And will they wrapper all your sites with an advertising banner script?
On an unrelated note, can we get a timeout on the banner ads that are hanging the display of the/. site? When I finally hit stop on my browser after a couple of minutes, the topic shows up with broken banner icons. Can't we program in banner ad sizes so the topic displays while they try to load?
MS may not have a services line item charge but look at the number of support calls and the cost of that and they're bundling a lot of "service" in that $90 Win9x price tag.
Yep, DEC and IBM do/did tend to entice people with deep discounts. Of course these aren't the single license people either. If you're negotiating a $10m sale, you're given a little leeway in charges. I was sold several times as an onsite person for free to close deals but still the balance sheet numbers were black (in those days)
It's rarely necessary that you have to buy a failing competitor. If you're the reason they're loosing market share, you're already getting the most important asset, the customer/user. It's far more likely a second tier vendor would buy them to consolidate/double their market position to avoid being "on the bubble" of insignificance in the market.
Professional services--essentially high-priced hand-holding for customers who need someone experienced to set up or run complex computer systems--are a growing business for computer companies. Although Linux can be obtained for free, Linux companies are hoping to make money by selling services. SCO is a new arrival in this area, though, because it sells Unix but not its offspring, Linux.
Thie isn't a new business for computer companies... In the 20+ years I've been in the industry most serious computer companies have had services as a major line item on their balance sheets. After the brand loyalty issue died with the workstation revolution, this got even more important. Just like when browsers became free, value added was the major reason to go with one company over the other. Services has always been that value added. There are entire companies dedicated to handholding out there and it isn't a new market segment. It's been pointed to as validation that Linux is a force in the industry when we get some recognition like this but I'm really sorry to see SCO go that way. It probably is the one way they can avoid firesaling the company with the lost revenues. Try to keep in mind that this is the AP reporting on a PR document generated by SCO Marketing to help their position/perception in the market. 40 people isn't a lot of commitment to services if you factor in their other claims (1 person per percent of the Unix market?). Those people will be out there answering questions which is good but they're more likely to be generating custom solution consulting revenue to help their bottom line. I think it's really too little too late for yet another player.
I can't see it replacing ext2 for the general user distros. I can see value if you're running a server site or some large raid DB but for day to day stuff.
Keep in mind that this is actually a Linux build of the standard Iris buildtree. You guys are also getting it before the people in Cambridge have seen much of it. This rounds out their (AS/400, RS6000, and S390) server line nicely 8^)
Seriously, the Unix and Mac clients were withheld to make the R5 dates and are only now starting to see the light of day (I just saw an internal 5.01 Mac build this week)
It's groupware that allows online collaboration and messaging. There's an HTML interface now and R5 allows S/MIME email to the outside world along with the normal Notes format. It also allows replication of information around an enterprise network so you can work remotely and resync when you get back online.
Alpha isn't one of the pieces Compaq really wanted when Palmer sold out. They wanted the Enterprise desktop and figured they could sell Wintel boxes into it better than Alpha. Hyping Alpha directly competes with their core business. They will quietly continue to sell servers and support to the current customer base while weaning them from it.
Re: 2
The MS OS honeymoon is over. Sure they'll jump onboard but the fact that it's an architecture change. MS has it's hands full with the three OS updates it has in the pipe. I seem to remember rumblings of a Unified Windoze OS... 8^)
Re: 3
IBM has jumped on the bandwagon in a major way. The DB2 port and the other announcement this afternoon with the Lotus Notes/Domino port (remember there's BLUE underwear under that yellow and black outfit).
Re: 4
That was my total point. 64bit is old news but the release makes it sound like a major feature of the port. New chip is new chip is new chip.
Doesn't matter if the architecture is different to get a hack/hello world OS port up. The Alpha project was done to a large extent in house so the beginnings of it were under the standard employee NDA. The IA-64 port isn't going to be interesting until they decide on the interface chips and someone has something to write actual drivers for. Getting an initial compiler up isn't as tough as the optimizers after it's running. Besides, they can always blame the performance on the emulation.
Everytime one of the "lead" manufacturers does something, it's always news. Yeah, Alpha has been out there for a while and doing it's thing. Linux has absorbed all those changes and become 64 bit clean. What's the big deal? Tuning for a specific architecture doesn't seem to be a make it/break it deal. Sure it's nice to blow out some random benchmark when you announce but is it really something worthy of this kind of hype? The real coup would be if Intel does a silicon run in Hudson MA on the old Alpha line they bought 8^(
I guess I just don't get why the port is such a major project to take all this public effort. Most of the other ones have been midnight hacks that have gotten apologized for after the fact. I'm more curious as to why it ISN'T done...
And bubble you had to cycle through the entire buffer to replace a bit as well. As we use to say back then SSDD (same sh!t, different day). Still got a UV prom eraser too 8^)
The biggest problem there is right now in this field is moving from 2 to 3 dimensions. If someone were to come up with a method of moving waste heat out of the substrate and made the technology stackable, densities wouldn't be as much of a problem. There is some interesting optical reading of magnetic effects going on in some of the labs these days which should improve access times but this usually means that the 3rd dimension is needed for the optics (like heads over media). One thing that I think was played around with was vertical positioning with edge bonding as well as double sided dies but that never went very far in the 80s when I was involved (I was a wirebonder in a previous life, now it's all automated)
The biggest misconception I find in the whole process is that once the design documents are reviewed, they turn read-only.
I'm a firm believer in the proof of concept prototype and the investigative coding but I also feel that you need to go back and make the design document reflect the final outcome. Remember, this won't be a release one project forever and, god forbid you should move on to a new project, they're still going to come to you for the sticky problem that they can't figure out and it's nice to have a quick refresher doc available when all eyes are on you. Besides, if the doc is complete enough, they won't have to!
One of the biggest stumbling blocks that distributed computing runs into is the ability of the programmer to break the task up into independent subtasks. Most programmers are trained to program in a monolithic, serial manner. Many system programmers can break out of this by further subdividing tasks into threaded execution. To fully take advantage of this capability, the programmer has to be able to break the process down into queued, discrete tasks that can be handled by "anyone" and farmed out to an available compute unit (thread or CPU). The only type of generic programs that lend themselves to compiler generated distributed processing are large array processing types of things like the big old Fortran array processors of the past. Even there, SOMEONE had to generate the library that actually does the computation distribution.
This is really a technology enablement, not an end user solution.
Yeah, that was one of the suggestions but we need a chess source program to recompile for the project and then, as you point out, we need someone to actually challenge it.
This was to be an ad hoc "Stone Soupercomputer" style configuration built out of machines brought to the conference by attendees.
I think the problem with the transaction systems is that they top out on a different bottleneck. CPU isn't the major gating factor. Multithreadde applications will take great advantage of this type of system. One application that I worked on in a previous life was a creditcard limit verification system for a major player. They had a 1 second transaction turn around specification. We ended up setting it up with discrete machines with a failure rollover mechanism involved. Much of the coordination we had to design would have been far easier in a coupled system like Beowulf.
There's a movement on to put together a large Beowulf cluster for the Boston Geekfest in October. One of the things we're trying to come up with is a good demo that actually shows something to the crowd. We've had ideas from the realtime rendering of POV scenes to decryption (yeah, right, watch it hum for 20 hours and then spit out the true key) but haven't come up with a "killer demo app". Email if you have any ideas.
co-processor performance
on
LinModems?
·
· Score: 1
Yeah but ask a gamer that's utilizing his CPU 100% in some game if he wants to give up FPU/Graphics 3D/modem performance at a cost of several FPS. The cost was 10-15%, not 1%. Was memory-mapped video a "good" idea? How many machines really need to have a modem these days anyway. I've always preferred external modems so I can move them from system to system (Mac/Linux/Windoze), watch the lights when somethings "not right", and reset them without rebooting the host. With the advent of home networks, the need to have a modem in every machine is pretty much over. Too many built-in ethernet controllers (would you suggest they make one of them software only?) to need to have every connected system go direct. Hell, even Windows has figured out modem sharing. WinPrinters was another great advance!
It's just a general system cost copout. One of the reasons modem became what they were was to offload the CPU so more of it was available to the user. Now we've taken a commodity chip off the daughter card and brought the mundane processing back into the main CPU. people should look at this as if they had taken a coprocessor off the motherboard. they are stealing CPU from you afterall!
But this isn't a total commercialization that we're talking about here. This is a matter of allowing them to make use of the returns from the services they are providing. Don't tell me that you believe that Nasa doesn't already have the monopoly of the launch services used in the US. Look at what they tried to do to SeaLaunch when Boeing went to Russia for vehicles. Nope, just look at the problems Rotary is having trying to get FAA approval for untethered flight. There's already the problems you mention.
But Congress only has oversight on funds it authorizes. Any profits would be used as Nasa saw fit, not in the program where funding was cut from (necessarily). Congress would have to be very careful or pork projects would suffer. Keep in mind that a profit is defined as an amount greater than the cost so they couldn't cut the funding to a self-sufficient program since it was not funded externally...
But that would move the $10bn into descretionary funding to be used on =any= Nasa items, spent in =any= congressional district, not necessarily on things that Congress wants it spent on. Projects with hometown pork barrel ties are still going to have to be funded by the appropriate congress critters in order for them to have a say in how the money is spent. The budget funding is all earmarked when given.
It's not to make Nasa become self-sufficient, it's to funnel profits from things it's already doing back into the agency. Things like the earth imaging it does. Why should an outside firm get the commercial revenue from that? Sure it would probably skew some of the projects and reprioritize a few but profit isn't always an evil...
I think this would be an excellent idea. Nasa always seems to be trying various technologies that then get commercialized into spin-offs so I think that since they are basically eing the R&D lab of the commercial market, they should get some of the profit sharing. I also think that this would provide a little disincentive towards the ongoing pork barrel economics happening in this round (and every round) of budgets. I really dislike the cuts that have happened this season. Some of the obvious pork that has been added into budget cut to pieces in the same session are just outragous. I'd much prefer Nasa run something like DC-X and be able to use the results to commercialize the technology into something that could become an industry segment long term.
Slashdot Mirror
And will they wrapper all your sites with an advertising banner script?
/. site? When I finally hit stop on my browser after a couple of minutes, the topic shows up with broken banner icons. Can't we program in banner ad sizes so the topic displays while they try to load?
On an unrelated note, can we get a timeout on the banner ads that are hanging the display of the
MS may not have a services line item charge but look at the number of support calls and the cost of that and they're bundling a lot of "service" in that $90 Win9x price tag.
Yep, DEC and IBM do/did tend to entice people with deep discounts. Of course these aren't the single license people either. If you're negotiating a $10m sale, you're given a little leeway in charges. I was sold several times as an onsite person for free to close deals but still the balance sheet numbers were black (in those days)
It's rarely necessary that you have to buy a failing competitor. If you're the reason they're loosing market share, you're already getting the most important asset, the customer/user. It's far more likely a second tier vendor would buy them to consolidate/double their market position to avoid being "on the bubble" of insignificance in the market.
The following paragraph strikes me a bit funny:
Thie isn't a new business for computer companies... In the 20+ years I've been in the industry most serious computer companies have had services as a major line item on their balance sheets. After the brand loyalty issue died with the workstation revolution, this got even more important. Just like when browsers became free, value added was the major reason to go with one company over the other. Services has always been that value added. There are entire companies dedicated to handholding out there and it isn't a new market segment. It's been pointed to as validation that Linux is a force in the industry when we get some recognition like this but I'm really sorry to see SCO go that way. It probably is the one way they can avoid firesaling the company with the lost revenues. Try to keep in mind that this is the AP reporting on a PR document generated by SCO Marketing to help their position/perception in the market. 40 people isn't a lot of commitment to services if you factor in their other claims (1 person per percent of the Unix market?). Those people will be out there answering questions which is good but they're more likely to be generating custom solution consulting revenue to help their bottom line. I think it's really too little too late for yet another player.
I can't see it replacing ext2 for the general user distros. I can see value if you're running a server site or some large raid DB but for day to day stuff.
Keep in mind that this is actually a Linux build of the standard Iris buildtree. You guys are also getting it before the people in Cambridge have seen much of it. This rounds out their (AS/400, RS6000, and S390) server line nicely 8^)
Seriously, the Unix and Mac clients were withheld to make the R5 dates and are only now starting to see the light of day (I just saw an internal 5.01 Mac build this week)
It's Super.Human.Software 8^)
It's groupware that allows online collaboration and messaging. There's an HTML interface now and R5 allows S/MIME email to the outside world along with the normal Notes format. It also allows replication of information around an enterprise network so you can work remotely and resync when you get back online.
Re: 1
Alpha isn't one of the pieces Compaq really wanted when Palmer sold out. They wanted the Enterprise desktop and figured they could sell Wintel boxes into it better than Alpha. Hyping Alpha directly competes with their core business. They will quietly continue to sell servers and support to the current customer base while weaning them from it.
Re: 2
The MS OS honeymoon is over. Sure they'll jump onboard but the fact that it's an architecture change. MS has it's hands full with the three OS updates it has in the pipe. I seem to remember rumblings of a Unified Windoze OS... 8^)
Re: 3
IBM has jumped on the bandwagon in a major way. The DB2 port and the other announcement this afternoon with the Lotus Notes/Domino port (remember there's BLUE underwear under that yellow and black outfit).
Re: 4
That was my total point. 64bit is old news but the release makes it sound like a major feature of the port. New chip is new chip is new chip.
Doesn't matter if the architecture is different to get a hack/hello world OS port up. The Alpha project was done to a large extent in house so the beginnings of it were under the standard employee NDA. The IA-64 port isn't going to be interesting until they decide on the interface chips and someone has something to write actual drivers for. Getting an initial compiler up isn't as tough as the optimizers after it's running. Besides, they can always blame the performance on the emulation.
Everytime one of the "lead" manufacturers does something, it's always news. Yeah, Alpha has been out there for a while and doing it's thing. Linux has absorbed all those changes and become 64 bit clean. What's the big deal? Tuning for a specific architecture doesn't seem to be a make it/break it deal. Sure it's nice to blow out some random benchmark when you announce but is it really something worthy of this kind of hype? The real coup would be if Intel does a silicon run in Hudson MA on the old Alpha line they bought 8^(
I guess I just don't get why the port is such a major project to take all this public effort. Most of the other ones have been midnight hacks that have gotten apologized for after the fact. I'm more curious as to why it ISN'T done...
And bubble you had to cycle through the entire buffer to replace a bit as well. As we use to say back then SSDD (same sh!t, different day). Still got a UV prom eraser too 8^)
Reads like an anti-gravity press release.
The biggest problem there is right now in this field is moving from 2 to 3 dimensions. If someone were to come up with a method of moving waste heat out of the substrate and made the technology stackable, densities wouldn't be as much of a problem. There is some interesting optical reading of magnetic effects going on in some of the labs these days which should improve access times but this usually means that the 3rd dimension is needed for the optics (like heads over media). One thing that I think was played around with was vertical positioning with edge bonding as well as double sided dies but that never went very far in the 80s when I was involved (I was a wirebonder in a previous life, now it's all automated)
The biggest misconception I find in the whole process is that once the design documents are reviewed, they turn read-only.
I'm a firm believer in the proof of concept prototype and the investigative coding but I also feel that you need to go back and make the design document reflect the final outcome. Remember, this won't be a release one project forever and, god forbid you should move on to a new project, they're still going to come to you for the sticky problem that they can't figure out and it's nice to have a quick refresher doc available when all eyes are on you. Besides, if the doc is complete enough, they won't have to!
P.S. Don't skip Step 2 8^)
One of the biggest stumbling blocks that distributed computing runs into is the ability of the programmer to break the task up into independent subtasks. Most programmers are trained to program in a monolithic, serial manner. Many system programmers can break out of this by further subdividing tasks into threaded execution. To fully take advantage of this capability, the programmer has to be able to break the process down into queued, discrete tasks that can be handled by "anyone" and farmed out to an available compute unit (thread or CPU). The only type of generic programs that lend themselves to compiler generated distributed processing are large array processing types of things like the big old Fortran array processors of the past. Even there, SOMEONE had to generate the library that actually does the computation distribution.
This is really a technology enablement, not an end user solution.
Yeah, that was one of the suggestions but we need a chess source program to recompile for the project and then, as you point out, we need someone to actually challenge it.
This was to be an ad hoc "Stone Soupercomputer" style configuration built out of machines brought to the conference by attendees.
I think the problem with the transaction systems is that they top out on a different bottleneck. CPU isn't the major gating factor. Multithreadde applications will take great advantage of this type of system. One application that I worked on in a previous life was a creditcard limit verification system for a major player. They had a 1 second transaction turn around specification. We ended up setting it up with discrete machines with a failure rollover mechanism involved. Much of the coordination we had to design would have been far easier in a coupled system like Beowulf.
There's a movement on to put together a large Beowulf cluster for the Boston Geekfest in October. One of the things we're trying to come up with is a good demo that actually shows something to the crowd. We've had ideas from the realtime rendering of POV scenes to decryption (yeah, right, watch it hum for 20 hours and then spit out the true key) but haven't come up with a "killer demo app". Email if you have any ideas.
Yeah but ask a gamer that's utilizing his CPU 100% in some game if he wants to give up FPU/Graphics 3D/modem performance at a cost of several FPS. The cost was 10-15%, not 1%. Was memory-mapped video a "good" idea? How many machines really need to have a modem these days anyway. I've always preferred external modems so I can move them from system to system (Mac/Linux/Windoze), watch the lights when somethings "not right", and reset them without rebooting the host. With the advent of home networks, the need to have a modem in every machine is pretty much over. Too many built-in ethernet controllers (would you suggest they make one of them software only?) to need to have every connected system go direct. Hell, even Windows has figured out modem sharing. WinPrinters was another great advance!
It's just a general system cost copout. One of the reasons modem became what they were was to offload the CPU so more of it was available to the user. Now we've taken a commodity chip off the daughter card and brought the mundane processing back into the main CPU. people should look at this as if they had taken a coprocessor off the motherboard. they are stealing CPU from you afterall!
But this isn't a total commercialization that we're talking about here. This is a matter of allowing them to make use of the returns from the services they are providing. Don't tell me that you believe that Nasa doesn't already have the monopoly of the launch services used in the US. Look at what they tried to do to SeaLaunch when Boeing went to Russia for vehicles. Nope, just look at the problems Rotary is having trying to get FAA approval for untethered flight. There's already the problems you mention.
But Congress only has oversight on funds it authorizes. Any profits would be used as Nasa saw fit, not in the program where funding was cut from (necessarily). Congress would have to be very careful or pork projects would suffer. Keep in mind that a profit is defined as an amount greater than the cost so they couldn't cut the funding to a self-sufficient program since it was not funded externally...
But that would move the $10bn into descretionary funding to be used on =any= Nasa items, spent in =any= congressional district, not necessarily on things that Congress wants it spent on. Projects with hometown pork barrel ties are still going to have to be funded by the appropriate congress critters in order for them to have a say in how the money is spent. The budget funding is all earmarked when given.
It's not to make Nasa become self-sufficient, it's to funnel profits from things it's already doing back into the agency. Things like the earth imaging it does. Why should an outside firm get the commercial revenue from that? Sure it would probably skew some of the projects and reprioritize a few but profit isn't always an evil...
Yes, they are a federally funded segment of the government with strong ties to the military launch capability.
I think this would be an excellent idea. Nasa always seems to be trying various technologies that then get commercialized into spin-offs so I think that since they are basically eing the R&D lab of the commercial market, they should get some of the profit sharing. I also think that this would provide a little disincentive towards the ongoing pork barrel economics happening in this round (and every round) of budgets. I really dislike the cuts that have happened this season. Some of the obvious pork that has been added into budget cut to pieces in the same session are just outragous. I'd much prefer Nasa run something like DC-X and be able to use the results to commercialize the technology into something that could become an industry segment long term.
but I refrained from putting it into the first reply.