I want graphics cards to support things like nurbs more in the future. Instead of having to use polygons, and interpolating polygons from a spline before rendering, it would be nice to draw actual curves. Unfortunantly technology and algorithms havent made this feasable yet (AFAIK)
I wish it wasn't just workstation gpu's that got the good 2d and line drawing support (I guess it's not economic for consumer cards) I'm really interested in NPR (nonphotorealistic rendering) but all graphics cards are concerned with is producing more realistic scenes, not artistic.
Out of context? That's not out of context. "Playstation 3 is a computer. We don't need the PC", it means the same when theyre talking about all of their "entertainment functions." The PS3 is as much a PC as any console, i.e. it is not. Remember their claims that the PS2 would replace PC's? It's the same deal, stupid hyperbole in an attempt to draw in nongamers.
Why are we worrying about DOS... This is Windows... the only people who still use DOS are the technical elite and I don't have a problem with the backslash. I do have a problem that "ls" isn't aliases to "dir" by default Also, since no real standard exists for the directory path delimiters... (Java uses ".", Unix uses "/" and Window uses "\") so beating Windows up for this... is kinda unfair.
Only from windows users do I hear "do you mean backslash or forward slash?" The standard *is* the unix way (which is, by the transitive law, is the linux and windows way) notice how you use it on the interenet as well? That's because most of the interent is run by Unix machines.
Again... not sure why you are complaining about this. 1 byte per 80 characters is not going to kill you. Not only that, but the same argument could be used against multibyte encodings such as UTF-8. Why use UTF-8 because it doubles your text files size.
The difference here is that using both CR and LF has no benifit. It seems their mode of thinking was: Well Mac uses CR, unix uses LF, why dont we use both so nobody is compatible? great! Really, what the hell. Windows is also the only OS that seems to get confused when a single CR or a single LF is in a textfile (depending on the application, you may get a "square" character instead of a newline, retarded)
Precedence. Everyone knows that C: is the root drive for windows... just like they know that A and B are floppy drives. Windows is meant to make things easy. I tried explaining the UNIX filesystem hierachy to someone... it wasn't easy
Wrong. Maybe 50% (made up statistic of course) of "normal" windows users (your mom, grandma etc) understand the C: concept. People that call the whole machine the harddrive get confused when you try and explain that C: is a harddrive (my mom) Sure, calling it hda is pretty crappy. The mac solution? Labels. By default the drive is called "Macintosh HD", and the icon on the desktop is an HD, no stupid "My Computer" abstraction (another thing that confuses windows users as ive seen) No one needs to know its actually called disk0s3, ever. If Microsoft can lift everything else from OSX, why not this? Oh wait, that would require real work (Adding gel-like buttons in the UI is easy though)
It is called cygwin, Putty or SecureCRT. I really don't think Microsoft cares about your terminal applications... they care about "windows".
A good console application would take about 5 seconds to write. Apple did it. Apple doesn't care about command line stuff, they want the pretty UI. But, they are not stupid enough to leave out that functionality for people that want it. People shouldn't be forced to download some shitty (and probably shareware, goddamn windows developers) console app, that should be included in the goddamn OS. Obviosuly Microsoft cares about the command line, though, or they wouldn't have made that new shell. Idiot.
Honestly, if you want to complain... talk about the crappy APIs, the slow release cycles(compared to say Linux or OS X), the abondoning of applications such as Internet Explorer, the poor window management.
Everyone always complains about those things. Sometimes its nice to complain about more obscure things. So, I'll add one to the list: ctrl+c, ctrl+v etc for copy and paste and junk. It should be windows+C, windows+V. Of course, thats impossible to change now, even grandma understands ctrl+c is copy. However it should've never been that (if you don't know why then don't worry)
You reminded me of a quotation in Slaughterhouse-Five (I don't know if its a fictious one or not):
America is the wealthiest nation on Earth, but its people are mainly poor, and poor Americans are urged to hate themselvves. To quote the American humourist Kin Hubbard, "It ain't no disgrace to be poor, but it might as well be." It is in fact a crime for an American to be poor, even though America is a nation of poor. Every other nation has folk traditions of men who were poor but extremly wise and virtuuous, and therefore more estimable than anyone with power and gold. No such tales are told by the American poor. They mock themselves and glorify their betters. The meanest eating or drinking establishment, owned by a man who is himself poor, is very likely to have a sign on its wall asking this cruel question: "If you're so smart, why ain't you rich?" There will also be an American flag no larger than a child's hand-glued to a lollipop stick and flying from the cash register
...
Americans, like human beings everywhere, believe many things that are obviously untrue. Their most destructive unthruth is that it is very easy for any American to make money. They will not acknowledge how in fact hard money is to come by, and, therefore, those who have no money blame and blame and blame themselves. This inward blame has been a treasure for the rich and powerful, who have had to do less for their poor, publicily and privately, than any other ruling class since, say, Napoleonic times
The quote isnt 100% compatible here but whatever.
Profitable ventures are not humanities best interest. They are the best interest of a random few. Obviously, if the majority of people are suffering, with a very small minority leading good lives, then it is not humanities interest, unless the unvaccinated are not humans. Your reasoning is pathetic.
I would like to see what would happen to your views on life if you were forced to live in Africa the way that all those AID's infected children do. If you were given a chance to write a follow up comment, would you still praise your twisted view of capitalism, and die peacefully knowing that since you couldn't help yourself, and no one else - even though they could, easily - would, your death was "justified"?
Of course, I'd never wish anything like than on anybody, even you.
Wait wait wait, hold the presses. Meryl-Linch doesn't make the playstation? You mean they are basically analyzing facts and drawing a conclusion from them, much in the way a financial firm would? Man, I totally misunderstood the article, thanks a bunch.
I'm disappointed that after 10 years Google can't write a spider that DOESN'T identify itself as GoogleBot and confirms that pages match what the spider sees. How hard could it possibly be to setup a few more spiders' whose sole job is to follow the real Googlebots and misidentify their UA to confirm what's been indexed? So, should they also use a new IP that doesn't resolve in any way to google, because websites could check for that too. Changing the UA would be useless. You know, there are many many reasons why googlebot uses a consistant UA (besides "why not?") for example, I can see how much google is going through my pages, which pages and how much per etc. in my logs. What if a website was all Flash, but they offered a link for a text only version. Well, Google can only use the text only version, so why not just replace the main page with it and skip the flash when googlebot is detected. That's definantly not abuse, it's good design, and in fact makes Google's results more relevent.
That game was 80% HUD, but it felt leet watching your mech boot up, and looking at all the pretty radars and switches and shit. Hell, look at the controller. Man I want that game..
....
Troll I hope.
Being anti-US is fun, I would know, I'm Canadian. However, wanting to keep the master DNS nameservers in America for political reasons has nothing to do with telco companies wanting to tier their internet services. All of the nameservers could be overseas and they could still do it. What they want to do is say "for $xx.xx you get yyy-MB a month bandwidth etc, and have multiple packages. This has nothing to do with the internet's structure, and only affects American citizens.
There is no grand conspiracy.
Halo was first an RTS type game like Myth, not an online persistant universe. Then it changed to a RTTS, realtime tactical shooter (oo buzzword), i.e. it was a third person shooter. That was what Bungie showed at MacWorld, before their purchase. MS bought them, and some point in development they decided that 3rd person was no fun and too hard to control, so it became first person. MS has *no* creative control over Bungie. If MS did anything to negativly impact Halo, it was pressuring them to have it ready for launch.
Oh, and no tactical elements? Go play it on legendary mode. It has some of the most clever AI (and its not a they-have-more-health-and-strength-than-thou situation, they really appear smart) in games even by todays standards. Obviously you haven't played much of it, but if it makes you happy to pick on the underdog-gone-overnight-success that Bungie has become, so be it. (You know, the people that suddenly hate google now that they are successful, despite all the cool things they still do (right now I'm browsing around on the google library, great stuff))
1. It will be more than weeks, by far 2. It takes more than weeks to write emulators. Years. The "mature" emulators stop at the SNES/16-bit generation. There's just so much more complexity each new generation.
3. Emulation is veryyyyy slow. N64 emu's take a good computer to run (well, they did a year or two ago) and AFAIK there are no playable (i.e. non-buggy, fast, fully featured) gamecube/ps2 emulators (xbox is a x86 so not hard to emulate) Even the DS emulators can barely run bits of comercial games, the leaked nintendo dev emulator runs games at like 16fps instead of the native 60 on good computers.
4. Youre also going to have to make a bluetooth driver for the revolution remote too (actually, I bet that'll happen in under a week)
You fuckwit. The constitution never said you are free from all consequences from what you say. Freedom of speech means youre not going to go to jail for saying your university sucks dick. However, the university, private or public, has all the right in the universe to say fuck you in return. If you got a job, and wrote about how you think your boss molests children in your blog, you are not free from getting fired. Freedom of speech is not freedom of consequence.
This is why you shouldn't read blogs. I bet all the bloggers out there are bitching and complaining about how unfairly bloggers are treated, how America is turning Orwellian (hail Big Brother) and how we should all join the EFF and revolt. The fact is, bloggers are losers writing crap with no intelligence whatsoever. I think it's really telling that bloggers picked up on this first. More important news outlets are busy covering real news, not some fat doctor wannabe getting kicked out of university because he's a dick.
Nintendo is only one developer, albiet a very big one, oher people do make software for their hardware. Think of the first party games from MS and Sony, and theres a pretty big yawn (some shooters from one camp, and some boring platforming mario ripoffs from the other.) Nintendo usually goes off in crazy directions making new IP (nintendogs is a recent example, pikmin etc) and they do a better job at making new IP than most of the industry on average (iD software: wolfienstien quake and doom, lots of sequals to games which are basically the same with soem graphical tweaks, Blizzard: starcraft and warcraft, two games which are the same with different looking characters, and hey look, after the sequels of WC got boring, they made an mmorpg of it! Shame! etc etc)
Nintendo needs to rely somewhat on established franchises for financial stablity. But guess what, its obviously working, which means people are buying it, which means people like it.
It's not Nintendo's job to meet speculations launch dates. Watch the TGS trailer, says "2006". The April/may predictions were based on financial forcasts released up until that time and that made april/may the earliest, and of course everyone wish it would just come out yesterday so those are the dates that people choose to believe.
Mobile phones and Java don't mix. Read Carmack's (creator of Doom, Quake) blog. A game he was developing needed a seperate port for each phone, because of variations. Write once run everywhere? Ha.
They did for the PS2 also, and it wasn't well supported, and most of the "good" stuff was in binary only drivers. How much do you think they wil support linux? I doubt much, they want you buying games, not a PC. The extent of their limits will not be known until its released. There will be a homebrew Linux implementation, you can count on that.
Uh, yeah, well guess what? It doesn't matter what their target audience is, a huge percentage (if not the majority, which I suspect) are under 18, and either way, who wants the butt ugly console that doesn't match anything with the rest of their home entertainment stuff? Mine sit on the carpet all the time, and they don't overheat. Maybe MS should've delayed a few months and fixed the issues huh? Don't apologize for MS.
Who cares if your cluster is wasting CPU time? Your cluster that could've cost millions to make? (Remember: this OS is *not* targeted at you, "Some Random Username (873177)", but big buisness and scientists, etc) GUI may not take up much cpu, but it takes up a nice chunk of RAM, and multiply that by however many nodes you need to administer, and wow, what a huge waste of money. Linux can run in command line, open the GUI when required, then close back down when it's finished. Try and close the GUI in windows and fall back into DOS. Oh wait, that doesn't make sense.
Uh, okay. You do realize super computers are EXTREMLY costly? There will always be enough experts out there to design an app for you. A scientist isn't likely going to write his own app for a super computer, he would hire someone that could make it work the best. A graphics designer isn't going to build their own distributed rendering software, they're going to get it made from someone else. Your fast car analogy is crap, because it's implying that Linux isn't usable. Just because you can't install it, doesn't mean someone who makes a living doing it can't. In fact, Linux is sooo much easier for something like this over windows it's insane. Only if you forget the fact it's impossible with Windows as it is. MS would be VERY hard pressed to beat Linux is the supercomputing market. Since it is open source, it's very flexible. You can get an entire system, with command line tools, on a floppy disk at around 600kb. Or you canget a run-off-the-cd or even DVD distro, like knoppix. All that and once you've figured thing's out, it's very easy! (Just read the online Linux-From-Scratch tutorials, you can literally take the source for apps, compile it, bootstrap and have your own custom OS as easy as pie)
There aren't going to be newer people who want to build supercomputers but refuse to learn Linux, because there are alrady so many that are linux proficent. If a CEO decides to make a supercomputer, he doesn't make it, he hire's someone. There are plenty of someones who know Linux. It'll be faster in Linux, and believe it or not programming an application in linux and dealing with open source API's is much easier than windows (what the hell is error: 0x432d423a supposed to mean?) so you get faster code and faster development. What advantage does windows offer?
Slashdot Mirror
Wow, you sure are an asshole.
I want graphics cards to support things like nurbs more in the future. Instead of having to use polygons, and interpolating polygons from a spline before rendering, it would be nice to draw actual curves. Unfortunantly technology and algorithms havent made this feasable yet (AFAIK)
I wish it wasn't just workstation gpu's that got the good 2d and line drawing support (I guess it's not economic for consumer cards) I'm really interested in NPR (nonphotorealistic rendering) but all graphics cards are concerned with is producing more realistic scenes, not artistic.
Out of context? That's not out of context. "Playstation 3 is a computer. We don't need the PC", it means the same when theyre talking about all of their "entertainment functions." The PS3 is as much a PC as any console, i.e. it is not. Remember their claims that the PS2 would replace PC's? It's the same deal, stupid hyperbole in an attempt to draw in nongamers.
Why are we worrying about DOS... This is Windows... the only people who still use DOS are the technical elite and I don't have a problem with the backslash. I do have a problem that "ls" isn't aliases to "dir" by default Also, since no real standard exists for the directory path delimiters... (Java uses ".", Unix uses "/" and Window uses "\") so beating Windows up for this... is kinda unfair.
Only from windows users do I hear "do you mean backslash or forward slash?" The standard *is* the unix way (which is, by the transitive law, is the linux and windows way) notice how you use it on the interenet as well? That's because most of the interent is run by Unix machines.
Again... not sure why you are complaining about this. 1 byte per 80 characters is not going to kill you. Not only that, but the same argument could be used against multibyte encodings such as UTF-8. Why use UTF-8 because it doubles your text files size.
The difference here is that using both CR and LF has no benifit. It seems their mode of thinking was: Well Mac uses CR, unix uses LF, why dont we use both so nobody is compatible? great! Really, what the hell. Windows is also the only OS that seems to get confused when a single CR or a single LF is in a textfile (depending on the application, you may get a "square" character instead of a newline, retarded)
Precedence. Everyone knows that C: is the root drive for windows... just like they know that A and B are floppy drives. Windows is meant to make things easy. I tried explaining the UNIX filesystem hierachy to someone... it wasn't easy
Wrong. Maybe 50% (made up statistic of course) of "normal" windows users (your mom, grandma etc) understand the C: concept. People that call the whole machine the harddrive get confused when you try and explain that C: is a harddrive (my mom) Sure, calling it hda is pretty crappy. The mac solution? Labels. By default the drive is called "Macintosh HD", and the icon on the desktop is an HD, no stupid "My Computer" abstraction (another thing that confuses windows users as ive seen) No one needs to know its actually called disk0s3, ever. If Microsoft can lift everything else from OSX, why not this? Oh wait, that would require real work (Adding gel-like buttons in the UI is easy though)
It is called cygwin, Putty or SecureCRT. I really don't think Microsoft cares about your terminal applications... they care about "windows".
A good console application would take about 5 seconds to write. Apple did it. Apple doesn't care about command line stuff, they want the pretty UI. But, they are not stupid enough to leave out that functionality for people that want it. People shouldn't be forced to download some shitty (and probably shareware, goddamn windows developers) console app, that should be included in the goddamn OS. Obviosuly Microsoft cares about the command line, though, or they wouldn't have made that new shell. Idiot.
Honestly, if you want to complain... talk about the crappy APIs, the slow release cycles(compared to say Linux or OS X), the abondoning of applications such as Internet Explorer, the poor window management.
Everyone always complains about those things. Sometimes its nice to complain about more obscure things. So, I'll add one to the list: ctrl+c, ctrl+v etc for copy and paste and junk. It should be windows+C, windows+V. Of course, thats impossible to change now, even grandma understands ctrl+c is copy. However it should've never been that (if you don't know why then don't worry)
No, that is not true. It is a different design from that of sony-microsoft-immersions.
You reminded me of a quotation in Slaughterhouse-Five (I don't know if its a fictious one or not):
...
America is the wealthiest nation on Earth, but its people are mainly poor, and poor Americans are urged to hate themselvves. To quote the American humourist Kin Hubbard, "It ain't no disgrace to be poor, but it might as well be." It is in fact a crime for an American to be poor, even though America is a nation of poor. Every other nation has folk traditions of men who were poor but extremly wise and virtuuous, and therefore more estimable than anyone with power and gold. No such tales are told by the American poor. They mock themselves and glorify their betters. The meanest eating or drinking establishment, owned by a man who is himself poor, is very likely to have a sign on its wall asking this cruel question: "If you're so smart, why ain't you rich?" There will also be an American flag no larger than a child's hand-glued to a lollipop stick and flying from the cash register
Americans, like human beings everywhere, believe many things that are obviously untrue. Their most destructive unthruth is that it is very easy for any American to make money. They will not acknowledge how in fact hard money is to come by, and, therefore, those who have no money blame and blame and blame themselves. This inward blame has been a treasure for the rich and powerful, who have had to do less for their poor, publicily and privately, than any other ruling class since, say, Napoleonic times
The quote isnt 100% compatible here but whatever.
Profitable ventures are not humanities best interest. They are the best interest of a random few. Obviously, if the majority of people are suffering, with a very small minority leading good lives, then it is not humanities interest, unless the unvaccinated are not humans. Your reasoning is pathetic.
I would like to see what would happen to your views on life if you were forced to live in Africa the way that all those AID's infected children do. If you were given a chance to write a follow up comment, would you still praise your twisted view of capitalism, and die peacefully knowing that since you couldn't help yourself, and no one else - even though they could, easily - would, your death was "justified"?
Of course, I'd never wish anything like than on anybody, even you.
Wrong. They don't sell copies. The only way to get osx-x86 is to buy an intel mac.
Wait wait wait, hold the presses. Meryl-Linch doesn't make the playstation? You mean they are basically analyzing facts and drawing a conclusion from them, much in the way a financial firm would? Man, I totally misunderstood the article, thanks a bunch.
I'm disappointed that after 10 years Google can't write a spider that DOESN'T identify itself as GoogleBot and confirms that pages match what the spider sees. How hard could it possibly be to setup a few more spiders' whose sole job is to follow the real Googlebots and misidentify their UA to confirm what's been indexed?
So, should they also use a new IP that doesn't resolve in any way to google, because websites could check for that too. Changing the UA would be useless. You know, there are many many reasons why googlebot uses a consistant UA (besides "why not?") for example, I can see how much google is going through my pages, which pages and how much per etc. in my logs. What if a website was all Flash, but they offered a link for a text only version. Well, Google can only use the text only version, so why not just replace the main page with it and skip the flash when googlebot is detected. That's definantly not abuse, it's good design, and in fact makes Google's results more relevent.
That game was 80% HUD, but it felt leet watching your mech boot up, and looking at all the pretty radars and switches and shit. Hell, look at the controller. Man I want that game..
.... Troll I hope. Being anti-US is fun, I would know, I'm Canadian. However, wanting to keep the master DNS nameservers in America for political reasons has nothing to do with telco companies wanting to tier their internet services. All of the nameservers could be overseas and they could still do it. What they want to do is say "for $xx.xx you get yyy-MB a month bandwidth etc, and have multiple packages. This has nothing to do with the internet's structure, and only affects American citizens. There is no grand conspiracy.
Halo was first an RTS type game like Myth, not an online persistant universe. Then it changed to a RTTS, realtime tactical shooter (oo buzzword), i.e. it was a third person shooter. That was what Bungie showed at MacWorld, before their purchase. MS bought them, and some point in development they decided that 3rd person was no fun and too hard to control, so it became first person. MS has *no* creative control over Bungie. If MS did anything to negativly impact Halo, it was pressuring them to have it ready for launch.
Oh, and no tactical elements? Go play it on legendary mode. It has some of the most clever AI (and its not a they-have-more-health-and-strength-than-thou situation, they really appear smart) in games even by todays standards. Obviously you haven't played much of it, but if it makes you happy to pick on the underdog-gone-overnight-success that Bungie has become, so be it. (You know, the people that suddenly hate google now that they are successful, despite all the cool things they still do (right now I'm browsing around on the google library, great stuff))
1. It will be more than weeks, by far
:)
2. It takes more than weeks to write emulators. Years. The "mature" emulators stop at the SNES/16-bit generation. There's just so much more complexity each new generation.
3. Emulation is veryyyyy slow. N64 emu's take a good computer to run (well, they did a year or two ago) and AFAIK there are no playable (i.e. non-buggy, fast, fully featured) gamecube/ps2 emulators (xbox is a x86 so not hard to emulate) Even the DS emulators can barely run bits of comercial games, the leaked nintendo dev emulator runs games at like 16fps instead of the native 60 on good computers.
4. Youre also going to have to make a bluetooth driver for the revolution remote too (actually, I bet that'll happen in under a week)
I liked the AC:DS reference though
Didn't get the 64DD selling in Japan. Man those are huge knockers.
You fuckwit. The constitution never said you are free from all consequences from what you say. Freedom of speech means youre not going to go to jail for saying your university sucks dick. However, the university, private or public, has all the right in the universe to say fuck you in return. If you got a job, and wrote about how you think your boss molests children in your blog, you are not free from getting fired. Freedom of speech is not freedom of consequence.
This is why you shouldn't read blogs. I bet all the bloggers out there are bitching and complaining about how unfairly bloggers are treated, how America is turning Orwellian (hail Big Brother) and how we should all join the EFF and revolt. The fact is, bloggers are losers writing crap with no intelligence whatsoever. I think it's really telling that bloggers picked up on this first. More important news outlets are busy covering real news, not some fat doctor wannabe getting kicked out of university because he's a dick.
Tell EA to stop making football games.
Nintendo is only one developer, albiet a very big one, oher people do make software for their hardware. Think of the first party games from MS and Sony, and theres a pretty big yawn (some shooters from one camp, and some boring platforming mario ripoffs from the other.) Nintendo usually goes off in crazy directions making new IP (nintendogs is a recent example, pikmin etc) and they do a better job at making new IP than most of the industry on average (iD software: wolfienstien quake and doom, lots of sequals to games which are basically the same with soem graphical tweaks, Blizzard: starcraft and warcraft, two games which are the same with different looking characters, and hey look, after the sequels of WC got boring, they made an mmorpg of it! Shame! etc etc)
Nintendo needs to rely somewhat on established franchises for financial stablity. But guess what, its obviously working, which means people are buying it, which means people like it.
It's not Nintendo's job to meet speculations launch dates. Watch the TGS trailer, says "2006". The April/may predictions were based on financial forcasts released up until that time and that made april/may the earliest, and of course everyone wish it would just come out yesterday so those are the dates that people choose to believe.
It's not being released, details are being revealed. I'm sure the Big N will leave you plenty of time for a divorce.
:) Best wishes
Just kidding
Uh porting code is no where near the feat of writing it, alot of the things they just renamed files .java :P not that great of a feat.
Mobile phones and Java don't mix. Read Carmack's (creator of Doom, Quake) blog. A game he was developing needed a seperate port for each phone, because of variations. Write once run everywhere? Ha.
They did for the PS2 also, and it wasn't well supported, and most of the "good" stuff was in binary only drivers. How much do you think they wil support linux? I doubt much, they want you buying games, not a PC. The extent of their limits will not be known until its released. There will be a homebrew Linux implementation, you can count on that.
Free60? That's pretty cool. What are the other consoles going to get for a name? "Open Source Revolution", uh.. "PS3 Linux"?
Uh, yeah, well guess what? It doesn't matter what their target audience is, a huge percentage (if not the majority, which I suspect) are under 18, and either way, who wants the butt ugly console that doesn't match anything with the rest of their home entertainment stuff? Mine sit on the carpet all the time, and they don't overheat. Maybe MS should've delayed a few months and fixed the issues huh? Don't apologize for MS.
Who cares if your cluster is wasting CPU time? Your cluster that could've cost millions to make? (Remember: this OS is *not* targeted at you, "Some Random Username (873177)", but big buisness and scientists, etc) GUI may not take up much cpu, but it takes up a nice chunk of RAM, and multiply that by however many nodes you need to administer, and wow, what a huge waste of money. Linux can run in command line, open the GUI when required, then close back down when it's finished. Try and close the GUI in windows and fall back into DOS. Oh wait, that doesn't make sense.
Uh, okay. You do realize super computers are EXTREMLY costly? There will always be enough experts out there to design an app for you. A scientist isn't likely going to write his own app for a super computer, he would hire someone that could make it work the best. A graphics designer isn't going to build their own distributed rendering software, they're going to get it made from someone else. Your fast car analogy is crap, because it's implying that Linux isn't usable. Just because you can't install it, doesn't mean someone who makes a living doing it can't. In fact, Linux is sooo much easier for something like this over windows it's insane. Only if you forget the fact it's impossible with Windows as it is. MS would be VERY hard pressed to beat Linux is the supercomputing market. Since it is open source, it's very flexible. You can get an entire system, with command line tools, on a floppy disk at around 600kb. Or you canget a run-off-the-cd or even DVD distro, like knoppix. All that and once you've figured thing's out, it's very easy! (Just read the online Linux-From-Scratch tutorials, you can literally take the source for apps, compile it, bootstrap and have your own custom OS as easy as pie)
There aren't going to be newer people who want to build supercomputers but refuse to learn Linux, because there are alrady so many that are linux proficent. If a CEO decides to make a supercomputer, he doesn't make it, he hire's someone. There are plenty of someones who know Linux. It'll be faster in Linux, and believe it or not programming an application in linux and dealing with open source API's is much easier than windows (what the hell is error: 0x432d423a supposed to mean?) so you get faster code and faster development. What advantage does windows offer?