Posts by Morten Bjoernsvik
92 posts • joined Friday 7th March 2008 10:10 GMT
Re: How about a stock buyback??? Seems like smarter move...lots smarter than giving in to Loeb
You cant buy back stocks with money you do not have. A stock buyback is great if You have money in the bank with no idea how to spend (Apple, IBM, Intel etc). But Sony is deep in the red, so they have to wrestle out all the vaules they can find.
Re: Why so long?
After installing the code I see it waits 10 sec between each shoot so everything becomes static, that is why it takes so long 10 sec every move, would have been nice this was shortened down. but AI need to be smarter then to shorten, not much brute force then.
Re: Why so long?
Or is it trying the level multiple times to see what works and what doesn't? If it is doing this why does the article not mention it?
It tries shot after shot and sees how well it goes, sets angle and power and fires away.
This computation they have shortened down from 10sec to 1/10 because they have probably taken away the presentation and go directly onto the physics computation of the impact.
The nice thing is that they do not bend the rules just try and try, although it is not much AI in this because it is easy to compute the successrate for each shot. Try 10 shots then take the one that destroys most objects and go to next shot ets. it is static and not more than 5-6 birds. This is no chess solver like deep blue.
But it is cool and fun to watch.
Re: Linux as a desktop is a failure, its time to move on
The only program I've missed from windows was Visio. Now with libreoffice4 we now have a much better draw package. And with Steam now accelerating on linux. I would say the future has never looked brighter for the linux desktop.
Re: Is this some new Microshill tactic?
suse have suse studio, I use it to set up rpms for redhat because my big do it all rpm of our commercial app spec file just fails on RHEL6. After making the spec file through suse studio, it worked. So I develop all my company commercial code in open suse, then when it is finished I verify the code with suse studio and build for centos5/6. Very nice piece of software.
Re: Sniff
>But I'm fond of jfs as a file system, which for some reason Suse stopped supprting some time back.
JFS is in the 12.3 filesystem list, it is not the default though which is ext4, I myself always uses XFS.
I've had lots of cheap disks failing, but I've always managed to get xfs_repair to restore the disk into a readable condition. much faster than Spinrite.
Thank heaven for virtualization
I used to have something similar, but now I have lots of vmware images on one quad core 24GB workstation.
disk-share on host, and all kinds of linux (opensuse 11.0,11.4,12.1,12.2,12.3,centos5,6), winxp for all kinds of vpns for work and a win7 for gaming, different work images of our software so I can test at home. etc all in all I have 23 images on 2x2TB disks all running on vmware workstation v8.0.6. Fortunately I do not need to run more than max 2-3 vms at once.
I used to hate the frequent upgrades with OpenSuse, because I have a rather tricky wikimedia setup with some heavy configured plugins and getting this to work on a new system take a lot of time. Now I Just clone the image and start upgrading while the old one is running until it is ready. if it stalls I just start on a new clone.
Gaming in win7 vm on a linux host works fine. The most demaning game I've played have been Skyrim.
I played to level 67 and put 135 hours into it, so it was a fine experience.
But You need to have a nvidia card, I tried an AMD card and then it just froze, vmware complains saying there are issues with this card/driver on a linux host when you start the vm in accelerated mode.
I consider the $179 vmware license well spent money and well within a home budget.
I've used Xen and Virtual box also, but they are not in the same ballpark. especially considering performance and hw-accelerated gfx on guest vms.
HP get over it
Itanic is dead and has been for years. How long can you beat a dead horse?
The revenue stream from itanics dwindle day by day. There cant be much left.
if they jumped ship when this was announced they would have been in much better shape now.
There is a marked out there for linuxboxes with the same feature set as itanic superdomes,
Couldn't be that hard. SGI moved from itanium to Xeons in 2 years on their Altix line.
Nobody is missing the itanics. it was a bad design that lived way too long.
The slow single thread performance and poor intel compilers will not be missed.
Re: No love for Kubuntu . . .
> KDE 3.5 was a fantastic desktop. I still use it in places.
> Then KDE 4.0 came along. And it was *terrible*.
KDE4.9 is fantastic. I've been using it ~8h/day since beginning of September and it has not crashed once.
Now you can move all icons around from anywhere to everywhere. The shortcuts are stable and always working, which was not the case earlier. Now I'm watining for KDE4.10
I rather use Samba
Why do you get only 35MByte/s write performance? Your network must be saturated.
I do not see the point in testing a NAS array when the network is the limitation.
If the Drobo is the limitation it is a bad selling point.
I tested my samba share from my fanless low end linux box exporting a cheap WD 2TB green disk and get 70MBytes/s write and 85MBytes/s read from a win7 client.
I only have a D-Link dir-825 wireless/gigabit router in between.
IMHO the samba swat web interface is just as easy as the Drobo.
linux?
Nice tech, but what about linux?, should be easier to create linux runtime.
Welcome after
In Norway we turned of analogue May 20, 2008. I do not miss the snowy pictures for sure.
The apps
Appstore > 500K, Android Play > 500K, Nokia MarketPlace ~ 80K, WP marketplace ~ 100K
Is Nokia symbian apps? or just a clone of WP marketplace?
Why should anyone develop for Nokia and WP when they only hold around 2% of the market.
This is already a lost battle. RIP Nokia(^D^D^D^D^D Microsoft Phone Subsidiary)
Oracle Linux and RedHat
"We think Sparc will become clearly the best chip for running Oracle software. At that point we'd be nuts not to move Oracle Enterprise Linux there. We're a ways away, but I think that's definitely going to happen," Ellison said.
OEL is just a rebranded, recompiled RHEL with some kernel patches and settings suited for oracle software.
Nice try getting that onto SPARC without RedHats Approval. They can make their own distro and not scavenge upon others. Or do they actually send a tiny fraction of all that OEL support income to RedHat, I do not believe so.
I'm not allowed to use it
Installed amazon appstore, but since I'm in a backwater 3rd world country (Norway), I do not have a valid purchase country. I can shop in the Kindle Store on the same device though via android kindle app on same account. Maybe Amazon assumes all appstore customers use Kindle Fire.
Re: Will the Iranians get the fixes?
Even though Siemens is not directly involved with the Iranians, they surely have a subcontracted subcontractor somewhere. All so obscured no one can find the connection.
RIP SPARC?
We all know the 10x boost comes from replacing sparc with x86_64.
I'm still a linux netbook fan
I'm still perfectly happy with my EEE PC 1018 which cost me around £210 with 2GB ram and a cheap 80GB SSD.
Battery lasts on average 11hours. it boots in 4sec from hibernation, instant from suspend.
I can have it in suspend for weeks.
And it runs IMHO the best OS in the world OpenSuse 11.4. (not 12.1)
The screen is not good compared to the IPAD3 though, but it browses much faster, maybe
because the 2GB mem is much faster than whats in the ipad.
it runs citrix and vmware so I've access to all corporate software and everything I need to do my job developing software and do presentations in case of emergency.
Posted in What should Oracle do with Sun
Oracle on SPARC/SOLARIS is very competetive
From customers I've heard that Oracle is pushing SPARCS to run their Enterprise Database.
Although it cant match Power6+ or latest X86_64 on single thread speed, the Sparc architecture still offers great benefits when it comes to hardware redundancy, storage management and a rock solid OS in the bottom with some nice features you will never see on RHEL (DTrace, ZFS, Fault manager, Service Manager to name a few).
They discount the oracle core licenses so they become competetively regarding price/performance.
The hardware price is nothing compared to the $47.500 per processor list price, and AFAIK no other processor beats the 64threads on T4 or 128threads on T3.
Add up the discounts and the most attactive system to run a large oracle database is on Sparc/Solaris.
The next SPARC T5 will have 128cores and 16K threads and IO backbone to sustain it.
Singlethread will be mediocre but no one else
I work with databases that grows with >10mill rows each day, and I've never seen any need for faster cpus, it is mostly IO and memory. If a single thread is slow, just run them in parallel and you get linear speedup.
When you run queries you need lots of indexes to back you up which makes you IO bound.
Posted in HP-Oracle Itanium smackdown starts
HP priorities?
Why do not HP just rebuild their superdome hardware to use xeons, like SGI did with Altix?
HP should have ported HPUX to X86_64 years ago, or switched to linux.
The magins can't have been that good?
Re: Poor contrast on e-readers
I have a kindle4 and it is as crisp as it can be, no problems there. what I miss is the backlight of a tablet so you can read in the dark.
Posted in Life at Googleplex REVEALED in hot pics
SGI buildings 40-43
The cafeteria looked better when it was part of MIPS/SGI campus and was called Cafe Ozone.
It cost almost nothing to eat and the quality of the food was exceptionally.
SGI sold the buildings to a joint venture firm for around $800mill and leased it back. It financed the company deficit for years.
Re: ARM Emulator
Interesting. They have to do _MUCH_ better than their last effort:
I recall the X86emulator on Itanic. On the first revisions it was made in hardware, later they figured it did perform better in software and saved silicon.
It had one main shortcoming, it was tied to the core frequency of the itanic, and at 600MHz while the pentiums where at 2.4GHz it was way too slow to be usable, even for testing.
AC power and computers
I recall my days at SGI, During 1997-2000, Every year end of May we had to replace 3-4 powersupplies in the University of Bergen HPC. On the 3rd year we found this to be a travelling circus/tivoli connecting to the same power source nearby. It showed up yearly for the national holiday.
Posted in Microsoft milks Casio for using Linux
Show me your stinking patents
Do anyone have a list of the offending patents. I tried to google and did not find any?.
When I install opensuse I only get one license for truetype, but where are the other 234?
An emulator wont hurt
I do not see why an emulator will hurt them, it would be a very valuable tool for developing and testing software. They should ease the access to mainframes to help porting software.
I've been asked by our IBM outsourced customers to test/port our software to AIX and eventually also Z/OS. IBM provides access to hardware for free. And running AIX/ZOS seem to be cheaper than linux when outsorced to IBM, when you already have those already.
You can get far better IO on most other high end unix boxes, they just do not provide so many levels of fault tollerant microcode as the mainframe. Something IBM touts you head full of.
I've tested hot swappable memory in X3590 x86 servers and it is slow as hell, almost unusable. If you need this feature you have to sacrifice latency or pay the extra for the mainframe.
I use AIR on linux
In order to use WIMP (a music streaming service like spotify). I had to install AIR and it works fairly well. I have to go back to piracy again then. Fat chance Wimp will make a native linux player.
When flash works on linux, there cant be much work supporting AIR, it is just a runtime for flash outside the browser.
simple used to be faster
Legacy Fortran code is fast because the F77 compiler was really simple, no function stack and no dynamic memory allocation. Just fixed arrays and static libraries for everything. basic stuff like recursion was not allowed
Pure C-compilers used to be fast also before all the OOP stuff was added.
And not to mention all the kernel, multitask, GUI, interrupt libraries you have to incorporate.
For many simple tasks todays computers are too complex.
Cloud idots
Why all this talk about clouds. I want sunshine and long lazy days on the beach.
Fortran?
Why not try and get it even faster, port it to fortran.
Posted in Dell Inspiron Zino HD 410
overkill and expensive
I did not want yet another hot noisy harddrive in the bench under the TV, So I purchased an Apacer AL460. Along with an old usb wlan stick, it streams hd from a local server via a samba-share.
It cost me £45 and is completely silent, small and lukewarm. I'm unable to see any difference between this and the PS3 on playback quality and it plays all format and subtitles I have collected during the years.
I only see the need for a mediapc if you do not have any other pc in the house that can act as a server. I rather spend the money on a vanilla server where you can get 5-6 disk drives. You better soon need the space.
Posted in SGI swings to a profit on sales jump
Octane3 is rather nice
I think the Octane3 10-node deskside cluster is probably the most sexy box out there. Xeon or atom(?) processors. The original driver only support quadro gfx cards, but I know from reliable sources that geforce 440 fanless works fine.
Posted in HP lands $2.5bn NASA IT support deal
@Hass80
No it will be Bangalore.... we have a problem.
cheap numas are useless
IBM has Xseries 3850 and 3950 which they claim are numa, but if you connect more than one box together and use memory cards, the memory becomes so slow that my eeepc901 showed better latency. You are then far better off with a cluster of cheaper nodes.
My experience from this, is to run the stream benchmark on all new configs I get to deploy on and then just reject them if memory becomes too slow.
If you need numa you need to buy something that give you almost the same memory latency for all nodes, like the SGI altix. It doesn't cost you so much more than all those crappy numas around.
Posted in Jobs savages 7-inch tablet competition
Stylus????
I have for the last 10 years been using palm devices, now I've unfortunately moved on to Android, but I love using the stylus instead of my butterfingers. I would have loved seeing more stylus apps on the android, and also a place to put it on the device.
7inch is like heaven with a stylus.
And where is that grafitti1
Posted in IBM racks up the memory
performance?
I've seen older IBM X-boards and they all have terrible bandwidth (PCIX?). Not much better than running SD cards in parallell.
Posted in 3PAR awash in sea of green
Author missed the point
HP entered the stage after Dell and 3PAR had signed the papers.
Dell only have to match HPs bid, while HPs offering have to be substantially higher. 3PAR also have to pay Dell a ~72 mill$ termination fee if they choose another partner.
Posted in Unisys floats mainframe cloud
Why not use an emulator on your laptop instead
<quote>
The ClearPath Cloud slices sell in three-month blocks. The base cloud slice is rated at 25 MIPS and has 8MB of main memory (all you need to write and compile code) and 75GB of disk capacity; it costs $13,000 over the three months.
</quote>
I can use an emulator like the Hercules Emulator (IBM S/370) and easily get 60-70 MIPS with 1GB of memory on my 1 year old laptop, and that is in a not very optimized emulated mode.
I believed the only thing keeping the mainframe business afloat was dead old code nobody dear to touch, or written in a programming language (Cobol?) where all once proficient programmers are now retired. Definitely not being taught in Bangalore or Mumbai.
why aix
I'm confident the aix division is deep in the red. Why not ditch it and use linux instead. linux scales to 64TB and 2048cores with the proper kernel patches. Should only be to add some hardware drivers for the various power architectures and compilers. Linux runs well through powerVM so it should not be that much work. And you get the rest of the ecosystem for free.
Fedora and Ubuntu have different focus
Fedora is primary a testing ground for RedHat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), so it is not allowed to flow too far away from its main sponsor. That is why you will never see all those fancy newbie stuff.
If you test and develop software to be run on RHEL, having latest builds of fedora around is a must.
I've worked with linux for 10 years and only seen RHEL and SLES(Suse) being demanded by enterprise customers, thats why I've never ever bothered learning the inns and out of Ubuntu although it may look and feel fabulous. Canonical is nowhere near the reach Redhat have in the enterprise world, or its free rebuilds like Oracle Unbreakable and CentOS that we use because RHEL is too expensive.
port away
I'm still puzzled why people still choose IBM mainframe lockin.
At the Intel Developer Forum in September the IBM DB2 linux team quite openly indicated the benchmarks on Nehalem Xeons compiled with intel v11 compilers were better than on power.
But if you entire IT-dept is outsourced to IBM it may be hard to resist.
Posted in Sagem DTR94500S HD Freesat+ DVR
noisy?
I have a sagem rebranded as a 'canal digital hd pvr recorder', it has different software, probably an older version, but the plastic chassis amplifies the harddrives vibrations. So it is noisy as hell. I have to tune up the volume when I'm using it. It is also very sensitive to high temperature. You can't put nothing on top of it, then decoding of hd-channels just produce artifacts. If i keep the nearby door to the -10C outside open it works flawlessly though.
How is the noise level of this?
Corporate policy to migrate from RHEL to CentOS
My company recently sent out an announcement, urging us to migrate from RedHat Enterprise to Suse Enterprise, It would save the company several 100K £. Suse is approx 30% cheaper.
Although we mostly use CentOS and OpenSuse, I find it OK to pay for support and give money back to those providing us such fine piece of software, but the support prices of Redhat are rather high ($179USD per low end server, without discounts). I urge you to use Suse instead. IMHO it is a far better distribution especially for us with non american characters and KDE fanboys.
Posted in Open source - the once and future dream
Oracle moved to linux to keep margins up
The only reason Oracle embraced linux is to keep the total cost of the system down. Cheap hardware and free OS, rather use your bucks on their pricey software then. It is all about transactions/$.
They have made their own RedHat Clone called 'Oracle Enterprise Linux' free to big buck paying software customers. This is much the same as 'CentOS' with just some oracle software and patches added.
If RedHat goes belly up, there is no-one left to 'maintain' 'Oracle Enterprise Linux' for them.
Nice if someone could get a comment out of RedHat about 'Oracle Enterprise Linux'. No wonder why RedHat puts most of their efforts into semi-closed-source addons like GFS, Virtualization, JBoss etc.
Posted in Oracle: destroyer of virtual worlds
I definetely see the rationale behind this
Seems to me Sun never catched the point of cost-control. When you are so deep in the red, you have to drop "no profit for the near future projects" like this.
When you have engineers at the helm, not focusing on keeping the bottom line afloat, you drift into takeover waters. But it ment dropping the entire SPARC line years ago, something that was unthinkable by the Sun-mind hive until Oracle borded them.
With the latest erotions (sales down 50%, loss up). I'm surprised if anything survives the Oracle cost inspection other than their large protofolio of patents and some java core developments which is vital for other Oracle products.
Posted in Serial slurry fetish man jailed again
Is this the Sun or some other shite paper
Little IT news today eh?
Better than 'Deep Thought'
Although 'Deep Thought' aka the Earth used 7.5 mill years, Wolfram|Alpha uses only a blink.
Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything = 42
Jokes aside, The only use I see for it is to get some semi random math content onto your site.
If you ever need that.
Posted in Sun's Sparc server roadmap revealed
just die-shrinks, no real development
This is just shrinks based on new lasers with shorter wavelength. It is as hard as taking the original candence-file and shrink it to the new size-factor. There may be some out of sync pulses that needs to be fixed because of shorter transportation, but this is no hard work.
This kind of development can be sustained by 2-3 people.
The investment is in the die-factory (Texas Instruments and Fujitsu), Sun/Oracle has to
guarantee a lot of cash or minimum production quantity to get this going. Or share the
production with someone else, which means far longer from cadence-file to real chip.
Posted in Cat awarded online high school diploma
Please use the diploma
What's the point with a diploma if you don't use it. Please try applying for college/university, that would be fun. But it probably makes your cat a criminal.
Posted in Cray lands $70m super deals
HyperTransport != QuickPath
Cray's Seastar interconnect uses Hypertransport and is completely integrated with the opteron memory-hierarchy, Switching to intel's Quickpath needs a major redesign of the entire memory system and low level system calls used in XT.
Quickpath may look better on paper(because it is designed ~7 years later), but it is still pretty immature compared to HyperTransport, at least in the >1000 cores range.
The CX1 is just a motheboard mod (Like Tyan) with a fancy deskside chassis, and AFAIK it only runs windows, has nothing to do with the XT-architecture. It is just an attempt to create a new market.
