"can't be everything to everyone and remain completely Free"...
I don't know that I agree with that, since the nature of Open Source is such that it can become whatever it needs to without having to fight over the issue. But...
Rendering on Linux seems just to be common sense from a cost standpoint. How much does an SGI cluster cost these days? I don't know. But I do know that a 128-node render farm made of second-hand Pentium II systems will probably run about
128 P2s at $200 each...
$25600
Sufficient network switches for the job, maybe 6 24-port units, call it...
$2000 or so
9 Shelving units, at $40/shelf to hold, say, fifteen CPUs each...
$360
free copy of Red Hat 7.1 copied off a junior techie's home system...
Priceless (er, free):-)
The numbers work out much better that way, even if you're using current equipment instead of the cheezy second-hand P2s I figured on above.
You have an interesting point, but you know, I think Theo De Raadt said it best regarding the licensing of OpenBSD: if you want to use it in a baby mulcher, we can't stop you anyway. Linux is not an organization; it's an operating system. The organizations involved with it are entitled to make money (if they can; they shouldn't be running to the government for help), and they're as free to do with it as they please as we are.
The fact is that you can't say, "No, you can't use it for that" when you're dealing with a GPL product. Moreover, Linux is being used in the industry by techies, many of whom probably roughly the same attitude we do towards industry lawyers. We (who is this we, kemo sabe?) can object all we want, but the truth is that there isn't a damn thing anyone can do about it, and, like it or not, that's probably the way it should be.
And all the handwringing in the world won't change that.
I don't think you're likely to find that happening on the commercial level. It was so long ago I don't even remember where I read it (though it's the sort of thing that a/. poster might say), but I once heard it said that acknowledging bugs is probably a great way to tick off your investors.
"What, there's a flaw in your product?"
"Yes, but we can fix it pretty easily -- have the bug fix out tomorrow..."
Whereupon the non-technically-inclined investor writes the developer's comments as a sign of weakness and sells. I think that's also why commercial bug fix releases are such a big deal -- probably Microsoft's other reason for cramming all kinds of new features into their service packs.
Er, could be the poster's first language isn't English?
Actually, alimentation sounds about right for (probably) French or Spanish -- I once saw a poster somewhere (don't remember if it was/.) come up with "squanderer" for "heat sink" -- a wonderfully evocative term for it that was translated from "disipador" in Spanish.
The Mac uses the progress bar thing too, has since 7.5...
It's a moderately accurate way of describing how far along the boot process is, but it seems to be pretty easily fragged by a badly written system extension.
I haven't read Cuckoo's Egg (Cliff Stoll's late reputation as a minor nutjob tends to sour me on the idea), but you're right especially about Knuth -- it was sort of silly of me to ignore that. (I'd throw in MMIXware as well; if we want to build a chip in the future it'd be nice to see a cool RISC design with no holy war baggage.)
What piles the irony on even thicker is that Tom's Hardware got their hands on a prerelease version a month or so back and found out that it overclocked to be even faster than a P4 at the same speed. At the time the author of the article had a hunch that Intel might not even bother releasing it because of the marketing snafu it would cause.
Actually, a Palm has about as much computational punch as a 386/25 or maybe a bit more. The chip is a derivative of the 68020 and I think it runs around 30mHz (or at least the first DragonBalls did).
Yeah... and given the way he had it set up, it wasn't that different from what we'd understand as an arcade game today. It was apparently quite the tourist attraction in his lab.
You're accusing Microsoft of being clueful about things like that. They may be very good at sharking out a market, but they're also so arrogant that they actually believe the world at large wants a completely wired house, a cell phone that they can drive their car from, whatever.
They sure as hell weren't expecting the US Court of Appeals to give them the stay of execution and then say "Hold on, boys, we haven't disconnected the switch just yet..."
What they do understand is intimidation. If they lose that they lose the battle.
You wouldn't want anything to happen to your nice shiny new company, would you? My associates Doug and Dinsdale Piranha don't generally *like* the idea of nailing your head to the floor for using software that isn't legally licensed to you. It's just not fun for us (and when I say not fun, I mean a whole hell of a bloody lot of fun). So give us money.
"Excuse me? You're here to investigate? And who the fsck are you?"
Somehow I'm not shocked at the idea that this whole thing is little more than a shakedown. And I rather hope those who are dumping MSware number more than a few...
I look at it this way: some users need GUI, some need CLI. I, personally, am most comfortable having both (which is why it irks me that I can't run OS X).
The fact is that as much as people complain about learning curves, Linux is what it is. It's Unix (if dmr says so, it's Unix; certifications be damned), and that means it takes time to learn. It's not for everyone, though it can be made so with a little tweaking.
As for controlling everything from a GUI... just doesn't happen without a lot of work. Even on the Mac you need ResEdit to change some settings, and some of those you need to hexedit. XML is helping to close the gap, and LinuxConf is an excellent program (couldn't live without it myself). But sometimes, there's no choice but to geek out.
It depends on how your system is set up. RH6 (at least as I had it installed; my system was a bit, er, restricted so don't read into that) didn't seem to like dealing with FAT32 very much and I had to use mtools. RH7 (at least on my system) is better set up and doesn't have to worry about that at all.
(OT: What I would like, though, is CD mounting routines that recognize Mac HFS -- it works just fine manually, but it's a pain...)
mtools is a no-brainer, though. It could be a *little* smoother (I'd rather type mcp and mls than mcopy and mdir) but it works just fine.
Rambus won't take over the marketplace; that should be self-evident by now. If this is their motive, than they're in even bigger trouble than it looks from the outside.
Imagine that: forced to market the overrated technology of a disgraced company...
I don't know about Gateway -- their hardware can get very weird sometimes. A lot of their systems ship without reset buttons and have what seem to be soft power switches. I've had to unplug Gateways to get them to reboot.
Yeah... as a general rule that does seem to be the case. Those who know about computers build, and usually build AMD. Those who don't buy and tend to wind up with Intel.
But Intel is shooting themselves in the foot with this. They're holding off on DDR support for reasons that nobody claims to even try to understand and handing the high midrange over to AMD in giftwrap. Truthfully, in that kind of performance territory there's very few people this kind of performance should even remotely matter to (the usual high-demand games and scientific computing crowd being the usual exceptions). The fact is that even with this development there's no compelling reason to buy a P4.
Slashdot Mirror
"can't be everything to everyone and remain completely Free"...
:-)
I don't know that I agree with that, since the nature of Open Source is such that it can become whatever it needs to without having to fight over the issue. But...
Rendering on Linux seems just to be common sense from a cost standpoint. How much does an SGI cluster cost these days? I don't know. But I do know that a 128-node render farm made of second-hand Pentium II systems will probably run about
128 P2s at $200 each...
$25600
Sufficient network switches for the job, maybe 6 24-port units, call it...
$2000 or so
9 Shelving units, at $40/shelf to hold, say, fifteen CPUs each...
$360
free copy of Red Hat 7.1 copied off a junior techie's home system...
Priceless (er, free)
The numbers work out much better that way, even if you're using current equipment instead of the cheezy second-hand P2s I figured on above.
/Brian
You have an interesting point, but you know, I think Theo De Raadt said it best regarding the licensing of OpenBSD: if you want to use it in a baby mulcher, we can't stop you anyway. Linux is not an organization; it's an operating system. The organizations involved with it are entitled to make money (if they can; they shouldn't be running to the government for help), and they're as free to do with it as they please as we are.
The fact is that you can't say, "No, you can't use it for that" when you're dealing with a GPL product. Moreover, Linux is being used in the industry by techies, many of whom probably roughly the same attitude we do towards industry lawyers. We (who is this we, kemo sabe?) can object all we want, but the truth is that there isn't a damn thing anyone can do about it, and, like it or not, that's probably the way it should be.
And all the handwringing in the world won't change that.
/Brian
NuSphere is playing dirty. MySQL went GPL as a gesture of good faith, and NuSphere trampled all over it.
It's a question of respect more than anything else. NuSphere is playing the fork game in as nasty a manner as possible.
/Brian
I don't think you're likely to find that happening on the commercial level. It was so long ago I don't even remember where I read it (though it's the sort of thing that a /. poster might say), but I once heard it said that acknowledging bugs is probably a great way to tick off your investors.
"What, there's a flaw in your product?"
"Yes, but we can fix it pretty easily -- have the bug fix out tomorrow..."
Whereupon the non-technically-inclined investor writes the developer's comments as a sign of weakness and sells. I think that's also why commercial bug fix releases are such a big deal -- probably Microsoft's other reason for cramming all kinds of new features into their service packs.
/Brian
Er, could be the poster's first language isn't English?
/.) come up with "squanderer" for "heat sink" -- a wonderfully evocative term for it that was translated from "disipador" in Spanish.
Actually, alimentation sounds about right for (probably) French or Spanish -- I once saw a poster somewhere (don't remember if it was
/Brian
Crapflooded and apparently astroturfed on top of it...
/Brian
The Mac uses the progress bar thing too, has since 7.5...
It's a moderately accurate way of describing how far along the boot process is, but it seems to be pretty easily fragged by a badly written system extension.
/Brian
I haven't read Cuckoo's Egg (Cliff Stoll's late reputation as a minor nutjob tends to sour me on the idea), but you're right especially about Knuth -- it was sort of silly of me to ignore that. (I'd throw in MMIXware as well; if we want to build a chip in the future it'd be nice to see a cool RISC design with no holy war baggage.)
/Brian
You're being a bit too domain-specific.
Goedel, Escher, Bach -- Hofstadter
For the theory.
Code -- Charles Petzold
Yes, I know he's the Programming Windows guy, but this is one of the best explanations of how a computer works that I've ever seen.
The Lions Book
This is how to write an OS. Similarly, Coriolis' Linux and Apache source commentaries.
Win32 API Reference
4.4BSD manual set
Macintosh Human Interface Guidelines
Kernighan and Pike
Some of the basics of what a working system looks like. There might be a couple of others I'd throw in.
Include a bound copy of the most important RFCs.
Language references
K&R C
Stroustrup (3d edition)
Common Lisp: The Language
Programming Perl
Python references
Visual Basic Language Definition
The Dragon Book (for compiler writers)
Essentially this collection is the basics of how to build a computer system after the apocalypse.
/Brian
Naw, not shotguns. Black ice (viruses, worms, etc.).
/Brian
Announcing the Intel Feltrain...
/Brian
That's irony for you...
What piles the irony on even thicker is that Tom's Hardware got their hands on a prerelease version a month or so back and found out that it overclocked to be even faster than a P4 at the same speed. At the time the author of the article had a hunch that Intel might not even bother releasing it because of the marketing snafu it would cause.
/Brian
Actually, a Palm has about as much computational punch as a 386/25 or maybe a bit more. The chip is a derivative of the 68020 and I think it runs around 30mHz (or at least the first DragonBalls did).
/Brian
Yeah... and given the way he had it set up, it wasn't that different from what we'd understand as an arcade game today. It was apparently quite the tourist attraction in his lab.
/Brian
I always wanted to create my own open source license manager. I'm not quite sure why; I think it was just flat-out perversity...
(It might actually be useful for a Linux distro company to make sure their support costs are getting covered, though...)
/Brian
You're accusing Microsoft of being clueful about things like that. They may be very good at sharking out a market, but they're also so arrogant that they actually believe the world at large wants a completely wired house, a cell phone that they can drive their car from, whatever.
They sure as hell weren't expecting the US Court of Appeals to give them the stay of execution and then say "Hold on, boys, we haven't disconnected the switch just yet..."
What they do understand is intimidation. If they lose that they lose the battle.
/Brian
You wouldn't want anything to happen to your nice shiny new company, would you? My associates Doug and Dinsdale Piranha don't generally *like* the idea of nailing your head to the floor for using software that isn't legally licensed to you. It's just not fun for us (and when I say not fun, I mean a whole hell of a bloody lot of fun). So give us money.
Signed, Spiny Norman the Hedgehog
"Excuse me? You're here to investigate? And who the fsck are you?"
Somehow I'm not shocked at the idea that this whole thing is little more than a shakedown. And I rather hope those who are dumping MSware number more than a few...
/Brian
I look at it this way: some users need GUI, some need CLI. I, personally, am most comfortable having both (which is why it irks me that I can't run OS X).
The fact is that as much as people complain about learning curves, Linux is what it is. It's Unix (if dmr says so, it's Unix; certifications be damned), and that means it takes time to learn. It's not for everyone, though it can be made so with a little tweaking.
As for controlling everything from a GUI... just doesn't happen without a lot of work. Even on the Mac you need ResEdit to change some settings, and some of those you need to hexedit. XML is helping to close the gap, and LinuxConf is an excellent program (couldn't live without it myself). But sometimes, there's no choice but to geek out.
/brian
It depends on how your system is set up. RH6 (at least as I had it installed; my system was a bit, er, restricted so don't read into that) didn't seem to like dealing with FAT32 very much and I had to use mtools. RH7 (at least on my system) is better set up and doesn't have to worry about that at all.
(OT: What I would like, though, is CD mounting routines that recognize Mac HFS -- it works just fine manually, but it's a pain...)
mtools is a no-brainer, though. It could be a *little* smoother (I'd rather type mcp and mls than mcopy and mdir) but it works just fine.
/Brian
My resume has never seen a word processor; I've told people this, and usually send either plain text or HTML.
BrassRing.com seems to require MSWord format... why does that betray to me a fundamental failure to get geeks?
/Brian
In other words, it's completely nonsensical.
Rambus won't take over the marketplace; that should be self-evident by now. If this is their motive, than they're in even bigger trouble than it looks from the outside.
Imagine that: forced to market the overrated technology of a disgraced company...
/Brian
I don't know about Gateway -- their hardware can get very weird sometimes. A lot of their systems ship without reset buttons and have what seem to be soft power switches. I've had to unplug Gateways to get them to reboot.
/Brian
Yeah... as a general rule that does seem to be the case. Those who know about computers build, and usually build AMD. Those who don't buy and tend to wind up with Intel.
/Brian
This is a couple of weeks old...
But Intel is shooting themselves in the foot with this. They're holding off on DDR support for reasons that nobody claims to even try to understand and handing the high midrange over to AMD in giftwrap. Truthfully, in that kind of performance territory there's very few people this kind of performance should even remotely matter to (the usual high-demand games and scientific computing crowd being the usual exceptions). The fact is that even with this development there's no compelling reason to buy a P4.
/Brian