OK. So Motorola/Freescale still make the G4. So what? It's legacy and confined to Apple's low-end products. The future (and, indeed the present and past 5-10 years for a lot of us) is 64-bit.
Intel does not have a competitive 64-bit processor, either in Pentium VIIV (or whatever) or itanic. Both are turkeys.
Pentium M may be their saviour, but it's only 32-bit at the moment but you can get a better 32-bit part from AMD.
Wake me up when intel decides to compete in the market again.
Apple doesn't use Motorola PowerPC chips any more and hasn't for years. It gets them from IBM.
Intel chips are hot, offer poor performance at a given clock frequency, and the 64-bit AMD64-a-like models are in short supply.
No, this is nonsense and a hoax. If Apple were going to switch to the x86 architecture, it would make far more sense technically and economically to choose Opteron/Athlon 64.
However, think about it - someone would simply take their place - Novell, some corporate entity supporting a Debian or Gentoo distro - and they'd be right back where they started.
The elephant in the room here is Sun Solaris.
Microsoft and Sun have been doing a lot of deals recently. Think about it.
Also, if Microsoft tried to buy Red Hat, even Bush's out-to-lunch antitrust enforcement unit would have to do something.
I doubt it. What's more likely to happen is that the GPL and similar licenses will be declared "unconstitutional" or "illegal" or "unenforceabel" or something. Microsoft called the GPL a "cancer."
I'm sure that the first thing they'd do is work the legal system to have it destroyed.
I think Vader is more likely to be Scott McNeally. Red Hat Linux is Solaris' biggest competitor. Sun has been doing a lot of deals and technology exhcanges with Microsoft recently. The Emperor might be doing Vader a favour here. UltraSPARC is all but dead. Opterons are selling well. Linux emulation (Janus) didn't make it into mainline Solaris 10 and neither did ZFS.
My film would be about a Free Software developer who develops high-quality, innovative and useful code under the GPL and LGPL. Six months after he starts his project and a small community of developers and users has built up around the software, a mysterious closed-source commercial project with an almost identical feature set appears on the market.
The developers, although seething with anger, are dignified and respect the rule of law, so rather than resorting to vigilante actions such as DOSing thei suspect's web site, they call Lawrence Lessig who takes the closed-source guys to court and gets them prosecuted for copyright infringement and extracts a large quantity of money from them at the same time, which goes to the developers and the FSF.
I tried AbiWord too, and it's so full of bugs I gave up after 10 minutes. Open/StarOffice is far from perfect, and "office" aaplications always have been slow, every era on every kind of computer, so I know how you feel. I'm using OOo 2.0Beta in ager just now, and it's fairly good. I use gnumeric for personal spreadsheets. gnumeric is excellent.
I remember when we used to complain how slow MS Word 2.0 was on a 486.
As for this "64-bit mode" stuff, that's a simplistic way of looking at things. UltraSPARC and Opteron processors are designed to run old code seamlessly at full speed with out recompiling under the same OS. The only difference with Opteron is that it has extra general-purpose registers, which can only be used by the applications when they are recompiled, or in the case of byte-code interpreted languages (e.g. Java and Python) when the interpreter is rewritten to take advantage of them.
On an x86 machine, going to Opteron (or Athlon 64) most of the performance improvement to be gained in general-purpose office-type applications comes from higher memory bandwidth, larger caches and improved front-side busses (i.e. Hypertransport). Using the extra registers helps, but it's only a few percent, and when the application spends a lot of its time waiting for the disk, user and graphics hardware to do their stuff, it's not that important.
He said he knows he can run a 32-bit version but he doesn't want to. He said "it's like runnung a car on half its cylinders"
Well then he is a cretin.
The Opteron/Athlon 64 architecture has numerous advantes, of which the 64-bit registers and flat 64-bit address space are only two.
I feel it is my civic duty to cast what few pearls of wisdom I posess before the swine hear, although I'm growing weary, but here goes.
Other than hardware improvements like the integrated memory controllers and Hpertransport, which effectively come "for free" (i.e. the user-land software doesn't care) the other main performance gain to be had is the fact that the Opteron/Athlon 64/AMD64 architecture has twice as many general-purpose registers as the IA-32 (i.e. x86) architecture.
To take advantage of these extra registers in user-land on an AMD64 machine with a sane operating system such as Solaris 10 or Linux, it should involve no more effort than a recompile with the appropriate switch passed to gcc to tell it to use the extra registers in the object code it generates.
So really, I don't know what he is ranting about. Now, if the application was written in Java, the JVM would take care of all that for you. No recompile would be necessary.
Put that in your pipes and smoke it anit-Sun, anti-Java, slashbot weenie zealots.
Fair enough, but judging by his rants, it doesn't look like he has much of a clue what he's trying to achieve. Why is he trying to compile OOo "64-bit"?
On a properly-designed system, the headers and libraries should all be in the normal places for 32-bit compatibility, and it should "just work."
It sounds like he's using debian, so that would explain it. But rather than figuring this out, he blames Sun, and gets away with it because it's the fashionable stance to take around here just now. Times was it was M$ that took the bashing here.
Are all 64-bit Athlons Opterons?
Effectively, yes. Athlon-64, Opteron etc. are just marketing names for the AMD64 chips. They're all pretty much the same apart from minor differences to target them to the various market segments.
You bought an Opteron workstation. You want to run it with a 64-bit OS? So run Solaris 10. You shouldn't need to compile OpenOffice.org just download the darned binaries. Solaris 10 runs 32- and 64-bit binaries side by side, seamlessly, flawlessly and with no performance penalty.
They obviously didn't sacrifice quite enough beautiful young maidens to appease the rain god. In these cynical god-less times, could we learn from the wisdom of the ancients?
Dell's getting it's ass kicked by Opteron servers from the likes of Sun running Solaris and Linux.
Dell is Microsoft's and intel's bitch. Dell only sells machines with intel processors to get a good price from intel. That's why they can sell their machines so cheap.
Dell's contract with Microsoft forbids them from selling any quantity of machines without an OS (to prevent "piracy") or with Linux at a lower price than Windows. Try it, I did when I was buying servers for Sun. Despite the fact that we were going to be buying machines to develop and run Solaris x86, they said we either had to buy Windows or Linux (to preven "piracy"). I ended up buying Windows, because "Linux is more expensive" according to the Dell sales droids. Go figure.
Everyone except Dell is selling Opteron servers, which are cheaper, faster and cooler than intel servers. Dell does not have an OS. Sun will sell you Linux or Solaris x86. HP will sell you Linux, Windoze or Solaris x86 (I jest not). IBM will sell you Linux or Windoze. Dell is bound to M$ as mentioned above.
Michael Dell ain't stupid. He's covering his posterior, like all good business people do who want to still be in business in 5 years time.
Sun has already been trying to tempt schools with cheap and free StarOffice license and OpenOffice.org for a few years now.
The problem is with the way the UK Public Sector does business (negotiating itself long-term expensive single-supplier deals), the perceptions of the PHBs (everyone in Industry uses M$ and I have it on my PeeCee at home etc.) and lack of visibility of the M$ alternatives.
They don't want to rock the boat. They want the ticks in the boxes at their annual appraisals and their 3% pay rise for delivering by maintaining the status quo and conforming.
Also, when you create OSS, as soon as you release a new feature, all of your competition knows how you did it.
This is one of the Great Misunderstandings of software and engineering in general by PHBs.
Your competition probably knows how you did it already. Most algorithms, or "ways of doing things," have been discovered and thoroughly researched in the past, sometimes as long ago as 3000 years.
By providing Open Source, you're not giving away a secret, but you are giving away an implementation.
All you're doing, if anything, is saving your potential competitor a bit of coding and debugging.
Particularly in the field of Operating Systems, kernels such as Linux and Solaris use well understood, well designed and well tested techniques and algorithms. There's no secret sauce in there that you can't find out for yourself by googling or going to the library.
The thing about Open Source is it can potentially reveal trade secrets, things like secret hardware specs. designed to keep other companies and people in the dark regarding the particular nuances of an implementation, thus putting them at a brief competitive disadvantage, at least until the newer, better, more attractive product comes along.
There are a lot of cases where GPL'd and BSD drivers can't take full advantage of the hardware due to "Intellectual Property" issues - and the issues usually relate to secret hardware specs.
McNealy's a fool to himself - rather than embracing the open source community as an ally instead of an enemy five years ago, Solaris might well have been taken seriously as an OS on non-Sun hardware.
He never said that, well, not five years ago. It's RedHat he views as an enemy. Schwartz is the real fool. The engineers at Sun are far more clued-up and many of them are contributors to high-profile projects on a personal level, besides official projects like GNOME and OpenOffice.org.
I'm afraid the Pointy-Hairs don't see the value of community. To them it's all Wall Street, Java and "Kill RedHat." They very nearly missed Opteron.
Opteron could save Sun.
Let's face it, would Sun even consider making Solaris open source if Linux didn't exist?
I doubt it. But then the competition would only be Windows, not RedHat.
People forget that "Solaris 1.x" was BSD Unix. Sun was behind all the major innovations and standards.
Like I said, I couldn't care less any more, my only concern is for the great friends and colleagues still at Sun forced to toil under the pointy-haired regieme that still doesn't quite get it.
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Absolute hogwash. What nonsense and FUD. Tell me, how are things at intel? Do they pay you to astroturf here?
Intel does not have a competitive 64-bit processor, either in Pentium VIIV (or whatever) or itanic. Both are turkeys.
Pentium M may be their saviour, but it's only 32-bit at the moment but you can get a better 32-bit part from AMD.
Wake me up when intel decides to compete in the market again.
Intel chips are hot, offer poor performance at a given clock frequency, and the 64-bit AMD64-a-like models are in short supply.
No, this is nonsense and a hoax. If Apple were going to switch to the x86 architecture, it would make far more sense technically and economically to choose Opteron/Athlon 64.
Nothing to see here folks. Move along please.
Dude, you're 5 years out of date. India is saturated. My job just went to Beijing in China.
Yeah? Well I've got a Wooly Mammoth in my room and it wants to kick your elephant's ass. :-)
The elephant in the room here is Sun Solaris.
Microsoft and Sun have been doing a lot of deals recently. Think about it.
Ford Prefect, is that you?
I doubt it. What's more likely to happen is that the GPL and similar licenses will be declared "unconstitutional" or "illegal" or "unenforceabel" or something. Microsoft called the GPL a "cancer."
I'm sure that the first thing they'd do is work the legal system to have it destroyed.
I think Vader is more likely to be Scott McNeally. Red Hat Linux is Solaris' biggest competitor. Sun has been doing a lot of deals and technology exhcanges with Microsoft recently. The Emperor might be doing Vader a favour here. UltraSPARC is all but dead. Opterons are selling well. Linux emulation (Janus) didn't make it into mainline Solaris 10 and neither did ZFS.
My wife calls them, "smelly, autistic people with poor social skills."
The developers, although seething with anger, are dignified and respect the rule of law, so rather than resorting to vigilante actions such as DOSing thei suspect's web site, they call Lawrence Lessig who takes the closed-source guys to court and gets them prosecuted for copyright infringement and extracts a large quantity of money from them at the same time, which goes to the developers and the FSF.
I remember when we used to complain how slow MS Word 2.0 was on a 486.
As for this "64-bit mode" stuff, that's a simplistic way of looking at things. UltraSPARC and Opteron processors are designed to run old code seamlessly at full speed with out recompiling under the same OS. The only difference with Opteron is that it has extra general-purpose registers, which can only be used by the applications when they are recompiled, or in the case of byte-code interpreted languages (e.g. Java and Python) when the interpreter is rewritten to take advantage of them.
On an x86 machine, going to Opteron (or Athlon 64) most of the performance improvement to be gained in general-purpose office-type applications comes from higher memory bandwidth, larger caches and improved front-side busses (i.e. Hypertransport). Using the extra registers helps, but it's only a few percent, and when the application spends a lot of its time waiting for the disk, user and graphics hardware to do their stuff, it's not that important.
You too? So I'm not the only person here with a filthy mind. :-)
Well then he is a cretin.
The Opteron/Athlon 64 architecture has numerous advantes, of which the 64-bit registers and flat 64-bit address space are only two.
I feel it is my civic duty to cast what few pearls of wisdom I posess before the swine hear, although I'm growing weary, but here goes.
Other than hardware improvements like the integrated memory controllers and Hpertransport, which effectively come "for free" (i.e. the user-land software doesn't care) the other main performance gain to be had is the fact that the Opteron/Athlon 64/AMD64 architecture has twice as many general-purpose registers as the IA-32 (i.e. x86) architecture.
To take advantage of these extra registers in user-land on an AMD64 machine with a sane operating system such as Solaris 10 or Linux, it should involve no more effort than a recompile with the appropriate switch passed to gcc to tell it to use the extra registers in the object code it generates.
So really, I don't know what he is ranting about. Now, if the application was written in Java, the JVM would take care of all that for you. No recompile would be necessary.
Put that in your pipes and smoke it anit-Sun, anti-Java, slashbot weenie zealots.
Fair enough, but judging by his rants, it doesn't look like he has much of a clue what he's trying to achieve. Why is he trying to compile OOo "64-bit"?
On a properly-designed system, the headers and libraries should all be in the normal places for 32-bit compatibility, and it should "just work."
It sounds like he's using debian, so that would explain it. But rather than figuring this out, he blames Sun, and gets away with it because it's the fashionable stance to take around here just now. Times was it was M$ that took the bashing here.
Are all 64-bit Athlons Opterons?
Effectively, yes. Athlon-64, Opteron etc. are just marketing names for the AMD64 chips. They're all pretty much the same apart from minor differences to target them to the various market segments.
You bought an Opteron workstation. You want to run it with a 64-bit OS? So run Solaris 10. You shouldn't need to compile OpenOffice.org just download the darned binaries. Solaris 10 runs 32- and 64-bit binaries side by side, seamlessly, flawlessly and with no performance penalty.
They obviously didn't sacrifice quite enough beautiful young maidens to appease the rain god. In these cynical god-less times, could we learn from the wisdom of the ancients?
Well, it's Z80 for CALL $01C9. What machine is it on? Tell us, and we'll look up the ROM disassembly :-)
Easy peasy.
Dell's getting it's ass kicked by Opteron servers from the likes of Sun running Solaris and Linux.
Dell is Microsoft's and intel's bitch. Dell only sells machines with intel processors to get a good price from intel. That's why they can sell their machines so cheap.
Dell's contract with Microsoft forbids them from selling any quantity of machines without an OS (to prevent "piracy") or with Linux at a lower price than Windows. Try it, I did when I was buying servers for Sun. Despite the fact that we were going to be buying machines to develop and run Solaris x86, they said we either had to buy Windows or Linux (to preven "piracy"). I ended up buying Windows, because "Linux is more expensive" according to the Dell sales droids. Go figure.
Everyone except Dell is selling Opteron servers, which are cheaper, faster and cooler than intel servers. Dell does not have an OS. Sun will sell you Linux or Solaris x86. HP will sell you Linux, Windoze or Solaris x86 (I jest not). IBM will sell you Linux or Windoze. Dell is bound to M$ as mentioned above.
Michael Dell ain't stupid. He's covering his posterior, like all good business people do who want to still be in business in 5 years time.
The problem is with the way the UK Public Sector does business (negotiating itself long-term expensive single-supplier deals), the perceptions of the PHBs (everyone in Industry uses M$ and I have it on my PeeCee at home etc.) and lack of visibility of the M$ alternatives.
They don't want to rock the boat. They want the ticks in the boxes at their annual appraisals and their 3% pay rise for delivering by maintaining the status quo and conforming.
In the UK, if you shot someone's mule to settle a score, the RSPCA would find out and you'd likely get sent to prison.
Anyway, I thought they all had tractors in Texas nowadays, what with all that oil.
If sarcasm be the lowest form of wit, my cup runneth over.
Thank you.
This is one of the Great Misunderstandings of software and engineering in general by PHBs.
Your competition probably knows how you did it already. Most algorithms, or "ways of doing things," have been discovered and thoroughly researched in the past, sometimes as long ago as 3000 years.
By providing Open Source, you're not giving away a secret, but you are giving away an implementation.
All you're doing, if anything, is saving your potential competitor a bit of coding and debugging.
Particularly in the field of Operating Systems, kernels such as Linux and Solaris use well understood, well designed and well tested techniques and algorithms. There's no secret sauce in there that you can't find out for yourself by googling or going to the library.
The thing about Open Source is it can potentially reveal trade secrets, things like secret hardware specs. designed to keep other companies and people in the dark regarding the particular nuances of an implementation, thus putting them at a brief competitive disadvantage, at least until the newer, better, more attractive product comes along.
There are a lot of cases where GPL'd and BSD drivers can't take full advantage of the hardware due to "Intellectual Property" issues - and the issues usually relate to secret hardware specs.
He never said that, well, not five years ago. It's RedHat he views as an enemy. Schwartz is the real fool. The engineers at Sun are far more clued-up and many of them are contributors to high-profile projects on a personal level, besides official projects like GNOME and OpenOffice.org.
I'm afraid the Pointy-Hairs don't see the value of community. To them it's all Wall Street, Java and "Kill RedHat." They very nearly missed Opteron.
Opteron could save Sun.
Let's face it, would Sun even consider making Solaris open source if Linux didn't exist?
I doubt it. But then the competition would only be Windows, not RedHat.
People forget that "Solaris 1.x" was BSD Unix. Sun was behind all the major innovations and standards.
Like I said, I couldn't care less any more, my only concern is for the great friends and colleagues still at Sun forced to toil under the pointy-haired regieme that still doesn't quite get it.