He predicted the same thing a year ago, except back then the main reason for that was a slowing economy and a downward pressure on PC prices. That still hasn't happened. In fact, we saw major vendors like Dell and IBM drop Linux support from their desktops and laptops.
In addition, Sun was the first to announce that Solaris run on an Itanium emulator and there is a rumor that the OS used to run on test IA-64 equipment in Sun labs. However, because of Sun's squabbles with Intel, this project never saw the light. Was Intel so naive to believe in the beginning that Sun would abandon its SPARC platform for IA-64?
My world view is that Itanium based systems will become commodity products very quickly after good silicon is available in reasonable volume. At that point, why should one spend $8-10k for that hardware from the likes of HP, Compaq, Dell and others when one can build it for $2k (or even less)?
When peolpe start buying Itanium systems in volume, then the prices will drop on the Itanium systems. The reasons, they're expensive is not because the chips are hard to come by but because no one wants to buy them right now.
However, this comment alone makes me wonder about he posters cluelessness. He obviously hasn't worked in any real production environment. You people should realize that you simply can't build the kind of systems that Dell, HP, etc sell -today- out of commodity components. Take a look at a typical high-end SMP Dell server: propietary OEM motherboard, propietary case, hot-swap hard drives, hot-swap redundant power supplies and cooling, LOM support, etc. All components have been carefully designed to work together to produce a reliable, and scalable server system. You will never ever build the same kind of system on your own and if you do it's not going to be cheaper than buying one. Plus you don't get the vendor support.
The comment about SPARC being death is completely astonishing at the time when Sun is -THE- unix market leader. SPARC CPUs were never faster than the competition but that didn't worry Sun users as long as they were up to par with the competitors. The reason people buy Sun hardware is not the CPUs (CPU is alone is useless) but Solaris which is THE enterprise class OS and its applications, Sun's excellent support, massive multiprocessor scalability of Sun systems, massive I/O bandwidth, etc.
Current Sun chip is not bad at all (UltraSPARC III) and Sun is working on UltraSPARC V.
We're talking about one of the world's most connnected campuses with a +50,000 student/faculty/staff population most of whom make a heavy use of internet on a daily basis. Also, the bandwidth is certainly much cheaper here in the US than say in Europe, Australia, or developing countries.
The residence halls have a separate 40Mbps pipe, so it is 110Mbps combined. Also UC Berkeley conntects to Calren-2 and Internet-2 which run at much higher speeds but the problem with those is that they connect to large universities only.
Not braniaks. Palm started licensing their OS to clone makers years ago. Palm also make its own PDA. This sort of puts Palm into in akward position because it is both a partnet and a competitor to Sony, Handsrping and the like. Because of this, it has been decided to split the company into a hardware and software decision. Rumors of this started appearing starting a year ago.
Meanwhile, Richard Smith notes that the Globally Unique Identifier in every installation of Windows Media Player allows websites to universally track users, and Microsoft does not consider it a security problem.
Right. This is not a security problem. This is a privacy issue.
And speaking of which. Many of us have fixed IP addresses. Web sites already track our actions with cookies. Telcos sell information about us to anyone who wants to pay for it. Get over it. We have no privacy to begin with.
it's only the best environment to run Linux apps on a multiprocessor,
You have been brainwashed by Caldera's marketoids.
The best environment to run Linux apps on a multiprocessor? Is that a Joke? The best environment to run Linux apps on any machine is Linux (assumming you mean, binary only, commercial Linux applications) Will Caldera guarantee 100% binary compatibility? Will the software vendor actually support the application once they find out that you're running it on SCO? On some Linux servers, I run more than $10,000 worth of commercial, mission critical software. Why would I want to loose the vendor support on all those applications that have cost us some much, and why would I want to spend money on this slowly dying OS (SCO)? Why would I want to make all those applications potentially less stable? Just for making them run slightly faster on an SMP machine? Oh please. This claim is a joke.
RPM and apt are different tools. Debian's equivalent of RPM is DPKG. Using dpkg without apt running on top of it would be just as much pain as
when you use stand-alone RPM right now. There is clearly need a need for a tool that runs on top of RPM that takes care of dependencies and such. RedHat's up2date looks good. Too bad it is not a free service.
Also, I feel sorry for you if you think that buying a comodidy PC from CompUSA is a good substitute for a big iron server from companies like Sun.
Does the PC you buy from CompUSA come with front accessible, hot swappable UltraSCSI hard drives? Redundant, hot swappable cooling and power supplies? 64bit/66MHz PCI bus? What about quality and ? Hot swappable PCIc cards?
I am not saying that there aren't good substitutes for Sun, HP, etc servers in the x86 world. HP, IBM, Compaq, etc make excellent x86 servers but they are not sold in CompUSA and while they cost significantly less than Sun machines, they are much much more expensive than your typical (piece of junk) Compaq or HP PC that you buy in CompUSA.
The E250 sold for $1500 on ebay is not the same that Sun sells for $15000. I am betting the one sold for $15000 comes with three year warranty, dual 400MHz CPU, four or more 10K RPM 36GB disks, redundant power supplies, at least a gig of RAM, etc. The $1500 E250s that I saw on ebay were bare-bones (one slow CPU, one or two 9GB disks, 256MB of RAM, no redundant cooling or power)
Anyways, you shouldn't be looking at E250 anyways. The only reason Sun still sells E250, E450 and other UltraSPARC II based machines is to support customers who are not ready to run SOlaris 8.
If you don't have problems with Solaris 8 (which is an excellent OS BTW and it much better than previous releases) essentially for the same price you can buy UltraSPARC III based servers which are roughtly twice as fast as the old generation machines.
AMD has a long way to go to compete with Sun, or even Intel on the server market. You're comparing a useless piece of silicon with a leading server platform. When you pay to Sun, you're not just getting hardware but a proven, scalable, stable enterprice quality server platform with industry leading application support, industrial strength operating system and Sun support services.
Oh, no. The Blade100 uses a 500MHz US IIe processor with 256KB cache while Fire 15000 uses 900 MHz UltraSPARC III processors with 8MB cache. There is absolutely no comparison between the two. If you want a desktop machine with a USIII CPU it's gonna cost you around $10K
(Blade1000)
I don't understand why your post hasn't been modded down as a troll.
Bloat. MS Office defies the basic principles of UNIX. It will probably need to run as root and make our systems unstable. Do we need this?
FUD. What an inane thing to do. MS Office does not need to run as administrator on Windows or root on Mac OS X. It is a completely user level app.
As for bloat, MS office is certainly a big app but it is significantly less bloated than the well known Linux office suites like WordPerfect Office or StarOffice.
No freedom. This is a step in the wrong direction for those of us who prefer to use 'cvs update' instead of service packs to update our systems.
Then the tiny minority of those who prefer this highly ineficient method of software updates, will not install it. Big deal.
Monopoly leveraging. Microsoft will undoubtedly engineer their.Net "features" into new versions of Office. Don't be surprised if you, as a UNIX user, will need a Passport account just to run Word.
It is easy to tie IE to a web portal or something like it but I can hardly imagine how one could tie an office suite to something else.
The passport comment is rediculous.
Monopoly extension. Why would anyone work on improving Koffice, StarOffice, or LaTeX if MS Office exists on the UNIX platform? The competitors would start out at a huge disadvantage and know there's no place in the market for them.
Why did anyone work on Linux or FreeBSD when perfectly suitable substitute operating systems were available?
World domination. Anything that helps us replace inferior desktop OSs [microsoft.com] is a good thing, evolution-wise and principle-wise
The (inferior) Linux desktop environments are still trying to match the basic functionality of the more than five year old Win95 desktop environment.
Uh, what makes you think that Linux users won't buy the Office? The real reason MS won't port it is not because Linux users don't want to pay for it but because that will make Linux one step closer to being a mainstream desktop OS which is MS's territory.
As for loki, I was always skeptical about their business model. How many Linux users out there? How many DESKTOP Linux users out there? How many desktop Linux users out there who actually play games? How many Linux users out there who play games in Windows instead of Linux (e.g. because of poor support for graphics hardware). How many Linux users does that leave? How many of them will actually be willing to buy a game? There problem is not in wsillingness to play but in the number of people who want to play games on Linux.
About the only Sun system that is full of PC parts are the low-end Blade100 and Netra X1 ystems (well, and Ultra5/10 but those are on the way out). Sun's core business is still based on selling proprietary systems (granted, they don't mind using industry standard technologies like PCI, etc where it makes sense).
Slashdot Mirror
You wouldn't believe how many idiots^H^H^H^H^H people get the following hardware which is arguably as crappy as soft-WiFi cards:
..
USB DSL modems
USB WiFi access points
PCI DSL modems
the list goes on..
Just because someone gets a fancier network connection does not mean they are aware of all available options in order to choose the best one
These are the corrected peak speeds:
..
UltraSCSI (wide): 40MB/second
Utra2 SCSI: 80MB/second
Ultra160: 160MB/second
Ultra320: 320MB/second
Firewire: 40MB/second
As you canse, firewire compares well only to the old'good UltraSCSI standard. 40MB/second is still pretty fast for most users though
You're comparing apples and oranges. Blade100 is a cheap PC knock-off while Blade1000 and Blade2000 are real high-end unix workstations.
Sun is not going anywhere until Linux is able to match Solaris as an enterprise platform. I don't think that will ever happen.
He predicted the same thing a year ago, except back then the main reason for that was a slowing economy and a downward pressure on PC prices. That still hasn't happened. In fact, we saw major vendors like Dell and IBM drop Linux support from their desktops and laptops.
SGI is back at selling IRIX/MIPS computers and they have postponed their IA64/Linux plans indefinitely
Imagine a beowulf cluster of these running debian! ;p
In addition, Sun was the first to announce that Solaris run on an Itanium emulator and there is a rumor that the OS used to run on test IA-64 equipment in Sun labs. However, because of Sun's squabbles with Intel, this project never saw the light. Was Intel so naive to believe in the beginning that Sun would abandon its SPARC platform for IA-64?
My world view is that Itanium based systems will become commodity products very quickly after good silicon is available in reasonable volume. At that point, why should one spend $8-10k for that hardware from the likes of HP, Compaq, Dell and others when one can build it for $2k (or even less)?
When peolpe start buying Itanium systems in volume, then the prices will drop on the Itanium systems. The reasons, they're expensive is not because the chips are hard to come by but because no one wants to buy them right now.
However, this comment alone makes me wonder about he posters cluelessness. He obviously hasn't worked in any real production environment. You people should realize that you simply can't build the kind of systems that Dell, HP, etc sell -today- out of commodity components. Take a look at a typical high-end SMP Dell server: propietary OEM motherboard, propietary case, hot-swap hard drives, hot-swap redundant power supplies and cooling, LOM support, etc. All components have been carefully designed to work together to produce a reliable, and scalable server system. You will never ever build the same kind of system on your own and if you do it's not going to be cheaper than buying one. Plus you don't get the vendor support.
The comment about SPARC being death is completely astonishing at the time when Sun is -THE- unix market leader. SPARC CPUs were never faster than the competition but that didn't worry Sun users as long as they were up to par with the competitors. The reason people buy Sun hardware is not the CPUs (CPU is alone is useless) but Solaris which is THE enterprise class OS and its applications, Sun's excellent support, massive multiprocessor scalability of Sun systems, massive I/O bandwidth, etc.
Current Sun chip is not bad at all (UltraSPARC III) and Sun is working on UltraSPARC V.
We're talking about one of the world's most connnected campuses with a +50,000 student/faculty/staff population most of whom make a heavy use of internet on a daily basis. Also, the bandwidth is certainly much cheaper here in the US than say in Europe, Australia, or developing countries.
The residence halls have a separate 40Mbps pipe, so it is 110Mbps combined. Also UC Berkeley conntects to Calren-2 and Internet-2 which run at much higher speeds but the problem with those is that they connect to large universities only.
The world is switching to GRUB.
Not braniaks. Palm started licensing their OS to clone makers years ago. Palm also make its own PDA. This sort of puts Palm into in akward position because it is both a partnet and a competitor to Sony, Handsrping and the like. Because of this, it has been decided to split the company into a hardware and software decision. Rumors of this started appearing starting a year ago.
Right. This is not a security problem. This is a privacy issue.
And speaking of which. Many of us have fixed IP addresses. Web sites already track our actions with cookies. Telcos sell information about us to anyone who wants to pay for it. Get over it. We have no privacy to begin with.
it's only the best environment to run Linux apps on a multiprocessor,
You have been brainwashed by Caldera's marketoids.
The best environment to run Linux apps on a multiprocessor? Is that a Joke? The best environment to run Linux apps on any machine is Linux (assumming you mean, binary only, commercial Linux applications) Will Caldera guarantee 100% binary compatibility? Will the software vendor actually support the application once they find out that you're running it on SCO? On some Linux servers, I run more than $10,000 worth of commercial, mission critical software. Why would I want to loose the vendor support on all those applications that have cost us some much, and why would I want to spend money on this slowly dying OS (SCO)? Why would I want to make all those applications potentially less stable? Just for making them run slightly faster on an SMP machine? Oh please. This claim is a joke.
Apple's biggest competitors are Sony (on consumer market, laptops) and Dell (education and corporate market in general)
..a beowulf cluster of these ..
RPM and apt are different tools. Debian's equivalent of RPM is DPKG. Using dpkg without apt running on top of it would be just as much pain as
when you use stand-alone RPM right now. There is clearly need a need for a tool that runs on top of RPM that takes care of dependencies and such. RedHat's up2date looks good. Too bad it is not a free service.
Also, I feel sorry for you if you think that buying a comodidy PC from CompUSA is a good substitute for a big iron server from companies like Sun.
Does the PC you buy from CompUSA come with front accessible, hot swappable UltraSCSI hard drives? Redundant, hot swappable cooling and power supplies? 64bit/66MHz PCI bus? What about quality and ? Hot swappable PCIc cards?
I am not saying that there aren't good substitutes for Sun, HP, etc servers in the x86 world. HP, IBM, Compaq, etc make excellent x86 servers but they are not sold in CompUSA and while they cost significantly less than Sun machines, they are much much more expensive than your typical (piece of junk) Compaq or HP PC that you buy in CompUSA.
The E250 sold for $1500 on ebay is not the same that Sun sells for $15000. I am betting the one sold for $15000 comes with three year warranty, dual 400MHz CPU, four or more 10K RPM 36GB disks, redundant power supplies, at least a gig of RAM, etc. The $1500 E250s that I saw on ebay were bare-bones (one slow CPU, one or two 9GB disks, 256MB of RAM, no redundant cooling or power)
Anyways, you shouldn't be looking at E250 anyways. The only reason Sun still sells E250, E450 and other UltraSPARC II based machines is to support customers who are not ready to run SOlaris 8.
If you don't have problems with Solaris 8 (which is an excellent OS BTW and it much better than previous releases) essentially for the same price you can buy UltraSPARC III based servers which are roughtly twice as fast as the old generation machines.
AMD has a long way to go to compete with Sun, or even Intel on the server market. You're comparing a useless piece of silicon with a leading server platform. When you pay to Sun, you're not just getting hardware but a proven, scalable, stable enterprice quality server platform with industry leading application support, industrial strength operating system and Sun support services.
Oh, no. The Blade100 uses a 500MHz US IIe processor with 256KB cache while Fire 15000 uses 900 MHz UltraSPARC III processors with 8MB cache. There is absolutely no comparison between the two. If you want a desktop machine with a USIII CPU it's gonna cost you around $10K
(Blade1000)
Bloat. MS Office defies the basic principles of UNIX. It will probably need to run as root and make our systems unstable. Do we need this?
FUD. What an inane thing to do. MS Office does not need to run as administrator on Windows or root on Mac OS X. It is a completely user level app.
As for bloat, MS office is certainly a big app but it is significantly less bloated than the well known Linux office suites like WordPerfect Office or StarOffice.
No freedom. This is a step in the wrong direction for those of us who prefer to use 'cvs update' instead of service packs to update our systems.
Then the tiny minority of those who prefer this highly ineficient method of software updates, will not install it. Big deal.
Monopoly leveraging. Microsoft will undoubtedly engineer their .Net "features" into new versions of Office. Don't be surprised if you, as a UNIX user, will need a Passport account just to run Word.
It is easy to tie IE to a web portal or something like it but I can hardly imagine how one could tie an office suite to something else.
The passport comment is rediculous.
Monopoly extension. Why would anyone work on improving Koffice, StarOffice, or LaTeX if MS Office exists on the UNIX platform? The competitors would start out at a huge disadvantage and know there's no place in the market for them.
Why did anyone work on Linux or FreeBSD when perfectly suitable substitute operating systems were available?
World domination. Anything that helps us replace inferior desktop OSs [microsoft.com] is a good thing, evolution-wise and principle-wise
The (inferior) Linux desktop environments are still trying to match the basic functionality of the more than five year old Win95 desktop environment.
Uh, what makes you think that Linux users won't buy the Office? The real reason MS won't port it is not because Linux users don't want to pay for it but because that will make Linux one step closer to being a mainstream desktop OS which is MS's territory.
As for loki, I was always skeptical about their business model. How many Linux users out there? How many DESKTOP Linux users out there? How many desktop Linux users out there who actually play games? How many Linux users out there who play games in Windows instead of Linux (e.g. because of poor support for graphics hardware). How many Linux users does that leave? How many of them will actually be willing to buy a game? There problem is not in wsillingness to play but in the number of people who want to play games on Linux.
About the only Sun system that is full of PC parts are the low-end Blade100 and Netra X1 ystems (well, and Ultra5/10 but those are on the way out). Sun's core business is still based on selling proprietary systems (granted, they don't mind using industry standard technologies like PCI, etc where it makes sense).