Ever go on a picnic and see bees enter your soda can? Or see a trashcan buzzing with bees because people throw away their sweet, sugary beverages?
Santa is powered by cookies and milk. Bees are powered by honey... that's why they make it. Why not leave some "honey" out for them as a mid-flight snack?
My only question would be how this affects their ability to collect pollen and make honey back at the hive. If it allows them to pollinate more flowers, then hell, I'm all for it.
Deep pockets versus deeper pockets. Google's market cap is $125b and Microsoft's is $200b. Not long ago, the gap was larger. Falling PC sales have taken a bite out of Microsoft's revenue. They recently had their first down quarter in their history.
Microsoft still makes 4X the money Google does, though. In 2008, Microsoft earned $17b in net income compared to Google's $4b. Now, $4b is nothing to dismiss, especially when you're using and writing entirely free and open source software, but still, if Google has deep pockets, Microsoft's are even deeper.
Google is probably the only company in the world that can generate excitement about a new OS, and making an open platform will encourage software developers to write apps for it. Hasn't that been one of the big complaints, the lack of software for Linux?
Many have tried taking down Microsoft. All have failed. Perhaps Google is finally the David to slay Microsoft's Goliath. Perhaps not. Exciting times, these are.
JRockit has all kinds of monitoring features, memory profilers, and other useful metrics built into the JRE, but you need a license key to unlock them. Core Java was always free. You pay for the value-added stuff.
They already own a chip maker. That bit of news was from last year. It shouldn't surprise you today that they plan on actually using the chipmaker they bought.
Why any country would voluntarily base their national security on imported, closed-source, non-free software is beyond my reasoning.
If a country wants to control its infrastructure, it must use free software. Same goes for us computers users, too, of course, but the stakes are much higher for a sovereign nation.
VMWare licenses for ESX server cost something like $5k apiece. My company uses VMWare and I don't quite get it. We pay for expensive blade hardware ($8k each for those, not to mention the chasis), then we pay $5k per virtual server. And for what? Adding virtualization overhead to the runtime cost.
Meanwhile, in articles like this, people are showing how to run many applications and different versions within a single container. A single node in the cluster can run any application. There are always busy, keeping the hardware fully utilized. Isn't that the promise of utility computing? Rack up a bunch of cheaper (but not cheap/shoddy) servers and let your cluster go to town.
So, my question is, why are we (as an industry) embracing virtualization when apps written for a smart container (like OSGi) give the same benefits without all the additional co$t and runtime overhead?
Surely, 640 threads ought to be enough for anybody.
But seriously, have you seen the price of this beast? HUGE price tag. Why not build your own cluster?
There are technologies today (like, say, Terracotta Server) that allow for easy distribution of work across a large number of JVMs.
I suppose the companies that need all those cores and threads in one machine can afford the Honkin' Big Iron. For the rest of us, clustering is getting cheaper and cheaper these days.
At $0.11 on average per kWh, the savings is $1.7m annually, plus another $300k from the energy they sell to the power company. That's 45 years to recoup the investment ($90m), not including maintaining the turbines for 45 years (more info here)
Still, I think this should be the new standard for sustainable living and development.
And to put 16 gigawatt hours into perspective... the average household in America uses around 11,000 kWh annually. See Official Government Website
Rock Port, MO needs to add their watts saved to the total. It's like they switched out 64,000,000 incandescent bulbs for CFCs!
Greed and eBay's sagging revenue growth
on
eBay Sues Craigslist
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Craigslist is a untapped gold mine, and eBay knows it. eBay's growth is tepid, at best, and they need some way to appease Wall Street. Why not connive plans on a hugely profitable yet potentially hugely more profitable site like Craigslist? If a hostile takeover was ever their goal and Newmark and Co. nipped that idea in the bud, I'd be a mad eBay, too.
Forget software not being written for multi-cores, the entire infrastructure around the computer needs to "go wide" for massive parallelism, not just the software. This includes disk, memory, front-side bus, etc./p>
I'm doing highly concurrent projects (grid computing) for my company and we're finding that some things parallelize just fine, but others simply move the pain and bottleneck to a piece of infrastructure that hasn't quite caught up yet.
For example, my laptop has a dual-core 2.2Ghz processor, which you'd think is great for development. It's no better than a single CPU machine because my disk IO light is on all the time. IntelliJ pounds the disk. Maven and Ant pound the disk. Outlook pounds the disk. Even surfing the web puts pages into disk cache, so browsing while building a project is slow. Until I get a SCSI drive, you're still limited on disk IO, so those extra cores don't help that much.
All the cores are great on the server, though. I've recently completed a massive integration project where I grid-enabled my company's enterprise apps. All those cores running grid nodes is giving us very high throughput. Our next bottleneck is the database (all those extra grid nodes pounding away at another bottleneck resource...)
According to the Energy Infomration Administration, there are 107 million households in the US. The end-use consumption of electricity by household shows 318 kWh (kilowatt hours) used for a dekstop PC on average per household. There is, unfortunately, no breakdown of the electricity consumption per component in the PC, so I'm left to wonder how much is used by the hard drive specifically.
Profiling your code proves the 80/20 rule is correct. Your program spends 80% of its CPU time in 20% of the code. You would use a profiler to find the real meaty bottlenecks, right? As opposed to guessing where the bottlenecks are. Likewise, if we want to reduce electricity consumption, we're better off using data to guide us. Air conditioning, heating, and major appliances use by far the largest amount of electricity in your average household.
I'm interested in how this protocol can help glue together applications for better/easier/simpler distributed computing
With all the cheap servers with multi-cores we have, it seems like we all have the ability today to do distributed computing on our own grid.
This site (and corresponding book) Enterprise Integration Patterns was very enlightening to me as I thought more about messaging and less about imperative programming.
New technologies like Terracotta (for Java) make distribution simple, too. Everything works on the POJO model, but the POJOs are distributed magically via some fancy AOP code weaving. I wrote a blog article about how I used TC to make a message bus. It's been a very interesting project, thus far.
I can't speak for other companies, of course, but my company is moving toward a grid model with messaging forming the backbone of our processing. It's easy to scale horizontally, queue consumers all over the network form natural bulkheads protecting them from other components, and it's easy to throttle by having bounded queues and fixed numbers of consumers.
This is a java-centric feature, but it's something that frustrated the hell out of me when I worked on my first ASP.NET application (v1.1) after coming from a Eclipse/Tomcat environment...
Mix up this recipe:
Eclipse's autobuild-on-save feature
JVM's ability to hot swap code (typically accomplished by replacing the classloader at runtime)
Eclipse's ability to host the container (Tomcat in my case, but it can be WebLogic or any other)
Eclipse starts Tomcat in debug mode by default. Automatically compiled classes in Eclipse are piped over the debug socket to the container. The class is swapped out in real time, and you've got a brand new piece of code to run without having an entire build/deploy cycle. Better than that, you can be stepping through your code debugging a method, see your mistake, fix it, hit ctrl-S to save, and the debugger backs up to the top of the method and evaluates your new code!!!
VS.NET (v1.1 when I used it) simply could not do that. IIS was not as cleanly integrated with VS.NET (as far as I am aware, maybe I'm wrong)
Eclipse plug-ins exist for all major containers. MyEclipseIDE makes a killing marketing a bunch of them. Even IntelliJ (my preference for Java development) cannot match it, because you have to explicitly build (which can hot swap) but it'll take seconds, as opposed to milliseconds in Eclipse. big big fan of the hot swapping ability.
A smart alec news reporter once asked Albert Einstein how many feet were in a mile. Einstein said he had no idea. The news reporter then berated him, because he didn't know. Einstein said that's what he had books for, to look up things like that. He didn't want to clutter his mind with facts.
I've got no problem letting a device remind me when my mom's birthday is. That's what it's for.
... there's matplotlib and there's reportlab for PDFs. Both are excellent open source packages, and I can tell you from experience that reportlab has outstanding support. I recently posted a question to their mailing list and received three intelligent replies within an hour.
The F/A-18 means it's both a Fighter and also an Attack aircraft, which means is does neither as well as a plane designed specifically for that purpose. Meaning, the F/A-18 cannot carry as much ordinance as an A-6 nor dogfight as well as an F-14 or F-15.
That said, the F-14 is also one damned big plane compared to the F/A-18, despite how cool it may have looked. IANANA (I am not a naval aviator) so I can't say which flies better. I just know that when I was aboard CV-62 USS Independence, I was surprised at how much bigger the Tomcat was compared to the Hornet.
The last time Bill Gates spoke of peace I was a boy. And many Free Software nobles, who would not be slaves, were lured by him under a flag of truce to a barn, where he had them hanged. I was very young, but I remember Gate's notion of peace.
Why the hell would I want to entrust all my gov't operations, all my military, all my businesses' computing needs to a closed source, foreign (from my point of view) vendor... like, say, MS?
Ok, so your military doesn't run windows. Our military runs (or at least used to) Solaris and HP-UX... but those are closed source, too, and owned by a foreign entity.
In the end, open source provides me -- as a sovereign nation -- the ability to control the critical pieces of my own infrastructure.
That's how I (as a person) see it, anyway. Whether or not foreign governments agree, I don't know.
IP Holding companies. I think we all know it's ridiculous, but so long as the law supports this kind of business I imagine we can expect to see more of the same.
Let's hope that the big companies calling for patent reform manage to effect some positive change. Microsoft and Oracle in that article, I'm pretty sure IBM has sounded the call, too.
Wasn't it critical to Windows to have IE deeply integrated within? I seem to remember something about it and that MS couldn't easily disentangle it from the bowels...
But more importantly, IE is, I believ, used as the rendering engine for a whole lotta apps. I imagine the cost of replacing it would be a lot higher than the cost of buying Opera for $400m.
Don't Make Me Think! by Steve Krug is an awesome book that all software developers should read.
The goal is simplicity in all things. Someone shouldn't have to think about what is going on, it should be obvious.
The most interesting thing about that book is that the author applies the same principles he espouses for websites to the book. The book is very easily digestible. So, if it works for the web and it works for the book... what else can it apply to? If you follow this train of thought to its logical conclusion you'll realize it applies to lots and lots of things: your code, desktops, phone VRUs, brochures, etc.
Linus is a smart guy and I respect him, but the goal is simple.
Slashdot Mirror
Ever go on a picnic and see bees enter your soda can? Or see a trashcan buzzing with bees because people throw away their sweet, sugary beverages?
Santa is powered by cookies and milk. Bees are powered by honey... that's why they make it. Why not leave some "honey" out for them as a mid-flight snack?
My only question would be how this affects their ability to collect pollen and make honey back at the hive. If it allows them to pollinate more flowers, then hell, I'm all for it.
Deep pockets versus deeper pockets. Google's market cap is $125b and Microsoft's is $200b. Not long ago, the gap was larger. Falling PC sales have taken a bite out of Microsoft's revenue. They recently had their first down quarter in their history.
Microsoft still makes 4X the money Google does, though. In 2008, Microsoft earned $17b in net income compared to Google's $4b. Now, $4b is nothing to dismiss, especially when you're using and writing entirely free and open source software, but still, if Google has deep pockets, Microsoft's are even deeper.
See: MSFT and GOOG
.
Google is probably the only company in the world that can generate excitement about a new OS, and making an open platform will encourage software developers to write apps for it. Hasn't that been one of the big complaints, the lack of software for Linux?
Many have tried taking down Microsoft. All have failed. Perhaps Google is finally the David to slay Microsoft's Goliath. Perhaps not. Exciting times, these are.
JRockit has all kinds of monitoring features, memory profilers, and other useful metrics built into the JRE, but you need a license key to unlock them. Core Java was always free. You pay for the value-added stuff.
They already own a chip maker. That bit of news was from last year. It shouldn't surprise you today that they plan on actually using the chipmaker they bought.
Why any country would voluntarily base their national security on imported, closed-source, non-free software is beyond my reasoning. If a country wants to control its infrastructure, it must use free software. Same goes for us computers users, too, of course, but the stakes are much higher for a sovereign nation.
VMWare licenses for ESX server cost something like $5k apiece. My company uses VMWare and I don't quite get it. We pay for expensive blade hardware ($8k each for those, not to mention the chasis), then we pay $5k per virtual server. And for what? Adding virtualization overhead to the runtime cost.
Meanwhile, in articles like this, people are showing how to run many applications and different versions within a single container. A single node in the cluster can run any application. There are always busy, keeping the hardware fully utilized. Isn't that the promise of utility computing? Rack up a bunch of cheaper (but not cheap/shoddy) servers and let your cluster go to town.
So, my question is, why are we (as an industry) embracing virtualization when apps written for a smart container (like OSGi) give the same benefits without all the additional co$t and runtime overhead?
Surely, 640 threads ought to be enough for anybody.
But seriously, have you seen the price of this beast? HUGE price tag. Why not build your own cluster?
There are technologies today (like, say, Terracotta Server) that allow for easy distribution of work across a large number of JVMs.
I suppose the companies that need all those cores and threads in one machine can afford the Honkin' Big Iron. For the rest of us, clustering is getting cheaper and cheaper these days.
At $0.11 on average per kWh, the savings is $1.7m annually, plus another $300k from the energy they sell to the power company. That's 45 years to recoup the investment ($90m), not including maintaining the turbines for 45 years (more info here)
Still, I think this should be the new standard for sustainable living and development.
And to put 16 gigawatt hours into perspective... the average household in America uses around 11,000 kWh annually. See Official Government Website
Rock Port, MO needs to add their watts saved to the total. It's like they switched out 64,000,000 incandescent bulbs for CFCs!
Craigslist is a untapped gold mine, and eBay knows it. eBay's growth is tepid, at best, and they need some way to appease Wall Street. Why not connive plans on a hugely profitable yet potentially hugely more profitable site like Craigslist? If a hostile takeover was ever their goal and Newmark and Co. nipped that idea in the bud, I'd be a mad eBay, too.
Forget software not being written for multi-cores, the entire infrastructure around the computer needs to "go wide" for massive parallelism, not just the software. This includes disk, memory, front-side bus, etc./p>
I'm doing highly concurrent projects (grid computing) for my company and we're finding that some things parallelize just fine, but others simply move the pain and bottleneck to a piece of infrastructure that hasn't quite caught up yet.
For example, my laptop has a dual-core 2.2Ghz processor, which you'd think is great for development. It's no better than a single CPU machine because my disk IO light is on all the time. IntelliJ pounds the disk. Maven and Ant pound the disk. Outlook pounds the disk. Even surfing the web puts pages into disk cache, so browsing while building a project is slow. Until I get a SCSI drive, you're still limited on disk IO, so those extra cores don't help that much.
All the cores are great on the server, though. I've recently completed a massive integration project where I grid-enabled my company's enterprise apps. All those cores running grid nodes is giving us very high throughput. Our next bottleneck is the database (all those extra grid nodes pounding away at another bottleneck resource...)
Terracotta Server as a Message Bus. It's been a very interesting project.
According to the Energy Infomration Administration, there are 107 million households in the US. The end-use consumption of electricity by household shows 318 kWh (kilowatt hours) used for a dekstop PC on average per household. There is, unfortunately, no breakdown of the electricity consumption per component in the PC, so I'm left to wonder how much is used by the hard drive specifically.
Profiling your code proves the 80/20 rule is correct. Your program spends 80% of its CPU time in 20% of the code. You would use a profiler to find the real meaty bottlenecks, right? As opposed to guessing where the bottlenecks are. Likewise, if we want to reduce electricity consumption, we're better off using data to guide us. Air conditioning, heating, and major appliances use by far the largest amount of electricity in your average household.
Still, it looks like this site will have to add hard drives to their saved watts: http://www.whosavedwatt.com/
I'm interested in how this protocol can help glue together applications for better/easier/simpler distributed computing
With all the cheap servers with multi-cores we have, it seems like we all have the ability today to do distributed computing on our own grid.
This site (and corresponding book) Enterprise Integration Patterns was very enlightening to me as I thought more about messaging and less about imperative programming.
New technologies like Terracotta (for Java) make distribution simple, too. Everything works on the POJO model, but the POJOs are distributed magically via some fancy AOP code weaving. I wrote a blog article about how I used TC to make a message bus. It's been a very interesting project, thus far.
I can't speak for other companies, of course, but my company is moving toward a grid model with messaging forming the backbone of our processing. It's easy to scale horizontally, queue consumers all over the network form natural bulkheads protecting them from other components, and it's easy to throttle by having bounded queues and fixed numbers of consumers.
Why Closing a Driver loses its vendor money
ESR may or may not be popular on Slashdot, but he covered this topic pretty well in the Cathedral and the Bazaar.
Mix up this recipe:
Eclipse starts Tomcat in debug mode by default. Automatically compiled classes in Eclipse are piped over the debug socket to the container. The class is swapped out in real time, and you've got a brand new piece of code to run without having an entire build/deploy cycle. Better than that, you can be stepping through your code debugging a method, see your mistake, fix it, hit ctrl-S to save, and the debugger backs up to the top of the method and evaluates your new code!!!
VS.NET (v1.1 when I used it) simply could not do that. IIS was not as cleanly integrated with VS.NET (as far as I am aware, maybe I'm wrong)
Eclipse plug-ins exist for all major containers. MyEclipseIDE makes a killing marketing a bunch of them. Even IntelliJ (my preference for Java development) cannot match it, because you have to explicitly build (which can hot swap) but it'll take seconds, as opposed to milliseconds in Eclipse. big big fan of the hot swapping ability.
I've got no problem letting a device remind me when my mom's birthday is. That's what it's for.
... there's matplotlib and there's reportlab for PDFs. Both are excellent open source packages, and I can tell you from experience that reportlab has outstanding support. I recently posted a question to their mailing list and received three intelligent replies within an hour.
Kodak won $1 billion from Sun for (spurious?) patent violations in Java. I would not be surprised to see MS lose this fight.
And considering how similar C# and Java are, I'm surprised Kodak isn't alleging the same patent violation.
The F/A-18 means it's both a Fighter and also an Attack aircraft, which means is does neither as well as a plane designed specifically for that purpose. Meaning, the F/A-18 cannot carry as much ordinance as an A-6 nor dogfight as well as an F-14 or F-15.
That said, the F-14 is also one damned big plane compared to the F/A-18, despite how cool it may have looked. IANANA (I am not a naval aviator) so I can't say which flies better. I just know that when I was aboard CV-62 USS Independence, I was surprised at how much bigger the Tomcat was compared to the Hornet.
The last time Bill Gates spoke of peace I was a boy. And many Free Software nobles, who would not be slaves, were lured by him under a flag of truce to a barn, where he had them hanged. I was very young, but I remember Gate's notion of peace.
Ok, so your military doesn't run windows. Our military runs (or at least used to) Solaris and HP-UX... but those are closed source, too, and owned by a foreign entity.
In the end, open source provides me -- as a sovereign nation -- the ability to control the critical pieces of my own infrastructure.
That's how I (as a person) see it, anyway. Whether or not foreign governments agree, I don't know.
This is, of course, a registered trademark of MS now.
Let's hope that the big companies calling for patent reform manage to effect some positive change. Microsoft and Oracle in that article, I'm pretty sure IBM has sounded the call, too.
But more importantly, IE is, I believ, used as the rendering engine for a whole lotta apps. I imagine the cost of replacing it would be a lot higher than the cost of buying Opera for $400m.
The goal is simplicity in all things. Someone shouldn't have to think about what is going on, it should be obvious.
The most interesting thing about that book is that the author applies the same principles he espouses for websites to the book. The book is very easily digestible. So, if it works for the web and it works for the book... what else can it apply to? If you follow this train of thought to its logical conclusion you'll realize it applies to lots and lots of things: your code, desktops, phone VRUs, brochures, etc.
Linus is a smart guy and I respect him, but the goal is simple.
... then you spelt "Googol", when I think you meant "Google."
We all know that any mention of Google in a post equates to +5 Insightful.