I lock my house to keep out the opportunists and amateur thieves. An ID card would not stop the terrorists, as locking my house does not stop professional thieves, but these sort of measures are being justified by reference to preventing terrorism - which is as ridiculous as justifying locking your house to keep out professional thieves who can easily bypass your security. But the point here is this - locking your house does not restrict your own freedoms, and does not invite discrimination based on your identity or profiling.
You've heard of Legacy apps? Everybody has software that they just can't abandon. It's one thing for a hacker to hand-convert all his documents to KWord. It's quite another thing for a large company to abandon or convert hundreds of thousands of Word docs and Excel spreadsheets.
Can you read? I would hardly call Notepad a legacy app!! It produces plain ASCII!!
So much talk has gone into the dual PII side of things, but the original post was on the use of dual socket-7 boards. I haven't picked through every post (and from the looks of most -- nor do I care to) so if this is repeated, excuse me.
While I have heard of dual-socket-7 TX boards I know the TX chipset was not designed for SMP use so it has to be some wild hack. That leaves you with the 430HX (or worse 430NX) chipsets which WERE designed for SMP use. Now the downside of the HX is that you lose the UltraDMA HD interface (not a problem if you run SCSI which you probably do if you're considering SMP). You lose SDRAM (but still have EDO RAM). And finally you may have a problem with P55C (Pentium MMX) support due to core voltage issues. The HX was out before the P55C and therefore EARLY HX motherboards may not have had BIOS support for the 2.8V P55C core. I can't say for sure with these SMP socket-7 boards, I haven't used them, but the P54C (Pentium) had a 3.4V core. If these SMP socket-7 boards do not support 2.8V cores you'd be stuck with the P54C which only goes up to 166MHz (or is it 200?) and GOOD LUCK finding them.
While Pentium chips are cheap now days, dual socket-7 boards are not as cheap as you'd think. Given the problems above and the 66MHz bus of these boards, I honestly think a single Celeron 300A @450MHz, or if adventuresome, a dual Celeron 300A setup would be your best buy.
And by the way, people who say that programs have to be SMP-aware to take advantage of an SMP setup... you're wrong (unless you only run ONE program -- which is basically impossible unless you like just sitting in the shell doing nothing). Multiple programs will split across processors. Exactly how (under Linux) I'm not sure, but under NT you can hard-set processor affinity or let the OS do it.
Check http://wwwcsif.cs.ucdavis.edu/~wen/dual-cpu.html for info on all kinds of SMP socket-7 boards (dual and QUAD!)
Check http://www.taken.com.tw/ for a dual TX board -- but they no longer advertise this board so maybe you're out of luck here.
No the monopoly is about Microsoft forcing Office, Money, IE, or other MS software onto OEM systems just because they have Windows (and that is the *only* way they can get Windows). This practice is wrong, and for the most part has been stopped. But if you can only find OEMs offering Windows, that is not necessarily a monopoly (not by Microsoft's doing anyway). Microsoft doesn't own the hardware, OEMs do not buy the computers from Microsoft for resale. The OEMs are free to install any OS they want. Tell me, when does Microsoft come in and say "DELL... YOU HAVE TO INSTALL WINDOWS!"? What leverage do they have? What can they withhold from Dell if Dell chooses NOT to install Windows? Windows IS the leverage, if companies don't want it the leverage (and therefore the monopoly) vanishes. If Dell (or whoever) doesn't want to install Windows they won't. So obviously we have to move on to something else here. Like, oh I don't know... maybe Dell has figured out that Windows users is where their bread-and-butter comes from?!? And for this reason they will continue to offer Windows. The people you need to complain to here are the OEMs not Microsoft. What, Microsoft is supposed to shut down their whole company because YOU don't like Microsoft products? Hah! They're just doing business wherever they can, can't blame them for that, talk to the OEMs.
The market will follow the demand. If there are no OEMs/VARs offering Linux-installed systems, it is because there isn't enough demand to support operation (and yes, I know there are companies offering Linux, it is just to make a point). The same holds true for companies offering raw systems (without an OS), if there was enough demand for this the companies would be out there.
Damn the world for not bending over backwards for *your* demands? Wake up and do you own bending.
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I lock my house to keep out the opportunists and amateur thieves. An ID card would not stop the terrorists, as locking my house does not stop professional thieves, but these sort of measures are being justified by reference to preventing terrorism - which is as ridiculous as justifying locking your house to keep out professional thieves who can easily bypass your security.
But the point here is this - locking your house does not restrict your own freedoms, and does not invite discrimination based on your identity or profiling.
You've heard of Legacy apps? Everybody has software that they just can't abandon. It's one thing for a hacker to hand-convert all his documents to KWord. It's quite another thing for a large company to abandon or convert hundreds of thousands of Word docs and Excel spreadsheets.
Can you read? I would hardly call Notepad a legacy app!! It produces plain ASCII!!
flash, etal. has just gotten out of hand... eye candy is cool the first 3 times you see it.. after that it's just a waste of bandwidth.
But after that, it's in your cache...
So much talk has gone into the dual PII side of things, but the original post was on the use of dual socket-7 boards. I haven't picked through every post (and from the looks of most -- nor do I care to) so if this is repeated, excuse me.
While I have heard of dual-socket-7 TX boards I know the TX chipset was not designed for SMP use so it has to be some wild hack. That leaves you with the 430HX (or worse 430NX) chipsets which WERE designed for SMP use. Now the downside of the HX is that you lose the UltraDMA HD interface (not a problem if you run SCSI which you probably do if you're considering SMP). You lose SDRAM (but still have EDO RAM). And finally you may have a problem with P55C (Pentium MMX) support due to core voltage issues. The HX was out before the P55C and therefore EARLY HX motherboards may not have had BIOS support for the 2.8V P55C core. I can't say for sure with these SMP socket-7 boards, I haven't used them, but the P54C (Pentium) had a 3.4V core. If these SMP socket-7 boards do not support 2.8V cores you'd be stuck with the P54C which only goes up to 166MHz (or is it 200?) and GOOD LUCK finding them.
While Pentium chips are cheap now days, dual socket-7 boards are not as cheap as you'd think. Given the problems above and the 66MHz bus of these boards, I honestly think a single Celeron 300A @450MHz, or if adventuresome, a dual Celeron 300A setup would be your best buy.
And by the way, people who say that programs have to be SMP-aware to take advantage of an SMP setup... you're wrong (unless you only run ONE program -- which is basically impossible unless you like just sitting in the shell doing nothing). Multiple programs will split across processors. Exactly how (under Linux) I'm not sure, but under NT you can hard-set processor affinity or let the OS do it.
Check http://wwwcsif.cs.ucdavis.edu/~wen/dual-cpu.html for info on all kinds of SMP socket-7 boards (dual and QUAD!)
Check http://www.taken.com.tw/ for a dual TX board -- but they no longer advertise this board so maybe you're out of luck here.
-Gary
No the monopoly is about Microsoft forcing Office, Money, IE, or other MS software onto OEM systems just because they have Windows (and that is the *only* way they can get Windows). This practice is wrong, and for the most part has been stopped. But if you can only find OEMs offering Windows, that is not necessarily a monopoly (not by Microsoft's doing anyway). Microsoft doesn't own the hardware, OEMs do not buy the computers from Microsoft for resale. The OEMs are free to install any OS they want. Tell me, when does Microsoft come in and say "DELL... YOU HAVE TO INSTALL WINDOWS!"? What leverage do they have? What can they withhold from Dell if Dell chooses NOT to install Windows? Windows IS the leverage, if companies don't want it the leverage (and therefore the monopoly) vanishes. If Dell (or whoever) doesn't want to install Windows they won't. So obviously we have to move on to something else here. Like, oh I don't know... maybe Dell has figured out that Windows users is where their bread-and-butter comes from?!? And for this reason they will continue to offer Windows. The people you need to complain to here are the OEMs not Microsoft. What, Microsoft is supposed to shut down their whole company because YOU don't like Microsoft products? Hah! They're just doing business wherever they can, can't blame them for that, talk to the OEMs.
The market will follow the demand. If there are no OEMs/VARs offering Linux-installed systems, it is because there isn't enough demand to support operation (and yes, I know there are companies offering Linux, it is just to make a point). The same holds true for companies offering raw systems (without an OS), if there was enough demand for this the companies would be out there.
Damn the world for not bending over backwards for *your* demands? Wake up and do you own bending.