Gee, anybody think this IBM/Red Hat partnership mighta had something to do with last
week's story, "Red Hat Abandons Sparc"?
Nope. It's been pretty obvious for some time that the market for Sparc Linux isn't big enough
to justify such a big investment from Red Hat.
Even cheapbytes haven't found the market big enough
to justify pressing CDs for RH/Sparc. For recent RH releases,
they've been doing limited runs of CDRs rather than
pressing full CDs. It's purely down to market demand,
and has nothing to do with this IBM deal.
As everyone should know by now, MIPS stands for
Meaningless Indicator
of Processor Speed.
It's completely arbitrary because of the different
interpretations of the term "Instruction" between different CPU architectures.
A better way would be to use real performance mesaurements,
but I can't see Intel's marketing department going for
that one: "buy our new Pentium IV (specint 57, specfp 94)".
They're alway going to prefer "buy our new Pentium IV/1333 -- it's 33% faster than the Pentium IV/1000."
Did I miss a link? can anyone find high-res images?
Nope. I found some images, but Tet's first law of art states
that if I have to scale them up to fit on a 1600x1200 desktop,
they're not hi-res... Hell, they don't even fill a 1280x1024 desktop.
Cool images, certainly, but not hi-res.
The Toshiba Libretto ff1100V is only available in Japan.
Sure, you can get one from an importer like JPD, but
they'll slap a 200% markup on for you. I'm trying to get one
into the UK at the moment at a sensible price...
The way that Unisys provides 99.9 percent uptime is by migrating processes from one
processor to another when Windows crashes.
Indeed, as does Data General. Their 99.9% uptime guarantee is only
for their cluster products which basically consist of multiple
(usually two, sometimes more?) machines in an HA configuration. If one
crashes, the other takes over. Sure, they'll sell you a
standalone NT box, but not with the uptime guarantee.
For an HA cluster, 99.9% is pretty apalling, which puts it
all into perspective somewhat...
It's already been done along similar lines. There's
a guy in Austria with the email address dot#dot.at
(obviously, replace the # with an @ to get the unspamproofed version -- then try saying it out loud).
Man, thats old, I played that in 1982, and it was called "Space Invaders", but you
probably never heard of it.
Actually, the best Star Stek game ever made was
a shoot-em up -- "Starship Command", released by Acornsoft
for the BBC Micro. It wasn't an official Star Trek license, but there were enough
references that it was pretty obvious. Great game, that brings back many happy
memories of my childhood. I really must try and get hold
of a decent (i.e., not just Mode 7) Beeb emulator for Linux...
RedHat should be held accountabe, so flame away. This is what happens when
marketing/directors decide when a product is ready, not the people that are actually doing
the work.
Sure they should be held accountable, if they've truly released
a horribly buggy sytem. But it doesn't sound like they have. Alan Cox,
in his diary says:
Watching the bugs collect on Red Hat 7, but nothing too much so far, the
only obvious outstanding bug is the installer one where it decides it can't find a device
on NTFS (?) partitions being included.
CorelDraw is *the best* vector graphics illustration program on the market. Illustrator
notwithstanding.
Perhaps so, but I've been somewhat disappointed with CorelDRAW 9
for Linux. Compared to CorelDRAW 3 (the only other version I've used
extensively), it's far more fully featured, but the
user interface is awful. It now takes several times longer to accomplish the same tasks. I guess the Windows version has the same flaws, though.
Overall performance is OK, but not great, probably due to rushing it to market
rather than getting WINE working right, and there are still niggling little bugs. As you say, they're so close,
but just keep getting it wrong.
In my experience, there is increasing use of drugs among
high tech workers, but virtually none among true hackers.
The sort of programmers/sysadmins that don't have a home computer are the ones
taking drugs. That's probably a sign of the changing demographics of the IT industry more than anything else. The exception to that would probably be
the games industry, where drug taking seems more
prevalent than in the rest of IT.
I've been using Sparc Linux for about 5 years now,
and Red Hat bringing out a Sparc distribution was one of the things that legitimised the
platform in the early days. Now, of course, there's Debian,
SuSE and probably others, but I like Red Hat. I'll be sticking with RH
on my Sparc for now, with kernel upgrades as appropriate.
As major upgrades become necessary, I'll probably recompile stuff myself from now on.
It's not really surprising. Everyone that has a Sparc has a lifetime license for Solaris, so the
incentive to switch to Linux is much less than for other platforms, and there really isn't a good business case for continuing to support Sparc.
I wonder how that'll affect RH emplyees like David Miller and Jakub Jelinek,
who still use Sparc as their primary development platform, AFAIK. Obviously, the Linux/Sparc effort isn't going to die, and Sparc support in the kernel will continue indefinitely.
I've always been wary of this, because I haven't found a definitive
explanation of how the strings are interpreted before being compared.
I'm guessing that the intent is to allow naïve to be
considered "less" than naked, where it would
normally be considered alphabetically "greater", but I don't know for sure.
Other than that, I don't use any of your other pitfalls (apart
from the occasional signal when I'm knocking up a quick and dirty prototype, but not in production code)
My first kernel took about 8 hours as I recall, on a 386-16 with 4MB.
Luxury! While my CPU was a faster 386/SX25, I only had
2.5B RAM, which probably explains why your compile was quicker...
Re:Soon? 3dfx already dropped glide.
on
3dfx Does OpenGL
·
· Score: 2
Direct3D is lightyears ahead of OpenGL.
Since when? Direct 3D has traditionally sucked in a big way. Although I
haven't seem them myself, apparently the newer versions have
improved dramatically, and in places edged ahead of OpenGL.
But light years ahead? I think that's overstating things a bit.
It would be nice to do a rebel linux install on our Sun Enterprise 10ks (we have quite a
few).
Quite a few? I thought my last company was doing well
with four. The bastards wouldn't let me install Linux on
one of the unused domains, though:-( Linuxcare have put Linux on a 24 CPU Starfire domain:
http://linuxcare.com.au/anton/e10000/
IBM, Compaq, Dell and the other guys are WORKING on making 16 processors
and 32 processors based server - it's still vaporware!
Indeed, but other (more competent:-) companies are already
there, even with Intel CPUs. The Data General
AV25000, for example,
supports up to 64 PIII Xeon CPUs, and runs either DG/UX or Windows (or both). Of course, the
if you go the Windows route, you'll have to run multiple copies simultaneously, because Windows can only
scale to 4 CPUs on that machine. If you go the more sensible DG/UX route, of course,
it can use all 64 CPUs from a single system image:-)
Sun hardware does the following:
[...]
Prevents your kid brother playing games on it
That's just blatantly not true. Doom works fine on my
Sparc Linux box, and we used to have multiplayer doom games
at a previous employer running Sparc/Solaris. Of course, it was a little
unfair, 'coz the guy with the UltraSparc had a huge advantage over the rest
of us (who were using sun4m machines). But I guess your kid brother probably isn't
going to be interested in Doom any more, and AFAIK, Q3A and Unreal Tournament don't yet run on Sparc hardware.
As for comparing server performance, note that the original coment didn't explictly compare it to a PC. Much as I like Sun hardware, others (particularly IBM, and to an extent, Compaq) have been making some really nice PowerPC and Alpha boxen recently that gives Sun a run for its money in the price/performance game. Sun is heading towards being too expensive for what it does, but the strong brand name seems to make up for that in the market.
It has some code in it to handle multiple architectures on the same system (IA64 can use
IA32 binaries, same situation for SPARC/UltraSPARC)
Excellent. That's been another of my problems. I'd like to be able to install
x86 RPMS on my Sparc Linux server (they're available over NFS to the x86 boxen).
At the moment I have to either compile from source or kick
RPM into doing it against its will...
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, no. m68k was the first non-x86 processor to run Linux, but Alpha was the first to get integrated into the main kernel tree.
Nope. It's been pretty obvious for some time that the market for Sparc Linux isn't big enough to justify such a big investment from Red Hat. Even cheapbytes haven't found the market big enough to justify pressing CDs for RH/Sparc. For recent RH releases, they've been doing limited runs of CDRs rather than pressing full CDs. It's purely down to market demand, and has nothing to do with this IBM deal.
As everyone should know by now, MIPS stands for Meaningless Indicator of Processor Speed. It's completely arbitrary because of the different interpretations of the term "Instruction" between different CPU architectures. A better way would be to use real performance mesaurements, but I can't see Intel's marketing department going for that one: "buy our new Pentium IV (specint 57, specfp 94)". They're alway going to prefer "buy our new Pentium IV/1333 -- it's 33% faster than the Pentium IV/1000."
Nope. I found some images, but Tet's first law of art states that if I have to scale them up to fit on a 1600x1200 desktop, they're not hi-res... Hell, they don't even fill a 1280x1024 desktop. Cool images, certainly, but not hi-res.
The Toshiba Libretto ff1100V is only available in Japan. Sure, you can get one from an importer like JPD, but they'll slap a 200% markup on for you. I'm trying to get one into the UK at the moment at a sensible price...
Indeed, as does Data General. Their 99.9% uptime guarantee is only for their cluster products which basically consist of multiple (usually two, sometimes more?) machines in an HA configuration. If one crashes, the other takes over. Sure, they'll sell you a standalone NT box, but not with the uptime guarantee. For an HA cluster, 99.9% is pretty apalling, which puts it all into perspective somewhat...
It's already been done along similar lines. There's a guy in Austria with the email address dot#dot.at (obviously, replace the # with an @ to get the unspamproofed version -- then try saying it out loud).
Man, thats old, I played that in 1982, and it was called "Space Invaders", but you probably never heard of it.
Actually, the best Star Stek game ever made was a shoot-em up -- "Starship Command", released by Acornsoft for the BBC Micro. It wasn't an official Star Trek license, but there were enough references that it was pretty obvious. Great game, that brings back many happy memories of my childhood. I really must try and get hold of a decent (i.e., not just Mode 7) Beeb emulator for Linux...
Sure they should be held accountable, if they've truly released a horribly buggy sytem. But it doesn't sound like they have. Alan Cox, in his diary says:
Perhaps so, but I've been somewhat disappointed with CorelDRAW 9 for Linux. Compared to CorelDRAW 3 (the only other version I've used extensively), it's far more fully featured, but the user interface is awful. It now takes several times longer to accomplish the same tasks. I guess the Windows version has the same flaws, though. Overall performance is OK, but not great, probably due to rushing it to market rather than getting WINE working right, and there are still niggling little bugs. As you say, they're so close, but just keep getting it wrong.
Fair enough, but you'll notice that I started my comment with "In my experience". Naturally, others will have different experiences...
In my experience, there is increasing use of drugs among high tech workers, but virtually none among true hackers. The sort of programmers/sysadmins that don't have a home computer are the ones taking drugs. That's probably a sign of the changing demographics of the IT industry more than anything else. The exception to that would probably be the games industry, where drug taking seems more prevalent than in the rest of IT.
I've been using Sparc Linux for about 5 years now, and Red Hat bringing out a Sparc distribution was one of the things that legitimised the platform in the early days. Now, of course, there's Debian, SuSE and probably others, but I like Red Hat. I'll be sticking with RH on my Sparc for now, with kernel upgrades as appropriate. As major upgrades become necessary, I'll probably recompile stuff myself from now on. It's not really surprising. Everyone that has a Sparc has a lifetime license for Solaris, so the incentive to switch to Linux is much less than for other platforms, and there really isn't a good business case for continuing to support Sparc. I wonder how that'll affect RH emplyees like David Miller and Jakub Jelinek, who still use Sparc as their primary development platform, AFAIK. Obviously, the Linux/Sparc effort isn't going to die, and Sparc support in the kernel will continue indefinitely.
I've always been wary of this, because I haven't found a definitive explanation of how the strings are interpreted before being compared. I'm guessing that the intent is to allow naïve to be considered "less" than naked, where it would normally be considered alphabetically "greater", but I don't know for sure. Other than that, I don't use any of your other pitfalls (apart from the occasional signal when I'm knocking up a quick and dirty prototype, but not in production code)
Luxury! While my CPU was a faster 386/SX25, I only had 2.5B RAM, which probably explains why your compile was quicker...
Since when? Direct 3D has traditionally sucked in a big way. Although I haven't seem them myself, apparently the newer versions have improved dramatically, and in places edged ahead of OpenGL. But light years ahead? I think that's overstating things a bit.
Quite a few? I thought my last company was doing well with four. The bastards wouldn't let me install Linux on one of the unused domains, though :-( Linuxcare have put Linux on a 24 CPU Starfire domain:
http://linuxcare.com.au/anton/e10000/
Indeed, but other (more competent :-) companies are already
there, even with Intel CPUs. The Data General
AV25000, for example,
supports up to 64 PIII Xeon CPUs, and runs either DG/UX or Windows (or both). Of course, the
if you go the Windows route, you'll have to run multiple copies simultaneously, because Windows can only
scale to 4 CPUs on that machine. If you go the more sensible DG/UX route, of course,
it can use all 64 CPUs from a single system image :-)
Bah! Slashdot bugs inserted a space in between the "/" and the "a" in my close anchor tag. It looked fine in the preview. Ho hum...
At a guess, not very long at all. On a 24 CPU Sun Starfire machine, a kernel compile takes a shade over 20 seconds. See http://linuxcare.com.au/anton/e10000/ for details. I'd guess this Alpha will be comparable to that, if not faster. As an interesting datapoint, my first kernel compile took over 10 hours (that was 0.99pl8+ on a 386).
[...]
Prevents your kid brother playing games on it
That's just blatantly not true. Doom works fine on my Sparc Linux box, and we used to have multiplayer doom games at a previous employer running Sparc/Solaris. Of course, it was a little unfair, 'coz the guy with the UltraSparc had a huge advantage over the rest of us (who were using sun4m machines). But I guess your kid brother probably isn't going to be interested in Doom any more, and AFAIK, Q3A and Unreal Tournament don't yet run on Sparc hardware.
As for comparing server performance, note that the original coment didn't explictly compare it to a PC. Much as I like Sun hardware, others (particularly IBM, and to an extent, Compaq) have been making some really nice PowerPC and Alpha boxen recently that gives Sun a run for its money in the price/performance game. Sun is heading towards being too expensive for what it does, but the strong brand name seems to make up for that in the market.
Given that Transmeta was founded in 1995, by what logic do you deduce that they're less than 5 years old?
I live in the UK. We pay around $22 - $24 for a CD (that's US dollars), or up to $40 or more for imports.
Excellent. That's been another of my problems. I'd like to be able to install x86 RPMS on my Sparc Linux server (they're available over NFS to the x86 boxen). At the moment I have to either compile from source or kick RPM into doing it against its will...
Since it's already slashdotted, care to enlighten us as to what this is all about? I'm wary of the name already -- it's way too close to MSN...
RPM 4
Which gives us what benefits over 3.x? Does it support multiple databases yet (I want a system wide one, and one for my locally installed stuff).
FHS layout
Thank you. This is probably the biggest single improvement that RH7 gives us. I hope other distributions follow suit.