All of those run perfectly on linux via the wine API. For some functions they actually perform better than they do on the Microsoft implementation of win32.
Who the hell do you call for support with such a configuration. Good luck getting any help from Red Hat. The App vendor certainly isn't going to help. Are you going to hire a Wine programmer on staff to fix problems? If you are really producing something important with these office apps you can't afford to have them fail right before something important... you need support.
Workstation has been used in the computer industry, by system and network admins (as opposed to engineers who really have no place in this discussion) to indicate a client desktop machine in an office environment. As opposed to a desktop machine used at home. Secretaries and management use desktops that could also be called workstations.
Maybe my network admins who don't know what they're talking about. "Workstation" is a term invented by Sun to fit a new class of computer that they invented. And every network admin that I've worked with has known what a workstation was.
Only in the last couple of years has x86 hardware been workstation class... and even them only high end x86 hardware. There is no need for a workstation for normal office tasks. You need a workstation for CAD, 3d rendering, FEM, CFD, atmospheric modeling, etc, etc. You don't need a workstation to run WordPerfect (even though it will run on a Sun).
Besides, you keep ignoring my main point that just because Linux machines are used for engineering code at JPL doesn't mean that they are any more ready for the desktop. The author of the story tried to say as much, and in doing so he was being misleading.
Very few people who are making any sort of professional class presentation or writing any sort of professional document would use OpenOffice, StarOffice, etc. These pacakages are unstable and missing many important features. More people would use LaTex, but most people by far use software that is not available on Linux things like Office, or PageMaker, or Keynote, etc.
On the other hand very few people who have to do any sort of serious calculations would do it on anything other than Unix. A workstation is a high performance computer that is intended to be used by a single user to perform processor intensive work (not games). A PC running Linux can be a workstation without really being useful as a desktop (i.e. not having desktop applications). The long standing dream of Linux on the Desktop is not Grandma running CFD code, it's grandma using Linux to do what she does on Windows now. Saying JPL uses Linux for workstations has nothing to do with Linux succeeding on the desktop, and such 'spin' by the author is an intentionally deceptive ploy to increase site traffic.
I was referring to the way 'workstation' is used at JPL and in aerospace and other engineering fields. I was referring to workstation the way Sun (who invented the concept of a 'workstation' class computer) has used it for years. Since the article is about JPL, the definition of the term in engineering rather than in other businesses is apropos.
My point is that they intentionally made the article more sensationalist by claiming Linux is being used as "desktops" rather than saying "workstations". Would this story been a big deal if it was about JPL using Linux engineering workstations instead of Suns? The author knew damn well that he was spinning the truth.
NASA has a lot of fortran 77 code that it uses every day. Fortran 90,95, etc stuff too. There have been efforts to migrate to C++, python, and other things... but none have, of yet, been successful.
I guess we have different environments.. JPL is like 60% mac and percentage among technical employees is harder. So we use Macs for most of our unix-y goodness and only use Linux for stuff that has to be configuration managed or requires a powerful computer (most of the macs are laptops). And we have to write a lot of powerpoint presentations and memos... doing such things on Linux is less than fun, which is why we have desktop computers to do that sort of work as well as stuff like Illustrator, Omnigraffle, FastTrack, etc.
Using Linux machines as workstations is not the same as using them as Desktop machines. You use Desktop machines for Word, Powerpoint, Canvas, Illustrator, Mail, etc. You use workstations primarily to run computations. Linux has widely replaced Suns, HPs, etc as Workstations at JPL. The article seems to claim that Linux has replaced Macs and Windows machines on the desktop at JPL.... this is false. Even the LaTex jockeys who don't use Office prefer working on Macs for such tasks to Linux.
So you agree that the article is BS, right? There are very few Linux boxes used on the Desktop (i.e. used in exclusion to a Mac or Windows box and their desktop apps) but many used as workstations (i.e. used basically for in-house code that does various computations) and many Linux boxen are used as servers.
But the contract forbids users from running Linux machines as Desktop machines not administered by LMIT. The LMIT administration is not convenient to work with, and this is a major discouragement against using Linux.
There are people using Linux an the Desktop at JPL, but they are few and far between. Most people use Linux as a workstation OS and also have a Mac or a Windows machine to use as a Desktop machine (i.e. for Office and email and such).
And there are many flight projects using Linux servers. Suns are used mostly for web servers or when someone refuses to port software to Linux because they either don't want to spend money on programmers, or the programmers refuse to learn a different platform.
I've worked in mission control at JPL for several years and I've never seen Linux used as a Desktop OS by more people than I can count on one hand. In fact JPL has a contract with Lockheed Martin to supply Desktop computers that makes it very hard to run anything other than Windows or MacOS.
But, I have seen many workstations running Linux, and many servers running Linux. In fact, I think virtually all navigation is now done from Linux servers. And when workstations and Servers don't run Linux they run Solaris. There used to be some HPUX machines around, but you don't see many of them anymore after the crap HP put people through with HPUX-11 (what the hell was HP thinking by dropping fortran-77??)
Anyway this article is complete BS. Much like one MacWorld ran a while ago claiming JPL used Macs for everything.
1. That bee flight is exotic. (Which is pretty much a tautology; if bee flight were mundane, we would have figured it out a long time ago.)
This is B.S. I see birds and insects flying all of the time... there's nothing exotic at all about their flight. Aircraft are much larger and fly much faster in a different regime where flapping wing flight doesn't work (i.e. high Reynold's number flow). So they look different. But that doesn't make insect flight exotic... seeing as how their are way more insects than airplanes, I'd say high reynolds number flight is more exotic.
The thing is that the mathematics of insect and bird flight is complicated and required modern computers to solve the equations... but they have been solved and for at least 10 years too. This is just an article about a couple of biologists who didn't do any research into what CFD people had already done a while ago.
These go back to the 1940s and 1950s. Though I'm not sure how old the theory to explain them is.. But I do know that computer simulations in the 1990s were modeling moth and bumble bee flight, and also biologists had slow motion photography of bumble bee flight in the same time period that verified the computer models.... I know because I saw it on Scientific American Frontiers!
The scientists said the findings could lead to a model for designing aircraft that could hover in place and carry loads for many purposes such as diaster surveillance after earthquakes and tsunamis.
I guess that kinda puts a dent in these guys claim to be the first to explain bee flight....And I found this link from a google search!! You'd think Michael Dickinson would have better research skills than that!
I mean, bees flying! A mystery that has eluded smarty men for a hundred years or more! Finally solved! And nothing in the article actually approaches a description of the solution.
A friend of mine worked this out as a grad student at Purdue something like 10 or 15 years ago and his papers were presented at several AIAA conferences and in several AIAA journals. He was even interviewed on Scientific American frontiers. Last I heard he was working for Aerovironment in Monrovia, CA building mini spyplanes using insect style flight (which works at low Reynolds numbers).
This is just an article about someone reinventing the wheel instead of doing a search of existing publications.
I agree... I just suggest drug store glasses because they're better than nothing.
But in the context of health care costs, eye care is pretty damn cheap. And I think it's worth spending the money on good eye care. I'd rather loose my teeth or get acne scars than go blind, but for some reason most people are more willing to spend money at a dentists or a dermatologists than at the eye doctor.
In the US at least, good eye doctors are few and far between and you should take the time to research and find a good one... maybe even one that your insurance doesn't cover. I mean this mostly for people with bad eyesight that are in danger of loosing their eye sight (based on family history, etc) If your eye sight is bad, a bad eye doctor can make your vision much, much worse. A good eye doctor will explain what their doing and why their doing it...and won't waste a lot of time trying to sell you expensive options on your glasses or contacts.
When I was younger, I used to read books with them about 6 inches from my face. My parents were concerned and took me to an optometrist who told them that my vision was perfect, and reading that close wouldn't do me any harm at all as long as it was comfortable.
Well some people are pre-disposed to myopia. It runs in my family, and my optometrist warned me to be careful reading and with computers or I might go blind.
If you discovered you have astigmatism, surely the optometrist would have advised glasses at the time if necessary?
As someone with eye troubles since the first grade, and who now can't even read the big E on an eye chart...
Liquid Crystal Displays are enormously more gently on my eyes than are CRTs. So much so that at work I use a 14" LCD rather than a 27" monitor due to the strain from the monitor. If you do have CRT ensure the refresh rate is pretty high like 75Hz or up.
I definitely agree with LCD's help ing eye strain, and also turning the brightness down helps.. but those are personal preferences.
As far as science, my eye doctor told me that looking at close up things (e.g. reading a lot, or working on a computer) can cause two problems depending on a person genetic predisposition. in people like me: 1) astymagtism and near sightedness as the muscles pulling on your eye to focus on close up things cause your eye to deform or in other people 2) far sightedness as the muscles strain causes the muscle to stretch out and they loose their ability to focus close up over time. #2 is far more commone, and happens to most people as they age.
He proposed four things... 1) use large fonts 2) set your monitor about 30 inches away from your face 3) reading glasses that make you a little far sighted to allow your eyes to focus on close up things with less strain. He said that reading glasses don't have to be a prescription for people with normalish eye sight and you can pick them up at drug stores and at walmart and such. 4) always use lots of light in your work area.
I thought it was just a lame joke... but if it is to be modded down, it should be OffTopic or possibly FlameBait This doesn't appear to be designed to generate a heated discussion (which is a key part of the definition of a troll).
Do a google search on what a 'troll' is... from the wikipedia:
The main motive for a user trolling is to disrupt the community in some way. Inflammatory, sarcastic, disruptive or humorous content is posted, meant to draw other users into engaging the troll in a fruitless confrontation. The greater the reaction from the community the more likely the user is to troll again, as the person develops beliefs that certain actions achieve his/her goal to cause chaos. This gives rise to the often repeated protocol in Internet culture: "Do not feed the trolls".
It does not mean someone you disagree with or don't like. The point of moderations like "Troll" and "Flamebait" is to remove noise from the signal, not to try an bias the signal towards your own sensibilities.
The post above is a lame joke and not a troll... the earlier post arguing with the list by saying inflation isn't a bad theory isn't a troll... if only slashdot had a -1 Curmudgeon...
Anyway, if you don't like my comment here, moderate it as OffTopic, not as a troll or flamebait or whatever. Many of us have marked Trolls to be extra negative, but moderator abuse is making this a useless feature as someone will down moderate a +5 post by labeling it a troll just because it is pro-microsoft or pro-drug-czar or pro-copyrights or whatever....
As for Notepad, have you ever tried to edit a 6GB text file?
vi can open files of any size because it caches to disk and only has part in memory. I've opened text files of hundreds of gigabytes in vi on a 32-bit computer with only 64 MB memory. And you can get vi for windows, and I'm sure there are many other editors available for windows that handle large files properly.
As for IE,... well, okay, so let's imagine that IE got improved to the point where you could actually use it as your regular web browser. In that case, you could have half a dozen IE windows each with 20-30 tabs open, and you could leave some of those windows open for weeks on end and, yeah, I could see it potentially reaching 4GB of memory then, especially with cacheing and prefetching.
I do this sort of thing all of the time with (32-bit) Safari on a computer with 1 GB of memory. It uses virtual memory to page out parts of memory to disk. I'd guess IE does the same thing.
Let me ask another question... how many people with 64-bit computers do you think have more than 4 MB installed? Not many I'd guess since that much memory is rather pricey. And if you don't have that much memory you don't need the 64 bits.
Slashdot Mirror
I have in several places in this thread... look there or look it up in wikipedia
All of those run perfectly on linux via the wine API. For some functions they actually perform better than they do on the Microsoft implementation of win32.
Who the hell do you call for support with such a configuration. Good luck getting any help from Red Hat. The App vendor certainly isn't going to help. Are you going to hire a Wine programmer on staff to fix problems? If you are really producing something important with these office apps you can't afford to have them fail right before something important... you need support.
Workstation has been used in the computer industry, by system and network admins (as opposed to engineers who really have no place in this discussion) to indicate a client desktop machine in an office environment. As opposed to a desktop machine used at home. Secretaries and management use desktops that could also be called workstations.
Maybe my network admins who don't know what they're talking about. "Workstation" is a term invented by Sun to fit a new class of computer that they invented. And every network admin that I've worked with has known what a workstation was.
Only in the last couple of years has x86 hardware been workstation class... and even them only high end x86 hardware. There is no need for a workstation for normal office tasks. You need a workstation for CAD, 3d rendering, FEM, CFD, atmospheric modeling, etc, etc. You don't need a workstation to run WordPerfect (even though it will run on a Sun).
Besides, you keep ignoring my main point that just because Linux machines are used for engineering code at JPL doesn't mean that they are any more ready for the desktop. The author of the story tried to say as much, and in doing so he was being misleading.
Very few people who are making any sort of professional class presentation or writing any sort of professional document would use OpenOffice, StarOffice, etc. These pacakages are unstable and missing many important features. More people would use LaTex, but most people by far use software that is not available on Linux things like Office, or PageMaker, or Keynote, etc.
On the other hand very few people who have to do any sort of serious calculations would do it on anything other than Unix. A workstation is a high performance computer that is intended to be used by a single user to perform processor intensive work (not games). A PC running Linux can be a workstation without really being useful as a desktop (i.e. not having desktop applications). The long standing dream of Linux on the Desktop is not Grandma running CFD code, it's grandma using Linux to do what she does on Windows now. Saying JPL uses Linux for workstations has nothing to do with Linux succeeding on the desktop, and such 'spin' by the author is an intentionally deceptive ploy to increase site traffic.
I was referring to the way 'workstation' is used at JPL and in aerospace and other engineering fields. I was referring to workstation the way Sun (who invented the concept of a 'workstation' class computer) has used it for years. Since the article is about JPL, the definition of the term in engineering rather than in other businesses is apropos.
My point is that they intentionally made the article more sensationalist by claiming Linux is being used as "desktops" rather than saying "workstations". Would this story been a big deal if it was about JPL using Linux engineering workstations instead of Suns? The author knew damn well that he was spinning the truth.
NASA has a lot of fortran 77 code that it uses every day. Fortran 90,95, etc stuff too. There have been efforts to migrate to C++, python, and other things... but none have, of yet, been successful.
I guess we have different environments.. JPL is like 60% mac and percentage among technical employees is harder. So we use Macs for most of our unix-y goodness and only use Linux for stuff that has to be configuration managed or requires a powerful computer (most of the macs are laptops). And we have to write a lot of powerpoint presentations and memos... doing such things on Linux is less than fun, which is why we have desktop computers to do that sort of work as well as stuff like Illustrator, Omnigraffle, FastTrack, etc.
Using Linux machines as workstations is not the same as using them as Desktop machines. You use Desktop machines for Word, Powerpoint, Canvas, Illustrator, Mail, etc. You use workstations primarily to run computations. Linux has widely replaced Suns, HPs, etc as Workstations at JPL. The article seems to claim that Linux has replaced Macs and Windows machines on the desktop at JPL.... this is false. Even the LaTex jockeys who don't use Office prefer working on Macs for such tasks to Linux.
So you agree that the article is BS, right? There are very few Linux boxes used on the Desktop (i.e. used in exclusion to a Mac or Windows box and their desktop apps) but many used as workstations (i.e. used basically for in-house code that does various computations) and many Linux boxen are used as servers.
anyone who works at JPL understands the distinction between a Desktop and a workstation, and whoever wrote this article should as well
But the contract forbids users from running Linux machines as Desktop machines not administered by LMIT. The LMIT administration is not convenient to work with, and this is a major discouragement against using Linux.
There are people using Linux an the Desktop at JPL, but they are few and far between. Most people use Linux as a workstation OS and also have a Mac or a Windows machine to use as a Desktop machine (i.e. for Office and email and such).
And there are many flight projects using Linux servers. Suns are used mostly for web servers or when someone refuses to port software to Linux because they either don't want to spend money on programmers, or the programmers refuse to learn a different platform.
this article is BS.
I've worked in mission control at JPL for several years and I've never seen Linux used as a Desktop OS by more people than I can count on one hand. In fact JPL has a contract with Lockheed Martin to supply Desktop computers that makes it very hard to run anything other than Windows or MacOS.
But, I have seen many workstations running Linux, and many servers running Linux. In fact, I think virtually all navigation is now done from Linux servers. And when workstations and Servers don't run Linux they run Solaris. There used to be some HPUX machines around, but you don't see many of them anymore after the crap HP put people through with HPUX-11 (what the hell was HP thinking by dropping fortran-77??)
Anyway this article is complete BS. Much like one MacWorld ran a while ago claiming JPL used Macs for everything.
1. That bee flight is exotic. (Which is pretty much a tautology; if bee flight were mundane, we would have figured it out a long time ago.)
This is B.S. I see birds and insects flying all of the time... there's nothing exotic at all about their flight. Aircraft are much larger and fly much faster in a different regime where flapping wing flight doesn't work (i.e. high Reynold's number flow). So they look different. But that doesn't make insect flight exotic... seeing as how their are way more insects than airplanes, I'd say high reynolds number flight is more exotic.
The thing is that the mathematics of insect and bird flight is complicated and required modern computers to solve the equations... but they have been solved and for at least 10 years too. This is just an article about a couple of biologists who didn't do any research into what CFD people had already done a while ago.
http://www.ornithopter.org/electric.shtml
These go back to the 1940s and 1950s. Though I'm not sure how old the theory to explain them is.. But I do know that computer simulations in the 1990s were modeling moth and bumble bee flight, and also biologists had slow motion photography of bumble bee flight in the same time period that verified the computer models.... I know because I saw it on Scientific American Frontiers!
from TFA:
0 01/jpl10_2001.pdf
...And I found this link from a google search!! You'd think Michael Dickinson would have better research skills than that!
The scientists said the findings could lead to a model for designing aircraft that could hover in place and carry loads for many purposes such as diaster surveillance after earthquakes and tsunamis.
Hey look... someone else at CalTech is already working on such an aircraft: http://ho.seas.ucla.edu/publications/conference/2
This link says that they flew the first prototype in 1998!!
I guess that kinda puts a dent in these guys claim to be the first to explain bee flight.
I mean, bees flying! A mystery that has eluded smarty men for a hundred years or more! Finally solved! And nothing in the article actually approaches a description of the solution.
A friend of mine worked this out as a grad student at Purdue something like 10 or 15 years ago and his papers were presented at several AIAA conferences and in several AIAA journals. He was even interviewed on Scientific American frontiers. Last I heard he was working for Aerovironment in Monrovia, CA building mini spyplanes using insect style flight (which works at low Reynolds numbers).
This is just an article about someone reinventing the wheel instead of doing a search of existing publications.
I agree... I just suggest drug store glasses because they're better than nothing.
But in the context of health care costs, eye care is pretty damn cheap. And I think it's worth spending the money on good eye care. I'd rather loose my teeth or get acne scars than go blind, but for some reason most people are more willing to spend money at a dentists or a dermatologists than at the eye doctor.
In the US at least, good eye doctors are few and far between and you should take the time to research and find a good one... maybe even one that your insurance doesn't cover. I mean this mostly for people with bad eyesight that are in danger of loosing their eye sight (based on family history, etc) ...and won't waste a lot of time trying to sell you expensive options on your glasses or contacts.
If your eye sight is bad, a bad eye doctor can make your vision much, much worse. A good eye doctor will explain what their doing and why their doing it
When I was younger, I used to read books with them about 6 inches from my face. My parents were concerned and took me to an optometrist who told them that my vision was perfect, and reading that close wouldn't do me any harm at all as long as it was comfortable.
Well some people are pre-disposed to myopia. It runs in my family, and my optometrist warned me to be careful reading and with computers or I might go blind.
If you discovered you have astigmatism, surely the optometrist would have advised glasses at the time if necessary?
I do wear glasses, and have since I was 6.
As someone with eye troubles since the first grade, and who now can't even read the big E on an eye chart...
Liquid Crystal Displays are enormously more gently on my eyes than are CRTs. So much so that at work I use a 14" LCD rather than a 27" monitor due to the strain from the monitor. If you do have CRT ensure the refresh rate is pretty high like 75Hz or up.
I definitely agree with LCD's help ing eye strain, and also turning the brightness down helps.. but those are personal preferences.
As far as science, my eye doctor told me that looking at close up things (e.g. reading a lot, or working on a computer) can cause two problems depending on a person genetic predisposition. in people like me: 1) astymagtism and near sightedness as the muscles pulling on your eye to focus on close up things cause your eye to deform or in other people 2) far sightedness as the muscles strain causes the muscle to stretch out and they loose their ability to focus close up over time. #2 is far more commone, and happens to most people as they age.
He proposed four things... 1) use large fonts 2) set your monitor about 30 inches away from your face 3) reading glasses that make you a little far sighted to allow your eyes to focus on close up things with less strain. He said that reading glasses don't have to be a prescription for people with normalish eye sight and you can pick them up at drug stores and at walmart and such. 4) always use lots of light in your work area.
oh wait, macs don't have PC Card slots.
powerbooks do. ibooks don't.
"Architect" is not a verb
It is in Apple's dictionary (the one that comes with 10.4)
I thought it was just a lame joke... but if it is to be modded down, it should be OffTopic or possibly FlameBait This doesn't appear to be designed to generate a heated discussion (which is a key part of the definition of a troll).
...this quote sums up the troll definition nicely:
Read More: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_troll
An ideal troll would generate much heated discussion and posting without further intervention from the troll.
#15 - Slashdot Moderators
Do a google search on what a 'troll' is... from the wikipedia:
The main motive for a user trolling is to disrupt the community in some way. Inflammatory, sarcastic, disruptive or humorous content is posted, meant to draw other users into engaging the troll in a fruitless confrontation. The greater the reaction from the community the more likely the user is to troll again, as the person develops beliefs that certain actions achieve his/her goal to cause chaos. This gives rise to the often repeated protocol in Internet culture: "Do not feed the trolls".
It does not mean someone you disagree with or don't like. The point of moderations like "Troll" and "Flamebait" is to remove noise from the signal, not to try an bias the signal towards your own sensibilities.
The post above is a lame joke and not a troll... the earlier post arguing with the list by saying inflation isn't a bad theory isn't a troll... if only slashdot had a -1 Curmudgeon...
Anyway, if you don't like my comment here, moderate it as OffTopic, not as a troll or flamebait or whatever. Many of us have marked Trolls to be extra negative, but moderator abuse is making this a useless feature as someone will down moderate a +5 post by labeling it a troll just because it is pro-microsoft or pro-drug-czar or pro-copyrights or whatever....
As for Notepad, have you ever tried to edit a 6GB text file?
... well, okay, so let's imagine that IE got improved to the point where you could actually use it as your regular web browser. In that case, you could have half a dozen IE windows each with 20-30 tabs open, and you could leave some of those windows open for weeks on end and, yeah, I could see it potentially reaching 4GB of memory then, especially with cacheing and prefetching.
vi can open files of any size because it caches to disk and only has part in memory. I've opened text files of hundreds of gigabytes in vi on a 32-bit computer with only 64 MB memory. And you can get vi for windows, and I'm sure there are many other editors available for windows that handle large files properly.
As for IE,
I do this sort of thing all of the time with (32-bit) Safari on a computer with 1 GB of memory. It uses virtual memory to page out parts of memory to disk. I'd guess IE does the same thing.
Let me ask another question... how many people with 64-bit computers do you think have more than 4 MB installed? Not many I'd guess since that much memory is rather pricey. And if you don't have that much memory you don't need the 64 bits.