Just the fact that you are posting on slashdot shows that you are not the target audiance for this advertisement. You are aware of linux, you know its ins and outs, you know how to work around conflicts and driver problems. When an advertisement goes out to the general public, you have to assume that they don't and will never know as much as you do about linux.
The OS is great. Most distributions are really good as well. I have been using Redhat for years and recently switched to Ubuntu at home. I still use Redhat primarily at work. Linux is great on qualified hardware. The problem is, a lot of manufacturers charge extra for hardware that works with linux. The laptop I have is the best buy special. Linux works on it, wireless, not so much. So I have to go through online pages trying to find a card that is currently being sold that has the same level of support that my onboard card has under windows.
You mention that your kids use linux, which is great. But you had to be the one that set it up for them to use. It works, once all the hard up front decisions have been made. Its a lot easier than it used to be, and hardware support is amazing, for devices that are supported.
I still think that money would be better spent on drivers and wine. For linux to take off on the average persons desktop, you have to get them off of the windows dependency. I am currently dependent on windows for gaming, wireless and some websites. If I didn't have my OSX box, I would also be dependent on windows for Photoshop. I know my uses are the same as the average user, but I work with technical people all day long and all I ever hear is: "I wouldn't mind using linux at home, if only they had an application that did Y that didn't suck." Most of these people are buying Macs to fill that need. No amount of advertising on the back of a race car will solve that problem.
I love linux, using it daily. But why are we advertising a product that won't work for a lot of people who are watching the race. Most people advertise things people can go out, buy and use right now.
I have been using linux since slack on floppies and it has come a long way. But for the average consumer, it still needs work. Instead of 12k going to a bumper sticker on a car moving way too fast to read, why not put that money in projects that helps mature parts of linux. Lets get some working wifi broadcom drivers, being able to only connect at 11 mbs to an unencrypted network, its not fully finished. The people on those projects need funding. If you want people to switch, how about throwing that 12k towards the wine project? People won't give up old applications just like that. When ever you have to say "It's just like X, but..." then the project still needs work to replace the alternative.
That 12k could have gone a long way to several projects. The proposed 250k could have gone even further. When I can install linux on any of my laptops or desktops and be able to work and play like I do under Windows and Mac OSX, then it is time to advertise to the masses.
Maybe they are just waiting for some poll that isn't flooded by people who really love linux but have no plans on buying a Dell.
Yes, its good they are considering Linux on their machines. But how many people will actually buy it? How big is the market for Dell to bother with selling it? Most people using Linux in the workplace already have their preferred Linux hardware vendor. Most people that are Dell shops are MS exclusively. That leaves the companies that have mixed vendors and home and personal use.
Verifying hardware and drivers and support staff will take time and money. They can't switch overnight, not Dell. They are too big to do it quickly. If they don't do it right the first time, they will alienate everybody that may have been interested in the past as well as losing the money they spent on failing. If they take their time and do it right, they can start eating in to HP and other hardware vendors that ship with Linux certified.
That service has data locality to their farm. Rendering over generic nodes on the internet won't give you that locality of data. Or you will have hundreds of clients streaming 20 GB of data to their machine to do 4 hours worth of work. It just isn't worth it.
How many of these 30 minute jobs do you have? Do you have 10 or do you have 10,000. How long are people willing to wait on the 30 minute jobs?
A lot of tasks like this tend to batch easy, and if you can batch it, then you can throw it on a batch queueing system (like LSF, the one I have my experience with).
At the end of the day, its a lot easier to run multiple jobs on multiple machines than it is to optimize a single job. It all depends on where you want to spend your time and what return you want and expect.
Having 2 machines and an even load could cut the turn around time in half, writing cleaner, threaded code may not give you that. How much communication do the threads need? If the threads are just there to take advantage of multiple cores, then you probably should just batch up a bunch of serial jobs and run N jobs per host, where N is the number of cores. Only when the labor becomes undivisible on a current job, like 1 trade, will you really see the benifit of parallelizing the actual job.
Lots of people use batch processing via LSF or some other mechanism in financials.
I am saying the hardware is getting ahead of where the developers are.
Thinking of ways of better writing code to thread nicely is a difficult task. Very few things are embarassingly parallel.
I think its great we are adding more cores to a system, it will be a benifit overall. I just think too many people expect to get the ability of 8 single systems or the speed of a system 8x faster. The jump from 1 processor to 2 processors was a great one, it started making people think of how to divide labor, and it allowed for multi-tasking without as much of a hit to the cpu. Doubling the cores helped somewhat as well, but I have yet to see a killer app for a 2x2 system, let alone a 4x2.
Just a guess, they don't teach English there, do they? And, I want to guess you skipped typing when you left highschool early and went straight on to "college".
I think what they meant in the article is that they have no applications that thread to 8 threads nicely. Its easy to max out 8 CPU's/cores with 8 different tasks (or 9-10 tasks if you want to take advantage of context switches and iowait). Its harder to find something that scales past 4 threads because most programmers just don't program for it. Also, and probably more importantly, when we start hitting 8+ cores, we start to lose the near linear acceleration of multiple cores/threads for one application. Interprocess communication can start getting heavy, and after a certain point, it can get in the way of the process actually processing.
But I am sure they covered that in Web Design and Parallel Application Theory 101, or maybe it was Operating Syatems, Programming Complexity and Photoshop 210.
And its not that I am knocking DeVry (I am sure they do a great job teaching what they teach) I am just dissapointed with your attitude. Friendly advice, when you do go looking for a job, drop the attitude, the interviewers pick up on it. I know I have passed on people before purely on how they presented themselves. I would rather hire somebody on the "Chicken Lips" theory than a prima donna (don't get the reference, get Peopleware from DeMarco and Lister).
I figured there were others as well.:) The main reason I posted was I remembered there was an Amiga with CD in its name.
My first and last amiga was the 1000. We had the 2 MB memory expansion, the 5.25 drive/IBM emulator and the 3.5 external drive. I don't remember much else about it other than freddy fish disks and shadow of the beast.
I am interested in the cards that tmobile has to offer for laptops. I want an expresscard for my macbook pro. I have the sidekick and love it and would hate to have a mobile phone provider and a mobile data provider. They currently have an older pcmcia style card, but I have seen nothing about the next generation of cards. I would have thought enough vendors have the newer, faster standard on their laptops (mostly more professional level laptops) that the datacom people would follow suit.
The solution is more local storage caches like Network Appliance and others provide. The latency between you and a local server is pretty small. Then all you have to worry about is your cache being up to date with the real data, which is where probably most of the storage providers R&D time is being spent now.
You might have to go to an audio store to find them, but they are classic industry standards for musicians and other people that have to work with audio.
At this point Apple would be silly to not start threading their apps. Since even the base models of their systems will have 2 cpus, all of their applications should support it.
Who knows how long this will take, sometimes its easier to re-write whole sections of the app to parallelize it than it is to take a non-threaded application and make it thread.
So what will the new towers be? 4 dual core chips? 2 dual core 2+ghz chips? As many say (including yourself) if the applications aren't taking advantage of the extra cpus, then there is almost no noticeable gain, unless of course you run multiple applications at a time.
How is this misleading when the purpose is to compare the single proc g4 powerbook or the single proc g5 imac to the new intel counterparts with the 2 cores?
He is comparing the spec power of the system he is selling to the user, or, even looking at just the chip level, he is comparing the two chips they have, one just happens to have 2 cores.
He wants to re-asure the Apple community that the switch to the new processor makes sense.
Now what I want to see is how he justifies people switching from the dual core dual proc g5 towers.
I would say that rendering software is using very specific techniques to achieve what they are getting at. The differene between real time game rendering and what is done on a render farm is complexity.
It may look really good in a game, but if you compared similar scenes between the two you would notice a world of difference. Just the number of surfaces and size of texture maps (or procedural textures) is stagering in comparison.
If making movies could be done at console level quality, it would be.
If a system is set up correctly, developers should not need root privs. If there are sitiuations to the contrary, then they show a bigger problem with how things are structured or problems with the IT group.
Only IT should be able to modify the base install of a system. This includes common libraries, binaries, directories and other things that are on the system when it is rolled out.
Need to install new commands in a common tree? Have some other directory that is added to a common path that privelaged developers are able to install in.
Need to change file permissions? The only time I have seen this needed was log files that got owned by root after rotation. A better thing would be to make the rotation script give files correct permissions to begin with. A user should not need to change permissions on local files.
Need to install new software? If this is a real server and there is no tracked, established procedure for software being upgraded/installed/removed or altered in some way without IT involvement, there are more serious problems with the structure than the software change. There should always be a procedure that is followed with software changes, that should either be done by or with an IT person.
Servers should rarely be touched. Even desktops should rarely change if you expect some level of support from IT. If the IT group is not giving you the level of support for you to easily do what you need to do, the problem is not the lack of sudo, the problem is the lack of procedures and tracking and all the messy parts of IT that go beyond the root priveledges.
I have had to work on both sides of the sudo/root issue before, and I have seen places where giving root to the wrong person has caused more problems than it has solved. In jobs where I haven't had root, but needed it, there were bigger problems about how software was rolled out and administered. My need for root was a band-aid, quick solution to work around the bigger problem.
I am a firm believer that NFS filesystems should not be mountable without root squash except on a trusted server. If security in your company is important enough to have multiple users and user groups, it is important enough to limit root to those that have to deal with that type of work on a day to day basis.
I can see possibly allowing for one developer in a department to have some level of sudo but only if that person in an IT type support role for the department. (This does not mean somebody who also does IT work because dealing with the IT department is slow and cumbersome.)
buy an external 300 GB firewire drive every couple months, label the drive by the time period. If you are really worried, have 2 every couple of months, they are pretty cheap. Drives don't fail sitting on a shelf, at least not like dvds do. The last thing you wan't is a raid system thats active every day, it only increases the likelyhood of failure. raid is great for data you must access now, but a waste if you are just using it to back up data you only need once every so often.
If it is really important, use tape backup, make redundant copies, and send one off to a data storage place. As others noted, a backup solution should be part of the cost of the job, and is not really that expensive when divided over the different projects.
I am surprised that the women haven't formed their own internet by now. Guys get stupid around girls enough as it is. Adding in the fact that many of the guys escape to games because they have problems relating with people, let alone females, it only gets worse.
I, thankfully, haven't freaked out too much when the person on the other side revealed themselves to be female. On the other hand, there have been a few times where people were roll playing as a female and later revealed themselves to be a guy. It wasn't quite a crying game type of situation, but it was enough of a shock for me to still remember...
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Thank you to you and all the other developers. Your work has made my life so much easier.
You are right, we should give him the same credence as we do one with a mid ranged 6 figure one ;)
Just the fact that you are posting on slashdot shows that you are not the target audiance for this advertisement. You are aware of linux, you know its ins and outs, you know how to work around conflicts and driver problems. When an advertisement goes out to the general public, you have to assume that they don't and will never know as much as you do about linux.
The OS is great. Most distributions are really good as well. I have been using Redhat for years and recently switched to Ubuntu at home. I still use Redhat primarily at work. Linux is great on qualified hardware. The problem is, a lot of manufacturers charge extra for hardware that works with linux. The laptop I have is the best buy special. Linux works on it, wireless, not so much. So I have to go through online pages trying to find a card that is currently being sold that has the same level of support that my onboard card has under windows.
You mention that your kids use linux, which is great. But you had to be the one that set it up for them to use. It works, once all the hard up front decisions have been made. Its a lot easier than it used to be, and hardware support is amazing, for devices that are supported.
I still think that money would be better spent on drivers and wine. For linux to take off on the average persons desktop, you have to get them off of the windows dependency. I am currently dependent on windows for gaming, wireless and some websites. If I didn't have my OSX box, I would also be dependent on windows for Photoshop. I know my uses are the same as the average user, but I work with technical people all day long and all I ever hear is: "I wouldn't mind using linux at home, if only they had an application that did Y that didn't suck." Most of these people are buying Macs to fill that need. No amount of advertising on the back of a race car will solve that problem.
I love linux, using it daily. But why are we advertising a product that won't work for a lot of people who are watching the race. Most people advertise things people can go out, buy and use right now.
I have been using linux since slack on floppies and it has come a long way. But for the average consumer, it still needs work. Instead of 12k going to a bumper sticker on a car moving way too fast to read, why not put that money in projects that helps mature parts of linux. Lets get some working wifi broadcom drivers, being able to only connect at 11 mbs to an unencrypted network, its not fully finished. The people on those projects need funding. If you want people to switch, how about throwing that 12k towards the wine project? People won't give up old applications just like that. When ever you have to say "It's just like X, but..." then the project still needs work to replace the alternative.
That 12k could have gone a long way to several projects. The proposed 250k could have gone even further. When I can install linux on any of my laptops or desktops and be able to work and play like I do under Windows and Mac OSX, then it is time to advertise to the masses.
Maybe they are just waiting for some poll that isn't flooded by people who really love linux but have no plans on buying a Dell.
Yes, its good they are considering Linux on their machines. But how many people will actually buy it? How big is the market for Dell to bother with selling it? Most people using Linux in the workplace already have their preferred Linux hardware vendor. Most people that are Dell shops are MS exclusively. That leaves the companies that have mixed vendors and home and personal use.
Verifying hardware and drivers and support staff will take time and money. They can't switch overnight, not Dell. They are too big to do it quickly. If they don't do it right the first time, they will alienate everybody that may have been interested in the past as well as losing the money they spent on failing. If they take their time and do it right, they can start eating in to HP and other hardware vendors that ship with Linux certified.
Not the same.
That service has data locality to their farm. Rendering over generic nodes on the internet won't give you that locality of data. Or you will have hundreds of clients streaming 20 GB of data to their machine to do 4 hours worth of work. It just isn't worth it.
Sounds like you need Platform's LSF.
It would handle all of that for you.
How many of these 30 minute jobs do you have? Do you have 10 or do you have 10,000.
How long are people willing to wait on the 30 minute jobs?
A lot of tasks like this tend to batch easy, and if you can batch it, then you can throw it on a batch queueing system (like LSF, the one I have my experience with).
At the end of the day, its a lot easier to run multiple jobs on multiple machines than it is to optimize a single job. It all depends on where you want to spend your time and what return you want and expect.
Having 2 machines and an even load could cut the turn around time in half, writing cleaner, threaded code may not give you that. How much communication do the threads need? If the threads are just there to take advantage of multiple cores, then you probably should just batch up a bunch of serial jobs and run N jobs per host, where N is the number of cores.
Only when the labor becomes undivisible on a current job, like 1 trade, will you really see the benifit of parallelizing the actual job.
Lots of people use batch processing via LSF or some other mechanism in financials.
I call those tasks "embarassingly parallel".
Thats not what I am saying at all.
I am saying the hardware is getting ahead of where the developers are.
Thinking of ways of better writing code to thread nicely is a difficult task.
Very few things are embarassingly parallel.
I think its great we are adding more cores to a system, it will be a benifit overall.
I just think too many people expect to get the ability of 8 single systems or the speed of a system 8x faster.
The jump from 1 processor to 2 processors was a great one, it started making people think of how to divide labor, and it allowed for multi-tasking without as much of a hit to the cpu. Doubling the cores helped somewhat as well, but I have yet to see a killer app for a 2x2 system, let alone a 4x2.
Just a guess, they don't teach English there, do they? And, I want to guess you skipped typing when you left highschool early and went straight on to "college".
I think what they meant in the article is that they have no applications that thread to 8 threads nicely.
Its easy to max out 8 CPU's/cores with 8 different tasks (or 9-10 tasks if you want to take advantage of context switches and iowait). Its harder to find something that scales past 4 threads because most programmers just don't program for it. Also, and probably more importantly, when we start hitting 8+ cores, we start to lose the near linear acceleration of multiple cores/threads for one application. Interprocess communication can start getting heavy, and after a certain point, it can get in the way of the process actually processing.
But I am sure they covered that in Web Design and Parallel Application Theory 101, or maybe it was Operating Syatems, Programming Complexity and Photoshop 210.
And its not that I am knocking DeVry (I am sure they do a great job teaching what they teach) I am just dissapointed with your attitude. Friendly advice, when you do go looking for a job, drop the attitude, the interviewers pick up on it. I know I have passed on people before purely on how they presented themselves. I would rather hire somebody on the "Chicken Lips" theory than a prima donna (don't get the reference, get Peopleware from DeMarco and Lister).
I figured there were others as well. :) The main reason I posted was I remembered there was an Amiga with CD in its name.
My first and last amiga was the 1000. We had the 2 MB memory expansion, the 5.25 drive/IBM emulator and the 3.5 external drive. I don't remember much else about it other than freddy fish disks and shadow of the beast.
Other than the Amiga CD-32, you would almost be right.
I am interested in the cards that tmobile has to offer for laptops. I want an expresscard for my macbook pro. I have the sidekick and love it and would hate to have a mobile phone provider and a mobile data provider.
They currently have an older pcmcia style card, but I have seen nothing about the next generation of cards. I would have thought enough vendors have the newer, faster standard on their laptops (mostly more professional level laptops) that the datacom people would follow suit.
The solution is more local storage caches like Network Appliance and others provide. The latency between you and a local server is pretty small. Then all you have to worry about is your cache being up to date with the real data, which is where probably most of the storage providers R&D time is being spent now.
Buy the Sony 7506's if you want good headphones.
d io/headphones/sony/PRD_118049_2750crx.aspx
You might have to go to an audio store to find them, but they are classic industry standards for musicians and other people that have to work with audio.
http://www.audioreview.com/cat/headphones-home-au
At this point Apple would be silly to not start threading their apps.
Since even the base models of their systems will have 2 cpus, all of their applications should support it.
Who knows how long this will take, sometimes its easier to re-write whole sections of the app to parallelize it than it is to take a non-threaded application and make it thread.
So what will the new towers be? 4 dual core chips? 2 dual core 2+ghz chips?
As many say (including yourself) if the applications aren't taking advantage of the extra cpus, then there is almost no noticeable gain, unless of course you run multiple applications at a time.
How is this misleading when the purpose is to compare the single proc g4 powerbook or the single proc g5 imac to the new intel counterparts with the 2 cores?
He is comparing the spec power of the system he is selling to the user, or, even looking at just the chip level, he is comparing the two chips they have, one just happens to have 2 cores.
He wants to re-asure the Apple community that the switch to the new processor makes sense.
Now what I want to see is how he justifies people switching from the dual core dual proc g5 towers.
I would say that rendering software is using very specific techniques to achieve what they are getting at. The differene between real time game rendering and what is done on a render farm is complexity.
It may look really good in a game, but if you compared similar scenes between the two you would notice a world of difference. Just the number of surfaces and size of texture maps (or procedural textures) is stagering in comparison.
If making movies could be done at console level quality, it would be.
I thought it was the venues responsibility to pay the performance fee to the parties that care.
If a system is set up correctly, developers should not need root privs. If there are sitiuations to the contrary, then they show a bigger problem with how things are structured or problems with the IT group.
Only IT should be able to modify the base install of a system. This includes common libraries, binaries, directories and other things that are on the system when it is rolled out.
Need to install new commands in a common tree? Have some other directory that is added to a common path that privelaged developers are able to install in.
Need to change file permissions? The only time I have seen this needed was log files that got owned by root after rotation. A better thing would be to make the rotation script give files correct permissions to begin with. A user should not need to change permissions on local files.
Need to install new software? If this is a real server and there is no tracked, established procedure for software being upgraded/installed/removed or altered in some way without IT involvement, there are more serious problems with the structure than the software change. There should always be a procedure that is followed with software changes, that should either be done by or with an IT person.
Servers should rarely be touched. Even desktops should rarely change if you expect some level of support from IT. If the IT group is not giving you the level of support for you to easily do what you need to do, the problem is not the lack of sudo, the problem is the lack of procedures and tracking and all the messy parts of IT that go beyond the root priveledges.
I have had to work on both sides of the sudo/root issue before, and I have seen places where giving root to the wrong person has caused more problems than it has solved. In jobs where I haven't had root, but needed it, there were bigger problems about how software was rolled out and administered. My need for root was a band-aid, quick solution to work around the bigger problem.
I am a firm believer that NFS filesystems should not be mountable without root squash except on a trusted server. If security in your company is important enough to have multiple users and user groups, it is important enough to limit root to those that have to deal with that type of work on a day to day basis.
I can see possibly allowing for one developer in a department to have some level of sudo but only if that person in an IT type support role for the department. (This does not mean somebody who also does IT work because dealing with the IT department is slow and cumbersome.)
buy an external 300 GB firewire drive every couple months, label the drive by the time period. If you are really worried, have 2 every couple of months, they are pretty cheap. Drives don't fail sitting on a shelf, at least not like dvds do. The last thing you wan't is a raid system thats active every day, it only increases the likelyhood of failure. raid is great for data you must access now, but a waste if you are just using it to back up data you only need once every so often.
If it is really important, use tape backup, make redundant copies, and send one off to a data storage place. As others noted, a backup solution should be part of the cost of the job, and is not really that expensive when divided over the different projects.
Here is a list of shortcuts.
4 59
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=75
Also, most menus have key shortcuts listed on the Mac, and the best part is the consistancy between applications on what the shortcuts mean and do.
I actually find myself using shortcuts more in OSX than I did in Windows.
I am surprised that the women haven't formed their own internet by now. Guys get stupid around girls enough as it is. Adding in the fact that many of the guys escape to games because they have problems relating with people, let alone females, it only gets worse.
I, thankfully, haven't freaked out too much when the person on the other side revealed themselves to be female. On the other hand, there have been a few times where people were roll playing as a female and later revealed themselves to be a guy. It wasn't quite a crying game type of situation, but it was enough of a shock for me to still remember...
You mean the email posted April 1st 2005?
Who is the moron?