I thought it was well-known that the mission critical NYSE back-end database ran HP NonStop hardware and software (formerly Tandem). The NYSE has lots of systems...I'm sure they are moving some stuff to x86 Linux, but I really doubt they are replacing the NonStop systems with Linux.
The only way to both allow binary drivers and maintain stability is with a microkernel based design, where the drivers run sandboxed and can fail without taking down the whole kernel. Monolithic kernels will never have that sort of stability, but they are faster and far easier to understand. So it's a trade-off.
Nice post, but I have a quick comment about the above. Check out the Nooks research project out of the University of Washington: http://nooks.cs.washington.edu/
They managed to sandbox Linux drivers using page protection techniques. A driver cannot, under most circumstances, bring down the kernel.
I haven't seen a blue-screen since the days before NT 4.0. Of course I avoided the entire generation of Windows 95/98/Me.
Get good hardware with good drivers, and Windows is stable. I had an NT 4.0 server with an uptime of several years before I finally applied some long-overdue security patches. Windows 2000? Stable as a rock. Explorer occasionally crashes on my XP workstation, but I've never seen a blue-screen.
The author tries to act like a newbie in the first couple pages. But by page 3, the words "driver", "Wine" (as in the emulator), "partition", and more start to appear. Newbie?!! Are you kidding me?
When my Grandma sat down at a computer for the first time a few years ago, she tried waving the mouse in the air to make the pointer move. That is a computer newbie!
At the risk of being modded a troll (again), I will now make my case for why big corporate monopolies are good for research and innovation. The greatest monopoly of them all-- AT&T-- had the extra money to fund Bell Labs. What do we get? We get the ideas of Unix (Linux wouldn't exist if Unix didn't come first). We get C. We get C++. We get the transistor. How about the monopoly of Xerox?? We get the laser printer. We get GUIs. Need more examples? There are plenty.
Microsoft Research is the new Bell Labs.
Where are the open-source companies that hire PhDs to conduct research?
You make good sense and I agree with you. But big monopolies support big R&D efforts (think Bell Labs). Since I'm involved in research, clearly my view is biased!!
Microsoft hires people. Lots of people. So go on and support your free, open-source software done by people in their spare time. Kill off careers in software development.
In my computer science department, every single person who has accepted a job offer has accepted with a company developing closed-source software that is sold either directly or indirectly (including Microsoft). Yet so many people on Slashdot rant and rave about how evil Microsoft is and how we should all support open-source projects done by people in their spare time. DO ANY OF YOU MAKE A LIVING DEVELOPING OPEN-SOURCE SOFTWARE? I'm sorry, but open-source software doesn't pay the bills. Sure, there are some who are paid by RedHat, Novell, etc., but really, you can't make a living with open-source software. So why do slashdotters support it so rabidly? Are there so many few slashdotters that actually earn a living developing software?
Wow...if you went 20 years of all fun on the job, I am quite impressed! Work is work. Even the best job in the world can get tiresome such that it is "work" rather than "fun".
You could say the same thing about the future United States of Europe (that is the goal of the European Union after all). Many, but not all, states in the U.S. have a culture that is unique and different from its neighbors.
" a lot of Americans to understand though, since it's a country with no real culture or history of its own. "
The U.S. has a history. The U.S. also has plenty of local culture. The history doesn't go back thousands of years, and a distinct national culture is possibly lacking. But plenty of small, local cultures. Its sad that you would say such a thing.
Rude people are everywhere...but me the last time in the U.S. where you were _refused_ service for your nationality or for how you looked? There is the difference between snotty, minimal service and no service at all.
My impression of France is, overall, pretty good. Its just that I witnessed some of what gets the country its reputation.
Yup...a huge difference between France and America. Apparently if you dress wrong, you get rude service. We were dressed for a 5-hour train ride that day which included loose, comfortable jeans. I wore slacks the other days.
Don't get me wrong...I really liked Paris and most people we interacted with were just fine. But all the other European countries I've visited, the locals don't get snotty and rude if we happen to dress in bright colors, or god-forbid, wear blue jeans. Maybe this is why there is so much "French bashing"???
My wife and I were in Paris 3 weeks ago...we are both American. A local grocery store posted a sign saying they were closing at 1pm that day (due to a holiday). That day my wife and I were taking a train ride to Germany. We made a concerted effort to walk to the grocery store in order to get a couple sandwiches for the train ride. We got there at 12:40. The grocer wouldn't let us in saying they were closed. Fine...but in the next couple minutes as we stood outside trying to figure out where to go next, he let in several French men and women!! No, they didn't live there...we watched through the window as they grabbed their stuff and checked out!
Yes, only one person treated us like that, but its hard not to form a lasting impression!
Well the Macbook also gets more battery life too. So maybe Mac OSX is able to keep the CPU running while "sleeping" because it is so good at descheduling background tasks that HW power management keeps the impact on battery life to a minimum? I don't know...just speculating.
Agree. The LCD hinges on my $1500 Dell notebook busted in about 18 months...the metal literally sheared off. They are replaced, but 6 months later, they are starting to make creaking noises again. What am I supposed to do? Squirt some oil in there?!
I've been trying out a Macbook for the past week and am impressed with the build quality and some of the little details. For example, why doesn't my Dell have 2-finger trackpad scrolling? That feature is great! And why does it take my Dell notebook 2-3x longer to re-establish the 802.11 connection? In fact the Macbook even keeps my ssh sessions alive when I close the lid! Some of these things might have more to do with the OS than the build...I wouldn't mine buying a Macbook and then installing Windows Vista if I could (sorry, OS-X is really really slick, but in some ways I prefer Windows and I have some Windows-only apps).
You make a good point in that it does eliminate register-renaming logic. However I don't see how register-renaming is more resource-intensive than the wakeup/depedency logic for the bypassing of values from functional units to waiting instructions ready to fire. As the instruction window gets larger, the bypassing and the size of the wakeup CAMs get out of control.
??
When the anti-Microsoft teeny-boppers and college students start looking for jobs, and realize that Microsoft actually hires many of their peers, they might start to feel differently about Microsoft and "free software".
Slashdot Mirror
I thought it was well-known that the mission critical NYSE back-end database ran HP NonStop hardware and software (formerly Tandem). The NYSE has lots of systems...I'm sure they are moving some stuff to x86 Linux, but I really doubt they are replacing the NonStop systems with Linux.
The only way to both allow binary drivers and maintain stability is with a microkernel based design, where the drivers run sandboxed and can fail without taking down the whole kernel. Monolithic kernels will never have that sort of stability, but they are faster and far easier to understand. So it's a trade-off.
Nice post, but I have a quick comment about the above. Check out the Nooks research project out of the University of Washington: http://nooks.cs.washington.edu/
They managed to sandbox Linux drivers using page protection techniques. A driver cannot, under most circumstances, bring down the kernel.
I haven't seen a blue-screen since the days before NT 4.0. Of course I avoided the entire generation of Windows 95/98/Me.
Get good hardware with good drivers, and Windows is stable. I had an NT 4.0 server with an uptime of several years before I finally applied some long-overdue security patches. Windows 2000? Stable as a rock. Explorer occasionally crashes on my XP workstation, but I've never seen a blue-screen.
The author tries to act like a newbie in the first couple pages. But by page 3, the words "driver", "Wine" (as in the emulator), "partition", and more start to appear. Newbie?!! Are you kidding me?
When my Grandma sat down at a computer for the first time a few years ago, she tried waving the mouse in the air to make the pointer move. That is a computer newbie!
At the risk of being modded a troll (again), I will now make my case for why big corporate monopolies are good for research and innovation. The greatest monopoly of them all-- AT&T-- had the extra money to fund Bell Labs. What do we get? We get the ideas of Unix (Linux wouldn't exist if Unix didn't come first). We get C. We get C++. We get the transistor. How about the monopoly of Xerox?? We get the laser printer. We get GUIs. Need more examples? There are plenty.
Microsoft Research is the new Bell Labs.
Where are the open-source companies that hire PhDs to conduct research?
You make good sense and I agree with you. But big monopolies support big R&D efforts (think Bell Labs). Since I'm involved in research, clearly my view is biased!!
Thats right, the majority of jobs are in corporations developing closed-source, in-house applications.
Microsoft hires people. Lots of people. So go on and support your free, open-source software done by people in their spare time. Kill off careers in software development.
In my computer science department, every single person who has accepted a job offer has accepted with a company developing closed-source software that is sold either directly or indirectly (including Microsoft). Yet so many people on Slashdot rant and rave about how evil Microsoft is and how we should all support open-source projects done by people in their spare time. DO ANY OF YOU MAKE A LIVING DEVELOPING OPEN-SOURCE SOFTWARE? I'm sorry, but open-source software doesn't pay the bills. Sure, there are some who are paid by RedHat, Novell, etc., but really, you can't make a living with open-source software. So why do slashdotters support it so rabidly? Are there so many few slashdotters that actually earn a living developing software?
Wow...if you went 20 years of all fun on the job, I am quite impressed! Work is work. Even the best job in the world can get tiresome such that it is "work" rather than "fun".
You could say the same thing about the future United States of Europe (that is the goal of the European Union after all). Many, but not all, states in the U.S. have a culture that is unique and different from its neighbors.
" a lot of Americans to understand though, since it's a country with no real culture or history of its own. "
The U.S. has a history. The U.S. also has plenty of local culture. The history doesn't go back thousands of years, and a distinct national culture is possibly lacking. But plenty of small, local cultures. Its sad that you would say such a thing.
Rude people are everywhere...but me the last time in the U.S. where you were _refused_ service for your nationality or for how you looked? There is the difference between snotty, minimal service and no service at all.
My impression of France is, overall, pretty good. Its just that I witnessed some of what gets the country its reputation.
Yup...a huge difference between France and America. Apparently if you dress wrong, you get rude service. We were dressed for a 5-hour train ride that day which included loose, comfortable jeans. I wore slacks the other days.
Don't get me wrong...I really liked Paris and most people we interacted with were just fine. But all the other European countries I've visited, the locals don't get snotty and rude if we happen to dress in bright colors, or god-forbid, wear blue jeans. Maybe this is why there is so much "French bashing"???
My wife and I were in Paris 3 weeks ago...we are both American. A local grocery store posted a sign saying they were closing at 1pm that day (due to a holiday). That day my wife and I were taking a train ride to Germany. We made a concerted effort to walk to the grocery store in order to get a couple sandwiches for the train ride. We got there at 12:40. The grocer wouldn't let us in saying they were closed. Fine...but in the next couple minutes as we stood outside trying to figure out where to go next, he let in several French men and women!! No, they didn't live there...we watched through the window as they grabbed their stuff and checked out!
Yes, only one person treated us like that, but its hard not to form a lasting impression!
MOD PARENT UP
Dell Latitude D600. Mechanically a piece of junk.
See my previous comment in this thread about the hinges breaking on my $1500 Dell laptop. It is a D600, which is not far off from a D620
Well the Macbook also gets more battery life too. So maybe Mac OSX is able to keep the CPU running while "sleeping" because it is so good at descheduling background tasks that HW power management keeps the impact on battery life to a minimum? I don't know...just speculating.
Agree. The LCD hinges on my $1500 Dell notebook busted in about 18 months...the metal literally sheared off. They are replaced, but 6 months later, they are starting to make creaking noises again. What am I supposed to do? Squirt some oil in there?!
I've been trying out a Macbook for the past week and am impressed with the build quality and some of the little details. For example, why doesn't my Dell have 2-finger trackpad scrolling? That feature is great! And why does it take my Dell notebook 2-3x longer to re-establish the 802.11 connection? In fact the Macbook even keeps my ssh sessions alive when I close the lid! Some of these things might have more to do with the OS than the build...I wouldn't mine buying a Macbook and then installing Windows Vista if I could (sorry, OS-X is really really slick, but in some ways I prefer Windows and I have some Windows-only apps).
Epic Systems-- selling $4b systems based on clunky, non-relational databases you've never heard of.
You make a good point in that it does eliminate register-renaming logic. However I don't see how register-renaming is more resource-intensive than the wakeup/depedency logic for the bypassing of values from functional units to waiting instructions ready to fire. As the instruction window gets larger, the bypassing and the size of the wakeup CAMs get out of control. ??
When the anti-Microsoft teeny-boppers and college students start looking for jobs, and realize that Microsoft actually hires many of their peers, they might start to feel differently about Microsoft and "free software".
yup. in fact they came up with EDGE before 2004.
Fine. It gets rid of the complex, non-scalable register-bypass logic in the instruction window of an out-of-order superscalar.