Not according to some participants in the 'open' source project itself, they say the biggest problem with OO.o is the fact that Sun codes, owns & makes all key decisions for the project when it should be more community oriented. A professor who participates in the project itself said 'enough developers are frustrated by both the technical and the organizational infrastructure at OpenOffice.org' and cites this as 'a real problem that is weighing on the project.' Other members of the community agree like Michael Meeks who asked 'At what fraction of the community will Sun reconsider its demand for ownership of the entirety of OpenOffice.org?' Hopefully with IBM's entrance into OO.o participation we will see the product become more community controlled & accessible.
Am I the only one to see the problem here? OOo is, supposedly, troubled by the fact that Sun codes it, so the "solution" is to have IBM code it?
IBM is not the community. IBM is not even a company well known for open sourcing anything. In fact, they were the first IT company to be investigated for monopoly abuse, back in the day... Once they opensource AIX, and start playing nice, I'll consider them again. For now Sun is much more trustworthy than IBM.
While Maya for Mac does support both Intel and G5 it only runs in the 32-bit mode. A high-end 3D software limited to under 4GB of RAM isn't that good an idea... And is probably the reason people don't use it that much.
I mean, we are talking about a local root exploit, for a machine with graphics connected to it. Really...
That machine is a desktop / workstation anyway, and has no, or almost no (ssh being an only exception) means for anyone to obtain a non-console login in the first place. OTOH, a person physically sitting on a machine has no need to exploit it. Again, who cares?
and what it never mentions is how did they connect those DVD players to the TV. The simple chinese junk costing under 100$ are usually connected via a composite, or an S-Video cable at best. Now the difference in the quality of signal you can get through a composite cable and a higher-end component or HDMI connection is rather large. If they connected the PC's using VGA or DVI and the players using a cheap composite cable - well, no wonder the players sucked. You just can't transfer that kind of information through a single wire.
On a side note, the other reason most people use component players is their sound. A good Hi-Fi player has a much higher quality sound than any PC. You can probably get close to the quality of the sound of a under-1K$ player wtih a great sound for a PC, but let's face it: latest generation video card + high end sound + the PC... There is no much price difference. And that PC still doesn't play SACD.
There is an official site
There's even a comparison with other treo's. It seems it will be only US for now, and the only major difference is a better camera and more RAM. While it sounds ok, it's not a killer upgrade over 650.
Well they can learn how to flameware with Greeks on the net about the name of the country and learn how to avoid getting shot by Serbs by playing Quake.
Hate to dissapoint you, but Macedonia (FYROM is the officialname, ask the Greeks why) seceded from what is now Serbia and Montenegro peacefully. We are still in good relations, and no side ever fired a single non-FPS shot on each other:). I do think we pwn them in Enemy Territory tough:).
They are, unfortunately, being killed, constantly, but by Albanian separatists. They were promissed help by the U.S. , but since they have no oil they got nothing. Most of Macedonians still live in fear of Albanian terorists, who rampage, kill people, raid vilages and bomb cities allmost every few days.
The only ones the U.S. helped there are the Albanians. Islamic extremist and terorists are allways welcome in Europe, by the U.S., especially when they have drugs money to pay for CIA instructors.
...would be an option from HP, to buy the ability to buy a Linux desktop as easily as one can buy a Windows one from HP's website. I know HP does not want any kind of liability but Linux desktops could be sold without as much support as the Windows desktops...
This has NOTHING to do with Linux. It's a deal between HP and RedHat - just two croporations making bussines. And Yes, for the record, you can buy Red Hat on HP Workstations and Servers, and, also, on some corporate desktops you can go for SuSE or FreeDos.
The point of this deal is for the HP to have at least an Unix-like (Please no flame here - Linux is GNU, and GNU is Not Unix) OS with full storage support in it's control. IBM allready has a full Unix with Storage access (AIX), Sun too. Even Apple has an offer. This is just something that HP needs, and Red Hat gets a nice deal too. It has nothing to do with Linux, or something an enthusiast can use - it's just bussines.
- the Sun/Netscape/iPlanet/SJSDS-whatever-they-call-it-t his-second tends to run well directly out-of-the-box without the need for much in the way of expertise, in smaller environments. I would call this directory the defacto standard (although this statement may now be obsoleted by the advance of AD - hard to say). If you are using other SUN infrastructure, or if you are using the Sun Calendaring/Messaging product (which I would recommend as a very solid alternative to MS exchange), this DS is an excellent choice.
Been using this for over a year, without a single glitch. Setup is a bit long and complex, but it's straightforward and well documented. Once you're out of it however - everything runs smooth, and without any problems for very long periods of time.
The only advantage AD has is, well, AD integration - in the sence that you can define windows policies much stricter than with generic directory. However, you can integrate Sun JES with AD, and store AD data in Sun LDAP. This integration makes a lot of sense too : you use Sun for everything, and just add AD to directly control windows machines (and maybe add automated upgrades to the story too).
There's nothing wrong with DRM as such. I wouldn't mind having a hardware crypto processor on-board, or a secure place to store my ssh/gpg private keys, either. Or to sign my emails, documents....
The whole point is in usage. Even if it's used to sign my kernel, and it doesn't boot any unsigned I like it, as long as I decide what to sign - it's usefull in stopping rootkits and stuff. The only problem is when someone removes control from ME on what MY COMPUTER is willing to use. Open standards should at least provide me with choice on that. As long as I have that - there is no problem.
Ok - here goes my carma, but I just have to say it.
The cancellation of UltraSparc V is probably a good thing for everyone. US V was to be a new design, not fully compatible with the old ones, but instead leaning towards Itanic. This is good, mainly because it means that they will continue to focus on Sparc compatible chips. This means more stable hardware for us. Also this means that they will continue the focus towards multithread/multicore chips - which are terrific for server usage. KISS design, the way it should be done.
The alliance with Fujitsu is definitely a good thing. Fujitsu has great potential as a chip maker, and their Sparc CPU's are just as good as those made by Sun. What's bad is the supporting logic (Fujitsu-Siemens sparcs have limited LOM and are more expensive). This "union" if it happened would probably mean that we would see future sparcs with the best from both worlds.
Even the MS "pact" is not bad. It gets more money to sun, so that they can continue with the work, and shows us the perspective of using Sun instead of MS software for our server, while still being able to support MS clients. This would allow us to phase out MS from the corporate server pool easily, and also open room for Linux and other unices on the corporate desktop. Weather we like it or not MS is the current office standard and it will take us a lot of work to get it out of there. Not for the "office" (i.e. word, excel) but for the "groupware" software as the main backbone (outlook, exchange, and the new products).
The only "bad" thing is the layoff of 3000+ workers from the US, and the potential move of sun's cpu production from T.I. (and the US) to Fujitsu. And this is noting bad for the computing industry. It is bad for the US economy, but that's just the US. The rest of the world - and the unix community will probably end up benefiting from this.
Because there is no Solaris 9 port for either this, or the Blade 2500 workstation yet! It's supposed to be out around April.
Now, to performance:
On both workstations you can get XVR-600 which is lightning fast and extra high quality. It's a Wildcat 4 chip (3D Labs) with 10-bit pixel precision and dedicated texture ram. The least expensive card like this for the PC is around $1K5 (Wildcat 4 7110) Also you can't get Linux drivers for it yet.
As for the P4/1.8GHz story try this for a test : Install MySQL on your linux PC and create a database with a table of about 5-6GB. Run alter table on it. Wait for it CRUMBLE TO DUST as it hits past 2GBs. Then get a Sun.
Opteron might be the only challenger to sparc (which is why Sun is pushing for opteron-based servers), but it's main faults are :
Still has no real applications ported to it.
Can't scale beyond 8-cpu's. If you don't need that - well... Plenty people do - in servers at least. This isn't a workstation issue, but is a server one.
Integrated memory controllers are a bitch on multi-cpu systems if you need one cpu to access all memory, while the other is still doing something. This is the main reason why sun still sells Blade 2000, now that Blade 2500 has hit the market.
As for true workstation features check out Blade 2000 (2 cpu's, UPA graphics, FC-AL disks), or Blade 2500 (2 cpu's, scsi disks). Both more expensive (especially Blade 2000 which uses Ultra III CPU's without integrated memory controllers, but with a real crossbar switch instead), but they are still A LOT less expensive than their SGI or IBM counterparts. Sun isn't competing with the PC's with this WS, it's just for the people who need a cheap ws for home, remote work or something like that. As the author of the article puts it "make no mistake: this is a workhorse, not a pony or a racehorse"
Will they be suing all owners of new sun workstations? All the new Blade type machines have smartcards for user authentification. Tehnically they could all be used for that as well.
Just a few thoughts on, what everyone thinks, is the death of Sun and SGI:
- What Apple will never have are LARGE machines. By that I mean systems with 32+ CPU's (Sun goes to 106, SGI to 512). While you CAN cluster apples - a cluster is not a machine. You have no unified memory, and the latencies are much, much higher, even with specialized hardware (which apple doesn't have). Both SGI and Sun offer cluster, actually, which run on top of their high end system too... And those clusters even offer shared memory, unlike the apple.
- Also missing are apps. While you can run in-house scientific apps on apples (with penalties for latency, which would turn you over to sun or sgi at some point) - there are no major buissines apps for apple. Stuff like commercial web servers, databases (Meaning Oracle, and DB2, not MySQL), and even medical (I wouldn't want an unsupported open-source CT scan software used when treating me, would you?) . Next, apple graphics still has no specialized 3D cards - like WildCat, or Quadro. This may come along, but we'll have to see... Allthough, I don't think it will ever replace old school.
- Finally: simple logic: PowerPC 970 is a Power4 derivate. If it had the chance to take Sun, or SGI, it would have a sure go at IBM RS/6000 (ok, p-Series). IBM may be many thing, but they're not stupid. If there was a chance for it to do so - IBM would not have made it. Their profits from this are too small compared to what they make from these machines for them to risk it.
That said, I would still LOVE to get my hands on one of these Macs:)
Almost Certain End?
on
The Faded Sun
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
The real problem with this analisys is best seen here:
Cheap Intel and AMD hardware running Linux is going to kill Sun unless the company does something so stop it, which they aren't
This comment is so clearly comming from a journalist, and not from someone who ever done some real work. To explain:
x86 is a 32-bit architecture. It has a 4G RAM limit which you just can't help. There are ways to put more than that - but you can't have a single process which uses more than that. There are also problems with the fact that x86 doesn't scale well above 4-8 CPU's and others - but this is the main issue. Now days there are simply too many problems which require datasets larger than 4G, both on workstation, and on servers - scientific, database, just to name a few. Now we all now that both intel and AMD are going 64, but... Would you base your buissines on a brand new platform, no one tried? Well, neither would most others.:))
There are other issues here - sun is known for great service and reliability of their machines, but the main issue remains within these 64-bit. PC's, and mac's (for now) just can't cope with that. There are moves forward, but no one has tried them - and that's the bottom line.
How come no one noticed this:there was one a virus. Then that virus has met with anouther virus, they joined their "genes" and created a new one.
More simple they mutated. And I don't mean "mutated" like we usualy call a virus when someone changed it. I mean they did it on their one!!!!
Or, is you prefer it: they had sex...
Anyhow, these two viruses changed themselves on their own. I know that this was "probable" but so was evolution... Let's face it: we are witnessing a new life form being created here, or at least something like that....
Finaly a great comment! That's one thing we REALY do need!(And is not mentioned allready) And not just NSA code (I haven't even seen it). I would be a lot happier if we could also get stuff from openwall! Especialy stuff like: Non-executable stack, and protected/proc... I have realy gotten bored with the idea I have to patch every kernel again... And also that I will use 2.4 only if I have to, because there is no ow.
The only thing left, I guess, witch wasn;t mentioned is clustering: it would sure be nice to see mosix or something allready there. But this is is just nice, a wish....
Yeah, someone mentioned system calls made 32-bit all the way. That is an Idea, if there could be made through new libs, leaving us the old for compaibility.
Slashdot Mirror
No, a nuclear nightmare of the highest order is scores of terrorists running around with suitcase nukes. (you know, like the USA)
Somehow I was under the impression that nuclear war was a nightmare of a higher order then terrorists...
Maybe you're just too terrified of terrorists ?
IBM is not the community. IBM is not even a company well known for open sourcing anything. In fact, they were the first IT company to be investigated for monopoly abuse, back in the day... Once they opensource AIX, and start playing nice, I'll consider them again. For now Sun is much more trustworthy than IBM.
Probably because Maya for Mac OS X is only 32-bit. Look here:
= 123112&id=7639522
http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/index?siteID
While Maya for Mac does support both Intel and G5 it only runs in the 32-bit mode. A high-end 3D software limited to under 4GB of RAM isn't that good an idea... And is probably the reason people don't use it that much.
That machine is a desktop / workstation anyway, and has no, or almost no (ssh being an only exception) means for anyone to obtain a non-console login in the first place. OTOH, a person physically sitting on a machine has no need to exploit it. Again, who cares?
and what it never mentions is how did they connect those DVD players to the TV. The simple chinese junk costing under 100$ are usually connected via a composite, or an S-Video cable at best. Now the difference in the quality of signal you can get through a composite cable and a higher-end component or HDMI connection is rather large. If they connected the PC's using VGA or DVI and the players using a cheap composite cable - well, no wonder the players sucked. You just can't transfer that kind of information through a single wire.
On a side note, the other reason most people use component players is their sound. A good Hi-Fi player has a much higher quality sound than any PC. You can probably get close to the quality of the sound of a under-1K$ player wtih a great sound for a PC, but let's face it: latest generation video card + high end sound + the PC... There is no much price difference. And that PC still doesn't play SACD.
There is an official site There's even a comparison with other treo's. It seems it will be only US for now, and the only major difference is a better camera and more RAM. While it sounds ok, it's not a killer upgrade over 650.
They are, unfortunately, being killed, constantly, but by Albanian separatists. They were promissed help by the U.S. , but since they have no oil they got nothing. Most of Macedonians still live in fear of Albanian terorists, who rampage, kill people, raid vilages and bomb cities allmost every few days.
The only ones the U.S. helped there are the Albanians. Islamic extremist and terorists are allways welcome in Europe, by the U.S., especially when they have drugs money to pay for CIA instructors.
This has NOTHING to do with Linux. It's a deal between HP and RedHat - just two croporations making bussines. And Yes, for the record, you can buy Red Hat on HP Workstations and Servers, and, also, on some corporate desktops you can go for SuSE or FreeDos.
The point of this deal is for the HP to have at least an Unix-like (Please no flame here - Linux is GNU, and GNU is Not Unix) OS with full storage support in it's control. IBM allready has a full Unix with Storage access (AIX), Sun too. Even Apple has an offer. This is just something that HP needs, and Red Hat gets a nice deal too. It has nothing to do with Linux, or something an enthusiast can use - it's just bussines.
Been using this for over a year, without a single glitch. Setup is a bit long and complex, but it's straightforward and well documented. Once you're out of it however - everything runs smooth, and without any problems for very long periods of time.
The only advantage AD has is, well, AD integration - in the sence that you can define windows policies much stricter than with generic directory. However, you can integrate Sun JES with AD, and store AD data in Sun LDAP. This integration makes a lot of sense too : you use Sun for everything, and just add AD to directly control windows machines (and maybe add automated upgrades to the story too).
All in all - I higly recommended it.
The whole point is in usage. Even if it's used to sign my kernel, and it doesn't boot any unsigned I like it, as long as I decide what to sign - it's usefull in stopping rootkits and stuff. The only problem is when someone removes control from ME on what MY COMPUTER is willing to use. Open standards should at least provide me with choice on that. As long as I have that - there is no problem.
Ok - here goes my carma, but I just have to say it.
The cancellation of UltraSparc V is probably a good thing for everyone. US V was to be a new design, not fully compatible with the old ones, but instead leaning towards Itanic. This is good, mainly because it means that they will continue to focus on Sparc compatible chips. This means more stable hardware for us. Also this means that they will continue the focus towards multithread/multicore chips - which are terrific for server usage. KISS design, the way it should be done.
The alliance with Fujitsu is definitely a good thing. Fujitsu has great potential as a chip maker, and their Sparc CPU's are just as good as those made by Sun. What's bad is the supporting logic (Fujitsu-Siemens sparcs have limited LOM and are more expensive). This "union" if it happened would probably mean that we would see future sparcs with the best from both worlds.
Even the MS "pact" is not bad. It gets more money to sun, so that they can continue with the work, and shows us the perspective of using Sun instead of MS software for our server, while still being able to support MS clients. This would allow us to phase out MS from the corporate server pool easily, and also open room for Linux and other unices on the corporate desktop. Weather we like it or not MS is the current office standard and it will take us a lot of work to get it out of there. Not for the "office" (i.e. word, excel) but for the "groupware" software as the main backbone (outlook, exchange, and the new products).
The only "bad" thing is the layoff of 3000+ workers from the US, and the potential move of sun's cpu production from T.I. (and the US) to Fujitsu. And this is noting bad for the computing industry. It is bad for the US economy, but that's just the US. The rest of the world - and the unix community will probably end up benefiting from this.
Now, to performance:
On both workstations you can get XVR-600 which is lightning fast and extra high quality. It's a Wildcat 4 chip (3D Labs) with 10-bit pixel precision and dedicated texture ram. The least expensive card like this for the PC is around $1K5 (Wildcat 4 7110) Also you can't get Linux drivers for it yet.
As for the P4/1.8GHz story try this for a test : Install MySQL on your linux PC and create a database with a table of about 5-6GB. Run alter table on it. Wait for it CRUMBLE TO DUST as it hits past 2GBs. Then get a Sun.
Opteron might be the only challenger to sparc (which is why Sun is pushing for opteron-based servers), but it's main faults are :
Still has no real applications ported to it.
Can't scale beyond 8-cpu's. If you don't need that - well... Plenty people do - in servers at least. This isn't a workstation issue, but is a server one.
Integrated memory controllers are a bitch on multi-cpu systems if you need one cpu to access all memory, while the other is still doing something. This is the main reason why sun still sells Blade 2000, now that Blade 2500 has hit the market.
As for true workstation features check out Blade 2000 (2 cpu's, UPA graphics, FC-AL disks), or Blade 2500 (2 cpu's, scsi disks). Both more expensive (especially Blade 2000 which uses Ultra III CPU's without integrated memory controllers, but with a real crossbar switch instead), but they are still A LOT less expensive than their SGI or IBM counterparts. Sun isn't competing with the PC's with this WS, it's just for the people who need a cheap ws for home, remote work or something like that. As the author of the article puts it "make no mistake: this is a workhorse, not a pony or a racehorse"
Will they be suing all owners of new sun workstations? All the new Blade type machines have smartcards for user authentification. Tehnically they could all be used for that as well.
Boy, if SGI and Sun were in trouble before....
:)
Just a few thoughts on, what everyone thinks, is the death of Sun and SGI:
- What Apple will never have are LARGE machines. By that I mean systems with 32+ CPU's (Sun goes to 106, SGI to 512). While you CAN cluster apples - a cluster is not a machine. You have no unified memory, and the latencies are much, much higher, even with specialized hardware (which apple doesn't have). Both SGI and Sun offer cluster, actually, which run on top of their high end system too... And those clusters even offer shared memory, unlike the apple.
- Also missing are apps. While you can run in-house scientific apps on apples (with penalties for latency, which would turn you over to sun or sgi at some point) - there are no major buissines apps for apple. Stuff like commercial web servers, databases (Meaning Oracle, and DB2, not MySQL), and even medical (I wouldn't want an unsupported open-source CT scan software used when treating me, would you?) . Next, apple graphics still has no specialized 3D cards - like WildCat, or Quadro. This may come along, but we'll have to see... Allthough, I don't think it will ever replace old school.
- Finally: simple logic: PowerPC 970 is a Power4 derivate. If it had the chance to take Sun, or SGI, it would have a sure go at IBM RS/6000 (ok, p-Series). IBM may be many thing, but they're not stupid. If there was a chance for it to do so - IBM would not have made it. Their profits from this are too small compared to what they make from these machines for them to risk it.
That said, I would still LOVE to get my hands on one of these Macs
The real problem with this analisys is best seen here:
:))
Cheap Intel and AMD hardware running Linux is going to kill Sun unless the company does something so stop it, which they aren't
This comment is so clearly comming from a journalist, and not from someone who ever done some real work. To explain:
x86 is a 32-bit architecture. It has a 4G RAM limit which you just can't help. There are ways to put more than that - but you can't have a single process which uses more than that. There are also problems with the fact that x86 doesn't scale well above 4-8 CPU's and others - but this is the main issue. Now days there are simply too many problems which require datasets larger than 4G, both on workstation, and on servers - scientific, database, just to name a few. Now we all now that both intel and AMD are going 64, but... Would you base your buissines on a brand new platform, no one tried? Well, neither would most others.
There are other issues here - sun is known for great service and reliability of their machines, but the main issue remains within these 64-bit. PC's, and mac's (for now) just can't cope with that. There are moves forward, but no one has tried them - and that's the bottom line.
How come no one noticed this:there was one a virus. Then that virus has met with anouther virus, they joined their "genes" and created a new one.
More simple they mutated. And I don't mean "mutated" like we usualy call a virus when someone changed it. I mean they did it on their one!!!!
Or, is you prefer it: they had sex...
Anyhow, these two viruses changed themselves on their own. I know that this was "probable" but so was evolution... Let's face it: we are witnessing a new life form being created here, or at least something like that....
THAT THING IS ALIVE!!!!!!!
Finaly a great comment! That's one thing we REALY do need!(And is not mentioned allready) And not just NSA code (I haven't even seen it). I would be a lot happier if we could also get stuff from openwall! Especialy stuff like: Non-executable stack, and protected /proc... I have realy gotten bored with the idea I have to patch every kernel again... And also that I will use 2.4 only if I have to, because there is no ow.
The only thing left, I guess, witch wasn;t mentioned is clustering: it would sure be nice to see mosix or something allready there. But this is is just nice, a wish....
Yeah, someone mentioned system calls made 32-bit all the way. That is an Idea, if there could be made through new libs, leaving us the old for compaibility.