Posts by zenkaon 120 publicly visible posts • joined 4 Oct 2008
If anyone went up to one of our HPC sys admins and suggested windows HPC server they would be laughed out of town.
If anyone suggests to me that I design my jobs to run on windows HPC server I would laugh and laugh and probably never take that person seriously again.
Good luck to Microsoft in this field, they are going to need it!!! Red Hat is just too damn good at this sort of thing.
The ATLAS satellite control room (normal one isn't big enough for all of us!) is full of iMacs - but they mostly run scientific linux, only your crippled with one mouse button. I wouldn't recommend scientific linux to most people, it's not so good with a monitor, keyboard and mouse. Much better to use fedora or ubuntu. However, when you get several hundred racks of pizza boxes distributed worldwide....red hat (or derivatives) all the way! No other credible option really.
The reason physics guys love macs is because when you open a terminal you have unix.
Spotted a few comments about that windows XP screen and though I'd comment. I work for ATLAS.
CERN runs a mixed bag of OSes, XP is used for admin staff, meeting rooms (powerpoint lock-in), public PCs, running software for kit bought from outside (eg. some security stuff, some monitoring stuff) that only has XP software, and for generally being handy if you need a windows PC.
Mac Books are everywhere, I'd say about 40% of physicists use them. About 30% of laptops run windows (various flavours) and about 30% run linux (all flavours under then sun - choice of geek). Pretty much all our desktop PCs have Windows Vista Basic stickers but actually run scientific linux.
Deep underground, in the control rooms and on the grid, the OS that runs the show is scientific linux. It's a home brew based on red hat enterprise linux with a bucket load of custom software.
I know a lot of el reg readers like to see plots of computer usage, check out what the LCG (LHC Computing Grid) is doing:
http://gridview.cern.ch/GRIDVIEW/job_index.php
Have a click around, this is what can be done with "cloud computing" and red hat
Read accelerando by Charles Stross. An excellent Sci-Fi story where technology accelerates at an incredible rate. It's an awesome book. From now to fully uploaded personalities who leave their crude meat bodies behind! Highly recommended!
If the world goes this way then I won't be able to keep up!!
Microsofts problem is that their search is a big pile of bing. People gave it a fair go and decided that it was bing and went back to google. Microsoft gave it a good go with Bing but it turns out that it's only good if you want to buy something - if your not looking to spend money then google simply gives much better results.
As for the browsers, of all of Microsofts market share I'd say around 15% are people who have a choice (or have a choice but don't realize) and 85% are people using corporate locked down machines where there is no choice in browser or anything else.
If chrome had ad block I'd switch from FF now.....can't see the biggest ad firm on the web letting people block ads somehow.
...just a few months ago MS was desperate for someone, anyone to write plug-ins for IE, saying how easy it was to develop for in a vain attempt to get people to stop making plug-ins for FF. I believe it was mocked on the el reg comments page.
Who would have thought that google would go an do this, MS sure changed their tune on plug-ins for IE pretty quick. One minute they are desperate for people to make them, the next they are going on about how dangerous plug-ins are and hinting that they are for people who put babies in microwaves.
If anyone has actually started writing a plug-in for IE, I bet they're having doubts now. If it actually makes MS look bad they will turn on you. I remember a few years back some guy made a plug-in for visual studio, following MS encouragement. Problem was that it made MS look bad as the plug-in was so good.....he had his day in court and lost.
Looks like MS can't get Azure working properly and has had to buy a company which has got a clue.
"This move represents our ongoing commitment to parallel computing and high performance computing (HPC)" - Usual MS -> can't innovate so they buy someone who can and then assimilate them.
Azure is still stuck in Community Technology Preview.....and I keep submitting jobs to Linux clouds and keep getting high performance from the Linux clouds.....
We need a grid/cloud technology that works today, in fact we had that requirement several years back. The real choice in HPC is red hat Vs SuSe Vs ubuntu. We use red hat, the on-demand scalability and performance is, to a computer geek like me, stunning
I've never installed a deb or rpm to get a printer to work under Linux.
You goto system->Admin->Printers and then add your printer - There is a long long list, if needed the driver is downloaded and away you go.
My network printer was "installed" in less than 5 minutes from several Linux boxes, whereas on Vista it took around an hour and put a load of HP crapware on my wifes laptop - hardly plug and play!
Hayden, have you really plugged your fancy printer into a vista/win7 box (that has never seen the fancy printer before) and been printing or scanning in a minute or so??? Or did you need to put the cd in and install a load of crapware onto your machine?
The ARM port of Openoffice is currently available from the experimental stream of Debian.
That's one of the things about Linux, it will port onto any chipset. In fact didn't el Reg run an article a while back concluding that (due to geeks who love to do this sort of thing) it was impossible to stop a Linux port to any new platform. I see that Debain has 11 chipsets supported on it's download lenny page.
My NAS drive has an ARM chip, works a treat. Only 200 MHz, but does the job well.
Compiled (gcc) some source on it recently with no probs at all and there is always the ipkg package manager for installing ARM binaries.
Lots of ARM based netbooks will be good, MS won't be able to strongARM them unless they start telling OEMs to only use Intel or AMD. Hope the performance hype lives up to it and the OEMs go for ubuntu rather than Xandros
I'd buy one
....I'm going to vote Tory.
Just had a shudder as this would have been unthinkable several years back. Brown and NuLabour has really pissed me off and voting Tory seems the only way to get rid of them.
At least they are saying they will scrap all this police state madness, NuLabour are saying they want to increase it.
I remember a Bremner, Bird and Fortune episode years ago where they did the bigoted upper class dinner party. One guy asks "So what do you think of Cameron and all this green nonsense, do you think he's serious?" The other fool replys "hmmm, I just assumed he was lying" (or something like that)
Almost everything they list is a load of bing. They do have a point about video over IM. I note that they do not mention security, running on low-spec hardware or running on very high-spec hardware. I guess most customers don't want a supercomputer or a cloud, but if you do.....
I've never had to install a camera driver in Linux, all cameras use ptp and gThumb imports from everything I've ever plugged in. Installing my wireless printer took 5 minutes for each of my Linux boxes, on a vista laptop it took almost an hour (Even with all the HP crapware turned off). iPods are eaten for breakfast by most linux media players (amarok, rhythembox), not sure about zune but no one owns any so not really an issue. As for old hardware, my 1998 TV card never even ran in winXP, but works a treat in every Linux distro I've used since 1999.
The only part of the web that doesn't work under Linux is Macromedia shockwave and silverlight, but that's fine by me. (I know about Mono - I've chosen to skip).
Games?? Buy a console. Anyway, what's wrong with KTron??
So are Micros~1 saying this because:
(a) They genuinely believe it or
(b) They are scared shitless
My guess is that Balmer is an (a).
Last week I had a play with chrome and it is so much faster than FF3.5.2 that I've switched.
Chrome is noticeably faster, everything works faster. I'll look at FF4, but I'll skip the next few point releases.
That said, I'm not that happy about adverts on the interweb again :(
A sure fire way to attract the attention of a local ned who will stab you, take your laptop and sell it down the pub for a shot or 2 of brown.
Also, back to IT, wouldn't this be better served by the existing 3G network. I'm going to assume that the minister has no clue how the interweb works (he is labour). The bus WiFi would be routed through the 3G network as the trains and Oxford tube is. So why bother, if you want internet on the go use 3G.
Beer icon, as that's sold in the same place the ned will sell your laptop
Every windows release is the "Best windows ever". Last night I was installing win98 on a virtual machine (I only have an upgrade XP disc, so need to put 98 on first). Even win98 was saying that it was the best, fastest, most secure windows ever. Then when I installed XP it again claimed to be the best, fastest, most secure windows ever.
I bet the Vista install doesn't say "slow as a dog, will make you mad when you introduce it to a network, 7 minutes to fully boot (on my wifes newish laptop - and I mean once all the extra crap is loaded not the login screen - go make a cup of tea after that)"
To everyone who raves about the speed of the the win7 betas....you wait for the final release and see what extra DRM-type crap they have put on it. XP will still be faster.
Opera are a bunch of cry-baby twats with a shitty piece of propriety code that no-one wants.
MS are a bunch of monopolist bastards who force Windows upon the masses.
Lots of el reg readers are fanbois.
These articles amuse me.
I'm enjoying the corporate bitch-fight and commentary.
In a perfect world they would both loose (lawyers win regardless).
.....The first advert is for VM broadband. WTF??? The user is already saddled with VM broadband if they are seeing this. What's more, the user will be reminded of the crappy deal their stuck with and have to look at the latest offers for new customers only!!
Ah well, if the user is still using IE6 then this is the least of their problems....
I have FF3.5.2 on my laptop but she refuses to upgrade. Says she can't tell what tab she's on in the new version whereas it's obvious in FF3.0.x
She doesn't care about speed, will happily sit there while Vista thinks about maybe doing something, what she does care about is not knowing which tab she's on.
I have to say from my experience that FF3.5 is no faster than FF3.0, if it is I can't tell.
So I watched this video and did what it said, I put in a bing for "fixes for all of life's messes" just like it told me to. Top result:
Labour Central: Content Search
Gordon Brown "I will do all that's needed to fix mess" - News of the World ... times people should expect the highest standards from people in public life..
Errrr... Gordon Brown is NOT a fix for all of life's messes. What a big stinking pile of bing. I wouldn't bing on Brown if he was on fire. Bing appears to be a load of old bing.
Any bets on whether cloud computing turns out to be the biggest vaporware project ever?
- I take it you have never used cloud computing then. I submitted 1350 jobs on Wednesday afternoon and had them all back on Thursday morning. Each job took around 8 CPU hours. No CPU was "local" or under my direct control.
Sure clouds are useless if you can't think what to do with that much compute time....but I can.
Back to the story...whatever reason MS and/or others give for taking their cloud offline is just bitching as far as I am concerned, I don't care about their reasons. An outage like this screams "unreliable partner" to me.
As for MS Azure, sorry lads your about 5 years too late on this one. Everyones using Red Hat.
This exploit, as pointed out already, is a DD-WRT problem and is probably best solved by flashing your router with OpenWRT.
In fact I'd recommend anybody with a wireless router to flash it with openWRT, you get sooooo much control over what you can do. Head over to http://x-wrt.org/ for the webIF version.
The webIF is the most powerful webIF I've ever seen on a router.
If Linux has done one thing for you it's to reduce the price of Microsoft software. Sounds like you can get a better deal from Microsoft just by mentioning that your planning to switch to Linux.
Good to see that MS has put some code out there, sure I can modify it under the terms of the GNU/GPL, but how do I recompile windows and redistribute it??? Oh, I can't.....hmm I see.
Yep, it's called red hat. It's been working for years. Microsoft is 6+ years late on this and counting. I remember going to a meeting in 2001 where people were discussing how to set up global computing grids.
As for public / private clouds. Private clouds are clearly going to offer more performance but they come at an additional cost. For what I use, if you ain't got a valid certificate you can't submit and Joe blogger can't buy a certificate. Costs a bucket load but you get exclusive use, we still rag it to breaking point at times though :)
glad that they are doing well, good luck to them!
My firm is so stuck with red hat that moving platform isn't even on the cards. Not surprised that the "big 25" stuck with them. The big move coming up at work is from RHEL4 to RHEL5 - gcc changes from 3.4.x to 4.3.y and everyones worried their code will break (can't quite remember what x and y are and don't really feel like finding out)
Bit of a debian fanboi myself, but have to hand it to red hat - their stack works, and it works globally on distributed grids/clouds/next-buzz-word-for-a-fcuking-big-farm
Bit concerned about MySQL (and VirtualBox [other article yesterday/bottom of the page]) - they're dead now - surely. Maybe red hat sees a market. Ah well, whatever, Oracle runs our DBs anyhow so I guess we backed the "winning teams".
I'm going to pick a pint icon and raise it to red hat (and el reg for getting some more icons)
If this "lets create loads more business for lawyers" plan goes ahead then it needs to take into account versions. Fucking lawyers.
Lets say that my program foo is stable for release 01-00-00, then if add on some bleeding edge functionality - basically a quick hack so that it can do x, and I tag it as version 01-00-01. Then you can't sue me as the version number is not STABLE.
You can only sue me for version 01-01-00, when we consider this functionality stable.
That seems reasonable to me, hopefully the lawyers would buy it, then watch every project stay in an xx-yy-zz tag where zz!=00
Really looking forward to what Oracle are going to be offering in 6 months/ 1 year from now. I'm hoping for a complete solution and look forward to working with it. If it drives up performance significantly then they get a big thumbs up in my book.
Microsoft are simply shitting their pants at the moment and probably breathing a BIG sigh of relief that they didn't buy yahoo! I'm hoping that Win7 bombs, but unfortunately I think people will mostly like it as it seems (beta) such a big improvement on Vista .
Microsoft used to be able to do hardware. My (1998ish) Microsoft sidewinder force-feedback joystick is probably the best joystick I have ever used.
or have Microsoft actually come up with a useful search algorithm?
My money is on a rebranding and zero improvement on they're crappy algorithm. If they think anyone in Britain is going to take a kiev seriously they they are about to get a shock as we fall over laughing our arses off and they tiny market share plummets
from the web 2.0 likes of Youtube, Facebook,Twitter, BeBo etc....
...complete and unrestricted access to everyones accounts.
Seriously, I DO NOT want my council tax bill coming through on my facebook account.
Oh and McLaughlin saying "If you're a good person, he suggests you embed yourself"....forget it after what you've just said...I'll go and (continue to) actually do something that I can develop/use/advance without waiting for the political sayso of someone who still finds email a challenge
This worm's story is interesting, the bot masters are clearly on the defence and are probably doing a pretty good job of it.
But as far as I understand, please correct me if I'm wrong, this worm hasn't actually launched any attacks yet. The bot masters are still in phase 1 - "Infect as many windows boxes as possible" (or in phase 1a - "consolidate and protect"). Should be fun when phase 2 - "full scale attack" starts up.
Whatever they do I'll bet that MS and the AV guys will be several steps behind unable to comprehend the clusterfuck that has just happened.
Well done for the people dabbling in Linux, true it's a bit trickier to configure, but so much more powerful and a hell of a lot safer. If in doubt - go ubuntu
I've got an older (6 months old) 1TB version and they are great. Plug it into your router and you have a wifi hard disk with access anywhere in the world, providing you have set up your network properly.
The older version (mine) has a 500MHz ARM processor with 32MB of RAM, this limited the transfer rates, so hopefully this new version has a more powerful chip looking at el reg's benchmarks.
These things run Linux, check out:
http://mybookworld.wikidot.com/hacks-and-howto
I have mine fully AES encrypted (the big partition, not /) and setup as an nfs server, samba server, UPnP media server, printer server, rsync server. I can happily play 5 different films at the same time on a wired PC and 4 wireless laptops with no pause or skips. Need more laptops to fully stress test it.
Once you have ssh access these devices are a hackers dream, you can fool around with them to your hearts content. Nice community on the wikidot forums as well.
I haven't had any problems with connectivity like other are reporting. Set your router to assign the thing a static IP address, make sure everything is on the same workgroup if your using windows. NFS is still faster and nicer.
What was it, £70m + £34m = £104m a year. Bargain for all the spin offs that WILL come out the thing.
If anyone thinks that £104m a year is a lot of money, consider how much money the bankers can loose in an afternoon. The LHC costs peanuts compared to HBOS/Lloyds/Northern Rock et al. The banks have been a real boost to our economy recently haven't they.
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