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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.
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.
Those statistics indicate NT is waaay to unstable for EDA's multiple week simulation jobs.
-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...
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.
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.
Do you laugh at all BSOD's, or just the ones near the end of a 10-12 day simulation? :)
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.
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,
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
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?
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
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 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 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
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.
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 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.
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
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
...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.
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.
A troll is a troll.
/. is a linux site for linux geeks, just like freshmeat or linux today. Get used to it. If you like ms then go play on an ms site.
First, it was a stupid troll, obviously by an idiot.
Second,
support gun control: take guns from cops
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
Slashdot is not a Linux site for Linux geeks, it just happens to be that Linux geeks like Slashdot.
I questioned the legitimacy of the moderation too, until I read the post and saw how dumb it was. NTFS supports jounalism... :-) NTFS supports encryption?
It sounds like he took the wrong answers from a multiple choice question. The last person I met who said "NTFS supports encryption" was an MCP in NT 3.1, and said that encryption was a basic feature of NTFS which you did not have to even turn on.
Microsoft OTOH doesn't make this claim anywhere. It is as though people are reading "File permissions", "Security" and "NTFS" in the same sentence and immediately equating it to encryption.
(And for the next MCP who argues that encryption is a feature of NTFS, it is common knowledge in the real world that a DOS diskette with a NTFS utility, or a Linux boot disk with NTFS support will quite nicely read your NTFS drive.)
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..