OT: Linux CDs

Just zis Guy said:

On Tue, 15 Mar 2005 22:25:37 -0000, jas0n <[email hidden]> wrote in
message <[email hidden]>:

Quoted message said:

What is it with all this windows bashing! .... We wouldnt be where we
are today without it!

I wouldn't, anyway. My job exists primarily because Windows is so
unreliable :-)

reliably so ..

...d

In article <[email hidden]>,

Simon Brooke said:

Linux for servers, desktops, laptops, mainframes, supercomputers,
phones, embedded systems and various other things. Mac for *media*?
What /do/ you think the movie studios use these days?

FinalCutProHD, Shake, Motion, DVDStudio,... on a Mac?

Shaun

in message <[email hidden]>, jas0n

(') said:

In article <[email hidden]>,
[email hidden] says...

Quoted message said:

in message
<[email hidden]>,

Shaun Murray (') said:

No, no, no. Games consoles are for games, Linux for servers, Mac
for everything else. There's no reason to use a Windows PC unless
of course your PHB has told you your job depends on it. If that's
the case, change jobs - life is too short.

Linux for servers, desktops, laptops, mainframes, supercomputers,
phones, embedded systems and various other things. Mac for *media*?
What /do/ you think the movie studios use these days?

I agree with you about Windows, though.

What is it with all this windows bashing! .... We wouldnt be where we
are today without it!

No, we'd all be a lot better off. On security, speed, reliability,
ergonomics and backwards-compatibility, Windows has always been and is
still a very long way behind the state of the art.

--
[email hidden] (Simon Brooke) http://www.jasmine.org.uk/~simon/
Das Internet is nicht fuer gefingerclicken und giffengrabben... Ist
nicht fuer gewerken bei das dumpkopfen. Das mausklicken sichtseeren
keepen das bandwit-spewin hans in das pockets muss; relaxen und
watchen das cursorblinken. -- quoted from the jargon file

Quoted message said:

No, no, no. Games consoles are for games, Linux for servers, Mac for
everything else. There's no reason to use a Windows PC unless of course
your PHB has told you your job depends on it. If that's the case, change
jobs - life is too short.

Yet so many of us (obviously non-technical) people seem so happy with
our Windows boxes for which we have no obvious use.

Must be the cash we've saved by not buying into Mac. And the time
leftover from not having to configure a *Nix system...

silangdon said:

Yet so many of us (obviously non-technical) people seem so happy with
our Windows boxes for which we have no obvious use.
Must be the cash we've saved by not buying into Mac.

I bought a Mac in 1996 and it was in daily use for eight years. The
replacement cycle for computers in my old-old firm was five years for
Macs and three for PCs. In my experience the initial cost difference
of a Mac over another first-tier manufacturer is easily outweighed by
the savings in longer service life and drastically reduced support
requirements. YM[ac]MV.

Guy
--
May contain traces of irony. Contents liable to settle after posting.
http://www.chapmancentral.co.uk

88% of helmet statistics are made up, 65% of them at CHS, Puget Sound

Ian Smith said:

In my experience, when I've written computational systems featuring
manipulation of big matrices, my own-coded stuff (especially in a high
level language like fortran) just doesn't crunch teh numbers fast
enough.

Which is why I tend to use 4GLs specifically built for scientific array
processing jobs, like IDL, when I'm dealing with big arrays (typically
3D image stacks in my line of work). It might not suit everyone's
needs, but it does suit a lot in science and engineering (NASA use it
extensively), and though I run it under Solaris or XP I note it's
available for Mac OS X.

Pete.
--
Peter Clinch Medical Physics IT Officer
Tel 44 1382 660111 ext. 33637 Univ. of Dundee, Ninewells Hospital
Fax 44 1382 640177 Dundee DD1 9SY Scotland UK
net [email hidden] http://www.dundee.ac.uk/~pjclinch/

James Annan said:

Ian Smith said:

In my experience, when I've written computational systems featuring
manipulation of big matrices, my own-coded stuff (especially in a high
level language like fortran) just doesn't crunch teh numbers fast
enough. You can adopt some tricks by noting that in such problems
your very big matrix is normally also very sparse, but inverting a
millions-of-elements matrix in any general purpose code is not really
something you want to do, even when it is sparse, and even with modern
excess of crunching power.

Oh, I would expect to use LAPACK/LINPACK for the basic stuff.

Is that on a Mac?

So far as I can see, that approach depends for speed on calling
optimized platform dependant sub-routines rejoicing under the catchy
lable 'the BLAS'. A search for such routines turns them up quite
easily for Compaq, HP, IBM, Intel, SGI, and Sun hardware, but Mac...

Quoted message said:

Quoted message said:

Out of interest, when you want a letter to teh bank manager do you
write your own word processor to type it?

No, but someone has already written vi and LaTeX, so I don't need to :-)

I never got round to learning LaTeX, TeX always did enough for me.

regards, Ian SMith
--
|\ /| no .sig
|o o|
|/ \|

Ian Smith said:

On Wed, 16 Mar 2005, James Annan <[email hidden]> wrote:

Quoted message said:

Quoted message said:

Oh, I would expect to use LAPACK/LINPACK for the basic stuff.

Is that on a Mac?

So far as I can see, that approach depends for speed on calling
optimized platform dependant sub-routines rejoicing under the catchy
lable 'the BLAS'. A search for such routines turns them up quite
easily for Compaq, HP, IBM, Intel, SGI, and Sun hardware, but Mac...

First couple of googits for blas mac looked promising, but TBH for my
purposes I am not bothered about speed, just getting some robust code
for routine matrix manipulation. It's all downloadable as fortran, the
only point of BLAS is to get it compiled efficiently AIUI.

Quoted message said:

Quoted message said:

Quoted message said:

Out of interest, when you want a letter to teh bank manager do you
write your own word processor to type it?

No, but someone has already written vi and LaTeX, so I don't need to :-)

I never got round to learning LaTeX, TeX always did enough for me.

I never got round to learning TeX, LaTeX does enough for me :-) Must
admit it is not perhaps the most user-friendly system for brief letters
(not that I write many of them anyway) but is well-established and in
widespread use for (almost) all scientific output.

James

"Simon Brooke" <[email hidden]> wrote in message
news:[email hidden]...

Quoted message said:

Price of a Mac system (with lots of bundled software): £289 delivered.
<URL:http://store.apple.com/Apple/WebObjects/ukstore.woa/90101/>

Don't forget some people (eg me) pay VAT...

cheers,
clive

Simon Brooke said:

Time taken to configure a Linux system from bare hardware: shove CD in
drive, reboot, make coffee, come back and it's all ready to use.

That's a cup of coffee longer than your new UNIX OS X Mac would take, of
course...

Pete.
--
Peter Clinch Medical Physics IT Officer
Tel 44 1382 660111 ext. 33637 Univ. of Dundee, Ninewells Hospital
Fax 44 1382 640177 Dundee DD1 9SY Scotland UK
net [email hidden] http://www.dundee.ac.uk/~pjclinch/

Simon Brooke <[email hidden]> wrote:

: Time taken to configure a Linux system from bare hardware: shove CD in
: drive, reboot, make coffee, come back and it's all ready to use.
: <URL:http://www.knoppix.org/>

And you really believe that? I've installed Linux on lots of machines
and usually nearly everything works...

--
Arthur Clune PGP/GPG Key: http://www.clune.org/pubkey.txt
Don't get me wrong, perl is an OK operating system, but it lacks a
lightweight scripting language -- Walter Dnes

Simon Brooke said:

Price of a Mac system (with lots of bundled software): £289 delivered.
<URL:http://store.apple.com/Apple/WebObjects/ukstore.woa/90101/>

Doesn't include keyboard or monitor though.

John B
Surrounded by macs and pretending to be technical ;-)

JohnB said:

Simon Brooke said:

Price of a Mac system (with lots of bundled software): £289
delivered.
<URL:http://store.apple.com/Apple/WebObjects/ukstore.woa/90101/>

Doesn't include keyboard or monitor though.

Or VAT...

FWIW when TWFKAML bought her iMac about three years ago, it cost about twice
what I had paid for a powerful but relatively toy-free Wintel box not long
before.

--

Dave Larrington - http://www.legslarry.beerdrinkers.co.uk/
World Domination?
Just find a world that's into that kind of thing, then chain to the
floor and walk up and down on it in high heels. (Mr. Sunshine)

in message <[email hidden]>, Arthur Clune

(') said:

Simon Brooke <[email hidden]> wrote:

: Time taken to configure a Linux system from bare hardware: shove CD
: in drive, reboot, make coffee, come back and it's all ready to use.
: <URL:http://www.knoppix.org/>

And you really believe that? I've installed Linux on lots of machines
and usually nearly everything works...

Have you tried Knoppix? It's just amazingly good at hardware probing.
The only thing I've ever had it fail on was an on-board Intel 802.11b
chip.

I do know what you mean, though. The sound currently isn't working on my
desktop, and I can't be bothered to trace down the problem and fix it.

--
[email hidden] (Simon Brooke) http://www.jasmine.org.uk/~simon/

I'm fed up with Life 1.0. I never liked it much and now it's getting
me down. I think I'll upgrade to MSLife 97 -- you know, the one that
comes in a flash new box and within weeks you're crawling with bugs.

On 16/3/05 4:36 pm, in article [email hidden], "Dave

Larrington said:

JohnB said:

Simon Brooke said:

Price of a Mac system (with lots of bundled software): £289
delivered.
<URL:http://store.apple.com/Apple/WebObjects/ukstore.woa/90101/>

Doesn't include keyboard or monitor though.

Or VAT...

FWIW when TWFKAML bought her iMac about three years ago, it cost about twice
what I had paid for a powerful but relatively toy-free Wintel box not long
before.

Well, I'm writing this on a Mac that should last as long as it's
prececessor, or about three times as long as an x86 laptop of similar price.
It's predecessor suffered a hardware failure (broken case hinge) which makes
it not so useful for portability but is now used for software testing.

My family use my 'work computer at home' which is an iMac of dubious vintage
(first model with a 20Gb HDD) and even my 3 year old can manage that. All
have their own accounts.

The house server and firewall is a Linux PC. Mandrake (with urpmi it rivals
Debian/gentoo for ease of maintenance).

The only thing I'd want a Windows PC for would be Memory Map, unless similar
software is availabel for Mac/Linux.

...d

James Annan said:

I would write my own, in fortran, and it would run for free.
Although I supposed it might be worth paying for a good
compiler.

Fortran? Now there's a name I've not seen in a while. I learned to program
in that back in 1979. I've forgotten it all now though. We were recommended
to get A Fortran colouring book to help us study.
--
Mark

1x1 wheel, 3x2 wheels & 1x3 wheels.

the.Mark said:

James Annan said:

I would write my own, in fortran, and it would run for free.
Although I supposed it might be worth paying for a good
compiler.

Fortran? Now there's a name I've not seen in a while. I learned to program
in that back in 1979. I've forgotten it all now though. We were recommended
to get A Fortran colouring book to help us study.

ITYM FORTRAN ;-) Still the best scientific language around, IMO.

R.

On 16/3/05 10:32 pm, in article [email hidden],

Richard said:

the.Mark said:

James Annan said:

I would write my own, in fortran, and it would run for free.
Although I supposed it might be worth paying for a good
compiler.

Fortran? Now there's a name I've not seen in a while. I learned to program
in that back in 1979. I've forgotten it all now though. We were recommended
to get A Fortran colouring book to help us study.

ITYM FORTRAN ;-) Still the best scientific language around, IMO.

And the joke goes that physicists still write in FORTRAN, no matter which
language they are using.. It is one of those that I haven't quite got around
to learning.

...d

Right, that's setlled it then. Nobody wants them :-)

Geeky coffee mats they are then ...

--
Microsoft Sam speaks his mind:
www.artybee.net/sam_speaks_his_mind.mp3

Richard said:

ITYM FORTRAN ;-) Still the best scientific language around, IMO.

Depends on what science you're doing. If you've got a big array
crunching job where you know how big everything is in advance, want to
let it stew to output bits rather than be interactive or send out
pictures and have a good F90 compiler, yes, it's as good as anything
going, /especially/ on parallel processing hardware (but note comment
about "good F90 compiler"😉.

FORTRAN 77 is still Out There being used though, and is ghastly. Sorry,
but COMMON blocks, 6 letter variable names and no dynamic memory
allocation really do make it a Work Of Stan.

Pete.
--
Peter Clinch Medical Physics IT Officer
Tel 44 1382 660111 ext. 33637 Univ. of Dundee, Ninewells Hospital
Fax 44 1382 640177 Dundee DD1 9SY Scotland UK
net [email hidden] http://www.dundee.ac.uk/~pjclinch/