The other lesson I hope they learn is to create a controller chipset closer to that of FireWire: one that doesn't suck CPU, and where devices can talk to each other without hitting the hub.
They're talking about starting at 10 Gb/s and going to 100 Gb/s: that kind of throughput can suck a lot of compute, even in this age of multi-cores. And remember that a lot of these connected devices will be portable, where battery (which the CPU draws from) is still limited.
10 Gb/s says it all. It will have to have a dedicated controller chipset, or the overhead & inefficiency would be laughable.
I'm back here reporting behind 'enemy lines' and I see the 'repressed' citizenry are enjoying IE8, Safari, Opera, Firefox, and Chrome.. elsewhere IE6 is being enjoyed by people who don't care to know what a browser is. Are there any fronts to this war or is it all made up? *enjoys the local food and moves on*
Oh, I don't know, so that in the UNIX model of execing buttloads of processes, you don't wind up with multiple versions of libraries in play. Unless you don't think that's a problem. Hey, maybe Linux systems are designed to execute with totally different versions of shared libraries using the same filesystem entry.
the problem I see is with an OS that has so much crap in resident memory that overwriting any system file is dangerous and has to be put off until you can actually reboot the machine. On a linux machine, everything is fairly modular so you can just restart individual services
I'm pretty sure any sane Linux sysadmin understands the problem whether they'll admit it or not.
Want me to start picking random RPM updates and you try guessing exactly which components could be affected or what needs to be restarted? Repeat for a hundred updates * couple hundred servers, every six months. This isn't some cloud fantasy where all server's are built the same and one command controls them all. They will have different uses, different builds, different hardware, third party software, first party software, some will already have been fucked up by the guys before you, you just don't know it yet. Think hard the next time you overwrite a.so file... do you REALLY know what the impact is, and did the vendor test that update with YOUR configuration? That isn't good engineering, it's a hack.
like updating your web browser, because it's not integrated into the OS shell.
ROFL - in Linux, your browser IS integrated into your OS shell! Have you tried running a custom Firefox on a GNOME desktop?? GNOME & Firefox are PARTICULARLY bad at live updates! Linux desktop environments piss all over UNIX. Keep rolling the dice brother. Having to log out of a screwed up X session on your desktop is one thing, but the potential impact to a datacenter is a whole other ball game.
Come on guys, this is hardly new. On any Mac, you hold buttons down while pressing the power button. On SPARC hardware, there's a key position that boots the system straight to PROM prompt.
Either way, the advanced firmware on these systems can be manipulated while the OS is online.
Accessing modern firmware is such a non-problem you unimaginative clods.
Sorry, the simple fact is there is no need for another desktop OS. Windows and Mac are fine. I don't know why people think Linux will _ever_ make headway in that space when there's no conceivable way it ever will.
Instead, how about focusing on being a workstation OS and a server OS?
+1
Free software ideologies and non-technical users mix like oil and water. Chasing after non-technical users cost Linux projects a lot of progress in places that matter. Now, usability matters, but providing the best end user experience possible is/was/will never be a priority for the thousand headed beast called Linux. If there was a focus on engineering & integration instead of copying the Windows 95 desktop, I wonder where we would be today. And no, moving in a thousand directions at once will not get you the most well engineered, tightly integrated, usable OS, for any occasion; sorry to burst anyone's bubble.
Everyone knows how Linux can be improved on the desktop, but that's dangerously close to the 'why work for free when I hate doing it' zone. Unless someone wants to claim that free software has morphed from a hobby into a charity, and free software developers are all humanitarians... someone is going to have to show the money to get this kind of work done. Or, face the facts and rally the troops to a rational goal.
Works for Apple. Remember, you have to step back from the "geek" view. Fact is nongeek users know Windows. They want "Windows without the annoyances of Windows" - this is exactly what Apple sells to the consumer.
Reeeeeeeaaaallly.... Apple's schtick is selling a better Windows than Windows? Have you used anything Apple makes?
Look, first we sell them "Windows without the annoyances of Windows", then we educate them on how Linux is different than Windows, how Linux is not just free Windows.
How it's not just a free OS with butchered Windowsisms, it has butchered UNIXisms as well?
No. Linux does not need to be a better Windows than Windows. It needs to be itself.. whatever the **** it is. That is the big problem with Linux. Server, desktop, workstation, toy, hobby.. what is it? Oh.. I'm sorry, why can't it be all of those, right? Better server than Solaris? Better desktop than OS X? Better workstation than Windows? What you've got is all around mediocrity, against a fairly well rounded Windows, and OS X & Solaris excelling in their respective areas. The problem with Linux is the extreme lack of understanding of what people need computers to do for them. Just let it be, and stop "promoting" it like a little kid's first girlfriend. Fix your own problems and stop worrying about what software other people use for Christ's sake. You can't sell something without knowing what it is and what the customer wants, that is so f'ing retarded.
With linux, most of those updates you get are for other software you are running, and you tend not to need to restart your entire computer for them to work.
You don't need to restart because Linux lacks a mechanism to prevent in-memory executable files and shared libraries from being overwritten on disk.
If you don't see a problem with that, then sure, don't reboot ever, have fun.
I love it how elsewhere in the thread, people are ridiculing the idea of spending loads of money on the latest quadcore processor just to surf the web, yet for some reason things are different when it's a Mac, and any other laptop is branded "shitty"
Maybe these people find more value for their money in Macs in general than in quad-core processors. *shrug*
It's particularly ironic hearing all the praise when you remember that, yes that's right, it's an Intel processor.
Is a processor a computer? Are all computers with the same processor architecture the same?
Quick! What are the differences between Intel's Xeon and desktop lines? You fail, stop talking about processors.
(it's especially hilarious when the one reason an average person might need a high end computers - games - is something that Mac OS is far less of a suitable choice for, anyway).
You have a very shallow understanding of computers. Define high-end. Keep studying.
It seems to me that as soon as someone comes out with a smartphone / mp3 player that is not so "controlled" and lets users install what they want, it will eventually rule the market. I thought someone would have done that by now.
Is there a precedent for this, or wishful thinking?
Firefox is dramatically less likely to be vulnerable (ignoring plug-ins)
This is like a repeat of the summary, ROFL.
OS:App::Browser:Plugin
because Mozilla makes it so easy to stay up-to-date
There are centralized tools to manage Mozilla updates or we expect users to take care of themselves? Hell, Windows update is a piece of cake too, WTF is Microsoft's problem? Consistency is key, and any environment that takes security seriously needs to enforce security updates, not hope all users understand info security.
every box pulls the latest package list from our mirror server (and we log any boxes that fail to do so), then at 8am every box is polled by nagios to see if it requires any updates and an email alert is sent...
That is nice and all, but gathering the latest updates is the easiest part. There are tools for every major OS to do that, often many different tools. The difficult part, and the reason many companies have difficulty keeping up with patch releases are the logistics involved with applying updates - the testing (you _will_ be bit eventually, this pays off), keeping them consistent, rebooting them, restarting apps, outage notifications, failover preparations, etc. There are always gotchas in a large environment. Systems without boot blocks/grub installed to both root mirrors halves and missing the *good* disk for years, SAN volumes long gone still in vfstab, dsk/rdsk colums mismatching, hardware that just wants to die, and so on. There is nothing special about Linux in that regard unless you're one of those people who thinks it's safe to disable kernel updates and never reboot after shredding dozens of in use shared libraries, frameworks, runtimes, etc. I'll just presume you're more sensible than that, maybe you're fortunate enough to work in an environment where you can turn things off without providing a detailed plan to two levels of upper management:\ I envy you.
when PHP gets popped (is there really any other culprit these days?), the OS is still untouched
So what?
Today, the PHP service that got popped was running on the... PHP server. Is the OS important when someone snarfs up your web app and all data it had access to? Are you keeping unnecessary sensitive data on your PHP server? I hope not, but sure.. MAYBE it would be protected if your OS was secure.
In your analogy, it's like the tent poles of the "windows" tent are made of cardboard tubes... they might hold up due to the imbalance of newly torn cloth, or they might not.
You're completely missing the point. If someone tears through your tent, its game over, circus down. Nobody gives a damn about tearing your poles down, they have better ones at home.
Also a SPARC/Solaris fan... SUN really needs to polish their stuff up. They have a ton of cool tech, but it's very inaccessible to the average administrator. I consider myself to be fairly smart, and willing to go great lengths to learn new things, but I'm not who they need to market to. I wish they looked at the big picture and made their technology easy to use with fewer gotchas. The problem with Solaris.. I can't believe I'm saying this.. is UNIX. It really needs to go. I'm not talking about throwing out CLI's, KISS, openness, reuse, etc.. Just reevaluate what servers are used for today and design around that. Computers should be so damned easy to use today... when few have to manage many, the smallest usability improvement is multiplied, a LOT.
For example.. patching. Every other vendor can do this quickly and painfully now. I don't give a rat's ass how you implement it SUN, make it not suck. Backing out patches is a real cool feature, and slow, but Solaris is the only system I've ever had the need to revert an update. If it means we can no longer install hand stripped, custom slim builds, so f'ing be it. All full OEM instal then if thats required for decent QA. Linux can improve in this area too.. I'm sick and tired of all the minefields with "enter at own risk" signs. It is not necessary to be competitive. You need to look at the big picture, decide what users want, and guide them there. This is how Microsoft & Apple are eating everyone's lunches. Being "allowed" to walk the minefield ourselves it not a feature, it's just cheap.
I still love Sun's tech (and admire Linux), but the landmines are tiring.
I have yet to see any numbers that indicate that UltraSPARC-Tx can be beaten by the same number of Intel- or AMD-based boxes when it comes to highly parallel workloads. (The main provisos are with regards to floating point.:)
At spec.org you can see the previous generation of Xeons caught up and started peeling away from T2 performance, ad the new Nehalem Xeons absolutely throttle everything else out there (similar to how Sun's CMTs leapt ahead at launch). The most interesting thing I learned from staring at spec.org charts is that sooner or later a vendor will pull away from the competition like this, and it never lasts. Sort the charts by available date, and you can see Sun/Intel/AMD pulling away at times. I think Sun and AMD will catch up, but it might be a year out. Took Intel & AMD that long to catch up to the first CMT's anyway.
Personally I also prefer the console LOMs of SPARC machines more than the BIOS-redirect of most of the x86 hardware. IPMI and DRAC/iLO is fine for a lot of things, but going to serial (or SSHing in and getting the console redirect) is a very handy all-else-fails mechanism.
SUN's ILOMs for x86 and more recently T5xxx+ SPARC servers do bios redirection over serial (x86). On either system, ssh ilomaddress, start/SP/console It feels a little clunky on x86, but does what you expect on SPARC. I think it's slowly replacing their ALOMS. The Java based remote console GUI (x86 ILOM only) beats the pants off DRAC's ActiveX crap. That's got to be a little painful for those running Linux on Dells:P
There's two sides to that. The classic UNIX userland crap on Solaris is old and crufty - yes!, and GNU userland is much better but there is more than that. Then there are other things Sun has added over the years.. prstat, cfgadm, devfsadm, dladm, fmadm, ptree, pargs, pwdx etc, etc, etc (trying to leave out the big ones everyone already knows about) There is a lot of stuff Linux simply exposes through/proc and/sys which is awful... I can't fathom why there isn't a ptree for Linux, it's such a simple utility and all the long forum posts from Linux users trying to figure out zombie processes is just funny when such a basic utility easily visualizes it.
SAN management in particular on Linux leaves much to be desired. Solaris 10's cfgadm beats any combination of/sys,/proc and dmsetup related misery. One command vs. digging through logs to figure out which LUN and target sdabc is from, which inane devmapper entry wraps it and which subsystem manages it, cating & eching crap into proc somewhere to do the actual SAN level device management.. ugh..
I digress.. GNU utilities can easily be added to Solaris and even replace standard utilities without too much fuss, and SOMEDAY, Linux will have decent system administration utilities.. (not holding breath)
If you're talking about single machine SMP, Solaris will go to 256 way SMP on available machines from Sun. Linux can do 1024-way Itanium2. With NUMA architecture things can get even bigger
I'm sorry, are you suggesting there is a 1024-way SMP architecture available, and a 256-way SPARC system is not NUMA?
For Niagara to work for you you have to have a lot of extremely lightweight threads that don't depend on each other and can run completely in parallel. You won't find many workloads like that these days
I agree with you that database applications do often depend on single threaded performance, but the halo of application servers surrounding them fit the bill nicely.
they didn't actually do any more work, it just took twice as long to render
You know they had to actually produce it for 3D in the first place right? You can't just put 3D objects in a 1/2D scene and call that 3D filmmaking. By your definition, standup comedians are performing in 3D. How useless would that be, watching a stage performance filmed in 3D?
Double the render time isn't something to sneeze at either.
Everyone's already upgraded to shiny-new HDTVs and premium HD services.
I doubt HDTVs (and services) are quite as widespread as you think.
I've read somewhere that the surge of 3D movies over the past couple years are reason theaters are rolling out digital projectors faster. Maybe the prospect of a 3D home theater will boost HD TV penetration, at least spurring interest in HD even if consumers don't purchase new 3D sets. The next great thing doesn't make your old thing less useful to you, so enjoy your VHS or whatever. In the meantime, SOMEONE is watching a 3D movie right now thinking that would be pretty damned sweet in my living room. Don't look at me though, I've still got to figure out how to upgrade my stereo to play HD-DTS:(
Hey, Microsoft wasn't the one who decided that Mac users didn't need the right mouse button. If part of the "dumbing down" is a lack of easily-accessible context menus, blame the Mac GUI.
Odd, an Apple mouse has five buttons (how old is Mighty Mouse now?), their touchpads are capable of many multi touch gestures (quite new aside from multiple button simulation), desktop keyboards have FOUR (control/option/command/shift) standard accelerator/modifier keys used liberally throughout both user applications and OS interfaces (old as dirt; your "lack of accessible context menus" comment is utterly hilarious in light of this), and laptops technically have FIVE modifiers, counting the Fn key.
I keep hoping to find a good Linux UI that has the look-and-feel of Windows XP Pro (running a Classic Windows theme), but without the BSOD et al.
*sigh* way to set the bar... You should actually TRY a modern Mac/Windows UI, before settling for simplistic "classic windows" emulation.
PS. I'm not bull shitting you, even the shift key is used as a context menu modifier, often removing the (...) from a command and replacing it with a sensible default. EX: "Add Bookmark..." becomes "Add Bookmark to Menu" in Safari. "Force Quit..." becomes "Force Quit [FocusedApplicationName]" in the Apple menu. It seems to be similar to the option key, but that often alters commands that didn't have (...)'s in the name. Note how the text visibly changes in menus when a modifier is pressed, and the full accelerator+modifier sequence can be typed to avoid the menu altogether. This is why the Mac UI doesn't really need right click context menus. It already had uber context menus with more consistency and standardization than Windows's right-click context menus. Macs CAN make use of multiple mouse buttons however (games, complex apps, etc) and they are provided..
Gnome might be technically capable of using as many accelerator keys, but they are not represented in the UI well.. at all.. and few things outside the window manager will use them.
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The other lesson I hope they learn is to create a controller chipset closer to that of FireWire: one that doesn't suck CPU, and where devices can talk to each other without hitting the hub.
They're talking about starting at 10 Gb/s and going to 100 Gb/s: that kind of throughput can suck a lot of compute, even in this age of multi-cores. And remember that a lot of these connected devices will be portable, where battery (which the CPU draws from) is still limited.
10 Gb/s says it all. It will have to have a dedicated controller chipset, or the overhead & inefficiency would be laughable.
I'm back here reporting behind 'enemy lines' and I see the 'repressed' citizenry are enjoying IE8, Safari, Opera, Firefox, and Chrome.. elsewhere IE6 is being enjoyed by people who don't care to know what a browser is. Are there any fronts to this war or is it all made up? *enjoys the local food and moves on*
Oh, I don't know, so that in the UNIX model of execing buttloads of processes, you don't wind up with multiple versions of libraries in play. Unless you don't think that's a problem. Hey, maybe Linux systems are designed to execute with totally different versions of shared libraries using the same filesystem entry.
the problem I see is with an OS that has so much crap in resident memory that overwriting any system file is dangerous and has to be put off until you can actually reboot the machine. On a linux machine, everything is fairly modular so you can just restart individual services
I'm pretty sure any sane Linux sysadmin understands the problem whether they'll admit it or not.
Want me to start picking random RPM updates and you try guessing exactly which components could be affected or what needs to be restarted? Repeat for a hundred updates * couple hundred servers, every six months. This isn't some cloud fantasy where all server's are built the same and one command controls them all. They will have different uses, different builds, different hardware, third party software, first party software, some will already have been fucked up by the guys before you, you just don't know it yet. Think hard the next time you overwrite a .so file... do you REALLY know what the impact is, and did the vendor test that update with YOUR configuration? That isn't good engineering, it's a hack.
like updating your web browser, because it's not integrated into the OS shell.
ROFL - in Linux, your browser IS integrated into your OS shell! Have you tried running a custom Firefox on a GNOME desktop?? GNOME & Firefox are PARTICULARLY bad at live updates! Linux desktop environments piss all over UNIX. Keep rolling the dice brother. Having to log out of a screwed up X session on your desktop is one thing, but the potential impact to a datacenter is a whole other ball game.
Come on guys, this is hardly new. On any Mac, you hold buttons down while pressing the power button.
On SPARC hardware, there's a key position that boots the system straight to PROM prompt.
Either way, the advanced firmware on these systems can be manipulated while the OS is online.
Accessing modern firmware is such a non-problem you unimaginative clods.
Sorry, the simple fact is there is no need for another desktop OS. Windows and Mac are fine. I don't know why people think Linux will _ever_ make headway in that space when there's no conceivable way it ever will.
Instead, how about focusing on being a workstation OS and a server OS?
+1
Free software ideologies and non-technical users mix like oil and water. Chasing after non-technical users cost Linux projects a lot of progress in places that matter. Now, usability matters, but providing the best end user experience possible is/was/will never be a priority for the thousand headed beast called Linux. If there was a focus on engineering & integration instead of copying the Windows 95 desktop, I wonder where we would be today. And no, moving in a thousand directions at once will not get you the most well engineered, tightly integrated, usable OS, for any occasion; sorry to burst anyone's bubble.
Everyone knows how Linux can be improved on the desktop, but that's dangerously close to the 'why work for free when I hate doing it' zone. Unless someone wants to claim that free software has morphed from a hobby into a charity, and free software developers are all humanitarians... someone is going to have to show the money to get this kind of work done. Or, face the facts and rally the troops to a rational goal.
Shuttleworth should be talking with money.
PS: Mods, you should be ashamed.
. And even now with mandatory HD broadcasts,
Digital != HD
Works for Apple. Remember, you have to step back from the "geek" view. Fact is nongeek users know Windows. They want "Windows without the annoyances of Windows" - this is exactly what Apple sells to the consumer .
Reeeeeeeaaaallly.... Apple's schtick is selling a better Windows than Windows? Have you used anything Apple makes?
Look, first we sell them "Windows without the annoyances of Windows", then we educate them on how Linux is different than Windows, how Linux is not just free Windows.
How it's not just a free OS with butchered Windowsisms, it has butchered UNIXisms as well?
No. Linux does not need to be a better Windows than Windows. It needs to be itself.. whatever the **** it is. That is the big problem with Linux.
Server, desktop, workstation, toy, hobby.. what is it? Oh.. I'm sorry, why can't it be all of those, right? Better server than Solaris? Better desktop than OS X? Better workstation than Windows? What you've got is all around mediocrity, against a fairly well rounded Windows, and OS X & Solaris excelling in their respective areas. The problem with Linux is the extreme lack of understanding of what people need computers to do for them. Just let it be, and stop "promoting" it like a little kid's first girlfriend. Fix your own problems and stop worrying about what software other people use for Christ's sake. You can't sell something without knowing what it is and what the customer wants, that is so f'ing retarded.
With linux, most of those updates you get are for other software you are running, and you tend not to need to restart your entire computer for them to work.
You don't need to restart because Linux lacks a mechanism to prevent in-memory executable files and shared libraries from being overwritten on disk.
If you don't see a problem with that, then sure, don't reboot ever, have fun.
I love it how elsewhere in the thread, people are ridiculing the idea of spending loads of money on the latest quadcore processor just to surf the web, yet for some reason things are different when it's a Mac, and any other laptop is branded "shitty"
Maybe these people find more value for their money in Macs in general than in quad-core processors. *shrug*
It's particularly ironic hearing all the praise when you remember that, yes that's right, it's an Intel processor.
Is a processor a computer? Are all computers with the same processor architecture the same?
Quick! What are the differences between Intel's Xeon and desktop lines? You fail, stop talking about processors.
(it's especially hilarious when the one reason an average person might need a high end computers - games - is something that Mac OS is far less of a suitable choice for, anyway).
You have a very shallow understanding of computers. Define high-end. Keep studying.
ROFLMAO
It seems to me that as soon as someone comes out with a smartphone / mp3 player that is not so "controlled" and lets users install what they want, it will eventually rule the market. I thought someone would have done that by now.
Is there a precedent for this, or wishful thinking?
Firefox is dramatically less likely to be vulnerable (ignoring plug-ins)
This is like a repeat of the summary, ROFL.
OS:App::Browser:Plugin
because Mozilla makes it so easy to stay up-to-date
There are centralized tools to manage Mozilla updates or we expect users to take care of themselves?
Hell, Windows update is a piece of cake too, WTF is Microsoft's problem? Consistency is key, and any environment that takes security seriously needs to enforce security updates, not hope all users understand info security.
every box pulls the latest package list from our mirror server (and we log any boxes that fail to do so), then at 8am every box is polled by nagios to see if it requires any updates and an email alert is sent...
That is nice and all, but gathering the latest updates is the easiest part. There are tools for every major OS to do that, often many different tools. The difficult part, and the reason many companies have difficulty keeping up with patch releases are the logistics involved with applying updates - the testing (you _will_ be bit eventually, this pays off), keeping them consistent, rebooting them, restarting apps, outage notifications, failover preparations, etc. There are always gotchas in a large environment. Systems without boot blocks/grub installed to both root mirrors halves and missing the *good* disk for years, SAN volumes long gone still in vfstab, dsk/rdsk colums mismatching, hardware that just wants to die, and so on. There is nothing special about Linux in that regard unless you're one of those people who thinks it's safe to disable kernel updates and never reboot after shredding dozens of in use shared libraries, frameworks, runtimes, etc. I'll just presume you're more sensible than that, maybe you're fortunate enough to work in an environment where you can turn things off without providing a detailed plan to two levels of upper management :\ I envy you.
when PHP gets popped (is there really any other culprit these days?), the OS is still untouched
So what?
Today, the PHP service that got popped was running on the... PHP server. Is the OS important when someone snarfs up your web app and all data it had access to?
Are you keeping unnecessary sensitive data on your PHP server? I hope not, but sure.. MAYBE it would be protected if your OS was secure.
In your analogy, it's like the tent poles of the "windows" tent are made of cardboard tubes... they might hold up due to the imbalance of newly torn cloth, or they might not.
You're completely missing the point. If someone tears through your tent, its game over, circus down. Nobody gives a damn about tearing your poles down, they have better ones at home.
Also a SPARC/Solaris fan... SUN really needs to polish their stuff up. They have a ton of cool tech, but it's very inaccessible to the average administrator. I consider myself to be fairly smart, and willing to go great lengths to learn new things, but I'm not who they need to market to. I wish they looked at the big picture and made their technology easy to use with fewer gotchas. The problem with Solaris.. I can't believe I'm saying this.. is UNIX. It really needs to go. I'm not talking about throwing out CLI's, KISS, openness, reuse, etc.. Just reevaluate what servers are used for today and design around that. Computers should be so damned easy to use today... when few have to manage many, the smallest usability improvement is multiplied, a LOT.
For example.. patching. Every other vendor can do this quickly and painfully now. I don't give a rat's ass how you implement it SUN, make it not suck. Backing out patches is a real cool feature, and slow, but Solaris is the only system I've ever had the need to revert an update. If it means we can no longer install hand stripped, custom slim builds, so f'ing be it. All full OEM instal then if thats required for decent QA. Linux can improve in this area too.. I'm sick and tired of all the minefields with "enter at own risk" signs. It is not necessary to be competitive. You need to look at the big picture, decide what users want, and guide them there. This is how Microsoft & Apple are eating everyone's lunches. Being "allowed" to walk the minefield ourselves it not a feature, it's just cheap.
I still love Sun's tech (and admire Linux), but the landmines are tiring.
I have yet to see any numbers that indicate that UltraSPARC-Tx can be beaten by the same number of Intel- or AMD-based boxes when it comes to highly parallel workloads. (The main provisos are with regards to floating point. :)
At spec.org you can see the previous generation of Xeons caught up and started peeling away from T2 performance, ad the new Nehalem Xeons absolutely throttle everything else out there (similar to how Sun's CMTs leapt ahead at launch). The most interesting thing I learned from staring at spec.org charts is that sooner or later a vendor will pull away from the competition like this, and it never lasts. Sort the charts by available date, and you can see Sun/Intel/AMD pulling away at times. I think Sun and AMD will catch up, but it might be a year out. Took Intel & AMD that long to catch up to the first CMT's anyway.
Personally I also prefer the console LOMs of SPARC machines more than the BIOS-redirect of most of the x86 hardware. IPMI and DRAC/iLO is fine for a lot of things, but going to serial (or SSHing in and getting the console redirect) is a very handy all-else-fails mechanism.
SUN's ILOMs for x86 and more recently T5xxx+ SPARC servers do bios redirection over serial (x86). On either system, ssh ilomaddress, start /SP/console :P
It feels a little clunky on x86, but does what you expect on SPARC. I think it's slowly replacing their ALOMS. The Java based remote console GUI (x86 ILOM only) beats the pants off DRAC's ActiveX crap. That's got to be a little painful for those running Linux on Dells
Don't be a sore loser, nobody said it was a new concept. I did call you a loser though, chew on that.
There's two sides to that. The classic UNIX userland crap on Solaris is old and crufty - yes!, and GNU userland is much better but there is more than that. Then there are other things Sun has added over the years.. prstat, cfgadm, devfsadm, dladm, fmadm, ptree, pargs, pwdx etc, etc, etc (trying to leave out the big ones everyone already knows about) There is a lot of stuff Linux simply exposes through /proc and /sys which is awful... I can't fathom why there isn't a ptree for Linux, it's such a simple utility and all the long forum posts from Linux users trying to figure out zombie processes is just funny when such a basic utility easily visualizes it.
SAN management in particular on Linux leaves much to be desired. Solaris 10's cfgadm beats any combination of /sys, /proc and dmsetup related misery. One command vs. digging through logs to figure out which LUN and target sdabc is from, which inane devmapper entry wraps it and which subsystem manages it, cating & eching crap into proc somewhere to do the actual SAN level device management.. ugh..
I digress.. GNU utilities can easily be added to Solaris and even replace standard utilities without too much fuss, and SOMEDAY, Linux will have decent system administration utilities.. (not holding breath)
If you're talking about single machine SMP, Solaris will go to 256 way SMP on available machines from Sun. Linux can do 1024-way Itanium2. With NUMA architecture things can get even bigger
I'm sorry, are you suggesting there is a 1024-way SMP architecture available, and a 256-way SPARC system is not NUMA?
You're confused, man.
For Niagara to work for you you have to have a lot of extremely lightweight threads that don't depend on each other and can run completely in parallel. You won't find many workloads like that these days
I agree with you that database applications do often depend on single threaded performance, but the halo of application servers surrounding them fit the bill nicely.
IBM is afraid.
they didn't actually do any more work, it just took twice as long to render
You know they had to actually produce it for 3D in the first place right? You can't just put 3D objects in a 1/2D scene and call that 3D filmmaking.
By your definition, standup comedians are performing in 3D. How useless would that be, watching a stage performance filmed in 3D?
Double the render time isn't something to sneeze at either.
Everyone's already upgraded to shiny-new HDTVs and premium HD services.
I doubt HDTVs (and services) are quite as widespread as you think.
I've read somewhere that the surge of 3D movies over the past couple years are reason theaters are rolling out digital projectors faster. :(
Maybe the prospect of a 3D home theater will boost HD TV penetration, at least spurring interest in HD even if consumers don't purchase new 3D sets.
The next great thing doesn't make your old thing less useful to you, so enjoy your VHS or whatever. In the meantime, SOMEONE is watching a 3D movie right now thinking that would be pretty damned sweet in my living room. Don't look at me though, I've still got to figure out how to upgrade my stereo to play HD-DTS
Only one of those remotely resembled a book, and it rhymed with indle.
Hey, Microsoft wasn't the one who decided that Mac users didn't need the right mouse button. If part of the "dumbing down" is a lack of easily-accessible context menus, blame the Mac GUI.
Odd, an Apple mouse has five buttons (how old is Mighty Mouse now?), their touchpads are capable of many multi touch gestures (quite new aside from multiple button simulation), desktop keyboards have FOUR (control/option/command/shift) standard accelerator/modifier keys used liberally throughout both user applications and OS interfaces (old as dirt; your "lack of accessible context menus" comment is utterly hilarious in light of this), and laptops technically have FIVE modifiers, counting the Fn key.
I keep hoping to find a good Linux UI that has the look-and-feel of Windows XP Pro (running a Classic Windows theme), but without the BSOD et al.
*sigh* way to set the bar... You should actually TRY a modern Mac/Windows UI, before settling for simplistic "classic windows" emulation.
PS. I'm not bull shitting you, even the shift key is used as a context menu modifier, often removing the (...) from a command and replacing it with a sensible default.
EX: "Add Bookmark..." becomes "Add Bookmark to Menu" in Safari.
"Force Quit..." becomes "Force Quit [FocusedApplicationName]" in the Apple menu.
It seems to be similar to the option key, but that often alters commands that didn't have (...)'s in the name.
Note how the text visibly changes in menus when a modifier is pressed, and the full accelerator+modifier sequence can be typed to avoid the menu altogether. This is why the Mac UI doesn't really need right click context menus. It already had uber context menus with more consistency and standardization than Windows's right-click context menus. Macs CAN make use of multiple mouse buttons however (games, complex apps, etc) and they are provided..
Gnome might be technically capable of using as many accelerator keys, but they are not represented in the UI well.. at all.. and few things outside the window manager will use them.