In the origional, I didn't say that you have to give (I actually think the legislation mentioned in the blurb is stupid), I just said that it would pay you back to do so. The ROI on contributions here is incredible, it benefits both the giver and the project.
I also don't think that the contributions should be used as a club or an arm twisting mechanism. Influence is just that, and can be used for good or evil. If you are giving to a project, as opposed to an atempt to subsume it, you are probably acting altruisticly. In that case, the giving and the taking will most likely benefit all.
Anyone attempting to 'put on chains' should be bounced out of a project, and probably will be in short order. Isn't a true community process wonderful?
You are assuming that any time or money invested in the software will have no payback. Usually it does have payback, and a very good rate of return. If you have 10 people working on maintaining a set of servers, and with judicious coding, after a year of a half day a week coding, you could add a feature that would eliminate 2 jobs, what is the ROI?
Similarly, if you could ask the author to add that feature, and said you would pay him $5000 to do so, would it pay off? That is the point I was making in my origional article, it does pay you back, you just have to take a longer term view than next week.
I don't bite when people write me about my articles, that is why I put my e-mail on the top of every one:).
That said, if the people use it and love it, chances are that corporations are getting a benefit from it. I don't think the people contributing on their own time has the same power of contributing on corporate time.
The scenario I was imagining was that a company uses the software, and saves a ton of money doing so. An employee goes to his boss, and says 'Can I take friday afternoons to code a new feature and submit patches?'. In an ideal world, the boss would reply 'sure Bob, that would benefit us as well as the community, and it is a very good cost/benefit ratio' rather than the more common 'get bent, back to the mines'.
The reason I mentioned Nokia is not because of any thing the company did or did not to, it was because of an article that touched off something in my brain. I was reading an article in eWeek a few weeks ago about open source sucess stories, and there was one about a company that did sucessfully replace Nokia firewalls with OS stuff.
It clicked while I was reading the article that while every article about OS software touted huge savings, not a single one said anything in the slightest about giving back.
So, basically, it is based on a real case study. I don't have the magazine anymore, it is on a Northworst jet somewhere, so I can't quote specifics, but the idea isn't far off. So, the point about people being stupid for dumping proprietary stuff isn't borne out in the real world, at least according to eWeek.
Post the name of those places please. As a Minneapolinite with way to many parts, I could use a place like that. Hell, it might even make for an entertaining article, something like 'this is what happens to your old junk'.
I do agree that his contributions are great. He throws his money around in some really cool ways, and everyone I know who knows him says he is a really nice guy. Cool so far.
Then there is MS and Ticketmaster. Sorry, but he gets modded down to negative numbers for Ticketmaster alone. Ticketmaster, time to go shower, I wonder if steel wool would get the stain off of my soul for simply mentioning that blight.
I can't comment yet though, read the Inq, it will be there first. Athlon64s will be very cheap and very plentiful soon. By the time the 939s come out in late January/early Febuary, they will be all over the place, and they will get a good speed kick also. Can't talk about that either though, but it is not much of a secret at this point.
AMD will be introducing the 3000+ A64s next week. I am running off to snap a few pics of them now. All the details will be up on the Inq tomorrow morning, I don't want to scoop myself here though.:)
What I can say is: Lots and lots of them, no shortages here. They will be substantially cheaper than the current ~$400 Available to the public next week.
Last October (2002) I was talking to some AMD folk, and they indicated Sun was on board. Over the past year, those ties have gotten stronger, and the two companies have been getting closer and closer.
There are a bunch of boxes on the drawing board, the ones they announced are just the first of many. The delay is that there is no real support for Opterons until they ship Solaris 10, which is due in the not to distant future. Until that OS hits, the Opteron support will be pretty half baked, just Xeon code, and no real use of AMD64 extensions.
That said, without trying to sound to much like a whiny martyr, I have been writing this stuff up for the last year on the Inquirer, just no one believed me:). The first box that should hit is a dual CPU 1U opteron box, with a 4 way to follow shortly after that. The interesting stuff follows those vanilla boxes.
Sure, they are 12.73, 19.81, and 22.03 respectively. The hard part is figuring out the system specs I am quoting, and that will take a lot of testing, something I just don't have time for:(. If you do manage to figure it out, please post a reply though.
There is one thing most people don't realize about the Young Frankenstein monster's attacks on linux, they are not off the cuff responses. MS does rather carefull studies on what 'resonates' with CxO level buyers and attacks on that.
The last one of these had IP issues being the most scary to buyers, so they went after that, about the time the whole SCO thing surfaced. Before that. there were other avenues.
Since the whole IP liability issue is being handled rather deftly by the community, there is little to attack on anymore, so they went polling for the next round. The roadmap issue is the next 'attack point'.
Things like that don't get made up, it is not a broad enough topic to have been picked out of thin air. Expect to see a lot more of this in the near future, and when it gets summarily shot down, they will pay polsters and move on to the next topic. Same old same old. *YAWN*.
Patching windows won't do squat other than make you feel better for about a week. Then the next 3 holes are announced, and you are vulnerable. This is why I say Windows is insecurable, the best you can hope for is a very temporary safety window (no pun intended).
Do the patches work? Yes. Can you keep up? Nope. Should you stay on this train? Nope.
If you want to keep your systems secure, get rid of windows, nothing else will do. Before you mod me up for advocating Linux, I am not necessarily advocating it here. In fact, I would say go with a BSD probably NetBSD. If you need to go commercial, there are other choices, none as good though.
The point is, what is better? Everything. Sit where you are, advocating patches, and get screwed next time, you will. Even with a perfect record on patching as soon as they come out, there are exploits that are released before patches every so often. You need to be elsewhere to be safe.
For the MSCEs out there, here it is in simple terms. Imagine a giant hamster wheel. Imagine you are a hamster. Get off the #^&#%$# wheel!
No, I mean they didn't do so to me. They went on a 64-bit is worthless, and 100 watt CPUs are peachy tear shortly before and during IDF. I know where I got the info, and I know how those sources feel about Intel. None of those things were plants this time. The other thing is that the info ran counter to the official astroturf campaign that I was getting as a memeber of the media.
That said, look around, read up on it, and make up your own mind.:)
She is the 'Marketing Communication Manager' for ALi Microelectronics. No offense, but I am not going to put her name and number here:). What stuns me about the whole affair is that Hales labeled the pic right AND alt tagged it. I am shocked, and he must be much more bored than he tells me.
According to Le Inq, Prescott takes more than that. http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=11588 Now these may have been taken from a roadmap that I really should not have seen, but you can see that the 100w number is a bit conservative. The next few generations are specced to narrow the gap between min and max power usage, but not lessen it. Depressing.
I posted a bit about this above, but no, it is not their doing. They are going to be very very cross with me for this. I am expecting Magee to get a nasty letter from Intel PR about me. Luckily, he is in Taiwan this week, and will probably lose it in the shuffle:).
Think less of the conspiracy theory, and more towards what they did with Jackson technology. The very first P4 cores had a crappy version of Jackson, and it wasn't turned on. Those who managed to hack it on quickly realized that it wasn't all there yet.
I am pretty sure intel will do the same with the 64 bit functionality. They will at least have to wait until socket 775 makes it out before they start, the pins I was talking about are not there until those chips hit, so it is a moot point.
As for the power useage, AMD has a hard limit of 89w for any K8 cored CPU on a.13SOI process. They are nowhere near that, and since they just enabled the really advanced power management in the C stepping chips, they are even more efficient.
If you look at another of my IDF articles: http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=115 88 You will see what Intel has in store for the next 3 P4 generations. 125A?!? Holy shit.
-Charlie
Good point, one little problem.
on
Is Prescott 64-bit?
·
· Score: 4, Informative
I didn't consider timing when I wrote the story, or any of it's predecessors. Silly as I am going to the A64 launch tuesday. Anyway, I have been chasing this story since the chip-architect articles. The timing was unfortunate, but it wasn't an Intel plant, that much I can assure you.
For about 3 months, I have known there was 64 bit functionality there, but I didn't have enough to prove it to my own satisfaction. I chased leads, interviewed people, and got that info.
The fact that IDF brought me into close proximity with a ton of sources was the thing that got me so much info so quickly. There was only one thing from Intel directly, the rest were from third parties supporting the chip. If IDF had happened last January, I probably would have gotten the info then.
A really good example of what you are talking about is the G5. It simply extends an efficient architecture to 64 bits. Other than upping the memory limit, it does precious little to performance. The chip in 32 bit more is about as fast as 64 bit, and only starts to show a difference when memory useage gets large.
As for AMD, you can see the effect by running a program in 32 bit mode, then running a 32 bit program recompiled to take advantage of the registers in 'compatibility' mode. There is quite a difference.
There is a second article on Chip-Architect that goes into the 64-bitness in greater detail. I also linked to a few other sources. People keep talking about the exec bit that I had to make vague so the person who told me wouldn't get nailed. Take it as you will, but there is absolutely no doubt in my mind.
As the author of the article, I had to REALLY make things vague. The people involved would be hurt badly by Intel if their names got out. Some of the situations that were told to me make it quite apparent who was leaking. That was as specific as I could make it:(.
Slashdot Mirror
In the origional, I didn't say that you have to give (I actually think the legislation mentioned in the blurb is stupid), I just said that it would pay you back to do so. The ROI on contributions here is incredible, it benefits both the giver and the project.
I also don't think that the contributions should be used as a club or an arm twisting mechanism. Influence is just that, and can be used for good or evil. If you are giving to a project, as opposed to an atempt to subsume it, you are probably acting altruisticly. In that case, the giving and the taking will most likely benefit all.
Anyone attempting to 'put on chains' should be bounced out of a project, and probably will be in short order. Isn't a true community process wonderful?
-Charlie
You are assuming that any time or money invested in the software will have no payback. Usually it does have payback, and a very good rate of return. If you have 10 people working on maintaining a set of servers, and with judicious coding, after a year of a half day a week coding, you could add a feature that would eliminate 2 jobs, what is the ROI?
Similarly, if you could ask the author to add that feature, and said you would pay him $5000 to do so, would it pay off? That is the point I was making in my origional article, it does pay you back, you just have to take a longer term view than next week.
-Charlie
I don't bite when people write me about my articles, that is why I put my e-mail on the top of every one :).
That said, if the people use it and love it, chances are that corporations are getting a benefit from it. I don't think the people contributing on their own time has the same power of contributing on corporate time.
The scenario I was imagining was that a company uses the software, and saves a ton of money doing so. An employee goes to his boss, and says 'Can I take friday afternoons to code a new feature and submit patches?'. In an ideal world, the boss would reply 'sure Bob, that would benefit us as well as the community, and it is a very good cost/benefit ratio' rather than the more common 'get bent, back to the mines'.
-Charlie
The reason I mentioned Nokia is not because of any thing the company did or did not to, it was because of an article that touched off something in my brain. I was reading an article in eWeek a few weeks ago about open source sucess stories, and there was one about a company that did sucessfully replace Nokia firewalls with OS stuff.
It clicked while I was reading the article that while every article about OS software touted huge savings, not a single one said anything in the slightest about giving back.
So, basically, it is based on a real case study. I don't have the magazine anymore, it is on a Northworst jet somewhere, so I can't quote specifics, but the idea isn't far off. So, the point about people being stupid for dumping proprietary stuff isn't borne out in the real world, at least according to eWeek.
-Charlie
Post the name of those places please. As a Minneapolinite with way to many parts, I could use a place like that. Hell, it might even make for an entertaining article, something like 'this is what happens to your old junk'.
-Charlie
I do agree that his contributions are great. He throws his money around in some really cool ways, and everyone I know who knows him says he is a really nice guy. Cool so far.
Then there is MS and Ticketmaster. Sorry, but he gets modded down to negative numbers for Ticketmaster alone. Ticketmaster, time to go shower, I wonder if steel wool would get the stain off of my soul for simply mentioning that blight.
-Charlie
> Can't keep your big mouth shut, can you ?
:).
And what site do I work for? Duh. Give me credit for at least having the decency to not spill the K9 beans yet. Not a slow enough news day
> We're also locking you in a closet overnight with Leslie Cochran.
That kind of reminds me of the Athlon64 launch. What is it with AMD and street walking transvestites anyway?
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=11792
-Charlie
I can't comment yet though, read the Inq, it will be there first. Athlon64s will be very cheap and very plentiful soon. By the time the 939s come out in late January/early Febuary, they will be all over the place, and they will get a good speed kick also. Can't talk about that either though, but it is not much of a secret at this point.
-Charlie
They broke NDA and will get bitch slapped by AMD. The price is higher than you will find it for in less than a week, so buy early, buy high.
-Charlie
AMD will be introducing the 3000+ A64s next week. I am running off to snap a few pics of them now. All the details will be up on the Inq tomorrow morning, I don't want to scoop myself here though. :)
What I can say is:
Lots and lots of them, no shortages here.
They will be substantially cheaper than the current ~$400
Available to the public next week.
-Charlie
Last October (2002) I was talking to some AMD folk, and they indicated Sun was on board. Over the past year, those ties have gotten stronger, and the two companies have been getting closer and closer.
:). The first box that should hit is a dual CPU 1U opteron box, with a 4 way to follow shortly after that. The interesting stuff follows those vanilla boxes.
There are a bunch of boxes on the drawing board, the ones they announced are just the first of many. The delay is that there is no real support for Opterons until they ship Solaris 10, which is due in the not to distant future. Until that OS hits, the Opteron support will be pretty half baked, just Xeon code, and no real use of AMD64 extensions.
That said, without trying to sound to much like a whiny martyr, I have been writing this stuff up for the last year on the Inquirer, just no one believed me
-Charlie
"MP3s, WMDs, it's all the same..."
B[censored]t, MP3s exist.
As an homage to an old physics teacher:
:(. If you do manage to figure it out, please post a reply though.
Sure, they are 12.73, 19.81, and 22.03 respectively. The hard part is figuring out the system specs I am quoting, and that will take a lot of testing, something I just don't have time for
-Charlie
There is one thing most people don't realize about the Young Frankenstein monster's attacks on linux, they are not off the cuff responses. MS does rather carefull studies on what 'resonates' with CxO level buyers and attacks on that.
The last one of these had IP issues being the most scary to buyers, so they went after that, about the time the whole SCO thing surfaced. Before that. there were other avenues.
Since the whole IP liability issue is being handled rather deftly by the community, there is little to attack on anymore, so they went polling for the next round. The roadmap issue is the next 'attack point'.
Things like that don't get made up, it is not a broad enough topic to have been picked out of thin air. Expect to see a lot more of this in the near future, and when it gets summarily shot down, they will pay polsters and move on to the next topic. Same old same old. *YAWN*.
-Charlie
Patching windows won't do squat other than make you feel better for about a week. Then the next 3 holes are announced, and you are vulnerable. This is why I say Windows is insecurable, the best you can hope for is a very temporary safety window (no pun intended).
Do the patches work? Yes. Can you keep up? Nope. Should you stay on this train? Nope.
If you want to keep your systems secure, get rid of windows, nothing else will do. Before you mod me up for advocating Linux, I am not necessarily advocating it here. In fact, I would say go with a BSD probably NetBSD. If you need to go commercial, there are other choices, none as good though.
The point is, what is better? Everything. Sit where you are, advocating patches, and get screwed next time, you will. Even with a perfect record on patching as soon as they come out, there are exploits that are released before patches every so often. You need to be elsewhere to be safe.
For the MSCEs out there, here it is in simple terms. Imagine a giant hamster wheel. Imagine you are a hamster. Get off the #^&#%$# wheel!
-Charlie
No, but ask me again tuesday night, I hope to know by then. Alternatively, you could just read the Inq regularly, it will show up there first.
-Charlie
No, I mean they didn't do so to me. They went on a 64-bit is worthless, and 100 watt CPUs are peachy tear shortly before and during IDF. I know where I got the info, and I know how those sources feel about Intel. None of those things were plants this time. The other thing is that the info ran counter to the official astroturf campaign that I was getting as a memeber of the media.
:)
That said, look around, read up on it, and make up your own mind.
-Charlie
She is the 'Marketing Communication Manager' for ALi Microelectronics. No offense, but I am not going to put her name and number here :). What stuns me about the whole affair is that Hales labeled the pic right AND alt tagged it. I am shocked, and he must be much more bored than he tells me.
-Charlie
According to Le Inq, Prescott takes more than that.
Now these may have been taken from a roadmap that I really should not have seen, but you can see that the 100w number is a bit conservative. The next few generations are specced to narrow the gap between min and max power usage, but not lessen it. Depressing.
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=11588
-Charlie
I posted a bit about this above, but no, it is not their doing. They are going to be very very cross with me for this. I am expecting Magee to get a nasty letter from Intel PR about me. Luckily, he is in Taiwan this week, and will probably lose it in the shuffle :).
-Charlie
Think less of the conspiracy theory, and more towards what they did with Jackson technology. The very first P4 cores had a crappy version of Jackson, and it wasn't turned on. Those who managed to hack it on quickly realized that it wasn't all there yet.
.13SOI process. They are nowhere near that, and since they just enabled the really advanced power management in the C stepping chips, they are even more efficient.
5 88
I am pretty sure intel will do the same with the 64 bit functionality. They will at least have to wait until socket 775 makes it out before they start, the pins I was talking about are not there until those chips hit, so it is a moot point.
As for the power useage, AMD has a hard limit of 89w for any K8 cored CPU on a
If you look at another of my IDF articles:
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=11
You will see what Intel has in store for the next 3 P4 generations. 125A?!? Holy shit.
-Charlie
I didn't consider timing when I wrote the story, or any of it's predecessors. Silly as I am going to the A64 launch tuesday. Anyway, I have been chasing this story since the chip-architect articles. The timing was unfortunate, but it wasn't an Intel plant, that much I can assure you.
For about 3 months, I have known there was 64 bit functionality there, but I didn't have enough to prove it to my own satisfaction. I chased leads, interviewed people, and got that info.
The fact that IDF brought me into close proximity with a ton of sources was the thing that got me so much info so quickly. There was only one thing from Intel directly, the rest were from third parties supporting the chip. If IDF had happened last January, I probably would have gotten the info then.
-Charlie
A really good example of what you are talking about is the G5. It simply extends an efficient architecture to 64 bits. Other than upping the memory limit, it does precious little to performance. The chip in 32 bit more is about as fast as 64 bit, and only starts to show a difference when memory useage gets large.
As for AMD, you can see the effect by running a program in 32 bit mode, then running a 32 bit program recompiled to take advantage of the registers in 'compatibility' mode. There is quite a difference.
-Charlie
There is a second article on Chip-Architect that goes into the 64-bitness in greater detail. I also linked to a few other sources. People keep talking about the exec bit that I had to make vague so the person who told me wouldn't get nailed. Take it as you will, but there is absolutely no doubt in my mind.
-Charlie
As the author of the article, I had to REALLY make things vague. The people involved would be hurt badly by Intel if their names got out. Some of the situations that were told to me make it quite apparent who was leaking. That was as specific as I could make it :(.
-Charlie