Well, considering that SGI had a perfectly free choice between using Linux (which already runs on Itanium), porting Irix to the Itanium and trying to make Windows64 (or whatever they (MS) are going to call their Itanium version) work on a NUMA architecture machine, I'd say they probably made a wise choice.
SGI has been a BIG booster of Open Source software in general and Linux in particular for about the last 5 years. I was reading the changelogs for the 2.5 kernel tree a couple of nights ago and noticed that their code for running the kernel on NUMA-based machines has already been contributed to the tree and merged.
The major beef about Linux as a big-iron OS has always been "It doesn't scale well above 4 processors"... now, thanks to SGI's and IBM's big-iron work, it does... the Origin 3900 is a 128 processor monster, and it's my understanding that preformance under the NUMA-ized Linux scales linearly up to 64 processors. I haven't seen any reports on the bigger boxes, but Let's see Win2K server do that...
While you wouldn't want to run KDE on that system, you CAN run Linux, which is the point. The FACTS remain that you can do more with less hardware with a linux based system than you can with a Windows based system. Period.
For the same price? No way. Remove XWindows and you gotta spend thousands and thousands training each poor soul that sits down in front of a CMI.
The person to whom you were responding never suggested removing the X Window System (please... let's get the terminology right here). He said that he "wouldn't want to run KDE on that system...". There are MANY Window Managers for Linux and the VAST majority of them are considerably less resource-hungry than KDE and GNOME. Personally, I prefer WindowMaker to both of them because anything with a "panel" at the bottom of the screen is just too damned reminiscent of CDE for my taste.
Most Linux geeks that I know would want high end equipment not cheap junk. I've got an old celeron that has trouble running X.
My "old" Celeron 366s on an Abit BP-6 have NO problem running X and generating more than 1000 frames per second when running glxgears through my Voodoo4 4500.
It's true that the Via C3 is not a modern processor design but it is PLENTY adequate for running Linux.
As for the target market for these machines, well who knows... the "no money/no internet access" crowd you speak of isn't going to be buying from Wal-Mart.com (See the notice? The one that says "not available in stores"?) That 2 GHz P4 for < $500 might make one HELL of a personal workstation on some slightly tech-savvy small business's LAN if you gave it a RAM upgrade... especially if it was the Mandrake machine (which includes OpenOffice out of the box).
My question is this... does ANYone have any idea how many Linux boxes Wal-Mart.com is selling and what kind of customers they are selling them to?
My situation is similar and points out the problem with the concept of "free intrastate" bandwidth even more clearly.
From my workstation at the University of Houston it is a total of 21 hops to my box at home (on Time-Warner/Roadrunner). All of the nodes I bounce through are in Texas, but the route passes through three backbone providers' networks to travel a total (according to mapquest's driving directions) of 16.05 miles (approx 20 km for those outside the US).
The only way I could see anything like the New Zealand system occurring in the US would be if the entire infrastructure of the 'net was restructured so that all peering was done at the closest major node (e.g. Houston, Dallas, Denver, etc.) and that just isn't going to happen in OUR lifetimes...
The fact that Microsoft is using sales of its other products to continue to produce infirior hardware is not fair to the consumers who have already choosen Logitech and Genius.
I don't see how it can be unfair... if the consumers have already chosen Logitech and/or Genius over Microsoft's offerings then they are out of the market.
Personally, I find that Microsoft's hardware products tend to be of superior quality *AND* extremely reliable, although I canNOT, for the life of me, type on an "Unnatural" keyboard... they lose money because they always seem to be priced approximately 50% higher than the competition in the same quality tier.
Nope... my consulting fees are approximately 5 times my going rate as an employee... if this sounds too harsh, consider this... you have to pay Social Security and Medicare taxes (I'm assuming you're in the U.S.) at the self-employed rate, you have to do all the accounting, etc., for income taxes, AND you have to provide your own tools/equipment (if you're doing it right). In addition, there's the fact that, as an indie consultant, you do the project and leave. I accept a lower hourly rate for steady (read, employee) work than I require for my free lance stuff just because it's steady.
Finally, there is, I'll admit, a wee bit of punitive intent in setting the rate so high... partly for the attitude you have described and also a little reminder to your ex-boss just how much your services are REALLY worth when the fecal matter hits the rotary ventilation device.
Hey if I've got a.co.nz or.com.au email address, I'm sure that must mean that the US laws can go where the sun don't shine....
Not necessarily... if you direct your adverts specifically to the US market and they transgress some anti-fraud statute there, both Oz and Kiwi-land both have extradition treaties that just MIGHT kick in to get you a rather lengthy stay in the Federal Hotel in some lovely destination such as Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.
I dont even consider X usable on the network, tightvnc or remote desktop does a better job at that./blockquote? Odd, I'd say the same thing about Windows. I frequently run X apps on my Linux box at home through a gzipped ssh tunnel from my Sun workstation at work. It is remarkably responsive even though I STILL haven't managed to convince the U to shut down P2P (which consumes 40% of our gateway's bandwidth) on the campus network. Everytime I've used vnc or Netmeeting to remotely operate a Windows box, it has been a total slug.
I guess different people just have different expectations...
True, but you really need to know what you are doing when abusing one. FWD is much more forgiving, especially in the rain/snow.
Errrrmmm... no. Up until the Japanese reworked FWD in, I believe, the early to mid-seventies, all cars were rear-wheel drive because designs prior to that time had been VERY unforgiving about warning the driver about the approaching switch from under-steering to over-steering as cornering speed increased. The most notable example of this was the Cord in the 30s. Wonderful car but it was a killer.
The best Microsoft invention is the mouse-with-scroll-wheel.
Although I am not much of a Microsoft fan, I do have to give the Dark Lord's minions a few points for that one... and, while I'm at it, I think I'll cough up a couple of kudos for ODBC... hmmmm... funny thing... the only OPEN standard Microsoft ever proposed and it took over the world of client-server database communication protocols... it didn't help SQL Server sales much, though, because SQL Server REALLY sucked back in 1993.
IIRC, the markets (NYSE and NASDAQ) close at 3:00 pm EST. The documents were not made available until 4:40 pm EST. Late enough that the markets are closed, early enough to make the 6:00 o'clock News. Sounds like it was timed about right to me.
I've had more unexpected SIGTERMs under KDE than I have had BSODs (and other application crashes)under XP.)
I rather expect that you have seeing that, unlike SIGTERM, a BSOD is NOT an application crash. A BSOD is the equivalent of a "kernel panic".
No responsible Linux advocate claims that Linux applications don't crash... but when they DO crash, proper memory protection will prevent the application from crashing the system unless something is SERIOUSLY misconfigured or there is an incipient hardware failure.
If your Linux box is networked to another PC (Windows OR Linux), it's a simple matter to log in remotely and kill the locked up process, restoring the system to usability.
Linux is primarily usable by CS geeks who were learned Unix in college.
I can't speak for ALL other Linux users, but I weren't learned it in college. I graduated from college approximately seventeen years before Linus released kernel 0.0.1 in 1993. I have been teaching myself Linux for 5 years and will probably NEVER feel like I know all I NEED to know about it, but I know enough about it that I make my living administering it as well as several commercial UNIX variants.
He further saith:
These elite geeks put down users of publicly available commercial software that doesn't require broadband or other high-end technology to acquire and use.
If you think Linux is NOT commercial software, I hope you aren't invested in RedHat, IBM, Sun Microsystems, Dell, HP, Corel, or SuSE, because they all seem to think it is a VERY commercial software product.
As for Linux requiring broadband or "other high-end technology to acquire and use"... you can acquire Linux by automobile trip to Best Buy, CompUSA or, for that matter, Half-Price Books. You can also snail-mail order it from cheapbytes or half-a-dozen other CD pressers if you don't want to pay full price. Or, you can do what I did to acquire my first Linux distro... I spent 36 hours downloading it over a dial-up connection.
Yet again the poster ranteth:
Put your average accountant in front of KDE and ask her to get her work done and you're paycheck will likely go missing come Friday.
"Put your average accountant in front of" GNOME on a PC running a professionally-configured Linux installation and he'll probably get his work done in half the time using gnucash because he won't be rebooting 3-4 times a day. Companies that spend NO money on end-user training had DAMNED sure better have competent administrators on staff for whatever OS they standardize on... or have you not heard the "Oh Fred... " commercials advertising CDW?
The poster continueth:
Windows has seen a convergence of the easy to use desktop (Windows 9.x) with the secure desktop (Windows NT), and they're phasing out the old ways in favor of the new ways, which feature security. Why put them down for securing the average users desktop?
Windows 9.x easy to use??? You've obviously never worked in end-user support. Believe me, there's a reason that Simon Travaglia's BOFH refers to end-user support as the "Helldesk." NT secure??? Just search the "Incidents and Vulnerabilities" section of the CERT website. Or maybe you meant that as a joke...
I don't put Microsoft down for "securing the average users desktop... ", if that's your opinion of the Linux advocate's position, please allow me to clarify MY position for you.
I put Microsoft down for trying to hide vulnerabilities from their user base until something like Code Red and/or nimda brings the internet to it's knees.
I put Microsoft down for NOT "securing the average users desktop... " in a timely manner.
I put Microsoft down for their self-professed strategy of "embrace, extend, destroy... " wuth respect to open, non-proprietary standards and free interoperability between OSs.
I put Microsoft down for trying to destroy my freedom to choose NOT to use their product.
I put Microsoft down for FUD campaigning against the GPL because they want to take code developed by others without compensating the authors (the TCP/IP stack in Win2K was lifted from FreeBSD in one piece and grafted into Win2K/XP) and make it THEIR proprietary product.
I put Microsoft down for being a convicted software pirate.
I put Microsoft down for taking steps to "cut off the air supply" of any competitor who occupies a market niche that they decide they want to own.
I put Microsoft down for abusing the accounting rules so as to continue showing "profits" when their cash flow was HIGHLY negative. In that vein, I recently told my stockbroker that I considered Microsoft to be no better than a speculative investment, sort of pork bellies on the Chicago Board of Trade and the Denver "Penny Stock" market.
I could go on and on but I won't. I have a low opinion of Microsoft's executives, their business practices and their sense of business ethics because they have made a relied on marketing, strong-arming their customers and lying to consumers, investors and government regulators to reach and maintain their monopoly position rather than the technical excellence of their product.
It is a common clause in most licenses. Though, it seems that MS is just being a real dick of a corporation for putting up a fight. What would they prefer? BlueLight go to Solaris? Sheesh. (Having said that, they'll probably pay up for all new copies on Windows.)
Actually, AFAIK, all bluelight.com ever had licensed from Microsoft was IE5 and Outlook Express, which they distributed by the "bucketsful o' CDs" at the register. I see this as an attempt to extort revenue out of the buyer at the expense of K-Mart and/or its creditors.
Could it be that Microsoft is concerned over AOL 8 being Gecko-based? Wall-Mart.com selling pre-installed Linux boxen? Could a fluffy little penguin be worrying the behemoth from Redmond?
As long as you are on the internet, and can connect to IPv4 or IPv6, you cannot be stopped. The technology inherently allows you to move around blockages or outage points.
... and if the blockage point is your ISPs gateway to the backbone, how do you propose to route around that? A proxy MIGHT work unless they are using something like the Packeteer Packetshaper to control traffic.
I know this because I recently had to pry some straight answers out of Time-Warner/Roadrunner on behalf of my boss's boss's boss (He and I are both RR customers). It seems the Dean (yes, I work at an edu) wanted to work from home, including mounting the Windows shares on our NT domain. Time-Warner swore up and down that they did not have the netbios ports blocked until I identified myself as a customer and demanded to speak to security because I could prove that the Level I tech was lying to me. I had port-scanned my box at home and it showed 137, 138 and 139 in state 'filtered' (this is a Linux box without Samba installed, so blocking by RR is the ONLY way I could have gotten that result).
They finally told me that, yes, the netbios ports are blocked (which I consider to be a Good Thing (TM)) and will STAY that way, and that the only way the Dean could get them unblocked is to buy a commercial account and a static IP (for which RR charges $130.00/month) (which the Dean considers a Really Bad Thing(TM)).
I told them I would keep that in mind the next time a faculty member asked for my recommendation of an ISP and whether they should get cable internet or DSL.
Re:KDE 2.2
on
Xandros 1.0
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Quoth the poster:
I'm sure it's been said before, and probaly will many times now, but seriously...KDE 2.2?
Xandros is based on Debian, which is designed and developed to be a production system. As such, it often lacks the "latest-and-greatest bleeding edge toys", sacrificing newness in favor of tried-and-true KNOWN rock-solid stability. In a corporate environment, most managers would avoid EVER upgrading software if they could, which is why there was so much fear and uncertainty about Y2K.
It just seems rather a damper on the whole experience of using Linux on the desktop. Part of the fun for me was finding and playing around with the various themes, most of which are kde3 oriented now. I'd find it rather annoying to shell out that much money only to find that my system was uglier than someone who'd just downloaded theirs from the internet.
Again, corporate managers would really prefer to specify a mandatory standard for desktop appearance that applied company-wide. Your "half the fun" is ALL of there problem when they have to bring in a temp to cover for the receptionist or a secretary and the poor temp's eyes are hemorrhaging before noon because of some atrocious color scheme the regular employee "designed" to "improve" the appearance of their workstation. Computers in the corporate environment are supposed to be tools, not toys.
Xandros is going to have a tough go of it. They are taking on Microsoft head-on in a market that MSFT deems critical. The road will be long bumpy and dusty. I truly hope that they have the fortitude to stay the course. I don't think this distro is the Windows-killer, but It does seem to be well thought-out and put together.
Refusing to grant a visa is the best way the feds have to avoid committing an atrocity here. He'll be convicted in absentia, but they'll never ask for extradition- you can't request extradition for someone that you denied entry to.
You cannot be convicted in absentia in the United States. Proceedings in absentia violate the Fifth Amendment's guaranty of "due process of law" and the Sixth Amendment's guaranty of the right to confront the witnesses against you.
Denying an entry visa to Dmitri is a tactic by the DOJ to prevent the case from going to trial so that the constitutionality of the DMCA and their attempt to apply it outside the boundaries of the U.S. never gets challenged in the one place that counts, a court of law.
Seriously, what exactly does the CEO do anyway that makes him worth so much?
then quote your post:
(... like the dot-com assholes who lost were in it only for the $10 million homes - learn about these losers and you'll see they're nothing but upper class daddy's boys anyways....)
then, I'll respond:
The High-level execs who were the recipients of these corporate "gifts" ARE Junior! They didn't create the company, hell, they didn't even create much in the way of shareholder wealth. In the tech sector, it was the dot-com investor feeding frenzy that created any wealth that was realized.
You, OTOH are an entrepreneur. That is a very different species from these "boardroom stars," and I would not see your incentive reduced one iota.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, considering that SGI had a perfectly free choice between using Linux (which already runs on Itanium), porting Irix to the Itanium and trying to make Windows64 (or whatever they (MS) are going to call their Itanium version) work on a NUMA architecture machine, I'd say they probably made a wise choice.
... now, thanks to SGI's and IBM's big-iron work, it does ... the Origin 3900 is a 128 processor monster, and it's my understanding that preformance under the NUMA-ized Linux scales linearly up to 64 processors. I haven't seen any reports on the bigger boxes, but Let's see Win2K server do that ...
SGI has been a BIG booster of Open Source software in general and Linux in particular for about the last 5 years. I was reading the changelogs for the 2.5 kernel tree a couple of nights ago and noticed that their code for running the kernel on NUMA-based machines has already been contributed to the tree and merged.
The major beef about Linux as a big-iron OS has always been "It doesn't scale well above 4 processors"
The person to whom you were responding never suggested removing the X Window System (please
My "old" Celeron 366s on an Abit BP-6 have NO problem running X and generating more than 1000 frames per second when running glxgears through my Voodoo4 4500.
It's true that the Via C3 is not a modern processor design but it is PLENTY adequate for running Linux.
As for the target market for these machines, well who knows
My question is this
My situation is similar and points out the problem with the concept of "free intrastate" bandwidth even more clearly.
...
From my workstation at the University of Houston it is a total of 21 hops to my box at home (on Time-Warner/Roadrunner). All of the nodes I bounce through are in Texas, but the route passes through three backbone providers' networks to travel a total (according to mapquest's driving directions) of 16.05 miles (approx 20 km for those outside the US).
The only way I could see anything like the New Zealand system occurring in the US would be if the entire infrastructure of the 'net was restructured so that all peering was done at the closest major node (e.g. Houston, Dallas, Denver, etc.) and that just isn't going to happen in OUR lifetimes
I don't see how it can be unfair
Personally, I find that Microsoft's hardware products tend to be of superior quality *AND* extremely reliable, although I canNOT, for the life of me, type on an "Unnatural" keyboard
Nope ... my consulting fees are approximately 5 times my going rate as an employee ... if this sounds too harsh, consider this ... you have to pay Social Security and Medicare taxes (I'm assuming you're in the U.S.) at the self-employed rate, you have to do all the accounting, etc., for income taxes, AND you have to provide your own tools/equipment (if you're doing it right). In addition, there's the fact that, as an indie consultant, you do the project and leave. I accept a lower hourly rate for steady (read, employee) work than I require for my free lance stuff just because it's steady.
... partly for the attitude you have described and also a little reminder to your ex-boss just how much your services are REALLY worth when the fecal matter hits the rotary ventilation device.
Finally, there is, I'll admit, a wee bit of punitive intent in setting the rate so high
Just my US$0.02
Not necessarily
Yes, as long as the e-mail address you post is @127.0.0.1
Of COURSE the Times They Are a'Changing ... and I hope they DON'T stop
Pick 2
But then I guess that's why they make chocolate and vanilla
Damn I wish I had mod points!! That was FUNNY!
Errrrmmm
Although I am not much of a Microsoft fan, I do have to give the Dark Lord's minions a few points for that one
IIRC, the markets (NYSE and NASDAQ) close at 3:00 pm EST. The documents were not made available until 4:40 pm EST. Late enough that the markets are closed, early enough to make the 6:00 o'clock News. Sounds like it was timed about right to me.
I rather expect that you have seeing that, unlike SIGTERM, a BSOD is NOT an application crash. A BSOD is the equivalent of a "kernel panic".
No responsible Linux advocate claims that Linux applications don't crash
If your Linux box is networked to another PC (Windows OR Linux), it's a simple matter to log in remotely and kill the locked up process, restoring the system to usability.
I can't speak for ALL other Linux users, but I weren't learned it in college. I graduated from college approximately seventeen years before Linus released kernel 0.0.1 in 1993. I have been teaching myself Linux for 5 years and will probably NEVER feel like I know all I NEED to know about it, but I know enough about it that I make my living administering it as well as several commercial UNIX variants.
He further saith:
If you think Linux is NOT commercial software, I hope you aren't invested in RedHat, IBM, Sun Microsystems, Dell, HP, Corel, or SuSE, because they all seem to think it is a VERY commercial software product.
As for Linux requiring broadband or "other high-end technology to acquire and use"
Yet again the poster ranteth:
"Put your average accountant in front of" GNOME on a PC running a professionally-configured Linux installation and he'll probably get his work done in half the time using gnucash because he won't be rebooting 3-4 times a day. Companies that spend NO money on end-user training had DAMNED sure better have competent administrators on staff for whatever OS they standardize on
The poster continueth:
Windows 9.x easy to use??? You've obviously never worked in end-user support. Believe me, there's a reason that Simon Travaglia's BOFH refers to end-user support as the "Helldesk." NT secure??? Just search the "Incidents and Vulnerabilities" section of the CERT website. Or maybe you meant that as a joke
I don't put Microsoft down for "securing the average users desktop
I put Microsoft down for trying to hide vulnerabilities from their user base until something like Code Red and/or nimda brings the internet to it's knees.
I put Microsoft down for NOT "securing the average users desktop
I put Microsoft down for their self-professed strategy of "embrace, extend, destroy
I put Microsoft down for trying to destroy my freedom to choose NOT to use their product.
I put Microsoft down for FUD campaigning against the GPL because they want to take code developed by others without compensating the authors (the TCP/IP stack in Win2K was lifted from FreeBSD in one piece and grafted into Win2K/XP) and make it THEIR proprietary product.
I put Microsoft down for being a convicted software pirate.
I put Microsoft down for taking steps to "cut off the air supply" of any competitor who occupies a market niche that they decide they want to own.
I put Microsoft down for abusing the accounting rules so as to continue showing "profits" when their cash flow was HIGHLY negative. In that vein, I recently told my stockbroker that I considered Microsoft to be no better than a speculative investment, sort of pork bellies on the Chicago Board of Trade and the Denver "Penny Stock" market.
I could go on and on but I won't. I have a low opinion of Microsoft's executives, their business practices and their sense of business ethics because they have made a relied on marketing, strong-arming their customers and lying to consumers, investors and government regulators to reach and maintain their monopoly position rather than the technical excellence of their product.
Actually, AFAIK, all bluelight.com ever had licensed from Microsoft was IE5 and Outlook Express, which they distributed by the "bucketsful o' CDs" at the register. I see this as an attempt to extort revenue out of the buyer at the expense of K-Mart and/or its creditors.
Could it be that Microsoft is concerned over AOL 8 being Gecko-based? Wall-Mart.com selling pre-installed Linux boxen? Could a fluffy little penguin be worrying the behemoth from Redmond?
Why bother? Just drop each adserver you encounter in 'hosts' with an IP of 127.0.0.1.
I know this because I recently had to pry some straight answers out of Time-Warner/Roadrunner on behalf of my boss's boss's boss (He and I are both RR customers). It seems the Dean (yes, I work at an edu) wanted to work from home, including mounting the Windows shares on our NT domain. Time-Warner swore up and down that they did not have the netbios ports blocked until I identified myself as a customer and demanded to speak to security because I could prove that the Level I tech was lying to me. I had port-scanned my box at home and it showed 137, 138 and 139 in state 'filtered' (this is a Linux box without Samba installed, so blocking by RR is the ONLY way I could have gotten that result).
They finally told me that, yes, the netbios ports are blocked (which I consider to be a Good Thing (TM)) and will STAY that way, and that the only way the Dean could get them unblocked is to buy a commercial account and a static IP (for which RR charges $130.00/month) (which the Dean considers a Really Bad Thing(TM)).
I told them I would keep that in mind the next time a faculty member asked for my recommendation of an ISP and whether they should get cable internet or DSL.
Xandros is based on Debian, which is designed and developed to be a production system. As such, it often lacks the "latest-and-greatest bleeding edge toys", sacrificing newness in favor of tried-and-true KNOWN rock-solid stability. In a corporate environment, most managers would avoid EVER upgrading software if they could, which is why there was so much fear and uncertainty about Y2K.
Again, corporate managers would really prefer to specify a mandatory standard for desktop appearance that applied company-wide. Your "half the fun" is ALL of there problem when they have to bring in a temp to cover for the receptionist or a secretary and the poor temp's eyes are hemorrhaging before noon because of some atrocious color scheme the regular employee "designed" to "improve" the appearance of their workstation. Computers in the corporate environment are supposed to be tools, not toys.
Xandros is going to have a tough go of it. They are taking on Microsoft head-on in a market that MSFT deems critical. The road will be long bumpy and dusty. I truly hope that they have the fortitude to stay the course. I don't think this distro is the Windows-killer, but It does seem to be well thought-out and put together.
But the funniest "error message" I've ever seen was:
win.exe not found:
(A)bort, (R)etry, (C)heer
You cannot be convicted in absentia in the United States. Proceedings in absentia violate the Fifth Amendment's guaranty of "due process of law" and the Sixth Amendment's guaranty of the right to confront the witnesses against you.
Denying an entry visa to Dmitri is a tactic by the DOJ to prevent the case from going to trial so that the constitutionality of the DMCA and their attempt to apply it outside the boundaries of the U.S. never gets challenged in the one place that counts, a court of law.
then quote your post:
then, I'll respond:
The High-level execs who were the recipients of these corporate "gifts" ARE Junior! They didn't create the company, hell, they didn't even create much in the way of shareholder wealth. In the tech sector, it was the dot-com investor feeding frenzy that created any wealth that was realized.
You, OTOH are an entrepreneur. That is a very different species from these "boardroom stars," and I would not see your incentive reduced one iota.
Now, answer the original question