No, one license for all machines shown to have been used in the production of the sound files. A tiny tiny portion of the computers in their environment.
As a large company that creates the OS and management tools, I'm guessing they probably can pretty easily do an installed software inventory and send a check to SoundForge without blinking.
If they were to pay for one on every machine, then they might as well buy out SoundForge. Nothing that I've ever seen would make such a blanket licensing scheme required by law.
And SoundForge could probably refuse payment of the royalties and take them to court, but do the math and it is obvious what the smart decision would be.
You may not be new here, but you still don't get it... if people read this and find it interesting, even as a trivial bit of humor, then/. has done right to post it.
The fact that the fun is slowly draining out of/. as people come to legitimize it as a news site (instead of as an obviously biased site that often posts links to other news sites) is sad.
I'm not saying I want to see blatantly stupid accusations like "d00d, Microsloth is a bloated pig of a company because of 'X'", and I often see articles that I think are stupid. However when I do so, I have the ability to not read further.
In this case it was actually one of those slightly humorous little tidbits that I got a 1/2 second chuckle out of.
Did anything in the article say it was some vast conspiracy? No, it only pointed out that Microsoft got caught doing something naughty. I'm sure they'll be paying for licenses -quickly- but in the meantime even 1 idiot employee is still an employee and so therefore even if it was a miniscule portion of Microsoft, it was still legitimately labeled.
Besides, if you're just stopping by to see a train wreck, and you consider this evidence of a collision, why aren't you rejoicing? Or you can always just stop, I'm sure that if the server gets hit by a locomotive it will be on CNN a day or two later.
The first difference is that I strongly doubt that the MPAA has all of their content available online without some form of active protection.
However if you change the "MPAA's content" to "any site in the world that has public information no matter what it is (let us say for instance, CNN)...
Then the difference is a sad but true one... that being that while your use would be just as fair (like recording TV on a VCR or DVR), the LoC has the pockets and legislative favors to withstand any attempt to attack the process while you don't.
But let's expand it further... every site on the web that doesn't set a no-cache header (which I would stretch to say might be considered actively protected under the weak requirements of the DMCA) already let's you do EXACTLY that... because all modern browsers cache data for offline retrieval.
Also, to clarify, go back and read my post... I was not saying that the LoC (or you in this case) have the right to use the information for non-profit use for free. I was talking about keeping personal copies. In the case of the LoC remember that they won't even give you a -copy- of a copyrighted work unless you get permission from the (c) holder and then it is -still- not a license to -use- that information in anyway other than for personal fair use. A far cry from what your posit implies regarding MPAA content.
This is well established that recording/archiving of publicly available information is legal under fair use... it is how the LoC archives things like congressional proceedings, white house press releases, and ANY broadcasted event or in this case freely and publicly available online information. The words/transcripts of such items may often be in the public domain, but the actual footage is the property of whoever shot it. Legally you can not re-use the footage of the Presidential Debates if you recorded them on your DVR because the footage is (c) by whichever network you recorded. You could be there in person to record your own copy and do whatever you wanted with it.
I can simplify the difference thusly... you asked essentially why the LoC can take copyrighted material and -use- it for free non-profit use when you can't. My answer is, they can't (and neither can you), but you -can- archive it so long as you don't re-use it yourself (for instance, in creating a documentary) or give copies to others without explicit permission from the copyright holder.
And to further clarify, much my post was targetted at the idea of the LoC making copies of data on a server with a "robots.txt" rules file that supposedly disallowed it. I never said that going through a site to get protected content would be deemed legal under the DMCA, only that to violate the DMCA provisions you need active protection devices in place and "robots.txt" optional crawling rules are not active protection.
The point I was making about active versus passive protection was my language. The idea being that you can't violate protections (ie, reverse engineering, cracking encryption, scamming passwords) if those protections aren't enforced in the first place. There is no standard that says any form of HTTP client -must- use the "robots.txt" file if it exists and so just because the HTTP client is a crawler doesn't mean that it has to behave differently than any other HTTP client. If someone wants their site data to be protected under something like the DMCA, it needs to use something like passwords, encryption or both to force clients to go through the protection methods.
Obeying "robots.txt" is a courtesy. Yes, it is an -expected- courtesy like covering your mouth when you sneeze, but it is still a courtesy, not a lawful protection device.
IANAL but I would see this as falling under fair use.
1) the LoC is not profitting from your works nor is it re-using them (with the exception of providing an archive to others, see next item).
2) the LoC regularly tells people requesting copies of their information to first obtain permission from the copyright holder (in other words, as with any library, you can browse but you can't copy without permission and copy permission does not equal permission to reuse in a commercial work).
3) Copy protection schemes require active protection to fall under the DMCA, even if it is so simple that anyone can defeat it. Robots.txt is -passive- protection because you have to purposefully search for the file and then purposefully utilize it. To be active protection the document should not come up without the viewer (or blocked viewer) performing some form of action. When someone/something visits an unprotected public web page there is not a way for your web server to invoke the robots.txt file, therefore it is not an active mechanism.
We already knew that hydro-electric generators have this effect on water ecology. It only makes sense that wind would do something similar above ground.
But this being a push for the Nuclear lobby? No thanks. No, I'm not a conspiracy nut who refuses to acknowledge that a properly run fision plant built to modern specs can be run safely... but nothing stops the production of nasty spent fuel and we've proven over and over that stuff along those lines will leech into the environment at least a little no matter what we do.
Until Nuclear -fusion- is possible here on Earth, or unless someone figures out that solar panels will cool the Sun, I think I'll take my fusion energy from the sky.
Yes, Solar is more expensive... as was pointed out today on a local NPR station when talking about Colorado's new requirement that energy sellers must produce 10% from renewable sources by 2015. They pointed out that 4% of the total must come from solar and are balking because wind and hydro are so much cheaper. Yes, cheaper for -them- but still more expensive to everything in the long-run.
Of course, I will gladly watch wind and hydro generators replace "clean coal" (that damned coughing eagle!) and hold back fision lobbies, as pointed out wind is still more friendly by far than those sources. But in the end the only good solutions are going to be solar, fusion and if the Sim folks are right, Helium3.
For many of the people I know, going to college for CS is about 2 things:
1) Learning basic programmatic workflow and practices
2) Being able to show the piece of paper
Unfortunately for alot of people hiring, #2 is most important. For employers who I have -respected- #1 is the most important and they can recognize that with #1 and a creative thinking brain that any coder can quickly pick up new languages and technologies.
And people who excel at creative programmatic thinking often are the types that remember concepts, not trivia (the idea of testing intelligence and not memory). Expecting a person to remember, in a high stress situation, the terminology you learned in school tests the trivia.
Forgetting terminology (versus forgetting -theory-) doesn't mean that they cheated in school, it only means they remembered stuff differently. How many of us remember more than one or two geometry theorems even a few months after passing our last geometry test?
It is sad, but there are a number of elitists out there who use tests like the one you are so proud of. Do you give any type of explanation if the interview-ee says "what do you mean by that?" or do you assume that they have failed at that point? If you assume failure at that point you are the problem, not them.
If on the other hand you give a brief example and wait to see if they catch on, then you should be able to see who is truly good by how quickly they can code and/or how efficient that code is.
A person doesn't need to know the terminology -before- they join a group to be useful to that group. They need to be able to quickly put your group's terminology into a working context and start expanding on it. Otherwise all you are doing is a form of secret handshake.
This is one of the reasons that the original IQ tests were considered to be biased. They measured vocabulary knowledge as a prerequisite to concepts. Newer tests try to be language independent, recognizing that cognitive ability is more important.
Or in shorter terms, I agree with the grandparent of this post, you made the kind of boast that the submitter was talking about.
Show me an Open Source hardware platform that can be aquired for equal to or less than the cost of a commodity hardware platform with even 1/2 the performance.
The reason open source software succeeds so well is because of the low cost of entry as developer and the fact that the quality of open source software can match the quality of proprietary software. The case is not the same for hardware. You don't need a manufacturing facility or a the equivalent of an EE degree to get into engineering software, you only need a low cost PC or even access to a university lab.
A large part of the idea behind open source software is to commoditize the market so that everyone can afford to run high quality software. That goal has already been achieved in the hardware market (not saying that a $5,000 workstation counts there, but the fact that I can buy a -very- capable PC for $400 and the kind of performance that used to cost $50,000 maybe 5 years ago is now in the $5,000 range).
Another big factor in open source software is annoyance at companies like Microsoft and Bell that had traditionally kept people from knowing how to manipulate the proprietary software. CPU manufacturers like AMD and Intel have gone to great pains to make sure that the open source community had full access to the CPU architectures on the Opteron and the Itanium before it so that they ran Linux well.
Sure, there are things like 3D cards that are a big thorn in the side of open source coding, but you don't seem to be talking about them so much as CPU and chipset as a platform.
Apples : Oranges... the "low cost" was in the context of the article talking about Sun offering some of the most affordable Opteron workstations.
Besides... I have used USPARC-IIIi boxes and am using a w2100z right now. The Opteron platform has caught up to many of the speed advantages of the USPARC, especially when you get the peripherals up to equal specs (SCSI, memory type, etc). Hypertransport for memory shuttling and U320 for SCSI combined with running the Opteron in native 64-bits does a LOT to catch up to the USPARC boxes.
As with any comparison, there are things that one arch will do better than the other (including Xeon, which kicks Opteron on matrix functions) but overall the advantages between SPARC64 and AMD64 are alot flatter than SPARC64 to IA32.
Sun's Xeon servers (V60x and V65x) came out about 15 months ago. The LX50 (a P3 Xeon based server) came out about a year before that.
Sun's Opteron servers (V20z and V40z) started showing up about 6 months ago.
Sun doesn't have any Intel based workstations... the trade-in programs are generally to encourage people to give up their Xeons from other sources:)
Sun's Opteron workstations (w1100z and w2100z) started showing up a couple months ago.
Sun also has a low voltage Xeon Blade and an Athlon XP Blade. Based on trends I wouldn't be surprised to see an Opteron Blade if power requirements allow.
It is pretty obvious that it was so much x86 that Sun was against as it was Intel. When I was in Sun's entry-level server group the decision to use Xeon's was only grudgingly done because the Opterons kept getting pushed out. With a 64-bit CPU from an Intel competitor it looks like Sun is alot more comfortable with the relationship on the low-end. Opterons currently max out at 8 CPUs (I think) which is about the point where Sun's SPARC starts to really shine, so it has a lot of synergy.
Actually the best way to buy a w2100z, if you don't need it -today- but do want it cheap, is to buy off of Ebay. They are regularly going for about 1/2 the retail price.
And AMD isn't subsidizing this at all, at least not actively. Sun just happens to be willing to sell for much lower than their traditional margins on these products to get back some of the workstation market. They have realized that workstations were a wedge into the hearts and minds of the admins who later (sometimes years later) made decisions on servers. And Sun has some very well priced Opteron servers now, too.
The magic of Opteron is that you can be using a Sun workstation, getting low-cost high-performance Opteron CPUs and also be running Linux. I think that was the purpose of the article.
(written on a Sun w2100z dual Opteron box running Ubuntu AMD64 Linux with VMWare installed).
No it wouldn't. You'd still have to reboot to see the change... at least if you compile -before- the reboot you know that the compile worked.
Plus using this mechanism as-is without alternative boots would mean compiling your kernel every time you boot. A waste of time and resources.
Note that it didn't say it booted in 15 seconds... only that it -started- to boot in 15 seconds. Even removing all modules I find it impossible to believe that a P4 could compile the entire kernel with -any- compiler faster than it takes to load a precompiled kernel. No matter what you still have a "+ compile time" situation even if it is much faster than the stock gcc.
This has some "because you can" value, but otherwise I just don't see it as being useful to the user, or even to the vast majority of kernel developers.
Making C feel like Perl is not a good thing for me:)
And yet, it your own small way... that is exactly what has been done.
Of course there are those of us who enjoy the quirky "cuz we can" articles and get tired of people who post responses about how it is "Useless", but I don't think that should be posted on slashdot.
I wasn't just talking about high end gamers. The Quadro line is -not- meant for gamers... at least not unless you consider the Sun W1100z / W2100z to be game machines (just an example, you can also look at IBM and others).
Matrox -used- to own the high-end dual-head workstation market. Today they are being attacked hard on that front. The majority of workstations are not for video editing... and I don't believe that the original poster was talking about going for that market, they were talking about video cards pure and simple.
As for frame grabbers, cameras, etc you are right... but that is not relevant to the discussion that was at hand. I didn't say Matrox as a company was going away nor am I hoping they are. I was pointing out that the parent of my post was out of touch with the current status of things.
Oh that's just FUD. Do they have occasional bad bugs in there drivers? Sure. But they definitely have written ones that don't crash X. I've got an ATI Radeon All-in-Wonder (the first version) as well as a laptop with a Radeon M9 (Mobile 9000). I've run at least 3 different versions of SuSE on both and used Catalyst 3.7.6 and 3.9.0 on both using 3D acceleration and not had X problems. I -did- have problems with 3.12.? but I just reverted to 3.9.0 and was fine.
Are Nvidia's drivers better? Yes and I will be buying Nvidia for my next card. But that doesn't excuse over dramatizing like you did.
As for Matrox, sure, they're still in the market... but barely compared with the big 2. I don't think open sourcing their drivers caused them problems (in fact, it may have helped keep them afloat), they simply didn't innovate as well as Nvidia and ATI. Look at the graphics workstations being pumped out today and you'll find that many of them now are using Nvidia's Quadro line.
Sad as I feel saying it, if I were ATI or Nvidia I would be doing everything I could to keep the other party from knowing anymore about my board internals than they could. Will each eventually reverse engineer it all? Sure... but a delay in that is a competitive advantage.
I'm not dumping on Matrox... I still have my an older Matrox card (their first 3D one, with the uber expensive daughter card memory add-on) sitting in a box because I have this instinct to love it for what it was (I'll probably donate it on my next closet purge, but it has survived MANY of them to date).
Yeah, until they finally announce the new Mozilla TreeHugger... Not only will it support quad audio but it will have holographic ink, be delivered via transporter and the technology will be patent free so that we can all be freed from the tyranny of today's proprietary newsprint papers and inks!
But there -are- better ways to use the Electoral College. We have the technology now to transmit vote results faster than by horse, which is a large part of the idea behind sending the delegates to DC to do the true vote.
In Colorado there is an initiative to make the EC votes from the state be a proportional representation of the votes cast. That way if Bush gets 40% of the vote.
There are people who claim that this will marginalize Colorado's influence as a swing state. However it also makes it more honest. I would much rather see the Dem or Lib ticket get -some- of the votes -all- of the time than see the Reps get ALL of the votes -most- of the time. The more states that do this the more honest representation we get of the true voice of the people. Besides, seeing fewer political ads won't upset me at all:)
I think it is either Maine or Massachusetts that already gives a proportional amount of EC votes, though in a different manner (the overall winner gets 2 votes, then the state is split into north and south and the overall winner in each region gets one... sometimes it means that all 4 votes go to 1 person, sometimes it means that 1 person gets 3 votes and another gets 1... I think that's how they work it anyway). However that is still a very biased representation.
The EC still has some legitimate uses as a filter above an inherrently complicated system. But it is archaic in it's current form and can be revised without be replaced. If all states had a fully proportional vote (except perhaps a state that only had 1 EC vote if such a state exists), then the candidates would need to pay attention to the entire country instead of pandering to 10% of the states to influence swing voters.
I disagree. Sure, today's methods would be energy intensive, but for comparison look at solar today compared with the 1970's. In other words, things get more efficient the more you research them. We're nowhere close to 100% efficiency with solar but we're 10 times more efficient than we were.
Take a look at a pound of steak. The cow had to be at least 1 year old (I think it's usually closer to 2 years) to get to market. That cow didn't miraculously turn 1 season of grain into that pound... it took between 4 and 8 seasons of feed before it was brought to market. If we can get the process down to 2 seasons (and a season in my terms is 3 months, that's alot of grain) then we have a significant net improvement.
And it is a bit interesting that you're counter to my argument is that we have to live naturally, when my argument was a counter to the parent's that eating "natural" steak is not sustainable. What we need to do is realize that the "natural" of the past is not the right way to go. At the same time, I simply don't believe that a true vegetarian diet is healthful any more than the nearly carnivorous diet that many people today exhibit is. There has to be a happy middle-ground.
Oh yeah, and stealing from another that has something you need.
Not to mention a host of other things.
Does being natural make it -right- once you have a brain and base of knowledge capable of overcoming the need? Nope.
Note that I'm not saying we should all be vegetarians (though eating less meat would help most of us). However I -am- saying we should support finding a way to create meat that did not require slaughter to obtain, especially if we can find a way to grow it with fewer resources (it will take a LOT less agricultural resource if we can grow a fully developed steak with no birth, maturation or maintenance resources expended to get it there).
Most of the behaviors that are natural for a wild animal are not even CLOSE to scalable when you reach a critical mass. Have we reached a final critical mass? No, but we are getting really close to reaching a mass that is critical based on our current behavior. If we want to be able to expand past the current break point our behavior has to change... or we have to develop technology that will let us expand past a single planet -before- that break point hits (which looks less and less likely... I do think we'll reach past a single planet but not before we wreak total havoc on ourselves and this planet if we're not careful).
which could make a difference in which major party candidate takes those states.
Good.
And I'm not saying that because I am a Libertarian, I think Badnarik is full of it too... I'm saying that because anything that makes enough difference to point out that the 2 parties of today don't address a large portion of the needs of the public is a Good Thing.
Slashdot Mirror
No, one license for all machines shown to have been used in the production of the sound files. A tiny tiny portion of the computers in their environment.
As a large company that creates the OS and management tools, I'm guessing they probably can pretty easily do an installed software inventory and send a check to SoundForge without blinking.
If they were to pay for one on every machine, then they might as well buy out SoundForge. Nothing that I've ever seen would make such a blanket licensing scheme required by law.
And SoundForge could probably refuse payment of the royalties and take them to court, but do the math and it is obvious what the smart decision would be.
You may not be new here, but you still don't get it ... if people read this and find it interesting, even as a trivial bit of humor, then /. has done right to post it.
/. as people come to legitimize it as a news site (instead of as an obviously biased site that often posts links to other news sites) is sad.
The fact that the fun is slowly draining out of
I'm not saying I want to see blatantly stupid accusations like "d00d, Microsloth is a bloated pig of a company because of 'X'", and I often see articles that I think are stupid. However when I do so, I have the ability to not read further.
In this case it was actually one of those slightly humorous little tidbits that I got a 1/2 second chuckle out of.
Did anything in the article say it was some vast conspiracy? No, it only pointed out that Microsoft got caught doing something naughty. I'm sure they'll be paying for licenses -quickly- but in the meantime even 1 idiot employee is still an employee and so therefore even if it was a miniscule portion of Microsoft, it was still legitimately labeled.
Besides, if you're just stopping by to see a train wreck, and you consider this evidence of a collision, why aren't you rejoicing? Or you can always just stop, I'm sure that if the server gets hit by a locomotive it will be on CNN a day or two later.
The first difference is that I strongly doubt that the MPAA has all of their content available online without some form of active protection.
...
... that being that while your use would be just as fair (like recording TV on a VCR or DVR), the LoC has the pockets and legislative favors to withstand any attempt to attack the process while you don't.
... every site on the web that doesn't set a no-cache header (which I would stretch to say might be considered actively protected under the weak requirements of the DMCA) already let's you do EXACTLY that ... because all modern browsers cache data for offline retrieval.
... I was not saying that the LoC (or you in this case) have the right to use the information for non-profit use for free. I was talking about keeping personal copies. In the case of the LoC remember that they won't even give you a -copy- of a copyrighted work unless you get permission from the (c) holder and then it is -still- not a license to -use- that information in anyway other than for personal fair use. A far cry from what your posit implies regarding MPAA content.
... it is how the LoC archives things like congressional proceedings, white house press releases, and ANY broadcasted event or in this case freely and publicly available online information. The words/transcripts of such items may often be in the public domain, but the actual footage is the property of whoever shot it. Legally you can not re-use the footage of the Presidential Debates if you recorded them on your DVR because the footage is (c) by whichever network you recorded. You could be there in person to record your own copy and do whatever you wanted with it.
... you asked essentially why the LoC can take copyrighted material and -use- it for free non-profit use when you can't. My answer is, they can't (and neither can you), but you -can- archive it so long as you don't re-use it yourself (for instance, in creating a documentary) or give copies to others without explicit permission from the copyright holder.
However if you change the "MPAA's content" to "any site in the world that has public information no matter what it is (let us say for instance, CNN)
Then the difference is a sad but true one
But let's expand it further
Also, to clarify, go back and read my post
This is well established that recording/archiving of publicly available information is legal under fair use
I can simplify the difference thusly
And to further clarify, much my post was targetted at the idea of the LoC making copies of data on a server with a "robots.txt" rules file that supposedly disallowed it. I never said that going through a site to get protected content would be deemed legal under the DMCA, only that to violate the DMCA provisions you need active protection devices in place and "robots.txt" optional crawling rules are not active protection.
The point I was making about active versus passive protection was my language. The idea being that you can't violate protections (ie, reverse engineering, cracking encryption, scamming passwords) if those protections aren't enforced in the first place. There is no standard that says any form of HTTP client -must- use the "robots.txt" file if it exists and so just because the HTTP client is a crawler doesn't mean that it has to behave differently than any other HTTP client. If someone wants their site data to be protected under something like the DMCA, it needs to use something like passwords, encryption or both to force clients to go through the protection methods.
Obeying "robots.txt" is a courtesy. Yes, it is an -expected- courtesy like covering your mouth when you sneeze, but it is still a courtesy, not a lawful protection device.
IANAL but I would see this as falling under fair use.
1) the LoC is not profitting from your works nor is it re-using them (with the exception of providing an archive to others, see next item).
2) the LoC regularly tells people requesting copies of their information to first obtain permission from the copyright holder (in other words, as with any library, you can browse but you can't copy without permission and copy permission does not equal permission to reuse in a commercial work).
3) Copy protection schemes require active protection to fall under the DMCA, even if it is so simple that anyone can defeat it. Robots.txt is -passive- protection because you have to purposefully search for the file and then purposefully utilize it. To be active protection the document should not come up without the viewer (or blocked viewer) performing some form of action. When someone/something visits an unprotected public web page there is not a way for your web server to invoke the robots.txt file, therefore it is not an active mechanism.
All the more reason to support tax cuts while increasing spending ... make it truly free!
We already knew that hydro-electric generators have this effect on water ecology. It only makes sense that wind would do something similar above ground.
... but nothing stops the production of nasty spent fuel and we've proven over and over that stuff along those lines will leech into the environment at least a little no matter what we do.
... as was pointed out today on a local NPR station when talking about Colorado's new requirement that energy sellers must produce 10% from renewable sources by 2015. They pointed out that 4% of the total must come from solar and are balking because wind and hydro are so much cheaper. Yes, cheaper for -them- but still more expensive to everything in the long-run.
But this being a push for the Nuclear lobby? No thanks. No, I'm not a conspiracy nut who refuses to acknowledge that a properly run fision plant built to modern specs can be run safely
Until Nuclear -fusion- is possible here on Earth, or unless someone figures out that solar panels will cool the Sun, I think I'll take my fusion energy from the sky.
Yes, Solar is more expensive
Of course, I will gladly watch wind and hydro generators replace "clean coal" (that damned coughing eagle!) and hold back fision lobbies, as pointed out wind is still more friendly by far than those sources. But in the end the only good solutions are going to be solar, fusion and if the Sim folks are right, Helium3.
You don't have to cheat to forget naming.
For many of the people I know, going to college for CS is about 2 things:
1) Learning basic programmatic workflow and practices
2) Being able to show the piece of paper
Unfortunately for alot of people hiring, #2 is most important. For employers who I have -respected- #1 is the most important and they can recognize that with #1 and a creative thinking brain that any coder can quickly pick up new languages and technologies.
And people who excel at creative programmatic thinking often are the types that remember concepts, not trivia (the idea of testing intelligence and not memory). Expecting a person to remember, in a high stress situation, the terminology you learned in school tests the trivia.
Forgetting terminology (versus forgetting -theory-) doesn't mean that they cheated in school, it only means they remembered stuff differently. How many of us remember more than one or two geometry theorems even a few months after passing our last geometry test?
It is sad, but there are a number of elitists out there who use tests like the one you are so proud of. Do you give any type of explanation if the interview-ee says "what do you mean by that?" or do you assume that they have failed at that point? If you assume failure at that point you are the problem, not them.
If on the other hand you give a brief example and wait to see if they catch on, then you should be able to see who is truly good by how quickly they can code and/or how efficient that code is.
A person doesn't need to know the terminology -before- they join a group to be useful to that group. They need to be able to quickly put your group's terminology into a working context and start expanding on it. Otherwise all you are doing is a form of secret handshake.
This is one of the reasons that the original IQ tests were considered to be biased. They measured vocabulary knowledge as a prerequisite to concepts. Newer tests try to be language independent, recognizing that cognitive ability is more important.
Or in shorter terms, I agree with the grandparent of this post, you made the kind of boast that the submitter was talking about.
Show me an Open Source hardware platform that can be aquired for equal to or less than the cost of a commodity hardware platform with even 1/2 the performance.
The reason open source software succeeds so well is because of the low cost of entry as developer and the fact that the quality of open source software can match the quality of proprietary software. The case is not the same for hardware. You don't need a manufacturing facility or a the equivalent of an EE degree to get into engineering software, you only need a low cost PC or even access to a university lab.
A large part of the idea behind open source software is to commoditize the market so that everyone can afford to run high quality software. That goal has already been achieved in the hardware market (not saying that a $5,000 workstation counts there, but the fact that I can buy a -very- capable PC for $400 and the kind of performance that used to cost $50,000 maybe 5 years ago is now in the $5,000 range).
Another big factor in open source software is annoyance at companies like Microsoft and Bell that had traditionally kept people from knowing how to manipulate the proprietary software. CPU manufacturers like AMD and Intel have gone to great pains to make sure that the open source community had full access to the CPU architectures on the Opteron and the Itanium before it so that they ran Linux well.
Sure, there are things like 3D cards that are a big thorn in the side of open source coding, but you don't seem to be talking about them so much as CPU and chipset as a platform.
Apples : Oranges ... the "low cost" was in the context of the article talking about Sun offering some of the most affordable Opteron workstations.
... I have used USPARC-IIIi boxes and am using a w2100z right now. The Opteron platform has caught up to many of the speed advantages of the USPARC, especially when you get the peripherals up to equal specs (SCSI, memory type, etc). Hypertransport for memory shuttling and U320 for SCSI combined with running the Opteron in native 64-bits does a LOT to catch up to the USPARC boxes.
Besides
As with any comparison, there are things that one arch will do better than the other (including Xeon, which kicks Opteron on matrix functions) but overall the advantages between SPARC64 and AMD64 are alot flatter than SPARC64 to IA32.
s/was\ so\ much/wasn\'t\ so\ much/
Must have been awhile back ...
... the trade-in programs are generally to encourage people to give up their Xeons from other sources :)
Sun's Xeon servers (V60x and V65x) came out about 15 months ago. The LX50 (a P3 Xeon based server) came out about a year before that.
Sun's Opteron servers (V20z and V40z) started showing up about 6 months ago.
Sun doesn't have any Intel based workstations
Sun's Opteron workstations (w1100z and w2100z) started showing up a couple months ago.
Sun also has a low voltage Xeon Blade and an Athlon XP Blade. Based on trends I wouldn't be surprised to see an Opteron Blade if power requirements allow.
It is pretty obvious that it was so much x86 that Sun was against as it was Intel. When I was in Sun's entry-level server group the decision to use Xeon's was only grudgingly done because the Opterons kept getting pushed out. With a 64-bit CPU from an Intel competitor it looks like Sun is alot more comfortable with the relationship on the low-end. Opterons currently max out at 8 CPUs (I think) which is about the point where Sun's SPARC starts to really shine, so it has a lot of synergy.
Actually the best way to buy a w2100z, if you don't need it -today- but do want it cheap, is to buy off of Ebay. They are regularly going for about 1/2 the retail price.
And AMD isn't subsidizing this at all, at least not actively. Sun just happens to be willing to sell for much lower than their traditional margins on these products to get back some of the workstation market. They have realized that workstations were a wedge into the hearts and minds of the admins who later (sometimes years later) made decisions on servers. And Sun has some very well priced Opteron servers now, too.
The magic of Opteron is that you can be using a Sun workstation, getting low-cost high-performance Opteron CPUs and also be running Linux. I think that was the purpose of the article.
(written on a Sun w2100z dual Opteron box running Ubuntu AMD64 Linux with VMWare installed).
No it wouldn't. You'd still have to reboot to see the change ... at least if you compile -before- the reboot you know that the compile worked.
... only that it -started- to boot in 15 seconds. Even removing all modules I find it impossible to believe that a P4 could compile the entire kernel with -any- compiler faster than it takes to load a precompiled kernel. No matter what you still have a "+ compile time" situation even if it is much faster than the stock gcc.
:)
Plus using this mechanism as-is without alternative boots would mean compiling your kernel every time you boot. A waste of time and resources.
Note that it didn't say it booted in 15 seconds
This has some "because you can" value, but otherwise I just don't see it as being useful to the user, or even to the vast majority of kernel developers.
Making C feel like Perl is not a good thing for me
but I don't think it should be posted on slashdot
... that is exactly what has been done.
And yet, it your own small way
Of course there are those of us who enjoy the quirky "cuz we can" articles and get tired of people who post responses about how it is "Useless", but I don't think that should be posted on slashdot.
I wasn't just talking about high end gamers. The Quadro line is -not- meant for gamers ... at least not unless you consider the Sun W1100z / W2100z to be game machines (just an example, you can also look at IBM and others).
... and I don't believe that the original poster was talking about going for that market, they were talking about video cards pure and simple.
... but that is not relevant to the discussion that was at hand. I didn't say Matrox as a company was going away nor am I hoping they are. I was pointing out that the parent of my post was out of touch with the current status of things.
Matrox -used- to own the high-end dual-head workstation market. Today they are being attacked hard on that front. The majority of workstations are not for video editing
As for frame grabbers, cameras, etc you are right
Oh that's just FUD. Do they have occasional bad bugs in there drivers? Sure. But they definitely have written ones that don't crash X. I've got an ATI Radeon All-in-Wonder (the first version) as well as a laptop with a Radeon M9 (Mobile 9000). I've run at least 3 different versions of SuSE on both and used Catalyst 3.7.6 and 3.9.0 on both using 3D acceleration and not had X problems. I -did- have problems with 3.12.? but I just reverted to 3.9.0 and was fine.
... but barely compared with the big 2. I don't think open sourcing their drivers caused them problems (in fact, it may have helped keep them afloat), they simply didn't innovate as well as Nvidia and ATI. Look at the graphics workstations being pumped out today and you'll find that many of them now are using Nvidia's Quadro line.
... but a delay in that is a competitive advantage.
... I still have my an older Matrox card (their first 3D one, with the uber expensive daughter card memory add-on) sitting in a box because I have this instinct to love it for what it was (I'll probably donate it on my next closet purge, but it has survived MANY of them to date).
Are Nvidia's drivers better? Yes and I will be buying Nvidia for my next card. But that doesn't excuse over dramatizing like you did.
As for Matrox, sure, they're still in the market
Sad as I feel saying it, if I were ATI or Nvidia I would be doing everything I could to keep the other party from knowing anymore about my board internals than they could. Will each eventually reverse engineer it all? Sure
I'm not dumping on Matrox
Except:
... and my parent post was supposed to be funny (must have failed :)
* Not everyone gets news online either due to choice or lack of access for various reasons (on the road, no ISP, little money)
* Often online news is a small blurb compared to the print versions
* Online news very rarely covers local stories well
Oh yeah
Yeah, until they finally announce the new Mozilla TreeHugger ... Not only will it support quad audio but it will have holographic ink, be delivered via transporter and the technology will be patent free so that we can all be freed from the tyranny of today's proprietary newsprint papers and inks!
Which just goes to show that the engine doesn't make the game ... content quality:quantity do.
But there -are- better ways to use the Electoral College. We have the technology now to transmit vote results faster than by horse, which is a large part of the idea behind sending the delegates to DC to do the true vote.
:)
... sometimes it means that all 4 votes go to 1 person, sometimes it means that 1 person gets 3 votes and another gets 1 ... I think that's how they work it anyway). However that is still a very biased representation.
In Colorado there is an initiative to make the EC votes from the state be a proportional representation of the votes cast. That way if Bush gets 40% of the vote.
There are people who claim that this will marginalize Colorado's influence as a swing state. However it also makes it more honest. I would much rather see the Dem or Lib ticket get -some- of the votes -all- of the time than see the Reps get ALL of the votes -most- of the time. The more states that do this the more honest representation we get of the true voice of the people. Besides, seeing fewer political ads won't upset me at all
I think it is either Maine or Massachusetts that already gives a proportional amount of EC votes, though in a different manner (the overall winner gets 2 votes, then the state is split into north and south and the overall winner in each region gets one
The EC still has some legitimate uses as a filter above an inherrently complicated system. But it is archaic in it's current form and can be revised without be replaced. If all states had a fully proportional vote (except perhaps a state that only had 1 EC vote if such a state exists), then the candidates would need to pay attention to the entire country instead of pandering to 10% of the states to influence swing voters.
I disagree. Sure, today's methods would be energy intensive, but for comparison look at solar today compared with the 1970's. In other words, things get more efficient the more you research them. We're nowhere close to 100% efficiency with solar but we're 10 times more efficient than we were.
... it took between 4 and 8 seasons of feed before it was brought to market. If we can get the process down to 2 seasons (and a season in my terms is 3 months, that's alot of grain) then we have a significant net improvement.
Take a look at a pound of steak. The cow had to be at least 1 year old (I think it's usually closer to 2 years) to get to market. That cow didn't miraculously turn 1 season of grain into that pound
And it is a bit interesting that you're counter to my argument is that we have to live naturally, when my argument was a counter to the parent's that eating "natural" steak is not sustainable. What we need to do is realize that the "natural" of the past is not the right way to go. At the same time, I simply don't believe that a true vegetarian diet is healthful any more than the nearly carnivorous diet that many people today exhibit is. There has to be a happy middle-ground.
Killing to eat is natural.
... or we have to develop technology that will let us expand past a single planet -before- that break point hits (which looks less and less likely ... I do think we'll reach past a single planet but not before we wreak total havoc on ourselves and this planet if we're not careful).
So is procreating as prodigiously as possible.
As is killing to protect territory.
Oh yeah, and stealing from another that has something you need.
Not to mention a host of other things.
Does being natural make it -right- once you have a brain and base of knowledge capable of overcoming the need? Nope.
Note that I'm not saying we should all be vegetarians (though eating less meat would help most of us). However I -am- saying we should support finding a way to create meat that did not require slaughter to obtain, especially if we can find a way to grow it with fewer resources (it will take a LOT less agricultural resource if we can grow a fully developed steak with no birth, maturation or maintenance resources expended to get it there).
Most of the behaviors that are natural for a wild animal are not even CLOSE to scalable when you reach a critical mass. Have we reached a final critical mass? No, but we are getting really close to reaching a mass that is critical based on our current behavior. If we want to be able to expand past the current break point our behavior has to change
I can get leather whenever I want it and until we all stop eating real meat the leather I buy won't be hurting any animals.
What I want is a chairdog!
which could make a difference in which major party candidate takes those states.
... I'm saying that because anything that makes enough difference to point out that the 2 parties of today don't address a large portion of the needs of the public is a Good Thing.
Good.
And I'm not saying that because I am a Libertarian, I think Badnarik is full of it too