IBM gets hip with 'cool' Ubuntu PC deal

The Register (UK) ^ | 5th August 2008 19:02 GMT | Gavin Clarke in San Francisco

[Golden Eagle]

We've been here before with IBM partnering around, and talking up, the possibilities of the Linux desktop. Yet it's never really caught on.

IBM also had another complete disaster with attempted Office replacements recently with their Workplace product. They don't even sell PC's anymore either, they sold that wing off to the Chinese government a few years ago, IBM is the absolute last place I'd look for desktop productivity.

[conservatism_IS_compassion]

Multithreading also needs some real attention before multiple processor chips is going to mean much to average users. Now they just seem to idle along.

Windows could help with this. I'm running XP Pro on a Phenom Quad, and while you can associate a given app to prefer a given core, by default XP seems to throw everything on Core 1 . . . Why doesn't XP default to using an unused core if one is available??

One of the mysteries of life. You would think that a scheduler that just assigned the next available core to the next process would do something good, but the designs of the OSes were apparently blind-sided by multi-cores.

I thought it fascinating that OS X.6, "Snow Leopard," is slated to have "Open GL" technology to make it easier for application writers to more fully exploit multiple cores and even to tap the number crunch capabilities of graphics processors. It seems likely that speech processing will become efficient - and possibly go mainstream - with that sort of technology . . .