I agree w/ you about whatever gets the job done as a methodology. That is the whole goal of applied comp sci. You cannot tell me that you have not found recent behavior as unusual. Not the bickering between GNU about GNU linux or stuff like that. That is growing pains. But situations like the MindCraft test & the ethernet guy, there seems to be more to it. You can't tell me that you believe BillG is doing nothing about Linux/Open Source. Every other "fad" like Java & Windows CE has had action taken against it by Redmond. Do you really believe he is ignoring it? Often, what he has done has been a suttle strategy at first, but later, more of the pieces emerged. It is not just open source, I agree. It is a much bigger "THING". I will refer to it as that. This "THING" is undergoing growing pains, what better way to attack it than where it is weakest? And if he has nothing to do with what I am observing, then what is he doing about it? Any way, I like what you said about licensing also. Any particular reason why Public Domain was #1? Just curious. It was nice to hear from someone not in ELIZA mode. Thankyou for responding to my original post.
All the comments are religously defending one side or the other with emotional dribble. The open source movement is facing a lot of issues right now. The main one, which is at the heart of the problem in this discussion is how to get open source into the industry. Or put more bluntly, industry wants to know how to make money off the stuff. Sounds like growing pains to me. I have to say though, most of the comments I have read through on this page look like they were generated by some sort of ELIZA CGI script! It is not a matter of what is ideal, but what is practical. Both sides present elements of the ideal & practical & need to be sorted out. If there is anyone out their who is not an ELIZA script, please post some comments with apparent intelligence in them. Thankyou.
Has anyone else noticed that the whole open source methodology, the FSF, the GNU license, Linux, Apache, etc. has been under a huge attack lately? That may be a dumb question, but I have been reading slashdot for about 2 years now & I have noticed a number of the discussions being clouded with political crap & a bunch of opinions being presented by people who don't have their facts straight-usually because they DIDN'T read the article. If you ask me, I think that this is Bill Gates & every other major commercial software player's way of attacking the open source movement. All of the attacks seem to be at a technical level. We have the guy that invented ethernet call open source a fad & the discussions on slashdot and other sources have become so clouded with criticism, FUD, & pointless discussion that it is almost not even worth reading some of the slashdot posts. A bunch of people have been posting replies now for the last 6-8 months that don't make sense. They are full of directionless emotion without indicating any clear purpose or though behind it. It is my opinion that what we are seeing is Bill & his buddies attack on open source. Open Source people want to see code & action, not mindless, emotional pratal. And that seems to be exactly what Bill & his buddies are giving us. Call me paranoid, but you know Bill is paranoid. Look how he reacted to JAVA & the newtons, palm pilot craze (e.g. Windows CE-he wrote an operating system!!! He takes these things seriously.) Open Source is even more threatening to him than the other two combined. It attacks the very fabric of what Gates & his company stands for. And open source has been producing equal to or superior code in a shorter amount of time than M$ can hope to keep up with. Linus started what, back in 1991 (may have that wrong). If so, that is 8 years--linux is 8 yrs old! How long has Bill been working on Windows? And he still doesn't have it right. Bill has a lot of programming talent & he has had seasoned veterans for a while. Open Source WILL produce superior code in every area of software if it is allowed to continue. A simple comparison between commerical & free software proves that. That is what Bill is afraid of. Not so much of what we have now, but of what we will have in the future. He knows he cannot win by competing. Open source will beat him as time goes by. So he has to do his best-to kill it now. And he is doing it by flooding the tech realm w/ FUD & fighting. A house divided against itself cannot stand. Quit squabbling & keep coding!!! Well that is my 2 cents. Correct me at any point that you wish. I welcome it. I am seeking the truth as you all are. But don't waste my time or anyone else's by posting a piece of thoughless, emotion-filled dribble. Let's find the best solution w/o the dribble & code like their is no tomorrow. Bill knows he can't win-let's wipe him out...Remember the GHANDI quote:
First they ignore you. Then they laugh at you. Then they fight you. Then you win.
I have heard that Windows NT uses a BSD stack. That technology has been around for a while. Now Linux networking code derives from a similar background. How can their be such a performance different if Bill (gates) snagged BSD code? Could someone please explain this to me. I may not have my facts straight. Also, NT uses 7 mb MINIMUM just to load (according to NTLDR) + cpu time to run the gui + disk access time for virtual memory. Is their gui so well written that it minimizes the usage of such system resources? Well, I am a computer tech & I have seen what NT can do. I optimized an NT system where I work & later, I installed 95 on the same system & optimized it (disk cache sizing, vm adjustments, path/file cache, etc.). You would think the Pentium 200 I set it up on was a Pentium 100 running NT (32mb ram/3.2gb disk). I know NT should probably have more disk & double or quadruple the ram, but why? Why do you need such a beefy system just to run the stupid operating system. Why a gui? It will just sit their most of the time doing nothing but wasting resources. How can NT still come out on top? I want some answers.
AMD seems to have the technical know-how. Now they are improving their marketing. That is what has put m$ in it's place. I believe that AMD has a good design in their upcoming chip release. Intel is sweating over the Merced, and I really believe that this is AMD's chance to take some of the server market share to. It will rough terrain for them since they are new in town in that market. But if they undercut Intel on price, they have a shot at it. That is how they cut into the home-user market. The dollar sign & good design will be two things in their favor. As for name changing, I am more technically inclined individual. Names mean little to me. Just tell me what is under the hood and how much it costs. That is all that matters in the end anyway.
Why don't they just make a pact with COREL & ORACLE. COREL makes an office suite-didn't they try a JAVA one or something a couple years ago? And use Oracle for your database--personal addition. Even if they did something like that-it is no different than M$. I know commitees take a while, but you do get some pretty decent standards from them. If a cooperation sets the standards like M$ or anyone else, everyone pays for it & w/ more than money. If they want to make a commercial product, fine. But let an independent standards body create the standards and follow them. If they would do that, it would certainly fix a lot of problems. All for now...
The whole point of a server is stability and reliability. You want to setup a server to perform certain services (file service, print service, mail service -- or daemon depending on what world you come from) and that it would just do it's job with very little intervention from the administrator. Ideally, all the administrator should be doing is to continually customize the services the server is performing to meet the needs of those receiving service. However, things not being ideal, an administrator has to worry about hardware failure and hence must add tape backup, RAID, etc. to his server for fault tolerance, insurance against data loss, and to minimize down time. Now concerning the issue of whether or not to put certain drivers in the kernel, you must look at your application. In a server environment, you want to maximize stability and reliability. Therefore, the ideal situation is to minimize the number of factors that can directly affect stability. Device drivers are included in that category. With the creation of new hardware comes new drivers. The question is, is the driver updated enough to run the risk of failure? Patches and fixes are great, but you still have the possibility of failure present if such patches and fixes are needed. The question when looking into the operating system's design, and determining what drivers to include, do the drivers present a danger? Are they patched frequently? Are they stable? But those are all relative to what we know about the driver and it's history? What about rare and unknown bugs? Bugs that show up under unusual circumstances. Ever had a machine crash once out of the blue without knowing why? I have. Only God knows why in such situations. Maybe it never happens again. But it still happens. So what does one do? Do we accept that it will happen infrequent enough that we won't have to deal with it again? If you want stability, that is not acceptable. You cannot just leave such unknowns unanswered. NT and Linux both have such vulnerabilities since they both can have drivers present in the kernel. Getting back to the server, what do we do? Well, a design which I have been very impressed with in terms of an operating system is QNX. I do not know how many of you are familiar with it. It has a small message passing kernel and runs everything else as protected and separate entities. I found their microkernel model to be very impressive. I downloaded their demo and was very impressed with it also. For a server environment, it is a much better design than Linux or NT. I hope that someday Linux and NT will follow it's example. Perhaps two versions of each operating system. One version with a QNX-like model for servers, and one for high-performance workstations that don't need that kind of reliability. Another thing of noteworthiness that I wanted to look at deals with a difference between linux and NT. GUI interfaces are nice and pretty and are sometimes easier to use than a console. But if you think about it, on NT, the GUI is always running wasting precious memory and cpu time. I mean, how often does an administrator tinker with his server. Not often unless he is experiencing a high demand for changes from his users. Linux allows you to run the GUI if you want to, when you want to, and shut it down when you are done. In my opinion, that makes it a better design. I hope that microsoft will go back to the Win 3.xx/DOS model that is similiar to the X-Windows/Linux Model. It would certainly improve their server product. One of the engineers that designed VAX VMS worked on NT as you probably know. I believe at the heart of it, the microkernel is pretty good. It is all those nasty libraries on top, the integrated GUI, and the registry (yuck!!!had to mention that) that mess everything up. Hopefully my logic on this stuff is sound, but if someone finds fault, please reply and set it all straight. The point of discussions like this is not about who wins the argument, but that we find the best answer. One additional note about QNX, it is designed for embedded systems and the currently do not seem interested in the server market. However, I have heard rumors about Cyrix and QNX getting together to build ultra-cheap boxes for web-browsing or something. If you access their search engine, it provides detailed explanations about the QNX microkernel. I hope you all will read up on QNX. Linux and NT could definitely learn some things from it.
Is it just me, or do most the people that are preaching the y2k doom seem to be selling books that talk about it? Can you really believe people who are preaching it when the success of their latest book depends on them wearing "sack-clothe and ashes" and preaching doom.
Slashdot Mirror
Hey, it wasn't Windows CE Bill took action against, it was Palm Pilots/PDAs. windows ce was only part of his solution...sorry about that...
I agree w/ you about whatever gets the job done as a methodology. That is the whole goal of applied comp sci. You cannot tell me that you have not found recent behavior as unusual. Not the bickering between GNU about GNU linux or stuff like that. That is growing pains. But situations like the MindCraft test & the ethernet guy, there seems to be more to it. You can't tell me that you believe BillG is doing nothing about Linux/Open Source. Every other "fad" like Java & Windows CE has had action taken against it by Redmond. Do you really believe he is ignoring it? Often, what he has done has been a suttle strategy at first, but later, more of the pieces emerged. It is not just open source, I agree. It is a much bigger "THING". I will refer to it as that. This "THING" is undergoing growing pains, what better way to attack it than where it is weakest? And if he has nothing to do with what I am observing, then what is he doing about it? Any way, I like what you said about licensing also. Any particular reason why Public Domain was #1? Just curious. It was nice to hear from someone not in ELIZA mode. Thankyou for responding to my original post.
All the comments are religously defending one side or the other with emotional dribble. The open source movement is facing a lot of issues right now. The main one, which is at the heart of the problem in this discussion is how to get open source into the industry. Or put more bluntly, industry wants to know how to make money off the stuff. Sounds like growing pains to me. I have to say though, most of the comments I have read through on this page look like they were generated by some sort of ELIZA CGI script! It is not a matter of what is ideal, but what is practical. Both sides present elements of the ideal & practical & need to be sorted out. If there is anyone out their who is not an ELIZA script, please post some comments with apparent intelligence in them. Thankyou.
Has anyone else noticed that the whole open source methodology, the FSF, the GNU license, Linux, Apache, etc. has been under a huge attack lately? That may be a dumb question, but I have been reading slashdot for about 2 years now & I have noticed a number of the discussions being clouded with political crap & a bunch of opinions being presented by people who don't have their facts straight-usually because they DIDN'T read the article. If you ask me, I think that this is Bill Gates & every other major commercial software player's way of attacking the open source movement. All of the attacks seem to be at a technical level. We have the guy that invented ethernet call open source a fad & the discussions on slashdot and other sources have become so clouded with criticism, FUD, & pointless discussion that it is almost not even worth reading some of the slashdot posts. A bunch of people have been posting replies now for the last 6-8 months that don't make sense. They are full of directionless emotion without indicating any clear purpose or though behind it. It is my opinion that what we are seeing is Bill & his buddies attack on open source. Open Source people want to see code & action, not mindless, emotional pratal. And that seems to be exactly what Bill & his buddies are giving us. Call me paranoid, but you know Bill is paranoid. Look how he reacted to JAVA & the newtons, palm pilot craze (e.g. Windows CE-he wrote an operating system!!! He takes these things seriously.) Open Source is even more threatening to him than the other two combined. It attacks the very fabric of what Gates & his company stands for. And open source has been producing equal to or superior code in a shorter amount of time than M$ can hope to keep up with. Linus started what, back in 1991 (may have that wrong). If so, that is 8 years--linux is 8 yrs old! How long has Bill been working on Windows? And he still doesn't have it right. Bill has a lot of programming talent & he has had seasoned veterans for a while. Open Source WILL produce superior code in every area of software if it is allowed to continue. A simple comparison between commerical & free software proves that. That is what Bill is afraid of. Not so much of what we have now, but of what we will have in the future. He knows he cannot win by competing. Open source will beat him as time goes by. So he has to do his best-to kill it now. And he is doing it by flooding the tech realm w/ FUD & fighting. A house divided against itself cannot stand. Quit squabbling & keep coding!!! Well that is my 2 cents. Correct me at any point that you wish. I welcome it. I am seeking the truth as you all are. But don't waste my time or anyone else's by posting a piece of thoughless, emotion-filled dribble. Let's find the best solution w/o the dribble & code like their is no tomorrow. Bill knows he can't win-let's wipe him out...Remember the GHANDI quote:
First they ignore you.
Then they laugh at you.
Then they fight you.
Then you win.
I have heard that Windows NT uses a BSD stack. That technology has been around for a while. Now Linux networking code derives from a similar background. How can their be such a performance different if Bill (gates) snagged BSD code? Could someone please explain this to me. I may not have my facts straight. Also, NT uses 7 mb MINIMUM just to load (according to NTLDR) + cpu time to run the gui + disk access time for virtual memory. Is their gui so well written that it minimizes the usage of such system resources? Well, I am a computer tech & I have seen what NT can do. I optimized an NT system where I work & later, I installed 95 on the same system & optimized it (disk cache sizing, vm adjustments, path/file cache, etc.). You would think the Pentium 200 I set it up on was a Pentium 100 running NT (32mb ram/3.2gb disk). I know NT should probably have more disk & double or quadruple the ram, but why? Why do you need such a beefy system just to run the stupid operating system. Why a gui? It will just sit their most of the time doing nothing but wasting resources. How can NT still come out on top? I want some answers.
AMD seems to have the technical know-how. Now they are improving their marketing. That is what has put m$ in it's place. I believe that AMD has a good design in their upcoming chip release. Intel is sweating over the Merced, and I really believe that this is AMD's chance to take some of the server market share to. It will rough terrain for them since they are new in town in that market. But if they undercut Intel on price, they have a shot at it. That is how they cut into the home-user market. The dollar sign & good design will be two things in their favor. As for name changing, I am more technically inclined individual. Names mean little to me. Just tell me what is under the hood and how much it costs. That is all that matters in the end anyway.
Why don't they just make a pact with COREL & ORACLE. COREL makes an office suite-didn't they try a JAVA one or something a couple years ago? And use Oracle for your database--personal addition. Even if they did something like that-it is no different than M$. I know commitees take a while, but you do get some pretty decent standards from them. If a cooperation sets the standards like M$ or anyone else, everyone pays for it & w/ more than money. If they want to make a commercial product, fine. But let an independent standards body create the standards and follow them. If they would do that, it would certainly fix a lot of problems. All for now...
The whole point of a server is stability and reliability. You want to setup a server to perform certain services (file service, print service, mail service -- or daemon depending on what world you come from) and that it would just do it's job with very little intervention from the
administrator. Ideally, all the administrator should be doing is to continually customize the services the server is performing to meet the
needs of those receiving service. However, things not being ideal, an administrator has to worry about hardware failure and hence must add
tape backup, RAID, etc. to his server for fault tolerance, insurance against data loss, and to minimize down time. Now concerning the issue
of whether or not to put certain drivers in the kernel, you must look at your application. In a server environment, you want to maximize
stability and reliability. Therefore, the ideal situation is to minimize the number of factors that can directly affect stability. Device drivers are included in that category. With the creation of new hardware comes new drivers. The question is, is the driver updated enough to run the risk of failure? Patches and fixes are great, but you still have the possibility of failure present if such patches and fixes
are needed. The question when looking into the operating system's design, and determining what drivers to include, do the drivers present
a danger? Are they patched frequently? Are they stable? But those are all relative to what we know about the driver and it's history? What
about rare and unknown bugs? Bugs that show up under unusual circumstances. Ever had a machine crash once out of the blue without knowing why? I have. Only God knows why in such situations. Maybe it never happens again. But it still happens. So what does one do? Do we accept that it will happen infrequent enough that we won't have to deal with it again? If you want stability, that is not acceptable. You cannot
just leave such unknowns unanswered. NT and Linux both have such vulnerabilities since they both can have drivers present in the kernel.
Getting back to the server, what do we do? Well, a design which I have been very impressed with in terms of an operating system is QNX. I do not know how many of you are familiar with it. It has a small message
passing kernel and runs everything else as protected and separate entities. I found their microkernel model to be very impressive. I
downloaded their demo and was very impressed with it also. For a server environment, it is a much better design than Linux or NT. I hope that
someday Linux and NT will follow it's example. Perhaps two versions of each operating system. One version with a QNX-like model for servers,
and one for high-performance workstations that don't need that kind of reliability. Another thing of noteworthiness that I wanted to look at
deals with a difference between linux and NT. GUI interfaces are nice and pretty and are sometimes easier to use than a console. But if you think about it, on NT, the GUI is always running wasting precious memory and cpu time. I mean, how often does an administrator tinker with his server. Not often unless he is experiencing a high demand for changes from his users. Linux allows you to run the GUI if you want to, when
you want to, and shut it down when you are done. In my opinion, that makes it a better design. I hope that microsoft will go back to the Win
3.xx/DOS model that is similiar to the X-Windows/Linux Model. It would certainly improve their server product. One of the engineers that
designed VAX VMS worked on NT as you probably know. I believe at the heart of it, the microkernel is pretty good. It is all those nasty
libraries on top, the integrated GUI, and the registry (yuck!!!had to mention that) that mess everything up. Hopefully my logic on this stuff is sound, but if someone finds fault, please reply and set it all straight. The point of discussions like this is not about who wins the argument, but that we find the best answer. One additional note about QNX, it is designed for embedded systems and the currently do not seem interested in the server market. However, I have heard rumors about Cyrix and QNX getting together to build ultra-cheap boxes for web-browsing or something. If you access their search engine, it provides detailed explanations about the QNX microkernel. I hope you all will read up on QNX. Linux and NT could definitely learn some things from it.
Is it just me, or do most the people that are preaching the y2k doom seem to be selling books that talk about it? Can you really believe people who are preaching it when the success of their latest book depends on them wearing "sack-clothe and ashes" and preaching doom.