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

[Jay R. Ashworth]

On Thu, Apr 01, 2004 at 11:32:43AM -0500, Bill Vermillion wrote:
> 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.

The really good stuff... is all that stuff that OpenOffice.org *is
doing*.  I just installed 1.1.0 for a client as an upgraed.  It took
care of all the problems they had with 1.0.1, and they're happy (so far
as I know) as clams.

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

Close of business 2005.  :-)

> > 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  And the 485Mhz PowerPC is about as outdated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.

The PowerPC chip series was in fact a joint venture, originally, taking
advantage of IBM's POWER3 (and now 4, and 5) architecture from the 390
mainframe series, and Motorola's chip building prowess.  AIUI, IBM
bought Moto out a few years back.  And so, therefore, IBM builds the
chip that's at the heart of Apple's Mac.  Delightful, ain't it?

> > 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.

And Apple solved the "how do I boot it" problem very cleverly, joint
venturing, IIRC, with Sun on OpenFirmware -- the BIOS boot code is
written in *Forth*, with the dictionary standardized and the
interpreter in the BIOS on the mobo.  Since well compiled Forth is
*more efficient* than assembler, this is quite tasty indeed...

Cheers,
-- jra
-- 
Jay R. Ashworth                                                jra at baylink.com
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        "They had engineers in my day, too."  -- Perry Vance Nelson