Just ask ArsTechnica how it worked out for them when they tried to pull that crap and then got beligerant towards their longtime readers when they called them on it.
I'm sorry.. I agree with everything in your post, but I think, perhaps unintentionally by phrasing, you're short changing TOS here. The original one was almost entirely about social commentary, and it did a fantastic job. Thats why we're still talking about it decades later. Watch TOS through the lens of the times: cold war, racial instability, space race, technology leaps, counterculture, the end of imperialism.. All issues addressed head on.. in fact, one could argue it went too far. TNG also had some of this, but the time it was written in didn't allow such fertile ground for such work. Really, TNG is true to the series, but TOS is far and away the standard bearer for social commentary.
Things that are completely lacking in the reboot, as pretty much everyone agrees.
An early boss put it to me this way: In the corporate world, you are only ever going to be motivated to be just better enough than the competition to convince people to buy your product over theirs. If there are competiters, that means you get into a spiral of 'little advancement by one, followed by copying and little advancement in the others.".. its slow innovation. In a monopoly, you get no innovation at all.
In the open source world, you're motivated by what the problem really is. You're doing it to make a batter product, that meets a better need. It leads to much greater innovation. You don't stop when you're better than the competators. Whats more, if the need is great, anyone else can move it forward, not just the company/individual.
This is not unique microsoft, its something nearly every company struggles with.
Just for the record, I find the linux manpages to be extremely helpful and well put together. And that's good, because I can never seem to remember the order of the damned arguments to memcpy(), even after 19+ years of unix programming.
Ummm.. No. The toll on I-95 near the MD/Del line is in Delaware and run by Delaware people, and that's where all the money goes. Just like the DE memorial bridge from NJ. If you can prove otherwise, I'd like to know.
A quick look at google maps confirms it. The toll is the I-95 toll is located about a mile inside of Delaware. I know of no law of interstate commerce that would allow Maryland to run a toll boot on Delaware land.
Ummm.. No. The toll on I-95 near the MD/Del line is in Delaware and run by Delaware people, and that's where all the money goes. Just like the DE memorial bridge from NJ. If you can prove otherwise, I'd like to know.
And yes, you can avoid it, but troopers hang out on those backroads too to catch people avoiding it.. while technically not illegal, they will watch you like a hawk and get your for any infraction. And guess what they say on the side of their cars? Delaware.
Delaware has 6 miles of the most heavily traffic'ed road on the east coast running through the top tip of the state, and they use that revenue stream to the fullest.
MD's no saint (see the $4 northbound toll going over the susquehanna which used to be significantly less not all that long ago), but Delaware is much, much worse.
I grew up in Harford County, MD, went to college in upstate new york and lives in boston for several more years, I paid a -lot- of money to Delaware.
The agreement between Apple and MS is between two private, proprietary companies.
The difference is that Microsoft has openly been sabre rattling and spreading FUD that they will sue Linux users over intellectual property that is supposedly protected in SuSE due to this agreement. By entering into the agreement, Novell has (rightly or wrongly) lent credibility to these claims. This hurts community as a whole.
I don't game much anymore, but the games I used to play to the point where I knew them inside and out and would just play them to, well, think about something else... were mainly sports games:
- Super Tennis - NES Open - Bases Loaded 2 - One Must Fall 2049 - Blades of Steel
And the oddball: - Pool Of Radiance, the original C64 version. I still know where hidden treasures are!
and lately, College Hoops 2k5 and ESPN NFL 2k5. And, of course, SPIDER SOLITARE!
Games like Civ4 I play because they're hard for me, I would hardly call them relaxing:)
Somehow I think that giving a cute girl (whether she works in an IT department or not) a capacitor necklace would make for a pretty awkward moment. Especially if they weren't totally discharged....
Awww, cut the guy a little slack... he's just trying to make sparks fly.
Yes, OSX users have lost something, but they've also gained something in return: a moderately faster platform. Linux/PPC users have lost much more.. a comodity platform with comparable performance to the mainstream. And, quite frankly, my experience is that Linux flies on PPC, in some ways faster than on x86.
Can anyone tell me where you can find a PPC-based worstation, besides Apple? preferably PPC970, not power4? Call me crazy, I doubt anyone will really make PPC machines anymor outside of IBM, no matter how much they try and "open up" the architecture.
They're playing a little game here. It's numa. Every CPU gets full bandwith to its local memory. So if you have an app that has 4 threads, one on each processor, then each gets the full bandwitch to it's local memory. Add another 4 processors, and another 4 threads, and you get "double the bandwidth" because all 8 processes get the full bandwidth on thier local CPU.
Now, bandwidth -between- processors, that's another story... Sicne the Hammer has only 3 links, you can only do a 2D mesh....so the more processors you add, the more demand there is on the HT bus. That's why, for the current generations planned, they're only looking at most 8-way.. In reality, now that there at HT switches, you could scale almost infinitely higher.. but the more you add, the higher the latency, and the lower the bandwidth..
Yes, intel's compiler is faster. For intel chips. However, I have heard reliable sources say that Intel's compiler is guilty of the same problems that a lot of "vendor specific" compilers suffer from... It is great for compiling SPEC, but not much else. For starters, the front end is not GCC compatible, so you can not compile the linux kernel with it. Secondly, many times, it sacrifices precision for performance. Ask the creater of ScienceMark.
This isn't to say that GCC doesn't need help. One of the biggest areas GCC needs help in is prefetch analysis. This would benefit all platforms, especially RISC and x86... Other compilers have had this optimisation for a looong time, and I bet that the addition of it to GCC would easily make up 60-70% of the difference with intel's compiler.
Other reasons the intel compiler won't replace GCC:
1) Only optimised for intel X86 CPU's. What about all the PPC, MIPS, Sparc people? What about AMD?
2) Doesn't support "GCC-ism's" in the pre-processor (many codes won't compile without modification.)
3) Closed source, binary only.
4) If you really need it, you can get closed source compilers with better performance (for intel and AMD chips) from other sites. Do a google search for "OpenMP, Linux, C" and see what i mean.
This is a problem with the way the AGP GART memory mapping is handled in the linux kernel. So once again, slashdot got it wrong. Please, skim the articles in question before posting..It is a minor, elusive buglet in the linux kernel memory management.
This is all caused by AGP. Once again, the race for more frames per second in quake3 has caused a stability damaging technology to become mainstream.
Slackware was around long before David. Slackware will continue to be around long after David. He made some good tools, and I'm sorry he's decided not to develope them anymore, but se la vi.
To be quite honest, as a long time slackware user, I've never used his tools, and I never saw the need. It's slackware's lack of "sophisticated package management" that distinguishes it from the others.. and whether you agree with that or not, some people like it. And will continue to use it.
And I don't think the -real- driving force behind slackware, Peter, will be giving up on it anytime soon... even if he's no longer getting paid for it.
1 workstation of thier choosing. This should be a dual processor machine, used mostly for compilations, building, readiny company email, etc...
1 cheap development/crash-and-burn box. Useful for remote debugging and so they can continue to work even when they screw things up. (2 cheap boxes if doing network development)
1 good monitor of thier choosing, or the option to get 2 lesser quality monitors for dual displays if they like.. as long as it doesn't get too expensive.
1 cheap network hub/switch (5 ports)
Complete control over at least the crash-n-burn box, and moderate to complete control over their workstation.
This provides the developer with a comfortable environment that they helped build for themselves. It allows the to continue development (and reading email, etc) even when thier app completely hoses the system. It also gives them enough control over the system environment to test applications in real world situations.
I do kernel development, and this environment works out wonderfully for me and the others in my company.
The trident BladeXP is a low end chip, but offers several nice things. For starters, it uses up a total of.8W of power. It has an integrated T&L Engine, and it's windows performance is decent. It is not an SMA chipset either. It has it's own framebuffer.
HP is the major vendor that ships with Trident in thier laptops. Complain to HP as well, and tell them they're losing business. THEY will put pressure on trident.
I baught my HP N5430 (Duron 850) BECAUSE it has a trident chip and not an ATI one. (Compaq ships their duron notebooks with ATI). I figured that trident has always supported Linux, so this would be no different.. Now HP got my money, Trident got my money, and I got shafted.
I've been in touch with trident to get the docs, and they gave me the Blade3D (same line as CyberBlade series in Vaio's, etc..) specs easily enough, but the BladeXP requires a restrictive NDA.
Alan Houraine (sp?) is the XFree developer who's been workingon this, and is having the same problem I did.
The 2D support is unaccelerated, but quite tolerable with shadowFB enabled for this chipset. I'm writing this from my laptop now and in general, I'm quite happy about how 2D is working. Makes me wonder just how good accelerated 2D would be. Go
here for info on how to configure this chip under Linux.
It's weird it doesn't hit all banshee's though. Mine was able to run a sourceforge DRI snapshot from about a month ago just fine (with the modified slower ram timings). and my roomate's PCI OEM Banshee works just fine right out of the box with 4.1.0. very very weird.
voodoo3 for $30 locally, probably not;) pricewatch.com, sure.
Do you have the Creative Banshee? If so, that's your problem. Creative used underspec'd ram on some of thier cards. I talked with Daryll Strouse(sp?) about this at ALS last year (I happen to have these cards) and he was willing to put in an option "SlowRam" to use less aggressive timings on these cards, which would work. (The official TDFX drivers, may they rest in peace, had a similar patch applied, but it slowed down access for ALL banshee's with sgram)
Solution: contact me (clemej@pop3free.comCANNEDMEAT), my slashdot info is very outdated.), and I'll send you the patch from the X3 tree, you can find a way to apply it to X4. and then compile your own X. My attempts to make a SlowRam patch seemed straight forward enough, but never worked. Or, spend the 30$ and get a voodoo3. better performance, much more stable. I'm running X4.1.0 now on my Voodoo3 2000 PCI with DRI, and it runs great. Beats my old creative AGP banshee to a bloody pulp.
Staying with a buggy banshee means you're gonna have to recompile. A lot.
If that isn't your problem, will, then the best I can say is, IWFM.
Rambus RAM (RDRAM) is not all that bad. As a technology, it's pretty good. It's not something i would choose for my workstation, but for high bandwidth uses it's very good. I, for one, would like to see an Athlon RDRAM chipset for scientific computing.. or an Alpha one.
When you're not making enough money and decide that you're going to try and blackmail everyone else in your marketspace instead of building a better competing product, then you lose all of my respect.
Rambus got what it deserved.
It seems to me that everyone here is focusing on "The Demise of Cray". I've worked side by side with Cray employees and Tera ones. They're a perfect match, reguardless of who's funding what.
Tera's revolutionary MTA has been proven to work very well. The best of both a vector and a MPP. Cray's SV1 may have been a flop, but the SV2 promises not to be. I guess I'm just interested in pure performance, and I, for one, can't wait to see what a combined Tera/Cray company pulls out.
Imagine: Tera compilers for an SV2? or a Tera with all the I/O and experience of a Cray?
excuse me, I think I'm drowning in my own drool...
I came over the DOSland ~ 1995 and just needed a good editor. Slackware included jed, and I was hooked. I -STILL- use it wherever I go, and I keep turning more and more people onto it (and slackware for that matter)
John E Davis did a hell of a job on this one, and the new menuing system is very very cool and useful. I wish more people would realize it's not just an "emacs clone".. it's a lot more powerful.
Personally, while I don't think they should win because they're a relative newcomer to the movement (and people like Becker/Fred Fish/DJ have been working for the cause for much longer), I'm very happy to see SGI being nominated. Of all the companies that have joined the Linux bandwagon, they seem the be the largest one that "gets it". While I may not always agree with what they do or plan to do, I'm glad to see them nominated because they should get some recognition for wat they're doing.
Happy owner of a $650 Indigo2, soon to be running Linux, PM.
Slashdot Mirror
I have never successfully gotten Myst to run.
Just ask ArsTechnica how it worked out for them when they tried to pull that crap and then got beligerant towards their longtime readers when they called them on it.
I would, but haven't read their site since.
"The original did a good job too."
I'm sorry.. I agree with everything in your post, but I think, perhaps unintentionally by phrasing, you're short changing TOS here. The original one was almost entirely about social commentary, and it did a fantastic job. Thats why we're still talking about it decades later. Watch TOS through the lens of the times: cold war, racial instability, space race, technology leaps, counterculture, the end of imperialism.. All issues addressed head on.. in fact, one could argue it went too far. TNG also had some of this, but the time it was written in didn't allow such fertile ground for such work. Really, TNG is true to the series, but TOS is far and away the standard bearer for social commentary.
Things that are completely lacking in the reboot, as pretty much everyone agrees.
An early boss put it to me this way: In the corporate world, you are only ever going to be motivated to be just better enough than the competition to convince people to buy your product over theirs. If there are competiters, that means you get into a spiral of 'little advancement by one, followed by copying and little advancement in the others.".. its slow innovation. In a monopoly, you get no innovation at all.
In the open source world, you're motivated by what the problem really is. You're doing it to make a batter product, that meets a better need. It leads to much greater innovation. You don't stop when you're better than the competators. Whats more, if the need is great, anyone else can move it forward, not just the company/individual.
This is not unique microsoft, its something nearly every company struggles with.
Just for the record, I find the linux manpages to be extremely helpful and well put together. And that's good, because I can never seem to remember the order of the damned arguments to memcpy(), even after 19+ years of unix programming.
Way offtopic, but..
Ummm.. No. The toll on I-95 near the MD/Del line is in Delaware and run by Delaware people, and that's where all the money goes. Just like the DE memorial bridge from NJ. If you can prove otherwise, I'd like to know.
A quick look at google maps confirms it. The toll is the I-95 toll is located about a mile inside of Delaware. I know of no law of interstate commerce that would allow Maryland to run a toll boot on Delaware land.http://xkcd.com/386/
Way offtopic, but..
Ummm.. No. The toll on I-95 near the MD/Del line is in Delaware and run by Delaware people, and that's where all the money goes. Just like the DE memorial bridge from NJ. If you can prove otherwise, I'd like to know.
And yes, you can avoid it, but troopers hang out on those backroads too to catch people avoiding it.. while technically not illegal, they will watch you like a hawk and get your for any infraction. And guess what they say on the side of their cars? Delaware.
Delaware has 6 miles of the most heavily traffic'ed road on the east coast running through the top tip of the state, and they use that revenue stream to the fullest.
MD's no saint (see the $4 northbound toll going over the susquehanna which used to be significantly less not all that long ago), but Delaware is much, much worse.
I grew up in Harford County, MD, went to college in upstate new york and lives in boston for several more years, I paid a -lot- of money to Delaware.
The agreement between Apple and MS is between two private, proprietary companies.
The difference is that Microsoft has openly been sabre rattling and spreading FUD that they will sue Linux users over intellectual property that is supposedly protected in SuSE due to this agreement. By entering into the agreement, Novell has (rightly or wrongly) lent credibility to these claims. This hurts community as a whole.
That's a big distinction.
I don't game much anymore, but the games I used to play to the point where I knew them inside and out and would just play them to, well, think about something else... were mainly sports games:
:)
- Super Tennis
- NES Open
- Bases Loaded 2
- One Must Fall 2049
- Blades of Steel
And the oddball:
- Pool Of Radiance, the original C64 version. I still know where hidden treasures are!
and lately, College Hoops 2k5 and ESPN NFL 2k5.
And, of course, SPIDER SOLITARE!
Games like Civ4 I play because they're hard for me, I would hardly call them relaxing
Awww, cut the guy a little slack... he's just trying to make sparks fly.
Yes, OSX users have lost something, but they've also gained something in return: a moderately faster platform. Linux/PPC users have lost much more.. a comodity platform with comparable performance to the mainstream. And, quite frankly, my experience is that Linux flies on PPC, in some ways faster than on x86.
Can anyone tell me where you can find a PPC-based worstation, besides Apple? preferably PPC970, not power4? Call me crazy, I doubt anyone will really make PPC machines anymor outside of IBM, no matter how much they try and "open up" the architecture.
About the bandwidth...
They're playing a little game here. It's numa. Every CPU gets full bandwith to its local memory. So if you have an app that has 4 threads, one on each processor, then each gets the full bandwitch to it's local memory. Add another 4 processors, and another 4 threads, and you get "double the bandwidth" because all 8 processes get the full bandwidth on thier local CPU.
Now, bandwidth -between- processors, that's another story... Sicne the Hammer has only 3 links, you can only do a 2D mesh....so the more processors you add, the more demand there is on the HT bus. That's why, for the current generations planned, they're only looking at most 8-way.. In reality, now that there at HT switches, you could scale almost infinitely higher.. but the more you add, the higher the latency, and the lower the bandwidth..
god i'm a geek... i love this stuff...
pm.
Yes, intel's compiler is faster. For intel chips. However, I have heard reliable sources say that Intel's compiler is guilty of the same problems that a lot of "vendor specific" compilers suffer from... It is great for compiling SPEC, but not much else. For starters, the front end is not GCC compatible, so you can not compile the linux kernel with it. Secondly, many times, it sacrifices precision for performance. Ask the creater of ScienceMark.
This isn't to say that GCC doesn't need help. One of the biggest areas GCC needs help in is prefetch analysis. This would benefit all platforms, especially RISC and x86... Other compilers have had this optimisation for a looong time, and I bet that the addition of it to GCC would easily make up 60-70% of the difference with intel's compiler.
Other reasons the intel compiler won't replace GCC:
1) Only optimised for intel X86 CPU's. What about all the PPC, MIPS, Sparc people? What about AMD?
2) Doesn't support "GCC-ism's" in the pre-processor (many codes won't compile without modification.)
3) Closed source, binary only.
4) If you really need it, you can get closed source compilers with better performance (for intel and AMD chips) from other sites. Do a google search for "OpenMP, Linux, C" and see what i mean.
just my 2 cents..
pm.
This is a problem with the way the AGP GART memory mapping is handled in the linux kernel. So once again, slashdot got it wrong. Please, skim the articles in question before posting..It is a minor, elusive buglet in the linux kernel memory management.
This is all caused by AGP. Once again, the race for more frames per second in quake3 has caused a stability damaging technology to become mainstream.
ugh..
john.c
Slackware was around long before David. Slackware will continue to be around long after David. He made some good tools, and I'm sorry he's decided not to develope them anymore, but se la vi.
To be quite honest, as a long time slackware user, I've never used his tools, and I never saw the need. It's slackware's lack of "sophisticated package management" that distinguishes it from the others.. and whether you agree with that or not, some people like it. And will continue to use it.
And I don't think the -real- driving force behind slackware, Peter, will be giving up on it anytime soon... even if he's no longer getting paid for it.
pm.
1 workstation of thier choosing. This should be a dual processor machine, used mostly for compilations, building, readiny company email, etc...
1 cheap development/crash-and-burn box. Useful for remote debugging and so they can continue to work even when they screw things up. (2 cheap boxes if doing network development)
1 good monitor of thier choosing, or the option to get 2 lesser quality monitors for dual displays if they like.. as long as it doesn't get too expensive.
1 cheap network hub/switch (5 ports)
Complete control over at least the crash-n-burn box, and moderate to complete control over their workstation.
This provides the developer with a comfortable environment that they helped build for themselves. It allows the to continue development (and reading email, etc) even when thier app completely hoses the system. It also gives them enough control over the system environment to test applications in real world situations.
I do kernel development, and this environment works out wonderfully for me and the others in my company.
just my 2 cents.
A wide range of comments:
.8W of power. It has an integrated T&L Engine, and it's windows performance is decent. It is not an SMA chipset either. It has it's own framebuffer.
The trident BladeXP is a low end chip, but offers several nice things. For starters, it uses up a total of
HP is the major vendor that ships with Trident in thier laptops. Complain to HP as well, and tell them they're losing business. THEY will put pressure on trident.
I baught my HP N5430 (Duron 850) BECAUSE it has a trident chip and not an ATI one. (Compaq ships their duron notebooks with ATI). I figured that trident has always supported Linux, so this would be no different.. Now HP got my money, Trident got my money, and I got shafted.
I've been in touch with trident to get the docs, and they gave me the Blade3D (same line as CyberBlade series in Vaio's, etc..) specs easily enough, but the BladeXP requires a restrictive NDA.
Alan Houraine (sp?) is the XFree developer who's been workingon this, and is having the same problem I did.
The 2D support is unaccelerated, but quite tolerable with shadowFB enabled for this chipset. I'm writing this from my laptop now and in general, I'm quite happy about how 2D is working. Makes me wonder just how good accelerated 2D would be. Go here for info on how to configure this chip under Linux.
pm.
"The Speed Demon that Is Tux 2.0"
Shouldn't that be Daemon?
- --
It's weird it doesn't hit all banshee's though. Mine was able to run a sourceforge DRI snapshot from about a month ago just fine (with the modified slower ram timings). and my roomate's PCI OEM Banshee works just fine right out of the box with 4.1.0. very very weird.
;) pricewatch.com, sure.
voodoo3 for $30 locally, probably not
Good luck.
pm.
- --
Do you have the Creative Banshee? If so, that's your problem. Creative used underspec'd ram on some of thier cards. I talked with Daryll Strouse(sp?) about this at ALS last year (I happen to have these cards) and he was willing to put in an option "SlowRam" to use less aggressive timings on these cards, which would work. (The official TDFX drivers, may they rest in peace, had a similar patch applied, but it slowed down access for ALL banshee's with sgram)
Solution: contact me (clemej@pop3free.comCANNEDMEAT), my slashdot info is very outdated.), and I'll send you the patch from the X3 tree, you can find a way to apply it to X4. and then compile your own X. My attempts to make a SlowRam patch seemed straight forward enough, but never worked. Or, spend the 30$ and get a voodoo3. better performance, much more stable. I'm running X4.1.0 now on my Voodoo3 2000 PCI with DRI, and it runs great. Beats my old creative AGP banshee to a bloody pulp.
Staying with a buggy banshee means you're gonna have to recompile. A lot.
If that isn't your problem, will, then the best I can say is, IWFM.
pm.
- --
Rambus RAM (RDRAM) is not all that bad. As a technology, it's pretty good. It's not something i would choose for my workstation, but for high bandwidth uses it's very good. I, for one, would like to see an Athlon RDRAM chipset for scientific computing.. or an Alpha one. When you're not making enough money and decide that you're going to try and blackmail everyone else in your marketspace instead of building a better competing product, then you lose all of my respect. Rambus got what it deserved.
It seems to me that everyone here is focusing on "The Demise of Cray". I've worked side by side with Cray employees and Tera ones. They're a perfect match, reguardless of who's funding what.
Tera's revolutionary MTA has been proven to work very well. The best of both a vector and a MPP.
Cray's SV1 may have been a flop, but the SV2 promises not to be. I guess I'm just interested in pure performance, and I, for one, can't wait to see what a combined Tera/Cray company pulls out.
Imagine: Tera compilers for an SV2? or a Tera with all the I/O and experience of a Cray?
excuse me, I think I'm drowning in my own drool...
yep, cast my vote for that one too...
I came over the DOSland ~ 1995 and just needed a good editor. Slackware included jed, and I was hooked. I -STILL- use it wherever I go, and I keep turning more and more people onto it (and slackware for that matter)
John E Davis did a hell of a job on this one, and the new menuing system is very very cool and useful. I wish more people would realize it's not just an "emacs clone".. it's a lot more powerful.
cast my vote for the unsung editor, JED.
PM.
Personally, while I don't think they should win because they're a relative newcomer to the movement (and people like Becker/Fred Fish/DJ have been working for the cause for much longer), I'm very happy to see SGI being nominated. Of all the companies that have joined the Linux bandwagon, they seem the be the largest one that "gets it". While I may not always agree with what they do or plan to do, I'm glad to see them nominated because they should get some recognition for wat they're doing.
Happy owner of a $650 Indigo2, soon to be running Linux,
PM.