--- Matthew Dillon <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Er. Well, if I were talking about today I > would be talking about today. > I'm talking about the near-future, 2-3 > years from now. It would be the > height of stupidity to have programming > goals that only satisfy the > needs of today. It might be the "height of stupidity", but it takes 2-3 years to convince people that you have something worth using, even if you have something great, so are you prepared to wait 4-5 to have a mainstream O/S? Once you get the groundwork done, you should ramp up to be production quality so you can get some noteworthy people using the O/S in real-world servers. Then you can keep it stable and work in your roadmap. We're approaching a critical point where a lot of companies are going to start looking to move into MP who haven't been there before. Saying you'll have something really great in 2 years isn't going to get people involved with the project. Your project will move ahead at an exponential pace once you get more funding and more important people working on it. You can't do that with an OS that can't be used by anyone with the money to contribute. You're thinking like an engineer, and not a marketeer. Its sort of like a kid going to college part-time trying to pay as he goes, earning $10/hr, while he could borrow the money and pay it off by making $50. an hour by graduating earlier. Its a backwards approach to product development. > > In 2-3 years single-core cpus will be > relegated to niche status. You > won't be able *BUY* Intel or AMD > single-core's at all for general purpose > computers. It won't matter a bit whether > the average consumer is able > use the extra computing power, it will be > there anyway because it doesn't > cost Intel or AMD any more to build it > verses building single-core cpu's, > it doesn't eat any more power either (in > fact, it eats less, for more > aggregate computing power). So regardless > of what you believe the > future is quite clearly going to become > permanently multi-core. > > In anycase, it's a mistake to assume that > the extra computing power > is wasted just because you can't think of > anything that can use it > right now. That mentality is what caused > Bill Gates to make the statement > that no computer would ever need more then > 640KB of memory. Nobody is saying that it can't be used, I'm just saying its not worth the $$$ today because the marginal cost of the hardware can't be utilized by the O/S and the applications that most use. So why buy MP today? Surely it makes sense to begin developing O/S applications (which is what I need to do), however I need an OS that is production ready, even if its not as good as its going to be, because I can't reasonably test the performance of an application on an OS that can't handle production loads. > > There are plenty of applications both > existing and on the horizon that > would be easily be able to use the > additional computing power. Even on a > fast machine today SSH can still only > encrypt at a 25-40MB/sec rate. > Filesystems such as ZFS are far more > computationally expensive then > what we use today, but what you get for > that price is an unbelievable > level of stability and redundancy. > Photo-processing? It takes my > fastest box 4 hours to run through the > fixups for one trip's worth of > photos. Since that workload is primarily > userland, it only takes > 2 hours on my dual-core box. Encryption, > Graphics, Photo-processing, > Database operations. Well I'm talking about servers here, because thats where the big $$$ are. With photoshop you're talking about saving some seconds here and there. Maybe productivity but most people do multiple things at once so its not really clear that being able to do something in 2 seconds instead of 5 matters. We're not talking floppy disks vs scsi raid here. The big picture issue is capacity. I don't really care if my server has 2ms or 4ms latency, I want it to be able to handle the load without barfing. At gigabit speeds filtering devices (like firewalls, soft routers, bandwidth management boxes) are pushing the envelope now. They can't relinquish capacity in order to have a smoother feel to the user interface. The capacity has to at LEAST be the same, or very close. DT __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com