Tracy R Reed wrote:
Yeah, yeah. The rant of the curmudgeon. I am quite familiar with it. :) Were they doing it for $300 a box and giving you the source? I don't think so. And that is a very different thing which make FOSS "innovative".
No, but unlike FOSS, it is tested for backward compatibility for 30+ *years*.
Personally, I'd take an actual unit tested OS over more features at this point.
Yes, it certainly would. Unfortunately the mainframe world has never been all that good about cooperating or sharing knowledge. The Unix world is having to reinvent the wheel and the Free software world is having to invent it again. In spite of all of this, progress is being made and we can now have virtualization on our $300 PC's.
Ahem. The pee-cee world has never been particularly good at adhereing to a standard. In addition, the x86 architecture has been absolute garbage for having the extensions required to support some of this stuff until the last couple of years.
For the love of Deity, I *still* can't do remote access and control of a $300 pee-cee. IPMI compliant stuff is starting to appear, but it's just *starting* and its expensive.
It isn't the fact that mainframes hoarded their knowledge (I can point you to *lots* of IBM Journal of R&D articles on how to do virtualization). It's simply that none of the FOSS folks cared until recently.
Personally, I *still* don't care. Rather than virtual x86's, I would rather have a "virtual processor" so I don't have to care about x86, PowerPC, Alpha, etc. I'm tired of "processor specific". Given that people don't actually care about overall performance in 90+% of all applications, it's time we dumped that whole issue in the trash.
-a -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
