Has anyone followed his link ? SuSE is not abandoning KDE to favor GNOME. And this comes from SuSE's CEO:
Together with our Ximian colleagues at Novell, we will also enable our
customers to use GNOME with the same convenience and comfort KDE offers to me
and all SUSE employees today.
It's all about giving their costumers what they ask for, and some customers prefer GNOME. This is it. He is actually stating that most of the European deployment of desktop Linux is due to KDE. He uses KDE and he will keep using it.
In fact, Mandrake has been offering both KDE and GNOME almost at the same level of support (though KDE is the default, but then of course you have to pick a default).
It is really striking how it took them so long to emit such a weak statement. They would have been better off saying that Howard Jones did only speak by himself, and that Princeton uses and develops open source software.
First of all: they present a dichotomy between commercial and open source software. Commercial as opposed to open source. This is plain wrong. JBoss is commercial and open source. RedHat too. SuSE, Mandrake, God, should I keep listing ? They meant to say proprietary vs. open source. The problem is, thy are implying that open source cannot be commercial, and this is a dangerous misunderstanding.
Second error: they imply that proprietary software usually offers better support (though some times it is the other way around). They definetly don't understand the open software model, but they should get informed before writting an official letter. In the open software model,
support, customization and services is pretty much all you can sell. And that's where you put your effort.
Finally, an academic institution should prefer, if at all possible, an open source / free software solution rather than a proprietary solution. Why ? Because it is built with an open, peer reviewed method, which is really what the academia is all about. They choose, instead,
the classical use the best tool for the job motto, that seems to more appropriate for a commercial company than for a University.
This is very, very cool. For one thing, a bottleneck in supercomputers is in most cases the network. In this regard, dropping some per/node performance might not affect the overall performance for applications that need intensive interprocess communication.
The other point is: how expensive it is to support a cluster ? Not only the energy consumption, but also the infraestructure. It is pretty darn difficult to keep a thousand processors cold. You may need a special building, special power supply for it, etc.
A final point: as far as I know, the rule of thumb is that the floating point performance with these energy efficient processors is of the same order of magnitude as regular processor, may be a factor 2 difference.
I always found inconsistencies with advanced group search when conditioned to a
date range:
Search 1:
186,000 posts for mandrake in the last 6 months
Search 2:
186,000 posts for mandrake in the last 3 months
Change the search string and still the same issue.
Re:What about other software?
on
Mplayer Revisited
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Now.. what if all three groups combined their resources and put the best parts of each into one GOOD program?
Well, I probably didn't make my point clear. Each of these programs use different criteria/algorithms to deal with partition tables. And it was this diversity what saved my ass. If they all got merged, they would settle for ONE path to solve a problem. And this is not necessarily good in general... and wouldn't have probably saved my ass:-)
I really think you haven't discovered the great advantages of urpmi, rpmdrake et al.:
1. We're sick of RPM. We've hard RPM break on a few machines already (I think the RPM database becomes corrupted if I remember correctly). Needless to say, it's hard to upgrade your machine when your package manager goes kaput. APT/debs are SO much easier to deal with anyway.
Allright, I never had such a problem, and I used RPM based distros for years (RedHat and now Mandrake). Most problems that I saw reported in mailing lists about RPM going belly up are user problems: using --force to force installation, messing with the database, using experimental or third party packages, etc. If you stick to your distro you are most likely ok. Plus, there are tools to rebuild databases. Oh, and I've seen problems with debian database too (disclaimer: I love the debian project)
2. Too much crap! Literally, Mandrake has TOO MUCH crap these days. I know Debian is hardly innocent, but the dependency train for whatever reason seems to be much more palatable when using Debian as opposed to Mandrake. Maybe it's all the package/package-dev combo packs that the Mandrake/RedHat people like, I'm not entirely sure. It's just too much honestly. Let me install mySQL and be done with it.
This is called granularity, and it is not a problem if you use a front-end to RPM, such as urpmi. Simply fire up the mandrake control center, then Software Manager, search for mySQL and you'll see a few packages. Click on what you think you need, and the software manager will select for you the packages required by dependencies. It is that easy. Separating _dev_ packages from the binaries is great. That allows for a minimal install for people who don't care about compiling stuff. What's wrong with it ?
A great way to capitalize all the discussions at the Kastle: the devs are
starting the 3.2 release cycle now . The integration of PIM stuff in 3.2 will make for a complete, extremely consistent desktop environment (except for KOffice that will need onesome extra time to mature, incorporate the OpenOffice filters, etc.)
I never give cold numbers to non-techies. I always compare to something they know. Some examples:
If talking about a digital camera memory card, I say "it holds 80 pictures at maximum resolution" , I don't say "it is a 64 Mb card".
Instead of "this is a 2GHz machine" , I would say "This computer is 4 times faster than the one we are using now"
You get the idea. Non techies should not need to know all the jargon, just a few basic concepts and names. The same goes for User Interfaces in operating systems:-)
Yes, I hope so too. But first of all I want to see them sell Linux preinstalled notebooks. It would be a winner situation for HP, to sell a full line of Linux-preinstalled hardware: servers, desktops, notebooks and handhelds. RedHat, Mandrake and SuSE are all excellent candidates...
You should be good with C++ which includes having a knowledge of pthreads, the Standard Template Library (STL), and templates. A heathly knowledge of design patterns is also helpful. To download the source code click here.
Contradictory ? Yes. To make it even funnier, his project is only made by him and two contributors (what a big project), and to tap it all he recommends you being wealthy.
I would rather read what other people have to say on OSS management (say Linus, RMS, folks from OpenOffice, Mozilla, JBoss, etc.)
But what are people doing with these things in the wild?
Huh ? How got this modded as insightful ? Anyways, if you read the announcement, this is for high performance computing. It is a turn-key solution to easily set up, maintain and monitor a parallel cluster.
Parallel clusters are essentially arrangements of computers that allow to process data at each computer at the same time ("in parallel"), and then collect the results and combine them, thus making possible to achieve supercomputing power out of inexpensive hardware.
The announcement very clearly states which is the market niche they target (i.e. research labs and the like):
"MandrakeClustering is not only a impressive example of innovative Linux technology, but it's also a complete "all-in-one" solution that includes support & assistance for "real-world" clustering deployments and critical research lab activities. We are extremely confident that this product will answer the needs of numerous technology research centers where time of deployment and ease of administration are highly valued", said FranÃois Bancilhon, MandrakeSoft CEO.
By the way. It is so nice to see Mandrake aiming at corporate/government customers, this is going to be very healthy for the company. I would expect and encourage more of this...
I very much welcome the promotion of Linux-preinstalled
hardware by Linux Distros. This is vital, since most users don't want to install an OS (even when it has gotten incredibly easy to install Linux). They actually prefer a simpler solution: open the box, power on, surf the net. In particular, there is a great niche for affordable, Linux Laptops with no MS tax. Your Mobile PC looks promising, but it received some criticism for the use of a VIA processor, a
low-power processor that is therefore considerably slower than an Intel/AMD processor of comparable clock speed. This is a valid option for people interested in long battery life. Nonetheless, there is a market for people who need more computing power. Are you working on a deal to sell a similar solution but with
a more powerfull CPU ? Any other news in the hardware related arena that you could share with us ?
GNU/Linux went this far (up to a point of being a threaten to the evil empire) by damn good coding. Where do you want to spend the next half our of your spare time, discussing this FUD in/. or coding (bug reporting, writing documentation, etc) for your favorite project ? It's your choice:-)
There are several goals in a next generation filesystem implementation. Low cost and speed are important, and conquest goes in the right direction. But how reliable is persistent RAM for storage ? Hard drives go belly up every once in a while, and we would all like to see some sort of affordable solid state storage come up and replace HDD. Persistent RAM seems to be a step in the opposit direction, or Am I wrong ?
The combination of GNU utilities, Linux kernel and several extremely successfull Free Software projects (read Mozilla, OpenOffice, GNOME, KDE, Apache...) has gotten big enough as to make the 10 million ton gorilla (MS) at least shake a little bit.
They first ignored Free Software, later on they attacked it with arrogance, now they are switching from FUD (mainly misleading arguments against free software) to mimicking (we share our source too, you see ? We are open too, really).
I guess from my view the bottomline here is:
GNU/Linux is a mainstream valid alternative. Corporations and governments can use it either as a resource or at least as an element to negotiate with MS.
GNU/Linux is forcing MS to do things they would have never imagined doing (having to watch out a little bit for their abusive licensing terms, having to share some code, etc)
If nothing else, Free Software is playing a role on balancing the arrogant power of MS. And I personally think it is doing much more than that;-)
I very much welcome the post of this informative review of RH 9.0 . I hope this starts a trend in Slashdot, and that childish, bitching, immature first-person-experience reviews (should we even call them "reviews"?) are no longer posted here. Posting serious Journalism is a way to promote it. Slashdot Editors: please stop feeding trolls
On the bright side, I think that RedHat's decision to split their software in a publically available, bleeding edge distribution and a more conservative, corporate version is just great. The former is a test bed for the latter. Donwnloaders and enthusiasts do the stress tests, corporations get a stabilized product. Excellent scheme !
Red Hat, a company supporting lots of developing in the GNU/Linux community, releases their newest version as a privileged one-week-early download for their customers through their network.
In the meantime, Slashdot publishes this inflamatory plug for bit torrent, as a workaround to kind-of-boycott Red Hat's policy.
Correct me if I've got the facts wrong. But it sounds to me like a week long wait is not really long, and that this announcement in Slashdot is not really ethical...
I just wonder why is it that other distros don't follow the trend, use some of knoppix' technology and add a demo mode to their installers. People could boot off the CD, see a demo, and if they like it and their hardware gets successfully detected they can go ahead and install on the disk. If I remember correctly SuSE was doing it ? How about Mandrake and RedHat ? Are they going to catch up on this one ? It looks like the way to go !
And for the record, the referenced article states "Free Software" 7 times, and never mentions "Open Source" even once. Their goals are *definitely* not in doubt. I consider this to be a very good thing.
Yes , my bad, and thanks for pointing this out. But really, it would be great news even if it they decided to go open source, not necesarily FS in the sense of the FSF. I agree with you that the fact that they talk about "Free Software" makes it even better though. Cheer up my friend !
I am writting this from ML 9.1 (great, great release). Everything is a piece of cake, including upgrading my 3 machines, what I did almost flawlessly and with no effort (clicking "next" at each default option).
One of the things that look promising is that Mandrake is now really using bugzilla (qa.mandrakesoft.com), you can get an account and help and they can track QA issues much more easily.
My only concern with Mandrake is how they can make a profit.
I was hoping they would release the ISOs a few days after making them available in Mandrake Club (kind of what Redhat is doing with the next release). This would give people one more reason to be in the club. Also, the ISOs should be made public right after they are available to be purchased from MandrakeStore IMHO. Oh, and it would probably be a good idea to enforce trademark, so that cheap CD sites can't sell "Mandrake 9.1" (I think RedHat does this). In fact, if Mandrake made the "download version" (just the CD's) available cheap and early, I guess many people would guy the CDs on the mail instead of going through the hassle of downloading and burning.
In general, and I really don't mean to be mean, Mandrake should probably borrow a few ideas from Red Hat in the business camp. Otherwise they are doing great and improving:-)
Despite the tone of Yahoo's article, and despite the fact that unfortunately physicists are resorting more and more into spectacular announcements (and I am a physicist), the issue is not settled.
This search at the NASA's ADS will show you a bunch of papers on the topic (even tough some entries are unrelated). Just browse the abstracts, you will see that not everyone in the astrophysics community agrees that variations in solar radiation are the main cause of global warming.
What if another coutry did the same ?
on
Strike on Iraq
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
I wonder what would be the reaction here in/. if another country, ANY country, was bombing a poor country against the willing of millions of protesters around the world and with no consensus from the United Nations. Yes, everybody would be talking about a coward attack, a massacre, a genocide. [I know I will be modded as a troll by people who care more about Nacionalism than about other people. Ironically, that was the root of Nazism.]
I am proud of the few among you,/. readers and US Citizens who *are* complaining about these
horrible attacks. Poor Iraquies had to suffer Saddam Hussein's - former ally of the US - dictatorship, and now many of them will be killed by the bombings. Just like it happened with civilians in Alfghanistan, tortured by the Taliban regime and afterwords bombed by the US. Again, some of these Talibans were allies of the US when fighting a prior "evil", the Soviet Union. You have to stop this nosense. It will bring more terrorism, more hatred, and innocent civilian deaths, once more.
Who cares about those people ? I do. Human rights should prevail. A dead kid is a dead kid, be him or her, poor angel, Palestinian, Israeli, Iraqui, or whatever. It is a sad day in History, I feel like vomiting, I feel like crying, I already am...
Slashdot Mirror
Has anyone followed his link ? SuSE is not abandoning KDE to favor GNOME. And this comes from SuSE's CEO:
It's all about giving their costumers what they ask for, and some customers prefer GNOME. This is it. He is actually stating that most of the European deployment of desktop Linux is due to KDE. He uses KDE and he will keep using it.
In fact, Mandrake has been offering both KDE and GNOME almost at the same level of support (though KDE is the default, but then of course you have to pick a default).
First of all: they present a dichotomy between commercial and open source software. Commercial as opposed to open source. This is plain wrong. JBoss is commercial and open source. RedHat too. SuSE, Mandrake, God, should I keep listing ? They meant to say proprietary vs. open source. The problem is, thy are implying that open source cannot be commercial, and this is a dangerous misunderstanding.
Second error: they imply that proprietary software usually offers better support (though some times it is the other way around). They definetly don't understand the open software model, but they should get informed before writting an official letter. In the open software model, support, customization and services is pretty much all you can sell. And that's where you put your effort.
Finally, an academic institution should prefer, if at all possible, an open source / free software solution rather than a proprietary solution. Why ? Because it is built with an open, peer reviewed method, which is really what the academia is all about. They choose, instead, the classical use the best tool for the job motto, that seems to more appropriate for a commercial company than for a University.
As I said, pretty weak clarification IMHO ...
The other point is: how expensive it is to support a cluster ? Not only the energy consumption, but also the infraestructure. It is pretty darn difficult to keep a thousand processors cold. You may need a special building, special power supply for it, etc.
A final point: as far as I know, the rule of thumb is that the floating point performance with these energy efficient processors is of the same order of magnitude as regular processor, may be a factor 2 difference.
You do the math ... :-)
Search 1: 186,000 posts for mandrake in the last 6 months
Search 2: 186,000 posts for mandrake in the last 3 months
Change the search string and still the same issue.
Well, I probably didn't make my point clear. Each of these programs use different criteria/algorithms to deal with partition tables. And it was this diversity what saved my ass. If they all got merged, they would settle for ONE path to solve a problem. And this is not necessarily good in general ... and wouldn't have probably saved my ass :-)
They all do the same thing in principle. Although, you see ? Software diversity saved my ass :-)
Allright, I never had such a problem, and I used RPM based distros for years (RedHat and now Mandrake). Most problems that I saw reported in mailing lists about RPM going belly up are user problems: using --force to force installation, messing with the database, using experimental or third party packages, etc. If you stick to your distro you are most likely ok. Plus, there are tools to rebuild databases. Oh, and I've seen problems with debian database too (disclaimer: I love the debian project)
This is called granularity, and it is not a problem if you use a front-end to RPM, such as urpmi. Simply fire up the mandrake control center, then Software Manager, search for mySQL and you'll see a few packages. Click on what you think you need, and the software manager will select for you the packages required by dependencies. It is that easy. Separating _dev_ packages from the binaries is great. That allows for a minimal install for people who don't care about compiling stuff. What's wrong with it ?
A great way to capitalize all the discussions at the Kastle: the devs are starting the 3.2 release cycle now . The integration of PIM stuff in 3.2 will make for a complete, extremely consistent desktop environment (except for KOffice that will need onesome extra time to mature, incorporate the OpenOffice filters, etc.)
You get the idea. Non techies should not need to know all the jargon, just a few basic concepts and names. The same goes for User Interfaces in operating systems :-)
Yes, I hope so too. But first of all I want to see them sell Linux preinstalled notebooks. It would be a winner situation for HP, to sell a full line of Linux-preinstalled hardware: servers, desktops, notebooks and handhelds. RedHat, Mandrake and SuSE are all excellent candidates ...
Well, not only this, but also he says in the FAQ for the project:
Contradictory ? Yes. To make it even funnier, his project is only made by him and two contributors (what a big project), and to tap it all he recommends you being wealthy.
I would rather read what other people have to say on OSS management (say Linus, RMS, folks from OpenOffice, Mozilla, JBoss, etc.)
Huh ? How got this modded as insightful ? Anyways, if you read the announcement, this is for high performance computing. It is a turn-key solution to easily set up, maintain and monitor a parallel cluster. Parallel clusters are essentially arrangements of computers that allow to process data at each computer at the same time ("in parallel"), and then collect the results and combine them, thus making possible to achieve supercomputing power out of inexpensive hardware.
The announcement very clearly states which is the market niche they target (i.e. research labs and the like):
By the way. It is so nice to see Mandrake aiming at corporate/government customers, this is going to be very healthy for the company. I would expect and encourage more of this ...
Fear not my friend :-) . Please read the announcement from Ingo:
You will just need to flag your binaries ...
Good luck folks!
I very much welcome the promotion of Linux-preinstalled hardware by Linux Distros. This is vital, since most users don't want to install an OS (even when it has gotten incredibly easy to install Linux). They actually prefer a simpler solution: open the box, power on, surf the net. In particular, there is a great niche for affordable, Linux Laptops with no MS tax. Your Mobile PC looks promising, but it received some criticism for the use of a VIA processor, a low-power processor that is therefore considerably slower than an Intel/AMD processor of comparable clock speed. This is a valid option for people interested in long battery life. Nonetheless, there is a market for people who need more computing power. Are you working on a deal to sell a similar solution but with a more powerfull CPU ? Any other news in the hardware related arena that you could share with us ?
GNU/Linux went this far (up to a point of being a threaten to the evil empire) by damn good coding. Where do you want to spend the next half our of your spare time, discussing this FUD in /. or coding (bug reporting, writing documentation, etc) for your favorite project ? It's your choice :-)
There are several goals in a next generation filesystem implementation. Low cost and speed are important, and conquest goes in the right direction. But how reliable is persistent RAM for storage ? Hard drives go belly up every once in a while, and we would all like to see some sort of affordable solid state storage come up and replace HDD. Persistent RAM seems to be a step in the opposit direction, or Am I wrong ?
They first ignored Free Software, later on they attacked it with arrogance, now they are switching from FUD (mainly misleading arguments against free software) to mimicking (we share our source too, you see ? We are open too, really).
I guess from my view the bottomline here is:
If nothing else, Free Software is playing a role on balancing the arrogant power of MS. And I personally think it is doing much more than that ;-)
On the bright side, I think that RedHat's decision to split their software in a publically available, bleeding edge distribution and a more conservative, corporate version is just great. The former is a test bed for the latter. Donwnloaders and enthusiasts do the stress tests, corporations get a stabilized product. Excellent scheme !
Correct me if I've got the facts wrong. But it sounds to me like a week long wait is not really long, and that this announcement in Slashdot is not really ethical ...
I just wonder why is it that other distros don't follow the trend, use some of knoppix' technology and add a demo mode to their installers. People could boot off the CD, see a demo, and if they like it and their hardware gets successfully detected they can go ahead and install on the disk. If I remember correctly SuSE was doing it ? How about Mandrake and RedHat ? Are they going to catch up on this one ? It looks like the way to go !
Yes , my bad, and thanks for pointing this out. But really, it would be great news even if it they decided to go open source, not necesarily FS in the sense of the FSF. I agree with you that the fact that they talk about "Free Software" makes it even better though. Cheer up my friend !
One of the things that look promising is that Mandrake is now really using bugzilla (qa.mandrakesoft.com), you can get an account and help and they can track QA issues much more easily.
My only concern with Mandrake is how they can make a profit. I was hoping they would release the ISOs a few days after making them available in Mandrake Club (kind of what Redhat is doing with the next release). This would give people one more reason to be in the club. Also, the ISOs should be made public right after they are available to be purchased from MandrakeStore IMHO. Oh, and it would probably be a good idea to enforce trademark, so that cheap CD sites can't sell "Mandrake 9.1" (I think RedHat does this). In fact, if Mandrake made the "download version" (just the CD's) available cheap and early, I guess many people would guy the CDs on the mail instead of going through the hassle of downloading and burning.
In general, and I really don't mean to be mean, Mandrake should probably borrow a few ideas from Red Hat in the business camp. Otherwise they are doing great and improving :-)
Despite the tone of Yahoo's article, and despite the fact that unfortunately physicists are resorting more and more into spectacular announcements (and I am a physicist), the issue is not settled. This search at the NASA's ADS will show you a bunch of papers on the topic (even tough some entries are unrelated). Just browse the abstracts, you will see that not everyone in the astrophysics community agrees that variations in solar radiation are the main cause of global warming.
I am proud of the few among you, /. readers and US Citizens who *are* complaining about these
horrible attacks. Poor Iraquies had to suffer Saddam Hussein's - former ally of the US - dictatorship, and now many of them will be killed by the bombings. Just like it happened with civilians in Alfghanistan, tortured by the Taliban regime and afterwords bombed by the US. Again, some of these Talibans were allies of the US when fighting a prior "evil", the Soviet Union. You have to stop this nosense. It will bring more terrorism, more hatred, and innocent civilian deaths, once more.
Who cares about those people ? I do. Human rights should prevail. A dead kid is a dead kid, be him or her, poor angel, Palestinian, Israeli, Iraqui, or whatever. It is a sad day in History, I feel like vomiting, I feel like crying, I already am ...