Microsoft announces that the next version of Exchange, its upcoming Windows Server “Longhorn” SBS and its Centro infrastructure solution for midsize businesses will only be released as 64-bit.
Microsoft to Add 64-Bit Computing to Key Products
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
…their new crap will not run on old crap.
Q’uell surprise.
For the love of God, who would run a mid-sized business on anything Microsoft is producing? This is not a troll, this is me being honestly incredulous that anyone would entrust their multi-million dollar business on Microsoft’s Fisher Price OS. 100,000 functional viruses, 50,000 spyware products, hundreds of root-kits, blue screens of death, proprietary protocols, memory leaks galore, DLL Hell, the Registry (need not say more), lack of bundled functionality for text processing, Baby’s First firewall… when does the list of mediocrity and insanity in software design end? Really?
I’m perplexed, and that’s no lie.
This is not a troll
Yes it is. -1 for you.
I have to agree. It’s also said to be modded down for speaking the truth.
It’d be nice to see MS finally get windows out of beta.
Didn’t the 20 year anniversary just pass? And it’s still more of the same.
If I’d been trolling, I’d not have said exactly what I meant, I’d be looking for reactions. What I said *IS* what I meant to say. Windows *IS* a dangerous, insecure, black hole of money for a mid-sized company. Your -1 says more about your bias than mine… you didn’t even bother to rebut.
So why aren’t companies flocking to better solutions like mad? Put away the tin foil hat too, because it has relatively little to do with “lock-in” and other magical Linux FUDster words.
Babe, don’t you understand, there is a big grand conspiracy theory where by there is a effort by unnamed people and organisations to make Linux illegal – yes, there are people out there with their head up their ass.
Linux is good, but only in niche areas; the key word is niche.
Linux is good, but only in niche areas; the key word is niche.
I have no interest in joining this flamewar, but wouldn’t it be more accurate to say that Windows is good, but only in niche areas?
Where is Windows good or dominant except on the desktop? Linux is dominant in supercomputing and *nixes still dominate servers. Video and audio editing is mostly done on Mac, and Windows is a very distant third in the smartphone market.
Everything is a niche market, Windows just dominates more of them than Linux.
> Everything is a niche market, Windows just
> dominates more of them than Linux.
The opposite is true. Windows dominates one market: the desktop.
And Linux dominates nothing. Can you honestly say that Linux dominates the server market? Desktop? Embedded? No, no, and no. It just has shares in each.
Windows, on the other hand, dominates the desktop market, and has some grips on the server and embedded markets.
And Linux dominates nothing. Can you honestly say that Linux dominates the server market? Desktop? Embedded? No, no, and no. It just has shares in each.
Supercomputers
Haha … supercomputers tend to run real operating systems, like AIX and other custom-brew proprietary unices.
Wrong.
Very wrong, in fact.
Linux-based clustering is by a wide margin the most common and popular HPC choice – Cray will sell you a linux cluster, SGI do them almost exclusively now, as well as all the other big players in the market (IBM, Dell) selling linux-based clusters on assorted chip architectures.
Let’s do the norm, and take top500.org – the fastest 500 HPC machines in the world. Over 300 of them are linux-based – there’s a single Windows machine, and I believe 4 Solaris machines (though that might not apply anymore, the new list was recently published).
Linux owns HPC. If you claim otherwise, then really you’re just a badly deluded troll.
Where does it say that 300 of the Top 500 supercomputers are running Linux? I deliberately went there to see if I could find OS information about each entry in the list, but I couldn’t find anything.
here you go
http://www.top500.org/lists/2005/11/l/Operating_System
Thanks. I stand corrected.
It’s a shame, though. 🙂
Haha … supercomputers tend to run real operating systems, like AIX and other custom-brew proprietary unices.
What do you think L in IBM BlueGene/L (the world’s fastest supercomputer) stands for?
Answer it stands for Linux
Edited 2005-11-16 13:59
The BlueGene/L “Livermore” system
The L does not stand for Linux, stop spreading fud.
The BlueGene/L “Livermore” system
The L does not stand for Linux, stop spreading fud.
It is true that the machine is for the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory but it was also the first BlueGene to run on Linux (for the I/O nodes). I believe there were earlier BlueGene versions running AIX.
From a recent article on the latest supercomputer ratings:
According to the 26th edition of the Top500 report, the fastest computer on the planet is IBM’s BlueGene/L System, which is used by the DOE’s National Nuclear Security Administration. BlueGene, running Linux of course, achieved a jaw-dropping 280.6 teraflop (trillion calculations per second) performance, doubling its own record it set six months ago. This is the first supercomputer to break the 100 teraflop barrier.
http://www.tectonic.co.za/view.php?id=711
So you can make your choice for the L standing for either Linux or the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
If that’s what you want to believe … that’s fine. But I’m tempted to agree with the parent. Livermore it is.
And Linux dominates nothing.
It dominates the supercomputer market.
It is probably the most widely used operating system for webservers.
It is the fastest growing operating system for servers in general.
Tomorrow the desktop
Yeah, they say that every year. 🙂
Keep dreaming.
<i<It dominates the supercomputer market.
It is probably the most widely used operating system for webservers.
It is the fastest growing operating system for servers in general[/i]
These are facts poo – BTW I Just looked up your website http://www.tomchu.com on Netcraft it reports your site as running on Linux. If you view the detailed site report it reports it as running on Linux and FreeBSD hosts but never on a Windows host. Please explain. Are you not true to your beliefs or do you just troll for the fun of it. Are you going to change your hosting provider?
Sadly you are right in some way but vendor lock-in is a problem in the IT industry as a whole and Microsoft is no angel when it comes to playing fair in that arena. Lock-in is one issue amongst many.
I would say that a clearly defined product that has broad industry support is extremely hard to usurp. Look, most IT decision makers aren’t too cluey and they are familiar with Microsoft, understanding even some of the Unix concepts is a little beyond their capability. Sad but true.
don’t they mean “Microsoft to Remove 32-bit Computing From Key Products”?
Uhm, if they were to do that all your programs would stop functioning as you no longer can perform calculations on datatypes other than 8-bit, 16-bit, and 64-bit long…:-P
Just because you have a 64-bit CPU doesn’t mean you have to stop using 8-/16-/32-bit variables when it makes sense to use them…
>So why aren’t companies flocking to better solutions
>like mad? Put away the tin foil hat too, because it
>has relatively little to do with “lock-in” and other
>magical Linux FUDster words.
There’s these three little things you may have heard of… marketing, larceny and illegal abuse of a monopoly. Microsoft has been exceptional at all three. And at very little else.
Obviously you weren’t around in the late 80s when Microsoft stole IBM’s fire to start their own, burned or savaged what competitors it couldn’t buy, forced companies to sell its product exclusively, purchased its own positive media coverage; actively flouted law and ethics whenever it felt there was a need.
There are other reasons. Novell’s terrible gullability and arrogance. Commodore’s larcenous board of directors. Atari’s poor quality control. DEC’s lack of vision. SGI’s single-mindedness and faith in gullible customers. Apple’s hubris. Sun’s inability to keep the pace of performance and desire to be all things to few people, without an ability to make those products robust and mature. It wasn’t all Microsoft’s gangster tactics… but the pressure they exerted with their strongarm tactics just magnified the problems of the others as they succumbed to fear, uncertainty and doubt. Now where did I hear those words before?
Pretty much like the history of the US,
but nobody is complaining.
Do not use any Microsoft products and please do not give a f… BIASED opinion.
Thanks.
By the way, I use BSD and Windows.
Thanks
Edited 2005-11-16 04:55
>conspiracy theory where by there is a effort by
>unnamed people and organisations to make Linux
>illegal – yes, there are people out there with their
>head up their ass.
There is plenty of proof that Microsoft is doing what it can without getting the government down on its head again to make Linux an impossible choice. You have to have your head deep in the sand to not have heard about the SCOX lawsuit that has been funded by Microsoft and their partners. It’s not a conspiracy, it’s HAPPENED.
As for Linux being a niche product… please, get a grip. If Linux is a niche product, it’s found itself into one hell of a lot of niches.
> And Linux dominates nothing.
Wrong. But I’m too tired to come up with a list of areas where Linux is dominant. Dominance doesn’t imply quality or performance – if it did, we’d all be driving Bugatti Veyrons.
>Can you honestly say that Linux dominates the server
>market?
Thank heavens no. Luckily there is competition in that market still. Competition is good, despite Microsoft’s best attempts to stifle it.
You know you want to spend those mod points.
—
…their new crap will not run on old crap.
Q’uell surprise.
For the love of God, who would run a mid-sized business on anything Microsoft is producing? This is not a troll, this is me being honestly incredulous that anyone would entrust their multi-million dollar business on Microsoft’s Fisher Price OS. 100,000 functional viruses, 50,000 spyware products, hundreds of root-kits, blue screens of death, proprietary protocols, memory leaks galore, DLL Hell, the Registry (need not say more), lack of bundled functionality for text processing, Baby’s First firewall… when does the list of mediocrity and insanity in software design end? Really?
I’m perplexed, and that’s no lie.
Spend, spend, spend those mod points!
—
>So why aren’t companies flocking to better solutions
>like mad? Put away the tin foil hat too, because it
>has relatively little to do with “lock-in” and other
>magical Linux FUDster words.
There’s these three little things you may have heard of… marketing, larceny and illegal abuse of a monopoly. Microsoft has been exceptional at all three. And at very little else.
Obviously you weren’t around in the late 80s when Microsoft stole IBM’s fire to start their own, burned or savaged what competitors it couldn’t buy, forced companies to sell its product exclusively, purchased its own positive media coverage; actively flouted law and ethics whenever it felt there was a need.
There are other reasons. Novell’s terrible gullability and arrogance. Commodore’s larcenous board of directors. Atari’s poor quality control. DEC’s lack of vision. SGI’s single-mindedness and faith in gullible customers. Apple’s hubris. Sun’s inability to keep the pace of performance and desire to be all things to few people, without an ability to make those products robust and mature. It wasn’t all Microsoft’s gangster tactics… but the pressure they exerted with their strongarm tactics just magnified the problems of the others as they succumbed to fear, uncertainty and doubt. Now where did I hear those words before?
Mod points are free so that w can be free of opinions…!
—
>conspiracy theory where by there is a effort by
>unnamed people and organisations to make Linux
>illegal – yes, there are people out there with their
>head up their ass.
There is plenty of proof that Microsoft is doing what it can without getting the government down on its head again to make Linux an impossible choice. You have to have your head deep in the sand to not have heard about the SCOX lawsuit that has been funded by Microsoft and their partners. It’s not a conspiracy, it’s HAPPENED.
As for Linux being a niche product… please, get a grip. If Linux is a niche product, it’s found itself into one hell of a lot of niches.
I personally think this is an odd move by MS. They sure play with high stakes lately when they push technology forward a lot.
I’m all for 64bit so I guess this means more happy apps for me, but on the other hand, is there really reason enough for everyone? I mean just because you can be 64bit doesn’t necessarily mean you should be 64 bit?
On a little sidenote as a comment. We run 2k3 servers in our office and I’m happy we chose that in favour of other solutions. Easy to administer, very few exploits for small bucks. We need to have long-term plans and it’s hard to bet on an option to MS then. Well surely we could’ve gone Sun… but looking at the options like Red Hat or IBM, we simply realized it will cost us FAR to much.
so thay need 64 bit for the exchange information store – it enables bigger databases, bigger caches in RAM, and so on.
making better use of RAM is a very valid argument, but why is 64 bit needed for a bigger storage? probably because their database driven mailstore is broken in the first place. i love maildir 🙂
Just wondering if Microsoft need to rewrite everything from scratch to get it to work on 64 bit – it’s obvious they can’t write portable code…
-Brendan
“it’s obvious they can’t write portable code… ”
Is that why WinNT ran on MIPS, Alpha, and PowerPC?. Win2K was also ported to Alpha, but was development was cancelled by Compaq.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_NT
(quoting the Wikipedia, I know….)
Win2K and up have run on Itanium. Look at the TPC scores for HP SuperDome (highest Superdome score) http://www.tpc.org/tpcc/results/tpcc_perf_results.asp
XBox 360 runs a custom NT kernel. The developer workstations for XBox 360 are dual Apple G5s running a custom NT kernel.
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=14407
Windows CE runs on Arm, MIPS, and SH3/4 processors, as well as x86:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/wc…
By design, anyways, very little of Windows is non-portable. Only the HAL, which deals with interrupts, SMP, etc. is non-portable.
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/q99588/
By the time Longhorn is released no new x86 chips will be 32-bit only and any existing servers will need to be upgraded with new hardware anyway.
Linux is a monolithic kernel with no unified driver model or fully asynchronous IO wrapped up with ad-hoc GUIs to make 100s of incompatible distributions to confuse the hell out of a user.
Linux = Loser invented new unix xerox (aka clone)
Linux User = Lusers
“Linux = Loser invented new unix xerox (aka clone)
Linux User = Lusers”
<sarcasm>oh…how inventive of you</sarcasm>
Can the admins here actually ban Shaman’s account and IP…this is just getting ridiculous. This is becoming worse than ./ comments
Hehe… it’s /. not ./
I think you’ve been running a lot ./configure lately
Is the beast awake?
Blocking annonymous posting didn’t work out that well after all huh? Except that Linux is Poo is making overall better comments, still there’s a lot of raged fanboys trolling on both sides, with reposts and all
Edited 2005-11-16 11:57
Why I am reposting is that I believe my comments are bang-on valid. And this casual mod point system is just a way for fanboys on the other side of the argument to make arguments they don’t like disappear.
By way of demonstration, my posts are almost evenly modded up and down. The truth hurts, all the way around, I guess.
I think I am sitting at my last 32 bit machine. When I am ready to upgrade 64bit will be the standard. All of the people who don’t understand the need for this haven’t been paying attention for the past 20 years. 10 years from now I will be doing things that we have a hard time conceptualizing today–and to perform these untold wonders we will need faster machines. Progress marches on and it is good. When I was using a 120 Mhz machine, I might have said that no one needs a 3 Ghz machine and never will. I would have been wrong then, and the naysayers are wrong now.
Hmmm – what exactly is the need for “64 bit” for desktop machines?
BTW your old computer is no good because it doesn’t have the new metallic blue racing stripes. I think you should spend $2000 on hardware and another $1500 on software, just so you can take advantage of these nice new racing stripes. To ensure that your wallet is emptied sooner, we’ll be discontinuing support for the old “non-striped” models, because honestly, all computers will have fancy blue racing stripes by the time we’ve convinced suckers that they’re useful. Send your check for $3500 today (or 40 easy credit card payments of $100 a month) and we’ll throw in a set of free steak knives! But ring quick – stocks are limited..
While the 64-bitness of AMD and Intel’s new chips isn’t useful yet, these chips are greatly beneficial for a couple of reasons. First, the extra registers that come with the x86-64 mode provides flexibility and performance. Second, DEP makes it easier to write secure software.
Now that I think of it, 5 – 10 years from now, 3GB of ram on a desktop machine will be fairly common. It’s a good idea to start building up demand now, so the industry is completely ready once we start feeling the pinch.
Hmmm – what exactly is the need for “64 bit” for desktop machines?
Not much today. But in order to implement 64 bit we need hardware, an OS, and applications. The latter two aren’t going to happen without the first two.
So my answer is that we don’t need it today, but if the next ten years are anything like the last ten years–then we surely will need it. And it is a long implementation cycle.
Vista’s successor (Windows 2020? We see clearly now?) will be MS’s first 64 bit only OS.
There are two main reasons to use 64 bit machines, both are likely to need the ability to use the much larger virtual address space.
1. For handling very large databases.
2. For video editing.
The first reason is why Opterons and 64bit Xeons are going out the door fast primarily to run Oracle, DB2 etc. The second case is as far as I know the only reason why you would need a 64 bit desktop machine.
@Drumhellar
The extra registers can cause a small performance increase (between 0% and 15%) but won’t make software more flexible. DEP or NX can theoretically improve security, but I’ve never had a problem that it would have prevented despite running Win95 and Win98 for ten years without anti-virus or firewall software.
3 GB of RAM might be common on desktop machines in 5 to 10 years, but a 32 bit CPU can handle up to 16 GB of RAM using PAE or PSE (36 bit physical addressing). I’d be very surprised if desktop machines need more than 16 GB of RAM in the next 10 years (despite the hardware requirements I saw for Vista :-).
@jtrapp
For well written/portable software, the “long implementation cycle” means recompiling it. This has already been seen with GNU/Linux software. IMHO there are some situations where 64 bit is currently beneficial (large servers, specialized applications, etc), so the long implementation cycle could begin with these areas so that compilers, etc are ready well before desktop machines need 64 bit.
@chemical_scum
Very large databases and video editing are specialized areas that a normal desktop computer user is unlikely to worry about. Despite this, if a single application needs more than 3 GB of virtual memory it can be split into several processes – for e.g. 4 processes at 3 GB each (which helps for multi-CPU or dual core, and in some cases allows those processes to be run on different computers). For an example of this have a look at how Google works. I also seem to recall an article on OSNews a month or so ago about setting up a distributed rendering farm (but normal video editing wouldn’t require that sort of thing).
// I’m perplexed, and that’s no lie.//
Perhaps you’ve never had to make a solid business decision?
Businesses use the software that GETS THE JOB DONE. For many businesses, there is NO LINUX equivalent for the software they use. NONE. NOT EVEN CLOSE.
So, they go with Microsoft — and, they learn how to lock stuff down.
Which isn’t terribly difficult, by the way. I’ve been using Windows XP for four years. Not one virus, not one trojan, maybe three or four BSOD’s. Tons of productivity, tons of *FREE* software.
The horror … the horror.
> Perhaps you’ve never had to make a solid business
> decision?
Perhaps you’re talking out of your rectum?
>For many businesses, there is NO LINUX equivalent
>for the software they use.
Or they’re kidding themselves. It can happen, we have one legacy app that we may never be rid of on Microsoft platforms. It’s quite sad.
> The horror … the horror.
Now see, folks. THIS post was a troll. Please take note.
//Or they’re kidding themselves. It can happen, we have one legacy app that we may never be rid of on Microsoft platforms. It’s quite sad.//
Why won’t you ever be rid of it, since it’s apparently so easy to get Linux equivalents of necessary software?
Contradict yourself a few more times, chumly.
>Why won’t you ever be rid of it, since it’s
>apparently so easy to get Linux equivalents of
>necessary software?
You don’t even know what app I’m talking about, sizzlechest. Moving to any other *app* is the problem in this case because of the legacy data. Not that you’re interested in a reason, being trollful.
//Moving to any other *app* is the problem in this case because of the legacy data. //
So … sometimes, it’s just not that easy, then, is it?
What an asshat you are. Begone!
> What an asshat you are. Begone!
Pot, kettle, black-hole stupidity. Kill yourself.