It doesn’t fix greed, bad ideas, or worse still, embedded contradiction. You have no freedom, just rights, fact. house.gov is down, so if you were looking for a copy of the new proposal for the $700 billion bail out, you’ll have to wait. So Pelosi tells Wall street that the party is over. CEO compensation is going to be regulated. What, you mean they can’t decide for themselves how much they get? That is a restriction of their freedom, and quite likely a form of terrorism.
They’ve only just started emphasising the need for accountability. The first draft was essentially a blank cheque. Clinging onto a patchwork solution shows serious lack of fore sight, which is a pity, given that their governance effects billions of lives. To think that they want to export this form of governance to the rest of the world, completely unaware of the huge array of caveats.
On a more positive note, it will push the public to pay more attention to public affairs, internal and external. That you chose your future for yourself in a consenting manner doesn’t make it ok when it all goes wrong. It just means you implemented a bad idea. Sometimes your best isn’t good enough. Lets think a little more about the matter, or hire someone smarter than us.
Is using software to work out what folds you need to do, cheating? Who cares! I have always been a fan of folding paper, so I’m quite happy that people spent time to work out what the principles are behind the art, and then applying them in some decent software Happy folding!
It feels like it took a while, but now that storm over South Ossetia has calmed a little, the media has taken a step back and started digging harder. Lionel Beehner reveals to us his thoughts on why Dick Cheneny has arrived in Eastern Europe, (reosurces) with some aid in hand. It makes you wonder why the BBC don’t let the cat out the bag, when they showed a map of the region pinpointing the pipe lines, but saying nothing about them. Put simply, Georgian foreign policy is under the hand of the US and it probably won’t be long before military presence gets beefed up with an arms deal.
But for me the more interesting question is, when will it be publicly revealed that there is already American and Israeli ordinance in Georgia, and that the Russians have captured unmanned aerial vehicles? It won’t be long before that kit gets stripped down, reverse engineered and resold to the Syrians ….. (Bashar Al Assad has already made his visit to Moscow)
You can find XMMS in the ports collection, which is great. XMMS will even play you wav files out of the box. To get mp3s to play, you’ll need to do a little bit more work and also install:
xmms-mad
which you can find in /usr/ports/audio (presuming thats where you put your ports files)
In unix pretty much everything is a file (some people don’t like this), including audio devices. So if you fancy listening to some white noise, just cat a file to /dev/sound
Its got to be said, the documentation from the bsd guys is very thorough. Its not good enough for them that they get your mp3s playing. They tell you that wav and au files use little-endian byte ordering and signed linear quantization. You could figure this out by reading the header with hexdump(1). Reading the hex of your audio files, wow, thats a bit hardcore! Having said that, if you cared a little bit more and read up what that meant, you might be a better person. Or maybe a little more bitter….or maybe neither. Who knows! Either way, enjoy the audible goodness!
Ok, so people who know me, will know that I think RAM is pretty cool stuff, and that you cant really have enough. OK, so you can have enough, but it is very handy stuff.
A register article today was talking about how MetaRAM can now get 288GB of RAM in a single machine. As someone quickly pointed out in the comments, Sun Microsystems have a machine out for almost 2 years now which supports 256GB of RAM. Its an x86 machine called the x4600. Sun also sell a SPARC machine called the M9000. It supports 2TB of RAM. Thats 2000GB of RAM. Oh, and its got 64 processors.
People should really not be surprised that the limit of how much RAM they have, is not to do with their choice of hardware, but rather choice of Operating System. At this time of writing, thew most advanced version of Windows Server 2003 (Datacenter Edition) CAN address up to 2TB of RAM. But because its written for the x86 architecture, you’ll struggle to run it anywhere to address it all. I should imagine that its partly to do with market demand; you can be sure that if customers were crying out for high capacity x86 equipment, the manufacturers would be making it. Maybe Microsoft should make a port of Windows to run on SPARC?
I find that on the whole this is quite typical of Sun. Their hardware can cost more, but it comes out earlier, and its better than kit in the same class. Sort of like Volkswagen or BMW. Higher cost, but higher quality, and more innovation.
You have a classic style, but you’re up-to-date with the latest technology. You’re ambitious, competitive, and you love to win. Performance, precision, and prestige – you’re one of the elite,and you know it.
So HP have put 1000 cores in a rack ( with some serious cut backs ). Well thats great. Web 2.0 can keep growing nicely. Sun however, can put 336 cores in a rack. Yes, thats less, but its units of execution that count (i.e. threads) ( of course it all depends on your workload, but still, we’ll play the numbers game). So in these 336 cores, Sun pack 2688 threads. Using these t5240 machines, you ‘ll also get 2688GB of RAM. 42 DVD drives, 84 * 10Gb Ethernet interfaces. You also get on-cpu cryptographic acceleration for DES, 3DES, AES, RC4, SHA1, SHA256, MD5, RSA to 2048 key, ECC, CRC32. Nice. Oh, with HP, you get no storage. Not one bit. With the Sun configuration, you’ll get 336 * 146GB drives. Thats 49056GB of storage (49TB). Theres a Sun released white paper which explains more about how the new generation of T2 and T2+ chips work.
Working for Sun may change my views on hardware, but really these figures speak for themselves!
Ok, so Linux doesn’t have ZFS yet, but it might not be that far off. There are signs of a readonly implementation, depending on whether or not people actually understand the license, being considered by linux kernel hackers. This would be a huge boost for linux, and Solaris alike. As Darren Moffat points out, ZFS already exists in the FreeBSD source tree, and its likely to be in Mac OSX . Given this, surely its only a matter of time before we see it put in. Already we’ve seen Linus have talks with Jeff Bonwick, which is definitely a good sign.
Maybe once this is done, a proper attempt at getting dtrace across might happen. After all, something like dtrace ishighly desirable on any operating system.
Either way, enjoy the audible goodness!
