I forget the original writer, but loosely paraphrased, the bad guys (of whom there are hordes) have all day to pick at your system, while you (collective, but smaller number) work 9 to 5 to keep them out.
Something that breeds in the millions to billions every 20 minutes is hard to fight with a research program that takes years between tries.
List price is important, because it gets people's initial attention, but the killer about the mini is "Tiny!". A complete computer, the size of a large sandwich. Utterly unobtrusive. Comes in a lunchbox with a handle. This is what entranced my class last year when I brought in a Mini to drive a projector.
Well, you can tell them that we (i.e. technical computing end-users) want an easy to install, seamless, HPC cluster, built around Opterons. I mention Rocks because they're a great bunch of guys, but also because their clustering solution is clean, elegant, and works. It also configures for Sun Grid Engine (:~) right out of the box.
Politely, while the UltraSparc hardware is great for reliability, management, and end-user support, it's been doomed for several years, from a performance standpoint. We retired our US-III V880s to purchase a large cluster of Opterons, and did better than double our throughput.
Some of us would like to see a V880 using Opterons, as those hooked together using Infiniband to cluster would solve some serious problems.
Take all of this with a grain of salt. I'm a chemist who's worked in HPC, and I know we're not the bulk of the market for anyone's systems.
Thank you. Thank you (collective) for actually worrying about shipping a Fortran with your development tools for Solaris x86. For pushing Opterons, which, while not Itaniums, are still strong floating-point processors, and easy to cluster. I'd say nice things about the Sun Ultra60 I used to have as a desktop, but that's a different era.
Now, get together with the Rocks guys http://www.rocksclusters.org/, and get a Solaris/Rocks installation out there!
I would like to think so, and some nostaligic part of me is rooting for Sun. I actually have great hope for the AMD hypertransport bus, as that might get us back to where we'd have been if SGI's ccNUMA (used in the Origins) had caught on with desktop systems. The Rocks, plus Sun's engineers, will be an interesting team to beat. After that, better algorithms and better compilers.
Still, the most impressive chip I've seen in the last 5 years is the Itanium-2, and as you say, it's on life-support. (it's also amazingly hot and power hungry, which still limits its use) Four 64-bit floating-point operations per clock cycle. On our codes, only the IBM Power 4/5 are competitive with it, though the Alpha probably would have been, had development continued.
Probably not true. Consider the yelling and screaming that went on in the late 90s as code had to become 'thread-safe'. Now that fight is mostly over, so you're already on the right track. Next step is take a page from the technical computing market, and generalize 'thread' to 'non-local access', i.e. your thread may be on another proc, with another cache or memory to access. This gets you to dual core, or openMP type systems. (SMP). One more step, and you're at NUMA, where that other core could be another entire computer, with a longer latency. Usable techniques are known (after all, somebody is using BlueGene, and there are codes such as NAMD which run segmented across hundreds of machines), so compilers have to be taught how to do as much of this automatically as possible, while programmers will have to be up to speed on multi-threaded, heirarchical memory access patterns.
The key is whether enough processors can be sold to make this investment of time worthwhile. Advances in Windows (quit yelling) have already driven some of those changes, as can be seen if you compare the behaviour of current programs versus those aimed for 3.1/95, but you haven't noticed it much because those changes are incremental. More tasks run asynchronously, dialogues don't lock the entire window manager while waiting for your response, systems wait until idle periods to do heavy I/O. The proposed Cell compiler is just one step beyond multi-threaded, so the transition will, in the end, be less fuss than is currently anticipated.
Dig into the technical docs for Intel's current Fortran versus its ancestral DEC variants, and you'll see compilers are already doing an amazing amount of work in terms of code reorganization, execution order prediction, etc., that their ancestors didn't. The language the programmer sees is almost identical to the one they saw 20 years ago, and only comes with a few more 'gotchas' to avoid. This has to happen, as the Market has decided that it's cheaper to add cores than design faster ones, so this sort of distributed programming is going to become the norm. You'll look back at simple, imperitive code some day soon and say, "How quaint". From the programmer's view, all that their new, miraculous, octapiler, has to do is take OpenMP statements within a current language, and they can continue working much as they did before.
On that note, it's somewhat heartwarming to envision hordes of recent CS grads, soaked in the latest OO paradigms, being told, "there's great money to be made programming for the Cell, but you're going to do it in High-Performance Fortran."
They have, although outside of certain implementations of double-complex, 64-bit double-precision (REAL*8 to Real Programmers) is enough.
Those machines are Cray Vector Processors, MIPS R8K and later, DEC Alpha, HP/Intel Itanium, IBM Power 4/5/n, IBM Vector Facility for the 3090, etc.
Notice how many of those you see every day, and how many fewer of those you can still buy.
Yes, unfortunately, you are that tiny a proportion of the world pop. I had hoped by this point that we'd have Cray Vector Processors on a chip, or integrated into the base chipset (like the old Proc/Math-CoProc combos), or be running EV10 Alphas on our desktops. Unfortunately, double-precision floating point benefits so few people that it's not worth it from a design standpoint to optimize the processors around it. The R8000 was a good example of this; incredible FP for the time, but terrible integer (early Itanium-2 falls into this category as well). So, it crushes numbers like mad in the background, but your word processor, etc, are no faster and possibly slower than the previous generation, less expensive processor.
Just a couple of years ago my boss commented that we had problems in quantum chemistry which were still more time-effective to solve on mid-90s Crays than modern MPPs, because the algorithms vectorized easily but didn't parallelize. Some of them have been fixed by now, and alternatives found for others, but there are a lot of problems (by the standard of scientists) that would benefit from having a processor optimized for double-precision ops. Unfortunately, by the standards of the cell-phone-camera wielding email junkies, those problems are an invisible subset of the things you do with a computer. Ergo, good enough for home entertainment and PowerPoint, less than ideal for scientific use.
Thankfully Power5 and Itanium will be around for a few more years.
Yes, but could you find those OS/2 servers in a small town in Colorado? I bet the town is trolling for Cheap Sysadmins, who will move there for the skiing/mountain-biking, etc. They're not trying to bargain Microsoft down; they're trying to bargain *You* down. "Sure, we only pay $8000/yr, and half of that is in Beaver-pelts, but just check out the skiing!"
Outside of law-enforcement circles, "screening" is taken to mean "hunting through hundreds of thousands of similar molecules to find the ones that are bioactive". In other words, it's how you find candidates for further development.
It's also tedious, error-prone, and sometimes fruitless, as the compounds of interest interact poorly with the host. As in, "Earl took that new Pentium-X for his Malaria, and now he's got purple spots on his nose".
but that headline seems to imply that prizes are being offered to people willing to search Yahoo users. How thorough of a search do I have to perform, and do they have a suggested list of users? Will a basic pat-down and frisk be enough, or do I have to get a flashlight and gloves? Inquiring minds want to know.
The only question in my mind is whether they have the software engineers working on compilers, autoparallelising tools, etc., to efficiently use these multiple cores. If they don't, then it's the same old "embarrasingly parallel" problem, where your apps don't run any faster, but you can run more of them at once, at the cost of apps competing for cache adn processor bandwidth.
Let's hope this leads to better parallel tools, new algorithms, and new possibilities instead of 'now run 4 simultaneous copies of Minesweeper without a slowdown!'
What I don't understand is that given the current cost of tobacco products, why smokers don't just use nicotine patches instead? I mean, if you'll stand outside in a Chicago Winter to stick burning weeds in your mouth, you've crossed from "habit" to "substance-abuse problem".
The alternative; buy one pack of cigs for show, slap the patch on your neck, go talk to people like you're going outside, then end the loop back at your desk without ever leaving the warm.
As a non-smoker, I still feel that since you can't drink, shoot-up, drop acid, make out or engage in life-threatening sports on the job, why do smokers get a free pass for their addiction?
Probably because the part that's not open to technological improvement is the density of the hydrogen in space. One account I read is that the ramjet design originally presumed a much denser interstellar medium.
OTOH, if deliberately-created, miniature singularities ever become possible, we won't have to worry about what goes into the jet, and maybe there's enough hydrogen + dust + other stuff to propel craft. On the other hand, who's going to volunteer to ride a mini-black-hole to another solar system?
I remember a copy of Astronomy Magazine from the 1970s arguing that we could build using fission technology a craft capable of 0.1 C (Alpha Centauri in 45 years, ignoring accel/decel), or Orion, which would hit 0.3 c by detonating hydrogen bombs behind it. Nasty sounding, but if you don't have to ride in the back, at least it would let us get a probe out there. ~12-15 years out, 4.5 years for the first signal to come back, but we'd certainly have stepped through a new frontier. Plus, it's not like those H-bombs are being used for anything productive down here.
I was always disappointed that the Cow boxes didn't have Cow-print computers inside as well. The trouble is going far enough that you've crossed the line from "tacky" to "camp". People would be trolling EBay for a genuine, 1996 P90 "Gurnsey" or "Hereford", instead of Mac Cubes.
Obligatory Gateway Bashing Story: Back around 1993ish, my boss bought a Gateway 486 laptop. He added a PCMCIA modem which never worked right. After some back and forth with heavily accented (Dakotan) tech-support, he finally got them to admit that they hadn't quite implemented the entire PCMCIA spec that was current at the time, meaning that it worked with many, but not all, adapters. That was our last Gateway.
Let's not forget the outright bonehead moves in the mid-lates '90s.
"We're going to compete in mid-range business servers". Squashed by IBM from above and Sun from below, especially as bankers think of them as "the Jurassic-Park people".
"We're going to makes Windows NT boxes". Twice as long development as their competitors. Nice machines, steep price, wierd drivers, and ineffectual marketing (as well as insufficient effort porting key apps that Irix graphics customers were used to).
"We're going to build Supercomputers". Spend money on Cray, ditch the Sparc-based Cray that they didn't know what to do with (you probably know that machine as the Sun E10K Starfire), sell a few Origins (Very Nice Machines(tm), btw.), then sell Cray at a loss to Tera.
"We have the best hardware in the business, and we're getting stronger". So why does my Dell PII-450 + Linux + Matrox G??? card flog your O2 on both cpu performance and graphics performance?
"IRIX!" More security holes out of the box than any competitor's product. Pity it included some great components (XFS), and had had some others in the past (NeWS window manager, which was display postscript), but securing them was a nightmare.
Frankly, the handwriting was on the wall in 1990 when IBM shipped the RS/6000 320, which was twice as fast as the MIPS chips available at the time, and DEC shipped the 64-bit Alphas. All they had were their graphics boards, which were destined (though we certainly didn't know it at the time) to become commodities as well. Some great software, which vanished into the ether, missed chances, cc-NUMA architecture which was never commoditized (one can only imagine modern PC's which could be stacked into a hulking SMP box when you felt like adding the extra nodes), money spent on diversions, and revolving management.
Lost focus, lost their core market, lost the engineers and vision necessary to build the Next Big Thing. Sic transit gloria mundi.
You write careful searches, optimize your algorithms, and wait.
I visited Fermi once, and they have a massive facility to archive, search, and process the petabytes of data they create. It was mentioned that if you make a bad search request, it can go off for a month or so.
There are PhD theses waiting in your last question, if you care to apprentice yourself to the physicists.
Frankly, that one will save you more than most of the rest. There are a wide variety of not bad foods that can be made in semi-bulk (so you only have to cook new every couple of days), that can be dressed differently at the table for varied meals. It's how I survived grad school.
Follow that one by shoping for clothes at the local version of Goodwill, turn down the heat, plug the drafts, and unplug appliances not in use. Consider adding an insulating blanket to your hot water heater, if it's not an instant-on type.
And, of course, don't do anything that makes holes in walls. Those are pricey to fix and tend to make landlords a bit touchy. The same comment applies to carpets.
The Zig-zag missile might just be a normal missile, with normal soviet-quality gyros. In other words, admit what we always suspected, but at least get some PR in the process.
Such is the defining characteristic of civilization: trying to solve problems to help people is much less interesting than trying to solve problems to kill people.
I inadvertently tried this in undergrad; I had one night that for whatever reason I only got two hours of sleep. The next day I felt great, so I repeated this for the entire week. As I remember, I was alert and felt better than I did on seven hours.
The problem was that friday night, I sat down on the edge of the bed, and slept straight through for 15 hours. (the first several in an upright position, until my roomie came home and tipped me over) Maybe spacing out cat-naps would work better, but I'd be careful of confusing euphoria from sleep deprivation with actual improvements.
On the other hand, sleeping for six hours, hitting a class, then taking an hour nap before lunch did used to work.
I'm glad to see that Gates is doing something with his fortune beyond using it to ensure his vision of computing. However, it seems that the actual useful donations (disease) were after he married Melinda, as opposed to his early clumsy forays, which often came across as Microsoft Marketing or attempts to convince the DOJ that he wasn't really all that bad. On the other hand, there would be something noble about certain foundations getting an anonymous infusion of money, earmarked for developing world diseases, etc, rather than the eponymously named B&MG Foundation.
Maybe Jobs and Ellison don't have the right people goading them into doing public charity. Maybe they're secure enough in their egos that if they're despised like Rockefeller was, they don't feel the need to improve their public image by doing charity.
Whatever the motivation, don't knock it. J. D. Rockefeller founded the U. of Chicago, Andrew Carnegie many public libraries, and if Gates cures Malaria, then what the heck?
I believe they're talking about on-board x86 emulation, because it never worked well, and it's sucking up space that could be used for useful silicon, while only adding complexity. I had Itanium systems in a previous life, and their chief problem was the heat they put out. Even the much reviled Itanium-I was faster than Sun UltraSparc III kit available at the time, at approximately 60% of the cost, and the Itanium-2 kept up with everything except the Power5. Ignore what you hear people saying about the compilers; by version 6.0 the floating-point scores on real code exceeded anything else you could afford to buy, and each revision of the compiler just got faster. When I left that job I had 2001 Itanium-2 systems that could, on certain matrix-heavy codes, still outrun a 2.2GHz Opteron (fastest we could buy at the time) by about 30%
Beyond the cost issues, and the power-sucking, the other mistake Intel made is the one that SGI made with the R8000; the chip was unbalanced. Blazing floating point and iffy integer.
All of this makes me doubt that Apple would really use the design, but for those of us making our living by crunching numbers (and who are being forced into the arms of Intel), I can at least dream.
Slashdot Mirror
If it were only that elegant and well-implemented.
Somewhere, there's a rational parallel universe where almost everything is done in SmallTalk. Very little actually gets done, but it looks beautiful.
I forget the original writer, but loosely paraphrased, the bad guys (of whom there are hordes) have all day to pick at your system, while you (collective, but smaller number) work 9 to 5 to keep them out.
Something that breeds in the millions to billions every 20 minutes is hard to fight with a research program that takes years between tries.
My money's on the bugs.
List price is important, because it gets people's initial attention, but the killer about the mini is "Tiny!". A complete computer, the size of a large sandwich. Utterly unobtrusive. Comes in a lunchbox with a handle. This is what entranced my class last year when I brought in a Mini to drive a projector.
Pity that they had to copy a Sun IPC/IPX, http://www.black-cube.net:8000/Sun/ without including the cool little purple feet.
Well, you can tell them that we (i.e. technical computing end-users) want an easy to install, seamless, HPC cluster, built around Opterons. I mention Rocks because they're a great bunch of guys, but also because their clustering solution is clean, elegant, and works. It also configures for Sun Grid Engine ( :~) right out of the box.
Politely, while the UltraSparc hardware is great for reliability, management, and end-user support, it's been doomed for several years, from a performance standpoint. We retired our US-III V880s to purchase a large cluster of Opterons, and did better than double our throughput.
Some of us would like to see a V880 using Opterons, as those hooked together using Infiniband to cluster would solve some serious problems.
Take all of this with a grain of salt. I'm a chemist who's worked in HPC, and I know we're not the bulk of the market for anyone's systems.
Presuming you're being truthful, then:
Thank you. Thank you (collective) for actually worrying about shipping a Fortran with your development tools for Solaris x86. For pushing Opterons, which, while not Itaniums, are still strong floating-point processors, and easy to cluster. I'd say nice things about the Sun Ultra60 I used to have as a desktop, but that's a different era.
Now, get together with the Rocks guys http://www.rocksclusters.org/, and get a Solaris/Rocks installation out there!
I would like to think so, and some nostaligic part of me is rooting for Sun. I actually have great hope for the AMD hypertransport bus, as that might get us back to where we'd have been if SGI's ccNUMA (used in the Origins) had caught on with desktop systems. The Rocks, plus Sun's engineers, will be an interesting team to beat. After that, better algorithms and better compilers.
Still, the most impressive chip I've seen in the last 5 years is the Itanium-2, and as you say, it's on life-support. (it's also amazingly hot and power hungry, which still limits its use) Four 64-bit floating-point operations per clock cycle. On our codes, only the IBM Power 4/5 are competitive with it, though the Alpha probably would have been, had development continued.
Probably not true. Consider the yelling and screaming that went on in the late 90s as code had to become 'thread-safe'. Now that fight is mostly over, so you're already on the right track. Next step is take a page from the technical computing market, and generalize 'thread' to 'non-local access', i.e. your thread may be on another proc, with another cache or memory to access. This gets you to dual core, or openMP type systems. (SMP). One more step, and you're at NUMA, where that other core could be another entire computer, with a longer latency. Usable techniques are known (after all, somebody is using BlueGene, and there are codes such as NAMD which run segmented across hundreds of machines), so compilers have to be taught how to do as much of this automatically as possible, while programmers will have to be up to speed on multi-threaded, heirarchical memory access patterns.
The key is whether enough processors can be sold to make this investment of time worthwhile. Advances in Windows (quit yelling) have already driven some of those changes, as can be seen if you compare the behaviour of current programs versus those aimed for 3.1/95, but you haven't noticed it much because those changes are incremental. More tasks run asynchronously, dialogues don't lock the entire window manager while waiting for your response, systems wait until idle periods to do heavy I/O. The proposed Cell compiler is just one step beyond multi-threaded, so the transition will, in the end, be less fuss than is currently anticipated.
Dig into the technical docs for Intel's current Fortran versus its ancestral DEC variants, and you'll see compilers are already doing an amazing amount of work in terms of code reorganization, execution order prediction, etc., that their ancestors didn't. The language the programmer sees is almost identical to the one they saw 20 years ago, and only comes with a few more 'gotchas' to avoid. This has to happen, as the Market has decided that it's cheaper to add cores than design faster ones, so this sort of distributed programming is going to become the norm. You'll look back at simple, imperitive code some day soon and say, "How quaint". From the programmer's view, all that their new, miraculous, octapiler, has to do is take OpenMP statements within a current language, and they can continue working much as they did before.
On that note, it's somewhat heartwarming to envision hordes of recent CS grads, soaked in the latest OO paradigms, being told, "there's great money to be made programming for the Cell, but you're going to do it in High-Performance Fortran."
They have, although outside of certain implementations of double-complex, 64-bit double-precision (REAL*8 to Real Programmers) is enough.
Those machines are Cray Vector Processors, MIPS R8K and later, DEC Alpha, HP/Intel Itanium, IBM Power 4/5/n, IBM Vector Facility for the 3090, etc.
Notice how many of those you see every day, and how many fewer of those you can still buy.
Yes, unfortunately, you are that tiny a proportion of the world pop. I had hoped by this point that we'd have Cray Vector Processors on a chip, or integrated into the base chipset (like the old Proc/Math-CoProc combos), or be running EV10 Alphas on our desktops. Unfortunately, double-precision floating point benefits so few people that it's not worth it from a design standpoint to optimize the processors around it. The R8000 was a good example of this; incredible FP for the time, but terrible integer (early Itanium-2 falls into this category as well). So, it crushes numbers like mad in the background, but your word processor, etc, are no faster and possibly slower than the previous generation, less expensive processor.
Just a couple of years ago my boss commented that we had problems in quantum chemistry which were still more time-effective to solve on mid-90s Crays than modern MPPs, because the algorithms vectorized easily but didn't parallelize. Some of them have been fixed by now, and alternatives found for others, but there are a lot of problems (by the standard of scientists) that would benefit from having a processor optimized for double-precision ops. Unfortunately, by the standards of the cell-phone-camera wielding email junkies, those problems are an invisible subset of the things you do with a computer. Ergo, good enough for home entertainment and PowerPoint, less than ideal for scientific use.
Thankfully Power5 and Itanium will be around for a few more years.
Yes, but could you find those OS/2 servers in a small town in Colorado? I bet the town is trolling for Cheap Sysadmins, who will move there for the skiing/mountain-biking, etc. They're not trying to bargain Microsoft down; they're trying to bargain *You* down. "Sure, we only pay $8000/yr, and half of that is in Beaver-pelts, but just check out the skiing!"
So... Email and Powerpoint junkies are "Knowledge Workers", while workers with actual knowledge, such as Petroleum Engineers are ... in Dell-speak?
Guess that despite my complaints to the contrary, my last job was just overrun with Knowledge Workers.
If your first-born child is the same age, your offer becomes easily understandable...
Outside of law-enforcement circles, "screening" is taken to mean "hunting through hundreds of thousands of similar molecules to find the ones that are bioactive". In other words, it's how you find candidates for further development.
It's also tedious, error-prone, and sometimes fruitless, as the compounds of interest interact poorly with the host. As in, "Earl took that new Pentium-X for his Malaria, and now he's got purple spots on his nose".
but that headline seems to imply that prizes are being offered to people willing to search Yahoo users. How thorough of a search do I have to perform, and do they have a suggested list of users? Will a basic pat-down and frisk be enough, or do I have to get a flashlight and gloves? Inquiring minds want to know.
The only question in my mind is whether they have the software engineers working on compilers, autoparallelising tools, etc., to efficiently use these multiple cores. If they don't, then it's the same old "embarrasingly parallel" problem, where your apps don't run any faster, but you can run more of them at once, at the cost of apps competing for cache adn processor bandwidth.
Let's hope this leads to better parallel tools, new algorithms, and new possibilities instead of 'now run 4 simultaneous copies of Minesweeper without a slowdown!'
What I don't understand is that given the current cost of tobacco products, why smokers don't just use nicotine patches instead? I mean, if you'll stand outside in a Chicago Winter to stick burning weeds in your mouth, you've crossed from "habit" to "substance-abuse problem".
The alternative; buy one pack of cigs for show, slap the patch on your neck, go talk to people like you're going outside, then end the loop back at your desk without ever leaving the warm.
As a non-smoker, I still feel that since you can't drink, shoot-up, drop acid, make out or engage in life-threatening sports on the job, why do smokers get a free pass for their addiction?
Probably because the part that's not open to technological improvement is the density of the hydrogen in space. One account I read is that the ramjet design originally presumed a much denser interstellar medium.
OTOH, if deliberately-created, miniature singularities ever become possible, we won't have to worry about what goes into the jet, and maybe there's enough hydrogen + dust + other stuff to propel craft. On the other hand, who's going to volunteer to ride a mini-black-hole to another solar system?
I remember a copy of Astronomy Magazine from the 1970s arguing that we could build using fission technology a craft capable of 0.1 C (Alpha Centauri in 45 years, ignoring accel/decel), or Orion, which would hit 0.3 c by detonating hydrogen bombs behind it. Nasty sounding, but if you don't have to ride in the back, at least it would let us get a probe out there. ~12-15 years out, 4.5 years for the first signal to come back, but we'd certainly have stepped through a new frontier. Plus, it's not like those H-bombs are being used for anything productive down here.
I was always disappointed that the Cow boxes didn't have Cow-print computers inside as well. The trouble is going far enough that you've crossed the line from "tacky" to "camp". People would be trolling EBay for a genuine, 1996 P90 "Gurnsey" or "Hereford", instead of Mac Cubes.
Obligatory Gateway Bashing Story: Back around 1993ish, my boss bought a Gateway 486 laptop. He added a PCMCIA modem which never worked right. After some back and forth with heavily accented (Dakotan) tech-support, he finally got them to admit that they hadn't quite implemented the entire PCMCIA spec that was current at the time, meaning that it worked with many, but not all, adapters. That was our last Gateway.
Let's not forget the outright bonehead moves in the mid-lates '90s.
"We're going to compete in mid-range business servers". Squashed by IBM from above and Sun from below, especially as bankers think of them as "the Jurassic-Park people".
"We're going to makes Windows NT boxes". Twice as long development as their competitors. Nice machines, steep price, wierd drivers, and ineffectual marketing (as well as insufficient effort porting key apps that Irix graphics customers were used to).
"We're going to build Supercomputers". Spend money on Cray, ditch the Sparc-based Cray that they didn't know what to do with (you probably know that machine as the Sun E10K Starfire), sell a few Origins (Very Nice Machines(tm), btw.), then sell Cray at a loss to Tera.
"We have the best hardware in the business, and we're getting stronger". So why does my Dell PII-450 + Linux + Matrox G??? card flog your O2 on both cpu performance and graphics performance?
"IRIX!" More security holes out of the box than any competitor's product. Pity it included some great components (XFS), and had had some others in the past (NeWS window manager, which was display postscript), but securing them was a nightmare.
Frankly, the handwriting was on the wall in 1990 when IBM shipped the RS/6000 320, which was twice as fast as the MIPS chips available at the time, and DEC shipped the 64-bit Alphas. All they had were their graphics boards, which were destined (though we certainly didn't know it at the time) to become commodities as well. Some great software, which vanished into the ether, missed chances, cc-NUMA architecture which was never commoditized (one can only imagine modern PC's which could be stacked into a hulking SMP box when you felt like adding the extra nodes), money spent on diversions, and revolving management.
Lost focus, lost their core market, lost the engineers and vision necessary to build the Next Big Thing. Sic transit gloria mundi.
You write careful searches, optimize your algorithms, and wait.
I visited Fermi once, and they have a massive facility to archive, search, and process the petabytes of data they create. It was mentioned that if you make a bad search request, it can go off for a month or so.
There are PhD theses waiting in your last question, if you care to apprentice yourself to the physicists.
Frankly, that one will save you more than most of the rest. There are a wide variety of not bad foods that can be made in semi-bulk (so you only have to cook new every couple of days), that can be dressed differently at the table for varied meals. It's how I survived grad school.
Follow that one by shoping for clothes at the local version of Goodwill, turn down the heat, plug the drafts, and unplug appliances not in use. Consider adding an insulating blanket to your hot water heater, if it's not an instant-on type.
And, of course, don't do anything that makes holes in walls. Those are pricey to fix and tend to make landlords a bit touchy. The same comment applies to carpets.
The Zig-zag missile might just be a normal missile, with normal soviet-quality gyros. In other words, admit what we always suspected, but at least get some PR in the process.
Such is the defining characteristic of civilization: trying to solve problems to help people is much less interesting than trying to solve problems to kill people.
I inadvertently tried this in undergrad; I had one night that for whatever reason I only got two hours of sleep. The next day I felt great, so I repeated this for the entire week. As I remember, I was alert and felt better than I did on seven hours.
The problem was that friday night, I sat down on the edge of the bed, and slept straight through for 15 hours. (the first several in an upright position, until my roomie came home and tipped me over) Maybe spacing out cat-naps would work better, but I'd be careful of confusing euphoria from sleep deprivation with actual improvements.
On the other hand, sleeping for six hours, hitting a class, then taking an hour nap before lunch did used to work.
I'm glad to see that Gates is doing something with his fortune beyond using it to ensure his vision of computing. However, it seems that the actual useful donations (disease) were after he married Melinda, as opposed to his early clumsy forays, which often came across as Microsoft Marketing or attempts to convince the DOJ that he wasn't really all that bad. On the other hand, there would be something noble about certain foundations getting an anonymous infusion of money, earmarked for developing world diseases, etc, rather than the eponymously named B&MG Foundation.
Maybe Jobs and Ellison don't have the right people goading them into doing public charity. Maybe they're secure enough in their egos that if they're despised like Rockefeller was, they don't feel the need to improve their public image by doing charity.
Whatever the motivation, don't knock it. J. D. Rockefeller founded the U. of Chicago, Andrew Carnegie many public libraries, and if Gates cures Malaria, then what the heck?
I believe they're talking about on-board x86 emulation, because it never worked well, and it's sucking up space that could be used for useful silicon, while only adding complexity. I had Itanium systems in a previous life, and their chief problem was the heat they put out. Even the much reviled Itanium-I was faster than Sun UltraSparc III kit available at the time, at approximately 60% of the cost, and the Itanium-2 kept up with everything except the Power5. Ignore what you hear people saying about the compilers; by version 6.0 the floating-point scores on real code exceeded anything else you could afford to buy, and each revision of the compiler just got faster. When I left that job I had 2001 Itanium-2 systems that could, on certain matrix-heavy codes, still outrun a 2.2GHz Opteron (fastest we could buy at the time) by about 30%
Beyond the cost issues, and the power-sucking, the other mistake Intel made is the one that SGI made with the R8000; the chip was unbalanced. Blazing floating point and iffy integer.
All of this makes me doubt that Apple would really use the design, but for those of us making our living by crunching numbers (and who are being forced into the arms of Intel), I can at least dream.
You'll notice that I didn't mention running out to patent this process. :~)
Too bad; I imagine the "Floating Junk Meteor Shower of 2012" would have been quite a show.