What makes M$SQLServer and Oracle more "suitable" for enterprises is...[snip]... the fact they maintain service centers for when the DBA throws up his hands and gives up.
Redhat will quite happily sell you a version of Postgres that they then support. For a price, of course, but a shitload cheaper than either Oracle or DB2.
The answer to all the above is: You are going to have to put in some effort, sorry. The Microsoft curve always runs easier at the start and harder as time goes on. The Unix curve generally loses some wizards and other gumpf in exchange for a need to get a bit low down and grunty. It'll take you longer to get going, but when it's up you'll understand *why* things are they way they are and how to maintain it in the long term. Harder at the start, easier as time goes on.
Oh, puhleeeze, can we please be done with that one now? Do you think if nVidia or ATI were forced to open source their chip designs we'd get anything like the rate of progress we've seen over the last three years?
C'mon. The drivers have a lot of intellectual property in them, nVidia ones in particular (ironically, considering how much better they run under Linux).
If these seem like the actions of a desperate fc, that's because they are. Shall we all look for our favourite quote? I like "Revenues for the third quarter of 2002 were $179,000 versus $10,831,000 in the comparable 2001 period.", although it does struggle for attention when compared to "The third quarter 2002 net loss from operations was $20,622,000 or $1.05 per share". I note as well that their licence fee income is a glorious $43k for the last quarter. Shit, I know contractors who have made that much.Their assets minus liabilities is somewhere in the region of $56M, although we can safely assume a lot of those assets aren't going to be cash in the bank.
Anyway, so it's not me getting the legal hassles, but I say stall the bastards. If you can stall for six months or so they'll just disappear off the radar. Either that or Apple, Real or Microsoft will walk round with the big stick and knock them off the radar.
The Intel compiler is a fscking great piece of code. My video compression stuff drops out 20% faster than it does under GCC 3.1. On an AMD chip, and it has specific flags to compile for P4 so god alone knows how fast that would be. All this is before we start to take advantage of the built in vectorisation (that actually sucks a fair bit), or change my source in any way.
Something that's fun, for the geeks out there (what am I doing, this is slashdot) is to turn the optimisation up to full whack but leave the debug symbols in.... Jeez, it does some clever shit.
Going back to the bad old days while the Geforce FX was a bunch of unsubtantiated rumours, I remember the furore around the theory that the FX would only have a 128 bit memory interface.
Theory goes that by having a 128 bit interface the cards themselves are cheaper to produce. The fact that all bar one of the Radeon 9700 pro cards are using the ATI reference design is surely a testament to how much of a bitch it is to produce a 256 bit memory interface in the real world. But then they go and stick that f*cking vacuum cleaner thing on top. Are you expecting me to believe that a copper heat sink, heat pipes, and a rediculous vacuum cleaner thing is cheap to produce?
Nah, it's panic innit. NV30 is nowhere near as fast as it should have been and they're having to overclock it's tits off to get any reasonable headway over the R300.
Personally I blame specification overkill. Given that we won't be seeing DX9/GL2 based games for at least two years, what's the point of having 64k instruction long pipelines? Maybe nVidia are eyeing up the professional rendering market but... well... I dunno. It just seems a little over the top. The "ti200" version might be worth it, but then so is a Radeon 9700 (ordinary, not pro) and you can have that now.
The vast majority of people found easier ways of enjoying their computers more. Most people are a long way short of even understanding programming, let alone enjoying it. Printed program listings were tedious, cover tapes then disks, CD's and finally websites were a godsend.
I assume that most of your problems are in the GUI end of the equation - why not break the application into two bits? Put the numerical stuff on a grunty 8 way box, and cook up the UI with whatever language best suits the available (and hireable) skills and platform?
Communication between the two is probably best through SOAP, although to be honest I've not looked into this area for a long time. The GUI can still be built from Java (I believe Java has some reasonably fast OpenGL wrappers now), or look into wxWindows using the existing C++ resource.
Heh, I was working on a bit LDAP based site once. We had two LDAP servers and a load balancer to fail one out if it shit itself. Couple of months in, come in one morning to discover LDAP down and the site wiggling it's feet in the air. Why didn't the load balancer fail over onto the other LDAP?
Once we'd done the autopsy we discovered that it did.... days ago and nobody noticed. Hence when the second LDAP went as well we were left high and dry.
Nah, sounds like a hardware bork if two of the three drives went. The *real* problem is a lack of reporting tools for the state of drives in raid arrays. Let's face it, if it's anything more complex than "drive has red light lit up, must replace" then you're a bit screwed to find out what's going on.
And yes, I would like to know how it's supposed to be done.
When i can look at a variable in a strange piece of code and tell it's type and scope just from it's name, that saves a ton of time.
Yes, but it's the sort of thing that could be handled more elegantly by an editor - hover over varible, tooltip tells you the type, that sort of thing.
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Funny thing is that someone rated it informative.
Dave
Doesn't look like a very convincing case to me.
Dave
I have never heard of open source hardware.
There's several open source cores for FPGA's, and an ARM based single board computer.
Dave
I stand corrected, it's easier than I thought :)
Dave
What makes M$SQLServer and Oracle more "suitable" for enterprises is ...[snip] ... the fact they maintain service centers for when the DBA throws up his hands and gives up.
Redhat will quite happily sell you a version of Postgres that they then support. For a price, of course, but a shitload cheaper than either Oracle or DB2.
Dave
The answer to all the above is: You are going to have to put in some effort, sorry. The Microsoft curve always runs easier at the start and harder as time goes on. The Unix curve generally loses some wizards and other gumpf in exchange for a need to get a bit low down and grunty. It'll take you longer to get going, but when it's up you'll understand *why* things are they way they are and how to maintain it in the long term. Harder at the start, easier as time goes on.
I guess it depends where your head sits.
Dave
Closed source drivers inhibit innovation.
Oh, puhleeeze, can we please be done with that one now? Do you think if nVidia or ATI were forced to open source their chip designs we'd get anything like the rate of progress we've seen over the last three years?
C'mon. The drivers have a lot of intellectual property in them, nVidia ones in particular (ironically, considering how much better they run under Linux).
Dave
No, that's trade marks.
Dave
If these seem like the actions of a desperate fc, that's because they are. Shall we all look for our favourite quote? I like "Revenues for the third quarter of 2002 were $179,000 versus $10,831,000 in the comparable 2001 period.", although it does struggle for attention when compared to "The third quarter 2002 net loss from operations was $20,622,000 or $1.05 per share". I note as well that their licence fee income is a glorious $43k for the last quarter. Shit, I know contractors who have made that much.Their assets minus liabilities is somewhere in the region of $56M, although we can safely assume a lot of those assets aren't going to be cash in the bank.
Anyway, so it's not me getting the legal hassles, but I say stall the bastards. If you can stall for six months or so they'll just disappear off the radar. Either that or Apple, Real or Microsoft will walk round with the big stick and knock them off the radar.
Best of luck,
Dave
BTW, how much are they looking for?
+1 Funny.
-1 Unemployable.
Dave
It's apparently been done within Intel, but they had to do some wacky patches to make it a goer.
Dave
The Intel compiler is a fscking great piece of code. My video compression stuff drops out 20% faster than it does under GCC 3.1. On an AMD chip, and it has specific flags to compile for P4 so god alone knows how fast that would be. All this is before we start to take advantage of the built in vectorisation (that actually sucks a fair bit), or change my source in any way.
.... Jeez, it does some clever shit.
Something that's fun, for the geeks out there (what am I doing, this is slashdot) is to turn the optimisation up to full whack but leave the debug symbols in
Dave
Ten thousand dollars sounds like about a months' worth of hiring someone who knows what they're doing plus computer, desk, coffee etc.
Fscking bargain, if you want the source to an editor, and it effectively kills selling into OSS as an industry.
Dave
Going back to the bad old days while the Geforce FX was a bunch of unsubtantiated rumours, I remember the furore around the theory that the FX would only have a 128 bit memory interface.
Theory goes that by having a 128 bit interface the cards themselves are cheaper to produce. The fact that all bar one of the Radeon 9700 pro cards are using the ATI reference design is surely a testament to how much of a bitch it is to produce a 256 bit memory interface in the real world. But then they go and stick that f*cking vacuum cleaner thing on top. Are you expecting me to believe that a copper heat sink, heat pipes, and a rediculous vacuum cleaner thing is cheap to produce?
Nah, it's panic innit. NV30 is nowhere near as fast as it should have been and they're having to overclock it's tits off to get any reasonable headway over the R300.
Personally I blame specification overkill. Given that we won't be seeing DX9/GL2 based games for at least two years, what's the point of having 64k instruction long pipelines? Maybe nVidia are eyeing up the professional rendering market but... well... I dunno. It just seems a little over the top. The "ti200" version might be worth it, but then so is a Radeon 9700 (ordinary, not pro) and you can have that now.
Dave
I hate DRM, and all but ... fuck me, a DRM system designed by someone who knew what they were doing? No wonder it cost the wrong end of half a billion.
Dave
What the Fu*k happened?
The vast majority of people found easier ways of enjoying their computers more. Most people are a long way short of even understanding programming, let alone enjoying it. Printed program listings were tedious, cover tapes then disks, CD's and finally websites were a godsend.
Dave
Use one. Perhaps get lessons.
Dave
I assume that most of your problems are in the GUI end of the equation - why not break the application into two bits? Put the numerical stuff on a grunty 8 way box, and cook up the UI with whatever language best suits the available (and hireable) skills and platform?
Communication between the two is probably best through SOAP, although to be honest I've not looked into this area for a long time. The GUI can still be built from Java (I believe Java has some reasonably fast OpenGL wrappers now), or look into wxWindows using the existing C++ resource.
Dave
If you're hating apt-get, then don't use Debian.
Dave
Since my X-box can play PS and PS2 games (thanks to hacking) better then my PS2 can
The X box can emulate all four processors in a PS2. Yeah, right, no GT3 for you - lamer.
Dave
Heh, I was working on a bit LDAP based site once. We had two LDAP servers and a load balancer to fail one out if it shit itself. Couple of months in, come in one morning to discover LDAP down and the site wiggling it's feet in the air. Why didn't the load balancer fail over onto the other LDAP?
Once we'd done the autopsy we discovered that it did.... days ago and nobody noticed. Hence when the second LDAP went as well we were left high and dry.
Dave
Nah, sounds like a hardware bork if two of the three drives went. The *real* problem is a lack of reporting tools for the state of drives in raid arrays. Let's face it, if it's anything more complex than "drive has red light lit up, must replace" then you're a bit screwed to find out what's going on.
And yes, I would like to know how it's supposed to be done.
Dave
Could they have recovered from ext3?
Dave
OMFG, someone who knows about software design posting to slashdot. Where are my mod points when I need them?
Dave
When i can look at a variable in a strange piece of code and tell it's type and scope just from it's name, that saves a ton of time.
Yes, but it's the sort of thing that could be handled more elegantly by an editor - hover over varible, tooltip tells you the type, that sort of thing.
Dave