The only source of leaks in normal use into a small boat, like my own steel-hulled 12M, is via the stern tube. But eventually something will happen - perhaps a rust hole, perhaps an underwater obstruction, perhaps being driven against a weir - and I will be very relieved to have a bilge pump going while I try to plug the hole and make it to dry dock.
However, when my father had his little steel hulled boat in WW2, he had more interesting problems - fire from the Germans and the Japanese, mine detonations and shells at a distance springing the odd rivet, the odd incendiary dropping on the deck. At the moment the Internet is a lot more like WW2 than a nice peaceful river.
Ships have bilge pumps because there are just so many ways a leak can start. In fact, back in the day of wooden ships it was not unknown for the Dutch to fit old ships with wind powered bilge pumps and just keep them pumping so they could be used beyond the normal lease of life. The analogy is not exact, but it is common for any very complex system to have continuous maintenance needs that in theory could be avoided. I'm not justifying MS, just pointing out that your analogy would lead to MS building in the equivalent of automatic bilge pumps, fire extinguishers and smoke alarms, just like you have to have on a ship. Which seems to be what they are at last doing.
If Hope is right, then I don't need to pay him anything. I can just stake my own claim to the Moon - which, given the current state of manned spaceflight, is just as good as his. In the absence of any evidence to the contrary, I can counter-claim for any parts of the Moon he says he owns.
There is also the minor issue of jurisdiction. Who says anybody on Earth has any claim to the Moon? For all he knows, there's some Galactic government out there, the Earth is somebody's backyard and the Moon is the Zen garden they built to think deep thoughts in.
While on this witter, has anybody considered the state of intellectual property law if it turns out there is a Galactic government, that it has IP which has now ratcheted up to several billion years of extension, and that it extends to business methods and software patents? When they find us, they'll sue every corporation and individual on the entire planet. And win...
The serious point I'm trying to make is that trying to extend your jurisdiction too far just exposes you to the person who has an even bigger reach. The tacit assumption of successive superpower governments from Persia and Rome through China to the US is that there is nobody else out there. Which is not proven to say the least.
The story reminds me of the old Naval urban legend of the file being passed around a shore establishment and getting fatter and fatter without getting closer to completion until somebody scrawls on the front page "Round objects". Eventually the file returns but now on the front page a senior officer has written "Please will Mr. Round state his rank and clarify his objection".
So I have to ask: What is it about business that it objects to Eclipse?
Marketing: "We need a CRM module!"
Development: "Nobody wants CRM, anyway we're busy"
Marketing: "You will do it, only we can't be bothered to spec it out properly"
Development: "OK, here's your half-assed CRM system."
Sales: "Product can't be right, nobody wants it."
Slashdot: "CRM? Nobody gives a flying sexual intercourse."
Google, Amazon.com etc: "Oh yes they do, but it needs to be an in-house, business driven and tightly integrated solution, not some third party kludge. "
I've just reduced my development system from six boxes to three. Running VMWare on a laptop is all very well but 2.5 inch hard drives are a major limitation, even if you get the faster 5400 rpm drives. The data transfer rate is slower, the seek is slower, the capcity per buck is far lower. There is no way they compare to a couple of 10000rpm WD SATA drives when it comes to booting up, shutting down and taking snapshots - which I do a lot. I imagine too that the memory speed on the notebooks will be lower than for equivalent desktops. The loss of productivity would prevent me from moving over to a notebook.
If the Apple X86 portables are dual core - which they should be - they will still be up against PC portables which will have been in the market longer. It will be interesting indeed to see where (K)Ubuntu and Novell/SuSE have got to by April next year.
I am currently getting good results beta testing - sorry- Windows XP 64 bit as a host for VMWare 5.5 on AMD64 and I expect to get just as good results when 5.5 goes release and gets installed on Linux. Much as I like my OS X boxes, I'm finding it increasingly hard to understand what compelling extra features I would get for my money from an Apple X86 laptop.
I saw a reference the other day that suggested that Google now has more ad revenue than any print company. I'm sorry I didn't bookmark it, but it may well be true. Newsprint is paid for mainly by commercial ads and classified ads. Google is doing well on the commercial side. If as rumored they get in on the classified ads as well they could take a whole chunk off of eBay (lots of eBay users really do not want auctions and "buy it now" dilutes the brand) as well as taking another chunk out of print media. Tie classified ads to Google maps and you could apply serious traction to the job ad market, house sales...
Anybody who thinks "only search as a product" neither understands Google nor the power of search.
This seems to be more about bad rack design than raised floors. It's a basic principle of ducting design that, as the airflow spreads out from the source through different paths, the total cross section of the paths should stay roughly constant. (Yes, I am simplifying and I as sure someone can explain this better and in more detail. Yes, duct length and pressure drop is important. But the basic concept is true. If I want consistent airflow in my system, and the inlet is one square metre, the total of all the outlets should be around one square metre too.)
Standard racks tend completely to ignore this. They rely on the internal modules handling their own airflow with fans, which is fine if the inlet area to the modules is much less than the size of the duct entering the cabinet. But if the total area of the inlets to the modules is more than the incoming duct area, the modules furthest from the duct (i.e. the ones at the top) will be starved of air. 1U servers are inevitably going to worsen the problem because they create a large number of competing inlets, stratified up the cabinet. Sucking air out at the top will only work if the air flow is so great it creates a significant pressure drop across the servers, which leads to noise problems, is inefficient, and may adversely affect local cooling inside the server. Blades are potentially much better because, with fewer modules in the cabinet, each with similar requirements, it should be easier to design a cabinet-wide ducting system. However, the most logical solution is to go back to designing the entire cabinet as an integrated system - in which case the entire base of the cabinet can be the inlet duct opening, with appropriate internal structures and blade design to fulfil the objectives of keeping consistent flow to each blade rack and across each blade.
It's the old engineering issue - ad hoc design leads to suboptimal results, and systems need to be considered as a whole. Blades are, depending on how you look at it, a step in the right direction or a return to the way things used to be designed when real computers were loads of tight packed boards full of ECL and proper cooling design of the cabinet was essential if the thing was to work at all.
The metre (NOT meter, please...this is the systeme internationale des unites des poids et mesures we're talking about here, whose name can't even be spelled out correctly on Slashdot I find) is defined in terms of speed of light IN VACUO. No problem. Last I heard, IBM hadn't been using vacuum tubes in quite a while.
The Commedia ("Divine Comedy" is not an appropriate translation into modern English) consists of the Inferno, the Purgatorio, and the Paradiso. You are referring to the first part and are thus quite right, though you are wrong in thinking that (a) IBM is bundling Solaris - they aren't and (b) that inferno has anything to do with heat. It's just the word for Hell.
But did you realise that there is actually a Vita Nuovo who produce an OS called Inferno? These are deep waters indeed.
In any case, there are clearly references to Slashdot in the Commedia. There is a verse which is clearly an attack on the moderation system: "One set of people advance to power and another falls back according to the judgement of the one who lies hidden like a snake in vegetation" Perche una gente impera e l'altra langue secondo la giudicio de costei che est occulta come in erba l'angue Apologies for any spelling errors, I'm writing from memory and I'm too lazy to look it up.
If everybody in the US drove cars this size for their commuting, even with a gas engine, there would probably be no oil capacity problem and no demand for a fuel cell car. Just persuading people to drive European size cars would make a huge difference. But presumably the real hidden benefit of the fuel cell to the auto makers is that it will ultimately enable them to keep right on making SUVs and suburban trucks.
All memory has an access time, and the further you get from the CPU the longer it is going to be. CPU registers have the shortest access time, with (nowadays) subnanosecond access. L1 cache comes next, then L2, then external RAM, then HDD, and finally the slow backing store represented nowadays by CD and DVD. This heirarchical memory architecture changes with time mostly in that the caches grow bigger, so the 640K of RAM from DOS days now fits into the cache of each processor in a pentium-D with room to spare, and a Pentium-M could in theory run DOS with extended and expanded memory without needing any external RAM at all. (I'd almost like to try that.)
So talking about optimisation for low-latency RAM is, I suspect, nonsense. What we are surely seeing here is that the actual limitation on memory bandwidth is somewhere else - in the memory controller,in the cache controller, in the CPU fetch rate, in the rate at which stuff is being fetched from hard disk, in bus contention. Overclocking - speeding up memory controllers and buses - will have an effect. Reducing the number of wait states on the memory bus will not have much effect on performance if the total number of active memory cycles in a given period is largely unchanged.
If you had a need for real speed in an application which was not dependent on the graphics subsystem or access to network and HDD, I am sure you could get much more performance out of low-wait state RAM, but you would do it by HARDWARE design, not by software optimisation.
As a simple example from the dim and distant past when I was building hardware, TI used to have a microcontroller called the TMS9995 which ran at, for the day, a hefty 12MHz. With the slow DRAM of the time, it always needed a wait state and this meant that it could manage, as I recall, two memory accesses per microsecond. With static RAM, it could manage 3. The 9995 actually stored its working registers in external memory and so this meant a real world speedup of nearly 30%. The 8088, on the other hand, kept its working registers on-chip and had a limited instruction pipeline. As a result, the equivalent speedup was nothing like 30%. This was due to hardware differences not software differences.
In fact, the applications which really test out the memory subsystem are not games - they are databases and webservers, which hardly use the graphics system at all. And in these cases, for low end systems, the big beast in the equation is cache. It's quite astonishing how a Pentium-M can churn through a badly designed join while a low end AMD 64 struggles, simply because one has 2Mbytes of cache and the other has only 512K. As a result, for ordinary technical laptop and desktop work, I now specify Pentium-M, the AMD 64 with 1Mbyte cache, or pentium-D with 1Mbyte per core. You know it makes sense.(And now everyone can explain why I'm wrong, in my turn)
Anticompetitive practice legislation was designed to punish cartels who raised prices artificially, not ones which forced them down. In many industries the way this issue is handled is by meetings in standards bodies such as ISO and the IEC. Representatives of manufacturers (and governments) get together to agree on standards - norms- for product types, and this is perfectly legal because it is intended to promote safety and to enable easier consumer choice and so lower prices. And at these meetings manufacturer representatives never ever get together in the bar and say "OK guys, balls on the table, we're being eaten up by these shit merchants from -name of third world country-, how low can we all go on price to keep them out while we raise the standards barriers and get them excluded on safety grounds?". Because that would be collusion...and in any case there are no reporters present and no notes are taken. Why otherwise would executives of large companies travel round the world to boring meetings when they could exchange traceable emails or recordable phone calls instead?
So to my mind the errors made by the DRAM companies were:
They seem to have put things in writing
They worked with a JEDEC standard instead of creating an IEC standard and so keeping out patentable technology.
They weren't based in the US (the most serious error).
I don't agree. I can only assume you haven't used a lot of professional applications. Office is the exception rather than the rule for a really large app. If Office wasn't around, OO2 would be considered pretty good. But Office is not typical of the software industry. In fact, Microsoft's own server side tools are not as well finished as Office. Microsoft has to do something to justify the huge profits from Office and to keep users happy, because for most people the suite already does far more than they will ever need. But professional line of business applications need to be functional rather than pretty. (At the other end of the scale I keep seeing very "pretty" apps designed by people who are designers rather than coders, which look nice but actually seem to do very little.)
A smaller OO would be a Good Thing, but let's be clear; it would have a lot less functionality. A usability review which really took into account the actual needs of ordinary users and produced a cut down OO would probably improve speed and size quicker than rewriting the code base. If that's what you mean by "minimalistic design" then yes, I agree. I hope Google will produce a download-on-demand version of OO which starts with a minimal version and then downloads additional functionality as you need it, but I doubt that is what they intend for one moment, or that I can outguess the calibre of people that Google can recruit.
Interesting that I seem to have read the Book of Mormon more thoroughly than the parent poster. But it's not surprising. As I said in my original post, I have a chunk of my family in Utah, and my great^4 uncle was one of those English people who crossed the Atlantic and trekked with Brigham Young. His brother died on the voyage. I guess somewhere in Utah my parish roll record is on microfilm.
Perhaps I should qualify my own remarks by saying that the Mormon achievement in Utah is remarkable. But, as someone who studied sociology of religion, I see Mormonism itself as a unifying system intended to give a sense of social coherence to people from disparate backgrounds. The parallels with the origins of Islam are striking, so much so that students of such things classify both Islam and Mormonism as schisms of Christianity, though I'm not competent to comment on that.
I won't be around in a thousand years time to see if Mormonism has resulted in the explosion of achievement in science, architecture and civilisation that followed the establishment of Islam, but I do think the recently reported fact that Mormons no longer constitute a majority in Salt Lake City is a dead giveaway.
And in answer to your last question - I am not an atheist. However, I do not believe in any kind of afterlife, and I can point to this position being supported at many points in the Bible. I won't bore you with my own theological beliefs, but whether or not you believe in a Creator God the idea that God would create the entire universe just as a kind of juvenile training system for a part of the human race to go on to another, invisible universe for which there is no objective evidence whatsoever - well, it's not worth spending time on. However, people who do believe it are extremely dangerous because they have no vested interest in preserving our planet. I would rather be governed by atheists who believe that this is what we have and therefore we need to look after it, than by people who think that if WW3 happens tomorrow, they will be sitting on a cloud playing a harp.
As a newbie around here, I am frankly amazed at some of what is being posted. People in the 21st century, presumably many in technical careers, are writing about Intelligent Design as if it wasn't just another derivation of one of the so-called 7 proofs of the existence of God. This is a pre-medieval discussion!
To my mind, it's a pity that basic history of science and history of religion is not taught in schools. It might come as a shock to a lot of Americans to discover that a lot of the people who discovered that Creationism was bunk were mostly ordained clergy in the Church of England (==Episcopalians), working in Cambridge in the 19th century. As they gradually understood the geological history of the Earth and the fossil record, as they took on the ideas of evolution, the sheer weight of evidence caused a lot of them to re-think the basics of their faith. In other words, it was the people with the theological background - men who could easily read the Bible in the original, which is more than I imagine the Kansas Board of Education can do - who accumulated and accepted the evidence that the Bible could not be literally true, and had to think out their theology based on the new discoveries. The -I choose the word with care- garbage that is Intelligent Design is part of a trend of thought that any well educated student of theology will know is fatally flawed. So why is this discussion still going on?
The problem, of course, is that a lot of religion in the US grew in a cultural vacuum. It took place on the frontiers, well away from the academic world in Europe (and the East Coast.) That's how ludicrous religions like Mormonism were able to evolve: uneducated people with limited vocabularies didn't realise that prophets with names like Moron and Ether were either the result of ignorance or exploitation. It hurts me to say this, because I have relatives descended from a family member who was on the first of the Mormon treks to Utah and they are fine people. But they have also not had the educational opportunities of the English side of the family, who in recent history got their educations at Cambridge, Oxford and London and as a result regard both Mormons and Southern Baptists in much the same light as Wahabis or Hassidim. It's extraordinary that George Bush senior, for whom I have a lot of time, is an educated man who knows that Christian fundamentalism is deeply flawed, while his son claims to embrace it. But it's just like an educated Pakistani or Iranian struggling to understand why his son is picking up aggressive (and regressive) ideas down the madrissah.
Until I found that people were still taking this stuff seriously, I used to think that Richard Dawkins and Jay Gould protested too much. But now I realise that there is a huge tide of reaction in the US, and that it needs to be stopped and reversed or it will ultimately lead to new wars of religion. It's absurd to watch American politicians attacking reactionary Islam and claiming to spread democracy while being prepared, in support of reactionary Christianity, to reduce women's rights. Theologically, I suspect all fundamentalists are much the same at bottom, and they are never happier than when they are either fighting fundamentalists of different religions, or fighting non-fundamentalists of their own religion.
Anti-virus programs are an obvious example of a case where the subscription model is appropriate. There is a clear need for continuous updating. There are other cases, such as stable corporate applications that function within a corporate environment, where periodic major upgrades are required, driven by business need, but until the buying round starts the exact nature of the changes is unknown. In those cases, subscription may not be appropriate, though there may be a support contract.
I think too you need to look at what the value proposition is. For an enterprise Linux, it's understood that it is a work in progress and that, to a certain extent, money in represents value out. In effect, Linux is a clever way for competing companies to cooperate on core infrastructure without having to reveal what they are doing to the competition. It has the benefits of socialism (large resources focussed on a task) with the benefits of capitalism (market driven progress.) A subscription model fuels that by providing a market for people to demonstrate their demand for the product in hard cash. For Windows, the understood background is that a company has developed a product that is expected to work properly first time (this is written quite seriously, I'm not judging whether or not Microsoft achieves this.) For this reason, companies are expected to pay a lot for it up front. A subscription model allows Microsoft to screw up royally and still get cash while the problems are fixed, i.e. it destroys the Microsoft value proposition. If I buy a car and it fails within warranty, I expect it to be fixed FOC. In fact, nowadays I don't expect it will fail during warranty at all. The last car I bought (VW group) survived its first 4 years with only routine servicing - which is largely why I still have it. When cars were unreliable heaps of junk - i.e. until the 1990s unless there was a 3-pointed star on it somewhere - leasing made a certain amount of sense because the thing was really unfit for use after just a few years of company driving. There was no sense of owing a valuable capital asset with many years of good service in it, it was a case of having a service on tap.
By that analogy, I expect software that comes with a capital asset to be largely subscription free. I would not be happy if there was an annual licence for software to use a digital camera. I would not be at all happy to have to pay an annual licence to boot my PC or read my own archives. But I accept that I need to subscribe for FUTURE services - email, internet connectivity, to deal with new viruses and worms.
To cut the inevitable long story short, I once worked for a company that had one of those MRP systems that had an annual contract and a licence key. One year they screwed up delivering the new licence keys. For three days at a busy time of year, not only could we not enter new business, we could not read old business data. The pain was such that I made it a primary objective to win over the board and replace the system with one which did not stop working under these conditions.
Before you look it up, you should know it shows a half naked woman writhing around what looks like an enormous yellow penis. You couldn't make it up. But what the heck? The researcher has just got more publicity than he probably ever imagined. And his next funding offer might come from highly unexpected sources - the sort of people who need huge server farms and wide pipes to, ah, service their clients.
I think it's well known that a GCHQ scientist (with the unfortunate name of Cocks) came up with the public/private key idea before Rivest,Shamir and Adelmann. British security predictably sat on it, with the result it was patented in the US and the UK lost the benefits of yet another bit of fundamental research.
However, given the prevailing attitudes in the English speaking world, I suggest you patent your ideas in the non-UK EU. Luxembourg?
BTW, I live in an area where there is a local project under way to produce bio-ethanol (suits our climate better than biodiesel) in a small-scale plant of around 20M. This will be fuel for local consumption, probably needing nothing but a short-haul tanker vehicle for delivery. I guess you don't live in a rural area, or you would know about farming cooperatives. We have an excellent one which is used by people from local towns as well as by farmers, and they could easily set up the necessary infrastructure to supply biofuel if it was available from local sources.
I'm in no way opposed to fuel cells - in fact a distant cousin more or less invented the modern fuel cell - but I have considerable experience of pressurised hydrogen and believe me, it is a pig to contain and a pig to manage. Metal hydrides have consistently failed to live up to expectations for hydrogen storage. The advantage of hydrogen is that leaks indoors are relatively safe compared to propane or butane, and unlike methanol it is not toxic. The other advantage, that no CO2 is produced, is lessened because the oil industry's proposals for making the hydrogen result in a lot of CO2 at point of manufacture. The system may be overall carbon neutral, but so are the biofuels.
I don't doubt that in the long term we will come up with a better localised storage/generation technology. I just doubt it will take over in my lifetime.
If we look at the speed of adoption of portable power sources, this looks more unlikely than most. Just consider that most of the world's portable power generation is by gasoline (or Diesel) engines; most of the portable temporary storage is still by lead-acid batteries. So the bulk of the market is still using refinements of 100+ year old technologies. A lot of the rest is using a technology nearly as old: Nickel cadmium, a derivative of the old nickel-iron (NiFe) cell. Rechargeable lithium cells are the only really new thing on the block and they have been in development for many years.
All of these are still based on the simple air cooled pot with two electrodes format. No-one has yet commercialised a single fuel cell technology for anything other than the most niche of applications, partly because storage cells really are quite efficient. And yet we are expected to believe that a technology based on an unproven delivery system involving a substance that has never been deployed in volume in the field, is somehow going to come to market in a foreseeable future.
I suspect that the oil industry is behind all of this. They are desperate to promote hydrogen technology - why? Because many of the alternatives - biodiesel, bioethanol, wind, do not require large scale infrastructure. The oil industry maintains its grip because it controls the means of distribution as well as production. The difficulties of hydrogen storage and transmission mean that the expensively developed business model of the oil industry continues to work for them because they have the infratructure. Biodiesel or bioethanol can be produced and sold by a single farmer. (which is why the oil industry wouldn't want alcohol-fulled cells.) Wind farms use the electrical grid that competes with the oil industry. Technologies like coal burning with CO2 resequestering use disused oil wells but not the distribution infrastructure.
Constantly hacking away at "hydrogen this and hydrogen that is just around the corner" is intended to promote acceptance in the public mind.
It would be interesting to know whether it would be more efficient to use nuclear power stations to produce hydrogen from water, or use the waste heat to help drive fermentation/distillation plants for producing bioethanol and biomethanol.
Isn't the problem here that there was a delay between the creation of the identity and the refusal to allow it? If "inappropriate" names were to be notified within, say, a seven day period, and this was made very clear at registration, there would be far less irritation. The whole point of role playing games is to build up an existence in an imaginary world, and the longer the time that elapses, the greater the unfairness. At the same time, the naming policy does rather point to a fundamental flaw of the concept - who determines what is appropriate? I doubt that a committee of descendants of Inklings, medieval historians and Zen masters sits on the matter.
Slashdot Mirror
However, when my father had his little steel hulled boat in WW2, he had more interesting problems - fire from the Germans and the Japanese, mine detonations and shells at a distance springing the odd rivet, the odd incendiary dropping on the deck. At the moment the Internet is a lot more like WW2 than a nice peaceful river.
Ships have bilge pumps because there are just so many ways a leak can start. In fact, back in the day of wooden ships it was not unknown for the Dutch to fit old ships with wind powered bilge pumps and just keep them pumping so they could be used beyond the normal lease of life. The analogy is not exact, but it is common for any very complex system to have continuous maintenance needs that in theory could be avoided. I'm not justifying MS, just pointing out that your analogy would lead to MS building in the equivalent of automatic bilge pumps, fire extinguishers and smoke alarms, just like you have to have on a ship. Which seems to be what they are at last doing.
There is also the minor issue of jurisdiction. Who says anybody on Earth has any claim to the Moon? For all he knows, there's some Galactic government out there, the Earth is somebody's backyard and the Moon is the Zen garden they built to think deep thoughts in.
While on this witter, has anybody considered the state of intellectual property law if it turns out there is a Galactic government, that it has IP which has now ratcheted up to several billion years of extension, and that it extends to business methods and software patents? When they find us, they'll sue every corporation and individual on the entire planet. And win...
The serious point I'm trying to make is that trying to extend your jurisdiction too far just exposes you to the person who has an even bigger reach. The tacit assumption of successive superpower governments from Persia and Rome through China to the US is that there is nobody else out there. Which is not proven to say the least.
So I have to ask: What is it about business that it objects to Eclipse?
Development: "Nobody wants CRM, anyway we're busy"
Marketing: "You will do it, only we can't be bothered to spec it out properly"
Development: "OK, here's your half-assed CRM system."
Sales: "Product can't be right, nobody wants it."
Slashdot: "CRM? Nobody gives a flying sexual intercourse."
Google, Amazon.com etc: "Oh yes they do, but it needs to be an in-house, business driven and tightly integrated solution, not some third party kludge. "
If the Apple X86 portables are dual core - which they should be - they will still be up against PC portables which will have been in the market longer. It will be interesting indeed to see where (K)Ubuntu and Novell/SuSE have got to by April next year.
I am currently getting good results beta testing - sorry- Windows XP 64 bit as a host for VMWare 5.5 on AMD64 and I expect to get just as good results when 5.5 goes release and gets installed on Linux. Much as I like my OS X boxes, I'm finding it increasingly hard to understand what compelling extra features I would get for my money from an Apple X86 laptop.
Anybody who thinks "only search as a product" neither understands Google nor the power of search.
Der Himmel nicht die Erde umgeht
Wie die Gelehrten meynen
Muss jeden Mann sein Wurm gewiss
Kopernikus des seinen
(roughly The heavens do not go round the Earth as the learned held. Every man will get eaten by worms, even Copernicus)
Standard racks tend completely to ignore this. They rely on the internal modules handling their own airflow with fans, which is fine if the inlet area to the modules is much less than the size of the duct entering the cabinet. But if the total area of the inlets to the modules is more than the incoming duct area, the modules furthest from the duct (i.e. the ones at the top) will be starved of air. 1U servers are inevitably going to worsen the problem because they create a large number of competing inlets, stratified up the cabinet. Sucking air out at the top will only work if the air flow is so great it creates a significant pressure drop across the servers, which leads to noise problems, is inefficient, and may adversely affect local cooling inside the server. Blades are potentially much better because, with fewer modules in the cabinet, each with similar requirements, it should be easier to design a cabinet-wide ducting system. However, the most logical solution is to go back to designing the entire cabinet as an integrated system - in which case the entire base of the cabinet can be the inlet duct opening, with appropriate internal structures and blade design to fulfil the objectives of keeping consistent flow to each blade rack and across each blade.
It's the old engineering issue - ad hoc design leads to suboptimal results, and systems need to be considered as a whole. Blades are, depending on how you look at it, a step in the right direction or a return to the way things used to be designed when real computers were loads of tight packed boards full of ECL and proper cooling design of the cabinet was essential if the thing was to work at all.
The metre (NOT meter, please...this is the systeme internationale des unites des poids et mesures we're talking about here, whose name can't even be spelled out correctly on Slashdot I find) is defined in terms of speed of light IN VACUO. No problem. Last I heard, IBM hadn't been using vacuum tubes in quite a while.
But did you realise that there is actually a Vita Nuovo who produce an OS called Inferno? These are deep waters indeed.
In any case, there are clearly references to Slashdot in the Commedia. There is a verse which is clearly an attack on the moderation system:
"One set of people advance to power and another falls back according to the judgement of the one who lies hidden like a snake in vegetation"
Perche una gente impera e l'altra langue
secondo la giudicio de costei
che est occulta come in erba l'angue
Apologies for any spelling errors, I'm writing from memory and I'm too lazy to look it up.
If everybody in the US drove cars this size for their commuting, even with a gas engine, there would probably be no oil capacity problem and no demand for a fuel cell car. Just persuading people to drive European size cars would make a huge difference. But presumably the real hidden benefit of the fuel cell to the auto makers is that it will ultimately enable them to keep right on making SUVs and suburban trucks.
So talking about optimisation for low-latency RAM is, I suspect, nonsense. What we are surely seeing here is that the actual limitation on memory bandwidth is somewhere else - in the memory controller,in the cache controller, in the CPU fetch rate, in the rate at which stuff is being fetched from hard disk, in bus contention. Overclocking - speeding up memory controllers and buses - will have an effect. Reducing the number of wait states on the memory bus will not have much effect on performance if the total number of active memory cycles in a given period is largely unchanged.
If you had a need for real speed in an application which was not dependent on the graphics subsystem or access to network and HDD, I am sure you could get much more performance out of low-wait state RAM, but you would do it by HARDWARE design, not by software optimisation.
As a simple example from the dim and distant past when I was building hardware, TI used to have a microcontroller called the TMS9995 which ran at, for the day, a hefty 12MHz. With the slow DRAM of the time, it always needed a wait state and this meant that it could manage, as I recall, two memory accesses per microsecond. With static RAM, it could manage 3. The 9995 actually stored its working registers in external memory and so this meant a real world speedup of nearly 30%. The 8088, on the other hand, kept its working registers on-chip and had a limited instruction pipeline. As a result, the equivalent speedup was nothing like 30%. This was due to hardware differences not software differences.
In fact, the applications which really test out the memory subsystem are not games - they are databases and webservers, which hardly use the graphics system at all. And in these cases, for low end systems, the big beast in the equation is cache. It's quite astonishing how a Pentium-M can churn through a badly designed join while a low end AMD 64 struggles, simply because one has 2Mbytes of cache and the other has only 512K. As a result, for ordinary technical laptop and desktop work, I now specify Pentium-M, the AMD 64 with 1Mbyte cache, or pentium-D with 1Mbyte per core. You know it makes sense.(And now everyone can explain why I'm wrong, in my turn)
So to my mind the errors made by the DRAM companies were:
A smaller OO would be a Good Thing, but let's be clear; it would have a lot less functionality. A usability review which really took into account the actual needs of ordinary users and produced a cut down OO would probably improve speed and size quicker than rewriting the code base. If that's what you mean by "minimalistic design" then yes, I agree. I hope Google will produce a download-on-demand version of OO which starts with a minimal version and then downloads additional functionality as you need it, but I doubt that is what they intend for one moment, or that I can outguess the calibre of people that Google can recruit.
Perhaps I should qualify my own remarks by saying that the Mormon achievement in Utah is remarkable. But, as someone who studied sociology of religion, I see Mormonism itself as a unifying system intended to give a sense of social coherence to people from disparate backgrounds. The parallels with the origins of Islam are striking, so much so that students of such things classify both Islam and Mormonism as schisms of Christianity, though I'm not competent to comment on that.
I won't be around in a thousand years time to see if Mormonism has resulted in the explosion of achievement in science, architecture and civilisation that followed the establishment of Islam, but I do think the recently reported fact that Mormons no longer constitute a majority in Salt Lake City is a dead giveaway.
And in answer to your last question - I am not an atheist. However, I do not believe in any kind of afterlife, and I can point to this position being supported at many points in the Bible. I won't bore you with my own theological beliefs, but whether or not you believe in a Creator God the idea that God would create the entire universe just as a kind of juvenile training system for a part of the human race to go on to another, invisible universe for which there is no objective evidence whatsoever - well, it's not worth spending time on. However, people who do believe it are extremely dangerous because they have no vested interest in preserving our planet. I would rather be governed by atheists who believe that this is what we have and therefore we need to look after it, than by people who think that if WW3 happens tomorrow, they will be sitting on a cloud playing a harp.
To my mind, it's a pity that basic history of science and history of religion is not taught in schools. It might come as a shock to a lot of Americans to discover that a lot of the people who discovered that Creationism was bunk were mostly ordained clergy in the Church of England (==Episcopalians), working in Cambridge in the 19th century. As they gradually understood the geological history of the Earth and the fossil record, as they took on the ideas of evolution, the sheer weight of evidence caused a lot of them to re-think the basics of their faith. In other words, it was the people with the theological background - men who could easily read the Bible in the original, which is more than I imagine the Kansas Board of Education can do - who accumulated and accepted the evidence that the Bible could not be literally true, and had to think out their theology based on the new discoveries. The -I choose the word with care- garbage that is Intelligent Design is part of a trend of thought that any well educated student of theology will know is fatally flawed. So why is this discussion still going on?
The problem, of course, is that a lot of religion in the US grew in a cultural vacuum. It took place on the frontiers, well away from the academic world in Europe (and the East Coast.) That's how ludicrous religions like Mormonism were able to evolve: uneducated people with limited vocabularies didn't realise that prophets with names like Moron and Ether were either the result of ignorance or exploitation. It hurts me to say this, because I have relatives descended from a family member who was on the first of the Mormon treks to Utah and they are fine people. But they have also not had the educational opportunities of the English side of the family, who in recent history got their educations at Cambridge, Oxford and London and as a result regard both Mormons and Southern Baptists in much the same light as Wahabis or Hassidim. It's extraordinary that George Bush senior, for whom I have a lot of time, is an educated man who knows that Christian fundamentalism is deeply flawed, while his son claims to embrace it. But it's just like an educated Pakistani or Iranian struggling to understand why his son is picking up aggressive (and regressive) ideas down the madrissah.
Until I found that people were still taking this stuff seriously, I used to think that Richard Dawkins and Jay Gould protested too much. But now I realise that there is a huge tide of reaction in the US, and that it needs to be stopped and reversed or it will ultimately lead to new wars of religion. It's absurd to watch American politicians attacking reactionary Islam and claiming to spread democracy while being prepared, in support of reactionary Christianity, to reduce women's rights. Theologically, I suspect all fundamentalists are much the same at bottom, and they are never happier than when they are either fighting fundamentalists of different religions, or fighting non-fundamentalists of their own religion.
I think too you need to look at what the value proposition is. For an enterprise Linux, it's understood that it is a work in progress and that, to a certain extent, money in represents value out. In effect, Linux is a clever way for competing companies to cooperate on core infrastructure without having to reveal what they are doing to the competition. It has the benefits of socialism (large resources focussed on a task) with the benefits of capitalism (market driven progress.) A subscription model fuels that by providing a market for people to demonstrate their demand for the product in hard cash.
For Windows, the understood background is that a company has developed a product that is expected to work properly first time (this is written quite seriously, I'm not judging whether or not Microsoft achieves this.) For this reason, companies are expected to pay a lot for it up front. A subscription model allows Microsoft to screw up royally and still get cash while the problems are fixed, i.e. it destroys the Microsoft value proposition. If I buy a car and it fails within warranty, I expect it to be fixed FOC. In fact, nowadays I don't expect it will fail during warranty at all. The last car I bought (VW group) survived its first 4 years with only routine servicing - which is largely why I still have it. When cars were unreliable heaps of junk - i.e. until the 1990s unless there was a 3-pointed star on it somewhere - leasing made a certain amount of sense because the thing was really unfit for use after just a few years of company driving. There was no sense of owing a valuable capital asset with many years of good service in it, it was a case of having a service on tap.
By that analogy, I expect software that comes with a capital asset to be largely subscription free. I would not be happy if there was an annual licence for software to use a digital camera. I would not be at all happy to have to pay an annual licence to boot my PC or read my own archives. But I accept that I need to subscribe for FUTURE services - email, internet connectivity, to deal with new viruses and worms.
To cut the inevitable long story short, I once worked for a company that had one of those MRP systems that had an annual contract and a licence key. One year they screwed up delivering the new licence keys. For three days at a busy time of year, not only could we not enter new business, we could not read old business data. The pain was such that I made it a primary objective to win over the board and replace the system with one which did not stop working under these conditions.
Before you look it up, you should know it shows a half naked woman writhing around what looks like an enormous yellow penis. You couldn't make it up. But what the heck? The researcher has just got more publicity than he probably ever imagined. And his next funding offer might come from highly unexpected sources - the sort of people who need huge server farms and wide pipes to, ah, service their clients.
However, given the prevailing attitudes in the English speaking world, I suggest you patent your ideas in the non-UK EU. Luxembourg?
I'm in no way opposed to fuel cells - in fact a distant cousin more or less invented the modern fuel cell - but I have considerable experience of pressurised hydrogen and believe me, it is a pig to contain and a pig to manage. Metal hydrides have consistently failed to live up to expectations for hydrogen storage. The advantage of hydrogen is that leaks indoors are relatively safe compared to propane or butane, and unlike methanol it is not toxic. The other advantage, that no CO2 is produced, is lessened because the oil industry's proposals for making the hydrogen result in a lot of CO2 at point of manufacture. The system may be overall carbon neutral, but so are the biofuels.
I don't doubt that in the long term we will come up with a better localised storage/generation technology. I just doubt it will take over in my lifetime.
All of these are still based on the simple air cooled pot with two electrodes format. No-one has yet commercialised a single fuel cell technology for anything other than the most niche of applications, partly because storage cells really are quite efficient. And yet we are expected to believe that a technology based on an unproven delivery system involving a substance that has never been deployed in volume in the field, is somehow going to come to market in a foreseeable future.
I suspect that the oil industry is behind all of this. They are desperate to promote hydrogen technology - why? Because many of the alternatives - biodiesel, bioethanol, wind, do not require large scale infrastructure. The oil industry maintains its grip because it controls the means of distribution as well as production. The difficulties of hydrogen storage and transmission mean that the expensively developed business model of the oil industry continues to work for them because they have the infratructure. Biodiesel or bioethanol can be produced and sold by a single farmer. (which is why the oil industry wouldn't want alcohol-fulled cells.) Wind farms use the electrical grid that competes with the oil industry. Technologies like coal burning with CO2 resequestering use disused oil wells but not the distribution infrastructure.
Constantly hacking away at "hydrogen this and hydrogen that is just around the corner" is intended to promote acceptance in the public mind.
It would be interesting to know whether it would be more efficient to use nuclear power stations to produce hydrogen from water, or use the waste heat to help drive fermentation/distillation plants for producing bioethanol and biomethanol.
Isn't the problem here that there was a delay between the creation of the identity and the refusal to allow it? If "inappropriate" names were to be notified within, say, a seven day period, and this was made very clear at registration, there would be far less irritation. The whole point of role playing games is to build up an existence in an imaginary world, and the longer the time that elapses, the greater the unfairness. At the same time, the naming policy does rather point to a fundamental flaw of the concept - who determines what is appropriate? I doubt that a committee of descendants of Inklings, medieval historians and Zen masters sits on the matter.