Not only that, there is a choice of desktops. The two main ones are GNOME and KDE. Then you have things like XFce and GNUstep.
What's more, these desktops are not merely Linux desktops. They're portable desktops for unix-like operating systems. So, you have a choice of desktop, a choice of kernel, a choice of distribution, a choice of hardware architecture and a choice of vendor. Not only that, you can choose to have it at zero cost or pay for support.
Linux on the desktop is getting real long in the tooth for me. I'm trying real hard not to boot Windows but I keep doing it day after day even though I'm wasting all of my free time trying to assemble some usable "free desktop".
We see this same whinge daily on slashdot. It's just that: a whinge.
I last used Windows at home in 1997. Back then it was Windows 3.1 on MS-DOS 6.22. I've been using Linux for all my computing needs since then, after first trying it out in 1995 and then installing it as my primary OS in 1996.
Linux is very useable on the desktop and has been even my fairly non-technical users for about 5 years now. It's just different to Windows, which is what most people are used to and conditioned to think of as "normal" and "right."
The chances are if you're still finding Linux unuseable on the desktop, you'd probably find any non-Windows OS "unsuseable" too. If you can put up with the expense and inconvenience of Windows (and prefer it) stick with it, but keep your anti-Linux rhetoric to your self. We're sick and tired of hearing it.
And if you are implementing a game where players can fire an assault rifle full-automatic (600-700 rounds a minute or more, depending on too many factors to list - which might need to be implemented and calcuated by the computer, of course...) you can see that the CPU is going to start needing some help to work it out.
but what the heck is it? Is it just a RISC processor with lots of FP SIMD units for doing lots of sums in a hurry? Is it VLIW? Is it related to any existing CPUs? Is it just the next evolutionary development of the current generation of GPUs?
Pictures of boards are all well and good, and the martketing hype is fun, but we need to know.
Intel implemented the weak fpu unit in the p4 to try and steer users onto sse code even when it's not really appropriate.
SSE has scalar instructions too. Since the SSE registers are in a flat register file (c.f. stack in the legacy FPU descended from the 287/387), it's actually easier for a compiler to generate efficient code for SSE. SSE only does single precision though, so for double precision you need SSE2/SSE3. Incidentally, if you look at the intel manuals you will see that SSE3 is only a minor extension to SSE2 adding a few more data shuffling instuctions which save a few operations here and there.
Imagine having to reboot a whole cluster after the BSOD.
Ah but... See what I'd do is have each of the nodes reboot itself in turn five minutes after the last one, is a continuous cycle. That way you'd avoid the worst memory leaks and reduce the likelyhood of BSODs. All good Windows admins know to have multiple redundant servers sharing the load and to reboot them once every 24 hours (usually in the middle of the night).
So you want programming that fits your tastes for £120 and screw those who DO want the lame rubbish?
They already get the lame rubbish on ITV. The BBC does not need to do the same. It shouldn't be in competition with ITV in this area. I'm glad someone at the top has finally had the guts to come out and say this.
You should welcome these changes, because one of the conditions the BBC agreed to in order to keep the license fee is to scrap makeover shows, shows about houses and clones of other shit like stars in their eyes. Basically anything that commercial broadcasters can do better.
I think that there should be a publically-funded, challenging and independent broadcaster. It should concentrate on investigating, challenging authority, educating, informing and funding the quality end of the entertainment spectrum that otherwise would not exist due to mnority appeal.
The low-brow, unchallenging, mass-market stuff can be done by commercial broadcasters, after all, by definition that sort of stuff gets high ratings and therefore high advertising revenue. My license fee shouldn't be fritterd away on Neighbours, East Enders and whatever else. That stuff should be on ITV where it belongs, paid for by advertising revenue.
I don't mind paying for good TV and Radio. I'd subscribe to an advert-free channel of high-qulaity comedy, news, current affairs, science and culture.
TV is obsolete anyway. It's one-way, from the Establishment into your mind. At least here on the Intarweb I can make my own content if I chose, and air my own views.
I don't like the heavy-handed way the license fee is collected --- they use scare tactics a lot. "This man didn't pay his license fee. Now he's bankrupt, his wife has left him, his kids are drug addicted hookers, and we shot his dog. Don't let this happen to you." They also have a lot of trouble believing that some people don't have TVs. If they'd be nicer about it, I'd be much happier paying for it.
A lot of posts here, and so far nobody seems to have mentioned what I thought was the most encouraging part of the announcement, namely that the BBC has been told it is not to chase ratings but focus on quality programming.
Well, if they actually do that, them I for one will no longer resent paying my TV license fee.
I'm a British taxpayer, but I don't own a TV so I don't pay the licence fee.
Do you get a constant stream of phone calls and red letters from the Television Licensing Authority demanding that you buy a license? Do they keep sending a man round to your house to intimidate you and ask you why you haven't got a license? Do they keep making you sign forms to declare that you haven't got a TV set? Have they put up a huge poster on the nearest billboard to your house declaring that someone in your street hasn't got a TV license?
I chose to live without a TV set for over 6 years. Eventually I gave in and got one because the only broadband Internet access in my area was through a TV set top box.
The best things that the BBC does are BBC2 (TV) and Radio 4, in my opinion. BBC1 is largely drivel, and even the news seems to be aimed at morons on that channel now (to compete with ITV). I gather that Radio 3 is very good if you're into serious music. Radio 1 is pure handbag and trandy crap and Radio 2 ear-candy for the hard-of-thinking. BBC4 TV was OK for a while.
I really resent paying £120 a year (or whatever) to fund make-over shows, soaps (Eastenders, Neighbours etc.) and all the other assorted lame rubbish on TV. I also resent the fact that Radio 1 pays record companies to advertise their wares (manufactured handbag music).
Sorry, but I'm so used to the rabid anti-Sun trolling on this site that it's difficult to tell who's being deliberately inflammatory or genuinely asking questions.
So Field Rep #2 and the PHBs were happy. How about the customer? What did the customer think? Didn't the customer think that the company looked incompetent having to come out several times, unprepared, with the wrong equipment etc.?
Did the customer go and tell all her colleagues and friends what a bunch of morons this company were?
When I was 16 I got a job putting out potatoes in Safeway. I got some basic training. This particular phenomenon was called "the domino effect." One customer's bad experience with the company is communicated by word of mouth to other customers or potential customers.
Sounds like that particular company was in for a fall. Field Rep #1 being "let go" was probably a blessing in disguise for him.
I try not to respond to trolls, but here goes nothing.
I just installed Solaris 10 on an Enterprise 450 (from scratch not an upgrade) and it's about as barebones and hostile as 9 or 8. The only difference is that Gnome can be chosen for the desktop...though it's not nearly as nice as Fedora let alone Ubuntu. The video also looks horrible.
First of all the video. The E450 is an archaic server (UltraSPARC II processors) and IIRC it has a 4 megabyte ATI graphics accelerator built in. It's a server, so mostly it will be used headless on a network with a serial console (i.e. no graphics at all, just ASCII over serial). Or it may be used as an MP3 player in dme's car...
As for barebones, did you look in/usr/sfw? Solaris 10 has a lot more stuff in/usr/sfw/bin. Did you install the Companion CD? There's lots of stuff in/opt/sfw. There's even pkg-get so you can download stuff from blastwave (boo hiss).
It's not a clean and simple configuration either. A Nessus scan of the system shows 9 known security holes (not potential warnings) and a bunch of services running that aren't necessary. I'm keeping it off the network till I can lock down the system properly.
Please submit bug reports. PHBs listen to customers more than they do engineers.
Solaris 10 is not a Linux killer. Keep in mind, though, that I have no axe to grind against Solaris. As far as I'm concerned it's unix...just like the *BSDs or the Linux distros. It's not great for a novice admin nor is is good for a regular user. Sun dropped the ball.
Solaris 10 is not quite a Linux killer yet, but when they put the Linux emulation into the mainstream product, and when they get the accelerated video drivers, it sure as heck will be. Yes, Sun dropped the ball, but about two years ago, they got a new head of Software and got a clue about AMD processors (Sun just stopped selling machines with intel processors). For the last two years Sun has been working its butt off to make Solaris 10 totally rule and to make the fastest Opteron workstations and servers money can buy.
Sun has reinvented itself yet again. Well, maybe. Time will tell.
Sorry you're going. V40z is fast like a scalded lizard. Only prob is that the thing is LOUD. Not good for desktop box...
Well, if it's a workstation you want, the Dual Opteron W2100z totally rules. Make sure you put Solaris 10 on it for 64-bit goodness and to get the benefit of those extra registers. It comes with NVIDIA Quadro graphics. You can't buy a faster workstation (AFAIK).
I am interested to see how exactly Sun gets around the numerous graphics cards etc out there by just releasing Solaris 10 for intel/amd!
Easy. Solaris 10 "on x86" (or x64 - pointy-haired mareketing name) comes with Xorg as the default X server. Hence you get all the open-source "Linux" drivers for free. I have an Acer Ferrari 3400 with built in 128MB ATi graphics (which I have to give back next months when I get made redundant from Sun) running Solaris 10 Build 74l1. That's an Athlon 64 machine (Opteron) running the 64-bit Solaris x86 kernel.
NVidia is writing native Solaris x86 drivers for Sun so you'll get full acceleration, just as in Linux, on Solaris x86 with an NVidia grpahics card.
I don't know what's happening with ATi any more. I'm on garden leave...
As for drivers for other hardware, Sun has signed up hundreds of companies to do drivers.
By the way, before my pride for Solaris 10 runs out, and while they're still paying me, the V40z is a very good server. I had one for building the Companion CD. It goes like poop off a Teflon(TM) shovel, especially when running 64-bit Solaris 10. Buy one.
Ever concieved that maybe Solaris 10 and the Hundreds variation builts on Linux may coexist simply because each has it's own features to offer?
Yes indeed. That's what I've been saying about all the different unixes for the 10 years I've been using them.
I don't see a future for this so called "competition".
But there is bound to be some competition. As each unix develops new featrures, others will run to catch up. There will be a continuous leap-frogging of features and performance.
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Sorry, I was referring to the ignoramuses. I forgot about the snobs at the other end of the spectrum.
Not only that, there is a choice of desktops. The two main ones are GNOME and KDE. Then you have things like XFce and GNUstep.
What's more, these desktops are not merely Linux desktops. They're portable desktops for unix-like operating systems. So, you have a choice of desktop, a choice of kernel, a choice of distribution, a choice of hardware architecture and a choice of vendor. Not only that, you can choose to have it at zero cost or pay for support.
We see this same whinge daily on slashdot. It's just that: a whinge.
I last used Windows at home in 1997. Back then it was Windows 3.1 on MS-DOS 6.22. I've been using Linux for all my computing needs since then, after first trying it out in 1995 and then installing it as my primary OS in 1996.
Linux is very useable on the desktop and has been even my fairly non-technical users for about 5 years now. It's just different to Windows, which is what most people are used to and conditioned to think of as "normal" and "right."
The chances are if you're still finding Linux unuseable on the desktop, you'd probably find any non-Windows OS "unsuseable" too. If you can put up with the expense and inconvenience of Windows (and prefer it) stick with it, but keep your anti-Linux rhetoric to your self. We're sick and tired of hearing it.
Easy work-around: make it a game with laser guns.
/me ducks.
Pictures of boards are all well and good, and the martketing hype is fun, but we need to know.
SSE has scalar instructions too. Since the SSE registers are in a flat register file (c.f. stack in the legacy FPU descended from the 287/387), it's actually easier for a compiler to generate efficient code for SSE. SSE only does single precision though, so for double precision you need SSE2/SSE3. Incidentally, if you look at the intel manuals you will see that SSE3 is only a minor extension to SSE2 adding a few more data shuffling instuctions which save a few operations here and there.
Tell me, are they recruiting at IBM? Only I need a new job and I'm willing to sell my soul for the right price.
We get on average one of these per month posted here to slashdot as news.
Nothing to see here. Move along please.
Ah but... See what I'd do is have each of the nodes reboot itself in turn five minutes after the last one, is a continuous cycle. That way you'd avoid the worst memory leaks and reduce the likelyhood of BSODs. All good Windows admins know to have multiple redundant servers sharing the load and to reboot them once every 24 hours (usually in the middle of the night).
They already get the lame rubbish on ITV. The BBC does not need to do the same. It shouldn't be in competition with ITV in this area. I'm glad someone at the top has finally had the guts to come out and say this.
Yes, I do welcome these changes.
The low-brow, unchallenging, mass-market stuff can be done by commercial broadcasters, after all, by definition that sort of stuff gets high ratings and therefore high advertising revenue. My license fee shouldn't be fritterd away on Neighbours, East Enders and whatever else. That stuff should be on ITV where it belongs, paid for by advertising revenue.
I don't mind paying for good TV and Radio. I'd subscribe to an advert-free channel of high-qulaity comedy, news, current affairs, science and culture.
TV is obsolete anyway. It's one-way, from the Establishment into your mind. At least here on the Intarweb I can make my own content if I chose, and air my own views.
I totally agree with you.
Why should they get commercially-viable pap paid for out of my license fee? They can watch it on ITV. The system is rotten.
Amen to that.
Well, if they actually do that, them I for one will no longer resent paying my TV license fee.
Do you get a constant stream of phone calls and red letters from the Television Licensing Authority demanding that you buy a license? Do they keep sending a man round to your house to intimidate you and ask you why you haven't got a license? Do they keep making you sign forms to declare that you haven't got a TV set? Have they put up a huge poster on the nearest billboard to your house declaring that someone in your street hasn't got a TV license?
I chose to live without a TV set for over 6 years. Eventually I gave in and got one because the only broadband Internet access in my area was through a TV set top box.
The best things that the BBC does are BBC2 (TV) and Radio 4, in my opinion. BBC1 is largely drivel, and even the news seems to be aimed at morons on that channel now (to compete with ITV). I gather that Radio 3 is very good if you're into serious music. Radio 1 is pure handbag and trandy crap and Radio 2 ear-candy for the hard-of-thinking. BBC4 TV was OK for a while.
I really resent paying £120 a year (or whatever) to fund make-over shows, soaps (Eastenders, Neighbours etc.) and all the other assorted lame rubbish on TV. I also resent the fact that Radio 1 pays record companies to advertise their wares (manufactured handbag music).
Oh well. Must be getting old or something.
Sorry, but I'm so used to the rabid anti-Sun trolling on this site that it's difficult to tell who's being deliberately inflammatory or genuinely asking questions.
Did the customer go and tell all her colleagues and friends what a bunch of morons this company were?
When I was 16 I got a job putting out potatoes in Safeway. I got some basic training. This particular phenomenon was called "the domino effect." One customer's bad experience with the company is communicated by word of mouth to other customers or potential customers.
Sounds like that particular company was in for a fall. Field Rep #1 being "let go" was probably a blessing in disguise for him.
I just installed Solaris 10 on an Enterprise 450 (from scratch not an upgrade) and it's about as barebones and hostile as 9 or 8. The only difference is that Gnome can be chosen for the desktop...though it's not nearly as nice as Fedora let alone Ubuntu. The video also looks horrible.
First of all the video. The E450 is an archaic server (UltraSPARC II processors) and IIRC it has a 4 megabyte ATI graphics accelerator built in. It's a server, so mostly it will be used headless on a network with a serial console (i.e. no graphics at all, just ASCII over serial). Or it may be used as an MP3 player in dme's car...
As for barebones, did you look in /usr/sfw? Solaris 10 has a lot more stuff in /usr/sfw/bin. Did you install the Companion CD? There's lots of stuff in /opt/sfw. There's even pkg-get so you can download stuff from blastwave (boo hiss).
It's not a clean and simple configuration either. A Nessus scan of the system shows 9 known security holes (not potential warnings) and a bunch of services running that aren't necessary. I'm keeping it off the network till I can lock down the system properly.
Please submit bug reports. PHBs listen to customers more than they do engineers.
Solaris 10 is not a Linux killer. Keep in mind, though, that I have no axe to grind against Solaris. As far as I'm concerned it's unix...just like the *BSDs or the Linux distros. It's not great for a novice admin nor is is good for a regular user. Sun dropped the ball.
Solaris 10 is not quite a Linux killer yet, but when they put the Linux emulation into the mainstream product, and when they get the accelerated video drivers, it sure as heck will be. Yes, Sun dropped the ball, but about two years ago, they got a new head of Software and got a clue about AMD processors (Sun just stopped selling machines with intel processors). For the last two years Sun has been working its butt off to make Solaris 10 totally rule and to make the fastest Opteron workstations and servers money can buy.
Sun has reinvented itself yet again. Well, maybe. Time will tell.
Well, if it's a workstation you want, the Dual Opteron W2100z totally rules. Make sure you put Solaris 10 on it for 64-bit goodness and to get the benefit of those extra registers. It comes with NVIDIA Quadro graphics. You can't buy a faster workstation (AFAIK).
Easy. Solaris 10 "on x86" (or x64 - pointy-haired mareketing name) comes with Xorg as the default X server. Hence you get all the open-source "Linux" drivers for free. I have an Acer Ferrari 3400 with built in 128MB ATi graphics (which I have to give back next months when I get made redundant from Sun) running Solaris 10 Build 74l1. That's an Athlon 64 machine (Opteron) running the 64-bit Solaris x86 kernel.
NVidia is writing native Solaris x86 drivers for Sun so you'll get full acceleration, just as in Linux, on Solaris x86 with an NVidia grpahics card.
I don't know what's happening with ATi any more. I'm on garden leave...
As for drivers for other hardware, Sun has signed up hundreds of companies to do drivers.
By the way, before my pride for Solaris 10 runs out, and while they're still paying me, the V40z is a very good server. I had one for building the Companion CD. It goes like poop off a Teflon(TM) shovel, especially when running 64-bit Solaris 10. Buy one.
Yes indeed. That's what I've been saying about all the different unixes for the 10 years I've been using them.
I don't see a future for this so called "competition".
But there is bound to be some competition. As each unix develops new featrures, others will run to catch up. There will be a continuous leap-frogging of features and performance.
Indeed. Linux is now the dominant UNIX-like operating system after Mac OS X.
My point is that the slashdot peanut gallery underestimates the work that Sun has done on Solaris 10.
My darned keyboard is getting worn out. I meant Solaris 10.