Actually Google isn't the only search-engine using these techniques (that is: rank sites after how many pages that link to them). I have been on some lectures with FAST which Lycos and others are running their searches on. Perhaps they were first though, I don't know.
The main benefit Google has these days, is that they have ~8000 PCs clustered which they run the searches on, while FAST (as an example) has only 600. Google can therefore take the freedom to do searches that cost more processingpower, while others have to think of smart techniques to maintain good results without using the same power.
One example is that of searching for patterns, ie. several words in given order ("to be or not to be"). While Google uses their searchpower to find all those words, FAST saves all three words following each other ("to be or", "be or not",...). This means three times the diskspace, but disk is cheap. This way, they have fast lookups, and save plenty of time.
My university has experimented much with thin clients the last years. I'm most satisfied with the SunRays, especially with the smartcards, so I can go from one terminal to another and never log in or out. The SunRays are, however, limited to parts of the informatics institute (we've got about 50 of them).
There are open labs for the rest of the university where they use other thin clients for the windows platform. I don't have much good experience with those though.
But for the elementary courses they have the last couple of years taken old PCs and installed terminalclients on them. We have some racks of Intel-servers in our serverroom for them. About one server per 10 machines I think.
Now, the last month, they've had problems with more PCs getting old, and difficulties with diskspaces etc., so they've converted about 100 additional boxes to terminalclients. Before, there were actually problems with not all PCs having enough disk for all programs (we have quite some many programs available), but now all PCs have the same programs.
It seems that they save a lot of money on this, both in hardware and running costs (don't have to check 50 different PCs, only a couple of servers). And for the old computers this work reasonably well, as they get faster, and better to use for school work.
But there are some problems. Especially with Javaprograms, such as JBuilder, which gets _very_ slow, since they send much information over the network. But a bigger threat is that now, most of the PCs are terminalclients. There are always things you can't do equally well on a terminalclient as on a PC. And that, I think, will affect the students new to computers the most, because they can't play with them the same way.
Though I think they are going to buy some hundred PCs when a new building is finished this fall.
But personally, I'm quite happy with the SunRays:)
Nice domain!:) I'd love to have one. What is the criteria of becoming a museum;)
Well, back to reality. Every country has a lot of museums. Large cities may have several dousins. But they don't get sorted after country, and that may be troublesome.
On the other hand, stockholm.music.museum. They categorize the museums in which fields they belong to. And that makes it quite clear. You know you're at the right place when you are at einstein.technical.museum, rather when you're at theeinsteinmuseum.com.
These are some of the basic rules of why we put criminals in prison:
To protect the society.
To punish the criminal.
To make them not commit a new crime again.
I can promise you, that even if all convicts where locked up in cells with television and computers, it wouldn't be a place you'd want to be. Locked up most of the time, up early in the morning, crappy food, some fresh air between 13-15, almost no outside calls, don't get to see your family and friends in some years...
The point is, that the prison IS punishing them. In USA you have quite strict prisons already, and it doesn't seem to help much on the crime rate. Why? When prisoners are released, they can nothing of value. The only things they can, are beating up people (with the muscles they got in prison), and not much more...
They probably won't go volunteerly in prison again, but they don't have any skills that they can use to make an honest living. They will steal again. But if they were able to do something productive, and earn a little more than needed to survive, they might get content, and don't do any more crimes.
In my country we give the prisoners a chance to learn something useful. And we have a lot less returning criminals than you have. Think about that!
Hm. I talked to a couple of Trolltechs employees some weeks ago. They said explicitly clear that they've recently made Qt for Win32 (binary) free for free apps. One of those two, was one of Qt's founders.
Sweden has actually a plan to give every home broadband access, just like telephone and electric power. Though I haven't seen much of it yet, but they are digging fiber all over the country.
Myself, I live at a student-complex in Trondheim/Norway, and here 100MBs is included in the rent:) We've got 100MBs internally, connected to gigabit switches. We got 1 gigabit to the university, and 3,5 gigabit to Oslo (where the rest of the world is linked).
Actually there is a total of 8.000-10.000 students living at such complexes here (of 20.000).
We had a Cray at our university some years ago. It was leased, and when they stopped using it, people from Cray came and took the hardware and destroyed it (secret hardware etc.). Now only the empty "box" is left, and is used as a sofa (you can actually sit on the boxes where the power-agregators where) at the faculty of electronics.
Yes, I've played through the demo. It is quite excellent. I'm thinking of ordering the game.
It is a good strategy-game. You build towns and upgrade them (new buildings are in the town, not separete buildings like Warcraft). And you build mines and outposts. Unlike in other similar games, you can't control one unit alone. You form companies, which can consist of up to 7 units. And you have a support-zone around your towns, so that if you loose men in a company, you only go back into a support-zone, and they will automatically be resupported with units.
The companies are also divided into 'front line' and 'support'. If you have units you don't actually have a big use for anymore, you disband them, because in this game, you pay your units salaries.
It is very difficult to control your companies during battle, because they fight their own life. And if it gets too rough, they will retreat. That is quite nice, because if you have a hero in a company, he may flee when almost everyone is dead, and then you keep him:)
Well, maybe some windozers already know everything about this game, but this is to the other slashdotters.
So, now you must be happy... You've got your post:)
Hardware vs. software
on
Mac Rants
·
· Score: 2, Informative
I agree that it is difficult to measure all the features of such different platforms, but the pointsystem he uses is totally screwed.
Example: The Apple-box gets 2 points for 2MB L3 cache, but the pentium-boxes only get 0.5 point extra for 400MHz System Bus against Apples 133MHz. What is the need of L3 cache when you have a such fast system?
And that he gives points for both hardware and software in the same test isn't quite the way to do it. He gives points in the range 5,5-7,5 for major software included, while giving 2,5-3,0 points for the size of the harddisk.
Those things aren't exactly in the same area. He should rather have done to test, a hardware, and a software. But nowadays, what software you can run on the computer is less important, because you can do what you want no most computers today anyway. So I would say that hardware alone is a better method of comparision.
Though, in the earlier days, the major problems with running different architectures and platforms, was that you didn't have the same programs, they were quite incompatible with eachother, and there was major differences in performance in similar programs.
I know I bought a Mac because it looked good and felt good, and that has no bearing on MHz or performance.
That is a much better argument to buy a Mac, than because "it is better (because I read it in a test...)":)
What do you think of FSF getting more sister-organizations over the world, like FSF Europe?
And how well do you think FSF Europe has done so far? Are you planning helping new sister-organizations to life other places in the world in, say, the first 5 years from now?
Is Micro$oft going to implement support for several desktops soon? Because what irritates me the most when I have to use a win-box, is that it only has one desktop. With several desktops it is quite much easier to have a "clean" desktop, and good control over all your programs.
When you have more than 4-5 programs running on a single desktop, it becomes chaos. It is really a nice feature, so I'm actually surprised over that M$ hasn't implemented it already. But then again, Unix would loose one of it's main advantages on the desktop-side.
I'm not sure if there is a ps2pdf but I assume that their is.
Yes there is:) And there are also 'ps2ascii', 'ps2epsi', 'pstotext' and 'pstohtml'. Actually most of these tools use 'gs' (ghostview) to to this conversion.
But ps is quite a large format (usually 3 times pdf), and it takes long time to convert both ps and pdf to different formats, so a cgi that creates a copy on the fly, is a bad idea:(
Actually, pdf is not a bad idea. It is what is used for publications all over the net, and it has good support, both in win and unix. Some documents doesn't work well in all pdf-viewers, but if you check if the files you create work with ghostview or other unix-equivalents, it's probably good enough.
Though, as you say, the optimal would have been a html-version in addition to this. If you mix XHTML 1.1 with MathML, it would probably get good results too, but I'm not sure how big support browsers have for MathML.
There are some tools, like 'pdftohtml', you can use. So it shouldn't be a big problem with having both versions on the site.
He is obviously only going some minutes out of the atmosphere, and then down again:
The rocket carrying passenger Brian Feeney lifted to an altitude of 18km -- suspended 300m below a piloted hot-air balloon. The computer-controlled engine ignites and the rocket simultaneously separates from the balloon tether.
After 7 - 8 seconds of flight at 60 degrees followed by thrust vectoring to 90 degrees, the four fins separate from the rocket. The main engine cuts off at 40km, and the rocket glides for about five minutes in zero - G.
The rocket begins freefall for about 100 seconds. The reentry ballute is then deployed. The ballute protects the rocket from heat of thousands of degrees Celsius, and cushions the engines upon landing.
The main chute deploys at 7.6km and slows the rocket to a speed of 4m per second. The rocket lands and falls on its side -- supported at 52 degrees by the ballute.
There are no doubt that X is a good piece of work, since M$ is copying more and more from it. In Windows XP they have copied the ability to run the windowsystem remote on another computer.
I wonder how long it will take before they copy the ability to have several desktops. That is at least one of the features I favor the most of X which Win doesn't yet have.
Our TV is so old that the volume-button is trashed. And if you turn off the TV you have to tune in all the channels again. So if you want to see program a at 17, and program b at 21, you'll normally just let the TV pounder all that bad stuff in the meantime.
Reminds me of 1984. There, every party member has a TV home, which is constantly doing commercials for Big Brother (or something like that), and you can turn down the sound, but you can't turn off the TV. The TV is on 24 hours a day.
That is certainly not the life I want:( Though in 1984 they also have your kids spying on you, cameras all over the place, and always a big picture of Big Brother nearby, whose eyes are following you.
And, yes... If you don't behave properly, they don't shock your hand, they actually erases you. That mean they rewrite the history so it seems you've never excisted!
Well, it is not an impossible scenario. I think the society are becoming more and more like it than the otherway around. There are always people like us fighting against it, but many, many people don't mind (we actually have a program called Big Brother here, where the participants are living constantly watched by cameras for several months, and the worst part is that many people want to participate).
Anyone stupid enough not to have local copies of their current source tree deserves to lose their project.
I won't argue with that, but what is more important, is that SourceForge is a center for all this information, which make it convenient for users. If SourceForge was to go down, half of todays opensource-projects would temporarily be down, and all links broken.
Most projects don't have alternative download-sites. When SourceForge is down or unreachable from your connection, you will not only be stopped from downloading many opensource-projects, but sometimes even all of the working projects that you are looking for.
Actually they probably have switches which can be configured for different VLANs, and then they won't have any extra costs for having them on a "separate" network.
Why the hell would important computers which control the power grid be accessable from the internet in any way.
It is cheaper than laying a dedicated net to all of the programmable power-controlling units. Remember that they must have an easy way to redirect the power (spare power is often sent to other countries buying it). But normally vital parts are strongly protected to ensure no outside interference. That is why heavy cryptography is commonly used in these businesses, and security is a big issue.
My father leads a power company. There they have a small dedicated net for the most vital parts, separate from the internet, which you have to call up using special routers. But his company is rather small compared to the system Cal-ISO controls.
"That's really amazing on two counts: that there were computers not behind a firewall and it took 17 days to discover," said state Sen.
What's more, dozens of ports into the computer system were open, when only a handful should have been available.
It seems strange how professionals can install a system full of securityholes and have it online. Probably that means their default distro of the operating system (their not mentioning which) has these holes per default. Since they have a system like this online for a relative long period of time, why should it not be probable that they also has many such systems behind the firewall?
Obviously they are reliabiling 100% on the firewall. If the intruders had made it through the wall, they would no doubt have easy access to many of the systems there. And that would be scary, if they can't secure such vital systems in a proper way.
If they don't desalinate them, they will crumble to dust in just a few years. The alternative is to just let them lie in the water. But since they have held 2000 years in the water already, it can't hurt with some thousand years more;)
They bring it up to the surface for they scientists and tourists watch them and study them. But I've got a much better idea: Underwater Safari!
Wouldn't it be amazing floating round in a large, complete, 2000 year old city, which was a famous port, and legendary from antic history? They could use small submarines with large windows we could see through.
And the best part is that it will be saved from the hands of the evil scientists;) They should have learned from the early 20th century archaelogy-methods.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually Google isn't the only search-engine using these techniques (that is: rank sites after how many pages that link to them). I have been on some lectures with FAST which Lycos and others are running their searches on. Perhaps they were first though, I don't know.
The main benefit Google has these days, is that they have ~8000 PCs clustered which they run the searches on, while FAST (as an example) has only 600. Google can therefore take the freedom to do searches that cost more processingpower, while others have to think of smart techniques to maintain good results without using the same power.
One example is that of searching for patterns, ie. several words in given order ("to be or not to be"). While Google uses their searchpower to find all those words, FAST saves all three words following each other ("to be or", "be or not", ...). This means three times the diskspace, but disk is cheap. This way, they have fast lookups, and save plenty of time.
My university has experimented much with thin clients the last years. I'm most satisfied with the SunRays, especially with the smartcards, so I can go from one terminal to another and never log in or out. The SunRays are, however, limited to parts of the informatics institute (we've got about 50 of them).
:)
There are open labs for the rest of the university where they use other thin clients for the windows platform. I don't have much good experience with those though.
But for the elementary courses they have the last couple of years taken old PCs and installed terminalclients on them. We have some racks of Intel-servers in our serverroom for them. About one server per 10 machines I think.
Now, the last month, they've had problems with more PCs getting old, and difficulties with diskspaces etc., so they've converted about 100 additional boxes to terminalclients. Before, there were actually problems with not all PCs having enough disk for all programs (we have quite some many programs available), but now all PCs have the same programs.
It seems that they save a lot of money on this, both in hardware and running costs (don't have to check 50 different PCs, only a couple of servers). And for the old computers this work reasonably well, as they get faster, and better to use for school work.
But there are some problems. Especially with Javaprograms, such as JBuilder, which gets _very_ slow, since they send much information over the network. But a bigger threat is that now, most of the PCs are terminalclients. There are always things you can't do equally well on a terminalclient as on a PC. And that, I think, will affect the students new to computers the most, because they can't play with them the same way.
Though I think they are going to buy some hundred PCs when a new building is finished this fall.
But personally, I'm quite happy with the SunRays
Nice domain! :) I'd love to have one. What is the criteria of becoming a museum ;)
Well, back to reality. Every country has a lot of museums. Large cities may have several dousins. But they don't get sorted after country, and that may be troublesome.
On the other hand, stockholm.music.museum. They categorize the museums in which fields they belong to. And that makes it quite clear. You know you're at the right place when you are at einstein.technical.museum, rather when you're at theeinsteinmuseum.com.
My humble opinion at least :)
All you want to do is punish, punish, punish.
These are some of the basic rules of why we put criminals in prison:
I can promise you, that even if all convicts where locked up in cells with television and computers, it wouldn't be a place you'd want to be. Locked up most of the time, up early in the morning, crappy food, some fresh air between 13-15, almost no outside calls, don't get to see your family and friends in some years...
The point is, that the prison IS punishing them. In USA you have quite strict prisons already, and it doesn't seem to help much on the crime rate. Why? When prisoners are released, they can nothing of value. The only things they can, are beating up people (with the muscles they got in prison), and not much more...
They probably won't go volunteerly in prison again, but they don't have any skills that they can use to make an honest living. They will steal again. But if they were able to do something productive, and earn a little more than needed to survive, they might get content, and don't do any more crimes.
In my country we give the prisoners a chance to learn something useful. And we have a lot less returning criminals than you have. Think about that!
Hm. I talked to a couple of Trolltechs employees some weeks ago. They said explicitly clear that they've recently made Qt for Win32 (binary) free for free apps. One of those two, was one of Qt's founders.
Or are you saying the founder of Qt is lying?
Sweden has actually a plan to give every home broadband access, just like telephone and electric power. Though I haven't seen much of it yet, but they are digging fiber all over the country.
Myself, I live at a student-complex in Trondheim/Norway, and here 100MBs is included in the rent :) We've got 100MBs internally, connected to gigabit switches. We got 1 gigabit to the university, and 3,5 gigabit to Oslo (where the rest of the world is linked).
Actually there is a total of 8.000-10.000 students living at such complexes here (of 20.000).
The only problem is that the world is too slow :(
We had a Cray at our university some years ago. It was leased, and when they stopped using it, people from Cray came and took the hardware and destroyed it (secret hardware etc.). Now only the empty "box" is left, and is used as a sofa (you can actually sit on the boxes where the power-agregators where) at the faculty of electronics.
Yes, I've played through the demo. It is quite excellent. I'm thinking of ordering the game.
It is a good strategy-game. You build towns and upgrade them (new buildings are in the town, not separete buildings like Warcraft). And you build mines and outposts. Unlike in other similar games, you can't control one unit alone. You form companies, which can consist of up to 7 units. And you have a support-zone around your towns, so that if you loose men in a company, you only go back into a support-zone, and they will automatically be resupported with units.
The companies are also divided into 'front line' and 'support'. If you have units you don't actually have a big use for anymore, you disband them, because in this game, you pay your units salaries.
It is very difficult to control your companies during battle, because they fight their own life. And if it gets too rough, they will retreat. That is quite nice, because if you have a hero in a company, he may flee when almost everyone is dead, and then you keep him
Well, maybe some windozers already know everything about this game, but this is to the other slashdotters.
So, now you must be happy... You've got your post :)
I agree that it is difficult to measure all the features of such different platforms, but the pointsystem he uses is totally screwed.
Example: The Apple-box gets 2 points for 2MB L3 cache, but the pentium-boxes only get 0.5 point extra for 400MHz System Bus against Apples 133MHz. What is the need of L3 cache when you have a such fast system?
And that he gives points for both hardware and software in the same test isn't quite the way to do it. He gives points in the range 5,5-7,5 for major software included, while giving 2,5-3,0 points for the size of the harddisk.
Those things aren't exactly in the same area. He should rather have done to test, a hardware, and a software. But nowadays, what software you can run on the computer is less important, because you can do what you want no most computers today anyway. So I would say that hardware alone is a better method of comparision.
Though, in the earlier days, the major problems with running different architectures and platforms, was that you didn't have the same programs, they were quite incompatible with eachother, and there was major differences in performance in similar programs.
I know I bought a Mac because it looked good and felt good, and that has no bearing on MHz or performance.
That is a much better argument to buy a Mac, than because "it is better (because I read it in a test...)" :)
What do you think of FSF getting more sister-organizations over the world, like FSF Europe?
And how well do you think FSF Europe has done so far? Are you planning helping new sister-organizations to life other places in the world in, say, the first 5 years from now?
So, just wondering...
Is Micro$oft going to implement support for several desktops soon? Because what irritates me the most when I have to use a win-box, is that it only has one desktop. With several desktops it is quite much easier to have a "clean" desktop, and good control over all your programs.
When you have more than 4-5 programs running on a single desktop, it becomes chaos. It is really a nice feature, so I'm actually surprised over that M$ hasn't implemented it already. But then again, Unix would loose one of it's main advantages on the desktop-side.
I'm not sure if there is a ps2pdf but I assume that their is.
Yes there is :) And there are also 'ps2ascii', 'ps2epsi', 'pstotext' and 'pstohtml'. Actually most of these tools use 'gs' (ghostview) to to this conversion.
But ps is quite a large format (usually 3 times pdf), and it takes long time to convert both ps and pdf to different formats, so a cgi that creates a copy on the fly, is a bad idea :(
Actually, pdf is not a bad idea. It is what is used for publications all over the net, and it has good support, both in win and unix. Some documents doesn't work well in all pdf-viewers, but if you check if the files you create work with ghostview or other unix-equivalents, it's probably good enough.
Though, as you say, the optimal would have been a html-version in addition to this. If you mix XHTML 1.1 with MathML, it would probably get good results too, but I'm not sure how big support browsers have for MathML.
There are some tools, like 'pdftohtml', you can use. So it shouldn't be a big problem with having both versions on the site.
He is obviously only going some minutes out of the atmosphere, and then down again:
There are no doubt that X is a good piece of work, since M$ is copying more and more from it. In Windows XP they have copied the ability to run the windowsystem remote on another computer.
I wonder how long it will take before they copy the ability to have several desktops. That is at least one of the features I favor the most of X which Win doesn't yet have.
Our TV is so old that the volume-button is trashed. And if you turn off the TV you have to tune in all the channels again. So if you want to see program a at 17, and program b at 21, you'll normally just let the TV pounder all that bad stuff in the meantime.
But luckily I don't watch much TV ;)
Reminds me of 1984. There, every party member has a TV home, which is constantly doing commercials for Big Brother (or something like that), and you can turn down the sound, but you can't turn off the TV. The TV is on 24 hours a day.
That is certainly not the life I want :( Though in 1984 they also have your kids spying on you, cameras all over the place, and always a big picture of Big Brother nearby, whose eyes are following you.
And, yes... If you don't behave properly, they don't shock your hand, they actually erases you. That mean they rewrite the history so it seems you've never excisted!
Well, it is not an impossible scenario. I think the society are becoming more and more like it than the otherway around. There are always people like us fighting against it, but many, many people don't mind (we actually have a program called Big Brother here, where the participants are living constantly watched by cameras for several months, and the worst part is that many people want to participate).
Anyone stupid enough not to have local copies of their current source tree deserves to lose their project.
I won't argue with that, but what is more important, is that SourceForge is a center for all this information, which make it convenient for users. If SourceForge was to go down, half of todays opensource-projects would temporarily be down, and all links broken.
Most projects don't have alternative download-sites. When SourceForge is down or unreachable from your connection, you will not only be stopped from downloading many opensource-projects, but sometimes even all of the working projects that you are looking for.
It has happened to me before.
This post is licensed with GPL ;)
Makes me wonder if they will break the old record of ftp.cdrom.com, 996Gb on one day!
If I've understood correctly, the download is available for 3 days, for 100.000 people. That means: 100.000 * 600Mb / 3 = 20.000.000 Mb
That surely beats the old record :)
After what I've been reading here lately, power-consuming seems to be just what California needs ;)
Actually they probably have switches which can be configured for different VLANs, and then they won't have any extra costs for having them on a "separate" network.
Why the hell would important computers which control the power grid be accessable from the internet in any way.
It is cheaper than laying a dedicated net to all of the programmable power-controlling units. Remember that they must have an easy way to redirect the power (spare power is often sent to other countries buying it). But normally vital parts are strongly protected to ensure no outside interference. That is why heavy cryptography is commonly used in these businesses, and security is a big issue.
My father leads a power company. There they have a small dedicated net for the most vital parts, separate from the internet, which you have to call up using special routers. But his company is rather small compared to the system Cal-ISO controls.
"That's really amazing on two counts: that there were computers not behind a firewall and it took 17 days to discover," said state Sen.
What's more, dozens of ports into the computer system were open, when only a handful should have been available.
It seems strange how professionals can install a system full of securityholes and have it online. Probably that means their default distro of the operating system (their not mentioning which) has these holes per default. Since they have a system like this online for a relative long period of time, why should it not be probable that they also has many such systems behind the firewall?
Obviously they are reliabiling 100% on the firewall. If the intruders had made it through the wall, they would no doubt have easy access to many of the systems there. And that would be scary, if they can't secure such vital systems in a proper way.
I'm glad I don't live in California.
If they don't desalinate them, they will crumble to dust in just a few years. The alternative is to just let them lie in the water. But since they have held 2000 years in the water already, it can't hurt with some thousand years more ;)
They bring it up to the surface for they scientists and tourists watch them and study them. But I've got a much better idea: Underwater Safari!
Wouldn't it be amazing floating round in a large, complete, 2000 year old city, which was a famous port, and legendary from antic history? They could use small submarines with large windows we could see through.
And the best part is that it will be saved from the hands of the evil scientists ;) They should have learned from the early 20th century archaelogy-methods.