I presume you mean *if* nVidia stops releasing Linux drivers. Between now and that hypothetical future, who knows what might happen. Maybe AMD's change in release strategy to 'as-needed' instead of 'arbitarily monthly' might improve their quality. Maybe if Steam releases a Linux based home console with amd inside, maybe amd will have the resources and priority needed to make the linux drivers better. Maybe Intel and the community will play better, making QuickSync usable from Linux, distros giving a pain-free path to VA-API, and maybe they'll finally get the open source graphics architecture in shape at the same time Intel GPU becomes 'good enough' for 1920x1080 gaming with decent quality.
If you are expressing a concern over support of my current setup, then I would probably stop upgrading my OS to keep nVidia working until my budget suggests a good time to replace it. In terms of likelihood of it happening, it's fairly low. nVidia is playing *hard* for the Linux-dominated HPC market for GPGPU and has a significant share of Linux workstations in professional engineering to worry about. If Valve comes through and makes Linux a viable gaming platform, that may sway the market even more. In terms of track record, AMD has already sunset Linux support of hardware that is *still* sold as current, with fairly pessimistic statements around 'legacy' maintenance and updates. Meanwhile, my nVidia GPU that hasn't sold in 4 years is still in the newest drivers and the 'legacy' branch seems to have been
Well there's your problem, having your OSes walk 10 paces, turn around, and shoot each other is bound to lead to problems. I would suggest trying to dual boot instead.
In a world of blind men, the one eyed man is king....
If I want to have decently supported video offload and remotely respectable 3D performance, nVidia drivers are about the only choice.
AMD drivers to this day cause my system to panic on shutdown attempt. MythTV's OpenGL painter and video renderer don't work correctly with AMD drivers, leaving me with video playback with XV and no recourse to sync to vblank. They do have XvBA out there, but I have to go into a more 'bleeding edge' xbmc and then be greeted by very bad artefacts with videos that are profile 5.1. AMD's open source interaction seems better, but none of the open source drivers come close to the 3D performance and notably no video decode offload is available.
Intel I heard great things about, but at least with Fedora 17 I can't seem to find the best way to get vaapi driver on there. All I see are requests to get it in being met with 'too messy'. It's also not in rpm fusion. I dug up a module from an old rpm and got vainfo running, only to find out rpmfusion xbmc build disabled vaapi support anyway, and only went with vdpau. Now I could recompile, but the point being that the larger community seems to not be bothering with trying to test Intel's solution as much.
Meanwhile, my nVidia system does vdpau beautifully, has pretty much no-brainer 3d support, and tear-free XV playback (even though I never use it anymore in favor of opengl rendering). Everything about the experience shows that both nVidia as a company and the userbase at large are developing and testing with nVidia primarily.
I could see as a developer being frustrated at supporting a kernel where a large portion is running kernel-mode code that you can't see, but from a user perspective, nVidia is about the only viable solution for Linux graphics.
MS doesn't 'make' anything. The most notable 'microsoft' hardware platform without OEM branding is xbox 360, and that's made by Flextronics, Wistron, and Celestica.
In this case, I'd wager they have an ODM relationship in place with some southeast asia company. It's possible they'll design it and OEM it out, but I'd guess ODM instead.
You talk about streaming performance, which hard disks are perfectly fine at (some SSDs are faster than the fastest HDDs, but by and large that's not the type of storage load that SSDs are interesting for). SSDs have orders of magnitude lower access time. So if IOs are kind of all over the place (common in random os/application activity, games with lots of textures, etc), things work out well. Same reason people sweat fragmentation so much on HDD. On SSDs, fragmentation really doesn't matter.
Some also just like storage that doesn't make whirring and clicky noises and can accomodate peculiar form factors that spinning platters don't play well in.
Because MS themselves say there is no transparency. They disabled transparency everywhere else. To leave the taskbar doing realtime transparency would be pretty counter (they removed the eyecandy ostensibly for the sake of efficiency, but leaving the taskbar as a floating blended entity would be pretty contrary to that stance.
Without copyright and patents the GPL would not be necessary
Actually, without copyright the GPL would be impossible. The specific intent of GPL contrasted with, for example BSD could not be fulfilled (to prevent third parties to subvert the project through closed source redistribution. BSD intent also could not be fulfilled (permit third parties more freedom use, but at least preserve attribution). If someone truly wishes to abstain from copyright/patent system they can, just declare the work to be public domain and then the work is no longer subject to copyright and patent restrictions.
If you are trying to imply the GPL grants some sort of immunity to violating the copyright and patents of *other* works, that would be incorrect. GPL and BSD users had better at least believe in copyright.
I think the lesson would be that in jumping platforms, they elected to have Google as a competitor rather than a partner. They bet on MS hard, despite the market reality demonstrating a pretty bleak scenario for Windows Phone. So *if* you are going to finally jump platforms, don't jump to the last-place player.
Correction: "2012 will be the year of Windows 7 on the desktop"
If you want to get really crazy: "2012 will be the year of OSX on the desktop"
As much as I would like more Linux on the desktop, it is not to be........ Unless Valve releases most of their first party library, steam, and all the indie games that support linux there too, that could change something...
My guess is it isn't real-time blend and blur, but a blend and blur only when wallpaper changes. I'm guessing if you have a window 'under' the taskbar, you won't see the window contents blended and blurred like you do in 7.
Actually, the color scheme is *actually* defaulting in that way and not a lot of customization offered to change it. At least based on the release preview....
The task bar is no longer has the glass, transparent look or blur effect.
Actually, look at the lower right corner. The wallpaper is indeed showing through in a blurred translucent way. Of course, I'm going to guess the trick is the wallpaper has a one-time blend done and windows will not show up behind the bar in a blurred way....
In any event, MS is throwing Desktop experience under the bus hard chasing that tablet market...
They are thinking they want to keep the same profits margins they have always had (which of course won't work)
Actually, they aren't, they are seeking *more*. On top of the pricing change, I wager there is a lot of x86 crapware to recover the cost of the license on x86 systems, not so much with the ARM variant.
If you have a salt in *code* (I presume a static one), I would wager it would be easy to discern. A salt is not supposed to be 'secret', it's just supposed to prevent easy identification of common passwords and a simplistic rainbow table attack.
Now if each client had a machine generated salt to append before transmit to server, that actually is servicable. Of course, the standard practice of complete obfuscation of the password through local algorithms is better.
The point being, if you don't need it, ok. The parent poster indicated that they tried to use the feature, and the vendor provided facility did not work for them.
If you don't need the fetaure, you don't care.
If you think you need remote management, but are not an expert or don't have time to do a platform evaluation, it's safer to go with the 'tier one' vendors.
If you need remote manegement, posess significant expertise on the industry standards and how the vendors might implement them, and have the time and resources to do a full platform evaluation te verify vendor claims and identify problems the vendors testing process might miss (hardware version/model+firmware version), you may be able to make due with supermicro. You can be a bit more confident in the Tier Ones as the cost delta in part covers more rigorous validation.
Sadly, closest IBM comes is x3630 M4. For 3.5", it only gets 14 drives in, and only three pcie slots, or 12 drives and 5 pcie slots. The m3 had 28 2.5" variant, and expecting an m4 refresh along those lines would be reasonable. It seems they make a big deal of going over 2U, and the systems get very very expensive in IBM world, but focus on memory and cpu capacity and actually has less storage capacity.
In the interest of trying to unfairly disparage competitors, I have been giving Dell and HP the benefit of the doubt until a customer tells me otherwise. It may be the case that the good things I've heard about HP come from people heavily bought into HP's proprietary protocols rather than IPMI.
I will say IBM has had solid IPMI implementation (with some admitted historical sore spots, e325 and e326 in particular).
My personal take is that if you are going with supermicro or similar, you best understand how the standard(s) work and use vendor-agnostic tools and steer clear of the tools that SuperMicro and similar provide. For example, understand how IPMI security model works, disable cipher suite 0, refrain from using ipmi 1.5 straight authentication, set user table up so that the first user is effectively disabled, and all other ipmi account slots are all managed securely by your processes. Rather than use setup dialogs and utilities from supermicro, use tools like ipmish from freeipmi and/or ipmitool for one-off usage or to build your own infrastructure. If you want a bigger infrastructure that is a bit more designed from ground-up for mass server management, then something like xCAT can help, but it's not exactly easy to use, might be a bit more ambitious than what you want to do, and despite best efforts it will still be no substitute for understanding the security implications of the implementation provided by the vendor (e.g. right now it only messes with the first 4 user slots, assumes that if cipher suite 0 is there, it's the first one, and so on and so forth).
Now if this seems overly complicated, then buy from a vendor like IBM or HP (Dell I have heard varies more between the spectrum of direct Tyan/SuperMicro and IBM/HP standards, but perhaps closer to IBM and HP for the most part). The standards based tools still continue to work, but the factory default in modern systems is more carefully considered and what proprietary tooling provided is generally more robust than the white box vendors have time/resources to bother with. While these vendors have an increasingly difficult job to distinguish themselves from cheaper competitors from Taiwan, they still do spend some of the money entailed in the price premium on a more finished and confidence inspiring experience.
Keep in mind that as recently as 3 or so years ago, us 'tier one' vendors had pretty crappy defaults and inconsistent tooling as well. However, at least in IBM world, that was all very forcibly corrected for as of the 'M2' generation (the models that released with Nehalem processors).
Guess it depends on 'clusters'. I assumed high performance clusters where you have more workload than reasonably be accomodated on one or two servers.
If you have a small load with HA clustering for 2-3 servers, it really doesn't matter much what the hardware is nowadays. Given that you want to be resiliant in the face of failures that no expensive hardware redundancy would recover from anyway, it just makes sense.
If, however, you need a few hundred servers, things change. It's not that the management features are critical (though I think they are), but selecting a socket 1155 class system quickly erases cost benefit over a low-end multi-socket system. The amount of power overhead associated with distinct systems compared to cramming the same count of cores and memory in fewer systems is significant. Will this offset the cost of servers that run E7? No, but EN and even some EP solutions actually ultimately cost no different at that scale.
It's a SoC. Each vendor's solution exhibits different levels of restrictions and ambitions.
I recall years ago, one whitebox just gave you root ssh access to the linux system that was the BMC.
On the other hand, most of the time it's very tightly restricted to specifically do things like alerting, power on/off, remote video and serial, event logs, etc. Mostly because the whole point of the stack is to *always* work, and the more complicated you go, the higher the risk gets that you will fare no better than the OS instance on the server you are trying to manage.
IBM and the like will do things like system firmware management and changing things like hyperthreading via service processor, but still steers very clear of allowing open-ended usage of their service processor.
If the vendor says 'server' it's very likely that it also has service processor capability. E.g. if you get an board capable of hosting a dual intel socket config, the chipset has some bits and pieces that almost certainly allow for remote ipmi access.
It's also completely unsubstantiated that you *won't* double your sales. The problem is, everyone guesses based on assumptions. I'd say the evidence around game of thrones *specifically* suggests that for that property, reducing scarcity to allow for 10% price would probably lead to more than 10-fold sales.
Now some may *claim* they have solid, market research and models and stuff, but generally those are tainted by feelings of 'worth' established in a time when content distribution warranted a more traditional supply-demand curve and drove up costs to land at the prices of the day.
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I presume you mean *if* nVidia stops releasing Linux drivers. Between now and that hypothetical future, who knows what might happen. Maybe AMD's change in release strategy to 'as-needed' instead of 'arbitarily monthly' might improve their quality. Maybe if Steam releases a Linux based home console with amd inside, maybe amd will have the resources and priority needed to make the linux drivers better. Maybe Intel and the community will play better, making QuickSync usable from Linux, distros giving a pain-free path to VA-API, and maybe they'll finally get the open source graphics architecture in shape at the same time Intel GPU becomes 'good enough' for 1920x1080 gaming with decent quality.
If you are expressing a concern over support of my current setup, then I would probably stop upgrading my OS to keep nVidia working until my budget suggests a good time to replace it. In terms of likelihood of it happening, it's fairly low. nVidia is playing *hard* for the Linux-dominated HPC market for GPGPU and has a significant share of Linux workstations in professional engineering to worry about. If Valve comes through and makes Linux a viable gaming platform, that may sway the market even more. In terms of track record, AMD has already sunset Linux support of hardware that is *still* sold as current, with fairly pessimistic statements around 'legacy' maintenance and updates. Meanwhile, my nVidia GPU that hasn't sold in 4 years is still in the newest drivers and the 'legacy' branch seems to have been
Both systems duel boot the OSs.
Well there's your problem, having your OSes walk 10 paces, turn around, and shoot each other is bound to lead to problems. I would suggest trying to dual boot instead.
In a world of blind men, the one eyed man is king....
If I want to have decently supported video offload and remotely respectable 3D performance, nVidia drivers are about the only choice.
AMD drivers to this day cause my system to panic on shutdown attempt. MythTV's OpenGL painter and video renderer don't work correctly with AMD drivers, leaving me with video playback with XV and no recourse to sync to vblank. They do have XvBA out there, but I have to go into a more 'bleeding edge' xbmc and then be greeted by very bad artefacts with videos that are profile 5.1. AMD's open source interaction seems better, but none of the open source drivers come close to the 3D performance and notably no video decode offload is available.
Intel I heard great things about, but at least with Fedora 17 I can't seem to find the best way to get vaapi driver on there. All I see are requests to get it in being met with 'too messy'. It's also not in rpm fusion. I dug up a module from an old rpm and got vainfo running, only to find out rpmfusion xbmc build disabled vaapi support anyway, and only went with vdpau. Now I could recompile, but the point being that the larger community seems to not be bothering with trying to test Intel's solution as much.
Meanwhile, my nVidia system does vdpau beautifully, has pretty much no-brainer 3d support, and tear-free XV playback (even though I never use it anymore in favor of opengl rendering). Everything about the experience shows that both nVidia as a company and the userbase at large are developing and testing with nVidia primarily.
I could see as a developer being frustrated at supporting a kernel where a large portion is running kernel-mode code that you can't see, but from a user perspective, nVidia is about the only viable solution for Linux graphics.
MS doesn't 'make' anything. The most notable 'microsoft' hardware platform without OEM branding is xbox 360, and that's made by Flextronics, Wistron, and Celestica.
In this case, I'd wager they have an ODM relationship in place with some southeast asia company. It's possible they'll design it and OEM it out, but I'd guess ODM instead.
You talk about streaming performance, which hard disks are perfectly fine at (some SSDs are faster than the fastest HDDs, but by and large that's not the type of storage load that SSDs are interesting for). SSDs have orders of magnitude lower access time. So if IOs are kind of all over the place (common in random os/application activity, games with lots of textures, etc), things work out well. Same reason people sweat fragmentation so much on HDD. On SSDs, fragmentation really doesn't matter.
Some also just like storage that doesn't make whirring and clicky noises and can accomodate peculiar form factors that spinning platters don't play well in.
Because MS themselves say there is no transparency. They disabled transparency everywhere else. To leave the taskbar doing realtime transparency would be pretty counter (they removed the eyecandy ostensibly for the sake of efficiency, but leaving the taskbar as a floating blended entity would be pretty contrary to that stance.
Yes, but that has nothing to do with GPL.
Without copyright and patents the GPL would not be necessary
Actually, without copyright the GPL would be impossible. The specific intent of GPL contrasted with, for example BSD could not be fulfilled (to prevent third parties to subvert the project through closed source redistribution. BSD intent also could not be fulfilled (permit third parties more freedom use, but at least preserve attribution). If someone truly wishes to abstain from copyright/patent system they can, just declare the work to be public domain and then the work is no longer subject to copyright and patent restrictions.
If you are trying to imply the GPL grants some sort of immunity to violating the copyright and patents of *other* works, that would be incorrect. GPL and BSD users had better at least believe in copyright.
I think the lesson would be that in jumping platforms, they elected to have Google as a competitor rather than a partner. They bet on MS hard, despite the market reality demonstrating a pretty bleak scenario for Windows Phone. So *if* you are going to finally jump platforms, don't jump to the last-place player.
Correction: "2012 will be the year of Windows 7 on the desktop"
If you want to get really crazy: "2012 will be the year of OSX on the desktop"
As much as I would like more Linux on the desktop, it is not to be........ Unless Valve releases most of their first party library, steam, and all the indie games that support linux there too, that could change something...
My guess is it isn't real-time blend and blur, but a blend and blur only when wallpaper changes. I'm guessing if you have a window 'under' the taskbar, you won't see the window contents blended and blurred like you do in 7.
Actually, the color scheme is *actually* defaulting in that way and not a lot of customization offered to change it. At least based on the release preview....
No, the Windows Classic theme is actually not there this time. After surviving XP, Vista, 7, 8 seems to kill it off.....
The task bar is no longer has the glass, transparent look or blur effect.
Actually, look at the lower right corner. The wallpaper is indeed showing through in a blurred translucent way. Of course, I'm going to guess the trick is the wallpaper has a one-time blend done and windows will not show up behind the bar in a blurred way....
In any event, MS is throwing Desktop experience under the bus hard chasing that tablet market...
They are thinking they want to keep the same profits margins they have always had (which of course won't work)
Actually, they aren't, they are seeking *more*. On top of the pricing change, I wager there is a lot of x86 crapware to recover the cost of the license on x86 systems, not so much with the ARM variant.
If you have a salt in *code* (I presume a static one), I would wager it would be easy to discern. A salt is not supposed to be 'secret', it's just supposed to prevent easy identification of common passwords and a simplistic rainbow table attack.
Now if each client had a machine generated salt to append before transmit to server, that actually is servicable. Of course, the standard practice of complete obfuscation of the password through local algorithms is better.
The point being, if you don't need it, ok. The parent poster indicated that they tried to use the feature, and the vendor provided facility did not work for them.
If you don't need the fetaure, you don't care.
If you think you need remote management, but are not an expert or don't have time to do a platform evaluation, it's safer to go with the 'tier one' vendors.
If you need remote manegement, posess significant expertise on the industry standards and how the vendors might implement them, and have the time and resources to do a full platform evaluation te verify vendor claims and identify problems the vendors testing process might miss (hardware version/model+firmware version), you may be able to make due with supermicro. You can be a bit more confident in the Tier Ones as the cost delta in part covers more rigorous validation.
Sadly, closest IBM comes is x3630 M4. For 3.5", it only gets 14 drives in, and only three pcie slots, or 12 drives and 5 pcie slots. The m3 had 28 2.5" variant, and expecting an m4 refresh along those lines would be reasonable. It seems they make a big deal of going over 2U, and the systems get very very expensive in IBM world, but focus on memory and cpu capacity and actually has less storage capacity.
In the interest of trying to unfairly disparage competitors, I have been giving Dell and HP the benefit of the doubt until a customer tells me otherwise. It may be the case that the good things I've heard about HP come from people heavily bought into HP's proprietary protocols rather than IPMI.
I will say IBM has had solid IPMI implementation (with some admitted historical sore spots, e325 and e326 in particular).
Disclaimer: I'm an IBM employee.
My personal take is that if you are going with supermicro or similar, you best understand how the standard(s) work and use vendor-agnostic tools and steer clear of the tools that SuperMicro and similar provide. For example, understand how IPMI security model works, disable cipher suite 0, refrain from using ipmi 1.5 straight authentication, set user table up so that the first user is effectively disabled, and all other ipmi account slots are all managed securely by your processes. Rather than use setup dialogs and utilities from supermicro, use tools like ipmish from freeipmi and/or ipmitool for one-off usage or to build your own infrastructure. If you want a bigger infrastructure that is a bit more designed from ground-up for mass server management, then something like xCAT can help, but it's not exactly easy to use, might be a bit more ambitious than what you want to do, and despite best efforts it will still be no substitute for understanding the security implications of the implementation provided by the vendor (e.g. right now it only messes with the first 4 user slots, assumes that if cipher suite 0 is there, it's the first one, and so on and so forth).
Now if this seems overly complicated, then buy from a vendor like IBM or HP (Dell I have heard varies more between the spectrum of direct Tyan/SuperMicro and IBM/HP standards, but perhaps closer to IBM and HP for the most part). The standards based tools still continue to work, but the factory default in modern systems is more carefully considered and what proprietary tooling provided is generally more robust than the white box vendors have time/resources to bother with. While these vendors have an increasingly difficult job to distinguish themselves from cheaper competitors from Taiwan, they still do spend some of the money entailed in the price premium on a more finished and confidence inspiring experience.
Keep in mind that as recently as 3 or so years ago, us 'tier one' vendors had pretty crappy defaults and inconsistent tooling as well. However, at least in IBM world, that was all very forcibly corrected for as of the 'M2' generation (the models that released with Nehalem processors).
Guess it depends on 'clusters'. I assumed high performance clusters where you have more workload than reasonably be accomodated on one or two servers.
If you have a small load with HA clustering for 2-3 servers, it really doesn't matter much what the hardware is nowadays. Given that you want to be resiliant in the face of failures that no expensive hardware redundancy would recover from anyway, it just makes sense.
If, however, you need a few hundred servers, things change. It's not that the management features are critical (though I think they are), but selecting a socket 1155 class system quickly erases cost benefit over a low-end multi-socket system. The amount of power overhead associated with distinct systems compared to cramming the same count of cores and memory in fewer systems is significant. Will this offset the cost of servers that run E7? No, but EN and even some EP solutions actually ultimately cost no different at that scale.
It's a SoC. Each vendor's solution exhibits different levels of restrictions and ambitions.
I recall years ago, one whitebox just gave you root ssh access to the linux system that was the BMC.
On the other hand, most of the time it's very tightly restricted to specifically do things like alerting, power on/off, remote video and serial, event logs, etc. Mostly because the whole point of the stack is to *always* work, and the more complicated you go, the higher the risk gets that you will fare no better than the OS instance on the server you are trying to manage.
IBM and the like will do things like system firmware management and changing things like hyperthreading via service processor, but still steers very clear of allowing open-ended usage of their service processor.
If the vendor says 'server' it's very likely that it also has service processor capability. E.g. if you get an board capable of hosting a dual intel socket config, the chipset has some bits and pieces that almost certainly allow for remote ipmi access.
Systems may NOW have a dedicated management port, I don't know, I haven't seen a server with IPMI in a while, what with the emphasis on clusters.
What servers do you use now without IPMI?
It's also completely unsubstantiated that you *won't* double your sales. The problem is, everyone guesses based on assumptions. I'd say the evidence around game of thrones *specifically* suggests that for that property, reducing scarcity to allow for 10% price would probably lead to more than 10-fold sales.
Now some may *claim* they have solid, market research and models and stuff, but generally those are tainted by feelings of 'worth' established in a time when content distribution warranted a more traditional supply-demand curve and drove up costs to land at the prices of the day.