Outside of big releases with people dressed up like Jar Jar for the opening night and $1 family day at the movies, movie theatres are largely obselete. Last time we went to a movie, we ended up spending $25 for two people for, what, two hours? Amusement parks are cheaper per hour than that, and even they are way too expensive! ($50+/person/day to hug Mickey is just plain idiotic, IMO)
I remember using gnuplot to make great EPS (encapsulated PostScript) graphs for papers in college. I'm not sure of a better way to put nice charts into LaTeX documents. Even the developers of LaTeX modules for things like rotated charts with regular headers and footers deserve a share of credit.
I thought JDS is pretty slick. Also, it is the default UI design, now, for Solaris 10 on x86 and SPARC, replacing CDE. It certainly isn't going anywhere, now that Sun is commited to it in Solaris (they even kept pre-CDE OpenWindows up until Solaris 8, IIRC).
BTW, how can Sun borrow somthing that it owns (StarOffice) or is on the foundation for (GNOME)?
If the BIOS on these machines support network booting, they could even all be set up diskless. With 100Mb/s Ethernet, the speed difference between the local disk and the network isn't so great that the management savings can be worth it. If they can get their hands on a good server, the PIII systems could even just be X-terminals into the server--giving just one point of management.
I disagree. First, these are PIII computers--they won't be expecting the latest and greatest performance anyway. It would be better to put a real well-integrated user-oriented distro like JDS on them, than put together a hacked up custom job. The people reviewing these systems don't care about how nifty Emacs is--they will want to see OpenOffice.org, Firefox, and how pretty GNOME can be.
Even though my current computer has 512MB of RAM, it is about the speed of a 400MHz PIII, and OpenOffice and Firefox generally do just fine, in the sense that my patience isn't tried very much. Really, the only thing that I could use a faster computer for is Ogg Vorbis encoding and compressing very large files--something that has nothing to do with whether I run GNOME at all (given sufficient swap to hold GNOME in the meantime).
Combine that with McNealy gloating about having the only legal version of linux right after the "driver deal" and there's a lot more here than a conspiracy theory.
Sun does provide a level of indemnification that no other business can. This is a strategic advantage, so, at worst, Sun is not against Linux but enjoyed jabbing IBM in the ribs a few times. I can see that (keep Linux around for everyone, just make IBM uncomfortable for a while). That would be business as usual in the computer world.
You make several good points, but I don't think Opteron is a bad thing for Sun. For once in history, there's a decent x86 chip out there, which Sun can offer to its low-end customers.
Also, Solaris x86 and Solaris SPARC are source-compatible with eachother. Applications should need only a recompile between systems--much easier than moving between Linux/x86 and Solaris/SPARC.
For customers who really like UNIX, Sun has set themselves up pretty good, IMO.
The GP rebuttal still stands: The Appro system has no redundant power supplies or lights-out management capabilities. Can they put four of the fastest Opterons in 1U and still cool them reliably? Also, the 600GB in disks is with IDE not SCSI.
These systems are just for entirely different purposes: one is a compute cluster node, the other is suitable for running a business.
I love it (and hate it) when comments like the parent, here, get modded insightful. The SPARCstation 20 maxes out at four 200MHz Ross CPUs. It might be as fast, in aggregate, as a ~1GHz Pentium III. The SBus (like PCI) and probably the RAM in the SS20 are also comparable to a motherboard for the Pentium III. This was all very impressive for the mid-to-late 1990s, when the SS20 was hot stuff.
You do not have a God-given right to free content provided at the expense of the work of others.
One thing I find interesting about registration-only news sites, is that they somehow feel their news is more worthy than all the hundreds of other news sites. They really think I should take time to register on a site I probably won't visit again for a long time. So, instead of me reading one story and seeing some of their advertising space, I just close that broswer tab. No story for me (it isn't a big deal, really), and no advertising for them.
There are so many news sources, that my daily intake of news certainly doesn't suffer for it.
Look at Alpha - fastest platform in its day but it had the stink of death even though a well-heeled company (more than one through acquisitions) was being it.
Even thought the quality of Sun's marketing dept. is certainly open for debate, it is clearly better than DEC's was.
What is a "high end" chip anyway?
One thing that differentiates UltraSPARC from Opteron is that UltraSPARC is designed to scale to over 1000 CPUs in a system. Opteron's sweet-spot is up to 8 CPUs. Otherwise, both CPUs have similar characteristics, such as ECC support, etc.
A lot of work can get done with 8 CPUs, but for everything else, there's UltraSPARC, POWER, and Itanium.
If that's the case, I really hope they ruggedize them. Throwing a hard drive into a back pack, followed by throwing it onto the floor of the school bus or onto the floor of a friend's house gives me a chill.
I thought the whole point to consoles was to sell a unified hardware platform. Making a hard drive an option seems like a headache for game developers. It would essentially make unit w/ harddrive a different platform to test with than unit w/o hard drive on top of the other platforms, such as Windows 98/2000/XP, next-gen GameCube, and PS3.
For the price of one airline ticket to Korea, you can have your broadband in the USA for at least a year. Add in the costs of moving your furniture overseas and the costs of living in an urban area, you're set for broadband for a lifetime, probably.
Now that I think of it, this sounds a lot like airline ticket pricing. Cheaper three weeks out, getting more expensive up to the day of the flight, but getting really really cheap just before takeoff (e.g., Priceline.com). The difference is that CPUs don't take off, so the price dip at the end wouldn't happen (Sun could just turn off the servers if they really want to).
Sun has been experimenting with EBay for quite a while now. It would be pretty neat if they could figure out a way to auction off chunks of their grid on some sort of how-much-and-how-soon basis, like you say. If a movie company or fluids dynamics contractor needs the whole thing yesterday, they would be willing to pay a premium for not having to make a grid of their own and get a few thousand CPUs _right_now_.
Actually, Java would be perfect for managing a grid. If you have a network of Linux, Windows, Solaris, AIX, HPUX, etc. computers, you can use the same Java management application on all of them, with only extra code for nuances of issuing jobs, etc., on each platform. Networking in Java is really easy, too.
The advantages of IBM and Sun are that they can just pull racks of servers out of their factories at cost and pay their own people to set them up. This will always give them a price advantage over the platform-agnostic competition who would be using the same Opteron, Xeon, SPARC, or POWER CPUs, anyway.
I thought technically abled people still used tar and bzip2? Putting the compression separate from the archiving makes sense--it still works great in piped UNIX commands and bzip2 is more aggressive than Zip is.
Why not just put (insert hyped up character) on an empty game box with just a fan club postcard inside and charge $40? The guilt on money lost would be the same.
Tomb Raider was actually an entertaining movie. Like the X-Men movie, which was also pretty good, if the game/comic spin-off movie is done well, it is worth it. The movies can give a two-hour digest of what the game/comic is about, which is great for people not into spending time on comics or gaming.
Perhaps, the time investment is the main thing. Games often require 30 to 100+ hours to complete, which is really time available only to teenagers or adults with nothing better to do. Anyone can watch a movie, though, in time winding down from work or during weekends.
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Outside of big releases with people dressed up like Jar Jar for the opening night and $1 family day at the movies, movie theatres are largely obselete. Last time we went to a movie, we ended up spending $25 for two people for, what, two hours? Amusement parks are cheaper per hour than that, and even they are way too expensive! ($50+/person/day to hug Mickey is just plain idiotic, IMO)
I remember using gnuplot to make great EPS (encapsulated PostScript) graphs for papers in college. I'm not sure of a better way to put nice charts into LaTeX documents. Even the developers of LaTeX modules for things like rotated charts with regular headers and footers deserve a share of credit.
I live in Atlanta (their corp offices are here)...
That skyscraper in downtown Charlotte, NC, would disagree, IMO.
I thought JDS is pretty slick. Also, it is the default UI design, now, for Solaris 10 on x86 and SPARC, replacing CDE. It certainly isn't going anywhere, now that Sun is commited to it in Solaris (they even kept pre-CDE OpenWindows up until Solaris 8, IIRC).
BTW, how can Sun borrow somthing that it owns (StarOffice) or is on the foundation for (GNOME)?
If the BIOS on these machines support network booting, they could even all be set up diskless. With 100Mb/s Ethernet, the speed difference between the local disk and the network isn't so great that the management savings can be worth it. If they can get their hands on a good server, the PIII systems could even just be X-terminals into the server--giving just one point of management.
I disagree. First, these are PIII computers--they won't be expecting the latest and greatest performance anyway. It would be better to put a real well-integrated user-oriented distro like JDS on them, than put together a hacked up custom job. The people reviewing these systems don't care about how nifty Emacs is--they will want to see OpenOffice.org, Firefox, and how pretty GNOME can be.
Even though my current computer has 512MB of RAM, it is about the speed of a 400MHz PIII, and OpenOffice and Firefox generally do just fine, in the sense that my patience isn't tried very much. Really, the only thing that I could use a faster computer for is Ogg Vorbis encoding and compressing very large files--something that has nothing to do with whether I run GNOME at all (given sufficient swap to hold GNOME in the meantime).
Combine that with McNealy gloating about having the only legal version of linux right after the "driver deal" and there's a lot more here than a conspiracy theory.
Sun does provide a level of indemnification that no other business can. This is a strategic advantage, so, at worst, Sun is not against Linux but enjoyed jabbing IBM in the ribs a few times.
I can see that (keep Linux around for everyone, just make IBM uncomfortable for a while). That would be business as usual in the computer world.
You make several good points, but I don't think Opteron is a bad thing for Sun. For once in history, there's a decent x86 chip out there, which Sun can offer to its low-end customers.
Also, Solaris x86 and Solaris SPARC are source-compatible with eachother. Applications should need only a recompile between systems--much easier than moving between Linux/x86 and Solaris/SPARC.
For customers who really like UNIX, Sun has set themselves up pretty good, IMO.
The GP rebuttal still stands: The Appro system has no redundant power supplies or lights-out management capabilities. Can they put four of the fastest Opterons in 1U and still cool them reliably? Also, the 600GB in disks is with IDE not SCSI.
These systems are just for entirely different purposes: one is a compute cluster node, the other is suitable for running a business.
I love it (and hate it) when comments like the parent, here, get modded insightful. The SPARCstation 20 maxes out at four 200MHz Ross CPUs. It might be as fast, in aggregate, as a ~1GHz Pentium III. The SBus (like PCI) and probably the RAM in the SS20 are also comparable to a motherboard for the Pentium III. This was all very impressive for the mid-to-late 1990s, when the SS20 was hot stuff.
You do not have a God-given right to free content provided at the expense of the work of others.
One thing I find interesting about registration-only news sites, is that they somehow feel their news is more worthy than all the hundreds of other news sites. They really think I should take time to register on a site I probably won't visit again for a long time. So, instead of me reading one story and seeing some of their advertising space, I just close that broswer tab. No story for me (it isn't a big deal, really), and no advertising for them.
There are so many news sources, that my daily intake of news certainly doesn't suffer for it.
Look at Alpha - fastest platform in its day but it had the stink of death even though a well-heeled company (more than one through acquisitions) was being it.
Even thought the quality of Sun's marketing dept. is certainly open for debate, it is clearly better than DEC's was.
What is a "high end" chip anyway?
One thing that differentiates UltraSPARC from Opteron is that UltraSPARC is designed to scale to over 1000 CPUs in a system. Opteron's sweet-spot is up to 8 CPUs. Otherwise, both CPUs have similar characteristics, such as ECC support, etc.
A lot of work can get done with 8 CPUs, but for everything else, there's UltraSPARC, POWER, and Itanium.
Sun won't sell you Windows, but these servers are "Windows Certified". This is just fine if your company happens to have a site license.
I knew that the ultraSPARC was dead a few years ago.
The next-generation Niagara and Rock CPUs will be SPARC. Not quite dead...
If that's the case, I really hope they ruggedize them. Throwing a hard drive into a back pack, followed by throwing it onto the floor of the school bus or onto the floor of a friend's house gives me a chill.
I thought the whole point to consoles was to sell a unified hardware platform. Making a hard drive an option seems like a headache for game developers. It would essentially make unit w/ harddrive a different platform to test with than unit w/o hard drive on top of the other platforms, such as Windows 98/2000/XP, next-gen GameCube, and PS3.
For the price of one airline ticket to Korea, you can have your broadband in the USA for at least a year. Add in the costs of moving your furniture overseas and the costs of living in an urban area, you're set for broadband for a lifetime, probably.
Now that I think of it, this sounds a lot like airline ticket pricing. Cheaper three weeks out, getting more expensive up to the day of the flight, but getting really really cheap just before takeoff (e.g., Priceline.com). The difference is that CPUs don't take off, so the price dip at the end wouldn't happen (Sun could just turn off the servers if they really want to).
Sun has been experimenting with EBay for quite a while now. It would be pretty neat if they could figure out a way to auction off chunks of their grid on some sort of how-much-and-how-soon basis, like you say. If a movie company or fluids dynamics contractor needs the whole thing yesterday, they would be willing to pay a premium for not having to make a grid of their own and get a few thousand CPUs _right_now_.
Actually, Java would be perfect for managing a grid. If you have a network of Linux, Windows, Solaris, AIX, HPUX, etc. computers, you can use the same Java management application on all of them, with only extra code for nuances of issuing jobs, etc., on each platform. Networking in Java is really easy, too.
The advantages of IBM and Sun are that they can just pull racks of servers out of their factories at cost and pay their own people to set them up. This will always give them a price advantage over the platform-agnostic competition who would be using the same Opteron, Xeon, SPARC, or POWER CPUs, anyway.
Better than all of the above, except the badgers, if you are into that kind of thing.
I thought technically abled people still used tar and bzip2? Putting the compression separate from the archiving makes sense--it still works great in piped UNIX commands and bzip2 is more aggressive than Zip is.
Why not just put (insert hyped up character) on an empty game box with just a fan club postcard inside and charge $40? The guilt on money lost would be the same.
Tomb Raider was actually an entertaining movie. Like the X-Men movie, which was also pretty good, if the game/comic spin-off movie is done well, it is worth it. The movies can give a two-hour digest of what the game/comic is about, which is great for people not into spending time on comics or gaming.
Perhaps, the time investment is the main thing. Games often require 30 to 100+ hours to complete, which is really time available only to teenagers or adults with nothing better to do. Anyone can watch a movie, though, in time winding down from work or during weekends.