>>If people can't cope with simple tasks such as this, they probably shouldn't be performing any maintenance on their PC at all, in particular installing new video drivers.
How wonderfully arrogant.
Why not simplify maintenance tasks so that more users can perform them on their own? I guess some would rather keep this sort of elitist attitude that makes the geek community look bad, particularly the GNU/Linux users.
Besides, maybe it's not just novices that could use a little help. Perhaps some people have multiple machines with different nVidia graphics cards. Should they be expected to log in to each machine, lspci, and download + install the proper driver for each different machine? Or just download one driver for which they can hack up a simple script to distribute to all machines at once and install / update automatically?
Funny, I can play Neverwinter Nights just fine with my Ti4600 and 5328 drivers. Heck, I'm even using kernel 2.6 with the Minion.de driver patch.
Yes, I've seen a lot of complaints about the drivers on the nVnews.net forums, but I really wish Slashdot editors would refrain from making blanket statements.
>>Doesn't anyone find it odd that they reccomend the SAME drivers for an 8mb TNT card and a 256mb quadra or FX?
Not at all--Their unified driver architecture helps to make sure that no matter which card a user has, he only needs to download one driver package.
Believe it or not, many people don't even know which video card they own, much less could they tell the difference between a GeForce MX 200, GeForce MX 400, GeForce MX 440, GeForce FX 5600, GeForce 5900, GeForce 5950 Ultra, one of many varieties of "Quadro" based products, etc. It's easier and a lot less error prone to tell people just to download the 'latest nVidia graphics driver' than to go into the device manager or lspci or whatever and figure out exactly which piece of hardware they own.
"We would expect Microsoft to react no differently if someone launched an operating system called Microsofta just as Microsoft did when confronted with an operating system called Lindows," Mythic President and Chief Executive Mark Jacobs said."
While I got a kick out of it at first, it sort of seems to validate Microsoft's lawsuit. It certainly is an amusing twist of irony, though.
Last four options in the "rank the reasons you like Linux for the home" section: The satisfaction of not giving Microsoft more money. I don't trust Microsoft. I don't want to use proprietary software. I don't want to use commercial software.
I was almost taking the survey seriously until I saw those options.
What's more important is what SGI has to say about this:
"October 1, 2003
To the Linux Community:
As one of many contributors to the Open Source movement and to Linux, SGI takes the subject of intellectual property rights seriously. Our contributions are a valuable expression of ideas which contribute to the intellectual richness of Linux.
Over the past four years, SGI has released over a million lines of code under an open source license. Throughout, we have carried out a rigorous internal process to ensure that all software contributed by SGI represents code we are legally entitled to release as open source.
When a question was raised by the community earlier in the summer about the ate_utils.c routine, we took immediate action to address it. We quickly and carefully re-reviewed our contributions to open source, and found brief fragments of code matching System V code in three generic routines (ate_utils.c, the atoi function and systeminfo.h header file), all within the I/O infrastructure support for SGI's platform. The three code fragments had been inadvertently included and in fact were redundant from the start. We found better replacements providing the same functionality already available in the Linux kernel. All together, these three small code fragments comprised no more than 200 lines out of the more than one million lines of our overall contributions to Linux. Notably, it appears that most or all of the System V code fragments we found had previously been placed in the public domain, meaning it is very doubtful that the SCO Group has any proprietary claim to these code fragments in any case.
As a precaution, we promptly removed the code fragments from SGIs Linux website and distributed customer patches, and released patches to the 2.4 and 2.5 kernels on June 30 and July 3 to replace these routines and make other fixes to the SGI infrastructure code that were already in progress at SGI. Our changes showed up in the 2.5 kernel within a few weeks of our submission, and the 2.4 changes were available in the production version of the 2.4 kernel as of August 25 when the 2.4.22 kernel was released. Thus, the code in question has been completely removed.
Following this occurrence, we continued our investigation to determine whether any other code in the Linux kernel was even conceivably implicated. As a result of that exhaustive investigation, SGI has discovered a few additional code segments (similar in nature to the segments referred to above and trivial in amount) that may arguably be related to UNIX code. We are in the process of removing and replacing these segments.
SCO's references to XFS are completely misplaced. XFS is an innovative SGI- created work. It is not a derivative work of System V in any sense, and SGI has full rights to license it to whomever we choose and to contribute it to open source. It may be that SCO is taking the position that merely because XFS is also distributed along with IRIX it is somehow subject to the System V license. But if so, this is an absurd position, with no basis either in the license or in common sense. In fact, our UNIX license clearly provides that SGI retains ownership and all rights as to all code that was not part of AT&Ts UNIX System V.
I hope this answers some of the questions that you and the Linux community might have. We continue to release new Linux work, and are very excited about the growth and acceptance of Linux. We are continuing full speed to do new work and release new Linux products. We take our responsibility to the open source community seriously and are confident that we have an effective process to verify the quality and integrity of our contributions to Linux.
>>They are trying to restrict the GPL version of XFS to Linux.
It means what you said the second time: "XFS has been released under the GPL and a linux implementation is available."
It was released a long time ago, too. I've been using XFS since before Mandrake started supporting it in version 8 (With an early 2.4 kernel). So "has been released" is a reference to an event that occured a couple years ago.
"With the US legal system, it's always hard to tell what the hell is going to happen," Torvalds says. "So I can't just dismiss the lawsuit as the complete crapola I think it is."
Shouldn't the focus be more on engine technology than "missions?" I mean, sure it's great publicity to send a human out to space, particularly if they're going to walk on some celestial body, but wouldn't it be cool just to figure out how to launch probes with better propulsion systems to get further than probe currently in space? And maybe give them better power sources so they can use more powerful computers?
Humans are rather delicate objects and can't seem to adjust to large changes in velocity very well. Throw a human at a brick wall at a few hundred kilometers per hour and you'll see what I mean. Sure, a trained and well-conditioned human can withstand being shot out to space by a rocket, but for a high-power rail gun or another type of projectile cannon? I doubt it. If we really want to see what's out there, manned exploration is not the way to go until there's a feasible solution to counteract the effects of really high acceleration on the human body.
I think it would be great just to have a large magnetic launching platform on the moon with a dedicated power source (Fission? Solar?) to make it possible to send unmanned probes out at extremely high velocities.
Again, I'm not a scientist, so please correct me if what I'm suggesting sounds totally rediculous.
Re:I'm personally donating $10.00 to Linux BIOS...
on
Phoenix's BIOS Roadmap
·
· Score: 1
Send an e-mail to dwh@lanl.gov. We might be able to help get it working on your machine:)
Which EPIA do you have? I used the EPIAs with 500Mhz and 800MHz C3 processors using normal SDRAM. There are other EPIA boards that support DDR RAM. If you're using the 500MHz/800MHz normal SDRAM version, I'll send you a ROM I used with the old freebios tree and an Etherboot payload.
Look for messages by Sone Takeshi on the LinuxBIOS mailing list--He's done extensive work on those mainboards and has been working on a HOWTO. He also wrote FILO which is an extremely useful loader that you should consider using as your "payload."
It's also important to know whether you're attempting to build with an old freebios tree or the freebios2 tree.
It's really quite safe, I've done it several times on VIA EPIA mini-ITX mainboards and a couple K8 boards (Arima HDAMA and Tyan S2885).However, it's definitely a good idea to burn a backup ROM just in case your board isn't quite supported.
Your reference to "sacrificial hardware" is simply an exaggeration. Reaching into an energized system is inherently dangerous, yes, but perfectly harmless if reasonable safety precautions are taken--Ground yourself, don't let your tool slip and short anything, don't spill your coffee on the mainboard, etc.
Re:I'm personally donating $10.00 to Linux BIOS...
on
Phoenix's BIOS Roadmap
·
· Score: 1
Your concern is touching, but unnecessary. The LinuxBIOS project at heart is run by the CCS-1 division of Los Alamos National Laboratory and is pretty well funded thanks to the success of various government clustering projects which use LinuxBIOS (Lightning, Orange, Pink, and a couple others). Of course, much code is contributed through private companies like Linux Networks, Tyan, Linux Labs, etc, but LANL is like LinuxBIOS-HQ.
Having said that, the best way you could help would be to help out with documentation and tell your friends about the project. The mailing list is a great resource, but hardly place for a beginner to start. Best of all, writing documentation wouldn't cost you a penny and you'd probably learn a great deal from it:)
Yep. That's the reason high-speed interconnects such from companies like Mryinet and Quadrics are used for real clusters. It's also the main selling point of Cray's Red Storm.
You're right about heat and density. Heat and density are directly associated. It's the reason 1.6U Evelocity nodes were chosen for Orange instead of.8U nodes used in Pink.
Slashdot Mirror
Did you remember to comment out the "Load dri" and "Load GLCore" lines in the modules section of your XF86Config-4 file and add "Load glx"?
Could you please post your XF86Config-4 file somewhere so we can have a look at it?
ATi has recently turned to this practice as well. You can get ATi-based cards ("Powered by ATi") from Asus, Tyan, and a variety of others.
>>If people can't cope with simple tasks such as this, they probably shouldn't be performing any maintenance on their PC at all, in particular installing new video drivers.
How wonderfully arrogant.
Why not simplify maintenance tasks so that more users can perform them on their own? I guess some would rather keep this sort of elitist attitude that makes the geek community look bad, particularly the GNU/Linux users.
Besides, maybe it's not just novices that could use a little help. Perhaps some people have multiple machines with different nVidia graphics cards. Should they be expected to log in to each machine, lspci, and download + install the proper driver for each different machine? Or just download one driver for which they can hack up a simple script to distribute to all machines at once and install / update automatically?
Funny, I can play Neverwinter Nights just fine with my Ti4600 and 5328 drivers. Heck, I'm even using kernel 2.6 with the Minion.de driver patch.
Yes, I've seen a lot of complaints about the drivers on the nVnews.net forums, but I really wish Slashdot editors would refrain from making blanket statements.
>>Doesn't anyone find it odd that they reccomend the SAME drivers for an 8mb TNT card and a 256mb quadra or FX?
Not at all--Their unified driver architecture helps to make sure that no matter which card a user has, he only needs to download one driver package.
Believe it or not, many people don't even know which video card they own, much less could they tell the difference between a GeForce MX 200, GeForce MX 400, GeForce MX 440, GeForce FX 5600, GeForce 5900, GeForce 5950 Ultra, one of many varieties of "Quadro" based products, etc. It's easier and a lot less error prone to tell people just to download the 'latest nVidia graphics driver' than to go into the device manager or lspci or whatever and figure out exactly which piece of hardware they own.
I couldn't help but to grin at this:
"We would expect Microsoft to react no differently if someone launched an operating system called Microsofta just as Microsoft did when confronted with an operating system called Lindows," Mythic President and Chief Executive Mark Jacobs said."
While I got a kick out of it at first, it sort of seems to validate Microsoft's lawsuit. It certainly is an amusing twist of irony, though.
Last four options in the "rank the reasons you like Linux for the home" section:
The satisfaction of not giving Microsoft more money.
I don't trust Microsoft.
I don't want to use proprietary software.
I don't want to use commercial software.
I was almost taking the survey seriously until I saw those options.
Next thing you know they'll make my home phone tracable so that if I need an ambulence or something they'll be able to trace that too!
Those evil bastards!
What's more important is what SGI has to say about this:
"October 1, 2003
To the Linux Community:
As one of many contributors to the Open Source movement and to Linux,
SGI takes the subject of intellectual property rights seriously. Our
contributions are a valuable expression of ideas which contribute to
the intellectual richness of Linux.
Over the past four years, SGI has released over a million lines of code
under an open source license. Throughout, we have carried out a
rigorous internal process to ensure that all software contributed by
SGI represents code we are legally entitled to release as open source.
When a question was raised by the community earlier in the summer about
the ate_utils.c routine, we took immediate action to address it. We
quickly and carefully re-reviewed our contributions to open source, and
found brief fragments of code matching System V code in three generic
routines (ate_utils.c, the atoi function and systeminfo.h header file),
all within the I/O infrastructure support for SGI's platform. The three
code fragments had been inadvertently included and in fact were
redundant from the start. We found better replacements providing the
same functionality already available in the Linux kernel. All
together, these three small code fragments comprised no more than 200
lines out of the more than one million lines of our overall
contributions to Linux. Notably, it appears that most or all of the
System V code fragments we found had previously been placed in the
public domain, meaning it is very doubtful that the SCO Group has any
proprietary claim to these code fragments in any case.
As a precaution, we promptly removed the code fragments from SGIs Linux
website and distributed customer patches, and released patches to the
2.4 and 2.5 kernels on June 30 and July 3 to replace these routines and
make other fixes to the SGI infrastructure code that were already in
progress at SGI. Our changes showed up in the 2.5 kernel within a few
weeks of our submission, and the 2.4 changes were available in the
production version of the 2.4 kernel as of August 25 when the 2.4.22
kernel was released. Thus, the code in question has been completely
removed.
Following this occurrence, we continued our investigation to determine
whether any other code in the Linux kernel was even conceivably
implicated. As a result of that exhaustive investigation, SGI has
discovered a few additional code segments (similar in nature to the
segments referred to above and trivial in amount) that may arguably be
related to UNIX code. We are in the process of removing and replacing
these segments.
SCO's references to XFS are completely misplaced. XFS is an innovative
SGI- created work. It is not a derivative work of System V in any
sense, and SGI has full rights to license it to whomever we choose and
to contribute it to open source. It may be that SCO is taking the
position that merely because XFS is also distributed along with IRIX it
is somehow subject to the System V license. But if so, this is an
absurd position, with no basis either in the license or in common
sense. In fact, our UNIX license clearly provides that SGI retains
ownership and all rights as to all code that was not part of AT&Ts UNIX
System V.
I hope this answers some of the questions that you and the Linux
community might have. We continue to release new Linux work, and are
very excited about the growth and acceptance of Linux. We are
continuing full speed to do new work and release new Linux products.
We take our responsibility to the open source community seriously and
are confident that we have an effective process to verify the quality
and integrity of our contributions to Linux.
Rich Altmaier
VP of Software, SGI
richa@sgi.com"
Source: http://oss.sgi.com/letter_100103.txt
>>They are trying to restrict the GPL version of XFS to Linux.
It means what you said the second time: "XFS has been released under the GPL and a linux implementation is available."
It was released a long time ago, too. I've been using XFS since before Mandrake started supporting it in version 8 (With an early 2.4 kernel). So "has been released" is a reference to an event that occured a couple years ago.
Wait a second, they're turning to Sun to save money? *Scratches head*
"With the US legal system, it's always hard to tell what the hell is going to happen," Torvalds says. "So I can't just dismiss the lawsuit as the complete crapola I think it is."
Source: Wired
Just as I bought my Darl McBride quotes t-shirt!
...will always be the machines I build with my own two fsck'in hands!
I am not a scientist, but...
Shouldn't the focus be more on engine technology than "missions?" I mean, sure it's great publicity to send a human out to space, particularly if they're going to walk on some celestial body, but wouldn't it be cool just to figure out how to launch probes with better propulsion systems to get further than probe currently in space? And maybe give them better power sources so they can use more powerful computers?
Humans are rather delicate objects and can't seem to adjust to large changes in velocity very well. Throw a human at a brick wall at a few hundred kilometers per hour and you'll see what I mean. Sure, a trained and well-conditioned human can withstand being shot out to space by a rocket, but for a high-power rail gun or another type of projectile cannon? I doubt it. If we really want to see what's out there, manned exploration is not the way to go until there's a feasible solution to counteract the effects of really high acceleration on the human body.
I think it would be great just to have a large magnetic launching platform on the moon with a dedicated power source (Fission? Solar?) to make it possible to send unmanned probes out at extremely high velocities.
Again, I'm not a scientist, so please correct me if what I'm suggesting sounds totally rediculous.
Send an e-mail to dwh@lanl.gov. We might be able to help get it working on your machine :)
If you're still interested, e-mail dwh@lanl.gov. Ron wants to help, too :)
Which EPIA do you have? I used the EPIAs with 500Mhz and 800MHz C3 processors using normal SDRAM. There are other EPIA boards that support DDR RAM. If you're using the 500MHz/800MHz normal SDRAM version, I'll send you a ROM I used with the old freebios tree and an Etherboot payload.
Look for messages by Sone Takeshi on the LinuxBIOS mailing list--He's done extensive work on those mainboards and has been working on a HOWTO. He also wrote FILO which is an extremely useful loader that you should consider using as your "payload."
It's also important to know whether you're attempting to build with an old freebios tree or the freebios2 tree.
It's really quite safe, I've done it several times on VIA EPIA mini-ITX mainboards and a couple K8 boards (Arima HDAMA and Tyan S2885).However, it's definitely a good idea to burn a backup ROM just in case your board isn't quite supported.
Your reference to "sacrificial hardware" is simply an exaggeration. Reaching into an energized system is inherently dangerous, yes, but perfectly harmless if reasonable safety precautions are taken--Ground yourself, don't let your tool slip and short anything, don't spill your coffee on the mainboard, etc.
Your concern is touching, but unnecessary. The LinuxBIOS project at heart is run by the CCS-1 division of Los Alamos National Laboratory and is pretty well funded thanks to the success of various government clustering projects which use LinuxBIOS (Lightning, Orange, Pink, and a couple others). Of course, much code is contributed through private companies like Linux Networks, Tyan, Linux Labs, etc, but LANL is like LinuxBIOS-HQ.
:)
Having said that, the best way you could help would be to help out with documentation and tell your friends about the project. The mailing list is a great resource, but hardly place for a beginner to start. Best of all, writing documentation wouldn't cost you a penny and you'd probably learn a great deal from it
Like Lightning, a Linux-based Opteron cluster ranked at #6 in the newly released 2003 list?
By "of its kind" the article meant that is used for oceanography. By "fastest" they mean that it excelled in ECCO.
Yep. That's the reason high-speed interconnects such from companies like Mryinet and Quadrics are used for real clusters. It's also the main selling point of Cray's Red Storm.
Check out DQ some time.
.8U nodes used in Pink.
You're right about heat and density. Heat and density are directly associated. It's the reason 1.6U Evelocity nodes were chosen for Orange instead of
Just a guess, but I can only imagine that the energy required to create such a system would be greater than the energy returned by using it.
*cough*Earth Simulator*cough*