POWER5/6 systems are pretty much commodity systems, and there you can do weighted sharing of CPU time between LPARs with a guaranteed minimum. Some of the low end boxes are pretty competitive to similarly configured Intel/AMD boxes, tho it varies a lot with memory/disk configs.
But for virtualization work where SLAs are involved, it might be something to at least consider.
Re:Not Quake, but GL Quake!
on
Quake is 10
·
· Score: 1
Yup, it was true. Played it on OS/2 with a Matrox Mystique video card. Why OS/2? Because it had native OpenGL and IPX support... it was built for Quake, multigaming with IPX and OpenGL goodness:)
To be fair to Windows (ha!), I have found that the useful life of a Linux installation is a lot shorter than Windows. I would never consider installing a Linux distribution from 2000, but Win2k isn't all that bad (as Windows goes) even 6 years later.
Yes, naturally. There haven't been many obvious development for Win2K/XP since then. Some new eye candy, a bit of plumbing have changed (but nothing most users would notice)... So functionality of a W2K-SP4 and XP-SP2, from an end user that is only using Office, Outlook and IE is the same, is more or less the same.
If you look at Linux, it was way behind Windows in many areas in 2000. Install Red Hat anno 2000 and Red Hat/Fedora anno 2005, and the difference will be obvious. Not only in the operating system or desktop environment, but also in bundled apps. It's a world of difference.
As Linux matures on the desktop over the next 5-10 years, I would expect Linux to have longer cycles. As the architecture and platform itself matures, and as update/upgrade technology improves.
...but all of that is old stuff. OS/2 WorkPlace Shell (the desktop environment that lived on top of Presentation Manager) from version 2.0 and onwards had all that too. It was CORBA based, using (D)SOM and could be controlled via REXX, just as DCOP can for KDE. Control and send messages to/from SOM-aware applications were just as easy.
So, what's my point... ranting on about a dead OS? My point is that people are continually re-inventing stuff. People live in seperate niches and recieve little imput from others. Issues and ideas ends up in flame-fests and silly meta-discussions. Component and message passing functionality should be part of the OS, not the Desktop Environment. Both KDE and Gnome use the Windows 3.1 angle, put a GUI with all its trimmings on top of an OS. Granted, Linux og UNIX is much much better suited than PC/MS-DOS, but it's architectually the same thing. Transport and low-level functionality into Linux and the trimmings and APIs into GNU standard tools. Then Desktop development can go back to building good user interfaces.
Yes, now that the Rio Karma is discontinued, the iAudio X5 is the best that is out there in the stores.
It only lack one major feature for me, and that is ID3-tag based browsing. No other player got a user interface as easy to use and as powerful as the Rios, and the Karma in particular. IMO the iPod is not even close, even if it hadn't been disqualified by me as it lacks gapless playback. No, crossfading is not gapless playback.
But, I am happy with my Rio Karma for now -- and I hope to be for many years.
1. Even if it is VoIP, it is desentralised. Businesses that implement VoIP generally use so with IP-telephones and IP-telephone centrals. They implement it as they did with old telephones. This makes the calls cheaper, but do not add the flexibility as a software based VoIP solution do.
2. It contains Chat and File Transfer (IM and P2P), causing a knee-jerk reaction to ban it. Both the hacker/pirate/illegal distribution of music, movies and applications, but also uncontrolled transfer of internal confidential information with no audit trail. Even if *we* know that any unfaithful worker can find other ways to steal information, it is a CMA (Cover My A**) procedure among the security folks.
3. The established telecommunication community fight against it, of course. It will eradicate their soft and cushy market. They will be demoted to Layer 1 and 2 communication providers and ruin everything they have worked to do the last 20 years... to spread out and be telecommunication services providers -- not just a provider of commodity products.
Mix these factors together, and you will have a strong lobby for banning Skype.
Well, if you are on.NET, DB2 has had.NET integration for a long while now. I heard some claim that it was even better than the.NET integration in the SQL Server 2005 betas, but I guess that depends on your style and requirements.
Where did you get the idea that MCA was better than PCI? ISA, yes; ISA was total crap, but PCI was so successful that it's still the dominant bus on PCs and other architectures as well, and is only now being slowly replaced by PCIe (PCI Express), which has the same software interface but higher speeds (PCIe 1x is about twice as fast as 32/33 PCI). IIRC, MCA was 32 bits but only 8 MHz, and was much slower than PCI. It wasn't even as fast as VLB.
MCA had more ground wires, making a better electrical interface. MCA had a better and totally independent busmaster feature. MCA had 64 IRQ levels (PCI has four). MCA was initially 8MHz, but came as 16MHz later and could easily be upgraded. MCA had hardware Plug&Play. And please, don't mention VLB, it was an horrible hack:)
But... MCA also had high licensing fees, and in it's first years, the smaller size of MCA cards compared to ISA made it more expensive. More LSI/VLSI chips had to be used. Also, it got bungled into the IBM PS/2, OS/2 mess... many thought that it only worked with OS/2 and vice versa.
Since you say that the technical community will choose the best linux distro out there, why didn't the technical community choose MCA machines? (price) Why didn't they choose Token Ring networks, instead of coax-Ethernet? (price) And why is Red Hat the largest and most widespread distro out there, when so many diss it? Sure, Linux isn't totally market driven, but Linux is fast becoming a seasoned player in the marketing and management levels of business too.
KDE will not succeed on the basis of Qt beeing good and that the DE is better designed.
Yes, I've heard that too... but others say gnome/gtk is easier to write for. Gnome is also CORBA based, that is a point in Gnome's favour.
But! This isn't about wether KDE is better than Gnome or vice versa. It's about a unified desktop, and a focus on how to drive Linux market share. A common desktop in the enterprise/business segment can only help.
Technical excellence never really help... Betamax had a beter picture, OS/2 was way better than Win 3.1, MCA bus was way better than ISA and PCI, and so on... It seems that it never pays to be the best solution. If that was the case, we might all be running FreeBSD by now, who knows...
Oh, and some pointers on installing it... install RSCT first (Reliable Scalable Cluster Technology). That is the cluster framework for AIX and Linux from IBM, and provides the node-to-node communications and some low-level management tools and APIs. Then put GPFS on top. While you're at it, check out CSM too. That only support a limited distro set (SLES/RHEL), but automates node installation and management on a higher level... it use the RSCT layer and is quite neat.
But get the manuals too and keep them close while installing:)
Ground Avoidance Radar is something different, and something that I only have heard of on military planes. It it a true radar and it looks forward and down and works in conjunction with maps and GPS data. It will be able to guide the plane at low altitudes to smoothe out the ride while going as low as possible. Ya know, for those 100 feet Mach 0.8 approaches to runway 14R on JFK:)
What I want to know is if there are any stores selling FLAC or other lossless formats. Now, that would be useful. Who knows what format I want to use in the future?
For home media centers, lossless is great and completely removes the need for CD players... apart from ripping the music in the first place. For portable players, who knows what format I want in the future. Transcoding from mp3 to aac or whatnot is not a good solution. Lossless source is the only long-term option for music. I plan to listen to the music I own for the rest of my life.
This is not the first time that Steve Ballmer goes over the line. He is responsible for much of what is wrong with Microsoft. He is not a business man, he is on a egomaniac crusade against the rest of the world. It is my belief that Microsoft without Steve Ballmer would behave much more ethical in the industry, and not like a drunk and blind elephant in a porn shop.
It's a full AGP x8 implementation, not a pokey AGP-thru-PCI or something like that. In fact, at present AGP is faster than PCIe on it... But read the review for yourself.
Solaris is pretty good, but only an old solaris admin with a shedload of scripts can admin it effectively. Both HP-UX and AIX are better in that regard. Personally I would prefer AIX, for it's clean set of commands (using prefixes, ch=change, rm=remove, ls=list, mk=make), excellent menu driven admin tool that will give you scripts and commands ready to be used (either in it's log file for easy editing or by pressing F6) and not to mention the very excellent LVM that maybe only Veritas can equal.
But all *ix operating systems got an advantage for admins... you can script everything. You can manage everything through a ssh session. You can automate and schedule your processes with powerful scripting languages from sh, sed and awk to perl and python. GUI oriented operating systems are hard pressed to duplicate the flexibility. In Windows, sure you can use Windows Scripting or yoy can install perl and whatnot... but it's all addons and afterthoughts. And how do you manage the applications and services on the servers? It's not just a geeky idea that Microsoft is developing a Windows shell modeled after the unix idea for Longhord (or thereabouts).
All you unix admins raise your hand. You are all lazy gits!:) Your goal is to let scripts do everything so you get time to do interesting stuff. All you Unix admins that works together with Windows admins; ever smirked at their petty problems with automation and impelenting small jobs that isn't catered for in their GUI world?
So... my point is. Linux, *BSD, Solaris, AIX, HP-UX... I don't care. They are all much easier to admin than any Windows flavour, if -- and I repeat *IF* -- the admin is competent. Unfortunately good unix admins are more expensive than pimply faced Windows admin. And the good Windows admins adopt unix ideas... they try to automate, they search for tools on the net, they changes registry keys, they use cli interfaces to their apps and services where they are available. Problem is that it's so much harder on Windows than on Unix.
People arguing what's better; FreeBSD or Linux. Go get a life. They are both good.
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POWER5/6 systems are pretty much commodity systems, and there you can do weighted sharing of CPU time between LPARs with a guaranteed minimum. Some of the low end boxes are pretty competitive to similarly configured Intel/AMD boxes, tho it varies a lot with memory/disk configs.
But for virtualization work where SLAs are involved, it might be something to at least consider.
Yup, it was true. Played it on OS/2 with a Matrox Mystique video card. Why OS/2? Because it had native OpenGL and IPX support... it was built for Quake, multigaming with IPX and OpenGL goodness :)
Yeah, the 134 CPU archtecture is not well known....
To be fair to Windows (ha!), I have found that the useful life of a Linux installation is a lot shorter than Windows. I would never consider installing a Linux distribution from 2000, but Win2k isn't all that bad (as Windows goes) even 6 years later.
Yes, naturally. There haven't been many obvious development for Win2K/XP since then. Some new eye candy, a bit of plumbing have changed (but nothing most users would notice)... So functionality of a W2K-SP4 and XP-SP2, from an end user that is only using Office, Outlook and IE is the same, is more or less the same.
If you look at Linux, it was way behind Windows in many areas in 2000. Install Red Hat anno 2000 and Red Hat/Fedora anno 2005, and the difference will be obvious. Not only in the operating system or desktop environment, but also in bundled apps. It's a world of difference.
As Linux matures on the desktop over the next 5-10 years, I would expect Linux to have longer cycles. As the architecture and platform itself matures, and as update/upgrade technology improves.
...but all of that is old stuff. OS/2 WorkPlace Shell (the desktop environment that lived on top of Presentation Manager) from version 2.0 and onwards had all that too. It was CORBA based, using (D)SOM and could be controlled via REXX, just as DCOP can for KDE. Control and send messages to/from SOM-aware applications were just as easy.
So, what's my point... ranting on about a dead OS? My point is that people are continually re-inventing stuff. People live in seperate niches and recieve little imput from others. Issues and ideas ends up in flame-fests and silly meta-discussions. Component and message passing functionality should be part of the OS, not the Desktop Environment. Both KDE and Gnome use the Windows 3.1 angle, put a GUI with all its trimmings on top of an OS. Granted, Linux og UNIX is much much better suited than PC/MS-DOS, but it's architectually the same thing. Transport and low-level functionality into Linux and the trimmings and APIs into GNU standard tools. Then Desktop development can go back to building good user interfaces.
Yes, now that the Rio Karma is discontinued, the iAudio X5 is the best that is out there in the stores.
It only lack one major feature for me, and that is ID3-tag based browsing. No other player got a user interface as easy to use and as powerful as the Rios, and the Karma in particular. IMO the iPod is not even close, even if it hadn't been disqualified by me as it lacks gapless playback. No, crossfading is not gapless playback.
But, I am happy with my Rio Karma for now -- and I hope to be for many years.
...in enterprise environments.
1. Even if it is VoIP, it is desentralised. Businesses that implement VoIP generally use so with IP-telephones and IP-telephone centrals. They implement it as they did with old telephones. This makes the calls cheaper, but do not add the flexibility as a software based VoIP solution do.
2. It contains Chat and File Transfer (IM and P2P), causing a knee-jerk reaction to ban it. Both the hacker/pirate/illegal distribution of music, movies and applications, but also uncontrolled transfer of internal confidential information with no audit trail. Even if *we* know that any unfaithful worker can find other ways to steal information, it is a CMA (Cover My A**) procedure among the security folks.
3. The established telecommunication community fight against it, of course. It will eradicate their soft and cushy market. They will be demoted to Layer 1 and 2 communication providers and ruin everything they have worked to do the last 20 years... to spread out and be telecommunication services providers -- not just a provider of commodity products.
Mix these factors together, and you will have a strong lobby for banning Skype.
Well, if you are on .NET, DB2 has had .NET integration for a long while now. I heard some claim that it was even better than the .NET integration in the SQL Server 2005 betas, but I guess that depends on your style and requirements.
Where did you get the idea that MCA was better than PCI? ISA, yes; ISA was total crap, but PCI was so successful that it's still the dominant bus on PCs and other architectures as well, and is only now being slowly replaced by PCIe (PCI Express), which has the same software interface but higher speeds (PCIe 1x is about twice as fast as 32/33 PCI). IIRC, MCA was 32 bits but only 8 MHz, and was much slower than PCI. It wasn't even as fast as VLB.
:)
MCA had more ground wires, making a better electrical interface. MCA had a better and totally independent busmaster feature. MCA had 64 IRQ levels (PCI has four). MCA was initially 8MHz, but came as 16MHz later and could easily be upgraded. MCA had hardware Plug&Play. And please, don't mention VLB, it was an horrible hack
But... MCA also had high licensing fees, and in it's first years, the smaller size of MCA cards compared to ISA made it more expensive. More LSI/VLSI chips had to be used. Also, it got bungled into the IBM PS/2, OS/2 mess... many thought that it only worked with OS/2 and vice versa.
Since you say that the technical community will choose the best linux distro out there, why didn't the technical community choose MCA machines? (price) Why didn't they choose Token Ring networks, instead of coax-Ethernet? (price) And why is Red Hat the largest and most widespread distro out there, when so many diss it? Sure, Linux isn't totally market driven, but Linux is fast becoming a seasoned player in the marketing and management levels of business too.
KDE will not succeed on the basis of Qt beeing good and that the DE is better designed.
Yes, I've heard that too... but others say gnome/gtk is easier to write for. Gnome is also CORBA based, that is a point in Gnome's favour.
But! This isn't about wether KDE is better than Gnome or vice versa. It's about a unified desktop, and a focus on how to drive Linux market share. A common desktop in the enterprise/business segment can only help.
Technical excellence never really help... Betamax had a beter picture, OS/2 was way better than Win 3.1, MCA bus was way better than ISA and PCI, and so on... It seems that it never pays to be the best solution. If that was the case, we might all be running FreeBSD by now, who knows...
Over here, over there... where I am (yes, I'm in Europe), most people don't care. And I am from the country where Qt was made.
Novell didn't buy a KDE distribution. They wanted an enterprise ready distro. Two choices: Red Hat or SUSE. Red Hat was probably too expensive.
The enterprise/business end of Linux is Gnome. Sun, Red Hat, Novell and IBM all lean to Gnome, some more than others.
"KDE distribution"... get real. Who chooses a distro on the basis of the primary desktop environment?
Cannot do it with Gnome? Why not? Users in general don't care. Only religious zealots really care.
Oh, and some pointers on installing it... install RSCT first (Reliable Scalable Cluster Technology). That is the cluster framework for AIX and Linux from IBM, and provides the node-to-node communications and some low-level management tools and APIs. Then put GPFS on top. While you're at it, check out CSM too. That only support a limited distro set (SLES/RHEL), but automates node installation and management on a higher level... it use the RSCT layer and is quite neat.
:)
But get the manuals too and keep them close while installing
If I'm not mistaken, GPFS is free as in beer for Linux. Download it and give it a spin...
GPFS download page...
Ground Avoidance Radar is something different, and something that I only have heard of on military planes. It it a true radar and it looks forward and down and works in conjunction with maps and GPS data. It will be able to guide the plane at low altitudes to smoothe out the ride while going as low as possible. Ya know, for those 100 feet Mach 0.8 approaches to runway 14R on JFK :)
What I want to know is if there are any stores selling FLAC or other lossless formats. Now, that would be useful. Who knows what format I want to use in the future?
For home media centers, lossless is great and completely removes the need for CD players... apart from ripping the music in the first place. For portable players, who knows what format I want in the future. Transcoding from mp3 to aac or whatnot is not a good solution. Lossless source is the only long-term option for music. I plan to listen to the music I own for the rest of my life.
This is not the first time that Steve Ballmer goes over the line. He is responsible for much of what is wrong with Microsoft. He is not a business man, he is on a egomaniac crusade against the rest of the world. It is my belief that Microsoft without Steve Ballmer would behave much more ethical in the industry, and not like a drunk and blind elephant in a porn shop.
Heh, it was still strangely on-topic'ish :)
Well, look no further:
http://www.anandtech.com/mb/showdoc.aspx?i=2471
It's a full AGP x8 implementation, not a pokey AGP-thru-PCI or something like that. In fact, at present AGP is faster than PCIe on it... But read the review for yourself.
Solaris is pretty good, but only an old solaris admin with a shedload of scripts can admin it effectively. Both HP-UX and AIX are better in that regard. Personally I would prefer AIX, for it's clean set of commands (using prefixes, ch=change, rm=remove, ls=list, mk=make), excellent menu driven admin tool that will give you scripts and commands ready to be used (either in it's log file for easy editing or by pressing F6) and not to mention the very excellent LVM that maybe only Veritas can equal.
:) Your goal is to let scripts do everything so you get time to do interesting stuff. All you Unix admins that works together with Windows admins; ever smirked at their petty problems with automation and impelenting small jobs that isn't catered for in their GUI world?
But all *ix operating systems got an advantage for admins... you can script everything. You can manage everything through a ssh session. You can automate and schedule your processes with powerful scripting languages from sh, sed and awk to perl and python. GUI oriented operating systems are hard pressed to duplicate the flexibility. In Windows, sure you can use Windows Scripting or yoy can install perl and whatnot... but it's all addons and afterthoughts. And how do you manage the applications and services on the servers? It's not just a geeky idea that Microsoft is developing a Windows shell modeled after the unix idea for Longhord (or thereabouts).
All you unix admins raise your hand. You are all lazy gits!
So... my point is. Linux, *BSD, Solaris, AIX, HP-UX... I don't care. They are all much easier to admin than any Windows flavour, if -- and I repeat *IF* -- the admin is competent. Unfortunately good unix admins are more expensive than pimply faced Windows admin. And the good Windows admins adopt unix ideas... they try to automate, they search for tools on the net, they changes registry keys, they use cli interfaces to their apps and services where they are available. Problem is that it's so much harder on Windows than on Unix.
People arguing what's better; FreeBSD or Linux. Go get a life. They are both good.