You're right, Google is not the government. But check out the very first line of Google's "About Us" page:
Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.
What does it mean when censorship is exercised by the company whose declared purpose is to making all information accessible? If private organizations are going to take on lofty goals, they should conform to the ideals of those lofty goals. We have the right to criticize them for that, even though they are not bound to the Constitution.
is a change from previous versions of Windows, which only required a valid license key
No, they required the install CD if the previous OS or current OS was not installed. At the very minimum, you would have to pop in that CD... it would not ask you for the previous license. E.g. XP would ask you to pop in a Windows 2000 CD if XP or Windows 2K was not on any HDD on your system.
That's right. If you have a renderer that does adaptive supersampling decently (aka not Mental Ray), you can render below your final resolution and get away with it. It seems like you have a lot of experience, so I can't imagine that you haven't been somewhere at 5am trying to get 3 hour renders out for a post session at 9am. Those are the times you're thankful you have a renderer where you can actually get away with rendering some elements at.75 or.9 rez and still have them look good.
And what the hell are you talking about "roll their own solutions, hardware and software"? If you watched TFV in TFA, you would have seen that ILM flashed Dell badges among others. And as everyone knows, Pixar was in bed with Sun for years. Granted, I don't really keep up with what other people buy anymore, and I can't speak for Weta, Framestore, and the other smaller shops you mention. The companies I've worked for had deals with HP, Compaq (nee Digital), and Dell (x2). They were all film studio size deals, which might explain the different experience.
You should go on record instead of posting as an AC, I'd love to actually have an on the record conversation with someone else in the business.
but at a resolution of 4096x2160 pixels, each frame takes a while to generate.
Where'd you come up with this resolution? I've never worked on a movie where the final rez was higher than 2K. I can only think of one set of elements I rendered at 4K -- a bunch of badly aliasing Mental Ray renders. A halfway decent renderer will let you get away with rendering at a lower rez than needed for the final comp.
Not to say your point isn't a good one though. Google's velcro and duct tape solution to server farms isn't really appropriate for the needs of 3D rendering. Plus, visual effects studios just don't have Google money to throw at custom farm solutions. On their scale, it's much more effective to just pay Dell or HP to take care of it.
As always, Intel's real strength lies in their mastery of the process. They still haven't solved their memory bandwidth issues - clovertown is a joke as soon as you set it on non trivial apps.
Interesting. Have you used one? For what purpose? I never expected 8x performance on a dual clovertown box when I first fired off 8 processes of a popular 3D app to bake geometry. But that's exactly what I got when I tried it.
Unless AMD employs completely incompetent morons as engineers, of course "Barcelona" should be faster than "Clovertown". Clovertown was released half a year to a year before Barcelona.
The tables have turned. Even though Clovertown is not a "true" quad-core (aka a single die), Intel has a huge head start on AMD on quad core. Intel will be pushing forward with their 45nm technology and pushing out yet more models by the time these arrive. With their fabrication prowess, I would expect the gap to increase over AMD. Since dumping NetBurst, Intel is finally battling AMD in an sport they can potentially win.
Most things that desperately need to be parallelized can be when someone takes the time to do it. What's the most CPU intensive thing the average user does on their computer? Media encoding? Gaming? Both of these are ripe for parallelization if someone spends the time to do it. Even high end computational uses like fluid dynamics and 3D rendering are parallelizable.
The multi-core strategy has been superb for those who already have parallelized needs and a dire lack of rackspace, A/C and power. Intel is selling these chips like gangbusters to those people who see the price/performance in it. A 3.0ghz dual-core Woodcrest might cost $200 more than a 2.66ghz version and gives you a 12% speed bump on an serial algorithm. A slower 1.86ghz quad core Clovertown costs $100 less than a 2.66ghz dual core Woodcrest, but can still give you upwards a 40% bump if your algorithm is perfectly parallelized. That math is why Intel's strategy is working for businesses that need it.
Note: prices taken from Dell's main, non-discounted site.
From TFA: To add insult to injury, the monopolist who absolutely controls the Korean market for computers won't delay the launch of Vista to alllow for Korean websites to re-code their sites.
Gee, because Korean websites had absolutely no advance notice that Vista was coming out. Nope. No one heard about that one in advance.
I'm getting really tired of Slashdot publishing vendor complaints about Vista catching them all by surprise. Vista's anything but a surprise.
My point in saying that is that Windows and Office are cheap compared to the development costs most companies take on on Windows. If one is just looking to use Windows as an Apache webserver, then yes, Windows is not cheap.
2: Ubuntu. It's even free.
7: Retraining costs. See #2.
Right, because deploying Linux in an all-Windows company wouldn't have any major retraining or IT costs.
Tell me why it won't cost a huge amount to switch from Windows to Linux on the desktop? Windows and Office licenses are cheap. What's expensive is most companies developing completely new applications for their business domain, often using.NET. These apps take time to develop, time to deploy, time to debug, and time to train users. Explain to me how these expenses are overcome so simply in the Linux fan's mind.
I'm surprised that you're suprised: the author of these "roughly drafted" blog posts is one of the biggest Apple apologists on the net. What surprises me is that the/. editors keep posting his stuff, it's about as one-sided and without reason as you can get as far as Apple fanboys go.
That said, the iPhone is a tired subject. Let's just see it in action, then we'll decide if we want to buy it. (I'm also skeptical if I'd ever buy a device like this on EDGE rather than EV-DO).
Have you seen the server management software for WS2003? It's pretty pointy-clicky friendly these days. Shouldn't be hard to make an even more decent UI around the management tools, but who knows.
Right, back in the day, we used to write assembly in hex and use BSAVE it to floppy. I'd like to imagine we've gotten somewhere since 1982. It was long before we had enormous APIs that we code around like we do today. We used to do sound by toggling $C030. Comparing those development processes to today's is absurd.
Given that C# and C++ serve our needs pretty well, I'd like to start looking at new languages as a whole development package rather than some syntactical sugar that might shave off 5 minutes on "Hello World". We live in an era where the languages matter far less than the development process -- at least on the level I'm talking about. When you're writing in EditPlus, it's no easier to write and manage 1m lines of code in D than it is in C++ or Python. I'd love to see someone to prove otherwise.
The only IDE support is in an SVN repository for a tool that last saw a packaged release in 2005?
Guys, this just doesn't sound realistic. These are the things that need to be overcome for exotic languages to get widespread acceptance in the corporate world. It's one thing to adopt a language like D when you're working on something at college or in your basement. It's a totally different situation when you're writing code that need to be extended, supported and linked to by hundreds of people.
I just can't see why I'd want to switch to a language that has no IDE support and is evolutionary to C# or C++. I hardly have to look at documentation for APIs anymore because I can just use Visual Studio's autocompletion to figure things out.
The continuing vague blurb sounds fantastic but Share-point is specifically for MS Windows.
Users can access Sharepoint from other OSes, but you're right, Sharepoint itself only runs on Windows Server.
"Oh it not like Windows" or "It does not have my favorite MS Windows app" or "We are going to have to retrain all our staff".
It seems like you're minimizing this, but these are pretty important. One of the things often ignored on/. is that the human cost at a company almost always exceeds the cost of machinery (by far). Switching to OpenOffice is not trivial... a lot of people are upset about the UI changes to Office 12 and retraining costs incurred by that. If you've ever worked with computer illiterates, you'll know that mortals just don't click around to figure things out. In their experience, computers do unexpected things and they lose work when they do that. It's a shame that people feel that way, but that's the way it is. Switching to an all new Linux setup wouldn't help that.
And with 32bit it's impossible to address more than 4GB.
Spoken like someone who has never had any experience with this sort of thing. 32-bit only allows you to address 2GB of RAM per process. 32-bit operating systems have been able address more than 4GB of RAM since the pPentium Pro.
At the very minimum, applications on Windows can address 3GB by building for/LARGEADDRESSAWARE and running Windows with the/3GB flag in boot.ini. Beyond that, one can write an application that uses AWE on Windows to access more RAM. On Linux, it can be done as well: Intel has had its PAE technology for years, which allows up to 64GB of RAM for OSes that work with it.
Bottom line is your deadline is false. The small percentage of people will be using 64-bit are probably already using it. Operating systems that need more RAM for all processes can do it now anyway.
Why would I want to spend $2000 on an HDTV, another $500-$1K or whatever iTV will cost, to watch crappy Flash Video? The novelty will wear off when the new season of "24" starts.
The killer app for any of these set top boxes is well compressed HD programming on demand. Right now on Xbox Live, HD movies run about 6 GB, which takes a long time to download at 1.5 Mbs or even a cable modem's top speed of 8 Mbs.
Comcast, on the other hand, has the bandwidth and set-top boxes to deliver HD on demand right now. I'm not sure how Apple is going to compete against this unless they have some awesome new codec to do it. Comcast has already rendered the Tivo Series 3 POA (Pointless On Arrival). Comcast's HD DVR solution, while crappy, is $10 a month; the HD Tivo is $800 plus another $20 a month for dual CableCards and can't do on demand HD at any point. When I click on an HD movie using Comcast's On Demand, it plays within a second or two. I'm just don't see Apple--or Microsoft, or Tivo or anyone--competing in the face of this bandwidth juggarnaut, even if their equipment is superficially nicer to use.
The post I was replying to insinuated that it wouldn't be economical to send Vista CDs to bloggers because of hardware compatibility. My claim is that no blogger is in that Windows 95 camp you described. Most of them probably have hardware no older than a year.
BTW, a Windows 95-class machine would be a Pentium Pro or Pentium II. I just don't buy your claim that the 83% of users browsing the web with XP and 2K are on that class of machine, sorry. If you have any evidence, please post it.
As mentioned over and over by other commenters, no person with ancient hardware and Windows 95 installed would upgrade to Vista by buying it at the store. They'll buy a new PC and get Vista with it. This is just like every other Windows release. I'm not sure why/.ers are so dense in comprehending this and we keep getting front page posts that claim Vista will be a huge failure, etc..
Slashdot Mirror
You're right, Google is not the government. But check out the very first line of Google's "About Us" page:
Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.
What does it mean when censorship is exercised by the company whose declared purpose is to making all information accessible? If private organizations are going to take on lofty goals, they should conform to the ideals of those lofty goals. We have the right to criticize them for that, even though they are not bound to the Constitution.
Of course, running 3D isn't as bad as an AJAX-y web app ruining the planet. ;)
They have been playing this game for long enough that they know that eye candy sells
Someone's complaining that Microsoft sells more with eye candy than Apple?
Apocalypse. Here. Now.
is a change from previous versions of Windows, which only required a valid license key
No, they required the install CD if the previous OS or current OS was not installed. At the very minimum, you would have to pop in that CD... it would not ask you for the previous license. E.g. XP would ask you to pop in a Windows 2000 CD if XP or Windows 2K was not on any HDD on your system.
That's right. If you have a renderer that does adaptive supersampling decently (aka not Mental Ray), you can render below your final resolution and get away with it. It seems like you have a lot of experience, so I can't imagine that you haven't been somewhere at 5am trying to get 3 hour renders out for a post session at 9am. Those are the times you're thankful you have a renderer where you can actually get away with rendering some elements at .75 or .9 rez and still have them look good.
And what the hell are you talking about "roll their own solutions, hardware and software"? If you watched TFV in TFA, you would have seen that ILM flashed Dell badges among others. And as everyone knows, Pixar was in bed with Sun for years. Granted, I don't really keep up with what other people buy anymore, and I can't speak for Weta, Framestore, and the other smaller shops you mention. The companies I've worked for had deals with HP, Compaq (nee Digital), and Dell (x2). They were all film studio size deals, which might explain the different experience.
You should go on record instead of posting as an AC, I'd love to actually have an on the record conversation with someone else in the business.
but at a resolution of 4096x2160 pixels, each frame takes a while to generate.
Where'd you come up with this resolution? I've never worked on a movie where the final rez was higher than 2K. I can only think of one set of elements I rendered at 4K -- a bunch of badly aliasing Mental Ray renders. A halfway decent renderer will let you get away with rendering at a lower rez than needed for the final comp.
Not to say your point isn't a good one though. Google's velcro and duct tape solution to server farms isn't really appropriate for the needs of 3D rendering. Plus, visual effects studios just don't have Google money to throw at custom farm solutions. On their scale, it's much more effective to just pay Dell or HP to take care of it.
As always, Intel's real strength lies in their mastery of the process. They still haven't solved their memory bandwidth issues - clovertown is a joke as soon as you set it on non trivial apps.
Interesting. Have you used one? For what purpose? I never expected 8x performance on a dual clovertown box when I first fired off 8 processes of a popular 3D app to bake geometry. But that's exactly what I got when I tried it.
Unless AMD employs completely incompetent morons as engineers, of course "Barcelona" should be faster than "Clovertown". Clovertown was released half a year to a year before Barcelona.
The tables have turned. Even though Clovertown is not a "true" quad-core (aka a single die), Intel has a huge head start on AMD on quad core. Intel will be pushing forward with their 45nm technology and pushing out yet more models by the time these arrive. With their fabrication prowess, I would expect the gap to increase over AMD. Since dumping NetBurst, Intel is finally battling AMD in an sport they can potentially win.
Not everything can be parallelized
Most things that desperately need to be parallelized can be when someone takes the time to do it. What's the most CPU intensive thing the average user does on their computer? Media encoding? Gaming? Both of these are ripe for parallelization if someone spends the time to do it. Even high end computational uses like fluid dynamics and 3D rendering are parallelizable.
The multi-core strategy has been superb for those who already have parallelized needs and a dire lack of rackspace, A/C and power. Intel is selling these chips like gangbusters to those people who see the price/performance in it. A 3.0ghz dual-core Woodcrest might cost $200 more than a 2.66ghz version and gives you a 12% speed bump on an serial algorithm. A slower 1.86ghz quad core Clovertown costs $100 less than a 2.66ghz dual core Woodcrest, but can still give you upwards a 40% bump if your algorithm is perfectly parallelized. That math is why Intel's strategy is working for businesses that need it.
Note: prices taken from Dell's main, non-discounted site.
From TFA: To add insult to injury, the monopolist who absolutely controls the Korean market for computers won't delay the launch of Vista to alllow for Korean websites to re-code their sites.
Gee, because Korean websites had absolutely no advance notice that Vista was coming out. Nope. No one heard about that one in advance.
I'm getting really tired of Slashdot publishing vendor complaints about Vista catching them all by surprise. Vista's anything but a surprise.
My point in saying that is that Windows and Office are cheap compared to the development costs most companies take on on Windows. If one is just looking to use Windows as an Apache webserver, then yes, Windows is not cheap.
2: Ubuntu. It's even free.
.NET. These apps take time to develop, time to deploy, time to debug, and time to train users. Explain to me how these expenses are overcome so simply in the Linux fan's mind.
7: Retraining costs. See #2.
Right, because deploying Linux in an all-Windows company wouldn't have any major retraining or IT costs.
Tell me why it won't cost a huge amount to switch from Windows to Linux on the desktop? Windows and Office licenses are cheap. What's expensive is most companies developing completely new applications for their business domain, often using
Stop posting FUD. They distributed it as an ISO to all of their volume customers and have been to beta customers since it went into beta.
How would you be able to do a clean install if they didn't give you an ISOs?
I'm surprised that you're suprised: the author of these "roughly drafted" blog posts is one of the biggest Apple apologists on the net. What surprises me is that the /. editors keep posting his stuff, it's about as one-sided and without reason as you can get as far as Apple fanboys go.
That said, the iPhone is a tired subject. Let's just see it in action, then we'll decide if we want to buy it. (I'm also skeptical if I'd ever buy a device like this on EDGE rather than EV-DO).
The iPod entered a completely new space (portable digital music) at the time.
The space for the handset market is well defined with massive, $40b companies fighting for it. It's just not the same.
Have you seen the server management software for WS2003? It's pretty pointy-clicky friendly these days. Shouldn't be hard to make an even more decent UI around the management tools, but who knows.
Looks interesting. Would be nice if it worked with C++ clases. Has anyone tried creating a C++ app around this?
That's why there's aGPS. Check out what VZNavigator can do without ever looking for a satellite.
I guarantee this technology, if it's true, won't use traditional satellite signals for triangulation.
Right, back in the day, we used to write assembly in hex and use BSAVE it to floppy. I'd like to imagine we've gotten somewhere since 1982. It was long before we had enormous APIs that we code around like we do today. We used to do sound by toggling $C030. Comparing those development processes to today's is absurd.
Given that C# and C++ serve our needs pretty well, I'd like to start looking at new languages as a whole development package rather than some syntactical sugar that might shave off 5 minutes on "Hello World". We live in an era where the languages matter far less than the development process -- at least on the level I'm talking about. When you're writing in EditPlus, it's no easier to write and manage 1m lines of code in D than it is in C++ or Python. I'd love to see someone to prove otherwise.
it has some IDE support, like Code::Blocks SVN
The only IDE support is in an SVN repository for a tool that last saw a packaged release in 2005?
Guys, this just doesn't sound realistic. These are the things that need to be overcome for exotic languages to get widespread acceptance in the corporate world. It's one thing to adopt a language like D when you're working on something at college or in your basement. It's a totally different situation when you're writing code that need to be extended, supported and linked to by hundreds of people.
I just can't see why I'd want to switch to a language that has no IDE support and is evolutionary to C# or C++. I hardly have to look at documentation for APIs anymore because I can just use Visual Studio's autocompletion to figure things out.
The continuing vague blurb sounds fantastic but Share-point is specifically for MS Windows.
/. is that the human cost at a company almost always exceeds the cost of machinery (by far). Switching to OpenOffice is not trivial... a lot of people are upset about the UI changes to Office 12 and retraining costs incurred by that. If you've ever worked with computer illiterates, you'll know that mortals just don't click around to figure things out. In their experience, computers do unexpected things and they lose work when they do that. It's a shame that people feel that way, but that's the way it is. Switching to an all new Linux setup wouldn't help that.
Users can access Sharepoint from other OSes, but you're right, Sharepoint itself only runs on Windows Server.
"Oh it not like Windows" or "It does not have my favorite MS Windows app" or "We are going to have to retrain all our staff".
It seems like you're minimizing this, but these are pretty important. One of the things often ignored on
And with 32bit it's impossible to address more than 4GB.
/LARGEADDRESSAWARE and running Windows with the /3GB flag in boot.ini. Beyond that, one can write an application that uses AWE on Windows to access more RAM. On Linux, it can be done as well: Intel has had its PAE technology for years, which allows up to 64GB of RAM for OSes that work with it.
Spoken like someone who has never had any experience with this sort of thing. 32-bit only allows you to address 2GB of RAM per process. 32-bit operating systems have been able address more than 4GB of RAM since the pPentium Pro.
At the very minimum, applications on Windows can address 3GB by building for
Bottom line is your deadline is false. The small percentage of people will be using 64-bit are probably already using it. Operating systems that need more RAM for all processes can do it now anyway.
Why would I want to spend $2000 on an HDTV, another $500-$1K or whatever iTV will cost, to watch crappy Flash Video? The novelty will wear off when the new season of "24" starts.
The killer app for any of these set top boxes is well compressed HD programming on demand. Right now on Xbox Live, HD movies run about 6 GB, which takes a long time to download at 1.5 Mbs or even a cable modem's top speed of 8 Mbs.
Comcast, on the other hand, has the bandwidth and set-top boxes to deliver HD on demand right now. I'm not sure how Apple is going to compete against this unless they have some awesome new codec to do it. Comcast has already rendered the Tivo Series 3 POA (Pointless On Arrival). Comcast's HD DVR solution, while crappy, is $10 a month; the HD Tivo is $800 plus another $20 a month for dual CableCards and can't do on demand HD at any point. When I click on an HD movie using Comcast's On Demand, it plays within a second or two. I'm just don't see Apple--or Microsoft, or Tivo or anyone--competing in the face of this bandwidth juggarnaut, even if their equipment is superficially nicer to use.
The post I was replying to insinuated that it wouldn't be economical to send Vista CDs to bloggers because of hardware compatibility. My claim is that no blogger is in that Windows 95 camp you described. Most of them probably have hardware no older than a year.
/.ers are so dense in comprehending this and we keep getting front page posts that claim Vista will be a huge failure, etc..
BTW, a Windows 95-class machine would be a Pentium Pro or Pentium II. I just don't buy your claim that the 83% of users browsing the web with XP and 2K are on that class of machine, sorry. If you have any evidence, please post it.
As mentioned over and over by other commenters, no person with ancient hardware and Windows 95 installed would upgrade to Vista by buying it at the store. They'll buy a new PC and get Vista with it. This is just like every other Windows release. I'm not sure why