I'm sorry, but most of us have seen in Chem I or II where the teacher takes a balloon filled with helium and pops it, causing a fireball. Yes, it does take an ignition (via spark or open flame), but it *is* highly flammable in oxygen rich environments as 2 H2 molecules and 1 02 molecule combine to make the rare di-hydro-oxide (sic - water) or H20, as well as others such as H202. I agree that the hydrogen probably didn't start the fire, but it definately was the main component in the explosion that we've all seen on public television and the History Channel.
Carnivore cannot
- Alter or remove packets from the network or introduce new packets
- Block any traffic on the network
- Remove images, terms, etc. from communications
- Seize control of any portion of Internet traffic
- Shut down or shut off the communications of any person, web site, company, or ISP
- Shut off accounts, ISPs, etc. to "contain" an investigation
Sooooo send all your "sensitive" information encoded inside of gif's and jpeg's. Amazing. Big bad Carnivore can be defeated by a little Gimp.
Just my Buck-o-five
Does anyone have these posts archived on a server somewhere. I'd be more than happy to mirror them for the/. community. Oh wait. I don't want them to yank my cable modem...
Truth be told, they have a strangle hold on the average consumer broadband market until the phone companies can get ADSL and DSL to market in larger areas for a better price. As soon as they do, I'm jumping ship.
To be honest with you, these are the first candidates that I've been able to understand on issues that are important to me. Gore and Bush are well trained double-speakers that will spew what they think the American people want to hear. At least Brown and McReynolds are giving you their opinions rather than the opinions of their political correctness cadre of panelists and specialists tell them they should say to get the vote. I for one applaud them for being able to take the time to respond to a small group such as ours (lets be honest, we're small) with issues that we present to them. I'm curious to see whether the " Majority Candidates" take the time to respond.
As always, please redirect all flames to/dev/null
I'm going to patent both trolls and first post, thereby charging all "First Posters" and trolls for their incessant cluttering of open forums such as slashdot, newsgroups and the world in general. Also to be patented at a later date will be "Natelie Portman's petrified clitoris," +5v, -5v, +12v, -12v, +3.3v and other voltages as deemed fit by my spleen.
As a fellow stress tester, I'm actually not just disappointed in the crashing of the servers and the lag (I have a feeling that the lag will still be there come live-day), but in the lack of complexity of gameplay. I've become a bit of an Asheron's Call snob of late (yes, I know its a M$ game) and I have to say the complexity gives the game a GREAT advantage over others IMHO. Diablo and Diablo II are just point, click and kill. While its cool because I'm leveling pretty quickly now, I'm sure that I'll tire of it soon enough, then back to AC.
There are multiple levels of Enterprise systems. The lowest level is the Enterprise 220, 250, 420, 450 level. These are more like desktops on steroids, they have much of the same deep-down archetecture as the Ultra 30's and 60's with some hot-swap components like SCSI drives.
Next is the Enterprise 3x00 - 6x00 series. They have from 4 to 16 "Boards" which are like small Motherboards that plug into a main backplane. Each system must have at least 1 I/O Board, and 1 populated (with at least 1 CPU and 1 bank or Memory) CPU/Memory board to stay up, but you can do what you wish with the others.
Finally, there is the Enterprise 10,000. It has 16 Boards that can handle I/O and CPU / Memory. They can too be swapped out.
On the systems that I deal with on a daily basis (Enterprise 250's and 450's) they have interlocks like Compaq Proliant servers that will power-off the server once the case opens (unless you short it out). Therefore hot-swapping PCI would be pointless.
I'd also note that I work for a LARGE isp, and a certain Microsoft partner that I can't name uses all Microsoft / Compaq computers for the front end web servers and Sun E450's for the Oracle Database backend.
Let me take it upon myself to defend Sun one line at a time from your complaints.
1) The CPU's are overpriced.
The CPU's are *MORE EXPENSIVE* yes, overpriced, no. Look at a comparison in the CPU's on just a very simple level. The CPU has 8 Megs of L2 Cache. Not 256k, not 512k, not 1 meg, 8 Megs. That Cache is running at CPU Speed. If there's anything at all that's slowing their speed down, its the large amounts of L2 Cache they run with their servers.
2) Motherboards are overpriced.
I honestly can't say I've ever priced a Sun Motherboard. There is no such animal.
3) Memory is overpriced.
Yes, yes it is. Buy Kingston.
4) The funky hot-swap PCI cards are overpriced.
First off, I'm Sun Hardware Certified, and I don't know of a single system in which you can hot-swap PCI cards. You can do this to drives and I/O Boards (on the Enterprise 3500+ systems), but not individual cards. Now getting back to PCI cards being overpriced, in Sun's specifications, it dictates that all hardware MUST have a PROM with the drivers on it to be certified as Sun Compatable. At boot time, all of the PROM's are polled and all of the drivers are loaded at the hardware level. Plug and play that really works, imagine that...
5) The OS is waaay overpriced.
Free, yeah way too expensive.
6) What does Sun do that Lintel cannot?
A lot of things. First, all of the workstations and servers have TRUE plug and play. There processors scale from Laptops (anyone remember Tadpoles) all the way up to Mainframe-sized computers (E10k). Also - hot-swappable I/O and CPU/Memory in the Enterprise systems. The E10K can scale up to 64 450 Meg processors with 8 megs of L2 Cache, 64 Gigs of Ram, and can run 4 Virtual Machines that can be dynmically allocated on the fly.
7) Even a Farm of Lintel boxes can be had for less than that sun.
Sometimes, true. If you had a farm of 386 Linux boxen, (~$5 apiece) will cost less than a fully loaded E10K (~$10,000,000). Realistically, the cost/performance is about 50/50. UltraPenguin is runs better IMHO than Alpha Linux or x86 Linux.
Don't make opinions without the data to back it up.
Correct me if I'm wrong on this one, but isn't Betelgeuse the brightest star in Orion? I couldn't remember the exact distance but I kinda remember reading about it when I was still into Astronomy that it is one of the few stars that we actually would have a chance of discovering life on with SETI type projects due to the relatively small distance (0 - 25 Light Years). Please correct me if I'm wrong.
I was fortunate enough to work in "Computer Services" about 5 years ago at the local community college when they got their first fractional T1. I watched in wide-eyed amazement as we FTP'd at 50...60....70......even the astounding 80 MBPS. Of course at this time 28.8 modems were considered fast connections and noone had a connection to their home over ISDN.
Now, I work at an Internet media company with multiple OC-12's and have a Cable Modem at home. If I download a file and the rate is *BELOW* 20, I disconnect and try to find a faster server. Downloading large files like Linux ISO's irritate me because 720 Megabytes *might* take 10 minutes to download. I hate traveling with my laptop, because I'm limited to 53K again. What do you do when you get an entire generation of me out there? Fiber to the curb!
Roblimo knows this too. We're in the same LUG here in Baltimore, and we all know that @Home wants Windows on your system when they come to install the cable modem. Most have just bit the bullet and grudgingly installed a 200 MB partition with Dos 6.22 and Win 3.1, but a few of the guys have basically told them, "my computer's down right now, but if you give me all the information I need, I'm an IS person and could set it up. I'll just sign any paperwork for you that you need signed saying that you did your job correctly." As a matter of fact, I think that our server here has the @Home Cable modem experience written down in exciting FAQ-O-RAMA.
While far from the 400Kbps needed for VCR quality, video on the handset is smoother than the world's first video phone, Kyocera's 165-gram VisualPhone, according to the NEC representative. The Kyocera phone retails for around 40,000 yen (US$385) and broadcasts data at 32Kbps, or about 2 images per second.
Why don't they just save money and put a Tamagochi that synchs up with the users voice for that rate. I believe that most internet phones over a 56k like have at least 6 fps, possibly more. IMHO 2 fps is too jerky to cause me to go out and buy this technology that could quite possibly go the way of Beta and Divx.
I hope that the new phones are at least in the 10 to 15 fps range
Lets be honest friends and fellow Linux Advocates, SUN is a Hardware manufacturer first and foremost. Making money off of Linux would be as simple as them dropping their Solaris Development team, and embracing Linux as the *One True Operating System* (tm). I'd love to install Linux on an Enterprise 10000 and set it up as a "One box Beowulf" system.
Those that fear SUN as much as M$ are just plain silly. The Solaris environment was created because the other UNIXs at the time were insufficient and kludgy. Now with Linux on the scene, SUN Developers are taking notice. As many of you know SUN gives away Solaris OS free to anyone who would want it for a nominal fee.
It may not be official yet, but eventually I think SUN will come around and include Linux as an operating system choice just like SGI.
First off, I think that the idea of Karma instead of Points is much better. There are some people (MEEEEPT comes to mind) who are just walking flamebait. Others like ESR and Bruce Perens often have insightful additions to/. and can bring these things to the table.
I'm glad to see this new moderation technique, as I've used my moderation points in the past to moderate posts that I thought were unfairly moderated to 0 or -1 back to 1 or 0 respectfully.
Now on to the bugs. I like many others am getting the SQL Error Email Rob and tell him what you were doing please! All I was doing was Submitting my changes for today. I really hope that you get it all ironed out as I think this is a great forum for us geeks and I like to see it prosper.
The point is not that *SLACKWARE* allows me to set up the partition as I want to, but that VA Research won't. If I want to install Slackware and have my partitions set up a certain way, and use icewm, I can. If they're shipping systems like that, its not much better than M$.
Let me give everyone here a little skinny for a/. article that will be in the works soon. SUN Microsystems bought out a company that was privy to NT's source code (trust me, MS doesn't want anyone to know about this). In taking classes for SUN, I ran across an instructor who told the class to learn SAMBA, but not to dwell on it because SUN was working on a TRUE SMB client for UNIX.
I'd assume that it will be for Solaris 2.x SPARC first, then ported to x86 and possibly open sourced, although I wouldn't open my breath. For those of us in the situation where we need to talk to both worlds, this is a godsend.
SAMBA's done a great job and is one of the best tools ever created for interoperablility, but with SUN's new tool, at least Solaris users will have a commercially supported product to do what we need to do.
VA Research buys linux.com. Sits on it for a couple of months, with big fat VAR ads all over it, now says it's opening today (Tuesday), and at 9:17a Eastern, it's still nothing but a giant VAR ad.
Preach on brother. its now 3:36p EST and nothing. I was hoping to at least see a Coming soon... Java thingie with a countdown clock or something.
It's not enough that VAR only offers RedHat, a distribution which I explicitly *refuse* to run.
Again I have to agree. I'm a Slackware kinda guy, but who's splitting straws. I like setting up my partitions as *I* want them set up./,/etc,/sbin,/root,/bin,/usr on 1 partition, everything else somewhere else. Solaris x86 on a seperate partition that Linux doesn't see. Can VA Research do that? Can they ship me a Slackware CD with the other niceties that the box ships with? I think not.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm sorry, but most of us have seen in Chem I or II where the teacher takes a balloon filled with helium and pops it, causing a fireball. Yes, it does take an ignition (via spark or open flame), but it *is* highly flammable in oxygen rich environments as 2 H2 molecules and 1 02 molecule combine to make the rare di-hydro-oxide (sic - water) or H20, as well as others such as H202. I agree that the hydrogen probably didn't start the fire, but it definately was the main component in the explosion that we've all seen on public television and the History Channel.
Just my buck-o-nine
Secret windows code
That was actually exactly my point, thanks for being so concise.
Regards
Does anyone have these posts archived on a server somewhere. I'd be more than happy to mirror them for the /. community. Oh wait. I don't want them to yank my cable modem...
Truth be told, they have a strangle hold on the average consumer broadband market until the phone companies can get ADSL and DSL to market in larger areas for a better price. As soon as they do, I'm jumping ship.
To be honest with you, these are the first candidates that I've been able to understand on issues that are important to me. Gore and Bush are well trained double-speakers that will spew what they think the American people want to hear. At least Brown and McReynolds are giving you their opinions rather than the opinions of their political correctness cadre of panelists and specialists tell them they should say to get the vote. I for one applaud them for being able to take the time to respond to a small group such as ours (lets be honest, we're small) with issues that we present to them. I'm curious to see whether the " Majority Candidates" take the time to respond. /dev/null
As always, please redirect all flames to
I'm going to patent both trolls and first post, thereby charging all "First Posters" and trolls for their incessant cluttering of open forums such as slashdot, newsgroups and the world in general. Also to be patented at a later date will be "Natelie Portman's petrified clitoris," +5v, -5v, +12v, -12v, +3.3v and other voltages as deemed fit by my spleen.
Lets hope that SCO doesn't change Linux to use their cryptic Alt-Printscreen-P to change virtual terms. I couldn't live without my Alt-F1 through F6.
I also hope that this means that they'll opensource some of SCO propritary stuff to fall into accord with the license and emotion of the GPL.
As a fellow stress tester, I'm actually not just disappointed in the crashing of the servers and the lag (I have a feeling that the lag will still be there come live-day), but in the lack of complexity of gameplay. I've become a bit of an Asheron's Call snob of late (yes, I know its a M$ game) and I have to say the complexity gives the game a GREAT advantage over others IMHO. Diablo and Diablo II are just point, click and kill. While its cool because I'm leveling pretty quickly now, I'm sure that I'll tire of it soon enough, then back to AC.
There are multiple levels of Enterprise systems. The lowest level is the Enterprise 220, 250, 420, 450 level. These are more like desktops on steroids, they have much of the same deep-down archetecture as the Ultra 30's and 60's with some hot-swap components like SCSI drives.
Next is the Enterprise 3x00 - 6x00 series. They have from 4 to 16 "Boards" which are like small Motherboards that plug into a main backplane. Each system must have at least 1 I/O Board, and 1 populated (with at least 1 CPU and 1 bank or Memory) CPU/Memory board to stay up, but you can do what you wish with the others.
Finally, there is the Enterprise 10,000. It has 16 Boards that can handle I/O and CPU / Memory. They can too be swapped out.
Hope this clears it up a bit.
On the systems that I deal with on a daily basis (Enterprise 250's and 450's) they have interlocks like Compaq Proliant servers that will power-off the server once the case opens (unless you short it out). Therefore hot-swapping PCI would be pointless.
I'd also note that I work for a LARGE isp, and a certain Microsoft partner that I can't name uses all Microsoft / Compaq computers for the front end web servers and Sun E450's for the Oracle Database backend.
Let me take it upon myself to defend Sun one line at a time from your complaints.
1) The CPU's are overpriced.
The CPU's are *MORE EXPENSIVE* yes, overpriced, no. Look at a comparison in the CPU's on just a very simple level. The CPU has 8 Megs of L2 Cache. Not 256k, not 512k, not 1 meg, 8 Megs. That Cache is running at CPU Speed. If there's anything at all that's slowing their speed down, its the large amounts of L2 Cache they run with their servers.
2) Motherboards are overpriced.
I honestly can't say I've ever priced a Sun Motherboard. There is no such animal.
3) Memory is overpriced.
Yes, yes it is. Buy Kingston.
4) The funky hot-swap PCI cards are overpriced.
First off, I'm Sun Hardware Certified, and I don't know of a single system in which you can hot-swap PCI cards. You can do this to drives and I/O Boards (on the Enterprise 3500+ systems), but not individual cards. Now getting back to PCI cards being overpriced, in Sun's specifications, it dictates that all hardware MUST have a PROM with the drivers on it to be certified as Sun Compatable. At boot time, all of the PROM's are polled and all of the drivers are loaded at the hardware level. Plug and play that really works, imagine that...
5) The OS is waaay overpriced.
Free, yeah way too expensive.
6) What does Sun do that Lintel cannot?
A lot of things. First, all of the workstations and servers have TRUE plug and play. There processors scale from Laptops (anyone remember Tadpoles) all the way up to Mainframe-sized computers (E10k). Also - hot-swappable I/O and CPU/Memory in the Enterprise systems. The E10K can scale up to 64 450 Meg processors with 8 megs of L2 Cache, 64 Gigs of Ram, and can run 4 Virtual Machines that can be dynmically allocated on the fly.
7) Even a Farm of Lintel boxes can be had for less than that sun.
Sometimes, true. If you had a farm of 386 Linux boxen, (~$5 apiece) will cost less than a fully loaded E10K (~$10,000,000). Realistically, the cost/performance is about 50/50. UltraPenguin is runs better IMHO than Alpha Linux or x86 Linux.
Don't make opinions without the data to back it up.
Correct me if I'm wrong on this one, but isn't Betelgeuse the brightest star in Orion? I couldn't remember the exact distance but I kinda remember reading about it when I was still into Astronomy that it is one of the few stars that we actually would have a chance of discovering life on with SETI type projects due to the relatively small distance (0 - 25 Light Years). Please correct me if I'm wrong.
sorry - kps is what I meant - sorry for the confusion.
Now, I work at an Internet media company with multiple OC-12's and have a Cable Modem at home. If I download a file and the rate is *BELOW* 20, I disconnect and try to find a faster server. Downloading large files like Linux ISO's irritate me because 720 Megabytes *might* take 10 minutes to download. I hate traveling with my laptop, because I'm limited to 53K again. What do you do when you get an entire generation of me out there? Fiber to the curb!
Isn't it funny how a year ago we were all shunning DIVX and praising DVD as the almighty movie format? Funny how things have changed in recent times.
As always, your milage may vary.
I hope that the new phones are at least in the 10 to 15 fps range
As usual all opinions are probably wrong.
Those that fear SUN as much as M$ are just plain silly. The Solaris environment was created because the other UNIXs at the time were insufficient and kludgy. Now with Linux on the scene, SUN Developers are taking notice. As many of you know SUN gives away Solaris OS free to anyone who would want it for a nominal fee.
It may not be official yet, but eventually I think SUN will come around and include Linux as an operating system choice just like SGI.
I'm glad to see this new moderation technique, as I've used my moderation points in the past to moderate posts that I thought were unfairly moderated to 0 or -1 back to 1 or 0 respectfully.
Now on to the bugs. I like many others am getting the SQL Error Email Rob and tell him what you were doing please! All I was doing was Submitting my changes for today. I really hope that you get it all ironed out as I think this is a great forum for us geeks and I like to see it prosper.
The point is not that *SLACKWARE* allows me to set up the partition as I want to, but that VA Research won't. If I want to install Slackware and have my partitions set up a certain way, and use icewm, I can. If they're shipping systems like that, its not much better than M$.
I meant "hold my breath for it to be open" Sorry all
I'd assume that it will be for Solaris 2.x SPARC first, then ported to x86 and possibly open sourced, although I wouldn't open my breath. For those of us in the situation where we need to talk to both worlds, this is a godsend.
SAMBA's done a great job and is one of the best tools ever created for interoperablility, but with SUN's new tool, at least Solaris users will have a commercially supported product to do what we need to do.
As always, redirect all flames to /dev/null.