal retainer, they could show Apple the door in minutes. However, Steve Jobs was there (well, down the block) when Adam Osborne killed Osborne I sales and a solid PC firm by showing off the Osborne II before it was anywhere near ready to ship. With this history, there's no point in talking to Steve about "legal merit" or "proportionate response".
At our center, we're installing a batch of new SMP nodes, so I'll be interested to see just where we place in the standings when we rerun the benchmark.
It's dictated by the number of RS6000 nodes we had online on our biggest system on the day the benchmark was run. At the time, we were running with 3 different RS6000 SP systems with 128 or mode processing nodes. Nodes are constantly moved between the different systems as needs change.
Of course, it didn't stop with the core code. Anyone who loaded Office onto their new PPC back in '94 will remember that the GUI looked just like the Win version, and was soooooooo slooooooow. Exactly. MS was running their Win code through compatibility libs to end up with PPC executable. From that moment on, it was obvious MS was just milking the MacOS market with a minimum effort while they drove everyone over to Windows. It wasn't a hard sell, when the apps looked the same, and the native Windows version ran faster.
If MS ever allows one of it's captive licensee's efforts at an honest to God NT API on Linux product to become sucessful, you can COUNT on these things: