I am sure that IBM is not going to lose a whole bunch on this, but there isn't a whole lot you are going to do with some vintage equipment. E.g. what is the current market for working VT320 terminals. Well, the answer is not much. I sold one on ebay for all of $1, and the buyer begged to back out when he found out I wasn't local to him. In MA, the trash won't pick it up, Goodwill won't take them, and they take up space. Unless you want to find a friendly dumpster after hours, you are stuck with it. Sure, you turn some into routers, intranet file servers, etc. but how many does any one person need? Ever try and give away a 386?
This indeed was being done when the price of gold was high enough. Alas, with the price of gold down at $260/troy, this has lost a great amount of whatever allure it had. Unfortunately, recycling metals like gold involves some rather nasty chemicals (cyanides in some cases, e.g. heap leatching is get a pile of gold ore and pore cyanide on it), and is cost prohibitive when the price is too low. Silver from fixer can be recovered by electolysis from photographic fixer (sodium theosulphate for the most part), but you already have the silver in solution. Silver is more reactive than gold by a far shot.
Lord knows every other internet appliance has failed miserably. Netpliance an nounced that they will be getting out of the business, Virgin has bailed out (and yes Virginia, the bios password was hacked within 24 hours of that announcement), WebPods had all of 300 subscribers, etc. Somehow, the lack of local hard storage to store stuff plus (frequently) a poor isp service, doomed these guys. I wonder if this guy will be any different?
You gotta say one thing about Branson, he at least thinks about his biz plans before he does them. The reason that few (if any) of these have been hacked (unlike the i-opener, etc) is that you don't own them for 3 years. After that, sure, you can hack it all you want, but before then its not yours yet. Unlike the somewhat dubious i-opener tos, this one was enforceable. Further after 3 years, you don't want to own it since you are now responsible for its disposal. With more and more folks having fits about the toxic stuff in the trash, a load of these would be a real liability.
With the release from the tos, I suspect that you will see a few of these hacked, but since the supply has dried up, not many.
Anyway, with Webpad gone under (they had all of 300 subscribers at one point), this off the board and i-opener painfully dying, it appears that the demand for the standalone device bundled in to a isp just isn't there. Some of it may be grandma can't deal with the technology, but I suspect that the level of service that these folks offered was just not up to snuff. Hardware was fine, content was awful.
Sorry, but read the reviewws. The 1.5 Ghz P4 loses to 1.1 and 1.2 Athlon in most benchmarks. (This was without the DDR, and with the P4 using Rambust). With DDR, the P4 gets burried. Sorry, but since Andy Grove semi-retired, these guys can't get it right.
Check out the BBS here. This started as a I-opener hacking site, but has evolved into a more general internet appliance, etc. hacking site. Recomend it to everyone.
So sorry, i guess my wide lvd scsi arrays do not quite make it then. But seriously, a terabyte of raid is absurdly cheap. The difference between a "home system" and the cruft that Dell and company puts out is more in the case. Given that you can get a 1 ghz tbird for $250 or so and a kt7-raid mobo with raid built in for another $140, "home systems" are not exactly inferior machines these days. As for ide vs scsi, the cpu horsepower that is available in such a 1 ghz system (indeed quite a bit lower), is more than enough to perform software raid-4 or raid-5 if you want with ide and still have cycles left over after you pump it out a 100base-t ethernet. If you are a bank or airline feeding a cluster, I agree with you. this isn't home machine ide-land, but for raw video stuff (non-transaction oriented), still not impressed.
When a maxstor 60 gig drive is all of $200, a terabyte is less than $5000 and 6 dual ide controllers. 200 times this is indeed a megabuck, but a megabuck ain't what it used to be. I run over a terabyte of storage here in my own house, so sorry, impressed I am not.
I must agree with you entirely. Anytime I have to use part of M$ office suite it takes me a long time to find it on my machine. Its there and its liscensed, but I rarely use it. This machine is my Photoshop setup for still graphics, a web server, and one of 2 gateways to my intranet.. My other mac next to me is my nle video setup. The several wintel machines are for dvd processing and creation of other stuff for other wintel platforms. My 2 linux servers in the celler and the mac down there are backup.. Between one thing or another, they are a bunch of serious machines (something over a terabyte of storage, etc., 100baset network, routers, etc. etc.) , but Office is very very much in the background. The presumption that an office suite is required to be productive is really quite untrue. Actually, it is sometimes counter-productive. Office 98 is so frustrating to my wife that she writes papers in html using bbedit rather than spend time wrestling with the paperclip that ate the world.
Given that they have run this story, I doubt that/. will run a story that I submitted at about the same time. The University of Maryland at Diamondback is going to try and tax every student to have access to M$ products and updates. Read about it here This is an effort to make sure that there is compliance with M$ liscensing. No matter if you don't even have a computer, you are presumed guilty of infringement and must pay up. Linux or not, you gotta send money to unka Bill... Somehow I think that this is beyond the pale...
The price of such things is one of the many hidden costs of M$ software. Even if everything is above board and legal, the price you pay to have a staff member keep a constant catalog of liccenses as folks come and go in any organization is non trivial. The loaded cost of an individual is roughly 2x to 3x their salary. The cost of an audit is on top of such a person. I really wish more folks have read the Aesop's fable of the man the horse and the wolf. They might realize what M$ is about. Diddiap dobbin...
A reasonable alternative to the IBM machines is Sun's architecture. Unfortunately their most recent effort in Australia has gone somewhat sour
Such machines are all very well and good, but there will be serious competition from the Seti sort of model for those things that can decomposed correctly.
The Register also carried the story. They had an interesting point about the benchmarking business. How do you benchmark a piece of hardware that "learns" about its applications and improves performance over time? The initial benchmark will be poor, but as you run the app again and again (as you will with most apps), the performance will improve. Not what your typical benchmark measures. Do we now have to "brun in" a benchmark?
Actually Rambus isn't hard to make except in the higher grades. Since the entire stick has to be fabricated including the attached heatsink before it can be tested for speed, you get a lot of lower grade stuff and not much higher grade stuff. Where Rambust fails is in the noise immunity when it comes to making chipsets, thus Intel's problems with their various efforts.
Jc is reporting that Dell pulled their P4 system out of a "shootout" vs the DDR Athlon systems after looking at their performance. He also has numerous other links to 760-land. It is really looking like Intel had better dump Rambust and get with the program if they are ever going to sell anything with the P4. Likewise, Dell had better re-consider its Intelicide policy and start making AMD machines, especially when the multi-processor version of the 760 goes commercial. They have held the server market because Intel was the only multi-processor game in town. This is going to change soon bigtime.
"We've been forecasting worm-based industrial espionage to happen for quite some time,"
said Mikko Hyppönen, anti-virus researcher for F-Secure Corp. "It has finally happened. I'm
just surprised it happened at the top."
Since these guys are (by definition) running M$ cruft to the hilt and the worms usually take advantage of Outlook/Viral Basic. What better place to target? Someplace that runs Lotus Notes maybe??
Ignoring all the issues of the role of government, etc. this is the usual response of a government. To wit: You are behind the times by about 5 years. In a peer to peer high speed interconnected world, something that I wanted to keep from others eyes might not even be on the same continent as my computer. Indeed, it might not be on any one computer, but on several computers in seemingly meaningless pieces. Thus this sort of action will only "catch" the small fry. The governemnt will (of course) trumpet this as a grand examaple of the sucess of the action, but the folks who are running the real crimial exercises (and for whom such draconian measures might possibly, in the wildest imagination be justified) will conduct business as usual.
Now if folks would only use the sensible English units of measure all of this mars stuff could have been pre-empted. But noooo, they have to use the French system of measurement sponsered by the French Revolution. Why the meter isn't even the correct sub-multiple of the distance from the pole to the equator that it was supposed to be. From here on, they should use only furlongs/fortnight for speed, stones per square ell for pressure, and other sensible units of measure... Now how much is that in old pence?
A EULA with this sort of verbage in it would stand no chance in court of being upheld. It is very similar to the sale of a book with the provision that it not be placed in a library. Coming at a time when the entire M$ anti-trust thing is coming up for review, it smacks of stupidity/ego on the part of someone at M$, rather than merit.
Its not a computer its an amplifier...
on
Microsoft Cracked
·
· Score: 2
Sigh. That thing on your desk is not a computer. It is an amplifier. If you are smart, it allows you to be very, very smart. If you are stupid, it allows you to be very, very stupid. Outlook allows folks to be very very stupid bigtime. When anyone who has any DP skills at all is in big demand, sooner or later, you will find someone who you have hired that is going to amplify their stupidity bigtime. You don't hand your car keys over to your 10 year old, but many places are doing the equivalent with Outlook, and other M$ products. I personally feel that the risk/reward against a tightly coupled rice-pudding OS/Application model such as M$ brings out. I shed no tears that they have been given a dose of their own medicine...
Re:Price-Performance of "iCubes" and other Macs
on
X On OSX Now Free
·
· Score: 5
Hmm... A Seti workset on my Mac G4 at 450 Mhz takes 6 hrs, done on my 333 Pentium 2 its 16 hrs if it is done under Windoze and 12 if it is done under BeOS (same hardware thus 33% penalty for Microsquish OS over BeOS). My 700 Mhz Athlon does one in about 8 hours (direct scale from the P2) in Windoze. My dual 450 P2 does one in 12 hrs. Somehow, it seems that clock for clock, I am getting more out of the Power PC. Further, stability is not an issue even though I am running a frankenmachengezelshaftcomputingmachin machine (a 7500 with a boatload of ram, ide disks off a 3rd party card, drop in processor, etc.) Somehow the "rice pudding" model that M$ uses to make their OS is more the problem in stability than the hardware.
It has always been my impression that the users of the network are the customers of the IT department. Thus, it is the duty of the IT department to make the customers happy or the customers should seek another source for their services. The arrogance of those IT departments who state that they are the Holy of Holies and know all is beyond the pale. They should be given their walking papers because they display a conflict of interest that will destroy the organization that employs them. If I were in the upper management of a company and Linux started to appear, I would start to make inquiry as to why. Things like this just don't happen for a lark. They come about because some need of the customers is not being satisfied. Linux may not be the answer either, but it is a symptom of such a need. To have a IT department that states that they will be unresponsive to that need, is a IT department that will sink a company.
Dow Jones has reported today that Hyunadai has accused Rambust of anti-competative practices by manipulating the JDECC standards in their suit against Rambust. Hyundai also accuses them of violation of JDECC rules in failure to disclose any patents that may have been involved
any standards that they may have been involved in setting. Now, if they prevail on either or both of these points, is there recourse to class-action civil suits against Rambust for this anti-competative activity by the folks that bought Rambust memory.
Rambust reported a 9 cent quarter yesterday. With a street estimate of 47 cents for the year going forward, they are at a price/earnings of 150. With Intel going more and more to DDR, etc. and suits like Hyundai's, I wonder if that 47 cents isn't a bit on the optimistic side...
While I don't root for Intel, its good to see that they finally realized that they are riding a lame horse with this one...
Complements of a lead from "JC's", here is an interesting article about Intel and DDR. Rambus always impressed me as an idea looking for a problem. Given Intel's switcheroo, it may be a problem looking for a wastebasket.
Slashdot Mirror
I am sure that IBM is not going to lose a whole bunch on this, but there isn't a whole lot you are going to do with some vintage equipment. E.g. what is the current market for working VT320 terminals. Well, the answer is not much. I sold one on ebay for all of $1, and the buyer begged to back out when he found out I wasn't local to him. In MA, the trash won't pick it up, Goodwill won't take them, and they take up space. Unless you want to find a friendly dumpster after hours, you are stuck with it. Sure, you turn some into routers, intranet file servers, etc. but how many does any one person need? Ever try and give away a 386?
This indeed was being done when the price of gold was high enough. Alas, with the price of gold down at $260/troy, this has lost a great amount of whatever allure it had. Unfortunately, recycling metals like gold involves some rather nasty chemicals (cyanides in some cases, e.g. heap leatching is get a pile of gold ore and pore cyanide on it), and is cost prohibitive when the price is too low. Silver from fixer can be recovered by electolysis from photographic fixer (sodium theosulphate for the most part), but you already have the silver in solution. Silver is more reactive than gold by a far shot.
Lord knows every other internet appliance has failed miserably. Netpliance an nounced that they will be getting out of the business, Virgin has bailed out (and yes Virginia, the bios password was hacked within 24 hours of that announcement), WebPods had all of 300 subscribers, etc. Somehow, the lack of local hard storage to store stuff plus (frequently) a poor isp service, doomed these guys. I wonder if this guy will be any different?
With the release from the tos, I suspect that you will see a few of these hacked, but since the supply has dried up, not many.
Anyway, with Webpad gone under (they had all of 300 subscribers at one point), this off the board and i-opener painfully dying, it appears that the demand for the standalone device bundled in to a isp just isn't there. Some of it may be grandma can't deal with the technology, but I suspect that the level of service that these folks offered was just not up to snuff. Hardware was fine, content was awful.
Sorry, but read the reviewws. The 1.5 Ghz P4 loses to 1.1 and 1.2 Athlon in most benchmarks. (This was without the DDR, and with the P4 using Rambust). With DDR, the P4 gets burried. Sorry, but since Andy Grove semi-retired, these guys can't get it right.
Check out the BBS here. This started as a I-opener hacking site, but has evolved into a more general internet appliance, etc. hacking site. Recomend it to everyone.
So sorry, i guess my wide lvd scsi arrays do not quite make it then. But seriously, a terabyte of raid is absurdly cheap. The difference between a "home system" and the cruft that Dell and company puts out is more in the case. Given that you can get a 1 ghz tbird for $250 or so and a kt7-raid mobo with raid built in for another $140, "home systems" are not exactly inferior machines these days. As for ide vs scsi, the cpu horsepower that is available in such a 1 ghz system (indeed quite a bit lower), is more than enough to perform software raid-4 or raid-5 if you want with ide and still have cycles left over after you pump it out a 100base-t ethernet. If you are a bank or airline feeding a cluster, I agree with you. this isn't home machine ide-land, but for raw video stuff (non-transaction oriented), still not impressed.
When a maxstor 60 gig drive is all of $200, a terabyte is less than $5000 and 6 dual ide controllers. 200 times this is indeed a megabuck, but a megabuck ain't what it used to be. I run over a terabyte of storage here in my own house, so sorry, impressed I am not.
I must agree with you entirely. Anytime I have to use part of M$ office suite it takes me a long time to find it on my machine. Its there and its liscensed, but I rarely use it. This machine is my Photoshop setup for still graphics, a web server, and one of 2 gateways to my intranet.. My other mac next to me is my nle video setup. The several wintel machines are for dvd processing and creation of other stuff for other wintel platforms. My 2 linux servers in the celler and the mac down there are backup.. Between one thing or another, they are a bunch of serious machines (something over a terabyte of storage, etc., 100baset network, routers, etc. etc.) , but Office is very very much in the background. The presumption that an office suite is required to be productive is really quite untrue. Actually, it is sometimes counter-productive. Office 98 is so frustrating to my wife that she writes papers in html using bbedit rather than spend time wrestling with the paperclip that ate the world.
Given that they have run this story, I doubt that /. will run a story that I submitted at about the same time. The University of Maryland at Diamondback is going to try and tax every student to have access to M$ products and updates. Read about it here This is an effort to make sure that there is compliance with M$ liscensing. No matter if you don't even have a computer, you are presumed guilty of infringement and must pay up. Linux or not, you gotta send money to unka Bill... Somehow I think that this is beyond the pale...
The price of such things is one of the many hidden costs of M$ software. Even if everything is above board and legal, the price you pay to have a staff member keep a constant catalog of liccenses as folks come and go in any organization is non trivial. The loaded cost of an individual is roughly 2x to 3x their salary. The cost of an audit is on top of such a person. I really wish more folks have read the Aesop's fable of the man the horse and the wolf. They might realize what M$ is about. Diddiap dobbin...
Such machines are all very well and good, but there will be serious competition from the Seti sort of model for those things that can decomposed correctly.
The Register also carried the story. They had an interesting point about the benchmarking business. How do you benchmark a piece of hardware that "learns" about its applications and improves performance over time? The initial benchmark will be poor, but as you run the app again and again (as you will with most apps), the performance will improve. Not what your typical benchmark measures. Do we now have to "brun in" a benchmark?
Actually Rambus isn't hard to make except in the higher grades. Since the entire stick has to be fabricated including the attached heatsink before it can be tested for speed, you get a lot of lower grade stuff and not much higher grade stuff. Where Rambust fails is in the noise immunity when it comes to making chipsets, thus Intel's problems with their various efforts.
Jc is reporting that Dell pulled their P4 system out of a "shootout" vs the DDR Athlon systems after looking at their performance. He also has numerous other links to 760-land. It is really looking like Intel had better dump Rambust and get with the program if they are ever going to sell anything with the P4. Likewise, Dell had better re-consider its Intelicide policy and start making AMD machines, especially when the multi-processor version of the 760 goes commercial. They have held the server market because Intel was the only multi-processor game in town. This is going to change soon bigtime.
"We've been forecasting worm-based industrial espionage to happen for quite some time," said Mikko Hyppönen, anti-virus researcher for F-Secure Corp. "It has finally happened. I'm just surprised it happened at the top."
Since these guys are (by definition) running M$ cruft to the hilt and the worms usually take advantage of Outlook/Viral Basic. What better place to target? Someplace that runs Lotus Notes maybe??
Ignoring all the issues of the role of government, etc. this is the usual response of a government. To wit: You are behind the times by about 5 years. In a peer to peer high speed interconnected world, something that I wanted to keep from others eyes might not even be on the same continent as my computer. Indeed, it might not be on any one computer, but on several computers in seemingly meaningless pieces. Thus this sort of action will only "catch" the small fry. The governemnt will (of course) trumpet this as a grand examaple of the sucess of the action, but the folks who are running the real crimial exercises (and for whom such draconian measures might possibly, in the wildest imagination be justified) will conduct business as usual.
I stand corrected, that is what they get for hiring a bad pr agent...
Now if folks would only use the sensible English units of measure all of this mars stuff could have been pre-empted. But noooo, they have to use the French system of measurement sponsered by the French Revolution. Why the meter isn't even the correct sub-multiple of the distance from the pole to the equator that it was supposed to be. From here on, they should use only furlongs/fortnight for speed, stones per square ell for pressure, and other sensible units of measure... Now how much is that in old pence?
A EULA with this sort of verbage in it would stand no chance in court of being upheld. It is very similar to the sale of a book with the provision that it not be placed in a library. Coming at a time when the entire M$ anti-trust thing is coming up for review, it smacks of stupidity/ego on the part of someone at M$, rather than merit.
Sigh. That thing on your desk is not a computer. It is an amplifier. If you are smart, it allows you to be very, very smart. If you are stupid, it allows you to be very, very stupid. Outlook allows folks to be very very stupid bigtime. When anyone who has any DP skills at all is in big demand, sooner or later, you will find someone who you have hired that is going to amplify their stupidity bigtime. You don't hand your car keys over to your 10 year old, but many places are doing the equivalent with Outlook, and other M$ products. I personally feel that the risk/reward against a tightly coupled rice-pudding OS/Application model such as M$ brings out. I shed no tears that they have been given a dose of their own medicine...
Hmm... A Seti workset on my Mac G4 at 450 Mhz takes 6 hrs, done on my 333 Pentium 2 its 16 hrs if it is done under Windoze and 12 if it is done under BeOS (same hardware thus 33% penalty for Microsquish OS over BeOS). My 700 Mhz Athlon does one in about 8 hours (direct scale from the P2) in Windoze. My dual 450 P2 does one in 12 hrs. Somehow, it seems that clock for clock, I am getting more out of the Power PC. Further, stability is not an issue even though I am running a frankenmachengezelshaftcomputingmachin machine (a 7500 with a boatload of ram, ide disks off a 3rd party card, drop in processor, etc.) Somehow the "rice pudding" model that M$ uses to make their OS is more the problem in stability than the hardware.
It has always been my impression that the users of the network are the customers of the IT department. Thus, it is the duty of the IT department to make the customers happy or the customers should seek another source for their services. The arrogance of those IT departments who state that they are the Holy of Holies and know all is beyond the pale. They should be given their walking papers because they display a conflict of interest that will destroy the organization that employs them. If I were in the upper management of a company and Linux started to appear, I would start to make inquiry as to why. Things like this just don't happen for a lark. They come about because some need of the customers is not being satisfied. Linux may not be the answer either, but it is a symptom of such a need. To have a IT department that states that they will be unresponsive to that need, is a IT department that will sink a company.
Rambust reported a 9 cent quarter yesterday. With a street estimate of 47 cents for the year going forward, they are at a price/earnings of 150. With Intel going more and more to DDR, etc. and suits like Hyundai's, I wonder if that 47 cents isn't a bit on the optimistic side...
While I don't root for Intel, its good to see that they finally realized that they are riding a lame horse with this one...
Complements of a lead from "JC's", here is an interesting article about Intel and DDR. Rambus always impressed me as an idea looking for a problem. Given Intel's switcheroo, it may be a problem looking for a wastebasket.