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I'm curious what people who've gone the DIY route are using to ease the management hassle that I could easily see a SAN becoming if it's OS is just straight Linux.

I'm curious what people who've gone the DIY route are using to ease the management hassle that I could easily see a SAN becoming if it's OS is just straight Linux.

While I'm not aware of any open source 3D accelerated drivers for NVidia cards, there are the DRI drivers for Radeon cards 9200/9250 and under which are very good. I'm using them on my Radeon Mobility 7500 card and after enabling S3TC, speeds are very impressive, probably about equal to that of the Windows drivers. S3TC isn't enabled by default because of potential IP issues, but even without it, the drivers are still quite fast.

There currently is an active project to get the DRI drivers working on the R300 series of Radeons (ie, the rest of them), but I'm not aware of anyone who has tried them, and I don't have the hardware necessary to try them myself. The page itself strongly suggests that these drivers are not finished or stable at the moment however, so try at your own risk.

happy downloading

www.kx.com,

Celko's article

http://www.intelligententerprise.com/010327/celko_ online.jhtml

read about tick
http://www.kx.com/products/kdb+tick.php

q is used for terabyte datawarehouses on wall street. realtime algorithmic trading.

milan's page.
http://homepage.hispeed.ch/milano/k4kdb+.htm

The ATI drivers for linux suck. ATI doesn't release the spec for the FOSS community to write our own drivers, and ATI's binary drivers are terrible.

I've been looking at upgrading my video card (I want to run tenebrae on my box, but don't have the horsepower in my video card. I've decided against going with ATI because fo this article and this comparison of the available ATI drivers (the FOSS dri drivers, the ATI binary drivers and the XiG Xserver). All three fare pretty poorly in different ways, and it's just a mess. My impression is that things have not gotten any better.

Basically, the ATI drivers don't present a problem for testing under Windows, but under Linux it is a mess best left alone, simply because all three implementations are incomplete or underperform in their own special ways. It's an intractable problem for the game vendors, and I think the best route for them is to make everything work in standard OpenGL, and check it with nVidia hardware. If it works there, they've got it. Gamers using ATI cards with linux are out of luck because of ATI's stance on specs and linux support.

So, your problem is that you assume ATI has written complete drivers for linux.

Jeff

You can find my benchmarks of DRI compatible cards here. They're a first attempt at benchmarking DRI and still need some tweaking.

Eric Anholt's benchmarks of DRI on FreeBSD are here.

Roland Scheidegger's comparison of the three drivers available for the Radeon 9000 (DRI, FGLRX, XIG) is here.

It's a bit surprising that the Radeon 8500 series is completly absent from this comparison. The 8500 and FireGL 8800 are still remarkable video cards.

I've been hunting for a win32 email client that doesn't suck a bag of cocks. Anyone got any suggestions? I'd appreciate it a lot.

I've tried Thunderbird and others, but am still staying with Eudora for now.

A few months ago, I started to write some sort of review/blog, pointing out some aspects of the mailers I tried. Never finished it really, but in case you find it useful: here it is

Agreed, but I tend to think that any magazine that knew anything about benchmarking on Linux would be using the fastest driver in the first place. They normally do use the best driver that is available on Windows. Often, they will even use "leaked" Detonators when testing a piece of hardware. Any reasonably intelligent reviewer would probably do the same thing on Linux - or even test it with both sets.

One such example is this comparison, which outlines the pros and cons of the various drivers available for ATI cores on Linux. One might find it interesting that some of the alternatives offer better performance than ATI's drivers in some instances.

http://homepage.hispeed.ch/rscheidegger/atilinux_o ct03/ati_linux_comp_oct03.html

From here, you will see that it is not entirely unlikely that an open source implementation of nVidias drivers could offer nVidia some insight into how to make their drivers perform better on Linux. I suspect that this will help ATI improve their OpenGL support across each supported, assuming they take this stuff seriously. I'd actually be seriously interested in buying some XIG Summit drivers, if they could only support the R300 cores (not likely right now since the programming docs aren't available).

Besides, only a fool buys a $300 video card. Yes, I may get flamed for that comment, but that doesn't detract from the fact that (with a few exceptions) it's true.
First, $300 isn't unreasonable at all, especially if you're a heavy gamer. $300 is about the point where you get a top-of-the-line card, without spending extra change for features that don't add any performance. Spend less than about $200, and you give up significant amounts of performance or next-generation features. To those who spend a lot of time gaming, an extra $150 for the ability to turn the detail to maximum in all theri games is worth it. Especially when you consider that the amortized cost is only about $12.50 per month if you upgrade once a year. Second, not everybody uses their cards just for gaming. $300 cards aren't fast enough when you've got a deadline coming up and SolidEdge feels slower and slower by the minute...

No, the point is that we can't[1] code something better because they won't release the necessary programming information.
Check out this driver comparison on the Radeon 9000. The DRI drivers perform very poorly. Yet, the documentation for chips up to the Radeon 9200 *was* supplied to the DRI project. Indeed, the DRI project doesn't support any cards that don't have documentation. So "no documentation" is no excuse. Its just the simple fact that ATI knows the hardware because they designed it, and they are in a much better position to write these drivers than the OSS community.

It is well known that the ATI DRI drivers are slower than even the proprietory ATI Linux ones (which suck) and much slower than the ATI Windows or XIG drivers. In high-detail OpenGL scenes, the DRI drivers can be less than half as fast. Good benchmark here.

And now for something completely different.

It's...

Python scripting for NSIS.

Seriously, there are times when these scripting systems can't do the heavy lifting of a "real" scripting language. I've often thought that Python might be an ideal embedded scripting language for an installer, especially with Mark Hammond's excellent Windows Extensions.

Has anyone used this NSIS/Python package? I suppose the only thing stopping me from trying at this point is my own laziness. Alas, this plugin requires that you track your own Python module dependencies.

-Peter

If you're into this sort of thing (and have a little time to spare), here is some more data for you survey-chart-whatever nerds.

What are "the nation's 500 fastest-growing private companies, from Inc magazine" running?

Inc.com publishes the company list including website for free, so with the help of Perl, I got the HTTP headers for these 500 companies. 44 sites appeared to be down, and didn't respond. For the 456 others, get the data in various formats and enjoy.

Of course, if you do make fancy graphs with it, please give us the link.

(and you should probably give credit to Inc.com for making the original company listing available for free)

XiG has a pretty damn good Linux X server, which supports ATI in all its glory (apparently better than XFree86 does). http://homepage.hispeed.ch/rscheidegger/atilinux_o ct03/ati_linux_comp_oct03.html

No, I don't work for XiG.