The vast majority of fibre channel SANs use SCSI disks. Usually the RAID controller in the SAN has multiple channels of SCSI going out to the disks and redundant fibre channel connections back to the fibre channel switch. SCSI is still cheaper on the disk than all those lasers and optics.
Eventually most vendors will go fibre channel from end to end but not yet. GBICs and cable are just too expensive.
Re:NEPOTISM!! Not Gary's secret - read the FAQ
on
Interview with Gary Gygax
·
· Score: 2, Informative
If you read the FAQ that is linked in the article you will see that for most of TSR's existance Gary Gygax was a minority shareholder who had little control of the company. Over 60% of the shares were controlled by Brian and Kevin Blume. 90 of the Blumes relatives were employed by the company, that is the nepotism the Wallstreet Journal spoke of.
At some point in 1984 Gygax convinced the board of directors (The two Blumes, Gygax and 3 other directors brought in by the Blumes) to remove Kevin Blume as president and replace him with Richard Koenigs as president pro-tem. At this point those 90 relatives of the Blumes were let go and many other changes were made in order to save the company from bankruptcy.
Eventually Gygax sold off his shares when an associate of the Blumes acquired a majority interest in the company.
For most of TSR's existance Gary Gygax was not in control of the company, he just had the misfortune of being the famous figurehead of a notoriously badly run business.
If the IBM PC hadn't been open and reproducible we wouldn't be buying IBM PCs at all. That platorm would be as dead as the DEC Rainbow. It would have been buried by the Apples and dozens of other superior proprietary platforms.
It is the openess of the platform which made the PC market worthy. The ready availability of common, compatible sysems, software and peripherals is what made the IBM compatible PC attractive to buy and to produce.
IBM may not have 100% of the market share of the PC but at least there is a market for them to have a share of.
You aint gonna learn that from the article. The entire fucking reason this made it to slashdot is because in his entire plan, there was exactly one mention of Linux.
/QUOTE
Okay, bit of a troll but I have to say: What the heck are you smoking!?!
Its friggin' Doom3! On w00d generatingly fast, unobtainable, seriously over-priced hardware no less. Of course its gonna be on Slashdot, linux or no linux.
Compaq sells through distributors and resellers. If you want to buy an Alpha from Compaq and aren't from the department of defense or doing Human Genome research you pretty much have to buy from a reseller or distributor.
The Compaq rep you contacted should have put you in contact with a local distributor. Perhaps you got one of the old wintel reps who still can't spell Alpha.
DARPA got its funding long before Gore became a senator. He may have once voted for a budget bill that included continuing funding for DARPA or ARPANET (along with many other senators and representatvies) but that hardly makes him a visionary.
Gore jumped on the internet bandwagon in the 90's with his "Information Superhighway" proposal but has really done very little of substance.
Personally, I think I would have chosen to keep the stable release of gcc in, wait until KDE 2.0 was out, add in XFree4.0 and the latest stable GNOME,
I'd have to agree that it would have been wiser to keep the latest stable release of gcc as the default, but Redhat 7.0 does have XFree4.0.1 (using it right now) and GNOME 1.2.
As far as waiting for KDE 2.0, why bother? No distribution maker is under any obligation to delay their distro for the benefit of an app vendor. I don't see SuSe, Debian or Corel doing this either. Really the best thing to do - imho - is ship the latest KDE stable, offer the development snapshot as an option and provide the 2.0 stable when available as a download. In fact doing this with gcc might have averted some of the criticism.
Not really responding to anything you (fireproof) said, but really I think RedHat has done a better than decent job with RH7.0. Its by far their best x.0 release yet (maybe not saying much;-). It's default install is much more secure and out of the box it gives me about 95% of the stuff I spent weeks adding to 6.2.
One last note, 4 of Redhat's employees are on the gcc steering committee and some were directly involved in the decision to ship gcc 2.96, so this issue is alot less cut-and-dried than it is made out to be on Slashdot.
Hmm, no offense but I think you are wrong. Last year Compaq earned more revenue on its RISC platforms (VMS, Tru64, NSK) than on all its x86 NT Server products. Almost $1.5billion more. Those RISC platforms also have a much higher profit margin than the Proliants.
Don't get me wrong, the Proliant is a strong platform, it has the unit volume for sure, but its not going to replace the Alpha.
I spent last week at the Compaq Enterprise Technical Symposium, and it was very enlightening. The place was overrun by Alpha users, distributors and VARS. A huge percentage of the course tracks were Tru64, OpenVMS or Linux on Alpha.
Compaq is a very different company than they were before the Digital buyout. They have alot more enterprise savvy and far superior engineering than the old Compaq did. In fact, they feel alot like the old robust, creative DEC of the 80's but with good marketing, smart management and a decent PC line.
I think that the PA-RISCS and SGI-MIPS platforms are in alot more danger of becoming extinct than the Alpha.
Heck if I were Sun I'd be brittin' shicks right about now. Compaq will have Sun in a market pincer next year with IA-64 coming up from the low end and Alpha pressing down from above.
Also, Compaq doesn't fab or market the Alpha. Compaq designs the chip and uses it in their systems. Samsung and IBM provide the fabs and API does the marketing for third party chip and board sales.
For what its worth Compaq now fully supports Alpha and x86 Linux on its RA8000, ESA12000 and MA8000/12000 RAID arrays. They support FibreChannel HBAs and proper FC switches not just arbitrated loop.
Yes, but imagine how many parallel instances you could run.
Actually this might be pretty useful for all those new massively multiplayer online roleplaying games, and with the monthly revenue stream they generate it might even be cost effective.
Increased security is mentioned several times throughout the article. They say that Redhat has improved security for default installations and quote RedHat's CEO listing increased security first in a list of improvements in RedHat 7.0.
RedHat has taken a bit of a (deserved) beating over the holes in it's default install. I hope this is a sign that they are listening to the criticism.
Many Slashdotters were less than enthused with the new registered user concept when it was first introduced and refused, or at least delayed, registration for a while.
I waited over a month as I recall and still ended up with a pretty low number.
While I don't imagine that anyone cares about their Slashdot user# I know some people who would really like lower ICQ numbers.
Tru64 was Digital Unix was OSF/1. Ultrix for VAX and MIPS was also BSD based.
As I recall, DEC wanted to have input into the AT&T/Sun Unix project but AT&T was pretty eager to regain some control of Unix now that its anti-trust was settled and rejected outside input (Or so the story goes at DEC, I was working for DEC at the time).
DEC and HP were very small companies compared to AT&T, heck HP was smaller than DEC back then, so you can imagine that this made them nervous.
The OSF project initially planned to use Ultrix as its base for the OSF 1 standard but then giant IBM joined up and OSF switched to AIX.
I remember everyone saying 'AIX, what the heck is AIX?'
There were some calls for AT&T to just join OSF and solve the problem but that never happened.
In the end no unified Unix emerged from either camp and DEC produced OSF/1 based on BSD and MACH 2.5.
Sun switched from the BSD based SunOS to Solaris, IBM continued to develop AIX and HP went with HP-UX.
AT&T did nothing of note as a developer but they bought a TON of VAX Ultrix machines helping make DEC the largest Unix vendor in the world at that time (go figure).
NOTE: I was a young DECie at the time so feel free to take my comments with a grain of salt.
Heck, your reading this on Slashdot, you should do that regardless.
These are supposed to be shipping in October according to the web site.
There is also a reservation form you can fill out at the site but as far as I can tell its just a way for them to collect marketing data.
I met Jason Hall at a LAN party where he demo'd a beta of Shogo prior to its release. At that time he explained that Monolith and Microsoft had disolved their relationship over creative differences in the development of Shogo (originally titled "Riot: Mobile Armor"). Monolith paid a large sum of money to Microsoft in order to take full ownership of the game property, so there is definitely no residual MS funding of this port, as ironic and amusing as that might be.
From other articles I've read on this topic it appears that Monolith had contracted out Mac and Amiga ports of their game Shogo, and has recently expanded the porting contract to include a Linux port of the entire Lithtech engine, not just a specific game.
IIRC The US Champ Car series (Formerly Indy Car) uses methanol, but Formula 1, which uses pressurized pumps during pitstops, still uses racing gasoline. Champ Car switched decades ago due to the high probability of fuel cell rupture in accidents on US superspeedway tracks. You are correct about the fire safety benefits, methanol can be diluted with water, gasoline just floats on top.
About half of all dedicated quake servers on the internet (many thousands) run Linux. Just in the past two weeks I have helped several people set up Linux systems in order run dedicated Quake or Half-Life servers. In any case the SuSE disks are free so who cares if they aren't needed.
Quake 3 will only have one platform's binary in each box, forcing you to buy the correct version. According to Carmack's work log it is likely that distribution will be slower to get the Mac and Linux boxes on the shelves and he warned that customers who buy the Windows version and expect to download a patch to convert it to Linux or Mac will not be able to do so until next year.
With Quake 1&2 Only a Windows version was released and Linux users had to buy the Windows version and download a new binary to convert to Linux. (A couple years later MacMillan did release a Quake boxed set but many users had already converted their windows copies at that point).
Slashdot Mirror
The vast majority of fibre channel SANs use SCSI disks. Usually the RAID controller in the SAN has multiple channels of SCSI going out to the disks and redundant fibre channel connections back to the fibre channel switch. SCSI is still cheaper on the disk than all those lasers and optics.
Eventually most vendors will go fibre channel from end to end but not yet. GBICs and cable are just too expensive.
If you read the FAQ that is linked in the article you will see that for most of TSR's existance Gary Gygax was a minority shareholder who had little control of the company. Over 60% of the shares were controlled by Brian and Kevin Blume. 90 of the Blumes relatives were employed by the company, that is the nepotism the Wallstreet Journal spoke of.
At some point in 1984 Gygax convinced the board of directors (The two Blumes, Gygax and 3 other directors brought in by the Blumes) to remove Kevin Blume as president and replace him with Richard Koenigs as president pro-tem. At this point those 90 relatives of the Blumes were let go and many other changes were made in order to save the company from bankruptcy.
Eventually Gygax sold off his shares when an associate of the Blumes acquired a majority interest in the company.
For most of TSR's existance Gary Gygax was not in control of the company, he just had the misfortune of being the famous figurehead of a notoriously badly run business.
If the IBM PC hadn't been open and reproducible we wouldn't be buying IBM PCs at all. That platorm would be as dead as the DEC Rainbow. It would have been buried by the Apples and dozens of other superior proprietary platforms.
It is the openess of the platform which made the PC market worthy. The ready availability of common, compatible sysems, software and peripherals is what made the IBM compatible PC attractive to buy and to produce.
IBM may not have 100% of the market share of the PC but at least there is a market for them to have a share of.
"Honey, the doctor said my abdominal swelling was caused by a sperm virus. And you gave it to me!"
And the DMCA is a law made by congress, so the First Amendment applies here no?
Okay, bit of a troll but I have to say: What the heck are you smoking!?!
Its friggin' Doom3! On w00d generatingly fast, unobtainable, seriously over-priced hardware no less. Of course its gonna be on Slashdot, linux or no linux.
Get with the program son.
The Compaq rep you contacted should have put you in contact with a local distributor. Perhaps you got one of the old wintel reps who still can't spell Alpha.
DARPA got its funding long before Gore became a senator. He may have once voted for a budget bill that included continuing funding for DARPA or ARPANET (along with many other senators and representatvies) but that hardly makes him a visionary.
Gore jumped on the internet bandwagon in the 90's with his "Information Superhighway" proposal but has really done very little of substance.
I'd have to agree that it would have been wiser to keep the latest stable release of gcc as the default, but Redhat 7.0 does have XFree4.0.1 (using it right now) and GNOME 1.2.
As far as waiting for KDE 2.0, why bother? No distribution maker is under any obligation to delay their distro for the benefit of an app vendor. I don't see SuSe, Debian or Corel doing this either. Really the best thing to do - imho - is ship the latest KDE stable, offer the development snapshot as an option and provide the 2.0 stable when available as a download. In fact doing this with gcc might have averted some of the criticism.
Not really responding to anything you (fireproof) said, but really I think RedHat has done a better than decent job with RH7.0. Its by far their best x.0 release yet (maybe not saying much;-). It's default install is much more secure and out of the box it gives me about 95% of the stuff I spent weeks adding to 6.2.
One last note, 4 of Redhat's employees are on the gcc steering committee and some were directly involved in the decision to ship gcc 2.96, so this issue is alot less cut-and-dried than it is made out to be on Slashdot.
Hmm, no offense but I think you are wrong. Last year Compaq earned more revenue on its RISC platforms (VMS, Tru64, NSK) than on all its x86 NT Server products. Almost $1.5billion more. Those RISC platforms also have a much higher profit margin than the Proliants.
Don't get me wrong, the Proliant is a strong platform, it has the unit volume for sure, but its not going to replace the Alpha.
I spent last week at the Compaq Enterprise Technical Symposium, and it was very enlightening. The place was overrun by Alpha users, distributors and VARS. A huge percentage of the course tracks were Tru64, OpenVMS or Linux on Alpha.
Compaq is a very different company than they were before the Digital buyout. They have alot more enterprise savvy and far superior engineering than the old Compaq did. In fact, they feel alot like the old robust, creative DEC of the 80's but with good marketing, smart management and a decent PC line.
I think that the PA-RISCS and SGI-MIPS platforms are in alot more danger of becoming extinct than the Alpha.
Heck if I were Sun I'd be brittin' shicks right about now. Compaq will have Sun in a market pincer next year with IA-64 coming up from the low end and Alpha pressing down from above.
Also, Compaq doesn't fab or market the Alpha. Compaq designs the chip and uses it in their systems. Samsung and IBM provide the fabs and API does the marketing for third party chip and board sales.
All of this information is available in the Compaq Quickspecs. Here is the link to the MA8000 quickspecs for North America: http://www5.co mpa q.com/products/quickspecs/10545_na/10545_na.HTML
I don't know if this support was available back in april, it may not have been, or the sales rep may have been one of the Proliant old guard types.
I got a little hands on time with an RA8000 and Linux last week and it was very slick and easy to set up.
But I am drooling, dammit!
:-)
I got the bootlog by email a three weeks ago and had to stay seated for half an hour.
Of course geeks lust after cool hardware, just like car guys lust after cool cars.
:-) My question is why aren't you drooling? Are you some sorta software nancy boy or something?
Yes, but imagine how many parallel instances you could run.
Actually this might be pretty useful for all those new massively multiplayer online roleplaying games, and with the monthly revenue stream they generate it might even be cost effective.
You should ask Compaq why they want to run Linux on it.
They're the ones who did it and they are the ones writing kernel support for this machine.
RedHat has taken a bit of a (deserved) beating over the holes in it's default install. I hope this is a sign that they are listening to the criticism.
Well, we'll al find out soon enough.
I waited over a month as I recall and still ended up with a pretty low number.
While I don't imagine that anyone cares about their Slashdot user# I know some people who would really like lower ICQ numbers.
Okay, so if this is set 40 years in the future who will play the elderly Bruce Wayne?
How about Clint Eastwood?
You are correct.
Tru64 was Digital Unix was OSF/1. Ultrix for VAX and MIPS was also BSD based.
As I recall, DEC wanted to have input into the AT&T/Sun Unix project but AT&T was pretty eager to regain some control of Unix now that its anti-trust was settled and rejected outside input (Or so the story goes at DEC, I was working for DEC at the time).
DEC and HP were very small companies compared to AT&T, heck HP was smaller than DEC back then, so you can imagine that this made them nervous.
The OSF project initially planned to use Ultrix as its base for the OSF 1 standard but then giant IBM joined up and OSF switched to AIX.
I remember everyone saying 'AIX, what the heck is AIX?'
There were some calls for AT&T to just join OSF and solve the problem but that never happened.
In the end no unified Unix emerged from either camp and DEC produced OSF/1 based on BSD and MACH 2.5.
Sun switched from the BSD based SunOS to Solaris, IBM continued to develop AIX and HP went with HP-UX.
AT&T did nothing of note as a developer but they bought a TON of VAX Ultrix machines helping make DEC the largest Unix vendor in the world at that time (go figure).
NOTE: I was a young DECie at the time so feel free to take my comments with a grain of salt.
Heck, your reading this on Slashdot, you should do that regardless.
These are supposed to be shipping in October according to the web site. There is also a reservation form you can fill out at the site but as far as I can tell its just a way for them to collect marketing data.
I met Jason Hall at a LAN party where he demo'd a beta of Shogo prior to its release. At that time he explained that Monolith and Microsoft had disolved their relationship over creative differences in the development of Shogo (originally titled "Riot: Mobile Armor"). Monolith paid a large sum of money to Microsoft in order to take full ownership of the game property, so there is definitely no residual MS funding of this port, as ironic and amusing as that might be.
From other articles I've read on this topic it appears that Monolith had contracted out Mac and Amiga ports of their game Shogo, and has recently expanded the porting contract to include a Linux port of the entire Lithtech engine, not just a specific game.
IIRC The US Champ Car series (Formerly Indy Car) uses methanol, but Formula 1, which uses pressurized pumps during pitstops, still uses racing gasoline. Champ Car switched decades ago due to the high probability of fuel cell rupture in accidents on US superspeedway tracks. You are correct about the fire safety benefits, methanol can be diluted with water, gasoline just floats on top.
About half of all dedicated quake servers on the internet (many thousands) run Linux. Just in the past two weeks I have helped several people set up Linux systems in order run dedicated Quake or Half-Life servers. In any case the SuSE disks are free so who cares if they aren't needed.
Quake 3 will only have one platform's binary in each box, forcing you to buy the correct version. According to Carmack's work log it is likely that distribution will be slower to get the Mac and Linux boxes on the shelves and he warned that customers who buy the Windows version and expect to download a patch to convert it to Linux or Mac will not be able to do so until next year.
With Quake 1&2 Only a Windows version was released and Linux users had to buy the Windows version and download a new binary to convert to Linux. (A couple years later MacMillan did release a Quake boxed set but many users had already converted their windows copies at that point).
For single processor performance Alpha servers came in with SPECint of 39.1 and SPECfp of 68.1