The decline of SGI and Cray began long before Beowulf. Cray's rivals, such as Hitachi, Fijitsu and Thinking Machines took huge chunks of its markets, even the IBM machines were a threat. There simply wasn't enough momentum behind UNICOS for it to compete with Cellular IRIX even within SGI.
SGI are struggling as much as they can, but really they are only delaying the inevitable. They are being attacked on all sides, HP and IBM are crushing them in the VLDB market, Sun are making ever larger inroads into rendering, Compaq's professional workstations are forcing SGI out of CAD shops, the latest kit from Apple is competitive in the DV space... SGI need a miracle to save them.
This would keep the mean old Beowulf at bay.
Beowulf doesn't really compare to a Cray, since it lacks common memory across all of its nodes. Beowulf is more analogous to PVM.
You've got to look at the disk access characteristics of mail servers. In many cases, you'll find that you have lots of writes, and a comparable number of reads. RAID5 works best in situations where you need space, redundancy and reads, but if you want good write performance, you need to sacrifice space and go with a RAID 0+1 solution, also known as a mirrored stripe set.
CNN has posted a pleasantly Linux biased story about the DVD hack
I'm just having difficulty parsing pleasantly and biased in the same sentence. I hope you're not saying that bias and prejudice are ok so long as they match your views - only objective facts are worth reporting.
Would the open source movement even be that big without Linux backing it up?
You've got it the wrong way round. Would Linux be this big without the free software movement backing it up?
The answer is a resounding no. Linux is ONLY a kernel. Everything else, the shells, the daemons, the applications, came from places like FSF, UCB, WU and elsewhere. These were all around long before Linux -- and without gcc and bash, the Linux kernel wouldn't exist.
I suspect this Y2K patent will fail to stand up in court, I'm guessing that some far-sighted engineer did something similar in the 80s and "prior art" will apply.
insane (and unknown to him) reason the dallas PCs were authenticating against the Chicago servers.
There's a sound reason for this, it's so you can have central administration for all users regardless of physical location. This is useful if you have resources spread throughout your organisation which must be shared to a wide range of different users, or if you have a central HR organisation. It means a single sign on and easy ACL administration.
The correct way to do it is to have a PDC+BDC in your main office, and a BDC in each remote office. You want another BDC in each office for every 2000 users. This arrangement scales up to about 40,000 users in a single domain, then you'll need to move to a multiple master domain.
It's easy compared to the likes of C++ or java and because of this, you don't need to hire top-notch talent. The pool of available 'programmers' is much larger.
This statement is nonsense, and shows that you have totally misunderstood the reason. People use Developer/2000 so they can concentrate on the business not the tools.
You can be the greatest programmer in the world, but if you don't understand the business and can't get your application ready while it is still relevant, then you have failed in your mission.
Given that the professional Developer/2000 consultant brings both a technical and business expertise to the table, the pool of available talent is actually smaller than for conventional programming languages.
I remember back when VMS on Alpha was farely new, DEC had a couple of boxes that they gave away accounts on, you could just telnet in (or connect over X), there were no quotas, full suite of compilers etc. It was pretty interesting to play with (I was working on VAX/VMS at the time) but then we got our own cluster of AXPs running OpenVMS 6 and all was right with the world!
Think of it as insurance. For example, if you're a power company, you'll make more $ if it's cold, and consequently you'll make less $ if it's warm. But you're worried about fluctuations in your cash flow, because you have to pay the coupon on bonds you've issued (for example). So by buying weather futures, you ensure that even if your revenues fall, your cashflow can be evenned out and you're not caught short. Of course, if the weather does the opposite, the broker has just made a bag full of money, which you've lost, but that's ok, you were willing to pay that much up front to cover the risk, because it's less than you would have lost if you didn't have it.
It's just a mechanism to transfer risk from those who don't want it to those that do, and it makes perfect sense for people in an industry that is affected by the weather.
Countries like Norway, Denmark, Sweden, Great Britain, etc. have strict gun laws. Even the police normally doesn't carry guns in these countries.
There was a story on the BBC News this morning about a UK police Armed Response unit killing an unarmed man, because a passer by thought that he might be carrying a shotgun. They opened fire before bothering to verify the claim.
An armed society is a polite society, and has no need to fear government-sanctioned killers roaming the streets.
I'm hoping this machine will be an adequate laptop replacement. It's subnotebook sized, which looks big enough for touch typing, the screen is apparently quite clear. I'm very happy with my Series 5, but I need more and I don't want a Libretto, EPOC is a great OS, fast, rock solid, good communications facilities. A slightly beefier but similar machine is the NetBook but no pricing information or detailed application information is available yet.
What I specifically want is a better word processor and spreadsheet - for programming and computing I have sizeable Suns and NT servers, but I need a machine I can take anywhere and work on documents with, the office is too distracting. This is one reason the S5 is so great, it has several times more battery life than any CE machine. Proper indexes, nested bullet lists, footnotes/endnotes, better font support, better table support, etc, would make this a perfect machine for me.
Why can't they just spend the money on improving linux? Haven't they heard of Linux?
Linux is wholly unsuitable for use as an embedded operating system. It it far too large, for starters, and doesn't have any real-time scheduling or runtime features. It doesn't really compare to, say, QNX for real time, deteministic scheduling, memory allocation, and I/O.
You can fit a preemptively multi tasking OS with a windowing system, web server and browser on a single floppy disk with QNX. You can fit a fully functioning router onto a single floppy disk with picoBSD.
But - given that foundation, do you think Linux would be anywhere near where it is today? Would anyone be developing any software for this thing, closely held by some companies, under licenses which may someday change radically?
I don't believe anyone should be obligated to release their intellectual property for free. If they choose to do so, that's fair enough, but what really matter here is the right of the individual to the use and disposal of the rational product of their mind.
Star Division developed the product, they sold it to Sun, and Sun now have control over it. They spent a lot of money - and they're not a charity. Sun's interests happen to be aligned with ours at the moment. It's up to the community whether or not they choose to exist in conflict or synergy with Sun, certainly StarOffice is measurably superior to K-Office, which may be a part of the cause of any hostility. It all depends what is more important to you, ideology or business. Personally, Sun fulfill both of these criteria for me.
They know that the time their developers spend on improving this product in-house is time and money lost.
Not necessarily. Sun's business model is that they sell hardware; they are perfectly happy to fund a loss leader if it means that they can move more boxes. If giving StarOffice away for free (and you can bet that they will invest significant resources in making it fly on the U5S workstation) and this encourages people to deploy Sun hardware where they wouldn't have considered it before, then it's money well spent. This is what they've always done, for example Java, NFS, NeWS - and so do many Unix vendors.
I spend much of my time either writing documents (Office 2000) or running Oracle Developer/2000 (over X windows, from a Sun in the server room). A working, fully comprehensive office suite available for Sun would at least make me consider getting a Sun for my desktop. And remember that getting onto the desktop and using that as a staging point to attack the server market has proven an effective strategy for Microsoft.
The question is, will they see the light soon enough, change, and survive?
I don't think the survival of the product is in question. I think that it is in Sun's best interest, as a corporate entity, not to give away the source - because that would run counter to their model of wanting to sell more SPARC workstations.
Well, I was "not too happy" with the general suck of the new movie... can I sue for that?
Yeah, I came out of the theatre feeling as if I'd just watched an SGI showreel, or a demo from one of the NGPS houses!
The whole film should be a free download from apple.com, just to show off their quicktime stuff, or maybe the effects houses could give it away for free in their marketing literature.
But then again, I've never been much of a capitalist.
Capitalism states you can only charge as much for a product as the market will stand. Certainly repeat viewings will form a major part the revenue; I wouldn't waste my $ on going again tho'.
The RS/6000 family of computers feature IBM RISC-based microprocessors and run AIX, IBM's UNIX operating system. RS/6000 delivers the industry's most complete UNIX offerings by combining applications with hardware, software, service and support for unmatched high availability, scalability, system management, and performance.
If you can afford RS/6000 in the first place (and they're not cheap) then it's presumably because you need these facilities - and the AIX license (IIRC) travels with the hardware, like SunOS or NeXTStep. Now, I agree that linux has a lot going for it on x86 hardware (it makes a great cheap desktop X terminal for example), but what compelling advantage does it offer that makes it superior to AIX?
IMHO, the linux community needs to guard itself against bandwagonneering. (is that a word?!) Porting to a new platform for it's own sake is cool, but when corporates see linux on RS/6000 and realise how inferior it is to AIX, it will long-term reinforce the view held by many that linux is just a toy.
Now, why is sql*kitten, known anti-open-source advocate saying these things? Simply because strength comes from conflict and competition - nothing would make me happier than for linux to be a serious threat to NT, because the only outcome of that situation is a better NT (or a better AIX or whatever). Linux's push towards the enterprise is premature.
Are you saying that companies ought to be able to hire and fire based on religous or racial criterea? Is it OK for Rupert Murdoch to fire all democrats/liberals because he is conservative? How about firing all the catholics because the ceo is a protestant? Is that OK too?
Whether or not you or I think this is a good policy is irrelevant. The company is the private property of the owner (or the shareholders) and they have the absolute right to determine their own policies. If you don't like it, you are free to start your own company and compete with them.
If you are unwilling to do so, you have absolutely no right to criticise someone who has.
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The decline of SGI and Cray began long before Beowulf. Cray's rivals, such as Hitachi, Fijitsu and Thinking Machines took huge chunks of its markets, even the IBM machines were a threat. There simply wasn't enough momentum behind UNICOS for it to compete with Cellular IRIX even within SGI.
SGI are struggling as much as they can, but really they are only delaying the inevitable. They are being attacked on all sides, HP and IBM are crushing them in the VLDB market, Sun are making ever larger inroads into rendering, Compaq's professional workstations are forcing SGI out of CAD shops, the latest kit from Apple is competitive in the DV space... SGI need a miracle to save them.
This would keep the mean old Beowulf at bay.
Beowulf doesn't really compare to a Cray, since it lacks common memory across all of its nodes. Beowulf is more analogous to PVM.
I would recommend a Sun MultiPack with Solstice DiskSuite for management.
I'm just having difficulty parsing pleasantly and biased in the same sentence. I hope you're not saying that bias and prejudice are ok so long as they match your views - only objective facts are worth reporting.
You've got it the wrong way round. Would Linux be this big without the free software movement backing it up?
The answer is a resounding no. Linux is ONLY a kernel. Everything else, the shells, the daemons, the applications, came from places like FSF, UCB, WU and elsewhere. These were all around long before Linux -- and without gcc and bash, the Linux kernel wouldn't exist.
I suspect this Y2K patent will fail to stand up in court, I'm guessing that some far-sighted engineer did something similar in the 80s and "prior art" will apply.
There's a sound reason for this, it's so you can have central administration for all users regardless of physical location. This is useful if you have resources spread throughout your organisation which must be shared to a wide range of different users, or if you have a central HR organisation. It means a single sign on and easy ACL administration.
The correct way to do it is to have a PDC+BDC in your main office, and a BDC in each remote office. You want another BDC in each office for every 2000 users. This arrangement scales up to about 40,000 users in a single domain, then you'll need to move to a multiple master domain.
surely the world's slowest NT server will also be, by definition, the world's slowest Linux, FreeBSD, OS/2, Netware, whatever server?
This statement is nonsense, and shows that you have totally misunderstood the reason. People use Developer/2000 so they can concentrate on the business not the tools.
You can be the greatest programmer in the world, but if you don't understand the business and can't get your application ready while it is still relevant, then you have failed in your mission.
Given that the professional Developer/2000 consultant brings both a technical and business expertise to the table, the pool of available talent is actually smaller than for conventional programming languages.
I remember back when VMS on Alpha was farely new, DEC had a couple of boxes that they gave away accounts on, you could just telnet in (or connect over X), there were no quotas, full suite of compilers etc. It was pretty interesting to play with (I was working on VAX/VMS at the time) but then we got our own cluster of AXPs running OpenVMS 6 and all was right with the world!
Think of it as insurance. For example, if you're a power company, you'll make more $ if it's cold, and consequently you'll make less $ if it's warm. But you're worried about fluctuations in your cash flow, because you have to pay the coupon on bonds you've issued (for example). So by buying weather futures, you ensure that even if your revenues fall, your cashflow can be evenned out and you're not caught short. Of course, if the weather does the opposite, the broker has just made a bag full of money, which you've lost, but that's ok, you were willing to pay that much up front to cover the risk, because it's less than you would have lost if you didn't have it.
It's just a mechanism to transfer risk from those who don't want it to those that do, and it makes perfect sense for people in an industry that is affected by the weather.
There was a story on the BBC News this morning about a UK police Armed Response unit killing an unarmed man, because a passer by thought that he might be carrying a shotgun. They opened fire before bothering to verify the claim.
An armed society is a polite society, and has no need to fear government-sanctioned killers roaming the streets.
Entertainingly, this means that NT is actually more Unix than Linux is. Oh, the irony!
I'd guess the longest open connection would be on a trading system that's been constantly up for years, for example at an investment bank.
If you have a 5MX, you can run the SSH client from MindBright.
What I specifically want is a better word processor and spreadsheet - for programming and computing I have sizeable Suns and NT servers, but I need a machine I can take anywhere and work on documents with, the office is too distracting. This is one reason the S5 is so great, it has several times more battery life than any CE machine. Proper indexes, nested bullet lists, footnotes/endnotes, better font support, better table support, etc, would make this a perfect machine for me.
Linux is wholly unsuitable for use as an embedded operating system. It it far too large, for starters, and doesn't have any real-time scheduling or runtime features. It doesn't really compare to, say, QNX for real time, deteministic scheduling, memory allocation, and I/O.
You can fit a preemptively multi tasking OS with a windowing system, web server and browser on a single floppy disk with QNX. You can fit a fully functioning router onto a single floppy disk with picoBSD.
I don't believe anyone should be obligated to release their intellectual property for free. If they choose to do so, that's fair enough, but what really matter here is the right of the individual to the use and disposal of the rational product of their mind.
Star Division developed the product, they sold it to Sun, and Sun now have control over it. They spent a lot of money - and they're not a charity. Sun's interests happen to be aligned with ours at the moment. It's up to the community whether or not they choose to exist in conflict or synergy with Sun, certainly StarOffice is measurably superior to K-Office, which may be a part of the cause of any hostility. It all depends what is more important to you, ideology or business. Personally, Sun fulfill both of these criteria for me.
Not necessarily. Sun's business model is that they sell hardware; they are perfectly happy to fund a loss leader if it means that they can move more boxes. If giving StarOffice away for free (and you can bet that they will invest significant resources in making it fly on the U5S workstation) and this encourages people to deploy Sun hardware where they wouldn't have considered it before, then it's money well spent. This is what they've always done, for example Java, NFS, NeWS - and so do many Unix vendors.
I spend much of my time either writing documents (Office 2000) or running Oracle Developer/2000 (over X windows, from a Sun in the server room). A working, fully comprehensive office suite available for Sun would at least make me consider getting a Sun for my desktop. And remember that getting onto the desktop and using that as a staging point to attack the server market has proven an effective strategy for Microsoft.
The question is, will they see the light soon enough, change, and survive?
I don't think the survival of the product is in question. I think that it is in Sun's best interest, as a corporate entity, not to give away the source - because that would run counter to their model of wanting to sell more SPARC workstations.
Or is it just easier for you to blindly attack Microsoft given the slightest excuse?
And I hope to have officials elected that will do this. We still can vote those people in and out of office yah know.
So on the one hand you say that people cannot be trusted to donate freely, but on the other they can elect officials to force them to?
This is an inconsistent and hence invalid position. The fact of the matter is, any payment extracted unwillingly is theft by force, pure and simple.
Oh right, so FreeBSD, Roxen and ksh are "second class" in your Brave New World?
You're just another crazy fanatic, worse than what you imagine Microsoft to be, because you don't even know it.
Look under CSS, XML and DOM.
What, Mozilla doesn't support these standards? ooops.
Yeah, I came out of the theatre feeling as if I'd just watched an SGI showreel, or a demo from one of the NGPS houses!
The whole film should be a free download from apple.com, just to show off their quicktime stuff, or maybe the effects houses could give it away for free in their marketing literature.
But then again, I've never been much of a capitalist.
Capitalism states you can only charge as much for a product as the market will stand. Certainly repeat viewings will form a major part the revenue; I wouldn't waste my $ on going again tho'.
The RS/6000 family of computers feature IBM RISC-based microprocessors and run AIX, IBM's UNIX operating system. RS/6000 delivers the industry's most complete UNIX offerings by combining applications with hardware, software, service and support for unmatched high availability, scalability, system management, and performance.
If you can afford RS/6000 in the first place (and they're not cheap) then it's presumably because you need these facilities - and the AIX license (IIRC) travels with the hardware, like SunOS or NeXTStep. Now, I agree that linux has a lot going for it on x86 hardware (it makes a great cheap desktop X terminal for example), but what compelling advantage does it offer that makes it superior to AIX?
IMHO, the linux community needs to guard itself against bandwagonneering. (is that a word?!) Porting to a new platform for it's own sake is cool, but when corporates see linux on RS/6000 and realise how inferior it is to AIX, it will long-term reinforce the view held by many that linux is just a toy.
Now, why is sql*kitten, known anti-open-source advocate saying these things? Simply because strength comes from conflict and competition - nothing would make me happier than for linux to be a serious threat to NT, because the only outcome of that situation is a better NT (or a better AIX or whatever). Linux's push towards the enterprise is premature.
Whether or not you or I think this is a good policy is irrelevant. The company is the private property of the owner (or the shareholders) and they have the absolute right to determine their own policies. If you don't like it, you are free to start your own company and compete with them.
If you are unwilling to do so, you have absolutely no right to criticise someone who has.