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EDA: Unix vs. NT
Geoff Parker wrote in with a
story about competition between
Unix and Linux vs. NT in the EDA market. An interesting read that puts Linux in good light and
says that expctations for the EDA on NT market are falling short . It
also seems Intel has a 1000-member LUG.
EDA = Electronic Design Automation. In a nutshell, it encompasses all of the software used to design computer chips and printed circuit boards. I am a CAD Engineer for a major US Semiconductor company. My company is exclusively a Sun/Solairs operation for EDA. A few years ago when we were going through a major port of our CAD flow, one of the issues that came up was "NT". It took us all of 5 minutes to dismiss it.
Windows NT is completely unsuitable for an EDA platform. Its networking brain damage (how do you telnet in?), extensive burden for system administration, and excellent ability to reboot after every miniscule change to the system makes it unsuitable. On the flip side, for example, we are in the process of upgrading to many UltraSparc workstations. Sun is nice enough to put the ethernet address and hostid on the box, so we simply add those to our configuration files. Next, we plug it in and turn it on. It boots up, finds the jumpstart server, partitions the hard disk, installs the operating system, applies all the patches and is ready to go. It does all this without having to type a single key or do a single mouse click on the system!
Don't get me wrong by thinking I'm dissin' Linux. Heck, I've got my own Linux x86 box at my desk, and it is very useful around the office. Although we are exclusively using Sun/Solaris for EDA at the moment, Linux may be on the horizon. Unfortunately for Microsoft, Windows NT is not. It is fundamentally unsound as an operating system for anything as demanding as an EDA development. Linux, being very similar to Unix, is quite capable.
When you read these stats you have to ask yourself "what kind of users are these?". I use NT as my desktop OS at work, almost everyone I know does too. Almost every one also shuts there computer off every evening before going home. I don't have actual statistics supporting this, but I suspect that in most cases NT is deployed as a desktop OS. This is not a "mission critical" OS, although it was intended to by a server OS, it isn't used that capacity in many cases.
Unix machines on the other hand have much more expected of them. It's not unusual to have Unix servers that have been running continuously for years. There is an old Sun server I use at work that has never crashed in over 5 years.
My company sells products that are deployed on NT servers and we state that they must run only our server applications. We have found that if you pre-configure everything, and run just a small set of applications, NT works fine. You don't have to be a Unix zealot to understand that NT is not as robust of an OS as Unix.
Nonsense! Microsoft is a monopoly that restricts competition. Restricted competition means lower wages paid to dedicated middle class working people.
... and Linus can't throw a curve ball. Go O's !!!
Those statistics indicate NT is waaay to unstable for EDA's multiple week simulation jobs.
Why do I have an email filter to automatically delete the incoming messages of when my company's WinNT servers are being rebooted? Because it happens so frequently, it is a downright nuisance to get all those messages. Why is WinNT so downright flakey that rebooting it usually temporarily resolves the problem? I do not know, but it defies all logic.
I'll give it this, however. WinNT does an ok job as a personal computer handling a little websurfing, word processing, spreadsheets, and basic office automation programs. It is not fundamentally designed properly to compete with Unix. It is not a properly networked operating system.
The network is the computer.
My main NT server runs DNS, DHCP, HTTPD, and File/print. The last reboot I had was when I added three drives.
I also have three Citrix servers running in a load balancing cluster. They run a variety of apps.
Chris
mtnbkr@mindspring.com
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 120020 Apr 9 22:33 /usr/sbin/pppd*
There you have it. I am connected as a regular user, with pppd having NO suid permissions. I use PPP as a regular user all the time. You, quite frankly, don't know what you are talking about.
Remember that only NT has a c2 security rating
Only when it is not networked. Big deal. And that particular configuration is NOT what you get out of the box. Try using the C2 configuration tool that comes in the NT4 Resource Kit, and you'll see it's not as simple as "point and click." And you'll see that it's not what you got when you installed, either. And for that matter, it was NT 3.51 that was certified -- NOT NT 4 (no, the certification isn't "upgradeable"; each OS version has to be certified itself).
I would be thoroughly stunned if no Unix was ever C2 certified. I simply don't believe that.
As for the Navy using NT -- I'm beginning to suspect this is a clever troll. Do I really have to remind you of how an NT crash resulted in a ship being towed back to port?
DFL
Never send a human to do a machine's job.
Conclusion: he's wasting bandwidth.
DFL
Never send a human to do a machine's job.
> Err, you definitely need root permission to use /dev/modem is a device under /dev/modem :))
> pppd. Obvious since
> unix and hence by default not all users should
> be allowed to use pppd. (Well unless
> is 777
That's why you use Unix groups... although most people don't for some stupid reason.
---
DNA just wants to be free...
The survey certainly was funded by Microsoft, insofar as they advertise on ZDNet and PCWeek.
That is totally counter to what the Linux people say. All Linux has IS self selected reports. This was a real poll, which I think is a cut above the "I run NT at school and we tried to run quake on it while serving the network and it crashed. We have had the machine 2 days so that must mean NT crashes every 2 days!" which I see all over /. about linux.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Secondly, we have no idea who funded it. We know who provided the data to ZD: Giga. That tells me nothing about who funded the survey. If you can provide me with a URL at Giga's site to support your claim that M$ didn't fund it, please do so (I went to their site, and nothing easily presented itself). Absent some actual proof as to who funded it, I think you ought to omit this from your arguments in favor of it (I am certainly not going to claim that M$ funded it because I don't know).
We also don't know what sort of people they asked: Joe Average, or Joe Microsoft Employee, or who? Obviously this has a dramatic impact upon the results.
We also don't know the EXACT question that was asked. Obviously the wording of the question can make a big difference in the results. Example: "When did you stop beating your wife? Today, yesterday, or last week?" (well, what if I wasn't beating her at ANY time at all?). The wording of the question matters.
Frankly, this is irrelevant. I can give you a survey where 90% of the users reboot NT daily (my client's office), where 100% of the users curse NT's existence hourly (my company, where we suffer NT's indignities but not gladly), and where a sizable percentage reinstall NT on a regular basis due to OS failures. My point is this: surveys can be had to say whatever you want.
The bottom line, however, is that these statistics bear zero resemblance to the reality experienced by any NT user I know of who puts the OS through its paces. I have seen *one* NT box stay up for 78 days -- but it was almost never used and even then finally had to be rebooted due to memory leaks. On the other hand, I've seen NT completely *incapable* of shutting down some *user* applications under certain circumstances. I've seen problems in *user* applications that can only be resolved by a reboot (just restarting the app wouldn't itself wouldn't do it). I have a client with an office full of such stories.
I'm not suggesting the people in the survey lied. I'm suggesting that we don't know what they were asked, and we don't know who was asked, and we don't know what these people meant when they answered (BSODs only? They're rare for me too -- but not rebooting to solve OS problems with NT).
DFL
Never send a human to do a machine's job.
Being a moderator, I post this as an AC for two obvious reasons.
Threatening to erase Linux from your disks will not accomplish anything. People seriously don't care whether you deinstall Linux.
Your article was moderated down because it was a troll. The solution to the problem of having your articles moderated down is to post things which are on topic and are not flamebait, redundant, or trolls.
It's as simple as that.
Just for the record Santa Cruz Unix had C2 certification 10 years ago.
I have worked on B2 certified Unix systems and those applying for B1 security.
Great. It's possible to keep NT up. But can you guarantee that, like SUN and HP do?
Everybody likes to point out that their own NT never crashes... Obviously most people's NT does crash. There are always exceptions, and they usually shouldn't be noted. Yes, some peoples' P3s will clock to 1GHz with a liquid cooler, but seeing as MOST peoples' won't, it's really not relevant.
DAC is the Design Automations Conference, where all of the EDA vendors put on a show to try to woo over all of the EDA customers with the latest developments. The annual conference just happened a few weeks ago. One hilarious event that was not mentioned in the linked article was Intel's big commitment speech to EDA. Intel's speaker was Craig Barrett, if I remember (and spelled) correctly. However, as soon as it became obvious that it was just another Wintel speech, over half the crowd got up and left! If it were a Linux/Intel speech, I guarantee you that very few people would have left.
Intel, if you are listening, it is time for you to drop EDA on Windows. If you want to sell chips for EDA, focus on Linux.
Do you laugh at all BSOD's, or just the ones near the end of a 10-12 day simulation? :)
Engineers, like myself, care about the applications not the OS. They know their CAD app, they have written many scripts, and they are reluctant to change - they are most certainly not hacking the OS while designing circuits.
Linux has a chance because it will run UNIX apps with little change and because a $10K Linux workstation outperforms a $80K HP/SGI/IBM UNIX workstation. That said, I still find NT much easier to work with on a daily basis, not to mention the multitude of apps available compared to UNIX.
It makes little to no difference when crashes are unacceptable in the first place.
Please report to your regeneration creche for your humor upgrade.
I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
The EDA company I work for recently ported some applications to NT, and they have been nothing but a pain in the wazoo to support, both the apps (which to be perfectly candid is really our problem) and the OS. I'd rather go back to Apollo Domain than work with NT. Fortunately the suits are looking at Linux, I just hope they allow engineering to do a good port.
Despite MS's rehetoric, the level of porting help received was minimal. Quite frankly, they really haven't done anything on their end besides talk and send out press releases.
It's kind of nice seeing bill get sand kicked in his face...
OF COURSE there are a zillion job openings for NT sysadmins. It takes several NT admins to manage the same userload that one 'nix admin does (this from our IT department, heavily M$).
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
Some of you don't understand the difference between "AutoCAD" and "EDA tools." Personally I've never used AutoCAD but I use 10 different EDA tools every day.
EDA tools are not like mechanical eng. CAD tools.
Most chip designers have to use 5 to 10 different programs from different vendors to design a chip.
They can't be locked into a "one program" mindset.
While most of the programs have GUIs they usually never get used (except for chip layout programs)
This is because the text only version allows almost infinite scriptability, many programs such as Synopsys Design Compiler have tcl or lisp/scheme interpreters built into them to aid in scripting.
None of the EDA tool vendors has a complete top to bottom flow so chip designers buy various tools
from various vendors and glue them all together
with perl, tcl, etc.
My GOD man, it's called SARCASM.
1) This was a DAC for the aerobic. The fool hall was all in line. A truly linear DAC.
2) Penguins *everywhere* -- even among the companies that didn't know that it would draw attention from Linux lovers.
3) In conversations with some of the companies that _don't_ have announced Linux products, it turns out that all it'll take is someone ready to write a purchase order. Typical conversation:
"Do you have a Linux version?"
"No, but it wouldn't be difficult."
"I know that it's not a big deal to port between Unix versions."
"No, you don't understand. Our programmers insist on developing under Linux -- the commercial versions are the ports. All we need is an order."
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
yeah, that secrecy was really annoying...the mystery behind the acronym was the only thing that got me to actually read into the article :)
my 2 colegues have one printer at theire office conected to one of their NT workstations and shared. but this workstation is not able to behave properly when printing so i'm pushed to deploy my experimental i386 linux box as print server there.
so it leaves all NTs as workstations for mostly Word processing, surfing and e-mailing. the day i found acceptable office solution with slovak characters support on linux, all NTs'll go away.
hany
Our good friends over at ZDNet publishing the truth and only the truth about MS products. Well if it's in print it's got to be true.
You should not believe everything you read.
Part of this is that it's widely believed that MCSE certification is sufficient to be an NT admin.
I'm not knocking MCSE's here; OS certification tends not to be worth much regardless of the OS. The same problem applies to CNEs, Solaris 2000-level certification, etc. But with PHBs dragging in NT by the boatload, they expect that any random MCSE can make and keep it running.
Having a fancy certificate can never replace solid hands-on experience, whether with NT, NetWare, Unix, etc. (An experienced NT admin can make NT work adequately, or even "well", for relatively low-usage (compared to enterprise installations with tens or hundreds of thousands of users.)
In fact, to be honest, NT is *not* the absolute horror some paint it as. It *can* be, if installed and administered by someone who doesn't really know what they're doing; perhaps NT's single biggest problem is the "anyone can manage it" mentality that Microsoft fosters. NT, like any other OS, lets you shoot yourself in the foot --- this, combined with the "any warm body" mentality, virtually ensures disaster. (That said, its second biggest problem is that it doesn't really scale because Microsoft thinks a "big" installation is 200 users --- so even a good NT admin will have problems with a large installation.)
-- brandon s. allbery, sysadmin @ cmu electrical & computer engineering "Think, youth, THINK!"
That the file formats of the CAD tools are text-based and open isn't directly a Unix thing, but it is very much in the Unix spirit, and somthing that ECAD users in my experience find useful
I wonder what apps you need that Linux doesn't have? Do you write your documentation in Word?
LOL
so you are comparing NT's crash numbers to the number of people able to clock P3s to 1Ghz? How absolutely flipping stupid.
Becuase Windows and NT is more widely used than Linux etc by the consumer market, cries of crashes are heard much more easily than that of Unix crases. The notes of sun workstations running for over 6 months shouldn't be noted since they "aren't relevant".
Are you really deluded to think that the world's most popular business desktop workstation does not work most of the time? Have you ever used NT?
I've had more core dumps and X crashes with Linux...does this mean that Linux crashes all the time, and the reports of "non crashes for 50000 years" is the minority? Or could it be just that I haven't set up linux prolery, or that I play with too many different pieces of software? Just like those NT "administrators" who claim that NT crashes 5 times a day...LOL, i just setup my NT fie servers, and never think of them again unless i need to install a service pack or add a user.
Err, you definitely need root permission to use pppd. Obvious since /dev/modem is a device under unix and hence by default not all users should be allowed to use pppd. (Well unless /dev/modem is 777 :)) /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-ppp0 will contain an option called USERCTL which controls whether the "normal" user can access pppd.
So why doesn't your pppd have a suid. Well, if your system is like mine (Red Hat), you will have a wrapper around pppd. The file
Now when you run "usernet" this in turn calls another suid program called usernetctl. Hence there is a suid program after all.
BTW maybe someone can help - with my ISP, the expect/send pairs are sername: and ord:, rather than ogin: and ord: Could this be the reason many newbies find the automatic PPP configuration doesn't work.
worse than an ignorant troll...
>1.)First off my point is that unix is a hell to setup compared to NT
No it's not! "out of the box" many unix installations are far easier. You are comparing the one and only monolithic NT system install to an infinitely variable range of unix installations. My experience on the very same hardware has been 5 times longer on win98 (easier than NT of course!) than linux. Statement so ridiculously wrong, why bother...
>2.)NT 4 has earned c2 certification not too long ago
If you'd bothered reading the comments, you'd havae realized how wrong that statement is...
>3.)The problem with the navy's computer was a divide by 0 error
If you'd bothered reading the articles about this, you would remember that the problem was that an OS is NOT SUPPOSED TO CRASH when an app divides by 0!
>My experiences with pppd are mine...
Thus we see the root of the problem.
>...Also NT will win at the rate its going...
until eventually it's so bloated and bug-ridden it's completely unusable?
>...only NT has the alpha cpu-to-card binding...
Patch is already available. These are irrelevent observations. Linux is evolving far faster than NT.
>No OS has every recovered from might [sic] microsoft.
MS has only predominated because of cheap hardware. As hardware becomes even cheaper, it will become harder to justify spending major portion of a system's cost on the OS.
Conclusion: Pull your head out of the sand!
tcboo
The internet existed a long time before Linux existed. It existed a long time before WinNT existed. It existed a long time before winsock existed. The internet is a US military network. Don't you remember that Algore invented the internet while he was busy dodging the Vietnam draft? (Ok, that was uncalled for.) The internet has grown by leaps and bounds through universities, companies, and the world.
Unix thrives on the internet.
Yeah, funny. ...Student, Artist, Techie - Geek *
* Paul Madley
*...Slacker, Artist, Techie - Geek *
Remember: Nothing is Cool.
Jesse Berst may be an arse, but hes not THIS big of an arse. Zealots back down.
cheese logs keep my wang warm at night.
If I remember correctly the first definition was the one the arcticle was referring to.
cheese logs keep my wang warm at night.
I don't know about you but Linux gives me a great big O! Just close your eyes and think of Finland...
I remember a big thing in Integrated System Design last year about how many companies were porting their UNIX-based EDA tools to NT. There was a sampler CD (I still haven't microwaved that one yet) with useless demos on it.
:-)* ).
The readers, the people who have to use the damn software, went on a rampage. Letters poured into the journal, and contained things like, "If my dept. goes NT, I quit." Some people knew their managers would jump on it and were scared of that. Some felt comfortable because their management wasn't that dumb.
Many suggested writing to the EDA companies and urging, "If you're gonna port it, port it to Linux."
It's good, this is a user base, that could care less about MSOffice, et al. and just want to use what they know works.
Of course we all kind of find out what it's like to be a win user with that Linux guy shoving Linux-this, Linux-that down everybody's throats (I admittedly get like that, I laugh at other people's BSODs
Oh well, I'm glad the EDA companies are getting the point.
If after weeks of trying, you havn't been able to read a man page and go "chmod 6755 /usr/sbin/pppd" then I guess it explains why you might think NT is a good way to run a serious computer sysem. After all, NT has all those lovely little pictures you can look at and sometimes, when you click your mouse on them they show nice boxes with funny wrinting in them.
However, the main thrust of this argument is Unix versus NT and not Linux. Unix is a real beast and had journaling file systems, SMP and all the pointy clicky bits when you where still drawing on your parents walls with a crayon.
Regards
''In March 1998, Intel and Microsoft joined together to host a "Workstation Leadership Forum" near the software giant's headquarters ...''
;) ;)
;)
They're as good as dead. If someone had noticed this in march 1998 they could already have predicted that wintel loses
Don't step in the leadership
In a normal story, the author would define EDA in the first few paragraphs, so we would know what the hell it is... he did not. the little link a few pages down had two definitions, I'm guessing it was the second one, but still... geez
_
"Subtle mind control? Why do all these HTML buttons say 'Submit' ?"
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
These people ported their DOS/Windoze Stuff
to Linux:
http://www.cadsoft.de. They were
stuck with DOS/Win for a decade but decided
recently to support Linux AFAIK.
Their Product is called EAGLE and they
have a "free" Version for half-euro boards.
It's pretty cool.
They are located in Germany (as I am), but
their hp is english.
greetings,
Jurij
Moderators: would you call it a troll if the names had been reversed? Think about it.
Your first mistake is taking "benchmarks"
at face value. Your second mistake is
believing that this benchmark applies to
the box running NT at your office cause
I'll wager yours isn't a Quad-Xeon with
4 Enet controllers.
Go look at the c't magaizine review to get
a clearer picture! Turns out there is a
corner case with 4 Enet controllers that
Linux has to improve on. This is a fairly
rare setup, most machines are going to have
1 NIC - maybe 2....where there is a different
result to the benchmark!
Next - in the EDA market that this article
is talking about (which is where I live all
day as a user) NT leaves alot to be desired
as a platform. Some of this is just "it isn't
what I'm used too" while other parts have to
do with a lack of a good scripting environment.
Oddly - the scripting can be corrected by putting
the MKS tool kit and perl on your machine...still
EDA users are usually unix jocks - and we like
having all the unix tools like awk and sed to
deal with the differences between EDA tools.
There are some EDA related benchmarks
published by ISD magazine (www.isd.com) that
might be of interest to folks if you want
to see how NT really faired!
Have you compiled your kernel today??
If we were losing this market to NT we really would have lost.
Since fp performance is important to these users I guess Linux on the AMD Athlon/K7 and the Alpha should be ideal.
Samba has reached a point where it can almost totally
replace NT, Our NT servers, now only act as one thing..
Print Server.
Hardly an advertisment for NT. How come your print servers
are still on NT anyway? You can run a machine on which
NT wouldn't even boot as a print server with Samba/Linux.
> You just gotta have the skills, ma friend.
You have plenty of "skills", using tough words like "Pr0n", you sound like a script kiddie who supports Windows and still uses the term M$.
> Peace out to M$. You make my dreams come true.
Those must be some small dreams if "M$" can make them come true.
- "My name is Legion, for we are many" -Mark 5:9
the day i found acceptable office solution with slovak
characters support on linux, all NTs'll go away.
The Koffice website would be a useful place to look.
There is also the ability to add requests to the wishlist.
The fact that it can read it at all is cool, but I think you have overstated the current state of the Linux NTFS art.
Ask yourself if it would have been as likely to cause a furor if the names had been reversed. The idea behind troll-control is not to suppress unpopular ideas, but to keep the discussion from getting sidetracked into unproductive emotional squabbling. A meandering, incoherent flame against Linux is likely to elicit lots of negative responses--lots of heat but very little light. A similar post attacking NT may be just as bogus, but likely won't stir up a riot.
VHDL, Verilog, *SPICE, EDIF, Gerber, CIF, GDS2, DXF, to name a few.
Here's a good place to browse for related EDA material.
System Level Design Language is supposed to help bridge many of the gaps and differences between "everything".
--The more you know, the less you know.
Since this was the only NT related topic, I will post this here.
4 05201,00.html
The most common lie I see on this site is that NT is unstable. Here are some FACTS:
How Often Users Reboot (including force reboots due to crashes)
Every 6 Months or More
61%
Every 3 to 6 Months
18%
Every 1 to 3 Months
11%
Monthly
6%
Weekly
3%
Daily
Less than 1%
Those are FACTS... scream all you want, it won't change anything.
You can see the rest of the facts here:
http://www.zdnet.com/pccomp/stories/all/0,6605,
Oh... this study was NOT FUNDED by MS. So don't bother screaming that common reply.
The internet would too exist if it wasn't for Linux. And in much the same state it is in today. Just because you and your friends use Linux doesn't mean it is God. Hell, you seem like a the kind of Linux user that would classify as yuppie. "Give me anal sex or I'll delete Linux off of MY computer!" Who cares?
:P Now I am going to have to reminisce about my old SLIP dialup...
Linux didn't exist til late 94 if my memory serves. ARPAnet started a wee bit before that, and I got access in 1991, at the ripe old age of 8. More relevant, Linux didn't make any noticable impact until about 1997. And please, show me a better dialup protocol
He didn't say "The Internet wouldn't exist if it weren't for Linux". He said the Internet wouldn't exist if it weren't for free software... which is 100% true.
"the world is always going to need and want choice." So so NO to MS.
The primary design feture of all MS softwar is
incompatibility. So if one product is MS ALL
products must be MS. What choise is that?
Are you stupid, ignorant, or a MS FUD Sucker.
I couldn't have said it better myself, so I won't. :-)
DFL
Never send a human to do a machine's job.
Yes, I know that usernetctl is suid. However, even this can be made irrelevant if one is really concerned about someone taking advantage of pppd (though honestly I'm not exactly sure what they'd do with it...). You can create a modem group and add /dev/modem and all appropriate users to it, and make it 770 or 660 or whatever you wish. PPP is not a massive security risk, despite this person's assertions to the contrary. And you don't have to have pppd suid root, despite his assertions to the contrary. Which takes me back to my main point: troll who doesn't know how to read.
DFL
Never send a human to do a machine's job.
What we can tell is that those numbers are unlikely to reflect a representative sample of real NT sites, since most users would have experienced downtime at intervals of less than six months due to the service packs and security holes on NT that require attention with clockwork regularity.
I wouldn't take anything that those consulting firms publish very seriously, unless it comes with a lot of detail about how the experiment/survey was designed and unless that design actually survives scrutiny.
hahaha
You are just making your aND THE Linux community look bad when you turn into abunch of zealots. If you printed these comments in zdnet you would of been laughed off with scrunity. NT may not be the best OS for every situation but is linux the best. Linus himself recommends NT over linux for ost users. Linux has holes worse then NT and its hard to setup. I am not referring about software installations but setting path variables and permissions and daemons and hardware. NT works right out of the box. Small bussinesses are dominated by people with no computer science degrees and NT is paradise to them.
If you had no computer science degree would you either want to learn unix or pay for NT and set it up. NT is a savior for computer neophyites and large mission critical computers only make up a thrid of a percent of all computers. Domain controllers and department servers make up a much larger market and Bill Gates saw this and took advantage of it. NT is just going with the market and the market just doesnt need linux right now. Solaris or OS/390 is much more suitable for mission critcal work for a thrid of a percent of all those computers out there.
Heck, I used it before the 90s, back when 110 baud modems were standard and 300 baud was fast. And they were just developing 1200 baud.
... nah, ok, but we do live for more than 100 years in my family ...
Of course, I was a child prodigy
Will in Seattle
Will in Seattle
You meant before George W. Bush was dodging the draft. Al Gore served in Vietnam, George the Shrub used family connections to avoid combat via the Air National Guard, just like that other war wimp, Dan Quayle.
And since I, my father, and my grandfather (ok, further back than that) have all served in the military and not tried to avoid combat, I think I know whereof I speak.
Will in Seattle
which OS would you use for a destroyer?
Will in Seattle
BSD has fallen on hard times. FreeBSD is in trouble; Walnut Creek is struggling to stay afloat. Rumor has it that it is up for sale. BSDI growth is flat. And then there are the "also-rans" NetBSD, OpenBSD etc--no comment needed. BSD never caught on with users, and odds are that it never will amount to more than the niche OS that it has always been. Unable to attract younger users, a BSD BOF is looking more and more like an AARP coffee klatch. The BOF chit chat is now just as likely to center around prostate problems and "regularity" than it is to BSD topics. The twilight years of BSD are now upon us. A "Kevorkian" may eventually be in order. Who will be the first to "pull the plug"?
Remember that only NT has a c2 security rating
Sorry, NT only has C2 when it is not connected to a network and has no floppy drive installed, and has some fairly major changes to the registery, etc. etc. This was for NT Server remember. What sort of NT Server is not connected to a network? NT's C2 rating is totally irrelevant because no-one using NT in the real world can have a server configured like that.
Well said stevew, I think the moderators should have given that response a higher score, you made some interesting points that most M$ users overlook once they see the outcome of the benchmark. "OOoohh look, NT beat linux, hahaha" sure, quad xeons and all, I have 3 or 4 of those laying around ;)
- "My name is Legion, for we are many" -Mark 5:9
If you've got that kind of bandwidth to play with why aren't you using ATM. I believe there is ATM support for a few cards in Linux. Were they trunking the 4 ethernet cards together or was it serving different subnets?
...and the "next big thing" to watch for is Holistic design techniques.
In a nutshell, as digital designs enter the GHz range, you have to design them more as analog/RF circuits, taking into consideration the 3D structure and layout of physical wires and devices. A lot of convergence of tools (CAD meets EDA meets Thermal/EMI analysis), use of VRML for physical design data exchange, that sort of thing.
--The more you know, the less you know.
EDA is specific to CAD tools for integrated circuits, boards, etc.
You serve up the entire population of Earth 70 times over in one hour? That's one popular web site!
MS have abandoned it for the end-user platform. It's done poorly in the web-server space, and losing out lately in the general server space. The workstation market has shunned it.
Despite all this, 2/3 of all the jobs I see go something like this "NT, IIS, IE, VB, COM" etc. I'm a bit confused about how well/badly NT is doing. My best guess is that a lot of people still see an all-MS solution as a safe way to go. I reckon they're going to get burned in a couple of years when everybody accepts that open standards based on UNIX are the right thing and nobody wants to maintain all that asp crap.
I think there's just going to be as much place for NT as there is for Unix and Linux, and all other varients. These 'holy wars' between the two really don't have much effect on the people who already been using Unix/Linux/NT for an amount of time (Or so I observe). It's a waste of bandwidth almost. Clearly, I won't complain all that much, considering the way the Linux developers have responded to the benchmarks. But when people realize some will always like a point-and-click, and others will always like command line, then the world will be a happier place.. =] I suppost MS as much as I dispise them. Most of us techies and whatnot have our jobs because of MS (Entry level type techs in ISPs and whatnot, not you 75k a year techs =]). But still, the world is always going to need and want choice.
The problem is the stupid unix kernels consider using a protocol as interfacing a device. You can have pppd available to regualr users and it still wont work because the kernel will stop this. You need to make a root account or an account with a few root priveledges to get it too work and then make a script and then chmod pppd and then you might have a connection going if your lucky after hours of work and you will have a computer with a servre security hole in it after this. NT doesnt have this problem. With NT you just log in as a regualr user and dial-in a connection that was setup by an administrator and there is no worry over permissions on this and no security holes by doing this.
I have a friend who was an early 2600 hacker and he told me that unix is a hackers dream because its so easy to crack. This was 10 years ago though. BUt I can do everyone to load a unix server with processes to lock the admin out too DOS attacks. The list of holes are endless and having to be root to dial in is just plain stupid. If you look at security holes at security oriented web sites you will notice that unix has as many if not more then NT.
Just a fact from the unix hater handbook.
Remember that only NT has a c2 security rating and Sun and SGI tried for years for the same rating yet even without being connected to a network there are still hacker and cannot get this security rating. This is why the Navy uses NT. NT may not be as reliable but its sure hell of alot easier to setup and its alot more secure and less work. Wiht clustering it doenst matter how bad the reliablility is. Why do you think ITweek just did an article on how bussiness are moving NT beyond file serving and into mission critcal ssytems thanks to ms cluster server. There are even hospitals that use NT instead of unix.
Try using KLyx.
The quality of typesetting produced by it is much higher then word can ever hope for (since klyx uses latex as a back end)
I typeset Russian texts with it all the time, and it works great
It seems many of these users are migrating to NT in the form of SGI's Visual Workstations, since it offers easy integration into existing UN*X networks (NFS mounting and stuff).
./install.
In my experience most UN*X workstation users in CAD don't know jack shit about unix - they know their CAD program, and that's it. I spent like 30 minutes over the phone the other day to help a Pro/REFLEX user install Netscape 4.6 on an Indy - a matter of gunzip, untar, and
The EDA guys I suppose are way more technical.
/El Niño
If i heard right, wasn't that C2 security rating
when you disabled networking on the NT machine? If
so, what the hell is the point of a C2 rating?
BTW, the modem -is- a device, so you need the
privileges to OPEN the device before you can
do jack shit with it.
Unix may have more holes in it than NT but it also
has the userbase behind it to quickly fix them. You
probably love installing the bi-annual NT service
pack that corrects holes discovered the day after
the last service pack was released, don't you?
Dogma: Dead (mostly because your Karma ran it over)
First thing, what's with your english? > If Linux can't server... > ... cuz ... > ... gotta ... Come back tomorrow when you can speak proper english.
BTW, that's obviously bullshit, 345 billion hits every other hour. On a p100. You couldn't even forge those logfiles, or even have enough bandwidth for that.
Dogma: Dead (mostly because your Karma ran it over)
A well versed NT admin can manage a decent system with a small userbase (sorry, 200 is tiny. I have managed email systems for 1000+ users). The problem is usually NT admins are not as well trained as their Unix counterparts. Let's face it, if you learn Unix in the first place you have to be an analytical geek, where as most NT admins don't really seem into it as much. That's a vast overgeneralization but Unix admins do seem to be far more technical than their NT equivalents. Anyone can become an NT admin it seems, where if you are ignorant you won't last a day in Unix admin.
NT ? Despite all the talk about how NT is better then Unix/Linux/BSD Etc.. I _still_ fail to see why.
.. we _do_ have VisualBasic/Java scripts bloating the server, and taking a week to load up.
As a file server NT severly struggles, at work we (unfortuently) run a 100 person NT network.. and the fileserver would crumble under any sort of network trafic. Crashing 5 times a day, walking intot he server room like a zombie to hit the infamous 'reset' button isnt suitable alternative.
Solution: Samba.
Samba has reached a point where it can almost totally replace NT, Our NT servers, now only act as one thing.. Print Server. All file server functions are handled under Samba, Running Debian(potato). Even more so. the move over from NT to Linux/Samba was almost flawless. All file server accesses are Authenticated with the NT server.
Result. Currently our file server running Linux/Samba doesnt crash. NT Still crashes at least once or twice a day.
Now if i wanted to actually spend a tad of effort, lets see.. i'll move DNS/DHCP over to the Linux Machine, Set up Masquarading, Setup Samba to ack as a PDC, Then finally Do lpr/printer stuff. And finally i will try to figure out why we have a P2-400 PDC, and and Dual p2-300's BDC sitting there collecting dust, as a p100 takes over the job.
But sure.. lets see what else nt tries to do which my Linux machine does better
a) IIS, sure its faster then Apache. no-one is arguing that, at least they shouldnt be. but Who doesnt have a web page without cgi/perl/postgres/php3/python... WAIT
b) Mirroring works under Linux and NT. It was the main issue when moving the file server over.
c) graphical clicky thingies for the typing impaired: For you folk yes you still can use M$ programs to modify the settings on Samba shared files.
Any M$ Fan here want to let me know how/why Linux with Samba + 10 hours of work, could totally Replace NT ?
-- Chris Andrews
Damn, that's *huge*
We've got about a three member LUG here at Saturn. Me, a Pipefitter, and one of the Electrician's sons.
I've even given away about a dozen CD's, not to mention all of the Linux Journal's. I just can't seem to get the interested ones to take the plunge.
Sigh.
One of the leading German EDA companies, CadSoft has already released a Linux version of their PCB CAD package which is actively marketed the same way as the DOS and Windows 95/NT versions. So, apparently, there is a market.
-- Jochen
As long as there's money at stake, there's going to be friction. :)
And I think it's kind of silly to ask Linux people to "get along" with NT people, when Microsoft has recently formed an internal anti-Linux team, a "hitsquad" which is supposed to undermine Linux's recent advances in the marketplace.
If anything, it's the people in Redmond who are trying to squelch the freedom to choose your OS; they're the ones who need to play nicely..