Well the Opteron isn't exclusively owned by AMD. It is based on technology from other companies with a few patents that AMD developed. It sounds to me like the word open is being confused with free. I see an inherent difference. AMD puts a lot of R&D into the product which would not exist without recouping costs and funding further R&D. So yes, the schematics are available and in many cases readily online so you could reproduce the Opteron without asking AMD as long as you didn't intent to profit from it.
I don't see anything wrong with this and I would call it open.
As for your comment I didn't feel I needed to respond to it as the discussion wasn't about Microsoft and its proprietary nature. There is no debate there is a lot of the platform that is either not documented or not publically available. Thus I would agree it conforms to the definition of proprietary.
You didn't answer the question. Everything you need to build an Opteron and associated compilers is available from AMD free of charge. So I don't see how it isn't open in any way. As I asked before, what more are you looking for them to provide you before you will call it "open?"
Well to that I would say that it might be worth a few hours of investigating if the time savings = a cost savings that is. Otherwise there really isn't a point to switching. I know all of our new servers here are Opteron based. They are vastly more stable. Our DBMS both Oracle and MS SQL runs much more smoothly for some reason. Might have been the fact that I knew more when I setup these systems. The Intel compilers are the major stumbling block right now although there are many codecs that have been optimized for AMD and more graphics apps such and Maya, Max, and Lightwave have AMD binaries which dramatically speed things up. In the streaming world there is virtual dub, mplayer, cinerra, and a few others that I have tried out on different platforms.
In either case, I'd tend to say its always good to test in multiple scenarios especially if you have luxury of being able to test implement before you have to purchase all the new equipment.
I happen to have a few friends in the banking industry and I find your statements curious. Are 100 clustered servers not more reliable than 1 mainframe? 100 clustered servers not more powerful than 1 mainframe? The price still isn't even close. Also, the banking industry has been clustering for quite some time now. It makes good sense considering database access works better inherently when you add more processors and more threads to the mix.
After my latest experience with EMC equipment I have concluded that for the vast majority of applications clustering works better at a much better price point. So as your statement said, the replacements will be mainframes in everything but name. Ultra secure, reliable, recoverable systems. Around here we call it Oracle and the grid. Its real hard to take down the RAC here and I would say it is all safe and secure with the additional security found in the ability to have half the cluster here at HQ and the other half off site.
Sorry but what would you consider an open processor then? All the documentation on the Opteron is available free of charge. What more are you looking for them to provide?
Since the 286 days I've had both AMD and Intel and I gotta say, in those days there was very little difference between processors. Fast forward to today and I wonder if you've even look at AMDs offerings in the last 3 years. Video processing? I stream live dvd quality feeds using Opteron processors for a simple reason. Dual Xeon 2.8ghz server could make 2 high quality dvd streams with minimal frame drops. Powerful yes, now compare it to the dual Opteron 1.8ghz the lowest of the low end. I can do 4 streams with the same level of compression. In both scenarios I'm using the same Osprey 230 PCI-X cards.
So I'm a big curious what is so vastly superior? Are you using Intel compiled codecs on AMD machines when you did your testing? Did you even do any testing? I'll admit I had some trouble getting things running smoothly with the Opteron box but the end results speak for themselves; especially when you move over to the 64bit world with 64bit capture drivers the Opteron blows away anything Intel has put out to date. Of course Intel 64bit support is slow as all hell right now so I'm sure that will change in the near future.
While you may have been burnt by AMD I will stick with them for the time being until Intel shows some signs of turning around their product offerings. I'm still curious how a processor has gone bad though. In my experience once you get back the first 90 days its smooth sailing regardless of manufacturer. Only reason I can think a chip would die later in life would be from a PSU failure or some sort of disruption. I've seen that happen, never just seen a cpu die though. Always some other component causing it.
Of course this is getting off track from the article. The Opteron is very well suited for these large machines so I'll be curious how they perform in real environments like Oracle and DB2 setups. Opterons bandwidth improve the more processors you throw at it so it'll be intriguing to see the results.
I'll keep that in mind when I'm driving through the mountains where you can't even receive FM radio stations.
Say what you like about the quality of XM and FM but the reality is that XM is consistent, sure there are one or two times in a year I won't get signal because I'm going under a tunnel or something but with FM there are all kinds of distortions that crop up everyday. With that said I don't know how you can in any reasonable way say the quality is better. Who cares if the sound is better if you can't get it as consistently.
Also the thing that confuses me here is that I just installed my XM tuner in my car and it has not 1 not 2, but 3 transponders which tells me that your information is either dated or inaccurate. I switch to channel 81 and I'm on transponder 2, channel 20 I'm on 1. I would imagine this has dramatically improved quality of broadcasts when compared to the past. As of right now I get much better sound out of XM than I do on any FM station in the area.
Of course I'm in the desert, go north where there is a lot more in the atmosphere and many tall buildings around you and it may be different. I'll find out when I head to LA and Vegas next weekend.
Interesting view of reality. Yes a lot of the stuff they've done is taking an existing an idea and implementing it. Implementing it reall counts for more than you give it credit for. What good is a technology that either cannot be implemented or a technology that is difficult to implement.
My recent experience with Apache with Tomcat is one my chief examples. To get Tomcat to serve a JSP app with an Oracle datasource I had to edit a could number of configs. All and all gathering documentation which is pathetic at best and implementing a solution that worked took a good couple of hours. Compare that with IIS which is both a web server and app server and I deployed an ASP.Net app talking to same Oracle server in a matter of minutes.
Another Example is Outlook in combination with Exchange. The collaboration features found in these products are only now beginning to find rivals with Oracle Collaboration Suite and a few other open source apps which are still in the process of catching up. They were behind the ball on dealing with spam, spamassassin taught MS a few things and they produced a product that rivals it very nicely.
I'm not saying MS is perfect but they deserve a little more credit than you are giving them. MAPI is a great protocol, pretty fast, lots of features. The only other products out there that match its featureset seem to be reverse engineered copies of MAPI.
Of course there are numerous examples to contrary such as Active Directory, IIS, IAS, SQL Server. I won't go through the list but there is a reason they became so prevalent all over and that is primarily because of their ability to implement technologies. They can give you a workable solution. Of course there is a reason Windows can't be used to control a nuclear power plant or a heart monitoring device.
Out of curiosity, how many other office suites out there support the Open Document File formats?
I can think of maybe one, I say I maybe because of Star Office's ties to Open Office. Are there any or many others?
The major thing I don't understand about this whole argument is how this would in any way effect the government's interaction with outside people and businesses. Could they not offer a plugin that would allow MS Office to read the file format? Wouldn't such a plugin be free? It would be just like putting a link to the Acrobat reader so people can read the PDFs they put out.
Seems to me this could be accomplished simply with the read-only switch in the bios. Boot up your favorite OS, so what if it gets exploited? Just reboot and the thing is back the way it was. Gets even better in the VMWare world where you can create drive images and modify them externally while the VMWare environment has no such access.
To save files and documents? Pretty simple, redirect My Documents or whatever storage mechanism you use to a network resource with proper access controls. Not 100% secure but much closer
My E4cs have accidently been rolled over by my chair and shoved all sorts of places. They are well built. Breaking them is no an easy task. I've gone through many earbuds where that was the case.
They are quite a bit more expensive though. I've had mine for almost a year now and they still work great. I don't see a need to replace them in the near future.
I'd suggest upping to the E4c then. I bought those and they are the best sounding ear buds I've ever heard. I tried a good number of others out and they produce the widest range of sound plus the music isn't projected to everyone in the room.
I love them. Only need 30% volume maybe 50 when a really great song comes across the playlist. They are definitely the best method and worth every penny I think.
That said, I usually listen to music pretty loud, my roommate listens to his music quietly. However, we will both be outside and I'll hear something that will comepletely go unheard by him. So I tend to wonder just how much keeps your ears tuned and how much causes damage. Naturally this would be different for everyone, I'd be curious to know what ranges there would be.
I would agree that mainframes aren't dying but they are certainly shrinking. I know of an insurance company who recently built, yes, an MS SQL Cluster of about 250 servers. This is still cheaper than buying a new mainframe and is arguably much more redundant.
Oracle's latest commercials might give you a little insight into where the community, the database community in particular is heading.
Grid computing is cheaper, faster, and has proven itself reliable time and time again. Of course, the mainframe has been quite reliable for quite a long period of time but as the grid becomes more and more robust the need for mainframes will be pushed higher and higher up the the big company ladder. Only the largest of companies actually need mainframes at this point, of course there are other specific reasons to have one as well.
You are right though, if the industry is short on people then they will have to train from within or hire people and get them the training they need.
Well, if you're that clumsy with equipment then buy the ToughBook. Thing won't care if you drop it.
I'm still trying to figure out what is so special about including RAID in a laptop though. HP has been doing it with their upper model level laptops for at least a year now. One of my friends came back from the army with his, it had dual SATA 250s in it. Fast as all hell. Naturally battery life suffered tremendously. I think he'd be lucky to get an hour out of it.
This I know, and this I think should be outlawed. I give my credit card company access to some information. I don't want them selling that information to 3rd parties. Yes there are regulations in place in regards to that but thats obviously not enough.
Mainly there is a simple law on the books. When I give my information to a company it is my information they are "licensing." This has been the case for 20 years. They don't own the information about me, I do. With that being the case I should think that they require my express consent to share that information, and if they are making money on it you bet I want a piece of the pie.
I'm not accusing SpamCop of anything, if anything I stated rather plainly that they were doing their jobs. Only problem is, how to correct the issue with your mailing list if they won't give you their address?
The answer is, ask them for the address, eventually you'll get it out of them, then remove the address from your list.
Of course, periodic reregistration such as a mail once a year where the members have to click a link to remain included in the list is another way to clean house and ensure I'm using the smallest amount of resources available to send out a mass mail. All of it points at our main mail server with full RDNS support. I'd say we effectively do everything we can to ensure we have a proper list of people that actually want to know when we are having an auction. Course we only put on an auction twice a year right now so we don't send out mail that often.
Well I got the address from them eventually, I imagine they have several they use. Basically I got it off my list and all is well.
You're right about the double opt-in approach. I neglected to mention that as being part of our solution.
As far as Opt-out, we provide a link in every email. They click it, it brings up a plain webpage with just the words, "Would you like to unsubscribe from our lists?" There is a Yes button. They click it and they are removed from our database.
I don't really like this approach but it is the best thing I can think of. I get a large number of spam to my domain and I really don't think I'd ever click unsubscribe to any of those links. Of course you rarely ever get emails from the same address so I suppose from their perspective it is a bit different.
I tend to think you just outlaw the sale for mailing lists in general. Then the whole drive for this crap goes away. If I am a customer of one company then in no way would I want any other company to be mailing me anything. The whole idea seems absurd to me.
Of course if I am a customer of the company then they have a legitimate reason to be able to contact me although for obvious reasons a simple banning of the sale of mailing lists will not solve everything. I could see companies with large customer bases selling their services as mailers.
I recently ran into this issue with our mailing list which consists of about 55,000 people. This list is 100% opt-in but regardless, someone didn't like us, so they submitted spamcops trap email address to our list. We included them in our email blast and naturally received a complaint.
When I followed up with SpamCop they weren't helpful at all, they would not tell me why it happened, who was involved or how I could stop it from happening again. They just labeled my company as one that bought an email list and said to hell with us.
Naturally this wasn't acceptable to me so I moved to their parent company where I actually got some help. I explained to them exactly how we got the email addresses we used and that we understood there was some abuse of the system, so we asked them how to proceed without making the problem worse.
The solution was to send out an email blast asking everyone to confirm their wish to be on the list. This would be the only thing we were allowed to ask in the email. No advertising, not even any logos, just a simple plain email with a link to our website. Yes this shrunk our list a little bit but the majority of people on it were customers of ours and wanted to be there.
So yes, if I had mod points I'd mod you up. Its very important not promoting any products. That is the difference between spam and legitimate messaging.
Perhaps because I don't receive truck loads of junk mail at my house much to the enjoyment of my postal carrier.
I filter spam for my entire organization, we get about 30,000 emails a day and about 25,000 of them are spam. Imagine receiving 25,000 coupons in your mail everyday, and ten times that twice a year.
I agree with what I believe was your underlying point in that advertising in all forms has gotten way out of control. I would be curious about measuring the average television show to commericial ratio in minutes 20 years ago as compared to now. Considering 1/3rd of the Simpsons is typically commercials I'd think its safe to say thats quite a bit more than in the past.
Of course if thats not what you were saying I apologize.
I'd say it was designed, I'm unsure as to if the scientist actually knew what would be produced with absolulte certainty.
Also, these organisms were created over the last 30 years of human knowledge. The rest of the world had billions of years to arrive where we are now.
I won't hazard a discussion about where all life came from but the two competing theories in my mind don't compete. In reality evolution doesn't explain where it all began, only how we arrived where we are today. Picture it like traveling across the United States. Just because you know the roads that were taken doesn't necessary mean you know where I started the trip. You have enough information to hazard a guess, then again, if I told you I took I10 to get to AZ that wouldn't be enough information. I could be from California or I could be from Florida or any number of places in between.
I'd say let's keep looking and learning for ourselves, share what we've experienced, and move on and build off of eachother rather than tearing everything down.
Without a license using 1watt amplifiers? Or with a license using 2 watt amps? Combined that with 20db antennas and you can quite easily cover two miles with one AP. Combined that with about 30 APs placed in a nice star around the city with a massive wireless distribution network then yes. $800 for an Orinoco AP700 or $400 for the AP2000, put two radios in each thats another $100. $200 for the amp and another $150 for the antenna.
In short, yes, I believe it is quite possible using existing technology. I do this twice a year with the 6 APs we have here. I could about 2 squares miles with 802.11b/g. b for obvious reasons doesn't work as well so cut it in half for b users.
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I don't see anything wrong with this and I would call it open.
As for your comment I didn't feel I needed to respond to it as the discussion wasn't about Microsoft and its proprietary nature. There is no debate there is a lot of the platform that is either not documented or not publically available. Thus I would agree it conforms to the definition of proprietary.You didn't answer the question. Everything you need to build an Opteron and associated compilers is available from AMD free of charge. So I don't see how it isn't open in any way. As I asked before, what more are you looking for them to provide you before you will call it "open?"
In either case, I'd tend to say its always good to test in multiple scenarios especially if you have luxury of being able to test implement before you have to purchase all the new equipment.
After my latest experience with EMC equipment I have concluded that for the vast majority of applications clustering works better at a much better price point. So as your statement said, the replacements will be mainframes in everything but name. Ultra secure, reliable, recoverable systems. Around here we call it Oracle and the grid. Its real hard to take down the RAC here and I would say it is all safe and secure with the additional security found in the ability to have half the cluster here at HQ and the other half off site.
Sorry but what would you consider an open processor then? All the documentation on the Opteron is available free of charge. What more are you looking for them to provide?
So I'm a big curious what is so vastly superior? Are you using Intel compiled codecs on AMD machines when you did your testing? Did you even do any testing? I'll admit I had some trouble getting things running smoothly with the Opteron box but the end results speak for themselves; especially when you move over to the 64bit world with 64bit capture drivers the Opteron blows away anything Intel has put out to date. Of course Intel 64bit support is slow as all hell right now so I'm sure that will change in the near future.
While you may have been burnt by AMD I will stick with them for the time being until Intel shows some signs of turning around their product offerings. I'm still curious how a processor has gone bad though. In my experience once you get back the first 90 days its smooth sailing regardless of manufacturer. Only reason I can think a chip would die later in life would be from a PSU failure or some sort of disruption. I've seen that happen, never just seen a cpu die though. Always some other component causing it.Of course this is getting off track from the article. The Opteron is very well suited for these large machines so I'll be curious how they perform in real environments like Oracle and DB2 setups. Opterons bandwidth improve the more processors you throw at it so it'll be intriguing to see the results.
Say what you like about the quality of XM and FM but the reality is that XM is consistent, sure there are one or two times in a year I won't get signal because I'm going under a tunnel or something but with FM there are all kinds of distortions that crop up everyday. With that said I don't know how you can in any reasonable way say the quality is better. Who cares if the sound is better if you can't get it as consistently.
Also the thing that confuses me here is that I just installed my XM tuner in my car and it has not 1 not 2, but 3 transponders which tells me that your information is either dated or inaccurate. I switch to channel 81 and I'm on transponder 2, channel 20 I'm on 1. I would imagine this has dramatically improved quality of broadcasts when compared to the past. As of right now I get much better sound out of XM than I do on any FM station in the area.Of course I'm in the desert, go north where there is a lot more in the atmosphere and many tall buildings around you and it may be different. I'll find out when I head to LA and Vegas next weekend.
My recent experience with Apache with Tomcat is one my chief examples. To get Tomcat to serve a JSP app with an Oracle datasource I had to edit a could number of configs. All and all gathering documentation which is pathetic at best and implementing a solution that worked took a good couple of hours. Compare that with IIS which is both a web server and app server and I deployed an ASP.Net app talking to same Oracle server in a matter of minutes.
Another Example is Outlook in combination with Exchange. The collaboration features found in these products are only now beginning to find rivals with Oracle Collaboration Suite and a few other open source apps which are still in the process of catching up. They were behind the ball on dealing with spam, spamassassin taught MS a few things and they produced a product that rivals it very nicely.I'm not saying MS is perfect but they deserve a little more credit than you are giving them. MAPI is a great protocol, pretty fast, lots of features. The only other products out there that match its featureset seem to be reverse engineered copies of MAPI.
Of course there are numerous examples to contrary such as Active Directory, IIS, IAS, SQL Server. I won't go through the list but there is a reason they became so prevalent all over and that is primarily because of their ability to implement technologies. They can give you a workable solution. Of course there is a reason Windows can't be used to control a nuclear power plant or a heart monitoring device.I can think of maybe one, I say I maybe because of Star Office's ties to Open Office. Are there any or many others?
The major thing I don't understand about this whole argument is how this would in any way effect the government's interaction with outside people and businesses. Could they not offer a plugin that would allow MS Office to read the file format? Wouldn't such a plugin be free? It would be just like putting a link to the Acrobat reader so people can read the PDFs they put out.Cause I work with 2005 and I call bullshit
VSS 6 was worthless, slow, and prone to corruption. 2005 is db driven so things actually work now. Consequently it is also a lot faster.To save files and documents? Pretty simple, redirect My Documents or whatever storage mechanism you use to a network resource with proper access controls. Not 100% secure but much closer
They are quite a bit more expensive though. I've had mine for almost a year now and they still work great. I don't see a need to replace them in the near future.
I love them. Only need 30% volume maybe 50 when a really great song comes across the playlist. They are definitely the best method and worth every penny I think.
That said, I usually listen to music pretty loud, my roommate listens to his music quietly. However, we will both be outside and I'll hear something that will comepletely go unheard by him. So I tend to wonder just how much keeps your ears tuned and how much causes damage. Naturally this would be different for everyone, I'd be curious to know what ranges there would be.Rrrrright, cause everyone logs in with the same username these days. Sorry but this problem simply does not exist anymore.
Oracle's latest commercials might give you a little insight into where the community, the database community in particular is heading.
Grid computing is cheaper, faster, and has proven itself reliable time and time again. Of course, the mainframe has been quite reliable for quite a long period of time but as the grid becomes more and more robust the need for mainframes will be pushed higher and higher up the the big company ladder. Only the largest of companies actually need mainframes at this point, of course there are other specific reasons to have one as well.You are right though, if the industry is short on people then they will have to train from within or hire people and get them the training they need.
I do, you'd stop caring because no such problem exists. Problem solved, wipe hands, rinse, repeat.
I'm still trying to figure out what is so special about including RAID in a laptop though. HP has been doing it with their upper model level laptops for at least a year now. One of my friends came back from the army with his, it had dual SATA 250s in it. Fast as all hell. Naturally battery life suffered tremendously. I think he'd be lucky to get an hour out of it.
Mainly there is a simple law on the books. When I give my information to a company it is my information they are "licensing." This has been the case for 20 years. They don't own the information about me, I do. With that being the case I should think that they require my express consent to share that information, and if they are making money on it you bet I want a piece of the pie.
The answer is, ask them for the address, eventually you'll get it out of them, then remove the address from your list.
Of course, periodic reregistration such as a mail once a year where the members have to click a link to remain included in the list is another way to clean house and ensure I'm using the smallest amount of resources available to send out a mass mail. All of it points at our main mail server with full RDNS support. I'd say we effectively do everything we can to ensure we have a proper list of people that actually want to know when we are having an auction. Course we only put on an auction twice a year right now so we don't send out mail that often.You're right about the double opt-in approach. I neglected to mention that as being part of our solution.
As far as Opt-out, we provide a link in every email. They click it, it brings up a plain webpage with just the words, "Would you like to unsubscribe from our lists?" There is a Yes button. They click it and they are removed from our database.I don't really like this approach but it is the best thing I can think of. I get a large number of spam to my domain and I really don't think I'd ever click unsubscribe to any of those links. Of course you rarely ever get emails from the same address so I suppose from their perspective it is a bit different.
Of course if I am a customer of the company then they have a legitimate reason to be able to contact me although for obvious reasons a simple banning of the sale of mailing lists will not solve everything. I could see companies with large customer bases selling their services as mailers.
When I followed up with SpamCop they weren't helpful at all, they would not tell me why it happened, who was involved or how I could stop it from happening again. They just labeled my company as one that bought an email list and said to hell with us.
Naturally this wasn't acceptable to me so I moved to their parent company where I actually got some help. I explained to them exactly how we got the email addresses we used and that we understood there was some abuse of the system, so we asked them how to proceed without making the problem worse.The solution was to send out an email blast asking everyone to confirm their wish to be on the list. This would be the only thing we were allowed to ask in the email. No advertising, not even any logos, just a simple plain email with a link to our website. Yes this shrunk our list a little bit but the majority of people on it were customers of ours and wanted to be there.
So yes, if I had mod points I'd mod you up. Its very important not promoting any products. That is the difference between spam and legitimate messaging.I filter spam for my entire organization, we get about 30,000 emails a day and about 25,000 of them are spam. Imagine receiving 25,000 coupons in your mail everyday, and ten times that twice a year.
I agree with what I believe was your underlying point in that advertising in all forms has gotten way out of control. I would be curious about measuring the average television show to commericial ratio in minutes 20 years ago as compared to now. Considering 1/3rd of the Simpsons is typically commercials I'd think its safe to say thats quite a bit more than in the past.Of course if thats not what you were saying I apologize.
Also, these organisms were created over the last 30 years of human knowledge. The rest of the world had billions of years to arrive where we are now.
I won't hazard a discussion about where all life came from but the two competing theories in my mind don't compete. In reality evolution doesn't explain where it all began, only how we arrived where we are today. Picture it like traveling across the United States. Just because you know the roads that were taken doesn't necessary mean you know where I started the trip. You have enough information to hazard a guess, then again, if I told you I took I10 to get to AZ that wouldn't be enough information. I could be from California or I could be from Florida or any number of places in between.I'd say let's keep looking and learning for ourselves, share what we've experienced, and move on and build off of eachother rather than tearing everything down.
In short, yes, I believe it is quite possible using existing technology. I do this twice a year with the 6 APs we have here. I could about 2 squares miles with 802.11b/g. b for obvious reasons doesn't work as well so cut it in half for b users.