Slashback: Apache, DRM, Limbo

Slashback tonight has an important correction about the role of the Apache Foundation (none) vis a vis yesterday's ".NET for Apache" post. Also, another view of the recent DRM (stacked) roundtable in Washington, a review of Red Hat's new beta, and more. Anyone who has successfully downloaded the new Mandrake beta want to comment on that?

Those guys did not ride in with us. Sascha Schumann of the Apache Software Foundation wrote to correct the story presented in Monday's post (".Net for Apache"), writing "this is _not_ a joint Apache Software Foundation/Microsoft stunt. It has not been approved or endorsed by the Apache Software Foundation, nor does it require any of those acts -- it is a deal between two private companies, Covalent and Microsoft."

Fly on wall video, anyone? kikensei writes: "DSL Reports has a story summarizing last week's DRM round table that was stacked with corporate panel members. You can read it here. It presents a much more apt framework for discussion than the overly sensitive, passive account from Al3x that defined our discussion last week."

Dancing in limbo, limbo, limbo. Earlier this month, we mentioned Red Hat's new beta, called Limbo. wiredog writes "From eWeek, a review of RedHat 8.0 beta. With gcc 3.1,the latest versions of GNOME, Mozilla and OpenOffice, and Apache 2.0"

The force is strong in these metallic boxes. Verizon Guy writes "CNet is reporting that Industrial Light and Magic, the group responsible for rendering the special effects in the Star Wars films, is moving away from their proprietary SGI/IRIX/RISC based systems and is instead moving to Dells running Linux. This will give them 100% performance at 20% of the cost."

Here's a link to our post with the recent Linux Journal article on same; look for more on this soon.

Wear name tags, please. mpawlo writes "Slashdot meetup day is only a week away. Some 4 500 people have already signed up to meet all over the world on Thursday July 25, 2002, 7 pm. We need more fellow Swedes to meet in Stockholm and I guess the same goes for other cities."

Comments

Did they waited to see how others did ?

[philipx]

ILM switching is another sign of the popularity Linux gains in the graphics market too. But what I found interesting was the way the changed happened.

I have a friend who has a friend who etc. works for ILM. They had planned this thing for a loooong time and they had assigned three (small) teams to this swithover project.
One of the teams was to investigate the actual power of Linux in this domain and the offer of the marked. Techies .
Second team was to look over the market see about savings, opportunities, investors, stuff like that. Financial $tuff
The existence of the third team will probably never be acknowledged, but their task was to look into what their competitors who switched to Linux (see preview slashdot's announces of switchovers) were doing, how were they doing it, what impact on their revenues had, etc. I'd say spies. They've done a pretty good job.

Of course, this is highly fictional and has no relation to any living person or existing company ;) .

Not Again

[krmt]

Possibly offtopic, but I don't remember Arthur Clarke's story having any mention of destroying Italy...

Or, for that matter, any humans seeking revenge, or even live aliens present on the ship (unless you count plant and animal life).

I'm getting that "they're going to rape and pillage it like Starship Troopers" feeling. What a waste.

The Quiet Majority

[s20451]

Check out the top cities for Slashdot Meetup Day. First on the list is Toronto. Vancouver (13) and Montreal (Tied-14) are in the top 20; taken together they outscore the combination of San Francisco and San Jose. Outside of Canada, London (England) is second on the list (the top American city is Washington, at third). The Aussies are putting in a strong showing with three in the top 20: Melbourne (6), Sydney (7), and Brisbane (11); Perth weighs in at 32nd. "Majority" is too strong a word to use, but ... are us non-Americans taking over Slashdot?

Re:Manhattan ( = 42nd) meetup @ Bowlmor Lanes

[seek3r2k]

I think its rediculous how the manhattan location is getting all of NY's members, what about Queens?? Long island?? There are 5 or 6 people to those locations. LAME!

Theres more to NY than the over populated and polluted island. :)

Re:My current view on MDK 9.0 b1

[DodgyGeezer]

Strewth: do they not have a net installer with just a basic small (e.g. 35MB) bootableISO download yet? Why waste your precious bandwidth on packages you're never going to use? Try Debian see why I don't ever want to download Mandrake again.

I wish Mandrake come up with some way for me to upgrade painlessly over the 'net without having to download and burn GBs of ISO. If I can't get it done, the next time I try to upgrade my Mandrake 8.1 system, I'll replace it with Debian and never worry about it again.

Then C-Net casually mentions:

[Brian Stretch]

Along with replacing its workstations, ILM also has installed a 1,000-processor render farm based on Advanced Micro Devices' Athlon processors and a server cluster built with Compaq Alpha processors.

So Intel chips get the headline but Athlon MP rackmounts do the serious computation. I bet if ILM had found a top-tier vendor with a decent Athlon business (vs. consumer) desktop configuration they'd have Athlon XP's on their desktops too. Or Athlon MP dual CPU workstations, which cost about the same as a high-end uniprocessor P4. Having fought with some thoroughly screwed up Dell Optiplexes recently, the support geeks at ILM have my sympathies.

(Not that the whole business vs. consumer thing really matters, until you try to convince purchasing of that point...)