They aren't going to drop Itanium. Why would they? Big servers and desktop processors or two vastly different market segments and Intel has different products and features aligned to those segments. Besides, there are probably currently more apps for IA64 than x86-64.
because now people have no reason not to port their software to x86-64
I can thing of one valid reason not to port software over to x86-64 : there is no good reason to do it - unless I need 8GB of memory, which I don't.
Well I stand corrected then. I guess the reason I thought apple made most of their own hardware is because they make so many things. I always thought part of Apple's problem was that they tried to do too much of the computer business all at once. They develop the OS, the Systems, the displays, etc.
Sorry to reply twice to your post, and I know it isn't popular to defend MS. They may have done bad things in the past, but let me play the devil's advocate.
MS *does* have to support the apps and devices to some degree. They have to ensure backwards compatibility. They have to (at least try to) fix bugs and problems. If many popular devices or apps cause hangs then people would quickly stop using Windows.
Unfortunetly in a capitalistic society the line between healthy competetive corporate behavior and limiting monopolistic behavior can be thin.
RealOne is now complaining that MS in unfairly bundling Windows Media Player with Windows and forcing most users to use Media Player. I will agree with that. However, they also support a fairly robust Direct Show interface in Direct X 9 that allows any programmer to write fairly robust multimedia apps with minimal code.
It doesn't matter who writes the driver for my digital camera, it still works on windows, like most digital cameras. If you want to be able to use the most hardware and run the most apps then use Windows.
Microsoft, however, might have used monopolistic tactics to promote their OS and other apps. I suppose it is (ironically, as you claim) because of these tactics that Windows is the more widely used OS and therefore the one more software writers target. MS, of course, exposes and documents their API and DDI so that more applications and devices can use windows and help it propogate.
All I am trying to say is that Apple, in general, has fewer devices and programs that can run on it. It seems like nearly all the hardware you can use on an Apple is sold by Apple themselves.
I mean compare Apple and Windows. Apple supports a very small select group of software and hardware. With windows you can choose from just about any device on the market. Why do you think so many drivers come with the OS and so much legacy support has to stick around. Apple designs all their products, so making sure they are fully supported and work well is easy.
Now I do think that they are unfairly trying to force people to use IE and Windows Media Player, but that doesn't mean you can't install and use something else.
I work at a large tech firm and our goal is to be paperless, which will never happen of course, but we are close. All presentations, handouts, code, etc is all usually electronic, hardly anything is paper.
He is trying to say that Linux, if used as widely as Windows, would not be as vulnerable. However, he then goes on to describe how Window's monoculture of running the same apps the same way is virus prone. A monoculture is virus prone for the very same reason that a pervasive OS is virus prone. One vulnerability effects all the same OSs.
Maybe Linux is less "monoculture" prone than Windows however the point stands that diversity prohibits infection and similarity encourages it. If everyone in the world used Linux, we would see more linux viruses, although maybe not nearly as many as Windows.
He also seems to ignore the fact that the average computer skills of a Linux user are vastly superior to the average skills of a Windows User. The worst propogaters of viruses, chain mails, and worms (due to unsecure computers) are the family computers and uneducated users who use Windows for its ease of use. I don't know if the marketing dept. would be able to survive if all computers in the world instantly started running Linux instead of Windows tomorrow.
When TV was still young there were several different standards within the US, as they tried to standardize those while improving picture quality PAL, NTSC, and SECAM emerged. All TV's in america should support all the common versions of NTSC (mostly NTSC-M). Now TV standards are generally standardized in each country, but differ from country to country.
SCO's IS suing - who cares if their claims are strong. HP is saying, fine let them sue, they don't have any backing. To me it seems to weaken their claims.
Once SCO is discredited, or stops their litigation then small customers won't have to worry about offering indemnification. In the meantime we don't want to scare small business and other customers away from Linux because SCO is being daft.
The status of Prescott's supposed 64bit instructions (or instruction extensions) is highly speculative. Even if they were there, it is doubtful that they would be enabled on Prescott's initial release. Also Windows has claimed support for 5 different 64bit versions of Windows. So nobody really knows if Prescott supports x86-64 (AMD64).
If China enfonces their own standards then China might be slow in adopting new and faster standards that the rest of the world develops (regardless of who creates them).
Had China done this 5 years ago, they probably would have some mandated form of the PCI bus. They wouldn't like it much when the faster and better PCI-Express (which is due out shortly) comes and wipes out AGP and PCI for the rest of the world but they are stuck on their own standard.
True, Intel and Microsoft want their chunk of China BUT one of the most important things in the current technological landscape is the creation of common standards. Look at the mess America is in with cell phones. I should be able to easily send text messages, pictures, email and web content to anyone else with a cell phone, but instead we have a bunch of different providers all using different standards.
Before someone came along and standardized TV broadcast signals, there were multiple different ones and some TV's wouldn't work on some signals.
If they want *communication* standards on PC's, then it is probably in their best interest to do what the rest of the world is doing. Unless, that is, they want to remain isolated from the rest of the world. That way they won't get burned when the next new ground breaking release of Linux, Windows, or whatever comes out.
So what you are saying is that you can't see how someone can replace one pleasure/vice with another. Like maybe smoking instead of eating. Or how about giving up smoking but to replace it you chew a lot of gum. Or maybe you want to stop watching TV so you read a lot of books. It may also be possible that in order to listen to less music, and to avoid wanting to buy the latest and greatest CD, you focus more free time on watching movies.
Nobody is saying that they are the same thing, he could just as easily have said "My own response to the RIAA crackdown was to get a library card and start reading more books".
Ummm... Okay let me get this straight. Instant messaging lets people communicate faster, and because of this people can spread word of a bad movie faster and this is supposedly why sales are down.
I have a hypothetical situation here. What if hollywood made a good movie, then word of how good it was would spread faster and by the same logic sales would go up.
So maybe, just maybe faster communication isn't causing sales to decrease. Poor movie quality is.
There is a game out there called Project Entropia that is being designed to allow you to purchase online credits with real money. I believe they were initially planning a 10 to 1 ratio of online money to real money. Items in the game will all degrade over time, so eventually you will need to repair or get new items. This keeps a need for income around that can be made in the game or outside of the game.
This is a great idea but it brings up a host of new problems. Who owns online items? What legal recourse is there if someone cheats? Who is liable for your money. etc.
People spend so much time and effort on MMORPGs that they should allow people to actually make a little money.
I would like to suggest websites similar to Everything2. Everything2 has drastically improved my writing skill and it is a great website designed from the ground up for authors. They tend to enforce strict grammar and spelling and it already has a support system and rating system built in. Students could write on literally any topic, and you could have them monitor the write-ups/essays to see how the general E2 populous reacts.
You can write weblogs, technical articles, reviews, however the majority of the content seems to be well-written stories. Users of E2 vote on write ups and the authors can see its overall score. There is a lengthy list of editors and management persons who, I am sure, would be more than happy to help you with a project like this.
You may have to be careful about what they read, however, there are a couple "explicit" write ups. But it is all text - no pictures and anything extremely vulgar or inappropriate gets removed.
The site is interesting to browse around and contains lots of good stuff, which helped me realize the true difference between quality literature and normal bland cookie-cutter writing.
I know there isn't a lot of faith in Microsoft or new Products in the tech world these days but I think it is important to consider the Tablet PC (if you have the money).
They have, depending on the model, close to full functionality of a laptop - which is much better than a rarely used pda. They have wireless access, and TabletOS comes with some really good handwritting recognition software (I showed 99% accuracy with no training when trying to write even somewhat legibly). The journal is a great way to take notes in class.
I had the benefit of being able to use one at work for a while, and I was dying for meetings to go to where I could easily jot down notes and pictures and convert my notes to text where neccesary.
Highlighting and editing notes afterwords is great, no more losing notes to spilled drinks, once written you can never change it, or pointless notetaking.
Also, with a docking station and display the tablet pc pretty much becomes a desktop system. While you wouldn't want to play brand new games on it (just as you wouldn't play them on a laptop), they are still powerfull enough for just about every other use.
Recent improvements in graphics drivers, hardware, and support from OS make the Tablet PC much more attractive than anything else like it I have seen.
The downsides are 1) Expensive and 2) Not enough gfx power for the latest games.
Slashdot Mirror
Itanium sells more and more every year and actually did decent this year. If ever they failed on it, it was initially, now it is succeeding.
They aren't going to drop Itanium. Why would they? Big servers and desktop processors or two vastly different market segments and Intel has different products and features aligned to those segments. Besides, there are probably currently more apps for IA64 than x86-64.
because now people have no reason not to port their software to x86-64
I can thing of one valid reason not to port software over to x86-64 : there is no good reason to do it - unless I need 8GB of memory, which I don't.
Can someone find a translation of this?
Well I stand corrected then. I guess the reason I thought apple made most of their own hardware is because they make so many things. I always thought part of Apple's problem was that they tried to do too much of the computer business all at once. They develop the OS, the Systems, the displays, etc.
MS *does* have to support the apps and devices to some degree. They have to ensure backwards compatibility. They have to (at least try to) fix bugs and problems. If many popular devices or apps cause hangs then people would quickly stop using Windows.
Unfortunetly in a capitalistic society the line between healthy competetive corporate behavior and limiting monopolistic behavior can be thin.
RealOne is now complaining that MS in unfairly bundling Windows Media Player with Windows and forcing most users to use Media Player. I will agree with that. However, they also support a fairly robust Direct Show interface in Direct X 9 that allows any programmer to write fairly robust multimedia apps with minimal code.
Microsoft, however, might have used monopolistic tactics to promote their OS and other apps. I suppose it is (ironically, as you claim) because of these tactics that Windows is the more widely used OS and therefore the one more software writers target. MS, of course, exposes and documents their API and DDI so that more applications and devices can use windows and help it propogate.
All I am trying to say is that Apple, in general, has fewer devices and programs that can run on it. It seems like nearly all the hardware you can use on an Apple is sold by Apple themselves.
Now I do think that they are unfairly trying to force people to use IE and Windows Media Player, but that doesn't mean you can't install and use something else.
First to steal from Xerox Park?
I work at a large tech firm and our goal is to be paperless, which will never happen of course, but we are close. All presentations, handouts, code, etc is all usually electronic, hardly anything is paper.
A COMMON feature like disabling autorun is public knowledge and isn't any flaw or revelation on anyone's part.
Maybe Linux is less "monoculture" prone than Windows however the point stands that diversity prohibits infection and similarity encourages it. If everyone in the world used Linux, we would see more linux viruses, although maybe not nearly as many as Windows.
He also seems to ignore the fact that the average computer skills of a Linux user are vastly superior to the average skills of a Windows User. The worst propogaters of viruses, chain mails, and worms (due to unsecure computers) are the family computers and uneducated users who use Windows for its ease of use. I don't know if the marketing dept. would be able to survive if all computers in the world instantly started running Linux instead of Windows tomorrow.
When TV was still young there were several different standards within the US, as they tried to standardize those while improving picture quality PAL, NTSC, and SECAM emerged. All TV's in america should support all the common versions of NTSC (mostly NTSC-M). Now TV standards are generally standardized in each country, but differ from country to country.
The example might not be accurate in my trying to express how common standards are important for computer technology.
Once SCO is discredited, or stops their litigation then small customers won't have to worry about offering indemnification. In the meantime we don't want to scare small business and other customers away from Linux because SCO is being daft.
My main info source
Had China done this 5 years ago, they probably would have some mandated form of the PCI bus. They wouldn't like it much when the faster and better PCI-Express (which is due out shortly) comes and wipes out AGP and PCI for the rest of the world but they are stuck on their own standard.
True, Intel and Microsoft want their chunk of China BUT one of the most important things in the current technological landscape is the creation of common standards. Look at the mess America is in with cell phones. I should be able to easily send text messages, pictures, email and web content to anyone else with a cell phone, but instead we have a bunch of different providers all using different standards.
Before someone came along and standardized TV broadcast signals, there were multiple different ones and some TV's wouldn't work on some signals.
If they want *communication* standards on PC's, then it is probably in their best interest to do what the rest of the world is doing. Unless, that is, they want to remain isolated from the rest of the world. That way they won't get burned when the next new ground breaking release of Linux, Windows, or whatever comes out.
Windows XP Athlon XPripoff
Nothing. Because we are all Boycotting the RIAA.
Nobody is saying that they are the same thing, he could just as easily have said "My own response to the RIAA crackdown was to get a library card and start reading more books".
So I suppose it is just a convenience thing, but it depends on what you do on the internet and what you use it for.
I have a hypothetical situation here. What if hollywood made a good movie, then word of how good it was would spread faster and by the same logic sales would go up.
So maybe, just maybe faster communication isn't causing sales to decrease. Poor movie quality is.
This is a great idea but it brings up a host of new problems. Who owns online items? What legal recourse is there if someone cheats? Who is liable for your money. etc.
People spend so much time and effort on MMORPGs that they should allow people to actually make a little money.
You can write weblogs, technical articles, reviews, however the majority of the content seems to be well-written stories. Users of E2 vote on write ups and the authors can see its overall score. There is a lengthy list of editors and management persons who, I am sure, would be more than happy to help you with a project like this.
You may have to be careful about what they read, however, there are a couple "explicit" write ups. But it is all text - no pictures and anything extremely vulgar or inappropriate gets removed.
The site is interesting to browse around and contains lots of good stuff, which helped me realize the true difference between quality literature and normal bland cookie-cutter writing.
They have, depending on the model, close to full functionality of a laptop - which is much better than a rarely used pda. They have wireless access, and TabletOS comes with some really good handwritting recognition software (I showed 99% accuracy with no training when trying to write even somewhat legibly). The journal is a great way to take notes in class.
I had the benefit of being able to use one at work for a while, and I was dying for meetings to go to where I could easily jot down notes and pictures and convert my notes to text where neccesary.
Highlighting and editing notes afterwords is great, no more losing notes to spilled drinks, once written you can never change it, or pointless notetaking.
Also, with a docking station and display the tablet pc pretty much becomes a desktop system. While you wouldn't want to play brand new games on it (just as you wouldn't play them on a laptop), they are still powerfull enough for just about every other use.
Recent improvements in graphics drivers, hardware, and support from OS make the Tablet PC much more attractive than anything else like it I have seen.
The downsides are 1) Expensive and 2) Not enough gfx power for the latest games.
Thats just my opinion.