They don't compete any more. They mandate. Their problem seems to be that OEMs are now following along by releasing systems under their mandate, but also building neat stuff outside the mandate. They can't do anything about the fact that their mandate subtracts value, making the new Linux gear immensely popular.
Can someone convince me that these devices are [very] useful to the point of replacing the notebook?
The point isn't really to replace the notebook. They'll do that too, though. A modern laptop is ridiculously overpowered for the purpose of running a well designed OS and office application. The idea is to make it cheap enough to not freak out about breaking it, to provide enough power to do your stuff but not so much that you have to be chained to a wall wart to accomplish anything that takes more than two hours.
Can I for example, load OpenOffice.org on the Eee PC?
Yes. And it runs just fine. And with Compiz the visual effects are flashier than Aero if you want them to be. And it will play HD video just fine. And it's got all the wireless features you would expect. And on and on. The screen and keyboard are a little small. The next generation may be better in this regard.
So if you're looking for thin & light notebooks to join your AD domain, you still need the Linux ones.
They've just defined the features for the next big Linux boom: 12" touch screen, 100GB HDD, dual core. That was clever. Differentiate your product as the less capable one. Genius!
These machines will never run Vista well. Let's keep that important knowledge in front of people. Intel expects to move 10 million Atom platforms in the first wave, and none will have Vista.
Because the APA was secret until extracted in the SCO V Novell trial, there was no way for Sun to know SCO didn't have the rights. That wasn't settled by the court until last August.
Sun could know, though that they were creeps that it was dangerous to do business with them. That much was clear by the way they were running aruond suing or threatening to sue everyone who had ever done business with them.
stupid enough? I don't know about the characterization.
They had the rights to SVR4 that Solaris is based on to use it, to develop their own OS based on it, to sell it under trade secret and copyright protection but not to make it open. They then bought that right for a song from SCO because at that moment the latter needed a cash infusion to continue their jihad against Linux.
The judge in te SCO V Novell case ruled last August that SCO does not own the copyright to SVR4 and it follows had no right to sell the right to make it open. Novell owns that right and reserved it in a document called th APA. You can read about it on groklaw.
The reason why Novell reserved that right - and why the rights to unix were split so badly as to make it irretrievably dead had to do with Ransom Love's hubris. Hubris is the arrogance of pride.
Mr. Love was president and founder of one of the earliest commercial Linux companies, the Santa Cruz Operation (not to be confused with SCO). When his IPO went bizarrely huge for no good reason its treasury stock was worth several more digits than he was used to dealing with. Paid in equity grew to half a billion and they never sold the majority of treasury stock. Marke cap was several times that early on. Of course he bought all the toys the bubble millionaires like and threw huge company parties, but he was also an old school geek like you find here on slashdot now and then.
It happened that at that precise moment the company that had purchased the rights, code and business of unix from bell labs in their breakup (but not the trademark oddly enough), Novell was finding no success with unix and needed a cash infusion to retake ownership of the network, which had been their genesis. (Some will get the irony of this!). Being an old school geek Ransom wanted to "buy unix" as a trophy for having built a successful Linux business.
Unfortunately he didn't have enough to buy the whole thing and being as he was still wet behind the ears in corporate goverment and his company had never ever turned a quarterly profit, Novell insisted on terms. Here's where the hubris come in. He bought the right to market unix for 5% of the gross with the rest going to Novell plus the right to develop a new and better unix he could keep all of the profits from. For rhis he paid in company stock that I hope Novell sold right away because within a year it was nearly wothless. I think he really believed he could mix in GNU/Linux and come out with something like this Open Solaris and buy up the rest of the rights and take over the server market. It didn't work out because he didn't have the rights to open it fully to attract open developers, his ipo money bled out too fast and eventually his company was bought out by an investment group (this one is the SCO we know and loathe)
By making the attempt he fractured the rights to unix in such a way that the OS languished for over a decade, much to the glee of Microsoft which spent that decade taking ownership of the desktop network client and nearly half of servers. In software a decade is a very long time.
I hope this explains it well enough. My thumbs hurt now.
ARM took off in the thin and light space because of the watts. The thing is that ARM cannot compete with Atom in toolchain or processing power or available software or available hardware.
ARM can get better but there's a reason Intel sold it. It may live on in phones and devices like that.
For internet everywhere devices, no. Look at the available choices for browsers on ARM platforms. Blech. The Atom devices and their counterparts from via will run modern operating systems (but not vista) and familiar apps and interact with the usb devices and networking you already have. Add to this that Atom is "low power enough" and it's over.
The race may not go always to the swift or the battle to the strong, but that's where the smart money lays their bets.
Don't believe the major information providers. The boom of the 90's was all about the information infrastructure and the insanely huge margins available in delivering bandwidth at monopoly prices. They cook the books to make it look like it's a loss-making enterprise and then lobby aggressively for every advantage they can get.
Remember $1.10 a minute to the town just across the county line when calls to the far side of the country were $.10/min or less? What do you suppose that was about?
Rural areas of my state get symmetrical 100mbps broadband for $40/month from their public utility and the utility makes money at this. No joke. Low latency Fiber To The Premises. In the urban counties we are protected by Qwest and Comcast from this government abuse so we pay twice as much for 1% as much uplink with over 500 times the population density.
What kind of idiot thinks that the highway between producers of goods and their markets, between the markets and consumers, are in the domain of government responsibility?
I recall a clue here I followed here on Slashdot to an interesting story. It happens that in the 90's there was literally no interest in building out broadband to rural areas of the state because of the enormous cost of wiring sparsely populated areas. Three state power districts (PUDs) had embarrassing surplus funds from their overbuilt hydro installations they needed to get rid of. They got permission to pilot broadband over fiber to the home (FTTH) to dissipate some of the excess. After some time building out their networks (circa 2000) Farmer John on his tractor can reap the grain and enjoy VOIP and streaming hi-def video to his laptop because his household network has a symmetrical 100mbps with ridiculously low latency. This costs him $40 a month and installation is $100 or free. Unfortunately charging these rates is enormously profitable even though most homes are miles apart. You can imagine the economic disaster this was. The PUDs are government agencies and are not supposed to be earning the absurd profits they're making on this transaction.
The economic impacts kept getting worse. Major server farms and hosting companies are building out huge factory style hosting plants where once nothing grew but grass. This gained huge new tax revenues, and of course highly paid server room techs and managers need places to live so property values increased tenfold (with the accompanying dizzying increase in property taxes of course). This of course drew attention to the unspoiled natural beauty of the land, which began to draw tourism. Now they have no idea what they're going to do with this excess money and are considering some sort of negative income tax or dividend fund similar to Alaska.
Recently it was proposed that the ability to offer this service to the residents of the other public utility districts in some sort of Senate Bill. Fortunately it may have drawn the attention of public minded lobbyists because it was sent to die quietly in committee unread and the crisis was averted.
I wish I could remember where I found that clue. I think it was in a sig.
They were hoping for 100M units this year. They've reached 0.5% of that. Turning over the entire leadership team to corporate pawns and stripping out everything that makes the platform special is not going to help.
With its social mission dead, I don't see any positive outcome for the product. I'll agree with the other poster who said it's an overpriced under performing subnotebook without the parts (including open systems) that made it special. With the market about to be awash in Atom mini-notebooks we won't remember this one two years from now. "A cute experiment. Too bad it didn't work out."
It's sad to see progress thrown so often under the wagon wheels of commerce.
If you want to understand this thoroughly and completely, the most reasonable thing to do would be to just read the standard. It's only a few thousand pages. You should be able to grind your way through it in a few days. ISO did.
Boot the rascals out. All of them. Even the ones that vote against it will do so because passage of this evil plan is a foregone conclusion and so the powerful puppetmasters will vote against it to a negotiated victory for the plan. Out with them. All of them.
If you give a damn about liberty and privacy boot the rascals out.
Data center folks... You know you can sell them 72GB SCSI drives all day. They have no clue about reliability, performance, capacity or redundancy. All they know is what they learned 10 years ago when they got their certs, and what their rep has told them since. They have no desire to read Google's published data.
SAS is the latest fad if they're not buying into iSCSI or whatever else they've been told is the latest trend in reliability and performance.
My vote for reliability, redundancy, bandwidth, volume and price? A low power Linux or BSD host on a platform with lots of bus bandwidth with lots of SATA Host controllers that support the attached SATA Port Multipliers. Then calculate. Five drives per Port Multiplier, 16 port multipliers per host controller (PCIE x8). Capacity is nothing less than immense even with the cheapest available drives (That's 800 SATA drives per x8 PCIe slot). RAID 6 with LED indicators. Net Drive bandwidth across this many drives can approach RAM bandwidth. Latency is not as good. Add processor cores to divide the data processed/network bandwidth to suit. With cheapest B/$ drives this is 400TB/slot. With highest capacity it's 800TB/slot or 3.2PB per server. For capacity on a retail solution this is about the max. YMMV. Rack mounts? Try sheet metal, a bender and a drill. Fans are <$1 in volume. You can put drives three deep and 20 wide in 3U with a PSU at the rear with room for cables. That's 800 drives per standard rack, with room for the server also. Failures? If a drive in an array fails, take an image of it and throw it away. The peers of a failed drive are probably doomed.
Of course if you need really high volume data storage you should send me a gmail with the specifics for a more tailored solution:-)
Naturally you're going to need a fatter network tube. At 10 Gbps it takes 44 minutes to backup 3.2PB.
A 400MHz processor can saturate a 1Gbit network link, or two. If they're File servers, more is not needed.
If they're serving files from encrypted media to encrypted links without offloading the encryption, there may be issues. Otherwise the excess clocks are unnecessary waste of watts.
Slashdot Mirror
But it does have an external video port.
They don't compete any more. They mandate. Their problem seems to be that OEMs are now following along by releasing systems under their mandate, but also building neat stuff outside the mandate. They can't do anything about the fact that their mandate subtracts value, making the new Linux gear immensely popular.
Let's not miss this one. The Atom processors will come up to dual core. No XP for them.
The point isn't really to replace the notebook. They'll do that too, though. A modern laptop is ridiculously overpowered for the purpose of running a well designed OS and office application. The idea is to make it cheap enough to not freak out about breaking it, to provide enough power to do your stuff but not so much that you have to be chained to a wall wart to accomplish anything that takes more than two hours.
Yes. And it runs just fine. And with Compiz the visual effects are flashier than Aero if you want them to be. And it will play HD video just fine. And it's got all the wireless features you would expect. And on and on. The screen and keyboard are a little small. The next generation may be better in this regard.
So if you're looking for thin & light notebooks to join your AD domain, you still need the Linux ones.
They've just defined the features for the next big Linux boom: 12" touch screen, 100GB HDD, dual core. That was clever. Differentiate your product as the less capable one. Genius!
These machines will never run Vista well. Let's keep that important knowledge in front of people. Intel expects to move 10 million Atom platforms in the first wave, and none will have Vista.
Because the APA was secret until extracted in the SCO V Novell trial, there was no way for Sun to know SCO didn't have the rights. That wasn't settled by the court until last August.
Sun could know, though that they were creeps that it was dangerous to do business with them. That much was clear by the way they were running aruond suing or threatening to sue everyone who had ever done business with them.
Sun is not blameless in this.
You get the Blackberry answer because I'm remote.
stupid enough? I don't know about the characterization.
They had the rights to SVR4 that Solaris is based on to use it, to develop their own OS based on it, to sell it under trade secret and copyright protection but not to make it open. They then bought that right for a song from SCO because at that moment the latter needed a cash infusion to continue their jihad against Linux.
The judge in te SCO V Novell case ruled last August that SCO does not own the copyright to SVR4 and it follows had no right to sell the right to make it open. Novell owns that right and reserved it in a document called th APA. You can read about it on groklaw.
The reason why Novell reserved that right - and why the rights to unix were split so badly as to make it irretrievably dead had to do with Ransom Love's hubris. Hubris is the arrogance of pride.
Mr. Love was president and founder of one of the earliest commercial Linux companies, the Santa Cruz Operation (not to be confused with SCO). When his IPO went bizarrely huge for no good reason its treasury stock was worth several more digits than he was used to dealing with. Paid in equity grew to half a billion and they never sold the majority of treasury stock. Marke cap was several times that early on. Of course he bought all the toys the bubble millionaires like and threw huge company parties, but he was also an old school geek like you find here on slashdot now and then.
It happened that at that precise moment the company that had purchased the rights, code and business of unix from bell labs in their breakup (but not the trademark oddly enough), Novell was finding no success with unix and needed a cash infusion to retake ownership of the network, which had been their genesis. (Some will get the irony of this!). Being an old school geek Ransom wanted to "buy unix" as a trophy for having built a successful Linux business.
Unfortunately he didn't have enough to buy the whole thing and being as he was still wet behind the ears in corporate goverment and his company had never ever turned a quarterly profit, Novell insisted on terms. Here's where the hubris come in. He bought the right to market unix for 5% of the gross with the rest going to Novell plus the right to develop a new and better unix he could keep all of the profits from. For rhis he paid in company stock that I hope Novell sold right away because within a year it was nearly wothless. I think he really believed he could mix in GNU/Linux and come out with something like this Open Solaris and buy up the rest of the rights and take over the server market. It didn't work out because he didn't have the rights to open it fully to attract open developers, his ipo money bled out too fast and eventually his company was bought out by an investment group (this one is the SCO we know and loathe)
By making the attempt he fractured the rights to unix in such a way that the OS languished for over a decade, much to the glee of Microsoft which spent that decade taking ownership of the desktop network client and nearly half of servers. In software a decade is a very long time.
I hope this explains it well enough. My thumbs hurt now.
ARM took off in the thin and light space because of the watts. The thing is that ARM cannot compete with Atom in toolchain or processing power or available software or available hardware.
ARM can get better but there's a reason Intel sold it. It may live on in phones and devices like that.
For internet everywhere devices, no. Look at the available choices for browsers on ARM platforms. Blech. The Atom devices and their counterparts from via will run modern operating systems (but not vista) and familiar apps and interact with the usb devices and networking you already have. Add to this that Atom is "low power enough" and it's over.
The race may not go always to the swift or the battle to the strong, but that's where the smart money lays their bets.
Ransom Love killed it with hubris.
And Sun bought the right to open "Open Solaris" from a company that didn't own that right. Install this at your own risk.
Did you consider, even for a brief moment, that he actually cared about the environment when he had his house designed to consider it?
Was the limited square feet not a clue?
For those of you who are keeping score on who's talking the talk and who's walking the walk I offer this:
A tale of two houses
To see Microsoft for once making the right choice. That's sad. The brain of the beast is not yet completely dead.
That means quite more suffering for the rest of us.
s/partition/vm/g
ftfy
fwiw - you'll find HP network printers amply supported in every environment.
Don't believe the major information providers. The boom of the 90's was all about the information infrastructure and the insanely huge margins available in delivering bandwidth at monopoly prices. They cook the books to make it look like it's a loss-making enterprise and then lobby aggressively for every advantage they can get.
Remember $1.10 a minute to the town just across the county line when calls to the far side of the country were $.10/min or less? What do you suppose that was about?
Rural areas of my state get symmetrical 100mbps broadband for $40/month from their public utility and the utility makes money at this. No joke. Low latency Fiber To The Premises. In the urban counties we are protected by Qwest and Comcast from this government abuse so we pay twice as much for 1% as much uplink with over 500 times the population density.
Yeah, it's not about the density.
What kind of idiot thinks that the highway between producers of goods and their markets, between the markets and consumers, are in the domain of government responsibility?
Oh... wait... never mind.
I recall a clue here I followed here on Slashdot to an interesting story. It happens that in the 90's there was literally no interest in building out broadband to rural areas of the state because of the enormous cost of wiring sparsely populated areas. Three state power districts (PUDs) had embarrassing surplus funds from their overbuilt hydro installations they needed to get rid of. They got permission to pilot broadband over fiber to the home (FTTH) to dissipate some of the excess. After some time building out their networks (circa 2000) Farmer John on his tractor can reap the grain and enjoy VOIP and streaming hi-def video to his laptop because his household network has a symmetrical 100mbps with ridiculously low latency. This costs him $40 a month and installation is $100 or free. Unfortunately charging these rates is enormously profitable even though most homes are miles apart. You can imagine the economic disaster this was. The PUDs are government agencies and are not supposed to be earning the absurd profits they're making on this transaction.
The economic impacts kept getting worse. Major server farms and hosting companies are building out huge factory style hosting plants where once nothing grew but grass. This gained huge new tax revenues, and of course highly paid server room techs and managers need places to live so property values increased tenfold (with the accompanying dizzying increase in property taxes of course). This of course drew attention to the unspoiled natural beauty of the land, which began to draw tourism. Now they have no idea what they're going to do with this excess money and are considering some sort of negative income tax or dividend fund similar to Alaska.
Recently it was proposed that the ability to offer this service to the residents of the other public utility districts in some sort of Senate Bill. Fortunately it may have drawn the attention of public minded lobbyists because it was sent to die quietly in committee unread and the crisis was averted.
I wish I could remember where I found that clue. I think it was in a sig.
Stick a fork in OLPC. It's done.
They were hoping for 100M units this year. They've reached 0.5% of that. Turning over the entire leadership team to corporate pawns and stripping out everything that makes the platform special is not going to help.
With its social mission dead, I don't see any positive outcome for the product. I'll agree with the other poster who said it's an overpriced under performing subnotebook without the parts (including open systems) that made it special. With the market about to be awash in Atom mini-notebooks we won't remember this one two years from now. "A cute experiment. Too bad it didn't work out."
It's sad to see progress thrown so often under the wagon wheels of commerce.
No jury.
If you want to understand this thoroughly and completely, the most reasonable thing to do would be to just read the standard. It's only a few thousand pages. You should be able to grind your way through it in a few days. ISO did.
Boot the rascals out. All of them. Even the ones that vote against it will do so because passage of this evil plan is a foregone conclusion and so the powerful puppetmasters will vote against it to a negotiated victory for the plan. Out with them. All of them.
If you give a damn about liberty and privacy boot the rascals out.
They all got a lot of options, so if by some miracle they can win this thing they should do well.
I'm pretty sure that CEO of a $1M market cap company doesn't qualify him for rich and powerful status.
Data center folks... You know you can sell them 72GB SCSI drives all day. They have no clue about reliability, performance, capacity or redundancy. All they know is what they learned 10 years ago when they got their certs, and what their rep has told them since. They have no desire to read Google's published data.
SAS is the latest fad if they're not buying into iSCSI or whatever else they've been told is the latest trend in reliability and performance.
My vote for reliability, redundancy, bandwidth, volume and price? A low power Linux or BSD host on a platform with lots of bus bandwidth with lots of SATA Host controllers that support the attached SATA Port Multipliers. Then calculate. Five drives per Port Multiplier, 16 port multipliers per host controller (PCIE x8). Capacity is nothing less than immense even with the cheapest available drives (That's 800 SATA drives per x8 PCIe slot). RAID 6 with LED indicators. Net Drive bandwidth across this many drives can approach RAM bandwidth. Latency is not as good. Add processor cores to divide the data processed/network bandwidth to suit. With cheapest B/$ drives this is 400TB/slot. With highest capacity it's 800TB/slot or 3.2PB per server. For capacity on a retail solution this is about the max. YMMV. Rack mounts? Try sheet metal, a bender and a drill. Fans are <$1 in volume. You can put drives three deep and 20 wide in 3U with a PSU at the rear with room for cables. That's 800 drives per standard rack, with room for the server also. Failures? If a drive in an array fails, take an image of it and throw it away. The peers of a failed drive are probably doomed.
Of course if you need really high volume data storage you should send me a gmail with the specifics for a more tailored solution :-)
Naturally you're going to need a fatter network tube. At 10 Gbps it takes 44 minutes to backup 3.2PB.
When Intel introduces a business card sized platform with Atom though, it's all over for the slug.
A 400MHz processor can saturate a 1Gbit network link, or two. If they're File servers, more is not needed.
If they're serving files from encrypted media to encrypted links without offloading the encryption, there may be issues. Otherwise the excess clocks are unnecessary waste of watts.