Just as any real libertartian would not feel you or I have any business telling another whether they should work on fixing a friend's roof for free (even though a commercial entity loses business), a real libertarian wouldn't deny the right of anyone to create and support software that they give away. Nor would they try to argue the creator cannot set the terms under which they give it away.
Sun paid about 1 billion for MsSQL and Oracle says EU hold up is costing them 100s of millions of dollars a month by delaying decision which appears to largely hinge on Oracle's plans for MySQL. So Oracle must value it very highly since with a few more months of delay, Oracle reluctance to let it go will cost it more than it's worth. So why does Oracle care that much about MySQL? One can speculate...
Yup, back in the 80s the physicists said it would be physically impossible to provide switching and encoding which would allow phone line communication to exceed 2400 baud in modems. Yet before we gave up on phone lines, the modem builders were giving us 56,000 baud connections.
Sorry, the bricking itselft is part of the story. PC manufacturers moved to a 2-phase process for BIOS/fimware updates where a backup copy is in place in case of failure in the update. Console manf wouldn't dream of adding that extra 40 cents or so to their BOM (bill of materials) cost so bricking is possible there. Haven't heard of a bricked PC in 5-10 years.
this time PCs will have to work with all versions of Windows 7 to qualify for the sticker Nonsense, there are lot's of systems out there, particularly Netbooks, which will not. Certainly will not necessarily be 64-bit. If it only ran on 64-bit-capable systems, why is there a 32-bit version of Win 7 at all?
No particular reason for FOSS to be cheaper once it's not "free beer". RH or Novell could very price Linux solutions at level higher than MSFT. Ubuntu, Debian or other traditional FOSS could be much cheaper (depending what kind of support model you use)
This will give 1) Power 7 a run for the money on performance (and will kill every other microarchitecture incl all other x86) 2) Out-RAS SPARC and scale much more flexibly 3) Be available from dozens of vendors including everybody named on this page 4) Run Linux, Solaris, Windows, MacOS, BSD and probably others 5) Be the least expensive 'big iron' architecture available If I was Oracle, I'd be planning my strategy around this, but I'd certainly not Osborne my SPARC sales by saying so until I'm ready to pull the trigger....And even when I announce, I would say nice things about SPARC to keep those comfortable with it buying until they wise-up. But if you care about price/performance/uptime you'll know where to go.
Your IP lease expired by DHCP server because the DHCP server violated privacy policy. You will be asked to go to the ISPs website to "opt-in" to have that data persistnant but - whoops - you have no IP to connect with...
Just like we have a speed/size hierarchy in processor caches (L1 smaller and faster than L2 which is smaller and faster than L3), we are about to enter a tiering model for storage. It's silly to compare a 128GB SSD with 1.5TB spindle drive. On a personal system you're going to do different things with them. The SSD (or other systemboard flash) will be your fast OS and frequently used disk where fast reads / writes are important but files are not huge. For very large data, a secondary spindle drive with TBs connected either as second SATA drive or eSATA external (or, frankly, my preference) located on a storage server or appliance will be appropriate, But for most laptop users, i fyou cna have only one drive, a MLC SSD drive ~160GB or larger will be plenty and WILL make a qualitative change in you life. If only in that with SSD you can hibernate (full save of RAM to disk then shutdown) in seconds instead of minutes. Anyone who has not used an SSD just doesn't know
In the real sciences (chemistry or physics) where they need to get real things done, the elegance of the language is a very minor consideration. Major ones are: are there libraries that contain key specialised functions and subroutines that apply in my discipline and does it avoid any obscure object paradigms that though a steep learning curve into the procedural code I really want to write and does it manage variable memory for me in ways that will not create unstable code from poor pointer management? For most scientists, FORTRAN fits this requirement perfectly and I doubt Python will ever have 10% of the scientific libraries FORTRAN has acquired over the years. Even in commercial technical codes FORTRAN is widely used. 80% or the computational-assisted-engineering cluster cycles at automakers (and at many other industries) are consumed by materials deformation codes like LS-DYNA which has always been and is still written in FORTRAN. (Lots of the key engineering codes were written in the 60s for NASA and they survive today) People use languages that work best for them, not what some meta-discipline like computer science says is the right thing.
i7 is a very expensive platform to buy into, with a premium on processors and motherboards Well, there is still a premium on X58 chipset mainboards (although that may change) but the lowest Core i7 is not ridiculously expensive ($200) and is faster than almost anything except it's i7 big brothers. As we get to 32nm gen NHM desktop parts soon, expect to see some much cheaper NHM follow ons too.
But they DON'T do more work per clock. A Core i7 at same freq kills a Shanghai. If you did clock a Nehalem up to 7Ghz it would clobber the new AMD part.
Patch and drop cables being used from punchdown blocks to rack devices and from wall sockets to desktop systems take abuse and should be replaced as appropriate. In-wall wiring going from punchdowns in wire closets and to wall sockets is pretty static and unless there were illegal twists or other abuse applied in the original installation these should last a lot of years (how many is a good question - probably at least 10-15 years I would think). Most likely reason they would be replaced is when cheap 10GE over copper mandates wire a bit better than Cat 6.
Does the FTC consider apps servers a market?
on
Oracle Buys Sun
·
· Score: 1
If it does, then Oracle+Sun is probably an unacceptable concentration in the J2EE and middleware markets. Ironically, Oracle would probably argue that all those MSFT.Net servers out there are competitors in that space too, so Oracle won't totally own the segment. This is the one thing that might take the deal down.
Sun hdw doesn't necessarily mean SPARC
on
Oracle Buys Sun
·
· Score: 1
Oracle might just drive Sun's x86 platforms harder, starting with their new Intel Nehalem 2-ways. When the big scalable Nehalem EX boxes come out at the end of the year, they'll be able to take on just about all other other RISC big iron.
...could send a Friend of the Court letter to the Judge advising him what idiots the security people are? It sounds like the student was an idiot too, but making his OS sound like some kind of devious evasion of authority is inane.
Is the goal really to find "earth-like" planets (ones are similar, size, dist from star etc) or to find "habitable" planets which could support life somewhat like us or (maybe someday) us. These planets could very well exist at different distances as moons of gas giants that are closer to the star than our gas giants (which might provide supplimentry heat) and while these would probably be smaller, many gg moons are not much smaller than earth. Needless to say, these are going to be really hard to pick out from here, so in one sense, right now, we're looking for what we possibly can see, even if it's not all of what we're interested in. I am not an astronomer, obviously, but it there any merit in this?
What Moore's Law Really Says
on
Less Is Moore
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
The observation behind Moore's Law doesn't say anything about performance. It's a projection about the rate at which transistor density on a wafer grows every 18 months. Historically most companies incl Intel had used this to make bigger dies for larger and more complex processors, but you can also use the improvements in transistor real estate to simply make smaller dies and hence, more of them, increasing yield and bringing down the price. So bringing the price down isn't different than Moore's Law, it's just another way to use ML.
...notebooks' integrated graphics would be more tricky to replace and would cost between $245 and $590 per unit. Both integrated (in the chipset) and discrete (separate graphics chip) are generally 'down' on the board - meaning they're soldered on. You can't even replace the board as a a replacement board has the same non-Aero-capable components and no manufacturer makes a more modern notebook board that would be a drop in replacement. (Not to mention the massive labor costs) If (which I doubt) a fix like this was ever mandated, it would simply be a big award of money to buy replacement laptops - with the original OEMs no doubt lobbying for a requirement that the end-user much purchase another one of THEIR notebooks. Won't happen though, partially because everyone in the industry is terrified of a precedent of replacement of whole system in the event of proven non-performance-to-spec and they will fight like hell to keep that from happening. Best case scenario is some kind of rebate value coupon (or as one other poster more sagely suggested possible refund of replacement of OS value)
1) No buyout of any vehicle purchased within 3 months (prevents acquisition of vehicles just to sell them to the program)
2) No buyout (receipt required) of any vehicle that was purchased for less than then the buyout amount (prevents any profit from vehicles worth even less than the program value). This is problematic in that some of these will be the worst offenders, ideally the program would have a "Kelly Bluebook"-type valuation system that can put a value on any make/model/year on a sliding scale. Then, no swap on vehicles sold below it's target value.
3) Vehicles must be in running condition. (If they are inoperable wrecks, they aren't going to be run and they aren't an environmental problem. Submitting these to the program is simply fraudulent.)
4) Program should be limited to no more than one vehicle per person per year (no corporations or other business entities can participate). (This prevents mass purchase of vehicles which might be used to skirt 2) on a massive scale).
5) Program should be funded by per gallon gas tax - this needs to happen soon, before price creeps back up into the range (mids to high 2.00+ dollars) where public push-back will stop it. If it's enacted while price is low, petro industry will have to adapt and incorporate this into pricing decisions.
Ok, I'll give you the short-as-possible version for the acronym-phobic. vPro (not an acronym) is an umbrella brand covering a bunch of technologies (including the Trusted Execution Technology that was hacked). But that's a really minor feature that is hardly being used yet because the software world is still working on implementing it. Dozens of management software companies from Microsoft to LANDesk to Symantec to Cisco and Checkpoint DO support the Active Management Technology out-of-band management features in vPro which have been around for years. This lets admins remotely power-up/down systems watch the Power-On-Self-Test and control the Basic-Input-Output-System (you may have heard of that one.. BIOS:-)) redirect boot to a remote Compact-Disk ( Phillips trademarked as CD) image file and apply network filers at the Network-Interface-Controller level using a secure Internet Protocol (techies call this IP) routeable remote console AND do all this out-of-band when there's no Operating System (OS to some people) running on the Personal Computer (which many people seem to recognize as a PC).
And the security of all this good stuff has nothing to do with the Trusted Execution Technology exploit - even though they're both pieces of the vPro bag of capabilities. Ok? (Sorry for the sarcasm, but except for TXT, the only acronyms I used were industry standard terms, not Intel word-salad)
vPro is mostly about AMT OOB management which is secure and is in it's 5th generation. TXT is relatively new component which is implemented virtually nowhere yet and has virtually nothing to do with the AMT functionality that has been and is being implemented hundreds of sites. AMT management is 97% of what vPro really is and is what the industry system OEMs generally mean when they say vPro. TXT is a future technology waiting for ISV enablement whereas core AMT/vPro is real and here now. Saying that because TXT may be compromised AND suggesting that the primary, working part of vPro is insecure is outrageously misleading.
4 drives and eSATA for expansion. Details here This uses a 1.6GHz Celeron, which, while low end for a general cpu, is pretty fast compared to most cheap NAS units and will come closer to utilizing the gig port than most.
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Just as any real libertartian would not feel you or I have any business telling another whether they should work on fixing a friend's roof for free (even though a commercial entity loses business), a real libertarian wouldn't deny the right of anyone to create and support software that they give away. Nor would they try to argue the creator cannot set the terms under which they give it away.
Sun paid about 1 billion for MsSQL and Oracle says EU hold up is costing them 100s of millions of dollars a month by delaying decision which appears to largely hinge on Oracle's plans for MySQL. So Oracle must value it very highly since with a few more months of delay, Oracle reluctance to let it go will cost it more than it's worth.
So why does Oracle care that much about MySQL? One can speculate...
Yup, back in the 80s the physicists said it would be physically impossible to provide switching and encoding which would allow phone line communication to exceed 2400 baud in modems. Yet before we gave up on phone lines, the modem builders were giving us 56,000 baud connections.
Sorry, the bricking itselft is part of the story. PC manufacturers moved to a 2-phase process for BIOS/fimware updates where a backup copy is in place in case of failure in the update. Console manf wouldn't dream of adding that extra 40 cents or so to their BOM (bill of materials) cost so bricking is possible there. Haven't heard of a bricked PC in 5-10 years.
this time PCs will have to work with all versions of Windows 7 to qualify for the sticker
Nonsense, there are lot's of systems out there, particularly Netbooks, which will not. Certainly will not necessarily be 64-bit.
If it only ran on 64-bit-capable systems, why is there a 32-bit version of Win 7 at all?
No particular reason for FOSS to be cheaper once it's not "free beer". RH or Novell could very price Linux solutions at level higher than MSFT. Ubuntu, Debian or other traditional FOSS could be much cheaper (depending what kind of support model you use)
This will give
1) Power 7 a run for the money on performance (and will kill every other microarchitecture incl all other x86)
2) Out-RAS SPARC and scale much more flexibly
3) Be available from dozens of vendors including everybody named on this page
4) Run Linux, Solaris, Windows, MacOS, BSD and probably others
5) Be the least expensive 'big iron' architecture available
If I was Oracle, I'd be planning my strategy around this, but I'd certainly not Osborne my SPARC sales by saying so until I'm ready to pull the trigger....And even when I announce, I would say nice things about SPARC to keep those comfortable with it buying until they wise-up. But if you care about price/performance/uptime you'll know where to go.
Management engine in the chipset has it's own IP stack and runs even when PC is off.
Your IP lease expired by DHCP server because the DHCP server violated privacy policy. You will be asked to go to the ISPs website to "opt-in" to have that data persistnant but - whoops - you have no IP to connect with...
Just like we have a speed/size hierarchy in processor caches (L1 smaller and faster than L2 which is smaller and faster than L3), we are about to enter a tiering model for storage.
It's silly to compare a 128GB SSD with 1.5TB spindle drive. On a personal system you're going to do different things with them. The SSD (or other systemboard flash) will be your fast OS and frequently used disk where fast reads / writes are important but files are not huge. For very large data, a secondary spindle drive with TBs connected either as second SATA drive or eSATA external (or, frankly, my preference) located on a storage server or appliance will be appropriate,
But for most laptop users, i fyou cna have only one drive, a MLC SSD drive ~160GB or larger will be plenty and WILL make a qualitative change in you life. If only in that with SSD you can hibernate (full save of RAM to disk then shutdown) in seconds instead of minutes.
Anyone who has not used an SSD just doesn't know
In the real sciences (chemistry or physics) where they need to get real things done, the elegance of the language is a very minor consideration. Major ones are: are there libraries that contain key specialised functions and subroutines that apply in my discipline and does it avoid any obscure object paradigms that though a steep learning curve into the procedural code I really want to write and does it manage variable memory for me in ways that will not create unstable code from poor pointer management?
For most scientists, FORTRAN fits this requirement perfectly and I doubt Python will ever have 10% of the scientific libraries FORTRAN has acquired over the years.
Even in commercial technical codes FORTRAN is widely used. 80% or the computational-assisted-engineering cluster cycles at automakers (and at many other industries) are consumed by materials deformation codes like LS-DYNA which has always been and is still written in FORTRAN. (Lots of the key engineering codes were written in the 60s for NASA and they survive today)
People use languages that work best for them, not what some meta-discipline like computer science says is the right thing.
i7 is a very expensive platform to buy into, with a premium on processors and motherboards
Well, there is still a premium on X58 chipset mainboards (although that may change) but the lowest Core i7 is not ridiculously expensive ($200) and is faster than almost anything except it's i7 big brothers. As we get to 32nm gen NHM desktop parts soon, expect to see some much cheaper NHM follow ons too.
But they DON'T do more work per clock. A Core i7 at same freq kills a Shanghai.
If you did clock a Nehalem up to 7Ghz it would clobber the new AMD part.
Patch and drop cables being used from punchdown blocks to rack devices and from wall sockets to desktop systems take abuse and should be replaced as appropriate.
In-wall wiring going from punchdowns in wire closets and to wall sockets is pretty static and unless there were illegal twists or other abuse applied in the original installation these should last a lot of years (how many is a good question - probably at least 10-15 years I would think). Most likely reason they would be replaced is when cheap 10GE over copper mandates wire a bit better than Cat 6.
If it does, then Oracle+Sun is probably an unacceptable concentration in the J2EE and middleware markets. Ironically, Oracle would probably argue that all those MSFT .Net servers out there are competitors in that space too, so Oracle won't totally own the segment.
This is the one thing that might take the deal down.
Oracle might just drive Sun's x86 platforms harder, starting with their new Intel Nehalem 2-ways. When the big scalable Nehalem EX boxes come out at the end of the year, they'll be able to take on just about all other other RISC big iron.
...could send a Friend of the Court letter to the Judge advising him what idiots the security people are? It sounds like the student was an idiot too, but making his OS sound like some kind of devious evasion of authority is inane.
Is the goal really to find "earth-like" planets (ones are similar, size, dist from star etc) or to find "habitable" planets which could support life somewhat like us or (maybe someday) us.
These planets could very well exist at different distances as moons of gas giants that are closer to the star than our gas giants (which might provide supplimentry heat) and while these would probably be smaller, many gg moons are not much smaller than earth. Needless to say, these are going to be really hard to pick out from here, so in one sense, right now, we're looking for what we possibly can see, even if it's not all of what we're interested in.
I am not an astronomer, obviously, but it there any merit in this?
And MSFT gets royalties from all of them?
The observation behind Moore's Law doesn't say anything about performance. It's a projection about the rate at which transistor density on a wafer grows every 18 months. Historically most companies incl Intel had used this to make bigger dies for larger and more complex processors, but you can also use the improvements in transistor real estate to simply make smaller dies and hence, more of them, increasing yield and bringing down the price. So bringing the price down isn't different than Moore's Law, it's just another way to use ML.
...notebooks' integrated graphics would be more tricky to replace and would cost between $245 and $590 per unit.
Both integrated (in the chipset) and discrete (separate graphics chip) are generally 'down' on the board - meaning they're soldered on. You can't even replace the board as a a replacement board has the same non-Aero-capable components and no manufacturer makes a more modern notebook board that would be a drop in replacement. (Not to mention the massive labor costs)
If (which I doubt) a fix like this was ever mandated, it would simply be a big award of money to buy replacement laptops - with the original OEMs no doubt lobbying for a requirement that the end-user much purchase another one of THEIR notebooks.
Won't happen though, partially because everyone in the industry is terrified of a precedent of replacement of whole system in the event of proven non-performance-to-spec and they will fight like hell to keep that from happening. Best case scenario is some kind of rebate value coupon (or as one other poster more sagely suggested possible refund of replacement of OS value)
1) No buyout of any vehicle purchased within 3 months (prevents acquisition of vehicles just to sell them to the program)
2) No buyout (receipt required) of any vehicle that was purchased for less than then the buyout amount (prevents any profit from vehicles worth even less than the program value). This is problematic in that some of these will be the worst offenders, ideally the program would have a "Kelly Bluebook"-type valuation system that can put a value on any make/model/year on a sliding scale. Then, no swap on vehicles sold below it's target value.
3) Vehicles must be in running condition. (If they are inoperable wrecks, they aren't going to be run and they aren't an environmental problem. Submitting these to the program is simply fraudulent.)
4) Program should be limited to no more than one vehicle per person per year (no corporations or other business entities can participate). (This prevents mass purchase of vehicles which might be used to skirt 2) on a massive scale).
5) Program should be funded by per gallon gas tax - this needs to happen soon, before price creeps back up into the range (mids to high 2.00+ dollars) where public push-back will stop it. If it's enacted while price is low, petro industry will have to adapt and incorporate this into pricing decisions.
Ok, I'll give you the short-as-possible version for the acronym-phobic. vPro (not an acronym) is an umbrella brand covering a bunch of technologies (including the Trusted Execution Technology that was hacked). But that's a really minor feature that is hardly being used yet because the software world is still working on implementing it. Dozens of management software companies from Microsoft to LANDesk to Symantec to Cisco and Checkpoint DO support the Active Management Technology out-of-band management features in vPro which have been around for years. This lets admins remotely power-up/down systems watch the Power-On-Self-Test and control the Basic-Input-Output-System (you may have heard of that one.. BIOS :-)) redirect boot to a remote Compact-Disk ( Phillips trademarked as CD) image file and apply network filers at the Network-Interface-Controller level using a secure Internet Protocol (techies call this IP) routeable remote console AND do all this out-of-band when there's no Operating System (OS to some people) running on the Personal Computer (which many people seem to recognize as a PC).
And the security of all this good stuff has nothing to do with the Trusted Execution Technology exploit - even though they're both pieces of the vPro bag of capabilities. Ok?
(Sorry for the sarcasm, but except for TXT, the only acronyms I used were industry standard terms, not Intel word-salad)
vPro is mostly about AMT OOB management which is secure and is in it's 5th generation. TXT is relatively new component which is implemented virtually nowhere yet and has virtually nothing to do with the AMT functionality that has been and is being implemented hundreds of sites. AMT management is 97% of what vPro really is and is what the industry system OEMs generally mean when they say vPro. TXT is a future technology waiting for ISV enablement whereas core AMT/vPro is real and here now. Saying that because TXT may be compromised AND suggesting that the primary, working part of vPro is insecure is outrageously misleading.
4 drives and eSATA for expansion. Details here
This uses a 1.6GHz Celeron, which, while low end for a general cpu, is pretty fast compared to most cheap NAS units and will come closer to utilizing the gig port than most.