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Technology Stocks : All About Sun Microsystems -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: QwikSand who wrote (21730)	10/25/1999 10:04:00 AM
From: dmf	Respond to of 64865

Qwik: Thanks. Your long reply helped. I understand the difference between the server and distributed computing but needed others to explain how each will evolve and what opportunities and threats exist. Maybe I hung up on all this because I just NOW made the connection between the 1992-1995 science project my son worked on. He didn't have enough time to do all the work he wanted to do to get results on his research in AI (neural networks). He ended up giving all his friends a disk and telling them to put it in their computer when they were through using it for the night. The next morning they returned their disks to him when they went to school and he had more data than he would have had from his computer alone. He never had the latest and greatest but always managed to get the max out of whatever computer he had...or was able to use. Reading about Beowulf and Geowulf and others intrigued me because I can see that this could end up being the future...of something. Non-techies like myself get a fuzzy grasp of things but that doesn't mean we can't see enough to have a million questions. I felt the same way about Sun and the network a few years ago. Have to stay tuned to receive the signals of what's ahead. SI is great when you and JC take time to share your understanding and experience. Congrats on your participation in Intelligent Life@HOME. Kinda neat! dmf

To: QwikSand who wrote (21730)	10/25/1999 10:43:00 AM
From: Stormweaver	Respond to of 64865

Qwik, bandwidth is here right now to do this kind of thing in a LAN environment - how do you think clusters stay in-sync ? Compute bound apps have been the first to take advantage of this probably due cost (cheaper) and lack of i/o demands (makes it easier to implement). I think that in the very near future we'll see a natural progression toward building distributed apps - as we build more distributed systems we understand how to distribute data as well. Here's what I think may drive it... 1. Component Software: current frameworks/languages are leading us toward distributed apps; Java is a perfect language for this sort of thing. 2. More Cost effective - can use cheaper iron. 3. More Fault Resilience - risk spread across N nodes. 4. Large SMP can scale only so far - eventually you hit kernel limits (ie. access of shared kernel resources) ... probably others... Regarding TP systems we already have multi-node configurations to distribute high-level functionality - ie. comm gateway, web server, data server. The distributed app I'm talking about is just another level (or two) more distributed. p.s. what's with the spatula comment ? Cheers James

To: QwikSand who wrote (21730)	10/25/1999 11:07:00 AM
From: John Mireley	Respond to of 64865

OpenTV Converges With Major Broadcasters - ....Sun will increase it's investment. newsbytes.com

To: QwikSand who wrote (21730)	10/25/1999 11:59:00 AM
From: JC Jaros	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 64865

That way I do't have to ask JC to analyze my feelings of worthlessness.) Feelings of worthlessness? Eating disorder? Hmmm... Have you tried Crack? <g> Anyway, distributed computing, like the SETI project and whatnot are great for idle cpu cycles connected to the net. This brings us back full circle to how worthless PCs are otherwise. That is, we're all connecting these things with huge idle CPU cycles to the net (and paying through the nose for the privilege). It just highlights how inane PCs are anymore (except James' apparently - even though he's professing via his browser to no longer use a compiler). The idea of having a Beowolf cluster is cool. Me, I'd still run Minicom (terminal) on it and get a big thrill out of running *everything, including the Lynx browser through my ISP shell account. :) -JCJ