What we don't know from the original article because there is a bit of sensationalist language in it is if the assumption that the VME system was installed on ICL hardware from 1974 and has existed and functioned ever since without update. Keep in mind that the current product is software-only running on x86/x64 gear from Fujitsu and is called OpenVME. There have been several intervening generations of hardware and software from 2900 to Series 39 to Trimetra/Nova and Supernova. How do we know from this article that they didn't buy or upgrade one or more times yet keep their apps basically the same (what works) on the same development platform? I don't believe the original 1974 hardware unchanged could cope with or keep up with business load for that department... I/O beast that it might have been for the time. It was probably upgraded/expanded in the 80's and 90's at least once or twice. The 70's disk drives alone wouldn't hold much (200MB and 40MB platters). That might not be a problem for a simple OS image, system files, and their apps but I think the data created would eventually start to fill available storage pretty quick.
This is why I see the future being Tesla (electric), Diesel, and Diesel-Electric Hybrid (benefits of both). The alternative diesel fuels are easier to source and more widely varied (veggie oils anyone?). There really is no excuse to use a petrol-electric hybrid when a diesel-electric is better. Now if they ever discover a way to use Thorium efficiently, then there is probably option 4 out there.
I totally agree with this. I'd eat an occasional pizza, mexican, mac n' cheese, or Indian meal as a treat and totally live on this kind of thing. I'd like to see it in dry biscuit or cookie form or perhaps gelatin too. I don't always want to drink my meals. Maybe even as a 3D-printing paste... or... solid biscuits and paste-filling (sandwich)
Why attack Apple for pricing products so they make the same profit in every market per person? There's no reason why a $39,000 Nissan 350Z (I had a 2008GT) should cost $67,000 AUD. Everything costs more over here. This is made worse now that the USD is less valuable then the AUD.
I'd say the Australian government should be going after the automotive industry and many others to lower their prices and cost of living substantially. It doesn't cost that much to put a car on a boat and ship it. Japan to the US? (Low US price). Japan to Australia (shorter distance) (price almost double US model)
The entire Kernel is developed by the open source community, let alone all the core-applications and libraries. Apple would have NEVER been Apple making the swith to x86 in such a (seemingly) short amount of time. Why? it has already been prepared for by the Open Darwin Team to make that step a long time before Apple even decided to change CPU-vendors. Yes, Apple doesn't even pay their Kernel developers!
This is totally false. Open Darwin did not exist before OS X. Open Darwin was the base system released to the open source community under the Apple Public License. OS X is based on NeXT's version of BSD 4.4 lite on top of Mach, and yes they did write the kernel or more precisely Andy Tanenbaum and Avie Tevanian of NeXT were the creators of the Mach microkernel and the guts of NEXTSTEP, OPENSTEP, and OS X (nee Rhapsody). OS X is not simply BSD Lite, nor an open source OS.
In addition, Apple did a lot of work with Linux on Mach (MkLinux) a while back as well. You have the entire process backwards. Apple is getting the benefit of open source developer's attentions and bug fixing after originally releasing the skeleton of their OS as Darwin.
They've gone from a good architecture POWER/PPC (32 bit from the start and 64 bit for almost 10 years) to a crappy obsolete one (x86) descended from 8 bit machines.
I often enjoy reading Dvorak, but this is just nonsense. Apple's usability comes from their software. Nobody buys Mac because of the hardware no matter what they say.
I did. I bought a Quad G5 because I wanted a PowerPC based Mac and it was time to buy a new one. When there are no more PPC macs left, I'll find an old IBM pSeries box and switch to AIX full time. I already have a 44P Quad 375 next to my Quad Powermac.
We've tried bullying fat people to "quit eating so much and go for a walk" for decades now. Results have not been stellar. Maybe we ought to try something else. Maybe it might be worth a shot to afford them the dignity of any other human beings, and find ways to help them get thinner.
It's not like fat people want to be fat. You can't even make the case that the pleasures of eating and relaxation (or avoiding the discomfort of working out and going hungry) are more important to them than their health and appearance. There are people who are suicidal over their weight, and willing to endure painful, dangerous, ill-advised medical procedures to correct it.
Some fat people want to be fat. Here's an idea, lets leave people the f*** alone. If people cannot be arsed to eat healthily and get regular exercise, then that's their choice. Some people will get fat doing that others won't (according to genetics).
Obesity is not a disease and it's not an epidemic. The diet industry just wants you to think it is so they can get controversial drugs approved for greater profit. So they can keep people slaves to their bodies and the industry. It's the same thing all over life.
Lets leave fat people alone, there's nothing wrong with them.
We've been lied to horribly for the last 3-4 years. Clock for clock intels are as powerful as PowerPC. So when I bought my 1.8GHz iMac G5 it was already slower than equivalent PCs. Now thats all very well and good, except that Apple were screaming that it was faster, better, stronger. That you would be mad to even think about buying Intel, and I sucked it up. Its not even like they didn't know the truth. They've been developing Mac OS X on intel for the last 5 years, so they new they were onto a looser with PowerPC and they still over sold.
Now I'm very happy with my Mac, but the smug sense of superiority that I bought with the Mac has been wiped out. I miss being inside the RDF.
I don't believe Apple's benchmark personally. I feel they are inflating that graph partially through a benchmark which allows both cores of the duo to be used highly effectively. The performance between a 1.8 Ghz G5 and a 1.8 Ghz Pentium M is very close at the iMac system bus speed which sucks. If you were to race a desktop G5 dual 2 with a 1Ghz system bus against a dual Pentium M 2Ghz with whatever bus Intel can manage, you'd have a better comparison. If you then did more tests and stuff that applies to real world work the Intel would start to look like crap. Peecees do one thing at a time very fast. Give them 20 simultaneous tasks and they fall on their ass.
This still says nothing about how we're still saddled with a processor in modern use that has 8 bit direct ancestors. It kind of makes very little sense for Apple to replace a modern 32 bit architecture from 1992 (64 bit for a long time with the advent of the RS64 in the later 90's) with a 70's architecture whose ancestors were used in calculators. Apple won't be better than the competition speed-wise and they'll never really be that unique again.
Given that Apple did need a modern Powerbook processor, maybe they should have gone with x86 in laptops and PowerPC in desktops permanently.
Well it's back to crap choices in the consumer market... nothing distinguishes itself any longer.
Personally I'm not a smoker, but I am certainly not in favor of America making yet more laws to control what we can and cannot have like they're our mommies. We've already lost enough of our civil liberties. If tobacco companies can make safer cigarettes (truly safer which means being federally mandated to filter the nicotine too), they'll lose profits and shrink to a manageable size. We'll have less smokers and 90% of them will be recreational and casual users. (I like one or two a month at a bar). We'll also have less of the government interfering with out lives like they did with marijuana (not because it was bad but because it would bankrupt the paper companies). Tobacco companies need to be held liable for health problems and smacked continuously until they divest 80% of their tobacco business and start making normal, reasonable, and healthy products...which aims at why I am responding here. I believe in breaking tobacco addiction and I believe a "safer cigarette" (not in this iteration perhaps but if we keep going, future developments will yield one) will assist greatly in this as opposed to the knee-jerk reaction many anti-smoking people have where they want to ban all smoking and make cigarettes illegal.
It's also widely known that Gates may be a shrewd businessman but he is not a genius and is quite bad at many of his undertakings... one of which being programming. One has to merely read the accounts by some of his teachers on electronic projects. The man is no technical genius. The number one thing that matters to him is business... the business of Microsoft and dominance.
Besides... a technical genius would not have allowed Windows to escape the lab.
Ozone tends to react with rubbers and other non-metallic compounds that may be used in different parts of the machine. It might destroy the cooling fans and other plastic items.
...And if IBM says: why would we work with the #2 processos archeteture (powerpc)?
For IBM... PowerPC is #1. Don't ever fool yourself on this one. This is one of the top moneymakers for IBM along with zSeries, pSeries stuff stomps all over the other UNIX high-end vendors now that most of them are committed to PieTanic and/or cancelling most of their next generation processors.
POWER is going somewhat open too... so IBM is planning to hook up lots of foundry deals.
These chips are used in everything from Cisco routers, to Tivos, to Apple computers, to pSeries boxen, to XBox 2 and Gamecube.
These are IBM's bread and butter... and if they play their cards right will replace Intel's market in about 4-6 years. (finally x86 will go away too... it's about time that 70's calculator based architecture died [and most people could argue based on the oldest and slowest example of an architecture, but in this case x86 has many holdovers still in the ISA that are from those days]) -- in this case PPC was 1989-1991 or so with the 601 and POWER 1. Compare 1970's with 1990... and look at the room for growth.
4 General purpose registers and chained interrupts my a**
First HP makes PA-RISC. This turns out to be a kick-ass architecture with a lot of room to grow. Years go by and Intel enters into a partnership with HP to develop PA-RISC into Merced... nee Itanium. This is good. Intel of course bojos everything up and many millions of dollars later, we have really kick-ass PA-RISC chips and Itanium 1 which nobody gives a rats ass about. Some improvement later and we still have some even more kick-ass HPPA chips and Itanium 2 and its ilk.
Then $SUIT_IN_THE_EXTREME Carly decides after buying CornPACK and Tandem to say F*** all common sense... we have this next-gen PA-RISC design called MAKO and our current Superdomes that outperform Itanium 2 (but shhh don't publish those results)... lets throw it all out... HPPA, MIPS (Himalaya), Alpha, yes all the good processor technology we own... to be dependent on Intel who has no prior experience with 64 bits other than our partnership that makes crappy chips and bet the farm on Intel as being the bomb diggity of 64-bitness.
Now Intel realizes... WE GOOFED big time. WE HUFFED the SCO crack-pipe... lets make x86-64 (one big head smack for the obvious not occurring to them earlier, and another one for extending the life of x86 even farther). WHERE does this leave both Intel (with IBM and POWER4/5/6+ spanking their asses back to the stone age) and poor (NOT) HP who bet the farm on Itanic 2... ?
Oh this is too good.
I hope they both sink in the same boat.
and for AMD's sake I hope they add a fs*ckin thermistor to their procs so if the heat sink is loose they don't smoke themselves... (fsckin unacceptable).
This brings up the question of why Fax machines are still used anymore. Any slightly experienced computer user can easily send a color JPEG scan of a document via email in about the same time it would take to send a fax. For the technophobes, why isn't there some type of terminal that emulates faxing though email? It could either connect to an office ethernet or dial into an ISP at 56k, and send a scanned document as a color JPEG to any email address (which would probably be faster than traditional faxes, which send uncompressed TIFFs at 14.4kbps). If the recipient doesn't have a computer, the machine could function as a email to paper gateway, collecting and printing from a cheap POP3 email account. Am I missing something?
It's called an HP Digital Sender. Our office has one. Quite handy. You can have it fax through the phone line, or e-mail, though we only use the e-mail function. Scans paper docs in and sends pdf's. Much faster than a fax machine too. It doesn't print, however so it cannot receive faxes. I'm sure though you could just use one of those faxing copiers to receive stuff and send stuff in that manner.
I didn't say it was... but Solaris x86 was and is a serious UNIX that was around before Linux became popular. It was and is also more powerful than SCO's offerings.
There were in 1988 for that matter also Sinix 2.1, UNIX System V R 3.2 (AT&T), CTIX (386), and a number of other choices... some requiring proprietary x86 hardware, but available nonetheless.
Dont forget, that untill the whole mess started, SCO was considered the _only_ (commercial) unix that was worth anything on intel.
If you're going for commercial UNIX that is worth anything on Intel, you're forgetting Solaris 9 (8,7, 2.6, 2.5.1 for x86) is light years ahead of both Open Server (older), and Unixware (newer). Sol 9 is actually actively developed and supported these days.
Well we know that Gollum and the Spider from Return of the King don't like Linux... evidence... one dead penguin hanging upside down in the spider cave. One only wonders what evil trixes Gollum used to get the penguin to enter that cave.
Slashdot Mirror
What we don't know from the original article because there is a bit of sensationalist language in it is if the assumption that the VME system was installed on ICL hardware from 1974 and has existed and functioned ever since without update. Keep in mind that the current product is software-only running on x86/x64 gear from Fujitsu and is called OpenVME. There have been several intervening generations of hardware and software from 2900 to Series 39 to Trimetra/Nova and Supernova. How do we know from this article that they didn't buy or upgrade one or more times yet keep their apps basically the same (what works) on the same development platform? I don't believe the original 1974 hardware unchanged could cope with or keep up with business load for that department... I/O beast that it might have been for the time. It was probably upgraded/expanded in the 80's and 90's at least once or twice. The 70's disk drives alone wouldn't hold much (200MB and 40MB platters). That might not be a problem for a simple OS image, system files, and their apps but I think the data created would eventually start to fill available storage pretty quick.
This is why I see the future being Tesla (electric), Diesel, and Diesel-Electric Hybrid (benefits of both). The alternative diesel fuels are easier to source and more widely varied (veggie oils anyone?). There really is no excuse to use a petrol-electric hybrid when a diesel-electric is better. Now if they ever discover a way to use Thorium efficiently, then there is probably option 4 out there.
I totally agree with this. I'd eat an occasional pizza, mexican, mac n' cheese, or Indian meal as a treat and totally live on this kind of thing. I'd like to see it in dry biscuit or cookie form or perhaps gelatin too. I don't always want to drink my meals. Maybe even as a 3D-printing paste... or... solid biscuits and paste-filling (sandwich)
Quick... someone send Newt to Russia.
Why attack Apple for pricing products so they make the same profit in every market per person? There's no reason why a $39,000 Nissan 350Z (I had a 2008GT) should cost $67,000 AUD. Everything costs more over here. This is made worse now that the USD is less valuable then the AUD.
I'd say the Australian government should be going after the automotive industry and many others to lower their prices and cost of living substantially. It doesn't cost that much to put a car on a boat and ship it. Japan to the US? (Low US price). Japan to Australia (shorter distance) (price almost double US model)
The entire Kernel is developed by the open source community, let alone all the core-applications and libraries. Apple would have NEVER been Apple making the swith to x86 in such a (seemingly) short amount of time. Why? it has already been prepared for by the Open Darwin Team to make that step a long time before Apple even decided to change CPU-vendors. Yes, Apple doesn't even pay their Kernel developers!
This is totally false. Open Darwin did not exist before OS X. Open Darwin was the base system released to the open source community under the Apple Public License. OS X is based on NeXT's version of BSD 4.4 lite on top of Mach, and yes they did write the kernel or more precisely Andy Tanenbaum and Avie Tevanian of NeXT were the creators of the Mach microkernel and the guts of NEXTSTEP, OPENSTEP, and OS X (nee Rhapsody). OS X is not simply BSD Lite, nor an open source OS.
In addition, Apple did a lot of work with Linux on Mach (MkLinux) a while back as well. You have the entire process backwards. Apple is getting the benefit of open source developer's attentions and bug fixing after originally releasing the skeleton of their OS as Darwin.
They've gone from a good architecture POWER/PPC (32 bit from the start and 64 bit for almost 10 years) to a crappy obsolete one (x86) descended from 8 bit machines.
I often enjoy reading Dvorak, but this is just nonsense. Apple's usability comes from their software. Nobody buys Mac because of the hardware no matter what they say.
I did. I bought a Quad G5 because I wanted a PowerPC based Mac and it was time to buy a new one. When there are no more PPC macs left, I'll find an old IBM pSeries box and switch to AIX full time. I already have a 44P Quad 375 next to my Quad Powermac.
We've tried bullying fat people to "quit eating so much and go for a walk" for decades now. Results have not been stellar. Maybe we ought to try something else. Maybe it might be worth a shot to afford them the dignity of any other human beings, and find ways to help them get thinner.
It's not like fat people want to be fat. You can't even make the case that the pleasures of eating and relaxation (or avoiding the discomfort of working out and going hungry) are more important to them than their health and appearance. There are people who are suicidal over their weight, and willing to endure painful, dangerous, ill-advised medical procedures to correct it.
Some fat people want to be fat. Here's an idea, lets leave people the f*** alone. If people cannot be arsed to eat healthily and get regular exercise, then that's their choice. Some people will get fat doing that others won't (according to genetics).
Obesity is not a disease and it's not an epidemic. The diet industry just wants you to think it is so they can get controversial drugs approved for greater profit. So they can keep people slaves to their bodies and the industry. It's the same thing all over life.
Lets leave fat people alone, there's nothing wrong with them.
I'm too skinny. :-)
2x faster? 4x faster?
We've been lied to horribly for the last 3-4 years. Clock for clock intels are as powerful as PowerPC. So when I bought my 1.8GHz iMac G5 it was already slower than equivalent PCs. Now thats all very well and good, except that Apple were screaming that it was faster, better, stronger. That you would be mad to even think about buying Intel, and I sucked it up. Its not even like they didn't know the truth. They've been developing Mac OS X on intel for the last 5 years, so they new they were onto a looser with PowerPC and they still over sold.
Now I'm very happy with my Mac, but the smug sense of superiority that I bought with the Mac has been wiped out. I miss being inside the RDF.
I don't believe Apple's benchmark personally. I feel they are inflating that graph partially through a benchmark which allows both cores of the duo to be used highly effectively. The performance between a 1.8 Ghz G5 and a 1.8 Ghz Pentium M is very close at the iMac system bus speed which sucks. If you were to race a desktop G5 dual 2 with a 1Ghz system bus against a dual Pentium M 2Ghz with whatever bus Intel can manage, you'd have a better comparison. If you then did more tests and stuff that applies to real world work the Intel would start to look like crap. Peecees do one thing at a time very fast. Give them 20 simultaneous tasks and they fall on their ass.
This still says nothing about how we're still saddled with a processor in modern use that has 8 bit direct ancestors. It kind of makes very little sense for Apple to replace a modern 32 bit architecture from 1992 (64 bit for a long time with the advent of the RS64 in the later 90's) with a 70's architecture whose ancestors were used in calculators. Apple won't be better than the competition speed-wise and they'll never really be that unique again.
Given that Apple did need a modern Powerbook processor, maybe they should have gone with x86 in laptops and PowerPC in desktops permanently.
Well it's back to crap choices in the consumer market... nothing distinguishes itself any longer.
Personally I'm not a smoker, but I am certainly not in favor of America making yet more laws to control what we can and cannot have like they're our mommies. We've already lost enough of our civil liberties. If tobacco companies can make safer cigarettes (truly safer which means being federally mandated to filter the nicotine too), they'll lose profits and shrink to a manageable size. We'll have less smokers and 90% of them will be recreational and casual users. (I like one or two a month at a bar). We'll also have less of the government interfering with out lives like they did with marijuana (not because it was bad but because it would bankrupt the paper companies). Tobacco companies need to be held liable for health problems and smacked continuously until they divest 80% of their tobacco business and start making normal, reasonable, and healthy products...which aims at why I am responding here. I believe in breaking tobacco addiction and I believe a "safer cigarette" (not in this iteration perhaps but if we keep going, future developments will yield one) will assist greatly in this as opposed to the knee-jerk reaction many anti-smoking people have where they want to ban all smoking and make cigarettes illegal.
Now, the question is... what will the new platform be called? Certainly not PowerMac...
Power Efficient Mac?
Uh... for the most part Jobs statement about efficiency per watt was utter bullshit... even considering how efficient the Pentium M may be.
How about the Apple Macintosh Pentra or Celeris?
It's also widely known that Gates may be a shrewd businessman but he is not a genius and is quite bad at many of his undertakings... one of which being programming. One has to merely read the accounts by some of his teachers on electronic projects. The man is no technical genius. The number one thing that matters to him is business... the business of Microsoft and dominance.
Besides... a technical genius would not have allowed Windows to escape the lab.
Biscuit
Ozone tends to react with rubbers and other non-metallic compounds that may be used in different parts of the machine. It might destroy the cooling fans and other plastic items.
...And if IBM says: why would we work with the #2 processos archeteture (powerpc)?
For IBM... PowerPC is #1. Don't ever fool yourself on this one. This is one of the top moneymakers for IBM along with zSeries, pSeries stuff stomps all over the other UNIX high-end vendors now that most of them are committed to PieTanic and/or cancelling most of their next generation processors.
POWER is going somewhat open too... so IBM is planning to hook up lots of foundry deals.
These chips are used in everything from Cisco routers, to Tivos, to Apple computers, to pSeries boxen, to XBox 2 and Gamecube.
These are IBM's bread and butter... and if they play their cards right will replace Intel's market in about 4-6 years. (finally x86 will go away too... it's about time that 70's calculator based architecture died [and most people could argue based on the oldest and slowest example of an architecture, but in this case x86 has many holdovers still in the ISA that are from those days]) -- in this case PPC was 1989-1991 or so with the 601 and POWER 1. Compare 1970's with 1990... and look at the room for growth.
4 General purpose registers and chained interrupts my a**
First HP makes PA-RISC. This turns out to be a kick-ass architecture with a lot of room to grow. Years go by and Intel enters into a partnership with HP to develop PA-RISC into Merced... nee Itanium. This is good. Intel of course bojos everything up and many millions of dollars later, we have really kick-ass PA-RISC chips and Itanium 1 which nobody gives a rats ass about. Some improvement later and we still have some even more kick-ass HPPA chips and Itanium 2 and its ilk.
Then $SUIT_IN_THE_EXTREME Carly decides after buying CornPACK and Tandem to say F*** all common sense... we have this next-gen PA-RISC design called MAKO and our current Superdomes that outperform Itanium 2 (but shhh don't publish those results)... lets throw it all out... HPPA, MIPS (Himalaya), Alpha, yes all the good processor technology we own... to be dependent on Intel who has no prior experience with 64 bits other than our partnership that makes crappy chips and bet the farm on Intel as being the bomb diggity of 64-bitness.
Now Intel realizes... WE GOOFED big time. WE HUFFED the SCO crack-pipe... lets make x86-64 (one big head smack for the obvious not occurring to them earlier, and another one for extending the life of x86 even farther). WHERE does this leave both Intel (with IBM and POWER4/5/6+ spanking their asses back to the stone age) and poor (NOT) HP who bet the farm on Itanic 2... ?
Oh this is too good.
I hope they both sink in the same boat.
and for AMD's sake I hope they add a fs*ckin thermistor to their procs so if the heat sink is loose they don't smoke themselves... (fsckin unacceptable).
Anyone think SCO reminds them of Bela Oxmyx in A Piece of the Action...the Star Trek TOS episode? The whole SCO charade reminds me of that episode.
How do I set my laser printer on stun?
Wouldn't it be better if it was How do I set my Xerox Phaser on Stun?
This brings up the question of why Fax machines are still used anymore. Any slightly experienced computer user can easily send a color JPEG scan of a document via email in about the same time it would take to send a fax. For the technophobes, why isn't there some type of terminal that emulates faxing though email? It could either connect to an office ethernet or dial into an ISP at 56k, and send a scanned document as a color JPEG to any email address (which would probably be faster than traditional faxes, which send uncompressed TIFFs at 14.4kbps). If the recipient doesn't have a computer, the machine could function as a email to paper gateway, collecting and printing from a cheap POP3 email account. Am I missing something?
It's called an HP Digital Sender. Our office has one. Quite handy. You can have it fax through the phone line, or e-mail, though we only use the e-mail function. Scans paper docs in and sends pdf's. Much faster than a fax machine too. It doesn't print, however so it cannot receive faxes. I'm sure though you could just use one of those faxing copiers to receive stuff and send stuff in that manner.
AFAIK, Solaris 9 was not around in the '80s.
I didn't say it was... but Solaris x86 was and is a serious UNIX that was around before Linux became popular. It was and is also more powerful than SCO's offerings.
There were in 1988 for that matter also Sinix 2.1, UNIX System V R 3.2 (AT&T), CTIX (386), and a number of other choices... some requiring proprietary x86 hardware, but available nonetheless.
Dont forget, that untill the whole mess started, SCO was considered the _only_ (commercial) unix that was worth anything on intel.
If you're going for commercial UNIX that is worth anything on Intel, you're forgetting Solaris 9 (8,7, 2.6, 2.5.1 for x86) is light years ahead of both Open Server (older), and Unixware (newer). Sol 9 is actually actively developed and supported these days.
Well we know that Gollum and the Spider from Return of the King don't like Linux... evidence... one dead penguin hanging upside down in the spider cave. One only wonders what evil trixes Gollum used to get the penguin to enter that cave.
You realize that faux is pronounced "foe" rather than "fox" right?
That sir is a fox paw! -- (see an early episode of The Daily Show)