"f you have an open Opteron socket on your multi-way box, wouldn't you probably achieve better performance by shoving another Opteron into there?"
No. Let's assume you are computing an FFT on some data and the Operon CPU can do (say) 100 per second. Adding a second CPU would at beat get you up to 200 per second. But hardware FFTs can go maybe 10X faster than software FFTS so with the new chip you can do 1100 per second.
With a general purpose CPU there needs to be balance but if you know you will be computing FFTs you might build 16 or 32 hardware multiply units on the chip and you can leave off just about everything else.
The chip only needs to be 3X faster then a CPU to look good but for specialized applications 10X is not hard to get.
Yes, selective presures have changed. Currently the biggest predictor od how many kids a person will have is economic class. The poorest and least educated have the most kids. Poor, ingle women in Africa "win" with 8 kids each while afluent familes in Tokyo have few ofspring. Whatever it is that make one poor and uneducatedwill spread through the gene pool.
This sounds more like a "milestone" then a "breakthrough". non-spinning sounds like a huge simplifying assumption as I doubt there are many non-spinniong black holes except for very, very small ones.
Your argument sounds good: Mac's stability comes from Apples control over the entire system. But what about Linux and Solaris.
Solaris on PC hardware is __exactly__ as stable as PC hardware. In other words I've never even heard of Solaris crashing and I'm on a number of Solaris e-mail lists. Pretty much the same wioth Linux. Linux is as stable as Mac OS X or even more stable and of course there is no linux company makeing hardware. Solaris does runn better on Sun hardware but it's maaajor problem is lake of drivers not stbility
One more Idea: If Apple did want to license Mac OX they could simply offer aist of "certified" computers. Verious models of Dell and so on that were tested and offer pre-installed Mac OSX. Maybe in 10 years.... After all Hell has frozen over once already
VMWare started offing thier "VMWare Server" for free a few weeks ago. Microsoft is simply price matching the VMWare product.
I'e been using QEMU which is GLP'd and does a few things neither of the above products do. However I have to admit that VMWare is slick. Good interface and easy to install.
What do you mean "most expensive"? I have one that could cost more sendmy $1M and you cn not only have my blue 4GB "mini" but you get bragging rights to owning the most expensive iPod on Earth.
"...People actually taking time out of their day to care about something other than what's on TV..."
You over estimate the public. They don't really _care_ what is on TV. Most people make the decision in this order (1) turn on the TV, (2) Let's see what's on.
There is even an industry term: "least objectionale program" All you need is the show that sucks the least to be a hit, people have already decided to watch TV.
Bill Gates got rich because he made one very smart observation: "There are a lot more people who don't know anything about computers then there are computer experts -- Why not sell to the larger market?"
How many of you remeber computers before IBM's first PC and Microsoft's DOS? It that era the big coputer makers (IBM, DEC, Sun, Data General, CDC,..) made computers for and sold them to people with much expertise in the field. The typical computer buyer either had degree(s) in enginerring, machmatics or computer science or had people on staff who did. "Joe Sixpack" didn't make buying decisions. When you sell to the non-expert public technical merit is irrelevent they buy based on other criteria they can understand like "every else is buying this, so it must be good", "this one costs tens bucks less", "I like blue"
The problem here is that the market is becomming more educated and a few of the more technically oriented buyers are beginning to use more relelent criteria like "does it do what I want?", "Will it break?"
That said I think Gate's observetion will always remain true.
Many servers (http and databses) use one process per client. It's not uncommon to see 20 copies of Apache running on a web server. I typically see a few copies of ostgreSQL running on my system.
for desktops video rendering can uses as many CPUs as you can get. Many desktop apliations are now written to tae advantage of multiple CPUs. Check out Apple's iTunes. I've seen iTunes run a dozen threads.
huge numbers of CPUs, as in "thousands" will likely be required for true AI.
Some expense is simple. Say I've got 3 weeks of vacation saved up and then when I get fired I will get a check for three weeks pay plus maybe two weeks severance pay. And then what about the moving company that hauls all the projects stuf off to some landfill or a storage place.
It's very common for the government to spend say $100M per year of some project and then one yearcongres wants to save $100M so they cut the project (and waste the $500M already spent) this is so common that everyone who does bussies woth the government wants a cancelation claise in the contract to cover unexpected expenses like lump sum vacation pay for 100 employees
Also it is common for the government to direct a canceled project to carefully preserve some of their equipment and to write up documetation and edit notes and clean up computers files. Many times
when a spacecraft is canceled the instruments will fly on some later spacecraft so it pays to keep these instruments in proper storage. Someone has to pay for these kinds of tasks
Once you become a monopoly different rules apply. Now you ask why should diffent rules apply? It is to prevent abuse of "monpoly power". So what is "monpoly power" and how can it be abused? Here is an extreame example: Let's say I'm "The Water Company", the only company that can supply water to your house. It would be easy for me to abuse this power. Let's say I jack the rates up by 10X but offer you a 90% discount if you buy tires at some tire company I'm trying to start up. So you'd be stuck. Either my my tires or you toilets don't flush and your lawn turns brown. Bottled water only goes so far.
Microsoft does the same exact thing except more subtly. They say if you are a good water customer we will give you free tires. Subtle yes but just as effective if the goal is to drive the other tire resellers out of bussines. Microsoft clearly has the goal of driving browser makers and media player makers out of bussines.
To prevent the more subtle types of abuse many places have laws to prevent "product linking" by a monopoly to prevent them effectly forcing you to buy something you don't want.
"couldn't they build it to survive impact into the ocean, and then retrieve it?"
Why spend the money to land it safely and retreive it? What would you do with it? There is no need to fly it again they already did the test. There are no plans to fly a second test with the same hardware they will do that with other hardware.
Also, and more importently an aircraft that can fly at both hypersonic and slower speeds is _much_ more complex then one that can fly at only one speed
Sorry I meant "wifi" in a generic way. The links could be wired or us a 100 feet of fiber or one could use some very directional (20+ db gain) antenna and solve the bandwidth saturation problem that way. So to be more clear: "each house would have the goal to establish 8 POINT TO POINT LINKS with other nearby houses" Yes I do agree with you that using a common "witreless router" would be a dumb way to do this and would not work anyway as I doubt those little routers handle dynamic routing well enough.
You don't need 5,000 miles of fiber. Use radio or a 100BaseT cable. What would happen if every house in a city had a wifi router that could communicated with eight nearby houses? You would have a very dense mesh with unbelievable bandwidth. Start a small club where every member has the gaol to create 8 100Mbps links with eight other club memebers. Everyone is required to route trafic. All packets have encrypted payloads so no one can look at anyone else's mail, porn or whatever.
Not all thechnology changes at the same rate. Microelectronics technology is far from mature and it's changinf fast. Chenical rocets has become a mature technology. Just look at the two newest large space bosters the Delta IV and the Atlas V. Mechanically there is nothing in there an engineer from the 1960s would not recognize. Same goes for the passigeer jet aircraft. Rapid changes in the first half of the 20th centerury and little change from the 1970's to present. I suspect that people in the 1930's figured that airplans in 2006 would be 1000 feet long and flay at 18 times the speed of sound and look like cruise ships inside complete with casinos and swimming pools. It didn't work out that way. They were just in a "bubble" of rapid aeroplane technology development and that pace was not sustainable.
BTW, it is only microelectronics that is advancing quickly now. Computers have not changed much except to get cheaper and a little faster. And software has ot changed much at all either
Those are trailers used to transport liquidified gas. Around here you see them all the time on the road because there is a "Liquid Air" plat nearby and many aerospace companies that use various type of gas. No there is not a mile between the rocket and the tank trailers. You kind of have to leave the tanks near the rocket becase you can't make the plumbing a mile long. They put the fule into the rocket then fire it and after that pump the fue out of the rock and back to the tanks. There really is no way to store cryogenic fuels miles away from the pad
Go to a public libray. Pick one that uses the Library of Congres system and look what they do then copy thier system. This will save you much effort because all your books will already have card catalog information that you can use and the system will be understandable to anyone who has been to school. But the biggest and best reason is so you can make use of other people's work. There are widely used standards for keeping library information -- don't reinvent the wheel.
One good place to find out more is at the library of congress web site. Here is an example page
http://www.loc.gov/marc/faq.html
"my company is very conservative with respect to technology, so Open Source is unfortunately not an option here..."
So what happened to your servers when Sun decided to Open Source the Solaris operatinf system? You started out as conservative as can be with Sun SPARC servers runnnig Solaris and are happy with none of that new untried stuff like Intel based servers and then without asking you Sun Make Solaris open source. Thank God for Microsoft. They are now the only ones with a fully closed source OS. If you wnt to feel 'safe" they are the only closed source option left.
And what's worse is that Sun anoucement where they will be including (and supporting) PostgreSQL in later releases of Solaris.
Yes it will work fine if you are carful about what you install. Both KDE and Gnome are not god for a low end machine. use one of the lighter weight window managers.
It's pretty simple really. If you spend hours each day doing math you get pretty good at it but those hours spent on math take away from hours spent praticing the piano so you are less good at that. Likewise if all your time is spent on games you get good at games but nothing else. Both the body and the mind adapt to get better at what it does most of the time. Not surprizing when yo say it that way.
This is the best argument to the anti-evolution crowd. That if you look at how DNA works it _has_ to evolve. It's like you are look at a clock and can see the gears and spings and then argue that "timekeepping is impossable".
What selective pressure exists today? Poverty. Lack of money, education and marketabe skills seems to be a huge selective pressure. If you look around those people who are the poorest seem to be the ones most successfull at reproduction. Poor women in Africa with eight kids. So see it all over, always it's the same the most afluent and educated have the fewest kids. What is the birth rate in Japan? Below 2.0 per woman, I think. Here in the US the trend among the more afluent is to wait longer
Why not release the results of all the bugs? All those OSS projects will then have 0.00% bugs!
Many other studies and most programmers experiance shows that there is a high likelyhood of introducing a bug whenever you make a change to existing code, In fact on a per line of code written basis "fixes" are about the buggyist code you can write. So if you have.3 bugs per KSLOC (Kilo lines of code) in mature code like Apache orthe Linux kernal the new stuff that fixes a bug might have three times as many bugs per line. But the bug fix is typically small, many time just one to four lines so you do make projess. Over tiome the "defect rate" falls. Graphically it is a curve to reaches zero at infinity.
"Everyone" knows the above so after even a triveal fix you test the heck out of the system then put it though a long beta cycle. Well, at least the projects that have some kind of process in place do this. But note that all the "best" OSS systems sdo have a very strong and well ordered developent process. I'd say the low bug rate is due to the process. The best they can do is make incremental tweeks to the process and wait. At infinity the bug rate will in fact reach zero, or so says the theory.
Title: Intel Unveils New Chips to Battle AMD
Summary: Intel will anounce new chip at upcomming event
Real World: At a future event Intel will talk about a chip that will be
available some months after the event
What this means: In the future Intel will talk about the future
We've have open souce routers for 20+ years. Any UNIX box with two or more network interfaes is a "router".
THere have been live CD implementations of Linux based routers for years now. This is just "Yet Another".
That's one of the first things you turn off to protect the machine.
No, you don't have to turn it off. Just don't give out user accounts to other people. These guys who broke in where gien accounts with passwords. SSH is very secure as long as you closely control what accounts may be accessed via ssh and varify that these accounts use strong passwords. But if you machine has an account with username "bob" and uses "bob" as the password your sytem is wide open, or at least Bob's account is.
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"f you have an open Opteron socket on your multi-way box, wouldn't you probably achieve better performance by shoving another Opteron into there?" No. Let's assume you are computing an FFT on some data and the Operon CPU can do (say) 100 per second. Adding a second CPU would at beat get you up to 200 per second. But hardware FFTs can go maybe 10X faster than software FFTS so with the new chip you can do 1100 per second. With a general purpose CPU there needs to be balance but if you know you will be computing FFTs you might build 16 or 32 hardware multiply units on the chip and you can leave off just about everything else. The chip only needs to be 3X faster then a CPU to look good but for specialized applications 10X is not hard to get.
Yes, selective presures have changed. Currently the biggest predictor od how many kids a person will have is economic class. The poorest and least educated have the most kids. Poor, ingle women in Africa "win" with 8 kids each while afluent familes in Tokyo have few ofspring. Whatever it is that make one poor and uneducatedwill spread through the gene pool.
This sounds more like a "milestone" then a "breakthrough". non-spinning sounds like a huge simplifying assumption as I doubt there are many non-spinniong black holes except for very, very small ones.
Your argument sounds good: Mac's stability comes from Apples control over the entire system. But what about Linux and Solaris.
Solaris on PC hardware is __exactly__ as stable as PC hardware. In other words I've never even heard of Solaris crashing and I'm on a number of Solaris e-mail lists. Pretty much the same wioth Linux. Linux is as stable as Mac OS X or even more stable and of course there is no linux company makeing hardware. Solaris does runn better on Sun hardware but it's maaajor problem is lake of drivers not stbility
One more Idea: If Apple did want to license Mac OX they could simply offer aist of "certified" computers. Verious models of Dell and so on that were tested and offer pre-installed Mac OSX. Maybe in 10 years.... After all Hell has frozen over once already
I'e been using QEMU which is GLP'd and does a few things neither of the above products do. However I have to admit that VMWare is slick. Good interface and easy to install.
What do you mean "most expensive"? I have one that could cost more sendmy $1M and you cn not only have my blue 4GB "mini" but you get bragging rights to owning the most expensive iPod on Earth.
You over estimate the public. They don't really _care_ what is on TV. Most people make the decision in this order (1) turn on the TV, (2) Let's see what's on.
There is even an industry term: "least objectionale program" All you need is the show that sucks the least to be a hit, people have already decided to watch TV.
How many of you remeber computers before IBM's first PC and Microsoft's DOS? It that era the big coputer makers (IBM, DEC, Sun, Data General, CDC, ..) made computers for and sold them to people with much expertise in the field. The typical computer buyer either had degree(s) in enginerring, machmatics or computer science or had people on staff who did. "Joe Sixpack" didn't make buying decisions. When you sell to the non-expert public technical merit is irrelevent they buy based on other criteria they can understand like "every else is buying this, so it must be good", "this one costs tens bucks less", "I like blue"
The problem here is that the market is becomming more educated and a few of the more technically oriented buyers are beginning to use more relelent criteria like "does it do what I want?", "Will it break?"
That said I think Gate's observetion will always remain true.
for desktops video rendering can uses as many CPUs as you can get. Many desktop apliations are now written to tae advantage of multiple CPUs. Check out Apple's iTunes. I've seen iTunes run a dozen threads.
huge numbers of CPUs, as in "thousands" will likely be required for true AI.
It's very common for the government to spend say $100M per year of some project and then one yearcongres wants to save $100M so they cut the project (and waste the $500M already spent) this is so common that everyone who does bussies woth the government wants a cancelation claise in the contract to cover unexpected expenses like lump sum vacation pay for 100 employees Also it is common for the government to direct a canceled project to carefully preserve some of their equipment and to write up documetation and edit notes and clean up computers files. Many times when a spacecraft is canceled the instruments will fly on some later spacecraft so it pays to keep these instruments in proper storage. Someone has to pay for these kinds of tasks
Microsoft does the same exact thing except more subtly. They say if you are a good water customer we will give you free tires. Subtle yes but just as effective if the goal is to drive the other tire resellers out of bussines. Microsoft clearly has the goal of driving browser makers and media player makers out of bussines. To prevent the more subtle types of abuse many places have laws to prevent "product linking" by a monopoly to prevent them effectly forcing you to buy something you don't want.
Why spend the money to land it safely and retreive it? What would you do with it? There is no need to fly it again they already did the test. There are no plans to fly a second test with the same hardware they will do that with other hardware. Also, and more importently an aircraft that can fly at both hypersonic and slower speeds is _much_ more complex then one that can fly at only one speed
Sorry I meant "wifi" in a generic way. The links could be wired or us a 100 feet of fiber or one could use some very directional (20+ db gain) antenna and solve the bandwidth saturation problem that way. So to be more clear: "each house would have the goal to establish 8 POINT TO POINT LINKS with other nearby houses" Yes I do agree with you that using a common "witreless router" would be a dumb way to do this and would not work anyway as I doubt those little routers handle dynamic routing well enough.
You don't need 5,000 miles of fiber. Use radio or a 100BaseT cable. What would happen if every house in a city had a wifi router that could communicated with eight nearby houses? You would have a very dense mesh with unbelievable bandwidth. Start a small club where every member has the gaol to create 8 100Mbps links with eight other club memebers. Everyone is required to route trafic. All packets have encrypted payloads so no one can look at anyone else's mail, porn or whatever.
Not all thechnology changes at the same rate. Microelectronics technology is far from mature and it's changinf fast. Chenical rocets has become a mature technology. Just look at the two newest large space bosters the Delta IV and the Atlas V. Mechanically there is nothing in there an engineer from the 1960s would not recognize. Same goes for the passigeer jet aircraft. Rapid changes in the first half of the 20th centerury and little change from the 1970's to present. I suspect that people in the 1930's figured that airplans in 2006 would be 1000 feet long and flay at 18 times the speed of sound and look like cruise ships inside complete with casinos and swimming pools. It didn't work out that way. They were just in a "bubble" of rapid aeroplane technology development and that pace was not sustainable. BTW, it is only microelectronics that is advancing quickly now. Computers have not changed much except to get cheaper and a little faster. And software has ot changed much at all either
Those are trailers used to transport liquidified gas. Around here you see them all the time on the road because there is a "Liquid Air" plat nearby and many aerospace companies that use various type of gas. No there is not a mile between the rocket and the tank trailers. You kind of have to leave the tanks near the rocket becase you can't make the plumbing a mile long. They put the fule into the rocket then fire it and after that pump the fue out of the rock and back to the tanks. There really is no way to store cryogenic fuels miles away from the pad
Go to a public libray. Pick one that uses the Library of Congres system and look what they do then copy thier system. This will save you much effort because all your books will already have card catalog information that you can use and the system will be understandable to anyone who has been to school. But the biggest and best reason is so you can make use of other people's work. There are widely used standards for keeping library information -- don't reinvent the wheel. One good place to find out more is at the library of congress web site. Here is an example page http://www.loc.gov/marc/faq.html
So what happened to your servers when Sun decided to Open Source the Solaris operatinf system? You started out as conservative as can be with Sun SPARC servers runnnig Solaris and are happy with none of that new untried stuff like Intel based servers and then without asking you Sun Make Solaris open source. Thank God for Microsoft. They are now the only ones with a fully closed source OS. If you wnt to feel 'safe" they are the only closed source option left. And what's worse is that Sun anoucement where they will be including (and supporting) PostgreSQL in later releases of Solaris.
Yes it will work fine if you are carful about what you install. Both KDE and Gnome are not god for a low end machine. use one of the lighter weight window managers.
It's pretty simple really. If you spend hours each day doing math you get pretty good at it but those hours spent on math take away from hours spent praticing the piano so you are less good at that. Likewise if all your time is spent on games you get good at games but nothing else. Both the body and the mind adapt to get better at what it does most of the time. Not surprizing when yo say it that way.
What selective pressure exists today? Poverty. Lack of money, education and marketabe skills seems to be a huge selective pressure. If you look around those people who are the poorest seem to be the ones most successfull at reproduction. Poor women in Africa with eight kids. So see it all over, always it's the same the most afluent and educated have the fewest kids. What is the birth rate in Japan? Below 2.0 per woman, I think. Here in the US the trend among the more afluent is to wait longer
Many other studies and most programmers experiance shows that there is a high likelyhood of introducing a bug whenever you make a change to existing code, In fact on a per line of code written basis "fixes" are about the buggyist code you can write. So if you have .3 bugs per KSLOC (Kilo lines of code) in mature code like Apache orthe Linux kernal the new stuff that fixes a bug might have three times as many bugs per line. But the bug fix is typically small, many time just one to four lines so you do make projess. Over tiome the "defect rate" falls. Graphically it is a curve to reaches zero at infinity.
"Everyone" knows the above so after even a triveal fix you test the heck out of the system then put it though a long beta cycle. Well, at least the projects that have some kind of process in place do this. But note that all the "best" OSS systems sdo have a very strong and well ordered developent process. I'd say the low bug rate is due to the process. The best they can do is make incremental tweeks to the process and wait. At infinity the bug rate will in fact reach zero, or so says the theory.
Summary: Intel will anounce new chip at upcomming event
Real World: At a future event Intel will talk about a chip that will be available some months after the event
What this means: In the future Intel will talk about the future
No news here. Tell me whan I can buy one.
We've have open souce routers for 20+ years. Any UNIX box with two or more network interfaes is a "router". THere have been live CD implementations of Linux based routers for years now. This is just "Yet Another".
That's one of the first things you turn off to protect the machine. No, you don't have to turn it off. Just don't give out user accounts to other people. These guys who broke in where gien accounts with passwords. SSH is very secure as long as you closely control what accounts may be accessed via ssh and varify that these accounts use strong passwords. But if you machine has an account with username "bob" and uses "bob" as the password your sytem is wide open, or at least Bob's account is.