These machines are sending out spam, and a fair amount of it is porn spam. The obvious conclusion is that most every Windows-using school in America has porn on the disks of its classroom computers.
Actually the percentage of infected machines in schools is probably higher than the general percentage, because schools typically don't have much budget for IT staff, and they often have older computers.
> This is all well and good. However, when you put together a Windows system you have the choice of selecting a system that has/does not have a TCPM in it. In fact, you can > hand pick your hardware down to mother board and ram modules. You cannot do the same with Apple.
You're missing the point of the original question. With Vista, you *will* have TC support, or you're not going to be able to play "premium" media, period, no choice. Sure, you're free to pick a system without TC support, but that's like saying you'll be free to pick a system without a hard drive or processor. Unless you don't care for music or movies or news or games or whatever, you've got no choice with Vista. See this article for example (also posted on Slashdot recently): http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/vista_c ost.txt
The remainder of this statement (conserning motherboard/memory) is somewhat off topic, but I'll respond. My view is that it's a difference of _variety_ (with Windows winning of course) but not a difference of _kind_. You can install 3rd party memory in Macs, and there are 3rd party processor upgrades. On the Windows side, you have the choice of exactly that set of hardware that is supported by Windows. Which is tautological of course. A broader range of choices, but Microsoft is still calling the shots. They could refuse to support some hardware and engineer the OS to accomplish this (as they have, occasionally, with software). It sounds like there will be extensive support for doing this sort of thing in Vista.
In fact, on a theoretical rather than practical level, there is actually *more* freedom in the Apple ecosystem, due to the fact that the basic operating system is open sourced.
Actually, this is incorrect. Go back 3-4 years and read about Microsoft's "Palladium" effort, now called Trusted Computing. Here's a FAQ:
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/tcpa-faq.html
"The Trusted Computing Group (TCG) is an alliance of Microsoft, Intel, IBM, HP and AMD".
Microsoft has been leading the charge on the software side. It's a remarkable effort, and Apple as of yet has nothing like it.
In Palladium, the hardware validates the OS before booting it, the OS can then validate programs such as media players
(refusing to run third-party players), and the players validate the content. If fully turned on it will be very difficult
to crack. It will also make programming essentially illegal, as some essays have pointed out.
It's like the nuclear bomb of computing. If they use it, they could control *everything*,
but the backlash would also be huge. They potentially have big supporters - Hollywood, the Christian right
(who could use it to eliminate porn), dictators, CEOs, etc. Read the bits about documents that can only be read
by their target audience, and that refuse to open after a designated period.
I suspect that much of Microsoft's strategic thought over the past 5 years has been devoted to puzzling over
how (far) to deploy this. If they don't go all the way (bios validates the OS, etc.), it will be easy to crack.
If they do, will they be able to keep people from fleeing their now total control of the computing environment?
As for Apple, I don't know. If TC is a success Apple will be forced by Hollywood to adopt it (at best),
or simply excluded from playing major media (a scenario that Microsoft has considered no doubt,
though they're probably thinking more of killing Linux with this...). With Intel supplying the
hardware, Apple is at least in a position to respond by implementing this if they need to.
But several facts make be believe that Apple does not actually want this:
1) They didn't implement the software side yet. They could have. Microsoft has.
2) The iTunes DRM, which is rather unrestrictive insofar as DRM goes. Plus,
iTunes itself lets you RIP DRM-free Mp3s (or Mp4/aac or flac) from CDs,
and you can put these mp3s on any non-Apple player you like (contrary
to earlier assertions in this discussion).
Plus, why would they (Apple) want this? Microsoft has a lot to gain by preventing
competing O/Ss from playing media. Apple (at this point) will only gain by
getting more marketshare.
To me, Microsoft represents the opposite of innovation, freedom, and other good things.
They are a main force against innovation.
Example #1: the Go PDA in the early 90s.
Microsoft convinced Go's investors to pull out, and the company died. Why?
NOT because it was in Microsoft's business interests. At the time
PocketPC/WindowsMobile did not exist, and PDAs do not take away business from
Desktops, so Go was not a competitor to Microsoft. Rather, they would have been synergy --
the devices would have needed to plug into PCs for syncing.
The only other explanation I can see is that Microsoft wants
to prevent innovation. Sounds far fetched, until you see that it is
actually a pattern. Read on...
Example #2: Microsoft vs. iTunes.
The Zune is actually Microsoft's *fifth* attempt to compete with iTunes
Before Zune there was the hyped venture with MTV. Before that
was an earlier Microsoft music store. etc.
The point: what did Microsoft gain by these efforts (before the Zune?).
It's well known that Apple makes its money off of selling the iPod,
whereas the store is only slightly above break-even (it is the music companies
get what profit there is to be had from the store). So here
we have Microsoft attacking an innovative area, even though it 1) does
not compete with Microsoft and 2) Microsoft will not profit
(indeed, they had to spend money to setup their various stores).
Microsoft's shareholders should object to this behavior by the way.
Example #3: Google.
Once again, an innovative area (search) that
was complementary to Microsoft's business. Microsoft makes it a priority
to try to kill Google, even though they have plenty of other
more important things to do, like getting their OS to ship on time
rather than 3 years late (thus creating actual revenue), or
fixing some bugs at least.
Example #4: Microsoft Research. MSR is a candidate for the single largest
group of brains on the planet. They're much bigger than any university CS
department for example.
What do they do with all those people? Ignore them, for the most part.
One would expect them to be doing wonders, yet all we see of Microsoft
is it's attempts to copy Google and Apple. It must be hard to be at MSR. I guess it's a comfortable job.
I assume there must be is a deep insecurity at the top of Microsoft
that leads to this negative behavior.
Microsoft seemed invincible in 1999. One could imagine them
taking over the internet and in effect becoming the corporation
that controlled the world. Fortunately that didn't happen,
and it now seems like Microsoft is quickly becoming irrelevant,
except for the Xbox.
The cell phone is the new computing platform, and if you read
the international (rather than US) computing press you already
know that Microsoft is way behind Linux on phones.
"On smartphones, Windows had a 4% stake of the operating systems in the same quarter, ranking third behind Symbian and Linux, with 64.8% and 26%, respectively."
The Go story was discussed in part in this slashdot article:
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/07/06/15 35231
"I used the Go OS, which was powerful, well-designed, feature-rich and ran acceptably on a 386-based touchscreen tablet - a real advance at that time....Microsoft suckered Go into telling secrets under NDA, and once they had the details, MS's marketing guys played the vaporware game on Go in the public arena. A key clue was that after Go fell, MS pen computing vanished for almost a decade."
The linked article does NOT say that "Linux will remain second best". Actually it describes many outcomes, including
Windows dying:
we look at the effect of having buyers such as governments and some large corporations committed to deployment of Linux in their organizations. We call such buyers strategic. In addition to cost-related reasons, governments back Linux because having access to the source code allows them to verify that sensitive data is treated securely. Binary code makes it hard to figure out who has access to information flowing in a network. Companies such as IBM, in contrast, back Linux because they see in OSS one way to diminish Microsoft's dominance. We find that the presence of strategic buyers together with Linux's sufficiently strong demand-side learning results in Windows being driven out of the market.
And in fact such "stategic" buyers are appearing all over the globe.
Further, the article ignores the role of hardware shift. Thus far, every time there has been a shift in
the preferred hardware class, the OS has shifted as well.
Mainframes: IBM os dominant. Minicomputers: VMS, others. Workstations: Unix dominant. PCs: DOS/Windows dominant.
We're entering the cellphone era, and some surveys have Linux already leading Windows mobile 2:1
(with Symbian dominant at them moment).
Ichat uses the H264 codec, which is the same one used in the HD-res (1920x1080) quicktime movie previews at apple's websites. I believe it
is the codec in either Blueray or HDdvd also. In anycase it looks great.
The stand-alone isight camera is very good. The built-in camera is pretty good.
In the past I've tried iVisit, yahoo, aol, and a couple other ugly buggy things.
I have not tried the "camfrog".
Someone posted an analogy of a company that produced 95% of the cars on the road.
I think an easier analogy (even if less exact) is if one company owned 95% of the roads in your country.
Then, they could extend this monopoly to start to specify what brand of cars were allowed to drive on those
roads. If they made a car, they could allow only that car to drive.
They could do the same with trucks. Then with the stuff that the trucks carry.
If left unchecked, someone with this kind of monopoly power soon owns EVERYTHING. You can see how.
There is the common phrase to watch what someone does, not what they say.
In the context of this discussion, signing a check and having someone else deal with it (even if it's
your wife), is mostly just talking. Signing the check took a few seconds. Plus a few speaking
engagements each year.
The domain of Apple and Microsoft is in computing, and I judge them by what they do most of the time,
rather than by an occasonal publicity stunt. The discussion so far is underrating the importance of computing
in our lives. It's really important stuff. Not quite moral on the level of curing diseases, but it really affects
the lives of *everyone*, and quite a lot.
And unfortunately Microsoft has a poor history here, established over several decades. Any good idea,
whether itunes, google search, java, portable computing, the internet, whatever - comes from elsewhere,
and Microsoft has one of two responses:
They try to crush the existing players and own it, even if it has nothing to do with their
core business (google, itunes...). How is a MUSIC STORE going to really help Microsoft FCS?
They just can't stand that Apple is successful in this area. Why is Microsoft so intent on competing with Google?
Why not let Google and others do the searching, leaving Microsoft some time to try to make a reliable operating system, and fix their word processor so that you can make bulleted lists easily?
They try to simply crush the other guys, period, without any attempt to get into that market.
Note that we do not ever see the more honorable response of
"That company came out with a great new thing... why haven't we. Let's get on it and
come up with something good ourself."
The pen-based GO operating system in the mid 90s is an example of the second point.
It's covered in the book
Barbarians Led by Bill Gates: Microsoft from the Inside (Paperback)
by Jennifer Edstrom, Marlin Eller
From an earlier slashdot posting,
"I was there, I was a witness to what happened back in the 90s when this all happened, and Microsoft really did to Go what Kaplan says they did. I worked for Slate, a pen-based apps startup in the same building in Foster City that Go was in. I used the Go OS, which was powerful, well-designed, feature-rich and ran acceptably on a 386-based touchscreen tablet - a real advance at that time. Microsoft's Pen Windows, which I also used on a personal machine, was inferior in comparison. Go was way ahead technologically. Microsoft suckered Go into telling secrets under NDA, and once they had the details, MS's marketing guys played the vaporware game on Go in the public arena. A key clue was that after Go fell, MS pen computing vanished for almost a decade."
It's as if Microsoft's real mission is to take revenge on anyone who is creative. They just can't stand
it when someone else innovates, but they never seem to do it themselves.
I imagine Microsoft must have a lot of creative people among its employees. It must be horrible to
be a creative person working a company like that.
We have a Pismo, an g3 graphite Ibook, and a Titanium.
The Pixmo (6 years old?) and the Titanium (4.5 years) are going great, no repairs, not even any major cosmetic issues.
More impressive, the Titanium has NEVER CRASHED. That despite the fact that I develop on it. Its up for weeks (occasionally months) at a time, put it to sleep when not in use.
The Ibook was the bad one, it had the common logic board problem, and it happened before we know about the free apple repair program for those models.
Contrary to one of the other posts, I do think Apple's hardware quality is going down in recent years, as they move production to China. The best that can be said is that they're as good as the better PC manufacturers.
But I lament the "cheap is all that matters" consumer philosophy that is now universal. I'd rather have the choice of paying more and being able to buy a reliable computer (in particular a reliable hard drive). A few more years of relentless cheap-ism and all components will by guaranteed to fail within months.
(This is the person who submitted the original post. I was travelling
the day the discussion came out and did not see it until later.)
In my opinion many of the comments explain why the Itanium is
not widely adopted, but they mostly do not explain the admitted
community attitude about the Itanium.
Specifically, yes the processor has a chicken-and-egg problem--
if it were popular, software would be ported and the cost would
come down (or at least this is conceivable). So one would think
our attitude would be,
"It's too bad the Itanium doesn't catch on, it sounds like an
interesting alternative processor choice".
Instead of the current,
"Itanic - why hasn't it died yet".
The post that (IMHO) maybe does explain the situation was this:
The winner is not always the best or even close to the best, the winner is often the one that people feel good about.
So maybe problem is that people want to feel good that their
3.4ghz processor is THE FASTEST thing out there, and the Itanium
is there in the background denying this claim.
Some repeated themes that (though true) do not explain the attitude are:
Integer versus Floating point performance.
Your quoting FP performance. The "integer" (aka general purpose) performance isn't nearly as competitive.
...
For about the millionth time:
itanium (itanic) is a poor design for anything other than numbercrunching.
The problem here is that, when purchasing a computer for personal use,
floating-point (games) is in most cases the only issue. You are't upgrading
to a 3.4Ghz processor to run Office faster.
Certainly running xyz.com's website and database are a different story
(integer performance needed), but this by itself wouldn't prevent
anyone from craving the itanium for personal use, any more
that it would distract us from wanting a PS3.
Compatibility
Sure, an Itanium will run all your existing 32-bit stuff...in compatibility mode, which means you get performance akin to a 300MHz Pentium-II on your $2000 CPU. Remind me again why I'm supposed to buy Itanium?
This is the chicken-egg issue.
heat/size
I don't know - could this be a checken/egg issue too? In other words,
if the chip were more popular, would intel spend more resources
trying to address this, or is it intrinsically large and hot?
The most frustrating part of the discussion to me was
the conflicting statements about whether the architecture is
potentially a good one. I don't have the background to judge,
though I'm more inclined to give it a chance than some.
Ignoring the fact that we may not have read this particular
article correctly (which would be funny in itself -- a slashdot
article that an article about people who don't understand,
that doesn't understand the article, or something),
I think this comes up not infrequently in polls. Leading
up to the US election I saw two polls with seemingly contradictory results, stuff like
- 60% think the situation in Iraq has made terrorism worse,
- 58% think Bush is doing a good job on terrorism
5) Sun will rig things to retain ALL creative control from the Java experience.
seems incorrect. Sun does not currently have
all creative control over Java (the Java standard is controlled
through the JCP, which includes IBM and a lot of other people),
and I don't think they can simply "take back" control without violating agreements.
This discussion is interesting in that we've got some actual knowledgeable people responding to what is essentially a marketing article disguised as a technical one.
Without this, I would have partially believed the article (though even I noted that they did not report the results for hotspot -server).
I've played with virtualPC, and it can get impressive speeds, for example above 50%, on particular programs that are dominated by a single small loop. Concluded this by running a small C numeric benchmark on both mac laptop and a linux box.
But in general, it feels more like 1/5 speed of the host processor.
I suspect that their 80% claim is (if true at all) a best case.
Slashdot Mirror
ror allowing Windows computers in the classroom in the first place.
t .html?_r=1&oref=slogin&pagewanted=print
Botnets are huge and well known to anyone who ever glances into their spam box.
Some collection of security experts claim that they are tracking 400,000 infected machines
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/07/technology/07ne
These machines are sending out spam, and a fair amount of it is porn spam. The obvious conclusion
is that most every Windows-using school in America has porn on the disks of its classroom computers.
Actually the percentage of infected machines in schools is probably higher than the general percentage,
because schools typically don't have much budget for IT staff, and they often have older computers.
> This is all well and good. However, when you put together a Windows system you have the choice of selecting a system that has/does not have a TCPM in it. In fact, you can > hand pick your hardware down to mother board and ram modules. You cannot do the same with Apple.
c ost.txt
You're missing the point of the original question. With Vista, you *will* have TC support, or you're not going to be able to play "premium" media, period, no choice.
Sure, you're free to pick a system without TC support, but that's like saying you'll be free to pick a system without a hard drive or processor.
Unless you don't care for music or movies or news or games or whatever, you've got no choice with Vista.
See this article for example (also posted on Slashdot recently):
http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/vista_
The remainder of this statement (conserning motherboard/memory) is somewhat off topic, but I'll respond.
My view is that it's a difference of _variety_ (with Windows winning
of course) but not a difference of _kind_. You can install 3rd party memory in Macs, and there are 3rd party processor upgrades.
On the Windows side, you have the choice of exactly that set of hardware that is supported by Windows. Which is tautological of course.
A broader range of choices, but Microsoft is still calling the shots. They could refuse to support some hardware and engineer
the OS to accomplish this (as they have, occasionally, with software). It sounds like there will be extensive support for doing this
sort of thing in Vista.
In fact, on a theoretical rather than practical level, there is actually *more* freedom in the Apple ecosystem, due to the fact that the
basic operating system is open sourced.
Actually, this is incorrect. Go back 3-4 years and read about Microsoft's "Palladium" effort, now called Trusted Computing. Here's a FAQ:
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/tcpa-faq.html
"The Trusted Computing Group (TCG) is an alliance of Microsoft, Intel, IBM, HP and AMD".
Microsoft has been leading the charge on the software side. It's a remarkable effort, and Apple as of yet has nothing like it. In Palladium, the hardware validates the OS before booting it, the OS can then validate programs such as media players (refusing to run third-party players), and the players validate the content. If fully turned on it will be very difficult to crack. It will also make programming essentially illegal, as some essays have pointed out.
It's like the nuclear bomb of computing. If they use it, they could control *everything*, but the backlash would also be huge. They potentially have big supporters - Hollywood, the Christian right (who could use it to eliminate porn), dictators, CEOs, etc. Read the bits about documents that can only be read by their target audience, and that refuse to open after a designated period.
I suspect that much of Microsoft's strategic thought over the past 5 years has been devoted to puzzling over how (far) to deploy this. If they don't go all the way (bios validates the OS, etc.), it will be easy to crack. If they do, will they be able to keep people from fleeing their now total control of the computing environment?
As for Apple, I don't know. If TC is a success Apple will be forced by Hollywood to adopt it (at best), or simply excluded from playing major media (a scenario that Microsoft has considered no doubt, though they're probably thinking more of killing Linux with this...). With Intel supplying the hardware, Apple is at least in a position to respond by implementing this if they need to.
But several facts make be believe that Apple does not actually want this:
1) They didn't implement the software side yet. They could have. Microsoft has.
2) The iTunes DRM, which is rather unrestrictive insofar as DRM goes. Plus, iTunes itself lets you RIP DRM-free Mp3s (or Mp4/aac or flac) from CDs, and you can put these mp3s on any non-Apple player you like (contrary to earlier assertions in this discussion).
Plus, why would they (Apple) want this? Microsoft has a lot to gain by preventing competing O/Ss from playing media. Apple (at this point) will only gain by getting more marketshare.
Microsoft convinced Go's investors to pull out, and the company died. Why?
NOT because it was in Microsoft's business interests. At the time PocketPC/WindowsMobile did not exist, and PDAs do not take away business from Desktops, so Go was not a competitor to Microsoft. Rather, they would have been synergy -- the devices would have needed to plug into PCs for syncing. The only other explanation I can see is that Microsoft wants to prevent innovation. Sounds far fetched, until you see that it is actually a pattern. Read on...
The Zune is actually Microsoft's *fifth* attempt to compete with iTunes Before Zune there was the hyped venture with MTV. Before that was an earlier Microsoft music store. etc.
The point: what did Microsoft gain by these efforts (before the Zune?). It's well known that Apple makes its money off of selling the iPod, whereas the store is only slightly above break-even (it is the music companies get what profit there is to be had from the store). So here we have Microsoft attacking an innovative area, even though it 1) does not compete with Microsoft and 2) Microsoft will not profit (indeed, they had to spend money to setup their various stores). Microsoft's shareholders should object to this behavior by the way.
Once again, an innovative area (search) that was complementary to Microsoft's business. Microsoft makes it a priority to try to kill Google, even though they have plenty of other more important things to do, like getting their OS to ship on time rather than 3 years late (thus creating actual revenue), or fixing some bugs at least.
What do they do with all those people? Ignore them, for the most part. One would expect them to be doing wonders, yet all we see of Microsoft is it's attempts to copy Google and Apple. It must be hard to be at MSR. I guess it's a comfortable job.
I assume there must be is a deep insecurity at the top of Microsoft that leads to this negative behavior.
Microsoft seemed invincible in 1999. One could imagine them taking over the internet and in effect becoming the corporation that controlled the world. Fortunately that didn't happen, and it now seems like Microsoft is quickly becoming irrelevant, except for the Xbox.
The cell phone is the new computing platform, and if you read the international (rather than US) computing press you already know that Microsoft is way behind Linux on phones.
"On smartphones, Windows had a 4% stake of the operating systems in the same quarter, ranking third behind Symbian and Linux, with 64.8% and 26%, respectively."
http://news.zdnet.com/2100-1035_22-6089270.html
http://www.symbian.com/files/rx/file8405.pdf
The Go story was discussed in part in this slashdot article:5 35231
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/07/06/1
"I used the Go OS, which was powerful, well-designed, feature-rich and ran acceptably on a 386-based touchscreen tablet - a real advance at that time....Microsoft suckered Go into telling secrets under NDA, and once they had the details, MS's marketing guys played the vaporware game on Go in the public arena. A key clue was that after Go fell, MS pen computing vanished for almost a decade."
And in fact such "stategic" buyers are appearing all over the globe.
Further, the article ignores the role of hardware shift. Thus far, every time there has been a shift in the preferred hardware class, the OS has shifted as well. Mainframes: IBM os dominant. Minicomputers: VMS, others. Workstations: Unix dominant. PCs: DOS/Windows dominant.
We're entering the cellphone era, and some surveys have Linux already leading Windows mobile 2:1 (with Symbian dominant at them moment).
Ichat uses the H264 codec, which is the same one used in the HD-res (1920x1080) quicktime movie previews at apple's websites. I believe it is the codec in either Blueray or HDdvd also. In anycase it looks great. The stand-alone isight camera is very good. The built-in camera is pretty good. In the past I've tried iVisit, yahoo, aol, and a couple other ugly buggy things. I have not tried the "camfrog".
I think an easier analogy (even if less exact) is if one company owned 95% of the roads in your country.
Then, they could extend this monopoly to start to specify what brand of cars were allowed to drive on those roads. If they made a car, they could allow only that car to drive.
They could do the same with trucks. Then with the stuff that the trucks carry.
If left unchecked, someone with this kind of monopoly power soon owns EVERYTHING. You can see how.
In the context of this discussion, signing a check and having someone else deal with it (even if it's your wife), is mostly just talking. Signing the check took a few seconds. Plus a few speaking engagements each year.
The domain of Apple and Microsoft is in computing, and I judge them by what they do most of the time, rather than by an occasonal publicity stunt. The discussion so far is underrating the importance of computing in our lives. It's really important stuff. Not quite moral on the level of curing diseases, but it really affects the lives of *everyone*, and quite a lot.
And unfortunately Microsoft has a poor history here, established over several decades. Any good idea, whether itunes, google search, java, portable computing, the internet, whatever - comes from elsewhere, and Microsoft has one of two responses:
Note that we do not ever see the more honorable response of
The pen-based GO operating system in the mid 90s is an example of the second point. It's covered in the book Barbarians Led by Bill Gates: Microsoft from the Inside (Paperback) by Jennifer Edstrom, Marlin Eller
From an earlier slashdot posting,
"I was there, I was a witness to what happened back in the 90s when this all happened, and Microsoft really did to Go what Kaplan says they did. I worked for Slate, a pen-based apps startup in the same building in Foster City that Go was in. I used the Go OS, which was powerful, well-designed, feature-rich and ran acceptably on a 386-based touchscreen tablet - a real advance at that time. Microsoft's Pen Windows, which I also used on a personal machine, was inferior in comparison. Go was way ahead technologically. Microsoft suckered Go into telling secrets under NDA, and once they had the details, MS's marketing guys played the vaporware game on Go in the public arena. A key clue was that after Go fell, MS pen computing vanished for almost a decade."
It's as if Microsoft's real mission is to take revenge on anyone who is creative. They just can't stand it when someone else innovates, but they never seem to do it themselves.
I imagine Microsoft must have a lot of creative people among its employees. It must be horrible to be a creative person working a company like that.
We have a Pismo, an g3 graphite Ibook, and a Titanium.
The Pixmo (6 years old?) and the Titanium (4.5 years) are going great, no repairs, not even any major cosmetic issues.
More impressive, the Titanium has NEVER CRASHED. That despite the fact that I develop on it. Its up for weeks
(occasionally months) at a time, put it to sleep when not in use.
The Ibook was the bad one, it had the common logic board problem, and it happened before we know about the
free apple repair program for those models.
Contrary to one of the other posts, I do think Apple's hardware quality is going down in recent years, as they move
production to China. The best that can be said is that they're as good as the better PC manufacturers.
But I lament the "cheap is all that matters" consumer philosophy that is now universal. I'd rather have the choice
of paying more and being able to buy a reliable computer (in particular a reliable hard drive). A few more
years of relentless cheap-ism and all components will by guaranteed to fail within months.
Suppose someone tried a lawsuit (class action version??) against one of these banks.
It might not win, but it might cause other banks in particular to change their ways and recommend more secure access methods.
A quick web search turns up several surveys with lots of benchmarks,
http://java.sys-con.com/read/45250.htmr k.html
http://www.idiom.com/~zilla/Computer/javaCbenchma
In my opinion many of the comments explain why the Itanium is not widely adopted, but they mostly do not explain the admitted community attitude about the Itanium.
Specifically, yes the processor has a chicken-and-egg problem-- if it were popular, software would be ported and the cost would come down (or at least this is conceivable). So one would think our attitude would be,
Instead of the current,The post that (IMHO) maybe does explain the situation was this:
So maybe problem is that people want to feel good that their 3.4ghz processor is THE FASTEST thing out there, and the Itanium is there in the background denying this claim.
Some repeated themes that (though true) do not explain the attitude are:
-
Integer versus Floating point performance.
- Compatibility
This is the chicken-egg issue.
- heat/size
I don't know - could this be a checken/egg issue too? In other words,
if the chip were more popular, would intel spend more resources
trying to address this, or is it intrinsically large and hot?
The most frustrating part of the discussion to me was the conflicting statements about whether the architecture is potentially a good one. I don't have the background to judge, though I'm more inclined to give it a chance than some.The problem here is that, when purchasing a computer for personal use, floating-point (games) is in most cases the only issue. You are't upgrading to a 3.4Ghz processor to run Office faster.
Certainly running xyz.com's website and database are a different story (integer performance needed), but this by itself wouldn't prevent anyone from craving the itanium for personal use, any more that it would distract us from wanting a PS3.
I think this comes up not infrequently in polls. Leading up to the US election I saw two polls with seemingly contradictory results, stuff like
- 60% think the situation in Iraq has made terrorism worse,
- 58% think Bush is doing a good job on terrorism
This discussion is interesting in that we've got some actual knowledgeable people responding to what is essentially a marketing article disguised as a technical one.
Without this, I would have partially believed the article (though even I noted that they did not report the results for hotspot -server).
I've played with virtualPC, and it can get impressive speeds,
for example above 50%, on particular programs that are
dominated by a single small loop. Concluded this
by running a small C numeric benchmark on both
mac laptop and a linux box.
But in general, it feels more like 1/5 speed of the host processor.
I suspect that their 80% claim is (if true at all) a best case.