Until March 14, a fully-installable of OS/2 Warp 4.52 (the newest version) is delivered to you on two CDs when you purchase a 2-year subscription to Software Choice. Software Choice can be purchased online at:
After March 14 (or when supplies at the above run out), you can get a new Warp 4.52 license through IBM's "Passport Advantage" program (new CD media is $20 additional) which requires a free online registration. Info from IBM is at:
Excellent comment! In a few words, you have managed to convey the very essence of why Microsoft needs to be reined in. Microsoft is not about competition, superior products, best value to consumers, or innovation. Microsoft has a monopoly in an essential market and they are using the power and wealth that derives from it to extend it. The old communist monopolies in the former USSR stifled economic growth and innovation with their central control, inefficiency, and lack of change. Now, Microsoft is doing the same thing in information technology by strangling innovation, controlling standards, creating artifically high costs for software, and destroying small companies that threaten the status quo. Hardware has become sufficiently-powerful to make major improvements in the way all people live. It is only software that is preventing this. No single company should ever be a position to excercise som much control over so many critically-important markets. It has been the "business" of government in a capitalist system since the middle ages to create and maintain free and open markets and government needs to start doing that. Microsoft *is* an enemy of both capitalism and a free society and they need to be treated as such.
Spending a few bucks buying a set of long cables for display, keyboard, speaker, microphone, and mouse beats buying passive coolers and having hot hardware. I did that several years ago and now my PC is much quieter (0 db vs 39.5 db) than the author's effort.
OS/2 gets dissed even when there are 37 opportunities to load it.
This is very bad news...
on
AMD Delays Hammer
·
· Score: 2, Informative
The hammer is a critical product for AMD that they would never delay unless there were *major* problems with it.
1) AMD is currently losing huge amounts of money. The hammer would have allowed them to sell at the high-performance end of the market again where the sales prices are higher and might have helped them reduce the flow of red ink.
2) The delay will badly hurt AMD partners such as motherboard and chipset vendors who have developed supporting products for hammer.
3) The hammer had a potential performance lead over Intel that will be greatly eroded by the time it finally appears.
4) Critical software development for hammer will be slowed which will slow eventual market acceptance of hammer.
5) The delay will build momentum for Itanium.
6) The delay will greatly reduce the pressure on Microsoft to support hammer and will give Microsoft the opportunity to also build momentum for Itanium. Depending on market conditions when the hammer finally appears, it is now even possible that Microsoft will never need to support hammer.
7) This delay is so serious that it creates real doubts that hammer will *ever* be a viable product.
No, IBM will still sell OS/2 to you (if you beat them with a stick and threaten them with whatever you can think of) but you have to buy a "Software Choice" 2-year subscription to get the latest version (Warp 4.52) which came out in January, 2002.
I still find OS/2 to be a lot of fun to use but it will obviously not be around forever. Linux is a much better platform than Windows XP at the moment due to its security, reduced opportunities for spyware, and its blue-sky future compared with Microsoft's ominous plans for future Windows versions.
I have been an OS/2 user for the last 7 years which mandates that one periodically looks at other OSs such as Linux and Windows every time IBM threatens to pull the plug as they do periodically.
This guy's comments about Linux are similar in some ways to my experience. Hardware support can be difficult. For example, one problem I had was that I simply could not find an effective way to support a dot-matrix printer with Linux that was needed to print a special 3-part form.
OS/2 offers a large base of hardware drivers that can be used with just about any version of OS/2. OS/2 can still run a fairly wide variety of software (DOS, Java, Windows, OS/2, X86). OS/2 is pretty easy to install, configure, clone, and migrate (if you are familiar with it), has simple software installation, is very stable and secure, supports TT fonts, has a very nice object-oriented user interface, etc. It's big drawbacks, of course, are IBM's indifference, a shrinking user base, limited future hardware and software support, and it's significant licensing costs.
Linux on the desktop needs to have a new device driver model that will future drivers to be used more interchangeably with future distributions, a simplified software installation model (such as the OS/2 'Warpin' design), and an easier method of installing new hardware. Even OS/2's ancient 'DDINSTALL' is much easier, right now. Software and hardware installation are basic activities for desktop users and they need to be much easier if Linux on desktop is ever going to be mainstream (a dubious goal, true).
Don't sell your MS stock yet. OS/2 has been running ATM machines for the last 10 years and look where it's at. Running the cash registers in 2500 paint stores is not going to give anyone at Microsoft a sleepless night.
--from the article... "Although the initial acceptance of Itanium-based servers and workstations has been slow, there is little doubt that it will eventually succeed in becoming the next-generation platform."
...as soon as it overcomes poor performance, high cost, poor initial acceptance, sledgehammer, a lack of applications, and a very strange name.
..."Second, the junior engineer there, a year out of UNH, made a point of running over the senior engineers toes many times. No injury, he was walking around fine. Third, he also made a point of running into the senior engineer a number of times. Getting hit by one of those things is no worse then getting hit by someone who weighs 75 pounds more then you do."
Why isn't the senior engineer running into the junior engineer and over his toes instead of the other way around? In my day, both the senior engineer and the junior engineer would have been running into an engineering tech while playing chicken on duelling Gingers. What's wrong with the kids these days anyway??
It would take *months* (or even years) for one of these large districts to train all of their staff in Linux and that's assuming that they could find someone to train the trainers and that they could find some money to pay them. Even if they *could* migrate x thousand machines to some distro of Linux, the machines would just sit there little-used because no one had figured out how to make them print with whatever printer was on hand and connect to the network. Most applications would be unfamiliar to those new users as well.
You have not checked Dell then. On their US website today, the "featured special" desktop system is a "Dell Dimension 4400" containing a P4 1.6Ghz with 128MB of DDR SDRAM.
Yeah, the Tom's Hardware 2.4Ghz P4 test platform is a dual-channel RDRAM system. Meanwhile, for obvious cost reasons, the P4 platform that most people will actually see down at their local CompUSA or on the cable shopping network will be a P4 with PC133 (or even PC100!!) memory. Let's see Tom put a P4 system with PC133 memory against the Athlon XP. That's the choice most people will actually have.
"Most likely, there will only be a small number of compilers that will do a decent job, and a lot of languages won't even try. That's fine if you think the world consists only of a bunch of SPEC benchmarks implemented in C/C++, Fortran, and Java, but it will make life even harder for non-standard languages or non-standard applications."
Outstanding comment. This seems to be the biggest attraction of Itanium for Intel and Microsoft. For people running their non-standard x86 code in the slow emulation mode, though, (most of the world) the Itanium processor looks like grim news.
First she dumped the HP calculators. I had to buy my son a TI graphing calculator recently because there no HP graphing calculators left to buy. No RPN...he will grow up with the "=" key and Carly is to blame.:( Now she wants to dump the HP computers (which used to much better than they are at the moment...Carly's fault there too?) What's next to go? Printers? The HP shareholders need to wise up and get rid of Carly before she wipes out the last vestiges of HP's reputation for high-quality useful products.
Why was this modded up? The heat issue identified (albeit poorly) by Tom's hardware was for an Athlon Thunderbird in which the heat sink was suddenly removed and has *nothing* to do with the heat output from the new transistor design announced by AMD yesterday. Why not compare the heat output from a 1964 Motorola B&W TV with the heat output from a Nintendo Gameboy color? It would be about as meaningful.
A year or so ago, this type of complaint would have been more impressive but now, it seems vaguely old-fashioned and quaint when we are living in the post-Clinton era where talk of war and bioterror is on every tongue, privacy is disappearing, and the FBI is discussing the use of torture as an interrogation technique.
I have an oem DTLA-307045 45GB GB drive that has been running since April non-Windows without problems. Maybe that gigantic Master File Table (MFT) that gets laid down with 45+ GB partitions in the Windows 2000 NTFS file system stresses the drives too much.
>what is an 'Athlon 4' and why would anyone want to use Sledgehammer when Intel has their own, totally incompatible, yet almost guaranteed to be more popular, 64-bit system?
Athlon 4 is a new low-power mobile version of the upcoming desktop Palomino Athlon with power management. There is no mobile P4 so the notebook powerCPU choices are PIII or Athlon 4.
The Intel 64-bit Itanium does not run 32-bit software very well and is also S-L-O-W (and expensive). They are being sold now but no one is trading in their P4 for one. Sledgehammer will run 32-bit software like Athlon does but will also be faster than Athlons with its new Silicon-on-Insulator (SOI) construction. Oh, and it will run 64-bit applications, too.
Slashdot Mirror
Until March 14, a fully-installable of OS/2 Warp 4.52 (the newest version) is delivered to you on two CDs when you purchase a 2-year subscription to Software Choice. Software Choice can be purchased online at:
2 31 ,0-12556-311-307063-3,00.html?tag=st.sh.12556-311- 3070
c tI d=114867&affid=874&adid=8744 sure.com/product.asp?ProductI d=114867&affid=874&adid=874t er.com/cgi-bin/utsearch?cd=02 &sku=IBM00310/ item.asp?sku=42 3884TD&S=324Ci ons/item.asp?sk u=423884TD&S=324Cd b2www/mns_art2.d2w/ report?catname=SWCHOICE&username=&i1=&o=&x=06:13:0 3
http://shopper.cnet.com/shopping/resellers/1,10
Other online sites selling Software Choice:
http://www.computers4sure.com/product.asp?Produ
http://www.solutions
http://www.pagecompu
http://www.techstore.com/solutions
http://www.officeexpress.com/solut
http://shop.mensys.nl/cgi-bin/
After March 14 (or when supplies at the above run out), you can get a new Warp 4.52 license through IBM's "Passport Advantage" program (new CD media is $20 additional) which requires a free online registration. Info from IBM is at:
http://www-3.ibm.com/software/os/warp/swchoice/
Excellent comment! In a few words, you have managed to convey the very essence of why Microsoft needs to be reined in. Microsoft is not about competition, superior products, best value to consumers, or innovation. Microsoft has a monopoly in an essential market and they are using the power and wealth that derives from it to extend it. The old communist monopolies in the former USSR stifled economic growth and innovation with their central control, inefficiency, and lack of change. Now, Microsoft is doing the same thing in information technology by strangling innovation, controlling standards, creating artifically high costs for software, and destroying small companies that threaten the status quo. Hardware has become sufficiently-powerful to make major improvements in the way all people live. It is only software that is preventing this. No single company should ever be a position to excercise som much control over so many critically-important markets. It has been the "business" of government in a capitalist system since the middle ages to create and maintain free and open markets and government needs to start doing that. Microsoft *is* an enemy of both capitalism and a free society and they need to be treated as such.
Never, never, nevuh! Heh. And everyone knows the earth is flat and that no one will ever need more than 64K of memory. Nevernevernevuh!
Spending a few bucks buying a set of long cables for display, keyboard, speaker, microphone, and mouse beats buying passive coolers and having hot hardware. I did that several years ago and now my PC is much quieter (0 db vs 39.5 db) than the author's effort.
He just lists 'OS/2' once. There was:
OS/2 v1
OS/2 v2
OS/2 v2.1
OS/2 warp v3
OS/2 Warp v4
OS/2 Warp v4.5
OS/2 Warp v4.51
OS/2 Warp v4.52
OS/2 gets dissed even when there are 37 opportunities to load it.
The hammer is a critical product for AMD that they would never delay unless there were *major* problems with it.
1) AMD is currently losing huge amounts of money. The hammer would have allowed them to sell at the high-performance end of the market again where the sales prices are higher and might have helped them reduce the flow of red ink.
2) The delay will badly hurt AMD partners such as motherboard and chipset vendors who have developed supporting products for hammer.
3) The hammer had a potential performance lead over Intel that will be greatly eroded by the time it finally appears.
4) Critical software development for hammer will be slowed which will slow eventual market acceptance of hammer.
5) The delay will build momentum for Itanium.
6) The delay will greatly reduce the pressure on Microsoft to support hammer and will give Microsoft the opportunity to also build momentum for Itanium. Depending on market conditions when the hammer finally appears, it is now even possible that Microsoft will never need to support hammer.
7) This delay is so serious that it creates real doubts that hammer will *ever* be a viable product.
No, IBM will still sell OS/2 to you (if you beat them with a stick and threaten them with whatever you can think of) but you have to buy a "Software Choice" 2-year subscription to get the latest version (Warp 4.52) which came out in January, 2002.
I still find OS/2 to be a lot of fun to use but it will obviously not be around forever. Linux is a much better platform than Windows XP at the moment due to its security, reduced opportunities for spyware, and its blue-sky future compared with Microsoft's ominous plans for future Windows versions.
I have been an OS/2 user for the last 7 years which mandates that one periodically looks at other OSs such as Linux and Windows every time IBM threatens to pull the plug as they do periodically.
This guy's comments about Linux are similar in some ways to my experience. Hardware support can be difficult. For example, one problem I had was that I simply could not find an effective way to support a dot-matrix printer with Linux that was needed to print a special 3-part form.
OS/2 offers a large base of hardware drivers that can be used with just about any version of OS/2. OS/2 can still run a fairly wide variety of software (DOS, Java, Windows, OS/2, X86). OS/2 is pretty easy to install, configure, clone, and migrate (if you are familiar with it), has simple software installation, is very stable and secure, supports TT fonts, has a very nice object-oriented user interface, etc. It's big drawbacks, of course, are IBM's indifference, a shrinking user base, limited future hardware and software support, and it's significant licensing costs.
Linux on the desktop needs to have a new device driver model that will future drivers to be used more interchangeably with future distributions, a simplified software installation model (such as the OS/2 'Warpin' design), and an easier method of installing new hardware. Even OS/2's ancient 'DDINSTALL' is much easier, right now. Software and hardware installation are basic activities for desktop users and they need to be much easier if Linux on desktop is ever going to be mainstream (a dubious goal, true).
Don't sell your MS stock yet. OS/2 has been running ATM machines for the last 10 years and look where it's at. Running the cash registers in 2500 paint stores is not going to give anyone at Microsoft a sleepless night.
--from the article...
"Although the initial acceptance of Itanium-based servers and workstations has been slow, there is little doubt that it will eventually succeed in becoming the next-generation platform."
...as soon as it overcomes poor performance, high cost, poor initial acceptance, sledgehammer, a lack of applications, and a very strange name.
The Microsoft-only mindset at Microsoft is so entrenched that it permeates everything they do. Microsoft Research developed something called Netscan
http://netscan.research.microsoft.com
that provides interesting statistics on Usenet sites and users. If you use it with anything other than IE, though, it says:
"Netscan support for browsers other than IE will be back shortly.
To view Netscan with all its functionallity, you need to have IE 5.5 and up."
And then follows a link to get...IE.
Why isn't the senior engineer running into the junior engineer and over his toes instead of the other way around? In my day, both the senior engineer and the junior engineer would have been running into an engineering tech while playing chicken on duelling Gingers. What's wrong with the kids these days anyway??
It would take *months* (or even years) for one of these large districts to train all of their staff in Linux and that's assuming that they could find someone to train the trainers and that they could find some money to pay them. Even if they *could* migrate x thousand machines to some distro of Linux, the machines would just sit there little-used because no one had figured out how to make them print with whatever printer was on hand and connect to the network. Most applications would be unfamiliar to those new users as well.
You have not checked Dell then. On their US website today, the "featured special" desktop system is a "Dell Dimension 4400" containing a P4 1.6Ghz with 128MB of DDR SDRAM.
Yeah, the Tom's Hardware 2.4Ghz P4 test platform is a dual-channel RDRAM system. Meanwhile, for obvious cost reasons, the P4 platform that most people will actually see down at their local CompUSA or on the cable shopping network will be a P4 with PC133 (or even PC100!!) memory. Let's see Tom put a P4 system with PC133 memory against the Athlon XP. That's the choice most people will actually have.
I knew how to put the aluminum foil on the TV antenna to stop the snow on "Romper Room" before I was seven. Kids nowadays...
"Most likely, there will only be a small number of compilers that will do a decent job, and a lot of languages won't even try. That's fine if you think the world consists only of a bunch of SPEC benchmarks implemented in C/C++, Fortran, and Java, but it will make life even harder for non-standard languages or non-standard applications."
Outstanding comment. This seems to be the biggest attraction of Itanium for Intel and Microsoft. For people running their non-standard x86 code in the slow emulation mode, though, (most of the world) the Itanium processor looks like grim news.
I have an Athlon XP 1700+ purchased in November, 2001 that shows the following with the AMD Dos CPUINFO utility:
AMD Athlon(TM) XP 1700+
AuthenticAMD
Model: 6
Step: 2
Family: 6
L1 Data Cache: 64 KB
L1 Inst Cache: 64 KB
L2 Cache: 256 KB
MMX Yes
AMD Extended MMX Yes
3DNow!(tm) Yes
Extended 3DNow!(tm) Yes
Looks like the Athlon XP series of processors basically do not have the bug.
First she dumped the HP calculators. I had to buy my son a TI graphing calculator recently because there no HP graphing calculators left to buy. No RPN...he will grow up with the "=" key and Carly is to blame. :( Now she wants to dump the HP computers (which used to much better than they are at the moment...Carly's fault there too?) What's next to go? Printers? The HP shareholders need to wise up and get rid of Carly before she wipes out the last vestiges of HP's reputation for high-quality useful products.
Why was this modded up? The heat issue identified (albeit poorly) by Tom's hardware was for an Athlon Thunderbird in which the heat sink was suddenly removed and has *nothing* to do with the heat output from the new transistor design announced by AMD yesterday. Why not compare the heat output from a 1964 Motorola B&W TV with the heat output from a Nintendo Gameboy color? It would be about as meaningful.
Netscape v4.61 for OS/2 renders just fine.
Mozilla/IBM Web Browser for OS/2 is blocked.
The posts about the AMD "heat emergencies" are gaining the same status as the posts about "beowolf clusters."
A year or so ago, this type of complaint would have been more impressive but now, it seems vaguely old-fashioned and quaint when we are living in the post-Clinton era where talk of war and bioterror is on every tongue, privacy is disappearing, and the FBI is discussing the use of torture as an interrogation technique.
I have an oem DTLA-307045 45GB GB drive that has been running since April non-Windows without problems. Maybe that gigantic Master File Table (MFT) that gets laid down with 45+ GB partitions in the Windows 2000 NTFS file system stresses the drives too much.
>what is an 'Athlon 4' and why would anyone want to use Sledgehammer when Intel has their own, totally incompatible, yet almost guaranteed to be more popular, 64-bit system?
Athlon 4 is a new low-power mobile version of the upcoming desktop Palomino Athlon with power management. There is no mobile P4 so the notebook powerCPU choices are PIII or Athlon 4.
The Intel 64-bit Itanium does not run 32-bit software very well and is also S-L-O-W (and expensive). They are being sold now but no one is trading in their P4 for one. Sledgehammer will run 32-bit software like Athlon does but will also be faster than Athlons with its new Silicon-on-Insulator (SOI) construction. Oh, and it will run 64-bit applications, too.