Apple had a very different set of problems, but has actually pulled something similar off three times.
68k to PowerPC: Lots of apps didn't work, though it was really hard to tell what System 7 broke versus what 68k to PowerPC broke.
OS9 to OS10: utter nightmare. Classic works great as long as you're on a single-user system running as admin with well behaved applications. You run into everything from apps that expect to busy-wait to the fact that OS9 has absolutely no idea what's going on with concepts like file permissions. Ridiculous support nightmare on anything with non-admin users, multiple users, etc.
OS10 PowerPC to OS10 Intel: 99% of stuff just works. Very clean, very well done. The handful of apps that broke were generally easily fixed, or were broken by design (i.e. anything made by Adobe)
XP on Win7 is more like the whole OS9 to OS10 transition, and like that transition, your best bet is to ignore the existence of XPM (just like your best bet was to ignore the existence of Classic)
I've actually been running Vista as a primary desktop OS for about a month, after 14 years of Unix type OS as a primary desktop system (Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, OSX, even Solaris)
Why? It's a change. I was too comfortable with all of the Linuxes, the others weren't a good fit for an ultralight Thinkpad. If you don't force yourself to be uncomfortable now and then, you stagnate. (I do still have Fedora in a VM for quite a few things - I'm trying to make myself learn, not be a masochist)
The specific OS is Vista Business 32-bit, because that's what I had a license for (bought it with the laptop "just in case"). If I were to reinstall, I would go with a 64-bit version.
For backups, I am currently using Acronis TrueImage. Based on a test "full image restore", it works. It's primarily an image backup utility, not rsync or similar. I'm just doing routine backups to an external hard drive.
What you're asking for is actually pretty difficult under Windows, as far as I can tell; it' s far easier on Linux or OSX. On the other hand, there is something to be said for a full native Excel 2007 (sorry OOo fans, but calc is nowhere remotely close to a usable Excel replacement, including fundamental design flaws in the solver that have been there since at least 1.1)
I'd say the ultimate netbook would be a slightly ruggedized version of the Lenovo X61s I already own, plus the built-in 3G that I wish I had ordered. (not that 3G via a USB 'modem' is bad)
For that matter, how about an X200s? Starting weight of 2.5 pounds, but a 'real' computer. The only disadvantage here is that they are expensive, but the article said 'ultimate', not 'ultimate when compromised to make it cheap'.
The sign-up page for Google Apps Premier says you get 99.9% uptime. That's about 1/3 of a day downtime per year, or a couple of hours per quarter.
Google seems to be managing to hit that 99.9% uptime, just not exceed it. VERY few in-house e-mail systems actually manage 99.9% uptime, especially when you consider scheduled maintenance and downtime (remember, Google's 99.9% is for all downtime)
In fact, I have seen very few Exchange systems that manage much more than 99% uptime. However, for those organizations, there are other compelling advantages to Exchange.
3G wireless data networking is a service with very limited total bandwidth. It has a premium price, and is primarily targeted at business users. Given the basic physical limits involved with the radio spectrum in question, you really have to either do this or have specific bandwidth quotas to effectively manage a network.
Having said that, I prefer Verizon's solution of clearly stated 5GB quota with overage at a known and stated cost. I don't use their service as a primary internet connection, but it's invaluable for the ability to connect from *anywhere*. This is particularly useful as I run my own consulting company, and need to be able to have access no matter what.
(Ultimate lightweight setup: Xseries Thinkpad plus Verizon EVDO modem)
This is an excellent argument for the practical interview; instead of just asking questions, have somebody actually show you what they know.
Mind you, this is also a good argument for forcing students to show their intermediate work (design, etc) and to do said intermediate work with pen and paper. It's a lot harder to outsource something that would be in the wrong handwriting and have to be Fedex'd from India.
As part of a senior project that was actually the visualization piece of somebody's thesis, I wrote a data visualization/analysis frontend (for software performance analysis data storied in a database) in perl. Full GUI, Perl/Tk, graphs/charts/etc. This was in the 1999-2000 timeframe.
It ran quite well on the hardware of the day, and had the advantage of actually behaving on just about everything in a very mixed-platform campus (Linux, Windows, Solaris, AIX, etc).
In your description of the extended warranty racket, you have just describe Apple's business model. You buy something expensive and of marginal quality (sorry, apple's hardware build quality is awful, though OSX is really nice) and then you have the big upsell to Applecare (takes care of everything for 3 years).
Then you probably need to be running Windows, at least on the client.
I have a day job as the head system administrator for a medium sized but very high-tech non-profit. We run Macintosh (OSX) clients and Linux servers because they do what we need to do, and do it well. I have also been working with Linux and various other forms of Unix since 1994 (this includes using Linux and/or FreeBSD as a primary desktop OS since 1994. LaTeX works fine as a word processor if you know what you're doing.)
I also do consulting work for several smallish companies, and they all run Windows. It's really simple - if you need good 2D CAD software, you need Windows. If you need a modern multi-user accounting package that can do strange things like payroll and integrate with direct deposit, you need Windows. If you need a *good* spreadsheet (no, OOo calc doesn't count), you need Windows or OSX. If you want to run all of this on one desktop operating system, you need Windows. Crossover Office, WINE, VMWare, etc. aren't going to convert many small businesses; they want less complexity, not more. (some of these clients have Linux servers - network edge, multiprotocol file and print services, web apps, etc. - but they are close to 100% Windows on the desktop)
I think that you could convert a LOT of small businesses over if you could get a Peachtree or Quickbooks port for Linux. However, for small business, you don't stand a chance until you get *good* accounting software. OOo calc not sucking would really help too; lots of businesses make very heavy use of spreadsheets. (OOo Writer sucks, but so does Word. OOo Impress is adequate, as it's all pretty much PowerPointless anyway.)
If you're looking for long-term savings, I'd suggest considering Windows TS clients (use your old XP machines/licenses/etc), and a Windows 2k3 server terminal server. It won't be all that cheap to setup initially, but you will be able to significantly reduce your maintenance headaches.
Look at the business needs, and pick technologies that meet the business needs. Make technology work FOR your business; I've see what happens when you flip that around, and it isn't pretty.
RT is a very powerful open source ticketing system, and RTx::AssetTracker adds adequate asset tracking to it. You would probably have to do a bit of work to get it to work with barcodes (or just use a barcode scanner with the cursor on the right page - most just send standard keyboard type input IIRC).
It's all open source, written in Perl, and really just works very well. And if it turns out to be inadequate, you'll learn enough from the experience to have a much better idea of what you actually need.
As somebody who interviews, selects, and supervises interns - the most important thing you can bring is attitude. You have to be ready to work, willing to work, and up for stretching to and beyond what you think the limits of your abilities are. You also can't consider physical work to be beneath you; especially in smaller organizations (like mine) sometimes everybody needs to help setup for a conference, move furniture, etc.
You absolutely cannot be afraid to do things that are hard; doing things that are hard is how you learn. You can't be afraid of failure; failure happens. It's what you learn from the failure that counts. If something is absolutely mission critical, I'm not going to hand it to an intern unless I have a backup plan.
Background is useful, and may get you more interesting work to start with, but attitude is what truly gets you in the door. Potential is much more important than which classes you've already taken.
For anybody who's supervising interns - you can learn a lot from those interns; sometimes it's good to get a reminder that just because somebody didn't grow up in a computer-enabled household doesn't mean they can't do useful system admin type work.
A bit of background on me: I'm the System Administrator for a small non-profit that does computational science education and research type work. We hire a lot of interns, for everything from System Admin and Programming to helping develop curriculum materials and teach workshops.
If anybody figures out which org this is - I only speak for myself.
While this is from approximately third-hand sources, wal-mart type stores have lots of those glass bubbles that look like they should contain a camera.
However, in most cases, only a few actually contain cameras. They might move the cameras around, but remember, wally-world labor is cheap, glass bubbles are cheap, and cameras are expensive.
Can be done with Linux, on (some) commodity HW
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This is just begging for the obligatory Heinlein quote:
"A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, design a building, conn a ship, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve an equation, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects."
-- Lazarus Long, in Robert Heinlein's "Time Enough for Love"
While I realize this topic has been brought up before, remember to step back and look at what you're reading. This isn't about any new technical merits or ideas, nor is it about education. It's about training people to handle the rote administrative tasks with Linux. This means things like machine installs, basic configuration, etc.
What this does NOT mean is people who have been through these training programs are any good at creative problem solving. To deal with architecture, complex problems, etc. it takes a lot more than vendor training.
This is just giving us many more marginal Unix/Linux admins, which we really don't need. What we need are more GOOD admins. These "training programs" should start calling themselves LCSE, because that's about what they are. Anybody who's good enough at thinking problems through, problem solving, etc. to be a really good admin doesn't NEED this kind of training.
Beowulf is nothing more than a bunch of PCs, connected via medium speed (100mbps to 1gbps) networking, running one or more of a couple particular software packages. Both pvm and mpich have been readily available, to the whole world, for a long time. MOSIX has also been available for a long time (though not on Linux)
In short, you can't restrict Beowulf because there's very little there to restrict. For example, mpich based parallel programs can very easily be recomiled on FreeBSD, and the performance is better. (yes, FreeBSD does have better networking. See http://www.cs.duke.edu/ari/trapeze/ip/ for some real benchmarks.)
Besides, MPI is a documented protocol, so even if implementations were banned, it shouldn't be that hard to re-implement from the protocol descriptions.
What the browser space really needs is competition, on all fronts. Companies and projects should be competing to make the fastest, most stable, most compliant browser with the best user interface. Mnemonic and several other free browser projects were effectively killed by Mozilla.
We shouldn't have all our browser eggs in one basket, any more than we should all be using the same operating system or text editor. Especially with open source browsers (but even with closed source ones), competition brings about innovation, as well as better code and, in the end, a better browser.
If one browser supports PNG, then they all will feel the need to support PNG. If another one is 100% compliant with the HTML 4.0 spec, then they all will feel the need to be compliatn. This competition is going to be the best thing that's happend to browsers, on any platform.
Personally, I look forward to trying out all the new browsers (konquerer, opera, and mozilla), as well as the old favorites (w3m, lynx, and netscape), and using whatever's best. Especially if it's open source, I'd also look forward to contributing bug fixes and new code. However, this means a relatively small and clean open source project, not that 120MB of C++ monstrosity called Mozilla.
Netscape, pretty much for the entire 4.x release process, appears to be unable to release a solid, stable browser that behaves consistently across different color depths, and doesn't crash regardless of what java and javascript do.
By version 4.7, you would think that they'd figure out how to make Java work consistently, regardless of how many times NS has crashed during that X session. By verison 4.7, you would think that random pieces of javascript (i.e. what's on/.'s homepage) wouldn't cause browser crashes under some circumstances but not others.
Finally, you would think that bugs that have been reported since 4.05 and earlier would actually be fixed in 4.7, instead of them just adding new features.
Right now, in terms of stability, netscape is crap. Right now, if IE was available for FreeBSD (either native of a Linux version), I would probably be running it, because IE on NT sure is a hell of a lot more stable than Netscape on anything. I don't think IE has better features. I don't think it has a better interface. The only reason I care about IE is that it has less bugs.
Right now I'd also be very very happy to be able to pay $35 for a copy of Opera for FreeBSD. It's small, fast, and STABLE! Yes, the most important part of that is STABLE. Besides being annoying, flaky software isn't user friendly.
In terms of mass acceptance of Unix in general as a desktop, Enlightenment is very important. It combines the usability, speed, and flashiness that users would generally look for. Best of all, it looks far nice than Windows.
However, in terms of personal use, I ran 0.15.5 for a while, but I've gone back to a very old standby: VTWM. It isn't flasy, it isn't very pretty, but it's fast, and I've found that I get work done better when I don't have all the chrome and glitz.
Having said that, once the port is updated, I'm going to give 0.16 a whirl. Enlightenment 0.15.5 has always been rock solid on FreeBSD, and very easy to build out of ports.
I salute Mandrake, Rasterman, and anybody else working on E's excellent work. A consistent GUI across various Unix platforms (I've used E on Linux and FreeBSD; I bet it'd run on Solaris without any real trouble) is key to keeping Unix a serious contender on the desktop.
What you mention are specific skills, not general concepts. What you describe is training, not an education. if all you want is training, you would be better off with vendor classes, and maybe community college.
An education teaches you things much more important that the skill, language, and software of the week. It teaches you how to think. Learning how to think about algorithms, logic, parsing, and other traditional computer science topics really does help with those real world applications.
If you learn Java, you learn Java, but if you learn the concepts of Object Oriented design and programming as well as the language, then you're much better prepared when the language of the week changes. If you take a GOOD databases class, you will learn database concepts in such a way that you can apply them to current and future database systems, instead of being tied to one system you were trained on.
Just remember, learning how to think is much more important in the long run than learning vendor specific skills.
Compile time is a very poor indicator of speed between different architectures. It's only a good indicator within the same OS, architecture, and compiler version.
An Alpha is a RISC CPU, and requires a lot more intelligence from the compiler, especially in areas like instruction reordering, than a CISC CPU such as the ia32 family (i.e. your K6).
Also, GCC has been running much longer on ia32 than it has on Alpha, and therefore the speed of the compiler itself has been better optimized.
The degree of optimization, simplification, instruction analysis, and instruction reordering needed on Alpha (versus x86) explains the long compilation times.
Re:FreeBSD v.s. other *BSD variants
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· Score: 4
The main free variants of BSD are FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD. They have different focuses.
NetBSD aims to be a stable, portable research platform. It runs on more hardware than any of the others, but has the ugliest installation (at least on sparc, 1.4 requires you to computer the block offsets of the cylinders to partition a disk). However, it runs on virtually anything, and is quite stable.
OpenBSD forked from NetBSD some time ago. Their primary focus is security. It runs on a good portion of the hardware that NetBSD runs on, is probably a bit less stable, and has massive amounts of crypto included in the distribution by default.
FreeBSD is primarily on Intel, though there is also a port to the Alpha. It has the nicest (by far) userland and installation, and the largest collection of ports. Its primary goals are stability and performance, with a strong security element (though not nearly as paranoid as OpenBSD). I'd say its largest strengths are overall performance and especially network and general I/O performance, and its biggest weakness is that it only runs on x86 and Alpha hardware.
Right now my personal stuff runs FreeBSD, and a couple of the sparcs at work run NetBSD (mostly a Linux shop).
As the length of the key increases, so does the amount of pad needed to encode short messages. For example, if your key was 8kb long and you encrypted a 2kb e-mail message, you would have 6kb of padding. This means, among other things, that you have 6kb of known plaintext, and also, the large amount of pad would affect the output of the cipher so that the result isn't as random or difficult to decipher as it theoretically should be with that key length.
This is why increasing key length can only happen for a limited time, and we need to keep looking for better algorithms.
It looks like an interesting design, with some good ideas. However, it also looks like it has a few fatal flaws. The first question... how do you hold it? For the knife itself that's obvious, but the rest of it doesn't appear to have any remotely comfortable place to put your hands. Several of the configurations also look like it'd be rather easy to cut your hand on the knife blade. It also looks like it'd be extremely uncomfortable to carry around, but that could be solved with a pouch/case. However, what I see as the biggest problem is that it looks like it'd take way too long to setup a lot of the tools for use. With my Victorinox Swisstool, It only takes about a second to be ready to use any of the tools. (I had a Leatherman Super Tool. It rusted.) I do think that Spyderco will get the metals and such right (they usually do, like Victorinox, unlike Leatherman) though. However, they need to work on a design with faster opening. I like Spyderco's knives (i've been thinking about buying one), but they need to look at why some of the other multitools are so useful.
I suspect that/. volunteers are not affected by this. The reason is that AOL guides are compensated with free service. This means that they are doing compensated work, not volunteer work./. moderators are only compensated by the fact that they know they're helping/. stay a viable community. They don't get free services, or other extra priveleges.
Slashdot Mirror
Apple had a very different set of problems, but has actually pulled something similar off three times.
68k to PowerPC: Lots of apps didn't work, though it was really hard to tell what System 7 broke versus what 68k to PowerPC broke.
OS9 to OS10: utter nightmare. Classic works great as long as you're on a single-user system running as admin with well behaved applications. You run into everything from apps that expect to busy-wait to the fact that OS9 has absolutely no idea what's going on with concepts like file permissions. Ridiculous support nightmare on anything with non-admin users, multiple users, etc.
OS10 PowerPC to OS10 Intel: 99% of stuff just works. Very clean, very well done. The handful of apps that broke were generally easily fixed, or were broken by design (i.e. anything made by Adobe)
XP on Win7 is more like the whole OS9 to OS10 transition, and like that transition, your best bet is to ignore the existence of XPM (just like your best bet was to ignore the existence of Classic)
I've actually been running Vista as a primary desktop OS for about a month, after 14 years of Unix type OS as a primary desktop system (Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, OSX, even Solaris)
Why? It's a change. I was too comfortable with all of the Linuxes, the others weren't a good fit for an ultralight Thinkpad. If you don't force yourself to be uncomfortable now and then, you stagnate. (I do still have Fedora in a VM for quite a few things - I'm trying to make myself learn, not be a masochist)
The specific OS is Vista Business 32-bit, because that's what I had a license for (bought it with the laptop "just in case"). If I were to reinstall, I would go with a 64-bit version.
For backups, I am currently using Acronis TrueImage. Based on a test "full image restore", it works. It's primarily an image backup utility, not rsync or similar. I'm just doing routine backups to an external hard drive.
What you're asking for is actually pretty difficult under Windows, as far as I can tell; it' s far easier on Linux or OSX. On the other hand, there is something to be said for a full native Excel 2007 (sorry OOo fans, but calc is nowhere remotely close to a usable Excel replacement, including fundamental design flaws in the solver that have been there since at least 1.1)
I'd say the ultimate netbook would be a slightly ruggedized version of the Lenovo X61s I already own, plus the built-in 3G that I wish I had ordered. (not that 3G via a USB 'modem' is bad)
For that matter, how about an X200s? Starting weight of 2.5 pounds, but a 'real' computer. The only disadvantage here is that they are expensive, but the article said 'ultimate', not 'ultimate when compromised to make it cheap'.
The sign-up page for Google Apps Premier says you get 99.9% uptime. That's about 1/3 of a day downtime per year, or a couple of hours per quarter.
Google seems to be managing to hit that 99.9% uptime, just not exceed it. VERY few in-house e-mail systems actually manage 99.9% uptime, especially when you consider scheduled maintenance and downtime (remember, Google's 99.9% is for all downtime)
In fact, I have seen very few Exchange systems that manage much more than 99% uptime. However, for those organizations, there are other compelling advantages to Exchange.
3G wireless data networking is a service with very limited total bandwidth. It has a premium price, and is primarily targeted at business users. Given the basic physical limits involved with the radio spectrum in question, you really have to either do this or have specific bandwidth quotas to effectively manage a network.
Having said that, I prefer Verizon's solution of clearly stated 5GB quota with overage at a known and stated cost. I don't use their service as a primary internet connection, but it's invaluable for the ability to connect from *anywhere*. This is particularly useful as I run my own consulting company, and need to be able to have access no matter what.
(Ultimate lightweight setup: Xseries Thinkpad plus Verizon EVDO modem)
This is an excellent argument for the practical interview; instead of just asking questions, have somebody actually show you what they know.
Mind you, this is also a good argument for forcing students to show their intermediate work (design, etc) and to do said intermediate work with pen and paper. It's a lot harder to outsource something that would be in the wrong handwriting and have to be Fedex'd from India.
As part of a senior project that was actually the visualization piece of somebody's thesis, I wrote a data visualization/analysis frontend (for software performance analysis data storied in a database) in perl. Full GUI, Perl/Tk, graphs/charts/etc. This was in the 1999-2000 timeframe.
It ran quite well on the hardware of the day, and had the advantage of actually behaving on just about everything in a very mixed-platform campus (Linux, Windows, Solaris, AIX, etc).
In your description of the extended warranty racket, you have just describe Apple's business model. You buy something expensive and of marginal quality (sorry, apple's hardware build quality is awful, though OSX is really nice) and then you have the big upsell to Applecare (takes care of everything for 3 years).
Then you probably need to be running Windows, at least on the client.
I have a day job as the head system administrator for a medium sized but very high-tech non-profit. We run Macintosh (OSX) clients and Linux servers because they do what we need to do, and do it well. I have also been working with Linux and various other forms of Unix since 1994 (this includes using Linux and/or FreeBSD as a primary desktop OS since 1994. LaTeX works fine as a word processor if you know what you're doing.)
I also do consulting work for several smallish companies, and they all run Windows. It's really simple - if you need good 2D CAD software, you need Windows. If you need a modern multi-user accounting package that can do strange things like payroll and integrate with direct deposit, you need Windows. If you need a *good* spreadsheet (no, OOo calc doesn't count), you need Windows or OSX. If you want to run all of this on one desktop operating system, you need Windows. Crossover Office, WINE, VMWare, etc. aren't going to convert many small businesses; they want less complexity, not more. (some of these clients have Linux servers - network edge, multiprotocol file and print services, web apps, etc. - but they are close to 100% Windows on the desktop)
I think that you could convert a LOT of small businesses over if you could get a Peachtree or Quickbooks port for Linux. However, for small business, you don't stand a chance until you get *good* accounting software. OOo calc not sucking would really help too; lots of businesses make very heavy use of spreadsheets. (OOo Writer sucks, but so does Word. OOo Impress is adequate, as it's all pretty much PowerPointless anyway.)
If you're looking for long-term savings, I'd suggest considering Windows TS clients (use your old XP machines/licenses/etc), and a Windows 2k3 server terminal server. It won't be all that cheap to setup initially, but you will be able to significantly reduce your maintenance headaches.
Look at the business needs, and pick technologies that meet the business needs. Make technology work FOR your business; I've see what happens when you flip that around, and it isn't pretty.
is RT at http://www.bestpractical.com/rt/ and RTx::AssetTracker at http://atwiki.chaka.net/
RT is a very powerful open source ticketing system, and RTx::AssetTracker adds adequate asset tracking to it. You would probably have to do a bit of work to get it to work with barcodes (or just use a barcode scanner with the
cursor on the right page - most just send standard keyboard type input IIRC).
It's all open source, written in Perl, and really just works very well. And if it turns out to be inadequate, you'll learn enough from the experience to have a much better idea of what you actually need.
As somebody who interviews, selects, and supervises interns - the most important thing you can bring is attitude. You have to be ready to work, willing to work, and up for stretching to and beyond what you think the limits of your abilities are. You also can't consider physical work to be beneath you; especially in smaller organizations (like mine) sometimes everybody needs to help setup for a conference, move furniture, etc.
You absolutely cannot be afraid to do things that are hard; doing things that are hard is how you learn. You can't be afraid of failure; failure happens. It's what you learn from the failure that counts. If something is absolutely mission critical, I'm not going to hand it to an intern unless I have a backup plan.
Background is useful, and may get you more interesting work to start with, but attitude is what truly gets you in the door. Potential is much more important than which classes you've already taken.
For anybody who's supervising interns - you can learn a lot from those interns; sometimes it's good to get a reminder that just because somebody didn't grow up in a computer-enabled household doesn't mean they can't do useful system admin type work.
A bit of background on me: I'm the System Administrator for a small non-profit that does computational science education and research type work. We hire a lot of interns, for everything from System Admin and Programming to helping develop curriculum materials and teach workshops.
If anybody figures out which org this is - I only speak for myself.
While this is from approximately third-hand sources, wal-mart type stores have lots of those glass bubbles that look like they should contain a camera.
However, in most cases, only a few actually contain cameras. They might move the cameras around, but remember, wally-world labor is cheap, glass bubbles are cheap, and cameras are expensive.
In short, see http://cambuca.ldhs.cetuc.puc-rio.br/multiuser/for the XFree86 patches.
I have this working (and working quite well) with the following hardware configuration:
Asus A7V600 in an Antec Sonata case
AMD Barton 2500+, 1GB RAM
3 40GB ATA disks
First user:
Matrox AGP G450 dual, with two heads, using Xinerama, PS/2 keyboard and rodent
Second user:
ATI Radeon 7000 PCI, one head, and with a USB keyboard and rodent
(OS is Fedora Core 1, with a patched X server)
It's fast, stable, quiet (the Sonata is a really nice case), and environmentally friendly (half the power, solid waste, etc. of having two PCs)
The only real issue is that switching sound between the two 'sides' is currently manual (either plug/unplug speakers, or a switchbox, or a splitter)
This is just begging for the obligatory Heinlein quote:
"A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, design a building, conn a ship, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve an equation, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects."
-- Lazarus Long, in Robert Heinlein's "Time Enough for Love"
While I realize this topic has been brought up before, remember to step back and look at what you're reading. This isn't about any new technical merits or ideas, nor is it about education. It's about training people to handle the rote administrative tasks with Linux. This means things like machine installs, basic configuration, etc.
What this does NOT mean is people who have been through these training programs are any good at creative problem solving. To deal with architecture, complex problems, etc. it takes a lot more than vendor training.
This is just giving us many more marginal Unix/Linux admins, which we really don't need. What we need are more GOOD admins. These "training programs" should start calling themselves LCSE, because that's about what they are. Anybody who's good enough at thinking problems through, problem solving, etc. to be a really good admin doesn't NEED this kind of training.
Beowulf is nothing more than a bunch of PCs, connected via medium speed (100mbps to 1gbps) networking, running one or more of a couple particular software packages. Both pvm and mpich
have been readily available, to the whole world, for a long time. MOSIX has also been available for a long time (though not on Linux)
In short, you can't restrict Beowulf because there's very little there to restrict. For example, mpich based parallel programs can very easily be recomiled on FreeBSD, and the performance is better. (yes, FreeBSD does have better networking. See http://www.cs.duke.edu/ari/trapeze/ip/ for some real benchmarks.)
Besides, MPI is a documented protocol, so even if implementations were banned, it shouldn't be that hard to re-implement from the protocol descriptions.
What the browser space really needs is competition, on all fronts. Companies and projects should be competing to make the fastest, most stable, most compliant browser with the best user interface. Mnemonic and several other free browser projects were effectively killed by Mozilla.
We shouldn't have all our browser eggs in one basket, any more than we should all be using the same operating system or text editor. Especially with open source browsers (but even with closed source ones), competition brings about innovation, as well as better code and, in the end, a better browser.
If one browser supports PNG, then they all will feel the need to support PNG. If another one is 100% compliant with the HTML 4.0 spec, then they all will feel the need to be compliatn. This competition is going to be the best thing that's happend to browsers, on any platform.
Personally, I look forward to trying out all the new browsers (konquerer, opera, and mozilla), as well as the old favorites (w3m, lynx, and netscape), and using whatever's best. Especially if it's open source, I'd also look forward to contributing bug fixes and new code. However, this means a relatively small and clean open source project, not that 120MB of C++ monstrosity called Mozilla.
Netscape, pretty much for the entire 4.x release
/.'s homepage) wouldn't cause browser
process, appears to be unable to release a
solid, stable browser that behaves consistently
across different color depths, and doesn't crash
regardless of what java and javascript do.
By version 4.7, you would think that they'd
figure out how to make Java work consistently,
regardless of how many times NS has crashed
during that X session. By verison 4.7, you would
think that random pieces of javascript (i.e.
what's on
crashes under some circumstances but not others.
Finally, you would think that bugs that have
been reported since 4.05 and earlier would
actually be fixed in 4.7, instead of them
just adding new features.
Right now, in terms of stability, netscape
is crap. Right now, if IE was available for
FreeBSD (either native of a Linux version),
I would probably be running it, because IE
on NT sure is a hell of a lot more stable
than Netscape on anything. I don't think IE
has better features. I don't think it has a
better interface. The only reason I care about
IE is that it has less bugs.
Right now I'd also be very very happy to be able
to pay $35 for a copy of Opera for FreeBSD.
It's small, fast, and STABLE! Yes, the most
important part of that is STABLE. Besides being
annoying, flaky software isn't user friendly.
In terms of mass acceptance of Unix in general
as a desktop, Enlightenment is very important.
It combines the usability, speed, and flashiness
that users would generally look for. Best of all,
it looks far nice than Windows.
However, in terms of personal use, I ran
0.15.5 for a while, but I've gone back to
a very old standby: VTWM. It isn't flasy,
it isn't very pretty, but it's fast, and I've
found that I get work done better when I don't
have all the chrome and glitz.
Having said that, once the port is updated,
I'm going to give 0.16 a whirl. Enlightenment
0.15.5 has always been rock solid on FreeBSD,
and very easy to build out of ports.
I salute Mandrake, Rasterman, and anybody else
working on E's excellent work. A consistent
GUI across various Unix platforms (I've used E
on Linux and FreeBSD; I bet it'd run on Solaris
without any real trouble) is key to keeping
Unix a serious contender on the desktop.
What you mention are specific skills, not
general concepts. What you describe is training,
not an education. if all you want is training,
you would be better off with vendor classes,
and maybe community college.
An education teaches you things much more
important that the skill, language, and software
of the week. It teaches you how to think. Learning
how to think about algorithms, logic, parsing,
and other traditional computer science topics
really does help with those real world
applications.
If you learn Java, you learn Java, but if you
learn the concepts of Object Oriented design
and programming as well as the language, then
you're much better prepared when the language
of the week changes. If you take a GOOD databases
class, you will learn database concepts in such
a way that you can apply them to current and
future database systems, instead of being tied
to one system you were trained on.
Just remember, learning how to think is much
more important in the long run than learning
vendor specific skills.
Compile time is a very poor indicator of speed
between different architectures. It's only a good
indicator within the same OS, architecture, and
compiler version.
An Alpha is a RISC CPU, and requires a lot more
intelligence from the compiler, especially in
areas like instruction reordering, than a CISC
CPU such as the ia32 family (i.e. your K6).
Also, GCC has been running much longer on ia32
than it has on Alpha, and therefore the speed
of the compiler itself has been better optimized.
The degree of optimization, simplification,
instruction analysis, and instruction reordering
needed on Alpha (versus x86) explains the long
compilation times.
The main free variants of BSD are FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD. They have different focuses.
NetBSD aims to be a stable, portable research platform. It runs on more hardware than any of the others, but has the ugliest installation (at least on sparc, 1.4 requires you to computer the block offsets of the cylinders to partition a disk). However, it runs on virtually anything, and is quite stable.
OpenBSD forked from NetBSD some time ago. Their primary focus is security. It runs on a good portion of the hardware that NetBSD runs on, is probably a bit less stable, and has massive amounts of crypto included in the distribution by default.
FreeBSD is primarily on Intel, though there is also a port to the Alpha. It has the nicest (by far) userland and installation, and the largest collection of ports. Its primary goals are stability and performance, with a strong security element (though not nearly as paranoid as OpenBSD). I'd say its largest strengths are overall performance and especially network and general I/O performance, and its biggest weakness is that it only runs on x86 and Alpha hardware.
Right now my personal stuff runs FreeBSD, and a couple of the sparcs at work run NetBSD (mostly a Linux shop).
There is one major problem with this premise.
As the length of the key increases, so does the amount of pad needed to encode short messages. For example, if your key was 8kb long and you encrypted a 2kb e-mail message, you would have 6kb of padding. This means, among other things, that you have 6kb of known plaintext, and also, the large amount of pad would affect the output of the cipher so that the result isn't as random or difficult to decipher as it theoretically should be with that key length.
This is why increasing key length can only happen for a limited time, and we need to keep looking for better algorithms.
It looks like an interesting design, with some good ideas. However, it also looks like it has a few fatal flaws. The first question... how do you hold it? For the knife itself that's obvious, but the rest of it doesn't appear to have any remotely comfortable place to put your hands. Several of the configurations also look like it'd be rather easy to cut your hand on the knife blade. It also looks like it'd be extremely uncomfortable to carry around, but that could be solved with a pouch/case. However, what I see as the biggest problem is that it looks like it'd take way too long to setup a lot of the tools for use. With my Victorinox Swisstool, It only takes about a second to be ready to use any of the tools. (I had a Leatherman Super Tool. It rusted.) I do think that Spyderco will get the metals and such right (they usually do, like Victorinox, unlike Leatherman) though. However, they need to work on a design with faster opening. I like Spyderco's knives (i've been thinking about buying one), but they need to look at why some of the other multitools are so useful.
I suspect that /. volunteers are not affected by this. The reason is that AOL guides are compensated with free service. This means that they are doing compensated work, not volunteer work. /. moderators are only compensated by the fact that they know they're helping /. stay a viable community. They don't get free services, or other extra priveleges.