ZFS can do RAID1 (mirror). I'm not sure if it does a concat or RAID0. It does RAIDZ which is like RAID5 w/o the write penalty. And RAIDZ2 which is like RAID6 (2 parity disks). You can layer them; A mirror of 2 RAIDZ pools for example.
ZFS does error correction. If you have a firmware issue in your controller or a bad cable, ZFS will detect it and correct on a RAID. It will do a bit or protection on non RAID too. Any other filesystem will silently corrupt your data. IMO this is the most important reason to use ZFS. Yes, I've lost a filesystem due to a firmware bug.
I have a system and get 60MB/s write with 4 500GB SATA drives in RAIDZ. Gigabit ethernet is about 20MB/s. I haven't done any tuning and am using cheap hardware (ethernet $20 card, $20 switch, motherboard SATA). My setup was $2k. If you need a more robust, fast platform, look to Sun hardware (the Thumper) that's been designed with this in mind
I'm running Solaris 10u3 which has been tested more extensively then Solaris Express/OpenSolaris. Many of the extra drivers & features from those will end up in 10u4 (iSCSI target).
I access the fileserver from my MacOSX server via NFS or Samba. MacOSX 10.5 has been seen with ZFS in it also.
At home I was running Linux w/ 3 120 GB SATA drives in software RAID-5 and LVM on top. I switched to Solaris 10u3 x86 with ZFS RAIDZ on 4 500GB SATA disks. Much easier to admin the files/resizing plus I get compression and error correction.
My main issues are: 1) An inexpensive ($100) 4 port SATA controller that is supported by Solaris 10u3
I had a $20 card working in Linux. I needed to flash the bios to JBOD (no "RAID" in its bios). I bricked it. I ended up getting a motherboard w/ 4 ports that someone else had already been using/testing. When I add more disk, I'll need to find a controller board. Hopefully 10u4 will be out with support for more boards.
2) Getting lots of disks in an enclosure with power and cooling
The Solaris box got a new case (Antec p180) that has power/cooling for 4 drives in the case. How do I add 4 more? For the other box I built something out of plywood/cardboard to hold the drives and duct the air over them. I added an old PC power supply and a 120 mm fan. 42" SATA cables can run out the back of the PC to it with no problem. I'd like to find something premade that holds 4 + drives and closer to $100.
Back in 2002 I bought a Compact Flash based MP3 player. FAT format, looks like a usb drive. cp in linux works. A card reader worked well too. And my camera uses CF cards too. I would still be using it except....
Fast forward to 2007. I rip *all* my CDs to make a jukebox (~450 and ~ 5000 songs). I decided I want to carry them all for me. It's almost 30GB. So I search for a 40GB+ MP3 player. There are not many choices. Archos looks very cool. An 80GB iPod is cheaper and larger (I don't care about video so much). Toshiba Gigabeat isn't much cheaper. I have a gift card too.
So I got an iPod. If I want an accessory, there are lots to choose from. Lots of inexpensive leftovers too.. Lots of alternatives to iTunes. And I have all my music with me.
The only thing I'm really disappointed with is thatI can't just cp files over. I have to use something that deals with the itunesDB in the iPod. However, with 30GB of music, a database makes sense plus it lets me have multiple index to organize (album, artist, genre, rating, etc)
Lernout & Hauspie and Dragon were constantly going back and forth a few years ago trying to get a leg up on each other. When L&H got into all of their accounting problems and shut down, that left Dragon and IBM. IBM's product went to Scansoft and went to Nuance where it languishes until somebody pulls the plug
L&H aquired Dragon and Dictaphone a few months before the accounting fraud came up. Dictaphone spun out again. Dragon and the L&H speech stuff was acquired by ScanSoft. The founders of Dragon were left with worthless stock & tried to get Dragon back which didn't happen. ViaVoice was acquired some time later.
I like having the lights, they're useful. I can't tell the difference with a dual color red/green LED. I'm color blind to light green/light red. I've heard 20% of the male population has this problem.
Of course I have no problem with traffic lights. The top is red, the bottom is green and I can easily tell if it's off or on. I wish my computer gear did this.
You're looking at car engines, right? My 1982 Honda CB900 redlines at 12,000. Around that time, Honda had a 500cc GP bike that had a powerband between 22,000 and 24,000 rpm. V4, oval pistons, 8 valves per cylinder. It made it to production as the NSR500.
On another front, cams can close valves too. Ducati uses a desmodramic(sp?) system that doesn't use valve springs at all. It was developed at a time when the metallurgy to make springs meant lots of compromise. Desmodromic means no vavle float. Ducati uses it in their production and MotoGP motorcycles. Right now in MotoGP, Ducati has a big horsepower advantage over Yamaha & Honda (both with valve springs I think) and Suzuki (with pneumatic valves).
In the 80s, Maico had a 4 stroke that used premix and reed valves. The air/fuel mix came into the crankcase via reed valves. Another reed valve from there went to a tube that lead to the more conventional overhead valves. It gave it a supercharger effect.
Running Linux @ home or your own personal webserver does not make you a bonafide sysadmin.
Amen! I'm amazed when I interview people for a sysadmin position that don't have/use a computer at home. "My kids have one...". Hell, lots of companies throw out computers that are more then good enough to run linux on.
That's how engineering used to be in some places. That's why some cars need to have the engine removed to change half the spark plugs.
I'm a sysadmin but I'm getting helped. No No, wrong group. I often have projects where the user has something in mind and they go buy a computer/software/etc.
I've got one group that wants dual boot laptops to run Solaris and Windows. guess what? Solaris doesn't have drivers for some of the stuff. If they had involved me, I would have found a laptop that worked.
Another group needed a "workstation class PC" with PCI-X slots for custom hardware. They got Windows XP 64bits. None of the drivers work. They can't fit all the hardware in because 2 of the slots overlap. Use PCIe or PCI-X in this slot. They got a different model/brand then we have in IT so none of our existing ghost images or drivers work.
They'll stuff a rack of equipment into a room that is already 80 degrees because the AC is maxed out. And there's no power there.
They'll decide to use "Fibre Channel" to connect all thier systems so they can share disk space. They have Windows, Solaris, Linux and Vxworks trying to use it. Sure, it worked with SCSI tape drives.
They'll not replace NAS systems that are failing with the vendor out of business because they don't have the $$, but they'll spend $17k on recovery services. Or worse, they'll have bought a new NAS w/ double the space but not move stuff to it so they don't fill it. And the backup system can only backup 1/3 of the old system.
Everyone thinks they "know computers" today so they don't listen to the person with 20 years experience.
I used to run my own mailserver. Now I use Google. I no longer have to worry about remote access to my mail. Spam filtering, security and search are done well. I miss having procmail rules a little. My servers at home can forward email to my gmail account very well. I don't have to patch my mail server or tweak the forwarding rules because my server IP is on a blacklist.
My home server does have file, web, TiVo, music and printing on it. I don't share that out on the net and frankly don't want to spend the bandwidth. I don't want (most of) my photos, TiVo shows, CD collection out there for personal, ethical and legal reasons either.
Not having a static IP and dealing with port blocking doesn't prevent running servers. If you know how to modify your firewall it' snot hard.
But email? Good riddance. I have better things to do with my time.
I remember the plethora of copy protection schemes and cracking programs for the Apple ][/Commodore 64/Atari 800/etc systems. The early IBM PC had some CP too. Most of those failed when faster CPUs or CDs came out.
I have a game that had code you typed in every time you started the game. It was in a book with black ink on dark red paper to defeat copiers. I also have a scanned in jpeg of the book that I GIMP'd to turn red to white. I don't need it now as I bought a compilation CD with the game that doesn't require the codes.
How long before DVD DRM follows copy protection? As I remember, CP was more robust then most of the stuff for DVDs.
I've read the book myself, mostly. It has applications beyond an embedded design.
It could be a tiny file server or a network device. I'd love to have some of the interfaces into my thermostat! As time goes on, more and more devices will offer interfaces to get data/control out to computers. This book provides a good example of what and how to offer it. It can certainly be extrapolated to non linux systems.
It's scriptable, can do some calculations, does time series, has multiple outputs and is cross platfor.
My intro was on DOS plotting time series data to screen or an Epson MX80 printer. I used Excel (4) which had serious issues with time series and Kaleidagraph on a Mac.
It's always there on Unix and I think there is/was a macintosh version.
gnuplot is timeless.
That said, for long term time series with thousands of data points, I like RRDtool. It deals well with consolidating the data.
The recording industry will soon die, and eventually the only survivors will be the indie bands singing for the love of music. They'll end up as 21st century minstrels wandering from pub to pub, settling for a meager income and drinks on the house, regardless of their talent.
I listen to folk music and the big names have already gotten out of the niche. Many churches around here in New England become "Coffeehouses" a few nights a week for folk singers. There is enough there for a singer to make a living, but they're not going to be rich.
Some smaller labels have popped up for folk. Some run their own label. Some record in studios, some with a simple 4 track. For me, this all works.
There is one radio station http://www.wumb.org/ that does folk all the time and it's on the net since '98/99.
OS/2 was to replace DOS, not Windows At the time, everyone ran DOS. Windows ran on top of DOS with all its limitations. DesqView was how you multitasked DOS though Windows 3.1 wasn't *too* bad. OS/2 was better.
In fact, I think the 1st versions of OS/2 didn't really have a GUI.
At the time OS/2 2.0 came out, MS was selling Windows 3.1 (or 3.0) not WfW 3.11. Networking was uncommon. Word ran on DOS. Word for Windows 2.0 was around, but very slow compared to WordPerfect on DOS. Excel worked well on Macintosh and Windows 3.1.
Gates saw where OS/2 was going and Windows internally and tried to get IBM to run with Windows instead.
Windows on OS/2 came a bit later after Windows had some marketshare.
I'm not sure Herbert edited the Encyclopedia. (I'll have to check my copy) It's also based on "Archeology" according to the back story so of course there are errors:-)
I agree that the Houses were bad. Vermillion hells! The Butlerian stuff was much better IMHO though I would like it if it coincided w/ the encyclopedia better.
I liked the 1st Hunter novel much better until the end. I think the 2nd will fall back to the Butlerian level:-(
In the early 80's I worked at an HVAC company. We had a program to do sizing estimates. You put in lat/long, ORIENTATION, window area, overhangs, heat sources (stoves, computers), humidity sources (coffee pots), ocupancy (heat + humidity there too), insulation R values in walls, roof, basement, etc.
It would take that information and tell you what size AC you needed to cool it. With these measurements & no college degree (yet) I would come up with the same answer the boss did with his 20 years of experience.
There was another module for the software that would let you rotate the building and see the difference. Making as much of the windows directly south facing and as few north made a *big* difference. It could be a 20-40% savings in cooling cost vs lining it up with the road like most developers do.
Of course most houses are build to parallel the road, not the sun.
As a standard power user running internet apps/office apps/video processing (home/tv)
At one point you have the app running on a core, the OS on one, the graphics on the GPU, the network on a cpu. You get lower latency because your app's cpu doesn't have to time slice with the others.
I can see parallel makes, conversion (wav2mp3, video formats etc), formatting (commercial skipping, panorama stitching). I/O is going to be the ultimate bottleneck.
Alter the figures printed on checks? Print an extra check that the envelope stuffer blindly puts in an envelope?
Or anything else you can do with an exploited computer inside a network. Most printers have pretty decent CPU in them (how do they do 20ppm?) with good network connectivity. Imagine what a compromised linksys router can do. Now add more CPU, more RAM and better I/O.
Heck, going back to '93 with the Apple LaserWriter. It probably had a faster CPU and more RAM then the Macs it was serving.
They're also probably the least audited devices on the network.
Newbies don't understand why vi was so good
on
The Birth of vi
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· Score: 1
By newbies, I mean people who started learning Unix with Linux.
I started with DTSS in 1980. I went through Apple ][, Zenith Z100 w/ MS-DOS 1.0, VMS, and various unixen.
DTSS had an ed editor, similar to the unix ed. DOS has edlin. The Apple ][ BASIC didn't have forward/backward. Just type and delete previous character. The Z100 had my college's WP, Galahad. VMS had EDT.
In the case of DTSS, VMS and the various unixen had various terminals. Teletype, decwriters, CRT based w/ VT100, GIGI, Tektronix, etc. When you ran across a 300 baud or 1200 baud line, you appreciated having something better then ed that was still faster. Emacs? Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping in an era of 1MB time shared machines.
The nice thing about vi was that it was usually available and your keystrokes worked on any terminal whether it had cursor keys or not. I ran vi on DOS on an 8088. Emacs didn't run w/o a 386 and > 4MB:-( Heck, I even had vi on the MacOS system 7.
Our site had 2 groups managing computers. My group supported the R&D group on Unix boxes. No PCs. The other group was IT supporting PCs. And a 3rd guy doing the networking stuff.
The R&D group developed network hardware. So naturally our network consisted of anything that could be scrounged from prototypes and refurbished systems returned from customers. Lots of blue wire. Some of the engineers would plug their prototype into the network to see what it would do with real traffic.....
Our group was originally 2 guys that we took over from as they went back to engineering. They had external SCSI drives with user home directories attached to people's desktops. And 3 NetApps in the server room that "were full". 25% of the storage on the NetApps was taken up by copies of the free Sun CDs with samples of vendor software.
The IT group never asked for budget. They didn't know they had to. They bought computers from the consumer part of gateway/compaq/etc. We regularly used thier budget and they never knew until one of our guys was made the boss.
100T was just coming in. We had just shipped our switch so the prototypes were available to our net. We converted the unix servers to it. Then we asked the PC guys. The building was all cat 3 so we had to run cat 5 to their server room. 2 months later, I went to their server room because users were complaining the Notes server was slow and the PC guys were out. I found 5 of the servers connected into a 10T hub that uplinked via the old cat3 wire to the network closet. All of the new (expensive) cat5 jacks were unused. We had the servers hooked up to them last month.
Finally, the we gave the PC guys a tape stacker to automate backups. After 6 months we found out he was coming in every Saturday to swap the tape (the backup took 2 tapes). He never setup the tape backup software we gave him. You couldn't call him lazy!
I think ZFS won't get into the Linux kernel for similar reasons that ReiserFS 4 is having problems. There are licensing issues too.
I'd say putting RAID, Volume Management and the filesystem into one unit is a good idea. Right now, the file system touches the data. Then the VMS. Then RAID. Then the device driver. Maybe a compression layer. And encryption.
This is the old BSD vs Bell Labs. ls -r vs ls | sort -r. Or monolithic vs micro kernel OS.
BSD's FFS depended on knowledge of the underlying disk geometry to do some of its speed. The only filesystem I can think of that is optimized for RAID is WAFL in NetApp. ZFS has taken some ideas from WAFL.
When you use RAM in your system, do you have to think about the 1st slot is a 512MB, the 2nd is a 256MB, etc? And there's another 1GB in swap. But when you go to malloc, you don't care where one device ends and another begins. You just get some memory from the pool. There might be ECC on it too. If it was on swap, it gets migrated to RAM as it gets used. ZFS does this for file systems.
[ZFS] will be implemented for Linux pretty quickly.
*sigh*. I wish. ZFS is being implemented on FUSE. This automatically creates limitations in performance and function (no root ZFS). IMO ZFS on FUSE will be a no starter in production.
I don't think we'll see ZFS in the kernel proper either, given the history of incorporating XFS and ReiserFS 4. Along the same lines, DTRACE will probably never make it in. It's being cloned in the form of Systemtap.
Meanwhile, FreeBSD has been porting ZFS and DTRACE. MacOSX is (partly) based on FreeBSD and DTRACE has shown up in MacOSX.
I agree that ZFS is a good reason to convert a file server to Solaris from Linux. FreeBSD may become a good candidate also. I'm a Solaris admin and haven't done much with FreeBSD so I'll lean that way. I'd love to see ZFS in the Linux kernel, but I'm not waiting for it.
Perhaps the way to go is Solaris x86 with ZFS file server then a BrandZ zone running Linux to provide other functions?
Slashdot Mirror
At least internally. The set top boxes take up an IP address too.
gzip compression is available in ZFS in addition to the standard.
I've found that compression sometimes makes for faster writes.
ZFS can do RAID1 (mirror). I'm not sure if it does a concat or RAID0. It does RAIDZ which is like RAID5 w/o the write penalty. And RAIDZ2 which is like RAID6 (2 parity disks). You can layer them; A mirror of 2 RAIDZ pools for example.
ZFS does error correction. If you have a firmware issue in your controller or a bad cable, ZFS will detect it and correct on a RAID. It will do a bit or protection on non RAID too. Any other filesystem will silently corrupt your data. IMO this is the most important reason to use ZFS. Yes, I've lost a filesystem due to a firmware bug.
I have a system and get 60MB/s write with 4 500GB SATA drives in RAIDZ. Gigabit ethernet is about 20MB/s. I haven't done any tuning and am using cheap hardware (ethernet $20 card, $20 switch, motherboard SATA). My setup was $2k. If you need a more robust, fast platform, look to Sun hardware (the Thumper) that's been designed with this in mind
I'm running Solaris 10u3 which has been tested more extensively then Solaris Express/OpenSolaris. Many of the extra drivers & features from those will end up in 10u4 (iSCSI target).
I access the fileserver from my MacOSX server via NFS or Samba. MacOSX 10.5 has been seen with ZFS in it also.
At home I was running Linux w/ 3 120 GB SATA drives in software RAID-5 and LVM on top. I switched to Solaris 10u3 x86 with ZFS RAIDZ on 4 500GB SATA disks. Much easier to admin the files/resizing plus I get compression and error correction.
My main issues are:
1) An inexpensive ($100) 4 port SATA controller that is supported by Solaris 10u3
I had a $20 card working in Linux. I needed to flash the bios to JBOD (no "RAID" in its bios). I bricked it. I ended up getting a motherboard w/ 4 ports that someone else had already been using/testing. When I add more disk, I'll need to find a controller board. Hopefully 10u4 will be out with support for more boards.
2) Getting lots of disks in an enclosure with power and cooling
The Solaris box got a new case (Antec p180) that has power/cooling for 4 drives in the case. How do I add 4 more? For the other box I built something out of plywood/cardboard to hold the drives and duct the air over them. I added an old PC power supply and a 120 mm fan. 42" SATA cables can run out the back of the PC to it with no problem. I'd like to find something premade that holds 4 + drives and closer to $100.
Any suggestions?
Back in 2002 I bought a Compact Flash based MP3 player. FAT format, looks like a usb drive. cp in linux works. A card reader worked well too. And my camera uses CF cards too. I would still be using it except....
Fast forward to 2007. I rip *all* my CDs to make a jukebox (~450 and ~ 5000 songs). I decided I want to carry them all for me. It's almost 30GB. So I search for a 40GB+ MP3 player. There are not many choices. Archos looks very cool. An 80GB iPod is cheaper and larger (I don't care about video so much). Toshiba Gigabeat isn't much cheaper. I have a gift card too.
So I got an iPod. If I want an accessory, there are lots to choose from. Lots of inexpensive leftovers too.. Lots of alternatives to iTunes. And I have all my music with me.
The only thing I'm really disappointed with is thatI can't just cp files over. I have to use something that deals with the itunesDB in the iPod. However, with 30GB of music, a database makes sense plus it lets me have multiple index to organize (album, artist, genre, rating, etc)
Lernout & Hauspie and Dragon were constantly going back and forth a few years ago trying to get a leg up on each other. When L&H got into all of their accounting problems and shut down, that left Dragon and IBM. IBM's product went to Scansoft and went to Nuance where it languishes until somebody pulls the plug
L&H aquired Dragon and Dictaphone a few months before the accounting fraud came up. Dictaphone spun out again. Dragon and the L&H speech stuff was acquired by ScanSoft. The founders of Dragon were left with worthless stock & tried to get Dragon back which didn't happen. ViaVoice was acquired some time later.
I like having the lights, they're useful. I can't tell the difference with a dual color red/green LED. I'm color blind to light green/light red. I've heard 20% of the male population has this problem.
Of course I have no problem with traffic lights. The top is red, the bottom is green and I can easily tell if it's off or on. I wish my computer gear did this.
You're looking at car engines, right? My 1982 Honda CB900 redlines at 12,000. Around that time, Honda had a 500cc GP bike that had a powerband between 22,000 and 24,000 rpm. V4, oval pistons, 8 valves per cylinder. It made it to production as the NSR500.
On another front, cams can close valves too. Ducati uses a desmodramic(sp?) system that doesn't use valve springs at all. It was developed at a time when the metallurgy to make springs meant lots of compromise. Desmodromic means no vavle float. Ducati uses it in their production and MotoGP motorcycles. Right now in MotoGP, Ducati has a big horsepower advantage over Yamaha & Honda (both with valve springs I think) and Suzuki (with pneumatic valves).
In the 80s, Maico had a 4 stroke that used premix and reed valves. The air/fuel mix came into the crankcase via reed valves. Another reed valve from there went to a tube that lead to the more conventional overhead valves. It gave it a supercharger effect.
Running Linux @ home or your own personal webserver does not make you a bonafide sysadmin.
Amen! I'm amazed when I interview people for a sysadmin position that don't have/use a computer at home. "My kids have one...". Hell, lots of companies throw out computers that are more then good enough to run linux on.
That's how engineering used to be in some places. That's why some cars need to have the engine removed to change half the spark plugs.
I'm a sysadmin but I'm getting helped. No No, wrong group. I often have projects where the user has something in mind and they go buy a computer/software/etc.
I've got one group that wants dual boot laptops to run Solaris and Windows. guess what? Solaris doesn't have drivers for some of the stuff. If they had involved me, I would have found a laptop that worked.
Another group needed a "workstation class PC" with PCI-X slots for custom hardware. They got Windows XP 64bits. None of the drivers work. They can't fit all the hardware in because 2 of the slots overlap. Use PCIe or PCI-X in this slot. They got a different model/brand then we have in IT so none of our existing ghost images or drivers work.
They'll stuff a rack of equipment into a room that is already 80 degrees because the AC is maxed out. And there's no power there.
They'll decide to use "Fibre Channel" to connect all thier systems so they can share disk space. They have Windows, Solaris, Linux and Vxworks trying to use it. Sure, it worked with SCSI tape drives.
They'll not replace NAS systems that are failing with the vendor out of business because they don't have the $$, but they'll spend $17k on recovery services. Or worse, they'll have bought a new NAS w/ double the space but not move stuff to it so they don't fill it. And the backup system can only backup 1/3 of the old system.
Everyone thinks they "know computers" today so they don't listen to the person with 20 years experience.
I used to run my own mailserver. Now I use Google. I no longer have to worry about remote access to my mail. Spam filtering, security and search are done well. I miss having procmail rules a little. My servers at home can forward email to my gmail account very well. I don't have to patch my mail server or tweak the forwarding rules because my server IP is on a blacklist.
My home server does have file, web, TiVo, music and printing on it. I don't share that out on the net and frankly don't want to spend the bandwidth. I don't want (most of) my photos, TiVo shows, CD collection out there for personal, ethical and legal reasons either.
Not having a static IP and dealing with port blocking doesn't prevent running servers. If you know how to modify your firewall it' snot hard.
But email? Good riddance. I have better things to do with my time.
It could happen.
I remember the plethora of copy protection schemes and cracking programs for the Apple ][/Commodore 64/Atari 800/etc systems. The early IBM PC had some CP too. Most of those failed when faster CPUs or CDs came out.
I have a game that had code you typed in every time you started the game. It was in a book with black ink on dark red paper to defeat copiers. I also have a scanned in jpeg of the book that I GIMP'd to turn red to white. I don't need it now as I bought a compilation CD with the game that doesn't require the codes.
How long before DVD DRM follows copy protection? As I remember, CP was more robust then most of the stuff for DVDs.
I've read the book myself, mostly. It has applications beyond an embedded design.
It could be a tiny file server or a network device. I'd love to have some of the interfaces into my thermostat! As time goes on, more and more devices will offer interfaces to get data/control out to computers. This book provides a good example of what and how to offer it. It can certainly be extrapolated to non linux systems.
It's scriptable, can do some calculations, does time series, has multiple outputs and is cross platfor.
My intro was on DOS plotting time series data to screen or an Epson MX80 printer.
I used Excel (4) which had serious issues with time series and Kaleidagraph on a Mac.
It's always there on Unix and I think there is/was a macintosh version.
gnuplot is timeless.
That said, for long term time series with thousands of data points, I like RRDtool. It deals well with consolidating the data.
I listen to folk music and the big names have already gotten out of the niche. Many churches around here in New England become "Coffeehouses" a few nights a week for folk singers. There is enough there for a singer to make a living, but they're not going to be rich.
Some smaller labels have popped up for folk. Some run their own label. Some record in studios, some with a simple 4 track. For me, this all works.
There is one radio station http://www.wumb.org/ that does folk all the time and it's on the net since '98/99.
OS/2 was to replace DOS, not Windows At the time, everyone ran DOS. Windows ran on top of DOS with all its limitations. DesqView was how you multitasked DOS though Windows 3.1 wasn't *too* bad. OS/2 was better.
In fact, I think the 1st versions of OS/2 didn't really have a GUI.
At the time OS/2 2.0 came out, MS was selling Windows 3.1 (or 3.0) not WfW 3.11. Networking was uncommon.
Word ran on DOS. Word for Windows 2.0 was around, but very slow compared to WordPerfect on DOS.
Excel worked well on Macintosh and Windows 3.1.
Gates saw where OS/2 was going and Windows internally and tried to get IBM to run with Windows instead.
Windows on OS/2 came a bit later after Windows had some marketshare.
I'm not sure Herbert edited the Encyclopedia. (I'll have to check my copy) It's also based on "Archeology" according to the back story so of course there are errors :-)
:-(
I agree that the Houses were bad. Vermillion hells!
The Butlerian stuff was much better IMHO though I would like it if it coincided w/ the encyclopedia better.
I liked the 1st Hunter novel much better until the end. I think the 2nd will fall back to the Butlerian level
In the early 80's I worked at an HVAC company. We had a program to do sizing estimates. You put in lat/long, ORIENTATION, window area, overhangs, heat sources (stoves, computers), humidity sources (coffee pots), ocupancy (heat + humidity there too), insulation R values in walls, roof, basement, etc.
It would take that information and tell you what size AC you needed to cool it. With these measurements & no college degree (yet) I would come up with the same answer the boss did with his 20 years of experience.
There was another module for the software that would let you rotate the building and see the difference. Making as much of the windows directly south facing and as few north made a *big* difference. It could be a 20-40% savings in cooling cost vs lining it up with the road like most developers do.
Of course most houses are build to parallel the road, not the sun.
As a standard power user running internet apps/office apps/video processing (home/tv)
At one point you have the app running on a core, the OS on one, the graphics on the GPU, the network on a cpu. You get lower latency because your app's cpu doesn't have to time slice with the others.
I can see parallel makes, conversion (wav2mp3, video formats etc), formatting (commercial skipping, panorama stitching). I/O is going to be the ultimate bottleneck.
What kind of consumer applications would benefit?
Alter the figures printed on checks?
Print an extra check that the envelope stuffer blindly puts in an envelope?
Or anything else you can do with an exploited computer inside a network.
Most printers have pretty decent CPU in them (how do they do 20ppm?) with good network connectivity. Imagine what a compromised linksys router can do. Now add more CPU, more RAM and better I/O.
Heck, going back to '93 with the Apple LaserWriter. It probably had a faster CPU and more RAM then the Macs it was serving.
They're also probably the least audited devices on the network.
By newbies, I mean people who started learning Unix with Linux.
:-( Heck, I even had vi on the MacOS system 7.
I started with DTSS in 1980. I went through Apple ][, Zenith Z100 w/ MS-DOS 1.0, VMS, and various unixen.
DTSS had an ed editor, similar to the unix ed. DOS has edlin. The Apple ][ BASIC didn't have forward/backward. Just type and delete previous character. The Z100 had my college's WP, Galahad. VMS had EDT.
In the case of DTSS, VMS and the various unixen had various terminals. Teletype, decwriters, CRT based w/ VT100, GIGI, Tektronix, etc. When you ran across a 300 baud or 1200 baud line, you appreciated having something better then ed that was still faster. Emacs? Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping in an era of 1MB time shared machines.
The nice thing about vi was that it was usually available and your keystrokes worked on any terminal whether it had cursor keys or not. I ran vi on DOS on an 8088. Emacs didn't run w/o a 386 and > 4MB
Our site had 2 groups managing computers. My group supported the R&D group on Unix boxes. No PCs. The other group was IT supporting PCs. And a 3rd guy doing the networking stuff.
The R&D group developed network hardware. So naturally our network consisted of anything that could be scrounged from prototypes and refurbished systems returned from customers. Lots of blue wire. Some of the engineers would plug their prototype into the network to see what it would do with real traffic.....
Our group was originally 2 guys that we took over from as they went back to engineering. They had external SCSI drives with user home directories attached to people's desktops. And 3 NetApps in the server room that "were full". 25% of the storage on the NetApps was taken up by copies of the free Sun CDs with samples of vendor software.
The IT group never asked for budget. They didn't know they had to. They bought computers from the consumer part of gateway/compaq/etc. We regularly used thier budget and they never knew until one of our guys was made the boss.
100T was just coming in. We had just shipped our switch so the prototypes were available to our net. We converted the unix servers to it. Then we asked the PC guys. The building was all cat 3 so we had to run cat 5 to their server room. 2 months later, I went to their server room because users were complaining the Notes server was slow and the PC guys were out. I found 5 of the servers connected into a 10T hub that uplinked via the old cat3 wire to the network closet. All of the new (expensive) cat5 jacks were unused. We had the servers hooked up to them last month.
Finally, the we gave the PC guys a tape stacker to automate backups. After 6 months we found out he was coming in every Saturday to swap the tape (the backup took 2 tapes). He never setup the tape backup software we gave him. You couldn't call him lazy!
I think ZFS won't get into the Linux kernel for similar reasons that ReiserFS 4 is having problems. There are licensing issues too.
I'd say putting RAID, Volume Management and the filesystem into one unit is a good idea. Right now, the file system touches the data. Then the VMS. Then RAID. Then the device driver. Maybe a compression layer. And encryption.
This is the old BSD vs Bell Labs. ls -r vs ls | sort -r. Or monolithic vs micro kernel OS.
BSD's FFS depended on knowledge of the underlying disk geometry to do some of its speed. The only filesystem I can think of that is optimized for RAID is WAFL in NetApp. ZFS has taken some ideas from WAFL.
When you use RAM in your system, do you have to think about the 1st slot is a 512MB, the 2nd is a 256MB, etc? And there's another 1GB in swap. But when you go to malloc, you don't care where one device ends and another begins. You just get some memory from the pool. There might be ECC on it too. If it was on swap, it gets migrated to RAM as it gets used. ZFS does this for file systems.
Palm has a history of this. Look at Handspring.
The Treo 700w uses Windows Mobile. From the reviews I've seen, it requires lots more clicking to get to items.
btw - IBM licenses Unix SVR4 which is the basis of AIX. Sun bought a permement license so they don't pay a license fee for Unix SVR4 anymore.
[ZFS] will be implemented for Linux pretty quickly.
*sigh*. I wish. ZFS is being implemented on FUSE. This automatically creates limitations in performance and function (no root ZFS). IMO ZFS on FUSE will be a no starter in production.
I don't think we'll see ZFS in the kernel proper either, given the history of incorporating XFS and ReiserFS 4. Along the same lines, DTRACE will probably never make it in. It's being cloned in the form of Systemtap.
Meanwhile, FreeBSD has been porting ZFS and DTRACE. MacOSX is (partly) based on FreeBSD and DTRACE has shown up in MacOSX.
I agree that ZFS is a good reason to convert a file server to Solaris from Linux. FreeBSD may become a good candidate also. I'm a Solaris admin and haven't done much with FreeBSD so I'll lean that way. I'd love to see ZFS in the Linux kernel, but I'm not waiting for it.
Perhaps the way to go is Solaris x86 with ZFS file server then a BrandZ zone running Linux to provide other functions?