Slashback: Grids, Netscape, AMD 266
And Campbell's puts glass marbles in their soup pictures. Roland Piquepaille writes "We saw several grid computing announcements in the last couple of days.Of course, Gateway stole the show. In 'Gateway makes store PCs work overtime,' you can read that 'Gateway's network of 8,000 PCs can deliver 14 teraflops.' This is plain wrong. You all know that this number of 14 teraflops is meaningless. It's just the addition of the peak speed of all the PCs -- never reached anyway on individual PCs. You need specialized software to work efficiently with a grid. And two companies are releasing new products to power grids. Avaki rolled out what it believes is the first Java-based data grid software for enterprise-class IT environments. Kontiki, for its part, on Monday released a grid server that brings its content delivery system into the server realm, whereas previously it was only available for PCs. Check this column for a summary, or this article for more details."
Why aren't those things called 'stick-up' ads, anyhow? Internet Ninja writes "Netscape today released version 7.01 of Netscape based on Mozilla 1.0.2. Back in is popup blocking which they got a lashing for in 7.0 as well as tabs as home pages just like Mozilla. Release notes here and there's a couple articles on Netscape devedge which may be of interest to developers."
And they will continue to have produced my Athlon, too. schnoz writes "And you thought AMD was quitting the PC chip market? Then check out this article on Business Week. Not only are they releasing new chips and plan to continue to do so, they're also still very active research wise, working on new transistor making techniques such as the double gate design as well as metal-rather-than-silicon design. Keep going at it AMD!!"
We saw several grid computing announcements.... (Score:2)
Two heads are better than one. -- John Heywood
Coincidence?
Gateway did it.... (Score:2, Funny)
Crap, now that they did it, what next? A cluster of clusters, clustering?
Physicists thinking about the Grid (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Physicists thinking about the Grid (Score:5, Interesting)
Physicists are more than thinking about the Grid, I should know as they're funding my PhD in Data Grid Computing 8*).
The main reason for this is the Large Hadron Collider, which is due to go into production at CERN [www.cern.ch] in about 2007. For the younger members of the audience, CERN was where Tim Berners-Lee developed the World Wide Web in the early 1990's
When it goes online it has 4 major experiments, each of which stores data at 100-400MB/sec, and I stress stores data at 100+ MB/sec, the first level is processing 40Terabytes a second. This equals a few petabytes a year (1PB = 1000TB = 1000000GB) which then has to be shipped to sites around Europe and the US.
All this is going to have data, processing and network requirements which make most techies gasp, i.e. Google only has a 20TB database, current physics ones are at 650TB+. At this level 14TFlops is kinda a cute little toy.
And yes, most of it's open source and based on the Globus [globus.org] Toolkit.
Re:Physicists thinking about the Grid (Score:5, Interesting)
I think that there are a few more reasons than just the Hadron Collider, however.
The astrophysicists have got their Hubble Telescope and the radio telescopes which the SETI@Home project gets it's data from. The nuclear medical technicians have their magnetic resonance imagers (nMRI) and their picture archiving and communication systems (PACS). The geologists have got their seismographs. And the geneticists have got their DNA databases.
Surprisingly, a lot of scientific equipment is actually able to generate between 100MB to 1GB of data per second. Not just a collider or accelerator, although they are certainly known for generating alot of information.
Information is cheap and free, if you understand how to generate digital content. MRI scanners, for instance, are able to generate that much information, and are nearly always underclocked because physicians generally aren't looking at the atomic or molecular level.
Agreed on the Google point. It goes to show that high end computing is still order's of magnitude faster than home appliances (PCs). I was impressed at college with the virtual reality workstations we used to navigate the grid network (Internet2 connection, via the CERN group, Argonne National Laboratories, Enrico Fermi Institute, et al. I happend to have studied under one of the Globus Toolkit authors, working out of Argonne, for a very short while.).
Anyhow, a moderate scientific/medical workstation nowdays has perhaps 4 to 32 GB of RAM. We would use that RAM to generate immersive 3D rendering of nucleic acids, genomes, proteins, biotech designs, astrometic simulations, and so forth. Now, considering a stereoscopic projection monitor, you've got anywhere between 2 and 16 GB of data streaming to you, per second, per eye, via the projection monitor. Stereoscopic photorealistic virtual environments, grid overlays, you name it. It can definately be information overload at times.
The interesting thing, I found, was that at 2GB of information, per second, per eye, was the threshhold before I really and truly began to get mentally 'tricked' into being totally immersed, visually. That is, 20/20 vision, photorealistic, full spectrum color, stereoscopic, requires about 4 GB of memory to acurately and artificially calculate and project a pixel for each rod/cone in the human retina. A little bit of neurobiology for you, I suppose. Yep, them darn Turring machines are pretty neat, when they're hooked up to a grid network.
Re:Physicists thinking about the Grid (Score:3, Insightful)
Geez-Louise!
It's a sad-sad day for Physics when CERN is reduced to 'the place where the Web was developed.'
There's one HELL of a lot more interesting stuff done at CERN, and there has been for decades, than the WWW.
This isn't meant to slight Berners-Lee or the web or anything, but mercy me. CERN is and has been coolness itself for longer than many people reading this have been alive.
Re:Physicists thinking about the Grid (Score:2, Insightful)
microchips
microwaves
cellular phone/beeper
telescopes (star wars, eschelon system)
that may be some physics between the manhattan project and WWW, which have probably affected you a lot.
Designed to be invisible, however. They call it "Transparent Technology"...
gateway's math is correct... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:gateway's math is correct... (Score:3, Informative)
All NEW Netscape 7.0 - Netscape's FASTEST browser! (Score:4, Funny)
Except this one, apparently.
I wonder how they got it so fast? They must have geavily modified the Mozilla 1.0.2 code because, compared to NS 3.x, it runs like a dog with no legs.
Re:All NEW Netscape 7.0 - Netscape's FASTEST brows (Score:2)
No no no, you see everybody had Pentiums running at 120 mhz when Netscape 3.0 was out. So technically they're right!
Re:All NEW Netscape 7.0 - Netscape's FASTEST brows (Score:3, Informative)
> when Netscape 3.0 was out.
Err, no, Pentiums didn't run that fast until a year or two later --
at least not the ones anyone could afford to actually buy. A
486 DX4/100 was still considered competitive as a new system even
when Netscape 4.0 came out. (Which, incidentally, tells you how
*old* Netscape 4.x is. Considering that Netscape 6 was really
ony of beta quality, we can be quite thankful that the long wait
is over and Netscape has a decent browser out again (since 7.0PR1,
which "Preview" or not made 6.2.anything look like junk).) This
new Netscape release, from what I've seen of it so far (admittedly,
not extensive use) seems to be quite solid, though of course it
lacks the majority of the features added during the 1.1 and 1.2
milestones. Which is fine; 1.1 lacked stability, and 1.2 is new
enough that it's hard to say (though I'm using 1.2.1 and it seems
very solid to me so far); Netscape is right to go with 1.0.2 for
now. I'm thinking they'll stick with that 1.0.x branch through
several minor releases and go back to the trunk for a new stable
branch around 1.4 or 1.6 or so. (This is not inside information,
just a prediction based on the pattern I've observed in their
behavior over the last couple of years.) By then, the branch
they are using will feel really obsolete to people who have been
testing the Mozilla builds, but that means that when users upgrade
to the next branch they'll notice a sudden influx of features.
That branch could be 7.5, but I'm predicting it will be 8.0
Re:All NEW Netscape 7.0 - Netscape's FASTEST brows (Score:2)
I remember the 2.0 -> 3.0 timeframe being shorter than 3.0 -> 4.0 was. Even so, I really doubt 3.0 came out before Intel managed to get to 120mhz.
Re:All NEW Netscape 7.0 - Netscape's FASTEST brows (Score:2)
Yes well I'm sure I could write a browser that really kicks ass, if, like NS3 it ignores all stylesheets, screws up tables and frames and only parses a handful of tags.
Actually the slowest version of NS I've used was the first effort at V6 - I almost gave up on them when I saw just how bad it was. Mozilla has really come along though - it's very close to IE with dynamic content now - I'm sure it'll pass IE7 for speed, as IE has been getting bigger and slower since V5...
Re:All NEW Netscape 7.0 - Netscape's FASTEST brows (Score:2, Informative)
Yes well I'm sure I could write a browser that really kicks ass, if, like NS3 it ignores all stylesheets, screws up tables and frames and only parses a handful of tags.
Don't bother, someone else already has. It's a GTK-based browser called Dillo [cipsga.org.br].
And it does kick ass.
Re:All NEW Netscape 7.0 - Netscape's FASTEST brows (Score:2)
Not that I actually use or even like earlier versions of Netscape; I just thought it was a very bold claim. Modern browsers seem to be superior in every way, except for speed and memory footprint.
Re:Netscape 7.0 Speed, Mozilla, Phoenix (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm now using Phoenix 0.5, which came out just recently, and it's quite toasty - I think it's ready to replace Mozilla as my main browser. The main plugins work (I'd had trouble getting them installed on 0.3 and 0.4) and it's very very fast, especially since I set the startup delay to 0 (default is 1200ms, which lets it recover from slow-loading graphics that would otherwise force redraws.) The Google-search-bar extension is really convenient, though I gather than newer Mozillas also have it. I'm normally no fan of themes (why clutter up the GUI at the cost of making it larger and slower?), but the "LittlePhoenix 1.3" theme has icons that are enough smaller that I can reclaim significant screen space, and the "Linky" extension has been a good way to handle pages with lots of links (e.g. letting you leech all the pictures into a separate window or tab, or examine a page by grabbing all the URLs on it into a tab, which can be cleaner than View Source for some ugly web pages.)
Re:Netscape 7.0 Speed, Mozilla, Phoenix (Score:2)
You needed 6 MB for it to really perform well.
(I haven't used OS/2 since 2.1, so I don't know about later versions, and nobody really seemed to use the pre 2.0 versions :) )
Best Netscape in a while (Score:2)
The popup filter sounds a system alert when it blocks something. Takes some getting used to, since it's the same noise by default as the new mail sound.
I was amused to see that popup blocking didn't work on Netscape's portal. The popup preferences warn that blocking might be defeated by sites using "other methods" to raise windows. Guess Netscape is using those Black Arts to do just that.
With the mail spellcheck and all the default plugins, this is a great mom-and-pop browser. Will probably load it on the family's machines. Nice to see decent Netscape product again.
Thank god for competition (Score:2, Interesting)
Keep on chuggin' AMD. College students are behind you!
Re:Thank god for competition (Score:4, Funny)
You're new to Slashdot, aren't you?
Heh.. (Score:5, Funny)
I didn't think they were quitting the PC Chip market. I actually read the article.
Mozilla - No tabs in home pages... (Score:2, Insightful)
Maybe you're thinking of the Mozilla derivative (soon to have a new name) Phoenix?
Re:Mozilla - No tabs in home pages... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Mozilla - No tabs in home pages... (Score:3, Informative)
It's in the Mozilla nightly builds, though I have no idea if it's in 1.2.1
Yeah, it's in 1.2.1. Just load up tabs for all the pages you want, then go to Edit | Preferences | Navigator and click "Use Current Group".
Netscape 7.01 blocks popups. Next will be IE? (Score:5, Insightful)
I bet the next version of IE will have a popup blocking feature.
Re:Netscape 7.01 blocks popups. Next will be IE? (Score:4, Insightful)
I would imagine we will start to see a IE 6.5 beta hit the net shortly, possibly incorporating the popup blocking, but my guess is that IE 7 will be the version to really grab mozilla(and opera for that matter) innovations.
Same old, same old
Re:Netscape 7.01 blocks popups. Next will be IE? (Score:2)
There are entire companies that make their living providing value added enhancements to windows that match and frequently beat the OSS offerings on Linux. (Object Desktop beats the hell out of any customizable desktop solution I've seen anywhere elase) They have to be careful about what gets included because any single feature at this point will have some segment of people FREAKING OUT about it.
Re:Netscape 7.01 blocks popups. Next will be IE? (Score:2)
> to their clients. Try looking at "Crazy Browzer". It only takes a
> few nights coding to add tabs to IE.
This is right, but it is only half the story. Microsoft is great at
leaving the innovations to ISVs and then buying or cloning the ones
that prove to be successful or useful. Think back...
DOSEDIT comes out, and people in-the-know declare that they can't
live without it. Microsoft produces DOSKEY for 5.0. Stacker is
successful. Microsoft produces DoubleSpace for the next version of
DOS. Desqview gets rave reviews, and customers say they want
windows like Macintosh has. Microsoft produces Windows. Central
Point and Norton produce useful disk defragmentation utilities;
Microsoft contracts for a defrag utility to include with DOS.
Third-party full-screen editors are all the rage; Microsoft drops
edlin and produces edit.com, leveraging the IDE editor that they
already developed for QuickBasic (and, in the process, including
a stripped-down QBasic to avoid the need to extract the editor
from it; apparently it was too interwoven to separate before 5.0
shipped; later they did separate it out (or rewrite it) for Win
95). On and on the list goes.
Will the next IE include tabbed browsing? Maybe, but if it
doesn't, the version after will. Will the next IE include popup
blocking? Maybe, but if it doesn't, more people will use Netscape
than already do, and Microsoft knows it; which does Microsoft
value more, strong dominance in the browser market (not mere
majority, but the kind of overwhelming majority only achieved
after IE5 came out), or the support of popup advertisers?
Actually, Microsoft could weasel a way to get both: ship IE with
popup blocking, but place "select partners" on a whitelist, and
make it prohibitively difficult for casual users to remove sites
from the whitelist. (HINT: involve regedit.) On the whole, this
would be mostly good for user experience, since it would greatly
reduce the sheer overwhelming quantity of popups. Microsoft could
claim that "the competitive market" (Netscape) forced them to
include popup blocking, elicit sympathy, use it as one more argument
in any antitrust procedings (oh, you thought we'd seen the last of
those?), and then turn around and tell strategic advertisers that
it means less competition from nobody advertisers who didn't make
the whitelist -- and use it as a negotiation point: doubleclick
would probably bend over backwards and kiss strategic parts of
Microsoft's corporate anatomy to be on the whitelist.
I wouldn't be surprised if Microsoft just _bought_ CrazyBrowser.
OTOH, popup blocking is not the hardest thing in the universe to
implement, and they could just do it from scratch. CrazyBrowser
would then have to offer more innovations or become irrelevant.
Re:Netscape 7.01 blocks popups. Next will be IE? (Score:2)
Keep this in mind, I guess they will somehow make it passport
I am a registered Opera 7 user, I'd care less
Re:Netscape 7.01 blocks popups. Next will be IE? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Netscape 7.01 blocks popups. Next will be IE? (Score:5, Interesting)
As far as new ad formats, right on devedge page linked from the artice, you are seeing the future of web advertising.
Instead of popup windows (which are *SO* 90's), we will have popup div layers, positioned to cover the page. Look at Netscape's own popup detection example. They show you how to detect a popup blocker, and open up a fixed position DIV to give visitor a "warning". How long do you think it will take an ad network programmer to figure out that instead of the warning, this DIV can actually be used to show the ad itself?
Better yet, if the window failed to open, you can open the div with an IFRAME in it that points to the same URL. And no popups. :)
Welcome to the future. Doesn't it look a lot like the past?
Your a fool (Score:2)
Technology Arms Race (Score:2)
It seems inevitable that this will lead to a technology arms race.
The advertisers get more obnoxious. Browsers and proxies get better at screening out ads. More features will appear to help the end user. And those features will become more sophisticated.
Here is a hypothetical example. [Disclaimer: this example is purely hypothetical. I have not done this myself, and am not trying to induce browser authors to commit a crime. Remember, a web site has to make money, and not watching ads is stealing!] Anyway, that said, suppose a browser (or proxy?) went through all the motions of running the ad. Executed the ad code, scripts, flash animations, etc. Dutifully simulated the popup windows, and executed their code. Dutifully requested all of the graphics, flash animations, and other inline content for the popup windows. This way the server really thinks that you see the ad. After all, your browser requested a flash that is only embedded in the popup. So you must not be a thief, because you are seeing the ad. The problem is, the authors of this browser or proxy have induced their users into stealing because the browser or proxy doesn't actually display the ads or popup windows. It still consumes the bandwidth, but these evil crooks (i.e. users) don't care.
This technique will prevent the advertisers from knowing that you've seen the ad. From their perspective, your browser has executed all the right code and requested all the right content from the server that should be associated with viewing this page.
Seen from the perspective I've described it here (advertiser friendly, and users as thieves) could the above hypothetical example be construed as a circumvention device? "Our content is protected by Anti-Leech, and these evil hackers have circumvented it. That's as bad as spray painting ad billboards!"
In the end, we'll have heads up displays in cars, with ad billboards constantly popping up in our face while driving. This will be seen as enormously beneficial in eliminating the visual clutter of billboards on buildings and roadways.
Re:Technology Arms Race (Score:2)
However in most cases bandwidth is unimportant, latency is what counts (how long until I can see the whole page). So you could do a QOS thing: defer the popups from pseudo-loading until every other thing on the page is done loading, and displayed.
The problem is that with new tools such as Anti Leech that prevent you from seeing the page at all until / unless you see the ads, the browsers (or proxys in between) will need to simulate the full bandwidth wasting effect of downloading the ads exactly as the browser would do so that from the server perspective, you are not blocking popup ads.
One thing I see happening is that sites with less obnoxious ads, fewer popups, etc. but with similar content, such as similar models, in similar poses, similar age, same gender, etc. will draw away eyeballs from the sites with similar content but more ads.
If blocking popups becomes popular, then sites would have to give you a pop quiz to make sure you had seen the ad. The problem with this is that taking such a quiz with one hand is difficult, and also might cause viewers to loose their..... um.... focus.
Re:Netscape 7.01 blocks popups. Next will be IE? (Score:2)
blocking goes mainstream, all it means to me is legacy sites that
require it for obscure reasons will be forced to be fixed or become
irrelevant. Then I can happily leave popups disabled *all* the time
and browse totally in one window (with multiple tabs if desired).
If advertisers load banners into pages to compensate for the lost
popups, that's fine with me.
So yes, I _do_ want IE to ship with popup blocking. On by default,
if possible. Not because I use IE, but because IE exerts pressure
on website authors.
Re:Netscape 7.01 blocks popups. Next will be IE? (Score:3, Funny)
Or this guy [foxsearchlight.com]. (Warning: many megs, but worth it if you have the bandwidth.)
Mozilla user using parents' IE over Thanksgiving (Score:3, Funny)
I took a long shower when I got home and scrubbed vigorously.
Re:Mozilla user using parents' IE over Thanksgivin (Score:2)
Re:Netscape 7.01 blocks popups. Next will be IE? (Score:2)
Re:Netscape 7.01 blocks popups. Next will be IE? (Score:2)
HAH! More like "The next version of MSN will have a pop-up blocking feature." Why put it in for free when Microsoft can get away with selling it to you instead?
Re:Netscape 7.01 blocks popups. Next will be IE? (Score:2)
A little context for the Soup Marbles (Score:5, Interesting)
Like, there's one where the mom is home alone with her little kid, and everyone knows that women are only motivated to actually cook when there's a hunky man around. So she's about to make the kid a FROZEN PIZZA when the kid holds up a drawing from school and says "Look, Mommy, I drawded you a pitcher!" and Mom oohs over it and to reward the kid she puts away the frozen pizza and instead the kid gets A BOWL OF CAMPBELL'S SOLID PINK "TOMATO" SOUP for lunch. This is love in the same sense that this is nutrition. Lumpless flesh-colored soup. Remember how Campbell's tried to use the slogan "Soup Is Good Food" for a few months until enough dieticians complained that that was an outright lie in the case of Campbell's watery slime? Remember how they got busted for always showing pictures of soup with the few measly pathetic little veggie bits standing on the surface of the soup because the bowls were always filled with GLASS MARBLES to hold up the little fragments of orange-gray carrots and caved-in peas?
Re:A little context for the Soup Marbles (Score:2)
Re:A little context for the Soup Marbles (Score:2)
Ask Microsoft (to give a recent example) about truth in advertising, with their use of stock photos and 'stories' to go with them.
I posted that snippet because I had no idea what marbles and soup had to do with each other - I figured someone else might not either.
If you think that the ad industry has your 'best interests' in mind, you're right! That's why they are using CAT scans to see what happens in your brain when you see boobies, so they can do the same thing with mac n' cheese.
You are a $.
The whole 'sex' in an ice cube thing was crazy back in '57 when the Hidden Persuaders was published, I'm sure Madison Avenue have leared a few things since then.
Re:A little context for the Soup Marbles (Score:2)
A quick search on Google [google.com] will find this [findlaw.com] and this [conspire.com] andthis [missouri.edu] as three of the top four results...
You may find that the "truth in advertising" regulations might have come into effect after several companies were caught trying such tricks. There have been many documented cases where advertisers have been even more deceitful than simply putting marbles in a bowl of soup.
Pop-up Blocker is a BAD idea. (Score:2, Funny)
HOWTO: How to avoid flash ads (Score:2, Insightful)
Step 1. Don't install flash plugin.
Step 2. ???
Step 3. Profit? err... not with flash ads.
Err... prices? (Score:5, Insightful)
$0.15/hour = $3.6/day = $1314/year
Curiously, right next to this was a Gateway advert:
Holiday Savings!
Flat Panel PC
Free Shipping (for a limited time)
Starting at $699
At those prices, what sane person would lease the systems instead of simply buying them?
Re:Err... prices? (Score:5, Insightful)
Someone who didn't want them for a full year? Didn't want to have to sys admin them themselves? Start-up trying to save costs? Need it done now? I think they are really aiming at things like time critical apps rather than long term general computing.
I'd assume Gateway are using some kind of sandbox to run software in, so its a fixed platform to develop in and in fairness I prefer to have a some jobs run on 1000 machines overnight than on a single machine 24/7 for a year.
Anyway, corporations don't work in the same way as individuals and a $700 system doesn't cover the full TCO
Re:Err... prices? (Score:2)
Yeah, right. Running time critical apps on unreliable and insecure hardware with a crappy interconnect?
Hey, you're at
Re:Err... prices? (Score:2)
Maybe good for the purposes of selling computers, but not good for the purpose of supercomputing. A "good" interconnect typically means at least 10Mbps bisection bandwidth per processor, and a worst-case latency of under a microsecond.
And I don't know about unreliable and insecure.
Joe average, walking in off the street, has physical access to the machines. That makes them unreliable and insecure.
Re:Err... prices? (Score:3, Informative)
Still, it's hard to say exactly which is the cheaper or better option without knowing all of the various costs involved.
Re:Err... prices? (Score:2)
Curiously, right next to this was a Gateway advert:
[snip]
Starting at $699
At those prices, what sane person would lease the systems instead of simply buying them?
Yeah, but electronics these days are so low quality [slashdot.org]... who knows if that new computer will last a full year?
Metal gate technology isn't new! (Score:5, Interesting)
Of course, the metal they were using back then was aluminum, not nickel. I'm surprised that nickel is a good choice since it's only about 1/4 as conductive as aluminum, but I don't know much about solid state physics so I'm sure it must have other properties that make it desirable.
Re:Metal gate technology isn't new! (Score:4, Informative)
The other motivation for using metal gates is to reduce the R-C charging delay when high speed signals are applied at the gate terminal of the transistor. This allows for higher clock speeds (or lower signal latency).
Of course, there are a lot of process integration and manufacturing issues when introducing metal gates. A lot of these metals cannot withstand the high-temperatures the wafer is subjected to in processing (this was actually the reason for moving to polysilicon gates in the early MOS devices). Moreover, there are other thermodynamic stability and etching issues in metal gate transistors.
To end on a pedantic note, AMD used nickel-silicide (strictly not a metal, but a high-conductivity compound formed when nickel reacts with silicon) and not nickel as the gate electrode. Silicides have been used for a while now to strap the source/drain and gates in today's chips to reduce parasitic resistances. What AMD did was to silicide all the way through the gate.
distributed.net (Score:2)
Where are the open source, general purpose distributed clients (and servers)???
This sounds like a great business idea. And I don't mean: 1. distributed computing 2. ??? 3. profit!
Seems like more corporations should be doing this sort of this. Even if not for their own computing benefit, but they could sell the CPU cycles to others in need of them. Of course I'm sure there are security implications in there somewhere.
Old IBM anecdote (Score:5, Funny)
working on new transistor making techniques such as the double gate design as well as metal-rather-than-silicon design.
This reminds me of one of my favorite IBM stories told to me by an ex-IBMer professor a few years back.
It would appear that some time in the 70s (it's been a few years since I heard this story), IBM was having problems with boules* falling over and breaking, costing a great deal of money. IBM being what it was, put out a solicitation for employee suggestions on how to remedy the problem.
One technician was very disappointed to hear that the boules were made of silicon and suggested using a stronger material. It was his wager that a stainless steel boule would be much more resistant to breaking. So, he suggested replacing all the silicon boules with stainless steel.
True story.
* Boules are very tall cylinders of monocrystalline silicon. They are sliced up into fairly thin, circular wafers. These wafers are then processed through the steps that make chips and lastly diced into the silicon chips we commonly see put on plastic or ceramic packages.
Netscape 7.01 released for spin? (Score:3, Interesting)
http://money.cnn.com/2002/12/10/news/companies/
Was this release of 7.01 just for spin, to try and keep the positve in the news more than the negative?
I hate marketing.
still no support for DNS SRV record (Score:3, Insightful)
Rather than using hostnames (www.foo.baz)
use a SRV record to send http traffic to a host:port pair, frp traffic to a different host:port pair, and on and on::
; SRV priority weight port target
_http._tcp IN SRV 0 0 8080 heuey.foo.baz.
_http._tcp IN SRV 0 0 8080 deuey.foo.baz.
_ftp._tcp.ftp IN SRV 0 0 21 louie.foo.baz.
No more do you need to include non-standard ports for http. (8080, 81, etc) just make the app SRV aware and update DNS. done.
This would allow for much simpler Server configs too!!
Re:still no support for DNS SRV record (Score:2, Funny)
Pop-up Blocking (Score:4, Interesting)
The future of internet advertising.... (Score:2)
We all know the "If we can't do it the way we're doing it now, it won't get done at all" argument, and we all know that it's BS. If a product or service has value, people will find a way to deliver it.
Outlawing supermarkets wouldn't stop people from eating.
Re:Pop-up Blocking (Score:2)
The way I'd like to see popup blocking done... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:The way I'd like to see popup blocking done... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:The way I'd like to see popup blocking done... (Score:4, Interesting)
True. So make it an option. Popup blocking will return a real handle but not actually draw the window. You can decide whether or not you want it to actually download the content (via an option which is off by default). This might not even have to be in the GUI (the dev team already complains about how complex it's become), but just in prefs.js.
Maybe there could also be an option for popups to open in a tab in the background; I seem to remember someone mentioning this, but I haven't been able to find it.
Re:The way I'd like to see popup blocking done... (Score:3, Insightful)
The ad provider pays for bandwidth as well. If you started loading banners without showing them you'd really annoy advertisers. Now bandwidth is being used, the servers are under load, but they can't be certain the ad actually appeared anywhere.
If you have a connection like mine and don't pay for the bandwidth you use, this costs you nothing. The browser could delay loading ads until your connection is idle.
The result: you don't see ads, advertisers pay for the server bandwidth, but get to results. If you want them to go away, nothing better than costing them some money.
And people with modems should... (Score:2)
Not everyone has a high-speed link.
Netscape Mail client broken (Score:2)
Double click on a mail message no longer opens the message in a separate window
right click - "open message in new window" no longer opens the message in a separate window
Don't tell me to get another mail client - Netscape has done the job for me so far.
Re:Netscape Mail client broken (Score:2, Informative)
How about, "Report the bug to Netscape, not Slashdot".
AMD's True Performance Initiative (Score:3, Informative)
Grid schmid (Score:5, Interesting)
The upside is that such processing using PCs is already taking place, in the form of distributed.net, folding@home and seti@home among many others. If gateway wants to use its spare cycles to create a supercomputer capable of many teraflops, then go for it.
On the other hand, apps that are well suited to such distributed computing are those that require little I/O and more number crunching. That is, you don't want to use BLAST (comparing gene sequences) as the data sets are on the order of GB. But simple number crunching, like the examples already given, do not require sending much data to the clients for processing.
BTW, LSF has software to do the same thing with desktop boxes.
well, which is it? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:well, which is it? (Score:2)
Rumours of Intel's demise have been exagerated, I believe.
AMD removing themselves as competition was BS (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Opensource Grid Computing (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Opensource Grid Computing (Score:2, Informative)
It's also a complete bear to install.
Re:Opensource Grid Computing (Score:3, Informative)
its a good piece of software at that.
i have had some experience with it.
Re:Opensource Grid Computing (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes, yes, imagine a beowulf cluster of these and then imagine the incredible total overhead wasted by hundreds or thousands of instances of any given JVM.
Re:Opensource Grid Computing (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Opensource Grid Computing (Score:2, Informative)
Your Definition? (Score:4, Insightful)
I attended a colloquim and seminar by Ian Foster, one of the authors of the Globus Toolkit, who was visiting down from Argonne Nat'l Labs. From what I gathered, grid computing is more about having the right kind of network negotiation and protocols between resources. Supper-efficient and superfast are second order derivatives; that is, they are a bonus and nice touch, but I don't think that is exactly what grid computing is about.
Specifically, as I understand it, its about global resource management, across distributed, world-wide systems. Joe, who runs a Particle Collider in Europe, can share information and network resources with Jane, who runs a MRI in America, who can share info and resources with Charlie, who runs a radio telescope in Antartica. I may be mistaken, but I understood grid computing to be sort-of the opposite of clustering.
Now, don't get me wrong... I'm not trying to start any kind of crusade. However, I do know a number of people who swear by Java, and I think that Java may actually be the protocol of choice for a lot of Grid Computing applications (such as sharing of astronomical data, genomic data, and magnetic resonance imaging data). These kinds of applications can greatly benefit by the sandbox architecture, garbage collection, security infrastructure, and virtual machines which Java supports. Sure it adds overhead, but I think that there are millions of programmers and scientists around the world who would gladly take the overhead costs, if it means that they can concentrate on chemistry, astronomy, genetics, or whatever, rather than having to worry about memory pointers, memory leaks, hardware support, and so forth.
But I only attended a couple of lectures by one of the authors of the Globus Toolkit. I'm not an expert or anything, so I could certainly be mistaken.
Re:AMD chipsets don't support Rambus (Score:2, Interesting)
The rambus technology is unique in that it was designed to co-operate with the P4 "netburst" architecture. That is, delivering very quick transfer of data, but the latency wasn't very good, and still isn't extremely good even though it is at 533mhz.
DDR is both cheaper and has better potential for the future. Do you ever see video cards (such as NV30 and ATI R300+) use rambus?
That and DDR2 is just around the corner. Basically, AMD has always followed the cheaper and faster route, and DDR is a lot cheaper than DDR.
My 2c.
Re:AMD chipsets don't support Rambus (Score:4, Funny)
What does dance, dance revolution have to do with any of this?
Re:AMD chipsets don't support Rambus (Score:2)
Re:AMD chipsets don't support Rambus (Score:3, Funny)
Alright, I guess if thats what you really want. Personally, I think it'd hurt but thats just me.
Re:Addendum (Score:2, Funny)
isn't any reason to stick with DDR (Score:3)
Re:Addendum (Score:2)
That said, all indications are it's a bear to work with, and perhaps narrow memory busses aren't the Right Thing? (Don't forget -- Intel RDRAM chipsets, with the exception of i820, all operate on dual-channel RDRAM, which means a 32-bit bus instead of 16... says something rather interesting about the limitations of serialized memory. On the flipside, I wouldn't want to be the engineer trying to root out crosstalk problems on a dual-DDR mobo design either... that's got to be even more of a nightmare.)
well if you want the whole story (Score:5, Informative)
first on the tech. (REALLY quick brief)
1) RDRAM has a faster interface (duh)
2) and it has a much more narrow bus
3) but to make chips drive at such a high frequency ON THE CIRCUIT BOARD, the bus interface for RDRAM is totally wacky
explanation: RDRAM is serially connected, *kinda* like... SCSI, or COAX ethernet back in the days. and it's heavily terminated. and because the signal goes so damn fast (remember, circuit board made of FR4 here - not cache->CPU interconnects), the routing of the signal traces, while sparse (something they tout - and it's true, DDR has like 2-4 time the wire density as RDRAM on the board), has very small tolerance for length difference. furthermore because the high speed, the chips must have a very strict output impedance (which is why mem-makers got shitty yields at the beginning and the RDRAM price were so high).
performance wise / practically speaking, since it's the signal routing / RIMM detection and delay adjustment (remember no trace length differences etc) that's difficult and causes trouble - in game consoles where you will never add memory, RDRAM is actually better (easier to work with / better performance - better perf because you don't incur additional delays in the trace by adding more modules, everything is fixed). Same time on PCs, when you do it right, RDRAM still offers better bandwidth than DDR; DDR-2 i am not so sure, but that won't be in massive production for a while so don't wait for it yet. depending on architecture (P4 is, have to say, on the side of "optimized for RDRAM"), you would get better performance out of RDRAM for a little while longer.
now the non-tech side:
RAMBUS charges royalty. 2% i think? now - memory business is not high-margin business (or else there won't be only like 4-5 memory makers left!), so when 2% is actually like 40% from the margin - if you can do away with RAMBUS (even at a performance hit), it would enable you to survive, or make more money - depending on the company.
so... the moral of the story? RDRAM is not bad technology (i.e. has its uses - like in consoles), but it's not GREAT technology, and certainly not good enough to warrent the margin cut and the headaches in engineering (output impedence - and these days they are going to 32/64 bit so the sparse signal lines is less and less of a advertisable benefit). But I expect that it will maintain it's little niche and won't just die off suddenly one day. i mean, heck - even if they only supplied for the game consoles, (especially with the large chunck of change intel gave to RAMBUS) they can survive for quite a while. RAMBUS as a company I think will eventually fail if they continue this path of IP-only, though - for other reasons. but this is getting long already.
Re:y2k3? (Score:2, Informative)
2k and 3
2000 and 3
2003
For the year 2300:
2k and 300
2k3c or 2k300
Re:Did anyone see Aqua Teen Hunger Force Sunday? (Score:2)
Re:Did anyone see Aqua Teen Hunger Force Sunday? (Score:2)
Re:What the hell? (Score:3, Insightful)
First, Java is a language. A language cannot be fast or slow. However, the implementation of the Java interpreter can be described as fast or slow.
Secondly, just because the memory heavy, CPU intensive Sun Java VM that you load on your linux or windows or solaris box is slow, doesn't mean that all other implementations are slow.
Thirdly, consider that a Java program that is written poorly will perform poorly. This is the case with any language. If you haven't carefully audited the source code to make sure it is making optimal use of your CPU's time, you can't say for sure that the program isn't at fault.
Re:What the hell? (Score:3, Informative)
First, Java is a language. [...] doesn't mean that all other implementations are slow.
Java is an environment as well as a language. Unless this Java grid is planning to throw away the JVM, I think it's fair to say that it's probably using that standard Java environment. I'm not ruling out that a "magic" JVM might come along that somehow overcomes all the baggage of how Java is designed, but so far we've not seen this. Given the current state of technology, it seems foolish to me to throw away all that performance.
Based on my own experience, Java is on the average about 1/10th the speed of an equivalent C program, although clearly it depends on what you're doing. Where Java is particularly bad is very data intensive work, such as string manipulation. Where I was particularly appalled at Java's performance was XML parsing.
Java works best when it's a "glue" mechanism to pass communication between systems. Where it is not appropriate IMO is very computationally intensive applications, which presumably would be what you would use a grid for.
Re:What the hell? (Score:3, Insightful)
huh? Where'd that 90% come from? Are you talking about the JRE? As I understand it, Java bytecode gets compiled at runtime, so for computational stuff where you're only launching the app once and letting it run for awhile, it should be pretty fast.
Re:AMD 64-Bit chips drop in? (Score:3, Informative)
Yes, you can run a standard x86 RedHat. That's the attractive thing about the Hammer/Athlon64/Opteron/Whatever. They can run 32- or 64-bit code. In fact, they can run BOTH at the same time. One of the demos that AMD showed was a dual-monitor Opteron, with two spinning 3D objects. One was running as a 32-bit app, the other as a 64-bit app - on the same machine.
However, I believe that RedHat IS going to have a release for the Hammer. Considering that some packages (like Apache) are having a good amount of work done to make them really take advantage of the 64-bit environment, I'm not sure how much of a difference the special distro will make, but there's plenty of time for that.
steve
Re:AMD 64-Bit chips drop in? (Score:2)
To answer your question, yes, you'll need a OS specifically built for the chip, and a new motherboard. There is some tentative support for x86-64 from a few companies (I believe SuSE).
But this raises the question of, why would you want to? The Alpha is an elegant architecture. x86-64 is a sin against nature.
Re:Radeon (Score:2)