Screamingly fast? do you base your assumptions on what? Intel's PR?
I had the pleasure of working with Itanium one, and boy - compiling Linux kernel on it was SLOWER then one of my AMD's machine (700Mhz) with the same amount of RAM.
Let us see a real comparison between Itanium 2 and Sun's hardware, SGI, or Alpha (latest generation which are available now).
Intel's biggest problem right now that the market is very slow now. Do you really think that IT managements in corporations will rush to buy something totally new, not backward compatible to anything at those very high price tags? I hardly think so.
Don't forget - with Opteron you got %100 backward compatibility, which means a LOT to IT staff, and it would probably cost MUCH lower then Intel's prices..
Don't know about you - but I had until few months ago few problems with NVidia cards + VIA chipset and AMD Athlon. Those problems have dissapeared lately.
As for ATI - well, their X driver is very good (written by non ATI people), but their Windows NT 4 drivers really sucks!
NVidia cannot release the source code due to parts which are not belong to them (they belong to SGI and other parties)...
BUT - do you really think that ATI or Matrox cannot reverse engineer the driver? Go ask Matrox engineer and they'll swear that NVidia reversed engineers Matrox's binary only driver for dual head and thats how NVidia got dual head (at least thats what one of Matrox engineers told me)
Remember - more and more special effects companies are moving to Linux. Not only in the rendering farm, but also at the artists workstations etc...
The 2D driver won't help much to the artists, and NVidia do want those studios to buy the latest and greatest graphics cards from them - specially the Quadro line which is their top professional card (and costs less then half of the really professional OpenGL based cards) - without drivers, those studios won't buy it. Thats why you see NVidia, Matrox and ATI promising drivers for Linux - and delivering them (specially NVidia - which keeps updating their driver).
If you do some research, you'll find that the sorenson codec in flash based products (Flash MX etc..) is very different from the version that is bundled with Quicktime..
Can you imagine a company with (lets say) 1000 pc's moving from Windows to Linux? or even moving from Office 2000/XP to Open-Office? I can hardly think so.
Why? think about training 1000 empolyees Open Office. Think that you need %100 export/import capabilities of Word, Excel, PowerPoint - OpenOffice can't give it to you (try to import a complicated PowerPoint from Office XP or complicated Word document and see what I mean)..
Add those costs - and you'll see why MS shouldn't be worry too much. The transformation and supporting all the workers will costs more then paying MS demands..
the problem on the Microsoft side is that they sold 300,000 copies of Mac Office for OS X, while they expected to sell 750,000 for the same period..
Don't forget that Mac BU is a self unit - profit from Office X goes to them and not to the Windows part, so they actually don't make the amount of money they expected...
I just wonder when Apple will move their butts and start Aquafying Open Office. My guess is that within few months you'll see some new "volunteers" without the @apple.com email address starting to port OpenOffice to OS X with Aqua..
Lets say you got the budget and the people to create the next-ubber-cool competitor to XFree..
When you'll do the 3D work, you'll need Vertex stuff, which is -> you guessed it, now owned by MS, thanks to SGI's stupidity.
So your very cool XFree killer can either have 3D without vertex stuff, or can be with vertex, but you'll need to charge your end-users to pay for MS licenses..
How many Linux users do you know that will actually pull their wallet and pay for this? maybe some graphics studios, but not others..
I belive (I can't belive that I type this, but here goes) that MS got their full rights to do what they're doing today...
Anyone of the readers here (if he/she got the money) or any company who got the money - could have bought the patents from SGI and start demanding money from the OpenGL ARB.
I belive (as I wrote here today) that it was SGI stupid move to sell those patents to MS (why not grant them a very limited license?) instead of selling it to a more OpenGL friendly company like NVidia...
You're talking about GAMES, while OpenGL has been mostly used in development 3D Applications (OK, some games like Quake uses OpenGL).
The big problem here, is once SGI foolishly sold those patents to Microsoft (instead of NVidia for example), They effectivly allowd MS to stretch the OpenGL ARB for royalties and effectivly kill OpenGL (forget free OpenGL if you need to pay per copy for MS patents).
However - we're talking different things here - a person who gets a Linux distribution from his friends and installs Linux + KDE to learn/experiment VS. your example - to buy a whole new machine...
you wrote: "I love Linux on the desktop, and I love KDE, but unless it offers something original, something that Windows and Mac OS don't, then what's the point?"
The moment that KDE will be radically different from Mac OS & Windows - thats the moment you'll start loosing people who wants to use Linux and came from Windows world. It's pretty hard to teach a newbie an entirely new window manager and/or desktop enviroment.
Try taking a kid who used only windows and give him Window Maker. See what he tells you.
* I don't see it getting crashed. If you can compile KDE 3.1 alpha - please do, and report crashes to bugs.kde.org * try to run your app with artsdsp: artsdsp xmms * you can compile kdebinding and switch from KHTML to KMOZILLA on the same window - it's in the "View" menu on Konqueror * if you want to look like XP - please give more details.
From my experience - I had installed Red Hat 7.3 with KDE 3.0 and I used it, but I missed the tabbed browsing (I open about 16 tabs on Konqueror on avrage) so I compiled KDE 3.1 Alpha and I'm using it already for about a week.
My impression so far - stable as a rock already! I removed my old KDE 3.0 RPMS and getting all my stuff with KDE 3.1 alpha - and it works! didn't see any crashes so far..
They're not trying to invent something new here - the great thing with this feature is that it's MUCH easier for end user to use without getting the headache of security (it's secured, expires after a period of time, etc)
Slashdot Mirror
Screamingly fast? do you base your assumptions on what? Intel's PR?
I had the pleasure of working with Itanium one, and boy - compiling Linux kernel on it was SLOWER then one of my AMD's machine (700Mhz) with the same amount of RAM.
Let us see a real comparison between Itanium 2 and Sun's hardware, SGI, or Alpha (latest generation which are available now).
Intel's biggest problem right now that the market is very slow now. Do you really think that IT managements in corporations will rush to buy something totally new, not backward compatible to anything at those very high price tags? I hardly think so.
Don't forget - with Opteron you got %100 backward compatibility, which means a LOT to IT staff, and it would probably cost MUCH lower then Intel's prices..
Don't know about you - but I had until few months ago few problems with NVidia cards + VIA chipset and AMD Athlon. Those problems have dissapeared lately.
As for ATI - well, their X driver is very good (written by non ATI people), but their Windows NT 4 drivers really sucks!
NVidia cannot release the source code due to parts which are not belong to them (they belong to SGI and other parties)...
BUT - do you really think that ATI or Matrox cannot reverse engineer the driver? Go ask Matrox engineer and they'll swear that NVidia reversed engineers Matrox's binary only driver for dual head and thats how NVidia got dual head (at least thats what one of Matrox engineers told me)
Then they'll loose shitload of money...
Remember - more and more special effects companies are moving to Linux. Not only in the rendering farm, but also at the artists workstations etc...
The 2D driver won't help much to the artists, and NVidia do want those studios to buy the latest and greatest graphics cards from them - specially the Quadro line which is their top professional card (and costs less then half of the really professional OpenGL based cards) - without drivers, those studios won't buy it. Thats why you see NVidia, Matrox and ATI promising drivers for Linux - and delivering them (specially NVidia - which keeps updating their driver).
Ahhm,
If you do some research, you'll find that the sorenson codec in flash based products (Flash MX etc..) is very different from the version that is bundled with Quicktime..
I belive that GSM uses the 900Mhz area (well, at least at europe) while blue tooth uses the 2.5 Ghz area..
Read again...
They want money also from the Browser vendors (Hi Microsoft, Opera, Netscape, AOL)...
Actually...
Sony just paid - I think something like $15 millions - the register have the story.
They bought Compression Labs which held the JPEG patent.
It seems that until they aquired Compression Labs, Compression Labs didn't bother to collect royalties...
Look at the year the patent was granted. 1986.
I hardly think that AVI, MPEG or PNG and some other popular formats were exists or known...
read the link! it says HP selects debian for it's *internal* use!
For customers, they'll continue to sell Red Hat products, and some Mandrake on "selected" machines..
No, in Norway it's different..
Can you imagine a company with (lets say) 1000 pc's moving from Windows to Linux? or even moving from Office 2000/XP to Open-Office? I can hardly think so.
Why? think about training 1000 empolyees Open Office. Think that you need %100 export/import capabilities of Word, Excel, PowerPoint - OpenOffice can't give it to you (try to import a complicated PowerPoint from Office XP or complicated Word document and see what I mean)..
Add those costs - and you'll see why MS shouldn't be worry too much. The transformation and supporting all the workers will costs more then paying MS demands..
the problem on the Microsoft side is that they sold 300,000 copies of Mac Office for OS X, while they expected to sell 750,000 for the same period..
Don't forget that Mac BU is a self unit - profit from Office X goes to them and not to the Windows part, so they actually don't make the amount of money they expected...
I just wonder when Apple will move their butts and start Aquafying Open Office. My guess is that within few months you'll see some new "volunteers" without the @apple.com email address starting to port OpenOffice to OS X with Aqua..
SMB?
Lets say you got the budget and the people to create the next-ubber-cool competitor to XFree..
When you'll do the 3D work, you'll need Vertex stuff, which is -> you guessed it, now owned by MS, thanks to SGI's stupidity.
So your very cool XFree killer can either have 3D without vertex stuff, or can be with vertex, but you'll need to charge your end-users to pay for MS licenses..
How many Linux users do you know that will actually pull their wallet and pay for this? maybe some graphics studios, but not others..
SGI used to do some OpenGL qualifications tests for hardware - if I recall correctly.
I belive (I can't belive that I type this, but here goes) that MS got their full rights to do what they're doing today...
Anyone of the readers here (if he/she got the money) or any company who got the money - could have bought the patents from SGI and start demanding money from the OpenGL ARB.
I belive (as I wrote here today) that it was SGI stupid move to sell those patents to MS (why not grant them a very limited license?) instead of selling it to a more OpenGL friendly company like NVidia...
Thanks to SGI stupid move - we'll be screwed..
THANKS SGI!
You're talking about GAMES, while OpenGL has been mostly used in development 3D Applications (OK, some games like Quake uses OpenGL).
The big problem here, is once SGI foolishly sold those patents to Microsoft (instead of NVidia for example), They effectivly allowd MS to stretch the OpenGL ARB for royalties and effectivly kill OpenGL (forget free OpenGL if you need to pay per copy for MS patents).
VirtualDub for example?
I agree with you on this one..
However - we're talking different things here - a person who gets a Linux distribution from his friends and installs Linux + KDE to learn/experiment VS. your example - to buy a whole new machine...
you wrote: "I love Linux on the desktop, and I love KDE, but unless it offers something original, something that Windows and Mac OS don't, then what's the point?"
The moment that KDE will be radically different from Mac OS & Windows - thats the moment you'll start loosing people who wants to use Linux and came from Windows world. It's pretty hard to teach a newbie an entirely new window manager and/or desktop enviroment.
Try taking a kid who used only windows and give him Window Maker. See what he tells you.
lets take it point by point:
* I don't see it getting crashed. If you can compile KDE 3.1 alpha - please do, and report crashes to bugs.kde.org
* try to run your app with artsdsp: artsdsp xmms
* you can compile kdebinding and switch from KHTML to KMOZILLA on the same window - it's in the "View" menu on Konqueror
* if you want to look like XP - please give more details.
From my experience - I had installed Red Hat 7.3 with KDE 3.0 and I used it, but I missed the tabbed browsing (I open about 16 tabs on Konqueror on avrage) so I compiled KDE 3.1 Alpha and I'm using it already for about a week.
My impression so far - stable as a rock already! I removed my old KDE 3.0 RPMS and getting all my stuff with KDE 3.1 alpha - and it works! didn't see any crashes so far..
They're not trying to invent something new here - the great thing with this feature is that it's MUCH easier for end user to use without getting the headache of security (it's secured, expires after a period of time, etc)
Original authors??
;)
Last time I checked - RPM stands for "Red hat Package Management" - so should John Gilmore (from Red Hat) pay Red Hat?