Somebody please tell me that this is complete bullshit. Firstly, I can't even fathom a company being this arrogant about its own product. I thought that Microsoft's "per seat or per head, whichever is greater" Client Access Licensing was absurd. But more importantly, I can't believe that people would actually buy into a license like that.
Actually this is quite sane pricing from an enterprise model. Charging based on machine size has been the norm on mainframes for decades. It's actually a lot more flexible then per seat or per user licensing since you can have an infinite amount of users per installation. Well, as many users as your hardware will support.;) Oddly enough, this is what industry wanted CPU serial numbers for in the first place. They could check the number and verify the CPU speed and number to catch licensing violations. The only problem being that PC hardware is changed almost continuously when compared to mainframes.
I disagree, B&N must keep logs of who bought what, probably by law. If you buy some books near the beginning of the month and then forget about it and they don't arrive you won't know. Latter you get your credit card bill and wonder what this charge to B&N is. You go to their site and ask for a history of your purchases which jogs your memory. Or, the charge showes up and you know you didn't buy anything so you go to the site to find out what is going on. Without the historical information there is no way to find out who bought what when and resolve fraud issues. Plus, for tax audit purposes, businesses must keep their books for seven years, that includes all transaction data of what was bought for how much. While doesn't mandate keeping track of who purchased it, you must record billing transaction. That is why people say to use cash if you don't want to be tracked, they record cash transaction for product A amount B. With a credit card they do have to record the card number for fraud purposes just in case the credit card company or the owner come calling.
I don't think it is possible for a commercial entitiy to not record billing transactions, at least not legally. This, of course, has nothing to do with what ISP's log.
ISP's have managed to get common carrier status in the U.S.A., which means they can't be held responsible for what goes over thier network. As part of that, I believe (but don't know for sure) that they are legally responsible for recording certain information for law enforcement purposes. I wouldn't be surprised to find out that the law still stated it in TelCo terms. Normally I would do the research to find out what the law says regarding common carrier status and logging information, but, well, I'm lazy.;)
For starters, as others have pointed out, these are slave processors, so by definition, putting this in does not make an SMP box. The S in SMP stands for symmetric, and while the CPU's on the card are symmetric, the card is not symmetric with the main CPU(s).
The way this works is much closer to a mainframe running VM with partitioned systems underneath it. You submit a job by tossing it over the wall to the VM partition (in this case one of these cards) and wait for it to toss the results back. You can probably watch the job some way with a properly written VM subsystem. You probably can't run interactive programs on these cards and if you can, you really wouldn't want to since you would clobber the PCI bus sending keystrokes and screens back and forth. And don't even think about trying to run a GUI on one of these cards.
What these cards are perfect for is batch processing. You write up a queuing mechanism to accept jobs and farm them out to the cards as they become available. The main CPU would manage the UI and the queue. The Cards have their own memory (max 512mb which is not a lot for this type of work) so you can get reasonable performance as long as the data sets are small enough to be loaded into memory on the card.
What this means is that the type of processing you can do with these is limited by the PCI bandwidth and the memory on the card. I don't think this is as great and wonderful as it looks. It's really cool, and if you need to run lots of compute intensive programs with smallish data sets it then this is ideal, but it will choke on high transaction rates and large data environments. Databases are an absolute no-no unless you really hate your PCI bus and want to try and burn it out.
Trust has nothing to do with if you trust the software to work correctly or not. Trust has a very specific meaning when it comes to secure systems. Most likely he has the DOD Orange Book in mind. As far as I know, none of the free OS's have an Orange Book security rating (thats what MS is talking about when they claim NT is C2 certified). The reason for my thinking this is it costs a considerable amount of money to get a system certified in this manner. Up to C2 the amount of documentation needed is not overly burdensome that Open Source couldn't pull it off. Above that (B1, B2, B3, and A1) you need a mathmatically provable design and specification. You need huge amounts of documentation and checks at all points of development. It is possible, but highly unlikely that Open Source could achieve B1 or B2. IBM managed to achieve B1 back in the 80's with a particular version of MVS and RACF. Only one system (at least as of the early 90's when I was writing a paper of the subject) has ever achieved an A1 level. The joke was that the system got it's rating by never remaining up long enough for anyone to do anything with the system. Here are a couple of links for more information regarding the Orange Book: http://www.multics.demon.co.uk/orange/index.html http://jcs.mil/htdocs/teinfo/directives/soft/ds520 0.281.html
Law is a necessary evil, as it keeps Microsoft under some measure of control. Lawyers, on the other hand, make a living by stretching, slicing, and sundering the law to fit the arbitrary viewpoint of their respective benefactors.
I'm not bitter, mind you.;)
Just don't fall prey to the supposition that Law cannot exist without Lawyer.
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Actually this is quite sane pricing from an enterprise model. Charging based on machine size has been the norm on mainframes for decades. It's actually a lot more flexible then per seat or per user licensing since you can have an infinite amount of users per installation. Well, as many users as your hardware will support. ;) Oddly enough, this is what industry wanted CPU serial numbers for in the first place. They could check the number and verify the CPU speed and number to catch licensing violations. The only problem being that PC hardware is changed almost continuously when compared to mainframes.
I disagree, B&N must keep logs of who bought what, probably by law. If you buy some books near the beginning of the month and then forget about it and they don't arrive you won't know. Latter you get your credit card bill and wonder what this charge to B&N is. You go to their site and ask for a history of your purchases which jogs your memory. Or, the charge showes up and you know you didn't buy anything so you go to the site to find out what is going on. Without the historical information there is no way to find out who bought what when and resolve fraud issues. Plus, for tax audit purposes, businesses must keep their books for seven years, that includes all transaction data of what was bought for how much. While doesn't mandate keeping track of who purchased it, you must record billing transaction. That is why people say to use cash if you don't want to be tracked, they record cash transaction for product A amount B. With a credit card they do have to record the card number for fraud purposes just in case the credit card company or the owner come calling.
I don't think it is possible for a commercial entitiy to not record billing transactions, at least not legally. This, of course, has nothing to do with what ISP's log.
ISP's have managed to get common carrier status in the U.S.A., which means they can't be held responsible for what goes over thier network. As part of that, I believe (but don't know for sure) that they are legally responsible for recording certain information for law enforcement purposes. I wouldn't be surprised to find out that the law still stated it in TelCo terms. Normally I would do the research to find out what the law says regarding common carrier status and logging information, but, well, I'm lazy. ;)
For starters, as others have pointed out, these are slave processors, so by definition, putting this in does not make an SMP box. The S in SMP stands for symmetric, and while the CPU's on the card are symmetric, the card is not symmetric with the main CPU(s).
The way this works is much closer to a mainframe running VM with partitioned systems underneath it. You submit a job by tossing it over the wall to the VM partition (in this case one of these cards) and wait for it to toss the results back. You can probably watch the job some way with a properly written VM subsystem. You probably can't run interactive programs on these cards and if you can, you really wouldn't want to since you would clobber the PCI bus sending keystrokes and screens back and forth. And don't even think about trying to run a GUI on one of these cards.
What these cards are perfect for is batch processing. You write up a queuing mechanism to accept jobs and farm them out to the cards as they become available. The main CPU would manage the UI and the queue. The Cards have their own memory (max 512mb which is not a lot for this type of work) so you can get reasonable performance as long as the data sets are small enough to be loaded into memory on the card.
What this means is that the type of processing you can do with these is limited by the PCI bandwidth and the memory on the card. I don't think this is as great and wonderful as it looks. It's really cool, and if you need to run lots of compute intensive programs with smallish data sets it then this is ideal, but it will choke on high transaction rates and large data environments. Databases are an absolute no-no unless you really hate your PCI bus and want to try and burn it out.
Trust has nothing to do with if you trust the software to work correctly or not. Trust has a very specific meaning when it comes to secure systems. Most likely he has the DOD Orange Book in mind. As far as I know, none of the free OS's have an Orange Book security rating (thats what MS is talking about when they claim NT is C2 certified). The reason for my thinking this is it costs a considerable amount of money to get a system certified in this manner. Up to C2 the amount of documentation needed is not overly burdensome that Open Source couldn't pull it off. Above that (B1, B2, B3, and A1) you need a mathmatically provable design and specification. You need huge amounts of documentation and checks at all points of development. It is possible, but highly unlikely that Open Source could achieve B1 or B2. IBM managed to achieve B1 back in the 80's with a particular version of MVS and RACF. Only one system (at least as of the early 90's when I was writing a paper of the subject) has ever achieved an A1 level. The joke was that the system got it's rating by never remaining up long enough for anyone to do anything with the system. Here are a couple of links for more information regarding the Orange Book: http://www.multics.demon.co.uk/orange/index.html http://jcs.mil/htdocs/teinfo/directives/soft/ds520 0.281.html
Strong words from an Anonymous Coward. If those words make sense, why won't you tell us who said them?
-c.
Law is a necessary evil, as it keeps Microsoft under some measure of control. Lawyers, on the other hand, make a living by stretching, slicing, and sundering the law to fit the arbitrary viewpoint of their respective benefactors.
;)
I'm not bitter, mind you.
Just don't fall prey to the supposition that Law cannot exist without Lawyer.
-c.