Smaller, nimbler, faster, easily customizable... This sounds like the perfect replacement for SMS Remote Control. Now I just need to sell my boss on the idea... --Shoeboy
What is more useless than NT on Alpha anyway? NT on PA-Risc, NT on PowerPC and NT on MIPS are good contenders. (yes, they do exist) The most useless of all though, has to be NT on x86 - nothing is more useless that this. --Shoeboy
the Compaq was only $12,514 Ok, this is odd. Compaq's web site gives the price of a default configured XP1000 with the low end gloria video card as ~$8,000. This story lists it as 12 Grand. For that price you ought to be able to get a stripped down DS-20 not a stripped XP1000. Either someone didn't do their shopping, or Compaq's site info is bad. Or I could just be stoned. --Shoeboy
Ok, so there is no _good_ web benchmark in existence, but that doesn't really excuse c't from doing a cgi comparison. This is a test designed to make NT look bad. The process creation overhead for NT is 3x higher than Unix. This is a known issue, and it's why multithreaded solutions like ASP exist in the first place. As a result, this c't benchmark is meaningless. A better test would be to specify the requirements of a dynamic site and then use the appropriate technology to implement it on each platform. So I guess that would be mod_perl on apache and vbscript ASPs on IIS. This would be a _much_ cooler comparison. I'm not sure who'd win, but I'd like to see a fair comparison of this type conducted. --Shoeboy.
Please note that these are the mayan pyramids, and not the egyptian ones. This is significant since the egyptian pyramids are simply burial places, but the design for the mayan temples was dictated to Conan of Cimmeria by a vast, cool and unsympathetic intelligence from the dog star Sirius. After Conan became King of Aquilonia he brought this knowledge to the western hemisphere and taught it to Mayan priesthood (Conan is Quetzlcoatl).
If your I.Q. is over 150, and you have $3,125.00 (plus handling), you might be eligible for a trial membership in the A.I.S.B. If you think you qualify, put the money in a cigar box and bury it in your backyard. One of our Underground Agents will contact you shortly.
Come on kids, IA64 is so delayed it's comical. Even with another NT-5 length production schedule, MS will beat IA64 by ~ 1000 years. When the Merced finally does ship it will barely be able to compete with the IA-32 branch. The Register got ahold of a Compaq roadmap and they say the following: "The estimate for the Alpha 1GHz 21264 is that it will reach 60 SPECint95 by Q2 of next year. Merced will (may?) enter the picture at 46 SPECint95, while the Xeon 8XX will tip in at 39 and the CuMine 8xx at 32." So it looks the IA64 architecture is all hype.
Q: With numbers like these, will you want to move from your speedy Xeon boxes to only slightly more speedy Merceds? A: Only if you run linux, since that will be the only way to have > 2Gb files.
Q: If you want 64 bits for either Linux or NT, what's the best choice? A: The alpha.
Q: If the alpha is so great, how come the merced gets more hype? A: I have no idea.
Q: Ok Shoeboy, when was the last time you bathed? A:
While win2k is supposed to be faster than NT4, there's a compelling reason to doubt this. MS has not posted any TPC/C benchmarks with win2k. This is very un-MS behavior for when they have a superior product. TPC/C benchmarks for SQL7 were being posted for several months before the official release of SQL7 simply because SQL7 blew away all competing systems even while still in beta. When MS has favorable benchmarks, they always publish them - but when the benchmarks look bad they don't. This is why MS has not published TPC-D,TPC-H or TPC-R results for SQL7. They aren't willing to admit that their superfast OLTP oriented RDBMS won't scale to the extent demanded by large data warehousing apps. If W2K server was faster than NT4, we'd have proof instead of hype. --Shoeboy
In a step that will surely shock both of us, I'm gonna have to side with tummyX. Joe's article has major problems. The assertion I like is that NT's stability peaked with 3.51. Based on my experience, this is laughable. I've had NT4 servers (running SQL 6.5 with 300 concurrent users) go 12 months with only 2 reboots (and those were service pack upgrades) OTO, the 3.51 servers I admin'd had to be cycled regularly (once a month to once a day) or they'd explode in a fiery ball o' bits. NT4, espescially SP3 is one hell of a stable OS - if you configure it properly. (I supported ~130 NT/SQL servers at MS, only ~6 of those ran 3.51 - so while my data isn't statistically relevant, it's _good_ anecdotal evidence.)
I'm still not wild about NT5 (oops win2k) though. And lets not forget that MS has been trotting out the "Cairo->NT5->win2k will release later this year" line for going on 3 years now.
--Shoeboy
Re:You guys sound so lame - wanna BSOD on w2k?
on
NT vs. Linux: Again
·
· Score: 1
Actually, I took a look at the memory dump, and this definitely is a video driver issue. I installed an unsigned NT4 driver, and it just took its time biting me on the ass. That makes this a "stupid user" problem. This will teach me to post on slashdot while drunk. --Shoeboy
Re:You guys sound so lame - wanna BSOD on w2k?
on
NT vs. Linux: Again
·
· Score: 1
This one's fun. Go to investor.msn.com and get the historic chart data for microsoft stock. Then click in the middle of the chart, hold down the primary mouse key and move your mouse side-to-side. Within 5 seconds you get taken to blue screen city. This is 100% reproducible on my W2K beta 3 box. I am not kidding. I thought MS servers were only supposed to crash your machine if you were running netscape;)
Great enthusiasm - You sound like Steve Balmer:) The problem here is that you're wrong on several key points: 1. Win2K's interface is not improved. It sucks. NT4 was good. I get paid to admin NT4. I like NT4. Win2k is a major step backwards in usability. The ungodly number of wizards in NT5 (oops win2k) makes it impossible to do any real work. Sure you can turn them off, but the mere sight of them drives me nuts - it's like having 4000 of those fscking dancing paperclips. This is supposed to be a server os - wizards don't belong on a server os. 2. Win2k's performance. This sucks too. Win2k takes ages to boot. Once it's up, using office 2k takes far longer than NT4 + Office97 ever did. My box is a PII 450 128Mb of RAM, I know that's not enough for the 2k products, but the company won't splurge for an upgrade. 3. Stability. This is anecdotal, but I've had more lockups (5) and blue screens (1) with NT5 than I had on the same box with NT4 (3)lock and (0)BSOD - Admitedly it's still in beta 4. Ease of development. There is a special place in the most fiery pit of hell for someone who names a function RegisterServiceCtrlHandlerW() Don't tell me that Win32 makes life easier for developers. It spawns carpal tunnel is what it does.
The only great thing about Microsoft was that my manager there was damn sexy. I couldn't get any work done without a bag of ice in my pants. --Shoeboy
If you're looking at commercial grade database solutions, your best bet is sybase. It's full featured, and the single process, simulated thread architecture is a lot faster than oracle or informix on low end servers.
Slashdot Mirror
Smaller, nimbler, faster, easily customizable... This sounds like the perfect replacement for SMS Remote Control. Now I just need to sell my boss on the idea...
--Shoeboy
What is more useless than NT on Alpha anyway?
NT on PA-Risc, NT on PowerPC and NT on MIPS are good contenders. (yes, they do exist) The most useless of all though, has to be NT on x86 - nothing is more useless that this.
--Shoeboy
the Compaq was only $12,514 Ok, this is odd. Compaq's web site gives the price of a default configured XP1000 with the low end gloria video card as ~$8,000. This story lists it as 12 Grand. For that price you ought to be able to get a stripped down DS-20 not a stripped XP1000. Either someone didn't do their shopping, or Compaq's site info is bad. Or I could just be stoned.
--Shoeboy
Ok, so there is no _good_ web benchmark in existence, but that doesn't really excuse c't from doing a cgi comparison. This is a test designed to make NT look bad. The process creation overhead for NT is 3x higher than Unix. This is a known issue, and it's why multithreaded solutions like ASP exist in the first place. As a result, this c't benchmark is meaningless. A better test would be to specify the requirements of a dynamic site and then use the appropriate technology to implement it on each platform. So I guess that would be mod_perl on apache and vbscript ASPs on IIS. This would be a _much_ cooler comparison. I'm not sure who'd win, but I'd like to see a fair comparison of this type conducted.
--Shoeboy.
You're right. I'd have realized this earlier, but I was busy sending death threats to Steve Balmer.
--Shoeboy
Flames per second! We can top any commercial OS out there. What a way to harness the talent of the AC community ;)
--Shoeboy
Please note that these are the mayan pyramids, and not the egyptian ones. This is significant since the egyptian pyramids are simply burial places, but the design for the mayan temples was dictated to Conan of Cimmeria by a vast, cool and unsympathetic intelligence from the dog star Sirius. After Conan became King of Aquilonia he brought this knowledge to the western hemisphere and taught it to Mayan priesthood (Conan is Quetzlcoatl).
If your I.Q. is over 150, and you have $3,125.00 (plus handling), you might be eligible for a trial membership in the A.I.S.B. If you think you qualify, put the money in a cigar box and bury it in your backyard. One of our Underground Agents will contact you shortly.
--Shoeboy
Microsoft is paying people to post to slashdot? Cool - Where do I go to apply for that job?
Come on kids, IA64 is so delayed it's comical. Even with another NT-5 length production schedule, MS will beat IA64 by ~ 1000 years. When the Merced finally does ship it will barely be able to compete with the IA-32 branch. The Register got ahold of a Compaq roadmap and they say the following:
"The estimate for the Alpha 1GHz 21264 is that it will reach 60 SPECint95 by Q2 of next year. Merced will (may?) enter the picture at 46 SPECint95, while the Xeon 8XX will tip in at 39 and the CuMine 8xx at 32."
So it looks the IA64 architecture is all hype.
Q: With numbers like these, will you want to move from your speedy Xeon boxes to only slightly more speedy Merceds?
A: Only if you run linux, since that will be the only way to have > 2Gb files.
Q: If you want 64 bits for either Linux or NT, what's the best choice?
A: The alpha.
Q: If the alpha is so great, how come the merced gets more hype?
A: I have no idea.
Q: Ok Shoeboy, when was the last time you bathed?
A:
While win2k is supposed to be faster than NT4, there's a compelling reason to doubt this. MS has not posted any TPC/C benchmarks with win2k. This is very un-MS behavior for when they have a superior product. TPC/C benchmarks for SQL7 were being posted for several months before the official release of SQL7 simply because SQL7 blew away all competing systems even while still in beta. When MS has favorable benchmarks, they always publish them - but when the benchmarks look bad they don't. This is why MS has not published TPC-D,TPC-H or TPC-R results for SQL7. They aren't willing to admit that their superfast OLTP oriented RDBMS won't scale to the extent demanded by large data warehousing apps. If W2K server was faster than NT4, we'd have proof instead of hype.
--Shoeboy
In a step that will surely shock both of us, I'm gonna have to side with tummyX. Joe's article has major problems. The assertion I like is that NT's stability peaked with 3.51. Based on my experience, this is laughable. I've had NT4 servers (running SQL 6.5 with 300 concurrent users) go 12 months with only 2 reboots (and those were service pack upgrades) OTO, the 3.51 servers I admin'd had to be cycled regularly (once a month to once a day) or they'd explode in a fiery ball o' bits. NT4, espescially SP3 is one hell of a stable OS - if you configure it properly. (I supported ~130 NT/SQL servers at MS, only ~6 of those ran 3.51 - so while my data isn't statistically relevant, it's _good_ anecdotal evidence.)
I'm still not wild about NT5 (oops win2k) though. And lets not forget that MS has been trotting out the "Cairo->NT5->win2k will release later this year" line for going on 3 years now.
--Shoeboy
Actually, I took a look at the memory dump, and this definitely is a video driver issue. I installed an unsigned NT4 driver, and it just took its time biting me on the ass. That makes this a "stupid user" problem. This will teach me to post on slashdot while drunk.
--Shoeboy
This one's fun. Go to investor.msn.com and get the historic chart data for microsoft stock. Then click in the middle of the chart, hold down the primary mouse key and move your mouse side-to-side. Within 5 seconds you get taken to blue screen city. This is 100% reproducible on my W2K beta 3 box. I am not kidding. I thought MS servers were only supposed to crash your machine if you were running netscape ;)
Great enthusiasm - You sound like Steve Balmer :) The problem here is that you're wrong on several key points:
1. Win2K's interface is not improved. It sucks. NT4 was good. I get paid to admin NT4. I like NT4. Win2k is a major step backwards in usability. The ungodly number of wizards in NT5 (oops win2k) makes it impossible to do any real work. Sure you can turn them off, but the mere sight of them drives me nuts - it's like having 4000 of those fscking dancing paperclips. This is supposed to be a server os - wizards don't belong on a server os.
2. Win2k's performance. This sucks too. Win2k takes ages to boot. Once it's up, using office 2k takes far longer than NT4 + Office97 ever did. My box is a PII 450 128Mb of RAM, I know that's not enough for the 2k products, but the company won't splurge for an upgrade.
3. Stability. This is anecdotal, but I've had more lockups (5) and blue screens (1) with NT5 than I had on the same box with NT4 (3)lock and (0)BSOD - Admitedly it's still in beta
4. Ease of development. There is a special place in the most fiery pit of hell for someone who names a function RegisterServiceCtrlHandlerW() Don't tell me that Win32 makes life easier for developers. It spawns carpal tunnel is what it does.
The only great thing about Microsoft was that my manager there was damn sexy. I couldn't get any work done without a bag of ice in my pants.
--Shoeboy
If you're looking at commercial grade database solutions, your best bet is sybase. It's full featured, and the single process, simulated thread architecture is a lot faster than oracle or informix on low end servers.