"Unix is a proprietary operating system intended to compete against Microsoft Windows"
I thought that originally Unix was distributed for free (source and all, with no support) because AT&T was prohibited from entering the OS market. Unfortunately for the folks at Capital Research, Unix had to wait several years before it could begin competing with Windows, because Windows didn't exist yet. -----
If you go back and look at the article they are referring to GNU's Unix... Which I suspect they are referring to HURD.
As I recall the full sentence is more like...
"GNU's Unix which was developed to compete with Windows, proprietary Unices from Sun, HP, IBM and others..."
I'm curious how you expect to comment on something you haven't read properly?
Hmm... A friend of mine installed Linux about 3-4 years ago at a company to run a simple customer database of some sort.
He used a commercial package to help write this software at the time, and this ran under Slackware.
Last year the multi-port serial board died in the computer. That model was no longer made, the new model did not have drivers for this version of Slackware with a 1.x kernel.
There were drivers available for RedHat 5.0, and so someone tried to upgrade the machine to that.
Well the new serial board worked. But the custom written software did not. It actually reported a rather interesting error:
"This is not a Linux system."
I can still run software written back in 1983 on my Windows NT machine. Not all of it, some of the stuff that uses funky Pharlap memory extensions and such does not always work well.
But even so, backwards compatibility is a design consideration that Linux has ignored.
And not just Windows, most of the commercial Unices, especially SCO, have tried to incorporate backwards compatibility within their systems.
NTFS has some journaling, but I think it may only be of the metadata. Windows 2000 is going to include functionality from Veritas, and may result in a full journaling filesystem. I'm not clear on that part.
When the article discusses SMP, they're talking about larger scale than say 4 processors. More like 32 or so. Obviously IBM leads the way with this, with Sun close behind.
NTFS does do some journaling, but I believe it's of a limited level. It is not the same as Veritas or JFS, etc.
For instance, if an NT(well or a standard Unix) partition of say 500 Gigs or larger were to go down hard. When the machine came back up, to run a full fsck on it would take several hours... You'd be down for the better part of a day or two.
But with Veritas, it can recover quite quickly without having to do a full integrity check on the filesystem, and your back up and running in only a handful of minutes.
As far as your other comment...
NTFS also allows you to extend a logical partition with additional space from another physical partition.
When they're talking about logging, they are most likely talking about Audit logs.
Who opened a file, who ran a program, who wrote to a file, when this occured, etc.
This is a pretty critical piece for many businesses in terms of security policy, etc.
Having a journaling filesystem available such as Veritas is also important, which is what some others assumed was being talked about.
I'm rather amazed at the number of comments calling this FUD when nobody seems to be quite sure what is being talked about. Of course this lack of understanding appears to have been encouraged by the initial poster.
I must say this is actually one of the more intelligently written commentaries I've seen on slashdot. I was under the impression that OSS followers were illiterate.:)
First off, I believe the economic analysis of the commercial software economy is fundamentally flawed. It does not take into account the funding of software failures. i.e. software that obviously cost something to build but yields no return on investment. For example Microsoft Bob.:)
Most software companies that I'm aware of create several bombs for each successful product.
It also doesn't take into account recurring costs of supporting the software base, marketing, sales, and other infrastructure.
In terms of the analysis on why companies pay for software even though they could copy it for free.
Two things here. Well first of all, the threat of being sued for copyright infringement is strong. But second, the capitalist economy recognizes the value given by the software and pays for that to encourage the development of other products. That is, it is in the best self-interest of the capitalist economy to help it's neighbors prosper.
Really it's not a question of being able to easily copy the product. If the source were available for the product, the fear is not that you could copy the software more easily.
The fear is that Group B would be able to look at the source and go "Ah ha! So that's how they did it." and then write their own product which does the same thing. And of course since they didn't have to pay some genius to figure out how to do that, they can charge half the price.
In terms of making OSS commercially viable. The people who are most vocal within the OSS community prevent this. Most persons who are using Linux and other OSS pieces are not doing so because they are good software. They are using them because it was "Free", as in "Free Beer".
College students have long complained about the price of software. I know, I used to do the same thing. We also used to complain about the price of beer.
"Once the initial project is underway it doesn't take long before the open project excells the closed one. "
I'm curious. Can you name any such software project?
All of the "follower" projects I can think of have either died by the wayside(Mozilla, many others), or have still not caught up with the commercial functionality even if they are damn close(Gimp).
I didn't get a chance to read the entire article, because their server is dying. But I did read the first and last pieces.
I find his notion that the Government *SHOULD* be funding competing software projects to commercial products to be distasteful. And while I'm a bleeding heart liberal, this really does strike me as socialism gone too far.
Government *IS* necessary to fund items which would not be possible to perform through free market funding to the benefit of all citizens... roads, police, fire, defense, education, etc.
But software is something that works *VERY* well in the free market. If someone desires some piece of software, they pay a programmer to write it for them. Whether that be paying someone to develop internally, or paying some via the purchase of a commercial product.
And a final point. Funding something via tax money doesn't make it free. It just means that everybody is *FORCED* to pay for it whether they like it or use it.
At least with commercial products, if I don't like it I don't have to pay for it. Whether than be Microsoft, Corel, Oracle or RedHat.
Ok, the guy makes a few good points about software, but I think he confuses them within the historical context.... Let me try to simplify.
If you look at the history, things come in waves.
Mainframes from IBM certainly came early on.
But then DEC entered the scene with PDP/VAX running VMS. They billed their systems as offering performance for less money. Of course at first, the Mainframe guys complained that they didn't scale and were unreliable.
Then later on Sun(and others) entered the scene selling Unix solutions. They billed their systems as offering performance for less money. Of course at first the Mainframe guys, and the VMS guys complained that they didn't scale and were unreliable. Actually as I recall the President at Digital stated that he never expected the Unix market to outgrow the VMS market.
Then a little later on, the PC entered the scene. It was intended for a different purpose. But guess what? Eventually it grew up and now they're claiming(well Microsoft is) performance at a reasonable cost. And the Mainframe, VMS and Unix guys are all saying it doesn't scale and it's unreliable.
Do you see a pattern here?
I fully expect in 5 years, PalmPilots will be offered as the next great solution, offering performance for a low cost!:)
he don't know nuthin' about Mainframes...
on
Philosophies of IT
·
· Score: 1
"Why do you think that the US Missle Cruiser that uses Windows NT to control it's engines had to be towed to port 3 times (the captain typed 0rpm and the engines crashed with a divide by zero). "
I don't understand why Linux users keep trying to grasp onto this story. Your interpretation is obviously incorrect.
Attributing an application error to the OS? Come on, you should know better.
Damn, trn crashed on me. I guess Linux must suck then!
How much are you going to save going with Linux over Solaris? Maybe $600, the price of a Solaris license. Considering hardware and database software is going to be the same price no matter which solution is chosen.
Is Linux signifigantly better than Solaris? No. Is the version of Oracle available for Linux signifigantly better than that for Solaris? No.
In fact the opposite is true. Solaris is signifigantly better than Linux as a server platform, and Oracle has been available for Solaris for a signifigantly longer amount of time than Linux, which generally equates to a more stable product.
I'm having a hard time trying to identify what you see as being positive about the Linux solution? You save very little money, and instead increase your risk by a large margin. That risk factor outweighs the initial cost by a huge margin.
Please leave your religion at the door next time you go to work.
He wasn't saying that Oracle itself was better software. He was saying that Oracle is capable of running on hardware which will more than beat what SQL Server will run on.
Ellison is a *HUGE* proponent of huge massive servers that cost a lot of money, instead of clusters of smaller cheaper servers.
Database configuration is seldom so easy. A search on a table could take anywhere from a second to two minutes depending on what sort of indexes you have setup and other optimization techniques.
yes, they both probably optimized, but in a sense that's how it's going to be done in the real world as well. Nothing wrong with using your tools to optimize the queries.
Now if they optimized the data, or optimized the engine to work with only that subset of data, I agree that'd be cheating.
Seems from the responses that nobody noticed this already occured yesterday.
The result of 71 seconds was from one of Oracle's initial results. They then optimized their database to work better with the specific benchmark and recorded a result of 1 second.
Microsoft is claiming that they worked with HP, didn't optimize their database to specifically work well on that one single benchmark, but instead used real world business ad-hoc type queries...
And achieved an average of a 1 second result.
Thus achieving very similar performance to the solutions from Oracle and IBM for 1/16th the cost.
Now *THAT* is the competition that Microsoft brings to this market.
Never heard of this company. I must be totally out of touch with today's fashion... Stuck in the days of Ralph Lauren and Nautica.
Actually a friend of mine was in a club recently wearing a Microsoft T-shirt, and had an amazing number of women come up to him and ask what he did for a living.:)
I am not entirely certain of this, and a legal type expert would need to be consulted, but...
I do not believe that you can copyright a database of information. Especially in this case since the database contains information of artists and song titles which are already copyrighted by the perspective record label/artist.
You can copyright the presentation and format of the database, however as that is an implementation of an idea.
Anyway, I believe that the information which has been contained within the CDDB archives could be extracted and put into a new format for use with another project. I notice that CDDB no longer has this available for download, but they did six months ago and I would think someone has an old copy lying about.
However, I guess I feel this project is a waste of time and money. Unless you think you can improve this service somehow, I am unsure why you feel it is necessary. Remember you'll need dedicated internet resources to host this. How are you going to pay for that?
There was a recent article posted on news.com about the Truth behind Sun. Sun themselves recognize how worthless Java is as a product, however it's buzzword potential is staggering.
Sun's been going around bandying the word 'Java' to gain name recognition, and now that people know who they are, they're starting to sell hardware at a tremendous pace.
I don't see how embracing Java would ever do anything for HP. I agree that they need to be innovative, but using some intelligence rather than buzzwords is what has made HP succeed over the years.
Why are they porting to "Red Hat" Linux??
on
ClearCase for Linux
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· Score: 1
It's called Configuration Management.
You don't port an application to Linux, because Linux is just a kernel. You need to port them to a specific version of the OS, or rather distribution.
Otherwise how are you going to know if the application is going to work when you developed it on RedHat and someone installs it on Slackware 1.0?
Oh yes, everybody at Ziff Davis are all in collusion on this! They're trying to get the hopes of the Linux geeks up, and then they dash them against the rocks!
Oh get a grip. There are several dozen different reporters and opinion writers and each one is going to have something different to say.
Slashdot Mirror
----
My favorite parts:
"Unix is a proprietary operating system intended to compete against Microsoft Windows"
I thought that originally Unix was distributed for free (source and all, with no support) because AT&T was prohibited from entering the OS market. Unfortunately for the folks at Capital Research, Unix had to wait several years before it could begin competing with Windows, because Windows didn't exist yet.
-----
If you go back and look at the article they are referring to GNU's Unix... Which I suspect they are referring to HURD.
As I recall the full sentence is more like...
"GNU's Unix which was developed to compete with Windows, proprietary Unices from Sun, HP, IBM and others..."
I'm curious how you expect to comment on something you haven't read properly?
Hmm... A friend of mine installed Linux about 3-4 years ago at a company to run a simple customer database of some sort.
He used a commercial package to help write this software at the time, and this ran under Slackware.
Last year the multi-port serial board died in the computer. That model was no longer made, the new model did not have drivers for this version of Slackware with a 1.x kernel.
There were drivers available for RedHat 5.0, and so someone tried to upgrade the machine to that.
Well the new serial board worked. But the custom written software did not. It actually reported a rather interesting error:
"This is not a Linux system."
I can still run software written back in 1983 on my Windows NT machine. Not all of it, some of the stuff that uses funky Pharlap memory extensions and such does not always work well.
But even so, backwards compatibility is a design consideration that Linux has ignored.
And not just Windows, most of the commercial Unices, especially SCO, have tried to incorporate backwards compatibility within their systems.
I think it's absolutely ridiculous to be able to take common english words and prevent people from using them.
It's frankly even more stupid than software patents.
NTFS has some journaling, but I think it may only be of the metadata. Windows 2000 is going to include functionality from Veritas, and may result in a full journaling filesystem. I'm not clear on that part.
When the article discusses SMP, they're talking about larger scale than say 4 processors. More like 32 or so. Obviously IBM leads the way with this, with Sun close behind.
NTFS does do some journaling, but I believe it's of a limited level. It is not the same as Veritas or JFS, etc.
For instance, if an NT(well or a standard Unix) partition of say 500 Gigs or larger were to go down hard. When the machine came back up, to run a full fsck on it would take several hours... You'd be down for the better part of a day or two.
But with Veritas, it can recover quite quickly without having to do a full integrity check on the filesystem, and your back up and running in only a handful of minutes.
As far as your other comment...
NTFS also allows you to extend a logical partition with additional space from another physical partition.
When they're talking about logging, they are most likely talking about Audit logs.
Who opened a file, who ran a program, who wrote to a file, when this occured, etc.
This is a pretty critical piece for many businesses in terms of security policy, etc.
Having a journaling filesystem available such as Veritas is also important, which is what some others assumed was being talked about.
I'm rather amazed at the number of comments calling this FUD when nobody seems to be quite sure what is being talked about. Of course this lack of understanding appears to have been encouraged by the initial poster.
Funny that that is the same excuse that software pirates have always used.
I must say this is actually one of the more intelligently written commentaries I've seen on slashdot. I was under the impression that OSS followers were illiterate. :)
:)
First off, I believe the economic analysis of the commercial software economy is fundamentally flawed. It does not take into account the funding of software failures. i.e. software that obviously cost something to build but yields no return on investment. For example Microsoft Bob.
Most software companies that I'm aware of create several bombs for each successful product.
It also doesn't take into account recurring costs of supporting the software base, marketing, sales, and other infrastructure.
In terms of the analysis on why companies pay for software even though they could copy it for free.
Two things here. Well first of all, the threat of being sued for copyright infringement is strong. But second, the capitalist economy recognizes the value given by the software and pays for that to encourage the development of other products. That is, it is in the best self-interest of the capitalist economy to help it's neighbors prosper.
Really it's not a question of being able to easily copy the product. If the source were available for the product, the fear is not that you could copy the software more easily.
The fear is that Group B would be able to look at the source and go "Ah ha! So that's how they did it." and then write their own product which does the same thing. And of course since they didn't have to pay some genius to figure out how to do that, they can charge half the price.
In terms of making OSS commercially viable. The people who are most vocal within the OSS community prevent this. Most persons who are using Linux and other OSS pieces are not doing so because they are good software. They are using them because it was "Free", as in "Free Beer".
College students have long complained about the price of software. I know, I used to do the same thing. We also used to complain about the price of beer.
"Once the initial project is underway it doesn't take long before the open project excells the closed one. "
I'm curious. Can you name any such software project?
All of the "follower" projects I can think of have either died by the wayside(Mozilla, many others), or have still not caught up with the commercial functionality even if they are damn close(Gimp).
Sigh....
s a.arrest.03/index.html
If you would read the CNN article...
http://www.cnn.com/TECH/computing/9904/02/melis
You'd find out they nabbed this guy by tracking the posting host, the AOL account, and then the phone line used to dial up to AOL.
About the only thing the GUID would be used for might be a piece of evidence linking the document to the computer used to write the virus.
I didn't get a chance to read the entire article, because their server is dying. But I did read the first and last pieces.
I find his notion that the Government *SHOULD* be funding competing software projects to commercial products to be distasteful. And while I'm a bleeding heart liberal, this really does strike me as socialism gone too far.
Government *IS* necessary to fund items which would not be possible to perform through free market funding to the benefit of all citizens... roads, police, fire, defense, education, etc.
But software is something that works *VERY* well in the free market. If someone desires some piece of software, they pay a programmer to write it for them. Whether that be paying someone to develop internally, or paying some via the purchase of a commercial product.
And a final point. Funding something via tax money doesn't make it free. It just means that everybody is *FORCED* to pay for it whether they like it or use it.
At least with commercial products, if I don't like it I don't have to pay for it. Whether than be Microsoft, Corel, Oracle or RedHat.
Ok, the guy makes a few good points about software, but I think he confuses them within the historical context.... Let me try to simplify.
:)
If you look at the history, things come in waves.
Mainframes from IBM certainly came early on.
But then DEC entered the scene with PDP/VAX running VMS. They billed their systems as offering performance for less money. Of course at first, the Mainframe guys complained that they didn't scale and were unreliable.
Then later on Sun(and others) entered the scene selling Unix solutions. They billed their systems as offering performance for less money. Of course at first the Mainframe guys, and the VMS guys complained that they didn't scale and were unreliable. Actually as I recall the President at Digital stated that he never expected the Unix market to outgrow the VMS market.
Then a little later on, the PC entered the scene. It was intended for a different purpose. But guess what? Eventually it grew up and now they're claiming(well Microsoft is) performance at a reasonable cost. And the Mainframe, VMS and Unix guys are all saying it doesn't scale and it's unreliable.
Do you see a pattern here?
I fully expect in 5 years, PalmPilots will be offered as the next great solution, offering performance for a low cost!
"Why do you think that the US Missle Cruiser that
uses Windows NT to control it's engines had to
be towed to port 3 times (the captain typed 0rpm
and the engines crashed with a divide by zero). "
I don't understand why Linux users keep trying to grasp onto this story. Your interpretation is obviously incorrect.
Attributing an application error to the OS? Come on, you should know better.
Damn, trn crashed on me. I guess Linux must suck then!
I was referring to religion in the context of the operating system war.
You learn it eventually....
Let's analyze this a bit.
How much are you going to save going with Linux over Solaris? Maybe $600, the price of a Solaris license. Considering hardware and database software is going to be the same price no matter which solution is chosen.
Is Linux signifigantly better than Solaris? No.
Is the version of Oracle available for Linux signifigantly better than that for Solaris? No.
In fact the opposite is true. Solaris is signifigantly better than Linux as a server platform, and Oracle has been available for Solaris for a signifigantly longer amount of time than Linux, which generally equates to a more stable product.
I'm having a hard time trying to identify what you see as being positive about the Linux solution? You save very little money, and instead increase your risk by a large margin. That risk factor outweighs the initial cost by a huge margin.
Please leave your religion at the door next time you go to work.
I think you misunderstood Ellison's challenge.
He wasn't saying that Oracle itself was better software. He was saying that Oracle is capable of running on hardware which will more than beat what SQL Server will run on.
Ellison is a *HUGE* proponent of huge massive servers that cost a lot of money, instead of clusters of smaller cheaper servers.
You don't think this is going to make Oracle think twice about their next version, as well as their pricing structure?
But that wouldn't be accurate either.
Database configuration is seldom so easy. A search on a table could take anywhere from a second to two minutes depending on what sort of indexes you have setup and other optimization techniques.
yes, they both probably optimized, but in a sense that's how it's going to be done in the real world as well. Nothing wrong with using your tools to optimize the queries.
Now if they optimized the data, or optimized the engine to work with only that subset of data, I agree that'd be cheating.
Seems from the responses that nobody noticed this already occured yesterday.
The result of 71 seconds was from one of Oracle's initial results. They then optimized their database to work better with the specific benchmark and recorded a result of 1 second.
Microsoft is claiming that they worked with HP, didn't optimize their database to specifically work well on that one single benchmark, but instead used real world business ad-hoc type queries...
And achieved an average of a 1 second result.
Thus achieving very similar performance to the solutions from Oracle and IBM for 1/16th the cost.
Now *THAT* is the competition that Microsoft brings to this market.
And Larry Ellison can eat his shoe now.
Erik's response was very childish.
That's about all there is to say.
Never heard of this company. I must be totally out of touch with today's fashion... Stuck in the days of Ralph Lauren and Nautica.
:)
Actually a friend of mine was in a club recently wearing a Microsoft T-shirt, and had an amazing number of women come up to him and ask what he did for a living.
I am not entirely certain of this, and a legal type expert would need to be consulted, but...
I do not believe that you can copyright a database of information. Especially in this case since the database contains information of artists and song titles which are already copyrighted by the perspective record label/artist.
You can copyright the presentation and format of the database, however as that is an implementation of an idea.
Anyway, I believe that the information which has been contained within the CDDB archives could be extracted and put into a new format for use with another project. I notice that CDDB no longer has this available for download, but they did six months ago and I would think someone has an old copy lying about.
However, I guess I feel this project is a waste of time and money. Unless you think you can improve this service somehow, I am unsure why you feel it is necessary. Remember you'll need dedicated internet resources to host this. How are you going to pay for that?
Steve
Java is a buzzword with no substance behind it.
There was a recent article posted on news.com about the Truth behind Sun. Sun themselves recognize how worthless Java is as a product, however it's buzzword potential is staggering.
Sun's been going around bandying the word 'Java' to gain name recognition, and now that people know who they are, they're starting to sell hardware at a tremendous pace.
I don't see how embracing Java would ever do anything for HP. I agree that they need to be innovative, but using some intelligence rather than buzzwords is what has made HP succeed over the years.
It's called Configuration Management.
You don't port an application to Linux, because Linux is just a kernel. You need to port them to a specific version of the OS, or rather distribution.
Otherwise how are you going to know if the application is going to work when you developed it on RedHat and someone installs it on Slackware 1.0?
Oh yes, everybody at Ziff Davis are all in collusion on this! They're trying to get the hopes of the Linux geeks up, and then they dash them against the rocks!
Oh get a grip. There are several dozen different reporters and opinion writers and each one is going to have something different to say.