OK, well it seems to me that you're looking at a computer lab that:
1. runs Unix/Linux clients; 2. runs apps that don't make huge demands or the processor or memory, and which never require sound; 3. doesn't require simultaneous use of resources; 4. has a server very close to all the displays.
And those are only some of the limitations and issues that you're ignoring.
Look at the big picture here. I'm not saying that dumb terminals can't work, I'm simply pointing out that the average computer lab is not a suitable place to install them.
Thank you for explaining concepts like hot-swapping to me. It wasn't necessary, but thank you anyway.
If I'm in charge of a computer lab, then I'd rather have fully-functional PCs that would allow me to keep 7/8ths running in case of a single component failure, and which could be easily administered by even the least experienced of sysadmins (because I won't always be there) than one that's reliant on a hydra configuration that could take down every machine if one key component fails and which might be a nightmare to look after for the poor neophyte who's asked to fill in while I'm on holiday.
Again, what your talking about isn't just a hardware alternative, it's a hardware/software alternative, which means that there's a lot more in terms of configuration, etc that can go wrong than just a hardware failure.
As to whether everyone would be running their most CPU-intensive app at the same time, well, I put it to you that in a teaching environment that's exactly what's likely to happen: when a CAD class or a Photoshop class is going on, everyone's going to be using a CPU- and memory-intensive application simultaenously, and few setups are going to be able to handle eight such tasks individually as well as eight reasonably-priced fully-functional PCs.
Remember, there's a significant performance overhead just dealing with all that extra I/O, to worry about too, and even the smallest delay between a user moving a mouse/typing on a keyboard and seeing the results of that movement/typing can create a significant cognitive dissonance that will distract the user from the task their trying to complete.
There are so many issues here that need to be considered, and, without wanting to be at all patronising, I don't think that everyone who's commented here has thought them all through.
Like I've said in other posts, this is great for trading desks or running bowling lane dispays, but I am highly skeptical about how practical it would be over the well-established alternatives in the environments that the person that my original comment was addressed to had envisaged.
Well, in most computer labs environments the eight PCs will often be being used simutaneously, especially so in a teaching environment, such as a school, college or university.
In such a setting, eight individual desktops are probably far more suitable for the job than a single eight-headed hydra and I challenge anyone to show me any significant savings that can be made here.
Patching, maintenance and upgrades can easily be done simultaneously, and in the case of software, automated. If eight PCs are needed, then a ninth identical system can be bought too, as a spare if one goes down, giving a level of redundancy that a hydra solution can never give (back to the motherboard failure example that I gave earlier). Etc, etc.
Don't get me wrong, I'm sure being able to use eight monitors from one PC has its uses, and I can think of a few myself (from the obvious: trading desks, to the not so obvious: bowling alleys) but I am yet to be convinced that the average computer lab is one of them.
Well, once you introduce games to the mix, then you're truly screwed, because, let's face it, for games you want a recent Windows OS (2000, XP) and as much performance as a desktop can give you.
You certainly don't want to be trying to play games on a machine that's giving you a Windows experience via Wine while at the same time it's playing back video to two other displays, recording a TV show or two, downloading something and processing a filter in Photoshop. It's just not practical.
If there are a couple of people who need to do these various things at various times then you might get away with doing some of them without incurring too many performance-related penalties. But if there are half a dozen of you doing these various tasks at the same time then you're royally screwed.
And, we haven't even talked about how something as simple as sound would be handled...
I'm not saying that a hydra system isn't the way of the future, I'm just saying that this motherboard is far from being the final piece of the jigsaw.
Ask yourself this: do you need eight PCs in eight locations in the house? A gaming rig and two PCs to run office apps on? No? Well neither do most people.
In my ideal home network (based upon my home right now), I'd say the most I'd need are a gaming/office PC, a dedicated home theatre PC (that would service two locations around the house), and a RAID-5 server. Add to that a notebook or two, perhaps.
Sure, if I had a bigger family or lived in a mansion that had TVs all over the place then I might think differently, but I don't, and neither do the overwhelming majority of the people here.
You've made assumptions based upon having eight PCs. I'm saying that this hydra solution could potentially benefit some people in the home but most people, including me, don't need more than three or four machines total, and the benefits of asking one machine to do all the jobs that are best handled by three to four are less compelling than asking it to handle the workload of eight PCs. And, given that, then eight-way video driven by a single quad PCIe motherboard isn't something that many people's homes would benefit from.
I like the idea of an eight-head computer. I wonder what the price difference would be to equip a computer lab with octoheads instead of singles.
Why would you do this? You risk losing eight desktops instead of just one to a single component failure (eg, a faulty motherboard).
Standard entry-level desktops and workstations are commodity items now: their prices are so low, and they are so easy to acquire that I doubt that there would be much in the way of cost savings to be had when comparing eight single-CPU PCs to one eight-headed hydra.
Don't forget, to be able to run standard applications at the same speed as even the cheapest of today's desktops the hydra solution would have to have a serious amount of processing power, memory, etc. Once you factor all those things into the equation then you'll soon realise that, in almost every case, there is little or nothing (financially, technically or even physically) to be gained from going down that road.
Of course, a home is a little different from a computer lab. For one thing, in a home solution any bottlenecks would be fewer in number and far less severe than they would be in a lab environment, which makes such a solution more viable.
Even so, I know that I for one would rather prefer a dedicated desktop, a dedicated home theatre PC, etc connected by a LAN/WAN than a single-PC, all-my-eggs-in-one-basket solution.
It maybe called "islamic" but it's ruled by a relatively sane and secular dictator.
I believe the same description was probably given to Saddam Hussein by many a western politician before the Gulf War of 1990-91.
Do we really need to dust off those links to pictures and comments of Dick Cheney's visits to Hussein before that war, that show him happily shaking hands and praising Hussein, even whilst he was committing atrocities on his his fellow Iraqis as well as waging war with Iran?
I think many people forget that it was the non-governmental organisations and charities that alerted the world to many of his crimes then, and that he literally got away with murder on a mass scale with the tacit approval of the US and other western powers.
I do believe that Pakistan has peaceful intentions but don't fall into the dangerous trap of assuming that a non-hostile dictatorship today can't turn into hostile dicatorship tomorrow. That mistake has been made too many times in modern history.
Seriously though, those in power really don't give a shit. I could sugar-coat it, but that's the reality of the situation.
Just take what happened in New Orleans as an example. Was this a wake-up call about the potential devastation that climate change could cause? No, it was practically shrugged off as a "shit happens", and no real discussion as to the hows, the whys and the what could bes of global climate change ever entered the mainstream.
I feel for the people of New Orleans, I really do, and I don't disagree that their suffering and loss was newsworthy but you don't help avoid such disasters happening again by ignoring the wider issue.
Bottom line: there's a good chance that we're going to be part of a generation that will have some real apologising to do to generations to come because we were so nonchalant about our environment.
I can't be the only one who can see himself telling a grandchild that we pissed away the planet because we were too busy having a good time to care about anything else.
Cue the people living with their heads in the sand with their "Chicken Little" accusations...
Now, look at the tops of the White House and some of the surrounding buildings in that image: if those don't appear obscured (synonyms of which include buried, concealed, covert and hidden) to you then you really need to see an optician.
From what I have read, the Google Maps images of the White House, etc have been deliberately obscured because, amongst other things, they divulged the positions of the Secret Service on the roofs of those buildings.
Somehow I rather doubt that the footage on the Discovery channels includes that information but feel free to argue that it does.
Really? And how is what India wants anything different from what the US has already got?
Go to Google Maps. Try to look at the White House and the surrounding area. You'll see that a great deal of detail has been obscured, precisely because of the security concerns.
Just like the US, India has suffered at the hands of internationally-sponsored terrorism. Unlike the US, its actually had the misfortune of having its parliament and parliamentary officials attacked. And Indians have far more first-hand experience of being the brunt of terrorism than the US has had too. Google for the facts if you don't believe me.
India has legitimate security concerns here. Discussing how those concerns are best dealt with in a cooperative manner, as India has chosen to do, rather than confrontational one, as others have opted for in the past, is to be commended rather than condemned.
How someone chooses to moderate my posts (if at all) is down to them, not me. Seems that your issue is with the moderators, not with me. Perhaps you should address your posts accordingly.
My point is still valid. Pick any country and you will find people who are shockingly rich and those who are shockingly poor.
Short of forced redistribution of wealth on a massive scale that puts us all on a level playing field, that's always going to be the case, so why make a big deal about this particular case?
Well, aren't there people in your country who are billionaires? People who have far more money than they could possibly spend? Well, there are also people who live in abject poverty too.
I too have a beautiful LaCie 80GB Mobile Hard Drive, with USB/Firewire support, but it's worth noting that the drive (and other drives in LaCie's product range) are actually designed by FA Porsche, which is not directly related to Porsche the car manufacturer.
If I recall correctly, the Porsche responsible for setting up FA Porsche is a blood relation to the Porsche that set up the car company but that's the extent of the connection. I'm sure someone will correctly if I'm wrong.
Anyhow, the FA Porsche-designed drives stack nicely and neatly too, plus they have the added advantage of not making you look ridiculous if you have to take one to a client's site.
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OK, well it seems to me that you're looking at a computer lab that:
1. runs Unix/Linux clients;
2. runs apps that don't make huge demands or the processor or memory, and which never require sound;
3. doesn't require simultaneous use of resources;
4. has a server very close to all the displays.
And those are only some of the limitations and issues that you're ignoring.
Look at the big picture here. I'm not saying that dumb terminals can't work, I'm simply pointing out that the average computer lab is not a suitable place to install them.
Thank you for explaining concepts like hot-swapping to me. It wasn't necessary, but thank you anyway.
If I'm in charge of a computer lab, then I'd rather have fully-functional PCs that would allow me to keep 7/8ths running in case of a single component failure, and which could be easily administered by even the least experienced of sysadmins (because I won't always be there) than one that's reliant on a hydra configuration that could take down every machine if one key component fails and which might be a nightmare to look after for the poor neophyte who's asked to fill in while I'm on holiday.
Again, what your talking about isn't just a hardware alternative, it's a hardware/software alternative, which means that there's a lot more in terms of configuration, etc that can go wrong than just a hardware failure.
As to whether everyone would be running their most CPU-intensive app at the same time, well, I put it to you that in a teaching environment that's exactly what's likely to happen: when a CAD class or a Photoshop class is going on, everyone's going to be using a CPU- and memory-intensive application simultaenously, and few setups are going to be able to handle eight such tasks individually as well as eight reasonably-priced fully-functional PCs.
Remember, there's a significant performance overhead just dealing with all that extra I/O, to worry about too, and even the smallest delay between a user moving a mouse/typing on a keyboard and seeing the results of that movement/typing can create a significant cognitive dissonance that will distract the user from the task their trying to complete.
There are so many issues here that need to be considered, and, without wanting to be at all patronising, I don't think that everyone who's commented here has thought them all through.
Like I've said in other posts, this is great for trading desks or running bowling lane dispays, but I am highly skeptical about how practical it would be over the well-established alternatives in the environments that the person that my original comment was addressed to had envisaged.
Well, in most computer labs environments the eight PCs will often be being used simutaneously, especially so in a teaching environment, such as a school, college or university.
In such a setting, eight individual desktops are probably far more suitable for the job than a single eight-headed hydra and I challenge anyone to show me any significant savings that can be made here.
Patching, maintenance and upgrades can easily be done simultaneously, and in the case of software, automated. If eight PCs are needed, then a ninth identical system can be bought too, as a spare if one goes down, giving a level of redundancy that a hydra solution can never give (back to the motherboard failure example that I gave earlier). Etc, etc.
Don't get me wrong, I'm sure being able to use eight monitors from one PC has its uses, and I can think of a few myself (from the obvious: trading desks, to the not so obvious: bowling alleys) but I am yet to be convinced that the average computer lab is one of them.
Well, once you introduce games to the mix, then you're truly screwed, because, let's face it, for games you want a recent Windows OS (2000, XP) and as much performance as a desktop can give you.
You certainly don't want to be trying to play games on a machine that's giving you a Windows experience via Wine while at the same time it's playing back video to two other displays, recording a TV show or two, downloading something and processing a filter in Photoshop. It's just not practical.
If there are a couple of people who need to do these various things at various times then you might get away with doing some of them without incurring too many performance-related penalties. But if there are half a dozen of you doing these various tasks at the same time then you're royally screwed.
And, we haven't even talked about how something as simple as sound would be handled...
I'm not saying that a hydra system isn't the way of the future, I'm just saying that this motherboard is far from being the final piece of the jigsaw.
Ask yourself this: do you need eight PCs in eight locations in the house? A gaming rig and two PCs to run office apps on? No? Well neither do most people.
In my ideal home network (based upon my home right now), I'd say the most I'd need are a gaming/office PC, a dedicated home theatre PC (that would service two locations around the house), and a RAID-5 server. Add to that a notebook or two, perhaps.
Sure, if I had a bigger family or lived in a mansion that had TVs all over the place then I might think differently, but I don't, and neither do the overwhelming majority of the people here.
You've made assumptions based upon having eight PCs. I'm saying that this hydra solution could potentially benefit some people in the home but most people, including me, don't need more than three or four machines total, and the benefits of asking one machine to do all the jobs that are best handled by three to four are less compelling than asking it to handle the workload of eight PCs. And, given that, then eight-way video driven by a single quad PCIe motherboard isn't something that many people's homes would benefit from.
I hope that clarifies what I said before.
I like the idea of an eight-head computer. I wonder what the price difference would be to equip a computer lab with octoheads instead of singles.
Why would you do this? You risk losing eight desktops instead of just one to a single component failure (eg, a faulty motherboard).
Standard entry-level desktops and workstations are commodity items now: their prices are so low, and they are so easy to acquire that I doubt that there would be much in the way of cost savings to be had when comparing eight single-CPU PCs to one eight-headed hydra.
Don't forget, to be able to run standard applications at the same speed as even the cheapest of today's desktops the hydra solution would have to have a serious amount of processing power, memory, etc. Once you factor all those things into the equation then you'll soon realise that, in almost every case, there is little or nothing (financially, technically or even physically) to be gained from going down that road.
Of course, a home is a little different from a computer lab. For one thing, in a home solution any bottlenecks would be fewer in number and far less severe than they would be in a lab environment, which makes such a solution more viable.
Even so, I know that I for one would rather prefer a dedicated desktop, a dedicated home theatre PC, etc connected by a LAN/WAN than a single-PC, all-my-eggs-in-one-basket solution.
It maybe called "islamic" but it's ruled by a relatively sane and secular dictator.
I believe the same description was probably given to Saddam Hussein by many a western politician before the Gulf War of 1990-91.
Do we really need to dust off those links to pictures and comments of Dick Cheney's visits to Hussein before that war, that show him happily shaking hands and praising Hussein, even whilst he was committing atrocities on his his fellow Iraqis as well as waging war with Iran?
I think many people forget that it was the non-governmental organisations and charities that alerted the world to many of his crimes then, and that he literally got away with murder on a mass scale with the tacit approval of the US and other western powers.
I do believe that Pakistan has peaceful intentions but don't fall into the dangerous trap of assuming that a non-hostile dictatorship today can't turn into hostile dicatorship tomorrow. That mistake has been made too many times in modern history.
You, like many others here, miss my point entirely.
If we continue to ignore the warning signs then, pretty soon, New Orleans 2005 might not be the exception, it may well be the rule.
And what about the causes of the increased hurricane activity in the Gulf of Mexico? Or did you forget about those facts?
..."LA-LA-LA-LA-LA I CAN'T HEAR YOU!"
Seriously though, those in power really don't give a shit. I could sugar-coat it, but that's the reality of the situation.
Just take what happened in New Orleans as an example. Was this a wake-up call about the potential devastation that climate change could cause? No, it was practically shrugged off as a "shit happens", and no real discussion as to the hows, the whys and the what could bes of global climate change ever entered the mainstream.
I feel for the people of New Orleans, I really do, and I don't disagree that their suffering and loss was newsworthy but you don't help avoid such disasters happening again by ignoring the wider issue.
Bottom line: there's a good chance that we're going to be part of a generation that will have some real apologising to do to generations to come because we were so nonchalant about our environment.
I can't be the only one who can see himself telling a grandchild that we pissed away the planet because we were too busy having a good time to care about anything else.
Cue the people living with their heads in the sand with their "Chicken Little" accusations...
As for that book, I see it as an anti-catholic conspiracy theory, and I don't get why it's so popular - I can find any number of those on crank.net.
Sometimes an entertaining book is just an entertaining book.
If in doubt, ask what Robocop would do:
1: Serve the public trust.
2: Protect the innocent.
3: Uphold the law.
I'm replying to your post via Opera 8.01. It does exactly what you talked about originally. Tell me again how this behaviour is missing in Opera?
If it walks like a duck, looks like a duck and sounds like a duck then it's probably a duck.
What version of Opera did you last use? Opera 8 does exactly what you're talking about too, as did Opera 6 and 7, if I remember correctly.
More FUD and false claims from yet another Slashdotter who hasn't used a version of Opera for years but talks like they're some sort of expert.
The mind does indeed boggle... at the foolishness of this and many of the other anti-Opera statements that so often crop up in stories on Slashdot.
How? Because she was a civilian? Sorry, but you need to look up the definition of "international".
An American space shuttle, with an all-American crew, including an American civilian blowing up is a tragedy, but it's not an "international" tragedy.
Just because something is a first, that doesn't make it international in its scope.
I didn't say blurred, I said obscured.
Now, look at the tops of the White House and some of the surrounding buildings in that image: if those don't appear obscured (synonyms of which include buried, concealed, covert and hidden) to you then you really need to see an optician.
From what I have read, the Google Maps images of the White House, etc have been deliberately obscured because, amongst other things, they divulged the positions of the Secret Service on the roofs of those buildings.
Somehow I rather doubt that the footage on the Discovery channels includes that information but feel free to argue that it does.
Really? And how is what India wants anything different from what the US has already got?
Go to Google Maps. Try to look at the White House and the surrounding area. You'll see that a great deal of detail has been obscured, precisely because of the security concerns.
Just like the US, India has suffered at the hands of internationally-sponsored terrorism. Unlike the US, its actually had the misfortune of having its parliament and parliamentary officials attacked. And Indians have far more first-hand experience of being the brunt of terrorism than the US has had too. Google for the facts if you don't believe me.
India has legitimate security concerns here. Discussing how those concerns are best dealt with in a cooperative manner, as India has chosen to do, rather than confrontational one, as others have opted for in the past, is to be commended rather than condemned.
How someone chooses to moderate my posts (if at all) is down to them, not me. Seems that your issue is with the moderators, not with me. Perhaps you should address your posts accordingly.
You need help.
My point is still valid. Pick any country and you will find people who are shockingly rich and those who are shockingly poor.
Short of forced redistribution of wealth on a massive scale that puts us all on a level playing field, that's always going to be the case, so why make a big deal about this particular case?
You're probably an American.
Well, aren't there people in your country who are billionaires? People who have far more money than they could possibly spend? Well, there are also people who live in abject poverty too.
Tell me, how is that any different?
P.S. The earthquake affected parts of India too.
FYI, the USSR hasn't existed for well over a decade now.
I too have a beautiful LaCie 80GB Mobile Hard Drive, with USB/Firewire support, but it's worth noting that the drive (and other drives in LaCie's product range) are actually designed by FA Porsche, which is not directly related to Porsche the car manufacturer.
If I recall correctly, the Porsche responsible for setting up FA Porsche is a blood relation to the Porsche that set up the car company but that's the extent of the connection. I'm sure someone will correctly if I'm wrong.
Anyhow, the FA Porsche-designed drives stack nicely and neatly too, plus they have the added advantage of not making you look ridiculous if you have to take one to a client's site.
"Add to that a CCTV camera on virtually every street corner..."
One word, two syllables: first one is "bull", second one is "shit". 'Nuff said.