10 years ago we were just starting to grapple with the new technologies that the Internet brought about. Applications over TCP/IP, the Web, all sorts of routers, switches and new appliances: all of that necessitated a long and steep learning curve.
Today we have 10 years of experience in all of this "stuff", which makes us enormously more knowledgeable and productive. From all perspectives, hardware vendors are now able to service customers with much more targeted, effective and cheaper offerings (notice the move from software to hardware appliances and custom chips), and IT staffs now know how to use all of these toys properly, what works and what doesn't.
It's all mostly a matter of experience. That's why IT budgets will remain flat for a while longer.
I beg to differ in some way regarding Startship Troopers:
While I agree with you that keeping the name and the setting and the bugs clearly states that the movie should be a rendition of the book, I think that the movie was excellent.
It wasn't excellent as a close adapation of the book, in fact I would contend that it was only loosely related to the book. But it was very witty and satirical, and well-acted. I thoroughly enjoyed it, and I for one am glad that it wasn't a rehash of the book.
"Meanwhile, Asseily added that the pricing issues surrounding Oracle's database leave lingering questions about its application to Oracle's application pricing.
"I have no faith they won't change the licensing strategy at a moment's notice because it has happened before," Asseily said."
No the current version of XCode uses GCC 3.3 and does NOT support autovectorization. The page you link to is a page that shows how to code vector-based programs. What the parent is asking is if the standard "Hello World" program can be auto-vectorized with one command-line argument, and that won't work currently. The next version of XCode (2.0) with GCC 3.4 will support partial auto-vectorization, as another comment said as well.
Try to use Brasso, it works great on the bottom side of the disk. It's by far the best and cheapest (yes, both) anti-scratch CD/DVD product you can buy.
I have never tried it on the top side of the disk, but I expect it will work as well as on the bottom side.
running a sql database concurrently with your fs is a terrible idea for just all the reasons you've named. why you would try to do it is beyond me.
I'm doing it because it's a very easy and cheap way to get a searchable specialized data store, as long as you're very careful about transaction management.
A few weeks of work yielded a very usable system that can handle high loads. Now what's missing is real live QA to look for exceptions.:-)
Also note that I'm coding this for a small number of file types, on server machines (raid, etc...) that are less prone to failure, with a heavy-duty backend db (Sybase ASE 12.5) in a failover configuration. So I have it a hell of a lot easier than the guys trying to do this for all types of hardware, including some bloke's 300Mhz Celeron.
Yeah, Hans Reiser is dealing with this right now with the new version of his FS. He's going to do it all on the filesystem, the way it really should be done. I just don't have the expertise (or if I really wanted to show hubris, I'd say I just don't have the time);)
Sounds good, but what happens when there's a filesystem problem upon the saving of the file? By then the OS has already added the key/value pairs to the master index, and you get an out-of-synch problem. No?
I'm working on a object file system right now, and it's really not easy. It's a simple concept: Store on a standard journaled b-tree (or similar) filesystem the binary data, and store in a database all sorts of meta-information about the data. Also if you want, store a reverse index of the textual info and maybe another 'index' of image features if it's an image. Then if you want to get anything, no need to go through the filesystem's tree, you can hit the DB indexes and get info instantly.
The real problem is keeping all of this in synch, with almost flawless atomic operations. (of course it's pretty much impossible to be flawlessly atomic, but one should come as close as the current journaled filesystems are).
So if you're using 2 components, let's say, a filesystem and a SQL database, then you need to open a SQL transaction, do your inserts/updates/deletes, then do the filesystem operation, then do the SQL transaction commit. If anything fails, you can revert the SQL modifications and everything goes back to normal. But if the filesystem has problems, then you can't keep the damn DB synchronized, and at some point you'll have to resynch both.
On 100k files, no problem. On 200MM files (what I'm aiming for), you're pretty much screwed. Then you have to start thinking of a self-healing system with a constantly-running checker that must ensure that it's very resource-efficient, etc...
It's just a huge problem. Supposedly Apple is solving this by Q1 2005, but I wouldn't be surprised if we see a massive increase in filesystem corruption bugs for a while on OS X (unless the DB indexing piece is just that, an indexer that runs x times a day and isn't atomically joined to the filesystem operations).
As the core business of MS is slowly but surely shrinking they are just diversifying to other avenues of income.
Not exactly correct. The core business of MS is slowing its growth, not shrinking. It's a small difference, but quite significant.
When you have the whole market, you can only grow at the growth rate of the market. Microsoft investors and Wall Street are asking MS to look for new avenues of growth, and patent licensing is one of them (XBox is another).
It's extremely hard for MS to find any new areas that can get significant enough to impact their bottom line.
So expect a lot of litigation, or at least behind-the-scenes dealmaking.
mod_perl turned out to be a horribly difficult
environment to program in
I've been using mod_perl for years now, and I find (even from the start) that there's nothing easier. You mean that Java with its 52 million acronyms is easier to comprehend? (EJB, etc...)
No he wasn't travelling near his top speed. In fact it was just at the start of the climb. So I would tend to believe the wind shear explanation:
At the start of the climb, the "plane" (more like a winged rocket, really) had high thrust but low speed, went vertical and hit wind shear. Each wing was going through a different wing mass, and this spun the plane 90 degrees. After that, the plane was going fast enough that wind shear didn't matter.
Incidentally, I was there watching with another 20,000+ people. It was impressive, seeing this white streak shooting vertically.
Well finally OS X will have 64-bit pointers and long longs. I've been waiting for that feature for a while now and to me that's the most valuable thing, along with Xcode being updated to take advantage of the LP64 model.
Up until now, the 64-bit G5 processor was rather wasted.
The dude is selling this for $100,000 starting price. That's pretty insane. Unless you're a store wanting to resell this in a 3rd world country (even then, it'll be hard), you're not going to make your money back.
Truly this is only for the insanely obsessed console freaks.
Not "Ferrari GT40". You either meant the Ferrari F40, or the Ford GT40. Of course they're both amazing supercars, but there's a slight difference.:-)
And in my opinion, the Ford GT40 is the best-looking car ever built, except for its new version, the Ford GT (they had to drop the 40 from the name because of some trademark thing, if I remember correctly.
And to get back on topic, you were using Win2k or WinXP and you got BSODs? That's relatively extreme. I haven't had more than one or 2 BSODs in windowsXP for a year. But still, my G5 at work is much better of a workhorse than my XP machine and gets me to do work faster and better.
here is a list of MiniDV camcorders under $1.000, with reviews.
I personally have a 1-year-old Sony DCR-TRV950, a 3 CCD camera with excellent low-light sensitivity. I like it a lot, except for the stupid sony stick stuff. Apart from that, the quality is excellent and the camera was under $1000 at the time.
It looks like they have 3 standard 2-channel audio inputs. If you need more, all you need to do is go to an electronics store and buy a multichannel input box, one that enough inputs for what you need, and 1 output. Even standard receivers today may not have the 7 inputs you require (including DVD and TV).
If you look at the total scores, the distribution is as follows:
With Final Cut Pro, the G5 and G4 comparison is:
G5: 5306.47s G4: 7481.06s (41% more than the G5)
Without Final Cut Pro, the full comparison is:
G5: 1206.47s G4: 1281.06s (6% more than the G5) Dell: 1462.4s (21% more than the G5, 14% more than the G4)
This shows quite a different picture. Of course one could argue that the tests should be weighted differently, etc... All you have to do to figure out which machine you should get is to weigh the scores the way you'd use the machine. Now I would have loved compile times but you can't get everything...
Slashdot Mirror
He's really forgetting the obvious:
10 years ago we were just starting to grapple with the new technologies that the Internet brought about. Applications over TCP/IP, the Web, all sorts of routers, switches and new appliances: all of that necessitated a long and steep learning curve.
Today we have 10 years of experience in all of this "stuff", which makes us enormously more knowledgeable and productive. From all perspectives, hardware vendors are now able to service customers with much more targeted, effective and cheaper offerings (notice the move from software to hardware appliances and custom chips), and IT staffs now know how to use all of these toys properly, what works and what doesn't.
It's all mostly a matter of experience. That's why IT budgets will remain flat for a while longer.
I beg to differ in some way regarding Startship Troopers:
While I agree with you that keeping the name and the setting and the bugs clearly states that the movie should be a rendition of the book, I think that the movie was excellent.
It wasn't excellent as a close adapation of the book, in fact I would contend that it was only loosely related to the book. But it was very witty and satirical, and well-acted. I thoroughly enjoyed it, and I for one am glad that it wasn't a rehash of the book.
Even in 2000 it was already very bad, with Oracle not so brilliantly (i.e. disastrously) introducing per-MHz pricing./ 001023hndb.html (see the insert towards the bottom of the page titled "Pricing becomes contentious")p oracle_1.html
Take a look at these urls:
http://www.infoworld.com/articles/hn/xml/00/10/23
and:
http://www.infoworld.com/article/02/04/04/020408a
and I quote:
"Meanwhile, Asseily added that the pricing issues surrounding Oracle's database leave lingering questions about its application to Oracle's application pricing.
"I have no faith they won't change the licensing strategy at a moment's notice because it has happened before," Asseily said."
Absolutely.
The game was "Shadow Warrior".
Awesome stuff.
Except that I was wrong on the fact that GCC 3.4 does auto-vectorization, while it's in fact GCC 4.0 (which will ship with XCode 2.0).
Other than that, I agree we agree on agreeing to agree.
No the current version of XCode uses GCC 3.3 and does NOT support autovectorization.
The page you link to is a page that shows how to code vector-based programs. What the parent is asking is if the standard "Hello World" program can be auto-vectorized with one command-line argument, and that won't work currently.
The next version of XCode (2.0) with GCC 3.4 will support partial auto-vectorization, as another comment said as well.
The rocket gets it up to the minimum speed at which the scramjet can operate: Mach 5-6.
Then the prototype separates and fires the scramjet to reach Mach 10. It is thought that a scramjet can operate at least until Mach 15.
Try to use Brasso, it works great on the bottom side of the disk.
It's by far the best and cheapest (yes, both) anti-scratch CD/DVD product you can buy.
I have never tried it on the top side of the disk, but I expect it will work as well as on the bottom side.
A few weeks of work yielded a very usable system that can handle high loads. Now what's missing is real live QA to look for exceptions. :-)
Also note that I'm coding this for a small number of file types, on server machines (raid, etc...) that are less prone to failure, with a heavy-duty backend db (Sybase ASE 12.5) in a failover configuration. So I have it a hell of a lot easier than the guys trying to do this for all types of hardware, including some bloke's 300Mhz Celeron.
Yeah, Hans Reiser is dealing with this right now with the new version of his FS. He's going to do it all on the filesystem, the way it really should be done. ;)
I just don't have the expertise (or if I really wanted to show hubris, I'd say I just don't have the time)
Sounds good, but what happens when there's a filesystem problem upon the saving of the file? By then the OS has already added the key/value pairs to the master index, and you get an out-of-synch problem. No?
I'm working on a object file system right now, and it's really not easy.
It's a simple concept:
Store on a standard journaled b-tree (or similar) filesystem the binary data, and store in a database all sorts of meta-information about the data. Also if you want, store a reverse index of the textual info and maybe another 'index' of image features if it's an image.
Then if you want to get anything, no need to go through the filesystem's tree, you can hit the DB indexes and get info instantly.
The real problem is keeping all of this in synch, with almost flawless atomic operations. (of course it's pretty much impossible to be flawlessly atomic, but one should come as close as the current journaled filesystems are).
So if you're using 2 components, let's say, a filesystem and a SQL database, then you need to open a SQL transaction, do your inserts/updates/deletes, then do the filesystem operation, then do the SQL transaction commit. If anything fails, you can revert the SQL modifications and everything goes back to normal. But if the filesystem has problems, then you can't keep the damn DB synchronized, and at some point you'll have to resynch both.
On 100k files, no problem. On 200MM files (what I'm aiming for), you're pretty much screwed. Then you have to start thinking of a self-healing system with a constantly-running checker that must ensure that it's very resource-efficient, etc...
It's just a huge problem. Supposedly Apple is solving this by Q1 2005, but I wouldn't be surprised if we see a massive increase in filesystem corruption bugs for a while on OS X (unless the DB indexing piece is just that, an indexer that runs x times a day and isn't atomically joined to the filesystem operations).
When you have the whole market, you can only grow at the growth rate of the market. Microsoft investors and Wall Street are asking MS to look for new avenues of growth, and patent licensing is one of them (XBox is another).
It's extremely hard for MS to find any new areas that can get significant enough to impact their bottom line.
So expect a lot of litigation, or at least behind-the-scenes dealmaking.
Why do you say that
mod_perl turned out to be a horribly difficult
environment to program in
I've been using mod_perl for years now, and I find (even from the start) that there's nothing easier. You mean that Java with its 52 million acronyms is easier to comprehend? (EJB, etc...)
No he wasn't travelling near his top speed. In fact it was just at the start of the climb.
So I would tend to believe the wind shear explanation:
At the start of the climb, the "plane" (more like a winged rocket, really) had high thrust but low speed, went vertical and hit wind shear. Each wing was going through a different wing mass, and this spun the plane 90 degrees. After that, the plane was going fast enough that wind shear didn't matter.
Incidentally, I was there watching with another 20,000+ people. It was impressive, seeing this white streak shooting vertically.
Well finally OS X will have 64-bit pointers and long longs.
I've been waiting for that feature for a while now and to me that's the most valuable thing, along with Xcode being updated to take advantage of the LP64 model.
Up until now, the 64-bit G5 processor was rather wasted.
The dude is selling this for $100,000 starting price. That's pretty insane. Unless you're a store wanting to resell this in a 3rd world country (even then, it'll be hard), you're not going to make your money back.
Truly this is only for the insanely obsessed console freaks.
It's only 3rd person from above. That's a design choice, to encourage a more squad-level tactical experience.
Small gripe:
:-)
Not "Ferrari GT40". You either meant the Ferrari F40, or the Ford GT40. Of course they're both amazing supercars, but there's a slight difference.
And in my opinion, the Ford GT40 is the best-looking car ever built, except for its new version, the Ford GT (they had to drop the 40 from the name because of some trademark thing, if I remember correctly.
And to get back on topic, you were using Win2k or WinXP and you got BSODs? That's relatively extreme. I haven't had more than one or 2 BSODs in windowsXP for a year.
But still, my G5 at work is much better of a workhorse than my XP machine and gets me to do work faster and better.
here is a list of MiniDV camcorders under $1.000, with reviews.
I personally have a 1-year-old Sony DCR-TRV950, a 3 CCD camera with excellent low-light sensitivity. I like it a lot, except for the stupid sony stick stuff. Apart from that, the quality is excellent and the camera was under $1000 at the time.
Go get the book. The games and other media can wait.
Not at all. Nothing happened to the stock price, you're looking at the 5-day graph.
Take a look a the 1-year graph and you'll see how successful their disgusting strategy has been.
Here are the 2 other dvd players mentioned in the parent and many times below, in the US: At bizrate.com
It looks like they have 3 standard 2-channel audio inputs. If you need more, all you need to do is go to an electronics store and buy a multichannel input box, one that enough inputs for what you need, and 1 output. Even standard receivers today may not have the 7 inputs you require (including DVD and TV).
If you look at the total scores, the distribution is as follows:
With Final Cut Pro, the G5 and G4 comparison is:
G5: 5306.47s
G4: 7481.06s (41% more than the G5)
Without Final Cut Pro, the full comparison is:
G5: 1206.47s
G4: 1281.06s (6% more than the G5)
Dell: 1462.4s (21% more than the G5, 14% more than the G4)
This shows quite a different picture. Of course one could argue that the tests should be weighted differently, etc...
All you have to do to figure out which machine you should get is to weigh the scores the way you'd use the machine.
Now I would have loved compile times but you can't get everything...