OT: OS bloat, CPU's, etc. (was Re: Record locking)

[Bill Vermillion]

On Thu, Apr 01, 2004 at 04:43:21AM -0500, Fairlight thus spoke:
> On Wed, Mar 31, 2004 at 11:32:14PM -0800, after drawing runes in goat's blood,
> Bill Campbell cast forth these immortal, mystical words:

> > You had to do some serious trimming to get SuSE 9.0
> > Professional crammed into a 2.1GB hard drive. When we were
> > runnin Caldera OpenLinux 1.3 with the 2.0.36 kernels,
> > everything fit nicely in a 1GB partition leaving room for
> > applictions. Now we're doing 5.0GB for the OS, and it will
> > probably get larger (I don't spend a lot of time trying to
> > trim things, preferring to have everything I normally use
> > available).

> I did indeed trim. :) A lot of cruft in there that I just don't
> use though. I'm not going to be doing DVD, video processing,
> office work, or half a million other things that they include
> software for. I'm thinking of eating about 260MB of my
> remaining 480MB just to try OpenOffice and see if it's any
> good. There was a dependancy issue, but I grabbed the JRE from
> 8.0 and installed that manually, so libjawt.so is taken care
> of. I'm free to do it, I just haven't yet. I can always take it
> back out again. :)

The last time I had MS office was when it was on a machine provided
to me by a company I was doing work for.

About 3 months ago I paid $79 for StarOffice 7, the commercial
version of OpenOffice.  For that price I got manuals, CD, binaries
for MS Windows {I'm running it on XP}, Solaris Sparc, and Linux.
And the shrinkwrap license that comes with it - no registration
required - say I can run it on up to 5 machines.  So you can put it
on your LInuxen and Win machines if you choose.

I'm only a light office type user and for the first time I can read
the powerpoint things that are sent to me.  So much SW seems to be
overpriced but I think StarOffice is a bargain.

And as to other things from Sun - rememeber in the past year when
others on this list mentioned the OS-less PCs and the Lindows
PCs from Wal-Mart.  Later they added Lycoris.

Newest addition - and price without montior - s $698 for a 3GHz
P4 with HTT, 256MB DDR RAM and an 800Mhz FSB [and that type of RAM
can be accessed in parallel so 2 sticks give an 8GB/sec tranfer
from memroy], 80 GH 100AHA 7200 RPM drive, CD-RW/DVD drive,
and includes the Java Desktop from Sun.  A feature now is
that there is a direct export to MacroMedia Flash.

I've been using the export to native PDF from SO quite effectively.

'tis an interesting world.

And yesterday Gates was speaking to a group of hardware
manufacturers and he said "free software can do some good stuff,
but not the really good stuff".  Hm.  He seems to forget that the
most popular web server is still Apache, and more mail is
transported by Sendmail than anything else.   Those two support a
lot of the 'net as we know it, so I wonder what he thinks the
"really good stuff" is.

Ah - and the really telling part is that he said the open source
communicty would have to deal with compatibility problems once it
gets an installed base.  His main point - talking to the HW
manufactures - and something they probably don't want to hear - is
that  hardware could be almost free in the next 10 years but free
(opens sourced) software won't be good for the best kind of
applications during that timeframe.

He almost sound the like the provebial 'boy whistling in the dark'
to keep away evil spirits.

> But yeah, I left a lot off. But then, I always do. I've -never-
> just left a default install go, on linux -or- 'doze. I always
> customise everything I install, right down to when I install
> Winamp or whatever.

The customized installs in RH [I've not looked at that in SuSE] are
not the type that make an average user want to do try it, and
therefor they take the approach of install it all.

> > I do find it interesting that Apple's OS X has been getting
> > faster with each new release while adding new features such
> > as expose. Panther is considerably faster than the first
> > version of OS X I used about two years ago on the same
> > machine, a 450MhZ G4.

> You wouldn't expect that. NeXTStep wasn't known for being
> particularly light on its feet, for instance, and a lot of
> the front end for Apple's current offerings springs from that
> lineage.

I didn't notice any real performance hit's on NeXTStep - but then
again I was running the 3.x series on a Pentium.  The video
requirments were strict - with only about 5 high end video card
supported and no color unless you had a minimum of 16MB RAM.  But
since the screen was Display Postscript it did require horsepower.

What many found to their advantage was the NeXSTep was an Object
Oriented operating system - the only one out there - and
applications could be developed with just the tools in the
operating system that could give finished product in about 1/4 the
time.  Chrysler financial used it build their apps in 6 months, as
opposed to 2 years estimated elsewhere.  I diddle with it a bit and
one of the demos to build was a 4 function graphical calculator.
All you did was grab objects, link them togther, and assign
functions.  Under 1/2 hour.  And that was in 1990.  But the current
OS/X is traditional in approach not an object oreinted OS.  The
look is reminscent of NeXTStep and OpenStep and that's about it as
I see it.

> Then again, the BSD underpinnings are probably nice and light.
> (Which BSD was it based off of again? I want to say just BSD
> 4.2 with Mach underneath, but people keep referencing FreeBSD,
> and I've heard NetBSD at least once.

It was FreeBSD 4.2 and now it's using much of the FreeBSD 5.x
underneath.  And it is FreeBSD - Apple hired Jordan K. Hubbard
from the FreeBSD/WalnutCreek to come to work for Apple.  Jordan was
the driving force behind FreeBSD after it sat stagnant.

William Jolitz was working on the '386 BSD after the Lite was
released from Berekely and the CSRG, but the suit against BSDI
[founded by former CSRG members] caused Jolitz to stop.  When the
suit was settled Jolitz never restarted, and it was Jordan who got
the ball rolling again - so FreeBSD just stalled for about 2 years.

Jolitz was writing a series of books on the lite BSD that would
have been similar to the Lyon's commentary on Unix.  He got one
volume finished.  I see that my copy of Lyons - which Doug Michaels
of SCO helped get published - is long out of print - and is going
for $100 to $150.  So few things I acquire get worth more as they
age.

> Hmmm...G4. I was looking at specs on that, and it appears
> that's a Motorola chip, which doesn't surprise me, as Apple has
> traditionally used Motorola.

The PowerPC is an IBM chip - the Motos Apple used were part of the
68K line.

> However, I -thought- that the PowerPC was a joint venture...and
> I've seen references that point to one 485MHz derivative of
> the PowerPC, which I can say is -really- powerful. Thing is,
> the whitepaper PDF on that derivative has IBM stamped all over
> it. Is the PowerPC processor a co-venture, or am I confusing
> things?

IBM product.  And the 485Mhz PowerPC is about as outdated
as a 500MHz PIII.    One of the clients I do DNS for is still
waiting for his new G5 Xrack server - they started shipping the
single CPU versions of the rack device last week, but the dual CPU
still isn't shippling.  It used two 2GHz PowerPCs.

And too many equate clock speed like the old cubic-inch wars of the
Detroit muscle car ear when horsepower really is what counts [ and
as much torgue as you can glom onto].

>From what I've read a PowerPC at an equal clock speed of a P4 will
outperform the P4 - almost up to a factor of two.

What is interesting in the G5 series is the bus the chips live on -
the FSB - Front Side Bus - runs at 1GHz as opposed to 800MHz on the
top end Intel boards.

Running with DDR ram - that can be accessed in parallel means that
the P5 series can transfer data to and from memory at 10GB/second
while the P4's can do this only a 8GB/second.

If you look at the Apple proaganda on their page on the G5 in
applications where the G5s excel, media streaming, it shows that
a dual 2GHz G5 can run 7 data streams as opposed to dual HP Xeon
a 2.8Ghz.  The G5 is 19% faster at a slower clock.

> If it -is- a PowerPC, even at that speed rating, that can be
> blazingly powerful. And I see they've much faster ones as well,
> not to mention the G5.

The slowest G4 is 1.25 GHz now.  Many still think the Apple line is
still 100% proprietary but the high end video cards in the current
lines are Nvidia and ATI AGP 8X.   PCI is really HW independant
though many think of it as Intel only.

Bill

-- 
Bill Vermillion - bv @ wjv . com