I am a consumer with significant disposable income. I want more music and I am trying to BUY more music. Interestingly, the music industry does whatever it can to prevent the sale.
The industry is doing everything possible to prevent people from previewing music before buying. The industry has shut down all file swapping services, and has not provided any alternatives. The radio stations play the SAME 10 SONGS over and over, endlessly. You can't rent music. Internet radio stations are actively being shut down.
I guess I am supposed to buy music "sight unseen!" That's much like wandering into a car dealership and saying "I'm buying a car, I want a test drive," only to be told: "NO! That's driving-piracy. You either buy up front or you GET OUT!" Naturally, I would go to another dealer.
Most industries do whatever is possible to shove their products in your face. It's annoying, but it's reasonable: they're trying to increase their sales. The music industry is doing everything possible to prevent me from buying their products. Bizarre.
The music industry does not even conduct market research, because:
We tend to ask how can we make more money and sell more product, not deal with consumer gripes
Umm...How do you intend to make more money and sell more product if you don't deal with consumer gripes? You are SELLING A PRODUCT. What a bunch of fucking idiots.
However, not all database applications require full ATOMicity and constraints in order to maintain their integrity. Most web applications are of this nature. For these kinds of applications, MySQL blows away other database engines
What? Most web applications do not require full atomicity and constraints to maintain their integrity? Every application requires full ATOMicity and constraints to maintain its integrity. Integrity cannot be maintained otherwise. If you are updating the data ever, full ATOMicity is required.
The basic feature of a database is that it structures and stores your data for later retrieval.
Something that stores data and retrieves it later, is called a "file." A database has a query language and failure resilience. MySQL only marginally supports SQL and does not support resilience.
Transactions are tools that assist in maintaining database integrity; they are not database integrity itself. (And, by the way, MySQL supports transactions).
Transactions are not "tools to assist" in maintaining database integrity. They are absolutely required to maintain integrity if you ever update the database.
Nice troll.
If you consider a complaint about the lack of ACIDity a "troll," then you know nothing whatsoever about databases.
I regularly hear the comment the MySQL lacks features on purpose, because it occupies a niche that does not require those features. It is a "lightweight" database and it supposedly fills that role well.
I have never been able to tell which niche MySQL is supposed to occupy. Is there really a niche where it doesn't matter if the database is corrupted? Is there really any niche where it doesn't matter if transactional integrity isn't maintained? MySQL does not provide any recovery functionality!
I can understand the point in lightweight software. But ACID features and transactions are at the very core of what constitutes a database; they are not "bloatware features" like the microsoft paperclip. Having a database without data integrity is like having a word processor which can't save files. It doesn't matter how lightweight it is.
State-sponsored pledges of allegiance are propagandistic, and exist to inspire collective feeling. That's not what America is about. It's not the "under God" part that bothers me, but rather the conscious attempt to instill loyalty in the young.
State-sponsored pledges are attempts to form state-sponsored beliefs. The pledge of alleigance is not essentially different from the mandatory pledges of loyalty that are taken by the soldiers of various totalitarian regimes. We decry their pledges as propaganda, yet we require our own.
I would rather see the pledge go by the wayside. The only expression of patriotism that is inspiring to me is one that is genuine and spontaneous.
I hope they gave more attention to product stability than to new features. My only difficulty with gnome is that it has tons of irritating bugs and regularly causes X crashes.
Oddly, my linux/gnome box is dramatically less reliable than my Win2000 box. Win2000 is a vast improvement over previous MS operating systems. The linux _kernel_ may be far more reliable, but the desktop certainly is not. It's embarrassing to suck more than Microsoft.
I sometimes get the feeling that the gnome crowd pays too much attention to screenshots, eye candy, themes, and pointless customizability. The vast majority of people want a desktop that just works, ALWAYS. Perhaps gnome 2 will be an improvement, beacause 1.x fell somewhat short of that goal.
With that in mind, I _do_ believe that linux will succeed on the desktop, but not for a couple of years. Microsoft's egregious pricing model will eventually benefit linux on the desktop.
The only workable argument for intellectual property is that greedy people want it. We've heard this argument applied to pollution, slavery, and fraud.
IP laws are not similar to slavery or pollution. "That greedy people want it" is not the only workable argument for IP.
Therefor, you cannot have a philosophy and therefor a society and have intellectual property too.
It's possible to have a society and IP laws at the same time. Evidence: The US, Germany, etc, continue to exist despite IP laws.
Political bias? There's no more anti-IP political bias here than there is pro-IP political bias in the news media.
The political bias on slashdot vastly exceeds that of any mainstream news publication.
In either case, the potential to become rich off the suffering of others is not ethical.
Not being able to bootleg a copy of Visio represents the "suffering of others?"
You see the restricted flow of information and how you could profit from it. Way to take the ethical high ground, sport!
What the fuck are you talking about? I wrote a post on slashdot. How am I profiting from that? How am I expanding "the power of Bill Gates and Valenti?"
The level of political bias on slashdot is absurd.
Text from the original post:
"What's next, the pope banning mp3's?"
"The worst type of theft, indeed."
Not to mention various posts about how muslim clerics intend to mutilate/castrate those who pirate software, etc.
A strong argument can be made that pirating is immoral. Islam is a religion that absolutely forbids theft, and taking the product of someone's labor without paying them could easily be construed as theft. Instead of positing counter-arguments, the slashdotters make all kinds of statements as if the prohibition is crazy, fundamentalist, or insane.
Pirating software could be seen as immoral from many more standpoints than the fundamentalist one. Piracy clearly violates many philosophical principles of ethical behavior. For example, Kant's categorical imperative: the software industry could not exist if everyone pirated, therefore those that do pirate are hypocrites, because in order for them to pirate, they require other people to pay and support the industry.
Let me answer one or two objections that are very common on slashdot. I am not a lackey of the software industry, or a hireling for Bill Gates (my favorite), or a secret agent for the RIAA. Even if I were, it logically changes nothing.
Transmeta chips are VLIW and therefore the bit width they are referring to is not width of the data bus, but the number of instructions that can be executed simultaneously. At present the transmeta chips are 128-bit (four 32-bit instructions), and the new ones will be 256-bit (eight).
Since transmeta chips are VLIW, they do not have to schedule instructions, and do not have to determine (at run time) which instructions can be executed in parallel. With VLIW, both of those functions are performed by _software_, statically, all at once. A singificant amount of the complexity of a cpu is dedicated to performing these functions, which are offloaded to software by transmeta in their "code morph" phase.
Furthermore, the conversion from outdated x86 microOps occurs in software during the "code morph" phase, further offloading functionality that otherwise would exist in silicon.
For these reasons, the transmeta CPU is dramatically simpler than comparable x86 cpus. Unfortunately, it did not perform as anticipated. However, since the die size is so small and the cpu so simple, it does offer some advantages (low power consumption, low heat dissipation).
other than saving disk space that is totally free now anyways. It would have been better to consolidate the effort taken with AbiWord and to use it on OpenOffice.
Who cares that AbiWord is smaller than OpenOffice? OpenOffice is 180MB! Have you seen the size of drives lately? OpenOffice takes ~$0.45 worth of disk space. But hooray, abiword is smaller (perhaps I'll save ~$0.40).
95% of the features of any heavyweight software product are unused by the average user. This led various software makers to create "lite" versions of their software. The difficulty is, even though each person uses only 5% of the features, it is not the same 5% as everyone else. Everyone has some feature that they absolutely REQUIRE and that is not included in the lite version. Consequently, "lite" software products rarely succeed.
How many people now use the lite versions of various word processors? How many people use MicroEmacs? etc?
Dude, the sun blade 100 is using the 4-year-old UltraSparc II chip, running at only 500mhz. I would HOPE that a new Athlon XP with a much newer core and more than triple the clock speed is faster! The blade 100 is Sun's ultra-low-end machine and starts at less than $1000. As such it should be compared to Celerons.
Actually Intel is mostly limited to 8-way. Those 32-way intel boxes have elaborate chipsets to handle the SMP; the SMP functionality on the x86 chip itself is disabled. The only company to "hack" x86 into a 32-way configuration is Unisys (some others are now jumping on the bandwagon).
Actually Intel "hacked" their architecture once again. Even though x86 is 32 bits, the "xeon" series has 36-bit memory addressing, allowing 64GB of RAM.
Wrong. Be did have a solution. They made it easy to install/run BeOS alongside Windows and Linux. Then people could easily switch into Be for things that it excelled at, such as multimedia. Their plans are all clearly laid out in their lawsuit against Microsoft, if you care to read it.
This is false. BeOS was not originally designed to run alongside anything. Originally, there was an entire PLATFORM including HARDWARE (the "bebox").
Yes, let's turn to the game console makers for examples of great businesses! Need I list all the failed game console makers in the past decade? It's a fairly high percentage of all game console makers!
The game console makers that failed are the ones that adopted the same business strategy as Be: build a console and hope the game developers come.
Besides, I'm sure it would have been cheap to get a company like Adobe to port their huge application (Photoshop) to an OS with a tiny market. Great business strategy... if your business has billions to burn.
If you don't have money to burn, don't start a company to compete against Micorosoft and Apple. "I have a garage and some tools, perhaps I'll start a car company to overtake Toyota."
If all you have is an OS with "Hello World," I suggest not starting a company to compete with Microsoft, as Be did.
A silly business model doomed Be to failure
on
Be Throws in the Towel
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Be wanted to create an OS that was superior to Windows and Mac OS. That was EASY TO DO. Back then, MS and Apple operating systems SUCKED ROYALLY and ANYONE could make something better. Some companies actually did make something better (OS/2). Even Apple and MS could have made something better if they started from scratch, however they both realized (correctly) that application support is far more important than kernel threading, so they stuck with their crappy backwards-compatible OSes.
Everyone was, at that time, aware of the "chicken and egg" problem: a new platform has no software, so no users will migrate to it, so nobody will write software, etc. This problem had doomed every new platform. Everyone was aware of it. Be decided to forge ahead anyway, while offering no solution to this problem whatsoever.
The result, predictably, was that BeOS had no applications. Running that nifty teapot demo got a little old, and nobody felt compelled to pay for it.
If you're going to make a new commercial desktop OS, forge an alliance with Adobe etc and have app makers lined up BEFOREHAND. The game console makers know this.
How did your comment get moderated up to a 4? Did you even read the comment to which you're responding? He did not tell the original poster to "fuck off," as you say. He mentioned an additional shell that is bourne-compatible and COMES WITH LINUX, thereby answering the original concern. Your mindless flame was the only comment with terminology like "fuck off."
I'm not meaning to flame, but your analysis was so flawed that I'm amazed it got moderated up to level 4. IBM's hardware is vastly superior to anything Sun has to offer.
First, even though Sun's E15k has 106 processors, only 72 of them are even directly connected to the memory fabric. The others are just PCI cards, with staggering latency, consequently they won't help transaction processing performance. The E15k actually has 72 usable processors; the others are there to impress people who measure system performance by "counting processors."
Second, the UltraSparc III is a notoriously weak performer. It can't even execute instructions out of order!! It is quite likely that IBM's POWER4 would outperform it by more than a factor of 2.
Third, although the p690 has only 32 processors, it has 64 cores. Each "processor" has two 4-way CPUs with a very low latency interconnect. The IBM product would be more accurately characterized as a 64-processor machine.
Fourth, the products from other Unix vendors (hp, ibm) always vastly outperform Sun's product with dramatically fewer processors. HP's new 16 processor box gets almost the same tpc rating as Sun's 64 processor E10k. IBM's old p680 with 24 processors almost doubled the performance of the E10k w/ 64 processors. Sun's most recent comments of "we've decided not to use industry-standard benchmarks any more" is likely because they always lose badly.
Sun's real benefit is in software (Solaris is way better than AIX and has more apps) and in the fact that they have one OS and one proc architecture (Solaris/Sparc) across their entire range of computers.
Note from the comparison, that the mainframe hardware is always more expensive than the PC hardware for a given number of users. The only reason the PC _solution_ ends up being more expensive is because of the price of MS Exchange ($50 per seat, or $2.5million for 50,000 users). In the PC solution, it is the cost of MS Exchange, not the hardware, that costs all the money.
If you remove the cost of licensing NT and Exchange, the Mainframe solution is more expensive in all circumstances, except with more than 50,000 users.
This article only demonstrates that Exchange is overpriced, not that mainframes make good mail servers.
The simplest answer is: we don't write code for free. Almost all programmers who work full time on an open source project are paid for it. There is a limited number of large-scale, successful open source projects (gcc, linux, apache, xfree, mozilla, gnome, postgres, and a few others). All of them have large sums of corporate or university money to pay professional programmers to work on them. Mozilla has _always_ had significant funding; gcc has had significant funding for over 10 years (cygnus); the linux kernel has $1 BILLION pumped into it a year by IBM. This myth of "hordes of free programmers collaborating over the internet voluntarily" is almost entirely false.
Next time you look in the "acknowledgements" section of an open source project, look at how many people actually contributed more than a few lines of code or a bug fix. Generally, the number of people who have _significantly_ contributed is less than 5, and those 5 are usually _all_ paid to do it.
IBM sells high-end hardware and services. A free operating system does not diminish IBM's profitability in any way. If you need a huge machine (like an S/80), you must pay IBM millions of dollars for it whether it comes with AIX or linux. Nobody bought those machines for AIX anyway; what IBM was actually selling all along was high-end hardware that few vendors have the ability to manufacture.
Linux does offer IBM an enormous advantage: a common, open operating system that spans their entire product line. This has always been sorely lacking and has been the main reason Sun has been triumphant. IBM offers six (!!!) operating systems. Prior to linux, none of them ran on all of IBM's machines. It's absurd to have a vendor be completely incompatible with itself.
Linux offers a common, open, standard operating system across a broad range of machines. This allows IBM to be more competitive with Sun. Linux does not detract from IBM's profitability at all (S/80s are still expensive) but increases their competitiveness. It seems like a no-brainer to me.
Slashdot Mirror
I am a consumer with significant disposable income. I want more music and I am trying to BUY more music. Interestingly, the music industry does whatever it can to prevent the sale.
The industry is doing everything possible to prevent people from previewing music before buying. The industry has shut down all file swapping services, and has not provided any alternatives. The radio stations play the SAME 10 SONGS over and over, endlessly. You can't rent music. Internet radio stations are actively being shut down.
I guess I am supposed to buy music "sight unseen!" That's much like wandering into a car dealership and saying "I'm buying a car, I want a test drive," only to be told: "NO! That's driving-piracy. You either buy up front or you GET OUT!" Naturally, I would go to another dealer.
Most industries do whatever is possible to shove their products in your face. It's annoying, but it's reasonable: they're trying to increase their sales. The music industry is doing everything possible to prevent me from buying their products. Bizarre.
The music industry does not even conduct market research, because:
We tend to ask how can we make more money and sell more product, not deal with consumer gripes
Umm...How do you intend to make more money and sell more product if you don't deal with consumer gripes? You are SELLING A PRODUCT. What a bunch of fucking idiots.
If you are updating the data ever, full ATOMicity is required.
Actually, I amend this. ATOMicity is not required if there is only one user who ever updates the data, and the database is backed up beforehand.
However, not all database applications require full ATOMicity and constraints in order to maintain their integrity. Most web applications are of this nature. For these kinds of applications, MySQL blows away other database engines
What? Most web applications do not require full atomicity and constraints to maintain their integrity? Every application requires full ATOMicity and constraints to maintain its integrity. Integrity cannot be maintained otherwise. If you are updating the data ever, full ATOMicity is required.
The basic feature of a database is that it structures and stores your data for later retrieval.
Something that stores data and retrieves it later, is called a "file." A database has a query language and failure resilience. MySQL only marginally supports SQL and does not support resilience.
Transactions are tools that assist in maintaining database integrity; they are not database integrity itself. (And, by the way, MySQL supports transactions).
Transactions are not "tools to assist" in maintaining database integrity. They are absolutely required to maintain integrity if you ever update the database.
Nice troll.
If you consider a complaint about the lack of ACIDity a "troll," then you know nothing whatsoever about databases.
I regularly hear the comment the MySQL lacks features on purpose, because it occupies a niche that does not require those features. It is a "lightweight" database and it supposedly fills that role well.
I have never been able to tell which niche MySQL is supposed to occupy. Is there really a niche where it doesn't matter if the database is corrupted? Is there really any niche where it doesn't matter if transactional integrity isn't maintained? MySQL does not provide any recovery functionality!
I can understand the point in lightweight software. But ACID features and transactions are at the very core of what constitutes a database; they are not "bloatware features" like the microsoft paperclip. Having a database without data integrity is like having a word processor which can't save files. It doesn't matter how lightweight it is.
State-sponsored pledges of allegiance are propagandistic, and exist to inspire collective feeling. That's not what America is about. It's not the "under God" part that bothers me, but rather the conscious attempt to instill loyalty in the young.
State-sponsored pledges are attempts to form state-sponsored beliefs. The pledge of alleigance is not essentially different from the mandatory pledges of loyalty that are taken by the soldiers of various totalitarian regimes. We decry their pledges as propaganda, yet we require our own.
I would rather see the pledge go by the wayside. The only expression of patriotism that is inspiring to me is one that is genuine and spontaneous.
I hope they gave more attention to product stability than to new features. My only difficulty with gnome is that it has tons of irritating bugs and regularly causes X crashes.
Oddly, my linux/gnome box is dramatically less reliable than my Win2000 box. Win2000 is a vast improvement over previous MS operating systems. The linux _kernel_ may be far more reliable, but the desktop certainly is not. It's embarrassing to suck more than Microsoft.
I sometimes get the feeling that the gnome crowd pays too much attention to screenshots, eye candy, themes, and pointless customizability. The vast majority of people want a desktop that just works, ALWAYS. Perhaps gnome 2 will be an improvement, beacause 1.x fell somewhat short of that goal.
With that in mind, I _do_ believe that linux will succeed on the desktop, but not for a couple of years. Microsoft's egregious pricing model will eventually benefit linux on the desktop.
The only workable argument for intellectual property is that greedy people want it. We've heard this argument applied to pollution, slavery, and fraud.
IP laws are not similar to slavery or pollution. "That greedy people want it" is not the only workable argument for IP.
Therefor, you cannot have a philosophy and therefor a society and have intellectual property too.
It's possible to have a society and IP laws at the same time. Evidence: The US, Germany, etc, continue to exist despite IP laws.
Political bias? There's no more anti-IP political bias here than there is pro-IP political bias in the news media.
The political bias on slashdot vastly exceeds that of any mainstream news publication.
In either case, the potential to become rich off the suffering of others is not ethical.
Not being able to bootleg a copy of Visio represents the "suffering of others?"
You see the restricted flow of information and how you could profit from it. Way to take the ethical high ground, sport!
What the fuck are you talking about? I wrote a post on slashdot. How am I profiting from that? How am I expanding "the power of Bill Gates and Valenti?"
The level of political bias on slashdot is absurd.
Text from the original post:
"What's next, the pope banning mp3's?"
"The worst type of theft, indeed."
Not to mention various posts about how muslim clerics intend to mutilate/castrate those who pirate software, etc.
A strong argument can be made that pirating is immoral. Islam is a religion that absolutely forbids theft, and taking the product of someone's labor without paying them could easily be construed as theft. Instead of positing counter-arguments, the slashdotters make all kinds of statements as if the prohibition is crazy, fundamentalist, or insane.
Pirating software could be seen as immoral from many more standpoints than the fundamentalist one. Piracy clearly violates many philosophical principles of ethical behavior. For example, Kant's categorical imperative: the software industry could not exist if everyone pirated, therefore those that do pirate are hypocrites, because in order for them to pirate, they require other people to pay and support the industry.
Let me answer one or two objections that are very common on slashdot. I am not a lackey of the software industry, or a hireling for Bill Gates (my favorite), or a secret agent for the RIAA. Even if I were, it logically changes nothing.
The whole strategy hasn't worked out that well. Neither transmeta nor itanium blow anyone away with their performance.
Transmeta chips are VLIW and therefore the bit width they are referring to is not width of the data bus, but the number of instructions that can be executed simultaneously. At present the transmeta chips are 128-bit (four 32-bit instructions), and the new ones will be 256-bit (eight).
Since transmeta chips are VLIW, they do not have to schedule instructions, and do not have to determine (at run time) which instructions can be executed in parallel. With VLIW, both of those functions are performed by _software_, statically, all at once. A singificant amount of the complexity of a cpu is dedicated to performing these functions, which are offloaded to software by transmeta in their "code morph" phase.
Furthermore, the conversion from outdated x86 microOps occurs in software during the "code morph" phase, further offloading functionality that otherwise would exist in silicon.
For these reasons, the transmeta CPU is dramatically simpler than comparable x86 cpus. Unfortunately, it did not perform as anticipated. However, since the die size is so small and the cpu so simple, it does offer some advantages (low power consumption, low heat dissipation).
other than saving disk space that is totally free now anyways. It would have been better to consolidate the effort taken with AbiWord and to use it on OpenOffice.
Who cares that AbiWord is smaller than OpenOffice? OpenOffice is 180MB! Have you seen the size of drives lately? OpenOffice takes ~$0.45 worth of disk space. But hooray, abiword is smaller (perhaps I'll save ~$0.40).
Most people don't even use the space they have.
95% of the features of any heavyweight software product are unused by the average user. This led various software makers to create "lite" versions of their software. The difficulty is, even though each person uses only 5% of the features, it is not the same 5% as everyone else. Everyone has some feature that they absolutely REQUIRE and that is not included in the lite version. Consequently, "lite" software products rarely succeed.
How many people now use the lite versions of various word processors? How many people use MicroEmacs? etc?
Dude, the sun blade 100 is using the 4-year-old UltraSparc II chip, running at only 500mhz. I would HOPE that a new Athlon XP with a much newer core and more than triple the clock speed is faster! The blade 100 is Sun's ultra-low-end machine and starts at less than $1000. As such it should be compared to Celerons.
> but Intel is limited to 32-way last I heard.
Actually Intel is mostly limited to 8-way. Those 32-way intel boxes have elaborate chipsets to handle the SMP; the SMP functionality on the x86 chip itself is disabled. The only company to "hack" x86 into a 32-way configuration is Unisys (some others are now jumping on the bandwagon).
Actually Intel "hacked" their architecture once again. Even though x86 is 32 bits, the "xeon" series has 36-bit memory addressing, allowing 64GB of RAM.
Wrong. Be did have a solution. They made it easy to install/run BeOS alongside Windows and Linux. Then people could easily switch into Be for things that it excelled at, such as multimedia. Their plans are all clearly laid out in their lawsuit against Microsoft, if you care to read it.
This is false. BeOS was not originally designed to run alongside anything. Originally, there was an entire PLATFORM including HARDWARE (the "bebox").
Yes, let's turn to the game console makers for examples of great businesses! Need I list all the failed game console makers in the past decade? It's a fairly high percentage of all game console makers!
The game console makers that failed are the ones that adopted the same business strategy as Be: build a console and hope the game developers come.
Besides, I'm sure it would have been cheap to get a company like Adobe to port their huge application (Photoshop) to an OS with a tiny market. Great business strategy... if your business has billions to burn.
If you don't have money to burn, don't start a company to compete against Micorosoft and Apple. "I have a garage and some tools, perhaps I'll start a car company to overtake Toyota."
If all you have is an OS with "Hello World," I suggest not starting a company to compete with Microsoft, as Be did.
Be wanted to create an OS that was superior to Windows and Mac OS. That was EASY TO DO. Back then, MS and Apple operating systems SUCKED ROYALLY and ANYONE could make something better. Some companies actually did make something better (OS/2). Even Apple and MS could have made something better if they started from scratch, however they both realized (correctly) that application support is far more important than kernel threading, so they stuck with their crappy backwards-compatible OSes.
Everyone was, at that time, aware of the "chicken and egg" problem: a new platform has no software, so no users will migrate to it, so nobody will write software, etc. This problem had doomed every new platform. Everyone was aware of it. Be decided to forge ahead anyway, while offering no solution to this problem whatsoever.
The result, predictably, was that BeOS had no applications. Running that nifty teapot demo got a little old, and nobody felt compelled to pay for it.
If you're going to make a new commercial desktop OS, forge an alliance with Adobe etc and have app makers lined up BEFOREHAND. The game console makers know this.
tom
How did your comment get moderated up to a 4? Did you even read the comment to which you're responding? He did not tell the original poster to "fuck off," as you say. He mentioned an additional shell that is bourne-compatible and COMES WITH LINUX, thereby answering the original concern. Your mindless flame was the only comment with terminology like "fuck off."
I'm not meaning to flame, but your analysis was so flawed that I'm amazed it got moderated up to level 4. IBM's hardware is vastly superior to anything Sun has to offer.
First, even though Sun's E15k has 106 processors, only 72 of them are even directly connected to the memory fabric. The others are just PCI cards, with staggering latency, consequently they won't help transaction processing performance. The E15k actually has 72 usable processors; the others are there to impress people who measure system performance by "counting processors."
Second, the UltraSparc III is a notoriously weak performer. It can't even execute instructions out of order!! It is quite likely that IBM's POWER4 would outperform it by more than a factor of 2.
Third, although the p690 has only 32 processors, it has 64 cores. Each "processor" has two 4-way CPUs with a very low latency interconnect. The IBM product would be more accurately characterized as a 64-processor machine.
Fourth, the products from other Unix vendors (hp, ibm) always vastly outperform Sun's product with dramatically fewer processors. HP's new 16 processor box gets almost the same tpc rating as Sun's 64 processor E10k. IBM's old p680 with 24 processors almost doubled the performance of the E10k w/ 64 processors. Sun's most recent comments of "we've decided not to use industry-standard benchmarks any more" is likely because they always lose badly.
Sun's real benefit is in software (Solaris is way better than AIX and has more apps) and in the fact that they have one OS and one proc architecture (Solaris/Sparc) across their entire range of computers.
Note from the comparison, that the mainframe hardware is always more expensive than the PC hardware for a given number of users. The only reason the PC _solution_ ends up being more expensive is because of the price of MS Exchange ($50 per seat, or $2.5million for 50,000 users). In the PC solution, it is the cost of MS Exchange, not the hardware, that costs all the money.
If you remove the cost of licensing NT and Exchange, the Mainframe solution is more expensive in all circumstances, except with more than 50,000 users.
This article only demonstrates that Exchange is overpriced, not that mainframes make good mail servers.
All open source companies are doing badly.
Suse recently had to be bailed out by IBM and Intel to prevent it from closing it doors.
VA Linux has exited the hardware market and is losing money hand over fist. It appears that VA Linux does not have much time before collapsing.
Corel is selling its _entire linux arm_ for $2 million, which is virtually nothing.
Ebiz, which merged with LinuxMall, has been delisted by the Nasdaq, is trading at $.04/share, has only $1,000 in the bank, and will collapse shortly.
Red Hat, which is by far the most successful of the group, has lost over 97% of its value and is trading at 1/8th its IPO price.
The simplest answer is: we don't write code for free. Almost all programmers who work full time on an open source project are paid for it. There is a limited number of large-scale, successful open source projects (gcc, linux, apache, xfree, mozilla, gnome, postgres, and a few others). All of them have large sums of corporate or university money to pay professional programmers to work on them. Mozilla has _always_ had significant funding; gcc has had significant funding for over 10 years (cygnus); the linux kernel has $1 BILLION pumped into it a year by IBM. This myth of "hordes of free programmers collaborating over the internet voluntarily" is almost entirely false.
Next time you look in the "acknowledgements" section of an open source project, look at how many people actually contributed more than a few lines of code or a bug fix. Generally, the number of people who have _significantly_ contributed is less than 5, and those 5 are usually _all_ paid to do it.
IBM sells high-end hardware and services. A free operating system does not diminish IBM's profitability in any way. If you need a huge machine (like an S/80), you must pay IBM millions of dollars for it whether it comes with AIX or linux. Nobody bought those machines for AIX anyway; what IBM was actually selling all along was high-end hardware that few vendors have the ability to manufacture.
Linux does offer IBM an enormous advantage: a common, open operating system that spans their entire product line. This has always been sorely lacking and has been the main reason Sun has been triumphant. IBM offers six (!!!) operating systems. Prior to linux, none of them ran on all of IBM's machines. It's absurd to have a vendor be completely incompatible with itself.
Linux offers a common, open, standard operating system across a broad range of machines. This allows IBM to be more competitive with Sun. Linux does not detract from IBM's profitability at all (S/80s are still expensive) but increases their competitiveness. It seems like a no-brainer to me.