To be fair, there are plenty of guides that are actual strategy guides, particularly when there is choice in character development.
In any party-based game, there is, I think, a solid role to be played by a guide that provides you with information about character strengths and weaknesses. It can be extremely tedious to go through every character stat screen, or to play with each secondary character and see how they level up.
In the KoTOR and KoTOR II Prima's guides (hey, I don't buy them...it was my roommate....), there are suggestions for how you might want to build your party depending on skill path and light/dark alignment.
In X-Men Legends, same deal. I really didn't want to have to spend several iterations figuring out the proper party balance or which skills it was worthwhile to upgrade.
For those roles, at least, the guide remains a side effect of the complexity of the game. Sometimes, too much choice shuts down options. I mean, I played through KoTOR about 6 times, and one can only sit through the same cut scenes for so long before losing interest.
The big issue with non-compliance would be DVD encoding that prevents them from playing DVDs or CDs in Macs. Already we have started to see push-back from recording-industry types about the iPod and iTunes, and one suspects that some of the limitations of iDVD are due to similar complaints.
It's hard to be the hub of a digital lifestyle if digital components no longer work. I'd love to see Apple continue to fight back on this front by emphasizing technology that lets you use material you have a right to use in innovative ways. They've done a good job of preventing their software from easily being used to distribute content without heinously restricting its usability. Examples like that might encourage other vendors and lawmakers to back off on legislating choice out of existence.
Dude. Suddenly, on September 12, a lot of different airports decided they would really like to be able to visualize the luggage that passed through their screening points better than the 12" black and white gave them. Actuality saw an opportunity to fit the niche. Are you saying it's in poor taste to sell a product you've developed to people that want to buy it?
As it happens, there are relatively few places where this technology is particularly useful right now. Screening luggage happens to be one of them. Cut the guys some slack.
Geez. I used to use Gatekeeper on my Mac, 10 years ago. Even if it were non-obvious, it's obviously non-unique. Do these people _ever_ do _any_ research?
Just a continuation of the trend toward "supporting the artist," I suppose, and protecting whoever can cough up enough cash for the lawyers.
Sure.
Clusters have been used for years (though not necessarily beowulfs--even so, in the examples I'm going to propose, one could use a beowulf) in various industries. The classic cases are:
Wall Street-it takes a lot of horsepower to calculate mortgage bond yields and other complex values. Currently, most employ clusters of Suns and IBMs, but linux has started to show up.
Oil exploration. I don't understand the science behind it, but predicting where oil will be found requires dealing with serious number crunching. I know that Amerada Hess uses a sizeable linux cluster to do this.
Rendering. Linux clusters are just starting to make headway there.
Bio/Chem informatics. Programs like BLAST can take ages to work, and are often data-parallel, making them ideal for running on a beowulf or similar cluster. There have been a number of pbs-based solutions, though commercial software tools like TurboBLAST and PowerBLAST have gotten what media exposure there is.
There's lots of data in the world, and in various fields, the data available is growing faster than Moore's Law.
As for the Macs, with Will Van Etten porting various clustering utilities (like pbs and grid engine) over to the Mac, and companies like Scientific Computing Associates and Platform Computing porting their parallel tools over to the Mac, there grow to be a number of possible implementations of clusters and desktop computing (including Pooch's MPI subset). MPI work is getting done on darwin, for those who want those standards.
I've used clusters of Macs and mixed clusters as well as linux clusters, though not beowulfs specifically (I work for a company that puts out commercial products that would be unwelcome on a Beowulf:). Macs are good. There are drawbacks--no autovectorizing compiler, no good fortran, and the lack of an elegantly rackable form factor.
But when you've got a program that benefits from altivec, and someone (or you) optimize it, well, holy smokes.
I think you're being a bit unfair. A vital part of budgeting and implementation of new solutions is evaluating options. So the last project was completed. In order to keep providing students with the best possible service, then new projects need to at least be considered. If you left it up to some administrators, then a lab of 6 pentiums might well be "everything we need out of it."
This is one of those areas that requires constant revision and reevaluation. It would be irresponsible to _not_ see what other universities and other people are doing, to see if anything can be learned by that.
If, at the end of a re-evaluation, it is discovered that there's nothing that would benefit students and instructors on which to spend money, then, perhaps, you can find a way to refund the money.
I am sorry that you are sickened by a person attempting to solicit ideas from the broader community on how to improve his campus. It seems to me just the thing a responsible administrator should do. Oftentimes, you don't know that you need something until you find it. When my undergraduate school put up the classes server (homebrewed WebCT/Blackboard-equivalent) four or five years ago, only two or three professors had any idea what to do with it. After the years of development, though, 70% of courses have materials there, and hundreds of students access them on a daily basis. Had no one looked around and said, "well, would it be worthwhile to explore this solution?" five years ago, the university would just now be trying to implement something, leaving it far behind its peers and without the infrastructure to meet the demand of students who like to have everything available on-line.
Having that consistent funding gives workers the flexibility to try new things and innovate.
Amusing to me that the chipmaker with the smallest share of the supercomputer market is the only one quoted in the article. I'd think this restriction change would be much more important for SGI, Compaq, Cray, HP, and IBM than for Intel at the moment. Admittedly, the industry shills will all say similar things, but geez. Let's try not to push the story of Intel as the only remaining chipmaker too much, huh? Especially in one of the few industries in which they don't have any sort of supremacy.
Note that this was the experience of someone at a smallish university in Ireland, too. One with a Microsoft-centric view, to boot. I have friends at university in Ireland (at Limerick) who have to put up with ridiculous outbound firewalls that a university in the states would never use. The environments have different sets of assumptions.
Not to mention, the press exposure is different.
This is not to say that similar things are not true at places in the States, but be wary of generalizing overmuch from this anecdote.
It's likely that the patent application predates the entire PVR war. It's not necessarily that the folks at the patent idiots are entirely clueless (could be; I don't know, and am MUCH too lazy to go look up the original date of the patent application, though it is one click away).
Whether they can win any damages from TiVO remains to be seen, however.
GCC (and emacs) can't really be replaced by a non-GNU alternative. The note said wget was going to be removed because it *could* be replaced by a non-GNU alternative.
So my hunch is that they want to expunge the GNU stuff they can avoid, and deal with what they can't.
Re:This sounds like...
on
IBM Wants Linux
·
· Score: 5, Informative
Perhaps the Open Source Community is up to the challenge, but AIX performs admirably in exactly the machines and situations in which Linux does the worst: multi-processor non-intel boxes with 4+ gigs of RAM. Right now, a person would be nuts to run linux in production on an RS/6000. The package stability on that hardware is sketchy, at best.
IBM's also spent a lot of time doing little things like graphics acceleration for their workstations that Linux can't yet strongly match.
As much as I'd like to see the death of AIX and dance on SMIT's grave, I think we're seeing the same story at the enterprise level as we always have: Operating Systems designed for enterprise hardware tend to be better on that hardware than Operating Systems designed for low-end microcomputers. If IBM dumped a hundred developers into pushing linux on its Power-based hardware, then we might see something to compete with AIX; as it is, there isn't a large enough install base for linux development to acheive critical mass.
I would be shocked if Darwin doesn't run on this machine. Folks have been working hard to decouple Darwin and the Apple hardware.
The form factor for the enclosure is the real story. The only other real player there is RLX, with their transmeta-based 24-blade 3U systems. While the RLX systems are denser, the Crusoe processors aren't as well-suited to high-power computations as the G4.
I figured this deserved more than the one line it got. A friend of mine from college said the same thing for his exit interview for the CS major. It's a great introductory language for people. It's complex enough to be worth an entire semester, allows for the teaching of OO techniques, and also doesn't make students feel utterly worthless (as C has been known to do. Do I malloc (amount + 1), or just (amount)? Argh!).
Python is the perfect way for people to get their feet wet. Especially as it doesn't "break" a person's perspective on what to expect from languages, as perl might.;)
Without more press about the nuances of the patent process, the reasons for it, and, above all, the general recycling of ideas and code in software development (many of the newest "innovations" are really just decades-old computer science concepts being dressed up in new e-commerce or biotech dresses, after all), the underlying problem will remain.
Companies want patents because investors see them as valuable. It's hard to say, "hey, we've got a great idea and no one else can do it better than us," without something concrete to back it up. Non-savvy investors are too skittish, and don't realize that most patents in this arena are utterly ridiculous. How many software architects really want to patent their work, after all?
Lawsuits can help to reduce this demand (hopefully the fad will pass after a few high-profile losses), but that's only one of the issues.
The laws aren't really the problem; they allow a large degree of latitude to the patent office. It's a problem of the patent office being overworked and undertrained in these areas. Any first-year CS grad student could see through half of the patents companies apply for these days, but how many CS masters and PhDs are motivated to work in the patent office? So, instead, the patents are reviewed by people with less experience than is necessary to adequately evaluate applications. There are simply too many patents coming through the pipes.
So, I wholeheartedly agree that education of the populace needs to occur, but it has to be in conjunction with an improvement of the training and pay in the patent office, so that clueless investors can be shot down whilst they begin to realize the differences between software and hardware.
Slashdot Mirror
To be fair, there are plenty of guides that are actual strategy guides, particularly when there is choice in character development.
In any party-based game, there is, I think, a solid role to be played by a guide that provides you with information about character strengths and weaknesses. It can be extremely tedious to go through every character stat screen, or to play with each secondary character and see how they level up.
In the KoTOR and KoTOR II Prima's guides (hey, I don't buy them...it was my roommate....), there are suggestions for how you might want to build your party depending on skill path and light/dark alignment.
In X-Men Legends, same deal. I really didn't want to have to spend several iterations figuring out the proper party balance or which skills it was worthwhile to upgrade.
For those roles, at least, the guide remains a side effect of the complexity of the game. Sometimes, too much choice shuts down options. I mean, I played through KoTOR about 6 times, and one can only sit through the same cut scenes for so long before losing interest.
The big issue with non-compliance would be DVD encoding that prevents them from playing DVDs or CDs in Macs. Already we have started to see push-back from recording-industry types about the iPod and iTunes, and one suspects that some of the limitations of iDVD are due to similar complaints.
It's hard to be the hub of a digital lifestyle if digital components no longer work. I'd love to see Apple continue to fight back on this front by emphasizing technology that lets you use material you have a right to use in innovative ways. They've done a good job of preventing their software from easily being used to distribute content without heinously restricting its usability. Examples like that might encourage other vendors and lawmakers to back off on legislating choice out of existence.
Dude. Suddenly, on September 12, a lot of different airports decided they would really like to be able to visualize the luggage that passed through their screening points better than the 12" black and white gave them. Actuality saw an opportunity to fit the niche. Are you saying it's in poor taste to sell a product you've developed to people that want to buy it?
As it happens, there are relatively few places where this technology is particularly useful right now. Screening luggage happens to be one of them. Cut the guys some slack.
Geez. I used to use Gatekeeper on my Mac, 10 years ago. Even if it were non-obvious, it's obviously non-unique. Do these people _ever_ do _any_ research?
Just a continuation of the trend toward "supporting the artist," I suppose, and protecting whoever can cough up enough cash for the lawyers.
Darwin isn't. If you wanted to do distributed computing, that's all you'd need, really.
:)
And then install X, and you'd be set.
Sure. Clusters have been used for years (though not necessarily beowulfs--even so, in the examples I'm going to propose, one could use a beowulf) in various industries. The classic cases are: Wall Street-it takes a lot of horsepower to calculate mortgage bond yields and other complex values. Currently, most employ clusters of Suns and IBMs, but linux has started to show up. Oil exploration. I don't understand the science behind it, but predicting where oil will be found requires dealing with serious number crunching. I know that Amerada Hess uses a sizeable linux cluster to do this. Rendering. Linux clusters are just starting to make headway there. Bio/Chem informatics. Programs like BLAST can take ages to work, and are often data-parallel, making them ideal for running on a beowulf or similar cluster. There have been a number of pbs-based solutions, though commercial software tools like TurboBLAST and PowerBLAST have gotten what media exposure there is. There's lots of data in the world, and in various fields, the data available is growing faster than Moore's Law. As for the Macs, with Will Van Etten porting various clustering utilities (like pbs and grid engine) over to the Mac, and companies like Scientific Computing Associates and Platform Computing porting their parallel tools over to the Mac, there grow to be a number of possible implementations of clusters and desktop computing (including Pooch's MPI subset). MPI work is getting done on darwin, for those who want those standards. I've used clusters of Macs and mixed clusters as well as linux clusters, though not beowulfs specifically (I work for a company that puts out commercial products that would be unwelcome on a Beowulf :). Macs are good. There are drawbacks--no autovectorizing compiler, no good fortran, and the lack of an elegantly rackable form factor.
But when you've got a program that benefits from altivec, and someone (or you) optimize it, well, holy smokes.
I think you're being a bit unfair. A vital part of budgeting and implementation of new solutions is evaluating options. So the last project was completed. In order to keep providing students with the best possible service, then new projects need to at least be considered. If you left it up to some administrators, then a lab of 6 pentiums might well be "everything we need out of it."
This is one of those areas that requires constant revision and reevaluation. It would be irresponsible to _not_ see what other universities and other people are doing, to see if anything can be learned by that.
If, at the end of a re-evaluation, it is discovered that there's nothing that would benefit students and instructors on which to spend money, then, perhaps, you can find a way to refund the money.
I am sorry that you are sickened by a person attempting to solicit ideas from the broader community on how to improve his campus. It seems to me just the thing a responsible administrator should do. Oftentimes, you don't know that you need something until you find it. When my undergraduate school put up the classes server (homebrewed WebCT/Blackboard-equivalent) four or five years ago, only two or three professors had any idea what to do with it. After the years of development, though, 70% of courses have materials there, and hundreds of students access them on a daily basis. Had no one looked around and said, "well, would it be worthwhile to explore this solution?" five years ago, the university would just now be trying to implement something, leaving it far behind its peers and without the infrastructure to meet the demand of students who like to have everything available on-line.
Having that consistent funding gives workers the flexibility to try new things and innovate.
Amusing to me that the chipmaker with the smallest share of the supercomputer market is the only one quoted in the article. I'd think this restriction change would be much more important for SGI, Compaq, Cray, HP, and IBM than for Intel at the moment. Admittedly, the industry shills will all say similar things, but geez. Let's try not to push the story of Intel as the only remaining chipmaker too much, huh? Especially in one of the few industries in which they don't have any sort of supremacy.
Note that this was the experience of someone at a smallish university in Ireland, too. One with a Microsoft-centric view, to boot. I have friends at university in Ireland (at Limerick) who have to put up with ridiculous outbound firewalls that a university in the states would never use. The environments have different sets of assumptions.
Not to mention, the press exposure is different.
This is not to say that similar things are not true at places in the States, but be wary of generalizing overmuch from this anecdote.
It's likely that the patent application predates the entire PVR war. It's not necessarily that the folks at the patent idiots are entirely clueless (could be; I don't know, and am MUCH too lazy to go look up the original date of the patent application, though it is one click away).
Whether they can win any damages from TiVO remains to be seen, however.
GCC (and emacs) can't really be replaced by a non-GNU alternative. The note said wget was going to be removed because it *could* be replaced by a non-GNU alternative.
So my hunch is that they want to expunge the GNU stuff they can avoid, and deal with what they can't.
Perhaps the Open Source Community is up to the challenge, but AIX performs admirably in exactly the machines and situations in which Linux does the worst: multi-processor non-intel boxes with 4+ gigs of RAM. Right now, a person would be nuts to run linux in production on an RS/6000. The package stability on that hardware is sketchy, at best.
IBM's also spent a lot of time doing little things like graphics acceleration for their workstations that Linux can't yet strongly match.
As much as I'd like to see the death of AIX and dance on SMIT's grave, I think we're seeing the same story at the enterprise level as we always have: Operating Systems designed for enterprise hardware tend to be better on that hardware than Operating Systems designed for low-end microcomputers. If IBM dumped a hundred developers into pushing linux on its Power-based hardware, then we might see something to compete with AIX; as it is, there isn't a large enough install base for linux development to acheive critical mass.
IMHO, natch.
I would be shocked if Darwin doesn't run on this machine. Folks have been working hard to decouple Darwin and the Apple hardware. The form factor for the enclosure is the real story. The only other real player there is RLX, with their transmeta-based 24-blade 3U systems. While the RLX systems are denser, the Crusoe processors aren't as well-suited to high-power computations as the G4.
I figured this deserved more than the one line it got. A friend of mine from college said the same thing for his exit interview for the CS major. It's a great introductory language for people. It's complex enough to be worth an entire semester, allows for the teaching of OO techniques, and also doesn't make students feel utterly worthless (as C has been known to do. Do I malloc (amount + 1), or just (amount)? Argh!).
;)
Python is the perfect way for people to get their feet wet. Especially as it doesn't "break" a person's perspective on what to expect from languages, as perl might.
Without more press about the nuances of the patent process, the reasons for it, and, above all, the general recycling of ideas and code in software development (many of the newest "innovations" are really just decades-old computer science concepts being dressed up in new e-commerce or biotech dresses, after all), the underlying problem will remain. Companies want patents because investors see them as valuable. It's hard to say, "hey, we've got a great idea and no one else can do it better than us," without something concrete to back it up. Non-savvy investors are too skittish, and don't realize that most patents in this arena are utterly ridiculous. How many software architects really want to patent their work, after all? Lawsuits can help to reduce this demand (hopefully the fad will pass after a few high-profile losses), but that's only one of the issues. The laws aren't really the problem; they allow a large degree of latitude to the patent office. It's a problem of the patent office being overworked and undertrained in these areas. Any first-year CS grad student could see through half of the patents companies apply for these days, but how many CS masters and PhDs are motivated to work in the patent office? So, instead, the patents are reviewed by people with less experience than is necessary to adequately evaluate applications. There are simply too many patents coming through the pipes. So, I wholeheartedly agree that education of the populace needs to occur, but it has to be in conjunction with an improvement of the training and pay in the patent office, so that clueless investors can be shot down whilst they begin to realize the differences between software and hardware.