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Running a Research Lab on Free Software?
"[Hardware Manufacturers] seem to get very upset when somebody asks them what the register-level interface to their card is. Who could blame them? Their Windows DLL is the perfect solution under [most] circumstances.
I'm not the only one around here getting frustrated, but all before me have been defeated. It seems I am to be as well, for today I have started to learn Visual Basic.
Has anyone had any *positive* experiences trying to move a lab from proprietary to free software? Surely the government-funded researchers of the world have a responsibility to ensure that their work is free, as in freedom. However, I have found out the hard way that it's usually just not worth the effort, following such ideals. You just get frustrated by apathetic colleagues, useless product support, and the conventional wisdom that it's OK to ignore your ideals, so long as you get the experiment working. Additionally, my ordeals convince my peers that free software isn't worth the trouble."
Big ups Trollkore, how you living my niggas?
-mao
w()()7
All the first posts he stole -
All other attempts would fail miserably -
or were lame, invalid or null.
Eat it, A/C bitches. You SUCK. Did you not know that sla$hdot lags new stories for A/C's by 2 minutes? Lamers. You will NEVER get FP while I am on watch. If you want FP, you have to login. If you are running a bot you have to send the user cookie. MMKAY? Did you know that? No. Because you are fucking stupid. I own you. Little A/C bitches. You suck. EAT A DICK.
Yes, I am going to get banned again for posting this but the truth must come out. Sla$hdot does fuck with people, they do kill moderation priveleges if you mod something up that they disagree with, and they are little power tripping linux hippies who are complete hypocrites in every sense of the word.
We are Slashdot. We believe in free speech, but we censor people who disagree with us. We hate doubleclick.net but we take money from them and let them fuck our loyal readers in the ass.
Just ask Signal_11. Here's to you, bro.
Now, let the trolling commence.
You've wasted a *lot* of time and effort trying to implement some simple stuff with free (and better) alternatives? Surely that beats wasting a lot of time and effort trying to implement the same things with commercial (and worse) alternatives?
I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you made a slight 'grammaro'.
Are you sure the fine print in your resident research grant allows you such freedom?
does it run linux?
The LAN manager, however, threw a ton of bullshit my way
:-)
Most certainly it will, because LAN manager is an M$ product
While I know Visual Basic (or just 'VB' as it is know in inside circles) isn't highly regard amongst the GNU/Slashdot population at large, it is often unfairly maligned and accidently lumped in with truly worthless languages like Scheme and LISP.
You mention that you would like to use Free software in your laboratory, but the preponderance of VB seems to preclude that. This doesn't have to be the case. As a counterexample, I give you win-apt-get, which is a Win32 port of the popular Debian apt-get package management program. I am porting this application to provide the Debian community with a third OS base, alongside GNU/Linux and GNU/Hurd: Debian GNU/Windows XP.
Sure, I had to resort to hand-optimised x86 assembler for some performance critical components of win-apt-get, but I was also able to get a lot of less speed sensitive parts of apt-get, like the Beowulf-clustering code and the paper-clip installation assistant coded quickly with VB.
I have a feeling that you are overlooking the potential synergistic benefits of Free Software and VB together. In fact, please contact me via e-mail if you are interested in collaborating on win-apt-get. It would be great to see how the world's greatest GNU/packaging system would benefit from the addition of quantum computing concepts. It's behaviour could change depending on how it was observed! Does it install the new update or not? Does it actually install both, but on a Debian GNU/Linux box in a parallel universe? Is there really a quantum copy of Bruce Perens somewhere in another dimension still employed at a pre-Compaq merger HP?
Sincerely,
Debian Troll
I work as a consultant for several Fortune 500 companies, and I think I can shed a little light on the climate of the open source community at the moment. I believe that part of the reason that open source based startups are failing left and right is not an issue of marketing as it's commonly believed but more of an issue of the underlying technology.
I know that that's a strong statement to make, but I have evidence to back it up! At one of the major corps(5000+ employees) that I consult for, we wanted to integrate the shareware version of Linux into our server pool. The allure of not having to pay any restrictive licensing fees was too great to ignore. I reccomended the installation of several boxes running the new 2.4.9 kernel, and my hopes were high that it would perform up to snuff with the Windows 2k boxes which were (and still are!) doing an AMAZING job at their respective tasks of serving HTTP requests, DNS, and fileserving.
I consider myself to be very technically inclined having programmed in VB for the last 8 years doing kernel level programming. I don't believe in C programming because contrary to popular belief, VB can go just as low level as C and the newest VB compiler generates code that's every bit as fast. I took it upon myself to configure the system from scratch and even used an optimised version of gcc 3.1 to increase the execution speed of the binaries. I integrated the 3 machines I had configured into the server pool, and I'd have to say the results were less than impressive...
We all know that linux isn't even close to being ready for the desktop, but I had heard that it was supposed to perform decently as a "server" based operating system. The 3 machines all went into swap immediately, and it was obvious that they weren't going to be able to handle the load in this "enterprise" environment. After running for less than 24 hours, 2 of them had experienced kernel panics caused by Bind and Apache crashing! Granted, Apache is a volunteer based project written by weekend hackers in their spare time while Microsft's IIS has an actual professional full fledged development team devoted to it. Not to mention the fact that the Linux kernel itself lacks any support for any type of journaled filesystem, memory protection, SMP support, etc, but I thought that since Linux is based on such "old" technology that it would run with some level of stability. After several days of this type of behaviour, we decided to reinstall windows 2k on the boxes to make sure it wasn't a hardware problem that was causing things to go wrong. The machines instantly shaped up and were seamlessly reintegrated into the server pool with just one Win2K machine doing more work than all 3 of the Linux boxes.
Needless to say, I won't be reccomending Linux/FSF to anymore of my clients. I'm dissappointed that they won't be able to leverege the free cost of Linux to their advantage, but in this case I suppose the old adage stands true that, "you get what you pay for." I would have also liked to have access to the source code of the applications that we're running on our mission critical systems; however, from the looks of it, the Microsoft "shared source" program seems to offer all of the same freedoms as the GPL.
As things stand now, I can understand using Linux in academia to compile simple "Hello World" style programs and learn C programming, but I'm afraid that for anything more than a hobby OS, Windows 98/NT/2K are your only choices.
Thank you for your time.
Umm VB and Windows are broke. And for your info there is far far better support for instrumentation in UNIX then Macrohard has ever thought of. The difficulty is 100% due to MS pressuring the manufacturers of Data Accuisition devises to only support ( publicly) Windows with their drivers.
the evil that you are and you represent will be exposed.
we will conquer your fledgling empire.
you will be destroyed for your nazi extermination tactives.
vae victus
dave shroeder is the manifestation of evil in our world today!