October 24th, 2009

What Windows7 could mean for Linux

Posted by Paul Murphy @ 12:15 am

Categories: Apple, Applications, Development, Linux

Tags: Marketing, OpenBSD, Microsoft Corp., Linux, Operating Systems, UNIX, Open Source, Software, Paul Murphy

I’ve had people using Windows 7 for about three months now, and everything about it so far seems to confirm my first impression that it’s a lot better than Vista: effectively reprising the consolidation and debugging Windows 98 offered over 95.

Once you get past the sheer shock of using a Microsoft OS that doesn’t fail daily, however, you start to fret about the things that aren’t there: as a Mac/Solaris user, for example, I find the absence of multi-screen capabilities and the relative inflexibility of working panes and icons extremely frustrating. Still it is usable; and that’s a long step forward - at least until you get to development work.

Then the frustrations set in: Visual Studio is very slick, but very limited. Specifically, it’s great if your application is going to use a super-computer desktop as a graphics terminal but pretty much counter-productive if you want to sidestep client-server and produce genuinely integrated multi-host applications.

So why? Well, mainly because Microsoft’s inability to transcend its own 90s focus on helping its sales force make money selling client-server into businesses has left the whole .net thing Microsoft promised to integrate into Longhorn and its successors implemented, along with the promised PICK-like file system and security conscious display frameworks, only in marketing documentation.

Organizational disfunction aside, I think the key technical reason for this has been that getting those things done within the underlying memory and process management paradigm Windows NT+ inherited from VMS has proven, if not actually impossible, at least too hard for Microsoft to make a commercial success of.

So now it wants to sell cloud computing and applications rentals but doesn’t have the OS foundation on which the development of these products has to rest - and that’s going to force Microsoft into a build or buy decision.

They’ve been trying to build a network based, vaguely Unix like, OS for PowerPC for about six years now -with no success to speak of, so my guess is that the build exponents will eventually lose the argument - leaving Microsoft with three mutually exclusive choices:

1. get there through a licensing deal with Apple;

2. do it by adopting and extending OpenBSD; or,
3. do it by adopting and extending Linux.

Each approach has pluses and minuses: the Apple approach would cost the most upfront, but drop a leading competitor out of Microsoft’s desktop markets; the OpenBSD approach combines low cost with a high quality code base and a well deserved reputation for security; and the Linux approach capitalizes on the breadth and capabilities of its community while threatening IBM.

You’d think Microsoft could do the Apple deal at the drop of a phone call to Mr. Jobs - who clearly wants to be out of the traditional PC business anyway - but my guess is that the emotional barriers to rational behavior on this will prevent that phone call.

If it comes to shootout between the OpenBSD and Linux options I suspect Microsoft’s techies will line up favoring OpenBSD as offering the stronger foundation for all the neat stuff they dream of doing, while all the marketing types will favor Linux - and in that company marketing trumps technology every time.

So the bottom line for Linux on Windows may be simple: Windows7 is probably Microsoft’s best OS yet and will therefore slow the move the Linux in the short term, but the limitations built into Microsoft’s development stack show it to be a dead end that will leave Microsoft marketing magnificent visions of its unfolding future while quietly figuring out how and when to abandon that code base for something else - and because that something could very logically be Linux it might be time for the Linux community to start paying a lot more attention to legacy interoperability with Windows.

September 26th, 2009

Linux as Wintel parasite

Posted by Paul Murphy @ 12:15 am

Categories: Apple, Development, Enterprise Policy, General, Linux, Linux Desktop OS, Sun

Tags: Wintel, Register, Linux, UNIX, Open Source, Operating Systems, Software, Paul Murphy

Last week Linus Torvalds told a seminar group at Portland’s LinuxCon that Linux is getting a little bloated - a consequence of the big blob kernel architecture required by his decision to prefer the efficiency of directly using x86 interrupts to the much more hardware independent architecture Tannenbaum developed Minix to teach.

Sun blogger Joerg Moellenkamp said something particularly interesting about this:

Of course it’s a nice sign of success, when people port more and more stuff to an operating environment and into the kernel. Perhaps this is the price of success. But at foremost it’s a problem. Bloat isn’t just about using more memory, it’s about speed as well.

The Register delivers another interesting piece of information:

Citing an internal Intel study that tracked kernel releases, Bottomley said Linux performance had dropped about two per centage points at every release, for a cumulative drop of about 12 per cent over the last ten releases.

…

Should they rearchitect Linux for the future (the SunOS/Solaris moment for the Linux community). And as refactoring, optimization and rearchitecting are tedious and boring tasks: Who will do it? I think, the next few years will be interesting ones for Linux.

Another speaker at the same event, IBM’s Bob Sutter, really needs to spend a few minutes looking at the history of his own company’s VM product line, but other than that came up with another absolute shocker: Linux won’t succeed on the desktop, he said, unless it creates a unique Linux desktop - or, in translation, that Linux can’t lead by following.

Personally I think that the SuSe business desktop does lead Microsoft in some areas, but, of course, Mr. Sutter wants to sell cloud computing - and so does Eric Mandel, CEO of a company called Blackmesh, providing managed Linux hosting services. He does a very sad and funny presentation on doing what they did: implementing a couple of open source deployment tools (Puppet and Cobbler) to make it fairly easy to configure and deploy Linux server/application combinations. This can be very important in their business, but I thought the retrograde nature of both the solution and its markets unhappily captured the essence of Linux today.

Basically he’s using an open source evolution of the old Jumpstart stuff to provision gear for customers who haven’t figured out yet that letting other people control both their data and their most critical business infrastructure is a recipe for coming to a quick and unhappy end. Cool stuff, for five years ago - but completely obsoleted for customers by today’s cost/risk trade-offs in doing it themselves and for techies by Solaris zones.

When you look at this kind of thing the contrast with BSD could hardly be greater. That group’s focus, despite their many divergences and disagreements, is always on better, faster, smaller - and Apple’s posture as the anti-IBM in personal computing carries over to its relationship with the BSD community: it’s the world’s biggest producer of Unix personal computers, but it doesn’t try to direct BSD research and it hasn’t tried to build services revenues on its own limitations.

Mr. Torvalds set out to build a “free Unix for the 386″ and succeeded brilliantly in doing so - but both its internal architecture and its market success depend on the peculiar dynamics of the wintel market in which x86 forms the common ground between the huge majority using Microsoft software and a rebel group looking for something to call its own.

Thus looking at it as an outsider, I’d say that much of what made headlines at Linuxcon 2009 was in one way or the other about the chickens associated with the reinvention of old technologies for commercial gain starting homeward -with all of it demonstrating that if the Linux community didn’t have Microsoft both to be against and to prop up their shared x86 foundations, it’d wouldn’t exist.

And that’s sad - but not irretrievable because at this point it’s fundamentally a leadership failure, not a community failure, and therefore something that could be changed.

August 22nd, 2009

Save money: buy from the enemy

Posted by Paul Murphy @ 12:15 am

Categories: Apple, Enterprise Policy, General, Hardware, Linux, Sun

Tags: Car, Dell Computer Corp., Sun Microsystems Inc., Apple Inc., Sun Sparc, Sun Solaris, Processors, Servers, Operating Systems, Software

When Spain opened its passenger vehicle markets to competition on entering the EU, the average new car price fell by about 20%, while the Obama cash for clunkers program, by reducing the availability of used cars, is expected to add about 3% to the value of the average used car still on the market - and significantly more for SUVs.

Those are obvious macro effects of competition. In IT there are similar effects: it’s competition that drives the innovation that drives the cost part of what we see as the operation of Moore’s law: Intel didn’t choose to produce the “nehalem” technologies because it wanted to sell faster processors for less, it got forced into doing this because AMD was eating away at its mindshare within the x86 community and both PPC and SPARC offered more for less beyond it.

As a result of competitive pressure a February 2009 TPC C result posted by Dell shows a per transaction (i.e. per “bang”) cost of just $0.60 compared to the $1.53 the same transaction cost according to a Dell report dated about five years (12/10/04) earlier - a gain of 2.55 times in bang for the buck.

It works the other way too. When Apple dropped the PPC for use in its traditional computer products processor competition declined: in 2002 Apple’s laptops were faster and cheaper than their (comparably equipped) PC counterparts, but today’s Apple laptop is physically indistinguishable from the PC equivalent - and costs more.

IBM has a closed mainframe market and its true believers are almost completely impervious to competitor appeal: thus a 3096 cost $4.5 million in 1982 while today’s version runs about $12.5 million -a larger jump than you’d expect from the consumer price index which grew by only 2.3 times over the period.

I get a fair amount of mail from nitwits rejoicing in what they see as they death of Sun - and particularly of the SPARC/Solaris combination. I don’t know what drives people to hate like that, but here’s a free bit of advice to everybody else: if SPARC/Solaris dies, you can expect to pay far more for your future x86 products than you will if Sun/Oracle gets it together and pushes these technologies as fast and as far as they will go.

Take away competitive pressure from the SPARC/Solaris combination and the rate of price/performance improvement for both wintel and lintel will decrease - imagine that it falls by only 20% (wildly optimistic, in my opinion) and your 2014 cost per “bang” will fall to only $0.29 instead of the $0.23 it’s headed for now. Six cents per “bang” - doesn’t sound like much, does it? The Dell that delivered the $0.60 I mentioned earlier produced 104,492 “bangs” - and that six cents works out to $6,270 for the system.

For you and me that difference won’t amount to much - perhaps a few thousand bucks we could otherwise spend on something else. For big players, however, this can add up to real money real fast - so much, and so fast that people making decisions for thousands of servers every year should be thinking that maybe the best way to get price breaks from the monopoly of their choice over the next few years might be to call their Sun/Oracle representative right now and talk about placing some serious orders.

August 8th, 2009

The! meaning! of! bing!

Posted by Paul Murphy @ 12:15 am

Categories: Apple, Applications, Database Management, Enterprise Policy, General, Strategy

Tags: Dell Computer Corp., Hewlett-Packard Co., Oracle Corp., Information Technology, Sun Microsystems Inc., Microsoft Corp., IBM Corp., Sales Strategy, Strategy, Sales Force Management

On the surface the bing/yahoo deal carries a simple technical message: unstructured search has finally defeated structured search. Less obviously, however, the real meaning of the deal may be financial.

IBM, Sun/Oracle, and Apple are all integrated businesses selling hardware, software, and IT services to customers worldwide. IBM and Sun/Oracle are direct competitors in commercial IT, while Apple sells from a unique consumer communications perspective, but each develops IT and related technology for its own markets and offers its customers everything from career support to systems that work.

In comparison the HP/Dell/MS/Intel grouping is a strategic mess. Between them they cover the same markets the other three do, but no single player dominates; the people they depend on for sales are aging; competition from outside the group is fierce; and technically they’re not in the game with the other three.

So what to do? HP has succeeded in becoming Compaq; but, like the original, they’re hurt by their lack of OS, application, and engineering control. Meanwhile, Dell is just a house branded reseller, Intel continues its long and proud history of popularizing AMD technologies; and Microsoft is constrained by its organizational inability to transcend its own x86 programming and sales models.

To succeed against IBM and Sun/Oracle the Wintel group need more than mere momentum; it needs tighter integration, and a more engineered product focus. When and how that will come about is an open question - but Microsoft’s recent ads for the non existent Microsoft PC suggest, I think, that they’ve chosen to to address this by building an integrated products and services company of their own. Thus the financial meaning of the Yahoo deal might be that Microsoft gets a longer reach, but keeps its cash available for strategic acquisition: presumably either HP or Dell.

That would give the world three big integrated IT suppliers plus Apple: all offering their customers everything from hardware to application support services -with IBM selling into its traditional big money DP markets, Sun/Oracle selling advanced technologies and packaged applications, and the Microsoft PC company straddling in the middle: advertising technology but mainly selling to hobbyists, small businesses, and data processing.

So which one? I’d bet on Microsoft going after Dell now and AMD later because that will force HP and Intel to make some deeply traumatic choices - but there’s no good reason Mr. Balmer couldn’t cut the Microsoft PC company’s long term cost of slaughtering HP by going after both companies right now: he’s got the money; anti-trust in the Obama is just a loyalties issue; and a survivor, if there is one, would be seriously weakened.

March 23rd, 2009

Today's Cloud: garbage; Tomorrow's? insanely great

Posted by Paul Murphy @ 12:15 am

Categories: Apple, Applications, Database Management, Development, Enterprise Policy, General, Infrastructure, Productivity

Tags: Agent, Data, Real Estate, Business Operations, Paul Murphy

The near term truth about cloud computing is that it’s only useful for enterprise applications if you’re a user manager who wants to get around the obstacles in IT - that’s what supported time sharing in the seventies and could make it a short term success again today.

Look beyond that, however, and the risks are simply too high for this ever to become a viable form of enterprise computing service. Google, a company with lots of resources and some pretty smart people, can neither keep gmail running consistently nor protect users from information abuse - and they’re not even handicapped by any commitment to Microsoft’s software.

Basically, my bottom line on cloud risk is that I’ll put serious user data on the cloud right about the same day someone proves Dante’s hell a physical reality, shows that it’s frozen over, and proves that it’s run entirely by squads of flying pigs.

On the other hand existing attempts at building a cloud do have two interesting uses:

1. as a transit and filtering service for high volume data subject to resource intensive, but non lossy, initial processing. You might, for example, load a 10GB seismic log via a connection in Siberia, process it in the cloud, and download the 1GB filtered result with very little lag in Calgary; and,
2. as an open source development and testing platform - providing quick access to wide variety of hardware and OS/combinations to project contributors around the world.

Beyond that, however, I think the standard cloud vision as some kind of universal computing resource is just eye candy for dilletantes - but that doesn’t mean we won’t see the evolution of a very different kind of cloud.

That one’s in sight and coming fast - although, admittedly, today’s google search stacks up to it just about the way Sony’s 1979 walkman relates to today’s ipod nano.

This is an eight minute video demo of something coming down the pike. The demo uses traditional input/output devices (real and virtual screens and keyboards), to communicate with the user and is, of course, canned in the sense that you can’t actually get all the data they’re showing in appropriate formats or at the rates they show.

But you should eventually be able to - and by then communication with that device should be based on something that looks a lot more like telepathy: at the very least, doing away with overt vocalization, keyboards, and screens.

When those devices become available, users will have the same problem the people making this demo did: where’s the data coming from and who controls it?

This problem comes in two forms:

1. on the survivability side, if you’ve ever tried to take away your teenage daughter’s cell phone you’ll be familiar with the kind of panic a device failure would cause among the information addicted. And that makes centralized storage an absolute requirement - meaning that you can use either the Sun Ray distributed server model or that model plus local storage, but you can’t get away with just local storage.
2. on the data source side the problems are sourcing, formatting and access: you’d pick up some data from local learning (for example, the name for your neighbor’s new puppy), and some from traditional sources: google, twitter, linkedIn, and so on; but even if you had sources for everything, how do you format and access it?

The answer to both parts will, I think, have to be delivered via a cloud of data jobbers: people who provide personalized data support by running automated agents handling multi-point lookup, retrieval, evaluation, and reformatting for each of their customers.

Thus I might sign up for Gold Support with Bre-X data mining - meaning that my link would connect exclusively to Bre-X, automated agents at Bre-x would both collect and manage my data, and Bre-X partners in other jurisdictions would seamlessly take over agent services when I travel. As a result I could be completely senile and still pass a math exam in Moscow, cheerfully hand over my iLink to the nice policeman in Beijing, get a replacement at the airport in Seoul, and still expect to know what the customs agent charges when I land near Brussels.

Oddly we have a cloud like that now: it’s called the telephone system - and really the bottom line on long term cloud computing is that data jobbing is the cloud opportunity - and it’s their opportunity to miss.

February 11th, 2009

Rearview madness and Wintel customer spin

Posted by Paul Murphy @ 12:15 am

Categories: Apple, Enterprise Policy, General, Strategy, Sun

Tags: Wintel, Storage, Paul Murphy

When I looked, last week, at the lack of fundamental differences between the first iMac G4s and today’s wintel7 stuff I was struck, for perhaps the zillionth time, by how the Wintel world first denigrates the Mac and then trails along behind it. Back then Wintel people decried cameras on laptops as pointless - now wintel laptops just aren’t cool without them -and the list goes on: tomorrow’s wintel7 machine just looks and acts a lot more like a old Mac than it acts like an old PC.

Then I realized something else: it’s a general phenomenon in the wintel industry. When AMD developed cohesive multi-core computing for x86, Intel scoffed and its flacks scoffed with it - but now it’s selling its i7 reinvention of those same technologies as The Future.

When Sun invented the coolthreads ideas, the wintel community scoffed - then discovered it couldn’t match the software or the hardware needed to make it work, and is now pretending that multi-core is the same as core multi-threading.

When Apple introduced the iPhone, the industry scoffed - and all the biggies now find themselves saying the iPhone sucks while their copies are every bit as good.

Most recently Sun has moved to revolutionize storage by using ZFS to integrate flash into the storage hierarchy and their dtrace technology to provide both storage and storage analytics nobody else can match - and what’s the industry doing? running down Sun’s products while pretending that adding some flash drives and canned reports to their 80s gear is somehow equivalent.

So what we have, I think, is a general thing: when confronted with better technology the wintel/DP world first denies the difference, then denies the value, and ultimately hypes its own copies as new inventions when they finally get them out.

And if it is indeed a general thing, you should be aware when you get their stuff that there’s an inevitable bottom line to this behavior: as they fall ever further behind, so do you.

February 10th, 2009

iPod, iPhone, iNet?

Posted by Paul Murphy @ 12:15 am

Categories: Apple, What users care about

Tags: Apple iPhone, Apple iPod, Microsoft Corp., Stryon iNET, Netbook, Netbooks, Nettops & MIDs, Hardware, Paul Murphy

When the video iPod gained voice communications hardware and software it became an iPhone - a small, PPC based (ARM is a PPC licensee), netbook.

So what’s wrong with it? Not much - except that the screen size makes it a poor choice for the next step up: multi-point video conferencing.

Of course, most broadcast networks aren’t up to that yet either, but that’s coming - along with roll out or projected screens and keyboards.

Meanwhile netbooks are gaining market share and thereby exposing a huge Wintel7 vulnerability because when you boil away the PC marketing you can see them for what they are: portable smart displays for web browsing, email, and minor note taking - i.e. iPods with keyboards or bigger iPhones without the telecom functionality.

And therein lies the wintel7 market vulnerability: Windows 7 is the first Microsoft OS since NT 4.0 Workstation replaced NT 3.51 to need fewer system resources than its predecessor (and since 4.0 was basically just a VMS port to Intel it’s the first one actually produced by Microsoft). Unfortunately it’s still too big - particularly in terms of disk usage - for devices featuring Intel’s light weight processors and 4 to 8 gigabyte flash drives.

So what’s going to happen? is Intel going to push its mobile Linux variant past Microsoft? Is Microsoft going to cut Windows7 to fit - and reduce its licensing expectations to the netbook level? What?

I’ve no idea - but what I do know is that Apple has to be weighing the pros and cons of issuing an iPhone in a netbook format: an iNet - something designed to build share by capturing much of today’s netbook market while creating a much larger future market for fully enabled voice and video conferencing on the go.

February 7th, 2009

Rednecks, old computers, and TCO

Posted by Paul Murphy @ 12:15 am

Categories: Apple, Unanswered questions, Wintel vs Lintel

Tags: ERROR: brand required [TR|ZD|BN] e.g. searchapi.php?brand=TR&mode=document

Uhuh, I hate to admit this, but it seems I have a problem: an inability to throw old computers away.

I have an Ultra2, purchased as dual 167s and since upgraded to a righteous 2 x 296Mhz, sitting in the garage. Now, in its defence: as recently as 2006 it spent a glorious eight months running a production Solaris 10 application where more than x86 security was needed and the client’s staff didn’t know how to not buy x86 - but really I think it’s probably seen its best days.

On the other hand, it still works, and someday I may need it.

There’s an old Mac in the garage too - a 1Ghz G4 Titanium whose graphics controller didn’t survive an accelerated encounter with a sidewalk. Someday I’m going to fix it. Or maybe not.

When we were moving here I thought about throwing this stuff away - but in Ontario they have this wonderful greenie gag going: you’re required to render used electronics to a speciality used electronics disposal depot which charges you a special disposal fee for taking out anything valuable to them and then trucking the rest to the same landfill everything else goes to. Kinda like tire recycling here in sunny Alberta: you pay green levies coming and going, but the only things growing faster than recycling costs are the stockpiles of unrecycled tires.

The reason I mention all this is that ever since I got Mr. Jordan’s letter about home TCO on Wintel7 I’ve been asking various people about the PCs they own at home. The record holder, so far, is a Wintel true believer from the NT era who claims to have every PC he’s ever bought: a total of 23, fourteen of them laptops - apparently running everything from Windows 95 to the Windows 7 beta he’s now using.

It’s a small sample, and certainly neither random nor representative, but I’m getting some amazing numbers: an average of more than three PCs per family member and a sharp difference between Mac users, who tend to dispose of old gear, and PC users who don’t.

As a result my mental image of the typical PC household is starting to form as a new machine, often a laptop and usually clearly marked as belonging only to one person; a couple of older machines with XP or 2000 used by younger kids (older ones seem to get shiny and new); an XP file server that started as a 2000 desktop somewhere; a linksys or similar wireless network; and, a bunch of deaders hidden away somewhere with some vague thought of current backup and future rehabilitation.

Look inside the survivors and you see weird third party peripheral and application clutters - my own local printer is a QMS 420 from the early ninties - and there’s some really weird and dated stuff out there in daily use.

Talk about the cost of upgrading to current gear and you get very different reactions from the PC and Mac camps. The Mac people mostly just say they’ll eventually have to buy a new one, but the PC people I’ve talked to seem to split between two forms of denial: those who deny they’ll have to change, and those who deny it’ll cost anything to change.

In reality, however, the costs of change are really the costs of complete renewal: so if you go with mid range Dell gear running Vista with MS Office lite, it’ll run you about $750 per desktop or $850 per laptop after Dell’s current super duper discounts (unless, of course, you’re a PC hobbyist, then you can build your own for $8.93 including the cost of a processor wholesaling at $659 in lots of 10,000.)

Sadly, however, machine costs are only the obvious part of the cost picture: you’ll also have to upgrade your wireless router, pay for support and/or security subscriptions, and pay for whatever your “personal critical” third party applications or devices are -and then you can relearn just about everything you thought you knew about running Windows because now you can license the primary desktop as the family file server, fight the driver or replacement battle for printing and/or multi-media display, and find space in the garage for all the old junkers you can’t quite bring yourself to get rid of.

All in, costs to the PC people I talked to are probably in the $1,200 per machine range exclusive of stress and time costs - and that’s before any consideration of information security, backup, and data transfer issues beyond the default stuff you get with the box and/or your subscriptions.

Ouch.

February 5th, 2009

TCO, Wintel 7, and the G4 Mac

Posted by Paul Murphy @ 12:15 am

Categories: Apple, Applications, Unanswered questions, Vistabulations, What users care about, Wintel vs Lintel

Tags: Wintel, Dell Computer Corp., Apple Macintosh, PC, Apple iMac, Apple Inc., TCO, Desktops, Hardware, Paul Murphy

One of the major cost sources raised by Mr. Jordan in last Saturday’s comment on TCO for Windows 7 at home involved the costs and risks attendant on upgrading or replacing custom components like his “5.1 surround sound system card from Creative Labs.”

I believe this problem - the cost consequences of the absence of continuing automated support for third party peripherals in Microsoft’s products - to be very common among PC users and want to discuss it today in the context of the mutual hand washing that goes on between consumer marketing and consumer education in the retail personal computer business.

Thus it’s an absolute axiom of faith in the Wintel community that Macs cost more than PCs - and, happily for them, this is actually true now that the Mac uses Intel processors. It wasn’t true, however, when the Mac ran on PPC and Mr. Jordan made his decisions - and therein lies the link to consumer education and the costs Mr. Jordan now faces with respect to Wintel 7 and his creative labs sound board.

Here’s a desktop comparison from before the change:

desktops

If we take vaguely comparable units from the low end, mid range, and high end of the Apple and PC lines using pricing from the Apple and Dell web stores as of August 21/04 we get the comparisons below:

Model	Price	Configuration
eMac	$799	17″ CRT, 1.25GHz PowerPC G4 256MB DDR333 SDRAM ATI Radeon 9200 32MB DDR 40GB Ultra ATA drive 14W stereo system AppleCombo drive
Dell Dimension 2400	$449	Intel Celeron processor at 2.40GHz 128MB shared DDR SDRAM at 266MHz 17″ (16.0″vis) CRT Monitor 40GB Ultra/ATA 100 Hard Drive Integrated Intel Extreme 3D Graphics
iMac	$1,799	17-inch widescreen LCD 1.25GHz PowerPC G4 NVIDIA GeForce FX 5200 Ultra 64MB DDR video memory 256MB DDR333 SDRAM 80GB Ultra ATA hard drive SuperDrive Apple Pro Speakers AirPort Extreme Ready Bluetooth Option
Dell OptiPlex GX270	$1,759	3.0 Ghz P4/800; 256MB, DDR, non ECC, 333Mhz 80GB EIDE 7200RPM, 8X DVD+RW Dell UltraSharp 1703FP flat panel 64MB, nVidia, GeForce 4MX
G5 Dual	$2,999	Dual 2.5GHz PowerPC G5 1.25GHz frontside bus/processor 512K L2 cache/processor 512MB DDR400 SDRAM Expandable to 8GB SDRAM 160GB Serial ATA 8x SuperDrive Three PCI-X Slots ATI Radeon 9600 XT 128MB DDR video memory 56K internal modem
Dell Precision 670	$4,009	2 x 3.4Ghz Xeon 512MB 160GB SATA, 7200 RPM Hard Drive 8X DVD+RW/+R 128MB PCIe x16 (DVI/VGA) ATI FireGL V3100,

The Macs have built in firewire, airport extreme, and 10/100 ethernet ports along with the OS X operating system and a bundle of software including ilife (which Apple describe as “office for the rest of your life” - GarageBand, iTunes, iPhoto,iMovie and iDVD) and stuff like AppleWorks, Quicken, and the World Book Encyclopedia.

The PCs come with some variant on Microsoft Windows/XP and varying levels of discount on Microsoft Office. Thus Office Professional costs $359 on the low end Dimension, $319 on the OptiPlex, and isn’t offered with the Precision bundle.

Oddly, Office Professional for the Mac includes a PC emulator and the package most comparable to the “Professional” PC edition appears to be called the Standard Edition. It sells at $399 for all Macs.

If we look at these raw cost comparisons carefully it becomes obvious that none of them really work because the Macs are consistently overspec relative to the PCs.

The entry level eMac, for example, costs $350 (78%) more than the PC but the latter is usable only to run Windows 98 and other software carried forward from previous generations. Accept Dell’s rather warmly endorsed package of the basic upgrades needed just to run XP comfortably, and the price difference falls to $190 (24%). That’s still considerably cheaper than the eMac, but still short stereo, a R/W CD/DVD combo, graphics capabilities, wireless connectivity, and dual firewire ports. Adding everything except firewire brings the price to rough parity but still leaves the PC under specified relative to the eMac.

The same problems afflict the iMac vs. OptiPlex270 comparison. The base PC is $40 cheaper than the mid range iMac, but the PC lacks the iMac’s connectivity and multi-media capabilities. It’s possible to add these, but doing so pushes the PC well over the high end of the price range for the iMac.

In this case, furthermore, you should be aware that the PC represents Dell’s latest product generation while Apple has just just stopped taking orders for the current iMacs preparatory to introducing the next generation iMacs in September.

The high end comparison shows the result of the underlying difference in functional focus much more clearly. Like the iMacs, Apple’s current G5 offering is actually well past its intended replacement date because of IBM’s delays in shipping new CPUs, but the basic box is still a full $1,000 bucks cheaper than Dell’s newest Xeons.

As usual, however, the PC lacks the Mac’s connectivity features. More importantly, my price comparison above omits the monitors for both because the recommended monitors are designed for different jobs and are not remotely comparable. Dell’s “UltraSharp 2001FP 20.1-inch Flat Panel LCD Monitor with Height Adjustable Stand” at $899 by itself or $700 if bundled with the Precision 670, is just a monitor.

Apple’s cinema displays are more than that. They’re intended to function at the core of digital production environments. Thus all three models, from the 20 inch to the 30 inch, have things like DVI and dual firewire ports to enable plug and go video recording or media sharing. In consequence the price ranges from $1,299 to $3,299, or $600 more than Dell wants for the 20 inch unit, but the additional things they do can’t be done with the Dell at any price.

The least unfair comparison, therefore is obtained by adding the Dell monitor, as the lowest common denominator, to both machines, thereby penalizing Apple’s price by the $199 difference between Dell’s stand-alone and package price. Do that and the Mac comes in at $3,898 with the Dell at $4,709 -making the Apple about 20% cheaper despite offering more features.

At the low end, therefore, the PC desktops are marginally cheaper than the Macs if you can do without their connectivity and multi-media capabilities and considerably more expensive if you can’t. At the very high end, however, all of the design focus is on multi-media processing and the PCs simply aren’t competitive from either hardware or cost perspectives.

Mr. Jordan couldn’t do without some of those extra features: ended up paying more for his PCs than he would have had he bought a Mac and accepted both the limitations of XP and the personal responsibility to maintain security while downloading and installing his own drivers in preference to just running OS X 10.3 with everything pre-integrated and PPC security. Worse, he now faces a difficult choice between continuing to nurse obsolete equipment along or paying the cost of upgrading to the latest Wintel partner offerings.

And what are those offerings? Well, there’s the anachronism - and the link to consumer education.

Take a close look at what the Wintel partners are promising home computer users in the 2009 Wintel 7 ecosystem: integrated sound, video, and connectivity; programmable widgets; flexible Windows; desktop multi-tasking; desktop searching; automated updates - it’s a long list that adds up to nearly everything on that “too expensive” 2003/4 i/eMac.

Back then, of course, the PC press reviled all this stuff as uninteresting and unnecessary - trapping people like Mr.Jordan in higher costs then and a choice between living with obsolescence or throwing money at replacing perfectly good systems just to keep up - and, meanwhile most of those G4 e and i Macs - are still working: unchanged.

P.S: but the PCs were so much faster, right? Wrong. Remember Apple OS X on a G4 offered pretty much what Windows 7 does on i7 -so to see the processor performance difference try loading W7 on that 2.4Ghz Dell Celeron.

January 29th, 2009

Clouds, history, and unmitigated drivel

Posted by Paul Murphy @ 5:15 am

Categories: Apple, Enterprise Policy, General, Government, Sun

Tags: Web, Client-server, Network, Operating System, API, RPC, Cloud Computing, Internet, Operating Systems, Networking

(Note to readers: I’ll be out of network reach until very late Sunday and so unable to respond to comments or mistakes until then.)

As I mentioned earlier this week, the roots of the conficker worm go back to the RPC code added to BSD (and Apollo) in the mid eighties - the problem then and now being that you can’t simultaneously open your OS user space to external applications and close it those same applications.

This was a big source of academic friction in the late seventies with those few muttering about systems integrity and implementation issues getting shouted down by grant getters wielding commitments to “appropriate” controls, hardware isolation, and the whole network shared user space thing - but what actually came out of it all was the Unix RPC structure and twenty-five years of progressive simplification as successful attacks demonstrated that the nay sayers had been right all along.

More recently, Microsoft has been trying for a decade to build a working network OS - and has failed to produce anything beyond what you’d expect from a senior year undergraduate project for a computing science class largely because their need to protect the client idea in a network context forces them into the RPC dead end.

Nevertheless, this is another dream that predictable failure cannot kill - to quote Ian Murdock:

What will be the cloud equivalent of the Linux distro?

I’ve been following the evolution of what is now called cloud computing for some time, and with great interest. Over the years, facets of cloud computing have had many names: ASP, grid computing, utility computing, Web services, SOA, mashups, SaaS, Web 2.0. In many ways, the emergence of cloud computing is the great coming together of these trends and technologies. But whatever moniker the industry puts on it, I’ll always think of this great coming together as Tim O’Reilly described it in 2002: the Internet operating system.

Bit by bit, we’ll watch the transformation of the Web services wilderness. The first stage, the pioneer stage, is marked by screen scraping and “unauthorized” special purpose interfaces to database-backed Web sites. In the second stage, the Web sites themselves will offer more efficient, XML-based APIs. (This is starting to happen now.) In the third stage, the hodgepodge of individual services will be integrated into a true operating system layer, in which a single vendor (or a few competing vendors) will provide a comprehensive set of APIs that turns the Internet into a huge collection of program-callable components, and integrates those components into applications that are used every day by non-technical people.

That essay, and the phrase “the Internet operating system”, profoundly changed my thinking about Google and the other companies of which Tim wrote. They were no longer merely purveyors of browser accessible services, some of which were beginning to acquire APIs; they were collectively, and in most cases unintentionally, building the platform of the future piece by piece. For the first time, I could think about that platform in a context I understood very well.

The vision behind all this is appealing: have your computer automatically find and use any application you need without the limitations and hassles that go with having to run those applications locally.

Cool! except for Wintel/Lintel devotees whose worldviews are bounded by client-server - because the concept itself embeds the separation of user interaction from processing: meaning that no real implementation of these ideas would need the PC.

Unfortunately abandoning the PC idea is simply not acceptable to people whose living and self-images depend on the client-server architecture and, in response, they’re willfully blind both to the history of RPC failure and the reality that Plan9, the second generation Unix designed by Pike, Thomson, Ritchie and others at Bell Labs, more than met their “network OS” goals in 1986.

Thus what Murdock and O’Reilly are really demonstrating in the bits quoted is that technologies which deliver what they’re looking for but carry the widespread use of smart displays as a necessary corollary simply can’t be allowed to enter their worldview -and it’s that kind of behavior, bottom line, that dooms the Wintel world to this week’s conficker and next week’s who knows what new horror.