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Comment Re:Original Source and Actual Paper (Score 1) 462

by aixylinux (#33753658) Attached to: Linux May Need a Rewrite Beyond 48 Cores

To say nothing of the Power 7 795, which scales to 256 cores with 4-way SMT, for 1024 hardware threads.

http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/power/hardware/795/index.html

And AIX 7 will handle this in a single-system image:

http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/power/software/aix/v71/preview.html

Desktop operating systems, indeed.
Idle

Paleontologists Discover World's Horniest Dinosaur 109

Posted by samzenpus from the overcompensatesaurus dept.
Ponca City, We love you writes "The Guardian reports that paleontologists have uncovered the remains of an ancient beast called Kosmoceratops richardsoni that stood 16 feet tall with a 6-foot skull equipped with 15 horns and lived 76 million years ago in the warm, wet swamps of what is now southern Utah. 'These animals are basically over-sized rhinos with a whole lot more horns on their heads. They had huge heads relative to their body size,' says Scott Sampson, a researcher at the Utah Museum of Natural History."
The Internet

The Puzzle of Japanese Web Design 242

Posted by kdawson from the how-to-pack-five-eggs dept.
I'm Not There (1956) writes "Jeffrey Zeldman brings up the interesting issue of the paradox between Japan's strong cultural preference for simplicity in design, contrasted with the complexity of Japanese websites. The post invites you to study several sites, each more crowded than the last. 'It is odd that in Japan, land of world-leading minimalism in the traditional arts and design, Web users and skilled Web design practitioners believe more is more.'"
Biotech

First Halophile Potatoes Harvested 117

Posted by timothy from the integrated-dill-is-the-next-step dept.
Razgorov Prikazka writes "A Dutch-based company from Groningen is trying to create a potato race that is able to survive in a saline environment. The first test-batch was just harvested (English translation of Dutch original) on the island Texel and seem to be in good shape. The company states that rising sea-levels will create a demand for halophile crops. I do wonder if one still has to put salt on ones potatoes when they are grown in salt water."
Space

Black Hole Emits a 1,000-Light-Year-Wide Gas Bubble 145

Posted by Soulskill from the reminds-me-of-a-buddy-of-mine dept.
PhrostyMcByte writes "12 million light-years away, in the outer spiral of galaxy NGC 7793, a bubble of hot gas approximately 1,000 light-years in diameter can be found shooting out of a black hole — one of the most powerful jets of energy ever seen. (Abstract available at Nature.) The bubble has been growing for approximately 200,000 years, and is expanding at around 1,000,000 kilometers per hour."
Windows

Microsoft Kills Support For XP SP2 315

Posted by timothy from the too-soon? dept.
Trailrunner7 writes "Microsoft's announcement this week that it is preparing to end support for machines running Windows XP SP2 not only represents a challenge for the thousands of businesses still running SP2, but also is the end of an era for both Microsoft and its customers. It wasn't until 2004 that the final release of XP SP2 hit the streets, but when it did, it represented a huge step forward in security for Windows users. It wasn't necessarily the feature set that mattered as much as the fact that the protections were enabled by default and taken out of the users' hands."
Education

Memorizing Language / Spelling Techniques? 237

Posted by timothy from the save-up-for-neural-implants dept.
NotesSensei writes "My kids are learning Chinese in school. While the grammar is drop-dead simple, writing is a challenge since there is no relation between sound and shape of the characters. I would like to know any good techniques (using technology or not) to help memorize large amounts of information, especially Chinese characters. Most of the stuff I Googled only helps on learning speaking."
Encryption

OpenSSH 5.4 Released 127

Posted by timothy from the but-it's-secret dept.
HipToday writes "As posted on the OpenBSD Journal, OpenSSH 5.4 has been released: 'Some highlights of this release are the disabling of protocol 1 by default, certificate authentication, a new "netcat mode," many changes on the sftp front (both client and server) and a collection of assorted bugfixes. The new release can already be found on a large number of mirrors and of course on www.openssh.com.'"
Earth

Breaking the Squid Barrier 126

Posted by timothy from the calimari-for-the-5000 dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Dr. Steve O'Shea of Auckland, New Zealand is attempting to break the record for keeping deep sea squid alive in captivity, with the goal of being able to raise a giant squid one day. Right now, he's raising the broad squid, sepioteuthis australis, from egg masses found in seaweed. This is a lot harder than it sounds, because the squid he's studying grow rapidly and eat only live prey, making it hard for them to keep the squid from becoming prey themselves. If his research works out, you might one day be able to visit an aquarium and see giant squid."
Space

Astronomers Discover 33 Pairs of Waltzing Black Holes 101

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the teach-them-to-foxtrot dept.
Astronomers from UC Berkeley have identified 33 pairs of waltzing black holes, closing the gap somewhat between the observed population of super-massive black hole pairs and what had been predicted by theory. "Astronomical observations have shown that 1) nearly every galaxy has a central super-massive black hole (with a mass of a million to a billion times the mass of the Sun), and 2) galaxies commonly collide and merge to form new, more massive galaxies. As a consequence of these two observations, a merger between two galaxies should bring two super-massive black holes to the new, more massive galaxy formed from the merger. The two black holes gradually in-spiral toward the center of this galaxy, engaging in a gravitational tug-of-war with the surrounding stars. The result is a black hole dance, choreographed by Newton himself. Such a dance is expected to occur in our own Milky Way Galaxy in about 3 billion years, when it collides with the Andromeda Galaxy."

Comment EBCDIC (Score 2, Informative) 251

by aixylinux (#30387364) Attached to: IBM's Newest Mainframe Is All Linux

The System z hardware is no more EBCDIC than you are. z/Linux uses ASCII for messages, commands, and utilities, just as z/OS uses EBCDIC. The z/Linux choices include ports of RedHat and Suse. The port does not include translating these to EBCDIC.

Now, the old native Unix for z/OS, Unix System Services, *was* an EBCDIC Unix. Nothing ever said Unix had to be based on ASCII. Porting programs to USS was a challenge because too many programs made assumptions about the binary value of characters. Usually the fixes were simple, but sometimes the defects were hard to find. But if an assumption was made about the collating sequence, the problem was harder.
Cellphones

iPhone Users Angry Over AT&T Upgrade Policy 789

Posted by kdawson from the fair's-fair-in-the-eye-of-the-beholder dept.
All is not sweetness and light in the wake of the Apple WWDC kickoff announcements, especially concerning the evolution of the iPhone. Reader Hugh Pickens writes: "AT&T will offer the new iPhone 3G S when it debuts later this month at a cost of $199 and $299 for the 16GB and 32GB models, but only to new customers and those who qualify for the discounted price. AT&T subscribers with an iPhone 3G who are not eligible for an upgrade — those not near the end of their two-year contracts — will have to pay $200 more — $399 for the 16GB model and $499 for the 32GB model. 'This is ridiculous and slap in the face to long-time loyal iPhone customers like me who switched from T-Mobile and the only reason was the iPhone,' writes one unhappy iPhone customer. 'We have to mount a vigorous campaign to change this policy. Call your local AT&T and ask for the manager and complain. Send e-mails and post in forums everywhere.' The issue is spurring heavy debate on support discussion forums, with some customers supporting AT&T. 'The option you have is to honor the contract you freely committed yourself to,' says one forum member. 'If you want to upgrade early then you will have to pay full price with no subsidy discount. You can't blame anyone but yourself for your predicament.'"

Comment IEFBR14 (Score 5, Informative) 903

by aixylinux (#23371430) Attached to: What Is the Oldest Code Written Still Running?
If by "program" you mean a stored program on what is conventionally meant by a computer today, I have a candidate.  IEFBR14 was used on the earliest version of OS/360 in 1964 as a do-nothing program. It is still in use today, unchanged on the latest version of z/OS.  Its function is to execute a JCL step which does nothing, but in the process of doing nothing, the job scheduler is invoked.  This is one method of creating and deleting datasets (files). It is also the shortest valid OS/360 (and z/OS) program, containing two executable assembler statements and two assembler directives.  The comments are mine.

IEFBR14  CSECT          START PROGRAM SECTION
         SR 15,15       SET EXIT CODE TO 0
         BR 14          RETURN AND EXIT
         END            TELL ASSEMBLER END OF PROGRAM

Interestingly, the first version of this program had a bug, which was subsequently corrected by doubling the program length.  It omitted the SR 15,15 statement, which meant that at program exit register 15 had an unpredictable value -- and the program exit code was therefore unpredictable.  Since a zero exit code is used to guide the conditional execution of subsequent steps, a failure could be indicated when there was none.

And contrary to another post, I believe there are a lot of people with computer experience predating 1970 who read Slashdot.  But I don't want to start a flame war over that.

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