Well, Mandrake is clearly a company, just think of the e-learning adventures they tried in the strange old boom days. But they suffered afterwards in a Chapter 11 process.
Suse isn't my favorit distro, but nevertheless i have to strongly speak for them - they are configuring and building good products. As they have to earn money, giving away isos so they could be downloaded from every mirror is certainly scary for "real businessmen". Given that they do a lot for the community, employ lots of developers, etc. they must ensure a solid financial basis. Especially in the months after the boom, SUSE was one of the very few Linux-related companies in Europe not in deep shit - some restrictions simply ensure business.
Speaking about the statements of their CEO, he clearly speaks about deep business relationships. If you read IT announcements regularly, you hear relationship announcements in the Linux sector all the time, but distro companies involved are constantly RedHat and SuSE (and rarely Mandrake - but I live in europe so I am not sure about asian news tickers).
Generally I don't believe the community is suffering under Suse's restrictions, - overall we all might even benefit by the work of solidly employed developers....
Well, the question is if the Athlon 64 would increase sells and processor prices that mutch that switching to an even more expensive die would bring any benefit to AMDs financal position - especially when there is no Windows(tm) 64 available, for sure a great disadvantage for marketing.
I also don't think that the Barton core has the potential to bring AMD back into the black numbers, because it is tecnically clearly behind the Intel P4 - and the increased size of the die should greatly increase production expenses (die size: +20%, transistor count: +44%!).
So let's hope AMD has luck with Microsoft, a good launch into the Opteron/HighEnd market and some advanceses with semiconductor processes, otherwise I fear that we will loose the only real competitor on the x86-CPU-market....
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Well, Mandrake is clearly a company, just think of the e-learning adventures they tried in the strange old boom days. But they suffered afterwards in a Chapter 11 process. Suse isn't my favorit distro, but nevertheless i have to strongly speak for them - they are configuring and building good products. As they have to earn money, giving away isos so they could be downloaded from every mirror is certainly scary for "real businessmen". Given that they do a lot for the community, employ lots of developers, etc. they must ensure a solid financial basis. Especially in the months after the boom, SUSE was one of the very few Linux-related companies in Europe not in deep shit - some restrictions simply ensure business. Speaking about the statements of their CEO, he clearly speaks about deep business relationships. If you read IT announcements regularly, you hear relationship announcements in the Linux sector all the time, but distro companies involved are constantly RedHat and SuSE (and rarely Mandrake - but I live in europe so I am not sure about asian news tickers). Generally I don't believe the community is suffering under Suse's restrictions, - overall we all might even benefit by the work of solidly employed developers....
Well, the question is if the Athlon 64 would increase sells and processor prices that mutch that switching to an even more expensive die would bring any benefit to AMDs financal position - especially when there is no Windows(tm) 64 available, for sure a great disadvantage for marketing.
I also don't think that the Barton core has the potential to bring AMD back into the black numbers, because it is tecnically clearly behind the Intel P4 - and the increased size of the die should greatly increase production expenses (die size: +20%, transistor count: +44%!).
So let's hope AMD has luck with Microsoft, a good launch into the Opteron/HighEnd market and some advanceses with semiconductor processes, otherwise I fear that we will loose the only real competitor on the x86-CPU-market....