Cliff's Notes has been compressing literature down to booklets for about fifty years. Does that mean that Dickens and Tolstoy and so forth wrote 'fluff'?
Even ignoring production, virtualization is great for test environments. My desktop is currently pretending to be a four node cluster and an iSCSI SAN.
Most Mac people I know aren't poor, and some edge into the wealthy category. On the other hand, a lot of them like to brag about the longevity of their computers. On the other other hand, most of them seem to accept a distinct lack of longevity when it comes to their iPods. I suspect that the price and the lock-in on the iPhone will make for pissed off people if the battery doesn't go the distance, though.
Unusual? None of the phones I've bought (three LG, three Motorolla, one Samsung, one Sanyo, one Kyocera, one Nokia) haven't had a user replaceable battery. And in all the ones I've used personall the battery life - both talk time and idle charge - was severely diminished before two years was out, enough to warrant battery replacement in a couple cases (bad to have a work phone die in the middle of a call or to find your personal phone dead in an emergency).
8 hyperthreading cores running 8 threads each, with each core having 2 ALUs and 1 FPU.
That's 64 concurrent threads, 16 ALUs, and 8 FPUs. And probably only needs a 150- or 200-watt power supply. There's a reason why Sun is getting something like $20K per UltraSPARC T1000 or T2000 rack-mount systems and can't keep up with demand...
Um, if you're talking about T1000 and T2000, that's 32 concurrent threads, 8 ALUs and 1 FPU. And the T1000 and T2000 start at $3995 and $9995, respectively. And lead time isn't any worse than their traditional single-core UltraSparc III based systems.
It's an apples to oranges comparison, anyways. Niagara has a wholly different design philosophy and a different set of trade-offs. The T2 cores are far more capable than the T1, but they are still relatively primiative compared to anything Intel or AMD are putting out, latency on common instructions and memory access are (often drastically) slower, and the clock speeds are significantly lower. The high concurrency successfully counter-blances the relatively low speed and high latency in certain workloads, but got spanked in real world tests (including web servers and databases, their target market) in benchmarks.
Apples to oranges. Niagara's design is based on lower speed, relatively primative cores using register switching to allow a lot of "concurrent" threads (most of which aren't actively executing at the time). They went with masking latency instead of reducing it (which, ironically, is pretty well the opposite of the UltraSparc III).
Rayman: I was halfway-enjoying the first round or 2. When it came to the area with the close-the-toilet-door scene, it was ridiculous. Not only was that event nearly impossible, the others were hard enough that I didn't care anymore, either.
Ermmm... both me and my wife got through everything in the first few rounds on our first tries.
It's in line with Apple's strategy in the computer market - the price is reasonable for what you get, but they don't sell into the low end.
The pricing may not be an order of magnitude cheaper, but then again it doesn't need to be. A Toyota doesn't have to be an order of magnitude cheaper than a Lexus to have greater mass market appeal. For most people a $500 phone is extravagent, especially contrasted against much cheaper options - $180 for a Blackjack, $250 for a Blackberry, $300 for a Palm Treo, $400 for a Windows Treo. And regardless of whether you personally count rebates or not they make the difference between settling for a traditional flip phone and splurging on a smartphone.
As an earlier response pointed out, it's entirely possible to get a Treo for $100. AT&T is running that deal right now on the 680.
That's not to say I have anything against the iPhone. It's hard to predict how it will do though. The price is high. There's only a single carrier. They lack 3G capability. They lack GPS/aGPS. A significant segment of their potential market is already under contract, thereby inflating the effective cost of acquisition. Blah blah blah et cetera.
On the other hand, it's a sexy looking device and Apple has a hell of a strong brand. The same could be said of Sony though, so only time will really tell.
Um, something doesn't have to be true for people to talk about it. Plenty of people have claimed the XBox outsold the GameCube by a huge margin. They're just wrong (or exaggerating, depending on the person).
The Quadro FX 3500 is a $1000 video card. The Quadro4 440 NVS is a $450 video card. The 7300 GT is a $60 video card. Try not an compare Apples and Oranges.:) You also included a second hard drive in the Dell config and chose the higher end 690 instead of the 490.
I'm not intimately familiar with the machines, but there are some glaring differences - Mac Pro caps at 16GB, the 490 at 32GB, the 690 at 64GB. The only storage option for the Mac Pro is 7.2K RPM SATA drives, while Dell offers 7.2K SATA, 10K SATA, 10K SAS and 15K SAS. And, as hinted about, the base graphics card on the Mac Pro is part of Nvidia's consumer line; they only offer a single workstation level option (for an extra $1649). The base model in the Dell workstations is at the low end of Nvidia's business class line, but it's still a significantly more expensive option than what Apple ships.
So, getting back to comparison, spec out a Dell Precision 490 with dual 5150s, 1GB ram, a single 250GB SATA drive and a DVD-RW (roughly equivilent to the Mac Pro) and you get a pricetag of $3,116. Not an unreasonable price premium for a higher end graphics card, more memory expansion and significantly more storage options.
There's also the option of going with a 390 instead, where you can get a QX6700 instead (quad core, 8MB cache) for $2,193. Not quite comparable, since it's a step down chipset wise, though on the other hand it shares the 16GB limitation of the Mac Pro. And it still includes a better graphics card.
Re-read the post you replied to. He didn't say Macs were overpriced, he said that to get a gaming machine you would have to spend more than you do with a PC. That's true because they don't offer a machine for less than $2200 (sans monitor, minimum cpu config, minimum memory, cheapest bundled graphics, smallest hard drive, etc). The next step down is the iMac which ships with a single last generation graphics card.
If you look at what you get with Apple, they're generally at least market competitive. In the case of the Mac Pro, they're actually a price leader for workstation class machines (or were, haven't looked recently). The problem for a lot of people is that particular features are tied to higher base configurations regardless of whether you want or need them. A gaming rig is a good example, since the benefit of dual Xeons is pretty much nil. Laptops are another area. Want a 15" screen? You're talking $2000 minimum for an Apple instead of $800 for a PC with a comparable display. Yes, yes, the Apple configuration at that price includes likes of nice amenities - marginally faster processor, 2GB ram, 120GB drive, dual layer DVD burner, blah blah. That really doesn't matter if you don't need any of that, or if you're on a budget or only have a grand to spend.
That being said, I think the limited product line is actually good business strategy for them, for a number of reasons. The most obvious is cost - less to design, test, warehouse, support, etc. There's also protection of Apple's reputation as a premium brand. By targeting the upper end of each market segment, they foster an image of quality (even in the cases where they fail to live up to it). And of course there's the fact that plenty of people who would have been happy buying an expandable Core Duo machine or a 15" notebook with otherwise iBook specs but ended up buying a Mac Pro or Mac Book because they had no other option to get the feature they actually wanted.
"At my house, we thought at first that the DVR crashed until the credits appeared in silence."
"Personally I thought that a show known for such excess tried to take an artful bow: It didn't work for me, but I get it at least."
Seems there's a "If you still have your copy sitting unwatched on your Tivo, I'd suggest that you stop reading before you are spoiled." warning now. Not sure if that was there earlier, but it's generally considered good form to either hide spoilers behind a link or at least cap or bold the warning and leave some whitespace.
My point was that you need to deal with the same issues regardless of whether you're installing from source or from binaries. Even avoiding "oddball" dependencies, version dependencies will still bite you in the ass. Part of the problem is that Linux desktops have historically had abysmal interface stability. Even where the ABI has remained consistent there have been infrastructure changes, like how menus are handled and what components comprise the desktop.
Moving to source based distribution doesn't solve any of these problems and ends up introducing the problem that, due to site changes, you're going to end up with an endless number of different builds. No vendor wants to support that. It's madness.
It seems to depend on how you define a core. Released details are sparse, but what's out there suggests there will be four sets of four "processing engines" sharing essential chip resources, including L1 cache. Is that really sixteen cores as the term is commonly used in the industry today, or is it stretching the definition? If you count them seperately, is it unfair not to count the discrete execution units that make up a "core" in Intel or AMD's offerings seperately too?
Cores are the new megahertz - a near meaningless way of comparing performance between chip makers, or even between product lines (especially with Sun, considering the considerable design differences between the Rock and the Niagara). As chip makers diverge even further in their designs, the nomenclature is getting muddied, with each vendor pushing whatever definition gives them big numbers to advertise with; hence the disagreement as to whether multi-chip modules are truly "multi-core"; hence Sun advertising the T1 as "32 thread" when it can only execute 8; hence Apple advertising dual processor machines as "quad Xeon".
Sun does a lot of very clever things in their designs, and I'm very interested in seeing what kind of performance Rock pushes, or Niagara 2 for that matter. I expect, as usual, that performance will vary highly depending on workload. In the case of Rock, if the reports of only 64K L1 cache (32K/32K split for data and instruction) per group of four processing engines is true it may scale poorly as data set grows. It's hard to predict though, since they may have a particularly large L2 cache with low latency access or some other scheme for minimizing the impact of sharing such a basic resource.
It's hard to make any prediction without detail, though, and the design significantly diverges from their only other recent new design in a number of areas. [Note: I'm not counting the UltraSparc IV+ as a new design; it's mostly a die shrunk IV with more cache, which itself was just a pair of IIIs on a single die.]
Hmm.. I've done a few 1.8.5 spins on 4.3, 4.4 and 4.5 without any serious hitches. I'd have to see the exact errors before I could opine on the cause. Annoying they're not more helpful on the lists.
But building from source if you don't know what you're doing pretty much eradicates the benefit of installing from source. It still also leaves the question of how to handle missing dependencies, what to do in the case of conflicts, how to handle distribution differences, and so forth.
You can install mplayer or upgrade Mutt all you want, and you will not be breaking the distribution stability. But when you mess with things like samba, apache, php, python or ruby, you ARE messing up with the distro stability, thus negating the whole point of using an enterprise grade linux distro. And if you are really using RHEL, and not CentOS/Scientific/etc, you are even throwing away your money.
Are you seriously suggesting that there is no value to backported patches, zero day security updates, regression testing, ISV validation and so forth if you run a custom version of Ruby? Do you really think it's better to introduce a second completely different platform to support a single PHP 5 application? I'd hate to work with you in an enterprise environment.
There are, certainly, some packages which one should take incredible care in updating - core system libraries, launguage interpreters that essential scripts and tools rely on (bash, python, perl mostly). Optional daemons though? Languages not a single bundled application relies on?
Even given the case of replacing or augmenting a package with dependencies, there better be a damn good reason it can't be installed parallel to the bundled version before I'll accept introducing a new platform.
I don't mean to offend you, but by your first comment, you are not someone who understands all the minor details of the distribution (how the library versions are interlinked, the different API/ABI versions in use etc etc). Really, don't get offended. You are in the same boat that 99.99% of the other RHEL/CentOS users, myself included, so you really can't do it safely.
I've been doing it safely for years. In my current position I've built thousands of packages from hundreds of packages. Some custom software, some custom builds, some backports, some just additions to our base distributions.
Of course, those are your servers, and you can do with them what you like. Just don't complain if they start giving you trouble later. Specially, don't go bothering the developers. I see enough of that (oh, but I changed only one minor package!) nonsense on the CentOS lists as it is.
I don't bother with the lists. Far quicker to fix things in house.
Actually, overall teen participation in the workforce is at a 40 year low of 62.3% and the most recent report from the beauru of labor statistics cites about a million teenages unable to find employment.
Suppose some people may not have thought it was that high.
You can grow ext3 or xfs while mounted. There's also zfs, vxfs and ufs. The Linux version of JFS requires a remount, but the AIX version can online resize.
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It's 164 characters, not 80. That was finally fixed in one of the Solaris 10 builds.
Cliff's Notes has been compressing literature down to booklets for about fifty years. Does that mean that Dickens and Tolstoy and so forth wrote 'fluff'?
I believe the missing step is
2. Print and sell 'Horsecock inside!' stickers.
Even ignoring production, virtualization is great for test environments. My desktop is currently pretending to be a four node cluster and an iSCSI SAN.
Hell, I can't even buy a $2500 COMPUTER that can keep pace with technology that long.
Some people use their electronics to do things, not "keep pace with technology". My last $600 computer lasted me seven years.
Most Mac people I know aren't poor, and some edge into the wealthy category. On the other hand, a lot of them like to brag about the longevity of their computers. On the other other hand, most of them seem to accept a distinct lack of longevity when it comes to their iPods. I suspect that the price and the lock-in on the iPhone will make for pissed off people if the battery doesn't go the distance, though.
Unusual? None of the phones I've bought (three LG, three Motorolla, one Samsung, one Sanyo, one Kyocera, one Nokia) haven't had a user replaceable battery. And in all the ones I've used personall the battery life - both talk time and idle charge - was severely diminished before two years was out, enough to warrant battery replacement in a couple cases (bad to have a work phone die in the middle of a call or to find your personal phone dead in an emergency).
8 hyperthreading cores running 8 threads each, with each core having 2 ALUs and 1 FPU.
That's 64 concurrent threads, 16 ALUs, and 8 FPUs. And probably only needs a 150- or 200-watt power supply. There's a reason why Sun is getting something like $20K per UltraSPARC T1000 or T2000 rack-mount systems and can't keep up with demand...
Um, if you're talking about T1000 and T2000, that's 32 concurrent threads, 8 ALUs and 1 FPU. And the T1000 and T2000 start at $3995 and $9995, respectively. And lead time isn't any worse than their traditional single-core UltraSparc III based systems.
It's an apples to oranges comparison, anyways. Niagara has a wholly different design philosophy and a different set of trade-offs. The T2 cores are far more capable than the T1, but they are still relatively primiative compared to anything Intel or AMD are putting out, latency on common instructions and memory access are (often drastically) slower, and the clock speeds are significantly lower. The high concurrency successfully counter-blances the relatively low speed and high latency in certain workloads, but got spanked in real world tests (including web servers and databases, their target market) in benchmarks.
Apples to oranges. Niagara's design is based on lower speed, relatively primative cores using register switching to allow a lot of "concurrent" threads (most of which aren't actively executing at the time). They went with masking latency instead of reducing it (which, ironically, is pretty well the opposite of the UltraSparc III).
Rayman: I was halfway-enjoying the first round or 2. When it came to the area with the close-the-toilet-door scene, it was ridiculous. Not only was that event nearly impossible, the others were hard enough that I didn't care anymore, either.
Ermmm... both me and my wife got through everything in the first few rounds on our first tries.
It's in line with Apple's strategy in the computer market - the price is reasonable for what you get, but they don't sell into the low end.
The pricing may not be an order of magnitude cheaper, but then again it doesn't need to be. A Toyota doesn't have to be an order of magnitude cheaper than a Lexus to have greater mass market appeal. For most people a $500 phone is extravagent, especially contrasted against much cheaper options - $180 for a Blackjack, $250 for a Blackberry, $300 for a Palm Treo, $400 for a Windows Treo. And regardless of whether you personally count rebates or not they make the difference between settling for a traditional flip phone and splurging on a smartphone.
As an earlier response pointed out, it's entirely possible to get a Treo for $100. AT&T is running that deal right now on the 680.
That's not to say I have anything against the iPhone. It's hard to predict how it will do though. The price is high. There's only a single carrier. They lack 3G capability. They lack GPS/aGPS. A significant segment of their potential market is already under contract, thereby inflating the effective cost of acquisition. Blah blah blah et cetera.
On the other hand, it's a sexy looking device and Apple has a hell of a strong brand. The same could be said of Sony though, so only time will really tell.
Not including a mail-in rebate, also from AT&T, a Palm Treo 680 is $299 and a Treo 750 is $399.
Um, something doesn't have to be true for people to talk about it. Plenty of people have claimed the XBox outsold the GameCube by a huge margin. They're just wrong (or exaggerating, depending on the person).
The Quadro FX 3500 is a $1000 video card. The Quadro4 440 NVS is a $450 video card. The 7300 GT is a $60 video card. Try not an compare Apples and Oranges. :) You also included a second hard drive in the Dell config and chose the higher end 690 instead of the 490.
I'm not intimately familiar with the machines, but there are some glaring differences - Mac Pro caps at 16GB, the 490 at 32GB, the 690 at 64GB. The only storage option for the Mac Pro is 7.2K RPM SATA drives, while Dell offers 7.2K SATA, 10K SATA, 10K SAS and 15K SAS. And, as hinted about, the base graphics card on the Mac Pro is part of Nvidia's consumer line; they only offer a single workstation level option (for an extra $1649). The base model in the Dell workstations is at the low end of Nvidia's business class line, but it's still a significantly more expensive option than what Apple ships.
So, getting back to comparison, spec out a Dell Precision 490 with dual 5150s, 1GB ram, a single 250GB SATA drive and a DVD-RW (roughly equivilent to the Mac Pro) and you get a pricetag of $3,116. Not an unreasonable price premium for a higher end graphics card, more memory expansion and significantly more storage options.
There's also the option of going with a 390 instead, where you can get a QX6700 instead (quad core, 8MB cache) for $2,193. Not quite comparable, since it's a step down chipset wise, though on the other hand it shares the 16GB limitation of the Mac Pro. And it still includes a better graphics card.
Re-read the post you replied to. He didn't say Macs were overpriced, he said that to get a gaming machine you would have to spend more than you do with a PC. That's true because they don't offer a machine for less than $2200 (sans monitor, minimum cpu config, minimum memory, cheapest bundled graphics, smallest hard drive, etc). The next step down is the iMac which ships with a single last generation graphics card.
If you look at what you get with Apple, they're generally at least market competitive. In the case of the Mac Pro, they're actually a price leader for workstation class machines (or were, haven't looked recently). The problem for a lot of people is that particular features are tied to higher base configurations regardless of whether you want or need them. A gaming rig is a good example, since the benefit of dual Xeons is pretty much nil. Laptops are another area. Want a 15" screen? You're talking $2000 minimum for an Apple instead of $800 for a PC with a comparable display. Yes, yes, the Apple configuration at that price includes likes of nice amenities - marginally faster processor, 2GB ram, 120GB drive, dual layer DVD burner, blah blah. That really doesn't matter if you don't need any of that, or if you're on a budget or only have a grand to spend.
That being said, I think the limited product line is actually good business strategy for them, for a number of reasons. The most obvious is cost - less to design, test, warehouse, support, etc. There's also protection of Apple's reputation as a premium brand. By targeting the upper end of each market segment, they foster an image of quality (even in the cases where they fail to live up to it). And of course there's the fact that plenty of people who would have been happy buying an expandable Core Duo machine or a 15" notebook with otherwise iBook specs but ended up buying a Mac Pro or Mac Book because they had no other option to get the feature they actually wanted.
"Sopranos Ends With a ..." (note the blank)
"At my house, we thought at first that the DVR crashed until the credits appeared in silence."
"Personally I thought that a show known for such excess tried to take an artful bow: It didn't work for me, but I get it at least."
Seems there's a "If you still have your copy sitting unwatched on your Tivo, I'd suggest that you stop reading before you are spoiled." warning now. Not sure if that was there earlier, but it's generally considered good form to either hide spoilers behind a link or at least cap or bold the warning and leave some whitespace.
It's not nice posting spoilers up as stories. Jackasses.
(Thankfully I watched it this morning.)
Unless I'm mistaken Apple uses TCPA to restrict MacOS X from booting on non-authorized (i.e. non-Apple) hardware.
My point was that you need to deal with the same issues regardless of whether you're installing from source or from binaries. Even avoiding "oddball" dependencies, version dependencies will still bite you in the ass. Part of the problem is that Linux desktops have historically had abysmal interface stability. Even where the ABI has remained consistent there have been infrastructure changes, like how menus are handled and what components comprise the desktop.
Moving to source based distribution doesn't solve any of these problems and ends up introducing the problem that, due to site changes, you're going to end up with an endless number of different builds. No vendor wants to support that. It's madness.
It seems to depend on how you define a core. Released details are sparse, but what's out there suggests there will be four sets of four "processing engines" sharing essential chip resources, including L1 cache. Is that really sixteen cores as the term is commonly used in the industry today, or is it stretching the definition? If you count them seperately, is it unfair not to count the discrete execution units that make up a "core" in Intel or AMD's offerings seperately too?
Cores are the new megahertz - a near meaningless way of comparing performance between chip makers, or even between product lines (especially with Sun, considering the considerable design differences between the Rock and the Niagara). As chip makers diverge even further in their designs, the nomenclature is getting muddied, with each vendor pushing whatever definition gives them big numbers to advertise with; hence the disagreement as to whether multi-chip modules are truly "multi-core"; hence Sun advertising the T1 as "32 thread" when it can only execute 8; hence Apple advertising dual processor machines as "quad Xeon".
Sun does a lot of very clever things in their designs, and I'm very interested in seeing what kind of performance Rock pushes, or Niagara 2 for that matter. I expect, as usual, that performance will vary highly depending on workload. In the case of Rock, if the reports of only 64K L1 cache (32K/32K split for data and instruction) per group of four processing engines is true it may scale poorly as data set grows. It's hard to predict though, since they may have a particularly large L2 cache with low latency access or some other scheme for minimizing the impact of sharing such a basic resource.
It's hard to make any prediction without detail, though, and the design significantly diverges from their only other recent new design in a number of areas. [Note: I'm not counting the UltraSparc IV+ as a new design; it's mostly a die shrunk IV with more cache, which itself was just a pair of IIIs on a single die.]
Hmm.. I've done a few 1.8.5 spins on 4.3, 4.4 and 4.5 without any serious hitches. I'd have to see the exact errors before I could opine on the cause. Annoying they're not more helpful on the lists.
But building from source if you don't know what you're doing pretty much eradicates the benefit of installing from source. It still also leaves the question of how to handle missing dependencies, what to do in the case of conflicts, how to handle distribution differences, and so forth.
You can install mplayer or upgrade Mutt all you want, and you will not be breaking the distribution stability. But when you mess with things like samba, apache, php, python or ruby, you ARE messing up with the distro stability, thus negating the whole point of using an enterprise grade linux distro. And if you are really using RHEL, and not CentOS/Scientific/etc, you are even throwing away your money.
Are you seriously suggesting that there is no value to backported patches, zero day security updates, regression testing, ISV validation and so forth if you run a custom version of Ruby? Do you really think it's better to introduce a second completely different platform to support a single PHP 5 application? I'd hate to work with you in an enterprise environment.
There are, certainly, some packages which one should take incredible care in updating - core system libraries, launguage interpreters that essential scripts and tools rely on (bash, python, perl mostly). Optional daemons though? Languages not a single bundled application relies on?
Even given the case of replacing or augmenting a package with dependencies, there better be a damn good reason it can't be installed parallel to the bundled version before I'll accept introducing a new platform.
I don't mean to offend you, but by your first comment, you are not someone who understands all the minor details of the distribution (how the library versions are interlinked, the different API/ABI versions in use etc etc). Really, don't get offended. You are in the same boat that 99.99% of the other RHEL/CentOS users, myself included, so you really can't do it safely.
I've been doing it safely for years. In my current position I've built thousands of packages from hundreds of packages. Some custom software, some custom builds, some backports, some just additions to our base distributions.
Of course, those are your servers, and you can do with them what you like. Just don't complain if they start giving you trouble later. Specially, don't go bothering the developers. I see enough of that (oh, but I changed only one minor package!) nonsense on
the CentOS lists as it is.
I don't bother with the lists. Far quicker to fix things in house.
Actually, overall teen participation in the workforce is at a 40 year low of 62.3% and the most recent report from the beauru of labor statistics cites about a million teenages unable to find employment.
Suppose some people may not have thought it was that high.
You can grow ext3 or xfs while mounted. There's also zfs, vxfs and ufs. The Linux version of JFS requires a remount, but the AIX version can online resize.
Bah. Chuck Norris is the new Chuck Norris.