Have have yet to see piece of comercial software which comes with great docs. Doesn't matter what we paid for it. It all requires training courses, extra books, and/or digging through usenet posts. Infact I'd venture that many OS apps have far better documentation than their closed source counterparts.
I take it you are new to this sysadmin thing. How would you install sshd on your old Irix server with a dodgy console port? Personally I logged in with rlogin to set it up. Also a lot of legacy apps still use rsh and rexec and not all of them play nicely with ssh.
These tools are like 'ed' 99.9% of the time you don't need to use them but for those 0.1% of the times when you do, knowing what you are doing saves you a lot of time and from looking like a complete amature.
Re:Not really different, just flexible.
on
Halloween VII
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· Score: 1
Maya is as usable as 3D Studio, but costs twice as much
Maya Complete (Which is basically the same as Unlimited, except for a couple of plug-ins which you can by third-party equivalents for if you really need them) costs $1990, and now includes the Mental Ray renderer for free. I don't recall what 3d studio costs be I do recall it being more the $2000.
A lot of people are asking about benchmarks and complaining about how MIPS sucks on SpecFP tests and stuff. So I thought I'd offer a quick test I ran for the company a worked for when we where deciding whether to go Intel or SGI for compositing. We ran this test on a highend dual proc x86 workstation and a middle of the road single proc Octane2 (I don't remember the exact specs any more, but I do recall we had the same amount of RAM, 1.5 gigs, in both machines, so there was no advantage there).
Anyway we ran two tests, one comping 8 bit video res. footage and some relativly simple effects, and one comping 16 bit film res footage with a number of heavy effects. On the video res stuff the x86 work station convincingly beat the Octane2 every time. However on the film res stuff the Octane2 totaly left the x86 machine in the dust, it wasn't even close.
So basically, unless you have really heavy loads an sgi workstation won't really shine and you're probably better off with an x86 box. However once the load starts to seriously increas the x86 archetcture simply cannot keep up and that's when the sgi boxes really start to show off. It just doesn't matter how fast you CPU is if your machine cannot shuffle data to and from it quickly enough,
I took a class in Advertising while in college. Guess how much cars would cost if the manufacturer did ZERO advertsing? (No TV, no radio, no newspapers, no nothing).
Half.
Bullshit. How many Highlanders would Toyota sell without advertising? A lot less than they do today, I'll tell you that much. Thus they would have to charge more pr. car to make the same end-of-year profit. I guess the advertising class of yours didn't cover basic economics (but based on the advertising people I've met I'm not really surprised)
Hm...would that imply that XFS would be say a really good candidate FS for building video streaming devices?
Yes. Streaming video has always been one of SGI's strong points. SGI have streaming video solutions that handle several Gb/s IO, although for those kinds of IO's you obviously need the hardware and server software as well as the filesystem. But you can rest asured that the fs won't be your bottleneck.
The best time to watch news is when you are out of the U.S. CNN International is a totally different creature than what you see here.
And CNN International is generally considered a joke and nothing but a pathetic attempt at news compared to, for example, BBC. If CNN International is considered good by US standards then I pity you.
I could be wrong, but I believe that there are a lot of casual gamers, like me, out there, for whom WineX is great. I am far from a hardcore gamer, the last game I played seriously was Doom II. However I enjoy playing the odd game now and then, maybe for half and hour to an hour when bored, but not enough to want to boot into Windows. I like taking a 20-30 minute brake from what I'm doing in Linux, switching to a new desktop, and play some Europa Universalis II or Fallout or Max Payne or whatever I happen to like(or Civ3 if I could get it to work. For what's worth I also own and play Mindrover and Heroes 3 from loki) and then switch back and get on with my work. The fact that the latest game doesn't work doesn't bother me in the slightest since I never buy new games simply because no game is worth much more than $25 to me.
So WineX may not be the ultimate sollution for hardcore gamers on linux, but for people like me it's great.
Who (as in retailers) in their right mind is going to let me install the compiler of my choice (assuming that I am not breaking my license by using it on more than one box...), compile my CFD models, and let them run for a couple of days on a computer I *might* buy?
Nobody, that's who.
Have you asked? Sure your local PC store might not, but I've gotten to borrow machines from HP, Fujitsu Siemens, sgi and a couple of local box shops in the past. And I was working for a tiny company buying maybe 3-5 high end workstation at a time. If you can convince them that you are seriously considering throwing money their way, you'd be surprised how far they might go.
Anyone that is even considering using a Intel solution as a renderstation, please don't waste the money. You can do a lot more with a lot less using AMD.
Or run your own benchmarks and see for yourself. I know the Pixar Renderman tests I did last year showed that a top of the line dual P4 Xeon beat a top of the line dual AMD MP. Then again things have change in the past few month so the situation may have been reversed. So basically make sure you test the CPU's with your app, not some random benchmark before making critical purchasing decisions.
Business DSL, Business DSL, Business DSL.. get it?
Redundancy, Redundancy, Redundancy...Get it?
If an internet connection is so important to your company why to you only have on method of getting it? Set up an ISDN router with 4 lines coming into it, that will give you 256kb/s for those times your fixed line goes down. Here I've got it set up so that if our main internet connection disapears the ISDN router will fire up and automatically take over. Quick, simple, fairly cheap and it works.
you have no alternative, and, therefore, the concept of consumer choice is nonexistant.
Yes, you do have a choice.
You have the choice not to use their service. You have the choice to go without cheap broadband access at home. It's not like broadband is a necessity.
I work at a small 3D animation shop with a small budget and as such we have to try to squeeze out as many rendering cycles as possible on the hardware we have. I'm running a rendering farm made up of 6 Intel boxes running linux and a couple of old Alphas running DEC Unix. However all our workstations run WinNT or 2000.
What I would really like to see would be something that I could install on these windows workstations so that the linux render servers could use their spare cycles when they aren't being used. Something like mosix, but with Windows clients would be amazingly useful for us. Does anybody know if such a program exsists.
Folks, I remember running the 1.x kernel series. The 2.x introduced some major changes, and we were thrilled to get it. But I haven't heard what new things could require (or deserve) a jump to 3.x.
According to an interview I read somewhere, the next big thing that will make the kernel 3.0 worthy is NUMA (Non-Uniform Memory Archetectur).
When someone breaks into a computer containing sensitive information, it makes a certain amount of sense to hand out punishment... to the idiots who left the computer unsecured.
What's a secure computer?
Anybody who deals with computer security knows that it's impossible to make a box 100% secure. If someone really wants to get into a server they can crack it. So how do you decide who's an 'idiot' and who's a responsible admin who happened to get their box cracked by a good cracker?
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Have have yet to see piece of comercial software which comes with great docs. Doesn't matter what we paid for it. It all requires training courses, extra books, and/or digging through usenet posts. Infact I'd venture that many OS apps have far better documentation than their closed source counterparts.
I take it you are new to this sysadmin thing.
How would you install sshd on your old Irix server with a dodgy console port? Personally I logged in with rlogin to set it up. Also a lot of legacy apps still use rsh and rexec and not all of them play nicely with ssh.
These tools are like 'ed' 99.9% of the time you don't need to use them but for those 0.1% of the times when you do, knowing what you are doing saves you a lot of time and from looking like a complete amature.
You mean like this?
http://www.3dwm.org/
Maya Complete (Which is basically the same as Unlimited, except for a couple of plug-ins which you can by third-party equivalents for if you really need them) costs $1990, and now includes the Mental Ray renderer for free. I don't recall what 3d studio costs be I do recall it being more the $2000.
A lot of people are asking about benchmarks and complaining about how MIPS sucks on SpecFP tests and stuff. So I thought I'd offer a quick test I ran for the company a worked for when we where deciding whether to go Intel or SGI for compositing. We ran this test on a highend dual proc x86 workstation and a middle of the road single proc Octane2 (I don't remember the exact specs any more, but I do recall we had the same amount of RAM, 1.5 gigs, in both machines, so there was no advantage there).
Anyway we ran two tests, one comping 8 bit video res. footage and some relativly simple effects, and one comping 16 bit film res footage with a number of heavy effects. On the video res stuff the x86 work station convincingly beat the Octane2 every time. However on the film res stuff the Octane2 totaly left the x86 machine in the dust, it wasn't even close.
So basically, unless you have really heavy loads an sgi workstation won't really shine and you're probably better off with an x86 box. However once the load starts to seriously increas the x86 archetcture simply cannot keep up and that's when the sgi boxes really start to show off. It just doesn't matter how fast you CPU is if your machine cannot shuffle data to and from it quickly enough,
I took a class in Advertising while in college. Guess how much cars would cost if the manufacturer did ZERO advertsing? (No TV, no radio, no newspapers, no nothing).
Half.
Bullshit. How many Highlanders would Toyota sell without advertising? A lot less than they do today, I'll tell you that much. Thus they would have to charge more pr. car to make the same end-of-year profit. I guess the advertising class of yours didn't cover basic economics (but based on the advertising people I've met I'm not really surprised)
Yes. Streaming video has always been one of SGI's strong points. SGI have streaming video solutions that handle several Gb/s IO, although for those kinds of IO's you obviously need the hardware and server software as well as the filesystem. But you can rest asured that the fs won't be your bottleneck.
And CNN International is generally considered a joke and nothing but a pathetic attempt at news compared to, for example, BBC. If CNN International is considered good by US standards then I pity you.
However I enjoy playing the odd game now and then, maybe for half and hour to an hour when bored, but not enough to want to boot into Windows. I like taking a 20-30 minute brake from what I'm doing in Linux, switching to a new desktop, and play some Europa Universalis II or Fallout or Max Payne or whatever I happen to like(or Civ3 if I could get it to work. For what's worth I also own and play Mindrover and Heroes 3 from loki) and then switch back and get on with my work.
The fact that the latest game doesn't work doesn't bother me in the slightest since I never buy new games simply because no game is worth much more than $25 to me.
So WineX may not be the ultimate sollution for hardcore gamers on linux, but for people like me it's great.
Nobody, that's who.
Have you asked? Sure your local PC store might not, but I've gotten to borrow machines from HP, Fujitsu Siemens, sgi and a couple of local box shops in the past. And I was working for a tiny company buying maybe 3-5 high end workstation at a time. If you can convince them that you are seriously considering throwing money their way, you'd be surprised how far they might go.
Or run your own benchmarks and see for yourself. I know the Pixar Renderman tests I did last year showed that a top of the line dual P4 Xeon beat a top of the line dual AMD MP. Then again things have change in the past few month so the situation may have been reversed. So basically make sure you test the CPU's with your app, not some random benchmark before making critical purchasing decisions.
Redundancy, Redundancy, Redundancy...Get it?
If an internet connection is so important to your company why to you only have on method of getting it? Set up an ISDN router with 4 lines coming into it, that will give you 256kb/s for those times your fixed line goes down. Here I've got it set up so that if our main internet connection disapears the ISDN router will fire up and automatically take over. Quick, simple, fairly cheap and it works.
Yes, you do have a choice.
You have the choice not to use their service. You have the choice to go without cheap broadband access at home. It's not like broadband is a necessity.
What I would really like to see would be something that I could install on these windows workstations so that the linux render servers could use their spare cycles when they aren't being used. Something like mosix, but with Windows clients would be amazingly useful for us. Does anybody know if such a program exsists.
According to an interview I read somewhere, the next big thing that will make the kernel 3.0 worthy is NUMA (Non-Uniform Memory Archetectur).
What's a secure computer?
Anybody who deals with computer security knows that it's impossible to make a box 100% secure. If someone really wants to get into a server they can crack it. So how do you decide who's an 'idiot' and who's a responsible admin who happened to get their box cracked by a good cracker?