IRIX and Solaris are the only serious scalable UNIXen on the market.
Not quite. DG/UX scales to 128 processors, and I believe Dynix/ptx and NCR's Unix are similar in that respect. Sure, none of them are major players in the Unix world, but they certainly do scale.
Oh, and isn't OS/390 technically classed as Unix these days?:-)
I don't use Linux because it's soposed to be cool, I use it because it's slick on a stinking IBM-PC compatible. On real H/W I would use Solaris over Linux any day.(OpenBSD too BTW)
I installed Linux on my SPARCs because Solaris was too slow, and because Linux is a nicer environment in which to work. Yes, Solaris has a place in the world (increasingly only on high-end hardware). For my machines, however, I'll stick with Linux.
This could be really good news -- Uncle Clive has a habit of getting the design right. I still have my ZX81 and Speccy, although I find XZX taking over these days...
However, he's proved absolutely hopeless at marketing. The auditors' reports for Sinclair Research have basically declared it an unviable company, due to the losses it's made for so many consecutive years. They note that the company only remains viable while Sir Clive bolsters it with his personal fortune.
As with most of us in the UK, I still have a soft spot for Sinclair, and I hope this succeeds. I've no doubt it will technically be a very good product -- not cutting edge, but good enough, and at a sensible price. It'll live or die by its marketing, though.
I've no objection to this, so long as the user has a choice. Either get the app for nothing, complete with annoying banner ads, or pay a normal price for the non-annoyware version.
Of course, advertising revenues like this will only remain viable until one of us writes a free alternative for the app in quesiton...
I used ViaVoice a while back, and was impressed by the accuracy. Speed sucked, but then I was running on a machine significantly below their minimum spec, and had to wait for it to catch up every now and then.
Basically, ViaVoice is an excellent product, and is pretty useful for dictating documents in human languages. Naturally, it's hopeless for coding or entering commands at a shell prompt, but that's more because speech will never be a natural way to communicate stuff like that than because of any failing in ViaVoice. As others have mentioned, it could prove useful for X10 automation, though.
Redhat vaguely bothers me because it does mess with/usr/local...
So exactly which version of RedHat are you using? I've been using RedHat since 3.0.3, and I've never seen it mess with/usr/local (other than creating the directory stubs allowed under the FHS).
...if you have to pay for MS Audio then it still doesn't stand a chance.
That's a big if. I can't see M$ doing anything other than releasing a zero-cost client. Yes, they'll charge vast amounts for the streaming server, and probably the basic encoder too, but if the public have a free client, they'll start demanding that people supply audio in that format, given it's apparent (in their eyes) superiority. It worked for RealAudio, I have no doubt it'll work just as well for M$ (at the expense of the rest of us).
The PSX2 will possibly be relasing in Japan by the end of the year. The Dreamcast has been in out Japan since the end of 1998.
Yes, maybe that's the case in Japan, but what about the rest of the world? According to friends that are writing games for PSX2, a UK release date is likely in Jan/Feb 2000 -- 3 or 4 months after Dreamcast. I've heard similar timescales for the US.
The MS format is a little smaller. Whoopee. Small price to pay for a lot more freedom. Like I said, disk is cheap.
Yes, but bandwidth isn't, and that's the real issue here. If it takes half the time to download, them MP3, RealAudio etc. don't stand a chance, cross-platform or not. Sure, you or I will still be able to encode and play back CDs, but we probably won't be able to download music from the net, and there may well come a time when music is only available in downloadable form. CDs may well not exist in the not too distant future.
Dreamcast is dead in the water. The machine has some impressive specs, and the new Mario is very pretty, although somewhat lacking in gameplay, I felt. Maybe I just haven't played it enough.
However, they needed to release it at the end of last year for it to stand any chance against the PSX2. The official Sega line has been that they knew the PSX2 would be better, because it would be released later, but that Dreamcast would be the most powerful console available now, and would have built up a substantial number of owners by the time PSX2 was released. Now they're planning on releasing it maybe 3 months before PSX2? It doesn't stand a chance.
Interesting to note that the UK version will be more expensive than anywhere else in the world -- nothing new there, then:-( Also, the UK shops have had Dreamcasts (presumably Japanese imports) on sale for some months now, at around US$480.
Friends working in the games industry have said that UK publishers, at least, are refusing to touch Dreamcast games. They're expecting PSX2 to take the bulk of the market. In house development is all well and good, but it can't provide the necessary quantity of games to satisfy the demand. Without publishers, there will be no 3rd party games, and without 3rd party games, Dreamcast is dead. Shame, because it looked promising, and it'd be sad to see Sega release another turkey like Saturn...
You can achieve a similar effect in much less space with the Ross SPARCplug. It's a complete HyperSPARC based Sparc 20 that fits in a standard 5.25" drive bay on a normal PC, running off the standard PC power supply. You can fit several of these in a standard PC tower case.
The article also contends that colleges are unable to keep up with the proliferation of programming languages and technologies driving today's job market, and thus do not outfit their students with the necessary job skills.
Which is why I appreciate my University course so much now. Yes, it taught me Pascal, C and Unix, but it didn't concentrate on them. They were a means to an end. It could equally well have taught me FORTRAN, Ada and VMS (actually, it did...) and still have achieved the same goal -- I learned how to program. It didn't matter what language or OS were used, we learned platform neutral stuff like general OS theory, compiling techniques, algorithms, cryptography, regular expressions etc. Things that apply irrespective of the OS or language being used.
No, you don't need a University education in computing to get a good IT job. However, I believe it puts you in a much stronger position than those without...
DG previously had a pact with Compaq to drop DG/UX in favour of Digital Unix
Actually, no. They had an agreement with SCO to use UnixWare, which presumably puts them in the Monterey camp. DG now sell NT, Intranetware and UnixWare on the low end and medium size servers, and DG/UX on their high end stuff. DG/UX is somewhat of a minimalist Unix -- it doesn't ship with much in the way of useful toys out of the box. However, it's incredibly stable, scales well to huge numbers of CPUs (128, last time I looked), has a nice LVM, and is techincally very sound. Sadly, I'm not convinced about their commitment to Unix. They're concentrating almost entirely on NT these days (as well as on their stunning storage products).
I dunno if even on an Ultra-450 16 processors is really all that worthwhile.
From experience, yes it is. We've got a few E10000 StarFires here -- the largest domains are 24 CPUs, each and they definitely *do* need them. Running them with 16 or less cripples performance. Admittedly, this is with Solaris, but given that Sun are now providing David Miller with access to hardware and information, I see no reason that Linux can't scale that high properly, too. 16 CPUs today, 64 tomorrow. World domination next week:-)
Which is precisely why they're called BogoMIPS -- they're a completely bogus measurement of CPU speed. Trust me, each of those UltraSparc CPUs will blast your AMD out of the water...
... when it comes to multiple processors in an x86 architecture, they are the only game in town.
So why stick with the x86 architecture? I've been running quad CPU Sparcs under Linux since 1996 or so (admittedly, SMP support was a bit ropey back then). Also, Sparc Linux happily scales to 16 CPUs, and you don't tend to run into the same "my frobnozz QX-439 chipset doesn't support more than 2 CPU" type issues.
I also seem to be hearing that vendors will release buggy binary drivers. Why? the drivers are the same for every OS. If it works buggy on Solaris it will Work buggy on Tu64 and Linux.
All of that is 100% true. But companies will still ship buggy drivers. They do it all the time on Windoze. Why do you think UDI would be any different? If they can't be bothered to ship bug-free drivers for 90% of their market, they're sure as hell not going to do it for the rest of us. Furthermore, not only do they ship buggy drivers, but they frequently refuse to fix them.
Simply put, binary-only drivers are bad for Linux.
Make sure to GPL your UDI device drivers, so that they don't show up on closed-source platforms.
I think you're missing the point here, Bruce. The idea is not to divide the world into "them" and "us". It's to create high quality software that we have the freedom to modify and redistribute as we please. As such, LGPL would be a much better license for UDI drivers. Otherwise, we'll end in a situation where there have to be two (or more) UDI drivers for each device -- one GPL (for us) and one non-GPL that can be used by the proprietary Unices.
I was wondering if anyone has a way to get all of the Solaris fonts into XFree86 on Linux, or at least something similar.
At my last job, I had a Sparc running Linux. It also had a Solaris disk in it (but I didn't boot into that much:-). To get at the fonts, I simply mounted the appropriate Solaris partitions and used xset fp+ to add the fonts directories to the font path. Under XFree86, you could also set the font path in XF86Config, but xset will work on any X server.
Why shouldn't the current mouse coordinates be stored in a global?
Multiple USB mice? It won't be long before someone wants to do it. Quake used mouse and keyboard simultaneously -- two mice isn't such a huge leap from that.
Yes, you are. There's nothing in the CDDB archive that isn't publically available elsewhere. Apart from anything else, I have not given CDDB permission to withold information I have submitted to them, and I doubt others have, either.
If you have an existing CDDB aware application, there's nothing they can do to prevent you from accessing the archive with it, and using the information in any way you see fit.
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It's already there in large corporations. My last company was rolling out dual PIIs on every desktop throughout Europe (~4000 seats).
Not quite. DG/UX scales to 128 processors, and I believe Dynix/ptx and NCR's Unix are similar in that respect. Sure, none of them are major players in the Unix world, but they certainly do scale.
Oh, and isn't OS/390 technically classed as Unix these days? :-)
I installed Linux on my SPARCs because Solaris was too slow, and because Linux is a nicer environment in which to work. Yes, Solaris has a place in the world (increasingly only on high-end hardware). For my machines, however, I'll stick with Linux.
However, he's proved absolutely hopeless at marketing. The auditors' reports for Sinclair Research have basically declared it an unviable company, due to the losses it's made for so many consecutive years. They note that the company only remains viable while Sir Clive bolsters it with his personal fortune.
As with most of us in the UK, I still have a soft spot for Sinclair, and I hope this succeeds. I've no doubt it will technically be a very good product -- not cutting edge, but good enough, and at a sensible price. It'll live or die by its marketing, though.
Of course, advertising revenues like this will only remain viable until one of us writes a free alternative for the app in quesiton...
Basically, ViaVoice is an excellent product, and is pretty useful for dictating documents in human languages. Naturally, it's hopeless for coding or entering commands at a shell prompt, but that's more because speech will never be a natural way to communicate stuff like that than because of any failing in ViaVoice. As others have mentioned, it could prove useful for X10 automation, though.
See http://www .idg.net/idg_frames/english/content.cgi?vc=docid_9 -116665.html for a comparison.
So exactly which version of RedHat are you using? I've been using RedHat since 3.0.3, and I've never seen it mess with /usr/local (other than creating the directory stubs allowed under the FHS).
Wow! It's huge and... well, cheesy. It's like RedHat's cheesy portal only bigger (and more useful :-)
That's a big if. I can't see M$ doing anything other than releasing a zero-cost client. Yes, they'll charge vast amounts for the streaming server, and probably the basic encoder too, but if the public have a free client, they'll start demanding that people supply audio in that format, given it's apparent (in their eyes) superiority. It worked for RealAudio, I have no doubt it'll work just as well for M$ (at the expense of the rest of us).
Yes, maybe that's the case in Japan, but what about the rest of the world? According to friends that are writing games for PSX2, a UK release date is likely in Jan/Feb 2000 -- 3 or 4 months after Dreamcast. I've heard similar timescales for the US.
Yes, but bandwidth isn't, and that's the real issue here. If it takes half the time to download, them MP3, RealAudio etc. don't stand a chance, cross-platform or not. Sure, you or I will still be able to encode and play back CDs, but we probably won't be able to download music from the net, and there may well come a time when music is only available in downloadable form. CDs may well not exist in the not too distant future.
However, they needed to release it at the end of last year for it to stand any chance against the PSX2. The official Sega line has been that they knew the PSX2 would be better, because it would be released later, but that Dreamcast would be the most powerful console available now, and would have built up a substantial number of owners by the time PSX2 was released. Now they're planning on releasing it maybe 3 months before PSX2? It doesn't stand a chance.
Interesting to note that the UK version will be more expensive than anywhere else in the world -- nothing new there, then :-( Also, the UK shops have had Dreamcasts (presumably Japanese imports) on sale for some months now, at around US$480.
Friends working in the games industry have said that UK publishers, at least, are refusing to touch Dreamcast games. They're expecting PSX2 to take the bulk of the market. In house development is all well and good, but it can't provide the necessary quantity of games to satisfy the demand. Without publishers, there will be no 3rd party games, and without 3rd party games, Dreamcast is dead. Shame, because it looked promising, and it'd be sad to see Sega release another turkey like Saturn...
http://www.iws-online.com/ross.html
Sadly, I believe Ross have now gone out of business (however, this means that you should be able to pick up a SPARCplug pretty cheaply :-)
Rumours are that someone (Stellar Performance?) is selling clusters of these in a beowulf-like system.
Which is why I appreciate my University course so much now. Yes, it taught me Pascal, C and Unix, but it didn't concentrate on them. They were a means to an end. It could equally well have taught me FORTRAN, Ada and VMS (actually, it did...) and still have achieved the same goal -- I learned how to program. It didn't matter what language or OS were used, we learned platform neutral stuff like general OS theory, compiling techniques, algorithms, cryptography, regular expressions etc. Things that apply irrespective of the OS or language being used.
No, you don't need a University education in computing to get a good IT job. However, I believe it puts you in a much stronger position than those without...
Actually, no. They had an agreement with SCO to use UnixWare, which presumably puts them in the Monterey camp. DG now sell NT, Intranetware and UnixWare on the low end and medium size servers, and DG/UX on their high end stuff. DG/UX is somewhat of a minimalist Unix -- it doesn't ship with much in the way of useful toys out of the box. However, it's incredibly stable, scales well to huge numbers of CPUs (128, last time I looked), has a nice LVM, and is techincally very sound. Sadly, I'm not convinced about their commitment to Unix. They're concentrating almost entirely on NT these days (as well as on their stunning storage products).
From experience, yes it is. We've got a few E10000 StarFires here -- the largest domains are 24 CPUs, each and they definitely *do* need them. Running them with 16 or less cripples performance. Admittedly, this is with Solaris, but given that Sun are now providing David Miller with access to hardware and information, I see no reason that Linux can't scale that high properly, too. 16 CPUs today, 64 tomorrow. World domination next week :-)
Which is precisely why they're called BogoMIPS -- they're a completely bogus measurement of CPU speed. Trust me, each of those UltraSparc CPUs will blast your AMD out of the water...
So why stick with the x86 architecture? I've been running quad CPU Sparcs under Linux since 1996 or so (admittedly, SMP support was a bit ropey back then). Also, Sparc Linux happily scales to 16 CPUs, and you don't tend to run into the same "my frobnozz QX-439 chipset doesn't support more than 2 CPU" type issues.
All of that is 100% true. But companies will still ship buggy drivers. They do it all the time on Windoze. Why do you think UDI would be any different? If they can't be bothered to ship bug-free drivers for 90% of their market, they're sure as hell not going to do it for the rest of us. Furthermore, not only do they ship buggy drivers, but they frequently refuse to fix them.
Simply put, binary-only drivers are bad for Linux.
I think you're missing the point here, Bruce. The idea is not to divide the world into "them" and "us". It's to create high quality software that we have the freedom to modify and redistribute as we please. As such, LGPL would be a much better license for UDI drivers. Otherwise, we'll end in a situation where there have to be two (or more) UDI drivers for each device -- one GPL (for us) and one non-GPL that can be used by the proprietary Unices.
At my last job, I had a Sparc running Linux. It also had a Solaris disk in it (but I didn't boot into that much :-). To get at the fonts, I simply mounted the appropriate Solaris partitions and used xset fp+ to add the fonts directories to the font path. Under XFree86, you could also set the font path in XF86Config, but xset will work on any X server.
Multiple USB mice? It won't be long before someone wants to do it. Quake used mouse and keyboard simultaneously -- two mice isn't such a huge leap from that.
Yes, you are. There's nothing in the CDDB archive that isn't publically available elsewhere. Apart from anything else, I have not given CDDB permission to withold information I have submitted to them, and I doubt others have, either.
If you have an existing CDDB aware application, there's nothing they can do to prevent you from accessing the archive with it, and using the information in any way you see fit.