It's bloated. It's slow. It's not very good for modern gaming. It doesn't have modern color matching/balancing Poor scaling (try running X on a very high res LCD and see how tiny everything is). It's a royal pain in the ass to get set up. It doesn't have a high level of standardization (this is also partly a window manager problem). Who really has any need at all for network transparency on a workstation desktop? It's a royal pain in the ass to program on. It doesn't lock on tight enough to the hardware for proper acceleration.
What I would like to see: Presentation layer lives in the kernel. All graphic processing that is possible is done on the GPU. Standardization and enforcement of standardization accross widget/behavior sets. OpenGL 1.4 - 2.0 fully embedded.
This is where both OS X and the next version of Windows are going and it is time that Linux catch up. OS X proves that a completely different approach not only can work, but excel.
What I want to see is the disappearance of even the idea of distinct desktops on multiple machines. The very concept of a "desktop" as a point of control for a computer is dated. Time to move on to a new idea. Something like transparent aggregation. Think about having multiple machines interconnected in various ways that appears to the end user as one machine and the only differentiation is at the user account level.
Citrix is the closest thing I have seen so far (when used with nFuse).
Between OpenFiler, Compiere, the DSM for OpenMosix, all I need now is migratable sockets and you should be able to to something close to this.
Okay, let's see: 1100 G5's w/4GB each @ $5,349 = $5,883,900 1100 Mellanox Infiniband Cards @ around $1000 = $1,100,000 23 Voltaire ISR 9600 96 port Infiniband Switches (it's two ports per Mellanox card) @ at least $30,000 each (the starter kit with only one 12 port blade costs $13,000 and you need 7 more blades) = $690,000
Total = $7,673,900
Assuming some better pricing here and there and $7 Million sounds more reasonable. There are other hidden costs such as the building, air conditioning (which I am betting runs several thousand per month), power, and labor.
I still think it was silly to get the G5's with full cases instead of just raw motherboards to save costs (that case costs over $200. That's a savings of nearly a quarter of a million dollars plus space), but it is a stupendous achievement to build a cluster this big.
Boise, Shiller and Flexner, the firm representing SCO, also represented the US government in US vs. Microsoft anti-trust case (which they lost...sort of) and Al Gore for the election crap in Florida (which they also lost...hell, I think we all lost on that one). Supposedly they are one of the best firms in the country, though.
At the firm I work at (relax, I am a systems manager), which is also considered one of the best in the same field, they (coworkers) said that the Boise, etc. is famous for getting huge settlements, so maybe that's what SCO is looking for.
I got the chance to play with the mid-model (single 1.8 GHz) G5 and it is VERY fast compared to the older models (roughly about the same if not faster than the previous top model). The owner of said machine (a video editor) uses it as a front end for some of his editing work mainly because he wanted a Mac to use for the interface. The back end is comprised of two large SGI's and dozens of linux boxes (all AMDs).
The best tool for the job. My hats off to Apple for a great machine.
If the RIAA is the one being directly issued subpoenas and executing the subpoenas, then are they not, in fact, and agent of the state and should be held accountable to the same standards?
Intel has access to the AMD64 ISA from AMD as part of their cross-licensing deal years ago. The big thing is that if Intel comes out with ANOTHER 64 bit ISA, then all of their Itanium customers (and co-developer HP) who have invested billions in the Itanium will be very angry.
My bet is that Intel won't go anywhere near 64bit on the desktop for a very long time (like never). We will see dual (or more) cores before that ever happens (which is slated for '05).
The main reason that RC5 goes so fast using AltiVec is that it includes a Vector Rotate instruction while every other SIMD engine does not. A Vector rotate is a very rare instruction (and trivial to add to SSE, etc.) that RC5 makes extremely heavy use of.
That is the ONLY reason why RC5 goes that fast on a G4/G5.
While the AltiVec unit is very impressive, The SSE2 unit on the P4 or the Opteron would have nearly the same performance and cost a whole heck of a lot less (I am betting if this rumor is true at all, then Apple has given the units to the school).
What I am wondering is, what OS is this cluster going to run? I mean, have the BSD folks figured out how to scale? No chance it will be OS X...maybe AIX?
The univeristy should roll its own linux that has everything necessary for the student and only allow that OS to operate on their intranet. Anything else is only allowed to operate outside the internal network.
This way students can still exercise their freedoms online, but will be in compliance with university policies. This is well within the already defined rights on American (and possibly European) campuses.
Firewalls and packet filters aren't just for the outside edge of your network, they can be used to protect your intranet also with your users existing in the middle of the two edges (AKA a perimeter network).
As I sit here typing on my $1800 dual Opteron running a 64 bit OS (United Linux), I can't help wonder that this shouldn't have been available on the market TWO MONTHS AGO when I bout it...hmmm.
The chipset on the G5 is mostly made by AMD (the hypertransport chip) and the process the G5 is made on (and the fab plant) is a joint venture between AMD and IBM.
1 & 2 are almost exactly the same for PC's running either Linux (okay...there are some driver issues, but my 82 year grandfather didn't have any trouble with Suse) or Windows XP on an Opteron system (except you dont need a dual 2 Ghz to get there and it cost almost half as much).
Suse and Redhat are the only ones who are DoE and DoD certified (along with ISO, etc.) that is necessary in many areas. These certs can cost millions and I don't see anyone else willing to pony up to get into this market.
OTOH, for a small office, just about any distro (NetBSD on the server, yeah) if administered well, would be good.
How much more would Suse cost? I have worked at facilities before that switch from windows to Suse recently and they said it was a lot less expensive in the long run.
As an Apple service man and systems technician all I have to say is
HAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!!
Lower maintenance my butt. OS X is not ready for the enterprise, period (not that windows solutions are quite all there either).
The reason I don't recommend Macs is because:
1.) The hardware is horribly overpriced and difficult to maintane (single vendor, hard to get parts, history of parts availibility probs, etc)
2.) Apple has lousy support for large corprate leases (in business you never ever buy desktops).
3.) Poor local warranty service in most areas of the country (think on-site, 24x7, 4 hour SLA everywhere in the country...just like Dell or HPaq)
Now if OS X was available on several platforms and carried by several vendors, then I would go for it (as long as licensing made sense), but I wouldn't touch Apple hardware with a ten foot pole in the business setting.
Note: I have two macs at home (and 4 x86 machines...and soon to be one x86-64 machine) all running Linux (the macs run Mac-On-Linux).
Low yield nuclear weapons (fission bombs) that generate a nice bang and flash with nearly no residual radiation have existed, but it was deemed too "usable".
The idea is that the weapon should be so horrible that it is strictly a last resort. Nukes are rapidly entering the territory of being able to be used all the time for any reason. That is the scary thing.
OBTW, the US government is very much into the devlopment of stuff that FAR surpasses the power of nukes, but can be smaller and directed in it's use (think ray gun type weapons...aka directed energy). These weapons are safe (relatively), cheap(er) and don't fall under the current treaties for nonproliferation.
One of the biggest problems of porting to another instruction set is that ALL drivers would have to be re-written to get the full potential of the hardware (that is the big deal with AMD64 and Windows 64bit edition). Not that 32 bit drivers do not work on a AMD64 chip, but that it would not work as well. Change that to a completely different instruction set, and you get big problems.
Just look at the Itanium: big, expensive, LOUSY to program for.
I think the PPC and AMD64 will merge sometime down the road, but only when IBM/AMD/Apple is really ready to go against Intel/Microsoft. Remember, neither AMD or IBM even has the fabrication CAPACITY to challenge Intel yet. That's the real reason AMD hasn't gained market share.
Slashdot Mirror
Gee, let's see.
It's bloated.
It's slow.
It's not very good for modern gaming.
It doesn't have modern color matching/balancing
Poor scaling (try running X on a very high res LCD and see how tiny everything is).
It's a royal pain in the ass to get set up.
It doesn't have a high level of standardization (this is also partly a window manager problem).
Who really has any need at all for network transparency on a workstation desktop?
It's a royal pain in the ass to program on.
It doesn't lock on tight enough to the hardware for proper acceleration.
What I would like to see:
Presentation layer lives in the kernel.
All graphic processing that is possible is done on the GPU.
Standardization and enforcement of standardization accross widget/behavior sets.
OpenGL 1.4 - 2.0 fully embedded.
This is where both OS X and the next version of Windows are going and it is time that Linux catch up. OS X proves that a completely different approach not only can work, but excel.
I will go back to linux on the desktop when Novell releases their desktop linux (they already own all of my favorite pieces).
And, oh yeah, NO MORE X WINDOWS!!!
Apple did at least one thing right.
What I want to see is the disappearance of even the idea of distinct desktops on multiple machines. The very concept of a "desktop" as a point of control for a computer is dated. Time to move on to a new idea. Something like transparent aggregation. Think about having multiple machines interconnected in various ways that appears to the end user as one machine and the only differentiation is at the user account level.
Citrix is the closest thing I have seen so far (when used with nFuse).
Between OpenFiler, Compiere, the DSM for OpenMosix, all I need now is migratable sockets and you should be able to to something close to this.
Okay, let's see:
1100 G5's w/4GB each @ $5,349 = $5,883,900
1100 Mellanox Infiniband Cards @ around $1000 = $1,100,000
23 Voltaire ISR 9600 96 port Infiniband Switches (it's two ports per Mellanox card) @ at least $30,000 each (the starter kit with only one 12 port blade costs $13,000 and you need 7 more blades) = $690,000
Total = $7,673,900
Assuming some better pricing here and there and $7 Million sounds more reasonable. There are other hidden costs such as the building, air conditioning (which I am betting runs several thousand per month), power, and labor.
I still think it was silly to get the G5's with full cases instead of just raw motherboards to save costs (that case costs over $200. That's a savings of nearly a quarter of a million dollars plus space), but it is a stupendous achievement to build a cluster this big.
Boise, Shiller and Flexner, the firm representing SCO, also represented the US government in US vs. Microsoft anti-trust case (which they lost...sort of) and Al Gore for the election crap in Florida (which they also lost...hell, I think we all lost on that one). Supposedly they are one of the best firms in the country, though.
At the firm I work at (relax, I am a systems manager), which is also considered one of the best in the same field, they (coworkers) said that the Boise, etc. is famous for getting huge settlements, so maybe that's what SCO is looking for.
Dirk Meyer, chief architect of the alpha, is chief architect for the Hammer (Opteron, Athlon64 series).
True seamless, transparent, process migration with full distributed shared memory so that as more machines are added to a network, a cluster evolves.
Then don't update the kernal for at least 18 motnhs and stabilize it.
I got the chance to play with the mid-model (single 1.8 GHz) G5 and it is VERY fast compared to the older models (roughly about the same if not faster than the previous top model). The owner of said machine (a video editor) uses it as a front end for some of his editing work mainly because he wanted a Mac to use for the interface. The back end is comprised of two large SGI's and dozens of linux boxes (all AMDs).
The best tool for the job. My hats off to Apple for a great machine.
If the RIAA is the one being directly issued subpoenas and executing the subpoenas, then are they not, in fact, and agent of the state and should be held accountable to the same standards?
I don't know if I want to pay $6,600 for a desktop processor.
Intel has access to the AMD64 ISA from AMD as part of their cross-licensing deal years ago. The big thing is that if Intel comes out with ANOTHER 64 bit ISA, then all of their Itanium customers (and co-developer HP) who have invested billions in the Itanium will be very angry.
My bet is that Intel won't go anywhere near 64bit on the desktop for a very long time (like never). We will see dual (or more) cores before that ever happens (which is slated for '05).
The main reason that RC5 goes so fast using AltiVec is that it includes a Vector Rotate instruction while every other SIMD engine does not. A Vector rotate is a very rare instruction (and trivial to add to SSE, etc.) that RC5 makes extremely heavy use of.
That is the ONLY reason why RC5 goes that fast on a G4/G5.
While the AltiVec unit is very impressive, The SSE2 unit on the P4 or the Opteron would have nearly the same performance and cost a whole heck of a lot less (I am betting if this rumor is true at all, then Apple has given the units to the school).
What I am wondering is, what OS is this cluster going to run? I mean, have the BSD folks figured out how to scale? No chance it will be OS X...maybe AIX?
The univeristy should roll its own linux that has everything necessary for the student and only allow that OS to operate on their intranet. Anything else is only allowed to operate outside the internal network.
This way students can still exercise their freedoms online, but will be in compliance with university policies. This is well within the already defined rights on American (and possibly European) campuses.
Firewalls and packet filters aren't just for the outside edge of your network, they can be used to protect your intranet also with your users existing in the middle of the two edges (AKA a perimeter network).
As I sit here typing on my $1800 dual Opteron running a 64 bit OS (United Linux), I can't help wonder that this shouldn't have been available on the market TWO MONTHS AGO when I bout it...hmmm.
The chipset on the G5 is mostly made by AMD (the hypertransport chip) and the process the G5 is made on (and the fab plant) is a joint venture between AMD and IBM.
1 & 2 are almost exactly the same for PC's running either Linux (okay...there are some driver issues, but my 82 year grandfather didn't have any trouble with Suse) or Windows XP on an Opteron system (except you dont need a dual 2 Ghz to get there and it cost almost half as much).
Yeah Suse and RedHat are COE and CCC. CCC is required for DoE servers that touch anything secure or nuclear.
Wow. Obviously you have never gone near Suse Enterprise or RedHat Advanced Server.
Suse's portal server is a killer platform and the first product in a long time to really challenge Exchange in the enterprise.
As for a desktop distro, from my experience in corporate buildouts, Suse and Lindows seem to really shine right now. RedHat is good, too.
We still run NetBSD or a trusted UNIX on our big iron servers, though.
Suse and Redhat are the only ones who are DoE and DoD certified (along with ISO, etc.) that is necessary in many areas. These certs can cost millions and I don't see anyone else willing to pony up to get into this market.
OTOH, for a small office, just about any distro (NetBSD on the server, yeah) if administered well, would be good.
Don't forget that Suse is pat of the United Linux distro (along with SCO unfortunately).
How much more would Suse cost? I have worked at facilities before that switch from windows to Suse recently and they said it was a lot less expensive in the long run.
As an Apple service man and systems technician all I have to say is
HAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!!
Lower maintenance my butt. OS X is not ready for the enterprise, period (not that windows solutions are quite all there either).
The reason I don't recommend Macs is because:
1.) The hardware is horribly overpriced and difficult to maintane (single vendor, hard to get parts, history of parts availibility probs, etc)
2.) Apple has lousy support for large corprate leases (in business you never ever buy desktops).
3.) Poor local warranty service in most areas of the country (think on-site, 24x7, 4 hour SLA everywhere in the country...just like Dell or HPaq)
Now if OS X was available on several platforms and carried by several vendors, then I would go for it (as long as licensing made sense), but I wouldn't touch Apple hardware with a ten foot pole in the business setting.
Note: I have two macs at home (and 4 x86 machines...and soon to be one x86-64 machine) all running Linux (the macs run Mac-On-Linux).
Low yield nuclear weapons (fission bombs) that generate a nice bang and flash with nearly no residual radiation have existed, but it was deemed too "usable".
The idea is that the weapon should be so horrible that it is strictly a last resort. Nukes are rapidly entering the territory of being able to be used all the time for any reason. That is the scary thing.
OBTW, the US government is very much into the devlopment of stuff that FAR surpasses the power of nukes, but can be smaller and directed in it's use (think ray gun type weapons...aka directed energy). These weapons are safe (relatively), cheap(er) and don't fall under the current treaties for nonproliferation.
Thanks Bush.
One of the biggest problems of porting to another instruction set is that ALL drivers would have to be re-written to get the full potential of the hardware (that is the big deal with AMD64 and Windows 64bit edition). Not that 32 bit drivers do not work on a AMD64 chip, but that it would not work as well. Change that to a completely different instruction set, and you get big problems.
Just look at the Itanium: big, expensive, LOUSY to program for.
I think the PPC and AMD64 will merge sometime down the road, but only when IBM/AMD/Apple is really ready to go against Intel/Microsoft. Remember, neither AMD or IBM even has the fabrication CAPACITY to challenge Intel yet. That's the real reason AMD hasn't gained market share.