what seems to have happened was that some executive heard about "free software", didn't check what it meant, didn't read the license, looked foreward to the free ride, and then started whining about "having to give away his valuable IP". and you are trying to defend that? nobody forced them to use linux. there are other alternatives
No code that is meant to be utilized by people outside of its respective project should ever be placed under the GPL. That's just plain rude.
what is plain rude is telling the copyright holder (i.e. owner) of the code how he has to release it. you can always negotiate (and the GPL does not stop the copyright holder from releasing the same code under a different license) if you don't like the terms (though with the many copyright holders of the linux kernel this might be difficult).
the simple solution to your problem: if you don't like the terms and can't negotiate other terms, dont use the code. you can either try to find something else that satisfies your needs and that you can use under terms you like, or write it yourself
wouldn't make a difference. even if you can access it only with a password, they would still be distributing it. contracts with their customers doesn't justify doing something illegal (distributing GPLed code in violation of the GLP)
you got your history mixed up. Caldera got its rights to DRDOS the same way they got the rights to Unixware and Openserver: they bought it from a company that bpught it from the creator
when microsoft started adding networking code to DOS, Novell got nervous and tried to buy up an alternative to MSDOS (remember Wordperfect?). Digital Research at that time was at its end (I think Kindall just had his fatal accident), so they bought up either DRDOS or the whole company to base their MS cometetitive product on DRDOS. for some reasons their anti MS effort wasn't overly successful and dwindled away. later Caldera bought the (already dormant) product and started the suit against MS
which one? the one where they claimed that IBM's refusal to offer indemnification confirms their claims or the one where HP's indemification confirms their claims
Why couldn't Zilog manage to market its CPUs for use in 16-bit consoles?
not sure. the best suggestion i can make: in the aftermath of the first oil crisis, several oild companies were trying to diversify. esso bought Zilog and a few other smaller companies with potential (don't ask me about the names of the other ones) and seem to have run them all into the ground. imo, Zilog didn't fail for technical reasons. I preferred the Z8000 over the 68000, and the Z80000 was a really nice design (backward compatibility without crippling the architecture
Re:Performance doesn't come directly from 64 bits
on
Is Prescott 64-bit?
·
· Score: 1
they didn't
Re:Its not the size, its how you use it...
on
Is Prescott 64-bit?
·
· Score: 1
The real question is why didn't Zilog get the Z800 out in 1979?
i guess you mean the Z8000. they got it out, there were a couple of systems built around it (i remember olivetti offered a Z8000 system, also a few unix systems). the problem was that IBM chose to build the PC around the x86 architecture, which pretty much dried up the market for other 16 bit processors.
Zilog also had plans for a 32 bit followup (the Z80000). i don't know why the never released that
Re:Performance doesn't come directly from 64 bits
on
Is Prescott 64-bit?
·
· Score: 1
the only reason why backward compatibility is needed is because many programs are released in binary only. with source distribution it would not be necessary: in most cases a recompilation would sufffice (ok, some things need adjustment)
but stackable registers (similar to register windows in Solaris)
register windows increase the work that must be done on context switches and have less flexibility than interprocedural register allocation
Re:Performance doesn't come directly from 64 bits
on
Is Prescott 64-bit?
·
· Score: 1
you must live in a dreamworld if you think that only apple reps do that. this is as old as the computer industry (actually: since sales people exist)
Re:Performance doesn't come directly from 64 bits
on
Is Prescott 64-bit?
·
· Score: 1
hardly possible: the number of registers has a big effect on instruction formats. if they add more not hidden registers, they have to completely redesign the instruction set
Re:There's more to it than 64-bit instructions
on
Is Prescott 64-bit?
·
· Score: 1
the architecture already supports 64 bit addressing, it just hasn't been implemented in silicon yet because it isn't needed yet.
huge mistake (unless software writers are careful), reminding me of the old IBM/360: they were 32 bit machines with a 24 bit address bus, and lots of software used the extra 8 bits in a word to encode extra information. turned out to be a huge nightmare when they wanted to extend to full 32 bit addressing
but you can assme that if something runs on another 64 bit machine, it's 64 bit clean, so the porting effort to the opteron wouldn't be all that bad (not much more than a recompilation)
And please do not try to use the car analogy, it just plain doesn't work.
actually, it does work, though not as intended: ford generally has pretty buggy cars (at least in my experience), and intel's reputation with their earliest releases isn't exactly shining (286 never really working in its "native" mode, early 387 floating point problems, the infamous pentioum (or was it 486?) floating point bug)
my point was that POWER owes much more to the 801 (thanks for helping me to recall the name) than to the ROMP. I really don't remember how much the ROMP owes to the 801 (afair it was developed in Austin for an office system and then was co-opted into serving as the processor for IBM's first unix workstation. my point was that while the POWER CPUs resembled the 801 quite considerably, there was very little similarity between the ROMP and either the 801 or POWER
i remember the TI9900 quite well (never gad a chance to work with it, but read the specs). it was quite a nice chip. too bad TI's marketing (and probably the fact that at the time technology hadn't advanced far enough for on-chip memory) prevented it from getting wider acceptanxe. the architecture was quite neat.
about the mismarketing: i tend to disagree with your assessment: if IBM would have come out early enough, they would have had a chance to sow up the unix workstation market. but due to internal squabbles (both the PC division and the mid-range division objected to its introduction out of fears that it would cut into their market) its introduction was delayed for a long time after it was ready (i know: we were using it internally for quite a while already). by the time it was introduced, it wasn't competitive with the Sun M68000 workstations and 386 based PCs any more
In other words... it's not a sane architecture. But presumably it was easy to implement the first time around, and now we're all paying for it.
there are a few reasons for that:
1. at that time memory was very expensive, and an ISA that minimized code size was highly valued, which accounts for the ISA that used many implied registers that didn't have to show up in the code itself
2.rumor has it that the register architecture was influenced by a paper that was published in the Communications of the ACM in the mid-1970s, where some ignoramus (who probably was about to lose tenure if he didn't get a paper published) "studied" the influence of register set size on the code quality produced by optimizing compilers (Intel sales people cited that paper continuously when somebody critisized the register set architectur during their sales talks). He experimented with the BLISS cmpiler (BLISS was a C like language with a compiler for the PDP-11), found a parameter in the register allocator that gave the number of general purpose registers, and compiled the same code several times varying this parameter. his findings were surprising to anybody who ever had played with compilers: increasing the number of registers from 1 to 4 (in steps of 1) gave significant performance improvements with each step. beyond 4 registers: nada. what he missed: because of the architecture of the PDP11 you really didn't have more than 4 general purpose registers, but the PDP11 could operate with all operands and results in memory. so the BLISS compiler had an extra pass before calling the register allocator where it was checking code for places where more than 4 registers were needed simultaneously and replace operations by memory to memory operations until the register need was reduced to 4. Apparently this pass didn't use the parameter used by the register allocator, so it wasn't exactly surprising that only playing with this parameter gave the published results results. so what we are suffering from is that intel based the desigh of the 8086 on some very sloppy research without checking its validity
Besides, ROMP begat POWER...
i wish this were true. IBM had a power like chip ready (internally) before ROMP. they had to switch to the ROMP because some divisions (esp. the mid range division with System 38) were afraid the other chip would eat into their market. which probably was a justified fear, but the effect of the decision to go with ROMP was that Sun could dominate the unix workstation market (with IBM's other chip this would have been much more difficult) and it was 386 type PCs that ate the mid range market
btw, th PC/RT mainly ran AIX. the BSD port (AOS) was done by the division that interfaced to academia (i forgot the name of that division) because many academic customers wanted BSD
Re:So why didn't Intel do this? Politics
on
AMD64 Preview
·
· Score: 1
10-15 years ago, everyone else in the industry thought x86 was a dead end.
not only then. the x86 architecture was a laughing stock from day 1. compliments to intel for eventually turning it into something almost useful. but intel finally came to realize that the only reason the architecture survived so long is the backward compatibility required because of binary release only software. with open source the architecture would be long where it belongs: in the dustbins of history
so far i had only one brief look at the opteron architecture, but my impression was that is is basically two CPUs on one chip (a pentium and the 64 bit processor) which from the register architecture are only remotely similar (i didn't check the instruction set). this is something that intel at least in theory should be able to do with the itanic as well (though afaik the itanic has a very high transistor count that might make it difficult)
Massive amounts of investement poured into RISC alternatives like Alpha and PPC.
the power pc development started almost 20 years ago (iirc, the RS6000 was released around 1990). sparc and mips preceeded it. motorola had the 88000 some time in the late 80s. and with similar clock speeds they tended to beat x86 machines easily in speed.
and the court said "Ok, SCO, you need to shut up until we have a hearing to determine the truth of your claims".
no. the court forbade them to repeat their claims without providing some evidence. my understanding was that if they had backed up their claims, they would not have been obliged to wait for a court decision on their claims
The Santa Cruz Operation, Inc. dissolved several years ago, and no longer exists.
sorry, but they didn't. they dumped their failing unix business and renamed themselves (tarantella)
There's no such operating system as "SCO UNIX". There's OpenServer (which is based on an old non-threading version of the UNIX kernel...SVR3)
optimized to run on 8086s and 8286s, a heritage they never could get rid off, useful to run mcdonals cash registers and veterinarian's reception desks
and OpenUNIX, formerly UnixWare, which is about as modern as UNIXes get.
i take it you never were unfortunate enough to have to use it
However, thanks to the LKP (Linux Kernel Personality) feature in OpenUNIX, that "Linux" web server may actually have a UNIX SVR5 kernel inside it with a GNU+Apache filesystem on top, making it indistinguishable from Linux from the outside.
the way these things tend to work is to enable application programs written and compiled for the emulated system to run under the hosting system without modification. usually they don't send out wrong identification over the net
becase it sounds impressive. iirc, they were talking about 3 teams: MIT mathematicians, spectarl analysts, and rocket scientists (probably to build their escape vehicle for when the scam blows)
but everything I've seen indicates that IBM has and as far as I know always had a very strong ethical sense.
well, let's say that at least since their antitrust trial they are very careful not to do anything illegal and, yes, their ethics seems to be above average (i worked there for about 10 years, and as far as i could see they were very good at it). but there have been a few things in the past (before my time there) where their behavior wasn't exactly exemplary (check out the suit that Control Data suit filed them during the anti trust trial)
A judge could argue that it isn't valid if you didn't know your stuff was in there.
they would have a hard time getting away with that. after all, they distributed and licensed (under the GPL) linux, even 2.4, for quite a while some time. they even had their own team working on the kernel. how can they argue they didn't know what was in there?
the sad fact is they couldn't make any money on linux, they couldn't do it any more with unix, so they decided to switch strategy. i vaguely remember an announcement when they changed name to the effect that they just had realized the financial potential of their ownership of the AT&T code and were going to tap it. the only problem with that strategy was that their unices are by far the weakest on the market, so that they had to resort to some machinations by which they hope to stake ownership of other people's code
Slashdot Mirror
what seems to have happened was that some executive heard about "free software", didn't check what it meant, didn't read the license, looked foreward to the free ride, and then started whining about "having to give away his valuable IP". and you are trying to defend that? nobody forced them to use linux. there are other alternatives
what is plain rude is telling the copyright holder (i.e. owner) of the code how he has to release it. you can always negotiate (and the GPL does not stop the copyright holder from releasing the same code under a different license) if you don't like the terms (though with the many copyright holders of the linux kernel this might be difficult).
the simple solution to your problem: if you don't like the terms and can't negotiate other terms, dont use the code. you can either try to find something else that satisfies your needs and that you can use under terms you like, or write it yourself
wouldn't make a difference. even if you can access it only with a password, they would still be distributing it. contracts with their customers doesn't justify doing something illegal (distributing GPLed code in violation of the GLP)
when microsoft started adding networking code to DOS, Novell got nervous and tried to buy up an alternative to MSDOS (remember Wordperfect?). Digital Research at that time was at its end (I think Kindall just had his fatal accident), so they bought up either DRDOS or the whole company to base their MS cometetitive product on DRDOS. for some reasons their anti MS effort wasn't overly successful and dwindled away. later Caldera bought the (already dormant) product and started the suit against MS
which one? the one where they claimed that IBM's refusal to offer indemnification confirms their claims or the one where HP's indemification confirms their claims
logic is hard, isn't it?
not sure. the best suggestion i can make: in the aftermath of the first oil crisis, several oild companies were trying to diversify. esso bought Zilog and a few other smaller companies with potential (don't ask me about the names of the other ones) and seem to have run them all into the ground. imo, Zilog didn't fail for technical reasons. I preferred the Z8000 over the 68000, and the Z80000 was a really nice design (backward compatibility without crippling the architecture
they didn't
i guess you mean the Z8000. they got it out, there were a couple of systems built around it (i remember olivetti offered a Z8000 system, also a few unix systems). the problem was that IBM chose to build the PC around the x86 architecture, which pretty much dried up the market for other 16 bit processors.
Zilog also had plans for a 32 bit followup (the Z80000). i don't know why the never released that
the only reason why backward compatibility is needed is because many programs are released in binary only. with source distribution it would not be necessary: in most cases a recompilation would sufffice (ok, some things need adjustment)
register windows increase the work that must be done on context switches and have less flexibility than interprocedural register allocation
you must live in a dreamworld if you think that only apple reps do that. this is as old as the computer industry (actually: since sales people exist)
hardly possible: the number of registers has a big effect on instruction formats. if they add more not hidden registers, they have to completely redesign the instruction set
huge mistake (unless software writers are careful), reminding me of the old IBM/360: they were 32 bit machines with a 24 bit address bus, and lots of software used the extra 8 bits in a word to encode extra information. turned out to be a huge nightmare when they wanted to extend to full 32 bit addressing
but you can assme that if something runs on another 64 bit machine, it's 64 bit clean, so the porting effort to the opteron wouldn't be all that bad (not much more than a recompilation)
actually, it does work, though not as intended: ford generally has pretty buggy cars (at least in my experience), and intel's reputation with their earliest releases isn't exactly shining (286 never really working in its "native" mode, early 387 floating point problems, the infamous pentioum (or was it 486?) floating point bug)
i remember the TI9900 quite well (never gad a chance to work with it, but read the specs). it was quite a nice chip. too bad TI's marketing (and probably the fact that at the time technology hadn't advanced far enough for on-chip memory) prevented it from getting wider acceptanxe. the architecture was quite neat.
about the mismarketing: i tend to disagree with your assessment: if IBM would have come out early enough, they would have had a chance to sow up the unix workstation market. but due to internal squabbles (both the PC division and the mid-range division objected to its introduction out of fears that it would cut into their market) its introduction was delayed for a long time after it was ready (i know: we were using it internally for quite a while already). by the time it was introduced, it wasn't competitive with the Sun M68000 workstations and 386 based PCs any more
there are a few reasons for that:
1. at that time memory was very expensive, and an ISA that minimized code size was highly valued, which accounts for the ISA that used many implied registers that didn't have to show up in the code itself
2.rumor has it that the register architecture was influenced by a paper that was published in the Communications of the ACM in the mid-1970s, where some ignoramus (who probably was about to lose tenure if he didn't get a paper published) "studied" the influence of register set size on the code quality produced by optimizing compilers (Intel sales people cited that paper continuously when somebody critisized the register set architectur during their sales talks). He experimented with the BLISS cmpiler (BLISS was a C like language with a compiler for the PDP-11), found a parameter in the register allocator that gave the number of general purpose registers, and compiled the same code several times varying this parameter. his findings were surprising to anybody who ever had played with compilers: increasing the number of registers from 1 to 4 (in steps of 1) gave significant performance improvements with each step. beyond 4 registers: nada. what he missed: because of the architecture of the PDP11 you really didn't have more than 4 general purpose registers, but the PDP11 could operate with all operands and results in memory. so the BLISS compiler had an extra pass before calling the register allocator where it was checking code for places where more than 4 registers were needed simultaneously and replace operations by memory to memory operations until the register need was reduced to 4. Apparently this pass didn't use the parameter used by the register allocator, so it wasn't exactly surprising that only playing with this parameter gave the published results results. so what we are suffering from is that intel based the desigh of the 8086 on some very sloppy research without checking its validity
btw, th PC/RT mainly ran AIX. the BSD port (AOS) was done by the division that interfaced to academia (i forgot the name of that division) because many academic customers wanted BSD
not only then. the x86 architecture was a laughing stock from day 1. compliments to intel for eventually turning it into something almost useful. but intel finally came to realize that the only reason the architecture survived so long is the backward compatibility required because of binary release only software. with open source the architecture would be long where it belongs: in the dustbins of history
so far i had only one brief look at the opteron architecture, but my impression was that is is basically two CPUs on one chip (a pentium and the 64 bit processor) which from the register architecture are only remotely similar (i didn't check the instruction set). this is something that intel at least in theory should be able to do with the itanic as well (though afaik the itanic has a very high transistor count that might make it difficult)
Massive amounts of investement poured into RISC alternatives like Alpha and PPC.
the power pc development started almost 20 years ago (iirc, the RS6000 was released around 1990). sparc and mips preceeded it. motorola had the 88000 some time in the late 80s. and with similar clock speeds they tended to beat x86 machines easily in speed.
no. the court forbade them to repeat their claims without providing some evidence. my understanding was that if they had backed up their claims, they would not have been obliged to wait for a court decision on their claims
sorry, but they didn't. they dumped their failing unix business and renamed themselves (tarantella)
There's no such operating system as "SCO UNIX". There's OpenServer (which is based on an old non-threading version of the UNIX kernel...SVR3)
optimized to run on 8086s and 8286s, a heritage they never could get rid off, useful to run mcdonals cash registers and veterinarian's reception desks
and OpenUNIX, formerly UnixWare, which is about as modern as UNIXes get.
i take it you never were unfortunate enough to have to use it
However, thanks to the LKP (Linux Kernel Personality) feature in OpenUNIX, that "Linux" web server may actually have a UNIX SVR5 kernel inside it with a GNU+Apache filesystem on top, making it indistinguishable from Linux from the outside.
the way these things tend to work is to enable application programs written and compiled for the emulated system to run under the hosting system without modification. usually they don't send out wrong identification over the net
becase it sounds impressive. iirc, they were talking about 3 teams: MIT mathematicians, spectarl analysts, and rocket scientists (probably to build their escape vehicle for when the scam blows)
well, let's say that at least since their antitrust trial they are very careful not to do anything illegal and, yes, their ethics seems to be above average (i worked there for about 10 years, and as far as i could see they were very good at it). but there have been a few things in the past (before my time there) where their behavior wasn't exactly exemplary (check out the suit that Control Data suit filed them during the anti trust trial)
they would have a hard time getting away with that. after all, they distributed and licensed (under the GPL) linux, even 2.4, for quite a while some time. they even had their own team working on the kernel. how can they argue they didn't know what was in there?
the sad fact is they couldn't make any money on linux, they couldn't do it any more with unix, so they decided to switch strategy. i vaguely remember an announcement when they changed name to the effect that they just had realized the financial potential of their ownership of the AT&T code and were going to tap it. the only problem with that strategy was that their unices are by far the weakest on the market, so that they had to resort to some machinations by which they hope to stake ownership of other people's code
what do you drink? and do you speak for the whole samba team on this?