3.Even back then he was firmly of the view that decent software could and would not be written by enthusiastic volunteers. He still can not see it, even with all the amazing stuff that has come out of decades of software sharing.
seeing as how MS is a consumer-software (non-expert) aimed company, could it not be said that this was true, even today? Linux and OSS is vastly superior in the realm of high-performance and expert computing needs, but have there been any successes of OSS on the average consumer's desktop?
Though technically brilliant software comes out of the OSS realm, easy to use software with a consistent idiot-friendly (where idiot really means average-non-computer-professional) interface has been and is dominated by Closed source.
I think his point was that OSS has never really had a success on the desktop. Linux and Apache may be successful on the server and workstation arena where you have a million or so generally experienced computer users, but many closed source products are being used by tens (if not hundreds) of millions of average users.
Yeah, but a whole lot more countries/tribes/empires fell because they stayed small...
Free trade has pretty much helped everyone who has tried it in the long run, and this is the goal of the WTO. If they actually get to it is another issue...
Though it is easy to villify faceless corporations as the goons of the next century, consider that when it comes down to the wire, corporations are one of the mechanisms we have seen for allocating resources where they are wanted. Look at the box in front of you. Its Operating system may have been constructed by a loose-nit band of freewheelers, but you can bet that the CPU was produced on a multi-billion dollar fab plant. Even the great grand-father UNIX was invented by AT&T, back when they were a monopoly.
I agree that corperations need to be kept in check (just like the government, unions, religion, and anything else with power and influence) but before we blast them as the Great Evil, look at some of the good they can do - ideally, a corporation wants money, it gains this by producing a product and selling it. it sells it by making its product something we want.
Of course, this usually gets muddled somewhere along the way, just like governments usually somehow forget to protect everyone's rights and freedoms and religions loose sight of their original intent, and what have you. This is the price we pay and the risk we take whenever humans decided to act together towards some goal.
My point is, coroprations have achieved some pretty spectaculary forms of efficency (things individuals simple could not have accomplished on their own), and they have done some pretty shoddy things as well. Keep this in mind before condemning.
The highly touted "Internet Revolution" took another major step forward Monday, when Compaq unveiled the breakthrough Compaq Presario 6000, a $4,995 multimedia computer system that enables users to download files containing network-television programs and display them on a computer monitor.
"Imagine watching TV at the click of a mouse, instead of a remote control," Compaq director of product development Bill Welborne said. "With the Compaq Presario 6000 and a few reasonably priced add-ons, you'll never have to watch TV on a television again."
Very true, the primary bottle neck in computers these days is memory and network latency. I think that the advances IBM is showcasing here will really pay off though in decreased power requirements which are becoming increasingly important as embedded devices appear. and the combination of Processor and Memory is an extremely attactive option as it relieves requirements on the bus.
Another mechanism to decrease the effect of this memory latency is to use large numbers of low-level threads (often automatically generated by the compiler) to mask latency. By decreasing the context switch penalty to a single cycle (or less with interwoven threads) and then switching on every cache miss substantial benifits can be made. One example of this is Tera computing MTA architechture. For certain common simulation tasks the 4-processor TERA machine blew away a multi-node Origin and Cray computer according to This NASA report.
Also, Sun's new MAJC architechture uses threads to mask latency.
Interwoven threads (where the processor switches thread every clock cycle) has the benifits of removing branch and data dependancies from a processor pipleine, thus removing the need for processor complexity like data forwarding, speculative execution, and the like. An example of this technique can be found a the TIPSI Project.
Say what you will about the WTO, but I trust a supra-national entity controled by corperations more than any government.
Corperations are all about greed, they want you to buy their stuff and make loads of money. And that I understand and can account for.
Altruistic Moral governements have a tendancy to want to "better society" which ususally means stripping people of basic freedoms and attempting to dictate morality.
All things considered, I trust a greedy man who admits that he wants my wallet than a noble man who claims to want to help me.
This technology was also used in other places. The first low-level multi-threading I know of was on one of the I/O controllers for Cray's CDC 6600. It could interleve 10 threads to hide latency.
Also, NASA did a great review of the TERA architechture. HERE. For many scientific computing tasks a MTA can blow away even a high end Origin or cluster. Let's face it - we can make our CPUs as fast as we want, but the memory bottleneck is just getting worse. I believe that low-level multithreading could solve a lot of these problems.
I would disagree that SGI is got on anyone's tail these days, especially SUN. Look at the stock prices: SGI has basicly been going down from a height of $40 in 1995 to its peresent around $8. In the same period of time, Sun has gone from $4 to $112.
SUN has stayed on a clear course of providing workhorse servers and workstations based on the SPARC architechture and SunOS/Solaris OS.
SGI has followed a confusing track on the high end (spliting their offerings by buying Cray (which competed with their own Origin line), then recently announcing to spin it off) and now deciding to move over to the unproven IA-64 technology (whose scalability is seriously questioned). In the workstation market they dabbled in and then withdrew from the IA-32 NT market. Over the last few years SGI has had "focus" on 4 architechtures (MIPS,IA-64,IA-32,Cray) and 4 operating systems (IRIX, UNICOS, NT, Linux). They have made a series of bad business moves (ex: the bus technology for the Sun Ultra Enterprise Servers is based off of technology SGI sold Sun) and have been laying off employees for the past several quarters.
True, SUN has not swept the world by storm with Java, but they have been very successful at their cord business - selling servers.
But leaving out the fan might be a bad idea. Half the home-market PCs these days have heat problems with at least one, often two, fans in them.
This is because other than macs all home-market PCs use x86 processors which run MUCH hotter than PPC chips.
according to http://infopad.eecs.berkeley.edu/CIC/summary/local / A PPC G3 typically draws something like 3-6 watts a PII something like 7-8 with peaks well above 18 A K6-III draws something around 12 typically.
from personal experince, I have been almost burnt by touching an x86 chip -after the computer has been off for a minute or two. With one of the G3s, you can easily open the case and touch the heatsink while the computer is running and feel only mild warmth.
Also, most PCs come in cases which were not well designed for anything other than being a rectangle. If done properly, convection can be amasingly powerful (If I recall my Tom Clancy, the US Navy uses coolant convection as the primary coolant for its Nuclear reactors on modern subs)
In sum, the convection thing may work quite well.
So bundle a SuperDrive on some models, then, and have a low-end unit without the floppy if you want.
IMHO, the iMac IS the low-end unit. some 2+ million people apparently get along without the floppy, so I think this was a good choice on apple's part.
IIRC, IBM was doing most of the actual porting of NT. They dropped it when it just turned out that there wasn't a huge market. Eventually the acchitechture moved on. There was also supposed to be a Solaris for PPC, but it never appeared. I believe that this is why there is a little-endian mode on PPC even though Mac and AIX are big-endian. It may have been intel, but there were other factors that killed PPC NT.
This is not completely accurate (at least for LinuxPPC). You can use OpenFirmware. The LinuxPPC web pages do focus on the BootX (needs macOS) solution, but OF is completely feasible
can't say for certain, but I know of at least one case where the Lawsuit worked against BSD.
one of the founders of the Beowulf project at NASA gave a lecture in which he said that BSD was originally seen as a technically superior OS (Linux was still pretty young then), but that the potential fallout from the lawsuit made them turn to Linux.
Probably several other smaller projects and developers has similar experiences - why pour effort into something which might be shutdown soon?
Henry Ford didn't invent the car or the assembly line, the IBM PC wasn't the first PC, The internet wasn't the first network, but they are all important.
Though linus may not have created a new OS paradigm, I think he deserves credit under then "lasting contribution to the field" sort of thing.
from what I know of security, Linux can be made VERY secure if you turn off services - which undoubtedly AOL would do. Turning off sendmail, apache, telnet, and everything else and in essence only have "outgoing" connections available would make them a lot more secure. Plus, since they all dial-in to AOL, AOL could easily proxy and firewall 'em into security.
What we need is a UNION not an escape. Hold our ground. I know that union conjors up negative images for most, but the basic idea is simple - people banding together and threatening to remove the most valuable thing they have - themselves - from those who need them.
This goes beyond high school and into the business world as well. Think about it - most companies need their tech people more than their marketers to function. Society as a whole needs geeks more than geeks need many aspects of society.
These are things which did contribute and were evidentely just as much a part as anything else.
Yes, there we all ahve horror stories of High school, being declared social outcasts because of being different, disliking the "popular" kids, and that can lead to hate - but I know few geeks who have then resorted to white supremacy.
Reform the school social ladder to protect those who are different yes, but I can't really sympathize with those who elevate hatred as these kids have.
Intel is leading the design of the Merced
and they are using their standard massively parallel design approach (lots of engineers)
It will be interesting to see if Intel Panics and tries to throw more people at the project if it falls behind. IMHO, that would cause more harm than good.
As I understand it, the HP Mckinely team is much smaller, which is a more intelligent way to attack a problem like this (drasticly new architechture)
IMHO, the trouble is with Intel. Though they make some decent chips, but it has been a long long time since they have done any huge innovation. Consider: with the virtual monpoly they held on PC chips for ages and ages they should have been able to pour money into R&D and create some pretty new and exciting things. True, they were held back by backward compatibility, but this should have been more than balanced out but $$$. Even the latest PIIIs on the enterprise level are not better than HP chips, Sun, SGI MIPS, PPCs, or what have you.
Also consider that the IA-64 EPIC architechture was orignally an HP invention. As I understand it HP designed it but realized that they didn't have the money or volume to produce it well, so they went to intel. Intel realized that they were in a position of power (they could live without HP, but HP would be in trouble without Intel's Fabs) so they grabbed the architechture and made it their own. for Merced, intel is throwing a huge team of designers agiainst it, but is still doing a poor job because the corperate architechture is too rigid. (Intel has been known to be a nasty employer, with a slew of age and sex discrimination suits behind it) HP meanwhile is working on the next-generation IA-64 chip (McKinely I believe) which is coming along quite nicely. The last estimate I heard was that McKinely will really show the power of EPIC chips, where as Merced will be about comperable to whatever Pentium successor they have out at the time.
I am a student, run linux, dislike NT, love comptuers, and usually vote with the mode in the/. polls. By most defintions, i would say I am an average user. and yes, I own a mac.
it seems to me that this community is best served by diversity. One-architechture One-OS One-processor computing doesn't seem nearly as intersting as being able to choose from Alphas, Suns, Macintoshes, other PPCs, Intels, and MIPS running Linux, MacOS, IRIX, SunOS, BeOS, DOS, and whatever else there is out there choosing on whatever suits your needs for cost, expandibility, ease of use and install, and everything else.
Imac fills a need (even for power users)
on
iMac Linux
·
· Score: 2
I agree. Yes, PPC machines are more expensive and may not run your favorite games and desktop productivity apps, but if you need speed, RISC is the way to go. For a lot of scientific computing and engineering applications the PPC chip is vastly superior to anything in the Intel world. True, the imac is not very expandable, but I really don't think too many people will be running servers off of them - there are plenty of G3 towers for that. What this lack of expandability does do is give you a small transportable desktop quality machine which does FFTs damn fast and doesn't cost more than $1000 -which is very good thing. Now that it runs Linux (and MacOS X) it has the stability to be used all over the place.
More importantly, I believe that supporting alternative CPU architechtures is just as important as supporting alternative OSes. If Intel had no competition, it is doubtful that they would be upping chip speeds and dropping prices like they are. And RISC and other architechtures provide fundamental advantages over CISC. The advances in RISC and high-performance chips work their way into every desktop in a few years (backside caches, pipeling, etc...) with an Imac you can have these advantages NOW and at a reasonable price.
LinuxPPC was actually originally developed for CHRP and PREP based PPC machines using openfirmware. There is a method (BootX) to boot into Linux from MacOS (this method is prefered for most people who dual boot) but the other method (setting OpenFirmware variables in PRAM) allows you to boot without MacOS.
Slashdot Mirror
3.Even back then he was firmly of the view that decent software could and would not be
written by enthusiastic volunteers. He still can not see it, even with all the amazing
stuff that has come out of decades of software sharing.
seeing as how MS is a consumer-software (non-expert) aimed company, could it not be said that this was true, even today? Linux and OSS is vastly superior in the realm of high-performance and expert computing needs, but have there been any successes of OSS on the average consumer's desktop?
Though technically brilliant software comes out of the OSS realm, easy to use software with a consistent idiot-friendly (where idiot really means average-non-computer-professional) interface has been and is dominated by Closed source.
I think his point was that OSS has never really had a success on the desktop. Linux and Apache may be successful on the server and workstation arena where you have a million or so generally experienced computer users, but many closed source products are being used by tens (if not hundreds) of millions of average users.
Yeah, but a whole lot more countries/tribes/empires fell because they stayed small...
Free trade has pretty much helped everyone who has tried it in the long run, and this is the goal of the WTO. If they actually get to it is another issue...
Though it is easy to villify faceless corporations as the goons of the next century, consider that when it comes down to the wire, corporations are one of the mechanisms we have seen for allocating resources where they are wanted. Look at the box in front of you. Its Operating system may have been constructed by a loose-nit band of freewheelers, but you can bet that the CPU was produced on a multi-billion dollar fab plant. Even the great grand-father UNIX was invented by AT&T, back when they were a monopoly.
I agree that corperations need to be kept in check (just like the government, unions, religion, and anything else with power and influence) but before we blast them as the Great Evil, look at some of the good they can do - ideally, a corporation wants money, it gains this by producing a product and selling it. it sells it by making its product something we want.
Of course, this usually gets muddled somewhere along the way, just like governments usually somehow forget to protect everyone's rights and freedoms and religions loose sight of their original intent, and what have you. This is the price we pay and the risk we take whenever humans decided to act together towards some goal.
My point is, coroprations have achieved some pretty spectaculary forms of efficency (things individuals simple could not have accomplished on their own), and they have done some pretty shoddy things as well. Keep this in mind before condemning.
Just my humble opinion
New $5,000 Multimedia Computer System
Downloads Real-Time TV Programs,
Displays Them On Monitor
The highly touted "Internet Revolution" took
another major step forward Monday, when Compaq unveiled the
breakthrough Compaq Presario 6000, a $4,995 multimedia
computer system that enables users to download files containing
network-television programs and display them on a computer
monitor.
"Imagine watching TV at the click of a mouse, instead of a
remote control," Compaq director of product development Bill
Welborne said. "With the Compaq Presario 6000 and a few
reasonably priced add-ons, you'll never have to watch TV on a
television again."
Very true, the primary bottle neck in computers these days is memory and network latency. I think that the advances IBM is showcasing here will really pay off though in decreased power requirements which are becoming increasingly important as embedded devices appear. and the combination of Processor and Memory is an extremely attactive option as it relieves requirements on the bus.
intersting work is being done in this direction under the Processor-in-Memory (PIM) project.
Another mechanism to decrease the effect of this memory latency is to use large numbers of low-level threads (often automatically generated by the compiler) to mask latency. By decreasing the context switch penalty to a single cycle (or less with interwoven threads) and then switching on every cache miss substantial benifits can be made. One example of this is Tera computing MTA architechture. For certain common simulation tasks the 4-processor TERA machine blew away a multi-node Origin and Cray computer according to This NASA report.
Also, Sun's new MAJC architechture uses threads to mask latency.
Interwoven threads (where the processor switches thread every clock cycle) has the benifits of removing branch and data dependancies from a processor pipleine, thus removing the need for processor complexity like data forwarding, speculative execution, and the like. An example of this technique can be found a the TIPSI Project.
Say what you will about the WTO, but I trust a supra-national entity controled by corperations more than any government.
Corperations are all about greed, they want you to buy their stuff and make loads of money. And that I understand and can account for.
Altruistic Moral governements have a tendancy to want to "better society" which ususally means stripping people of basic freedoms and attempting to dictate morality.
All things considered, I trust a greedy man who admits that he wants my wallet than a noble man who claims to want to help me.
Just my humble opinion.
This technology was also used in other places. The first low-level multi-threading I know of was on one of the I/O controllers for Cray's CDC 6600. It could interleve 10 threads to hide latency.
Also, NASA did a great review of the TERA architechture. HERE. For many scientific computing tasks a MTA can blow away even a high end Origin or cluster. Let's face it - we can make our CPUs as fast as we want, but the memory bottleneck is just getting worse. I believe that low-level multithreading could solve a lot of these problems.
I would disagree that SGI is got on anyone's tail these days, especially SUN. Look at the stock prices: SGI has basicly been going down from a height of $40 in 1995 to its peresent around $8.
In the same period of time, Sun has gone from $4 to $112.
SUN has stayed on a clear course of providing workhorse servers and workstations based on the SPARC architechture and SunOS/Solaris OS.
SGI has followed a confusing track on the high end (spliting their offerings by buying Cray (which competed with their own Origin line), then recently announcing to spin it off) and now deciding to move over to the unproven IA-64 technology (whose scalability is seriously questioned). In the workstation market they dabbled in and then withdrew from the IA-32 NT market. Over the last few years SGI has had "focus" on 4 architechtures (MIPS,IA-64,IA-32,Cray) and 4 operating systems (IRIX, UNICOS, NT, Linux). They have made a series of bad business moves (ex: the bus technology for the Sun Ultra Enterprise Servers is based off of technology SGI sold Sun) and have been laying off employees for the past several quarters.
True, SUN has not swept the world by storm with Java, but they have been very successful at their cord business - selling servers.
But leaving out the fan might be a bad idea. Half the home-market PCs these days have heat problems with at least one, often two, fans in them.
l /
This is because other than macs all home-market PCs use x86 processors which run MUCH hotter than PPC chips.
according to http://infopad.eecs.berkeley.edu/CIC/summary/loca
A PPC G3 typically draws something like 3-6 watts
a PII something like 7-8 with peaks well above 18
A K6-III draws something around 12 typically.
from personal experince, I have been almost burnt by touching an x86 chip -after the computer has been off for a minute or two. With one of the G3s, you can easily open the case and touch the heatsink while the computer is running and feel only mild warmth.
Also, most PCs come in cases which were not well designed for anything other than being a rectangle. If done properly, convection can be amasingly powerful (If I recall my Tom Clancy, the US Navy uses coolant convection as the primary coolant for its Nuclear reactors on modern subs)
In sum, the convection thing may work quite well.
So bundle a SuperDrive on some models, then, and have a low-end unit without the floppy if you want.
IMHO, the iMac IS the low-end unit. some 2+ million people apparently get along without the floppy, so I think this was a good choice on apple's part.
IIRC, IBM was doing most of the actual porting of NT. They dropped it when it just turned out that there wasn't a huge market. Eventually the acchitechture moved on. There was also supposed to be a Solaris for PPC, but it never appeared. I believe that this is why there is a little-endian mode on PPC even though Mac and AIX are big-endian. It may have been intel, but there were other factors that killed PPC NT.
This is not completely accurate (at least for LinuxPPC). You can use OpenFirmware. The LinuxPPC web pages do focus on the BootX (needs macOS) solution, but OF is completely feasible
I don't think the lawsuit was all that important.
can't say for certain, but I know of at least one case where the Lawsuit worked against BSD.
one of the founders of the Beowulf project at NASA gave a lecture in which he said that BSD was originally seen as a technically superior OS (Linux was still pretty young then), but that the potential fallout from the lawsuit made them turn to Linux.
Probably several other smaller projects and developers has similar experiences - why pour effort into something which might be shutdown soon?
Henry Ford didn't invent the car or the assembly line, the IBM PC wasn't the first PC, The internet wasn't the first network, but they are all important.
Though linus may not have created a new OS paradigm, I think he deserves credit under then "lasting contribution to the field" sort of thing.
just my $.02
from what I know of security, Linux can be made VERY secure if you turn off services - which undoubtedly AOL would do. Turning off sendmail, apache, telnet, and everything else and in essence only have "outgoing" connections available would make them a lot more secure. Plus, since they all dial-in to AOL, AOL could easily proxy and firewall 'em into security.
I am not clear on all the technogy issues here, but wouldn't even java need an underlying OS of some sort to run its VM?
What we need is a UNION not an escape. Hold our ground. I know that union conjors up negative images for most, but the basic idea is simple - people banding together and threatening to remove the most valuable thing they have - themselves - from those who need them.
This goes beyond high school and into the business world as well. Think about it - most companies need their tech people more than their marketers to function. Society as a whole needs geeks more than geeks need many aspects of society.
just a crazy idea.
Racism, Hitler worship, Nazism....
These are things which did contribute and were evidentely just as much a part as anything else.
Yes, there we all ahve horror stories of High school, being declared social outcasts because of being different, disliking the "popular" kids, and that can lead to hate - but I know few geeks who have then resorted to white supremacy.
Reform the school social ladder to protect those who are different yes, but I can't really sympathize with those who elevate hatred as these kids have.
LinuxPPC does have USB support. It already runs on Imacs and beige G3s.
check out :
LinuxPPC Imacs page
It will be interesting to see if Intel Panics and tries to throw more people at the project if it falls behind. IMHO, that would cause more harm than good.
As I understand it, the HP Mckinely team is much smaller, which is a more intelligent way to attack a problem like this (drasticly new architechture)
IMHO, the trouble is with Intel. Though they make some decent chips, but it has been a long long time since they have done any huge innovation. Consider: with the virtual monpoly they held on PC chips for ages and ages they should have been able to pour money into R&D and create some pretty new and exciting things. True, they were held back by backward compatibility, but this should have been more than balanced out but $$$. Even the latest PIIIs on the enterprise level are not better than HP chips, Sun, SGI MIPS, PPCs, or what have you.
Also consider that the IA-64 EPIC architechture was orignally an HP invention. As I understand it HP designed it but realized that they didn't have the money or volume to produce it well, so they went to intel. Intel realized that they were in a position of power (they could live without HP, but HP would be in trouble without Intel's Fabs) so they grabbed the architechture and made it their own. for Merced, intel is throwing a huge team of designers agiainst it, but is still doing a poor job because the corperate architechture is too rigid. (Intel has been known to be a nasty employer, with a slew of age and sex discrimination suits behind it) HP meanwhile is working on the next-generation IA-64 chip (McKinely I believe) which is coming along quite nicely. The last estimate I heard was that McKinely will really show the power of EPIC chips, where as Merced will be about comperable to whatever Pentium successor they have out at the time.
anyhow, this is just my take on it all.
I believe Sun got solaris running
Average?
/. polls. By most defintions, i would say I am an average user. and yes, I own a mac.
I am a student, run linux, dislike NT, love comptuers, and usually vote with the mode in the
it seems to me that this community is best served by diversity. One-architechture One-OS One-processor computing doesn't seem nearly as intersting as being able to choose from Alphas, Suns, Macintoshes, other PPCs, Intels, and MIPS running Linux, MacOS, IRIX, SunOS, BeOS, DOS, and whatever else there is out there choosing on whatever suits your needs for cost, expandibility, ease of use and install, and everything else.
I agree. Yes, PPC machines are more expensive and may not run your favorite games and desktop productivity apps, but if you need speed, RISC is the way to go. For a lot of scientific computing and engineering applications the PPC chip is vastly superior to anything in the Intel world. True, the imac is not very expandable, but I really don't think too many people will be running servers off of them - there are plenty of G3 towers for that. What this lack of expandability does do is give you a small transportable desktop quality machine which does FFTs damn fast and doesn't cost more than $1000 -which is very good thing. Now that it runs Linux (and MacOS X) it has the stability to be used all over the place.
More importantly, I believe that supporting alternative CPU architechtures is just as important as supporting alternative OSes. If Intel had no competition, it is doubtful that they would be upping chip speeds and dropping prices like they are. And RISC and other architechtures provide fundamental advantages over CISC. The advances in RISC and high-performance chips work their way into every desktop in a few years (backside caches, pipeling, etc...) with an Imac you can have these advantages NOW and at a reasonable price.
LinuxPPC was actually originally developed for CHRP and PREP based PPC machines using openfirmware. There is a method (BootX) to boot into Linux from MacOS (this method is prefered for most people who dual boot) but the other method (setting OpenFirmware variables in PRAM) allows you to boot without MacOS.