A big company such as IBM switching to Linux is sure to bring good things to the community. Perhaps this is the first major step in bringing Linux to the desktop market.
Hey, here's an idea: resurrect Workplace Shell. Linux could have the best desktop (easily better than Windows and arguably better than MacOS, though I realize this is all subjective) if they ported that.
This really isn't surprising. Using Free Software and developing Open Source software are not necessarily acts of altruism. They are acts of self-interest. They are exactly the kinds of things that a profit-making company operating under capitalism should do, to maximize its gain.
The question is: when is Microsoft going to start doing it? Eating their own dog food is good for their egos, but not so good for their internal productivity and infrastructure resilience. Maybe using Linux internally could turn out to be the boost Microsoft needs in order to improve Windows.
Are there really people out there who don't realize that building your own PC provides you with
a) higher quality
b) more flexibility
c) lower price.
I'm glad someone gets this. We hear words like "white box" and "Frankenstein" as pejoratives. It seems like some people don't realize that the Frankenstein machine is cheaper, faster, and more reliable than name brand computers. Dell is a name brand, but their components and employees are all no-name. When you buy a Dell, you have no fucking clue what you're going to get.
What kind of power supply is in that Dell? Is the RAM CAS2? Does the video card have drivers for the OS that I'm going to run?
My Frankenstein computer was assembled by someone who I trust implicitly (me) and with well-researched components from the highest reputation vendors.
Dell has a warranty, and Frankenstein doesn't. If that's important, then buy a Dell. But if you want a machine that is least likely to have problems (independent from what your recourse to problems will be) and also want excellent performance/cost, then Frankenstein wins.
.. with your computer. If you need to run that specific application (i.e. today's version of Adobe Photoshop) then this comparison was a good one. I can understand how this comparison would be of interest to some people.
But it just annoys me, because I happen to be a person who does not run that one particular app, and I start rolling my eyes where the article mentions they're talking about some old app compiled for i386 (which has so few registers) instead of x86-64, and on some legacy OS.
It doesn't seem like a "real world" test to me. Ok, sure, for some people, running 386 code and Windows XP is their "real world," as sad as that seems to me. But it's not my world. I live in a world where I have the source to most of the stuff I run, and compiling it to run natively is perfectly viable and easy. We are not waiting for "64-bit software"; we have had the software for years, and cheap hardware is what we were waiting for.
Running Adobe Photoshop compiled with Pentium optimizations vs Photoshop (optimized for the 604 or whatever) just seems silly, from this perspective. Crippled code vs crippled code is not realistic, to me. I wish someone would show me Gimp vs Gimp, emerge(gcc) vs emerge(gcc), mencoder vs mencoder -- with each system running appropriately-compiled code. Because that is the real world (my real world), that is what I'll actually be running when/if I get a new machine.
Now.. it's not like I have any right to demand these guys do some benchmarking of my real world apps, for free.:-) But at the same time, when they publish an article called "Dual G5 versus Dual Opteron" that is actually something far more narrow and specialized than the title suggests, then I think some deception has occurred, and people will draw ridiculous conclusions from it. Misinformation should be attacked. Appending "when running legacy binaries" to the title, would have made it a much better article.
Re:This may sound like flamebait or a troll...
on
G5 vs Opteron, Finally
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· Score: 0, Offtopic
honestly they're fine.
su and then type "emerge -eu world" and see if that 1700+ Athlon is still "fine.";-)
Gentoo is Intel's, AMD's, and IBM's dream-come-true. Of course you need a faster computer. Buy! Buy! Buy!
You're right about the 2xx limitation vs the 8xx. I forgot about that. So my quad-cpu example was.. an exaggeration. (Oh well, it's Slashdot. Nobody but you will notice my mistake.) Yeah, a pair of 2xx chips would be the system to get. Oh well, by the time the Opteron 846 is out, the 840 will be cheap.:-)
If I'm not mistaken, doesn't standard windows limit the # of CPU's to 2 on a standard copy, and charge more for 4x systems?
Beats me. Windows still doesn't scale? That would be pretty depressing, if it's true.
Yeah, I know this is a linux site, but not everyone in corporate culture has adopted yet.:D
People in "corporate culture" don't build their systems and put a lot of thought into the components; they're given an overpriced Dell box and told, "here's your computer" without any input into what the box contains. The exceptions to that rule, tend to be people who aren't limited to Windows.
I like On-Star for when my "check engine" light comes on, I press the button, they run a remote diagnostic on my engine's computer
At $400 per year, it only takes a couple of months before you can afford to go to your local auto parts store, and buy your own OBD II reader gizmo that will interface to your car's engine computer, and display the info for you.
Hmm.. that reminds me of what needs to go into the next "car computer" project. Instead of just playing music, it should also display/log diag codes.
AMD's 1.4 GHz Opteron 240, thanks to being "obsolete" is now down to about $215 per chip. (Anyone who thinks Opterons are expensive, is on crack.) Throw a couple of these into a dual-socket-940 motherboard (about $360), and you will have something that can bite the head off of (and shit down the neck stump of) a high-end single P4 system. And costs about the same (not counting the P4EE, which costs more).
The Pentium 4 "Extreme Edition" is the ultimate ripoff for suckers. $1k for a processor? You can get four "obsolete" Opterons for the same price, which make the "extreme" chip look extremely slow. (Hm.. trying to find a quad-940 mb to look up the price, but I'm failing. I know they exist, and there's no way they cost over $600.)
Of course, you can play the same dirty tricks by building multi-P4 systems out of older "obsolete" versions of the P4 which are cheaper, too. But I think the Opteron still wins. The point I'm trying to make is: "day-old" chips are cheap, and if you build SMP systems out of them, they slay!!
Leprechaun 4 (Leprechaun in Space) (which is a very bad movie, BTW, and I recommend against wasting any of the precious seconds of your life, watching it) uses Doom's door opening and closing sound effect.
Now we have a real choice in architecture (ppc vs. x86)
You're out of date. The real choice, now, is between PPC and x86-64. It's IBM vs AMD. Intel (and their obsolete IA32 (a.k.a. x86) and IA64 (Itanium)) are on the sidelines, rapidly fading into irrelevance.
Buy yeah, it's good news. Computers were exciting 15 years ago. 5 to 10 years ago, they were boring. Now it's starting to get a little exciting again. The dark ages (1990s) have come to an end.
Why are you convinced that a 64-bit processor will help you in any way? It won't, of course, unless it also happens to be faster in run-of-the-mill 32-bit code - which I will admin AMD's 64-bit chips sometimes are.
Speed is not the only advantage the AMD brings with the x86-64 architecture. It also has features. For example, if you run OpenBSD natively on one of these chips, you'll have something to sing about. X86-64 lets to control whether a page of memort is executable or not -- a nice protection against things like buffer-overflow attacks.
People have been saddled with the x86 legacy for so long, that they have forgotten the old days, when processors distinguished themselves from one another, in ways other than price/performance.
It looks like someone has discovered a couple of good ideas:
It's nice to be able to see what people are responding to. That's why people quote.
Threaded display, in case someone forgets to quote.
The most innovative thing here, is their new usage for the word "innovative." The word now has a brand new definition. "Innovative: taking the best ideas from common knowledge and the past."
GWB has been in office for 3 years, has had a largely cooperative congress, and has not worked to repeal DMCA. (Whereas he has been happy to undo some other things done by previous leaders, from as recent as Clinton, to as far back as the original framers.) If he didn't like DMCA, then it wouldn't be the law anymore.
That causes some of the responsibility to fall onto him. Don't let any president off the hook, until this law is gone. As GWB himself might say: you're either with us, or against us.
The view from outside the ISP's network, is that the data is coming from the ISP. From outside, it looks the same, whether it originates on a machine under the ISP's control or a machine under their customer's control: the world just sees the packet coming from the ISP.
The intent of the DMCA's notifcation mechanism, is that the ISP either has to take responsibility for the packets they are transmitting to the rest of the world, or pass the buck to whoever is responsible. In light of that, this ruling appears to subvert the intent of the law.
The issue shouldn't be about who owns a piece of equipment; it should be about who is responsible for that equipment's behavior. DMCA was intended to identify who is responsible for copyright infringement in cases where there is a "common carrier" in the mix. Treating P2P differently than hosting, doesn't make any sense.
This is a victory only by a perverted technicality, using a loophole. It does not mean that the courts have taken pirates' side. If this ruling stands, then the people who passed DMCA are just going to ammend and "clarify" the law.
I was able to download and play the test file with MPlayer and Linux. Finally, a music service for us geeks.
That's because you're running Microsoft code. Mplayer plays those files (on x86 only, of course) using Win32 codecs from Microsoft. You're practically running MS Windows -- your system now relies on the good will of Microsoft, is using code that cannot easily be debugged or maintained (since nobody has the source code), and you are locked into x86.
Tell me, just why do you run Linux at all? Is it really just for the performance? Because you've sacrificed all the other advantages.
Your post would make a lot more sense if you had left "capitalism" out of it, because capitalism is not the enemy nor does it conflict with Open Source or Free Software in any way.
The conflict is value (possibly implemented using open source) vs corruption (probably implemented by lock-in, a.k.a. The Microsoft Legacy).
THe only question is: who donated more money to the Bush campaign in 2000, and will likely donate more in 2004: Microsoft or their competitors? That's how you predict who will win.
The killer app is Gentoo Linux itself (well, gcc). There's no point in getting fast CPUs unless you're gonna use them. If you run Gentoo, you can show your friends, "Look how fast this is compiling! You would never have noticed this with Mandrake."
Phones that use open code, that the user could modify and maintain, would be totally bitchin'! As much as phones have been advancing, they have been retarded (held back) in certain ways. If they were open, then there would be no stopping us from adding some rather obvious features.
Imagine this scenario: Type in 555-1234 and press send. Here's what you see on the screen:
Searching database... found. DSA/1024 keyid 65342954. Warning: This key is only signed by two moderately trusted introducers.
Most Americans think of that country as being Communist. You know, planned economy. The proletariat has siezed the means of production. Industry == Government == Nation == People. It's all the same entity. There are no "independent companies" of the corrupt running dog capitalist variety, comrade, because private enterprise would just be a way of shirking man's responsibility to other men. That would be like stealing!
Look around at this world we've made
Equality our stock in trade
Come and join the Brotherhood of Man
Oh, what a nice, contented world
Let the banners be unfurled
Hold the Red Star proudly high in hand.
(Ok, that's obviously not the reality of the situation. Reality, schmeality. That's the connotation of Communism, the western perception of China. (In Soviet Russia, product releases YOU!))
IMHO, the problem is that defense is too expensive. You ought to be able to hire a lawyer for one hour (e.g. $200) to get your facts straight, and then not have to pay another dollar (unless your case really needs it) until after the judge/jury has given the verdict.
I haven't been sued yet, so I don't know what all the damned expenses are. But I strongly suspect they're bullshit. I wish someone who has stood up to a bully, would post about what all the costs were. Then we can start attacking the parts of the system that are creating these costs.
Slashdot Mirror
The question is: when is Microsoft going to start doing it? Eating their own dog food is good for their egos, but not so good for their internal productivity and infrastructure resilience. Maybe using Linux internally could turn out to be the boost Microsoft needs in order to improve Windows.
What kind of power supply is in that Dell? Is the RAM CAS2? Does the video card have drivers for the OS that I'm going to run?
My Frankenstein computer was assembled by someone who I trust implicitly (me) and with well-researched components from the highest reputation vendors.
Dell has a warranty, and Frankenstein doesn't. If that's important, then buy a Dell. But if you want a machine that is least likely to have problems (independent from what your recourse to problems will be) and also want excellent performance/cost, then Frankenstein wins.
But it just annoys me, because I happen to be a person who does not run that one particular app, and I start rolling my eyes where the article mentions they're talking about some old app compiled for i386 (which has so few registers) instead of x86-64, and on some legacy OS.
It doesn't seem like a "real world" test to me. Ok, sure, for some people, running 386 code and Windows XP is their "real world," as sad as that seems to me. But it's not my world. I live in a world where I have the source to most of the stuff I run, and compiling it to run natively is perfectly viable and easy. We are not waiting for "64-bit software"; we have had the software for years, and cheap hardware is what we were waiting for.
Running Adobe Photoshop compiled with Pentium optimizations vs Photoshop (optimized for the 604 or whatever) just seems silly, from this perspective. Crippled code vs crippled code is not realistic, to me. I wish someone would show me Gimp vs Gimp, emerge(gcc) vs emerge(gcc), mencoder vs mencoder -- with each system running appropriately-compiled code. Because that is the real world (my real world), that is what I'll actually be running when/if I get a new machine.
Now .. it's not like I have any right to demand these guys do some benchmarking of my real world apps, for free. :-) But at the same time, when they publish an article called "Dual G5 versus Dual Opteron" that is actually something far more narrow and specialized than the title suggests, then I think some deception has occurred, and people will draw ridiculous conclusions from it. Misinformation should be attacked. Appending "when running legacy binaries" to the title, would have made it a much better article.
Gentoo is Intel's, AMD's, and IBM's dream-come-true. Of course you need a faster computer. Buy! Buy! Buy!
Hmm.. that reminds me of what needs to go into the next "car computer" project. Instead of just playing music, it should also display/log diag codes.
AMD's 1.4 GHz Opteron 240, thanks to being "obsolete" is now down to about $215 per chip. (Anyone who thinks Opterons are expensive, is on crack.) Throw a couple of these into a dual-socket-940 motherboard (about $360), and you will have something that can bite the head off of (and shit down the neck stump of) a high-end single P4 system. And costs about the same (not counting the P4EE, which costs more).
The Pentium 4 "Extreme Edition" is the ultimate ripoff for suckers. $1k for a processor? You can get four "obsolete" Opterons for the same price, which make the "extreme" chip look extremely slow. (Hm.. trying to find a quad-940 mb to look up the price, but I'm failing. I know they exist, and there's no way they cost over $600.)
Of course, you can play the same dirty tricks by building multi-P4 systems out of older "obsolete" versions of the P4 which are cheaper, too. But I think the Opteron still wins. The point I'm trying to make is: "day-old" chips are cheap, and if you build SMP systems out of them, they slay!!
Leprechaun 4 (Leprechaun in Space) (which is a very bad movie, BTW, and I recommend against wasting any of the precious seconds of your life, watching it) uses Doom's door opening and closing sound effect.
Buy yeah, it's good news. Computers were exciting 15 years ago. 5 to 10 years ago, they were boring. Now it's starting to get a little exciting again. The dark ages (1990s) have come to an end.
People have been saddled with the x86 legacy for so long, that they have forgotten the old days, when processors distinguished themselves from one another, in ways other than price/performance.
- It's nice to be able to see what people are responding to. That's why people quote.
- Threaded display, in case someone forgets to quote.
The most innovative thing here, is their new usage for the word "innovative." The word now has a brand new definition. "Innovative: taking the best ideas from common knowledge and the past."That causes some of the responsibility to fall onto him. Don't let any president off the hook, until this law is gone. As GWB himself might say: you're either with us, or against us.
The intent of the DMCA's notifcation mechanism, is that the ISP either has to take responsibility for the packets they are transmitting to the rest of the world, or pass the buck to whoever is responsible. In light of that, this ruling appears to subvert the intent of the law.
The issue shouldn't be about who owns a piece of equipment; it should be about who is responsible for that equipment's behavior. DMCA was intended to identify who is responsible for copyright infringement in cases where there is a "common carrier" in the mix. Treating P2P differently than hosting, doesn't make any sense.
This is a victory only by a perverted technicality, using a loophole. It does not mean that the courts have taken pirates' side. If this ruling stands, then the people who passed DMCA are just going to ammend and "clarify" the law.
Clever thinking, Chinese government.
Tell me, just why do you run Linux at all? Is it really just for the performance? Because you've sacrificed all the other advantages.
The conflict is value (possibly implemented using open source) vs corruption (probably implemented by lock-in, a.k.a. The Microsoft Legacy).
THe only question is: who donated more money to the Bush campaign in 2000, and will likely donate more in 2004: Microsoft or their competitors? That's how you predict who will win.
The killer app is Gentoo Linux itself (well, gcc). There's no point in getting fast CPUs unless you're gonna use them. If you run Gentoo, you can show your friends, "Look how fast this is compiling! You would never have noticed this with Mandrake."
Imagine this scenario: Type in 555-1234 and press send. Here's what you see on the screen:
Oh, the possibilities...(Ok, that's obviously not the reality of the situation. Reality, schmeality. That's the connotation of Communism, the western perception of China. (In Soviet Russia, product releases YOU!))
No, it doesn't look Photoshopped. It looks GIMPed!
I haven't been sued yet, so I don't know what all the damned expenses are. But I strongly suspect they're bullshit. I wish someone who has stood up to a bully, would post about what all the costs were. Then we can start attacking the parts of the system that are creating these costs.
For great justice...