Quoting Geoff Galitz <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, on Fri 04 Apr 2008 03:19:42 AM PDT:
Just to be fair... well... maybe not fair... how about Devil's Advocate:
Are any of the MS anti-malware apps more or less difficult to manage than
their *NIX counterparts? Network layer firewalls, HIDS, file system
integrity apps, spam containment and prevention apps and so on?
Indeed.
I don't think anyone expects currently established tools like NAMD (just as
an example) to ever be ported over to Windows, but if MS can provide great
development environments and support libraries for a new generation of
scientists... well... maybe the future is less predictable than we may
think. It seems HPC has been swinging away from performance and towards
ease-of-use for some time, in my opinion.
Why not.. just add more processors to make up for the inefficiency.
That's because performance keeps getting cheaper and labor to use that
performance more expensive. Economic forces have always driven this
way.
Aside from list members and embedded systems coders, how many people
still program in machine code eschewing an operating system (context
switch time?) or subroutine calls (all that overhead to remember where
to go back to, why not just jump). No, you're willing to accept some
minor inefficiency (e.g. dynamic memory allocation, etc.) in exchange
for much higher human productivity. And, in some cases, thanks to
extremely smart compiler builders, the "machine generated code" is
superior and faster than hand coded versions that do the same thing.
Jim
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