Vision and execution are two separate things. The idea for the merger has been speculated as being the Compaq CEO's idea (look what he did for Worldcom). So giving her full credit for this one decision may not be completely right. She did a great job selling it to Wall Street and Retirement fund managers. But just because she made one right call, there were 100s of others she missed.
What really did her in was how she ran things afterwards that was the issue. She set unrealistic goals (saying we were going to grow by 15% when the industry was declining). She said something to the effect if we didn't have the bar set high enough, we never would try to beat it. Her over promising the world to the market setup us up for failure, especially considering if would make it impossible to get a company bonus requirements. As a matter of fact, she would never tell us how we were evaluated so we could try to hit them. This was one of many things she did that effected moral in the rank and file. She would change the company's focus several times just when we were gaining steam. This inconsistent direction alienated us even more, to the point where feedback showed we had little faith in upper management.
So even though she was a great speaker, it takes more than a few good ideas to make a decent CEO. I would give Hurd the credit for increasing the stock price and Dell dropping the ball for the last 3 or 4 plays over Carly's few decision that remain today. Now if he would stop reducing our benefits in the name of "Matching the industry average", I would be happier.
btw, I would say there are still some excellent engineers left at HP, and they are helping train the next set of them. The group I'm in is still open working together, mentoring, and trying to keep moral up under our current contraints. We may not have the HP way, but looking at the way the industry is, very few companies that are over 30 yrs old have their original cultures left... But it would be nice it if came back again.
I'm honestly not trying to be a troll, but if something could survive reentry into the atmosphere, by an advanced civilization should be designed not to be taken out by lighting strike. Something tells me if they could travel all the way to earth from where ever they came from, their equipment is strong enough to handle some lighting.
I'm amazed at how everyone wants blow up sats. Its not in anyones interest to leave all that space debris around for other satellites and spacecraft to be hit with. It seems like it would be better to launch multiple satellites that latched onto the target and pushed it into the atmosphere. The victim satellite burns up on reentry and there isn't all that crap floating around to poke holes with.
Now, personally, I think the death tax is the most fair tax possible. You can't take it with you anyways, and your heirs didn't earn it.
Heirs sometimes do help earn the wealth. If you look at many small businesses, the children on those owners usually work for them from when their 6 yrs old until when they head off to college (and sometimes after they come back). This usually results in a shorter childhoold. Its seems a little unfair to say they didn't help earn it. The government already taxed that amount of money long ago, it should not be entitled them second helpings.
Well, maybe to answer your question: If you have a heavy cart to need to be moved do you?:
A) Use a hurd of chickens to pull it (Sun T1)
B) Use a couple of oxen (Itanium)
I'm thinking B, but those chicken are 'eco friendly' so maybe some greenpeace people will help pull the cart with them.
Well, not in a small processor system, but once you start building larger and larger systems, Itanium (or Power5+) have the extra 'features' for error handling and reporting that an x86 don't have. Xeon and Opteron have the error handling of a fleet of 1950's cars. Sure they have alot of horsepower, but when they break down it stops running. You might have to drive the car a couple of more times to determine whether the car needs to be replaced. In a large computer system, this increases the down up time of a system. Itanium is like a BMW X3. Sure its a gas hog, and maybe a little less horsepower, but when it breaks down, you have tons of status lights to tell you what's wrong, and which processor is broken and whether the part is still good (a cache single bit correctable error) or needs to be replaced (mbe error on the fsb.) In large system, you can determine the source of the problem, whether it was an ignorable or replacible the processor error or a chipset problem.
If any of you have ever put together a computer that has a bad part, its sometimes really hard to figure out what caused the problem. Systems that Itaniums usually go in have the error detection and error logging to exactly pinpoint where problems lie. This is the reason oracle DBs use these type of processors. It doesn't make sense for the common user to use Itanium, but companies like Amazon and Visa want these systems more for the reliability features than the speed.
As has been already mentioned, IBM is the company fabricating the chips for Xbox360. Its also doing the same for ps3 and revolution. What usually happens with a fab like IBM, they share the same manufacturing lines between their products and their clients (ie MS,Nintendo and Sony.) Hopefully they are not all being manufactured at the fishkill plant....
I'd be surprised if they release the codebase for the entire chip. There is alot of industry secrets that go into processors that are not patented. By giving this away, they'd give IBM and HP the abilitity to analyze the performance of the chip with a fine tooth comb. It only provide more FUD for HP and IBM to throw at them.
The interface portions of the chip to be probably be opened up. Mainly to allow other companies to design chipsets for their new system.
I would like to see where they go with this. Software is a great thing to opensource because changes can be make with little effort and it is very cheap to verify your changes worked. Chip design on the other hand is extremely expensive, with slow turn around times and difficulting in debugging. Not only do you have to worry about the code, but how to design it properly for the process that is being used to fabricate it. Opensource is all about turnaround time, and chip design currently can not support that. Now if someone could create a extremely high density reprogrammable chip (500M gates) then all bets are off.
However, this will be a great learning experience to see any code they provide. It will give student and people in developing nations a chance to learn what goes into a 'high' performance chip design.
While most of you probably know this, you have to do one thing before compiling the code. The '.md' files in the lcc/src need to be converted to unix end of line characters, otherwise one of the lcc compiler programs will barf. To fix this, jump into the lcc/src directory and run this little perl function on all the files in that directory.
cd lcc/src
tcsh
foreach i (*)
perl -p -e 's/\r/\n/g' $i.unix
mv $i.unix $i
end
and btw, if there is a nice unix utility that already does this, let me know.
My money says that the 'highest' clocked part of the chip is over 4GHz, but different part of the chip actually run slower. Lots of chip now a-days (including the P4 with its double pumped alu) run at different frequencies inside the chip. I bet the powerpc core runs around 2.5GHz while the SPEs (or whatever the vector cores are called) run at 4.6GHz. If I was an IBM architect and wanted to make everyone's life easier, I'd take the power5 core, strip out a couple of things and not mess with the timing buckets instead the chip too much. Lots of reuse without redesigning everything.
Its like saying someone claiming a corolla engine runs at 10krpms, but in reality its on the smallest gear spinning at that rate.
Stringing vast arrays of processors together to build supercomputers tells you almost nothing about >the performance of the individual processors.
IA-64 just doesn't give much bang for the buck (or transistor). If you strap a jet engine to a pig, sure it'll fly.
Actually, the companies that create "stringing vast arrays of processors together" machines tend to only waste their time on high powered processors. Itanium processors were designed to kill risc based systems (like Power4/5, ultra sparc...), which used to cost $5k to $32k per risc processor. Itanium processor are very inexpensive processors compared to them. Maybe you should actually look at spec numbers, tpcc and scientific benchmarks before making a judgement. x86 do really well at int based benchmarks, but are enemic on floating point. As a matter of fact, if there was a market for games on itanium2, you'd see them really take advantage of the floating point (as compared to x86 based processors.)
If you do a comparison on price/transistor, you're only seeing a $7.8/mill transistor for p4 vs $9.1/M transistor for Madison 4M based processors. While that's more than 20%, the performance difference favors itanium2.
btw, I find some of your comments about performance and transistor effiency amusing considering you spent a huge amount of time working on java.;)
I work with debian in a production environment, and I must say, install/upgrade can be a dangerous thing. If your workstation/server hasn't been updated in a while, and you want to install something on your machine, you may have a large number of packages that need to be updated. This inturn means the config files may be effected also. I've seen it where apt-get overwrote a custom modified config file, resulting in support issues until the problem was identified. Debian is great for home, but depending on it to keep the money coming in is a different question.
I've played in competitive rtcw (including getting creamed in the first rtcw tourney at quakecon) and I've spec'd a few really great players in my day. Its a combination of practice, understanding and properly executing strategies, amazing eye-mouse coordination. Some of the best can spin around and know exactly when to stop to fire at someone's head, whereas other people see a blur. Reaction time does help in some situations, but thinking and executing a strat in many modern games is just as important. The great teams usually practice and scrim every night. They can spent 2 to 3 hrs a night scriming different teams to try new strats and prepare for upcoming matches. You have to have a lot of time to be in the top tier of players.
The greats (especially in fps) know how to configure the client to better enable them to play. There is a real art in modifying a quake3/rtcw/rtcw-et/... config files to provide the most fov, lighting conditions and tweaking of their mouse settings. There are some settings that are outlawed, where as others are accepted in the community. Many of the competitive gaming leagues have published configs for the servers.
Finally, the type of computer isn't that important (as long as its above the minimum requirements). The ping does, however, and many teams fight about which server they use to play their matches, hoping to give them an advantage in the game. There is definitely homefield advantage when your team has the best ping.
btw, who ever posted that replay was cutting and pasting Linus' response to EFI. No wonder it was an anonymous post. To see where the plagirism came from, check out..
http://www.kerneltraffic.org/kernel-traffic/kt2003 0910_231.html#7
I'll hold off cutting and pasting Intel's response to Linus' statement.
Re:EFI is actually OS independent and quite useful
on
More Power To The Firmware
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
And that back-end is going to be buggy if it's for some random bytecode that isn't widely used except for some silly EFI thing and is tested exclusively with just a few versions of Windows and _maybe_ occasionally on Linux.
bytecode has one significant advantage, it allows pci cards that store option roms the ability to run on multiple architectures. There are quite a few Mac people that aren't too happy they have to wait for the latest geforce card to be released on their machine, cuz the option ROM only has x86 code stored in it. Being able to plug the same grafix/io card into multiple machines with different arch (x86, PARisc, IA64, Sparc, power4, m6800....) without reburning the option rom can enable hardware developers the ability to sell their cards to as many people as possible. Granted arch-specific drivers will be needed per OS, but at least you don't have to buy a special version of the card to use it.
* Source code. LinuxBIOS works today, and is a lot more flexible than EFI will _ever_ be.
Not to be a troll, but just cuz you can say it doesn't mean its true. Only history will be able to say that. Many of your comments are valid, but a balance needs to be made by supporting legacy vs. enabling hw and sw makers the freedom to innovate. I agree its annoying trying to get something to work when you didn't have any involvement in the design, but creating a hardware interface that meets everyone's needs (usb, grafix, lan, fibrechannel) might be worse than dealing with the problem. Hell, I'd love it if ieee standard came out that required everyone to either be little endian or big endian, but the hw world can't even decide on that. Can you expect them to come up with a standard interface for accessing devices.
I've been using EFI (on Itanium) for quite some time, and have had zero issues with it. I really like the fact there are DCHP modules that allow networking to be started without the OS running. They have ftp servers, disk drivers and you can boot your machine from a remote image using bootp services. If your OS is dead on your disk, you can restart to efi and download a previous image on to your harddisk (or remote boot/install). Heck, you can run your code without even booting the OS. Imagine dedicated distributed.net clients that run straight from EFI without the overhead of an OS.
While I understand people have concerns that Microsoft is using this as a DRM delivery mechanism, there is nothing that is stopping Microsoft from working with Phoniex to add DRM to today's bios's. EFI (and non-legacy bios environments like openBios) make it easier for non-windows OSes to run on new Hardware. This isn't in microsoft's best interests. Microsoft wants a bios that only runs signed code (like their XBOX), so that you have to ask them nicely for a key to your equipment.
The topic seems a little alarmist concerning patenting #TODOs in source code. After reading the article, it doesn't seem that outrageous of a patent. Putting code/greps in to find TODO's and saving them off is trivia. Going the extra mile and cataloging them, managing them and "removing after the task has been completed" is complex and a little ingenious. While I appreciate the article, who ever posted this to slashdot should have summarized it without all this chicken little tactics.
I think the change in interface is more related to the lack of content they provide with the new OS's. If you look at feature difference (ignoring the interface) between XP Pro vs Win2k, you would find that you're paying for Remote Desktop Connection services (which is handy), some minimal movie edit software and new 3d screensavers. oh, and the driver fallback stuff. While Remote desktop stuff is nice, its not worth the $200 to upgrade. So to entice people to pay XP, they had to update the look, or people wouldn't think it was worth their money.
People do this all the time... If the content they are trying to say can't stand on its own, they try to wrap it in a pretty package, and some people are fooled by that....
Because of its abysmal performance, Intel has abandoned this approach and now uses a Celeron coprocessor to handle x86 software execution.
I think you're mistaken. Itanium and Itanium2 have dedicated logic to run x86 code. They don't emulate x86 code, they actually run it. The logic is not pentium nor celeron based. The amount of engineering time to add a celeron coprocessor to a processor the size of an Itanium, or to modify a chipset to include a celeron, would be not be costeffective, nor be a sound engineering decision.
btw, everything else in your comment is well thoughtout.
You have a very valid question, but you're statement,
"At that point, why should one spend $8-10k for that hardware from the likes of HP, Compaq, Dell and others when one can build it for $2k (or even less)?"
Is missing something. HP, Compaq and Dell provide more than the hardware. They provide services that go along with the HW. They use the hardware to suck you into to using their services. While small companies can build these systems on their own for cheaper, the larger companies are the ones that need to outsource some things that HP, Compaq and Dell's services provide.
Also its kind of silly to think that these IA-64 systems will be able to be built for $2k each (given the cost of similiarly performance) Sparc's and IBMs. Intel is hoping for their backwards compatibility and clout to push ISVs into programming for their systems. Once they have those vendors in their camps, the chip and server prices will go up again.
And finally, most people that would need a 64bit solution will probably need multiproc systems. OEM's will be able to provide the small systems, but once you go past the 4-8 way space, there really isn't a cheep way of scaling up any higher (, and btw, clustering is really only a solution for tasks that don't involve large sharing of data between processors that is time sensitive.) Which is where HP, Compaq, Fujitsu, NEC, and IBM will be with their high-end systems. I doubt I will ever see Dell release a system with more than 8 IA-64 processors.
Of course only time will tell what will happen next.
OH, one last thing. The guy who posted should be informed that HP did not sell any processor guys, they sold some chipset guys to Intel. I'm surprised that someone that is in a processor research group would not know this.
Checkout:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=22319&threshol d=0&commentsort=3&tid=118&mode=thread&cid=0
Just out of curiousity, what do you mean "HP's feet-dragging commitment to hteir own platform"? Do you mean moving from PA_RISC to IA64 or features they were applying to their servers.
Dark Days are approaching
on
HP Buys Compaq
·
· Score: 5, Informative
While I am sure many of you have only thought about the "technological" ramifications this brings, let me shead some light on what it means to work at one of these companies.
After last weeks layoffs, this is really bad news to HP. While I think Compaq does an execellent job with their engineering, their view on treating workers as "resources" may affect "The HP Way." HP "was" known for their treatment of employees, their ability to hedge back times, and for promoting team work instead of individualism. With Compaq being brought in, I think HP's directors and managers could become tainted by Compaq's tendency to layoff workers when profits look bad.
HP and compaq have very different mindsets, and this merge(/buyout) only means that this new company will be a compromise of the two. HP used to do everything within its power to keep a "work force reduction" from happening. I was throughly conviced that last weeks layoffs were an adjustment due to changing times, but now bringing compaq in cements the fact that layoffs (or work force reductions as their PR department likes to put it) will become a cyclical thing. Also these different mindset will cause bad decisions to only explode. If they plan on succedding, they will need to adopt a single culture (and not a hybrid of the two.) Otherwise only bickering and redtape will result.
Another reason this is a bad idea is the effect it will have on its effect of swiftness. There is burecarcy (sp) all over both. The new company will even be slower. This is not the time to slow down a tech company. I can see how easly its going to be in the future when it comes to implementing new solutions/products
And yes there is overhead. Major overhead. Carlies biggest reason for buying compaq would be to add to HP's services group. (Which happened to be the reason why Compaq bought Digital. Honestly, it wasn't for their UNIX business or alpha processors.) There will be several labs in both HP and compaq that will start to sweat over how will stay and how will be re-orged. The next few monthes are not going to be a good time for HP and/or Compaq.
I'm hoping things work out. Otherwise Carly could be HP's Rick Bullizo.
Slashdot Mirror
Vision and execution are two separate things. The idea for the merger has been speculated as being the Compaq CEO's idea (look what he did for Worldcom). So giving her full credit for this one decision may not be completely right. She did a great job selling it to Wall Street and Retirement fund managers. But just because she made one right call, there were 100s of others she missed.
What really did her in was how she ran things afterwards that was the issue. She set unrealistic goals (saying we were going to grow by 15% when the industry was declining). She said something to the effect if we didn't have the bar set high enough, we never would try to beat it. Her over promising the world to the market setup us up for failure, especially considering if would make it impossible to get a company bonus requirements. As a matter of fact, she would never tell us how we were evaluated so we could try to hit them. This was one of many things she did that effected moral in the rank and file. She would change the company's focus several times just when we were gaining steam. This inconsistent direction alienated us even more, to the point where feedback showed we had little faith in upper management.
So even though she was a great speaker, it takes more than a few good ideas to make a decent CEO. I would give Hurd the credit for increasing the stock price and Dell dropping the ball for the last 3 or 4 plays over Carly's few decision that remain today. Now if he would stop reducing our benefits in the name of "Matching the industry average", I would be happier.
btw, I would say there are still some excellent engineers left at HP, and they are helping train the next set of them. The group I'm in is still open working together, mentoring, and trying to keep moral up under our current contraints. We may not have the HP way, but looking at the way the industry is, very few companies that are over 30 yrs old have their original cultures left... But it would be nice it if came back again.
I'm honestly not trying to be a troll, but if something could survive reentry into the atmosphere, by an advanced civilization should be designed not to be taken out by lighting strike. Something tells me if they could travel all the way to earth from where ever they came from, their equipment is strong enough to handle some lighting.
I'm amazed at how everyone wants blow up sats. Its not in anyones interest to leave all that space debris around for other satellites and spacecraft to be hit with. It seems like it would be better to launch multiple satellites that latched onto the target and pushed it into the atmosphere. The victim satellite burns up on reentry and there isn't all that crap floating around to poke holes with.
Well, maybe to answer your question: If you have a heavy cart to need to be moved do you?: A) Use a hurd of chickens to pull it (Sun T1) B) Use a couple of oxen (Itanium) I'm thinking B, but those chicken are 'eco friendly' so maybe some greenpeace people will help pull the cart with them.
Well, not in a small processor system, but once you start building larger and larger systems, Itanium (or Power5+) have the extra 'features' for error handling and reporting that an x86 don't have. Xeon and Opteron have the error handling of a fleet of 1950's cars. Sure they have alot of horsepower, but when they break down it stops running. You might have to drive the car a couple of more times to determine whether the car needs to be replaced. In a large computer system, this increases the down up time of a system. Itanium is like a BMW X3. Sure its a gas hog, and maybe a little less horsepower, but when it breaks down, you have tons of status lights to tell you what's wrong, and which processor is broken and whether the part is still good (a cache single bit correctable error) or needs to be replaced (mbe error on the fsb.) In large system, you can determine the source of the problem, whether it was an ignorable or replacible the processor error or a chipset problem.
If any of you have ever put together a computer that has a bad part, its sometimes really hard to figure out what caused the problem. Systems that Itaniums usually go in have the error detection and error logging to exactly pinpoint where problems lie. This is the reason oracle DBs use these type of processors. It doesn't make sense for the common user to use Itanium, but companies like Amazon and Visa want these systems more for the reliability features than the speed.
As has been already mentioned, IBM is the company fabricating the chips for Xbox360. Its also doing the same for ps3 and revolution. What usually happens with a fab like IBM, they share the same manufacturing lines between their products and their clients (ie MS,Nintendo and Sony.) Hopefully they are not all being manufactured at the fishkill plant....
I'd be surprised if they release the codebase for the entire chip. There is alot of industry secrets that go into processors that are not patented. By giving this away, they'd give IBM and HP the abilitity to analyze the performance of the chip with a fine tooth comb. It only provide more FUD for HP and IBM to throw at them.
The interface portions of the chip to be probably be opened up. Mainly to allow other companies to design chipsets for their new system.
I would like to see where they go with this. Software is a great thing to opensource because changes can be make with little effort and it is very cheap to verify your changes worked. Chip design on the other hand is extremely expensive, with slow turn around times and difficulting in debugging. Not only do you have to worry about the code, but how to design it properly for the process that is being used to fabricate it. Opensource is all about turnaround time, and chip design currently can not support that. Now if someone could create a extremely high density reprogrammable chip (500M gates) then all bets are off.
However, this will be a great learning experience to see any code they provide. It will give student and people in developing nations a chance to learn what goes into a 'high' performance chip design.
Check out this opinion piece about the manufacturing costs of Blu-ray vs HD-DVD. It definitely makes more sense to create HD-DVDs than Blu-ray discs. http://arstechnica.com/articles/paedia/hardware/ne xt-gen-dvd.ars
My money says that the 'highest' clocked part of the chip is over 4GHz, but different part of the chip actually run slower. Lots of chip now a-days (including the P4 with its double pumped alu) run at different frequencies inside the chip. I bet the powerpc core runs around 2.5GHz while the SPEs (or whatever the vector cores are called) run at 4.6GHz. If I was an IBM architect and wanted to make everyone's life easier, I'd take the power5 core, strip out a couple of things and not mess with the timing buckets instead the chip too much. Lots of reuse without redesigning everything.
Its like saying someone claiming a corolla engine runs at 10krpms, but in reality its on the smallest gear spinning at that rate.
Actually, the companies that create "stringing vast arrays of processors together" machines tend to only waste their time on high powered processors. Itanium processors were designed to kill risc based systems (like Power4/5, ultra sparc...), which used to cost $5k to $32k per risc processor. Itanium processor are very inexpensive processors compared to them. Maybe you should actually look at spec numbers, tpcc and scientific benchmarks before making a judgement. x86 do really well at int based benchmarks, but are enemic on floating point. As a matter of fact, if there was a market for games on itanium2, you'd see them really take advantage of the floating point (as compared to x86 based processors.)
If you do a comparison on price/transistor, you're only seeing a $7.8/mill transistor for p4 vs $9.1/M transistor for Madison 4M based processors. While that's more than 20%, the performance difference favors itanium2.
btw, I find some of your comments about performance and transistor effiency amusing considering you spent a huge amount of time working on java.
I work with debian in a production environment, and I must say, install/upgrade can be a dangerous thing. If your workstation/server hasn't been updated in a while, and you want to install something on your machine, you may have a large number of packages that need to be updated. This inturn means the config files may be effected also. I've seen it where apt-get overwrote a custom modified config file, resulting in support issues until the problem was identified. Debian is great for home, but depending on it to keep the money coming in is a different question.
I've played in competitive rtcw (including getting creamed in the first rtcw tourney at quakecon) and I've spec'd a few really great players in my day. Its a combination of practice, understanding and properly executing strategies, amazing eye-mouse coordination. Some of the best can spin around and know exactly when to stop to fire at someone's head, whereas other people see a blur. Reaction time does help in some situations, but thinking and executing a strat in many modern games is just as important. The great teams usually practice and scrim every night. They can spent 2 to 3 hrs a night scriming different teams to try new strats and prepare for upcoming matches. You have to have a lot of time to be in the top tier of players. The greats (especially in fps) know how to configure the client to better enable them to play. There is a real art in modifying a quake3/rtcw/rtcw-et/... config files to provide the most fov, lighting conditions and tweaking of their mouse settings. There are some settings that are outlawed, where as others are accepted in the community. Many of the competitive gaming leagues have published configs for the servers. Finally, the type of computer isn't that important (as long as its above the minimum requirements). The ping does, however, and many teams fight about which server they use to play their matches, hoping to give them an advantage in the game. There is definitely homefield advantage when your team has the best ping.
btw, who ever posted that replay was cutting and pasting Linus' response to EFI. No wonder it was an anonymous post. To see where the plagirism came from, check out.. http://www.kerneltraffic.org/kernel-traffic/kt2003 0910_231.html#7
I'll hold off cutting and pasting Intel's response to Linus' statement.
Not to be a troll, but just cuz you can say it doesn't mean its true. Only history will be able to say that. Many of your comments are valid, but a balance needs to be made by supporting legacy vs. enabling hw and sw makers the freedom to innovate. I agree its annoying trying to get something to work when you didn't have any involvement in the design, but creating a hardware interface that meets everyone's needs (usb, grafix, lan, fibrechannel) might be worse than dealing with the problem. Hell, I'd love it if ieee standard came out that required everyone to either be little endian or big endian, but the hw world can't even decide on that. Can you expect them to come up with a standard interface for accessing devices.
I've been using EFI (on Itanium) for quite some time, and have had zero issues with it. I really like the fact there are DCHP modules that allow networking to be started without the OS running. They have ftp servers, disk drivers and you can boot your machine from a remote image using bootp services. If your OS is dead on your disk, you can restart to efi and download a previous image on to your harddisk (or remote boot/install). Heck, you can run your code without even booting the OS. Imagine dedicated distributed.net clients that run straight from EFI without the overhead of an OS.
While I understand people have concerns that Microsoft is using this as a DRM delivery mechanism, there is nothing that is stopping Microsoft from working with Phoniex to add DRM to today's bios's. EFI (and non-legacy bios environments like openBios) make it easier for non-windows OSes to run on new Hardware. This isn't in microsoft's best interests. Microsoft wants a bios that only runs signed code (like their XBOX), so that you have to ask them nicely for a key to your equipment.
The topic seems a little alarmist concerning patenting #TODOs in source code. After reading the article, it doesn't seem that outrageous of a patent. Putting code/greps in to find TODO's and saving them off is trivia. Going the extra mile and cataloging them, managing them and "removing after the task has been completed" is complex and a little ingenious . While I appreciate the article, who ever posted this to slashdot should have summarized it without all this chicken little tactics.
I think the change in interface is more related to the lack of content they provide with the new OS's. If you look at feature difference (ignoring the interface) between XP Pro vs Win2k, you would find that you're paying for Remote Desktop Connection services (which is handy), some minimal movie edit software and new 3d screensavers. oh, and the driver fallback stuff. While Remote desktop stuff is nice, its not worth the $200 to upgrade. So to entice people to pay XP, they had to update the look, or people wouldn't think it was worth their money.
People do this all the time... If the content they are trying to say can't stand on its own, they try to wrap it in a pretty package, and some people are fooled by that....
But that's my 2 cents...
Because of its abysmal performance, Intel has abandoned this approach and now uses a Celeron coprocessor to handle x86 software execution. I think you're mistaken. Itanium and Itanium2 have dedicated logic to run x86 code. They don't emulate x86 code, they actually run it. The logic is not pentium nor celeron based. The amount of engineering time to add a celeron coprocessor to a processor the size of an Itanium, or to modify a chipset to include a celeron, would be not be costeffective, nor be a sound engineering decision. btw, everything else in your comment is well thoughtout.
Is missing something. HP, Compaq and Dell provide more than the hardware. They provide services that go along with the HW. They use the hardware to suck you into to using their services. While small companies can build these systems on their own for cheaper, the larger companies are the ones that need to outsource some things that HP, Compaq and Dell's services provide.
Also its kind of silly to think that these IA-64 systems will be able to be built for $2k each (given the cost of similiarly performance) Sparc's and IBMs. Intel is hoping for their backwards compatibility and clout to push ISVs into programming for their systems. Once they have those vendors in their camps, the chip and server prices will go up again.
And finally, most people that would need a 64bit solution will probably need multiproc systems. OEM's will be able to provide the small systems, but once you go past the 4-8 way space, there really isn't a cheep way of scaling up any higher (, and btw, clustering is really only a solution for tasks that don't involve large sharing of data between processors that is time sensitive.) Which is where HP, Compaq, Fujitsu, NEC, and IBM will be with their high-end systems. I doubt I will ever see Dell release a system with more than 8 IA-64 processors.
Of course only time will tell what will happen next. OH, one last thing. The guy who posted should be informed that HP did not sell any processor guys, they sold some chipset guys to Intel. I'm surprised that someone that is in a processor research group would not know this. Checkout:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=22319&thresho
Just out of curiousity, what do you mean "HP's feet-dragging commitment to hteir own platform"? Do you mean moving from PA_RISC to IA64 or features they were applying to their servers.
While I am sure many of you have only thought about the "technological" ramifications this brings, let me shead some light on what it means to work at one of these companies. After last weeks layoffs, this is really bad news to HP. While I think Compaq does an execellent job with their engineering, their view on treating workers as "resources" may affect "The HP Way." HP "was" known for their treatment of employees, their ability to hedge back times, and for promoting team work instead of individualism. With Compaq being brought in, I think HP's directors and managers could become tainted by Compaq's tendency to layoff workers when profits look bad. HP and compaq have very different mindsets, and this merge(/buyout) only means that this new company will be a compromise of the two. HP used to do everything within its power to keep a "work force reduction" from happening. I was throughly conviced that last weeks layoffs were an adjustment due to changing times, but now bringing compaq in cements the fact that layoffs (or work force reductions as their PR department likes to put it) will become a cyclical thing. Also these different mindset will cause bad decisions to only explode. If they plan on succedding, they will need to adopt a single culture (and not a hybrid of the two.) Otherwise only bickering and redtape will result. Another reason this is a bad idea is the effect it will have on its effect of swiftness. There is burecarcy (sp) all over both. The new company will even be slower. This is not the time to slow down a tech company. I can see how easly its going to be in the future when it comes to implementing new solutions/products And yes there is overhead. Major overhead. Carlies biggest reason for buying compaq would be to add to HP's services group. (Which happened to be the reason why Compaq bought Digital. Honestly, it wasn't for their UNIX business or alpha processors.) There will be several labs in both HP and compaq that will start to sweat over how will stay and how will be re-orged. The next few monthes are not going to be a good time for HP and/or Compaq. I'm hoping things work out. Otherwise Carly could be HP's Rick Bullizo.