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Gateway to Sell Cobalt Systems
Manuka writes "According to news.com, computer maker Gateway will be selling Cobalt systems, such as the RaQ and Qube. Neat, but will it come in the trademark Cobalt blue, or will it have blue cow spots? " Cobalt, Amiga - GW seems to be all over the place.
But the $3.75 question is....
What the heck kind of hardware is in one of those blue boxes? They say '64-bit superscalar processor' and nought else. Are they Alpha? Sun Ultra? Or are they some 'special' Cobalt arch that isn't quite either?
.sig: Now legally binding!
At my house, I have a dedicated internet connection (T1) which I use for a bit of web hosting. The members of the household, and a couple of the neighbors use the T1 link as their source to the internet as well.
I realize that their bandwidth usage isn't that high, but since most users seem to be hitting the same sites over and over again, I think I would see a difference in usage (and speed visiting those sites) by using an appliance similar to CacheFlow's.
Since their devices are more expensive than a regular linux box, and they run on their own proprietary OS (called CacheOS), I would presume I could set up a low end server with a 14.4gig hard drive and let it cache for me.
My question is, what software (linux) have people used to do this? Are the advantages worth the effort?
- Hugh Buchanan
- Userfriendly.com
Please remember that Gateway is going to be reselling these Cobalt Qubes and RaQ's. Gateway won't have control over the hardware. Cobalt will continue the same kind of quality as they had before. Gateway will just provide greater product visibility.
-Brent--
I would still tend to expect that 500MB would be enough for most purposes; even with some fairly large PDF's involved, that's quite a lot of space, and I would find it somewhat surprising for there to be an "active set" of commonly-hit stuff that would amount to more than that.
(Trying to stay at least a little on the main topic...) I'm not sure if Squid is installed by default on Cobalt Qubes; I kind of suspect not. I doubt it would be a problem to get it compiled and running...
I have heard reports that putting a Squid proxy in front of Apache can improve performance over just plain hitting Apache, as this allows Squid to provide more efficient (possibly in-RAM) access paths to web pages that remain static...
If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
There's a big problem with that unfortunately... Blue LED's are about 20 times as expensive as Red/Green/Yellow. They use Gallium, which is mucho expensive.
Besides, the green is good, and now, we can think of it as cow-patty green.
SpamapS -- Undernet #Linuxhelp
Of course it's a real Linux box. You're complaining about the Redhat Package Manager not working? So what if it isn't a straight Redhat box. Linux is the kernel.
The title makes it sound as if Gateway is selling off a subsidiary, when in fact they are going to be a RESELLER of Cobalt's products. Come on guys.
-josh
Cobalt makes Linux hardware (more or less) and it's great to see them get what ammounts to a large distribution deal.
Gateway is nothing more than a distributor of hardware anyway. The don't actually MAKE anything, so this deal gives them an entry into the LInux market.
The question I have is: Who will do the support? Coablt? or Gateway? Because if it's Cobalt, I think you have people that will incorrectly assume that Gateway has contracted their support to a 3rd party. If it's Gateway, I'd worry that they won't know HOW to support Linux systems.
Other than that, this seems like a great setup though.
Werd.
The world is getting weird...
;-) ;-)
;-)
who accidentally hit Gateway with the cluestick?
Obviously this is a Good Thing (tm) for many reasons:
(1) Gateway selling Linux boxen means more corporate awareness and more Linux awareness at Gateway (a very Good Thing (tm), no more Winmodems!!! (hopefully))
(2) This means another Linux-corp is going to be rolling in dough, always good for those of us with Linux all over our resume
(3) the publicity on news.com means user-awareness
(4) Persumably Gateway will actually sell some units of these, which means more *nix shops instead of NT shops (I do not think they will be stealing from existing *nix resellers, as if I am a biig *nix shop I go to Sun or IBM or HP, and if I am a Linux-shop and have been, prob already have a commerical relationship with VA or Penguin (or I roll my own
Companies (in my limited experience) tend to stick to companies that they have bought from before... Hence most sales of Gateway's with this product line are likely to be existing customers of Gateway's who have been buying win* only up till now...
And damn that blue is cool looking
We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars --Oscar Wilde
Grrr. my nick is "Forward the Light Brigade"...
I've got two qubes, e-mail/web/file servers. They have been very nice and rather easy. The main one has been up for over two months with nary a whisper, set 'em up and forget about it, my kind of servers. I haven't done anything t0o strenuous (no SQL install), but as a basic web server, say for a small company like mine, they work great. I also have it doing NAT, DHCP, filtering, mostly configured through the browser-GUI. Coming with two NICS installed makes it that much easier. I must say I have been impressed, plus they're so dang cute, especially when you turn the lights out. Mmmm, glowing green lights...
+&x
I think you have the wrong idea of Dell. Sure you got their Dimension line right, it is entirely what you described, but Dell does create many products. The may not create Hard drives like IBM, and they may not manufacture their own stuff, but much of it is designed by Dell.
It has been a long time since I worked there, so I will not get too specific, as I may not remember the details and don't want to post incorrect information here. One thing I do remember clearly about when I did work there was the Latitudes were designed in house, but made by someone else, and many of the Optiplex and poweredge components were the same. (this includes everything from Motherboards and up).
Gateway and Dell are simular because they got in on the ground floor of mail order computers, not because they are "Box Movers".
As I understand it gateway makes 90%+ of it's money from family systems and not from business class servers which these appear to be. How many people are going (besides geeks) to buy one of these? I really don't go to some computer store and buy a sytem for $15,000 just to have it outdated in a couple of years when a new motherboard design or a new chipset comes out.
Slashdot social engineering at it's finest
We have 4 Cobalt CacheRaqs and a Cobalt WebRaq. These things are great. 3 of our cache raqs and out web raq have been up for over 190 days without a problem. The only reason that we had to reboot them was to throw a custom kernel from Cobalt on them for gated and assorteds.
Great support from Cobalt...
Joseph W. Breu
They also seem to be a little confused; it's "just released for Linux," but: Hm. Didn't know that there was a FreeBSD-based version of Linux.
Think perhaps they're trying to just shove copies of anything out the door, look nice in the media, and get handed a huge pile of cash by some sucker of suckers in an IPO or buyout? Or is tehre more to the story? Anyone know?
Napster-to-go says "Fill and refill your compatible MP3 player", which is a lie. It's not MP3. It's WMA with DRM.
I bought a Gateway system last year. It was cheap, they financed over the phone, and they mailed it to Japan, where I was living at the time. It is a great little system...
But still.
It was put together with the crappiest OEM parts I have ever heard of. There were corners cut on nearly every modular part inside the thing, from generic RAM to a seriously (non-Linux) flawed integrated video chipset. For what I paid from, I got a good deal, but I have replaced most of the parts in it to get it to perform like I want it.
Do I want a server to do that? No.
A server should have the top of the line, state of the art hardware in it, at all times, if possible.
Can Gateway do that?
Computers can only simulate determinism. ~Hermetic.
Would that make them Cowbalt products?
Squid is a full-featured, free cacheing web proxy that is most certainly what you want to look at. It is available in RPM and DEB pre-packaged form.
You might also want to look into filtering web proxies that might be what users set up to "hit," to do things like filtering out cookies and/or annoying banner ads. (Not the Slashdot ones, of course!). The "standard" one to mention is Junkbuster but there are other possibly more sophisticated ones as listed at HTTP Links.
I'd hazard the guess that you'd be able to get most of the web cacheing benefits from a 386 box with 8MB of RAM and 500MB of disk; moving up to 14.4GB isn't likely to increase performance vastly over that...
If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.