IBM, SCO - hammer the law, hammer the facts, hammer the table

SCO releases new open letter on GPL

Here in the colonies is this lawyerly saying "If you have the law, hammer the law. If you have the facts, hammer the facts. If you have neither the law nor the facts, hammer the table".

However, in hammering the table Darl is presenting IBM and Red Hat with fodder for their case when they cross examine him.

IBM lawyer: "Your Honor, I offer here into evidence a letter written by Mr. McBride dated 04 DEcember 2003 titled "'An Open Letter'"

IBM lawyer continued: "Now, Mr. McBride, are you saying that as an American you do not have the constitutional freedom to donate your privately owned goods and services? Or that you do not have the constitutional right to attach conditions when you donate your privately owned goods and services?"

How far will that get him?

Henry K

Do Intel domain names spell doom for Itanic?

Hello

I was looking for registered domain names

Pentium
www.pentium.com
www.pentium2.com
www.pentium3.com
www.pentium4.com
www.pentium5.com
www.pentium6.com

Owner = Intel Corporation

So the future looks bright for Intel PentiumX :-)

(www.pentium7.com is something else....)

Itanic
www.itanium.com => Intel
www.itanium2.com => for sale for 250$
www.itanium3.com => available !

Horst G

Celerons: an Intel Fan Boy writes

"Intel Celerons roasted on open fire for poor performance"

Here's a GREAT rebuttal to that ridiculous article http://www.overclockers.com/tips00497/

At Anandtech

http://www.anandtech.com/cpu/showdoc.html?i=1927

Did anyone ask how this flawless execution has managed to produce two delays already, dropping 90 nm products from AMD's schedule of H2 2003 to H2 2004?

Maybe AMD considers that "flawless ?

Paul R. Engel

George W. Bush

Keep in mind, the Democratic party are the fools that said G.W. Bush is stupid and AL GORE is a brilliant scholar. Upon closer inspection though, Bush graduated Yale with good enough grades to continue on with a Harvard MBA. As you know, graduate studies require maintaining a B average.

AL GORE on the other hand, barely passed undergraduate studies due to a love for living in a drugged-up stupor. Then he not only flunked Law school, but, went on to flunk out of DIVINITY school! How the hell do you flunk DIVINITY school?? You read one book, the bible, then you do a book report! YEA! This is what American politics has become.

Howard Rennerfeldt

Microsoft has licence to Chipkill

A very interesting piece on Microsoft moving in for licensing fees on processors. It made me think why they choose IBM for the XBox besides the fact that it may be the most competitive option in the console game. IBM still has a big influence, name recognition and respect w/ the corporate industry and the mainstream public. If they could hook them in where IBM made enough cashola w/ MS in the console market (& set-top boxes which is bound to grow dramatically) what kind of influence could they have w/ IBM?

This could take a great deal of $$$ for IBM is no small calf. But as of right now IBM is the biggest influence to put Linux on the desktop. MS needs more cash influx. Although they are huge a static Co. is no good to its shareholders. They are fighting for the next frontiers in China and the like as we speak but they will need more and can't afford to lose what they have.

Will IBM fall into the influence of MS?

Argis

Threat: Adverts are getting Annoying

Can't see some of the stories, intel adverts are covering part of the text. Gartner bangs Microsoft drum again article.

It's probably an ie 6 problem, and I use my own font size/style (because some websites have insanely small text, and no I don't even use/need glasses), but still this is new to me, for this site.

Been reading the Inq since sometime in 99(?) or whenever the split with the reg happened...sort of regularly.

Hope this is fixed. I'll check back in a week. If not....

Rob

Build a PC for Yuletide

Dear Arron,

Nice article, however one little point is a bit messy: you recommend SATA drives and say that people can easily skip the floppy drive. That's the fun I've done, too. So to skip the whole story here is the morale: Windows XP install (SP1) doesn't recognise the Silicon Image S-ATA controller / present on many boards - maybe this is the case with the other types, too/. You think you can get away with the driver CD shipped with the motherboard? Nope. At least I could only get the installer to load it from a floppy.

On Linux the same surprise emerges, as the installers of the new distros try to mimic Windows as much as possible. In my case Debian started the same stupid thing by asking for a driver on a floppy. However if you are not afraid to switch to another console, you can get away without a floppy disk drive - I do not have experience with other distros, so things can be better there. Oh yes, new kernels should have this support out of the box, so if your distro's installer comes with one of these, you might be lucky - in mine there were other options, but all of them hung at boot:(

If you might want to raid them, the story is much more worse, as the Medley raid implementation in the 2.4.22 kernel is broken, but I realize I am getting too far away with this.

Bottom line: keep a P-ATA drive or get the floppy drive from the attic (optionally form the old computer at least for the install) or you might not pass the install, and if you are going to do this under the Christmas tree you will be fairly disappointed for that night.

Yours,
Szenthe, Laszlo

Sun Arise, early in the Moaning

The statement of SUN regarding availability of mid-range and highend Servers based on the Opteron Processor is clear. They will become available, as market requires. But why would one want one? AMD has done an incredible job with its 64bit processor line, but there are reasons, why I don't think, they will threaten the existence of the SPARC archichtecture (or the UltraSPARC implementation). First of all, there is scalability. Take a random benchmark and compare a 2-way Opteron system against a similar 1-way system. It won't scale by 100% (which isn't great news). It will scale around 85 to 90 percent (maybe a bit higher or lower in some very extreme tests).

Take an UltraSPARC or a SPARC64 and compare it. You will find, they scale a lot better, around 92% bottom line, up to 99% in some tests. Inofficial SUN numbers say, performance of a 32 Processor Sun Fire loses around one processor. this would be like around 97% scale, in a performance segment, where AMD has yet to get. As You perhaps know, You can't put arbitrarily many Opterons in a parallel shared memory system, without the help of a chipset (I have the number of 16 processors in mind, but this could be wrong).

So how will AMD scale beyond this point? No one know, no one has even tried at this point and therefore, AMD has to proof its stability at that point (rumors tell, AMD asked for assistance of Sun for this one).

There's a second argument. Look at the time it took AMD to switch from Athlon to Opteron core. So, when will the next step of AMD technology arrive? Ok, we're likely to see 90nm SOI Opterons real soon, but what about multithreaded Opterons? Multiple Chip on a die? Inventions, we don't know about, yet? Sun has (in)officially announced its next generation UltraSPARC IV real soon. Think about a timespan of one and a half year or less. Then You'll at least have a multithreaded CPU, multiple CPU per die are about to appear not so far in the future.

And then, there's money. Sun, although not quite up to its old results has still more than 5.5 billion dollars in cash. So they don't have to get nervous when spending an awful amount of money for research, while AMD seems to run into real trouble, if they can't get into the blacks real soon. Will they cut into development costs at that point?

Maybe. They haven't done in the past. Last idea to think about. Who needs compatibility to 32bit Application at that customer level? Whoever uses these new Sun Boxes is likely to order them with Solaris x86-64 (or else, there's not much point in buying a Sun). Where will those customers come from? When they come from an out-of-Solaris world, they will have to recompile their programs anyway. So there's not much difference in compiling them for Solaris/SPARC or Solaris/x86.

AMDs 32bit compatibility won't yield much at that point.

Talking about Linux customers, Sun never made any secret out of the fact, it doesn't like Linux. They ship and support it due to customer demand, but not out of the same commitment, for example IBM does. So, why would a Linux customer order a Sun Box?

Best regards,
Jonathan Schmitt

Memory Manufacturers and Microsoft

Dear Inq

In your article Microsoft to gouge for flash memory FAT licenses you said at the end that flash memory manufacturers might be pushed by Microsoft's demand for licensing fees to another OS, "Or even IBM PC DOS, which is still its own entity." Unless my memory of the BW (before Windows) age is failing me, IBM's PC DOS uses the FAT system. So how would going to that avoid the IP issue about the FAT file system?

Isn't this really a matter of the file system, regardless of and unconnected to any operating system, except that the file system must be accessible to the operating system of any computer trying to read/write memory contents? Choice of the FAT file system stems from its wide OS compatibility, being accessible by DOS, Windows, Linux, and probably even Mac OSes. Using a Linux file system like EX2 would cut off operation with probably all but Linux operating systems, because, to my knowledge, the ubiquitous Windows does not read EX2. Of course, flash memory manufacturers could develop their own file system, similar to what has evolved with CDs and DVDs (and then maybe even charge Microsoft licensing fees to add compatibility to its Windows systems).

It's a puzzling, if not amusing, situation, and it will be fun to see how it plays out (shades of RAMBUS!). I am counting on The Inquirer to keep me abreast of the situation. Thanks...

Fred Yontz

Sun customers nervous about Opteron?

Matthew Wilkins wonders whether Sun's enterprise customers might be "getting a little nervous" about the forthcoming Opteron systems and whether the move might mean a change in its long term strategy.

Speaking as one, no, we are not. It may do, but so what? Few sane customers give a damn about the underlying CPU, provided that it delivers the reliability and performance they want.

Provided that Sun manage the situation properly, we don't mind which of several strategies they adopt. Opteron only for the low end until they see how it goes? Fine. Both architectures in parallel? Fine. All change for Opteron, over 5+ years and with migration plans? Fine.

Yes, it is a risky move, but the risk is manageable. The only real danger to Sun is if they fail to adopt a coherent strategy for the 5-10 year timescale.

Name supplied

SCO a dear, a lawsuit dear

Dear Mike,

I would only make one minor correction to this piece you have published today:

SCO is no longer a software firm, but a publicly traded lawsuit. :-)

Regards,

Paul