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As I said when I went over the high-end and the entry Unix server markets earlier this year, without any doubt, IBM has been an increasingly dominant factor in the Unix server business, across all form factors and SMP scalability, since the Power4 processors debuted four years ago. IBM is, in fact, arguably the main reason that the Unix server business has seen any growth at all.

As I said when I went over the high-end and the entry Unix server markets earlier this year, without any doubt, IBM has been an increasingly dominant factor in the Unix server business, across all form factors and SMP scalability, since the Power4 processors debuted four years ago. IBM is, in fact, arguably the main reason that the Unix server business has seen any growth at all.

... by the community, see

http://www.opensolaris.org/os/community/power_pc/
http://www.itjungle.com/tfh/tfh011606-story02.html
http://www.blastware.org/

I really don't think there are that many people drinking the MS kool aid. People have been switching to Apple desktops and *nix servers fairly steadily, but you're not going to see an overnight change because the cost of migration is so high

I'd say you're drinking the Slashdot kool-aid. Apple desktop market share is not growing in any significant way - still below 3%, and Windows Server 2000/2003 is gaining market share against *nix.

Microsoft Revenues Grow 6 Percent, Profit Soars to $3.1 Billion Back-to-school sales were good. Server sales are strong. Windows MCE looks to be a big winner.

i believe you mean Id software. DOOM is a product and as such can't own anything.

I understood references to DOOM in such contexts as references to a hypothetical "Doom division" of Id Software, analogous to the Windows Core OS Division of Microsoft. This would be the division of Id responsible for developing the Doom(tm) engine and marketing it to other game developers, using tech-de^W games such as Doom 3.

Here's another article from the Big Iron newsletter, "Mainframe, Z Next Generation".

Here's a quoute from the article:
Apparently IBM IBM has committed to maintain the level of mainframe experts in the field, which means adding 20,000 or so people who are trained in mainframe technologies between now and 2010

Funny you should mention IBM, because they have had first samples of the upcoming POWER6 line of chips for a few months now. According to reports, the plan is to first produce POWER5+ CPU's and then to move on to the POWER6 eventually combining "blocks" of 8 cores that can fit in the palm of your hand, running at up to 6ghz all on a 65nm process. Yeah, these are not laptop chips, but honestly since Apple represents a tiny niche market for high speed CPU's, who can blame IBM for basically ignoring their requirements when coming up with the next generation CPU's?

Don't look so shocked, many people have underestimated IBM's technical ability in the past.

It looks to me like the submitter, who is also the author of the linked article, is the one guilty of the phrase "best combination of Open Source and proprietary" and only in the /. submission. It doesn't appear in the article itself. In another article, VMWare specifically shies away from commenting on OS as a business model.

So I am not certain that the phrase you object to was not a tech writer attempt to push a boundry that the company was not doing itself.

Basically, instead of doubling up on server hardware (that's the 2n approach) and using high availability clustering software to keep systems in synch, Tandem created the n+1 approach, which says create a clustered system that spreads the database over many nodes that share nothing and throw in an extra one that can take over if one fails. The Tandem approach makes for complex interconnection, but it also does not require companies to double up on their processing capacity.

In a triply redundant system, like the one used in the Space Shuttle, all of the redundant parts run the same instruction code against the same data in exactly the same sequence. To finish a transaction, the three redundant computers to vote for each transaction they process. If all three machines agree, the transaction continues; if two out of three agree, the one that does not agree is taken offline and the transaction progresses until a spare is brought online. If none of the nodes agree, several people have lost their jobs.

In the post-boom era, those same companies are now buying (mainly) x86 boxes and (secondarily) PowerPC servers running Linux. This phenomenon explains why Sun has failed to achieve profitability and revenue growth while both Dell and IBM have been doing well during the last 2 years of the economic recovery. IBM, especially, has been selling billions of dollars of Linux-powered boxes to finance companies.

In 2000 and 2001, folks from the marketing and tech-marketing departments at Sun would spend hours each day on writing condemnations of IBM in SlashDot forums. In particular, one of the Sun talking (actually, "condemnation") points is that IBM supports multiple operating systems (OSes) whereas Sun supports only a single unified OS across all Sun platforms. Now, Sun supports 3 OSes: Solaris, Linux, and (gasp!) Windows. My. My. The times have changed.

Now, where are these talking heads? They have been fired (or euphemistically, "laid off"), reprimanded, or demoted.

For whom does the bell toll? It tolls for Sun.

You can make a turtle fly at speeds breaking the sound barrier aswell.

Is the turtle designed for that?
Is it capable of that?

Please answer those questions, then replace the turtle with windows and breaking the sound barrier with building a cluster. As someone noted, MS and Dell put together that cluster. The obvious conclusion is that other people aren't out of their minds yet.

Also, i said "No wonder that the top500 is mostly made up from unix/linux systems". The exception makes the rule stronger, is this familiar?
According to this article: "the computer scientists behind the Top 500 list say that 291 of the machines (58 percent) on the list are clustered machines. While the Top 500 list does not specifically identify the operating system platform, it probably breaks down to around 55 percent Linux, 40 percent Unix, and another 5 percent as Windows platforms."

No and yes. From http://www.itjungle.com/breaking/bn022405-story01. html

Sun Microsystems just barely held onto its number three position, with $1.365 billion in sales after a 5.1 percent decline in revenue compared to the fourth quarter of 2003. Part of Sun's revenue decline is due to the shift toward X86 server, but most of it is due to Sparc customers buying less iron or paying a lot less for what they do buy.

Also interesting...

Sun's X86 server revenue grew by 360 percent, hitting $152.5 million for 2004.

My guess would be Linux as reports claim that the majority of Sun's x86 servers are ordered with linux preloaded. Compared to 4.something billion in linux server sales overall, it wouldn't make that much difference in the numbers. Sun's still a small player in x86 but they're growing fast. They're more in the 64 bit x86 space. I read somewhere that they're the largest buyer of AMD Opteron chips.

" Last fall, IBM and Sony said they were developing a workstation based on Cell chips, which is the first product IBM will ship based on Cell."

Regardless if this is the first product shipped or not, a workstation is coming. I can't see it running anything but linux. Given the mass market targeting of the cell, I hope Sony makes a strong go at grabbing the market with cheap hardware, rather than trying to milk the high-end content creation market first.

And with Power5 being able to run multiple OSes in different virtual partitions concurrently (via Hypervisor, etc)
One could be running Linux for Apache,
AIX for whatever that's for,
And OS X for Photoshop.

I have something here from an American, about France anf the hours they work.