Slashdot is lots of machines, DejaNews is lots of machines, Etoys may or may not be lots of machines.
Frankly enterprise ready is a meaningless buzzword, but I at least, tend to think of large single system image Big Iron database servers like the E10K. In that respect neither Linux nor Microsoft is enterprise ready.
But seriously, as I have mentioned in other posts, this is unconfirmed speculation about an unbuilt machine. FUD might be bad, but vaporware is worse. This appears to be slashdotware (a product invented by the journalist to attract hits). --
There are several Linux clusters in the top 500, not individual computers and certainly not anything that could replace an E10K easily. While Beowulf is great for a certain class of parallelizable problems. A Big Iron database server such as the E10K is useful for it's single system image and huge memory access as well as fault tolerance and failover capablities in hardware and software. I'm not convinced that Linux will ever be used in such as system, since the advantages of open source are not as great in an environment where there are few end users, and where the end users already are spending enormous amounts of money on hardware, software, and support contracts. So the cost of an OS (really just the price of the OS support contract) is minimal in comparison to other costs. And the ability of the hardware to work tightly with the OS is a major selling point.
Linux will continue to thrive in the low-end and will migrate up to more and more powerful servers as they get cheaper and used more generally. High Availability solutions are already beginning to surface, as with TurboLinux. This will probably be the way to go for most modest sized enterprise applications.
The only way Linux will get onto a Big Iron box is for SGI, IBM or Sun to put it on there. The only good reason to do this would be to ease migration from low end solutions running on Linux. Or to appease the PHB's that demand a Linux based solution (just wait...It'll happen). Since they wouldn't abandon their current customers, they would be supporting two OSes in the same space with the same developers for quite some time. While the Linux solution would be open source, there would not be great advantages to this since the user community would be so small. --
The article is rampant speculation. This does not mean that it couldn't happen, although I wouldn't hold my breath.
Perhaps we need a new term for a product that even the company which is supposed to be developing it is unwilling to speculate on.
Any votes for: assware (as in the journalist pulled one out of his ass). deadlineware (just meeting a deadline) slashdotware (targeted at attracting the/. effect) pipedreamware... you get the picture
I have admined an Alpha workstation with Digital Unix and one with RedHat. I have not had experience with either in production environment.
Your choices on Alpha are currently OpenVMS (great, but only if you're into that kind of thing)
Digital Unix (I refuse to call it Tru64. It's nothing spectacular, but it is stable and certainly commercial.)
NetBSD, FreeBSD, OpenBSD (Which are probably fine but which are going to annoy admins used to System V)
Linux (Closer to Solaris in terms of administration than either of the other two unicies. Alpha port is older than FreeBSD, but younger than Net/OpenBSD.)
NT (no longer under development apparently, and you know the rest)
My recommendation, based on my limited experience and limited knowledge of your application would be to purchase RedHat 6.1 for Alpha with a support contract. That should appease the PHB's, be reasonably easy to migrate for the admins, and be cheaper than Digital Unix. --
SGI: We are making a bid for the T30 supercomputer CNET: What OS will you be using? SGI: No comment. CNET: (aha!) So what CPU will you be using? SGI: No comment. CNET: (Aha!) Can you confirm that you will be using Linux. SGI: No comment. CNET: AHA!!!!! (Whoops did I say that out loud?)
Later...
CNET: (Damn, I forgot to ask about alien technology, I guess I'll just go with the Linux angle. I'll throw some "experts" in there for "balance". Slashdot readers will read it....I'll be rich) Rich I tell you!! haHaHAHAHAHAHAH!!!!!! (cough)
Actually upon rereading the article I could only find that SGI had confirmed that they are making a bid, not that Linux is a possibility. The rest of the article is rampant speculation.
Or I could be wrong again, in which case chalk one up to a late night. --
SGI has not announced that they are going to put linux on this beast, only that it was "a possibility". Given that the Irix OS scales well beyond Linux currently I doubt they'd replace it on such short notice. The problems with Irix, namely nonstandard library layout and bad security are non-issues in a supercomputer environment.
In related news, Microsoft has confirmed that it is "possible" that WindowsCE will be used for critical life support systems in upcoming space missions. I mean come on. Neither is strictly speaking impossible, but I'd take it with a large grain of NaCl. --
What could be done to speed up Linux boot ups ? Write scripts in Perl instead of bash, perhaps ?
I don't think this would help much. The most time spent booting up is not the scripts themselves but the processes they start. Many of the processes have to configure hardware, open ports, and do DNS lookups. The biggest time savings would probably come from parallelizing startup of independent daemons. This would have the advantage of increasing speed, but the disadvantage of increasing complexity and adding potential race conditions. --
My 486 DX-100 with 8 MB of RAM took over 24 hours to do a make zImage on a vanilla 2.2.12. Of course it was running an MUD bot (niced) at 80% CPU at the time. --
Or maybe we should sic him on the OS 8.6 developers which takes longer to boot on my iMac than Win98 on my PC (although not as long as linux on the same PC). Frankly boot time is much less important to me than degree to which that boot was volunatary. --
Don't forget that NFS was once a Sun proprietary network protocol and is certainly not optimal as a distributed file system. I'm perfectly willing to believe that Samba is as good or better than NFS or at least that the Linux implementation of Samba is as good or better than the Linux implementation of NFS. --
Screen resolution. Hell that's easy (Ctrl-Alt-+), now if someone could tell me how to change bit depth on the fly I'll send them a beer. I know how to do it at startup but I don't know how to do it without taking down X. Windows does it...so it must be easy right. --
Why do I suspect you have no real idea about what marxism stands for.
I would say the Slashdot party line is to be:
libertarian wrt personal freedom and government(encryption, free speech etc., limited government powers)
capitalistic wrt most economics (property ownership, free markets) although there is distrust of large corporations.
anarchic wrt intellectual property (but not physical property)
The only thing that comes close to marxism is opensourceism, which is really a conflation of libertarianism/anarchism (BSD), libertarianism/socialism (GPL), and libertarianism/pragmatism (Open Source (TM)).
The main grey areas are in the degree to which government should intervene to promote the above values, and the protection of virtual property (e.g. should unauthorized computer entry be criminal). Social issues are largely undiscussed except when they touch on freedoms, as are issues of race or socioeconomic disparity. --
Once you have been convicted of a crime, all bets are off. You have violated the contract with the society and you lose rights. There is still the restriction against cruel and unsual punishment. I think the way the courts get around the unfairness of unusual punishments such as keeping a hacker from using computers, or implanted contraceptives to drug addicts is to offer them as alternatives to extended prison sentences. Most restrictions that happen as part of a probation are constitutional. --
I believe that contracts between unequal parties are justly and appropriately regulated by the government. First of all, my employer is handing me boilerplate written by lawyers, who are uniquely skilled at constructing contracts. Unless I am myself a lawyer, I am not uniquely skilled at interpreting contracts. And even if I do not like a clause I am in a much weaker position for negotiation. For the libertarian version to work at all, I would expect the two parties to have roughly equal knowledge as to the contents and effects of the contract as well as an equal role in writing that contract. I can't think of a good way of achieving this parity.
Even if such parity were achieved, the resulting contract would probably be poorly worded and ineffective, as it had been crafted by non-experts. Lawyers and courts, although much maligned do play a necessary role in any system, including a libertarian one, in crafting unambiguous documents where possible and interpreting ambiguous ones where necessary.
Libertarianism gives one enough rope to hang oneself, or more accurately gives enough rope to the more powerful party to hang the weaker party. The longer rope certainly allows more freedom and less government, but I worry about hanging individuals for their mistakes. I also worry about giving even more power to the powerful than they currently enjoy. --
Sadly it's 95 years for corporate authors or 75 years from the creators death and appears to be on track to be extendeded indefinitely. There is an excellent resource on the copyright extensions, the corporate lobbying by Disney and others, and the constitutional challenges to the extention. It is well worth reading. --
Slashdot Mirror
Slashdot is lots of machines, DejaNews is lots of machines, Etoys may or may not be lots of machines.
Frankly enterprise ready is a meaningless buzzword, but I at least, tend to think of large single system image Big Iron database servers like the E10K. In that respect neither Linux nor Microsoft is enterprise ready.
--
They could use VMWare :-)
But seriously, as I have mentioned in other posts, this is unconfirmed speculation about an unbuilt machine. FUD might be bad, but vaporware is worse. This appears to be slashdotware (a product invented by the journalist to attract hits).
--
There are several Linux clusters in the top 500, not individual computers and certainly not anything that could replace an E10K easily. While Beowulf is great for a certain class of parallelizable problems. A Big Iron database server such as the E10K is useful for it's single system image and huge memory access as well as fault tolerance and failover capablities in hardware and software. I'm not convinced that Linux will ever be used in such as system, since the advantages of open source are not as great in an environment where there are few end users, and where the end users already are spending enormous amounts of money on hardware, software, and support contracts. So the cost of an OS (really just the price of the OS support contract) is minimal in comparison to other costs. And the ability of the hardware to work tightly with the OS is a major selling point.
Linux will continue to thrive in the low-end and will migrate up to more and more powerful servers as they get cheaper and used more generally. High Availability solutions are already beginning to surface, as with TurboLinux. This will probably be the way to go for most modest sized enterprise applications.
The only way Linux will get onto a Big Iron box is for SGI, IBM or Sun to put it on there. The only good reason to do this would be to ease migration from low end solutions running on Linux. Or to appease the PHB's that demand a Linux based solution (just wait...It'll happen). Since they wouldn't abandon their current customers, they would be supporting two OSes in the same space with the same developers for quite some time. While the Linux solution would be open source, there would not be great advantages to this since the user community would be so small.
--
The article is rampant speculation. This does not mean that it couldn't happen, although I wouldn't hold my breath.
/. effect)
Perhaps we need a new term for a product that even the company which is supposed to be developing it is unwilling to speculate on.
Any votes for:
assware (as in the journalist pulled one out of his ass).
deadlineware (just meeting a deadline)
slashdotware (targeted at attracting the
pipedreamware...
you get the picture
--
I have admined an Alpha workstation with Digital Unix and one with RedHat. I have not had experience with either in production environment.
Your choices on Alpha are currently
OpenVMS (great, but only if you're into that kind of thing)
Digital Unix (I refuse to call it Tru64. It's nothing spectacular, but it is stable and certainly commercial.)
NetBSD, FreeBSD, OpenBSD (Which are probably fine but which are going to annoy admins used to System V)
Linux (Closer to Solaris in terms of administration than either of the other two unicies. Alpha port is older than FreeBSD, but younger than Net/OpenBSD.)
NT (no longer under development apparently, and you know the rest)
My recommendation, based on my limited experience and limited knowledge of your application would be to purchase RedHat 6.1 for Alpha with a support contract. That should appease the PHB's, be reasonably easy to migrate for the admins, and be cheaper than Digital Unix.
--
SGI: We are making a bid for the T30 supercomputer
CNET: What OS will you be using?
SGI: No comment.
CNET: (aha!) So what CPU will you be using?
SGI: No comment.
CNET: (Aha!) Can you confirm that you will be using Linux.
SGI: No comment.
CNET: AHA!!!!! (Whoops did I say that out loud?)
Later...
CNET: (Damn, I forgot to ask about alien technology, I guess I'll just go with the Linux angle. I'll throw some "experts" in there for "balance". Slashdot readers will read it....I'll be rich) Rich I tell you!! haHaHAHAHAHAHAH!!!!!! (cough)
--
Actually upon rereading the article I could only find that SGI had confirmed that they are making a bid, not that Linux is a possibility. The rest of the article is rampant speculation.
Or I could be wrong again, in which case chalk one up to a late night.
--
SGI has not announced that they are going to put linux on this beast, only that it was "a possibility". Given that the Irix OS scales well beyond Linux currently I doubt they'd replace it on such short notice. The problems with Irix, namely nonstandard library layout and bad security are non-issues in a supercomputer environment.
In related news, Microsoft has confirmed that it is "possible" that WindowsCE will be used for critical life support systems in upcoming space missions. I mean come on. Neither is strictly speaking impossible, but I'd take it with a large grain of NaCl.
--
Maybe if you renamed it EarthQuake you could get processor time, although I doubt the beast has a good 3D graphics card much less a mouse port.
--
Don't Panic
--
What could be done to speed up Linux boot ups ?
Write scripts in Perl instead of bash, perhaps ?
I don't think this would help much. The most time spent booting up is not the scripts themselves but the processes they start. Many of the processes have to configure hardware, open ports, and do DNS lookups. The biggest time savings would probably come from parallelizing startup of independent daemons. This would have the advantage of increasing speed, but the disadvantage of increasing complexity and adding potential race conditions.
--
My 486 DX-100 with 8 MB of RAM took over 24 hours to do a make zImage on a vanilla 2.2.12. Of course it was running an MUD bot (niced) at 80% CPU at the time.
--
Wow just did that.
0 seconds
Thank God for UPS.
--
Or maybe we should sic him on the OS 8.6 developers which takes longer to boot on my iMac than Win98 on my PC (although not as long as linux on the same PC). Frankly boot time is much less important to me than degree to which that boot was volunatary.
--
Oh sorry, you will just have to leave the 10 tons of butter out here in the sun. Computer problems you know..." (true story)
Do tell.
--
Don't forget that NFS was once a Sun proprietary network protocol and is certainly not optimal as a distributed file system. I'm perfectly willing to believe that Samba is as good or better than NFS or at least that the Linux implementation of Samba is as good or better than the Linux implementation of NFS.
--
Tell that to the MacOS
--
Screen resolution. Hell that's easy (Ctrl-Alt-+), now if someone could tell me how to change bit depth on the fly I'll send them a beer. I know how to do it at startup but I don't know how to do it without taking down X. Windows does it...so it must be easy right.
--
MS server OS deadlock?
Yes quite frequently.
--
Why do I suspect you have no real idea about what marxism stands for.
I would say the Slashdot party line is to be:
libertarian wrt personal freedom and government(encryption, free speech etc., limited government powers)
capitalistic wrt most economics (property ownership, free markets) although there is distrust of large corporations.
anarchic wrt intellectual property (but not physical property)
The only thing that comes close to marxism is opensourceism, which is really a conflation of libertarianism/anarchism (BSD), libertarianism/socialism (GPL), and libertarianism/pragmatism (Open Source (TM)).
The main grey areas are in the degree to which government should intervene to promote the above values, and the protection of virtual property (e.g. should unauthorized computer entry be criminal). Social issues are largely undiscussed except when they touch on freedoms, as are issues of race or socioeconomic disparity.
--
Party at your office :-)
--
Once you have been convicted of a crime, all bets are off. You have violated the contract with the society and you lose rights. There is still the restriction against cruel and unsual punishment. I think the way the courts get around the unfairness of unusual punishments such as keeping a hacker from using computers, or implanted contraceptives to drug addicts is to offer them as alternatives to extended prison sentences. Most restrictions that happen as part of a probation are constitutional.
--
I believe that contracts between unequal parties are justly and appropriately regulated by the government. First of all, my employer is handing me boilerplate written by lawyers, who are uniquely skilled at constructing contracts. Unless I am myself a lawyer, I am not uniquely skilled at interpreting contracts. And even if I do not like a clause I am in a much weaker position for negotiation. For the libertarian version to work at all, I would expect the two parties to have roughly equal knowledge as to the contents and effects of the contract as well as an equal role in writing that contract. I can't think of a good way of achieving this parity.
Even if such parity were achieved, the resulting contract would probably be poorly worded and ineffective, as it had been crafted by non-experts. Lawyers and courts, although much maligned do play a necessary role in any system, including a libertarian one, in crafting unambiguous documents where possible and interpreting ambiguous ones where necessary.
Libertarianism gives one enough rope to hang oneself, or more accurately gives enough rope to the more powerful party to hang the weaker party. The longer rope certainly allows more freedom and less government, but I worry about hanging individuals for their mistakes. I also worry about giving even more power to the powerful than they currently enjoy.
--
Sadly it's 95 years for corporate authors or 75 years from the creators death and appears to be on track to be extendeded indefinitely. There is an excellent resource on the copyright extensions, the corporate lobbying by Disney and others, and the constitutional challenges to the extention. It is well worth reading.
--
You go to X.
--