If IBM was REALLY committed to LINUX then they would offer a PowerPC based THINKPAD that came with Linux installed. IBM makes PowerPC processors, IBM sells ONLY INTEL based ThankPads. Don't you see a conflict of intereste there? I think IBM's committment to Linux is true, but yet unrealistic at the same time.
If if if.... IBM hasn't made enough $ on Linux laptops (any variety) to justify a PPC version. Binary compatability would also be an issue.
IBM would look foolish if they did what you asked, unless it were for some narrow industrial use (say, if they sold work pads to UPS, FEDX, or WalMart).
That said, I'd gladly take an IBM PPC laptop with Linux pre-installed if offered!
I think it has more to do with the quality of the hardware than windows itself.
Agreed. I always do a multi-day burn in of any new equipment, and repeat the test for any system that starts acting goofy. For Linux, for Windows, for BSD...anything.
The latest problem I've found: If the secondary cache is enabled, my old Athlon (800) will crash at odd times under Linux. If it is turned off...no problems (though the system is slow). Memtest found the error. Haven't figured out if it is the CPU or the system board...probably won't bother!
This might not just be Windows Server 2003 with an extra service, it might just be the windows kernel and the required code for HPC.
I agree that this is probably what they will do. Add in a management console and ditch the GUI on the nodes, and it probably could be very light weight. With few of the regular code running on the nodes, it will probably be very stable and quick -- in comparison to trimming down what Microsoft currently is shipping.
It can't be nearly as light weight or as customizable as something that already has a group of excited and established researchers that aren't restricted by propriatory/closed licences from modifying and distributing code. It's just not possible for Microsoft to pull this off!
I'd be more interested in making an HPC from one of the BSDs let alone Linux. Windows is and will be a hard sell because it can't scale nearly as well.
...because Microsoft want's a clean slate when they deal with the EU and other much larger threats.
What's $12 million to a company making that much profit in a few hours? Getting asked about these annoyances or having them show up as evidence is dangerous. Saying "we settled that dispute, your honor" is well worth it.
Make no mistake, Microsoft executives have not learned anything since there's nothing to learn. It's entirely intentional.
You could just as easily be forced to abandon a GPLed package because it is no longer being upgraded and you need the latest features.
GPL or not...with the source, it's more likely that you or someone else who wants to migrate can be able to move on without loosing data. Much of the work is already done for you...or the format might be understandable enough to parse it out yourself...and allow you to move on to the tool of your choice.
What possible motivation would a propriatory application provider have to help you migrate?
That's one of the reasons why I chose Bugzilla for a defect tracking system...a migration path to Scarab and other tools was already available!
This is the reason why Microsoft Office is such a PITA and why they have such a dominate hold on Microsoft and potential Microsoft Office customers.
"People who don't understand how I interact with the people I work with literally feel better just having it down more as a documented process," he [Linus] said.
That's exactly it. Why is it that most of the comments here say "Good...Linux needed more professionalism/riggor/process/...."
I'm Mr Process myself. I ~love~ the SEI-CMM, will quote you hymn and verse from project plans, will dog you if you are sloppy and can't file a defect report on stuff you yourself wrote or if you mis-categorize it. Process is important because it makes people focus on doing the right thing when they don't want to.
OTOH...I've also been following Linux (the kernel) for years and how it is managed. The added test suite is fantastic, as is Linus' stand on using the best tools for the task. Linus and the other core Linux developers are already motivated to do the right thing so adding more formal processes in that don't help with development is not a good thing. It's sad. I have no doubt that this extra layer will not get in the way...so it's not too sad!
Anything that prevents the possibility of another SCO-type BS lawsuit is a Good Thing.
Prevent? Nothing will do that short of turning SCO corp. into a legal crater as an example of any other company foolish enough to attempt the same stunt.
The kernel development process is about as public, auditable, and open as I can imagine. (Yes, there are some with better audit controls, though most of those projects are quite private or secret!)
Any code that has substance goes in has a name associated with it in the change log, and historic versions of the kernel are available going back 10+ years. I don't know of any closed commercial application I've ever worked with that can say the same...usually, it's a couple years, major releases (maybe), and forks. That's it!
Beyond the normal trash, broken, and consumed stuff that should be thrown away anyway...
Every year, sell, give away, or throw away 1 jumbo-sized garbage can worth of stuff.
We're talking the big can that you drag to the curb. It might even have rollers on it.
Looks like you, like me, are over due. Maybe make it 2 cans of just equipment?
Where does it go? To your friends, your local LUG, sell it on Ebay, in second hand stores, library book drive, or toss it in the recycle/garbage pile.
Things I'm getting rid of: Power cords, low-grade and excess IDE and floppy cables, system boards, ISA cards (bundle them with system boards or toss), spare 56K modems, boxes, questionable devices (may be defective), memory (small or odd pinouts), hard drives, CD drives, ink jet printers (it's almost 'use ink, toss printer' these days), Sparc Stations, dozens of various cables,... and on and on and on. I'll probably have a half dozen empty bins when I'm done this year.
Your friends, local LUG, Ebay, second hand stores, library book drive, or recycle/garbage.
That brings me to the fire sale rule...
No returns, no support, everything is AS-IS. They can throw it away as easily as you can.
Please. How long did it take for the robots up there now to pick up a bloody rock or to even get off the landing vehicle? In the time it took a machine to roll 10 feet I would have been able to pick up sacks of rocks and dig a hole 6 feet deep.
While I think there are good reasons to send people to Mars, I'll pose a devil's avocate question to you;
Say today the US, Europe, China, Japan...by themselves or as a group decide to mount a manned Mars mission. By the time people leave Earth on the trip to Mars, how advanced will the robots be?
Overall, machines do some things very well...or they can be made -- created and instructed -- to do them. An initial manned mission will likely be light and last a few months or weeks. Additional missions (if any) will likely include a hell of a lot of hardware to set up a long-term base there. I don't expect the second trip to occur for 50+ years...Mars just doesn't offer much in exploitable resources!:O
While everyone is on a rant about how much Enterprise should be put out of it's misery...I have a gripe to throw on the pire;
What is it with that damn song??? 1980s Rod Stewert throwback. My first thought was "OH, that sucks" and the show itself has only done slightly better.
We need Hexen or Heretic ported to a newer engine.
I'd be happy if Heretic II (Linux) could be fixed. It's a great game, though it's also one of the few titles from Loki that no longer works on a modern distribution.
If a corporation says it's doing something altruistically (open sourcing shit (MS), recycling PCs to "save the environment") it always has other interests to serve.
If that sounds cynical, I'm sorry. But it's true: corporations work for profit, and as far as I can see the only reason a corporation would want to recycle PCs is to get new ones out on the market. NO OTHER REASON.
It's simpler than that.
Try this test: When you read an advertisement, consider the opposite of what it says or attempts to get you to feel.
What was more likely?
The advertisement as-is.
The opposite of the advertisement.
The reason for that is that people focus on negitives. A product with 90% good parts, and one major defect is a hard sell. Advertisement not only promote a product (or company, or group, or...), they also try and minimize that 10% or even eliminate it.
That's easy for you to say. From my point of view (1st level tech), I see a lot of idiots who say things have been working fine, it can't POSSIBLY be something on their end, you bypass the router and WHAM, everything works.
When I worked tech support, there were two types of customer calls that were hard to handle;
Clueless and combative.
Quite smart and well researched.
With the clueless and nasty, you know the deal.
With the smart customer who has done the work up front, you *still* have to walk them through a few steps that show *you* that what they say is real. If you don't, chances are that there will be something incredibly stupid the normally smart person did/did not do...and you'll both think that "it can't be that".
The easiest calls?
Anyone interested in solving the problem and will follow directions.
Tech support is not a career. Most people quit or move on around 6-9 months after starting since it is too stressful and your co-workers are typically clueless. If you can do something else, you probably will.
I'm sorry, but if those lights are out, its not a problem with my computer.... its narrowed down to the modem, my coax, or their local network. Some techs, not all, but many.....are absolutely clueless if they don't follow their pre-determined question line.
I tried to explain the same thing to Earthlink...shortly before I dropped them. Even bent over backward by grabbing a power cord and going outside to the telco hookup, disconnecting my phone line, and connecting directly to it...still, no light...still they kept asking what my computer's network settings were! The on-site support also mangled the wires from the telco hookup to the rest of the house.
You know something interesting? I was tracking web stats on my web page. And no more than 60% of the traffic was IE. Then, I made it so that the root directory of the server (never published) is a redirect instead of a missing page. Guess what? Suddenly the hits go to 95% MSIE.
Over the same period of time, what is the ratio of hits that you get on the unpublished root vs. the published one? That might give an idea of what the real IE brower share is for your site (tossing out bot and virus probing).
Slashdot Mirror
If if if.... IBM hasn't made enough $ on Linux laptops (any variety) to justify a PPC version. Binary compatability would also be an issue.
IBM would look foolish if they did what you asked, unless it were for some narrow industrial use (say, if they sold work pads to UPS, FEDX, or WalMart).
That said, I'd gladly take an IBM PPC laptop with Linux pre-installed if offered!
Agreed. I always do a multi-day burn in of any new equipment, and repeat the test for any system that starts acting goofy. For Linux, for Windows, for BSD...anything.
The latest problem I've found: If the secondary cache is enabled, my old Athlon (800) will crash at odd times under Linux. If it is turned off...no problems (though the system is slow). Memtest found the error. Haven't figured out if it is the CPU or the system board...probably won't bother!
This might not just be Windows Server 2003 with an extra service, it might just be the windows kernel and the required code for HPC.
I agree that this is probably what they will do. Add in a management console and ditch the GUI on the nodes, and it probably could be very light weight. With few of the regular code running on the nodes, it will probably be very stable and quick -- in comparison to trimming down what Microsoft currently is shipping.
It can't be nearly as light weight or as customizable as something that already has a group of excited and established researchers that aren't restricted by propriatory/closed licences from modifying and distributing code. It's just not possible for Microsoft to pull this off!
I'd be more interested in making an HPC from one of the BSDs let alone Linux. Windows is and will be a hard sell because it can't scale nearly as well.
...because Microsoft want's a clean slate when they deal with the EU and other much larger threats.
What's $12 million to a company making that much profit in a few hours? Getting asked about these annoyances or having them show up as evidence is dangerous. Saying "we settled that dispute, your honor" is well worth it.
Make no mistake, Microsoft executives have not learned anything since there's nothing to learn. It's entirely intentional.
GPL or not...with the source, it's more likely that you or someone else who wants to migrate can be able to move on without loosing data. Much of the work is already done for you...or the format might be understandable enough to parse it out yourself...and allow you to move on to the tool of your choice.
What possible motivation would a propriatory application provider have to help you migrate?
That's one of the reasons why I chose Bugzilla for a defect tracking system...a migration path to Scarab and other tools was already available!
This is the reason why Microsoft Office is such a PITA and why they have such a dominate hold on Microsoft and potential Microsoft Office customers.
Agreed...though I'm very puzzled why the stock price is still above the $3 mark (the price when they started this mess about 13 months ago).
Why isn't it at $2 or even lower?
If someone is pumping up the stock price, they can't do it forever...it's got to collapse sometime! (Doesn't it?)
That's exactly it. Why is it that most of the comments here say "Good...Linux needed more professionalism/riggor/process/...."
I'm Mr Process myself. I ~love~ the SEI-CMM, will quote you hymn and verse from project plans, will dog you if you are sloppy and can't file a defect report on stuff you yourself wrote or if you mis-categorize it. Process is important because it makes people focus on doing the right thing when they don't want to.
OTOH...I've also been following Linux (the kernel) for years and how it is managed. The added test suite is fantastic, as is Linus' stand on using the best tools for the task. Linus and the other core Linux developers are already motivated to do the right thing so adding more formal processes in that don't help with development is not a good thing. It's sad. I have no doubt that this extra layer will not get in the way...so it's not too sad!
Prevent? Nothing will do that short of turning SCO corp. into a legal crater as an example of any other company foolish enough to attempt the same stunt.
The kernel development process is about as public, auditable, and open as I can imagine. (Yes, there are some with better audit controls, though most of those projects are quite private or secret!)
Any code that has substance goes in has a name associated with it in the change log, and historic versions of the kernel are available going back 10+ years. I don't know of any closed commercial application I've ever worked with that can say the same...usually, it's a couple years, major releases (maybe), and forks. That's it!
Don't organize, obliterate!
Beyond the normal trash, broken, and consumed stuff that should be thrown away anyway...
We're talking the big can that you drag to the curb. It might even have rollers on it.
Looks like you, like me, are over due. Maybe make it 2 cans of just equipment?
Where does it go? To your friends, your local LUG, sell it on Ebay, in second hand stores, library book drive, or toss it in the recycle/garbage pile.
Things I'm getting rid of: Power cords, low-grade and excess IDE and floppy cables, system boards, ISA cards (bundle them with system boards or toss), spare 56K modems, boxes, questionable devices (may be defective), memory (small or odd pinouts), hard drives, CD drives, ink jet printers (it's almost 'use ink, toss printer' these days), Sparc Stations, dozens of various cables, ... and on and on and on. I'll probably have a half dozen empty bins when I'm done this year.
Your friends, local LUG, Ebay, second hand stores, library book drive, or recycle/garbage.
That brings me to the fire sale rule...
Thanks! It doesn't seem to make any difference...maybe a meta moderator will figure it out.
The bold parts below are what I wrote (check the thread to verify this);
It's also for Mars, not the moon or space.
(That said, Mars only has 0.01 Earth atmospheres...so it may as well be the moon.)
Agreed. I'm getting borred with folks draging up OS/2 when Wine is mentioned. The two aren't similar enough to draw an useful comparison.
I fail to see the problem.
The insignia shows that Mars is only one in a chain. Quite appropriate, me thinks!
While I think there are good reasons to send people to Mars, I'll pose a devil's avocate question to you;
Overall, machines do some things very well...or they can be made -- created and instructed -- to do them. An initial manned mission will likely be light and last a few months or weeks. Additional missions (if any) will likely include a hell of a lot of hardware to set up a long-term base there. I don't expect the second trip to occur for 50+ years...Mars just doesn't offer much in exploitable resources! :O
...and Loki is reborn! (Ya, right.)
Thanks for letting me know that it's a more general issue -- not just with the Linux port.
With the Linux port, though, I can run it in software mode just not with 3D. You probably can too...though software mode is horrid.
It's also for Mars, not the moon or space.
(That said, Mars only has 0.01 Earth atmospheres...so it may as well be the moon.)
What is it with that damn song??? 1980s Rod Stewert throwback. My first thought was "OH, that sucks" and the show itself has only done slightly better.
I'd be happy if Heretic II (Linux) could be fixed. It's a great game, though it's also one of the few titles from Loki that no longer works on a modern distribution.
If that sounds cynical, I'm sorry. But it's true: corporations work for profit, and as far as I can see the only reason a corporation would want to recycle PCs is to get new ones out on the market. NO OTHER REASON.
It's simpler than that.
Try this test: When you read an advertisement, consider the opposite of what it says or attempts to get you to feel.
What was more likely?
The advertisement as-is.
The opposite of the advertisement.
The reason for that is that people focus on negitives. A product with 90% good parts, and one major defect is a hard sell. Advertisement not only promote a product (or company, or group, or...), they also try and minimize that 10% or even eliminate it.
There is. Go to the Mozilla Marketing Project and take a look.
To submit a marketing request, go to the main Bugzilla database, and select Marketing as the category.
Some of the other ones are good too!
When I worked tech support, there were two types of customer calls that were hard to handle;
Clueless and combative.
Quite smart and well researched.
With the clueless and nasty, you know the deal.
With the smart customer who has done the work up front, you *still* have to walk them through a few steps that show *you* that what they say is real. If you don't, chances are that there will be something incredibly stupid the normally smart person did/did not do...and you'll both think that "it can't be that".
The easiest calls?
Anyone interested in solving the problem and will follow directions.
Tech support is not a career. Most people quit or move on around 6-9 months after starting since it is too stressful and your co-workers are typically clueless. If you can do something else, you probably will.
I tried to explain the same thing to Earthlink...shortly before I dropped them. Even bent over backward by grabbing a power cord and going outside to the telco hookup, disconnecting my phone line, and connecting directly to it...still, no light...still they kept asking what my computer's network settings were! The on-site support also mangled the wires from the telco hookup to the rest of the house.
Over the same period of time, what is the ratio of hits that you get on the unpublished root vs. the published one? That might give an idea of what the real IE brower share is for your site (tossing out bot and virus probing).