The perception of the performance of any GUI depends on the *latency* of the GUI. If you compare X with RDP, X has a significantly better latency response than RDP does so when there is sufficient bandwidth it is a faster option than RDP.
The bandwidth required to run X is cheap. It was designed for shared 10Mbps local area networks and on today's 100mbps switched networks it absolutely flies. I run several hundred engineers using full screen Gnome (yes, that was a mistake) X sessions on a couple of login servers and the burst rate doesn't flatten the interfaces even when they log in. It peaks at around 4Mbps for a few seconds during login and then dies off to bugger all. It doesn't get anywhere near 10mbps, never mind 100mbps or 1000mpbs.
The "run it over a modem" set is a very limited subset of the population who use remote GUIs. The vast majority of people who use X and RDP, do so over a local area network. So the statement that X must be replaced because it doesn't run on a 300 baud modem (or whatever) is bullshit. Especially when there are protocol compressors which you can plug into the architecture to improve low bandwidth performance (at the expense of interactive latency BTW).
Have you compared RDP with X on a LAN? X wins, no questions about it (except Gnome). MS have sacrificed interactive performance for the majority of remote display users on a LAN in order to increase performance for the minority who use dialup.
BTW, X apps run fine over DSL. I do it all the time. If however you want to bitch about how Gnome apps run over DSL, I'll join with you cos Gnome really does suck when compared to KDE, CDE, GnuStep etc.
Most X performance is about latency rather than bandwidth. If you're on a LAN, straight X is a much nicer proposition than the compressed protocols because the latency is lower, imperceptible even.
So, if you're running it over a high latency link like ADSL or god forbid a modem then go for it with the protcol compressors.
KDE runs fine over a LAN. It's just like it's local, Gnome is noticably slower. Throw in a couple of router hops or wireless and KDE still responds as if it's local, Gnome *doesn't*.
Oh, the other thing you can do is drop the number of colours in your X servers. Run the majority of them at 8bpp, 16bpp only for people who insist they need it.
"Fire suppression systems such as those that use Halon (which was outlawed in the '90s due to its ozone-destroying side-effects) put out fires by displacing oxygen with some other gas."
Nope. Halon systems work by absorbing free radicals in the fire. It literally interferes with the chemical processes required to sustain burning. The same reason they are so dangerous to the ozone layer. It's also the reason the newer gas based fire suppressants aren't nearly as effective.
Free radicals are also the reason pre-burned wood can be restarted burning again so easily, and why burned toast is more likely to give you bowel cancer than lightly tanned toast.
It's $1/CPU hour. If your CPU was running at 100% for an hour you'd get $1/hr. For server based operation like an email relay, the CPU will sit almost completely idle waiting on the network and waiting on the disk. So it's going to take a lot longer than an hour to get your $1.
Alternatively. Get your shitest old 386 and shitest pre-IDE hard disks and watch the CPU spend ages sucking data from here and there.
It's not the the result which matters in America
on
AmEx vs. rec.humor.funny
·
· Score: 5, Informative
It's the cost of the process itself. For individuals It doesn't really matter whether you'll win or not. The process itself is so long, slow and expensive that it'll bankrupt you.
In order to keep systems secure, a number of "distasteful" actions have to be performed regularly, these actions can be almost completely automated, but they are "distasteful" to the users.
1: Regular down time to apply patches. 2: Secure passwords 3: A secure environment
Regular downtime can be almost impossible to get permision for, and the bigger the system the harder it gets. The owners of the systems simply don't see the need and so don't allow it, until it's too late.
Secure passwords are a pain in the arse to users and are usually incompatible across applications and systems due to the differing rules. People then write them down and use simple to remember and crack passwords, replace O with 0, l with 1, E with 3 etc.
Secure environments like Kerberos require buy in from all of the little fiefdoms who want their own IT department. That means giving up control. It also means changing working practices quite significantly.
Poor IT security is usually a sign of politics and bad management within an organisation rather than laziness.
Any reasonable software will perform a seek to the block the files you need are on, taking minutes. Shit software will scan the cartridge, taking hours.
It has to be said that DLT is *old* and usually not up to the job of serious backups given the size of hard disk drives around now.
If you're backing systems up, tape begins making economic sense when your backups start getting past 100Gb or so. Below that level you might as well use removable hard disks + hotplug bay.
4 factors which are statistically significant predictors of your chance of being involved in a road accident.
The ones which you can affect most are milage and obervational errors. Reduce your milage. Get training, if you have had training, get advanced training.
Starts off slow, accelerates due to the feedback loop, become an exponential change. Then it'll reach a mid point and tail off to a plateau. It isn't clear exactly how long it'll take, the rate of change or the carrying capacity but barring legislation making Linux illegal, it's going to happen.
e.g. http://marine.geol.sc.edu/BIOL/Courses/BIO L301/Wet hey/Outline09.html
It's fairly clear there will be several years of "Linux on the desktop".
I can just see the rollouts now. Linux on every local desktop, local passwd, group, apps, complexity rising exponentially, security, performance and reliability decreasing in response.
While Windows can be an insecure mess, it's nothing compared to just how messy Unix systems can become.
With Unix, the least efficient use of the hardware is to put a single instance of many different applications on to lots of different machines.
Say a Unix app consumes 20Mb of RAM, 80% -> 90% of that memory is shareable; shared libraries, program text and the like. So *conservatively* 2 people can run the application on a machine and it only takes 24Mb of RAM, not 40Mb of RAM, 3 people it uses 28Mb, not 60Mb and so on. On top of this, the application is already loaded, it doesn't have to be read from disk again each time it's started. The filesystem buffers are already pre-loaded, the CPU caches have a significantly better hit rate than if there are a dozen different apps running.
Unix(and Linux) is *not* Windows, there's an entirely different system architecture which should really be considered before just wiping Windows on each desktop and replacing it with Linux.
Of course there's a great opportunity for people who know.
They are small, unobtrusive and the chance of being caught is infinitesimally small.
Someone's pissing you off? Click it on and their signal vanishes. Sure they try to re-dial for 2 mins but as soon as it's apparent that their mobile just isn't working they stop.
If the janitor[1] comes up to you and says "The front door isn't secure, we need to put a lock on it. He gets ignored. He's only a janitor, gets paid peanuts, what could he possibly know.
If he puts on a suit and becomes a $200/hour security consultant and charges $15,000 for a security audit coming to the conclusion that, damn those doors should really have locks on them, he will be listened to. That advice is worth $15,000 after all... Isn't it...
[1] And yes, this *is* how systems administrators are viewed by man
To interview the people who are now doing the jobs. How much are they really paid, what are the conditions of employment, how is their economy? etc etc.
Slashdot Mirror
Mobius tape. A whole 85kb. Which was huge at the time. Tasword could only handle about 10k-20k at a time.
No. Unless something is explicitly illegal, it's legal.
They could try to prosecute all they like. Unless you are cultivating a plant, you haven't broken the law.
So you can stick it on your Linux/ Solaris/ HP-UX/ AIX/ *BSD system.
For those who write OS X software, you are also writing for GNUStep.
In the UK it isn't illegal to own, buy or import cannabis seeds.
It's illegal to germninate the seeds and grow or tend the plants though.
The perception of the performance of any GUI depends on the *latency* of the GUI. If you compare X with RDP, X has a significantly better latency response than RDP does so when there is sufficient bandwidth it is a faster option than RDP.
The bandwidth required to run X is cheap. It was designed for shared 10Mbps local area networks and on today's 100mbps switched networks it absolutely flies. I run several hundred engineers using full screen Gnome (yes, that was a mistake) X sessions on a couple of login servers and the burst rate doesn't flatten the interfaces even when they log in. It peaks at around 4Mbps for a few seconds during login and then dies off to bugger all. It doesn't get anywhere near 10mbps, never mind 100mbps or 1000mpbs.
The "run it over a modem" set is a very limited subset of the population who use remote GUIs. The vast majority of people who use X and RDP, do so over a local area network. So the statement that X must be replaced because it doesn't run on a 300 baud modem (or whatever) is bullshit. Especially when there are protocol compressors which you can plug into the architecture to improve low bandwidth performance (at the expense of interactive latency BTW).
Have you compared RDP with X on a LAN? X wins, no questions about it (except Gnome). MS have sacrificed interactive performance for the majority of remote display users on a LAN in order to increase performance for the minority who use dialup.
BTW, X apps run fine over DSL. I do it all the time. If however you want to bitch about how Gnome apps run over DSL, I'll join with you cos Gnome really does suck when compared to KDE, CDE, GnuStep etc.
Most X performance is about latency rather than bandwidth. If you're on a LAN, straight X is a much nicer proposition than the compressed protocols because the latency is lower, imperceptible even.
So, if you're running it over a high latency link like ADSL or god forbid a modem then go for it with the protcol compressors.
KDE runs fine over a LAN. It's just like it's local, Gnome is noticably slower. Throw in a couple of router hops or wireless and KDE still responds as if it's local, Gnome *doesn't*.
Oh, the other thing you can do is drop the number of colours in your X servers. Run the majority of them at 8bpp, 16bpp only for people who insist they need it.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/1759791
"Fire suppression systems such as those that use Halon (which was outlawed in the '90s due to its ozone-destroying side-effects) put out fires by displacing oxygen with some other gas."
Nope. Halon systems work by absorbing free radicals in the fire. It literally interferes with the chemical processes required to sustain burning. The same reason they are so dangerous to the ozone layer. It's also the reason the newer gas based fire suppressants aren't nearly as effective.
Free radicals are also the reason pre-burned wood can be restarted burning again so easily, and why burned toast is more likely to give you bowel cancer than lightly tanned toast.
It's $1/CPU hour. If your CPU was running at 100% for an hour you'd get $1/hr. For server based operation like an email relay, the CPU will sit almost completely idle waiting on the network and waiting on the disk. So it's going to take a lot longer than an hour to get your $1.
Alternatively. Get your shitest old 386 and shitest pre-IDE hard disks and watch the CPU spend ages sucking data from here and there.
It's the cost of the process itself. For individuals It doesn't really matter whether you'll win or not. The process itself is so long, slow and expensive that it'll bankrupt you.
In order to keep systems secure, a number of "distasteful" actions have to be performed regularly, these actions can be almost completely automated, but they are "distasteful" to the users.
1: Regular down time to apply patches.
2: Secure passwords
3: A secure environment
Regular downtime can be almost impossible to get permision for, and the bigger the system the harder it gets. The owners of the systems simply don't see the need and so don't allow it, until it's too late.
Secure passwords are a pain in the arse to users and are usually incompatible across applications and systems due to the differing rules. People then write them down and use simple to remember and crack passwords, replace O with 0, l with 1, E with 3 etc.
Secure environments like Kerberos require buy in from all of the little fiefdoms who want their own IT department. That means giving up control. It also means changing working practices quite significantly.
Poor IT security is usually a sign of politics and bad management within an organisation rather than laziness.
There's a bunch of others who are quite happy to take your money.
Any reasonable software will perform a seek to the block the files you need are on, taking minutes. Shit software will scan the cartridge, taking hours.
It has to be said that DLT is *old* and usually not up to the job of serious backups given the size of hard disk drives around now.
Well, these days anyway. If you're using a 35-40Gb tape you're using *old* technology.
Current tape drives are:
200Gb (400gb compressed) 35MB/s (70MB/s) LTO 2.
300Gb (900Gb compressed) 40MB/s (120MB/s) IBM 3592.
300gb (600Gb compressed) 36MB/s (72MB/s) SDLT.
500Gb (1.3Tb compressed) 30MB/s (78MB/s) SuperAIT.
If you're backing systems up, tape begins making economic sense when your backups start getting past 100Gb or so. Below that level you might as well use removable hard disks + hotplug bay.
4 factors which are statistically significant predictors of your chance of being involved in a road accident.
The ones which you can affect most are milage and obervational errors. Reduce your milage. Get training, if you have had training, get advanced training.
For anyone interested, GNUStep implements the Cocoa API.
http://www.gnustep.org/
Starts off slow, accelerates due to the feedback loop, become an exponential change. Then it'll reach a mid point and tail off to a plateau. It isn't clear exactly how long it'll take, the rate of change or the carrying capacity but barring legislation making Linux illegal, it's going to happen.
O L301/Wet hey/Outline09.html
e.g.
http://marine.geol.sc.edu/BIOL/Courses/BI
It's fairly clear there will be several years of "Linux on the desktop".
I can just see the rollouts now. Linux on every local desktop, local passwd, group, apps, complexity rising exponentially, security, performance and reliability decreasing in response.
While Windows can be an insecure mess, it's nothing compared to just how messy Unix systems can become.
With Unix, the least efficient use of the hardware is to put a single instance of many different applications on to lots of different machines.
Say a Unix app consumes 20Mb of RAM, 80% -> 90% of that memory is shareable; shared libraries, program text and the like. So *conservatively* 2 people can run the application on a machine and it only takes 24Mb of RAM, not 40Mb of RAM, 3 people it uses 28Mb, not 60Mb and so on. On top of this, the application is already loaded, it doesn't have to be read from disk again each time it's started. The filesystem buffers are already pre-loaded, the CPU caches have a significantly better hit rate than if there are a dozen different apps running.
Unix(and Linux) is *not* Windows, there's an entirely different system architecture which should really be considered before just wiping Windows on each desktop and replacing it with Linux.
Of course there's a great opportunity for people who know.
They are small, unobtrusive and the chance of being caught is infinitesimally small.
Someone's pissing you off? Click it on and their signal vanishes. Sure they try to re-dial for 2 mins but as soon as it's apparent that their mobile just isn't working they stop.
That's like what... 3-4 seconds? A few trillion being 12-15 seconds these days. Are you sure that's all that's required?
Any companies out there with dodgy patents. Looks like it'll be a good bet to get a lawsuit going against MS.
$440 million to Intertrust
$2 billion to Sun
That's a *lot* of money, even if MS don't think so.
Look...
If the janitor[1] comes up to you and says "The front door isn't secure, we need to put a lock on it. He gets ignored. He's only a janitor, gets paid peanuts, what could he possibly know.
If he puts on a suit and becomes a $200/hour security consultant and charges $15,000 for a security audit coming to the conclusion that, damn those doors should really have locks on them, he will be listened to. That advice is worth $15,000 after all... Isn't it...
[1] And yes, this *is* how systems administrators are viewed by man
To interview the people who are now doing the jobs. How much are they really paid, what are the conditions of employment, how is their economy? etc etc.