I also just bought a Dual-G4/450 box, after aeons (i.e. a couple of Major versions) of running Linux on Intel hardware, and I absolutely love it. I'd have to say that OS-X on G4's is pretty much a must-have for any serious geek. The hardware is wonderful, the SMP support on OS-X is far beyond Linux 2.2 (I haven't tried 2.4 SMP, so I can't comment there), and as the previous poster points out, OSX is *beautiful*.
That said, I also intend to get myself another Linux box at some point to do things like CPU-work and as a disk-server. Apple hardware is both too expensive and too pretty to be something you stick in a closet. I actually would say that I see OSX *helping* linux in the long run, because it gives UNIX a port-of-entry to the desktop world. Eventually, I see it as being both desirable and trivial to use Linux boxes as server and cpu-farms for large Apple installations. MS has announced that Office will be ported to OSX, as will Alias|Wavefronts Maya, my favorite program of all time. The apps will be there, and there's no good reason Linux can't be the NFS/WWW/Whatever server for them.
And, while I respect the work of the GNOME folk (sorry, KDE still makes me shudder), they are very far behind the Aqua desktop, and will be for quite some time. The combination of the OpenStep dev environment with the Apple UI engineers has created a work of beauty, IMHO, and having things like live Quicktime video feeds sitting behind tcsh just makes me smile every time.
In summary, I'd think that any UNIX-lover out there should welcome the arrival of a very advanced UNIX environment (open-source of a kind, no less) with a very advanced GUI environment on top. This only bodes well for UNIX in general...
Did anyone else notice, or has it already been discussed, that in this article Belluzo says they'll be bringing ccNUMA support into Linux? ccNUMA is definitely drool material - even better than Beowulf, and this would suggest that they are planning to have Linux running on machines in the 'Blue Mountain' (~6000 processor?) class...
Seems to me that SGI may turn out to be the best thing to happen to Linux since usenet. After all, what have the three biggest (technical) problems with Linux been since it started getting mainstream acceptance?
1. Lack of a solid jfs 2. Lack of high-end graphics 3. Lack of support for *really* big, high-throughput hardware
All three of which SGI looks to be contributing.
I agree with the previous poster - you gotta love these guys.
I must admit my disappointment at both this article and the responses to it. All of the respondents who tout pure economics as a justification for amazon's schizophrenia would do well to remember that the economics of capitalism also justify every one of Microsoft's practices, including not fixing bugs (people buy new versions anyway, so why bother investing valuable hours into fixing broken programs?) and trying to make every kind of software product known to man and drive it down the throats of every user (pretty much 'leveraging' the microsoft name, same as Amazon)
To me, the wonderful thing about the internet is that it creates/encourages a philosophy that looks beyond pure ruthless economics. Hello, Open Source/Free Software? Hello, Slashdot? What do we love slashdot for except for the relative narrowness of its focus? That's the same thing I used to love amazon for, because when I wanted books I could go and buy/browse books, and not be constantly implored to go buy a CD, someone's old crap they found in the attic, the newest star wars toy, whatever.
I always thought the brilliance of electronic retailing was in it's specificity, not it's diversity. I HATE walmart, not just because they are demonstrably evil, but because going in to one is like wondering around in the capitalist wonderland on acid. Buy our shit, we don't care if you want it or not, we have it.
This is a serious problem with the recent interleaving of traditional corporate capitalism and the new philosophy engendered by the exponential explosion of communication and the consequent/consonant destruction of traditional geographic boundaries. It deserves serious discussion; neither Katz's too-short rant nor knee-jerk capitalist defense does it justice.
From DejaNews(obviously biased)website: Deja News is one of the top destination sites on the Web, with some four to five million unique users a month who generate more than 125+ million pageviews monthly.
Which would be about 3 million hits/day. Check netcraft, and you find - Linux/Apache.
They claim to process over a million articles a day as well. And it's a remarkably responsive site.
Slashdot Mirror
I also just bought a Dual-G4/450 box, after aeons (i.e. a couple of Major versions) of running Linux on Intel hardware, and I absolutely love it. I'd have to say that OS-X on G4's is pretty much a must-have for any serious geek. The hardware is wonderful, the SMP support on OS-X is far beyond Linux 2.2 (I haven't tried 2.4 SMP, so I can't comment there), and as the previous poster points out, OSX is *beautiful*.
...
That said, I also intend to get myself another Linux box at some point to do things like CPU-work and as a disk-server. Apple hardware is both too expensive and too pretty to be something you stick in a closet. I actually would say that I see OSX *helping* linux in the long run, because it gives UNIX a port-of-entry to the desktop world. Eventually, I see it as being both desirable and trivial to use Linux boxes as server and cpu-farms for large Apple installations. MS has announced that Office will be ported to OSX, as will Alias|Wavefronts Maya, my favorite program of all time. The apps will be there, and there's no good reason Linux can't be the NFS/WWW/Whatever server for them.
And, while I respect the work of the GNOME folk (sorry, KDE still makes me shudder), they are very far behind the Aqua desktop, and will be for quite some time. The combination of the OpenStep dev environment with the Apple UI engineers has created a work of beauty, IMHO, and having things like live Quicktime video feeds sitting behind tcsh just makes me smile every time.
In summary, I'd think that any UNIX-lover out there should welcome the arrival of a very advanced UNIX environment (open-source of a kind, no less) with a very advanced GUI environment on top. This only bodes well for UNIX in general
Did anyone else notice, or has it already been discussed, that in this article Belluzo says they'll be bringing ccNUMA support into Linux? ...
ccNUMA is definitely drool material - even better than Beowulf, and this would suggest that they are planning to have Linux running on machines in the 'Blue Mountain' (~6000 processor?) class
Seems to me that SGI may turn out to be the best thing to happen to Linux since usenet. After all, what have the three biggest (technical) problems with Linux been since it started getting mainstream acceptance?
1. Lack of a solid jfs
2. Lack of high-end graphics
3. Lack of support for *really* big, high-throughput hardware
All three of which SGI looks to be contributing.
I agree with the previous poster - you gotta love these guys.
I must admit my disappointment at both this article and the responses to it. All of the respondents who tout pure economics as a justification for amazon's schizophrenia would do well to remember that the economics of capitalism also justify every one of Microsoft's practices, including not fixing bugs (people buy new versions anyway, so why bother investing valuable hours into fixing broken programs?) and trying to make every kind of software product known to man and drive it down the throats of every user (pretty much 'leveraging' the microsoft name, same as Amazon)
To me, the wonderful thing about the internet is that it creates/encourages a philosophy that looks beyond pure ruthless economics. Hello, Open Source/Free Software? Hello, Slashdot? What do we love slashdot for except for the relative narrowness of its focus?
That's the same thing I used to love amazon for, because when I wanted books I could go and buy/browse books, and not be constantly implored to go buy a CD, someone's old crap they found in the attic, the newest star wars toy, whatever.
I always thought the brilliance of electronic retailing was in it's specificity, not it's diversity. I HATE walmart, not just because they are demonstrably evil, but because going in to one is like wondering around in the capitalist wonderland on acid. Buy our shit, we don't care if you want it or not, we have it.
This is a serious problem with the recent interleaving of traditional corporate capitalism and the new philosophy engendered by the exponential explosion of communication and the consequent/consonant destruction of traditional geographic boundaries. It deserves serious discussion; neither Katz's too-short rant nor knee-jerk capitalist defense does it justice.
From DejaNews(obviously biased)website:
Deja News is one of the top destination sites on the Web, with some four to five million unique users a month who generate more than 125+ million pageviews monthly.
Which would be about 3 million hits/day. Check netcraft, and you find - Linux/Apache.
They claim to process over a million articles a day as well. And it's a remarkably responsive site.