Believe it or not, closed hardware is a good thing. This is why Apple, IBM, and Sun all have legendary support and OS integration statistics. They don't have to worry about a motherboard from Dr. Wong's House 'O Chips being so out of spec and cheap that it doesn't work with their software. They save money on support and portability issues by keeping their hardware under lock and key.
The result of doing this is they are able to release a much higher quality "product" on the whole. Apple is a computer company. They sell computers. OS X is a tool to help them sell computers.
Buying a Mac is like buying a BMW. Sure, it's more expensive then a Ford. But it's also faster, more reliable, and has a far greater build quality. It's also worth more should you wish to sell it a few years down the road and buy a new(er) one.
Anyway, "still mad at them for what they did to BeOS" ? What exactly did Apple do to BeOS? It's more like what they did not do, they did not buy a company that would have failed to make something like OS X a reality in the short term. NeXT could, and did.
Other studies, however, point to the fact that the rare freebsd is naturally imune to the widely known linuxhypeix-A strain of virus, as well as the dotusbombed-B strain. It is also much better suited to cope with harsh environmental changes such as the K1d33-effect and is much less frequently effected by the kerneldumpage effect, and the filesystemwhipeage effect.
The most interesting situation of note is the rare freebsd mating with the highly effective macos species. The result has resulted in the death of many, many penguins.. ur.. I mean, kangaroos.
I'm sure someone makes a USB IR adapter of some sort. Actually, a better solution might be one of the old ePods WebPads. They had a built in IR port, as well as a serial port. If, that is, you can get something other then CE to run on it.
If you want a cheap(er) touch screen remote, however, just get a plam pilot with OmniRemote. I've had no problems controlling everything I own from up to 30 feet or so with my IIIc.
I've used pretty much every form of hard drive out there, and in my experience the Fujitsu (whom makes IBM's drives for them) and Western Digital drives are the worst to be had.
For IDE applications, I recommend the Seagate 7200rpm Baracuda line.
For SCSI, the Cheetah line. I have one of the age-old original 4.5GB Cheetahs. I've low level formatted it a few dozen times, high level formatted it a few hundred times, run a dozen operating systems on it, dropped it numerous times, whacked it, smacked it, and just generally abused the hell out of it in my torture (Q&A) server for many years. Once, when all the little brushless fans in my drive coolers decided to die within a hour of each other, it got so hot I couldn't even touch it for a few hours.
And.. it's still working.:) I've never, ever had a bad experience with Seagate, and will recommend them to anyone who listens. The few extra bucks you'll pay over a Maxtor or similar mass market drive are worth it a hundred times over when you've got critical data floating around in a non-raid situation. That's the situation for most college kids whom are cash-starved, yet need to have their thesis survive to the end of the term.:)
No, I have a thin film transistor (TFT) active-matrix Liquid Crystal Display (LCD). Regardless of what method they use, they are indeed LCD displays.
Now, perhaps a little education is in order as you seem to be the slashdot moron here.
There are two types of Liquid Crystal Displays (LCD). Active Matrix and Passive Matrix.
First, I'd like to point out that the article did not specify between Active or Passive Matrix LCD screens, and as such my comment on the high quality apple Active Matrix LCD's is perfectly valid.
Now, Active Matrix LCD screens are also known as TFT screens, which stands for Thin Film Transistor. In this type, each pixel is controlled by one to four transistors. The TFT system offers the best resolution and image quality of any LCD, and as such is more costly to produce and buy. Thusly you will note my comment about spending a few extra bucks for something that does not suck.
Passive Matrix LCD Screens come in three major flavors. DSTN (Dual Scan STN), CSTN (Color Super Twist Nematic), and TSTN (Triple Super Twist Nematic). There are numerous differences between them, for exmaple DSTN divides the screen into halves and scans seach simultaneously, thusly giving twice the refresh rate and a sharper appearance. Many Sony Vaio laptops use this type, and have the characteristic line through the middle of the screen.
In future, I would suggest you do your homework before telling someone who knows what they are talking about that TFT is not LCD.
Apple's LCD displays are probably the best that exist, beating out SGI by a large margin. I've never had a moment's problem playing Quake or Unreal Tournament on my TiBook or G4, using either the Studio or Cinema display.
Perhaps the solution isn't more hacks, but better hardware. Sure, it comes at a price, but I'd rather drop an extra couple hundred for something that actually works.
Good idea? No.. not really. One thing that never ceases to amaze me is that the typical slashdot reader/poster assumes their demographic is the one that actively effects the music or motion picture industry.
Well, I more then seriously doubt the slashdot demographic is comprised of a majority of young teenage girls, which is what the music industry targets.
A few thousand geeks returning CD's is not going to stop copy protection. If 60% of the people whom bought a CD returned it, maybe. But you're talking about hundreds of thousands of CD's. That's quite simply not realisitc.
The solution is countermeasure development for the demographic that does give a damn about the quality loss and inability to rip CD's.
This doesn't really effect me at all, as since time out of mind I have been recording CD's using very high end analog recording gear, and then dumping that audio into MP3 format for use with the empeg in my car. There isn't any form of copy protection that's ever going to keep me from doing that.
Token Ring runs over many sorts of cable, among them Coax and good 'ol UTP. The real fun is the ancient wall-drop plugs in use by IBM, and others.
I used to work for IBM, and was only too exposed to the hell that is TR. The most common way rings go boom is when unix-type users add machines to a ring at the wrong speed. E.g. Bringing a card up at 4Mbit on a ring running at 16 will usually drop it.
My solution was to build a gateway running a very hacked up debian. IBM's 300PL worked great, as it came out of the box with both ethernet and token ring cards. I ran 2.2.19 on it and used iproute2 to do various NAT and address forwarding tricks to an ethernet switch.
Worked great until the hard drive melted. Damned fujitsu's.
Lessons learned:
1. Test first. A nice way of doing this is to get one of IBM (or someone else's) TR Hubs, and use it for your testing. That way, if you blow something up, you'll only blow up your testing network. The downside is that these things are expensive as all hell, and hard to come by. Even at IBM they required much bribery to nab for... 'unofficial uses'.
2. Use IBM hardware if at all possible. Someone else said something to the effect of "IBM - Hardware build like a tank". Very true.
3. Ask someone first. Chances are, at least in larger tech-oriented companies, someone else will have tried alternative operating systems before, and have advice (or horror stories) to share.
... considering that 99.9% of the movie is shot on location in Vancouver, B.C., Canada. The evil cloning center they blow up is really the downtown library building.:}
You wrote "Define serving huge mission critical projects" and not "Define serving huge mission critical projects which you are currently running". I mean really, if you want to form an arguement, fine. But please do not put words in my mouth if you can't come up with anything.
On the subjects of systems I have run or am running, yes. I have tried Linux, and it was not as stable or as fast as FreeBSD. As I said, in big bold letters, FreeBSD is the better serving OS based on my experience with FreeBSD and Linux. If you have tried both, and prefer Linux, more power to you. I have, and in my opinion, FreeBSD is the better serving OS, while Linux is the better desktop OS.
As for DoS attacks on Linux.. well, TearDrop for one. Now, before you rant that it was patched within days of being found, consider this. That exploit required a kernel patch and a reboot. If you had been running a high profile system somewhere that could not go down, it would have, or you would have risked leaving a security hole open. FreeBSD was not effected by TearDrop, or any of the other Nuke-type attacks that Linux has proven vulnerable to. Bottom line is, the Linux system would have had to have been patched and rebooted, and the FreeBSD system would not have.
Now, if you would like to debate Linux vs. FreeBSD in the serving arena, fine. But please keep the personal insults to yourself. I mean, how much merrit do you think people really assign to anyone who resorts to personal insults, rather then debateable facts. It is you who ends up looking like an idiot.
Back to the sendmail thing. Yes, I am quite serious. I've run a totally unprotected FreeBSD machine with sendmail, and I have not had one single intrustion EVER. Sure, there have been attempts, but that's about all.
Oh, and by the way, you brought up application level attacks such as sendmail, not me.
With regard to my previous post-- I had hoped that an overview of my own experience with Linux and FreeBSD would be taken as just that, and not gobbled up for flame bait.
Hey, guess what. I use Linux. I like using Linux. It's kernel is a heck of a lot more forgiving to weird hardware, which I sometimes need to use.
BUTbased on my own experience running an ISP, and a number of free-for-all type of services over the years, FreeBSD is the better server OS. Hey, your milage may vary.
If you like Linux and consider it the mecca of serving platforms, more power to you. I do not. as I've used both and found Linux to just plain not equal FreeBSD when it comes to serving on x86 platforms.
FreeBSD is basically designed as a bulletproof server OS; its desktop capabilities are less than those of Linux, quite a lot in some cases, but its performance and security as a server are unmatched.
Again, I am not saying "FreeBSD Rocks and Linux is crap!", I am saying "Linux is great, but when I have to serve something that can not go down, I use FreeBSD." Big difference there.
Okay... Yahoo, IMDB.com, Walnut Creek CDROM... to name a few.
As for DoS attacks, I was talking about the OS, not an attack against an application (I assume sendmail here) running on it.
On the topic of sendmail... as a matter of fact, I've run a FreeBSD server with sendmail bare to the world with no firewall, and have never gotten one successful intrusion to the system.
See my reply to the parent thread for a little flame-bait justification.
Having used FreeBSD and Linux for a number of years now... well, I'll share my own opinion on the xBSD vs. Linux ball of wax.
Linux gets the nod from me for a desktop workstation. It's got the widest support of obscure hardware, multimedia support, graphics support, and so on.
xBSD (FreeBSD in perticular) gets the nod from me for serving. It is infinately more stable and secure then any flavor of Linux I've tried, out of the box, without any tuning. My Linux boxes are just fine for creating content, and mild serving. But, past experience has taught me not to trust them for serving huge mission critical projects.
Don't get me wrong, I like Linux. However, the development structure is just too muddled. There's some excellent code, some good code, and some not so good code. FreeBSD (and call this snobbish if you will, but it works) has a 'tighter fist' as I put it on source, Open but it gets scrutinized more, as such it's stable and secure as a rock. Sure, explots show up (e.g. the 3.2 natd thing) but they are much less common then the Linux expolits which turn up. e.g. Teardrop, and the fistfull of other DoS attacks on Linux. Sure, they are patched within hours of being found, but with xBSD they generally aren't there to begin with.
I believe Red Hat's "Dr. Linux" book has a full history in it. It's a huge, 20 lb. slab of a book that was in their "Maximum Linux" bundle a while back.
Slashdot Mirror
It's called a cluster. Netcraft has nicely provided an explanation of this for people without the benifit of a clue.
Believe it or not, closed hardware is a good thing. This is why Apple, IBM, and Sun all have legendary support and OS integration statistics. They don't have to worry about a motherboard from Dr. Wong's House 'O Chips being so out of spec and cheap that it doesn't work with their software. They save money on support and portability issues by keeping their hardware under lock and key.
The result of doing this is they are able to release a much higher quality "product" on the whole. Apple is a computer company. They sell computers. OS X is a tool to help them sell computers.
Buying a Mac is like buying a BMW. Sure, it's more expensive then a Ford. But it's also faster, more reliable, and has a far greater build quality. It's also worth more should you wish to sell it a few years down the road and buy a new(er) one.
Anyway, "still mad at them for what they did to BeOS" ? What exactly did Apple do to BeOS? It's more like what they did not do, they did not buy a company that would have failed to make something like OS X a reality in the short term. NeXT could, and did.
Other studies, however, point to the fact that the rare freebsd is naturally imune to the widely known linuxhypeix-A strain of virus, as well as the dotusbombed-B strain. It is also much better suited to cope with harsh environmental changes such as the K1d33-effect and is much less frequently effected by the kerneldumpage effect, and the filesystemwhipeage effect.
The most interesting situation of note is the rare freebsd mating with the highly effective macos species. The result has resulted in the death of many, many penguins.. ur.. I mean, kangaroos.
No, I am. Grrr. =^_^=
I'm sure someone makes a USB IR adapter of some sort. Actually, a better solution might be one of the old ePods WebPads. They had a built in IR port, as well as a serial port. If, that is, you can get something other then CE to run on it.
If you want a cheap(er) touch screen remote, however, just get a plam pilot with OmniRemote. I've had no problems controlling everything I own from up to 30 feet or so with my IIIc.
I've used pretty much every form of hard drive out there, and in my experience the Fujitsu (whom makes IBM's drives for them) and Western Digital drives are the worst to be had.
:) I've never, ever had a bad experience with Seagate, and will recommend them to anyone who listens. The few extra bucks you'll pay over a Maxtor or similar mass market drive are worth it a hundred times over when you've got critical data floating around in a non-raid situation. That's the situation for most college kids whom are cash-starved, yet need to have their thesis survive to the end of the term. :)
For IDE applications, I recommend the Seagate 7200rpm Baracuda line.
For SCSI, the Cheetah line. I have one of the age-old original 4.5GB Cheetahs. I've low level formatted it a few dozen times, high level formatted it a few hundred times, run a dozen operating systems on it, dropped it numerous times, whacked it, smacked it, and just generally abused the hell out of it in my torture (Q&A) server for many years. Once, when all the little brushless fans in my drive coolers decided to die within a hour of each other, it got so hot I couldn't even touch it for a few hours.
And.. it's still working.
No, I have a thin film transistor (TFT) active-matrix Liquid Crystal Display (LCD). Regardless of what method they use, they are indeed LCD displays.
Now, perhaps a little education is in order as you seem to be the slashdot moron here.
There are two types of Liquid Crystal Displays (LCD). Active Matrix and Passive Matrix.
First, I'd like to point out that the article did not specify between Active or Passive Matrix LCD screens, and as such my comment on the high quality apple Active Matrix LCD's is perfectly valid.
Now, Active Matrix LCD screens are also known as TFT screens, which stands for Thin Film Transistor. In this type, each pixel is controlled by one to four transistors. The TFT system offers the best resolution and image quality of any LCD, and as such is more costly to produce and buy. Thusly you will note my comment about spending a few extra bucks for something that does not suck.
Passive Matrix LCD Screens come in three major flavors. DSTN (Dual Scan STN), CSTN (Color Super Twist Nematic), and TSTN (Triple Super Twist Nematic). There are numerous differences between them, for exmaple DSTN divides the screen into halves and scans seach simultaneously, thusly giving twice the refresh rate and a sharper appearance. Many Sony Vaio laptops use this type, and have the characteristic line through the middle of the screen.
In future, I would suggest you do your homework before telling someone who knows what they are talking about that TFT is not LCD.
Apple's LCD displays are probably the best that exist, beating out SGI by a large margin. I've never had a moment's problem playing Quake or Unreal Tournament on my TiBook or G4, using either the Studio or Cinema display.
Perhaps the solution isn't more hacks, but better hardware. Sure, it comes at a price, but I'd rather drop an extra couple hundred for something that actually works.
Good idea? No.. not really. One thing that never ceases to amaze me is that the typical slashdot reader/poster assumes their demographic is the one that actively effects the music or motion picture industry.
Well, I more then seriously doubt the slashdot demographic is comprised of a majority of young teenage girls, which is what the music industry targets.
A few thousand geeks returning CD's is not going to stop copy protection. If 60% of the people whom bought a CD returned it, maybe. But you're talking about hundreds of thousands of CD's. That's quite simply not realisitc.
The solution is countermeasure development for the demographic that does give a damn about the quality loss and inability to rip CD's.
This doesn't really effect me at all, as since time out of mind I have been recording CD's using very high end analog recording gear, and then dumping that audio into MP3 format for use with the empeg in my car. There isn't any form of copy protection that's ever going to keep me from doing that.
Token Ring runs over many sorts of cable, among them Coax and good 'ol UTP. The real fun is the ancient wall-drop plugs in use by IBM, and others.
I used to work for IBM, and was only too exposed to the hell that is TR. The most common way rings go boom is when unix-type users add machines to a ring at the wrong speed. E.g. Bringing a card up at 4Mbit on a ring running at 16 will usually drop it.
My solution was to build a gateway running a very hacked up debian. IBM's 300PL worked great, as it came out of the box with both ethernet and token ring cards. I ran 2.2.19 on it and used iproute2 to do various NAT and address forwarding tricks to an ethernet switch.
Worked great until the hard drive melted. Damned fujitsu's.
Lessons learned:
1. Test first. A nice way of doing this is to get one of IBM (or someone else's) TR Hubs, and use it for your testing. That way, if you blow something up, you'll only blow up your testing network. The downside is that these things are expensive as all hell, and hard to come by. Even at IBM they required much bribery to nab for... 'unofficial uses'.
2. Use IBM hardware if at all possible. Someone else said something to the effect of "IBM - Hardware build like a tank". Very true.
3. Ask someone first. Chances are, at least in larger tech-oriented companies, someone else will have tried alternative operating systems before, and have advice (or horror stories) to share.
... considering that 99.9% of the movie is shot on location in Vancouver, B.C., Canada. The evil cloning center they blow up is really the downtown library building. :}
Looks like Word 2000, or whatever the M$ droid used to write that has a few bugs too. (shocking)
;-)
"... been suggested by the government, because we because we don't believe..."
Must be one of the Windows programmers...
You wrote "Define serving huge mission critical projects" and not "Define serving huge mission critical projects which you are currently running". I mean really, if you want to form an arguement, fine. But please do not put words in my mouth if you can't come up with anything.
On the subjects of systems I have run or am running, yes. I have tried Linux, and it was not as stable or as fast as FreeBSD. As I said, in big bold letters, FreeBSD is the better serving OS based on my experience with FreeBSD and Linux. If you have tried both, and prefer Linux, more power to you. I have, and in my opinion, FreeBSD is the better serving OS, while Linux is the better desktop OS.
As for DoS attacks on Linux.. well, TearDrop for one. Now, before you rant that it was patched within days of being found, consider this. That exploit required a kernel patch and a reboot. If you had been running a high profile system somewhere that could not go down, it would have, or you would have risked leaving a security hole open. FreeBSD was not effected by TearDrop, or any of the other Nuke-type attacks that Linux has proven vulnerable to. Bottom line is, the Linux system would have had to have been patched and rebooted, and the FreeBSD system would not have.
Now, if you would like to debate Linux vs. FreeBSD in the serving arena, fine. But please keep the personal insults to yourself. I mean, how much merrit do you think people really assign to anyone who resorts to personal insults, rather then debateable facts. It is you who ends up looking like an idiot.
Back to the sendmail thing. Yes, I am quite serious. I've run a totally unprotected FreeBSD machine with sendmail, and I have not had one single intrustion EVER. Sure, there have been attempts, but that's about all.
Oh, and by the way, you brought up application level attacks such as sendmail, not me.
With regard to my previous post-- I had hoped that an overview of my own experience with Linux and FreeBSD would be taken as just that, and not gobbled up for flame bait.
Hey, guess what. I use Linux. I like using Linux. It's kernel is a heck of a lot more forgiving to weird hardware, which I sometimes need to use.
BUT based on my own experience running an ISP, and a number of free-for-all type of services over the years, FreeBSD is the better server OS. Hey, your milage may vary.
If you like Linux and consider it the mecca of serving platforms, more power to you. I do not. as I've used both and found Linux to just plain not equal FreeBSD when it comes to serving on x86 platforms.
FreeBSD is basically designed as a bulletproof server OS; its desktop capabilities are less than those of Linux, quite a lot in some cases, but its performance and security as a server are unmatched.
Again, I am not saying "FreeBSD Rocks and Linux is crap!", I am saying "Linux is great, but when I have to serve something that can not go down, I use FreeBSD." Big difference there.
Regards,
Define serving huge mission critical projects?
Okay... Yahoo, IMDB.com, Walnut Creek CDROM... to name a few.
As for DoS attacks, I was talking about the OS, not an attack against an application (I assume sendmail here) running on it.
On the topic of sendmail... as a matter of fact, I've run a FreeBSD server with sendmail bare to the world with no firewall, and have never gotten one successful intrusion to the system.
See my reply to the parent thread for a little flame-bait justification.
Having used FreeBSD and Linux for a number of years now... well, I'll share my own opinion on the xBSD vs. Linux ball of wax.
Linux gets the nod from me for a desktop workstation. It's got the widest support of obscure hardware, multimedia support, graphics support, and so on.
xBSD (FreeBSD in perticular) gets the nod from me for serving. It is infinately more stable and secure then any flavor of Linux I've tried, out of the box, without any tuning. My Linux boxes are just fine for creating content, and mild serving. But, past experience has taught me not to trust them for serving huge mission critical projects.
Don't get me wrong, I like Linux. However, the development structure is just too muddled. There's some excellent code, some good code, and some not so good code. FreeBSD (and call this snobbish if you will, but it works) has a 'tighter fist' as I put it on source, Open but it gets scrutinized more, as such it's stable and secure as a rock. Sure, explots show up (e.g. the 3.2 natd thing) but they are much less common then the Linux expolits which turn up. e.g. Teardrop, and the fistfull of other DoS attacks on Linux. Sure, they are patched within hours of being found, but with xBSD they generally aren't there to begin with.
FreeBSD, from the people who brought you TCP/IP.
I thought the article might at least be an amusing read, but haven't been able to connect to the site after trying for an hour or so.
:)
Makes me wonder how long the silly NT box stood up to a slashdotting. (Can we use negative numbers?
--Simba (says roar)
I believe Red Hat's "Dr. Linux" book has a full history in it. It's a huge, 20 lb. slab of a book that was in their "Maximum Linux" bundle a while back.