I hear there's a reverse-engineered driver for the SD coming from the iPaq.
y reading of the iPaq mailing lists is that
there cannot currently be an open source SDIO
driver due to licensing issues. OTOH, there
is open source MMC drivers running on the ipaq.
I understand there is ongoing lobbying of
the SDIO association to open the specs, but
I had not heard of any success.
The secretive European Union has been launching tornadoes and hurricanes and floods against the Americans for decades, unfortunately it's only resulted in more sturdy trailer-home designs...
Typical Eurocentric. It is axiomatic that all bad weather in the US comes from Canada.
Pan to Dr. Canuck in his secret
hideout atop Tim Hortons:
Mhahahah, first we beat them at their national
game, war, err, I mean hockey, then we destroy the source
of all of their great philosophers and leaders,
the
Trailer Park.
Finance is not going to be happy without running Excel, the VP is going to be annoyed by not being able to access his IE only stock market site.
I'm confused. I thought the study, and most of
the discussion here was about servers. I think that
the reason that Microsoft is expending all this effort marketing against Linux is that some bright spark noticed
that many of the backend servers could be replaced
without effecting the user experience.
Absolutely and with debian if you stick apt-get update apt-get upgrade
as a weekly.... or daily.... cron-job
Argh. Don't do that. Really. You know those annoying questions that the upgrade process asks you? That is because the user is supposed to be
smarter than... Oh. Nevermind. Sorry I brought
it up:-)
Hmm, I thought about moderating the parent up,
but surely the original poster will read _all_
of the answers:-)
Anyway, I wanted to give a vote for OpenPBS.
It works pretty well, and the code is moderately
ok (i.e., I could sit down and add some new features).
It is true that the
license is not Open Source
(whomever) compliant,
it only restricts your rights to redistribute
commercially.
For many people this is not an onerous restriction. Sun probably makes you register as well; they seem to like registration forms:->
PBS can use the MAUI scheduler as well.
One thing that PBS does, that condor does not,
is support parallel jobs.
Anyway, I don't hate it, which is more than
I can say for a lot of software.
I trust HP and Sun to be around longer than SGI though, and they won't fuck you over like SGI will.
As someone burned by the demise of Alpha,
I can attest that all vendors suck. More precisely,
their interests (never mind what the crack-heads
in charge think are their interests)
often diverge from those of their customers.
Its fine if you want to stick to text only, but don't act like your too fucking stupid to realize why 99% of the world doesn't want to deal with ncurses and text menus and tools.
Well, somebody got up on the wrong side of bed this morning. If we can't act stupid on Slashdot,
where can we:-)
I see this attitude a great deal on slashdot
(and more elsewhere I suppose) that something
cannot possibly be "user friendly" without
being graphical.
Unless "user friendly" is defined as
"conforms to the expectations of Windows users"
I don't see this statement as being at all obvious. Being "Windows-like" is a possible
design goal, but maybe not the top priority.
One can look at this debate from two sides:
Yes, if you want to sell Debian/FreeBSD/UnixALikes-in-General to people
whose only background is Windows (or Mac),
then a spiffy graphical installer might help.
On the other hand, if the FreeBSD (Debian, etc..) install process turns you off, the probably
using the actual system won't be that much fun either.
This is different than the "Linux is not ready for
gramma" discussion. None of these systems is
that difficult to use, but roughly speaking, the
install process is a preview of the user experience.
I dunno who this mythical average person is,
but anyone who does not care about a factor
of two speedup is not doing "intensive computation"
in my books. For me this makes a difference between
six months and a year worth of CPU time.
But aren't we all a little bored of this
back-and-forth? Every few weeks Intel/Amd announces
a speed bump. Half of slashdot says "Who needs that
power, computers are fast enough" and the other
half (including me, oops) says "no they're not,
we have hard problems to crunch".
The interesting questions are essentially business questions at this point. Obviously
there are applications that can use near-infinite computing power; on the other hand, web browsing and running Microsoft or (Open) Office probably
are not them. So the real question is
what do the great unwashed (err. the original sense, not slashdot readers) need the power for
?
Until Apple submits SPECCPU benchmark results, it is hard to escape the conclusion that they
are not cost effective machines for building
scientific computing clusters.
Of course the benchmarks might make that
conclusion inescapable.
Mac fans are welcome to do the benchmarking to
prove my suspicions incorrect. Or
you could translate this page from Japanese. It seems to say
that a G4 at 1GHz is about 1/6 the speed of
a 2.8GHz P4 on the floating point benchmark.
Yes, they would be rockin fast if they used
IBM Power4s. But they don't.
As an American living in Canada, I find it very surprising to see the pent up anger that a several Canadians seem to have for Americans.
Umm, it is not just Canada, it is the entire planet.
Sorry to ruin your day.:-)
But (semi)-seriously I think large, powerful neighbours (note spelling!) are universally resented, even if they have not invaded recently.
I think the big difference is that Canadians are
actually interested in the U.S. As tacky
as "Talking to Americans" is, it is really about
the US, if in a completely distorted way, where
say South Park essentially makes fun of the idea
of hating Canadians. I mean who cares about
Canada really?
Besides, there is NOTHING wrong with being a Nazi.
I hate to be the first one to break this to you,
but this is not universally acknowledged as true.
In fact, for most of the world, Nazi is more or less
synonymous with evil. If what you really mean
is
Besides, there is NOTHING wrong with being evil.
That is just nonsense; this not a matter of politics, it is a matter of language.
Re:SPECint / SPECfp vs. POWER4 / US III / P4
on
Itanium Problems
·
· Score: 1
You said it, Sun leads in "commercial Unix"
which is obviously not about uniprocessor performance or Sun would be belly up a long time ago. The SPEC benchmarks were developed to measure
workstation performance.I'm not sure when the last
time Sun had the lead in workstation performance,
but I would hazard a guess that it was before
the Alpha. One can, and
many people do, still argue about what the
heck "workstation performance means", but the
individual benchmark numbers can still be pretty
helpful. For example if you spend your life waiting for GCC, then you should look at the GCC numbers. The dogma of benchmarking is that
the only useful numbers are those for your code; the next best approach is to
try to guestimate which parts of the benchmark
are most like your code. The
SPEC Website has all kinds of information
about the benchmark codes.
Well, I like the look of tiBooks too, but one
thing that is discouraging me is that I think
5.4 pounds is not that light! (compare to
3.6 for a thinkpad X24.) Yes, the screen is bigger.
Yes the battery life is (might be) better. But two
pounds seem like a lot to pay.
I guess laptops is just like anything else:
there aint no free lunch.
Re:Clean look and good international support
on
Google Does the News
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Hmm. I know its not cool to pick on people's English
when you don't speak their language, but
living in Munich I was amused by the following
quote from the Islamic Republic News Agency
"This government will only govern for a very short time," Stoiber
told his disappointing supporters at a gathering in Munich, broadcast
live on German television.
I mean, hey, Bavarians are a unique bunch, but
disappointing seems a bit harsh, especially during Oktoberfest:->
Seriously though, I wonder just how the IRNA one paragraph story
got to be number two on the list of sources.
B.T.W., and this is probably redundant, but if you
think slashdotting is cool, wait till google news
points at your community newspaper.
Well, I'm not going to invest, but one
way to arrange things is what I have seen
in some hotels: You have to visit a web
page, with adverts, in order to get your
pipe working. Of course, the number of
advertising impressions (whatever the hell that
means) just plummeted to one per connection.
On the other hand, people will visit your "portal"
and probably not be that annoyed with you
(a missing link in many web advertising strategies)
Anybody can download the word viewer from http://office.microsoft.com/downloads/2000/wd97vwr 32.aspx for free
Cool. Where can I get the IRIX/MIPS version?
No? How about Linux/Alpha? No? maybe FreeBSD/Intel? Oh all right, my laptop is very
mainstream, it runs debian/intel. Oh. I need Windows.
I expect you were just trying to be +4 informative, but it is worth noting that while
this may be helpful for some people, it does
not address the broader point of tying your data
to one vendor.
No, I _could_ go on, but I'm tired of _this_. People who hate Windows just because it's a Microsoft product. Slashdot
seems to just orgasm any time it gets to report on something going against Microsoft. I get tired of it.
Umm. So don't read Slashdot? Seriously, while
there may be some people here that hate Windows
because it is a Microsoft product, there are also
lots who dislike Microsoft because of their unpleasant experiences with Windows.
So Windows XP works great for you? Great. The rest
of us are still a little pissed about 15 years or
so of crappy software.
Yeah, I used to think HTML was a bit lame,
but not completely evil as a mail format. Last week
my wife tried sending out a newsletter in html,
about 40K (generated by Hyperlatex, which makes
nice html). About half of the recipients either
had the attachment stripped or mail bounced by
paranoid smtp servers.
So, yeah, get the jokes about the newsletter's content out of your system, but there seems to
be a genuine problem. On the other hand, this
is not exactly a scientific study.
This is a constant problem with free/low cost software.
[...]
I've looked at every single office suite out there. None of them - NONE of them, have any type of automation interface.
I don't think this has to with free/proprietary
at all. I think it has to do with young versus
old projects. I would be willing to bet
that almost anyone developing an office suite will
work on the basics, including file level interoperability before adding features needed
by a tiny fraction of the users. Especially, a
commercial effort, where to do otherwise would
be commercial suicide.
In fact, having a nifty extension language/API
is just the sort of thing I would expect free
projects to fritter their time away on cuz it is
cool. [Pause. goto www.openoffice.org]
Yep, I thought so. Have a look at
the
openoffice API FAQ. Then find something else
to complain about:-)
Well, I think the original poster, and anyone
who has lived in a city with a decent public
transport system (i.e. outside of the USA, and
for the most part outside of Canada), could
argue that requiring roads and parking lots for
people to move in is _not_ realistic. Look
at the old city in any major European city. Basically twisty roman cart tracks are not too
swell for SUVs, but strangely enough people pay
through the nose to live there.
But hey, its only a game. The standard slashdot
reply should be for people to get off their butts
and write a better one.:-)
Perhaps SE versus CS is a little narrow, but I
like the spirit of the thing.
Ask them what they think the purpose of doing
a degree in Computer Science is. Ask several
different professors and students; academic departments are not homogeneous. See if the answers sound like something you would
want to do.
Ignore
the promotional blurbs and "vision statements" put together by overworked, well-intentioned secretaries and administrators. At least in North
America, these will have little influence on
your experience.
Well, I won't get involved with whether CNN is accurate, but the Frankfurfurter Algemeine(Sp?) Zeitung english edition also reported the guns as being legally owned, acquired via membership in a gun club. This seems to have focussed some (negative) attention on German gun clubs. The article I read mentioned that the largest gun club federation did not permit pump shotguns, but that other clubs did (or more precisely what they said was that not all clubs are part of this federation).
Slashdot Mirror
No that's debian
Redhat is the one with the uhh, cool installer.
ducks...
y reading of the iPaq mailing lists is that there cannot currently be an open source SDIO driver due to licensing issues. OTOH, there is open source MMC drivers running on the ipaq.
I understand there is ongoing lobbying of the SDIO association to open the specs, but I had not heard of any success.
Pan to Dr. Canuck in his secret hideout atop Tim Hortons:
Hmm, I thought about moderating the parent up, but surely the original poster will read _all_ of the answers :-)
Anyway, I wanted to give a vote for OpenPBS. It works pretty well, and the code is moderately ok (i.e., I could sit down and add some new features).
It is true that the license is not Open Source (whomever) compliant, it only restricts your rights to redistribute commercially. For many people this is not an onerous restriction. Sun probably makes you register as well; they seem to like registration forms :->
PBS can use the MAUI scheduler as well. One thing that PBS does, that condor does not, is support parallel jobs.
Anyway, I don't hate it, which is more than I can say for a lot of software.
Well, somebody got up on the wrong side of bed this morning. If we can't act stupid on Slashdot, where can we :-)
I see this attitude a great deal on slashdot (and more elsewhere I suppose) that something cannot possibly be "user friendly" without being graphical.
Unless "user friendly" is defined as "conforms to the expectations of Windows users" I don't see this statement as being at all obvious. Being "Windows-like" is a possible design goal, but maybe not the top priority.
One can look at this debate from two sides:
- Yes, if you want to sell Debian/FreeBSD/UnixALikes-in-General to people
whose only background is Windows (or Mac),
then a spiffy graphical installer might help.
- On the other hand, if the FreeBSD (Debian, etc..) install process turns you off, the probably
using the actual system won't be that much fun either.
This is different than the "Linux is not ready for gramma" discussion. None of these systems is that difficult to use, but roughly speaking, the install process is a preview of the user experience.Well, you might look at SynCE, but it does not look ready for production.
Of course, under certain circumstances you can run Linux your pocket pc, but then syncing is still a bit crude.
I dunno who this mythical average person is, but anyone who does not care about a factor of two speedup is not doing "intensive computation" in my books. For me this makes a difference between six months and a year worth of CPU time.
But aren't we all a little bored of this back-and-forth? Every few weeks Intel/Amd announces a speed bump. Half of slashdot says "Who needs that power, computers are fast enough" and the other half (including me, oops) says "no they're not, we have hard problems to crunch".
The interesting questions are essentially business questions at this point. Obviously there are applications that can use near-infinite computing power; on the other hand, web browsing and running Microsoft or (Open) Office probably are not them. So the real question is what do the great unwashed (err. the original sense, not slashdot readers) need the power for ?
Until Apple submits SPECCPU benchmark results, it is hard to escape the conclusion that they are not cost effective machines for building scientific computing clusters.
Of course the benchmarks might make that conclusion inescapable.
Mac fans are welcome to do the benchmarking to prove my suspicions incorrect. Or you could translate this page from Japanese. It seems to say that a G4 at 1GHz is about 1/6 the speed of a 2.8GHz P4 on the floating point benchmark.
Yes, they would be rockin fast if they used IBM Power4s. But they don't.
Umm, it is not just Canada, it is the entire planet. Sorry to ruin your day. :-)
But (semi)-seriously I think large, powerful neighbours (note spelling!) are universally resented, even if they have not invaded recently.
I think the big difference is that Canadians are actually interested in the U.S. As tacky as "Talking to Americans" is, it is really about the US, if in a completely distorted way, where say South Park essentially makes fun of the idea of hating Canadians. I mean who cares about Canada really?
--Canuck in exile
JAAB
just another alpha bigot
I guess laptops is just like anything else: there aint no free lunch.
Seriously though, I wonder just how the IRNA one paragraph story got to be number two on the list of sources.
B.T.W., and this is probably redundant, but if you think slashdotting is cool, wait till google news points at your community newspaper.
On the other hand, people will visit your "portal" and probably not be that annoyed with you (a missing link in many web advertising strategies)
Cool. Where can I get the IRIX/MIPS version? No? How about Linux/Alpha? No? maybe FreeBSD/Intel? Oh all right, my laptop is very mainstream, it runs debian/intel. Oh. I need Windows.
I expect you were just trying to be +4 informative, but it is worth noting that while this may be helpful for some people, it does not address the broader point of tying your data to one vendor.
So Windows XP works great for you? Great. The rest of us are still a little pissed about 15 years or so of crappy software.
So, yeah, get the jokes about the newsletter's content out of your system, but there seems to be a genuine problem. On the other hand, this is not exactly a scientific study.
But hey, its only a game. The standard slashdot reply should be for people to get off their butts and write a better one. :-)
Umm. How about:
"Sim Risking their Lives to Improve the President's Chances in the Next E(r|l)ection?"
There. Now everybody should be happy. Except
maybe Democrats. Or Republicans.
-- Playing nice with the other children since my
last electroshock treatment
Perhaps SE versus CS is a little narrow, but I like the spirit of the thing.
Ask them what they think the purpose of doing a degree in Computer Science is. Ask several different professors and students; academic departments are not homogeneous. See if the answers sound like something you would want to do.
Ignore the promotional blurbs and "vision statements" put together by overworked, well-intentioned secretaries and administrators. At least in North America, these will have little influence on your experience.
Well, I won't get involved with whether CNN is
accurate, but the Frankfurfurter Algemeine(Sp?)
Zeitung english edition also reported
the guns as being legally owned, acquired via
membership in a gun club. This seems to have
focussed some (negative) attention on German gun
clubs. The article I read mentioned that the largest gun club federation did not permit pump
shotguns, but that other clubs did (or more
precisely what they said was that not all clubs
are part of this federation).
FAZ can make mistakes too of course.