\w+ = 1 or more alphanumerics \w* = 0 or more alphanumerics
I mean \w*AA would match "AA" as well as "FAA", "RIAA" and "MPAA". I don't think the Alcoholics Anonymous folks would like to be lumped in with the other AAs, do you?
Crays at Y-12?
Are you sure you weren't at X-10? (Also known as Oak Ridge National Lab) Y-12 doesn't allow tour, specifically of its network stuff to the best of my knowledge. I've been to ORNL, and I've seen a large room with the new Cray towers (as well as the IBM Cheetah, the SGI Altix system, and that multi-Petabyte tape silo).
Y-12 is a totally different animal from X-10, FWIW.
I use an Apple Extended Keyboard II at work with a G5. Amazing keyboard. I hate going back to working on mushy keyboards after working on the AEK for a while. I found out last week that a canadian company (Matias? I think) is making modern USB keyboards with the old AEK switches. Won't need the ADB-USB adapter anymore, but they're pretty pricey.
The fact of the matter is if you build it, they will come. I'd bet that it won't be more than a couple of years before you see a recommendation for 2 processors on games.
Agreed. I've been building my own machines for about 10 years. I'm done building. I currently use a 15" PowerBook and after the initial setup (eg. graphical Emacs, a "real" Python installation, etc) it's able to do everything I would normally do on a Linux box, while looking better.
I'll always retain a Linux box of some sort, but my next desktop will be a G5 or whatever comes next.
I'm a Mac hater. Ever since I was a PC sysadmin in college I have loved x86 boxes and hated Macs. On my old 486 systems I could edit the.ini files to change features, make ramdrives to speed up logins for users, and use the command line to move files around which made it much faster than the eye-candy of a GUI. In fact I told one Mac loving friend that it would take a full-frontal lobotomy before I ever used a Mac of my own choice.
Now I'm using a Powerbook all of the time for development and trying to figure out how to justify a dual-CPU G5 at work. But I console myself with the knowledge that it's not me that had the brain surgery - it's the OS.
I've been running Unix and Linux for a few years, and I don't think I'll ever be without a SuSE or Fedora box somewhere. But for my day-to-day use and programming, the Macs are just too easy...
There are folks out there buying Apple hardware because they are more comfortable with a UNIX-like operating system. They want a system capable of interfacing with all of their various Linux and Unix boxes with built-in ability to run X11 (or some variant thereof). They also realize that they work in a corporate environment where MS Office is King, and may have been burned in the past with OpenOffice not handling all MS documents properly.
Some folks may also value the XCode suite as a development environment.
There are some heretics that may even believe that the Apple is the current power tool for a person that has to live in both the Windows corporate environment and the Linux/Unix world of servers, clusters, and simulations.
These folks may be willing to pay a premium for hardware that works and works well without a lot of fuss. The attractive interface, sexy boxes, and secret-society appeal are just added bonuses.
Which I have since learned. My apologies for spreading FUD. I was shocked at the difference, and it really had me questioning why the OS X system was so slow when all I'd heard was good things. I wonder if there's any way to re-compile openssl without that assembler code in any way that might speed up the G5's performance?
I've tried installing YDL on a small G5 cluster. It was a PITA to get running (3 installs before I was able to get the X server running right). And still I can't find any fan control. After 5 minutes the fans spool up to "ludicrous speed" and stick there.
I really want to like YDL. I've been talking to the folks who do OSCAR about trying to get OSCAR to support YDL. But I'm not sure how it will work out yet, at least until I can figure out how to turn down the fans!
I can tell you one reason that I've messed with Yellow Dog Linux on a G5.
I've been doing a bit of clustering, and have been using the OSCAR system for building clusters. OSCAR is build using RPM-based distros (primarily RedHat). There are some folks porting OSCAR to Debian, but it's not there yet. Apple's got some pretty good tools that can be used for clustering, but nothing I've been able to get my hands on yet does all the stuff OSCAR does.
So since YDL is an RPM-based distro, there is a hope that OSCAR could be used with YDL. It doesn't work now, but it would probably be easier to do than try to port everything over to OS X right off the bat.
Now I will say I didn't like YDL on the G5 AT ALL. I told a co-worker it was like being a kid and taking apart your favorite Tonka truck to "improve" it. I ended up with something different, but I really wanted my old truck back. Also, there are some things that OS X is slower than Linux for (eg - run openssl speed on a dual G5 vs. a single Xeon - the Xeon will be multiple times as fast).
OS X is a fantastic operating system. The developers package is incredible, Fink rocks, and having X11 inside is cool as heck. I'm saving up to buy a G5 for my next personal machine. However, it's not perfect (no OS is). I can fully understand folks wanting to get a working Linux install running on Apple hardware.
is whether PC users who regularly play with Mac users do anything to try to support their Mac brethren.
Years ago I played a MMO flight sim called "Warbirds" (It's still around I think, but it's a shadow of its former self). When they went from version 1 to version 2 (3D models), they didn't release the Mac version concurrently. Version 2 had its own troubles, but it was just gorgeous. The models were beautiful. However, we spent several months staying in the old V1 arenas because a significant number of our squadmates were Mac jockeys. It wasn't fair to leave them behind, so we tried to keep them involved.
I wonder if current clans with Mac members will try to do something similar to support them.
I think that perception is slowly changing. I went to
SuperComputing2004 last month in Pittsburgh. Looking around, I was
shocked at just how many of the laptops were PowerBooks. I tried
counting at one point and ended up with about 40% of the laptops I
could see being PowerBooks.
I also had the priviledge to talk to some folks from the DOE national
labs. These folks can get just about any hardware toy they want for
their systems. And interestingly enough, the vast majority of the
keyboard jockeys were running PowerBooks, primarily the 15" model. So
I spoke to a couple of them and asked why.
For all of them it came down to three things: 1) first and most
important, a UNIX-based system that could easily interface with
anything they needed to work on. 2) bulletproof hardware that "just
works" and 3) MS Office. Managers love MS office. Consensus was
that OpenOffice wasn't ready for primetime yet, and that by running a
Mac you still had the ability to turn out Excel and Word docs and be
absolutely, positively sure that your management chain could read
them.
So I find myself at the Apple booth, thinking back 10 years to when I
was a PC systems administrator. A friend was trying to get me to come
over to the "dark side" and use Macs. I told him it would take a full
frontal lobotomy before I even considered it.
The lobotomy happened, but it wasn't me - it was the MacOS. Now I'm
setting up a G5 to be my primariy machine at work, trying to get a
PowerBook from the company for travel, and saving up for a G5 at home
as well. So I think the shift is happening among tech folks.
If I'm not mistaken, one of the letters in one of the books accompanying HALO 2 (great for thumbing through while waiting an ETERNITY for another MP game to be found) shows a pretty romantic interest by the Admiral's daughter, Melissa Keys (?).
The 2004 SuperComputing conference in Pittsburgh is just wrapping up today. I've spent the last few days soaking it in, and chuckling with other folks about the Windows Cluster concept.
However, Microsoft isn't targeting techies. They're not going after linux users for sure. They know that their solutions are a total flop where scaling is concerned, and it appears that they're conceding the mid- and high-end markets to the *nix vendors. MS is going after the small ones. Don't know anyting about Linux but think you need a bit more power than a desktop? No problem! Run Windows Cluster Edition on your 24 node cluster!
Hell of a marketing strategy. You take a company that everybody knows, and leverage it into the small cluster market. I don't think MS honestly thinks they can compete with say a 256 node SGI Altix, or certainly not one of the big Crays, but they can compete with Penguin, Linux Networx, Verati, etc in the small-scale market (even though those companies would rather sell you a 128+ node system.)
Cray, SGI, and the other big system experts can only sell so many large scale parallel systems per year. Microsoft would rather have the few thousand small systems than a couple of Red Storm size machines from the look of it.
And on the Itanic, Intel kept screaming through the conference that "IT'S THE COMPILER!!!! YOU NEED AN OPTIMIZED COMPILER!" Apparently, you will likely need to re-engineer the code as well. The best fun of the week was hearing one smaller cluster vendor start bashing the Itanic in front of a mixed crowd. After a couple minutes an Intel guy announced his affiliation and the cluster rep turned about fifteen shades of pale. Was amazingly good entertainment.
Re:I've never understood the obsession with Halo
on
Halo 2 Reviews
·
· Score: 1
I'm actually starting to get a bit miffed about the desire to know everything about how defensive systems work. There's a part of me that thinks we really shouldn't be announcing anything of this sort. I've got a great idea - let's let the public know exactly how each and every one of our systems operate! The enemy (pick one) would NEVER think of watching CNN or the Discovery Channel to try to gain a small clue they could turn into a tactical advantage!
It will be of enormous concern, because it will imply that all our global warming predictions for the next hundred years or so will have to be redone.
Or just maybe it implies that the model of global warming is flawed? Perhaps the ecosystem is a bit more complex than any of us realize, and perhaps this is a natural phenomenon?
While all these ideas about implementing new digital technology are important and interesting, I feel that the designers don't grasp the central point of the digital revolution.
That is, digitronics are supposed to make everything in which it is implemented vastly cheaper.
Umm, according to whom? When you're adding new capability to existing applications (or combining unrelated technologies in new applications), it's almost always more expensive than either of the original items.
examples:
early PDA/Cell phones were much more expensive than buying a PDA and a cell phone
those wierd combo refridgerator/TV combos are more expensive than either.
I'm old enough to remember when calculator writstwatches were more expensive than a calculator and a wrist watch.
Remember, it was his analogy, not mine. If he wants to compare DVD's to Cognac glasses, I think it's fair to extend the analogy. If he's comparing the content to Cognac and the media to the glass, that's a different story.
Slashdot Mirror
Ummm, wouldn't it be \w+AA?
\w+ = 1 or more alphanumerics
\w* = 0 or more alphanumerics
I mean \w*AA would match "AA" as well as "FAA", "RIAA" and "MPAA". I don't think the Alcoholics Anonymous folks would like to be lumped in with the other AAs, do you?
Crays at Y-12? Are you sure you weren't at X-10? (Also known as Oak Ridge National Lab) Y-12 doesn't allow tour, specifically of its network stuff to the best of my knowledge. I've been to ORNL, and I've seen a large room with the new Cray towers (as well as the IBM Cheetah, the SGI Altix system, and that multi-Petabyte tape silo). Y-12 is a totally different animal from X-10, FWIW.
I use an Apple Extended Keyboard II at work with a G5. Amazing keyboard. I hate going back to working on mushy keyboards after working on the AEK for a while. I found out last week that a canadian company (Matias? I think) is making modern USB keyboards with the old AEK switches. Won't need the ADB-USB adapter anymore, but they're pretty pricey.
The fact of the matter is if you build it, they will come. I'd bet that it won't be more than a couple of years before you see a recommendation for 2 processors on games.
I'll always retain a Linux box of some sort, but my next desktop will be a G5 or whatever comes next.
Now I'm using a Powerbook all of the time for development and trying to figure out how to justify a dual-CPU G5 at work. But I console myself with the knowledge that it's not me that had the brain surgery - it's the OS.
I've been running Unix and Linux for a few years, and I don't think I'll ever be without a SuSE or Fedora box somewhere. But for my day-to-day use and programming, the Macs are just too easy...
There are folks out there buying Apple hardware because they are more comfortable with a UNIX-like operating system. They want a system capable of interfacing with all of their various Linux and Unix boxes with built-in ability to run X11 (or some variant thereof). They also realize that they work in a corporate environment where MS Office is King, and may have been burned in the past with OpenOffice not handling all MS documents properly.
Some folks may also value the XCode suite as a development environment.
There are some heretics that may even believe that the Apple is the current power tool for a person that has to live in both the Windows corporate environment and the Linux/Unix world of servers, clusters, and simulations.
These folks may be willing to pay a premium for hardware that works and works well without a lot of fuss. The attractive interface, sexy boxes, and secret-society appeal are just added bonuses.
Which I have since learned. My apologies for spreading FUD. I was shocked at the difference, and it really had me questioning why the OS X system was so slow when all I'd heard was good things. I wonder if there's any way to re-compile openssl without that assembler code in any way that might speed up the G5's performance?
I've tried installing YDL on a small G5 cluster. It was a PITA to get running (3 installs before I was able to get the X server running right). And still I can't find any fan control. After 5 minutes the fans spool up to "ludicrous speed" and stick there.
I really want to like YDL. I've been talking to the folks who do OSCAR about trying to get OSCAR to support YDL. But I'm not sure how it will work out yet, at least until I can figure out how to turn down the fans!
I've been doing a bit of clustering, and have been using the OSCAR system for building clusters. OSCAR is build using RPM-based distros (primarily RedHat). There are some folks porting OSCAR to Debian, but it's not there yet. Apple's got some pretty good tools that can be used for clustering, but nothing I've been able to get my hands on yet does all the stuff OSCAR does.
So since YDL is an RPM-based distro, there is a hope that OSCAR could be used with YDL. It doesn't work now, but it would probably be easier to do than try to port everything over to OS X right off the bat.
Now I will say I didn't like YDL on the G5 AT ALL. I told a co-worker it was like being a kid and taking apart your favorite Tonka truck to "improve" it. I ended up with something different, but I really wanted my old truck back. Also, there are some things that OS X is slower than Linux for (eg - run openssl speed on a dual G5 vs. a single Xeon - the Xeon will be multiple times as fast).
OS X is a fantastic operating system. The developers package is incredible, Fink rocks, and having X11 inside is cool as heck. I'm saving up to buy a G5 for my next personal machine. However, it's not perfect (no OS is). I can fully understand folks wanting to get a working Linux install running on Apple hardware.
Years ago I played a MMO flight sim called "Warbirds" (It's still around I think, but it's a shadow of its former self). When they went from version 1 to version 2 (3D models), they didn't release the Mac version concurrently. Version 2 had its own troubles, but it was just gorgeous. The models were beautiful. However, we spent several months staying in the old V1 arenas because a significant number of our squadmates were Mac jockeys. It wasn't fair to leave them behind, so we tried to keep them involved.
I wonder if current clans with Mac members will try to do something similar to support them.
I also had the priviledge to talk to some folks from the DOE national labs. These folks can get just about any hardware toy they want for their systems. And interestingly enough, the vast majority of the keyboard jockeys were running PowerBooks, primarily the 15" model. So I spoke to a couple of them and asked why.
For all of them it came down to three things: 1) first and most important, a UNIX-based system that could easily interface with anything they needed to work on. 2) bulletproof hardware that "just works" and 3) MS Office. Managers love MS office. Consensus was that OpenOffice wasn't ready for primetime yet, and that by running a Mac you still had the ability to turn out Excel and Word docs and be absolutely, positively sure that your management chain could read them.
So I find myself at the Apple booth, thinking back 10 years to when I was a PC systems administrator. A friend was trying to get me to come over to the "dark side" and use Macs. I told him it would take a full frontal lobotomy before I even considered it.
The lobotomy happened, but it wasn't me - it was the MacOS. Now I'm setting up a G5 to be my primariy machine at work, trying to get a PowerBook from the company for travel, and saving up for a G5 at home as well. So I think the shift is happening among tech folks.
I really like OS X. I have considered a PowerBook. But the Trackpoint of my IBM laptop is so much easier to use (IMHO) than the touchpads...
It's in there already.
However, Microsoft isn't targeting techies. They're not going after linux users for sure. They know that their solutions are a total flop where scaling is concerned, and it appears that they're conceding the mid- and high-end markets to the *nix vendors. MS is going after the small ones. Don't know anyting about Linux but think you need a bit more power than a desktop? No problem! Run Windows Cluster Edition on your 24 node cluster!
Hell of a marketing strategy. You take a company that everybody knows, and leverage it into the small cluster market. I don't think MS honestly thinks they can compete with say a 256 node SGI Altix, or certainly not one of the big Crays, but they can compete with Penguin, Linux Networx, Verati, etc in the small-scale market (even though those companies would rather sell you a 128+ node system.)
Cray, SGI, and the other big system experts can only sell so many large scale parallel systems per year. Microsoft would rather have the few thousand small systems than a couple of Red Storm size machines from the look of it.
And on the Itanic, Intel kept screaming through the conference that "IT'S THE COMPILER!!!! YOU NEED AN OPTIMIZED COMPILER!" Apparently, you will likely need to re-engineer the code as well. The best fun of the week was hearing one smaller cluster vendor start bashing the Itanic in front of a mixed crowd. After a couple minutes an Intel guy announced his affiliation and the cluster rep turned about fifteen shades of pale. Was amazingly good entertainment.
"Halt! Commenzie!"
(or some such)
I'm actually starting to get a bit miffed about the desire to know everything about how defensive systems work. There's a part of me that thinks we really shouldn't be announcing anything of this sort. I've got a great idea - let's let the public know exactly how each and every one of our systems operate! The enemy (pick one) would NEVER think of watching CNN or the Discovery Channel to try to gain a small clue they could turn into a tactical advantage!
How did they get John Madden in there? a)he won't fly, and b) he's way over the 400lb cargo requirement...
Umm, according to whom? When you're adding new capability to existing applications (or combining unrelated technologies in new applications), it's almost always more expensive than either of the original items.
examples:
early PDA/Cell phones were much more expensive than buying a PDA and a cell phone
those wierd combo refridgerator/TV combos are more expensive than either.
I'm old enough to remember when calculator writstwatches were more expensive than a calculator and a wrist watch.
Early adopters always pay a "cool" tax.
Thanks a bunch!
Thanks regardless.
Remember, it was his analogy, not mine. If he wants to compare DVD's to Cognac glasses, I think it's fair to extend the analogy. If he's comparing the content to Cognac and the media to the glass, that's a different story.
Why not? JFK was a lowlife, too....