Actually, my experience with SNA is that it is actually far less reliable than TCP/IP in practice. This is at least true when you are dealing with SNA over WAN connections, and more true when you start mixing in 3rd party SNA products like Brixton and SunLink. One of its biggest failings of SNA is that it doesn't automatically recover from line outages and requires messy 'reaquisition' of connections which often requires manual interactions. Some of these failings may be in the way that SNA works with CICS. I don't really understand the mainframe side of things that well. In comparison, once the hardware problems on a line are fixed, TCP/IP networks just start talking again.
You might look at Bochs, which is an open sourced x86 emulator that should work on PPC (it works on Sparc). It isn't the fastest thing in the world, but it is supposed to be able to run Windows 9x and a lot of Windows software.
This is a problem that OS/2 had, and part of the reason that it didn't flourish as it could have.
So far this sort of problem isn't happening in the Linux world. I think there are a number of reasons why.
OS/2 didn't provide enough good reasons to write native apps. One problem I think is that also sharing a history with MS-DOS, it really wasn't perceived as different enough from Windows. Linux clearly doesn't have this problem. I think OS/2 also had difficulty courting developer mindshare because of a percieved deficiency in native development tools (either in availabilty, quality or cost). This is not a problem for Linux which was able to initially draw on the strong history of UNIX development tools (many of which are free) and has now started to attract many of its own or ports from other platforms (such as CodeWarrior). Linux clearly has significant developer mindshare and is quickly growing it, which is something that OS/2 never really achieved. Furthermore WINE (and Twin and TWINE) is not just an emulator, it is also a porting toolkit. Which should help serve as a bridge for Windows-centric developers to port their code to Linux. Once they have things running, they can write more native apps if they want. Unfortunately, OS/2 never really offered a good way to port Windows code over. In the early days of OS/2 that didn't matter so much, because there weren't very many Windows apps and the Windows API and MFC were't very popular yet, but today a lot of developers feel locked into those or at least have code that is.
What is your stock ticker symbol so I can short it? Seriously, if your IT management makes their decisions based on postings on an advocacy site such as Slashdot instead of doing a serious analysis of the actual products, then they are probably making a lot of other stupid decisions.
There is valuable information to be found in online forums, but anyone who is a veteran of the computer world should know that the signal to noise ratio in most online forums is not what we'd like.
If you think that 'people with 12 year old minds' are the most visible Linux advocates then you just aren't looking very hard, and probably not at Microsoft either. They've certainly got their share of the juvenile trolls. Unfortunately, what they also seem to be plagued with are the advocates that obviously have a vested interest in Microsoft (I.E., paid off in one way or another).
Juvenile trolls will probably grow up some day, while the people whose allegiance can be bought will eventually move on to other pastures.
I hope more people follows your excellent example and get their ethical guidance from the behaviour of pigs!
People should realize that they are, when it comes right down to it, animals. We can try to pretend otherwise, but we certainly aren't plants.
No seriosly, pigs and dogs can not make the moral judgement that causing huge amounts of suffering for very weak reasons is bad.
Who are you to say that pigs and dogs can't make moral judgements? If such animals can't make moral decisions, then how can they really suffer 'huge amounts'? Furthermore, carnivores don't really have any choice, it is virtually impossible for them to survive without eating meat.
You can.
I have made my moral decision, and I've decided that eating meat is ethically correct.
Not that a dogs consuming of meat isn't as bad as yours, it is,
Oh, please. This is the stupidest thing I've ever heard. Animals have been eating other animals since before humans walked the face of the earth. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that, it is part of nature.
but you can do something about it!
But why should I? If there is nothing morally wrong with other animals eating animals, and I believe there isn't, then why should I be any different.
Suffering is suffering, no matter if the individual is a green alien, human or pig. If it can be avoided (and in the case of the pig, it most definetly can) it should be avoided.
What am ignorant idea. Suffering is unavoidable when it comes down to it. No matter what peoples intentions are, it will still occur. Suffering predates humans and will continue long after we are extinct.
Eating animals is the cause of heart disease and many cancers.
That is a crock of excrement. Eating too much meat and not eating enough vegetables may contribute to the risk of cancer, but it does not cause cancer. Similarly, eating an improperly balanced vegetarian diet could also lead to serious health problems.
More importantly, most people don't know about the ecological problems of modern hog and chicken farm methods
I live in an agricultural state, so I know damned well what is going on. And FYI, most people don't know about the ecological problems of modern grain farming methods either.
because they don't know what's been going on in recent years with the large corporate farms (and payoffs to politicians to allow it to go on.).
Payoffs to politicians like Bill Clinton from people like the Tyson family no doubt.
Believe it or not, at least around here, farms aren't nearly as 'corporate' as some people would have you believe.
it warms my heart to know that you will die so much sooner because of your crappie diet.. For a second there, I thought I would have to deal with you forever
It is this kind of attitude that makes the sane look upon the PETAphiles as the loons they are.
For your information, roasted bird (as opposed to deep fried anyway), as part of an otherwise balanced diet is one of the healthiest things you can eat.
I guarantee that if someone was eat nothing but deep fried breaded tofu, potato chips and dougnuts and other similar stuff that is all-vegetable that they would be less healthy than someone who eats a balanced omnivorous diet. There are a lot of all-vegetable foods that are full of fat and empty calories.
A lot of the people I know that are vegetarian aren't that healthy (most of them are major-league hypocondriacs), nor do I see any real evidence that they really have significantly longer lifespans than other people who live in the same area that eat a sensible diet including meat.
I am not ashamed to say that I eat animals. When someone comes up with a good reason why dogs, cats, wolves, coyotes, tigers, bears, etc. should feel guilty for eating other animals, then I will rethink my position. Heck, a lot of PETAphiles don't even know that pigs are not herbivores -- far from it, they are occasionally cannibalistic. The reason you have to be so careful about properly cooking pork is because our digestive system is so similar to that of pigs that we are susceptible to the same intestinal tract parasites. A lot of PETAphiles also assume that humans are the only primates that are omnivorous, which is also incorrect. It is common for many other primate species to eat insects (and yes, bugs do count as animals), and some large primates will occasionally catch and eat other types of animals.
If I was intended to eat only plants, I would probably have no canine teeth and two stomaches.
Or the time they threw turkeys out of the helicopter cuz they thot they could fly?
Actually wild turkeys can fly (not all that well though), however, domestic turkeys generally can't. Wild turkeys are also intelligent (as anyone who has tried to hunt them could attest) while domestic turkeys are one of the stupidest animals you will find on a farm.
I am fed up with the PETAphiles. Almost all of their arguments are morally and intellectually bankrupt, and their tactics are either stupid or heinous.
I live in a state with a lot of agricultural production, and myself, and I would venture to guess, most of the rest of the population is tired of their lame stunts.
I actually remember seeing those trays somewhere, but the prie was a bit exaggerated.
They are available at a couple of retail places around here (midwest US) for between $10 and $25 depending on the place. You can find them mail order for similar prices.
Nevertheless, I may consider using them.
They would seem to be an ideal solution to the need for lots of primary partitions.
For now, swapoff.vi/etc/fstab.fdisk.swapon is the cheaper solution:o) Dis I say I am also short of money?
No... as a matter of fact, I seem to recall that you were the guy saying you were going to buy an Athlon 650... Of course that might just be where you spent all your money...
"The traditional supercomputer market is not really going anywhere anyway, with the trend clearly more towards commodity architecture clusters typified by Beowulf."
These are two completely different architectures, designed for solving very different problems. Why do people think that they are always interchangeable.
They are clearly different architectures. The traditional (read X/YMP series) Cray architecture machines were superfast uniprocessor machines, however many of the later Cray machines were tightly coupled multiprocessor machines. Beowulf machines are loosely coupled clusters of (usually uni but sometimes dual) processors.
However it is obvious that most of the traditional supercomputer market has been in decline for some time, with such former vendors as Control Data dropping out entirely. Even many of the tightly-coupled multiprocessor supercomputer vendors have had serious financial problems. Cray wasn't doing well even before SGI bought them out.
Although they require different types of programming and have their own set of strengths and weaknesses for solving certain types of problems, machines of the loosely coupled Beowulf type are clearly taking over the market from specialized supercomputer hardware.
Linux is fucking at least two times slower on the desktop.
Even if that were true, which I don't believe, at least not as a general case, what does it have to do with what we were talking about? The example was talking about IRIX, not Linux.
Actually I have possibly a better suggestion... You might find something called a "Lock and Load Tray" to be useful. What they are is a 5.25" drive bay frame with a pull-out middle part that fits around a normal 3.5" IDE type drive (there are SCSI versions available, but generally more expensive). If you buy two (or more) of them, then you can easily swap drives, which gives you a very flexible multi-boot solution. Lock and load trays generally sell between $10 and $25 each.
Another solution to needing to multiboot a lot of different distros is what I do... have a lot of machines. I have machines running various versions of Red Hat, SuSE, Caldera and FreeBSD, etc. I've also got non-PC machines such as Sparcstations and Macs... Its really more of a 'concurrent boot' than multi-boot I suppose.
Any reason why you can't put some of your stuff on extended partitions? I often use 7 or 8 partitions on a drive. I've never tried putting swap or my root file system on an extended partition though. You could also use the old trick of adding another hard drive as a workaround. Drives are cheap these days.
If SGI godes under, this could become "Let's all ditch this Linux thing before it drags us down like it did SGI!".
This would be much more of a problem if SGI had bet on Linux when they were profitable and then went down the tubes. Since SGI is already in serious financial trouble, if they fail now, the worst you can say is that their move to Linux failed to rescue them. But you certainly can't say it was what did them in.
Dumping Cray is smart just from the standpoint that SGI never seemed to be able to really capitolize on Cray. The traditional supercomputer market is not really going anywhere anyway, with the trend clearly more towards commodity architecture clusters typified by Beowulf.
Dumping their NT sales is smart because SGI is not equipped to compete in that sort of market. They need to be in areas where people are willing to pay for quality (the high end). People who are the customers for NT in general are not interested in paying for quality. They want cheap, commodity hardware/software. They are often not willing to pay for balanced subsystems or high performance I/O. Many buy based primarily on clock-speed and whiz-bang advertising. They look at SGI's $5000 450MHz Xeon and think that some generic clone vendor's 450MHz Xeon box is comparable, just because it has the same processor. SGI just isn't the right company to make it in that sort of market. Even the established high end PC vendors (Compaq, HP, IBM, etc) have had trouble being consistantly profitable with their high end PC workstation business, and none of them really went to the extremes of breaking out of the PC design mold that SGI did.
Unfortunately for PC-clone vendors, Microsoft has structured the market so that most of the potential profits go to Redmond, and that just doesn't leave the margins there for companies like SGI.
Actually NT is really lousy for graphics, unfortunately a lot of good graphics software runs on NT. That software would be better suited to a good OS, however.
What is the BFD reason you don't want a swap partition? If you really don't want to use swap, do the install with a tiny swap partition, then do swapoff and you can get rid of the partition. I still fail to see any reason why you would want to run without any swap space available though.
If you are the AC who thinks that there is no commercial grade software for Linux, then you are pretty deluded, regardless of how long you've been out there. Just as two examples, Word Perfect 8 and Star Office 5.1 are definitely on par with their versions on Windows. They are also comparable to their competitors products on those platforms.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, my experience with SNA is that it is actually far less reliable than TCP/IP in practice. This is at least true when you are dealing with SNA over WAN connections, and more true when you start mixing in 3rd party SNA products like Brixton and SunLink. One of its biggest failings of SNA is that it doesn't automatically recover from line outages and requires messy 'reaquisition' of connections which often requires manual interactions. Some of these failings may be in the way that SNA works with CICS. I don't really understand the mainframe side of things that well. In comparison, once the hardware problems on a line are fixed, TCP/IP networks just start talking again.
You might look at Bochs, which is an open sourced x86 emulator that should work on PPC (it works on Sparc). It isn't the fastest thing in the world, but it is supposed to be able to run Windows 9x and a lot of Windows software.
You can find the bochs home page at:
http://www.bochs.com
This is a problem that OS/2 had, and part of the reason that it didn't flourish as it could have.
So far this sort of problem isn't happening in the Linux world. I think there are a number of reasons why.
OS/2 didn't provide enough good reasons to write native apps. One problem I think is that also sharing a history with MS-DOS, it really wasn't perceived as different enough from Windows. Linux clearly doesn't have this problem.
I think OS/2 also had difficulty courting developer mindshare because of a percieved deficiency in native development tools (either in availabilty, quality or cost). This is not a problem for Linux which was able to initially draw on the strong history of UNIX development tools (many of which are free) and has now started to attract many of its own or ports from other platforms (such as CodeWarrior). Linux clearly has significant developer mindshare and is quickly growing it, which is something that OS/2 never really achieved.
Furthermore WINE (and Twin and TWINE) is not just an emulator, it is also a porting toolkit. Which should help serve as a bridge for Windows-centric developers to port their code to Linux. Once they have things running, they can write more native apps if they want. Unfortunately, OS/2 never really offered a good way to port Windows code over. In the early days of OS/2 that didn't matter so much, because there weren't very many Windows apps and the Windows API and MFC were't very popular yet, but today a lot of developers feel locked into those or at least have code that is.
whatever happened to bochs?
Looks like it is alive and well. Apparently it can run Windows 9x and a fair amount of Windows software these days given a fast enough CPU.
The Bochs homepage can be found at:
http://www.bochs.com
Oh no! My car's Holley 750 double pumper carb and Accell dual point distributor are going to stop working because of the Y2K problem!
That was a joke son, a joke.
Said in best "Foghorn Leghorn" voice.
And yes, Mel Blanc is probably rolling in his grave right about now.
What is your stock ticker symbol so I can short it? Seriously, if your IT management makes their decisions based on postings on an advocacy site such as Slashdot instead of doing a serious analysis of the actual products, then they are probably making a lot of other stupid decisions.
There is valuable information to be found in online forums, but anyone who is a veteran of the computer world should know that the signal to noise ratio in most online forums is not what we'd like.
If you think that 'people with 12 year old minds' are the most visible Linux advocates then you just aren't looking very hard, and probably not at Microsoft either. They've certainly got their share of the juvenile trolls. Unfortunately, what they also seem to be plagued with are the advocates that obviously have a vested interest in Microsoft (I.E., paid off in one way or another).
Juvenile trolls will probably grow up some day, while the people whose allegiance can be bought will eventually move on to other pastures.
I hope more people follows your excellent example and get their ethical guidance from the behaviour of pigs!
People should realize that they are, when it comes right down to it, animals. We can try to pretend otherwise, but we certainly aren't plants.
No seriosly, pigs and dogs can not make the moral judgement that causing huge amounts of suffering for very weak reasons is bad.
Who are you to say that pigs and dogs can't make moral judgements? If such animals can't make moral decisions, then how can they really suffer 'huge amounts'? Furthermore, carnivores don't really have any choice, it is virtually impossible for them to survive without eating meat.
You can.
I have made my moral decision, and I've decided that eating meat is ethically correct.
Not that a dogs consuming of meat isn't as bad as yours, it is,
Oh, please. This is the stupidest thing I've ever heard. Animals have been eating other animals since before humans walked the face of the earth. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that, it is part of nature.
but you can do something about it!
But why should I? If there is nothing morally wrong with other animals eating animals, and I believe there isn't, then why should I be any different.
Suffering is suffering, no matter if the individual is a green alien, human or pig. If it can be avoided (and in the case of the pig, it most definetly can) it should be avoided.
What am ignorant idea. Suffering is unavoidable when it comes down to it. No matter what peoples intentions are, it will still occur. Suffering predates humans and will continue long after we are extinct.
Eating animals is the cause of heart disease and many cancers.
That is a crock of excrement. Eating too much meat and not eating enough vegetables may contribute to the risk of cancer, but it does not cause cancer. Similarly, eating an improperly balanced vegetarian diet could also lead to serious health problems.
More importantly, most people don't know about the ecological problems of modern hog and chicken farm methods
I live in an agricultural state, so I know damned well what is going on. And FYI, most people don't know about the ecological problems of modern grain farming methods either.
because they don't know what's been going on in recent years with the large corporate farms (and payoffs to politicians to allow it to go on.).
Payoffs to politicians like Bill Clinton from people like the Tyson family no doubt.
Believe it or not, at least around here, farms aren't nearly as 'corporate' as some people would have you believe.
Is this the state where they recently caught a couple of hog farm workers sawing off the leg of a live sow "for fun"?
Must not be, because I've never heard of such a thing. I could believe something like that happening in say... Arkansas, but not around here.
it warms my heart to know that you will die so much sooner because of your crappie diet.. For a second there, I thought I would have to deal with you forever
It is this kind of attitude that makes the sane look upon the PETAphiles as the loons they are.
For your information, roasted bird (as opposed to deep fried anyway), as part of an otherwise balanced diet is one of the healthiest things you can eat.
I guarantee that if someone was eat nothing but deep fried breaded tofu, potato chips and dougnuts and other similar stuff that is all-vegetable that they would be less healthy than someone who eats a balanced omnivorous diet. There are a lot of all-vegetable foods that are full of fat and empty calories.
A lot of the people I know that are vegetarian aren't that healthy (most of them are major-league hypocondriacs), nor do I see any real evidence that they really have significantly longer lifespans than other people who live in the same area that eat a sensible diet including meat.
and no i dont eat them
I am not ashamed to say that I eat animals. When someone comes up with a good reason why dogs, cats, wolves, coyotes, tigers, bears, etc. should feel guilty for eating other animals, then I will rethink my position. Heck, a lot of PETAphiles don't even know that pigs are not herbivores -- far from it, they are occasionally cannibalistic. The reason you have to be so careful about properly cooking pork is because our digestive system is so similar to that of pigs that we are susceptible to the same intestinal tract parasites. A lot of PETAphiles also assume that humans are the only primates that are omnivorous, which is also incorrect. It is common for many other primate species to eat insects (and yes, bugs do count as animals), and some large primates will occasionally catch and eat other types of animals.
If I was intended to eat only plants, I would probably have no canine teeth and two stomaches.
Or the time they threw turkeys out of the helicopter cuz they thot they could fly?
Actually wild turkeys can fly (not all that well though), however, domestic turkeys generally can't. Wild turkeys are also intelligent (as anyone who has tried to hunt them could attest) while domestic turkeys are one of the stupidest animals you will find on a farm.
Actually, it seems like most Microsoft fans are trolls... :-)
I am fed up with the PETAphiles. Almost all of their arguments are morally and intellectually bankrupt, and their tactics are either stupid or heinous.
I live in a state with a lot of agricultural production, and myself, and I would venture to guess, most of the rest of the population is tired of their lame stunts.
I actually remember seeing those trays somewhere, but the prie was a bit exaggerated.
/etc/fstab.fdisk.swapon is the cheaper solution :o) Dis I say I am also short of money?
They are available at a couple of retail places around here (midwest US) for between $10 and $25 depending on the place. You can find them mail order for similar prices.
Nevertheless, I may consider using them.
They would seem to be an ideal solution to the need for lots of primary partitions.
For now, swapoff.vi
No... as a matter of fact, I seem to recall that you were the guy saying you were going to buy an Athlon 650... Of course that might just be where you spent all your money...
"The traditional supercomputer market is not really going anywhere anyway, with the trend clearly more towards commodity architecture clusters typified by Beowulf."
These are two completely different architectures, designed for solving very different problems. Why do people think that they are always interchangeable.
They are clearly different architectures. The traditional (read X/YMP series) Cray architecture machines were superfast uniprocessor machines, however many of the later Cray machines were tightly coupled multiprocessor machines. Beowulf machines are loosely coupled clusters of (usually uni but sometimes dual) processors.
However it is obvious that most of the traditional supercomputer market has been in decline for some time, with such former vendors as Control Data dropping out entirely. Even many of the tightly-coupled multiprocessor supercomputer vendors have had serious financial problems. Cray wasn't doing well even before SGI bought them out.
Although they require different types of programming and have their own set of strengths and weaknesses for solving certain types of problems, machines of the loosely coupled Beowulf type are clearly taking over the market from specialized supercomputer hardware.
Linux is fucking at least two times slower on the desktop .
Even if that were true, which I don't believe, at least not as a general case, what does it have to do with what we were talking about? The example was talking about IRIX, not Linux.
Actually I have possibly a better suggestion... You might find something called a "Lock and Load Tray" to be useful. What they are is a 5.25" drive bay frame with a pull-out middle part that fits around a normal 3.5" IDE type drive (there are SCSI versions available, but generally more expensive). If you buy two (or more) of them, then you can easily swap drives, which gives you a very flexible multi-boot solution. Lock and load trays generally sell between $10 and $25 each.
Another solution to needing to multiboot a lot of different distros is what I do... have a lot of machines. I have machines running various versions of Red Hat, SuSE, Caldera and FreeBSD, etc. I've also got non-PC machines such as Sparcstations and Macs... Its really more of a 'concurrent boot' than multi-boot I suppose.
I am short of primary partitions on a drive.
Any reason why you can't put some of your stuff on extended partitions? I often use 7 or 8 partitions on a drive. I've never tried putting swap or my root file system on an extended partition though.
You could also use the old trick of adding another hard drive as a workaround. Drives are cheap these days.
If SGI godes under, this could become "Let's all ditch this Linux thing before it drags us down like it did SGI!".
This would be much more of a problem if SGI had bet on Linux when they were profitable and then went down the tubes. Since SGI is already in serious financial trouble, if they fail now, the worst you can say is that their move to Linux failed to rescue them. But you certainly can't say it was what did them in.
Dumping Cray is smart just from the standpoint that SGI never seemed to be able to really capitolize on Cray. The traditional supercomputer market is not really going anywhere anyway, with the trend clearly more towards commodity architecture clusters typified by Beowulf.
Dumping their NT sales is smart because SGI is not equipped to compete in that sort of market. They need to be in areas where people are willing to pay for quality (the high end). People who are the customers for NT in general are not interested in paying for quality. They want cheap, commodity hardware/software. They are often not willing to pay for balanced subsystems or high performance I/O. Many buy based primarily on clock-speed and whiz-bang advertising. They look at SGI's $5000 450MHz Xeon and think that some generic clone vendor's 450MHz Xeon box is comparable, just because it has the same processor. SGI just isn't the right company to make it in that sort of market. Even the established high end PC vendors (Compaq, HP, IBM, etc) have had trouble being consistantly profitable with their high end PC workstation business, and none of them really went to the extremes of breaking out of the PC design mold that SGI did.
Unfortunately for PC-clone vendors, Microsoft has structured the market so that most of the potential profits go to Redmond, and that just doesn't leave the margins there for companies like SGI.
Actually NT is really lousy for graphics, unfortunately a lot of good graphics software runs on NT. That software would be better suited to a good OS, however.
What is the BFD reason you don't want a swap partition? If you really don't want to use swap, do the install with a tiny swap partition, then do swapoff and you can get rid of the partition. I still fail to see any reason why you would want to run without any swap space available though.
I've been using it since 1996.
I've been using it since 1993.
If you are the AC who thinks that there is no commercial grade software for Linux, then you are pretty deluded, regardless of how long you've been out there. Just as two examples, Word Perfect 8 and Star Office 5.1 are definitely on par with their versions on Windows. They are also comparable to their competitors products on those platforms.