Spend USD$3k on a commodity PC (or buy four little PCs, some networking gear and IO cards) and be amazed. I'm pretty sure I could squeeze four Athlons and a few GB of RAM into the box for USD$3000.
ASCI Q runs Tru64, and I'd like that for a desktop (provided someone else pays the power bill).
It's interesting to note that the #3 supercomputer is Linux based, #2 is about twice as powerful as it, and #1 is about six times as powerful - but had ASCI Q arrived last year it would have been undisputed king of the hill.
I sat down to a fresh Mandrake 9.1 installation yesterday, and everything that they are allowed to ship "just worked".
I typed one line at a shell prompt to bring an unofficial repository of Mandrake RPMs to the system's attention, started a package manager, selected all, and a whole lot of things which Mandrake can't safely ship (video CoDecs etc) came on line as well. This could have been done with a single click in the web browser, but for some reason Mandrake are a bit thingy about letting random websites have open slather on their systems. Note that it's possible to have that work OOTB as well (by defining a KParts handler for it and having that prompt for superuser rights).
Funny that the above paragraph describes the kind of stuff that Lindows want to charge you $99 a year for access to. And Lindows isn't shy about running stuff as root (how you say, disaster in the offing?).
Here in remote Perth, Western Australia (the most isolated city in the world) you can buy a complete Athlon 2000 system (256MB, 40GB, 17" CRT) for AUD$862+GST, which (including GST) works out at USD$629. If you can get by with a Cyrix, 15" and and 128MB, knock about USD$150 off that. On special, getting a new "real" (ie processor speed etc not far off bleeding edge) system for under USD$500 (AUD$753 inc GST) is not hard.
Try http://www.pompom.org.uk/ instead. And yes, it does look really cool, and does run on Linux, MS-Windows and Mac OS X, and yes there is a free demo. (-:
A FOSS ethernet driver would be bundled by Mandrake, thus enabling me to go on line OOTB through my ethernet-interfaced DSL modem to collect the proprietary video driver if I wanted accelerated 3D. Sound is (hawk, spit) Intel i810 (I'd be even more pleased if the next nForce was based on the Yamaha chips instead), and non-3D video is fine with the FOSS X driver.
SCO doesn't need rights to the code itself (although it does appear to be claiming those as well - I'm still confused), as long as the contracts stipulate that the licensor can control the distribution of associated technologies. (Which is itself doubtful, but we'll see.)
TSG (as distinct from the original SCO, now called (IIRC) Tarantella) seems to be claiming just about everything, probably working on the idea that the worst outcome is the judge saying no. The common-language term for this is "trying it on".
As I read the contract docs, IBM unquestionably retains the rights to any derivatives they wrote, the only thing they can't distribute is the original source. In their last Exhibit, TSG are implicitly including those derivatives in "SOFTWARE PROGRAMS", trying to eliminate a distinction carefully drawn in the original contract.
Copy of a post to LWN in answer to someone else who applauded the humour:
The Who's down with Other People's Intellectual Property sign is major chutzpah. The IP which TSG (not the original SCO, The SCO Group) is laying claim to is code written by IBM which belongs to IBM according to the terms of the AT&T agreement.
For an example of such code, turn to SMP. TSG's own SMP implementation sucks so badly that all of their licencees, past and present, have written and are using their own implementation instead. TSG is claiming ownership of those implementations.
The short story is that the IP in contention does not belong to TSG even if it was originally developed (by IBM) for use with SCO UNIX or UnixWare sources and is not a part of the BSD codebase or otherwise public domain or copyright (e.g. GPL) by others. To put it in the same terms that TSG are applying to IBM and Linux TSG are using barratry to steal the rights to code that they did not write and do not own.
It's worse than that. If you read what Chris Sontag said in the BYTE article, you will see that TSG are trying to leverage their barratry to steal ownership of every significant OS in the world.
You know how annoying parking meters are? In asserting that everything else descends at least in principle from their UNIX codebase, TSG are trying to install a meter on every CPU in the world, starting with the USA. They are trying to encumber everybody with a licence agreement, but instead of using Microsoft's attrition method, they're aiming for one fell swoop.
To show you how brazen this is, consider the same scenario in another industry. The Canopy Group buys Ford, then claims that since every production-line car in the world was derived in one way or another from Henry Ford's system. They start with General Motors but have an eye on an unexpectedly thriving kit-car industry. Is the analogy clear, and good enough?
While TSG employees might be fine and friendly to deal with, TSG management is trying to stage one of the biggest ripoffs in software history. If they succeed, it will undermine the livelihood implied in tens of thousands of Linux-related job in the USA and greatly slow Linux deployment worldwide. They even have the gall to hint about taxing the BSDs! If they fail, TSG and these guys' jobs, pensions etc will be a scorched memory.
This (to say nothing of much other lying and prevarication) makes those posters a lot less funny than you hope. Ha, ha, and all, but meanwhile they're trying to throw the IT world over a barrel.
And suddenly Boise' actions make sick sense. In the unlikely event of him winning this one, he'll be first in line for the next one, and the next, and the next... and if TSG's licence works out to something of the order of $100 a CPU a year, their income will easily exceed Microsoft's. Are you reading me, Bill?
The penny evidently hasn't yet dropped for Sun. The $100M they've already paid is a drop in the bucket compared with what TSG will get out of them if they win.
Be kind to it, only fetch if you're going to do something useful with the code. Some of the real mirror sites are still up (wayback is your friend) and may be faster if you're in the USA or Europe. Of course, if you're hitting my ISP from WAIX then ArachNet won't care about bytes, so go for it.
I posted a long list to another/. article less than a month ago. Deem Terry Pratchett included, mostly SciFi but a wide range of other stuff occasionally. I read SciFi for the science, so I like such as Robert Forward, Larry Niven and Arthur Clark (until he went senile and turned everything into soft porn).
Doesn't actually help to get me away from the computer much, though.
I write articles about computers. OpenOffice.org forever, and damn the RAM! It feels kind of recursive, and definitely does not get me away from the computer.
Flanel pajamas. Thick, heavy cloth, usually covers head to toe. Definitely not sexy.
You don't get around enough.
I have a number of cousins and nieces and things who do make flannel pyjamas look sexy, in some cases downright licentious. OTOH, most of them are also absolute showstoppers in, for example, close-fitting jeans. One breathtaking example recently got herself baptised into a serious pentecostal church (at age 15) and the crowd attending looked kind of like the one at Daisy Duck's wedding to Donald. (-:
I used to amuse myself with another particular cousin by going shopping with her and keeping a tally of the number of blokes who walked into things like street signs and glass doors during the outing. My highest tally was seven (shopping for a hard-to-locate toy for her baby sister), not counting "kerb-rapes" (drivers clipping the kerb with their tyres or even mounting the kerb). If she'd ever suggested going in a bikini (not her style, she's quite a private person) I'd have suggested accompanying her with a self-loading shotgun. (-:
I worry that my 13yo daughter is turning out to be that pretty too. There's still too much little-girl about her figure to turn the trick in flannel, but I can't see that lasting more than another couple of years. Then it'll be buy-a-shotgun time. Sigh. Something I hadn't though about nearly-14 years ago (through an odd chain of events, I'm still able to remember the date she was concieved on).
Most of ours do, big steel ones, too many idiots wandering/falling into them over the years and not coming back out, and/or meatheads taking big stalagmites home as conversation pieces.
I also walk and climb rocks. We have lots of room, and lots of rocks in Western Australia. If I was into windburn (and grit in everything), I could do the beach thing, we have lots of great beaches.
I also take pictures of various things with my Sony DSC-F707, but my sister-in-law is practically married to the camera (my camera!) so I don't get to do that as often as whim takes me.
...give your wife practically no money to spend, but let her go to garage sales (Yanks call them "yard sales") and shop for your (nearly) 4yo son. (-:
Xan now has at least six times as much Lego as I ever owned. Probably more than six times the combined total of my peak Lego possession and that of my Lego-freak neighbours in Paraburdoo at the time (Greg and Robert Moore).
It was one of these billionaires that gave $1 billion dollars away to charity (it was either Ted Turner or Bill Gates... I think). Now, are you going to turn around and say that's not enough?
No, I'm going to turn around and say (I already did, had you bothered to read it) that what Bill donated to was more or less his own companies and he got a tax writedown as well. On over $100M a year (which is chump change anyway for someone worth over $60G). How generous!
On Burt... [...] I noticed that he's not exactly giving himself to charity. After all, his space craft is in the contest to win the $10 million.
And he's building the ship for free, is he? Keep reading, and you'll see that he's already spent over twice as much developing the thing, and he's not done yet. Business plan: 1. Drop $20-30M on development 2. Win $10M prize 3. Prof... oh...
Care to try again, this time with your brains in a forward gear?
Slashdot Mirror
Spend USD$3k on a commodity PC (or buy four little PCs, some networking gear and IO cards) and be amazed. I'm pretty sure I could squeeze four Athlons and a few GB of RAM into the box for USD$3000.
It's interesting to note that the #3 supercomputer is Linux based, #2 is about twice as powerful as it, and #1 is about six times as powerful - but had ASCI Q arrived last year it would have been undisputed king of the hill.
I typed one line at a shell prompt to bring an unofficial repository of Mandrake RPMs to the system's attention, started a package manager, selected all, and a whole lot of things which Mandrake can't safely ship (video CoDecs etc) came on line as well. This could have been done with a single click in the web browser, but for some reason Mandrake are a bit thingy about letting random websites have open slather on their systems. Note that it's possible to have that work OOTB as well (by defining a KParts handler for it and having that prompt for superuser rights).
Funny that the above paragraph describes the kind of stuff that Lindows want to charge you $99 a year for access to. And Lindows isn't shy about running stuff as root (how you say, disaster in the offing?).
OS X will understand it, Temporal's sarcasm aside. (-: Dang Mac zealots, only thing worse'n a BSD zealot... oh... :-)
...which I have been told require you to ship the motor back to Italy for refurbishing after circa 90,000km.
Here in remote Perth, Western Australia (the most isolated city in the world) you can buy a complete Athlon 2000 system (256MB, 40GB, 17" CRT) for AUD$862+GST, which (including GST) works out at USD$629. If you can get by with a Cyrix, 15" and and 128MB, knock about USD$150 off that. On special, getting a new "real" (ie processor speed etc not far off bleeding edge) system for under USD$500 (AUD$753 inc GST) is not hard.
Try http://www.pompom.org.uk/ instead. And yes, it does look really cool, and does run on Linux, MS-Windows and Mac OS X, and yes there is a free demo. (-:
Looks(tm) like(tm) someone(tm)'(tm)s(tm) got(tm) too(tm) much(tm) time(tm) on(tm) their(tm) hands(tm).
A FOSS ethernet driver would be bundled by Mandrake, thus enabling me to go on line OOTB through my ethernet-interfaced DSL modem to collect the proprietary video driver if I wanted accelerated 3D. Sound is (hawk, spit) Intel i810 (I'd be even more pleased if the next nForce was based on the Yamaha chips instead), and non-3D video is fine with the FOSS X driver.
TSG (as distinct from the original SCO, now called (IIRC) Tarantella) seems to be claiming just about everything, probably working on the idea that the worst outcome is the judge saying no. The common-language term for this is "trying it on".
As I read the contract docs, IBM unquestionably retains the rights to any derivatives they wrote, the only thing they can't distribute is the original source. In their last Exhibit, TSG are implicitly including those derivatives in "SOFTWARE PROGRAMS", trying to eliminate a distinction carefully drawn in the original contract.
Copy of a post to LWN in answer to someone else who applauded the humour:
The Who's down with Other People's Intellectual Property sign is major chutzpah. The IP which TSG (not the original SCO, The SCO Group) is laying claim to is code written by IBM which belongs to IBM according to the terms of the AT&T agreement.
For an example of such code, turn to SMP. TSG's own SMP implementation sucks so badly that all of their licencees, past and present, have written and are using their own implementation instead. TSG is claiming ownership of those implementations.
The short story is that the IP in contention does not belong to TSG even if it was originally developed (by IBM) for use with SCO UNIX or UnixWare sources and is not a part of the BSD codebase or otherwise public domain or copyright (e.g. GPL) by others. To put it in the same terms that TSG are applying to IBM and Linux TSG are using barratry to steal the rights to code that they did not write and do not own.
It's worse than that. If you read what Chris Sontag said in the BYTE article, you will see that TSG are trying to leverage their barratry to steal ownership of every significant OS in the world.
You know how annoying parking meters are? In asserting that everything else descends at least in principle from their UNIX codebase, TSG are trying to install a meter on every CPU in the world, starting with the USA. They are trying to encumber everybody with a licence agreement, but instead of using Microsoft's attrition method, they're aiming for one fell swoop.
To show you how brazen this is, consider the same scenario in another industry. The Canopy Group buys Ford, then claims that since every production-line car in the world was derived in one way or another from Henry Ford's system. They start with General Motors but have an eye on an unexpectedly thriving kit-car industry. Is the analogy clear, and good enough?
While TSG employees might be fine and friendly to deal with, TSG management is trying to stage one of the biggest ripoffs in software history. If they succeed, it will undermine the livelihood implied in tens of thousands of Linux-related job in the USA and greatly slow Linux deployment worldwide. They even have the gall to hint about taxing the BSDs! If they fail, TSG and these guys' jobs, pensions etc will be a scorched memory.
This (to say nothing of much other lying and prevarication) makes those posters a lot less funny than you hope. Ha, ha, and all, but meanwhile they're trying to throw the IT world over a barrel.
And suddenly Boise' actions make sick sense. In the unlikely event of him winning this one, he'll be first in line for the next one, and the next, and the next... and if TSG's licence works out to something of the order of $100 a CPU a year, their income will easily exceed Microsoft's. Are you reading me, Bill?
The penny evidently hasn't yet dropped for Sun. The $100M they've already paid is a drop in the bucket compared with what TSG will get out of them if they win.
Click here to download 35 megabytes of FreeCraft in a tarfile: burymeindata
One of the projects listed as using OGRE is FreeCraft3D.
Pulled that from Debian (who will soon have to drop it, I'm sure), now sussing out a Mandrake SRPM in case it includes extras.
Be kind to it, only fetch if you're going to do something useful with the code. Some of the real mirror sites are still up (wayback is your friend) and may be faster if you're in the USA or Europe. Of course, if you're hitting my ISP from WAIX then ArachNet won't care about bytes, so go for it.
I posted a long list to another /. article less than a month ago. Deem Terry Pratchett included, mostly SciFi but a wide range of other stuff occasionally. I read SciFi for the science, so I like such as Robert Forward, Larry Niven and Arthur Clark (until he went senile and turned everything into soft porn).
I write articles about computers. OpenOffice.org forever, and damn the RAM! It feels kind of recursive, and definitely does not get me away from the computer.
You don't get around enough.
I have a number of cousins and nieces and things who do make flannel pyjamas look sexy, in some cases downright licentious. OTOH, most of them are also absolute showstoppers in, for example, close-fitting jeans. One breathtaking example recently got herself baptised into a serious pentecostal church (at age 15) and the crowd attending looked kind of like the one at Daisy Duck's wedding to Donald. (-:
I used to amuse myself with another particular cousin by going shopping with her and keeping a tally of the number of blokes who walked into things like street signs and glass doors during the outing. My highest tally was seven (shopping for a hard-to-locate toy for her baby sister), not counting "kerb-rapes" (drivers clipping the kerb with their tyres or even mounting the kerb). If she'd ever suggested going in a bikini (not her style, she's quite a private person) I'd have suggested accompanying her with a self-loading shotgun. (-:
I worry that my 13yo daughter is turning out to be that pretty too. There's still too much little-girl about her figure to turn the trick in flannel, but I can't see that lasting more than another couple of years. Then it'll be buy-a-shotgun time. Sigh. Something I hadn't though about nearly-14 years ago (through an odd chain of events, I'm still able to remember the date she was concieved on).
Most of ours do, big steel ones, too many idiots wandering/falling into them over the years and not coming back out, and/or meatheads taking big stalagmites home as conversation pieces.
...keyboard, baritone, bass guitar.
I also walk and climb rocks. We have lots of room, and lots of rocks in Western Australia. If I was into windburn (and grit in everything), I could do the beach thing, we have lots of great beaches.
I also take pictures of various things with my Sony DSC-F707, but my sister-in-law is practically married to the camera (my camera!) so I don't get to do that as often as whim takes me.
Xan now has at least six times as much Lego as I ever owned. Probably more than six times the combined total of my peak Lego possession and that of my Lego-freak neighbours in Paraburdoo at the time (Greg and Robert Moore).
You're making it worse! (slaps illumin8, makes his hardhat spin)
It's inconcievable that with such dizzying intellects, they could refuse such a challenge!
No, I'm going to turn around and say (I already did, had you bothered to read it) that what Bill donated to was more or less his own companies and he got a tax writedown as well. On over $100M a year (which is chump change anyway for someone worth over $60G). How generous!
And he's building the ship for free, is he? Keep reading, and you'll see that he's already spent over twice as much developing the thing, and he's not done yet. Business plan:
1. Drop $20-30M on development
2. Win $10M prize
3. Prof... oh...
Care to try again, this time with your brains in a forward gear?