With SGI putting so much faith in Linux, it would be idiotic for them not to certify Mesa as open GL compliant. that is unless they want to re-implement openGL from the start with Linux. It wouldent suprise me it once Mesa is up to specs, and has desent hardware acceleration, that SGI would certify it for no fee. SGI is still a leader in graphics, and for them to deny the certification of a critical 3D API for the OS that they are betting on would be relatively stupid...
I tend to agree. While this technicaly dosent compare with programing, I have seen its effects. I was a Network Engineer for a local computer shop. The lady that had my position before I got in there was basically promoted from secratary, and sent of to school at the local community colege. I ended up fixing so many of her blunders where she set up the network totaly ass backwards from logical. most of the time if it did work, it was on the brink of colapsing in on itself. In on instance instead of using NAT, or a proxy server to connect a LAN to the internet, she used modem sharing in Lantastic to do the job. It broke so many times it wasn't funny, and all they wanded to do was to surf the web. There are many more where that comes from (such as setting up a server with win 95 installed, and not a workstatino/server, a dedicated server)
I am a freshman CompE student. I graduated out of a 900 student Highschool. There were about 3 SERIOUS computer nuts in my class, all male. There were also about 20 peaple I would call computer capable, with about 2 being girls. The situation is about the same for the class that graduated ahead of me. The girls seamed to understand the "surface" elements of computers (point here, click here) but I never saw one of them intrested in the inner workings (Programing, etc..). Now just for the record, we had a 50/50 mix of male/femaile in both science and math. I dont know what the diffrence was. Our High School CS teacher was even a female. If there was anyone discouraging females from CS, it was the school councelers, and there piers.
I use all three (Krabber is a front end for bladeenc and cdparanoia). It is real nice, it uses a CDDA server interface that gets the names of about 75% of classes. on my PII 300 it takes about 3 minutes to rip a song, and 6 minutes to encode it. so I can do a whole CD in about 2 hours. not blindingly fast, but it is easy, and produces good sound.
ok, 1 crash/day isn't that far off. but lets look at in closer. only 1 in 3 crashes ussualy causes any significant data loss. and only 1 in 20 crashes causes the operating system to piss all over itself. lets say that it takes someone 15 minutes just to reboot, and 2 hours to recover a lost document, or correct a corrupted one. and lets say it takes on average 45 minutes for a tech to repair the 1 in 20 crashes that causes OS damage. now lets say that 1 in 5 of those requires an OS re-install, which takes 4 hours to get the OS back on, network configured, and apps back on. lets say you are managing a 500 computer network.
so you have 500 crashes/day totle. 2/3 of those require just a re-boot = 333 crashes = 83.25 Hours
and 19 out of 20 requires 2 hours of work by the user. well with 166 crashes left, this comes to 158 * 2 = 316 hours.
now you have 9 crashes/day that require a tech to do some work. 4/5 of those require just 45 minutes work so 2 crashes*45=1.5 hours
ok, and 1 of those crashes requires an OS re-install that is 4 hours of a techs time.also note that when the tech is fixing the computer, the worker isn't working, so count these times also.
ok, so 83.25 + 316 + 1.5 + 4 = 404.75 hours of clerical time lost * say $12/hr=$4857/day
add to this 5.5 hours of tech time/day * say $18/hr = $100/day.
now lets see how many days/year are working days. 52 weeks * 5 = 260 days * 4957 = 1.3 Million/year.
now for just 500 computers, that is significant. That dosent count for other IS costs such as new servers etc.....
well, if you think about it, with the mass of a black hole, and the gravitational pull it exerts, it would be more like the earth orbiting the black hole. This would have a tendency to cause a few problems though. first, where would the moon go (oops there went the tides) secondaly wouldent it slow down the earths rotation after a while. 48 Hour days would get old after a while....
if you figure this out, you get the fact that it is only traveling at less then 1% the speed of light (the theoretical limit). now lets see how Relatively stacks up agenst say a 1 kg particle.
m=mo/sqrt(1-(v^2)/(c^2))
This brings the relative Mass to 1.000047 kg or a ~.005% diffrence in mass. No big deal... Havent they goten particals up to 10% the speed of light before in mass accelerators.
As it has been said, This is only like 18-19 common exploites. If the server in Japan was cracked and it was only running SSH and HTTPD then this is only a small persentage of total hosts that could be cracked (wether they keep up to date on patches or not). In this case it was because an NT machine was compromised, and that machine connected to the same network as this server. If this is the case I suspect the the total of computers that COULD be cracked by a GOOD cracker would be as high as 70% to 80%. now this is something to be woried about.
I tend to agree from my own personal opinion. I was brought up in a VERY strict religious family till I was about 10 (Seventh Day Adventist). Even after I was 10, I was in an environment that promoted religion, but dident quite slam it down my throught as it had been before. When I was first exposed to REAL science (science was never taught in my grade school) in the 7th and 8th grade, I tried to make up a model that fit both theories... obviously it dident work. After my sophmore year, I did some research, and decided that all this religous stuff was just a load of crap. All in all, I have taken 6 years of Science in high school (2 years I took 2 courses) of them I have taken Biology, Zoology/Botney, Physical Science, Physics, Chem I, Chem II. Education in the sciences does tend to disprove the creationist theory, espicaly the physical sciences (Steven Hawking did it for me).
Just because SGI has decided to embrace Linux dosent mean they are dying. In many respects, it is a very cost effective measure. Even IBM is turning to linux in a big way. Simply put, it is cheaper for SGI to port the few high end features from Irix to Linux for there IA-32/IA-64 servers then it is for them to port the whole of Irix over. in addition to this, there customers get the benefit of patches for problems in under 12 hours from when it becomes public knoledge. also, they will get quite a few good features from peaple outside of SGI. Simply put it is cheeper for them to use Linux then Irix. There are probably very few peaple that buy an SGI machine just because it runs Irix, from what I have heard, Irix can be rather buggy to work with. Dont count SGI out yet. I personaly think that this is a smart move by SGI, not a desperate move to stay alive...
What about the power requirements
on
Athlon Reviews
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· Score: 1
Has anyone looked. For instance, if you have a 650 Mhz Processor with 22 Million transistors, you are bound to draw over 50 watts of power, plus the 200 Mhz main buss. add to that say a 7200K RPM UW SCSI disk, CD-Rom, CD-R, Zip, Floppy, voodoo2/3, sound card, modem, NIC, SCSI card, and multiple fans. for such a system, it seams as though a 300Watt Power supply or more would be needed. also, with all those transistors, especialy the.25 micron varity ought to pump out the heat like a space heater. is the standart case ready to handle all that heat, or do we all need to get SuperMicro 750A cases.
Look at the HP 6xx series
on
LinModems?
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· Score: 1
ok, I am going to list some modles, HP 600, HP 660C, HP 670C, HP 672C, HP 690C, HP 692C, HP 694C. all of these work well with linux. now if you get any HP printer that ends with CXE dont buy it, but my HP 692C works very well with Linux. Try this simple test to see if it is a software printer. boot to a DOS disk, and type this `type config.sys > PRN` if your printer starts printing out stuff, then it has alteast hardware support for text printing, and can probably print a file in PCL just fine. one final note, stay away from the 7xx series of HP printers, every one that I have seen is a software printer....
Did anyone else see this. is this SGI Linux Environment an add on package. is it only administration tools and the like, or does it consist of kernel patches, new file systems (XFS anyone). If it is includes kernel patches, where are they, and what do they do. Due to the GPL, unless they are a module, they need to be publicaly available.
>As others have mentioned before, WinNT is based on Dec's VMS, an OS that is of the same vintage as Unix
Hymm, I have always been told that NT is what Microsoft took away from the IBM/Microsoft joint venture called OS/2. They split in the late 80s, early 90s. IBM kept the name, but much of that technology was used by microsoft for NT. correct me if I am wrong, but isn't NTFS a highly modified version of HPFS on OS/2. perhaps the OS/2 project had roots in VMS, I'm not sure...
well, as far as ISA PnP goes, I can do without, or do with what we already have (enough to get my sound card working). PCI is inherantly PnP, there are no recources to fight with (except when mobo manufactures make stupid assumptions about IRQ assignment). AGP is just an extention of PCI so it to is PnP. Scsi is alos PnP by design when you use SCAM. USB and firewire are alos PnP by design. This leaves ISA and Parallel connections that are not PnP. The parport driver does a relatively good job for parallel port. for ISA, dont toutch it with PnP. My bios sets up enough of my sound card to get it working relatively well without PnPtools in linux, and I will leave it that way. anyway, ISA slots are disapearing in computers, most mobo s only have 1 or 2 ISA slots, a year ago, they had 2 or 3, and a year befor that, 3 or 4. so ISA may become an exception rather then a rule (where will I put my modem). oh well....
With the change from 2.0 to 2.2, there were no big changes from the end users perspective (even if everything was re-writen from the ground up), all you needed was a relatively current set of libs, and the transition was relitevly painless. where if 2.4 uses a new file system (ext3, xfs, etc.) this would require a complete re-install to take advantage of the file system. This also may be true with devfs if it is implemented. I realy dont want to see to many tools to convert ext2->ext3 or xfs (remember that fat16 -> fat32 utility for win98 upgrade, I lost many a file system to that tool).
Microsoft.... -- Closed Source, Closed Protocals Sun, AOL, Netscape -- Closed Source,Open Protocals SGI, IBM (with Linux) -- Open Source, Open Protocals
I dont know about you guys, but I am rooting for IBM (Who would have ever thought). In recent years, IBM has learned some lessons the hard way (remember OS/2). Both SGI and IBM make money off of hardware and service. but dont make much money off of software (this is where linux comes into play).
I would like win 98(or even NT with proxy Server) to do this. run NAT (IP Masquarading) over a dynamic PPP link, route between two seperate ethernet networks, run a wins server on each network, and run a caching proxy server like squid. all on a 486 66Mhz, with 16 Megs of RAM. and add to this not ever having to re-boot the machine.
I dont know about the Visual Workstation, but the article stated that they were leading out Linux on NEW Intel servers. correct me if I am wrong, but I believe that the Visual Workstation was built around NT, and while it is possible to get Linux up and running on one, it is not practicle. Linux does not yet have the openGL support to preform the primary purpose of these machines, 3D graphics, and video editing. While they would make a ok server, there are better options for less money out there.
I'm not sure about 3D support, but 3.3.3 already has good 2D support for the Permedia 2. I would think that 3D support would be provided. This is one of the few boards that both MetroX and Xi Graphics said that they will support hardware accelerated X. From my reading, the Permedia 2 has some of the best Open GL support in hardware. it dosent have super-fast triangle fill rates, and Quake 2 on it is a joke, but 3D Studio Max on it looks GREAT (yes, I have used WIn95 occationaly, but I work mostly in Linux). It would be a shame if it dident work, I might be forced to move my business to Manufactures that support there hardware (nVidia, Matrox).
ok, feel free to correct me if I am wrong, but there are some serious technical problems with having a main board support both alpha and K7. first and formost, alphas tend to have A LOT of firmware on board. this would drive up the price of the board for average Joe who only wants a K7 and isn't even thinking of alphas. also, the PC bios tends to need to execute x86 instructions on boot up. now I dont think that an alpha 21264 would have any idea of what to do with the x86 instructions that the BIOS would give it. yes you could set up a set of jumpers, but then you would need additional hardware just to switch the firmware, driving the cost up even more. Here is a possible senario. K7/Alpha main board for around $600 or just a K7 main board for $150. Most peaple and all but the dumbest corperations would want the K7/Alpha board. also I am not sure, but I think that the high end Alpha boards use L3 cache.... I'm not sure how that would work out.
um, the only reason that the american car companies survived is because they had some serious cash that they had built up in the 60s, and earliy 70s. without that cash, they would have gone under. now AMD dosent have any cash to ride out a rough year. they just build a new fab in Germany, and they just lost $130 million. if there were another serious competator in the x86 CPU business, I would write this off as just evolution, but there aren't. Do you remember the mid 90s when Intel charged $600 for a pentium CPU. There cheepest CPU's came in at around $250. now you can get a decent intel CPU for just over $80. This is more like Intel kicking AMD while they are down. they are trying to kill off there only competition. Just look at what intel does with the Xeon processor. thee is no real competator for the Xeon (untill the AMD K7 SMP boards are out). They price these things at well above $900. They did the same thing with the PPros when they were out. Do you realy want to start paying $450 for a decent CPU again with the cuting edge CPUs comming in at over $900 (not including server chips). AMD has forced Intel to stay in check for the past 2 years with the K6. you can now get a PII 400 for $160. if the pricing of the mid 90s had continued, this processor would easly cost in excess of $350-$400. if AMD dies, prices will start to creap up again. This is in no way like the auto industry where there were three seperate compinies that compeated with each other, and several new commers came in with better products. This is a former monopilist trying to re-gain ground that it has lost by killing its only competition.
Should we not save the whales because they cant compeate with the fissing boats ?? it dosent always boil down to Darwinian evolution, it boils down to what is better for the population of the world as a whole.
Try Central Illinois. you can get a decent ( 1800 sq ft.) house in a city lot for about $60k-$80k. we are getting aDSL in the next few months. we are under 2 hours from St. Louis and 4 hours from Chicago. very low crime rate (the big news 2 years ago was when some old man shot and killed some intruders in his home. that was the last killing here in taylorville). the job market may not be what it is in the San Francisco area, but if you look hard enough, it is there. with a bit of expearance and a college degree, 75k / year would be possible. remember there is more to illinois then Chicago and East St. Louis. also you are about 3 hours from Kentuckey where the states bigest income generator realy isn't leagal and contains a bit of THC. it isn't hard to find good moonshine down there also:)
>>Software crashes usually aren't OS related. Windows terminates applications that start to do bad things.
um, I dont think so. from my expearance, this mechanisim has a sucess rate of about 25% in NT. This is one thing that I love about Linux, I realy can kill a rouge application ( Netscape comes to mind ) without re-booting the machine. There are several times when an NT server just froze cold, no BSOD, no error messages, nothing. now in some cases, it was a hardware problem like bad RAM, but atleast with linux, it gave me some idea of what went bad. with Linux, I have had 2 panics in the past year on about 3 machines. in one case, I accidently disconnected the IDE cable from the disk that held the swap partision, the second, I had a bad root disk on a slackware install....
yes that would work well. the kernel is granular enough that that can be done without a problem ( in linux 2.0.x, only one processor could be in the kernel at one time, in 2.2 each processor can be in seperate parts of the kernel, eg SCSI support, file system, and tcpip stack) now if you were running multiple NICs or multiple SCSI adapters only one processor could be in the SCSI driver at one time. I believe that in 2.3.7 they made the file systems, or at least ext2, much more granular. any number of processors can be in the file system drivers at one time. the TCP/IP stack and the block/SCSI drivers need this same kind of treatment.
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With SGI putting so much faith in Linux, it would be idiotic for them not to certify Mesa as open GL compliant. that is unless they want to re-implement openGL from the start with Linux. It wouldent suprise me it once Mesa is up to specs, and has desent hardware acceleration, that SGI would certify it for no fee. SGI is still a leader in graphics, and for them to deny the certification of a critical 3D API for the OS that they are betting on would be relatively stupid...
I tend to agree. While this technicaly dosent compare with programing, I have seen its effects. I was a Network Engineer for a local computer shop. The lady that had my position before I got in there was basically promoted from secratary, and sent of to school at the local community colege. I ended up fixing so many of her blunders where she set up the network totaly ass backwards from logical. most of the time if it did work, it was on the brink of colapsing in on itself. In on instance instead of using NAT, or a proxy server to connect a LAN to the internet, she used modem sharing in Lantastic to do the job. It broke so many times it wasn't funny, and all they wanded to do was to surf the web. There are many more where that comes from (such as setting up a server with win 95 installed, and not a workstatino/server, a dedicated server)
I am a freshman CompE student. I graduated out of a 900 student Highschool. There were about 3 SERIOUS computer nuts in my class, all male. There were also about 20 peaple I would call computer capable, with about 2 being girls. The situation is about the same for the class that graduated ahead of me. The girls seamed to understand the "surface" elements of computers (point here, click here) but I never saw one of them intrested in the inner workings (Programing, etc..). Now just for the record, we had a 50/50 mix of male/femaile in both science and math. I dont know what the diffrence was. Our High School CS teacher was even a female. If there was anyone discouraging females from CS, it was the school councelers, and there piers.
I use all three (Krabber is a front end for bladeenc and cdparanoia). It is real nice, it uses a CDDA server interface that gets the names of about 75% of classes. on my PII 300 it takes about 3 minutes to rip a song, and 6 minutes to encode it. so I can do a whole CD in about 2 hours. not blindingly fast, but it is easy, and produces good sound.
ok, 1 crash/day isn't that far off. but lets look at in closer. only 1 in 3 crashes ussualy causes any significant data loss. and only 1 in 20 crashes causes the operating system to piss all over itself. lets say that it takes someone 15 minutes just to reboot, and 2 hours to recover a lost document, or correct a corrupted one. and lets say it takes on average 45 minutes for a tech to repair the 1 in 20 crashes that causes OS damage. now lets say that 1 in 5 of those requires an OS re-install, which takes 4 hours to get the OS back on, network configured, and apps back on. lets say you are managing a 500 computer network.
so you have 500 crashes/day totle. 2/3 of those require just a re-boot = 333 crashes = 83.25 Hours
and 19 out of 20 requires 2 hours of work by the user. well with 166 crashes left, this comes to 158 * 2 = 316 hours.
now you have 9 crashes/day that require a tech to do some work. 4/5 of those require just 45 minutes work so 2 crashes*45=1.5 hours
ok, and 1 of those crashes requires an OS re-install that is 4 hours of a techs time.also note that when the tech is fixing the computer, the worker isn't working, so count these times also.
ok, so
83.25 + 316 + 1.5 + 4 = 404.75 hours of clerical time lost * say $12/hr=$4857/day
add to this 5.5 hours of tech time/day * say $18/hr = $100/day.
now lets see how many days/year are working days.
52 weeks * 5 = 260 days * 4957 = 1.3 Million/year.
now for just 500 computers, that is significant. That dosent count for other IS costs such as new servers etc.....
well, if you think about it, with the mass of a black hole, and the gravitational pull it exerts, it would be more like the earth orbiting the black hole. This would have a tendency to cause a few problems though. first, where would the moon go (oops there went the tides) secondaly wouldent it slow down the earths rotation after a while. 48 Hour days would get old after a while....
some quick calulations....
6,500,000 MPH = 2,905,760 Meters/Sec = 2.9e6
Speed of Light = 299,792,458 Meters/Sec = 3.0e8
if you figure this out, you get the fact that it is only traveling at less then 1% the speed of light (the theoretical limit). now lets see how Relatively stacks up agenst say a 1 kg particle.
m=mo/sqrt(1-(v^2)/(c^2))
This brings the relative Mass to 1.000047 kg or a ~.005% diffrence in mass. No big deal... Havent they goten particals up to 10% the speed of light before in mass accelerators.
As it has been said, This is only like 18-19 common exploites. If the server in Japan was cracked and it was only running SSH and HTTPD then this is only a small persentage of total hosts that could be cracked (wether they keep up to date on patches or not). In this case it was because an NT machine was compromised, and that machine connected to the same network as this server. If this is the case I suspect the the total of computers that COULD be cracked by a GOOD cracker would be as high as 70% to 80%. now this is something to be woried about.
I tend to agree from my own personal opinion. I was brought up in a VERY strict religious family till I was about 10 (Seventh Day Adventist). Even after I was 10, I was in an environment that promoted religion, but dident quite slam it down my throught as it had been before. When I was first exposed to REAL science (science was never taught in my grade school) in the 7th and 8th grade, I tried to make up a model that fit both theories... obviously it dident work. After my sophmore year, I did some research, and decided that all this religous stuff was just a load of crap. All in all, I have taken 6 years of Science in high school (2 years I took 2 courses) of them I have taken Biology, Zoology/Botney, Physical Science, Physics, Chem I, Chem II. Education in the sciences does tend to disprove the creationist theory, espicaly the physical sciences (Steven Hawking did it for me).
Just because SGI has decided to embrace Linux dosent mean they are dying. In many respects, it is a very cost effective measure. Even IBM is turning to linux in a big way. Simply put, it is cheaper for SGI to port the few high end features from Irix to Linux for there IA-32/IA-64 servers then it is for them to port the whole of Irix over. in addition to this, there customers get the benefit of patches for problems in under 12 hours from when it becomes public knoledge. also, they will get quite a few good features from peaple outside of SGI. Simply put it is cheeper for them to use Linux then Irix. There are probably very few peaple that buy an SGI machine just because it runs Irix, from what I have heard, Irix can be rather buggy to work with. Dont count SGI out yet. I personaly think that this is a smart move by SGI, not a desperate move to stay alive...
Has anyone looked. For instance, if you have a 650 Mhz Processor with 22 Million transistors, you are bound to draw over 50 watts of power, plus the 200 Mhz main buss. add to that say a 7200K RPM UW SCSI disk, CD-Rom, CD-R, Zip, Floppy, voodoo2/3, sound card, modem, NIC, SCSI card, and multiple fans. for such a system, it seams as though a 300Watt Power supply or more would be needed. also, with all those transistors, especialy the .25 micron varity ought to pump out the heat like a space heater. is the standart case ready to handle all that heat, or do we all need to get SuperMicro 750A cases.
ok, I am going to list some modles, HP 600, HP 660C, HP 670C, HP 672C, HP 690C, HP 692C, HP 694C. all of these work well with linux. now if you get any HP printer that ends with CXE dont buy it, but my HP 692C works very well with Linux. Try this simple test to see if it is a software printer. boot to a DOS disk, and type this `type config.sys > PRN` if your printer starts printing out stuff, then it has alteast hardware support for text printing, and can probably print a file in PCL just fine. one final note, stay away from the 7xx series of HP printers, every one that I have seen is a software printer....
Did anyone else see this. is this SGI Linux Environment an add on package. is it only administration tools and the like, or does it consist of kernel patches, new file systems (XFS anyone). If it is includes kernel patches, where are they, and what do they do. Due to the GPL, unless they are a module, they need to be publicaly available.
>As others have mentioned before, WinNT is based on Dec's VMS, an OS that is of the same vintage as Unix
Hymm, I have always been told that NT is what Microsoft took away from the IBM/Microsoft joint venture called OS/2. They split in the late 80s, early 90s. IBM kept the name, but much of that technology was used by microsoft for NT. correct me if I am wrong, but isn't NTFS a highly modified version of HPFS on OS/2. perhaps the OS/2 project had roots in VMS, I'm not sure...
well, as far as ISA PnP goes, I can do without, or do with what we already have (enough to get my sound card working). PCI is inherantly PnP, there are no recources to fight with (except when mobo manufactures make stupid assumptions about IRQ assignment). AGP is just an extention of PCI so it to is PnP. Scsi is alos PnP by design when you use SCAM. USB and firewire are alos PnP by design. This leaves ISA and Parallel connections that are not PnP. The parport driver does a relatively good job for parallel port. for ISA, dont toutch it with PnP. My bios sets up enough of my sound card to get it working relatively well without PnPtools in linux, and I will leave it that way. anyway, ISA slots are disapearing in computers, most mobo s only have 1 or 2 ISA slots, a year ago, they had 2 or 3, and a year befor that, 3 or 4. so ISA may become an exception rather then a rule (where will I put my modem). oh well....
With the change from 2.0 to 2.2, there were no big changes from the end users perspective (even if everything was re-writen from the ground up), all you needed was a relatively current set of libs, and the transition was relitevly painless. where if 2.4 uses a new file system (ext3, xfs, etc.) this would require a complete re-install to take advantage of the file system. This also may be true with devfs if it is implemented. I realy dont want to see to many tools to convert ext2->ext3 or xfs (remember that fat16 -> fat32 utility for win98 upgrade, I lost many a file system to that tool).
Microsoft.... -- Closed Source, Closed Protocals
Sun, AOL, Netscape -- Closed Source,Open Protocals
SGI, IBM (with Linux) -- Open Source, Open Protocals
I dont know about you guys, but I am rooting for IBM (Who would have ever thought). In recent years, IBM has learned some lessons the hard way (remember OS/2). Both SGI and IBM make money off of hardware and service. but dont make much money off of software (this is where linux comes into play).
I would like win 98(or even NT with proxy Server) to do this. run NAT (IP Masquarading) over a dynamic PPP link, route between two seperate ethernet networks, run a wins server on each network, and run a caching proxy server like squid. all on a 486 66Mhz, with 16 Megs of RAM. and add to this not ever having to re-boot the machine.
To Microsoft, I dare you:
I dont know about the Visual Workstation, but the article stated that they were leading out Linux on NEW Intel servers. correct me if I am wrong, but I believe that the Visual Workstation was built around NT, and while it is possible to get Linux up and running on one, it is not practicle. Linux does not yet have the openGL support to preform the primary purpose of these machines, 3D graphics, and video editing. While they would make a ok server, there are better options for less money out there.
I'm not sure about 3D support, but 3.3.3 already has good 2D support for the Permedia 2. I would think that 3D support would be provided. This is one of the few boards that both MetroX and Xi Graphics said that they will support hardware accelerated X. From my reading, the Permedia 2 has some of the best Open GL support in hardware. it dosent have super-fast triangle fill rates, and Quake 2 on it is a joke, but 3D Studio Max on it looks GREAT (yes, I have used WIn95 occationaly, but I work mostly in Linux). It would be a shame if it dident work, I might be forced to move my business to Manufactures that support there hardware (nVidia, Matrox).
ok, feel free to correct me if I am wrong, but there are some serious technical problems with having a main board support both alpha and K7. first and formost, alphas tend to have A LOT of firmware on board. this would drive up the price of the board for average Joe who only wants a K7 and isn't even thinking of alphas. also, the PC bios tends to need to execute x86 instructions on boot up. now I dont think that an alpha 21264 would have any idea of what to do with the x86 instructions that the BIOS would give it. yes you could set up a set of jumpers, but then you would need additional hardware just to switch the firmware, driving the cost up even more. Here is a possible senario. K7/Alpha main board for around $600 or just a K7 main board for $150. Most peaple and all but the dumbest corperations would want the K7/Alpha board. also I am not sure, but I think that the high end Alpha boards use L3 cache.... I'm not sure how that would work out.
um, the only reason that the american car companies survived is because they had some serious cash that they had built up in the 60s, and earliy 70s. without that cash, they would have gone under. now AMD dosent have any cash to ride out a rough year. they just build a new fab in Germany, and they just lost $130 million. if there were another serious competator in the x86 CPU business, I would write this off as just evolution, but there aren't. Do you remember the mid 90s when Intel charged $600 for a pentium CPU. There cheepest CPU's came in at around $250. now you can get a decent intel CPU for just over $80. This is more like Intel kicking AMD while they are down. they are trying to kill off there only competition. Just look at what intel does with the Xeon processor. thee is no real competator for the Xeon (untill the AMD K7 SMP boards are out). They price these things at well above $900. They did the same thing with the PPros when they were out. Do you realy want to start paying $450 for a decent CPU again with the cuting edge CPUs comming in at over $900 (not including server chips). AMD has forced Intel to stay in check for the past 2 years with the K6. you can now get a PII 400 for $160. if the pricing of the mid 90s had continued, this processor would easly cost in excess of $350-$400. if AMD dies, prices will start to creap up again. This is in no way like the auto industry where there were three seperate compinies that compeated with each other, and several new commers came in with better products. This is a former monopilist trying to re-gain ground that it has lost by killing its only competition.
Should we not save the whales because they cant compeate with the fissing boats ?? it dosent always boil down to Darwinian evolution, it boils down to what is better for the population of the world as a whole.
Try Central Illinois. you can get a decent ( 1800 sq ft.) house in a city lot for about $60k-$80k. we are getting aDSL in the next few months. we are under 2 hours from St. Louis and 4 hours from Chicago. very low crime rate (the big news 2 years ago was when some old man shot and killed some intruders in his home. that was the last killing here in taylorville). the job market may not be what it is in the San Francisco area, but if you look hard enough, it is there. with a bit of expearance and a college degree, 75k / year would be possible. remember there is more to illinois then Chicago and East St. Louis. also you are about 3 hours from Kentuckey where the states bigest income generator realy isn't leagal and contains a bit of THC. it isn't hard to find good moonshine down there also :)
>>Software crashes usually aren't OS related. Windows terminates applications that start to do bad things.
um, I dont think so. from my expearance, this mechanisim has a sucess rate of about 25% in NT. This is one thing that I love about Linux, I realy can kill a rouge application ( Netscape comes to mind ) without re-booting the machine. There are several times when an NT server just froze cold, no BSOD, no error messages, nothing. now in some cases, it was a hardware problem like bad RAM, but atleast with linux, it gave me some idea of what went bad. with Linux, I have had 2 panics in the past year on about 3 machines. in one case, I accidently disconnected the IDE cable from the disk that held the swap partision, the second, I had a bad root disk on a slackware install....
yes that would work well. the kernel is granular enough that that can be done without a problem ( in linux 2.0.x, only one processor could be in the kernel at one time, in 2.2 each processor can be in seperate parts of the kernel, eg SCSI support, file system, and tcpip stack) now if you were running multiple NICs or multiple SCSI adapters only one processor could be in the SCSI driver at one time. I believe that in 2.3.7 they made the file systems, or at least ext2, much more granular. any number of processors can be in the file system drivers at one time. the TCP/IP stack and the block/SCSI drivers need this same kind of treatment.