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FreeBSD sets new 1-day download record
HerbieTMac writes "Congrats to FreeBSD for a new single day download record. Two terabytes (that's 2 trillion bytes!) from a single machine (ftp.freesoftware.com). This was brought about by the simultaneous release of RedHat 7 and FreeBSD 4.1.1."
Whoa.
--Giving to trolls for the benefit of us all
Don't start doing what the hard drive manufacturers started doing. When we are talking about small values, it does not really matter. At these levels it can mean a big difference.
2 terabytes = 2199023255552 bytes
To find out how much you are off:
2199023255552 - 2000000000000 = 199023255552 bytes
This is 185.35 GB which is a lot of data just in itself.
Sometimes I ask myself the same question, why isn't this on the front page? Then I get my wish on the next BSD story and the nearly all the posts on the front page BSD story are worthless. People bicker about how *BSD is dead, not as good as Linux, or how they don't like Theo de Raadt of OpenBSD because they heard something somewhere about him, the list goes on and on. So basically 90% of the posts are off-topic for the story. It's too bad people miss the point and the good news of the story.
It's nice to hear another story about FreeBSD standing up to the challenge. I'm sure they'll be breaking the record again soon in the near future. Mabye cdrom.com will have a go at the record again. Anyway, I'd never heard about Terasolutions before. They have a nice plain website. Yet another vendor who supports BSD.
Keep in mind that this is a single machine with a single processor. This is not a load-balanced set of servers. I am truly impressed with FreeBSD as a server OS. I have yet to see an NT server perform such a feat. This is probably the reason Hotmail has not been moved onto an NT server. I am a linux user and a loyal one too. However, I think most of us who use linux should not forget the contributions the BSD's have made to UNIX as a whole.
The University of California, Berkeley used Unix as a research system. It also had a DARPA grant to develop and implement the Arpanet protocols, which became TCP/IP. Companies such as Cisco, Frontier, NetManage, and others based their initial products on implementations of Berkeley TCP/IP.
Many features we nowadays take for granted were introduced on BSD and only later adopted by AT&T and other vendors: the vi screen editor, the termcap terminal capability database and the curses screen manipulation library, csh, job control, long file names, symbolic links, TCP/IP networking, the socket interface, various r* utilities, etc...
Keep in mind also, the BSD crowd and the linux crowd have similar goals and aspirations. We both like our respective OS's because they are free and open. We both like our OS's because they are both UNIX, whether the Open Group allows you to call it that or not. Both groups know that either a demon or a penguin can break windows with no trouble at all. Sure, there is the BSD vs. SysV argument and others, but who cares. We are on the same side and we should be learning from eachother instead of starting a flamefest. If you see an honest, educated post about why someone prefers BSD to Linux or vice versa, you should respect their opinion and try to understand why (some feature here) is important in their world view. I am personally looking forward to getting an extra box so I can start learning more about the BSD's.
cheers.