So I also ran a netpipe test to see what it thought of my NICs.
It gives you a NetPIPE.out. According to the man page, they contain: "time to transfer the block, bits per second, bits in block, bytes in block, and variance."
First of all, the manpage is wrong because the second column gives a number much closer to megabits per second, and after numerical verification, I found that it's giving the value of 1024*1024 bits per second and not 1000*1000 bits per second.
In NIC-talk, when we say gigabit, we mean 1000,000,000 bits, not 1000*1024*1024 bits.
So when benchmarking your gigabit network card with netpipe, please remember that you're looking at speed results "1024*1024"-megabits, so your NIC is really only 953.6 megabits, which immediately gives a much better insight into the speed achieved by the Syskonnect card.
"with a celeron 1.1 Ghz, 256 MB ram, and a 20 gigabyte hard drive"
That is surplus by today's standards, and the parts in those boxes won't be quality components either. You can never beat surplus prices by whiteboxing. whiteboxing only works good in the high or top-level. Think XP1900+ and up, 512MB + 60GB minimum, etc.
If your budget is $/Eur 2500, and stability is very important, than use that budget to build two simpler and each slightly different systems. You'll love it, especially when for example you think the video drives of that top-of-the-line video card you bought are causing those hard-to-reproduce problems. You'll have a PC right next to it with a different brand videocard that doesn't hav the problem, and a 20-minute swap-diagnostic will show you if the problem is related to the video card.
Plus then when that harddisk goes, or powersupply gives up right before that deadline, you'll have a working spare computer on which you made that backup of your files yesterday!
Re: system building *is* a pain, nowdays!
on
PC Prices to Rise?
·
· Score: 2
In many cases, it's not brand names of the components that give you quality (anymore). All mainboard manufacturers fluke every once in a while, all drive manufacturers do, a bunch of cdrw manufacturers did, etc. But also, many lower-budget manufacturers make excellent high quality and long-term stable products every once in a while.
In any case, motherboard manufacturers such as Abit are fair in their warranty service, if you don't mind waiting two months for your repaired item. Drive manufacturers also are good at sending replacement items for broken drives.
But you don't want to be without PC for weeks waiting for warranty repair, so lesson number one: When you build PCs yourself, build multiple PCs so you can keep spare components laying around.
A problem here is also that it's getting harder to identify which components are of good quality. Review websites will give you some information, but of course nobody has long-term stability tests for those brand-new chipset mainboards.
BUT, neither does HP, or Compaq, or Dell. The last Athlon-carrying HP I've examined contained a mainboard based on the lobu KL133 SDRAM(!) chipset (further rant deleted). Bringing your broken PC back to the retailer 9 months after you bought it also doesn't give to an instant fix or replacement, they might send it to the manufacturer for you though, saving you some shipping cost.
What I'm trying to say is that 'whiteboxing' your own PC is not as simple as going onto pricewatch and finding the cheapes supplier for the latest and hottest hardware reviewed by tom on the web.
Succesfull whiteboxing requires keeping good track of all review websites (and top magazines such as the german "CT magazine"), and paying special attention to stability issues. Even then, don't go whiteboxing just for one PC, because you'll have much more trouble diagnosing which part is broken or unstable in case you have problems. When you have multiple PCs that you are 'whiteboxing', you can often quickly identify problem components by swapping them around.
For succesfull whiteboxing, you will want to run your own stability tests (memtest86, cpu+disk loads, benchmarks, etc), and you will want to have alternate (varying brand or model) components to swap in and out to find the optimal combination.
You will want to do all testing while you don't have to wait for it, so it will have to be at least your second PC, so you can keep surfing the web for example while a 48hour test runs.
Then, you want to deal with suppliers that you can simply send low quality components back to with not much more than a quoted reason like 'unstable', 'unreliable', or 'incompatible'. If you can't find such a supplier, you want one that is 20+% cheaper than the rest so you can simply stoss one in every 5 components you buy in the bin if they are pieces of junk.
For most people, that means that they can only be succesfull whiteboxers if they build computers for themselves, and their family, and maybe the aunts friends, the neighbours daughter, their pets outdour house and that cute girl in the bar.
But that's the way it has always been, and nothing is changing there at all. Whiteboxing is not for the amateur, if you want the perfect system and you're not ready to go all the way, then buy your stuff at the dealer and buy the expensive extended warranty, and forget about whiteboxing. If you don't mind messing with the stuff, reading and learing about the stuff, and doing it for others too (including fixing it when they bring it back broken (which they will!)), then go ahead you've found yourself a more interesting alternative to fishing or stamp collecting.
That's what whiteboxing is all about, it's not about spending a couple of evenings at pricewatch and toms web site after watching a technet show and then flushing the cash for the 'perfect' system that you will love for years to come.
I guess you don't recognize irony when it hits you in the face. I'm sure Microsoft can setup an IIS server in the time it takes to copy an OEM image to a harddrive plus fifty-two mouse clicks and seventeen reboots for configuration changes.
I guess you also don't know that many professional hosting providers give you two IP numbers in totally different subnets, with different routing on each subnet, for better availability upon uptream-network failure.
Be glad that keyboards have that numeric patch on the right (yes that part that almost nobody uses), otherwise, how else would you type an asterisk without the shift?
-- ps: I'll give freeBSD an honest try as soon as Debian has packaged it (soon). I'll take apt-get source over cvsup any day.
Copy-on-write files, that's a nice feature I've already been waiting for for other reasons in Linux filesystems. Maybe one day I'll feel strong enough again to poke around in the kernel.
I can see how that would really, really speedup a snapshot too.
And that is confirmed by netcraft (yes netcraft seems slashdotted). The changeover happened just today, the BSD site was known up since March 28. I guess when you want something quickly, FreeBSD with RapidSite/Apache is the way to go. Then later on, when your employer starts pushing, you can always migrate towards the much harder to setup IIS server. hihi. I'm wondering if it has Minda yet.
"Even more important, who is accountable? Linux is an amalgamation of the input of many companies and individual software engineers. So whom do you call when it breaks?"
Old moot. If you want accountability when something breaks, get a contract with a service company. Just call IBM, or SUN, or LinuxCare, or RedHat, or whichever company you want to use for service to your car^H^H^Hoperating system.
"Also, contrary to popular belief, Linux is not really "free." How are large-scale licensing agreements to be worked out?"
Suit-talk. You don't need to 'work out a licence agreement', you either accept the GPL and use Linux, or you don't accept it and don't use Linux.
Sure, the service company isn't free but nobody is forcing you to use a service company. In some companies, the internal IT department can very well be made capable to do all servicing themselves. Oil change? Brake pads? 'apt-get install oil task-brake' (yes in my dreams)
You want 'accountability'? Then you pay somebody for the right to blame them.
"Would I put an air traffic control system on Linux right now? No," says Carey,chief technology architect at Merrill.
I didn't know ML made air traffic control systems? What's the statement for then?
It's not the question whether or not giving the money to buy a 'license' is worth it. I've already been running Notes under Wine for almost a year now, and with every 'apt-get install wine' update, it works better than before. Now web pages on the Notes internal viewer look perfect, two months ago it sometimes wouldn't show all images. It simply goes to show that there is significant improvement, and codeweavers is doing their part making it available with support.
In the end, all that functionality will be available in Wine, for free. So the $55 issue is just an issue of whether or not you want it today with support, or maybe if you want to support codeweavers in how they support wine. Otherwise, don't spend the $55, wait 6-9 months and it will available at no cost.
"... then there will be no open source industry. "
Free Software doesn't need an 'open source industry'. Free Software will always be, because it is an artistic expression of the mind of programmers willing to donate some of their time to society. Thee will always be Free Software programmers,just like there will always be artists. Sure, many artists aren't rich, but they're not doing for the money. That's why Free Software will live and grow, and if that means that as a result companies face competition of a completely free operating system and commodoty applications such as email programs, word processors etc, and if they then have more trouble making money, then that's just the way it is. Maybe those companies should be go back to making added value software instead of overcharging the the latest pastel-tinted version of software you already paid for when it was blue-grey.
So the sole purpose of this bill is to stop piracy of movies on the Internet?
So now we're supposed to all have difficult addons to all our electronic tools just for that?
How about first starting at making a bill that forces the gun industry to make guns that can't kill innocent people. And if they can't come up with a solution in 2 years, the government will come up with one: Welded-shut barrels.
Then cars that can't run over people and pets.
Then alcohol that doesn't result in drunk drivers or violent drunks.
Then cigarettes that don't spread smoke around the smoker.
Then sleeping pills that can't overdose a person.
...
Why suddenly is the revenue stream of poor unprotected Hollywood so much more important than protecting the lives of so many innocent people killed each year.
Your Windows software License is only valid for use with the following list of MS-approved software programs...
"Well, I guess Microsoft finally figured out how to take care of the thousands of trojans out there... Just forbid them in the EULA, and surely they'll all go away;-)"
No, it's not. It simply means that every computer that has a trojan on it suddenly is out of license for Windows.
Since so many windows PC's out there _are_ trojaned (I still get minda scans in my firewall logs), that means that they can tell all these people to buy pay them a lot of damages, because the computer owners have committed breach of contract by installing the trojan on their computer.
So, Microsoft will not scan the Internet itself for port 31337 (backorifice) and others, and when it finds a trojan, they can send in the troops...
Actually, they can just bundle VNC with the next IEploder or outlook 'security update', making everybody who installs it out-of-license. They could then also claim billions more tax deductions to piracy losses.
Slashdot Mirror
if being a CEO meant simply choosing the largest suppliers we would have computers running companies.
KLIK? But I don't use KDE.
Or the other way around: Maybe we should stay away from Microsoft alltogether. Many CEOs are not PHBses you know.
So I also ran a netpipe test to see what it thought of my NICs.
It gives you a NetPIPE.out. According to the man page, they contain: "time to transfer the block, bits per second, bits in block, bytes in block, and variance."
First of all, the manpage is wrong because the second column gives a number much closer to megabits per second, and after numerical verification, I found that it's giving the value of 1024*1024 bits per second and not 1000*1000 bits per second.
In NIC-talk, when we say gigabit, we mean 1000,000,000 bits, not 1000*1024*1024 bits.
So when benchmarking your gigabit network card with netpipe, please remember that you're looking at speed results "1024*1024"-megabits, so your NIC is really only 953.6 megabits, which immediately gives a much better insight into the speed achieved by the Syskonnect card.
"with a celeron 1.1 Ghz, 256 MB ram, and a 20 gigabyte hard drive"
That is surplus by today's standards, and the parts in those boxes won't be quality components either. You can never beat surplus prices by whiteboxing. whiteboxing only works good in the high or top-level. Think XP1900+ and up, 512MB + 60GB minimum, etc.
If your budget is $/Eur 2500, and stability is very important, than use that budget to build two simpler and each slightly different systems. You'll love it, especially when for example you think the video drives of that top-of-the-line video card you bought are causing those hard-to-reproduce problems. You'll have a PC right next to it with a different brand videocard that doesn't hav the problem, and a 20-minute swap-diagnostic will show you if the problem is related to the video card.
Plus then when that harddisk goes, or powersupply gives up right before that deadline, you'll have a working spare computer on which you made that backup of your files yesterday!
In many cases, it's not brand names of the components that give you quality (anymore). All mainboard manufacturers fluke every once in a while, all drive manufacturers do, a bunch of cdrw manufacturers did, etc. But also, many lower-budget manufacturers make excellent high quality and long-term stable products every once in a while.
In any case, motherboard manufacturers such as Abit are fair in their warranty service, if you don't mind waiting two months for your repaired item. Drive manufacturers also are good at sending replacement items for broken drives.
But you don't want to be without PC for weeks waiting for warranty repair, so lesson number one: When you build PCs yourself, build multiple PCs so you can keep spare components laying around.
A problem here is also that it's getting harder to identify which components are of good quality. Review websites will give you some information, but of course nobody has long-term stability tests for those brand-new chipset mainboards.
BUT, neither does HP, or Compaq, or Dell. The last Athlon-carrying HP I've examined contained a mainboard based on the lobu KL133 SDRAM(!) chipset (further rant deleted). Bringing your broken PC back to the retailer 9 months after you bought it also doesn't give to an instant fix or replacement, they might send it to the manufacturer for you though, saving you some shipping cost.
What I'm trying to say is that 'whiteboxing' your own PC is not as simple as going onto pricewatch and finding the cheapes supplier for the latest and hottest hardware reviewed by tom on the web.
Succesfull whiteboxing requires keeping good track of all review websites (and top magazines such as the german "CT magazine"), and paying special attention to stability issues. Even then, don't go whiteboxing just for one PC, because you'll have much more trouble diagnosing which part is broken or unstable in case you have problems. When you have multiple PCs that you are 'whiteboxing', you can often quickly identify problem components by swapping them around.
For succesfull whiteboxing, you will want to run your own stability tests (memtest86, cpu+disk loads, benchmarks, etc), and you will want to have alternate (varying brand or model) components to swap in and out to find the optimal combination.
You will want to do all testing while you don't have to wait for it, so it will have to be at least your second PC, so you can keep surfing the web for example while a 48hour test runs.
Then, you want to deal with suppliers that you can simply send low quality components back to with not much more than a quoted reason like 'unstable', 'unreliable', or 'incompatible'. If you can't find such a supplier, you want one that is 20+% cheaper than the rest so you can simply stoss one in every 5 components you buy in the bin if they are pieces of junk.
For most people, that means that they can only be succesfull whiteboxers if they build computers for themselves, and their family, and maybe the aunts friends, the neighbours daughter, their pets outdour house and that cute girl in the bar.
But that's the way it has always been, and nothing is changing there at all. Whiteboxing is not for the amateur, if you want the perfect system and you're not ready to go all the way, then buy your stuff at the dealer and buy the expensive extended warranty, and forget about whiteboxing. If you don't mind messing with the stuff, reading and learing about the stuff, and doing it for others too (including fixing it when they bring it back broken (which they will!)), then go ahead you've found yourself a more interesting alternative to fishing or stamp collecting.
That's what whiteboxing is all about, it's not about spending a couple of evenings at pricewatch and toms web site after watching a technet show and then flushing the cash for the 'perfect' system that you will love for years to come.
Equal news value as the headliner here.
I guess you don't recognize irony when it hits you in the face. I'm sure Microsoft can setup an IIS server in the time it takes to copy an OEM image to a harddrive plus fifty-two mouse clicks and seventeen reboots for configuration changes.
I guess you also don't know that many professional hosting providers give you two IP numbers in totally different subnets, with different routing on each subnet, for better availability upon uptream-network failure.
Be glad that keyboards have that numeric patch on the right (yes that part that almost nobody uses), otherwise, how else would you type an asterisk without the shift?
-- ps: I'll give freeBSD an honest try as soon as Debian has packaged it (soon). I'll take apt-get source over cvsup any day.
Copy-on-write files, that's a nice feature I've already been waiting for for other reasons in Linux filesystems. Maybe one day I'll feel strong enough again to poke around in the kernel.
I can see how that would really, really speedup a snapshot too.
"That's VNC. XXXX Frame Buffer.."
XXXX=Remote
VNC is open source. How can they be using open source? Isn't open source evil in the eyes of MS?
AFAIK, 'snapshot' is just a filesystem mirror. Nothing a little perl script can't fix.
And that is confirmed by netcraft (yes netcraft seems slashdotted). The changeover happened just today, the BSD site was known up since March 28. I guess when you want something quickly, FreeBSD with RapidSite/Apache is the way to go. Then later on, when your employer starts pushing, you can always migrate towards the much harder to setup IIS server. hihi. I'm wondering if it has Minda yet.
hihi.
;-))
But then they were right about it being unusable, slow, and a support nightmare
(yes that was too easy).
"I would think that something fish would be hidden in this "striped down" version."
That sounds, scary, they could just _fabricate_ a stripped down version that's slower and crashes a lot. And then say 'told you so'.
Umm, but maybe they don't need to do anything special to achieve a slow unstable OS anyway.
They're counting on the judge believing using his computer would become a lot harder if he punished them.
"Even more important, who is accountable? Linux is an amalgamation of the input of many companies and individual software engineers. So whom do you call when it breaks?"
Old moot. If you want accountability when something breaks, get a contract with a service company. Just call IBM, or SUN, or LinuxCare, or RedHat, or whichever company you want to use for service to your car^H^H^Hoperating system.
"Also, contrary to popular belief, Linux is not really "free." How are large-scale licensing agreements to be worked out?"
Suit-talk. You don't need to 'work out a licence agreement', you either accept the GPL and use Linux, or you don't accept it and don't use Linux.
Sure, the service company isn't free but nobody is forcing you to use a service company. In some companies, the internal IT department can very well be made capable to do all servicing themselves. Oil change? Brake pads? 'apt-get install oil task-brake' (yes in my dreams)
You want 'accountability'? Then you pay somebody for the right to blame them.
"Would I put an air traffic control system on Linux right now? No," says Carey,chief technology architect at Merrill.
I didn't know ML made air traffic control systems? What's the statement for then?
It's not the question whether or not giving the money to buy a 'license' is worth it. I've already been running Notes under Wine for almost a year now, and with every 'apt-get install wine' update, it works better than before. Now web pages on the Notes internal viewer look perfect, two months ago it sometimes wouldn't show all images. It simply goes to show that there is significant improvement, and codeweavers is doing their part making it available with support.
In the end, all that functionality will be available in Wine, for free. So the $55 issue is just an issue of whether or not you want it today with support, or maybe if you want to support codeweavers in how they support wine. Otherwise, don't spend the $55, wait 6-9 months and it will available at no cost.
"... then there will be no open source industry. "
Free Software doesn't need an 'open source industry'. Free Software will always be, because it is an artistic expression of the mind of programmers willing to donate some of their time to society. Thee will always be Free Software programmers,just like there will always be artists. Sure, many artists aren't rich, but they're not doing for the money. That's why Free Software will live and grow, and if that means that as a result companies face competition of a completely free operating system and commodoty applications such as email programs, word processors etc, and if they then have more trouble making money, then that's just the way it is. Maybe those companies should be go back to making added value software instead of overcharging the the latest pastel-tinted version of software you already paid for when it was blue-grey.
So the sole purpose of this bill is to stop piracy of movies on the Internet?
So now we're supposed to all have difficult addons to all our electronic tools just for that?
How about first starting at making a bill that forces the gun industry to make guns that can't kill innocent people. And if they can't come up with a solution in 2 years, the government will come up with one: Welded-shut barrels.
Then cars that can't run over people and pets.
Then alcohol that doesn't result in drunk drivers or violent drunks.
Then cigarettes that don't spread smoke around the smoker.
Then sleeping pills that can't overdose a person.
...
Why suddenly is the revenue stream of poor unprotected Hollywood so much more important than protecting the lives of so many innocent people killed each year.
Your Windows software License is only valid for use with the following list of MS-approved software programs...
"Well, I guess Microsoft finally figured out how to take care of the thousands of trojans out there... Just forbid them in the EULA, and surely they'll all go away
No, it's not. It simply means that every computer that has a trojan on it suddenly is out of license for Windows.
Since so many windows PC's out there _are_ trojaned (I still get minda scans in my firewall logs), that means that they can tell all these people to buy pay them a lot of damages, because the computer owners have committed breach of contract by installing the trojan on their computer.
So, Microsoft will not scan the Internet itself for port 31337 (backorifice) and others, and when it finds a trojan, they can send in the troops...
Actually, they can just bundle VNC with the next IEploder or outlook 'security update', making everybody who installs it out-of-license. They could then also claim billions more tax deductions to piracy losses.
V+1=W
M+1=N
S+1=T
take the VMS people, make another OS: WNT, Windows NT
Of course everybody already knew that, so I'll probably burn some karma for getting 'redundant' rating here...
All right that's the spirit. finger-ssl. Why not?
"WHO IS RUNNING HOST *LONGBEACH*???"
That's what HINFO records are for in the DNS.
dig hinfo longbeach
And the hinfo line is shown.