I don't know about SGI, but I do know that the biggest AIX/Power7 box you can get today has 256 cores (32 chips with 8 cores each). I know there was kernel work involved but the scaling problems I remember mentioned involved the number threads (1024) as the P7 core has 4-way multithreading.

The Linux certainly may need work for such machines, but a new operating system ? bullshit.

Use standard HTML for as much as possible. Complement the rest with flash.

If you choose Silverlight you'll exclude automatically all platforms which are not Windows mainstream (Vista and 7). Flash is well supported about everywhere.

I'm typing this on a Ubuntu workstation with Chrome. No Silverlight available here.

You don't post any specific minimal specs you need, so here what I'd want for my lab:

• Four channels, quite often two channels are a bit short
• Color, with four channels color helps a lot to identify the signals
• DSO, goes without mention
• Computer-interface, mostly for screen shots to document and share
• Built-in logic analyzer, many times you'll have a combination of analog and digital signals to watch

I've seen many intelligent discussion on avrfreaks.net about the topic Oscilloscope search on avrfreaks

Markus

I hope Motorola get's a nice class-action suit out of this.

Imagine a nice little virus, designed to trigger the 'self-destruct' and some innocent users getting infected.

Markus

I'd like that screen on my mobile phone. That's where I'd need a sunlight-readable, battery conserving display most. Most GPS functions only work outside due to feeble GPS signals, but at the same time the display become almost unreadable.

There are plenty of business opportunities and markets for Mary Lou to explore !

Markus

On and Android Phone there is an application called 'Market' this application allow you to browse all applications on the google android market, install the ones you like, uninstall what you don't want any more, etc. In addition this application periodically checks with the server to see if there are new versions of your installed apps and offers to update those.

I suppose the market did check for the offending apps and found that they had the 'remove' flag set and removed them from the phone.

If you would have installed the same apps without market (downloading the apk file) the market would not know about them and leave them alone.

Markus

This might be a case where the EFF might be interested to help.

Also, banding all together, you are 35 people strong, considerably lowering expenses.

Markus

The title of this article is bullshit an the contents in large parts. The journalist has apparently no clue what he/she is talking about and just aims to grab attention with a grossly wrong article.

Baki is correct, there are proposals under way to create a new law. Among them an extreme 'full ban'. The likely outcome is something 'eurocompatible', e.g. similar to what the other countries (France, Germany) do.

Markus

I agree. this is the kind of device I want. The sunlight-readable screen and the long battery life are essential. Finally I can read my ebooks on the beach !

I might prefer Chrome-OS or a Linux tablet edition over Android. We'll see.

About the microcode part. The drive pretends to be a 512byte drive, but internally is using 4k sectors and and claims to 'translate transparently'. I can understand that in a random-access scenario it it has to read-modify-write 2 sectors each time and performance suffers (2 additional reads and one additional write). But in a sequential access scenario, the penalty should be once per sequence/file, not once per sector. Here the microcode fails completely to make the best out of the suboptimal situation.

What do you disagree with ? There is a performance problem and the author thinks the kernel people should look into the matter. I don't think they can do much, after all the kernel just writes 4k block to the drive. The problem is with the drive microcode which should attenuate the problem in the case of sequential writes, like the first case. Obviously it does not do that at all. Markus

I've ran through the performance numbers announced by IBM and what I found at spec.org (specint_rate & specfp_rate) of the other CPU's and roughly the following picture (give/take 20%):

• Power6/Power7: about 30 spec_int/fp_rate/core
• Intel Core i7: about 30 spec_int/fp_rate/core
• Sparc: about 10 spec_int/fp_rate/core
• Itanium 2: about 12 spec_int/fp_rate/core

So it looks to me that performance-wise Power and x86_64 are similar. Both seem almost three times as fast as Itanium/Sparc. However. in the commercial world scalability matters and I there are not many big (>4 socket) x86 systems around. Big Power, Sparc and Itanium servers scale to hundreds of cores and are built like mainframes with excellent RAS features. I see high-end kit from both sides, x86 and Power and the margins in the x86 world are not good enough to pay for the engineering it takes to get to the same levels.

If you compare Power and x86_linux with cars:

• You are read to spend some money to drive a nice car with excellent performance and stop at the dealer for inspections regularly then you well of with a Range Rover (=AIX Power server).
• You are going to cross Africa, will be on your own (and have the truck full f spare parts) and are ready to get your hands dirty then you want a Land Rover (=Linux x86).

This picture is far from complete, but shows what the choice is quite well.

Markus

Make sure that your bank uses strong authentication (bejond userid/password) when you access your account. Any strong authentication mechanism (securid token , one-time token, etc.). All Swiss banks provide/require such a method.

I don't know about todays but only some years ago most US banks used vanilla useid/password combinations. With those one can eavesdrop on the line (or just watching you at the internet cafe). That's not safe. If that still is the case with your bank I'd change.

Most other things are either complicated and not practical or don't help safety much in real life.

Markus

I think it shows how Google lives the 'don't do evil' slogan. They try to be a good citizen everywhere. Unfortunately this is not easy, in Chine a good citizen does not talk about certain things, in the US you are not supposed to hide the same things. Sou you can not be a good citizen in both places at the same time. Google could choose not to be in China, but this would not help matters (it would be blocked by the great firewall).

If their president is almost openly like that, drafting laws almost explicitly designed to stop his prosecution, why should other behave better ?