SGI's website has always been somewhat flashy. I think the new website is a lot cleaner than their previous one... The tab menus at the top are fast & very usable. this isn't form over function, this is form working with function nicely.
What, you don't like sites that actually use real graphic artists instead of code monkeys to do their webpages?
you seem to have an odd sence of what "professional" means...
Interesting article. It's almost bang on with the end goal of the FSF: software (and IP) should have no owners.
We know that abolishing copyright is the proper choice for freedom.. what we don't know yet is if its the proper choice for economics. There never are easy choices in that regard. A physical property-driven society has led us to great advances in the standard of living among the industrial nations - should that right be extended to intellectual property, for the economic benefit of all?
In past, it was justifiable.. is it now? Will "piracy" go UP when copyright is abolished, or will it stay the same & people continue to buy stuff because "it's the right thing"? Will we figure a way to charge for copies when necessary? What restrictions are reasonable on modification (of music, for instance)?
There are plenty of problems to be resolved, and I'm still very skeptical about how it would work for stuff like books & music, but... only with argument & debate will we find out if it'll work.
I'm sitting on the fence, with my foot somewhat on the "no it won't work" side, for now, but that might change.
First off, I want to second Chris Thomas' comments about college.. there really ARE two types, and even though most type 2 universities aren't always perfect [mine isn't], it's better than everything else out there.
Now.. I enjoy university a lot, but I tend to have a different perspective towards school than my peers - many of them are in it for the paper and don't see the point of the courses that we take...however, I see every reason behind the course curriculum, and see what I can benefit out if it - usually concepts I wouldn't have the time or energy to learn on my own w/o assistance.
I enjoy what I'm learning because I know it *matters*.. if people in school actually remembered the concepts during a concurrency or OS course, they'd be considered expert programmers (compared to the majority).
Of course, the down side to my enjoyment of school is that I tend to get crappy marks in areas that I'm less passionate about.. CS. I love CS. I ace CS all the time... Math. I like math, but I'm not good at it, and it's pulling me down. So I'm faced with the threat every term of being bumped out of my honours degree to a general degree e... The question is: do I really need MORE CS courses, or have I learned enough that I can just take the easier degree & get out?
I really like higher education, but I think it always comes down to personal choice.. if you want to have a career doing web development, don't go to college. But don't cry if the economy turns sour and you wind up unemployed. If you want to be an expert programmer in enterprise systems, or distributed systems, or graphics, or.. etc, college will do you good, and it provides security.
Soon, having "a job" isn't going to matter as having a "career" and a way of distinguishing yourself from your peers. You have to be able to say - "THIS IS ME, This is why I'm the best at what I do, and this is why I command a high salary." Otherwise your voice will be lost in the herd, and you won't stand out. Contributing free software is uplifting, but not very much so when you're forced to settle for a poor salary because you're just "another C programmer" or another "VB programmer"....
The only way to differentiate yourself is through knowledge - and higher education is one way (not the only way) to get it. I think in future college/univeristy may become obselete because of the rampant incompetence of the majority of them, but that doesn't mean that "higher education" will die - it will just take other forms.
i had a big obsession with "making things go" from day one of using my computers.... I too never understood coders, but I always was interested in programming on the side, and was quite good at it... never really felt it was a career option because i couldn't see myself doing it all the time. Furthermore, I always envisioned "real programmers" as extremely bright people.
After a time I got to experience the typical large IS department politics, hubris and the bags under the eyes of most senior IS managers... The future for IS people doesn't look pleasing, unless you really enjoy being yelled at by users and having to put up with incompetent coworkers. Everyone and their dog wants to be a sysadmin/IS worker, with MCSE's being more common than VISA cards now. It didn't seem to be what I wanted in a career - everyone else was doing it, and I didn't see the potential to differentiate myself enough to advance to the level of salary & responsibility that I wanted to have.
So - the stories in this forum are comforting because they remind me that there ARE (a few) competent sysadmins who are trying to fight against the tide of managers and cheap, clueless-neophytes turning IS into a "factory worker's job".
Anyway.. I got into programming heavily over the past three years, especially with higher level languages like Smalltalk, ObjC and Java... and the thrill is pretty similar: you make things work, but this time it is on a much grander scale. There is *so* much to learn in programming & designing and communicating with users/coworkers that it is a never ending journey....
Of course, what I *don't* understand are the coders who label themselves as "C coders", or "COBOL coders", and basically sit in a corner all day, bitter at anyone who challenges the "one true way".
To me, this is sort of like arguing in favor of stone tablets vs. paper. While I can see the joy of twiddling bits with older/lower level languages, programming can be so much more than that, given a broader set of tools and stylistic ideas. Use the right tool for the right job - Perl vs. C vs. Java vs. SmallTalk.. they're all good for their own uses. [well, Perl is good for everything, but.. >;) ]
Programming is great BECAUSE there are so many paradigms, styles and idioms, and the religious wars continue to amaze me.
On the ironic side, there seem to be as many clueless programmers out there as there are clueless IT people (if not more so)... though for now I think it's easier to differentiate your skills in the programming world (where your past designs/code speak for themselves) than in the sysadmin world (where everything is based on intangible effectiveness).
the problem with that approach is that there is just chaos with regards to "community opinions", and nothing will be accomplished.
having respected members of the community speak on our behalf is an imperfect, but acceptable solution, especially when dealing with the business community. the alternative, anarchy, is not an option.
Actually, Apache does technically use thread pooling, but more precicely it is "process pooling". The difference being that each process is given its own address space, execution state and OS resources, whereas a thread/task just gives seperate execution state to each thread: they all share the same address space.
On most OS', Linux included, creating many processes is understandably a lot more heavyweight (and inefficient) than creating lightweight threads. This isn't really that noticable under light/moderate loads, but when the server is under heavy load and threads are being spawned on a near per-request basis, you'll notice Apache's performance degrade significantly vs. Netscape Enterprise server, Zeus, or even Java web server (which uses user-level threading typically).
Here's a good paper by Doug Schmidt on web server threading models.. it's about 2 years old so Apache is probably a LOT better now, but it explains the issues & shows benchmarks clearly:
Software is usually about making my life better: more productive, more fun, more interesting.
For that reason, freedom is only one way to make my life better - it's not the only way. I disagree fundamentally with your postulation that "everybody loses" when software is not free. It is, and always will be a *choice* as to whether software is free, as the freedom to *choose* about what you do with your property is a more fundamental freedom than to have the freedom to have widespread modification/redistribution rights to someone else's property, intellectual or otherwise.
The mainstream is not going to all of a sudden awaken from their slumber and realize magically that our personal freedoms are being trounced upon by proprietary software. This is based on the fundamentally flawed assumption that intellectual property rights don't exist from a moral/ethical perspective. The jury's still out on that one because history & economics have shown the power of "property-driven" societies.
As RMS says, the one threat to software freedom is to use proprietary software when it is "convenient to do so". Do you really think the herd is going to move to free software unless it IS MORE CONVENIENT than proprietary? That IS the reason Linux & Apache are so successful. Will the GIMP replace Photoshop any time soon? I doubt it. Will vi/emacs+gcc replace the major IDE environments out there? Very, very, doubtful.
As for your domestic violence analogy: I'm a recent Mac convert - I guess I must be a masochist, is that it?:) I've never owned a Mac before, though I've used them and my next computer WILL be a G3, because it offers me what I want: power, style, speed at a decent price. I will be running Linux because I enjoy the OS and I enjoy the freedom it gives me, but I probably also will run MacOS X because it will be convenient to do so (i.e. powerful, elegent and usable, and has the dev tools I want).
Mac users do 'get it', after living in there self-enforced bubble over the last 10 years, they're starting to venture out of it and realize there's a big, complex world out there. Perhaps some Slashdot users will do the same some day....
I agree with your sentiment. While their treatment of NT in this study is erroneous in some ways, D.H. Brown has dissed NT significantly in the past, so I think that's why I'm not concentrating on that aspect of the study as much. Of course, in Linux vs. NT debates it certainly is disappointing to seem them cast as near-equals, which obviously isn't true. (though must debates don't always have to be about NT vs. Linux)
The thing is, why haven't there been any real studies about Mean Time Between Failures of Linux vs. NT? Sure, it's a difficult subject to tackle in a controlled fashion, but enquiring minds want to know:)
The evidence of NT's up/downtime is mostly anecdotal as well! [or it's just marketing spew]..
Most of the evidence I've seen is anecdotal, and I too would like some hard numbers about Linux+Apache+mod_perl vs. NT+IIS+ASP .
My anecdotal experiences tell me that overall the Linux solution would be better, but I know that IIS does thread management a lot better than apache [thread pool vs. thread-per-process] & hence typically serves up pages quicker when under lighter loads. Under heavier loads, NT will crash:)
As was discussed when this story was up a few days ago, this study isn't FUD. It makes an honest attempt at comparing commercial Unicies & Linux. D.H. Brown has no particular love for NT, either.
The fact of the matter is that Linux's SMP support isn't on par with Solaris' (4 CPU's vs. 64), Linux's high-availability clusters aren't on par with *any* commercial UNIX (yet), and Linux's filesystems aren't journaled. (yet)
Some day (Kernel 2.4/3.0) all these features will probably be there, but let's not start touting vapourware over other solutions. Open source can only combat FUD if the code IS THERE. Right now, it isn't.
"Use the right tool for the right job" - Linux [on Intel especially] isn't it for sites that need extreme scalability & high availability. (A Sun Ultra 10k, AS/400 parallel cluster or S/390 mainframe is better suited to those environments.)
Ditto for sites that need to run a transaction processing monitor (like BEA Tuxedo) or a high end application server (like Apple's WebObjects). Though, this is changing... I think BEA is thinking of a Linux port... and WebObjects on Mac OS X Server is pretty sweet.
[ though not 100% open source, but nothing open source comes even close to Tuxedo or WebObjects in terms of performance, elegence, reusability & developer tools. Perhaps the GNUstep project will adopt the WebObjects framework as another pet project.. ]
As an example, there are people out there in the "Java" community who really are happy about Sun's licence for Jini so they can ensure it is continually refined. The "pay if you play" model may have potential.
The slashdot community does not represent "every" interest. Some people just want to see better quality infrastructure & don't care if the license is restrictive.
Larry Wall, ESR, Guido, et al have contributed VAST AMOUNTS open source code to the community. They are well known *precisely* for that reason, though ESR is better well known because of his excellent essay-writing ability.
If you contribute code or documentation to this community you too will become well known and help further the cause more than any baffle-gabble on Slashdot will do.
If you don't do the above, you're just a voice in the herd, and there really isn't a reason to listen to you over the others.
What IF Microsoft released the source to their OS under an NPL-like licence?
That sure is going to tear up a lot of people who claim they're in favour of open source for the "moral aspects" of it.... I think that if Microsoft does this, we're going to see a lot of flaming akin to the KDE vs. GNOME battle - no matter how much one side tries, the other side continues to aimlessly flame away.
Microsoft is a very competitive company with some questionable businesses practices, and some "less than innovating" products...so what - that doesn't exactly make them evil. I don't like them, nor their products, but I do understand that they (Ballmer especially) are *bright* people. If they see business benefit with open source, they'll use it.
Actually, I agree more or less with your assessment, though I'm a little more optimistic about Java's abilities. (This probably comes down to the strong vs. weak typing argument that I won't get into. In summary: I like both, but going foward there are certain domains that need strong typing, and others that should have weak typing. This is too much of a religious issue: witness the flamewars against Tcl:)
SmallTalk did catch on in many industries, but it never quite penetrated into mainstream use. Does anyone really know why? Perhaps it primarily because it was so advanced for its time (in the business community, I'd say late 80s to early 90s). Perhaps it was because C++ offered the "path of least resistance". I don't really know.
Java is just an attempt (imho, and from what I understand, some veteren SmallTalker's opinions) at doing SmallTalk over again for the C++ crowd (albeit with some limitations, since the programming community at large seems to be set against weakly-typed languages)
I love SmallTalk [and am very interested in Dylan or Self], and wish it would resurge with industry support. Until it does, (go Squeak go!) however, Java is an acceptable alternative, as it also provides the "path of least resistence" to some of SmallTalk's better technologies: GC, dynamic typing (though restricted through java interfaces), and a Packages/Classes/Methods IDE (through VisualAge for Java).
Regarding COM: I felt that Microsoft actually did some cool stuff with their VM to support COM and make it MUCH easier to use than the C++-way of using COM. COM inherently is based upon the idea of C/C++ pointers, so it's not going to naturally map to any language, Java or otherwise (witness the atrocity called "Automation" to allow COM to talk to Visual Basic).
Furthermore, as for your "double lines of code" assertion, I think you're overstating it a bit. Java doesn't have blocks, and it requires explicit type down-casting, but I don't see this as "doubling" code requirements. Certainly, the code requirement is larger than SmallTalk, but not significantly so.
I'm very glad to hear this. I think this was my point.. we need to counteract FUD by "just doing it" - creating the features the market thinks it needs.
Of course, this is for Linux 2.3... and it will be a long... long.. time before it is "produciton quality" and released in Linux 2.4/3.0 (12-18 months?) So my observations [about Linux not competing with high-end unicies] were very valid for the time being.
the more I read about the hoopla over this virus, the more I want to switch industries to something less blatantly silly and immature (like concrete production)
- It has become clear just HOW stupid ZDNet and its target readership are. I still can't fathom that people actually ate up the dumbed-down explanations, the conspiracy-theory GUID matching saga, the prediction of hundreds of millions of dollars of lost productivity, etc. It was a BENIGN MACRO VIRUS! This doesn't deserve a whole "special report".
Of course, on the bright side, the "truly professional" trade rags, like InformationWeek or InfoWorld, barely had a peep about Melissa.
- People who were affected were those who were stupid enough to click "YES" when the "Do you want to run this macro (which may be a virus) ?" question came up. I have little sympathy for them or their IT departments. Macro viruses have been a well-known threat for years, and avoidance training should have been provided.
- The obtuse "virus protection schemes" from IT shops are beyond ludicrous. Go to Bob Lewis' infoworld column this week and read about how they removed EVERYONE'S FLOPPY DRIVE at one shop, and you now had to use a floppy under lock & key to copy disks....
- They want to put a benign macro virus writer in jail for 40 years, when arguably, all of the damage (tied up mail servers and crashed NT boxes) were the result of a) stupid operators and b) shoddy technology.
In all, this whole incident makes me ill. I hope that if open source does anything, it helps to bring FUD like this down to a tolerable level.
Is it our role to continually scorn criminals even after they have paid for their crimes?
Kevin's jail time has exceeded that of most fraud-related charges. The government is abusing his rights. Furthermore, many of his charges are very "trumped up".
This is why people support him. He's paid for his crime, and now is the time to seek his freedom.
- You can't run a 64-processor SMP box on Linux. - You can't get a government B1 security rating on Linux (You can on "Trusted Solaris" or on AIX) - Inclusive with the above, we need a journaled filesystem - You can't get highly-available failover clusters with Linux. [though the linux-HA project is working on it] - You can't get single-system-image clusters for scalability with Linux (Beowulf uses a low-level messaging API that essentially ties your app to Linux) - You can't have terabyte files for large databases [that means no data warehouses] - You can't have > 100,000 users on a Linux box for very large networks [Solaris & AIX can]
etc.
By now you're all probably hopping mad at me, but please folks: take a deep breath. Is this really FUD? Or is it merely pointing out some small nitpicks? My, my... people are so quick to criticize and yet so hyper-sensitive to their own medicine.
Let's get real: we're only talking some minimal feature-lack, and not very "widely used" features at that. Wanna fix it? Contribute code. This is how Linux makes FUD irrelevant - not through whining about the WSJ's misleading prose.
The underlying study by D.H. Brown is rooted in fact, and it means one thing: we now have specific target areas that Linux "could" be improved, provided someone with the time+need will contribute.
Linux is a good OS. Probably the best available for the Intel archiecture.
However, it does not come close to offerings from Sun or IBM for SMP scalability, security, and high-availability [i.e. fail-over clusters].
Wanna fix this? Join the Linux-High Availability project. Write a journaled filesystem. etc. Because for NOW, this isn't FUD, there are the hard facts.
- the litigation conspiracy was well done at first and believable - the 'injunction' shutdowns were plain silly.
Conclusion: - this was about as funny as the jwz-is-dead piece. it wasn't.
only bright thing is that the creators of this hoax got a laugh out of it... I guess it releases some of their stress before the flamethrowers are turned on again...
Slashdot Mirror
SGI's website has always been somewhat flashy. I think the new website is a lot cleaner than their previous one... The tab menus at the top are fast & very usable. this isn't form over function, this is form working with function nicely.
What, you don't like sites that actually use real graphic artists instead of code monkeys to do their webpages?
you seem to have an odd sence of what "professional" means...
Interesting article. It's almost bang on with the end goal of the FSF: software (and IP) should have no owners.
We know that abolishing copyright is the proper choice for freedom.. what we don't know yet is if its the proper choice for economics. There never are easy choices in that regard. A physical property-driven society has led us to great advances in the standard of living among the industrial nations - should that right be extended to intellectual property, for the economic benefit of all?
In past, it was justifiable.. is it now?
Will "piracy" go UP when copyright is abolished, or will it stay the same & people continue to buy stuff because "it's the right thing"?
Will we figure a way to charge for copies when necessary?
What restrictions are reasonable on modification (of music, for instance)?
There are plenty of problems to be resolved, and I'm still very skeptical about how it would work for stuff like books & music, but... only with argument & debate will we find out if it'll work.
I'm sitting on the fence, with my foot somewhat on the "no it won't work" side, for now, but that might change.
First off, I want to second Chris Thomas' comments about college.. there really ARE two types, and even though most type 2 universities aren't always perfect [mine isn't], it's better than everything else out there.
..however, I see every reason behind the course curriculum, and see what I can benefit out if it - usually concepts I wouldn't have the time or energy to learn on my own w/o assistance.
Now.. I enjoy university a lot, but I tend to have a different perspective towards school than my peers - many of them are in it for the paper and don't see the point of the courses that we take.
I enjoy what I'm learning because I know it *matters*.. if people in school actually remembered the concepts during a concurrency or OS course, they'd be considered expert programmers (compared to the majority).
Of course, the down side to my enjoyment of school is that I tend to get crappy marks in areas that I'm less passionate about.. CS. I love CS. I ace CS all the time... Math. I like math, but I'm not good at it, and it's pulling me down. So I'm faced with the threat every term of being bumped out of my honours degree to a general degree e... The question is: do I really need MORE CS courses, or have I learned enough that I can just take the easier degree & get out?
I really like higher education, but I think it always comes down to personal choice.. if you want to have a career doing web development, don't go to college. But don't cry if the economy turns sour and you wind up unemployed. If you want to be an expert programmer in enterprise systems, or distributed systems, or graphics, or.. etc, college will do you good, and it provides security.
Soon, having "a job" isn't going to matter as having a "career" and a way of distinguishing yourself from your peers. You have to be able to say - "THIS IS ME, This is why I'm the best at what I do, and this is why I command a high salary." Otherwise your voice will be lost in the herd, and you won't stand out. Contributing free software is uplifting, but not very much so when you're forced to settle for a poor salary because you're just "another C programmer" or another "VB programmer"....
The only way to differentiate yourself is through knowledge - and higher education is one way (not the only way) to get it. I think in future college/univeristy may become obselete because of the rampant incompetence of the majority of them, but that doesn't mean that "higher education" will die - it will just take other forms.
i had a big obsession with "making things go" from day one of using my computers.... I too never understood coders, but I always was interested in programming on the side, and was quite good at it... never really felt it was a career option because i couldn't see myself doing it all the time. Furthermore, I always envisioned "real programmers" as extremely bright people.
....
After a time I got to experience the typical large IS department politics, hubris and the bags under the eyes of most senior IS managers... The future for IS people doesn't look pleasing, unless you really enjoy being yelled at by users and having to put up with incompetent coworkers. Everyone and their dog wants to be a sysadmin/IS worker, with MCSE's being more common than VISA cards now. It didn't seem to be what I wanted in a career - everyone else was doing it, and I didn't see the potential to differentiate myself enough to advance to the level of salary & responsibility that I wanted to have.
So - the stories in this forum are comforting because they remind me that there ARE (a few) competent sysadmins who are trying to fight against the tide of managers and cheap, clueless-neophytes turning IS into a "factory worker's job".
Anyway.. I got into programming heavily over the past three years, especially with higher level languages like Smalltalk, ObjC and Java... and the thrill is pretty similar: you make things work, but this time it is on a much grander scale. There is *so* much to learn in programming & designing and communicating with users/coworkers that it is a never ending journey
Of course, what I *don't* understand are the coders who label themselves as "C coders", or "COBOL coders", and basically sit in a corner all day, bitter at anyone who challenges the "one true way".
To me, this is sort of like arguing in favor of stone tablets vs. paper. While I can see the joy of twiddling bits with older/lower level languages, programming can be so much more than that, given a broader set of tools and stylistic ideas. Use the right tool for the right job - Perl vs. C vs. Java vs. SmallTalk.. they're all good for their own uses. [well, Perl is good for everything, but.. >;) ]
Programming is great BECAUSE there are so many paradigms, styles and idioms, and the religious wars continue to amaze me.
On the ironic side, there seem to be as many clueless programmers out there as there are clueless IT people (if not more so)... though for now I think it's easier to differentiate your skills in the programming world (where your past designs/code speak for themselves) than in the sysadmin world (where everything is based on intangible effectiveness).
cool, glad to hear it.
the problem with that approach is that there is just chaos with regards to "community opinions", and nothing will be accomplished.
having respected members of the community speak on our behalf is an imperfect, but acceptable solution, especially when dealing with the business community. the alternative, anarchy, is not an option.
Actually, Apache does technically use thread pooling, but more precicely it is "process pooling". The difference being that each process is given its own address space, execution state and OS resources, whereas a thread/task just gives seperate execution state to each thread: they all share the same address space.
p s.gz
On most OS', Linux included, creating many processes is understandably a lot more heavyweight (and inefficient) than creating lightweight threads. This isn't really that noticable under light/moderate loads, but when the server is under heavy load and threads are being spawned on a near per-request basis, you'll notice Apache's performance degrade significantly vs. Netscape Enterprise server, Zeus, or even Java web server (which uses user-level threading typically).
Here's a good paper by Doug Schmidt on web server threading models.. it's about 2 years old so Apache is probably a LOT better now, but it explains the issues & shows benchmarks clearly:
http://siesta.cs.wustl.edu/~schmidt/INFOCOM-97.
Software is usually about making my life better: more productive, more fun, more interesting.
:) I've never owned a Mac before, though I've used them and my next computer WILL be a G3, because it offers me what I want: power, style, speed at a decent price. I will be running Linux because I enjoy the OS and I enjoy the freedom it gives me, but I probably also will run MacOS X because it will be convenient to do so (i.e. powerful, elegent and usable, and has the dev tools I want).
For that reason, freedom is only one way to make my life better - it's not the only way. I disagree fundamentally with your postulation that "everybody loses" when software is not free. It is, and always will be a *choice* as to whether software is free, as the freedom to *choose* about what you do with your property is a more fundamental freedom than to have the freedom to have widespread modification/redistribution rights to someone else's property, intellectual or otherwise.
The mainstream is not going to all of a sudden awaken from their slumber and realize magically that our personal freedoms are being trounced upon by proprietary software. This is based on the fundamentally flawed assumption that intellectual property rights don't exist from a moral/ethical perspective. The jury's still out on that one because history & economics have shown the power of "property-driven" societies.
As RMS says, the one threat to software freedom is to use proprietary software when it is "convenient to do so". Do you really think the herd is going to move to free software unless it IS MORE CONVENIENT than proprietary? That IS the reason Linux & Apache are so successful. Will the GIMP replace Photoshop any time soon? I doubt it. Will vi/emacs+gcc replace the major IDE environments out there? Very, very, doubtful.
As for your domestic violence analogy: I'm a recent Mac convert - I guess I must be a masochist, is that it?
Mac users do 'get it', after living in there self-enforced bubble over the last 10 years, they're starting to venture out of it and realize there's a big, complex world out there. Perhaps some Slashdot users will do the same some day....
a lot of systems that have extremely high uptimes (over 2 years) are internal business systems and probably wouldn't be on such a survey.
for instance, some mainframe systems have had uptimes of 5+ years.
I agree with your sentiment. While their treatment of NT in this study is erroneous in some ways, D.H. Brown has dissed NT significantly in the past, so I think that's why I'm not concentrating on that aspect of the study as much.
:)
Of course, in Linux vs. NT debates it certainly is disappointing to seem them cast as near-equals, which obviously isn't true. (though must debates don't always have to be about NT vs. Linux)
The thing is, why haven't there been any real studies about Mean Time Between Failures of Linux vs. NT? Sure, it's a difficult subject to tackle in a controlled fashion, but enquiring minds want to know
The evidence of NT's up/downtime is mostly anecdotal as well! [or it's just marketing spew]..
Most of the evidence I've seen is anecdotal, and I too would like some hard numbers about Linux+Apache+mod_perl vs. NT+IIS+ASP .
:)
My anecdotal experiences tell me that overall the Linux solution would be better, but I know that IIS does thread management a lot better than apache [thread pool vs. thread-per-process] & hence typically serves up pages quicker when under lighter loads. Under heavier loads, NT will crash
Read those comments again. 2 GB *is* the limitation of physical RAM.
the AS/400's we had over at a medium-sized financial services company that I worked for in Canada had 1 gig of memory and 512 megs of memory.
They were upgraded a year later to 3 gigs of memory and 1 gig, respectively. Oh, and the second machine was JUST a developer server.
I know of a major bank that has 4+ gigs of ram for their Internet & Telephone banking computers.
Such is life in big business. $50 solutions for $5 problems.
The fact of the matter is that Linux's SMP support isn't on par with Solaris' (4 CPU's vs. 64), Linux's high-availability clusters aren't on par with *any* commercial UNIX (yet), and Linux's filesystems aren't journaled. (yet)
Some day (Kernel 2.4/3.0) all these features will probably be there, but let's not start touting vapourware over other solutions. Open source can only combat FUD if the code IS THERE. Right now, it isn't.
"Use the right tool for the right job" - Linux [on Intel especially] isn't it for sites that need extreme scalability & high availability. (A Sun Ultra 10k, AS/400 parallel cluster or S/390 mainframe is better suited to those environments.)
Ditto for sites that need to run a transaction processing monitor (like BEA Tuxedo) or a high end application server (like Apple's WebObjects). Though, this is changing... I think BEA is thinking of a Linux port... and WebObjects on Mac OS X Server is pretty sweet.
[ though not 100% open source, but nothing open source comes even close to Tuxedo or WebObjects in terms of performance, elegence, reusability & developer tools. Perhaps the GNUstep project will adopt the WebObjects framework as another pet project.. ]
As an example, there are people out there in the "Java" community who really are happy about Sun's licence for Jini so they can ensure it is continually refined. The "pay if you play" model may have potential.
The slashdot community does not represent "every" interest. Some people just want to see better quality infrastructure & don't care if the license is restrictive.
Larry Wall, ESR, Guido, et al have contributed VAST AMOUNTS open source code to the community. They are well known *precisely* for that reason, though ESR is better well known because of his excellent essay-writing ability.
If you contribute code or documentation to this community you too will become well known and help further the cause more than any baffle-gabble on Slashdot will do.
If you don't do the above, you're just a voice in the herd, and there really isn't a reason to listen to you over the others.
What IF Microsoft released the source to their OS under an NPL-like licence?
That sure is going to tear up a lot of people who claim they're in favour of open source for the "moral aspects" of it.... I think that if Microsoft does this, we're going to see a lot of flaming akin to the KDE vs. GNOME battle - no matter how much one side tries, the other side continues to aimlessly flame away.
Microsoft is a very competitive company with some questionable businesses practices, and some "less than innovating" products...so what - that doesn't exactly make them evil. I don't like them, nor their products, but I do understand that they (Ballmer especially) are *bright* people. If they see business benefit with open source, they'll use it.
Actually, I agree more or less with your assessment, though I'm a little more optimistic about Java's abilities. (This probably comes down to the strong vs. weak typing argument that I won't get into. In summary: I like both, but going foward there are certain domains that need strong typing, and others that should have weak typing. This is too much of a religious issue: witness the flamewars against Tcl :)
SmallTalk did catch on in many industries, but it never quite penetrated into mainstream use. Does anyone really know why? Perhaps it primarily because it was so advanced for its time (in the business community, I'd say late 80s to early 90s). Perhaps it was because C++ offered the "path of least resistance". I don't really know.
Java is just an attempt (imho, and from what I understand, some veteren SmallTalker's opinions) at doing SmallTalk over again for the C++ crowd (albeit with some limitations, since the programming community at large seems to be set against weakly-typed languages)
I love SmallTalk [and am very interested in Dylan or Self], and wish it would resurge with industry support. Until it does, (go Squeak go!) however, Java is an acceptable alternative, as it also provides the "path of least resistence" to some of SmallTalk's better technologies: GC, dynamic typing (though restricted through java interfaces), and a Packages/Classes/Methods IDE (through VisualAge for Java).
Regarding COM: I felt that Microsoft actually did some cool stuff with their VM to support COM and make it MUCH easier to use than the C++-way of using COM. COM inherently is based upon the idea of C/C++ pointers, so it's not going to naturally map to any language, Java or otherwise (witness the atrocity called "Automation" to allow COM to talk to Visual Basic).
Furthermore, as for your "double lines of code" assertion, I think you're overstating it a bit. Java doesn't have blocks, and it requires explicit type down-casting, but I don't see this as "doubling" code requirements. Certainly, the code requirement is larger than SmallTalk, but not significantly so.
I'm very glad to hear this. I think this was my point.. we need to counteract FUD by "just doing it" - creating the features the market thinks it needs.
Of course, this is for Linux 2.3... and it will be a long... long.. time before it is "produciton quality" and released in Linux 2.4/3.0 (12-18 months?) So my observations [about Linux not competing with high-end unicies] were very valid for the time being.
the more I read about the hoopla over this virus, the more I want to switch industries to something less blatantly silly and immature (like concrete production)
- It has become clear just HOW stupid ZDNet and its target readership are. I still can't fathom that people actually ate up the dumbed-down explanations, the conspiracy-theory GUID matching saga, the prediction of hundreds of millions of dollars of lost productivity, etc. It was a BENIGN MACRO VIRUS! This doesn't deserve a whole "special report".
Of course, on the bright side, the "truly professional" trade rags, like InformationWeek or InfoWorld, barely had a peep about Melissa.
- People who were affected were those who were stupid enough to click "YES" when the "Do you want to run this macro (which may be a virus) ?" question came up. I have little sympathy for them or their IT departments. Macro viruses have been a well-known threat for years, and avoidance training should have been provided.
- The obtuse "virus protection schemes" from IT shops are beyond ludicrous. Go to Bob Lewis' infoworld column this week and read about how they removed EVERYONE'S FLOPPY DRIVE at one shop, and you now had to use a floppy under lock & key to copy disks....
- They want to put a benign macro virus writer in jail for 40 years, when arguably, all of the damage (tied up mail servers and crashed NT boxes) were the result of a) stupid operators and b) shoddy technology.
In all, this whole incident makes me ill. I hope that if open source does anything, it helps to bring FUD like this down to a tolerable level.
go to www.infoworld.com and read their take on the D.H. Brown study. They focused on commercial unicies. NT was included for balance.
Is it our role to continually scorn criminals even after they have paid for their crimes?
Kevin's jail time has exceeded that of most fraud-related charges. The government is abusing his rights. Furthermore, many of his charges are very "trumped up".
This is why people support him. He's paid for his crime, and now is the time to seek his freedom.
- You can't run a 64-processor SMP box on Linux.
- You can't get a government B1 security rating on Linux (You can on "Trusted Solaris" or on AIX)
- Inclusive with the above, we need a journaled filesystem
- You can't get highly-available failover clusters with Linux. [though the linux-HA project is working on it]
- You can't get single-system-image clusters for scalability with Linux (Beowulf uses a low-level messaging API that essentially ties your app to Linux)
- You can't have terabyte files for large databases [that means no data warehouses]
- You can't have > 100,000 users on a Linux box for very large networks [Solaris & AIX can]
etc.
By now you're all probably hopping mad at me, but please folks: take a deep breath. Is this really FUD? Or is it merely pointing out some small nitpicks? My, my... people are so quick to criticize and yet so hyper-sensitive to their own medicine.
Let's get real: we're only talking some minimal feature-lack, and not very "widely used" features at that. Wanna fix it? Contribute code. This is how Linux makes FUD irrelevant - not through whining about the WSJ's misleading prose.
The underlying study by D.H. Brown is rooted in fact, and it means one thing: we now have specific target areas that Linux "could" be improved, provided someone with the time+need will contribute.
Linux is a good OS. Probably the best available for the Intel archiecture.
However, it does not come close to offerings from Sun or IBM for SMP scalability, security, and high-availability [i.e. fail-over clusters].
Wanna fix this? Join the Linux-High Availability project. Write a journaled filesystem. etc. Because for NOW, this isn't FUD, there are the hard facts.
- the litigation conspiracy was well done at first and believable
- the 'injunction' shutdowns were plain silly.
Conclusion:
- this was about as funny as the jwz-is-dead piece. it wasn't.
only bright thing is that the creators of this hoax got a laugh out of it... I guess it releases some of their stress before the flamethrowers are turned on again...