I agree - the US robots were _useless_ with the exception of Frenzy (the yellow one with a sledgehammer) which was an excellent destruction machine, and made it to the final. The others were far too crude and failed very quickly.
After seeing battlebots recently, I'm glad we have robot wars. 'bots has a stupid arena, no space to fight without the triggerhappy arena people raising some spikes or a saw, they call matches to and end too soon (we _want_ to see the defeated bot scattered across the arena;-) ), each airing is far too short (25 minutes???), and those commentators... I though Craig Charles was grating, but those two fuckwits are actually more pointlessly annoying than the shouty wrestling types!
NTL in the UK (cablemodems) seem a bit more reasonable about this - their TOS simply states no web or ftp servers. Theres of course a clause saying they may add services to the list;-) Essentially they just want people to be responsible with the upstream that is there.
Of course, they're doing other good things too. Not only do they undercut the ADSL travesty we have in the UK, their web page explicity states that you can use any type of computer with an ethernet connector and DHCP. More recently, in our area cablemodem sales are on hold - because they know they cant sell any more and maintain the service. Sales should resume in a few months when the network is upgraded - why can't other companies be this sensible? (BT happily took more and more subscribers until the service became totally unusable every single weekend).
I'm just waiting for the catch to appear - as yet, it hasn't;-)
Actually on a scale of Europe, BT is by _far_ the most expensive, except for I _think_ Germany. They had a graph on BBC news last time Oftel started investigations, and the BT call charge bar was towering above most European countries.
BT also have lovely practises such as selling your ISDN line to someone else if they run out and you aren't using it. They won't mention this, keep charging you, then claim it was just disconnected and will be reconnected in a few days - while they find some other poor company to steal from.
Then theres ADSL. Not only is it expensive for an unroutable NAT ip address ($75 per month), but you have to use a USB ADSL box, or pay business rates if you want an ethernet one. Of course this mor or less dooms you to windows.
And all this before we even look at installation charges, DISCONNECTION charges, high monthly line rental in addition to costly local and even more costly national calls, and the fact that BT are evil anyway (remember the Hyperlinks patent?)
Hey - thats what happens if you privatise an originally state owned utility... It turns them directly into a monopoly that got a free infrastructure.
You are on the way to debt.
You have no chance to afford.
Seriously - is pewter really this expensive these days? I could get a _very_ detailed model car in pewter for a lot less than 70 dollars in the town centre here. Then again - it could give at least 70 dollarsworth of enjoyment when used as a weighty clue brick.
He reminds me of the infamous Witchfinder General (Matthew Hopkins) who was at large in England in the 17th century.
Same sort of system, you were guilty as charged either way, he was above the law, and made quite a bit of money from it.
I'm not saying pirates are innocent - what I'm primarily saying is that Hopkins was notoriously cruel and vindictive, delighting in his work and the suffering he caused - sound familiar? I'm sure if it's legal to have these pirates burned at the stake, Dave Powell will find a way.
You could do a lot worse than looking at www.exim.org. Not only does it work as a drop-in sendmail replacement, but the config files are in plain english (more or less), it's very flexible, very fast, and very robust too. Of course, what will help you is that it knows all about LDAP. (and mysql, postgresql, oracle, nis, etc)
Well in that case Microsoft should probably start cracking down on all those pesky applications with 'word' in the title, or company names with 'Micro' or 'soft' in them, etc. IMHO - SSH is a fairly obvious product name, and openssh is a fairly far enough derivative of it. Maybe they have a lot of customers who can't see the lines *shrug*.
I did mean to say trademark, but 'patent' just rolled off my tongue - you get to use it a lot these days when discussing companies and their "technologies".
I'd be really surprised if you can actually trademark a command name - and worried. Hopefully that one will never have a legal precedent set. I can't think of any clashes off the top of my head - but surely it would be similar to file extensions that clash? There's a massive list of extension types floating about somewhere, and there are several clashes.
The computer industry is getting more and more depressing with each passing day. Honestly, since the command name will probably be the same regardless of the name the project uses (lets see them try to patent command names..), what can they possibly hope to gain from this aside from contempt for their litigious asses?
I'll be switching all my ssh servers and clients to OpenSSH immediately.
This also applies to machines with intermittent low bandwidth connections (56k modems). These big companies are really pushing new systems and ways of distribution that assume cheap broadband for all is a reality, when it isn't, and won't be for a very, very long time. I'm in one of the better broadband connected areas of the UK, and some friends I know who live about 100 yards away cannot get it, while I can. Many countries aren't going to have broadband at all.
I can see it now: "sorry , you can't run the new version of Excel because you don't have cheap broadband access"
Does that mean if I live in the UK I'll be forced at gunpoint/by lawyers to use Red$hat? Urgh!;-)
Should I mention at this point that many Germans have better English than a lot of Americans?
Seriously - I doubt that this will have any effect on internationalisation in terms of English availability in distros, because so many non-English speaking countries speak it very well as a second language.
You play quicktime movies? Do you mean generic crappy old quicktime files, or the ones that it seems all game and movie companies provide, which use the Sorenson video codec, which is only built into Apples Quicktime player (I know this, because I mailed Sorenson to request that they kindly opensource their codec - they told me to use a license OS - lovely.)
Look closely. Note CGI processes. When a CGI process that takes a minute to run chews up an entire PII Xeon, I'd call that CPU hungry. Some of the more bugged user CGI attempts would occasionally stick in a loop at 99% CPU. I'd call that hungry too. Two NICs were required simply because the first initial one had started to constantly collide, so I enabled the second and bound apache and exim to different interfaces. Problem solved.
I'd suggest you try working with busy production servers before passing judgement. Or, I'd wager, working at all.
Probably a bit redundant now, maybe I'll be reiterating what everyone else has said - but here are my experiences with linux and freebsd as server operating systems.
At one job I had, we had 36 linux boxes, all loaded with Redhat 6.2. They were used for fairly hefty DNA sequencing, replacing a much smaller set of dual processor linux machines, which got binned because they kept crashing continually (certainly down to earlier 2.2.x SMP - my home SMP machine has been fine ever since I put 2.4.0-testX on it). These linux boxes would _consistently_ fall over if they went far enough into swap (512mb in each one), or just decided to be upset about life for no apparent reason. There was never a time at which all of them were working, the networking would glitch from time to time, and I absolutely hated being involved with them. They were _very_ heavily hit though.
At this point, after such a damning description, I should probably point out that I love Linux, I've been using it at home now since about '94 - with very few problems at all, bar a few buggy kernel versions and the usual disarray when libc changes;-)
Very shortly after being involved with the linux machines, I changed job - and ended up working at a place with a big freeBSD machine. 4 CPU, 2GB ram, two raid shelves. The raiding system used was software, as at the time of installation a driver for freebsd to talk to the raid cards didn't exist (it does now) - spread across 18 disks, 9 per shelf. The system in question was hosting an entire Virtual ISP. Over 100,000 active email users, each with webspace ability (though in practise I think only about 40,000 had done anything with it), and it handled the DNS for several hundred domains. The services were tuned to 150 exim processes, 150 apache daemons, a mysql server (ick - spit), as many ftp daemons as required, and of course the DNS server. It was using two network cards because it was so busy the initial first one (100mbit) had flooded. Despite the massive IO load the machine was seeing (remember the freebsd kernel was handling a raid 10 setup - thats a mirrored pair of stripes for those who haven't come across the higher numbers) from all the apache/exim servers hitting the disks, despite the number of mails it was processing at times, and despite the fact that many of the web users had hungry CGI processes, the machine was totally _solid_, and whats more - was under perfomance capacity by quite a margin.
That's why I would use FreeBSD for a server, every single time (or OpenBSD for things like pure DNS servers - also extremely reliable). These are not comparable tasks for the servers to perform - but they _were_ servers.
Im sure other people might have reversed stories of Linux triumphing, but thats my personal experience.
I'll leave you with one final nugget of personal experience. Around the time of Suse 6.0, can't remember which linux kernel that would be, I owned a cyrix 300 with linux on it, an ancient 486 dx2-66, a 33mhz HP9000 model 400 of some description, and a 33mhz SGI Indigo. The linux machine was the only with a 100mbit NIC in it, and I gave them all turns at being an NFS server for another machine I was setting up. Can you guess which was the slowest for NFS?
Sorry Linux, I _love_ you as a desktop OS, but there's an awful lot of catching up still to be done in the server area, where *BSD really rules like a king.
I've seen babies taking their first steps that were more stable. Personal experience, in the workplace, suggests that Windows 2000 is far less stable, and much much harder to integrate into a mixed system network than NT4 was.
The poor Windows guys at work were spending literally days setting these servers up, then having to pull down existing pieces of infrastructure and rebuild them with Win2000 to get it to talk to them at all. Then after all this work, they'd generally fuck up the filesystem in some way and have to be rebuilt again.
I wouldn't take that kind of unreliability from anything else - so why a "server" operating system?
I was meaning the whole package - the Interactive Desktop Applications (ie toolchest/etc) aren't available yet:
Please note that the previously scheduled release (01/01/2001) needed the ViewKit Runtime library to run....
So I've decided to re-write an optimized version of toolchest w/o the ViewKit lib which will be available by end of this week.
I'm very sorry about the delay, but I can't release it like this... The toolchest application must be very small, fast and only based on pure Xlib and Xm
Well - there's an authors note on the IMD in his download section, and no files available. Pity - I had an SGI for a while and quite liked their desktop look, but I don't really like the overheads of running Enlightenment.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree - the US robots were _useless_ with the exception of Frenzy (the yellow one with a sledgehammer) which was an excellent destruction machine, and made it to the final. The others were far too crude and failed very quickly.
;-) ), each airing is far too short (25 minutes???), and those commentators... I though Craig Charles was grating, but those two fuckwits are actually more pointlessly annoying than the shouty wrestling types!
After seeing battlebots recently, I'm glad we have robot wars. 'bots has a stupid arena, no space to fight without the triggerhappy arena people raising some spikes or a saw, they call matches to and end too soon (we _want_ to see the defeated bot scattered across the arena
--
NTL in the UK (cablemodems) seem a bit more reasonable about this - their TOS simply states no web or ftp servers. Theres of course a clause saying they may add services to the list ;-) Essentially they just want people to be responsible with the upstream that is there.
;-)
Of course, they're doing other good things too. Not only do they undercut the ADSL travesty we have in the UK, their web page explicity states that you can use any type of computer with an ethernet connector and DHCP. More recently, in our area cablemodem sales are on hold - because they know they cant sell any more and maintain the service. Sales should resume in a few months when the network is upgraded - why can't other companies be this sensible? (BT happily took more and more subscribers until the service became totally unusable every single weekend).
I'm just waiting for the catch to appear - as yet, it hasn't
--
Actually on a scale of Europe, BT is by _far_ the most expensive, except for I _think_ Germany. They had a graph on BBC news last time Oftel started investigations, and the BT call charge bar was towering above most European countries.
BT also have lovely practises such as selling your ISDN line to someone else if they run out and you aren't using it. They won't mention this, keep charging you, then claim it was just disconnected and will be reconnected in a few days - while they find some other poor company to steal from.
Then theres ADSL. Not only is it expensive for an unroutable NAT ip address ($75 per month), but you have to use a USB ADSL box, or pay business rates if you want an ethernet one. Of course this mor or less dooms you to windows.
And all this before we even look at installation charges, DISCONNECTION charges, high monthly line rental in addition to costly local and even more costly national calls, and the fact that BT are evil anyway (remember the Hyperlinks patent?)
Hey - thats what happens if you privatise an originally state owned utility... It turns them directly into a monopoly that got a free infrastructure.
--
You are on the way to debt.
You have no chance to afford.
Seriously - is pewter really this expensive these days? I could get a _very_ detailed model car in pewter for a lot less than 70 dollars in the town centre here. Then again - it could give at least 70 dollarsworth of enjoyment when used as a weighty clue brick.
--
Duh - silly me.
I forgot to add the smiley so that idiots would realise it was a joke.
--
I've got a (genuine UK market) Sony TV that copes with PAL and NTSC - specifically because I have a Japanese imported Saturn ;-)
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It was all a hoax organised by NASA!
--
He reminds me of the infamous Witchfinder General (Matthew Hopkins) who was at large in England in the 17th century.
Same sort of system, you were guilty as charged either way, he was above the law, and made quite a bit of money from it.
I'm not saying pirates are innocent - what I'm primarily saying is that Hopkins was notoriously cruel and vindictive, delighting in his work and the suffering he caused - sound familiar? I'm sure if it's legal to have these pirates burned at the stake, Dave Powell will find a way.
What a disgusting person.
--
*LOL*
;-)
I wish I hadn't wasted all my moderator points on genuine moderation
--
The thing I'm not quite sure about is why it's appeared again now?
;-)
I remember laughing _loudly_ when I first saw the intro, but that was many years ago when Zero Wing got released.
Has it just recently been romdumped or something?
--
I think it's very dependant on your library versions somewhere along the line - mine crashes constantly, usually when closing a window.
It's a very promising project though, I'd like a stable gtk widget set browser - maybe it'll be happier if I build it from source?
--
You could do a lot worse than looking at www.exim.org. Not only does it work as a drop-in sendmail replacement, but the config files are in plain english (more or less), it's very flexible, very fast, and very robust too. Of course, what will help you is that it knows all about LDAP. (and mysql, postgresql, oracle, nis, etc)
--
Well in that case Microsoft should probably start cracking down on all those pesky applications with 'word' in the title, or company names with 'Micro' or 'soft' in them, etc. IMHO - SSH is a fairly obvious product name, and openssh is a fairly far enough derivative of it. Maybe they have a lot of customers who can't see the lines *shrug*.
--
I think you'd more likely just annoy people ;-)
I did mean to say trademark, but 'patent' just rolled off my tongue - you get to use it a lot these days when discussing companies and their "technologies".
I'd be really surprised if you can actually trademark a command name - and worried. Hopefully that one will never have a legal precedent set. I can't think of any clashes off the top of my head - but surely it would be similar to file extensions that clash? There's a massive list of extension types floating about somewhere, and there are several clashes.
--
The computer industry is getting more and more depressing with each passing day. Honestly, since the command name will probably be the same regardless of the name the project uses (lets see them try to patent command names..), what can they possibly hope to gain from this aside from contempt for their litigious asses?
I'll be switching all my ssh servers and clients to OpenSSH immediately.
--
This also applies to machines with intermittent low bandwidth connections (56k modems). These big companies are really pushing new systems and ways of distribution that assume cheap broadband for all is a reality, when it isn't, and won't be for a very, very long time. I'm in one of the better broadband connected areas of the UK, and some friends I know who live about 100 yards away cannot get it, while I can. Many countries aren't going to have broadband at all.
I can see it now: "sorry , you can't run the new version of Excel because you don't have cheap broadband access"
--
And of course the wonderful '640K should be enough for anybody', which becomes increasingly amusing as Windows memory footprint blossoms.
--
Does that mean if I live in the UK I'll be forced at gunpoint/by lawyers to use Red$hat? Urgh! ;-)
Should I mention at this point that many Germans have better English than a lot of Americans?
Seriously - I doubt that this will have any effect on internationalisation in terms of English availability in distros, because so many non-English speaking countries speak it very well as a second language.
james
(who must try Turbolinux at some point)
--
You play quicktime movies? Do you mean generic crappy old quicktime files, or the ones that it seems all game and movie companies provide, which use the Sorenson video codec, which is only built into Apples Quicktime player (I know this, because I mailed Sorenson to request that they kindly opensource their codec - they told me to use a license OS - lovely.)
The developers where I'm working are using Java precisely because it is cross platform, so I'm not so sure that Sun got it wrong.
--
Look closely. Note CGI processes. When a CGI process that takes a minute to run chews up an entire PII Xeon, I'd call that CPU hungry. Some of the more bugged user CGI attempts would occasionally stick in a loop at 99% CPU. I'd call that hungry too. Two NICs were required simply because the first initial one had started to constantly collide, so I enabled the second and bound apache and exim to different interfaces. Problem solved.
I'd suggest you try working with busy production servers before passing judgement. Or, I'd wager, working at all.
Probably a bit redundant now, maybe I'll be reiterating what everyone else has said - but here are my experiences with linux and freebsd as server operating systems.
;-)
At one job I had, we had 36 linux boxes, all loaded with Redhat 6.2. They were used for fairly hefty DNA sequencing, replacing a much smaller set of dual processor linux machines, which got binned because they kept crashing continually (certainly down to earlier 2.2.x SMP - my home SMP machine has been fine ever since I put 2.4.0-testX on it). These linux boxes would _consistently_ fall over if they went far enough into swap (512mb in each one), or just decided to be upset about life for no apparent reason. There was never a time at which all of them were working, the networking would glitch from time to time, and I absolutely hated being involved with them. They were _very_ heavily hit though.
At this point, after such a damning description, I should probably point out that I love Linux, I've been using it at home now since about '94 - with very few problems at all, bar a few buggy kernel versions and the usual disarray when libc changes
Very shortly after being involved with the linux machines, I changed job - and ended up working at a place with a big freeBSD machine. 4 CPU, 2GB ram, two raid shelves. The raiding system used was software, as at the time of installation a driver for freebsd to talk to the raid cards didn't exist (it does now) - spread across 18 disks, 9 per shelf. The system in question was hosting an entire Virtual ISP. Over 100,000 active email users, each with webspace ability (though in practise I think only about 40,000 had done anything with it), and it handled the DNS for several hundred domains. The services were tuned to 150 exim processes, 150 apache daemons, a mysql server (ick - spit), as many ftp daemons as required, and of course the DNS server. It was using two network cards because it was so busy the initial first one (100mbit) had flooded. Despite the massive IO load the machine was seeing (remember the freebsd kernel was handling a raid 10 setup - thats a mirrored pair of stripes for those who haven't come across the higher numbers) from all the apache/exim servers hitting the disks, despite the number of mails it was processing at times, and despite the fact that many of the web users had hungry CGI processes, the machine was totally _solid_, and whats more - was under perfomance capacity by quite a margin.
That's why I would use FreeBSD for a server, every single time (or OpenBSD for things like pure DNS servers - also extremely reliable). These are not comparable tasks for the servers to perform - but they _were_ servers.
Im sure other people might have reversed stories of Linux triumphing, but thats my personal experience.
I'll leave you with one final nugget of personal experience. Around the time of Suse 6.0, can't remember which linux kernel that would be, I owned a cyrix 300 with linux on it, an ancient 486 dx2-66, a 33mhz HP9000 model 400 of some description, and a 33mhz SGI Indigo. The linux machine was the only with a 100mbit NIC in it, and I gave them all turns at being an NFS server for another machine I was setting up. Can you guess which was the slowest for NFS?
Sorry Linux, I _love_ you as a desktop OS, but there's an awful lot of catching up still to be done in the server area, where *BSD really rules like a king.
All IMHO!
james
I've seen babies taking their first steps that were more stable. Personal experience, in the workplace, suggests that Windows 2000 is far less stable, and much much harder to integrate into a mixed system network than NT4 was.
The poor Windows guys at work were spending literally days setting these servers up, then having to pull down existing pieces of infrastructure and rebuild them with Win2000 to get it to talk to them at all. Then after all this work, they'd generally fuck up the filesystem in some way and have to be rebuilt again.
I wouldn't take that kind of unreliability from anything else - so why a "server" operating system?
I was meaning the whole package - the Interactive Desktop Applications (ie toolchest/etc) aren't available yet:
Please note that the previously scheduled release (01/01/2001) needed the ViewKit Runtime library to run.... So I've decided to re-write an optimized version of toolchest w/o the ViewKit lib which will be available by end of this week. I'm very sorry about the delay, but I can't release it like this... The toolchest application must be very small, fast and only based on pure Xlib and Xm
Well - there's an authors note on the IMD in his download section, and no files available. Pity - I had an SGI for a while and quite liked their desktop look, but I don't really like the overheads of running Enlightenment.