I work in an enviroinment were real computing starts at 16 GB of RAM. Scientific computing. The funny thing is that it's not the programs. Often the programs take up a couple of hundred KB in memory themselves, but the data takes up huge quantities. I'll use an example I saw on some beowulf site...Los Alamos uses a beowulf to compute a nuclear explosion through 1,000,000 atoms....each atom takes up who knows how much. Even at a single K per atom, that's a gig. As I remember though, a single K would be kind of small for an atom. I didn't understand either until I saw it. It's just insane.
I got one of these too at SuperCOmputing 99. Very chic...I get a lot of comments on it. Anyone who knows what linux is in my town of 150,000 knows which truck is mine (bright red, linux plate in the window). I even managed to buzz Microsoft in Redmond one week while at Solaris admin training. I'm such a rebel;)
Why doesn't someone get off their keister and put a friggin' microdrive in some of these? Sheesh! They are small as sin, you can actually put a real amount of apps on them! Keep the ROM and ram, maybe put in some way to flash it with a new kernel (make dep;make clean;make bzFlash;make modules;make modules_install). Heck, if you wanted to get fancy with it, you have a couple of them and have friggin' software RAID in your palmtop! Think about it! You could store entire encyclopedias, it would make a great reference device. Include ht://dig (did I spell that right?) and voice recognition and you get almost a tricorder!
On a side note, I just got an email from the Yopy people (a derivative of Yuppie people?) saying that it would be available at the end of May in Europe and the US. Very cool.
See, officially, I put in right about 40 hours a week. That's in the office. What I find that eatsd up the most of my time is the keeping up to date. Now, the line here gets blurry, because I like to keep techonolically up to date anyways, but am I doing it for work or pleasure? Recently, I have seen myself doing it more for work and spending less time doing things that are clearing not work related. I have recently had several weeks where, if you counted my off hours that I worked on research for work, I was pushing 80 hours. Normally, though, it would be right around 60, including the offhours.
Really, if you love learning about tech, and you would do it anyways, and often work and pleasure overlap (I am a unix admin integrating linux into our environment, and I love linux), where is the line? I don't like to stop learning, even when I am not being paid for it.
Actually, when I wrote to them (once, and 2 paragraphs of thought out material) I mentioned that I have moved away from windows and did not anticipate buying any windows games in the future. I mentioned that in the past I had bought their games (mentioned each) and that it was profitable to hit a group with such "brand loyalty".
I cannot believe the domain hijacking thing above...I need to process it and come to terms with the fact that Blizzard is not nearly as holy as I would have believed. Can't anyone just buy a domain anymore? It's not the original buyers fault that blizzard (a computer-oriented company, and hardly lacking in net saavy) coul;dn't get on the ball and buy up their own domains? sheesh.
Well, in a word...nothing. It says they are looking at a lawsuit against MS. Over "features". I wish they would have gone into more detail about these offending features. Now, I am no MSFriend (tm), but I am rational. I can only assume that they are talking about the DNS business for the time being, since I know of no other issues. I have used win2k a bit through the betas, and from what I saw it is more stable, but it was also a bloated pig (debug code?). Just give us some facts, people! I have to agree with Wonko42 up there who is advising against knee-jerk jihads, which seems to be the running trend of Slashdot in general (I include myself here, I am trying to reform;). Lets see what the features are, give them honest appraisal, and then give it whatever it deserves. I imagine that if the MSStandard(tm) was open (as in speech) there would be a lot less griping.
I have to say that Mandrake was one of the best things to happen to Redhat. Here's why. Let.s start with redhat 5.2 (which is the first distribution that Mandrake used to my knowledge). Redhat had a solid system going there. But what was it missing? That feel that would allow new-to-linux users to get a feel for the whole thing. They had that FVWM95 interface in the gui. Yucky...So Mandrake says, "Hey...let's put Kde on Redhat!" and what do you have? A really nice way to get the average windows user into linux (trust me, I pulled 20 this way). So Redhat says, "Well, sheeeet! Look at Mandrake...we gotta get some interface action going here guys!" and then the saga of enlightenment and gnome happens. And we have redhat 6.0. Well, Mandrake says, "yea, ok, they got a gui now, we can concentrate on bug fixes and updating kernels" and then we have mandrake 6.0 (with 2.2.x kernel). So then Redhat says, "Well, damn! Those Mandrake guys are on the ball!" And Caldera says, "Heh, ok guys, we'll do ya one better...We'll have a GUI INSTALLER! Hah! Top that!" And redhat says, "Ok, we gotcha there...and now we offer gnome AND kde! Eat it!" And mandrake says, " ok ok ok! You know what sucks about linux? It is such a pain to repartition your hard drive (you gotta actually BUY something to resize!) So here it is, DiskDrake! Stuff it! And here's Lothar to kick you when your down! Oh yea, redhat? We're gonna take your Sparc and Alpha ports and do the same stuff that we have been doignto them TOO!"
I really really love open source for this...it speeds up the development cycle! Next thing you know, Redhat is going to have all of this and probably Xfree86-4 for it's next version. Of course, mandrake will follow suite shortly after, but probably with 2.4 kernel...oh, it is so cool;)
Well, basically this means that we need to by loki games and let them get some figures to show Blizzard. Now, personally, I think Quake3 will be the vehicle. It just has the best chance, not these (sorry, Loki, I still love you guys) older, almost second tier games. Heavy gear 2 will be a good one, but it is not a Quake game. It might also be time for us to revisit the linux advocacy how-to and not say mean things to Blizzard demanding games. A tasteful email to them would be in order, something to the effect that you are a gamer and you have bought such and such games from blizzard, and love their company, and would like to see them have linux ports, or allow Loki (who has done an excellent job) to. In some sense we need a CONTROLLED slashdot effect on blizzard.
You have no idea (well maybe you do) of how much I want Diablo 2 for linux. As with everyone and his brother, I swore to remove windows from my machine if they ported it. The reason is because it is big enough that Linux will have a slew of games out by the time I am done;)
As voiced by several people here, I have exactly the opposite expereince, and I have a WD SCSI drive in my machine, and have place a couple of WD IDE drives in machines. One thing I can say is that WD drives (in my experience) rarely slowly peter out. When they go, they go wholesale.
One thing I also noted is that you said you have worked at a computer store over the last 5 months. This 5 month period also crosses one of WD largest recalls ever on drives, with an acknowledged defect in a drive that would go into almost every companies "average family" system. The company I used to work for (I am still friends with the boss) had the same sort of sampling over the same period, but you compare that to the number of JTS (EVERY SINGLE ONE) and the number of maxtors (roughly 30%) that failed over a 3 year period, you begin to see a change. He began putting only WD ide drives in his computers because they had good support and he rarely had to send one back.
I was most impressed with Caldera's as it had a larger database than Mandrake (2.3 vs 6.1). Of course, i suppose with each iteration, these will improve.
try sourceforge, from VALinux....they seem to be giving out free web space. Not sure about the sql server though, but I am sure a perl interpreter is available.
The required functionality business will get them, unless they are very very smart. I was thinking about this the other day, and what i would tell some company who asked me to give them an infrastructure. I would ask, "What is your required functionality? What do you need to be able to do?" And the first words out of their mouth would be "I need to be able to use Microsoft Office". And of course, I reply with, "What, your business needs to be able to use MS Word, not any other word processing?"
See, the problem is that people confuise functionality with the product. I love StarOffice, but I will admit it loves memory (to eat it that is). It handles most word docs just fine. If they want a new infrastructure, they are going to have to change their way of business as well. Stop doing things with WOrd Macros left and right. If they can do the equivfalent of what they are doing with the word macros in another product, then that is equivalent functionality, but it does not have to be compatible. Sure, it helps reduce the cost of transitioning and training, but that is another issue.
And of course, this is where MS has been winnig all along, get people using their products, reliant upon them, because of some functionality that they feel is necessary, and lock them into a product. Which is why standards are nice, because you can use whatever product you like and be assured that it will inteface properly.
Ripping out an infrastructure is no mean feat. It requires lots of training of people, implementation of new software, and development of new procedures. Sometimes it does not justify the cost. You do not have to upgrade everytime a new thign comes out...
Is there a word processing standard? I am not talking about ASCII here. it has to do fonts and macros and all that stuff that makes document production such a production.
Actually, we talked about it;) They had a couple of technologies that I only briefly passed over that would have allowed that sort of thing, at least beowulfing the beowulfs (although careful application of net cards and ip's can do that too). It's really too bad that Quake servers are not designed to handle being beowulfed and use it effectively.
SLight bit of misinformation here...The fastest net in the world was at supercomputing, but it was not the oc-48 between MS and SC99. It was the LAN, which was multiple OC-192's, each wavelength multiplexed with 10 wavelengths. They could have gone higher, but as one of my coworkers stated, "they didn't need to and were feeling lazy". It was fricking insane (I was there). BTW, this wasn't some theoretical net, this was actually implemented complete with routers. As my coworker, who helped implement it said, "It's the hottest network on earth."
In addition, many other things that were at SC99 will be of interest to the Slashdotters. One was the incredible number of Beowulfs. The real world computing partnership had a ~30 node one, SGI had a 32 node one, VALinux had a 16 node one, Argonne, LBNL, and LNL all had VaLinux clusters as well. Dell had parts of one to go to PNL. Lots of clusters. There was a Cray T3, many Onyx 2's and several other large systems.
One of the neatest things I saw was a Sun e450 w/ 2 gigs of ram and 4 processors. It powers 26 Sunrays with netscape, StarOffice and Smart cards. It ran extrememly fast, as it took all 26 going hog wild before I noticed a slowdown.
Another neat thing was this thing that all I can remember is the software, called DomeGL. Basically, they take a wide angle lens that can project without focal loss across a 180 degree hemisphere, project it inside a hemispherical dome in a darkened room and it gives a strong illusion of 3d, even without shutter glasses.
Lets see...lots of stuff for the big computers (ASCI Red, Blue Pacific, etc), a robot name sprocket controlled rather directly that spoke ina rather saucy voice, IBM's new display that has 200 pixels per inch and displays at (cannot remmeber exact, but this is close) 2640x2048, which, I was told, is just inside the visual accuity range of a 20/20 vision adult, demos of everyones stuff, compaq's alpha clusters with their optimized gcc, Alta's clusters, and all sorts of other stuff. If you ever get a chance to help set up, I highly recommend it. I got the opportunity because my employer is an exhibitor, but they do have volunteers
As for some of the nontechnical stuff, IBM threw a party in the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry. Very nice, and lots of fun for geeks. On Wednesday night, VALinux threw a party at the Lucky Labrador, a brew pub. Good grub and free beer. SGI and SUn also had parties but they were the same night as IBM and I didn't go. I also did not get to go to any of the technical program, but I hear it was very good .
I was gonna write up an official report and send it in, but someone beat me to it;)
The irony...Age of Kings was on time..hell I think it was early.
Re:Q3Demo - Ibaibaibaibaiba...
on
No Next Q3Test
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I have a p2-300 w/ 64 megs of ram and sli voodoo2's. It is 30+fps at 800x600. Normally it is in the 40+ range. Plenty playable. btw, the default under linux for my system was superfast, 640x480, graphics settings were not conservative or anything.
How do you feel that Open Source and Free Software mesh with software engineering principals, including the capability maturity model. The seemingly haphazard methods of the bazaar would seem to fly in the face of the CMM
Personally, I think this is tasteless to put something like this on Slashdot. I mean, it is bad enough that we bash Microsoft as an entity, but now we have taken to bashing individual employees? Yea, sure, his name was changed, big deal. It just seems profoundly tasteless for a Loki employee to write an article on an incident which amounts to "look how dumb Microsoft employees are". The poor guy, I feel bad for him. Let's hope he doesn't read Slashdot and feel worse about it.
A) bears don't have opposable thumbs, so it is hard for them to grab
Bears usually attack people by claw swipes. Occasionally some biting. Probably the worst would be biting and hanging on then shaking it back and forth, which might produce some of the effects you are describing
I am forced to agree with this. I cannot remember if it is the same publisher or not, but this last weekend I read an article in PCWorld (I think that was it) about all the OS's out there, the couple versions of windows, Linux, Beos...It was sad. Barely a bash at all on Windows (and many praises) and hardly a praise on Linux or BeOS. They pointed that linux does not support many newer video cards. Hello? What if the vendor stopped writing drivers for windows? WOuld it be Windows fault? no...The reviewer chose Caldera 2.2 and Redhat 6, and decided he liked Caldera better, but it still sucked. I think that a responsible reporter would go out and find that Redhat 6 included more beta software than I care to think about (Gnome and KDE, the two most important pieces to this reviewer). He didn't think to try Mandrake. On a side note, I am sorry i only suggest redhat based, but the fact of the matter is that no newbie can barely point and click user is going to have an easy time installing slackware. Anyways, he compared staroffice...he says "It's not MS Office, it lacks things like me being able to drag and drop a whole word" (ok, not quite a direct quote). All I can say is "SHeesh". That is one of the lamest reasons I can think of for bashing an office suite that just took my powerpoint presentation and translated it to html flawlessly, does my spreadsheet for my bills (I am a loser without my wife around), browses the web (does office do this?), etc etc. If they want an office clone, talk to MS. He seemed to confuse "new and I have to learn a slightly different interface" with "bad". That's the worst part. Some new user who has never even used windows (like my Grandmother, who is in the market for a computer) is gonna read this and think linux is bad, when she is going to have just as much of a learning curve with windows. It's downright irresponsible to just compare it to windows and say it is not windows. Did he compare windows to anything? No. Did he say, "Well, windows sucks because you have to get up to install a printer on your kids computer" or "MSOffice sucks because it is not StarOffice"? No.
Responsibility in reporting. Amazing how little of it there is.
I went to a small university with a small computer science program (about 10-20 active members) and roughly 1/2 of the students were women. It was quite neat. They were just as geeky as the rest of us, but they concentrated on entirely different aspects. While most of the guys were hardwre junkies, most of the girls were software junkies. I think this is actually a trend. We sat down and talked avout it one time, and most of them said they didn't care how the hardware worked, as long as it let them get their job done.
On the other hand, and I'll use my wife as an example, they did care intimately about how the software worked. My wife is a software engineer at heart. She cares that the software is PERFECT. She will rake you over the coals for the littlest error, which is good. Other girls in the group followed a similar line, being programmers at heart. I know the program was wierd, because the math dept, which was linked to the CS dept, was also half women. One of my professors commented that that attittude of "women can't be geeks" had not gotten to that section of the world yet. Lets hope it stays out.
I think, though, that this illustrates an important point, that women geeks may not look like the traditional geek, but still are technically oriented. Work with it. Having that different view point will only help you. Girls out there reading this, do not be afraid of geek guys. They respect knowledge most of all, and will probably get all horny at the thought of a woman who can code them under the table;)
BTW, my wife uses linux. Just last night we dicussed her doing her senior project on open source software and software engineering. She RABIDLY hates Microsoft. I mean RABIDLY. SHe was saying to me that when she gets her new computer (she has picked it out, yea she picked it because it was cute, but it comes with linux, from buypogo.com) she was going to put BeOS and OS/2 warp on it, and Linux. Oh yea, and she can Calculus me under the table any day.
If you are interested in the school, check my email address.
I have seen more Amiga flipflops since I have been reading slashdot than I ever remember hearing about. You know who is really going to suffer? The people who have really had their hope up about Amiga. I have a friend who loves Amigas, and I think this might be the final straw to him, and with good reason. You just cannot depend on a company that cannot make a plan and stick to it.
Their strategy of making a network appliance is unoriginal, unimaginative, and not what we would typical expect from the forward thinking amiga crew. I wonder what is going on with that. The market is soon to be saturated with little internet appliances already. What is going to make it different? I don't think that people will buy it just because it is an amiga. People who bought amigas actually did work with them.
Get your act together, Amiga, or get out of the rat race
Slashdot Mirror
I work in an enviroinment were real computing starts at 16 GB of RAM. Scientific computing. The funny thing is that it's not the programs. Often the programs take up a couple of hundred KB in memory themselves, but the data takes up huge quantities. I'll use an example I saw on some beowulf site...Los Alamos uses a beowulf to compute a nuclear explosion through 1,000,000 atoms....each atom takes up who knows how much. Even at a single K per atom, that's a gig. As I remember though, a single K would be kind of small for an atom. I didn't understand either until I saw it. It's just insane.
I got one of these too at SuperCOmputing 99. Very chic...I get a lot of comments on it. Anyone who knows what linux is in my town of 150,000 knows which truck is mine (bright red, linux plate in the window). I even managed to buzz Microsoft in Redmond one week while at Solaris admin training. I'm such a rebel ;)
Why doesn't someone get off their keister and put a friggin' microdrive in some of these? Sheesh! They are small as sin, you can actually put a real amount of apps on them! Keep the ROM and ram, maybe put in some way to flash it with a new kernel (make dep;make clean;make bzFlash;make modules;make modules_install). Heck, if you wanted to get fancy with it, you have a couple of them and have friggin' software RAID in your palmtop! Think about it! You could store entire encyclopedias, it would make a great reference device. Include ht://dig (did I spell that right?) and voice recognition and you get almost a tricorder!
On a side note, I just got an email from the Yopy people (a derivative of Yuppie people?) saying that it would be available at the end of May in Europe and the US. Very cool.
See, officially, I put in right about 40 hours a week. That's in the office. What I find that eatsd up the most of my time is the keeping up to date. Now, the line here gets blurry, because I like to keep techonolically up to date anyways, but am I doing it for work or pleasure? Recently, I have seen myself doing it more for work and spending less time doing things that are clearing not work related. I have recently had several weeks where, if you counted my off hours that I worked on research for work, I was pushing 80 hours. Normally, though, it would be right around 60, including the offhours.
Really, if you love learning about tech, and you would do it anyways, and often work and pleasure overlap (I am a unix admin integrating linux into our environment, and I love linux), where is the line? I don't like to stop learning, even when I am not being paid for it.
Actually, when I wrote to them (once, and 2 paragraphs of thought out material) I mentioned that I have moved away from windows and did not anticipate buying any windows games in the future. I mentioned that in the past I had bought their games (mentioned each) and that it was profitable to hit a group with such "brand loyalty".
I cannot believe the domain hijacking thing above...I need to process it and come to terms with the fact that Blizzard is not nearly as holy as I would have believed. Can't anyone just buy a domain anymore? It's not the original buyers fault that blizzard (a computer-oriented company, and hardly lacking in net saavy) coul;dn't get on the ball and buy up their own domains? sheesh.
Well, in a word...nothing. It says they are looking at a lawsuit against MS. Over "features". I wish they would have gone into more detail about these offending features. Now, I am no MSFriend (tm), but I am rational. I can only assume that they are talking about the DNS business for the time being, since I know of no other issues. I have used win2k a bit through the betas, and from what I saw it is more stable, but it was also a bloated pig (debug code?). Just give us some facts, people! I have to agree with Wonko42 up there who is advising against knee-jerk jihads, which seems to be the running trend of Slashdot in general (I include myself here, I am trying to reform;). Lets see what the features are, give them honest appraisal, and then give it whatever it deserves. I imagine that if the MSStandard(tm) was open (as in speech) there would be a lot less griping.
I have to say that Mandrake was one of the best things to happen to Redhat. Here's why. Let.s start with redhat 5.2 (which is the first distribution that Mandrake used to my knowledge). Redhat had a solid system going there. But what was it missing? That feel that would allow new-to-linux users to get a feel for the whole thing. They had that FVWM95 interface in the gui. Yucky...So Mandrake says, "Hey...let's put Kde on Redhat!" and what do you have? A really nice way to get the average windows user into linux (trust me, I pulled 20 this way). So Redhat says, "Well, sheeeet! Look at Mandrake...we gotta get some interface action going here guys!" and then the saga of enlightenment and gnome happens. And we have redhat 6.0. Well, Mandrake says, "yea, ok, they got a gui now, we can concentrate on bug fixes and updating kernels" and then we have mandrake 6.0 (with 2.2.x kernel). So then Redhat says, "Well, damn! Those Mandrake guys are on the ball!" And Caldera says, "Heh, ok guys, we'll do ya one better...We'll have a GUI INSTALLER! Hah! Top that!" And redhat says, "Ok, we gotcha there...and now we offer gnome AND kde! Eat it!" And mandrake says, " ok ok ok! You know what sucks about linux? It is such a pain to repartition your hard drive (you gotta actually BUY something to resize!) So here it is, DiskDrake! Stuff it! And here's Lothar to kick you when your down! Oh yea, redhat? We're gonna take your Sparc and Alpha ports and do the same stuff that we have been doignto them TOO!"
;)
I really really love open source for this...it speeds up the development cycle! Next thing you know, Redhat is going to have all of this and probably Xfree86-4 for it's next version. Of course, mandrake will follow suite shortly after, but probably with 2.4 kernel...oh, it is so cool
Well, basically this means that we need to by loki games and let them get some figures to show Blizzard. Now, personally, I think Quake3 will be the vehicle. It just has the best chance, not these (sorry, Loki, I still love you guys) older, almost second tier games. Heavy gear 2 will be a good one, but it is not a Quake game. It might also be time for us to revisit the linux advocacy how-to and not say mean things to Blizzard demanding games. A tasteful email to them would be in order, something to the effect that you are a gamer and you have bought such and such games from blizzard, and love their company, and would like to see them have linux ports, or allow Loki (who has done an excellent job) to. In some sense we need a CONTROLLED slashdot effect on blizzard.
;)
You have no idea (well maybe you do) of how much I want Diablo 2 for linux. As with everyone and his brother, I swore to remove windows from my machine if they ported it. The reason is because it is big enough that Linux will have a slew of games out by the time I am done
As voiced by several people here, I have exactly the opposite expereince, and I have a WD SCSI drive in my machine, and have place a couple of WD IDE drives in machines. One thing I can say is that WD drives (in my experience) rarely slowly peter out. When they go, they go wholesale.
One thing I also noted is that you said you have worked at a computer store over the last 5 months. This 5 month period also crosses one of WD largest recalls ever on drives, with an acknowledged defect in a drive that would go into almost every companies "average family" system. The company I used to work for (I am still friends with the boss) had the same sort of sampling over the same period, but you compare that to the number of JTS (EVERY SINGLE ONE) and the number of maxtors (roughly 30%) that failed over a 3 year period, you begin to see a change. He began putting only WD ide drives in his computers because they had good support and he rarely had to send one back.
You'll be disappointed...sorry.
My wife says that Linus is easily the best looking. I think, speaking from an asthetic point of view, that she is right ;) Sorry guys
I was most impressed with Caldera's as it had a larger database than Mandrake (2.3 vs 6.1). Of course, i suppose with each iteration, these will improve.
try sourceforge, from VALinux....they seem to be giving out free web space. Not sure about the sql server though, but I am sure a perl interpreter is available.
The required functionality business will get them, unless they are very very smart. I was thinking about this the other day, and what i would tell some company who asked me to give them an infrastructure. I would ask, "What is your required functionality? What do you need to be able to do?" And the first words out of their mouth would be "I need to be able to use Microsoft Office". And of course, I reply with, "What, your business needs to be able to use MS Word, not any other word processing?"
See, the problem is that people confuise functionality with the product. I love StarOffice, but I will admit it loves memory (to eat it that is). It handles most word docs just fine. If they want a new infrastructure, they are going to have to change their way of business as well. Stop doing things with WOrd Macros left and right. If they can do the equivfalent of what they are doing with the word macros in another product, then that is equivalent functionality, but it does not have to be compatible. Sure, it helps reduce the cost of transitioning and training, but that is another issue.
And of course, this is where MS has been winnig all along, get people using their products, reliant upon them, because of some functionality that they feel is necessary, and lock them into a product. Which is why standards are nice, because you can use whatever product you like and be assured that it will inteface properly.
Ripping out an infrastructure is no mean feat. It requires lots of training of people, implementation of new software, and development of new procedures. Sometimes it does not justify the cost. You do not have to upgrade everytime a new thign comes out...
Is there a word processing standard? I am not talking about ASCII here. it has to do fonts and macros and all that stuff that makes document production such a production.
I saw this yesterday, and the first thing I thought was "How in the hell did he manage to spell methyldioxymethamphetamines while on them?"
Actually, we talked about it ;) They had a couple of technologies that I only briefly passed over that would have allowed that sort of thing, at least beowulfing the beowulfs (although careful application of net cards and ip's can do that too). It's really too bad that Quake servers are not designed to handle being beowulfed and use it effectively.
SLight bit of misinformation here...The fastest net in the world was at supercomputing, but it was not the oc-48 between MS and SC99. It was the LAN, which was multiple OC-192's, each wavelength multiplexed with 10 wavelengths. They could have gone higher, but as one of my coworkers stated, "they didn't need to and were feeling lazy". It was fricking insane (I was there). BTW, this wasn't some theoretical net, this was actually implemented complete with routers. As my coworker, who helped implement it said, "It's the hottest network on earth."
;)
In addition, many other things that were at SC99 will be of interest to the Slashdotters. One was the incredible number of Beowulfs. The real world computing partnership had a ~30 node one, SGI had a 32 node one, VALinux had a 16 node one, Argonne, LBNL, and LNL all had VaLinux clusters as well. Dell had parts of one to go to PNL. Lots of clusters. There was a Cray T3, many Onyx 2's and several other large systems.
One of the neatest things I saw was a Sun e450 w/ 2 gigs of ram and 4 processors. It powers 26 Sunrays with netscape, StarOffice and Smart cards. It ran extrememly fast, as it took all 26 going hog wild before I noticed a slowdown.
Another neat thing was this thing that all I can remember is the software, called DomeGL. Basically, they take a wide angle lens that can project without focal loss across a 180 degree hemisphere, project it inside a hemispherical dome in a darkened room and it gives a strong illusion of 3d, even without shutter glasses.
Lets see...lots of stuff for the big computers (ASCI Red, Blue Pacific, etc), a robot name sprocket controlled rather directly that spoke ina rather saucy voice, IBM's new display that has 200 pixels per inch and displays at (cannot remmeber exact, but this is close) 2640x2048, which, I was told, is just inside the visual accuity range of a 20/20 vision adult, demos of everyones stuff, compaq's alpha clusters with their optimized gcc, Alta's clusters, and all sorts of other stuff. If you ever get a chance to help set up, I highly recommend it. I got the opportunity because my employer is an exhibitor, but they do have volunteers
As for some of the nontechnical stuff, IBM threw a party in the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry. Very nice, and lots of fun for geeks. On Wednesday night, VALinux threw a party at the Lucky Labrador, a brew pub. Good grub and free beer. SGI and SUn also had parties but they were the same night as IBM and I didn't go. I also did not get to go to any of the technical program, but I hear it was very good .
I was gonna write up an official report and send it in, but someone beat me to it
The irony...Age of Kings was on time..hell I think it was early.
I have a p2-300 w/ 64 megs of ram and sli voodoo2's. It is 30+fps at 800x600. Normally it is in the 40+ range. Plenty playable. btw, the default under linux for my system was superfast, 640x480, graphics settings were not conservative or anything.
How do you feel that Open Source and Free Software mesh with software engineering principals, including the capability maturity model. The seemingly haphazard methods of the bazaar would seem to fly in the face of the CMM
Personally, I think this is tasteless to put something like this on Slashdot. I mean, it is bad enough that we bash Microsoft as an entity, but now we have taken to bashing individual employees? Yea, sure, his name was changed, big deal. It just seems profoundly tasteless for a Loki employee to write an article on an incident which amounts to "look how dumb Microsoft employees are". The poor guy, I feel bad for him. Let's hope he doesn't read Slashdot and feel worse about it.
A) bears don't have opposable thumbs, so it is hard for them to grab
Bears usually attack people by claw swipes. Occasionally some biting. Probably the worst would be biting and hanging on then shaking it back and forth, which might produce some of the effects you are describing
I am forced to agree with this. I cannot remember if it is the same publisher or not, but this last weekend I read an article in PCWorld (I think that was it) about all the OS's out there, the couple versions of windows, Linux, Beos...It was sad. Barely a bash at all on Windows (and many praises) and hardly a praise on Linux or BeOS. They pointed that linux does not support many newer video cards. Hello? What if the vendor stopped writing drivers for windows? WOuld it be Windows fault? no...The reviewer chose Caldera 2.2 and Redhat 6, and decided he liked Caldera better, but it still sucked. I think that a responsible reporter would go out and find that Redhat 6 included more beta software than I care to think about (Gnome and KDE, the two most important pieces to this reviewer). He didn't think to try Mandrake. On a side note, I am sorry i only suggest redhat based, but the fact of the matter is that no newbie can barely point and click user is going to have an easy time installing slackware. Anyways, he compared staroffice...he says "It's not MS Office, it lacks things like me being able to drag and drop a whole word" (ok, not quite a direct quote). All I can say is "SHeesh". That is one of the lamest reasons I can think of for bashing an office suite that just took my powerpoint presentation and translated it to html flawlessly, does my spreadsheet for my bills (I am a loser without my wife around), browses the web (does office do this?), etc etc. If they want an office clone, talk to MS. He seemed to confuse "new and I have to learn a slightly different interface" with "bad". That's the worst part. Some new user who has never even used windows (like my Grandmother, who is in the market for a computer) is gonna read this and think linux is bad, when she is going to have just as much of a learning curve with windows. It's downright irresponsible to just compare it to windows and say it is not windows. Did he compare windows to anything? No. Did he say, "Well, windows sucks because you have to get up to install a printer on your kids computer" or "MSOffice sucks because it is not StarOffice"? No.
Responsibility in reporting. Amazing how little of it there is.
On the other hand, and I'll use my wife as an example, they did care intimately about how the software worked. My wife is a software engineer at heart. She cares that the software is PERFECT. She will rake you over the coals for the littlest error, which is good. Other girls in the group followed a similar line, being programmers at heart. I know the program was wierd, because the math dept, which was linked to the CS dept, was also half women. One of my professors commented that that attittude of "women can't be geeks" had not gotten to that section of the world yet. Lets hope it stays out.
I think, though, that this illustrates an important point, that women geeks may not look like the traditional geek, but still are technically oriented. Work with it. Having that different view point will only help you. Girls out there reading this, do not be afraid of geek guys. They respect knowledge most of all, and will probably get all horny at the thought of a woman who can code them under the table ;)
BTW, my wife uses linux. Just last night we dicussed her doing her senior project on open source software and software engineering. She RABIDLY hates Microsoft. I mean RABIDLY. SHe was saying to me that when she gets her new computer (she has picked it out, yea she picked it because it was cute, but it comes with linux, from buypogo.com) she was going to put BeOS and OS/2 warp on it, and Linux. Oh yea, and she can Calculus me under the table any day.
If you are interested in the school, check my email address.
I have seen more Amiga flipflops since I have been reading slashdot than I ever remember hearing about. You know who is really going to suffer? The people who have really had their hope up about Amiga. I have a friend who loves Amigas, and I think this might be the final straw to him, and with good reason. You just cannot depend on a company that cannot make a plan and stick to it.
Their strategy of making a network appliance is unoriginal, unimaginative, and not what we would typical expect from the forward thinking amiga crew. I wonder what is going on with that. The market is soon to be saturated with little internet appliances already. What is going to make it different? I don't think that people will buy it just because it is an amiga. People who bought amigas actually did work with them.
Get your act together, Amiga, or get out of the rat race