Just to comment on the question about bundling JVM environment -
I've been using an application at work called ProactiveNet (http://www.proactivenet.com/). It bundles a full JVM, Perl and Apache (with mod_jserv installed) - specifically configured the way those apps need it. Putting the package together appears to have been fairly straightforward. Just specify an application-specific installation path (in this case, under/usr/pw/ ) and you have your own compartmentalized runtime environment. Much easier from the support standpoint than telling the customer they need to set up brand x of package y, version z.20 with modules foo, bar and baz installed.
That theory says ball lighting could move through windows and doors because they may have cracks in them seems like a bit of a gloss-over. What about passing through airplanes? I'm aware that select flights feature holes ripped in the body of the airplane, but still.;) Of course, the eye-witnesses could be lying...
The IDP you speak of is not likely primarily for economic reasons. Those who frequent AOL clearly are highly susceptible to marketing and have no critical thinking abilities. With a sucker signing up every minute, the majority of net merchants would ditch their network service providers in a minute rather than miss out on all the easy bucks.
Linux security is indeed an interesting topic for those of us who run Linux. However, you'd be doing yourself a disservice by relying on Slashdot for that. After all, being a Linux security resource is not Slashdot's goal.
Note that not every Microsoft security vulnerability out there is listed, either. Do a search on vunlerabilities by vendor for Microsoft at Security Focus, which is at http://www.securityfocus.com to see all 235 vulnerabilities listed, most of which Slashdot missed.
Good resources for Linux security news, specifically, are Linux Weekly News at http://lwn.net/ and its continually updated Daily Edition at http://lwn.net/daily/ For additional resources you can visit Linux.Com's security section at http://www.linux.com/security
But, the nature of the internet (see what you want, at least more so than TV) makes it less helpful to candidates. So, yes it will make a difference in the sense it will be used like every other media outlet to spread propaganda.
Actually, "see what you want" rather than "eat what you're fed" is *more* helpful to some candidates... Just not the set who just want to spend big bucks to pull the wool over your eyes long enough for the perks from lobbyists to kick in. Same principle as how net provided a means of co-operation and delivery for all the free software which is currently flourishing.:)
Linux & Win9x are on the machine. The issue was not OS-related, though - it happened at hard-drive detection time. Both the FIC board and SCSI controller were at their most recent firmware flash revisions.
Actually, the K7M is mentioned on the Motherboard Products page (in the body, not as a button) -
Athlon K7 OEM Solution
The ASUS K7M and K7M-RM is equipped with 200MHz FSB, 3x DIMM, UDMA/66, and optional Health Monitoring and 2 additional USB ports.
Interestingly, when you click on the K7M / K7M-RM the cpu connection button bar adds "Slot A" as an entry.;)
I have been on an AMD/Asus buying spree lately. I got my g/f an Asus P5A motherboard for her K6-2 and have built a webserver with K6-2 & Asus P5A. These machines have done quite well in relatively different applications - the webserver has been going non-stop for 243 days (running FreeBSD 3.2-RELEASE), and my g/f's workstation doesn't have any hardware issues with its wealth of toys. Eg., Hauppauge WinTV 401, Buslogic Multimaster SCSI controlling a Plextor 40X Max CD-ROM (which utterly and completely rocks), and Yamaha 4416 SCSI CD-RW. For some reason the FIC PA-2013 the system had before was unhappy about having the Buslogic controller and IDE drives on the primary controller. Smooth sailing in all cases w/ the ASUS P5A, though.
Also, I'm currently in the specification stage for 2 rackmount Athlon servers. After dealing with vendors to get the Athlon machines set up, I can tell you - it is *not* easy to find higher-end configurations with Athlon. Fortunately, the good people at ASL, Inc. have been very helpful. In fact, they were the first vendor I saw meaningfully demonstrate Athlons (when I was lucky enough to attend Atlanta Linux Showcase last year). If you're looking to build an Athlon server, check them out. They're cool. Tell them ninjaz sent you.;)
'smart' quotes (or is it ?smart? quotes?), make dumb apostrophes.
Perhaps the next round of MS-related litigation will be a class action suit by Windows users seeking damages for being made to appear more inept than they actually are.
I saw a DVD player at Fry's while doing my Christmas shopping with a big "Plays MP3" sticker on the front. Since there are already enough computers around here which are mp3 enabled, it wasn't a selling point, though. I got a Sony instead.;)
Would it be feasible/legal to create a group which did nothing but collect patents, allowing free use in any application where other portions of the result aren't patented (or not patented with intent of open use) by that implementor?
I.e. Amazon couldn't use any patent in the patent pool without allowing free use of the one-click technology or, preferably, giving the patent to the group.
It's an interesting prospect, eg., how Netscape patented SSL and allowed use of it as long as you didn't sue other people over patents, etc.
However, I think it's ultimately the Wrong Way to fix it. The troubles are:
1) How do you keep the group honest? Maybe RMS being leader would last for the rest of his life, but what about after that? What happens when you've got potentially a multi-billion dollar patent reserve? People such as these IP lawyers will attempt to bribe the people holding power in the organization and possibly resort to assassination. That is, like how the nice communists were all killed and replaced by mean exploiters of the power structure created after the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia.
2) The patent process is fairly expensive and tedious. Where does the money come from? How do you get investors in something that is guaranteed a 0% return?
3) How do you decide what to patent? The problem is that these things "look obvious". Sure, hindsight is 20/20, and you know what obvious thing someone has patented -yesterday-, but then you have to violate a patent, get sued (presumably paying lawyers the whole time), and only then get the original obvious patent invalidated.
4) There is no protection from patent squatters. Say Unisys has a patent on LZW, but wants to release a product that uses the GNU patented readline. They could just go ahead and sell a that patent to a squatter group (let's say Gold Digger Associates) Then, they're absolved from the stipulations that they not sue on what used to be their patent, get a nice lump sum from the sale of their LZW patent and the protections you've tried to achieve have been effectively sidestepped.
See what I mean? It would be better to actually fix the problem by having software & business-model patents declared invalid than to try to work around them. The ethically-challenged among us will always find workarounds to this sort of workaround.
The Soundblaster Live! is a bit more difficult than the other soundcards for the time being because Creative has only just decided to play ball with the open source community (see lwn.net's timeline in a previous slashdot article) To contrast, when I decided to give Linux Mandrake a shot a few weeks ago, the only step required for working sound was to type sndconfig
Anyway, the most recent fruits of Creative's newfound enlightenment can be had here:
http://www.alsa-project.org/ Don't let the version # fool you, ALSA has been awesome on w/ my GUS Max since I started using it 6-8 months ago. You may want to save ALSA for a future go-round, though, until you're feel comfortable configuring drivers not included as part of the stock kernel, as it's completely redone (and backward compatible) sound support for Linux, which is planned to be the next generation drivers and API. Also, it has a user mailing list in case you'd like a helping hand.
Both have documentation about how to go about setting it up, so given the inclination, you can have sound right now instead of waiting for the next round of distro updates.:)
Btw, kernel configuration and compiling really isn't very difficult - it's primarily choosing what devices to support, and a few protocols (and each option has a friendly little help display if you're unsure). For more information, you can visit the Linux Documentation Project at http://www.linuxdoc.org/ and LinuxNewbie.org at (oddly enough) http://www.linuxnewbie.org/- home of the NHFs (Newbieized Help files "in plain english")
Actually, Charter Schools snd voucher programs (to give indivudual students money to spend on private schools) have been established to help with the problems with govnerment-run schools. Sure, they require taxes still, but tend to have a lower cost per student (at least in the US) while at the same time being more effective.
As for the other social programs, I think private charites (red cross anyone?) are a nicer solution than government-run ones, which tend to be quite lossy (eg,. 60-70% administrative costs), and lack any sort of common sense or conscience due to bureaucracy.
I think RMS really is a communist, even though he strongly denies it. He's not authoritarian or fascist at all, though those are often confused with communism. But really -- "to each by his need, from each by his ability".
Actually, I don't think "communist" is a very good description of rms. For instance, consider his essay on "The right way to tax Dat": http://www.fsf.org/philosophy/dat.html
In it, he proposes that those taxes should go to the recording artists based on polls to determine popularity. That suggests "To each according to his ability" rather than need. In other words, it encourages doing something useful rather than being needy as communism does.
In the context of Free Software, his philosophies apply to the distribution of information, not of material things, which communism concerns itself with.
Regarding economics, Free Software specifically allows itself to be sold with the profits completely retained by the seller. Something I would consider more compatible with marxist ideals would be more along the lines of "Free for non-commercial use" and "Pay x% of your profits if you're making money with this. We'll make sure it gets to a needy person".
Also, rms' philosophy on copyright and patents is completely within the bounds described by Thomas Jefferson, who predated the idea of communism.
Quoth Mr. Jefferson:
"It would be singular to admit a natural and even an hereditary right to inventors... It would be curious... if an idea, the fugitive fermentation of an individual brain, could, of natural right, be claimed in exclusive and stable property. If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property. Society may give an exclusive right to the profits arising from them, as an encouragement to men to pursue ideas which may produce utility, but this may or may not be done, according to the will and convenience of the society, without claim or complaint from anybody... The exclusive right to invention [is] given not of natural right, but for the benefit of society." --Thomas Jefferson to Isaac McPherson, 1813. ME 13:333
Another insightful article (by rms) about why he is the way he is:
These systems will be running the server software they need, and X11 + (Gnome||KDE) for administration and so on.
I think X/(Gnome|KDE) a bad idea on a network server regardless of the operating system. My reasons for thinking it's a bad idea are:
video hardware (& its drivers) tends to be one of the touchiest areas of a system, best avoided if you're not using it as a workstation,
You're wasting resources that could be used for serving on your X environment (especially with some of those new-fangled screensavers;)
It's better to understand configuring the system the *right* way - via the command-line tools and configuration files. That way, you can keep multiple versions in case something goes wrong and you need to back out a change.
Now, with that out of the way..
Is OpenBSD more secure in some fundamental way that a well maintained Linux distribution?
The audits of source code would seem to imply that. If you'd like some data on the subject, visit the vulnerabilities section of http://www.securityfocus.com/ Have it show you the vulnerabilities of OpenBSD and of a few Linux distros so you can compare. Of course, unless you're allowing shell accounts, the external (network) security of either mostly depends on what daemons you're running and how they're configured.
Is OpenBSD more stable than a well maintained Linux distribution?
Both a well-maintained Linux server and a well-maintained OpenBSD server should be stable. There may be less scheduled downtime with OpenBSD if there's a kernel-related security issue in Linux, but in my experience with OpenBSD, NetBSD, FreeBSD, Linux and Solaris, all of them have been stable (current standard uptimes here around 6 months).
Will the OpenSource software we normally need (firewall, Apache, PHP4, Perl, Python) and so on probably compile on OpenBSD?
Yes, and/usr/ports/ is there in case a change does need to be made to something for it to compile (i.e., the patches are automatically applied when you type make
Does OpenBSD support multiple CPU's better then Linux?
No, it doesn't support them at all. If you want multi-cpu support with a *BSD, try FreeBSD.
One thing that BSD is currently very helpful with on the x86 architecture is large file support. The Linux limit is 2gb, so your MySQL databases are limited to that size.
Re:Will it work on my laptop (with PCMCIA) ?
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OpenBSD 2.6 released
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· Score: 2
It's impossible to say since you haven't specified which models they are. There are devices in each of the categories you metioned listed in the release notes for the i386 port, though, at http://www.openbsd.org/i386.html
If the money to swing this is impossible, then I'd recommend mirroring rather than RAID 5. All these kinds of things are compromises between reliability, cost, convenience and performance. RAID 5 is an excellent overall solution from a performance standpoint; but if you cannot afford this RAID 1 is a good choice. It offers fast reads at the cost of slow writes and survival from failure on either disk. In this application, users won't be affected by slightly slower write times. Since drives are so incredibly cheap these days, I'd say this is a pretty good choice if you are strapped for cash.
Actually, RAID-1 is more expensive and faster for writes than RAID-5.
The reason for this is that RAID-1 uses 1:1 mirroring of a 2-drive set while RAID-5 uses rotating parity in which parity information is distributed across all drives.
With regard to space, using RAID-1, your usable yield (what shows up in df) is half of the total disk space put into it. With RAID-5, parity info is spread througout all the drives. Eg., I have a RAID-5 using four 4GB drives, which gives me 12GB of usable space. With 0+1 on this configuration, it would be 8GB usable.
As for speed, both RAID-1 and RAID-5 allow you to read from multiple disks at once (which, of course, is a win). For writes, a drive pair in a RAID-1 will take as long as a write to a single drive. On RAID-5, however, it takes longer because (afaik) the RAID controller has to determine which drives to write the parity info to, which takes CPU time.
The reason I consider the "anectodal FUD" worth mentioning is that I have personally, (as have many people I know) been able to get Unix systems to be stable for months|years on a regular basis with no special effort.
I haven't met any NT admins who can demonstrate the same. It's always a story about how a friend of a friend had a cousin who worked at some important place that had a cream of the crop admin who was able to push NT to a whopping 60 days uptime or somesuch.
I really can post coherent messages. Honest, I can! I plead this copy of Netscape leaking huge amounts of ram with large 's, preventing me from previewing. O:)
People may say that Unix systems require less effort to run, but what it really requires is more knowledge.
Should be "may say that Unix systems require more effort".. Freudian slip. It's hard to say "Unix/more effort" together after the days I've wasted helping my g/f with her unweidly windows partition.;)
Btw, the "requires more knowledge" part mostly applies to getting started with the OS. It could require less knowledge to get a unix box running stably than it does to get an NT box running stably (and said knowledge is easier to come by) For example, you may have to do a bit of reading and compiling to get things how you want them, but the compiling is documented. Also, at least in the open source realm, mysterious failures tend not to be a problem. In the event something *does* fail, it's usually easy (or at least straightforward) to figure out why it's failing and how to fix it (as opposed to trying 25 different driver version, service pack version and system resource configurations) Even in the Unix world, Netscape Enterprise vs. Apache is a case in point here. When our corporate Netscape Enterprise server mysteriously failed to start one day due to a "sig6 pipe closed" error, it turned out that the search engine's index had gotten corrupted, and disabling the search engine prior to starting the netscape server would fix it. It took a call to netscape support to figure this out, though - running truss (equiv of strace on Linux) on the server didn't help, nor did the system or server logs.
Another thing I think I should mention is that if you put Linux on a webserver, and the application outgrows the machine (or OS), it's trivial to port the application up to a more "enterprise" class OS such as Solaris. At the Fortune 500 I mentioned in my last post, the enterprise webserver was recently moved from a big Irix machine to a big Solaris machine. Since all the in-house apps were coded in perl, everyone's applications didn't require any porting. The same would also be true for any of PHP, Python/Zope (and even java if you're lucky). Of course, you could also design the application with real scalability in mind and, for instance, use 2000 FreeBSD webservers like Microsoft does with Hotmail and let something like Solaris handle the backend mass storage. (Or like deja.com or google.com do with Linux.. or yahoo.com does with FreeBSD)
Looks like the astroturfers have come out of the woodwork for this one.;) I wonder how far up the chain this article got escalated at Microsoft today.
Anyway, regarding picking a Unix-type OS, and database it's obvious it's a complex issue. The machine crashing may be an immediate problem, but there are long-term issues to face. For instance, I have loaded (read loaded as in doing something - i.e., not idle) machines that stay up hundredes of days for an upgrade. That's without reading between the lines, reloading the OS, hacking the configuration or random parts of the OS breaking between upgrades.
People may say that Unix systems require less effort to run, but what it really requires is more knowledge. For instance, the primary webserver I run for an "e-business" is a single Debian machine on a pentium pro 200. Through several Debian upgrades (including libc5 -> libc6) it has always been stable and reliable. No service packs that break half the stuff, no middle of the night crashes, nothing. The amount of administration effort to run the box (which does hundreds of thousands of $$ of business a year) is a few hours a month. The cost of the setup was around $5000.
Pentium Pro 200 server machine (with premium parts)- $2000
There they recently migrated our mail server from a single (1) machine running netscape mail server to a farm of NT servers running Exchange. The Netscape mail server was on a Sun Enterprise and was rock solid. The Exchange servers, on the other hand, are on a weekly reboot schedule. Our Exchange/NT team had done all it could, and came to the conclusion that either the machines could be rebooted every 7 days or crash on their own every 10.
Also of interest is the management capabilities inherent with Unix-based systems vs. Exchange. For instance, on the Netscape mail server, if a user wanted files from his mailbox restored, a few files were restored from backup, and presto! On the Exchange server, the entire mail database has to be rolled back to the state where the files still existed (for *everyone*)
Another item of interest is that when doing the mail server migration, the postmaster box ended up with over 60,000 pieces of mail in its box from warnings. With the server on solaris, I was able to write a quick perl script that would delete the files of specific subject line. The Exchange team's answer to a similar problem (this time with 100,000 emails) was to pull them up in Outlook and delete the messages 10 at a time. Of course, that wasn't possible, as the machine would just freeze due to the insane amount of RAM required to do such a thing (not to mention the time required to do this 10 at a time..) Luckily one of the up & coming unix geeks had a MS background and mentioned that outlook delete filters would do the trick (which they did - but it had to be accomplished from the client side)
Anyway, the moral of the story is that NT server installations as a rule will cost more, require more maintenance and make it difficult for you to fix things when it really counts.
Anyway, no matter what you do this time, I'd reccommend you at least set up an experimental server to do similar things to familarize yourself with a unix-like enironment. And, learn enough perl (or python/zope or php or java...) to put together the kind of web application you'd want. My personal favorite is perl, as CPAN has modules to do just about anything, and it's been invaluable to me as a system administrator and web programmer, but I know people have done very cool things with the others, also. Also, SQL. I'd recommend Postgres and MySQL (whichever fits the job) and, possibly Sybase (but its proprietary nature can be a pain at times). Don't forget about FreeBSD, either. Its scaled-down nature can make administration easier when you only want specific things on a box, and at present, it has some large file advantages over Linux.
Actually, instead of StrongHold, I think Raven SSL for Apache would be better way to go. It's $357 vs $995 for Stronghold. Covalent (the company who sells Raven SSL) also does technical support for both the Raven SSL module and Apache in general, which should go over well with the suits.
Also, I wouldn't really call it a close race between Postgres and MySQL features. MySQL doesn't plan to do SQL Transactions, for instance, while Postgres does. MySQL, on the other hand, has much friendlier SQL extensions, particularly for date formatting and such. Both have commercial support options.
Re:What to use for NFS? SAMBA?
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Which BSD?
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· Score: 2
here are some (completely non-scientific) times from Linux (as server) and FreeBSD (as server) to NetBSD (as client):
$ time cp/from-linux-2.2.10-ac3/ppro-200/testfile.
real 1m11.308s user 0m0.017s sys 0m5.704s
$ time cp/from-freebsd-3.2-RELEASE/k6-2-400/testfile.
real 0m52.546s user 0m0.013s sys 0m5.314s
It's probably worth noting that (at least) FreeBSD and NetBSD support NFSv3 in stable releases, and Linux does not yet.
I can't give a good answer to what would be best for NFS serving *to* linux, as I don't have anything set up that way. Samba should display less variance as it's a user-level process. In that case, network stack and ethernet drivers would matter more.
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I've been using an application at work called ProactiveNet (http://www.proactivenet.com/). It bundles a full JVM, Perl and Apache (with mod_jserv installed) - specifically configured the way those apps need it. Putting the package together appears to have been fairly straightforward. Just specify an application-specific installation path (in this case, under /usr/pw/ ) and you have your own compartmentalized runtime environment. Much easier from the support standpoint than telling the customer they need to set up brand x of package y, version z.20 with modules foo, bar and baz installed.
Anyone really interested in an examination of the matter of militia and the people mentioned in the 2nd Amendment in a historicalc context should visit here: http://www.guncite.com/jo urnals/gun_control_hardhist.html
The set of applications available for SCO and not native on Linux is growing smaller by the hour.
According to it, St. Elmo's Fire always stays attached to an object, while ball lightning can "drift around like a soap bubble".
Another page with lots of Ball Lightning resources is here: http://www.sciam.com/askexper t/physics/physics30.html
That theory says ball lighting could move through windows and doors because they may have cracks in them seems like a bit of a gloss-over. What about passing through airplanes? I'm aware that select flights feature holes ripped in the body of the airplane, but still. ;) Of course, the eye-witnesses could be lying...
The IDP you speak of is not likely primarily for economic reasons. Those who frequent AOL clearly are highly susceptible to marketing and have no critical thinking abilities. With a sucker signing up every minute, the majority of net merchants would ditch their network service providers in a minute rather than miss out on all the easy bucks.
Note that not every Microsoft security vulnerability out there is listed, either. Do a search on vunlerabilities by vendor for Microsoft at Security Focus, which is at http://www.securityfocus.com to see all 235 vulnerabilities listed, most of which Slashdot missed.
Good resources for Linux security news, specifically, are Linux Weekly News at http://lwn.net/ and its continually updated Daily Edition at http://lwn.net/daily/ For additional resources you can visit Linux.Com's security section at http://www.linux.com/security
Linux & Win9x are on the machine. The issue was not OS-related, though - it happened at hard-drive detection time. Both the FIC board and SCSI controller were at their most recent firmware flash revisions.
http://www.asus.com.tw/Produ cts/Motherboard/index.html
Interestingly, when you click on the K7M / K7M-RM the cpu connection button bar adds "Slot A" as an entry. ;)
I have been on an AMD/Asus buying spree lately. I got my g/f an Asus P5A motherboard for her K6-2 and have built a webserver with K6-2 & Asus P5A. These machines have done quite well in relatively different applications - the webserver has been going non-stop for 243 days (running FreeBSD 3.2-RELEASE), and my g/f's workstation doesn't have any hardware issues with its wealth of toys. Eg., Hauppauge WinTV 401, Buslogic Multimaster SCSI controlling a Plextor 40X Max CD-ROM (which utterly and completely rocks), and Yamaha 4416 SCSI CD-RW. For some reason the FIC PA-2013 the system had before was unhappy about having the Buslogic controller and IDE drives on the primary controller. Smooth sailing in all cases w/ the ASUS P5A, though.
Also, I'm currently in the specification stage for 2 rackmount Athlon servers. After dealing with vendors to get the Athlon machines set up, I can tell you - it is *not* easy to find higher-end configurations with Athlon. Fortunately, the good people at ASL, Inc. have been very helpful. In fact, they were the first vendor I saw meaningfully demonstrate Athlons (when I was lucky enough to attend Atlanta Linux Showcase last year). If you're looking to build an Athlon server, check them out. They're cool. Tell them ninjaz sent you. ;)
That document was released in MSHTML.
'smart' quotes (or is it ?smart? quotes?), make dumb apostrophes.
Perhaps the next round of MS-related litigation will be a class action suit by Windows users seeking damages for being made to appear more inept than they actually are.
I saw a DVD player at Fry's while doing my Christmas shopping with a big "Plays MP3" sticker on the front. Since there are already enough computers around here which are mp3 enabled, it wasn't a selling point, though. I got a Sony instead. ;)
However, I think it's ultimately the Wrong Way to fix it. The troubles are:
1) How do you keep the group honest? Maybe RMS being leader would last for the rest of his life, but what about after that? What happens when you've got potentially a multi-billion dollar patent reserve? People such as these IP lawyers will attempt to bribe the people holding power in the organization and possibly resort to assassination. That is, like how the nice communists were all killed and replaced by mean exploiters of the power structure created after the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia.
2) The patent process is fairly expensive and tedious. Where does the money come from? How do you get investors in something that is guaranteed a 0% return?
3) How do you decide what to patent? The problem is that these things "look obvious". Sure, hindsight is 20/20, and you know what obvious thing someone has patented -yesterday-, but then you have to violate a patent, get sued (presumably paying lawyers the whole time), and only then get the original obvious patent invalidated.
4) There is no protection from patent squatters. Say Unisys has a patent on LZW, but wants to release a product that uses the GNU patented readline. They could just go ahead and sell a that patent to a squatter group (let's say Gold Digger Associates) Then, they're absolved from the stipulations that they not sue on what used to be their patent, get a nice lump sum from the sale of their LZW patent and the protections you've tried to achieve have been effectively sidestepped.
See what I mean? It would be better to actually fix the problem by having software & business-model patents declared invalid than to try to work around them. The ethically-challenged among us will always find workarounds to this sort of workaround.
Anyway, the most recent fruits of Creative's newfound enlightenment can be had here:
http://opensource.creative.com/
and here:
http://www.alsa-project.org/ Don't let the version # fool you, ALSA has been awesome on w/ my GUS Max since I started using it 6-8 months ago. You may want to save ALSA for a future go-round, though, until you're feel comfortable configuring drivers not included as part of the stock kernel, as it's completely redone (and backward compatible) sound support for Linux, which is planned to be the next generation drivers and API. Also, it has a user mailing list in case you'd like a helping hand.
Both have documentation about how to go about setting it up, so given the inclination, you can have sound right now instead of waiting for the next round of distro updates. :)
Btw, kernel configuration and compiling really isn't very difficult - it's primarily choosing what devices to support, and a few protocols (and each option has a friendly little help display if you're unsure). For more information, you can visit the Linux Documentation Project at http://www.linuxdoc.org/ and LinuxNewbie.org at (oddly enough) http://www.linuxnewbie.org/- home of the NHFs (Newbieized Help files "in plain english")
As for the other social programs, I think private charites (red cross anyone?) are a nicer solution than government-run ones, which tend to be quite lossy (eg,. 60-70% administrative costs), and lack any sort of common sense or conscience due to bureaucracy.
In it, he proposes that those taxes should go to the recording artists based on polls to determine popularity. That suggests "To each according to his ability" rather than need. In other words, it encourages doing something useful rather than being needy as communism does.
In the context of Free Software, his philosophies apply to the distribution of information, not of material things, which communism concerns itself with.
Regarding economics, Free Software specifically allows itself to be sold with the profits completely retained by the seller. Something I would consider more compatible with marxist ideals would be more along the lines of "Free for non-commercial use" and "Pay x% of your profits if you're making money with this. We'll make sure it gets to a needy person".
Also, rms' philosophy on copyright and patents is completely within the bounds described by Thomas Jefferson, who predated the idea of communism.
Quoth Mr. Jefferson:
Another insightful article (by rms) about why he is the way he is:http://www.linuxworl d.com/linuxworld/lw-1999-11/lw-11-rms.html
- video hardware (& its drivers) tends to be one of the touchiest areas of a system, best avoided if you're not using it as a workstation,
- You're wasting resources that could be used for serving on your X environment (especially with some of those new-fangled screensavers
;) - It's better to understand configuring the system the *right* way - via the command-line tools and configuration files. That way, you can keep multiple versions in case something goes wrong and you need to back out a change.
Now, with that out of the way.. The audits of source code would seem to imply that. If you'd like some data on the subject, visit the vulnerabilities section of http://www.securityfocus.com/ Have it show you the vulnerabilities of OpenBSD and of a few Linux distros so you can compare. Of course, unless you're allowing shell accounts, the external (network) security of either mostly depends on what daemons you're running and how they're configured. Both a well-maintained Linux server and a well-maintained OpenBSD server should be stable. There may be less scheduled downtime with OpenBSD if there's a kernel-related security issue in Linux, but in my experience with OpenBSD, NetBSD, FreeBSD, Linux and Solaris, all of them have been stable (current standard uptimes here around 6 months). Yes, andOne thing that BSD is currently very helpful with on the x86 architecture is large file support. The Linux limit is 2gb, so your MySQL databases are limited to that size.
It's impossible to say since you haven't specified which models they are. There are devices in each of the categories you metioned listed in the release notes for the i386 port, though, at http://www.openbsd.org/i386.html
The reason for this is that RAID-1 uses 1:1 mirroring of a 2-drive set while RAID-5 uses rotating parity in which parity information is distributed across all drives.
With regard to space, using RAID-1, your usable yield (what shows up in df) is half of the total disk space put into it. With RAID-5, parity info is spread througout all the drives. Eg., I have a RAID-5 using four 4GB drives, which gives me 12GB of usable space. With 0+1 on this configuration, it would be 8GB usable.
As for speed, both RAID-1 and RAID-5 allow you to read from multiple disks at once (which, of course, is a win). For writes, a drive pair in a RAID-1 will take as long as a write to a single drive. On RAID-5, however, it takes longer because (afaik) the RAID controller has to determine which drives to write the parity info to, which takes CPU time.
A decent little overview is at DPT's site (sadly, only in PDF) at http://www.dpt.com/pdf/understand_raid.pdf
I haven't met any NT admins who can demonstrate the same. It's always a story about how a friend of a friend had a cousin who worked at some important place that had a cream of the crop admin who was able to push NT to a whopping 60 days uptime or somesuch.
Btw, the "requires more knowledge" part mostly applies to getting started with the OS. It could require less knowledge to get a unix box running stably than it does to get an NT box running stably (and said knowledge is easier to come by) For example, you may have to do a bit of reading and compiling to get things how you want them, but the compiling is documented. Also, at least in the open source realm, mysterious failures tend not to be a problem. In the event something *does* fail, it's usually easy (or at least straightforward) to figure out why it's failing and how to fix it (as opposed to trying 25 different driver version, service pack version and system resource configurations) Even in the Unix world, Netscape Enterprise vs. Apache is a case in point here. When our corporate Netscape Enterprise server mysteriously failed to start one day due to a "sig6 pipe closed" error, it turned out that the search engine's index had gotten corrupted, and disabling the search engine prior to starting the netscape server would fix it. It took a call to netscape support to figure this out, though - running truss (equiv of strace on Linux) on the server didn't help, nor did the system or server logs.
Another thing I think I should mention is that if you put Linux on a webserver, and the application outgrows the machine (or OS), it's trivial to port the application up to a more "enterprise" class OS such as Solaris. At the Fortune 500 I mentioned in my last post, the enterprise webserver was recently moved from a big Irix machine to a big Solaris machine. Since all the in-house apps were coded in perl, everyone's applications didn't require any porting. The same would also be true for any of PHP, Python/Zope (and even java if you're lucky). Of course, you could also design the application with real scalability in mind and, for instance, use 2000 FreeBSD webservers like Microsoft does with Hotmail and let something like Solaris handle the backend mass storage. (Or like deja.com or google.com do with Linux.. or yahoo.com does with FreeBSD)
Anyway, regarding picking a Unix-type OS, and database it's obvious it's a complex issue. The machine crashing may be an immediate problem, but there are long-term issues to face. For instance, I have loaded (read loaded as in doing something - i.e., not idle) machines that stay up hundredes of days for an upgrade. That's without reading between the lines, reloading the OS, hacking the configuration or random parts of the OS breaking between upgrades.
People may say that Unix systems require less effort to run, but what it really requires is more knowledge. For instance, the primary webserver I run for an "e-business" is a single Debian machine on a pentium pro 200. Through several Debian upgrades (including libc5 -> libc6) it has always been stable and reliable. No service packs that break half the stuff, no middle of the night crashes, nothing. The amount of administration effort to run the box (which does hundreds of thousands of $$ of business a year) is a few hours a month. The cost of the setup was around $5000.
Fast-forward to my day job at a Fortune 500
There they recently migrated our mail server from a single (1) machine running netscape mail server to a farm of NT servers running Exchange. The Netscape mail server was on a Sun Enterprise and was rock solid. The Exchange servers, on the other hand, are on a weekly reboot schedule. Our Exchange/NT team had done all it could, and came to the conclusion that either the machines could be rebooted every 7 days or crash on their own every 10.
Also of interest is the management capabilities inherent with Unix-based systems vs. Exchange. For instance, on the Netscape mail server, if a user wanted files from his mailbox restored, a few files were restored from backup, and presto! On the Exchange server, the entire mail database has to be rolled back to the state where the files still existed (for *everyone*)
Another item of interest is that when doing the mail server migration, the postmaster box ended up with over 60,000 pieces of mail in its box from warnings. With the server on solaris, I was able to write a quick perl script that would delete the files of specific subject line. The Exchange team's answer to a similar problem (this time with 100,000 emails) was to pull them up in Outlook and delete the messages 10 at a time. Of course, that wasn't possible, as the machine would just freeze due to the insane amount of RAM required to do such a thing (not to mention the time required to do this 10 at a time..) Luckily one of the up & coming unix geeks had a MS background and mentioned that outlook delete filters would do the trick (which they did - but it had to be accomplished from the client side)
Anyway, the moral of the story is that NT server installations as a rule will cost more, require more maintenance and make it difficult for you to fix things when it really counts.
Anyway, no matter what you do this time, I'd reccommend you at least set up an experimental server to do similar things to familarize yourself with a unix-like enironment. And, learn enough perl (or python/zope or php or java...) to put together the kind of web application you'd want. My personal favorite is perl, as CPAN has modules to do just about anything, and it's been invaluable to me as a system administrator and web programmer, but I know people have done very cool things with the others, also. Also, SQL. I'd recommend Postgres and MySQL (whichever fits the job) and, possibly Sybase (but its proprietary nature can be a pain at times). Don't forget about FreeBSD, either. Its scaled-down nature can make administration easier when you only want specific things on a box, and at present, it has some large file advantages over Linux.
You can find its website here: http://www.covalent.net/
Or if you live in a free country, you can use mod_ssl at http://www.modssl.org
Also, I wouldn't really call it a close race between Postgres and MySQL features. MySQL doesn't plan to do SQL Transactions, for instance, while Postgres does. MySQL, on the other hand, has much friendlier SQL extensions, particularly for date formatting and such. Both have commercial support options.
$ time cp /from-linux-2.2.10-ac3/ppro-200/testfile .
real 1m11.308s
user 0m0.017s
sys 0m5.704s
$ time cp /from-freebsd-3.2-RELEASE/k6-2-400/testfile .
real 0m52.546s
user 0m0.013s
sys 0m5.314s
It's probably worth noting that (at least) FreeBSD and NetBSD support NFSv3 in stable releases, and Linux does not yet.
I can't give a good answer to what would be best for NFS serving *to* linux, as I don't have anything set up that way. Samba should display less variance as it's a user-level process. In that case, network stack and ethernet drivers would matter more.