I used to work at a hosting/colo/isp facility. I can tell you that we always put ourselves before any customer. We only had 30 minutes of UPS power for our own equipment. A few day power outage meant we were down for 3 days. After the first day, my boss bought some generators and started running essential servers.
I was a bit suprised myspace isn't using akamai or something. You would think News corp could afford backup servers.
3. College students who need to dual boot for school.
I had to install linux and could NOT use virtualization. In fact the first assignment was to build a kernel without any module support that supported all hardware in the machine, but didn't support anything else. We were explicitly told not to do any virtualization including vmware or virtual pc. Most of the students lost their windows install during the process. They couldn't figure out dual booting. We were also told not to use ubuntu since it has some strange tcp/ip stack patches and we had to do vanilla kernel patches. In my case, I couldn't boot into Windows without BSOD while using grub from gentoo. They really need to fix that. grub works with redhat or many other distros. lilo is a bitch for many, although its what I went with. I remembered how to use it from the redhat 5 era when I actually liked linux.
Obviously this is a very unusual case, but I'm sure there are others in the business world as well. As for developers, my wife is a programmer professionally. She's in charge of installing linux at work because the other programmers and IT person can't figure it out! Many programmers i've known can't get through a windows install by themselves.
I can't imagine having a pc that doesn't dual boot. I've dual booted since 1996 on every desktop pc i've had. (i got my first pc in 1995) I didn't know what I was doing then and I still wanted to try OS/2 warp, NT4, DOS, Linux, etc.
They have no choice. ATI has made a deal with intel. There are intel branded ATI chipset based motherboards out there. Intel needs ATI. If this is true, intel has a serious problem. (crossfire, chipsets, etc) nVidia and intel will need to make a deal very fast in order to sell product. Overnight AMD fanboys will turn on nVidia and start buying ATI products. nVidia has great driver support (in terms of OSes supported) and so does intel.
It depends. If you actually talk to a blind person, tables aren't as annoying as people using characters between links. For instance, doing navigation with a pipe (vertical bar) or some other character sounds strange to them. I worked for someone who was blind and owned their own business for a time. He said cnet was one of the most annoying web properties for him to use. At the time their navigation sounded terrible and was quite randomly placed. He also didn't like navigation at the top as much except on the first page. Worst of all, he hated hearing. about us vertical bar products veritcal bar etc...
Oh and he used Internet explorer. His software tied in with that so it looked like an ie hit and even tried to load all the crap everyone else deals with in IE. He did IE on windows using a dell.
At least linux gets flash. What about the BSDs? I would guess more people have x86 freebsd installed than linux with a different cpu. Lets hope they support all of the above.
On the up side, if someone follows these tips it might make flash not the number 1 plugin. That would mean a few people might think twice before using it.
Mosaic was still produced after netscape was founded. There were web standards by then. I had ncsa mosaic installed on Windows 95 along with netscape and IE at one point.
I don't smoke crack. Netscape 4's css support was terrible. For a time, Microsoft had the best CSS support. The whole point of IE4 was to implement css among other things. I had to work around so many bugs in netscape 4's engine its not funny. Netscape 3 didn't support css. Netscape implented blink and img tags which were not part of the standard. The w3 wanted something general purpose like the object tag. I'm not saying netscape wasn't innovative.
Well maybe some of us don't like Microsoft's idea of the web. Standards bodies are there to try to encourge innovation. At least they think of new ideas. What has Microsoft done with IE in years? Many of the new IE 7 features are just ripped off with a slight twist for MS to save face.
Microsoft has high marketshare but its not all one version either. A 90 percent defacto standard is one thing but when some people still use ie 5.x, it lowers the numbers. In some circles firefox is at 25 percent. That is just firefox not including netscape's gecko based browsers or the mozilla suite.
Another thing to consider is that a 90 percent statistic can't be right. If 90 percent of the desktops in the world run windows, and not all run IE6 how can IE have 90 percent marketshare? Granted not everything is on the internet either. I suspect those statistics are "created" by some online marketing firm or the posters mind. I almost never use IE in windows. It would be nice to see an os/browser breakdown for a change. I'd like to know what percentage of Windows users run IE, Firefox, and Opera. Similarly, I'd like to see what percentage of Linux, BSD, and Solaris users run Firefox, Opera, Konquerer, and so on. Lets not forget the mac either. Most mac users don't use IE anymore. Its been discussed recently on the apple web dev list. Safari and Firefox are very popular. Up until last month I was a mac systems administrator. My macs only had firefox and safari as a choice. I explictly deleted ie from the 10.2 systems and newer versions don't ship with IE. (maybe 10.3 did at release but not with my iBook)
Does anyone know of a log analyzer that can break up user agents by os version? (free or open source is better)
Yes, Microsoft is at fault for not updating IE in so many years and then only supporting a few new things in ie7. However, its not just Microsoft. Netscape didn't follow standards until it was too late (netscape 6 was not soon enough). Mosaic sucked for a long time. As a designer, I want all browsers to support the exact same things with the exact same behavior in 99 percent of cases. (implementations will vary some) However thats a pipe dream.
How about this: All browsers must support CSS1 completely and CSS 2.1's positioning at least. floats and centering with margin: auto should frickin' work. Then we need something like SVG and png w/ transparency. That would at least allow us to do flash like things and use a decent graphics format. Flash is bad since it doesn't support all platforms. Most people say its great because it work on x86 linux, windows and the latest OSX. What about everyone else? (*bsd, solaris, linux on any other kind of processor, OS/2, etc)
We also need a decent video format that is cross platform for streaming. I don't care what it is just so that everyone actually has it. I'm sick of not getting to watch news feeds because i don't use MSIE with WMP 10 or 11 series. (yes MSNBC you suck) I can't even watch it in firefox on WINDOWS.
Please someone with a brain come up with standards and find a way to force these people to use them. That is the real trick. Its not just microsoft but all the idiots who only develop for whatever the hell is on their computer that they like.
You are mostly correct. Not all apple customers are scared of technology or wish to be ignorant about computers. In my case, its nice to own one computer that just works and I can rely on for cs course work, surfing and email. I could probably do the same thing with a laptop loaded with bsd provided I could actually get all the hardware working. That day is coming I hope. Obviously linux can be ok as well. In short, a mac is good at everything a *nix system is bad at. Watching movies, games, etc. You can do those things in unix, but its a hassle to setup. (decss codecs, wine/vmware (if on x86), etc)
Also, I've met some *challenged* people who love SGI. I had a friend who thought they were amazing. He worked for a company that developed 3d rendering software for some time. Eventually they too shifted to windows. He loved irix because he could use it without hitting a terminal that often. (well thats what he said.. i have trouble believeing that) Regardless, he did not know UNIX/Linux stuff at all. In reality, I think he just liked them because SGI systems were used to host Netscape's web/ftp servers for so many years. Last I knew he was working as a Windows admin and hadn't gotten his GED yet. Very nice guy, but as I went to college we drifted apart.
If SGI can't cut it, I do hope someone will buy them and use the brand/technology. I hope sun doesn't buy them. It might be a nice way for Apple to reach the highend server space. The xserve falls right in the middle. I can't buy one as a lowend system and its not powerful enough for other tasks. They really need to diversify when they go intel on that front. Maybe the market is shrinking that all of these companies are trying to get. Open source has really changed things.
It comes from the movement to be specialized. In order to code in assembly, you need to have an understanding of the hardware. (at least a little) Most people i've had classes with think everything is drag and drop c# crap. One guy would only code in C++. Heck I had to buy a book on design patterns myself as they aren't part of any course. I recently transfered to another university which pushes java, patterns and makes assembly optional.
In order to solve the problem, cs cirriculum needs to be standarized. Not only would it help with the new programmers, but it would make it easier to transfer to a new school and keep your credits. My old university was accredited by the ACM and still didn't talk about patterns.
In my opinion the host os should be locked down and no services should be offered through it other than virtualization. In that setup one would not need to install patches very often. Obviously a firewall should be setup to block incoming traffic to the host os, etc. This applies to any os used to host others.
In this situation its entirely possible to run windows for a solid year or so before a reboot as long as the virtualization software handles resources well. You could make an argument that a BSD could run longer. I've only used netbsd on a sparc desktop so i don't know its uptime potential, but I do know that I need to reboot FreeBSD servers periodically if they run linux stuff. Every few months there is a kernel patch for FreeBSD anyway.
Those are quite nice. My wife kept hers as it was her first Mac. It runs OpenBSD well. I planned on attempting to put a 40gb drive in there from my iBook after I upgraded it, but 52 screws on mine convinced me otherwise. Apple fixed that problem with the new intel macs.
Yeah well they did the opposite with my iBook G4 800mhz. They released a firmware update which makes the fan NEVER kick in unless the unit gets so hot my apps crash anyway. The fan still works in hardware test, etc. I want the fan on. I wish apple would make it configurable. I can change the fan settings on my pc motherboards, etc. I don't mind more noise if i can actually run a game.
This argument is passed around by some computer science professors now. It seems that the logic is that most people don't know assembly well enough to write better code than gcc or whatever can produce. The problem is that if you get the intermediate assembly gcc spits out and know assembly for the target system at all you can still make some optimizations. I was taught how to do this in a sparc assembly course. I did get code that was slightly faster than what gcc produced but it wasn't much faster. Lesson learned was that most generated code is good enough and it takes routines used heavily (large loops) to really benefit from the extra time spent.
There were a few cases in my class where my code was worse than gcc's code, but I was still learning too. I think sometimes people forget about issues with memory alignment and things when they write assembly.
they have a great mail server. Its a bit funny they picked FreeBSD over OpenBSD considering OpenBSD is canadian. (well theo is anyway)
I found the story a bit odd to post though. Most websites run on apache which is free/oss. The default case is free software for all websites (and open source). Wouldn't it be interesting to talk about why 30% of the web chooses closed source software for their webservers instead?
You are right to some degree, but Microsoft hasn't crushed all of its competition. It stole large amounts of marketshare, but people still use many of the products you've listed. Java, Apache, Oracle, Mac OS, WordPerfect, Lotus Notes,... all have a following to this day much as Linux does. Microsoft has failed in a few markets. Microsoft lost marketshare to Apache since the classic ASP downward spiral to open and close sourced replacemnts. People don't need IIS anymore. While I hate the netcraft bsd jokes, they do show an obvious trend with IIS. Apache hovers around 65-70 percent most of the time.
No one thought Linux would be able to compete in the server market space like it has either. Linux has taken UNIX customers faster than Microsoft ever could and its even replaced some Windows/IIS servers. Counting Microsoft out and declaring them automatic victor are two different things. Microsoft can take a market but it takes all their resources to do so. They usually settle for a certain percentage based on what they feel they need to leverage another product in a related space. All they really care about is Windows and Office. Everything else they do is to protect those interests. Think about it. The new xbox has a feature that lets you use it with windows media center. Windows handhelds only seem to work well with Windows desktops. Microsoft continues to make office for the mac because its extremely profitable and they can't afford for someone else to make an office product on the mac that gets more popular. (they did start on the Mac)
Netscape failed because they didn't innovate. Netscape 4 had piss poor CSS support and the engine needed an overhaul. They started on it too late. But, the engine overhaul they did write became Gecko and now we have firefox between 5-25 percent depending who you ask. (much like Mac installbase numbers)
You are certainly correct about computer manufacturers recommending Microsoft. Remember how much news came out when the intel ceo recommended Macs. That should have been a clue to all of us that he either made a deal with apple or wanted to. Even apple pushes windows now with their boot camp ads. Macworld has articles this month about windows!
Unless this is recent, 9200 and lower are the only ones with 3d acceleration in xorg. I have a 9600xt all in wonder and i've never had 3D acceleration working without getting binary ATI drivers. (linux) And since i'm more of a BSD person, its really bad.
There are other reasons to buy nVidia. They actually support OTHER open source operating systems. (FreeBSD, Solaris) I can play some games under FreeBSD 6 like Enemy Territory quite nicely using the nvidia binary drivers. The binary drivers got me to buy my first nVidia card ever. I'm rather impressed with it considering its not even one of their more recent cards (only fx5200). xorg support sucks above 9200 chipsets as their is no 3d acceleration. I only wish nvidia made their own video cards like ati does. I've had bad luck with some oem cards. (one nvidia and several ati)
1. Energy efficient servers mean less electricity. How is it produced? Coal, nuclear, and other fuels. Less pollution. 2. It might save the government money and we have to pay for iraq somehow. 3. It will increase the demand and incentive for companies like AMD, Intel, Dell, Apple, HP and IBM to make energy efficent servers which in turn will get them to the masses. We all win.
Everyone is focused on gas prices because they are so high. Electricity and natural gas went up too. Look at your bill and compare it to a few years back. I know I'm feeling it. Gas won't go down below ~ 3 dollars ever. It doesn't go down. Our best bet is to save money elsewhere to pay for the $30 it takes to fill my saturn. Does anyone remember the brown outs and other problems of the past few years?
I also noticed some crazy conspiracy theories about this going through since Intel has good chips now. Well its entirely possible, but that doesn't mean AMD can't compete and get all the sales. Its about time AMD released something spectacular anyway. AMD64 has been out for awhile now.
I forget about it. Usually when I do laundry, I'm also programming. For some odd reason, I get great ideas loading laundry into the washer. I guess it cleanses my mind. Problem is I forget to put them in the dryer or to check on them. Worse yet, sometimes I play enemy territory and who wants to check on clothes when there is 3 minutes left and you haven't got the truck moving yet on goldrush.
While you have a bit of a point for end users, I think intel and amd are concerned about server chips. Sun has an 8 core, 32 way chip (think of it as 8 cores with 4 way hyperthreading per core). Long term, they need more cores to compete. I'm not trying to say sun is that far ahead, but sun certainly influenced where we are going. Plus, its been known for a long time we'd hit limits on what one core can do. Physics applies after all.
Does excel need better performance? Most apps run fine on one core. That means someday maybe each app you'd run could be on its own core. That sounds fast to me. Most people only have so many programs open. Also, parallel programming is very new to many programmers. Over time, computer science programs will focus on new algorithms and operating systems will provide better interfaces and generally operate better with multiple cpus. (scheduling, disk io, etc need work) We are at the beginning of some exciting improvements.
Finally, if you are concerned with gaming consider that this technology will trickle down to GPUs eventually. Won't a multicore video card kick ass? That's effectively what SLI and the like are doing now.
Apple hurt their customers too. I have an emagic usb 2/6 external sound card. Apple stopped updating the drivers for it. I can either run it in XP or Mac OS 10.3 or lower. If I install it in tiger, I get random crashes, lockups and even crashes shutting down! I wouldn't have bought a 300 dollar external soundcard to begin with, but my mother in law thought it was a usb hub:)
It worked great with iTunes and I love the bass compared to my lame iBook soundcard. All well, maybe i'll use it in linux someday as i know the 2.6 kernel has support for it.
Not only that, but they have to spend quite a bit of money on vista and office development and later advertising. They've dropped massive amounts of money into xbox products. It may have a small impact on their advertising budget for vista initially.
For gaming. Windows XP has better support for games than 2000 did. Some software runs on XP that also ran on 98, but not 2000. That is the reason. Windows 2000 Pro was targeted to business, but they also picked up a few geeks like me. I preferred the stability of NT4 and 2k to Windows 95/98. I actually prefer the new start menu layout over the old one. It did take time to get used to it.
I wish you would give Microsoft a break. We always complain about their lack of quality. If Bill Gates is actually telling us the truth, I'd enjoy a tested system over an untested one. Even if you don't plan to run vista, I bet your employer or family might. You'll still have to touch it, deal with it and if you're a linux developer compete with it.
Ok. Here is a start, W3 Schools hits. You'll notice that opera is not popular among people who learn about making websites. This is just one website, but they are more likely to have alternate browser hits than some. Since people don't use opera, I'm concluding they don't like opera or don't know about opera. Either way, opera has not been successful. Firefox, in constrast, has been successful. Many people have heard of it. Both of my parents have tried it. I called them and asked if they have ever heard of opera. Neither of them had.
I am quite terrible at statistics so I won't even try to meet your requirements. I do feel that I've show a subset of the population does not use opera. If they preferred opera, they would certainly use opera. In a given day, I use several browsers including Firefox, Safari, IE and even lynx on occasion. I don't use opera.
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I used to work at a hosting/colo/isp facility. I can tell you that we always put ourselves before any customer. We only had 30 minutes of UPS power for our own equipment. A few day power outage meant we were down for 3 days. After the first day, my boss bought some generators and started running essential servers.
I was a bit suprised myspace isn't using akamai or something. You would think News corp could afford backup servers.
3. College students who need to dual boot for school.
I had to install linux and could NOT use virtualization. In fact the first assignment was to build a kernel without any module support that supported all hardware in the machine, but didn't support anything else. We were explicitly told not to do any virtualization including vmware or virtual pc. Most of the students lost their windows install during the process. They couldn't figure out dual booting. We were also told not to use ubuntu since it has some strange tcp/ip stack patches and we had to do vanilla kernel patches. In my case, I couldn't boot into Windows without BSOD while using grub from gentoo. They really need to fix that. grub works with redhat or many other distros. lilo is a bitch for many, although its what I went with. I remembered how to use it from the redhat 5 era when I actually liked linux.
Obviously this is a very unusual case, but I'm sure there are others in the business world as well. As for developers, my wife is a programmer professionally. She's in charge of installing linux at work because the other programmers and IT person can't figure it out! Many programmers i've known can't get through a windows install by themselves.
I can't imagine having a pc that doesn't dual boot. I've dual booted since 1996 on every desktop pc i've had. (i got my first pc in 1995) I didn't know what I was doing then and I still wanted to try OS/2 warp, NT4, DOS, Linux, etc.
They have no choice. ATI has made a deal with intel. There are intel branded ATI chipset based motherboards out there. Intel needs ATI. If this is true, intel has a serious problem. (crossfire, chipsets, etc) nVidia and intel will need to make a deal very fast in order to sell product. Overnight AMD fanboys will turn on nVidia and start buying ATI products. nVidia has great driver support (in terms of OSes supported) and so does intel.
It depends. If you actually talk to a blind person, tables aren't as annoying as people using characters between links. For instance, doing navigation with a pipe (vertical bar) or some other character sounds strange to them. I worked for someone who was blind and owned their own business for a time. He said cnet was one of the most annoying web properties for him to use. At the time their navigation sounded terrible and was quite randomly placed. He also didn't like navigation at the top as much except on the first page. Worst of all, he hated hearing. about us vertical bar products veritcal bar etc...
Oh and he used Internet explorer. His software tied in with that so it looked like an ie hit and even tried to load all the crap everyone else deals with in IE. He did IE on windows using a dell.
At least linux gets flash. What about the BSDs? I would guess more people have x86 freebsd installed than linux with a different cpu. Lets hope they support all of the above.
On the up side, if someone follows these tips it might make flash not the number 1 plugin. That would mean a few people might think twice before using it.
Mosaic was still produced after netscape was founded. There were web standards by then. I had ncsa mosaic installed on Windows 95 along with netscape and IE at one point.
I don't smoke crack. Netscape 4's css support was terrible. For a time, Microsoft had the best CSS support. The whole point of IE4 was to implement css among other things. I had to work around so many bugs in netscape 4's engine its not funny. Netscape 3 didn't support css. Netscape implented blink and img tags which were not part of the standard. The w3 wanted something general purpose like the object tag. I'm not saying netscape wasn't innovative.
Well maybe some of us don't like Microsoft's idea of the web. Standards bodies are there to try to encourge innovation. At least they think of new ideas. What has Microsoft done with IE in years? Many of the new IE 7 features are just ripped off with a slight twist for MS to save face.
Microsoft has high marketshare but its not all one version either. A 90 percent defacto standard is one thing but when some people still use ie 5.x, it lowers the numbers. In some circles firefox is at 25 percent. That is just firefox not including netscape's gecko based browsers or the mozilla suite.
Another thing to consider is that a 90 percent statistic can't be right. If 90 percent of the desktops in the world run windows, and not all run IE6 how can IE have 90 percent marketshare? Granted not everything is on the internet either. I suspect those statistics are "created" by some online marketing firm or the posters mind. I almost never use IE in windows. It would be nice to see an os/browser breakdown for a change. I'd like to know what percentage of Windows users run IE, Firefox, and Opera. Similarly, I'd like to see what percentage of Linux, BSD, and Solaris users run Firefox, Opera, Konquerer, and so on. Lets not forget the mac either. Most mac users don't use IE anymore. Its been discussed recently on the apple web dev list. Safari and Firefox are very popular. Up until last month I was a mac systems administrator. My macs only had firefox and safari as a choice. I explictly deleted ie from the 10.2 systems and newer versions don't ship with IE. (maybe 10.3 did at release but not with my iBook)
Does anyone know of a log analyzer that can break up user agents by os version? (free or open source is better)
Yes, Microsoft is at fault for not updating IE in so many years and then only supporting a few new things in ie7. However, its not just Microsoft. Netscape didn't follow standards until it was too late (netscape 6 was not soon enough). Mosaic sucked for a long time. As a designer, I want all browsers to support the exact same things with the exact same behavior in 99 percent of cases. (implementations will vary some) However thats a pipe dream.
How about this: All browsers must support CSS1 completely and CSS 2.1's positioning at least. floats and centering with margin: auto should frickin' work. Then we need something like SVG and png w/ transparency. That would at least allow us to do flash like things and use a decent graphics format. Flash is bad since it doesn't support all platforms. Most people say its great because it work on x86 linux, windows and the latest OSX. What about everyone else? (*bsd, solaris, linux on any other kind of processor, OS/2, etc)
We also need a decent video format that is cross platform for streaming. I don't care what it is just so that everyone actually has it. I'm sick of not getting to watch news feeds because i don't use MSIE with WMP 10 or 11 series. (yes MSNBC you suck) I can't even watch it in firefox on WINDOWS.
Please someone with a brain come up with standards and find a way to force these people to use them. That is the real trick. Its not just microsoft but all the idiots who only develop for whatever the hell is on their computer that they like.
You are mostly correct. Not all apple customers are scared of technology or wish to be ignorant about computers. In my case, its nice to own one computer that just works and I can rely on for cs course work, surfing and email. I could probably do the same thing with a laptop loaded with bsd provided I could actually get all the hardware working. That day is coming I hope. Obviously linux can be ok as well. In short, a mac is good at everything a *nix system is bad at. Watching movies, games, etc. You can do those things in unix, but its a hassle to setup. (decss codecs, wine/vmware (if on x86), etc)
Also, I've met some *challenged* people who love SGI. I had a friend who thought they were amazing. He worked for a company that developed 3d rendering software for some time. Eventually they too shifted to windows. He loved irix because he could use it without hitting a terminal that often. (well thats what he said.. i have trouble believeing that) Regardless, he did not know UNIX/Linux stuff at all. In reality, I think he just liked them because SGI systems were used to host Netscape's web/ftp servers for so many years. Last I knew he was working as a Windows admin and hadn't gotten his GED yet. Very nice guy, but as I went to college we drifted apart.
If SGI can't cut it, I do hope someone will buy them and use the brand/technology. I hope sun doesn't buy them. It might be a nice way for Apple to reach the highend server space. The xserve falls right in the middle. I can't buy one as a lowend system and its not powerful enough for other tasks. They really need to diversify when they go intel on that front. Maybe the market is shrinking that all of these companies are trying to get. Open source has really changed things.
It comes from the movement to be specialized. In order to code in assembly, you need to have an understanding of the hardware. (at least a little) Most people i've had classes with think everything is drag and drop c# crap. One guy would only code in C++. Heck I had to buy a book on design patterns myself as they aren't part of any course. I recently transfered to another university which pushes java, patterns and makes assembly optional.
In order to solve the problem, cs cirriculum needs to be standarized. Not only would it help with the new programmers, but it would make it easier to transfer to a new school and keep your credits. My old university was accredited by the ACM and still didn't talk about patterns.
In my opinion the host os should be locked down and no services should be offered through it other than virtualization. In that setup one would not need to install patches very often. Obviously a firewall should be setup to block incoming traffic to the host os, etc. This applies to any os used to host others.
In this situation its entirely possible to run windows for a solid year or so before a reboot as long as the virtualization software handles resources well. You could make an argument that a BSD could run longer. I've only used netbsd on a sparc desktop so i don't know its uptime potential, but I do know that I need to reboot FreeBSD servers periodically if they run linux stuff. Every few months there is a kernel patch for FreeBSD anyway.
Those are quite nice. My wife kept hers as it was her first Mac. It runs OpenBSD well. I planned on attempting to put a 40gb drive in there from my iBook after I upgraded it, but 52 screws on mine convinced me otherwise. Apple fixed that problem with the new intel macs.
Yeah well they did the opposite with my iBook G4 800mhz. They released a firmware update which makes the fan NEVER kick in unless the unit gets so hot my apps crash anyway. The fan still works in hardware test, etc. I want the fan on. I wish apple would make it configurable. I can change the fan settings on my pc motherboards, etc. I don't mind more noise if i can actually run a game.
This argument is passed around by some computer science professors now. It seems that the logic is that most people don't know assembly well enough to write better code than gcc or whatever can produce. The problem is that if you get the intermediate assembly gcc spits out and know assembly for the target system at all you can still make some optimizations. I was taught how to do this in a sparc assembly course. I did get code that was slightly faster than what gcc produced but it wasn't much faster. Lesson learned was that most generated code is good enough and it takes routines used heavily (large loops) to really benefit from the extra time spent.
There were a few cases in my class where my code was worse than gcc's code, but I was still learning too. I think sometimes people forget about issues with memory alignment and things when they write assembly.
they have a great mail server. Its a bit funny they picked FreeBSD over OpenBSD considering OpenBSD is canadian. (well theo is anyway)
I found the story a bit odd to post though. Most websites run on apache which is free/oss. The default case is free software for all websites (and open source). Wouldn't it be interesting to talk about why 30% of the web chooses closed source software for their webservers instead?
You are right to some degree, but Microsoft hasn't crushed all of its competition. It stole large amounts of marketshare, but people still use many of the products you've listed. Java, Apache, Oracle, Mac OS, WordPerfect, Lotus Notes, ... all have a following to this day much as Linux does. Microsoft has failed in a few markets. Microsoft lost marketshare to Apache since the classic ASP downward spiral to open and close sourced replacemnts. People don't need IIS anymore. While I hate the netcraft bsd jokes, they do show an obvious trend with IIS. Apache hovers around 65-70 percent most of the time.
No one thought Linux would be able to compete in the server market space like it has either. Linux has taken UNIX customers faster than Microsoft ever could and its even replaced some Windows/IIS servers. Counting Microsoft out and declaring them automatic victor are two different things. Microsoft can take a market but it takes all their resources to do so. They usually settle for a certain percentage based on what they feel they need to leverage another product in a related space. All they really care about is Windows and Office. Everything else they do is to protect those interests. Think about it. The new xbox has a feature that lets you use it with windows media center. Windows handhelds only seem to work well with Windows desktops. Microsoft continues to make office for the mac because its extremely profitable and they can't afford for someone else to make an office product on the mac that gets more popular. (they did start on the Mac)
Netscape failed because they didn't innovate. Netscape 4 had piss poor CSS support and the engine needed an overhaul. They started on it too late. But, the engine overhaul they did write became Gecko and now we have firefox between 5-25 percent depending who you ask. (much like Mac installbase numbers)
You are certainly correct about computer manufacturers recommending Microsoft. Remember how much news came out when the intel ceo recommended Macs. That should have been a clue to all of us that he either made a deal with apple or wanted to. Even apple pushes windows now with their boot camp ads. Macworld has articles this month about windows!
Unless this is recent, 9200 and lower are the only ones with 3d acceleration in xorg. I have a 9600xt all in wonder and i've never had 3D acceleration working without getting binary ATI drivers. (linux) And since i'm more of a BSD person, its really bad.
There are other reasons to buy nVidia. They actually support OTHER open source operating systems. (FreeBSD, Solaris) I can play some games under FreeBSD 6 like Enemy Territory quite nicely using the nvidia binary drivers. The binary drivers got me to buy my first nVidia card ever. I'm rather impressed with it considering its not even one of their more recent cards (only fx5200). xorg support sucks above 9200 chipsets as their is no 3d acceleration. I only wish nvidia made their own video cards like ati does. I've had bad luck with some oem cards. (one nvidia and several ati)
It matters.
1. Energy efficient servers mean less electricity. How is it produced? Coal, nuclear, and other fuels. Less pollution.
2. It might save the government money and we have to pay for iraq somehow.
3. It will increase the demand and incentive for companies like AMD, Intel, Dell, Apple, HP and IBM to make energy efficent servers which in turn will get them to the masses. We all win.
Everyone is focused on gas prices because they are so high. Electricity and natural gas went up too. Look at your bill and compare it to a few years back. I know I'm feeling it. Gas won't go down below ~ 3 dollars ever. It doesn't go down. Our best bet is to save money elsewhere to pay for the $30 it takes to fill my saturn. Does anyone remember the brown outs and other problems of the past few years?
I also noticed some crazy conspiracy theories about this going through since Intel has good chips now. Well its entirely possible, but that doesn't mean AMD can't compete and get all the sales. Its about time AMD released something spectacular anyway. AMD64 has been out for awhile now.
I forget about it. Usually when I do laundry, I'm also programming. For some odd reason, I get great ideas loading laundry into the washer. I guess it cleanses my mind. Problem is I forget to put them in the dryer or to check on them. Worse yet, sometimes I play enemy territory and who wants to check on clothes when there is 3 minutes left and you haven't got the truck moving yet on goldrush.
While you have a bit of a point for end users, I think intel and amd are concerned about server chips. Sun has an 8 core, 32 way chip (think of it as 8 cores with 4 way hyperthreading per core). Long term, they need more cores to compete. I'm not trying to say sun is that far ahead, but sun certainly influenced where we are going. Plus, its been known for a long time we'd hit limits on what one core can do. Physics applies after all.
Does excel need better performance? Most apps run fine on one core. That means someday maybe each app you'd run could be on its own core. That sounds fast to me. Most people only have so many programs open. Also, parallel programming is very new to many programmers. Over time, computer science programs will focus on new algorithms and operating systems will provide better interfaces and generally operate better with multiple cpus. (scheduling, disk io, etc need work) We are at the beginning of some exciting improvements.
Finally, if you are concerned with gaming consider that this technology will trickle down to GPUs eventually. Won't a multicore video card kick ass? That's effectively what SLI and the like are doing now.
Apple hurt their customers too. I have an emagic usb 2/6 external sound card. Apple stopped updating the drivers for it. I can either run it in XP or Mac OS 10.3 or lower. If I install it in tiger, I get random crashes, lockups and even crashes shutting down! I wouldn't have bought a 300 dollar external soundcard to begin with, but my mother in law thought it was a usb hub :)
It worked great with iTunes and I love the bass compared to my lame iBook soundcard. All well, maybe i'll use it in linux someday as i know the 2.6 kernel has support for it.
Not only that, but they have to spend quite a bit of money on vista and office development and later advertising. They've dropped massive amounts of money into xbox products. It may have a small impact on their advertising budget for vista initially.
For gaming. Windows XP has better support for games than 2000 did. Some software runs on XP that also ran on 98, but not 2000. That is the reason. Windows 2000 Pro was targeted to business, but they also picked up a few geeks like me. I preferred the stability of NT4 and 2k to Windows 95/98. I actually prefer the new start menu layout over the old one. It did take time to get used to it.
I wish you would give Microsoft a break. We always complain about their lack of quality. If Bill Gates is actually telling us the truth, I'd enjoy a tested system over an untested one. Even if you don't plan to run vista, I bet your employer or family might. You'll still have to touch it, deal with it and if you're a linux developer compete with it.
Ok. Here is a start, W3 Schools hits. You'll notice that opera is not popular among people who learn about making websites. This is just one website, but they are more likely to have alternate browser hits than some. Since people don't use opera, I'm concluding they don't like opera or don't know about opera. Either way, opera has not been successful. Firefox, in constrast, has been successful. Many people have heard of it. Both of my parents have tried it. I called them and asked if they have ever heard of opera. Neither of them had.
I am quite terrible at statistics so I won't even try to meet your requirements. I do feel that I've show a subset of the population does not use opera. If they preferred opera, they would certainly use opera. In a given day, I use several browsers including Firefox, Safari, IE and even lynx on occasion. I don't use opera.