The ultimate example is IBM. Ask a IBM rep how fast the new mainframe model is. S/he'll try to buy you off with a relative performance index, or will tell you that it is X% faster than last years, or twice as fast as their model with 1/2 as many processors, or that it is directly comparable with Sun's model. No mention of actual performance, no 'We're running eight PowerPC processors at X Mhz, and each delivers a raw X FLOPS'. Sure, they won't stop you from publishing your own benchmarks, but they're not forthcoming either..
The lowest correct value I have ever seen was 4.81 BogoMips on a 386SX-18. (AMD Elan, hardware controlled variable clock, 2-18 Mhz) I did however run into the odd failure on a buggy Sunnylab MediaGX board that caused the BogoMips to be reported as 0.01 on one pass (after a lengthy hang) and 172.xx on the next with 2.2.4.
IBM is making some pretty durable IDE drives these days; 10, 12 and 14mm form factors with a guarantee of G-rating while spun up. They're very pricey, but I doubt you could kill one without intentional violence (hammer, chisel, 1962 Dodge).. They may be referring to something like a solid-state flash disk; SanDisk, anyone? O/T: I've seen IBM full-height drives still run after a fifteen foot fall from the second floor landing onto concrete. I had to replace the lower daughterboard, as it was crushed into PCB dust, but the mechanism itself survived with only a bent surround.. When IBM says 100G, they mean it!
Generally speaking, x86 is only arch that will not netboot out of the box. Sun, DEC, IBM, etc, all netboot with no more effort than perhaps a BIOS tweak. ---gross oversimplification, I know.
No, I meant the V-2. They used a simple cycling shutter and several small pump assemblies to control fuel whereas the US and Goddard had used rather complex gear mechanisms, transmissions, and one huge pump. Allowed the motor to go to a reliable 50% cycle for cruise, and the mixture could be adjusted so that no fuel oil sprayers were needed for startup.
Printers have pristine digital data; The person who sends it to the printer KNOWS what the printer is goint to output. When you scan something from an analog source, the data isn't pristine and ALWAYS needs adjustment. I have done a fair bit of commercial image processing (legal documents). Stick fifty documents into the ADF, half illegible faxes, greenbar 8 1/2 x 11, promotional flyers printed on bright red stock, a couple of big glossies and the source code to DeCSS. Scan all of them at the same set of threshold, contrast stretch and balance. I bet dollars to donuts only the source to DeCSS comes out 100%. When you are sitting at the scanner, or have 'local' access to the scanner, you can activly tweak the image stream on a per document basis, preview and scan, and if needed, (and it is available) send it back through the ADF loop for a second pass. But you can always just tweak at the scanner, right? Nope. I have seen 'standard' installations that required three imaging techs on NT boxen to scan the images just for export to the Irix workstations for processing. See, Irix didn't like the scanners that were required (damn you, Fujitsu!) and no other platform was capable of running the custom applications needed. It was an endless tirade of 'I need more X in that last one' or 'can you pull that sucker out of pseudo-zoom, please?? The noise is killing me!'
Von Braun was not the first man to make a rocket engine. Solid fuel rockets have been aroung since the Chinese invented gunpowder. He wasn't the first to play with liquid fuel either. In fact, most of his work was a rehash of Robert Goddard's decade old designs. Goddard had gyro guided, blast-vane directed liquid-fuel rockets up in the air when Von Braun and company in the German Army were still trying to get a fuel pump that didn't cause the rocket to explode on the pad.
The V-2 choke shutter was a novel idea though, although I don't know if that was Von Braun or not.
I did read. I just don't believe that anything can be developed without significant side effect over the course of the two day planned use period. (Look at the current offerings. They're basically the same as forty years ago!) The rest of the article was believable, even the time-release microchip and the nutrient delivery system.
'An Army moves on its stomach'.. Even thought the soldier may not be on the verge of death due to starvation, you can sure as all hell bet they are not going to 'play' their best on a rumbling, week-empty stomach. Then again, MRE's are never filling enough, and you have to endure the flavour (or in some cases, the complete lack of it). With the MRE-in-a-patch, at least you don't have to taste it. That ought to raise morale...
A not-so-standard use of ttysnoop may work. With ttysnoop you can 'spy' on any telnet/console session. I keep a snoopified shell session opened from the console whenever I need to keep tabs on a lengthy process from a variety of locations at random times. Just telnet/open a term to the server and interactivly spy on the persistant session. If you're dealing with X apps that need to be run on the server and seen at random times/locations, VNC will fill the bill..
We just sold a load of 'new' terminals for use in a POS system. 80x40, ANSI color, 14 inch, with serial and TwinAx connections. Price tag? $570 each. Sell them for $450, pre-installed with a terminal prog or browser, Ethernet/serial, and you can sure as hell take a chunk out of Olivetti.
We also sold three whole skids of year old Celerons, for use as X-Terminals at a university. Price tag? $550 each. Sell a model for $450 with ethernet, a *nix and X preinstalled on the flash and you sure as hell will take a chunk out of that market.
I bought a bunch of cheapo laptops a while back, to be used in much the same way a geek would use the I-Opener. P200MMX Dells, no HD, 16M ram. Price tag? $400 each. Sell them for $300 totally stripped, no processor, no HD/flash, no keyboard, with Ethernet and a real IDE header. Sell the rest of the components marked up, for those of us that can't live without a 'Pizza' key. I would have bought the I-Opener instead!! you'll make a bigger killing off of geekdom if you can lower the price further, say by offering a model without sound, or without a case for those kiosk builders.
I think this spectacle had more to do with money-grubbing corporate politics than anything else. Now that the hired sharks have jumped ship with far more than they were worth, I can only hope that Linuxcare can survive the restructuring throes.
100 GB/s periphs are not useless in todays market. Just because your rusted-out Pacer can't handle the Autobahn doesn't mean it can't cruise along at 55. Say the bus could techically handle 400 MB/s. That's still three times faster than the realized throughput from a pair of Yellowfin Gig Ether, and ten times as useful!! A 100 GB/s limit is like money in the bank!!
This isn't exactly a tool/use issue. In fact, it isn't even close. This is the issue of information. I can read about biological weapons; Use studies, collateral damage effects, detailed description of how the weapons are made and even the genetic 'source code' to the bio-weapon's key organism. Reading the source to Trin00 or to someone's RSA implementation should be (and is, according to the court) no different. I can read, and others can publish, books with titles like 'LSD; Five easy steps!' and 'Brewing your own nitrostarch'. Possessing either without special dispensation is a no-no. So even if Trin00 were to be declared patently illegal to posess or use, I could still read the source at my leisure without fear of Mr. FBI Agent knocking on/down my door.
On the other hand, it scares me a little that such a big line is drawn at the compiler. Compiling (but not linking) Trin00 in such a scenario for the express purpose of rerolling some of the messy C stuff into tighter assembler for re-integration with the source is way out in the gray. Heck, passing it through to check for those instances of 'WTF?!?! GCC allows THAT?!?!' is gray. I rue the day that compilers make you 'click-thru' a license to compile.
Andy Griffith. You can have a look at the TV-Guide advert ABC took out here. The POS spaceship he flew looked pretty much like Mir does; Hacked together from whatever garbage happened to float by.
Yes, the anger was misplaced. The well-meaning and obviously openminded people at Pinkerton are not directly to blame. I seriously wish that they will take our suggestions to heart, and hope that one mouthy idiot (myself) doesn't impede that.
Apologies to Pinkertons, and thank you to the pair of/.ers who called me on it.
I am a geek. A flaming geek. The kind of geek that inspired both fear from the mentally deficient and awe from the intelligent.
But even given the strictest 'psych-inspired' guidelines, I would have been locked away in a WAVE-sponsored rubber-room. I spent quite a few years studying 'profiling', and the underlying psychology as part of degrees in criminal justice and forensics. At the time, we were introduced to a study that had come out of the Ohio Department of Youth Services. According to their risk assessment criteria for juvenile offenders (which looks strangly enough like your WAVE criteria) I would have been locked away in a maximum security juvenile facility, drugged with antidepressants, and forced to undergo extensive counselling had I done anything as wrong as being ticketed for spitting on the sidewalk in Dayton.
And what had I done to deserve this dangerous classification? I was introverted, had an IQ of 160+, made vague verbal intimations of violence toward others ('get out of my face, jock, or I'll make sure you're the first one dead when the Revolution comes') and was more interested in frobbing ten-year old computer equipment than frobbing sixteen-year old girls.
'I must have been ill.' Bull. You stick yourself in a room full of mental vegetables and see how long it takes you to become depressed and angry. Try to sit through two years of high school after graduating college. Same feeling.
And what became of me? Well, I finished two degrees, and am on the 'fast-track' at a major company. I am well-adjusted, moral, and probably finished ahead of 90% of you 'WAVE-approved' sheep. The last generation of my family was almost locked up in a rubber room at Pleasant Ridge during the wave of profiling in the early sixties, for much the same reasons Ohio would have had me locked up. One is a lawyer, one is on her second doctorate, and the last is a published author and noted engineer. We are collectivly the cream of society. If your system would have us locked up as 'deviant', it needs to be rethought.
Announcing the 2002 Cray Research model T3r4. If the name doesn't make you laugh, you should stop reading now. You have an obvious inability to truly appreciate the power of our newest offering. Go find someone who laughs and ask him to hit you with a clue-by-four. Good! The new T3r4 comes in three standard massivly para.....
Cray: As cool as we used to be? Cray: Not your mothers Supercomputer? Tera: We put the T in T3E? Cray: 100% SGI-free? Cray: More expensive than a failed Pesidential campaign. (starring John McCain)? Cray: We were chewing numbers when Beowulf was just a gleam in some cheapskates eye? Cray: Buy Big Blue? We've got chunks of IBM in our stool!? Cray: Stop drooling and buy one? Cray: Just plain sexy.
I personally like the ES1370/1371 based Creative cards (eg, the PCI128). A good 256 stream through one sounds almost as good as the CD, whereas the Awe32 sounds like a dying Black and Decker jigsaw and a SB16 sounds like Norm just started every powertool in the New Yankee Workshop.
It's a good moderate newbie bit. We have a lot of them around here these days; Guys and gals that wouldm't know mpg123 from a hole in the ground or even their own behind. Not for lack of trying, they just haven't had any one to feed their brain.
Timothy is feeding them, and making them into us. Information is always a good thing.
McCarthy. As in Joseph McCarthy, U.S. Senator. The fact he was Dick Nixon's mentor and a freind to John and Bobby Kennedy for a fair number of years may make you want to re-read 'All the Presidents men' and rethink the motive for the plumbers, and consider JFKs psychotic aversion to Cuba. He also spawned Barry Goldwater and indirectly Ronnie Raygun, with their anti-communist tendancies.
Slashdot Mirror
The ultimate example is IBM. Ask a IBM rep how fast the new mainframe model is. S/he'll try to buy you off with a relative performance index, or will tell you that it is X% faster than last years, or twice as fast as their model with 1/2 as many processors, or that it is directly comparable with Sun's model. No mention of actual performance, no 'We're running eight PowerPC processors at X Mhz, and each delivers a raw X FLOPS'. Sure, they won't stop you from publishing your own benchmarks, but they're not forthcoming either..
The lowest correct value I have ever seen was 4.81 BogoMips on a 386SX-18. (AMD Elan, hardware controlled variable clock, 2-18 Mhz) I did however run into the odd failure on a buggy Sunnylab MediaGX board that caused the BogoMips to be reported as 0.01 on one pass (after a lengthy hang) and 172.xx on the next with 2.2.4.
IBM is making some pretty durable IDE drives these days; 10, 12 and 14mm form factors with a guarantee of G-rating while spun up. They're very pricey, but I doubt you could kill one without intentional violence (hammer, chisel, 1962 Dodge).. They may be referring to something like a solid-state flash disk; SanDisk, anyone? O/T: I've seen IBM full-height drives still run after a fifteen foot fall from the second floor landing onto concrete. I had to replace the lower daughterboard, as it was crushed into PCB dust, but the mechanism itself survived with only a bent surround.. When IBM says 100G, they mean it!
Generally speaking, x86 is only arch that will not netboot out of the box. Sun, DEC, IBM, etc, all netboot with no more effort than perhaps a BIOS tweak. ---gross oversimplification, I know.
the only reason people want/need broadband internet access is for the downloading of pr0n, MP3 and warez
No way!! Do you know how fast you can reload Slashdot on an unloaded T3?? Hell, over DSL you can still get almost 100 refreshes a minute!
Can we say 'First Post Baybee!'?? C'mon now! Say it with me! 'First Post!!'
No, I meant the V-2. They used a simple cycling shutter and several small pump assemblies to control fuel whereas the US and Goddard had used rather complex gear mechanisms, transmissions, and one huge pump. Allowed the motor to go to a reliable 50% cycle for cruise, and the mixture could be adjusted so that no fuel oil sprayers were needed for startup.
Printers have pristine digital data; The person who sends it to the printer KNOWS what the printer is goint to output. When you scan something from an analog source, the data isn't pristine and ALWAYS needs adjustment. I have done a fair bit of commercial image processing (legal documents). Stick fifty documents into the ADF, half illegible faxes, greenbar 8 1/2 x 11, promotional flyers printed on bright red stock, a couple of big glossies and the source code to DeCSS. Scan all of them at the same set of threshold, contrast stretch and balance. I bet dollars to donuts only the source to DeCSS comes out 100%. When you are sitting at the scanner, or have 'local' access to the scanner, you can activly tweak the image stream on a per document basis, preview and scan, and if needed, (and it is available) send it back through the ADF loop for a second pass. But you can always just tweak at the scanner, right? Nope. I have seen 'standard' installations that required three imaging techs on NT boxen to scan the images just for export to the Irix workstations for processing. See, Irix didn't like the scanners that were required (damn you, Fujitsu!) and no other platform was capable of running the custom applications needed. It was an endless tirade of 'I need more X in that last one' or 'can you pull that sucker out of pseudo-zoom, please?? The noise is killing me!'
Von Braun was not the first man to make a rocket engine. Solid fuel rockets have been aroung since the Chinese invented gunpowder. He wasn't the first to play with liquid fuel either. In fact, most of his work was a rehash of Robert Goddard's decade old designs. Goddard had gyro guided, blast-vane directed liquid-fuel rockets up in the air when Von Braun and company in the German Army were still trying to get a fuel pump that didn't cause the rocket to explode on the pad.
The V-2 choke shutter was a novel idea though, although I don't know if that was Von Braun or not.
I must be abnormal.. When I camp, I'll down four, mabye five in a day and not be happy.. Plus the odd extra chocolate bar, etc.
Versus two normal meals and a light breakfast at home..
I have an odd craving for barbacue pork all of a sudden..
I did read. I just don't believe that anything can be developed without significant side effect over the course of the two day planned use period. (Look at the current offerings. They're basically the same as forty years ago!) The rest of the article was believable, even the time-release microchip and the nutrient delivery system.
'An Army moves on its stomach'.. Even thought the soldier may not be on the verge of death due to starvation, you can sure as all hell bet they are not going to 'play' their best on a rumbling, week-empty stomach. Then again, MRE's are never filling enough, and you have to endure the flavour (or in some cases, the complete lack of it). With the MRE-in-a-patch, at least you don't have to taste it. That ought to raise morale...
A not-so-standard use of ttysnoop may work. With ttysnoop you can 'spy' on any telnet/console session. I keep a snoopified shell session opened from the console whenever I need to keep tabs on a lengthy process from a variety of locations at random times. Just telnet/open a term to the server and interactivly spy on the persistant session. If you're dealing with X apps that need to be run on the server and seen at random times/locations, VNC will fill the bill..
We just sold a load of 'new' terminals for use in a POS system. 80x40, ANSI color, 14 inch, with serial and TwinAx connections. Price tag? $570 each. Sell them for $450, pre-installed with a terminal prog or browser, Ethernet/serial, and you can sure as hell take a chunk out of Olivetti.
We also sold three whole skids of year old Celerons, for use as X-Terminals at a university. Price tag? $550 each. Sell a model for $450 with ethernet, a *nix and X preinstalled on the flash and you sure as hell will take a chunk out of that market.
I bought a bunch of cheapo laptops a while back, to be used in much the same way a geek would use the I-Opener. P200MMX Dells, no HD, 16M ram. Price tag? $400 each. Sell them for $300 totally stripped, no processor, no HD/flash, no keyboard, with Ethernet and a real IDE header. Sell the rest of the components marked up, for those of us that can't live without a 'Pizza' key. I would have bought the I-Opener instead!! you'll make a bigger killing off of geekdom if you can lower the price further, say by offering a model without sound, or without a case for those kiosk builders.
I think this spectacle had more to do with money-grubbing corporate politics than anything else. Now that the hired sharks have jumped ship with far more than they were worth, I can only hope that Linuxcare can survive the restructuring throes.
Gimme some support, damn it! Don't die yet!
100 GB/s periphs are not useless in todays market. Just because your rusted-out Pacer can't handle the Autobahn doesn't mean it can't cruise along at 55. Say the bus could techically handle 400 MB/s. That's still three times faster than the realized throughput from a pair of Yellowfin Gig Ether, and ten times as useful!! A 100 GB/s limit is like money in the bank!!
This isn't exactly a tool/use issue. In fact, it isn't even close. This is the issue of information. I can read about biological weapons; Use studies, collateral damage effects, detailed description of how the weapons are made and even the genetic 'source code' to the bio-weapon's key organism. Reading the source to Trin00 or to someone's RSA implementation should be (and is, according to the court) no different. I can read, and others can publish, books with titles like 'LSD; Five easy steps!' and 'Brewing your own nitrostarch'. Possessing either without special dispensation is a no-no. So even if Trin00 were to be declared patently illegal to posess or use, I could still read the source at my leisure without fear of Mr. FBI Agent knocking on/down my door.
On the other hand, it scares me a little that such a big line is drawn at the compiler. Compiling (but not linking) Trin00 in such a scenario for the express purpose of rerolling some of the messy C stuff into tighter assembler for re-integration with the source is way out in the gray. Heck, passing it through to check for those instances of 'WTF?!?! GCC allows THAT?!?!' is gray. I rue the day that compilers make you 'click-thru' a license to compile.
Sorry.. New webhost policy, I guess..
Here
I gotta start checking my links again.
Andy Griffith. You can have a look at the TV-Guide advert ABC took out here. The POS spaceship he flew looked pretty much like Mir does; Hacked together from whatever garbage happened to float by.
Yes, the anger was misplaced. The well-meaning and obviously openminded people at Pinkerton are not directly to blame. I seriously wish that they will take our suggestions to heart, and hope that one mouthy idiot (myself) doesn't impede that.
/.ers who called me on it.
Apologies to Pinkertons, and thank you to the pair of
I am a geek. A flaming geek. The kind of geek that inspired both fear from the mentally deficient and awe from the intelligent.
But even given the strictest 'psych-inspired' guidelines, I would have been locked away in a WAVE-sponsored rubber-room. I spent quite a few years studying 'profiling', and the underlying psychology as part of degrees in criminal justice and forensics. At the time, we were introduced to a study that had come out of the Ohio Department of Youth Services. According to their risk assessment criteria for juvenile offenders (which looks strangly enough like your WAVE criteria) I would have been locked away in a maximum security juvenile facility, drugged with antidepressants, and forced to undergo extensive counselling had I done anything as wrong as being ticketed for spitting on the sidewalk in Dayton.
And what had I done to deserve this dangerous classification? I was introverted, had an IQ of 160+, made vague verbal intimations of violence toward others ('get out of my face, jock, or I'll make sure you're the first one dead when the Revolution comes') and was more interested in frobbing ten-year old computer equipment than frobbing sixteen-year old girls.
'I must have been ill.' Bull. You stick yourself in a room full of mental vegetables and see how long it takes you to become depressed and angry. Try to sit through two years of high school after graduating college. Same feeling.
And what became of me? Well, I finished two degrees, and am on the 'fast-track' at a major company. I am well-adjusted, moral, and probably finished ahead of 90% of you 'WAVE-approved' sheep. The last generation of my family was almost locked up in a rubber room at Pleasant Ridge during the wave of profiling in the early sixties, for much the same reasons Ohio would have had me locked up. One is a lawyer, one is on her second doctorate, and the last is a published author and noted engineer. We are collectivly the cream of society. If your system would have us locked up as 'deviant', it needs to be rethought.
Announcing the 2002 Cray Research model T3r4. If the name doesn't make you laugh, you should stop reading now. You have an obvious inability to truly appreciate the power of our newest offering. Go find someone who laughs and ask him to hit you with a clue-by-four. Good! The new T3r4 comes in three standard massivly para.....
Cray --> SGI/CRAY --> SGI --> Tera --> Cray
Anyone else see a vicious cycle?
Whaddya think they're goinbg to use for a slogan:
Cray: As cool as we used to be?
Cray: Not your mothers Supercomputer?
Tera: We put the T in T3E?
Cray: 100% SGI-free?
Cray: More expensive than a failed Pesidential campaign. (starring John McCain)?
Cray: We were chewing numbers when Beowulf was just a gleam in some cheapskates eye?
Cray: Buy Big Blue? We've got chunks of IBM in our stool!?
Cray: Stop drooling and buy one?
Cray: Just plain sexy.
I personally like the ES1370/1371 based Creative cards (eg, the PCI128). A good 256 stream through one sounds almost as good as the CD, whereas the Awe32 sounds like a dying Black and Decker jigsaw and a SB16 sounds like Norm just started every powertool in the New Yankee Workshop.
Quicherbitchin.
It's a good moderate newbie bit. We have a lot of them around here these days; Guys and gals that wouldm't know mpg123 from a hole in the ground or even their own behind. Not for lack of trying, they just haven't had any one to feed their brain.
Timothy is feeding them, and making them into us. Information is always a good thing.
McCarthy. As in Joseph McCarthy, U.S. Senator. The fact he was Dick Nixon's mentor and a freind to John and Bobby Kennedy for a fair number of years may make you want to re-read 'All the Presidents men' and rethink the motive for the plumbers, and consider JFKs psychotic aversion to Cuba. He also spawned Barry Goldwater and indirectly Ronnie Raygun, with their anti-communist tendancies.