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Dell CIO Says "Unix is Dead"
An anonymous reader writes "I thought this might spur some good discussion on this board, including jabs at Dell and MS, which I always enjoy reading. Dell's CIO believes that the end of Unix is here, in fact his opening slide in a recent presentation was "Unix is dead." Specifically, he talked about the savings he claims in moving Dell's Oracle databases from Solaris to Red Hat.
Hmm, what he's missing is that Linux is the next jump in the evolution of Unix. So it's like noting the ascendency of Cro Magnon over Neanderthal, and deducing that "cavemen are dead". Nope, it's just evolution at work, and it's yielding impressive results.
For those of you who came in late, Unix and its workalikes (Linux etc) have grown in use exponentially since 1980.
What you say is true but basically the article is just saying that Linux and the other free Unix lookalikes are eating into the cake of the commercial Unices. I've seen enough Solaris workstations replaced with Linux machines to know that this is happening. The Unix culture is going anywhere, though. Quite the contrary.
"I have opinions of my own, strong opinions, but I don't always agree with them." -- George H. W. Bush
Except that the Dell CIO literally said, "Unix is Dead." Mott's the troll, here, not Timothy.
...unix is the "unix" that we used to write u*nix for or un*x, etc, because it was supposed to be trademarked or something.
it's not *BDS, including OS X.
It's not Linux.
And, honestly, when was the lastt ime you heard anything about Unix, proper.
I agree: unix is dead.
It never was UNIX...never will be.
;-)
The term UNIX these days refers not just to underlying mechanics, but also whether or not you've licensed the rights to use the UNIX trademark from X/Open.
Plus, having a Mach kernel, you could argue that MacOS X isn't built upon anything remotely similar to any true UNIX distribution.
Just because it's got bits of *BSD above that kernel does not UNIX make it
-psy
Since I worked on the earliest versions of Berkeley Unix, I can clarify this (the terse version is "BSD used to be UNIX, but that was a long time ago"):
The original Berkeley Unix was indeed a set of mods to the Bell Labs Unix code (which unfortunately were not accepted by Bell Labs/AT&T in a hissy fit of Not Invented Here Syndrome).
However licensing issues kept getting in the way of efforts of people like Bill Jolitz to make BSD Unix available on PCs (386 PCs, back then). This was another really nasty battle that reflected quite badly on AT&T, and caused untold trauma for Jolitz, other BSD developers, and of course the teeming masses that wanted affordable Unix on their PCs.
Therefore a huge effort was made to strip out all of the original Bell Labs source code.
Modern BSD distributions, like FreeBSD, therefore have none of the original Unix code, and properly should be called workalikes, just like Linux.
I've been using Linux for lo, these many years, so I'm out of touch with BSD issues, however there's every reason to think that BSD is a more exact workalike than Linux, since it started out as Unix and only gradually had each component rewritten as a close copy of the functionality of the original. Some purists care about this, I don't.
Except where functionality is actually removed. E.g. Stallman insists that man pages are obsolete and refuses to support them, which is incredibly wrongheaded. BSD is superior in that regard, and in a few other places. (Many places where BSD had a similar edge in the past are now obsolete issues; Linux has mostly caught up.)
Professional Wild-Eyed Visionary
Otherwise, you can say "Windows is dead" with the release of XP, because MS replaced the last of the old Windows code with a whole new 32-bit implementation.
Actally your wrong I work for city goverment and we have been fasing out VMS,IBM mainframe in place of newer applications being ported to Sun sparc C/Java/Peoplesoft Weblogic.. No one is writing new applications on VMS/MAINFRAME these days the problem with them is the lack of interfaces to easily access the data.... what's the point of warehousing data if its very complex to access ?
- I came I saw I Conquered
2. Dell has some of the worst-managed IT projects in existance.
3. Randy Mott is an idiot.
That about sums it up.
No sig, sorry.
it's not Unix. it's Solaris. if Mott's going to be taken seriously, he should define all his terms appropriately.
This has everything to do with more. On many systems, more will not page backwards from stdin.
Adjust your environment to include a "setenv PAGER less" (or equiv.) and be done with it. Or replace more with a link to less.
"I thought this might spur some good discussion on this board, including jabs at Dell and MS, which I always enjoy reading"
If you read the article, you'll notice Dell is saying Linux on Intel is killing traditional unix on Sun/HP/IBM etc.
Vote for Pedro
Pinfo is a godsend for people who just can't get the hang of the GNU info viewer. I concur that GNU info has one of the worst user interfaces ever conceived. Pinfo uses Lynx-like navigation and is a snap to get the hang of.
As for reinventing the wheel, Info has been around at least as long as HTML, and possibly longer. (The first entry in the TeXinfo changelog dates back to 1988). Info is also a lot more conducive to producing printed copies of the documentation than HTML is.
Info has been around a lot longer than HTML. TeXinfo is the latest incarnation, but TOPS-20 emacs was documented in an older info format when I first started using it in 1981, and probably long before that.
Or replace more with a link to less.
Don't do that. I have tried loging in remote to such a system and were having problems with my terminal. (I don't remember if this was a TERM environment problem, or broken terminal emulation.) Either way I had to use more, because less wouldn't work. However somebody had found it a good idea to make more an alias for less and replace more with a symlink to less.
Do you care about the security of your wireless mouse?
I seem to recall he also said that Debian policy is against this and in favor of having man pages
Correct; Debian policy is that everything has a man page. Where info pages exist, they get auto-converted to man pages, and such man pages note their origin so you can go to the info system to read them if you like.
Some programs have a man page that just says "UNDOCUMENTED: this command does not have a man page." This is considered a bug. Debian developers have been known to write man pages for programs that don't have them.
Personally, I hate hate hate the info text browser. Where info files get converted to HTML, I am happy to have the clickable browsing, but I still always want man pages. "man -k" (or "apropos" for BSD fans) is great when I'm trying to figure out which command to use, rather than figure out details of a command.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
No. Solaris is a branded UNIX. They filed the paperwork.
Linux is a kinda-sorta knockoff. Nobody even knows if it would be possible to file the paperwork. (who would pay, etc....)
By hitting the 'u' key. You know, as in Up.
BTW, when using Info remember that you're actually using a hacked version of Emacs. By learning to use Info you are learning some parts of Emacs. If you have some kind of religious conflict with this, you should probably stop using Info.
Have you ever worked on a computer??? Sun's have power lines that are several times thicker, the cases are much stronger, just about everything about them is made to much better specs than any pc server I have worked on (HP, IBM X series, Compaq, etc). Sure Hdd's etc can fail on any machine but with partitioning, hotswap, etc better made machines will have lower failure rate, even Dell isn't going to claim that their hardware can achieve the same uptimes as the big iron machines. Now if your app will fit into the paradigm a cluster might achieve similar uptimes to the big iron, but then you have the programming and maintenance complexity of maintaining the cluster. As for the IBM not sending a hdd, I have no clue what you are talking about, I regularly got HDD's for laptops shipped in 1-2 days, servers with support contracts would often have the drive there in less than 4 hours (I would often receive parts via Sonic Care, if the part wasn't available in my town they would get it from one nearby and buy it a seat on an airplane, correct support contracts are worth every penny)
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
That's odd. I still see clients today buying HP-9000 equipment, with HP-UX, to power their large oracle databases.
However, the market trend is going towards commodity hardware, so with that, I agree with you. The most pointy-haired of the pointy-haired bosses still don't trust Linux, even though there's little reason for them not to.
But, all this is not a death knell for UNIX.
-- I am. Therefore, I think!
That's right, and a Mercedes costs more than a Fiat.
True enough, but anyone worth their salt knows the A3500 was a flaming piece of
Now, take an E10k. I can dynamically add/remove processors, memory, SBus cards, PCI cards, etc.
In fact, I just replaced 4 SBus I/O mezz's each on 2 of my E10k's with PCI ones. All while the system was up. And the database was running. And the data was processing. And not a single hiccup.
Now _that_ is what I call hot-swap hardware.
Errr.... check the Solaris docs.
OK, you tell me how to keep an Oracle database highly available without decent clustering.
Yes, a parallel DB is still technically a cluster.
True enough, max. CPU in an SF15k (They're _not_ part of the Enterprise line), is 108.
However, it's not a "very specific" need; I see lots of places where running several domains on SF15k's would be ideal. I also have some E10k's that run balls-to-the-wall, 64 CPU's, 64gb RAM in one domain. We're trying to determine exactly what our performance gains would be if we migrated off of the pair of E10k's mentioned above to a single SF15k. Honestly, I don't think a single 15k would handle the load. The application in question seems to like more processors at a (relatively) slower speed than fewer procs at faster speed....
The US-II chips were very unreliable until the Sombra modules became available. They got seriously reliable after that.
Sun never introduced a Sombra-like module for the desktop-class equipment (E450 and below), _BUT_ they did replace the CPU's with IBM e-cache modules with CPU's with Sony e-cache modules. I haven't seen an e-cache parity error in a long, long time (And I support about 300 Sun machines, from Ultra 1's through SF6800's, and soon 15k's....)
That depends on what it means to your business. If downtime costs you serious $$$, that contract is worth its weight in gold.