don't know why this ceative gets a headline on slashdot.
A quick perusal of sgi's employment pages http://www.sgi.com/cgi-bin/employment/opportunitie s.cgi listed 6 linux development jobs. 3 in kernel, 1 I/O, 2 in OpenGL drivers. Search IBM/HP etc and you'll probably find a bunch more. Plenty of work for kernel hackers/device driver writers at the moment.
Just wanted to add to my own comment (can you go blind from that?)
I suspect SGI will release an Intel based 3D workstation that is SOLELY Linux based, i.e. you will NOT be able to run NT on it. The reason I suspect this is that SGI was severely hampered in the design of their Visual Workstations because they needed Microsoft to support them in NT. The VisWS was delayed for almost 6 months while they waited for NT5 and when that never came out they instead got a special patch to NT4.
SGI got burned badly on the VisWS by Microsoft and they wouldn't want to repeat that or just to put together a COMPAQ style generic intel workstation and slap a badge on it.
With Linux they can cut their own custom cut of the kernel and their own OpenGL drivers (with Nvidia) and be as funky as they wanna be with switch based busless architecture (OCTANE style) and multipipe rendering.
Hopefully their modifications would be included into the official kernel but if not I'm sure SGI is capable of maintaing their own stream and keeping it parallel to the official sources for a while.
Just my predictions.... we'll see if they come true.
I think I know why Nvidia is doing this and it ain't nothing to do with games or wanting to be nice to the open source community.
Nvidia and SGI are scheming behind the curtains to create NT killer 3d workstations that are Intel Linux based and will have either Quadro's or most likely some kind of multi-pipe (2-4 quadro's) in parallel and custom bus architecture (like the current SGI vis workstations).
Cue a release of Maya for Linux soon (it's done they're just waiting for the linux 3d hardware support to catch up...)
A broad release to the linux community gets their driver's throughly beta tested before the release of their custom boxes probably about march next year.
Unfortunately then I don't think they will opensource the drivers. It will probably be an open source resource manager (basic interface) and binary only glx module for XF86 4.0. If I understand the XF86 4.0 architecture correctly it's possible to have binary only modules that link into the X server and well at least we don't have the problem of kernel modules compiled for wrong kernel versions anymore.
Then once SGI get's a few more features in Linux (Raw i/o, XFS, realtime uncompressed video streaming) look for come seriously cool linux based video editing/compositing systems....
While I applaud JC for trying this I think it's unfortunately going to end badly. The current state of 3D acceleration support under Linux only allows Voodoo and G200/G400 owners to play at decent framerates and the Matrox drivers require a lot of technical knowhow to get working at the moment.
I have a Nvidia card and dual boot Windows/Linux, there is no way I would buy the Linux version now and have 4 times worse performance for 6 weeks until I can download the windows version! I'm sure many other people are in the same boat.
If Linux Q3A flops in the sales as I suspect it will, then will Id be available to convince distributors to try it again when the state of 3d support on Linux is much better?
Id should have done this experiment once X Free 86 4.0 is out and stable...
The fact that SGI is planning linux based supercomputer clusters is old news. It's been on SGI's site for months. Whats new and exciting here is that they have actually demonstrated the first IA64 technical application running and the first cluster on IA64 and done it using 64 bit Linux/Beowulf.
Two big firsts on IA64 for Linux and I think it's a great indication that Linux will be the first released OS for IA64.
Are you serious? Under SGI Irix I can have my root file system as XFS, then yank the power cord out while its live and, no problem, it will reboot cleanly without any need for an fsck. (yes I've done this many times... they're not servers...)
If ReiserFS is like you say I'll wait for XFS thanks.
A correction for you. It perfectly possible already to burn DVD's at home. I work at a video post production house and we can and do burn our own DVD's. Ok the DVD burner was expensive but they'll come down in price. You only need to be a licensee and pay big bucks to burn ENCRYPTED DVD's. But presumably independant film makers are not going to be too concerned about releasing their movies on unencrypted DVD's.
For a starting filmaker, people passing on copys of their work to friends and even burning illegal copys could help their career a lot as it gets their work seen by more people.
ASCII Blue is not Intel it's SGI, it's a cluster of Origin 2000 Systems running Irix. Check out http://www.top500.org for the list of current fastest 500 supercomputers and their details.
3DFX: Good fast glide driver, bad OpenGL driver but no one cares because all games run under glide (except minigl wrapper for quakes). Result Don't open their driver, don't need too.
Matrox: Bad opengl drivers, so they open their specs up to get the opensource community and fscking Joh Carmarck to write a driver for them. Then when the linux port is finished they can backport it to Windows and finally have a decent opengl driver.
NVidia: Many bigbrains ex SGI live here, patent sharing agreement with SGI. Best OpenGl driver of any consumer card. Result don't need to open driver.
S3: Similar to Matrox.
ATI: Seen the light of getting John Carmarck to write your driver for you. Opening up....
It seems there's more a correlation of how desperate they are to improve their driver than opensource=success....
Try Greg Egan, Iain M Banks
on
Snow Crash
·
· Score: 1
Some that are maybe less well known in the US.
Greg Egan - Permutation City Iain M Banks - The culture books, start with Use of Weapons or The Player of Games.
The scarey thing is, according to the paper specs a $300 GeForce has roughly equivalent triangle throughput and pixel fill rate to a $300,000 SGI Onyx2. Don't you love economies of scale?
Of course the SGI has a whole bunch of features the GeForce doesn't like 48 bit colour, insane amount of framebuffer memory, support for the complete OpenGL pipeline in hardware including 3d textures etc etc.
The GeForce doesn't have hardware opengl overlays so it won't be ideal for professional applications, what do you expect for the price?
But still, I know I'm slapping a GeForce in my system ASAP.
All commercial software is readily available in China, India and Thailand over the counter as pirated cd's, openly for sale.
When you buy a computer they ask you if you want a real copy of window's or should they just slap on for you for free.
In practical terms how can you enforce the GPL when they can't enforce ANY software licenses in these countries?
Also, IANAL but would the GPL have any validity under the chinese legal system? Who knows if it violates any kind of tenets of the legal system there, it's certainly never been tested.
Woomera and Pine Gap both still exist. The Australian government happily lets the US operate a station so that they can spy on us!!!!
Of course the US claims it's for maintaining communications with submarines and sattelites, yeah right!
Of course we really fucked things up for our good buddies in the NSA by admitting the existance of echeleon and that Australia participates in it a few months back, search slashdot for more details. Maybe we're not so dumb after all...
They should talk to maxis about licensing a "Official Artemis Project SimMoonBase" game. And promote it with a big sticker on the box that says that a portion of the profits are going to help actually setup a private enterprise moon base. I think this would be a big winner with geeks and sf fans and their business model would make a good sim game.
You get a big chunk of cash at the start from broadcasting rights and the movie and merchandising have, then you have to find long term revenue sources to keep the moonbase economical for 30 years or something. You can build luxury hotels for the tourists, moon themeparks, oxygen plants, hydroponics domes, magnetic acceleration cargo launchers etc Disasters would of course include depressurisation, meteorite strikes and workers going postal....
Also include details on the artemis project and the website address with the game, this would help raise awareness about them as well as raising some money for them.
It's seems no one's seen the movie Gattaca, a pity it flopped cause it was IMHO an excellent movie.
Go get it out on video, think about it and then ask yourself if there are any ethical objections to genetic engineering of humans.
I'm not saying I'm against it, and I don't have any religious objection to it. I'm just saying it's a complex issue that can't be dismissed out of hand.
>Now, about the use of SGI worksstations for >making special effects in movies. This has nothing >to do with SGI hardware at > all - Computer animations in >movies are based on raytracing techniques, which >to my knowledge are done entirely in > software.
Wrong! Many movies are composited (ie the different layers of the animation are added together) on software such Discreet's Inferno system. This runs on an Onyx2 IR and renders final frames using the OpenGL graphics pipeline. ILM uses it in house but calls it Sabre. Check out www.discreet.com for info. In this market SGI has NO competition, if they ain't using discreet they're using Kodak Cineon or Avid Illusion or Jaleo or Chalice, but they all run on SGI hardware. (yes there is NT compositing solutions but not at the high end).
Also in 3d modeling, sure you render the final frames using software only but during modelling you need a good opengl pipeline so you can see your 50,000 poly texture heavy model at a decent speed to make changes. Try running Maya or Softimage on your TNT or Voodoo 2, what's that, won't run? Funny that.... (Games 3D cards not equal good professional 3d card)
Lack of trimmed nurbs in Mesa won't keep maya or other professional packages from Linux.
When (not if, it's gotta be when) AW releases Maya for linux they will almost certainly require you to have one of the licensed OpenGL implementations from Xi Graphics or Metrolink. I'd bet SGI will also release their own implementation of OpenGL on linux (probably only supporting their own hardware).
After all if you're paying $5000US for a maya license $200 extra for a OpenGL implementation isn't really significant.
>Serious question: How in the hell do so many >people in Western Europe afford to take 4+ weeks > of vacation? I couldn't do without >pay for over a week, much less afford a couple of >weeks in a > hotel room and eating-out without >being paid. I just don't understand.
The real question is why do US employees stand for the way they get treated. The US is the odd country out not europe. In Australia the EU and most other developed countries at least 4 weeks paid holiday is the norm.
Also when you go on holiday you don't have to stay in a 5 star hotel or a resort.... go backpacking in bali or thailand for $20US a day no problem...
Remember there is more to life than putting in more hours than everyone else to climb the corporate ladder.
Maybe the purpose of this sight is for him to collect emails and contact details of thousands of geeks wanting demo cd's of PowerSE and then sell his mailing list? Possibly he could make enough money off this to make the time spent designing the site worthwhile.
I wouldn't give my real contact details to this guy....
Re:Where is the changelog?
on
Kernels Galore
·
· Score: 1
Oops that url for the 2.2.11 notes was supposed to be www.linux.org.uk
Maybe I'm dumb, but I've looked all over the web and I can't find any page which summarizes fixed bugs and new features in kernel versions. - Alan Cox posted one for the 2.2.11 kernel on www.kernel.org.uk but is there no page which does this for every new kernel. Is the only way to subscribe to kerneldev mailing lists or read the source code?
At first when I read this and especially the rumor that they are "downsizing" the team working on a replacement for Infinite Reality graphics (now 4 years old) I thought that's it, the end for sgi. - But maybe now the whole thing makes sense. SGI had already lost a whole bunch of their hotshot graphics engineers to Nvidia. So now they give the rest of their graphics engineers to Nvidia and outsource future graphics pipe development to them. Arguably, SGI hasn't been able to compete on graphics chip development for several years now anyway.
But their's one thing that noone else can do like them: Massive internal bandwidth. So they concentrate on developing radical new bus architectures and massive scalability (their core strength) and leave cpu development to intel (merced) and graphics chip development to Nvidia. SGI's almost certainly getting royalities from Nvidia anyway now that the patent swap thing has happened.
Slashdot Mirror
don't know why this ceative gets a headline on slashdot.
e s.cgi listed 6 linux development jobs. 3 in kernel, 1 I/O, 2 in OpenGL drivers. Search IBM/HP etc and you'll probably find a bunch more. Plenty of work for kernel hackers/device driver writers at the moment.
A quick perusal of sgi's employment pages http://www.sgi.com/cgi-bin/employment/opportuniti
Just wanted to add to my own comment (can you go blind from that?)
I suspect SGI will release an Intel based 3D workstation that is SOLELY Linux based, i.e. you will NOT be able to run NT on it. The reason I suspect this is that SGI was severely hampered in the design of their Visual Workstations because they needed Microsoft to support them in NT. The VisWS was delayed for almost 6 months while they waited for NT5 and when that never came out they instead got a special patch to NT4.
SGI got burned badly on the VisWS by Microsoft and they wouldn't want to repeat that or just to put together a COMPAQ style generic intel workstation and slap a badge on it.
With Linux they can cut their own custom cut of the kernel and their own OpenGL drivers (with Nvidia) and be as funky as they wanna be with switch based busless architecture (OCTANE style) and multipipe rendering.
Hopefully their modifications would be included into the official kernel but if not I'm sure SGI is capable of maintaing their own stream and keeping it parallel to the official sources for a while.
Just my predictions.... we'll see if they come true.
I think I know why Nvidia is doing this and it ain't nothing to do with games or wanting to be nice to the open source community.
Nvidia and SGI are scheming behind the curtains to create NT killer 3d workstations that are Intel Linux based and will have either Quadro's or most likely some kind of multi-pipe (2-4 quadro's) in parallel and custom bus architecture (like the current SGI vis workstations).
Cue a release of Maya for Linux soon (it's done they're just waiting for the linux 3d hardware support to catch up...)
A broad release to the linux community gets their driver's throughly beta tested before the release of their custom boxes probably about march next year.
Unfortunately then I don't think they will opensource the drivers. It will probably be an open source resource manager (basic interface) and binary only glx module for XF86 4.0. If I understand the XF86 4.0 architecture correctly it's possible to have binary only modules that link into the X server and well at least we don't have the problem of kernel modules compiled for wrong kernel versions anymore.
Then once SGI get's a few more features in Linux (Raw i/o, XFS, realtime uncompressed video streaming) look for come seriously cool linux based video editing/compositing systems....
The next year will be interesting....
While I applaud JC for trying this I think it's unfortunately going to end badly. The current state of 3D acceleration support under Linux only allows Voodoo and G200/G400 owners to play at decent framerates and the Matrox drivers require a lot of technical knowhow to get working at the moment.
I have a Nvidia card and dual boot Windows/Linux, there is no way I would buy the Linux version now and have 4 times worse performance for 6 weeks until I can download the windows version! I'm sure many other people are in the same boat.
If Linux Q3A flops in the sales as I suspect it will, then will Id be available to convince distributors to try it again when the state of 3d support on Linux is much better?
Id should have done this experiment once X Free 86 4.0 is out and stable...
Two big firsts on IA64 for Linux and I think it's a great indication that Linux will be the first released OS for IA64.
Some more info:
sgi's announcement
Project Trillian which is porting the linux kernel to IA64.
Are you serious? Under SGI Irix I can have my root file system as XFS, then yank the power cord out while its live and, no problem, it will reboot cleanly without any need for an fsck. (yes I've done this many times... they're not servers...)
If ReiserFS is like you say I'll wait for XFS thanks.
A correction for you. It perfectly possible already to burn DVD's at home. I work at a video post production house and we can and do burn our own DVD's. Ok the DVD burner was expensive but they'll come down in price. You only need to be a licensee and pay big bucks to burn ENCRYPTED DVD's. But presumably independant film makers are not going to be too concerned about releasing their movies on unencrypted DVD's.
For a starting filmaker, people passing on copys of their work to friends and even burning illegal copys could help their career a lot as it gets their work seen by more people.
ASCII Blue is not Intel it's SGI, it's a cluster of Origin 2000 Systems running Irix. Check out http://www.top500.org for the list of current fastest 500 supercomputers and their details.
How about the original elite for the PalmOS?
It originally ran on a spectrum and a C64 so there should be ample processing power, the Pilot can handle some wireframe vector graphics can't it?
Here is another more cynical interpretation.
3DFX: Good fast glide driver, bad OpenGL driver but no one cares because all games run under glide (except minigl wrapper for quakes). Result Don't open their driver, don't need too.
Matrox: Bad opengl drivers, so they open their specs up to get the opensource community and fscking Joh Carmarck to write a driver for them. Then when the linux port is finished they can backport it to Windows and finally have a decent opengl driver.
NVidia: Many bigbrains ex SGI live here, patent sharing agreement with SGI. Best OpenGl driver of any consumer card. Result don't need to open driver.
S3: Similar to Matrox.
ATI: Seen the light of getting John Carmarck to write your driver for you. Opening up....
It seems there's more a correlation of how desperate they are to improve their driver than opensource=success....
Some that are maybe less well known in the
US.
Greg Egan - Permutation City
Iain M Banks - The culture books, start
with Use of Weapons or The Player of Games.
Check em out yourself, here are the specs for SGI's Onyx2 with Infinite Reality graphics:
c e/page2.asp
http://www.sgi.com/onyx2/tech_specs.html
And here are the nvidia GeForce DDR specs:
http://www.firingsquad.com/hardware/nvidiagefor
The scarey thing is, according to the paper specs a $300 GeForce has roughly equivalent triangle
throughput and pixel fill rate to a $300,000 SGI
Onyx2. Don't you love economies of scale?
Of course the SGI has a whole bunch of features the GeForce doesn't like 48 bit colour, insane amount of framebuffer memory, support for the complete OpenGL pipeline in hardware including 3d textures etc etc.
The GeForce doesn't have hardware opengl overlays so it won't be ideal for professional applications, what do you expect for the price?
But still, I know I'm slapping a GeForce in my system ASAP.
Well good luck enforcing this one.
All commercial software is readily available in China, India and Thailand over the counter as pirated cd's, openly for sale.
When you buy a computer they ask you if you want a
real copy of window's or should they just slap on
for you for free.
In practical terms how can you enforce the GPL
when they can't enforce ANY software licenses
in these countries?
Also, IANAL but would the GPL have any validity under the chinese legal system? Who knows if it violates any kind of tenets of the legal system there, it's certainly never been tested.
Woomera and Pine Gap both still exist. The Australian government happily lets the US operate
a station so that they can spy on us!!!!
Of course the US claims it's for maintaining
communications with submarines and sattelites,
yeah right!
Of course we really fucked things up for our good
buddies in the NSA by admitting
the existance of echeleon and that Australia participates in it a few months back,
search slashdot for more details. Maybe we're not
so dumb after all...
Another Australian
Maybe the LinuxOne that a few other people
:)
have mentioned as having a deal with
Mandrake is actually the guys
at http://www.linuxone.com ---
Interesting site design yes?
Gentleman start your conspiracy theories....
They should talk to maxis about licensing a
"Official Artemis Project SimMoonBase" game. And
promote it with a big sticker on the box that says that a portion of the profits are going to help actually setup a private enterprise moon base. I think this would be a big winner with geeks and sf fans and their business model would make a good sim game.
You get a big chunk of cash at the start from
broadcasting rights and the movie and merchandising have, then you have to find long
term revenue sources to keep the moonbase economical for 30 years or something. You can build luxury hotels for the tourists, moon themeparks, oxygen plants, hydroponics domes, magnetic acceleration cargo launchers etc Disasters would of course include depressurisation, meteorite strikes and workers going postal....
Also include details on the artemis project and the website address with the game, this would help raise awareness about them as well as raising some money for them.
It's seems no one's seen the movie Gattaca, a pity it flopped cause it was IMHO an excellent movie.
Go get it out on video, think about it and then ask yourself if there are any ethical objections to genetic engineering of humans.
I'm not saying I'm against it, and I don't have any religious objection to it. I'm just saying it's a complex issue that can't be dismissed out of hand.
>Now, about the use of SGI worksstations for >making special effects in movies. This has nothing >to do with SGI hardware at
> all - Computer animations in >movies are based on raytracing techniques, which >to my knowledge are done entirely in
> software.
Wrong! Many movies are composited (ie the different layers of the animation are added together) on software such Discreet's Inferno system. This runs on
an Onyx2 IR and renders final frames using the OpenGL graphics pipeline. ILM uses it in house but calls it Sabre. Check out www.discreet.com for info. In this market SGI has NO competition, if they ain't using discreet they're using Kodak Cineon or Avid Illusion or Jaleo or Chalice, but they all run on SGI hardware. (yes there is NT compositing solutions but not at the high end).
Also in 3d modeling, sure you render the final frames using software only but during modelling you need a good opengl pipeline so you can see your 50,000 poly texture heavy model at a decent speed to make changes. Try running Maya or Softimage on your TNT or Voodoo 2, what's that, won't run? Funny that.... (Games 3D cards not equal good professional 3d card)
(a visual fx operator and everyday sgi user)
Lack of trimmed nurbs in Mesa won't keep maya or other professional packages from Linux.
When (not if, it's gotta be when) AW releases Maya for linux they will almost certainly require you to have one of the licensed OpenGL implementations from Xi Graphics or Metrolink. I'd bet SGI will also release their own implementation of OpenGL on linux (probably only supporting their own hardware).
After all if you're paying $5000US for a maya license $200 extra for a OpenGL implementation isn't really significant.
>Serious question: How in the hell do so many >people in Western Europe afford to take 4+ weeks
> of vacation? I couldn't do without >pay for over a week, much less afford a couple of >weeks in a
> hotel room and eating-out without >being paid. I just don't understand.
The real question is why do US employees stand for the way they get treated. The US is the odd
country out not europe. In Australia the EU and most other developed countries at least 4 weeks paid holiday is the norm.
Also when you go on holiday you don't have to stay in a 5 star hotel or a resort.... go backpacking
in bali or thailand for $20US a day no problem...
Remember there is more to life than putting in
more hours than everyone else to climb the corporate ladder.
Maybe the purpose of this sight is for him to collect emails and contact details of thousands of geeks wanting demo cd's of PowerSE and then sell his mailing list? Possibly he could make enough money off this to make the time spent designing the site worthwhile.
I wouldn't give my real contact details to this guy....
Oops that url for the 2.2.11 notes was supposed to be www.linux.org.uk
Maybe I'm dumb, but I've looked all over the
web and I can't find any page which summarizes
fixed bugs and new features in kernel versions.
-
Alan Cox posted one for the 2.2.11 kernel on www.kernel.org.uk but is there no page which
does this for every new kernel. Is the only
way to subscribe to kerneldev mailing lists or
read the source code?
At first when I read this and especially the rumor
that they are "downsizing" the team working on
a replacement for Infinite Reality graphics (now 4 years old) I thought that's it, the end for sgi.
-
But maybe now the whole thing makes sense. SGI had already lost a whole bunch of their hotshot
graphics engineers to Nvidia. So now they give the rest of their graphics engineers to Nvidia and outsource future graphics pipe development to them. Arguably, SGI hasn't been able to compete on graphics chip development for several years now anyway.
But their's one thing that noone else can do like them: Massive internal bandwidth. So they concentrate on developing radical new bus architectures and massive scalability (their core strength) and leave cpu development to intel (merced) and graphics chip development to Nvidia. SGI's almost certainly getting royalities from Nvidia anyway now that the patent swap thing has happened.
Not such a bad plan really.
SGI is going to release a source loadable kernel
module with XFS support in "late summer"
according to their webpage here:
http://oss.sgi.com/projects/
Whether or not it makes it into 2.4 is up to the community.