Never said I was a fontographer. As for the questions in my second post, I was simply playing devil's advocate in order to get some more information. Again, never said you were wrong, and just asked for a comment on the UNESCO document.
Very clear now, and makes perfect sense. Sorry if I ruffled your feathers in the process.
All the lawyerese aside, what you're saying is companies like Linotype, Adobe, etc. that sell purported copyrighted fonts are in fact breaking the law? How's that work? How can they sell a font that technically has no intellectual property rights associated with it? How are text-based company logos trademarked every day if that's the case? Especially those like IBM, SGI, and those that consist solely of stylized type? I'm definitely not saying your wrong, your argument speaks for itself, but there are hundreds of cases where your argument seems to have fallen flat on its face in practice. Just want to continue the discussion (if you have the time) and better educate myself, really. I have a few lawyer friends and it is always fascinating to hear how so many common practices are actually not legal at all.
Actually, typefaces are copyrighted and copyrightable. Let me explain why. Typefaces are a different animal in that the shape of the letters and how they are constructed can only be done one way. This is why they can be copyrighted. It's not the computer program that creates them that instills the copyright. It's the specific shape of the letters that makes them able to be copyrighted. BUT, it's also this specific copyrightable shape that makes it easy for other fontographers to create variants (small changes in the shapes of the letters) that closely resemble the work being mimicked and then copyright those variants for themselves. This shape being copyrighted protects the font no matter what creates or where it is used. It's the same thing as copyrighting a company logo. Trust me, I do identity design for a living!
BUZZ! Wrong! You cannot copyright, nor patent an artistic style. As long as Google did not use an actual piece of Miro's work, but only paid homage to his style, there is no violation of ANY law, civil, criminal, or "moral" for that matter. It's pure horse manure. Obviously you and many others here are not artists and are totally unfamiliar with the subject of art and art history; along with copyright and patent law.
As a creative professional I am appalled by the reaction of Dali's and Miro's estate with regard to Google paying tribute, and, yes, generating FREE public awareness (as in advertising) for an artist's works. I'm sorry but imitation is the purest form of flattery. It is done over and over again in art, architecture, and music, and has been done for centuries. You don't see Mario Botta, or Richard Meier, or the estate of Corbusier suing other architects for 'borrowing' design elements to put in their own designs. And, you can't tell me that architecture isn't a 'visual medium' in the built form. These people should be ashamed of themselves. Clearly, they are money grubbing scumbags!
There have been some comments about fair use in the thread. Let me just say that this type of activity does not fall under fair use. Fair use applies to using the 'actual' artwork for non-profit purposes, i.e., education and the like. This falls under imitation, where the style used to depict something is borrowed from another artist. There's absolutely NOTHING wrong with that, or there would have been only one impressionist artist, only one jazz musician, and only one music video because everyone else that ever made a work in the same style would have been sued. It's utterly ridiculous!
Let me leave my impressions of the article out and just give a little tidbit about why the IB (and other high-end interconnect companies) don't publish their prices. The reason is, they really don't have fixed prices. They will almost always do a custom pricing based on the size of your cluster and whether or not you will be a repeat customer (based on the nature of your business, etc.). Don't be afraid to call these guys, their really not hounds that will bug the crap out of you like a software sales guy. Most of them are extremely technical (unlike a lot of IT sales folks) coming from an engineering background. They are very reasonable people in that if they call you back a couple times and you don't answer, they won't call you again unless you call them...ever! The reason being, the ones that work for the smaller/earlier phase companies don't have the time to chase you down. They've got to get the big sales and will really not bother you if you're only gonna build a 64 (or less) node cluster and don't get back to them. The ones at the more established companies will know you just don't want to be bothered after they do a bit of due diligence when it comes to follow up. So, bottom line, don't be afraid to call these guys because you might just get a great deal out of it!
P.S. No I'm not a sales person for one of these companies, nor do I own any stock. I've just dealt with just about all of them over the last three years building clusters.
You're talking bandwidth in a read/write to a filesystem. You are not taking into consideration applications that are latency bound, or are both latency and bandwidth bound when passing information from node to node, let alone writing to a filesystem. We run a number of scientific codes on our IB-based cluster. Some of these codes are slinging around up to 20GB of data passing messages between nodes, and this is memory copies not filesystem read/wries. It has to be fast (lower the latency the better for these particular codes), and it has to have a data path capable of having large amounts of data (above 512 MB/s) going in each direction (TX and RX) at the same time.
It ain't bananas, it's NUTS! But, it does happen. Of course the one application could be running on up to 900 processors (450 nodes) at a time and will generate data files to our storage system in the neighborhood of 250 GB when it's all done. YIKES!
I should clarify that I refer to all open source applications as "code" (mostly because I prefer the source+compile methods over binary packages when available). So, when I say document the code, I'm not just referring to making useful/valuable comments in the lines of the source itself. I'm talking about documenting in detail the configuration and installation processes as well. It was clear from the original poster's example that the latter had not been reasonably done so that even someone with an acknowledgeable bit of experience could install correctly. It's the end-user documentation, not necessarily the source documentation, that I was speaking of that many developers make the mistakes in and often leave key bits dangling because they either don't want to be bothered to write it, are too close to the source/project to be detailed enough, or just plain leave out by accident. Your points about source documentation and early release, i.e., pre-1.0 versions of, community projects are spot on in my view as well. After re-reading the article, the author never states a version so I am not sure where his particular application falls in the grand scheme of things. If it was pre-1.0, I could see a bit of aggravation on the part of the developers not wanting to respond to inane questions. But, to take the actions that were described was a bit over the top, even for pre-1.0 code.
As far as the point of your comment, yes, I agree code should not be modified by just anyone, but we're not talking about code modification. We're talking about the ability to install and use a code to get work done, not code modification.
Let's really open this can of worms up and place blame where blame is due. The developers should, with all ethical correctness, DOCUMENT THEIR CODE!!! The problem is most coders are too close to the code in order to document it to the fullest extent necessary to release it into the public. They take short cuts in the documentation and inherently make gigantic assumptions about the skill level and knowledge of the code's users. It's a very myopic and arrogant pattern of behavior that has propagated throughout the open source community.
With that said, is it really the coder's fault? I say not entirely, it's also the fault of the mentors (or the lack thereof) that taught them how to code. Now this could be a colleague, friend, or former CS professor(s). In a lot of cases I blame the CS professors at the institution I work for and am constantly getting on undergrad and grad student coders I interact with for poor documentation habits.
Don't get me wrong, the arrogance and complete-for lack of a better description-dickheadedness is inexcusable. No one should be allowed to behave that way without consequences, and no one should tolerate such behavior. There's no excuse for it. I'm sure these guys, although probably thinking they know everything, have on occasion needed assistance from an expert in some field and have been treated with dignity and at least a civil amount of respect. I'm sure these same people would EXPLODE if they, say, took their car to a mechanic and the mechanic laughed them out of the garage because they didn't know how to fix a fuel injection system for themselves. There is plenty of documentation available to learn how to do it. Given, the mechanic IS getting paid for his services, but most mechanics also love working on cars. Most open source coders aren't in it for the money (obviously). They're doing what they do because they love/enjoy doing it. If this is so, then they need to take pride in their work and develop a level of aptitude and tolerance when dealing with people with lesser degrees of knowledge and/or experience that want to appreciate and proliferate their work. Proper documentation that is complete and easy for a lay person to understand is a big part of that. Another part of it is learning how to respectfully deal with those who have questions about your work.
There's also the chance that maybe their mother just didn't hug them enough; still not a defense for this kind of behavior.
I'm gonna go ahead and disagree with you there. The network alone is not to blame. Also, keep in mind that the latency differences between most 10GigE implementations and Myrinet are radically different especially once you get above the hardware and protocol levels. They are getting better, Force10's new 10GigE switches being good examples, but they're not that close when you put something like MPI and then a poorly implemented-algorithm wise-application on top of that. Another thing to keep in mind is that there are other interconnect technologies like Infiniband and Quadrics that may give you better performance.
The real scaling issues (in a lot of cases) are within the application itself. Some applications scale really well. I'll use scientific codes as examples. For instance, we've gotten LAMPSS (a molecular dynamics code) to scale very well across our 1024 node, 2048 processor cluster. It is capable of using the entire system to process jobs; all 2048 processors with an Infiniband interconnect and MVAPICH. However, applications like AMBER, another molecular dynamics code, don't scale at all well beyond 256 processors on our system. It's not a fault of the hardware, the network, or the message passing interface in a lot of cases. It's simply that the algorithm used in the code just doesn't scale well beyond a certain point. The code just isn't optimized well, or it just won't scale, period. There are other code bases that are being used by our researchers that do well in an SMP, shared-memory architecture, but simply won't run at all in a distributed memory, cluster architecture. Some because they require a large memory footprint, others simply because the problem the code needs to solve cannot be decomposed and spread across nodes in a cluster. As far as performance goes, we've actually seen some codes, like the quadrature code (APREC) run by David Bailey of LBL, actually achieve super-linear gains. He ran a series of jobs in his quest to do the largest one-dimensional quadrature calculation (which he achieved and published at SC04) starting with one processor and scaling to 512 nodes (1024 processors). At the 16, 64, and 256 processor range, his code actually got 17.66, 69.79, and 270.17 times speed up over a single processor, respectively. Now this is not typical behavior. Typically, you don't get this kind of speed up (usually you do see significantly lower efficiency; in the range of 15 to 20 percent in a lot of cases), and his code did fall off to 919.22 times speed up for 1024 processors. My point is, the application itself has as much impact on performance as the architecture it is being run on. And, don't forget compiler differences, but this could go on for days.
I would strongly urge the original poster to talk to the vendors that develop the software you use and simply ask them if the reason they don't make a cluster version of the software is due to economic reasons, or simply because the application just won't work in that architecture. Remember, computing is a right-tool-for-the-right-job arena. There's no single platform that will do everything for everybody.
Yes, Longhorn/Vista was NOT delayed six years, it was delayed two years from it's originally announced release date of 2004 (so far, i.e., to date). To state that it's six years overdue is far more accurate than a few months. This isn't The Price Is Right for Pete's sake! To blame the kernel switch or otherwise take the focus off the FACT that it is egregiously past the date that it was marketed (and sold via contract) as vapor is pure rubbish. As pointed out in a previous post, this behavior by Microsoft is CLEARLY a tactic for raping the consumer and hurting competitors that would be able to DELIVER A WORKING PRODUCT to customers that wait for something that won't deliver on its originally hyped specifications. It's unethical and immoral at best, which is the basis for laws that prevent such behavior. Microsoft is in violation of the law, and I am utterly shocked that any sane person would defend them. Their products (when shipping) are adequate at best. There are far better, cheaper, AVAILABLE products existing that can do as much if not more than anything Microsoft offers (say games and you will lose a testicle/ovary; I'm talking about getting WORK DONE!). Those with blinders can continue to get raped by the machine, the rest of us sane, open minded, and intelligent people will continue to try to educate ourselves and others that alternatives exist and that they can save money, time, and themselves a ton of stress by breaking away from a single platform, myopic view of the world.
Stick that in your Windows box and smoke it! MEOW!
As a consumer, not a business user, what software might they be re-paying for that wouldn't come pre-installed on the Mac? The only thing I can think of would be a spreadsheet app (If they have Works or Office on their Windows box already), but there are open-source and shareware versions of those available for the Mac (beyond buying MS Office). Yes, iWork is a $79 build-to-order option if they want it, but Text Edit is a fully RTF compliant word processor and even reads and writes MS Word format. Oh! The games. Well, my feelings on that are clear and I don't need to restate them, unless you really want to ask. If you have a quad-G5, a 30" Cinema Display, and tens of thousands of dollars worth of software, you're not the average consumer computer user. That's the market that Apple is trying to "switch".
One quick thing to note. The Dell Inspiron is a consumer laptop equivalent to the iBook (soon to be MacBook sans "Pro"). The fair model comparison should be done pitting a MacBook Pro against a Latitude model as this is something that Dell reps emphasize when selling laptops to educational institutions and the like. The Inspiron is a "bells and whistles" laptop model with ever changing specs where the Latitudes are the more stable configurations with "interchangeable parts [i.e., the removable media bays, docking port replicators, etc.] that don't vary much year-to-year, model-to-model" unless there is a complete revamp in the product line. This again is straight from the horse's mouth, i.e., the local Dell rep as to how they rank and compare their hardware against others. Similarly configured MacBooks (iBooks) will probably run $200 to $300 cheaper than the Pro models, but with smaller (physical size) screens. Although, this has yet to be seen (the screen thing that is).
Just a clarification, Consumer Reports is a non-profit organization and relies on donations for funding as well as private individuals to supply them with products ( http://www.consumerreports.org/cro/aboutus/test.ht m ). Please check your facts before making public statements. To say, "they can AFFORD to do that" is a bit of a stretch. It would be better to say that they do not rely on vendor supplied samples and purchase or receive products from private citizens, but to use a blanket statement saying they can afford it is untrue. They are dirt poor just like the Tom's Hardware and Anandtech folks, the only difference is they have a higher ethical standard (relating to consumer expectations of retail supplied products) and do not rely on vendor donated products to test.
I will say your other comments are spot on. Vendors of any product are notorious for supplying product samples for review that are certainly a pinnacle of quality control that the average consumer will not find off the shelf (or lot, or whatever).
I have worked EXCLUSIVELY on the Mac platform in an IT role for more than 15 years. It's completely myopic to think that someone with more than 10 years of experience in IT would *HAVE* to work with or on a Windows-based PC during that time. Open your eyes people and realize that the world is a much bigger and diverse place than the Microsoft zombie making machine has led you to believe. Just because you haven't experienced it doesn't mean it's not out there.
I will assert my point again, and emend it slightly and say that depending on your subject matter, mode of working, and available tools your choice of medium (whether graphite and paper, oil and canvas, SLR and film, etc.) will determine what is "easier and quicker" to do. I will agree that if I'm doing still life drawings of natural settings, using a pad of paper and a medium such as graphite, colored pencil, or pastels. Why? Because there are certain advantages that are gained (again individual preference has a lot to do with) from actually 'being' in the setting with natural light and other environmental conditions. However, I disagree that this is the only way or even a 'better' way of doing these types of drawings. It's *a* way, one of many that an artist may *choose* to do these types of work. There is nothing wrong with going out into the world, taking a photograph of something you want to later draw on the computer. Heck, I know 'traditional' artists that use this practice to do graphite, pencil, and pastel work! It doesn't make it any less 'real'. Reality is subjective. Your comments were well formed, but extremely subjective and individualized and applying something that works for you to poo-poo an alternative way of doing things is just silly (a polite way of saying ignorant). There is no such things as bad art. There is good art, better art, and exceptional art (based on accepted standards of composition within a style or medium), but bad art is all a matter of taste.
As a former design student, a design professional and instructor I found the post, the article and the first two comments a bit distressing. I'll try to keep my comments concise.
1. Blaming the tools is the first sign of a bad instructor
2. Drawing skills are still extremely valuable and *ARE* taught with digital tools today (Wacom tablets are wonderful)
3. Finding someone to agree (or disagree) that a piece of art is good isn't very hard; it's a matter taste to most, even the 'educated'
4. Drawing on the computer is just as challenging and frustrating as drawing in any other fashion; more so because of the myriad of tools and effects that can be used in a single drawing
5. Most professors that degrade the computer as a design tool are usually computer illiterate or barely literate and can be equated to math instructors that think that we should all go back to slide rules and ditch calculators (although for some types of calculations they may be correct)
My point is, the tool is not to blame. And, because the skills aren't necessarily directly transferrable from one medium to another (from graphite and paper to stylus and tablet, or mouse and screen) doesn't mean the artist is lacking in ability. All artists find a medium that they are comfortable with and will (in a lot of cases) stick to that medium for the duration of their careers. Just because I'm BETTER at drawing on the computer than drawing on a piece of paper doesn't make me a bad artist, creative thinker, or whatever. It means I've found a medium that allows ME to express my creativity.
Slashdot Mirror
donate them to poor urban schools, or third world countries? [like that'll happen, but it's an idea anyway]
It does happen, but that's passing the ecological disaster on, and not dealing with it.
Never said I was a fontographer. As for the questions in my second post, I was simply playing devil's advocate in order to get some more information. Again, never said you were wrong, and just asked for a comment on the UNESCO document.
Very clear now, and makes perfect sense. Sorry if I ruffled your feathers in the process.
Skipping my previous post, could you comment on this:
Font Licensing and Protection Details
All the lawyerese aside, what you're saying is companies like Linotype, Adobe, etc. that sell purported copyrighted fonts are in fact breaking the law? How's that work? How can they sell a font that technically has no intellectual property rights associated with it? How are text-based company logos trademarked every day if that's the case? Especially those like IBM, SGI, and those that consist solely of stylized type? I'm definitely not saying your wrong, your argument speaks for itself, but there are hundreds of cases where your argument seems to have fallen flat on its face in practice. Just want to continue the discussion (if you have the time) and better educate myself, really. I have a few lawyer friends and it is always fascinating to hear how so many common practices are actually not legal at all.
Actually, typefaces are copyrighted and copyrightable. Let me explain why. Typefaces are a different animal in that the shape of the letters and how they are constructed can only be done one way. This is why they can be copyrighted. It's not the computer program that creates them that instills the copyright. It's the specific shape of the letters that makes them able to be copyrighted. BUT, it's also this specific copyrightable shape that makes it easy for other fontographers to create variants (small changes in the shapes of the letters) that closely resemble the work being mimicked and then copyright those variants for themselves. This shape being copyrighted protects the font no matter what creates or where it is used. It's the same thing as copyrighting a company logo. Trust me, I do identity design for a living!
BUZZ! Wrong! You cannot copyright, nor patent an artistic style. As long as Google did not use an actual piece of Miro's work, but only paid homage to his style, there is no violation of ANY law, civil, criminal, or "moral" for that matter. It's pure horse manure. Obviously you and many others here are not artists and are totally unfamiliar with the subject of art and art history; along with copyright and patent law.
Dali would have said there weren't enough genitalia in it. lmao But, you're right on all counts.
You can't patent art! Just FYI for the record. You can copyright art, but you cannot patent it.
As a creative professional I am appalled by the reaction of Dali's and Miro's estate with regard to Google paying tribute, and, yes, generating FREE public awareness (as in advertising) for an artist's works. I'm sorry but imitation is the purest form of flattery. It is done over and over again in art, architecture, and music, and has been done for centuries. You don't see Mario Botta, or Richard Meier, or the estate of Corbusier suing other architects for 'borrowing' design elements to put in their own designs. And, you can't tell me that architecture isn't a 'visual medium' in the built form. These people should be ashamed of themselves. Clearly, they are money grubbing scumbags!
There have been some comments about fair use in the thread. Let me just say that this type of activity does not fall under fair use. Fair use applies to using the 'actual' artwork for non-profit purposes, i.e., education and the like. This falls under imitation, where the style used to depict something is borrowed from another artist. There's absolutely NOTHING wrong with that, or there would have been only one impressionist artist, only one jazz musician, and only one music video because everyone else that ever made a work in the same style would have been sued. It's utterly ridiculous!
Let me leave my impressions of the article out and just give a little tidbit about why the IB (and other high-end interconnect companies) don't publish their prices. The reason is, they really don't have fixed prices. They will almost always do a custom pricing based on the size of your cluster and whether or not you will be a repeat customer (based on the nature of your business, etc.). Don't be afraid to call these guys, their really not hounds that will bug the crap out of you like a software sales guy. Most of them are extremely technical (unlike a lot of IT sales folks) coming from an engineering background. They are very reasonable people in that if they call you back a couple times and you don't answer, they won't call you again unless you call them...ever! The reason being, the ones that work for the smaller/earlier phase companies don't have the time to chase you down. They've got to get the big sales and will really not bother you if you're only gonna build a 64 (or less) node cluster and don't get back to them. The ones at the more established companies will know you just don't want to be bothered after they do a bit of due diligence when it comes to follow up. So, bottom line, don't be afraid to call these guys because you might just get a great deal out of it!
P.S. No I'm not a sales person for one of these companies, nor do I own any stock. I've just dealt with just about all of them over the last three years building clusters.
You're talking bandwidth in a read/write to a filesystem. You are not taking into consideration applications that are latency bound, or are both latency and bandwidth bound when passing information from node to node, let alone writing to a filesystem. We run a number of scientific codes on our IB-based cluster. Some of these codes are slinging around up to 20GB of data passing messages between nodes, and this is memory copies not filesystem read/wries. It has to be fast (lower the latency the better for these particular codes), and it has to have a data path capable of having large amounts of data (above 512 MB/s) going in each direction (TX and RX) at the same time.
It ain't bananas, it's NUTS! But, it does happen. Of course the one application could be running on up to 900 processors (450 nodes) at a time and will generate data files to our storage system in the neighborhood of 250 GB when it's all done. YIKES!
I should clarify that I refer to all open source applications as "code" (mostly because I prefer the source+compile methods over binary packages when available). So, when I say document the code, I'm not just referring to making useful/valuable comments in the lines of the source itself. I'm talking about documenting in detail the configuration and installation processes as well. It was clear from the original poster's example that the latter had not been reasonably done so that even someone with an acknowledgeable bit of experience could install correctly. It's the end-user documentation, not necessarily the source documentation, that I was speaking of that many developers make the mistakes in and often leave key bits dangling because they either don't want to be bothered to write it, are too close to the source/project to be detailed enough, or just plain leave out by accident. Your points about source documentation and early release, i.e., pre-1.0 versions of, community projects are spot on in my view as well. After re-reading the article, the author never states a version so I am not sure where his particular application falls in the grand scheme of things. If it was pre-1.0, I could see a bit of aggravation on the part of the developers not wanting to respond to inane questions. But, to take the actions that were described was a bit over the top, even for pre-1.0 code.
Ok, you got a "Funny", but I'd say you're dead-on "Insightful" on that comment. Brilliant!
Wait, we're not talking about code modification here. We're talking about code use. Documentation for code use (not modification) should be addressed to the lay person with a minimum of systems experience, i.e. they are familiar with a command line or GUI installer process and basic system administration. And, I'm sorry, I teach students how to take complex technical subjects and present them so that the average person walking off the street, with maybe a few questions, can understand the topic being presented, ESM 4714: Scientific Visual Data Analysis and Multimedia. So you can't tell me it's not possible. I've been involved in the class either as an instructor or providing technical and advisory support for more than a decade.
As far as the point of your comment, yes, I agree code should not be modified by just anyone, but we're not talking about code modification. We're talking about the ability to install and use a code to get work done, not code modification.
Let's really open this can of worms up and place blame where blame is due. The developers should, with all ethical correctness, DOCUMENT THEIR CODE!!! The problem is most coders are too close to the code in order to document it to the fullest extent necessary to release it into the public. They take short cuts in the documentation and inherently make gigantic assumptions about the skill level and knowledge of the code's users. It's a very myopic and arrogant pattern of behavior that has propagated throughout the open source community.
With that said, is it really the coder's fault? I say not entirely, it's also the fault of the mentors (or the lack thereof) that taught them how to code. Now this could be a colleague, friend, or former CS professor(s). In a lot of cases I blame the CS professors at the institution I work for and am constantly getting on undergrad and grad student coders I interact with for poor documentation habits.
Don't get me wrong, the arrogance and complete-for lack of a better description-dickheadedness is inexcusable. No one should be allowed to behave that way without consequences, and no one should tolerate such behavior. There's no excuse for it. I'm sure these guys, although probably thinking they know everything, have on occasion needed assistance from an expert in some field and have been treated with dignity and at least a civil amount of respect. I'm sure these same people would EXPLODE if they, say, took their car to a mechanic and the mechanic laughed them out of the garage because they didn't know how to fix a fuel injection system for themselves. There is plenty of documentation available to learn how to do it. Given, the mechanic IS getting paid for his services, but most mechanics also love working on cars. Most open source coders aren't in it for the money (obviously). They're doing what they do because they love/enjoy doing it. If this is so, then they need to take pride in their work and develop a level of aptitude and tolerance when dealing with people with lesser degrees of knowledge and/or experience that want to appreciate and proliferate their work. Proper documentation that is complete and easy for a lay person to understand is a big part of that. Another part of it is learning how to respectfully deal with those who have questions about your work.
There's also the chance that maybe their mother just didn't hug them enough; still not a defense for this kind of behavior.
I'm gonna go ahead and disagree with you there. The network alone is not to blame. Also, keep in mind that the latency differences between most 10GigE implementations and Myrinet are radically different especially once you get above the hardware and protocol levels. They are getting better, Force10's new 10GigE switches being good examples, but they're not that close when you put something like MPI and then a poorly implemented-algorithm wise-application on top of that. Another thing to keep in mind is that there are other interconnect technologies like Infiniband and Quadrics that may give you better performance.
The real scaling issues (in a lot of cases) are within the application itself. Some applications scale really well. I'll use scientific codes as examples. For instance, we've gotten LAMPSS (a molecular dynamics code) to scale very well across our 1024 node, 2048 processor cluster. It is capable of using the entire system to process jobs; all 2048 processors with an Infiniband interconnect and MVAPICH. However, applications like AMBER, another molecular dynamics code, don't scale at all well beyond 256 processors on our system. It's not a fault of the hardware, the network, or the message passing interface in a lot of cases. It's simply that the algorithm used in the code just doesn't scale well beyond a certain point. The code just isn't optimized well, or it just won't scale, period. There are other code bases that are being used by our researchers that do well in an SMP, shared-memory architecture, but simply won't run at all in a distributed memory, cluster architecture. Some because they require a large memory footprint, others simply because the problem the code needs to solve cannot be decomposed and spread across nodes in a cluster. As far as performance goes, we've actually seen some codes, like the quadrature code (APREC) run by David Bailey of LBL, actually achieve super-linear gains. He ran a series of jobs in his quest to do the largest one-dimensional quadrature calculation (which he achieved and published at SC04) starting with one processor and scaling to 512 nodes (1024 processors). At the 16, 64, and 256 processor range, his code actually got 17.66, 69.79, and 270.17 times speed up over a single processor, respectively. Now this is not typical behavior. Typically, you don't get this kind of speed up (usually you do see significantly lower efficiency; in the range of 15 to 20 percent in a lot of cases), and his code did fall off to 919.22 times speed up for 1024 processors. My point is, the application itself has as much impact on performance as the architecture it is being run on. And, don't forget compiler differences, but this could go on for days.
I would strongly urge the original poster to talk to the vendors that develop the software you use and simply ask them if the reason they don't make a cluster version of the software is due to economic reasons, or simply because the application just won't work in that architecture. Remember, computing is a right-tool-for-the-right-job arena. There's no single platform that will do everything for everybody.
Why is this rated "Insightful"?!?!
Yes, Longhorn/Vista was NOT delayed six years, it was delayed two years from it's originally announced release date of 2004 (so far, i.e., to date). To state that it's six years overdue is far more accurate than a few months. This isn't The Price Is Right for Pete's sake! To blame the kernel switch or otherwise take the focus off the FACT that it is egregiously past the date that it was marketed (and sold via contract) as vapor is pure rubbish. As pointed out in a previous post, this behavior by Microsoft is CLEARLY a tactic for raping the consumer and hurting competitors that would be able to DELIVER A WORKING PRODUCT to customers that wait for something that won't deliver on its originally hyped specifications. It's unethical and immoral at best, which is the basis for laws that prevent such behavior. Microsoft is in violation of the law, and I am utterly shocked that any sane person would defend them. Their products (when shipping) are adequate at best. There are far better, cheaper, AVAILABLE products existing that can do as much if not more than anything Microsoft offers (say games and you will lose a testicle/ovary; I'm talking about getting WORK DONE!). Those with blinders can continue to get raped by the machine, the rest of us sane, open minded, and intelligent people will continue to try to educate ourselves and others that alternatives exist and that they can save money, time, and themselves a ton of stress by breaking away from a single platform, myopic view of the world.
Stick that in your Windows box and smoke it! MEOW!
As a consumer, not a business user, what software might they be re-paying for that wouldn't come pre-installed on the Mac? The only thing I can think of would be a spreadsheet app (If they have Works or Office on their Windows box already), but there are open-source and shareware versions of those available for the Mac (beyond buying MS Office). Yes, iWork is a $79 build-to-order option if they want it, but Text Edit is a fully RTF compliant word processor and even reads and writes MS Word format. Oh! The games. Well, my feelings on that are clear and I don't need to restate them, unless you really want to ask. If you have a quad-G5, a 30" Cinema Display, and tens of thousands of dollars worth of software, you're not the average consumer computer user. That's the market that Apple is trying to "switch".
One quick thing to note. The Dell Inspiron is a consumer laptop equivalent to the iBook (soon to be MacBook sans "Pro"). The fair model comparison should be done pitting a MacBook Pro against a Latitude model as this is something that Dell reps emphasize when selling laptops to educational institutions and the like. The Inspiron is a "bells and whistles" laptop model with ever changing specs where the Latitudes are the more stable configurations with "interchangeable parts [i.e., the removable media bays, docking port replicators, etc.] that don't vary much year-to-year, model-to-model" unless there is a complete revamp in the product line. This again is straight from the horse's mouth, i.e., the local Dell rep as to how they rank and compare their hardware against others. Similarly configured MacBooks (iBooks) will probably run $200 to $300 cheaper than the Pro models, but with smaller (physical size) screens. Although, this has yet to be seen (the screen thing that is).
Just a clarification, Consumer Reports is a non-profit organization and relies on donations for funding as well as private individuals to supply them with products ( http://www.consumerreports.org/cro/aboutus/test.ht m ). Please check your facts before making public statements. To say, "they can AFFORD to do that" is a bit of a stretch. It would be better to say that they do not rely on vendor supplied samples and purchase or receive products from private citizens, but to use a blanket statement saying they can afford it is untrue. They are dirt poor just like the Tom's Hardware and Anandtech folks, the only difference is they have a higher ethical standard (relating to consumer expectations of retail supplied products) and do not rely on vendor donated products to test.
I will say your other comments are spot on. Vendors of any product are notorious for supplying product samples for review that are certainly a pinnacle of quality control that the average consumer will not find off the shelf (or lot, or whatever).
I have worked EXCLUSIVELY on the Mac platform in an IT role for more than 15 years. It's completely myopic to think that someone with more than 10 years of experience in IT would *HAVE* to work with or on a Windows-based PC during that time. Open your eyes people and realize that the world is a much bigger and diverse place than the Microsoft zombie making machine has led you to believe. Just because you haven't experienced it doesn't mean it's not out there.
I will assert my point again, and emend it slightly and say that depending on your subject matter, mode of working, and available tools your choice of medium (whether graphite and paper, oil and canvas, SLR and film, etc.) will determine what is "easier and quicker" to do. I will agree that if I'm doing still life drawings of natural settings, using a pad of paper and a medium such as graphite, colored pencil, or pastels. Why? Because there are certain advantages that are gained (again individual preference has a lot to do with) from actually 'being' in the setting with natural light and other environmental conditions. However, I disagree that this is the only way or even a 'better' way of doing these types of drawings. It's *a* way, one of many that an artist may *choose* to do these types of work. There is nothing wrong with going out into the world, taking a photograph of something you want to later draw on the computer. Heck, I know 'traditional' artists that use this practice to do graphite, pencil, and pastel work! It doesn't make it any less 'real'. Reality is subjective. Your comments were well formed, but extremely subjective and individualized and applying something that works for you to poo-poo an alternative way of doing things is just silly (a polite way of saying ignorant). There is no such things as bad art. There is good art, better art, and exceptional art (based on accepted standards of composition within a style or medium), but bad art is all a matter of taste.
As a former design student, a design professional and instructor I found the post, the article and the first two comments a bit distressing. I'll try to keep my comments concise.
1. Blaming the tools is the first sign of a bad instructor
2. Drawing skills are still extremely valuable and *ARE* taught with digital tools today (Wacom tablets are wonderful)
3. Finding someone to agree (or disagree) that a piece of art is good isn't very hard; it's a matter taste to most, even the 'educated'
4. Drawing on the computer is just as challenging and frustrating as drawing in any other fashion; more so because of the myriad of tools and effects that can be used in a single drawing
5. Most professors that degrade the computer as a design tool are usually computer illiterate or barely literate and can be equated to math instructors that think that we should all go back to slide rules and ditch calculators (although for some types of calculations they may be correct)
My point is, the tool is not to blame. And, because the skills aren't necessarily directly transferrable from one medium to another (from graphite and paper to stylus and tablet, or mouse and screen) doesn't mean the artist is lacking in ability. All artists find a medium that they are comfortable with and will (in a lot of cases) stick to that medium for the duration of their careers. Just because I'm BETTER at drawing on the computer than drawing on a piece of paper doesn't make me a bad artist, creative thinker, or whatever. It means I've found a medium that allows ME to express my creativity.