Agreed. If anything, we need more digital divide. Most people who will get this free stuff don't have any appreciation for its uses. Those who do can already get access at public facilities like libraries and universities. All this really does is increase the number of people with net access and no clue. September that never ended, indeed. Then there are the privacy and ownership issues, the bandwidth problems,... There's nothing good in this.
I'm just wondering what is Intel going to do about it.
Not a thing would be my guess. Intel hasn't been anywhere near the top of the technology curve for many years. Nevertheless, they are immensely profitable. Ask yourself: what would you do? I would keep on hype, hype, hyping it up selling to gullible, brain-dead consumers until the consumers either kill themselves off in fits of idiocy or wise up. And I'd laugh all the way to the bank.
Get "The Sparc Architecture Manual V9" and you'll see 100s of this things.
Yep. I've read the whole thing.:) It's exceedingly easy to program as well. And has backward compatibility in such a way that doesn't interfere with the rest of the CPU. 44-bit (64 in US-3) address space. Memory-mapped I/O. I could go on... Intel could learn a lot from the Sparc.
Sun's architecture is based on high-speed switches connecting multiple fast/wide PCI or Sbus buses. The peecee architecture is based on having one to four PCI buses on another shared bus. Suns have memory buses no less than 1152 bits wide. Peecees generally have 256-bit memory buses. Summary: Suns can move far, far more bits around inside them than any peecee server can. Sun 4, Intel 0. It should be noted that this isn't entirely Intel's fault, but they aren't really helping anyone do something non-peeceeish. You _could_ build a Sun-like system with Xeons, but nobody does.
The peecee architecture is hopelessly obsolete. 16 bit bootstrap code. A BIOS. Forget boot monitors and intelligent peripherals, you know, things that make systems manageable and flexible (just try booting a peecee from tape - you can't - or over the network - that'll cost you extra). Both system architectures have their roots in the late 70s and early 80s. Sun started with a good design and have steadily improved and enhanced it. The peecee started with a poor design and have left it essentially unchanged for 20 years. Sun 5, Intel 0. Again, not all Intel's fault, but since there aren't really any other systems available using Intel CPUs, it counts against them anyway.
Now, even with these drawbacks, I could see the Xeons being a good choice for a midrange server if they cost much less than the Suns. Unfortunately, the Xeons are actually more expensive than the UltraSparcs, even at the same clock and with the same size L2 cache. If you have $4k to blow, you can get either a Xeon 500 w/2MB, or an UltraSparc 450 with 4MB. And the UltraSparc is faster, too. Oops, guess that's 3. Sun 6, Intel 0.
Unfortunately there are still problems with going offshore. The problems of physical connectivity, and of the authorities in question caving in to the US, would make it an exercise in futility. You might have better luck if you could find a reasonably powerful, well connected country willing to stand up to the US. Too bad there really aren't any these days.
Thus the only way to solve this problem is to buy up some land - preferably islands for defense reasons - and start our own country, which would intentionally not form any treaties with anyone, and completely ignore any and all foriegn intellectual property and/or censorship regulations. A "rogue" nation, with a single purpose in mind. There is still the problem of physical connectivity. Putting up a satellite would be a start, but it might be that nobody bothers to pick up the signal. Pipe piracy would, in the long run, probably be the only solution. Oops, Japan's not connected any more. Instead, we are.
Of course, it'd probably be easier to just have a revolution in the US. There will be sooner or later anyway...
All the high-end vendors support partitioning and/or recombination in some fashion. There's no technical reason "mainstream," by which I assume you mean "x86" processors could not be arranged in such an architecture. For starters, Intel made a supercomputer, the Paragon I believe, which used 386 processors. It's not a great leap from MPP to partitioning. However, the point is moot, as peecee-type systems aren't likely to have or need this capability. For one, there are usually too few processors for it to be useful; while partitioning one CPU may at times be interesting, it requires a great deal more software and architectural support. For another, people who buy peecee-type systems do so because they want a cheap box. The S/390's partitioning/VM scheme kicks serious ass, but the CPUs and architecture are more than adequate to handle the overhead - x86 CPUs would slow to a crawl. Those who need partitioning can afford to pay for it.
Right now they are breaking every copyright law in the book by allowing those posts to stay up
No. They may be in violation of one law, which is new and has never been tested in court. Therefore even if they are in violation, it does not necessarily mean they would lose in court.
This is NOT a free speech issue.
Yes, it is. It is about whether common carriers (ISPs, community sites like Slashdot, etc) can be held responsible for the content in their media. Ask yourself this: if you call a friend and read him the contents of the posts in question, can Microsoft sue the telco for failing to terminate your call?
What is someone posted an entire novel? It would be removed in a second.
A novel is an original work, and distributing it causes possible loss of revenue to the copyright holder. A technical specification derived from a freely distributable work which has already been published publically may or may not be copyrightable, but it surely cannot be held as a trade secret.
but these laws are what America was built upon.
Nope. For 200+ years, all we had were the USPTO and a set of laws that included provisions like "fair use" to protect the rights of everyone, not just megacorporations. The law in question here is brand new, and is very much in contrast with American history.
Without them, many great products would never have been created such as the car, light bulb, telephone
The light bulb, maybe - though we would certainly have fluorescent lighting anyway. The telephone was an obvious extension of the telegraph and would undoubtedly have existed anyway. The same arguments apply to the car. One might argue that the prospect of wealth derived from IP sped up development of some things, but by and large they would exist anyway for much the same reason that Linux exists. The protections afforded physical property are sufficient to foster development and I challenge you to prove otherwise.
That's right, Windows 98 is a great product.
Depends on the perspective. From Microsoft's perspective, it is. W98, like all of Microsoft's products, is designed with the single goal of making money for Bill Gates, which it achieves admirably. From the perspective of a potential customer, however, W98 is a terrible product, unless the potential customer's goal is also to increase Bill Gates's wealth. If his goal is to get anything useful done with a computer, then it is in fact a terrible product.
Anyone who says otherwise is a pro-Linux zelot or a fool.
Not bloody likely. It all depends on whose perspective you consider.
...the DMCA is blatantly unconstitutional, and this is the perfect way to prove it. Constitutionality can only be decided in the courts, and Andover's arrogant and unreasonable response will help generate bad blood, hopefully enough for this whole thing to go to court. Then this illegal piece of legislation gets tossed out and the US is safe for another year at least. There are times when being obnoxious and unreasonable is an advantage; this is one such.
Instead of paying lawyers tons of cash and standing the very real possibility of losing, wouldn't it just be a whole lot easier to spin off Slashdot, {SA, Inc,...} as a [insert name of freedom-friendly nation here] wholly owned subsidiary of Andover and move the servers to [freedom-friendly nation]? Fuck the US. If the US only wants $100 billion and larger corporations, then that can be arranged. "We'll take our business elsewhere, thanks. I'm afraid you're just not willing or able to meet our needs."
That's odd. I started running Linux on sparc a few years ago and I've never even thought about using a peecee since then. Linux may have good support for 95% of the peecee hardware out there, but what if you have something in the 5% category? I assure you your Alpha experiences were less frustrating than those of people trying to get Linux to be stable on an Abit BP6. And even if your hardware is well supported, it's still all a big pile of 16-bit legacy crap crufted together with obsolete glue and the marketing power of Microsoft.
Then I got myself a Sparcstation. Think of the light shining down from the heavens and illuminating the heathen's face for the first time. The hardware is beautifully built and high quality. The Linux support for it is excellent. As far as I'm concerned, the primary Linux platform is sparc; i386 is just a secondary little-used port. Linux on sparc is everything an OS should be - stable, fast, powerful, and elegant. And no matter how hard you try, you just can't do something this nice on shoddy, inferior hardware. Go buy yourself a cheap sparcstation 20 and find out what you've been missing. I've never tried Linux on Alpha, but the sparc port is proof that a port can be better than the original.
No, I mock the 13-year-old fuckfaces. If you need help understanding, place a pair around anything that refers to gamez and gamerz. I hate g4m3z d00dZ with unmatched passion. G4m3Z d00dz, 0v3rcl0|<|<3r |<1DD13zz, and general peecee wankers piss me off. I long for a return to the days when the bizarre priesthood carefully guarded access to monumentally complicated, expensive, and inaccessible computers. I wish people could understand and appreciate the design and engineering that go into real computers, and the idea that computers are meant to compute. In short, I think the referenced article points everything that's wrong with the computer industry today, and passionately despise the forces at work in the massive dumbing-down of the computers themselves and those who use them.
Hence the misspeeling. Ditto for the word "peecee."
Yeah, the used market is much more reasonable. And don't worry - I _like_ sgis. I even kind of like Irix most of the time. But the fact is, buying any decent machine new from SGI is going to be expensive. They're still well worth the price.
Uhm, I think that RH6.1 will run out of box on the original NT machines as well (since they merged the required patches into the system).
You are mistaken. A kernel built with VisWS support will not run on normal systems, and vice versa. Yes, the patches were integrated, but using them is a compile-time decision.
My point is that if I'm going to buy a system from SGI, I'm going to look for the best value. This isn't it. If you look at these products as a part of the SGI line, they provide a lower quality/price ratio. And thus are overpriced. In the peecee marketplace, quality == 0, so the position of these systems among their peers is unordered.
What's your point? These systems are not based on that architecture - the fact that they'll run unmodified RH6.1 is proof of that, and the datasheet even states, as if it's a benefit, "industry standard architecture and components."
The first-generation systems failed precisely because they had those characteristics. SGI was trying to sell a designed peecee. You can't do it. The whole point of the peecee is that it's just like everyone else's. Either you sell a peecee or you sell a workstation. SGI's come to their senses and decided to sell peecees. Sure, the first-generation systems were better; they were also a failure. Those systems were different. These are just blue peecees.
You are a complete idiot, or a troll. Innovation in the OS world is fairly irrelevant. For most purposes it doesn't matter which modern OS you use. Irix is fine; unlike Solaris, it isn't dog-ass slow. The real problem SGI has is the same one everyone has: good technology is expensive, and it's hard to sell expensive equipment. So they make some crappy systems, slap an SGI logo on them, and sell them for a tenth of their usual prices. People jump.
That doesn't mean the technology is better, just that it's more marketable. An Onyx2 with eight CPUs and an infinite reality engine is more powerful, by any standard, than anything that has ever existed containing an x86 CPU. And that's a low-end SGI. Nothing that runs Red Hat, except possibly a Sun Enterprise 10000, can even come close to an Origin 2000.
The peecee sucks. It may be easy to market, but it still sucks.
It both is and isn't. Compared with the rest of the high-end peecee market, it's not overpriced. Compared with anything else SGI sells or sold, it's horribly overpriced. I'd trade you a hundred of these for one Octane. Yes, I'm aware that the Octane is ten times as expensive, but it's a whole lot more than ten times as good. Just say no to obsolete technology.
$6000??? What dream world do you live in? The crappiest O2 is $6k; for any decent system, you'd be looking at $20k easy. Hell, used Octanes start around $6k. Unfortunately, I don't really see these boxes being worth $3k. It's still just a peecee. A peecee with a nice skin and fast graphics, sure, but under the hood it's pretty much the same old XT from 1984. More expensive or not, I'll stick to the machines that have earned the right to have an SGI cube on them. I do hope they continue to make such things.
Pretty much everything he says is correct. And it's a good thing. Microsoft's "standards" may be helpful for the peecee gamerz, but they're harmful to virtually everyone else who's ever touched a computer. We're all better off if Microsoft goes away completely; whatever "remedies" come out of this court case will probably be insignificant in the long run. Already the market is solving the problems itself with the rise of Linux, BSD, and the strengthening and in some cases re-invention of the traditional high-end vendors, then the subsequent Windows 2000 response from Microsoft. Sure, it still sucks, but if you ask me it's obvious that they recognized some of their shortcomings and have at least attempted to improve.
The problem for gamez writers is real. The fundamental problem with peecee gaming is that gamez, to get the performance gamerz want today, need to get very close to the hardware. Unfortunately, this is exactly the type of thing that good operating systems both prevent and facilitate: arbitrary random physical access to hardware devices is out of the question, but there exists one prescribed method of gaining the access you need, which offers protection from at least most mistakes. DirectAnything is hamstrung by two problems: 1) It fails to provide any real protection, and has been designed and implemented in the same slipshod way as the rest of windows, 2) It requires hardware support which is anything but universal.
So it's understandable that gamez manufacturers like targetting the consoles - it's a single known environment (as is pointed out in the article) which is generally rock solid internally and offers very direct hardware access, making high performance easy to get. Naturally, the lack of protection is problematic, but people have been writing hardware gamez since Pong - it's a science by now.
I would argue that, once completely implemented, the new DRI/DRM XFree implementation will be infinitely preferable to Microsoft targets for gamez developers. Why? Performance (with the right hardware), universal availability, and uniformity. In other words, you won't _need_ a FuxorGraphics model 455CA specifically; anything will work, though naturally if you want good performance you'll want something that can do hardware GL. GL is not itself without problems, but at least it's widely available. And with a fast enough CPU, software rendering is not out of the question (in fact, some SGI systems were set up specifically to do most of the rendering on the CPU. This is not altogether a bad thing; the 3D performance on those systems does not suck, to put it mildly).
Whether this ever happens, and whether it's ever adopted, remain to be seen. But even if all of his worst fears are realized, and DRI never gets completed in any sane fashion, it's not the end of the world. The worst doomsday scenario he comes up with is the death of the peecee. Would it be so bad to kiss the relic of the 70's, never designed but patched together by marketing types and marginal hackers from day one, unstable, unreliable, and nonuniform, a final goodbye? I'd like nothing better than the death of the peecee. Good riddance. Tragically, though, this fear is massively overblown: the peecee's existence relies on buyer ignorance and gullibility, of which there seem to be no shortage.
How long until they realize that the peecee platform just isn't up to it? How much will they spend on bizarro load balancing solutions to disguise the fact that the peecee platform just can't scale? If load balancing is used for reliability, that's fine. But it's not the solution for using an underpowered platform to begin with.
The right setup for this would be something more like two Sun 420s serving pages and a 3500 for the DB/fileserver. And yes, they should be running Linux (with Solaris you'd need twice as many machines to compensate for the built-in Molasses [tm] feature).
Let's face it, it doesn't take a PhD in economics to recognize that a situation in which stock valuations have no relation to present or future earnings isn't going to be good. We've already seen a lot of air out of the tech market, but unfortunately it wasn't enough. Companies with no earnings and no prospects still have market caps in the 8 or 9 digit range... this is absurd. Others like Yahoo! have earnings but PE ratios well over 100.
Ask yourself: if a heavy-equipment manufacturer had revenue, earnings, and growth identical to Yahoo!, would you pay $150 a share for it?
Another problem that isn't mentioned in the text (though it may be in the book) is that there is way too much money in the form of pension funds and other public and private "forced" investment. This causes a localized inflation in equities markets as too many dollars chase too few viable investments. "Why would you buy Amazon???" "Gotta buy something..."
So here it is, on the record and read-only: my target for the NASDAQ index bottom, whenever it's finally reached, is...2000. And I hope it kills all the idiot investors who seem attracted preferentially to unprofitable companies.
Please, don't sue me if you use this for advice. In that case, you're an idiot as I have no qualifications.
Of course. And if there were any account other than root for them to run this under, I'd agree. Failing to provide access control on system-critical files is a bug. When RedHat foolishly shipped piranha in 6.2 with inappropriate access control, they acknowledged it as a bug, which it was. Microsoft should do the same. It's that simple.
Of course, anyone running an OS with such a fundamental, known WONTFIX bug is an idiot ** 10000. So, yes, Microsoft fucked up, but the person really at fault is whoever signed the purchase order for the windoze licenses. I recommend that affected organizations find and promptly sack that individual. He or she cost your company millions, not Microsoft. Microsoft just did what they do best - make it easy (for you to lose millions).
I hope (and cautiously assume) you're only talking about software here. If you mean that it should be legal to sell childrens' car-seats made of balsa wood, or soup with botulin (so long as it's listed amongst the ingredients)
Actually, I have to disappoint you here. I may have a problem with the balsa child seat, because of the inherent consumer sovereignty problem - the parents buy it but it's the baby who dies if it's hosed. A baby shouldn't be punished for its parents idiocy. The soup, OTOH, is fine with me. Read the ingredients - if botulin's listed, that's a no-no. If the press does its job, they'll never sell a can of the stuff and the whole thing will be a total loss in business terms.
Laws against that sort of thing were made in a time of widespread illiteracy and scientific ignorance, and information sharing was virtually nonexistent. Those conditions no longer hold. Nearly everyone today has access to unlimited information and the capacity to interpret it.
Shouldn't a company be able to sell software with the understanding that there is no warranty?
Yes, absolutely! GPL or multi-million-dollar proprietary patentware, doesn't matter. I don't believe in product liability. If you want a warranty, buy one. Consider it insurance. If someone wants to offer you a warranty, that's fine, but nobody should have to. There's no hypocrisy involved here. I agree with the court's decision.
That said, I think the decision is great for Free Software. We don't offer a warranty, neither do the big guys. If you're not going to get a warranty, you might as well go with something that's used by the guy who wrote it and costs nothing. It's one less thing for PHBs to like about non-Free software (as the poster mentions, the "whom do we sue?" attitude).
In fact, I hope we see more like this. I don't want any proprietary vendor held to answer for its products, nor do I want any term of any license, proprietary or otherwise, declared invalid. Go UCITA! Let the big software houses fuck themselves up the ass. Carry it to the logical conclusion - lay bare the true motives of the megacorporations by letting them do business as they like. Once everyone realizes that they won't stand by their products and don't give a shit about their customers, it'll be that much easier to justify the decision to abandon proprietary software. Force people to read and follow their licenses instead of letting them hide behind the shield of the law.
In an environment where the license is written in stone and backed up with the force of law without appeal or mercy, a software package's terms of use become very important criteria indeed. So much the better for those who distribute their software under more agreeable terms.
As an administrator, I'm really torn here. Should I block this virus by various sendmail hacks, or let it go? If I let it go, then idiots who execute their mail, not to mention using windoze in the first place, get what they deserve, in spades. OTOH, if I block it I'm much less likely to have to deal with people asking me to fix up their machines (even if it just means I tell them that windoze isn't my problem). This is tough.
Oh well. At least it gives me one more thing to laugh at - two, really: the fuckwits who get hit by it, and the even greater fuckwits who think it's some kind of global emergency. I mean, really, most wars don't get this much attention. And it's not like people don't have a choice about getting the virus...
A Flu epidemic? Sure, that's news. ILOVEYOU? Gimme a fuckin break.
Slashdot Mirror
Agreed. If anything, we need more digital divide. Most people who will get this free stuff don't have any appreciation for its uses. Those who do can already get access at public facilities like libraries and universities. All this really does is increase the number of people with net access and no clue. September that never ended, indeed. Then there are the privacy and ownership issues, the bandwidth problems, ... There's nothing good in this.
Not a thing would be my guess. Intel hasn't been anywhere near the top of the technology curve for many years. Nevertheless, they are immensely profitable. Ask yourself: what would you do? I would keep on hype, hype, hyping it up selling to gullible, brain-dead consumers until the consumers either kill themselves off in fits of idiocy or wise up. And I'd laugh all the way to the bank.
Yep. I've read the whole thing. :) It's exceedingly easy to program as well. And has backward compatibility in such a way that doesn't interfere with the rest of the CPU. 44-bit (64 in US-3) address space. Memory-mapped I/O. I could go on... Intel could learn a lot from the Sparc.
Sun's architecture is based on high-speed switches connecting multiple fast/wide PCI or Sbus buses. The peecee architecture is based on having one to four PCI buses on another shared bus. Suns have memory buses no less than 1152 bits wide. Peecees generally have 256-bit memory buses. Summary: Suns can move far, far more bits around inside them than any peecee server can. Sun 4, Intel 0. It should be noted that this isn't entirely Intel's fault, but they aren't really helping anyone do something non-peeceeish. You _could_ build a Sun-like system with Xeons, but nobody does.
The peecee architecture is hopelessly obsolete. 16 bit bootstrap code. A BIOS. Forget boot monitors and intelligent peripherals, you know, things that make systems manageable and flexible (just try booting a peecee from tape - you can't - or over the network - that'll cost you extra). Both system architectures have their roots in the late 70s and early 80s. Sun started with a good design and have steadily improved and enhanced it. The peecee started with a poor design and have left it essentially unchanged for 20 years. Sun 5, Intel 0. Again, not all Intel's fault, but since there aren't really any other systems available using Intel CPUs, it counts against them anyway.
Now, even with these drawbacks, I could see the Xeons being a good choice for a midrange server if they cost much less than the Suns. Unfortunately, the Xeons are actually more expensive than the UltraSparcs, even at the same clock and with the same size L2 cache. If you have $4k to blow, you can get either a Xeon 500 w/2MB, or an UltraSparc 450 with 4MB. And the UltraSparc is faster, too. Oops, guess that's 3. Sun 6, Intel 0.
Thus the only way to solve this problem is to buy up some land - preferably islands for defense reasons - and start our own country, which would intentionally not form any treaties with anyone, and completely ignore any and all foriegn intellectual property and/or censorship regulations. A "rogue" nation, with a single purpose in mind. There is still the problem of physical connectivity. Putting up a satellite would be a start, but it might be that nobody bothers to pick up the signal. Pipe piracy would, in the long run, probably be the only solution. Oops, Japan's not connected any more. Instead, we are.
Of course, it'd probably be easier to just have a revolution in the US. There will be sooner or later anyway...
All the high-end vendors support partitioning and/or recombination in some fashion. There's no technical reason "mainstream," by which I assume you mean "x86" processors could not be arranged in such an architecture. For starters, Intel made a supercomputer, the Paragon I believe, which used 386 processors. It's not a great leap from MPP to partitioning. However, the point is moot, as peecee-type systems aren't likely to have or need this capability. For one, there are usually too few processors for it to be useful; while partitioning one CPU may at times be interesting, it requires a great deal more software and architectural support. For another, people who buy peecee-type systems do so because they want a cheap box. The S/390's partitioning/VM scheme kicks serious ass, but the CPUs and architecture are more than adequate to handle the overhead - x86 CPUs would slow to a crawl. Those who need partitioning can afford to pay for it.
No. They may be in violation of one law, which is new and has never been tested in court. Therefore even if they are in violation, it does not necessarily mean they would lose in court.
This is NOT a free speech issue.
Yes, it is. It is about whether common carriers (ISPs, community sites like Slashdot, etc) can be held responsible for the content in their media. Ask yourself this: if you call a friend and read him the contents of the posts in question, can Microsoft sue the telco for failing to terminate your call?
What is someone posted an entire novel? It would be removed in a second.
A novel is an original work, and distributing it causes possible loss of revenue to the copyright holder. A technical specification derived from a freely distributable work which has already been published publically may or may not be copyrightable, but it surely cannot be held as a trade secret.
but these laws are what America was built upon.
Nope. For 200+ years, all we had were the USPTO and a set of laws that included provisions like "fair use" to protect the rights of everyone, not just megacorporations. The law in question here is brand new, and is very much in contrast with American history.
Without them, many great products would never have been created such as the car, light bulb, telephone
The light bulb, maybe - though we would certainly have fluorescent lighting anyway. The telephone was an obvious extension of the telegraph and would undoubtedly have existed anyway. The same arguments apply to the car. One might argue that the prospect of wealth derived from IP sped up development of some things, but by and large they would exist anyway for much the same reason that Linux exists. The protections afforded physical property are sufficient to foster development and I challenge you to prove otherwise.
That's right, Windows 98 is a great product.
Depends on the perspective. From Microsoft's perspective, it is. W98, like all of Microsoft's products, is designed with the single goal of making money for Bill Gates, which it achieves admirably. From the perspective of a potential customer, however, W98 is a terrible product, unless the potential customer's goal is also to increase Bill Gates's wealth. If his goal is to get anything useful done with a computer, then it is in fact a terrible product.
Anyone who says otherwise is a pro-Linux zelot or a fool.
Not bloody likely. It all depends on whose perspective you consider.
...the DMCA is blatantly unconstitutional, and this is the perfect way to prove it. Constitutionality can only be decided in the courts, and Andover's arrogant and unreasonable response will help generate bad blood, hopefully enough for this whole thing to go to court. Then this illegal piece of legislation gets tossed out and the US is safe for another year at least. There are times when being obnoxious and unreasonable is an advantage; this is one such.
Instead of paying lawyers tons of cash and standing the very real possibility of losing, wouldn't it just be a whole lot easier to spin off Slashdot, {SA, Inc,...} as a [insert name of freedom-friendly nation here] wholly owned subsidiary of Andover and move the servers to [freedom-friendly nation]? Fuck the US. If the US only wants $100 billion and larger corporations, then that can be arranged. "We'll take our business elsewhere, thanks. I'm afraid you're just not willing or able to meet our needs."
Then I got myself a Sparcstation. Think of the light shining down from the heavens and illuminating the heathen's face for the first time. The hardware is beautifully built and high quality. The Linux support for it is excellent. As far as I'm concerned, the primary Linux platform is sparc; i386 is just a secondary little-used port. Linux on sparc is everything an OS should be - stable, fast, powerful, and elegant. And no matter how hard you try, you just can't do something this nice on shoddy, inferior hardware. Go buy yourself a cheap sparcstation 20 and find out what you've been missing. I've never tried Linux on Alpha, but the sparc port is proof that a port can be better than the original.
Hence the misspeeling. Ditto for the word "peecee."
Yeah, the used market is much more reasonable. And don't worry - I _like_ sgis. I even kind of like Irix most of the time. But the fact is, buying any decent machine new from SGI is going to be expensive. They're still well worth the price.
You are mistaken. A kernel built with VisWS support will not run on normal systems, and vice versa. Yes, the patches were integrated, but using them is a compile-time decision.
My point is that if I'm going to buy a system from SGI, I'm going to look for the best value. This isn't it. If you look at these products as a part of the SGI line, they provide a lower quality/price ratio. And thus are overpriced. In the peecee marketplace, quality == 0, so the position of these systems among their peers is unordered.
The first-generation systems failed precisely because they had those characteristics. SGI was trying to sell a designed peecee. You can't do it. The whole point of the peecee is that it's just like everyone else's. Either you sell a peecee or you sell a workstation. SGI's come to their senses and decided to sell peecees. Sure, the first-generation systems were better; they were also a failure. Those systems were different. These are just blue peecees.
That doesn't mean the technology is better, just that it's more marketable. An Onyx2 with eight CPUs and an infinite reality engine is more powerful, by any standard, than anything that has ever existed containing an x86 CPU. And that's a low-end SGI. Nothing that runs Red Hat, except possibly a Sun Enterprise 10000, can even come close to an Origin 2000.
The peecee sucks. It may be easy to market, but it still sucks.
It both is and isn't. Compared with the rest of the high-end peecee market, it's not overpriced. Compared with anything else SGI sells or sold, it's horribly overpriced. I'd trade you a hundred of these for one Octane. Yes, I'm aware that the Octane is ten times as expensive, but it's a whole lot more than ten times as good. Just say no to obsolete technology.
$6000??? What dream world do you live in? The crappiest O2 is $6k; for any decent system, you'd be looking at $20k easy. Hell, used Octanes start around $6k. Unfortunately, I don't really see these boxes being worth $3k. It's still just a peecee. A peecee with a nice skin and fast graphics, sure, but under the hood it's pretty much the same old XT from 1984. More expensive or not, I'll stick to the machines that have earned the right to have an SGI cube on them. I do hope they continue to make such things.
The problem for gamez writers is real. The fundamental problem with peecee gaming is that gamez, to get the performance gamerz want today, need to get very close to the hardware. Unfortunately, this is exactly the type of thing that good operating systems both prevent and facilitate: arbitrary random physical access to hardware devices is out of the question, but there exists one prescribed method of gaining the access you need, which offers protection from at least most mistakes. DirectAnything is hamstrung by two problems: 1) It fails to provide any real protection, and has been designed and implemented in the same slipshod way as the rest of windows, 2) It requires hardware support which is anything but universal.
So it's understandable that gamez manufacturers like targetting the consoles - it's a single known environment (as is pointed out in the article) which is generally rock solid internally and offers very direct hardware access, making high performance easy to get. Naturally, the lack of protection is problematic, but people have been writing hardware gamez since Pong - it's a science by now.
I would argue that, once completely implemented, the new DRI/DRM XFree implementation will be infinitely preferable to Microsoft targets for gamez developers. Why? Performance (with the right hardware), universal availability, and uniformity. In other words, you won't _need_ a FuxorGraphics model 455CA specifically; anything will work, though naturally if you want good performance you'll want something that can do hardware GL. GL is not itself without problems, but at least it's widely available. And with a fast enough CPU, software rendering is not out of the question (in fact, some SGI systems were set up specifically to do most of the rendering on the CPU. This is not altogether a bad thing; the 3D performance on those systems does not suck, to put it mildly).
Whether this ever happens, and whether it's ever adopted, remain to be seen. But even if all of his worst fears are realized, and DRI never gets completed in any sane fashion, it's not the end of the world. The worst doomsday scenario he comes up with is the death of the peecee. Would it be so bad to kiss the relic of the 70's, never designed but patched together by marketing types and marginal hackers from day one, unstable, unreliable, and nonuniform, a final goodbye? I'd like nothing better than the death of the peecee. Good riddance. Tragically, though, this fear is massively overblown: the peecee's existence relies on buyer ignorance and gullibility, of which there seem to be no shortage.
The right setup for this would be something more like two Sun 420s serving pages and a 3500 for the DB/fileserver. And yes, they should be running Linux (with Solaris you'd need twice as many machines to compensate for the built-in Molasses [tm] feature).
Ask yourself: if a heavy-equipment manufacturer had revenue, earnings, and growth identical to Yahoo!, would you pay $150 a share for it?
Another problem that isn't mentioned in the text (though it may be in the book) is that there is way too much money in the form of pension funds and other public and private "forced" investment. This causes a localized inflation in equities markets as too many dollars chase too few viable investments. "Why would you buy Amazon???" "Gotta buy something..."
So here it is, on the record and read-only: my target for the NASDAQ index bottom, whenever it's finally reached, is...2000. And I hope it kills all the idiot investors who seem attracted preferentially to unprofitable companies.
Please, don't sue me if you use this for advice. In that case, you're an idiot as I have no qualifications.
Of course, anyone running an OS with such a fundamental, known WONTFIX bug is an idiot ** 10000. So, yes, Microsoft fucked up, but the person really at fault is whoever signed the purchase order for the windoze licenses. I recommend that affected organizations find and promptly sack that individual. He or she cost your company millions, not Microsoft. Microsoft just did what they do best - make it easy (for you to lose millions).
Actually, I have to disappoint you here. I may have a problem with the balsa child seat, because of the inherent consumer sovereignty problem - the parents buy it but it's the baby who dies if it's hosed. A baby shouldn't be punished for its parents idiocy. The soup, OTOH, is fine with me. Read the ingredients - if botulin's listed, that's a no-no. If the press does its job, they'll never sell a can of the stuff and the whole thing will be a total loss in business terms.
Laws against that sort of thing were made in a time of widespread illiteracy and scientific ignorance, and information sharing was virtually nonexistent. Those conditions no longer hold. Nearly everyone today has access to unlimited information and the capacity to interpret it.
Yes, absolutely! GPL or multi-million-dollar proprietary patentware, doesn't matter. I don't believe in product liability. If you want a warranty, buy one. Consider it insurance. If someone wants to offer you a warranty, that's fine, but nobody should have to. There's no hypocrisy involved here. I agree with the court's decision.
That said, I think the decision is great for Free Software. We don't offer a warranty, neither do the big guys. If you're not going to get a warranty, you might as well go with something that's used by the guy who wrote it and costs nothing. It's one less thing for PHBs to like about non-Free software (as the poster mentions, the "whom do we sue?" attitude).
In fact, I hope we see more like this. I don't want any proprietary vendor held to answer for its products, nor do I want any term of any license, proprietary or otherwise, declared invalid. Go UCITA! Let the big software houses fuck themselves up the ass. Carry it to the logical conclusion - lay bare the true motives of the megacorporations by letting them do business as they like. Once everyone realizes that they won't stand by their products and don't give a shit about their customers, it'll be that much easier to justify the decision to abandon proprietary software. Force people to read and follow their licenses instead of letting them hide behind the shield of the law.
In an environment where the license is written in stone and backed up with the force of law without appeal or mercy, a software package's terms of use become very important criteria indeed. So much the better for those who distribute their software under more agreeable terms.
Oh well. At least it gives me one more thing to laugh at - two, really: the fuckwits who get hit by it, and the even greater fuckwits who think it's some kind of global emergency. I mean, really, most wars don't get this much attention. And it's not like people don't have a choice about getting the virus...
A Flu epidemic? Sure, that's news. ILOVEYOU? Gimme a fuckin break.