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Microsoft Bites It On 64-bit Microprocessors
Lots of readers pointed us to this Microsoft.com page that says MS has stopped trying to make NT run on 64-bit Alphas and isn't even going to release any new 32-bit Alpha products. For more info on the subject, check this Netcape Netcenter article and the Ixnay WinNT on Alphastory we ran last Friday. Meanwhile, according to a short blurb in The Register, Intel has finally prototyped Merced in silicon - and it runs Linux fine but won't run Win64 at all. It looks like Microsoft simply can't deal with 64-bit architecture. Please try not to say "I told you so" too loudly to your MS-boosting coworkers, okay? ;-)
What scares me is that, in light of all the problems they're having with NT, what's to keep M$ from buying Red Hat (or some other Linux retailer) and bundling crappy ports of M$ Office to Linux. I mean to them, they then get on the bandwagon, they leverage their crappy office products to take current users and installed base to Linux. THEIR Linux. They'll make Linux inexpensive, but you can bet you bottom dollar, they'll push the M$ Office bundle! And it gets them out of that nasty old monoply lawsuit!
:)
I don't know, maybe i just had too much coffee today?
Is it just me, or has Linux spread like kudzu in the same 5-6 year period that Microsoft has been steadily retreating? At one point, NT was supossed to run on Intel, PowerPC, MIPS and Alpha. Linux now runs on these and more, while NT is only on Intel now. When Transmeta, or whoever comes out with a new, hot chip, it seems that it is easier to get Linux on it than almost anything else, certainly easier than NT.
JET Program: see Japan, meet intere
This little anecdote is another example of why diversity is good. And why I fear the Intel hemogeny.
If M$ can't get it working on the IA64 arch. soon, then they'll try to make Intel change the specs, so that they can run Win2000 on it with no changes. (So there won't be any reason to buy the processor) If they can't get it working, they'll make some sort of statement on how "The general Public is not ready for 64 bit computers." simply because they aren't ready. :)
You running netscape on that machine? "And the beast shall come forth surrounded by a rolling cloud of vengeance. The house of the unbelievers shall be razed and they shall be scorched to the earth" about:mozilla
The Register: "Everything that's fit to print. Okay, everything else that nobody else wanted to waste space with. And some of it's even TRUE!!!"
Well, in that case, Win95 is very portable too!
It's just NT 5 with a new name.
Of course, when MS comes out with the *real* follow-on for Windows 98, their already confused naming conventions will have to undergo some big revisions.
That's a benefit for Microsoft and their "key partners.
It will be interesting to see how many of their 'key partners' Microsoft will stab in the back this time. Somehow transitions like this seem to benefit Microsoft much more than any of their partners.
Everyone must buy new apps. Everyone will want to have "64bit clean" systems.
It depends on how long it takes for people to upgrade. If its like the last time that the PC industry went through this (the transition from 286 to 386), it was both good and bad for vendors. It is hard to say at this point if this transition will be easier or harder, and if people on the desktop side will see the upgrade as compelling. On the server side, it is hard to imagine people won't, but they may be resistant to have mismatched client and server hardware. At the time of the 286->386 migration there was a lot smaller entrenched base of existing machines.
It will generate years and years of gluttony; several OS revisions and all-new-everything.
That is certainly what Microsoft would like to see happen. Time will tell if it does.
And then when it's all said-and-done nothing will have changed -- everything will look the same and performance will be back to what you'd expect.
If everything goes as Microsoft plans, this is probably true. However, if things don't go Microsoft's way, who knows.
As many companies as have just spent considerable sums on Y2K related upgrades, etc., it will be interesting to see how receptive they are to paying for upgrades to W2K, let alone to upgrade desktop hardware to 64 bit.
How expensive is a 32/64 bit mode switch? Is it feasible to compile certain parts of an application to be 64 bit, and others (less memory intensive) to be 32 bit? Is it fast enough so that I can decide bittiness on the procedure level, or should it be at the library level?
(Ignoring for now the complications of passing pointers of different lengths between various parts of the application. There's an interesting type checking problem here- a simplified instance of existential types, I think)
I guess you missed the first part of the link. I'll give you a hint, it was www.microsoft.com.
No matter how reliable you consider that site, I think it disproves your theory.
--
QDMerge 0.21!
how to invest, a novice's guide
is that you ken?
:)
I use Friend/Foe + mod-point modifiers as a karma/reputation system.
> The only non-Unix operating system I know of in >development is Be. Accually, BeOS is based off of some *BSD, and it is very unixish (though, not a full Unix, to my knowledge). I'm a bit ignorant on this subject, but i am aware that does hold a lot of Unix Like elements. Anybody care to expand on this?
I was telling people this about MS three years ago when Merced was just a twinkle in intel's eye, then again, last year when every OS vendor in the world except IBM, Apple, and MS made HUGE noise about porting their shit to ia64. I could understand then why Apple wouldn't, and IBM, because they only had one intel OS anyway, OS/2. But I couldn't understand why MS wasn't making any noise. Oh sure, they did have whitepapers saying that they planned a 64-bit port, but it was unnatural for them to not jump on the hype bandwagon, especially with their history of FUD and Vapor - I began to see this as a symptom - that they must be seriously in trouble on the 64-bit front if they were afraid to at least issue vapor.
Now we know.
"The number of suckers born each minute doubles every 18 months."
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Umm, examples, please... I certainly haven't found this to be the case. The great thing about Java is that it really IS portable. You get portability at the price of reduced performance. This isn't a problem for most applications, though, provided that you have a fast machine. My development team switched from C++ to Java 2 a while back, and our productivity went way up when all the porting issues went away. We are designing CAD software, and we have not had any performance problems.
>>How will Linux eventually affect Java development?
Linux and Java will complement one another. As more developers switch to Java, one will only need an OS with a Java interpreter/JIT to run those applications. If one has a choice of running those Java applications on a reliable (and inexpensive) OS like Linux, or a lousy (and expensive) OS like Winodws, which OS do you think they are going to use?
Uuuhh... Last time I checked you don't need a MCSE to be a developer. I'm a free-lance MS developer earning 6 figures a year, plus I get paid to travel. Not a single certification.
it's not a 'mode' switch. it uses truncated pointers and kernel support for a 32bit addr. space.
I use Friend/Foe + mod-point modifiers as a karma/reputation system.
Windows 1.0
Windows 2.0
Windows 386
Windows 3.0
Windows 3.1
Windows 3.11
Windows for Workgroups
Windows 95
Windows 95A
Windows 95B
Windows 95 OSR 2
Windows 95 OSR 2.1
Windows 95 OSR 2.5
Windows 98 (8 versions, currently)
Windows NT 3.1
Windows NT 3.1 Advanced Server
Windows NT 3.51 Workstation
Windoes NT 3.51 Server
Windows NT 4.0 Workstation
Windows NT 4.0 Server
Windows NT 4.0 Server Enterprise Edition
(Not to mention all the service packs for the above...)
I'm sure I missed some. Does anybody have a canonical list of all the versions of Windows?
Well, the way things are going it looks like the PPC750 is going to be used as a LinChip on those IBM boxes, unless there are OS's that I'm forgetting which will also run on those motherboards.
(Well, supposedly (according to Alan Cox) the WinChip is actually rather customizable and might even be able to say "LinChip". Not that I'd buy one, now that AMD K6-2s and Celery(-2)'s are so cheap.)
You missed the whole Windows CE line.
fwiw, most of my crashes (okay, lets be specific here, BSOD-en) seem to be networking and file-system related.
.
Right now, I have a folder in my Recycle Bin, that when I try to empty, I get an error saying the file or directory is corrupt. I can empty all the other stuff in there, but this one folder won't go away. I know that if I format the disk, the problem will go away, but I also know that if I format the disk, I'll have to reinstall the OS (it's not my startup disk, but I have all my apps installed there, including MS Office, which has a bunch of links and crap with the startup of the OS, so if I delete that, I won't be able to boot properly)
in other words NT sucks, and I'll be very happy when it becomes irrelevant to the business model of the company I work for, so we can get some REAL computers. It's already starting, I have a SPARC Ultra 10 PO awaiting approval. .
"The number of suckers born each minute doubles every 18 months."
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
I almost did when I wrote my original post, but I didn't want to get too verbose.
My understanding is that BeOS is genuinely a completely new kernel, designed from the ground up for use with multiple processors. I don't think the Be thread/process system owes much to Unix.
Be's window system is brand new and owes nothing to X-Windows. In terms of speed, this is a major advantage - the system definitely has a much crisper, zippier feeling than any other OS. The disadvantage, of course, is that it starts from ground zero in applications - X applications are not compatible without an X compatibility layer (which does exist; I don't know about its performance).
However, I believe Be is posix compliant, and it definitely supports many (but not all) of the usual Gnu utilities. I would guess that porting is not too difficult for non-GUI applications. I believe GTK+ is in beta for Be, and that should make it trivial to port GTK+-based applications.
D
----
That shell was not supported, and IIRC had a lot of bugs, and probably would be incompatible with a lot of modern software. You're talking about something that's 4 years old. There's so much tied in with Explorer, if you're talking about IE, and Office and desktop type applications. . .
I wouldn't recommend it. I would instead recommend fdisk, and install Linux, but, you gotta run what you gotta run at work.
"The number of suckers born each minute doubles every 18 months."
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Funny tho, the GUI's still SLOW.
"The number of suckers born each minute doubles every 18 months."
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
linux allowed me to buy a $3000 laptop. That said, at least the MSCE program allows morons with no marketable skills to stay off welfare.
MS _will_ make Win64 work with the new CPU. But until that time, it _IS_ pretty funny ;)
Talisman
"Study your math, kids. Key to the universe." -The Archangel Gabriel
So "The Register" reports a rumor that NT won't boot on early Merced silicon. And you believe this?
Note that Intel publically demo'd NT running on a Merced simulator months and months ago.
Who do you believe?
I have news for you. You're average Unix Sys Admin makes alot more than your better than average MCSE (not that that's saying much). If it's money that you're after, then you are obviously as dumb as most MCSEs.
Open source. Closed minds. We are Slashdot. News for Nerds. Stuff that matters...as long as it bashes Microsoft and supports Linux. Once again, the unbias in your reporting astonishes me! Keep up the objective viewpoints!
I have it running on a 64 meg 486-66 (in my lab).
Believe me. It's SLOOOOOW.
My biggest lab machine right now is a dual Pentium 166 with 64 megs RAM, and I don't plan on upgrading that to W2K. Too slow. In fact, now that I think of it, I don't even have a PII. . . I probably won't be able to run W2K at all. I think I need some new equipment.
"The number of suckers born each minute doubles every 18 months."
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
usloth can't program, but they can come up w/ CYA TLAs. beautiful.
Personally, I prefer NT3.51 to 4.0. It *feels* more solid and stable as well as being more stable. Probably it's that clunky Win3.1 interface that gives the 'solid' feel, compared to the Win95 interface with Start Menus flitting up and down and random popups appearing all the time.
Anyway, I believe that between the release of Win95 and NT4, Microsoft released the new shell as an addon for NT3.51. If you ran 3.51 with the new shell, it might be a good way to get a stable Windows system with a modern interface (as well as lower system requirements than the 64MB minimum recommended for NT4SP5). I think it was freely downloadable, but I haven't found a copy on Microsoft's site (the filename was newshell.exe, I am told). Does anyone have a copy?
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
Future Plans for 64-bit Versions of Microsoft Products This announcement does not affect our plans to develop and support 64-bit versions of our products on the Intel platform. Compaq, as well as our other OEM partners, will continue to work with us to deliver a 64-bit version of Windows for our enterprise customers based on the IA64 architecture.
Stupid, but marginally better than 'OSF/1'. They can't call it 'Digital Unix' since the Digital brand has all but disappeared. I think we will have to call it 'DEC Unix' - the name 'DEC' will probably annoy the Compaq marketing people even more than it annoyed the Digital marketing people.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
'No one will ever need more than 32 bits:' -- Bill Gates[0]
:)
*chortle*
[0] - ok, so it's fake, but doesn't this sound familiar?
-fester (still wanting flash for his hpux box)
-'fester
Oh, I messed with a beta too, and no, it didn't crash, and yes, it was very, very slow on a PII 300 with 128mb RAM.
However, I couldn't get any of the advance features to work, because everything relied on DNS (microsoft DNS), and I couldn't get the DNS server to install. I got a lame message that "RPC Service was not available". Just a popup dialog. No event log messages, nothing else. Of course the RPC Service showed it was running just fine.
It was an isolated network, so there was no TCP/IP addressing issue.
However, it did run that nifty pinball game GREAT!
"The number of suckers born each minute doubles every 18 months."
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Well.. running NT on a Alpha. Is just plain stupid. 32-bit system ; 64-bit arch. It's like running DOS on a PIII. A wasted computed.
your right. there's a problem with PCI which maps into memory at 1GB.. hence limiting physical RAM to 1GB. But I think it might have changed in 2.2.11 or so to 2GB (not sure).
:(
Tru64 supports scatter-gather mapping. ie arbitrary PCI address spaces can be mapped on demand to arbitrary address spaces. Also, the pyxis chipset used on a lot of PCI alpha's (PC164xx) has quite sophisticated scatter-gather support, ie cut-down page tables and a tlb (similar to the way most cpu's support virtual memory). But linux doesn't support this, and just uses direct mappings..
I use Friend/Foe + mod-point modifiers as a karma/reputation system.
I don't have anyone stupid enough at my office to promote windows. But for anyone who has ever doubted me and trusty linux, I told you so : )hehe
Is it larger than a factor of 2? I am willing to put up with a factor of 2 difference if it buys significant speed...
Ben
My usual seat in the cluetrain is at A HREF="http://pub4.ezboard.com/biwethey.ht
Like it or lump it, Intel is basically the only game in town.
PPC is hardly a fart in the windstorm comparatively.
Your use of the word "kernel" in your response hints that I was unclear. I wasn't referring to Linux@64 bits, but rather the CPU. The comments about 64 bit programs being much larger than 32 bit ones suggests that there are different operating modes for the processor. These are the modes I was referring to.
Sorry for being cryptic
I'm surprised that Cutler can look himself in the face long enough to shave every day. VMS was (and still is, AFAIK) renowned around the world for its absolutely unquestioned rock-solid stability and bank-vault security. NT, his current love-child, is renowned for a lot of things, but stability and security aren't two of them. In his shoes, I would be consumed with shame.
I'm guessing that he lays the blame firmly on Micros~1 management. Typical refuge of a failed technologist.
Cutler's brilliant, but history will probably remember him first for NT, and only second for VMS. Sad, really.
You believe he was on the panel?
;-)
Ummm... He said he was there. True, he could be lying, but it's probably in bad form to outright accuse him of such based solely on the fact that You don't know of an authoratative source.
Guess I took ac.uk's comment out of context.
--
--
Think Green... Burn only 100% recycled dinosaurs in you car.
What you say is more true of NetBSD. And OpenSTEP was supposed to be "write once, compile anywhere" (with those FAT binaries), which is a more interesting idea than Java IMO, but since Java seemed to catch on while OpenSTEP didn't really, Sun discontinued their support of it.
If MS wants their OS to run on a specific hardware platform, then THEY ought to do the f-ing port job. Just like any other OS vendor. NOT the hardware manufacturer.
Did intel write the x86 port of BeOS?
Did intel write the x86 version of Solaris?
f-ing Microsoft needs to get off their high-horse, because that model was bullshit anyway.
"The number of suckers born each minute doubles every 18 months."
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
not to burst any bubbles here or anything but Intel does not own anything of the alpha they have a Licence to manufacture it thats it. Not that they have made any so far and with Samsung moving towards .18 micron and IBM going copper, from what Ive heard Compaq is the only one that can buy the Alphas Intel produce and so far they have been too expensive. The reason it this came about was a lawsuit that Digital filed on stolen and non licensed patents(mostly cache/memory management but allso some specific CPU features) against Intel. This suit was settled out of court with the following agreement: Intel buys Digital FAB(since DEC wanted out of the FAB buisness this was a good thing) Digital get Intels chips first(the main reason you see the new Profusion being used in a Compaq first) Intel have to fab alphas for 10 years Intel pays x USD to Digital for the privilege. Intel allso got some other stuff like the Strong ARM and some of the networking parts Digital on the other hand had to find two other fab companies for the Alpha on FTC orders All design stayed with then Digital(now Compaq) who can still license it to anyone they want. There you have a somewhat informed outside view
Somebody want to organize a pool on by how many days commerical availability of NT for Merced will lag commercial availability of, say, the Red Hat distro for Merced? I'm buying up most of the numbers in the 100-200 range myself...
NT supposedly has a POSIX compliance subsystem too.
Supposedly is the key word there. It is almost completely unusable, and looks to be that way by design. It is often speculated that the only reason it exists at all is to provide a loophole to allow bids on government contracts that require POSIX compliance.
Because when push comes to shove, if Compaq wanted to crank out 200,000 desktop machines next quarter, they'd have no problem obtaining 200,000 intel CPUs and motherboards, but no hope of finding that many Alpha CPUs and motherboards.
"The number of suckers born each minute doubles every 18 months."
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
I be interested in looking at the bug report you filed for that one. You did file one didn't you?
Well, there was a Windows 286 (I still have the box around somewhere), but perhaps you typo'd that for Windows 386. And I'm not sure whether Win95B wasn't just another name for Win95 OSR2. (OBTW, there's also a Win 95C, which added some USB support to Win 95B).
...
Then there are all the beta versions floating around. (I ran W95 beta for about six months after W95 was released, I couln't be bothered doing the upgrade, and besides I was usually booting to Linux instead.)
Then of course there is (or I should say, was) Win NT for Alpha, Win NT for MIPS, Win NT for PowerPC,
-- Alastair
When I got my first C compiler for DOS I bought it used without (as far as I could tell) a license. I called up the company, after waiting jut a few seconds I was online with a real tech, who offered to send me (free of charge) the latest disks... I swore then that this was the company for me....
Today I curse that company's name... Microsoft.
What'd UNIX ever doto him? :)
:-)
It killed VMS.
Compaq, realising that it can not market Alpha servers to the ignorant Great Unwashed People in Suits, decides to give up on Alpha. Everyone wants NT anyway, and they have agood business selling x86 machines, IA64 is coming out sometime, even if Alpha is 5+ years ahead but they don't have to pay for Merced's development, so they (Compaq) pull support for developing NT on Alpha and quietly junk the architecture.
That makes good business sense in the short term for Compaq, and Microsoft too because it's one less processor to develop for. If there's only one architecture in the market place (Intel) who needs cross-platform portability (in the eyes of the Great Unwashed)?
Never mind, at least Sun are still plodding on with their stuff...
You mark my words, in a few month's time you won't be able to buy a new Alpha for love nor money.
I'm out of my tree just now but please feel free to leave a banana.
Well, shit yeah it's cheaper to develop Linux.
GCC=FREE
MSVC + 1yr membership in MSDeveloperNet = $2000
You do the math, but don't use a Pentium, because of the FP bug.
"The number of suckers born each minute doubles every 18 months."
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
WIth billions of dollars it is said a man can buy anything. I HARDLY beleive that Windows2000 64bit architecture IS NOT.. one of them.. I see everyones gettin excited to soon.
One time it helped me was when someone claimed that NT 3.5 had been reported to have an uptime of 7 years. I could then point to this document that revealed that the version had only been out four or five years.
--
The person making the claim has to come up with the proof. If someone claims Bill said that, then they need to prove it.
The default position is not to believe.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
It will be fairly interesting to see what happens in the next 3 months in terms of intel and microsoft relationship... Obviously microsoft is going to push intel on releasing the Merced as late as possible. Microsoft would not allow intel to release the most powerful chip on the market and not be able to be semi-reliable in running its operating system. Yet intel is trying to get the merced pushed out as fast as it can before people hear to many good things about the athelon... While amd was putting all their energy in the athelon intel been dumbing their resources into the merced. Crunch time is upon us and microsoft has spent their time messing around with windows 2000 which needs an overhaul to run on the Merced... All in all it is going a major fuck up for the intel/microsoft and definetly work in the favor of amd and I can only see good things happening to Linux.
Interesting Time Ahead...
jason
OK this is soo annoying! BEOS IS NOT BASED ON ANY UNIX LINUS BSD IRIX OR ANY OTHER UNIX CLONE. It is merely posix compatible (not completely compliant, however) meaning that it can run many unix applications. it however is in no way related to *unix. please tell me where you people are digging up this lie so I can tell the purveyer of this information to stop.
um. sorry to break the news to you, but JavaOS is dead.
"The number of suckers born each minute doubles every 18 months."
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
If Compaq decided to discontinue making alpha machines would they go bankrupt? Would it be the single turning point that hurtled the company into oblivion? I don't think so. And therefore don't think it's going to destroy MS.
People in this discussion list might not be famialiar with the MS products other than NT :) But there are quite a number of them and they sell regardless of how Alpha sales are doing.
Slashdot has never portrayed itself as a completely objective site. Microsoft has a history of attacking the concepts that helped build this site. So if Microsoft screws itself, you are going to have to expect some amount of gloating and celebration. Or, maybe you are one of the paid Microsoft astroturfers.
That's now.
Where's the future?
"The number of suckers born each minute doubles every 18 months."
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
There are no processor "modes". There are modes of writing assembly. In 64-bit use, pointers are 64-bit and the Alpha loads/stores these directly to registers. In 32-bit use, pointers are 32-bit and the Alpha loads/stores these to/from the bottom half of registers. NT does this with sign extension. As a consequence, NT uses the bottom 2GB of Alpha's 64-bit virtual address space for user programs, and the upper 2GB is reserved for kernel. The rest is ignored. All Alpha registers are 64-bit, always have been...
>The neat thing is: Linux has Merced support >*now*. No other OS can say that.
Do not comment on that which you do not know.
You have no idea how many in-house proprietary UNIX products are running on Merced "simulators" around the Valley.
They just don't wear it on their shoulder like linux monkeys.
Intel does not own the Alpha exclusively.
Compaq, Samsung and AMD all have access to the
Alpha architecure and can more or less do what
they want with it.
A piece of my brain is missing.
...there's really much more to life than money.
That's true. Also:
There's more to life than writing Linux code.
There's more to life than writing any kind of code.
There's more to life than computers.
There's more to life than... X. (X is anything you care to name)
So what? Some people code for love, some people code for money itself, some people code for money to do the other things they love to do.
Don't worry so much about what somebody else is or isn't doing... after all, you're not them, you're you.
I said I "messed with" the beta. I didn't "beta test", and I didn't have time to chase after something as glaringly obvious as this issue. But there is little chance of any kind of user-side resolution with error messaging as obtuse as this, so what would be the point?
(If you're wondering how I got ahold of the beta if I'm not a "beta tester", it was provided with a win2k class I attended, still have it, still using it as a coaster.)
"The number of suckers born each minute doubles every 18 months."
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
With the completion of Intel's Merced (which was developed to compete directly with architecture such as Compaq's alpha and Sun's sparc) it seems pretty obvious to me that MS is looking to stroke the back of Intel.
It appears (as it has always been the case) that Microsoft believes Compaq will not be able to survive with out its OS. Which is true to some extent, though MS may be finding itself with less aliances and more enemies as MS continues to boost the ego Intel.
And how exactly working with NT makes one loose his integrity ?
...
...
Those are computers we are taking about, computers...
If you step back you will realizez than Linux is riding on hype more than on anything else
At this point it is definately worse OS than Solaris and probably most of the commercial unices.
I am not saying that Linux is worthless but you need to keep things in perspective
so many out here wanted one of those, and
many did buy them, but many here were also stopped
by the very expensive proprietary ram which you
must use in them (and no, i have no reason to
believe it any faster then PC-100 dimms, twice
the bandwidth to the ram does not seem to make
much difference) wether or not this is a case of
it, sgi is known in the industry to find some way
of getting more of you money. so some think this
ram is just sgi back thier old tricks again.
NT supposedly has a POSIX compliance subsystem too.
"The number of suckers born each minute doubles every 18 months."
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
But your list is deceptive. The service packs are generally just minor cosmetic or bug fixes and addition of user mode programs.. not kernel changes. Also Workstation and Server use identical kernels, the only difference between the two is only a single registry setting a a few extra user level programs.
I must disagree. Some of the service packs for NT were significant enough changes to merit a version number change in any other sane numbering system.
-- benton.
You seem to have left out
Windows NT 4.0 Terminal Server
(something that's supposed to sort of, kinda, maybe introduce X-windows style Client/Server computing. Needless to say it needs way to much 'hand-holding' when used in the Real World.)
You seem to be forgetting that linux is not the only OS for Alpha. How about NetBSD or OpenBSD? I think even FreeBSD has a working alpha port. What about the loyal OpenVMS users? They swear by it. If you haven't used VMS, all I can say is that its 'different' than unix.
Well, not to totally offend (because it is obvious that you are coming to the light ) your MCSE was junk before this most recent failure. It'll get you in the door and let you battle NT all day long, but I think you'll go home flacid most days. Good news is you're making the switch now. Welcome to the promised land!
I have news for you. You're average Unix Sys Admin makes alot more than your better than average MCSE
Well, to be a Unix sysadmin, you actually have to KNOW something.
The be an MSCE, you just have to pass a test. A test that is freely available on the net. Just write the answers on your hand.
Linux runs fine on a 386. It's not what you want for development; I do a lot of compile/test cycles, so I want more speed. (I know, I'm responding to a troll...). As for "B": it looks like those MSCE courses didn't teach you to read. "At least" means that what I was saying is that one GOOD thing (perhaps the ONLY good thing) about the MSCE program is keeping people off welfare.
MS finally admit? The story in question is a TOTALLY unsubstantiated "reliable source" story that has a smell of being complete bullshit to make the Linux slackards slobber in glee.
Win16 was the turkey, not Win32. I suppose that you thought that all Win16 apps sharing the same virtual machine was a brilliant idea and letting each Win32 process have it's own virtual machine was a stupid idea. If Microsoft could jettison Win16 support altogether I think you'd be surprised at how much better a legacy-free Windows could be. The transition fron Win32 to Win64 shouldn't be as large a leap as Win16 to Win32 was.
In case you haven't noticed, the majority of Alpha sales have been OpenVMS and DG-UX kits, not NT. There actually hasn't been that much demand for NT on Alpha, so I think Compaq is just doing the savvy thing -- they're just dropping a less profitable (for them) OS.
Dropping NT is not going to have that significant an effect on Alpha sales.
Berlin-- http://www.berlin-consortium.org
DNA just wants to be free...
Why not just use the Gimp and Blender or POV-Ray or BMRT or Radiance? Or a mix of all of them?
Let us not forget what it stands for Meaningless indicator of processor speed I doubt that bogomips can be used very effectively to compare across CPU types if your going to compare at least use something like floating point/integer operations per second or a benchmarks like compile time for 2.2.10 kernel in 5 minutes. For example I doubt the k6 is really twice as fast as the Intel 400.
Yeah, lets see: $7.2 BILLION in yearly EARNINGS $485 BILLION in Market Cap. Whoa, they are headed for bankruptcy!!!
yep, i don't believe a word you written, you lying bastard. by default, of course.
xp% cat /proc/cpuinfo |grep BogoMIPS /sbin/lsmod
:)
BogoMIPS : 631.24
xp%
Module Size Used by
xfs-2.2.5-22 56384 2
tulip 36848 1 (autoclean)
xp% uname -a
Linux xp.my.org 2.2.5-22 #1 Wed Jun 2 09:32:09 EDT 1999 alpha unknown
Damn fast running X too
Merced is a funny creature. It supports two different instruction sets. One is the x86 (or now ia32) instruction set in use on most PCs today. The other is the ia64 instruction set. ia64 is 64bit, while ia32 is 32bit, but there are a whole slew of other differences. ia64 is also VLIW. I have no clue what this means but apparently it requires quite a bit of compiler voodoo and will result in extremely large binaries. IIRC there is a mode switch involved to go from ia32 to ia64, but I don't remember how long it takes. It's probally very similar to switching from real mode to protected mode on an x86 cpu, which IIRC is very expensive.
-matt
No but it is a Unix(tm) clone.
No it isn't accurate. It's "reliable source" bullshit with no credibility whatsoever. What'd they do, drop the chip in a BX motherboard? There are a HUGE number of what-ifs that would complete just running software on it. It is absolutely amazing seeing how garbage like this is eaten up in here though. Suddenly this is authentic, gotta-be-true news.
I mean, lets look at the numbers:
$7.2 BILLION in yearly EARNINGS
$485 BILLION in Market Cap.
They are obviously on the rocks. Its only a matter of time!
Uuuhh... I wasn't talking about developers, my message was in response to one about Unix Sys Admins making a LOT more than the average MCSE.
.
I know LOTS of MS developers, and yes, it's true, you don't need an MCSE to do MS development. In fact, I don't think I know of one MS developer who IS an MCSE (mainly Tech Support people get MCSEs anyway). But what you DO need to be an MS developer is an extraordinarily expensive copy of MSVC, and a subscription to MS Developer Net, which is outrageously expensive. Unless you Pir8 your SDKs. .
"The number of suckers born each minute doubles every 18 months."
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Microsoft's policy appears to be that they will only support non-X86 versions of NT if someone else funds the port and the maintenance. That's what killed the earlier non-X86 ports. It seems that Compaq decided that they weren't selling enough Alpha NT boxes to justify the cost of keeping NT Alpha alive. Microsoft doesn't think that NT Alpha is important enough to pay for it out of their own pocket.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
A Microsoft guy laughing at a Redhat guy for wearing a bicycle helmet.. when with Microsoft cronies realize that safety and security are more important than pure looks. "Why do I need a helmet, it messes up my hair, and I have enough money to pay for whatever hospital bills might come along now!"
"Looks as if the company is hurting, and too be honest except for a few IS/IT managers I don't think anyone cares anymore."
Hurting? Firstly this is Compaq's scheme of axing the Alpha, not MS'. Secondly the reality is that the alternative processors use to kick Intel's ass and MS had to support them to be competitive. But the reality is (despite the delusion that goes on here) that Intel processors now are the cats meow. NO ONE beats Intel anymore in real performance, except in extreme SMP setups where Intel still has some problems, but that accounts for an incredibly small sector of the market (>8 processors).
Yes. JavaOS is dead, but he didn't say anything about JavaOS. JavaOS was a bad idea, since much of the OS was written in Java itself. I think the guy was was just talking about using a lean version of linux optimized to run Java applets/applications, which I think is a very good idea. Such an OS could be very usefull for platform based embeded systems development/deployment.
In the press on this topic, Compaq was quoted as saying that only 5% of their Alphas went out as NT systems.
Actually, the figure I saw was 2%.
Furthermore, MS is still using Alpha as the development system for 64-bit W2k; they just apparently won't be polishing it, marketing it, etc.
Now, this seems pretty darn stupid of Compaq to me to discontinue plans to market 64-bit NT. Yeah, yeah, 2%--why bother, right? Thing is, that 2% refers to running a 32-bit OS on a 64-bit CPU. If you were going to the expense of buying an Alpha, why hinder it with an OS that doesn't take advantage of its architecture? Hence the 2% figure makes a lot of sense.
But now that Intel is coming out with a 64-bit chip, well, Microsoft decides that's important enough to warrant a 64-bit OS...and this is the time Compaq chooses to pull the plug on Alpha NT?? Huh???
Especially since, according to all reports, by the time Merced is finally released (Q2 next year? Q3??), the Alpha's going to be walloping it. By the middle of next year, the roadmaps I've seen have the 21264's hitting well over a GHz...I think I've even seen 1.4 tossed around (but it was prolly at The Register, so, grain of salt). More importantly, benchmark roadmaps (these, I remember, were leaked from Compaq, so more salt) have a 1GHz Alpha beating an 800MHz Merced by ~40-50% (SPECint, IIRC).
So what's up???
Two theories. Wait, make that three (er, four):
1. Compaq's stated reason: they want to revitalize Tru64, and support Linux. Plus, no demand for NT Alpha. Possible...but I dunno. Tru64 seems to be a losing battle as a long term strategy; it's faster than Linux on Alphas now, but a few years down the road?? Seems smarter to go the sgi route, let your proprietary UNIX die, and let Linux sell your boxes. As for the lack of demand for 32-bit Alpha, see above. I think once it was 64-bit, people would buy. An appropriately high end Alpha box'd kick the hell out of an 8-way Xeon box on NT, and prolly a 16-Athlon as well.
2. Merced NT doesn't have much in common with Alpha NT, so MS doesn't want to spend time on it. Here, I pretty much have little idea what I'm talking about, but it would make sense to me if programming for a VLIW chip is just too different from programming for anything else. Cause VLIW is waaay different--far more different from existing architectures than CISC is from RISC, at least the way "CISC" and "RISC" chips are made these days. So perhaps the whole, "we're making a 64-bit OS anyways, why not port to Alpha?" idea doesn't actually work. On the other hand, most VLIW issues seem to occur in the compiler...and they're still using Alpha as the development chip for 64-bit W2k. So...
3. Maybe Merced'll be faster than we thought. This is my conspiracy theory of the day, and you have to understand that I've been pretty disappointed by Intel tech lately, so it's taking quite a bit for me to say this. But still...I mean, even if they didn't count on selling many Alphas for NT, don't you think Compaq would love to be able to claim how their much cheaper (and they will be) Alphas kicked the tar out of those new Merceds in a fair fight with the same OS?? (Note: yeah, it wouldn't actually be fair...but it'd sure look that way.) So either Compaq got wind of the fact that Merced won't be slower after all...or perhaps they realized MS wouldn't do what it takes to make the 64-bit Alpha W2k compete with the Merced W2k...or perhaps...
4! Intel paid 'em off!! Ok, this is too fun to pass up. Essentially this goes like, Intel's just spent, what, 3 or 4 years now on a laughingstock of an overpriced chip (yes, I have no doubt that eventually IA64 will be amazing...but not on Merced), and they desperately want to avoid any controlled comparisons. So they politely ask Compaq and MS to stop development on 64-bit NT for Alpha. Besides, Compaq'll be selling their share of Merced boxes, so they've got as much to lose as anyone.
Pretty spooky, huh!!
For example, most of the Win32 interfaces (as well as driver interfaces etc) are phrased in terms of 32-bit data objects (ok) and 32-bit pointers (oops!)
So, do you shift all interfaces to 64-bits? Add a second set of 64-bit interfaces?!? Tough to add 64-bit support in NT, and still retain some useful degree of backwards-compatibility for 32-bit software.
> Get a real sports car like an audi S4
Uh...actually a corvette will take an Audi S4. Now I'll admit, I don't particularily care for the styling of a Corvette, but the new ones are extremly good cars.
Not to mention, if he lives in the US he can't currently get an S4, much less have gotten one in 1998.
Not to further mention, that if he is interested in cars like Corvettes and Ferraris the S4 sedan isn't exactly going to turn his crank. Essentially it looks like a really nice Honda Civic or at least close enough in comparison to a Ferrari.
This means that Linux and BeOS run on more platforms that NT...
... {probably more... but those are the ones that I can remember offhand now}
Linux: x86,Sparc,Alpha,PowerPC,68k,MIPS,ARM,
BeOS: PowerPC, x86
https://www.mav.net/teddyr/syousif/
--
Time is on my side
... looks to me like most operating systems these days are proprietary.
...is to provide a loophole to allow bids on government contracts that require POSIX compliance.
My understanding is that they were bidding a DoD contract that required POSIX compliance, so they began development of the POSIX subsystem. The contract was awarded to SUN, and MS never properly finished the development. No other contract of sufficient monetary value ever came along to justify spending the development bucks to properly finish the POSIX subsystem and so we got what we see today - It certainly looks only about half done to me. They have certainly kept it around in case another bid of that type comes along. I doubt that we will ever see a proper POSIX subsystem unless they are awarded one of those contracts. So far, AFAIK, all of the DoD contracts they have been awarded have waived POSIX compliance.
-- hgc
-- hgc
Linux: There is no infringing code.
Maybe he's happily married.
I know - this is a difficult concept for someone who uses the term "babes", but some people are happy with just one woman.
Go ahead and prove me right by telling me I'm only happily married because I can't "get more babes".
...vmware on non-x86 to run x86? Not likely.
The reason vmware works is because it takes advantage of virtual machine stuff that's been in x86 proccessors since the '286.
Now, if DEC/Digital/Compaq used that on-the-fly recompile program that they used when they released the MIPS machines in the late 80's to convert VAX binaries to MIPS binaries, on the fly, and morphed it so that it converted x86 ASM instructions to appropriate Alpha codes, and saved the morphed code...
bullshit, i'm running debian-alpha on an EV6 466mhz DS10, its every bit as stable as an intel system and easily 3-5 times as fast as a pentium II 400.
There's also the various add-ons that make changes to the OS. IE is a prime example. VB makes some changes as well. I'm sure there are others.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
Well first off I have to eat my hat, as I'd previously posted that I thought Win64 development was still on track when I replied to the first Slashdot article on this subject. I was quite wrong.
:-)
However, the decsion from Compaq and Microsoft to drop NT on Alpha is really a shining example of why Open Source projects like Linux, Apache, KDE, etc, are such a good bet for customers. They aren't owned by one entity, aren't developed on the strength of product sales, and can't be withdrawn from the market without regard for what the users and customers think.
What an endorsement of the Open Source model
Macka
Even if he DID make such a statement (which is dubious), I don't seem to see "For all of eternity, 640KB will be more than enough for anybody". Instead it seems to be a statement for the times. There is NOTHING absurd or amazing about this. In 1984 I was playing with a C64 with 64KB of RAM and I truly believed that was more than you would ever need...of course hindsight is twenty/twenty and I realize I SHOULD have thought "Yeah, 64KB is nice, but it would be far better if I had 512KB of 133Mhz RDRAM in here."
Allow me to harken back to the halcyon days of Graduate Computer Architecture.
;)
VLIW stands for "Very Long Instruction Word" and basically just concatenates several smaller instructions into one humongous one. In a simple example, consider a chip that has 2 int and 1 fp ALUs (Arithematic logic unit). Today's chip would have to find independant ops and either queue them or stagger the start through the ALUs. VLIW moves the process of finding independent operations into the compile stage, allowing the compiler to determine and "schedule" operations that can execute in parallel. At least in theory, you can get quite a bit of speedup. IF (Big If) you can find enough "parallelism" to be sending mostly full instructions through. You'll be spinning a lot of wheels if you have one add and three noops in each instruction word.
A couple of years ago I saw a printout of what the "compiled" (probably was simulated at the time) results were from the HP VLIW compiler, and what it basically looked like was:
-----
-----
-----
---
--
-
-
-
-
-----
-----
----
...
Essentially, all the independent operations would get moved up and shoved into the first few instructions, then there would be a (possibly long) series of instructions that had to complete in sequence. Rinse, repeat.
Theoretically, it should be a win, if they can figure out better ways to find/create/massage instructions that can be executed simultaneously. Of course, I haven't been paying attention for the last couple of years, maybe they've worked out some good solutions.
Who knows...
Jon
That would be the part of the link where MS says they're not going to support Alpha, not that Windows2000 doesn't run on IE64 - no matter how many times you repeat FUD it doesn't become FACT.
Of course they did. Read the news out of Judge Jackson's courtroom.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
THAT IS BECAUSE THE DOS NANO KERNEL USED IN NT STILL THINKS IT IS AN 8088
1. Compaq is probably not selling enough Tru64 or Linux systems to justify continued Alpha production. In the press on this topic, Compaq was quoted as saying that only 5% of their Alphas went out as NT systems.
As for the HAL originally hiding all hardware - this is not true, otherwise why would device drivers be necessary? I think the HAL abstracts basic resources such as CPU, memory, bus, etc, but
many other resources require drivers.
I think you are misunderstanding something. The HAL hides the nitty gritty details of talking to hardware from the programs.
It doesn't automatically talk to every kind of hardware every made.. that's why we need devicedrivers.
HAL needs to know how to talk to devices, so that it can abstract/hide it from programs.
You see?
In 1981 I was at the 'First West Coast BYTE Computer Show' and there was a panel discussion about PC's with the then new IBM-PC on everyones' mind. I believe that Bill Gates was on the panel and that he answered a question from the audience. The question was roughly, 'Would the pins of the 8088 processor which indicate which kind of segment a memory access is on (stack, data, instructions) be used to extend the address space beyond one megabyte?' Mr. Gates answer was, I believe, roughly '640K aught to be enough for for everyone.' The audience was quiet but a few gasps were heard. Tapes were made of the sessions; I only bought the keynote which was by Ted Nelson. I REALLY wish I would have gotten the tape of that panel.
Hmmm... Not likely. Last year in my Computer Architecture class we had an Intel engineer as a guest speaker. He told us that Merced would have a 32-bit execution unit tacked on seperately to the main 64-bit processor, just for backwards compatability. Looking at a picture of the die, it's like this little square down in the corner. To take advantage of all the cool Merced things like the advanced pipeline (with rotating registers) and the 8 or so main execution units, the binary would have to be 64 bit.
Correct me if I'm wrong, please.
bp
The first four are all *nix variants, and therefore are at most only semi-proprietary. All four are POSIX compliant if not POSIX certified (and their POSIX compliance is real, unlike NT's essentially unusable POSIX subsystem). All four vendors have moved towards embracing Linux.
The latter two are not only not in the same class (they are desktop OSes, not server OSes), they are at most niche players. BeOS is struggling even to establish a viable niche. MacOS's successor will be *BSD based at its core. Apple will join the ranks of another proprietary OS vendor that has moved to be a UNIX vendor.
Proprietary OSes, like the dinosaurs, are facing extinction. It remains to be seen if there will be survivors (like the crocodiles, aligators, etc).
That's a benefit for Microsoft and their "key partners. Everyone must buy new apps. Everyone will want to have "64bit clean" systems. It will generate years and years of gluttony; several OS revisions and all-new-everything.
And then when it's all said-and-done nothing will have changed -- everything will look the same and performance will be back to what you'd expect.
The wheel is turning but the hamster is dead.
The wheel is turning, but the hamster is dead.
Funny...after the debacle a few days ago bashing users for not knowing anything about programs, its refreshing to see a Slashdot nerd who obviously doesn't know the difference between WORD and Windows ( or that "Windows 4.0" is actually called Windows 95).
As for your arguement, well let me see....vmlinux 1.0 had some bugs - it worked just enough to get some people to "invest" their time and expertise to make it all the way to vmlinux 2.10, which argueable works much better than it's predessesors but could still use some work....
Seems to me your knocking progressive software development. Now if you mean that Access 1.0 performance was faked to fraudulently get people and money to invest in 2.0 (that is, Access never really did what it was supposed to, it was all faked) then say so with some proof.
Otherwise you just as guilty of spreading FUD as MS. Perhaps a reread of the Linux Advocacy HOWTO...
Never by hatred has hatred been appeased, only by kindness - the Buddha
That only makes part of the article accurate. The "internal MS sources say Windows2000 doesn't run on IA64..." quote is bull. Maybe I have "sources" that say Windows2000 runs fine on IA64 - so there!
There is only one operating system out there doing a passable job of killing Unix, and it's not from Microsoft.
I am curious why Compaq isn't doing something more agressive with OpenVMS; see my other comment. Maybe they could poach Cutler and the gang back from Microsoft.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
If you mix up pointers and ints I don't want to run your software on any platform.
Oh, and for those people who need a clue, It's Not Unix either :-)
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
Hey, I resemble that comment!
I'm a VB/VC++ programmer, and I read /., too.
Skevin, who's too tired to log in right now.
volt and tide in the same sentence.. I sense an ex contractor..
"Only game" or not, me and my 164SX server/router/firewall running 2.2.9 couldn't be happier together.
I'd use it as my workstation if it had any kind of reliable browser...
"Reactionaries must be deprived of the right to voice their opinions; only the people have that right." - Mao
Hmmm looks like time to junk my MCSE and get a Red Hat cetification
The world isn't run by weapons anymore, or energy, or money. It's run by little ones and zeroes, little bits of data.
One of us has misread the articles. From what I've read, Compaq will still happily sell you a fully support Alpha system.
You just have to run Linux on it. Compaq simply performed a cost-benefit analysis on continued support for NT/Alpha under the current terms from Micros~1, and decided it wasn't worth it. (E.g., to cover their costs they would have to raise their prices to the point where people would buy Intel systems, and since that reduced the user base they would have to raise the prices even higher, in a viscious death spiral.)
Had Micros~1 agreed to pick up more of the development and support costs, to develop the market, Compaq might have reversed itself. But Micros~1 has apparently decided to tie its fortune to the Pentium chip. (Not Intel, until they have a working 64-bit system. Pentium.)
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
Goody suggested:
Get someone like the people who make VMWare to get Win9* to run on Alpha and start packaging RedHat on Alpha machines.
VMWare? Why bother? Compaq now owns the original translate-on-the-fly Windows emulator, DEC's excellent FX!32. All others are pale imitations.
The trouble is that DEC had a sever case of craniorectal insertion (I know, I worked with them on two horribly mismanaged Alpha projects.) To this day Compaq tries to charge more for DEC Unix than a high-end workstation hardware costs. They just don't grasp the importance of GIVING AWAY the FX!32 software as the only way to bootstrap their hardware sales.
Tragedy. In the Greek sense.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
Office '97, however, is SLOW.
John
John_Chalisque
Hasn't Linux been 64-bit ready for years now?
They won't even need an OS as big as Linux. I can imagine a smaller OS based on the Linux kernel becoming the favoured Java desktop platform.
NO ONE beats Intel anymore in real performance AMD
The idea that they could take Windows 2000 (or any other version of Windows) and simply compile it to work on the 64-bit Alpha, or Merced processors was always going to be a joke.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
So who cares if Microsoft's first try at booting up on Merced hardware didn't work? They had it running on the Merced simulator, so presumably either they have a timing bug, or Intel's hardware didn't match spec (normal for first silicon). What matters is what Microsoft does between now any the introduction of real production IA-64 boxes.
Be has a POSIX compliance layer.
As for your arguement, well let me see.... vmlinux 1.0 had some bugs - it worked just enough to get some people to "invest" their time and expertise to make it all the way to vmlinux 2.10, which argueable works much better than it's predessesors but could still use some work....
The difference is that Linux was never marketed as a fully functional product. You didn't have to pay to find this out either. The fact that you could improve Linux by devoting some time and effort to it is not a drawback. With Microsoft's products, you buy it and are stuck with it whether it works or not. They've already got your money.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
Even more reason to hate M$ and their shifty dishonest practices.
But frankly, I'm disappointed in the company that I used and supported for years. Shoot, I typed a lot of papers using Microsoft Works 2.0 on our old green-screen Tandy 1000, and it did the job pretty well. But things have changed...
I wish linux wasn't such a hyped-up hassle and that Be had some worthwhile multimedia support. (like more scanners and printers...)
*sigh*
sorry for the unoriginal anti-M$ rant. Moderate downward as needed. (Moderation seems to suck of late, perhaps not enough moderators being made??)
"I want peace on earth and good will toward men." "We're the U.S. government. We don't do that sort of thing!!"
not to sound degrading, but Big Brother was one of the evil entities in 1984 (the other being "The Thought Police"/Your bad thoughts bringing yourself down.) More people should read that book. it's not really big, and it's well worth the time spent.
Hello Linamd!
Microsofts products are too fragmented and they don't have any development roadmap for the future :)
Considering that Microsoft demo'ed Win64 booting @ WinHEC in April, once again the Register is a bunch of bullshit...Hah.... Funny how people jump all over and laugh at MS anytime anyone claims anything, but if the Register said something (completely untrue, like they have here) about Linux, we'd lambast them for bad journalism... Do Linux advocates have no integrity?
>This is to easy.
/e /c /h / switches to upload your disk to a >server.
Liar. The biggest of the NT lies is "NT is easy to use." To a skilled UNIX sysadmin adding a user by hand is also "too easy." The fact that something like this requires all the steps that you describe totally blows away the conention that NT is "easy to use." NT should just pop up a messagebox that says, "I've found a problem and I'm fixing it." Or better yet, it fixes the problem silently without any user interaction needed. As is you outlined at least six involved steps that are necessary to fix this problem, and yet you call this "easy." Heh. Only easy to those who have seen and fixed it multiple times. But that couldn't have happened considering that NT is rock-solid and a problems of any sort are extremely rare, right?
>Are you on a network (y/n)
>(y) copy your suspect volume to the network. make >sure you are not running any
>applications or services that could have locks on >any of the files.
And how can you verify that in an easy way, since NT is so easy to use?
> Stop services with control
>panel, kill stray processs with taskman. Use the >xcopy (or scopy as needed) command and
>/s
You mean from the command line? God, I thought that the command line was cryptic technology from the '60s that should be going away with all those dinosaur-like UNIX servers.
> Verify the integrity of the copy!.
Shouldn't NT do this for you? I thought it was supposed to be easy to use!
>Format the partition. Copy data back to newly >formated drive.
With the same cryptic and outdated command-line argument you gave us before? Or are the cryptic switches different when you copy back?
I don't make the rules. I just make fun of them.
MS hasn't run Win64's source through their Code-Bloat Wizard 2000(tm) yet.
It's that simple.
-CausticPuppy "Of all the people I know, you're certainly one of them." -Somebody I don't know
I have to me-too this. Oracle on NT is a sick joke.
"Reactionaries must be deprived of the right to voice their opinions; only the people have that right." - Mao
Lucovsky says. "It would have been so easy to drop the RISC support; everyone in the company wanted to. But the only way to achieve portability is to develop for more than one platform at a time. It cost us a lot to keep portability alive, but we did, and that has made it easy for us to respond to things like Merced," he says, referring to the 64-bit chip from Intel.
l l/99Aug04.asp
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/server/beta/ha
Open mouth, insert foot, very good MS !
Here's a clue: the answer to all these questions is "no". The fact remains that after all these years, Linux is much more portable than Windows.
--
--
Think Green... Burn only 100% recycled dinosaurs in you car.
...wouldn't that be the bugs which are so called "features"?
Which is odd, considering how aggressivly Compaq is marketing them...
"Reactionaries must be deprived of the right to voice their opinions; only the people have that right." - Mao
I might try installing it again, but then again I haven't tried FreeBSD, so it might make better use of the partition.
I think it's fair to say that other betas that MS has released have been quite less developed than the final release, so I guess MS might have a few tricks left to pull before corporate america buys (into) win2k in full force.
"NT is so much more affordable than UNIX" -- someone I know whose business NT network is down about 20% of the time (exchange server is down about 50% of the time).
"You get what you pay for" -- me
I can't believe that after all these years they've had to work on the problem, that 64-bit support still isn't there. As if it's some amazing new surprise they weren't expecting. Not even working incrementally toward a solution...just ignoring it completely.
Microsoft is like an 800 pound gorilla...wearing blinders...and a soiled diaper.
As for Merced...I hope it tanks.
I'l be suprised if this is accurate!??!
I mean Billy has lotsa money at his disposal, so surely he could pay for NT on the Merced.
I dont think microsoft's page has this on it.
Hmmmmmmmm
Oh well, ive added it to #debian @ openprojects
so it has to be true
No one was using NT on the alphas anyway. Why take a horse-drawn cart on a superhighway?
-jpowers
A very perceptive statement. More telling is the fact that the move to 64-bit represents far less of a gain for the consumer than the move to 32-bit from 16-bit did.
Sounds like you used Beta 1, or maybe a Beta2 server (IIS5 sucked up ram like a black hole in that version). Current builds of Pro run fine on a P166 w/ 128 meg, a little slow but no worse than RH 5.1 with KDE 1.1.1. Windows2000 pro runs great on PII/300 w/128 meg. Current builds of server are far less resource intensive than earlier betas as well.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
>I be interested in looking at the bug report you filed for that one. You did file one didn't you?
How much does Microsoft pay us for bug reports? They do pay us, don't they?
What happened to "NT is extremely portable." In theory, the only hardware specific component is supposed to be HAL.DLL. The rest of the NT code base is supposed to be highly portable C code. By replacing HAL.DLL and recompiling the rest of the system, it was supposed to be possible to port NT to whatever in a matter of weeks. Why did compaq need an NT development team in the first place? Why did NT powerPC collapse when IBM withdrew funding? I refuse to believe that MS doesn't know how to write architecture neutral code - that's just too far fetched. I'm thinking that it's due to lightning storms.
--Shoeboy
That from the article yesterday one of the original NT goals was portability. It seems that the only platform that is going to be really supported is X86.
I don't remember, was portability one of the things they said was one of the two succeses of NT?
Oh how I love Micro$oft...
Compaq/Digital actually had developers working at Microsoft (and just down the road in Bellevue) to port NT. IBM did the same "developer lending" for the NT on PPC.
cpeterso
I don't know about the death of M$. As I see it, M$ sells _USER SPACE_ applications (read office, access & IE) that's where the profit is. More depressing however is the thought that that is where the money will _remain_...
M$'s 'power base' for keeping the market hostage, is the simple fact that most people are extremely computer illiterate. This causes them to be excessively trusting of any product that has achieved 'Big Brand' status - even if their dayly experiences with Big Brand Product W are very negative. (We'll be seeing the 'belief in the brand' in our own neck of the woods when Red Hat really hits the Linux==Red Hat Brand mark. People in the know, which will be defined by the ability to administer their linux boxen with out GUI tools & druids... won't be affected by this, but they will become a very small group vis a vis the mass 'new linux converts'.) So when our Real World people say that application X isn't compatible with the 'Holy Word', what they're actually saying is that they have no idea how to use that simple combo box in their 'Save file' dialog to save in a format that is readable by different apps.
The whole 'dominance of MS-windows' thing is proof of more ignorance of the type outlined above. Given the above, word-compatible actually means much of the following: "I don't know how to store information in non-propriatory format Y with tool X. Thus in order to alleviate the hassle of reading/distributing documents let all use tool X." The stupendous idiocy of this is amazing. It gets really mad when you consider the following: "... but we al know that Tool X only runs on OS W. How could we possibly consider _not_ using OS W??". Thus you have the source of that fabled M$ instrument - 'Leveraging Windows'. People just don't seem to be able to split binary compatibility from data compatibility. All this just shows why any environment that stores its information in a non-propriatory fashion, will automatically nullify any possibility of 'binding to tool X' - unless you play very, very dirtily. The web is the prime example. (by the way, I suspect that the emergence of XML as a storage standard has M$ MUCH more scared than anything else ever has - including this Win64 shambles - it undercuts their whole mode of operations.)
So, I think that - providing they find a way to deal with the threat of XML - M$ will be profitable for years to come, simply because people will not get smarter about the use of their information management tools. Which brings us to that age old basic point: it's people that use technology and it's the people that shoot themselves in the foot with it. They'll do this for as long as they are around, because in the Real World all sorts of horrid things like social standing, ego, personal gratification, 'human error' and other such things are just as, if not much more important factors in the use of technology than the actual merits of that technology.
PS. On re-reading I see that this post is a bit of a 'ramble' and it could be argued much more tighly, but I'll leave that to our penly luminaries such as Mr. Katz & Mr. Peterely.
This sort of thing has cropped up before. And it has always been due to human error.
--
This sort of thing has cropped up before. And it has always been due to human error.
HAL9000
Does anyone know if Merced ran the 64bit version of Linux?
Because if we're saying that it didn't run Win64, but ran plain old 32bit x86 Linux, that just reminds of the old Mindcraft thing:
"If a Linux advocate says it, it's probably not true."
ROFLMAO! Thats funny. Exactly HOW have the people voted? Lets see, and unreleased OS, a processor that JUST became something outside of a engineers dream and won't be hitting the market for years, and you say 'the people have voted'? That must be how the world looks through Linux colored glasses.
The way Microsoft phrase it, it's all Compaq's fault for "terminating Alpha support for current versions of Windows NT". As if Microsoft were helpless in front of Compaq's refusal to let them port their operating system!
Linux, as everyone here knows, ran on Alpha machines (as well as x86 and 68000) long before it could get acknowledgement of its existence from the processor manufacturers, let alone substantial help in making it happen. It was done in the usual way: get the specs of the hardware, and code to them. What is it that's so difficult about this process that Microsoft needs Compaq to hold its hand before it can think about it?
Microsoft don't expect ever to have to act like a software firm. You don't write code for other people's hardware - you graciously allow the hardware manufacturer to write code for you. Compaq have started to smell the independence from this kind of treatment that Linux gives them, and soon Microsoft will find out what that means for them.
Revenge is gonna be so sweet.
--
Xenu loves you!
uh... 98 Corvette =~ $45,000 Ferrari =~ $225,000 Maybe you can trade it if you happen to have about $75,000 cash to go along with it. 98 vetts blow anyway, you should have bought a 3000 GT.
Snipped from the news.com article about the MS/Alpha Split:
Which is awfully funny... It takes 8 x86 processors to get close to a single, _MID-RANGE_ alpha... however I suppose it fits into Microsoft's shady history to push us towards lower quality for more money... go fig.University of Stevens Point Wisconsin does. They've been NT freaks from the beginning. 8(
So does WinNT... that hardly makes it "Unix"! This is just a check-list item so they can sell to the government. The question is, is anyone actually using the "POSIX-compliant API" to do serious work?
Latest info also states....
1) Bill says he's pretty confident windoze 2000 will ship this year - said at DELL's conference earlier this week. ie it might not ship this year!
2) Latest info to analysts from M$ says they expect to earnings from w2k till Q2 next year - correlates well the above.
Looks like betting the family jewels on w2k was abad move Mr Gates.
Now that there's some muscle behind Star Office and KOfffice is developing nicely Unix (Linux/*BSD/Solaris...) on the desktop could be worthwhile looking at for major corporates.
and win2000?
even worse?
This only goes to show that all active Windows development on Alpha architecture is dead. That is after Microsfoft release service pack 6. Within the last four years they've dropped MIP, PPC, and now Alpha. Looks as if the company is hurting, and too be honest except for a few IS/IT managers I don't think anyone cares anymore. The 32bit version of Windows 2000 will be released sometime next year. I doubt it will make the fall release, and yes i've tried the beta, and no it's not good enough. A 64bit version might make it by 2001 to 2003, but considering their record on the true "Cairo" I wouldn't bet on it anytime soon. Microsoft is dying again, the only question is will they pull themselves out of the gutter like they did in 1994, well before the release of Windows 95. If they go I sure as hell won't be crying.
It's ironic that portability was SPECIFICALLY not a goal of Linux but that it wound up being ported to every platform on earth. That sure sounds ironic to me.
Application frobbing aside, Microsoft funded a comparison of WNT to a brand new Linux 2.2 kernel with brand new drivers running on a distribution based on the 2.0 kernel against WNT 4.0 which had been around for years and patched. Redhat was very careful to point out that 2.2 on 5.x wasn't officially supported, but MS chose this unsupported combination to make the comparison.
Since W2K (Y2K:) was previously announced to be *shipping* by the end of the year, it might be good to take whatever is available at the end of the year and benchmark it against whatever non-development Linux kernel is available -- all on Merced, preferably an 8-way system with >2GB RAM. If MS execs protest it's not in production yet, well, fair is fair.
If W2K still doesn't run on I64 by then, the results should be published anyway, perhaps in a parody of a popular consumer magazine review. ("Even our most patient testers gave up after two weeks when the bitmaps had *still* not downloaded on the test web page.")
As for the Merced announcement, I have to plead ignorance. Is this really late enough in the game to signify big trouble for MS? Or is it a normal kind of problem we should be expecting here? (I guess I'm assuming the two aren't mutually exclusive...)
I just noticed that the ProLiant 8000 8-way system quoted above was withdrawn from the active listings...must have been done today...maybe someone at compaq reads /. ;-)
The NT concept of a hardware abstraction layer that marshalled calls to the underlying system was fundamental in making NT stable. This is why NT3.51 was very stable. However, it also made many things slow, most noticably the grraphics side of things. With NT the GUI is not optional, so this poor performance was always noticable. To improve performance, graphics operations were allowed to bypass the HAL in NT4.0. This is why NT4.0 outperforms NT3.51, but is very unstable.
I don't know whether any other userland stuff was allowed direct hardware access, as I quit using NT after 3.51.
Chris Wareham
Look at the facts here:
:-(
Compaq decided they weren't interested in 32 bit systems any more and laid off most of their NT developers.
Microsoft decided that they weren't going to support 64 bit Alpha NT either if Compaq wasn't going to support 32 bit Alpha NT.
Someone wrote to The Register with information that cannot be verified that NT doesn't run on IA64 but Linux does. From what I understand, Intel hasn't made the silicon yet and both Linux and NT have been running on the simulators for a while now. My guess is that this story is about as accurate as that one about Apple having a contract with God.
The fact that so many people just take these things at face value makes me despair of the intelligence of the average Linux user when it comes to anti-MS news.
John Wiltshire
Fear: When you see B8 00 4C CD 21 and know what it means
Can I add Premieir and driver support for FireMax on Macintosh -- please!!!
[chris@moebius ~]$ cat /proc/cpuinfo
processor : 0
vendor_id : GenuineIntel
cpu family : 6
model : 6
model name : Celeron (Mendocino)
stepping : 0
cpu MHz : 451.026999
cache size : 128 KB
fdiv_bug : no
hlt_bug : no
sep_bug : no
f00f_bug : no
coma_bug : no
fpu : yes
fpu_exception : yes
cpuid level : 2
wp : yes
flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 mmx osfxsr
bogomips : 448.92
No offense, 621 bogomips is damn good, but it's not exactly 3-5 times...
Remember Access 1.0? Remember Windows 1.0? /*much better than their predecessors*/, so the strategy worked. But I guess you just can't pull that crap with a whole new arch. Especially with Linux on the horizon - it's nice to know that 'the people have voted', and 64 bits on the desktop will be a reality, sans M$.
Products that claimed to work - that sometimes worked - just enough to get a few people to buy into the concept, and fund development of another version. Granted, Access 97 and Windows 4.0 work
Now, about that 'chasing tail-lights' thing...
-- What you do today will cost you a day of your life.
Not supporting alpha doesn't mean NT is incompable of being ported to any platform (like some loser said - "Merced is out of the question").
NT is portable. Cause MS decides not to support NT Alpha afer Compaq did the same doesn't mean MS has 'given up' on 64bit.
Here's a summary.
That article doesn't mean:
Microsoft can't do 64bit.
NT will never do 64bit.
NT is incapable of being ported.
MS releasing NT on one platform means they don't understand other CPUs.
Linus is god.
ok?
Hello Lintel :)
Actually, the new Amiga machines seem to follow this very train of thought (as far as I could tell from reading through thier site).
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Stupid nested comments... You're right.
--
QDMerge 0.21!
how to invest, a novice's guide
Since when is the register a reliable source of information?
This document somehow leaked out of compaq - darn pesky email ... enjoy the "official" compaq position .. indaba...
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXxxxXXXXXXXXXXXX
Here is part of the communication package around Alpha NT.
No more NT4 on Alpha past SP6.
No 32 bit Win2000 on Alpha.
No 64 bit Win2000 on Alpha.
Alpha is purely for Tru64 Unix, OpenVMS and Linux.
Windows NT Alpha Strategy Q & A Version 1 - 25 Aug 99
General Questions:
Q. Exactly what has Compaq changed in its Alpha Windows NT Strategy? What has Compaq announced? Why has Compaq decommitted from Windows NT on Alpha systems?
A. Based on the extremely good scalability of our 4- and 8-way ProLiant servers with 32-bit Windows NT, Compaq believes that this platform can satisfy all market requirements for 32-bit Windows NT. We have therefore been able to simplify our strategy and offerings. Compaq will end 32-bit Windows NT Alpha systems development with V4 SP6, late in 1999, and will not support either 32 or 64-bit Windows 2000 on Alpha systems.
This change will enable us to sharply focus our Alpha strategy and resources on our aggressive plans to grow Tru64 UNIX market share, support our loyal OpenVMS customers, extend our Himalaya range, and drive volumes for Alpha systems with Linux.
Q. What is Compaq's Windows NT strategy going forward?
A. As the leading provider of Windows NT-based platforms and solutions, Compaq is a strong supporter of Windows NT and will remain at the forefront of moving Windows NT into the enterprise as its capabilities continue to mature. We will maintain our leadership role in providing the environment in which Microsoft is developing its 64-bit capable versions of NT as well as our extensive involvement in assuring the best performance and reliability on Microsoft's current and future 32 bit offerings. The only change in strategy is that all of Compaq's efforts on behalf of 32-bit Windows NT will now be built around our industry-leading IA32-based systems. The recent very strong performance results achieved with Compaq's new 8-way ProLiant servers demonstrates that we can meet 100% of the market requirement for 32-bit Windows NT systems with these platforms.
Q. Will Alpha support for 64-bit Windows NT also be discontinued? Why?
A. We will continue partnering aggressively with Microsoft on development of 64-bit Windows NT, utilizing Alpha systems. We do not plan to offer 64-bit Windows 2000 on Alpha systems, and will focus our efforts on offering the very best 64-bit IA32 Windows NT platforms in the market at the time of its introduction.
Q. Is this a sign of Compaq slowly backing away from Alpha?
A. Absolutely not. Alpha still remains a vital component of Compaq's NonStop eBusiness strategy for the enterprise. As evidence of this, the previous commitment to move the NonStop Himalaya and Integrity system architectures to Alpha is intact, as is the recent commitment by the senior management to spend an incremental $100M to further the position of Tru64 UNIX/AlphaServer in the marketplace. There is also strong market interest in Linux running on Alpha, and this will be a major focus for driving volume based on the Alpha architecture. Finally, the Alpha chip roadmap continues advancing, with "shrinks" of the 3rd-generation of Alpha architecture (the 21264), the finalization of the EV7 design, and early design of EV8 technologies all presently underway.
Installed Base Impact Questions:
Q. Am I "dead-ended" with the current investment in my AlphaServer? What options do I have?
A. No. Compaq is putting in place programs and growth paths to satisfy our customers' requirements through this change in plans.
For already installed AlphaServers running Windows NT: In the short term, customers can continue to use their existing systems with current applications and have the option to upgrade to Service Pack 5 and then Service Pack 6. In the long term, customers can continue to use their current systems with Windows NT 4, and will be supported by Compaq Customer Services until at least Q1 CY2001. For future needs (including Windows 2000), customers should take advantage of trade-in programs and migration services to Windows NT or Windows 2000 on ProLiant servers, or to Tru64 UNIX, OpenVMS or Linux on their AlphaServer systems.
For customers considering new AlphaServer systems running Windows NT: Customers can move to ProLiant Servers and run Windows NT 4 or Windows 2000, depending on their requirements.
For each of these circumstances, Compaq will provide attractive programs, upgrades and migration services to fit the individual customer needs. Details on these programs are available from your regional representative.
Q. I bought my Tru64 UNIX or OpenVMS AlphaServer with the promise that it would run Windows NT in the future. What do I do now?
A. Compaq will provide upgrade and trade-in programs to ProLiant Servers for customers who chose to move to Windows NT in the future. Details of these programs are available from your regional representative.
Q. I have an Alpha Windows NT-only DIGITAL Servers (white box), what options do I have?
A. Customers with Alpha Windows NT-only DIGITAL Servers can continue to run Windows NT V4 with support provided up through at least Service Pack 5. For customers who wish to move to Windows 2000, Compaq will provide attractive upgrade and trade-in programs to new ProLiant Servers.
Q. How long will my current Windows NT Alpha system be supported?
A. Our Customer Services organization will continue to support both hardware and software, for the foreseeable future and at least through Q1, 2001. Hardware support will be offered under standard terms & conditions. As a demonstration of this commitment, Compaq Customer Services still supports VAX and PDP technology.
Q. How long will you ship new Alpha systems running Windows NT V4?
A. A specific roadmap that details the last ship dates for each system model is provided in supporting materials.
Q. I have a large investment in Alpha for UNIX, why won't Tru64 UNIX be next to be dropped (when Merced ships)?
A. The market for enterprise servers running UNIX remains a very strong and vital one, and Compaq intends to be a leader within the segments of this market we focus on, in order to service the needs of our enterprise customers. Tru64 UNIX is widely acknowledged to be one of the finest UNIX operating systems in the market. The recent commitment by senior management to spend an incremental $100 million to fortify the position of Tru64 UNIX/AlphaServers in the market is tangible evidence of our intentions.
Q. I am in the middle of Y2K validation and am planning to move to Windows 2000. Why has Compaq dropped Alpha support for Windows NT at this critical time?
A. Customers will continue to be able to run Windows NT Service Pack 4 for Y2K conformance and have the ability to upgrade through Service Pack 6. This will enable customers to run current Alpha systems through CY2000 without impacting their Y2K readiness. As customers begin to move to implement Windows 2000, they have the option to re-deploy their current AlphaServer to run Tru64 UNIX or OpenVMS, add ProLiant Servers running Windows 2000 or take advantage of upgrade and trade-in programs being put in place by Compaq.
Q: How will this decision affect StorageWorks? Will Compaq StorageWorks products continue to support NT on Alpha?
A: The Raid Array 8000 and Enterprise Storage Array 12000 product lines will support 32-bit Windows NT on AlphaServers in FCAL configurations. Customers will have the option to upgrade to Service Pack 5 and then Service Pack 6. Compaq is making beta versions of the FCAL drivers available today and will have a production FCAL driver available for AlphaServers 32-bit Windows NT in October, 1999. This solution will support both clusters and high availability single system configurations. In the long term, customers can continue to use their current systems with Windows NT 4, and will be supported by Compaq Customer Services until at least Q1 CY2001. For future needs (including Windows 2000, support for FC Switched Fabrics, and value-added features such as Data Replication Manager), they can move to ProLiant Servers or consider trade-in programs and migration services to Tru64 UNIX, OpenVMS or Linux.
Q. What will happen with my ISV software licenses as I move to another platform?
We are working closely with key ISVs, for example Oracle and SAP, to assure that there are migration plans in place. Our key ISVs are supportive of this decision and are also committed to taking care of customers in the very best way. More details will be provided as each ISV develops their plans.
Business Questions:
Q. Was Compaq counting on Alpha Windows NT to drive volume?
A. No. There is enough Tru64 UNIX, OpenVMS, Himalaya and Linux business to sustain a competitive Alpha processor for the long term, along with our partners such as Samsung/API.
Q. What is Microsoft's position on this decision? Does this reflect a weakening of the Compaq/Microsoft relationship?
A. Microsoft supports this decision. It in no way reflects a weakening of the Compaq/Microsoft relationship. Compaq is working quite closely with Microsoft in the development of 64-bit Windows NT, in support of our drive to address more demanding enterprise requirements with Windows NT.
Q. How have Samsung and Alpha Processors, Inc. reacted to this decision? What will happen to other OEMs who are developing systems utilizing Windows NT on Alpha?
A. Recognizing the opportunity that exists for Alpha on Linux, Alpha Processor, Inc. has already made all its products available for Linux. Most recently they've been assisting an effort in bringing leading Linux tools and libraries to Alpha. API's and Samsung's resources will continue to support Linux-based solutions. With respect to OEM's who have been utilizing Windows NT on Alpha, API and Samsung are working closely to help those who wish to transition to other platforms. We'd recommend contacting API for further discussion regarding their platform strategies.
Q. What proportion of AlphaServer business is on Windows NT today? Has that fraction been increasing or decreasing?
A. Less than 2% of AlphaServer current business. Tru64 UNIX has become the predominant choice for Alpha systems, with OpenVMS in second position. While Tru64 UNIX and OpenVMS customers have benefited from Alpha's accelerated performance with EV6 technology, 32-bit Windows NT customers needs can be met with the performance and capabilities of the superior performing ProLiant servers.
Q. What proportion of AlphaServer business is on Linux today?
A. Small, but growing very rapidly.
B.
Q. What has been the reaction of ISV's? What about those ISV's who have made significant investments in Alpha/NT?
A. Our key ISVs support this decision. We will be working closely with our ISVs to offer trade-in and migration programs, to take care our mutual customers needs. In addition, Microsoft has committed to support ISVs with all aspects of their 64-bit development program.
Q. What is the impact of this decision on Compaq's workstation business?
A. The decision regarding Windows NT and Windows 2000 affects both AlphaServer systems as well as Alpha-based workstations. Attractive migration and trade-in offers will also be in place to IA32-based Compaq Professional Workstations or to other operating systems on the current platform.
Q. How will this announcement impact Compaq's focus on the ISP market?
A. It does not affect our comprehensive and aggressive focus on the ISP market, addressed with a combination of Tru64 UNIX on AlphaServers and Windows NT on ProLiant servers.
Overall Server and Competitive Positioning Questions
Q. How are Tru64 UNIX AlphaServer solutions for ISPs, ASPs and eBusiness positioned in the market?
A. Compaq Tru64 UNIX AlphaServer solutions are competitively positioned. Unlike any other RISC UNIX platform on the market, solutions delivered on Tru64 UNIX V5.0 AlphaServer systems offer our customers the highest availability with the lowest cost to implement, operate and manage. Additionally, eBusiness applications require the ability to scale to meet the peak demands placed on them. Unlike other UNIX platforms, Compaq's Tru64 UNIX AlphaServers have the power to meet the peak load requirements. Your systems will not slow down during a critical time of network traffic.
Q. Compaq appears to be positioning the ProLiant 8-way server against Sun. Isn't that in conflict with the positioning of Tru64 UNIX AlphaServer solutions?
A. Not at all. Compaq has a stronger set of products than Sun since we have both superior UNIX and Windows NT products, offering the customer more choice! The newly announced ProLiant 8000 and 8500 servers were announced to compete directly against Sun in the ASP and low-end of ISP markets, complemented by Tru64 UNIX for the higher end requirements. Compaq Tru64 UNIX AlphaServer solutions continue to compete effectively against Sun as demonstrated by numerous industry standard benchmarks and with the extremely high levels of availability and scalability.
Q: What are the benchmarks and how do Compaq ProLiant and AlphaServer offerings compare with Sun?
A. As an example, Compaq's AlphaServer DS10 with Tru64 UNIX, featuring 2GB memory and up to 54 GB disks, outperformed Sun's dual- and quad-processor servers running Internet applications at less than half the price on the SPECweb96 benchmark. The AlphaServer DS10 with Tru64 UNIX delivered results of 3404, outperforming both the Sun E450(2963) and the Sun E250 (2625). There are many other examples in other target market segments.
The ProLiant 8000 running Microsoft SQL Server 7.0 on Windows NT 4.0 offered more than double the performance at 30 percent better price:performance than the Sun E450.
Our key strength versus Sun is that no matter which OS our customers chose, either Tru64 UNIX on AlphaServers or Windows NT on ProLiant servers, they can be assured of the best absolute performance as well as price/performance across a range of applications and systems. Sun only has UNIX and cannot offer their customers the Windows NT choice.
Q. Isn't Compaq's strong support of both Windows NT and UNIX solutions confusing to the market?
A. Compaq is committed to solving the full range of business and technical challenges throughout the enterprise. Analyst reports estimate that 90% of all IT environments will be using both UNIX and Windows NT. Compaq, a leader in 64-bit UNIX and the market share leader in Windows NT solutions, is not only committed to offering a broad range of solutions for each operating system, but also to continuing to enhance its leadership position in UNIX/Windows NT interoperability. Compaq allows its customers to take advantage of both systems - without two support and development staffs, and a host of cross-platform application issues.
Workstation Alpha NT Strategy
Q: Why did Compaq decide to discontinue Windows NT on the Alpha workstation platforms?
A: Compaq re-evaluated the Windows NT strategy for workstations because of vastly improved graphics capabilities on Compaq AP and SP Professional Workstations and limited Windows NT sales on the Alpha workstations.
Q: How does this announcement effect Alpha Windows NT customers?
A: Compaq continues to ship and support Windows NT version 4.0 (Service Pack 3) on current Alpha workstation platforms (DPW500a, 600a, and XP1000/500MHz).
Compaq will qualify, release, and support Microsoft Service Pack 5 and Service Pack 6 for current Alpha workstation products (DPW500a, 600a, and XP1000/500MHz).
Q: How will this announcement effect Alpha workstation products?
A: Compaq will not support Windows NT or Windows 2000 on future Alpha products.
Platform upgrades and future Alpha workstations will support Tru64 UNIX, OpenVMS, and certified Linux operating systems.
Q: Will Compaq support 64-bit Windows NT on the Alpha workstation platforms?
A: There are no plans to deploy or support 64-bit Windows NT on Alpha workstations.
Q: How does this announcement effect Tru64 UNIX, OpenVMS, and Linux Alpha customers?
A: This announcement does not directly affect Tru64 UNIX, OpenVMS, or Linux Alpha workstation customers. We expect to re-deploy certain resources from Windows NT to these operating systems in order to provide a higher level of support there.
Q: How does this announcement effect Compaq Intel workstations?
A: This announcement does not affect Compaq AP and SP Professional Workstation customers.
Q: What is the migration path for Windows NT Alpha workstation customers?
A: Compaq will work with customers to help them migrate to the optimum AP or SP Professional Workstation or to one of the other operating systems supported on Alpha.
Q: What does this decision mean for Windows NT Alpha workstation OEM customers?
A: Compaq will work with OEM customers on an individual basis to determine how best to meet their short and long term needs. This can include OEM specific last buy dates and technical support for hardware and/or software migration plans.
Anyway, anything beyond a few pages, and word is crap no matter what version. I got so hooked on \LaTex I generate my output tables from within my programs... and XFig is much better than MSDraw when you think about it, even though I still like Draw ;-)
Also try me on word's equation writer output compared to \LaTeX :-)
---
"Hasta la victoria siempre!" El Comandante
No glitches in Debian when you get round the really confusing documentation, and pretty much everything I use compiles great and seem to work fine. WM, Gimp, PDL, LaTeX...
So why am I complaining? Well, if you try some of the logo scripts-fu on both the alpha and a PIII-550, the speed difference is not that noticeable at all.
The real test would be to do a povbench on both machines... but I got some errors half way thru the rendering on the alpha!
When alphalinux gets a descent compiler (I'm just blaming compaq here, the gcc team is doing a great job no matter what!)... well, that's going to be a different story, but compaq will never allow Linux take shares of Tru64 or whatever the name is... (OSF)
I'll check bladeenc with compaq's enhanced mathlib... that should be a pretty good test, but until then, I'm not convinced.
---
"Hasta la victoria siempre!" El Comandante
It's like the history of the architecture of the 8086 chip. Intel designed the chip to contain a superset of the 8080 architecture to allow the use of a binary translator on 8080 CP/M programs so that the output could run in the tiny model on CP/M 86. This was so the chip could get a head start on applications. (Not that it always worked - the translator caused expansion in the output code, and some programs became too large (>64K) to run.)
For the sake of this temporary (<6mo) advantage, the x86 architecture has been crippled ever since - inflicting untold pain on developers and users. "Memory models", 16-byte segments, pointer size confusion; absurd, nonstandard C keywords like 'near', 'far', and 'huge'. Bah!
And now, Intel seems to be doing it again...
--
An esoteric scratched itch:
Homeworld Map Maker Tool
This is completely false. Very little real software ports that easily unless it was designed on a 64 bit architecture. Too many people think that sizeof(int) == sizeof (char *) which is not true on alpha.
Well, if people didn't use such an icky lowlevel langauge as C, and used something more sensible (eg Ada '95), then they'd find that porting software is really quite easy. Ada does allow you to do stupid things, but they're obviously stupid things and you have to say "yes please, I want to cast that integer to a memory address to a pointer, I'm that hard I am".
- Aidan
I'm currently coding for the TIC6211 DSP processor, which is VLIW, 8 instructions per packet.
Everything you say is pretty much true, the C compiler has a hard time filling up the packets in general. However, a process of software pipelining can often be used to fairly automatically schedule inner loops so they perform iterations in parallel. Since usually most time is spent in inner loops you can often get fairly effective results like 75% of maximum speed with minimal hand optimization.
Some things, like my current project, require hand scheduling to achieve good performance because it is mostly sequential. Its a very small program fortunately, around 1K instructions.
Jim
Well - let's not overstate the case. MSSQL7 runs rings round just about anything else on NT, but stack it up against a real database server (like some of the big CC-NUMA boxes) and watch it squeal.
FYI - a Sequent NUMACentre 2000 posted 94000 tpmCs running Oracle 8 on Dynix on 64 Xeons, while a ProLiant 8000 posted 26500 tpmCs running MSSQL7 EE on NT4 EE on quad Xeons.
As far as big databases go, Unix (commercial flavours only so far) is still the only game in town.
Cheers
Jon
MCSE's with Unix skills, or vice-versa, are *extremely* well paid and very marketable.
Compaq had said that they would support NT for Alpha64. This sounds like MS is saying, "Oh yeah? Drop Alpha32 and kiss Alpha64 goodbye!".
It's interesting to see this in the light of yesterday's "Interview with Original NT OS/2" developers, which stressed the importance of platform independence and portability. With this announcement (correct me if I'm wrong), MS has finally gone from 4 platforms (PPC/MIPS/Alpha/x86) to 1 (x86).
This is to easy.
/s /e /c /h / switches to upload your disk to a server. Verify the integrity of the copy!. Format the partition. Copy data back to newly formated drive. restart services and applications.
Are you on a network (y/n)
(y) copy your suspect volume to the network. make sure you are not running any applications or services that could have locks on any of the files. Stop services with control panel, kill stray processs with taskman. Use the xcopy (or scopy as needed) command and
(n) do the same but backup to tape/zip/jaz whatever
I'm pretty sure it was Merced-native Linux, because *everyone* *including Intel* has been working on making Linux-Merced work beautifully.
-- The act of censorship is always worse than whatever is being censored. Always.
Especially since, according to all reports, by the time Merced is finally released (Q2 next year? Q3??), the Alpha's going to be walloping it. By the middle of next year, the roadmaps I've seen have the 21264's hitting well over a GHz...I think I've even seen 1.4 tossed around (but it was prolly at The Register, so, grain of salt).
.18 um, 600-1000 MHz, 15M transistors .18 um, 600-1000 MHz, 100+M transistors .13 um, 1200+ MHz, 250M transistors
.18-micron transistors" runs at 800-1000MHz with "real" EV68's in Q3, systems Q1'00.
At the MS TechEd 99 in Amsterdam there was a Compaq seminar on Alpha Technology where the roadmap they showed (thomas.siebold@compaq.com) was as follows
1099/2000 EV68,
2001 EV7,
2002 EV8,
The initial EV68 has already taped out, and the EV67 "with
All this is taken from their seminar notes.
hth,
andy
> Well, if you try some of the logo scripts-fu on both the alpha and a PIII-550, the speed
> difference is not that noticeable at all.
I've noticed this on the Alpha too: there really is no speed improvement in the Gimp versus modern Pentium systems. All other applications on the Alpha really fly (even compiles, which impressed me!)
It actually makes sense-- the Gimp is processing 24-bit RGB data, which means that it is probably doing a lot of 8-bit loads and stores (8 bits for red, green, and blue), which is something the Alpha is definately _not_ optimized for.
Now, if I were to use a version of the Gimp for floating point images, it would be a different story. (http://film.gimp.org/)
My point was that the Alpha did indeed support kernel modules; I just threw in the BogoMIPS for good measure.
BogoMIPS is not a measure of CPU performance.
Considering that NT was publically shown running on an IA-64 emulator back in the Spring, I don't think this will be a problem for Microsoft. It's Intel that seems to be having a problem getting the chips out the door.
No offense, 621 bogomips is damn good, but it's not exactly 3-5 times...
/proc/cpuinfo
raj$ uname -a
Linux raj 2.2.11 #4 Thu Aug 12 19:22:47 PDT 1999 i586 unknown
raj$ cat
processor : 0
[snip]
model name : AMD-K6(tm) 3D processor
stepping : 12
cpu MHz : 400.919133
[snip]
flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr mce cx8 sep mtrr pge mmx 3dnow
bogomips : 799.54
Your point?
[marshall@optimus marshall]$ cat /proc/cpuinfo processor : 0 vendor_id : AuthenticAMD cpu family : 5 model : 6 model name : AMD-K6tm w/ multimedia extensions stepping : 1 cpu MHz : 238.235397 fdiv_bug : no hlt_bug : no sep_bug : no f00f_bug : no fpu : yes fpu_exception : yes cpuid level : 1 wp : yes flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr mce cx8 sep mmx bogomips : 475.14 What exactly does bogoMIPS measure?
What the hell are you trying to say?
Linux 1.0.0
Linux 1.0.1
Linux 1.0.2
...
Linux 1.2.0
Linux 1.2.1
...
Linux 2.0.0
Linux 2.0.1
...
Linux 2.2.0
Linux 2.2.1
(not to mention the various patches people apply to their kernels...)
Most of the items you listed were just upates, not forks of code. Windows comes out with new versions just like Linux does. What's your point?
Oracle on NT makes me retch. It doesn't belong there. CreateThread() vs. fork(), IO completion ports vs select() and poll. There are waaay too many differences for a single program to make efficient use of both types of systems. MSSQL7 will run rings around oracle on NT. (Actually MSSQL7 runs rings around just about everything on intel hardware - check www.tpc.org if you doubt this) Oracle on Tru64 unix outperforms oracle on NT. There's simply _no_ good reason to run oracle on NT. Ever.
--Shoeboy
Cost of hiring a competent programmer for a year = $70 000 to $200 000.
Cost of providing office space, computers etc for said programmer = ???
Two grands worth of compiler ain't going to make much difference. Plus who pays list price for Microsoft products anyway? Not me, for one, and not *any* corporate...
Cheers
Jon
erm ... FX!32?
Cheers
Jon
Didn't M$ and Intel have some kind of falling out? Perhaps Intel deliberately caused Win64 to not work to show their displeasure with M$. Yeah, I remember that Intel wanted to support Linux but M$ got angry. Then M$ wanted to support AMD and Intel got angry. Hmmmm.....
At last we will reveal ourselves to Microsoft. At last we will have revenge.
I think the main point to take in mind is the fact that it was run on a Merced SIMULATOR. The simulator part makes me skeptical. If it was running on real silicon, I suppose I wouldn't have much to say (and this article would have never appeared in the first place). I don't know anything about this "simulator" but I doubt that it gives 1:1 results. In other words, the two arn't the same. For one, the merced is hardware and the simulator [I'm assuming] is some sort of software running on top of a harware base. NOT THE SAME.
Why didn't intel just run it on a real Merced then?? Maybe they couldn't get their hands on one, maybe it wasn't working.. some things can only be left to speculation.
What I can't understand is why Compaq can't get behind the Alpha and drive it home. It's superior over Intel architecture. Compaq could say "Screw you, M$ AND Intel" and have Alphas on every desktop. Get someone like the people who make VMWare to get Win9* to run on Alpha and start packaging RedHat on Alpha machines. Hell, they bought Digital and Tandem. If they knew how to integrate this vast wealth of knowledge together, they could kick ass, but apparently someone at Compaq just doesn't want to do it.
:-)
M$ will get NT working on 64 bits, but obviously they've got egg on their face. So much for portability. This is certainly going to drain resources. How many versions of Windows will M$ be supporting now ?
Tired of being "punished" by the Slashdot $rtbl since 2002. I'm now over at http://soylentnews.org/ .
Defaulting to disbelief is great in the event that the comment is particularly unbelievable. But the quote attributed to Uncle Bill is not particularly remarkable. It easily could have been an unintentional misstatement, or just as easily he could have truly meant it at the time. Remember, Bill Gates is generally not considered much of a visionary*, so it's not much of a stretch to doubt his foresight.
* Bill Gates is not a visionary. His strength is in finding technologies that others have invented & capitalizing on them. While this too requires a degree of foresight, it mostly requires a ruthless willingness to capitalize on the work of others.
I might get moderated down for saying this, particularly by any Amish moderators, but it has to be said so I'll commence:
I don't think he meant to offend anyone Amish who might have read the comment, but I think he meant to liken NT to a horse-drawn cart and an Alpha box to a superhighway, not the other way around.
So since an OS is "unix based", which the current and future MacOS's are not BTW, it is not proprietary. Wow, the Linux Distortion Field is really strong here. BTW, there are more users of MacOS than Linux. You can flame me now.
It looks like they are heading on the out. I think that they just pissed off one to many companies, and now these compaines are seeing Linux as a way to circumvent Microsoft.
Rather than rewrite their OS, they can use Linux on there hardware. (Linux runs on Mac, Alphas, INtel, Sparc, etc. It make more sense to have one operating system that runs on many cpu's than many operating systems that run on many cpu's.
Most Linux software on Linux/Intel will run on Linux/Alpha, with just a recompile, or on Linux PPC. And it will run faster than Java, unless you compile Java to OS native code.
How will Linux eventually affect Java development? In 5 years some Linux hybred OS may be the new OS. But a hybred of Linux and what? (so far SGI is adding to the Linux melting pot).
Only 'flamers' flame!
So that must be why MS earnings are reaching new records every quarter.
Damn, I bet Bill hates the direction the company is going.
Hasn't Penguin Computing been selling 8 way PIII boxes for Linux for months now? (not that Linux can realy do 8 way, but...)
-- The act of censorship is always worse than whatever is being censored. Always.
Hmm... BTW, Hasn't Penguin Computing been selling 8 way PIII boxes for Linux for months now? (not that Linux can realy do 8 way, but...)
-- The act of censorship is always worse than whatever is being censored. Always.
BTW, what happened to all the Astroturfers that were posting yesterday about how the Compaq decision was of little importance, because 64-bit NT Alpha development was going strong?
Whaddya think, everyone? Exit Cutler? Or is Merced going to keep him happy?
--
Interested in XFMail? New XFMail home page
It runs on Intel CPU's.... and... umn...
AMD... and on a good day maybe Cyrix too!
That's 3 platforms already!
I'm no NT expert, but this is confused.
What happened is that up to NT 3.51 inclusive, the Win32 subsystem was a completely separate process, as were the OS/2 and POSIX subsystems. In NT4, the Win32 subsystem was migrated into the kernel (in Linux speak; in NT it's the Executive, the Kernel is a very low level layer just above the HAL). There are rumours that this was resisted by key people on the NT team, but there was a strong push to improve GUI performance; there are also rumours that this is the reason for NT4 being less stable than NT 3.5x.
Certainly I never had a crash on NT 3.5x and have had many on NT4, but YMMV. On some configurations, NT does not really crash much (e.g. my Linux workstation on top of VMware!).
As for the HAL originally hiding all hardware - this is not true, otherwise why would device drivers be necessary? I think the HAL abstracts basic resources such as CPU, memory, bus, etc, but many other resources require drivers.
I'm not hugely surprised by Linux doing better on IA-64, since Linux has been 64-bit for some time and has worked out a lot of generic 64-bitness bugs, whereas Win64 is still alpha.
in the deadline, if Microsoft simply can't deal with 64-bit architecture certain they will buy some company or solution to do it best others. it's the microsoft way. :-(
will somebody get adobe and kinetix to go ahead and port photoshop and 3dsmax so i can go ahead and switch now?! jeez...
If NT wont run on non-86x processors, then the Intel Merced line is screwed too. THat may be one of the reasons for its delay.
For the curious or abscent-minded: Bill Gates' original infamous quote was "640KB should be enough for everyone."
The highest-performing Compaq AlphaServer gets >102k TpmC, as a cluster of 8 14-CPU servers (read 96 CPUs), with a total system cost of $14m. The new ProLiant 8000/8500 gets >40k TpmC, with a single server, and a total system cost of <$800k. Lower quality? Maybe. More money? Clearly not.
Unfortunately, it's not possible to compare the high-end Alphas on NT as the benchmarks submitted for them were almost always using Unix of some sort...at this point it's somewhat irrelevant.
Excuse me if this is a silly question, but I can't seem to find an arch/ia64/ or arch/merced/ directory under /usr/src/linux.
Has Intel really ported the kernel alone ? I don't think this has been discussed at all in the linux-kernel list, and it'd surprise me if Linus, Alan, and the others had been working secretly with Intel.
Or does the article only mean that Intel is committed to porting Linux on Merced and that it'll be easy because the code is already 64-bit ready ?
I heard that Linux's 64-bit support (on Alpha at least) is not exactly as good as it should be. Technically, Linux has 64-bit address space; both kernel and apps can use it. But there is a problem with PCI cards. Some cards need to be able to read/write to memory, but they can address only 32 bit space. In order for them to work, the kernel must allocate memory for them below 1 gig, as the person who told me that claimed. DEC Unix(*) does that, but Linux does not. This is similar to some old ISA cards, for which memory had to be allocated below 16 Mb.
Can somebody confirm / deny / comment on that?
(*) I refuse to call it "Compaq Tru64". Compaq had nothing to do with it, other then buying Digital. Besides, does anybody else think "Tru64" is a stupid name?
___
If you think big enough, you'll never have to do it.
We have a *long* way to go. Just cuz we stormed the beaches doesn't mean we've occupied the capital. We still got a long way to go and Bill's got plenty of reserve FUD troopers.
Thank you all for the clarification. I guess you don't have to be from Harvard to make mistakes! :-)
As long as he wants to "kill Unix", I don't think there's any other company out there who needs him. The only non-Unix operating system I know of in development is Be, and I don't think he'd like the Gassee co-existance philosophy. After reading 'Showstopper', I can almost hear him scream "Coexistance is for wimps!"
Of course the good news is that he's pretty rich now from Microsoft stock options, so he could always retire. But what then? I don't see him sitting around playing golf.
D
----
We used Win3.1 for 5 years after the first 32 bit processors and no-one ever complained. Now we'll just use 32 bit operating systems for 5 years after 64 bit processors. It looks like the 64 bit Linux is going to remain weekend hobbyist terratory while 32 bit WinNT is going to be the workplace.
I suspect Linux is cheaper to develop on the Alpha. With Compaq's finances in difficulty and no clear leadership on Alpha and where it's market should be it makes business sense to stop NT on Alpha. At least for now.
Developing Linux on Alpha and even Merced/McKinley is cheap because of the open software and eagerness of Linux developers. Given that Linux is gaining ground in the server market where Alpha would be strongest its a cheap way to hedge their bet on Alpha's future.
I think it was a business descision.
Of course, if MS is still arrogant enough to think they should be paid for the privelage of allowing NT on non-x86 systems...
A GPLed Flash plugin for Netscape can be found at http://www.geocities.com/TimesSquare/Labyrinth/508 4/flash.html. The web page claims it works on HP/UX. I've only tried it (briefly) on Linux.
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
About 0.1% of all NT installations are apparently running on Alpha.
Who gives a shit if the alpha Win64 doesn't boot now? Windows won't boot when Merced comes out in a year or two. Right. Linux is going away. The end of the world is 1/1/2000. What other looks into the crystal ball from the Register do we have on tap today? Can we get the Register to change its name to the Psychic Friends Network?
...then it must be true. I don't think I'll lose any sleep over this.
DrLunch.com The site that tells you what's for lunch!
Too bad it's a hoax and Bill never actually said it!
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
Most likely MS is asking Compaq for too much money to support NT on Alpha. That's why Motorola stopped PPC support and its most likely the reason MIPS support went away too. This announcment is bad news for the animation industry. They use a lot of alpha workstations for 3D rendering becasue they are fast and much cheaper than SGI boxes. That may be changing with the SGI visual workstations but I don't know for sure.
I'm part of the CPP for Windows 2000 and have been running Beta 3 and now RC1 for a while on my home machine (Wanna see what Linux is up against.) And while I can't speak for corporate environments I can speak from end user experience. Believe it or not I haven't had Windows 2000 crash even once on me...now I am not saying that it never crashes, but in my experience it really is not that bad.
Bloated and slow? Oh yeah, but to be taken seriously by the Linux community...yes.
I'm just saying...if it doesn't work on alphas or not, it really doesn't matter. We can't just ignore it. It's coming...maybe this year or next. But it's still coming. It's not yet time to sing the song of victory. We must fight 'till the very end!
Use the Z-modem protocol between Information Superhighway routers to compress the plaintext. ~LordOfYourPants
Probably it's that clunky Win3.1 interface that gives the 'solid' feel
;)
Like that Motif-fy look? (and wasn't MS involved with Motif at some point, which is why Motif titlebars look Win31-y and alt-tab functions like it does?
1. Compaq is probably not selling enough Tru64 or Linux systems to justify continued Alpha production. If Compaq was making lots of money, they might make some sort of daring move to push Unix/Linux on their systems. But since they're trying to cut costs they'll have to drop the Alpha.
2. Microsoft could easily continue Alpha development. Windows on Alpha is of strategic importance when dealing with Intel, so MS is shooting themselves in the foot by letting it die.
3. Microsoft isn't stupid. They're quite aware of points 1 & 2.
Conclusion: Compaq must have done something to really piss off Microsoft. Maybe those NT engineers Compaq layed off were really important to Microsoft for some reason. Perhaps Compaq is about to make some sort of big Linux announcement. Maybe Compaq pulled out of a product tying deal. Who knows. Whatever it was, Microsoft now feels that it must retaliate against Compaq even though it will hurt Microsoft on another front.
It is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail. - Abraham Maslow
Regarding this article: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/server/beta/hall/ 99Aug04.asp (posted on Aug 25 on Slashdot.org) The original developers are bragging about how good their design and plan was (for NT).. They say: "It cost us a lot to keep portability alive, but we did, and that has made it easy for us to respond to things like Merced," he says, referring to the 64-bit chip from Intel. Well obviously they didn't make it that easy.. ;)
Compaq bought Digital because they wanted Digital. That's a company that happens to produce the Alpha. It's also a company that produces a lot of things, and has a large market share in "Enterprise" stuff. Alpha just came along on the deal, and I'm sure the presence or absence of Alpha wasn't a major consideration when Compaq was considering buying Digital. The Alpha has languished on the edges of the market for a long, long time. Everybody knew that more than a little while back.
Also, VMware isn't going to help Win95 run on alpha -- it relies on having a native CPU.
--
Now, Microsoft being what they are, I'd bet Compaq knows they're indirectly funding Microsoft's entry into IA-64. Compaq pays the freight to pave the way from 32 to 64 bits. Then Microsoft does their own IA-64 port, cuts Compaq out of the revenue stream, and undermines their Alpha market.
Standard Operating Proceedure.
I'm glad to see someone wising up to Microsoft's business practices enough to make rational decisions. Microsoft will play along until its time for someone to get rich, then the one that gets rich will be Microsoft.
You believe he was on the panel? Sorry, yours is just another FOAF story. Noone has ever come up with an authoritative source for that quote. It's just one of those urban lengends that has been repeated so often that people believe it without question. A lot of these anti-Microsoft spews have their source with jealous competitors. Question everything you hear or read -- including this :-)
Yeah, they are falling apart:
That isn't what I said, exactly. While Microsoft is rolling in cash, it is primarily due to their control of OS preloads of Windows 98 and sales of Office. NT isn't responsible for their huge profits because it not only hasn't sold in huge quantities, it has cost them huge amounts in development and advertising. NT has failed to light a fire under the industry. It slowed, but failed to kill Novell. Novell looks resurgeant. It has failed to kill UNIX. UNIX growth continues. It has failed to slow acceptance of Linux. Linux is growing at a much faster rate than NT, despite the huge inequity of resources spent on promotion of NT versus that spent on promotion of Linux. Heck, NT has failed to even completely kill oS/2, despite IBM's best efforts at helping them out there.
Lets get some realism here....
The reality is that a lot of once large and once prosperous companies that relied on their own proprietary OSes have seen those products dry up and either ended up dead (like Prime (PrimeOS) for example), becoming a UNIX vendor (like HP (MPE), DEC (VMS), etc) or basically exiting the hardware/OS business altogether (Unisys).
Its easy to predict the status quo when a company is prosperous, but that can turn around quickly. If you had told people in 1980 that Digital Research would be a tiny, forgotten subsidiary of a company whos major product was a distribution of a free UNIX clone, they would have told you that you were insane.
This decision for Compaq to ditch support for the Alpha comes after the Intel lawsuit over the intellectual property of the Alpha chip, when it was a Digital product it made sense for Compaq/Digital to evangelize it but now that Intel royalties are being paid, Compaq is going to ride just one horse.
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Check these out:
Compaq is shutting down Bellevue facilities (http://www.news.com/News/Item/0,4,239-40760,00.h
$167 Price for Intel's 500MHz Celeron when purchased in 1,000-unit lots. By contrast, a 600MHz Pentium III costs $669. Can you really justify the extra $500 tocustomers? We can't.
(http://www.zdnet.com/sr/stories/issue/0,4537,2
The price for an Alpha chip? I would like to know and how it stacked up against Xeon.
rob@techboy.com all the tech, a growing boy needs
Digital was split into two parts, and sold seperately. Intel bought the part that made Alphas, and Compaq bought the rest. Intel was required to produce Alphas for 10 years after the purchase, however don't expect them to be putting much resources into it.