I think there's one main reason most of the hardware distributors insist on installing an operating system on every box that goes out their doors:
They want to be able to assure customers that their system is fully functional.
That would be much more difficult to accomplish without installing an OS onto the hard disk. You could probably put together a linux-compatabilty-floppy that would run through some diagnostics and let you know if it will run on that hardware...
Question: What good is MY DSL with your pipe stuck at 56kb/s?
Answer: Perfectly good, thanks.
If you had something of value at the other end of your pipe (information, commerce, web-based services), and you could only afford a 56k connection then there MIGHT be a problem.
As is the case with MOST internet users, there really is very little of value at their end of the pipe. As a result, their limited bandwidth does not deliteriously affect my internet experience.
You might want to think of the US Economics system (which we will loosely call 'capitalism') as just one economic meme. Each country has a different (some more so than others) economic system. It just so happens that the meme called 'capitalism' has been wildly more successful than any other that has been invented to date. Feudalism: Dead. Socialism: Mostly dead.
This capitalism meme has mutated, as do all good memes, as it has propogated throughout the meme-pool of economic systems. This is why the US variant is different from Germany's, etc.
If some new economic meme (let's call it 'foobarism') were to be created, it would spread/replicate to the extent that it was more adaptable and virulent than the other existing memes. The upshot is that if foobarism were 'better' (in the memetic sense), it would spread and overtake capitalism in due time.
So if you're so sure that Capitalism does not work, you just need to invent a new economic meme, call is foobarism, and then hope that it is more virulent than capitalism. If your meme is better, it will become the dominant meme, and all of us poor capitalist bastards will have to deal with it.
-jason
P.S. You would appear to be attending a University that is (1) private, and (2) founded by two entreprenurial capitalist pigs named John Boynton and Ichabod Washburn. I suggest you transfer to a state-funded, publicly managed university as soon as possible.
Andwer to: "allow multi-domains on single IPs?" Currently, under HTTP 1.0, an HTTP request does not include the hostname as part of the request. The requests look like:
'GET/foo.html HTTP/1.0'
Becuase the hostname is not included, the web server that responded to the socket request on that port/IP combination would have to serve pages from it's default htdocs root directory. With HTTP 1.1, the reqests are going to include the hostname. Don't quote me on the syntax, but they might look something like this:
'GET http://www.foo.com/foo.html HTTP/1.1'
With this format, the web server knows the request for was a website named 'www.foo.com', and can look into the appropriate htdocs root directory. And all of this can be one using a single port/IP combination.
What are the 'serious problems' that Cars.com has as a result of using Servlets? A few months back they switched from using the JWS to using NES as the web server, but that's the only change I've seen lately. Was that the problem? Also, how was the architecture not scalable?
I'm not defending NAS, per se, but the fact is ETrade get boatloads of traffic, and they handle it reasonably well.
I don't suppose you've single-handedly built an app server and run a site on it that gets in excess of 10M hits/day, have you? How'd you do it?
+ E*Trade is all Java (v1.1.x) running on top of Netscape App Server (formerly Kiva). + Cars.com is all Servlets and JDBC. + I have personally load tested a single Sun UE2 (2x300MHz) running Java Web Server and Servlets (with db access) up to 315,000 transactions/hour. This was done with JDK 1.2b3. + There are many others....
HotSpot:
+ HotSpot is a replacement VM, not a compiler. I spoke with some of the guys from the development team, and they are very near 100% Java2 compatability. If something uses a Java2 VM, you will be able to replace it with HotSpot.
TowerJ:
+ I have first-hand knowledge of a large European auto company using TowerJ to compile a client-side Java(CORBA) application. It worked as intended, and sped things up quite a bit.
What they don't tell you is that attendees of the JavaOne conference (which costs ~$1500 to attend) can buy these brand new Palm Vs for $199.00. I will be picking mine up tomorrow morning.
Let's say you have a server machine with two Interfaces, one on the Internet side with IP 199.99.99.1, and another on your private network side with IP 10.0.0.1. This server machine is doing Network Address Translation.
Within your network, you have a desktop PC running linux with IP 10.0.0.2.
The only way you could connect to your desktop PC would be to telnet to your server, and then telnet to your PC from the server.
If you had a web server running on that desktop PC, nobody outside of your private network could access it, as it has been assigned a non-routable address. That's how most companies secure their private networks.
Senior Taco: Although the Slashdotters may scoff at producst like WebTV, they now have 700,000 members signed up! Like it or not, they are a major force in the ISP world. They've gone from 0 to 700k, and have surpassed many other major national ISPs. Check the last couple of issues of Industry Standard for the story.
However, I'd still love to see a linux-based consumer net-appliance kick some butt. I'd gladly recommend that product to my parents.
4-way may be overkill for home use, but it is by no means overkill when you run an Internet company. Some of our production DB servers where I am employed contain 16 CPUs, and we are thinking of upgrading to even bigger babies (all Sun, of course).
Sun didn't create the Enterprise 10000 just for fun. There are people out there who need 64 CPUs to run apps like Oracle and PeopleSoft.
Senior Taco- Perhaps you missed their booth in all the craziness, but VAResearch was showing an 8-way Xeon box with something like 2TB on on-line storage.
It gave off enough heat to warm a small apartment, but it looked killer.
Hold on a minute there. Kevin Mitnick pleaded guilty to a specific set of charges brought against him the attorney general. He did not plead guilty to everything that he has been accused of in various mass-media outlets (such as hacking to NORAD).
For those such statements, if they are untrue as claimed by Mitnick, then he will have a formidable libel suit in his grasp.
Have you ever put together pricing on Intel-based (becuase that's the only linux platform that Oracle runs on) machies with redundant power supplies and the various hot-swappable components that a good sun server supports?
Oh, and what about the 2-hour replacement part service that sun offers? Which intel-linux vendor will do that at a price significantly less than Sun?
And then you add in the dual, redundant FCAL controllers.....these sorts of things add up quickly.
Sun does not want ridiculous money for their boxes...sun gives you much more than your typical intel-based hardware vendor.
On a limited budget you simply don't get the hardware that is up to the task.
I'd like to think that this is way beyond ZDNet. Your simplificaiton does not do justice to what a real app server is.
Load balancing, fault tolerance, auto-failover, distributed session management, two-phase commits, db connection pooling, thread pooling, template interpretation, remote manageability, result caching (at the Db and the app level), plus much, much more.
PHP3 does not even come close. It does template interpretation, and that's about it.
Have you used the product? I'd like to hear what you think of it in terms of stability, scalability, ease of configuration/installation, etc. Please e-mail me at jason@buberel.org.
If Bell Atlantic is anything like PacBell, ther differences between cable modem for $40/month and DSL for $60/month are this:
1. DSL service agreement does not prohibit the running of servers. AtHome, MediaOne, and RoadRunner (not sure about RR) strictly prohibit the running of servers (httpd, ftpd, BIND, smtp, etc.).
2. DSL service ususally comes with a static IP address. AtHome and MediaOne use DHCP.
Slashdot Mirror
I think there's one main reason most of the hardware distributors insist on installing an operating system on every box that goes out their doors:
They want to be able to assure customers that their system is fully functional.
That would be much more difficult to accomplish without installing an OS onto the hard disk. You could probably put together a linux-compatabilty-floppy that would run through some diagnostics and let you know if it will run on that hardware...
-jason
Question: What good is MY DSL with your pipe stuck at 56kb/s?
Answer: Perfectly good, thanks.
If you had something of value at the other end of your pipe (information, commerce, web-based services), and you could only afford a 56k connection then there MIGHT be a problem.
As is the case with MOST internet users, there really is very little of value at their end of the pipe. As a result, their limited bandwidth does not deliteriously affect my internet experience.
-jason
Hmmm, "necessary evil"? There are those who would argue that there is no such thing.
In either case, high speed access is available to you NOW. Frame-relay, T1, etc. You just can't afford it.
Is someone holding a gun to your head and forcing you to live where you live? No. If low-price bandwidth means that much to you, MOVE.
This is a (mostly) free country, and I think we'd both prefer it to stay that way.
-jason
Ummmm, rich?
Perhaps you should ask Cmdr Taco what color his Ferarri is?
I think a better term is 'fairly compensated'.
-jason
You might want to think of the US Economics system (which we will loosely call 'capitalism') as just one economic meme. Each country has a different (some more so than others) economic system. It just so happens that the meme called 'capitalism' has been wildly more successful than any other that has been invented to date. Feudalism: Dead. Socialism: Mostly dead.
This capitalism meme has mutated, as do all good memes, as it has propogated throughout the meme-pool of economic systems. This is why the US variant is different from Germany's, etc.
If some new economic meme (let's call it 'foobarism') were to be created, it would spread/replicate to the extent that it was more adaptable and virulent than the other existing memes. The upshot is that if foobarism were 'better' (in the memetic sense), it would spread and overtake capitalism in due time.
So if you're so sure that Capitalism does not work, you just need to invent a new economic meme, call is foobarism, and then hope that it is more virulent than capitalism. If your meme is better, it will become the dominant meme, and all of us poor capitalist bastards will have to deal with it.
-jason
P.S. You would appear to be attending a University that is (1) private, and (2) founded by two entreprenurial capitalist pigs named John Boynton and Ichabod Washburn. I suggest you transfer to a state-funded, publicly managed university as soon as possible.
Andwer to: "allow multi-domains on single IPs?" Currently, under HTTP 1.0, an HTTP request does not include the hostname as part of the request. The requests look like:
/foo.html HTTP/1.0'
'GET
Becuase the hostname is not included, the web server that responded to the socket request on that port/IP combination would have to serve pages from it's default htdocs root directory. With HTTP 1.1, the reqests are going to include the hostname. Don't quote me on the syntax, but they might look something like this:
'GET http://www.foo.com/foo.html HTTP/1.1'
With this format, the web server knows the request for was a website named 'www.foo.com', and can look into the appropriate htdocs root directory. And all of this can be one using a single port/IP combination.
-jason
What are the 'serious problems' that Cars.com has as a result of using Servlets? A few months back they switched from using the JWS to using NES as the web server, but that's the only change I've seen lately. Was that the problem? Also, how was the architecture not scalable?
I'm not defending NAS, per se, but the fact is ETrade get boatloads of traffic, and they handle it reasonably well.
I don't suppose you've single-handedly built an app server and run a site on it that gets in excess of 10M hits/day, have you? How'd you do it?
High Performance Java:
+ E*Trade is all Java (v1.1.x) running on top of Netscape App Server (formerly Kiva).
+ Cars.com is all Servlets and JDBC.
+ I have personally load tested a single Sun UE2 (2x300MHz) running Java Web Server and Servlets (with db access) up to 315,000 transactions/hour. This was done with JDK 1.2b3.
+ There are many others....
HotSpot:
+ HotSpot is a replacement VM, not a compiler. I spoke with some of the guys from the development team, and they are very near 100% Java2 compatability. If something uses a Java2 VM, you will be able to replace it with HotSpot.
TowerJ:
+ I have first-hand knowledge of a large European auto company using TowerJ to compile a client-side Java(CORBA) application. It worked as intended, and sped things up quite a bit.
So there you go,
jason
They did the first day. They'll have another shipment that goes on sale tomorrow (Wed) at 7:30 AM. I'll see you in line!
-jason
What they don't tell you is that attendees of the JavaOne conference (which costs ~$1500 to attend) can buy these brand new Palm Vs for $199.00. I will be picking mine up tomorrow morning.
Now that's a steal, JVM or no JVM!
-jason
OK, here it goes:
Let's say you have a server machine with two Interfaces, one on the Internet side with IP 199.99.99.1, and another on your private network side with IP 10.0.0.1. This server machine is doing Network Address Translation.
Within your network, you have a desktop PC running linux with IP 10.0.0.2.
The only way you could connect to your desktop PC would be to telnet to your server, and then telnet to your PC from the server.
If you had a web server running on that desktop PC, nobody outside of your private network could access it, as it has been assigned a non-routable address. That's how most companies secure their private networks.
-jason
But you apparently liked it enough to memorize one of his most famous passages....Hmmm.
Senior Taco: Although the Slashdotters may scoff at producst like WebTV, they now have 700,000 members signed up! Like it or not, they are a major force in the ISP world. They've gone from 0 to 700k, and have surpassed many other major national ISPs. Check the last couple of issues of Industry Standard for the story.
However, I'd still love to see a linux-based consumer net-appliance kick some butt. I'd gladly recommend that product to my parents.
-jason
4-way may be overkill for home use, but it is by no means overkill when you run an Internet company. Some of our production DB servers where I am employed contain 16 CPUs, and we are thinking of upgrading to even bigger babies (all Sun, of course).
Sun didn't create the Enterprise 10000 just for fun. There are people out there who need 64 CPUs to run apps like Oracle and PeopleSoft.
-jason
Senior Taco- Perhaps you missed their booth in all the craziness, but VAResearch was showing an 8-way Xeon box with something like 2TB on on-line storage.
It gave off enough heat to warm a small apartment, but it looked killer.
-jason
Hold on a minute there. Kevin Mitnick pleaded guilty to a specific set of charges brought against him the attorney general. He did not plead guilty to everything that he has been accused of in various mass-media outlets (such as hacking to NORAD).
For those such statements, if they are untrue as claimed by Mitnick, then he will have a formidable libel suit in his grasp.
-jason
Have you ever put together pricing on Intel-based (becuase that's the only linux platform that Oracle runs on) machies with redundant power supplies and the various hot-swappable components that a good sun server supports?
Oh, and what about the 2-hour replacement part service that sun offers? Which intel-linux vendor will do that at a price significantly less than Sun?
And then you add in the dual, redundant FCAL controllers.....these sorts of things add up quickly.
Sun does not want ridiculous money for their boxes...sun gives you much more than your typical intel-based hardware vendor.
On a limited budget you simply don't get the hardware that is up to the task.
-jason
Ummm. More scalable than Sun hardware? Do you really run DB servers with more than 64 CPUs in them? I'd be impressed!
-jason
I'd like to think that this is way beyond ZDNet. Your simplificaiton does not do justice to what a real app server is.
Load balancing, fault tolerance, auto-failover, distributed session management, two-phase commits, db connection pooling, thread pooling, template interpretation, remote manageability, result caching (at the Db and the app level), plus much, much more.
PHP3 does not even come close. It does template interpretation, and that's about it.
-jason
Have you used the product? I'd like to hear what you think of it in terms of stability, scalability, ease of configuration/installation, etc. Please e-mail me at jason@buberel.org.
thanks,
jason
If Bell Atlantic is anything like PacBell, ther differences between cable modem for $40/month and DSL for $60/month are this:
1. DSL service agreement does not prohibit the running of servers. AtHome, MediaOne, and RoadRunner (not sure about RR) strictly prohibit the running of servers (httpd, ftpd, BIND, smtp, etc.).
2. DSL service ususally comes with a static IP address. AtHome and MediaOne use DHCP.
-jason