First off, everything I've stated in my argument is not FUD. My point about the MAN pages is that, by default they're not installed, and the physical manuals by SCO have to be ordered from a 3rd party vendor for extra cost.
IBM makes great mid-sized servers. This could start a major flame war regarding which x86 servers the best so I'll leave it at this: that server (of which our company had quite a few of) were stable as any other server in both the NT and Novell 4.11 environment as servers, so I'd expect them to be STABLE in a UNIX environment since the OS generally is more stable (at least more stable than NT).
I too expect that SCO will be out and about for years to come, but fact remains that from the early to mid 90's, SCO had a large margin of the x86 UNIX market (80+% I believe) compared to other UNICIES at the time. Linux as well as the BSD's are the first comparable operating systems as far as acceptance and power.
If you feel you must flame me, please feel free to e-mail me directly at my address by changing the at and dot's to @ and . respectively.
Last year, I had a job as a UNIXWARE Administrator (2.1.2 or something). Out of the BOX, UNIXWARE had issues. Standard install doesn't include MAN pages, it doesn't work well with the IBM server we bought with it preinstalled, and the print drivers that were included didn't even work correctly with the printers they were supposed to work with (luckily that last was a HUGE shell script, and I just went into my vi editor and commented out a couple lines, and added the fixed lines after it).
Remember SCO's into the FUD arena too as it is an offshoot from M$. I'm not sure if its still true, but at one time M$ owned SCO (M$ gave SCO XENIX in return SCO gave M$ SCO), giving them aproximately 80% of the UNIX market as well as the DOS/Windows market (essentially a strangle hold on the operating systems, they were still partners with IBM on OS/2). SCO has had the INTEL/UNIX world totally wrapped up until recently when LINUX entered the arena. For a tidy license fee (similar to NT's) you too can have a nice little SCO Unixware box sitting at your desktop to do your bidding. Just don't try to use anything that's not approved SCO "Skunkware" or expect the entire system to go to hell in a handbasket.
Bottom line is that SCO fears LINUX for being able to take away its marketshare.
SUN may not be a company that is open source, but for the most part, it uses open standards, and open archetecture. SUN is much more of a hacker-type mentality company than SGI, IBM, and other would ever be. SUN's creator wanted a relatively inexpensive yet still powerful computer to use at home so that he wouldn't have to go to the Universities labs all the time to work on programming projects. He was to use the phrase "scratching an itch" that he felt needed to be scratched. All SUN hardware has and always will be open, and their code is obtainable without excessive cost.
Overall, I think that SUN has been an important contributer to open systems, and powerful systems overall.
With big players like HP now actually throwing their weight behind linux, how long will it be before there's a HP-Linux OEM Package for the servers and workstations. I wonder if all of the Linux hype that's been based mostly around RedHat's distro of Linux is going to lead for more companies going the way of Corel and packaging their own distribution based on the RedHat folks software. My biggest hope is that this will help port Linux to HP-UX RISC boxes (to the best of my knowledge it isn't yet).
Don't fear the Christians; just fear what they do.
on
Beyond The Holy Circle
·
· Score: 1
I'd agree that there have been "good" Christians in the past and present. I do acknowledge that the Pope is a strong player in the political arena and that religion can cause great peace in the world. Now lets flip the coin. Look at the evil things that have been done in the name of religion. I seem to remember a statistic from high school history that said somewhere around 90% of all wars start out because of religion. I point to the Northern Ireland dispute, the Kosovo problem, Turkey, and all Ethnic cleansing regimes. Ethinicity is secondary to religion because of the fact that so many people bury their heads in an imaginary world where you are relished for your accomplishments after you die for eternity.
There was a time and a place for religion, but that time has passed. People need to come to face with the reality that the here and now is what is important. Instead of thinking that a holy person can absolve them from sins, thus giving them the keys to the holy gate, people should strive to better themselves.
As many people that defend Christianity with all of their might forget the many times Christianity has gone out to binge the world of non-believers. The burning times (an attempt to destroy witches) and the inquisition (an attempt to wipe out the Jews and Muslims in Spain) are both prime examples of why I am weary of Christians, having attempted to destroy two things that make a part of me what I am today.
One thing that I did see in the last paragraph had a little to say about some of the hacker mentality. It said something to the effect of if the lock are so easy to pick (if the internet is that insecure) then you need to change the locks. I wonder how much longer it will be until the corporate world wakes up and smells the ozone realizing that (h/cr)ackers aren't there to cost them millions of dollars in lost assets, but are there to prove a point. The digital world is not secure nor will it be until there is a need for it to be. With the greater anonymity of the internet and more off the shelf tools for script kiddies, the chances of getting (h/cr)acked increase daily, whilst IS managers restore from tape without learning a thing.
Here's my thought on this matter. Lets be honest, this is a NT optimized environment. The hardware is set for NT, the RAID, the RAM, the PROCESSORS, everything set up in NT's favor. Here's my suggestion. Lets take a set of 5 - 10 boxes of varying speeds and abilities and compare NT versus Linux on them.
Here are my reccomendations for the boxes:
1: 486x33DX with 16 MB Ram and a 200 MB harddrive (circa 1993)
2: P100 32 MB RAM 500 MB harddrive (circa 1995)
3: AMD or Cyrix ~300 mhz computer with 64 MB RAM and a 4 gig harddrive (circa 1997)
4: PII 300 Celeron A (hrm...) Overclocked to about 450 with 128 Megs of RAM and a 8 gig drive (circa my wet dreams)
5: PII 450 Xeon with 1024 MB RAM and a RAID 5
6: Sun Sparc 5
7: Digital/Compaq Alpha
8: Some MIPS box
Wow, what do you know, NT server won't run on boxes 1 or 6, and on 2, 3 and 8 its gonna choke.
Okay, maybe I went a little overboard, but I'm sure you all get the picture. Dont' let this FUD distract you from the Ultimate goal of Linux... "World domination... FAST!"
I'm interested in finding out how they plan on suing the internet porn industry. The kid obviously ignored all of the warnings on the sites stating that he was of legal age of consent or whatever nonsense the page recomends before entering the site. If anything, this adds to the fact that his parents are totally and completely unsuitable.
Who bought those games for this boy? Who gave this boy a computer and internet access without supervision? Who enabled this boy to have access to 6 firearms without being locked up? Was the id programmer sitting behind the child in his room, telling him to go out and kill? Was there a scantily clad woman handing him his grandfather's pistol, and telling him to go kill the little church girls? Lets say there was an id programmer physically there and encouraging the child to murder people in cold blood. Where were the parents?
Lets put the blame where it fully belongs. Lets stop parents from blaming their lazyness onto the backs of the media.
IDC is *selling* the real article. That was just a synopsys.
Purchase realtime via credit card by clicking the Order link. This document costs $1,500.00 US Dollars plus tax.
Okay who's got a credit card? Can't repost it since its copyrighted, but you could give the rest of us a synopsys. Don't they realize that Linux programmers are poor?
Just kidding, but I don't have $1,500 to blow on whitepaper.
I totally agree with this editorial. I've met people that I know from IRC, and as a rule they have all been pleasant experiences. Before I was wise in the ways of internet meetings, I met a girl from a telnet chatter (sorta like a mud, but no fighting). She claimed to be the standard 36-24-36 or whatever, even during our phone conversations. I agreed to meet her IRL just to be extremely surprised when she was zero percent what she described online. Luckily, I was in my home turf. After visiting me and a couple of my friends that were similarly plugged in, we had a couple brews and called it a night. Sent her home the next morning at 9:30.
I've learned my lesson well. I now only meet groups of people with other groups of people that I already know. Gathers are relatively safe. Also if you're meeting a potential sexual partner, it may not be a bad idea to have a couple friends meet first with the new person. Sex on a first date generally isn't a good idea anyway.
Arguments like this are the things that could bring open source to its knees. Oh sorry, did I just use the term without getting proper authority from anti-intellectual-property group x, y, and z? Tie me up and beat me senseless for my horrid abuse of the term. Lets be frank, we need to stop bickering over what is and what isn't open source. I say, if you can see the source code, its open source. If Sun or Apple were to tell person x that they could no longer be privy to changing the code, coders will start to make OpenSolaris and OpenMacOSX or whatever.
Microsoft claims that they can't be a monopoly, because they only have a tiny share of the "Super-insanely-expensive-multi-terra-of-ram-monst er-server" Market. Truth of the matter is that NT (and definately 9x) is not scalable to that level of operating. NT's solution to everything is "throw another box at it." Here, where I work, we have aproximately 400 users total over a wan. At each location there is an NT box which services aproximately 10 - 25 users each. (PII 400, 512 Megs of Ram 9 gig drive et al). That's fine for the small branches, and I'd have to say for a small workgroup, NT is fine and dandy. Lets then look at our main office. 300 or so users. First, we have a box that's just the PDC (Primary Domain Controller). Its job it to make the Network Neighborhood look all nice and tidy and make the NT boxes see each other. How cute. This is a PII 300 with 1 gig of RAM. Crashes now and again, but overall not too bad. Then we have the Exchange server. Its a Alpha, pretty speedy, but I don't know the exact specs. I kinda remember something about 400+ Mhz and 2 gigs of RAM. Web server - P200 with 512 Megs of RAM. 2 BDC's (backup domain controller). These kick in if/when the PDC blows, and allow people to login to the domain when the main server gets lagged. Main file server (2 of these) actually house the files. Now, all totaled, we're looking at like 15 boxes to serve webpages, mail, and files to 300 users. Sounds like a good use of hardware to me. ----------
"VA has a excellent track record of supporting
the Linux community with everything from hardware to bandwidth," said Rob Malda, editor of Slashdot.org. "Slashdot.org is pleased to see VA continue this trend by developing Linux.com into a high quality portal that will be maintained by the open source community."
Guess it doesn't to scratch back once in a while:).
What the LSB needs to be is a standard set of tools that the machines need to be "standard." We all want our TAR to work the same and give the same flags. Something similar happened in the UNIX world a few years back. Everyone started sharing applications from one another to make a "standard" UNIX. Sun / Solaris gave out the works of NIS+. Others similarly contributed (I have no idea what though). If we can envelop a certain path to standardization be it RedHat RPM or Slackware's pkgtool or whatever, let everyone use it and Linux will get more backing from companies that want to produce binaries for Linux, but not Source (like Lotus).
Finally someone is willing to lay down the truth.
on
Review:Virtual Faith
·
· Score: 1
I for one am glad someone is finally willing to face up to the fact that today's prevelant religious streotypes don't apply to the modern digitized world. Christian society, which has opressed Jews, Muslems, Pagans and even fellow Christians, are finally losing the power that they hold over the masses. The "alternative" religous groups like the Wicca and Athiests (yes athiesm is a religion) are able to adapt better without the underlying dogma to hold them back. Let the digital age begin without having to worry if "god" is going to disapprove of my actions. ---------
He acknowledged that Compaq since 1993 hasn't regularly
sold computers using any operating system other than Windows, but he said that was a choice dictated by consumers.
What about DEC, VMS, Linux on the Alphas and other Digital Systems... I seem to recall having SCO and OS/2 Shipped with a Compaq Proliant Server in 1997 that I installed. -----
Truth of the matter is that emulators are inherantly bad for proprietary game consoles (Playstation, Nintendo *, SEGA * et al). It hurts the people making the games by cutting into their revenue and "intellectual rights." I'll be the first to admit, I think its cool to be able to test out a game first before buying, but I've gotten past my days of downloading rom's and onto renting them from Blockbuster (or your other favorite video rental location). That said, I love playing my games on my PC. I actually do have legal copies of certain game console although I don't own the console. I downloaded a rom of the game and play it on an emulator (okay - I bought Pokemon... I like the TV show - sue me!). ------
I'd like to agree with the others that are roasting your genitalia over an open spit. Get off the Wintel bandwagon and face facts. SUN and other proprietary boxes have the advantage of running on a bus on a comparable speed to the chip. Instead of a bus speed 1/4th the speed of the processor (BX motherboards have a 100 mHz bus compared to the 400 mHz processor) hence creating a bottleneck. Also the video cards run a helluva lot faster to help allievate the bottlenecks. All external i/o devices run on a seperate bus, so that the multi-processor systems can actually talk to each other at their speed (be it 320 mhz or whatever). I too would pit a Sun Ultra system against a Wintel anyday.
This is the sort of thing that I hope becomes a permanant portion on the/. website. If you BSI fellows are reading this would it be possible to archive the meat and potatoes of this without the glitzy formatting on slashdot somewhere? Please say yes as I think that this truly is as important as a lot of the stuff that ESR and Jon Katz has published.
The Compaq AlphaServer DS20 and 800 systems are available without a bundled software license, allowing you to use an open source operating system, such as Linux. This saves you the cost of purchasing an operating system you don't plan to use.
Now if only they'd do that with their Intel boxes!
Most of the people that read / use slashdot are geeks. We use or at the very least know about alternate operating systems (from BeOS to Mac to BSD to Linux and even SCO, SUN and AIX). How many people actually *buy* computers from Dell or Compaq for home use just to get it home and reformat the harddrive and do god knows what to it (like overclock with a water-cooled heatsink). Most of the people here are going to purchace from a place where you can get Linux (or BeOS or Mac or whatever) installed, and are going to purchace from a smaller company that a friends owns or such. I personally bought from a small company in Arizona, and got exactly the video card I wanted with the RAM I wanted and the Motherboard with the options I wanted. Lets face it, we're not afraid to do this because we're not afraid to jiggle the video cable a little if the screen is black, or even *gasp* open the case and examine the card. The only OEM stuff I have is stuff from work, and as a contractor, I really can't pull NT off of my workstation and install Linux to administrate the NT environment. Sure there are probably tools to allow me to engage in administration duties, but I'm not a permanent member here, and this isn't my PC to play with (although, I've gotta admit, I'm using spare cycles on this PC to crack RC5). Fact of the matter is that we're not going to have OEM's to deal with as we are for the most part buying non-EULA PC's.
I must say that jumping on the bandwagon of using the internet as a medium as well as a source for new ideas is not too far flung. I personally roleplay in the SuperHeroes genre and have made multiple characters with powers related to Computers / Telecomm / et al. As long as Mr. Lee doesn't make them all run NT, they should be great heroes . Just think... From Antartica its the defender of the open source.... SuperTux!
Wow... And to think... When I used to play Cyberpunk and Shadowrun I always *dreamed* about one day having a SPU running in my crainum with a data port so that I could "Jack-In" to the Matrix. Woe is me. I'm not going to be the first. Where can I sign up to be the first person to be *permantly* implanted? Think about the possibilities... Never need that little black book anymore. Never have to worry about cramming for an exam. Just upload baby! Wait till the stuff like in the ShadowTech book is available for all the rest of the Drek-heads like me. I'll have to invest in that $ to NuYen converter I've been dreaming about. *sigh* Back to reality...
Slashdot Mirror
IBM makes great mid-sized servers. This could start a major flame war regarding which x86 servers the best so I'll leave it at this: that server (of which our company had quite a few of) were stable as any other server in both the NT and Novell 4.11 environment as servers, so I'd expect them to be STABLE in a UNIX environment since the OS generally is more stable (at least more stable than NT).
I too expect that SCO will be out and about for years to come, but fact remains that from the early to mid 90's, SCO had a large margin of the x86 UNIX market (80+% I believe) compared to other UNICIES at the time. Linux as well as the BSD's are the first comparable operating systems as far as acceptance and power.
If you feel you must flame me, please feel free to e-mail me directly at my address by changing the at and dot's to @ and . respectively.
Remember SCO's into the FUD arena too as it is an offshoot from M$. I'm not sure if its still true, but at one time M$ owned SCO (M$ gave SCO XENIX in return SCO gave M$ SCO), giving them aproximately 80% of the UNIX market as well as the DOS/Windows market (essentially a strangle hold on the operating systems, they were still partners with IBM on OS/2). SCO has had the INTEL/UNIX world totally wrapped up until recently when LINUX entered the arena. For a tidy license fee (similar to NT's) you too can have a nice little SCO Unixware box sitting at your desktop to do your bidding. Just don't try to use anything that's not approved SCO "Skunkware" or expect the entire system to go to hell in a handbasket.
Bottom line is that SCO fears LINUX for being able to take away its marketshare.
Overall, I think that SUN has been an important contributer to open systems, and powerful systems overall.
Just my $1.19
With big players like HP now actually throwing their weight behind linux, how long will it be before there's a HP-Linux OEM Package for the servers and workstations. I wonder if all of the Linux hype that's been based mostly around RedHat's distro of Linux is going to lead for more companies going the way of Corel and packaging their own distribution based on the RedHat folks software. My biggest hope is that this will help port Linux to HP-UX RISC boxes (to the best of my knowledge it isn't yet).
There was a time and a place for religion, but that time has passed. People need to come to face with the reality that the here and now is what is important. Instead of thinking that a holy person can absolve them from sins, thus giving them the keys to the holy gate, people should strive to better themselves.
As many people that defend Christianity with all of their might forget the many times Christianity has gone out to binge the world of non-believers. The burning times (an attempt to destroy witches) and the inquisition (an attempt to wipe out the Jews and Muslims in Spain) are both prime examples of why I am weary of Christians, having attempted to destroy two things that make a part of me what I am today.
One thing that I did see in the last paragraph had a little to say about some of the hacker mentality. It said something to the effect of if the lock are so easy to pick (if the internet is that insecure) then you need to change the locks. I wonder how much longer it will be until the corporate world wakes up and smells the ozone realizing that (h/cr)ackers aren't there to cost them millions of dollars in lost assets, but are there to prove a point. The digital world is not secure nor will it be until there is a need for it to be. With the greater anonymity of the internet and more off the shelf tools for script kiddies, the chances of getting (h/cr)acked increase daily, whilst IS managers restore from tape without learning a thing.
Here are my reccomendations for the boxes:
Wow, what do you know, NT server won't run on boxes 1 or 6, and on 2, 3 and 8 its gonna choke.
Okay, maybe I went a little overboard, but I'm sure you all get the picture. Dont' let this FUD distract you from the Ultimate goal of Linux... "World domination... FAST!"
Who bought those games for this boy? Who gave this boy a computer and internet access without supervision? Who enabled this boy to have access to 6 firearms without being locked up? Was the id programmer sitting behind the child in his room, telling him to go out and kill? Was there a scantily clad woman handing him his grandfather's pistol, and telling him to go kill the little church girls? Lets say there was an id programmer physically there and encouraging the child to murder people in cold blood. Where were the parents?
Lets put the blame where it fully belongs. Lets stop parents from blaming their lazyness onto the backs of the media.
Just kidding, but I don't have $1,500 to blow on whitepaper.
I've learned my lesson well. I now only meet groups of people with other groups of people that I already know. Gathers are relatively safe. Also if you're meeting a potential sexual partner, it may not be a bad idea to have a couple friends meet first with the new person. Sex on a first date generally isn't a good idea anyway.
Just my $1.03
Microsoft claims that they can't be a monopoly, because they only have a tiny share of the "Super-insanely-expensive-multi-terra-of-ram-monst er-server" Market. Truth of the matter is that NT (and definately 9x) is not scalable to that level of operating. NT's solution to everything is "throw another box at it." Here, where I work, we have aproximately 400 users total over a wan. At each location there is an NT box which services aproximately 10 - 25 users each. (PII 400, 512 Megs of Ram 9 gig drive et al). That's fine for the small branches, and I'd have to say for a small workgroup, NT is fine and dandy. Lets then look at our main office. 300 or so users. First, we have a box that's just the PDC (Primary Domain Controller). Its job it to make the Network Neighborhood look all nice and tidy and make the NT boxes see each other. How cute. This is a PII 300 with 1 gig of RAM. Crashes now and again, but overall not too bad. Then we have the Exchange server. Its a Alpha, pretty speedy, but I don't know the exact specs. I kinda remember something about 400+ Mhz and 2 gigs of RAM. Web server - P200 with 512 Megs of RAM. 2 BDC's (backup domain controller). These kick in if/when the PDC blows, and allow people to login to the domain when the main server gets lagged. Main file server (2 of these) actually house the files. Now, all totaled, we're looking at like 15 boxes to serve webpages, mail, and files to 300 users. Sounds like a good use of hardware to me.
----------
Guess it doesn't to scratch back once in a while
What the LSB needs to be is a standard set of tools that the machines need to be "standard." We all want our TAR to work the same and give the same flags. Something similar happened in the UNIX world a few years back. Everyone started sharing applications from one another to make a "standard" UNIX. Sun / Solaris gave out the works of NIS+. Others similarly contributed (I have no idea what though). If we can envelop a certain path to standardization be it RedHat RPM or Slackware's pkgtool or whatever, let everyone use it and Linux will get more backing from companies that want to produce binaries for Linux, but not Source (like Lotus).
I for one am glad someone is finally willing to face up to the fact that today's prevelant religious streotypes don't apply to the modern digitized world. Christian society, which has opressed Jews, Muslems, Pagans and even fellow Christians, are finally losing the power that they hold over the masses. The "alternative" religous groups like the Wicca and Athiests (yes athiesm is a religion) are able to adapt better without the underlying dogma to hold them back. Let the digital age begin without having to worry if "god" is going to disapprove of my actions.
---------
extract spammer.email > mailbomb.spammer ???
What about DEC, VMS, Linux on the Alphas and other Digital Systems... I seem to recall having SCO and OS/2 Shipped with a Compaq Proliant Server in 1997 that I installed.
-----
Truth of the matter is that emulators are inherantly bad for proprietary game consoles (Playstation, Nintendo *, SEGA * et al). It hurts the people making the games by cutting into their revenue and "intellectual rights." I'll be the first to admit, I think its cool to be able to test out a game first before buying, but I've gotten past my days of downloading rom's and onto renting them from Blockbuster (or your other favorite video rental location). That said, I love playing my games on my PC. I actually do have legal copies of certain game console although I don't own the console. I downloaded a rom of the game and play it on an emulator (okay - I bought Pokemon... I like the TV show - sue me!).
------
I'd like to agree with the others that are roasting your genitalia over an open spit. Get off the Wintel bandwagon and face facts. SUN and other proprietary boxes have the advantage of running on a bus on a comparable speed to the chip. Instead of a bus speed 1/4th the speed of the processor (BX motherboards have a 100 mHz bus compared to the 400 mHz processor) hence creating a bottleneck. Also the video cards run a helluva lot faster to help allievate the bottlenecks. All external i/o devices run on a seperate bus, so that the multi-processor systems can actually talk to each other at their speed (be it 320 mhz or whatever). I too would pit a Sun Ultra system against a Wintel anyday.
It may be fast, but can it crack RC5? Just imagine that machine on team slashdot!
----------
This is the sort of thing that I hope becomes a permanant portion on the /. website. If you BSI fellows are reading this would it be possible to archive the meat and potatoes of this without the glitzy formatting on slashdot somewhere? Please say yes as I think that this truly is as important as a lot of the stuff that ESR and Jon Katz has published.
Most of the people that read / use slashdot are geeks. We use or at the very least know about alternate operating systems (from BeOS to Mac to BSD to Linux and even SCO, SUN and AIX). How many people actually *buy* computers from Dell or Compaq for home use just to get it home and reformat the harddrive and do god knows what to it (like overclock with a water-cooled heatsink). Most of the people here are going to purchace from a place where you can get Linux (or BeOS or Mac or whatever) installed, and are going to purchace from a smaller company that a friends owns or such. I personally bought from a small company in Arizona, and got exactly the video card I wanted with the RAM I wanted and the Motherboard with the options I wanted. Lets face it, we're not afraid to do this because we're not afraid to jiggle the video cable a little if the screen is black, or even *gasp* open the case and examine the card. The only OEM stuff I have is stuff from work, and as a contractor, I really can't pull NT off of my workstation and install Linux to administrate the NT environment. Sure there are probably tools to allow me to engage in administration duties, but I'm not a permanent member here, and this isn't my PC to play with (although, I've gotta admit, I'm using spare cycles on this PC to crack RC5). Fact of the matter is that we're not going to have OEM's to deal with as we are for the most part buying non-EULA PC's.
I must say that jumping on the bandwagon of using the internet as a medium as well as a source for new ideas is not too far flung. I personally roleplay in the SuperHeroes genre and have made multiple characters with powers related to Computers / Telecomm / et al. As long as Mr. Lee doesn't make them all run NT, they should be great heroes . Just think... From Antartica its the defender of the open source.... SuperTux!
Wow... And to think... When I used to play Cyberpunk and Shadowrun I always *dreamed* about one day having a SPU running in my crainum with a data port so that I could "Jack-In" to the Matrix. Woe is me. I'm not going to be the first. Where can I sign up to be the first person to be *permantly* implanted? Think about the possibilities... Never need that little black book anymore. Never have to worry about cramming for an exam. Just upload baby! Wait till the stuff like in the ShadowTech book is available for all the rest of the Drek-heads like me. I'll have to invest in that $ to NuYen converter I've been dreaming about. *sigh* Back to reality...