So you know you're probably basing your arguments against Linux on version 1.2 or something.
I've worked on large networks of both (admin of a large linux network, and designing software for a large mostly FreeBSD network) and the fact of the matter is that the technical reasons such as 'stability, security, speed' are there in both the OS's.
If you need SMP, you use Linux. FreeBSD's SMP support is horrid versus a 2.2 Linux box.
FreeBSD tends to handle massive swapping conditions better than Linux, this is true, but when you are deploying machines that are properly spec'd they don't swap at all anyway.
Security is better in FreeBSD? I'd like to know how this conclusion has been drawn. The fact of the matter is that in most situations the deployed servers in large networks tend to be running very customized setups. If you haven't taken the time to set them up properly, they'll be insecure, if you have, they won't be. That's an admin thing, after all, we don't see very many kernel level attacks these days, and we all know that we tend to run the *exact* same software on *BSD or Linux machines.
I use FreeBSD, OpenBSD and Linux all on a regular basis. They all have their strong points and weak points, but truly, I think most unbiased comparisons of Linux and FreeBSD show that they are very competitive operating systems with very similar features.
As for 100% reliability, I've seen the following operating systems turn to shit at some point in my life: Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, Solaris, Irix, HP-UX, OSF and of course win*. Nothing is 100%. 99.9999, maybe, but not 100.
there's a perl script that I use for that called pkg_version.
a simple pkg_version -v | grep "<" gives me a list of everything that's definitely outdated, and then pkg_version -v | grep "?" gives me the ones that it's not sure about (multiple versions in the index or installed on the system, e.g. bash, gcc, acroread, etc)
the only issue is occasionally a package changes names and thus pkg_version dies.
as for those who want a make upgrade, do a make, then a pkg_delete then a make install (having backed up any config files). and that's as close as you can come for the moment, i believe.
I've spec'd quite a few VA boxes in random consulting jobs and have always had spectacular performance and reliability with them, but the one anecdotal reference regarding service that I'll give is this.
We hooked up the box to use as a little firewall, and it wouldn't work. When I mentioned 'never mind, it's probably something flaky with our router, thank you for your help' they asked what kind of router it was, and offered to get somebody with Cisco knowledge to help. And this was for free. This was the first machine I ever bought from them, and was the incident that sold me on them for life. (the issue turned out to be a bad cable. DOH! that part of the incident convinced me to buy a good cable test kit)
Truly, there are some of us who have no desire to use DeCSS (or more accurately, derivitives thereof) to pirate movies. Currently I own a modified Pioneer DV-09 which plays all regions and does not output macrovision. The perfect machine to make copies on my DV recorder. I own approximately 150 DVDs and how many copies have I made? zero. exactly zero.
I'd love to have a DVD player available for FreeBSD/Linux/etc. Hell, I'd even like to see open source software on the windows platform. Without the technology in DeCSS, that just isn't possible. Much luck to those who fight this fight.
As to the video industry, as one of your more active consumers, I have to say, chill. One-way cable systems everywhere are vulnerable to descrambling, yet most people pay for their premium channels. DirecTV is vulnerable to card reprogramming with the older smart cards... free everything... yet most of us still pay our monthly fees.
And most importantly, those of us who know anything about DVD production know that you don't have to decrypt the DVD to clone it.
DVD players output MacroVision... unless of course you're a fidelity nut like myself and have your DVD player modified so that doesn't happen. (i have one of those 'evil' regionless, macro-vision free DVD players... and yet somehow i've still never copied a movie)
Nope, it's correct. Gemstar has patented basically everything which is obviously neccessary for a useful program guide. Up to and including the idea of highlighting the current selected grid.
Right now gemstar has a stranglehold on the cable industry with regards to program guides. it's evil, and i've been working with it for a bit. now it's more widely known to be evil. I so hope someday people realize that highlighting a grid with the time and program isn't really very clever or non-obvious.
If you're referring to your personal machine, perhaps you're right, assuming you love to do system maintenance. In a corporation, the cost factor definately swings towards SCSI and RAID. While they may seem quite expensive, the fact of the matter is that downtime costs are usually in the thousands/hour for small companies and go up from there. (put 200 people with an average salary of $70k out of work for an hour, and it just cost you $7000.) Cheap hardware starts looking really expensive when you realize that.
You can argue that your personal system downtime costs nothing, but that assumes that a) you don't value your time or you like spending it rebuilding systems or b) that you don't do anything worthwhile on your computer anyway. If these are true, then buy the cheapest thing you can find. Otherwise, I suggest looking at the MTBFs and realizing that about half the drives fail before that time.
A lot of people use this EIDE crap, thinking it's great for a server and what not, after all it works for their desktop. It's not.
While I'll admit, there are some SCSI disks which are differentiated from the IDE drives solely by their interface, the higher end SCSI disks usually do have some serious advantages.
Some of the bigger SCSI advantages are
low CPU load
the ability to queue multiple requests asynchronously.
higher quality components. yes, i know this is a manufacturer's choice, but true server-class hard drives use far more reliable actuators than your little desktop drive. And for those who point out the MTBF, remember that's the MTBF when used as a desktop drive, not as a news spool
15 devices off a single SCSI controller is standard. 4 devices off a single EIDE controller is standard.
the fact of the matter is that if you want a cheap drive, you can buy a cheap EIDE drive, or a cheap SCSI drive. if you want a *good* drive, ultra-high quality EIDE drives are virtually non-existant, leaving you with good ole' SCSI.
A lot of people have this odd notion that when two computers are PIII 600s with 256 megs RAM and 18 gigs hard drive, but one costs $500 more, that the more expensive one is automatically a ripoff. People seem to forget that sometimes the more expensive one has better components and is less likely to die and wipe out the past two weeks of work. (all you non-student types, how much did you make in the past two weeks? I'd bet a *lot* more than $500). We need less ads that say the price, and more like the great VA Linux ad with the steak dinner on one page, and the TV dinner on the other.
At the local library in my town (I live in the middle of Bucks County, Pennsylvania, USA), playboy is available by request behind the front counter. I believe to get it you have to show that you're 18, though I'm not really certain.
I personally had a mother who died of cancer. and I personally think your attitude is horrible. I took my VA Linux "winnings" and invested them in something with no chance of a financial ROI... research.
No, I'm not saying anybody else should do this. Just that I wish everybody would stop telling everybody how to spend their money. There are far more good causes than I know how to give to, so I pick and choose. I'm sure this is the norm, for those of us who give to charity.
Your comment is true, but it's not even remotely correct for 'all unices'. Take a look at the trusted unices sometime. ACLs and the ability to lock pieces of the system from the administrator aren't Microsoft 'innovations'. IMNSHO, the biggest security problem with NT has nothing to do with it's security model and everything to do with the implementation. I agree, the model itself is conceptually fine. As somebody's.sig notes 'the difference between theory and reality is that in theory there is no difference between theory and reality.'
B&N is bad because as far as 'real world bookstores' go, B&N and Borders have an effective duopoly. They're very quickly destroying the independant bookseller due to the fact that they can do discounts that can't be matched by an independant. This despite the fact that it's the rare B&N or Borders employee who has a true love of books and could help you with a request like 'i just read If On A Winter's Night A Traveler and found the storytelling style intriguing. Can you recommend a work I'd probably like that's not by Italo Calvino?'. I use this request as an example because it was my last request and an independant bookstore.
such as this guy which i received at 'yougotthisfromslashdot@overtone.org' the other day. --- We are writing in response to your software advertisement on the Internet, and will be honored to feature your software in our listings with a description and link to your home page., etc etc etc.
There seems to be an opinion floating around here that mental illness simply doesn't 'truly' exist. That most depression is just a 'down' feeling, and that other disorders such as bipolar disorder could be cured by a lifestyle change.
Ladies and gentleman, I hate to tell you this, but mental illness is real. Depression isn't a 'slightly draggy feeling' that you can just shake yourself out of. It's a chemical imbalance. Yes, there are things one can do to help from diet and exercise to therapy, but sometimes all that isn't enough. In those cases you have people who have been given a new chance for life due to drugs.
One poster commented 'It's a way for people to not have to take responsibility for their actions'. This is simply not true. While a few bad apples may abuse the system in this manner, it's the exception not the rule. Mental illness is hard to understand because it doesn't have physical signs that are easily understandable like migraine headaches, arthritis or heartburn. It's easy to get at some grasp of what it must be like to get heartburn. It's far harder to understand what it's like to be truly manic.
Another poster commented 'all solutions cannot be found in a pill'. I agree with you 100%. But I would also argue that sometimes pills help. If somebody has a back injury, we don't get upset that they use pain relievers, yet there is an attitude of intolerance for somebody who is manic depressive to use mood stabilizers. Some people feel that they should be able to 'just control themselves' and stop random switches between mania and depression. These people also probably don't realize the statistics for how dangerous these disorders are. I agree there is a problem with overmedication today, but medication itself is far from unneccessary.
A sidenote to Roblimo. I've never criticized/. admins before, and I agree that political correctness is mostly a bunch of baloney, but the title truly is very inappropriate. Just a thought for consideration
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Do you have a reference for the figures of DVD consortium license fees? I'd be *very* interested in such a document.
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yeah, all those little programs. apache. sendmail. bind. gtk. perl.
but on my FreeBSD box, actually yes, gnu ls is called 'gnuls'.
DrWiggy,
So you know you're probably basing your arguments against Linux on version 1.2 or something.
I've worked on large networks of both (admin of a large linux network, and designing software for a large mostly FreeBSD network) and the fact of the matter is that the technical reasons such as 'stability, security, speed' are there in both the OS's.
If you need SMP, you use Linux. FreeBSD's SMP support is horrid versus a 2.2 Linux box.
FreeBSD tends to handle massive swapping conditions better than Linux, this is true, but when you are deploying machines that are properly spec'd they don't swap at all anyway.
Security is better in FreeBSD? I'd like to know how this conclusion has been drawn. The fact of the matter is that in most situations the deployed servers in large networks tend to be running very customized setups. If you haven't taken the time to set them up properly, they'll be insecure, if you have, they won't be. That's an admin thing, after all, we don't see very many kernel level attacks these days, and we all know that we tend to run the *exact* same software on *BSD or Linux machines.
I use FreeBSD, OpenBSD and Linux all on a regular basis. They all have their strong points and weak points, but truly, I think most unbiased comparisons of Linux and FreeBSD show that they are very competitive operating systems with very similar features.
As for 100% reliability, I've seen the following operating systems turn to shit at some point in my life: Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, Solaris, Irix, HP-UX, OSF and of course win*. Nothing is 100%. 99.9999, maybe, but not 100.
there's a perl script that I use for that called pkg_version.
a simple pkg_version -v | grep "<" gives me a list of everything that's definitely outdated, and then pkg_version -v | grep "?" gives me the ones that it's not sure about (multiple versions in the index or installed on the system, e.g. bash, gcc, acroread, etc)
the only issue is occasionally a package changes names and thus pkg_version dies.
as for those who want a make upgrade, do a make, then a pkg_delete then a make install (having backed up any config files). and that's as close as you can come for the moment, i believe.
I've spec'd quite a few VA boxes in random consulting jobs and have always had spectacular performance and reliability with them, but the one anecdotal reference regarding service that I'll give is this.
We hooked up the box to use as a little firewall, and it wouldn't work. When I mentioned 'never mind, it's probably something flaky with our router, thank you for your help' they asked what kind of router it was, and offered to get somebody with Cisco knowledge to help. And this was for free. This was the first machine I ever bought from them, and was the incident that sold me on them for life. (the issue turned out to be a bad cable. DOH! that part of the incident convinced me to buy a good cable test kit)
Truly, there are some of us who have no desire to use DeCSS (or more accurately, derivitives thereof) to pirate movies. Currently I own a modified Pioneer DV-09 which plays all regions and does not output macrovision. The perfect machine to make copies on my DV recorder. I own approximately 150 DVDs and how many copies have I made? zero. exactly zero.
I'd love to have a DVD player available for FreeBSD/Linux/etc. Hell, I'd even like to see open source software on the windows platform. Without the technology in DeCSS, that just isn't possible. Much luck to those who fight this fight.
As to the video industry, as one of your more active consumers, I have to say, chill. One-way cable systems everywhere are vulnerable to descrambling, yet most people pay for their premium channels. DirecTV is vulnerable to card reprogramming with the older smart cards... free everything... yet most of us still pay our monthly fees.
And most importantly, those of us who know anything about DVD production know that you don't have to decrypt the DVD to clone it.
DVD players output MacroVision... unless of course you're a fidelity nut like myself and have your DVD player modified so that doesn't happen. (i have one of those 'evil' regionless, macro-vision free DVD players... and yet somehow i've still never copied a movie)
Thank you.
allow me to repeat that for emphasis.
Thank you.
That is all
Nope, it's correct. Gemstar has patented basically everything which is obviously neccessary for a useful program guide. Up to and including the idea of highlighting the current selected grid.
Right now gemstar has a stranglehold on the cable industry with regards to program guides. it's evil, and i've been working with it for a bit. now it's more widely known to be evil. I so hope someday people realize that highlighting a grid with the time and program isn't really very clever or non-obvious.
If you're referring to your personal machine, perhaps you're right, assuming you love to do system maintenance. In a corporation, the cost factor definately swings towards SCSI and RAID. While they may seem quite expensive, the fact of the matter is that downtime costs are usually in the thousands/hour for small companies and go up from there. (put 200 people with an average salary of $70k out of work for an hour, and it just cost you $7000.) Cheap hardware starts looking really expensive when you realize that.
You can argue that your personal system downtime costs nothing, but that assumes that a) you don't value your time or you like spending it rebuilding systems or b) that you don't do anything worthwhile on your computer anyway. If these are true, then buy the cheapest thing you can find. Otherwise, I suggest looking at the MTBFs and realizing that about half the drives fail before that time.
A lot of people use this EIDE crap, thinking it's great for a server and what not, after all it works for their desktop. It's not.
While I'll admit, there are some SCSI disks which are differentiated from the IDE drives solely by their interface, the higher end SCSI disks usually do have some serious advantages.
Some of the bigger SCSI advantages are
the fact of the matter is that if you want a cheap drive, you can buy a cheap EIDE drive, or a cheap SCSI drive. if you want a *good* drive, ultra-high quality EIDE drives are virtually non-existant, leaving you with good ole' SCSI.
A lot of people have this odd notion that when two computers are PIII 600s with 256 megs RAM and 18 gigs hard drive, but one costs $500 more, that the more expensive one is automatically a ripoff. People seem to forget that sometimes the more expensive one has better components and is less likely to die and wipe out the past two weeks of work. (all you non-student types, how much did you make in the past two weeks? I'd bet a *lot* more than $500). We need less ads that say the price, and more like the great VA Linux ad with the steak dinner on one page, and the TV dinner on the other.
was this just a clever way to repeat the tired "open source cannot make money" monologue?
nah, it wasn't clever at all.
i would. earlier today i made a cd from an out-of-print indie casette, and also made some mp3s for the hell of it.
At the local library in my town (I live in the middle of Bucks County, Pennsylvania, USA), playboy is available by request behind the front counter. I believe to get it you have to show that you're 18, though I'm not really certain.
Actually, libraries *do* tend to carry backissues of playboy. Most college libraries have every issue and the older ones on film/fiche.
an orbital fan. dig it.
I personally had a mother who died of cancer. and I personally think your attitude is horrible. I took my VA Linux "winnings" and invested them in something with no chance of a financial ROI... research.
No, I'm not saying anybody else should do this. Just that I wish everybody would stop telling everybody how to spend their money. There are far more good causes than I know how to give to, so I pick and choose. I'm sure this is the norm, for those of us who give to charity.
Your comment is true, but it's not even remotely correct for 'all unices'. Take a look at the trusted unices sometime. ACLs and the ability to lock pieces of the system from the administrator aren't Microsoft 'innovations'. IMNSHO, the biggest security problem with NT has nothing to do with it's security model and everything to do with the implementation. I agree, the model itself is conceptually fine. As somebody's .sig notes 'the difference between theory and reality is that in theory there is no difference between theory and reality.'
The phone touted on their website is a 486, running "Windows CE, a new and revolutionary operating system from Microsoft"
Le sigh.
How to make a $1M prototype:
Congratulations, you've just built your very first $1M prototype.
I'm guessing that this was probably demo'd at the western cable show last week or something.
B&N is bad because as far as 'real world bookstores' go, B&N and Borders have an effective duopoly. They're very quickly destroying the independant bookseller due to the fact that they can do discounts that can't be matched by an independant. This despite the fact that it's the rare B&N or Borders employee who has a true love of books and could help you with a request like 'i just read If On A Winter's Night A Traveler and found the storytelling style intriguing. Can you recommend a work I'd probably like that's not by Italo Calvino?'. I use this request as an example because it was my last request and an independant bookstore.
such as this guy which i received at 'yougotthisfromslashdot@overtone.org' the other day. ---
We are writing in response to your software advertisement on the Internet, and
will be honored to feature your software in our listings with a description and
link to your home page., etc etc etc.
There seems to be an opinion floating around here that mental illness simply doesn't 'truly' exist. That most depression is just a 'down' feeling, and that other disorders such as bipolar disorder could be cured by a lifestyle change.
/. admins before, and I agree that political correctness is mostly a bunch of baloney, but the title truly is very inappropriate. Just a thought for consideration
Ladies and gentleman, I hate to tell you this, but mental illness is real. Depression isn't a 'slightly draggy feeling' that you can just shake yourself out of. It's a chemical imbalance. Yes, there are things one can do to help from diet and exercise to therapy, but sometimes all that isn't enough. In those cases you have people who have been given a new chance for life due to drugs.
One poster commented 'It's a way for people to not have to take responsibility for their actions'. This is simply not true. While a few bad apples may abuse the system in this manner, it's the exception not the rule. Mental illness is hard to understand because it doesn't have physical signs that are easily understandable like migraine headaches, arthritis or heartburn. It's easy to get at some grasp of what it must be like to get heartburn. It's far harder to understand what it's like to be truly manic.
Another poster commented 'all solutions cannot be found in a pill'. I agree with you 100%. But I would also argue that sometimes pills help. If somebody has a back injury, we don't get upset that they use pain relievers, yet there is an attitude of intolerance for somebody who is manic depressive to use mood stabilizers. Some people feel that they should be able to 'just control themselves' and stop random switches between mania and depression. These people also probably don't realize the statistics for how dangerous these disorders are. I agree there is a problem with overmedication today, but medication itself is far from unneccessary.
A sidenote to Roblimo. I've never criticized