I don't know anyone who would want their production Oracle database on Intel hardware. You can't just keep throwing faster cpus into the same outdated backplane and expect to get the kind of throughput performance that a db requires.
Additionally, who with a production system isn't going to want both the hardware & software reliability and 24/7 support of the caliber that Sun provides?
Don't get me wrong, I love Linux & use it as my primary platform. But I wouldn't deploy my db back-end on it. We used Suns at my last job for very good reasons.
He may take the Sun out of Oracle, but he won't take the Sun out of the users, and if Oracle starts slipping on the Sun support, there's always Sybase.
Let's get one thing straight here. Using the EMBED tag in a page rendered by IE does not mean that you are using IE's support for the NS plugin API. You can EMBED an ActiveX control that's a MIME player or an ActiveDoc server and it's just a nicer way of writing an OBJECT tag.
The NS plugin API support in IE has never worked correctly and always taken hacking to use satisfactorily.
In fact, some versions of IE have a bug where a if you have installed on your system an NS plugin in Netscape and a Mime Player in IE for a given data type, if the Url in an EMBED tag for that data is greater than 60-something characters, IE will ignore its installed mime player and try to use its broken NS api support to load your NS plugin. The ugly mess that follows is, well, ugly.
So let's try to keep things straight on what's going on here, because everything since (and including) the original article is lumping EMBED and NS Plugins together, which just isn't true.
Take a look at the back of your ticket the next time you attend a sporting event. I'll bet that you'll see something similar to:
The ticketholder agrees that... shall have the unrestricted right and license to use his or her likeness as included in any broadcast, telecast, or photograph taken in connection with the game.
The holder grants permission to... utilize holders image or likeness incidental to any live or recorded video display or other transmission or reproduction in whole or in part of the event to which this ticket admits them.
Wired did an article on Sealand sometime back. If you can get the print copy it's excellent. There's also a trimmed-down online version that I found here.
Avoid? I love Sun keyboards. The one that came with the Ultra 5 at my last job was a joy to use, especially since it has the Control and Caps Lock keys in the right place, as well as Delete and Backspace (no crazy X hacking to swap any of them).
New job gave me a PC keyboard and within 6 months I had repetitive-stress tendonitis (aka "Emacs Pinky"). Now I have a Kinesis ergonomic and things are getting slowly better.
Oh, and you're still not going to see the I/O (or even backplane, iirc) throughput on PC hardware that you can get on a good Sun server.
The Ultra 5 is a PC-style hardware machine, with a 400MHz UltraSPARC IIi processor (256KB external cache), max of 512MB memory, 33MHz 32-bit PCI bus, and an IDE hard drive.
The E3500 (the low-end "midrange" server) takes up to 8 UltraSPARC processors with 4MB or 8MB external caches sitting on a Gigaplane interconnect, 64-bit SBus as well as 64-bit 66MHz PCI busses, a memory capacity up to 16GB, and laughs at IDE hard drives. It also supports numerous more production-environment accessories, such as redundant hot-swappable power and cooling, etc.
The E3500 is a far cry beyond the Ultra5. You are definitely overlooking a lot.
I use the Kinesis, though in Qwerty layout. One thing that helped me a ton, as an XEmacs user, was using the programmability of the keyboard to change the "delete" key to be "control", "home" is now "alt", "end" is now the windows key which is mapped to "meta".
This has given me excellent reduced finger motion and helped a ton with getting rid of my emacs-pinky-induced tendonitis.
I also use a Cirque SmartCat instead of a mouse, and have it affixed right on top of the keyboard between the two halves. Works great!
I'd hate to be on the receiving end of a healthcare system with such antiquated stuff.
I'd feel much better seeing equipment that's been around for many years, has every single bug or quirk well-documented and well-known, and is understood inside-out rather than watching my doctor view my X-rays using a Java applet inside Internet Explorer...
Another multithreaded class library is Rogue Wave's Threads.h++, which I believe since I last saw it has been encapsulated into another of their products. As it is, Sun's Workshop environment, (well, actually the SunPro C++ compiler, which works in that environment) comes with RW's Tools.h++ class libraries, which are pretty darn good, with the exception of RWCString, which is wicked slow in a multithreaded environment. There are many fine treatises out there about why lazy-write, reference counted classes are inefficient in a multithreaded environment, and this is one of those classes.
Also, as several people mentioned and I want to here second, Purify from Rational is an amazing debugging tool. I have used many different tools for watching memory allocations/accesses/leaks, and Purify, while seemingly simple, is actually elegant and extremely thorough and only continues to get "smarter" about what it does.
I used Solaris (on Sparc, though) quite extensively for multithreaded development using their SunPro Workshop (4.x) environment. A very well-done IDE that integrates directly with Emacs, your own Makefiles, and overall can be as much or as little visual vs. command-line as you'd like.
The debugger is dbx, fully supporting multithreaded debugging, and has a full GUI on top of it, as well as full visual integration into Emacs (better than you've ever seen gdb do).
Some people think that Solaris' thread libraries are less than adequate. Personally, I've never used a better multithreading system. The entire "kernel-scheduled LWP managing user-scheduled threads" many-many concept is more efficient and works far better than Linux's one-one kernel-scheduled threads. And all your threads run with the same PID - what a concept!
The obvious disclaimers are that I haven't used the newest Solaris tools, nor was this done on x86, but definitely consider not only the tool quality but also the OS' attitude towards threads. Solaris is better than Linux in that regard, IMO.
Let's be explicit about exactly which version we're talking about.
Netscape 4.75, under RH Linux 6.2, with Javascript enabled, will refuse to load www.microsoft.com with the following error:
JavaScript Error: http://www.microsoft.com , line 28: loadPage is not defined.
StarOffice was already very well integrated into KDE. By a menu choice, the entire SO desktop would vanish and all the SO menus, options, etc. would appear as a part of the KDE menus/desktop.
I received mine just yesterday, in a box with a return address of Wired, the phrase "what's next," and "presented by delta-air.com"
Inside was the scanner, a CD, documentation, and a "TV/PC Convergence Cable" which apparently listens to your TV's audio output for special encodings and sends them to your sound card, where the software does whatever, such as perhaps taking you to a Coke web site during a Coke commercial, for example.
There was also a pamphlet from Wired and Delta saying that they were bringing me the latest in web technology, and "as an added incentive to start using this amazing new technology, we've created the FAT CAT WEB HUNT," which is a sweepstakes where you enter by swiping the bar codes of advertisers in the next several issues of Wired. Full details are here, as well as the usual alternate way to enter, which is "legibly hand-print on a 3"x5" card the names of all advertisers displaying the Digital
Convergence Internet Enhanced Cue barcode in either the October 2000, November or
December 2000 issues of Wired Magazine."
Do I like it? No. Do I consider it snail-mail spam? Yes. Do I understand why Cue doesn't want their lousy IP broken because usage is their only revenue model? Yup. Do I pity the person who doesn't realize the privacy implications? Oh, yeah.
Do I also think the whole thing is a very clever idea? Definitely.
I don't see why people think an NDA at the interview is unusual. You, as a candidate, should want to know what you would be doing, what you'd be working on, what technology you would be using, before accepting any kind of job.
Yet this information may not be public knowledge. It might even be a trade secret. What if it's a startup that hasn't gone public with their product yet? Or a manufacturer working on a new, secret version of something?
The only solution in this case is an NDA. How else can you judge the position/job?
So does this new client use OSCAR (the proprietary protocol) instead of TOC (the ascii-based "talk to oscar" protocol that was GPL'd some time ago)?
Because if it uses OSCAR, then by your argument they could just eliminate TOC and wipe out Gaim, Gabber's Aim transport, and Tik all in one fell swoop.
I have a dual-boot system at home using Lilo. But VMWare gives me the ability to, without rebooting, open up Win98 and use Quicken and do my online banking.
More inmportantly, it allows me to easily test any software I'm developing under a variety of OS configurations. Each one can be booted in a VM, and when I shut the VM down I have the choice of keeping or discarding all the disk writes. In other words, boot up Windows, install a piece of software, run it, then instead of uninstalling I just shut down the VM and discard the disk changes. Presto! I'm 100% exactly as I was before the test.
VMWare is very, very useful beyond the dual-boot paradigm.
I have VMWare 2.0 and I run Quicken 2000 under Win98 in it, under my RH6 system, all the time. With enough RAM (256Mb or 128Mb and close other large apps) and CPU (PII-400), it is quick, responsive, and rock-solid reliable.
Quicken runs extremely well and you can't beat using Linux' underlying networking for the online banking features. The only thing that's really slow is backing data up to floppy.
Except that Microsoft is charging $500 a pop for those 65,000 bugs. A typical Linux distribution costs from under $100 to free. And list all their known bugs for you without reservation (ever seen Bugzilla at Red Hat's site?).
Okay, I'm a professional Solaris developer, and I've found LinuxThreads' 1:1 model and signalling deficiencies more than lacking compared to Solaris' LWP and user-thread model. What type of threading model(s) is/are available for the FreeBSD (and maybe NetBSD for my old Sun 3/60) platform?
As of October 1st, 2001, all cellular systems will have extremely accurate location finder systems in response to the FCC's Phase II of Enhanced 911 service. When you dial 911 they'll be able to pinpoint your location immediately (within, I think, 150m) either by base technology or, as I read somewhere (and of course cannot find) from GPS in the phones.
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I don't know anyone who would want their production Oracle database on Intel hardware. You can't just keep throwing faster cpus into the same outdated backplane and expect to get the kind of throughput performance that a db requires.
Additionally, who with a production system isn't going to want both the hardware & software reliability and 24/7 support of the caliber that Sun provides?
Don't get me wrong, I love Linux & use it as my primary platform. But I wouldn't deploy my db back-end on it. We used Suns at my last job for very good reasons.
He may take the Sun out of Oracle, but he won't take the Sun out of the users, and if Oracle starts slipping on the Sun support, there's always Sybase.
Let's get one thing straight here. Using the EMBED tag in a page rendered by IE does not mean that you are using IE's support for the NS plugin API. You can EMBED an ActiveX control that's a MIME player or an ActiveDoc server and it's just a nicer way of writing an OBJECT tag.
The NS plugin API support in IE has never worked correctly and always taken hacking to use satisfactorily.
In fact, some versions of IE have a bug where a if you have installed on your system an NS plugin in Netscape and a Mime Player in IE for a given data type, if the Url in an EMBED tag for that data is greater than 60-something characters, IE will ignore its installed mime player and try to use its broken NS api support to load your NS plugin. The ugly mess that follows is, well, ugly.
So let's try to keep things straight on what's going on here, because everything since (and including) the original article is lumping EMBED and NS Plugins together, which just isn't true.
Michael J.
Wired did an article on Sealand sometime back. If you can get the print copy it's excellent. There's also a trimmed-down online version that I found here.
Michael J.
Someone else who remembers Quark! Ah, Richard Benjamin's early years ... Now, who else remembers that other sci-fi extravaganza, Salvage One ???
Michael J.
New job gave me a PC keyboard and within 6 months I had repetitive-stress tendonitis (aka "Emacs Pinky"). Now I have a Kinesis ergonomic and things are getting slowly better.
Oh, and you're still not going to see the I/O (or even backplane, iirc) throughput on PC hardware that you can get on a good Sun server.
Michael J.
The Ultra 5 is a PC-style hardware machine, with a 400MHz UltraSPARC IIi processor (256KB external cache), max of 512MB memory, 33MHz 32-bit PCI bus, and an IDE hard drive.
The E3500 (the low-end "midrange" server) takes up to 8 UltraSPARC processors with 4MB or 8MB external caches sitting on a Gigaplane interconnect, 64-bit SBus as well as 64-bit 66MHz PCI busses, a memory capacity up to 16GB, and laughs at IDE hard drives. It also supports numerous more production-environment accessories, such as redundant hot-swappable power and cooling, etc.
The E3500 is a far cry beyond the Ultra5. You are definitely overlooking a lot.
Michael J.
I use the Kinesis, though in Qwerty layout. One thing that helped me a ton, as an XEmacs user, was using the programmability of the keyboard to change the "delete" key to be "control", "home" is now "alt", "end" is now the windows key which is mapped to "meta". This has given me excellent reduced finger motion and helped a ton with getting rid of my emacs-pinky-induced tendonitis. I also use a Cirque SmartCat instead of a mouse, and have it affixed right on top of the keyboard between the two halves. Works great!
Michael J.
I'd feel much better seeing equipment that's been around for many years, has every single bug or quirk well-documented and well-known, and is understood inside-out rather than watching my doctor view my X-rays using a Java applet inside Internet Explorer...
Michael J.
Also, as several people mentioned and I want to here second, Purify from Rational is an amazing debugging tool. I have used many different tools for watching memory allocations/accesses/leaks, and Purify, while seemingly simple, is actually elegant and extremely thorough and only continues to get "smarter" about what it does.
Michael J.
The debugger is dbx, fully supporting multithreaded debugging, and has a full GUI on top of it, as well as full visual integration into Emacs (better than you've ever seen gdb do).
Some people think that Solaris' thread libraries are less than adequate. Personally, I've never used a better multithreading system. The entire "kernel-scheduled LWP managing user-scheduled threads" many-many concept is more efficient and works far better than Linux's one-one kernel-scheduled threads. And all your threads run with the same PID - what a concept!
The obvious disclaimers are that I haven't used the newest Solaris tools, nor was this done on x86, but definitely consider not only the tool quality but also the OS' attitude towards threads. Solaris is better than Linux in that regard, IMO.
Michael J.
Oops.
Michael J.
Let's be explicit about exactly which version we're talking about. Netscape 4.75, under RH Linux 6.2, with Javascript enabled, will refuse to load www.microsoft.com with the following error:
JavaScript Error: http://www.microsoft.com , line 28:
loadPage is not defined.
Michael J.
StarOffice was already very well integrated into KDE. By a menu choice, the entire SO desktop would vanish and all the SO menus, options, etc. would appear as a part of the KDE menus/desktop.
Michael J.
Inside was the scanner, a CD, documentation, and a "TV/PC Convergence Cable" which apparently listens to your TV's audio output for special encodings and sends them to your sound card, where the software does whatever, such as perhaps taking you to a Coke web site during a Coke commercial, for example.
There was also a pamphlet from Wired and Delta saying that they were bringing me the latest in web technology, and "as an added incentive to start using this amazing new technology, we've created the FAT CAT WEB HUNT," which is a sweepstakes where you enter by swiping the bar codes of advertisers in the next several issues of Wired. Full details are here, as well as the usual alternate way to enter, which is "legibly hand-print on a 3"x5" card the names of all advertisers displaying the Digital Convergence Internet Enhanced Cue barcode in either the October 2000, November or December 2000 issues of Wired Magazine."
Do I like it? No. Do I consider it snail-mail spam? Yes. Do I understand why Cue doesn't want their lousy IP broken because usage is their only revenue model? Yup. Do I pity the person who doesn't realize the privacy implications? Oh, yeah.
Do I also think the whole thing is a very clever idea? Definitely.
Michael J.
Yet this information may not be public knowledge. It might even be a trade secret. What if it's a startup that hasn't gone public with their product yet? Or a manufacturer working on a new, secret version of something?
The only solution in this case is an NDA. How else can you judge the position/job?
Michael J.
[looks shamedly away] Ooops. Hadn't realized Jabber used OSCAR - that's awesome, actually!
Michael J.
So does this new client use OSCAR (the proprietary protocol) instead of TOC (the ascii-based "talk to oscar" protocol that was GPL'd some time ago)? Because if it uses OSCAR, then by your argument they could just eliminate TOC and wipe out Gaim, Gabber's Aim transport, and Tik all in one fell swoop.
Michael J.
I have a dual-boot system at home using Lilo. But VMWare gives me the ability to, without rebooting, open up Win98 and use Quicken and do my online banking.
More inmportantly, it allows me to easily test any software I'm developing under a variety of OS configurations. Each one can be booted in a VM, and when I shut the VM down I have the choice of keeping or discarding all the disk writes. In other words, boot up Windows, install a piece of software, run it, then instead of uninstalling I just shut down the VM and discard the disk changes. Presto! I'm 100% exactly as I was before the test.
VMWare is very, very useful beyond the dual-boot paradigm.
Michael J.
Quicken runs extremely well and you can't beat using Linux' underlying networking for the online banking features. The only thing that's really slow is backing data up to floppy.
Michael J.
Except that Microsoft is charging $500 a pop for those 65,000 bugs. A typical Linux distribution costs from under $100 to free. And list all their known bugs for you without reservation (ever seen Bugzilla at Red Hat's site?).
Michael J.
Along with the world's largest air-insulated Van de Graaff generator, the museum's Theatre of Electricity puts on a great show.
Michael J.
Okay, I'm a professional Solaris developer, and I've found LinuxThreads' 1:1 model and signalling deficiencies more than lacking compared to Solaris' LWP and user-thread model. What type of threading model(s) is/are available for the FreeBSD (and maybe NetBSD for my old Sun 3/60) platform?
Michael J.
As of October 1st, 2001, all cellular systems will have extremely accurate location finder systems in response to the FCC's Phase II of Enhanced 911 service. When you dial 911 they'll be able to pinpoint your location immediately (within, I think, 150m) either by base technology or, as I read somewhere (and of course cannot find) from GPS in the phones.
Michael J.