Spam has killed usenet as we know it. I still use deja.com to find techical answers (and the Linux-oriented groups are still pretty good). More and more of the spam free content are on private news servers (Redhat, Netscape, VMWare, Symantec) that provide product-specific information.
There are still some groups out there that are worth reading-- anyone else follow the insanity of alt.fan.keanu-reeves and the evil self-appointed moderator.
/. should take note--the crap that made usenet "uselessnet" is taking over here, too. The price of popularity.
You could set a better example if you ignored the flames. You seem pretty knowledgable, but also pretty hostile...the posts you choose to rip into aren't going to influence anyone anyway.
Maybe/. isn't your cup of tea--not that Mac oriented, and what little there is seems to piss you off.
In fact, Apple is pretty much antithetical to the/. Linux/OS-oriented ethos: closed hardware (not even PPC anymore). Closed OS. Closed Software. Charging a royalty for firewire. Those annoying "upgrage to quicktime pro" nags. Still, the hardware make prety good Linux boxes.
Apple execs must thank god every night for Adobe, otherwise, what would be the point?
The most impressive thing about the cluster, and about the Apple G3s used, is their ability to do parallel processing with comparatively little setup. The developers had to write some custom code, but not on the scale of Beowulf. That was pretty neat. The benchmarks were utterly bogus--they should have thrown in an IBM-360, maybe the ENIAC. 8 processor Crays, sheesh.
1. GLDoom is OpenSource, so you o-s fanatics will not give them shit over it.
2. GLDoom has already been ported to 64-bit CPU platforms--my other computer is an SGI O2; it comes with GLDoom. SGI is also writing the C-compiler and other core parts of Linux/IA-64. You figure it out...
What X Windows Server were they using at the demo? Was is a port of real OpenGL, or recompiled XFree86-3.3.x? Or XFree86-4.0beta + Mesa?
What Graphics card?
(guess I should read the article)
Re:On to Spanish Harlem!
on
On to Mars
·
· Score: 1
I appreciate your social consciousness and humanity, but this is a false choice. We are the richest society the world has ever seen. We spend billions annually on pet food, cosmetics, junk food, video games, (hey, wait, games are essential to life...), professional sports, and other useless junk.
If we cut the space program to $0, you would not see one dime of it in Spanish Harlem. If you guilted-out the entertainment industry, you might get some results.
Yes, I admit it, I do not run Linux or Unix. I run Windows 98.
Well, this is probably a troll, but what the heck, I'm bored...
I tried installing RedHat 6.1 by myself, it was hell, I screwed up 4 times before getting my friends help.
If this isn't a troll, then this is the heart of the matter--Linux bruised your pride. Don't sweat it--the first week is a bitch for most everyone. That's why we love it--you also learn a WHOLE LOT that first week, just getting your modem to work and being able to see the X-desktop in a resolution larger than 380x200. The last Linux box I set up for a friend, using RH6.2 was boring--I was pretty careful about the hardware, so I knew everything was suppported, but I didn't expect the freaking modem, sound card, and XFree86 to work right off the bat like that. Kinda took the fun out of it...
What CmdrTaco posted is true. When you design something for an OS most commonly used by techs, you forget to throw in the glitter and pretty shiney things (like a Vigor paperclip heh) that make the general user go "oooh, ah, this is so simple"
Okay, now I'm pretty sure that you never got X-Windows working. Linux may be guilty of a lot of things, but lack of glitter and pretty, shiny things in Enlightenment, ferchristsakes, is BS. You Windows Whiners have to make up your mind--do you hate Linux because it's a CLI, or because the GUI is too complicated and hard to understand?
Really, why do so many people who HATE windows stick with it? Aside from all the boring games made for it, it's EASY to use.
Really? Think back to that first month with Windows 3.1 or Windows 95. Was it really that easy to use? Or did you just not have any choice? Wasn't it really a case of "figure out how to use it or else?". That's probably a better Microsoft logo that "Where do you want to crash today". But the fact remains that you use windows because you had no choice when you bought a PC. And the PC you bought was comprised of components that were designed to work with windows. The greatest hack of all in the Linux movement is that we are hijacking their hardware--not just x86, either.
It's got a friendly interface, and it hides the 'dangerous' areas from stupid users. That's what makes it so popular.
Well, this was the most effective part of the troll. The interface isn't "friendly." It's monolithic. It's not as intuitive as the Mac's, and could learn some things from CDE. Also, as someone who fixes computer, I can tell you that youcan't hide things from stupid users--they are going to find them and break them. The idea is, protect the system from the stupid and malicious by providing real files system and configuration security. Assuming you actually got RH up and running, you only logged on as root, didn't you? Linux assumes that, if you are going to mess around as root, you already know what you are doing. In Windows, anybody who sits at the keyboard is root--with system privaleges. You understand why this is bad, right?
Linux and Unix and the like just leave the programs barren and devoid of beauty, the only layout the programs NORMALLY use are those designed soley for functionality.
A button here, a button there, a line here to break things up, ands it!
Of course, this is just MY opinion, I could be wrong.
Nice!! It's really hard to tell until the end whether you're an idiot or a clever troll! I'm still not 100% sure.
Yup. My 9-year-old daughter didn't know Gnome+Enlightenment. She also didn't know win98 (they use Macs at school). On my dual-boot machine, she prefers Gnome+E or KDE to Win98. They look more interesting, are fully themeable (she has definite preferences), the taskbar icons (shortcuts/launchers) are larger and aren't covered by application windows the way a desktop shortcut/launcher is in Windows. She likes the Xscreensavers more, and the Gnome/KDE games more, too. Her name begins with a "K", so she's convinced that KDE is named after her...
"Easy" depends on your frame of reference. She was a blank page with no frame of PC reference. She likes Gnome and KDE better than Win98. I'm sure I had no influence on her...;-)
I just bought a 1978 Chevrolet Impala. If this is the best car that GM is capable of producing, they are in serious trouble. It's too big, it gets lousy gas mileage, and the users manual is poorly written.
Moral: If you are going to criticize a distribution and UI, at least criticize the CURRENT version. RH6.2+Gnome looks a lot different from RH5.2 + XFree86-3.2 + fvwm.
How many (GUI interface/WM?) projects ae used by the computer using public? Probably more like 1%. Fact of the matter is, I don't care. If Gnome+E, Gnome+Sawmill, or KDE "intimidates" someone, they really need to stick with what works for them.
If you think that Gnome+E is ugly compared to an NT box, your XFree86 settings are misconfigured...
Linux is about flexibility. Maybe that comes at the expense of what you call consistency, but consistency can also mean conformity. Linux is the anthesis of this, and that's why I like it.
I'm not a coder. I'm a user. KDE is VERY intuitive. Gnome is pretty intuitive (E makes it less so, but I love E). Sawmill pretty much stays out of your way and let's Gnome be Gnome (or is a standalone WM in it's own right).
Try doing this with Windows or a Mac--add another task bar. Make it a corner panel that changes length as need for new task buttons. Put monitors that are large enough to see on it. Change the way the panel looks--color, textues, pixmap, whatever. Pick a clock you like--something non-standard. Make your own clock...
I'd like to see consistent key mapping--Netscape is the worst. But I left Windows for Linux for the flexibility. Stop trying to turn a Linux desktop into a Windows or Mac desktop. It's a big world with lots of boxes...
How many (GUI interface/WM?) projects ae used by the computer using public? Probably more like 1%. Fact of the matter is, I don't care. If Gnome+E, Gnome+Sawmill, or KDE "intimidates" someone, they really need to stick with what works for them.
If you think that Gnome+E is ugly compared to an NT box, your XFree86 settings are misconfigured...
Linux is about flexibility. Maybe that comes at the expense of what you call consistency, but consistency can also mean conformity. Linux is the anthesis of this, and that's why I like it.
I'm not a coder. I'm a user. KDE is VERY intuitive. Gnome is pretty intuitive (E makes it less so, but I love E). Sawmill pretty much stays out of your way and let's Gnome be Gnome (or is a standalone WM in it's own right).
Try doing this with Windows or a Mac--add another task bar. Make it a corner panel that changes length as need for new task buttons. Put monitors that are large enough to see on it. Change the way the panel looks--color, textues, pixmap, whatever. Pick a clock you like--something non-standard. Make your own clock...
I'd like to see consistent key mapping--Netscape is the worst. But I left Windows for Linux for the flexibility. Stop trying to turn a Linux desktop into a Windows or Mac desktop. It's a big world with lots of boxes...
Bite me, troll. Take your little NT CD and stuff it down your pants along with your grits. The more I read FUD like this, the more confident I am that shitheels like you are hearing footsteps...
It may not be using UDMA...what you see at boot time is the kernel quering the device--not an operational setting. Unless DMA is "Enabled by Default" in your kernel, or you are using/sbin/hdparm during system initialization, you are running in PIO mode.
The drive will benchmark well even in PIO-mode, because 3/4 of the performance of a single-task read/write is sheer spindle speed and platter density. When you benchmark with hdparm, all you are typically doing is running the benchmark--this is not real world.
The mode (PIO or DMA) really only becomes apparent when you are multitasking--then it is REAL apparent. Check the post above where someone explained how to see the difference between PIO and DMA using hdparm--benchmarking a HDD while accessing the CDROM.
Insightful? Hah! For the desktop, it typically does not matter that the theoretical bandwidth of the channel is--an individual drive is not going to perform raw reads/writes anywhere close to that. A server can and will use that capacity with multiple drives on the channel. Bottomline--if the machine is a desktop with a single drive (up to 70GB these days), UDMA-66/7,200-rpm with busmastering (DMA) enabled will match a single-drive SCSI system.
CPU utilization with busmastering is the same as with SCSI--check out the benchmarks at http://www.storagereview.com.
Here are the things that SCSI advocates never mention:
The interface standards are a mess--SCSI1, SCSI2, SCSIn, Ultra, Ultra-wide, Ultra2, etc., all with different connectors/cables, different termination. In other words, SCSI is wonderful if you have only one flavor of SCSI on the chain, and if the devices were made by the same company with the same termination scheme.
Besides, SCSI support in Linux continues to be flaky--hopefully the 2.4 kernel will fix this. ATA just works, and UDMA works quite well, with busmastering, for most desktop users. If you are doing video editing or other disk-intensive tasks, you should probably use SCSI, otherwise...
You got those DMA benchmarks with a 7,200-rpm ATA-66 drive? Something is wrong--probably just that Seagate makes crappy ATA drives, or it's an older Medalist Pro with low platter densities.
I have an IBM 13.5G ATA-66, running in UDMA-33 mode on a BH-6. hdparm typically benchmarks it at 21-25MB/sec. Your readings are closer to my Maxtor 5,400-rpm drive. Here's what that part of/etc/initab looks like:
# Run hdparm to turn on the good stuff h1::boot:/sbin/hdparm -c3X66d1u1m16k1/dev/hda h2::boot:/sbin/hdparm -c3X66d1u1m16k1/dev/hdb h3::boot:/sbin/hdparm -c3X66d1u1m16k1/dev/hdc h4::boot:/sbin/hdparm -c3k1/dev/cdrom
DMA is enabled by default in the kernel, but I do it again here to set the X66 (UDMA33) flag. If you have a UDMA-66 controller, use X68 UDMA-2 transfers.
If you think that the Transmeta chip only has implications for notebooks, think again. Internet aware cell phones; PDA's; remote monitoring equipment; embedded controllers. Virtually any device that requires low power consumption, low heat, and remote administration can adopt this technology. The fact that a remote administrator can update the software instruction set--never mind that it can execute x86 code--is going to drive people nuts. The telecom, power generation, petroleum, and many other huge industries are going to like this a great deal, as will the US defense and intelligence communities.
First, thank you for a very informative and gracious reply. If you care about moderator points, which I somehow doubt, you deserve a 5.
Second, I apologize for my ignorant, sweeping conclusions in the above post. I really look forward to enjoying the benefits of your work on the DRI and XFree86 4.0.
I think you are right today, in terms of "THE STANDARD" and the advantage that SGI/MIPS hardware enjoys. But you have to throw price into the mix, and the evolution of both Intel and AMD CPUs and core-logic chipsets. This is really a set of questions:
1. SGI has been loosing $ hand over fist--they make great iron, but for a very limited market (mainly US Government and some movie studios). Doesn't a move toward x86/Linux open new markets for lower-cost machines?
2. How much of an advantage does the SGI/MIPs architecture have over PC hardware in one year? Two years? We will probably looking at CPUs running well over 1GHz, and probably approaching 2GHz toward the middle of this decade. With RDRAM and DDRAM (and very high memory bandwidth), AGP 4X, and the Athlon's EV6 Bus?
3. More important: what will give you more bang for the buck in 1 or 2 years? SGI/MIPS/IRIX or, say, an SGI/VALinux workstation with full OpenGL support for a Quadro, with an optimized memory bus architecture (either Intel i840 or hopefully much better Athlon chipset) running at 1.2GHz?
Prediction: They will call it Mesa from precision insight, to satisfy the lawyers, but it will be more OpenGL than OpenGL, and it will be open sourced.
Oh, please give us a break! I don't care if it's "Open Source" right now, as long as it moves Linux into serious competition with NT and IRIX as a 3D graphics workstation platform. The friggin' lawyers will hash out the "Open Source" implications for the next two years (or more) do you want to wait that long?
The thing I find interesting is the same names popping up in the stories--SGI, NVDIA, RedHat, and Precision Insight. Take a look at the Precision Insight team (http://www.precisioninsight.com/our_team.html) and tell me that these guys are not dead fucking serious--the added Brian Paul, who wrote the MESA library. This week, they added Dave Dawes, co-founder and President of XFree86. Does this sound like a closed source-oriented team to you?
As for Nvidia--they have come lightyears in the past six months in terms of drivers--including for the GeForce256. And who do you think helped designed the core of the GeForce and the Quadro? It has "SGI" written all over it.
Precision Insight is writing great chunks of the hardware acceleration layer for XFree86-4.0. SGI and RedHat are paying for it. SGI and NVidia are designing the GeForce and it's successors, and they are making a major commitment to Linux.
At the end of the day, the only things that are going to be sucking are 3dfx (checked their stock lately?) and possibly IRIX. The next two years are going to be amazing in terms of Linux's emergence as a professional graphics workstation--fully supporting the next generation of cards/chips with full T&L and AGP 4X implementation. And the whining "Open Source" religionists will have SGI and Nvidia to thank.
Uh, what makes you think that the only shares in existance where those released for the IPO? It would be pretty typical for a company to hold shares back--say 2-4 million for an IPO of this size. Anybody know how many shares are still held by VALinux or it's principals?
Great, we've all read the same lousy Tom Clancy novels and other warp0rn. And there are about three posters in this entire thread that actually know something about PCL/Bistatic Radar (and I am not one of them).
This is old, old stuff--researchers in the UK tracked commercial aircraft over Britain in the 1970s using ambient radiation from TV and radio broadcasts. The problem then (and now) is processing--they collected data for a few days, and then spent months separating signal from noise, so it was not quite suited for acquiring a targeting solution 8-p.
Processing power has come a long way--a good-sized van full of computers would probably suffice. But for a PCL-based system to actually provide a targeting solution on a stealthy aircraft (with an RCS well below one foot--real experts would be talking about dB), you probably will need dedicated emitters. They can be remoted, and they can be numerous and redundant and therefore relatively impervious to jamming and antiradiation missiles, but it won't be cheap, and it is not going to happen in China anytime in the next 10 years.
When you read these kind of stories, you should be leery of assertions that a theoretical capability=a weapon=combat capability. China has always done well with pure science, and incredibly poorly at applied military science, and poorer still at turing a technology into a military capability.
Anyway, it's always more interesting to look less at what such pieces assert, and more at why it was leaked now--my guess is that some funding decisions are going to be made soon so they are pumping up the China threat again. You don't have to like China, but trying to paint them as a new USSR is laughable--the dog just doesn't hunt. And we are winning--just visit the place and you will see how much peaceful evolution is working.
PS, the first open demo of the GeForce256 was jointly sponsored with SGI, and featured OpenGL API god Dave Shreiner. Stop assuming the worst from Nvidia in terms of Linux support--SGI is taking some serious steps to turn Linux, with Nvidia chips, in to a serious graphics workstation OS.
Yup! SGI partnered with Nvidia last year, and had engineers work on the GeForce256 and the Quadro. There are major implications downstream for SGI and Linux in the graphics workstation market, using Nvidia-based graphics cards.
Over the past few months:
SGI has openly licensed its XFS journaling file system to linux, paving the way for Linux integration on SGI hardware.
Along with Redhat, SGI is funding Precision-Insight. Precision-Insight hired Brian Paul, the author of Mesa OpenGL port to Linux. Precision Insight's Multipipe Direct Rendering Infrastructure (DRI) within the upcoming XFree86 4.0 X Server. SGI is also providing extensive technical help and other resources to benefit the project. The DRI will include additions and modifications to GLX, Mesa 3.1, and XFree86 4.0, as well as any required modifications to the Linux kernel. Both Red Hat and SGI have agreed to allow full source for the entire project to be donated by Precision Insight to the open source community.
SGI is shipping servers with Linux, adapted from Redhat.
SGI has had a rocky time recently in terms of profits, but the technology is first-rate, and they are leveraging a strong Linux future, probably replacing IRIX, for x86-based workstations. Think about boxes with 1GHz+ Athlon, Coppermine, and Merced processors, and video cards like the Quadro, outperforming graphics workstations that cost 10 times as much. All of this is great for Linux.
Slashdot Mirror
Spam has killed usenet as we know it. I still use deja.com to find techical answers (and the Linux-oriented groups are still pretty good). More and more of the spam free content are on private news servers (Redhat, Netscape, VMWare, Symantec) that provide product-specific information.
There are still some groups out there that are worth reading-- anyone else follow the insanity of alt.fan.keanu-reeves and the evil self-appointed moderator.
/. should take note--the crap that made usenet "uselessnet" is taking over here, too. The price of popularity.
Sorry. My first post was trying to be funny. My "cup-o-tea" response was a flame. You didn't deserve it.
Shouldn't have opened the 2nd bottle of tequila...
Without the Mac, there would be no Windows.
Without windows, PCs would still be few and expensive.
A broad installed based of Windows PCs (linked by the internet) makes Linux possible.
How else do you explain RedHat's stock price?
You could set a better example if you ignored the flames. You seem pretty knowledgable, but also pretty hostile...the posts you choose to rip into aren't going to influence anyone anyway.
/. isn't your cup of tea--not that Mac oriented, and what little there is seems to piss you off.
/. Linux/OS-oriented ethos: closed hardware (not even PPC anymore). Closed OS. Closed Software. Charging a royalty for firewire. Those annoying "upgrage to quicktime pro" nags. Still, the hardware make prety good Linux boxes.
Maybe
In fact, Apple is pretty much antithetical to the
Apple execs must thank god every night for Adobe, otherwise, what would be the point?
The most impressive thing about the cluster, and about the Apple G3s used, is their ability to do parallel processing with comparatively little setup. The developers had to write some custom code, but not on the scale of Beowulf. That was pretty neat. The benchmarks were utterly bogus--they should have thrown in an IBM-360, maybe the ENIAC. 8 processor Crays, sheesh.
"What are the clusters user for, BTW?"
A1: Playing Quicktime movies of an Aibo, really, really, fast.
A2: Trading Apple stock options.
hehe, "checked out their stock latey?". Like that has anything to do with anything.
1. GLDoom is OpenSource, so you o-s fanatics will not give them shit over it.
2. GLDoom has already been ported to 64-bit CPU platforms--my other computer is an SGI O2; it comes with GLDoom. SGI is also writing the C-compiler and other core parts of Linux/IA-64. You figure it out...
What X Windows Server were they using at the demo? Was is a port of real OpenGL, or recompiled XFree86-3.3.x? Or XFree86-4.0beta + Mesa?
What Graphics card?
(guess I should read the article)
I appreciate your social consciousness and humanity, but this is a false choice. We are the richest society the world has ever seen. We spend billions annually on pet food, cosmetics, junk food, video games, (hey, wait, games are essential to life...), professional sports, and other useless junk.
If we cut the space program to $0, you would not see one dime of it in Spanish Harlem. If you guilted-out the entertainment industry, you might get some results.
Well, this is probably a troll, but what the heck, I'm bored...
I tried installing RedHat 6.1 by myself, it was hell, I screwed up 4 times before getting my friends help.
If this isn't a troll, then this is the heart of the matter--Linux bruised your pride. Don't sweat it--the first week is a bitch for most everyone. That's why we love it--you also learn a WHOLE LOT that first week, just getting your modem to work and being able to see the X-desktop in a resolution larger than 380x200. The last Linux box I set up for a friend, using RH6.2 was boring--I was pretty careful about the hardware, so I knew everything was suppported, but I didn't expect the freaking modem, sound card, and XFree86 to work right off the bat like that. Kinda took the fun out of it...
Okay, now I'm pretty sure that you never got X-Windows working. Linux may be guilty of a lot of things, but lack of glitter and pretty, shiny things in Enlightenment, ferchristsakes, is BS. You Windows Whiners have to make up your mind--do you hate Linux because it's a CLI, or because the GUI is too complicated and hard to understand? Really? Think back to that first month with Windows 3.1 or Windows 95. Was it really that easy to use? Or did you just not have any choice? Wasn't it really a case of "figure out how to use it or else?". That's probably a better Microsoft logo that "Where do you want to crash today". But the fact remains that you use windows because you had no choice when you bought a PC. And the PC you bought was comprised of components that were designed to work with windows. The greatest hack of all in the Linux movement is that we are hijacking their hardware--not just x86, either. Well, this was the most effective part of the troll. The interface isn't "friendly." It's monolithic. It's not as intuitive as the Mac's, and could learn some things from CDE. Also, as someone who fixes computer, I can tell you that youcan't hide things from stupid users--they are going to find them and break them. The idea is, protect the system from the stupid and malicious by providing real files system and configuration security. Assuming you actually got RH up and running, you only logged on as root, didn't you? Linux assumes that, if you are going to mess around as root, you already know what you are doing. In Windows, anybody who sits at the keyboard is root--with system privaleges. You understand why this is bad, right? Nice!! It's really hard to tell until the end whether you're an idiot or a clever troll! I'm still not 100% sure.Yup. My 9-year-old daughter didn't know Gnome+Enlightenment. She also didn't know win98 (they use Macs at school). On my dual-boot machine, she prefers Gnome+E or KDE to Win98. They look more interesting, are fully themeable (she has definite preferences), the taskbar icons (shortcuts/launchers) are larger and aren't covered by application windows the way a desktop shortcut/launcher is in Windows. She likes the Xscreensavers more, and the Gnome/KDE games more, too. Her name begins with a "K", so she's convinced that KDE is named after her...
"Easy" depends on your frame of reference. She was a blank page with no frame of PC reference. She likes Gnome and KDE better than Win98. I'm sure I had no influence on her...;-)
I just bought a 1978 Chevrolet Impala. If this is the best car that GM is capable of producing, they are in serious trouble. It's too big, it gets lousy gas mileage, and the users manual is poorly written.
Moral: If you are going to criticize a distribution and UI, at least criticize the CURRENT version. RH6.2+Gnome looks a lot different from RH5.2 + XFree86-3.2 + fvwm.
How many (GUI interface/WM?) projects ae used by the computer using public? Probably more like 1%. Fact of the matter is, I don't care. If Gnome+E, Gnome+Sawmill, or KDE "intimidates" someone, they really need to stick with what works for them.
If you think that Gnome+E is ugly compared to an NT box, your XFree86 settings are misconfigured...
Linux is about flexibility. Maybe that comes at the expense of what you call consistency, but consistency can also mean conformity. Linux is the anthesis of this, and that's why I like it.
I'm not a coder. I'm a user. KDE is VERY intuitive. Gnome is pretty intuitive (E makes it less so, but I love E). Sawmill pretty much stays out of your way and let's Gnome be Gnome (or is a standalone WM in it's own right).
Try doing this with Windows or a Mac--add another task bar. Make it a corner panel that changes length as need for new task buttons. Put monitors that are large enough to see on it. Change the way the panel looks--color, textues, pixmap, whatever. Pick a clock you like--something non-standard. Make your own clock...
I'd like to see consistent key mapping--Netscape is the worst. But I left Windows for Linux for the flexibility. Stop trying to turn a Linux desktop into a Windows or Mac desktop. It's a big world with lots of boxes...
How many (GUI interface/WM?) projects ae used by the computer using public? Probably more like 1%. Fact of the matter is, I don't care. If Gnome+E, Gnome+Sawmill, or KDE "intimidates" someone, they really need to stick with what works for them.
If you think that Gnome+E is ugly compared to an NT box, your XFree86 settings are misconfigured...
Linux is about flexibility. Maybe that comes at the expense of what you call consistency, but consistency can also mean conformity. Linux is the anthesis of this, and that's why I like it.
I'm not a coder. I'm a user. KDE is VERY intuitive. Gnome is pretty intuitive (E makes it less so, but I love E). Sawmill pretty much stays out of your way and let's Gnome be Gnome (or is a standalone WM in it's own right).
Try doing this with Windows or a Mac--add another task bar. Make it a corner panel that changes length as need for new task buttons. Put monitors that are large enough to see on it. Change the way the panel looks--color, textues, pixmap, whatever. Pick a clock you like--something non-standard. Make your own clock...
I'd like to see consistent key mapping--Netscape is the worst. But I left Windows for Linux for the flexibility. Stop trying to turn a Linux desktop into a Windows or Mac desktop. It's a big world with lots of boxes...
Bite me, troll. Take your little NT CD and stuff it down your pants along with your grits. The more I read FUD like this, the more confident I am that shitheels like you are hearing footsteps...
i ndex.html
http://www.realmagiclinux.com/mission-critical/
http://www.bynari.com/BCG/cases/mclinux.html
PS, to see if the drive is using DMA mode:
/sbin/hdparm -v /dev/hda
#
(or what ever "/dev" it is)
It may not be using UDMA...what you see at boot time is the kernel quering the device--not an operational setting. Unless DMA is "Enabled by Default" in your kernel, or you are using /sbin/hdparm during system initialization, you are running in PIO mode.
The drive will benchmark well even in PIO-mode, because 3/4 of the performance of a single-task read/write is sheer spindle speed and platter density. When you benchmark with hdparm, all you are typically doing is running the benchmark--this is not real world.
The mode (PIO or DMA) really only becomes apparent when you are multitasking--then it is REAL apparent. Check the post above where someone explained how to see the difference between PIO and DMA using hdparm--benchmarking a HDD while accessing the CDROM.
Insightful? Hah! For the desktop, it typically does not matter that the theoretical bandwidth of the channel is--an individual drive is not going to perform raw reads/writes anywhere close to that. A server can and will use that capacity with multiple drives on the channel. Bottomline--if the machine is a desktop with a single drive (up to 70GB these days), UDMA-66/7,200-rpm with busmastering (DMA) enabled will match a single-drive SCSI system.
CPU utilization with busmastering is the same as with SCSI--check out the benchmarks at http://www.storagereview.com.
Here are the things that SCSI advocates never mention:
The interface standards are a mess--SCSI1, SCSI2, SCSIn, Ultra, Ultra-wide, Ultra2, etc., all with different connectors/cables, different termination. In other words, SCSI is wonderful if you have only one flavor of SCSI on the chain, and if the devices were made by the same company with the same termination scheme.
Besides, SCSI support in Linux continues to be flaky--hopefully the 2.4 kernel will fix this. ATA just works, and UDMA works quite well, with busmastering, for most desktop users. If you are doing video editing or other disk-intensive tasks, you should probably use SCSI, otherwise...
You got those DMA benchmarks with a 7,200-rpm ATA-66 drive? Something is wrong--probably just that Seagate makes crappy ATA drives, or it's an older Medalist Pro with low platter densities.
/etc/initab looks like:
/dev/hda /dev/hdb /dev/hdc /dev/cdrom
I have an IBM 13.5G ATA-66, running in UDMA-33 mode on a BH-6. hdparm typically benchmarks it at 21-25MB/sec. Your readings are closer to my Maxtor 5,400-rpm drive. Here's what that part of
# Run hdparm to turn on the good stuff
h1::boot:/sbin/hdparm -c3X66d1u1m16k1
h2::boot:/sbin/hdparm -c3X66d1u1m16k1
h3::boot:/sbin/hdparm -c3X66d1u1m16k1
h4::boot:/sbin/hdparm -c3k1
DMA is enabled by default in the kernel, but I do it again here to set the X66 (UDMA33) flag. If you have a UDMA-66 controller, use X68 UDMA-2 transfers.
If you think that the Transmeta chip only has implications for notebooks, think again. Internet aware cell phones; PDA's; remote monitoring equipment; embedded controllers. Virtually any device that requires low power consumption, low heat, and remote administration can adopt this technology. The fact that a remote administrator can update the software instruction set--never mind that it can execute x86 code--is going to drive people nuts. The telecom, power generation, petroleum, and many other huge industries are going to like this a great deal, as will the US defense and intelligence communities.
First, thank you for a very informative and gracious reply. If you care about moderator points, which I somehow doubt, you deserve a 5.
Second, I apologize for my ignorant, sweeping conclusions in the above post. I really look forward to enjoying the benefits of your work on the DRI and XFree86 4.0.
Regards,
I think you are right today, in terms of "THE STANDARD" and the advantage that SGI/MIPS hardware enjoys. But you have to throw price into the mix, and the evolution of both Intel and AMD CPUs and core-logic chipsets. This is really a set of questions:
1. SGI has been loosing $ hand over fist--they make great iron, but for a very limited market (mainly US Government and some movie studios). Doesn't a move toward x86/Linux open new markets for lower-cost machines?
2. How much of an advantage does the SGI/MIPs architecture have over PC hardware in one year? Two years? We will probably looking at CPUs running well over 1GHz, and probably approaching 2GHz toward the middle of this decade. With RDRAM and DDRAM (and very high memory bandwidth), AGP 4X, and the Athlon's EV6 Bus?
3. More important: what will give you more bang for the buck in 1 or 2 years? SGI/MIPS/IRIX or, say, an SGI/VALinux workstation with full OpenGL support for a Quadro, with an optimized memory bus architecture (either Intel i840 or hopefully much better Athlon chipset) running at 1.2GHz?
Prediction: They will call it Mesa from precision insight, to satisfy the lawyers, but it will be more OpenGL than OpenGL, and it will be open sourced.
Word! Wish I had some moderation points to push this post up. Thanks.
Oh, please give us a break! I don't care if it's "Open Source" right now, as long as it moves Linux into serious competition with NT and IRIX as a 3D graphics workstation platform. The friggin' lawyers will hash out the "Open Source" implications for the next two years (or more) do you want to wait that long?
The thing I find interesting is the same names popping up in the stories--SGI, NVDIA, RedHat, and Precision Insight. Take a look at the Precision Insight team (http://www.precisioninsight.com/our_team.html) and tell me that these guys are not dead fucking serious--the added Brian Paul, who wrote the MESA library. This week, they added Dave Dawes, co-founder and President of XFree86. Does this sound like a closed source-oriented team to you?
As for Nvidia--they have come lightyears in the past six months in terms of drivers--including for the GeForce256. And who do you think helped designed the core of the GeForce and the Quadro? It has "SGI" written all over it.
Precision Insight is writing great chunks of the hardware acceleration layer for XFree86-4.0. SGI and RedHat are paying for it. SGI and NVidia are designing the GeForce and it's successors, and they are making a major commitment to Linux.
At the end of the day, the only things that are going to be sucking are 3dfx (checked their stock lately?) and possibly IRIX. The next two years are going to be amazing in terms of Linux's emergence as a professional graphics workstation--fully supporting the next generation of cards/chips with full T&L and AGP 4X implementation. And the whining "Open Source" religionists will have SGI and Nvidia to thank.
Uh, what makes you think that the only shares in existance where those released for the IPO? It would be pretty typical for a company to hold shares back--say 2-4 million for an IPO of this size. Anybody know how many shares are still held by VALinux or it's principals?
Great, we've all read the same lousy Tom Clancy novels and other warp0rn. And there are about three posters in this entire thread that actually know something about PCL/Bistatic Radar (and I am not one of them).
This is old, old stuff--researchers in the UK tracked commercial aircraft over Britain in the 1970s using ambient radiation from TV and radio broadcasts. The problem then (and now) is processing--they collected data for a few days, and then spent months separating signal from noise, so it was not quite suited for acquiring a targeting solution 8-p.
Processing power has come a long way--a good-sized van full of computers would probably suffice. But for a PCL-based system to actually provide a targeting solution on a stealthy aircraft (with an RCS well below one foot--real experts would be talking about dB), you probably will need dedicated emitters. They can be remoted, and they can be numerous and redundant and therefore relatively impervious to jamming and antiradiation missiles, but it won't be cheap, and it is not going to happen in China anytime in the next 10 years.
When you read these kind of stories, you should be leery of assertions that a theoretical capability=a weapon=combat capability. China has always done well with pure science, and incredibly poorly at applied military science, and poorer still at turing a technology into a military capability.
Anyway, it's always more interesting to look less at what such pieces assert, and more at why it was leaked now--my guess is that some funding decisions are going to be made soon so they are pumping up the China threat again. You don't have to like China, but trying to paint them as a new USSR is laughable--the dog just doesn't hunt. And we are winning--just visit the place and you will see how much peaceful evolution is working.
PS, the first open demo of the GeForce256 was jointly sponsored with SGI, and featured OpenGL API god Dave Shreiner. Stop assuming the worst from Nvidia in terms of Linux support--SGI is taking some serious steps to turn Linux, with Nvidia chips, in to a serious graphics workstation OS.
Yup! SGI partnered with Nvidia last year, and had engineers work on the GeForce256 and the Quadro. There are major implications downstream for SGI and Linux in the graphics workstation market, using Nvidia-based graphics cards.
Over the past few months:
SGI has openly licensed its XFS journaling file system to linux, paving the way for Linux integration on SGI hardware.
Along with Redhat, SGI is funding Precision-Insight. Precision-Insight hired Brian Paul, the author of Mesa OpenGL port to Linux. Precision Insight's Multipipe Direct Rendering Infrastructure (DRI) within the upcoming XFree86 4.0 X Server. SGI is also providing extensive technical help and other resources to benefit the project. The DRI will include additions and modifications to GLX, Mesa 3.1, and XFree86 4.0, as well as any required modifications to the Linux kernel. Both Red Hat and SGI have agreed to allow full source for the entire project to be donated by Precision Insight to the open source community.
SGI is shipping servers with Linux, adapted from Redhat.
SGI has had a rocky time recently in terms of profits, but the technology is first-rate, and they are leveraging a strong Linux future, probably replacing IRIX, for x86-based workstations. Think about boxes with 1GHz+ Athlon, Coppermine, and Merced processors, and video cards like the Quadro, outperforming graphics workstations that cost 10 times as much. All of this is great for Linux.