Well, slashdot's picked up the story of Larry, Damian, and my grants running out. The thread starts here and goes on for a while. Lucky me, they linked to the story I'd posted here a few days back.
Whenever anything either perl 6 or parrot related on Slashdot, I feel obligated to read everything with a score of 0 or higher. (Usually I read at 2, though most of the time I don't make it past the front page) I really hate doing that. I always come away feeling nauseous--the sheer amount of hatred, bile, and viciousness that flows is just amazing.
I know I shouldn't, but it's hard not to take this sort of stuff personally. Yeah, 99% of the people frothing have never met me, and odds are they've mostly never even seen (or run) code I've written. Still...
there were only 84 or so comments which is pretty amazing for /. where even the dumbest topic can generate hundreds of useless posts. So...it's not all bad and one guy said he sent in $100. :) Cheer up as there are plenty of people who appreciate your work.
Re:don't feel too bad...
Elian on 2002-07-08T21:54:23
Yeah, the fund jumped almost $4K in four hours, which is nice, and at 151 score 0 or higher comments it's been a positively tame topic as these things go. Still, seeing people rip into something you've worked hard on, for no particular reason outrside of just sheer viciousness, is kinda disheartening.Re:don't feel too bad...
koschei on 2002-07-09T04:45:53
Remember: they're from /.
Also: it was classed as a Developers post, which isn't on the default front page, so virtually noone saw it.
An authentic /. quote from an earlier thread follows. The subject of the original story was that some site at Alaska had bought a NEC SX-6 vector supercomputer. (Sold as a Cray, but never mind...)
Unimpressive performance
They say 8 cpu's, 64 GB ram, 1 TB disk, 64 GFlops peak performance. That hardly sounds like a supercomputer by today's standards. A single processor AMD Athlon is capable of (I think) around 8 peak gigaflops (2 Ghz * 4 SIMD operations using SSE instructions). Similarly the 8 GB of RAM and 125 GB of disk per CPU is in midrange workstation territory. While there's probably a much higher bandwidth memory system than you could get out of an 8-16 node Athlon cluster, it's not clear what problems this Cray unit will really be used for that couldn't as easily be done with a rack full of PC's or workstations.
So this is the level of technical expertise we are dealing with.
