That's SDSC's Storage Resource Broker, and while I didn't read every point in the patent application, what I read I thought "yeah, sounds like SRB written in vague terms to me."
I still have mine that I bought back in college in the 80's. It's in my desk drawer, and I still use it, even though I have a laptop sitting on my desk. I'm spoiled at this point... I look at new calculators, but since they don't have the features I use most on the 16C, I never bother to buy a new one.
and have it do the right thing?
*watches in horror as all his python code stops working...*
You might want to have a look-see at more than one strongly-typed language to see how how you can actually deal such things... or maybe just start using a real programming language.;-)
I forget what version of Python 1.X I learned on, but it really is starting to feel like it has lost the "fits in your head" elegance it once had.
I'm a systems programmer (20 years), and I look at some of the esoteric additions and think "yeah, that's nice, but... would I try to teach that to a junior sysadmin?" And that's where I think Python begins to lose its original beauty. The early Python versions I worked with were much more readable and understandable, and I had no quams about teaching it to novice programmers as a first language. Now, I take a look at things like generators and the like and think "Where is all that Perl'esque line noise coming from, and do we really need it?" Sure, you can only limit yourself to the basic parts of the language to start with, but it seems to me that what was once considered elegant Python code is now considered verbose...
The march of progress, I guess... but it makes me wonder if I'll be teaching my kids Python in a few years or looking for a more suitable learning language. Heh... I wonder if ABC is still around?;-)
The hearing impaired aren't about to die, so in that sense there's less use in such a device.
It's about quality of life. $1 million isn't a lot of money if it ultimately leads to better quality of life for millions of people. Sure, in the long run it's going to cost a lot more than $1 million to bring such a device the masses, but you have to start somewhere, and it has practical uses.
Yeah... not much use in having a small, portable device that would allow the hearing impared be able to understand people trying to communicate with them using something much smaller than a desktop...
(Of course, I'm going to leave out how this is the logical first step in on-the-fly language translation, since that's a ways off. But it's clear that this is a logical first-step in a lot of useful and helpful products once you look past the geeky "Look, I can talk to my computer..." stuff.)
[b][i]Books are even better, and you can get them FOR FREE from the library. Seriously, stop finding fucking gadgets that don't require any imagination to babysit kids.[/i][/b]
Some kids can't read in the car... motion sickness. Video's don't trip the "I need to vomit now..." switch the same way as when the kid is trying to read. My kid would love to read in the car, I just don't much care for cleaning up the puke. I'm sure that makes me a bad parent (in some folks eyes) for not letting him read in the car and just dealing with the consequences, but...
... or am I the only dinosaur who remembers these?
GraphOn made this really sweet line of X terminals that allowed you to split the X server between the remote workstation server and the the display/mouse/keyboard. I was lucky enough to have one of these at home, and it was very zippy... at 9600 baud I could run an X display that was darned nice to have a full X display at home while my VaxstationII sat at work. Later versions used better compression and were even faster and more responsive. They used all sorts of tricks with save-unders, display lists, and mouse-overs to keep the actual line traffic as low as possible.
Granted, that was the late 80's, and X was in its infancy and clients weren't as feature rich as they are today (The web? Oh... that thing that's going to replace archie, wais, and gopher...), but it worked just fine for what we used them for. Even at 2400 baud, you could use 'em, but you really wanted at 5400.
Ah... those were the days, when you could have a 12" X display at home... 17" if you were really, really lucky. And they screamed at 19.2k!:-D
Are people buying copies of the operating system it runs.
$0.00
$0.00
$0.00
--Your bonus card has saved you $0.00 this year. Thank you for shopping at Linux Mart--
Yeah, I know it's a troll, but the money you save with linux (assuming you downloaded a free version and paid nothing) was the money you would have spent on another operating system, not some vapid discount you got for not paying "full price." Unless you believe you save $100.00 when you buy XP at $100 less than the suggested retail price...
Actually, it's the first thing I'd love to see... get them the heck off the road, and the sooner the better as far as I'm concerned! I've seen more distracted SUV drivers talking on the phone and racing at 90+ MPH to get home than any other class of drivers... I'd be more than happy to let them pay huge sums of money to leave the highways to the rest of us who actually pay attention when we're driving.
The analogy to ADA is a good one. When I was at CMU we had a prof who told us one of the promises of ADA is that it would make programs easier to write/read/maintain because ADA enforced "Good software engineering practices" as a part of the language. Java does similar things by trying to encourage you to write your code a specific way.
I worked with Java for a while, before I learned Python. In fact, I kind of liked working in Java. But Python (IMO) takes a different spin on things. It's designed to be understandable, and I've found it just fits in my mind better than a lot of languages. Perl is a seductive language as well (I've coded in it), but Python's a lot easier to read and evolve into a working program (it's all out there for you to see, there is no default/hidden magic going on "under the covers".)
Yeah, you can write bad Python... you can write any program poorly in any language. But Python doesn't try to force you into a particular design style for OO code. Java does, and that IMO is it's weakness. Or Python's strength, depending on your point of view.
Ada died a slow death under the weight of it's bloat. I wouldn't be surprised if Java ultimately met the same fate. And unlike Java, Python doesn't get in your way when writing code, though it has a richer object model. And that's why I like it, and I suspect a lot of other folks feel the same way (unless I really am alone in the universe... as my/. profile seems to indicate.;-))
It's not just the speed of the data transfer, it's also the latency of the interconnect. A lot of scientific codes will pass around a lot of little messages, and GigE is fast for bulk transfer, but it's not so good for that. That's why there are companies like Quadrics, Myricom, etc... Infiniband should fix this, but you'll want a big infiniband switch.
His point is building fast machines is hard, and the fastest machines are really hard. Too many folks think all you have to do is throw enough PCs and GigE nics at the problem. You can build a machine that way, but the codes don't scale well. Some scientific code will quickly show negative scaling in fact (where the more processes you add, the *slower* you code will run.) MPI codes do that all the time, which is one of the reasons you'll see people running their code at sizes smaller than the whole machine, and different sizes on different machines.
Yeah, you can build a Linux based world-class supercomputer as a cluster, but you better be willing to sweat the details is all. Or buy a Cray, I guess.;-)
I can't help but wonder if the real taget for this thing isn't the US digital divide. That $250 price-point is near the magical price (which I'm guessing is $199 US) for all those students who can't afford a laptop, and school districts without deep pockets who feel they need laptops for all their students.
This is a real no-brainer for Microsoft... they export the XP programming interface for educational software developers, lock them in for developing educational software (Edutainment?), and set XP up as the defacto-standard platform for low-end educational platforms. And as familiarity breeds conformity, all those XP lite users eventually become XP consumers and developers world-wide.
That isn't to say this isn't something that wouldn't be used world-wide, but it sure smells like a proof-of-concept for the next generation of student computers targetted for schools. But maybe I'm just the paranoid sort that sees this as the obvious foot-in-the-door for Microsoft...
Summary: Briefly presents the motivation for Software Factories, a methodology developed at Microsoft. A Software Factory is a development environment configured to support the rapid development of a specific type of application.
Well, I guess when the Software Engineering Institute held the Software Factory Forum in 1985 (or was it '86... I forget) with various luminaries from around the software industry to discuss just these issues, they were really helping Microsoft develop the software factory methodology. Who knew?
Sure, it may be in their database somewhere, and yes, google is a search company. But how much server space do you think google has?
Enough to cache both the URLs they collect and the textual content of the pages when they collected it so it's available when you click that handy little cached link?
Are we really supposed to believe that what is arguably the largest search engine company in the world didn't know about froogles.com prior to trying to take the name?
I'm glad google lost this one, just from a pure "connect the dots" line of reasoning. Any judge had to wonder how google could have missed froogles.com, which it had to have in it's url database somewhere.
Part of the problem you face is that it's easier (not to mention cheaper) to support a single platform. Sure, there are folks who can support both, but from a purely budget standpoint, having a single platform is cheaper to support.
Yeah, it would be better if you had both. Yeah, it's a shame more money isn't spent on educational resources. But I suspect the reason for having a single platform has more to do with the cost of supporting a single platform vs multiple platforms when you factor in hardware, software, people who can adequately adminstrate, etc... than anything else.
The problem it likely solves is that when the jack-booted RIAA thugs come after the university, they can show that they paid their protection money... er... subscription to Napster and say "See? What else can we do?"
Expensive? Sure... Less options for the students? Sure... A huge waste of bandwidth? Debateable but the case can be made. But I suspect this is more about making sure the University doesn't get sued than anything else. Someone likely crunched the numbers and said "If we do this, we could save X dollars over being sued at any time in the next Y years given our students' habits."
Well, expect to see a lot more of this kind of silliness. It's an election year, and groups like the RIAA want their money's worth from the sitting president before they dump a bunch more money into his reelection coffers.
It's not all that surprising they're painting the warz sites and music swapping sites as run by syndicates in press releases. What are they going to say? "Um, uh... We stopped people trading game software we don't want out kids using, and songs we don't want them listening to, so can you please forget about all that other stuff we said we were going to do but can't seem to get a handle on? Please?"
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That's SDSC's Storage Resource Broker, and while I didn't read every point in the patent application, what I read I thought "yeah, sounds like SRB written in vague terms to me."
I still have mine that I bought back in college in the 80's. It's in my desk drawer, and I still use it, even though I have a laptop sitting on my desk. I'm spoiled at this point ... I look at new calculators, but since they don't have the features I use most on the 16C, I never bother to buy a new one.
Philadelphia and all of Allegheny County have a 7% sales tax, the rest of PA has a 6% sales tax.
Gee ... you mean you can't just say
and have it do the right thing?*watches in horror as all his python code stops working...*
You might want to have a look-see at more than one strongly-typed language to see how how you can actually deal such things... or maybe just start using a real programming language. ;-)
JNo, it's not just you.
I forget what version of Python 1.X I learned on, but it really is starting to feel like it has lost the "fits in your head" elegance it once had.
I'm a systems programmer (20 years), and I look at some of the esoteric additions and think "yeah, that's nice, but... would I try to teach that to a junior sysadmin?" And that's where I think Python begins to lose its original beauty. The early Python versions I worked with were much more readable and understandable, and I had no quams about teaching it to novice programmers as a first language. Now, I take a look at things like generators and the like and think "Where is all that Perl'esque line noise coming from, and do we really need it?" Sure, you can only limit yourself to the basic parts of the language to start with, but it seems to me that what was once considered elegant Python code is now considered verbose...
The march of progress, I guess ... but it makes me wonder if I'll be teaching my kids Python in a few years or looking for a more suitable learning language. Heh ... I wonder if ABC is still around? ;-)
The hearing impaired aren't about to die, so in that sense there's less use in such a device.
It's about quality of life. $1 million isn't a lot of money if it ultimately leads to better quality of life for millions of people. Sure, in the long run it's going to cost a lot more than $1 million to bring such a device the masses, but you have to start somewhere, and it has practical uses.
Yeah ... not much use in having a small, portable device that would allow the hearing impared be able to understand people trying to communicate with them using something much smaller than a desktop...
(Of course, I'm going to leave out how this is the logical first step in on-the-fly language translation, since that's a ways off. But it's clear that this is a logical first-step in a lot of useful and helpful products once you look past the geeky "Look, I can talk to my computer..." stuff.)
[b][i]Books are even better, and you can get them FOR FREE from the library. Seriously, stop finding fucking gadgets that don't require any imagination to babysit kids.[/i][/b]
Some kids can't read in the car ... motion sickness. Video's don't trip the "I need to vomit now ..." switch the same way as when the kid is trying to read. My kid would love to read in the car, I just don't much care for cleaning up the puke. I'm sure that makes me a bad parent (in some folks eyes) for not letting him read in the car and just dealing with the consequences, but ...
Does this mean that Disney licensed the MST3K parody commentary bit for their DVD's commentary track on Muppets From Space?
... or am I the only dinosaur who remembers these?
GraphOn made this really sweet line of X terminals that allowed you to split the X server between the remote workstation server and the the display/mouse/keyboard. I was lucky enough to have one of these at home, and it was very zippy ... at 9600 baud I could run an X display that was darned nice to have a full X display at home while my VaxstationII sat at work. Later versions used better compression and were even faster and more responsive. They used all sorts of tricks with save-unders, display lists, and mouse-overs to keep the actual line traffic as low as possible.
Granted, that was the late 80's, and X was in its infancy and clients weren't as feature rich as they are today (The web? Oh ... that thing that's going to replace archie, wais, and gopher...), but it worked just fine for what we used them for. Even at 2400 baud, you could use 'em, but you really wanted at 5400.
Ah ... those were the days, when you could have a 12" X display at home ... 17" if you were really, really lucky. And they screamed at 19.2k! :-D
But it really did make the list. #57
Right ... just below James and the Giant Peach. Who knew that homemade bombs were less dangerous than imaginary bugs... ?
Are people buying copies of the operating system it runs. $0.00 $0.00 $0.00 --Your bonus card has saved you $0.00 this year. Thank you for shopping at Linux Mart--
Yeah, I know it's a troll, but the money you save with linux (assuming you downloaded a free version and paid nothing) was the money you would have spent on another operating system, not some vapid discount you got for not paying "full price." Unless you believe you save $100.00 when you buy XP at $100 less than the suggested retail price...
Actually, it's the first thing I'd love to see ... get them the heck off the road, and the sooner the better as far as I'm concerned! I've seen more distracted SUV drivers talking on the phone and racing at 90+ MPH to get home than any other class of drivers ... I'd be more than happy to let them pay huge sums of money to leave the highways to the rest of us who actually pay attention when we're driving.
The analogy to ADA is a good one. When I was at CMU we had a prof who told us one of the promises of ADA is that it would make programs easier to write/read/maintain because ADA enforced "Good software engineering practices" as a part of the language. Java does similar things by trying to encourage you to write your code a specific way.
I worked with Java for a while, before I learned Python. In fact, I kind of liked working in Java. But Python (IMO) takes a different spin on things. It's designed to be understandable, and I've found it just fits in my mind better than a lot of languages. Perl is a seductive language as well (I've coded in it), but Python's a lot easier to read and evolve into a working program (it's all out there for you to see, there is no default/hidden magic going on "under the covers".)
Yeah, you can write bad Python ... you can write any program poorly in any language. But Python doesn't try to force you into a particular design style for OO code. Java does, and that IMO is it's weakness. Or Python's strength, depending on your point of view.
Ada died a slow death under the weight of it's bloat. I wouldn't be surprised if Java ultimately met the same fate. And unlike Java, Python doesn't get in your way when writing code, though it has a richer object model. And that's why I like it, and I suspect a lot of other folks feel the same way (unless I really am alone in the universe ... as my /. profile seems to indicate. ;-))
No one made you pay real money to make your tamagotchi happy.
... doesn't prohibit them from saying that the NDA doesn't say they not allowed to say that the NDA is about the movie titles covered under the NDA ...
It's not just the speed of the data transfer, it's also the latency of the interconnect. A lot of scientific codes will pass around a lot of little messages, and GigE is fast for bulk transfer, but it's not so good for that. That's why there are companies like Quadrics, Myricom, etc... Infiniband should fix this, but you'll want a big infiniband switch.
His point is building fast machines is hard, and the fastest machines are really hard. Too many folks think all you have to do is throw enough PCs and GigE nics at the problem. You can build a machine that way, but the codes don't scale well. Some scientific code will quickly show negative scaling in fact (where the more processes you add, the *slower* you code will run.) MPI codes do that all the time, which is one of the reasons you'll see people running their code at sizes smaller than the whole machine, and different sizes on different machines.
Yeah, you can build a Linux based world-class supercomputer as a cluster, but you better be willing to sweat the details is all. Or buy a Cray, I guess. ;-)
I can't help but wonder if the real taget for this thing isn't the US digital divide. That $250 price-point is near the magical price (which I'm guessing is $199 US) for all those students who can't afford a laptop, and school districts without deep pockets who feel they need laptops for all their students.
This is a real no-brainer for Microsoft ... they export the XP programming interface for educational software developers, lock them in for developing educational software (Edutainment?), and set XP up as the defacto-standard platform for low-end educational platforms. And as familiarity breeds conformity, all those XP lite users eventually become XP consumers and developers world-wide.
That isn't to say this isn't something that wouldn't be used world-wide, but it sure smells like a proof-of-concept for the next generation of student computers targetted for schools. But maybe I'm just the paranoid sort that sees this as the obvious foot-in-the-door for Microsoft...
Summary: Briefly presents the motivation for Software Factories, a methodology developed at Microsoft. A Software Factory is a development environment configured to support the rapid development of a specific type of application.
Well, I guess when the Software Engineering Institute held the Software Factory Forum in 1985 (or was it '86... I forget) with various luminaries from around the software industry to discuss just these issues, they were really helping Microsoft develop the software factory methodology. Who knew?
Sure, it may be in their database somewhere, and yes, google is a search company. But how much server space do you think google has?
Enough to cache both the URLs they collect and the textual content of the pages when they collected it so it's available when you click that handy little cached link?
Are we really supposed to believe that what is arguably the largest search engine company in the world didn't know about froogles.com prior to trying to take the name?
I'm glad google lost this one, just from a pure "connect the dots" line of reasoning. Any judge had to wonder how google could have missed froogles.com, which it had to have in it's url database somewhere.
Part of the problem you face is that it's easier (not to mention cheaper) to support a single platform. Sure, there are folks who can support both, but from a purely budget standpoint, having a single platform is cheaper to support.
Yeah, it would be better if you had both. Yeah, it's a shame more money isn't spent on educational resources. But I suspect the reason for having a single platform has more to do with the cost of supporting a single platform vs multiple platforms when you factor in hardware, software, people who can adequately adminstrate, etc... than anything else.
The problem it likely solves is that when the jack-booted RIAA thugs come after the university, they can show that they paid their protection money ... er ... subscription to Napster and say "See? What else can we do?"
Expensive? Sure ... Less options for the students? Sure ... A huge waste of bandwidth? Debateable but the case can be made. But I suspect this is more about making sure the University doesn't get sued than anything else. Someone likely crunched the numbers and said "If we do this, we could save X dollars over being sued at any time in the next Y years given our students' habits."
... that never mentions Cerebus the Aardvark when discussing graphic novels?
Well, expect to see a lot more of this kind of silliness. It's an election year, and groups like the RIAA want their money's worth from the sitting president before they dump a bunch more money into his reelection coffers.
It's not all that surprising they're painting the warz sites and music swapping sites as run by syndicates in press releases. What are they going to say? "Um, uh ... We stopped people trading game software we don't want out kids using, and songs we don't want them listening to, so can you please forget about all that other stuff we said we were going to do but can't seem to get a handle on? Please?"