Not specific to any programming language, but a very good introduction to the concepts and methods used developing distributed systems, as all multi-threaded programs are.
Well, one 16x link can transmit 8 Gibibytes per second. As PCIe is full-duplex, stupid salesdroids and marketingdwarves can be expected to simply add both directions together and use that figure instead. But I agree with you, it is misleading.
PCIe 1.0 does 2,500,000 Transfers per second per lane in each direction. Each transfer transmits one bit of data. It uses a 8B/10B encoding, therefore you need 10 transfers in order to transmit 8 bits of payload data. Disregarding further protocol overhead, the best rate you can get is 250,000,000 bytes of payload data per seconds per lane. 16 * 250 * 10^6 = 4 * 10^9 = 4 Gibibytes/s on a 16x link in each direction
with PCIe 2.0 the data rate doubles, therefore the max transfer rate per direction is 8 Gibibytes per second on a 16x link in each direction when you disregard protocol overhead.
The almighty journalists at hexus.net seem to be missing out on the fact that alienware is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Dell. As the article fails to elaborate on that fact, it becomes less interesting. What would be interesting indeed is whether Dell is behind this or not, because that might give us a clue about their marketing practices, as well.
Lets start by dealing with each example one-by-one:
Qt: To buy a "commercial" license for Qt gives you the right to use qt in non-free software. If you don't buy a "commercial" license, you can still use Qt but you'll have to comply to the GPL. This has ABSOLUTELY NOTHING TO DO with the question of getting support or not. As long as the GPL is ok for your business model, you can go to other companies than Trolltech in order to get a support contract for Qt, that's how Free Software works. Secondly, the "commercial" Qt license does give you more than simply the right to use the Qt libraries and entitlement to support, it also gives you the complete source code and the right to modify it as you see fit! MSVS won't give you that for any money in the world. Additionally, the renewal fees at Trolltech's webpage suggest that the yearly support comes at a price tag of about $1000 per seat, which is much closer to the price tag you've listed for MSVS.
Embedded Linux: I can't comment on that as you do not give enough data. However, my impression is that quite a number of Embedded Linux vendors violate the GPL anyway and that the pricing's dodgy. On the other hand, $250000 is a cheap price tag for a non-free OS license that gives you the right to integrate it into some piece of hardware and re-sell that piece of hardware as many times as you want. I doubt vxworks or WinCE will give you that, either. Again, the license will give you access to the complete source code, something windriver or ms won't give you unless you pay much more money.
RedHat: You've never heard of things like CentOS, Piebox Enterprise Linux etc. before, do you? Again, you're making the wrong assumption that one particular vendore has a monopoly on support. Get it, with Free Software and freely available source code, this is simply not the case. You can always go to another company in order to get support for a certain Free Software product. Again, ms won't give you no support and no source code for 140 bucks.
cygwin: I don't know what you want to use cygwin for, but I don't know why you'd need a "commercial" license again, either. You can get support for Free Software without paying for a "commercial" license (see above). Do you want to develop non-free software with cygwin? That'll be difficult, mate. cygwin itself is just a wee library, the biggest part of the software available in the cygwin package are GNU tools. These are not available for dual-licensing anyway, using them in non-free software would violate the GPL. You'd have to re-write GNU all yourself again...
Conclusion: You are either clueless or a fudder. You compare apples with oranges and you don't seem to know what you want to do with all that Free Software. It seems your business model is based on freeloading Free Software and converting it into something non-free to make quick money with going the old-fashioned non-free software way. D'oh, why don't you use BSD then? You don't understand how dual-licensing works. You don't realise that with Free Software, the imaginary "original vendor" doesn't have a monopoly on support. The source code is freely available, everyone can get it and maintain that piece of software for you, even you.
This is no big news at all. If you'd read the press releases linspire wrote in order to announce their freespire distro you could have foretold it all. Back then linspire already announced they would make cnr free of charge for freespire users. Back then they already promised to open-source the cnr client software. It was just a matter of time, so how is this big news?
This is just another attempt by kevin carmony to get some cheap viral marketing going, and it seems the media is stupid enough again to take the bait.
cnr might be a nice feature for a GNU/Linux distro, but it is by no means essential. It is just another way of locking users in by tying them to some non-free software. Well, why don't you just go back to ms then?
Ryan Gavin's statement about Free/Open Source Software being to complex is a complete no-brainer and doesn't even remotely reflect reality.
The truth is, complexity in computers and computer software is a tricky thing to tackle. As computer systems become more complex, complexity itself becomes a problem as integrating all the different components of high-complexity software into a working system as a whole is getting more difficult.
The perfect example is ms's own windows vista. That piece of software is so complex ms just can't get it to work properly. Delays are the logical consequence. Otoh, Free Software profits from having the source code available, not necessarily reducing complexity but making it easier to get along with it.
Summary: Complexity is a problem for software, but it doesn't matter if that software is free or non-free. Ryan Gavins statement is just what you would expect it to be, a stupid piece of FUD that might sound somewhat sophisticated to a non-guru but every proper software engineer would be rofl about.
A very good generic embedded SDK/compiler suite/distro generator is provided by the OpenEmbedded project: http://www.openembedded.org/
OE is used to produce various embedded GNU/Linux variants like: - OpenZaurus (Sharp Zaurus PDAs) - Familiar (various WinCE PDAs) - OpenDreambox (Dreambox PVRs) - OpenSlug, DebianSlug, UcSlugC (LinkSys NSLU2 router platform)
If using GNU/Linux is not a strict requirement, you could always give OpenBSD or NetBSD a try. Especially NetBSD runs on many platforms, the latest release supports 57 different ones.
Quite a few comments read like that famous story from ea_spouse. It is hard believe that people are willing to put up with 60+ hours working weeks for several months a stretch without any kind of compensation.
I don't mind doing overtime, as long as I am compensated for it. I usually prefer flexitime arrangements where you can save up the overtime hours you've worked and take days off in lieu after the crunch is over.
Uncompensated overtime is work without getting anything back for it. That concept is not new, it used to be called slavery.
Perhaps people working in the US gaming industry would do well organising themselves and setting up a union or two.
Aha, so I can only do multithreaded programming on GNU/Linux with NPTL'ed glibc or what? Other programming langunguages than C/C++ don't exist or don't do threading. What about other operating systems? Specific solutions to general problems only apply to specific manifestations of the general problem and are therefore useless for most of us.
The only good general advice about learning how to develop software on distributed systems I can give is: Read some of Andrew S Tanenbaum's books about operating systems and distributed systems in particular. The books contain knowledge you'll be able to apply to almost every system you develop software for.
..one should have a look at the Darwin Award statistics. How many Darwin Awards have been given to Trekkies, how many have been given to non-Trekkies? I'm afraid this will come out in favour of the Trekkies. However, that doesn't necessarily say anything. Trekkies are just as useless as non-Trekkies, perhaps just wee bit more able to survive.
Does anyone really wonder why Intel's announcement are getting so much press coverage lately?
Well, I don't wonder. It's all looking like good old IBM vs. Amdahl again. Surprising though that Intel seems to think they need to resort to FUD already. Perhaps they really think the heat is on.
Slashdot Mirror
First: Programming Erlang: Software for a Concurrent World
by Joe Armstrong
http://www.pragprog.com/titles/jaerlang/programming-erlang
The Erlang programming language is well suited to develop concurrent programs with.
The second book I'd recommend is
Distributed Systems: Principles and Paradigms, 2/E
by Andrew S. Tanenbaum
http://www.pearsonhighered.com/educator/academic/product/0,,0132392275,00%2Ben-USS_01DBC.html
Not specific to any programming language, but a very good introduction to the concepts and methods used developing distributed systems, as all multi-threaded programs are.
Well, one 16x link can transmit 8 Gibibytes per second. As PCIe is full-duplex, stupid salesdroids and marketingdwarves can be expected to simply add both directions together and use that figure instead. But I agree with you, it is misleading.
PCIe 1.0 does 2,500,000 Transfers per second per lane in each direction. Each transfer transmits one bit of data.
It uses a 8B/10B encoding, therefore you need 10 transfers in order to transmit 8 bits of payload data.
Disregarding further protocol overhead, the best rate you can get is 250,000,000 bytes of payload data per seconds per lane.
16 * 250 * 10^6 = 4 * 10^9 = 4 Gibibytes/s on a 16x link in each direction
with PCIe 2.0 the data rate doubles, therefore the max transfer rate per direction is 8 Gibibytes per second on a 16x link in each direction when you disregard protocol overhead.
https://hiddennetwork.com/
made by the guy behind the ever-funny thedailywtf.com
d'oh, must have overread that one :-(
The almighty journalists at hexus.net seem to be missing out on the fact that alienware is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Dell. As the article fails to elaborate on that fact, it becomes less interesting. What would be interesting indeed is whether Dell is behind this or not, because that might give us a clue about their marketing practices, as well.
Lets start by dealing with each example one-by-one:
Qt: To buy a "commercial" license for Qt gives you the right to use qt in non-free software. If you don't buy a "commercial" license, you can still use Qt but you'll have to comply to the GPL. This has ABSOLUTELY NOTHING TO DO with the question of getting support or not. As long as the GPL is ok for your business model, you can go to other companies than Trolltech in order to get a support contract for Qt, that's how Free Software works. Secondly, the "commercial" Qt license does give you more than simply the right to use the Qt libraries and entitlement to support, it also gives you the complete source code and the right to modify it as you see fit! MSVS won't give you that for any money in the world. Additionally, the renewal fees at Trolltech's webpage suggest that the yearly support comes at a price tag of about $1000 per seat, which is much closer to the price tag you've listed for MSVS.
Embedded Linux: I can't comment on that as you do not give enough data. However, my impression is that quite a number of Embedded Linux vendors violate the GPL anyway and that the pricing's dodgy. On the other hand, $250000 is a cheap price tag for a non-free OS license that gives you the right to integrate it into some piece of hardware and re-sell that piece of hardware as many times as you want. I doubt vxworks or WinCE will give you that, either. Again, the license will give you access to the complete source code, something windriver or ms won't give you unless you pay much more money.
RedHat: You've never heard of things like CentOS, Piebox Enterprise Linux etc. before, do you? Again, you're making the wrong assumption that one particular vendore has a monopoly on support. Get it, with Free Software and freely available source code, this is simply not the case. You can always go to another company in order to get support for a certain Free Software product. Again, ms won't give you no support and no source code for 140 bucks.
cygwin: I don't know what you want to use cygwin for, but I don't know why you'd need a "commercial" license again, either. You can get support for Free Software without paying for a "commercial" license (see above). Do you want to develop non-free software with cygwin? That'll be difficult, mate. cygwin itself is just a wee library, the biggest part of the software available in the cygwin package are GNU tools. These are not available for dual-licensing anyway, using them in non-free software would violate the GPL. You'd have to re-write GNU all yourself again...
Conclusion: You are either clueless or a fudder. You compare apples with oranges and you don't seem to know what you want to do with all that Free Software. It seems your business model is based on freeloading Free Software and converting it into something non-free to make quick money with going the old-fashioned non-free software way. D'oh, why don't you use BSD then? You don't understand how dual-licensing works. You don't realise that with Free Software, the imaginary "original vendor" doesn't have a monopoly on support. The source code is freely available, everyone can get it and maintain that piece of software for you, even you.
who said Germans have no sense of humour ;-)
This is no big news at all. If you'd read the press releases linspire wrote in order to announce their freespire distro you could have foretold it all. Back then linspire already announced they would make cnr free of charge for freespire users. Back then they already promised to open-source the cnr client software. It was just a matter of time, so how is this big news?
This is just another attempt by kevin carmony to get some cheap viral marketing going, and it seems the media is stupid enough again to take the bait.
cnr might be a nice feature for a GNU/Linux distro, but it is by no means essential. It is just another way of locking users in by tying them to some non-free software. Well, why don't you just go back to ms then?
Ryan Gavin's statement about Free/Open Source Software being to complex is a complete no-brainer and doesn't even remotely reflect reality.
The truth is, complexity in computers and computer software is a tricky thing to tackle. As computer systems become more complex, complexity itself becomes a problem as integrating all the different components of high-complexity software into a working system as a whole is getting more difficult.
The perfect example is ms's own windows vista. That piece of software is so complex ms just can't get it to work properly. Delays are the logical consequence. Otoh, Free Software profits from having the source code available, not necessarily reducing complexity but making it easier to get along with it.
Summary: Complexity is a problem for software, but it doesn't matter if that software is free or non-free. Ryan Gavins statement is just what you would expect it to be, a stupid piece of FUD that might sound somewhat sophisticated to a non-guru but every proper software engineer would be rofl about.
A very good generic embedded SDK/compiler suite/distro generator is provided by the OpenEmbedded project:
http://www.openembedded.org/
OE is used to produce various embedded GNU/Linux variants like:
- OpenZaurus (Sharp Zaurus PDAs)
- Familiar (various WinCE PDAs)
- OpenDreambox (Dreambox PVRs)
- OpenSlug, DebianSlug, UcSlugC (LinkSys NSLU2 router platform)
If using GNU/Linux is not a strict requirement, you could always give OpenBSD or NetBSD a try. Especially NetBSD runs on many platforms, the latest release supports 57 different ones.
Aha, so Noam Eppel is craving for attention again. What is it he needs this time, then? Job, money, 53x, foot massage?
Or has he finally realised that They Are Out To Get Him(tm)?
His doomsday scenario reminds me of an "interesting" article on uncoclypedia: http://uncyclopedia.org/wiki/Bird_Flu
Only, the article on uncoclypedia is funnier...
Quite a few comments read like that famous story from ea_spouse. It is hard believe that people are willing to put up with 60+ hours working weeks for several months a stretch without any kind of compensation.
I don't mind doing overtime, as long as I am compensated for it. I usually prefer flexitime arrangements where you can save up the overtime hours you've worked and take days off in lieu after the crunch is over.
Uncompensated overtime is work without getting anything back for it. That concept is not new, it used to be called slavery.
Perhaps people working in the US gaming industry would do well organising themselves and setting up a union or two.
Aha, so I can only do multithreaded programming on GNU/Linux with NPTL'ed glibc or what? Other programming langunguages than C/C++ don't exist or don't do threading. What about other operating systems? Specific solutions to general problems only apply to specific manifestations of the general problem and are therefore useless for most of us.
The only good general advice about learning how to develop software on distributed systems I can give is: Read some of Andrew S Tanenbaum's books about operating systems and distributed systems in particular. The books contain knowledge you'll be able to apply to almost every system you develop software for.
Oh, but these red uniforms look soooo sexy. Obtaining a willing partner for procreation should be a no-brainers with these ;-)
..one should have a look at the Darwin Award statistics. How many Darwin Awards have been given to Trekkies, how many have been given to non-Trekkies? I'm afraid this will come out in favour of the Trekkies. However, that doesn't necessarily say anything. Trekkies are just as useless as non-Trekkies, perhaps just wee bit more able to survive.
Does anyone really wonder why Intel's announcement are getting so much press coverage lately?
Well, I don't wonder. It's all looking like good old IBM vs. Amdahl again. Surprising though that Intel seems to think they need to resort to FUD already. Perhaps they really think the heat is on.