Mac OS X is not "more Unix than Linux", not by any stretch of the imagination. OS X is based on BSD, which no longer incorporates any code derived from original Unices. Therefore, they are both "clones". Mac OS X is a registered Unix, ie. they paid to be able to call it Unix. Linux probably meets the single unix specification more closely than OS X, but no one has paid to have Linux certified as a Unix.
"Unix" means Unix 98 certified. Any arguments about what's more Unix than what can easily be answered by this method.
I've used Rational Rose for a year and a half now. Here is my assement of the tool:
Now this is a proper review, not "ROSE is crap, because!" like the last one.
People looking to use Rose for softare development should first define what the problem is that they are looking to solve with Rose. Then test Rose directly against that problem.
You really should get a login, because that comment is +5 Insightful.
Rational Rose was one of the buggiest, worst-designed pieces of software I've ever used. The one time I had to use it I prayed that someone over there would buy a copy of Visio to learn how a diagramming tool SHOULD be designed.
Yes, but can Visio generate C++ from your UML, let you modify the C++, then import it back into the UML editor with all your changes intact? It's called "round trip engineering" and if you aren't doing it, you wasted your money buying ROSE!
Rational Rose is the shittiest piece of software I have ever had to use. We have to use it in some CS and SE classes to draw UML diagrams and it is total crap. Not only that but the program costs like thousands of dollars from what I hear. By judging the one piece of software they make that I have used I can tell you that Rational was not a very good company. Hopefully IBM will fix them so another CS student need not suffer.
ROSE is one of those packages like say I-DEAS that is very frustrating if you don't already know how it works and what to use it for. It does a hell of a lot more than "draw UML diagrams" - if that's all you wanted to do, you should have been using Visio.
If you ever work on a project with a development team of a hundred or more OO developers, then you need what Rational's tools like ROSE have got, there's really nothing else that can manage projects that complex. Harsh as this may sound, if you're an undergraduate you really don't qualify to have an opinion on ROSE either way.
It seems it's about time for IBM to demonstrate their loyalty to Free Software and Open Source by open sourcing Rational Rose -- the free software world is severely lacking in UML diagramming tools. So, what do you say IBM?
I don't work for IBM, but I can tell you what they will say: "We like Linux because it saves us money we would otherwise have had to spend on writing software which means we can make more money selling hardware, and after all, we are mostly a hardware company. We also sell a set of software engineering tools, and we'll probably integrate Rational's tools with that. Why would we give something away that competes directly with a revenue-generating product of our own?"
I call shenanigans on you. Libertarians *don't* trust government because it is bought and paid for by huge corporations. Libertarians want a government by and for the people, you may remember that phrase from somewhere.
Not quite right. Libertarians distrust governments because governments rely on threat of force for their legitimacy. It doesn't matter whether the government is run by large corporations, Marxists or anything in between. Any government that can jail you or confiscate your property for not paying its taxes is morally wrong.
Secondly, libertarians want a government that basically leaves them alone. Democracy without very strong limits is not suitable for libertarianism, since there's nothing to stop a mob voting in freedom-restricting laws. That's why the Founding Fathers wrote the constitution, specifically in order to limit the powers of the elected government. A pure democracy only lasts until 51% of the population realize they can vote to enslave the other 49%.
You have to understand the British. RISC-PC fans are at least as fanatical as Amiga fans are. There is a market, believe it or not.
Serious question, who uses the RISC PC, and what for? Amigas are still used for some TV effects, AFAIK. Is it just hobbyists, or do people use them commercially?
You know the first question 'the public' will have is... "...but does it run Windows?"
Or more accurately, does it have any useful applications? Without applications, the greatest CPU and the greatest OS in the world are only of interest to Slashbots. If it's aimed at consumers, it's got to have Office and it's got to run games. If it's targeted at business, it's also got to have Office, and it's got to have the relevant vertical market applications. If it's targeted at workstation users, it's got to have CAD/CAM software or whatever.
Without these, it's dead before it's even launched. Be should have taught you that.
And they are people that live like that all their lives, and not because they choose it, remember?
They do choose it, tho'. Osama bin Laden himself is a multi-millionaire heir to a dynastic fortune, and his lieutenant (whose name escapes me at the moment) is a qualified paediatrician from a wealthy Egyptian family. That is why they are so dangerous - they don't think the same way we do. The authorities have based their security measures on stopping people who think like Westerners, and that's why they aren't effective.
I'm sorry. Getting aroud NYC and many big cities without public transit is expensive, and complicated. Also, I would think that perhaps one might be irritated if they can't use the PUBLIC transit system their tax dollars pay for.
A terrorist on a one-way trip to Mecca or the Garden of Allah or wherever isn't going to be worried about a little inconvenience. These are people who live in caves without running water or electricity for years at a time, remember. All these measures do is annoy ordinary citizens to the point that they ignore any warning theey are given, which itself will only make a real terrorist act more effective.
I don't know if it is the beard or what, but I should not be picked for the random searches over 80% of the times I board a plane.
I know exactly what you mean. I have a neatly-trimmed goatee beard, and hair down to my shoulders, clean and usually tied back in a pony tail, and I dress business casual. But the guidelines airport security get don't say unkempt bushy beard, mad staring eyes and wild unwashed hair, dressed in robes like the typical terrorist, they just say "beard and long hair". But the authorities care more about the illusion of security and are so desperate to avoid accusations in the liberal press of "racial profiling" that they ignore common sense.
sony knows that office and windows are the cash cows for microsoft. sony knows that if microsoft starts hurting there, they can't afford to keep pissing money away on the xbox, sony's direct competition...
Sony have a fairly small share of the PC market and anyway, historically any threats to Microsoft's market share have only made them compete harder.
VAIO means video audio integrated operation. How many VAIO users are heavy Office users? Most likely Sony did this so they can save some money on licensing software their customers barely use anyway.
They see a tangible benefit if it's GPL'd too- they get to use the code, and can even sell derived works. They just can't be the *only* ones who benefit.
They aren't the only ones - anyone who wants to can develop the 1.0 code, and release their work commercially or GPL'd or under any other license. No freedom is being removed there. Remember that the software was funded entirely by the public up until 1.0, so it belongs in the public domain. Whatever anyone wants to do with it with their own money is no business of developers who wrote it with taxpayer funding - it doesn't belong to them, it belongs to the people who paid for it.
Sure it does- it restricts a particular derivative of that source code from being created. Sometimes these are trivial enhancements or bugfixes. Furthermore, you have to worry about patented enhancements being added, etc. so in practice you are obligated to check all the other derived works to make sure you haven't discovered the same obvious extension someone else has already bottled up in a patent
As I said, anyone who wants to can branch the 1.0 source code. If you branch it in one direction and I branch it in another, there's no conflict there - unless we are using it to create competing products in which case it still doesn't make a difference, because we both started with the same headstart. Patents are a whole 'nother discussion and are really nothing to do with open or closed source. After all, anyone can recreate a patented invention from looking at the patent documentation, they just can't use it without the author's permission.
That's the craziest Orwellian newspeak I've ever heard. Copyrights and patents that restrict the use of derivatives of software restrict my action. Your theory is that the more a corporation can profit, the more freedom we have.
In the case of the vast majority of software, the thing that adds value is not patented intellectual property, it's the fact that someone spent time and money finding out what users wanted, building it, testing and debugging it, and documenting it. GPL actively seeks to prevent people from making money by doing that, since redistribution of source means that anyone can get it without reimbursing the developers for their time.
And yes, in the general case, the more a corporation can profit the more freedom we all have because barring market distortions, a corporation can only profit by selling customers what they want at a price that they are willing to pay. A corporation who doesn't will quickly go bankrupt.
I'd say a lot of joe sixpack's software can be parallelized to some extent. But as very few consumers have multi-cpu computers, and win9x and xp home don't support SMP, the extra hassle of writing multithreaded programs is just not worth it. Perhaps when hyperthreading becomes more common, developers will start to use multiple threads. Perhaps xp home support it, I don't know.
Not quite true, there are tangible benefits to multithreading even on single-CPU machines. For example, your web browser can be downloading the next page while you scroll around the page that you're currently on. Word can spellcheck your document asynchonously in the background while you are typing. Most Java applications actually delegate redrawing the screen to a thread while their main processing continues in the foreground.
With these types of applications, the work of implementing threads has to be done anyway, for user-experience reasons. Therefore, you can take advantage of multiple CPUs at no extra development cost.
HP has been 'getting rid' of PA-RISC for ages. I remember attending an seminar on the virtues of Merced in the 1996-1997 timeperiod. At that time they planned phased out PA-RISC CPUs and were going to do PA emulation on Itanium by 2000 at the latest, to allow older HPUX installations to make a smooth transition.
They're not alone there. The same indecision and delay cost SGI dearly because it diverted resources from the R14000 team. In the consumer space there's only one real rival to Itanium and that's the PowerPC, and even that is only a blip on Intel's radar. Ultimately it's about software; superior processors aren't enough on their own, there must also be a critical mass of software to run on them. Until there is, MIPS, SPARC, Alpha, PowerPC (even in the Mac) et al will only sell into niche markets.
Re:The day of a single very powerful CPU is over..
on
End In Sight For Alpha
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Distributed computing is going to be the trend...if I can stack together a few cheap chips to rival a single high performance chip, what would I do?
Well, Be thought the same thing, and look what happened to them. Turned out one processor per person was enough after all, for the vast majority of users. Or should I say one general-purpose processor per person, a modern graphics card is more powerful than the CPU for its specialized task. And don't forget you won't just have to buy more processors, but the motherboard to support them - compare the prices of single, dual and quad hardware.
Granted, many apps don't fully use distributed processing power, but the ones that need most CPU probably do.
I think you are confused between distributed computing and SMP. They are different design approaches to different problems. A task that executes well (quickly + cheaply) on one won't necessarily execute well on another, even if the CPUs on both are identical.
The Alpha was always one of the better processors. It was fast and powerful and way ahead of its time. It is a shame that a truly great processor was killed by the economy and mergers galore. It will be missed.
What killed it was DEC, whose management were naive enough to believe that great products sell themselves and there's very little need for marketing. Unfortunately for them, engineers don't make purchasing decisions. VMS on Alpha 5 years ago was 10 years ahead of where Solaris on UltraSPARC is now - seriously, in terms of reliability and scalability. VMScluster was a joy to use, and the Alpha gave superb performance for anything involving floating point. They should have owned the high-end workstation market (along with SGI) if technology was all that mattered, but Sun were smart enough to spend lavishly on their marketing, and it paid off massively for them.
If it hadn't been for that, Compaq would never have bought DEC, and would instead be back competing against Dell where they belong. The management of DEC have a lot to answer for - technology and engineering cannot exist in a vaccuum despite what Slashbots think, it goes hand in hand with marketing and sales.
Regarding taxpayer money, why should industry get to close off avenues of inquiry that stem from it? Then only they benefit. The largest possible number of taxpayers should benefit from government software and from derivatives thereof. The best way to do that is GPL, since nobody can take away everyone's right to a particular improvement to the software.
Let's say that a govt. department, like the DoE write some code, and release the source to version 1.0 in the public domain. Organization A, which is itself a taxpayer, and whose shareholders and employees are taxpayers, take this code, and with their own time, money and equipment develop it into version 2.0, a commercial product. That in no way restricts the right of the public at large to version 1.0 source code, yet it means that A also see a tangible benefit to all the tax they pay.
This is freedom; restricting the right of A to benefit is not. Stallman's idea that you can charge what you want for GPL products is ridiculous, A would sell precisely one copy in that model, and would be highly unlikely to be able to recoup their investment if their product was aimed at the mass market.
GPL is anti-freedom therefore when it is applied to anything that is not developed entirely with private money. Stuff that is developed entirely privately can be released under whatever license the original owners prefer.
I feed and clothe my family with the money I make writing commercial software. I write desktop software which ships in the millions of copies, and no, in general consumers are not willing to pay for consulting services, support, or documentation like they do in the corporate IT world.
Actually, Stallman's ideas make perfect economic sense, if you make a couple of assumptions:
Everyone involved in the production of software has academic tenure, a grant from a philanthropic foundation, or does it just for fun and has a job in another industry to support themselves.
The developers rather than the end users are the best people to decide what software should be written, what it should do, how it should be used and when it should be written or upgraded
Of course, from his ivory tower at MIT, the world may well look like this. But until such time as it actually is (i.e. never) he might be a great software developer but as far as economics or politics goes, he's just another crackpot.
The GPL puts restrictions on adding restrictions. The restriction not to add restrictions is a restriction reducing measure. No wishing for more wishes, no freedom to restrict freedom.
If you write some software yourself in your own time and on your own equipment and want to release it under the GPL I fully support your right to do so. It's yours, so by definition you can do with it as you please.
But if you are paid from the taxpayer's money to write software as many academics and researchers are, then you don't own it, I do, along with every other taxpayer. You therefore have no right to enforce a license placing any restrictions, positive or negative, on what I can do with it, because it's not yours in the first place.
But RMS gets very angry at people who try to harm his ability to create software by closing off avenues of inquiry through abuse of the idea ownership system. They are harming him, and they are harming his ability to contribute to the software community.
Well, that's true, but no more than he is trying to harm the ability of everyone without academic tenure or a MacArthur Foundation grant to earn a living in the software industry. It balances out.
Re:The market frowns on Sun's 'monopoly potential'
on
Sun vs. OpenBSD?
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· Score: 5, Informative
Sun has the potential to be the biggest monopoly of all the big technology companies, yet their products are rapidly losing market share. Why? I think companies these days don't like buying into closed architectures. So I think open source supporters should stop calling for companies blood, and instead let the market decide who's best.
All technical information about the architecture is available for free and without royalties from SPARC International's public website. Anyone is welcome to download the SPARC specifications, which provide all of the technical requirements needed to design processors and other products based on the open SPARC standard.
And
The SPARC instruction set is published as IEEE Standard 1754-1994.
SPARC specifications are available for licensing by any person or company, giving customers flexibility and freedom to design their own solution.
Control of the SPARC architecture is in the hands of an independent, non-profit organization, SPARC International, whose membership is open to everyone.
Re:All about the benji's
on
Sun vs. OpenBSD?
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· Score: 5, Informative
I agree completely with Sun on this one. They have to make a buck, and when a free OS comes along wanting to utilize its systems and take away from its revenue. I work with Sparc 10 systems everyday, and I have come to love the Solaris system, it is pretty flawless and is specifically designed for the Ultra Sparc architecture. Plus, many people the utilize the Sparc Systems with Solaris use specifically written programs for the Solaris systems and are designed in house, this OpenBSD system could be hell on those programmers and Sys Admin.
But Sun don't many any money from Solaris, it's just the stuff you need to run your apps on Sun hardware. Sun are a hardware company first and foremost.
Secondly, Sun don't even own the UltraSPARC, certainly not in the same way that Intel own the Xeon - see the SPARC International web site. SPARC is about as close as you can get to an Open Source processor.
From reading the article, it seems that Sun simply didn't have anyone looking after the BSD community like they had looking after the Linux community, and when the matter was brought to their attention, they assigned someone to do the job.
Of course, anyone who pays $$$ for modern Sun kit is an idiot if they want to run anything other than Solaris on it, because Solaris, as well as being a solid and powerful Unix implementation in its own right, is designed from the ground up for SPARC hardware, it doesn't have to make any compromises for compatibility's sake. That's why NetBSD is generally slower than FreeBSD, it deliberately avoids anything too platform specific, and performance suffers as a result.
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Mac OS X is not "more Unix than Linux", not by any stretch of the imagination. OS X is based on BSD, which no longer incorporates any code derived from original Unices. Therefore, they are both "clones". Mac OS X is a registered Unix, ie. they paid to be able to call it Unix. Linux probably meets the single unix specification more closely than OS X, but no one has paid to have Linux certified as a Unix.
"Unix" means Unix 98 certified. Any arguments about what's more Unix than what can easily be answered by this method.
I've used Rational Rose for a year and a half now. Here is my assement of the tool:
Now this is a proper review, not "ROSE is crap, because!" like the last one.
People looking to use Rose for softare development should first define what the problem is that they are looking to solve with Rose. Then test Rose directly against that problem.
You really should get a login, because that comment is +5 Insightful.
Rational Rose was one of the buggiest, worst-designed pieces of software I've ever used. The one time I had to use it I prayed that someone over there would buy a copy of Visio to learn how a diagramming tool SHOULD be designed.
Yes, but can Visio generate C++ from your UML, let you modify the C++, then import it back into the UML editor with all your changes intact? It's called "round trip engineering" and if you aren't doing it, you wasted your money buying ROSE!
Rational Rose is the shittiest piece of software I have ever had to use. We have to use it in some CS and SE classes to draw UML diagrams and it is total crap. Not only that but the program costs like thousands of dollars from what I hear.
By judging the one piece of software they make that I have used I can tell you that Rational was not a very good company. Hopefully IBM will fix them so another CS student need not suffer.
ROSE is one of those packages like say I-DEAS that is very frustrating if you don't already know how it works and what to use it for. It does a hell of a lot more than "draw UML diagrams" - if that's all you wanted to do, you should have been using Visio.
If you ever work on a project with a development team of a hundred or more OO developers, then you need what Rational's tools like ROSE have got, there's really nothing else that can manage projects that complex. Harsh as this may sound, if you're an undergraduate you really don't qualify to have an opinion on ROSE either way.
It seems it's about time for IBM to demonstrate their loyalty to Free Software and Open Source by open sourcing Rational Rose -- the free software world is severely lacking in UML diagramming tools. So, what do you say IBM?
I don't work for IBM, but I can tell you what they will say: "We like Linux because it saves us money we would otherwise have had to spend on writing software which means we can make more money selling hardware, and after all, we are mostly a hardware company. We also sell a set of software engineering tools, and we'll probably integrate Rational's tools with that. Why would we give something away that competes directly with a revenue-generating product of our own?"
I call shenanigans on you. Libertarians *don't* trust government because it is bought and paid for by huge corporations. Libertarians want a government by and for the people, you may remember that phrase from somewhere.
Not quite right. Libertarians distrust governments because governments rely on threat of force for their legitimacy. It doesn't matter whether the government is run by large corporations, Marxists or anything in between. Any government that can jail you or confiscate your property for not paying its taxes is morally wrong.
Secondly, libertarians want a government that basically leaves them alone. Democracy without very strong limits is not suitable for libertarianism, since there's nothing to stop a mob voting in freedom-restricting laws. That's why the Founding Fathers wrote the constitution, specifically in order to limit the powers of the elected government. A pure democracy only lasts until 51% of the population realize they can vote to enslave the other 49%.
You have to understand the British. RISC-PC fans are at least as fanatical as Amiga fans are. There is a market, believe it or not.
Serious question, who uses the RISC PC, and what for? Amigas are still used for some TV effects, AFAIK. Is it just hobbyists, or do people use them commercially?
You know the first question 'the public' will have is... "...but does it run Windows?"
Or more accurately, does it have any useful applications? Without applications, the greatest CPU and the greatest OS in the world are only of interest to Slashbots. If it's aimed at consumers, it's got to have Office and it's got to run games. If it's targeted at business, it's also got to have Office, and it's got to have the relevant vertical market applications. If it's targeted at workstation users, it's got to have CAD/CAM software or whatever.
Without these, it's dead before it's even launched. Be should have taught you that.
And they are people that live like that all their lives, and not because they choose it, remember?
They do choose it, tho'. Osama bin Laden himself is a multi-millionaire heir to a dynastic fortune, and his lieutenant (whose name escapes me at the moment) is a qualified paediatrician from a wealthy Egyptian family. That is why they are so dangerous - they don't think the same way we do. The authorities have based their security measures on stopping people who think like Westerners, and that's why they aren't effective.
I'm sorry. Getting aroud NYC and many big cities without public transit is expensive, and complicated. Also, I would think that perhaps one might be irritated if they can't use the PUBLIC transit system their tax dollars pay for.
A terrorist on a one-way trip to Mecca or the Garden of Allah or wherever isn't going to be worried about a little inconvenience. These are people who live in caves without running water or electricity for years at a time, remember. All these measures do is annoy ordinary citizens to the point that they ignore any warning theey are given, which itself will only make a real terrorist act more effective.
I don't know if it is the beard or what, but I should not be picked for the random searches over 80% of the times I board a plane.
I know exactly what you mean. I have a neatly-trimmed goatee beard, and hair down to my shoulders, clean and usually tied back in a pony tail, and I dress business casual. But the guidelines airport security get don't say unkempt bushy beard, mad staring eyes and wild unwashed hair, dressed in robes like the typical terrorist, they just say "beard and long hair". But the authorities care more about the illusion of security and are so desperate to avoid accusations in the liberal press of "racial profiling" that they ignore common sense.
Of course, all evidence indicates that when Compaq bought DEC, they had no f*ing clue what they were doing.
You got that right, LOL!
sony knows that office and windows are the cash cows for microsoft. sony knows that if microsoft starts hurting there, they can't afford to keep pissing money away on the xbox, sony's direct competition...
Sony have a fairly small share of the PC market and anyway, historically any threats to Microsoft's market share have only made them compete harder.
VAIO means video audio integrated operation. How many VAIO users are heavy Office users? Most likely Sony did this so they can save some money on licensing software their customers barely use anyway.
They see a tangible benefit if it's GPL'd too- they get to use the code, and can even sell derived works. They just can't be the *only* ones who benefit.
They aren't the only ones - anyone who wants to can develop the 1.0 code, and release their work commercially or GPL'd or under any other license. No freedom is being removed there. Remember that the software was funded entirely by the public up until 1.0, so it belongs in the public domain. Whatever anyone wants to do with it with their own money is no business of developers who wrote it with taxpayer funding - it doesn't belong to them, it belongs to the people who paid for it.
Sure it does- it restricts a particular derivative of that source code from being created. Sometimes these are trivial enhancements or bugfixes. Furthermore, you have to worry about patented enhancements being added, etc. so in practice you are obligated to check all the other derived works to make sure you haven't discovered the same obvious extension someone else has already bottled up in a patent
As I said, anyone who wants to can branch the 1.0 source code. If you branch it in one direction and I branch it in another, there's no conflict there - unless we are using it to create competing products in which case it still doesn't make a difference, because we both started with the same headstart. Patents are a whole 'nother discussion and are really nothing to do with open or closed source. After all, anyone can recreate a patented invention from looking at the patent documentation, they just can't use it without the author's permission.
That's the craziest Orwellian newspeak I've ever heard. Copyrights and patents that restrict the use of derivatives of software restrict my action. Your theory is that the more a corporation can profit, the more freedom we have.
In the case of the vast majority of software, the thing that adds value is not patented intellectual property, it's the fact that someone spent time and money finding out what users wanted, building it, testing and debugging it, and documenting it. GPL actively seeks to prevent people from making money by doing that, since redistribution of source means that anyone can get it without reimbursing the developers for their time.
And yes, in the general case, the more a corporation can profit the more freedom we all have because barring market distortions, a corporation can only profit by selling customers what they want at a price that they are willing to pay. A corporation who doesn't will quickly go bankrupt.
I'd say a lot of joe sixpack's software can be parallelized to some extent. But as very few consumers have multi-cpu computers, and win9x and xp home don't support SMP, the extra hassle of writing multithreaded programs is just not worth it. Perhaps when hyperthreading becomes more common, developers will start to use multiple threads. Perhaps xp home support it, I don't know.
Not quite true, there are tangible benefits to multithreading even on single-CPU machines. For example, your web browser can be downloading the next page while you scroll around the page that you're currently on. Word can spellcheck your document asynchonously in the background while you are typing. Most Java applications actually delegate redrawing the screen to a thread while their main processing continues in the foreground.
With these types of applications, the work of implementing threads has to be done anyway, for user-experience reasons. Therefore, you can take advantage of multiple CPUs at no extra development cost.
HP has been 'getting rid' of PA-RISC for ages. I remember attending an seminar on the virtues of Merced in the 1996-1997 timeperiod. At that time they planned phased out PA-RISC CPUs and were going to do PA emulation on Itanium by 2000 at the latest, to allow older HPUX installations to make a smooth transition.
They're not alone there. The same indecision and delay cost SGI dearly because it diverted resources from the R14000 team. In the consumer space there's only one real rival to Itanium and that's the PowerPC, and even that is only a blip on Intel's radar. Ultimately it's about software; superior processors aren't enough on their own, there must also be a critical mass of software to run on them. Until there is, MIPS, SPARC, Alpha, PowerPC (even in the Mac) et al will only sell into niche markets.
Distributed computing is going to be the trend...if I can stack together a few cheap chips to rival a single high performance chip, what would I do?
Well, Be thought the same thing, and look what happened to them. Turned out one processor per person was enough after all, for the vast majority of users. Or should I say one general-purpose processor per person, a modern graphics card is more powerful than the CPU for its specialized task. And don't forget you won't just have to buy more processors, but the motherboard to support them - compare the prices of single, dual and quad hardware.
Granted, many apps don't fully use distributed processing power, but the ones that need most CPU probably do.
I think you are confused between distributed computing and SMP. They are different design approaches to different problems. A task that executes well (quickly + cheaply) on one won't necessarily execute well on another, even if the CPUs on both are identical.
The Alpha was always one of the better processors. It was fast and powerful and way ahead of its time. It is a shame that a truly great processor was killed by the economy and mergers galore. It will be missed.
What killed it was DEC, whose management were naive enough to believe that great products sell themselves and there's very little need for marketing. Unfortunately for them, engineers don't make purchasing decisions. VMS on Alpha 5 years ago was 10 years ahead of where Solaris on UltraSPARC is now - seriously, in terms of reliability and scalability. VMScluster was a joy to use, and the Alpha gave superb performance for anything involving floating point. They should have owned the high-end workstation market (along with SGI) if technology was all that mattered, but Sun were smart enough to spend lavishly on their marketing, and it paid off massively for them.
If it hadn't been for that, Compaq would never have bought DEC, and would instead be back competing against Dell where they belong. The management of DEC have a lot to answer for - technology and engineering cannot exist in a vaccuum despite what Slashbots think, it goes hand in hand with marketing and sales.
Regarding taxpayer money, why should industry get to close off avenues of inquiry that stem from it? Then only they benefit. The largest possible number of taxpayers should benefit from government software and from derivatives thereof. The best way to do that is GPL, since nobody can take away everyone's right to a particular improvement to the software.
Let's say that a govt. department, like the DoE write some code, and release the source to version 1.0 in the public domain. Organization A, which is itself a taxpayer, and whose shareholders and employees are taxpayers, take this code, and with their own time, money and equipment develop it into version 2.0, a commercial product. That in no way restricts the right of the public at large to version 1.0 source code, yet it means that A also see a tangible benefit to all the tax they pay.
This is freedom; restricting the right of A to benefit is not. Stallman's idea that you can charge what you want for GPL products is ridiculous, A would sell precisely one copy in that model, and would be highly unlikely to be able to recoup their investment if their product was aimed at the mass market.
GPL is anti-freedom therefore when it is applied to anything that is not developed entirely with private money. Stuff that is developed entirely privately can be released under whatever license the original owners prefer.
Actually, Stallman's ideas make perfect economic sense, if you make a couple of assumptions:
Of course, from his ivory tower at MIT, the world may well look like this. But until such time as it actually is (i.e. never) he might be a great software developer but as far as economics or politics goes, he's just another crackpot.
The GPL puts restrictions on adding restrictions. The restriction not to add restrictions is a restriction reducing measure. No wishing for more wishes, no freedom to restrict freedom.
If you write some software yourself in your own time and on your own equipment and want to release it under the GPL I fully support your right to do so. It's yours, so by definition you can do with it as you please.
But if you are paid from the taxpayer's money to write software as many academics and researchers are, then you don't own it, I do, along with every other taxpayer. You therefore have no right to enforce a license placing any restrictions, positive or negative, on what I can do with it, because it's not yours in the first place.
But RMS gets very angry at people who try to harm his ability to create software by closing off avenues of inquiry through abuse of the idea ownership system. They are harming him, and they are harming his ability to contribute to the software community.
Well, that's true, but no more than he is trying to harm the ability of everyone without academic tenure or a MacArthur Foundation grant to earn a living in the software industry. It balances out.
Nice troll. From the SPARC International FAQ:
And
I agree completely with Sun on this one. They have to make a buck, and when a free OS comes along wanting to utilize its systems and take away from its revenue. I work with Sparc 10 systems everyday, and I have come to love the Solaris system, it is pretty flawless and is specifically designed for the Ultra Sparc architecture. Plus, many people the utilize the Sparc Systems with Solaris use specifically written programs for the Solaris systems and are designed in house, this OpenBSD system could be hell on those programmers and Sys Admin.
But Sun don't many any money from Solaris, it's just the stuff you need to run your apps on Sun hardware. Sun are a hardware company first and foremost.
Secondly, Sun don't even own the UltraSPARC, certainly not in the same way that Intel own the Xeon - see the SPARC International web site. SPARC is about as close as you can get to an Open Source processor.
From reading the article, it seems that Sun simply didn't have anyone looking after the BSD community like they had looking after the Linux community, and when the matter was brought to their attention, they assigned someone to do the job.
Of course, anyone who pays $$$ for modern Sun kit is an idiot if they want to run anything other than Solaris on it, because Solaris, as well as being a solid and powerful Unix implementation in its own right, is designed from the ground up for SPARC hardware, it doesn't have to make any compromises for compatibility's sake. That's why NetBSD is generally slower than FreeBSD, it deliberately avoids anything too platform specific, and performance suffers as a result.
I developed a content management system.
Emptied the bins, then?