You are being naieve. The point about Opteron (athlon 64 etc.) is that each processor has its own memory controller connected to its own memory. This is NUMA. So if you have a 4-way system you have 4 processors all with (IIRC) 128-bit interfaces to 4 independent banks of DDR memory via 4 different memory controllers. Compare this to a Xeon (i.e. Pentium IV) system, which has one memory controller shared between the four processors.
Obviously in a single system image shared memory system there has to be some interprocessor communication to keep the different areas of memory coherent, but this is handled by hardware (the memory controller?) on the Opteron itself and the communication is done over Hypertransport.
This is a direct descendent of technology from the old and venerable Sun E10k (so I'm told) that was acquired from Cray (when SGI bough some of Cray and Sun bought the rest).
intel has nothing remotely close. I'm not sure about itanic, but intel is supposed to be developing a chipset to allow one single motherboard to be used for either Xeons or itanics. Therefore, to be compatible with Xeon, I can't see how the itanic can be much of an improvement. Allegedly itanic uses a crossbar switch (like old 64-bit workstations and the 320bit athlons) instead of the poxy old pentium bus. However, now I'm just speculating.
General purpose computing doesn't need to deal with over 4 billion unique things.
Music and video editing. CAD. Software Engineering.
No, your poxy M$ Turd word processor probably doesn't need 64 bits just now, but in 5 years time it will.
I still remember when the 386 was new and people were saying exactly the same things about the 16 to 32 bit transition that you are saying about 32 to 64 bits just now.
Breaking the 4GB segment barrier. If you ever coded on an 8-bit micro or DOS PeeCee you'll understand the crapness of small memory segements and the frustration and bugs caused.
There are other improvements in Opteron (AMD64) that are nothing to do with being 64-bit (such as the integrated memory controller, Hypertransport, NUMA, advanced superscalar execution) that have their roots in larger systems of yesteryear that intel has yet to catch up with (except in itanic).
And don't get me started on itanic. It's basically an over-grown signal processor whose sole purpose in life is executing SPEC floating-point benchmarks.
Anyway, screw the computer industry, I'm off to do something less boring instead.
Your initial question smacks of the lack of imagination and small-mindedness that condemns 99% of the population to a lifetime of mediocrity.
intel 64-bit Xeons suck, they are in short supply and I doubt he's got any (due to shortages) and the fact that they've only recently become available.
Two years ago when Sun decided to do an AMD64 port of Solaris, I spoke to my friendly Dell salesman and asked if they were going to be selling Opterons and he said "we're not sure, maybe if people ask for them."
Oh well. We bought a bunch of MSI and Tyan motherboards and made our own.
But my company is moving away from Solaris because the new Dell Boxes are at least three times as fast as the fastest Sun we have.
In three days time I will no longer work for Sun since I have been made redundant.
During my time at Sun I was part of the Companion CD team. We built on x86 and SPARC. For x86 builds we had a Dell 6400, Dell 6600 and finally a Sun V40z (4-way Opteron 246). For SPARC we built on E450, E4500, and V880 (8x900MHz UltraSPARC III) and V880 (8x1200MHz UltraSPARC III).
Now, I will not go into a long spiel about the realtive merits of the various hardware platforms, and I have no axe to grind now since I get my lasy pay cheque in a fortnight but:
Why the heck are you buying (32-bit intel) Dells when you can buy (cheaper and faster 64-bit) Opteron boxes from Sun? If you are a Linux fanboy, Sun will sell you one with DeadRat or SuSE. They are Windoze certified in case you have had a lobotomy, and you can run the free (as in beer) 64-bit Solaris 10 on them.
If it didn't work in Asia, why would it work in Brazil?
Many a right-wing capitalist believes that people are poor because they are stupid.
Brazillians are on average poorer than Americans hence, by that logic, are more stupid. Stupid people are more likely to be convinced to pay for a crippled version of Windows in contrast to just using a superior (to the non-crippled Windows) Free operating system.
This ignorant arrogance will be Microsoft's downfall.
From what I can gather of Catholicism, merely being fruitful and multiplying isn't enough. That poor, almighty, omniscient soul, God, is very sensitive and needs to feel wanted otherwise he sulks. (Discuss how something can be all-powerful and yet have a weakness.) So you not only have to breed, you have to breed lots of little Catholics.
OK, substitute all other religions for "Catholics" above. It holds equal water.
Speak nicely to your old boss and ask permission to show samples to your new prospective employer. Let old employer and new employer work out the legal details between them (and in the mean time they might both learn a thing or two about the ludicrous nature of "intellectual property" laws). The fact that you've shown the initiative might count for something, and also might demonstrate that your inablity to produce said evidence is not due to its non-existence, but rather beurocracy not of your making.
All people like to make sweeping generalisations. They like to pigeon-hole people (put them in arbitrary categories) based on all kinds of silly things like common visual charectaristics (hair length, sock colour, skin colour).
Pointy-haired closed-source commercial software people are no different. They will categorise others as GNU/Hippies as the will. It's the way of the world.
It's "us" and "them" whoever "us" and "them" are, even if we're all individuals.
Sun hopes that by open-sourcing Solaris they can attract a large community of developers to work on it, and that it will over-take Linux in development pace.
It will be interesting to see if anyone currently developing Linux jumps ship to Solaris...
How can I get a Significant Other with nothing but a hundred bucks and a brain on my side?
Spend it on soap, deodorant, toothpaste and mouthwash, and some quality Romantic novels (e.g. Bronte, Dickens, Trollope). Then go out on the pull with what's left of the money, your new found cleanliness, and well-rounded education.
Sun does control the standard and gets to decide who can call what Java.
When Linus started Linux he made it GPL'd. He said that it would aim towards POSIX (and other standards) compliance. The Open Group controls the Unix standards and gets to decide who calls what "Unix" (look at Apple's trouble). Linux can not be called "Unix" since it hasn't been validated. More specifically, every time it is modified, it would have to be revalidated to conform to the spec AFAIK, and not just the Linux kernel. It's more involved than that.
After Apple OS X, Linux is probably the most widely deployed Unix-like OS on the planet.
Sun is now open-sourcing Solaris to try to compete with Linux, to rejuvenate the Solaris community and to get more developers involved in Solaris and software to run on Solaris. Solaris is still 5 years ahead of Linux in many areas.
Now, if someone had developed a JVM in all but name (unable to call it "Java" for branding reasons), GPL'd it and said that it aimed towards Java compliance...
Just another thought.
It really is annoying not being able to redistribute those binaries that you've made. Keep shouting, but shout at the right people. They are listening, but big ships take time to turn.
Everyone their own opinion. I hope you live happy under the SUN.
OK, I'll admit I'm a beginner when it comes to Java, and I have been working for Sun for 4 years (which ends in a fortnight due to economics) so I maybe have been drinking the Kool Aid a bit, but why don't you ask IBM to make you a Free/OpenBSD JVM port? From what I can see, IBM loves to make PR out of Sun's perceived failings. Just look at the amount of IBM posted here as news.
Sun is very bad at PR and struggles to communicate well with the Linux/FOSS/Slashdot community. That's no secret. You can judge for yourself.
What also amazes me, is that Miguel jumped on the.NET bandwagon and started a.NET/C#/CLR project frmo scratch when he could have taken an Open Source or Free JVM/JRE project and built upon that.
the reality is that unless SUN decided to make binaries available for a platform with an end-user license, there is no practical way of getting JAVA on a machine.
Wrong. You confuse Java the language with Java the platform. gcc compiles Java source down to native machine code on most architectures and provides its own runtime for the parts of the system which require it. If you want to run Java bytecode (either compiled with gcc or some other Java compiler) you have a joice of Java Virtual Machines and Java Runtime Environments from sever manufacturers, including IBM.
Now, SUN of course has such binaries for Windows, Solaris and Linux and some other systems, but for example not for FreeBSD/OpenBSD.
FreeBSD and OpenBSD run Linux binaries very well. Native ports to these platforms are not required. Incidentally, Solaris 10 will also run Linux binaries unmodified on x86.
First of all, few Linux distributions seem to have managed to include a JAVA runtime environment at all, in all other cases I have to download it from SUN. More problematic however is that when maintaining a Linux machine, you may end up having to install newer versions of libraries, which at times introduces compatibility issues. It is however not trivial to just recompile JAVA and link against the new libraries.
Well, I use Slackware and that comes with an up-to-date Sun Java Runtime Environment. Installing a JRE (or SDK) is not very difficult, and is rearely more complicated than extracting a tarball as root and setting some environmnet variables. As for recompiling Java to run against "new libraries" you completely miss the point of Java. The new JREs are backwards compatible.
Failure to do so may result in one or both of two things:
* An alternative Open Source JAVA gets created over time
* JAVA becomes irrelevant
Unless you have been living under a rock, you will realise that there are several independent Java implementations available, including ones from Sun and IBM, a free one called kaffe, and of course gcc's java compiler. Java will not become irrelevant. There are billions of computing devices around the world running Java. What might happen is that Miguel's anti Java/pro.NET FUD might become a mindset amongst the/. zealots. (Might? I think it already has).
The recent settlement between SUN and Microsoft doesn't bode well
No, not for Microsoft. As usual, they're doing a good job of shooting themselves in the foot.
Sun's Java implementation is closed source.. Other peoples' implementations are either closed or open source depending. My point is that there's a choice.
Java is many things. It is a programming language. It is also a runtime environment in the form of a protable virtual machine. It also comes with a huge class library.
For some reason, that monkey Miguel went and decided to write his own version of M$'s Java clone, C#/.NET, for "Linux" (i.e. Unix-like OSes) to undermine everyone else's work.
Now, you can get branded Java from people other than Sun e.g. IBM. IBM is currently a great favourite of the slashdot peanut gallery.
In addition, gcc comes with a Java-language to native code compiler as well as byte code (to run on the evil, nasty closed-soure Sun (or IBM or whoever's) JVM).
If you don't like Sun, or IBM, or Blackdown or kaffe's JVM, including their JIT compilers which can optimise to exceed the efficiency of statically-compiled code, then you can always revert to gcc's Java language compiler.
However, I'm sure these facts will be conventiently ignored for the sake of a good, heated argument, and many rants.
Slashdot Mirror
Obviously in a single system image shared memory system there has to be some interprocessor communication to keep the different areas of memory coherent, but this is handled by hardware (the memory controller?) on the Opteron itself and the communication is done over Hypertransport.
This is a direct descendent of technology from the old and venerable Sun E10k (so I'm told) that was acquired from Cray (when SGI bough some of Cray and Sun bought the rest).
intel has nothing remotely close. I'm not sure about itanic, but intel is supposed to be developing a chipset to allow one single motherboard to be used for either Xeons or itanics. Therefore, to be compatible with Xeon, I can't see how the itanic can be much of an improvement. Allegedly itanic uses a crossbar switch (like old 64-bit workstations and the 320bit athlons) instead of the poxy old pentium bus. However, now I'm just speculating.
More usefully, if you want free as in beer and open as in source software to create PDFs on Linux get yourself over to OpenOffice.org
...and said in jest. Note the self-deprocating humour evident by the use of the word "conceited."
Yes, I know. If they'd delivered gcc in /usr/sfw two months earlier, we might have had time to remove it from the Companion CD. :-)
Music and video editing. CAD. Software Engineering.
No, your poxy M$ Turd word processor probably doesn't need 64 bits just now, but in 5 years time it will.
I still remember when the 386 was new and people were saying exactly the same things about the 16 to 32 bit transition that you are saying about 32 to 64 bits just now.
Er, um, well...
Did you look on the Companion CD that comes in your media kit?
Well did you?
Did you look on www.sun.com?
Did you hell.
But you still get modded up.
And for what it's worth, if you are running the 64-bit AMD Solaris 10 kernel, you are running a Solaris kernel compiled with gcc 3.4.x
Breaking the 4GB segment barrier. If you ever coded on an 8-bit micro or DOS PeeCee you'll understand the crapness of small memory segements and the frustration and bugs caused.
There are other improvements in Opteron (AMD64) that are nothing to do with being 64-bit (such as the integrated memory controller, Hypertransport, NUMA, advanced superscalar execution) that have their roots in larger systems of yesteryear that intel has yet to catch up with (except in itanic).
And don't get me started on itanic. It's basically an over-grown signal processor whose sole purpose in life is executing SPEC floating-point benchmarks.
Anyway, screw the computer industry, I'm off to do something less boring instead.
Your initial question smacks of the lack of imagination and small-mindedness that condemns 99% of the population to a lifetime of mediocrity.
Isn't beer fun? :-)
Two years ago when Sun decided to do an AMD64 port of Solaris, I spoke to my friendly Dell salesman and asked if they were going to be selling Opterons and he said "we're not sure, maybe if people ask for them."
Oh well. We bought a bunch of MSI and Tyan motherboards and made our own.
In three days time I will no longer work for Sun since I have been made redundant.
During my time at Sun I was part of the Companion CD team. We built on x86 and SPARC. For x86 builds we had a Dell 6400, Dell 6600 and finally a Sun V40z (4-way Opteron 246). For SPARC we built on E450, E4500, and V880 (8x900MHz UltraSPARC III) and V880 (8x1200MHz UltraSPARC III).
Now, I will not go into a long spiel about the realtive merits of the various hardware platforms, and I have no axe to grind now since I get my lasy pay cheque in a fortnight but:
Why the heck are you buying (32-bit intel) Dells when you can buy (cheaper and faster 64-bit) Opteron boxes from Sun? If you are a Linux fanboy, Sun will sell you one with DeadRat or SuSE. They are Windoze certified in case you have had a lobotomy, and you can run the free (as in beer) 64-bit Solaris 10 on them.
pBut hey, it's cool to hate Sun on slashdot.
What's doubly silly is going from 64-bit SPARC running Solaris to 32-bit intel (Dell) running Linux.
Going to 64-bit AMD running Linux (or even Solaris) I could understand...
It makes me feel conceited to think that I know better than wise and learned university staff.
Many a right-wing capitalist believes that people are poor because they are stupid.
Brazillians are on average poorer than Americans hence, by that logic, are more stupid. Stupid people are more likely to be convinced to pay for a crippled version of Windows in contrast to just using a superior (to the non-crippled Windows) Free operating system.
This ignorant arrogance will be Microsoft's downfall.
Oops, I forgot. Never discuss religion on slashdot (unless to support it). If I say, "Evolution is 'only' a theory," can I have my karma back?
From what I can gather of Catholicism, merely being fruitful and multiplying isn't enough. That poor, almighty, omniscient soul, God, is very sensitive and needs to feel wanted otherwise he sulks. (Discuss how something can be all-powerful and yet have a weakness.) So you not only have to breed, you have to breed lots of little Catholics.
OK, substitute all other religions for "Catholics" above. It holds equal water.
Speak nicely to your old boss and ask permission to show samples to your new prospective employer. Let old employer and new employer work out the legal details between them (and in the mean time they might both learn a thing or two about the ludicrous nature of "intellectual property" laws). The fact that you've shown the initiative might count for something, and also might demonstrate that your inablity to produce said evidence is not due to its non-existence, but rather beurocracy not of your making.
Pointy-haired closed-source commercial software people are no different. They will categorise others as GNU/Hippies as the will. It's the way of the world.
It's "us" and "them" whoever "us" and "them" are, even if we're all individuals.
Welcome to the crapness of human nature.
These guys seem to want to make it their business to do a port.
It will be interesting to see if anyone currently developing Linux jumps ship to Solaris...
/me ducks.
Spend it on soap, deodorant, toothpaste and mouthwash, and some quality Romantic novels (e.g. Bronte, Dickens, Trollope). Then go out on the pull with what's left of the money, your new found cleanliness, and well-rounded education.
You'd be better installing Ubuntu or even Solaris 10 if you believe in such things.
/me ducks.
When Linus started Linux he made it GPL'd. He said that it would aim towards POSIX (and other standards) compliance. The Open Group controls the Unix standards and gets to decide who calls what "Unix" (look at Apple's trouble). Linux can not be called "Unix" since it hasn't been validated. More specifically, every time it is modified, it would have to be revalidated to conform to the spec AFAIK, and not just the Linux kernel. It's more involved than that.
After Apple OS X, Linux is probably the most widely deployed Unix-like OS on the planet.
Sun is now open-sourcing Solaris to try to compete with Linux, to rejuvenate the Solaris community and to get more developers involved in Solaris and software to run on Solaris. Solaris is still 5 years ahead of Linux in many areas.
Now, if someone had developed a JVM in all but name (unable to call it "Java" for branding reasons), GPL'd it and said that it aimed towards Java compliance...
Just another thought.
It really is annoying not being able to redistribute those binaries that you've made. Keep shouting, but shout at the right people. They are listening, but big ships take time to turn.
OK, I'll admit I'm a beginner when it comes to Java, and I have been working for Sun for 4 years (which ends in a fortnight due to economics) so I maybe have been drinking the Kool Aid a bit, but why don't you ask IBM to make you a Free/OpenBSD JVM port? From what I can see, IBM loves to make PR out of Sun's perceived failings. Just look at the amount of IBM posted here as news.
Sun is very bad at PR and struggles to communicate well with the Linux/FOSS/Slashdot community. That's no secret. You can judge for yourself.
What also amazes me, is that Miguel jumped on the .NET bandwagon and started a .NET/C#/CLR project frmo scratch when he could have taken an Open Source or Free JVM/JRE project and built upon that.
Just a thought.
the reality is that unless SUN decided to make binaries available for a platform with an end-user license, there is no practical way of getting JAVA on a machine.
Wrong. You confuse Java the language with Java the platform. gcc compiles Java source down to native machine code on most architectures and provides its own runtime for the parts of the system which require it. If you want to run Java bytecode (either compiled with gcc or some other Java compiler) you have a joice of Java Virtual Machines and Java Runtime Environments from sever manufacturers, including IBM.
Now, SUN of course has such binaries for Windows, Solaris and Linux and some other systems, but for example not for FreeBSD/OpenBSD.
FreeBSD and OpenBSD run Linux binaries very well. Native ports to these platforms are not required. Incidentally, Solaris 10 will also run Linux binaries unmodified on x86.
First of all, few Linux distributions seem to have managed to include a JAVA runtime environment at all, in all other cases I have to download it from SUN. More problematic however is that when maintaining a Linux machine, you may end up having to install newer versions of libraries, which at times introduces compatibility issues. It is however not trivial to just recompile JAVA and link against the new libraries.
Well, I use Slackware and that comes with an up-to-date Sun Java Runtime Environment. Installing a JRE (or SDK) is not very difficult, and is rearely more complicated than extracting a tarball as root and setting some environmnet variables. As for recompiling Java to run against "new libraries" you completely miss the point of Java. The new JREs are backwards compatible.
Failure to do so may result in one or both of two things:
* An alternative Open Source JAVA gets created over time
* JAVA becomes irrelevant
Unless you have been living under a rock, you will realise that there are several independent Java implementations available, including ones from Sun and IBM, a free one called kaffe, and of course gcc's java compiler. Java will not become irrelevant. There are billions of computing devices around the world running Java. What might happen is that Miguel's anti Java/pro .NET FUD might become a mindset amongst the /. zealots. (Might? I think it already has).
The recent settlement between SUN and Microsoft doesn't bode well
No, not for Microsoft. As usual, they're doing a good job of shooting themselves in the foot.
Anyway, your article sucks.
Sun's Java implementation is closed source.. Other peoples' implementations are either closed or open source depending. My point is that there's a choice.
Java is many things. It is a programming language. It is also a runtime environment in the form of a protable virtual machine. It also comes with a huge class library.
For some reason, that monkey Miguel went and decided to write his own version of M$'s Java clone, C#/.NET, for "Linux" (i.e. Unix-like OSes) to undermine everyone else's work.
Now, you can get branded Java from people other than Sun e.g. IBM. IBM is currently a great favourite of the slashdot peanut gallery.
In addition, gcc comes with a Java-language to native code compiler as well as byte code (to run on the evil, nasty closed-soure Sun (or IBM or whoever's) JVM).
If you don't like Sun, or IBM, or Blackdown or kaffe's JVM, including their JIT compilers which can optimise to exceed the efficiency of statically-compiled code, then you can always revert to gcc's Java language compiler.
However, I'm sure these facts will be conventiently ignored for the sake of a good, heated argument, and many rants.