Memory Hierarchy

is Solaris a mainframe os pretending to be unix? I find myself getting more annoyed by my home computer's noise and heat and I'll gladly pay for a remote secure file storage coupled with a fanless, high resolution terminal with extensibility and mulitimedia features (various i/o ports). I dearly liked SunRay but it had a few limitations like fixed support for monitor and inability to multiplex underlying OS. The latter limitation is going away thanks to Solaris Zones ("Project Kevlar"). Hmmm, sweet daydream.

Many thanks to Patrick Logan for his answers to my questions, especially the last one. Even though I don't have anything coherent to add, I'll just jot down a few thoughts:

• MRAM can take care of D in ACID. Then because A, C, I and D are not orthogonal vectors, coordination can deal with A, C and I in a more application-specific yet interoperable fashion.


• Put it diffently, today's worry over ACID is from our insecurity about fast and volatile yet insufficiently-sized RAM.


• If we can get over this insecurity, we can make ACID far more useful abstraction for application domain model instead of reading and writing bits to disk.


• Once we can treat ACID as one of many models to choose from (instead of treating ACID as the only model and implementation as we do now) we can become more creative. Who knows? We may find some better models for long running transactions without any reference to ACID.

i wonder at what age do geeks start showing intereste in transhumanism. My random guess is around 30 when knees start to act up a bit for guys and skin care products become important for girls. Also it's about time to notice our parents showing their ages and start to wonder about the inevitable.

At the shopping malls I often see family members disagreeing with each other about shops to visit, items of clothing, brands, material, etc. But when they come to computer stores they seem to consult with each other ernestly unlike in say clothing stores. Computer stores look like only store where parents and children are on equal footing more or less, both sides acknowledging they are in giant toy stores.

as a present before fair-half of the intended recipients vetoed it.

Patrick Logan hints how the new technology of magnetic RAM -- that preserves data without power like flash memory -- will change software:

On messages, files, and persistence: when everything in your runtime is transparently persistent, and you've stripped away all the mechanisms that have only to do with making a transaction ACID, what you are left with is merely a coordination mechanism.

In this future there will still be a use for a tuple space, a versioned document tree, and a dimensional model.

An interesting idea. Instead of addressing it (and talk about what I call "tyranny of ACIDidity" and memory hierarchy), I'll just list some tangential questions:

• What are the experiences from orthogonally persistent OSes? Did they make say IPC any easier?


• Amoeba had more RAM then disk and it didn't get virtual memory until late. Obviously there must have been some problems making data persistent there. Was there ever another system that had larger primary memory then secondary?


• Palm PDA and cell phones have transparent persistence. What are other examples of a set of applications utilizing transparent persistence today?

It looks to me the last question is likely to yield most useful answers on this subject for myself.

I like reading "conservative" writers because they write floridly and without reservation: they cry rivers about ever-worsening decays of society and bitterly attack weak "appeasers" and "enemies of freedom, civilization, goodness", etc. There is a great deal to learn from these writers. Theodore Dalrymple is one such writer I enjoy occasionally. He writes learned prose (with a touch of sarcasm) and displays compassion and despairs over sorry lives he sees at his job as a psychiatrist at a British prison. But sometimes you have to wonder why he and likes of him seek so much unpleasantness: "One of the greatest displeasures of living in the modern world -- though there are compensatory pleasures, of course -- is that one finds oneself constantly compelled to argue against ideas that are so foolish and shallow that they should be self-refuting." This quote comes from the last paragraph of an essay denouncing Tony Blair's plan to lower voting age to 16, but it made me forget the rest of the essay altogether for some reason. What an astounding statement.

Sun is becoming intersting again thanks to Opteron:

Andy Bechtolsheim - employee #1 and the man who hired Scott McNealy - and his start-up Kealia will now become part of Sun, the companies announced Tuesday. Scott McNealy said the idea for an acquisition came up during a recent lunch with Bechtolsheim and other co-founders Bill Joy and Vinod Khosla. Financial terms, other than the sandwich, were not released.

A giddy McNealy introduced Bechtolsheim during a Sun conference here.

Kealia has been working on Opteron server designs, primarily thin 1U and 2U systems. The idea is to use the Kealia kit to quickly build out Sun's fledgling Opteron server line. Sun's first ever Opteron box - the dual-processor V20z - was unveiled today. ...

I wonder whether Solaris x86 will join the adult table with its big brother Solaris SPARC or get pushed aside in favor of Linux?
update 2003-02-22: various reports on Solaris 10 seem to suggest Solaris x86 will indeed join the adult table after all, thank goodness.

Tenured graduate student -- I thank my lucky stars that I didn't get my tenure. An acquintance of mine is in his 10th year making the idiotic pun ("ten-year") true. Only if I had timed my escape better!

Saw it again after 10 years. It's basically Allende allegory set in London where (old) Labour Party wins a landslide and starts nationalizing industries and asking Americans to withdraw their military bases. Of course, savage and powerful reaction follows. True, it is somewhat cartoonish and too fond of conspiracy but still it's a great political TV drama we don't see often enough (No, that obscene West Wing doesn't cout). Obviously viewers's reactions will be similar to their opinion on Allende history.

I find this so extraordinary. Firstly it's dead on correct and secondly the writer is Stefano Mazzocchi of Apache Cocoon fame.

Kevin Burton says Dell will ship Linux laptop in a year and Steve Jensen says otherwise. The winner will be the EFF, who will receive $50 donation from either Kevin or Steve. Looking at Dell Linux blog it looks like round 1 is going to Kevin. [Dell links via boingboing]