Hey, you forgot about io.com in Houston and Austin. They also do strictly telnet[/ssh] accounts, and provide web space, anonymous FTP, and POP. They're a Linux shop with one host running FreeBSD.
Never used them, but I know people who did, and were generally happy about it.
Actually, at various times I've gone by macaw and mrrrrow. I used macaw because I attended a school that let me change my username to 'anything that is clearly generated from your name,' and my middle initial (as evident from my current email address) is c, so macaw came naturally. While I attended that school. Mrrrrow I used in a MUD for a catlike character, since real names aren't used in MUDs. It stuck for a while, but I'm not much of a MUDer so it went away after awhile.
Someone else suggested that the hackers of old simply used their username, frequently assigned from their name, as their handle. Makes sense, and it's what I've done pretty consistently.
After all, if I go by some 'l33t handle, how let down are people going to be when they meet me? As it is, people are relieved that i'm not quite as boring as most other people who use their real names:)
You don't once mention the Kensington series of
trackballs, which are a generally nice set of devices. Really nice. I used to use a Logitech Trackman+ at home, and I loved it; I got another Logitech trackball at work (I can't remember which one, but it's finger operated, not thumb operated, with MOUSE1 controlled by the thumb).
But then I tried a Kensington Turboball in a local CompUSA. It was fantastic! I bought it almost immediately, and gave my fiancé my Trackman (she's got a laptop, one place where trackballs really shine IMO). It has two buttons on either side of a nice, big trackball, and a vertical wheel underneath your knuckles (depending upon how I'm using it, it falls under either my index or middle knuckle). It's USB with a PS/2 adapter (and you can get an ADB adapter for old Macs), has very nice fine control, and the buttons work fine in any setting I've tried.
I love it enough I've considered buying ADB adapters and 2 or 3 more to connect to my Mac and NeXTStations, so I can feel the love everywhere:)
A lot of people here have mentioned DICE as a place to stick job opportunities. As a job searcher 8-12 months ago, I was very disappointed with DICE, and the lack of regard for my interests there, and stopped bothering with them after about two weeks. Instead I went with monster.com, which landed me my current job (which on paper is not what I wanted, but in reality is damned close:).
I think it depends upon the employees you want -- if you're looking for contract work, DICE seemed like a good place to go, but more people might look for full-time employment at Monster.
For "Carbon" programming, find any books on Mac programming. Then take note of which parts of the API aren't included in Carbon (this week). For Cocoa programming, try to find some of the old NeXTStep programming books, or maybe look at MiscKit (the site hasn't been updated in a while, but in theory it will be ported to Cocoa); and of course, learn Obj-C (easy).
For Win32 programming... there are too many out there for anyone but a Win32-only reader to follow them all and be able to offer good reviews (and then, not from the perspective of a Unix programmer). So, I'd say grab a book from a publisher or author you've seen elsewhere (if possible), and read it.
Isn't all-in-one supposed to be the great big promise of digital entertainment?
*sigh* No, the promise of digital entertainment is affordable, widely compatible multimedia that is of acceptable quality. That's not the same as highest possible fidelity. I heard a fellow recently say something along the lines of "in 5-8 years, the only people using chemical photography [instead of digital] will be the Luddites who insist that vacuum tube amps are somehow sounds 'warmer,' too.[1]" Digital, all-in-one, widely compatible multimedia has its place, a very far-reaching and economically strong place -- but specialized and analog multimedia have a niche that anything less can not achieve.
The other issues you fail to bring up are quality, reliability, and expandability. The all-in-one units target a different market than components, because component buyers want the ability to add and remove individual components as they come into the market or break (respectively). You simply can't depend upon an all-in-one unit, just like a 4 piece RAID0 array is 4x as likely to fail as a single drive. Further, people who are willing to forego the reliability of components, are generally willing to forego the not-necessarily-concomitant higher quality of components, so the designers don't build for higher quality (kind of like the difference between SCSI and IDE used to be; now you only see that difference in the really high-end SCSI drives).
And in case you're wondering, I'm planning on buying an all-in-one, and using it until I can afford better. OTOH, I'd rather buy a scanner and use my decades-old manual camera than buy a digital camera.
1. Take a look at smp.html. I386 and sparc, and hopefully ppc now that SMP is mainstream on that platform. Note that SMP on alpha would likely only come after the alpha port were revived (regarding which there has been some talk, but I don't know how much code).
I must confess I'm surprised that this little post full of uninformed guessing was rated higher than the post to which it responds (mine). Isn't the primary idea behind the comments to (a) allow more informed (i.e., people who know rather than guess) than the article-writer to provide more depth, (b) allow people less informed (you) to ask questions, and (c) let people chatter about unrelated topics?
First, your characterization of the dedicated mode is incorrect. It wouldn't boot without a correct MBR.
Second, your guess as to the problem is off -- sufficiently off that it's clear you don't know much about BIOS, or the fact that any PC's BIOS will freak out with an incorrect MBR.
Finally, your last paragraph, suggesting the solution, clearly demonstrates that you didn't read, or didn't comprehend, a damned bit of the information provided in the link, and the links from that page on BSDToday.
It irks me that this is "interesting." What's worse, though, is that you figured that without any research you could simply make some uninformed guesses about a lot of things and be correct on any or all of the points. I'm trying to pretend that this isn't a rant. I suppose it is. But please please please, if you post to Slashdot, and you try to fall into category (a) above, at least read what the link to which the article points, and comment about that. It's not hard, it will let you learn stuff, it will make you look cool on Slashdot, and it takes just a few minutes of your time.
According to Pat, the problem is a BIOS bug in the affected laptops in booting with the specific partition type that BSD uses.
No, just FreeBSD. OpenBSD's fine. In all likelyhood, NetBSD is fine. Just the
And come on, it's a bug that only shows up with unsupported software. Can you blame them?
It's not entirely clear whether such domain names are allowed or not, although a cursory glance actually suggests that you can't -- which would be seem pretty fscked up, to me.
Certainly, CSpotRun has been useful. Living in Pgh, there's a weekly db that I download that lists currently playing movies. I haven't gotten around to saving other stuff on my Palm yet, but I will.
As others have said, DateBk[34]. The Visor comes with an older version of DateBk3, but the upgrades provide some noticable improvements sometimes. DateBk4 looks too busy for me, but 3 is just what I needed.
Parens {Lite}. If you like Revers Polish Notation, you might prefer RPN, but I've not been converted yet myself. Parens Lite provides standard scientific calculator functions and a backspace key.
Vexed: it's a great game until you beat it. Since there don't appear to be separate.pdb files of levels, but all built-in, there's simply no replay value.
PocketChess. I'm not a great chess player, but it's still a good game. If you have some chess-playing Palm-owning friends, you can even play against each other via the IR port. The AI isn't bad for a 68k processor:)
Look, that's why I wrote "currently." As in, "for now -- but not so in the future [when SMP Athlon motherboards are available]." As for "14 (!)," that's baby stakes. The Pentium Pro could, as I recall, support 64. Which is nothing to the 512 that an Onyx3000 can support.
While I agree that SMP is becoming much more commonplace than it used to be, I don't see Apple's moves to sell SMP on its systems a portent of its (SMP's) widespread use. USB is a technology that is easier to use than its predecessors, and this fits with Apple's focus on simple interfaces and products that appeal to the mass-market.
Ummm... Apple switched to USB at least as much because Macs were losing the peripheral war -- there wasn't ADB, DB-9 serial, or SCSI on most PCs, and that constituted 95% of Apple peripherals. However, for quite some time PCs had been coming with USB, whether manufacturers were supporting it or not. So, suddenly, they only had one mostly incompatible interface, but unlike ADB, SCSI, or DB-9 serial, it was intended to go on all PCs. Now, any new PC comes with USB.
Now Macs also have Firewire/IEEE 1394 and AirPort/IEEE 802.11, two Apple technologies making their way into PCs. Just a few days ago, I saw a pretty new Compaq system at Radio Shack with Firewire, and now Carnegie Mellon is installing 11Mbps wireless networking (you know, 802.11?) on campus. So, to recap: standard technology on Powermacs is: USB (on PCs too), Firewire (on PCs too), Airport (coming close to standard on laptops), and, now, SMP.
For most desktops, I don't see SMP being all that beneficial, because people don't truly multitask that much. Having efficient multibranch execution in a single CPU I'm sure has much more apparent performance gains to the average user than having multiple CPUs would. In applications where increased parallelization is helpful--for example, 3D rendering--it's being added due to market demand for speed increases that would be difficult to meet otherwise.
Take a look at your average Windows PC (yes, just pretend Windows9x could benefit from SMP for the sake of my argument). Now, take a look at all the little icons in the tray, and the desktop, and the taskbar itself, and then, finally, the one application our Hero, Joe Sixpack, is running. Suddenly, Joe doesn't need much CPU for any particular reason, but keeping all the little processes happy while he loads some Microsoft bloatware, and having a snappy system requires a good bit of CPU. Voila! Joe Sixpack could benefit from 2 200MHz CPUs, rather than 1 400-500MHz CPU.
I'll say it again: Apple seems to be leading the PC pack. Now that Apple has put out SMP machines, labelled them "fit for general consumption," and then gone off on how cool they are, I am quite confident that PC manufacturers will follow suit.
NT has always used the thread as the basic unit of resource allocation, not the process.
Yeah, I know. If you'd checked other replies to my post before you posted, you'd note that I corrected myself./. doesn't support post-post editing, unfortunately.
On the other hand, up until quite recently (and arguably not even now), why should Joe Sixpack's home PC do SMP?
Hey, I'm not saying Joe needs SMP -- I'm also not saying he doesn't. But considering how cheap previous-generation chips get, buying an SMP motherboard with just a single processor, and then upgrading later, allows for almost twice the upgradability (processor speed wise) later.
Although really, IMO, most people would be served just fine by a NeXTStation (33MHz 68040 and 64MB RAM, say).
As for few people needing SMP, consider this: if chip speeds were still in the 100-200MHz range, and CPU vendors had put more effort into improving ISA rather than pumping up speed (and providing incremental improvements in CPU technology), we could be running 4 CPU systems. And since 100-200MHz processors would still be in abundance, it would probably mean more cheap computing for everyone. The stratification of MHz has resulted in there not being any single CPU produced in sufficient quantities to spread computers faster.
Or to put it anouther way, the best SMP code will in the general case be slower on a 2 cpu system as the smae program for one processor that is twice as fast. (ie a SMP program for two P3-500 will run slower then a single processor only program for one P3-1000. Cache cohearancy issues and the like. Of course two P3-500s might be cheaper by enough to make it worthwhile.
Two things: first, why limit yourself to two processors? Compare the performance (of an easily threaded algorithm) on a single 500MHz Athlon against 8 200MHz PPro's (I would use a more updated example, but I can't remember if the PII or PIII support more than 2-4 processors). Second, why compare slower processors in an SMP box with faster uniprocessor systems? Compare the performance of a dual 800MHz PIII system against a single 800MHz PIII, and then take a look at when comparable uniprocessor performance will be possible. The point of SMP, quite simply, is what to do once you can't get a "processor twice [or four times, or...] as fast."
Of course, there are some operations that we don't have parallel algorithms for -- yet. Then again, there are some operations we don't have recursive algorithms for yet, either -- this is an area of research (and in the current age of cross-disciplinary research, it's being done as much by people who need the parallel algorithms as the people who know a lot about parallelism).
First of all, to some extent SMP is being commoditized -- Apple, for instance, is now selling SMP as being a simple one-step upgrade from UP in their PowerMac G4s. Apple is also the computer vendor that brought us widespread use of USB, the focus on industrial design as a consideration buying computers, etc. Expect other vendors to follow that lead, insofar as they can load operating systems that can take advantage of SMP.
Microsoft should probably credited with holding systems back to single processors with Win9x/ME, and yes even WinNT. With NT, IIRC, processes, not threads, were spread across processors -- so you saw very little benefit running a single, multi-threaded app on an SMP system. I would hope W2K does something more reasonable, as in something that virtually every other SMP implementation does (notably, except MacOS pre-X), and spread threads across processors.
Finally, in the x86 arena, only intel can support SMP currently -- and considering that AMD has been providing a much better price/performance ratio for some time, and is even generally ahead in performance right now. That makes it more difficult to justify going with lower-performing, more expensive processors to increase performance, although of course the difference between dual 800MHz P3's and a single 1.1GHz Athlon should be quite noticable if you're running a well-threaded application (or lots and lots of processes).
All that is for PC systems (including Macs as Personal Computers, if not Wintel PeeCees:). For other architectures (alpha, sparc/ultrasparc, MIPS, PA-RISC for instance), SMP is alive and well. SGI's highest-end workstations-that-could-be-servers, Octanes and Octane2s, support two processors, and their servers support a lot of processors. Sun has SMP workstations and ridiculously SMP servers as well; I've seen a lot of SMP alpha motherboards, but since alpha's are almost as commodity as PCs I haven't checked out what sorts of systems [c|o|m|p|a|q] sells. Hewlett-Packard also sells SMP workstations and servers, but my experience with them is with the old HP 9000/7xx series that are largely, if not completely, uniprocessor.
Based on the bitching and moaning (and relatively reasonable bitching and moaning) on the MacOS X mailing lists about the fact that Apple isn't selling MacOS X Server or their server systems right now, I'd say yes.
And for those idiots who are claiming MacOS X will not have sufficient applications, I give you
Exhibit A: Classic.app -- run your original Mac apps with their Platinum interface in MacOS X!
Exhibit B: Carbon -- run some of your better behaved Mac apps with the Aqua interface in MacOS X!
Exhibit C: Cocoa -- run, with just a little porting, many of your favorite old NeXTSTEP/OPENSTEP applications in MacOS X (sorry, requires source, or a vendor still around)
Exhibit D: Unix -- run your favorite command-line programs ported from BSD, Linux, or virtually any other UNIX, right in MacOS X!
Exhibit E: X -- being made available is an X Windowing Server for MacOS X -- port your favorite X applications, or run them remotely on that Onyx2000 and display them on MacOS X!
And, for the record, if I got purchasing power in a small- or medium-sized network with UNIX servers after MacOS X is officially out, I'd certainly consider MacOS X as an option. Especially if NetInfo gets encryption like I've been hearing it would.
...the guys as Open freaking because it presents a remote root exploit as the code hasn't been thoroughly audited...
I don't think you grasp the idea of the ports collection: it's intended to allow people to download pristine source, and then automate compiling it for your system (or, in some cases, pristine binaries:( ). The OpenBSD people don't audit ports code (or at least they don't require it be audited, although it's encouraged). NetBSD people don't, so far as I know, insist that their ports work with all architectures (at least not if they have any binary ports [Communicator, for instance] like OpenBSD does).
The ports are the one area it seems the BSDs are all together -- united against external code:-)
For network configuration, DHCP is one reasonable alternative (although you'll probably simply want bootp support, allowing systems to keep their own IPs static). Using rdist to propagate changes may also be reasonable, for other things, and it can be used with ssh.
Kerberos is one way to handle network-wide logins, although I have issue with it because it requires/etc/passwd be kept around (Kerberos handles authentication but not the additional needs of Unix, such as file ownership determination and such). NIS is insecure, NIS+ is too complex for a single domain (and I'm not sold on its scalability, either). However, it doesn't look like that sort of thing is really you're concern, so I'd say rdist:)
Regardless of DiBona's and Ockman's respective ethics and/. habits, I don't plan on buying anything from Penguin-Computing.
At my last job, we ordered 2 Penguins, and an affiliated company bought I don't know how many more (somewhere around 5-10?). With every single one, we had to take the system apart and make sure PCI cards were snug before the thing would boot. A PCI card occasionally coming loose is to be expected; but, come on, we're talking about every single computer we got from them.
Also with one of them, we had a problem connecting an external Ultra (Ultra2? I can't remember now) drive, because, as it turned out, the external SCSI connector was attached to the motherboard via a 1 meter (and change) cable that did nothing but connect to the backplane. (note, of course, that no more than 1.5m of SCSI cable was supported by that particular version of SCSI, so our use of a short, slightly-over-.5m external cable was screwing us) Repeated calls to Penguin CS gave us no clue that they were, essentially, putting their machines together wrong (since there was already an internal Ultra2 connector, the extra.75m or so of unneeded cable served no purpose).
I wouldn't be surprised if they were simply using the cables supplied by their motherboard manufacturer, who didn't know what would be where SCSI-wise; that's the sort of mistake I'd make. But if I'm paying someone to build a machine for me, I expect it's because I'd rather depend upon their superior knowledge and experience wrt PC-building -- i.e., if they're just going to do what I'd do, and make the mistakes I'd make, why buy from them?
You'd probably have to kill me to get me to buy a VA box for personal use -- I've moved away from PeeCees as much as possible, and I prefer to pick the exact components I want myself -- but you'll see me shove a pitchfork through my nose before I buy, or recommend someone else buy, a Penguin machine.
And it's a shame to not see good template (genericity?) support in C#. Or any language, for that matter.
How do you figure? C++ templates are a hack to deal with the lack of a base class; other OO languages (Java, Objective-C, C#,Smalltalk...) let you do generic things by operating on the base class, from which all objects inherit. Also, with interfaces, you can define an operation that only affects classes that know about the operation, without worrying about where in the class hierarchy the class is.
I think choosing a good type system is where a lot of languages fall flat, and I'm not a big fan of the huge C++/Java Object/Type/Library approach, although I haven't seen a truly good solution to this problem yet.
Would you mind explaining this a bit? What do you mean by 'Object/Type/Library' approach to typing?
Failed? How do you figure? As has been pointed out, NeXT was bought by Apple, and depending on whether you count Jobs as an Apple or NeXT guy, NeXT is either strongly represented in management, or is management at Apple. NeXT's technologies (updated, of course) are being brought forth as mainstream by a major niche player, rather than a startup. Most of the people who worked at NeXT have either moved to Apple, or been able to use their time at NeXT to land even sweeter jobs.
Me thinx you're overlooking the whole wireless clipped web thingy...
Are you kidding? Internet access mediated by Palm.net, with support only for websites that support it? No thanks, I'll go with real wireless -- which is available for the Visor. Take a look at http://www.novatelwireless.co m/palmtop/minstrelS.html.
Slashdot Mirror
For the curious, the license is available at http://www.openssh.com/LICENCE. Don't blame me, I didn't misspell LICENSE.
Hey, you forgot about io.com in Houston and Austin. They also do strictly telnet[/ssh] accounts, and provide web space, anonymous FTP, and POP. They're a Linux shop with one host running FreeBSD.
Never used them, but I know people who did, and were generally happy about it.
I'm not sure what to say.
Actually, at various times I've gone by macaw and mrrrrow. I used macaw because I attended a school that let me change my username to 'anything that is clearly generated from your name,' and my middle initial (as evident from my current email address) is c, so macaw came naturally. While I attended that school. Mrrrrow I used in a MUD for a catlike character, since real names aren't used in MUDs. It stuck for a while, but I'm not much of a MUDer so it went away after awhile.
Someone else suggested that the hackers of old simply used their username, frequently assigned from their name, as their handle. Makes sense, and it's what I've done pretty consistently.
After all, if I go by some 'l33t handle, how let down are people going to be when they meet me? As it is, people are relieved that i'm not quite as boring as most other people who use their real names :)
You don't once mention the Kensington series of trackballs, which are a generally nice set of devices. Really nice. I used to use a Logitech Trackman+ at home, and I loved it; I got another Logitech trackball at work (I can't remember which one, but it's finger operated, not thumb operated, with MOUSE1 controlled by the thumb).
But then I tried a Kensington Turboball in a local CompUSA. It was fantastic! I bought it almost immediately, and gave my fiancé my Trackman (she's got a laptop, one place where trackballs really shine IMO). It has two buttons on either side of a nice, big trackball, and a vertical wheel underneath your knuckles (depending upon how I'm using it, it falls under either my index or middle knuckle). It's USB with a PS/2 adapter (and you can get an ADB adapter for old Macs), has very nice fine control, and the buttons work fine in any setting I've tried.
I love it enough I've considered buying ADB adapters and 2 or 3 more to connect to my Mac and NeXTStations, so I can feel the love everywhere :)
A lot of people here have mentioned DICE as a place to stick job opportunities. As a job searcher 8-12 months ago, I was very disappointed with DICE, and the lack of regard for my interests there, and stopped bothering with them after about two weeks. Instead I went with monster.com, which landed me my current job (which on paper is not what I wanted, but in reality is damned close :).
I think it depends upon the employees you want -- if you're looking for contract work, DICE seemed like a good place to go, but more people might look for full-time employment at Monster.
For "Carbon" programming, find any books on Mac programming. Then take note of which parts of the API aren't included in Carbon (this week). For Cocoa programming, try to find some of the old NeXTStep programming books, or maybe look at MiscKit (the site hasn't been updated in a while, but in theory it will be ported to Cocoa); and of course, learn Obj-C (easy).
For Win32 programming... there are too many out there for anyone but a Win32-only reader to follow them all and be able to offer good reviews (and then, not from the perspective of a Unix programmer). So, I'd say grab a book from a publisher or author you've seen elsewhere (if possible), and read it.
*sigh* No, the promise of digital entertainment is affordable, widely compatible multimedia that is of acceptable quality. That's not the same as highest possible fidelity. I heard a fellow recently say something along the lines of "in 5-8 years, the only people using chemical photography [instead of digital] will be the Luddites who insist that vacuum tube amps are somehow sounds 'warmer,' too.[1]" Digital, all-in-one, widely compatible multimedia has its place, a very far-reaching and economically strong place -- but specialized and analog multimedia have a niche that anything less can not achieve.
The other issues you fail to bring up are quality, reliability, and expandability. The all-in-one units target a different market than components, because component buyers want the ability to add and remove individual components as they come into the market or break (respectively). You simply can't depend upon an all-in-one unit, just like a 4 piece RAID0 array is 4x as likely to fail as a single drive. Further, people who are willing to forego the reliability of components, are generally willing to forego the not-necessarily-concomitant higher quality of components, so the designers don't build for higher quality (kind of like the difference between SCSI and IDE used to be; now you only see that difference in the really high-end SCSI drives).
And in case you're wondering, I'm planning on buying an all-in-one, and using it until I can afford better. OTOH, I'd rather buy a scanner and use my decades-old manual camera than buy a digital camera.
1. Bill Cheswick, LISA 2000
1. Take a look at smp.html. I386 and sparc, and hopefully ppc now that SMP is mainstream on that platform. Note that SMP on alpha would likely only come after the alpha port were revived (regarding which there has been some talk, but I don't know how much code).
2. Take a look at sparc64.html.
I must confess I'm surprised that this little post full of uninformed guessing was rated higher than the post to which it responds (mine). Isn't the primary idea behind the comments to (a) allow more informed (i.e., people who know rather than guess) than the article-writer to provide more depth, (b) allow people less informed (you) to ask questions, and (c) let people chatter about unrelated topics?
First, your characterization of the dedicated mode is incorrect. It wouldn't boot without a correct MBR.
Second, your guess as to the problem is off -- sufficiently off that it's clear you don't know much about BIOS, or the fact that any PC's BIOS will freak out with an incorrect MBR.
Finally, your last paragraph, suggesting the solution, clearly demonstrates that you didn't read, or didn't comprehend, a damned bit of the information provided in the link, and the links from that page on BSDToday.
It irks me that this is "interesting." What's worse, though, is that you figured that without any research you could simply make some uninformed guesses about a lot of things and be correct on any or all of the points. I'm trying to pretend that this isn't a rant. I suppose it is. But please please please , if you post to Slashdot, and you try to fall into category (a) above, at least read what the link to which the article points, and comment about that. It's not hard, it will let you learn stuff, it will make you look cool on Slashdot, and it takes just a few minutes of your time.
No, just FreeBSD. OpenBSD's fine. In all likelyhood, NetBSD is fine. Just the And come on, it's a bug that only shows up with unsupported software. Can you blame them?
What are the rules for random.au? notadotcom.au?
It's not entirely clear whether such domain names are allowed or not, although a cursory glance actually suggests that you can't -- which would be seem pretty fscked up, to me.
Look, that's why I wrote "currently." As in, "for now -- but not so in the future [when SMP Athlon motherboards are available]." As for "14 (!)," that's baby stakes. The Pentium Pro could, as I recall, support 64. Which is nothing to the 512 that an Onyx3000 can support.
Ummm... Apple switched to USB at least as much because Macs were losing the peripheral war -- there wasn't ADB, DB-9 serial, or SCSI on most PCs, and that constituted 95% of Apple peripherals. However, for quite some time PCs had been coming with USB, whether manufacturers were supporting it or not. So, suddenly, they only had one mostly incompatible interface, but unlike ADB, SCSI, or DB-9 serial, it was intended to go on all PCs. Now, any new PC comes with USB.
Now Macs also have Firewire/IEEE 1394 and AirPort/IEEE 802.11, two Apple technologies making their way into PCs. Just a few days ago, I saw a pretty new Compaq system at Radio Shack with Firewire, and now Carnegie Mellon is installing 11Mbps wireless networking (you know, 802.11?) on campus. So, to recap: standard technology on Powermacs is: USB (on PCs too), Firewire (on PCs too), Airport (coming close to standard on laptops), and, now, SMP.
Take a look at your average Windows PC (yes, just pretend Windows9x could benefit from SMP for the sake of my argument). Now, take a look at all the little icons in the tray, and the desktop, and the taskbar itself, and then, finally, the one application our Hero, Joe Sixpack, is running. Suddenly, Joe doesn't need much CPU for any particular reason, but keeping all the little processes happy while he loads some Microsoft bloatware, and having a snappy system requires a good bit of CPU. Voila! Joe Sixpack could benefit from 2 200MHz CPUs, rather than 1 400-500MHz CPU.
I'll say it again: Apple seems to be leading the PC pack. Now that Apple has put out SMP machines, labelled them "fit for general consumption," and then gone off on how cool they are, I am quite confident that PC manufacturers will follow suit.
Yeah, I know. If you'd checked other replies to my post before you posted, you'd note that I corrected myself. /. doesn't support post-post editing, unfortunately.
Hey, I'm not saying Joe needs SMP -- I'm also not saying he doesn't. But considering how cheap previous-generation chips get, buying an SMP motherboard with just a single processor, and then upgrading later, allows for almost twice the upgradability (processor speed wise) later.
Although really, IMO, most people would be served just fine by a NeXTStation (33MHz 68040 and 64MB RAM, say).
As for few people needing SMP, consider this: if chip speeds were still in the 100-200MHz range, and CPU vendors had put more effort into improving ISA rather than pumping up speed (and providing incremental improvements in CPU technology), we could be running 4 CPU systems. And since 100-200MHz processors would still be in abundance, it would probably mean more cheap computing for everyone. The stratification of MHz has resulted in there not being any single CPU produced in sufficient quantities to spread computers faster.
Two things: first, why limit yourself to two processors? Compare the performance (of an easily threaded algorithm) on a single 500MHz Athlon against 8 200MHz PPro's (I would use a more updated example, but I can't remember if the PII or PIII support more than 2-4 processors). Second, why compare slower processors in an SMP box with faster uniprocessor systems? Compare the performance of a dual 800MHz PIII system against a single 800MHz PIII, and then take a look at when comparable uniprocessor performance will be possible. The point of SMP, quite simply, is what to do once you can't get a "processor twice [or four times, or...] as fast."
Of course, there are some operations that we don't have parallel algorithms for -- yet. Then again, there are some operations we don't have recursive algorithms for yet, either -- this is an area of research (and in the current age of cross-disciplinary research, it's being done as much by people who need the parallel algorithms as the people who know a lot about parallelism).
Hmmm. According to anectdotal evidence posted elsewhere in this article, single multi-threaded apps do see improvement in NT. I stand corrected.
First of all, to some extent SMP is being commoditized -- Apple, for instance, is now selling SMP as being a simple one-step upgrade from UP in their PowerMac G4s. Apple is also the computer vendor that brought us widespread use of USB, the focus on industrial design as a consideration buying computers, etc. Expect other vendors to follow that lead, insofar as they can load operating systems that can take advantage of SMP.
Microsoft should probably credited with holding systems back to single processors with Win9x/ME, and yes even WinNT. With NT, IIRC, processes, not threads, were spread across processors -- so you saw very little benefit running a single, multi-threaded app on an SMP system. I would hope W2K does something more reasonable, as in something that virtually every other SMP implementation does (notably, except MacOS pre-X), and spread threads across processors.
Finally, in the x86 arena, only intel can support SMP currently -- and considering that AMD has been providing a much better price/performance ratio for some time, and is even generally ahead in performance right now. That makes it more difficult to justify going with lower-performing, more expensive processors to increase performance, although of course the difference between dual 800MHz P3's and a single 1.1GHz Athlon should be quite noticable if you're running a well-threaded application (or lots and lots of processes).
All that is for PC systems (including Macs as Personal Computers, if not Wintel PeeCees :). For other architectures (alpha, sparc/ultrasparc, MIPS, PA-RISC for instance), SMP is alive and well. SGI's highest-end workstations-that-could-be-servers, Octanes and Octane2s, support two processors, and their servers support a lot of processors. Sun has SMP workstations and ridiculously SMP servers as well; I've seen a lot of SMP alpha motherboards, but since alpha's are almost as commodity as PCs I haven't checked out what sorts of systems [c|o|m|p|a|q] sells. Hewlett-Packard also sells SMP workstations and servers, but my experience with them is with the old HP 9000/7xx series that are largely, if not completely, uniprocessor.
Based on the bitching and moaning (and relatively reasonable bitching and moaning) on the MacOS X mailing lists about the fact that Apple isn't selling MacOS X Server or their server systems right now, I'd say yes.
And for those idiots who are claiming MacOS X will not have sufficient applications, I give you
And, for the record, if I got purchasing power in a small- or medium-sized network with UNIX servers after MacOS X is officially out, I'd certainly consider MacOS X as an option. Especially if NetInfo gets encryption like I've been hearing it would.
I don't think you grasp the idea of the ports collection: it's intended to allow people to download pristine source, and then automate compiling it for your system (or, in some cases, pristine binaries :( ). The OpenBSD people don't audit ports code (or at least they don't require it be audited, although it's encouraged). NetBSD people don't, so far as I know, insist that their ports work with all architectures (at least not if they have any binary ports [Communicator, for instance] like OpenBSD does).
The ports are the one area it seems the BSDs are all together -- united against external code :-)
For network configuration, DHCP is one reasonable alternative (although you'll probably simply want bootp support, allowing systems to keep their own IPs static). Using rdist to propagate changes may also be reasonable, for other things, and it can be used with ssh.
Kerberos is one way to handle network-wide logins, although I have issue with it because it requires /etc/passwd be kept around (Kerberos handles authentication but not the additional needs of Unix, such as file ownership determination and such). NIS is insecure, NIS+ is too complex for a single domain (and I'm not sold on its scalability, either). However, it doesn't look like that sort of thing is really you're concern, so I'd say rdist :)
At my last job, we ordered 2 Penguins, and an affiliated company bought I don't know how many more (somewhere around 5-10?). With every single one, we had to take the system apart and make sure PCI cards were snug before the thing would boot. A PCI card occasionally coming loose is to be expected; but, come on, we're talking about every single computer we got from them.
Also with one of them, we had a problem connecting an external Ultra (Ultra2? I can't remember now) drive, because, as it turned out, the external SCSI connector was attached to the motherboard via a 1 meter (and change) cable that did nothing but connect to the backplane. (note, of course, that no more than 1.5m of SCSI cable was supported by that particular version of SCSI, so our use of a short, slightly-over-.5m external cable was screwing us) Repeated calls to Penguin CS gave us no clue that they were, essentially, putting their machines together wrong (since there was already an internal Ultra2 connector, the extra .75m or so of unneeded cable served no purpose).
I wouldn't be surprised if they were simply using the cables supplied by their motherboard manufacturer, who didn't know what would be where SCSI-wise; that's the sort of mistake I'd make. But if I'm paying someone to build a machine for me, I expect it's because I'd rather depend upon their superior knowledge and experience wrt PC-building -- i.e., if they're just going to do what I'd do, and make the mistakes I'd make, why buy from them?
You'd probably have to kill me to get me to buy a VA box for personal use -- I've moved away from PeeCees as much as possible, and I prefer to pick the exact components I want myself -- but you'll see me shove a pitchfork through my nose before I buy, or recommend someone else buy, a Penguin machine.
How do you figure? C++ templates are a hack to deal with the lack of a base class; other OO languages (Java, Objective-C, C#,Smalltalk...) let you do generic things by operating on the base class, from which all objects inherit. Also, with interfaces, you can define an operation that only affects classes that know about the operation, without worrying about where in the class hierarchy the class is.
Would you mind explaining this a bit? What do you mean by 'Object/Type/Library' approach to typing?
Failed? How do you figure? As has been pointed out, NeXT was bought by Apple, and depending on whether you count Jobs as an Apple or NeXT guy, NeXT is either strongly represented in management, or is management at Apple. NeXT's technologies (updated, of course) are being brought forth as mainstream by a major niche player, rather than a startup. Most of the people who worked at NeXT have either moved to Apple, or been able to use their time at NeXT to land even sweeter jobs.
So, where's the failure? :-)
Are you kidding? Internet access mediated by Palm.net, with support only for websites that support it? No thanks, I'll go with real wireless -- which is available for the Visor. Take a look at http://www.novatelwireless.co m/palmtop/minstrelS.html.