Gaming is intensely creative, in some contexts - Quake 3, Unreal, Ultima - almost approaching a new art form. The animation is rich and multi-dimensional, and violence is stylized, often presented more as a strategic challenge like chess than anything truly brutal or graphically violent.
Quake as an art form? I don't buy it at all. Quake Deathmatch is pure visceral violence: kill, kill, kill. Gratification is immediate and gory; Id couldn't have chosen a better name. Trust me, I've played a fair bit. Unreal is just visceral killing with bright colors -- there is no added "artistic value". And strategy? Deathmatch has no strategy. It is about reaction speed and skill, but not strategy. Team Fortress involves some strategy, but that is not an Id product. No: these games are *not* thoughtful, like chess. And if you truly consider them an art form, then you need to get out and see some art. "Kewl Grafix" are quite different than art. I don't believe that these violent games will turn healthy, well-adjusted school children into cold-blooded killers, but I can sure see why cold-blooded killers would like these games. I believe most Slashdot-readers feel similarly. And Katz, I can't believe that you had the nerve to write on this topic. This is an extremely sensitive subject for those of us in the states right now. While we are trying to sort through this, we do NOT need your pompous musings on the advent of the digital age. I didn't even detect any attempt at compassion in your piece. I am rather upset that you tried to make an article out of this tragedy. --Lenny, who very seldom rants.
//"You can't prove anything about a program written in C or FORTRAN. It's really just Peek and Poke with some syntactic sugar."
Mandrake's original draw was the whole KDE+Red Hat thing, which appealed to a lot of people back when Red Hat refused to touch K. I expect that the existence of Mandrake helped push Red Hat to include KDE in RH 6.
Now that an "alternative" Red Hat that includes KDE isn't needed anymore, though, I was wondering what Mandrake would do with themselves. Well, apparently they've found a very worthy case to pursue. Even if this project doesn't suceed (and I hope that it does), it will pressure Red Hat to improve *their* hardware configuration support, just to stay up with the "competition".
I see this cycle continuing: Red Hat overlooks something that the users want, so people put together a "better" Red Hat that addresses these issues. In order not to lose users, Red Hat realizes that it must develop these features for it's release. And most will happily stay with Red Hat as a result.
This is all As It Should Be, as far as I am concerned.
--Lenny
//"You can't prove anything about a program written in C or FORTRAN. It's really just Peek and Poke with some syntactic sugar."
And all (most) the college kids find summer jobs or internships. Sometimes the firms that hire them underestimate their abilities or just don't have much work to hand them (or the kids just slack). So these students browse the web all day because they are Bored At Work.:)
just my hunch, --Lenny (who wishes people would miss his posts on occasion)
//"You can't prove anything about a program written in C or FORTRAN. It's really just Peek and Poke with some syntactic sugar."
So can linux 2.2 compile with egcs now?
on
egcs to become gcc
·
· Score: 1
I was under the impression that kernel 2.0 was dependent upon a few quirks of the gcc compiler and would not properly compile under egcs. Is this not the case for kernel 2.2? As I saw it, this was one of the fundamental reasons for keeping gcc around, and if modern kernels are no longer tied to gcc, then all the better.
Looks like another long-awaited change that will (hopefully) make it into RH 6.0 --Lenny
//"You can't prove anything about a program written in C or FORTRAN. It's really just Peek and Poke with some syntactic sugar."
"So-called IP address"? Is there any doubt?
on
"Hackers" are Dumb
·
· Score: 1
This article was definately about script kiddies. The dangerous/skilled hackers don't just mince HTML. And I expect that they are considerably more difficult to track.
And the author of the Melissa virus didn't "sign" it, MS did that for him and he just didn't try and remove it (perhaps he was unaware). Also, from what I've heard, the guy who wrote the virus isn't the one who released it.
--Lenny
//"You can't prove anything about a program written in C or FORTRAN. It's really just Peek and Poke with some syntactic sugar."
>How do I do this? Bewolf does not seem to be this.
Beowulf certainly does not. You want a myriad of nodes to act as one single REALLY FAST computer which, I dare say, is the Holy Grail of clustering. If you discover a good way of doing this, than the computing world will knock down your door.:)
SMP systems will be able to split your threads between processors, yielding a significant speedup, but SMP systems are shared memory devices. Clusters are not, so communication happens over the network.
To take advantage of a cluster, apps have to be custom written to coordinate over seperate machines, connected by a network. The kernel provides virtually no abstraction here...the application author has to fully specify the coordination between components of his task.
I believe CORBA is meant to help in cases such as this, by providing services with a layer of network transparency. I'm not too familiar with the beast, but it seems like one could write a CORBA app that would, say, perform a FFT calculation on a chunk of data and return the result. Then, you could have a cluster of identical machines networked together, all with this service. You would have a "master" node that you were doing your work on. Whenever you needed to perform a FFT on a vector of data, your application would break up the vector and send requests out to all available systems for a FFT "service", and collect the results when the nodes return their answers.
There may be modern approaches to distributed computing that are more elegant than the above...this is not an area in which I conduct research. In general, though, I think that the problem is far from solved, and still an area of active research.
sorry that I couldn't provide you with a more satisfying answer,
--Lenny
//"You can't prove anything about a program written in C or FORTRAN. It's really just Peek and Poke with some syntactic sugar."
About four months after I bought my current monitor, the display went inexplicably dead. After a day or so, whenever I turned on the monitor, 2-inch long blue sparks would shoot out of the power supply in back, scorching my table and making impressive crackling noises. I showed it to my friends and they all agreed: it was seriously cool.
It was still well within warranty, so I shipped it back to Princeton with a nice note about the lightning. A few weeks later, I got it back, all fixed and fully functional. The note attached simply said: "resoldered power supply...".
I don't know if the electrical arcs hurt anything internally, but I'm still happily using this monitor 2 years later, so...
--Lenny
//"You can't prove anything about a program written in C or FORTRAN. It's really just Peek and Poke with some syntactic sugar."
>Second, on an old gateway 486 my roommate put the >power supply cables in wrong and turned it on. >Nothing happen. He simply switch the cables and >it worked fine. Maybe it was a good motherboard.
I've attached power supply cables backwards as well. My system did nothing and nothing was damaged, but it scared me half to death. I will forever have "black cables go on the *inside*" etched in my mind. Also, one of my friends accidentally put a 486 CPU in at a 90 degree angle from the correct position. He was lucky: when he powered up the system, nothing happened, and nothing was hurt. Again, though: it scared the hell out of us.
And all the PC screws I've ever seen have been basic Phillips heads.
--Lenny
//"You can't prove anything about a program written in C or FORTRAN. It's really just Peek and Poke with some syntactic sugar."
No, I'm not. It's just that I'm talking about kernels here. Unless I'm mistaken, even the 8.x series of MacOS kernels lacks pre-emptive multitasking and protected memory. These concepts have been well understood for decades and their power proven time and again. And this is not deep magic. Heck, even *I* have written a kernel with pre-emptive multitasking and protected memory.
I don't consider a decent GUI and environment a technology, though some would argue that it is. It *is* an important aspect of computing, however. That is what I was referring to with the "many other things going for it" line.
As for RISC, I would question your history. Unfortunately, I don't have a decent source on me to reference, so I'm not going to be able to argue with you.
BTW- I don't consider many of Window's features "high end". I'm largely interested in computing from a systems perspective. BeOS is reminescant of MacOS in many ways, but the kernel, API, and filesystem are all far more advanced from a strictly technical standpoint. The performance (especially on multimedia) is supposed to be quite impressive as a result.
--Lenny
//"You can't prove anything about a program written in C or FORTRAN. It's really just Peek and Poke with some syntactic sugar."
I guess Mac's are officially "mainstream" again...
on
EvangeList closes down
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· Score: 1
All the fringe types are going to have to find a new fringe platform to support. They'll probably switch over to BeOS. I can very easily see BeOS becoming the next Amiga in terms of advocacy. Atleast it is technically sound. Macs have alot going for them, but MacOS is still quite technologically primitive. Maybe OS X will change things...
Linux is good and it's politics are better, but it's also probably too mainstream for the "oppressed" these days. Who knows? Perhaps those seeking a cause will come upon FreeBSD. Instead of Mac vs. Big Evil MS, the struggle could be FreeBSD vs. Big Evil Linux. Then again, nah...
--Lenny
//"You can't prove anything about a program written in C or FORTRAN. It's really just Peek and Poke with some syntactic sugar."
LGPL is not "infectious" like the pure GPL. For instance, people can write proprietary code that works with GTK. The reason that people want a LGPL Qt is so that the community can control patches and fixes that may be necessary as time goes on.
>PS Cmdrtaco, how about mentioning this next time you post an article from the NY Times?
Well, there may be issues on legality (I'm not sure how it all works), but even if this is legal, I think that it would be in poor taste to post logins and passwords to other sites. Sure, sites that require passwords may be annoying, but its their site, so they get to pick the rules.
...and as long as they continue to license their tools and software under the GPL, they can not become "the next MS". Think about Mandrake...people used it because they like RH but they also like KDE. Red Hat got the message and, since the license change, KDE will be included in RH 6.0 (atleast as an option). Now people will move back to Red Hat. With the GPL, we will always have this branching option.
I can't even think of examples where Red Hat has bullied other distros around (yes: I remember the LSB, but I understand that that is somewhat rectified, and I still wouldn't call it bullying).
Many are complaining that the new Palm's should have had 8 MB anyway. I'm not sure that I agree. I know plenty of people who don't need anymore than the 1 MB that comes on their Palm Pro. Those apps are *tiny*, so it doesn't take much room to load up.
I know that there are always things that you could find to fill up the extra RAM, but I'm not sure that it really adds to the usefulness of the product. mp3? Get a Rio instead, or wait for an integration sort of affair. This thing wasn't meant to replace a Discman, anyway.
The reason the Palms are successful is that they are well designed with a clean, efficient, and highly usable UI in a compact package. The hardware doesn't need to be blazingly fast, since those apps aren't exactly proc-hogs anyway. Most of what sets the Palms apart is the software. Sure you can get a stacked WinCE machine, but what good is that? I don't want to try and run WordCE...the palmtop is not the best platform for that kind of work. MS and others are trying to push palmtops as "really small PC's", but I don't think such a product is terribly useful. 3com has the right idea, as far as I am concerned...
All intelligently designed hardware leaves room for improvement. When they come out with a newer version with more RAM, different screen, faster proc, or whatever, it's a lot nicer if they can keep the same already designed and proven motherboard to connect the newer/different components. My motherboard can move faster than my CPU...that is so I can upgrade later and not have to buy a new MB as well. And you better believe it can support more RAM than I have...
Of course, the room that they leave for improvement can be used by intrepid soles such as this one in Japan.
Also, as has been mentioned, the Palm V is only superior to the Palm IIIx cosmetically. If you are interested in the raw tech, go with IIIx.
...all of the features that you mentioned that you like in KDE are in WM as well. Plus, WM has a few WONDERFUL features that I haven't seen anywhere else (like ALT + drag to move/resize).
I ran KDE for a while (back in the Beta 2 days). I like that it's clean, modern, and friendly to people coming from Windows. But then I found WM and there was no going back (though I still use a few of the nifty little K apps). I need to take a close look at KDE 1.1 and see what all has changed.
Clusters are definately a better idea for something as blatently parallel as non-real-time rendering. Commodity parts are vastly more cost effective. However, this is a very special case. Most applications require far more bandwidth for heavy interprocess communication. Try such an application on a Beowulf-type system and you can watch it fall flat on it's face. Suddenly computation is I/O bound, and the Cray really earns it's keep.
Things like Crays are expensive mainly because they have very special, very fast hardware for this purpose. It may be extraneous hardware for something straight ahead like a render farm, but there are many cases where such massive bandwidth is very necessary. Thus, for most applications, replacing a Cray with a Beowulf cluster just isn't an acceptable solution.
Beowulf clustering has been proven to be a cost-effective non-real-time rendering system, however. --Lenny
...which is equivalent to loading a service pack in the Windows world. How many people run stock NT 4.0? Even clueless users know better: they make sure to keep up with service packs. Using RH 5.2 plus updates is as close to "off the shelf" as a standard production line Windows system.
Just because teachers will be using Linux/GNOME in school does NOT mean that they will be teaching more fundamental or universal concepts of how computers work than if they had Windows machines. You know what it takes for that? Good teachers and motivated students.
Most people simply want to be able to poke around a GUI, learn how to use very specific applications and know as little as possible about the underlying product. They take "business computing" classes or some such and avoid CS. We think of this as "point and drool", but that is all most people WANT. And you know what? GNOME and KDE will let you point in drool almost as much as Windows.
Now if the teacher and students are motivated to learn more about a computer ANYWAY, than Linux is great, because they will be able to tinker with/study anything in the system at all. It has wonderful academic potential, but once again you need a good teacher to make any USE of this.
The bottom line is this: replacing Windows with GNOME is going to have little effect on those who only wanted to learn application specific skills. They'll just learn GNOME-specific skills instead which will be even less useful than equivalent Windows skills because Windows is far more common (although that might change in Mexico).
And you know what? Mexico isn't installing these systems because they too have tasted the grand spirit of Open Source Software. They are doing it because they're broke and can't afford MS. That isn't a bad reason, but it is a BUSINESS decision, irrespective of underlying technology. Honestly, they probably also resent US companies anyway and like using "Mexican" software. If MS is seen as typical of US business, I'd resent it too. If I was Mexican I'd take pride in Miguel, and if I was Finnish I would take pride in Linus. Nationalism counts for something, no?
If I were in school right now, I know I'd prefer Linux over Windows, but I am hardly typical. Of course even when I WAS in school, we learned general programming principles, not how to use DOS. Why? Because I was in CS courses, not business courses and because I had a good teacher.
And, in my opinion, it is a terrible site. Even since the update, the site is poorly organized, updated infrequently, low on information and just generally makes Linux look bad. And I remember the layout they had before this current one...it was even worse and their background didn't even TILE properly. Not even close. It looked wretched. Some college kids run better done sites out of their dorm rooms.
Plus the guy who runs it is the same one who tried to start up that "standard Linux" movement that got everyone so fired up.
I'm glad VA has linux.com . I expect that they will use it well...
Slashdot Mirror
//"You can't prove anything about a program written in C or FORTRAN.
It's really just Peek and Poke with some syntactic sugar."
Mandrake's original draw was the whole KDE+Red Hat thing, which appealed to a lot of people back when Red Hat refused to touch K. I expect that the existence of Mandrake helped push Red Hat to include KDE in RH 6.
Now that an "alternative" Red Hat that includes KDE isn't needed anymore, though, I was wondering what Mandrake would do with themselves. Well, apparently they've found a very worthy case to pursue. Even if this project doesn't suceed (and I hope that it does), it will pressure Red Hat to improve *their* hardware configuration support, just to stay up with the "competition".
I see this cycle continuing: Red Hat overlooks something that the users want, so people put together a "better" Red Hat that addresses these issues. In order not to lose users, Red Hat realizes that it must develop these features for it's release. And most will happily stay with Red Hat as a result.
This is all As It Should Be, as far as I am concerned.
--Lenny
//"You can't prove anything about a program written in C or FORTRAN.
It's really just Peek and Poke with some syntactic sugar."
And all (most) the college kids find summer jobs or internships. Sometimes the firms that hire them underestimate their abilities or just don't have much work to hand them (or the kids just slack). So these students browse the web all day because they are Bored At Work. :)
just my hunch,
--Lenny (who wishes people would miss his posts on occasion)
//"You can't prove anything about a program written in C or FORTRAN.
It's really just Peek and Poke with some syntactic sugar."
I was under the impression that kernel 2.0 was dependent upon a few quirks of the gcc compiler and would not properly compile under egcs. Is this not the case for kernel 2.2? As I saw it, this was one of the fundamental reasons for keeping gcc around, and if modern kernels are no longer tied to gcc, then all the better.
Looks like another long-awaited change that will (hopefully) make it into RH 6.0
--Lenny
//"You can't prove anything about a program written in C or FORTRAN.
It's really just Peek and Poke with some syntactic sugar."
This article was definately about script kiddies. The dangerous/skilled hackers don't just mince HTML. And I expect that they are considerably more difficult to track.
And the author of the Melissa virus didn't "sign" it, MS did that for him and he just didn't try and remove it (perhaps he was unaware). Also, from what I've heard, the guy who wrote the virus isn't the one who released it.
--Lenny
//"You can't prove anything about a program written in C or FORTRAN.
It's really just Peek and Poke with some syntactic sugar."
>How do I do this? Bewolf does not seem to be this.
:)
Beowulf certainly does not. You want a myriad of nodes to act as one single REALLY FAST computer which, I dare say, is the Holy Grail of clustering. If you discover a good way of doing this, than the computing world will knock down your door.
SMP systems will be able to split your threads between processors, yielding a significant speedup, but SMP systems are shared memory devices. Clusters are not, so communication happens over the network.
To take advantage of a cluster, apps have to be custom written to coordinate over seperate machines, connected by a network. The kernel provides virtually no abstraction here...the application author has to fully specify the coordination between components of his task.
I believe CORBA is meant to help in cases such as this, by providing services with a layer of network transparency. I'm not too familiar with the beast, but it seems like one could write a CORBA app that would, say, perform a FFT calculation on a chunk of data and return the result. Then, you could have a cluster of identical machines networked together, all with this service. You would have a "master" node that you were doing your work on. Whenever you needed to perform a FFT on a vector of data, your application would break up the vector and send requests out to all available systems for a FFT "service", and collect the results when the nodes return their answers.
There may be modern approaches to distributed computing that are more elegant than the above...this is not an area in which I conduct research. In general, though, I think that the problem is far from solved, and still an area of active research.
sorry that I couldn't provide you with a more satisfying answer,
--Lenny
//"You can't prove anything about a program written in C or FORTRAN.
It's really just Peek and Poke with some syntactic sugar."
This is no fault of my own, but...
About four months after I bought my current monitor, the display went inexplicably dead. After a day or so, whenever I turned on the monitor, 2-inch long blue sparks would shoot out of the power supply in back, scorching my table and making impressive crackling noises. I showed it to my friends and they all agreed: it was seriously cool.
It was still well within warranty, so I shipped it back to Princeton with a nice note about the lightning. A few weeks later, I got it back, all fixed and fully functional. The note attached simply said: "resoldered power supply...".
I don't know if the electrical arcs hurt anything internally, but I'm still happily using this monitor 2 years later, so...
--Lenny
//"You can't prove anything about a program written in C or FORTRAN.
It's really just Peek and Poke with some syntactic sugar."
>Second, on an old gateway 486 my roommate put the >power supply cables in wrong and turned it on. >Nothing happen. He simply switch the cables and >it worked fine. Maybe it was a good motherboard.
I've attached power supply cables backwards as well. My system did nothing and nothing was damaged, but it scared me half to death. I will forever have "black cables go on the *inside*" etched in my mind. Also, one of my friends accidentally put a 486 CPU in at a 90 degree angle from the correct position. He was lucky: when he powered up the system, nothing happened, and nothing was hurt. Again, though: it scared the hell out of us.
And all the PC screws I've ever seen have been basic Phillips heads.
--Lenny
//"You can't prove anything about a program written in C or FORTRAN.
It's really just Peek and Poke with some syntactic sugar."
This sounds like a large step forward technology-wise. I wish them well.
--Lenny
//"You can't prove anything about a program written in C or FORTRAN.
It's really just Peek and Poke with some syntactic sugar."
> Primitive? Are you deranged?
No, I'm not. It's just that I'm talking about kernels here. Unless I'm mistaken, even the 8.x series of MacOS kernels lacks pre-emptive multitasking and protected memory. These concepts have been well understood for decades and their power proven time and again. And this is not deep magic. Heck, even *I* have written a kernel with pre-emptive multitasking and protected memory.
I don't consider a decent GUI and environment a technology, though some would argue that it is. It *is* an important aspect of computing, however. That is what I was referring to with the "many other things going for it" line.
As for RISC, I would question your history. Unfortunately, I don't have a decent source on me to reference, so I'm not going to be able to argue with you.
BTW- I don't consider many of Window's features "high end". I'm largely interested in computing from a systems perspective. BeOS is reminescant of MacOS in many ways, but the kernel, API, and filesystem are all far more advanced from a strictly technical standpoint. The performance (especially on multimedia) is supposed to be quite impressive as a result.
--Lenny
//"You can't prove anything about a program written in C or FORTRAN.
It's really just Peek and Poke with some syntactic sugar."
All the fringe types are going to have to find a new fringe platform to support. They'll probably switch over to BeOS. I can very easily see BeOS becoming the next Amiga in terms of advocacy. Atleast it is technically sound. Macs have alot going for them, but MacOS is still quite technologically primitive. Maybe OS X will change things...
Linux is good and it's politics are better, but it's also probably too mainstream for the "oppressed" these days. Who knows? Perhaps those seeking a cause will come upon FreeBSD. Instead of Mac vs. Big Evil MS, the struggle could be FreeBSD vs. Big Evil Linux. Then again, nah...
--Lenny
//"You can't prove anything about a program written in C or FORTRAN.
It's really just Peek and Poke with some syntactic sugar."
I've heard nothing but horror stories about Fantasm. Surely there is something better out of the GNU project.
--Lenny
//"You can't prove anything about a program written in C or FORTRAN.
It's really just Peek and Poke with some syntactic sugar."
LGPL is not "infectious" like the pure GPL. For instance, people can write proprietary code that works with GTK. The reason that people want a LGPL Qt is so that the community can control patches and fixes that may be necessary as time goes on.
--Lenny
>PS Cmdrtaco, how about mentioning this next time you post an article from the NY Times?
Well, there may be issues on legality (I'm not sure how it all works), but even if this is legal, I think that it would be in poor taste to post logins and passwords to other sites. Sure, sites that require passwords may be annoying, but its their site, so they get to pick the rules.
--Lenny
...and as long as they continue to license their tools and software under the GPL, they can not become "the next MS". Think about Mandrake...people used it because they like RH but they also like KDE. Red Hat got the message and, since the license change, KDE will be included in RH 6.0 (atleast as an option). Now people will move back to Red Hat. With the GPL, we will always have this branching option.
I can't even think of examples where Red Hat has bullied other distros around (yes: I remember the LSB, but I understand that that is somewhat rectified, and I still wouldn't call it bullying).
--Lenny
If this was written by their "tech journalist" than they need to find a new one. The inaccuracy and lack of understanding was painful.
--Lenny
Many are complaining that the new Palm's should have had 8 MB anyway. I'm not sure that I agree. I know plenty of people who don't need anymore than the 1 MB that comes on their Palm Pro. Those apps are *tiny*, so it doesn't take much room to load up.
I know that there are always things that you could find to fill up the extra RAM, but I'm not sure that it really adds to the usefulness of the product. mp3? Get a Rio instead, or wait for an integration sort of affair. This thing wasn't meant to replace a Discman, anyway.
The reason the Palms are successful is that they are well designed with a clean, efficient, and highly usable UI in a compact package. The hardware doesn't need to be blazingly fast, since those apps aren't exactly proc-hogs anyway. Most of what sets the Palms apart is the software. Sure you can get a stacked WinCE machine, but what good is that? I don't want to try and run WordCE...the palmtop is not the best platform for that kind of work. MS and others are trying to push palmtops as "really small PC's", but I don't think such a product is terribly useful. 3com has the right idea, as far as I am concerned...
wondering if he will get flamed,
--Lenny
All intelligently designed hardware leaves room for improvement. When they come out with a newer version with more RAM, different screen, faster proc, or whatever, it's a lot nicer if they can keep the same already designed and proven motherboard to connect the newer/different components. My motherboard can move faster than my CPU...that is so I can upgrade later and not have to buy a new MB as well. And you better believe it can support more RAM than I have...
Of course, the room that they leave for improvement can be used by intrepid soles such as this one in Japan.
Also, as has been mentioned, the Palm V is only superior to the Palm IIIx cosmetically. If you are interested in the raw tech, go with IIIx.
--Lenny
...all of the features that you mentioned that you like in KDE are in WM as well. Plus, WM has a few WONDERFUL features that I haven't seen anywhere else (like ALT + drag to move/resize).
I ran KDE for a while (back in the Beta 2 days). I like that it's clean, modern, and friendly to people coming from Windows. But then I found WM and there was no going back (though I still use a few of the nifty little K apps). I need to take a close look at KDE 1.1 and see what all has changed.
--Lenny
Clusters are definately a better idea for something as blatently parallel as non-real-time rendering. Commodity parts are vastly more cost effective. However, this is a very special case. Most applications require far more bandwidth for heavy interprocess communication. Try such an application on a Beowulf-type system and you can watch it fall flat on it's face. Suddenly computation is I/O bound, and the Cray really earns it's keep.
Things like Crays are expensive mainly because they have very special, very fast hardware for this purpose. It may be extraneous hardware for something straight ahead like a render farm, but there are many cases where such massive bandwidth is very necessary. Thus, for most applications, replacing a Cray with a Beowulf cluster just isn't an acceptable solution.
Beowulf clustering has been proven to be a cost-effective non-real-time rendering system, however.
--Lenny
...which is equivalent to loading a service pack in the Windows world. How many people run stock NT 4.0? Even clueless users know better: they make sure to keep up with service packs. Using RH 5.2 plus updates is as close to "off the shelf" as a standard production line Windows system.
--Lenny
and Caldera hit them with a big lawsuit over it.
...but I can't say much for the rest of the environment. Still, the pager was truly a thing of joy. FVWM's isn't anywhere close to as useful.
BTW- I use textedit some as well. It's a lousy program, though. Now I mostly use strait Emacs or KWrite.
--Lenny
Just because teachers will be using Linux/GNOME in school does NOT mean that they will be teaching more fundamental or universal concepts of how computers work than if they had Windows machines. You know what it takes for that? Good teachers and motivated students.
Most people simply want to be able to poke around a GUI, learn how to use very specific applications and know as little as possible about the underlying product. They take "business computing" classes or some such and avoid CS. We think of this as "point and drool", but that is all most people WANT. And you know what? GNOME and KDE will let you point in drool almost as much as Windows.
Now if the teacher and students are motivated to learn more about a computer ANYWAY, than Linux is great, because they will be able to tinker with/study anything in the system at all.
It has wonderful academic potential, but once again you need a good teacher to make any USE of this.
The bottom line is this: replacing Windows with GNOME is going to have little effect on those who only wanted to learn application specific skills. They'll just learn GNOME-specific skills instead which will be even less useful than equivalent Windows skills because Windows is far more common (although that might change in Mexico).
And you know what? Mexico isn't installing these systems because they too have tasted the grand spirit of Open Source Software. They are doing it because they're broke and can't afford MS. That isn't a bad reason, but it is a BUSINESS decision, irrespective of underlying technology. Honestly, they probably also resent US companies anyway and like using "Mexican" software. If MS is seen as typical of US business, I'd resent it too. If I was Mexican I'd take pride in Miguel, and if I was Finnish I would take pride in Linus. Nationalism counts for something, no?
If I were in school right now, I know I'd prefer Linux over Windows, but I am hardly typical. Of course even when I WAS in school, we learned general programming principles, not how to use DOS. Why? Because I was in CS courses, not business courses and because I had a good teacher.
Again I state: the teacher makes the difference.
--Lenny
And, in my opinion, it is a terrible site. Even since the update, the site is poorly organized, updated infrequently, low on information and just generally makes Linux look bad. And I remember the layout they had before this current one...it was even worse and their background didn't even TILE properly. Not even close. It looked wretched. Some college kids run better done sites out of their dorm rooms.
Plus the guy who runs it is the same one who tried to start up that "standard Linux" movement that got everyone so fired up.
I'm glad VA has linux.com . I expect that they will use it well...
--Lenny