Re:Courts vs reality: microsoft is not a monopoly.
on
Longhorn in 2006
·
· Score: 1
> Yes, it is a fact that the courts lied.
Uh... huh. You don't find this at all disingenuous or anything, do you? But, well, I guess you wouldn't.
> The same kind of courts that declared blacks to be 4/5 of a person and Bush to be president.
Check your numbers. But definitely cute examples.
> I can read a dictionary even if a few boobs in robes can't.
So it has never occurred to you, even in your wildest dreams, that the definition of 'monopoly' in the LAW that they were INTERPRETING might be a little bit different than the definition of 'monopoly' in your little college dictionary?
I'll tell you what, how about this: every time you see the word 'monopoly' in relation to Microsoft, or the anti-trust legislation, or anything similar, mentally substitute the word 'grundlesnort'. That way, since it's not in your dictionary, and is therefore only defined in terms of the law and of Microsoft's behaviour, there's no conflict, and suddenly the justices were perfectly correct.
My company finds it much more effective to buy Powerbooks and Dell laptops for its employees. Plug into monitors and external keyboards just fine, and at the end of the day the employee can bring it home and maybe (eek!) actually do some work there as well. In fact, because of this, we actually have (no, *really*) some people who telecommute one day a week and actually *get* *something* *done* at home! Wow!
'Ever seen a badly configured system on the network fuck up connections to other computers?'
Not for years. And we're running the most hererogenous small network I've seen for a long time.
Basically, these days, since unswitched networks and 10-base-2 are gone the way of the winds, there is almost nothing that will bring down a well-designed network except operator incompetence or inadequate design due to inadequate funding or inadequate manpower. Which do you have?
'If an employee needs a tool for their job, they request it, just like any other resource. It will be investigated and implemented if appropriate and feasible.'
This almost always means management will look at it and shrug and look at IT, and IT will look at it and say 'No, that might mean work for us', and the request is rubber-stamped 'no'. As for 'More often than not, it's a bad idea to implement their demands', what that means is, 'I don't care if it actually works, more often than not it annoys me and doesn't save ME any work.'
Mind you, this is most often because IT departments are understaffed by 50% for the work they have to do. But that doesn't excuse the attitude. The appropriate response in that case is, 'We could order that, but we don't have the manpower to support it', or 'We could order that, but only after I talk to him and assure myself that he can support it himself, because we don't have the manpower to support it,' or even, 'Yes, that would be an excellent solution to his problem, and probably make him a lot more productive; it's a pity we don't have the manpower to support it'.
Just rubber stamping 'no' on things, or (even worse) assuming that YOU know better than the end user how to do his job, just leads to the kind of IT that *should* be outsourced to India.
Apple has already answered this question, but you really had to be paying attention to notice it. When the fellow tried to sell his iTunes-purchased song via eBay, Apple's comment was: we believe that this is legal, but probably not logistically feasible.'
The reason they believed it was legal was because of the dictates of the right of first purchase. However, if the right of first purchase is in fact applicable here (as Apple has said it is), then you are the owner of the song in question, and it can no longer be considered a 'service'. I believe there are also very strict regulations about how a contract you signed when purchasing something can be changed, even if it has a 'we can change this contract any time we feel like it' clause in it.
There was ONE guy who complained that this was the case. He called Apple, and either they or he misinterpreted something and complained about it all over the place. Apple noticed this and contacted him and reauthorized his stuff, and told him that their policy was to reauthorize people in these circumstances, and that there had been a mistake.
One, MacOS 8 (circa 1996, so don't even compare it with Win98) and 9 are much more stable and pleasant network citizens than Windows 95 and 98, in my experience (having run three different networks, two corporate and one university, in the last ten years). (And the dramatic majority of machines in a corporate environment are certainly able to run 9 anyway. Which is definitely a better citizen than 8 is.)
Two, the earliest machines that run MacOS X are vintage 1997, and despite some griping from a few people here and there, I can tell you that on my vintage (early) 1998 beige G3 300 mhz (upgraded to 512 mb RAM), it runs *just* *fine*, including the internet sharing, web site-hosting, file serving, DNS, and a number of other server tasks, plus checking email, web browsing, etc. (Admittedly, I do my dev work, and my IT admin work, from my 400 mHz TiBook). So maybe comparing an OS that your vintage 1997 machine can be *comfortably* upgraded to, and Windows 98 (which is all that some similarly-aged machines can run with any reasonable level of performance) is not so irrational as you claim.
And yes, I know that 10.3.0 won't support the beige box. I don't know if I'll buy a new desktop then, or just continue using 10.2 on that machine and just upgrade my laptop.
According to the ones I've seen, blast runs approximately an order of magnitude faster on a single G4 1.25 than it does on a single Pentium IV 2.8. Now, I don't know about the Xeons, but I'm going to hazard a guess that they aren't much different. So you'd need ten 2.8 Pentium IVs to match a G4.
Now, you might say that these numbers are wrong. I say in turn, I haven't seen anyone claiming that they're wrong except you. Have you run tests? If so, did you use the BLAST app that Apple provided, since it's been heavily altivec-enhanced (to match the vector-enhanced Intel versions)?
So your claim is that if one company has a competitive advantage over another, then it automatically instantly wins and all of its competitors go away?
Additionally, are you somehow claiming that speed doesn't give you any competitive advantage at all?
So you don't think it says anything about human folly that this guy made a post saying 'but it doesn't hold a candle to these thingies here!' and putting two links to silly and amusing parody sites, and then was immediately marked as insightful and informative, when that was obviously the exact opposite not only of wht he actually was but of what he was actually intending?
*woosh* (Wow, all in one breath.)
Note that I make that last distinction because it is still ironic if someone makes a post that is 100% false and someone marks it as informative and insightful, even if he DOES think it's true. It's just that it's partly his fault too.
If your/tmp is that big, you're doing something very strange. No, that is, of course, the extra swap file(s) that MacOS X creates when it runs out of swap space with the first swap file it creates. You reboot, the extra swap file goes away, and doesn't get recreated for a while.
Incidentally, if you use up that 500 megs in the mean time, so you don't have enough space on the boot drive for MacOS X to create a new swap file when it needs to, Bad Things Happen.
It's called 'Paying for Software'. I'm aware that Slashdot readers have some serious problems wrapping their minds around this concept, but there are a few people out there who have figured it out.
You see, Apple decided that their backup program would only be available to people who PAID them for it, and decided that this subscription service was a good way to implement that without adding the overhead of an additional product to the company. So they rolled the software in with.Mac, and now if you want Apple's branded backup software, you pay them for it! Wow!
See? It's not THAT hard to understand, even for a dumb PC user.
If you have the machine set to auto-login, next time wait two minutes and watch the clock. If it doesn't change, then at the very least your display server is toast.
Well, or the clock program is dead. But that seems unlikely.
But they didn't become popular, didn't become a common replacement for Intel chips in the real world, until the K5 and K6, and the 6x86 (from whoever made those), etc. Before that, Intel didn't have to worry about them; they weren't much of a threat.
According to you, then, Apple, when it sells direct to a customer through the Apple store, is making less than a 15% margin on its machines. Because that's the typical maximum discount they give, except in cases of clearing up back stock to make way for new models. Even then, I suspect that Apple's margins are 'healthy' enough that they're not selling below cost, but I *know* their margins are more than 15%. It's one of the things people like you complain about, that Apple makes big margins on their machines, 'overcharging' their poor, hapless consumers.
Basically, grow up, There are plenty of nasty, awful things that Apple has done in the past, and a number of them they still do. When you make stupid accusations with no basis in fact, just because it's Apple and you hate them, you make it harder to have a reasonable dialog about what's really going on.
Okay, I can see that. If we're progressive about our income tax, I can't imagine why we couldn't be progressive about our capital gains taxes as well.
The truly sad thing is, I didn't even *think* of that before you said it. I mean, god, I'm a liberal, and we have this absolutely dead-flat tax, and the debate has been SO much about getting rid of it or not getting rid of it that it didn't even occur to me to make it progressive.
If you let your enemies frame the debate, you've already lost.
The real answer is that the problems that are going to be solved with this cluster are easily parallelizable. That's the IDEA, right? 1100 machines, each running one chunk. Well, the G5, and more specifically the Altivec vector processing section of it, is SO MUCH better for processing big bites of easily parallelizable data at a time than any of the alternatives that it can run rings around any Intel or AMD machine you care to name with fewer than double the number of processors. (And in the cases of some particular kinds of calculations, it beats those, too. But you can't count on that for all your problems.)
We've seen this before a number of times... I seem to recall a gene sequencing program that was running five or six times faster on a G4 than it was on a Pentium IV of the same speed. And then there's SETI@home, which runs much faster, cycle-for-cycle, on the Mac, and doesn't even USE altivec. (Though I believe it does take advantage of the 'multiply-and-add' instruction of the PPC, which is another nice little feature.)
Altivec is an astonishingly clean and usable interface for an amazingly powerful vector processor that is, in 99% of the Macs out there, underutilized to the point that if it suddenly disappeared, most people wouldn't notice any difference at all. It's kind of a pity, really.
Basically, Intel came out with MMX (and all the later developments) in order to have a talking point on a slide presentation about their processors, about the time when competitors like AMD were starting to come forward: functionally, an awful mess, and impossibly difficult to program. (In fact, for the first few years, Intel would send programmers out to work with companies to implement MMX, because otherwise none of them would bother.
AMD came up with something that was a little less hacked together in a very short period of time, as a response to Intel. But it still wasn't pretty, at least partially because of the limitations of the archetecture, and the performance wasn't *that* much better than just doing without.
Apple (who really designed a lot of the basics themselves when it comes to Altivec, so don't think this was a Motorola invention) said, 'Hey, wow, we need something like that, in order to compete.' First they decided on a coprocessor, but that didn't fly any better with the PPC than it did with the older Macs (840av, 660av) with DSPs in them. So they sat down and came up with a really *good* spec for a set of multimedia extensions. And they've only gotten better since.
I've toyed with altivec code, and I can tell you that in one application that I wrote, one instruction (vector permute) did the work of ten or more non-altiveced instructions on four times the data per cycle. Mind you, I just did it for fun, I don't know enough about parallel computing problems to come up with anything useful... but there's some interesting stuff under the hood.
Of course, nobody is going to believe this, because as fashionable as it is to like MacOS X on slashdot these days, nobody wants to admit that, for *some* subset of problems, Mr. Jobs's reality distortion field might not be quite as much of a distortion as you might think...
The boxes were purchased at the standard academic discount price from Apple. Not even a volume discount. It's said so in at least two of the articles I read about this story.
But the truth usually doesn't stand very well against the 'obviously true', does it?
We've got an Exchange box running behind a firewall, with a machine (also behind the firewall, but with a couple open ports) that accepts mail, virus-checks it, spam-checks it, and then forwards it to the exchange box. And we've got a VPN set up so that people can get to the Exchange box to get their email.
A whole lot of work, just so that our CEO can use the 'shared calendar' function on Exchange, huh?
Slashdot Mirror
> Yes, it is a fact that the courts lied.
Uh... huh. You don't find this at all disingenuous or anything, do you? But, well, I guess you wouldn't.
> The same kind of courts that declared blacks to be 4/5 of a person and Bush to be president.
Check your numbers. But definitely cute examples.
> I can read a dictionary even if a few boobs in robes can't.
So it has never occurred to you, even in your wildest dreams, that the definition of 'monopoly' in the LAW that they were INTERPRETING might be a little bit different than the definition of 'monopoly' in your little college dictionary?
I'll tell you what, how about this: every time you see the word 'monopoly' in relation to Microsoft, or the anti-trust legislation, or anything similar, mentally substitute the word 'grundlesnort'. That way, since it's not in your dictionary, and is therefore only defined in terms of the law and of Microsoft's behaviour, there's no conflict, and suddenly the justices were perfectly correct.
-fred
My company finds it much more effective to buy Powerbooks and Dell laptops for its employees. Plug into monitors and external keyboards just fine, and at the end of the day the employee can bring it home and maybe (eek!) actually do some work there as well. In fact, because of this, we actually have (no, *really*) some people who telecommute one day a week and actually *get* *something* *done* at home! Wow!
-fred
'Ever seen a badly configured system on the network fuck up connections to other computers?'
Not for years. And we're running the most hererogenous small network I've seen for a long time.
Basically, these days, since unswitched networks and 10-base-2 are gone the way of the winds, there is almost nothing that will bring down a well-designed network except operator incompetence or inadequate design due to inadequate funding or inadequate manpower. Which do you have?
'If an employee needs a tool for their job, they request it, just like any other resource. It will be investigated and implemented if appropriate and feasible.'
This almost always means management will look at it and shrug and look at IT, and IT will look at it and say 'No, that might mean work for us', and the request is rubber-stamped 'no'. As for 'More often than not, it's a bad idea to implement their demands', what that means is, 'I don't care if it actually works, more often than not it annoys me and doesn't save ME any work.'
Mind you, this is most often because IT departments are understaffed by 50% for the work they have to do. But that doesn't excuse the attitude. The appropriate response in that case is, 'We could order that, but we don't have the manpower to support it', or 'We could order that, but only after I talk to him and assure myself that he can support it himself, because we don't have the manpower to support it,' or even, 'Yes, that would be an excellent solution to his problem, and probably make him a lot more productive; it's a pity we don't have the manpower to support it'.
Just rubber stamping 'no' on things, or (even worse) assuming that YOU know better than the end user how to do his job, just leads to the kind of IT that *should* be outsourced to India.
-fred
Apple has already answered this question, but you really had to be paying attention to notice it. When the fellow tried to sell his iTunes-purchased song via eBay, Apple's comment was: we believe that this is legal, but probably not logistically feasible.'
The reason they believed it was legal was because of the dictates of the right of first purchase. However, if the right of first purchase is in fact applicable here (as Apple has said it is), then you are the owner of the song in question, and it can no longer be considered a 'service'. I believe there are also very strict regulations about how a contract you signed when purchasing something can be changed, even if it has a 'we can change this contract any time we feel like it' clause in it.
-fred
Not, in fact, true.
There was ONE guy who complained that this was the case. He called Apple, and either they or he misinterpreted something and complained about it all over the place. Apple noticed this and contacted him and reauthorized his stuff, and told him that their policy was to reauthorize people in these circumstances, and that there had been a mistake.
-fred
A valid point, except for two things.
One, MacOS 8 (circa 1996, so don't even compare it with Win98) and 9 are much more stable and pleasant network citizens than Windows 95 and 98, in my experience (having run three different networks, two corporate and one university, in the last ten years). (And the dramatic majority of machines in a corporate environment are certainly able to run 9 anyway. Which is definitely a better citizen than 8 is.)
Two, the earliest machines that run MacOS X are vintage 1997, and despite some griping from a few people here and there, I can tell you that on my vintage (early) 1998 beige G3 300 mhz (upgraded to 512 mb RAM), it runs *just* *fine*, including the internet sharing, web site-hosting, file serving, DNS, and a number of other server tasks, plus checking email, web browsing, etc. (Admittedly, I do my dev work, and my IT admin work, from my 400 mHz TiBook). So maybe comparing an OS that your vintage 1997 machine can be *comfortably* upgraded to, and Windows 98 (which is all that some similarly-aged machines can run with any reasonable level of performance) is not so irrational as you claim.
And yes, I know that 10.3.0 won't support the beige box. I don't know if I'll buy a new desktop then, or just continue using 10.2 on that machine and just upgrade my laptop.
-fred
Which aren't Apple numbers, by the way.
According to the ones I've seen, blast runs approximately an order of magnitude faster on a single G4 1.25 than it does on a single Pentium IV 2.8. Now, I don't know about the Xeons, but I'm going to hazard a guess that they aren't much different. So you'd need ten 2.8 Pentium IVs to match a G4.
Now, you might say that these numbers are wrong. I say in turn, I haven't seen anyone claiming that they're wrong except you. Have you run tests? If so, did you use the BLAST app that Apple provided, since it's been heavily altivec-enhanced (to match the vector-enhanced Intel versions)?
If so, show me your numbers.
-fred
So your claim is that if one company has a competitive advantage over another, then it automatically instantly wins and all of its competitors go away?
Additionally, are you somehow claiming that speed doesn't give you any competitive advantage at all?
I revise my claim. Dumb *and* obnoxious.
-fred
I benefit every time someone buys a Mac before they're fully stable. (So does Microsoft, which is unfortunate.)
:-)
Why? Because I'm going to buy a G5 in six months.
-fred
You get points for Aretha Franklin, but many more points taken away for 'leetunes'.
(Unless your name is Lee, or your friend's name is Lee, or your wife's name is Lee, or your dog's name is Lee.)
-fred
So you don't think it says anything about human folly that this guy made a post saying 'but it doesn't hold a candle to these thingies here!' and putting two links to silly and amusing parody sites, and then was immediately marked as insightful and informative, when that was obviously the exact opposite not only of wht he actually was but of what he was actually intending?
*woosh* (Wow, all in one breath.)
Note that I make that last distinction because it is still ironic if someone makes a post that is 100% false and someone marks it as informative and insightful, even if he DOES think it's true. It's just that it's partly his fault too.
-fred
Actually, it's been a while since my lymph nodes have been drained, I'm probably due by now.
I need a lube job, too, but that's an entirely different issue.
-fred
Grr. No, slashdot, I'm not behind a wacky firewall, it really HAS been one minute since I last posted. I'm fast. Deal with it.
Please?
> That's probably from clearing out /tmp.
/tmp is that big, you're doing something very strange. No, that is, of course, the extra swap file(s) that MacOS X creates when it runs out of swap space with the first swap file it creates. You reboot, the extra swap file goes away, and doesn't get recreated for a while.
If your
Incidentally, if you use up that 500 megs in the mean time, so you don't have enough space on the boot drive for MacOS X to create a new swap file when it needs to, Bad Things Happen.
Trust me.
-fred
It's called 'Paying for Software'. I'm aware that Slashdot readers have some serious problems wrapping their minds around this concept, but there are a few people out there who have figured it out.
.Mac, and now if you want Apple's branded backup software, you pay them for it! Wow!
You see, Apple decided that their backup program would only be available to people who PAID them for it, and decided that this subscription service was a good way to implement that without adding the overhead of an additional product to the company. So they rolled the software in with
See? It's not THAT hard to understand, even for a dumb PC user.
-fred
> So, when they don't update it, it would become closed somehow? I don't get it.
When they don't update darwin to match the updates in MacOS X, the FreeBSD core of (the current release of) MacOS X isn't open source.
Even for an annoying nitpicker like me, that was a perfectly reasonable sentence.
-fred
If you have the machine set to auto-login, next time wait two minutes and watch the clock. If it doesn't change, then at the very least your display server is toast.
Well, or the clock program is dead. But that seems unlikely.
-fred
But they didn't become popular, didn't become a common replacement for Intel chips in the real world, until the K5 and K6, and the 6x86 (from whoever made those), etc. Before that, Intel didn't have to worry about them; they weren't much of a threat.
-fred
According to you, then, Apple, when it sells direct to a customer through the Apple store, is making less than a 15% margin on its machines. Because that's the typical maximum discount they give, except in cases of clearing up back stock to make way for new models. Even then, I suspect that Apple's margins are 'healthy' enough that they're not selling below cost, but I *know* their margins are more than 15%. It's one of the things people like you complain about, that Apple makes big margins on their machines, 'overcharging' their poor, hapless consumers.
Basically, grow up, There are plenty of nasty, awful things that Apple has done in the past, and a number of them they still do. When you make stupid accusations with no basis in fact, just because it's Apple and you hate them, you make it harder to have a reasonable dialog about what's really going on.
-fred
Okay, I can see that. If we're progressive about our income tax, I can't imagine why we couldn't be progressive about our capital gains taxes as well.
The truly sad thing is, I didn't even *think* of that before you said it. I mean, god, I'm a liberal, and we have this absolutely dead-flat tax, and the debate has been SO much about getting rid of it or not getting rid of it that it didn't even occur to me to make it progressive.
If you let your enemies frame the debate, you've already lost.
-fred
Or do you just want to bitch?
The real answer is that the problems that are going to be solved with this cluster are easily parallelizable. That's the IDEA, right? 1100 machines, each running one chunk. Well, the G5, and more specifically the Altivec vector processing section of it, is SO MUCH better for processing big bites of easily parallelizable data at a time than any of the alternatives that it can run rings around any Intel or AMD machine you care to name with fewer than double the number of processors. (And in the cases of some particular kinds of calculations, it beats those, too. But you can't count on that for all your problems.)
We've seen this before a number of times... I seem to recall a gene sequencing program that was running five or six times faster on a G4 than it was on a Pentium IV of the same speed. And then there's SETI@home, which runs much faster, cycle-for-cycle, on the Mac, and doesn't even USE altivec. (Though I believe it does take advantage of the 'multiply-and-add' instruction of the PPC, which is another nice little feature.)
Altivec is an astonishingly clean and usable interface for an amazingly powerful vector processor that is, in 99% of the Macs out there, underutilized to the point that if it suddenly disappeared, most people wouldn't notice any difference at all. It's kind of a pity, really.
Basically, Intel came out with MMX (and all the later developments) in order to have a talking point on a slide presentation about their processors, about the time when competitors like AMD were starting to come forward: functionally, an awful mess, and impossibly difficult to program. (In fact, for the first few years, Intel would send programmers out to work with companies to implement MMX, because otherwise none of them would bother.
AMD came up with something that was a little less hacked together in a very short period of time, as a response to Intel. But it still wasn't pretty, at least partially because of the limitations of the archetecture, and the performance wasn't *that* much better than just doing without.
Apple (who really designed a lot of the basics themselves when it comes to Altivec, so don't think this was a Motorola invention) said, 'Hey, wow, we need something like that, in order to compete.' First they decided on a coprocessor, but that didn't fly any better with the PPC than it did with the older Macs (840av, 660av) with DSPs in them. So they sat down and came up with a really *good* spec for a set of multimedia extensions. And they've only gotten better since.
I've toyed with altivec code, and I can tell you that in one application that I wrote, one instruction (vector permute) did the work of ten or more non-altiveced instructions on four times the data per cycle. Mind you, I just did it for fun, I don't know enough about parallel computing problems to come up with anything useful... but there's some interesting stuff under the hood.
Of course, nobody is going to believe this, because as fashionable as it is to like MacOS X on slashdot these days, nobody wants to admit that, for *some* subset of problems, Mr. Jobs's reality distortion field might not be quite as much of a distortion as you might think...
-fred
Funniest thing I've seen all day.
And I'm a Mac guy, too. I wouldn't mind wandering through that room for a while myself... though I probably would keep my pants on.
-fred
...after a good ten minutes of googling, I can't actually find anything out about it.
Basically, he made it up, because he doesn't like the idea that something like this might be possible.
-fred
The boxes were purchased at the standard academic discount price from Apple. Not even a volume discount. It's said so in at least two of the articles I read about this story.
But the truth usually doesn't stand very well against the 'obviously true', does it?
-fred
We've got an Exchange box running behind a firewall, with a machine (also behind the firewall, but with a couple open ports) that accepts mail, virus-checks it, spam-checks it, and then forwards it to the exchange box. And we've got a VPN set up so that people can get to the Exchange box to get their email.
A whole lot of work, just so that our CEO can use the 'shared calendar' function on Exchange, huh?
-fred
virus n. pl. viruses
The American Heritage Dictionary
(Also, the Oxford English Dictionary, and possibly others I didn't check.)
-fred