how many students can make a comprehensible engineering sketch without the aid of a computer or software?
You can easily spot which engineers were trained on paper and which were trained on CAD. If their handwriting is clear, legible, and precise, they learned on paper.
While I agree with you about C# being more open than Java...
Score: +5 wishful thinking. How can a single-platform platform be more open than Java? C#'s standardization is simply a marketing trick by Microsoft to lead people into.NET. It is really meaningless in the big picture, especailly compared to Sun's JCP, which has hundreds of members from many varied backgrounds (incl. Apache and JBoss).
They didn't start to sell Opterons just because they liked to, they did because they can't compete.
It's more complicated than that, IMO. AMD plays the Intel Marketing Game even better than Intel does. If you look at the Opteron architecture, it's actually very similar to that of the UltraSPARC IIIi (JBUS vs. HT) and light years ahead of the Xeon architecture. For an x86 architecture, the Opteron fits really well into Sun's overall product line and is good for customers who need x86 interoperability.
...I don't expect Niagara to magically show superior results on Java Appservers in general.
The jury will be out until Sun actually starts shipping systems. However, the general knowledge floating around is that Niagara will have multiple memory controllers to feed lots of bandwidth into its eight cores. The cores internally have rediculous bandwidth between them, so thread scheduling should go really well.
We'll just have to wait and see, but Sun is betting on their observations that typical workloads are only 25% efficient on today's CPUs. They had a presentation slide showing that moving from a ~1GHz Pentium to a ~2GHz pentium resulted in far less than twice the performance on a business-like benchmark but it also had far more than twice the power consumption. Not a good sign for modern single-threaded super-hot CPUs.
I wonder if furniture polish would work, too. I use Pledge-type polish on my eye glasses all the time to cover minor scratches. Next time get a scratched DVD, I'll need to give it a try.
When I was shopping for a SCSI CD-RW for one of my workstations, I notced a huge correlation between price and the published MTBF number (up to a point, of course). I ended up paying twice as much for three times the MTBF, IIRC.
I do understand that MTBF is a statistical quanity for large numbers of drives, but a high MTBF is also a vote of confidence on the part of the manufacturer regarding their expected average quality.
For Sun, going dual core was just limitation of damage.
Actually, Sun is less interested in the Intel marketing game and more interested in throughput. Just wait for their 32-way Niagara next year. Their USIV should be doubling speed this year, too (USIV+).
The other day I discovered that my version of IE doesn't support the full HTML character set (e.g., ). I could have had a really nice text-based left arrow, but, no, I guess that's too much to ask. A while back when I was toying with CSS (version 1, even), all my kludgy work-arounds were for IE. Why is it that a spin-off browser from a failed company maintained by a relatively small team of developers can do so much better than Microsoft?
If MS product fails, they'll point the finger at MS.
Sun, Novell, SuSE, Red Hat, and several others are more than happy to have fingers pointed at them in exchange for letting people buy their Linux desktops. Sun will even shoot the lawyers for you (indemnification). Okay, they won't really shoot the lawyers, but, still, the legal risks are low.
When BIG corporations decide to make Firefox specific technologies, we can finally say "Goodbye IE and Hello Firefox."
All the commercial Linux distributions and all the commercial UNIX distributions have been using Mozilla for years. Since when is today the beginning of BIG corpration adoption?
I think what you are looking for is when DELL and HP start shipping Firefox on all their Windows desktops. Microsoft would probably incinerate those companies before allowing that. Thus the rise of the GNOME/OO.org/Firefox desktop.
"Install this, upgrade this, enter validation key here, run ad-aware there, and all the gnarly little tasks that people don't do because they're so freaking boring and tedious that end up making a P4 crawl to a painful stop, making the befuddled l-user call ME on the weekend to "please help me fix my PC cuz it's soo sloww". And then, I have to spend my precious time (not that precious considering/. really) telling them nicely (they're a friend of my wife) that, hum, yes I'm a computer programmer, but that, hum, no, I can't help them because I'm so busy and without sounding like a complete insensitive jerk."
If you look at the capabilities of the Sun Grid along with SunRay, it is plausible that in the future people could order a managed desktop service (100% GNOME/Mozilla/OpenOffice.org/etc.) from their telephone or cable company just like ordering TV service or VoIP, now.
Many people already do this for e-mail (Yahoo! Mail) and search engines (Google), for example, so basic word processing and web browsing are not far-fetched extensions. It's just one of those things that someone's personal porn stash would be best kept on a home PC, but for tons of other things the privacy of a managed service is adequate.
What you are suggesting is that we go back back to 1970s IBM-style buttreaming.
I don't think this is the result, but what is happening is that software-only systems companies (Microsoft) are being undercut on their entire product lineup. That ain't good for business.
Look what Sun and IBM can do that Microsoft can't:
- give away the OS (OpenSolaris and Linux)
- give away the dev platform (Java & J2EE--rumors of open source JES from Sun, too)
- give away productivity apps (OpenOffice.org, GIMP, etc.)
What does that leave Microsoft with, the XBox? All the while, Sun and IBM are selling SPARC, POWER, and Opteron servers and selling support and services surrounding those servers.
IMO, in the long term, Microsoft will either have to be bought by a real systems company (HP? Dell?) and become a small figment of what they now are or inevitably become a teeny-tiny figment of what they now are.
No, that won't work. My model uses the original series isolinear chips, not the next generation ones, and I need even more Gigawatts to get them going.
Microsoft can't give away Windows for free, because thier billions in cash would start to evaporate. Well, given how frequrently they settle lawsuits lately, it's probably evaporating already.
Sun became the dominant UNIX vendor in part because they stuck to their guns.
The fact that they never became a Microsoft reseller puts them in a unique postion against Dell, for example, who will have a harder time visibly pushing Linux. But now that Linux is proven in many situations, Sun does sell Linux--both Red Hat and SuSE--on their Opteron servers, and they can do it without any fear of licensing penalties from Microsoft.
The tax system now is (mostly) fair. Everyone pays a % of their earnings.
A very high percentage of their earnings. People can have some control over sales tax (don't spend as much), but what do we do with the income tax (don't earn as much?)?
I've found for many items I can get them cheaper at the local small hardware store or at the local grocery store. There are some things that Wal-Mart just doesn't compete in (e.g., some heavy-duty cleaning supplies, beef, certain pet supplies).
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I agree about textbooks. Lots of my textbooks came with CDs or floppies in the back, and I don't think I ever used a single one.
Why do the publishers even bother?
how many students can make a comprehensible engineering sketch without the aid of a computer or software?
You can easily spot which engineers were trained on paper and which were trained on CAD. If their handwriting is clear, legible, and precise, they learned on paper.
While I agree with you about C# being more open than Java...
.NET. It is really meaningless in the big picture, especailly compared to Sun's JCP, which has hundreds of members from many varied backgrounds (incl. Apache and JBoss).
Score: +5 wishful thinking. How can a single-platform platform be more open than Java?
C#'s standardization is simply a marketing trick by Microsoft to lead people into
They didn't start to sell Opterons just because they liked to, they did because they can't compete.
...I don't expect Niagara to magically show superior results on Java Appservers in general.
It's more complicated than that, IMO. AMD plays the Intel Marketing Game even better than Intel does. If you look at the Opteron architecture, it's actually very similar to that of the UltraSPARC IIIi (JBUS vs. HT) and light years ahead of the Xeon architecture. For an x86 architecture, the Opteron fits really well into Sun's overall product line and is good for customers who need x86 interoperability.
The jury will be out until Sun actually starts shipping systems. However, the general knowledge floating around is that Niagara will have multiple memory controllers to feed lots of bandwidth into its eight cores. The cores internally have rediculous bandwidth between them, so thread scheduling should go really well.
We'll just have to wait and see, but Sun is betting on their observations that typical workloads are only 25% efficient on today's CPUs. They had a presentation slide showing that moving from a ~1GHz Pentium to a ~2GHz pentium resulted in far less than twice the performance on a business-like benchmark but it also had far more than twice the power consumption. Not a good sign for modern single-threaded super-hot CPUs.
If 20% of your production run dies within months of coming off the line, it costs you...
Not with the magic 90-day Warranty.
I wonder if furniture polish would work, too. I use Pledge-type polish on my eye glasses all the time to cover minor scratches. Next time get a scratched DVD, I'll need to give it a try.
When I was shopping for a SCSI CD-RW for one of my workstations, I notced a huge correlation between price and the published MTBF number (up to a point, of course). I ended up paying twice as much for three times the MTBF, IIRC.
I do understand that MTBF is a statistical quanity for large numbers of drives, but a high MTBF is also a vote of confidence on the part of the manufacturer regarding their expected average quality.
For Sun, going dual core was just limitation of damage.
Actually, Sun is less interested in the Intel marketing game and more interested in throughput. Just wait for their 32-way Niagara next year. Their USIV should be doubling speed this year, too (USIV+).
Actually, the new Canadian Enterprise will be rather low-budget...they're actually re-branding "Mutants of 2051 AD".
Odds are this game isn't going to be a huge revolution in technology or gaming principles or programming or graphics or anything.
No, but it could be utterly rediculous, which might make it worth buying.
I meant (e.g., larr).
The other day I discovered that my version of IE doesn't support the full HTML character set (e.g., ). I could have had a really nice text-based left arrow, but, no, I guess that's too much to ask. A while back when I was toying with CSS (version 1, even), all my kludgy work-arounds were for IE. Why is it that a spin-off browser from a failed company maintained by a relatively small team of developers can do so much better than Microsoft?
If MS product fails, they'll point the finger at MS.
Sun, Novell, SuSE, Red Hat, and several others are more than happy to have fingers pointed at them in exchange for letting people buy their Linux desktops. Sun will even shoot the lawyers for you (indemnification). Okay, they won't really shoot the lawyers, but, still, the legal risks are low.
When BIG corporations decide to make Firefox specific technologies, we can finally say "Goodbye IE and Hello Firefox."
All the commercial Linux distributions and all the commercial UNIX distributions have been using Mozilla for years. Since when is today the beginning of BIG corpration adoption?
I think what you are looking for is when DELL and HP start shipping Firefox on all their Windows desktops. Microsoft would probably incinerate those companies before allowing that. Thus the rise of the GNOME/OO.org/Firefox desktop.
"Install this, upgrade this, enter validation key here, run ad-aware there, and all the gnarly little tasks that people don't do because they're so freaking boring and tedious that end up making a P4 crawl to a painful stop, making the befuddled l-user call ME on the weekend to "please help me fix my PC cuz it's soo sloww". And then, I have to spend my precious time (not that precious considering /. really) telling them nicely (they're a friend of my wife) that, hum, yes I'm a computer programmer, but that, hum, no, I can't help them because I'm so busy and without sounding like a complete insensitive jerk."
If you look at the capabilities of the Sun Grid along with SunRay, it is plausible that in the future people could order a managed desktop service (100% GNOME/Mozilla/OpenOffice.org/etc.) from their telephone or cable company just like ordering TV service or VoIP, now.
Many people already do this for e-mail (Yahoo! Mail) and search engines (Google), for example, so basic word processing and web browsing are not far-fetched extensions. It's just one of those things that someone's personal porn stash would be best kept on a home PC, but for tons of other things the privacy of a managed service is adequate.
What you are suggesting is that we go back back to 1970s IBM-style buttreaming.
I don't think this is the result, but what is happening is that software-only systems companies (Microsoft) are being undercut on their entire product lineup. That ain't good for business.
Look what Sun and IBM can do that Microsoft can't:
- give away the OS (OpenSolaris and Linux)
- give away the dev platform (Java & J2EE--rumors of open source JES from Sun, too)
- give away productivity apps (OpenOffice.org, GIMP, etc.)
What does that leave Microsoft with, the XBox? All the while, Sun and IBM are selling SPARC, POWER, and Opteron servers and selling support and services surrounding those servers.
IMO, in the long term, Microsoft will either have to be bought by a real systems company (HP? Dell?) and become a small figment of what they now are or inevitably become a teeny-tiny figment of what they now are.
I'm sure someone will provide an analysis of the game comparing it's story to accepted historical theory. Blogging isn't just for geeks, you know.
No, that won't work. My model uses the original series isolinear chips, not the next generation ones, and I need even more Gigawatts to get them going.
Microsoft can't give away Windows for free, because thier billions in cash would start to evaporate. Well, given how frequrently they settle lawsuits lately, it's probably evaporating already.
Sun became the dominant UNIX vendor in part because they stuck to their guns.
The fact that they never became a Microsoft reseller puts them in a unique postion against Dell, for example, who will have a harder time visibly pushing Linux. But now that Linux is proven in many situations, Sun does sell Linux--both Red Hat and SuSE--on their Opteron servers, and they can do it without any fear of licensing penalties from Microsoft.
prompting Microsoft's Steve Balmer to offer a rebate of 90%.
Ah, the price of Windows XP is now down to $20? With Linux and Solaris free of charge, Microsoft still has some distance to go.
I can finally replace the broken isolinear chip in my time machine!
The tax system now is (mostly) fair. Everyone pays a % of their earnings.
A very high percentage of their earnings. People can have some control over sales tax (don't spend as much), but what do we do with the income tax (don't earn as much?)?
Many people say the same thing about WalMart.
I've found for many items I can get them cheaper at the local small hardware store or at the local grocery store. There are some things that Wal-Mart just doesn't compete in (e.g., some heavy-duty cleaning supplies, beef, certain pet supplies).
The Sun's come with Ultra320 SCSI, ECC RAM, redundant power supplies, lights-off management, etc. Those "cheapest Opteron" boxes don't.