Hey, in the UK you can legally drive a (decommissioned) tank on the public highway. And I've seen someone do that - down Camden Road in North London of all places!
Wonder if it makes a good pickup vehicle? At least you'd be immune to 'road rage'...
Well, with (much) older CRTs this might be the case, however modern ones are designed to fail in a relatively safe manner. I know, because I was once opening up a monitor to try to extract the flyback transformer (for HV experiments). I snapped the tube right at the stem in from of the electron gun. All I heard was a fairly innocuous 'pop' sound. Hardly any glass left the case, and the front of the tube was almost intact. Just don't much on the lead coatings.
Of course you should wear eye protection when you do such things. Heck, they say you should wear a mask when cutting wood these days! (Something about resin particulates).
Hmm - I looked at at and cringed at Jeremy Irons' terrible, hammy acting. As hammy villains go, few beat the great humour and camp of Alan Rickman in "Prince of Thieves" - one of the few good parts of an otherwise dire movie.
Irons seems to have 'lost it' somewhat - I remember him being almost a perfect casting in 'Dead Ringers' (another all-time favourite of mine). But here, 'cheesy' doesn't even begin to describe it. Parmesan with a side-dish of Gorgonzola. Old trainers as a freebie.
Hehe, that reminds me that someone once told me that all barcodes (or at least all I've seen) use the number "6" as a mark for the beginning, centre and end of every barcode, thus giving "6-6-6". And hell, I looked at everything I could find with a code, and he was right!
Now *that* freaked me out for a while - beats people in pubs telling you that Marlboro packet design contains three "K"s!
I'll agree with you here about Acers - I had a really beautiful silver-coloured magnesium cased ultra-portable last year when I was travelling in Brazil and the States. It survived sand from the beach, extreme humidity and temperatures well over 40 degrees C, and a whoops-I-snagged-the-modem-cable fall from a sofa onto a polished wood floor.
It booted without hesitation, was quiet and had excellent battery life - nearly 3 hours, as stated in the specs (so often you never get what they say)! It also looked sweet - it got plently of compliments when I opened it up. I still miss it..
Huh?
You either have to spin the disk, the laser or give the laser full x-y freedom. How can moving it on a track accomplish anything if the disk's not spinning?
Giving full x-y freedom would be a nightmare, and the inertia of 'wiggling' it back and forth would probably eat more power than spinning the disk!
Now, as was said before, mulithead is a good idea - if we can get the most efficient laser diodes possible.
Ok, I should have said/occasional/ but regular. The problem seems to be related to reconfiguration of (well known) third party software on the servers. After saving the changes and restarting the service, the machine will often pause or lock up and BSOD when you try to reboot. Luckily we don't do this too often (and we're checking our n/w drivers, scsi drivers, even graphics card drivers all the time for updates. . Perhaps it could be something to do with that software rather than NT, but it happens. And the 'alternate boot' thing has everyone stumped. Very strange - the first hard reboot BSOD's before the GUI/logon appears, the second is normal.
Happily in normal running, when left alone, they are OK (so far).
Can someone mod the reponses to my last post up? An intelligent response that doesn't deserve to stay on 0 - make that two. AC maybe, but I'm going to investigate this and have a go at testing on a coupla' spare boxes.
He's right about money and experience - most of the initial cost comes from h/w, the rest from admin/support. X bits per second is not relevant in the real world, considering that if most clients don't get the page within 30 seconds, they automatically click 'refresh' anyway, at which time it's 99% certain bandwidth will have been freed.
And don't talk to me about the cost of bandwidth in the UK. Ugh. 768k tiered service is enough for 3-5 months, and, indeed, I'd prefer reliability to speed - who gets the flak when something goes down, after all? Yup, the sysadmin and all his (hardworking) networking staff.
Enjoyed this thread - have to go now as BT are bankrupting me for these posts!
However, this doesn't really indicate that Apache might have good performance increases on Linux itself, which is what the article is on about.
...
The most visible and noteworthy addition is the ability to run Apache in a hybrid thread/process mode on any platform that supports both threads and processes. This has shown to mprove the scalability of the Apache HTTPD server significantly in our early testing, on some versions of Unix.
...
As has been discussed before, threading and forking on Linux are highly intertwined, and in may cases neither is significantly better than the other. And, you are talking about an alpha release - not something, as I said, that Dell would wish to support. I'd hope to see such improvements combined with TUX, and maybe then we'll get those top ratings!
BTW, why post AC when you are an Apache guru (or at least you seem to thoroughly read the docs/ChangeLogs)? I don't think anyone would mod you down if you'd given the link in the first place! I only post AC when I respond to obvious flaming threads, unless I'm really baiting! Your point was valid, if sparse...
Ok, you've got a bite - but can you provide a link to substantiate that? I'm looking now, but 'SMP' as a keyword on apache.org returns nothing. I'd be initerested if they're working on this - we have several SMP-capable servers at work that we plan to upgrade when demand ramps up (currently doubling every month!).
Tux is/not/ just for static pages. See previous articles on this where the author states this explicitly. It uses the kernel to serve up pages at a great rate of knots - how they are generated seemed not to have much effect in recent benches (although benches should never, ever be the sole criteria for setting up a web box)
Search/. for 'TUX'. A great, threaded, scalable, SMP-aware, kernel-based server, which can hook into Apache, and can server both static and dynamic HTML with equal gusto. Serving requests at speed was a major concern under 2.2 kernels and Apache, but not under this system.
The recent most exciting benhcmark (not that I fully trust them) used SpecWeb99, which tests both kinds of content. It slapped down NT handily. It's still in development, but enterprise-ready solutions are not far-off. S/390's anyone?
With big-time hardware vendors such as IBM, SGI, Sun and others behind us, the situation has advanced far beyond this. If you're talking about desktop hardware, you might be right - cf. NVidia cards, USB mice, etc - but when it comes to the hard stuff (which incidentally is often made by more 'enlightened' manufacturers, a la Symbios, Adaptec, again IBM, and so forth), we are in a much better situation. You won't find many RAID cards are unsupported, I can tell you - I've investigated a fair few for my company, and despite the fact that Dell won't support them under Linux, I could.
The second point is that Apache, as others have stated, is not the best situation to model. See recent TUX articles for a better comparison. It's not optimised for SMP, and in addition Dell aren't going to install the vastly more SMP-aware 2.4-test kernels, which far outperform 2.2 series. If you go to the cutting edge, then you'll see much better results. That cutting edge will soon be the new standard, so keep your eyes open.
And, in slating the 'Freebie-loving' nature of Linux people, you're neglecting to see that management and finance love to keep costs down (depsite my standoffish-ness to such people). I'm sure that with a good failover/clustering solution, Linux could provide more efficient on many counts than 2K, and possibly more stable. I've never seen Apache crash (yet) and instead the IIS servers I use will BSOD on regular occasions, and (strangely) on every other boot.
I'm not a Linux zealot myself, I'm thinking of having a crack at a BSD sometime (heresy!), but I have grown to trust it (*not* stock installs, fully tweaked and hardened - same applies to NT).
Manageability, and especially the remote kind, is my favourite thing about Unices. ssh beats PCa and others hands down in my book. Fast, secure and can make a full VPN for remote admin. Sweet.
Sheesh!
Did you bother to read the post before flaming? The word "scope" specifically. NT5 is not for embedded systems - as he said, it's a generic OS. You dont use it to control nuclear plants. You use a much smaller, dedicated system for all critical mechanisms. With failsafe.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't W2K still have issues with lack of driver availability? A friend is stuck using NT4 drivers with his scanner, which intermittently craps out (usually just after I've been round to uninstall drivers, reboot, reinstall, reboot, etc.
Half the functionality of the API? Hang on - how many languages, API's, etc are available right now, for free on Linux, and most of them are on the distro disks! And we have more and more RAD platforms being ported every year. I'll leave C# to you lot.
XFree86, I'll admit, is not perfect (yet), but it works for me, and seems as if it will get better (ie antialising, alpha etc, hopefully more stable). At least I can run apps on remote machines without having to get hold of PCAnywhere (which has caused innumerable headaches for remote s/w testers where I work). And we do have GUIs, thanks - lots of them. Diversity is the key here.
QNX is a totally different kettle of fish. It's not really designed to be a new Windows or Linux. Heck, it can't even do D'n'D. It's more for developing RT stuff and is focussed on being slimline. Win2K is still a hulk when it comes to booting. Even running Gnome I can be at a desktop long before my friend's 2K system.
We will get there on all fronts. 2K is the best from MS yet, but I've not been tempted back.
One thing I can recommend is getting hold of an old fixed-sync workstation monitor. Can be had for $50 or less for 1280*1024@72Hz (like my GDM-1961 from an old DecStation. A 19" monitor,/very/ solidly built, i.e. very heavy).
Configuration is a bit fiddly (best to set up fbcon support, as it won't display any other resolution), and you need a Matrox card or a sync-on-green adapter, but that picture is sweet. Keeps the room warm, too!
Well, Photoshop seems to run quite happily under recent WINEs for me! I was amazed... even more than when I ran all the MSOffice apps apart from Access. However Pagemaker won't run, yet.
Ok everybody, I'm a new user to/., so I expect a lot of flame mail and negative moderation. However, I have to agree that the flamewars are getting out of hand re: OSS/Desktop pervasion. I have used Linux for more than 3 years (Slackware in '96, SuSE, RedHat and now Mandrake) and I've loved every single minute of it. However, I will freely admit that Be is an *amazing* MM and gaming OS. It is blindingly fast even on crappy platforms, has great stability and manufacturer backing (apart from NVidia, with all the other issues I feel like dumping my GeForce). They are announcing because it is simply good for their business - looking at the XBox and the PS/2, we are talking about a serious competitor here - bugger Indrema, this could crack it with that kind of performance - and with the BeIA version set-top boxes could really become the basis of blow-you-away entertainment systems. The Linux community really just has to stand up, take the flak and say "OK, they creamed us - now we'll get to work and fix it." Criticism is the only thing that gets what people, and yes, even 'lusers' want. Pointless flames and reactionary attitudes only reduce the Linux community's acceptability. My business runs it in increasingly mission-critical applications, but we don't need our MD finding out too much of the 'zealot stuff'. OK, personally my NT4 desktop at work makes me physically ill, but I can turn around and enjoy the aesthetics and warmth of e... Lets just all take it in the way it's meant and start pushing and coding (I'm just learning C and perl, and the kernel essentials now) for a better Linux - I'm talking about making Linux easy to set up/download/install specifically for either games/development or a business desktop - and in the end, who knows - we might get the best of all worlds, and be able to share it - without the dreaded spectre of 'fragmentation'. my £0.02
Slashdot Mirror
Hey, in the UK you can legally drive a (decommissioned) tank on the public highway. And I've seen someone do that - down Camden Road in North London of all places!
Wonder if it makes a good pickup vehicle? At least you'd be immune to 'road rage'...
Well, with (much) older CRTs this might be the case, however modern ones are designed to fail in a relatively safe manner. I know, because I was once opening up a monitor to try to extract the flyback transformer (for HV experiments). I snapped the tube right at the stem in from of the electron gun. All I heard was a fairly innocuous 'pop' sound. Hardly any glass left the case, and the front of the tube was almost intact. Just don't much on the lead coatings.
Of course you should wear eye protection when you do such things. Heck, they say you should wear a mask when cutting wood these days! (Something about resin particulates).
Hmm - I looked at at and cringed at Jeremy Irons' terrible, hammy acting. As hammy villains go, few beat the great humour and camp of Alan Rickman in "Prince of Thieves" - one of the few good parts of an otherwise dire movie.
Irons seems to have 'lost it' somewhat - I remember him being almost a perfect casting in 'Dead Ringers' (another all-time favourite of mine). But here, 'cheesy' doesn't even begin to describe it. Parmesan with a side-dish of Gorgonzola. Old trainers as a freebie.
Hehe, that reminds me that someone once told me that all barcodes (or at least all I've seen) use the number "6" as a mark for the beginning, centre and end of every barcode, thus giving "6-6-6". And hell, I looked at everything I could find with a code, and he was right!
Now *that* freaked me out for a while - beats people in pubs telling you that Marlboro packet design contains three "K"s!
I'll agree with you here about Acers - I had a really beautiful silver-coloured magnesium cased ultra-portable last year when I was travelling in Brazil and the States. It survived sand from the beach, extreme humidity and temperatures well over 40 degrees C, and a whoops-I-snagged-the-modem-cable fall from a sofa onto a polished wood floor. It booted without hesitation, was quiet and had excellent battery life - nearly 3 hours, as stated in the specs (so often you never get what they say)! It also looked sweet - it got plently of compliments when I opened it up. I still miss it..
Huh? You either have to spin the disk, the laser or give the laser full x-y freedom. How can moving it on a track accomplish anything if the disk's not spinning? Giving full x-y freedom would be a nightmare, and the inertia of 'wiggling' it back and forth would probably eat more power than spinning the disk! Now, as was said before, mulithead is a good idea - if we can get the most efficient laser diodes possible.
Ok, I should have said /occasional/ but regular. The problem seems to be related to reconfiguration of (well known) third party software on the servers. After saving the changes and restarting the service, the machine will often pause or lock up and BSOD when you try to reboot. Luckily we don't do this too often (and we're checking our n/w drivers, scsi drivers, even graphics card drivers all the time for updates. . Perhaps it could be something to do with that software rather than NT, but it happens. And the 'alternate boot' thing has everyone stumped. Very strange - the first hard reboot BSOD's before the GUI/logon appears, the second is normal.
Happily in normal running, when left alone, they are OK (so far).
Can someone mod the reponses to my last post up? An intelligent response that doesn't deserve to stay on 0 - make that two. AC maybe, but I'm going to investigate this and have a go at testing on a coupla' spare boxes. He's right about money and experience - most of the initial cost comes from h/w, the rest from admin/support. X bits per second is not relevant in the real world, considering that if most clients don't get the page within 30 seconds, they automatically click 'refresh' anyway, at which time it's 99% certain bandwidth will have been freed. And don't talk to me about the cost of bandwidth in the UK. Ugh. 768k tiered service is enough for 3-5 months, and, indeed, I'd prefer reliability to speed - who gets the flak when something goes down, after all? Yup, the sysadmin and all his (hardworking) networking staff. Enjoyed this thread - have to go now as BT are bankrupting me for these posts!
Thanks.
However, this doesn't really indicate that Apache might have good performance increases on Linux itself, which is what the article is on about.
...
The most visible and noteworthy addition is the ability to run Apache in a hybrid thread/process mode on any platform that supports both threads and processes. This has shown to mprove the scalability of the Apache HTTPD server significantly in our early testing, on some versions of Unix.
...
As has been discussed before, threading and forking on Linux are highly intertwined, and in may cases neither is significantly better than the other. And, you are talking about an alpha release - not something, as I said, that Dell would wish to support. I'd hope to see such improvements combined with TUX, and maybe then we'll get those top ratings!
BTW, why post AC when you are an Apache guru (or at least you seem to thoroughly read the docs/ChangeLogs)? I don't think anyone would mod you down if you'd given the link in the first place! I only post AC when I respond to obvious flaming threads, unless I'm really baiting! Your point was valid, if sparse...
Ok, you've got a bite - but can you provide a link to substantiate that? I'm looking now, but 'SMP' as a keyword on apache.org returns nothing. I'd be initerested if they're working on this - we have several SMP-capable servers at work that we plan to upgrade when demand ramps up (currently doubling every month!).
Tux is /not/ just for static pages. See previous articles on this where the author states this explicitly. It uses the kernel to serve up pages at a great rate of knots - how they are generated seemed not to have much effect in recent benches (although benches should never, ever be the sole criteria for setting up a web box)
Close!
/. for 'TUX'. A great, threaded, scalable, SMP-aware, kernel-based server, which can hook into Apache, and can server both static and dynamic HTML with equal gusto. Serving requests at speed was a major concern under 2.2 kernels and Apache, but not under this system.
Search
The recent most exciting benhcmark (not that I fully trust them) used SpecWeb99, which tests both kinds of content. It slapped down NT handily. It's still in development, but enterprise-ready solutions are not far-off. S/390's anyone?
Simply untrue, I'm afraid.
With big-time hardware vendors such as IBM, SGI, Sun and others behind us, the situation has advanced far beyond this. If you're talking about desktop hardware, you might be right - cf. NVidia cards, USB mice, etc - but when it comes to the hard stuff (which incidentally is often made by more 'enlightened' manufacturers, a la Symbios, Adaptec, again IBM, and so forth), we are in a much better situation. You won't find many RAID cards are unsupported, I can tell you - I've investigated a fair few for my company, and despite the fact that Dell won't support them under Linux, I could.
The second point is that Apache, as others have stated, is not the best situation to model. See recent TUX articles for a better comparison. It's not optimised for SMP, and in addition Dell aren't going to install the vastly more SMP-aware 2.4-test kernels, which far outperform 2.2 series. If you go to the cutting edge, then you'll see much better results. That cutting edge will soon be the new standard, so keep your eyes open.
And, in slating the 'Freebie-loving' nature of Linux people, you're neglecting to see that management and finance love to keep costs down (depsite my standoffish-ness to such people). I'm sure that with a good failover/clustering solution, Linux could provide more efficient on many counts than 2K, and possibly more stable. I've never seen Apache crash (yet) and instead the IIS servers I use will BSOD on regular occasions, and (strangely) on every other boot.
I'm not a Linux zealot myself, I'm thinking of having a crack at a BSD sometime (heresy!), but I have grown to trust it (*not* stock installs, fully tweaked and hardened - same applies to NT).
Manageability, and especially the remote kind, is my favourite thing about Unices. ssh beats PCa and others hands down in my book. Fast, secure and can make a full VPN for remote admin. Sweet.
Sheesh! Did you bother to read the post before flaming? The word "scope" specifically. NT5 is not for embedded systems - as he said, it's a generic OS. You dont use it to control nuclear plants. You use a much smaller, dedicated system for all critical mechanisms. With failsafe.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't W2K still have issues with lack of driver availability? A friend is stuck using NT4 drivers with his scanner, which intermittently craps out (usually just after I've been round to uninstall drivers, reboot, reinstall, reboot, etc.
Half the functionality of the API? Hang on - how many languages, API's, etc are available right now, for free on Linux, and most of them are on the distro disks! And we have more and more RAD platforms being ported every year. I'll leave C# to you lot.
XFree86, I'll admit, is not perfect (yet), but it works for me, and seems as if it will get better (ie antialising, alpha etc, hopefully more stable). At least I can run apps on remote machines without having to get hold of PCAnywhere (which has caused innumerable headaches for remote s/w testers where I work). And we do have GUIs, thanks - lots of them. Diversity is the key here.
QNX is a totally different kettle of fish. It's not really designed to be a new Windows or Linux. Heck, it can't even do D'n'D. It's more for developing RT stuff and is focussed on being slimline. Win2K is still a hulk when it comes to booting. Even running Gnome I can be at a desktop long before my friend's 2K system.
We will get there on all fronts. 2K is the best from MS yet, but I've not been tempted back.
Hmm, looks like I'm on Acid today. This should of course have been attached to the previous parent.
Doh.
Ohmigod!
That's, like, 1000 trips! Hardcore!
Seriously, don't you mean micrograms?
One thing I can recommend is getting hold of an old fixed-sync workstation monitor. Can be had for $50 or less for 1280*1024@72Hz (like my GDM-1961 from an old DecStation. A 19" monitor, /very/ solidly built, i.e. very heavy).
Configuration is a bit fiddly (best to set up fbcon support, as it won't display any other resolution), and you need a Matrox card or a sync-on-green adapter, but that picture is sweet. Keeps the room warm, too!
Anybody else try one of these?
Well, Photoshop seems to run quite happily under recent WINEs for me! I was amazed... even more than when I ran all the MSOffice apps apart from Access. However Pagemaker won't run, yet.
Ok everybody, I'm a new user to /., so I expect a lot of flame mail and negative moderation. However, I have to agree that the flamewars are getting out of hand re: OSS/Desktop pervasion. I have used Linux for more than 3 years (Slackware in '96, SuSE, RedHat and now Mandrake) and I've loved every single minute of it. However, I will freely admit that Be is an *amazing* MM and gaming OS. It is blindingly fast even on crappy platforms, has great stability and manufacturer backing (apart from NVidia, with all the other issues I feel like dumping my GeForce). They are announcing because it is simply good for their business - looking at the XBox and the PS/2, we are talking about a serious competitor here - bugger Indrema, this could crack it with that kind of performance - and with the BeIA version set-top boxes could really become the basis of blow-you-away entertainment systems. The Linux community really just has to stand up, take the flak and say "OK, they creamed us - now we'll get to work and fix it." Criticism is the only thing that gets what people, and yes, even 'lusers' want. Pointless flames and reactionary attitudes only reduce the Linux community's acceptability. My business runs it in increasingly mission-critical applications, but we don't need our MD finding out too much of the 'zealot stuff'. OK, personally my NT4 desktop at work makes me physically ill, but I can turn around and enjoy the aesthetics and warmth of e... Lets just all take it in the way it's meant and start pushing and coding (I'm just learning C and perl, and the kernel essentials now) for a better Linux - I'm talking about making Linux easy to set up/download/install specifically for either games/development or a business desktop - and in the end, who knows - we might get the best of all worlds, and be able to share it - without the dreaded spectre of 'fragmentation'. my £0.02