It's really simple. A lot of ISP's (including, to my knowledge, almost all broadband, and quite a few small dial ups) just use standard dial-in setups - username, password, ppp, BAM online. But some of the big ones (aol, and perhaps MSN) use proprietary connection methods.
Therefore, linux is useless to my parents.
And i consider my parents to be very much the average consumer.
Thank you for seeing my post for what it was. Much appreciated. I'm actually surprised that I didn't get flamed for saying this. I'm a real linux advocate (i work at a webhosting company, and use linux and solaris day in and day out), but I'm not zealous enough to think that if no one had windows, there'd be a spontaneous migration towards linux before there was an economic crash. But, usually, anytime I mention that Microsoft does some things good (office is the best office program out there), or that they are helping prop up the economy and keep the tech sector afloat, I usually get flamed.
I know we all bash M$, and we all use the dollarsign instead of an 'S', and all that stuff. But, in all seriousness: If microsoft is prevented from shipping windows, that means that dell, HP, ibm, micron, et. al. are prevented from selling comptuers with windows.
If no one can sell comptuers with windows, the tech sector in specific, and the american economy in general, is fucked. Plain and simple. Dell operates on making about half a billion a day, m ost of it from computers with windows, and most of it would not be sold if it came sans os (get off of your linux high horse for a sec and remember john q public). IBM is close to the same. When I worked at Best Buy, the comptuer department would regularly sell $30,000 worth of computer towers PER DAY, in one store. Multiply by 450 stores and you're talking 13.5 million in lost revs by one retail chain, PER DAY. And it was significantly higher starting black friday (we sold over 350k in the computer department 2 black fridays ago).
I know it's cool to make fun of and bash microsoft, and all of that, and I understand your need to do that.
But, please recognize. If no one can sell microsoft windows, then no one can sell computers with windows, and since most of the consumer sector doesn't want a computer with no OS, almost no computers will be sold, and the american economy will come to a screeching halt. We'll immediately be plunged back into the recession we're slowly starting to climb out of.
Oh, my, god. Newsflash, people. The article you link to is *gasp* biased. Educators are *gasp* biased.
Historically, Liberals (democrats, lefties, whatever) are the ones who support education more than Conservatives (republicans, righties, whatever). Therefore, it is in an educator's best interest to support the political party that pays his or her paycheck. This isn't quantum physics here.
I'm going to be a teacher someday. Am I happy about no child left behind? No. It takes money away from almost all schools until they can bring themselves into compliance with a fairly arbitrary set of standards. And gives no funding to meet these standards. It was a way the government can take those last few dollars they have given to the schools back.
Or, how about my university now? Virginia Tech has resorted to building a supercomputer so that they can benifit from the grant money that will roll in, the prestige of the university, and leasing time on the comptuer to companies that can benifit from it. Why? Because the state jacked $40M of our funding. Why? Because college students don't vote, and there aren't enough of us anyway.
From my *gasp* biased point of view, conservatives seem hell bent on both reducing the income and increasing the output of the government (see also: iraq, afghanistan, military spending, tax cuts). I simply believe that if you want something from your government, it is expected that you need to give it money. And as a current student, and future educator, I have seen, and will see again, how the actions of the government directly affect me. As such, I choose to be a member of the party that most directly posatively influences my life in the greatest way.
Ummm... Did I miss something somewhere, or did one's rights on the Internet become directly linked with how much they pay? The well-heeled are somehow better than the rest of us?
It's not rights. It's privilages.
Say, I want to pay $800/month for a T-1. I have permission to run a mail server, and everything else.
But, for $40/month DSL, no. As one paying for an expensive t-1 (hypothetically), I don't want you doing the same thing with your bandwidth that I do with mine.
Moot point anyway: if you have an ISP who blocks outbound SMTP traffic or if this whole thing goes through and you can't use your own, just use your ISP's SMTP. Almost ALL ISP's provide a free outbound mail server for you to use.
I was kinda pissed to see this modded flamebait. If it hadn't been modded in any way, I would have been ok with that, but, damn.
Posting a review of the G-5 which claims that it's fast because "it starts photoshop in 8 seconds" is flamebait. Pointing out that a year-and-a-half old computer, worth $500, can do the same thing, is not flamebait.
Now, notice that I didn't say "the G-5 is not fast". I'm sure it's fast. All I wanted was some meaningful benchmarks.
I go to Virginia Tech, and even our cheezy college newspaper had a rundown on the dual 2ghz G-5, cause we're the assholes that bought 1100 of them to cluster. It says they do 14 teraflops or something. Even that was more useful than this.
On the G5, Photoshop launched in 8 seconds, and relaunched in 4. Yes, 4.....
--snip--... And clicking a stopwatch, and measuring how long launching a program takes, or how long a reboot lasts isn't that much of a "benchmark".
Fantastic!
Oh, wait. My homebuilt computer with an AMD 1800+ and 512MB of DDR, which is probably worth about, what, $500 today?, and running windows XP, starts photoshop in 8 seconds. And it's over a year old. And it didn't cost $5000 when it was new.
God. I thought photoshop was the raison d'etre to move to Mac. I thought it was "well you can't play games or use most software, but at least we have photoshop, and it's faster" was the whole 9 yards for a Mac. Now that I hear that, I'm glad my pocketbook is $4500 richer.
Now that I think about it, I think my Used honda accord cost less than a dual G-5.
Fast computer, but, 1.) too expensive, and 2.) these benchmarks mean jack shit.
I practice, mail.netmar.com handles 300,000 pieces of mail a day for over 1000 customers. Many of whom want to get attachments and don't really know much about spam. Many of whom are not technically literate, or less so than you and I.
I'll run it by the boss, though. It's getting really annoying.
It might be the Swen worm, I haven't looked at that one.
I get lots of other spam there, too. There's not too much I can do about it (see other posts in this thread by me). But, yeah, I know that worms aren't the same as spam.
All of these either look like they're from Microsoft Tech Support or they're trying to tell me that a mail has bounced, convieniently it was the attachment.
I wish slashdot still used timestamps for posts, so you could see, but I've had 7 of that worm come in since I posted that post.
The thing about legislation: People claim that it's the first thing we reach for, when we know that laws have a way of turning bad on us. To that I say "try administering a spam-filtered mail server for an ISP". It's a constant fight between spam and blocking mail that users want. And, honestly, if you (the anonymous "you people", not parent poster) feel that legislation is a last resort, I feel equally that, basically, I'm out of ideas. I've tried everything. It's time to board talyn and blow up the command carrier; we can't run from Scorpius anymore.
Frustrated, Annoyed, and generally having given up,
But, everyone who signs up for an account at Netmar gets a username@netmar.com email address, and filtering would be done for every email address. Not to mention, everyone else that uses the mail server. So we're talking thousands of our customers, most of whom use windows, and a good portion of whom aren't as technically literate as you and I. It would be irresponsible for me to want to impose my views of "Microsoft is bad, any mail passing through here with Microsoft in it gets kicked" on 300,000 emails a day.
Part of the problem is that is the email I use for work, and as such, I only check it via webmail. So, clientside baysean filtering is out.
On the server side, it's a very touchy subject on how to deal with spam. It's netmar's primary mail server that comes through. netmar.com's MX record uses our filtered mail server, but our customers start to get really mad when we crank up the filtering (for example, turning on the mail restriction that bounces mail from mail servers without valid reverse dns lookups; pointless in light of verisign, and also blocks lots of legitimate mail from people who just are ignorant of DNS). So, that's probably out of the questioning.
I'm really at a loss. We use ORDB and a few RBL's and also a list of keywords, email addresses, and bad servers, but these emails are changing so often that I don't see it would be effective. And I can't very well filter out anything that comes in with the words "Microsoft Update" in them.
Oh, wait. I just sent some emails to the people who own: mail006.syd.optusnet.com.au mta05.mail.mel. aone.net.au mta04.mail.mel.aone.net.au
And told them to stop the spamming.
Return-Path: spachakra@ozemail.com.au Received: from mta04.mail.mel.aone.net.au (mta04.mail.au.uu.net [203.2.192.84]) by mail.netmar.com (8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id AAA02654 for <your_mom@netmar.com>; Sun, 5 Oct 2003 00:04:47 -0400 (EDT) Received: from fsveeyjv ([63.60.218.131]) by mta04.mail.mel.aone.net.au
with SMTP
id <20031005040357.GWUT21664.mta04.mail.mel.aone.net. au@fsveeyjv>;
Sun, 5 Oct 2003 14:03:57 +1000 FROM: "Microsoft Customer Support" <njsmmr_lcmmo@technet.com> TO: "Customer" <customer-ciltovfs@technet.com> SUBJECT: New Net Update Mime-Version: 1.0 Message-Id: <20031005040357.GWUT21664.mta04.mail.mel.aone.net. au@fsveeyjv> Date: Sun, 5 Oct 2003 14:04:37 +1000 Content-Type: multipart/mixed; boundary="ucvnkfiuyukzljwof" Content-Length: 157002
Yeah, I'm getting these "Microsoft Net Update" mail messages at a rate of about 6 an hour. "Please install this latest update, rejwk.bat". Please wash my balls.
I'm so freaking frustrated, though. I don't know how to filter them, cause they're comming from lots of different (some non-open relay) mail servers, and the messages are innocent enough as to not be words I'd want to filter out of my incomming mail. Plus, all the file attachments and email addresses and attachments are all randomly generated characters.
FUCKING SPAM make the internet unusable! GOD DAMNIT. They took something that was beautiful in it's simplicity, and FUCKING RUINED IT.
GOD, I must be tired to rant, but it pisses me off. Viruses! Spam! Worms! Denial of service! Get sued by the FBI, CIA, RIAA, SCO, FreeMasons! Fuck, it's a wonder anyone's still online.
I can't reply to everyone that replied to my post, so I'll reply to you and let it stand as my general comment on all.
I've almost stopped reading slashdot because of stuff like this. It bugs me to no end. Just because someone states an opinion, it is an invitation for everyone and their brother to not only tell you that you're wrong, but that your mother was an ape.
At any rate.
I work with sun hardware day-in and day-out. Any one can say anything that they want to about sun versus linux cluster, but the fact is not everyone wants to deal with a linux cluster. Plus, the fallacy that sun hardware is slow is simply wrong. At netmar, our quad proc Ultra II 300Mhz 1GB ram machine can compile and perform circles around a dual- PIII 1.4 Ghz w/ 4 GB of ram.
Plus, I've noticed in x86 hardware, if you run out of resources, the computer just gives up. The sun machines (even the little IPC's and SPARCstation 1's and 2's) keep chugging. They may never get caught up, but they never give up.
Sun hardware is rediculously stable. It's not uncommon to have 400 day uptimes in solaris without blinking an eye. If you end up with a 32 node x86 cluster, you're going to have hardware failure. x86 hardware is simply not as reliable.
Just because Sun overcharges for their computers doesn't make them a "high-end market provider".
Sun does not overcharge. They charge what the market demands as a price, while still trying to make a profit. It's just that they don't also sell inkjet printers and plasma screen TVs and PDA's and logitech 4.1 speakers like dell, so they actually have to make a profit on the computer (gasp!). Look at sun's servers. You can get a sun blade ~500 Mhz Ultra Sparc for about a grand, nicely equiped. And (to quote other manufacturers) don't believe the mhz myth.
Actually, Sun is running Solaris now.
True. And what I said is also true. The Solaris Operating Environment contains SunOS. Or, at least, the Solaris 7 contained SunOS 5.7.
If it came on the market today, it would be laughed at.
Irrelevant. And untrue. This is the arguement of windows vs. linux, which you obviously participate in until you yell yourself silly while no one is listning at your local LUG. Unix is *tried and tested*. Windows users hate unix because it's so old, unix users love it for the same reason. Same goes for Sun OS (slash solaris). It is based on proven technology.
All software has bugs. I hope you're not asserting that solaris has less bugs than your favorite linux distro, or you just haven't been reading slashdot.
The only reason why people are still using it is because they have been using it for years.
The only reason people have been using it for years is *because it works* and it does everything they need it to do.
OK.
So what it comes down to is there is a time and place for everything. Sun will still have a market, I believe that. If the subject of my post had been "$ARCHETICTURE_SUPPORTED_BY_VENDOR_X will be alright" I would have been flamed by Mac zealots, anti-Mac zealots, 32bit freaks, 64 bit freaks, alpha users, and god knows who else. Just deal with the fact that, though you may like some system over another, to someone else, there are other choices.
Sun will be fine. After the exit of the two companies mentioned in the story, they are the 64 bit and high end market provider now.
Seriously. If you want to spend $5000, $8000, or even $75,000 on a computer, you can go to Dell. But, if you're looking to drop $1.3 million on a computer, you go to Sun.
For anyone that has used sun hardware, we know. It really can't be beat. The stuff is fast, scalable, and bulletproof. Sun OS is about as stable as they come.
The Academy members will just download the movies from the internet instead!
Dude, no they won't! Where do you think we got the internet rips?!?
Seriously, that's how I got my copy of Two Towers before I went out and bought it. Someone ripped the DVD that was given to one of the academy reviewers. Then, instead of compressing it, they put it on the internet as 6 gigs of raw DVD movie file. Weeeeeee! DVD burner, and bam, instant two towers. To be honest, I haven't bought it yet, but I'm planning on buying a boxed set. I refuse to purchase 2 copies of the same movie, so I always wait for special editions and boxed sets. Case in point, dogma DVD.
WHY ISN'T SCO OFFERING ITS CUSTOMERS INDEMNIFICATION AGAINST IBM'S CLAIMS???????
ftp> cd OpenLinux311 250-NOTICE: SCO has suspended new sales and distribution of SCO Linux until
the intellectual property issues surrounding Linux are resolved. SCO will,
however, continue to support existing SCO Linux and Caldera OpenLinux
customers consistent with existing contractual obligations. SCO offers at
no extra charge to its existing Linux customers a SCO UNIX IP license for
their use of prior SCO or Caldera distributions of Linux in binary
format. The license also covers binary use of support updates distributed
to them by SCO. This SCO license balances SCO's need to enforce its
intellectual property rights against the practical needs of existing
customers in the marketplace.
The Linux rpms available on SCO's ftp site are offered for download to
existing customers of SCO Linux, Caldera OpenLinux or SCO UnixWare with
LKP, in order to honor SCO's support obligations to such customers. 250 CWD command successful.
They are, more or less. All SCO customers have a SCO licence automatically, which SCO claims to own entirely, and legally.
Slashdot Mirror
worms armageddon works, but you have to install like a 30MB patch. I love that game.
My parents could not use linux.
Why?
They get online with AOL.
It's really simple. A lot of ISP's (including, to my knowledge, almost all broadband, and quite a few small dial ups) just use standard dial-in setups - username, password, ppp, BAM online. But some of the big ones (aol, and perhaps MSN) use proprietary connection methods.
Therefore, linux is useless to my parents.
And i consider my parents to be very much the average consumer.
Thank you for seeing my post for what it was. Much appreciated. I'm actually surprised that I didn't get flamed for saying this. I'm a real linux advocate (i work at a webhosting company, and use linux and solaris day in and day out), but I'm not zealous enough to think that if no one had windows, there'd be a spontaneous migration towards linux before there was an economic crash. But, usually, anytime I mention that Microsoft does some things good (office is the best office program out there), or that they are helping prop up the economy and keep the tech sector afloat, I usually get flamed.
Thanks.
~Will
Yes, I know it won't come to that.
I hope to god it doesn't.
Seriously.
I know we all bash M$, and we all use the dollarsign instead of an 'S', and all that stuff. But, in all seriousness: If microsoft is prevented from shipping windows, that means that dell, HP, ibm, micron, et. al. are prevented from selling comptuers with windows.
If no one can sell comptuers with windows, the tech sector in specific, and the american economy in general, is fucked. Plain and simple. Dell operates on making about half a billion a day, m ost of it from computers with windows, and most of it would not be sold if it came sans os (get off of your linux high horse for a sec and remember john q public). IBM is close to the same. When I worked at Best Buy, the comptuer department would regularly sell $30,000 worth of computer towers PER DAY, in one store. Multiply by 450 stores and you're talking 13.5 million in lost revs by one retail chain, PER DAY. And it was significantly higher starting black friday (we sold over 350k in the computer department 2 black fridays ago).
I know it's cool to make fun of and bash microsoft, and all of that, and I understand your need to do that.
But, please recognize. If no one can sell microsoft windows, then no one can sell computers with windows, and since most of the consumer sector doesn't want a computer with no OS, almost no computers will be sold, and the american economy will come to a screeching halt. We'll immediately be plunged back into the recession we're slowly starting to climb out of.
~Will
Oh, my, god. Newsflash, people. The article you link to is *gasp* biased. Educators are *gasp* biased.
Historically, Liberals (democrats, lefties, whatever) are the ones who support education more than Conservatives (republicans, righties, whatever). Therefore, it is in an educator's best interest to support the political party that pays his or her paycheck. This isn't quantum physics here.
I'm going to be a teacher someday. Am I happy about no child left behind? No. It takes money away from almost all schools until they can bring themselves into compliance with a fairly arbitrary set of standards. And gives no funding to meet these standards. It was a way the government can take those last few dollars they have given to the schools back.
Or, how about my university now? Virginia Tech has resorted to building a supercomputer so that they can benifit from the grant money that will roll in, the prestige of the university, and leasing time on the comptuer to companies that can benifit from it. Why? Because the state jacked $40M of our funding. Why? Because college students don't vote, and there aren't enough of us anyway.
From my *gasp* biased point of view, conservatives seem hell bent on both reducing the income and increasing the output of the government (see also: iraq, afghanistan, military spending, tax cuts). I simply believe that if you want something from your government, it is expected that you need to give it money. And as a current student, and future educator, I have seen, and will see again, how the actions of the government directly affect me. As such, I choose to be a member of the party that most directly posatively influences my life in the greatest way.
~Will
heh.
If I remember correctly, sympatico* is banned in #linux on undernet, for being, quote, "the AOL of the great white north".
now, *that's* funny.
I commend you sir. Mod up?
Felten asks: "Is this the end of the road for CD copy protection?"
I'll take "Phrases that start with 'Y' and end with 'ou wish' for $400, Alex".
Do I know what retorical means?
~Will
See, now you've made it worse. Not only has he broken the DMCA, he's provided the information to FOREIGN POWERS!
Aaaieee! No! If you provide information like this to a foreign power, the terrorists have already won.
~Will
I'd love to see him offer to put daleks on spikes.
"err eek errr eeek THUMP"
Eh, you had to be there.
~Will
Ummm... Did I miss something somewhere, or did one's rights on the Internet become directly linked with how much they pay? The well-heeled are somehow better than the rest of us?
It's not rights. It's privilages.
Say, I want to pay $800/month for a T-1. I have permission to run a mail server, and everything else.
But, for $40/month DSL, no. As one paying for an expensive t-1 (hypothetically), I don't want you doing the same thing with your bandwidth that I do with mine.
Moot point anyway: if you have an ISP who blocks outbound SMTP traffic or if this whole thing goes through and you can't use your own, just use your ISP's SMTP. Almost ALL ISP's provide a free outbound mail server for you to use.
~Will
Thanks, dude.
I was kinda pissed to see this modded flamebait. If it hadn't been modded in any way, I would have been ok with that, but, damn.
Posting a review of the G-5 which claims that it's fast because "it starts photoshop in 8 seconds" is flamebait. Pointing out that a year-and-a-half old computer, worth $500, can do the same thing, is not flamebait.
Now, notice that I didn't say "the G-5 is not fast". I'm sure it's fast. All I wanted was some meaningful benchmarks.
I go to Virginia Tech, and even our cheezy college newspaper had a rundown on the dual 2ghz G-5, cause we're the assholes that bought 1100 of them to cluster. It says they do 14 teraflops or something. Even that was more useful than this.
~Will
p.s. made you a friend.
FLAIMBAIT?
...
Since when is truth flaimbait?
Posting an review on slashdot that claims that the G-5 is fast because it boots into photoshop in 8 seconds is flaimbait.
This is just pointing out the flaws in your article.
Sometimes I hate slashdot
~Will
On the G5, Photoshop launched in 8 seconds, and relaunched in 4. Yes, 4. ....
... And clicking a stopwatch, and measuring how long launching a program takes, or how long a reboot lasts isn't that much of a "benchmark".
--snip--
Fantastic!
Oh, wait. My homebuilt computer with an AMD 1800+ and 512MB of DDR, which is probably worth about, what, $500 today?, and running windows XP, starts photoshop in 8 seconds. And it's over a year old. And it didn't cost $5000 when it was new.
God. I thought photoshop was the raison d'etre to move to Mac. I thought it was "well you can't play games or use most software, but at least we have photoshop, and it's faster" was the whole 9 yards for a Mac. Now that I hear that, I'm glad my pocketbook is $4500 richer.
Now that I think about it, I think my Used honda accord cost less than a dual G-5.
Fast computer, but, 1.) too expensive, and 2.) these benchmarks mean jack shit.
~Will
Thank you =).
I don't do this often enough, but I'm only replying to say thank you for your inisightful post.
~Will
In theory, a good idea.
I practice, mail.netmar.com handles 300,000 pieces of mail a day for over 1000 customers. Many of whom want to get attachments and don't really know much about spam. Many of whom are not technically literate, or less so than you and I.
I'll run it by the boss, though. It's getting really annoying.
~Will
No, what I am saying is that less spam would make my job easier and allow me to focus on other things that need attention.
It might be the Swen worm, I haven't looked at that one.
I get lots of other spam there, too. There's not too much I can do about it (see other posts in this thread by me). But, yeah, I know that worms aren't the same as spam.
All of these either look like they're from Microsoft Tech Support or they're trying to tell me that a mail has bounced, convieniently it was the attachment.
I wish slashdot still used timestamps for posts, so you could see, but I've had 7 of that worm come in since I posted that post.
The thing about legislation: People claim that it's the first thing we reach for, when we know that laws have a way of turning bad on us. To that I say "try administering a spam-filtered mail server for an ISP". It's a constant fight between spam and blocking mail that users want. And, honestly, if you (the anonymous "you people", not parent poster) feel that legislation is a last resort, I feel equally that, basically, I'm out of ideas. I've tried everything. It's time to board talyn and blow up the command carrier; we can't run from Scorpius anymore.
Frustrated, Annoyed, and generally having given up,
~Will
Oh, for my part, I have no problem.
But, everyone who signs up for an account at Netmar gets a username@netmar.com email address, and filtering would be done for every email address. Not to mention, everyone else that uses the mail server. So we're talking thousands of our customers, most of whom use windows, and a good portion of whom aren't as technically literate as you and I. It would be irresponsible for me to want to impose my views of "Microsoft is bad, any mail passing through here with Microsoft in it gets kicked" on 300,000 emails a day.
But, there are some days.....
~Will
Yeah, I know.
Part of the problem is that is the email I use for work, and as such, I only check it via webmail. So, clientside baysean filtering is out.
On the server side, it's a very touchy subject on how to deal with spam. It's netmar's primary mail server that comes through. netmar.com's MX record uses our filtered mail server, but our customers start to get really mad when we crank up the filtering (for example, turning on the mail restriction that bounces mail from mail servers without valid reverse dns lookups; pointless in light of verisign, and also blocks lots of legitimate mail from people who just are ignorant of DNS). So, that's probably out of the questioning.
I'm really at a loss. We use ORDB and a few RBL's and also a list of keywords, email addresses, and bad servers, but these emails are changing so often that I don't see it would be effective. And I can't very well filter out anything that comes in with the words "Microsoft Update" in them.
Aargh.
~Will
Oh, wait. I just sent some emails to the people who own:
mail006.syd.optusnet.com.au
mta05.mail.mel
mta04.mail.mel.aone.net.au
And told them to stop the spamming.Yeah, I'm getting these "Microsoft Net Update" mail messages at a rate of about 6 an hour. "Please install this latest update, rejwk.bat". Please wash my balls.
I'm so freaking frustrated, though. I don't know how to filter them, cause they're comming from lots of different (some non-open relay) mail servers, and the messages are innocent enough as to not be words I'd want to filter out of my incomming mail. Plus, all the file attachments and email addresses and attachments are all randomly generated characters.
FUCKING SPAM make the internet unusable! GOD DAMNIT. They took something that was beautiful in it's simplicity, and FUCKING RUINED IT.
GOD, I must be tired to rant, but it pisses me off. Viruses! Spam! Worms! Denial of service! Get sued by the FBI, CIA, RIAA, SCO, FreeMasons! Fuck, it's a wonder anyone's still online.
~Will
I can't reply to everyone that replied to my post, so I'll reply to you and let it stand as my general comment on all.
I've almost stopped reading slashdot because of stuff like this. It bugs me to no end. Just because someone states an opinion, it is an invitation for everyone and their brother to not only tell you that you're wrong, but that your mother was an ape.
At any rate.
I work with sun hardware day-in and day-out. Any one can say anything that they want to about sun versus linux cluster, but the fact is not everyone wants to deal with a linux cluster. Plus, the fallacy that sun hardware is slow is simply wrong. At netmar, our quad proc Ultra II 300Mhz 1GB ram machine can compile and perform circles around a dual- PIII 1.4 Ghz w/ 4 GB of ram.
Plus, I've noticed in x86 hardware, if you run out of resources, the computer just gives up. The sun machines (even the little IPC's and SPARCstation 1's and 2's) keep chugging. They may never get caught up, but they never give up.
Sun hardware is rediculously stable. It's not uncommon to have 400 day uptimes in solaris without blinking an eye. If you end up with a 32 node x86 cluster, you're going to have hardware failure. x86 hardware is simply not as reliable.
Just because Sun overcharges for their computers doesn't make them a "high-end market provider".
Sun does not overcharge. They charge what the market demands as a price, while still trying to make a profit. It's just that they don't also sell inkjet printers and plasma screen TVs and PDA's and logitech 4.1 speakers like dell, so they actually have to make a profit on the computer (gasp!). Look at sun's servers. You can get a sun blade ~500 Mhz Ultra Sparc for about a grand, nicely equiped. And (to quote other manufacturers) don't believe the mhz myth.
Actually, Sun is running Solaris now.
True.
And what I said is also true.
The Solaris Operating Environment contains SunOS. Or, at least, the Solaris 7 contained SunOS 5.7.
If it came on the market today, it would be laughed at.
Irrelevant. And untrue. This is the arguement of windows vs. linux, which you obviously participate in until you yell yourself silly while no one is listning at your local LUG. Unix is *tried and tested*. Windows users hate unix because it's so old, unix users love it for the same reason. Same goes for Sun OS (slash solaris). It is based on proven technology.
All software has bugs. I hope you're not asserting that solaris has less bugs than your favorite linux distro, or you just haven't been reading slashdot.
The only reason why people are still using it is because they have been using it for years.
The only reason people have been using it for years is *because it works* and it does everything they need it to do.
OK.
So what it comes down to is there is a time and place for everything. Sun will still have a market, I believe that. If the subject of my post had been "$ARCHETICTURE_SUPPORTED_BY_VENDOR_X will be alright" I would have been flamed by Mac zealots, anti-Mac zealots, 32bit freaks, 64 bit freaks, alpha users, and god knows who else. Just deal with the fact that, though you may like some system over another, to someone else, there are other choices.
~Will
Sun will be fine. After the exit of the two companies mentioned in the story, they are the 64 bit and high end market provider now.
//Netmar uses sun machines. www.netmar.com
Seriously. If you want to spend $5000, $8000, or even $75,000 on a computer, you can go to Dell. But, if you're looking to drop $1.3 million on a computer, you go to Sun.
For anyone that has used sun hardware, we know. It really can't be beat. The stuff is fast, scalable, and bulletproof. Sun OS is about as stable as they come.
~Will
The Academy members will just download the movies from the internet instead!
Dude, no they won't! Where do you think we got the internet rips?!?
Seriously, that's how I got my copy of Two Towers before I went out and bought it. Someone ripped the DVD that was given to one of the academy reviewers. Then, instead of compressing it, they put it on the internet as 6 gigs of raw DVD movie file. Weeeeeee! DVD burner, and bam, instant two towers.
To be honest, I haven't bought it yet, but I'm planning on buying a boxed set. I refuse to purchase 2 copies of the same movie, so I always wait for special editions and boxed sets. Case in point, dogma DVD.
~Wx
They are, more or less. All SCO customers have a SCO licence automatically, which SCO claims to own entirely, and legally.
~Will
You're missing the point, dude.
I'm going to lose my uptime.
Therefore, I won't play games.
~Will