You haven't got it yet: The point about making a parody of the Microsoft slogan is that "where do you want to go today" is a completely braindead slogan! It's just pure sillyness. That's why everybody is so keen to ridicule it. TA
Oh come on, it's not creating "confusion, mistakes or deception"! No way it is. It's crystal clear, everybody immediately remembers Microsoft's slogan, "where do you want to go today" and then they see the point. So where's the confusion, deception and mistakes? TA
Yeah I see the same. Although I don't do dvorak I am in three different keyboard layouts and I have absolutely no problem switching from one of them to one of the other, *unless* I'm at the wrong place! Typing on the wrong keyboard in my office makes me crazy, but the good office layout confuses me if I'm in the computer room! However, the switch itself is easy. It's just a question of having the right clues to switch, because switching mental keymaps doesn't seem to be something you can do consciously -- you just have to think the "right thoughts" or feel the right way and the switch is transparent. TA
They can't claim the whois database 'proprietary' *now*, *AFTER* 'everybody' has registered information with them. It certainly wasn't the deal when we (that is, the company where I work) registered our networks/domains with InterNIC. We certainly didn't mean that info to be *proprietary* for InterNIC or NIS or whoever!! Now this is the dirtiest trick I've heard in a while. Grumble. TA
Ok I found it but it wasn't obvious. I use Lynx, and with the new layout you don't see 'Flat Mode', you only see 'Threaded' and you have to select that link and *then* you'll find a menu with Flat Mode among them. Sigh. The new layout isn't so Lynx friendly as it used to be, now you have to know in advance what features exist and where they can be found:-( TA
So why did the following posting to this thread end up with no Score whatsoever, so only 'raw mode' would show it? TA
So where did Flat Mode go? by TA on Saturday March 27, @03:28PM EDT ([123]User Info) Where did Flat Mode go? I can't see it anywhere. That makes it just too much work to wade through comments. TA
I believe you are wrong. Where can they make the profit? Digital, er, Compaq has to pay *huge* license fees to sell Digital Unix. They even have to pay license fees on the PROMs they have to ship for booting DU (the SRM console).. when they sell NT (or Linux) they can ship the ARC PROMs instead which is cheaper. Look at the price difference between the two alternatives: DU with SRM console, Linux with ARC console. Now tell me where they make their huge profit? Better to rip it away and sell them cheaper. Hell, if DEC had aggresively pushed Alpha workstations with Linux (in my country) a couple of years back I guarantee we had been an Alpha workstation company now, instead of Sun/SGI.. TA
>Here, they can only terminate if YOU bring a suit against Apple. >Isn't that the key difference?[...] >Or am I misunderstanding the issue? You are. Read it again.. They will terminate *your* license immediately if YOU bring a suit against apple, but they will also terminate it (by putting a note at its webside) in case (from memory): a) They can't aquire the patent/rights (apparently they will try that..) b) They can't change the code to work around it c) is the last one -- they terminate the license with a note on the web. TA
Yeah, we're using slightly old models, as I mentioned in another posting. That's the deal with IBM, however I didn't think they're pushing 1994 models on us! The first rack had 66MHz nodes and the HP switch, the next (which came a couple of months later) had changed to the SP switch (less reliable from our experience btw), the newest nodes are now 133MHz which are still a bit behind the specs you can find on the latest and greatest. It's interesting that you have measured 100MB on the latest equipment, the application should in theory be running on new hardware when it gets operational. It's very useful to have an idea of how the switch will perform, so thanks a lot for that info. TA
Oh I have read that page, and I have used all the tuning tricks in the (IBM) books, and the SP switch bandwidth *still* sucks. Other companies we work with on a big project have done a lot of testing as well, and the TCP bandwidth is just bad. As I said, if you get 30MB/sec in real life then you're good (and don't even think about UDP, that's really terrible). Now, we're not using the latest and greatest hardware, the nodes we use are 133 MHz. But we don't see much improvement from the 66 MHz nodes. No, I'm not impressed by the SP switch. And besides, it's a terrible beast to work with. TA
Er, the IBM SP2 inter node bandwidth is nothing to write home about.. I'm working with these beasts, and the SP switch can do around 30 megabytes/second at maximum. If you reach 25 MB/s in real life then you're lucky. I haven't heard about any big improvements on that speed on the newest models either, in any event they must increase that speed by several orders of magnitude if you want to compare with e.g. Origin 2000. And considering the price of an SP2 rack the price/performance is, eh, interesting.. TA
You obviously haven't thought this through. People are replacing the CPU in their computer all the time these days. Even I have (I actually forgot that for a moment..), and I'm no "upgrade at all costs" guy. Can you imagine the hassle to get all your CPU-tied license servers for all your "top-notch 3D, CAD, and hardware- simulation" tools working again after a CPU change? TA
I don't know what Coldfire is either, but finally there's something with a lower BogoMIPS count than my computers;-) TA
Yep: Just one big partition
on
HPs Linux Push
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· Score: 1
That's what I meant.. and that's how SGIs come these days. Ok it's/usr/people not/home, but other than that all those directories are in one big partition (and SGI *does* have a growable file system just like IBM). And yeah, it works *much* better than it used to do in the past, when they came with the tiny root partition which always ran full at the most inconvenient time. I remember Sun hell back in the past when we only had Sun boxes and they all had tiny root partitions. The reasoning was that it was "less chance of destroying something important if you don't keep your files (eggs) in the same partition (basket)", but that's in my opinion bogus. The other argument I hear is that with/usr/people on the same partition as / then a user can fill up the "root" disk and you have a DoS attack when root can't even log in to fix it.. wrong again, only root can fill up the last few percents of the disk (it's like that in Linux too). Now, there are some exceptions of course. Solaris uses a special file system type for/tmp (swap filesystem), so it's separate from the rest. That's fine. And if I set up a CVS server on a (non-Solaris) box, then I would also make/tmp a separate filesystem, a really big super-fast one, because CVS servers first copy everything into/tmp before sending it over the net to client. But for ordinary workstations and standard servers I say "make the disk one big partition and put / and/usr and/tmp and even/home on it and be done with it". No need to juggle the space between file systems, with one partition you have the ultimate dynamic system.. no more "I need 200 MB for this temporary file, and I have 150 MB free on / and 170 MB free on/usr but I can't find 200 MB in one place". Make another partition/filesystem when you get another disk, heck, add the disks together with md or another logical volume manager and make one even bigger filesystem of those disks:-) TA
Whoa there. That would be crazy, agreed. You don't need sendmail or any mail software *at all* to forge an address, so that's bogus anyway. You would have to make the whole SMTP protocol illegal.
I'm from Europe so no expert on that first amendment, but isn't it just about "free speech"? So what on earth has "free speech" got to do with the right to force yourself into peoples home to "speak" to them? (not to mention that it's about marketing, not "speech" as such). In my ears "free speech" doesn't mean "free to force everybody to listen". It should be about being free to speak to whoever wants to listen. No?
I have used Linux for nearly seven years, and AIX for only two, but "If Linux has reached a level where it is relatively equal to AIX in relaibilty and functionality[...]" all those two years it has never been a question of Linux reaching the reliability level of AIX.. Linux is way more reliable. It's another division completely. About functionality, the only thing I can think of is the growable file system in AIX, and as I've said before that's really an external feature not a characteristic of the operating system. I grow those JFS filesystems all the time, but face it people, as long as it isn't possible to *reduce* filesystems it's simply a glorified way of putting off the decision about how big you want to make the filesystem in the first place. An AIX box comes preinstalled with a whole bunch of tiny tiny filesystems (/tmp,/usr,/var,/home,/man,/ and so on), and the first thing you have to do is to increase them before they hit you straight in the face. It *always* fails because IBM won't sell a useless config..? Then you can start pointing out to people that IBM systems come with a completely useless setup (not only the partitions, everything else is crazy too.. process limits, login limits, swap space, basically *everything* is preconfigured to give you and your users a headache). And in the end it's so much better to just make a big partition and be done with it (SGI come preconfigured this way now, and that's how I do my Linux setups too. No separate/tmp sillyness. Never regretted that.) In this way you avoid the decisions about how much to give to this filesystem and how much to give to that filesystem. But come back when you can *reduce* the filesystems.. then it may be more of an advantage. TA
Ridiculous comparision of HP-UX and Linux
on
HPs Linux Push
·
· Score: 1
"Next time you guys invest alot of money in HP hardware and decide to throw it out, let me know which dumpster you use. My email address is zachary@acm.org." Naah, next time we'll run Linux on them instead and get some mileage out of the hardware. IMO HP should have dumped HP-UX a long time ago and gone Linux instead. Then we would probably still use HP around here. -TA
Is Linux the 3rd best *nix?
on
HPs Linux Push
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· Score: 1
As another person said, it depends on what you do. But IMO when you compare an OS with another on a generic level you should ignore any special "features" they might come with, like LVM or journalled file systems. That's like an application anyway. It's like blindly saying one car is better than another because it has no-flat tyres or something. As far as Unix is concerned there are IMO a couple of real losers out there: 1: Ultrix. 2: HP-UX. AIX is full of strange bugs and annoyances, but it's much more mainstream to work with (and definitely getting even more mainstream), but do an "ls" in AIX 4.1 or 4.2, then ask yourself "now where the h*** did my files go??" Repeat the command and suddenly they're back. That's something you can get used to, it's worse when sockets stop working on the SP/2 switch for no apparent reason and you have to reboot. Then there are unkillable processes, memory leaks (a workstation here with 64MB RAM has to be rebooted every two weeks because it eats all the memory. And it's doing nothing.. we don't use it for anything. It's *idle* all the time. Compare that to my heavy-duty Linux box with uptimes over a year and not a byte leaked (X11 up all the time too). But I would still say AIX is better than HP-UX or Ultrix. Solaris is probably ok but I just don't enjoy working with it. IRIX is good. Linux is good. SCO pre-Unixware was pretty bad to work with, but not necessarily buggy though. I don't know about Unixware. I have no personal experience with the *BSDs but from what I hear they are good too. Oh, and DEC Unix is ok from what I hear, but again I have no personal experience with it. We use SGI hardware, Sun hardware, IBM hardware, and we used to have HP hardware. For the three first ones we can live with the vendor OS (IRIX is particularly ok IMO), but no way we could go with HP-UX. If Linux ran on HP two or three years ago (no technical reason it couldn't have) we would still have the HP boxes in-house. We can survive with AIX on IBM workstations, but it's a lot of pain and you can stand the pain only so long. - TA
Ridiculous comparision of HP-UX and Linux
on
HPs Linux Push
·
· Score: 1
That statement from HP that Linux was not up to the quality of HP-UX is so crazy that I don't know if I should cry or laugh.. we bought a bunch of HP work stations because they looked cheap at first sight. In the end we threw them all out and good riddance. What a crappy OS! Full of bugs, and all the HP-VUE X applications were statically linked so we had to buy a lot of extra RAM to make the boxes usable. That killed the price advantage.. Ok it may be that HP-UX can run 8-CPU better, but other than that HP-UX is in the league of Ultrix: Total crap.
Why? If you had tried you would know why..
on
PPC SMP Boxes
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· Score: 1
Having worked on single-CPU computers for years I changed to a 2-CPU SGI system. Suddenly you don't notice that a compile is going on, or you are running something CPU-demanding in the background.. or somebody else is.. the whole thing feels much smoother. Now, when I compile Mozilla on my single-CPU Intel box I can as well go home. Well, later I got two more CPUs installed in that SGI box (for a total of 4), and this is just great.. Compiling XEmacs in two minutes flat and the system *still* feels smooth. I'm in for a new Linux box now and I really don't want a 1-CPU box:-(
Slashdot Mirror
You haven't got it yet: The point about making a parody of the Microsoft slogan is that "where do you want to go today" is a completely braindead slogan! It's just pure sillyness. That's why everybody is so keen to ridicule it.
TA
Oh come on, it's not creating "confusion, mistakes or deception"! No way it is. It's crystal clear, everybody immediately remembers Microsoft's slogan, "where do you want to go today" and then they see the point. So where's the confusion, deception and mistakes?
TA
That analogy you presented was the worst piece of crap I've seen in a long, long time. Was that the best you could come up with?
TA
Yeah I see the same. Although I don't do dvorak I am in three different keyboard layouts and I have absolutely no problem switching from one of them to one of the other, *unless* I'm at the wrong place! Typing on the wrong keyboard in my office makes me crazy, but the good office layout confuses me if I'm in the computer room!
However, the switch itself is easy. It's just a question of having the right clues to switch, because switching mental keymaps doesn't seem to be something you can do consciously -- you just have to think the "right thoughts" or feel the right way and the switch is transparent.
TA
They can't claim the whois database 'proprietary' *now*, *AFTER* 'everybody' has registered information with them. It certainly wasn't the deal when we (that is, the company where I work) registered our networks/domains with InterNIC. We certainly didn't mean that info to be *proprietary* for InterNIC or NIS or whoever!! Now this is the dirtiest trick I've heard in a while. Grumble.
TA
Ok I found it but it wasn't obvious. I use Lynx, and with the new layout you don't see 'Flat Mode', you only see 'Threaded' and you have to select that link and *then* you'll find a menu with Flat Mode among them. Sigh. The new layout isn't so Lynx friendly as it used to be, now you have to know in advance what features exist and where they can be found :-(
TA
So why did the following posting to this thread end up with no Score whatsoever, so only 'raw mode' would show it?
TA
So where did Flat Mode go?
by TA on Saturday March 27, @03:28PM EDT
([123]User Info)
Where did Flat Mode go? I can't see it anywhere. That makes it just
too much work to wade through comments.
TA
I believe you are wrong. Where can they make the profit? Digital, er, Compaq has to pay *huge* license fees to sell Digital Unix. They even have to pay license fees on the PROMs they have to ship for booting DU (the SRM console).. when they sell NT (or Linux) they can ship the ARC PROMs instead which is cheaper.
Look at the price difference between the two alternatives: DU with SRM console, Linux with ARC console. Now tell me where they make their huge profit?
Better to rip it away and sell them cheaper. Hell, if DEC had aggresively pushed Alpha workstations with Linux (in my country) a couple of years back I guarantee we had been an Alpha workstation company now, instead of Sun/SGI..
TA
>Here, they can only terminate if YOU bring a suit against Apple.
>Isn't that the key difference?[...]
>Or am I misunderstanding the issue?
You are. Read it again..
They will terminate *your* license immediately if YOU bring a suit against apple, but they will also terminate it (by putting a note at its webside) in case (from memory):
a) They can't aquire the patent/rights (apparently they will try that..)
b) They can't change the code to work around it
c) is the last one -- they terminate the license with a note on the web.
TA
.. fix his terminology! Mis-using "hacker" the way he did in that article makes him look like an idiot.
TA
Yeah, we're using slightly old models, as I mentioned in another posting. That's the deal with IBM, however I didn't think they're pushing 1994 models on us! The first rack had 66MHz nodes and the HP switch, the next (which came a couple of months later) had changed to the SP switch (less reliable from our experience btw), the newest nodes are now 133MHz which are still a bit behind the specs you can find on the latest and greatest.
It's interesting that you have measured 100MB on the latest equipment, the application should in theory be running on new hardware when it gets operational. It's very useful to have an idea of how the switch will perform, so thanks a lot for that info.
TA
Oh I have read that page, and I have used all the tuning tricks in the (IBM) books, and the SP switch bandwidth *still* sucks. Other companies we work with on a big project have done a lot of testing as well, and the TCP bandwidth is just bad. As I said, if you get 30MB/sec in real life then you're good (and don't even think about UDP, that's really terrible). Now, we're not using the latest and greatest hardware, the nodes we use are 133 MHz. But we don't see much improvement from the 66 MHz nodes.
No, I'm not impressed by the SP switch. And besides, it's a terrible beast to work with.
TA
Er, the IBM SP2 inter node bandwidth is nothing to write home about.. I'm working with these beasts, and the SP switch can do around 30 megabytes/second at maximum. If you reach 25 MB/s in real life then you're lucky. I haven't heard about any big improvements on that speed on the newest models either, in any event they must increase that speed by several orders of magnitude if you want to compare with e.g. Origin 2000. And considering the price of an SP2 rack the price/performance is, eh, interesting..
TA
That 128 bit processor is almost certainly just two :-)
64 bit wide chips (or worse
TA
You obviously haven't thought this through.
People are replacing the CPU in their computer all
the time these days. Even I have (I actually forgot that for a moment..),
and I'm no "upgrade at all costs" guy.
Can you imagine the hassle to get all your CPU-tied license
servers for all your "top-notch 3D, CAD, and hardware-
simulation" tools working again after a CPU change?
TA
I don't know what Coldfire is either, but finally there's something with a lower BogoMIPS count than my computers ;-)
TA
That's what I meant.. and that's how SGIs come these days. Ok it's /usr/people not /home, but other than that all those directories are in one big partition (and SGI *does* have a growable file system just like IBM). And yeah, it works *much* better than it used to do in the past, when they came with the tiny root partition which always ran full at the most inconvenient time. I remember Sun hell back in the past when we only had Sun boxes and they all had tiny root partitions. The reasoning was that it was "less chance of destroying something important if you don't keep your files (eggs) in the same partition (basket)", but that's in my opinion bogus. The other argument I hear is that with /usr/people on the same partition as / then a user can fill up the "root" disk and you have a DoS attack when root can't even log in to fix it.. wrong again, only root can fill up the last few percents of the disk (it's like that in Linux too). /tmp (swap filesystem), so it's separate from the rest. That's fine. And if I set up a CVS server on a (non-Solaris) box, then I would also make /tmp a separate filesystem, a really big super-fast one, because CVS servers first copy everything into /tmp before sending it over the net to client. But for ordinary workstations and standard servers I say "make the disk one big partition and put / and /usr and /tmp and even /home on it and be done with it". No need to juggle the space between file systems, with one partition you have the ultimate dynamic system.. no more "I need 200 MB for this temporary file, and I have 150 MB free on / and 170 MB free on /usr but I can't find 200 MB in one place". Make another partition/filesystem when you get another disk, heck, add the disks together with md or another logical volume manager and make one even bigger filesystem of those disks :-)
Now, there are some exceptions of course. Solaris uses a special file system type for
TA
Whoa there. That would be crazy, agreed. You don't need sendmail or any mail software *at all* to forge an address, so that's bogus anyway. You would have to make the whole SMTP protocol illegal.
I'm from Europe so no expert on that first amendment, but isn't it just about "free speech"? So what on earth has "free speech" got to do with the right to force yourself into peoples home to "speak" to them? (not to mention that it's about marketing, not "speech" as such). In my ears "free speech" doesn't mean "free to force everybody to listen". It should be about being free to speak to whoever wants to listen. No?
I have used Linux for nearly seven years, and AIX for only two, but /tmp sillyness. Never regretted that.) In this way you avoid the decisions about how much to give to this filesystem and how much to give to that filesystem.
"If Linux has reached a level where it is relatively equal to AIX in
relaibilty and functionality[...]"
all those two years it has never been a question of Linux reaching the reliability level of AIX.. Linux is way more reliable. It's another division completely. About functionality, the only thing I can think of is the growable file system in AIX, and as I've said before that's really an external feature not a characteristic of the operating system. I grow those JFS filesystems all the time, but face it people, as long as it isn't possible to *reduce* filesystems it's simply a glorified way of putting off the decision about how big you want to make the filesystem in the first place. An AIX box comes preinstalled with a whole bunch of tiny tiny filesystems (/tmp,/usr,/var,/home,/man,/ and so on), and the first thing you have to do is to increase them before they hit you straight in the face. It *always* fails because IBM won't sell a useless config..? Then you can start pointing out to people that IBM systems come with a completely useless setup (not only the partitions, everything else is crazy too..
process limits, login limits, swap space, basically *everything* is preconfigured to give you and your users a headache).
And in the end it's so much better to just make a big partition and be done with it (SGI come preconfigured this way now, and that's how I do my Linux setups too. No separate
But come back when you can *reduce* the filesystems.. then it may be more of an advantage.
TA
"Next time you guys invest alot of money in HP hardware and decide to
throw it out, let me know which dumpster you use. My email address is
zachary@acm.org."
Naah, next time we'll run Linux on them instead and get some mileage out of the hardware.
IMO HP should have dumped HP-UX a long time ago and gone Linux instead. Then we would probably still use HP around here.
-TA
As another person said, it depends on what you do.
But IMO when you compare an OS with another on a generic level you should ignore any special "features" they might come with, like LVM or journalled file systems. That's like an application anyway. It's like blindly saying one car is better than another because it has no-flat tyres or something.
As far as Unix is concerned there are IMO a couple of real losers out there: 1: Ultrix. 2: HP-UX. AIX is full of strange bugs and annoyances, but it's much more mainstream to work with (and definitely getting even more mainstream), but do an "ls" in AIX 4.1 or 4.2, then ask yourself "now where the h*** did my files go??" Repeat the command and suddenly they're back. That's something you can get used to, it's worse when sockets stop working on the SP/2 switch for no apparent reason and you have to reboot. Then there are unkillable processes, memory leaks (a workstation here with 64MB RAM has to be rebooted every two weeks because it eats all the memory. And it's doing nothing.. we don't use it for anything. It's *idle* all the time. Compare that to my heavy-duty Linux box with uptimes over a year and not a byte leaked (X11 up all the time too).
But I would still say AIX is better than HP-UX or Ultrix. Solaris is probably ok but I just don't enjoy working with it. IRIX is good. Linux is good. SCO pre-Unixware was pretty bad to work with, but not necessarily buggy though. I don't know about Unixware. I have no personal experience with the *BSDs but from what I hear they are good too. Oh, and DEC Unix is ok from what I hear, but again I have no personal experience with it.
We use SGI hardware, Sun hardware, IBM hardware, and we used to have HP hardware. For the three first ones we can live with the vendor OS (IRIX is particularly ok IMO), but no way we could go with HP-UX. If Linux ran on HP two or three years ago (no technical reason it couldn't have) we would still have the HP boxes in-house. We can survive with AIX on IBM workstations, but it's a lot of pain and you can stand the pain only so long.
- TA
That statement from HP that Linux was not up to the
quality of HP-UX is so crazy that I don't know if
I should cry or laugh.. we bought a bunch of HP
work stations because they looked cheap at first sight.
In the end we threw them all out and good riddance.
What a crappy OS! Full of bugs, and all the HP-VUE
X applications were statically linked so we had to buy
a lot of extra RAM to make the boxes usable. That killed
the price advantage.. Ok it may be that HP-UX can
run 8-CPU better, but other than that HP-UX is in the league of Ultrix: Total crap.
Having worked on single-CPU computers for years I :-(
changed to a 2-CPU SGI system. Suddenly you don't
notice that a compile is going on, or you are running
something CPU-demanding in the background.. or somebody else is.. the whole
thing feels much smoother. Now, when I compile Mozilla
on my single-CPU Intel box I can as well go home.
Well, later I got two more CPUs installed in that
SGI box (for a total of 4), and this is just great.. Compiling XEmacs
in two minutes flat and the system *still* feels
smooth. I'm in for a new Linux box now and I really don't want a 1-CPU box
I registered many years ago.. I'm number 70 :-)
(the counter can send you a nice Penguin gif with
"Registered User # xx")