The dogma of journalism is to "be objective". I think that is the death of intelligent discussion. Either something affects your life or it doesn't (a little extremism here, but bear with me).
If something affects your life, you are going to report it in a way that you think about it. No matter how hard you try to present both sides, your biases will come through. This is a good thing if I understand who you are and what those biases are. Slashdot is built on the strength of people writing about what they care about.
If something does not affect you, then you don't know how to sniff out the bull from your information sources. Most stories start out with someone wanting something to be made public. The people behind the information expect to benefit from it. If you can't understand their bias, you might as well just print exactly what they give you.
There was an article in the San Jose Mercury News last week about how great Windows 2000 was and how it would go head to head against Solaris. Linux was never mentioned. The anti-trust case was never mentioned. There were no techincal details of how they made this so much better than the predecessors. The authors weren't the usual computing reporters. Now I know what story Microsoft wants to tell. The next day, one of the computing reporters did write it the way he sees it (basically, don't believe the hype, treat this like any other OS rev). His understanding of what is real and what it company marketing is the added value of the paper.
If I didn't read the paper regularly, I wouldn't know who has what biases and who is beyond what affects them. This information should be readily available with the articles. It would love to see counterpoint by people with different positions/biases/lives right along with the main article. This is the other great advance of SlashDot.
The paper is made up of people. Make that obvious on paper.
The biggest real complaint that I have about X is that is doesn't capture the entire user interface experience.
The biggest current issue here is sound. Enlightenment created it's own sound server to fix this. If we could turn that into a standard that everyone agrees on, then we would really be getting somewhere.
Then you would want to generalize to other user interface components: 3D displays, touch screens, digitizers, security cards/buttons, pan-tilt cameras, etc.
If the user interacts with it, then you should be able to access (or at least coordinate) it through a single server/protocol. It must all work over a network (with bandwidth management) and require only one authentication.
It might be interesting to see of you could make CORBA do all this (tied into an X server for the graphics part). In theory it could do this, now we just need to see it really happen (sort of a summation of the whole CORBA idea:-). You would need some really well written APIs, and it would have to be open source to justify commiting resources to work with/on it.
The great technologies that you mention are from 30 years ago. NASA now imports much more technology than it exports (and simply misses even more technology).
NASA is a good example of what happens to a politically driven monopoly. They start for the right reasons and have well meaning people, but they end up spending most of their effort squashing the competition and fighting for more money.
NASA "owns" space and has little to show to justify $13B a year. NASA is actively trying to kill Mir (the competition for space station) which runs on a miniscule amount of money.
A new method of organizing and funding "big science/technology" is needed. A politically drive bureaucracy doesn't have the right feedback forces to stay focused and innovative.
By the way, I used to work for NASA. I don't want to knock the people, they are there because they want to make a difference. But the endless rules and constantly changing priorities create a highly unproductive environment.
I develop the Linux port of Netscape Messaging Server. Most of this is not open source, but key parts of the system are open or can be easily customised (web mail screens, account management, spam filters, etc). We also give you a wide choice of OSes. The Netscape Messaging servers scale into the millions and have great performance (IMHO). We even give you great tools to do your own benchmarking (I wrote some of these too:-).
Your request left out a lot of details about usage profile (corporate or ISP). For an ISP profile (at most 10% active at once), you can probably run 25K users on a single Linux box (Dual 400Mhz PII +1Gb, RAID controller) plus a directory server (smaller Linux box). For availability issues, you probably want to distribute this over multiple boxes. If you enable SSL support, you will need more CPU.
The Linux version isn't shipping yet. Let me know if you are interested in the public beta.
Typically, the critical components are memory and disk subsystem. Disk latency really hurts performance. RAID controllers with memory back cache can help SMTP performance a lot. Remember the data is the important part; processors are disposable these days.
I have talked to customers who have millions of mailboxes on sendmail. They had to do a lot of customization to make this work (and I think they are still wrestling with it). They were also doing POP only. IMAP tends to require a much larger message store.
I wouldn't mix mail servers with other functions (shell, web). This tends to make performance variable and create administration headaches.
Test everything before you go public. Every site is different. Until you test it the way you will use it, you won't really know what to expect. Test you backup and restore proceedures to!
I have a Dell PowerEdge 6300 with 64bit PCI. I haven't used any 64bit cards yet, so I can't really say if it works.
This is a good enterprise class machine. Quad Xeons and up to 4Gb RAM. 2 Ultra2 SCSI and 1 fast SCSI on the motherboard. Built in hot swap Ultra SCSI. No ISA slots (no big loss there:-).
There is a huge market of industrial PCs out there. They have all the rugged options that you are looking for.
Flash or solid state disk is the best but expensive. Laptop hard drives on vibration mounts are the next best thing. You can get multiple gigabytes, it's low power (5V only), and it's shock tolerant.
Watch out for high voltage (50V) spikes and noise on auto power.
Check out www.cyberresearch.com and get a catalog (it's better than their online stuff).
Slashdot Mirror
The dogma of journalism is to "be objective". I think that is the
death of intelligent discussion. Either something affects your life
or it doesn't (a little extremism here, but bear with me).
If something affects your life, you are going to report it in a way
that you think about it. No matter how hard you try to present both
sides, your biases will come through. This is a good thing if I
understand who you are and what those biases are. Slashdot is built
on the strength of people writing about what they care about.
If something does not affect you, then you don't know how to sniff out
the bull from your information sources. Most stories start out with
someone wanting something to be made public. The people behind the
information expect to benefit from it. If you can't understand their
bias, you might as well just print exactly what they give you.
There was an article in the San Jose Mercury News last week about how
great Windows 2000 was and how it would go head to head against
Solaris. Linux was never mentioned. The anti-trust case was never
mentioned. There were no techincal details of how they made this so
much better than the predecessors. The authors weren't the usual
computing reporters. Now I know what story Microsoft wants to tell.
The next day, one of the computing reporters did write it the way he
sees it (basically, don't believe the hype, treat this like any other
OS rev). His understanding of what is real and what it company
marketing is the added value of the paper.
If I didn't read the paper regularly, I wouldn't know who has what
biases and who is beyond what affects them. This information should
be readily available with the articles. It would love to see
counterpoint by people with different positions/biases/lives right
along with the main article. This is the other great advance of
SlashDot.
The paper is made up of people. Make that obvious on paper.
The biggest real complaint that I have about X is that is doesn't capture the entire user interface experience.
:-). You would need some really well written APIs, and it would have to be open source to justify commiting resources to work with/on it.
The biggest current issue here is sound. Enlightenment created it's own sound server to fix this. If we could turn that into a standard that everyone agrees on, then we would really be getting somewhere.
Then you would want to generalize to other user interface components: 3D displays, touch screens, digitizers, security cards/buttons, pan-tilt cameras, etc.
If the user interacts with it, then you should be able to access (or at least coordinate) it through a single server/protocol. It must all work over a network (with bandwidth management) and require only one authentication.
It might be interesting to see of you could make CORBA do all this (tied into an X server for the graphics part). In theory it could do this, now we just need to see it really happen (sort of a summation of the whole CORBA idea
-Dan
The great technologies that you mention are from 30 years ago. NASA now imports much more technology than it exports (and simply misses even more technology).
NASA is a good example of what happens to a politically driven monopoly. They start for the right reasons and have well meaning people, but they end up spending most of their effort squashing the competition and fighting for more money.
NASA "owns" space and has little to show to justify $13B a year. NASA is actively trying to kill Mir (the competition for space station) which runs on a miniscule amount of money.
A new method of organizing and funding "big science/technology" is needed. A politically drive bureaucracy doesn't have the right feedback forces to stay focused and innovative.
By the way, I used to work for NASA. I don't want to knock the people, they are there because they want to make a difference. But the endless rules and constantly changing priorities create a highly unproductive environment.
-Dan
I develop the Linux port of Netscape Messaging Server. Most of this is not open source, but key parts of the system are open or can be easily customised (web mail screens, account management, spam filters, etc). We also give you a wide choice of OSes. The Netscape Messaging servers scale into the millions and have great performance (IMHO). We even give you great tools to do your own benchmarking (I wrote some of these too :-).
Your request left out a lot of details about usage profile (corporate or ISP). For an ISP profile (at most 10% active at once), you can probably run 25K users on a single Linux box (Dual 400Mhz PII +1Gb, RAID controller) plus a directory server (smaller Linux box). For availability issues, you probably want to distribute this over multiple boxes. If you enable SSL support, you will need more CPU.
The Linux version isn't shipping yet. Let me know if you are interested in the public beta.
Typically, the critical components are memory and disk subsystem. Disk latency really hurts performance. RAID controllers with memory back cache can help SMTP performance a lot. Remember the data is the important part; processors are disposable these days.
I have talked to customers who have millions of mailboxes on sendmail. They had to do a lot of customization to make this work (and I think they are still wrestling with it). They were also doing POP only. IMAP tends to require a much larger message store.
I wouldn't mix mail servers with other functions (shell, web). This tends to make performance variable and create administration headaches.
Test everything before you go public. Every site is different. Until you test it the way you will use it, you won't really know what to expect. Test you backup and restore proceedures to!
-Dan
I have a Dell PowerEdge 6300 with 64bit PCI. I haven't used any 64bit cards yet, so I can't really say if it works.
:-).
This is a good enterprise class machine. Quad Xeons and up to 4Gb RAM. 2 Ultra2 SCSI and 1 fast SCSI on the motherboard. Built in hot swap Ultra SCSI. No ISA slots (no big loss there
There is a huge market of industrial PCs out there. They have all the rugged options that you are looking for.
Flash or solid state disk is the best but expensive. Laptop hard drives on vibration mounts are the next best thing. You can get multiple gigabytes, it's low power (5V only), and it's shock tolerant.
Watch out for high voltage (50V) spikes and noise on auto power.
Check out www.cyberresearch.com and get a catalog (it's better than their online stuff).