One major driving force in the server share market is companies that have a "one platform only" policy. Many big companies currently have themselves (willingly and happily) stuck with NT and Microsoft products.
Two cases, same story:
I worked for small web projects of two different big, multi national companies. We had ready-to-run Unix based solutions at hand, but both companies had an NT-only policy.
Both projects were short-term, small things that could have been done on a temporarily installed Unix box. We had all the software ready, since we did those things required times and times before.
But it had to be NT, no matter what. We spent 90% of the project porting the code to NT; of course, it finally did not even work the way it should. (That one company's main network tech spent two days installing NT with direct premium support from Microsoft and still couldn't even get the basic services to run...)
I just finished an article for University about the role of user and offer profiles within E-Commerce. Of course, I also had to look at TrustE for this (it was only a marginal topic, though).
It's a culture difference.
In the anglo-saxon world, especially in the US, people in general hate the idea of government intervention. It is common belief that the market will regulate itself, without any direct influence by the state.
Self-regulation is something people are much more comfortable with, so TrustE is something quite typically American.
That self-regulation of consumer profiling does not work however is more than evident, this only being yet another example. Nevertheless, there are little to no laws in the US that regulate their citizen's privacy.
The authors Choi, Stahl, Whinston (The Economics of Electronic Commerce) state that "Privacy is nothing but a myth" today. You can trade, buy and analyze consumer data with multitudes of sources and it is possible to (not exact quote) "create a detailed profile about practically anyone".
This is by no means meant as US-bashing. While we have a few strong laws that regulate consumer privacy in many European countries, I don't claim that they work as well as they are intended. (It is just interesting that we voters in Germany ask the government to regulate privacy and happily accept laws about it.)
You basically have little possibility to enforce these laws as a consumer since you rarely are in the position to find out if and where your privacy was breached before it is too late.
And some companies just don't care. There are German companies collecting user data that are not located in Germany themselves, only to avoid the local laws regarding privacy...
Here's my attempt at a translation. Sorry, English is not my first language.
German government fosters open source
The open source project "GNU privacy guard" (GPG) led by the German developer Werner Koch shall receive a financial aid of 250,000 DM by the German Ministry for Enonomy and Science (BMWi) this year. More funds and similar actions shall follow next year. The German government wants to tap the potential of open source development within the area of security related software and hopes to set a signal effect by supporting open source.
The second focus shall be supporting open source projects within security related software projects that the BMWi hope to help increase transparency and reliability of future security products. The core question, according to Ulrich Sandl of the BMWi, is how to increase the transparency of security technology: "It is almost impossible for small to medium businesses today to judge the actual security value of an encryption product."
An important step shall be the support for GPG. "The concept of GPG might help to create a tool that can be used as public domain software without any restrictions for all members of a society - the state, businesses and private users alike can get free access for no charge," says Hubertus Soquat, referent for IT security at the BMWi.
The financial aid for GPG shall mainly be used to create comfortable user interfaces for GPG and to port the tool for various operating systems, various mail clients etc.
The basics of Spacewar was featured in Scientific American's GREAT* column "Computer Recreations" years ago.
While in high school in Germany, I wrote my own version of it that I called "Grav" - using Turbo Pascal 3.0 on old 4.77 MHz Dos PCs, using CGA graphics and "incredible" (eek) sound effects.
It was quite a hit with school mates and we spent a lot of school breaks competing with each other on it. I also distributed it as freeware, including its (horrible) pascal source code. In those days, you had to order free- and shareware disks through mail order, if anyone cares to remember that...
Anyway, only later when I had my game finished I found "Spacewar", which (I think) was written in C and had a much better keyboard control code.
Nevertheless, I liked my own version and still think that Grav did not have to hide from Dos' Spacewar in any way.
(* I think that this series of wonderful articles actually made me consider studying computer science in the first place.)
What I find increasingly funny - there is currently no _real_ reason for the mass market to use these chips.
Come on, except for gaming, today there is no *home user* software needing the processing power offered by these current chips.
Sure, there are always bigger, fatter, more feature-rich versions of your favourite office software just around the corner, but consider this - AMD and Intel have vastly overtaken the gap between processing power and processing needs, far more than they used to a few years ago.
I myself still run Win95 and Linux on a P75 Toshiba Libretto with 32 MB Ram. Works like a charm and I even do some of the web database development for my clients on it. My clients may then use big servers with hairy chests for the live server, but even as a developer, I do not have to have a BIG computer when testing my small projects.
Since a few years, I made a habit of only buying computer parts that just went "out of fashion". By buying outdated material, I get the kind of computing that is below average today, but that was incredible 6 or 9 months ago. For a nice price, of course.
I'm surprised by so many "hey, wasn't VRML that thing that didn't work out?" comments here.
Yes, VRML was overhyped to the maximum, so much that most everyone started hating it; but if you consider it, VRML _is_ a good idea done _right_.
Just think of today's market in consumer computer graphics. Current low-cost graphics cards for standard PCs have the 3D processing power that was exclusively available to high end graphics workstations only a very short time ago. The vast majority of today's computers are equipped with 3D graphics cards. And the only product research made by graphics card manufacturers is in the 3D sector.
And of course the games market, that is driving this technology. There is practically _no_ 2D game available today. When I first saw Doom-like first person shooters, I never expected to see games like we have today - I too thought that 3D was "just a trend".
I'm pretty sure that there will be a need for 3D in internet applications and I am glad that VRML is here already as a working solution. It's not as important as its inventors claimed it would be, but it's certainly more than "just a trend" and surely more than a failure.
So far, we have absolutely no idea why this was done and what the (_potential_) registrants are up to.
Previously, there have been individuals who abused their ownership of a Linux-related trademark, domain name, whatever, and there have been other people who donated it to the community.
As long as we don't know anything, let's just wait and see, ok? If Channel.One turns out to be evil, I am sure to take out my clue-stick and hit them.
I did read his question and still think that he did not give enough data to give more than an educated guess on what kind of hardware he needs. Also, on the topic of slashdot, if you are a registered user logged in or using cookies, the server creates a page on the fly just for you. "My" slashdot says "this page was created for hanno" on the top. So it must be truely dynamic. There may be optimization for the majority of non-registered readers where personalization is not important.
Ignore most of the hardware recommendations from above, since THERE IS NO ANSWER TO YOUR QUESTION. It *depends* on what you are about to do. But you do not say what you are about to do...
Your question is *way* too generic. "I want a car. What should I buy?"
In your case, it depends on what kind of pages you are about to serve.
You haven't mentioned if your pages are static or dynamic. Dynamic means that they are created "on the fly", e.g. using content from a database. Slashdot itself is a dynamic site. And even then, there are lots of differences - some database engines require more hardware than others, some technologies for dynamic pages require more processing power per page hit than others etc. etc.
Reading your question, it seems that your site is made of static pages only. In that case, you do not need very much processing power and an older CPU will do.
With webcams, that again is something that completely depends on what kind of camera hardware you are about to use. Some of them require a lot of help by your web server, but most of them don't. You don't say what kind of camera you have, so again, no definite answer is possible.
Once you actually know what you will do, feel free to mail me. THEN I could try to help you...
...the machines developed by Konrad Zuse in the 1930s, a German engineer who spent hours building the (as some people claim) first programmable computer simply because he was too lazy to do the math by hand...
Right now, computers based on Intel and x86 compatible CPUs outnumber everything else. And thus, they are the preferred platform for Linux.
As soon as another platform emerges, I'm sure that some folks will port the compiler tools for that hardware, others will work on the kernel, yet another group of hackers will port XFree and in the end, it will be fully supported -- if only enough people feel the urge to use this other platform with Linux.
And because of this, the question "which is the preferred platform for Linux?" is pointless: It's the platform you already own.
You do realize that most browsers claim to be "Mozilla 3.0 compatible" in their identification string? Some older site statistiscs tools might add those browsers in the wrong category. Yes, MSIE also mentions Mozilla in its id string.
Manufacturers always use the measuring system that sounds best. Because of this, hard disks have been measured in "metric gigas" since a lot of years now.
Just because the Americans don't use metric/decimal measures, it doesn't mean that the rest of the world has to change the naming of their measuring system.
I agree. Gimp's "click the right button" interface is lousy. I still prefer Photoshop - I know that Gimp has the same tools, but with Photoshop, I actually find them...
Don't know if anybody else thought of this already, but I'd like to see something like a true "boot and play" game CD. One that brings its own OS, so to speak.
The CD would include a stripped-down Linux distribution with all the libraries and drivers needed for the game. No installation of a complete system is necessairy - all you need to do is boot the CD (or copy a few files on your system's harddrive and run it with loadlin or lilo).
When new drivers come along, the game manufacturer could update the files of its "distribution".
>In defense of wincam, the image quality is >actually better than the axis since it's a >true digital camera
The Axis camera is just as "true digital" as the wincam, so that's rather pointless.
I confess that the last time that I compared these two products was more than a year ago. But back then, the Axis camera's quality was _far_ superior to the Wincam.
Images were blurry, colours were wrong and needed a lot of help by the camera's client software, light conditions were not working, the CCD's colour structure was clearly visible in the image. Just plain and simply bad.
Looking at the images on wincam.com now, those images are indeed far better. But some of the annoying artifacts that bothered me back then still seem to be there. The far-to-strong fisheye effect, the colour artifacts.
others already recommended the Axis camera - I agree.:-)
I have been doing a lot with webcams for the company I worked for in the past, even made a review of different webcams for a German internet magazine. That hardware test was about a 1.5 years ago, so my experience is a bit dated.
To sum up: The Axis camera was the best of the crowd. It is basically a camera with an ethernet plug. _Great_ image quality, very easy to use in a network. A bit pricy, but definitely worth it. (http://www.axis.com/products/camera_servers/)
The Stardot camera has a few nice benefits, too. It uses a standard serial connector, you can use customized cables that are _very_ long, you can also use it with a modem. But the image quality of the camera that I tested 1.5 years ago was just _lousy_. It was even worse than the first version of the Connectix colour quickcam.
The old parallel Connectix camera has a lot of support by different Unix flavours, yet I only had running three of them simultaniously on one PC. Also, the quickcam really hogs any computer because it needs to be polled all the time - stupid protocol chosen by the developers.
Microplex offers a camera hub made for the parallel quickcam (http://www.microplex.com/microplex/info/networkEy e.html). But since the parallel quickcam is hard to get these days, it is probably not an option for you. Also, the Microplex hub was nice and a good value for its price, but only if you already own a quickcam.
There are a lot of USB cameras out there (the Philips product is _really_ good), but there still is no support that I know of for Linux. Don't know about BSD though.
So to sum up, the Axis camera was the way to go back then. From reading the description of your project, it sounds like it is exactly what you are looking for.
Slashdot Mirror
One major driving force in the server share market is companies that have a "one platform only" policy. Many big companies currently have themselves (willingly and happily) stuck with NT and Microsoft products.
Two cases, same story:
I worked for small web projects of two different big, multi national companies. We had ready-to-run Unix based solutions at hand, but both companies had an NT-only policy.
Both projects were short-term, small things that could have been done on a temporarily installed Unix box. We had all the software ready, since we did those things required times and times before.
But it had to be NT, no matter what. We spent 90% of the project porting the code to NT; of course, it finally did not even work the way it should. (That one company's main network tech spent two days installing NT with direct premium support from Microsoft and still couldn't even get the basic services to run...)
------------------
I just finished an article for University about the role of user and offer profiles within E-Commerce. Of course, I also had to look at TrustE for this (it was only a marginal topic, though).
It's a culture difference.
In the anglo-saxon world, especially in the US, people in general hate the idea of government intervention. It is common belief that the market will regulate itself, without any direct influence by the state.
Self-regulation is something people are much more comfortable with, so TrustE is something quite typically American.
That self-regulation of consumer profiling does not work however is more than evident, this only being yet another example. Nevertheless, there are little to no laws in the US that regulate their citizen's privacy.
The authors Choi, Stahl, Whinston (The Economics of Electronic Commerce) state that "Privacy is nothing but a myth" today. You can trade, buy and analyze consumer data with multitudes of sources and it is possible to (not exact quote) "create a detailed profile about practically anyone".
This is by no means meant as US-bashing. While we have a few strong laws that regulate consumer privacy in many European countries, I don't claim that they work as well as they are intended. (It is just interesting that we voters in Germany ask the government to regulate privacy and happily accept laws about it.)
You basically have little possibility to enforce these laws as a consumer since you rarely are in the position to find out if and where your privacy was breached before it is too late.
And some companies just don't care. There are German companies collecting user data that are not located in Germany themselves, only to avoid the local laws regarding privacy...
------------------
*B*undes *M*inisterium (Federal Ministry) für *Wi*rtschaft (Economy)
------------------
Here's my attempt at a translation. Sorry, English is not my first language.
German government fosters open source
The open source project "GNU privacy guard" (GPG) led by the German developer Werner Koch shall receive a financial aid of 250,000 DM by the German Ministry for Enonomy and Science (BMWi) this year. More funds and similar actions shall follow next year. The German government wants to tap the potential of open source development within the area of security related software and hopes to set a signal effect by supporting open source.
The second focus shall be supporting open source projects within security related software projects that the BMWi hope to help increase transparency and reliability of future security products. The core question, according to Ulrich Sandl of the BMWi, is how to increase the transparency of security technology: "It is almost impossible for small to medium businesses today to judge the actual security value of an encryption product."
An important step shall be the support for GPG. "The concept of GPG might help to create a tool that can be used as public domain software without any restrictions for all members of a society - the state, businesses and private users alike can get free access for no charge," says Hubertus Soquat, referent for IT security at the BMWi.
The financial aid for GPG shall mainly be used to create comfortable user interfaces for GPG and to port the tool for various operating systems, various mail clients etc.
Original German article by Stefan Krempl.
------------------
Will be ready in a few minutes. Just wait.
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The basics of Spacewar was featured in Scientific American's GREAT* column "Computer Recreations" years ago.
While in high school in Germany, I wrote my own version of it that I called "Grav" - using Turbo Pascal 3.0 on old 4.77 MHz Dos PCs, using CGA graphics and "incredible" (eek) sound effects.
It was quite a hit with school mates and we spent a lot of school breaks competing with each other on it. I also distributed it as freeware, including its (horrible) pascal source code. In those days, you had to order free- and shareware disks through mail order, if anyone cares to remember that...
Anyway, only later when I had my game finished I found "Spacewar", which (I think) was written in C and had a much better keyboard control code.
Nevertheless, I liked my own version and still think that Grav did not have to hide from Dos' Spacewar in any way.
(* I think that this series of wonderful articles actually made me consider studying computer science in the first place.)
------------------
Hallo, dies ist ein Test.
------------------
Alongside the switch to Linux as a server os for the Royal web site, it has been reported that the Queen is in fact surfing the web.
:-)
The obvious question - is this true or not?
And if it is true, can you ask her to grant Slashdot an interview as well?
------------------
What I find increasingly funny - there is currently no _real_ reason for the mass market to use these chips.
Come on, except for gaming, today there is no *home user* software needing the processing power offered by these current chips.
Sure, there are always bigger, fatter, more feature-rich versions of your favourite office software just around the corner, but consider this - AMD and Intel have vastly overtaken the gap between processing power and processing needs, far more than they used to a few years ago.
I myself still run Win95 and Linux on a P75 Toshiba Libretto with 32 MB Ram. Works like a charm and I even do some of the web database development for my clients on it. My clients may then use big servers with hairy chests for the live server, but even as a developer, I do not have to have a BIG computer when testing my small projects.
Since a few years, I made a habit of only buying computer parts that just went "out of fashion". By buying outdated material, I get the kind of computing that is below average today, but that was incredible 6 or 9 months ago. For a nice price, of course.
I didn't say that everything should be 3D. I sure hope it won't. But there is far more 3D used today than I ever expected.
I'm surprised by so many "hey, wasn't VRML that thing that didn't work out?" comments here.
Yes, VRML was overhyped to the maximum, so much that most everyone started hating it; but if you consider it, VRML _is_ a good idea done _right_.
Just think of today's market in consumer computer graphics. Current low-cost graphics cards for standard PCs have the 3D processing power that was exclusively available to high end graphics workstations only a very short time ago. The vast majority of today's computers are equipped with 3D graphics cards. And the only product research made by graphics card manufacturers is in the 3D sector.
And of course the games market, that is driving this technology. There is practically _no_ 2D game available today. When I first saw Doom-like first person shooters, I never expected to see games like we have today - I too thought that 3D was "just a trend".
I'm pretty sure that there will be a need for 3D in internet applications and I am glad that VRML is here already as a working solution. It's not as important as its inventors claimed it would be, but it's certainly more than "just a trend" and surely more than a failure.
So far, we have absolutely no idea why this was done and what the (_potential_) registrants are up to.
Previously, there have been individuals who abused their ownership of a Linux-related trademark, domain name, whatever, and there have been other people who donated it to the community.
As long as we don't know anything, let's just wait and see, ok? If Channel.One turns out to be evil, I am sure to take out my clue-stick and hit them.
I did read his question and still think that he did not give enough data to give more than an educated guess on what kind of hardware he needs. Also, on the topic of slashdot, if you are a registered user logged in or using cookies, the server creates a page on the fly just for you. "My" slashdot says "this page was created for hanno" on the top. So it must be truely dynamic. There may be optimization for the majority of non-registered readers where personalization is not important.
Ignore most of the hardware recommendations from above, since THERE IS NO ANSWER TO YOUR QUESTION. It *depends* on what you are about to do. But you do not say what you are about to do...
Your question is *way* too generic. "I want a car. What should I buy?"
In your case, it depends on what kind of pages you are about to serve.
You haven't mentioned if your pages are static or dynamic. Dynamic means that they are created "on the fly", e.g. using content from a database. Slashdot itself is a dynamic site. And even then, there are lots of differences - some database engines require more hardware than others, some technologies for dynamic pages require more processing power per page hit than others etc. etc.
Reading your question, it seems that your site is made of static pages only. In that case, you do not need very much processing power and an older CPU will do.
With webcams, that again is something that completely depends on what kind of camera hardware you are about to use. Some of them require a lot of help by your web server, but most of them don't. You don't say what kind of camera you have, so again, no definite answer is possible.
Once you actually know what you will do, feel free to mail me. THEN I could try to help you...
The chips are indeed hard to get, but it's not impossible. However, the mainboards are currently in short supply.
...the machines developed by Konrad Zuse in the 1930s, a German engineer who spent hours building the (as some people claim) first programmable computer simply because he was too lazy to do the math by hand...
...the platform most widely available.
Right now, computers based on Intel and x86 compatible CPUs outnumber everything else. And thus, they are the preferred platform for Linux.
As soon as another platform emerges, I'm sure that some folks will port the compiler tools for that hardware, others will work on the kernel, yet another group of hackers will port XFree and in the end, it will be fully supported -- if only enough people feel the urge to use this other platform with Linux.
And because of this, the question "which is the preferred platform for Linux?" is pointless: It's the platform you already own.
You do realize that most browsers claim to be "Mozilla 3.0 compatible" in their identification string? Some older site statistiscs tools might add those browsers in the wrong category. Yes, MSIE also mentions Mozilla in its id string.
Manufacturers always use the measuring system that sounds best. Because of this, hard disks have been measured in "metric gigas" since a lot of years now.
Just because the Americans don't use metric/decimal measures, it doesn't mean that the rest of the world has to change the naming of their measuring system.
Hemos, get your facts straight. A simple redirection
is *not* the same as cracking a machine.
I agree. Gimp's "click the right button" interface is lousy. I still prefer Photoshop - I know that Gimp has the same tools, but with Photoshop, I actually find them...
Don't know if anybody else thought of this already, but I'd like to see something like a true "boot and play" game CD. One that brings its own OS, so to speak.
The CD would include a stripped-down Linux distribution with all the libraries and drivers needed for the game. No installation of a complete system is necessairy - all you need to do is boot the CD (or copy a few files on your system's harddrive and run it with loadlin or lilo).
When new drivers come along, the game manufacturer could update the files of its "distribution".
>In defense of wincam, the image quality is
>actually better than the axis since it's a
>true digital camera
The Axis camera is just as "true digital" as
the wincam, so that's rather pointless.
I confess that the last time that I compared these two products was more than a year ago. But back then, the Axis camera's quality was _far_ superior to the Wincam.
Images were blurry, colours were wrong and needed a lot of help by the camera's client software, light conditions were not working, the CCD's colour structure was clearly visible in the image. Just plain and simply bad.
Looking at the images on wincam.com now, those images are indeed far better. But some of the annoying artifacts that bothered me back then still seem to be there. The far-to-strong fisheye effect, the colour artifacts.
Hi,
:-)
y e.html). But since the parallel quickcam is hard to get these days, it is probably not an option for you. Also, the Microplex hub was nice and a good value for its price, but only if you already own a quickcam.
others already recommended the Axis camera - I agree.
I have been doing a lot with webcams for the company I worked for in the past, even made a review of different webcams for a German internet magazine. That hardware test was about a 1.5 years ago, so my experience is a bit dated.
To sum up: The Axis camera was the best of the crowd. It is basically a camera with an ethernet plug. _Great_ image quality, very easy to use in a network. A bit pricy, but definitely worth it. (http://www.axis.com/products/camera_servers/)
The Stardot camera has a few nice benefits, too. It uses a standard serial connector, you can use customized cables that are _very_ long, you can also use it with a modem. But the image quality of the camera that I tested 1.5 years ago was just _lousy_. It was even worse than the first version of the Connectix colour quickcam.
The old parallel Connectix camera has a lot of support by different Unix flavours, yet I only had running three of them simultaniously on one PC. Also, the quickcam really hogs any computer because it needs to be polled all the time - stupid protocol chosen by the developers.
Microplex offers a camera hub made for the parallel quickcam (http://www.microplex.com/microplex/info/networkE
There are a lot of USB cameras out there (the Philips product is _really_ good), but there still is no support that I know of for Linux. Don't know about BSD though.
So to sum up, the Axis camera was the way to go back then. From reading the description of your project, it sounds like it is exactly what you are looking for.
Mail me if you need to know more details.