I'm struggling with limited resources to find and acquire tools to work on an adaptive design problem, using say simulated annealing or genetic algorithms and real-time plotting. I have a 1.8GHZ P4 machine running Win2000 sp4. For now. If the project proves feasible, I intend to move on to a machine that can use the nVidia CUDA parallel processing GPU system (a 8800GT or 9800GT board). With my resources, that means a self-assembled barebones computer kit and as much free OS, graphics and (fortran) compiler software as I can lay my hands on. I've been looking at OpenSolaris for the free OS and associated Fortran compiler.
One of the first things I noticed when I booted the OpenSolaris live CD is that it could see files on my C: FAT32 drive where I keep the Win98SE that W2k upgraded. But nothing else. Scattered over two hard drives I have two other FAT32 and five NTFS partitions. All invisible. That is somewhat troubling, and ultimately disappointing. I note from http://blogs.sun.com/observatory/entry/triple_boot_part_4_access that OpenSolaris has no support for NTFS, and that getting any support is complicated and burdensome. I think that SUN is making a marketing mistake in not fully supporting easy, seamless access to Windows and Mac file systems. Both on the same computer and over a net. I have windows and dos files going back ten to twenty years. It's too much to ask that one toss all that work away just because it doesn't force fit to someone's favored file system. Apple made that point nicely when it hosted MS Office on its machines. I have both Windows and an Apple OS X machine, and I have no trouble moving files between them on my LAN, or looking at files on an external USB drive connected to either OS. Inclusion and adaptability is a much more effective selling point than exclusion and difficulty. A white blood cell makes that point when it swallows a bacterium, instead of watching it multiply while pretending that it doesn't exist. That is how we got mitochondria and nuclear DNA after all. Hopefully it won't take SUN the same billion years to take the hint :) Best regards, An old fossil fortran programmer -- This message posted from opensolaris.org
