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And the WORD was made flesh, and dwelt among us. (John 1:14) |
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Look, I have used BSD for over 25 years on a variety of workstations (and minicomputers!). I love the system. The lack of specialized software is a real problem for me, and it simply is not cost-effective to write my own for everything I need. |
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And maybe this is a misconception on my part, but I also thought that the highest level of scientific computing, in Universities for Mathematics departments and NASA and nuclear physics labs, etc., ran UNIX - usually in huge superclusters - to do the heavy number crunching their disciplines required (think of where UNIX was first developed and evolved).
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And the WORD was made flesh, and dwelt among us. (John 1:14) |
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Unix was sold initially as a text-processing system for Bell Labs on the powerful PDP-7. The tools for that purpose are really very good, and I still use them. |
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I must have missed that, but if DrJ's comments were referring to biological research, then I have absolutely no experience in that within the context of Unix or Windows. I can't speak accurately on that. Although, my goal is to work as a medical scientist, when I grow up, so we'll see what my experiences are then.
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"UNIX is basically a simple operating system, but you have to be a genius to understand the simplicity." MacBook Pro (Darwin 9), iMac (Darwin 9), iPod Touch (Darwin 9), Dell Optiplex GX620 (FreeBSD 7.1-STABLE) |
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I should add that that fact that I owe him money has nothing to do with my support of his views.
Anyway, to be serious... Mac has always been the favorite of the multimedia--though ironically, often various TV station music videos wouldn't play on Mac. (Hi MTV? You fix that yet?) I think that MS and Apple are probably equally evil--Apple's more insidious because it denies that it's evil. Unfortunately, in the world, much of the time you will come across a situation where you have to use some sort of commercial software. The Shut up and hack answer is ok for hobbyists, but not for professionals who don't have the time or knowledge to do so. |
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I don't have a problem with using commercial software. I'll do that on Unix if I have to, but I'd like to use a Unix as my operating system. I have a specific style of computing, and only Unix fits that style.
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"UNIX is basically a simple operating system, but you have to be a genius to understand the simplicity." MacBook Pro (Darwin 9), iMac (Darwin 9), iPod Touch (Darwin 9), Dell Optiplex GX620 (FreeBSD 7.1-STABLE) |
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I was talking of a user's point of view. In my example above, you won't find soccer mom taking the kids out in a Mac truck. Nor will you find soccer mom trying to install FreeBSD so she can shop online.
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Then, the network features of Unix-like systems, and X11 in particular, really come in handy. For instance, the local school district doesn't run Windows in the elementary schools (with the exception of the odd office computer). And we have 4 secondary school that are Linux everywhere (with a couple of Windows VMs for Simply Accounting). With two more secondary schools going all Linux over the summer. In total, we have around 5000 desktops in the district, and about 4000 of those are Debian, with the remaining slated to be converted to Debian over the next two years. We put 1 uber-server (or two for the secondaries) into the school (dual-Opteron 2 GHz CPU, 4-8 GB RAM, 4x 500 GB HDs in RAID5 or RAID10, 2x gigabit NICs bonded together). Then put in $150 diskless workstations (no HD, no floppy, no CD-ROM, onboard graphics/NIC) for the staff and students. These boot off the network, mount all the system partitions read-only via NFS, and mount the /home partition read-write via NFS. Everything loads off the network, but runs locally. We can outfit a complete elementary school for under $20,000, including a computer lab, a library mini-lab, a computer in every classroom, the office computers, an LAT mini-lab, etc. All it requires is 100 Mbps from the client to the switch, gigabit between the switches, and dual-gigabit to the server (the secondaries have multi-gigabit links between switches). All the software we need is available for Debian (CAD, programming, office apps, web browser, e-mail, educational games, etc), 95% or more with is zero-cost. Administration is all done via the network, to a single server in each school. Upgrades are done on the server, and all the clients pick them up automatically. Wake-on-Lan and SSH access allows us to turn on or off clients automatically. CUPS handles printing. We even have VNC enabled on the clients so that we can monitor their screens during helpdesk calls, or for teachers to monitor student stations (and we're working on broadcast VNC in the labs to replace data projectors). It's taken 6 years to get to this point, starting with the elementaries, but this coming September will be the third year it's been in the secondaries, and by Sept 2010, there will be fewer than 100 Windows licenses in the district, mostly in virtual machines (and <60 Novell client licenses by the end of this month, with 0 by June 2009). Unix-like systems may not be ready to take over the consumer/home desktop markets (although they have their uses there as well), but they are definitely ready to take over the educational desktop market. At least here in BC, Canada. We were the pioneers, but several other districts are following in our footsteps. Just google for "diskless" "thin client" and "school district 73" for more information. |
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That's really cool phoenix
Have the students had trouble adapting to the new environment? EDIT: Seriously, love the last name... it has value. Last edited by BSDfan666; 5th July 2008 at 02:11 AM. |
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Nope. In fact, when we put it into the first elementary school, the grade 6 and 7 classes did English and Computer projects where they developed manuals and tutorials for the younger students. Some classes went so far as to make pamphlets and booklets (using screenshots, digital photos copied from cameras, Scribus for page layout, OpenOffice for text, GIMP and Krita for drawings, etc) that the school sold to other schools. Very, very, very few students complain ... as they now have working computers in the lab, with a helpdesk that the teachers can call when there are issues, and remote help via VNC. Problems are usually fixed while the student is still in the class, instead of waiting a couple weeks for one of the 2 elementary schools techs to get to their school (2 techs for 37 schools).
The students took to it like fish to water. They figured things out right away. It was the staff that had "issues" adapting (especially those who had developed software-version-specific curriculum and assignments, who didn't think it was their job to change/update it to work with OpenOffice or KOffice or whatnot). My favourite story from that time deals with my sister (she's a penguin fanatic) and her discovering Tux as the Linux mascot. She went nuts over Linux (and Tux in particular). Then she graduated and moved on to grade 8, where everything was Windows XP. After the first week of school, she called to complain about the computers, about how they kept crashing, they never had 30 working computers in the lab, how she kept losing work in MS Office XP, and how boring everything was. And she demanded to know when we'd be bringing Tux into the school! Unfortunately for her, the summer after she graduated from grade 12, we converted her school to Linux. She still hasn't really forgiven me for that. And she still calls every now and then to complain about the college computers (running XP) and how she misses the Linux desktop she had in elementary school. She's very much a Windows user, now, though. I put together a laptop for her, and offered to put Linux on it, but she wanted Windows, as that's what they use at the college, and what's on the home computer. |
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That poor woman :\
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My Journal Thou shalt check the array bounds of all strings (indeed, all arrays), for surely where thou typest ``foo'' someone someday shall type ``supercalifragilisticexpialidocious''. |
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I am one of those persons who carries the title of nuclear physicist. I have the piece of paper collecting dust somewhere. I work with a few labs. Specifically, Notre Dame, Yale, Berkeley, and Argonne National labs. I will get to add Pacific Northwest National Labs to that list if my trip next week goes well. All of these labs use mostly Linux. In particular Red Hat variants. Some use enterprise (Yale) others use Scientific or Fedora. There are still some machines that run some older version of Unix that are being phased out. Argonne was using Solaris, but now they are migrating to Red Hat Enterprise the last time I was up there. Yes, all of our processor intensive applications are run on Linux clusters. We are fortunate to have one here. These are generally used for theory modeling calculations. From what I have seen is the main reason we use Linux is cost, and the availability of developer tools. Most of our software is custom made. We are not a large enough market to justify forming a company to make it for us. Also most of it was originally written in Unix, and we want to continue to use it instead of investing the time to re-write the code. In addition to that we would be very hesitant to spend money on software versus a new piece of equipment. To complicate things even further we often have to modify our programs to analyze the data for different situations. Although that situation is improving (see Root, no not root user it is a software program). Another thing you may notice is they generally install a version of Linux and leave it. I am using Red Hat 5.1 (not sure about that version number it uses Nautilus 1.0.4) on one of my work machines. I should also mention that the vast majority of people still use Windows. Most people have a laptop that runs Windows or dual boots with Linux. Then there is the Linux desktop used for analysis and work. Windows is mainly used for Power Point and the Adobe products for work items. I should also mention due to the power and affordability of laptops more and more people are shifting all their work with the exception of intensive calculations to exclusive use on their laptops. That way you can carry your work with you. The secretarial and support staff all run Windows. In the administrative area is Windows dominant. Those admin guys insist on sending me Microsoft Word documents and then get irritated when they don't print out like they should, even though all I have is a Linux machine with a very old version of Open Office. The bottom line is that we have to get work done and publish results. We use whatever will help us achieve this the best. In general we don't care about the software or who makes it as long as we can afford it and it gets the job done. We want it to work as quickly as possible as cheaply as possible. |
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The most famous computer Algebra software of general nature is Maple which is coded on the base of Maxima (original 1969 MIT project). Guess what. Maxima is developed before Windows even existed and it is released under GPL2 licence now. Maple again runs far better on Unix. More specialized projects like GAP (computational group theory) REQUIRE Unix to run. 100% of all machines used by faculty, researches, and graduate students at the research Universities in U. S. run Linux, Solaris, and BSD (I listed them in popularity in descending order). Are you saying that we do not use professional numerical tools? Last edited by Oko; 5th July 2008 at 04:33 PM. |
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By the way, there's GNU Octave, which aims to be compatible with MatLab. It's really nice and easy to use, in my opinion.
__________________
"UNIX is basically a simple operating system, but you have to be a genius to understand the simplicity." MacBook Pro (Darwin 9), iMac (Darwin 9), iPod Touch (Darwin 9), Dell Optiplex GX620 (FreeBSD 7.1-STABLE) |
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