Comment Here kitty kitty (Score 2, Funny) 99
I want to see what it would do if a cat jumped up on the table...
Comment Re:Dangerous reading. (Score 1) 464
You are on the right track. Religion and morality are two different things.
The two are logically separate from each other. (even if they weren't in theory, they certainly are in practice)
A non religious person can be moral and religion doesn't prevent a person from being immoral.
Morality only requires empathy and reciprocity. No coercion from invisible beings required.
Comment Clock cycle comparison is incomplete (Score 1) 253
A closer speed estimate:
The Atari's chip took about 4 clock cycles per instruction.
The Intel chip does 4 instructions per clock cycle. (so multiply by 16)
The byte size is 8 bit vs 64 bits. (multiply again by 8)
The Intel has a floating point subsystem. (multiply by 10? if you are doing math calculations.
Probably more like 40 if you were to have each do 32bit floats.)
The Intel has 2 cores. (multiply by 2)
The Intel has L1 L2 RAM cache. (probably factored in to the 4 instructions per clock timing)
So the actual speedup is more like 1000 x 16 x 8 x 10 x 2 = 2,560,000 for floating point
and 1000 x 16 x 8 x 2 = 256,000 for data manipulation.
Multiply by another 10 for the newer faster 8 core desktop machines.
Open Source Network Management Beats IBM and HP 100
mjhuot writes "Last week SearchNetworking.com announced their Product Leadership Awards for 2007. It was a pleasant surprise to see an open source project, OpenNMS, win the Gold in their Network and IT Management Platforms category. OpenNMS beat out the established players of Hewlett-Packard's OpenView and IBM's Tivoli. This was based on a user survey of all IT solutions, not just open source; it demonstrates that open source software is indeed making inroads into the enterprise."
Comment Re:Speaking of time... (Score 1) 535
I guess I was too lazy to proofread my semi-coherent post previously also.
Anyway here's a link for the delayed choice thought experiment using the gravitational lens...
http://www.space.com/searchforlife/quantum_astron
Server Monitoring Solutions? 58
bwhaley asks: "The University I work for has asked me to research software solutions for server monitoring. More specifically, a piece of software that will monitor server variables such as load, swap usage, POP/IMAP processes, total processes, and all the other interesting data about a server's health. Watching these variables can give administrators advance warning about potential problems with the server. We are currently using an in-house solution written in Perl but its age is showing. I have found plenty of proprietary solutions such as HP OpenView and Sun Management Center, but these cost thousands of dollars. What solutions do Slashdot readers use? Are there any powerful open source solutions that I'm missing? Is anyone else running homegrown software that they are happy with? We are running an entirely Solaris environment but I am interested in any UNIX solution."
