And when I say 'big box' I really mean it! It measures 82x42x33 in inches, has two side by side 21" racks (I have little plates to hook up my rackmount hardware) and a big house fan. The whole thing is cased in 3/4" oak plywood with big glass doors.
I put 120lb capacity 18.5x26" sliding shelves in to hold up to 8 CPU's plus hard drives etc. (yes, I have a KVM switch). Everything is attached to a steel frame and fully adjustable.
As for noise, mostly I hear the horizontally mounted 20" fan that blows upwards. I plan on replacing it with one that is supposed to be mounted flat, as this one makes a lot of noise. I can't really hear the CPUs at all. Eggshell foam matress padding is going in on the walls soon.
Temperatures run about 7 degrees warmer than in the room, I usually have 4 computers on at once.
I may put pictures/plans of it online at hammitt.com just for kicks. There's two places to sit and work along each side, one for the Linux boxen hooked to the KVM and another for the Mac.
It cost about $750 to make, but was an interesting challenge. The worst thing about it was when I had cheaper drawer slides for the shelves and they dropped my PowerMac from about 5 feet. Ouch.
Drop a note to tony@hammitt.com if you want plans, I could arrange something for a nominal fee. =-)
Guess what would happen if the windows source code suddenly became open? All kinds of cracks would appear. We've just proven it.
They open the source for Quake1, and within days, there's people out there playing cheat clients. It wouldn't take even hours for the world's windoze boxes to all be cracked if they opened the source code. Anyone depending on windoze would simply be out of business.
You can't go from 'security' through obscurity to open source. That is the main problem. All of this other stuff about the details of how people cheat when it happens are not the core issue. The core issue is that the development model cannot change from closed to open source without exposing all of the security flaws. Suddenly there are thousands of eyes looking at the code for weaknesses where before there were only dozens (who were mainly interested in functionality, not security. Why should they care; it's closed source?)
So, how do we fix it? We could develop games entirely open source. Who's going to pay for that? People don't buy support contracts for games; they rarely buy the manuals.
We could try to convince Carmack to release the code in stages. Release the server code first to get all of the bugs and cracks worked out. Then release the clients after most of the hacks have been anticipated. This is still suboptimal, with optimality being the unlikely open-source case. Anyone have any better ideas?
Yes, I know, there are plenty of open source projects. They usually only have a dozen developers at most. I doubt they would pass a security audit. I know most open source net games are crackable, I've done it myself.
Maybe in the future they will give the code a security audit before they release it. They're doing this as a publicity stunt anyway, they might as well get the most out of it.
Dilbert is standing there and notices that someone else is also staring into space twitching his fingers. He asks if the other guy is an engineer, and he replies 'No, just a moron. Common mistake'
But, for us geeks, something like that could save major wrist strain. I'm all for the idea.
Most of the broken Y2K software has been constantly maintained for the last 30 years. If some company's software is still not fixed, they have no one to blame but themselves.
Old firmware is another case, for the most part, the engineers seriously didn't think that their gadgets would be used for so long. It's been hardcoded and no one can change it.
Personally, I use 64-bit double precision to store times and dates in my software. It'll be quite a while before I have problems. =-) Wait, maybe I should patent that idea! Pretend you never read this...
(I hereby assign all rights to RMS for the 64-bit dates idea under the LGPLv2 license)
Say the patent is overturned and someone goes out of their way to prove that the patent was filed maliciously, can the former owner of the patent be jailed for extortion? Everyone with a brain knows that this windowing technique is prior art (_way_ prior, some versions have been used for centuries).
Let's assume that the holder of the patent knew that the technique was prior art, and a criminal court can prove it. They would be very close to an conviction for extortion. How are Mafia 'protection' schemes any different? You threaten someone that if they don't pay, you'll take some action against them, with the threat being based on criminal activity.
Is it a crime to obtain a patent on prior art? IANAL, but it seems like it should be, at least if it can be proven that you knew about it beforehand. If the reason he obtained the patent was specifically because he wanted to shake down other people?
It'd be great if this gonif got sent to jail... =-]
Just want to post a note to everyone to not waste the 3.5 hours or so reading the 'novel.'
Remember when you were in 6th grade and had to do a report on bats or something? You took the encyclopedia entry and stretched it to 2 pages or some such... The 'novel' is exactly the same thing. Silverberg just inserted words into the story and added at most 2 scenes. A complete waste of effort. They had to use large print and thick paper to get the 'novel' to look like a whole book.
Just read the original story and if you're a CGI fan, go see the movie. But avoid the 'novel' at all costs.
I think the only thing they could do with such pictures is sell them to magazines. It's not as if the box contains useful components like hard drives or lots of RAM. You'd run as much of a chance of getting sued for breaking the damn thing by opening the case...
Let's think about a similar situation: You somehow find or receive 1kg of cocaine (you think). What do you do with it? Can you find some underworld type to fence it with? Will the real owners eventually find out who got it? The bag of cocaine, which could be useful if it were in small quantity, is thoroughly useless and very dangerous in large quantity.
Maybe the analogy doesn't hold up, I doubt that the use value of a webtv box is anything more than the street price of the current model at BestBuy. In any case, how would you alert the other people who are making webtv like boxes that you had the photos without M$ finding out somehow? Who are the competitors anyway? How much good would pictures do them?
2. Run a cleaning tape at least weekly. I run one everytime I use my drive, maybe that's why it still works fine after 5 years.
3. Check your backups to make sure they worked.
4. Figure in the cost of the media as at least as important as the drive itself. Those cheap looking IDE QIC drives have cartridges that not only don't hold much but cost a fortune as well. DAT is _really_ cheap media and holds a lot. You don't have to worry about getting a few extra tapes since it will only cost $20.
5. Since you should go with SCSI anyway, get an external drive. It's very handy to have the capability of taking the drive over to a new machine or a friend's house.
6. It's just plain easier to do incremental backups to another disk, then back up the disk at your convenience. This applies for home use only.
7. Get a data grade fire safe. Those paper grade safes don't help media at all. APStech.com sells a small one for $140.
8. Separate what data you have that is static from that which changes/is important onto different file systems. Backups are lots easier and faster if you don't back up your MP3 collection daily.
My setup: I back up any file that has changed in the last half hour to a separate disk, then back up/home every 12 hours to another separate disk. Once a week I back up the whole computer and every once in a while I back up my useless but fun files. I haven't lost any data in a very long time. I also use an 'rm' script that copies files to $HOME/.trashcan so I have to run my 'dump' script to actually remove them.
First off, I have to nominate Kepler's elliptical planetary orbits. Everyone in the history of the world had been using some variation of circles and he comes up with ellipses. Truly a hack.
Someone already mentioned Archimedes. I second them.
Then there's Newton, previously nominated for the catflap, but I think Calculus is pretty important, too. Not to forget gravity or inertia either. They seem pretty obvious now.
And anyone who has worked through the derivation of the special thoery of relativity comes away with an appreciation of a truly monumental hack.
And finally an actual computer hack: Seymour Cray punched in the bootstrap loader for an early computer by hand, from memory, and got it right the first time. Wow.
Here's an advertising section I'd like to see in a magazine or even standalone:
I keep getting all of these catalogs, you know the type, like MacWarehouse. I think it would be really great if someone with money published an OpenSource catalog. Make it look just like *Warehouse's one. List all of the OS packages, tools, WM's etc, and where the price is normally listed, just put FREE and the URL. Send it to the normal mailing list; everyone with a permanent address.
I think it would be great. Heck, we could even try and get the 'catalog' registered as a nonprofit org. =-]
Sorry for the slightly offtopic, but we are talking about dead trees.
1. There are more neurons in your head than computers on the planet. The number and nature of the interconnections are something that technology will not be able to duplicate for quite a while. Then you have to take into consideration the effect of hormones, nutrients and cellular respiration that also affect how the brain functions. Replicating that would be fairly difficult as well. I'm not saying that it is impossible, just impractical. You can already use neural networks for some amazing things. Getting a system up to the computational abilities of the human brain is a lot easier than duplicating all of the functioning of the brain. I seriously doubt that any actual researcher would go the extra light year just so their system can pray.
2. Supposing that there were some way to manufacture an artificial brain, the only way to get it to pray would be the same way you get people to do so. Brainwashing. The only reason that people pray in the first place is because someone told them they had to. Actually it's worse than that, their guardians typically resort to threats, intimidation and physical abuse when their little brainwashee's don't start to behave. That may not work with an artificial system.
I think that the artist made a good point about children. They don't understand what they are saying anymore than a computer, or for that matter, a tape recorder (remember those?). All they know is that this is what you must do whenever you are taken to the place of worship. (Catholics have it relatively easy, they only have to go once or twice a week. Think of the poor Muslim child who is dragged to the mosque 5 times a day.)
I wonder if more people would find the excercise silly if the computers all pointed east and chanted in Arabic. Would you personally have taken as much offense?
I have a Belkin Omniview 8-port, expandable to 16 units (128 ports). It works OK, notable gripes are: At any video mode I get vertical stripes on the display, which I suppose is due to crosstalk in the cable mess. Another gripe is that everything has to be powered down in order to plug anything else in (according to the manual).
Now, the first one, I can live with. Convenience outweighs a few stripes.
The second one is intolerable. We're running Linux, we DON'T shut down our computers. Ever. I suppose if we all were stuck with windoze, we would plug new things in in the daily downtime. 99.9% uptime leaves more than enough time to plug a new computer in every day =-]
A minor gripe is that in order to access the on-screen display for chosing your node you have to hit scroll-lock twice. Not all that bad, but sometimes it doesn't catch and you have a computer sitting there thinking scroll lock is on. I would like to be able to choose another key, like F12 or print screen (I never have used either).
Good points are that the cables are really cheap, like $6 for a KVM set through Buy.com, cascading uses parallel printer cables. It's easy to set up and comes with rackmount hardware, you can even get Macintosh adapters. It can be bought for under $350.
Features I'd like: 2 independent heads, USB support, HOT PLUGGABILITY, SNMP management.
Did anyone else notice that the pictures of the 'Gods of Cholua' don't match the 'Starchild'? The 'Gods' have large mandibles, sub-orbital sinuses and deep occiputs?
It seems strange to me that the page maintainers didn't notice these discrepancies. So what if the 'Gods' have enlarged crania? That could easily be explained by hydrocephalism. Besides, third hand accounts of local legends about why those skeletons are on display aren't exactly what I would take as evidence.
The 'Starchild' skull looks fairly compelling to me as evidence of either some _extreme_ deformations or "some other explanation". Being a good scientist, I'll not try to form opinions about why the skull (if it exists) looks the way it does without at least looking at it. If the evidence they gave obout the morphology of the skull is accurate, we're talking some major additions to the knowledge base.
Otherwise, it's just a nice way to spend part of a Saturday evening.
Maybe the inventor is really an anti-patent fanatic who is trying to set up a test case. This patent has no chance of being upheld since it is obviously public domain. So he's sitting there thinking 'how would I demonstrate to the world that software patents are stupid?' and comes up with this farce.
The set-up is perfect, they have set up a system where they will infuriate every company that uses mainframes (the patent is somewhat specific to EBCDIC). This invites a real, open-court test of software patents which is highly visible. Mr. anarchist achieves his goal when Congress steps in and disallows all 'frivolous patents' and rewrites the laws.
You seem to have forgotten that the reason competition is good is that it allows you to determine what needs to be done. If GNOME/KDE were to have merged back when people started bitching about it, they would be nowhere near where they are now.
Not only would they have spent enormous resources talking about what to do, they would have missed out on the opportunity to do a little 'my feature is better than yours' nagging which is always productive. If you don't have someone in mind to beat, you slack off. If you are convinced of your superiority, you end up losing (just like what is happening to M$).
I guess my point is that you have to allow code forking in order to get a better end product. Keeping the 'one true source' concept around discourages people from innovating. GNOME wouldn't be as good if KDE didn't exist, and vice versa.
Personally, I can't stand KDE's WM. Am I stuck with it? Not since GNOME came along and encouraged the development of WM's like Enlightenment which will run both. We'd all be stuck with KDE's ugly, designed by committee, CDE clone interface if we had to agree on one standard at the beginning. Without that WM, KDE is cool again. Thanks GNOME!
I like the idea of being able to write applications once that run anywhere, but the reality is that they won't work. Java is a nice idea, but there are so many bugs that it can't be used in any realistic sense.
Writing for the web sould work if everyone supported the standards and only the standards. But with companies like M$ perverting everything they touch (how'd the screw up ASCII? why?) we all have to put up with code that works on one box but crashed on another.
I usually run with Java* turned off. There's a lot of room for bad code in the standard, so it's best to just avoid it.
In order for a place like Slashdot to exist, there have to be people around writing code for their pages to run on and code for us to talk about. I realize that you could be joking here but let's get serious. There is no way that you can write applications for the 'web' and expect them to work for everyone. Even if they did, they'd be about 1/50th the speed of a compiled app, so what's the point?
1. What good does an anti-missile system do if the most likely way for a terrorist to deliver a bomb is a boat? Missiles are expensive and unreliable, and hard to test without alerting the satelites. Boats are cheap, extremely reliable, and are let into harbors with a minimum of inspection.
2. A working anti-missile defense system is an offensive weapon. I.e. that which is used as a way to defeat an enemy. Without giving out this technology to everyone, whoever has it is instantly a target for foreign governments because they know that they will lose a full-scale nucelar war. It's actually worse than that. Since we're developing this technology out in the open, the foreign governments know that they only have a few years until we cannot be beaten (if the system works). They therefore can assume that we intend to use the system as part of a first strike and preemptively retaliate.
So, let's assume that the USA is not suicidal. The only thing we can do at this stage is declare that we are going to protect the entire world from anyone shooting balisitc missiles at anyone else. Any other course of action will result in some foreign paranoid government nuking us first while they still have a chance to hit us.
A while back someone was talking about developing a stealth cruise missile. The idea was hopefully scrapped. The last thing we need in a paranoid world is for any random explosion to be blamed on the USA because of our unique ability to blow things up without being able to trace who did it. Anytime anything blew up, we'd get blamed.
This anti-missile system is exactly the same thing, a way for the whole world to justifiably get mad at the USA. I wish our president wasn't chasing skirts and would pull his head out of his arse. Maybe he would see the suicidal futility of such a project.
Back in the 50's general LeMay (sp?) was advocating a nuclear first strike against the USSR (haven't typed that in a while..) because of the results of the single game prisoner's dilemma research. Basically, if you expect to play only once, you should cheat. We expect to keep playing the politics game for a long time, over and over. We therefore have to mutually cooperate, that is the best possible solution. Building an anti-missile system is cheating. Saying that you are going to build such a system should prompt the other nations to cheat first.
To all of those people who bragged that they registered someone's junk-mail account, the rest of us get to say "Ha-Ha!!". Now _anyone_ can get the junk-mail account for.com...
MAN what a f*ck-up! They need to remove the entire system and start over.
To say that I'm favorably impressed by the performance of the Compaq ccc compiler would be a major understatement. IMHO, with the release of this compiler, they have just overcome the Intel price/performance issue.
I've seen 280% speedups over gcc's best effort, more than justifying the 100% price premium of the hardware over (for instance) dual PIII boxen.
If I was going to put in a number crunching cluster (and I may) AlphaLinux would be the best way for me to go, cutting 40% from my TCO over IntelLinux.
IMHO, IBM has really come out in the right direction here with the install guide and pointing out exactly what hardware works and what doesn't.
I wish more vendors would give out explicit details of how to configure their hardware during the install process. Let's face it, Linux works with almost anyting, as long as you know how to configure it (except those idiotic winmodems). I'd really appreciate it if other vendors told you what install/kernel options to choose for their hardware.
This is a basic problem with Linux, the OS should be capable of determining what hardware is in the computer and choosing a more specialized configuration. We don't really need (or want) hardware vendors to ship us binary drivers, but working up an autoconfigurator script would be very useful.
Back on topic, the Thinkpad is certainly a good box; a little pricey, but what would you expect from IBM? Nice to see Linux support is being taken seriously. A couple more years and we'll have that world domination thing worked out...
Actually, SGI isn't getting rid of IRIX on the big iron either. They're just dumping the NT shit for a real small-box OS.
Porting to a huge SMP box like the S80 would be a lot easier than porting to a ccNUMA box like the O2000. Either port would cost incredible amounts of money, and in the end result in having just another UNIX running on the box.
It is certainly physically possible, but there is no business case to even try.
The AIX/Linux box is a nice, simple uniprocessor PPC box. No one is going to provide a $1M computer to Linus to play with just so Linux can steal some enterprise server OS licenses.
Ya, because the S80 would walk all over it.
on
IBM takes aim at Sun
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The 6X00 from Sun is absolutely no match for an S80. Those 4 512 bit memory paths really make the transactions fly.
There's no chance that the 24 CPU box will run Linux. IBM is not interested in porting it to the big iron. They would like to keep Linux on the small scale where people expect to see it.
Last I heard, the kernel isn't even capable of running on 24 cpu's.
There is too much specialized hardware in a S80 to ever expect that Linux would run on it. The OS has to be aware of the service processor, memory faults, and really complex connection system to the IO drawers. Not to mention the fact that people expect to be able to plug SSA drives into the system, which aren't even close to being supported.
According to the API press release, the market for 1-2 processor Alpha boxes was 95% Linux in the past few months. That's why they dropped NT. A much better reason than why there are hardly any Linux games.
I like the compiler, it needed a little configuring, but I expected that. It works good on the things I've tried it on so far, giving a 16% speedup on a tight loop (which I would have expected GCC to be able to give).
So what if it's not GPL, they are being nice and everyone of the./'ers are treating them like shit. Get over yourselves. Someone just gave you an almost free gift. Say 'Thanks!' like I did.
Slashdot Mirror
And when I say 'big box' I really mean it! It measures 82x42x33 in inches, has two side by side 21" racks (I have little plates to hook up my rackmount hardware) and a big house fan. The whole thing is cased in 3/4" oak plywood with big glass doors.
I put 120lb capacity 18.5x26" sliding shelves in to hold up to 8 CPU's plus hard drives etc. (yes, I have a KVM switch). Everything is attached to a steel frame and fully adjustable.
As for noise, mostly I hear the horizontally mounted 20" fan that blows upwards. I plan on replacing it with one that is supposed to be mounted flat, as this one makes a lot of noise. I can't really hear the CPUs at all. Eggshell foam matress padding is going in on the walls soon.
Temperatures run about 7 degrees warmer than in the room, I usually have 4 computers on at once.
I may put pictures/plans of it online at hammitt.com just for kicks. There's two places to sit and work along each side, one for the Linux boxen hooked to the KVM and another for the Mac.
It cost about $750 to make, but was an interesting challenge. The worst thing about it was when I had cheaper drawer slides for the shelves and they dropped my PowerMac from about 5 feet. Ouch.
Drop a note to tony@hammitt.com if you want plans, I could arrange something for a nominal fee. =-)
Guess what would happen if the windows source code suddenly became open? All kinds of cracks would appear. We've just proven it.
They open the source for Quake1, and within days, there's people out there playing cheat clients. It wouldn't take even hours for the world's windoze boxes to all be cracked if they opened the source code. Anyone depending on windoze would simply be out of business.
You can't go from 'security' through obscurity to open source. That is the main problem. All of this other stuff about the details of how people cheat when it happens are not the core issue. The core issue is that the development model cannot change from closed to open source without exposing all of the security flaws. Suddenly there are thousands of eyes looking at the code for weaknesses where before there were only dozens (who were mainly interested in functionality, not security. Why should they care; it's closed source?)
So, how do we fix it? We could develop games entirely open source. Who's going to pay for that? People don't buy support contracts for games; they rarely buy the manuals.
We could try to convince Carmack to release the code in stages. Release the server code first to get all of the bugs and cracks worked out. Then release the clients after most of the hacks have been anticipated. This is still suboptimal, with optimality being the unlikely open-source case. Anyone have any better ideas?
Yes, I know, there are plenty of open source projects. They usually only have a dozen developers at most. I doubt they would pass a security audit. I know most open source net games are crackable, I've done it myself.
Maybe in the future they will give the code a security audit before they release it. They're doing this as a publicity stunt anyway, they might as well get the most out of it.
Dilbert is standing there and notices that someone else is also staring into space twitching his fingers. He asks if the other guy is an engineer, and he replies 'No, just a moron. Common mistake'
But, for us geeks, something like that could save major wrist strain. I'm all for the idea.
Most of the broken Y2K software has been constantly maintained for the last 30 years. If some company's software is still not fixed, they have no one to blame but themselves.
Old firmware is another case, for the most part, the engineers seriously didn't think that their gadgets would be used for so long. It's been hardcoded and no one can change it.
Personally, I use 64-bit double precision to store times and dates in my software. It'll be quite a while before I have problems. =-) Wait, maybe I should patent that idea! Pretend you never read this...
(I hereby assign all rights to RMS for the 64-bit dates idea under the LGPLv2 license)
Say the patent is overturned and someone goes out of their way to prove that the patent was filed maliciously, can the former owner of the patent be jailed for extortion? Everyone with a brain knows that this windowing technique is prior art (_way_ prior, some versions have been used for centuries).
Let's assume that the holder of the patent knew that the technique was prior art, and a criminal court can prove it. They would be very close to an conviction for extortion. How are Mafia 'protection' schemes any different? You threaten someone that if they don't pay, you'll take some action against them, with the threat being based on criminal activity.
Is it a crime to obtain a patent on prior art? IANAL, but it seems like it should be, at least if it can be proven that you knew about it beforehand. If the reason he obtained the patent was specifically because he wanted to shake down other people?
It'd be great if this gonif got sent to jail... =-]
Just want to post a note to everyone to not waste the 3.5 hours or so reading the 'novel.'
Remember when you were in 6th grade and had to do a report on bats or something? You took the encyclopedia entry and stretched it to 2 pages or some such... The 'novel' is exactly the same thing. Silverberg just inserted words into the story and added at most 2 scenes. A complete waste of effort. They had to use large print and thick paper to get the 'novel' to look like a whole book.
Just read the original story and if you're a CGI fan, go see the movie. But avoid the 'novel' at all costs.
I think the only thing they could do with such pictures is sell them to magazines. It's not as if the box contains useful components like hard drives or lots of RAM. You'd run as much of a chance of getting sued for breaking the damn thing by opening the case...
Let's think about a similar situation: You somehow find or receive 1kg of cocaine (you think). What do you do with it? Can you find some underworld type to fence it with? Will the real owners eventually find out who got it? The bag of cocaine, which could be useful if it were in small quantity, is thoroughly useless and very dangerous in large quantity.
Maybe the analogy doesn't hold up, I doubt that the use value of a webtv box is anything more than the street price of the current model at BestBuy. In any case, how would you alert the other people who are making webtv like boxes that you had the photos without M$ finding out somehow? Who are the competitors anyway? How much good would pictures do them?
This whole idea is silly.
1. Go with SCSI.
/home every 12 hours to another separate disk. Once a week I back up the whole computer and every once in a while I back up my useless but fun files. I haven't lost any data in a very long time. I also use an 'rm' script that copies files to $HOME/.trashcan so I have to run my 'dump' script to actually remove them.
2. Run a cleaning tape at least weekly. I run one everytime I use my drive, maybe that's why it still works fine after 5 years.
3. Check your backups to make sure they worked.
4. Figure in the cost of the media as at least as important as the drive itself. Those cheap looking IDE QIC drives have cartridges that not only don't hold much but cost a fortune as well. DAT is _really_ cheap media and holds a lot. You don't have to worry about getting a few extra tapes since it will only cost $20.
5. Since you should go with SCSI anyway, get an external drive. It's very handy to have the capability of taking the drive over to a new machine or a friend's house.
6. It's just plain easier to do incremental backups to another disk, then back up the disk at your convenience. This applies for home use only.
7. Get a data grade fire safe. Those paper grade safes don't help media at all. APStech.com sells a small one for $140.
8. Separate what data you have that is static from that which changes/is important onto different file systems. Backups are lots easier and faster if you don't back up your MP3 collection daily.
My setup: I back up any file that has changed in the last half hour to a separate disk, then back up
Do you have a link for a $150 DDS-2 drive? I can't find them on Pricewatch. I found refurbished ones for $255, but certainly not new ones for $150.
TIA,
Tony
First off, I have to nominate Kepler's elliptical planetary orbits. Everyone in the history of the world had been using some variation of circles and he comes up with ellipses. Truly a hack.
Someone already mentioned Archimedes. I second them.
Then there's Newton, previously nominated for the catflap, but I think Calculus is pretty important, too. Not to forget gravity or inertia either. They seem pretty obvious now.
And anyone who has worked through the derivation of the special thoery of relativity comes away with an appreciation of a truly monumental hack.
And finally an actual computer hack: Seymour Cray punched in the bootstrap loader for an early computer by hand, from memory, and got it right the first time. Wow.
Here's an advertising section I'd like to see in a magazine or even standalone:
I keep getting all of these catalogs, you know the type, like MacWarehouse. I think it would be really great if someone with money published an OpenSource catalog. Make it look just like *Warehouse's one. List all of the OS packages, tools, WM's etc, and where the price is normally listed, just put FREE and the URL. Send it to the normal mailing list; everyone with a permanent address.
I think it would be great. Heck, we could even try and get the 'catalog' registered as a nonprofit org. =-]
Sorry for the slightly offtopic, but we are talking about dead trees.
A couple more points,
1. There are more neurons in your head than computers on the planet. The number and nature of the interconnections are something that technology will not be able to duplicate for quite a while. Then you have to take into consideration the effect of hormones, nutrients and cellular respiration that also affect how the brain functions. Replicating that would be fairly difficult as well. I'm not saying that it is impossible, just impractical. You can already use neural networks for some amazing things. Getting a system up to the computational abilities of the human brain is a lot easier than duplicating all of the functioning of the brain. I seriously doubt that any actual researcher would go the extra light year just so their system can pray.
2. Supposing that there were some way to manufacture an artificial brain, the only way to get it to pray would be the same way you get people to do so. Brainwashing. The only reason that people pray in the first place is because someone told them they had to. Actually it's worse than that, their guardians typically resort to threats, intimidation and physical abuse when their little brainwashee's don't start to behave. That may not work with an artificial system.
I think that the artist made a good point about children. They don't understand what they are saying anymore than a computer, or for that matter, a tape recorder (remember those?). All they know is that this is what you must do whenever you are taken to the place of worship. (Catholics have it relatively easy, they only have to go once or twice a week. Think of the poor Muslim child who is dragged to the mosque 5 times a day.)
I wonder if more people would find the excercise silly if the computers all pointed east and chanted in Arabic. Would you personally have taken as much offense?
Adding data:
I have a Belkin Omniview 8-port, expandable to 16 units (128 ports). It works OK, notable gripes are: At any video mode I get vertical stripes on the display, which I suppose is due to crosstalk in the cable mess. Another gripe is that everything has to be powered down in order to plug anything else in (according to the manual).
Now, the first one, I can live with. Convenience outweighs a few stripes.
The second one is intolerable. We're running Linux, we DON'T shut down our computers. Ever. I suppose if we all were stuck with windoze, we would plug new things in in the daily downtime. 99.9% uptime leaves more than enough time to plug a new computer in every day =-]
A minor gripe is that in order to access the on-screen display for chosing your node you have to hit scroll-lock twice. Not all that bad, but sometimes it doesn't catch and you have a computer sitting there thinking scroll lock is on. I would like to be able to choose another key, like F12 or print screen (I never have used either).
Good points are that the cables are really cheap, like $6 for a KVM set through Buy.com, cascading uses parallel printer cables. It's easy to set up and comes with rackmount hardware, you can even get Macintosh adapters. It can be bought for under $350.
Features I'd like: 2 independent heads, USB support, HOT PLUGGABILITY, SNMP management.
Hope this helps,
Tony
Did anyone else notice that the pictures of the 'Gods of Cholua' don't match the 'Starchild'? The 'Gods' have large mandibles, sub-orbital sinuses and deep occiputs?
It seems strange to me that the page maintainers didn't notice these discrepancies. So what if the 'Gods' have enlarged crania? That could easily be explained by hydrocephalism. Besides, third hand accounts of local legends about why those skeletons are on display aren't exactly what I would take as evidence.
The 'Starchild' skull looks fairly compelling to me as evidence of either some _extreme_ deformations or "some other explanation". Being a good scientist, I'll not try to form opinions about why the skull (if it exists) looks the way it does without at least looking at it. If the evidence they gave obout the morphology of the skull is accurate, we're talking some major additions to the knowledge base.
Otherwise, it's just a nice way to spend part of a Saturday evening.
Regards,
Tony
For you conspiricists out there:
Maybe the inventor is really an anti-patent fanatic who is trying to set up a test case. This patent has no chance of being upheld since it is obviously public domain. So he's sitting there thinking 'how would I demonstrate to the world that software patents are stupid?' and comes up with this farce.
The set-up is perfect, they have set up a system where they will infuriate every company that uses mainframes (the patent is somewhat specific to EBCDIC). This invites a real, open-court test of software patents which is highly visible. Mr. anarchist achieves his goal when Congress steps in and disallows all 'frivolous patents' and rewrites the laws.
It could happen...
Tony
You seem to have forgotten that the reason competition is good is that it allows you to determine what needs to be done. If GNOME/KDE were to have merged back when people started bitching about it, they would be nowhere near where they are now.
Not only would they have spent enormous resources talking about what to do, they would have missed out on the opportunity to do a little 'my feature is better than yours' nagging which is always productive. If you don't have someone in mind to beat, you slack off. If you are convinced of your superiority, you end up losing (just like what is happening to M$).
I guess my point is that you have to allow code forking in order to get a better end product. Keeping the 'one true source' concept around discourages people from innovating. GNOME wouldn't be as good if KDE didn't exist, and vice versa.
Personally, I can't stand KDE's WM. Am I stuck with it? Not since GNOME came along and encouraged the development of WM's like Enlightenment which will run both. We'd all be stuck with KDE's ugly, designed by committee, CDE clone interface if we had to agree on one standard at the beginning. Without that WM, KDE is cool again. Thanks GNOME!
Tony
I like the idea of being able to write applications once that run anywhere, but the reality is that they won't work. Java is a nice idea, but there are so many bugs that it can't be used in any realistic sense.
Writing for the web sould work if everyone supported the standards and only the standards. But with companies like M$ perverting everything they touch (how'd the screw up ASCII? why?) we all have to put up with code that works on one box but crashed on another.
I usually run with Java* turned off. There's a lot of room for bad code in the standard, so it's best to just avoid it.
In order for a place like Slashdot to exist, there have to be people around writing code for their pages to run on and code for us to talk about. I realize that you could be joking here but let's get serious. There is no way that you can write applications for the 'web' and expect them to work for everyone. Even if they did, they'd be about 1/50th the speed of a compiled app, so what's the point?
Have a fun day, gotta go code...
1. What good does an anti-missile system do if the most likely way for a terrorist to deliver a bomb is a boat? Missiles are expensive and unreliable, and hard to test without alerting the satelites. Boats are cheap, extremely reliable, and are let into harbors with a minimum of inspection.
2. A working anti-missile defense system is an offensive weapon. I.e. that which is used as a way to defeat an enemy. Without giving out this technology to everyone, whoever has it is instantly a target for foreign governments because they know that they will lose a full-scale nucelar war. It's actually worse than that. Since we're developing this technology out in the open, the foreign governments know that they only have a few years until we cannot be beaten (if the system works). They therefore can assume that we intend to use the system as part of a first strike and preemptively retaliate.
So, let's assume that the USA is not suicidal. The only thing we can do at this stage is declare that we are going to protect the entire world from anyone shooting balisitc missiles at anyone else. Any other course of action will result in some foreign paranoid government nuking us first while they still have a chance to hit us.
A while back someone was talking about developing a stealth cruise missile. The idea was hopefully scrapped. The last thing we need in a paranoid world is for any random explosion to be blamed on the USA because of our unique ability to blow things up without being able to trace who did it. Anytime anything blew up, we'd get blamed.
This anti-missile system is exactly the same thing, a way for the whole world to justifiably get mad at the USA. I wish our president wasn't chasing skirts and would pull his head out of his arse. Maybe he would see the suicidal futility of such a project.
Back in the 50's general LeMay (sp?) was advocating a nuclear first strike against the USSR (haven't typed that in a while..) because of the results of the single game prisoner's dilemma research. Basically, if you expect to play only once, you should cheat. We expect to keep playing the politics game for a long time, over and over. We therefore have to mutually cooperate, that is the best possible solution. Building an anti-missile system is cheating. Saying that you are going to build such a system should prompt the other nations to cheat first.
My $0.02.
To all of those people who bragged that they registered someone's junk-mail account, the rest of us get to say "Ha-Ha!!". Now _anyone_ can get the junk-mail account for .com...
MAN what a f*ck-up! They need to remove the entire system and start over.
To say that I'm favorably impressed by the performance of the Compaq ccc compiler would be a major understatement. IMHO, with the release of this compiler, they have just overcome the Intel price/performance issue.
I've seen 280% speedups over gcc's best effort, more than justifying the 100% price premium of the hardware over (for instance) dual PIII boxen.
If I was going to put in a number crunching cluster (and I may) AlphaLinux would be the best way for me to go, cutting 40% from my TCO over IntelLinux.
Thanks Compaq!
IMHO, IBM has really come out in the right direction here with the install guide and pointing out exactly what hardware works and what doesn't.
I wish more vendors would give out explicit details of how to configure their hardware during the install process. Let's face it, Linux works with almost anyting, as long as you know how to configure it (except those idiotic winmodems). I'd really appreciate it if other vendors told you what install/kernel options to choose for their hardware.
This is a basic problem with Linux, the OS should be capable of determining what hardware is in the computer and choosing a more specialized configuration. We don't really need (or want) hardware vendors to ship us binary drivers, but working up an autoconfigurator script would be very useful.
Back on topic, the Thinkpad is certainly a good box; a little pricey, but what would you expect from IBM? Nice to see Linux support is being taken seriously. A couple more years and we'll have that world domination thing worked out...
Actually, SGI isn't getting rid of IRIX on the big iron either. They're just dumping the NT shit for a real small-box OS.
Porting to a huge SMP box like the S80 would be a lot easier than porting to a ccNUMA box like the O2000. Either port would cost incredible amounts of money, and in the end result in having just another UNIX running on the box.
It is certainly physically possible, but there is no business case to even try.
The AIX/Linux box is a nice, simple uniprocessor PPC box. No one is going to provide a $1M computer to Linus to play with just so Linux can steal some enterprise server OS licenses.
The 6X00 from Sun is absolutely no match for an S80. Those 4 512 bit memory paths really make the transactions fly.
Last I heard, the kernel isn't even capable of running on 24 cpu's.
There is too much specialized hardware in a S80 to ever expect that Linux would run on it. The OS has to be aware of the service processor, memory faults, and really complex connection system to the IO drawers. Not to mention the fact that people expect to be able to plug SSA drives into the system, which aren't even close to being supported.
That's why it will never happen.
According to the API press release, the market for 1-2 processor Alpha boxes was 95% Linux in the past few months. That's why they dropped NT. A much better reason than why there are hardly any Linux games.
./'ers are treating them like shit. Get over yourselves. Someone just gave you an almost free gift. Say 'Thanks!' like I did.
I like the compiler, it needed a little configuring, but I expected that. It works good on the things I've tried it on so far, giving a 16% speedup on a tight loop (which I would have expected GCC to be able to give).
So what if it's not GPL, they are being nice and everyone of the