Didn't this only last about 1/2 of a "generation" the last two times it was attempted?
"Two?" you say? Yes, the obvious one is the old Voodoo 1 & 2 cards, but I distictly remember at least one (I think 2 or 3) company(ies) making cards that used 3 S3 chips (one processing each color) for a performance boost. They were all "really hot" (popularity, not thermally... well, ok both) for a very short period of time, since the next full generation of chips completely blew them away.
It was silly then, it's silly now.
Now what _I_ want, is a triple-headed system that you can play FPS games on with a front and two side views (peripheral vision, or at least just a wider landscape in 2 or 3 monitors). The hardware is there (well, for dual at least), but do any games support this? It _can't_ be that off-the-wall, after all, the SPARC version of Doom supported triple-heads way back in version 1.2! (they dropped it after that) OK, that wasn't *exactly* the same thing... that required a different box for each of the left and right displays, but they acted as a slave so you only operated the center system... it was _extremely_ cool!
Hmmm... I wonder how long it'll be before 16:9 displays are common, the only one I know of is the sweet monster made by apple that costs as much as a used car!
(for the few who don't know, the more people downloading something via bittorrent, the faster everyone's download occurs, as it's distributed downloading, unlike ftp... which hammers the servers)
Then someone needs to slap your network engineer, sysadmin, or whoever is cutting their budgets - and fast!
I've used SunRays at work and home, and deployed them for Universities, and everyone loves 'em. There's even a local engineering firm using them for ECAD. They're hardly slow.
The slowness you're complaining about is undoubtedly a lack of network, CPU, or memory in the server. Easy enough to diagnose for a competent sysadmin. My guess, with no information at all of your installation, is you have far too many SunRays installed on one 100mb subnet connected to a single 100mb port on the server, or you're using a shared network for them (very bad idea).
If the issue you're trying to solve is desktop maintenance, then I strongly suggest going to an Ultra Thin Client like the Sun Ray architecture.
I have installed Sun Ray networks at universities, and they absolutely love them. Yes, I work with Suns as a profession, so if you feel you must, take this with a grain of salt. Then again, I'm very much pro-Linux and would love to see an LTSP installation as well, that doesn't reduce the maintenance as much as the Sun Rays will.
If you aren't familiar with them, think of a telephone... if it breaks, you unplug it and put a new one in place and as soon as you plug it in, it's working. Same thing. No hard drive. No fans. No noise at all. Nothing mechanical to break, nothing to fix.
They are effectively a remote display (+kb+mouse) to the Solaris system running the Sun Ray Server software... so everyone shares the same (remote) box. Suns are designed to be much more efficient in multitasking "server" environments than the typical PC, so you can run quite a lot of Sun Rays off one server without anyone noticing a degredation in performance.
Browser choices include Netscape, Mozilla, Firefox, and I'm sure others. Desktops include CDE and GNOME (recommended) and soon, JDS (Java Desktop Environment = slicked up GNOME).
Another plus is "hot desking". Say you get a page and have to run to the other end of the building, but you're in the middle of something, or remotely logged into the server you need to work on with tasks running you don't want to stop, etc. You either disconnect the display with a simple command or button push, or if you're using the available smartcards, you yank your card out and run. You get to the other end of the building or server room (whatever), you plug in your smartcard (if you're using it) or you just log in, and the display you had at the former location is now in front of you still running and active. I've done exactly this on many occasions, having something running on a console of a box, with the serial console controled via minicom in an xterm... but I needed to be in the server room to do something then get back to the console again. You get the idea.
Ports on the incredibly simple devices include: VGA (DB15); 4 USB (for keyboard, mouse, etc.); ethernet; power; audio out (in case the internal speaker isn't loud enough for ya); audio in, and video in. Yes, you read that right, it has composite video (and audio) in, so you can do video-conferencing using these Ultra Thin Clients.
I'm leaving a lot out... these things are much nicer and more versatile than I'm describing.
I seriously think Sun should market these things more, everyone who I've demoed them for has loved 'em.
Anyways, just to prove I'm not just trying to sell new Sun hardware (I'm not a sales-droid, I'm a tech), check out the used ones on ebay. I'm running some Sun Rays at home on an old Ultra 10... got the former for $30/each and the latter for around $125.
So much for MS's claim that the number of viruses a platform has is proportional to its popularity... that is, so they claim, why Linux has so few (no?) viruses and why Win32 has so many.
Somehow I think the number of people running Linux outnumber the people running Win64 by about 1,000,000:1 (maybe more).
I'd recommend building yourself a simple "run from RAM" setup using Knoppix (or something similar), and install it on a CompactFlash card. CompactFlash has several data transfer modes, one of which is essentially IDE. Yes, you can take one of those ultra-cheap PCMCIA->CompactFlash adaptors, rip it apart and solder on a parallel IDE cable (google for it, it's common), and plug it right into your motherboard. I just googled for it myself, and found that CompactFlash-IDE adaptors are now being sold, so you don't even need to get your soldering iron out.
Now you've eliminated the hard drive, so you don't have to worry about the various issues associated with them, and you've eliminated the issue with powering off the device while it's running.
I can't be the only one who noticed that the people selling this don't even know what a notebook computer is... they actually have it propped on his lap with the hinge VERTICAL! (like a book)
No, I'm saying EITHER(/ANY) country would act like a brat, they already do!
As far as NASA's budget goes... I'm shocked that someone in your position (making parts for the ISS) hasn't seen all of the headlines about it since Bush took office (15,500 matches), it has been a few years now.
Oh I agree! I would love to see the space program take off (pun not intended) again!
The "Oh great" was sarcastic... I'm saying this sucks that China pulled out, as that means the political motivation is gone, which means we'll probably not end up going any time soon.
( This will undoubtedly get modded as a troll by some Bush-loving republican, but who cares?;) )
Now Bush will undoubtedly follow by canceling the new moon & mars missions.
Why do I say this?
He was killing off everything he could with regard to NASA, cutting their funding to the extreme... until China announced their plans. He immediately did a 180 and said we have to go to the moon and mars.
Why?
We haven't been there in over 25 years, it's up for grabs! Whoever gets there 1st will end up claiming it like a poor mannered brat in a sandbox.
Why should anyone care?
Because the moon has resources that can be used to launch further missions... watch educational TV some time (Discovery, TLC, Science channel, etc.) and you might see what I'm talking about.
Notice I said "numerous episodes", not "nearly all episodes".
He says "kill all humans" in many, many episodes, but he also says "destroy all humans" in a few... like the one where all the robots meet on one planet to plan the destruction of the entire human race, for example.
Do you REALLY think that all the books that have been written on the subject will have been updated in ONLY 10 years?!?
Life must be nice on your planet.;)
As far as confusion goes, I haven't yet met anyone who knows anything about networking who thinks that network speeds are rated in base-2.
It has been long accepted, though equally long protested, that hard drive manufacturers list in terms of speed and not size. Do you really think that Maxtor, Seagate, Western Digital, et al will suddenly be honest about their drive sizes and list them with this new silly term?
You know... that's part of it - if they had to come up with another term, why make it sound like the person has had too much novacaine? If I start using that word in front of customers, they'd think I need hospitalization!
As far as computer memory, program usage, space allocation, etc.... it's all base-2. Always has been, and it's impossible to change considering the way computers work.
Changing the name several decades after common use would be like changing the word "airplane" to "jackalope" and "car" to "snipe". No matter which way you look at it, it's a dumb idea.
An amateur thinks one kilobyte is 1000 bytes. A computer scientist thinks one kilometre is 1024 metres....'cept no-one I would ever consider a "computer scientist" would be that naive or uneducated.
I do understand their reasoning though, but as you (also) pointed out, it's too late for that - they should have thought of that several decades ago.:)
I'm still shocked that Mibibabyboobybytes has been accepted as a "standard!"
How many thousands of titles (possibly billions of books) have been written based on the FACT that Megabytes and Kilobytes, et al, have all been BASE-2 from the initial concept?
The ONLY people in the entire industry who considers MB/KB/et al to be in base-10 are the hard drive manufacturers, and that's just so they can claim their 230GB drives are 250GB!
You don't go out and buy a 536.89MB stick of RAM, you buy a 512MB stick! Your video card doesn't have 134.22MB of video RAM, it has 128MB!
I don't know why, I should be used to it by now, but the "standards bodies" still blow my mind with their utter stupidity.
Why are all these people suddenly making projects that have been done over and over, and reporting them as "new ideas"? Just like the jet engine made out of a turbo-charger the other day... that's been done hundreds of times! Heck, it's even been done on Junkyard Wars!
And again, I agree completely with someone who thinks they don't agree with me.:) I agree that calendars should be separate from email clients... same with web browsers and news readers. I personally use Sylpheed for email, and a big part of why I do is the fact that it does NOT do HTML rendering - it is a pure email client. I also use pure news-readers, not a web-browser, and not a web portal to a newsgroup ('cept when searching).
Unfortunately, there are (for the sake of this discussion) two types of people, those who are computer savvy and want distinct, efficient tools for distinct tasks, and the "users" who want a better version of exactly the same thing. MS has convinced them that Outlook is the best tool for the job(s), so that's what they want... Outlook, or something that is so similar they can't tell the difference.
I'm not making this stuff up, I work for a Sun VAR and I meet with customers and discuss these things with them... my boss even more so. The people with the money, the customers who want to buy, the people making the decisions, the people with little or no exposure to Linux or anything Open Source... these are the people we are dealing with and showing these solutions to. They either want to completely replace MS-Exchange with something that does _exactly_ the same thing to the point the Outlook users will never see the difference, or they want to replace Outlook with something that again... the users will never notice the difference.
This isn't academia, this isn't in Silicon Valley (I wish I were back there...), this isn't a LUG, this is Corporate America I'm dealing with.
Unfortunately, what people want isn't always what's the most appropriate, most efficient, or most Logical... or else there'd be about 1/100th the number of SUVs on the road.
(sorry if this sounds rantish, I'm extremely tired)
I agree with you completely, but then I understand how both the F/OSS world and the commercial world works.
The problem is, the people who are "in charge" of IT departments and budgets are not always the most logical people (think "PHB")... and many of the ones I speak of have zero exposure to Linux. They are afraid of such a drastic change, and they're used to MS's "oh, that's extra $ too" methods, so when discussing a Linux solution and they hear "oh, you have to buy this and that to get those functionalities", they get _very_ skeptical and wonder what else they're going to have to pay for... for things they haven't thought of yet.
Tab books published instructions how to build a device that does exactly this decades ago... TAB! Yeah, I know the cover looks ridiculous... I bought it when I was a teen and still have it - neat projects inside and better written than the cover would indicate.
Slashdot Mirror
Didn't this only last about 1/2 of a "generation" the last two times it was attempted?
"Two?" you say?
Yes, the obvious one is the old Voodoo 1 & 2 cards, but I distictly remember at least one (I think 2 or 3) company(ies) making cards that used 3 S3 chips (one processing each color) for a performance boost.
They were all "really hot" (popularity, not thermally... well, ok both) for a very short period of time, since the next full generation of chips completely blew them away.
It was silly then, it's silly now.
Now what _I_ want, is a triple-headed system that you can play FPS games on with a front and two side views (peripheral vision, or at least just a wider landscape in 2 or 3 monitors). The hardware is there (well, for dual at least), but do any games support this?
It _can't_ be that off-the-wall, after all, the SPARC version of Doom supported triple-heads way back in version 1.2! (they dropped it after that)
OK, that wasn't *exactly* the same thing... that required a different box for each of the left and right displays, but they acted as a slave so you only operated the center system... it was _extremely_ cool!
Hmmm... I wonder how long it'll be before 16:9 displays are common, the only one I know of is the sweet monster made by apple that costs as much as a used car!
Anyone have a torrent for this?
(for the few who don't know, the more people downloading something via bittorrent, the faster everyone's download occurs, as it's distributed downloading, unlike ftp... which hammers the servers)
Then someone needs to slap your network engineer, sysadmin, or whoever is cutting their budgets - and fast!
I've used SunRays at work and home, and deployed them for Universities, and everyone loves 'em.
There's even a local engineering firm using them for ECAD. They're hardly slow.
The slowness you're complaining about is undoubtedly a lack of network, CPU, or memory in the server. Easy enough to diagnose for a competent sysadmin.
My guess, with no information at all of your installation, is you have far too many SunRays installed on one 100mb subnet connected to a single 100mb port on the server, or you're using a shared network for them (very bad idea).
I wasn't there, but I heard that at the last LinuxWorld conference in NY, Sun announced the next version WILL run on Linux! (I can't wait!)
If the issue you're trying to solve is desktop maintenance, then I strongly suggest going to an Ultra Thin Client like the Sun Ray architecture.
I have installed Sun Ray networks at universities, and they absolutely love them. Yes, I work with Suns as a profession, so if you feel you must, take this with a grain of salt. Then again, I'm very much pro-Linux and would love to see an LTSP installation as well, that doesn't reduce the maintenance as much as the Sun Rays will.
If you aren't familiar with them, think of a telephone... if it breaks, you unplug it and put a new one in place and as soon as you plug it in, it's working. Same thing. No hard drive. No fans. No noise at all. Nothing mechanical to break, nothing to fix.
They are effectively a remote display (+kb+mouse) to the Solaris system running the Sun Ray Server software... so everyone shares the same (remote) box. Suns are designed to be much more efficient in multitasking "server" environments than the typical PC, so you can run quite a lot of Sun Rays off one server without anyone noticing a degredation in performance.
Browser choices include Netscape, Mozilla, Firefox, and I'm sure others.
Desktops include CDE and GNOME (recommended) and soon, JDS (Java Desktop Environment = slicked up GNOME).
Another plus is "hot desking".
Say you get a page and have to run to the other end of the building, but you're in the middle of something, or remotely logged into the server you need to work on with tasks running you don't want to stop, etc. You either disconnect the display with a simple command or button push, or if you're using the available smartcards, you yank your card out and run. You get to the other end of the building or server room (whatever), you plug in your smartcard (if you're using it) or you just log in, and the display you had at the former location is now in front of you still running and active. I've done exactly this on many occasions, having something running on a console of a box, with the serial console controled via minicom in an xterm... but I needed to be in the server room to do something then get back to the console again. You get the idea.
Ports on the incredibly simple devices include: VGA (DB15); 4 USB (for keyboard, mouse, etc.); ethernet; power; audio out (in case the internal speaker isn't loud enough for ya); audio in, and video in.
Yes, you read that right, it has composite video (and audio) in, so you can do video-conferencing using these Ultra Thin Clients.
I'm leaving a lot out... these things are much nicer and more versatile than I'm describing.
I seriously think Sun should market these things more, everyone who I've demoed them for has loved 'em.
Anyways, just to prove I'm not just trying to sell new Sun hardware (I'm not a sales-droid, I'm a tech), check out the used ones on ebay. I'm running some Sun Rays at home on an old Ultra 10... got the former for $30/each and the latter for around $125.
So much for MS's claim that the number of viruses a platform has is proportional to its popularity... that is, so they claim, why Linux has so few (no?) viruses and why Win32 has so many.
Somehow I think the number of people running Linux outnumber the people running Win64 by about 1,000,000:1 (maybe more).
I'd recommend building yourself a simple "run from RAM" setup using Knoppix (or something similar), and install it on a CompactFlash card.
CompactFlash has several data transfer modes, one of which is essentially IDE.
Yes, you can take one of those ultra-cheap PCMCIA->CompactFlash adaptors, rip it apart and solder on a parallel IDE cable (google for it, it's common), and plug it right into your motherboard. I just googled for it myself, and found that CompactFlash-IDE adaptors are now being sold, so you don't even need to get your soldering iron out.
Now you've eliminated the hard drive, so you don't have to worry about the various issues associated with them, and you've eliminated the issue with powering off the device while it's running.
Yeah, I think I'm the one who needs coffee (too bad I hate the taste)...
My dim monitor provided a cool optical illusion, apparently.
I can't be the only one who noticed that the people selling this don't even know what a notebook computer is... they actually have it propped on his lap with the hinge VERTICAL! (like a book)
No, I'm saying EITHER(/ANY) country would act like a brat, they already do!
As far as NASA's budget goes... I'm shocked that someone in your position (making parts for the ISS) hasn't seen all of the headlines about it since Bush took office (15,500 matches), it has been a few years now.
Oh I agree! I would love to see the space program take off (pun not intended) again!
The "Oh great" was sarcastic... I'm saying this sucks that China pulled out, as that means the political motivation is gone, which means we'll probably not end up going any time soon.
( This will undoubtedly get modded as a troll by some Bush-loving republican, but who cares?
Now Bush will undoubtedly follow by canceling the new moon & mars missions.
Why do I say this?
He was killing off everything he could with regard to NASA, cutting their funding to the extreme... until China announced their plans.
He immediately did a 180 and said we have to go to the moon and mars.
Why?
We haven't been there in over 25 years, it's up for grabs!
Whoever gets there 1st will end up claiming it like a poor mannered brat in a sandbox.
Why should anyone care?
Because the moon has resources that can be used to launch further missions... watch educational TV some time (Discovery, TLC, Science channel, etc.) and you might see what I'm talking about.
It was a joke.
(besides, the rules are rarely followed)
That was part of the change... it didn't actually break yum, it merely reconfigured it to use the release directory rather than the test directory.
Once they change the permissions on the core/2 directories, yum will work again.
I used yum as installed, unmodified, with the original RedHat/Fedora config:
[development]
name=Fedora Core $releasever - Development Tree
baseurl=http://download.fedora.redhat.com/p
This, when you run 'yum -y update', replaces this config with:
[base]
name=Fedora Core $releasever - $basearch - Base
baseurl=http://download.fedora.redhat.com/p
[updates-released]
name=Fedora Core $releasever - $basearch - Released Updates
baseurl=http://download.fedora.redhat.co
You don't have to download everything if you're running FC2 Test3, simply update using yum.
yum -y update
This will bring everything up to the full FC2 release. I did this days ago (it's been out via yum repositories that long).
$ cat
Fedora Core release 2 (Tettnang)
Notice I said "numerous episodes", not "nearly all episodes".
He says "kill all humans" in many, many episodes, but he also says "destroy all humans" in a few... like the one where all the robots meet on one planet to plan the destruction of the entire human race, for example.
I wonder how long until they sue anyone airing Futurama, since Bender says that exact phrase in numerous episodes.
After all, it is the 200x decade's business-model: Patent/Copyright/Trademark something that's long been in use and sue everyone who still does.
.
(for the humor impaired/moderators: it's a joke)
Do you REALLY think that all the books that have been written on the subject will have been updated in ONLY 10 years?!?
Life must be nice on your planet.
As far as confusion goes, I haven't yet met anyone who knows anything about networking who thinks that network speeds are rated in base-2.
It has been long accepted, though equally long protested, that hard drive manufacturers list in terms of speed and not size.
Do you really think that Maxtor, Seagate, Western Digital, et al will suddenly be honest about their drive sizes and list them with this new silly term?
You know... that's part of it - if they had to come up with another term, why make it sound like the person has had too much novacaine?
If I start using that word in front of customers, they'd think I need hospitalization!
As far as computer memory, program usage, space allocation, etc.... it's all base-2. Always has been, and it's impossible to change considering the way computers work.
Changing the name several decades after common use would be like changing the word "airplane" to "jackalope" and "car" to "snipe".
No matter which way you look at it, it's a dumb idea.
An amateur thinks one kilobyte is 1000 bytes. A computer scientist thinks one kilometre is 1024 metres.
I do understand their reasoning though, but as you (also) pointed out, it's too late for that - they should have thought of that several decades ago.
I'm still shocked that Mibibabyboobybytes has been accepted as a "standard!"
How many thousands of titles (possibly billions of books) have been written based on the FACT that Megabytes and Kilobytes, et al, have all been BASE-2 from the initial concept?
The ONLY people in the entire industry who considers MB/KB/et al to be in base-10 are the hard drive manufacturers, and that's just so they can claim their 230GB drives are 250GB!
You don't go out and buy a 536.89MB stick of RAM, you buy a 512MB stick!
Your video card doesn't have 134.22MB of video RAM, it has 128MB!
I don't know why, I should be used to it by now, but the "standards bodies" still blow my mind with their utter stupidity.
Others have done it... here's a 3-way speaker reported on
Why are all these people suddenly making projects that have been done over and over, and reporting them as "new ideas"? Just like the jet engine made out of a turbo-charger the other day... that's been done hundreds of times! Heck, it's even been done on Junkyard Wars!
And again, I agree completely with someone who thinks they don't agree with me.
I agree that calendars should be separate from email clients... same with web browsers and news readers.
I personally use Sylpheed for email, and a big part of why I do is the fact that it does NOT do HTML rendering - it is a pure email client.
I also use pure news-readers, not a web-browser, and not a web portal to a newsgroup ('cept when searching).
Unfortunately, there are (for the sake of this discussion) two types of people, those who are computer savvy and want distinct, efficient tools for distinct tasks, and the "users" who want a better version of exactly the same thing. MS has convinced them that Outlook is the best tool for the job(s), so that's what they want... Outlook, or something that is so similar they can't tell the difference.
I'm not making this stuff up, I work for a Sun VAR and I meet with customers and discuss these things with them... my boss even more so. The people with the money, the customers who want to buy, the people making the decisions, the people with little or no exposure to Linux or anything Open Source... these are the people we are dealing with and showing these solutions to. They either want to completely replace MS-Exchange with something that does _exactly_ the same thing to the point the Outlook users will never see the difference, or they want to replace Outlook with something that again... the users will never notice the difference.
This isn't academia, this isn't in Silicon Valley (I wish I were back there...), this isn't a LUG, this is Corporate America I'm dealing with.
Unfortunately, what people want isn't always what's the most appropriate, most efficient, or most Logical... or else there'd be about 1/100th the number of SUVs on the road.
(sorry if this sounds rantish, I'm extremely tired)
I agree with you completely, but then I understand how both the F/OSS world and the commercial world works.
The problem is, the people who are "in charge" of IT departments and budgets are not always the most logical people (think "PHB")... and many of the ones I speak of have zero exposure to Linux.
They are afraid of such a drastic change, and they're used to MS's "oh, that's extra $ too" methods, so when discussing a Linux solution and they hear "oh, you have to buy this and that to get those functionalities", they get _very_ skeptical and wonder what else they're going to have to pay for... for things they haven't thought of yet.
Tab books published instructions how to build a device that does exactly this decades ago... TAB!
Yeah, I know the cover looks ridiculous... I bought it when I was a teen and still have it - neat projects inside and better written than the cover would indicate.