Exactly. That's my point, go buy a support contract for free sw and reduce the military budget by a lot more than what you save on the sw. You can then spend all this extra cash you were wasting on more productive things for society, things that bring about real change and benifit for people.
That is true but when your millitary has a budget of $400bn it's not a lot, and besides it's proprietry software that runs in pretty much all your planes bombs and what not.
A better way would be to half the millitary budget and install some kind of NHS system so that everyone could benifit from decent care when needed.
Does that mean google has to go too? After all you can always use that to search for mp3's
It seems to me that anything that trawls for information is now illegal in the RIAAs eyes. I suppose the only way that this will end is if they try to sue someone who can afford to fight in them courts and make it so tht future such actions can't occur. Looks like the RIAA is speciffically targeting people who they know wont be able to afford to fight them in court but who can give them a few grand. Thus preserving their right to threaten college students who cave in and settle out of court.
I disagree. Every time Sun has made something cheap, it has been CHEAP. Take the uniprocessor and dual processor Ultrasparcs for example. The Ultra 1 and 2 were pretty well-built machines, though certainly not up to the standards of the SS20 for example. Ultra 5 machines are flaky like a normal PC, I keep hearing of systems with dead this or nonfunctional that. As it is, the only Sun system I've ever received DOA was an Ultra 2, which isn't even built as cheaply as the Ultra 5 and 10 (you can tell.)
I use an Ultra1 as my desktop at work (at Sun) and before that an Ultra 5, both are rock solid and powerful enough for work use and this is about 8 years after they were released. Although I could really do with a v240 as my desktop.
I can't remember how much of a stake Scott Mc Nealy holds with Sun (is it greater than 50%?) I remember a while back him saying that he would only accept a cash only offer for the company. And there aren't that many people around with that ammount of cash in the bank who are also willing to spend it. I think Cisco would be a good parternering acquisition and make Sun a more competative player in the market. Hopefully they'd reform Sun and add a lot of clout to any offer they could put to customers. Trying to sell. Sun + Cisco > IBM or HP or Dell (naturally;-))
The reason why the NASA is keeping old 8080 Intels in their shuttles is that they won't get decent code quality form modern processors these days.
Employ decent programmers and use decent compliers is what that comes down to, nothing to do with the processor. NASA employ extreamly strict code review processes for their software although I tend to agree that for 'consumer' code sloppy coding has been the result, but better interfaces too.
I really think AMD has to get it's head on straight soon. They are being trounced by Intel and have gone back a few years to being the processor for budget buyers only. Hopefully the Athlon 64 will rock and hit intel where it hurts althoughw ith memory prices as they stand I can't see many people taking full use of it any time soon.
... wider bus, lights out management, proper console connection, Solaris stack and future plans for dual core processors and N1. Performance wise, at the low end Sun systems might struggle against x86 but they come with a whole lot more. This make them extreamly nice from a sys admin point of view that makes them excellent systems.
Eventually, an underpowered underdog (say, Linux) captures the smaller markets. Through gradual improvements, the underdog is eventually powerful enough to meet the requirements of the established company's customers.
I don't think you can say that Sun has been ignoring the low end, it's their low end that makes them the most money. Their volume systems, the 1&2P systems up to 12P systems are developed by 10% of the workforce yet contribute over a third to Suns bottom line.
Sun find them selves in strange position of liking and wanting a part of the Linux pie and the x86 pie whilst wanting people to eventually migrate to SPARC Solaris where there is the biggest value add for the customer and profit for Sun. It's been tepid in this area kind of not knowing where to turn but now I think it's clear what they want to achieve. In the end I think offering people a large choice of products, Solaris & Sun Linux on x86 and SPARC is a good idea. Put all together, people can mix and match the components they want, the architecture they want and have it all work seamlessly under N1 and the Sun software stack.
I can't imagine anone wanting to run Windows on sun hardware to start with. Plus there is still a lot of proprietry hardware that goes into making the blades and chassis work that I don't think Sun are going to share.
An 8 processor system running 8 core SPARC processors, now that would be a beast! I think we have to wait about a year for that though. The two core chips are comming first by the end of the year hopfully, 1.2GHz + IIRC. I think these will run in the new v210, v240 and 2PTower servers, possibly the blades, I'm not too sure.
I don't think so. Sun has more people working on SPARC than AMD do on it's processors. Sun wants to use these on their blades, in the Sun fire blade 100's. That'll give them SPARC Solaris, x86 Solaris and x86 Linux available to mix and match in the B1600 shelf. They'll probably get used in the Cobalt line if they can.
But in now way is Sun giving up on SPARC there are plenty of ground breaking chips in the pipeline for the not to distant future.
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Exactly. That's my point, go buy a support contract for free sw and reduce the military budget by a lot more than what you save on the sw. You can then spend all this extra cash you were wasting on more productive things for society, things that bring about real change and benifit for people.
That is true but when your millitary has a budget of $400bn it's not a lot, and besides it's proprietry software that runs in pretty much all your planes bombs and what not.
A better way would be to half the millitary budget and install some kind of NHS system so that everyone could benifit from decent care when needed.
Does that mean google has to go too? After all you can always use that to search for mp3's
It seems to me that anything that trawls for information is now illegal in the RIAAs eyes. I suppose the only way that this will end is if they try to sue someone who can afford to fight in them courts and make it so tht future such actions can't occur. Looks like the RIAA is speciffically targeting people who they know wont be able to afford to fight them in court but who can give them a few grand. Thus preserving their right to threaten college students who cave in and settle out of court.
oh, i was just joking. Those people must have either been 'smoking' a lot or had real forsight to do that in 1993.
jism in 0-G I don't fancy cleaning that up! "oh man! Last nights 'thought' is all over the navigation system now".
Subdomains!
.mod.mer
.nhs.ven
.bushsplanet.eth
.info.mar
.org.jup
.gov.sat
.sex.anus
.car.nep
.lone.plo
I think the lag when playing HL2 with someone on Mars would be too much to take.
I disagree. Every time Sun has made something cheap, it has been CHEAP. Take the uniprocessor and dual processor Ultrasparcs for example. The Ultra 1 and 2 were pretty well-built machines, though certainly not up to the standards of the SS20 for example. Ultra 5 machines are flaky like a normal PC, I keep hearing of systems with dead this or nonfunctional that. As it is, the only Sun system I've ever received DOA was an Ultra 2, which isn't even built as cheaply as the Ultra 5 and 10 (you can tell.)
;-))
I use an Ultra1 as my desktop at work (at Sun) and before that an Ultra 5, both are rock solid and powerful enough for work use and this is about 8 years after they were released. Although I could really do with a v240 as my desktop. I can't remember how much of a stake Scott Mc Nealy holds with Sun (is it greater than 50%?) I remember a while back him saying that he would only accept a cash only offer for the company. And there aren't that many people around with that ammount of cash in the bank who are also willing to spend it. I think Cisco would be a good parternering acquisition and make Sun a more competative player in the market. Hopefully they'd reform Sun and add a lot of clout to any offer they could put to customers. Trying to sell. Sun + Cisco > IBM or HP or Dell (naturally
The reason why the NASA is keeping old 8080 Intels in their shuttles is that they won't get decent code quality form modern processors these days.
Employ decent programmers and use decent compliers is what that comes down to, nothing to do with the processor. NASA employ extreamly strict code review processes for their software although I tend to agree that for 'consumer' code sloppy coding has been the result, but better interfaces too.
I really think AMD has to get it's head on straight soon. They are being trounced by Intel and have gone back a few years to being the processor for budget buyers only. Hopefully the Athlon 64 will rock and hit intel where it hurts althoughw ith memory prices as they stand I can't see many people taking full use of it any time soon.
... wider bus, lights out management, proper console connection, Solaris stack and future plans for dual core processors and N1. Performance wise, at the low end Sun systems might struggle against x86 but they come with a whole lot more. This make them extreamly nice from a sys admin point of view that makes them excellent systems.
Eventually, an underpowered underdog (say, Linux) captures the smaller markets. Through gradual improvements, the underdog is eventually powerful enough to meet the requirements of the established company's customers.
I don't think you can say that Sun has been ignoring the low end, it's their low end that makes them the most money. Their volume systems, the 1&2P systems up to 12P systems are developed by 10% of the workforce yet contribute over a third to Suns bottom line. Sun find them selves in strange position of liking and wanting a part of the Linux pie and the x86 pie whilst wanting people to eventually migrate to SPARC Solaris where there is the biggest value add for the customer and profit for Sun. It's been tepid in this area kind of not knowing where to turn but now I think it's clear what they want to achieve. In the end I think offering people a large choice of products, Solaris & Sun Linux on x86 and SPARC is a good idea. Put all together, people can mix and match the components they want, the architecture they want and have it all work seamlessly under N1 and the Sun software stack.
I can't imagine anone wanting to run Windows on sun hardware to start with. Plus there is still a lot of proprietry hardware that goes into making the blades and chassis work that I don't think Sun are going to share.
An 8 processor system running 8 core SPARC processors, now that would be a beast! I think we have to wait about a year for that though. The two core chips are comming first by the end of the year hopfully, 1.2GHz + IIRC. I think these will run in the new v210, v240 and 2PTower servers, possibly the blades, I'm not too sure.
I don't think so. Sun has more people working on SPARC than AMD do on it's processors. Sun wants to use these on their blades, in the Sun fire blade 100's. That'll give them SPARC Solaris, x86 Solaris and x86 Linux available to mix and match in the B1600 shelf. They'll probably get used in the Cobalt line if they can.
But in now way is Sun giving up on SPARC there are plenty of ground breaking chips in the pipeline for the not to distant future.