Seems to me that since you have to shut all the processes down anyway, we can just acheive the same effect by allowing people to overwrite their uptime with a fake value.:-)
I'd say that the company also has personnel problems, since I heard one of their employees shooting his mouth off about their plans on a flight from Dallas to Orlando yesterday.
There were a lot of IT people on that flight, from a lot of different companies in various aspects of the field.
Sounds to me like you're drawing an awful lot of conclusions with very little actual information. Your comments amount to anti-Compaq FUD.
"Optimizing for Linux" could be as simple as choosing hardware that has really good Linux drivers, or that won't require special configuration steps under Linux.
It could also include little things like picking a video adapter that had good XFree86 support, and even bundling a three-button mouse instead of the usual 2-button Logitech Firstmouse. (BTW, Logitech makes a three-button OEM version of that mouse. Hewlett Packard bundles them, they're not bad. I'm looking for a consumer version.)
Optimizing for Linux could also involve staying away from any chipsets that had known problems with Linux.
In short, optimizing for Linux is a very good thing.
Linux is certainly not presently suited for people who need their computers to be toasters.
However, this does not excuse trying to scare people off. Just because they don't know anything yet doesn't mean they're unwilling to learn.
The first time you logged into a Unix system, if I'd handed you a tape and said "here, recover the Samba configuration from the third dump session on here", would you have known what to do? I seriously doubt it.
Computers are always approaching ease of use. It's not a point, it's a process, but if you oppose it you are in an awfully Luddite-ish position.
Linux is proving the point that just because the interface *CAN* be improved to where anybody can use it, doesn't mean the guts under the hood have to be inaccessible.
It would be a very wonderful thing if we can continue to improve both. Don't try to put the "ubiquitous computing" genie back in it's bottle, it's gotten quite too large to fit in there. Instead, try helping the process.
If you insist on denying the need, rest assured that technology will march along without you.
Why does Slashdot have to only be what you want it to be?
The slashboxes are configurable. I say, the more the merrier. I won't use a Drudge one either, but if that floats somebody else's boat then more freakin' power to him.
Once you have them firewalled, you can then dictate terms about really egregious problems.
Things like "either update your widgetd to a version without the buffer overflow documented in CERT bulletin #666, or on 4/7/99 we lock all traffic out of the widgetd port on your box."
Then actually do it when you say you will. If they can't figure out how to upgrade widgetd, then you lock their ass out until you have time to fix the problem.
Here's what Linus Torvalds has to say on it, from his section in Open Sources:
Symmetric Multi-Processing (SMP) is one area that will be developed. The 2.2 Linux kernel will handle four processors pretty well, and we'll develop it up to eight or sixteen processors. The support for more than four processors is already there, but not really. If you have more than four processors now, it's like throwing money at a dead horse. So that will certainly be improved.
But, if people want sixty-four processors they'll have to use a special version of the kernel, because to put that support in the regular kernel would cause performance decreases for the normal users.
In other words, Linus says EXACTLY the same thing I do! So grow up and stop doing Linux the disservice of claiming it's all things to all people. That's the tactic that's shooting Microsoft in the foot right now.
Scalability? Linux is more scalable than most OS's. my friends. We have Beowulf for PVM fun.. and we have SMP, for 4-8+ way fun.
Oooo, 8 whole processors!
It gets awful after 4, sorry; circuit-switched SMP is like that, and always will be.
Solaris scales well up to 64 processors right now, and the stuff in development is orders of magnitude beyond that. (Can't say more, under NDA, sorry.) HP-UX is the same way.
Linux kicks ass on the low-end box, and when you put lots of low-end boxes together in a Beowulf cluster you can kick the pants off the big boys in terms of bang for the buck, but let's not do ourselves the disservice of calling it all things to all people on all platforms. That's Microsoft's style.
Slashdot had serious kernel level problems when it's hits started increasing. AFAIK CT had to do a recompile to fix it. Noone is going to bet a serious business on that.
Nobody is going to bet a serious business on an OS where they can tune the kernel to meet their particular needs that easily?
You don't have the slightest clue what you're talking about.
A serious business won't rely on an operating system where you *CAN'T* tune the kernel that way.
I work for FedEx. We have recompiled kernels to meet specific needs thousands of times.
Are you meaning to suggest that FedEx isn't a serious business? I bet we do more business every day than your company does in a year.
b) You must cause any work that you distribute or publish, that in whole or in part contains or is derived from the Program or any part thereof, to be licensed as a whole at no charge to all third parties under the terms of this License.
This explictly denies what you suggest is possible.
It would, if you hacked the GPL off at that point instead of continuing down 4 more paragraphs:
In addition, mere aggregation of another work not based on the Program with the Program (or with a work based on the Program) on a volume of a storage or distribution medium does not bring the other work under the scope of this license.
How this applies is quite simple; the stub is a derivitive work. The driver is a program that interfaces with, but does not derive from, the stub.
If you think that "interfacing with" is the same as "derived from", then Wordperfect would have to be covered by GPL because it interfaces with X.
For that matter, any application that interfaced with the kernel's filesystem drivers by writing a file to the disk would be considered "derived from" the kernel.
If you write a program that is proprietary, then write a small stub for the kernel that communicates with it, all you need do to meet the GPL requirements is release source for your stub.
The GPL can't prevent that.
Get over it, people. The GPL is not an iron-clad guarantee that every program that in any way remotely touches Linux will be completely open.
These same misconceptions come up on at least one topic on/. every single *DAY*. Don't you people read the replies to the articles?
Even the workstation market is starting to use PCI, AGP and other "PC" architectures...have you ever seen the inside of one of the new, low end Sun's?
Even the low-end AS/400s use PCI. To say that this makes them more "PC-like" is about like saying the addition of a standard power cord would make them more PC-like.
Windows has been steadily rising in consumer price, while OEM price has been fairly steady recently but is still usually higher than it was during the Dos 6.x/Win 3.x days.
Solaris is free for single-user noncommercial use.
BSD is free.
Microsoft may not charge a yearly fee, but they do have a penchant for releasing bugfixes as full operating systems, and they charge a shitload for them.
As for people hating the Microsoft gives away IE, are you on crack? Pretty much Netscape and the DoJ hate that. Nobody else gives a shit.
Hard drives crash all the time. If my HD on my new free PC happens to crash the first time I run a program on it, such as Partition Magic, well of course I'll have to reinstall the software.
If they didn't send me a CD, well, OK, I'll use one of mine; this here CheapBytes RedHat 5.2 CD is handy, I'll use it.
If they email me in a few weeks asking why I never seem to log on, well, maybe this Internet thing is just too hard, or maybe their software isn't working right, how should I know? I'm just a poor old country boy.
Hell, if the contract lets them take the computer back, it'll take months before they can get around to enforcing it. And then I just wipe the HD and give 'em their computer back. No harm done for me, I stored all my files on my servers.
And if the contract wasn't negotiable, it's not a valid contract.
Or, if you're scared of a few angry phone calls, well just set the damn thing up to dual boot. Log on once every couple of weeks and surf Slashdot, then boot back into Linux.
But a news portal ought to be a little more careful about presenting fair and consistent views from the editorial staff, and they ought to be as impartial as possible.
A t1 line cists about $900.00 per month with $3000.00 installation costs.
Most telcos will knock off the installation charge if you sign a really long contract.
Set your company up as an LLC first, before you do anything.
Then sign 5 year contracts for the data circuit and phone circuits.
If your business succeeds, you'll need the line for all 5 years. If your business fails, you just declare bankruptcy and they can't come after your personal assets.
You can shave a few thousand off the initial costs this way. Plus it'll save your butt when some idiot builds his business web page with FrontPage and then erases his own HD and can't edit the page any more, and decides to sue.
Smaller towns are not necessarily the only place to give this a go.
I live in Orlando, FL. There are approximately 1.4 million people in this metropolitan area.
Miami, Jacksonville, and Tampa all have cable modems, but the big cable modem providers say it will be 7 years or more before they'll move in.
In 7 years, I could start an ISP with nothing but venture capital, build it up to thousands of users, sell it to MPINet, and live off my earnings for a few years. Assuming my credit didn't suck as badly as it does.
There are lots of other big cities where this is true.
Plus, you can cover a lot of rural cities in the same state really cheaply by just linking them together with a network of cheap T1s. Point-to-point links are not expensive over such short distances, and you are only paying a provider for one link.
Rent a room from a backbone provider's POP in a nearby metro, run a few T1s out to rural towns with no ISP (or a crappy ISP), set up a few cheap Linux boxes at each POP to do RADIUS and Squid proxying, and you'll clean up.
In a few years one of the big providers will buy you out. You won't make enough to retire, but you'll make enough to buy some nice computers, a nice car, a nice house, and a reputation for building ISPs. Then you hire yourself out as a consultant to people like the doofus who thought you needed a T3.
I don't think it has any restrictions on anything, and it's easier to setup. It's also very reliable. My network has been running for over a month now.
Gosh, no restrictions on anything? That's amazing. Service Pack 4 must have been a real humdinger, to change it from all those limitations Microsoft teaches in their official course materials.
If you're going to lie, at least be creative enough to make it plausible, dumbass.
Slashdot Mirror
Seems to me that since you have to shut all the processes down anyway, we can just acheive the same effect by allowing people to overwrite their uptime with a fake value. :-)
Hell, tests even show that Samba on NT beats regular NT networking.
Besides, the problems I was having were in NT5 using IIS5 on a P166 w/64 megs of RAM...not the most optimal system configuration for such things.
That's a kick-ass web server configuration for Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, BSD/OS, etc.
It only sucks with NT.
I'd say that the company also has personnel problems, since I heard one of their employees shooting his mouth off about their plans on a flight from Dallas to Orlando yesterday.
There were a lot of IT people on that flight, from a lot of different companies in various aspects of the field.
hopefully we can get a larger participation in the u.s. this year!!
If you do, it'll be because of the tremendous commercial success of the Internet.
BTW, where'd the computer you posted that come from? Built by a capitalist company, or did a "benevolent" government just pull it out of their ass?
Are you certain you mean "I'm sure" and not "I think"?
Google is doing just fine caching everything, as are all the ISPs who use Squid proxies.
And, for that matter, companies such as the one I work for who use Squid proxies internally.
You have got to be kidding. Ease of use hasn't changed the world?
So, you honestly think that nobody except propellerheads uses computers today?
Of course you don't; that was a troll. Entered, no doubt, from a GUI web browser.
Sounds to me like you're drawing an awful lot of conclusions with very little actual information. Your comments amount to anti-Compaq FUD.
"Optimizing for Linux" could be as simple as choosing hardware that has really good Linux drivers, or that won't require special configuration steps under Linux.
It could also include little things like picking a video adapter that had good XFree86 support, and even bundling a three-button mouse instead of the usual 2-button Logitech Firstmouse. (BTW, Logitech makes a three-button OEM version of that mouse. Hewlett Packard bundles them, they're not bad. I'm looking for a consumer version.)
Optimizing for Linux could also involve staying away from any chipsets that had known problems with Linux.
In short, optimizing for Linux is a very good thing.
Linux is certainly not presently suited for people who need their computers to be toasters.
However, this does not excuse trying to scare people off. Just because they don't know anything yet doesn't mean they're unwilling to learn.
The first time you logged into a Unix system, if I'd handed you a tape and said "here, recover the Samba configuration from the third dump session on here", would you have known what to do? I seriously doubt it.
Computers are always approaching ease of use. It's not a point, it's a process, but if you oppose it you are in an awfully Luddite-ish position.
Linux is proving the point that just because the interface *CAN* be improved to where anybody can use it, doesn't mean the guts under the hood have to be inaccessible.
It would be a very wonderful thing if we can continue to improve both. Don't try to put the "ubiquitous computing" genie back in it's bottle, it's gotten quite too large to fit in there. Instead, try helping the process.
If you insist on denying the need, rest assured that technology will march along without you.
Why can't it be both?
Why does Slashdot have to only be what you want it to be?
The slashboxes are configurable. I say, the more the merrier. I won't use a Drudge one either, but if that floats somebody else's boat then more freakin' power to him.
Once you have them firewalled, you can then dictate terms about really egregious problems.
Things like "either update your widgetd to a version without the buffer overflow documented in CERT bulletin #666, or on 4/7/99 we lock all traffic out of the widgetd port on your box."
Then actually do it when you say you will. If they can't figure out how to upgrade widgetd, then you lock their ass out until you have time to fix the problem.
Want to disagree with what I say on it? Fine.
Here's what Linus Torvalds has to say on it, from his section in Open Sources:
Symmetric Multi-Processing (SMP) is one area that will be developed. The 2.2 Linux kernel will handle four processors pretty well, and we'll develop it up to eight or sixteen processors. The support for more than four processors is already there, but not really. If you have more than four processors now, it's like throwing money at a dead horse. So that will certainly be improved.
But, if people want sixty-four processors they'll have to use a special version of the kernel, because to put that support in the regular kernel would cause performance decreases for the normal users.
In other words, Linus says EXACTLY the same thing I do! So grow up and stop doing Linux the disservice of claiming it's all things to all people. That's the tactic that's shooting Microsoft in the foot right now.
No shit. All of which supports my point.
Instead of just reading the GPL, why don't you read the thread to which you're replying, too?
"does 64 processors" and "does 64 processors noticably faster than 8 processors" are two different statements.
Scalability? Linux is more scalable than most OS's. my friends. We have Beowulf for PVM fun..
and we have SMP, for 4-8+ way fun.
Oooo, 8 whole processors!
It gets awful after 4, sorry; circuit-switched SMP is like that, and always will be.
Solaris scales well up to 64 processors right now, and the stuff in development is orders of magnitude beyond that. (Can't say more, under NDA, sorry.) HP-UX is the same way.
Linux kicks ass on the low-end box, and when you put lots of low-end boxes together in a Beowulf cluster you can kick the pants off the big boys in terms of bang for the buck, but let's not do ourselves the disservice of calling it all things to all people on all platforms. That's Microsoft's style.
Slashdot had serious kernel level problems when it's hits started increasing. AFAIK CT had to do a recompile to fix it. Noone is going to bet a serious business on that.
Nobody is going to bet a serious business on an OS where they can tune the kernel to meet their particular needs that easily?
You don't have the slightest clue what you're talking about.
A serious business won't rely on an operating system where you *CAN'T* tune the kernel that way.
I work for FedEx. We have recompiled kernels to meet specific needs thousands of times.
Are you meaning to suggest that FedEx isn't a serious business? I bet we do more business every day than your company does in a year.
Have a closer look at the GPL.
b) You must cause any work that you distribute or publish, that in
whole or in part contains or is derived from the Program or any
part thereof, to be licensed as a whole at no charge to all third
parties under the terms of this License.
This explictly denies what you suggest is possible.
It would, if you hacked the GPL off at that point instead of continuing down 4 more paragraphs:
In addition, mere aggregation of another work not based on the Program with the Program (or with a work based on the Program) on a volume of a storage or distribution medium does not bring the other work under the scope of this license.
How this applies is quite simple; the stub is a derivitive work. The driver is a program that interfaces with, but does not derive from, the stub.
If you think that "interfacing with" is the same as "derived from", then Wordperfect would have to be covered by GPL because it interfaces with X.
For that matter, any application that interfaced with the kernel's filesystem drivers by writing a file to the disk would be considered "derived from" the kernel.
If you write a program that is proprietary, then write a small stub for the kernel that communicates with it, all you need do to meet the GPL requirements is release source for your stub.
/. every single *DAY*. Don't you people read the replies to the articles?
The GPL can't prevent that.
Get over it, people. The GPL is not an iron-clad guarantee that every program that in any way remotely touches Linux will be completely open.
These same misconceptions come up on at least one topic on
Even the workstation market is starting to use PCI, AGP and other "PC" architectures...have you ever seen the inside of one of the new, low end Sun's?
Even the low-end AS/400s use PCI. To say that this makes them more "PC-like" is about like saying the addition of a standard power cord would make them more PC-like.
You are completely out of your fucking mind.
Windows has been steadily rising in consumer price, while OEM price has been fairly steady recently but is still usually higher than it was during the Dos 6.x/Win 3.x days.
Solaris is free for single-user noncommercial use.
BSD is free.
Microsoft may not charge a yearly fee, but they do have a penchant for releasing bugfixes as full operating systems, and they charge a shitload for them.
As for people hating the Microsoft gives away IE, are you on crack? Pretty much Netscape and the DoJ hate that. Nobody else gives a shit.
Hard drives crash all the time. If my HD on my new free PC happens to crash the first time I run a program on it, such as Partition Magic, well of course I'll have to reinstall the software.
If they didn't send me a CD, well, OK, I'll use one of mine; this here CheapBytes RedHat 5.2 CD is handy, I'll use it.
If they email me in a few weeks asking why I never seem to log on, well, maybe this Internet thing is just too hard, or maybe their software isn't working right, how should I know? I'm just a poor old country boy.
Hell, if the contract lets them take the computer back, it'll take months before they can get around to enforcing it. And then I just wipe the HD and give 'em their computer back. No harm done for me, I stored all my files on my servers.
And if the contract wasn't negotiable, it's not a valid contract.
Or, if you're scared of a few angry phone calls, well just set the damn thing up to dual boot. Log on once every couple of weeks and surf Slashdot, then boot back into Linux.
But a news portal ought to be a little more careful about presenting fair and consistent views from the editorial staff, and they ought to be as impartial as possible.
Screw news; Slashdot is entertainment.
A t1 line cists about $900.00 per month with $3000.00 installation costs.
Most telcos will knock off the installation charge if you sign a really long contract.
Set your company up as an LLC first, before you do anything.
Then sign 5 year contracts for the data circuit and phone circuits.
If your business succeeds, you'll need the line for all 5 years. If your business fails, you just declare bankruptcy and they can't come after your personal assets.
You can shave a few thousand off the initial costs this way. Plus it'll save your butt when some idiot builds his business web page with FrontPage and then erases his own HD and can't edit the page any more, and decides to sue.
Smaller towns are not necessarily the only place to give this a go.
I live in Orlando, FL. There are approximately 1.4 million people in this metropolitan area.
Miami, Jacksonville, and Tampa all have cable modems, but the big cable modem providers say it will be 7 years or more before they'll move in.
In 7 years, I could start an ISP with nothing but venture capital, build it up to thousands of users, sell it to MPINet, and live off my earnings for a few years. Assuming my credit didn't suck as badly as it does.
There are lots of other big cities where this is true.
Plus, you can cover a lot of rural cities in the same state really cheaply by just linking them together with a network of cheap T1s. Point-to-point links are not expensive over such short distances, and you are only paying a provider for one link.
Rent a room from a backbone provider's POP in a nearby metro, run a few T1s out to rural towns with no ISP (or a crappy ISP), set up a few cheap Linux boxes at each POP to do RADIUS and Squid proxying, and you'll clean up.
In a few years one of the big providers will buy you out. You won't make enough to retire, but you'll make enough to buy some nice computers, a nice car, a nice house, and a reputation for building ISPs. Then you hire yourself out as a consultant to people like the doofus who thought you needed a T3.
I don't think it has any restrictions on anything, and it's easier to setup. It's also very reliable. My network has been running for over a month now.
Gosh, no restrictions on anything? That's amazing. Service Pack 4 must have been a real humdinger, to change it from all those limitations Microsoft teaches in their official course materials.
If you're going to lie, at least be creative enough to make it plausible, dumbass.