RE: Status of 6.0 for production systems
-Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of Freminlins Sent: Tuesday, November 22, 2005 1:37 AM To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Status of 6.0 for production systems Ted, Why don't you do us all a favour and shut up. Probably because it's more fun upsetting self righeous turkey gobblers like yourself? I hope I'm not wasting too much of your Over 2667.576162 megabytes (and counting) of free storage on your gmail.com account. That would be a pity. Ted ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
RE: Status of 6.0 for production systems
-Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of Chad Leigh -- Shire.Net LLC Sent: Saturday, November 19, 2005 6:45 AM To: Ted Mittelstaedt Cc: Free BSD Questions list Subject: Re: Status of 6.0 for production systems On Nov 19, 2005, at 5:10 AM, Ted Mittelstaedt wrote: Although, come to think of it, it also illustrates one other point - that Apple isn't simply taking the Intel CPU and using it in their own superior hardware design. Instead they are just copying the existing Wintel motherboard designs and porting to that. We don't know that and that is a subject of much speculation. Will they be adopting Wintel motherboard designs or coming out with something different? (ie, BIOS versus that new Intel thing no one uses, etc) We will see when the NetBSD people start porting to the new Macs. We'll see if that is what they do. The internal guts may be the same Wintel motherboard designs or may be different. However, with PPC they never really controlled the HW either as they were dependent on IBM and Motorola. As one of the largest customers of PPC I think that they had a lot more control over it than you are claiming, but that is a point. It is, in fact, a good question - since Apple thinks of itself as a HW company, why don't they make the CPU themselves? Sun does. That is what IBM said and also did. IBM did not come through and had nothing they were working on. Get your facts straight Ted. The low-power Power 970FX cpu which is currently available from IBM uses 16 watts at 1.6Ghz. The speed and power of that chip at 1.6Ghz is far faster than a Pentium running at 1.6Ghz, as has been proven by benchmarking. See the following article titled No More Apple Mysteries, Part Two here: http://www.anandtech.com/mac/showdoc.aspx?i=2520 After some research, the author found serious problems in how MacOSX is optimized for the PPC. Perhaps if Apples programmers had done the work, they could have used the existing G5 chips in laptops that would be just as powerful as anything that is shipping on the Wintel platform. Whatever you say Ted. Confronted with some facts to the contrary, you have nothing to say I see. I love this arguement - people are buying lots and lots of currently shipping PPC gear so they must be wanting Intel-based gear. You ought to be a politician. people's PPC purchases are a show of faith that the Intel platform will be a success. you REALLY REALLY ought to be a politician! Yes, that is not in dispute. What is in dispute is that you claim that Apple want's people to transition so they can drive a spike in revenue. I claim it is because the long term health of their market demands it -- ie, in order to continuing competing their existing platform was not going to cut it. If that was true the new wintel Macs would use completely different architecture that wasn't hobbled by all the archaic PCisms left over from the IBM PC Jr. We will see if that happens. Right now what it looks like is a quick port of MacOS X to some wintel motherboards that have a security chip in them that MacOS X requires in order to boot (to prevent people from buying cheap PC clones and running MacOS X on them) and a big marketing campaign with a lot of song and dance about poor Apple how we have to move to the x86. I have always understood it Ted. Understanding it and agreeing with it are two different things. You claims are utter BS Ted. History does not support it (based on previous transitions). Nor does logic. Nor any other set of facts. That about sums up your argument - you don't agree with something, so you claim what you don't agree with is BS. or they made a business decision to switch because the PPC was no longer a long term viable architecture for their needs (Chad). Btw, your theories don't pass Occam's Razor either. You add complexity to Apple's decision when the simplest is Apple's stated public reason. Most successful ways of making money don't pass Occam's Razor. If they did, then making lots of money would be so simple and obvious that everyone would be doing it. It was just an interesting observation. And I think a valid observation since people who ascribe all sorts of complexity to actions that can be described in much simpler terms are usually wrong. If it was a valid observation you wouldn't be here, you would be lying on your yacht somewhere trying to figure out what to do with your billions. And, the theory of we move to wintel to make a big pile of money sounds pretty simple to me anyway. Ted ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
RE: Status of 6.0 for production systems
-Original Message- From: Chad Leigh -- Shire.Net LLC [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Saturday, November 19, 2005 6:08 AM To: Ted Mittelstaedt Cc: David Kelly; FreeBSD-Questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Status of 6.0 for production systems You keep talking like the laptop market is paramount - but who says it is? Laptops are always more expensive, and much more fragile. Do you honestly think that laptops make up the bulk of Apple's sales today? Yes, Ted, laptops are fragile, but they are also a very important part of ANY computer manufacturer's lineup and a growing part of their mix. Go read the sales stats Ted. For any PC manufacturer the laptop is growing greater than the desktop. That is because there's very few clone laptops. The PC market overall is growing. Assuming that growth is evenly distributed among clone (white box) makers like the corner computer stores and the national makers like Dell, and evenly distributed between laptops and desktops - the lack of laptops from the corner computer stores is going to mean ALL computer manufacturers will see a high growth in sales of laptops compared to desktops. This doesen't mean a higher percentage of the market is switching to laptops. It means that the national makers like Dell are losing a lot of desktop sales to cloners. Also keep in mind that sales growth is a figure like accelleration Suppose you and I get on the drag track, your in a 1000 cc Kawasaki motorcycle and I'm in a top fuel dragster. We both start at the same time. For the first 200 feet, your accelleration, or growth in the sales parlance, will be greater than mine. But at the end of the race your going to be going at 100Mph and I'll be over 200Mph. Laptop growth right now is higher than desktop growth but unless it stays that way for another decade, the percentage of laptops in service compared to desktops will still be smaller. Laptops are important for Apple right now because they allow Apple to offer a full service product line - in short, there's places where you need a laptop and if your a Mac user you will need an Apple laptop. But I don't think Apple is expecting that it's going to see it's desktop sales volume drop below it's laptop sales volume in the future. Unless of course Apples laptop sales growth stays higher than it's desktop sales growth for as long as it takes to change the volume ratio (probably 20 years) If Apple really only cared about pushing more kit (instead of creating and nurturing a growing market over the long haul) don't you think they would have come out with a G5 laptop if it were possible? Your presuming that they have the technical know how to do so. I always posted the info on the low-power 16 watt design, and you ignored that because it didn't fit your world view of Apple. If Apple uses wintel designs in it's future laptops, that pretty much proves that they are as far as they can go in personal computer design. Compaq went through this 20 years ago, early in the DOS 2.0 days the DOS for Compaq machines was different than the DOS for IBM machines - because Compaq had a complete set of architecture designers and their Compaq XT computers at the time were really different than the IBM ones. Eventually Compaq found they couldn't keep up with the changes that all the cloners were making and gave it up, and then their designs reverted to the same thing everyone else was doing - basically just copies of each other. Apple may be in that boat now, we won't know until people start taking apart the new x86 Macs. In fact it may be that we are both completely wrong about this and the real reason Apple went to the Intel chip is because they just can't keep up anymore with the motherboard companies who are doing wintel motherboards, and all the future Macs will be wintel with a few additions (like the security chip) Ted ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Status of 6.0 for production systems
Ted, On 11/22/05, Ted Mittelstaedt [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: [snipped a massive load of nonsense] Why don't you do us all a favour and shut up. Your posts are off-topic and a waste of storage bytes. AFAIK this mailing list is not your personal soap box. Frem. ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Status of 6.0 for production systems
On Tue, 22 Nov 2005 10:37:04 +0100 Freminlins [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Ted, On 11/22/05, Ted Mittelstaedt [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: [snipped a massive load of nonsense] Why don't you do us all a favour and shut up. Your posts are off-topic and a waste of storage bytes. AFAIK this mailing list is not your personal soap box. Frem. Ooooh! I bet that one hurt him. ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
RE: Status of 6.0 for production systems
-Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of Dinesh Nair Sent: Saturday, November 19, 2005 3:16 AM To: Ted Mittelstaedt Cc: Michael Vince; Peter Clutton; freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Status of 6.0 for production systems On 11/19/05 17:28 Ted Mittelstaedt said the following: Absolute total rubbish. Let's take one of these developing countries - China PRC - shall we? right, pick a country which has seen billions in investment flowing in over the last 5 years and use that as an example. shall we consider other countries such as those in africa and the greater part of Asia now ? Touchy are we? China may have billions of investment coming into it now, but they got that way because they made some hard, difficult choices. Such as deciding to put a lid on their population growth and learn how to do it without having a war every decade or so. Such as cracking down on government corruption. Such as cracking down on public health. It's not China with an AIDS epidemic right now. And I'm not saying China is perfect - they steal every engineering idea in existence and have no respect for the patent process - but they know they want to be a player in the world, they know that the world is driven by economics today not arms, and they have resolved to win at the economic wars. the point of the matter is, mr mittelstaedt, is that you're america-centric worldview just does not jive with what happens in the rest of the world. Wrong, it may not jive with what happens in a certain percentage of the rest of the world comprised of a SUBSET of developing countries - that is, a subset of the set of developing countries. But of course, if you put all those qualifiers in to make your statements actually truthful, it would diminish their impact greatly. what you suggest and propose is not possible Untrue. and things here are just different. Anything is possible if you make it important enough. As I already have said, once the oil runs out, which is going to happen in a blink of an eye in geological time, and in human history time, solar energy will be the ONLY viable power source left - and the tropics have the lions share of it. Consider that the whole of RECORDED human history, is a much LONGER time than even the most optimistic estimates of the length of time left for fossil fuel resources. Your great grandchildren (assuming you have kids) will very likely have an exact date figured in their lifetime that the fossil fuel resources will be dried up. If you choose to cop the attitude today that solar is impossible for your culture, and just give up on even trying to get it started now, then I guarentee that when it's the only thing left, the rest of the world will be in your country just like they are in Iraq today, and you will have lost any chance you have of self-determination for your future. I'd suggest you get cracking on building those photovoltiac manufacturing facilities in your area, if you ever want to have a say in your future. One day not very far in the future the world will be at your door demanding energy, and if you are still saying it's impossible then, well then the world is going to just shove you aside and show you how to do it. Ted ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Status of 6.0 for production systems
I remember back a while when 5.x had been recently released as STABLE and the conventional wisdom said not to use it in production until the 5.3 release. Is there any such conventional wisdom as regards 6.x? my home system is actually production system that can't be stopped for a long time. i moved finally from NetBSD for various reasons including real SMP support (real=not crashing and not all-giant lock). what i can say is 1) performance is excellent. maybe it should be named FastBSD not FreeBSD :) 2) it DO has bugs, but i already filtered those than can make a problems for me. 3) first bug - kldunload means danger. many kernel modules just crash the system when unloaded. solution: just don't do it, not a real problem. 4) using kernel-ppp+pppd=crash after not a long time. that forced my to learn user ppp(8) which is actually MUCH better. same solution as 3. anyway i don't see any reason why kernel ppp is maintained at all. user ppp+tun interface works perfect. 5) sio driver has bugs. no crashes but overruns are reported by thousands unless i patched sio.c to increase buffer eightfold. the real bug is somewhere else, and can always be repeated with just dd if=/dev/ad0 bs=1m of=/dev/null the larger bs - the larger buffer have to be set to fix it until some value than enlarging bs to anything doesn't break things at all. i don't know how this all works in kernel so have no idea about the real fix. but this fix is enough for now. if you don't use high-speed serial it shouldn't be a problem for you anyway. 6) still have to learn ipfw more, an excellent tool! incomparably better than NetBSD's ipf! found no bugs on other things and system works stable. for 4 days now but stable without any problems, having stable 921kbps ppp link (which is my outbound connection) and all userlevel programs working fine. ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
RE: Status of 6.0 for production systems
-Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of Dinesh Nair Sent: Thursday, November 17, 2005 5:07 AM To: Ted Mittelstaedt Cc: Michael Vince; Peter Clutton; freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Status of 6.0 for production systems On 11/17/05 20:35 Ted Mittelstaedt said the following: In the tropics you are flooded with free energy streaming down on you all day long and your complaining?!?!? Please, search Google for the term photovoltaic and be enlightened. photovoltaic arrays and solar energy panels are not as econiomically viable in developing countries as you think it is in your geocentric worldview. Absolute total rubbish. Let's take one of these developing countries - China PRC - shall we? Read the following: http://www.threegorgesprobe.org/tgp/index.cfm?DSP=contentContentID=13667 In the cities we have photovoltaic integrated building schemes, like the '100,000 roofs' project in Shanghai, and plans for solar street lights. And photovoltaic application in the rural sector will be a big player in China. Electricity consumers across China will pay a little more Ð an extra 0.2 per cent Ð to subsidise the provision of photovoltaic technology to rural users And in the long view, Once the non-renewable energy sources like oil and coal run out, all that will be left for electrical generation is solar, ie: wind and photovoltaic. And when that happens, the countries along the equator will become the energy kingpins for the rest of the world, in the same way that the oil producing countries are today. Ted ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
RE: Status of 6.0 for production systems
-Original Message- From: Chad Leigh -- Shire.Net LLC [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, November 17, 2005 10:33 AM To: Ted Mittelstaedt Cc: David Kelly; FreeBSD-Questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Status of 6.0 for production systems On Nov 17, 2005, at 6:01 AM, Ted Mittelstaedt wrote: The plan is to come out with new gear every few years so as to extract money from the customer base. As I already said in my first post, lots of people are like you - perfectly happy NOT buying the latest Apple product. Apple wants money from them - so Apple has to shake things up. Those same people will continue to use their older Apple HW. No need for them to be shook up. So then Apple is coming out with all that new hardware for nothing. Too bad for them then since according to you nobody will be buying it. You can't have it both ways. Either the Apple userbase will continue to use their older Apple hardware and not buy the new WintelApple gear - in which case this move to Intel chips will be a giant flop - or they will rush to the new gear and dump all their old gear, thus causing untold millions of bucks to flow into the Apple coffers. I think Apple knows it's userbase and they know that if they simply kept going with the same Power PC architecture that there would not be a compelling enough reason for the userbase to pay money for new hardware. Since the goal is to get money, they needed to do something that would cause real differentiation with the new product. Changing the CPU is definitely that. Now, with MacOS X86, Apple can put real marketing pressure on the laggarts in it's customer base to upgrade. And they will, and Apple will get a pile of money for doing it. You make claims but have nothing more than your opinion to support it. Naturally, since Apple isn't going to tell the real truth - which is they want to extract a pile of money from you - their customer. You keep talking like the laptop market is paramount - but who says it is? Laptops are always more expensive, and much more fragile. Do you honestly think that laptops make up the bulk of Apple's sales today? When you can get a G4 minimac for under $500? Logic doesn't even support it. No, in this case there's real logic behind it. It is rather unflattering to the typical Apple consumer of course - nobody wants to admit that they are being manipulated, obviously - but it is very logical. Much more so than the official line from Apple which basically is a statement that the Apple hardware designers aren't smart enough to design a laptop that will handle the G5 Mommy, the chip is to hot, it hurts our hands, wahhh wa wahhh But on second thought, these are the designers that made a computer look like a table lamp, so maybe they really -aren't- smart enough to do it. Ted ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
RE: Status of 6.0 for production systems
-Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of Chad Leigh -- Shire.Net LLC Sent: Thursday, November 17, 2005 10:28 AM To: Ted Mittelstaedt Cc: Free BSD Questions list Subject: Re: Status of 6.0 for production systems Ted. Apple did play some games to try and prod IBM. And your assertion that they could use Intel for laptops until IBM got its act together is hysterical. Glad you aren't running Apple or any other real company. You want them to commit to a much more expensive 2- architecture strategy indefinitely? Why not, every major name brand computer manufacturer produces systems that are either AMD or Intel CPUs. Ted, are you really this dumb or do you just play it in the list. AMD and Intel are the same architecture -- the x86 architecture. No, they are not the same architecture. Both can run x86 programs but the chips have a superset of instructions that are different. Please read what the gcc flags -march=opteron and -march=pentium4 do and quit with the nonsense. If these are the same architecture then those flags wouldn't exist. for Intel just as easy as for Power PC. And besides, they are going to be doing it anyway - or do you really think Apple is going to turn it's back on all it's Power PC installed base? Aha! So forced obsolescence isn't an Apple motive like you earlier claimed as Apple will be supporting both for a while and NOT turning their backs on the installed base. Which is it Ted, forced obsolescence or not? What Apple WANTS and what they are going to DO may possibly be different things. Apple WANTS obsolescense of the PPC stuff, no question about it. They will be pushing with the marketing as hard as they can to do it. But, when the pedal meets the metal, that is, when the buyer has cash in hand and is standing in the computer store looking at the x86 Mac and the PPC Mac and deciding what to buy - well, what happens as a result of that, is what Apple is going to DO. If the buyers stick with the PPC stuff and ignore the x86 stuff then Apple has no choice but to give it up and stick with the PPC. Oh sure, if things get bad Apple will change pricing to practically give away the x86 stuff compared to the PPC stuff - but right now we don't KNOW what will happen. I can definitely assure you that if Apple fails with the marketing campaign to switch the customer base to x86, that they won't turn their back on PPC - because they will be unable to do it and stay solvent. But I think you will see them doing everything short of simply stopping production on PPC gear to convince customers to buy the x86 gear. No, I am not. I am fully aware that unix like and UNIX runs on multiple platforms. It is also a major undertaking. x86 is still the only real stable version of FreeBSD with the x64 version coming along to join it -- a very related architecture btw. NetBSD m68k runs just as stable as FreeBSD, I've had it running for years on an old 68K Mac. Read the history of FreeBSD - it was originally chartered for ONLY the x86. The BSD code itself came to the PC from a non-PC architecture. UNIX was designed to be ported to many different architectures. For that matter the crackers have already broken the weak security and run MacOS X 86 on standard PC hardware: http://www.osx86.theplaceforitall.com/howto/ The above is irrelevant to the discussion. Apple made the x86 version of OS X. Not some hacker group. The hackers only got the pre- release dev version to run on HW that lacked the Apple security chip. Big deal. It in no way supports any arguments you have made. If not then why do you feel compelled to comment on it? Does that bit of news disturb you that much? I merely brought it up to illustrate that it is not this big major undertaking to support multiple platforms with UNIX, Apples doing it now. Although, come to think of it, it also illustrates one other point - that Apple isn't simply taking the Intel CPU and using it in their own superior hardware design. Instead they are just copying the existing Wintel motherboard designs and porting to that. Yet even one more reason to ask why are we going to spend extra money on an x86 Mac hardware when what's in the guts of the x86 Macintosh is the same thing that is in any typical Wintel clone. If I was running Apple I would have opened the specs ages ago. Apple did so and for a while people made Apple clones, then Apple got greedy. Or more specifically, Jobs got greedy. Since he was the one that killed the Mac clones. Like it or not Ted, Apple would not have survived without that action. Jobs thought so but I think that's a rediculous assumption. Microsoft was much much smaller than Apple and they stayed out of the PC hardware market, and now are far larger than Apple. That proves that there is no need to be in the hardware market to survive. I was not happy with that action but the proof is in the pudding. Apple has revitalized
Re: Status of 6.0 for production systems
On 11/19/05 17:28 Ted Mittelstaedt said the following: Absolute total rubbish. Let's take one of these developing countries - China PRC - shall we? right, pick a country which has seen billions in investment flowing in over the last 5 years and use that as an example. shall we consider other countries such as those in africa and the greater part of Asia now ? the point of the matter is, mr mittelstaedt, is that you're america-centric worldview just does not jive with what happens in the rest of the world. what you suggest and propose is not possible and things here are just different. -- Regards, /\_/\ All dogs go to heaven. [EMAIL PROTECTED](0 0)http://www.alphaque.com/ +==oOO--(_)--OOo==+ | for a in past present future; do| | for b in clients employers associates relatives neighbours pets; do | | echo The opinions here in no way reflect the opinions of my $a $b. | | done; done | +=+ ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Status of 6.0 for production systems
On Nov 19, 2005, at 2:43 AM, Ted Mittelstaedt wrote: -Original Message- From: Chad Leigh -- Shire.Net LLC [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, November 17, 2005 10:33 AM To: Ted Mittelstaedt Cc: David Kelly; FreeBSD-Questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Status of 6.0 for production systems On Nov 17, 2005, at 6:01 AM, Ted Mittelstaedt wrote: The plan is to come out with new gear every few years so as to extract money from the customer base. As I already said in my first post, lots of people are like you - perfectly happy NOT buying the latest Apple product. Apple wants money from them - so Apple has to shake things up. Those same people will continue to use their older Apple HW. No need for them to be shook up. So then Apple is coming out with all that new hardware for nothing. Too bad for them then since according to you nobody will be buying it. You can't have it both ways. Either the Apple userbase will continue to use their older Apple hardware and not buy the new WintelApple gear - in which case this move to Intel chips will be a giant flop - or they will rush to the new gear and dump all their old gear, thus causing untold millions of bucks to flow into the Apple coffers. Whatever you say Ted. No one is asking to have anything both ways. People will upgrade their Macs on pretty much the schedule they would have before. A few early adopters will rush in. Whatever you say Ted. I think Apple knows it's userbase and they know that if they simply kept going with the same Power PC architecture that there would not be a compelling enough reason for the userbase to pay money for new hardware. Whatever you say Ted Since the goal is to get money, they needed to do something that would cause real differentiation with the new product. Changing the CPU is definitely that. Now, with MacOS X86, Apple can put real marketing pressure on the laggarts in it's customer base to upgrade. And they will, and Apple will get a pile of money for doing it. Whatever you say Ted. Yes, Apple's goal os to make money, and over the long run the change will pay off since if they fall behind the curve over the long run they suffer. But it won't cause a huge spike in sales and a huge jump in profits. You need to understand the market better Ted. You make claims but have nothing more than your opinion to support it. Naturally, since Apple isn't going to tell the real truth - which is they want to extract a pile of money from you - their customer. Whatever you say Ted You keep talking like the laptop market is paramount - but who says it is? Laptops are always more expensive, and much more fragile. Do you honestly think that laptops make up the bulk of Apple's sales today? Yes, Ted, laptops are fragile, but they are also a very important part of ANY computer manufacturer's lineup and a growing part of their mix. Go read the sales stats Ted. For any PC manufacturer the laptop is growing greater than the desktop. When you can get a G4 minimac for under $500? Logic doesn't even support it. No, in this case there's real logic behind it. It is rather unflattering to the typical Apple consumer of course - nobody wants to admit that they are being manipulated, obviously - but it is very logical. No its not Ted. Only to you Ted. History doesn't support it. Logic doesn't support it. Apple's efforts to continue support for PPC for a long while don't support it. The chip market facts don't support it. Whatever you say Ted Much more so than the official line from Apple which basically is a statement that the Apple hardware designers aren't smart enough to design a laptop that will handle the G5 Mommy, the chip is to hot, it hurts our hands, wahhh wa wahhh Whatever you say Ted. Just remember that chip experts, who don't work for Apple, agree with me, not you. IBM agrees with me, not you. Motorola agrees with me, not you. If Apple really only cared about pushing more kit (instead of creating and nurturing a growing market over the long haul) don't you think they would have come out with a G5 laptop if it were possible? Go read Apple's statements over the last 2 years on a G5 laptop. Google is your friend But on second thought, these are the designers that made a computer look like a table lamp, so maybe they really -aren't- smart enough to do it. Whatever you say Ted. Chad Ted --- Chad Leigh -- Shire.Net LLC Your Web App and Email hosting provider [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Status of 6.0 for production systems
On Nov 19, 2005, at 5:10 AM, Ted Mittelstaedt wrote: -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of Chad Leigh -- Shire.Net LLC Sent: Thursday, November 17, 2005 10:28 AM To: Ted Mittelstaedt Cc: Free BSD Questions list Subject: Re: Status of 6.0 for production systems Ted. Apple did play some games to try and prod IBM. And your assertion that they could use Intel for laptops until IBM got its act together is hysterical. Glad you aren't running Apple or any other real company. You want them to commit to a much more expensive 2- architecture strategy indefinitely? Why not, every major name brand computer manufacturer produces systems that are either AMD or Intel CPUs. Ted, are you really this dumb or do you just play it in the list. AMD and Intel are the same architecture -- the x86 architecture. No, they are not the same architecture. Both can run x86 programs but the chips have a superset of instructions that are different. Please read what the gcc flags -march=opteron and -march=pentium4 do and quit with the nonsense. If these are the same architecture then those flags wouldn't exist. Whatever you say Ted. The Opteron is a superset of the 32 bit x86 architecture adding in 64bit capability. They are the same architecture Ted. That doesn't mean each can't have their own optimizations and different sets of features. Architectures are not a chip. They are the architecture with different chips being different implementations. for Intel just as easy as for Power PC. And besides, they are going to be doing it anyway - or do you really think Apple is going to turn it's back on all it's Power PC installed base? Aha! So forced obsolescence isn't an Apple motive like you earlier claimed as Apple will be supporting both for a while and NOT turning their backs on the installed base. Which is it Ted, forced obsolescence or not? What Apple WANTS and what they are going to DO may possibly be different things. Apple WANTS obsolescense of the PPC stuff, no question about it. Whatever you say Ted. Obviously Apple hopes that people adopt the x86 stuff as quickly as possible so they can reduce their support costs of PPC. But that doesn't mean the intent and purpose of the move is to cause a spike in sales to make more money. Use your head Ted They will be pushing with the marketing as hard as they can to do it. But, when the pedal meets the metal, that is, when the buyer has cash in hand and is standing in the computer store looking at the x86 Mac and the PPC Mac and deciding what to buy - well, what happens as a result of that, is what Apple is going to DO. If the buyers stick with the PPC stuff and ignore the x86 stuff then Apple has no choice but to give it up and stick with the PPC. Oh sure, if things get bad Apple will change pricing to practically give away the x86 stuff compared to the PPC stuff - but right now we don't KNOW what will happen. I can definitely assure you that if Apple fails with the marketing campaign to switch the customer base to x86, that they won't turn their back on PPC - because they will be unable to do it and stay solvent. But I think you will see them doing everything short of simply stopping production on PPC gear to convince customers to buy the x86 gear. Whatever you say Ted. No, I am not. I am fully aware that unix like and UNIX runs on multiple platforms. It is also a major undertaking. x86 is still the only real stable version of FreeBSD with the x64 version coming along to join it -- a very related architecture btw. NetBSD m68k runs just as stable as FreeBSD, I've had it running for years on an old 68K Mac. Read the history of FreeBSD - it was originally chartered for ONLY the x86. The BSD code itself came to the PC from a non-PC architecture. Read what I said Ted. I was not talking about netbsd. You like to change the subject when shown you are wrong. UNIX was designed to be ported to many different architectures. For that matter the crackers have already broken the weak security and run MacOS X 86 on standard PC hardware: http://www.osx86.theplaceforitall.com/howto/ The above is irrelevant to the discussion. Apple made the x86 version of OS X. Not some hacker group. The hackers only got the pre- release dev version to run on HW that lacked the Apple security chip. Big deal. It in no way supports any arguments you have made. If not then why do you feel compelled to comment on it? Does that bit of news disturb you that much? I merely brought it up to illustrate that it is not this big major undertaking to support multiple platforms with UNIX, Apples doing it now. You brought up the irrelevant stuff Ted. Stuff that does not support anything you have said. Of course Unix runs on multiple platforms. No one made any claims to the contrary. The first Unix exposure I ever had was some sort of System III
RE: Status of 6.0 for production systems
-Original Message- From: Chris [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Tuesday, November 15, 2005 3:46 PM To: Ted Mittelstaedt Subject: RE: Status of 6.0 for production systems Ted Mittelstaedt wrote: -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of Michael Vince While most people aren't using a pentium 1 to run a water sprinkler system, there are a countless amount of people using machines for things that aren't ideally power efficient. A lot of people using old PCs and Internet gateways in their home network and nothing else. This is a 24 hour PC running just to provide Internet where a basic Netgear home router 500ma device can do it just as well, (5volts * 0.5amp = 2.5watts), a lot of people use FreeBSD as a server in some way on a network and need to keep it somewhat up to date for security reasons this also means 24 hour running. Hmm - let's see now, where does this extra wasted power go? It is turned into heat. Which heats your house. Which means you do A lot of it doesn't, it gets lost to the atmosphere at the power station and in transmission losses. not have to run the furnace so much, thus saving energy there. If you mean gas fired, almost all the heat is generated inside your house There's a huge number of people that heat with electric, and more and more every day since more people are living in apartments these days, and the apartment complexes, particularly the new ones, are going electric baseboard heaters since that way they can bill the resident their exact usage. Also even a gas furnace uses electricity for the blower, quite a lot of it. So you spend more energy to run inefficient PC's and save energy in not running your furnace. Seems to me to be a wash, here. So the saving of C02 emissions by reducing your gas heating is not as great as the extra C02 emissions generated by your PC, by quite a large amount I believe. Older gas furnaces are about 70% efficient, even newer ones are about 80%. A lot of energy goes up the flue. You can get 90% efficient furnaces but they cost double or more than a standard one (I know, I own one) so most people don't buy them. A natural gas fired power plant can get more efficiency. I should also point out that in many areas power is generated by wind. Here in the Pacific NW you can pay a bit extra on your power bill to have all your electricity come from wind if you want. I wish we could have more commitment to sustainable energy in UK but UK governments noise about it _is_ wash sadly. A lot of people on the FreeBSD mailing lists like the idea of getting rid of their clunky old PC routers and still using a good firewall like Packet Filter by using the MIPS based linksys WRT54G router that could run FreeBSD, while there is no port for this on FreeBSD the closest front for this would be NetBSD. At the ISP I work at we USED to recommend Linksys routers. Then we found that without exception they fail after about a year to two of continuous use. Therefore the person goes and buys another router. Talk about wasted energy of manufacture and increased use of landfill space. That is indeed a waste but consider that in that year the PC at 150 watts has consumed 60 times as much power as the router at 2.5 watts. I make that 1314kWh for the PC and 21.9kWh for the router 24/7 for a year. Anyone know how much power it takes to manufacture and deliver a small router? And maybe other routers last a bit longer. Where this comes back just a little to topic is if an OS such as FreeBSD can be made to run as effectively on an older PC as Windows on a new PC the new PC doesn't have to be manufactured and the old PC doesn't have to go into landfill. And then the FreeBSD project _is_ saving the world. You need to rethink your views on energy. The problem in the world today is not electrical energy. We can generate all the electric power we could ever need using wind energy, for very little more There is actually some debate about how much sustainable energy we can produce globally, and we also have to think about the world tomorrow when low consuming countries convert to consumer societies, eg China. As long as the Chinese government is a dictatorship they will not permit China to become dependent on foreign oil, they are far too paranoid for that. China is the world's sixth largest oil producer, and 60 per cent of its oil consumption is domestically produced. Oil makes up only 23 per cent of the country's total energy consumption, far less than coal, which accounted for 68 per cent, and also less than the world average, which is 40 per cent. According to BP's Statistical Review of World Energy 2005, China consumed 310 million tons of oil in 2004, accounting for 8 per cent of the world total, whereas the United States consumed 938 million tons -- a quarter of the global total and three times China's consumption. The International Energy Agency estimated the growth of China's oil
RE: Status of 6.0 for production systems
-Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of Chad Leigh -- Shire.Net LLC Sent: Tuesday, November 15, 2005 8:14 PM To: Ted Mittelstaedt Cc: Free BSD Questions list Subject: Re: Status of 6.0 for production systems Ted It would be nice if you could at least get your facts straight (continued below) On Nov 15, 2005, at 6:15 PM, Ted Mittelstaedt wrote: On Nov 14, 2005, at 9:23 PM, Ted Mittelstaedt wrote: A lot of people wondered how Steve Jobs could dare change over to Intel chips. In Steve Jobs keynote speech announcing the big move Intel chips was just about entirely stated as because of the 'performance per watt ratio' of Intel CPUs. Check out the picture of the key note speech and look at the bottom of the picture with Intel and IBM's PowerPC processor. http://images.anandtech.com/reviews/tradeshows/2005/WWDC/ perfperwatt.jpg This is a bunch of whitewashing as anyone in the tech industry knows. Wrong. WHat jobs said was exactly correct Jobs changed over to Intel for two reasons. First, because Intel gave him a better price on the CPU's. This is also a consideration. Price always is/ However, the main reason was that the performance they needed at the wattage they needed (for laptops) was not on the horizon for PPC. The G5 can compete against the Intel desktop offerings but there was not a laptop G5 coming any time soon [because of energy dissipation) and the G4 for laptops was not cutting it. Rubbish. They could simply use Intel for laptops until IBM got it together. Or signed a letter of intent which would prod IBM. There is nothing inherent in the design of the G5 that makes it so that you cannot make low power and low heat versions of it. Ted. Apple did play some games to try and prod IBM. And your assertion that they could use Intel for laptops until IBM got its act together is hysterical. Glad you aren't running Apple or any other real company. You want them to commit to a much more expensive 2- architecture strategy indefinitely? Why not, every major name brand computer manufacturer produces systems that are either AMD or Intel CPUs. You can compile Darwin - I mean MacOS X for Intel just as easy as for Power PC. And besides, they are going to be doing it anyway - or do you really think Apple is going to turn it's back on all it's Power PC installed base? Right now nobody knows if the public will go for the Intel-based Macs. Apple is claiming the public will but they really don't know. If the public balks and stops buying Macs except for powerPC based ones, Apple will certainly not stop production on the PowerPC stuff. Don't forget the Apple Lisa and what happened to it. How long have you been running FreeBSD? And you still are so ignorant of porting UNIX to other platforms? UNIX was designed to be ported to many different architectures. For that matter the crackers have already broken the weak security and run MacOS X 86 on standard PC hardware: http://www.osx86.theplaceforitall.com/howto/ If I was running Apple I would have opened the specs ages ago. Apple did so and for a while people made Apple clones, then Apple got greedy. Or more specifically, Jobs got greedy. Since he was the one that killed the Mac clones. Jobs had a choice back in 1997 or whenerver he shot down Power Computing. The cloners were making Mac clones better and faster than Apple. Jobs could either circle the wagons and retard Mac development to continue to wring money out of Mac users, or he could concentrate on making Mac software so great and compelling that people would buy it. People are leaving Sparc architecture in droves for everything other than supercomputers, they are going Solaris x86. Why - because the major motherboard makers do it better and cheaper than Sun, and they would do it better and cheaper than Apple if Apple allowed it. That makes a lot of sense. IBM was not interested in making a G5 caliber chip made for laptops. That's what Apple says to justify their switch. There was nothing in their roadmap and nothing technology wise they were showing. Yeah, right they are going to publish their roadmap so Intel can see it. Intel has some nice laptop chipsets and cpus. It is difficult and expensive as is to do a multi year transition and keep support of PPC machines for the sveeral years that they will be doing so after the transition. -IF- they transition and the Intel-based Mac's don't crash and burn like the Apple Lisa. It probably was technically feasible to come up with a G5 caliber laptop chip but IBM was not interested for someone as low volume as Apple. They are much more interested in XBox 360 , Playstation 3 and Nintendo evolution. Other computer manufacturers have no problems using different CPU's in their products. Name one major manufacturer in the same market as Apple that has an indefinite long term strategy of multiple CPUs. I can only think of Big Iron like Sun
RE: Status of 6.0 for production systems
-Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of Dinesh Nair Sent: Tuesday, November 15, 2005 10:58 PM To: Ted Mittelstaedt Cc: Michael Vince; Peter Clutton; freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Status of 6.0 for production systems On 11/15/05 12:23 Ted Mittelstaedt said the following: Hmm - let's see now, where does this extra wasted power go? It is turned into heat. Which heats your house. Which means you do not have to run the furnace so much, thus saving energy there. that's a very geocentric view. for most of us who live in the tropics or on the equator where the ambient temperature is 31degC, the wasted power is really wasted twice: once from the PC, and once more thru higher airconditioning/cooling devices. In the tropics you are flooded with free energy streaming down on you all day long and your complaining?!?!? Please, search Google for the term photovoltaic and be enlightened. Ted ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
RE: Status of 6.0 for production systems
-Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of David Kelly Sent: Tuesday, November 15, 2005 9:38 PM To: Chad Leigh -- Shire.Net LLC Cc: FreeBSD-Questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Status of 6.0 for production systems On Tue, Nov 15, 2005 at 09:13:54PM -0700, Chad Leigh -- Shire.Net LLC wrote: Ted It would be nice if you could at least get your facts straight Agreed. There is no software obsolescence issue. Besides making it quite easy to port software to OS X Intel for most people, since the underlying OS and libraries is the same, Apple has invested a ton of money into the Rosetta technology which allows PPC software to continue to run on the Intel boxes. And they are also still introducing PPC machines for a while and will continue to support PPC machines for several years so as to avoid the problem. Once again typical Apple apologizing. When Apple dumped MacOS Classic in favor of MacOS X, all the Apple proponents who for years were saying that MacOS was the best OS in existence, didn't let the door hit them on the ass on the way out of the mac Classic room. Before it MacOS X, MacOS 9 was not known as Classic. Classic is MacOS 9 being hosted *under* MacOS X. Contrary to Ted's revisionist view of Macintosh history, Mac users were pushed to X kicking and screaming in protest. Much the same as when DOS users were forced to use subdirectories. If the Mac users really didn't like it, they would have told Apple to wank off and gone to Windows. Much like the little child who throws a temper tantrum when the parents try to get him to eat his carrots, but when they finally give up and let him alone he eats every carrot in sight. The protesting was completely empty and as fake as a crocodile's tears. Secretly the Mac faithful loved the move to OS X. If they really had been mad at Apple, they would have retaliated by leaving Apple. The fact that they didn't speaks far more volumes than any kicking and screaming. ? classic MacOS (OS 9) was good for the market it was competing in but could not last forever. Apple has the Classic compatibility in OS X and for a few years after OS X was introduced continued to introduce new machines that support OS 9 natively. I can still run lots of my System 7 apps on my G5 under Classic today... no software obsolescence and nothing to worry about hitting me in the ass. I have an Introl C-11 compiler from 1991 for the 68hc11 family which still runs under my old 68k version of MPW, under Classic, under MacOS 10.4.3. One OS hosted under another and one CPU doing soft interpretation of 68k binary code. Generating code for yet a 3rd CPU. And on my lowly 867 MHz Dual G4 its 30x faster than it ever was on native 68k. Hmm - let's see, where's Introl today? Do you suppose that all that backwards compatability helped Introl's sales? ;-) In real world use my 256MB G4-400 MacOS X 10.4.3 Powerbook is faster than my 512MB 2GHz WinXP Pro box at work. But - Chad said that the G4 is a no-go? That the G5 was an absolute requirement for laptop use? Yet your saying that a G4 for a laptop is perfectly acceptable? Then why again ais Apple moving to Intel chips to get laptops? :-) Thats also no small part of why I keep a 450 MHz PII FreeBSD system at work. There is too much real work that needs to be done which is easy in Unix but a pain in Windows. Am not going to waste *my* perfectly good Macintosh at work. If this is planned obsolescence then I love it! The plan is to come out with new gear every few years so as to extract money from the customer base. As I already said in my first post, lots of people are like you - perfectly happy NOT buying the latest Apple product. Apple wants money from them - so Apple has to shake things up. Ted ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Status of 6.0 for production systems
On 11/17/05 20:35 Ted Mittelstaedt said the following: In the tropics you are flooded with free energy streaming down on you all day long and your complaining?!?!? Please, search Google for the term photovoltaic and be enlightened. photovoltaic arrays and solar energy panels are not as econiomically viable in developing countries as you think it is in your geocentric worldview. -- Regards, /\_/\ All dogs go to heaven. [EMAIL PROTECTED](0 0)http://www.alphaque.com/ +==oOO--(_)--OOo==+ | for a in past present future; do| | for b in clients employers associates relatives neighbours pets; do | | echo The opinions here in no way reflect the opinions of my $a $b. | | done; done | +=+ ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Status of 6.0 for production systems
On Nov 17, 2005, at 5:18 AM, Ted Mittelstaedt wrote: -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of Chad Leigh -- Shire.Net LLC Sent: Tuesday, November 15, 2005 8:14 PM To: Ted Mittelstaedt Cc: Free BSD Questions list Subject: Re: Status of 6.0 for production systems Ted It would be nice if you could at least get your facts straight (continued below) On Nov 15, 2005, at 6:15 PM, Ted Mittelstaedt wrote: On Nov 14, 2005, at 9:23 PM, Ted Mittelstaedt wrote: A lot of people wondered how Steve Jobs could dare change over to Intel chips. In Steve Jobs keynote speech announcing the big move Intel chips was just about entirely stated as because of the 'performance per watt ratio' of Intel CPUs. Check out the picture of the key note speech and look at the bottom of the picture with Intel and IBM's PowerPC processor. http://images.anandtech.com/reviews/tradeshows/2005/WWDC/ perfperwatt.jpg This is a bunch of whitewashing as anyone in the tech industry knows. Wrong. WHat jobs said was exactly correct Jobs changed over to Intel for two reasons. First, because Intel gave him a better price on the CPU's. This is also a consideration. Price always is/ However, the main reason was that the performance they needed at the wattage they needed (for laptops) was not on the horizon for PPC. The G5 can compete against the Intel desktop offerings but there was not a laptop G5 coming any time soon [because of energy dissipation) and the G4 for laptops was not cutting it. Rubbish. They could simply use Intel for laptops until IBM got it together. Or signed a letter of intent which would prod IBM. There is nothing inherent in the design of the G5 that makes it so that you cannot make low power and low heat versions of it. Ted. Apple did play some games to try and prod IBM. And your assertion that they could use Intel for laptops until IBM got its act together is hysterical. Glad you aren't running Apple or any other real company. You want them to commit to a much more expensive 2- architecture strategy indefinitely? Why not, every major name brand computer manufacturer produces systems that are either AMD or Intel CPUs. Ted, are you really this dumb or do you just play it in the list. AMD and Intel are the same architecture -- the x86 architecture. And the 64 bit extension is just an extension of that same x86. 2 different physical CPU families but the same architecture. NO comparison. There is no major vendor shipping desktop and laptop computers in more than one architecture of the long haul You can compile Darwin - I mean MacOS X Darwin != Mac OS X. Darwin is the underlying kernel and supporting layers but it is not Mac OS X. There is a lot more to Mac OS X. And you, you obviously can compile Mac OS X for both as Apple has been doing that for several years. And they will continue to do that. But over the long term it is a much more expensive proposition and Apple is a company whose job it is to pull a profit and they try to minimize theor expenses just like everyone else. for Intel just as easy as for Power PC. And besides, they are going to be doing it anyway - or do you really think Apple is going to turn it's back on all it's Power PC installed base? Aha! So forced obsolescence isn't an Apple motive like you earlier claimed as Apple will be supporting both for a while and NOT turning their backs on the installed base. Which is it Ted, forced obsolescence or not? Right now nobody knows if the public will go for the Intel-based Macs. Apple is claiming the public will but they really don't know. If the public balks and stops buying Macs except for powerPC based ones, Apple will certainly not stop production on the PowerPC stuff. Don't forget the Apple Lisa and what happened to it. How long have you been running FreeBSD? Sine 1996 And you still are so ignorant of porting UNIX to other platforms? No, I am not. I am fully aware that unix like and UNIX runs on multiple platforms. It is also a major undertaking. x86 is still the only real stable version of FreeBSD with the x64 version coming along to join it -- a very related architecture btw. UNIX was designed to be ported to many different architectures. For that matter the crackers have already broken the weak security and run MacOS X 86 on standard PC hardware: http://www.osx86.theplaceforitall.com/howto/ The above is irrelevant to the discussion. Apple made the x86 version of OS X. Not some hacker group. The hackers only got the pre- release dev version to run on HW that lacked the Apple security chip. Big deal. It in no way supports any arguments you have made. If I was running Apple I would have opened the specs ages ago. Apple did so and for a while people made Apple clones, then Apple got greedy. Or more specifically, Jobs got greedy. Since he was the one
Re: Status of 6.0 for production systems
On Nov 17, 2005, at 6:01 AM, Ted Mittelstaedt wrote: In real world use my 256MB G4-400 MacOS X 10.4.3 Powerbook is faster than my 512MB 2GHz WinXP Pro box at work. But - Chad said that the G4 is a no-go? That the G5 was an absolute requirement for laptop use? Yet your saying that a G4 for a laptop is perfectly acceptable? Then why again ais Apple moving to Intel chips to get laptops? :-) Current G4 chips work fine in laptops and allow people to get their work done. Some people need more. But G4s are not competitive with the Intel competition and into the future would be even less competitive. Long term Apple needed a new solution. They chose what they feel (and probably is) the best solution. Personally I would rather have had AMD but the current AMD laptop solution (and laptops were Apple's biggest concerns IMHO) is not as strong and Intel is seen as a stronger partner. It is all irrelevant anyway as AMD and Intel are the same architecture anyway and so Apple could easily move to AMD or to a mix without SW issues. Chad --- Chad Leigh -- Shire.Net LLC Your Web App and Email hosting provider [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Status of 6.0 for production systems
On Nov 17, 2005, at 6:01 AM, Ted Mittelstaedt wrote: The plan is to come out with new gear every few years so as to extract money from the customer base. As I already said in my first post, lots of people are like you - perfectly happy NOT buying the latest Apple product. Apple wants money from them - so Apple has to shake things up. Those same people will continue to use their older Apple HW. No need for them to be shook up. You make claims but have nothing more than your opinion to support it. Logic doesn't even support it. Chad --- Chad Leigh -- Shire.Net LLC Your Web App and Email hosting provider [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[summary] Apple intel transition (was: Re: Status of 6.0 for production systems)
On Nov 17, 2005, at 11:32 AM, Chad Leigh -- Shire.Net LLC wrote: On Nov 17, 2005, at 6:01 AM, Ted Mittelstaedt wrote: The plan is to come out with new gear every few years so as to extract money from the customer base. As I already said in my first post, lots of people are like you - perfectly happy NOT buying the latest Apple product. Apple wants money from them - so Apple has to shake things up. Those same people will continue to use their older Apple HW. No need for them to be shook up. You make claims but have nothing more than your opinion to support it. Logic doesn't even support it. This is pretty much the gist of it: Ted maintains that the or a major reason for Apple to switch to Intel was to force an extra HW upgrade cycle amongst Mac users to generate more revenue than they would otherwise have gotten by maintaining the PPC as their architecture for OS X / Macintosh. He used the word greed to describe this. This ignores the fact that Apple is doing everything they possibly can, at great expense, to make sure that the PPC Macs are fully supported and usable after the transition. Very few people will upgrade their Macs sooner due to this transition and so most upgrades will happen on the normal HW upgrade cycle that an particular Mac user follows. Hence there is no short term economic benefit to this transition as no extra HW cycle will in general take place.There may be long term economic benefits from this decision based on component costs, RD costs, etc. but Ted's greed argument falls flat on its face. There will of course be some upgrades to Intel platform by typical power-user/early adopter/tech weenie type people who are interested in the technology itself, but not enough to set any sort of macro trend or to have a meaningful padding of the Apple bottom line. The same kind of people are probably buying the Quad G5 now (I know I want one :-) ). Chad most of whose Macs are built from parts from eBay and parts shops and PC parts [total 3 Macs in the last 3 years -- personal and business owned], though he does have 3 original purchased Macs from Apple since 1998 [all business owned], 1 of which has been passed on to others. Also has built numerous x86 architecture based (mostly AMD chips) FreeBSD boxes and one Solaris 10 box. Chad --- Chad Leigh -- Shire.Net LLC Your Web App and Email hosting provider [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions- [EMAIL PROTECTED] --- Chad Leigh -- Shire.Net LLC Your Web App and Email hosting provider [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Status of 6.0 for production systems
Wow, did this thread veer off-topic! On Tue, Nov 15, 2005 at 11:50:40PM +, Chris wrote: That is indeed a waste but consider that in that year the PC at 150 watts This is probably a high estimate, especially for an older, single-cpu box. has consumed 60 times as much power as the router at 2.5 watts. I make that 1314kWh for the PC and 21.9kWh for the router 24/7 for a year. Anyone know how much power it takes to manufacture and deliver a small router? And maybe other routers last a bit longer. You can probably get an idea from extrapolating these figures [1]: RAM: 11.4 kWh and 32 L water for 32 MB chip CPU: 1.4 kWh and5.9 L water per square-cm silicon wafer LCD: 553 kWh and 2394 L water for a 15 monitor A dragonball CPU (2 dies each .343cm x .343 cm) requires 0.3 kWh and 1.4L. The impact of producing a CPU seems low to me, especially when compared to the RAM. Needs to do some more research ... :) m [1] Environmnetal Implications of New Wireless Technologies: News Delivery and Business Meetings by Michael W. Toffel, Haas School of Biz, UCal Berkely and Arpad Horvath, Civil Eng, UCal Berkely accepted for publication 3/18/2004 in American Chemical Society http://www.haas.berkeley.edu/responsiblebusiness/documents/wireless_asap.pdf ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Status of 6.0 for production systems
Mark Bucciarelli wrote: Wow, did this thread veer off-topic! It did rather ;) but it's an important topic for us energy users. On Tue, Nov 15, 2005 at 11:50:40PM +, Chris wrote: That is indeed a waste but consider that in that year the PC at 150 watts This is probably a high estimate, especially for an older, single-cpu box. has consumed 60 times as much power as the router at 2.5 watts. I make that 1314kWh for the PC and 21.9kWh for the router 24/7 for a year. Anyone know how much power it takes to manufacture and deliver a small router? And maybe other routers last a bit longer. You can probably get an idea from extrapolating these figures [1]: RAM: 11.4 kWh and 32 L water for 32 MB chip CPU: 1.4 kWh and5.9 L water per square-cm silicon wafer LCD: 553 kWh and 2394 L water for a 15 monitor Thank you! That's a lot of water too. A dragonball CPU (2 dies each .343cm x .343 cm) requires 0.3 kWh and 1.4L. The impact of producing a CPU seems low to me, especially when compared to the RAM. Needs to do some more research ... :) Well wild guessing, if a router requires 100kWh to make and an old PC uses 1000kWh more in a year than the router you can kill 10 routers in the year and still break even. Obviously there are many more considerations in calculating total environmental cost but the router is an awful long way ahead here. What's more at 10p/kWh the PC has used £100 more in the year. I can buy a router for less than £25 so purely on a selfish basis I should get one. I suppose as a responsible eco-citizen I should also use packages instead of ports to save on the compile time electricity. m [1] Environmnetal Implications of New Wireless Technologies: News Delivery and Business Meetings by Michael W. Toffel, Haas School of Biz, UCal Berkely and Arpad Horvath, Civil Eng, UCal Berkely accepted for publication 3/18/2004 in American Chemical Society http://www.haas.berkeley.edu/responsiblebusiness/documents/wireless_asap.pdf Chris ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
RE: Status of 6.0 for production systems
Ted Mittelstaedt wrote: -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of Michael Vince While most people aren't using a pentium 1 to run a water sprinkler system, there are a countless amount of people using machines for things that aren't ideally power efficient. A lot of people using old PCs and Internet gateways in their home network and nothing else. This is a 24 hour PC running just to provide Internet where a basic Netgear home router 500ma device can do it just as well, (5volts * 0.5amp = 2.5watts), a lot of people use FreeBSD as a server in some way on a network and need to keep it somewhat up to date for security reasons this also means 24 hour running. Hmm - let's see now, where does this extra wasted power go? It is turned into heat. Which heats your house. Which means you do A lot of it doesn't, it gets lost to the atmosphere at the power station and in transmission losses. not have to run the furnace so much, thus saving energy there. If you mean gas fired, almost all the heat is generated inside your house So you spend more energy to run inefficient PC's and save energy in not running your furnace. Seems to me to be a wash, here. So the saving of C02 emissions by reducing your gas heating is not as great as the extra C02 emissions generated by your PC, by quite a large amount I believe. I should also point out that in many areas power is generated by wind. Here in the Pacific NW you can pay a bit extra on your power bill to have all your electricity come from wind if you want. I wish we could have more commitment to sustainable energy in UK but UK governments noise about it _is_ wash sadly. A lot of people on the FreeBSD mailing lists like the idea of getting rid of their clunky old PC routers and still using a good firewall like Packet Filter by using the MIPS based linksys WRT54G router that could run FreeBSD, while there is no port for this on FreeBSD the closest front for this would be NetBSD. At the ISP I work at we USED to recommend Linksys routers. Then we found that without exception they fail after about a year to two of continuous use. Therefore the person goes and buys another router. Talk about wasted energy of manufacture and increased use of landfill space. That is indeed a waste but consider that in that year the PC at 150 watts has consumed 60 times as much power as the router at 2.5 watts. I make that 1314kWh for the PC and 21.9kWh for the router 24/7 for a year. Anyone know how much power it takes to manufacture and deliver a small router? And maybe other routers last a bit longer. Where this comes back just a little to topic is if an OS such as FreeBSD can be made to run as effectively on an older PC as Windows on a new PC the new PC doesn't have to be manufactured and the old PC doesn't have to go into landfill. And then the FreeBSD project _is_ saving the world. You need to rethink your views on energy. The problem in the world today is not electrical energy. We can generate all the electric power we could ever need using wind energy, for very little more There is actually some debate about how much sustainable energy we can produce globally, and we also have to think about the world tomorrow when low consuming countries convert to consumer societies, eg China. than burning fossil fuel - and in many places, at a lower cost than fossil-fuel generation if you subtract the initial investment costs. (most fossil fuel generating plants have long since paid off their initial investments) In the end I think any discussion which can start us thinking about how we individually consume and why and how we should reduce our consumption is positive. Ie whether using an old PC or a router, turning it off when it is not actually being used is win-win. On that point, I believe the ATX power supply should be made illegal - in the UK PC's and monitors which are 'shutdown' but not switched off at the wall use up the output of a medium sized power station. Chris ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
RE: Status of 6.0 for production systems
-Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of Chad Leigh -- Shire.Net LLC Sent: Monday, November 14, 2005 10:57 PM To: Ted Mittelstaedt Cc: Free BSD Questions list Subject: Re: Status of 6.0 for production systems On Nov 14, 2005, at 9:23 PM, Ted Mittelstaedt wrote: A lot of people wondered how Steve Jobs could dare change over to Intel chips. In Steve Jobs keynote speech announcing the big move Intel chips was just about entirely stated as because of the 'performance per watt ratio' of Intel CPUs. Check out the picture of the key note speech and look at the bottom of the picture with Intel and IBM's PowerPC processor. http://images.anandtech.com/reviews/tradeshows/2005/WWDC/ perfperwatt.jpg This is a bunch of whitewashing as anyone in the tech industry knows. Wrong. WHat jobs said was exactly correct Jobs changed over to Intel for two reasons. First, because Intel gave him a better price on the CPU's. This is also a consideration. Price always is/ However, the main reason was that the performance they needed at the wattage they needed (for laptops) was not on the horizon for PPC. The G5 can compete against the Intel desktop offerings but there was not a laptop G5 coming any time soon [because of energy dissipation) and the G4 for laptops was not cutting it. Rubbish. They could simply use Intel for laptops until IBM got it together. Or signed a letter of intent which would prod IBM. There is nothing inherent in the design of the G5 that makes it so that you cannot make low power and low heat versions of it. Other computer manufacturers have no problems using different CPU's in their products. Second because doing this instantly obsoletes the older power PC macs thus pushing all the Mac users to fork over money for new software and hardware. Wrong. Conspiracy-Ted at it again. But of course you have no answer to the software obsolescence issue. Once again typical Apple apologizing. When Apple dumped MacOS Classic in favor of MacOS X, all the Apple proponents who for years were saying that MacOS was the best OS in existence, didn't let the door hit them on the ass on the way out of the mac Classic room. When Apple dumped Motorola in favor of IBM all the Apple people who for years had been claiming that Apples were so much better because they held their value over the years while PC's didn't, conveniently forgot that now the resale value of the 68k Mac was zero. What I think is the biggest joke is that you Apple guys worship the ground that Jobs walks on like he's Apple's Savior, Jobs can do no wrong is the mantra. Yet to the non Apple-colored-eyglasses computer industry, the guy is just as money-grubbing profit-grubbing as any other. This is a guy that didn't even know that FreeBSD was one of the bases of MacOSX and was telling people it was built on -LINUX- for crying out loud. Jobs switched CPU's to get a whole lot of you guys to dump you holds its resale value hardware in the ashbin, and run out and give a lot of money to Apple for the latest and greatest Intel gear, as well as help out all the software ISV's writing software for MacOS X by giving them a reason to prod all of you into buying software upgrades. And you can't get enough of it! Simply amazing! Apple is working exactly like Microsoft these days yet you all think it's still better! I guess one of these days when General Motors finally gets stick of propping up Saturn (Saturn has never turned a profit since it was founded) all the Saturn owners who think they are 'different kinna car people' will be saying that Chevrolet is a 'different kinna car' Cast from the same mold you all are. Ted ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Status of 6.0 for production systems
Ted It would be nice if you could at least get your facts straight (continued below) On Nov 15, 2005, at 6:15 PM, Ted Mittelstaedt wrote: On Nov 14, 2005, at 9:23 PM, Ted Mittelstaedt wrote: A lot of people wondered how Steve Jobs could dare change over to Intel chips. In Steve Jobs keynote speech announcing the big move Intel chips was just about entirely stated as because of the 'performance per watt ratio' of Intel CPUs. Check out the picture of the key note speech and look at the bottom of the picture with Intel and IBM's PowerPC processor. http://images.anandtech.com/reviews/tradeshows/2005/WWDC/ perfperwatt.jpg This is a bunch of whitewashing as anyone in the tech industry knows. Wrong. WHat jobs said was exactly correct Jobs changed over to Intel for two reasons. First, because Intel gave him a better price on the CPU's. This is also a consideration. Price always is/ However, the main reason was that the performance they needed at the wattage they needed (for laptops) was not on the horizon for PPC. The G5 can compete against the Intel desktop offerings but there was not a laptop G5 coming any time soon [because of energy dissipation) and the G4 for laptops was not cutting it. Rubbish. They could simply use Intel for laptops until IBM got it together. Or signed a letter of intent which would prod IBM. There is nothing inherent in the design of the G5 that makes it so that you cannot make low power and low heat versions of it. Ted. Apple did play some games to try and prod IBM. And your assertion that they could use Intel for laptops until IBM got its act together is hysterical. Glad you aren't running Apple or any other real company. You want them to commit to a much more expensive 2- architecture strategy indefinitely? That makes a lot of sense. IBM was not interested in making a G5 caliber chip made for laptops. There was nothing in their roadmap and nothing technology wise they were showing. Intel has some nice laptop chipsets and cpus. It is difficult and expensive as is to do a multi year transition and keep support of PPC machines for the sveeral years that they will be doing so after the transition. It probably was technically feasible to come up with a G5 caliber laptop chip but IBM was not interested for someone as low volume as Apple. They are much more interested in XBox 360 , Playstation 3 and Nintendo evolution. Other computer manufacturers have no problems using different CPU's in their products. Name one major manufacturer in the same market as Apple that has an indefinite long term strategy of multiple CPUs. I can only think of Big Iron like Sun and IBM. Second because doing this instantly obsoletes the older power PC macs thus pushing all the Mac users to fork over money for new software and hardware. Wrong. Conspiracy-Ted at it again. But of course you have no answer to the software obsolescence issue. There is no software obsolescence issue. Besides making it quite easy to port software to OS X Intel for most people, since the underlying OS and libraries is the same, Apple has invested a ton of money into the Rosetta technology which allows PPC software to continue to run on the Intel boxes. And they are also still introducing PPC machines for a while and will continue to support PPC machines for several years so as to avoid the problem. Once again typical Apple apologizing. When Apple dumped MacOS Classic in favor of MacOS X, all the Apple proponents who for years were saying that MacOS was the best OS in existence, didn't let the door hit them on the ass on the way out of the mac Classic room. ? classic MacOS (OS 9) was good for the market it was competing in but could not last forever. Apple has the Classic compatibility in OS X and for a few years after OS X was introduced continued to introduce new machines that support OS 9 natively. I can still run lots of my System 7 apps on my G5 under Classic today... no software obsolescence and nothing to worry about hitting me in the ass. When Apple dumped Motorola in favor of IBM all the Apple people who for years had been claiming that Apples were so much better because they held their value over the years while PC's didn't, conveniently forgot that now the resale value of the 68k Mac was zero. Dude, you have no idea what you were talking about. The PPC Mac was introduced in late 93 and 68K based Macs still had value (including resale) for a long while (I know as I sold one then). Your good on making crap up but bad on facts and history. What I think is the biggest joke is that you Apple guys worship the ground that Jobs walks on like he's Apple's Savior, Jobs can do no wrong is the mantra. Jobs can do wrong. But he has been a lot more successful than you or most any other industry executive over the last 7 years. I give the guy a break most of the
Re: Status of 6.0 for production systems
On Tue, Nov 15, 2005 at 09:13:54PM -0700, Chad Leigh -- Shire.Net LLC wrote: Ted It would be nice if you could at least get your facts straight Agreed. There is no software obsolescence issue. Besides making it quite easy to port software to OS X Intel for most people, since the underlying OS and libraries is the same, Apple has invested a ton of money into the Rosetta technology which allows PPC software to continue to run on the Intel boxes. And they are also still introducing PPC machines for a while and will continue to support PPC machines for several years so as to avoid the problem. Once again typical Apple apologizing. When Apple dumped MacOS Classic in favor of MacOS X, all the Apple proponents who for years were saying that MacOS was the best OS in existence, didn't let the door hit them on the ass on the way out of the mac Classic room. Before it MacOS X, MacOS 9 was not known as Classic. Classic is MacOS 9 being hosted *under* MacOS X. Contrary to Ted's revisionist view of Macintosh history, Mac users were pushed to X kicking and screaming in protest. Much the same as when DOS users were forced to use subdirectories. ? classic MacOS (OS 9) was good for the market it was competing in but could not last forever. Apple has the Classic compatibility in OS X and for a few years after OS X was introduced continued to introduce new machines that support OS 9 natively. I can still run lots of my System 7 apps on my G5 under Classic today... no software obsolescence and nothing to worry about hitting me in the ass. I have an Introl C-11 compiler from 1991 for the 68hc11 family which still runs under my old 68k version of MPW, under Classic, under MacOS 10.4.3. One OS hosted under another and one CPU doing soft interpretation of 68k binary code. Generating code for yet a 3rd CPU. And on my lowly 867 MHz Dual G4 its 30x faster than it ever was on native 68k. In real world use my 256MB G4-400 MacOS X 10.4.3 Powerbook is faster than my 512MB 2GHz WinXP Pro box at work. Thats also no small part of why I keep a 450 MHz PII FreeBSD system at work. There is too much real work that needs to be done which is easy in Unix but a pain in Windows. Am not going to waste *my* perfectly good Macintosh at work. If this is planned obsolescence then I love it! -- David Kelly N4HHE, [EMAIL PROTECTED] Whom computers would destroy, they must first drive mad. ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Status of 6.0 for production systems
On 11/15/05 12:23 Ted Mittelstaedt said the following: Hmm - let's see now, where does this extra wasted power go? It is turned into heat. Which heats your house. Which means you do not have to run the furnace so much, thus saving energy there. that's a very geocentric view. for most of us who live in the tropics or on the equator where the ambient temperature is 31degC, the wasted power is really wasted twice: once from the PC, and once more thru higher airconditioning/cooling devices. -- Regards, /\_/\ All dogs go to heaven. [EMAIL PROTECTED](0 0)http://www.alphaque.com/ +==oOO--(_)--OOo==+ | for a in past present future; do| | for b in clients employers associates relatives neighbours pets; do | | echo The opinions here in no way reflect the opinions of my $a $b. | | done; done | +=+ ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
RE: Status of 6.0 for production systems
-Original Message- From: Michael Vince [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Friday, November 11, 2005 3:59 PM To: Ted Mittelstaedt Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED]; freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Status of 6.0 for production systems Ted Mittelstaedt wrote: Admittedly if Microsoft were trying to make Windows XP run well on a 486 it wouldn't be nearly as a likable OS it is today. That's not true either. If Microsoft were trying to make it work on a 486 it would run a lot better on bigger hardware because they would have to prune all the fat off it. Haven't you ever noticed with Windows that the user interface speed is still the same today, with brand new hardware, as it was 10 years ago on older versions of Windows? Try running Windows 98 one day on brand new hardware - it is almost a religious experience. Open a window and Bang - it's there, completely drawn in, so fast you can't even see it draw. THAT is how it's supposed to be. The problem is the stupid consumers don't understand that every year that they buy newer and faster hardware it just helps Microsoft to make their stuff slower. So they never get ahead. Windows 98 is what made MS famous for instability The only people that say that don't know how to run Windows. Windows 98 is a very stable OS if you know what you are doing. I've had both stable and unstable Win98 systems, and I've learned from the unstable ones what to to do make the system stable. Just because you haven't doesen't make it an unstable OS. and its not even a comparable OS in terms of stability of Windows XP. Windows XP is better, however part of the reason people think this is that XP will not run on older hardware because it's too slow. Back in the good old days there was a lot more shoddy PC hardware than there is today partly because there were a lot more manufacturers than there are today. If Win XP is installed on the system minimums, and you are patient enough to spend the 24 hours necessary waiting for it to finish jacking off or whatever it does during installation, then the result would be a lot less stable. Your either arguing that FreeBSD should be made more stable by modifying it so that it will only boot on 1 year old or younger hardware that is more stable than older hardware is in general, or your arguing that only new hardware is stable enough to field really stable OSes on, I can't figure out which. I believe most tech people have thought the same way in terms of every new versions of MS windows needs a faster PC, and it has a good side of MS as far as I am concerned because without the demand for faster CPUs to run MS Windows the CPU industry would still be sitting around Pentium 2 performance today. This is a very naieve argument. For starters all machine designs no matter what will ultimately hit the law of diminishing returns. Take the automobile, there have been 80 years of trying to make the internal combustion engine more efficient so as to get better gas mileage and the end result is we are abandoning that design and going to hybrids, because it's impossible to make it more efficient than it has been for the last 40 years. The mpg of a typical car rolling off the line today is no better than one built in 1960 the only difference is it pollutes less. The computer industry is much younger than the automobile industry but it will eventually hit this ceiling too. Then the only way around it is to make the software more efficient or to chuck the existing computer design and go to something different. Maybe photon chips or something else, who knows. If the computer hardware industry only made pentium 2's for the last 20 years then we could still see speed increases if Microsoft made a better windows. And as I already pointed out, the observed interface speed of a P4 under XP is no better than a P3 under 2K or a P2 under w98, so I think by your p 2 performance yardstick we are still no better off under Windows today. So why is this a good side of MS pray tell? Its the same for the Internet if Gates had not put a 'get on the Internet now' icon on all those win95 and 98 during the pc boom days to trigger peoples interest the Internet it wouldn't be as cheap or as fast as it is for end consumers. That's fine except that there was not a mass migration to Win95 in 1995, the year that the Internet exploded in terms of ISP growth. You probably never heard of trumpet winsock? Connecting Win31 systems to the Internet was going great guns well into 1997. What put the Win31 systems out of the Internet game was the browser wars between MS and Netscape. But MS supported Win31 up until IE4 as did Netscape. MS even included a dialer and winsock in their Win31 web browser issues. The Internet exploded before MS got into it, not as a result of MS getting into it. MS actually pooh-poohed the Internet, and later on in around 1999 Gates was quoted as saying that was a big mistake of theirs. The original Win95 did not even contain a web
RE: Status of 6.0 for production systems
-Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of Michael Vince Sent: Friday, November 11, 2005 7:48 PM To: Peter Clutton Cc: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org; Ted Mittelstaedt Subject: Re: Status of 6.0 for production systems I prefer the idea of the FreeBSD team aiming at only the latest hardware, all I use is brand new server equipment. I don't like the idea that FreeBSD features and performance development could be hampered by the core guys trying to make stuff work on old hardware, in fact if it was a fact that a lot more performance and features could be in 6.x if they dropped support for everything below 1ghz for x86 I would be happy Supporting older hardware is not some bad decision made by core, it is a general design and philosophy point of not only FreeBSD, but unix and the community in general. That is a very selfish statement, and rather rediculous actually, that the tens of thousands of people running older hardware (example: Yahoo! - pentium of about half that speed serving hundreds of thousands of http requests per day) should upgrade to 1ghz machines because that's what you use. Even Windows runs on less than that. But you are always welcome to make your own version that supports only that. I said it in terms of an over the top example to maximize a trigger of thoughts in this area of topic, such as an example of movement as those more in the realms of what MS do with what their standard is in hardware support for modern operating systems, luckily I am just 'some guy' on the mailing list and have little what so ever say to what happens on FreeBSD. I don't believe its a very selfish statement at all. When I say get rid of old hardware the one of the largest flow of thoughts that go through my mind is the support future world energy needs. Most scientists tell you that there will be a world energy crisis sometime in the future and people should be prepared to pay money money for the energy they use. Its energy crisis web sites are all over the Internet. While some people fear a nuclear attack from terrorists or nuclear war in general if you want to fear a day of doom some people will tell you there is something even more terrifying and just as destructive coming our way, that is running out of cheap energy, hard to understand? I recommend to any one using a PC for the single use of a home gateway or using power in ways that aren't ideal but simply because energy is cheap simply because they can get away with it the get the DVD 'The End of Suburbia'. It will tell you that as the world hits its energy peak the cost of fuel will always go up in the world market every time there is any kind of issue and barely go back down (as it has lately). They claim the cost of moving around in suburbia will get so expensive that the value of the suburban house will fall through the floor and ruin a lot of lives since most people put their life savings investing in their home assuming it will increase in value over time. http://www.endofsuburbia.com/ http://www.energycrisis.com/ While most people aren't using a pentium 1 to run a water sprinkler system, there are a countless amount of people using machines for things that aren't ideally power efficient. A lot of people using old PCs and Internet gateways in their home network and nothing else. This is a 24 hour PC running just to provide Internet where a basic Netgear home router 500ma device can do it just as well, (5volts * 0.5amp = 2.5watts), a lot of people use FreeBSD as a server in some way on a network and need to keep it somewhat up to date for security reasons this also means 24 hour running. Hmm - let's see now, where does this extra wasted power go? It is turned into heat. Which heats your house. Which means you do not have to run the furnace so much, thus saving energy there. So you spend more energy to run inefficient PC's and save energy in not running your furnace. Seems to me to be a wash, here. I should also point out that in many areas power is generated by wind. Here in the Pacific NW you can pay a bit extra on your power bill to have all your electricity come from wind if you want. If anyone on the list does not feel this way please feel free to send me your old PCs. Specifically, your old rack mounted servers with large SCSI arrays. I will take servers that are as old as Pentium II 500Mhz devices with 40GB or greater RAID 5 arrays. Compaq/HP and other name brands preferred. A lot of people on the FreeBSD mailing lists like the idea of getting rid of their clunky old PC routers and still using a good firewall like Packet Filter by using the MIPS based linksys WRT54G router that could run FreeBSD, while there is no port for this on FreeBSD the closest front for this would be NetBSD. At the ISP I work at we USED to recommend Linksys routers. Then we found that without exception they fail after about a year to two of continuous use. Therefore the person goes and buys another
Re: Status of 6.0 for production systems
On Nov 14, 2005, at 9:23 PM, Ted Mittelstaedt wrote: A lot of people wondered how Steve Jobs could dare change over to Intel chips. In Steve Jobs keynote speech announcing the big move Intel chips was just about entirely stated as because of the 'performance per watt ratio' of Intel CPUs. Check out the picture of the key note speech and look at the bottom of the picture with Intel and IBM's PowerPC processor. http://images.anandtech.com/reviews/tradeshows/2005/WWDC/ perfperwatt.jpg This is a bunch of whitewashing as anyone in the tech industry knows. Wrong. WHat jobs said was exactly correct Jobs changed over to Intel for two reasons. First, because Intel gave him a better price on the CPU's. This is also a consideration. Price always is/ However, the main reason was that the performance they needed at the wattage they needed (for laptops) was not on the horizon for PPC. The G5 can compete against the Intel desktop offerings but there was not a laptop G5 coming any time soon [because of energy dissipation) and the G4 for laptops was not cutting it. Second because doing this instantly obsoletes the older power PC macs thus pushing all the Mac users to fork over money for new software and hardware. Wrong. Conspiracy-Ted at it again. Chad --- Chad Leigh -- Shire.Net LLC Your Web App and Email hosting provider [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
RE: Status of 6.0 for production systems
-Original Message- From: Michael Vince [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, November 10, 2005 7:35 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cc: 'Ted Mittelstaedt'; freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Status of 6.0 for production systems Gayn Winters wrote: There are some things broken in 5.4 that are still broken in 6.0 with regards to support of older hardware. In particular the ida driver is a mess - EISA support in that was busted years ago, then 5.X busted support for more 'modern' systems like the Compaq 1600R HP DL series of systems are kind of a moving target anyway, unfortunately. For those sytems I still use 4.11 (in fact I just setup 2 new 4.11 production systems two days ago) However, 6.0 is a requirement for currently shipping hardware, in particular the Intel series of boxed server motherboards, if you want to use raid and sata drives, since Intel seems to like to change it's motherboard chipsets as fast as most people change their underpants. I'm actually building a 6.0 production server today. (5.4 and earlier will not recognize the disk array) It would be nice if we could get more support for SATA raid in the atacontrol program. Ted On the plus side, I've thrown a lot of hardware at FreeBSD with great success. On the other hand, FreeBSD's primary weakness seems to be the support of newer hardware. I suppose I shouldn't be surprised to hear of problems with older hardware as well, and Ted's solution of pairing older hardware with an older release seems reasonable if in fact one has the experience to support the older release. I prefer the idea of the FreeBSD team aiming at only the latest hardware, all I use is brand new server equipment. I don't like the idea that FreeBSD features and performance development could be hampered by the core guys trying to make stuff work on old hardware, This really isn't the issue. Drivers and their development are a different issue than internal kernel changes and such. The problem with breaking old hardware, illustrated by the ida0 driver example, is that the manufacturer (ie: Compaq) comes out with a newer intelligent controller and the documentation on that says it's backwards compatible so the older drivers will still work with it. Then we come to find out that this isn't true - so the driver author modifies the driver to work with the newer controller revision and is pretty sure that his mods won't hose up older controller support, but doesen't have an opportunity to test with it (either doesen't have the hardware or some other reason) in fact if it was a fact that a lot more performance and features could be in 6.x if they dropped support for everything below 1ghz for x86 I would be happy, I got a few older machines but they could go onto NetBSD since its a very similar OS as it has the same rc script system which FreeBSD imported from NetBSD to start with. Admittedly if Microsoft were trying to make Windows XP run well on a 486 it wouldn't be nearly as a likable OS it is today. That's not true either. If Microsoft were trying to make it work on a 486 it would run a lot better on bigger hardware because they would have to prune all the fat off it. Haven't you ever noticed with Windows that the user interface speed is still the same today, with brand new hardware, as it was 10 years ago on older versions of Windows? Try running Windows 98 one day on brand new hardware - it is almost a religious experience. Open a window and Bang - it's there, completely drawn in, so fast you can't even see it draw. THAT is how it's supposed to be. The problem is the stupid consumers don't understand that every year that they buy newer and faster hardware it just helps Microsoft to make their stuff slower. So they never get ahead. AMD64/EMT64 appears to be the mainstream high performance future and should get the most support, although some technologists are saying that Itanium is going to make a come back believe it or not, check out the latest anandtech article for example http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=2598 If theres some guy who uses a 386sx 25mhz to run his water gardening sprinkler system he should let go of demanding 6.x work on his system and just use what he needs such as 4.x 6.x will not boot on a 386, the math coprocessor emulator is not in the generic kernel anymore. And if he needs say the latest perl 6 to control his sprinkler system and its not available in 4.x any more then he should just use NetBSD, NetBSD is for all types of hardware and is a fine OS. That is not a FreeBSD issue, that is an issue with the Perl development team and what -they- choose to support. You frankly sound like you have never compiled anything from scratch. The entire point of scripts like 'configure' is to setup options so an application will compile on any OS version. In any case why possibly would you strip out support for compiling on an older BSD version from an application like Perl? Unless
Re: Status of 6.0 for production systems
Ted Mittelstaedt wrote: Admittedly if Microsoft were trying to make Windows XP run well on a 486 it wouldn't be nearly as a likable OS it is today. That's not true either. If Microsoft were trying to make it work on a 486 it would run a lot better on bigger hardware because they would have to prune all the fat off it. Haven't you ever noticed with Windows that the user interface speed is still the same today, with brand new hardware, as it was 10 years ago on older versions of Windows? Try running Windows 98 one day on brand new hardware - it is almost a religious experience. Open a window and Bang - it's there, completely drawn in, so fast you can't even see it draw. THAT is how it's supposed to be. The problem is the stupid consumers don't understand that every year that they buy newer and faster hardware it just helps Microsoft to make their stuff slower. So they never get ahead. Windows 98 is what made MS famous for instability and its not even a comparable OS in terms of stability of Windows XP. I believe most tech people have thought the same way in terms of every new versions of MS windows needs a faster PC, and it has a good side of MS as far as I am concerned because without the demand for faster CPUs to run MS Windows the CPU industry would still be sitting around Pentium 2 performance today. Its the same for the Internet if Gates had not put a 'get on the Internet now' icon on all those win95 and 98 during the pc boom days to trigger peoples interest the Internet it wouldn't be as cheap or as fast as it is for end consumers. And if web pages had been only made for dial up to keep modem users happy broadband wouldn't exist or be nearly as cheap. AMD64/EMT64 appears to be the mainstream high performance future and should get the most support, although some technologists are saying that Itanium is going to make a come back believe it or not, check out the latest anandtech article for example http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=2598 If theres some guy who uses a 386sx 25mhz to run his water gardening sprinkler system he should let go of demanding 6.x work on his system and just use what he needs such as 4.x 6.x will not boot on a 386, the math coprocessor emulator is not in the generic kernel anymore. I know I used it as an example. And if he needs say the latest perl 6 to control his sprinkler system and its not available in 4.x any more then he should just use NetBSD, NetBSD is for all types of hardware and is a fine OS. That is not a FreeBSD issue, that is an issue with the Perl development team and what -they- choose to support. You frankly sound like you have never compiled anything from scratch. I used it as another mere possible example in the future. ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Status of 6.0 for production systems
I prefer the idea of the FreeBSD team aiming at only the latest hardware, all I use is brand new server equipment. I don't like the idea that FreeBSD features and performance development could be hampered by the core guys trying to make stuff work on old hardware, in fact if it was a fact that a lot more performance and features could be in 6.x if they dropped support for everything below 1ghz for x86 I would be happy Supporting older hardware is not some bad decision made by core, it is a general design and philosophy point of not only FreeBSD, but unix and the community in general. That is a very selfish statement, and rather rediculous actually, that the tens of thousands of people running older hardware (example: Yahoo! - pentium of about half that speed serving hundreds of thousands of http requests per day) should upgrade to 1ghz machines because that's what you use. Even Windows runs on less than that. But you are always welcome to make your own version that supports only that. I said it in terms of an over the top example to maximize a trigger of thoughts in this area of topic, such as an example of movement as those more in the realms of what MS do with what their standard is in hardware support for modern operating systems, luckily I am just 'some guy' on the mailing list and have little what so ever say to what happens on FreeBSD. I don't believe its a very selfish statement at all. When I say get rid of old hardware the one of the largest flow of thoughts that go through my mind is the support future world energy needs. Most scientists tell you that there will be a world energy crisis sometime in the future and people should be prepared to pay money money for the energy they use. Its energy crisis web sites are all over the Internet. While some people fear a nuclear attack from terrorists or nuclear war in general if you want to fear a day of doom some people will tell you there is something even more terrifying and just as destructive coming our way, that is running out of cheap energy, hard to understand? I recommend to any one using a PC for the single use of a home gateway or using power in ways that aren't ideal but simply because energy is cheap simply because they can get away with it the get the DVD 'The End of Suburbia'. It will tell you that as the world hits its energy peak the cost of fuel will always go up in the world market every time there is any kind of issue and barely go back down (as it has lately). They claim the cost of moving around in suburbia will get so expensive that the value of the suburban house will fall through the floor and ruin a lot of lives since most people put their life savings investing in their home assuming it will increase in value over time. http://www.endofsuburbia.com/ http://www.energycrisis.com/ While most people aren't using a pentium 1 to run a water sprinkler system, there are a countless amount of people using machines for things that aren't ideally power efficient. A lot of people using old PCs and Internet gateways in their home network and nothing else. This is a 24 hour PC running just to provide Internet where a basic Netgear home router 500ma device can do it just as well, (5volts * 0.5amp = 2.5watts), a lot of people use FreeBSD as a server in some way on a network and need to keep it somewhat up to date for security reasons this also means 24 hour running. A lot of people on the FreeBSD mailing lists like the idea of getting rid of their clunky old PC routers and still using a good firewall like Packet Filter by using the MIPS based linksys WRT54G router that could run FreeBSD, while there is no port for this on FreeBSD the closest front for this would be NetBSD. Its really a case of the dark side of the force is clouds your vision. Most people who have a properly functioning conscious mind who setup a PC as nothing more then a gateway for a small band of traffic feel a bit of guilt when they do it while others are just ignorant or work under the theme of what they can get away with is OK. Lets just continue this line of thought, how about the rich and powerful nations go dropping barrels of nuclear waste out of airplanes on poor nations, this is something they could probably 'get away with' but its not right thing to do. A lot of people wondered how Steve Jobs could dare change over to Intel chips. In Steve Jobs keynote speech announcing the big move Intel chips was just about entirely stated as because of the 'performance per watt ratio' of Intel CPUs. Check out the picture of the key note speech and look at the bottom of the picture with Intel and IBM's PowerPC processor. http://images.anandtech.com/reviews/tradeshows/2005/WWDC/perfperwatt.jpg Big tech industry is trying to take some responsibility for people and Intel and AMD are already making it easier to build desktop systems using their mobile chips, check out more on Anandtech for that. If Yahoo are
Re: Status of 6.0 for production systems
On 11/11/05, Michael Vince [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Its the same for the Internet if Gates had not put a 'get on the Internet now' icon on all those win95 and 98 during the pc boom days to trigger peoples interest the Internet it wouldn't be as cheap or as fast as it is for end consumers. That's hilarious really. To mention that the internet was developed long before this on BSD systems probably isn't necessary. It also shouldn't be necessary for anyone who has followed the internet to mention Bill Gates' famous 1994 speech where he said that the internet was a play thing for researchers and academics and that Windows would never need to support TCP/IP. Next year (after someone obviously had a word in his ear) he basically said that Microsoft had just invented TCP/IP. Maybe this is where your confusion is coming from. And in the end I doubt that FreeBSD core team will be responsible for the end of the world lol. It's going a long way past reasonableness, and to answer it adequately would require a flame. Thus this will be my last post on this thread. ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Status of 6.0 for production systems
At 07:47 PM 11/11/2005, Michael Vince wrote: I prefer the idea of the FreeBSD team aiming at only the latest hardware, all I use is brand new server equipment. I don't like the idea that FreeBSD features and performance development could be hampered by the core guys trying to make stuff work on old hardware, in fact if it was a fact that a lot more performance and features could be in 6.x if they dropped support for everything below 1ghz for x86 I would be happy Supporting older hardware is not some bad decision made by core, it is a general design and philosophy point of not only FreeBSD, but unix and the community in general. That is a very selfish statement, and rather rediculous actually, that the tens of thousands of people running older hardware (example: Yahoo! - pentium of about half that speed serving hundreds of thousands of http requests per day) should upgrade to 1ghz machines because that's what you use. Even Windows runs on less than that. But you are always welcome to make your own version that supports only that. I said it in terms of an over the top example to maximize a trigger of thoughts in this area of topic, such as an example of movement as those more in the realms of what MS do with what their standard is in hardware support for modern operating systems, luckily I am just 'some guy' on the mailing list and have little what so ever say to what happens on FreeBSD. I don't believe its a very selfish statement at all. When I say get rid of old hardware the one of the largest flow of thoughts that go through my mind is the support future world energy needs. Most scientists tell you that there will be a world energy crisis sometime in the future and people should be prepared to pay money money for the energy they use. Its energy crisis web sites are all over the Internet. While some people fear a nuclear attack from terrorists or nuclear war in general if you want to fear a day of doom some people will tell you there is something even more terrifying and just as destructive coming our way, that is running out of cheap energy, hard to understand? I recommend to any one using a PC for the single use of a home gateway or using power in ways that aren't ideal but simply because energy is cheap simply because they can get away with it the get the DVD 'The End of Suburbia'. It will tell you that as the world hits its energy peak the cost of fuel will always go up in the world market every time there is any kind of issue and barely go back down (as it has lately). They claim the cost of moving around in suburbia will get so expensive that the value of the suburban house will fall through the floor and ruin a lot of lives since most people put their life savings investing in their home assuming it will increase in value over time. http://www.endofsuburbia.com/ http://www.energycrisis.com/ While most people aren't using a pentium 1 to run a water sprinkler system, there are a countless amount of people using machines for things that aren't ideally power efficient. A lot of people using old PCs and Internet gateways in their home network and nothing else. This is a 24 hour PC running just to provide Internet where a basic Netgear home router 500ma device can do it just as well, (5volts * 0.5amp = 2.5watts), a lot of people use FreeBSD as a server in some way on a network and need to keep it somewhat up to date for security reasons this also means 24 hour running. A lot of people on the FreeBSD mailing lists like the idea of getting rid of their clunky old PC routers and still using a good firewall like Packet Filter by using the MIPS based linksys WRT54G router that could run FreeBSD, while there is no port for this on FreeBSD the closest front for this would be NetBSD. So, it's better to buy a shiny new piece of low power equipment, than to use an older yet perfectly suitable piece of equipment that needs more power to operate? I wonder how long it would take for the additional power consumed by the older equipment to equal the amount of power it took to design, build, distribute and market the shiny new piece of low power equipment... the second law of thermodynamics comes to mind... Its really a case of the dark side of the force is clouds your vision. Most people who have a properly functioning conscious mind who setup a PC as nothing more then a gateway for a small band of traffic feel a bit of guilt when they do it while others are just ignorant or work under the theme of what they can get away with is OK. Lets just continue this line of thought, how about the rich and powerful nations go dropping barrels of nuclear waste out of airplanes on poor nations, this is something they could probably 'get away with' but its not right thing to do. A lot of people wondered how Steve Jobs could dare change over to Intel chips. In Steve Jobs keynote speech announcing the big move Intel chips was just about entirely stated as
Re: Status of 6.0 for production systems
On Wed, Nov 09, 2005 at 08:49:29PM -0500, Bob Johnson wrote: On 11/9/05, John Fox [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I remember back a while when 5.x had been recently released as STABLE and the conventional wisdom said not to use it in production until the 5.3 release. Is there any such conventional wisdom as regards 6.x? 5.0 introduced a lot of new features and replaced some major components, so the warning was that it would take longer than normal to reach a level of stability suitable for critical systems. As I understand it, 6.0 is primarily concentrating on improving some of the major stuff introduced in 5.x, and shouldn't take nearly as long to become a stable platform. Even so, conventional wisdom generally warns against using any X.0 release for critical applications, but that depends on your definition of critical and your level of tolerance for excitement. You really shouldn't think of 6.0 as like a usual .0 release, so handle with care, but more like 5.4 plus extra optimization and stability fixes. We spent nearly 6 months during the release cycle on stress-testing and fixing stability bugs, and that hard work resulted in a lot of fixes to long-standing bugs that have existed since FreeBSD 5.x. In addition to the improved stability, performance is much better than 5.4 in several areas. Naturally there may be some regressions, but in the average case 6.0 seems to be an outstanding release of FreeBSD no matter what version number you give it. Kris pgpduN8jGhILv.pgp Description: PGP signature
RE: Status of 6.0 for production systems
There are some things broken in 5.4 that are still broken in 6.0 with regards to support of older hardware. In particular the ida driver is a mess - EISA support in that was busted years ago, then 5.X busted support for more 'modern' systems like the Compaq 1600R HP DL series of systems are kind of a moving target anyway, unfortunately. For those sytems I still use 4.11 (in fact I just setup 2 new 4.11 production systems two days ago) However, 6.0 is a requirement for currently shipping hardware, in particular the Intel series of boxed server motherboards, if you want to use raid and sata drives, since Intel seems to like to change it's motherboard chipsets as fast as most people change their underpants. I'm actually building a 6.0 production server today. (5.4 and earlier will not recognize the disk array) It would be nice if we could get more support for SATA raid in the atacontrol program. Ted -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of John Fox Sent: Wednesday, November 09, 2005 5:23 PM To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Status of 6.0 for production systems I remember back a while when 5.x had been recently released as STABLE and the conventional wisdom said not to use it in production until the 5.3 release. Is there any such conventional wisdom as regards 6.x? Thanks, John -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] John Fox, Senior Systems Administrator InfoStructure - http://www.mind.net Vox: (541)773-5000 / Fax: (541)488-7599 ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- No virus found in this incoming message. Checked by AVG Free Edition. Version: 7.1.362 / Virus Database: 267.12.8/163 - Release Date: 11/8/2005 ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
RE: Status of 6.0 for production systems
There are some things broken in 5.4 that are still broken in 6.0 with regards to support of older hardware. In particular the ida driver is a mess - EISA support in that was busted years ago, then 5.X busted support for more 'modern' systems like the Compaq 1600R HP DL series of systems are kind of a moving target anyway, unfortunately. For those sytems I still use 4.11 (in fact I just setup 2 new 4.11 production systems two days ago) However, 6.0 is a requirement for currently shipping hardware, in particular the Intel series of boxed server motherboards, if you want to use raid and sata drives, since Intel seems to like to change it's motherboard chipsets as fast as most people change their underpants. I'm actually building a 6.0 production server today. (5.4 and earlier will not recognize the disk array) It would be nice if we could get more support for SATA raid in the atacontrol program. Ted On the plus side, I've thrown a lot of hardware at FreeBSD with great success. On the other hand, FreeBSD's primary weakness seems to be the support of newer hardware. I suppose I shouldn't be surprised to hear of problems with older hardware as well, and Ted's solution of pairing older hardware with an older release seems reasonable if in fact one has the experience to support the older release. (I don't, since I jumped to FreeBSD at release 5.1.) I recall sos@ complaining (well, at least mentioning) that his work on ata was hampered by a lack of hardware. I'm sure other developers that support drivers have the same problem. I've been wondering what could be done about this - at least for 6.0++. I assume we don't have enough volume to interest many hardware manufacturers into developing FreeBSD drivers for their hardware. BUT, do our driver developers get early access to specs and (if it would help) source code to other drivers? What would that take? Do we have relationships with hardware manufactures to get samples and prototypes for our driver developers? Or, do we simply have to wait and buy retail versions of the hardware? -gayn Bristol Systems Inc. 714/532-6776 www.bristolsystems.com ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Status of 6.0 for production systems
On Thu, Nov 10, 2005 at 03:14:25AM -0500, Kris Kennaway wrote: As I understand it, 6.0 is primarily concentrating on improving some of the major stuff introduced in 5.x, and shouldn't take nearly as long to become a stable platform. Even so, conventional wisdom generally warns against using any X.0 release for critical applications, but that depends on your definition of critical and your level of tolerance for excitement. You really shouldn't think of 6.0 as like a usual .0 release, so handle with care, but more like 5.4 plus extra optimization and stability fixes. We spent nearly 6 months during the release cycle on stress-testing and fixing stability bugs, and that hard work resulted in a lot of fixes to long-standing bugs that have existed since FreeBSD 5.x. In addition to the improved stability, performance is much better than 5.4 in several areas. Naturally there may be some regressions, but in the average case 6.0 seems to be an outstanding release of FreeBSD no matter what version number you give it. So ... I am genuinely curious ... if 6.0 is basically 5.4 plus improvements, why isn't it called 5.5? -danny -- http://dannyman.toldme.com/ ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Status of 6.0 for production systems
Danny Howard wrote: So ... I am genuinely curious ... if 6.0 is basically 5.4 plus improvements, why isn't it called 5.5? FreeBSD numbers releases based on compatibility, not based on features. You can take programs compiled for FreeBSD 5.3 (the first release from the 5-stable branch) and run them on FreeBSD 5.4 and know that they will all work; but if you want to run them on FreeBSD 6.0, you might need to recompile them. This is generally more of an issue for kernel modules than it is for applications, but the point remains: If binary interfaces change, the major number should change. Colin Percival ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Status of 6.0 for production systems
On Thu, Nov 10, 2005 at 10:10:28AM -0800, Colin Percival wrote: Danny Howard wrote: So ... I am genuinely curious ... if 6.0 is basically 5.4 plus improvements, why isn't it called 5.5? FreeBSD numbers releases based on compatibility, not based on features. You can take programs compiled for FreeBSD 5.3 (the first release from the 5-stable branch) and run them on FreeBSD 5.4 and know that they will all work; but if you want to run them on FreeBSD 6.0, you might need to recompile them. So, the 6.0 denotes some note-worthy realignment of the symbol table or such. Thank you for an excellent answer, Colin. Some of us were secretly worried that FreeBSD was catching a case of the Sun Marketing. :) Cheers, -danny -- http://dannyman.toldme.com/ ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Status of 6.0 for production systems
Danny Howard wrote: So, the 6.0 denotes some note-worthy realignment of the symbol table or such. Thank you for an excellent answer, Colin. Some of us were secretly worried that FreeBSD was catching a case of the Sun Marketing. :) If we were suffering from versionitis, we would have released FreeBSD 10.6.0, with FreeBSD 10.6.1, 10.6.2, and 10.6.3 to follow over the next year. :-) Colin Percival ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Status of 6.0 for production systems
On Thu, Nov 10, 2005 at 10:00:48AM -0800, Danny Howard wrote: On Thu, Nov 10, 2005 at 03:14:25AM -0500, Kris Kennaway wrote: As I understand it, 6.0 is primarily concentrating on improving some of the major stuff introduced in 5.x, and shouldn't take nearly as long to become a stable platform. Even so, conventional wisdom generally warns against using any X.0 release for critical applications, but that depends on your definition of critical and your level of tolerance for excitement. You really shouldn't think of 6.0 as like a usual .0 release, so handle with care, but more like 5.4 plus extra optimization and stability fixes. We spent nearly 6 months during the release cycle on stress-testing and fixing stability bugs, and that hard work resulted in a lot of fixes to long-standing bugs that have existed since FreeBSD 5.x. In addition to the improved stability, performance is much better than 5.4 in several areas. Naturally there may be some regressions, but in the average case 6.0 seems to be an outstanding release of FreeBSD no matter what version number you give it. So ... I am genuinely curious ... if 6.0 is basically 5.4 plus improvements, why isn't it called 5.5? Because under the hood there are a few large changes to support the performance optimizations (e.g. VFS locking), and some that break compatibility. FreeBSD tries to keep compatibility of interfaces within a -STABLE branch, so if we called it 5.5 we'd have broken that rule. Kris pgp7DHI6pNl9h.pgp Description: PGP signature
RE: Status of 6.0 for production systems
-Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of Gayn Winters Sent: Thursday, November 10, 2005 8:03 AM To: 'Ted Mittelstaedt'; freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: RE: Status of 6.0 for production systems There are some things broken in 5.4 that are still broken in 6.0 with regards to support of older hardware. In particular the ida driver is a mess - EISA support in that was busted years ago, then 5.X busted support for more 'modern' systems like the Compaq 1600R HP DL series of systems are kind of a moving target anyway, unfortunately. For those sytems I still use 4.11 (in fact I just setup 2 new 4.11 production systems two days ago) However, 6.0 is a requirement for currently shipping hardware, in particular the Intel series of boxed server motherboards, if you want to use raid and sata drives, since Intel seems to like to change it's motherboard chipsets as fast as most people change their underpants. I'm actually building a 6.0 production server today. (5.4 and earlier will not recognize the disk array) It would be nice if we could get more support for SATA raid in the atacontrol program. Ted On the plus side, I've thrown a lot of hardware at FreeBSD with great success. On the other hand, FreeBSD's primary weakness seems to be the support of newer hardware. I suppose I shouldn't be surprised to hear of problems with older hardware as well, and Ted's solution of pairing older hardware with an older release seems reasonable if in fact one has the experience to support the older release. (I don't, since I jumped to FreeBSD at release 5.1.) I recall sos@ complaining (well, at least mentioning) that his work on ata was hampered by a lack of hardware. I'm sure other developers that support drivers have the same problem. I've been wondering what could be done about this - at least for 6.0++. More lack of access to hardware - he doesen't need to have the hardware in possession to work on this stuff. If you setup a system with for example a dodgy controller in it, on the Internet that he can get at, that would probably work just as well or even better. I assume we don't have enough volume to interest many hardware manufacturers into developing FreeBSD drivers for their hardware. BUT, do our driver developers get early access to specs and (if it would help) source code to other drivers? What would that take? Do we have relationships with hardware manufactures to get samples and prototypes for our driver developers? Or, do we simply have to wait and buy retail versions of the hardware? Most companies that do not make programming info available to the public on a website or some such, want you to sign an NDA which kills chances of developing open source drivers for the hardware. For example Nvidia. My experience in getting eval gear is usually if the manufacture does have an eval program, they run it through a reseller, and resellers aren't interested in anything that doesen't create money for them. So if your a big company with an existing relationship with a reseller and you have bought a lot of gear previously, the reseller will take the time to process the paperwork to get you eval copies of things. Otherwise if your a nobody to the reseller, you call them and they never call you back. The real problem I am afraid is that not many people go out and buy brand new hardware specifically to run FreeBSD. They go out and buy brand new hardware to run the latest bloated version of Windows, then they take last years' hardware that was running Windows perfectly fine until the next version of Windows came out, and want to use it for FreeBSD and then bitch when drivers aren't available. The solution is getting the people who write RFP's for a living for new hardware, to include FreeBSD as a mandatory operating system that the hardware must be compatible with, even though the intended use of the hardware is Windows. This requires people to plan for the future which is of course, rather difficult. Ted -gayn Bristol Systems Inc. 714/532-6776 www.bristolsystems.com ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- No virus found in this incoming message. Checked by AVG Free Edition. Version: 7.1.362 / Virus Database: 267.12.8/165 - Release Date: 11/9/2005 ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Status of 6.0 for production systems
Gayn Winters wrote: There are some things broken in 5.4 that are still broken in 6.0 with regards to support of older hardware. In particular the ida driver is a mess - EISA support in that was busted years ago, then 5.X busted support for more 'modern' systems like the Compaq 1600R HP DL series of systems are kind of a moving target anyway, unfortunately. For those sytems I still use 4.11 (in fact I just setup 2 new 4.11 production systems two days ago) However, 6.0 is a requirement for currently shipping hardware, in particular the Intel series of boxed server motherboards, if you want to use raid and sata drives, since Intel seems to like to change it's motherboard chipsets as fast as most people change their underpants. I'm actually building a 6.0 production server today. (5.4 and earlier will not recognize the disk array) It would be nice if we could get more support for SATA raid in the atacontrol program. Ted On the plus side, I've thrown a lot of hardware at FreeBSD with great success. On the other hand, FreeBSD's primary weakness seems to be the support of newer hardware. I suppose I shouldn't be surprised to hear of problems with older hardware as well, and Ted's solution of pairing older hardware with an older release seems reasonable if in fact one has the experience to support the older release. I prefer the idea of the FreeBSD team aiming at only the latest hardware, all I use is brand new server equipment. I don't like the idea that FreeBSD features and performance development could be hampered by the core guys trying to make stuff work on old hardware, in fact if it was a fact that a lot more performance and features could be in 6.x if they dropped support for everything below 1ghz for x86 I would be happy, I got a few older machines but they could go onto NetBSD since its a very similar OS as it has the same rc script system which FreeBSD imported from NetBSD to start with. Admittedly if Microsoft were trying to make Windows XP run well on a 486 it wouldn't be nearly as a likable OS it is today. AMD64/EMT64 appears to be the mainstream high performance future and should get the most support, although some technologists are saying that Itanium is going to make a come back believe it or not, check out the latest anandtech article for example http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=2598 If theres some guy who uses a 386sx 25mhz to run his water gardening sprinkler system he should let go of demanding 6.x work on his system and just use what he needs such as 4.x And if he needs say the latest perl 6 to control his sprinkler system and its not available in 4.x any more then he should just use NetBSD, NetBSD is for all types of hardware and is a fine OS. ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Status of 6.0 for production systems
On Fri, Nov 11, 2005 at 02:35:16PM +1100, Michael Vince wrote: Gayn Winters wrote: I prefer the idea of the FreeBSD team aiming at only the latest hardware, all I use is brand new server equipment. I don't like the idea that FreeBSD features and performance development could be hampered by the core guys trying to make stuff work on old hardware, in fact if it was a fact that a lot more performance and features could be in 6.x if they dropped support for everything below 1ghz for x86 I would be happy, I got a few older machines but they could go onto NetBSD since its a very similar OS as it has the same rc script system which FreeBSD imported from NetBSD to start with. I would have to disagree strongly with this. I'v got about 50 PII machines deployed running FreeBSD 4/5, and I'd really hate to migrate to another BSD, just because ome one wanted to try to optimize for the latest gee whiz hardware. -- U.S. Encouraged by Vietnam Vote - Officials Cite 83% Turnout Despite Vietcong Terror - New York Times 9/3/1967 ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Status of 6.0 for production systems
On Fri, Nov 11, 2005 at 02:35:16PM +1100, Michael Vince wrote: I don't like the idea that FreeBSD features and performance development could be hampered by the core guys trying to make stuff work on old hardware, in fact if it was a fact that a lot more performance and features could be in 6.x if they dropped support for everything below 1ghz for x86 I would be happy, I got a few older machines but they could go onto NetBSD since its a very similar OS as it has the same rc script system which FreeBSD imported from NetBSD to start with. It's not a matter of deliberate choice, but that a) Docs for new hardware are often hard to come by (and sometimes impossible) b) It takes time and effort for someone to add support for new hardware, whereas support for old hardware is usually easier to maintain. Kris pgpSbqHjtc6m2.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: Status of 6.0 for production systems
On Wed, Nov 09, 2005 at 05:23:13PM -0800, John Fox wrote: I remember back a while when 5.x had been recently released as STABLE and the conventional wisdom said not to use it in production until the 5.3 release. Is there any such conventional wisdom as regards 6.x? FreeBSD 6.0 is the most stable .0 release ever, and more stable than 5.4 in general (although of course you may encounter a bug). Kris pgpCRCnDbbw2d.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: Status of 6.0 for production systems
On 11/9/05, John Fox [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I remember back a while when 5.x had been recently released as STABLE and the conventional wisdom said not to use it in production until the 5.3 release. Is there any such conventional wisdom as regards 6.x? 5.0 introduced a lot of new features and replaced some major components, so the warning was that it would take longer than normal to reach a level of stability suitable for critical systems. As I understand it, 6.0 is primarily concentrating on improving some of the major stuff introduced in 5.x, and shouldn't take nearly as long to become a stable platform. Even so, conventional wisdom generally warns against using any X.0 release for critical applications, but that depends on your definition of critical and your level of tolerance for excitement. IIRC, the release announcement had something to say on the topic, too. - Bob ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
