Somethings you are correct, but on some key things you are very wrong
SGI had very few Linux workstations and for a longer period of time have had their 1450, 1200, 1100, etc. line which are server only.
Irix is licensed with the hardware so if you own the hardware you can run Irix. Even with Linux you are still paying the $200,000 for licenses, only you are paying for the application (Maya, Softimage, etc.) which for the most part are completely not transferable (that has caused so many headaches for people, sell their computer but can't transfer their application license to the other person).
I've not known too many places that are using *only* SGI's for rendering, often they run it on every single machine they can get their hands on at night (cron process or whatever kicks off at 8 pm for all their workstations, a Sun server, couple of Linux & NT systems and have them render all night long).
Linux on commodity hardware is not going to be replacing development in many major studios anytime soon. The top of the line Geforce3 will smoke a Irix system running Quake (which they do have ported), but you'll have to shoot most people to get them to give up their SGI workstations since none of the PC graphics cards are any good at really anything but fill rates. Try and transorm, or do rotations on anything with any good number of polygons, any SGI Irix workstation that has came out within the past 5 years ago will go head to head with the latest commodity graphics cards today. That is what matters, to the graphic developers they doing transforming, rotating them around, etc. and nobody really is doing that well yet. I guess what I'm saying is, you won't be seeing people throwing out their Octane's anytime soon to put in a Geforce card to get faster development.
I will say this though, Nvidia has gotten alot better lately... simply because they licensed the tech from SGI:)
Umm... SGI *still* offers graphics acceleration that will blow away any general purpose card you can get off the street for building 3d animation.
Linux is only being used for rendering, they don't even have to have a graphics card, all they are doing is calculate pixel, color and write it out to a file, no-one ever has to look at the images as they are being created.
If you ever look at a studio, you'll see SGI workstations everywhere, and lots and lots of rendering systems, that most likely have no monitor at all, and a very low-end graphics card if any. Most of the time you'll have to pry a SGI Irix workstation out of the cold dead hand of an animator, since nobody else has anything that will come close for animation development.
If he's still hassling you, tell him that he could only possibly get 33.6 out of the connection. Only way he could get 56k to you would be for you to bring in a digital line (aka channelized T1) so that the modem would only have to do 1 analog to digital conversion (56k can't do a home analog -> telco digital -> end home analog).
You could always ask him for the infrastructure fee's to get it setup: T1 installation charge, modems that can handle a digital trunk... probably somewhere around $5k, not including reoccuring costs, that wouldn't be a problem now would it, since you'd now have "free 56k access":)
In my example you have already purchased the I-brick, possibly the R-brick (depending upon how large you are), if you are using XIO the X-brick, etc. All you are doing is adding some more CPU's to existing systems in the 3000. Which before if I had 32 procs in a Sun 6500, you were done you had to do essentially throw our your 6400 and do a forklift upgrade to an E10k; with SGI's 3000 you are at CPU's you don't run out of headroom, you never have to get rid of your original investment. I can start with a 4 proc system and scale it up to a 1000 proc system and never have to throw out hardware to get there because you don't run out of headroom (there is a theoretical max I will admit but it's a limitation in interconnect speed).
Anyway yeah, you have to buy the I-brick, P-brick & C-brick to get a system running and each system will need to have at least an I & P brick; but to add to an existing system no problems.
It's a link to a running *single image* (i.e. not a beowulf cluster) 128 proc Linux system on a mips box. When was the last time you saw Dell, HP, Gateway, do that with a Linux system? This little cluster in the post is not where SGI is going with their systems (as you said anybody can do that) but are moving with Intel numa with high speed numalink interconnects that are much faster than standard Myranet (their cross bar is in the gigaBYTES).
The real interesting part that I see (if they can live long enough for Intel to release Mercede) is the system partitioning and it's modularization. Need 2 more procs for your database but all your CPU slots are full, well plug in another "C brick", you won't have to worry about running out of CPU slots in your frame, everything is a component, you won't have to do another fork lift upgrade. Also with their partitioning I can purchase a 100 proc system, partition it into twenty 5 proc systems all within the same frame I don't have to pay for all of the overhead for 20 different frames and space for expansion in 20 of those frames, because all I need to do is plug in another "C brick" and give two of the boxes two more CPU's without ever having to have bought the headroom to begin with.
Whoa getting a bit long, SGI really has some cool stuff going on right now. If they could only market themselves out of a paper bag they wouldn't be in the bled-dry situation they are in. Personally I think the best thing for them would be to be bought by someone with big pockets who can market a product properly.
Feeling cheecky this morning, so read with a bit of humour
OK, so where is the court case saying the DMCA is illegal/unconstitutional. Waiting... Still waiting... Didn't find one??? Then you have no leg to stand on until the court system issues an official rulling.
Obedience to the Constitution, I believe as part of the the Constitutional checks and balances it REQUIRES them to execute the laws that the legislative branch creates, UNTIL the judicial branch strikes it down.
Fairness, they treated him exactly the same others, they did NOT judge him but executed what they were bound by the Constitution to do. If they were unfair they would have pre-judged him either as innocent (which is what you really want them to be I guess, judges) or guilty.
The FBI may be an organization that has not done everything properly, or even done things down right illegal; but in *this* case everything was done properly. The people who passed the DMCA are the ones who are in the wrong here, Cliton and Congress are the ones who put their signature on that paper signing it into law, and they are ultimately at fault for the DMCA. (along with Adobe in this case)
I'm sorry but you must be living somewhere than America to make the statements you are making. I mean, your Constitution allowing the the police department to decide which laws created by elected officials they feel like ignoring and also allowing them to be the judge... that doesn't sound like a very nice place to me. You must have a lot of corruption there since nobody can keep them in check, I mean what's the point of having elected officials, if the police can still do whatever they want?
I don't believe he was arrested because of writing the code or being in the company, etc. BUT he was arrested because he gave a talk on how to circumvent the encryption *while he was in the US*.
I believe the US government was more then willing to completely ignore the matter (happens all the time, getting a warning instead of a speeding ticket), but Adobe called up their lawyers and basically required the government to act on a law that's on the books (could you imagine the lawsuits over law enforcement refusing to enforce a law on the books). Once he was arrested a chain of events occurs (and from what I can tell he technically *did* break the law while in the US), which doesn't really give any shortcuts out; one pretty much has to follow the court process till the end. When one is arrested the government is commited to due process, which Adobe forced them to do.
Sklyarov from all accounts *did* break a law (whoops on him), it is a law full of loop holes that are being used for unintended purposes (shame on Clinton & congress), and Adobe is using the US government to run ruckshaw over a foreigner, and twist the law to things that the original drafter hadn't really intended it's use for (context wise)... shame shame on Adobe. Of course now Adobe wants to hide it under the run and act like they never meant for this to happen when it was them in the first place.
On a side note, I tend to agree with how the once you are arrested method currently works, other than it can be painfully slow; but once someone is arrested there is no turning back, so the arresting officer needs to make *damn* sure that something did occur, elsewise be expecting that "unlawful arrest" lawsuit to be coming over the fence. If they could just arrest and release people as they wish without any checks and ballances with no end trial, imagine the amount of abuse that would occur.
The heat should not leave Adobe's feet on this one, Adobe's fault should not be forgotten (and sadly it almost seems their PR dept has gotten if forgotten), since it is their fault that they twisted the law in this manner.
I don't know what your problem was, but 2-3 years ago I had MS SQL running with close to a million records added daily. This was on a 2x PPro 200 with 512 mb ram (course that hardware was damn expensive at the time).
Almost always (note almost) the problem with pretty much all sql servers is due to the admin not knowing enough about it to run it properly. I've seen some really crappy Oracle servers running on 32 proc Sun systems along with some really kick ass Oracle servers on a 4 proc Sun system. The DBA makes or breaks sql systems these days a whole lot more than the sql server software itself.
Why would it be in Ford's best interest to release software??? They made it internally, and aren't distributing it outside their company so why would they push specialized software that they used their own money to develope with???
It seems to me that they would never want internal code to go outside their company, for a couple of reasons.
1) Most likely nobody but other auto makers will even glance at their code (so what's the point then)
2) Other automakers will use their code, and they DON'T have to release any changes if they don't distribute it so Ford would never get any improvements back.
97... are you running 6.4?? I don't believe 6.2 supported the Octane 10k procs, and 97 would be pretty early for 6.5.
On freeware.sgi.com under gcc they have a link to a page on Developer Central (http://www.sgi.com/developers/devtools/apis/irix. html) that should give you everything that you might need outside of gcc (linker, header files, etc).
If you aren't there already, you really should see about getting Irix 6.5; SGI cleaned up lots of messes (and added a few.. nsd). But you get snmp, file ACL's, NFS, etc. there are just lot's of enhancements in 6.5 (6.4 was almost a rogue port of 6.2 to support the 10k proc). It's only 600 bucks, you get lots of stuff for you money. But if possibly you check out the above you should be able to do pretty much anything you need to.
As a side note, if a compile fails, I've had best luck getting it to go by adding a couple of CFLAGS when using 3rd party apps from the -n32 (or -64 depending upon CPU) & -cckr; I normally use these on the Irix cc compiler but should also work on gcc.
What exactly is the problem you are/were having. Using them for years I can say Irix is my favorite, as long as people are willing to *not* use the GUI for administration (elsewise you are really limiting yourself) it can't be beat (give me "inst" over any other rpm, aptget, pkgadd crap).
Are you having a performance issue?? Memory, CPU, disk I/O? More than likely it's a simple thing that you don't know about, or has been fixed in the past 4 years.
Irix must work properly/reliably for lots of people or else they wouldn't continue to sell their thousand proc plus single image configurations. You can't have downtime or not have it work exactly the way you want it when you are 30 days in to a 60 day calculation.
The *REAL* reason SGI is floundering is because for years they could never market themselves out of a paper bag. You can have the best stuff in the world, but if your sales force doesn't quite get it...
Maybe you can enlighten me, but I've never quite understood the reasoning that people think that ISP's that they are paying 20 dollars a month (or less) should open themselves up to a possibility of massive expense (how much money can you get out of an individual, compared to how much money could you get out of a national ISP).
Being realistic a webhoster deals in quantity, thousands of sites and dropping off a couple of customers to this is MUCH less expensive and doesn't really touch the bottom line; than dragging up log files, going to court, etc. Also being realistic if the ISP has good prices, good service, good performance, etc. with their only fault being that in a legal case they wash their hands of the problem... well that's not going to cause a mass exodus and kill them off.
Just being a bit realistic, in what $20/month buys you, if you want your ISP to take on some of that risk you had better make it financially attractive to the ISP.
No, Mercedes for the price of a Mercedes would be a SGI workstation. They had innovative style way before the Mac tried to patent it, and under the hood can blow the doors off of about anything you put up against it.
It would depend upon when you contacted them, here semi-recently (2 years??) it'd be over at Sun, before then you'd have gotten the old Netscape. I've not had the best luck with Sun's support (gold support contract on 30+ enterprise servers) so I'm guessing it's them.
If I remember correctly cnn.com ran on ver 2 for a number of years after ver 3 came out (they're on ver 4 now). I loved ver 2, none of this java crap, just nice clean config files that did exactly what it was meant for (webserving) and did it faster than anyone else at the time. I did get ver 3 to run OK but it took forever going through this file and that file and yanking out crap I didn't need, ver 3 seemed like it was meant for "intranet's" not for main webservers, all this distributed admin, indexing, etc. crap it's not used for the outside world.
When we flipped to ver 3 all I can say is thank god for Irix's vswap, just to run it wanted to allocate something like 2 gig of swap space, never used it just allocated it on startup, if it didn't have this space it would kill it's main process. Vswap allowed me to say the system had more swap space than it really did (as long as you NEVER request it you're fine), this was back when storage wasn't cheap like it is today and essentially throwing away space wasn't looked kindly upon by the higher-ups.
Then you are talking to Sun, Aol pretty much gave them iPlanet for hardware. Netscape at one point actually *did* have good support, I think I called them once maybe twice on an issue... of course that was back in days of version 2 enterprise server which kicked some major butt. Later versions seriously sucked when they started adding in "features" that other products did so much better (search engine for example).
I washed my hands of their server line a few years ago, but I still have a sticker on my car from certification training in rememberence of their old product.
That was the part that I don't quite get, to use napster you had to know either the song or the artist; which if you are looking for new indie music which you hadn't heard before... well you were screwed (there was the "featured music" but can anyone honestly say that was their primary use of napster???) They are going to have to change some major things to the client to get something like this going.
I don't believe that napster ever was *really* used to find new music by bands users had never heard of; sure they could find stuff but who's main use of napster was to out type some random words in and download music you never heard of. I'm sure it was done, but I'd guess it was next to nothing compared to everything else.
This is not about making closed software; the software will still be available for download (GPL requires this). What they are doing is requiring every system running it to be licensed. It is still opensource, it is still GPL'd.
What they've done is, prevent you from downloading or purchasing a single copy and running it on all your systems in your organization. You still have the source code, you just can't copy and run it on all the systems you want without paying Caldera.
Whether or not this *is* a smart thing to do... well I guess we'll let f*uckedcompany.com decide. It tends to go against the philosophy that grew Linux over the years: download, try it out, give it to a friend, repeat. One of the things that has allowed Linux to grow (above all of the ultristic GPL stuff) is that fact that it has been free (cost wise or beer) to use and share.
A medium that is completely, perfectly reproduceable costing on a few cents to do is inherently different then a medium that takes years to perfect duplication of and costs X times more to duplicate. Ask yourself why a limited print run is so *much* cheaper than an actual painting, It's the same artist.
Having just a original that can be mass produced exactly as the original doesn't mean much, having a *scarce* individual product does.
I think it's a *great* motivator and really spurs creativity (not bad in anyway); but again that's completely different than a "noble goal".
I'd like to believe that if asked to name a noble goal, that it generally wouldn't be; "to distributed computer source code, so those who could afford to have a computer could use it in other ways".
How many of the 6 major figure heads mentioned at the top of this thread branch are starving and penniless? Linus created Linux NOT because of a "noble goal" but because he wanted to do things that he couldn't do previously.
There are noble goals in the world, but opensource is not one of them. There are far greater things in the world than the pathetic microscopic world of open vs. closed source.
In 94 I was playing Falcon 3.0 multiplayer 3D flight simulator on a 486. It may not have had every little thing that the military had, but it was a 3D battle simulation on a PC, with attention paid to how a real airplane handled (the manual was not for the faint of heart).
For those of you who have not heard of Falcon, it was the first "good" military flight sim. Had awacs sending you on missions to go out wack a few military targets (tanks, bridges, other airplanes, etc.), escort mission, etc. It was super advanced for it's time, I can't remember on how many floppies the damn thing came on though (too damn many). I must say it was pretty cool (maybe in a twisted way) zooming in and watching people running from your missile, headed for their SAM site.
Ummm that second coax doesn't give you any extra bandwidth, it's there to give you a clean signal to you cable modem. I guess they were having issues with dirty lines giving the install techs issues.
Slashdot Mirror
Somethings you are correct, but on some key things you are very wrong
:)
SGI had very few Linux workstations and for a longer period of time have had their 1450, 1200, 1100, etc. line which are server only.
Irix is licensed with the hardware so if you own the hardware you can run Irix. Even with Linux you are still paying the $200,000 for licenses, only you are paying for the application (Maya, Softimage, etc.) which for the most part are completely not transferable (that has caused so many headaches for people, sell their computer but can't transfer their application license to the other person).
I've not known too many places that are using *only* SGI's for rendering, often they run it on every single machine they can get their hands on at night (cron process or whatever kicks off at 8 pm for all their workstations, a Sun server, couple of Linux & NT systems and have them render all night long).
Linux on commodity hardware is not going to be replacing development in many major studios anytime soon. The top of the line Geforce3 will smoke a Irix system running Quake (which they do have ported), but you'll have to shoot most people to get them to give up their SGI workstations since none of the PC graphics cards are any good at really anything but fill rates. Try and transorm, or do rotations on anything with any good number of polygons, any SGI Irix workstation that has came out within the past 5 years ago will go head to head with the latest commodity graphics cards today. That is what matters, to the graphic developers they doing transforming, rotating them around, etc. and nobody really is doing that well yet. I guess what I'm saying is, you won't be seeing people throwing out their Octane's anytime soon to put in a Geforce card to get faster development.
I will say this though, Nvidia has gotten alot better lately... simply because they licensed the tech from SGI
Umm... SGI *still* offers graphics acceleration that will blow away any general purpose card you can get off the street for building 3d animation.
Linux is only being used for rendering, they don't even have to have a graphics card, all they are doing is calculate pixel, color and write it out to a file, no-one ever has to look at the images as they are being created.
If you ever look at a studio, you'll see SGI workstations everywhere, and lots and lots of rendering systems, that most likely have no monitor at all, and a very low-end graphics card if any. Most of the time you'll have to pry a SGI Irix workstation out of the cold dead hand of an animator, since nobody else has anything that will come close for animation development.
If he's still hassling you, tell him that he could only possibly get 33.6 out of the connection. Only way he could get 56k to you would be for you to bring in a digital line (aka channelized T1) so that the modem would only have to do 1 analog to digital conversion (56k can't do a home analog -> telco digital -> end home analog).
:)
You could always ask him for the infrastructure fee's to get it setup: T1 installation charge, modems that can handle a digital trunk... probably somewhere around $5k, not including reoccuring costs, that wouldn't be a problem now would it, since you'd now have "free 56k access"
Whoops got my bricks mixed... was thinking of the pdu brick.
In my example you have already purchased the I-brick, possibly the R-brick (depending upon how large you are), if you are using XIO the X-brick, etc. All you are doing is adding some more CPU's to existing systems in the 3000. Which before if I had 32 procs in a Sun 6500, you were done you had to do essentially throw our your 6400 and do a forklift upgrade to an E10k; with SGI's 3000 you are at CPU's you don't run out of headroom, you never have to get rid of your original investment. I can start with a 4 proc system and scale it up to a 1000 proc system and never have to throw out hardware to get there because you don't run out of headroom (there is a theoretical max I will admit but it's a limitation in interconnect speed).
Anyway yeah, you have to buy the I-brick, P-brick & C-brick to get a system running and each system will need to have at least an I & P brick; but to add to an existing system no problems.
Would you consider the following link new & cool???
o wn load/mips128.out
http://oss.sgi.com/projects/linux-scalability/d
It's a link to a running *single image* (i.e. not a beowulf cluster) 128 proc Linux system on a mips box. When was the last time you saw Dell, HP, Gateway, do that with a Linux system? This little cluster in the post is not where SGI is going with their systems (as you said anybody can do that) but are moving with Intel numa with high speed numalink interconnects that are much faster than standard Myranet (their cross bar is in the gigaBYTES).
The real interesting part that I see (if they can live long enough for Intel to release Mercede) is the system partitioning and it's modularization. Need 2 more procs for your database but all your CPU slots are full, well plug in another "C brick", you won't have to worry about running out of CPU slots in your frame, everything is a component, you won't have to do another fork lift upgrade. Also with their partitioning I can purchase a 100 proc system, partition it into twenty 5 proc systems all within the same frame I don't have to pay for all of the overhead for 20 different frames and space for expansion in 20 of those frames, because all I need to do is plug in another "C brick" and give two of the boxes two more CPU's without ever having to have bought the headroom to begin with.
Whoa getting a bit long, SGI really has some cool stuff going on right now. If they could only market themselves out of a paper bag they wouldn't be in the bled-dry situation they are in. Personally I think the best thing for them would be to be bought by someone with big pockets who can market a product properly.
Feeling cheecky this morning, so read with a bit of humour
OK, so where is the court case saying the DMCA is illegal/unconstitutional. Waiting... Still waiting... Didn't find one??? Then you have no leg to stand on until the court system issues an official rulling.
Obedience to the Constitution, I believe as part of the the Constitutional checks and balances it REQUIRES them to execute the laws that the legislative branch creates, UNTIL the judicial branch strikes it down.
Fairness, they treated him exactly the same others, they did NOT judge him but executed what they were bound by the Constitution to do. If they were unfair they would have pre-judged him either as innocent (which is what you really want them to be I guess, judges) or guilty.
The FBI may be an organization that has not done everything properly, or even done things down right illegal; but in *this* case everything was done properly. The people who passed the DMCA are the ones who are in the wrong here, Cliton and Congress are the ones who put their signature on that paper signing it into law, and they are ultimately at fault for the DMCA. (along with Adobe in this case)
I'm sorry but you must be living somewhere than America to make the statements you are making. I mean, your Constitution allowing the the police department to decide which laws created by elected officials they feel like ignoring and also allowing them to be the judge... that doesn't sound like a very nice place to me. You must have a lot of corruption there since nobody can keep them in check, I mean what's the point of having elected officials, if the police can still do whatever they want?
I don't believe he was arrested because of writing the code or being in the company, etc. BUT he was arrested because he gave a talk on how to circumvent the encryption *while he was in the US*.
I believe the US government was more then willing to completely ignore the matter (happens all the time, getting a warning instead of a speeding ticket), but Adobe called up their lawyers and basically required the government to act on a law that's on the books (could you imagine the lawsuits over law enforcement refusing to enforce a law on the books). Once he was arrested a chain of events occurs (and from what I can tell he technically *did* break the law while in the US), which doesn't really give any shortcuts out; one pretty much has to follow the court process till the end. When one is arrested the government is commited to due process, which Adobe forced them to do.
Sklyarov from all accounts *did* break a law (whoops on him), it is a law full of loop holes that are being used for unintended purposes (shame on Clinton & congress), and Adobe is using the US government to run ruckshaw over a foreigner, and twist the law to things that the original drafter hadn't really intended it's use for (context wise)... shame shame on Adobe. Of course now Adobe wants to hide it under the run and act like they never meant for this to happen when it was them in the first place.
On a side note, I tend to agree with how the once you are arrested method currently works, other than it can be painfully slow; but once someone is arrested there is no turning back, so the arresting officer needs to make *damn* sure that something did occur, elsewise be expecting that "unlawful arrest" lawsuit to be coming over the fence. If they could just arrest and release people as they wish without any checks and ballances with no end trial, imagine the amount of abuse that would occur.
The heat should not leave Adobe's feet on this one, Adobe's fault should not be forgotten (and sadly it almost seems their PR dept has gotten if forgotten), since it is their fault that they twisted the law in this manner.
I don't know what your problem was, but 2-3 years ago I had MS SQL running with close to a million records added daily. This was on a 2x PPro 200 with 512 mb ram (course that hardware was damn expensive at the time).
Almost always (note almost) the problem with pretty much all sql servers is due to the admin not knowing enough about it to run it properly. I've seen some really crappy Oracle servers running on 32 proc Sun systems along with some really kick ass Oracle servers on a 4 proc Sun system. The DBA makes or breaks sql systems these days a whole lot more than the sql server software itself.
Why would it be in Ford's best interest to release software??? They made it internally, and aren't distributing it outside their company so why would they push specialized software that they used their own money to develope with???
It seems to me that they would never want internal code to go outside their company, for a couple of reasons.
1) Most likely nobody but other auto makers will even glance at their code (so what's the point then)
2) Other automakers will use their code, and they DON'T have to release any changes if they don't distribute it so Ford would never get any improvements back.
97... are you running 6.4?? I don't believe 6.2 supported the Octane 10k procs, and 97 would be pretty early for 6.5.
. html) that should give you everything that you might need outside of gcc (linker, header files, etc).
On freeware.sgi.com under gcc they have a link to a page on Developer Central (http://www.sgi.com/developers/devtools/apis/irix
If you aren't there already, you really should see about getting Irix 6.5; SGI cleaned up lots of messes (and added a few.. nsd). But you get snmp, file ACL's, NFS, etc. there are just lot's of enhancements in 6.5 (6.4 was almost a rogue port of 6.2 to support the 10k proc). It's only 600 bucks, you get lots of stuff for you money. But if possibly you check out the above you should be able to do pretty much anything you need to.
As a side note, if a compile fails, I've had best luck getting it to go by adding a couple of CFLAGS when using 3rd party apps from the -n32 (or -64 depending upon CPU) & -cckr; I normally use these on the Irix cc compiler but should also work on gcc.
Good luck, happy compiling
What exactly is the problem you are/were having. Using them for years I can say Irix is my favorite, as long as people are willing to *not* use the GUI for administration (elsewise you are really limiting yourself) it can't be beat (give me "inst" over any other rpm, aptget, pkgadd crap).
Are you having a performance issue?? Memory, CPU, disk I/O? More than likely it's a simple thing that you don't know about, or has been fixed in the past 4 years.
Irix must work properly/reliably for lots of people or else they wouldn't continue to sell their thousand proc plus single image configurations. You can't have downtime or not have it work exactly the way you want it when you are 30 days in to a 60 day calculation.
The *REAL* reason SGI is floundering is because for years they could never market themselves out of a paper bag. You can have the best stuff in the world, but if your sales force doesn't quite get it...
I remember there being lots of porn on Gopher & Archie back in 93 during college :)
Maybe you can enlighten me, but I've never quite understood the reasoning that people think that ISP's that they are paying 20 dollars a month (or less) should open themselves up to a possibility of massive expense (how much money can you get out of an individual, compared to how much money could you get out of a national ISP).
Being realistic a webhoster deals in quantity, thousands of sites and dropping off a couple of customers to this is MUCH less expensive and doesn't really touch the bottom line; than dragging up log files, going to court, etc. Also being realistic if the ISP has good prices, good service, good performance, etc. with their only fault being that in a legal case they wash their hands of the problem... well that's not going to cause a mass exodus and kill them off.
Just being a bit realistic, in what $20/month buys you, if you want your ISP to take on some of that risk you had better make it financially attractive to the ISP.
No, Mercedes for the price of a Mercedes would be a SGI workstation. They had innovative style way before the Mac tried to patent it, and under the hood can blow the doors off of about anything you put up against it.
It would depend upon when you contacted them, here semi-recently (2 years??) it'd be over at Sun, before then you'd have gotten the old Netscape. I've not had the best luck with Sun's support (gold support contract on 30+ enterprise servers) so I'm guessing it's them.
If I remember correctly cnn.com ran on ver 2 for a number of years after ver 3 came out (they're on ver 4 now). I loved ver 2, none of this java crap, just nice clean config files that did exactly what it was meant for (webserving) and did it faster than anyone else at the time. I did get ver 3 to run OK but it took forever going through this file and that file and yanking out crap I didn't need, ver 3 seemed like it was meant for "intranet's" not for main webservers, all this distributed admin, indexing, etc. crap it's not used for the outside world.
When we flipped to ver 3 all I can say is thank god for Irix's vswap, just to run it wanted to allocate something like 2 gig of swap space, never used it just allocated it on startup, if it didn't have this space it would kill it's main process. Vswap allowed me to say the system had more swap space than it really did (as long as you NEVER request it you're fine), this was back when storage wasn't cheap like it is today and essentially throwing away space wasn't looked kindly upon by the higher-ups.
Then you are talking to Sun, Aol pretty much gave them iPlanet for hardware. Netscape at one point actually *did* have good support, I think I called them once maybe twice on an issue... of course that was back in days of version 2 enterprise server which kicked some major butt. Later versions seriously sucked when they started adding in "features" that other products did so much better (search engine for example).
I washed my hands of their server line a few years ago, but I still have a sticker on my car from certification training in rememberence of their old product.
That was the part that I don't quite get, to use napster you had to know either the song or the artist; which if you are looking for new indie music which you hadn't heard before... well you were screwed (there was the "featured music" but can anyone honestly say that was their primary use of napster???) They are going to have to change some major things to the client to get something like this going.
I don't believe that napster ever was *really* used to find new music by bands users had never heard of; sure they could find stuff but who's main use of napster was to out type some random words in and download music you never heard of. I'm sure it was done, but I'd guess it was next to nothing compared to everything else.
This is not about making closed software; the software will still be available for download (GPL requires this). What they are doing is requiring every system running it to be licensed. It is still opensource, it is still GPL'd.
What they've done is, prevent you from downloading or purchasing a single copy and running it on all your systems in your organization. You still have the source code, you just can't copy and run it on all the systems you want without paying Caldera.
Whether or not this *is* a smart thing to do... well I guess we'll let f*uckedcompany.com decide. It tends to go against the philosophy that grew Linux over the years: download, try it out, give it to a friend, repeat. One of the things that has allowed Linux to grow (above all of the ultristic GPL stuff) is that fact that it has been free (cost wise or beer) to use and share.
alt.idiot.doesn't.know.first_ammendment.applies.to .government.only.not.companies.or.individuals
A medium that is completely, perfectly reproduceable costing on a few cents to do is inherently different then a medium that takes years to perfect duplication of and costs X times more to duplicate. Ask yourself why a limited print run is so *much* cheaper than an actual painting, It's the same artist.
Having just a original that can be mass produced exactly as the original doesn't mean much, having a *scarce* individual product does.
I think it's a *great* motivator and really spurs creativity (not bad in anyway); but again that's completely different than a "noble goal".
I'd like to believe that if asked to name a noble goal, that it generally wouldn't be; "to distributed computer source code, so those who could afford to have a computer could use it in other ways".
How many of the 6 major figure heads mentioned at the top of this thread branch are starving and penniless? Linus created Linux NOT because of a "noble goal" but because he wanted to do things that he couldn't do previously.
There are noble goals in the world, but opensource is not one of them. There are far greater things in the world than the pathetic microscopic world of open vs. closed source.
In 94 I was playing Falcon 3.0 multiplayer 3D flight simulator on a 486. It may not have had every little thing that the military had, but it was a 3D battle simulation on a PC, with attention paid to how a real airplane handled (the manual was not for the faint of heart).
For those of you who have not heard of Falcon, it was the first "good" military flight sim. Had awacs sending you on missions to go out wack a few military targets (tanks, bridges, other airplanes, etc.), escort mission, etc. It was super advanced for it's time, I can't remember on how many floppies the damn thing came on though (too damn many). I must say it was pretty cool (maybe in a twisted way) zooming in and watching people running from your missile, headed for their SAM site.
Ummm that second coax doesn't give you any extra bandwidth, it's there to give you a clean signal to you cable modem. I guess they were having issues with dirty lines giving the install techs issues.