Despite the typically sensational headline of this article, an Australian ADSL provider, Green Telecommunications (formely Apple Telecommunications...can you guess why they had to change their name?) has recently re-launched an unlimited download ADSL plan. For AUD$160/month, you get unlimited 512/128k ADSL access. Not all Australian internet experiences are as backward as Slashdot would have you believe...try finding an affordable internet cafe in any major US city compared to the choices you have in Sydney...it's like zapping back 10,000 years when you get off the plane in LAX or SFO.
Sound card detection and setup happens invisibly and automatically on several other distributions. Why is this article worth mentioning? What would actually be newsworthy would be some Debian people swallowing their pride and incorporating some of the excellent automatic hardware detection, setup and installation routines that the other distro developers have produced. That's what free and open software is all about, right?
Huh? Unless something changed recently, all the details illustrated in the DNA diagram are still as valid now as they were in the 70s. Is the story submitter upset because the double helix isn't animated, spinning slowly around, backlit by an offscreen purple fluorescent light source with meaningless reams of genetic code flashing past in the background like in a million bad sci-fi movies?
You'll still find a very similar style of diagram in any molecular biology textbook.
What about tomorrow? It is true that they likely wouldn't change that easily after investing in one product but for businesses that does not necessarily hold true.
Yep...If someone don't think HP/Compaq would be willing to throw away a few person-years of work, maybe they're not thinking hard enough about it.
I think HP would spend about as much time agonizing over whether to ditch Debian or not as Carly Fiorina would spend trying to decide on whether to drive the Porsche or the Ferrari to work on any given day. HP/Compaq have killed projects immeasurably larger than their Debian support project, multiple times in the past. Debian could be gone in a heartbeat.
I use debian extensivly, mainly because its a no frills linux distro
It certainly is. It doesn't even seem to include an ispell or aspell package.
Re:How does this compare to a 'workstation'?
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nForce2 Preview
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i've got 50 karma anyway. i want to draw out a response from the workstation zealots. but thanks for your useful input all the same.
How does this compare to a 'workstation'?
on
nForce2 Preview
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· Score: 1
I know that a lot of people who use traditional Unix workstations like SGIs, Suns and Alphas have always looked down on PC-based systems, even when in recent times the straight-out benchmark speed of PC-based CPUs has roughly equalled or surpassed their 'workstation' counterparts (eg: Athlon XP 2100+ base SpecInt: 720, Sun Blade 1000 900MHz Cu base SpecInt: 470. Athlon base SpecFP: 613, Sun base SpecFP: 629)
The normal response is "a PC might have a fast CPU, but it's connected to slow RAM, slow buses and a slow architecture". Now we have something like the nForce2, which has a dual channel DDR400 memory controller, HyperTransport linking the two components of the chipset, AGP 8x port to a graphics board of your choice, and with an Athlon XP, a 266MHz interface to the CPU. How does a PC-based system stack up against a modern traditional Unix-type workstation like a Sun Blade or SGI Fuel? Is there still some major architectural difference in the design of those systems that still makes them superior to a modern PC design like the nForce2? Assume that all storage is equal, eg: SCSI, to get past IDE vs. SCSI arguments, and you're not using the built in GeForce4 MX core available in the higher-end nForce2 northbridge.
I don't have a link to PubMed or anything handy, but I thought the aluminium connection has been discarded. The story I heard was that the fixing solution that the original researchers used for preparing tissue sections for microscopy was contaminated with aluminium. Hence a noticeable concentration of aluminium was detected in the protein plaques on the microscope slide.
Like I said...I don't have a link to back this up with at the moment...I'll take a look around.
I know it's possible to upgrade Debian 2.2 to just about anything, but the argument that keeps being presented by Debian supporters is "Sure, Debian 2.2 is old, but it's heavily tested, and stable as hell". Fair enough. But when you start upgrading core components like the kernel, you aren't running that "heavily tested stable as hell" distribution any more. You're running something of your own invention, or something which hasn't been subjected to anywhere near the same level of testing and abuse.
It's either one or the other: You're stable but 3 years out of date, or you're up to date, but you're in the same boat as all the other distributions with regard to the amount of testing done...except that you've had to do all the hard work of upgrading, patching, etc etc yourself.
Tell me exactly what you would need for a home or semi-pro server that's not in Debian Stable?
Journalling filesystems. I've got 120GB of crap on my home system, and there's not a fucking chance that I (or anyone else) should have to sit through ext2fs crawling through a filesystem that big because someone accidently pulled out the wrong power plug or there was a brownout.
People keep saying that Debian stable is perfect for servers. How can it be?!?! It's running from a 2.2 series kernel, so unless you're going to start patching like a quiltmaker on amphetamines (thus defeating the purpose of all that wonderful stability testing), you're not going to have journalling filesystems, large files over 2GB, decent SMP support, or drivers for any new gigabit ethernet, SCSI, RAID or SAN adapter card released in the last 3 years.
What sort of servers exactly is Debian stable suitable for? The only thing I can think of is small uniprocessor PC systems without any significant amount of attached storage, ie: a pissant little firewall or router. And there are better distros than Debian for those purposes.
Slightly offtopic, but our Indian DB2 administrator speaks with an accept which has an uncanny resemblance to the mumbling, rambling style of Milton (ie: the Swingline stapler guy). I have visited his desk many times, but have never noticed a red Swingline stapler anywhere. This new product may give him all he needs to complete his full transition to Milton (except that he's Indian, doesn't wear glasses, and doesn't have any facial hair).
Hacking at a liberal pace
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Cyber-Attacks?
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case in Australia where a consultant used his inside knowledge of a local sewage treatment system to dump raw sewage, hoping for a contract to solve the problem he created.
I believe the name of the contractor in this case was John W Howard. The name of the company was the Federal Commonwealth of Australia. The incident was the 2001 Federal Election. And no, the sewage still hasn't been cleaned up...we're still waiting
I wonder if this will affect any enthusiasm or special testing/optimisation that RedHat might have planned for the AMD side of the 64-bit fence. I can't imagine Intel not putting just a little bit of pressure on RedHat to be more forceful in their...patriotism.
And if you have your laptop then you have access to the material electorniclly. SO whats the point?
I prefer reading things from crisp, clear print-on-paper, nicely bound up into a compact package with a durable cover that's always available and ready to go (ie: a book) about 1000 times more than I prefer reading text on a screen that gets blinded out by the sun, covered in dust, fingerprints, gets hot after running for a few minutes, needs to be recharged every 3 hours, costs $2500, and shatters into 500 pieces when you drop your bag getting off the train.
Even prior to the GeForce 440 making it into Dell laptops, they had some pretty decent 3D-capable systems. I have an Inspiron 4100 (1GHz PIII, 32MB GeForce2 GO), and I play Jedi Knight II, Medal of Honor and RTCW all at 1024x768 without any slowdown at all. The sound isn't too bad either (provided you use headphones or good external speakers...the inbuilt ones are *terrible*).
It's a good time to be a techie/bio nerd indeed.;-)
Indeed. There's an IBM p690 Regatta turning up here in a few weeks, but unfortunately we're only setting it up for a customer and then it'll be on it's way again. Hopefully there will be some time to take some photos of the biologists loading cases of beer in and out of the system unit...it's too much of a fridge-like opportunity to pass up.
(Even so, I've seen one of our biologists propose a computation that would take 6 months on 32 CPUs...)
Which is why all the high-end computer hardware manufacturers are talking about bioinformatics being the industry that drives their revenues for the next few years;-)
the biologists learn computer skills and the computational researchers learn biology
I'm probably biased, since I'm a biologist who learned computers (or really a geek who's been playing with computers since the Apple II and the C64 and just happened to get a degree in biochemistry along the way), but I would say that it's the IT guys who have the hardest time adopting the biological point of view, rather than the other way around. We seem to end up with a lot of software that solves a non-existent biological problem, but does a great job of demonstrating some great algorithm that gets the computer scientists all boned up. I live in hope...
Bioinformatics sounds hot and it's certainly getting the hell hyped out of it at the moment, but from first hand experience, it can get pretty frustrating at times. What they don't mention in any of the glowing reports on the industry is the frequent brain explosions than can be caused by putting biologists and computer scientists in the same room for prolonged periods of time. Maybe it's just where I work and everyone's an asshole (or I'm an asshole), but trying to get the researchers and the computer guys to agree on anything is a fucking nightmare.
I guess this is the same in any branch of IT (instead of biologists and programmers each trying to clobber each other into submission, it's your banker or manufacturing customer)...and I guess I'm especially sensitive to it at the moment. Oh well...something for newbies into the field to think about.
Well commented code should definitely contain a liberal smattering of four-letter expletives, eg:
// no fucking idea how this works obj.doMagic();
or...
//bet those fucking lazy cunts in the QA team don't pick this up fileSystem.delete();
When your code is released as open source and becomes famous, people can amuse themselves by searching through the source code to find all the hidden expletives, sort of like easter eggs. If you work for a commercial organisation, you can sit back and enjoy the panic as the QA and release teams sweat it out trying to track down every last filthy utterance before shipping to a fucker...errr..customer.
What's the point of having 50 karma if you can't burn it up with a Debian is dying post:
It is official; Netcraft confirms: Debian is dying
One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered Debian community when IDC confirmed that Debian market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all servers> Coming on the heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states that Debian has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. Debian is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last [samag.com] in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.
You don't need to be a Kreskin [amdest.com] to predict Debian's future. The hand writing is on the wall: Debian faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for Debian because Debian is dying. Things are looking very bad for Debian. As many of us are already aware, Debian continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood. Debian/HURD is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core developers.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
Debian/HURD leader Assclown states that there are 7000 users of Debian/HURD. How many users of Debian/SPARC are there? Let's see. The number of Debian/HURD versus Debian/SPARC posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 Debian/SPARC users. Debian/m68k posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of Debian/SPARC posts. Therefore there are about 700 users of Debian/m68k. A recent article put Debian/i386 at about 80 percent of the Debian market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 Debian/i386 users. This is consistent with the number of Debian/i386 Usenet posts.
Due to the troubles of Walnut Creek, abysmal sales and so on, Debian/i386 went out of business and was taken over by who Progeny sell another troubled OS. Now Progeny is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.
All major surveys show that Debian has steadily declined in market share. Debian is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If Debian is to survive at all it will be among OS dilettante dabblers. Debian continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, Debian is dead.
Slashdot Mirror
Despite the typically sensational headline of this article, an Australian ADSL provider, Green Telecommunications (formely Apple Telecommunications...can you guess why they had to change their name?) has recently re-launched an unlimited download ADSL plan. For AUD$160/month, you get unlimited 512/128k ADSL access. Not all Australian internet experiences are as backward as Slashdot would have you believe...try finding an affordable internet cafe in any major US city compared to the choices you have in Sydney...it's like zapping back 10,000 years when you get off the plane in LAX or SFO.
Green Telecommunications
Sound card detection and setup happens invisibly and automatically on several other distributions. Why is this article worth mentioning? What would actually be newsworthy would be some Debian people swallowing their pride and incorporating some of the excellent automatic hardware detection, setup and installation routines that the other distro developers have produced. That's what free and open software is all about, right?
...and perhaps the most dated picture of DNA
Huh? Unless something changed recently, all the details illustrated in the DNA diagram are still as valid now as they were in the 70s. Is the story submitter upset because the double helix isn't animated, spinning slowly around, backlit by an offscreen purple fluorescent light source with meaningless reams of genetic code flashing past in the background like in a million bad sci-fi movies?
You'll still find a very similar style of diagram in any molecular biology textbook.
If it's so great, why does SAP normally sit atop a different database, like Oracle or DB2?
In short, what you do own is the mass of carbon, silicone, and assorted metals,
whoa buddy...i'd like to take a look at your DVD collection! I wanna see the behind the scenes special for 'Double-D Delights'.
What about tomorrow? It is true that they likely wouldn't change that easily after investing in one product but for businesses that does not necessarily hold true.
Yep...If someone don't think HP/Compaq would be willing to throw away a few person-years of work, maybe they're not thinking hard enough about it.
- Alpha: GONE
- Tru64: GONE
- PA-RISC: GONE
- HP's entire notebook range: GONE
I think HP would spend about as much time agonizing over whether to ditch Debian or not as Carly Fiorina would spend trying to decide on whether to drive the Porsche or the Ferrari to work on any given day. HP/Compaq have killed projects immeasurably larger than their Debian support project, multiple times in the past. Debian could be gone in a heartbeat.
I use debian extensivly, mainly because its a no frills linux distro
It certainly is. It doesn't even seem to include an ispell or aspell package.
i've got 50 karma anyway. i want to draw out a response from the workstation zealots. but thanks for your useful input all the same.
I know that a lot of people who use traditional Unix workstations like SGIs, Suns and Alphas have always looked down on PC-based systems, even when in recent times the straight-out benchmark speed of PC-based CPUs has roughly equalled or surpassed their 'workstation' counterparts (eg: Athlon XP 2100+ base SpecInt: 720, Sun Blade 1000 900MHz Cu base SpecInt: 470. Athlon base SpecFP: 613, Sun base SpecFP: 629)
The normal response is "a PC might have a fast CPU, but it's connected to slow RAM, slow buses and a slow architecture". Now we have something like the nForce2, which has a dual channel DDR400 memory controller, HyperTransport linking the two components of the chipset, AGP 8x port to a graphics board of your choice, and with an Athlon XP, a 266MHz interface to the CPU. How does a PC-based system stack up against a modern traditional Unix-type workstation like a Sun Blade or SGI Fuel? Is there still some major architectural difference in the design of those systems that still makes them superior to a modern PC design like the nForce2? Assume that all storage is equal, eg: SCSI, to get past IDE vs. SCSI arguments, and you're not using the built in GeForce4 MX core available in the higher-end nForce2 northbridge.
I don't have a link to PubMed or anything handy, but I thought the aluminium connection has been discarded. The story I heard was that the fixing solution that the original researchers used for preparing tissue sections for microscopy was contaminated with aluminium. Hence a noticeable concentration of aluminium was detected in the protein plaques on the microscope slide.
Like I said...I don't have a link to back this up with at the moment...I'll take a look around.
I know it's possible to upgrade Debian 2.2 to just about anything, but the argument that keeps being presented by Debian supporters is "Sure, Debian 2.2 is old, but it's heavily tested, and stable as hell". Fair enough. But when you start upgrading core components like the kernel, you aren't running that "heavily tested stable as hell" distribution any more. You're running something of your own invention, or something which hasn't been subjected to anywhere near the same level of testing and abuse.
It's either one or the other: You're stable but 3 years out of date, or you're up to date, but you're in the same boat as all the other distributions with regard to the amount of testing done...except that you've had to do all the hard work of upgrading, patching, etc etc yourself.
Tell me exactly what you would need for a home or semi-pro server that's not in Debian Stable?
Journalling filesystems. I've got 120GB of crap on my home system, and there's not a fucking chance that I (or anyone else) should have to sit through ext2fs crawling through a filesystem that big because someone accidently pulled out the wrong power plug or there was a brownout.
People keep saying that Debian stable is perfect for servers. How can it be?!?! It's running from a 2.2 series kernel, so unless you're going to start patching like a quiltmaker on amphetamines (thus defeating the purpose of all that wonderful stability testing), you're not going to have journalling filesystems, large files over 2GB, decent SMP support, or drivers for any new gigabit ethernet, SCSI, RAID or SAN adapter card released in the last 3 years.
What sort of servers exactly is Debian stable suitable for? The only thing I can think of is small uniprocessor PC systems without any significant amount of attached storage, ie: a pissant little firewall or router. And there are better distros than Debian for those purposes.
Bah, I meant 'accent', not 'accept'. Now I'm just as bad as Milton.
Slightly offtopic, but our Indian DB2 administrator speaks with an accept which has an uncanny resemblance to the mumbling, rambling style of Milton (ie: the Swingline stapler guy). I have visited his desk many times, but have never noticed a red Swingline stapler anywhere. This new product may give him all he needs to complete his full transition to Milton (except that he's Indian, doesn't wear glasses, and doesn't have any facial hair).
case in Australia where a consultant used his inside knowledge of a local sewage treatment system to dump raw sewage, hoping for a contract to solve the problem he created.
I believe the name of the contractor in this case was John W Howard. The name of the company was the Federal Commonwealth of Australia. The incident was the 2001 Federal Election. And no, the sewage still hasn't been cleaned up...we're still waiting
I really doubt we will ever again see software that universally makes almost everyone want to continually upgrade
;-)
I believe it's called Doom III
I wonder if this will affect any enthusiasm or special testing/optimisation that RedHat might have planned for the AMD side of the 64-bit fence. I can't imagine Intel not putting just a little bit of pressure on RedHat to be more forceful in their...patriotism.
And if you have your laptop then you have access to the material electorniclly. SO whats the point?
I prefer reading things from crisp, clear print-on-paper, nicely bound up into a compact package with a durable cover that's always available and ready to go (ie: a book) about 1000 times more than I prefer reading text on a screen that gets blinded out by the sun, covered in dust, fingerprints, gets hot after running for a few minutes, needs to be recharged every 3 hours, costs $2500, and shatters into 500 pieces when you drop your bag getting off the train.
Books are going to be around for a long time.
Even prior to the GeForce 440 making it into Dell laptops, they had some pretty decent 3D-capable systems. I have an Inspiron 4100 (1GHz PIII, 32MB GeForce2 GO), and I play Jedi Knight II, Medal of Honor and RTCW all at 1024x768 without any slowdown at all. The sound isn't too bad either (provided you use headphones or good external speakers...the inbuilt ones are *terrible*).
It's a good time to be a techie/bio nerd indeed. ;-)
Indeed. There's an IBM p690 Regatta turning up here in a few weeks, but unfortunately we're only setting it up for a customer and then it'll be on it's way again. Hopefully there will be some time to take some photos of the biologists loading cases of beer in and out of the system unit...it's too much of a fridge-like opportunity to pass up.
(Even so, I've seen one of our biologists propose a computation that would take 6 months on 32 CPUs...)
;-)
Which is why all the high-end computer hardware manufacturers are talking about bioinformatics being the industry that drives their revenues for the next few years
the biologists learn computer skills and the computational researchers learn biology
I'm probably biased, since I'm a biologist who learned computers (or really a geek who's been playing with computers since the Apple II and the C64 and just happened to get a degree in biochemistry along the way), but I would say that it's the IT guys who have the hardest time adopting the biological point of view, rather than the other way around. We seem to end up with a lot of software that solves a non-existent biological problem, but does a great job of demonstrating some great algorithm that gets the computer scientists all boned up. I live in hope...
Bioinformatics sounds hot and it's certainly getting the hell hyped out of it at the moment, but from first hand experience, it can get pretty frustrating at times. What they don't mention in any of the glowing reports on the industry is the frequent brain explosions than can be caused by putting biologists and computer scientists in the same room for prolonged periods of time. Maybe it's just where I work and everyone's an asshole (or I'm an asshole), but trying to get the researchers and the computer guys to agree on anything is a fucking nightmare.
I guess this is the same in any branch of IT (instead of biologists and programmers each trying to clobber each other into submission, it's your banker or manufacturing customer)...and I guess I'm especially sensitive to it at the moment. Oh well...something for newbies into the field to think about.
Well commented code should definitely contain a liberal smattering of four-letter expletives, eg:
// no fucking idea how this works
obj.doMagic();
or...
//bet those fucking lazy cunts in the QA team don't pick this up
fileSystem.delete();
When your code is released as open source and becomes famous, people can amuse themselves by searching through the source code to find all the hidden expletives, sort of like easter eggs. If you work for a commercial organisation, you can sit back and enjoy the panic as the QA and release teams sweat it out trying to track down every last filthy utterance before shipping to a fucker...errr..customer.
What's the point of having 50 karma if you can't burn it up with a Debian is dying post:
It is official; Netcraft confirms: Debian is dying
One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered Debian community when IDC confirmed that Debian market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all servers> Coming on the heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states that Debian has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. Debian is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last [samag.com] in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.
You don't need to be a Kreskin [amdest.com] to predict Debian's future. The hand writing is on the wall: Debian faces a bleak
future. In fact there won't be any future at all for Debian because Debian is dying. Things are looking very bad for Debian. As many of us are already aware, Debian continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood. Debian/HURD is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core developers.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
Debian/HURD leader Assclown states that there are 7000 users of Debian/HURD. How many users of Debian/SPARC are there? Let's see. The number of Debian/HURD versus Debian/SPARC posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 Debian/SPARC users. Debian/m68k posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of Debian/SPARC posts. Therefore there are about 700 users of Debian/m68k. A recent article put Debian/i386 at about 80 percent of the Debian market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 Debian/i386 users. This is consistent with the number of Debian/i386 Usenet posts.
Due to the troubles of Walnut Creek, abysmal sales and so on, Debian/i386 went out of business and was taken over by who Progeny sell another troubled OS. Now Progeny is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.
All major surveys show that Debian has steadily declined in market share. Debian is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If Debian is to survive at all it will be among OS dilettante dabblers. Debian continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, Debian is dead.
Fact: Debian is dying