This one of the main reasons I left France for the USA. In France it was impossible for me to get an interview at a decent company without a degree. I already had an American passport, so I made the move. Most American companies I have dealt with previously - certainly nearly all in Silicon Valley - request degrees in their job listings, but they don't actually make it a pre-requisite and they will interview you if they think that there is a potential match on your skillset. There is no good business reason for a company not to hire you if you can do the job, regardless of degree. This is how I was able to get in the door. In my case, some companies took the risk of hiring me, initially not knowing if I was going to be able to do the job or not, since at first I had not only no degree but also limited experience. But if I didn't work out, they could always get rid of me, and the risk to them wasn't that high because I wasn't getting paid a lot in my first few years, probably a bit less than people with degrees and no experience - but that didn't take long to get fixed after I rose to the occasions on several projects.
Given 2 candidates with little or no experience, the one with a degree presents less risk to a company; it is akin to an insurance policy. I can certainly understand a company prefering to hire the person with a degree in that case if they can afford to, as clearly Google can. However, between someone with a degree and no experience, and someone with no degree and experience, the choice is not nearly as obvious, and I think it is shallow of Google to make the degree from certain elite schools and GPA such an important factor in their hiring process. I'm certain it is not in their business interest to do so. However, I'm only a small shareholder through my mutual funds, the 2 biggest shareholders obviously differ on that;)
I have been getting calls from several Google recruiters since July. I finally returned a few of them last month. Discussions were going really well until the subject of degree and GPA came about. I am self-taught and have none to speak of, since I dropped out of high school back in France where GPA doesn't exist.
On the other hand, I do have 10 years professional experience as a programmer in the USA at such high-profile companies as Computer Associates, Netscape Communications, America-Online, and Sun Microsystems, where I have been extremely successful, always one of the top-rated employees everywhere. I have actually been programming for 18 years, and turned 30 last june. I don't actually feel young anymore, but I would think I would still fit well with the corporate culture of Google. I bought a house in Silicon Valley at 21, I have been making 6 figures since 2000, and my career continued to flourish even during the dot-com bust.
However, my lack of degree made me a complete non-starter at Google. They wouldn't even schedule me for an interview. At least they didn't waste much of my time !
But the emails and calls from Google recruiters keep coming. This very morning, I got an email from another one about a possible 3 months temporary position as a software QA. I really went off on them about how mismatched that was for me, and told them to delete my resume from their database, since I just accepted a new job, at conditions sufficiently advantageous to guarantee a comfortable early retirement.
Google's stupidity in hiring practices was their loss, IMNSHO.
It is unfortunate that OpenSSL had its certificate revoked. Condolences to the developers, and good luck going through the revalidation process with NIST.
I would like to point out however that Mozilla's NSS (Network Security Services) library is also open-source, performs much of the same functions as OpenSSL, and has been previously FIPS140-1 validated several times - the first validation was over 5 years ago. A FIPS140-2 validation is ongoing. See http://www.mozilla.org/projects/security/pki/nss/f ips/ for more information. NSS is used in Mozilla, Evolution, OpenOffice, Solaris, Sun Java Enterprise System, RedHat Linux, among others.
The UltraSparc T1 chip indeed provides some special SIMD assembly instructions for modular arithmetic. These instructions are not part of the public Sparc instruction set currently. As such, they only available through the Hypervisor. They can't be used directly in regular user programs. Sun has implemented a device driver that takes advantage of these instructions to help RSA private and public key operations, which are a significant part of the cost of SSL. This is called the Niagara Crypto Provider or NCP . This is a device driver for the Solaris Kernel Crypto Framework, which is usable by the Solaris Crypto Framework which has exposes a PKCS#11 library interface.
Sun Java Enterprise System (JES) server applications are able to use the Solaris Crypto Framework with Niagara Crypto Framework, using the Mozilla NSS (Network Security Services) libraries, which implement SSL using PKCS#11 . The Niagara Crypto Framework is treated just like any other SSL accelerator.
Applications based on OpenSSL can also use SCF/NCP using the version of OpenSSL shipped with Solaris, that has a special engine that talks PKCS#11 to the Solaris Crypto Framework.
When I worked for AOL / Netscape on security, I suggested they do exactly this - use S/MIME for spam filtering . AOL had a mail client that supported S/MIME - called AOL communicator. I was doing part of the implementation - the NSS S/MIME code in Mozilla . This was back in 2002. But using the very idea of using S/MIME as a spam filter tool fell on deaf ears at the executive level. I guess they still don't get it:-(
Yeah, Apple has great customer service. They really helped all the poor dual G4 owners that were so loud. They told customers who complained to put it on Ebay and buy another new model that was fixed ! I did only the former. Never another apple product again.
Since both of these protocols require the use of MD5 (and SHA1) for HMAC in handshakes, regardless of which cipher suite and hash algorithm is selected to encrypt/hash the data records. See section 5 of RFC2246 (TLS) for more info.
Re:Anybody can get code signed if they send cash
on
Do You Code Sign?
·
· Score: 1
Verifying data against raw keys is primitive. Ever heard of certificates ?
They bind the public key to an identity . The cert gets verified against a whole chain. It doesn't matter if Verisign's web site gets compromised, as long as your local trusted root store has not been compromised.
Now if Verisign were to sign certificates for the wrong person, then there would be a risk, but that's very different than a website compromise.
Re:"Always trust code from Microsoft"
on
Do You Code Sign?
·
· Score: 2, Funny
If you don't trust Microsoft code, what the hell are you doing running Windows ? I think Microsoft should have preloaded their cert store with the trust bit set.
The Toyota Prius and other hybrids on the market don't have a charger outlet, so, no, they cannot be "filled" with electricity.
While the Prius can go on electric only, the decision of which engine to use is made electronically by the onboard computer depending on battery state but also other load such as speedm, A/C, heating.
The electric engine isn't big enough to go by itself at more than about 25 miles per hour, with A/C and heater off, for a few minutes. Basically it will work that way in parking lots most of the time, or in the city if you are a really slow driver (just observing all the 25 MPH speed limits will do it !).
I am a dual citizen, born in California from French parents. I was raised in France. At age 19, I decided to move back to my "home" land (which I really had only visited once in my lifetime, having left California at the age of 3 weeks!).
I had my US passport renewed at the US embassy in Paris, France. This is the only ID that I carried for many of the following years. This passport carried no address.
In subsequent years, I lived in Florida and California, without getting a state ID or driver's license. You see, I didn't know how to drive...
I was able to register & vote in Florida in 1996 for the presidential election without a state ID or a DL.
When it was time to move from Florida to California, I believe I did have to show my passport to fly, as that was my only ID. I thought nothing of it at the time, being used to having to show papers in France at any time to cops when requested. You see, over in France, it's illegal to even be out in the street without your national ID card. Let alone board a plane...
Once in California, I lived nearly another year without a state ID or DL.
The only reason I got a California state ID was that after I bought a house, I needed to furnish it. But the furniture stores wouldn't take my checks without an ID. My non-existent credit history was good enough to get a $200,000 secured mortgage for the house, but not an unsecured credit card with more than $500 credit line, which wasn't enough to buy furniture for the house, and at the time my bank did not offer a debit card... So I had to use old-fashioned checks, and that required ID...
It wasn't until 4 years later at the ripe old age of 25 that I learned to drive and finally got a California driver license . Now I'm sure my name appears in many files. It's very reluctantly that I drive at all, but at least it's a low-polluting hybrid car...
I have just noticed that my French national expired last month. 10 years, eh... I have been taking annual trips to France to visit family. I always use my French ID to get in to France, rather than show my US passport, so it never gets stamped (there is no stamp on ID cards, and I never carried a French passport, I used the US one lifelong). It always confuses the immigration officers when I come back to California at SFO and they never see any foreign stamp on my US passport. They can't really tell where I have been. The US passport is full of stamps - but only those of US officials, coming *back* into the US...
I need to renew my French ID so I can continue using this trick...
Based on the current available catalog, there is much more music on SACD. My collection includes about 50 titles.
On DVD-Audio there is far less, by lesser known artists. I only have about 20.
But the biggest problem to me is that many DVD-Audio titles are poorly authored, and require a video display in order to navigate through the menu. I don't want to turn on my noisy projector in order to start listening to music.
I would say that SACD is the present of high-fidelity music, and I hope that DVD-Audio will disappear.
I thought for a second that perhaps I now had a reason to ever go to Starbucks - you see, I don't like coffee;)...
But, it seems they also chose to ignore my musical tastes by not planning on having any classical music available apparently.
Oh well. I thought I fit the demographic well - I'm between 25 - 50 (actually, I haven't made the big 3 yet) and I'm rather affluent. Guess they are not interested.
On a side note, I have yet to find a decent commercial vehicle for classical music other than traditional retail stores and mail order. Online music stores just don't get it - they charge by the track, and that's not the way any classical music enthusiast buys music. You might buy one track to preview, but if you are interested, you buy the whole recording... Online stores actually make it more expensive. Eg. if I wanted to buy my favorite works, Bach's Goldberg Variations, I would have to buy 32 tracks. Multiply that by the 30 versions I have. At iTunes' price, that's $960 . At retail prices, at about $15 per CD, that's $450... Through music clubs, at $7 per CD, it's $210...
What's the big deal ? How is this news ? IBM had ViaVoice built-in to OS/2, and it worked with Netscape Navigator for OS/2 , back in 1996 . And it worked quite well. But somehow, 8 years later, this is news.
Unfortunately, it looks like none of these alarms support 24 hours (military time). I can't begin to tell you the number of times I have set an alarm to PM instead of AM. I have missed countless work meetings, piano lessons, and even flights, due to this. I still can't find an alarm that wakes me up.
Every hard drive I have owned has failed at some point, it doesn't matter which brand. The difference has been how long it has taken for them to fail.
Over the last 12 years, I have owned in my various computers such brands of hard drives as Miniscribe, Seagate, Quantum, Maxtor, Western Digital, IBM, CDC. I probably owned about 25 drives. You may not recognize all the names because some of the manufacturers are defunct. During about 4 years, I ran a BBS 24/7 and kept the drives running. I remember maxing out the capacity of the narrow SCSI card (7 devices).
I have not resold any of the hard drives, rather, I have just kept using them. All of them ended up dying, except the 3 I'm currently using, which are all less than 2 years old. Most of the drives failed between the third and the fifth year. Since they were nearly all SCSI drives that carried 5 year manufacturer warranties, they were eligible for free replacements, but of course by then the capacity of was ridiculously small.
I almost didn't want to reply to this one - this is Slashdot, but I guess I have to get it out of the system.
Having spent many years working on a commercial web server, NES, or the Netscape web server, which then became the iPlanet web server, I can tell you that you are completely wrong.
In fact, Apache is many years behind most commercial web servers. Apache 2.0 finally got threads, but no one is using it because open-source programmers are just finding out how hard it is to write good multi-threaded software. In particular, just count the number of Apache modules that are compatible with threads, and actually scale in performance (not just one big global lock).
Also, you can't do all the performance optimization work on a little 1 or 2 CPU machine, and this is partly why commercial web servers tend to perform better. Eg. when I worked with Sun in the alliance, we had access to machine with dozens of CPUs. This is something an open-source developer rarely has access to, unless he is being paid by a commercial entity.
Meanwhile, NES has supported a hybrid multiprocess and multithreaded model since at least version 3.0 1997, and possibly long before. So Apache is about 5 years behind in the matter of threads, which I think is extremely important.
Many applications vendors wrote to the NSAPI, which allows extending the server and runs in its threads.
Microsoft countered and came up with its ISAPI in IIS, which does something very similar.
With the Apache 1.x process-based model, many applications just weren't possible or were much more complicated to implement with processes.
So, I don't know whether to laugh or to cry when I see comments like yours about innovation in open-source software, in particular Linux and Apache. All I can tell you is that when I browse the Apache section on slashdot, it really makes me feel like it is a crowd of pathetic morons, just as much as people who worship Linux and can't objectively see its flaws - eg. threads in Linux still haven't been made POSIX compliant, though NPTL is supposed to fix this. That's at least 5 years late. I speak from the perspective of having to make NES run on Linux with its non-compliant threads. Finding all the Linux threading bugs was just hell. And in the end, people wanted to run NES on big Sun iron anyway, so nobody licensed NES for Linux, it was mostly large Solaris customers for whom the license instantly paid for itself in reduced hardware requirements compared to other web servers (Apache included).
Certainly I don't deny that Apache is the #1 in market share, but I don't think we are using the same scales for innovation. Unless you count everything that's being added to Apache as innovation, even though these additions merely make it catch up with things that were in commercial web servers years ago. Which wouldn't be very different from what Microsoft calls its innovations...
I'm posting this on a Dell P530 development desktop, running Windows 2000 Server. The CPU is a single Intel Xeon 2.2 GHz. Hyperthreading can be turned on or off in the BIOS of the machine. I turned it on before I installed Win2K.
The system was seen as a dual CPU machine from the time I installed it from the original CD, before I applied any service pack.
If I disable hyperthreading in the BIOS and boot Win2K, then I only see one CPU.
I have a second Xeon CPU on order for this machine as it is dual capable. Once I get it, it should make it look like a quad CPU in Win2K.
FYI, I am also running another OS on the system, Warp Server for E-business with the SMP kernel. Unfortunately the OS2APIC.PSD driver only detected one CPU even with hyperthreading enabled. I contacted the OS/2 kernel developer at IBM Austin, who told me that somehow there needed to be explicit support for it in OS/2 SMP for it to work.
I also left about 20 GB unpartitioned on my hard disk for Linux, but I haven't gotten around to installing it yet. Thread support in Linux has historically been poor and this is the main reason why I haven't done so. With the availability of the NPTL library, I'm looking forward to installing Linux, as NPTL becomes the standard pthreads library for Linux.
Pacbell is an investor in Covad
on
Covad On The Mend
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Slashdot Mirror
This one of the main reasons I left France for the USA. In France it was impossible for me to get an interview at a decent company without a degree. I already had an American passport, so I made the move. Most American companies I have dealt with previously - certainly nearly all in Silicon Valley - request degrees in their job listings, but they don't actually make it a pre-requisite and they will interview you if they think that there is a potential match on your skillset. There is no good business reason for a company not to hire you if you can do the job, regardless of degree. This is how I was able to get in the door. In my case, some companies took the risk of hiring me, initially not knowing if I was going to be able to do the job or not, since at first I had not only no degree but also limited experience. But if I didn't work out, they could always get rid of me, and the risk to them wasn't that high because I wasn't getting paid a lot in my first few years, probably a bit less than people with degrees and no experience - but that didn't take long to get fixed after I rose to the occasions on several projects.
;)
Given 2 candidates with little or no experience, the one with a degree presents less risk to a company; it is akin to an insurance policy. I can certainly understand a company prefering to hire the person with a degree in that case if they can afford to, as clearly Google can. However, between someone with a degree and no experience, and someone with no degree and experience, the choice is not nearly as obvious, and I think it is shallow of Google to make the degree from certain elite schools and GPA such an important factor in their hiring process. I'm certain it is not in their business interest to do so. However, I'm only a small shareholder through my mutual funds, the 2 biggest shareholders obviously differ on that
On the other hand, I do have 10 years professional experience as a programmer in the USA at such high-profile companies as Computer Associates, Netscape Communications, America-Online, and Sun Microsystems, where I have been extremely successful, always one of the top-rated employees everywhere. I have actually been programming for 18 years, and turned 30 last june. I don't actually feel young anymore, but I would think I would still fit well with the corporate culture of Google. I bought a house in Silicon Valley at 21, I have been making 6 figures since 2000, and my career continued to flourish even during the dot-com bust.
However, my lack of degree made me a complete non-starter at Google. They wouldn't even schedule me for an interview. At least they didn't waste much of my time !
But the emails and calls from Google recruiters keep coming. This very morning, I got an email from another one about a possible 3 months temporary position as a software QA. I really went off on them about how mismatched that was for me, and told them to delete my resume from their database, since I just accepted a new job, at conditions sufficiently advantageous to guarantee a comfortable early retirement.
Google's stupidity in hiring practices was their loss, IMNSHO.
It is unfortunate that OpenSSL had its certificate revoked. Condolences to the developers, and good luck going through the revalidation process with NIST.
f ips/ for more information. NSS is used in Mozilla, Evolution, OpenOffice, Solaris, Sun Java Enterprise System, RedHat Linux, among others.
I would like to point out however that Mozilla's NSS (Network Security Services) library is also open-source, performs much of the same functions as OpenSSL, and has been previously FIPS140-1 validated several times - the first validation was over 5 years ago. A FIPS140-2 validation is ongoing. See http://www.mozilla.org/projects/security/pki/nss/
The UltraSparc T1 chip indeed provides some special SIMD assembly instructions for modular arithmetic. These instructions are not part of the public Sparc instruction set currently. As such, they only available through the Hypervisor. They can't be used directly in regular user programs. Sun has implemented a device driver that takes advantage of these instructions to help RSA private and public key operations, which are a significant part of the cost of SSL. This is called the Niagara Crypto Provider or NCP . This is a device driver for the Solaris Kernel Crypto Framework, which is usable by the Solaris Crypto Framework which has exposes a PKCS#11 library interface.
Sun Java Enterprise System (JES) server applications are able to use the Solaris Crypto Framework with Niagara Crypto Framework, using the Mozilla NSS (Network Security Services) libraries, which implement SSL using PKCS#11 . The Niagara Crypto Framework is treated just like any other SSL accelerator.
Applications based on OpenSSL can also use SCF/NCP using the version of OpenSSL shipped with Solaris, that has a special engine that talks PKCS#11 to the Solaris Crypto Framework.
When I worked for AOL / Netscape on security, I suggested they do exactly this - use S/MIME for spam filtering . AOL had a mail client that supported S/MIME - called AOL communicator. I was doing part of the implementation - the NSS S/MIME code in Mozilla . This was back in 2002. But using the very idea of using S/MIME as a spam filter tool fell on deaf ears at the executive level. I guess they still don't get it :-(
Yeah, Apple has great customer service. They really helped all the poor dual G4 owners that were so loud.
They told customers who complained to put it on Ebay and buy another new model that was fixed !
I did only the former. Never another apple product again.
Due to California's 3 strikes law, if he is convicted of 3 felonies, he will never get out of prison !
Since both of these protocols require the use of MD5 (and SHA1) for HMAC in handshakes, regardless of which cipher suite and hash algorithm is selected to encrypt/hash the data records. See section 5 of RFC2246 (TLS) for more info.
Verifying data against raw keys is primitive. Ever heard of certificates ?
They bind the public key to an identity . The cert gets verified against a whole chain.
It doesn't matter if Verisign's web site gets compromised, as long as your local trusted root store has not been compromised.
Now if Verisign were to sign certificates for the wrong person, then there would be a risk, but that's very different than a website compromise.
If you don't trust Microsoft code, what the hell are you doing running Windows ? I think Microsoft should have preloaded their cert store with the trust bit set.
I have seen gas at nearly $3 a gallon in Northern california (silicon valley) in the last few weeks. Makes me feel good I bought a Prius 4 years ago.
The Toyota Prius and other hybrids on the market don't have a charger outlet, so, no, they cannot be "filled" with electricity.
While the Prius can go on electric only, the decision of which engine to use is made electronically by the onboard computer depending on battery state but also other load such as speedm, A/C, heating.
The electric engine isn't big enough to go by itself at more than about 25 miles per hour, with A/C and heater off, for a few minutes. Basically it will work that way in parking lots most of the time, or in the city if you are a really slow driver (just observing all the 25 MPH speed limits will do it !).
a Prius driver
Not to mention a larger spacebar.
... But not for one with 29 extra useless keys.
I think those windows keys are a rip-off. They stole valuable space from actually useful keys.
Unfortunately my old AT keyboard which was pre-windows keys (and probably pre-windows too) died due to drink spilling . I could never buy one again.
I would pay god money for such a more plain keyboard
I am a dual citizen, born in California from French parents. I was raised in France. At age 19, I decided to move back to my "home" land (which I really had only visited once in my lifetime, having left California at the age of 3 weeks!).
I had my US passport renewed at the US embassy in Paris, France. This is the only ID that I carried for many of the following years. This passport carried no address.
In subsequent years, I lived in Florida and California, without getting a state ID or driver's license. You see, I didn't know how to drive ...
I was able to register & vote in Florida in 1996 for the presidential election without a state ID or a DL.
When it was time to move from Florida to California, I believe I did have to show my passport to fly, as that was my only ID. I thought nothing of it at the time, being used to having to show papers in France at any time to cops when requested. You see, over in France, it's illegal to even be out in the street without your national ID card. Let alone board a plane ...
Once in California, I lived nearly another year without a state ID or DL.
The only reason I got a California state ID was that after I bought a house, I needed to furnish it. But the furniture stores wouldn't take my checks without an ID. My non-existent credit history was good enough to get a $200,000 secured mortgage for the house, but not an unsecured credit card with more than $500 credit line, which wasn't enough to buy furniture for the house, and at the time my bank did not offer a debit card ... So I had to use old-fashioned checks, and that required ID ...
It wasn't until 4 years later at the ripe old age of 25 that I learned to drive and finally got a California driver license . Now I'm sure my name appears in many files. It's very reluctantly that I drive at all, but at least it's a low-polluting hybrid car ...
I have just noticed that my French national expired last month. 10 years, eh ... I have been taking annual trips to France to visit family. I always use my French ID to get in to France, rather than show my US passport, so it never gets stamped (there is no stamp on ID cards, and I never carried a French passport, I used the US one lifelong). It always confuses the immigration officers when I come back to California at SFO and they never see any foreign stamp on my US passport. They can't really tell where I have been. The US passport is full of stamps - but only those of US officials, coming *back* into the US ...
I need to renew my French ID so I can continue using this trick ...
I wonder what you base your assertion on.
Based on the current available catalog, there is much more music on SACD. My collection includes about 50 titles.
On DVD-Audio there is far less, by lesser known artists. I only have about 20.
But the biggest problem to me is that many DVD-Audio titles are poorly authored, and require a video display in order to navigate through the menu. I don't want to turn on my noisy projector in order to start listening to music.
I would say that SACD is the present of high-fidelity music, and I hope that DVD-Audio will disappear.
I thought for a second that perhaps I now had a reason to ever go to Starbucks - you see, I don't like coffee ;) ...
... Online stores actually make it more expensive. Eg. if I wanted to buy my favorite works, Bach's Goldberg Variations, I would have to buy 32 tracks. Multiply that by the 30 versions I have. At iTunes' price, that's $960 . At retail prices, at about $15 per CD, that's $450 ... Through music clubs, at $7 per CD, it's $210 ...
But, it seems they also chose to ignore my musical tastes by not planning on having any classical music available apparently.
Oh well. I thought I fit the demographic well - I'm between 25 - 50 (actually, I haven't made the big 3 yet) and I'm rather affluent. Guess they are not interested.
On a side note, I have yet to find a decent commercial vehicle for classical music other than traditional retail stores and mail order. Online music stores just don't get it - they charge by the track, and that's not the way any classical music enthusiast buys music. You might buy one track to preview, but if you are interested, you buy the whole recording
What's the big deal ? How is this news ?
IBM had ViaVoice built-in to OS/2, and it worked with Netscape Navigator for OS/2 , back in 1996 . And it worked quite well.
But somehow, 8 years later, this is news.
Unfortunately, it looks like none of these alarms support 24 hours (military time).
I can't begin to tell you the number of times I have set an alarm to PM instead of AM. I have missed countless work meetings, piano lessons, and even flights, due to this.
I still can't find an alarm that wakes me up.
In a word, yes.
Surviving on $4000 in Silly valley for a few months would be quite difficult. After figuring in taxes, try a few weeks.
FYI, Netscape fixed this bug in NSS in 1998. No Netscape or Sun SSL servers released since then have been vulnerable to the attack as a result.
This is merely a problem in OpenSSL, and it doesn't affect SSL in general.
Every hard drive I have owned has failed at some point, it doesn't matter which brand. The difference has been how long it has taken for them to fail.
Over the last 12 years, I have owned in my various computers such brands of hard drives as Miniscribe, Seagate, Quantum, Maxtor, Western Digital, IBM, CDC. I probably owned about 25 drives.
You may not recognize all the names because some of the manufacturers are defunct. During about 4 years, I ran a BBS 24/7 and kept the drives running. I remember maxing out the capacity of the narrow SCSI card (7 devices).
I have not resold any of the hard drives, rather, I have just kept using them. All of them ended up dying, except the 3 I'm currently using, which are all less than 2 years old. Most of the drives failed between the third and the fifth year. Since they were nearly all SCSI drives that carried 5 year manufacturer warranties, they were eligible for free replacements, but of course by then the capacity of was ridiculously small.
I almost didn't want to reply to this one - this is Slashdot, but I guess I have to get it out of the system.
...
Having spent many years working on a commercial web server, NES, or the Netscape web server, which then became the iPlanet web server, I can tell you that you are completely wrong.
In fact, Apache is many years behind most commercial web servers. Apache 2.0 finally got threads, but no one is using it because open-source programmers are just finding out how hard it is to write good multi-threaded software. In particular, just count the number of Apache modules that are compatible with threads, and actually scale in performance (not just one big global lock).
Also, you can't do all the performance optimization work on a little 1 or 2 CPU machine, and this is partly why commercial web servers tend to perform better. Eg. when I worked with Sun in the alliance, we had access to machine with dozens of CPUs. This is something an open-source developer rarely has access to, unless he is being paid by a commercial entity.
Meanwhile, NES has supported a hybrid multiprocess and multithreaded model since at least version 3.0 1997, and possibly long before. So Apache is about 5 years behind in the matter of threads, which I think is extremely important.
Many applications vendors wrote to the NSAPI, which allows extending the server and runs in its threads.
Microsoft countered and came up with its ISAPI in IIS, which does something very similar.
With the Apache 1.x process-based model, many applications just weren't possible or were much more complicated to implement with processes.
So, I don't know whether to laugh or to cry when I see comments like yours about innovation in open-source software, in particular Linux and Apache. All I can tell you is that when I browse the Apache section on slashdot, it really makes me feel like it is a crowd of pathetic morons, just as much as people who worship Linux and can't objectively see its flaws - eg. threads in Linux still haven't been made POSIX compliant, though NPTL is supposed to fix this. That's at least 5 years late. I speak from the perspective of having to make NES run on Linux with its non-compliant threads. Finding all the Linux threading bugs was just hell. And in the end, people wanted to run NES on big Sun iron anyway, so nobody licensed NES for Linux, it was mostly large Solaris customers for whom the license instantly paid for itself in reduced hardware requirements compared to other web servers (Apache included).
Certainly I don't deny that Apache is the #1 in market share, but I don't think we are using the same scales for innovation. Unless you count everything that's being added to Apache as innovation, even though these additions merely make it catch up with things that were in commercial web servers years ago. Which wouldn't be very different from what Microsoft calls its innovations
I'm posting this on a Dell P530 development desktop, running Windows 2000 Server.
The CPU is a single Intel Xeon 2.2 GHz.
Hyperthreading can be turned on or off in the BIOS of the machine. I turned it on before I installed Win2K.
The system was seen as a dual CPU machine from the time I installed it from the original CD, before I applied any service pack.
If I disable hyperthreading in the BIOS and boot Win2K, then I only see one CPU.
I have a second Xeon CPU on order for this machine as it is dual capable. Once I get it, it should make it look like a quad CPU in Win2K.
FYI, I am also running another OS on the system, Warp Server for E-business with the SMP kernel. Unfortunately the OS2APIC.PSD driver only detected one CPU even with hyperthreading enabled. I contacted the OS/2 kernel developer at IBM Austin, who told me that somehow there needed to be explicit support for it in OS/2 SMP for it to work.
I also left about 20 GB unpartitioned on my hard disk for Linux, but I haven't gotten around to installing it yet. Thread support in Linux has historically been poor and this is the main reason why I haven't done so. With the availability of the NPTL library, I'm looking forward to installing Linux, as NPTL becomes the standard pthreads library for Linux.
So you aren't getting away from them either way.