You can't keep piling crap on top of a deadening architecture. Eventually, it becomes more economical to start from scratch or at least a more recent starting point.
That's what Be tried to do, and look at how popular they've turned out. That's what Apple originally planned with Rhapsody, and they had to back track on that in order to convince developers to update their products. MS Windows 2000 has been plagued with compatiblity concerns...
Given MS & Intel's revenues and profits, it's a fair statement to say that the computing world values compatibility over performance/reliablitly/price/whatever other concern.
Isn't NT & Linux "comsumer" enough? Though I just read on PC Week that Microsoft is going to themselves suspend development for Alpha past the next service pack... story to come
PowerPC won't ever drop to the prices you see in x86 land. Why? 10x as many users. AMD motherboards are projected to be MUCH more expensive than BX boards for that same reason, until the volume comes. At least AMD remains compatible with Intel...
What you're talking about is running non-standard software on non-standard hardware... I just don't think that PPC will be able to compete with Alpha at the high-end and doesn't have a chance to displace x86 at the low-end since that's where Linux gets its new users... That leaves a very narrow middle ground, which would probably be best served by Athlon, Dual-P2's... etc...
Porting should be easy enough, it's Linux to Linux after all... But I doubt that many people will ship source-code anytime soon. So you're locked into what whomever wants to ship. Take photoshop, for instance. For a long time the Mac version came out eons before the PC version. Now they're roughly equal with maybe even the PC version arriving first. They cost the same, too. Last I looked, Photoshop for SGI or Solaris was $2500 and still at version 3.
What it really boils down to is a matter of PACKAGING. Redhat, as so many/.er's love to point out is worth more than SCO, SGI, and myself combined. They can go to a software company, anysoftware company, and say "So, you're developing that for Linux, eh? How about we pay you $XXXXXXX dollars and whenever you mention Linux on the packaging or in the manual, have it say "Redhat Linux" instead?"... Oh and we're going to use a slightly different directory layout than say Caldera and Debian, so be sure to hard code that info into your installation routine"
So a company would get development money to make a version for Redhat. They'ed then need to ship a second boxed version for any other x86 Linux. Most vendors do not ship for different platforms on one medium (aside from games)... If you're going to use your software on a Mac and PC and Linux, you've gotta buy it 3 different times, as stupid as it seems. So it may turn out that if you're going to run Linux software on Alpha Linux, Redhat Linux, and LinuxPPC, you need to purchase 3 separate editions of it...
Of course that all goes away when everyone embraces opensource. Unfortunatly.... That's going to take longer than the time it takes my wristwatch to crack 4,096,302,813,988 bit PGP keys...
Linux for the most part came to being because it ran on "commodity" hardware. You'd have never seen it take the form it has if it were developed for Sparc or Alpha initially. Why? Because all the developers already had x86 boxen in their basements. People switch to Linux because they can try it on their current computer, rather than needing to go buy a whole other box to see if they'll actually like it.
x86 will always be the platform of choice for Linux, in my eyes. And yes, G3 definetly womps on Pentiums... But the G3 is constrained to single CPU machines. G4's are around the corner, but how much will they close the distance between PPC and Alpha?
I'd rather see Linux settle onto x86 and Alpha rather than run out and try to support every platform. That's probably contrary to the mindset that got it to where it is today, but... I want to see more commercial apps appearing. That'll only really happen once linux is settled into it's place in the universe.
Imagine having to decide between: XXX Software for Redhat Linux on x86 XXX Software for Redhat Linux on SPARC XXX Software for Redhat Linux on Alpha XXX Software for Redhat Linux on PPC XXX Software for Debian on x86 XXX Software for Slackware on x86 XXX Software for Corel Linux on whatever chips they'd use XXX Software for Linux PPC
etc... etc... etc...
This only serves to slow down the application development, in my eyes...
True, the Mac OS isn't as buzzword compliant as Linux and Windows...
No opensource, pre-emptive multitasking, protected memory, open source, object oriented archetecture... Just a very easy to set up and use system. I gave my mom a PC running Windows 98. Now that she's actually doing stuff on it beyond just looking at email, I wish I'd gotten her an iMac instead. Linux? Never.
There's more to an OS than Marketing. Apple made a great system in the Mac Operating System... Fortunately they're wiser than MSFT in realizing they needed to rebuild everything from the ground up.
As for hating their prices. Go nickle and dime with the rest of the PC crowd. You get what you pay for in when you buy Apple. PowerPC. Plug & Play. Great case designs (8500 & earlier not withstanding!).
But all the application vendors seem to contently be supporting x86 linux only... Until they start releasing native and optimized versions of software for PPC, Alpha, etc... I'd stick with x86.
Unless you're using all open-source software... It just seems that switching to PPC Linux closes more doors than it opens.
Apple is dependant on hardware sales to fuel software development. It is now and has been for sometime extremely difficult if not impossible to imagine a way that they could separated their businesses and suceed. They can't. They sell complete systems.
So far as interest to the Mac User goes... It's actually of much interest to us mac users... Supposing darwin gets ported to it, it may turn out that all one needs to do is purchase this machine, install darwin, purchase Mac OS-X and somehow install that over it (supposing apple doesn't just build support into the OS to handle the hardware)...
And that's something forceseeable. Apple could get away with chargin NT Workstation like prices for OS-X (client). Especially now that Apple is seeing their profits from the iMac, which a cloner can't quite compete, it's a great time for apple to consider opening up their OS to cloners again. Give them the mid range of the market, keeping the lowend and highend to themselves. And even if they started eating into OS_X Server sales, Apple'd still get $500 a pop... much more than they did from Power Computing et al
All the "top tier" server vendors are rushing like mad to get 8-way Xeon systems out the door. They're most likely not going to want to support a second CPU/Chipset combination. If the Athlon was pin compatible with the Xeon, that'd be a different story, no matter what the performance advantages of EV6.
What AMD needs to do is first ship the chip, in volume and avoid all the glitches that've plagued it in the past. Then they can try to make some deals with the server vendors. Until then, SMP Athlons are really going to be the domain of workstation-users and hobbyists.
There aren't any so far as I know. Are there quad athlons available? How about dual? What about an Athlon single CPU machine? They don't exist.
They will, sure, but corporates trust Intel, just as they trust Microsoft and they used to trust IBM. It's going to take more than just a flash in the pan to jump over to Athlon servers... Show successive generations widening the performance gap vs. Intel, and IT departments will bite. Until then, you'll probably see them drop them by power-user desktops asking them to check them out and let them know if there's anything funky about them.
I know I'm going way off topic here, but bringing AMD into this does them a great disservice, being that they're not equipped at this point to take on this market segment.
Unless they've changed recently, Intel's always seemed to use Unixware for their past SPEC runs. I see no reason they'ed switch to Linux for this (given the 8 processors of the system).
How are you supposed to exchange pads with the people you communicate with?
Use PGP to encrypt the random data for your one time pad? According to them, all one would need to do is crack the PGP encryped data to retrieve your padding material. If they couldn't break the PGP... then why are you using this? If they can break the PGP... then they have access to your padding info, and can decrypt all the rest of your communications.
I guess you could send email to everyone and have them send their snailmail addresses so you could send them a custom burned CD... but then, someone who was monitoring your email would know this and therefore intercept the CD's, make copies for themselves and then forward them along to their intended recipients...
I just can't see how this is feasible, unless you use public-key crypto to exchange pad or keys...
I was at the train station today after work, and one of the boards was blinking "RTC failed, system rebooting"... Naturally, i assumed it was linked to the GPS satelites in some way... now that it seems that the rollover doesn't happen til tomorrow, I'm thinking that the train authority switched their systems to NT or something...
This is probably after the fact and you won't get this... but in case you do, i was actually wondering about a chip, or sublogic to an existing chip, of the chipset which intel sells... it wouldn't matter which keyboard you used... so long as the input came from a PS/2 keyboard, AT keyboard, or theoretically, the USB device with the slowest I/O (which would mean a human was attatched to it)... So, no, in that scenario, hanging on to your keyboard but upgrading your motherboard would do you no good.
Funny how that works, isn't it?:) I was fully expecting to be moderated down, but instead I went up!?! Go figure!
Anyways, that's how I feel about slashdot nowadays.... if it's about computers and somehow doesn't benefit Linux, it must be anti-Linux... anti-linus, for that matter... I'm all for free/open-source software when it does the job i want it to, but when it doesn't, I'd rather shell out the $$$ rather than try to make due with a 0.1 version that i can look at the source of...
I won't agree that an operating system sucks simply because it's corporate. An operating sucks if it makes accomplishing a task more tedious than it would be in another operating system.
I think M$ makes a great OS for gaming, with all that DirectX stuff...
I think Linux is a great OS for development (in all areas) and networking
I think the Mac is a great OS for making graphics, laying out pages, and providing a simplified work environment.
Pick your tools according to how well they accomplish the job, not for any other reason (hatred of a company, etc...)
What I said was said in an entirely mocking way, by the way... I just get upset when for the most part, people refuse to see faults in Linux, just for the sake that it's Linux and that's okay... In the same light, it would seem to me that many people will bash people, articles, and organizations for saying something about Linux without it necessarily being good. Like everything in life, Linux has it's good points and bad points.
Besides all that, since when is Slashdot the voice of linux? Last time I looked it simply says "News for nerds. Stuff that matters." NOT "Linux news for nerds. Linux stuff that matters."
Well, I haven't read it yet, but if it says something bad about Linux, it must be bad, right?
The only way that Linux is going to gain marketshare and respectability is if there's only good news put forth about it. Whomever published the article therefore must not like Linux and hence is on the Microsoft payroll in some way shape or form.
What we need these days is more objective news covering the linux phenomenon. If it degrades linux, obviously they don't see the full picture, and therefore is not objective and they're being paid-off by Bill Gates.
I just realized that the comment I posted on behalf of "us x86 users" was posted from a Mac G3...
But seriously, if the gov't can get require intel to include this functionality, they can just as easily go to AMD and require the same thing, or for that matter, any motherboard manufacturer...
I'd think the way to cirumvent the above scenario would be to use USB devices, actually... So long as they all provide standard I/O, it'd hopefully (someone help me here?) be impossible for a loggin mechanism of that type to discern which device sent which particular input... Unless it just logged the device with the slowest throughput or something.
This subject seems have been glued in the back of my mind now. I'm sitting here working, but thinking of the most invasive ways to monitor computers and then ways to circumvent them as well...
For us x86 users (or any other platform, for that matter), how can one be sure that the Feds don't persuade Intel to put the logic within chipset of the logic board? Say add an extra chip the the 440xX chipset that contains the sniffer, battery backed memory that logs everything you typed for the past 2 months (what's that? 2 MB?)... it'd add probably $5 or $10 to the cost of the system, and with it on the logic board, there'd be no way for anyone to bypass it, save for building your own systems using 3rd party chipsets developed outside the reach of the Gov't... So long as there become no regulation barring the import of parts without the required logic chip
Re:I think they are going in the wrong direction h
on
The Future of KDE
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· Score: 1
You can get a kensington trackball - other mice will probably do it as well - which you can program the buttons to do whatever you want. For instance, you could make the left button "control-click" so that it would bring up a contextual menu in apps that supported that. Or have the button launch netscape... Whatever
Re:I think they are going in the wrong direction h
on
The Future of KDE
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· Score: 1
All you do is click on the link and hold down for a pop up menu to appear... next?
Slashdot Mirror
You can't keep piling crap on top of a deadening architecture. Eventually, it becomes more economical to start from scratch or at least a more recent starting point.
That's what Be tried to do, and look at how popular they've turned out. That's what Apple originally planned with Rhapsody, and they had to back track on that in order to convince developers to update their products. MS Windows 2000 has been plagued with compatiblity concerns...
Given MS & Intel's revenues and profits, it's a fair statement to say that the computing world values compatibility over performance/reliablitly/price/whatever other concern.
Isn't NT & Linux "comsumer" enough? Though I just read on PC Week that Microsoft is going to themselves suspend development for Alpha past the next service pack... story to come
Last I knew, they tried to propose that to the cloners, but they all rejected the idea of actually paying enought to cover their costs...
PowerPC won't ever drop to the prices you see in x86 land. Why? 10x as many users. AMD motherboards are projected to be MUCH more expensive than BX boards for that same reason, until the volume comes. At least AMD remains compatible with Intel...
What you're talking about is running non-standard software on non-standard hardware... I just don't think that PPC will be able to compete with Alpha at the high-end and doesn't have a chance to displace x86 at the low-end since that's where Linux gets its new users... That leaves a very narrow middle ground, which would probably be best served by Athlon, Dual-P2's... etc...
Porting should be easy enough, it's Linux to Linux after all... But I doubt that many people will ship source-code anytime soon. So you're locked into what whomever wants to ship. Take photoshop, for instance. For a long time the Mac version came out eons before the PC version. Now they're roughly equal with maybe even the PC version arriving first. They cost the same, too. Last I looked, Photoshop for SGI or Solaris was $2500 and still at version 3.
/.er's love to point out is worth more than SCO, SGI, and myself combined. They can go to a software company, anysoftware company, and say "So, you're developing that for Linux, eh? How about we pay you $XXXXXXX dollars and whenever you mention Linux on the packaging or in the manual, have it say "Redhat Linux" instead?"... Oh and we're going to use a slightly different directory layout than say Caldera and Debian, so be sure to hard code that info into your installation routine"
What it really boils down to is a matter of PACKAGING. Redhat, as so many
So a company would get development money to make a version for Redhat. They'ed then need to ship a second boxed version for any other x86 Linux. Most vendors do not ship for different platforms on one medium (aside from games)... If you're going to use your software on a Mac and PC and Linux, you've gotta buy it 3 different times, as stupid as it seems. So it may turn out that if you're going to run Linux software on Alpha Linux, Redhat Linux, and LinuxPPC, you need to purchase 3 separate editions of it...
Of course that all goes away when everyone embraces opensource. Unfortunatly.... That's going to take longer than the time it takes my wristwatch to crack 4,096,302,813,988 bit PGP keys...
Linux for the most part came to being because it ran on "commodity" hardware. You'd have never seen it take the form it has if it were developed for Sparc or Alpha initially. Why? Because all the developers already had x86 boxen in their basements. People switch to Linux because they can try it on their current computer, rather than needing to go buy a whole other box to see if they'll actually like it.
x86 will always be the platform of choice for Linux, in my eyes. And yes, G3 definetly womps on Pentiums... But the G3 is constrained to single CPU machines. G4's are around the corner, but how much will they close the distance between PPC and Alpha?
I'd rather see Linux settle onto x86 and Alpha rather than run out and try to support every platform. That's probably contrary to the mindset that got it to where it is today, but... I want to see more commercial apps appearing. That'll only really happen once linux is settled into it's place in the universe.
Imagine having to decide between:
XXX Software for Redhat Linux on x86
XXX Software for Redhat Linux on SPARC
XXX Software for Redhat Linux on Alpha
XXX Software for Redhat Linux on PPC
XXX Software for Debian on x86
XXX Software for Slackware on x86
XXX Software for Corel Linux on whatever chips they'd use
XXX Software for Linux PPC
etc... etc... etc...
This only serves to slow down the application development, in my eyes...
I could be wrong... That's jsut me though
True, the Mac OS isn't as buzzword compliant as Linux and Windows...
No opensource, pre-emptive multitasking, protected memory, open source, object oriented archetecture... Just a very easy to set up and use system. I gave my mom a PC running Windows 98. Now that she's actually doing stuff on it beyond just looking at email, I wish I'd gotten her an iMac instead. Linux? Never.
There's more to an OS than Marketing. Apple made a great system in the Mac Operating System... Fortunately they're wiser than MSFT in realizing they needed to rebuild everything from the ground up.
As for hating their prices. Go nickle and dime with the rest of the PC crowd. You get what you pay for in when you buy Apple. PowerPC. Plug & Play. Great case designs (8500 & earlier not withstanding!).
But all the application vendors seem to contently be supporting x86 linux only... Until they start releasing native and optimized versions of software for PPC, Alpha, etc... I'd stick with x86.
Unless you're using all open-source software... It just seems that switching to PPC Linux closes more doors than it opens.
Apple is dependant on hardware sales to fuel software development. It is now and has been for sometime extremely difficult if not impossible to imagine a way that they could separated their businesses and suceed. They can't. They sell complete systems.
So far as interest to the Mac User goes... It's actually of much interest to us mac users... Supposing darwin gets ported to it, it may turn out that all one needs to do is purchase this machine, install darwin, purchase Mac OS-X and somehow install that over it (supposing apple doesn't just build support into the OS to handle the hardware)...
And that's something forceseeable. Apple could get away with chargin NT Workstation like prices for OS-X (client). Especially now that Apple is seeing their profits from the iMac, which a cloner can't quite compete, it's a great time for apple to consider opening up their OS to cloners again. Give them the mid range of the market, keeping the lowend and highend to themselves. And even if they started eating into OS_X Server sales, Apple'd still get $500 a pop... much more than they did from Power Computing et al
All the "top tier" server vendors are rushing like mad to get 8-way Xeon systems out the door. They're most likely not going to want to support a second CPU/Chipset combination. If the Athlon was pin compatible with the Xeon, that'd be a different story, no matter what the performance advantages of EV6.
What AMD needs to do is first ship the chip, in volume and avoid all the glitches that've plagued it in the past. Then they can try to make some deals with the server vendors. Until then, SMP Athlons are really going to be the domain of workstation-users and hobbyists.
There aren't any so far as I know. Are there quad athlons available? How about dual? What about an Athlon single CPU machine? They don't exist.
They will, sure, but corporates trust Intel, just as they trust Microsoft and they used to trust IBM. It's going to take more than just a flash in the pan to jump over to Athlon servers... Show successive generations widening the performance gap vs. Intel, and IT departments will bite. Until then, you'll probably see them drop them by power-user desktops asking them to check them out and let them know if there's anything funky about them.
I know I'm going way off topic here, but bringing AMD into this does them a great disservice, being that they're not equipped at this point to take on this market segment.
Unless they've changed recently, Intel's always seemed to use Unixware for their past SPEC runs. I see no reason they'ed switch to Linux for this (given the 8 processors of the system).
How are you supposed to exchange pads with the people you communicate with?
Use PGP to encrypt the random data for your one time pad? According to them, all one would need to do is crack the PGP encryped data to retrieve your padding material. If they couldn't break the PGP... then why are you using this? If they can break the PGP... then they have access to your padding info, and can decrypt all the rest of your communications.
I guess you could send email to everyone and have them send their snailmail addresses so you could send them a custom burned CD... but then, someone who was monitoring your email would know this and therefore intercept the CD's, make copies for themselves and then forward them along to their intended recipients...
I just can't see how this is feasible, unless you use public-key crypto to exchange pad or keys...
I was at the train station today after work, and one of the boards was blinking "RTC failed, system rebooting"... Naturally, i assumed it was linked to the GPS satelites in some way... now that it seems that the rollover doesn't happen til tomorrow, I'm thinking that the train authority switched their systems to NT or something...
This is probably after the fact and you won't get this... but in case you do, i was actually wondering about a chip, or sublogic to an existing chip, of the chipset which intel sells... it wouldn't matter which keyboard you used... so long as the input came from a PS/2 keyboard, AT keyboard, or theoretically, the USB device with the slowest I/O (which would mean a human was attatched to it)... So, no, in that scenario, hanging on to your keyboard but upgrading your motherboard would do you no good.
Yep! Funny how that works... you should try it yourself sometime
Funny how that works, isn't it? :) I was fully expecting to be moderated down, but instead I went up!?! Go figure!
Anyways, that's how I feel about slashdot nowadays.... if it's about computers and somehow doesn't benefit Linux, it must be anti-Linux... anti-linus, for that matter... I'm all for free/open-source software when it does the job i want it to, but when it doesn't, I'd rather shell out the $$$ rather than try to make due with a 0.1 version that i can look at the source of...
I won't agree that an operating system sucks simply because it's corporate. An operating sucks if it makes accomplishing a task more tedious than it would be in another operating system.
I think M$ makes a great OS for gaming, with all that DirectX stuff...
I think Linux is a great OS for development (in all areas) and networking
I think the Mac is a great OS for making graphics, laying out pages, and providing a simplified work environment.
Pick your tools according to how well they accomplish the job, not for any other reason (hatred of a company, etc...)
No, for real it's a mac! Look! colored apple logo... one button mouse... productive user!
What I said was said in an entirely mocking way, by the way... I just get upset when for the most part, people refuse to see faults in Linux, just for the sake that it's Linux and that's okay... In the same light, it would seem to me that many people will bash people, articles, and organizations for saying something about Linux without it necessarily being good. Like everything in life, Linux has it's good points and bad points.
Besides all that, since when is Slashdot the voice of linux? Last time I looked it simply says "News for nerds. Stuff that matters." NOT "Linux news for nerds. Linux stuff that matters."
Well, I haven't read it yet, but if it says something bad about Linux, it must be bad, right?
:)
The only way that Linux is going to gain marketshare and respectability is if there's only good news put forth about it. Whomever published the article therefore must not like Linux and hence is on the Microsoft payroll in some way shape or form.
What we need these days is more objective news covering the linux phenomenon. If it degrades linux, obviously they don't see the full picture, and therefore is not objective and they're being paid-off by Bill Gates.
This is slashdot.
Now I'm gonna go read it!
I just realized that the comment I posted on behalf of "us x86 users" was posted from a Mac G3...
But seriously, if the gov't can get require intel to include this functionality, they can just as easily go to AMD and require the same thing, or for that matter, any motherboard manufacturer...
I'd think the way to cirumvent the above scenario would be to use USB devices, actually... So long as they all provide standard I/O, it'd hopefully (someone help me here?) be impossible for a loggin mechanism of that type to discern which device sent which particular input... Unless it just logged the device with the slowest throughput or something.
This subject seems have been glued in the back of my mind now. I'm sitting here working, but thinking of the most invasive ways to monitor computers and then ways to circumvent them as well...
For us x86 users (or any other platform, for that matter), how can one be sure that the Feds don't persuade Intel to put the logic within chipset of the logic board? Say add an extra chip the the 440xX chipset that contains the sniffer, battery backed memory that logs everything you typed for the past 2 months (what's that? 2 MB?)... it'd add probably $5 or $10 to the cost of the system, and with it on the logic board, there'd be no way for anyone to bypass it, save for building your own systems using 3rd party chipsets developed outside the reach of the Gov't... So long as there become no regulation barring the import of parts without the required logic chip
You can get a kensington trackball - other mice will probably do it as well - which you can program the buttons to do whatever you want. For instance, you could make the left button "control-click" so that it would bring up a contextual menu in apps that supported that. Or have the button launch netscape... Whatever
All you do is click on the link and hold down for a pop up menu to appear... next?