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Pixar Eclipses Sun with Linux/Intel
lieutenant writes "Pixar Animation Studios is replacing servers from Sun in its render farm with eight new blade servers from Rackspace. In all, the blade system contains 1,024 Intel 2.8GHz Xeon processors, and it runs the open-source Linux operating system. Pixar has ported its Renderman software to run on Linux." I'd love to see their electric bill ;)
No, apps under 2000/XP (and lets forget about 98/ME - may as well have a one hour timer on the reset switch) are not more reliable. Apps can lock up the OS. Completely. No way out but reset.
As you've suggested, we'll ignore Win95/98/Me.
Yes, this is true. Some things can lock up the OS. Mostly, though, this is owning to security failures or badly written device drivers (ATI comes immediately to mind...).
If you find that a particular linux app locks your desktop, you can 3 finger salute to get to a command prompt. Not that it happens very often.What does Joe User do from there? I get support calls from people who forget what they're supposed to do at login prompts, they're going to know to type "startx" to get the GUI back?
Even so, yeah, the bigger problems with Linux apps is not that they lock up the desktop (though there should be an easy point-and-click remedy to that to put features on par with Windows). Linux apps usually just disappear when they crash, which is pretty frequent.
Not only that, but if a particular Linux app does this more often than you like, you are likely to be able to quickly find a nice free replacement app on the net with a few minutes of looking.Maybe if all I need is vi or emacs, sure.
What if I need a spreadsheet with basic data analysis tools and the ability to import Excel files? These aren't too weird requirements for spreadsheet users, and there's only one that I know of: Gnumeric.
How about an e-mail client with passive spellchecking and the ability to draw characters onto the screen at least as fast as I can type them? Since I don't have a 2.8GHz P4, Evolution won't do it, and neither will KMail, though there are about a dozen for Windows which do that.
Video player which will open most formats? Xine or mplayer. But my distro is the most common one on the face of the earth, it comes with an unsupported and weird-assed version of GCC, so I can't run mplayer.
My options are running a little thin.
I find it ironic that you get so emotionally attached to Windows.Oh, I wish you could only know how much I hate Windows.
Your language gets stronger with every post.My frustration grows stronger with every post.
Your claims that I represent what's wrong with linux ring hollow. You imnsho, are what's wrong with Linux. Narrow minded users that want everything exactly the same as it is in Windows and are unwilling to try another paradigm.I don't want everything the same as Windows. All I want is applications that work reliably, that can do the same things as their Windows counterparts, and which don't look like shit.
We have *none* of those things. But hey, xine is skinnable, and that's all that really matters, right?
Funny that a so called power user like yourself doesn't like Linux, yet, my mother, with almost no computer experience, is fine with it on her desktop.I'm sure her requirements are less than mine.
She's probably never seen a spellchecker, so one that makes her manually intervene with every potentially mis-spelled word is still an excellent innovation.
She's probably still blown away by kcalc, so we won't ask her about her preferences in a spreadsheet.
And since she's still amazed that this magic box can transport video by the telephone line, we won't have counted on her to notice that xine won't endlessly repeat that little 20-second video of her grandson puking that she was e-mailed.
I put it to you that you are far too rigid and set in your ways.My demands are less than most people making actual IT purchasing decisions. They're simple:
Those are my requirements. Rigid? No.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.