...and think twice before you drop out based on what a few privileged geniuses (who were going to succeed in life no matter what) were able to do. Cherry-picked anecdotes are nice but in real life, the unemployment rate among recent college grads is 6.8%. Among recent HS grads? 24% Do you feel lucky punk?
Talented people want to exercise their talents. The question is what the medium skill range will do. However, the absolute worst approach would of course be to let them all slide into poverty.
Talented people want to exercise their talents and be rewarded for such. They do not want their rewards to be deliberately diluted by an enormous welfare subsidy to the rest of society. Don't forget that individuals can simply pick up their talents and take them somewhere that adequately rewards them for their accomplishments. Siphoning this talent from the rest of the world is a fundamental tenet upon which the USA was founded, and subsequently emerged as the world's only superpower.
As of right now, the description up at the apple store (where the leaked G5 info was found earlier) still lists the old G4 specs on the G5 Power Mac page.
Dual PowerPC G4 processors at up to 1.42 GHz, etc. OOPS!
I guess the Steve frightened the web designers so much that nobody wants to touch that part of the page again until he gives the OK in writing.
We always talk about SCO, SCO, SCO but I realized I have no clue about what IBM's response is...
This was addressed in the recent salon.com article called "Lawyers against Linux". I think it's a MUST READ - at least click-through to get a day pass for this article.
To quote the bit about IBM's response:
An IBM spokesman declined to comment on the SCO case. The company's legal response to SCO, however, leaves little doubt about IBM's feelings: The filing is an almost comically terse list denying all but the most indisputable claims that SCO makes. For example, one line reads that IBM "denies the averments of paragraph 19, except admits that IBM markets a Unix software product under the trade name 'AIX.'" IBM also candidly admits that its principal place of business is in New York, that it maintains an office in Salt Lake City, and that some of its microchips are more powerful than chips made by Intel. It gives no more ground than that, however.
In a nutshell, they aren't really taking it seriously - at least not in their initial response to SCO's allegations...
The top tier costs $2500 and you get one year of 24x7 support with a one-hour response time and unlimited incedents.
For a mission-critical business system (like one that MAKES REAL MONEY for a company) this is not a bad price to pay to keep running.
ALso, if you've only got one or two boxes like this, paying RedHat $2500 a year would be a lot cheaper than keeping a really good UNIX sysadmin around.
I think if you look at the competition (Microsoft and Commercial UNIX vendors), this would be pretty good deal.
Odd, since I played with it since it's days on SGI systems, and not once to I remember the 3D engine being used in either audio or video applications. It's a 3D rendering engine, and nothing more, or so I was led to believe
OpenGL is not only a 3D rendering engine. In fact, the <TITLE> tag on www.opengl.org reads "OpenGL - High Performance 2D/3D graphics."
OpenGL is a full-featured graphics API and is equally capable of doing 2D and 3D operations. There have indeed been some unique video applications built with OpenGL.
Whether that qualifies it as a "multimedia platform" is a judgement left to the reader.
Hardware diags on most commercial UNIX boxes (I've got most experience with SGI) is light-years ahead of the Linux/x86 world.
For example, a typical 64 processor SGI Origin server with 32GB of memory has on the order of 130 DIMMS in it. Vendor, you had damn well better have a good way to tell me exactly which one just made the system crash. And they do.
Checkpoint/restart. Oops, I need move this rack to the other side of the room but this guy has a job running for the next two weeks. No sweat - checkpoint the running system to disk, shutdown, move the system, reboot, then restart the system from the checkpoint and things chug along like you never missed a beat.
How about crash logs? SGI's savecore feature will catch a kernel panic and dump an image of the running system to disk before it automatically reboots itself. Then when the system comes back up there are tools which analyze the image and tell you what may have caused the crash. The analysis will give you a percent confidence level that each possible cause it is suggesting was the actual cause so you can check things out in order of likelyhood.
In all fairness, Linux on standard PC hardware probably can never have this level of hardware/software integration simply because of the commodity nature of PC hardware. Commercial outfits like Sun and SGI control both the hardware and the software and this gives them tremendous opportunities to integrate things on a level that Linux developers could only dream of.
IMO, Linux has made serious progress to catch up with commercial Unices the last couple of years. If you'd asked this two years ago I would have had a lot of very serious complaints about 3D graphics, filesystems, a whole *bunch* of very serious NFS issues and probably a few others I'm forgetting. These have all been addressed to a considerable extent well over the last couple years. There are still a few rough spots that I keep running into but it could be argued that these are a bit less serious:
Linux needs better (less buggy) nfs tools. For example, showmount and/var/lib/nfs/rmtab seem to be horribly broken. Some recent versions of exportfs had some really strange problems if you were digging deep, as well. Also I find that if an NFS server goes down and a Linux client has it mounted, you cannot convince the client to remove the mount to that server - even if you are using soft mounts.
Linux needs a better autofs implementation. At the very least, autofs on Linux really should have the typical/hosts mechanism built-in.
A better ypserver. In my hands, the Linux implementation is pretty buggy in a mixed UNIX environment - the most annoying problem I have seen is that rebuilding the maps on the master doesn't always propogate to the Linux slaves (but not always - I cannot reproduce this at will). Second on my list of yp issues is the broken ypset mechanism in the linux NIS client.
There are also many small inconsistencies that I run across in Linux that just aren't there in the commercial Unices that I've used (mainly Solaris and IRIX). Config files that don't obey netgroups but should, various performance problems here and there (usually I/O related), user-interface issues, window managers that only allow a single instance to be run for a single user (Ever try to work in an NFS-mounted home directory on two machines at once using Gnome?). Stupid things like this (that most people would not encounter) continue to slip through the Linux development model.
So here is my main point: On the surface, Linux can and does appear nearly perfect to most users in most configurations. But when you start digging deeper - when you start integrating Linux into a heterogenous mid- to large-sized network with multiple services and numerous users - strange issues crop up frequently that just aren't there on the commercial platforms.
The less-traveled code paths in Linux do have problems and in my mind it is easy to see why. Linux is changing way too rapidly for the community to find, document and squash all the obscure bugs. And in my opinion, the development model is not particularly well-suited to obscure-bug-squashing in the first place (except for security-related bugs).
The PowerPoint control requires "Visual Basic for Applications" to be installed. If you haven't got it, PowerPoint will tell you.
In this case, run the Office X installer and select only the "Visual Basic for Applications" option from inside the "Tools" dropdown - then finish the installation process.
If you've already applied the Office 10.1.2 patch, you will need to patch it again. PowerPoint kept crashing on me when I tried to start the slide show from my phone until I re-applied the patch.
This is a truly awesome application.
My original submission had the URL inserted between "to" and "SGI". So it read:
According to http://www.sgi.com/features/2002/nov/hpc/ SGI will unveil...
Slashdot Mirror
...and think twice before you drop out based on what a few privileged geniuses (who were going to succeed in life no matter what) were able to do. Cherry-picked anecdotes are nice but in real life, the unemployment rate among recent college grads is 6.8%. Among recent HS grads? 24% Do you feel lucky punk?
Wow, that's amazing news. It does almost everything that email can do. What will they think of next?
Talented people want to exercise their talents. The question is what the medium skill range will do. However, the absolute worst approach would of course be to let them all slide into poverty.
Talented people want to exercise their talents and be rewarded for such. They do not want their rewards to be deliberately diluted by an enormous welfare subsidy to the rest of society. Don't forget that individuals can simply pick up their talents and take them somewhere that adequately rewards them for their accomplishments. Siphoning this talent from the rest of the world is a fundamental tenet upon which the USA was founded, and subsequently emerged as the world's only superpower.
hrmph...
Dual PowerPC G4 processors at up to 1.42 GHz, etc. OOPS!
I guess the Steve frightened the web designers so much that nobody wants to touch that part of the page again until he gives the OK in writing.
This was addressed in the recent salon.com article called "Lawyers against Linux". I think it's a MUST READ - at least click-through to get a day pass for this article.
To quote the bit about IBM's response:
In a nutshell, they aren't really taking it seriously - at least not in their initial response to SCO's allegations...
For a mission-critical business system (like one that MAKES REAL MONEY for a company) this is not a bad price to pay to keep running.
ALso, if you've only got one or two boxes like this, paying RedHat $2500 a year would be a lot cheaper than keeping a really good UNIX sysadmin around.
I think if you look at the competition (Microsoft and Commercial UNIX vendors), this would be pretty good deal.
OpenGL is not only a 3D rendering engine. In fact, the <TITLE> tag on www.opengl.org reads "OpenGL - High Performance 2D/3D graphics."
OpenGL is a full-featured graphics API and is equally capable of doing 2D and 3D operations. There have indeed been some unique video applications built with OpenGL.
Whether that qualifies it as a "multimedia platform" is a judgement left to the reader.
For example, a typical 64 processor SGI Origin server with 32GB of memory has on the order of 130 DIMMS in it. Vendor, you had damn well better have a good way to tell me exactly which one just made the system crash. And they do.
Checkpoint/restart. Oops, I need move this rack to the other side of the room but this guy has a job running for the next two weeks. No sweat - checkpoint the running system to disk, shutdown, move the system, reboot, then restart the system from the checkpoint and things chug along like you never missed a beat.
How about crash logs? SGI's savecore feature will catch a kernel panic and dump an image of the running system to disk before it automatically reboots itself. Then when the system comes back up there are tools which analyze the image and tell you what may have caused the crash. The analysis will give you a percent confidence level that each possible cause it is suggesting was the actual cause so you can check things out in order of likelyhood.
In all fairness, Linux on standard PC hardware probably can never have this level of hardware/software integration simply because of the commodity nature of PC hardware. Commercial outfits like Sun and SGI control both the hardware and the software and this gives them tremendous opportunities to integrate things on a level that Linux developers could only dream of.
Linux needs better (less buggy) nfs tools. For example, showmount and /var/lib/nfs/rmtab seem to be horribly broken. Some recent versions of exportfs had some really strange problems if you were digging deep, as well. Also I find that if an NFS server goes down and a Linux client has it mounted, you cannot convince the client to remove the mount to that server - even if you are using soft mounts.
Linux needs a better autofs implementation. At the very least, autofs on Linux really should have the typical /hosts mechanism built-in.
A better ypserver. In my hands, the Linux implementation is pretty buggy in a mixed UNIX environment - the most annoying problem I have seen is that rebuilding the maps on the master doesn't always propogate to the Linux slaves (but not always - I cannot reproduce this at will). Second on my list of yp issues is the broken ypset mechanism in the linux NIS client.
There are also many small inconsistencies that I run across in Linux that just aren't there in the commercial Unices that I've used (mainly Solaris and IRIX). Config files that don't obey netgroups but should, various performance problems here and there (usually I/O related), user-interface issues, window managers that only allow a single instance to be run for a single user (Ever try to work in an NFS-mounted home directory on two machines at once using Gnome?). Stupid things like this (that most people would not encounter) continue to slip through the Linux development model.
So here is my main point: On the surface, Linux can and does appear nearly perfect to most users in most configurations. But when you start digging deeper - when you start integrating Linux into a heterogenous mid- to large-sized network with multiple services and numerous users - strange issues crop up frequently that just aren't there on the commercial platforms.
The less-traveled code paths in Linux do have problems and in my mind it is easy to see why. Linux is changing way too rapidly for the community to find, document and squash all the obscure bugs. And in my opinion, the development model is not particularly well-suited to obscure-bug-squashing in the first place (except for security-related bugs).
The PowerPoint control requires "Visual Basic for Applications" to be installed. If you haven't got it, PowerPoint will tell you. In this case, run the Office X installer and select only the "Visual Basic for Applications" option from inside the "Tools" dropdown - then finish the installation process. If you've already applied the Office 10.1.2 patch, you will need to patch it again. PowerPoint kept crashing on me when I tried to start the slide show from my phone until I re-applied the patch. This is a truly awesome application.
My original submission had the URL inserted between "to" and "SGI". So it read: According to http://www.sgi.com/features/2002/nov/hpc/ SGI will unveil...