I am flexible in terms of storage space; I currently have an 80GB disk, but I'm using less than 5GB of it. I'd like to start using a bit more, but not having more bandwidth makes this difficult.
Can anyone recommend a hosting company that would offer this kind of set-up for under about $50/month? DedicatedNow seemed like they had a reasonable offer, but they had some quite unreasonable demands, such as needing a copy of my passport faxed to them to complete the transaction (and I don't do that for any business, particularly not one I have had no prior dealings with).
In unrelated news, it looks like I'm getting a Google-sponsored minion for the summer. The SoC results were announced this morning, and the project I am mentoring got accepted. Should be fun.
The NetBSD and OpenBSD articles got between 15-30K unique readers in the first seven days. I don't have figures for after that. I've been contacted by a few people who said they started using NetBSD as a result of the article. The moral of this story? If you want free publicity, try being polite.
Today, I got a reply, saying:
Thank you for your communication of the
1/2/2007, By E-Mail
which will receive attention
Now, normally, I would expect a reply of this nature to be sent by email, since it's basically an auto-responder. In this case, however, it was sent via a different mechanism. Second class mail.
Yes, my MP employs someone to act as an email auto-responder, replying by postcard to all emails. Isn't technology great?
Ping Wales have the full story. From the article:
A straw poll of businesses in Wales which use Macs reveals that no business customers have been informed of the change to the repair service.
Apparently customers were not the only ones kept in the dark over this:
Apple resellers in the region told Ping Wales that they hadn't been informed of the change either, adding that this did explain why the number of repairs coming in had increased significantly over the last few weeks.
Can anyone recommend a good supplier for Opteron machines at a reasonable price? I need a minimum of two CPUs (or cores), a reasonably sized (but not necessarily fast) hard disk, a couple of GB of RAM. It's going to run headless, so no graphics card is required (the Sun workstation line looks nice, but I object to spending money on an nVidia Quadro card that is never going to be used).
On the more geeky side, there are a couple of large SGI SMP boxes (one 60 CPU, one 30) for me to play with and a Linux cluster.
Today we warned the technicians that we might need to use a big chunk of disk space. We were told that there might not be enough, since they only had about 200GB free on the RAID array we wanted to use (the one local to the 60 CPU box). Back home, our technicians complained when I dumped a 2GB DVD image in my home directory...
OS X sucks at system calls. Due to the Mach+BSD kernel design, system calls are very expensive on OS X. On Mach, the system call cost is around 10x the cost on BSD - on OS X it's some combination of the two depending on what you do. The next thing to realise is that all of the POSIX thread synchronisation mechanisms are implemented using Mach-level synchronisation primitives. This means every time you lock a mutex (for example) you need to dive down through the BSD layer to the Mach layer. This gives you the horrible overhead of checking the permissions on a Mach port (something that sane Microkernels like L4 abandoned), and is expensive. This makes locking operations on OS X much more expensive than on BSD-like kernels. This, in turn, can make threaded code much slower. If you are Adobe, and you are rendering an entire image transformation in a small number of threads, then you will only lock at the beginning and the end of the operations, so it will be nice and fast. If you are doing low-level parallel operations for scientific computing (when not bitching about the OS X kernel), then you should really try harder to persuade someone to buy you a nice Solaris box.
This is why I like Objective-C, and why using languages like C++ feels so painful in comparison. Oh, and for reference, enumerating the classes was around half a dozen lines. Sure, this kind of thing is possible in C++, but only if you build a huge amount of extra stuff on top.
This is all well and good, but FPGAs don't offer the same feature density as even ASICs (although they are re-writable), so this raises the question of whether it would be commercially viable to do a run of ASICs based on an open core, with a motherboard also based on an open design. Would you buy a motherboard / CPU that could run, for example, NetBSD and was entirely open source? How much of a premium would you be willing to pay for such a thing?
I really like the design of the Alpha CPU, and I would be interested in a machine that had a similar core design, and maybe willing to pay around a 50% premium over x86 for the elegance of the system - particularly if I could also download the core design to an FPGA, modify it, and submit changes back for inclusion in the next revision.
One of the real advantages of open source software is that it can easily be compiled for multiple architectures, so once you've written a GCC back-end and a boot loader for your system you suddenly have a huge amount of usable software.
I am rapidly coming to the conclusion that the ideal CPU would have a very simple instruction set, and not even do out-of-order execution. Code running on it should be compiled first into some kind of byte-code, and any re-scheduling should occur in the bytecode JIT - move as much complexity into software as possible, since it's much easier to upgrade (and to configure at run-time).
A month later they finally admitted that they'd lost it. A month after that they got around to replacing it. The one they replaced it with didn't even boot. They collected it and fixed it relatively quickly, leaving me with a new machine which had a fault in one of the SO-DIMM slots.
At this point, I decided not to send it back in for repair again. I'd already wasted around 10 hours on hold to Apple's customer support, and I didn't want to spend any longer.
Now, however, the fault with one slot has become an intermittent fault with both. Moving the machine at all causes memory errors (and will cause it not to resume from standby). When I boot, I have no idea which RAM slot will be operational (I've put a stick in each - sometimes I boot with 512MB, sometimes with 256MB. So far, I haven't managed to boot with 768MB, but there's hope...).
I am going to try to borrow a machine from the department while I wait for this one to be repaired. If I am really lucky, I'll be able to bring it home and work from here. Well, I can hope...
I suddenly have an incentive to stay at my desk (apart from the view of the sea).
In unrelated news, I mentioned previously that I was putting OpenBSD on a co-located Mac Mini, and would be writing about this. The first 4 of these are now online:
Macs in a rack - taking the mini to the masses
Why OpenBSD?
Setting up secure mail on OpenBSD
Filtering Spam with OpenBSD
The fifth one (Web and Webmail) is done, but will not be release until next Friday (it's my birthday next week, so I wrote it early). The sixth will cover setting up a Jabber server. I haven't yet decided what the seventh will cover - suggestions welcome...
Oh, and the hosting place has agreed to give a discount to Ping Wales readers, so don't forget to mention Ping to them if you do decide to use them (details in the first article).
Once the system is set up and running, I will post more details.
Say "twenty-three-skiddoo" to logout.