Mate, you should be forced to print this out and shove it up your arse. Let's have a look at this, shall we?
Badly written software crashes Win2k? Badly written software should crash itself. If I fsck up on FreeBSD I get a core dump I can trawl through at the exact moment of the crash. Nothing else notices. NOTHING. I run through a secure terminal to a remote machine all the time. No problem. I write network software that runs in the background at ~40Mbit/s. No problem. An operating system's job is to protect all the other stuff from fsck ups.
With the possible exception of Win3.1
Badly written drivers? Yeah, there's not a lot you can do about this. The stock MS CD driver is what causes our win2k box to bin out.
All Netscape/Real products? HELLO?? Do you not, maybe, think that these people are competitors to Microsoft? Perhaps, perchance, this is a deliberate ploy... Do you really thing Microsoft got to be this much of a monopoly by playing fair?
And finally, "significant experience with Windows 2000". I saw it was a microsoft.com link and was expecting maybe an MVP? Perhaps one of the development team? At very least a marketroid pretending to be a sysadmin? No. A twat. Playing games. At 45FPS on a GeForce. Using 340 Meg.
Unfortuately ShootOnSight.com appears to be taken, or the world would be blessed with a new website.
Seriously. Post it again. The whole post. Put it in the root thread to see what happens.
The only serious thing I have used Win2k for was an MP3 player at work. Bitch to install. Completely failed to recognise an s3 videocard. 95% of ripping software wouldn't run (complaining about ATAPI or something). The network browser thing doesn't appear to browse the lan correctly. It has blue screened twice in a month and then shown some dire warning about how the drive may have shit it.
Apart from that, yeah, I guess it's pretty.
For my stuff I use NT4 workstation and run the excellent finnish X server on it (http://www.labf.com/) that costs but is worth every penny. Then real work can take place on three FreeBSD4 boxen.
And this whole 'crap' software thing, by which I take it you mean stuff that doesn't come with a holographic label and draconian licencing agreement. For gods' sake. The entire mission statement for Win2k is to further leverage the microsoft monopoly into selling other products - office, IE, media player, IM, some shit we haven't though of yet... You're just falling for it, man.
Best tool for the job. Speech-free, beer-free or for pay, just get on with your work.
Truly beautiful man. Maybe part of the problem are the moderation guidelines which I believe encourage positive moderation rather than negative moderation. That and moderators cruising at +2 (something that I'm guilty of).
I can't help feeling that the moderation points evaporating after three days doesn't help either. I'd rather save mine for a couple of weeks and give +1 to something *genuinely* insiteful (spell?).
BTW, I have problems with that word. Does it mean "as in to shine a torch on a previously dark area", "sharing of insights", or more "insightment to riot".
Anyway, I started this with the idea of adding to your list of negative moderations, but you seem to have pretty well covered the bases there.
I can't really tell what the real problem is here. There seem to be two symptoms: Loads and loads of +5's and trigger happy posting. Easy kill solutions would appear to raise the moderation limit to 10, and have an hour - SIXTY GODDAM MINUTES - before you can post. Hopefully somebody somewhere will actually read the story before zapping in with xxxSux or xxxRocks.
But there's a more fundamental problem going on, god knows what it is but maybe you're right - maybe I'm back to usenet.
Something along these lines: Take one one vanilla NT4 box (ie. without service packs), send a 65535 byte ping, gasp in wonderment as your 64K packet *plus*its'*header* overflows a 64K buffer in the kernel and bangs it over in one fell swoop.
These numbers seem hugely high to me. I mean... 4,200 simultaneous connections at 350kbit/sec is around 1.5Gbit/s. To do that you'd need some fairly serious NIC's. A closer inspection of the test setup reveals the server was pushing 4 networks through 4 gigabit alteon network cards.
Reality check guys. Does anyone have 4 gig of external connectivity? And doesn't 4,200 simultaneous connections of 350kbit/sec each represent, like, Yahoo? (without doing the sums)
This would also seem to spurn a more serious debate in terms of web performance testing. If we can get a single server to munge through this kind of quantity of throughput - why have clusters of servers at all? Clearly real world servers perform nothing like as well as this, and we need to have a better look at why.
I always get this *slightly* wrong, so bear with me.
BSD sets off on branches with a fairly broad set of features. So, the 3.x branch changed a whole lot of stuff from 2.x and added (for instance) support for the Alpha.
4.x binned the whole of 3.x's IDE architecture and replaced it with a new ATA one. The jail system call was added. A new network card driver architecture for cards that use the MII physical layer went in. Stateful extensions were put on the firewall. Lots of USB stuff. IP6 is now *very* integrated, SSL is quite integrated and all is good. Go see the changes for your self. I use it every day with no problem.
Anyway, development continues along all these branches until no-one needs/wants it any more. There are thousands of incredibly serious users of the 3.x branch that have no desire to break their scripts so development continues along 3.x. Most users now use 4.x that I believe has just had its' first "-STABLE" release. I should cvsup and buildworld, really.
There is a 5.x branch that is merging some of the work from BSDi. This is cowboy country, for hackers developers and nutters only. Not for production servers.
So there you go. A more verbose explaination is yours for the taking in the FAQ.
The "Why NetBSD" page alludes to something I only found out about the other day, and may have me working with NetBSD quite a bit in the near future:
Driver independence. Say I have an embedded x86 running NetBSD with an intel 82559 network card. It then strikes me that a PowerPC would be a far better call for an embedded platform, and the same network card driver works on that too.
Is it just me, or is this a complete shocker? I'll definately be getting a disk off these guys.
What does this mean in the bigger picture? Particularly when we shine the same torch on a profitable BSDI as we do on a shriking TurboLinux or Linux Care. Or even the evaporating market cap of VA and/or RedHat, Caldera et al?
I honestly don't know. The only thing it says to me is either "No forgone conclusion in this one", or "Don't believe the hype". Depending what mood you're in.
Sorry, but slightly bored of the "linux vs bsd as holy war" thing. There so damn close, in the bigger picture.
I've been getting hugely into BSD over the last six months or so, and have been slowling bringing it into work. The response has been hugely positive. The couple of linuxen we have want a 'go', and our NT admin is, like "God, you can do *that*?".
I'm surprised no-one's mentioned it, so I will. KDevelop rocks. I'm not one for going overboard on evangelising technology (apart from the intel 82559 that's just made my BSD box go like a rocket), but KDevelop blows *all* other Unix IDE's totally out of the water.
Why?
Maybe why not is a better approach. I don't use it to develop K applications. I have nothing to do with Qt. I've never even seen the dialog editor. The great thing with KDevelop is the debugger is integrated. Properly. It's like what ddd could have been.
And, dare I say it, yes - I come from a VC++ background. (Hi, my name is Dave and I have a Microsoft problem). I use Ctrl-C and Ctrl-V. I like to use the mouse to highlight things.
It just bloody works OK! I couldn't face emacs and was just about running out of patience with combinations of C-Forge, vi, UltraEdit over a samba share (yes, it got that desperate), ddd and all that.
cd/usr/ports/devel/kdevelop make all install
And retire to a safe distance. For quite a while. Then be productive.
It matters, fellow geeks, because Lineo are not friends.
Why? Because "You must complete a royalty-based licence with Lineo to distribute this product".
But! but! but! it's GPL'd!! Indeed it is. Let's look at what that means. IANAL: GPL means we have to make the source of any derivative product public, basically. So what's a derivative product?
"Lineo does not consider the following to be derivative works: - a driver loaded as a module into the Linux kernel - a module written to be plugged into an API defined specifically to support dynamic loading. - a program which uses a library is generally not a derivative work of that library - a library linked to a program is not a derivative work of the program - a program running as a process on a Linux system is not a derivative work of the Linux kernel "
Pretty well everything that isn't the kernel itself. So, for instance if your software uses the shell included with Embedix, you pay the licence fee. Lineo is about closing as much source as possible, as fast as possible, and charging for it. I could go on, but I have other things to say.
Lineo is not about squashing Microsoft and crappy many-boot hideously-insecure operating systems. Lineo is an easy-in for getting to QNX, Wind River and anyone else in the same space. Now, don't get me wrong, Wind River aren't open source hippies either - given half a chance they'll sting you for the kind of money that would make Rational blush. There is mega money to be made in this sector, arguably far more than the desktop sector - and all Lineo want is (not having the actual figures) a dollar an unit and two grand per developer.
Quick aside: There are things going on with embedding BSD. Subscribe to freebsd-small. And don't forget those three words: "Royalty based licence" - and you were worried about Red Hat.
What I don't understand about this is: What's to stop a broken in two microsoft colluding in a duopolistic fashion? In other words, what's there to stop Microsoft-OS from sharing API's with Microsoft-Apps and no-one else?
You know, I've been thinking this for a while. Q3 was all well and good, very pretty - not that you've got time to look at it. But it is a sport, not a game as such.
So where'd all the magic go? These games used to suck you in so you'd forget to eat. My flatmate failed his degree because of Doom2 (I only survived because I passed my degree before 486's were commonplace). I was thinking that maybe I was getting old, but, well.... half life.
Are id in trouble? Have they lost their way? Have we reached a point where merely better graphics will not make a game more immersive, and did we get there when Quake was released?
More to the point, when the hell do we get Duke Nukem forever?
Absolutely, but you're forgetting what it is in power outages that causes disk crashes.
Filesystems (and ext2fs in particular) keep a certain amount of the state of the 'disk' in memory, leaving the actual physical disk in an incomplete state. If you see what I mean.
The simple solution is to use synchronous writes - the api call doesn't return until the state has been written on disk. This, incidentally, is the default for mount under FreeBSD - you can make FreeBSD a whole lot faster writing to disk by mounting async, but it would be less safe so you have to enable it manually:) But anyway, this isn't a fail safe method, you just have to be a much better shot with the power button.
A jfs means that even if you trip the power half way through the write, the whole thing can be rolled back to a pre-written state, a la database transactions.
A quick aside is the softupdates package under FreeBSD which does something similar to a jfs. Unfortunately I've not got further than the limited licence for this so I cannot comment further.
So, why does this matter for flash? Because flash is embedded. It cannot be allowed to go wrong. Do you really want a fsck button on your digital camera? Oh - OK, errrmm, Aircraft? Exactly.
Slashdot Mirror
Metric Tonne.
Imperial Ton.
Thank you,
Dave
Really? Are we sure? Does the Java(tm) API have some way of getting low down and grunty enough to be able to lift numbers straight off the DVD?
:)
Dave
.doc -> StarOffice5.2. Surprisingly good (disclaim: only use windows version).
:)
Photoshop -> will gimp do it? Otherwise, fair enough.
VC++ -> Kdevelop rocks. Give it a go.
Dave
An Ultra-virtualized hell? WTF is one of those then?
:)
Hell is COM in MFC. Don't believe me? Try it.
Dave
Mind you, "code for X - envy the dead" still has a certain ring to it.
Mate, you should be forced to print this out and shove it up your arse. Let's have a look at this, shall we?
Badly written software crashes Win2k? Badly written software should crash itself. If I fsck up on FreeBSD I get a core dump I can trawl through at the exact moment of the crash. Nothing else notices. NOTHING. I run through a secure terminal to a remote machine all the time. No problem. I write network software that runs in the background at ~40Mbit/s. No problem. An operating system's job is to protect all the other stuff from fsck ups.
With the possible exception of Win3.1
Badly written drivers? Yeah, there's not a lot you can do about this. The stock MS CD driver is what causes our win2k box to bin out.
All Netscape/Real products? HELLO?? Do you not, maybe, think that these people are competitors to Microsoft? Perhaps, perchance, this is a deliberate ploy... Do you really thing Microsoft got to be this much of a monopoly by playing fair?
And finally, "significant experience with Windows 2000". I saw it was a microsoft.com link and was expecting maybe an MVP? Perhaps one of the development team? At very least a marketroid pretending to be a sysadmin? No. A twat. Playing games. At 45FPS on a GeForce. Using 340 Meg.
Unfortuately ShootOnSight.com appears to be taken, or the world would be blessed with a new website.
Seriously. Post it again. The whole post. Put it in the root thread to see what happens.
Just don't go near any computer networks.
Dave
Hang on, is this a troll? Nah.
The only serious thing I have used Win2k for was an MP3 player at work. Bitch to install. Completely failed to recognise an s3 videocard. 95% of ripping software wouldn't run (complaining about ATAPI or something). The network browser thing doesn't appear to browse the lan correctly. It has blue screened twice in a month and then shown some dire warning about how the drive may have shit it.
:)
Apart from that, yeah, I guess it's pretty.
For my stuff I use NT4 workstation and run the excellent finnish X server on it (http://www.labf.com/) that costs but is worth every penny. Then real work can take place on three FreeBSD4 boxen.
And this whole 'crap' software thing, by which I take it you mean stuff that doesn't come with a holographic label and draconian licencing agreement. For gods' sake. The entire mission statement for Win2k is to further leverage the microsoft monopoly into selling other products - office, IE, media player, IM, some shit we haven't though of yet... You're just falling for it, man.
Best tool for the job. Speech-free, beer-free or for pay, just get on with your work.
Dave
Truly beautiful man. Maybe part of the problem are the moderation guidelines which I believe encourage positive moderation rather than negative moderation. That and moderators cruising at +2 (something that I'm guilty of).
:)
I can't help feeling that the moderation points evaporating after three days doesn't help either. I'd rather save mine for a couple of weeks and give +1 to something *genuinely* insiteful (spell?).
BTW, I have problems with that word. Does it mean "as in to shine a torch on a previously dark area", "sharing of insights", or more "insightment to riot".
Anyway, I started this with the idea of adding to your list of negative moderations, but you seem to have pretty well covered the bases there.
Dave
ObAOL: Me Too.
:(
I can't really tell what the real problem is here. There seem to be two symptoms: Loads and loads of +5's and trigger happy posting. Easy kill solutions would appear to raise the moderation limit to 10, and have an hour - SIXTY GODDAM MINUTES - before you can post. Hopefully somebody somewhere will actually read the story before zapping in with xxxSux or xxxRocks.
But there's a more fundamental problem going on, god knows what it is but maybe you're right - maybe I'm back to usenet.
alt.peeves anyone?
Dave
So, let me get this straight...
:(
The pioneers of Apple, NeXT etc. throw away the rulebook and decide to revolutionise the way we use computers using Linux and X as the base.
And we get... a file browser. Can I even bring myself to say it? Yes: Explorer, guys. It looks like windows explorer. Immeasurably dissapointing.
I tell you, mobile phones, PDA's, they *own* the future. People don't even think of mobile phones as computers (mostly because they don't go wrong).
*sigh* Glad I stayed away from client side.
Dave
Out of Band. Ping of death in common parlance.
:)
Something along these lines: Take one one vanilla NT4 box (ie. without service packs), send a 65535 byte ping, gasp in wonderment as your 64K packet *plus*its'*header* overflows a 64K buffer in the kernel and bangs it over in one fell swoop.
They fixed that pretty quick.
Dave
MacJunkie has it right. (new) Apple loves handles and there would be no way on earth you could pick this up.
:)
But if someone wants to fake pictures of a rack mounted G4 with OSX, I'll fall for that if you like.
Dave
Slashdot as pseudo-intellegent cache anyone?
These numbers seem hugely high to me. I mean... 4,200 simultaneous connections at 350kbit/sec is around 1.5Gbit/s. To do that you'd need some fairly serious NIC's. A closer inspection of the test setup reveals the server was pushing 4 networks through 4 gigabit alteon network cards.
:)
Reality check guys. Does anyone have 4 gig of external connectivity? And doesn't 4,200 simultaneous connections of 350kbit/sec each represent, like, Yahoo? (without doing the sums)
This would also seem to spurn a more serious debate in terms of web performance testing. If we can get a single server to munge through this kind of quantity of throughput - why have clusters of servers at all? Clearly real world servers perform nothing like as well as this, and we need to have a better look at why.
Dave
I always get this *slightly* wrong, so bear with me.
:)
BSD sets off on branches with a fairly broad set of features. So, the 3.x branch changed a whole lot of stuff from 2.x and added (for instance) support for the Alpha.
4.x binned the whole of 3.x's IDE architecture and replaced it with a new ATA one. The jail system call was added. A new network card driver architecture for cards that use the MII physical layer went in. Stateful extensions were put on the firewall. Lots of USB stuff. IP6 is now *very* integrated, SSL is quite integrated and all is good. Go see the changes for your self. I use it every day with no problem.
Anyway, development continues along all these branches until no-one needs/wants it any more. There are thousands of incredibly serious users of the 3.x branch that have no desire to break their scripts so development continues along 3.x. Most users now use 4.x that I believe has just had its' first "-STABLE" release. I should cvsup and buildworld, really.
There is a 5.x branch that is merging some of the work from BSDi. This is cowboy country, for hackers developers and nutters only. Not for production servers.
So there you go. A more verbose explaination is yours for the taking in the FAQ.
Dave
The "Why NetBSD" page alludes to something I only found out about the other day, and may have me working with NetBSD quite a bit in the near future:
:)
Driver independence. Say I have an embedded x86 running NetBSD with an intel 82559 network card. It then strikes me that a PowerPC would be a far better call for an embedded platform, and the same network card driver works on that too.
Is it just me, or is this a complete shocker? I'll definately be getting a disk off these guys.
Dave
3) Being Microsoft. Not an option for most non-Microsoft companies.
Although Sun are willing to have a go.
Dave :)
Shocker, eh?
:)
What does this mean in the bigger picture? Particularly when we shine the same torch on a profitable BSDI as we do on a shriking TurboLinux or Linux Care. Or even the evaporating market cap of VA and/or RedHat, Caldera et al?
I honestly don't know. The only thing it says to me is either "No forgone conclusion in this one", or "Don't believe the hype". Depending what mood you're in.
BSD != competitor, anyway. BSD is your friend.
Dave
Sorry, but slightly bored of the "linux vs bsd as holy war" thing. There so damn close, in the bigger picture.
:)
I've been getting hugely into BSD over the last six months or so, and have been slowling bringing it into work. The response has been hugely positive. The couple of linuxen we have want a 'go', and our NT admin is, like "God, you can do *that*?".
Oh yes, my man, oh yes.
My favourite linux distribution is FreeBSD.
Dave
Overrated and Underrated are used for when you can't remember if the others add a point or take it away.
;)
This is known as the "is flamebait a good thing" effect.
Dave
I'm surprised no-one's mentioned it, so I will. KDevelop rocks. I'm not one for going overboard on evangelising technology (apart from the intel 82559 that's just made my BSD box go like a rocket), but KDevelop blows *all* other Unix IDE's totally out of the water.
/usr/ports/devel/kdevelop
:)
Why?
Maybe why not is a better approach. I don't use it to develop K applications. I have nothing to do with Qt. I've never even seen the dialog editor. The great thing with KDevelop is the debugger is integrated. Properly. It's like what ddd could have been.
And, dare I say it, yes - I come from a VC++ background. (Hi, my name is Dave and I have a Microsoft problem). I use Ctrl-C and Ctrl-V. I like to use the mouse to highlight things.
It just bloody works OK! I couldn't face emacs and was just about running out of patience with combinations of C-Forge, vi, UltraEdit over a samba share (yes, it got that desperate), ddd and all that.
cd
make all install
And retire to a safe distance. For quite a while. Then be productive.
Dave
It matters, fellow geeks, because Lineo are not friends.
:)
Why? Because "You must complete a royalty-based licence with Lineo to distribute this product".
But! but! but! it's GPL'd!! Indeed it is. Let's look at what that means. IANAL: GPL means we have to make the source of any derivative product public, basically. So what's a derivative product?
"Lineo does not consider the following to be derivative works:
- a driver loaded as a module into the Linux kernel
- a module written to be plugged into an API defined specifically to support dynamic loading.
- a program which uses a library is generally not a derivative work of that library
- a library linked to a program is not a derivative work of the program
- a program running as a process on a Linux system is not a derivative work of the Linux kernel "
Pretty well everything that isn't the kernel itself. So, for instance if your software uses the shell included with Embedix, you pay the licence fee. Lineo is about closing as much source as possible, as fast as possible, and charging for it. I could go on, but I have other things to say.
Lineo is not about squashing Microsoft and crappy many-boot hideously-insecure operating systems. Lineo is an easy-in for getting to QNX, Wind River and anyone else in the same space. Now, don't get me wrong, Wind River aren't open source hippies either - given half a chance they'll sting you for the kind of money that would make Rational blush. There is mega money to be made in this sector, arguably far more than the desktop sector - and all Lineo want is (not having the actual figures) a dollar an unit and two grand per developer.
Quick aside: There are things going on with embedding BSD. Subscribe to freebsd-small. And don't forget those three words: "Royalty based licence" - and you were worried about Red Hat.
Dave
What I don't understand about this is: What's to stop a broken in two microsoft colluding in a duopolistic fashion? In other words, what's there to stop Microsoft-OS from sharing API's with Microsoft-Apps and no-one else?
:)
Dave
You know, I've been thinking this for a while. Q3 was all well and good, very pretty - not that you've got time to look at it. But it is a sport, not a game as such.
:)
So where'd all the magic go? These games used to suck you in so you'd forget to eat. My flatmate failed his degree because of Doom2 (I only survived because I passed my degree before 486's were commonplace). I was thinking that maybe I was getting old, but, well.... half life.
Are id in trouble? Have they lost their way? Have we reached a point where merely better graphics will not make a game more immersive, and did we get there when Quake was released?
More to the point, when the hell do we get Duke Nukem forever?
Dave
Absolutely, but you're forgetting what it is in power outages that causes disk crashes.
:) But anyway, this isn't a fail safe method, you just have to be a much better shot with the power button.
;)
Filesystems (and ext2fs in particular) keep a certain amount of the state of the 'disk' in memory, leaving the actual physical disk in an incomplete state. If you see what I mean.
The simple solution is to use synchronous writes - the api call doesn't return until the state has been written on disk. This, incidentally, is the default for mount under FreeBSD - you can make FreeBSD a whole lot faster writing to disk by mounting async, but it would be less safe so you have to enable it manually
A jfs means that even if you trip the power half way through the write, the whole thing can be rolled back to a pre-written state, a la database transactions.
A quick aside is the softupdates package under FreeBSD which does something similar to a jfs. Unfortunately I've not got further than the limited licence for this so I cannot comment further.
So, why does this matter for flash? Because flash is embedded. It cannot be allowed to go wrong. Do you really want a fsck button on your digital camera? Oh - OK, errrmm, Aircraft? Exactly.
Corrections by email please
Dave
The technet link comes through as "IT Prostitute", I kid you not.
:)
Dave