Slashdot Mirror

MIPS isn't going to replace your x86 desktop. MIPS certainly has been scaled up to high end computing before, it's not really well suited to fast desktops running a small number of tightly coupled threads (very dependent on inter-processor cache performance)

If you think it is important to use an alternative, then take a look at getting a TALOS II. It's a POWER9 based workstation that is pricey but not totally bananas. You do give up about 5% of performance on POWER9 when you apply the Spectre and Meltdown patches, which is not ideal but may be acceptable.

AMD has one problem in common with Intel: Spectre. Meltdown is alone Intel's problem.

Not that it's germane to the AMD vs. Intel argument, but IBM got it wrong too. Power7 through Power9 processors are vulnerable to MELTDOWN, and mitigation will be expensive just as it is on Intel.

Intel chose to behave in this fashion while AMD (and literally everyone else) did it the correct way.

Correction, everyone else but IBM, whose Power7 through Power9 processors are also vulnerable and where mitigation will be expensive. How far POWER has fallen, from the PPC601 where everything was done right... to today. (PPC601 was actually a POWER processor in a sense, in that it actually implemented the full ISA.)

I don't know what OS you think of, but even for OS/400 there's antiviruses.

http://www.itjungle.com/fhs/fh...

Z series and power definitely do not share an instruction set, and they have really substantial differences, but that isn't keeping the engineering teams all that separated, if indeed they are at all.

Quoting Timothy Prickett Morgan from http://www.itjungle.com/tfh/tf... , "And as has been the case in the past, the Power and z processors are designed by a single processing team and are borrowing technologies from each other. This does not, however, mean that IBM is creating a converged processor that can support either Power or z instruction sets." My hazy memory makes me think they're sharing FPU blocks, possibly one of the bus interfaces, and it seems like one of the cache blocks (L3?). Z has plenty of custom hardware - I think it's fair to say it's predominantly custom - the branch predictor would have to be pretty different, and of course power doesn't have a BCD arithmetic unit.

Point being, if you're going down the Z Series road to run a Unix-like OS, why not just (conceptually) stop early, end up with something like Power, and call it good? Anyway, I'll argue that they're spiritually and economically related, and there's more than a passing family resemblance. Kind of like power and modern ("advanced server") iSeries, though that's getting more into Deliverance territory.

Meanwhile, channel controllers aren't as dumb as they look. A little wikipedia action here (I know, citing wikipedia, but it's monday and I'm still tired): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... . Turns out the little dickens can do a decent amount of work on its own. I think the wikipedia entry is showing its age... seems like IBM's done a lot more work since this.

I remember when SASI came out. I looked at the spec and thought "Hey, this is a lot like a channel controller." Then I read some more and decided "No, a channel controller is much smarter. But this isn't bad." SASI became SCSI and everything else flowed downhill from that. At a very real level, Linux is forcing a million dollar fibre channel array to look more or less like an ST506 connected a board from 1984. Wild.

I never used it but they partnership with sourceforge.net for that same purpose:
http://www.itjungle.com/tlb/tlb080205-story03.html

I'm not against them on advertising their product but it is just not correct when they do so using FUD tactics:
http://techrights.org/2009/10/28/black-duck-scare-tactics/

Watson also wasn't doing speech recognition (the original topic of this thread) when it played Jeopardy. It received the clues as text. They're working on it though.

I4I said they would have sued sooner but were having financial problems.

I checked out the i4i web site. My impression is that i4i had financial problems because they were a dinky little company with almost no significant products. I suspect they had no more than one software developer, and were probably lucky to stay in business all this time. I doubt MS even bothered to ever meet with them. Their business, so far as I can tell, doesn't even significantly benefit from the patented idea, and in no way competes with Microsoft. I don't see how Microsoft's patent infringement hurt them in the least.

In other words, i4i is simply patent-trolling. A lot of tiny companies do this when they have hard times.

Would it be MS who said "well, we had a business meeting with them, lets implement their plan without them and run them out of business"?

Yes, this is the traditional Microsoft business strategy. There are lots of cases where they did this:

- These guys were the disk-compression company MS drove under. They won $120M in a lawsuit considered one of the best examples ever of how software patents can protect innovation.
- Casualties include WordPerfect, and QuattroPro

There are also a lot of patent trolls sucking the life out of Microsoft:

- They were ordered to pay $521M to the "inventor" of browser plug-ins
- They were ordered to pay $367M to Alcatel/Lucent in some sort of user interface patent nonsense.
- They were ordered to pay $388M to Uniloc, for a patent about registering software during installation.
- Korea is one of the few other countries to jump on the patent-troll suck-life-out-of-MS bandwagon.

All I can say is Microsoft made their bed, and now they have to sleep in it. No other company did more to force software patents through congress. D'oh!

I seem to recall them selling off their PC business to a Chinese company a few years ago, calls itself "Lenovo." In 2007 IBM sold it's printing division to Ricoh; in 2002 it sold its chipset business... All that will be left are a bunch of smart people who tell you what to spend your money on, aside from their gold-plated advice. And those smart people will live and consume wherever it makes sense for them to do so.

This is from two years ago, there has since been a new family of mainframes, and new cell processors, but you get the idea.

Hoplon entertainment. http://www.itjungle.com/big/big050207-story01.html

The "5 9's" of the System z platform weren't exactly meeting the needs of the NYSE (hence their switch to Linux & pSeries):

http://searchdatacenter.techtarget.com/news/article/0,289142,sid80_gci1254860,00.html
http://www.itjungle.com/big/big052008-story01.html

Though, to be fair, the NYSE also had a huge, embarrassing outage of its own in 2006 IIRC (not to mention a well-documented outage in 2001 when from a software bug pushed to their mainframes) - I guess there's no such thing as 100% uptime...

Yeah, that is probably why they are going the reseller route now.

You see, unlike the things you've listed, the mainframe really provides (as far as I know) no advantage over a modern Linux system (or cluster) other than that people already know it, and that it will run these old COBOL apps.

Some points that might contradict you

And for many types of jobs, IO is far, far more important than raw processor speed.

Mainframes (System/i maybe too) also have BCD computational capabilities in hardware, which is still better for financial applications (x86 only has a mode where it transforms BCD into an 80-bit float and then back).

I addressed that a few posts above, but I'll address it more thoroughly now.

From IT Jungle:
"According to sources at IBM, about 1,800 of the patents that were issued to Big Blue in 2005 were for software-related inventions... IBM says that the percentage of its patents relating to software inventions has been increasing steadily in the past few years. It was 51 percent in 2003, 58 percent in 2004, and 61 percent in 2005."

-----

Second, until patent reform takes place, this is the best IBM can do. Offer their patents to others wishing patent reform on software patents while at the same time making sure they are protected

Well, it's true that despite what changes are in store, you've got to play the current game as well as you can.

However, IBM is one of the strongest supporters of software patents, and has consistently been so throughout the history of software patenting.

Here is a transcript of USPTO hearings in 1994 - back when many industry players held Slashdot-like dislike for software patents. Even back then, IBM took a pro-software-patent stance and advocated for their allowance.

(Incidentally, that transcript should be required reading for anyone who wants to participate in this debate - IBM raised some extremely persuasive points that most Slashdotters don't like to acknowledge - such as: "We can't divorce computer program-related inventions from computer hardware and other microprocessor inventions. The overlap between the two is so great that cutting back on one automatically cuts back on the other.")

IBM continues to lobby in favor of software patents - particularly in the EU. From FFII.org:
"In the wake of the Opensource hype, IBM's rhetoric has become relatively moderate, but nonetheless it is supported by real pressure. IBM has acquired approximately 1000 European software patents whose legal status is currently unclear. Given the great number of software patents in IBM's hands, IBM is one of the few software companies who may have a genuine interest in software patentability."

From Ars Technica:
"IBM and OSDL to help Patent Office get organized"
This article is about IBM's contributions to the USPTO to help it improve its search tools, and in developing a Wiki-like system for allowing the public to participate in patent examination. This initiative is hardly about deconstructing the patent system - it's about sharpening and improving it, so that better-examined patents can issue.

And from Gartner:
"IBM Uses Patents to Lead Open-Source Community"
"IBM announced that it would open access to technology covered by 500 IBM software patents to any individual, community or company working on or using software that meets the Open Source Initiative (OSI) definition of open-source software (see www.opensource.org). IBM also proposed an industrywide "patent commons" for sharing patents among technology developers."

Note: This is not "donating patents to the public domain" or "abandoning patents." This is "using patents strategically to promote a particular sector of the market," i.e., the OSI crew.

In short - you couldn't be more wrong in your summary of IBM's position on software patents. IBM is a HUGE player in this space. They know how to get them, and they know how to use them well. They have consistently supported software patenting, from its mainstream inception in the 1990's and through today, and consistently lobby for expansion in terms of allowability, regional acceptance, and enforcement power.

- David Stein

By "market leader"... do you mean having an 12.7% market share? You might want to check your "facts". I'm just sayin'.

Linux doesn't even have a bigger share than UNIX (33%), and obviously not bigger than Windows Servers (36.6%). When your sales exceed the "market leader" by so much... it's pretty laughable.

That damn reality-based community, always making Teh Lunix look bad! Everybody knows reality has a well-worn pro-Microsoft bias.

IT Jungle seems to think a top end 595 with 64 cores would cost upwards of $8 million.

I think the author's point was that to squeeze more performance out of a piece of silicon, you can either crank the speed up or pile on more cores + threads. IBM is (mostly) doing the former, while Sun is (primarily) doing the latter.

IBM's multithreading is a baby step compared to Sun's T1 and T2. Power6 = 2 cores*2threads each. T1 = (4 to 8 cores)*4 threads each. T2 = (up to 8 cores)*8 threads each.

Of course, this simply underlines the fact that Sun and IBM are coming at this from 2 different directions. Sun set out to build a economical cpu for entry-level systems that would perform well with lots of everyday tasks (emphasis on low cost of ownership, easily fit into any environment, server consolidation roles), with minimal need to optimise code. If your code supports multithreading on SPARC, you are good to go. Their higher-end systems will get more cores per processor in the future.

IBM started at the top end of the spectrum with a datacenter-centric platform, and will require heavier modification / optimisation of apps to see performance improvements. Their aim is to have screaming sequential execution in a big-iron box. They are planning to merge the technology down into more commoditized products in the future.

Each of the threads on a T2 only sucks up about 1.5 watts. Does anyone out there have any idea what the thermal envelope on a Power6 is? I haven't seen anything more accurate than educated guesses. Assuming 100 watts for a 4.7Ghz Power6 with 4 threads, you're looking at about 25 watts per thread. Okay if you want to run a few things at max speed (batch processing), bad if you want to run lots of threads (ie, server consolidation & virtualization).

A liquid cooling system is good for establishing uber-geek status among peers, but it's bad for cost of ownership, simplicity of operation, etc.

Overall, Sun offers way more threads at half the speed, while IBM gives you top-end clock speed. Ultimately, while the Power6 is terribly sexy with its ginormous clock speed and liquid-cooling system, you can get +/- similar performance out of less expensive hardware.

Never confuse processor speed with processing power.

It's always important to notice when an article starts off with "The SCO Group plans ..." and then doesn't seek out any verification or outside opinions. It's probably another lazy journalism piece where the author simply rewords a press release and calls it "news". All this article does is lay out a motion with no investigation into the context.

For example, you would think he would have noticed that Novell has already objected to the reorg because of the sketchy details. Like, does SNCP even have access to that kind of money? There is this article that says Norris might have Middle East connections, but no explanations of why those connections would want in on the SCO case. Or how much of the bill they'd be willing to cough up. The schedule's a bit iffy too. Novell points out that SCO's hanging on to the "definitive documents" on the reorg and isn't planning on releasing them until the day that objections to the reorg are due. Read carefully and you'll see that objections are due by March 26th at 4:00pm, while the documents are to be released on March 26th, but with no time stated. Any bets on SCO planning on providing those at 4:01pm?

Keep in mind that SCO has already proposed and scrapped a bailout deal. In that one, they were playing a shell game where all the company's assets (and execs) went one way, while all the company's liabilities went the other. Needless to say, the courts weren't going to let that happen.

The bottom line is that this is SCO, so you already know it's a scam. It's just a matter of waiting and watching to determine what kind of scam they're trying to run this time.

Actually, IBM doesn't usually use MIPS. Usually, the mainframe systems people use MSU as the performance measurement (Millions of Service Units). http://www.itjungle.com/big/big061306-story01.html

In fact... http://www.itjungle.com/fhs/fhs022205-story02.html

But that NTFS "database" isn't really user accessible like BeFS was.

NTFS supports it, the functionality is just not exposed to user mode.

What you say is important.. it "could be done" typical Microsoft drivel... in BeOS it WAS done. When Microsoft was shipping Windows ME! They had features like OSX Spotlight and better because they implemented the OS and file system AROUND those features. The programmers that worked on BeOS moved over to Apple and reimplemented something "like" what BeOS had to make Spotlight on top of MacOSX.

So Microsoft spent their vast resources making sure that ME could run Dos games, Win32 apps and WDM drivers written for 95, 98 and Windows 2000. Developers! Developers! Developers isn't just a slogan, Microsoft spend a fortune subsidizing third party developers. Most importantly they make sure that Windows release N+1 contains shims and compatibility stuff so broken third party code from N-1 will still run.

BeOS had warts mostly because it was such a different programming model nobody could even port applications to it to use features properly... and it was way too small of installed base to get money to fix the issues... chicken/egg problem (and mortgage payments) and all.

And Be spent their tiny resources building an OS with no third party support.

Consider 10 years later Microsoft after bragging for 3 years about adding it in to Vista had to pull WinFS from general distribution in Vista because they couldn't get it right... but somebody did way back then.

I dunno, I think no one cares about database filesystems. All the application that need it can do it in user space, which means they can run from an FS that doesn't do database stuff, like SMB on network drive, or FAT on a USB key, or an old version of NTFS.

As far as proof look here: http://www.itjungle.com/mid/mid022702-story06.html
(found on an old slashdot post! http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/02/08/2031244)

These are the facts. Microsoft ended up paying $100 million to shut them up. And that contract term is STILL in OEM contracts today.. no Grub will be installed with Linux AND Windows from a licensed OEM ever for this reason.

"Be says in its suit that in early 1998 equipment manufacturer Hitachi committed verbally that it would load BeOS alongside Windows on a line of its PCs. Several months later, Hitachi told the start-up that it could not install the BeOS on its computers and that BeOS would have to be booted off a floppy disk, according to Be. Hitachi explained that the terms of its license with Microsoft prohibited pre-installation of another OS in a dual-boot configuration. Be further claims Hitachi revealed that Microsoft expressed its "anger" with Hitachi over its arrangement with Be.

Hitachi eventually shipped a line of computers with BeOS preinstalled on the hard drive. However, those computers were not preconfigured to allow the user to boot into the BeOS. "Hitachi's decision [...] resulted directly from threats by Microsoft," Be claimed in its filing. Be says that the same restrictions that deprived it from financial benefit through its Hitachi deal precluded it from entering pre-installation deals with other PC makers."

Dunno sounds like sour grapes to me. The article says
Be missed its biggest opportunity to success when its Jean-Louis Gassee turned down a purchase offer from Apple in 1996, which reportedly wanted to pay $125 million for the start-up, but Gassee wanted $200 million. Apple purchased Next, a company launched by Steve Jobs, Apple's co-founder and former CEO, for $400 million instead. Next's OS now powers Apple's computers in the form of MacOS X.

Now, Be says its failure was Microsoft's fault, since the company already possessed monopoly power for operating systems for Intel-compatible PCs

But that NTFS "database" isn't really user accessible like BeFS was.

What you say is important.. it "could be done" typical Microsoft drivel... in BeOS it WAS done. When Microsoft was shipping Windows ME! They had features like OSX Spotlight and better because they implemented the OS and file system AROUND those features. The programmers that worked on BeOS moved over to Apple and reimplemented something "like" what BeOS had to make Spotlight on top of MacOSX.

BeOS had warts mostly because it was such a different programming model nobody could even port applications to it to use features properly... and it was way too small of installed base to get money to fix the issues... chicken/egg problem (and mortgage payments) and all. Consider 10 years later Microsoft after bragging for 3 years about adding it in to Vista had to pull WinFS from general distribution in Vista because they couldn't get it right... but somebody did way back then.

As far as proof look here: http://www.itjungle.com/mid/mid022702-story06.html
(found on an old slashdot post! http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/02/08/2031244)

These are the facts. Microsoft ended up paying $100 million to shut them up. And that contract term is STILL in OEM contracts today.. no Grub will be installed with Linux AND Windows from a licensed OEM ever for this reason.

"Be says in its suit that in early 1998 equipment manufacturer Hitachi committed verbally that it would load BeOS alongside Windows on a line of its PCs. Several months later, Hitachi told the start-up that it could not install the BeOS on its computers and that BeOS would have to be booted off a floppy disk, according to Be. Hitachi explained that the terms of its license with Microsoft prohibited pre-installation of another OS in a dual-boot configuration. Be further claims Hitachi revealed that Microsoft expressed its "anger" with Hitachi over its arrangement with Be.

Hitachi eventually shipped a line of computers with BeOS preinstalled on the hard drive. However, those computers were not preconfigured to allow the user to boot into the BeOS. "Hitachi's decision [...] resulted directly from threats by Microsoft," Be claimed in its filing. Be says that the same restrictions that deprived it from financial benefit through its Hitachi deal precluded it from entering pre-installation deals with other PC makers."

The question is how bad will be their fall? Will it be like IBM and Apple, who emerged with new life and remade themselves? Or will it be like SGI or Commodore?

Unlike Commodore which died SGI has changed their focus. SGI now builds High Performance and supercomputers. Here's an article on CNN Money about SGI, Marking First 25 Years, SGI Highlights How Its Customers Have Changed the World.

OK, when you're telling me that something is completely untrue about the stock markets you can at least check the charts.

Microsoft has been consistently between ~$21 & ~$30 for the last 3 years or so. Since mid-November in 2006 they've covered that entire ground (from 21 to 30+), which means that their market cap is up. So I seriously question your "bottom line" comments b/c MS doen't seem to be suffering that much. Windows Server usage is actually moving up. And home Windows usage is likely moving sideway to "slightly" down as usual. (which is irrelevant b/c, let's face it, when you have more than 90% share in a competitive market, you basically have to go down)

So basically you managed to spout a bunch of opinions with no research and a complete failure to counter anything I've mentioned. You may believe that these flaws are impacting the bottom line of the MS OS division, but if you can't bother to at least do a Google and look up stock prices then you're just spouting fumes.

You're also not making any counters to my SAP comments. You got all in a huff about MS, but you didn't give me one good reason why a giant like SAP should be paying for security flaws. You've done nothing to help improve my understanding of reality (or anyone else's), you've done nothing to clarify the situation or attempt to even correctly grasp the problem.

So, in light of that, I think paying for flaws is actually a very good idea.

Clearly I did too, I was trying to tell you why it's not happening and you didn't listen.

In reply to myself above, to satisfy my own curiosity, I just spent an hour researching this company. Seems they began as EJB Solutions in 1998 with one Rod Cope as co-founder. 2003 finds them headquartered in Highlands Ranch, Colorado. They were specialized in Java, J2EE, XML, and web service technologies, and without doubt the "EJB" in their name refers to Enterprise Java Beans which were all the rage back then. EJB Solutions changed their name to Open Logic sometime around June 21, 2004. They released the BlueGlue 3.2 Open Source Stack July 13, 2005. They launched Indemnification for their Certified Library of Open Source Products on October 17, 2006, but at least one blogger was not too impressed with that

Rod Cope of OpenLogic explains what this is all about in a nice video at JavaOne 2007 where he really seems to be a nice guy who perhaps deserves our support as they have been involved in Open Source and promoting it for a long time. Its just this thing about their Indemnification offer that has touched off a raw nerve here. I hereby invite Rod Cope to contact me and I will ask him about this, do a little interview with him, and report back.

For a nice story about taxes paid by American corporations, click here.

Once we're sure it's stable, because it looks like a massive improvement over the 1970s-style file systems we're using now. ZFS is now part of FreeBSD, Solaris will have ZFS "soon" and many Linux distros are also considering it. Good. Let's get to a common standard that's excellent and forget the tedium of these past, less effective file systems.

Last year IBM hit $22 Billion dollars in sales in a single quarter. Microsoft is about half that per quarter.

Here ya go:
http://www.itjungle.com/big/big102406-story01.html

Note the "resurgent market for mainframes". Mainframes are what run lots and lots of the key infrastructure in the country. It ain't Linux and it ain't Windows.

You're right the comparison is absurd. IBM has their business locked up tight, with absolutely no competition anywhere. They make Microsoft look like Open Source.

I hate to repeat a post, but for additional information:

In case anyone is wondering about what the project has acheived so far, here is the link.

Concerning global warming, the processing statistics imply the PS3 is by far the most efficient. At 380 watts, using the statistics given (which are said to be conservative in the case of the PS3), that puts the PS3 at 63 teraFLOPS/megawatt, or 16.5 kilowatts/teraFLOPS. I'm not really familiar with this, but isn't that fairly good? It's definately better than using PCs. Blue Gene/L, which is supposed to be very efficient, will deliver 240,000 FLOPS/watt, or about 0.24 teraFLOPS/megawatt. My calculations may be off, but that suggests the PS3 is highly efficient and a better use of power than a supercomputer.

I'm sure I'm missing some important considerations, so can someone through a little knowledge at this?

In case anyone is wondering about what the project has acheived so far, here is the link.

Concerning global warming, the processing statistics imply the PS3 is by far the most efficient. At 380 watts (at least this is what I've heard), using the statistics given (which are said to be conservative in the case of the PS3), that puts the PS3 at 63 teraFLOPS/megawatt, or 16.5 kilowatts/teraFLOPS. I'm not really familiar with this, but isn't that fairly good? It's definately better than using PCs. Blue Gene/L, which is supposed to be very efficient, will deliver 240,000 FLOPS/watt, or about 0.24 teraFLOPS/megawatt. My calculations may be off, but that suggests the PS3 is highly efficient and a better use of power than a supercomputer.

I'm sure I'm missing some important considerations, so can someone through a little knowledge at this?

Personally, if I could get my hands on a Power6 PC, and slap linux on it, I'd be all but done with x86. I'm personally surprised that IBM isn't doing this in lieu of the Apple switch to Intel.

They aren't?

It was Hitachi http://www.itjungle.com/mid/mid022702-story06.html

Here's a link with the patent numbers: http://www.itjungle.com/big/big121206-story01.html

Regarding Linux, just call Platform Solutions up and ask. One can't keep this sort of thing a secret; certainly not from their customers.

The impact on Linux is up to a Judge to decide. Given IBM's vast number of Patents, the point is that IBM can shut anything down on Linux that they so choose. And that they are starting to exercise this power now. This is not what a good member of the Open Source community does.

The article linked to is lame. There are dozens of articles out there on MS announcing Windows Home Server out there. Why pick this one? For example here are a couple of articles that actually have real informaiton in them: http://www.itjungle.com/two/two011007-story01.html http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070108-8573 .html http://www.winsupersite.com/reviews/whs_preview.as p

Of course. http://www.itjungle.com/tlb/tlb101706-story01.html /

• 3 million+ Visual Basic developers with the release of VB.NET, a language totally incompatible with VB6 and earlier versions,
  
• 2 million+ ASP developers when they abandoned VBScript and released ASP.NET,
  
• all JScript developers when they released ASP.NET, whose ECMAScript compiler is a complete rewrite of JScript, mandating a complete retest of all scripts. This is not aided by the fact that the ASP.NET server-side objects are significant revisions of those in ASP.
  

The jargon alert should have been before 'service-oriented applications'.

Stay the Recourse

MS for example takes no responsibility for just about anything that could happen with their products.

It is also now providing OEM system builders with protection for the four major forms of disputes commonly associated with software, which are patent, copyright, trade secret, and trademark.

Correct second link: Windows XP Service Pack 2: Install With Care

I don't believe I saw an example of one of "several of their mission critical apps".

And you won't. What those locations do, and what's wrong with them, is between them and their vendors, not for your leader in Redmond to interfere with. If they worked with XP SP1, why change? A security patch, if that's what it really is, shouldn't affect functionality. If it's not a security patch, but a functionality upgrade, then it's fraudulent to call it a security patch. If undesireable changes in configuration and functionality are pushed out by bundling them with security patches deemd essential, then that's illegal and unethical, though you'll have to ask a lawyer what that's actually called.

However, a quick check of any non-MSN search engine will bring up lots of articles about the troubles caused by XP SP2.

• Redmond, We Have a Problem Here: XP SP2
• Users Give XP SP2 Mixed Marks
• Windows XP SP2 and the Risk of a Linux Backlash
• WinXP SP2 = security placebo?
• Microsoft: DRM Trojan hole is not a vulnerability
• Programs "Seem" to Break Under Windows XP SP2, Microsoft Says

Given the problems SP2 has had with third party (and even MS' own) apps as well as falling on its face security-wise, it would appear that SP2 is more about rolling out unpopular configuration and functionality changes under the guise of "security". After most customers, politicians and even courts will simply roll over and close their eyes when the magic word, "security", is mentioned.

Like I said, get over it. And while you're at it, get out of the way. Like one of the reviewers says, "Unfortunately, Windows remains a quite dangerous system to connect to the Internet, and users are still very much on their own in terms of security solutions."

Hinkley explains, "Each of our fifty states has its own corporate law allowing corporations to be formed and establishing the rules for how such corporations are to operate. Each of these laws has something in common with each of the others. Each says that the only goal of corporations formed in that jurisdiction is to maximize profits for shareholders. In effect, each state does something for corporations that it does not do for its individual citizens--it dictates their purpose. This purpose, the pursuit of corporate self-interest, drives all corporate action. Every act carried out by a corporate employee can be traced back to this purpose established in the corporate law."

Thus the courts created entities that could acquire vast resources over an indefinite life span. They could use these resources as they see fit, for the singular purpose of maximizing profits, without an accompanying set of values or principles that an individual would likely have to guide his actions. "This lack of values," Hinkley writes, "is in evidence every time a corporation makes money at the expense of the dignity of human beings, the welfare of our communities or the protection of our environment."

-http://www.itjungle.com/tfh/tfh040102-story08.htm l (emphasis added)

And, wouldn't someone else be able to use commodity chips (some workstation-grade core 2 duo or opteron) and build a robust system out of that, for only part of they price they ask. Thomas J. Watson was a very good salesman (a bit too good to be legal :) ), and I guess IBM still has a very good salesforce to get their stuff out, but how long can they keep this up with pricing systems like this?

IBM had server sales of more than five billion dollars last year (or three billion, if you don't count mainframes). Even lowly Sun beats out Dell, which comes in at almost $1B.

Keep in mind that this is just for one year. Pick your favorite guess for how large Googles server farm is and divide by the average age of those machines. Do you still think they're assembling more than a billion dollars of hardware per year?

http://www.microsoft.com/Presspass/press/2000/jan0 0/donationpr.mspx
http://charlotte.bizjournals.com/charlotte/stories /2003/08/18/daily27.html
http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/060505/sff021.html
http://news.zdnet.com/5208-1040-0.html?forumID=1&t hreadID=13766&messageID=275522&start=-1
http://www.indonesia-relief.org/mod.php?mod=publis her&op=viewarticle&cid=25&artid=1558
http://www.itjungle.com/two/two030106-story08.html

Wow, you're really stupid aren't you.

I can't wait to see how you spin that. But you will. A world of black and white is the only way your intellect can operate. Real world scenarios are just too much for people like you to process and understand, so you resort to dumbing everything down in a futile effort to pretend you're not overwhelmed.

I love pointing out when you idiots are wrong.

The way the summary is written, you'd think that actual site was down or something. But the website and grid itself was fine - it was just the free example (running on separate hardware) that got busy. (I dunno how busy - I accessed it yesterday and it was fine at the time).

I dunno, Slashdot could have reported on something more meaningful - like Sun GPL'ing their latest processor. You can download it here:
http://opensparc-t1.sunsource.net/download_hw.html

There's a decent write-up here:
http://www.itjungle.com/breaking/bn032106-story01. html

Manufacturing fab not included...

. . . an IBM Cell-based bladeserver. Lookie here:
The Linux Beacon--IBM Announces BladeCenter Kickers
The Cell Processor's Other Life - NewsFactor Network

You can get a IBM Cell blade, but its only availiable by special bid:

http://www.itjungle.com/tlb/tlb021406-story02.html
http://www.newsfactor.com/story.xhtml?story_id=022 00000JLPQ The Cell Processor's Other Life - NewsFactor Network

You can get a IBM Cell blade, but its only availiable by special bid:

http://www.itjungle.com/tlb/tlb021406-story02.html
http://www.newsfactor.com/story.xhtml?story_id=022 00000JLPQ The Cell Processor's Other Life - NewsFactor Network

Firefox just recently passed the 150 million download mark.

Redhat alone sold 215,000 sold 215,000 Linux licenses in just the 2nd quarter of 2005.

Think outside of your tiny world of single-pc households and do the math. There are a lot more Linux installations than there are Firefox installations.

Nice troll ... here's REAL data from 2004

For all the talk of Linux, only 230,074 machines, or about 14.7 percent of shipments, were servers running Linux. However, all of those Linux machines added up to a smidgen more than $1 billion in sales for the quarter, with IBM and HP getting a little under 30 percent each and Dell getting 18 percent. The Linux server space is white hot, though, with sales up 57.3 percent and shipments up 69.7 percent, according to Gartner.

In troll math that's less than 1% but in registerable IQ math that's closer to 4.4%, also, note that that's a percentage of revenue, not shipments. Since Linux typically ships on lower end hardware, the shipment percentage is probably closer to 8% for IBM. Just factoring the growth rate from 2004, IBMs Linux shipment percentage should now be somewhere above 20% of their total server shipments.

AFAIK Xiph has not published the details of the patents they considered

This is probably for the same reason that OSRM doesn't publish its list of patents that the Linux kernel may infringe: liability. Apparently, if the study were to be published before the patents expire, it might make the judge more likely to find that an infringement was willful and award treble damages.*

* Here, "treble" is legalese for triple. It has nothing to do with clipped audio killing your tweeters.