Some of you think TNG was the best thing since sex. TNG was seriously flawed in the first year or two because Roddenberry, bless his heart, was recycling all his old TOS and '70's Planet Earth/Genesis II scripts. To us older folks who grew up with TOS (and it was a BIG deal to see it in COLOR!!), the first couple of years of TNG was alot of repeats.
Give this one a chance. One thing Trekkies (and Slashdotters alike) due is kill the baby before it's even born. Put down your coding pencil...er...mouse and take a Prozac and chill.
John, you're totally wrong. The EV6 bus and HyperTransport are NOT the same thing.
Read the specs.
OS X and Linux are looking better and better
on
Dan Gillmor on WinXP
·
· Score: 1
This whole issue should be fast-tracked thru the Justice Dept. Once the genie (XP) is let out of the bottle, it'll be alot harder. Microsoft is in a monopoly position and that needs to be corrected. To BillG and SteveB, you have only innovated in marketing. Technically, you have not.
If a friend who was not computer savvy asked what he/she should get, I'd point them at Apple and OS X. If they are savvy, Linux.
Oh please... Not every has the opportunity to get/complete a formal education. We have two sysadmins here who run rings around most others and they don't have formal degrees. I myself was a "system manager" on VMS systems in the 80's and 90's and worked in the VMS developement group and I don't have a formal degree.
When I interviewed people I looked for real world experience and attitude instead of what was on some piece of paper.
Did you happen to notice just how much anti-aircraft was being shot into the air over Iraq?
FWIW, I'm not sure if a F-117 was shot down over Iraq. However, there WAS an F-117 shot down over Bosnia. That was alledgedly due to a leak of the operation schedule of the aircraft. Anyone who knows when and where an aircraft is due to fly over can take it out visually or via heat seeking missile (or both).
Stealth is not just coatings and aircraft design. Stealth is also not letting your opponent know when and where you are going to be at a particular time.
The UP1000 would technically accept a Slot-A Athlon in the Slot-B slot. (Slot-B being a
superset of Slot-A) Why you'd want to do that when you can get a Slot-A motherboard cheaper is beyond me.
The UP2000 has Slot-B slots but the chipset, the Tsunami, doesn't support Athlons.
I bought my VAX 400-100 for $75 when I left DEC..er..Compaq in 1998. It has served me for MANY years. In DEC, it was known as AXEL.
The reason they charged me $75 was for the VT320. The VAX I could take for free, but some VP's secretary took a look at the VT and said "You're buying a monitor!". After trying to convince her I couldn't hook it up to a PC and run Powerpoint on it, I relented and paid the $75.
My VAX runs VMS 6.2. One of these days, when the price of electricty comes down, I'll put it back up on the net. Till then, it and its 500MB (why do you need more?) disks will sit in the closet.
Red Hat and others look at sales of box sets as a metric for how well a platform distribution is doing. I suspect that many of the folks just download the ISO from a mirror. The distributions look and see that the box sets aren't selling. They then ask "Why should we do anything further on the
? It's only sold xxxx boxes!"
Folks, if you are at a big site and use a particular distro on a particular platform, even if you download the ISO, spend the $79 or so and order the box. Even if you never open it, the distro will know it's important to you!
Disclaimer: The platform I use is Alpha. I work at API NetWorks.
But part of the *marketing* of Itanium was that it would run 32-bit code on-chip. This *marketing* is what led so many people to think they could migrate to IA64 easily. "Oh, I can still run my x86 apps until they get ported!"
From what I've seen of these (probably dubious) benchmarks is that performance of the on-chip emulator is LESS than the performance of FX!32 on Alpha NT systems. For those who don't know, FX!32 was a Win32 x86 *translator* (Not emulator) that ran on Alpha NT systems. It would allow you to run an x86 Win32 image on an Alpha Win32 system. It translated the x86 Win32 code to Alpha Win32. Subsequent re-runs of the code would run the translated code. The translated code would be optimized in the background. (Does this sound familiar to a method another chip manufacturer is using?)
So, the point is, if the on-chip x86 emulation sucks, then what's the incentive for someone to move to IA-64 with immature compilers and dubious performance, when they could just as easily move to another MATURE 64bit architecture like PPC, Sparc, or Alpha? Or wait for x86-64 from AMD?
Sigh.. Did nobody click on the banner ads we ran on Slashdot and Freshmeat for about 6 months? (Obviously not!)
You can get an EV67-based Alpha system, complete, for under $3k. Go to www.api-networks.com and check out the UP1100. Then visit our reseller page and get in touch with a reseller who'll sell you a system. Want to build it yourself? Go to the All American distributor page and order up the UP1100 motherboard/CPU combo and pull your old x86 motherboard out and drop in an Alpha. The UP1100 is an ATX board and uses PC100 ECC memory.
Compaq isn't the ONLY supplier of Alpha's.
Oh, and FWIW, we sent the Slackware folks a UP2000 to do development of Slack for Alpha on a while back.
Wrong. Alpha Linux works fine with Myrinet. What you get with Tru64 however is a more optimized OS for the Alpha platform. Side by side comparisons of the same platform, one running Tru64 and one running Linux, shows that Tru64 is about 2-10% faster, depending on what you are doing.
I have no doubt that over time, that gap will close significantly when things like page coloring and other performance optimizations are built into the Linux kernel.
One thing Linux has over Tru64 is that there's alot more drivers for alot more peripherals. Myrinet, Dolphin, 1000Mb ethernet, etc, all work just fine on Alpha Linux. All are used, depending on the application, by folks in the HPC (high performance computing) world.
I gave my stepdad a WebTV. He LOVED it also. When he went back to Ireland, I gave him a laptop with Windows so he'd have something to read email with. It's collecting dust because "it's not as easy as WebTV"
There's a market out there for the over-55 crowd. Our Moms and Dads need something SIMPLE that always works, is limited in functionality, and lets them print pretty pictures of the kids.
A Linux distribution that addressed this need would go a long way. All it has to do is work and have a REALLY simple interface. (no, X et al is too complicated. Clone Webtv an you've got a winner!)
Besides, if you really want to pick nits, the "VAXmate" came out LONG before an iMac did.
Go to Google and search for VAXmate. You'll see
Again, DEC had it in 1986.
Re:I hope that Linux becomes more popular...
on
LinuxPPC 2000 Update
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· Score: 3
Why doesn't cheaper non-x86 stuff exist?
One word: Volume
I work at API NetWorks. We have an ATX sized Alpha motherboard with USB, sound, ethernet, PCI, etc... A -complete- system is about $3000 or under from our resellers. (We don't sell direct, tho you can buy the board/CPU alone thru a distributor of ours)
Back to the volume answer. Without volume, you don't get price. Everyone would "love" an Alpha but in the real world, the people that buy it are the people that need it. (scientific/high performance computing) There's NOT a large influx of Slashdot readers knocking our doors down looking for an alternative. Why? #1 issue: Cost. My first 486 cost $4000. Most Slashdot readers will be damned if they pay more than $1000 for a PC. Tell me, how is Alpha, or any other "non-x86" CPU supposed to compete at those price levels?? I'd really like to know! CmdrTaco likes to "avoid stories about the businessy side of the whole Open Source thing" but quite frankly, it's the "businessy" (sic) thing that pays MY paycheck.
>The next slashdotter who compares anything Red
>Hat does to Microsoft will be punished. The
>punishment will be to find the nearest
>blackboard and write "freedom & personal
>responsibility good, serfdom & tyrannical
>control bad" seven hundred times.
I'm looking forward to seeing this being written by Bart Simpson during the opening credits sometime this season.:)
EV6 CPU's are at.35um
EV67 CPU's are at.25um
EV68 CPU's are at.18um
The UP1100 and UP2000 systems from API are EV67's.
We have been running EV67's for some time now.
The UP1100 board/CPU combo runs quite nicely on a 300w power supply. The combo pulls around 90w.
>forcefully take the SPECint crown away from
>Alpha, and depending on Intel's progress in
>optimizing their compilers for SSE2, might even
>take the SPECfp crown as well.
Look at your history. Any time in the past 8 years that x86 has come close to Alpha, something happens where Alpha again leapfrogs in speed. That's not about to change. Not to mention that thru history, Alpha's available today are always compare with vaporware of tomorrow.
I'd like to see a P4 using LESS power, as small a power supply, and in the form factors that Alpha can get in today. Not to mention price. It'll be interesting to see all the same people who bitch about Alpha not having this or or that or being too expensive when they see P4 systems at $4000 using non-standard power supplies and cases.
Slashdot Mirror
I was waiting for her to say "Hey! THAT'S not the medical gel!"
None of you have even seen the show.
Some of you think TNG was the best thing since sex. TNG was seriously flawed in the first year or two because Roddenberry, bless his heart, was recycling all his old TOS and '70's Planet Earth/Genesis II scripts. To us older folks who grew up with TOS (and it was a BIG deal to see it in COLOR!!), the first couple of years of TNG was alot of repeats.
Give this one a chance. One thing Trekkies (and Slashdotters alike) due is kill the baby before it's even born. Put down your coding pencil...er...mouse and take a Prozac and chill.
Better yet, buy a boxed copy of Red Hat and donate it to your local high school computer science teacher.
John, you're totally wrong. The EV6 bus and HyperTransport are NOT the same thing.
Read the specs.
This whole issue should be fast-tracked thru the Justice Dept. Once the genie (XP) is let out of the bottle, it'll be alot harder. Microsoft is in a monopoly position and that needs to be corrected. To BillG and SteveB, you have only innovated in marketing. Technically, you have not.
If a friend who was not computer savvy asked what he/she should get, I'd point them at Apple and OS X. If they are savvy, Linux.
Oh please... Not every has the opportunity to get/complete a formal education. We have two sysadmins here who run rings around most others and they don't have formal degrees. I myself was a "system manager" on VMS systems in the 80's and 90's and worked in the VMS developement group and I don't have a formal degree.
When I interviewed people I looked for real world experience and attitude instead of what was on some piece of paper.
I wish I was moderating today. That one cracked me up.
No matter how much horsepower you throw at it, voice recognition still sucks.
...at a Linuxworld, only without the beanbag chairs. Just a bunch of geeks hanging out in front of computers.
(FWIW, I think what they are doing is decent science)
Did you happen to notice just how much anti-aircraft was being shot into the air over Iraq?
FWIW, I'm not sure if a F-117 was shot down over Iraq. However, there WAS an F-117 shot down over Bosnia. That was alledgedly due to a leak of the operation schedule of the aircraft. Anyone who knows when and where an aircraft is due to fly over can take it out visually or via heat seeking missile (or both).
Stealth is not just coatings and aircraft design. Stealth is also not letting your opponent know when and where you are going to be at a particular time.
Yea, right...
The UP1000 would technically accept a Slot-A Athlon in the Slot-B slot. (Slot-B being a
superset of Slot-A) Why you'd want to do that when you can get a Slot-A motherboard cheaper is beyond me.
The UP2000 has Slot-B slots but the chipset, the Tsunami, doesn't support Athlons.
There's no such board as a UP1200.
FWIW, I work at API.
Define "afford"?
I bought my VAX 400-100 for $75 when I left DEC..er..Compaq in 1998. It has served me for MANY years. In DEC, it was known as AXEL.
The reason they charged me $75 was for the VT320. The VAX I could take for free, but some VP's secretary took a look at the VT and said "You're buying a monitor!". After trying to convince her I couldn't hook it up to a PC and run Powerpoint on it, I relented and paid the $75.
My VAX runs VMS 6.2. One of these days, when the price of electricty comes down, I'll put it back up on the net. Till then, it and its 500MB (why do you need more?) disks will sit in the closet.
AXEL::FOLEY
Don't even get me started on how much they swiped from DEC.
Microsoft only innovated marketing.
Hear hear!
Red Hat and others look at sales of box sets as a metric for how well a platform distribution is doing. I suspect that many of the folks just download the ISO from a mirror. The distributions look and see that the box sets aren't selling. They then ask "Why should we do anything further on the
? It's only sold xxxx boxes!"
Folks, if you are at a big site and use a particular distro on a particular platform, even if you download the ISO, spend the $79 or so and order the box. Even if you never open it, the distro will know it's important to you!
Disclaimer: The platform I use is Alpha. I work at API NetWorks.
But part of the *marketing* of Itanium was that it would run 32-bit code on-chip. This *marketing* is what led so many people to think they could migrate to IA64 easily. "Oh, I can still run my x86 apps until they get ported!"
From what I've seen of these (probably dubious) benchmarks is that performance of the on-chip emulator is LESS than the performance of FX!32 on Alpha NT systems. For those who don't know, FX!32 was a Win32 x86 *translator* (Not emulator) that ran on Alpha NT systems. It would allow you to run an x86 Win32 image on an Alpha Win32 system. It translated the x86 Win32 code to Alpha Win32. Subsequent re-runs of the code would run the translated code. The translated code would be optimized in the background. (Does this sound familiar to a method another chip manufacturer is using?)
So, the point is, if the on-chip x86 emulation sucks, then what's the incentive for someone to move to IA-64 with immature compilers and dubious performance, when they could just as easily move to another MATURE 64bit architecture like PPC, Sparc, or Alpha? Or wait for x86-64 from AMD?
(Disclamer: I work for API)
Sigh.. Did nobody click on the banner ads we ran on Slashdot and Freshmeat for about 6 months? (Obviously not!)
You can get an EV67-based Alpha system, complete, for under $3k. Go to www.api-networks.com and check out the UP1100. Then visit our reseller page and get in touch with a reseller who'll sell you a system. Want to build it yourself? Go to the All American distributor page and order up the UP1100 motherboard/CPU combo and pull your old x86 motherboard out and drop in an Alpha. The UP1100 is an ATX board and uses PC100 ECC memory.
Compaq isn't the ONLY supplier of Alpha's.
Oh, and FWIW, we sent the Slackware folks a UP2000 to do development of Slack for Alpha on a while back.
Wrong. Alpha Linux works fine with Myrinet. What you get with Tru64 however is a more optimized OS for the Alpha platform. Side by side comparisons of the same platform, one running Tru64 and one running Linux, shows that Tru64 is about 2-10% faster, depending on what you are doing.
I have no doubt that over time, that gap will close significantly when things like page coloring and other performance optimizations are built into the Linux kernel.
One thing Linux has over Tru64 is that there's alot more drivers for alot more peripherals. Myrinet, Dolphin, 1000Mb ethernet, etc, all work just fine on Alpha Linux. All are used, depending on the application, by folks in the HPC (high performance computing) world.
Some of the real brains are probably still working at the DEC...er..Compaq research labs!
I gave my stepdad a WebTV. He LOVED it also. When he went back to Ireland, I gave him a laptop with Windows so he'd have something to read email with. It's collecting dust because "it's not as easy as WebTV"
There's a market out there for the over-55 crowd. Our Moms and Dads need something SIMPLE that always works, is limited in functionality, and lets them print pretty pictures of the kids.
A Linux distribution that addressed this need would go a long way. All it has to do is work and have a REALLY simple interface. (no, X et al is too complicated. Clone Webtv an you've got a winner!)
(Semi-off-topic...)
Besides, if you really want to pick nits, the "VAXmate" came out LONG before an iMac did.
Go to Google and search for VAXmate. You'll see
Again, DEC had it in 1986.
Why doesn't cheaper non-x86 stuff exist?
One word: Volume
I work at API NetWorks. We have an ATX sized Alpha motherboard with USB, sound, ethernet, PCI, etc... A -complete- system is about $3000 or under from our resellers. (We don't sell direct, tho you can buy the board/CPU alone thru a distributor of ours)
Back to the volume answer. Without volume, you don't get price. Everyone would "love" an Alpha but in the real world, the people that buy it are the people that need it. (scientific/high performance computing) There's NOT a large influx of Slashdot readers knocking our doors down looking for an alternative. Why? #1 issue: Cost. My first 486 cost $4000. Most Slashdot readers will be damned if they pay more than $1000 for a PC. Tell me, how is Alpha, or any other "non-x86" CPU supposed to compete at those price levels?? I'd really like to know! CmdrTaco likes to "avoid stories about the businessy side of the whole Open Source thing" but quite frankly, it's the "businessy" (sic) thing that pays MY paycheck.
I suspect there are numerous PDP-11's and VAXes out there, still running after 20+ years.
>The next slashdotter who compares anything Red
:)
>Hat does to Microsoft will be punished. The
>punishment will be to find the nearest
>blackboard and write "freedom & personal
>responsibility good, serfdom & tyrannical
>control bad" seven hundred times.
I'm looking forward to seeing this being written by Bart Simpson during the opening credits sometime this season.
EV6 CPU's are at .35um
.25um
.18um
EV67 CPU's are at
EV68 CPU's are at
The UP1100 and UP2000 systems from API are EV67's.
We have been running EV67's for some time now.
The UP1100 board/CPU combo runs quite nicely on a 300w power supply. The combo pulls around 90w.
EV68 based systems will be out in Q1 of 2001.
FWIW, I work at API.
>forcefully take the SPECint crown away from
>Alpha, and depending on Intel's progress in
>optimizing their compilers for SSE2, might even
>take the SPECfp crown as well.
Look at your history. Any time in the past 8 years that x86 has come close to Alpha, something happens where Alpha again leapfrogs in speed. That's not about to change. Not to mention that thru history, Alpha's available today are always compare with vaporware of tomorrow.
I'd like to see a P4 using LESS power, as small a power supply, and in the form factors that Alpha can get in today. Not to mention price. It'll be interesting to see all the same people who bitch about Alpha not having this or or that or being too expensive when they see P4 systems at $4000 using non-standard power supplies and cases.
The FUD is so thick, you can cut it with a knife.