(Microsoft even releases Home and Pro editions of operating systems that are the same in concept and principle and most of the code, and just have different sets of features enabled. It gives the users a choice to make when buying a computer, a radio box to click. Remind anyone of... *begin voice* THE TWO PARTY POLITICAL SYSTEM??? *end voice*)
So which one is which? Is XP home the Democratic party, helping the home user out and coming with a lot less corporate support?
Is XP Pro the Republican party that costs a lot more in the form of increased deficits and doesn't care about you unless you're a large corporation?
Either way, both the voters and users are getting screwed, and the majority of them don't even realize it... The more I think about it, the more I like your analogy.
Now sun have donated a server with dual Opteron and 4G RAM.
I wonder how the anti-Sun slashbots will spin this one? Is big, bad, evil Sun out to squash open source now? Perhaps they are going to put a timebomb in the server so that it will fail miserably and take an entire open source project down with it...
All joking aside, I wish that people would recognize the good things Sun has done for open source rather than nitpicking over small details that are really insignificant.
The reported threading problems were not, in fact, threading problems at all. Instead, they are the result of F_FULLFSYNC fcntl. You will probably find this thread interesting.
I too read the Anandtech review of OS X server performance and decided right then and there that OS X server was not (yet) ready for primetime. As much as I love my PowerBook, I had to come to terms that an x86 Linux box was much better as a MySQL server. Anyone that can't come to terms with that plain and simple fact is a platform zealot.
From TFA that you linked to:
3. Some say that the performance problem may be related to the built-in F_FULLFSYNC fcntl which will ask the drive to flush all of its buffered data to disk. This has been questioned and at the OS level it is always on. it is possible to turn this off if the app allows it. However this is a tradeoff between speed and data integrity. (http://lists.apple.com/archives/darwi n-dev/2005/F eb/msg00072.html) Written by the dev who wrote BeOS and now works for Apple - excellent thread.
That's not reassuring to hear that it's a tradeoff between speed and data integrity. The beauty of a Mac is that you shouldn't have to tune it. I should never have to modify kernel parameters on a Mac, much less operate in an unstable mode that might corrupt data just to get performance only half as good as a Linux box, instead of 1/10th. This, along with poor onsite support (we were told that in our area in the northeast, in one of the biggest tech hubs of the country, we couldn't expect same day service from Apple) is the reason why Apple hasn't made inroads into the enterprise computing market.
Believe me, I want them to. I use a PowerBook, and every other Unix sysadmin at my company has either an iBook or a PowerBook, plus we all have iPods, so we are big Apple fans, but we're just not willing to drink the kool-aid and put our jobs on the line out of platform zealotry.
Hey this is totally off-topic, but I read your Farmers sucks website and I'd just like to recommend that you speak with an attorney right away. You should have spoken with one right away, and yes, you are right, you should have had her take an ambulance to the hospital. The pain and suffering that your wife went through (and you to, for all the hassle and emotional distress you've put up with) are the reason why we have a tort system in the first place.
I know that ethical people like yourself are the least likely to want to sue someone, but believe me when I tell you that when a company treats you in this way, this is the only recourse you can have. I believe a lot of accident attorneys will give you an initial consultation free of charge. Good luck and I hope everything works out ok. I know I won't be choosing Farmer's insurance after reading the horror story that you went through.
I think this review is biased towards PocketPC/Windows Mobile. The reason is that they didn't compare newer versions of PalmOS (5.x+). They listed as some of the advantages of PocketPC the higher resolution (320x240), which PalmOS has had for about 2 years or so now, ever since 5.x came out. Also, ClearType. PalmOS 5 supports Font smoothing. In fact, almost all of these so-called advantages are already present on newer devices like my PalmOne Treo 650 smartphone:
1. It has some form of protected memory and so when applications crash the OS stays alive (well, most of the time).
This one goes to PocketPC. Palm OS still doesn't have protected memory.
2. It looks better, more modern, than PalmOS. Support for Clear Type.
This point is debateable. Any color PalmOS device with a 320x240 screen can look just as good or better than a PocketPC device. In fact, if you really wanted the freakin' Windows logo all over everything, you could skin it with Zlauncher to look just like a PocketPC or a Mac even.
3. It has good support for the Exchange server that most businesses care about.
Point to the PocketPC here. Although you can get third-party mail apps for Palm that support push technology like Blackberry, which makes it more useful IMO as an instant email device.
4. Internet Explorer and Outlook are more robust than WebPro, Mail and Blazer.
Debateable. I like the fact that apps open instantly on the Palm and browsing on a modern Palm is fast and compatible with most websites.
5. More input options than PalmOS (e.g. transcriber, speech addon from MS).
Hello, transcriber? Palm has had Graffiti since inception. What do you call graffit but an instant transcriber. The speech addon may be available for Palm but I'm not sure.
6. "Today" default screen more relevant than "Applications" (because of the very nature of PDAs in the business world).
Palm has had a Today screen ever since version 5.0, which shows all appointments, tasks that are due that day, as well as all unread email.
7. WMA/WMV and ASF built-in support.
Point for PocketPC here. Although Palm has several media players that can play most formats, including Divx.
8. Automatic support for USB host connector, when available.
Point PocketPC.
9. Runs on faster XScale hardware than PalmOS usually.
False. Almost all newer Palm devices use Xscale processors. My Treo has an Xscale processor in it, just like a PocketPC.
10. DirectX/3D support, more multimedia capable.
Point for the PocketPC.
11. Apps use the full 320x240 resolution (instead of the 160x160 that most PalmOS apps use and double-pixel at 320x320).
Absolutely false. Palm has had real 320x240 for about 2 years now, and almost all apps use it.
12. Able to run more complex games, some 3D games too.
Point for the PocketPC. I have a PSP for games, an iPod for Music. I want my smartphone to be good for email and office applications, not games.
11. Better office format compliancy, MS Office is usually bundled with the PDA.
My Treo came bundled with Datavis Documents to Go, which let's me edit or create Word, Excel and Powerpoint documents. That seems pretty bundled to me.
12. ActiveSync rocks, it allows for direct internet connection and can mount the PDA to your desktop (PalmOS' drive mode is a hack, and only available to recent models)
Point for the PocketPC here.
13. Programming APIs similar to Win32, porting is easy, development too.
If you develop Windows apps, I guess this is a plus.
14. Basic and.NET available if C/C++ is not desired.
Again, if you develop Windows apps, this is nice. It sounds like this article was written by a Windows developer trying to plug PocketPC over PalmOS.
Memo to Bill Gates: Even you sir, cannot have your cake and eat it too.
If you insist on importing massive numbers of H1B visa applicants and paying them slave-labor wages to write code, you'll eventually reap the fruits of this policy. If you insist on outsourcing software development to third world countries just to save a few bucks on developer's salaries, you'll eventually get what's coming to you.
The IT industry as a whole has been guilty of this. All of the big players: Microsoft, Cisco, Sun, and IBM have taken part in the outsourcing craze and now they act surprised when college students don't want to study IT for fear of being outsourced.
You cannot have your cake and eat it too. Want cheap labor? Fine, you can have it, but after you've laid off all the highly paid US developers and decimated the IT industry, don't expect to be able to find talented individuals to manage your cutrate 3rd world development teams.
The outsoured phone shops want only to dot Is and cross Ts, and care nothing for actually solving customer problems. Even Gold contract calls, occasinally even handled domestically, still don't elicit actual fixes on time, every time.
I agree 100%. The onsite support people are great, and I've worked with enough of them to know that they are very qualified and talented people. Unfortunately, everyone in the industry has outsourced their support to India. Sun has to do this just to keep costs in line with what the rest of the industry is paying. I've been pretty disappointed with the results myself, but the entire industry thinks this is acceptable now, so I don't think it will change anytime soon.
Customer support on every product imaginable has been outsourced to India. It's unfortunate, but what can we do?
*ahem* I bought an L25 (2-drive, 20-tape SDLT library) with only one drive in it. When I got budget for a second drive, Sun had switched the unit from LVD to HVD. I was told that buying a new drive that would be covered under my existing support contract (vs. just buying one off EBay or a gray market reseller) would require actually junking the unit and buying a whole new library and two drives.
Hmm... That's a tough one. You can always buy a drive off eBay, and your L25 will remain supported, they just won't fix the 3rd party drive. If anything else in the box fails, you'll be just fine. In truth, they will probably even replace the 3rd party drive for you if it fails. Sun is usually really cool about that. I've replaced 3rd party memory that went bad in a server before, even when I knew the customer had bought it on their own.
But the fact that they switched from LVD to HVD on the tape library doesn't negate your support contract. Your tape library will continue to be supported throughout the product lifecycle.
I own one of the L25s too. We're using LTO media, and I wish we'd gotten a second drive since it makes life a lot easier for scheduling backups. It's a good unit though (really a rebranded ATL library). Anyway, good luck.
There you'll see that a 24 cpu F25K scores 11631.1 MB/s in the TRIAD benchmark (you can choose COPY, ADD or SCALE instead for that matter, the results are similar), a 144 cpu F25K 76097.8 MB/s, a 4 cpu Opteron (called AMD_Opteron_848) 15921.0 MB/s, and finally a 64 cpu IBM p5-595 173564.2 MB/s. And just like I said in my previous post, those numbers show that a 4 cpu Opteron beats a 24 cpu F25K, and a 64 cpu IBM beats the highest end 144 cpu sun pretty badly.
You are obviously cherry-picking data to prove your point. I'll give you the fact that it looks like the 64-way IBM eserver has more memory bandwidth than the F25K (now show me $ per MB comparison and we'll see who is more cost effective), but how is 15921.0 MB/s (Opteron 4-way) more bandwidth than 76097.8 MB/s (F25K)? Your numbers seem wrong to me.
Also, you seem well educated enough to know that you can't compare a 4-way box to a 144 way box. Cost becomes exponentially greater for non-exponential increases in performance. If you really need over 100,000 MB/s of bandwidth, you're going to pay through the nose for it, no matter who you go with.
For a more valid comparison, why don't you compare the SunFire V40z 4-way Opteron servers with whatever IBM and HP's 4-way Opteron offerings are?
Just keep in mind that Sun has a very consistent track record of trying out the low end market, only to decide that they'd be better off sticking with the high end, after all. You may end up stuck with no support in just a few months.
I call bullshit. Name me one Sun hardware product that they have dropped support for before the support lifecycle was over? There isn't one. Sun's hardware support is second to none. They guarantee that a box you buy now will continue to be supported up until 5 years after the product is EOLd (end of life). This means that in 2007, when they stop selling whatever Opteron server you're buying from them today (like the V40z or whatever), you'll still get full hardware support until 2012!!! Name me one beige box vendor that guarantees that. In fact, name me one x86 hardware vendor that does that. I don't think there are any.
In the past year we have had two processors fail, some memory sticks fail and about 8 NICs fail on our Sun boxes.
This might sound a really high rate of failure, but this is typical with all manufacturers of computer equipment. Let me ask you how many servers you have, and also, how many CPUs are in each server? Now, how long do you expect a CPU to last? You need to do the math here to determine how often one will fail. I've done large enterprise support and this is why you can't base your analysis of the reliability of a particular vendor without a lot more data than you've given us:
1. Let's say I have 500 servers, each one has 2 CPUs. 2. Let's say that the MTBF (mean time between failures) of a given CPU is rated at 100,000 hours (that's 11.4 years). 3. Now, given that there are approximately 594 weeks in 11.4 years, divide that by 1000 total CPUs (2x 500 servers), and you can see that:
You will be replacing 0.59 CPUs a week on average.
This is not abnormal. People get freaked out when they hear that you have to replace a CPU or a couple memory DIMMs every couple of weeks, but this is totally normal. The fact that you only had to replace 2 CPUS in a whole year, given a whole slew of servers, seems to indicate to me that you've gotten great reliability from your Sun servers.
Yeah? That must be why SPARCs gets pummeled so completely in the STREAM benchmark which measures memory bandwidth. For example, their current highend system (F25K) in a 24 cpu configuration is beaten by a 4 cpu Opteron. Or the IBM p5-595 at 64 cpu:s has more than twice the memory bw than a 144 cpu F25K. Go figure...
Show me proof. I haven't seen any of these memory bandwidth benchmarks, but I'm pretty sure you're talking out your ass because the MINIMUM configuration for an F25K is 36 CPUs. Also, show me the benchmark of an Opteron server that puts out up to 25.2 GB/sec sustained I/O bandwidth. Such a beast does not even exist right now.
Oh, right, you were just trolling and spouting the typical anti-Sun pro-IBM Slashbot FUD.
I hope that the hardware *does* stagnate, and maybe devs will stop writing 500 lines of code to control breast jiggle in the next Dead On Arrival and instead brainstorm some ingenuity into the games instead.
Are you kidding me? I hope they spend more money than 500 lines of code on the breast jiggle... For my $50 I expect them to hire a top plastic surgeon to describe how the perfect breast should jiggle to the development team and developing a patentable breast-jiggling algorithm!
Dear God man! There are a lot of places in the game that can be skimped on: The story, or the gameplay is fine, but for god's sake, KEEP THE BREAST JIGGLE!;-)
Does anyone have experience with partnering with Sun on the hardware end of things? What kind of reputation do they have? Or can anyone suggest another server vendor that I could investigate? I realize there are a thousand white box vendors out there, but I'm more interested in a mature partner program: coop marketing opportunities, top-notch support resources, etc.
As a former Sun Systems Support Engineer (SSE, basically onsite hardware/OS support), I can probably answer this for you.
First of all, you're right about the price. Sun servers, especially the UltraSparc line of servers tend to be much more pricey than your average x86 server vendor. They also tend to be relatively slow in CPU-speed, but make up for this in spades with I/O throughput and memory bandwidth. You see, Sun was one of the first server vendors to have the full 64-bit support necessary for large enterprise databases that banks, telcos and other high-end OLTP outfits require. For the first time you could run an Oracle instance on a single server with up to 106 CPUs and 512GB (that's half a terabyte) of physical memory. Of course there are only limited market segments that need this technology, but during the.com days, everybody thought they needed it and this is how Sun got away with charging ridiculous prices for this type of servers.
Now that the reality of the IT market has been back in effect, Sun has realized it can't keep up with Intel and AMD on the CPU speed front, so Sun has decided to focus on its great operating system and Unix that can scale so well and perform on such a large number of processors, and hopefully sell some nice AMD Opteron servers to run their great, full-featured Unix OS on.
One of the benefits that Sun can offer is true enterprise, 24/7, international on-site and telephone support. If you have an investment bank that's located in 10 countries worldwide, at stock exchanges in London, NY, Singapore, etc., and you want a single 1-800 number to call for a 2-hour onsite response, 2 hour fix time repair on your Oracle database cluster, Sun is a great choice. They are truly on the level of IBM Global Services and only a couple others when it comes to knowledgeable onsite support.
Their newer AMD Opteron server offerings are starting to be much more competitively priced than HP or Dell in the x86 arena. You also have the advantage of natively running either Solaris 10 x86-64 or Linux on the same hardware, with enterprise level onsite support.
Whether Sun can turn themselves around in the market or not is one question, but they provide so many services to government agencies and fortune 500 corporations at the highest levels that their continued survival (in however small a role that might be) in the computer industry is pretty much guaranteed. When their systems are used on a lot of military installations, do you really think the US government would let them go out of business or sell off their assets to a foreign corporation?
Anyway, Sun is a solid choice and reliable server provider, with a true enterprise level support channel. I no longer work there, but I know enough people that do to know you can't really go wrong recommending them.
RedHat Enterprise Linux 4 has become the distribution of choice at work. It's not my first choice but RHEL is easy to install - and has the support pricetag (and scapegoat) to keeps management happy.
I know this opinion isn't going to be very popular around here, but at my company we found exactly the opposite was true. The Redhat servers are nice, and seem to run well, however the support costs are borderline ridiculous, and we end up paying more for annual support that it would cost us for Sun support. As far as our cost analysis goes, we would actually save money by staying on Sun, rather than replacing all of our Sun boxes with Redhat boxes requiring a Redhat software support contract plus a hardware support contract. Redhat has priced themselves out of the market by charging way too much for support.
Also, their support is terrible. I was trying to get assistance with Samba, and when I talked to their one employee that was a "samba expert", he knew less than I did and I felt like I was giving him a training session.
If you're doing Linux on x86, go with Suse. I think you'll get better support at a lower cost.
They even replace the normal copper wires going to your house with fiber (doesn't work in a power outage though! I hope nobody gets upset about 911;)
Why would it not work during a power outage? I've actually seen a FTTP setup at a small-town run telco when I went to repair a server there. It was slick. They basically have a durable plastic case that you mount on the wall in the garage. It has a self-enclosed UPS with replaceable battery, power conditioner, fiber modem/router/wireless 802.11G card optional, plus patch panel for analog phone jacks (VoIP router built in) and coax jacks for HDTV set-top boxes.
You mount that sucker on the wall of your garage, or in a closet, or in the basement, connect it to AC power, fiber, and run all your internal wiring to the patch panel... voila! Fully digital, battery-backed up home information system... All your services, voice, data, HDTV plus video on demand on 1 fiber. More than enough bandwidth for any service, or all of them at once. 100 megabits is a ton, and most services stay on the MAN (metropolitan area network), so they only need a couple DS3s to provide internet service to the whole town... All the feeds for digital TV and video on demand come in over Satellite and are stored on some Sun servers at the head-end.
OptimumOnline caps their customer's upload throughput at 150kbit/s for uploading "too much". They don't even tell you what "too much" is. Their normal caps are rather generous at 10mbit/1mbit, but what's the point if you can't actually use it?
I've had OptimumOnline for the last year and it is the best broadband internet service I've ever had. I have 10 megabits down, 1 megabit up, and I've never been capped. Granted, I'm not stupid enough to leave Kazaa up sharing files 24/7, but I've done my fair share of BitTorrent, including uploading about 10GB worth of traffic (that's gigabytes) during the course of a month.
You would have to be a total leech trying to run a warez hub to get your cap cut down. This just goes to show you that some people can never be pleased. I think paying $29 a month for 10 megabits down 1 megabit up is the best bang for the buck you can get nowadays. Also, they were ranked 2nd best ISP in the country by some review I read on Slashdot recently.
But I like to buy and build systems I can use for years and years without having to bother with upgrading, and figure I've made a long-term (at least 4-5 years, which is long term in the computer world) investment that provides me with much more than just storage functionality. And again, $1.46/GB is hard to beat.
Sure, call me in two years from now, when they come out with $5 laser-etched holographic 3d memory cubes, which store an unlimited amount of data in a space the size of a few cubic inches... Need a few more petabytes of space? Just ask the laser etching device to allocate a few more nano-blocks. We'll finally need 128-bit filesystems then.
Meanwhile, you'll have a noisy space heater hidden in your closet, that dims the lights in a half-block radius every time a drive overheats and the array goes into rebuild mode...:-P
Just kidding... It sounds like you got a lot of bang for your buck. Congrats on the nice (and well built, I might add) fat RAID array. (you lucky bastard)...:-)
Software companies, Blizzard included, shouldn't be worrying about sequals or next generation software before they've got all the problems fixed.
I agree completely, but unfortunately, patches are free, and Expansion Packs make money... That's what it's all about really.
Blizzard has the capability of simply adding new content in the form of patches. My god, the patches are already huge to begin with, and they need a BitTorrent client just to download them. Also, I think $14.95 a month * over 2 million people equals enough money to pay for an army of artists, coders, and story writers to create new content continually.
But, the bottom line is money. Blizzard will extract as much money as possible from their customers, whether they've fixed the bugs in the original WoW or not.
Building universal binaries takes only a checkbox. Only the insane would drop support for PPC when it's so easy to support it.
That's a very naive statement. Sure, it's only a checkbox to compile a universal binary, but how do you know it will run properly on both platforms? Now you need to have duplicate QA departments. Basically double your testing staff because everything has to be tested on both platforms. Even years into the future, software developers will have to keep ancient PowerPC machines around just to do regression testing on.
Due to market share alone, PowerPC will be around for at least 10 years. In fact, OS X only recently broke the 50% installed base of all Mac users. That's right, there's still over 10 million System 9 and older users out there... That gives you something to think about. So yeah, it might seem really easy for somebody to compile an app for the other platform, but that doesn't mean they've even had a chance to check it and see if it actually runs.
No, but neither does iTunes. According to their patent, the software must be capable of "b) sending a data stream from the computer to the computer controlled music device in response to step a) for controlling the playing of the selected song;". Or in other words, the external device must respond directly to the stream provided by the computer device.
Actually, now it does. See the Airport Express, which allows you to send a stream of music to a remote device or stereo.
Slashdot Mirror
(Microsoft even releases Home and Pro editions of operating systems that are the same in concept and principle and most of the code, and just have different sets of features enabled. It gives the users a choice to make when buying a computer, a radio box to click. Remind anyone of... *begin voice* THE TWO PARTY POLITICAL SYSTEM??? *end voice*)
So which one is which? Is XP home the Democratic party, helping the home user out and coming with a lot less corporate support?
Is XP Pro the Republican party that costs a lot more in the form of increased deficits and doesn't care about you unless you're a large corporation?
Either way, both the voters and users are getting screwed, and the majority of them don't even realize it... The more I think about it, the more I like your analogy.
It's not an SGI, but still, good luck getting support for that SUN machine in two years...
Bullshit... Sun will still support that server for 5 years after the EOL (end of life), or whenever they stop manufacturing it.
You just proved my point by giving the typical slashbot anti-Sun response. Why don't you go find some other fanboi hangout to troll at.
Now sun have donated a server with dual Opteron and 4G RAM.
I wonder how the anti-Sun slashbots will spin this one? Is big, bad, evil Sun out to squash open source now? Perhaps they are going to put a timebomb in the server so that it will fail miserably and take an entire open source project down with it...
All joking aside, I wish that people would recognize the good things Sun has done for open source rather than nitpicking over small details that are really insignificant.
The reported threading problems were not, in fact, threading problems at all. Instead, they are the result of F_FULLFSYNC fcntl. You will probably find this thread interesting.
i n-dev/2005/F eb/msg00072.html)
I too read the Anandtech review of OS X server performance and decided right then and there that OS X server was not (yet) ready for primetime. As much as I love my PowerBook, I had to come to terms that an x86 Linux box was much better as a MySQL server. Anyone that can't come to terms with that plain and simple fact is a platform zealot.
From TFA that you linked to:
3. Some say that the performance problem may be related to the built-in F_FULLFSYNC fcntl which will ask the drive to flush all of its buffered data to disk.
This has been questioned and at the OS level it is always on. it is possible to turn this off if the app allows it. However this is a tradeoff between speed and data integrity.
(http://lists.apple.com/archives/darw
Written by the dev who wrote BeOS and now works for Apple - excellent thread.
That's not reassuring to hear that it's a tradeoff between speed and data integrity. The beauty of a Mac is that you shouldn't have to tune it. I should never have to modify kernel parameters on a Mac, much less operate in an unstable mode that might corrupt data just to get performance only half as good as a Linux box, instead of 1/10th. This, along with poor onsite support (we were told that in our area in the northeast, in one of the biggest tech hubs of the country, we couldn't expect same day service from Apple) is the reason why Apple hasn't made inroads into the enterprise computing market.
Believe me, I want them to. I use a PowerBook, and every other Unix sysadmin at my company has either an iBook or a PowerBook, plus we all have iPods, so we are big Apple fans, but we're just not willing to drink the kool-aid and put our jobs on the line out of platform zealotry.
Intel 3 GHz P4.. kinda in the midrange of PC hardware. I want to know how OS X86 would run on my new home system .. Athlon X2 4400+ SLI mobo.
It won't. Apple will never allow OSX X86 to run on a non-Apple system. Expect to see on-chip Intel DRM enforcing this.
Hey this is totally off-topic, but I read your Farmers sucks website and I'd just like to recommend that you speak with an attorney right away. You should have spoken with one right away, and yes, you are right, you should have had her take an ambulance to the hospital. The pain and suffering that your wife went through (and you to, for all the hassle and emotional distress you've put up with) are the reason why we have a tort system in the first place.
I know that ethical people like yourself are the least likely to want to sue someone, but believe me when I tell you that when a company treats you in this way, this is the only recourse you can have. I believe a lot of accident attorneys will give you an initial consultation free of charge. Good luck and I hope everything works out ok. I know I won't be choosing Farmer's insurance after reading the horror story that you went through.
OMG, is that for real? I would hate to be that employee!
I think this review is biased towards PocketPC/Windows Mobile. The reason is that they didn't compare newer versions of PalmOS (5.x+). They listed as some of the advantages of PocketPC the higher resolution (320x240), which PalmOS has had for about 2 years or so now, ever since 5.x came out. Also, ClearType. PalmOS 5 supports Font smoothing. In fact, almost all of these so-called advantages are already present on newer devices like my PalmOne Treo 650 smartphone:
.NET available if C/C++ is not desired.
1. It has some form of protected memory and so when applications crash the OS stays alive (well, most of the time).
This one goes to PocketPC. Palm OS still doesn't have protected memory.
2. It looks better, more modern, than PalmOS. Support for Clear Type.
This point is debateable. Any color PalmOS device with a 320x240 screen can look just as good or better than a PocketPC device. In fact, if you really wanted the freakin' Windows logo all over everything, you could skin it with Zlauncher to look just like a PocketPC or a Mac even.
3. It has good support for the Exchange server that most businesses care about.
Point to the PocketPC here. Although you can get third-party mail apps for Palm that support push technology like Blackberry, which makes it more useful IMO as an instant email device.
4. Internet Explorer and Outlook are more robust than WebPro, Mail and Blazer.
Debateable. I like the fact that apps open instantly on the Palm and browsing on a modern Palm is fast and compatible with most websites.
5. More input options than PalmOS (e.g. transcriber, speech addon from MS).
Hello, transcriber? Palm has had Graffiti since inception. What do you call graffit but an instant transcriber. The speech addon may be available for Palm but I'm not sure.
6. "Today" default screen more relevant than "Applications" (because of the very nature of PDAs in the business world).
Palm has had a Today screen ever since version 5.0, which shows all appointments, tasks that are due that day, as well as all unread email.
7. WMA/WMV and ASF built-in support.
Point for PocketPC here. Although Palm has several media players that can play most formats, including Divx.
8. Automatic support for USB host connector, when available.
Point PocketPC.
9. Runs on faster XScale hardware than PalmOS usually.
False. Almost all newer Palm devices use Xscale processors. My Treo has an Xscale processor in it, just like a PocketPC.
10. DirectX/3D support, more multimedia capable.
Point for the PocketPC.
11. Apps use the full 320x240 resolution (instead of the 160x160 that most PalmOS apps use and double-pixel at 320x320).
Absolutely false. Palm has had real 320x240 for about 2 years now, and almost all apps use it.
12. Able to run more complex games, some 3D games too.
Point for the PocketPC. I have a PSP for games, an iPod for Music. I want my smartphone to be good for email and office applications, not games.
11. Better office format compliancy, MS Office is usually bundled with the PDA.
My Treo came bundled with Datavis Documents to Go, which let's me edit or create Word, Excel and Powerpoint documents. That seems pretty bundled to me.
12. ActiveSync rocks, it allows for direct internet connection and can mount the PDA to your desktop (PalmOS' drive mode is a hack, and only available to recent models)
Point for the PocketPC here.
13. Programming APIs similar to Win32, porting is easy, development too.
If you develop Windows apps, I guess this is a plus.
14. Basic and
Again, if you develop Windows apps, this is nice. It sounds like this article was written by a Windows developer trying to plug PocketPC over PalmOS.
Memo to Bill Gates: Even you sir, cannot have your cake and eat it too.
If you insist on importing massive numbers of H1B visa applicants and paying them slave-labor wages to write code, you'll eventually reap the fruits of this policy. If you insist on outsourcing software development to third world countries just to save a few bucks on developer's salaries, you'll eventually get what's coming to you.
The IT industry as a whole has been guilty of this. All of the big players: Microsoft, Cisco, Sun, and IBM have taken part in the outsourcing craze and now they act surprised when college students don't want to study IT for fear of being outsourced.
You cannot have your cake and eat it too. Want cheap labor? Fine, you can have it, but after you've laid off all the highly paid US developers and decimated the IT industry, don't expect to be able to find talented individuals to manage your cutrate 3rd world development teams.
In Soviet King Of Prussia, You arrest Companies!
The outsoured phone shops want only to dot Is and cross Ts, and care nothing for actually solving customer problems. Even Gold contract calls, occasinally even handled domestically, still don't elicit actual fixes on time, every time.
I agree 100%. The onsite support people are great, and I've worked with enough of them to know that they are very qualified and talented people. Unfortunately, everyone in the industry has outsourced their support to India. Sun has to do this just to keep costs in line with what the rest of the industry is paying. I've been pretty disappointed with the results myself, but the entire industry thinks this is acceptable now, so I don't think it will change anytime soon.
Customer support on every product imaginable has been outsourced to India. It's unfortunate, but what can we do?
*ahem* I bought an L25 (2-drive, 20-tape SDLT library) with only one drive in it. When I got budget for a second drive, Sun had switched the unit from LVD to HVD. I was told that buying a new drive that would be covered under my existing support contract (vs. just buying one off EBay or a gray market reseller) would require actually junking the unit and buying a whole new library and two drives.
Hmm... That's a tough one. You can always buy a drive off eBay, and your L25 will remain supported, they just won't fix the 3rd party drive. If anything else in the box fails, you'll be just fine. In truth, they will probably even replace the 3rd party drive for you if it fails. Sun is usually really cool about that. I've replaced 3rd party memory that went bad in a server before, even when I knew the customer had bought it on their own.
But the fact that they switched from LVD to HVD on the tape library doesn't negate your support contract. Your tape library will continue to be supported throughout the product lifecycle.
I own one of the L25s too. We're using LTO media, and I wish we'd gotten a second drive since it makes life a lot easier for scheduling backups. It's a good unit though (really a rebranded ATL library). Anyway, good luck.
There you'll see that a 24 cpu F25K scores 11631.1 MB/s in the TRIAD benchmark (you can choose COPY, ADD or SCALE instead for that matter, the results are similar), a 144 cpu F25K 76097.8 MB/s, a 4 cpu Opteron (called AMD_Opteron_848) 15921.0 MB/s, and finally a 64 cpu IBM p5-595 173564.2 MB/s. And just like I said in my previous post, those numbers show that a 4 cpu Opteron beats a 24 cpu F25K, and a 64 cpu IBM beats the highest end 144 cpu sun pretty badly.
/s (Opteron 4-way) more bandwidth than 76097.8 MB /s (F25K)? Your numbers seem wrong to me.
/s of bandwidth, you're going to pay through the nose for it, no matter who you go with.
You are obviously cherry-picking data to prove your point. I'll give you the fact that it looks like the 64-way IBM eserver has more memory bandwidth than the F25K (now show me $ per MB comparison and we'll see who is more cost effective), but how is 15921.0 MB
Also, you seem well educated enough to know that you can't compare a 4-way box to a 144 way box. Cost becomes exponentially greater for non-exponential increases in performance. If you really need over 100,000 MB
For a more valid comparison, why don't you compare the SunFire V40z 4-way Opteron servers with whatever IBM and HP's 4-way Opteron offerings are?
Just keep in mind that Sun has a very consistent track record of trying out the low end market, only to decide that they'd be better off sticking with the high end, after all. You may end up stuck with no support in just a few months.
I call bullshit. Name me one Sun hardware product that they have dropped support for before the support lifecycle was over? There isn't one. Sun's hardware support is second to none. They guarantee that a box you buy now will continue to be supported up until 5 years after the product is EOLd (end of life). This means that in 2007, when they stop selling whatever Opteron server you're buying from them today (like the V40z or whatever), you'll still get full hardware support until 2012 !!! Name me one beige box vendor that guarantees that. In fact, name me one x86 hardware vendor that does that. I don't think there are any.
In the past year we have had two processors fail, some memory sticks fail and about 8 NICs fail on our Sun boxes.
This might sound a really high rate of failure, but this is typical with all manufacturers of computer equipment. Let me ask you how many servers you have, and also, how many CPUs are in each server? Now, how long do you expect a CPU to last? You need to do the math here to determine how often one will fail. I've done large enterprise support and this is why you can't base your analysis of the reliability of a particular vendor without a lot more data than you've given us:
1. Let's say I have 500 servers, each one has 2 CPUs.
2. Let's say that the MTBF (mean time between failures) of a given CPU is rated at 100,000 hours (that's 11.4 years).
3. Now, given that there are approximately 594 weeks in 11.4 years, divide that by 1000 total CPUs (2x 500 servers), and you can see that:
You will be replacing 0.59 CPUs a week on average.
This is not abnormal. People get freaked out when they hear that you have to replace a CPU or a couple memory DIMMs every couple of weeks, but this is totally normal. The fact that you only had to replace 2 CPUS in a whole year, given a whole slew of servers, seems to indicate to me that you've gotten great reliability from your Sun servers.
Yeah? That must be why SPARCs gets pummeled so completely in the STREAM benchmark which measures memory bandwidth. For example, their current highend system (F25K) in a 24 cpu configuration is beaten by a 4 cpu Opteron. Or the IBM p5-595 at 64 cpu:s has more than twice the memory bw than a 144 cpu F25K. Go figure...
Show me proof. I haven't seen any of these memory bandwidth benchmarks, but I'm pretty sure you're talking out your ass because the MINIMUM configuration for an F25K is 36 CPUs. Also, show me the benchmark of an Opteron server that puts out up to 25.2 GB/sec sustained I/O bandwidth. Such a beast does not even exist right now.
Oh, right, you were just trolling and spouting the typical anti-Sun pro-IBM Slashbot FUD.
I hope that the hardware *does* stagnate, and maybe devs will stop writing 500 lines of code to control breast jiggle in the next Dead On Arrival and instead brainstorm some ingenuity into the games instead.
;-)
Are you kidding me? I hope they spend more money than 500 lines of code on the breast jiggle... For my $50 I expect them to hire a top plastic surgeon to describe how the perfect breast should jiggle to the development team and developing a patentable breast-jiggling algorithm!
Dear God man! There are a lot of places in the game that can be skimped on: The story, or the gameplay is fine, but for god's sake, KEEP THE BREAST JIGGLE!
Does anyone have experience with partnering with Sun on the hardware end of things? What kind of reputation do they have? Or can anyone suggest another server vendor that I could investigate? I realize there are a thousand white box vendors out there, but I'm more interested in a mature partner program: coop marketing opportunities, top-notch support resources, etc.
.com days, everybody thought they needed it and this is how Sun got away with charging ridiculous prices for this type of servers.
As a former Sun Systems Support Engineer (SSE, basically onsite hardware/OS support), I can probably answer this for you.
First of all, you're right about the price. Sun servers, especially the UltraSparc line of servers tend to be much more pricey than your average x86 server vendor. They also tend to be relatively slow in CPU-speed, but make up for this in spades with I/O throughput and memory bandwidth. You see, Sun was one of the first server vendors to have the full 64-bit support necessary for large enterprise databases that banks, telcos and other high-end OLTP outfits require. For the first time you could run an Oracle instance on a single server with up to 106 CPUs and 512GB (that's half a terabyte) of physical memory. Of course there are only limited market segments that need this technology, but during the
Now that the reality of the IT market has been back in effect, Sun has realized it can't keep up with Intel and AMD on the CPU speed front, so Sun has decided to focus on its great operating system and Unix that can scale so well and perform on such a large number of processors, and hopefully sell some nice AMD Opteron servers to run their great, full-featured Unix OS on.
One of the benefits that Sun can offer is true enterprise, 24/7, international on-site and telephone support. If you have an investment bank that's located in 10 countries worldwide, at stock exchanges in London, NY, Singapore, etc., and you want a single 1-800 number to call for a 2-hour onsite response, 2 hour fix time repair on your Oracle database cluster, Sun is a great choice. They are truly on the level of IBM Global Services and only a couple others when it comes to knowledgeable onsite support.
Their newer AMD Opteron server offerings are starting to be much more competitively priced than HP or Dell in the x86 arena. You also have the advantage of natively running either Solaris 10 x86-64 or Linux on the same hardware, with enterprise level onsite support.
Whether Sun can turn themselves around in the market or not is one question, but they provide so many services to government agencies and fortune 500 corporations at the highest levels that their continued survival (in however small a role that might be) in the computer industry is pretty much guaranteed. When their systems are used on a lot of military installations, do you really think the US government would let them go out of business or sell off their assets to a foreign corporation?
Anyway, Sun is a solid choice and reliable server provider, with a true enterprise level support channel. I no longer work there, but I know enough people that do to know you can't really go wrong recommending them.
RedHat Enterprise Linux 4 has become the distribution of choice at work. It's not my first choice but RHEL is easy to install - and has the support pricetag (and scapegoat) to keeps management happy.
I know this opinion isn't going to be very popular around here, but at my company we found exactly the opposite was true. The Redhat servers are nice, and seem to run well, however the support costs are borderline ridiculous, and we end up paying more for annual support that it would cost us for Sun support. As far as our cost analysis goes, we would actually save money by staying on Sun, rather than replacing all of our Sun boxes with Redhat boxes requiring a Redhat software support contract plus a hardware support contract. Redhat has priced themselves out of the market by charging way too much for support.
Also, their support is terrible. I was trying to get assistance with Samba, and when I talked to their one employee that was a "samba expert", he knew less than I did and I felt like I was giving him a training session.
If you're doing Linux on x86, go with Suse. I think you'll get better support at a lower cost.
They even replace the normal copper wires going to your house with fiber (doesn't work in a power outage though! I hope nobody gets upset about 911 ;)
Why would it not work during a power outage? I've actually seen a FTTP setup at a small-town run telco when I went to repair a server there. It was slick. They basically have a durable plastic case that you mount on the wall in the garage. It has a self-enclosed UPS with replaceable battery, power conditioner, fiber modem/router/wireless 802.11G card optional, plus patch panel for analog phone jacks (VoIP router built in) and coax jacks for HDTV set-top boxes.
You mount that sucker on the wall of your garage, or in a closet, or in the basement, connect it to AC power, fiber, and run all your internal wiring to the patch panel... voila! Fully digital, battery-backed up home information system... All your services, voice, data, HDTV plus video on demand on 1 fiber. More than enough bandwidth for any service, or all of them at once. 100 megabits is a ton, and most services stay on the MAN (metropolitan area network), so they only need a couple DS3s to provide internet service to the whole town... All the feeds for digital TV and video on demand come in over Satellite and are stored on some Sun servers at the head-end.
OptimumOnline caps their customer's upload throughput at 150kbit/s for uploading "too much". They don't even tell you what "too much" is. Their normal caps are rather generous at 10mbit/1mbit, but what's the point if you can't actually use it?
I've had OptimumOnline for the last year and it is the best broadband internet service I've ever had. I have 10 megabits down, 1 megabit up, and I've never been capped. Granted, I'm not stupid enough to leave Kazaa up sharing files 24/7, but I've done my fair share of BitTorrent, including uploading about 10GB worth of traffic (that's gigabytes) during the course of a month.
You would have to be a total leech trying to run a warez hub to get your cap cut down. This just goes to show you that some people can never be pleased. I think paying $29 a month for 10 megabits down 1 megabit up is the best bang for the buck you can get nowadays. Also, they were ranked 2nd best ISP in the country by some review I read on Slashdot recently.
From TFA:
:-P
:-)
But I
like to buy and build systems I can use for years and years without
having to bother with upgrading, and figure I've made a long-term (at
least 4-5 years, which is long term in the computer world) investment
that provides me with much more than just storage functionality. And
again, $1.46/GB is hard to beat.
Sure, call me in two years from now, when they come out with $5 laser-etched holographic 3d memory cubes, which store an unlimited amount of data in a space the size of a few cubic inches... Need a few more petabytes of space? Just ask the laser etching device to allocate a few more nano-blocks. We'll finally need 128-bit filesystems then.
Meanwhile, you'll have a noisy space heater hidden in your closet, that dims the lights in a half-block radius every time a drive overheats and the array goes into rebuild mode...
Just kidding... It sounds like you got a lot of bang for your buck. Congrats on the nice (and well built, I might add) fat RAID array. (you lucky bastard)...
Software companies, Blizzard included, shouldn't be worrying about sequals or next generation software before they've got all the problems fixed.
I agree completely, but unfortunately, patches are free, and Expansion Packs make money... That's what it's all about really.
Blizzard has the capability of simply adding new content in the form of patches. My god, the patches are already huge to begin with, and they need a BitTorrent client just to download them. Also, I think $14.95 a month * over 2 million people equals enough money to pay for an army of artists, coders, and story writers to create new content continually.
But, the bottom line is money. Blizzard will extract as much money as possible from their customers, whether they've fixed the bugs in the original WoW or not.
Building universal binaries takes only a checkbox. Only the insane would drop support for PPC when it's so easy to support it.
That's a very naive statement. Sure, it's only a checkbox to compile a universal binary, but how do you know it will run properly on both platforms? Now you need to have duplicate QA departments. Basically double your testing staff because everything has to be tested on both platforms. Even years into the future, software developers will have to keep ancient PowerPC machines around just to do regression testing on.
Due to market share alone, PowerPC will be around for at least 10 years. In fact, OS X only recently broke the 50% installed base of all Mac users. That's right, there's still over 10 million System 9 and older users out there... That gives you something to think about. So yeah, it might seem really easy for somebody to compile an app for the other platform, but that doesn't mean they've even had a chance to check it and see if it actually runs.
No, but neither does iTunes. According to their patent, the software must be capable of "b) sending a data stream from the computer to the computer controlled music device in response to step a) for controlling the playing of the selected song;". Or in other words, the external device must respond directly to the stream provided by the computer device.
Actually, now it does. See the Airport Express, which allows you to send a stream of music to a remote device or stereo.