Yeah I guess they always have to look out for their top-end line, but with the likes of Dell, Compaq, Gateway etc etc having offered 17" screens standard with a lot of their 'entry-level' systems for a long time now, I would have thought that a 17" screen *is* entry level, and coupled with the unexpandable (compared to the G4 Tower) iMac chassis, wouldn't have cut into professional sales too badly.
I will admit that a 15" flat panel has almost the same viewable area as a 17" CRT, but a low-cost iMac with a cheaper 17" CRT screen wouldn't cut into existing Apple markets too badly...I think it would create a new one. OS X has generated a lot of interest lately, and not everyone can afford a G4 Tower at the top end, or be restricted to a 15" screen iMac at the low end.
Anyhoo what the hell do I know about Macs anyway...I'm typing this message on a Dell Inspiron 4100, and the only Mac we have around here is a sad little indigo iMac we use for Mac IE testing...it's too sloooooooow to use for anything else
an iMac with a 17" screen...wasn't this the thing that people have been clamouring for, and rumours flying over ever since the original iMac was launched? this is what a hell of a lot of people have been waiting for, and apple decides to release it for the educational market only? i don't get it...it uses a CRT, so there should be a lot fewer problems with supply, and it has to be cheaper to produce than the new flat-panel iMac with moving parts, so you can flood the consumer market with it. steve moves in mysterious ways...
Fisher Price faceplates
on
PDAs For Kids
·
· Score: 1
Sounds like my girlfriend's Palm m105. She's got this pastel blue faceplate for it that makes it look like a FisherPrice toy. Don't get any PlayDoh in your PDA!
Sounds good, except we're in Sydney. The p620 is only about 4 months old, and we're IBM business partners, so we shouldn't have any trouble getting the problem looked at (if IBM acknowledges it). We have a p660 turning up any day, so it'll be interesting to see if it acts the same way
I admin Solaris (both SPARC and x86) Tru64 on the Alpha, Irix and Linux. The SPARC, Alpha, and MIPS boxen just DON'T go down barring a power outage or a hard drive failure, which can and will happen on ANY architecture.
Can you drop by our server room for an hour or two and try and find out why our IBM p620 running AIX 5.1L keeps crashing without explanation every 50-60 days? I wish our RISC hardware was as reliable as some of our beige-box Intel Linux machines...
the entry price for.Net development was a $1000/year MSDN subscription. Right!
Are you complaining about a $1000 per year cost to develop for.NET? Sure, it would be better if it was free, but seriously...who except for maybe 13 year old at-home hackers isn't going to be able to afford $2.73 a day if they want to develop commercial apps for.NET? I know everyone around here expects companies to just give away everything for free and pay their employees with bananas or something, but $1000/year seems pretty reasonable to me (and no I'm not an MS stooge, I use Linux, Perl and Java for my work...all free...but I would happily pay $2.73/day if necessary to get access to these tools...my ADSL costs more than that and it barely works...thanks Telstra).
so giving other companies a chance to fix the mess they've made of the computing industry.
I for one look forward to having a group of altruistic, community minded, morally just companies like Oracle, Sun, IBM and AOL step into the vacuum left by Microsoft, and get straight to work fixing all the mess. God knows that with crusaders for justice like Scott McNeally and Larry Ellison on our side, it should only be a short matter of time before things are set straight. The rest of the industry thanks you for your insight!
I thought it was only crystallographers and protein modellers who bought up all the SGI stuff. All the attention recently seems to have been focussed on Compaq Alphas (Celera, EBI + others), or Intel Linux clusters (everyone else). The company I work for has recently become a strategic partner with IBM, so of we're now doing all our proteomics on RS/6000s (or pSeries, to keep up with the IBM lingo). Not that I would mind if we got some SGIs...they're a lot nice to look at than a big black slab of IBM:-)
It's interesting to note what the sources of the quotes surrounding the PowerBook are. Three of them are from people working in the life sciences or associated fields (one guy from the Brain Mapping Centre at UCLA, another one from the genetics department at Stanford, and the third from a cheminformatics company). Even Tim O'Reilly is showing an interest in the life sciences computing market these days (another person who is quoted in the ad) by publishing a series of books about bioinformatics.
Apples have long been used in educational and research settings, but over the last few years, Linux workstations have becoming more and more frequent (especially in light of the need for everyday labs working in genomics and proteomics to be paying more attention to their data generation and analysis). I wonder if Apple is recognising this and specifically targeting people working in bioinformatics and life science research to try and win them back to their 'traditional' platform?
agreed. sun desktop hardware is fucking disgusting. it boils my blood to see an ultra 5 or ultra 10 (or even a blade 100) sitting on someone's desk when it isn't being used to stop papers from blowing away. low quality components, terrible performance, a healthy hatred of the desktop user, and complete fucking highway robbery in terms of cost.
fuck you sun. you're a dinosaur, and ironically, you're going to be destroyed by IBM within the next 5 years.
we're entering an age of Pax Americana, where the US military is so dominant that competitors exist only at our sufferance
Except when the competitors are invisible and you're still only vaguely sure of their location and numbers after they launch a devastating attack.
Al Qaeda killed more US citizens in 1 hour than were killed in Grenada, Panama, Iraq, Bosnia, Kosovo and Afghanistan combined. All competitors have done is change the way in which they compete.
I'm not sure IBM would need to buy Sun. If they keep up the pressure in the UNIX server space the same way that they have been doing for the past 12 months or so, they might be able to eat up a substantial portion of Sun's current market.
What will be very interesting is when (if?) IBM brings the POWER4 chip down the line from the p690. This has already happened with the p670. A 1.1GHz or 1.3GHz POWER4 chip in a low-cost, lower-end machine, like a 4 or 8 way server, would put some intense pressure on Sun and stuff like their V880.
The Java angle is also interesting...would IBM need Sun to dominate Java? They already claim to have the largest group of Java developers in the world. They produce their own quality Java compiler and JVM. They have a highly competitive Java application server and framework, and a suite of GUI RAD tools to go with them. They have a strong database server that links in with the app server, and supports Java too. In some respects, IBM's Java position may be stronger than Sun's. Maybe.
This hasn't stopped the traditional Unix vendors bragging about their new 1GHz chips, after spending most of the last 12 months or so downplaying the 1GHz + raw clock speeds of Intel and AMD CPUs. Face it...Sun, IBM, SGI, HP and Compaq are only too happy to talk endlessly about superior architectures and special 64-bitness when their chips are lagging in raw clock speed. But as soon as they hit the magic 1000MHz...witness the breathless hype spewing from IBM about the POWER4, and the recent press releases from Sun about their new Blade 2000 workstation ("the industry's first 1 GHz 64-bit workstation!")
Are Sun, IBM, or HP there even yet? I know they're getting close.
IBM hit the 1 GHz mark last year with the POWER4 and the p690 'Regatta'. You can get it at up to 1.3GHz I believe. Sun also recently announced a workstation line based on a 1GHz UltraSPARC III.
How long did they support the RS/6000 well beyond its useful limit? Oops...we've just bought a p620 and a p660 from IBM. We'd better send them back and get something else. You might be half-right...I'm not sure if AIX 5.1L runs on the older MCA-based RS/6000 systems. Does anyone know?
#... and KDE: P3/400 or better, with 32 MB RAM or better (and 64MB RAM is much better!:-)
I'd say 128MB if you want to actually use the machine for anything except driving around the desktop applets. I was stuck with a Toshiba Tecra 750 (P233MMX, 64MB RAM) for a few weeks, running KDE. It was abominable. Recommending 64MB on any machine to a new user trying KDE is a sure fire way to make sure they never touch Linux ever again.
Who'd have thought that there would have been enough interest in the Motorola CPU that powers the Palm family to make a movie of it? Tron was pretty popular I guess...
I know I should know this, but what does PFY stand for? I've been reading BOFH on The Register for about a year and I don't think I've ever seen it explained, and I'm far too stupid/lazy to figure it out.
it is likely more nearly comparable from a technical perspective to Oracle than just about any other DBMS available on Linux
You've never seen DB2 on Linux? IBM is arguably Oracle's strongest competitor in the RDBMS market, and DB2 is fully available and supported on Linux...even the EEE (clustering) version. I'm taking a wild shot here, but I'd guess that DB2 7.2 is probably more a technical match for Oracle 8/9 on Linux than SAP DB is.
i saw the same thing...then cynical bastard in me thinks it's because it was a story about HP preinstalling Mandrake on some of their desktop systems. bruce perens works at HP and is a notorious debian zealot. running a story about how a company that employs one of the hardest core debian fanatics around, yet then chooses to use mandrake on their desktops probably doesn't look very good for the debian loving guys at slashdot.
Mandrake and HP are doing something involving Linux on the desktop
So what happened to Bruce Peren's involvement with HP and their Linux efforts? Why no Debian on their desktops? Perhaps a tacit admission that Debian might be a little...inappropriate for their regular desktop customers but Mandrake isn't?
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Yeah I guess they always have to look out for their top-end line, but with the likes of Dell, Compaq, Gateway etc etc having offered 17" screens standard with a lot of their 'entry-level' systems for a long time now, I would have thought that a 17" screen *is* entry level, and coupled with the unexpandable (compared to the G4 Tower) iMac chassis, wouldn't have cut into professional sales too badly.
I will admit that a 15" flat panel has almost the same viewable area as a 17" CRT, but a low-cost iMac with a cheaper 17" CRT screen wouldn't cut into existing Apple markets too badly...I think it would create a new one. OS X has generated a lot of interest lately, and not everyone can afford a G4 Tower at the top end, or be restricted to a 15" screen iMac at the low end.
Anyhoo what the hell do I know about Macs anyway...I'm typing this message on a Dell Inspiron 4100, and the only Mac we have around here is a sad little indigo iMac we use for Mac IE testing...it's too sloooooooow to use for anything else
an iMac with a 17" screen...wasn't this the thing that people have been clamouring for, and rumours flying over ever since the original iMac was launched? this is what a hell of a lot of people have been waiting for, and apple decides to release it for the educational market only? i don't get it...it uses a CRT, so there should be a lot fewer problems with supply, and it has to be cheaper to produce than the new flat-panel iMac with moving parts, so you can flood the consumer market with it. steve moves in mysterious ways...
Sounds like my girlfriend's Palm m105. She's got this pastel blue faceplate for it that makes it look like a FisherPrice toy. Don't get any PlayDoh in your PDA!
Sounds good, except we're in Sydney. The p620 is only about 4 months old, and we're IBM business partners, so we shouldn't have any trouble getting the problem looked at (if IBM acknowledges it). We have a p660 turning up any day, so it'll be interesting to see if it acts the same way
I admin Solaris (both SPARC and x86) Tru64 on the Alpha, Irix and Linux. The SPARC, Alpha, and MIPS boxen just DON'T go down barring a power outage or a hard drive failure, which can and will happen on ANY architecture.
Can you drop by our server room for an hour or two and try and find out why our IBM p620 running AIX 5.1L keeps crashing without explanation every 50-60 days? I wish our RISC hardware was as reliable as some of our beige-box Intel Linux machines...
the entry price for .Net development was a $1000/year MSDN subscription. Right!
.NET? Sure, it would be better if it was free, but seriously...who except for maybe 13 year old at-home hackers isn't going to be able to afford $2.73 a day if they want to develop commercial apps for .NET? I know everyone around here expects companies to just give away everything for free and pay their employees with bananas or something, but $1000/year seems pretty reasonable to me (and no I'm not an MS stooge, I use Linux, Perl and Java for my work...all free...but I would happily pay $2.73/day if necessary to get access to these tools...my ADSL costs more than that and it barely works...thanks Telstra).
Are you complaining about a $1000 per year cost to develop for
so giving other companies a chance to fix the mess they've made of the computing industry.
I for one look forward to having a group of altruistic, community minded, morally just companies like Oracle, Sun, IBM and AOL step into the vacuum left by Microsoft, and get straight to work fixing all the mess. God knows that with crusaders for justice like Scott McNeally and Larry Ellison on our side, it should only be a short matter of time before things are set straight. The rest of the industry thanks you for your insight!
You're a 900 lb gorilla, you've been acting like one, now we're going to treat you like one.
Ummm....scream hopelessly at him and then proceed to be torn limb from limb? I thought that was already happening.
What a twit. I've seen plenty of Sun boxes with uptimes over 2 years. Try that with a 2.2GHz P4 (heheheh, had to go for the cheap shot).
That certainly would be difficult, since the 2.2GHz P4 has only been out for a month or two.
It's time for some Q&A.Let's start with familiar /. lore.
Q. Who invented the Internet?
Al Gore.
I thought it was only crystallographers and protein modellers who bought up all the SGI stuff. All the attention recently seems to have been focussed on Compaq Alphas (Celera, EBI + others), or Intel Linux clusters (everyone else). The company I work for has recently become a strategic partner with IBM, so of we're now doing all our proteomics on RS/6000s (or pSeries, to keep up with the IBM lingo). Not that I would mind if we got some SGIs...they're a lot nice to look at than a big black slab of IBM :-)
Middle management has been targeted for years by companies like IBM, Sun and Microsoft. This isn't news.
It's interesting to note what the sources of the quotes surrounding the PowerBook are. Three of them are from people working in the life sciences or associated fields (one guy from the Brain Mapping Centre at UCLA, another one from the genetics department at Stanford, and the third from a cheminformatics company). Even Tim O'Reilly is showing an interest in the life sciences computing market these days (another person who is quoted in the ad) by publishing a series of books about bioinformatics.
Apples have long been used in educational and research settings, but over the last few years, Linux workstations have becoming more and more frequent (especially in light of the need for everyday labs working in genomics and proteomics to be paying more attention to their data generation and analysis). I wonder if Apple is recognising this and specifically targeting people working in bioinformatics and life science research to try and win them back to their 'traditional' platform?
agreed. sun desktop hardware is fucking disgusting. it boils my blood to see an ultra 5 or ultra 10 (or even a blade 100) sitting on someone's desk when it isn't being used to stop papers from blowing away. low quality components, terrible performance, a healthy hatred of the desktop user, and complete fucking highway robbery in terms of cost.
fuck you sun. you're a dinosaur, and ironically, you're going to be destroyed by IBM within the next 5 years.
we're entering an age of Pax Americana, where the US military is so dominant that competitors exist only at our sufferance
Except when the competitors are invisible and you're still only vaguely sure of their location and numbers after they launch a devastating attack.
Al Qaeda killed more US citizens in 1 hour than were killed in Grenada, Panama, Iraq, Bosnia, Kosovo and Afghanistan combined. All competitors have done is change the way in which they compete.
What will be very interesting is when (if?) IBM brings the POWER4 chip down the line from the p690. This has already happened with the p670. A 1.1GHz or 1.3GHz POWER4 chip in a low-cost, lower-end machine, like a 4 or 8 way server, would put some intense pressure on Sun and stuff like their V880.
The Java angle is also interesting...would IBM need Sun to dominate Java? They already claim to have the largest group of Java developers in the world. They produce their own quality Java compiler and JVM. They have a highly competitive Java application server and framework, and a suite of GUI RAD tools to go with them. They have a strong database server that links in with the app server, and supports Java too. In some respects, IBM's Java position may be stronger than Sun's. Maybe.
This hasn't stopped the traditional Unix vendors bragging about their new 1GHz chips, after spending most of the last 12 months or so downplaying the 1GHz + raw clock speeds of Intel and AMD CPUs. Face it...Sun, IBM, SGI, HP and Compaq are only too happy to talk endlessly about superior architectures and special 64-bitness when their chips are lagging in raw clock speed. But as soon as they hit the magic 1000MHz...witness the breathless hype spewing from IBM about the POWER4, and the recent press releases from Sun about their new Blade 2000 workstation ("the industry's first 1 GHz 64-bit workstation!")
IBM hit the 1 GHz mark last year with the POWER4 and the p690 'Regatta'. You can get it at up to 1.3GHz I believe. Sun also recently announced a workstation line based on a 1GHz UltraSPARC III.
How long did they support the RS/6000 well beyond its useful limit?
Oops...we've just bought a p620 and a p660 from IBM. We'd better send them back and get something else. You might be half-right...I'm not sure if AIX 5.1L runs on the older MCA-based RS/6000 systems. Does anyone know?
I'd say 128MB if you want to actually use the machine for anything except driving around the desktop applets. I was stuck with a Toshiba Tecra 750 (P233MMX, 64MB RAM) for a few weeks, running KDE. It was abominable. Recommending 64MB on any machine to a new user trying KDE is a sure fire way to make sure they never touch Linux ever again.
Who'd have thought that there would have been enough interest in the Motorola CPU that powers the Palm family to make a movie of it? Tron was pretty popular I guess...
I know I should know this, but what does PFY stand for? I've been reading BOFH on The Register for about a year and I don't think I've ever seen it explained, and I'm far too stupid/lazy to figure it out.
it is likely more nearly comparable from a technical perspective to Oracle than just about any other DBMS available on Linux
You've never seen DB2 on Linux? IBM is arguably Oracle's strongest competitor in the RDBMS market, and DB2 is fully available and supported on Linux...even the EEE (clustering) version. I'm taking a wild shot here, but I'd guess that DB2 7.2 is probably more a technical match for Oracle 8/9 on Linux than SAP DB is.
i saw the same thing...then cynical bastard in me thinks it's because it was a story about HP preinstalling Mandrake on some of their desktop systems. bruce perens works at HP and is a notorious debian zealot. running a story about how a company that employs one of the hardest core debian fanatics around, yet then chooses to use mandrake on their desktops probably doesn't look very good for the debian loving guys at slashdot.
Mandrake and HP are doing something involving Linux on the desktop
So what happened to Bruce Peren's involvement with HP and their Linux efforts? Why no Debian on their desktops? Perhaps a tacit admission that Debian might be a little...inappropriate for their regular desktop customers but Mandrake isn't?