I have a TNT card. I like it. In fact, it's really great when I play quake and other 3D games. This is all under Windows, though, since the TNT drivers are slower and less reliable under linux. Hence the G200 under linux. Not as great for the 3D, but blazing 2D, and well supported (throw in your plug about open source drivers here). My concern isn't as much the open-sourcedness of the drivers (though I think they should be), but that the quality of the drivers on two different OSs should be comparable.
Now we hear again that they won't open up on this. So? Nothing has changed, but more importantly, nothing has improved. In fact, it almost seems as if relations have gotten a little more strained... I'll be thrilled when *my hardware* works under linux with similar or better performance than it does under windows, but until then, there's not much that we can do. I've sent letters to Nvidia, asking nicely for them to open up and work with the community, take advangtage of the ready and willing people that will nearly do your work for you. Scratch their back, and they will scratch yours. Make them happy, and they will buy a GeForce DDR when they get a chance. Granted, most of the sales are through deals with OEMs and not individual purchases by the open-source community, but I'd think that any small effort to improve your market share would be a worthwhile one.
An increasing number of people using Linux and BSD these days are in the young, game playing market. Take advantage of this! Create even a little bit of customer loyalty. It's worked on me with Matrox. I'm leaning towards a G400Max instead of a GeForce. Why? It works with my setup, and it works *well*, the manufacturer has given support, and I give it back. It's as simple as that.
I'd like *some*, but not *all* of the crap - for example, I'd like to play with Netscrape's newest HTML composer, but not the mail/news client, or maybe I'd like the news client without the mail client (though they are one big evil piece of $#!% now...). The point is, the custom install *should* have those boxes selectable (as they used to be), or they shouldn't even show them to you at all. What's the point. That, and the newest navigator is a couple of minor versions behind the browser that comes with Communicator 4.72. Some of the bugs are gone (yay!) and some new ones (like the auto-complete bug) are in. If 4.09 or 4.10 was out, I would have d/l that instead, but getting 4.08 again doesn't solve the problems I was having. This did, but I pay for it in wasted drive space and all sorts of extra menu options that I pray I never click on...
Netscape still bounces my mail to Eudora. I use my Linux box for a lot of things, but I haven't found a mail client yet that's nearly as nice. No configuring needed either (there are some nice features in LoseNT, after all).
um.... ok... if you are talking about Chubb or ITT tech 'engineering'. Of course, that's not a real school, and not real engineering.
Re:Calulators in math class
on
Laptop Exams?
·
· Score: 2
A friend of mine has a slide rule mouted on a plaque with a little plate that says "Use in case of emergency" or something like that. Pretty good. I'm thinking of mounting one of the slide rules I have around (2 right now - one 'pocket' rule, and one larger, more accurate one). Pretty nifty inventions.
Re:More money = better grade at the end?
on
Laptop Exams?
·
· Score: 2
Why, back when I was at RPI, they were just starting off the studio class programs... I was in normal physics/calc, and I had some friends in the studio / pilot laptop versions of these courses. Our take on that? The laptop versions were way easier, and you got less out of it, partly because the curriculum was different, and nobody was used to teaching this way yet. But by my senior year, it had been decided that the laptop program was in for good. At first they said that the laptops were not going to be part of your tution, and not even considered with financial aid (yikes!), but they seem to have relented there, and the software discounts from the conputer store aren't all that bad. I still think that mandating laptops and focusing a greater number of courses around them is a poor idea, though it does have its place. Unfortunately, I think that Calc 1 should *never* be one of those places - learn it, then learn to use the computer to do it. But learn it first. Maple is your friend (gosh, the earlier versions were so awful), but if you don't understand what it is doing, you're not gaining anything.
All that being said, your education is what you make of it. Laptops or not, graphical calculators or not, you still have the opportunity to learn a lot of neat and important things, and it's your decision to deprive yourself of that knowledge.
Re:More money = better grade at the end?
on
Laptop Exams?
·
· Score: 2
That's just it - good tests force you to do things symbolically (though Maple and Mathematica can help you cheat a little there), but a good "show all work" kinda thing is really the point.
Integrate this from 5 to 12, integrate this from t0 to t1, show me an example graph with different values of w all on the same plot, and explain what this means show an increasing amount of knowledge on the student's part. The first is trivial with a calculator or laptop. The second requires several steps, and may need some work with it. The third could be done with a graphing calc, but it would still require some understanding to put things on the same graph. The fourth is the kind of analysis that you really want to get at, most notably in an Electromagnetics course, where you've got all sorts of great 'div, grad, curl and all that' equations, but what does any of it mean? I'm still happier with an engineer that can explain to me how something works than one who can crank through needless calculations, but cranking away is often part of the path to understanding.
This one is pretty lengthy: >>>/usr/src/linux-2.2.14/Documentation/mca.txt and also: MCA Linux Home Page: http://glycerine.itsmm.uni.edu/mca/
This may be mostly x86 stuff, but hopefully you can find some info to help you along.
The MCA bus was a great thing at the time, but unfortunately is was kept closed and heavily taxed... better than standard ISA though, no doubt about that.
There's also the HOWTOs and MINI-HOWTOs - many of which come with the distros, and they can be easily located on the web. Oftentimes these are pretty good at handholding until you get brave enough to man smb.conf or something else fairly large...
True, the 3.x and 4.x versions were close enough that that worked. Version numbering for the sake of version numbering is dumb, but so it the general populous (the same one whose word processor is Windows, and internet provider is Netscape....)
I don't have this problem with Netcape on my AIX or Mandrake box, but it does happen on 95,98, and NT (that silly autocompletion thing must be killing me). Of course, it is kind of nice, considering I type 's' and hit return, since it's already filled in slashdot.org. Ayeeeeeeeee only shows a list of things to page down (which could be better at times), but doesn't really complete properly... oh well until it can read my mind, I can only suggest improvements (and try to fix them in Mozilla).
Shouldn't that be internal versions, though... unless we see it, it shouldn't be numbered... then there's that 5 = Mozilla thing.... don't think that's really right, either. What would we do if Mozilla suddenly was at M20? Revolt! We want the buggy earlier releases!!! or not...
It's especially good on a page like/. over a slow link. It's one thing at home over a cable modem, but ona dial-up or work link.... slow..... and again... slow for no reason...
I thought Netscape 5 was coming soon - I guess that got scrapped and we're heading straight to 6? Sorta like the Slackware 4 -> 7 jump...
The one thing I hate about my netscraper now is that I'll go to type in a URL (say: www.foobar.org), and after I've typed "www.", I hit 'f' and "www.f" all dissapears, so I'm left with oobar.org...
That and I can't unselect components from the full communicator install (previous versions let me). I refuse to use the NS mail/news clients, since they bungled them so badly - but of course, I can't install anything without everything... bah!
That's a pretty odd stance, considering I know of several friends with dual-proc boxes running 2.2, and you can easily check to see the processes running on each CPU (or a quick MT RC5 check, too)...
or check out http://www.phy.duke.edu/brahma/smp-faq/
If you can't get SMP properly working, there are many people who can help, I'm sure...
>2.3 isn't shipping anywhere. This is sm@rt reseller. Their target audience isn't slashdot.
True, and I addressed that. It is just as 'public' if you can get it from any internet connected computer anywhere in the world for free and without special logins as it is sold on a shelf. I made that point and understand what he meant. That doesn't mean that it is accurate journalism.
>n terms of performance, as Sm@rt Reseller has shown over the last year and a half, Linux actually outworks--on low-end Intel uniprocessor systems--all other network operating systems. It also does well on high-end uniprocessor boxes. But Linux takes a back seat to NT on symmetric-multiprocessing (SMP) systems. However, the next public edition of the operating system, Linux 2.4, due out this summer, will offer SMP support.
That is the paragraph I was quoting. It says that Linux is great on 1 proc, and 2.4 will offer SMP support. Not *improved* SMP support, just that it will (sounds almost like 'will finally') have SMP... That and the "next public edition" thing... I understand what is meant there, but all of he 2.3 series is just as "public" as the 2.2 or 2.4 stuff. Free, anonymous downloads... (but it's not on a shelf at CrimpUSA, so it's not public).
I'm not disagreeing with the general idea, it was just poorly presented.
Yes, but they didn't say that 2.2 does SMP, but it really isn't up to par with AIX/Solaris, which would be the truth. What they essentially said was that it *doesn't* have it now, but it *will* have it soon. They didn't say 4+ procs (after which NT gained minimally, I haven't made new #s on W2k yet), they mentioned 'SMP' which means 2 or more to me and just about everybody else. It's not defensive, it's ust poor journalism. They can rip on anything that I use, as long as they do it truthfully.
I meant that Solaris and AIX scale much better than NT does (example RS/6k SP ). I certainly wasn't bashing solaris (I've used solaris x86 and liked it).
They sort of insinuate that the 2.2 Linux kernel can't do SMP - the 2.4 kernel is SMP enabled or some garbage like that... I know that Linux SMP isn't the highest performing SMP implementation out there, and that 2.2 doesn't scale to 128 procs, but they said it 'takes a backseat to NT'... last time I check NT SMP above 4 procs wasn't getting you very much... If they said AIX or Solaris, I'd have to agree, or if they at least acknowledged that people *do* run lots of SMP linux boxen. Not very informed.........
Slashdot Mirror
Time to send in a patch for the doc file, I guess 8^D That came out of source d/l just a couple of weeks ago... Sorry I didn't check it first.
I have a TNT card. I like it. In fact, it's really great when I play quake and other 3D games. This is all under Windows, though, since the TNT drivers are slower and less reliable under linux. Hence the G200 under linux. Not as great for the 3D, but blazing 2D, and well supported (throw in your plug about open source drivers here). My concern isn't as much the open-sourcedness of the drivers (though I think they should be), but that the quality of the drivers on two different OSs should be comparable.
Now we hear again that they won't open up on this. So? Nothing has changed, but more importantly, nothing has improved. In fact, it almost seems as if relations have gotten a little more strained... I'll be thrilled when *my hardware* works under linux with similar or better performance than it does under windows, but until then, there's not much that we can do. I've sent letters to Nvidia, asking nicely for them to open up and work with the community, take advangtage of the ready and willing people that will nearly do your work for you. Scratch their back, and they will scratch yours. Make them happy, and they will buy a GeForce DDR when they get a chance. Granted, most of the sales are through deals with OEMs and not individual purchases by the open-source community, but I'd think that any small effort to improve your market share would be a worthwhile one.
An increasing number of people using Linux and BSD these days are in the young, game playing market. Take advantage of this! Create even a little bit of customer loyalty. It's worked on me with Matrox. I'm leaning towards a G400Max instead of a GeForce. Why? It works with my setup, and it works *well*, the manufacturer has given support, and I give it back. It's as simple as that.
I'd like *some*, but not *all* of the crap - for example, I'd like to play with Netscrape's newest HTML composer, but not the mail/news client, or maybe I'd like the news client without the mail client (though they are one big evil piece of $#!% now...). The point is, the custom install *should* have those boxes selectable (as they used to be), or they shouldn't even show them to you at all. What's the point. That, and the newest navigator is a couple of minor versions behind the browser that comes with Communicator 4.72. Some of the bugs are gone (yay!) and some new ones (like the auto-complete bug) are in. If 4.09 or 4.10 was out, I would have d/l that instead, but getting 4.08 again doesn't solve the problems I was having. This did, but I pay for it in wasted drive space and all sorts of extra menu options that I pray I never click on...
Netscape still bounces my mail to Eudora. I use my Linux box for a lot of things, but I haven't found a mail client yet that's nearly as nice. No configuring needed either (there are some nice features in LoseNT, after all).
um.... ok... if you are talking about Chubb or ITT tech 'engineering'. Of course, that's not a real school, and not real engineering.
A friend of mine has a slide rule mouted on a plaque with a little plate that says "Use in case of emergency" or something like that. Pretty good. I'm thinking of mounting one of the slide rules I have around (2 right now - one 'pocket' rule, and one larger, more accurate one). Pretty nifty inventions.
Why, back when I was at RPI, they were just starting off the studio class programs... I was in normal physics/calc, and I had some friends in the studio / pilot laptop versions of these courses. Our take on that? The laptop versions were way easier, and you got less out of it, partly because the curriculum was different, and nobody was used to teaching this way yet. But by my senior year, it had been decided that the laptop program was in for good. At first they said that the laptops were not going to be part of your tution, and not even considered with financial aid (yikes!), but they seem to have relented there, and the software discounts from the conputer store aren't all that bad. I still think that mandating laptops and focusing a greater number of courses around them is a poor idea, though it does have its place. Unfortunately, I think that Calc 1 should *never* be one of those places - learn it, then learn to use the computer to do it. But learn it first. Maple is your friend (gosh, the earlier versions were so awful), but if you don't understand what it is doing, you're not gaining anything.
All that being said, your education is what you make of it. Laptops or not, graphical calculators or not, you still have the opportunity to learn a lot of neat and important things, and it's your decision to deprive yourself of that knowledge.
That's just it - good tests force you to do things symbolically (though Maple and Mathematica can help you cheat a little there), but a good "show all work" kinda thing is really the point.
Integrate this from 5 to 12, integrate this from t0 to t1, show me an example graph with different values of w all on the same plot, and explain what this means show an increasing amount of knowledge on the student's part. The first is trivial with a calculator or laptop. The second requires several steps, and may need some work with it. The third could be done with a graphing calc, but it would still require some understanding to put things on the same graph. The fourth is the kind of analysis that you really want to get at, most notably in an Electromagnetics course, where you've got all sorts of great 'div, grad, curl and all that' equations, but what does any of it mean? I'm still happier with an engineer that can explain to me how something works than one who can crank through needless calculations, but cranking away is often part of the path to understanding.
doh! left in some irrelevant files ("I'll just take those out after I finish typing"). Oops. I'm sure you can all figure it out, though.
There has been some bits of MCA support for x86 Linux - I know of a few that have gotten linux running on an old PS/2.
h a d .h
/usr/src/linux-2.2.14/Documentation/mca.txt
I come up with the following on a quick search...
/usr/src/linux-2.2.14/include/linux/mca.h
/usr/src/linux-2.2.14/include/asm-i386/mca_dma.
/usr/src/linux-2.2.14/include/config/mca.h
/usr/src/linux-2.2.14/net/core/dev_mcast.c
/usr/src/linux-2.2.14/net/ipv6/mcast.c
/usr/src/linux-2.2.14/drivers/net/smc-mca.c
/usr/src/linux-2.2.14/drivers/net/smc-mca.h
/usr/src/linux-2.2.14/drivers/net/sk_mca.c
/usr/src/linux-2.2.14/drivers/net/sk_mca.h
/usr/src/linux-2.2.14/drivers/scsi/ibmmca.c
/usr/src/linux-2.2.14/drivers/scsi/ibmmca.h
/usr/src/linux-2.2.14/drivers/scsi/mca_53c9x.c
/usr/src/linux-2.2.14/drivers/scsi/mca_53c9x.h
/usr/src/linux-2.2.14/drivers/scsi/README.ibmmc
/usr/src/linux-2.2.14/drivers/isdn/avmb1/avmcar
/usr/src/linux-2.2.14/arch/i386/kernel/mca.c
/usr/src/linux-2.2.14/Documentation/mca.txt
/usr/i386-glibc20-linux/include/linux/mca.h
This one is pretty lengthy:
>>>
and also:
MCA Linux Home Page: http://glycerine.itsmm.uni.edu/mca/
This may be mostly x86 stuff, but hopefully you can find some info to help you along.
The MCA bus was a great thing at the time, but unfortunately is was kept closed and heavily taxed... better than standard ISA though, no doubt about that.
There's also the HOWTOs and MINI-HOWTOs - many of which come with the distros, and they can be easily located on the web. Oftentimes these are pretty good at handholding until you get brave enough to man smb.conf or something else fairly large...
True, the 3.x and 4.x versions were close enough that that worked. Version numbering for the sake of version numbering is dumb, but so it the general populous (the same one whose word processor is Windows, and internet provider is Netscape....)
I don't have this problem with Netcape on my AIX or Mandrake box, but it does happen on 95,98, and NT (that silly autocompletion thing must be killing me). Of course, it is kind of nice, considering I type 's' and hit return, since it's already filled in slashdot.org. Ayeeeeeeeee only shows a list of things to page down (which could be better at times), but doesn't really complete properly... oh well until it can read my mind, I can only suggest improvements (and try to fix them in Mozilla).
Shouldn't that be internal versions, though... unless we see it, it shouldn't be numbered... then there's that 5 = Mozilla thing.... don't think that's really right, either. What would we do if Mozilla suddenly was at M20? Revolt! We want the buggy earlier releases!!! or not...
It's especially good on a page like /. over a slow link. It's one thing at home over a cable modem, but ona dial-up or work link.... slow..... and again... slow for no reason...
I thought Netscape 5 was coming soon - I guess that got scrapped and we're heading straight to 6? Sorta like the Slackware 4 -> 7 jump...
The one thing I hate about my netscraper now is that I'll go to type in a URL (say: www.foobar.org), and after I've typed "www.", I hit 'f' and "www.f" all dissapears, so I'm left with oobar.org...
That and I can't unselect components from the full communicator install (previous versions let me). I refuse to use the NS mail/news clients, since they bungled them so badly - but of course, I can't install anything without everything... bah!
Yup, but this AC saying that 'enalbing SMP doesn't actually do anything' is also pretty bothersome...
;-) Oh wait... that would include me on some subjects, too 8^)
Who let in the uneducated masses, anyway
That's a pretty odd stance, considering I know of several friends with dual-proc boxes running 2.2, and you can easily check to see the processes running on each CPU (or a quick MT RC5 check, too)...
or check out http://www.phy.duke.edu/brahma/smp-faq/
If you can't get SMP properly working, there are many people who can help, I'm sure...
Now I'm *never* going to get any of that rewiring done on the house 8^D
>2.3 isn't shipping anywhere. This is sm@rt reseller. Their target audience isn't slashdot.
True, and I addressed that. It is just as 'public' if you can get it from any internet connected computer anywhere in the world for free and without special logins as it is sold on a shelf. I made that point and understand what he meant. That doesn't mean that it is accurate journalism.
works for me (15 minutes later...)
>n terms of performance, as Sm@rt Reseller has shown over the last year and a half, Linux actually outworks--on low-end Intel uniprocessor systems--all other network operating systems. It also does well on high-end uniprocessor boxes. But Linux takes a back seat to NT on symmetric-multiprocessing (SMP) systems. However, the next public edition of the operating system, Linux 2.4, due out this summer, will offer SMP support.
That is the paragraph I was quoting. It says that Linux is great on 1 proc, and 2.4 will offer SMP support. Not *improved* SMP support, just that it will (sounds almost like 'will finally') have SMP... That and the "next public edition" thing... I understand what is meant there, but all of he 2.3 series is just as "public" as the 2.2 or 2.4 stuff. Free, anonymous downloads... (but it's not on a shelf at CrimpUSA, so it's not public).
I'm not disagreeing with the general idea, it was just poorly presented.
Yes, but they didn't say that 2.2 does SMP, but it really isn't up to par with AIX/Solaris, which would be the truth. What they essentially said was that it *doesn't* have it now, but it *will* have it soon. They didn't say 4+ procs (after which NT gained minimally, I haven't made new #s on W2k yet), they mentioned 'SMP' which means 2 or more to me and just about everybody else. It's not defensive, it's ust poor journalism. They can rip on anything that I use, as long as they do it truthfully.
I meant that Solaris and AIX scale much better than NT does (example RS/6k SP ). I certainly wasn't bashing solaris (I've used solaris x86 and liked it).
Sorry for the confusion.
tar.gz is better than the various implementations of rpm...
They sort of insinuate that the 2.2 Linux kernel can't do SMP - the 2.4 kernel is SMP enabled or some garbage like that... I know that Linux SMP isn't the highest performing SMP implementation out there, and that 2.2 doesn't scale to 128 procs, but they said it 'takes a backseat to NT'... last time I check NT SMP above 4 procs wasn't getting you very much... If they said AIX or Solaris, I'd have to agree, or if they at least acknowledged that people *do* run lots of SMP linux boxen. Not very informed.........