IBM Claims Breakthrough Energy-Efficient Algorithm 231
jitendraharlalka sends news of a claimed algorithmic breakthrough by IBM, though from the scant technical detail provided it's hard to tell exactly how important the development might be. IBM apparently presented its results yesterday at the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics conference in Seattle. The breathless press release begins: "IBM Research today unveiled a breakthrough method based on a mathematical algorithm that reduces the computational complexity, costs, and energy usage for analyzing the quality of massive amounts of data by two orders of magnitude. This new method will greatly help enterprises extract and use the data more quickly and efficiently to develop more accurate and predictive models. In a record-breaking experiment, IBM researchers used the fourth most powerful supercomputer in the world... to validate nine terabytes of data... in less than 20 minutes, without compromising accuracy. Ordinarily, using the same system, this would take more than a day. Additionally, the process used just one percent of the energy that would typically be required."
Wat (Score:4, Funny)
I guess they stopped using Windows Vista?
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2006 called and wants its jokes back.
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*ahem* I guess they stopped using Longhorn?
just trying to be relevant (Score:5, Insightful)
Sounds like someone found a faster algorithm (maybe just constants), and since energy efficiency is the hot new thing, "faster" is now translated into "saves energy".
Re:just trying to be relevant (Score:5, Interesting)
I find it interesting on a philosophical level to think about what computing is doing to us. CPU's require energy to perform calculations. Then there's the system overhead, a fixed energy cost that included the assembly and set up costs, and the running and maintenance/replacement costs. Now obviously humans have been almost taken out of the equation. Where before you had thousands of workers all requiring to be fed, all requiring furniture and space and light and reasonably cool/warm air, all of them needing transport, and all of them victims of entropy and therefore needing accident and health insurance, taking sick days, etc. We've come a long way.
Now you just need the brains. Brains to design the system, brains to drive the investigation, and brains to try to improve the algorithms the system uses. To save even more energy. Of course eventually physical limits will be reached. There's no escaping the fundamental laws of our universe. But the energy "savings" from doing it the "old way" is translated into the ability to essentially brute-force the universe with raw computing power. Er, but what are we going to do with all the people who just don't "have" the brains? They get a free ride?
Sorry I'm waxing philosophical today.
Zombie Computer Says: (Score:5, Funny)
Now you just need the brains. Brains to design the system, brains to drive the investigation, and brains to try to improve the algorithms the system uses. ... Er, but what are we going to do with all the people who just don't "have" the brains?
Mmmm, brains ...
Re:just trying to be relevant (Score:4, Funny)
Er, but what are we going to do with all the people who just don't "have" the brains? They get a free ride?
That [welfareinfo.org] seems [stopthehou...ailout.com] to [propublica.org] be [bnet.com] the [securitygu...sguide.com] way [adelphi.edu] it's [vatican.va] been [funlol.com] working [bloomberg.com] so [thecarpetb...report.com] far [wikipedia.org].
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Re:just trying to be relevant (Score:5, Insightful)
In a post scarcity economy? Yeah, everyone gets a free ride. Everything changes if you can get to that.
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A "post scarcity" economy is a physical impossibility. The universe doesn't have unlimited resources.
HOWEVER, it's at least plausible that an economy could exist whereby the essentials to support billions of human lives in decent conditions could be generated with almost no input of human labor. All living humans could get all of their needs, and most of their wants taken care of with little effort on their part. With virtual reality, those humans who wanted things the economy couldn't provide (their own
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Fail.
I want the people at Starbucks to not fuck up my order because they were hired to not fuck up coffee orders.
The problem with socialism is that as people expect more and more from their government they begin to expect less and less of themselves. If you socialist, wealth-redistributing, vomit-spewers scorn the idea of trickle-down economics in business why do you think it will magically work at the highest levels of government? In fact, it can work in business because companies are ultimately accountabl
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One fatal flaw with capitalism is that it leads to runaway wealth and poverty distribution. Socioeconomic mobility is essentially destroyed. The "land of opportunity" as we've been called for so long becomes no more as time goes on. The rich get much richer every year, while the poor get relatively poorer over time.
We're seeing this now as the standards of living for the middle class have been in slow decline for over 15 years. The super-rich continue to amass wealth above the rate of inflation, while many
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The rich get much richer every year, while the poor get relatively poorer over time.
That's not exactly true. I myself come from a background that 50 years ago was incredibly wealthy. The family had race-horses and private aircraft. Everyone had a brand new luxury car and changed it every year. We had all the luxuries, and no one has been obliged to "work" in a conventional "job" for 3 generations. We thought we had looked after our money. We have managed to triple our net worth over ti
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One fatal flaw with capitalism is that it leads to runaway wealth and poverty distribution. Socioeconomic mobility is essentially destroyed. The "land of opportunity" as we've been called for so long becomes no more as time goes on. The rich get much richer every year, while the poor get relatively poorer over time.
And you think that has nothing to do with the government? Our government redistributes wealth to the rich through subsidies, creates big corporations through a mixture of stupid laws, complicated regulations and subsidies, and makes sure that the rich don't lose their money or power by providing bailouts. It's hardly capitalism creating the problem. Some of us oppose any socialist laws here because we know how they always turn out.
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The speculative bubble as you say it affected millions of recent homebuyers.
Employer provided healthcare isn't wealth redistribution. It's a way for employers to provide a benefit to employees so they can pay them less, and simultaneously decrease their tax exposure. Benefits also attract better employees. It's a business decision, not some massive wealth redistribution conspiracy.
The real conspiracy is the single-payer healthcare system we have now. We need basic health services back on a fee-for-service s
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The problem with socialism is that as people expect more and more from their government they begin to expect less and less of themselves.
That's a nice hypothesis, and a very common one. Would you like to back it up with facts?
Preferably a nice graph correlating various nations' economic growth with their economic models. Ideally, your graph should demonstrate that socialist countries like China and the former Soviet Union are/were composed of shiftless layabouts content to let their nations languish in obscurity, while the most laissez-faire or anarcho-capitalist countries lead the world in industrial growth.
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Your ravings is to philosophy what slaps are to fire bombing Dresden
And your criticism is to my writing what a wailing child is to a wolf.
This is a pretty good energy-saving algo... (Score:2)
Implemented for Linux, but analogously applicable to other systems. Running this once should reduce your PC's energy consumption to near zoro:
#!/bin/bash
#
# save-energy.sh
#
# Save enormous amounts of energy, irrespective of cost in lost computation
# must be run as root
Of course, effeciency will be lost if you do anything else with your PC (like turn it back on), but hey, no algorithm is perfect for all use cases.
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Feh, slashdot reformatted /sbin/shutdown to be part of the preceeding line, ruining the joke. Ah well, time to get more coffee and do some more day-job work.
Re:This is a pretty good energy-saving algo... (Score:4, Funny)
Running this once should reduce your PC's energy consumption to near zoro:
The only problem is, with all that jumping around and swordplay, Zorro ends up using tons of energy.
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Re:just trying to be relevant (Score:4, Informative)
Did you actually read the article?
Well, that's hard to do since there was no reference. But the guy seems to be talking about "Massively Parallel Low Cost Uncertainty Quantification". This is probably the same work as this:
http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1645413.1645421 [acm.org]
The work has nothing to do with energy savings, it's just about a fast, approximate algorithm for a fairly common operation.
Common sense tells you that spending 20 minutes to do something takes less energy than taking up to a day doing the same thing.
My point exactly. The whole press release is analogous to saying that you save a lot of energy by compiling with "-O0" instead of "-O4".
Impressive but (Score:4, Funny)
Can it organise my porn?
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Nope. In the early 20th century, Turing proved that no logically consistent porn library can contain both "donkey tennis" and "David Hasselhoff". Sorry
Green-washing (Score:2)
I'm all for energy-efficient algorithms and datacenter but this PR is nothing but green-washing. IBM's algorithm is just faster so it uses less energy. Duh.
Automatically spreading loads across datacenters in multiple locations to take advantage of local environmental conditions so you don't have to use chillers, now that's something.
Re:Green-washing (Score:5, Insightful)
With faster algorithms, the machine can just get more jobs done in the same amount of time. But the jobs will just keep coming, so the energy use never changes.
Or are the new algorithms SO fast that all processing needs of humanity will be done in a week, thereby allowing us to turn off all supercomputers? Now that would save energy.
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The fans on servers have variable speed. Case closed.
Re:Green-washing (Score:5, Funny)
The fans on servers have variable speed. Case closed.
I believe that you will find those fans can still run at variable speeds with the case open.
What?
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With faster algorithms, the machine can just get more jobs done in the same amount of time. But the jobs will just keep coming, so the energy use never changes.
This is true, but the energy-cost-per-job is still 1/100th the cost and if you're paying to run the job, that could be a significant savings.
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With faster algorithms, the machine can just get more jobs done in the same amount of time. But the jobs will just keep coming, so the energy use never changes.
Or are the new algorithms SO fast that all processing needs of humanity will be done in a week, thereby allowing us to turn off all supercomputers? Now that would save energy.
Hey now! Everyone knows that 5 IBM mainframes covers the entire world market for computers.
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Awesome! (Score:4, Insightful)
I'll buy three!
What do they do exactly?
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Yeah? Well just wait till they crank it up to eleven! You'll think that three isn't enough.
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Clarification? (Score:5, Insightful)
Can someone please clarify exactly what they've achieved here? All I hear is that they can somehow sift through large quantities of data much quicker. What kind of data? What are they trying to extract? And for what end?
Re:Clarification? (Score:5, Funny)
"What kind of data? What are they trying to extract? And for what end?"
The web. Porn. Fun.
In that order.
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Porn. The web. Fun.
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Can someone please clarify exactly what they've achieved here? All I hear is that they can somehow sift through large quantities of data much quicker. What kind of data? What are they trying to extract? And for what end?
I don't know about the rest of it, but I can answer the last question: To boost IBM's stock price! And as the holder of a number of IBM stock options, I must say I think that's a wonderful goal. :-)
Re:Clarification? (Score:5, Informative)
The conference proceedings are not online yet. So I am not sure. I could not even find the title of the talk on the conference web page
I know people who are at SIAM PP and they are all : "why are they talking about PP on slashdot ?". There was no major anouncement. I'll check the proceedings again next week, but I believe there is no major improvement. IBM is probably just trying to get some more light.
We can find the following IBM talks in yesterday page :
http://meetings.siam.org/sess/dsp_programsess.cfm?SESSIONCODE=9507 [siam.org]
The paper have the same author and name than this paper published last year :
http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1645413.1645421 [acm.org]
So they are probable publishing an improvement on their 2009 work.
TFA is worthless (Score:5, Insightful)
This would be a real story if it gave implementation details, but it doesn't even tell us what the algorithm does; therefore it's totally worthless. Get this crap off the front page.
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I have discovered a truly remarkable explanation which this internet is too small to contain.
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Did you RTFA, they said right there it verifies data. Picture you have 400TB of HC particle data that you want to reduce but somebody stuffs some porn, pictures of their trip to Aruba and a loads of warez right smack in the middle of it. What are you going to do ?
Well IBM can help, they can verify that data and within mere hours remove that weird 399TB of noise and you're left with pure signal.
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I don't mean to offend, but... are you even a programmer? There is no magic "verify data" algorithm. Supposing your scenario were to occur, you'd have to produce an algorithm that was specifically designed to either a) detect the specific form of noise you want to remove, or b) detect the signal you want to extract.
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Was my post that confusing ... removing 399TB of noise from your 400TB HC data leaving the porn and warez .. hint hint.
Maybe I should have put /snark at the end of the post or something. I was agreeing with the OP that the article was entirely short on content.
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Maybe I should have put /snark at the end of the post or something.
You could've, but it's early, I haven't had any coffee yet, and I'm a bit of a dumbass at the best of times, so there's no guarantee that would've made any difference at all.
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Yes it was. I think we'd all assumed that you'd meant that the porn was occupying the middle 399TB of the drive...
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Pfft, next you'll be telling us that there's no "Override all security" command.
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Implementation details are not equivalent to merely clarifying what the heck it does. In the case of cold fusion it's pretty clear what it does: cold fusion. In the case of this press release it does "algorithmy things to your data really fast".
This really says nothing (Score:3)
Without more information, this really sounds like they just had a horribly-slow-but-at-least-it-works algorithm in the first place and now done some work on making it more efficient. They don't even say what type of processing was being done on the data..
Empty statements (Score:5, Funny)
...for analyzing the quality of massive amounts of data...
I have an algorithm that does that in O(1):
return "Not the best quality, but pretty good.";
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Or the UEA version
return "OMG, we're all gonna die from the CO2";
Soulnds like Improvements to Data Mining (Score:2)
and Business Inteligence software. Things that large corps use to help make decisions (Goldman-Sachs?) and manipulate the banks/markets even faster today so Yea! This is a big deal to corps. Not so big a deal to individuals other then the damn corps can make idiot decisions even faster now.
So what's it mean to games? (Score:2)
Techniques from parameterized algorithms? (Score:3, Insightful)
regularly produce this magnitude of algorithm speedup...
Mixed emotions... (Score:3, Interesting)
As a wired citizen, I'm terrified of the additional data-mining capabilities this will provide to our corporate overlords.
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What was the algorithm? (Score:2, Redundant)
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What was the algorithm? For all I know (having not read TFA), it could be that they replaced bubble sort with quicksort.
Given that this is from the very well-respected IBM research labs, I really doubt it's anything trivial or obvious.
Given that the press release came through IBM's PR machine, I'm sure that the announcement overstates the applicability of the result.
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They pushed the turbo button. Freaking interns.
A more informative link (Score:4, Informative)
Here's a link with actual content on what the algorithm does:
http://www.hpcwire.com/features/IBM-Invents-Short-Cut-to-Assessing-Data-Quality-85427987.html
Here's the actual paper. (Score:5, Informative)
"Low cost high performance uncertainty quantification", full text available in PDF.
http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1645421&coll=GUIDE&dl=GUIDE&CFID=77531079&CFTOKEN=42017699&ret=1#Fulltext [acm.org]
And, here's the abstract:
Uncertainty quantification in risk analysis has become a key
application. In this context, computing the diagonal of in-
verse covariance matrices is of paramount importance. Stan-
dard techniques, that employ matrix factorizations, incur a
cubic cost which quickly becomes intractable with the cur-
rent explosion of data sizes. In this work we reduce this
complexity to quadratic with the synergy of two algorithms
that gracefully complement each other and lead to a radi-
cally different approach. First, we turned to stochastic esti-
mation of the diagonal. This allowed us to cast the problem
as a linear system with a relatively small number of multiple
right hand sides. Second, for this linear system we developed
a novel, mixed precision, iterative refinement scheme, which
uses iterative solvers instead of matrix factorizations. We
demonstrate that the new framework not only achieves the
much needed quadratic cost but in addition offers excellent
opportunities for scaling at massively parallel environments.
We based our implementation on BLAS 3 kernels that en-
sure very high processor performance. We achieved a peak
performance of 730 TFlops on 72 BG/P racks, with a sus-
tained performance 73% of theoretical peak. We stress that
the techniques presented in this work are quite general and
applicable to several other important applications.
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Sounds like the risk analysis/data mining that was used to justify the pricing of derivatives on Wall Street during the run-up to the 2007 meltdown.
Blame the algorithm not the stupid people making stupid decisions.
Sounds like magic to me. (Score:2)
Obviously they are going to Patent the algorithm (Score:2)
Obviously are not releasing details until the Patent application goes through and the Patent Troll company set up. They certainly would not release the information so other people could just steal their idea. Maybe they will package it in sealed application and rent it out. Hmmmm anyone remember the Chess Playing Mechanical Turk? (1770).
What does it mean for encryption and security? (Score:2)
The description of this "new algorithm" is pretty sparse.
Any word on if it allows faster solutions to encryption problems so that we now all need longer passwords?
Secret: Here's the algorithm (Score:2)
I shouldn't be telling anyone this but I found the algorithm. Here it is in Java, please convert it to your preferred language.
public int computeData(Data data) { return 42; }
Oh crap, I forgot to post this anonymously. Why are there mice all over the pl@#M *^&I RCS$WE^%
[CARRIER LOST]
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Hopefully us mere mortals will be able to benefit from such algorihtms
It's a certainty. Your cell phone is more powerful than the biggest supercomputer that existed in 1970.
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And this is a benefit how exactly?
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You don't realize that to post his comment, mcgrew traveled back in time from 2104 using his cell phone.
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You don't see the benefits of technology advances? If it advances as fast as the last 40 years, then 40 years from now this giant computer will be the size of your cell phone, and just as cheap.
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And this is a benefit how exactly?
If your PC or cell phone does similar tasks, its computational load is reduced by two orders of magnitude (in other words, somewhere in the range of 1%). That means your computer of cell phone spends 1% of the time doing the work, and the other 99% of the time either doing other useful work (making it faster) or in standby (making it use less energy, or last longer on battery power, or the same time on less battery).
I consider all these things benefits. Of course, it depends on if the algorithm is actual
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ofcourse it will, dont you realize the NSA will be using this to crack encryption like 10000% faster? :P
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Not if the energy industry has anything to say about it.
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Why would they care?
Back during one of the droughts in Southern California they called for mandatory conservation. The people actually took this to heart and water usage dropped so much that revenue at the local municipal water companies fell.
So the utilities raised their rates to get it back.
More conservation means having to obtain less resources, process less resources, employ less workers, spend less on distribution and capacity. After that, they can raise rates as well.
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Man, the energy industry doesn't like it when five more people start riding bikes. They dispatch armies of lobbyists to Washington if there's even a hint that the EPA mileage standards are going to increase by three miles per gallon.
You best believe they're going to pay attention if computers become more energy efficient. You know how much of the nation's energy bill is because of computer use?
Me neither, but I bet it runs into a whole bunch of money.
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The word "energy efficiency" now gets appended to anything. The story really isn't about energy efficiency, that's just a buzzword.
Of course, if you do anything faster or more efficiently, if doing it uses energy, then doing it more efficiently uses less energy. Paint it green!
Re:I'd expect this (Score:4, Insightful)
The funny thing about energy efficiency is that it saves companies money, but they get to spin it as being "green." [For example, when grocery stores eliminate plastic bags to be "green," what they really mean is they're eliminating bags to be "cheap."] If this new algorithm has no penalty associated with it, then it saves time and energy, therefore money and "the environment."
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AH you are not seeing the real potential of this.
It took them 20 mins to do. Meaning they can do 70 more customers in one day. Charge 10% more for the same job. Poof 70x1.1xcost gross profit. Oh and it cost them 99% less power wise. Margin just went up by 99%. Meaning they can also undercut competitors in the field. Or resize the computer so it still takes a day and still sell by the same price point. So it just costs them 99% less to do powerwise and customers pay the same amount.
Wont cost them a t
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which means now i need one or more less to get the same job done - OR i don't need to add one for an increased work load or i could power extras down for later days or or sell them to another group.
any time you can make existing equipment more efficient the gains are wonderful because you have already made the investment in buying and maintaining the hardware
Total cost of ownership for equipment is far more than the initial cost to purchase it - and it is a cost i'm going to pay - so if i can get more out o
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Not to nitpick, but plastic bags are a lot cheaper than paper bags.
Grocery stores often stop using plastic bags because they're banned on a city or township level.
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So, you'd rather them not be Green and waste money? And by "Penalty" you mean Government interference?
People like this have no idea of the consequences of their stupid insane policies. Here in California, we're losing Dairy Farms at an alarming rate, because of so-called "penalties" to raising cows.
Even Dairies that have tried to comply and work with the "Greenies" are folding, because the pound of flesh they demand never satiates them. There is always MORE that "needs" to be done. Green is never Green enou
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You're talking about a company that builds supercomputers to play chess. They're hardly greenards.
They are, however, moving to greener pastures in response to the demands of the marketplace.
That sounds smart to me.
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I think he gets his insults from moveon.org.
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ok, mr. anonymous, I work with all those wares, and the differences aren't *that* big, some percentage points in certain situations with certain hardware and certain transactions. and the very fastest way to run databases doesn't involve open source software, tpc.org will tell you all about that. it happens Oracle or DB2 on a big HP/UX or AIX is going to whoop open source ass with usual business needs on mid and large systems, but at huge cost and with vendor lock-in and limitations to customization and i
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hah, only on slashdot can someone post exaggerated urban legends and be marked interesting while a dose of reality gets "troll"