Ah yes, that's quite significant. I understand that's mainly why IBM's Power4 has a lower clockspeed than PPC970 -- not just the other core and the extra monitoring circuitry, but it has just plain thicker wires (or something like that, IANAE, a speed-to-reliability trade-off anyway). But I guess the current discussion was mostly about single or dual CPU worksations, where reliability isn't such a killer feature -- with servers it certainly is.
I guess another design strength of the US3 that shows better in big iron is the integrated memory controller. Well, I guess it can show already in "measly" workstations -- AMD's Hammers have been really shining in memory latency benchmarks (whereas throughput has been more mundane).
If you mean "Freax", it was the original name Linus had for his rendering of Minix; he was uncomfortable with naming it after himself. Fortunately (IMO) a friend convinced him that "Linux" would be better, when it was time to open it up for the world.
Um, it probably wasn't so much about the whole country living in the USSR's shadow (which was true enough, and had a big impact on things), but about Finland having a true and working multi-party system. You could be right wing, you could be left wing, up to you.
Well, at least some time after the bloody, essentially capitalists vs. socialists civil war in 1918, which ended in the defeat and mass murders of the latter, and left a sore wound for a couple of decades, until the Soviet invasion of 1939 which pretty much overnight unified the country. (Obviously the invasion and the encore in 1941-5 didn't succeed, Finland got defeated both times but not conquered.)
The shadow was very clear, though, and sometimes got even exaggerated out of the reality of the Soviet intentions. And it was regularly used as a trump card in Finnish internal politics. What with the Prez undeniably the best at playing the survival game getting re-elected for a total of 25 years, with a slight twisting of the Constitution... (But no problem, it was perfectly within the Constitution to change the Constitution to accommodate this. Flexibility, kinda.)
'Nuff ranted I guess. I hope I didn't appear anti-Russian above. I have some good friends over there, and I'm well aware that the Russians where the ones to suffer the most from what the Soviet Union, after a glorious start, turned into when Stalin took over. A good portion of the soldiers who attacked Finland didn't know why they were doing it (or knew only the flat out lies they'd been told), some didn't even know which country exactly they were in, which is pretty telling in a way. Of course, all water under the bridge now. Now it's just an exciting neighbour:-) (And creating a significant amount of new business in Finland.)
Yes plenty had Communist Party membership cards (in the form of small books, really) and proudly carried them around. Finland has been a multi-party system since the independence in 1917. In fact, there have been and still are multiple communist and socialist parties, typically warring between themselves more than with the center and right-wing parties...
The commies in Finland had their heyday after WWII where Finland was among the losers for teaming up with Germany for help (but hey, the Soviets attacked first, on both occasions), but from the Fifties onward they became an increasingly marginal bunch of always-opposition parties. However, one of the most left-wing factions reportedly had undeniably the best parties at Helsinki Uni in the Seventies, and many now busy at Nokia or elsewhere dearly miss those;-)
What's the word, is this just coincidence or was it intended? If it was (at least originally) an inside joke, is "New Technology" then just the politically correct backronym -- and has MS actually confirmed this popular interpretation is what "NT" stands for?
(I mean, "Based on Windows New Technology Technology" doesn't sound too smart out loud... I've tried;-)
The G5 is a Power4 chip without the other processor core and the RAS circuitry, with faster instead of "extra reliable" physical wiring, and with more advanced branch prediction and of course the Velocity Engine. Substantial differences in the chip (and in the remaining core).:-)
No problem with that. The "GNU/Linux hood ornament" would simply have both RMS and Linus in it. Simple!
Oh wait.
I'm suddendly getting a mental image of a hood ornament consisting mostly of a giant beard flapping in the wind, with two dim and indistinguishable faces somewhere inside it, one with blue eyes. Need to reconsider this....
Um, can we have a GNU/SCO hood ornament instead? Richard and Darl up there side by side -- I'd probably never need to honk again!
Yep it's interesting, but "ordinary desktop PC" means 32-bit 33MHz PCI bus, and that means 133MB/s of memory bandwidth shared by *all* of the 1 to 24 co-processors (64 to 1536 FPUs) they say they'll fit into one PC. This is like a Linux cluster with all the RAM pooled in one box, with a single GigE connection to all the rest of the nodes. Ugh.
The memory bottleneck is so serious, they should have addressed it right away and thoroughly in this press release. Why no mention of big mama L2 caches to counter the bottleneck? (Well, at 2 or 3 Watts per chip you're not likely to have the transistor count for much cache anyway -- supposing reasonable clockspeeds, not the kHz range...) Why so very little emphasis on this system's obvious focus on the "embarrassingly parallel" kind of computing tasks? (Instead, they almost present this as an all-purpose vector computer. I almost expected them to use "Cray-on-a-Chip"...) And why not bring in PCI-X and bank on it for performance?
Am I cynical here or is this press piece written exclusively for the clueless? Is this company worth checking out or something else?
And of course the obvious question, how is this any better than a PlayStation3?;-)
But of course apple.com gives an objective review of the development process. Never had any reality distortion there, ever.
Joking aside, IBM tamed the PPC970/G5 down from their existing Power4 chip which they developed completely without Apple. (Dropping the other core and the self monitoring/healing circuitry, sacrificing inherent stability for clockspeed in the physical wiring, adding more advanced branch prediction and the Altivec/Velocity Engine.) Of course they listened carefully to Apple's wishes, but that was about the extent of "teaming up" that took place.
Correct about Apple co-designing the impressive chipset, though! Quite a leap forward from the PC133 days:-)
Yikes, the furniture prices of today. To even be included on a list of just seven entries summing up a multi-million budget, those must be Aeron chairs. I wonder what's so special about faculty chairs anyway?
Sir, from your mastery of layout it indeed shows that UI design is a part time job for you.;-)
Joking aside, you were right in that Linux desktop designers should just accept the fact that the majority of their clientele have (more or less) deeply ingrained Windows habits -- expectations of where things are, how things work, how things are done. Windows may be bad (yadda yadda), but the users and their little habits should be respected nonetheless. Kinda "embrace and extend" instead of "invent a square wheel"...
Good idea, but for sure the mass tort specialists have already got it. They probably are already busy deputizing local ambulance chasers to put up ads and collect victims to build up big fat lawsuits against select telemarketers (in this case).
Slashdot Mirror
DiectX sucked untill it got to 8.0
DX6 and DX7 were okay; DX5 and prior versions sucked. That's what they say on the enthusiast sites, anyway.
But I thought Sun didn't have a Linux strategy...
Well, it's Thursday. They have Linux strategy on Tuesdays and Fridays.
Who do you have to know around here?
For starters, Petrified Natalie Portman, Yoda, Beowulf, and Soviet Sad Man will suffice.
Interesting! Thanks.
HP's collection of Dell and Compaq
In Soviet Russia, Digital buys HP!
Ah yes, that's quite significant. I understand that's mainly why IBM's Power4 has a lower clockspeed than PPC970 -- not just the other core and the extra monitoring circuitry, but it has just plain thicker wires (or something like that, IANAE, a speed-to-reliability trade-off anyway). But I guess the current discussion was mostly about single or dual CPU worksations, where reliability isn't such a killer feature -- with servers it certainly is.
I guess another design strength of the US3 that shows better in big iron is the integrated memory controller. Well, I guess it can show already in "measly" workstations -- AMD's Hammers have been really shining in memory latency benchmarks (whereas throughput has been more mundane).
Yep, and twice 1200 MHz (US3) isn't quite 3200 MHz (P4)...
If you mean "Freax", it was the original name Linus had for his rendering of Minix; he was uncomfortable with naming it after himself. Fortunately (IMO) a friend convinced him that "Linux" would be better, when it was time to open it up for the world.
+1 Funny!
Um, it probably wasn't so much about the whole country living in the USSR's shadow (which was true enough, and had a big impact on things), but about Finland having a true and working multi-party system. You could be right wing, you could be left wing, up to you.
:-) (And creating a significant amount of new business in Finland.)
Well, at least some time after the bloody, essentially capitalists vs. socialists civil war in 1918, which ended in the defeat and mass murders of the latter, and left a sore wound for a couple of decades, until the Soviet invasion of 1939 which pretty much overnight unified the country. (Obviously the invasion and the encore in 1941-5 didn't succeed, Finland got defeated both times but not conquered.)
The shadow was very clear, though, and sometimes got even exaggerated out of the reality of the Soviet intentions. And it was regularly used as a trump card in Finnish internal politics. What with the Prez undeniably the best at playing the survival game getting re-elected for a total of 25 years, with a slight twisting of the Constitution... (But no problem, it was perfectly within the Constitution to change the Constitution to accommodate this. Flexibility, kinda.)
'Nuff ranted I guess. I hope I didn't appear anti-Russian above. I have some good friends over there, and I'm well aware that the Russians where the ones to suffer the most from what the Soviet Union, after a glorious start, turned into when Stalin took over. A good portion of the soldiers who attacked Finland didn't know why they were doing it (or knew only the flat out lies they'd been told), some didn't even know which country exactly they were in, which is pretty telling in a way. Of course, all water under the bridge now. Now it's just an exciting neighbour
Yes plenty had Communist Party membership cards (in the form of small books, really) and proudly carried them around. Finland has been a multi-party system since the independence in 1917. In fact, there have been and still are multiple communist and socialist parties, typically warring between themselves more than with the center and right-wing parties...
;-)
The commies in Finland had their heyday after WWII where Finland was among the losers for teaming up with Germany for help (but hey, the Soviets attacked first, on both occasions), but from the Fifties onward they became an increasingly marginal bunch of always-opposition parties. However, one of the most left-wing factions reportedly had undeniably the best parties at Helsinki Uni in the Seventies, and many now busy at Nokia or elsewhere dearly miss those
"WNT is to VMS what IBM is to HAL"
;-)
Hey, a nice one.
What's the word, is this just coincidence or was it intended? If it was (at least originally) an inside joke, is "New Technology" then just the politically correct backronym -- and has MS actually confirmed this popular interpretation is what "NT" stands for?
(I mean, "Based on Windows New Technology Technology" doesn't sound too smart out loud... I've tried
Whatever, got a chuckle out of it regardless!
Pfft. Mine is bigger.
What?
The G5 is a Power4 chip without the other processor core and the RAS circuitry, with faster instead of "extra reliable" physical wiring, and with more advanced branch prediction and of course the Velocity Engine. Substantial differences in the chip (and in the remaining core). :-)
Ah, then you would prefer the original "Freax", of course.
(As an aside, do you think Earth the planet did the coding? Which planet are you on, actually?)
Disturbingly animated ;-)
Okay, it's a cliche. The tango scene is totally weird, tho.
No, that means SCO will sue the poor bastard for a license violation ;-)
No problem with that. The "GNU/Linux hood ornament" would simply have both RMS and Linus in it. Simple!
Oh wait.
I'm suddendly getting a mental image of a hood ornament consisting mostly of a giant beard flapping in the wind, with two dim and indistinguishable faces somewhere inside it, one with blue eyes. Need to reconsider this....
Um, can we have a GNU/SCO hood ornament instead? Richard and Darl up there side by side -- I'd probably never need to honk again!
Yep it's interesting, but "ordinary desktop PC" means 32-bit 33MHz PCI bus, and that means 133MB/s of memory bandwidth shared by *all* of the 1 to 24 co-processors (64 to 1536 FPUs) they say they'll fit into one PC. This is like a Linux cluster with all the RAM pooled in one box, with a single GigE connection to all the rest of the nodes. Ugh.
;-)
The memory bottleneck is so serious, they should have addressed it right away and thoroughly in this press release. Why no mention of big mama L2 caches to counter the bottleneck? (Well, at 2 or 3 Watts per chip you're not likely to have the transistor count for much cache anyway -- supposing reasonable clockspeeds, not the kHz range...) Why so very little emphasis on this system's obvious focus on the "embarrassingly parallel" kind of computing tasks? (Instead, they almost present this as an all-purpose vector computer. I almost expected them to use "Cray-on-a-Chip"...) And why not bring in PCI-X and bank on it for performance?
Am I cynical here or is this press piece written exclusively for the clueless? Is this company worth checking out or something else?
And of course the obvious question, how is this any better than a PlayStation3?
But of course apple.com gives an objective review of the development process. Never had any reality distortion there, ever.
:-)
Joking aside, IBM tamed the PPC970/G5 down from their existing Power4 chip which they developed completely without Apple. (Dropping the other core and the self monitoring/healing circuitry, sacrificing inherent stability for clockspeed in the physical wiring, adding more advanced branch prediction and the Altivec/Velocity Engine.) Of course they listened carefully to Apple's wishes, but that was about the extent of "teaming up" that took place.
Correct about Apple co-designing the impressive chipset, though! Quite a leap forward from the PC133 days
As discussed somewhere above, the Apple Store price of $2999 quite doesn't include the 4GB of RAM these shipped with...
And "cheap RAM" and "Apple" go as well together as "cheap RAM" and "SGI"...
four new endowed faculty chairs in ICES at UT
Yikes, the furniture prices of today. To even be included on a list of just seven entries summing up a multi-million budget, those must be Aeron chairs. I wonder what's so special about faculty chairs anyway?
Sir, from your mastery of layout it indeed shows that UI design is a part time job for you. ;-)
Joking aside, you were right in that Linux desktop designers should just accept the fact that the majority of their clientele have (more or less) deeply ingrained Windows habits -- expectations of where things are, how things work, how things are done. Windows may be bad (yadda yadda), but the users and their little habits should be respected nonetheless. Kinda "embrace and extend" instead of "invent a square wheel"...
Good idea, but for sure the mass tort specialists have already got it. They probably are already busy deputizing local ambulance chasers to put up ads and collect victims to build up big fat lawsuits against select telemarketers (in this case).
;-)
That or I've been reading too much Grisham
Too bad you didn't have a spare mod point to help me out of the "Score: 0" purgatory where my obscure sense of humour has taken me ;-)