MS' problem is clearly that they have too many managers and businesspeople, and not enough technical people (or perhaps their technical people have no voice). That a MS employee can say such things that everyone else in the world clearly knows is wrong says something about their concern for real security...
What are you talking about? That's like saying that if you browse the Internet while printing a document, some characters might get lost. Might have happened with cheap IDE cd drives on PCs way back when, but these are Macs. Absolute voodoo. Doesn't happen. Not relevant.
BSD is NOT dying. The official dying title goes to Amiga, of course, which has been "dying" since 1993. So enough with the "BSD is dying" statements - you're showing your lack of experience.
I've been using IPv6 for nearly three years now, and all of my hosting has been available via IPv6 since September, 2001. Sure, most ISPs don't do native IPv6, so we have to set up tunnels and whathaveyou, but it's not that hard at all.
Where it really shines is with local networks which normally use NAT. Set up a tunnel on the gateway, run rtadvd, and plug-and-play with any computer with a modern OS. Mac OS X was actually TOO easy - I spent an hour looking for docs on how to set it up, only to find out it automatically does a router solicitation and already had an IPv6 address!
So now anyone can go the Tompkins Square Park with a laptop, a wireless card, two NetBSD installation floppies (or a boot CD), and install NetBSD over the Internet over the wireless via IPv6 with no configuration... So simple...
This article could have had more information. For starters, it could've compared the various DOS emulation environments and their features - like which actually do CPU level emulation, and which use the underlying x86...
Another thing: why is it that everyone assumes that every machine on which software will be run is a local machine running X? (Let's just forget for a moment that everyone assumes you're running GNU/Linux...) Personally, I'd like to find a way to run a DOS emulation via the command line - so people can ssh to my colocated server, start up a DOS environment, and use it from anywhere. Ideas?
It's hard enough getting people to download an ssh client. I don't think getting people to download, possibly buy, and install an X Server package is going to happen. Nor do I think it'd be reasonably quick enough...
Are the Slashdot crowd really that Linux and x86 biased that they really do not know that there is news and progress on stuff that is neither x86 nor Linux? Come on - read the posting!
This is simply about this:
1) Mac OS X (and Darwin) has and will have lots of good commerical software developed for it. Of particular interest to the kind of people that run NetBSD are software packages which have no GUI; ie, will run on a headless, colocated box, which, incidentally, would be called a "server".
2) The ability to run Mac OS X and Darwin binaries on NetBSD means that the availability of good commercial software which can runs on NetBSD increases (obviously), plus other bonuses (such as, for instance, Apple's very decent JVM).
3) That NetBSD's ABI emulation (NetBSD emulates the ABI of OS X / Darwin) can run XDarwin is a very good sign of the progress of the work on the ABI emulation.
This just makes the idea of hosting / serving using PowerPC hardware that much more attractive.
Such an "Ask Slashdot" should be properly qualified. Of course, the author is talking about Windows, and of course, I'm sure lots of people have poined this out already.
But then what about Unix(like) OSes? Although Linux is free and Solaris is not, I see many instances of Linux "admins" waiting until an "official" patch / RPM / Debian package / whatever comes out rather than compiling vulnerable software themselves, just like their Solaris counterparts who don't have a choice most of the time.
So better questions might be:
How many admins depend solely on vendor patches / binary patches rather than patching themselves? And how much time does this waiting cause?
Furthermore, how many "admins" are too afraid to break things because they do not fully understand the interdependencies of their systems? This one I see a LOT.
This leads to the best question:
If you don't patch immediately, WHY NOT?
Using Microsoft in infrastructure?
on
Code Red Refunds?
·
· Score: 1
Any company stupid enough to use Microsoft products in their infrastructure should not expect others to simply accept downtime as a result of this stupidity.
If my line went down because the people that run my ISP are inept, I would DEMAND a refund of the time that it was down. If I had an option, I'd switch ISPs.
Honest accidents, or causes like weather, are understandable. Large tech companies that have extensive tech staff running Microsoft products is unexcusable.
Yucky hardware?
on
Case Tweaking
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
"without the G4 and all that yucky Mac hardware"
Let's see... 64 bit PCI, gigabit ethernet, Altivec... Even story submitters can post anonymously so as to make stupid, stupid comments like this with no responsibility for answering to them.
The benchmarks were not adjusted for MHz. Apple's claims about speed are valid; they're testing their software, which is as optimised for PowerPC as much as gcc on GNU/Linux is optimised for x86.
Comparisons between platforms should be done with similar memory and processor speeds; a while back, I benchmarked my G3/450 (100 MHz memory bus) running NetBSD against my girlfriend's IBM pentium III/450 (100 MHz memory bus). That tells a tale: the G3 was, on average, 1.2 times the speed of the Pentium III.
Otherwise, these results should be adjusted for MHz.
I don;t understand why every slashdot post needs to have some dismissive comment appended to the end of it.
I have a Diesel Chevette with 400,000 miles on it, and Diesel pumps ARE everywhere. I've driven to every part of the USA, and trust me: truck stops are EVERYWHERE. (In case you don't know, trucks have Diesel engines.)
And although I haven't travelled much in the world outside of the US, the few places I did travel to had MORE Diesel facilities than the US.
I was in a situation where I had a small clan of geeks on one of my NetBSD machines where I worked. I started hosting some small sites for friends, and all was cool.
When I decided to leave, I realised that I couldn't (and didn't want to) just dump everyone, so I decided to colocate. At first, I was paying the bill out of pocket, but I asked users for donations, and they were more than happy to give.
As time has gone on, I have added paying customers and now have more than 50 domains and about 100 users. The people more than pay for the colocation, and the additional money has gone to several server upgrades and additions.
Now sixgirls.org, running NetBSD on an Amiga, is actually pulling a profit and is growing nicely. People like the server because it is a community, not an impersonal ISP. People prefer to develop there because they can talk with me directly and have things they need added and updated easily.
It hasn't always been easy, but taking that first step to ask for a few dollars from those who benefit the most is the best thing to do. In my case, they were more than happy to give it.
Why is it that the people that post the most obnoxious, ignorant posts all do so anonymously?
Coincidence?
If NetBSD is dead, why can they do things no other OS can do? Show me a Linux distro that runs flawlessly on two different processor architectures. I'll show you a more stable, more robust, and more secure OS that runs on 21!
Putting down BSD doesn't change anything - people will still develop it, ISPs, companies, and people will continue using it, and we'll all be happy.
Go see http://www.sixgirls.org/ and see what an obsolete Amiga can do with NetBSD. 100 users, more than 50 domains... What're you running on your Windows box?
If the most original improvement that the./ moderators can come up with is the addition of a couple of mouse buttons, I'd say that they're getting a little too far away from being geeks.
MacOS GUI is the best GUI available; your statements imply that there is something lacking in the GUI. The shortcomings of the other aspects of the OS do not make the GUI any less useable.
The hardware costs more? That is plainly incorrect. Show me an equally performing PC comparable to a $1799 G4 cube. Show me a decent Sparc that costs less than $2000. Tell me that x86 is a platform where you can pay little money and count on the quality of the components.
You can't. I run a server on a 68060 because x86 hardware is so damned problematic. Aside from moving my server, it's been up continuously since December without a problem.
I can't wait to move to PPC based servers; however, NetBSD for PowerMac is not quite mature yet, and Mac OS X is not ready yet. But come January, I'll have no problem shelling out some cash for Mac OS X.
This is the best of all worlds: The Mac OS GUI (the best in the world), on top of a real Unix core (BSD on Mach), on top of clean hardware (PPC is much prettier than x86, and Apple makes good quality computers).
If people still want to argue that x86 might be better than Mac OS X on PPC, then I just need to say that I believe in quality and elegance over all else; what does one's choice of x86 hardware say about his or her beliefs? Who would you want to host with?
As Win NT has made no significant inroads in the web serving business, it is clear that people and companies are sometimes smart enough to decide to not believe the FUD when the difference in quality is clear. Servers need uptime, not NT.
Therefore, I firmly embrace Mac OS X, and I think when, and not if, is what matters. People who require the Mac GUI for things like Photoshop will use it; people who require X will use MachTen's software, or Xfree will be ported promptly.
The real issue, then, should be whether the Mac GUI will be availabler for other unix platforms, or if people are going to need to write for two GUI APIs, or if people are going to stick with X and run MachTen's X Window or port Xfree...
SCSI is the only way to go when it comes to the drive interface; no IDE can touch SCSI in CPU utilisation unless you do something stupid like use an ISA SCSI card.
It really depends on what you want to burn; if your software lets you make image files, and you only want to burn one CD at a time, any computer will do. If you want to burn over the network, burn lots of tiny files, and so on, you'll need a faster computer all around and software that buffers a lot.
I've tried two 4x SCSI CD burners on my Amiga 1200 - burned two separate CDs from two different sets of data at the same time. I was still able to browse and run other software without noticeable slowdown, as my SCSI is DMA and my CD software (MakeCD) can let me set large buffers.
This is a different issue than if you want to burn several CDs simultaneously from the same source; lots of generic software lets you do that, but not many let you burn different CDs from different data.
In end, do you want to do it live over a 10-base-T network? Faster computer. 100-base-TX? Not as important. Make an image file first, then burn it? Speed is irrelevant.
BTW - who ever said that the machine is tied up while burning? You're not running a multitasking OS? I thought this was the year 2000...
Again it is proven that people are subject to media sensationalism. Every newspaper, every news program, even every talk show tries to get one's attention with the threat of the worst-case scenario.
It's like when Apple was having financial troubles: "Don't buy Apple, what if they go out of business?" Who cares if they have $2 billion in cash reserves? Media sensationalism.
And Amiga. Amiga has died so many times, nobody takes the report of Amiga's death seriously anymore. Perhaps nobody defined dying: new products are becoming available, a new AmigaOS came out 5 months ago, and so on. So what is "dead"?
Now slashdot: anyone who has spent any time in the industry knows that Unix is the most dominant force holding the whole computing world together, so why pretend to take a question like this seriously? Media sensationalism. That's all.
Until I see a headline like, "Unix is dead!", followed by "a young man named Unix was gunned down", I'll stick to reality.
Now: a more apt question is: Is Windows dying? I have some compelling ideas about THAT...
Slashdot Mirror
MS' problem is clearly that they have too many managers and businesspeople, and not enough technical people (or perhaps their technical people have no voice). That a MS employee can say such things that everyone else in the world clearly knows is wrong says something about their concern for real security...
What are you talking about? That's like saying that if you browse the Internet while printing a document, some characters might get lost. Might have happened with cheap IDE cd drives on PCs way back when, but these are Macs. Absolute voodoo. Doesn't happen. Not relevant.
BSD is NOT dying. The official dying title goes to Amiga, of course, which has been "dying" since 1993. So enough with the "BSD is dying" statements - you're showing your lack of experience.
I've been using IPv6 for nearly three years now, and all of my hosting has been available via IPv6 since September, 2001. Sure, most ISPs don't do native IPv6, so we have to set up tunnels and whathaveyou, but it's not that hard at all.
Where it really shines is with local networks which normally use NAT. Set up a tunnel on the gateway, run rtadvd, and plug-and-play with any computer with a modern OS. Mac OS X was actually TOO easy - I spent an hour looking for docs on how to set it up, only to find out it automatically does a router solicitation and already had an IPv6 address!
So now anyone can go the Tompkins Square Park with a laptop, a wireless card, two NetBSD installation floppies (or a boot CD), and install NetBSD over the Internet over the wireless via IPv6 with no configuration... So simple...
This article could have had more information. For starters, it could've compared the various DOS emulation environments and their features - like which actually do CPU level emulation, and which use the underlying x86...
Another thing: why is it that everyone assumes that every machine on which software will be run is a local machine running X? (Let's just forget for a moment that everyone assumes you're running GNU/Linux...) Personally, I'd like to find a way to run a DOS emulation via the command line - so people can ssh to my colocated server, start up a DOS environment, and use it from anywhere. Ideas?
It's hard enough getting people to download an ssh client. I don't think getting people to download, possibly buy, and install an X Server package is going to happen. Nor do I think it'd be reasonably quick enough...
Are the Slashdot crowd really that Linux and x86 biased that they really do not know that there is news and progress on stuff that is neither x86 nor Linux? Come on - read the posting!
This is simply about this:
1) Mac OS X (and Darwin) has and will have lots of good commerical software developed for it. Of particular interest to the kind of people that run NetBSD are software packages which have no GUI; ie, will run on a headless, colocated box, which, incidentally, would be called a "server".
2) The ability to run Mac OS X and Darwin binaries on NetBSD means that the availability of good commercial software which can runs on NetBSD increases (obviously), plus other bonuses (such as, for instance, Apple's very decent JVM).
3) That NetBSD's ABI emulation (NetBSD emulates the ABI of OS X / Darwin) can run XDarwin is a very good sign of the progress of the work on the ABI emulation.
This just makes the idea of hosting / serving using PowerPC hardware that much more attractive.
Such an "Ask Slashdot" should be properly qualified. Of course, the author is talking about Windows, and of course, I'm sure lots of people have poined this out already.
But then what about Unix(like) OSes? Although Linux is free and Solaris is not, I see many instances of Linux "admins" waiting until an "official" patch / RPM / Debian package / whatever comes out rather than compiling vulnerable software themselves, just like their Solaris counterparts who don't have a choice most of the time.
So better questions might be:
How many admins depend solely on vendor patches / binary patches rather than patching themselves? And how much time does this waiting cause?
Furthermore, how many "admins" are too afraid to break things because they do not fully understand the interdependencies of their systems? This one I see a LOT.
This leads to the best question:
If you don't patch immediately, WHY NOT?
If my line went down because the people that run my ISP are inept, I would DEMAND a refund of the time that it was down. If I had an option, I'd switch ISPs.
Honest accidents, or causes like weather, are understandable. Large tech companies that have extensive tech staff running Microsoft products is unexcusable.
Let's see... 64 bit PCI, gigabit ethernet, Altivec... Even story submitters can post anonymously so as to make stupid, stupid comments like this with no responsibility for answering to them.
The benchmarks were not adjusted for MHz. Apple's claims about speed are valid; they're testing their software, which is as optimised for PowerPC as much as gcc on GNU/Linux is optimised for x86.
Comparisons between platforms should be done with similar memory and processor speeds; a while back, I benchmarked my G3/450 (100 MHz memory bus) running NetBSD against my girlfriend's IBM pentium III/450 (100 MHz memory bus). That tells a tale: the G3 was, on average, 1.2 times the speed of the Pentium III.
Otherwise, these results should be adjusted for MHz.
I don;t understand why every slashdot post needs to have some dismissive comment appended to the end of it.
I have a Diesel Chevette with 400,000 miles on it, and Diesel pumps ARE everywhere. I've driven to every part of the USA, and trust me: truck stops are EVERYWHERE. (In case you don't know, trucks have Diesel engines.)
And although I haven't travelled much in the world outside of the US, the few places I did travel to had MORE Diesel facilities than the US.
So stop with the uneducated comments.
NetBSD - the same whether on VAX, Amiga, SPARC, or Alpha.
Hello,
I was in a situation where I had a small clan of geeks on one of my NetBSD machines where I worked. I started hosting some small sites for friends, and all was cool.
When I decided to leave, I realised that I couldn't (and didn't want to) just dump everyone, so I decided to colocate. At first, I was paying the bill out of pocket, but I asked users for donations, and they were more than happy to give.
As time has gone on, I have added paying customers and now have more than 50 domains and about 100 users. The people more than pay for the colocation, and the additional money has gone to several server upgrades and additions.
Now sixgirls.org, running NetBSD on an Amiga, is actually pulling a profit and is growing nicely. People like the server because it is a community, not an impersonal ISP. People prefer to develop there because they can talk with me directly and have things they need added and updated easily.
It hasn't always been easy, but taking that first step to ask for a few dollars from those who benefit the most is the best thing to do. In my case, they were more than happy to give it.
Good luck!
Coincidence?
If NetBSD is dead, why can they do things no other OS can do? Show me a Linux distro that runs flawlessly on two different processor architectures. I'll show you a more stable, more robust, and more secure OS that runs on 21!
Putting down BSD doesn't change anything - people will still develop it, ISPs, companies, and people will continue using it, and we'll all be happy.
Go see http://www.sixgirls.org/ and see what an obsolete Amiga can do with NetBSD. 100 users, more than 50 domains... What're you running on your Windows box?
If the most original improvement that the ./ moderators can come up with is the addition of a couple of mouse buttons, I'd say that they're getting a little too far away from being geeks.
I suppose nobody ever heard of USB mice?
If a Celeron 700 or Duron 700 is low end, then these people are on crack.
And a G3/450 is completely archaic! And when I get that GeForce for my Amiga, what could we call that?
Crack! Really fucking nasty crack!
has done more than 100k hits a day, while cpu average was around 2%...
Then again, here's a company selling a kid's version of Linux
preinstalled. I certainly wouldn't trust them to do my Apache config for me.
The only real way to tell is to buy both and test them exactly as delivered.
Imagine that... judging an operating system by the number of Usenet posts!
What about documentation? I suppose Novell would be the best operating system in the world, then...
Where do these people come from?
The hardware costs more? That is plainly incorrect. Show me an equally performing PC comparable to a $1799 G4 cube. Show me a decent Sparc that costs less than $2000. Tell me that x86 is a platform where you can pay little money and count on the quality of the components.
You can't. I run a server on a 68060 because x86 hardware is so damned problematic. Aside from moving my server, it's been up continuously since December without a problem.
I can't wait to move to PPC based servers; however, NetBSD for PowerMac is not quite mature yet, and Mac OS X is not ready yet. But come January, I'll have no problem shelling out some cash for Mac OS X.
This is the best of all worlds: The Mac OS GUI (the best in the world), on top of a real Unix core (BSD on Mach), on top of clean hardware (PPC is much prettier than x86, and Apple makes good quality computers).
If people still want to argue that x86 might be better than Mac OS X on PPC, then I just need to say that I believe in quality and elegance over all else; what does one's choice of x86 hardware say about his or her beliefs? Who would you want to host with?
As Win NT has made no significant inroads in the web serving business, it is clear that people and companies are sometimes smart enough to decide to not believe the FUD when the difference in quality is clear. Servers need uptime, not NT.
Therefore, I firmly embrace Mac OS X, and I think when, and not if, is what matters. People who require the Mac GUI for things like Photoshop will use it; people who require X will use MachTen's software, or Xfree will be ported promptly.
The real issue, then, should be whether the Mac GUI will be availabler for other unix platforms, or if people are going to need to write for two GUI APIs, or if people are going to stick with X and run MachTen's X Window or port Xfree...
John Klos
http://www.sixgirls.org/
SCSI is the only way to go when it comes to the drive interface; no IDE can touch SCSI in CPU utilisation unless you do something stupid like use an ISA SCSI card.
It really depends on what you want to burn; if your software lets you make image files, and you only want to burn one CD at a time, any computer will do. If you want to burn over the network, burn lots of tiny files, and so on, you'll need a faster computer all around and software that buffers a lot.
I've tried two 4x SCSI CD burners on my Amiga 1200 - burned two separate CDs from two different sets of data at the same time. I was still able to browse and run other software without noticeable slowdown, as my SCSI is DMA and my CD software (MakeCD) can let me set large buffers.
This is a different issue than if you want to burn several CDs simultaneously from the same source; lots of generic software lets you do that, but not many let you burn different CDs from different data.
In end, do you want to do it live over a 10-base-T network? Faster computer. 100-base-TX? Not as important. Make an image file first, then burn it? Speed is irrelevant.
BTW - who ever said that the machine is tied up while burning? You're not running a multitasking OS? I thought this was the year 2000...
It's like when Apple was having financial troubles: "Don't buy Apple, what if they go out of business?" Who cares if they have $2 billion in cash reserves? Media sensationalism.
And Amiga. Amiga has died so many times, nobody takes the report of Amiga's death seriously anymore. Perhaps nobody defined dying: new products are becoming available, a new AmigaOS came out 5 months ago, and so on. So what is "dead"?
Now slashdot: anyone who has spent any time in the industry knows that Unix is the most dominant force holding the whole computing world together, so why pretend to take a question like this seriously? Media sensationalism. That's all.
Until I see a headline like, "Unix is dead!", followed by "a young man named Unix was gunned down", I'll stick to reality.
Now: a more apt question is: Is Windows dying? I have some compelling ideas about THAT...