Slashdot Mirror

Pop the cases open, look and see if the have the infamous IBM "deathstar" Hard Drives in them, however, it seems like most of them that are going to die quick deaths already have. I've been running a 30GB DTLA since Jan 2001 with no problems, but I personally saw 2 crap out in a week at work in late '01.

What's the advantage of dual cpu machine for Internet browsing? Or editing files? Or for gaming (decent video card is more important here)?

For file editing, it depends on the kind of files. Your basic office stuff won't benefit any more than the aforementioned internet usage will. But if you're working with media, it will go a lot faster (not quite a 100% gain, because of SMP management overhead, memory bandwidth limitations, etc., but it will be well above 50% for anything multithreaded, and allows you to do multiple instances for single-threaded things).

Gaming will start to show more benefit as hardware shifts things that are traditionally hardware functions into their drivers (particularly 3D audio in sound cards, as shown here). When a sound card is trying to use 30% of a cpu for 3D audio (as one sound card in that link did at times), that'll have quite an effect on gaming performance on a single-cpu system. An SMP system will just have the other cpu pick up the extra load from the sound card drivers, along with whatever network, AI, and other threads the OS load balances onto it, leaving the first cpu free to handle whatever's most cpu-intensive in the game (usually graphics).

Why is this post Insightful ? Poster didnt even RTFA :/

Click on the Promise link you insensitive clod, ALL FastTrak SX4xxx series controllers are HARDWARE RAIDs :/. Plus
http://techreport.com/reviews/2002q4/ideraid/index .x?pg=1
Promise SX4xxx is the best in the low budget area (beating Adaptec and 3ware).

There is a reduction in performance for writes (twice as much data must go through the bus)

That's also not true. Since the bus speed typically is much higher than the drive's actual sustainable data speed, RAID1 in hardware generally doesn't show any performance degradation from writes, unless you have extremely, extremely fast drives on a slow bus. On a dual-channel ATA RAID solution, fundamentally this doesn't have to cause any slowdown, as one write command issued to the controller simply becomes a write on each of the attached channels, at the same time.

In software RAID all it really does is up the CPU usage.

You can see the recently reported Tech Report article on SATA RAID here. Write for RAID 1 and write for single disk are pretty much identical. Read is higher for RAID1. Write for RAID 0 is, of course, much higher, as you multiplex the latencies for different stripes.

For personal use, a two-drive RAID 1 is probably the easiest way to go, and involves the fewest drives, but loses the most space (half). Raid 5 is the standard, but the hardware is more expensive and it involves at least one additional drive.

For simplicity and low expense, even though you lose a full drive worth of capacity, go with RAID 1.

You might want to read The Tech Report's recent article mentioned on Slashdot if you haven't already.

The controller has to be able to multiplex the reads to get the kind of performance you're talking about here, and given the tests in this article, this does not seem to be the case. With the exception of the old Intel ICH5R controller, none of the other controllers showed anything more than a statistically insignificant difference in single disk vs. RAID 1 read performance, and in fact, most of the RAID 1 read results were less than single disk, which is expected of simple controllers.

With respect to comparing reads from mirrors vs. striped disks, you are way out in left field again here and the article definitely backs this up. IIRC, the transfer rate for striped reads was about 33% faster than mirrored reads. This included the Intel controller that seemed to have some intelligence built in to multiplex the reads. The third to last graph in this page from the article should remove all doubt that RAID 0 reads are faster than RAID 1 reads, and that RAID 1 reads are nearly identical to single disk reads. And to hammer this point home further, why would a RAID 1 setup that could multiplex the disks for reads be any faster than a RAID 0 setup? Unless your RAID 0 stripe size is so small as to make overall RAID 0 slow (say a 64kb stripe vs. 2MB stripes), a multiplexed RAID 1 read from several disks simultaneously essentially is a RAID 0 read.

And with respect to write performance, I stand by my statement entirely. Striping, while more risky, is far faster than mirroring for writes. Mirrored writes get a little bit better with a duplex setup where the two drives are on separate controllers, but it's still slower than a striped write to two disks on the same controller.

Research done, conclusions drawn, still saying the same thing I was before....any other questions?

"I committed further crimes when I chose the MSI K8T Master2 motherboard for testing the Opteron processors. The Master2 only has DIMM slots hanging off of one of the two CPU sockets on the board, cutting off the second processor's ability to talk to a pair of DDR400 DIMMs via its built-in memory controller. Tyan's Thunder K8W has the magic combination of an AGP slot and a "full" dual Opteron memory configuration.

In my defense, there are some good reasons why I committed such heinous acts. The Thunder K8W showed us its eye-popping memory bandwidth potential in our recent Opteron workstation motherboard round-up, but it was only able to realize that potential with the 64-bit beta of Windows XP. Right now, there is no workstation-class version of Windows available, outside of early beta versions, that understands the non-uniform memory access (NUMA) configuration of Opteron systems, so much of the K8W's memory bandwidth goes to waste. This reality, combined with the fact that the K8W doesn't tolerate aggressive memory timings well, caused the Thunder K8W to lose out to the K8T Master2 in many of our performance tests. So I decided to go with the K8T Master2 for our purposes. Of course, future versions of Windows with NUMA awareness and 64-bitness should give dually Opteron systems a big boost over their present incarnations. Had we more time with the Opteron 250 prior to its launch, we might have been able to test with a 64-bit version of Linux on the Thunder K8W. No doubt that could be scary fast."

I can see from your previous posts that you're a TechReport fanboi and that's fine, but don't try and justify their consumer level report as something useful for IT professionals on Slashdot.

Actually, I think I was trying to point out that it's useful for non- IT professionals on Slashdot, rather than people such as yourself. Still, even in my short term experience with Slashdot itself, IT professionals seem to be only one type of Slashdot reader, among many.

I personally find TechReport useful for good first impressions of new (to me) technology, hardware, and links to the same sorts of things at other sites. Joe Blow benchmarks on typical end-user hardware are good for that. This isn't what you expected (ie, you must be a new visitor there), and I guess my suggestion to you is to either use it as it is, or just not read TechReport. You're don't seem to be particularly interested in what they have to say.

early adopters and hardcore gamers who buy a new graphics card every 6 months. This is an important market segment as they buy far more graphics cards than everyone else

That segment might be the most profitable in terms of margins, but they are a relatively tiny part of the market. The low/mid range cards are where the volume is.

It's not perfect (primarily because of their games low hardware requirements), but Valves survey of hardware in use illustrates this.

ATI doesn't have enough of a lead over Nvidia to convince people to wait for their releases.

Who's doing the waiting? ATI shipped their first X800 cards this week (via Best Buy and their own online store). The first competitive cards from Nvidia (6800 GT) aren't due until mid-june.

Well, if you count her, then yes, the ATI card does come with a girlfriend.

Before you know it we'll have hardware capable of photo-realistic on the fly rendering for under $200.

Wait a couple years, and pick up a Radeon X800 XT Platinum that is capable of photo-realistic rendering on the fly (damn, Ruby looks good) for $200.

stolen from Anandtech

HardOCP
Ascully
DriverHeaven
TrustedReviews
K-Hardware
Hardware Analysis
Hexus
The Tech Report
Beyond3D
Neoseeker
ExtremeTech
Gamers Depot
Lost Circuits
Firing Squad
Tom's Hardware
Bjorn3D
Hot Hardware

Your comment has too few characters per line (currently 10.9). Your comment has too few characters per line (currently 12.3). Your comment has too few characters per line (currently 14.9). Your comment has too few characters per line (currently 17.4).

It's likely they already have feasible prototypes. However, IBM is currently having problems turning out enough G5's just for the towers and XServes. They are not likely to push ahead until they are certain supplies will be maintainable.

And really, the need to handle power/heat issues in a laptop may be causing other problems with getting one in a laptop anyway. If they went through the trouble of introducing a speed bump G5 laptops won't be in the next 6 months. In addition, when they do arrive they will probably be only in the high end at first, so if your thinking low-end money range it will probably be longer still.

TechReport.com consistently has the most thorough, careful, credible, and insightful hardware reviews. Here's their excellent review of the Nvidia GeForce 6800 Ultra, which should have been included at the top with the others.

TechReport.com consistently has the most thorough, careful, credible, and insightful hardware reviews. Here's their excellent review of the Nvidia GeForce 6800 Ultra, which should have been included at the top with the others.

I see a lot of posts on the fact that the 6800 Ultra requires a 480W power supply. However, if you read Tech Report's review, you'll notice that the card's actual power consumption isn't much more than the previous generation of cards. In fact, its idle power consumption is actually lower than the 9800 XT.

If you aren't looking to use the firewall, it looks like it's pretty easy to turn it off.

In the Forceware screenshot it shows a line labeled "Firewall Setup: Change firewall profiles including turning Firewall on/off." But, I guess if price was an issue, and you the firewall kept you from getting it, I could see that. Seems to me, this would be cheaper than a spare system in the closet. I guess you would have to test it with the firewall on/off to know if it was stealing your cycles, though.

The ForceWare software that comes with it looks semi-decent. I like how it has a built in statistics graph for the firewall, too.

Bizzare eh?

Tech Report's review tests the FX-53 against a total of sixteen other chips. Good reading if you've got a benchmark fetish, too.

As covered by arstechnica, there are also reviews at [H]ardOCP, Hexus, HotHardware.com, Sudhian, and The Tech Report. AMD's official announcement is here.

Tom's Hardware has nothing to worry about from IBM.

IBM's GXP Deathstar hard drives, as /. regulars are well aware of, are exactly that. Death comes to your data on these drives eventually. Too bad for a large number of customers, it came sooner rather than later.

When the news first broke on these drives, some tech sites came out with the news, and others kept fairly silent. Silence isn't a crime. But continuing to use Deathstars in review gear should be. Why? Because some readers, myself included, used reviews and testing gear examples from Tom's Hardware to build our first computers. Take advice and recommendations from the experts, and you get a better computer, right?

As the current /. story points out, why bite the hand that feeds you advance facts on hardware under ndas, and direct contact with company engineers?

Consumer Reports buys everything they test. With the money that Tom's Hardware has made from advertising on its site (from reader views), they should be doing the same.

Don't take my word for it. Check the dates of when the Deathstar stories first appeared. Then check the hardware reviews on Tom's Hardware. Not just hard drive reviews. Check reviews of other hardware related or dependent upon hard drive speed to get some benchmarks or results. Then see what hard drives are used in the benchmarks, and in the review gear.

While some of their readers went down in flames, others were announcing that the there was a problem, and they continued on as if nothing was wrong. They may have acknowledged the problem in a small story or two iirc (maybe not even that), but they continued using the hard drives in their review gear, without a footnote or warning about them.

Why?

Tom's Hardware has nothing to worry about from IBM.

IBM's GXP Deathstar hard drives, as /. regulars are well aware of, are exactly that. Death comes to your data on these drives eventually. Too bad for a large number of customers, it came sooner rather than later.

When the news first broke on these drives, some tech sites came out with the news, and others kept fairly silent. Silence isn't a crime. But continuing to use Deathstars in review gear should be. Why? Because some readers, myself included, used reviews and testing gear examples from Tom's Hardware to build our first computers. Take advice and recommendations from the experts, and you get a better computer, right?

As the current /. story points out, why bite the hand that feeds you advance facts on hardware under ndas, and direct contact with company engineers?

Consumer Reports buys everything they test. With the money that Tom's Hardware has made from advertising on its site (from reader views), they should be doing the same.

Don't take my word for it. Check the dates of when the Deathstar stories first appeared. Then check the hardware reviews on Tom's Hardware. Not just hard drive reviews. Check reviews of other hardware related or dependent upon hard drive speed to get some benchmarks or results. Then see what hard drives are used in the benchmarks, and in the review gear.

While some of their readers went down in flames, others were announcing that the there was a problem, and they continued on as if nothing was wrong. They may have acknowledged the problem in a small story or two iirc (maybe not even that), but they continued using the hard drives in their review gear, without a footnote or warning about them.

Why?

Tom's Hardware has nothing to worry about from IBM.

IBM's GXP Deathstar hard drives, as /. regulars are well aware of, are exactly that. Death comes to your data on these drives eventually. Too bad for a large number of customers, it came sooner rather than later.

When the news first broke on these drives, some tech sites came out with the news, and others kept fairly silent. Silence isn't a crime. But continuing to use Deathstars in review gear should be. Why? Because some readers, myself included, used reviews and testing gear examples from Tom's Hardware to build our first computers. Take advice and recommendations from the experts, and you get a better computer, right?

As the current /. story points out, why bite the hand that feeds you advance facts on hardware under ndas, and direct contact with company engineers?

Consumer Reports buys everything they test. With the money that Tom's Hardware has made from advertising on its site (from reader views), they should be doing the same.

Don't take my word for it. Check the dates of when the Deathstar stories first appeared. Then check the hardware reviews on Tom's Hardware. Not just hard drive reviews. Check reviews of other hardware related or dependent upon hard drive speed to get some benchmarks or results. Then see what hard drives are used in the benchmarks, and in the review gear.

While some of their readers went down in flames, others were announcing that the there was a problem, and they continued on as if nothing was wrong. They may have acknowledged the problem in a small story or two iirc (maybe not even that), but they continued using the hard drives in their review gear, without a footnote or warning about them.

Why?

Tom's Hardware has nothing to worry about from IBM.

IBM's GXP Deathstar hard drives, as /. regulars are well aware of, are exactly that. Death comes to your data on these drives eventually. Too bad for a large number of customers, it came sooner rather than later.

When the news first broke on these drives, some tech sites came out with the news, and others kept fairly silent. Silence isn't a crime. But continuing to use Deathstars in review gear should be. Why? Because some readers, myself included, used reviews and testing gear examples from Tom's Hardware to build our first computers. Take advice and recommendations from the experts, and you get a better computer, right?

As the current /. story points out, why bite the hand that feeds you advance facts on hardware under ndas, and direct contact with company engineers?

Consumer Reports buys everything they test. With the money that Tom's Hardware has made from advertising on its site (from reader views), they should be doing the same.

Don't take my word for it. Check the dates of when the Deathstar stories first appeared. Then check the hardware reviews on Tom's Hardware. Not just hard drive reviews. Check reviews of other hardware related or dependent upon hard drive speed to get some benchmarks or results. Then see what hard drives are used in the benchmarks, and in the review gear.

While some of their readers went down in flames, others were announcing that the there was a problem, and they continued on as if nothing was wrong. They may have acknowledged the problem in a small story or two iirc (maybe not even that), but they continued using the hard drives in their review gear, without a footnote or warning about them.

Why?

Some info here. SSE3 is the big thing.

Tech Report compares the SilenX with four of its competitors here.

They claim it's supposed to compare against the the 'Thunderbird' model Athlon (the one that topped out at 1.4 GHz). Not the Duron.

Most people will keep matching it against the P4 regardless, of course. Will this continue to hold true against the Prescott (allowing AMD to hike up their PR numbers by a goodly amount), or will they stick to their supposed guns?

More info here.

For the benefit of those who have not read the F. article, don't miss the "Zen babe" on the Conclusions page. I'll leave the review of that part up to you folks. :)

... who is that horrendous chick on the concluding page of the review?

Bleeeuuuuuurrgh, makes me want to wash my mouth out with cpu coolant paste.

If you want to bring out your system with a bang... you better get some better looking models than this one.

Jenny's Picture

AC

Well, they got the dimensions down to around the Apple Cube's size, but it is still lacking in aesthetics. For instance, one could never put this thing on your desk with its back facing to someone else if you place any value on style. I mean check this out. The Apple cube had a completely smooth appearance with connections to the display coming discretely out of the underside of the case. Oh, and it is silent. Cooling a P4 chip is going to require some fans on this baby, but I guess its all about tradeoffs. For a PC case though, this is not that bad for small form factors.

Check out the story times for this article and this one at The TR.

No attribution exists on either story so as far as I can tell. As a result both 'authors' would appear to be claiming 'ownership'.

It's a small thing really but someone needs to speak up when they find this sort of thing going on. I don't care who wrote the article but shouldn't someone be properly credited? Then again perhaps they are both by the same person?

You may also want to take a look at this review at our good old Tech Report.

You may also want to take a look at this review at our good old Tech Report.

Don't forget Tech Report

Tech Report also has DeltaChrome preview with screen shots of just how messed up S3's drivers are in some applications.

It's a smart decision because the new Opteron CPUs are now performing very well against Intel's fastest 32-bit CPUs and AMD thinks they can continue to compete with Intel in the 64-bit arena.

Keep in mind that while AMD is immensely popular for lower cost boxes, the real profit margins are made at the high end. The new 64-bit AMD chips could go a long ways towards making AMD profitable and it's no surprise they want to push high end parts as soon as possible.

It seems to me that lately AMD has lost some momentum with the high end Athlon XPs not being able to keep pace with a high-end P4.

Part of the problem was inflicted by AMD themselves and their + performance rating scheme for the XP line of processors.

While AMD stated that the + rating was not meant to directly compare with any Intel processor, some remarkable coincidence always seemed to result in an Athlon XP XXXX+ benchmarking about the same as an XXXXGhz Pentium 4 yet cost ~20% less. Unfortunately, the PR ratings didnt scale linearly (especially at the top end) and they whole scheme now looks contrived. AMD would be wise to put it behind them ASAP.

You'll notice that the new Opterons now use model numbers that have very little basis for comparison with clock speed from either vendor. Only time will tell if this strategy sells any better...

It's a smart decision because the new Opteron CPUs are now performing very well against Intel's fastest 32-bit CPUs and AMD thinks they can continue to compete with Intel in the 64-bit arena.

Keep in mind that while AMD is immensely popular for lower cost boxes, the real profit margins are made at the high end. The new 64-bit AMD chips could go a long ways towards making AMD profitable and it's no surprise they want to push high end parts as soon as possible.

It seems to me that lately AMD has lost some momentum with the high end Athlon XPs not being able to keep pace with a high-end P4.

Part of the problem was inflicted by AMD themselves and their + performance rating scheme for the XP line of processors.

While AMD stated that the + rating was not meant to directly compare with any Intel processor, some remarkable coincidence always seemed to result in an Athlon XP XXXX+ benchmarking about the same as an XXXXGhz Pentium 4 yet cost ~20% less. Unfortunately, the PR ratings didnt scale linearly (especially at the top end) and they whole scheme now looks contrived. AMD would be wise to put it behind them ASAP.

You'll notice that the new Opterons now use model numbers that have very little basis for comparison with clock speed from either vendor. Only time will tell if this strategy sells any better...

The problem with a benchmark like this is that UT2003 is a DX8-level game, so it doesn't take really take full advantage of these newer cards as it doesn't use features such as PS2.0. We're not really going to know how the two brands truly stack up until next-gen games (Doom 3, HL2, etc.) which take full advantage of the hardware start to show up.

Early indicators seem to be that nVidia's cards struggle to handle DX9-level pixel shaders. While I'm taking the pre-release benchmarks on HL2 from Valve with a grain of salt, the Aquanox (DX9) benchmark and comments I've read from John Carmack as well as others seem to echo the fact that nVidia's hardware's just not up to snuff when it comes to next generation performance. IE: nVidia's cards are fine for anything that's out now, but if you want to hold onto a card for a couple of years, I'd stay away personally.

Let me also add in a disclaimer that I've been a long time fan of nVidia's hardware, having owned a TNT2, GF2, and GF4 previously. In fact, I'd sworn off ATI as crap back in the days of the Rage and it's absolutely horrendous drivers. So let's just say it wasn't an easy decision for me when time to upgrade rolled around this time and I ended up going with a Radeon 9600 Pro. :)

And since you asked, I'm not sure about Matrox (I assume they're still around), but S3 was recently revived from the dead. It seems they were bought out by VIA when they went bankrupt, who continued development of the hardware, and we'll be seeing a new chip from them called Delta Chrome sometime in the next few months. All the rumblings I've heard have indicated that this thing could be competitive with nVidia and ATI in the low and mid-range market segments. This should be interesting to watch play out.

That was my initial though to the parent post as well. However, if you read this from The Tech Report, Valve may be somewhat biased towards ATI.
"Finally, Valve's top dog addressed potential accusations of bias head-on. The company recently signed a deal allowing ATI to distribute Half-Life 2 with its Radeon cards, but Newell made clear this was not a case of the tail wagging the dog."

Maybe ATI is really that much better than Nvidia now but I'll wait until I see some Doom3 benchmarks before I run out an upgrade my video card.

Forget ExtremeTech's article, and go check out the one at The Tech Report. According to Gabe Newell of Valve, one of the graphics card companies was trying to detect when a screen shot was being made, so that it could output a higher resolution frame, hiding the quality trade-offs made by the driver. From the article: "He also mentioned that he's seen drivers detect screen capture attempts and output higher quality data than what's actually shown in-game."

"IBM's failure to protect its customers sends several signals to the market, including that Linux is not ready to become a mainstream computer operating system, and that there is a chance that SCO's claims against IBM just might have some validity."

"Every other software and hardware vendor provides indemnification for its products. IBM is saying it doesn't want to take that chance because SCO might win."

Personally, I think that IBM deserves everything they get. Or lose in sales. From some of the posts I've read in the past, IBM basically invented the shakedown tactic. One small computer manufacturer posted a story sometime in the last two years, possibly right here on slashdot, of him receiving correspondence or communication from IBM, regarding possible patent infringement. His company was assembling computers, and wasn't one of the big companies. The letter mentioned one or several patents, and requested a meeting. The guy was prepared for the patents, with one of his attorneys, and one or more of his technical people. If I recall correctly, it was him, one of his attorneys, and one or two of his tech people. IBM showed up with about a dozen people, and they went into a conference room. IBM's opening was that the company was infringing one or a couple of their patents. The guy's tech person(s) then refuted that, showing prior use, and whatever else they had to refute it. Then the IBM lawyers, after a pause (I think he said there was something like a dozen of them) said let's cut to the chase. We have a huge number of patents you are infringing. Do you want to spend your time and money in court, or settle this?

Guess what the guy did?

The guy went further, suggesting that as far as he knew, every computer manufacturer/assembler making any kind of money is paid a visit by IBM eventually.

That means that not only are you paying a microsoft tax on every computer sold, but you are also paying an IBM tax, even if there are no IBM parts in it.

Don't get me started on IBM deathstars, and IBM's atrocious treatment of it's customers.

IBM won't indemnify? Not publicly? Why not? They need to put there money where there mouth is.

Will IBM agree, by publishing a binding offer, if accepted, on their site, not to charge any computer assembler or manufacturer who assembles a desktop computer, with no IBM hardware or software, and who installs a linux distro, with patent infringement?

Will they agree to give to the public, any patents that they hold that were previously used to shake money out of manufacturers in the above described manner?

If not, then IBM is doing the same thing that ms is doing, they are just doing it under non-discloure agreements.

And if not, then the community needs to wake up. IBM is just as evil, and just as much a threat or cost to computer users everywhere, regardless of the pocket change they will spend to take on sco.

If sco goes down, I hope they take ibm with them. They are both cockroaches.

Just as some in florida can't punch a punch card, some in the community can't or won't face reality.

"IBM's failure to protect its customers sends several signals to the market, including that Linux is not ready to become a mainstream computer operating system, and that there is a chance that SCO's claims against IBM just might have some validity."

"Every other software and hardware vendor provides indemnification for its products. IBM is saying it doesn't want to take that chance because SCO might win."

Personally, I think that IBM deserves everything they get. Or lose in sales. From some of the posts I've read in the past, IBM basically invented the shakedown tactic. One small computer manufacturer posted a story sometime in the last two years, possibly right here on slashdot, of him receiving correspondence or communication from IBM, regarding possible patent infringement. His company was assembling computers, and wasn't one of the big companies. The letter mentioned one or several patents, and requested a meeting. The guy was prepared for the patents, with one of his attorneys, and one or more of his technical people. If I recall correctly, it was him, one of his attorneys, and one or two of his tech people. IBM showed up with about a dozen people, and they went into a conference room. IBM's opening was that the company was infringing one or a couple of their patents. The guy's tech person(s) then refuted that, showing prior use, and whatever else they had to refute it. Then the IBM lawyers, after a pause (I think he said there was something like a dozen of them) said let's cut to the chase. We have a huge number of patents you are infringing. Do you want to spend your time and money in court, or settle this?

Guess what the guy did?

The guy went further, suggesting that as far as he knew, every computer manufacturer/assembler making any kind of money is paid a visit by IBM eventually.

That means that not only are you paying a microsoft tax on every computer sold, but you are also paying an IBM tax, even if there are no IBM parts in it.

Don't get me started on IBM deathstars, and IBM's atrocious treatment of it's customers.

IBM won't indemnify? Not publicly? Why not? They need to put there money where there mouth is.

Will IBM agree, by publishing a binding offer, if accepted, on their site, not to charge any computer assembler or manufacturer who assembles a desktop computer, with no IBM hardware or software, and who installs a linux distro, with patent infringement?

Will they agree to give to the public, any patents that they hold that were previously used to shake money out of manufacturers in the above described manner?

If not, then IBM is doing the same thing that ms is doing, they are just doing it under non-discloure agreements.

And if not, then the community needs to wake up. IBM is just as evil, and just as much a threat or cost to computer users everywhere, regardless of the pocket change they will spend to take on sco.

If sco goes down, I hope they take ibm with them. They are both cockroaches.

Just as some in florida can't punch a punch card, some in the community can't or won't face reality.

"IBM's failure to protect its customers sends several signals to the market, including that Linux is not ready to become a mainstream computer operating system, and that there is a chance that SCO's claims against IBM just might have some validity."

"Every other software and hardware vendor provides indemnification for its products. IBM is saying it doesn't want to take that chance because SCO might win."

Personally, I think that IBM deserves everything they get. Or lose in sales. From some of the posts I've read in the past, IBM basically invented the shakedown tactic. One small computer manufacturer posted a story sometime in the last two years, possibly right here on slashdot, of him receiving correspondence or communication from IBM, regarding possible patent infringement. His company was assembling computers, and wasn't one of the big companies. The letter mentioned one or several patents, and requested a meeting. The guy was prepared for the patents, with one of his attorneys, and one or more of his technical people. If I recall correctly, it was him, one of his attorneys, and one or two of his tech people. IBM showed up with about a dozen people, and they went into a conference room. IBM's opening was that the company was infringing one or a couple of their patents. The guy's tech person(s) then refuted that, showing prior use, and whatever else they had to refute it. Then the IBM lawyers, after a pause (I think he said there was something like a dozen of them) said let's cut to the chase. We have a huge number of patents you are infringing. Do you want to spend your time and money in court, or settle this?

Guess what the guy did?

The guy went further, suggesting that as far as he knew, every computer manufacturer/assembler making any kind of money is paid a visit by IBM eventually.

That means that not only are you paying a microsoft tax on every computer sold, but you are also paying an IBM tax, even if there are no IBM parts in it.

Don't get me started on IBM deathstars, and IBM's atrocious treatment of it's customers.

IBM won't indemnify? Not publicly? Why not? They need to put there money where there mouth is.

Will IBM agree, by publishing a binding offer, if accepted, on their site, not to charge any computer assembler or manufacturer who assembles a desktop computer, with no IBM hardware or software, and who installs a linux distro, with patent infringement?

Will they agree to give to the public, any patents that they hold that were previously used to shake money out of manufacturers in the above described manner?

If not, then IBM is doing the same thing that ms is doing, they are just doing it under non-discloure agreements.

And if not, then the community needs to wake up. IBM is just as evil, and just as much a threat or cost to computer users everywhere, regardless of the pocket change they will spend to take on sco.

If sco goes down, I hope they take ibm with them. They are both cockroaches.

Just as some in florida can't punch a punch card, some in the community can't or won't face reality.

Is the Zalman's ZM400A-APF 400W power supply goth? And if so, is it a threat to our children? Should it be banned like guns at school? I don't want PSU's making kids into terrorists.

I don't know why, but this graph just makes me laugh!

Any readers not already aware of the deathstar gxp drives designed and manufactured by IBM, and now a Hitachi/IBM product, should check out the links.

And immediately after reading the articles, should backup, get one or more new drives by another company who stands behind their products, and use the current deathstars as additional swap drives if you can afford losing the drive, or just dump it.

And you should seriously question any hardware articles you read from any tech review site who has intentionally kept their head in the sand on this issue, even after being alerted to the issue at the height of the storm.

Are you listening, t**?

Any readers not already aware of the deathstar gxp drives designed and manufactured by IBM, and now a Hitachi/IBM product, should check out the links.

And immediately after reading the articles, should backup, get one or more new drives by another company who stands behind their products, and use the current deathstars as additional swap drives if you can afford losing the drive, or just dump it.

And you should seriously question any hardware articles you read from any tech review site who has intentionally kept their head in the sand on this issue, even after being alerted to the issue at the height of the storm.

Are you listening, t**?