Sure. Off-the-shelf systems will catch up with supercomputers. With today's supercomputers. But supercomputers are being improved just as quickly as desktop systems. Today's Big Iron is tommorows's heap of useless junk, that's how it is with computers.
Preach on. The need for really fast node interconnection is what still makes people buy honest-to-god supercomputers. Look at this baby that was just installed next door from me.
No Linux clustering project will ever reach the performance of such systems (though some of them might eventually run Linux), but the low-end high performance computing market (yes, I know it sounds oxymoronish) is bound to be taken by Linux.
Doesn't work. Huge discs require huge heads, which, together with larger tracks, increases seek times. And of course, there is simply no way anymore to get a consumer to buy anything that doesn't fit into his 3.5"-normed box.
The age of "big iron" has passed, and those few companies that continue to try and fight this trend are doomed to an ignoble failure.
And once more: Big Iron still has its place. It's not anymore as prevalent as it used to be, but standard PC architecture has design limits that prevent it from ever being usable for certain tasks (basically, anything that requires low-latency, high-bandwidth I/O). The supercomputing center next door just got a new Big Iron that's now the most powerful computer in Europe. It cost about $30,000,000. Look at the specs, especially the IO part. A Beowulf for the same money would be a huge, mostly useless pile of junk, when faced with the kind of problems this machine is designed to solve.
Nice idea.. but now that beowulf clusters are available en masse and target the same market as Cray
Not by a long shot. There are a lot of problems for which Beowulf clusters are totally worthless. Real supercomputing consists of converting CPU-bound problems to IO-bound ones, and solving them on appropriate hardware. And IO is what x86 hardware is worst at.
There is still a very healthy market for real supercomputers, and there are no signs of erosion.
Well, Slashdot is de facto mainly about Open Source software. Its not meant to act as a source of news on software in general. But then, using any one website as ones only source of news is just plain daft.
Unfortunately, it would be pointless, the post you complain about would already get around it, while "first" and "post" may both appear in a perfectly valid post. It would be a pointless and unwinnable arms race taking away coding time that could be used for much better ends.
You really want to claim that ix86 Linux does not make up 95% of all Linux installations, possibly more?
and many people who do have Linux will know where to get DeCSS
DeCSS does not a DVD player make. If Lucent manages to make it comfortable to use and make use of hardware decoders and graphics cards, I see it as a very good thing. I'd buy it immediately if it supports my H+ card and comes ata reasonable price.
Errm, right. So getting people to learn new software is going to be a walk in the park is it?
What prevents you from giving a Linux app the exact same user interface than the Windows version, hm?
Whether you want to admit it or not there will always be costs when changing over to a new system,
Again, no-one said they had to switch everything over to Linux immediately. They'd probably do it during a standard, scheduled upgrade: use Linux instead of Windows 2000 when replacing Windows 95.
And as for "easier" and "cheaper" administration, aren't Linux sys admins supposed to spend a lot of time getting new fixes, kernel updates and other enhancements to prevent security leaks? I mean I'm not a sys admin, but I'm sure plenty of them here could back me up on that. A Linux system, especially a large one, doesn't entirely run itself, which is why we have sys admins in the first place.
Perfectly true. But a Windows System doesn't run itself either, and Linux admins have time to concern themselves with security because they don't have to run around all the time because some stupid user misconfigured their machine or deleted important files.
Did you know you're supposed to read a post before replying? I never said I believed anything of the sort, I just said that was the image being presented by certain parts of the media, and which people tend to believe if they don't know all the facts.
I adressed that aspect right afterwards where I said that Linux does not have a big enough media presence in the first place.
Firstly, the cost of installing, configuring and running open-source software would be prohibitive. Yeah, sure it's free to buy, but let's face it, it's the TCO that counts in these matters. If they were to go with Linux they'd have to hire a load of sys admins to go with it, and they would cost far more in wages than the equivalent professionals, MSCEs.
"equivalent"? snigger...
Anyway, it's not a black and white issue. No-one would force them to use Linux for everything, immediately. The smart thing would be to start out with the servers and proceed slowly.
And then there's the fact that for your average Joe who works for the government, Linux is far too complex to use. Despite all claims to the contrary Linux is still unwieldly and old-fashioned in its approach to the user interface, and staff training costs would again be enormous.
Bullshit. Linux has ease of use like the best of them. Except when administering a machine. But especially in a government environment, the normal user wouldn't have to do that. In fact, the administarion would be much easier and cheaper with Linux because you can make it impossible for Joe Average to fuck up his installation. And you can have remote administration, which is a huge factor.
There's also the security issue. Governments love security and have been known to spend insane amounts of money on it.
And even apart from these issues, there's the image issue. Linux has recently been linked to all kinds of criminal activities in the public eye, especially the DVD pirating program DeCSS. If the German government were to embrace Linux it would seem like they were condoning the piracy of DVDs and the like. In the international community this would harm their reputation, something governments never enjoy.
Now this is total bullshit, if I ever saw any. As has been explained a 100 times before, DeCSS is not a "pirating program", and anyone with half a brain understands that whatever some people do with an OS, it doesn't make the OS bad.
Linux may have an reputation for being difficult to use among computer users, but I have yet to see it have a "criminal" image in the "public eye". In fact, it doesn't have an image at all to most people, who don't even know it exists.
Just look through the history of Germany, and what do you see but facism and failed attempts to conquer France.
Fascism is a very new concept, so of course your statement, can't help to be anything but bullship, but among other things that you will see in German history, is that Germany and France used to be the same country at first.
Besides, the relationship between Germany and France is, at the moment, really good, so please spread your stupid propaganda (that reeks more of fascism than anything Germany has done recently) elsewhere.
...not much. What happened was that an analysis in favor of open source software was redrawn from public display. A decision of any kind had not even been made yet. Though I can't imagine a reason either, except for not wanting to publically offend M$.
The fallacy in your argument is that you assume one can really work with a computer using "plain English". Linux can't do that, and Microsoft can't do that either because computers are still a long way from being as intelligent as humans, which is what it takes to understand human speech. Pretending that this is not the case is pure Marketing, i.e. a lie.
Besides, whats so cryptic about usind "rm" instead of "remove" and "*" instead of "all". The Linux version is way more flexible about the "all" part (not that my example does not delete all files, just JPEG images!), and no-one prevents you from setting up "remove" as a alias for "rm" (which is used merely because it's quicker to type).
When a Windows program wants to offer the functionality of complicated (and yes, cryptic) Unix commands like "grep", it needs a screenful of menus, checkboxes and radiobuttons which is totally unusable for a blind person and still not as powerful as the Linux command.
Not really. This is a well known slashdot troll. He starts all his posts with "I am a [insert important position in the field being talked about]", thats how you recognize him.
I disagree. Microsoft has made it exponentially easier for a blind person to use Windows. You dont have to say "Left click coordinate ( 832 , 005 )" You can simply say "Minimize."
What good does that do if you have no idea what window is on top? How does that help you making any sort of use of all the pretty icons?
Face it, Windows is a graphical-only user interface, and therefore essentially not the right thing for people for whom the "graphical" part is useless. Windows is useless for blind people, and Linux is not, period. Your example does not prove the opposite: "Minimize" is a function that is only necessary because you have a graphical user interface in the first place. On the other hand, please tell me how windows "exponentially easier" supports the functionality offered by, for example telling Linux to "rm *.jpg".
Say a bad thing about a Linux product on slashdot and get censored immediately?
Nope, it's "make a stupid troll post and get moderated down immediately". His intentional misspelling alone proves that he's a troll trying to disguis as someone with a point (which he hasn't: if synthesizer producers what their hardware supported, it's their job to open standards so that drivers can be written! Actually, no-one stops them from writing their own ones)
Without taking anything away from this effort, don't the visually impaired have enough problems without attempting to use the notoriously cryptic Linux operating system ?
No. For them, Linux is a much better operating system than Windows or Mac OS for one simple reason: under Linux, everything can be done through a text interface. How do you expect a blind person to use a graphical user interface? If it's text, it can simply be displayed on a Braille terminal.
I mean, it's a really cool tool for hackers and nerds, but for normal use
That's the keyword: normal. A blind person can simply not use a computer the same way everyone else can.
y if a movie from a "Zone 3" country come out in DVD, what code will it use? Zone 3?
Exactly.
What if it is not yet available to ALL other countries (like Zone 1 - 2, 4 - 5)?
Then people in these other countries are out of luck, unless they own a player with cracked region protection. That is exactly the point of the Region Coding bullshit!
The whole CSS thing seems to assume that all movies are from Zone 1 countries!
What it actually assumes is that the vast majority of popular movies are from zone 1 (true), and that their main group of customers are also (true), so that they won't realize how blatantly anti-customers-rights the method is. I heard that in New Zealand, it is actually illegal to sell a DVD player that has region coding not cracked...
Wrong. The funny thing is, there is no patent of any kind on the CSS code. Therefore, you don't need a license for it. If this were about licensing, the MPAA would have won the case months ago. But there is no licensing issue, therefore they have to try and win it on the stupid copy-protection argument.
Slashdot Mirror
Sure. Off-the-shelf systems will catch up with supercomputers. With today's supercomputers. But supercomputers are being improved just as quickly as desktop systems. Today's Big Iron is tommorows's heap of useless junk, that's how it is with computers.
No Linux clustering project will ever reach the performance of such systems (though some of them might eventually run Linux), but the low-end high performance computing market (yes, I know it sounds oxymoronish) is bound to be taken by Linux.
Doesn't work. Huge discs require huge heads, which, together with larger tracks, increases seek times. And of course, there is simply no way anymore to get a consumer to buy anything that doesn't fit into his 3.5"-normed box.
No. The only thing we could logically conclude from that is that Pat Robertson == Bill Gates....
And once more: Big Iron still has its place. It's not anymore as prevalent as it used to be, but standard PC architecture has design limits that prevent it from ever being usable for certain tasks (basically, anything that requires low-latency, high-bandwidth I/O). The supercomputing center next door just got a new Big Iron that's now the most powerful computer in Europe. It cost about $30,000,000. Look at the specs, especially the IO part. A Beowulf for the same money would be a huge, mostly useless pile of junk, when faced with the kind of problems this machine is designed to solve.
Not by a long shot. There are a lot of problems for which Beowulf clusters are totally worthless. Real supercomputing consists of converting CPU-bound problems to IO-bound ones, and solving them on appropriate hardware. And IO is what x86 hardware is worst at.
There is still a very healthy market for real supercomputers, and there are no signs of erosion.
Well, Slashdot is de facto mainly about Open Source software. Its not meant to act as a source of news on software in general. But then, using any one website as ones only source of news is just plain daft.
No, I actually do see your point and agree with it somewhat, but its not applicable to this particular article.
Unfortunately, it would be pointless, the post you complain about would already get around it, while "first" and "post" may both appear in a perfectly valid post. It would be a pointless and unwinnable arms race taking away coding time that could be used for much better ends.
You really want to claim that ix86 Linux does not make up 95% of all Linux installations, possibly more?
and many people who do have Linux will know where to get DeCSS
DeCSS does not a DVD player make. If Lucent manages to make it comfortable to use and make use of hardware decoders and graphics cards, I see it as a very good thing. I'd buy it immediately if it supports my H+ card and comes ata reasonable price.
So that you can make copies of DVDs you rented or borrowed from a friend.
What prevents you from giving a Linux app the exact same user interface than the Windows version, hm?
Whether you want to admit it or not there will always be costs when changing over to a new system,
Again, no-one said they had to switch everything over to Linux immediately. They'd probably do it during a standard, scheduled upgrade: use Linux instead of Windows 2000 when replacing Windows 95.
And as for "easier" and "cheaper" administration, aren't Linux sys admins supposed to spend a lot of time getting new fixes, kernel updates and other enhancements to prevent security leaks? I mean I'm not a sys admin, but I'm sure plenty of them here could back me up on that. A Linux system, especially a large one, doesn't entirely run itself, which is why we have sys admins in the first place.
Perfectly true. But a Windows System doesn't run itself either, and Linux admins have time to concern themselves with security because they don't have to run around all the time because some stupid user misconfigured their machine or deleted important files.
Did you know you're supposed to read a post before replying? I never said I believed anything of the sort, I just said that was the image being presented by certain parts of the media, and which people tend to believe if they don't know all the facts.
I adressed that aspect right afterwards where I said that Linux does not have a big enough media presence in the first place.
What I'm talking about is the kingdom of "Karl der Grosse" (or "Charlemange" in French).
"equivalent"? snigger...
Anyway, it's not a black and white issue. No-one would force them to use Linux for everything, immediately. The smart thing would be to start out with the servers and proceed slowly.
And then there's the fact that for your average Joe who works for the government, Linux is far too complex to use. Despite all claims to the contrary Linux is still unwieldly and old-fashioned in its approach to the user interface, and staff training costs would again be enormous.
Bullshit. Linux has ease of use like the best of them. Except when administering a machine. But especially in a government environment, the normal user wouldn't have to do that. In fact, the administarion would be much easier and cheaper with Linux because you can make it impossible for Joe Average to fuck up his installation. And you can have remote administration, which is a huge factor.
There's also the security issue. Governments love security and have been known to spend insane amounts of money on it.
And even apart from these issues, there's the image issue. Linux has recently been linked to all kinds of criminal activities in the public eye, especially the DVD pirating program DeCSS. If the German government were to embrace Linux it would seem like they were condoning the piracy of DVDs and the like. In the international community this would harm their reputation, something governments never enjoy.
Now this is total bullshit, if I ever saw any. As has been explained a 100 times before, DeCSS is not a "pirating program", and anyone with half a brain understands that whatever some people do with an OS, it doesn't make the OS bad.
Linux may have an reputation for being difficult to use among computer users, but I have yet to see it have a "criminal" image in the "public eye". In fact, it doesn't have an image at all to most people, who don't even know it exists.
Fascism is a very new concept, so of course your statement, can't help to be anything but bullship, but among other things that you will see in German history, is that Germany and France used to be the same country at first.
Besides, the relationship between Germany and France is, at the moment, really good, so please spread your stupid propaganda (that reeks more of fascism than anything Germany has done recently) elsewhere.
...not much. What happened was that an analysis in favor of open source software was redrawn from public display. A decision of any kind had not even been made yet. Though I can't imagine a reason either, except for not wanting to publically offend M$.
Also, you should learn the difference between posting as an AC or under a registered account. Hint: it can be expressed with the number "1".
Besides, whats so cryptic about usind "rm" instead of "remove" and "*" instead of "all". The Linux version is way more flexible about the "all" part (not that my example does not delete all files, just JPEG images!), and no-one prevents you from setting up "remove" as a alias for "rm" (which is used merely because it's quicker to type).
When a Windows program wants to offer the functionality of complicated (and yes, cryptic) Unix commands like "grep", it needs a screenful of menus, checkboxes and radiobuttons which is totally unusable for a blind person and still not as powerful as the Linux command.
Not really. This is a well known slashdot troll. He starts all his posts with "I am a [insert important position in the field being talked about]", thats how you recognize him.
What good does that do if you have no idea what window is on top? How does that help you making any sort of use of all the pretty icons?
Face it, Windows is a graphical-only user interface, and therefore essentially not the right thing for people for whom the "graphical" part is useless. Windows is useless for blind people, and Linux is not, period. Your example does not prove the opposite: "Minimize" is a function that is only necessary because you have a graphical user interface in the first place. On the other hand, please tell me how windows "exponentially easier" supports the functionality offered by, for example telling Linux to "rm *.jpg".
Nope, it's "make a stupid troll post and get moderated down immediately". His intentional misspelling alone proves that he's a troll trying to disguis as someone with a point (which he hasn't: if synthesizer producers what their hardware supported, it's their job to open standards so that drivers can be written! Actually, no-one stops them from writing their own ones)
This is pathetic. And here I thought you were a troll with standards...
No. For them, Linux is a much better operating system than Windows or Mac OS for one simple reason: under Linux, everything can be done through a text interface. How do you expect a blind person to use a graphical user interface? If it's text, it can simply be displayed on a Braille terminal.
I mean, it's a really cool tool for hackers and nerds, but for normal use
That's the keyword: normal. A blind person can simply not use a computer the same way everyone else can.
Exactly.
What if it is not yet available to ALL other countries (like Zone 1 - 2, 4 - 5)?
Then people in these other countries are out of luck, unless they own a player with cracked region protection. That is exactly the point of the Region Coding bullshit!
The whole CSS thing seems to assume that all movies are from Zone 1 countries!
What it actually assumes is that the vast majority of popular movies are from zone 1 (true), and that their main group of customers are also (true), so that they won't realize how blatantly anti-customers-rights the method is. I heard that in New Zealand, it is actually illegal to sell a DVD player that has region coding not cracked...
Wrong. The funny thing is, there is no patent of any kind on the CSS code. Therefore, you don't need a license for it. If this were about licensing, the MPAA would have won the case months ago. But there is no licensing issue, therefore they have to try and win it on the stupid copy-protection argument.