And *particularly* this series lags even "entry" level Xeons (the ones that go up to two sockets). Generally, about 6 months after an architecture makes it to desktop land the associated entry Xeons release, and then about six months after that the high-end Xeon implementation of that architecture comes out. Hence this announcement in the ballpark of six months after the low-end Xeon Westmeres (I think a bit longer, but too lazy to look up).
Deep in my heart I'm a WindowMaker/GNUstep guy. Unfortunately, that environment is particularly 'all or nothing' and without a reasonably browser, office suite, image editor, I have to use non-GNUstep apps and the experience breaks down quickly. I also really really don't want to go without 'scale windows with window title filter'/'present windows' now that I have it.
XFCE/LXDE are nice enough, but lacking certain features I want that come with a larger user base.
Gnome has been quite sufficient and gvfs with fuse does a *lot* for having arbitrary applications enabled for non-admin access to network resources. The problem has been they have been fighting a war against configurability. It's bad enough they don't want to present a UI, but they don't even want to add 'hidden' gconf options even when given patches. Gnome 3 has been the last straw for me, going too far in forcing the specific vision of the developers.
Unity offers an alternative, but suffers the same fate of their way or no way (not even able to move their 'dock'.
Currently I'm in the KDE4 camp. A lot of the defaults were not what I wanted, but I was able to configure it easily enough to fit my preferences. One issue I do have is they are on their high horse on KIO, and have outright refused to embrace some fuse based bridge to ease life on people forced to use applications that aren't KDE. This is even worse because out of the box most distros select the Xine phonon backend instead of gstreamer, meaning KDE's own media players cannot even use KIO. Embracing fuse out-of-the-box to provide a POSIX entrypoint into KIO would fully get me inte KDE.
Just because you don't see a Windows sticker on your DVR doesn't mean MS had nothing to do with it.
I'd be very surprised, since I built mine from scratch and installed the OS myself. But more to the point, I think Linux has a much larger base by virtue of most TV integration using it ('google tv'), Boxee boxes, Tivo, etc etc etc.
I think Tablets aren't going to last (people will get tired of carrying around something that large just like they don't want to tote around laptops everywhere), but I don't think 'full featured' tablets are the future.
For one, we've *had* laptop replacement tablets for a while as a niche market. It has failed to never get out of the gate I think that's enough information to suggest that it's a dead end. I don't think 4GB is particularly out of reach for tablets, but it's also more than the common user needs. In terms of processor, ARM performance has proven to increase leaps and bounds and is currently in the 'fast enough' category for most users. Of course, most damning, $1,200 is way more than any computing device market will bear nowadays.
For another, *if* Tablets of any sort have any staying power, it's explicitly because of the oversized phone vision that the 'popular' tablets deliver. Many of us who use 'real' computers considered the limited UI of smartphones a necessary evil due to the realities of the screen size. I think the tablets have demonstrated there is a significant market who wanted their computers to act like that the whole time (limited multitasking, one-app on the screen at a time, etc etc).
The bad news (for MS) is that I think the user base currently engrossed in tablet world are destined to ultimately go to cell phones and set-top boxes, not the directions MS are particularly strong in relative to the desktop/laptop world. I think that no matter what happens in tablet/netbook/etc, the desktop/laptop market is in maintenance mode, with people finding their current product 'good enough' until it actually breaks instead of when it is obsolete.
I'm personally waiting for augmented reality capable glasses add-on to my 'phone' to give me a personal, seemingly huge screen in a form factor that can always be with me. I'll even let apple release first if they want and call it 'iWear'.
They already have the carriers doing that with Android phones today. The upfront cost of a phone is near irrelevant and carriers will and do cut costs down to zero depending on success of a phone without sweating too much because almost all the cost is in the data plan.
I suspect it's more likely that Apple would hold share as they release an 'iphone nano' or similar device for the 'coming from dumbphone' world than Nokia transforming *all* of their Symbian base to WP7.
IDC seems to presume that Nokia is somehow bulletproof. This isn't logically reasonable. If Nokia is so secure, they accept such a drastic measure as the MS pact. We see a combination of some amount of desperation in the face of falling share to Apple/Android and MS trojan executives dictating that Nokia is going to bet their future on the last-place contender even though #1 would let them on for free. WP7 is not making inroads in the market, and combining an already declining Nokia with a non-starter MS platform seems like the worst of both worlds.
Every damn time that MS makes any significant move in a market they do not currently dominate, I am bombarded with people presuming the eventual *domination* of MS (whether they like it or not) to the exclusion of all others. MS has really only done that *twice*, desktop OS and Office suite, and *that's it*. They have not 'done it' in search and servers. They came closer in game consoles, closer than either search or server space, but they have not acheived near-monopoly status anywhere else or even become #1 in any of these markets.
MS is simply not the beast it used to be and/or the competitive landscape is a bit more competent. In OS space the only viable competitor at the time dominance was established was Apple, which MS successfully outmaneuvered in volume by managing to get cloning companies going and getting hardware companies to destroy each others' margins to deliver more volume to MS. My opinion is the office market was lost by simple business and/or technical inadequacies depending on which company you are talking about. Apple has learned how to be price competitive if it *has* to, while at the same time successfully marketing themselves so they don't have to. Google is going much further than MS did in enabling 'cloning' whilst mostly keeping integration with Google services very much intact.
Corporations are slimy entities. Just because they rely upon the US market doesn't mean they don't take every opportunity to screw it over for their own benefit. They will gladly provide a skeleton staff of local people to facilitate initial sale/installation/whatever needed to extract revenue from wealthier/more willing to spend local people. At the same time, all their support/development/manufacturing/etc investment goes wherever in the globe gives them the lowest cost. And they'll spend a lot of resources figuring out new ways of moving jobs from the skeleton crew to remote workers. They do not want to pay their workers an amount that would make them viable consumers of their product, they want to leech until the host is dried up. I would have great respect for a company doing offshore work in order to actually service the market in that country and not much else, but that never happens.
After that, when the execs and shareholders come to reap the harvest, the hypothetical place where they actually invest somewhat in the US economy through taxation, they dodge the burden at ludicrous scale.
The most effective way to reduce tax avoidance is to lower the tax rate
Only as part of a larger reform that also closes the loopholes. Basically making the tax system more straightforward and by extension fairer between mega-companies that can afford the overhead of an army of beancounters and small businesses, that cannot. I agree that a lower percentage (*without* loopholes) would probably net more aggregate tax revenue.
most desktop users absolutely will see a difference...you can now do a massive compile
I stand by my point. *Most* desktop users aren't doing that. Chrome is probably the most 'mainstream' application that would produce a potentially busy large process group depending on tab count, but on the other hand they are genreally only interacting with that application at the time.
This is not to take away how much this change just makes sense and how much it can do for certain cases, but the way people talk it up sets expectations way too high.
Not all GPU accelerated desktop is 'fluff', such as expose/compiz scale/kde present windows (particularly the latter with window title search). When I have many windows open, it's a vastly superior way to find what I need than anything else. It could have been done without craphics acceleration, but it's easiest to get large as possible previews of the results of your search this way.
I would say most dektop users won't even notice this. It may prevent fork-heavy things like Chrome from starving other things, but the best cases to demonstrate was 'make -j ', in a terminal, which isn't particularly indicative of most user load.
As awesome as everyone talks up these 'brains' and how incredibly superior they are with only 20 watts, the fastest brain on earth can't even keep up with a 10 dollar pocket calculator that uses a fraction of a watt when it comes to remotely complex arithmetic.
Obviously, we have very two different things here. We created computers to be good at the stuff we are *not* good at, not to match our capabilities (we wouldn't spend so much money to make machines that are good at just the same things we are). That's one fallacy these discussions keep running into, we assume one is simply 'better' than the other rather than distinct.
This title/summary really must be changed. It's clearly trying to establish a relationship between this and Oracle in the 'base platform', when the article is basically 'random application developers for *any* platform don't pay close attention to the license terms'.
if IBM give Microsoft a powerpc license (they wont use it... it just makes lawyers feel good)
You do know that IBM designed and manufacture the processors for all the game consoles? If MS went PPC again, they'd continue the relationship with IBM.
I could see ARM or PPC. ARM to ease 'synergy' between their gaming consoles and their phone endeavors.
PPC to have backwards compatibility and least new development costs required. That and I think IBM has some patents they employ in their PPC designs that could make things very hard to jailbreak.
Well, to be fair, CentOS isn't 'driven' by a communtity (other than the mostly simplistic mission of 'rebadge RHEL'. Indirectly, RedHat does the 'driving' for CentOS. That is explicitly why it is so popular, the users piggy back on the hardware vendor and ISV support RedHat has.
Debian is largest among distributions that are not ultimately beholden to a commercial entity and not following the lead of another distribution.
Maybe nowadays, but debian did do apt before yum or anything else like it, and now that sort of capability is absolutely ubiquitous. In terms of things a "distribution" does inherently, that aspect of package management is very large.
They just said 'picosends' they didn't put an upper bound on it. 'Trading in mere picoseconds' could just mean'Trades in mere billions of picoseconds'.
Sometimes a one-off mistake happens, and reinstall makes sense. Many other times, the reason you had to reinstall is due to a more persistent problem (program/script systematically messing up or an admin that just needs to not be doing admin work), and skipping root cause analysis means you'll lose more time in the aggregate.
Oh, and re-installing the machine means 24h of downtime
I am with you except here. If re-installing a machine incurs 24h of downtime, you do not have a suitable contingency plan. Most environments I deal with are 15-20 minutes from offline to production on reinstall at the long end.
Well, to point one, I personally had a couple of relatives who lived during the great depression who would antagonize at length over the need for every little item and the relative costs down to the penny. If they had gone through the line only to find out they misunderstood a discount that means they would end up paying 2 cents more than the next cheapest bread, they would either hold things up while they traded bread, or even give up their place in line if the cashier would not wait for them. The obvious fact of the lengths they would go to over 2 cents is striking, but it also means they so carefully examined the alternatives that they *remembered* exactly how much the alternative bread was. I know not everyone was changed to that extent, but a non-trivial part of the population will be effected, depending largely upon the degree to which they were impacted or *felt* like they were impacted.
Because checking out a book from a library appears completely legitimate to anyone monitoring/logging traffic on the outside and all the 'infringement' is contained entirely within their house and impossible to tell the difference between someone following the rules and someone copying off the data.
Slashdot Mirror
And *particularly* this series lags even "entry" level Xeons (the ones that go up to two sockets). Generally, about 6 months after an architecture makes it to desktop land the associated entry Xeons release, and then about six months after that the high-end Xeon implementation of that architecture comes out. Hence this announcement in the ballpark of six months after the low-end Xeon Westmeres (I think a bit longer, but too lazy to look up).
Deep in my heart I'm a WindowMaker/GNUstep guy. Unfortunately, that environment is particularly 'all or nothing' and without a reasonably browser, office suite, image editor, I have to use non-GNUstep apps and the experience breaks down quickly. I also really really don't want to go without 'scale windows with window title filter'/'present windows' now that I have it.
XFCE/LXDE are nice enough, but lacking certain features I want that come with a larger user base.
Gnome has been quite sufficient and gvfs with fuse does a *lot* for having arbitrary applications enabled for non-admin access to network resources. The problem has been they have been fighting a war against configurability. It's bad enough they don't want to present a UI, but they don't even want to add 'hidden' gconf options even when given patches. Gnome 3 has been the last straw for me, going too far in forcing the specific vision of the developers.
Unity offers an alternative, but suffers the same fate of their way or no way (not even able to move their 'dock'.
Currently I'm in the KDE4 camp. A lot of the defaults were not what I wanted, but I was able to configure it easily enough to fit my preferences. One issue I do have is they are on their high horse on KIO, and have outright refused to embrace some fuse based bridge to ease life on people forced to use applications that aren't KDE. This is even worse because out of the box most distros select the Xine phonon backend instead of gstreamer, meaning KDE's own media players cannot even use KIO. Embracing fuse out-of-the-box to provide a POSIX entrypoint into KIO would fully get me inte KDE.
Or the fork of KDE3 intent on actually maintaining KDE3
http://www.trinitydesktop.org/
Just because you don't see a Windows sticker on your DVR doesn't mean MS had nothing to do with it.
I'd be very surprised, since I built mine from scratch and installed the OS myself. But more to the point, I think Linux has a much larger base by virtue of most TV integration using it ('google tv'), Boxee boxes, Tivo, etc etc etc.
I think Tablets aren't going to last (people will get tired of carrying around something that large just like they don't want to tote around laptops everywhere), but I don't think 'full featured' tablets are the future.
For one, we've *had* laptop replacement tablets for a while as a niche market. It has failed to never get out of the gate I think that's enough information to suggest that it's a dead end. I don't think 4GB is particularly out of reach for tablets, but it's also more than the common user needs. In terms of processor, ARM performance has proven to increase leaps and bounds and is currently in the 'fast enough' category for most users. Of course, most damning, $1,200 is way more than any computing device market will bear nowadays.
For another, *if* Tablets of any sort have any staying power, it's explicitly because of the oversized phone vision that the 'popular' tablets deliver. Many of us who use 'real' computers considered the limited UI of smartphones a necessary evil due to the realities of the screen size. I think the tablets have demonstrated there is a significant market who wanted their computers to act like that the whole time (limited multitasking, one-app on the screen at a time, etc etc).
Good news is I think they are right.
The bad news (for MS) is that I think the user base currently engrossed in tablet world are destined to ultimately go to cell phones and set-top boxes, not the directions MS are particularly strong in relative to the desktop/laptop world. I think that no matter what happens in tablet/netbook/etc, the desktop/laptop market is in maintenance mode, with people finding their current product 'good enough' until it actually breaks instead of when it is obsolete.
I'm personally waiting for augmented reality capable glasses add-on to my 'phone' to give me a personal, seemingly huge screen in a form factor that can always be with me. I'll even let apple release first if they want and call it 'iWear'.
They already have the carriers doing that with Android phones today. The upfront cost of a phone is near irrelevant and carriers will and do cut costs down to zero depending on success of a phone without sweating too much because almost all the cost is in the data plan.
I suspect it's more likely that Apple would hold share as they release an 'iphone nano' or similar device for the 'coming from dumbphone' world than Nokia transforming *all* of their Symbian base to WP7.
IDC seems to presume that Nokia is somehow bulletproof. This isn't logically reasonable. If Nokia is so secure, they accept such a drastic measure as the MS pact. We see a combination of some amount of desperation in the face of falling share to Apple/Android and MS trojan executives dictating that Nokia is going to bet their future on the last-place contender even though #1 would let them on for free. WP7 is not making inroads in the market, and combining an already declining Nokia with a non-starter MS platform seems like the worst of both worlds.
Every damn time that MS makes any significant move in a market they do not currently dominate, I am bombarded with people presuming the eventual *domination* of MS (whether they like it or not) to the exclusion of all others. MS has really only done that *twice*, desktop OS and Office suite, and *that's it*. They have not 'done it' in search and servers. They came closer in game consoles, closer than either search or server space, but they have not acheived near-monopoly status anywhere else or even become #1 in any of these markets.
MS is simply not the beast it used to be and/or the competitive landscape is a bit more competent. In OS space the only viable competitor at the time dominance was established was Apple, which MS successfully outmaneuvered in volume by managing to get cloning companies going and getting hardware companies to destroy each others' margins to deliver more volume to MS. My opinion is the office market was lost by simple business and/or technical inadequacies depending on which company you are talking about. Apple has learned how to be price competitive if it *has* to, while at the same time successfully marketing themselves so they don't have to. Google is going much further than MS did in enabling 'cloning' whilst mostly keeping integration with Google services very much intact.
Corporations are slimy entities. Just because they rely upon the US market doesn't mean they don't take every opportunity to screw it over for their own benefit. They will gladly provide a skeleton staff of local people to facilitate initial sale/installation/whatever needed to extract revenue from wealthier/more willing to spend local people. At the same time, all their support/development/manufacturing/etc investment goes wherever in the globe gives them the lowest cost. And they'll spend a lot of resources figuring out new ways of moving jobs from the skeleton crew to remote workers. They do not want to pay their workers an amount that would make them viable consumers of their product, they want to leech until the host is dried up. I would have great respect for a company doing offshore work in order to actually service the market in that country and not much else, but that never happens.
After that, when the execs and shareholders come to reap the harvest, the hypothetical place where they actually invest somewhat in the US economy through taxation, they dodge the burden at ludicrous scale.
The most effective way to reduce tax avoidance is to lower the tax rate
Only as part of a larger reform that also closes the loopholes. Basically making the tax system more straightforward and by extension fairer between mega-companies that can afford the overhead of an army of beancounters and small businesses, that cannot. I agree that a lower percentage (*without* loopholes) would probably net more aggregate tax revenue.
most desktop users absolutely will see a difference...you can now do a massive compile
I stand by my point. *Most* desktop users aren't doing that. Chrome is probably the most 'mainstream' application that would produce a potentially busy large process group depending on tab count, but on the other hand they are genreally only interacting with that application at the time.
This is not to take away how much this change just makes sense and how much it can do for certain cases, but the way people talk it up sets expectations way too high.
Not all GPU accelerated desktop is 'fluff', such as expose/compiz scale/kde present windows (particularly the latter with window title search). When I have many windows open, it's a vastly superior way to find what I need than anything else. It could have been done without craphics acceleration, but it's easiest to get large as possible previews of the results of your search this way.
I would say most dektop users won't even notice this. It may prevent fork-heavy things like Chrome from starving other things, but the best cases to demonstrate was 'make -j ', in a terminal, which isn't particularly indicative of most user load.
As awesome as everyone talks up these 'brains' and how incredibly superior they are with only 20 watts, the fastest brain on earth can't even keep up with a 10 dollar pocket calculator that uses a fraction of a watt when it comes to remotely complex arithmetic.
Obviously, we have very two different things here. We created computers to be good at the stuff we are *not* good at, not to match our capabilities (we wouldn't spend so much money to make machines that are good at just the same things we are). That's one fallacy these discussions keep running into, we assume one is simply 'better' than the other rather than distinct.
This title/summary really must be changed. It's clearly trying to establish a relationship between this and Oracle in the 'base platform', when the article is basically 'random application developers for *any* platform don't pay close attention to the license terms'.
if IBM give Microsoft a powerpc license (they wont use it... it just makes lawyers feel good)
You do know that IBM designed and manufacture the processors for all the game consoles? If MS went PPC again, they'd continue the relationship with IBM.
I could see ARM or PPC. ARM to ease 'synergy' between their gaming consoles and their phone endeavors.
PPC to have backwards compatibility and least new development costs required. That and I think IBM has some patents they employ in their PPC designs that could make things very hard to jailbreak.
We'll see Netcraft confirms...
Well, to be fair, CentOS isn't 'driven' by a communtity (other than the mostly simplistic mission of 'rebadge RHEL'. Indirectly, RedHat does the 'driving' for CentOS. That is explicitly why it is so popular, the users piggy back on the hardware vendor and ISV support RedHat has.
Debian is largest among distributions that are not ultimately beholden to a commercial entity and not following the lead of another distribution.
Maybe nowadays, but debian did do apt before yum or anything else like it, and now that sort of capability is absolutely ubiquitous. In terms of things a "distribution" does inherently, that aspect of package management is very large.
They just said 'picosends' they didn't put an upper bound on it. 'Trading in mere picoseconds' could just mean'Trades in mere billions of picoseconds'.
I can drive cross country in a matter of seconds.
Sometimes a one-off mistake happens, and reinstall makes sense. Many other times, the reason you had to reinstall is due to a more persistent problem (program/script systematically messing up or an admin that just needs to not be doing admin work), and skipping root cause analysis means you'll lose more time in the aggregate.
Oh, and re-installing the machine means 24h of downtime
I am with you except here. If re-installing a machine incurs 24h of downtime, you do not have a suitable contingency plan. Most environments I deal with are 15-20 minutes from offline to production on reinstall at the long end.
Well, to point one, I personally had a couple of relatives who lived during the great depression who would antagonize at length over the need for every little item and the relative costs down to the penny. If they had gone through the line only to find out they misunderstood a discount that means they would end up paying 2 cents more than the next cheapest bread, they would either hold things up while they traded bread, or even give up their place in line if the cashier would not wait for them. The obvious fact of the lengths they would go to over 2 cents is striking, but it also means they so carefully examined the alternatives that they *remembered* exactly how much the alternative bread was. I know not everyone was changed to that extent, but a non-trivial part of the population will be effected, depending largely upon the degree to which they were impacted or *felt* like they were impacted.
Because checking out a book from a library appears completely legitimate to anyone monitoring/logging traffic on the outside and all the 'infringement' is contained entirely within their house and impossible to tell the difference between someone following the rules and someone copying off the data.