That seems smart to me, especially if the coffee shop is charging for wireless access. It pays for them to keep people connected as long as possible!
It still seems kind of funny. I mean, we didn't need the wireless revolution for a bunch of people to cluster around a table and plug in, we could have done that years ago with wired ethernet!:)
Although, to be fair, wi-fi brought a level of plug-and-play to the equation that wasn't there before. I think Win2K was the first microsoft OS that cleanly could handle multiple ethernet configs. I distinctly remember running a little shareware app called NetSwitcher on Windows 98 so that I could have two different ethernet configs for home and office.
You don't put a 3.4GHz Pentium 4 (desktop model) chip into a laptop and expect it to last more than an hour. That's stupid, they weren't made for that. Get a Pentium M or at the very least, Pentium 4 M. Forget the M and you can forget your battery life. Same goes for Athlon too.
You make a great point. Most people seem to ignore the battery life of their notebook or their usage patterns and just buy whatever looks shiny (or believe the manufacturer's battery ratings.)
I think most people, if they were truly informed, would trade 25% less performance for 50% more battery life. But, Intel and others have trained consumers that speed is king.
Sorry to reply to my own comment, but I looked closer at the picture in the article of Richard MacKinnon, captioned as part of the Austin Wireless City Project. He has a rather conspicuous power cable plugged into his laptop.
I chuckle every time I hear about "wireless" networks because every time I wander into starbuck's or any other spot with wireless everyone with a computer is jockeying for the power outlets. There usually aren't nearly enough outlets for the number of people who need power. Heck, when people bring laptops into one-hour meetings in my workplace they are usually jockeying for outlets too.
So, maybe we're seeing a large deployment of "one less wire" networks, but until battery life gets much better, I don't think it's fair to say wireless. Most laptops and pda-type gadgets are lucky to get two hours of "real" usage in the field. By "real" I mean actually using the laptop or gadget on the wireless to surf the internet while, for example, playing music. (Everyone in these coffee shops seems to have headphones plugged into their laptop when I see them.)
Just an observation, not a critique on the article.
I checked California Digital's site. Those servers are 4U behemoths. The Xserves are 1U. So the Xserves actually take up half the space (2U for 4 processors versus 4U for 4 processors) for roughly similar performance.
Like I said, I'm surprised the Itanium 2's performance was so low, given that it's a newer architecture than the PowerPC 970.
If I calculate right, they are claiming an Rmax of 19.94 teraflops with 4096 processors.
The Virginia Tech cluster for Apple had an Rmax of 10.28 teraflops with 2200 processors.
So, the Itaninum 2 delivered 4.8 gigaflops per processor, the G5 delivered 4.6 gigaflops per processor.
This seems like a pretty poor showing for Itanium 2, overall. It's a much hotter chip than the Opteron or the G5, so cooling and power costs are likely much higher than a comparable apple cluster. The Xserve G5 is also likely cheaper than a similarly equipped Itanium 2 server, given that the Itanium 2 is $1398 per chip on Pricewatch, and a dual processor Xserve G5 cluster node is $2,999 list. Even with 4 cpus in a single box, I think the Itanium 2 server would easily top $6,000.
But anyway, good game to Lawrence Livermore. I'll be curious to see if Apple has another volley to fire before the top500 list closes for this round.
The Xserve G5's are quite a bit quieter than the Xserve G4's. However, the HP/Compaq rackmounts (DL3xx series) are by far the loudest rackmount servers I've heard, even louder than the G4's.
Also, the Xserve G5's have the same adaptive fanspeeds as the desktop Powermac G5's, so if they aren't working hard they are extremely quiet.
There was an interesting editorial in one of the workstation 'zines a few months ago. If I remember correctly, their observation was that in 1996, UNIX workstations sold about 700,000 units, NT boxes sold about 250,000 units, and Linux PCs sold about 100,000 units. However, they projected that in 1997, the final figures would be UNIX workstations: 750,000, NT workstations: 1 million, and Linux PC's: about 500,000. On which growth curve, Linux overtakes the entire UNIX workstation market in number of units sold some time in 1998, and by late '98 is nipping at NT's heels -- possibly overtaking NT, if NT 5.0 is delayed any further (snort).
Replace "NT" with "Longhorn" and change the dates and it still works!!!:):):)
Great electronic stuff from guys like Squarepusher and Plaid in un-DRM'd 192k LAME-encoded mp3 goodness.
I wish iTunes had a higher quality option. It's not that 160k AAC sounds bad, but if the download is all I get, I'd like a higher quality format to get at the same time.
If your web site doesn't work in Lynx, your web site is thoroughly, thoroughly fucked.
The only way to use Gmail is the way that the Gmail designers use Gmail. The only way Gmail could be less accessible is if the entire site were built in Flash.
That said, I have a gmail account and I think it looks great. Still, that's an awesome flame from Mark Pilgrim.
Neat, I'll have to try that. Although Alt-F2 is a terrible keystroke. I assume it can be remapped. Command-Spacebar is just intuitive after using it a few times, at least on the mac.
Actually, I'm an OSX user, and I find the Finder on OSX mostly annoying, but it's perfect for the average user. I think most "power" OSX users ignore the Finder and use a tool like PathFinder, QuickSilver, LaunchBar, or the good ol' command line to get around.
Personally, I use QuickSilver. Basically, it let's you pop up a menu (command spacebar) and then just type the first few letters of something (or a predefined shortcut) to launch an app or a bookmark or a file or a google search. LaunchBar is the same. It's a really nice application and the Linux world could certainly use something like it, dunno if it exists.
Yeah, hehe, because of this I even thought that linked article containts some rant about KDE's supposedly poor usability.
When I saw that the second screenshot was about how you can cut and paste error message to submit your own bug reports, I still wasn't sure which way the story was going.
But seriously, KDE is looking good, some of the nice features like viewing inside zip files and such will help win over windows users.
Personally, I read Dan's column pretty regularly in my newsreader, and I think he's a pretty smart guy. He doesn't like Microsoft, he does like Apple, and he generally supports the stands of the EFF (anti DRM, etc.)
So I don't think this is jumping on the bandwagon. It seems like a fair assessment of where Linux is on the desktop. Dan had to find and download a patch to get his wireless card to work. That alone rules out most consumers. Not everyone can patch the kernel on their own.
Way back in the NetWare 3 days, IBM resold Novell NetWare in a blue box. Also, IBM wrote and supported the later revisions of Novell's NetWare for SAA gateway.
I imagine that there are still plenty of people in both companies that have past business relationships. I'm sure that helps a lot when inking agreements like this.
Well, we have differing opinions, obviously. I think Cory is a attention-whore whose head needs buttered on the sides to fit through most standards-compliant doors. You do not.
Fortunately, there is no ultimate judge of human character, so both of our ideas can exist in the same space-time.
I don't fault Cory for what he does. Heck, he's a success by most measures. I just don't like his massive ego.
Oh yeah, well I think eggboard is just a Cory alias! How do you like *that* unfounded accusation?:)
Actually it was Damien from Robot Army asking the question. In fact, I met Damien because afterwards I went up to him to find out why Cory came down so hard on him. It was a DRM panel that he was sitting on with Dan Gillmor at ETcon 2003.
Damien basically asked a question (nicely) about how DRM could be used for good or evil, that it wasn't inherently evil in-an-of-itself. Cory not only didn't deal with the question, he was really really hostile about it. Maybe he and Damien have some sort of past.
But, in any event, I've seen Cory in action at multiple EFF and O'Reilly events, and he's always all about Cory. This doesn't make him unique in the pundit world by any means, that's how these guys get to be pundits.
Cory forgot to mention his enormous, throbbing ego, which he carries around with him all the time.
I saw Cory speak at a conference last year. He got a legitimate, well-reasoned, nicely worded question from the crowd. Because it didn't agree with his world-view, Cory belittled the guy and didn't address the questioner's point at all.
All Cory is about is promoting Cory. Remember a few months ago when he got press for being on the Atkins diet? Cory would get into necrophilia if he thought there was an upcoming "Necrophiliac Geek Trends" article in Wired that he might get mentioned in.
Car Talk will now be available via the Windows Media Player, rather than RealMedia. That's right, we're unceremoniously dumping RealMedia.
Why? Because, for a long time, we've had tons of complaints about RealNetworks. And the one that ticks us off the most is the perceived trickery they use to sell their premium products. This is just our opinion, mind you, but it's shared by enough of our listeners, that we finally decided to take action.
Here's the problem. In order to hear our audio, you have to go to Real.com and download their "free" RealPlayer. But when you get to the web site, the free player is harder to find than Osama Bin Laden at night. And the site seems to do everything it possibly can to get you to "buy" a player instead. You have to work very hard to get the free player. And we think that stinks. And get this. It stinks so much that it even makes Microsoft look good by comparison. That's something, huh?
We've heard from many of our fans that have been duped, and who have accidentally shelled out their hard-earned dineros. And we won't even get into the ways that the RealPlayer tries to take over your computer once you install it. So, after surveying the alternatives, we're switching to Windows Media Player (which works on Macs, too).
For Novell, I think the biggest challenge is to keep revenue stable while customers transition from NetWare to Linux, without losing too many customers to Windows in the process.
NetWare is still pretty expensive on the server. A 50-user copy is about $150 a seat on CDW retail ($7,500), about $50 a seat under a licensing agreement ($2,500).
SuSE is $999 per server with no client licenses fees.
Figuring NetWare to be about 50% of Novell's one billion in revenue, that means Novell would stand to lose more that 25% of their total revenue assuming everyone switched to SuSE. Novell might make this up with SuSE/Ximian desktop revenue, but I see large amounts of revenue from Linux on the desktop as being a long time in the making.
The estimates for SuSE revenue for 2003 were for about $40 million in revenue. As near as I can tell Ximan never really made any money to speak of.
So, if I haven't bored anyone to death yet, Novell NetWare is a $500 million revenue stream, SuSE is a $40 million revenue stream. Novell needs to very carefully transition from NetWare to SuSE if they want to keep revenue even. They can also grow by taking customers from Microsoft or Red Hat. But, it appears to me that Novell will have to shrink about 25% in size in order to remain profitable in the short term. Red Hat, with a more mature Linux strategy, only made $100 million in the last four quarters.
None of this is a bad thing, and I wish Novell the best of luck. I used to work there, and I still have friends there. Just doing the math though it seems like they will need to get smaller before they get bigger again.
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That seems smart to me, especially if the coffee shop is charging for wireless access. It pays for them to keep people connected as long as possible!
It still seems kind of funny. I mean, we didn't need the wireless revolution for a bunch of people to cluster around a table and plug in, we could have done that years ago with wired ethernet!
Although, to be fair, wi-fi brought a level of plug-and-play to the equation that wasn't there before. I think Win2K was the first microsoft OS that cleanly could handle multiple ethernet configs. I distinctly remember running a little shareware app called NetSwitcher on Windows 98 so that I could have two different ethernet configs for home and office.
You don't put a 3.4GHz Pentium 4 (desktop model) chip into a laptop and expect it to last more than an hour. That's stupid, they weren't made for that. Get a Pentium M or at the very least, Pentium 4 M. Forget the M and you can forget your battery life. Same goes for Athlon too.
You make a great point. Most people seem to ignore the battery life of their notebook or their usage patterns and just buy whatever looks shiny (or believe the manufacturer's battery ratings.)
I think most people, if they were truly informed, would trade 25% less performance for 50% more battery life. But, Intel and others have trained consumers that speed is king.
Sorry to reply to my own comment, but I looked closer at the picture in the article of Richard MacKinnon, captioned as part of the Austin Wireless City Project. He has a rather conspicuous power cable plugged into his laptop.
:)
Wireless? I think not.
I chuckle every time I hear about "wireless" networks because every time I wander into starbuck's or any other spot with wireless everyone with a computer is jockeying for the power outlets. There usually aren't nearly enough outlets for the number of people who need power. Heck, when people bring laptops into one-hour meetings in my workplace they are usually jockeying for outlets too.
So, maybe we're seeing a large deployment of "one less wire" networks, but until battery life gets much better, I don't think it's fair to say wireless. Most laptops and pda-type gadgets are lucky to get two hours of "real" usage in the field. By "real" I mean actually using the laptop or gadget on the wireless to surf the internet while, for example, playing music. (Everyone in these coffee shops seems to have headphones plugged into their laptop when I see them.)
Just an observation, not a critique on the article.
I checked California Digital's site. Those servers are 4U behemoths. The Xserves are 1U. So the Xserves actually take up half the space (2U for 4 processors versus 4U for 4 processors) for roughly similar performance.
Like I said, I'm surprised the Itanium 2's performance was so low, given that it's a newer architecture than the PowerPC 970.
If I calculate right, they are claiming an Rmax of 19.94 teraflops with 4096 processors.
The Virginia Tech cluster for Apple had an Rmax of 10.28 teraflops with 2200 processors.
So, the Itaninum 2 delivered 4.8 gigaflops per processor, the G5 delivered 4.6 gigaflops per processor.
This seems like a pretty poor showing for Itanium 2, overall. It's a much hotter chip than the Opteron or the G5, so cooling and power costs are likely much higher than a comparable apple cluster. The Xserve G5 is also likely cheaper than a similarly equipped Itanium 2 server, given that the Itanium 2 is $1398 per chip on Pricewatch, and a dual processor Xserve G5 cluster node is $2,999 list. Even with 4 cpus in a single box, I think the Itanium 2 server would easily top $6,000.
But anyway, good game to Lawrence Livermore. I'll be curious to see if Apple has another volley to fire before the top500 list closes for this round.
That was a general point on the noise, not a specific point on the cluster, Mr. Literal.
The Xserve G5's are quite a bit quieter than the Xserve G4's. However, the HP/Compaq rackmounts (DL3xx series) are by far the loudest rackmount servers I've heard, even louder than the G4's.
Also, the Xserve G5's have the same adaptive fanspeeds as the desktop Powermac G5's, so if they aren't working hard they are extremely quiet.
*and* the original poster is slashdot user #1328!!
:)
http://slashdot.org/~charlie
Charlie, um, you were a bit off. Nice to see you're still a geek, though.
link
Replace "NT" with "Longhorn" and change the dates and it still works!!!
bookmarked, thanks!
My current favorite download service is Bleep
http://www.warprecords.com/bleep/
Great electronic stuff from guys like Squarepusher and Plaid in un-DRM'd 192k LAME-encoded mp3 goodness.
I wish iTunes had a higher quality option. It's not that 160k AAC sounds bad, but if the download is all I get, I'd like a higher quality format to get at the same time.
http://diveintomark.org/archives/2004/04/12/dream
and here:
http://diveintomark.org/archives/2004/04/10/gmail
My favorite quotes:
That said, I have a gmail account and I think it looks great. Still, that's an awesome flame from Mark Pilgrim.
Neat, I'll have to try that. Although Alt-F2 is a terrible keystroke. I assume it can be remapped. Command-Spacebar is just intuitive after using it a few times, at least on the mac.
Actually, I'm an OSX user, and I find the Finder on OSX mostly annoying, but it's perfect for the average user. I think most "power" OSX users ignore the Finder and use a tool like PathFinder, QuickSilver, LaunchBar, or the good ol' command line to get around.
Personally, I use QuickSilver. Basically, it let's you pop up a menu (command spacebar) and then just type the first few letters of something (or a predefined shortcut) to launch an app or a bookmark or a file or a google search. LaunchBar is the same. It's a really nice application and the Linux world could certainly use something like it, dunno if it exists.
Yeah, hehe, because of this I even thought that linked article containts some rant about KDE's supposedly poor usability.
When I saw that the second screenshot was about how you can cut and paste error message to submit your own bug reports, I still wasn't sure which way the story was going.
But seriously, KDE is looking good, some of the nice features like viewing inside zip files and such will help win over windows users.
Well, to be honest, I all but understood it.
It's become clear that the Linux desktop has all but surpassed proprietary alternatives.
Now that's a phrase I'm sure even Microsoft can agree with. Let me rephrase it for you:
"The Linux desktop has everything proprietary alternatives have, but the proprietary alternatives are better."
Personally, I read Dan's column pretty regularly in my newsreader, and I think he's a pretty smart guy. He doesn't like Microsoft, he does like Apple, and he generally supports the stands of the EFF (anti DRM, etc.)
So I don't think this is jumping on the bandwagon. It seems like a fair assessment of where Linux is on the desktop. Dan had to find and download a patch to get his wireless card to work. That alone rules out most consumers. Not everyone can patch the kernel on their own.
Way back in the NetWare 3 days, IBM resold Novell NetWare in a blue box. Also, IBM wrote and supported the later revisions of Novell's NetWare for SAA gateway.
I imagine that there are still plenty of people in both companies that have past business relationships. I'm sure that helps a lot when inking agreements like this.
Here's an interesting story on IBM's website that has some more background on the alliance:
http://www-1.ibm.com/linux/news/novell.shtml
Well, we have differing opinions, obviously. I think Cory is a attention-whore whose head needs buttered on the sides to fit through most standards-compliant doors. You do not.
Fortunately, there is no ultimate judge of human character, so both of our ideas can exist in the same space-time.
I don't fault Cory for what he does. Heck, he's a success by most measures. I just don't like his massive ego.
Oh yeah, well I think eggboard is just a Cory alias! How do you like *that* unfounded accusation? :)
Actually it was Damien from Robot Army asking the question. In fact, I met Damien because afterwards I went up to him to find out why Cory came down so hard on him. It was a DRM panel that he was sitting on with Dan Gillmor at ETcon 2003.
Damien basically asked a question (nicely) about how DRM could be used for good or evil, that it wasn't inherently evil in-an-of-itself. Cory not only didn't deal with the question, he was really really hostile about it. Maybe he and Damien have some sort of past.
But, in any event, I've seen Cory in action at multiple EFF and O'Reilly events, and he's always all about Cory. This doesn't make him unique in the pundit world by any means, that's how these guys get to be pundits.
Cory forgot to mention his enormous, throbbing ego, which he carries around with him all the time.
I saw Cory speak at a conference last year. He got a legitimate, well-reasoned, nicely worded question from the crowd. Because it didn't agree with his world-view, Cory belittled the guy and didn't address the questioner's point at all.
All Cory is about is promoting Cory. Remember a few months ago when he got press for being on the Atkins diet? Cory would get into necrophilia if he thought there was an upcoming "Necrophiliac Geek Trends" article in Wired that he might get mentioned in.
I like what the car talk guys had to say about Real:
http://cartalk.com/Radio/windowsmedia-switch.html
Car Talk will now be available via the Windows Media Player, rather than RealMedia. That's right, we're unceremoniously dumping RealMedia.
Why? Because, for a long time, we've had tons of complaints about RealNetworks. And the one that ticks us off the most is the perceived trickery they use to sell their premium products. This is just our opinion, mind you, but it's shared by enough of our listeners, that we finally decided to take action.
Here's the problem. In order to hear our audio, you have to go to Real.com and download their "free" RealPlayer. But when you get to the web site, the free player is harder to find than Osama Bin Laden at night. And the site seems to do everything it possibly can to get you to "buy" a player instead. You have to work very hard to get the free player. And we think that stinks. And get this. It stinks so much that it even makes Microsoft look good by comparison. That's something, huh?
We've heard from many of our fans that have been duped, and who have accidentally shelled out their hard-earned dineros. And we won't even get into the ways that the RealPlayer tries to take over your computer once you install it. So, after surveying the alternatives, we're switching to Windows Media Player (which works on Macs, too).
For Novell, I think the biggest challenge is to keep revenue stable while customers transition from NetWare to Linux, without losing too many customers to Windows in the process.
NetWare is still pretty expensive on the server. A 50-user copy is about $150 a seat on CDW retail ($7,500), about $50 a seat under a licensing agreement ($2,500).
SuSE is $999 per server with no client licenses fees.
Figuring NetWare to be about 50% of Novell's one billion in revenue, that means Novell would stand to lose more that 25% of their total revenue assuming everyone switched to SuSE. Novell might make this up with SuSE/Ximian desktop revenue, but I see large amounts of revenue from Linux on the desktop as being a long time in the making.
The estimates for SuSE revenue for 2003 were for about $40 million in revenue. As near as I can tell Ximan never really made any money to speak of.
So, if I haven't bored anyone to death yet, Novell NetWare is a $500 million revenue stream, SuSE is a $40 million revenue stream. Novell needs to very carefully transition from NetWare to SuSE if they want to keep revenue even. They can also grow by taking customers from Microsoft or Red Hat. But, it appears to me that Novell will have to shrink about 25% in size in order to remain profitable in the short term. Red Hat, with a more mature Linux strategy, only made $100 million in the last four quarters.
None of this is a bad thing, and I wish Novell the best of luck. I used to work there, and I still have friends there. Just doing the math though it seems like they will need to get smaller before they get bigger again.