It's a good idea if your datasets take a long enough time to process. You could run 6 or so cards (maybe 1 AGP super fast, 5 PCI slowish (eg FX5200)) in your machine and send a dataset to each GPU and the main CPU, then get the results back. The trick is to keep them working without blowing all your bandwidth or PSU. Also depends on the resolution required, because the GPU is only 32 bits FP, compared to 80 bits for the CPU.
All I can suggest is download the Brook libraries and try it out. See if it helps, and see if the results are accurate enough. And yes, Fortran can be used if you can bind it - Intel's compiler suite worked for me.
Yep. Good job if it was for school, but but if they wanted to prove how leet they were they should've just made a set of packages or patches for Debian or whatever. If they want anyone to use their distro, they now have the task of supporting an entire OS based on an obsolete distro. Not smart. Additionaly, if their mods are all that, how long untill they find their way back to WINE and friends for mainline integration? They've done well for a group of students, but they must've missed the class on project maintenance.
At least, not in here in NZ. Telecoms companies generally get paid per megabyte on the high speed lines, so the more data flying aroudn the better. Sure I can stop all the spam, viruses, and worms and crap at my firewall, but I've already paid for it by then.
I can't see them implementing it for flat-rate (if there is still such a thing) consumers either, because the added processing costs eat into their margins. Sounds like there's a need for a cheap packet-processing co-processor or something...
That makes some amount of sense to you and me, but we're geeks. Joe Public isn't curious, he gets up goes to work, comes home and watches TV. Rinse, repeat. So while being curious and wanting to know something for the sake of knowing it is normal here on Slashdot, it's fairly unusual for the masses. However, if you're a paranoid law enforcement officer or politician it's not a legit reason, it's a warning sign.
Yeh, it's not silly in an Internet cafe scenario either. Sure beats the current status quo of Winodws boxes that flake out every couple of hours or so, just make sure you use a tweaked Firefox or Opera or something and MPlayer plugin so the punters get all their designed for IE web goodness.
The other nice thing is you can run a centralised PC and just plug'n'play both clients and hosts as your needs grow. It's very scalable, and it's also easy to monitor cluster resource usage with OpenMosix. Don't overestimate the processing power of the VIA chips though. If selling processor power was your game, you might be better off with a P4 Mini-ITX system...
BTW, it's even cooler if you use a wireless LAN.:-)
You don't even need the drive, or floppy, or CD for that matter (although some users will want it for music). If the system supports network booting (which Mini-ITX does, I think) you can literally plug it in with net-booting enabled, and be ready to go. The minimal OS and everything loads over the network.
You can even go a bit further and run them as OpenMosix nodes to share processing. The keen admin may also consider adding a box or twenty on very fast links to the LTSP server, so allowing 600 MHzfanless bookshelf PCs to render movies (or whatever) in record time.
What I find funny about this whole thing, is that a few years back studying for my degree, I started writing an XDM login thingy which used NDIS PAM modules and stuff. When combined with LTSP and some cunning scripting would have been quite useful in a Novell school situation... Still, the IT dept there were Windows freaks so it would never have flown... Nice to see Novell is finally catching up;-)
Damn straight. Somebody needs their ass kicked over this one. Hopefully nobody dies as a result.
When your systems are that important, it's madness to run them unsecured. There should be strong firewalls on the networks and virus scanners on every machine. If the virus finds a way in (say a managers laptop) there's no way it should be able to spread. And vulnerable systems (*cough* Windows *cough*) should be kept to a minimum.
I know some folks say if it's behind the firewall it's safe, but as we see again and again, that's rarely the case. It's my policy to ensure *every* machine is updated as required, and the servers and Windows machines run AV software.
Presumably by licensing them? Maybe the idea here is that Microsoft expects to lose OS sales, but wants to make the difference by licensing it's patents.
Personally, I think the software industry is reasonably screwed if they're really pushing out 10 a day. If nothing else, they'll have well and truely killed any desktop innovation - probably the kind of things that open source desktop projects would use to properly surpass Windows in the next 2 years or so.
OTOH, maybe this will be enough motivation for an overhaul of the patent system.
As a New Zealander, all I can say is WTF? I'll stick to my Maori/PI/Asian/Antipodean/etc culture thanks (yeh I'm white but screw it, I'm not European, I'm a New Zealander). I don't really get the need to build a "me too" monument to astronomy, but hey, if it floats his boat let him build it.
Drug companies make Viagra-like drugs (Cialis in this case, I think). Bill makes security-lax Windows PCs that get trojaned - which creates significant sales for this kind of product through spam distribution. It's clearly a match made in heaven.
but when you get to that point, there's the issue of wether you even *want* to change things anymore. I'd say I'm depressed (medically speaking, although I've not been diagnosed by anyone) and just getting my ass out of bed is very hard to do each day.
I can look at my life and say yeh, I'm not happy, and there's lots of things that could change to make it better. Problem is that I've already been in that better place - shortly before it all turned to shit and I landed up here. What's to stop it happening again? Nothing. I've gotten through the worst of it - the out-of-control phase and the suicidal phase - and now I just don't give a shit. Being depressed is actually a choice now, because the alternative of getting better and later hitting that rock bottom again just isn't worth the risk to me. If it happens again, I know I'll top myself because it's a less painful option than 3 or 4 years of being fucked up.
BTW, one of the catch-22s is that "cognitive distortions" work both ways. Your shrink is messing with you in a good way rather than the bad way you may have been doing it to yourself. Same process is going on though, and likely niether are "reality". Still, if it works for you that's great.
They don't seem to be "abiding by the law" as such, more like doing what the MPAA tells them. And it doesn't seem like they are informing their customers of their rights, more like asking them to incriminate themselves (with legal threats behind the request).
I think the real issue is that others like Verizon havn't been doing this, have gone to court, and there appears to be nothing the movie publishing industry representative can do about it. However, Comcast is bending over and setting it's customers up the bomb.
You would think so, but not with the Woody installer, and not with the development installer. Perhaps it was my particular combination, but either way, Mandrake, RedHat and SuSE all had no problems with it.
The installer is pretty simple - if you know what you want. The other distros (Knoppix, Mandrake, SuSE, etc) make some assumptions based on hardware found and typical usage and set much of the system up for you, but Debian doesn't. Eg, many people won't know which modules they want to load, things like the parport module - obvious if you know, but the installer should detect a parallel port and decide to load it automagically. Imagine a new user doing that, and then hitting #linux with questions about why his printer doesn't work. That's probably the kind of thing that makes it hard for new users, especially users who haven't had much Linux experience.
I've installed Debian many times (it was my first distro - but not my current one), and my pet peeve is the glaring lack of software raid support. Pretty much every other installer can set up, partition and install onto software RAID (md device) - but Debian can't.
Apple's marketshare is similar to Linux currently. I can see Linux growing further over the next few years at the expense of Windows. This makes Linux a more appealing target for application developers.
If Apple provided/opened their APIs for use on Linux, it leverages the Linux market for Apple. Developers no longer have to choose between Linux and Apple - they can use this an have both. Potentially, KDE and Gnome can provide wrappers to implement many of the same calls on their desktops too. It's win-win.
I don't see it taking sales from Apple, because most of the apps are already available for Windows. However, I can see bringing more commercial software and more developers to the Apple world - and to Linux.
Maybe Novell should have a word with Apple some time soon...
Cost and availability. When my boxed set of OpenBSD 3.5 arrives in a week or so, I can go out and buy a Mini-ITX board and box for a few hundred dollars off the shelf. I can have a reasonable firewall device up and running the afternoon the CDs arrive. And even better, it's not using overpriced development components, it's in full volume production. The AMD product is interesting, but unless they get real product on shelves at reasonable prices, it's not worth my time to chase what is effectively vapour-ware.
BTW, your mention of "uATX-like" is way off base. Mini-ITX is sgnificantly smaller, and VIA has released it's even smaller Nano-ITX range as well.
Mostly because the government are shitting themselves over what would happen if more of the population "woke up" to they way the country is run, and the impact if they realized they aren't the only ones with "subversive" thoughts (eg, maybe I want to be a chef instead of an army secretary...)
Agreed. Their website site should read "The other, other Office has arrived!" What's worse, there's no mention of the Linux version on their site (other than the North America only store item linked in the article). It's like they're scared to say it in public or something...
Re:*sigh* in russia, obviously
on
Robocones
·
· Score: 1
In soviet russia jokes suck at you!
If the jokes are naked, I'm moving to soviet russia!
I'm not sure how to address it. I don't think it can be addressed without getting into lawsuits... a bit like the current problem with companies using GPL'd software without adhearing to the license. Business is such that if someone sees an opportunity, they'll weigh the risks and take it. If the risk is being told off by a bunch of geeks, who's gonna care about that?
The idea of free becoming non-free is something that'd been niggling in the back of my mind. The Novell situation in particular. If a time comes when Novell or subsiduary says "MINE!" to whatever components, you have to be very sure that nobody contributed something under the GPL and isn't getting screwed by a license or dual-license arrangement (I have the same problem with MySQL, BTW).
Interesting perspective, but I'm calling "business mentality" on it. Indeed, those folks who think that hundreds or thousands of contributors working on software such as Apache or Linux constitutes the same thing as offshoring to the lowest bidder clearly have no clue how this all works. It's not about cost, it's about gaining mindshare. Sure, it might be free and all, but your project's getting access to some very smart people from all around the globe.
Claiming that if something has "business value' that it *must* be paid for is just not true. It's very likely how your world works, but it's not the same rules in my world. People write neat stuff all the time, sometimes they sell it, and sometimes they don't. The business value isn't in the code, it's in the support and implementation.
Also, you make a note of MS using anti-dumping laws, well how about Sun Microsystems? They sell Star Office, but gave away the very core of that product to OpenOffice.org. Maybe they should sue themselves? Sun has value by selling support and a slightly beter product. MS has value by churning out screeds of MSCEs to support their stuff. I expect that you'll be able to pay someone to teach your department OpenOffice.org too, if needed.
The point is that although other people might be making money by using it, or you might be making money on training for it, free software is still free. It's not like it grows to point where it's useful and then suddenly different rules apply, or it's only allowed to be free if it doesn't compete (in the market sense) with someone else trying to sell something similar.
The rules changed with the popularity of open source software, and because we're not dealing with "real" things many production comparisons just don't apply. A small development shop would be silly to try to take on a multinational venture with a hundred experienced staff, but that's what some folks seem to want to do. Software is ultimately abstract stuff, and we can play the game anyway we like now - if you don't like it anymore, get out of the software industry.
BTW, there are licenses such as the Creative Commons license that would possibly fit your needs, but hey, the (L)GPL works for me 95% of the time. If you want "a piece of the pie" when people make a buck using free software you were involoved with, consider where "your" software came from - how much did you pay for you compiler, libraries, tutorials, example code, base code even? What goes around comes around.
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It's a good idea if your datasets take a long enough time to process. You could run 6 or so cards (maybe 1 AGP super fast, 5 PCI slowish (eg FX5200)) in your machine and send a dataset to each GPU and the main CPU, then get the results back. The trick is to keep them working without blowing all your bandwidth or PSU. Also depends on the resolution required, because the GPU is only 32 bits FP, compared to 80 bits for the CPU.
All I can suggest is download the Brook libraries and try it out. See if it helps, and see if the results are accurate enough. And yes, Fortran can be used if you can bind it - Intel's compiler suite worked for me.
Some dude wrote Frogger almost entirely in pixel shaders. http://www.beyond3d.com/articles/shadercomp/result s/ (2nd from the bottom).
Isn't Sony in the RIAA too? Isn't that like some sort of conflict of interest?
Yep. Good job if it was for school, but but if they wanted to prove how leet they were they should've just made a set of packages or patches for Debian or whatever. If they want anyone to use their distro, they now have the task of supporting an entire OS based on an obsolete distro. Not smart. Additionaly, if their mods are all that, how long untill they find their way back to WINE and friends for mainline integration? They've done well for a group of students, but they must've missed the class on project maintenance.
At least, not in here in NZ. Telecoms companies generally get paid per megabyte on the high speed lines, so the more data flying aroudn the better. Sure I can stop all the spam, viruses, and worms and crap at my firewall, but I've already paid for it by then.
I can't see them implementing it for flat-rate (if there is still such a thing) consumers either, because the added processing costs eat into their margins. Sounds like there's a need for a cheap packet-processing co-processor or something...
That makes some amount of sense to you and me, but we're geeks. Joe Public isn't curious, he gets up goes to work, comes home and watches TV. Rinse, repeat. So while being curious and wanting to know something for the sake of knowing it is normal here on Slashdot, it's fairly unusual for the masses. However, if you're a paranoid law enforcement officer or politician it's not a legit reason, it's a warning sign.
Yeh, it's not silly in an Internet cafe scenario either. Sure beats the current status quo of Winodws boxes that flake out every couple of hours or so, just make sure you use a tweaked Firefox or Opera or something and MPlayer plugin so the punters get all their designed for IE web goodness.
:-)
The other nice thing is you can run a centralised PC and just plug'n'play both clients and hosts as your needs grow. It's very scalable, and it's also easy to monitor cluster resource usage with OpenMosix. Don't overestimate the processing power of the VIA chips though. If selling processor power was your game, you might be better off with a P4 Mini-ITX system...
BTW, it's even cooler if you use a wireless LAN.
You don't even need the drive, or floppy, or CD for that matter (although some users will want it for music). If the system supports network booting (which Mini-ITX does, I think) you can literally plug it in with net-booting enabled, and be ready to go. The minimal OS and everything loads over the network.
;-)
You can even go a bit further and run them as OpenMosix nodes to share processing. The keen admin may also consider adding a box or twenty on very fast links to the LTSP server, so allowing 600 MHzfanless bookshelf PCs to render movies (or whatever) in record time.
What I find funny about this whole thing, is that a few years back studying for my degree, I started writing an XDM login thingy which used NDIS PAM modules and stuff. When combined with LTSP and some cunning scripting would have been quite useful in a Novell school situation... Still, the IT dept there were Windows freaks so it would never have flown... Nice to see Novell is finally catching up
Damn straight. Somebody needs their ass kicked over this one. Hopefully nobody dies as a result.
When your systems are that important, it's madness to run them unsecured. There should be strong firewalls on the networks and virus scanners on every machine. If the virus finds a way in (say a managers laptop) there's no way it should be able to spread. And vulnerable systems (*cough* Windows *cough*) should be kept to a minimum.
I know some folks say if it's behind the firewall it's safe, but as we see again and again, that's rarely the case. It's my policy to ensure *every* machine is updated as required, and the servers and Windows machines run AV software.
Presumably by licensing them? Maybe the idea here is that Microsoft expects to lose OS sales, but wants to make the difference by licensing it's patents.
Personally, I think the software industry is reasonably screwed if they're really pushing out 10 a day. If nothing else, they'll have well and truely killed any desktop innovation - probably the kind of things that open source desktop projects would use to properly surpass Windows in the next 2 years or so.
OTOH, maybe this will be enough motivation for an overhaul of the patent system.
As a New Zealander, all I can say is WTF? I'll stick to my Maori/PI/Asian/Antipodean/etc culture thanks (yeh I'm white but screw it, I'm not European, I'm a New Zealander). I don't really get the need to build a "me too" monument to astronomy, but hey, if it floats his boat let him build it.
Drug companies make Viagra-like drugs (Cialis in this case, I think). Bill makes security-lax Windows PCs that get trojaned - which creates significant sales for this kind of product through spam distribution. It's clearly a match made in heaven.
/it's only paranoia if it's not true
but when you get to that point, there's the issue of wether you even *want* to change things anymore. I'd say I'm depressed (medically speaking, although I've not been diagnosed by anyone) and just getting my ass out of bed is very hard to do each day.
I can look at my life and say yeh, I'm not happy, and there's lots of things that could change to make it better. Problem is that I've already been in that better place - shortly before it all turned to shit and I landed up here. What's to stop it happening again? Nothing. I've gotten through the worst of it - the out-of-control phase and the suicidal phase - and now I just don't give a shit. Being depressed is actually a choice now, because the alternative of getting better and later hitting that rock bottom again just isn't worth the risk to me. If it happens again, I know I'll top myself because it's a less painful option than 3 or 4 years of being fucked up.
BTW, one of the catch-22s is that "cognitive distortions" work both ways. Your shrink is messing with you in a good way rather than the bad way you may have been doing it to yourself. Same process is going on though, and likely niether are "reality". Still, if it works for you that's great.
They don't seem to be "abiding by the law" as such, more like doing what the MPAA tells them. And it doesn't seem like they are informing their customers of their rights, more like asking them to incriminate themselves (with legal threats behind the request).
I think the real issue is that others like Verizon havn't been doing this, have gone to court, and there appears to be nothing the movie publishing industry representative can do about it. However, Comcast is bending over and setting it's customers up the bomb.
You would think so, but not with the Woody installer, and not with the development installer. Perhaps it was my particular combination, but either way, Mandrake, RedHat and SuSE all had no problems with it.
The installer is pretty simple - if you know what you want. The other distros (Knoppix, Mandrake, SuSE, etc) make some assumptions based on hardware found and typical usage and set much of the system up for you, but Debian doesn't. Eg, many people won't know which modules they want to load, things like the parport module - obvious if you know, but the installer should detect a parallel port and decide to load it automagically. Imagine a new user doing that, and then hitting #linux with questions about why his printer doesn't work. That's probably the kind of thing that makes it hard for new users, especially users who haven't had much Linux experience.
I've installed Debian many times (it was my first distro - but not my current one), and my pet peeve is the glaring lack of software raid support. Pretty much every other installer can set up, partition and install onto software RAID (md device) - but Debian can't.
Apple's marketshare is similar to Linux currently. I can see Linux growing further over the next few years at the expense of Windows. This makes Linux a more appealing target for application developers.
If Apple provided/opened their APIs for use on Linux, it leverages the Linux market for Apple. Developers no longer have to choose between Linux and Apple - they can use this an have both. Potentially, KDE and Gnome can provide wrappers to implement many of the same calls on their desktops too. It's win-win.
I don't see it taking sales from Apple, because most of the apps are already available for Windows. However, I can see bringing more commercial software and more developers to the Apple world - and to Linux.
Maybe Novell should have a word with Apple some time soon...
Cost and availability. When my boxed set of OpenBSD 3.5 arrives in a week or so, I can go out and buy a Mini-ITX board and box for a few hundred dollars off the shelf. I can have a reasonable firewall device up and running the afternoon the CDs arrive. And even better, it's not using overpriced development components, it's in full volume production. The AMD product is interesting, but unless they get real product on shelves at reasonable prices, it's not worth my time to chase what is effectively vapour-ware.
BTW, your mention of "uATX-like" is way off base. Mini-ITX is sgnificantly smaller, and VIA has released it's even smaller Nano-ITX range as well.
A billion "consumers" - most of which don't have any money. Yeh, that's a market I want to get into...
Mostly because the government are shitting themselves over what would happen if more of the population "woke up" to they way the country is run, and the impact if they realized they aren't the only ones with "subversive" thoughts (eg, maybe I want to be a chef instead of an army secretary...)
Agreed. Their website site should read "The other, other Office has arrived!" What's worse, there's no mention of the Linux version on their site (other than the North America only store item linked in the article). It's like they're scared to say it in public or something...
In soviet russia jokes suck at you!
If the jokes are naked, I'm moving to soviet russia!
I'm not sure how to address it. I don't think it can be addressed without getting into lawsuits... a bit like the current problem with companies using GPL'd software without adhearing to the license. Business is such that if someone sees an opportunity, they'll weigh the risks and take it. If the risk is being told off by a bunch of geeks, who's gonna care about that?
The idea of free becoming non-free is something that'd been niggling in the back of my mind. The Novell situation in particular. If a time comes when Novell or subsiduary says "MINE!" to whatever components, you have to be very sure that nobody contributed something under the GPL and isn't getting screwed by a license or dual-license arrangement (I have the same problem with MySQL, BTW).
Interesting perspective, but I'm calling "business mentality" on it. Indeed, those folks who think that hundreds or thousands of contributors working on software such as Apache or Linux constitutes the same thing as offshoring to the lowest bidder clearly have no clue how this all works. It's not about cost, it's about gaining mindshare. Sure, it might be free and all, but your project's getting access to some very smart people from all around the globe.
Claiming that if something has "business value' that it *must* be paid for is just not true. It's very likely how your world works, but it's not the same rules in my world. People write neat stuff all the time, sometimes they sell it, and sometimes they don't. The business value isn't in the code, it's in the support and implementation.
Also, you make a note of MS using anti-dumping laws, well how about Sun Microsystems? They sell Star Office, but gave away the very core of that product to OpenOffice.org. Maybe they should sue themselves? Sun has value by selling support and a slightly beter product. MS has value by churning out screeds of MSCEs to support their stuff. I expect that you'll be able to pay someone to teach your department OpenOffice.org too, if needed.
The point is that although other people might be making money by using it, or you might be making money on training for it, free software is still free. It's not like it grows to point where it's useful and then suddenly different rules apply, or it's only allowed to be free if it doesn't compete (in the market sense) with someone else trying to sell something similar.
The rules changed with the popularity of open source software, and because we're not dealing with "real" things many production comparisons just don't apply. A small development shop would be silly to try to take on a multinational venture with a hundred experienced staff, but that's what some folks seem to want to do. Software is ultimately abstract stuff, and we can play the game anyway we like now - if you don't like it anymore, get out of the software industry.
BTW, there are licenses such as the Creative Commons license that would possibly fit your needs, but hey, the (L)GPL works for me 95% of the time. If you want "a piece of the pie" when people make a buck using free software you were involoved with, consider where "your" software came from - how much did you pay for you compiler, libraries, tutorials, example code, base code even? What goes around comes around.