I can see it now. While driving along peacefully at 65mph, obeying the speed limit, your 14 year old script-kiddie son sitting next to you remaps the fuel injector to inject the fuel at full capacity regardless of throttle position. Since he was running Windows, his computer crashes shortly afterwards and you find yourself cruising down the highway at 200mph.
Actually this won't happen, if you add lots of fuel without adding lots of air, all you get is smoke and not very much power. After a while, you also get a worn out engine.
What you should watch out for is when you have quite a lot of power and not enough fuel, then you get a melted piston or valve.
Linux has started to become the platform of choice for extremely complex and involved multimedia production, powering enormous render farms and video storage RAID arrays, yet still, Linux falls on its face for mundane day-to-day productivity work.
A rendering application is fairly operating system independent. It only requires ANSI C level functions for opening the source files, crunching the data, and writing the output. There is a little bit of OS stuff for communication between nodes etc, but really nothing compared to making a wordprocesssor.
So if you have a Solaris or SGI renderfarm program, and you recompile it for linux, you quickly get a userbase of happy users who start wanting to run the modeller on this cheap hardware. So you port that too, which might not be that hard if it was coming from another unix.
Writing a spreadsheet that reads Excel files is more difficult than porting your own application which you know you can sell, for actual money.
You might want to check out the mailing lists at www.diy-efi.org. I don't think there are any linux efforts going on there at the moment, but they do have a lot of knowlege in reverse engineering OEM systems and building them from scratch.
Indeed, as usual. In 1985 I had a Xerox 1108 (Dandelion) workstation with megapixel display, nice three-button optical mouse, and, of course, ethernet. Original big, fat, thick-wire ethernet that you have to cut into with a special tapping tool to add a drop-lead for a workstation (and you could only cut taps at particular intervals which had something to do with the wavelength of the signal.
And they called the tapping tool a "Vampire Tap":-)
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I can see it now. While driving along peacefully at 65mph, obeying the speed limit, your 14 year old script-kiddie son sitting next to you remaps the fuel injector to inject the fuel at full capacity regardless of throttle position. Since he was running Windows, his computer crashes shortly afterwards and you find yourself cruising down the highway at 200mph.
Actually this won't happen, if you add lots of fuel without adding lots of air, all you get is smoke and not very much power. After a while, you also get a worn out engine.
What you should watch out for is when you have quite a lot of power and not enough fuel, then you get a melted piston or valve.
Linux has started to become the platform of choice for extremely complex and involved multimedia production, powering enormous render farms and video storage RAID arrays, yet still, Linux falls on its face for mundane day-to-day productivity work.
A rendering application is fairly operating system independent. It only requires ANSI C level functions for opening the source files, crunching the data, and writing the output. There is a little bit of OS stuff for communication between nodes etc, but really nothing compared to making a wordprocesssor.
So if you have a Solaris or SGI renderfarm program, and you recompile it for linux, you quickly get a userbase of happy users who start wanting to run the modeller on this cheap hardware. So you port that too, which might not be that hard if it was coming from another unix.
Writing a spreadsheet that reads Excel files is more difficult than porting your own application which you know you can sell, for actual money.
You might want to check out the mailing lists at www.diy-efi.org. I don't think there are any linux efforts going on there at the moment, but they do have a lot of knowlege in reverse engineering OEM systems and building them from scratch.
Indeed, as usual. In 1985 I had a Xerox 1108 (Dandelion) workstation with megapixel display, nice three-button optical mouse, and, of course, ethernet. Original big, fat, thick-wire ethernet that you have to cut into with a special tapping tool to add a drop-lead for a workstation (and you could only cut taps at particular intervals which had something to do with the wavelength of the signal.
:-)
And they called the tapping tool a "Vampire Tap"