Any system running Solaris will probably be slower than a system running GNU/Linux. Have you tried Linux for Sparc?
Trust me, I'd much prefer to use Linux over Solaris, but those are my work machines. I don't think my boss would go for me installing Linux on any of _them. Or the ones in the public CS lab, for that matter. Most of my university has 'standardized' on Solaris (so we can use the same OS for servers and workstations, better support, whatever).
But now with the Alpha unable to sustain a big clock rate advantage, does the Alpha get any sort of real performance advantage when compared to x86, or particularly other less "reduced" architectures like HP's, Sun's or IBM's?
Alpha will still kick the crap out of x86, especially in floating point. HPPA's are supposed to be as fast or faster than Alpha's at floating point, though I don't know much about HPs stuff. Ultra's are slow. They're nice when you put 4 or 8 into a server. I don't have benchmarks, but an Ultra5 running Solaris 'feels' slower than my P-II 350 running Linux. And Sun's pricing will make you feel like an Alpha is cheap. PowerPCs are pretty cheap (and very nice chips), but not as fast as an Alpha, AFAIK.
Also, you can't get 32 or 64 proccessor setups for x86, which you can for some of the better Unix-vendor RISC machines.
After I went to Ground Zero -- Compaq -- I came away with a discreet impression that they really don't want to talk to a mere peon like me. Their web site, apparently, is really put together more like a business-to-business (or government) type of a deal.
You're defintly right about that... my experience trying to spec a nice Alpha box at Compaq's site was about the same as yours. However Microway seems quite willing to sell single machines to private customers. They have a 533 Mhz 21164 (with a reasonably good setup) for $2000. For some reason the price for a NT box and a Linux box is the same, though - I guess the best move would be to order the NT machine and then install Linux (keep the NT CDs for posterity or something).
would be Compaq's new chip, the Beta. Hey, they made CPUs called the ARM and the Thumb, right? I think I heard about one called the Hand too, but hopefully that was just the voices in my head.
And, it's often brought up that since Star Office doesn't run as root, it's less of a threat. Well, on my system, I have the operating system installed as root. EVERYTHING that is important on the system, my documents, my source code, is owned by my own personal user account. Sure, a virus would probably not be able to bring down my system, but it definitely would be able to destroy a lot of things that I need and use and work on every day. My personal loss would be just as large as if I were running a Windows machine.
Though it is good to remember that if you gave someone else an account on your machine, Star Office would not destroy your files if they screwed up. On a Windows box, somewhat different results may occur.
Of course, nothing beats regular backups. Disks sometimes break, and filesystems get corrupted, and sometimes people time rm -rf * without thinking, and you've got to deal with it somehow. Hmmm... good poll, Favorite Backup Method:
Tape CD-R Copy to another machine Floppy Don't
One think I really like about Unix is the directory setup... you know that if you backup/home and/etc you're basically safe, especially on package based systems like most Linux distros. Whereas on Windows where config files and user stuff is all over the place, and you have to search it out and copy it bit-by-bit. Real pain in the ass.:(
A real threat to everyone, not just the RIAA, is that some really good (unknown) musicians may choose not to pursue a career in music because there isn't enough financial incentive to live like a pauper for a few years while you are waiting to get heard.
Possibly, but unlikely. Some friends of mine are in a band called Mycroft Holmes. They make a few bucks playing clubs and parties, but not a whole lot. MP3s have nothing to do with the problem, either, as they were distributing them for (I think geocities didn't go for it though [even though they _are_ the copyright owner])
And they seem willing (if not eager) to be poor if they have a chance at making it big and getting famous.
One band is not particularly staticstical, but OTOH it's basically impossible to get any kind of hard evidence about something like that either way.
For example, I went down to the store and bought Play, Moby's new album. After buying this, I was really pleased with Moby's music and I wanted to see if I should buy any of his other cds.
Though Napster et. al. is not the only solution to this dilema. One of my housemates also has the new Moby CD, and I'm probably going to buy a copy, because it sounds damned cool. Similiarly, I've picked up a bit of a taste for Tom Waits, The Clash, and Portishead from him. As soon as I've bought every Cure CD in existence - I mean one copy of each, not all of them (!!!). I'll proabably get stuff from one or more of the abovenamed bands.
Though I've also found good bands online through MP3s - sTs being my favorite.
If you have the skills to write a GPL app that people actually want, you probably have a day job that pays well, and can easilly swing the hundred bucks per five years to keep your "prestige" project under your name...
Though it could be a problem for students (high school + college). Yeah $100 is reasonable... but still... quite a bit of money as far as I'm concerned.
and if you don't, the FSF or some other patron would probably be willing to pick up the tab, just for the benifit of the community.
Though FSF would probably only be interested in GPLed programs, which would be a problem for BSD/MIT projects.
Of course, you would be out of luck if your code was redundant and/or useless and you worked at McDonalds for a living... but isn't that the idea? To preserve copy[right,left] of viable products while letting everything else fall into public domain?
IIRC, the point of copyright was to encourage people to write stuff and let them make a profit from their works (for a limited time - something Congress seems to have forgotten about). And the viability of me as a worker (which detirmines how much money I have) and the viability of my code, seem somewhat unrelated, at least in some cases. What if I'm given to periods of extreme depression, and I can't work much of the time. But when I do, I hack up wonderful code that I give to everyone to use. Should my work go into the public domain just because I am unable (for whatever reason) to hold a steady job? Note that this question is purely hypothetical - well, mostly.:)
Though you'd have problems getting it to work with code anyway. For instance, let's say I have a program foo 1.0, and it's copyrighted 2000. Then I add some really cool features and create foo 1.1, which is copyrighted 2001. Even if I don't pay the fee, anyone who wants to use the cool features has to use my copyrighted code. Just make small changes/additions to the code every few years and the more recent versions will never go into the public domain.
Not the mention the fact that even if all these ROMs and old computer games went into the public domain, we still wouldn't have the code. The company has it and has absolutly no reason to take it out of the big underground vault where they're keeping it. The binaries will be available and in the public domain, but the source will still be secret (if still "public domain").
Errr. So, I want Foo&Bar's new CD. I'm going to their concert tonight. I'll take a gun and blow their heads off. Now their works are in the public domain.
You'd have to be pretty dedicated to the idea of free music if you were willing to take a murder charge or two. Ohh... that Stallman! I'll get him... it's time that Emacs got out of under the thumb of those FSF dorks. [joking!]
Linux doesn't run on POWER (though a port from PowerPC might be possible), and doesn't support MCA. However, NetBSD seems at least interested in running on RS/6000. From http://www.netbsd.org/Ports/:
IBM RS/6000 (MCA based)
The pre-PowerPC RS/6000 machines were based on the POWER and POWER2 architecture, with Microchannel (MCA) bus. There is i386 MCA bus code in NetBSD tree now, which would help with the MCA aspect.
However, this is in the "Suggested Ports" category. So if you've got some time on your hands and like to hack stuff, you've got a great project. Otherwise you'll have to run AIX until someone gets around to doing it.
The story doesn't really matter, since Jupiter isn't going to "blow up." Jupiter doesn't have enough mass to become a star, and if it were to become one, I find it hard to believe that its satelites wouldn't be enveloped.
Aliens engineered Jupiter into becoming a star so as to heat the moons and help life evolve on Europa.
In terms of the books I stand corrected, but I was under the impression we were talking about reality.
Oh, sorry. The thread originally started because someone was speculating on which of Clarke's predictions would come true next. I figured Jupiter's core being a giant diamond would be an interesting one to be true.
The 'Linux vendors' like Red Hat definitely do NOT want a cleaned up and unified/etc based on XML.
They won't have any choice if all the tools switch to XML configuration. They then have the choices:
1) Keep using the old versions (suicide) 2) Alter the new versions to use the old configuration methods (suicide, and hard work at that) 3) Use the new versions with XML configuration
If Redhat doesn't do it, some other distribution will. At the very least Debian will, as they're pretty non-commercial. In which case a lot of people will say "Fuck Redhat if they don't want to do it. I'll go use distribution X".
Doing something like that would NOT be in their best interest.
well, if x86 users have made WINE to run Windows apps under Linux, nothing's preventing Linux on Mac users to write a MacOS X compatibility layer...
And people writing a MacOS X layer over Linux would have an advantage over WINE in that the APIs are probably a lot more open than Windows (and hopefully smaller and less crufty too)
Producing diamonds, which has been done for ages, would be cheaper than extracting them from Jupiter's gravity well. So finding a "diamond mountain" on Jupiter would be about as useful as that giant piece of copper ore they found years ago in the U.S.
In the story, they found the mountain on one of the moons after Jupiter was destroyed. It blew up, and a piece of the core hit into one of the moons - other pieces were still orbiting around the new sun that was Jupiter. So probably the easiest method would be to attach some engines to one of the orbiting pieces and send it towards Earth. It might take a few years to get there, but it would be relatively cheap to do, because (in the story) we already had settlements on the Moon, Mars, Phobos and Deimos, and were starting to explore the moons of Jupiter. So whenever we send some people out there, we give them a big engine and have them attach it to a large chunk of diamond (ok, it's not quite that simple but you know what I mean).
I didn't mean it was cheap in comparison to other metals neccessarily; more that it used to be quite valuable (people used to have their good silverware be made of aluminum) and now is significantly less so. Simliarly, diamonds are now quite expensive, but if several large mountains made of diamond was found, the price would probably drop significantly.
My claim is that you can sample any hardware, really. Sound cards, hard drive accesses, keyboard input, or whatever.
You need to be careful about it though. Guttman did a paper a few years ago "Software Generation of Practically Strong Random Numbers", and he found that taking input from the sound input produced very little entropy in some cases. OTOH,/dev/random does a pretty good job, hashing in all keyboard and mouse interupts, along with a timestamp. Dedicated hardware is still cool, though.
are you sure youre not thinking of neptune and uranus? it may rain diamonds on those planets but the center of jupiter is thought to be made of liquid metal hydrogen. there may or may not be a rocky core after that in the direct center. but its not diamond, if you look at a phase diagram for carbon the center of jupiter is too hot for diamond to exist.
When Clarke blew up Jupiter in 2010 (I think that was the right one...) he made the center of Jupiter a diamond (and then his characters find out and discover a small mountain made of the stuff that smacked down on one of the moons). The post I was responding to was speculating on which of Clarke's preditions would come true next.
And IIRC, the upper atomosphere is supposed to be at least partly carbon: maybe after time it condensed in the core (or maybe around the hydrogen)? I don't know crap about physics or astronomy (and I've heard the metal hydrogen theory before), so you're probably right. I was just being facetious.:)
A VMS cluster essentially turns a group of machines into a single machine. All resources are multiplexed into a single logical unit. If one of them fails, the others pick up all the work it left behind. Beowulf is nothing like it. Doesn't even come close.
Sounds a lot like MOSIX to me, though I don't know what kind of error recovery it has with regards to a unit failing. Of course, it should not give new tasks to a failed member of the cluster, but I don't know what it would do with tasks that had been running on it at the time; obviously complete recovery is not possible in most cases.
MOSIX only works well in the precense of multiple procceses and/or threads, but of course such could be said for SMP machines as well. And if VMS actually manages to get around that (ie, run a single process on two machines, cutting the work in half), I'll be shocked and very impressed (also curious how the hell they did it).
OK, I've got to say this: I wonder what a Beowulf cluster of VMS clusters would be like. There, I said it.:P
I almost forgot about the diamond thing. Wouldn't that be awesome? Oh, and then we could use the Carbon from the diamond to make a bunch of buckyballs and build a bunch of space elevators...
Yes! Orbiting hotel, here I come! Not to mention making whatever you want out of diamond. It'd be the next aluminum (which used to be worth a lot because it was hard to extract, until cheap methods were found and people started making soda cans out of them).
The press release said something like the atmosphere is 1/billionth the density of that on earth. That could make it a little tough for human habitation.
Not to mention the intense radiation and tempeture. Also, it's quite a ways from home...
"All these worlds are yours, except Europa. Attempt no landings there." So I guess a settlement on Io would be OK, though I'd settle for the Moon and Mars.
So what's next? The Jupiter-Io Flux or Deep Sea Vents on Europa?
No, the center of Jupiter really is a giant diamond. Oh, yeah, and enourmous beasts made of gas exist in Jupiter's upper atomosphere.
Oh, man, if we found out all that stuff Clarke has written about Jupiter were true, I would freak.:) Of course, he's been right so far... [insert alien/Clarke conspiracy theory here]
i suppose ther is still a miniscule possibility of life but shouldn't the temperature gradient, where it would have to reside, between the roasting lava feilds and the rest of the cryogenic surface be constantly moving though? as the lava cools it approaches the frozen temperature of the rest of the planet and when a volcano erupts the frozen surface is immediately plunged into a blast furnace of heat.
IIRC much of the surface of Io is covered in ice, and people are theorizing/hoping that there is a vast sea underneath, heated by the lava. And the radiation might help life evolve: throw lots of sulfur and other minerals into water, add radiation, and heat for several billion years. Sounds like a good recipe for life to me.
And hey, Sir Clarke has written about it happening, which as far as I'm concerned, increases the chances by at least 25% right there.:)
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Any system running Solaris will probably be slower than a system running GNU/Linux. Have you tried Linux for Sparc?
Trust me, I'd much prefer to use Linux over Solaris, but those are my work machines. I don't think my boss would go for me installing Linux on any of _them. Or the ones in the public CS lab, for that matter. Most of my university has 'standardized' on Solaris (so we can use the same OS for servers and workstations, better support, whatever).
Anything I missed? Is Intel going to go Copper, or are they just going to keep on naming their processors so that they sound like it?
Willamette (the P-IV) is supposed to have copper. That's not coming out until (IRRC) Q3 2001.
But now with the Alpha unable to sustain a big clock rate advantage, does the Alpha get any sort of real performance advantage when compared to x86, or particularly other less "reduced" architectures like HP's, Sun's or IBM's?
Alpha will still kick the crap out of x86, especially in floating point. HPPA's are supposed to be as fast or faster than Alpha's at floating point, though I don't know much about HPs stuff. Ultra's are slow. They're nice when you put 4 or 8 into a server. I don't have benchmarks, but an Ultra5 running Solaris 'feels' slower than my P-II 350 running Linux. And Sun's pricing will make you feel like an Alpha is cheap. PowerPCs are pretty cheap (and very nice chips), but not as fast as an Alpha, AFAIK.
Also, you can't get 32 or 64 proccessor setups for x86, which you can for some of the better Unix-vendor RISC machines.
After I went to Ground Zero -- Compaq -- I came away with a discreet impression that they really don't want to talk to a mere peon like me. Their web site, apparently, is really put together more like a business-to-business (or government) type of a deal.
You're defintly right about that... my experience trying to spec a nice Alpha box at Compaq's site was about the same as yours. However Microway seems quite willing to sell single machines to private customers. They have a 533 Mhz 21164 (with a reasonably good setup) for $2000. For some reason the price for a NT box and a Linux box is the same, though - I guess the best move would be to order the NT machine and then install Linux (keep the NT CDs for posterity or something).
would be Compaq's new chip, the Beta. Hey, they made CPUs called the ARM and the Thumb, right? I think I heard about one called the Hand too, but hopefully that was just the voices in my head.
And, it's often brought up that since Star Office doesn't run as root, it's less of a threat. Well, on my system, I have the operating system installed as root. EVERYTHING that is important on the system, my documents, my source code, is owned by my own personal user account. Sure, a virus would probably not be able to bring down my system, but it definitely would be able to destroy a lot of things that I need and use and work on every day. My personal loss would be just as large as if I were running a Windows machine.
/home and /etc you're basically safe, especially on package based systems like most Linux distros. Whereas on Windows where config files and user stuff is all over the place, and you have to search it out and copy it bit-by-bit. Real pain in the ass. :(
Though it is good to remember that if you gave someone else an account on your machine, Star Office would not destroy your files if they screwed up. On a Windows box, somewhat different results may occur.
Of course, nothing beats regular backups. Disks sometimes break, and filesystems get corrupted, and sometimes people time rm -rf * without thinking, and you've got to deal with it somehow. Hmmm... good poll, Favorite Backup Method:
Tape
CD-R
Copy to another machine
Floppy
Don't
One think I really like about Unix is the directory setup... you know that if you backup
Don't buy magazines with photos of Britney Spears.
:) OK, I'd take SMG over her, but whatever...
No way. I'm cool with a boycott on RIAA/MPAA, but give up my little Britney? Uh-uh.
Funny that the Natalie Portman trolling hasn't extended to other stars too... (maybe I'll start trolling about Shirley Manson).
[Yes this entire post is ridiculous and offtopic and quite possibly a troll as well - if I could post at 0 without being anonymous I would do so]
A real threat to everyone, not just the RIAA, is that some really good (unknown) musicians may choose not to pursue a career in music because there isn't enough financial incentive to live like a pauper for a few years while you are waiting to get heard.
Possibly, but unlikely. Some friends of mine are in a band called Mycroft Holmes. They make a few bucks playing clubs and parties, but not a whole lot. MP3s have nothing to do with the problem, either, as they were distributing them for (I think geocities didn't go for it though [even though they _are_ the copyright owner])
And they seem willing (if not eager) to be poor if they have a chance at making it big and getting famous.
One band is not particularly staticstical, but OTOH it's basically impossible to get any kind of hard evidence about something like that either way.
For example, I went down to the store and bought Play, Moby's new album. After buying this, I was really pleased with Moby's music and I wanted to see if I should buy any of his other cds.
Though Napster et. al. is not the only solution to this dilema. One of my housemates also has the new Moby CD, and I'm probably going to buy a copy, because it sounds damned cool. Similiarly, I've picked up a bit of a taste for Tom Waits, The Clash, and Portishead from him. As soon as I've bought every Cure CD in existence - I mean one copy of each, not all of them (!!!). I'll proabably get stuff from one or more of the abovenamed bands.
Though I've also found good bands online through MP3s - sTs being my favorite.
If you have the skills to write a GPL app that people actually want, you probably have a day job that pays well, and can easilly swing the hundred bucks per five years to keep your "prestige" project under your name...
:)
Though it could be a problem for students (high school + college). Yeah $100 is reasonable... but still... quite a bit of money as far as I'm concerned.
and if you don't, the FSF or some other patron would probably be willing to pick up the tab, just for the benifit of the community.
Though FSF would probably only be interested in GPLed programs, which would be a problem for BSD/MIT projects.
Of course, you would be out of luck if your code was redundant and/or useless and you worked at McDonalds for a living... but isn't that the idea? To preserve copy[right,left] of viable products while letting everything else fall into public domain?
IIRC, the point of copyright was to encourage people to write stuff and let them make a profit from their works (for a limited time - something Congress seems to have forgotten about). And the viability of me as a worker (which detirmines how much money I have) and the viability of my code, seem somewhat unrelated, at least in some cases. What if I'm given to periods of extreme depression, and I can't work much of the time. But when I do, I hack up wonderful code that I give to everyone to use. Should my work go into the public domain just because I am unable (for whatever reason) to hold a steady job? Note that this question is purely hypothetical - well, mostly.
Though you'd have problems getting it to work with code anyway. For instance, let's say I have a program foo 1.0, and it's copyrighted 2000. Then I add some really cool features and create foo 1.1, which is copyrighted 2001. Even if I don't pay the fee, anyone who wants to use the cool features has to use my copyrighted code. Just make small changes/additions to the code every few years and the more recent versions will never go into the public domain.
Not the mention the fact that even if all these ROMs and old computer games went into the public domain, we still wouldn't have the code. The company has it and has absolutly no reason to take it out of the big underground vault where they're keeping it. The binaries will be available and in the public domain, but the source will still be secret (if still "public domain").
Errr. So, I want Foo&Bar's new CD. I'm going to their concert tonight. I'll take a gun and blow their heads off. Now their works are in the public domain.
You'd have to be pretty dedicated to the idea of free music if you were willing to take a murder charge or two. Ohh... that Stallman! I'll get him... it's time that Emacs got out of under the thumb of those FSF dorks. [joking!]
Linux doesn't run on POWER (though a port from PowerPC might be possible), and doesn't support MCA. However, NetBSD seems at least interested in running on RS/6000. From http://www.netbsd.org/Ports/:
:P
IBM RS/6000 (MCA based)
The pre-PowerPC RS/6000 machines were based on the POWER and POWER2 architecture, with Microchannel (MCA) bus. There is i386 MCA bus code in NetBSD tree now, which would help with the MCA aspect.
However, this is in the "Suggested Ports" category. So if you've got some time on your hands and like to hack stuff, you've got a great project. Otherwise you'll have to run AIX until someone gets around to doing it.
First post?
The story doesn't really matter, since Jupiter isn't going to "blow up." Jupiter doesn't have enough mass to become a star, and if it were to become one, I find it hard to believe that its satelites wouldn't be enveloped.
Aliens engineered Jupiter into becoming a star so as to heat the moons and help life evolve on Europa.
In terms of the books I stand corrected, but I was under the impression we were talking about reality.
Oh, sorry. The thread originally started because someone was speculating on which of Clarke's predictions would come true next. I figured Jupiter's core being a giant diamond would be an interesting one to be true.
The 'Linux vendors' like Red Hat definitely do NOT want a cleaned up and unified /etc based on XML.
They won't have any choice if all the tools switch to XML configuration. They then have the choices:
1) Keep using the old versions (suicide)
2) Alter the new versions to use the old configuration methods (suicide, and hard work at that)
3) Use the new versions with XML configuration
If Redhat doesn't do it, some other distribution will. At the very least Debian will, as they're pretty non-commercial. In which case a lot of people will say "Fuck Redhat if they don't want to do it. I'll go use distribution X".
Doing something like that would NOT be in their best interest.
well, if x86 users have made WINE to run Windows apps under Linux, nothing's preventing Linux on Mac users to write a MacOS X compatibility layer...
And people writing a MacOS X layer over Linux would have an advantage over WINE in that the APIs are probably a lot more open than Windows (and hopefully smaller and less crufty too)
Producing diamonds, which has been done for ages, would be cheaper than extracting them from Jupiter's gravity well. So finding a "diamond mountain" on Jupiter would be about as useful as that giant piece of copper ore they found years ago in the U.S.
In the story, they found the mountain on one of the moons after Jupiter was destroyed. It blew up, and a piece of the core hit into one of the moons - other pieces were still orbiting around the new sun that was Jupiter. So probably the easiest method would be to attach some engines to one of the orbiting pieces and send it towards Earth. It might take a few years to get there, but it would be relatively cheap to do, because (in the story) we already had settlements on the Moon, Mars, Phobos and Deimos, and were starting to explore the moons of Jupiter. So whenever we send some people out there, we give them a big engine and have them attach it to a large chunk of diamond (ok, it's not quite that simple but you know what I mean).
(it will probably never be cheaper than steel).
I didn't mean it was cheap in comparison to other metals neccessarily; more that it used to be quite valuable (people used to have their good silverware be made of aluminum) and now is significantly less so. Simliarly, diamonds are now quite expensive, but if several large mountains made of diamond was found, the price would probably drop significantly.
My claim is that you can sample any hardware, really. Sound cards, hard drive accesses, keyboard input, or whatever.
/dev/random does a pretty good job, hashing in all keyboard and mouse interupts, along with a timestamp. Dedicated hardware is still cool, though.
You need to be careful about it though. Guttman did a paper a few years ago "Software Generation of Practically Strong Random Numbers", and he found that taking input from the sound input produced very little entropy in some cases. OTOH,
are you sure youre not thinking of neptune and uranus? it may rain diamonds on those planets but the center of jupiter is thought to be made of liquid metal hydrogen. there may or may not be a rocky core after that in the direct center. but its not diamond, if you look at a phase diagram for carbon the center of jupiter is too hot for diamond to exist.
:)
When Clarke blew up Jupiter in 2010 (I think that was the right one...) he made the center of Jupiter a diamond (and then his characters find out and discover a small mountain made of the stuff that smacked down on one of the moons). The post I was responding to was speculating on which of Clarke's preditions would come true next.
And IIRC, the upper atomosphere is supposed to be at least partly carbon: maybe after time it condensed in the core (or maybe around the hydrogen)? I don't know crap about physics or astronomy (and I've heard the metal hydrogen theory before), so you're probably right. I was just being facetious.
Don't confuse Io with Europa. AFAIK Clarke wrote about life on Europa.
:)
Oops, you're right. Got confused there (like that's unusual...) Well, as long as at least one moon of Jupiter has life, I'll be happy.
A VMS cluster essentially turns a group of machines into a single machine. All resources are multiplexed into a single logical unit. If one of them fails, the others pick up all the work it left behind. Beowulf is nothing like it. Doesn't even come close.
:P
Sounds a lot like MOSIX to me, though I don't know what kind of error recovery it has with regards to a unit failing. Of course, it should not give new tasks to a failed member of the cluster, but I don't know what it would do with tasks that had been running on it at the time; obviously complete recovery is not possible in most cases.
MOSIX only works well in the precense of multiple procceses and/or threads, but of course such could be said for SMP machines as well. And if VMS actually manages to get around that (ie, run a single process on two machines, cutting the work in half), I'll be shocked and very impressed (also curious how the hell they did it).
OK, I've got to say this: I wonder what a Beowulf cluster of VMS clusters would be like. There, I said it.
I almost forgot about the diamond thing. Wouldn't that be awesome? Oh, and then we could use the Carbon from the diamond to make a bunch of buckyballs and build a bunch of space elevators...
Yes! Orbiting hotel, here I come! Not to mention making whatever you want out of diamond. It'd be the next aluminum (which used to be worth a lot because it was hard to extract, until cheap methods were found and people started making soda cans out of them).
The press release said something like the atmosphere is 1/billionth the density of that on earth. That could make it a little tough for human habitation.
Not to mention the intense radiation and tempeture. Also, it's quite a ways from home...
"All these worlds are yours, except Europa. Attempt no landings there." So I guess a settlement on Io would be OK, though I'd settle for the Moon and Mars.
So what's next? The Jupiter-Io Flux or Deep Sea Vents on Europa?
:) Of course, he's been right so far... [insert alien/Clarke conspiracy theory here]
No, the center of Jupiter really is a giant diamond. Oh, yeah, and enourmous beasts made of gas exist in Jupiter's upper atomosphere.
Oh, man, if we found out all that stuff Clarke has written about Jupiter were true, I would freak.
i suppose ther is still a miniscule possibility of life but shouldn't the temperature gradient, where it would have to reside, between the roasting lava feilds and the rest of the cryogenic surface be constantly moving though? as the lava cools it approaches the frozen temperature of the rest of the planet and when a volcano erupts the frozen surface is immediately plunged into a blast furnace of heat.
:)
IIRC much of the surface of Io is covered in ice, and people are theorizing/hoping that there is a vast sea underneath, heated by the lava. And the radiation might help life evolve: throw lots of sulfur and other minerals into water, add radiation, and heat for several billion years. Sounds like a good recipe for life to me.
And hey, Sir Clarke has written about it happening, which as far as I'm concerned, increases the chances by at least 25% right there.