Judge for yourself. Plan 9's Factotum security architecture was described in a paper presented at the USENIX Security '02 conference in August. The paper won the 'Best Paper' award, so it clearly impressed some people.
Computer Lib/Dream Machines is (are?) two of the most original books out there. One side of the book was titled 'Computer Lib'; you'd flip it over to find 'Dream Machines' printed from the other side. They met in the middle.
Computer Lib was an idiosyncratic explanation of computer technology, complete with Nelson's own drawings. Dream Machines dived into Nelson's true love, how the computer screen could transform the way people used computers. (In 1974 the typical computer interface was a 10 characters-per-second teletype or a 30 cps DECwriter.) Nelson's ultimate goal was a hypertext (Nelson coined the word) system he called Xanadu. Nelson regards the web as a pale imitation of his plans for Xanadu. (Xanadu has never been finished, but it still lives: see xanadu.com)
Ideally, you'd get a copy of the big, white, 1974 home-published version. Nelson put out a smaller revised version in 1987 from Microsoft Press. Both are of out of print.
Computer Lib/Dream Machines remains a visionary book.
True; most of CNN is served off of dual-processor Sun boxes (mostly Ultra 60's and 2300's.)
CNN has a major dependency on ad serving software from Netgravity. Netgravity is not available on Linux or for Apache. (Customers of Netgravity tend to be very large sites that, like CNN, tend to run on commercial UNIX systems.)
We've been exploring using Linux for systems that don't require Netgravity, but to this point there are only a few production systems running Linux. But it's clearly something we will continue to explore and use where it makes sense.
I'd be interested in knowing if Google actually gave them any software. Last I heard, Google is only selling a service - if you want them to search your site, you let them crawl your site. Much like Inktomi, and in contrast to Infoseek, which will sell you software you can host at your site.
I got the biggest kick out of of seeing the old machines.
Gates was shown hacking up Basic on what looked a DEC PDP-8/E (the box with the orange/yellow front panel and lots of flat toggle switches.)
I also looked like they found an Alto. It was also a kick to see the Lisa interface again.
I'll swear I saw what looked like an Apple III on a desk.
I know I was at at least one Homebrew Computer club meeting where they were showing the Apple I, and I was at the First West Coast Computer Faire where the II was introduced. But in both cases, I remember the machines, not the people.
It's worth remembering that CNN has a deal with IDG that allows CNN to beef up their tech coverage. The good news is that IDG seems to have good coverage of Linux.
I'm not so sure it's the case that you have a Linux advocate within CNN as much as it is that Linux is interesting right now, and like any media outlet, CNN tries to make itself interesting to its readers.
So, yes - I agree that it's good that CNN brings this coverage out to a mainstream audience, but the real credit for these articles should go back to IDG, Linux World, and the writers.
Phillip Greenspun has an on-line SQL book that he's working on called "SQL For Web Nerds". It's a little hidden at his site - look for www.photo.net/sql.
It's not all new - he's pulled pieces from his other books, but it's got some useful stuff in it, and the price is right.
Phillip's new book - "Phillip and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing" - has a fair amount of SQL within it. Phillip's book will be out anytime, but the entire text of the book is available on-line. Check out www.photo.net/wtr for this and other resources.
If you're a public site, the other thing you can do is put the Linux boxes behind a router or firewall and block ports that the public doesn't need to get at. If you're running a web service, there's very little beyond port 80 that you must let people see.
Any major technology cutover is going to come with glitches.
I'm a long-time listener of NPR, and a few weeks back I heard a screw-up the likes of which I hadn'd heard before. Linda Werthheimer was doing the "billboard" - the little 60 second piece at the top of the hour where they hype the stories coming up in the next hour. She appeared to have completely lost her place, to the point where she just had to stop talking and left about 20 seconds of dead air, which is unheard of on national radio or TV.
At the end of the next week, they made some reference to a technology changeover, which made Linda's screw-up make sense; I'm guessing she was trying to read some text off some electronic display, and the whole thing went haywire.
In any case, technology of this sort is very difficult to completely shake out with a live-fire test. Salon will have problems; their job is to make sure the problem are annoyances rather than complete failures. Assuming they can do that, these initial problems will be forgotten by most people.
CNN is an all-Solaris/Netscape site. We're pretty much tied to both by our choice of ad server technology: we use Netgravity, which doesn't support Linux and uses the NSAPI interface.
Like most large entities, CNN tends to be pretty conservative in how they use technology. We support over 150 million hits on an average day; over 500,000 hits a minute at our highest peaks. I wouldn't say at all that you couldn't do that with Linux or Apache, but I would say that I wouldn't try switching just to be fasionable. When you're running at those volumes, you have to be careful in how you make changes.
The VP quoted in the News.com article - Chad Dickerson - used to work for cnn.com.
Chad didn't work in the group doing the cnn.com server management, but he did hopefully absorb a few lessons about how to run a high-volume reliable web site. (The first lesson he absorbed was 'Get rid of NT', so he apparently learned something.)
You've missed it in the east coast and now almost central, but west coast can still get it. It comes up somewhere between 10:20 and 10:30 Thursday night.
Unfortunately CNN doesn't come in stereo - at least on my cable system - so the picture is better than on my pc but the sound is worse.
You're not likely to see Linux in the CNN Newsroom anytime soon - for years, the newsroom had only VT100 terminals, and they're still converting over to Windows machines.
It's certainly possible that Linux may crop up somewhere behind the scenes, just as it has in lots of other large companies. But even that may take a while. I was talking to someone recently about some or another computer that supported the on-air side of the house. This computer runs a version of NT, but it's a special version; the companies that make this kind of gear won't let you touch the insides of these boxes and still certify that they will work in the real-time on-air environment.
The CNN.com/internet side of things is all Sun Solaris running Netscape Enterprise servers right now. That could change someday, but we're pretty conservative technically; you have to be when your site is subject to the kind of loads CNN.com can get. (Our newest record is over 500k hits/minute across the entire family of web sites - (cnn|cnnfn|cnnsi).com and misc other sites) We take some pride that our site usually stays up when others are crushed under the load, so we have to take care not to screw it up.
Phillip Greenspun wrote what I consider to be the most sensible book on database-backed web sites available.. the book is called, uh, "Database Backed Web Sites". It's out of print, but he's coming out with a new edition called "Phillip and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing". (Alex is his dog. You'll find pictures of him all over Phillip's site. In addition to writing about the web, databases, and collaborative technologies, Phillip is a pretty good photographer.)
That book isn't out yet, but the good news is that the *entire text* of that book is already on-line at http://www.photo.net/wtr.
That site also has an excellent user forum on web-backed databases.
Phillip favors Oracle, but he also pushes Solid. He's down on mysql for the same reason others have mentioned - no transactions. If you want to know why, go check out his book.
Slashdot Mirror
Judge for yourself. Plan 9's Factotum security architecture was described in a paper presented at the USENIX Security '02 conference in August. The paper won the 'Best Paper' award, so it clearly impressed some people.
Computer Lib/Dream Machines is (are?) two of the most original books out there. One side of the book was titled 'Computer Lib'; you'd flip it over to find 'Dream Machines' printed from the other side. They met in the middle. Computer Lib was an idiosyncratic explanation of computer technology, complete with Nelson's own drawings. Dream Machines dived into Nelson's true love, how the computer screen could transform the way people used computers. (In 1974 the typical computer interface was a 10 characters-per-second teletype or a 30 cps DECwriter.) Nelson's ultimate goal was a hypertext (Nelson coined the word) system he called Xanadu. Nelson regards the web as a pale imitation of his plans for Xanadu. (Xanadu has never been finished, but it still lives: see xanadu.com) Ideally, you'd get a copy of the big, white, 1974 home-published version. Nelson put out a smaller revised version in 1987 from Microsoft Press. Both are of out of print. Computer Lib/Dream Machines remains a visionary book.
True; most of CNN is served off of dual-processor Sun boxes (mostly Ultra 60's and 2300's.)
CNN has a major dependency on ad serving software from Netgravity. Netgravity is not available on Linux or for Apache. (Customers of Netgravity tend to be very large sites that, like CNN, tend to run on commercial UNIX systems.)
We've been exploring using Linux for systems that don't require Netgravity, but to this point there are only a few production systems running Linux. But it's clearly something we will continue to explore and use where it makes sense.
I'd be interested in knowing if Google actually gave them any software. Last I heard, Google is only selling a service - if you want them to search your site, you let them crawl your site. Much like Inktomi, and in contrast to Infoseek, which will sell you software you can host at your site.
I got the biggest kick out of of seeing the old machines.
Gates was shown hacking up Basic on what looked a DEC PDP-8/E (the box with the orange/yellow front panel and lots of flat toggle switches.)
I also looked like they found an Alto. It was also a kick to see the Lisa interface again.
I'll swear I saw what looked like an Apple III on a desk.
I know I was at at least one Homebrew Computer club meeting where they were showing the Apple I, and I was at the First West Coast Computer Faire where the II was introduced. But in both cases, I remember the machines, not the people.
Where can I find a list of those 4 steps?
You can find the herding cats article at
http://www.fastcompany.com/online/22/cdu.html.
It's worth remembering that CNN has a deal with IDG that allows CNN to beef up their tech coverage. The good news is that IDG seems to have good coverage of Linux.
I'm not so sure it's the case that you have a Linux advocate within CNN as much as it is that Linux is interesting right now, and like any media outlet, CNN tries to make itself interesting to its readers.
So, yes - I agree that it's good that CNN brings this coverage out to a mainstream audience, but the real credit for these articles should go back to IDG, Linux World, and the writers.
Phillip Greenspun has an on-line SQL book that he's working on called "SQL For Web Nerds". It's a little hidden at his site - look for www.photo.net/sql.
It's not all new - he's pulled pieces from his other books, but it's got some useful stuff in it, and the price is right.
Phillip's new book - "Phillip and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing" - has a fair amount of SQL within it. Phillip's book will be out anytime, but the entire text of the book is available on-line. Check out www.photo.net/wtr for this and other resources.
If you're a public site, the other thing you can do is put the Linux boxes behind a router or firewall and block ports that the public doesn't need to get at. If you're running a web service, there's very little beyond port 80 that you must let people see.
Doesn't ring a bell. All the work on the CNN site infrastructure - servers, networks - is done by CNN internal staff.
It's possible some outside group helped produce the content for some part of the CNN sites. That I don't know about.
Any major technology cutover is going to come with glitches.
I'm a long-time listener of NPR, and a few weeks back I heard a screw-up the likes of which I hadn'd heard before. Linda Werthheimer was doing the "billboard" - the little 60 second piece at the top of the hour where they hype the stories coming up in the next hour. She appeared to have completely lost her place, to the point where she just had to stop talking and left about 20 seconds of dead air, which is unheard of on national radio or TV.
At the end of the next week, they made some reference to a technology changeover, which made Linda's screw-up make sense; I'm guessing she was trying to read some text off some electronic display, and the whole thing went haywire.
In any case, technology of this sort is very difficult to completely shake out with a live-fire test. Salon will have problems; their job is to make sure the problem are annoyances rather than complete failures. Assuming they can do that, these initial problems will be forgotten by most people.
CNN is an all-Solaris/Netscape site. We're pretty much tied to both by our choice of ad server technology: we use Netgravity, which doesn't support Linux and uses the NSAPI interface.
Like most large entities, CNN tends to be pretty conservative in how they use technology. We support over 150 million hits on an average day; over 500,000 hits a minute at our highest peaks. I wouldn't say at all that you couldn't do that with Linux or Apache, but I would say that I wouldn't try switching just to be fasionable. When you're running at those volumes, you have to be careful in how you make changes.
I'll guess longer. Microsoft spreads money around to all types; MSN is advertising to get a certain deoographic, not as a statement.
The VP quoted in the News.com article - Chad Dickerson - used to work for cnn.com.
Chad didn't work in the group doing the cnn.com server management, but he did hopefully absorb a few lessons about how to run a high-volume reliable web site. (The first lesson he absorbed was 'Get rid of NT', so he apparently learned something.)
You've missed it in the east coast and now almost central, but west coast can still get it. It comes up somewhere between 10:20 and 10:30 Thursday night.
Unfortunately CNN doesn't come in stereo - at least on my cable system - so the picture is better than on my pc but the sound is worse.
You're not likely to see Linux in the CNN Newsroom anytime soon - for years, the newsroom had only VT100 terminals, and they're still converting over to Windows machines.
It's certainly possible that Linux may crop up somewhere behind the scenes, just as it has in lots of other large companies. But even that may take a while. I was talking to someone recently about some or another computer that supported the on-air side of the house. This computer runs a version of NT, but it's a special version; the companies that make this kind of gear won't let you touch the insides of these boxes and still certify that they will work in the real-time on-air environment.
The CNN.com/internet side of things is all Sun Solaris running Netscape Enterprise servers right now. That could change someday, but we're pretty conservative technically; you have to be when your site is subject to the kind of loads CNN.com can get. (Our newest record is over 500k hits/minute across the entire family of web sites - (cnn|cnnfn|cnnsi).com and misc other sites) We take some pride that our site usually stays up when others are crushed under the load, so we have to take care not to screw it up.
Phillip Greenspun wrote what I consider to be the most sensible book on database-backed web sites available .. the book is called, uh, "Database Backed Web Sites". It's out of print, but he's coming out with a new edition called "Phillip and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing". (Alex is his dog. You'll find pictures of him all over Phillip's site. In addition to writing about the web, databases, and collaborative technologies, Phillip is a pretty good photographer.)
That book isn't out yet, but the good news is that the *entire text* of that book is already on-line at http://www.photo.net/wtr.
That site also has an excellent user forum on web-backed databases.
Phillip favors Oracle, but he also pushes Solid. He's down on mysql for the same reason others have mentioned - no transactions. If you want to know why, go check out his book.