Not sure of the level of integration, but I believe KDE now has support for the integral piece of Rendezvous (the multicast DNS responder). At least I saw it on the list of optional dependencies for KDE 3.4.
The "ps -ef" vs. "ps ax" has nothing to do with Linux or "Real UNIX". It is simply "SVR4 vs. BSD" for the parameter types for "ps". All the BSDs use the latter, all the SVR4's use the former, and some systems (like AIX) support both.
I just handed in my notice today. I've known my job was the wrong place for me since not long after I started, and I've been there a year and a half. However, not feeling comfortable leaving without somewhere else to go, I stuck with it for quite while longer than I probably should have.
Essentially, my job for the past year and a half was my first job out of college, and it didn't contribute towards technical experience useful for the career I want to have. Thankfully this new job will set me back on the right track.
Also, in my experience, you usually don't find more than one of those "crusty old bearded guys" in any particular group or organization. Some sort of natural limit, since their kind only finds its place with local uniqueness.:-)
Yeah, but when a Sun box crashes because of bad RAM, you actually get a meaningful death message. Heck, a lot of the time the message even tells you exactly which stick is bad and needs replacing!
OpenBSD/sparc64 isn't a valid measure of performance. In my attempts at using it, I've noticed that OpenBSD on an UltraSPARC-IIi is SIGNIFICANTLY slower than Solaris pretty much all around. The Netra I was trying to run it on was way too sluggish. But once I dumped it in favor of Solaris 9, the machine suddenly became a lot faster. (not to say your CPU comparison isn't accurate, but that the differences are a lot less than you make them out to be.)
Now OpenBSD/sparc (32-bit), on the other hand, tends to work very well on its intended machines.
I'm not really sure how difficult it would be to figure out Solaris kernel code. (ok, maybe for Linux developers, but maybe not BSD ones) A couple years ago, I did some investigation into device driver code. One thing I found was that Solaris and FreeBSD device drivers looked VERY similar in structure. The main differences were the names of the callable kernel functions (names, more than functionality), and that Solaris strongly pushed the philosophy of using mutex locks for all data structures.
Actually, Sun has been toying around a lot with licensing costs lately. The current round I believe for Solaris 9 was free (maybe with conditions) for a single-CPU machine, and something like $250 for dual-cpu. (going up from there, but bigger machines usually cost enough that it isn't really that much relative to machine price)
However, the OS itself does absolutely nothing at all to check compliance, so the only purpose of the license is "being legit on paper". Thus, reasonable prices for businesses, and the hobbyists can get an OS for whatever they dig out of eBay or somebody's dumpster.
Actually, one thing I really like about Solaris is a forwards-compatable interface for kernel modules (i.e. drivers and such). This is something that Linux feels downright embarassing at (heck, they're not even compatable from one build to another, yet alone a point version), and I'm really not sure how FreeBSD is at this (havn't checked).
I can take a device driver written for Solaris version X, and chances are pretty good that it "will just work" on Solaris X+1 and maybe even X+2. (heck, I've even seen a single device driver module "supported" on multiple versions by a HW vendor) The only real requirement is that the module be built for the same architecture as the kernel (i.e. a 32-bit module won't work on a 64-bit kernel, and vice versa).
It wouldn't surprise me if it would actually be technically easier to put Solaris code into FreeBSD than into Linux (though there might be license issues). Then again, that's probably because of two observations... First, more lineage in common. Second, most FreeBSD folks I've met are far more willing to dabble in commercial 'nixes than most Linux folks I've met.
Sun's been using the term "Open" in their stuff forever. Remember, Sun's X environment was called "OpenWindows", and even though they've since discontinued the old OpenWindows window manager, their X server still resides in "/usr/openwin".
Though Sun's definition of "Open" has traditionally been "open standards", as opposed to the F/OSS definition which I believe to be "open implementations".
I was never a fan of the tap-click, on the eraser-head or the touch-pad. That's why it is the first feature I disable on a laptop. My last laptop was an eraser (Thinkpad), and my current one is a PowerBook (touchpad). In the end, neither is easier than the other, once you get used to it. (except when the eraser is moving slowly, and it wears your finger out)
Actually, the bulk of the Israeli people aren't religious loonies. The religious loonies living there don't support Israel, because the messiah hasn't come yet. Besides, Israel exists because of the secular Jewish people who were willing to take up arms and fight for their cause, not the ultra-religious ones. (Yes, I said fight. Sure, the UN did pass a resolution officially creating the country, but they still had to fight for their independence after the paperwork was signed.)
As I understand it, just before this latest terrorism mess started up over there, they were willing to give in to almost all of the Palistinian demands. However, the 95% solution wasn't good enough for them. So they all find themselves in this mess, with no clear way out of it.
And yes, it actually is a lot of land relative to the size of the country.
Oh, and why doesn't the rest of the surrounding Arab world offer to take in the Palistinians and solve the problem? Well, because they probably don't really like the Palistinians either, beyond their usefulness as a political tool against Israel.
Then again, doesn't a lot of good German beer also come from little breweries that no one has ever heard of? Seems like every town in Bavaria seems to have one.
I think you already can! Song has ethernet to every seat on their planes, and I think I even got a link when I tried "for the heck of it". Of course switch doesn't hook up to anything yet, but I suppose you could build a laptop-to-laptop ad-hoc LAN out of it.
Next time you fly on Song, look around seat-level under the arm rests. They've got what look like RJ-45 and USB jacks to every seat. I even plugged my laptop into the RJ-45 jack for the heck of it once, and actually got a link! So I take it, they've put in the wiring, and installed the switches, but havn't done anything else yet.
(FYI, the embedded passenger entertainment screens on the Song jets run Linux as well... I've flown on those planes enough to have seem them reboot.)
True, SGI does have a large market for scientific computing, and SGI Origin machines tend to use serial consoles.
However, last I checked, SGI got off the ground with the patent on a chip that did 4x4 matrix multiplication in hardware, hence hardware-accelerated 3D graphics.
(and I think the Origin line is a by-product of the time when they owned Cray... Of course I remeber salivating over product info sheets on the Power Challenge server series way back when)
Rather amazing, isn't it, when you discover that the installer for an OS targetted at a "graphical" machine is entirely text-based. Heck, Solaris even had a GUI installer as far back as 2.4 (possibly further, but that's the oldest I've tried.) Of course having the text-based on still there makes sense, when installing a headless machine over serial console.
Of course these days they're getting into the Itainium2 in a big way, and seem to be producing the only line of Itainium2 machines I ever hear about anyone actually buying.
I was also there. The system they were showing off was actually some sort of Altix, running Linux, with their fancy multi-pipe graphics hardware based off ATI chips.
Slashdot Mirror
Not sure of the level of integration, but I believe KDE now has support for the integral piece of Rendezvous (the multicast DNS responder). At least I saw it on the list of optional dependencies for KDE 3.4.
The "ps -ef" vs. "ps ax" has nothing to do with Linux or "Real UNIX". It is simply "SVR4 vs. BSD" for the parameter types for "ps". All the BSDs use the latter, all the SVR4's use the former, and some systems (like AIX) support both.
I just handed in my notice today. I've known my job was the wrong place for me since not long after I started, and I've been there a year and a half. However, not feeling comfortable leaving without somewhere else to go, I stuck with it for quite while longer than I probably should have.
Essentially, my job for the past year and a half was my first job out of college, and it didn't contribute towards technical experience useful for the career I want to have. Thankfully this new job will set me back on the right track.
Also, in my experience, you usually don't find more than one of those "crusty old bearded guys" in any particular group or organization. Some sort of natural limit, since their kind only finds its place with local uniqueness. :-)
Yeah, but when a Sun box crashes because of bad RAM, you actually get a meaningful death message. Heck, a lot of the time the message even tells you exactly which stick is bad and needs replacing!
OpenBSD/sparc64 isn't a valid measure of performance. In my attempts at using it, I've noticed that OpenBSD on an UltraSPARC-IIi is SIGNIFICANTLY slower than Solaris pretty much all around. The Netra I was trying to run it on was way too sluggish. But once I dumped it in favor of Solaris 9, the machine suddenly became a lot faster.
(not to say your CPU comparison isn't accurate, but that the differences are a lot less than you make them out to be.)
Now OpenBSD/sparc (32-bit), on the other hand, tends to work very well on its intended machines.
I'm not really sure how difficult it would be to figure out Solaris kernel code. (ok, maybe for Linux developers, but maybe not BSD ones) A couple years ago, I did some investigation into device driver code. One thing I found was that Solaris and FreeBSD device drivers looked VERY similar in structure. The main differences were the names of the callable kernel functions (names, more than functionality), and that Solaris strongly pushed the philosophy of using mutex locks for all data structures.
Actually, Sun has been toying around a lot with licensing costs lately. The current round I believe for Solaris 9 was free (maybe with conditions) for a single-CPU machine, and something like $250 for dual-cpu. (going up from there, but bigger machines usually cost enough that it isn't really that much relative to machine price)
However, the OS itself does absolutely nothing at all to check compliance, so the only purpose of the license is "being legit on paper". Thus, reasonable prices for businesses, and the hobbyists can get an OS for whatever they dig out of eBay or somebody's dumpster.
Actually, one thing I really like about Solaris is a forwards-compatable interface for kernel modules (i.e. drivers and such). This is something that Linux feels downright embarassing at (heck, they're not even compatable from one build to another, yet alone a point version), and I'm really not sure how FreeBSD is at this (havn't checked).
I can take a device driver written for Solaris version X, and chances are pretty good that it "will just work" on Solaris X+1 and maybe even X+2. (heck, I've even seen a single device driver module "supported" on multiple versions by a HW vendor) The only real requirement is that the module be built for the same architecture as the kernel (i.e. a 32-bit module won't work on a 64-bit kernel, and vice versa).
It wouldn't surprise me if it would actually be technically easier to put Solaris code into FreeBSD than into Linux (though there might be license issues). Then again, that's probably because of two observations... First, more lineage in common. Second, most FreeBSD folks I've met are far more willing to dabble in commercial 'nixes than most Linux folks I've met.
Sun's been using the term "Open" in their stuff forever. Remember, Sun's X environment was called "OpenWindows", and even though they've since discontinued the old OpenWindows window manager, their X server still resides in "/usr/openwin".
Though Sun's definition of "Open" has traditionally been "open standards", as opposed to the F/OSS definition which I believe to be "open implementations".
And how exactly would that help on SPARC, the primary architecture for Solaris? (where I seriously doubt IBM has Linux versions of anything)
I was never a fan of the tap-click, on the eraser-head or the touch-pad. That's why it is the first feature I disable on a laptop. My last laptop was an eraser (Thinkpad), and my current one is a PowerBook (touchpad). In the end, neither is easier than the other, once you get used to it. (except when the eraser is moving slowly, and it wears your finger out)
Actually, the bulk of the Israeli people aren't religious loonies. The religious loonies living there don't support Israel, because the messiah hasn't come yet. Besides, Israel exists because of the secular Jewish people who were willing to take up arms and fight for their cause, not the ultra-religious ones. (Yes, I said fight. Sure, the UN did pass a resolution officially creating the country, but they still had to fight for their independence after the paperwork was signed.)
As I understand it, just before this latest terrorism mess started up over there, they were willing to give in to almost all of the Palistinian demands. However, the 95% solution wasn't good enough for them. So they all find themselves in this mess, with no clear way out of it.
And yes, it actually is a lot of land relative to the size of the country.
Oh, and why doesn't the rest of the surrounding Arab world offer to take in the Palistinians and solve the problem? Well, because they probably don't really like the Palistinians either, beyond their usefulness as a political tool against Israel.
Then again, doesn't a lot of good German beer also come from little breweries that no one has ever heard of? Seems like every town in Bavaria seems to have one.
You know, there's more to memory performance than just throughput. Ever hear of latency?
Likewise, my 12" Apple PowerBook works wonderfully on planes. Heck, it even fits in the seat pocket in front of me during takeoff and landing!
I think you already can! Song has ethernet to every seat on their planes, and I think I even got a link when I tried "for the heck of it". Of course switch doesn't hook up to anything yet, but I suppose you could build a laptop-to-laptop ad-hoc LAN out of it.
Next time you fly on Song, look around seat-level under the arm rests. They've got what look like RJ-45 and USB jacks to every seat. I even plugged my laptop into the RJ-45 jack for the heck of it once, and actually got a link! So I take it, they've put in the wiring, and installed the switches, but havn't done anything else yet.
(FYI, the embedded passenger entertainment screens on the Song jets run Linux as well... I've flown on those planes enough to have seem them reboot.)
True, SGI does have a large market for scientific computing, and SGI Origin machines tend to use serial consoles.
However, last I checked, SGI got off the ground with the patent on a chip that did 4x4 matrix multiplication in hardware, hence hardware-accelerated 3D graphics.
(and I think the Origin line is a by-product of the time when they owned Cray... Of course I remeber salivating over product info sheets on the Power Challenge server series way back when)
Rather amazing, isn't it, when you discover that the installer for an OS targetted at a "graphical" machine is entirely text-based. Heck, Solaris even had a GUI installer as far back as 2.4 (possibly further, but that's the oldest I've tried.) Of course having the text-based on still there makes sense, when installing a headless machine over serial console.
IBM (pSeries) - Good CPU
Never heard of SGI ever touching an Alpha.
Of course these days they're getting into the Itainium2 in a big way, and seem to be producing the only line of Itainium2 machines I ever hear about anyone actually buying.
I was also there. The system they were showing off was actually some sort of Altix, running Linux, with their fancy multi-pipe graphics hardware based off ATI chips.