I don't necessarily disagree with you but I think it's important to remember the past as well. Netware had millions of dollars being shoveled at it as well before the M$ NT platform took off. BSD was widely deployed and supported by large corps as well. It is hard for companies to admit their wrong and stop supporting something. It is easier to claim something "hot" or "better" is now their focus. Linux could be dropped into the wastebasket of yesterday's news by the large computer companies if a motivation (read: profit) comes along which is palatable to PHBs and market droids. The real saving grace for Linux may really be the developer base which contributes their OWN time and money to the cause. The RMS types will save the day at some point if they haven't moved on the something else.
To be honest, I wasn't really looking for your location. I just happened to notice this when I looked in your gallery. I enjoy seeing what other people do with their gallery. I use mine for pics of friends/family and as a beer review. I guess if I was trolling for geek girls I could start looking up DNS whois entries, but I really don't have the desire to find them.
A/. reading StarWars fangirl in the same city (StL) as me? I've been on/. for a long time and this is a first (and much too late since I'm married now). What are the odds!
For the rest of you... just wait several years. It could be you next time.
Conceivably so that your volumes and filesystems are portable to other VXVM platforms. It might be nice to spawn a copy of your data on AIX, break off the mirror and import it into Linux/Solaris/Windows or whatever. Your storage becomes platform agnostic. PHB's love that because they can use that little bit as a bargaining tool against the OS/Hardware vendors.
PHB: "I need a %60 discount off list." Sales: "We can't do that. NOBODY gets that kind of discount. Unless you want to also buy..." PHB: "Nope. Already agreed not to talk about that, remember? I'm getting that from [insert other vendor] and since they can access my data volumes from the SAN maybe I'll get my boxes from them too..." Sales: "60% huh?"
BTW, it seems to matter very little what admins think in these situations. I've seen HP/Sun/IBM/DELL come and go from companies preferred vendor roles just because a salesperson didn't stroke an ego enough. Usually this can be fixed by a nice lunch at the local strip bar, but too many decisions are made on the basis of Sales and PHB relationships.
I am not against subsidy locks for a REASONABLE duration. If a carrier want to try and lure customers to their service, that's a valid business plan with a benefit to consumers. What I do not support is carriers who will not activate a phone unless it was purchased through them. It creates artificial sales channels that further benefit them by disabling features or forcing consumers to purchase services through them that would/could be otherwise free. (See the article for examples.)
The price of phones may not increase as dramatically as you suggest. The current model is artificial. If manufacturers had to compete with sales directly to consumers, I believe low price alteratives would be available for cost-conscious consumers. Cell phones would be commoditized as PCs are today. What was once a $600 phone market would become a $200 market.
That Verizon was in support of portability is not relevant to my point. Sure, they want you to switch carriers. In order to move your phone number to their network, you have to purchase one of their crippled phones. In order to get the low price (or free) phone, you have to sign up for a long term contract (2 years). With GSM-type phone mobility, I could do the same without buying a new phone. The contract would be shorter (Tmobile's is one year.). I would also have the near standard 15-30 day backout window if the service wasn't acceptable.
As far as the networks, I'd prefer not to argue over syntax. Yes, Cingular will get rid of its TDMA network on 800-850Mhz. I had not seen concrete plans to bring WCDMA to those bands. If they do, well I guess that's good. The slower speeds at that frequency won't really give us anything spectacular. I do like the increased range and penetration so maybe it will be worth it.
Lastly, I do not want a "truly free market" as my comments clearly indicate. I specifically called for regulation to balance the interests of carriers and consumers. While I lean pretty far toward libertarianism usually, I did not sound like it this time. The current model is much freer than what I espouse. What we have received from it is a decent cell network. What I'd like to see going forward is competing carriers using compatible networks that allow greater consumer freedom. This in turn may drive carriers to improve service and benefit all of us.
I've had Schlafly. A very good Kolsch and Pale Ale. Haven't had Forbes. Sounds a little pretentious. Where can I get it? Paul? You mean Paulaner? Not bad. Middle of the road, really.
UMTS is the term given for the standard chosen by the EU's standards body (. It will NOT run in 800 mhz band. UMTS will run around 2Ghz. The present GSM-GPRS runs at 1800Mhz in most of Europe. They sold a whole raft of spectrum a few years ago to make something like 50 billion euros just in Germany. Of course this change in the frequency will require 4 to 16 times the number of base stations. In the US, AT&T Cingular will use the same bands they have now. I am hoping it will be WCDMA and compatible with Europe, but history is not on our side. Hell, even the Chinese are going a different way using their own home-grown signaling method to avoid paying licensing fees to Qualcomm. Qualcomm did announce that they would produce a single chip that could be used on UMTS/EDGE/CDMA2000 etc, but that seems a really stupid way to do things. As the article mentions, GSM (or similar next gen system) is the way to go so you can move from phone to phone or carrier to carrier with little hastle. This Verizon model where they subsidize a crippled phone and lock me down to their service isn't consumer friendly. What Verizon is afraid of is true competition. None of these companies wants to have to compete on service. That's why they lock your phone to prevent you from using it on another carrier, that's why they lock you into a 2 year contract and that's why they cripple your phone. Once they sucker you in they nickel and dime you for the entire length of your contract. It amazes me that Republicans who claim to love free markets don't use a little enforcement power to guarantee consumer choice. Mandating a network akin to the EU's would go far to allowing consumers to directly interface with phone manufacturers who in turn would be more inclined to provide phones with features consumers really want instead of bowing to the demands of the carriers. Mandating SIM chips to allow portability would also go far in allowing consumers to choose phones on their merits. Most people today can't imagine that I once tried out a friend's phone for a day by trading SIM chips. I got to see if the reception was good at work and on my commute, see if the menus were useable and test the speakerphone. Sitting in a Sprint Store isn't going to give you that experience. I decided I didn't like the phone and went with another. That saved me a couple hundred bucks. Oh well, enough ranting for now.
I've seen this posted before and others have linked to a google search. It was a great segway into it though. I personally found this craigslist comment funny the other day. This guy must be a college geek.
Why the hell would you want to freeze your beer? Does it taste that bad? Try different beers than the ones that come in convenient to stuff in your fridge boxes. A good beer should taste acceptable all the way up to room temperature. I'm not advocating drinking warm beer, it should be chilled usually.
Here's an excerpt from a good beer page about ruining beers. Note that he does not conduct his testing on beers that are still frozen!
Next up on my torture calendar were two frozen Franklinfests. Everyone's done this once or twice, stuck a beer in the freezer to chill it fast and forgotten it, left beer in a garage in the winter. I let the beer freeze up until there were solid beersicles inside the bottles, then let it slowly thaw in the fridge.
It tastes a lot like the baseline beer: malty, smooth, just a touch of hops. The finish seems a bit longer, and the carbonation somewhat spikey. The mouthfeel is perhaps a touch creamy, fuller.
If I had not known this beer had been mistreated, I might not have guessed it. This was a quite subtle effect, and not all unpleasant. This is actually how American breweries make ice beer. They freeze it, then thaw it, without removing any ice. (Canadian brewers skim some ice, raising the alcohol levels, but this practice is considered distilling in the US and requires a distiller's license.) What's the point, and what's going on here?
Siebel to the rescue again. "Freezing puts a denaturing pressure on the proteins in the beer. As they denature they come out of solution and create a haze, or even flakes, in the beer," Radzanowski told me. Denaturing means the proteins' structures are being ripped apart. "Repeated cycles of freezing and thawing have a greater effect."
You are essentially distilling your beer to get more alcohol by volume if you drink it and leave the ice. If that's what floats your boat, go for it. I'll take a shot of Don Julio or Petron for my quick kicks and then savor my Orval slowly.
While I'm sure McNealy loves comments from customers like you, let's not exagerate and plain mistake the truth. OS patches of any significance require reboots to take effect -- period. On the replacement of memory, the new enterprise models do allow you to Dynamically Reconfigure (DR) a board out and replace cpu/mem on the fly. The older models (except for the E10000) did not allow for DR. The Ex500 models could in theory, but the practice was flaky at best and required a big performance trade-off of disabling memory interleaving across boards and enabling the kernel cage to restrict the kernel to the memory of (typically) board 0. This also did not work if you had nonpagable memory on other boards (Oracle or realtime processes). Such restrictions really hampered the use of DR on that generation of machines.
Sun just signed a big deal with Fujitsu to use their Sparc chips in their next Big Iron box which they'll jointly develop. After that generation, Sun plans on having their next "throughput computing" chips running their servers. While you may ponder whether it's at that point they'll abandon Sparc, I doubt it. That's quite a few years off and it doesn't take that long to port an OS if you really concentrate your personel.
Don't worry, Sparc will be around for a while longer.
Who cares what the "uptime" on netcraft is? Why would anyone think that's important? Most serious shops have scheduled maintenance windows for upgrades, app and OS patching, replacing EMC with anything else, etc. Most critical apps are failover so there is no real downtime to 5 9's services. Plus, most vendors and DC managers are bonused/measured against unplanned downtime. Taking netcraft uptime rankings as a measure of any OS or platform's reliability is laughable. It may be fun for kids to aim for the longest uptime, but in the real world who cares?
Here's my experience with XP SP2. I seem to see a similar type of preblem. XP seems to forget my passwd every once in a while. If I reset my passwd on the wireless ap to the same passwd, xp will log in automagically again. I'm not sure if it's a bug in sp2rc2 or the wireless ap, but I'm hoping it's fixed in the rtm version of sp2. Otherwise, I have to talk with the idiot^H^H^H^H^H^H technical support persons from the manufacturer.
Agreed, this has always bugged me about anandtech and cnet. Their content to flashing crap ratio is horrible. Even though I have a nice ISP hookup, I find the eye candy too much and shy away from the sites for that reason.
I just moved to St Louis from SFBay and it is really disappointing. I spend a few minutes a day flagging spam posts, but their just aren't enough people out here to get the posts removed. In SF, NY, etc a blatant spam gets knocked off pretty quickly. Out here it stays on indefinitely. I've been "spreading the word" to people in St Louis, but it'll take a while to get people up there. Is there anyway that the threshold for smaller markets can be adjusted so that it doesn't take as many flaggings to get something removed? Maybe something proportionate to the number of hits in the region.
I don't think they are rumors as I've seen customer demonstrations. The even sent over a VP from Sun to the customer site and had him plug in a SunRay (outside their firewall, of course) and pull up his Sun work session over the internet. I'm told it was a t1 drop, but still over the internet with no performance hit that we could see. That's my kind of "working from home". The implications go far beyond that. That's the kind of easy system my grandma could use. No equipment on the user side except SunRay, Monitor (HD TV perhaps?) and keyboard/mouse. No patching, updating software, backups, etc. Just reliable computing at home. Anyway, I should shut up.
Not true. The 6800 allowed for using either a 8 slot PCI I/O assy or a 6 slot cPCI assy. Since there were 4 I/O assemblys, you could mix, but no one does. The Sun System Handbook on sunsolve.sun.com can confirm this. Actually, the WCI I/O boats have cPCI slots as well. The are two slots for paroli cards and two cPCI slots bookending the Parolis. I am not sure which netra the poster was referring to, but I don't doubt it. There is a lot of netra crap that I don't care to remember.
You can use it over public networks as well now. That functionality has been there for a while now. It initially required a dedicated 100mbs network, but that requirement is no longer there. You may be able to use it over the internet as well over DSL and/or cable.
You have a CompactPCI sparc server you weren't using? That would make it an enterprise server (3800, 4800, 4810, 6800). I'll give you just about any x86 linux box you want in exchange for it. I'll even throw in a copy of SUSE!:)
"stupid conspiracy theory" moderation option?
on
Sun Rays For Linux
·
· Score: 1
Can't we get one of these mod options?
If anything, buying Novell and thus SUSE, would indemnify all the SUSE users against SCO since Sun has a defined relationship with SCO allowing use of any SCO unix works. This might even put a crimp in some of SCO's complaints against IBM since they use SUSE.
Yeah -- I work for Sun but I don't drink the Kool Aide.
In a strip bar. There's always at least one lady who doesn't do it for you. So I pulled out my... G1000 pda phone and surfed over to see what the poll on/. was. BTW the dancer was not happy that I'd still given her a dollar but completely ignored her. Oh well.
Lots of people run "desktop OSes" on x86 boxes in datacenters. Why pay more for the "server version" when you're not using the additional features? Same kernel, runs the same win32 binaries - why not? What features in W2k server do you need for apache load balanced boxes that isn't in XP?
Bleeding edge hardware == problems
You don't need to add an OS to make that statement true.
Slashdot Mirror
I read about half the article and still was having a hard time making sense of how it works. I have a pounding headache now.
Or it could have been the beer and tequila at the Cardinals rally last night. I'm not sure. It's a toss up.
I don't necessarily disagree with you but I think it's important to remember the past as well. Netware had millions of dollars being shoveled at it as well before the M$ NT platform took off. BSD was widely deployed and supported by large corps as well. It is hard for companies to admit their wrong and stop supporting something. It is easier to claim something "hot" or "better" is now their focus.
Linux could be dropped into the wastebasket of yesterday's news by the large computer companies if a motivation (read: profit) comes along which is palatable to PHBs and market droids. The real saving grace for Linux may really be the developer base which contributes their OWN time and money to the cause. The RMS types will save the day at some point if they haven't moved on the something else.
To be honest, I wasn't really looking for your location. I just happened to notice this when I looked in your gallery. I enjoy seeing what other people do with their gallery. I use mine for pics of friends/family and as a beer review. I guess if I was trolling for geek girls I could start looking up DNS whois entries, but I really don't have the desire to find them.
A /. reading StarWars fangirl in the same city (StL) as me? I've been on /. for a long time and this is a first (and much too late since I'm married now). What are the odds!
For the rest of you... just wait several years. It could be you next time.
Conceivably so that your volumes and filesystems are portable to other VXVM platforms. It might be nice to spawn a copy of your data on AIX, break off the mirror and import it into Linux/Solaris/Windows or whatever. Your storage becomes platform agnostic. PHB's love that because they can use that little bit as a bargaining tool against the OS/Hardware vendors.
PHB: "I need a %60 discount off list."
Sales: "We can't do that. NOBODY gets that kind of discount. Unless you want to also buy..."
PHB: "Nope. Already agreed not to talk about that, remember? I'm getting that from [insert other vendor] and since they can access my data volumes from the SAN maybe I'll get my boxes from them too..."
Sales: "60% huh?"
BTW, it seems to matter very little what admins think in these situations. I've seen HP/Sun/IBM/DELL come and go from companies preferred vendor roles just because a salesperson didn't stroke an ego enough. Usually this can be fixed by a nice lunch at the local strip bar, but too many decisions are made on the basis of Sales and PHB relationships.
I am not against subsidy locks for a REASONABLE duration. If a carrier want to try and lure customers to their service, that's a valid business plan with a benefit to consumers. What I do not support is carriers who will not activate a phone unless it was purchased through them. It creates artificial sales channels that further benefit them by disabling features or forcing consumers to purchase services through them that would/could be otherwise free. (See the article for examples.)
The price of phones may not increase as dramatically as you suggest. The current model is artificial. If manufacturers had to compete with sales directly to consumers, I believe low price alteratives would be available for cost-conscious consumers. Cell phones would be commoditized as PCs are today. What was once a $600 phone market would become a $200 market.
That Verizon was in support of portability is not relevant to my point. Sure, they want you to switch carriers. In order to move your phone number to their network, you have to purchase one of their crippled phones. In order to get the low price (or free) phone, you have to sign up for a long term contract (2 years). With GSM-type phone mobility, I could do the same without buying a new phone. The contract would be shorter (Tmobile's is one year.). I would also have the near standard 15-30 day backout window if the service wasn't acceptable.
As far as the networks, I'd prefer not to argue over syntax. Yes, Cingular will get rid of its TDMA network on 800-850Mhz. I had not seen concrete plans to bring WCDMA to those bands. If they do, well I guess that's good. The slower speeds at that frequency won't really give us anything spectacular. I do like the increased range and penetration so maybe it will be worth it.
Lastly, I do not want a "truly free market" as my comments clearly indicate. I specifically called for regulation to balance the interests of carriers and consumers. While I lean pretty far toward libertarianism usually, I did not sound like it this time. The current model is much freer than what I espouse. What we have received from it is a decent cell network. What I'd like to see going forward is competing carriers using compatible networks that allow greater consumer freedom. This in turn may drive carriers to improve service and benefit all of us.
I've had Schlafly. A very good Kolsch and Pale Ale.
Haven't had Forbes. Sounds a little pretentious. Where can I get it?
Paul? You mean Paulaner? Not bad. Middle of the road, really.
UMTS is the term given for the standard chosen by the EU's standards body (. It will NOT run in 800 mhz band. UMTS will run around 2Ghz. The present GSM-GPRS runs at 1800Mhz in most of Europe. They sold a whole raft of spectrum a few years ago to make something like 50 billion euros just in Germany. Of course this change in the frequency will require 4 to 16 times the number of base stations.
In the US, AT&T Cingular will use the same bands they have now. I am hoping it will be WCDMA and compatible with Europe, but history is not on our side. Hell, even the Chinese are going a different way using their own home-grown signaling method to avoid paying licensing fees to Qualcomm. Qualcomm did announce that they would produce a single chip that could be used on UMTS/EDGE/CDMA2000 etc, but that seems a really stupid way to do things.
As the article mentions, GSM (or similar next gen system) is the way to go so you can move from phone to phone or carrier to carrier with little hastle. This Verizon model where they subsidize a crippled phone and lock me down to their service isn't consumer friendly. What Verizon is afraid of is true competition. None of these companies wants to have to compete on service. That's why they lock your phone to prevent you from using it on another carrier, that's why they lock you into a 2 year contract and that's why they cripple your phone. Once they sucker you in they nickel and dime you for the entire length of your contract.
It amazes me that Republicans who claim to love free markets don't use a little enforcement power to guarantee consumer choice. Mandating a network akin to the EU's would go far to allowing consumers to directly interface with phone manufacturers who in turn would be more inclined to provide phones with features consumers really want instead of bowing to the demands of the carriers. Mandating SIM chips to allow portability would also go far in allowing consumers to choose phones on their merits.
Most people today can't imagine that I once tried out a friend's phone for a day by trading SIM chips. I got to see if the reception was good at work and on my commute, see if the menus were useable and test the speakerphone. Sitting in a Sprint Store isn't going to give you that experience. I decided I didn't like the phone and went with another. That saved me a couple hundred bucks.
Oh well, enough ranting for now.
I've seen this posted before and others have linked to a google search. It was a great segway into it though. I personally found this craigslist comment funny the other day. This guy must be a college geek.
Here's an excerpt from a good beer page about ruining beers. Note that he does not conduct his testing on beers that are still frozen!
You are essentially distilling your beer to get more alcohol by volume if you drink it and leave the ice. If that's what floats your boat, go for it. I'll take a shot of Don Julio or Petron for my quick kicks and then savor my Orval slowly.
While I'm sure McNealy loves comments from customers like you, let's not exagerate and plain mistake the truth. OS patches of any significance require reboots to take effect -- period.
On the replacement of memory, the new enterprise models do allow you to Dynamically Reconfigure (DR) a board out and replace cpu/mem on the fly. The older models (except for the E10000) did not allow for DR. The Ex500 models could in theory, but the practice was flaky at best and required a big performance trade-off of disabling memory interleaving across boards and enabling the kernel cage to restrict the kernel to the memory of (typically) board 0. This also did not work if you had nonpagable memory on other boards (Oracle or realtime processes). Such restrictions really hampered the use of DR on that generation of machines.
Sun just signed a big deal with Fujitsu to use their Sparc chips in their next Big Iron box which they'll jointly develop. After that generation, Sun plans on having their next "throughput computing" chips running their servers. While you may ponder whether it's at that point they'll abandon Sparc, I doubt it. That's quite a few years off and it doesn't take that long to port an OS if you really concentrate your personel.
Don't worry, Sparc will be around for a while longer.
Who cares what the "uptime" on netcraft is? Why would anyone think that's important? Most serious shops have scheduled maintenance windows for upgrades, app and OS patching, replacing EMC with anything else, etc. Most critical apps are failover so there is no real downtime to 5 9's services. Plus, most vendors and DC managers are bonused/measured against unplanned downtime.
Taking netcraft uptime rankings as a measure of any OS or platform's reliability is laughable. It may be fun for kids to aim for the longest uptime, but in the real world who cares?
Here's my experience with XP SP2. I seem to see a similar type of preblem. XP seems to forget my passwd every once in a while. If I reset my passwd on the wireless ap to the same passwd, xp will log in automagically again. I'm not sure if it's a bug in sp2rc2 or the wireless ap, but I'm hoping it's fixed in the rtm version of sp2. Otherwise, I have to talk with the idiot^H^H^H^H^H^H technical support persons from the manufacturer.
Agreed, this has always bugged me about anandtech and cnet. Their content to flashing crap ratio is horrible. Even though I have a nice ISP hookup, I find the eye candy too much and shy away from the sites for that reason.
I just moved to St Louis from SFBay and it is really disappointing. I spend a few minutes a day flagging spam posts, but their just aren't enough people out here to get the posts removed. In SF, NY, etc a blatant spam gets knocked off pretty quickly. Out here it stays on indefinitely. I've been "spreading the word" to people in St Louis, but it'll take a while to get people up there.
Is there anyway that the threshold for smaller markets can be adjusted so that it doesn't take as many flaggings to get something removed? Maybe something proportionate to the number of hits in the region.
Just my $.02
I don't think they are rumors as I've seen customer demonstrations. The even sent over a VP from Sun to the customer site and had him plug in a SunRay (outside their firewall, of course) and pull up his Sun work session over the internet. I'm told it was a t1 drop, but still over the internet with no performance hit that we could see. That's my kind of "working from home".
The implications go far beyond that. That's the kind of easy system my grandma could use. No equipment on the user side except SunRay, Monitor (HD TV perhaps?) and keyboard/mouse. No patching, updating software, backups, etc. Just reliable computing at home.
Anyway, I should shut up.
Not true. The 6800 allowed for using either a 8 slot PCI I/O assy or a 6 slot cPCI assy. Since there were 4 I/O assemblys, you could mix, but no one does. The Sun System Handbook on sunsolve.sun.com can confirm this. Actually, the WCI I/O boats have cPCI slots as well. The are two slots for paroli cards and two cPCI slots bookending the Parolis.
I am not sure which netra the poster was referring to, but I don't doubt it. There is a lot of netra crap that I don't care to remember.
There are other neat things that I really wanna talk about, but can't ... they know my ID here ;)
Ha! I know what you're talking about. I stopped going to the SunLabs Open Houses 'cause it filled my head with things that I cannot talk about.
You can use it over public networks as well now. That functionality has been there for a while now. It initially required a dedicated 100mbs network, but that requirement is no longer there. You may be able to use it over the internet as well over DSL and/or cable.
You have a CompactPCI sparc server you weren't using? That would make it an enterprise server (3800, 4800, 4810, 6800). I'll give you just about any x86 linux box you want in exchange for it. I'll even throw in a copy of SUSE! :)
Can't we get one of these mod options?
If anything, buying Novell and thus SUSE, would indemnify all the SUSE users against SCO since Sun has a defined relationship with SCO allowing use of any SCO unix works. This might even put a crimp in some of SCO's complaints against IBM since they use SUSE.
Yeah -- I work for Sun but I don't drink the Kool Aide.
In a strip bar. There's always at least one lady who doesn't do it for you. So I pulled out my... G1000 pda phone and surfed over to see what the poll on /. was. BTW the dancer was not happy that I'd still given her a dollar but completely ignored her. Oh well.
Lots of people run "desktop OSes" on x86 boxes in datacenters. Why pay more for the "server version" when you're not using the additional features? Same kernel, runs the same win32 binaries - why not? What features in W2k server do you need for apache load balanced boxes that isn't in XP?
Bleeding edge hardware == problems
You don't need to add an OS to make that statement true.