Microsoft's agreements with OEMs (the agreements themselves were trade secrets, by the way) forbad creating multiple-boot machines.
That's not a gun. That's a mutual agreement between two consenting private parties. For example, there is nothing forcing OEM's to deal with Microsoft at all. They only do so because it's in their self-interest.
Let me get this straight. You think the world (and the average consumer) would be better off if there was only one browser, and you had to pay $40 for it?
You think the fact that Microsoft intensified the browser wars, thereby dramatically increasing the quality of the available browsers, and reducing the price from $40 to $0 is a bad thing?
The only people who aren't better off because of MS's entry into the browser market is Netscape. Boo-hoo for them.
You're missing the point. GNU/Linux is gaining desktop space also.
Yeah, but Linux is not Unix. Unix will never own the desktop. Whether Linux will own the mass-business/consumer desktop is up in air.
And a UNIX server is much more likely backend for GNU/Linux desktop than NT on the otherhand supports Windows desktops in more "native" way.
Probably _the_ killer app for Linux is Samba which is expressly for using Windows clients with Linux servers. Most Internet (web, e-mail) servers are some sort of Unix, and most clients are Windows. So Windows and Linux can definitely get along with each other...
IBM doesn't really care about it's desktop presence. It's been a money losing area for them for years and they have recently decided to stop manufacturing their own desktop computers.
Exactly. Microsoft owns the desktop, and IBM doesn't want it. So what exactly is this perceived conflict between Microsoft and IBM?
The tension between Sun and IBM is much greater since they are going after the same market. They're going after each other much more than they are going after Microsoft.
This isn't WalMart against Shell. It's WalMart against Your Local Mechanic. Sellingat or below cost isn't efficient, it's abusive.
That's for the consumers to decide. If consumers want to pay a premium to support a local business, they are free to. It is likely that most will simply go for the cheaper gas, and the less efficient supplier will go out of business.
What's the problem? Should decisions about who sells what to whom for how much be made by the consumers who are actually paying for the goods, or by some elites who have some random agenda?
Also, if desktops run UNIX-like systems (like GNU) it becomes much easier for a UNIX company like Sun to make products that work together with other products.
Desktop Unix is dead. Sun lost that battle ten years ago.
Only problem is that when FreeBSD (or GNU/Linux) starts to gain more space in serverspace, it might mean that Solaris sales drop and Sun will become weaker to help us.
But this is inevitable, right? Everybody is moving their servers to Linux, so where does that leave Sun with its expensive, proprietary products? I think the comparison to DEC is appropriate; DEC supported Unix when it exploded in the 80's, but only just. It really wanted to sell you VMS. Sun is supporting Linux, but really they want to sell you Solaris.
My theory about open source is that Linux in particular is being privately funded by IBM, Sun, AOL and other big companies with the sole intention of breaking up Microsoft.
Why would IBM have any interest whatsoever in breaking up Microsoft? IBM needs for there to be a strong desktop presence in order to drive its core business (enterprise servers), and Microsoft does that better than anybody. I don't think IBM is particularly interested in entering the mass-consumer/business desktop software market. IBM even ships Microsoft software on their low-end server and desktop products.
Sun is dead. They'll go the way of DEC by the end of the decade. They picked up on Linux way too late.
AOL is probably the most direct competitor of the three, though it is hard to imagine how embracing Linux would help them gain any sort of advantage in the ISP market. AOL already comes pre-installed on practically every computer anyways. Again, AOL greatly benefits from a mass-produced, easy-to-use desktop. Would AOL be around if Microsoft (and Intel) hadn't created the commoditized PC? It's hard to imagine how.
Sure I *love* spending the.91 a gallon I pay for premium fuel, all sparked by a Walmart gas war. They are selling at cost. They have been doing this for the past week. 2 mom and pop stations are now doing the same. I'm sure "the mart" can hang on much longer then mom and pop can.
THE HORROR! I'm sure all those mom and pops like Shell, ExxonMobil, and Chevron are shivering in their shoes. Maybe they'll actually be forced to come up with ways to be more efficient, so they can lower the cost, too, and reduce their own prices.
Speed. RDRAM looked fast because it was implemented with multiple banks. You can do the same thing with SDRAM, if you like. And that would give an apples to apples comparison.
The whole advantage of RDRAM is high bandwidth/pin, and the fastest RDRAM has more than double bandwith/pin than the fastest DDR. RDRAM is very cheap to make dual channel because it has fewer pins. It is very expensive to make a dual channel DDR system because it requires that many more signals. The only dual channel DDR system I know of is the upcoming Serverworks Grand Champion chipset for the P4 Xeon which is very high-end (and no doubt expensive).
I guess the Government-enforced copyright monopoly doesn't count?
The only monopoly granted to Microsoft by means of copyright law is the monopoly on Windows. It's not much different from the monpoly that the trademark office has granted to Kraft for Philadelphia Cream Cheese. But neither is a monopoly, because you can get other operating systems, or other cream cheeses.
Unlike the reviewer, we're all the way in Boston, so turnaround time is much higher -- sometimes more than a week round-trip. This means that unlike the 45 movies he mentions, we can only fit seven or eight in a month, and that only if we watch right when they come
Learn to pipeline to get around the high latency of US mail. I live in Texas and also have about a one week round-trip time. But, you have three rental slots so you can make three-stage pipeline. That way, if you time things right, you will get a movie every 2 days, which is 15 per month.
I have noticed that the service has gotten much slower since September/October (presumably because of the anthrax scares?), and hasn't really recovered. Since then, I've had a number of very long waits (2+ weeks) for movies to ship.
DRAM fails all the time. In fact, DRAM is almost certainly responsible for more data corruption than disks are. DRAM gets SBE's all the time, but while when disks fail, they tend to go completely down and don't return corrupt data (which is preferably, IMHO). Of course, DRAM with ECC is significantly more reliable (and also more expensive).
You have a gross misunderstanding of capitalism. In *real* capitalism, you would simply do without Encarta. Perhaps you would purchase a competing product that you found to have a more reasonable price, perhaps not. But *stealing* is certainly not a part of, nor is it justifiable by, capitalism.
That's not true at all. There are countless underground economies in the capitalist world: drugs, remarked cars, hot electronics, and many others. The legitimate players in the economy are always competing with the underground. Software is as good an example as any. Software makers are limited in their pricing ability by the prevalence of piracy. The more expensive and more popular a piece of software, the more people will want to pirate it.
Hmm, the people I've met from Phoenix are, shall we say, slow. BIOS writers do tend have a fairly good "big picture" view of the system, but nowhere near people involved in chipset or CPU design.
The real reason they won't release any kind of info (docs or the source to their drivers) is that their plan is to segment the market via driver tweaks.
It's very tempting to criticize AMD for their handling of speculative writes, but that handling is really irrelevant. It seems to me that the cache line's contents should not be marked dirtybefore the processor has actually written to it (which in this case it never does).
That's only half of the issue -- and certainly not illegal behavior. If the line first went into 'E' state, you would still have a coherency problem if you later did a write. Although, true, the issue only becomes visible if you go straight into 'M' state.
I think the real root of the problem is that they are doing speculative writes (obviously, they mean 'speculative reads-for-ownership' since speculative writes are highly illegal in IA32) into a page which the processor is not storing to.
If the OS knows that it is not going to do any loads or stores to a page, it should have the right to give the page any memory type it wants, and it shouldn't have to worry about coherency issues, because, as far as the software is concerned, the processor is not a participating agent on the bus.
IMHO, it's a processor bug, but obviously one that's very easy to workaround (make the memory UC, even though you're not using it).
If you were building a central database server, and one option delivered 5,000 transactions per day, at a cost of $1 each, and another delivered 500,000 transactions/day at the cost of $1000 each, and you had demand for 1,000,000 transactions a day @ $1,000,000 each in revenue, which server would you choose?
If you choose the one with better price/performance you will get fired in a heartbeat.
Get a clue: price/performance is a bogus benchmark because it assumes the cost of lower performance is $0. Period.
You'd think that if they wanted to show AMD up, they'd just clock them at > 2.5GHz now and keep going. I'm puzzled.
You're confusing sports with business. Intel's job is to make money, not to show up its competition. Don't assume that Intel's profits would be boosted by having the fastest part around. Indeed, in 2000, Intel made $10 billion in profit which is more than any other tech company has made -- before or since -- in a single year, but for at least half of the year, their fastest part was appreciably slower than AMD's (AMD, meanwhile, who is highly interested in showmanship, is losing money every quarter).
Have you been in a cave for the last two decades? In the days of the VAX, computers were marketed as systems. It made sense to benchmark a VAX 11/780 because it was a system, not a processor. You could take a benchmark and run it on any VAX 11/780 and you will get the same results. You had a DEC supplied compiler, a DEC supplied CPU, and a DEC supplied system.
But in the last 20 years, the market has competely horizontalized. Intel & AMD make the chips, the software is Microsoft or Linux, and the system is made by Compaq, Dell, HP, IBM, or Gateway.
So what sense does it make to supply a benchmark to market a single component in the system? AMD claims that their Athlon 2000+ is equivalent to a 2 GHz Pentium 4. What does this mean? Could I plug that Athlon into a motherboard with PC100 SDRAM, a crappy chipset, and an old compiler, and expect it to perform as well a 2 GHz Pentium 4 with dual-channel RDRAM, an expensive server chipset, and P4-optimized software? Of course not. AMD's processor benchmarks represent one _system_ configuration. They are meaningless (and misleading) across different systems.
Furthermore, how does AMD recalibrate when their 'standard' changes? On some apps, Northwood is more than 50% faster _per_clock_ than Willamette, so does that mean AMD has to change their rating system? They haven't.
Lastly, although it could conceivably be wise for AMD to use a peformance benchmark instead of clock frequency for marketing processors, it is clearly misleading for them to try to match those up to frequencies. If they were really noble, they'd come up with a completely different instead of trying to confuse customers.
AMD has posted a net loss every quarter since the introduction of the performance rating system, and plans to continue losing money for the next several quarters. I don't think that's a coincidence. It seems that consumers aren't willing to support companies who are trying to mislead them.
Um, don't you remember the Internet appliance which was a joint project between AOL, Gateway, and Transmeta? It was a complete and total flop.
Even if an 'Internet appliance' becomes a lucrative item (IMHO, it already missed the boat a year ot two ago), why would AOL be more effective than any other established hardware maker? They have no brand in the PC market, they have zero relationships with parts suppliers, and they have no experience at all in any hardware or manufacturing business.
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Microsoft's agreements with OEMs (the agreements themselves were trade secrets, by the way) forbad creating multiple-boot machines.
That's not a gun. That's a mutual agreement between two consenting private parties. For example, there is nothing forcing OEM's to deal with Microsoft at all. They only do so because it's in their self-interest.
Let me get this straight. You think the world (and the average consumer) would be better off if there was only one browser, and you had to pay $40 for it?
You think the fact that Microsoft intensified the browser wars, thereby dramatically increasing the quality of the available browsers, and reducing the price from $40 to $0 is a bad thing?
The only people who aren't better off because of MS's entry into the browser market is Netscape. Boo-hoo for them.
You're missing the point. GNU/Linux is gaining desktop space also.
...
Yeah, but Linux is not Unix. Unix will never own the desktop. Whether Linux will own the mass-business/consumer desktop is up in air.
And a UNIX server is much more likely backend for GNU/Linux desktop than NT on the otherhand supports Windows desktops in more "native" way.
Probably _the_ killer app for Linux is Samba which is expressly for using Windows clients with Linux servers. Most Internet (web, e-mail) servers are some sort of Unix, and most clients are Windows. So Windows and Linux can definitely get along with each other
IBM doesn't really care about it's desktop presence. It's been a money losing area for them for years and they have recently decided to stop manufacturing their own desktop computers.
Exactly. Microsoft owns the desktop, and IBM doesn't want it. So what exactly is this perceived conflict between Microsoft and IBM?
The tension between Sun and IBM is much greater since they are going after the same market. They're going after each other much more than they are going after Microsoft.
This isn't WalMart against Shell. It's WalMart against Your Local Mechanic. Sellingat or below cost isn't efficient, it's abusive.
That's for the consumers to decide. If consumers want to pay a premium to support a local business, they are free to. It is likely that most will simply go for the cheaper gas, and the less efficient supplier will go out of business.
What's the problem? Should decisions about who sells what to whom for how much be made by the consumers who are actually paying for the goods, or by some elites who have some random agenda?
Also, if desktops run UNIX-like systems (like GNU) it becomes much easier for a UNIX company like Sun to make products that work together with other products.
Desktop Unix is dead. Sun lost that battle ten years ago.
Only problem is that when FreeBSD (or GNU/Linux) starts to gain more space in serverspace, it might mean that Solaris sales drop and Sun will become weaker to help us.
But this is inevitable, right? Everybody is moving their servers to Linux, so where does that leave Sun with its expensive, proprietary products? I think the comparison to DEC is appropriate; DEC supported Unix when it exploded in the 80's, but only just. It really wanted to sell you VMS. Sun is supporting Linux, but really they want to sell you Solaris.
My theory about open source is that Linux in particular is being privately funded by IBM, Sun, AOL and other big companies with the sole intention of breaking up Microsoft.
Why would IBM have any interest whatsoever in breaking up Microsoft? IBM needs for there to be a strong desktop presence in order to drive its core business (enterprise servers), and Microsoft does that better than anybody. I don't think IBM is particularly interested in entering the mass-consumer/business desktop software market. IBM even ships Microsoft software on their low-end server and desktop products.
Sun is dead. They'll go the way of DEC by the end of the decade. They picked up on Linux way too late.
AOL is probably the most direct competitor of the three, though it is hard to imagine how embracing Linux would help them gain any sort of advantage in the ISP market. AOL already comes pre-installed on practically every computer anyways. Again, AOL greatly benefits from a mass-produced, easy-to-use desktop. Would AOL be around if Microsoft (and Intel) hadn't created the commoditized PC? It's hard to imagine how.
Sure I *love* spending the .91 a gallon I pay for premium fuel, all sparked by a Walmart gas war. They are selling at cost. They have been doing this for the past week. 2 mom and pop stations are now doing the same. I'm sure "the mart" can hang on much longer then mom and pop can.
THE HORROR! I'm sure all those mom and pops like Shell, ExxonMobil, and Chevron are shivering in their shoes. Maybe they'll actually be forced to come up with ways to be more efficient, so they can lower the cost, too, and reduce their own prices.
Speed. RDRAM looked fast because it was implemented with multiple banks. You can do the same thing with SDRAM, if you like. And that would give an apples to apples comparison.
The whole advantage of RDRAM is high bandwidth/pin, and the fastest RDRAM has more than double bandwith/pin than the fastest DDR. RDRAM is very cheap to make dual channel because it has fewer pins. It is very expensive to make a dual channel DDR system because it requires that many more signals. The only dual channel DDR system I know of is the upcoming Serverworks Grand Champion chipset for the P4 Xeon which is very high-end (and no doubt expensive).
I guess the Government-enforced copyright monopoly doesn't count?
The only monopoly granted to Microsoft by means of copyright law is the monopoly on Windows. It's not much different from the monpoly that the trademark office has granted to Kraft for Philadelphia Cream Cheese. But neither is a monopoly, because you can get other operating systems, or other cream cheeses.
Unlike the reviewer, we're all the way in Boston, so turnaround time is much higher -- sometimes more than a week round-trip. This means that unlike the 45 movies he mentions, we can only fit seven or eight in a month, and that only if we watch right when they come
Learn to pipeline to get around the high latency of US mail. I live in Texas and also have about a one week round-trip time. But, you have three rental slots so you can make three-stage pipeline. That way, if you time things right, you will get a movie every 2 days, which is 15 per month.
I have noticed that the service has gotten much slower since September/October (presumably because of the anthrax scares?), and hasn't really recovered. Since then, I've had a number of very long waits (2+ weeks) for movies to ship.
DRAM fails all the time. In fact, DRAM is almost certainly responsible for more data corruption than disks are. DRAM gets SBE's all the time, but while when disks fail, they tend to go completely down and don't return corrupt data (which is preferably, IMHO). Of course, DRAM with ECC is significantly more reliable (and also more expensive).
You have a gross misunderstanding of capitalism. In *real* capitalism, you would simply do without Encarta. Perhaps you would purchase a competing product that you found to have a more reasonable price, perhaps not. But *stealing* is certainly not a part of, nor is it justifiable by, capitalism.
That's not true at all. There are countless underground economies in the capitalist world: drugs, remarked cars, hot electronics, and many others. The legitimate players in the economy are always competing with the underground. Software is as good an example as any. Software makers are limited in their pricing ability by the prevalence of piracy. The more expensive and more popular a piece of software, the more people will want to pirate it.
Hmm, the people I've met from Phoenix are, shall we say, slow. BIOS writers do tend have a fairly good "big picture" view of the system, but nowhere near people involved in chipset or CPU design.
The real reason they won't release any kind of info (docs or the source to their drivers) is that their plan is to segment the market via driver tweaks.
... ?
And this is a problem for you because
If people weren't willing to pay $30 for the company's games, why would they pay $100 to help save the company?
It's very tempting to criticize AMD for their handling of speculative writes, but that handling is really irrelevant. It seems to me that the cache line's contents should not be marked dirtybefore the processor has actually written to it (which in this case it never does).
That's only half of the issue -- and certainly not illegal behavior. If the line first went into 'E' state, you would still have a coherency problem if you later did a write. Although, true, the issue only becomes visible if you go straight into 'M' state.
I think the real root of the problem is that they are doing speculative writes (obviously, they mean 'speculative reads-for-ownership' since speculative writes are highly illegal in IA32) into a page which the processor is not storing to.
If the OS knows that it is not going to do any loads or stores to a page, it should have the right to give the page any memory type it wants, and it shouldn't have to worry about coherency issues, because, as far as the software is concerned, the processor is not a participating agent on the bus.
IMHO, it's a processor bug, but obviously one that's very easy to workaround (make the memory UC, even though you're not using it).
If you were building a central database server, and one option delivered 5,000 transactions per day, at a cost of $1 each, and another delivered 500,000 transactions/day at the cost of $1000 each, and you had demand for 1,000,000 transactions a day @ $1,000,000 each in revenue, which server would you choose?
If you choose the one with better price/performance you will get fired in a heartbeat.
Get a clue: price/performance is a bogus benchmark because it assumes the cost of lower performance is $0. Period.
You'd think that if they wanted to show AMD up, they'd just clock them at > 2.5GHz now and keep going. I'm puzzled.
You're confusing sports with business. Intel's job is to make money, not to show up its competition. Don't assume that Intel's profits would be boosted by having the fastest part around. Indeed, in 2000, Intel made $10 billion in profit which is more than any other tech company has made -- before or since -- in a single year, but for at least half of the year, their fastest part was appreciably slower than AMD's (AMD, meanwhile, who is highly interested in showmanship, is losing money every quarter).
If the Power4 ran an instruction set which more than five people cared about, they would.
The target market clearly is PC enthusiasts, who, along with 95% of the world, only care about X86.
Have you been in a cave for the last two decades? In the days of the VAX, computers were marketed as systems. It made sense to benchmark a VAX 11/780 because it was a system, not a processor. You could take a benchmark and run it on any VAX 11/780 and you will get the same results. You had a DEC supplied compiler, a DEC supplied CPU, and a DEC supplied system.
But in the last 20 years, the market has competely horizontalized. Intel & AMD make the chips, the software is Microsoft or Linux, and the system is made by Compaq, Dell, HP, IBM, or Gateway.
So what sense does it make to supply a benchmark to market a single component in the system? AMD claims that their Athlon 2000+ is equivalent to a 2 GHz Pentium 4. What does this mean? Could I plug that Athlon into a motherboard with PC100 SDRAM, a crappy chipset, and an old compiler, and expect it to perform as well a 2 GHz Pentium 4 with dual-channel RDRAM, an expensive server chipset, and P4-optimized software? Of course not. AMD's processor benchmarks represent one _system_ configuration. They are meaningless (and misleading) across different systems.
Furthermore, how does AMD recalibrate when their 'standard' changes? On some apps, Northwood is more than 50% faster _per_clock_ than Willamette, so does that mean AMD has to change their rating system? They haven't.
Lastly, although it could conceivably be wise for AMD to use a peformance benchmark instead of clock frequency for marketing processors, it is clearly misleading for them to try to match those up to frequencies. If they were really noble, they'd come up with a completely different instead of trying to confuse customers.
AMD has posted a net loss every quarter since the introduction of the performance rating system, and plans to continue losing money for the next several quarters. I don't think that's a coincidence. It seems that consumers aren't willing to support companies who are trying to mislead them.
Since when did Red Hat have anything at all to do with enterprise computing?
Um, don't you remember the Internet appliance which was a joint project between AOL, Gateway, and Transmeta? It was a complete and total flop.
Even if an 'Internet appliance' becomes a lucrative item (IMHO, it already missed the boat a year ot two ago), why would AOL be more effective than any other established hardware maker? They have no brand in the PC market, they have zero relationships with parts suppliers, and they have no experience at all in any hardware or manufacturing business.
What would you lower the price to? What price-point would maximize profitability? What does the supply/demand curve for Photoshop look like?
Additionally, why are they using such slow memory? Why not PC2100, PC2400, or PC2700?