The Free Software Foundation (FSF) has written to 499 of the Fortune 500 most powerful companies in the world to warn them that adopting Microsoft’s new operating system, Windows 7, at the expense of alternatives such as GNU/Linux, would further reinforce the dominance of Microsoft on the global software market.

The FSF is strongly urging the installation of the GNU/Linux operating system for computers because it’s the platform for which many thousands of free software applications have been written. Millions of people around the world have already taken up the GNU/Linux option and the move towards creating and sharing free software is accelerating all the time, threatening the profits of companies such as Microsoft and Apple, who mostly charge for their software.

“Replacing all your desktop systems with GNU/Linux will give you independence from Microsoft, access to thousands of free software applications, and help break the social ill of proprietary software. Thousands of organizations have already moved to free software. What’s your organization’s plan? Investing in Microsoft’s Windows 7 will only get you more stuck and more dependent on them,” the FSF said.

The only one of the Fortune 500 that the FSF did not write to was, unsurprisingly, Microsoft.

With more than 90 per cent of the world’s computers running the Windows operating system, the maker of the software, Microsoft, has an effective monopoly on the global computer environment. If you also consider the fact that Microsoft also owns all-pervasive applications such as Word, Excel and PowerPoint, any challenge to the company’s dominance is a long way off.

A number of companies have tried to compete with Microsoft, most famously Apple and its charismatic leader Steve Jobs. Apple’s initial success was mainly attributable to the computer’s user-friendliness, epitomised by its use of a mouse and an icon-based graphical user interface (GUI). At the time, Microsoft was still in the DOS mode.

But then Microsoft gave DOS a facade, and that facade was the GUI called Windows, which Apple claimed was too similar to their own GUI. But after Apple’s failure to persuade the courts that Microsoft was practising in plagiarism when it moved from the old DOS operating system to the icon-based Windows, Apple’s challenge fell away. Now, the glamorous Apple only has around 5 per cent of the operating system market with its OS X, while Windows owns the rest, with some leftovers for Linux and even smaller operators.

But wait. Linux may be small, but it has the most vocal and enthusiastic following. Rather like the old Apple, actually. Nowadays, Apple owners tend to be happy that they own an Apple and are not too bothered that the war was well and truly won by Microsoft, to the extent that Microsoft owns shares in Apple.

However, Microsoft’s war with Linux is only just beginning. On the one side, we have Microsoft, the most powerful, profitable software company in the world. And on the other we have a software company that can’t be described as a company, rather a language, Linux, which was derived from Unix, that has been taken up by millions of computer users around the world. The main reason Linux was taken up was because it was free and the software written for it was free. Which is most definitely not Microsoft or Apple standard policy.

It may be early days for the open source movement, but with growing support, it may well be the only real challenge left to Microsoft’s ever-increasing dominance.

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It’s an easy answer: yes you should, if you can afford it. The latest version of Apple’s operating software is looking like it will be its most best upgrade yet, and it includes some important new features that, Apple hopes, will entice those all-important Windows users.

Snow Leopard, its less catchy name being OS X 10.6, is not what you might expect – a marketing-friendly bonanza of features that the most buyers are unlikely to use. Rather than do that, Apple has been very selective in what it adds to the hugely successful series, which started with the original Unix-based OS X.

In truth, the main thing that Apple has done is plug the gaps and prepare the Leopard operating system to cope with the cold winter months against the forthcoming launch of Windows 7, which is likely to benefit from a far bigger marketing fanfare than even Apple can muster.

Microsoft’s Windows operating system is used on more than 90 per cent of computers worldwide, and no matter how celebrated Apple OS X has become over the years, it has still failed to make a significant dent in Microsoft’s market dominance. The Linux operating system has also been received well in certain circles and has established a global user base, but Microsoft is still is the king of the operating systems jungle.

Apple’s new move to try and grab some market share from Microsoft is by including an important feature that allows Snow Leopard to work with Microsoft Exchange systems. In other words, Snow Leopard will include built-in support for Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 that Apple says will allow users to employ Snow Leopard’s mail, contacts, and calendar applications while accessing Windows-based network services.

Apple hopes this will encourage business customers who have a certain number of employees to consider switching to their OS X product, knowing that it will work with Microsoft products that few companies are unlikely to want to completely abandon. For the individual, it simply means that you will have fewer worries when your Apple computer meets a Windows computer, as they are likely to understand each other better.For example, if you work in a company that uses Exchange Server technologies, you can turn up for work with your MacBook Pro or whatever else it is that you have, and not have to worry about compatibility issues.

So what do Apple say about Snow Leopard? Here’s some of the new features that they are promising:

- it takes up 7 gigabytes less space on your hard drive than did your previous OS X

- it’s faster to wake up and shut down

- Finder is altogether more zippy now and its refresh rates are faster

- it’s entirely re-written in the Cocoa language, which should mean it makes the most of its 64-bit architecture

- in fact, all the onboard applications, such as Safari, Mail and others are now in 64-bit code, making them faster and more efficient

- a new look for Stacks and Exposé as well as some refinements and extra features for Quicktime and Time Machine

- a useful printer driver update facility, which keeps your Apple up-to-date with your printers without too much hassle

Apple is saying that the Snow Leopard operating system is more refinement than reinvention, which is understandable as too drastic a change can only happen once in a while, as it did when Apple jumped from OS 9 to OS X. Making that sort of “mini-giant leap” is fraught with problems, and Apple was lucky that its move from its old operating system, which was prone to crashes, to the new Unix-based OS X series, which is much more stable very rarely crashes, was smooth and most Apple users were pleased with the transition.

Snow Leopard is priced reasonably, too. Apple has decided to charge what some would say is a nominal fee of $29 for an upgrade. This should mean take-up will be extensive, considering Apple’s not-inconsiderable following.

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With NVIDIA’s Tesla Supercomputer selling for around £4,000 each for an entry level version, the price of personal supercomputers is beyond the reach of the average household. But before dealing with the issue of pricing, first of all, why would anyone want so much computing power in their home?

The easy answer is they want a computer that can navigate the web faster, they want web pages to load faster, to see online video at a higher resolution and to see it play smoothly. Plus, they might want to play RAM-intensive computer games, whose graphics are extraordinarily rich and complex already, but on a high-performance computer would be even more amazing.

But as mentioned, prices are too high. That’s the reason most consumers would give if asked if they want a personal supercomputer. But even if they were prepared to pay the high prices, it’s unlikely that personal computers would be made available in large quantities at your local high street shops.

Apart from obvious security concerns, such as the computers could be used by hackers and malware pushers to make their work even more difficult to defend against, there is also the issue of software: there is simply not enough software being made for personal supercomputers.

The vast majority of software makers are concentrating on the current mass-market machines, which can have up to 4 GHz of processing power, while supercomputers tend to have around 1,000 times the speed. Supercomputers used to be the preserve of universities and large computing companies.

For example, when Sony released the PlayStation 3, it was a machine that was capable of far more than what games makers were used to. It took them a while to become familiar with the machine and develop appropriate games for the platform. The machine could have failed commercially, but Sony had already built up a following with the first and second PlayStation – both in the developer community as well as the market at large. As a result of that momentum, the PlayStation 3 became the success it is today.

The launch of the PlayStation 3 was one of the first occasions when the general public was introduced to the term “flops”, an acronym that stands for “floating point operations”, basically meaning a calculation. So a computer that is capable of 5 gigaflops is basically capable of making 5,000,000,000 calculations per second.

The commonly used method of communicating a computer’s speed is by using hertz, which would be more appropriate in the radio industry, referring, as it does, to radio waves. So a computer is said to be capable of a certain number of gigahertz, but it’s unclear to most of us what it actually means, except the higher the number the better it’s supposed to be.

The speed of supercomputers, on the other hand, tends to be measured in flops, although there is a lot more to be considered when deciding which one is the best.

A supercomputer were introduced in the 1960s and Seymour Cray at Control Data Corporation was one of the pioneers. In the 1980s a large number of smaller competitors entered the market, but many of these disappeared in the mid-1990s during the “supercomputer market crash”.

Today, supercomputers are typically one-of-a-kind custom designs produced by “traditional” companies such as Cray, IBM and Hewlett-Packard, who had purchased many of the 1980s companies to gain their experience. As of July 2009^[update], the IBM Roadrunner, located at Los Alamos National Laboratory, is the fastest supercomputer in the world.

The term supercomputer itself is rather fluid, and today’s supercomputer tends to become tomorrow’s ordinary computer. As mentioned earlier, the Apple G5 was promoted as the world’s first desktop supercomputer. But, by definition, supercomputers are computers that are at the very forefront of computing speed and power and the world’s leading supercomputers certainly do not fit on a desktop.

It’s inevitable that mass market computing machines will become increasingly powerful, and stay within a price range that is affordable for most people. Otherwise they’ll fail to find a market. But it’s also inevitable that corporations, institutions and, increasingly, private enterprises will always have the largest, most powerful computers.

According to the top500.org website, which studies these things, the world’s top 10 supercomputers are:

1. Roadrunner, owned by IBM, and running on the Linux operating system, Roadrunner boasts a processing speed of 12.8 gigaflops

2. Jaguar, owned by Cray, it runs the CNL proprietary operating system; it has a speed of 9.2 gigaflops

3. Jugene, IBM, CNK/SLES operating system, 3.4 gigaflops.

4. Pleiades, NASA, SLES, 12 gigaflops

5. BlueGene/L, CNK/SLES, 2.8 gigaflops

6. Kraken, Cray, CNL, 9.2 gigaflops

7. Blue Gene/P, CNK/SLES, 3.4 gigaflops

8. Ranger, University of Texas, Linux, 9.2 gigaflops

9. Dawn, IBM, CNK/SLES, 3.4 gigaflops

10. Juropa, Forschungszentrum Juelich, Linux, 11.72 gigaflops

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Within 40 years of being created, the computer language known as Unix has become the pre-eminent language of the intensely computerised modern world. For example, it is the code behind the user-friendly interface of Apple computers. And most of the internet now runs on Unix servers. Moreover, the language and its development has directly inspired the open source software movement, which is growing in influence even after it has become the leading source of software online.

As with most things, Unix has a convoluted history. It started life in Bell Labs in the US after AT&T, MTI and GE scrapped an ambitious project to develop an operating system called Multics. The concept was to write a piece of software for mainframe computers that would enable them to serve many people at the same time.

“With Multics they tried to have a much more versatile and flexible operating system, and it failed miserably,” said Dr Peter Salus, author of the definitive history of Unix’s early years.

The cancellation of the project left two of the researchers, Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie, with enough time on their hands to develop the language without the constraints that may have entailed working with big corporate giants like GE and AT&T.

It was some time in August 1969 that Thompson wrote the core of the language. And the operating system he and his growing team eventually came up with was tested on operating system running on a DEC computer known as a PDP-7.

One of the central ideas behind Unix was to create a language that was more compact than the languages used by the mainframe computers of the day. It is this compactness which has almost certainly ensured its longevity. Unix is known for its stability and adaptability.

But it still came as a surprise to many that Unix was chosen by Steve Jobs to be the basis of the new operating system for Apple computers, as the language was developed with mainframes in mind. In hindsight, however, it was a brilliant move because it gave Unix server operators around the world a new lease of life, and a hip and trendy association with a dynamic company such as Apple, which has since adapting Unix for its OSX gone on to capture an increasing share of the computer market.

Computer professionals tend to have some reverence for Unix, but very few of us have to learn it, thank goodness, even if we work as website designers or in another, related job. But we know that Unix is there in the background, whether it’s on the Apple computer we’re using or on the server at the company that hosts our website, even it is in the guise of Linux, which is a language derived from Unix.

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In the computer business, a year is a very long time indeed. So why has NVIDIA’s Tesla Personal Supercomputer failed to become the PC of choice for more netizens around the world since its launch last year? Unlike the iPhone, for example, it is arguably fading into obscurity and the technology is being assimilated into other areas of the industry by other companies.

One reason is the price: a basic Tesla can cost around £4,000 and a high-end flavour can cost two or three times as much. But price alone cannot be the reason. After all, if you build it, they will pay. Apple built the iPhone, priced it at several times more than even the highest spec mobile phones that were on the market at the time, and still the consumers paid.

Could it be the design of the Tesla that puts people off? It certainly isn’t imaginative. The Tesla Supercomputer looks much like any other ordinary PC. So why would people want something that they will have to do their own word-of-mouth marketing for?

“Oh, I see you’ve got a different computer.”

“You can say that again. It’s different alright. It’s a supercomputer.”

“Yeah? What’s super about it?”

“The performance of course. It’s 1,000 times faster than ordinary PCs.”

“Really? But it looks like an ordinary PC.”

“Yeah, I guess they could’ve put some more effort into the design.”

So on the two colleagues/friends/family members go to the specs of the computer, which, needless to say are all very impressive. While the top-of-the-range computers offered by Apple and other companies can boast quad-core architecture, the Tesla can boast that it can house up to 960 cores. Except… it doesn’t boast – you can tell by the design.

NVIDIA aimed the machine at the science market, which may be a reason for the company to opt for a more conservative approach to design. Many scientists, as well as researchers of other kinds, need access to massive processing power in order to simulate experiments that require gargantuan calculations. Which is why most research takes place at universities, an increasing number of which have built their own supercomputers, often using lots of not-so-super ordinary computers.

Scientists are not strongly associated with computer hardware aesthetics and tend to concentrate on function rather than form, unless it’s part of their remit or unless form is part of the function. Like in the car industry, for example, where the more aerodynamic a car is, the more fuel-efficient and faster it is – and the more aesthetically pleasing it is. NVIDIA would have considered all this, and maybe it knew that at that price, it was unlikely to be a mass-market phenomenon like the iPhone, so why bother too much about the design…?

However, it could be argued that innovative yet user-friendly design is the whole reason why Apple is the owner of such mass-market products such as the iPhone, and before that, the iMac, its sleek laptops, and even its G5 desktop computer, which has an industrial-looking casing and was, when it was launched, promoted by Apple as the world’s first desktop supercomputer.

Apple computers tend to be around three times the price of their competitors’ most similar machines. And yet the company has gone from strength to strength in the last 10 years and has spawned many imitators. Maybe NVIDIA should have taken a leaf out of Apple’s design book. Then maybe the Tesla would shift in larger quantities to early adopters, and the rest of us could have benefited from economies of scale and got it on the cheap later on.

NVIDIA could have captured a large share of the gaming market with its machine. It knows enough about that market as its components tend to be sought after by games machines builders. So why the science market? Maybe it thought the scientists would be prepared to spend that kind of money on a computer. But studies show that the average gamer is in his (or her) mid-thirties. And it’s likely that after a home, a computer would be their most important life purchase, even competing with that sleek, aerodynamic, fuel-efficient car they sit in during the constant traffic jams in the city. Maybe they would’ve been prepared to pay a little extra to be in the fast lane when it comes to internet traffic.

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