I am certainly not a Mac fan and for most of my life have been using PCs, but Apple and VT have had a great victory. They are using normal G5s, with off-the-shelf MacOS X, linked with high bandwith networks.
Do you see any Windows clusters among the Top 10? No, Linux is the only way to go if you want serious performance on Intel hardware, as the Top500.org list show. There are lots of Unix and Linux computers on the list, and the performance of MacOS X shows that Apple has not screwed up the BSD core to build MacOS X.
The result also shows that the G5s scale well and is a great processor. Imagine the day IBM starts selling Linux workstations with those babies...
It is a different ball park. Zodiac is a Palm OS PDA, that you can use to manage your life, and has Bluetooth, enabling you to sincrinize with your cellphone and have access to e-mail everywhere. Is also works like a Gameboy, and you can have some "kewl" games. Even if the games are a complete flop, the hardware tag is very aggressive.
Jack Dongarra says that a "supercomputer" is simply a computer that, for todays's standards, is REALLY fast. I saw one presentation from him, and he said he run the Linpack benchmark on his notebook (2.4 GHz Pentium 4) and it would get to the bottom of the Top500 list in 1992. So, this supercomputer definition is very fluid.
That's how it works: if you buy Advanced Server, you can only have support for the contracts you have bought - and that includes downloading patches from RHN.
You can, however, buy only one copy of Advanced Server, install on many machines as you want, download the patches from Red Hat and distribute internally for the other computers. However, imagine that the OS that you bought is a webserver, and you have a problem on MySQL that is in another machine: you can't cry for mommy and call Red Hat. It is also not wise to call Red Hat for on-site support, as they would see that you have hundreds of computers without support contracts and that would give them the right to cancel your only support contract and direct access to RHN.
Have you realy read the article? The guy is primarily a Linux user, but considered FreeBSD the fastest free Unix-like system around - wining for a small margin Linux 2.6. He said that NetBSD was the only OS that has not crashed on him, and that is normal, as he tested unstable version from FreeBSD, OpenBSD and Linux 2.6. Notice, however, that he has tested Linux 2.4, that was suposed to be stable.
All in all, you can read that, as far as performance and stability goes, the article says that the current Linux kernel ranks below the BSDs, but that this situation should change with Linux 2.6.
The Alpha is still, believe me, a good processor. Check out the list of the top 500 computers on the world, and you will see that the second and the fourth biggest computers on the world are ASCII Q and ASCII White. They are clusters of thousand of Alpha servers, and a testemony of the strenght of this processor. Now the Alpha might be expensive and not have a good cost/performance ratio, but, if you need serious performance, it is still a contender.
I believe that the death of Alpha is closely related to the EOLing of Windows NT, the only Microsoft operating system that runs on Alpha. If Microsoft had made ports for Alpha for Windows 2000 and 2003, there would still be demand for it. Linux kept the Alpha alive, but could not make it viable.
Then, again, Microsoft has not ported Windows 2000 for the Alpha because demand was weak - and so followed Red Hat and most commercial Linux vendors, until Debian was prety much the only Linux distro that sustained the Alpha.
When Red Hat tried to do that, the editors were the first to publish the links to the torrent files. I don't see why there is such an outcry now that someone has did the same for Mandrake.
I, personally, have never paid for the Mandrake box (I live in Brazil, where S&H and taxes make the prices triple). However, I have bought a magazine for US$ 5 that has the three CDs of Mandrake 9.1 and I am seriously thinking of making it my main Linux distro.
It is obvious that these torrent files would appear: they are legal and, in the view of many, decent. If I were a member club of Mandrake, I wouldn't bother to get those isos on a torrent (I don't see the value it would bring to the community) and I am not going to use them to download 9.2 (I don't have MD5 sum files to feel confident). But I do not condone people that either upload or download 9.2 this way.
The moddep-up posts don't talk about the heat generated by the distributed clients that make your CPU run at 100% for hours, what is adressed on this post.
Processors have a long life time, unless you overclocked them. I have a 5-year old Pentium II system that recently was retired where almost everything moving part is dead: floppy drive, CD-Rom drive, power supply. However, the motherboard, processor, memory, cooler and PCI peripherals are still working.
I have noticed that Seti, Distributed.net and other distributed clients raise the temperature of my processor for almost 5 degrees (YMMV). I am not concerned about this raise, but on the pressure it puts on the processor fan, as it has a lot of moving parts.
The Bayesian filter in Mozilla is very good. I have been using it for two months and now it is almost perfect, catching most spam without messing with ilegitimate messages. After two weeks of training,the filter gets very smart. I recommend Mozilla as the best e-mail client for any Windows or Linux user.
When Thunderbird gets a little better I will recommend it, also. I think that a good e-mail client, with strong spam filtering, is something that most internet users need. And, frankly, most of them don't want another browser that is almost like the one they have, with a few extras (direct google search, tabbed browsing). Ironically, Mozilla project, that started building a browser, might get famous for their e-mail client.
This startup company is about to release a PDA that also has allows you to play cool games, like Doom 2 or Duke Nukem. If you want something expensive, buy the version with 128 MB, that sells for $ 400.
ESR said in his editorial that Linux is killing Sun. Dead wrong. Sun is a hardware company that evolved to a solutions company, but has its roots planted deep on the Sparc platform. Sun doesn't care if you buy their servers and use Linux, but gets hurt if you buy Intel boxes and install Windows 2003 or Linux (byt the way, it seems that the old Wintel duo is still kicking - 70% of Intel servers run Windows, and the rest run Linux).
They should drop Sparc and adopt some other processor (be it AMD 64, Itanium or Power4), and sell some lean, mean, powerfull and cheap server. You can't compete in price against AMD or Intel, and now it seems that you can't compete on computer power either. They can go on their Solaris route or make a Linux revolution, but Sparc is dead. I compare it to Motorola's PowerPC G4.
I haven't tested it through, but I have a Ipaq and am using a "calculator" on it. Although it looks nice, if I need some bad ass calculations, like 60000 x (e^-7,5), the HP12c (a calculator released 20 years ago) seems to give the right answer, and not some funny numbers. So, I guess the software is still a problem.
Re:What about supporting hardware?
on
Athlon 64 Debuts
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· Score: 1
I would not be so confident. Somne companies have a great record of not supporting Linux, or supporting it only with closed source drivers, that are not included on the kernel or on a vanilla Red Hat. You have to download it separatly and muck around a bit, and a kernel upgrade might break that closed source driver. The drivers for ATI graphic cards and for some Wi-Fi cards are some examples.
So, if you install a x86-64 Linux, your wireless card or video might not work. I will wait and see the first "real world" reviews (and not one using alpha or beta drivers) and complains on Slashdot to make up my mind about the ease of difficulty of upgrading to Athlon 64.
Re:What about supporting hardware?
on
Athlon 64 Debuts
·
· Score: 1
There are mobos for the Athlon 64, but I think the problem is elsewhere. If you use a 64-bit OS with it (Linux or Windows) you will need 64 bit drivers for video cards, sound cards, network cards and everything else. And I am afraid these are in short supply.
So, in the begining most people will use 32-bit Windows or Linux on Athlons 64. Wait for Sladhtot posts like "How to run Doom III with 64-bit Linux".
It is another community-oriented project that makes high-quality RPMs for people that have Red Hat Linux, but think Red Hat have messed up bad with KDE. Also, they allowed me to upgrade from KDE 3 to 3.1 using Red Hat 8, without breaking my system. Check these guys out at kde-redhat.sourceforge.net.
Well, you will buy a computer for 4 grand if it is going to help you make more money. So, on a bussines enviroment, it is acceptable.
One wrong argument to defend Apple computers is to say that you have a good reselling price for a 2 year system, compared to a 2 year PC system. It is partially true: Macs have better mechanical components (fans and stuff) that degrade with time, so you can have a good system for 4 years or more.
But what is happening now on the used Apple marketplace is just casual: the G4s faced a tough time, so the new computers were not so good compared to the old ones. But just wait 3 months, for real aviability of the G5s, and see the price drop on used G4 and G3 systems.
But making good hardware means you have to develop and make your own processor? HP, and to a lesser extend IBM, prefers to buy Intel processors and build really good servers around it. Itanium could be an HP product, but they chose to make it a joint venture with Intel. Shouldn't Sun do it, and drop Sparc in favor of Intel or Opteron? They can continue do develop their OS, for sure, but if they proceed on this curse won't reach the year 2010. The "not invented here" syndrome almost killed Apple, and might kill Sun.
It surprises me that Slashdot accepts this kind of nonsense. Officialy Intel says 32 bits and big megahertz for desktops is just fine, and AMD-64 doesn't cut a slack. It looks that, off-the record, someone is telling The Inquirer to wait for their next big processor. By no means I am pro-Intel or Pro-AMD (my two last processors were Intel's and my next will be AMD), but, when you want to buy a new computer today, don't get fooled by these declarations. It is a very safe bet to say that next year's processors will be faster than today's, but if you follow this logic you would postpone your buying forever!
I am not saying that Red Hat Enterprise is perfect, but is a software that has not so much bugs as vanilla Red Hat (think Debian stable). The chances of finding a bug there are not very big, and, when they patch it, it doesn't breaks everything, liker some Windows hotfixes. Companies pay big bucks for it for the support, but is almost to give peace of mind to them, and they should call the support line, say, once or twice a year. And Red Hat can say that they give 24/7 support because the software is stable and tested by the community, so they are not getting many calls.
So, let's think: Red Hat packages a software that was tested by the community and sell it for enterprises for big bucks. They say they only charge for support, but, as we have used this software for years and contributed to their Bugzilla, they don't need to give a lot of for their costummers. They are selling a product, even if they say it is a service.
A very interesting business model, and the ecosystem analogy you used, of home users getting free (as in beer) software and being unpaid beta-testers for a software sold for big corporations, is excelent. I can only say that I support it 100%!
Red Hat says they are a service company, but their cap improved after they developed the Red Hat Enterprise Linux. In fact, it is a service: Red Hat downloads a bunch of free software avaliable on the internet, packages it and works hard to make it a stable platform for enterprises, backporting bugfixes for it for years (free software developers tend to make bugfixes only for their latest software, but you can't be on the bleeding edge because dependencies may break other applications, specially closed source ones, like the Oracle database).
They sell it for a thousand dollars or more, saying they are only charging for 24/7 support. But whoever runs Red Hat Enterprise knows that it is a very stable software, and, once you have set it up, requires only small atention. So, in fact, it works like a product.
Purchasing services might be good if you have on special neeed, but 90% of IT needs can be supplied by off-the-shelf software, that should require little baby feeding. The whole Linux mantra "you get the software for free and pay only for support" is not endorsed by many companies - they don't want to have a source of impredictability on their budgets. Red Hat has learned this, adapted itself and is making a living, paying for a lot of free software developers. If you tune free software, purge the bugs and sell it, you have gains of scale that could not be possible on a traditional service model.
Buying Red Hat Linux is great for a company because, even after they stop supporting it, you can hire someone to backport bugfixes and support it - you get the freaking source code of it.
Slashdot Mirror
Do you see any Windows clusters among the Top 10? No, Linux is the only way to go if you want serious performance on Intel hardware, as the Top500.org list show. There are lots of Unix and Linux computers on the list, and the performance of MacOS X shows that Apple has not screwed up the BSD core to build MacOS X.
The result also shows that the G5s scale well and is a great processor. Imagine the day IBM starts selling Linux workstations with those babies...
It is a different ball park. Zodiac is a Palm OS PDA, that you can use to manage your life, and has Bluetooth, enabling you to sincrinize with your cellphone and have access to e-mail everywhere. Is also works like a Gameboy, and you can have some "kewl" games. Even if the games are a complete flop, the hardware tag is very aggressive.
Jack Dongarra says that a "supercomputer" is simply a computer that, for todays's standards, is REALLY fast. I saw one presentation from him, and he said he run the Linpack benchmark on his notebook (2.4 GHz Pentium 4) and it would get to the bottom of the Top500 list in 1992. So, this supercomputer definition is very fluid.
You can, however, buy only one copy of Advanced Server, install on many machines as you want, download the patches from Red Hat and distribute internally for the other computers. However, imagine that the OS that you bought is a webserver, and you have a problem on MySQL that is in another machine: you can't cry for mommy and call Red Hat. It is also not wise to call Red Hat for on-site support, as they would see that you have hundreds of computers without support contracts and that would give them the right to cancel your only support contract and direct access to RHN.
All in all, you can read that, as far as performance and stability goes, the article says that the current Linux kernel ranks below the BSDs, but that this situation should change with Linux 2.6.
I believe that the death of Alpha is closely related to the EOLing of Windows NT, the only Microsoft operating system that runs on Alpha. If Microsoft had made ports for Alpha for Windows 2000 and 2003, there would still be demand for it. Linux kept the Alpha alive, but could not make it viable.
Then, again, Microsoft has not ported Windows 2000 for the Alpha because demand was weak - and so followed Red Hat and most commercial Linux vendors, until Debian was prety much the only Linux distro that sustained the Alpha.
I, personally, have never paid for the Mandrake box (I live in Brazil, where S&H and taxes make the prices triple). However, I have bought a magazine for US$ 5 that has the three CDs of Mandrake 9.1 and I am seriously thinking of making it my main Linux distro.
It is obvious that these torrent files would appear: they are legal and, in the view of many, decent. If I were a member club of Mandrake, I wouldn't bother to get those isos on a torrent (I don't see the value it would bring to the community) and I am not going to use them to download 9.2 (I don't have MD5 sum files to feel confident). But I do not condone people that either upload or download 9.2 this way.
The moddep-up posts don't talk about the heat generated by the distributed clients that make your CPU run at 100% for hours, what is adressed on this post.
I have noticed that Seti, Distributed.net and other distributed clients raise the temperature of my processor for almost 5 degrees (YMMV). I am not concerned about this raise, but on the pressure it puts on the processor fan, as it has a lot of moving parts.
When Thunderbird gets a little better I will recommend it, also. I think that a good e-mail client, with strong spam filtering, is something that most internet users need. And, frankly, most of them don't want another browser that is almost like the one they have, with a few extras (direct google search, tabbed browsing). Ironically, Mozilla project, that started building a browser, might get famous for their e-mail client.
It is the author explaining her book!
This startup company is about to release a PDA that also has allows you to play cool games, like Doom 2 or Duke Nukem. If you want something expensive, buy the version with 128 MB, that sells for $ 400.
They should drop Sparc and adopt some other processor (be it AMD 64, Itanium or Power4), and sell some lean, mean, powerfull and cheap server. You can't compete in price against AMD or Intel, and now it seems that you can't compete on computer power either. They can go on their Solaris route or make a Linux revolution, but Sparc is dead. I compare it to Motorola's PowerPC G4.
I haven't tested it through, but I have a Ipaq and am using a "calculator" on it. Although it looks nice, if I need some bad ass calculations, like 60000 x (e^-7,5), the HP12c (a calculator released 20 years ago) seems to give the right answer, and not some funny numbers. So, I guess the software is still a problem.
So, if you install a x86-64 Linux, your wireless card or video might not work. I will wait and see the first "real world" reviews (and not one using alpha or beta drivers) and complains on Slashdot to make up my mind about the ease of difficulty of upgrading to Athlon 64.
So, in the begining most people will use 32-bit Windows or Linux on Athlons 64. Wait for Sladhtot posts like "How to run Doom III with 64-bit Linux".
If this is a paper launch, Alienware is selling some interesting paper.
It is another community-oriented project that makes high-quality RPMs for people that have Red Hat Linux, but think Red Hat have messed up bad with KDE. Also, they allowed me to upgrade from KDE 3 to 3.1 using Red Hat 8, without breaking my system. Check these guys out at kde-redhat.sourceforge.net.
One wrong argument to defend Apple computers is to say that you have a good reselling price for a 2 year system, compared to a 2 year PC system. It is partially true: Macs have better mechanical components (fans and stuff) that degrade with time, so you can have a good system for 4 years or more.
But what is happening now on the used Apple marketplace is just casual: the G4s faced a tough time, so the new computers were not so good compared to the old ones. But just wait 3 months, for real aviability of the G5s, and see the price drop on used G4 and G3 systems.
But making good hardware means you have to develop and make your own processor? HP, and to a lesser extend IBM, prefers to buy Intel processors and build really good servers around it. Itanium could be an HP product, but they chose to make it a joint venture with Intel. Shouldn't Sun do it, and drop Sparc in favor of Intel or Opteron? They can continue do develop their OS, for sure, but if they proceed on this curse won't reach the year 2010. The "not invented here" syndrome almost killed Apple, and might kill Sun.
It surprises me that Slashdot accepts this kind of nonsense. Officialy Intel says 32 bits and big megahertz for desktops is just fine, and AMD-64 doesn't cut a slack. It looks that, off-the record, someone is telling The Inquirer to wait for their next big processor. By no means I am pro-Intel or Pro-AMD (my two last processors were Intel's and my next will be AMD), but, when you want to buy a new computer today, don't get fooled by these declarations. It is a very safe bet to say that next year's processors will be faster than today's, but if you follow this logic you would postpone your buying forever!
So, let's think: Red Hat packages a software that was tested by the community and sell it for enterprises for big bucks. They say they only charge for support, but, as we have used this software for years and contributed to their Bugzilla, they don't need to give a lot of for their costummers. They are selling a product, even if they say it is a service.
A very interesting business model, and the ecosystem analogy you used, of home users getting free (as in beer) software and being unpaid beta-testers for a software sold for big corporations, is excelent. I can only say that I support it 100%!
Red Hat is as "outdated" as Debian stable (it is based on Red Hat 7.x). And that is good - it is much more stable than Red Hat 9.
They sell it for a thousand dollars or more, saying they are only charging for 24/7 support. But whoever runs Red Hat Enterprise knows that it is a very stable software, and, once you have set it up, requires only small atention. So, in fact, it works like a product.
Purchasing services might be good if you have on special neeed, but 90% of IT needs can be supplied by off-the-shelf software, that should require little baby feeding. The whole Linux mantra "you get the software for free and pay only for support" is not endorsed by many companies - they don't want to have a source of impredictability on their budgets. Red Hat has learned this, adapted itself and is making a living, paying for a lot of free software developers. If you tune free software, purge the bugs and sell it, you have gains of scale that could not be possible on a traditional service model.
Buying Red Hat Linux is great for a company because, even after they stop supporting it, you can hire someone to backport bugfixes and support it - you get the freaking source code of it.
This whole thing reminds me of when Judas Priest was accused of stimulating suicide of two young fans.