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The real problem with the Mindcraft benchmark has nothing to do with most of what they cited: the graphs are painfully clear that the limited resource is network bandwidth. That's why it's so funny when they say "We'd never test a server that's resource-limited. What's the point?" That's what I'd ask them now.

Note that they test with one and with four processors, but do not test with one or two ethernet cards. In fact, they never mention the complete hardware configuration of the machine, so we just have to assume they used the same f*cked-up four ethernet card configuration.

There were actually benchmarks put out by c't explaining this, with graphs, and real tasks. Linux performance generally did much better until that second ethernet card was added. I'll believe them, that it's a software limitation in the TCP stack, but I'll also believe that they were exploiting a known problem in the Linux kernel--that only happens under these strange conditions--to their ends. Until they show some benchmarks with the ethernet cards mentioned as a factor.

NT vs. Linux Server Benchmarks: informative and interesting, but most of all truthful, with a link to the c't article I mentioned, and many other more realistic benchmarks.
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pb Reply rather than vaguely moderate me.

There are roumors about an MS and T-Online joint venture. T-Online is the biggest ISP in Germany.
Article in german on Heise Online

That's http://www.theregister.co.uk/991026 -000001.html for the lazy.

There is apparently a bug of some kind, discovered by the German magazine c't, which affects the 733 MHz version of the Coppermine chip and causes the SPEC tests to compute a false result occasionally. (Sound familiar?)

But Intel Germany is blaming it on the i820 chipset, not the processor, which I guess is supposed to instill one with great confidence.
--

Much of this has been because everyone was planning to build StrongARM-based systems where they knew the CPU cost only $25, failing to realize that the only way to get costs down was to have mass production of StrongARM motherboards and other components.

Net result: They hadn't yet generated quantities of product, so price wasn't down to an economical level to allow it to be cheap enough for anyone to even consider.

The sort of model that they need to follow is similar to that of the Nintendo 64/Sony PlayStation game systems; those units are getting sold these days for around $100-$150, and probably are sold at around cost. Several years ago, there was an April Fools Article on Linux on Nintendo 64; I've had a more serious assessment of this for a couple years now.

Down to details...

Way back when, everyone thought that they should be using "cheaper" StrongARM (or perhaps MIPS or PPC) chips that were greatly cheaper than the Intel stuff. The fact that you're left custom-building motherboards was the "kiss of death" to cheapness.

Now that prices of IA-32 chips have fallen through the floor, an Intel Celeron or AMD K6 may be economical enough.

The big deal is to have a compact IA-32 motherboard with integrated video, perhaps sound, and integrated Ethernet, along with some FlashRAM in lieu of a hard drive.

If there's a Taiwanese vendor selling such motherboards for $50 in quantity, add in $40 for CPUs, $15 for a plastic case, $40 for a stick of RAM, and $5 for power supply, and you've got a $150 internal cost.

That only leaves $50 for the costs of pushing the box through retail channels, which seems low. Of course, as with Nintendo 64 and Sony Playstation, the real money comes in selling software, and it will certainly be in Ellison's interests to have both service and software offerings for these boxes so as to extract more than $200 from the average user of them...

One huge problem is the abuse of the system. Someone could simply set up the knowledge base to go fishing for some secret industrial data, well someone already did.

The story of the german energy company Enercon is a good example here. In short it describes how a german company finds their own invention already patented in the US, by the US competitor Kennentech, with papers bearing even Enercon logos! It sounds funny until you realize that Enercon lost 100 million DM and 300 people lost their jobs, as Enercon was not allowed to sell their products in the US.

So if you are looking for some adversely affected 'decent citizens' (though not US citizens) throw the words 'Enercon' and 'NSA' at your preferred Searchengine. I did so and got some coverage of the case here or a little down the page from heise. German readers might want to look at a script for the "plusminus" show or a "Spiegel" or "Zeit" article. While digging up the case i also stumbled over this nice collection of slides concerning the NSA.

>4.Another useful Firewire feature that USB doesn't seem to have is providing power through the same connector used for communications. Again, I may have missed it.

As far as I know it DOES provide power on the same cable. (But no great amount so if your device requires a lot of current, it will still need to get its power from an external source)

>5.I don't remember how many devices USB supports, but I suspect it's less than Firewire.

I don't know about Firewire but theoretically USB is meant to support up to 127 devices. I have read a report in the German c't magazine once where it stated that Intel had managed to connect 123 devices to it (mainly mice, keyboards and USB hubs)

Personally I do not use either USB nor Firewire (occasionally installed some USB devices for others though) because I do not have any device that would support them. On the long run I think hardware manufacturers will make the decision on what to use, simply by making their products work with one defined standard. (For me it's difficult to forsee which one that will be but maybe some insiders know more about this ;)

Disclaimer: This is all AFAIK. Correct me where appropriate.

Yeah, but they sure as hell can't boot *Windows* off a CD can they. That's the point. You get a fully functioning OS of a bootable CD on the Mac.

Often this is because many users don't know how to make their machine boot from the CD. If it's not enabled by default then they have to edit BIOS settings. Easy for some, but impossible or very stressful for most. Also, what CD do you boot up? I've never seen a bootable Windows CD.

Hrmmm. Once Japan decides on a standard for DVD-R, the technology will perpetuate itself especially when you take into account the fact that the DVD encryption algorythm has already been broken, according to . So, perhaps theory of American's economic collapse due to Chinese software piracy would have been lent a higher degree of credibility had you included DVD movie piracy in the mix...

..however, IMHO, the American economy will collapse for entirely different reasons that intellectual property rights abuses. However, this isn't the time for grim analyses.

The german computer magazine c't has an article on this on their newsticker (In german). There's also this News.com article on the subject... Hope this helps!

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The german computer magazine c't has an article on this on their newsticker (In german). There's also this News.com article on the subject... Hope this helps!

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c't (famous german computer magazine) writes that they could not measure any stability problems on the RamBus boards they tested, not even with fully loaded RAM-banks. So this must either be a very rare problem, or it affects only certain board designs.

There's another article regarding the trademark application at Heise.
There's a statement from Roy Boldt, who applied for the trademark. He said, they did it because there were rumors, another firm wanted to get this trademark to make money from it. They only wanted to prevent this. According to his lawyers the trademark 'Linux' isn't protected in germany, contradicting german linux federation LIVE.

So enough bad english for today,
Keef

He called the response by Microsoft (quote) "logical and satisfying at best for a first look" and calls for state institutions to use alternative operating system.

I love that thing about "alternative OS's" ;-)

/sascha

I can play the speculation game, too. Spooks may not choose the obvious paths of least resistance, because they're too obvious. When it comes to rogue bureaucracies, you can't take anything for granted.

From Linux Today: Update: Heise has exposed this as a hoax,. Complete with surplus comma! ;)

The Swedish newspaper Expressen reports today that the Hotmail security breach has led to some serious consequences in Sweden. Someone used the "security issue" to steal and publish the email of a circle of Swedish prostitutes, containing data about their customers including sexual preferences. One of the customers named is the "leader of a major Swedish company". My Swedish is, ahem, a little rusty, but here is the article. (No, Babelfish doesn't offer Swedish as a source languange.) I saw it reported first at ct News Ticker (in German).

.is from Mary Jo Foley of ZDNN Tech news.

"The slant is so weird," Foley said, citing a recent Slashdot-linked interview on the Microsoft Web site. "What they highlight from the interview is not what a journalist would highlight. They like to highlight things that make Microsoft look stupid."

It's like saying that the boy who mentioned "The Emperor has no clothes!!" is biased against the emperor. Then she goes on to say there's no editor to say what's "legitimate" ... Given what's seen coming from the direction of ZDNN Tech News, the definition of "legitimate" is tied more to finances (with clear bias favoring Microsoft) than truth.

I think if Mary Jo Foley wants to see a balanced view of Tech news, she should have a look at C'T magazine and Linux news at Linux Weekly News These are part of the very small group of publications I've seen who try to get to the actual meaning behind current events (and tend to do a good job of it) .. Highlighting Microsoft's "roadmap", "vision", etc., while ignoring the fact they've been known to be less than honest & unethical in the past is what strikes me as bad journalism.

Sorry you WinTroll, you're talking garbage!

c't is the authoritative source for geeks and nerds (who understand German or Dutch) and way more independent and credible than that ZiffDavis crap like PCWeek.

From the c't article "As is the custom with Microsoft, the introduction of this new proprietary standard..." sounds like they didn't do their homework since this is an open standard, Nullsoft didn't seem to have any problem adding support for ASF to Winamp.
Garbage. Nullsoft has to license it like everybody else. Where's the source, where's the (OSS) encoder? ASF is absolutely proprietary.
MP3, while having some patent woes, can be encoded with an open source product like LAME.

PCWeek says that ASF sounds as good or better than MP3
There is no backup of that claim whatsoever, it's just a short note, so it's highly unlikely that they tested it properly (it wasn't even released by then).
The c't article OTOH presents an excellent test complete with audio samples and precise descriptions where ASF fails miserably in comparison to MP3 whith distortions and a lower signal resolution. It is, however, comparable to other pure streaming formats like Real Audio.

The number of trolling MS employees on /. is getting annoying recently, I must say...

Sorry you WinTroll, you're talking garbage!

c't is the authoritative source for geeks and nerds (who understand German or Dutch) and way more independent and credible than that ZiffDavis crap like PCWeek.

From the c't article "As is the custom with Microsoft, the introduction of this new proprietary standard..." sounds like they didn't do their homework since this is an open standard, Nullsoft didn't seem to have any problem adding support for ASF to Winamp.
Garbage. Nullsoft has to license it like everybody else. Where's the source, where's the (OSS) encoder? ASF is absolutely proprietary.
MP3, while having some patent woes, can be encoded with an open source product like LAME.

PCWeek says that ASF sounds as good or better than MP3
There is no backup of that claim whatsoever, it's just a short note, so it's highly unlikely that they tested it properly (it wasn't even released by then).
The c't article OTOH presents an excellent test complete with audio samples and precise descriptions where ASF fails miserably in comparison to MP3 whith distortions and a lower signal resolution. It is, however, comparable to other pure streaming formats like Real Audio.

The number of trolling MS employees on /. is getting annoying recently, I must say...

Who told you that MSAudio is better than MP3?
The acclaimed computer magazine c't have done listening tests and concluded that sound quality of MSAudio is worse than MP3. Read the full text here: Internet Audio and Video: Microsoft contra Apple and MP3.

A similiar letter from Janet Reno was sent to Germany's federal minister of justice Hertha Däubler-Gmelin too.
Read that letter here and the background story here.

The only explanation that makes sense to me is that the U.S. government indeed is able to gather a lot of useful information under present communication habits.

And what nature is this information - fighting drug dealers, organized crime or terrorists?

Nope. It seems to be mostly economical espionage. Some cases that became public:

• European Union / U.S. economic treaty negotiations - the EU delegation was eavesdropped by the U.S. who had easy play knowing the others strategy and goals
• A solar energy company from north germany suddenly found their invention patented by a U.S. company
• During the bidding for a train system, the german led ICE consortium lost to the french TGV because the French were able to eavesdrop the ICE faxes

A similiar letter from Janet Reno was sent to Germany's federal minister of justice Hertha Däubler-Gmelin too.
Read that letter here and the background story here.

The only explanation that makes sense to me is that the U.S. government indeed is able to gather a lot of useful information under present communication habits.

And what nature is this information - fighting drug dealers, organized crime or terrorists?

Nope. It seems to be mostly economical espionage. Some cases that became public:

• European Union / U.S. economic treaty negotiations - the EU delegation was eavesdropped by the U.S. who had easy play knowing the others strategy and goals
• A solar energy company from north germany suddenly found their invention patented by a U.S. company
• During the bidding for a train system, the german led ICE consortium lost to the french TGV because the French were able to eavesdrop the ICE faxes

Again you forgot the Geramn Computer Mag c't. They have a very positive review (Athlon's gonna kick some butf) and very good benchmarks. Check it out here.
Oh and do not forgot to pop in your babelfish - it is in German ;-)

The question needs to be, are 'they' going after: 1. Labor unions ? 2. Communists ? 3. Jews ? 4. Catholics ?

Nope, they are directly going after you, leaving out all these groups. As said before: The attitude "as long as I don't do anything wrong I don't care" will cost you your privacy faster then you can say "Why me?"

Related to that: At the end of may Janet Reno wrote a note to the german minister of justice about the issue of exporting strong cryptography.

Germany, as well as most other countries in the European Union allow the export programs using strong cryptography, as long as they are in the Public Domain.

Janet Reno opposed to that, saying that this weakens the Wassenaar treaty, which was signed by more than 30 countries world wide.

For the complete article - and Janet Reno's letter - go here (by telepolis, an online magazine published by the Heise-Verlag, which also publishes c't).

Sorry, only available in german, maybe you want to babelfish it.

Ralph

Does anyone have a link to the article in c't (even if it is in German)?

Check it out.
And yes, it is in German.

The test failed because it relied on cell phone communications to transfer data.

With so many youngsters sporting cell phones (the "Loveparade" was visited by 1.5 million people), the wireless communications network in the event's area went down...

Sources: Report at Heise Newsticker, more info and pictures at Telepolis.

The test failed because it relied on cell phone communications to transfer data.

With so many youngsters sporting cell phones (the "Loveparade" was visited by 1.5 million people), the wireless communications network in the event's area went down...

Sources: Report at Heise Newsticker, more info and pictures at Telepolis.

The c't benchmark used a Linux-based benchmarking tool that is available from them.

The c't benchmark used a Linux-based benchmarking tool that is available from them.

c't/heise Linux/NT benchmarks

It's good. Read it!

Summary:
- NT is faster in one unrealistic test.
- Linux is much faster in one somewhat unrealistic test (CGI on NT).
- Linux is much faster in a more realistic test (many files).
- Linux is slightly faster in all other tests.

I still wonder why the Linux guys accepted the unrealistic test for the PC Week benchmark ("Mindcraft 3") and didn't insist on additional realistic benchmarks.

Did I miss this one on the Slashdot front page?
Or weren't they posted?
If they weren't, please someone kick Rob...

Here's the link. Quite interesting actually.
http://www.ct.heise.de/ct/english/99/13/186-1/
Or click here .

But all you have to do is put the link inside an anchor, we could click directly on it, rather than having to cut and paste it. Having said that, Here it is done for you as an example:

See Http://www.ct.heise.de/ct/english/99/13/186-1/ for details, or click the link to go directly to the English translation of CT's Linux Vs NT. Article.

For those of you wondering about that benchmark c't translated the article into English (although, not the graph labels, but those shouldn't be too hard to figure out ;) and posted it on their website here.

The German computer mag C't decided to do their own, more detailed benchmarks. Their conclusion was that the PC Labs/Mindcraft results sound plausible, but under more realistic scenarios, Linux & NT are neck and neck, or Linux beats NT soundly. Find the English version of the article here

>Ok, the results are in. The benchmarks, when
>administered properly, show that NT outperforms
>Linux in every category.

"Every category"? As I recall, there were exactly TWO categories:

1) Web serving static documents using multiple network cards;

2) File serving using Microsoft's proprietary SMB protocol, also using multiple network cards.

In the former case, see what c't magazine found:


http://www.heise.de/ct/english//99/13/ 186-1/

Namely, Linux outperforms NT when a single 100 mbps network card is used. When serving STATIC pages, NT outperforms Linux when using multiple network cards.

Regardless of the number of NICs, Linux greatly outperforms NT when dynamic content is used (CGIs in this case). Almost all websites use dynamic content.

The tests weren't run on file serving, but it seems likely that a Linux networking bottleneck is the culprit there as well, when multiple NICs are used. Other ZDLabs tests show Linux + Samba outperforming NT on single-NIC systems.

Keep in mind that the Samba team had to reverse-engineer the Microsoft protocols, and it's possible MS is doing things specifically to sabotage Samba (they have done so in the past).


I also take issue with your statement:

>The benchmarks, when
>administered properly,

That seems to read:

"The benchmarks, when administered so NT wins, show that NT wins."

There are clearly numerous benchmarks other than Winbench and other than static webpage serving which show Linux comes out on top.

Also remember than Mindcraft has at various times been commissioned to show Windows beating Novell and Windows beating Solaris (yes, Solaris, as in "Oracle will pay you one million dollars if you can show NT+MS SQL Server-7 is no more than 99 times slower than Solaris+Oracle [which we're running on an Ultra 10000, of course]").


>The benchmark has exposed an architectural
>flaw/oversight.

Apparently we need a multithreaded TCP/IP stack. This is mainly of use to people who need to serve more than 100 Mb/second from a single box.

Unless you're serving static content over an OC-3 line, you're not going to hit this snag as a webserver in the real world.

If you DO need to serve a lot of data, a cluster of INEXPENSIVE Linux boxes will do nicely (one CPU and network card each). This is also far more fault-tolerant than a single Quad Xeon overpriced box. (Remember that extra CPUs didn't help out much with static content -- NT with one CPU served 1800 pages per second, while with four, it served 4100 -- not the 7200 you'd expect.)
Four Linux boxes will serve 1300 per second each, for a total of 5200 requests per second.

A few other changes with regard to Apache, in conjunction with kHTTPd, should help Linux exceed NT's static page serving even on single-CPU systems. This isn't terribly important since once you start using dynamic content, you're more likely to see 20 page-views per second per CPU than 1,000 no matter what the operating system.



>We need to fix this in order to reach the
>performance numbers we need to be a server
>operating system.

Uhh, Kostya -- Linux has already reached those numbers in real-world situations. Should it be improved? Yes, and this will happen anyway. In specific benchmark configurations, it's slower than NT -- but if you were to rely on this data and choose NT, you'd quickly run into the problem that NT doesn't have the stability you need for a server operating system. It'd also be much slower once you started using dynamic content in your website.

>So let's do it. Let's fix it. Start downloading
>and start coding.

Somehow I suspect that "Let's" means "Other people". Are you "downloading and coding"?

FYI, people ARE already addressing this issue, but it is nowhere near as pressing as you seem to think.


>I have linux installed on every one of my file
>servers. I will be able to fend off the criticism
>for now.

Criticism from whom? Your pointy-haired boss? Offer to use NT on a system and see how well it does. I don't know ANYONE who prefers NT over UNIX in any real-world setting for servers when experienced with both.

Are you getting insufficient performance from your Linux servers? I know a lot of people who rush out to get the latest and greatest and then don't make use of it (e.g., a P3 500 for Quake won't improve your game so much as some extra practice!).

Chances are, when the multiple-NIC issue is fixed, you won't even notice the difference. It won't affect most people!

... and Linux came out marginally on top. Conditions were a good bit more real-world, and the article is pretty well-written. Read it in English at http://www.heise.de/ct/english//99/13/ 186-1/

(Info found at http://www.lwn.net/daily/)

The (yep!) english article can be found here.

Sorry, there is no (I wonder why) german page available, the results can be found in c't 13/99 on pages 186 and following.

Short summary: This test shows, that Linux+Apache outperforms NT as a webserver if there is only one NIC to handle. It also shows, that the number of processors daoesn't matter that much, when using Linux as the host sytsem for apache.
NT runs much better than Apache on Linux, when more then one NIC has to be served - which might be the result of not having a multi-threaded IP-stack under Linux.

Read ;-)

Ralph

Actually, Britain is by no means the first country to come up with this idea; a very similar proposal was considered last year in germany and is again under consideration now.

The scary thing about it is that it's only a question of implementing existing legislature, namely para. 88 of the telecommunications act. So, the basic laws which require this sort of monitoring are already in place.

Basically, any network provider (ISP, company network, whatever) will have to provide dedicated access to the network at its own cost, in a way that not only enables government to capture any and all data but also leaves the network provider none the wiser.

Cost for the required infrastructure is estimated to be between DM 15.000 for small and DM 100.000 ( US $ 7.500 - 50.000) for large providers (Numbers from german iX magazine, 6/1999). In addition to the complete loss of privacy this offers a perfect infrastructure for hackers..

You can find details (in german!) at http://www.heise.de/tp/deutsch/ inhalt/te/2793/1.html

Here's a working link to the article.

they seem to have changed their mind and now
use cracker instead of hacker.

see http://www.heise.de/newsticker /data/fr-01.06.99-000/

(it's in german, but you can clearly see the term cracker ;-)

-funzel

Enforcing this sort of thing by law is difficult. In the past some progress has been made by putting requirements in bidding conditions for government sales. This is why almost every OS under the sun has a Posix compatibility layer. Not that the NT layer is much use. You can't use it at the same time as the normal API and if you want to be secure you have to remove it.

(Btw. this seminar, which I saw on the Heise newsticker has a few other pearls, like the fact that most firewalls can't tell the difference between a virus and a Windows NT service pack. Nor can I :-)

c't has a comprehensive test and description of CSS (wannabe) capable browser (unfortunately not online). Gecko is best, even in version M3, followed by Opera and IE5.

Things look pretty bad on the CSS 2 side, though.

Anyway, with IE5 trying to undermine the web standards it's excellent to see Mozilla make progress.

The German computer magazine c't will have a description, board layout etc. of a hardware mp3 decoder that hooks up to the parallel port in their next issue. They claim it works with 80286 and even XTs. Sorry, don't have more info yet.

Regards, Jochen

The exploit I was thinking of was from this article. The Slashdot discussion after this seemed to suggest that however this particular exploit was done could be coded to run in userspace on a unix box, and would be nearly impossible to block through the kernel. This was just what several people seemed to say, though, and I am kind of hoping that somebody out there can provide a more definitive answer.

I'd like to draw your attention also on Europe, where gouverments try to do some similar thing: The Enfopol-Project by the European Union. (read more (in german) at telepolis (Enfopol Special)) Have anyone more Information on that ? Maybe also about the Russian "SORM 1&2" Project ? (link in german!)

I'd like to draw your attention also on Europe, where gouverments try to do some similar thing: The Enfopol-Project by the European Union. (read more (in german) at telepolis (Enfopol Special)) Have anyone more Information on that ? Maybe also about the Russian "SORM 1&2" Project ? (link in german!)

I'd like to draw your attention also on Europe, where gouverments try to do some similar thing: The Enfopol-Project by the European Union. (read more (in german) at telepolis (Enfopol Special)) Have anyone more Information on that ? Maybe also about the Russian "SORM 1&2" Project ? (link in german!)

The Fraunhofer institute, which has developed the MP3 format (and owns the patents) is researching on this issue for a long time now.
According to C't (apparently only in the printed version) they're not far away from releasing a new format, which will be considerably smaller at the same quality.

The 'bandwith' the human ear uses to transmit the information to the brain is magnitudes smaller than the MP3 one, so they say file sizes can still be decreased very much.

Research on this subject is quite difficult, but if anyone, Fraunhofer will be able to do it.

Conclusion: Whatever the music industry tries to come up with, it'll fail unless it offers better quality. This will likely be delivered by Fraunhofer, so we better take a close look at how they handle the copyright issue.

Personally I have nothing against digitally signed music files, as long as the format can be used (=encoded) by everyone. After all, not everything is copyrighted.