The article misses the point. They do intend to use composite fibers.
What they are trying to convey is that power transmission companies are considering using the same type of fiber-glass strength member that is currently being used in fiber-optic data cables as opposed to a steel strength member. This will make the cables lighter and sag less. Your point about composites is well taken, but carbon-fiber is a bit too expensive for applications such as this. Fiber-glass with intermediate strands of kevlar would probably work very nicely, which oddly enough is exactly how Siecor (and others) makes their fiber-optic cables.
Approach: The simplest solution is to increase the volume of the aluminum strands without increasing the assembly diameter. This can be achieved by replacing the steel strands with fiber-reinforced composites that are more than twice as strong and far lighter. Thus, less material is needed to carry loads, and more Al can be incorporated into the design. USC is teaming with several industrial partners (Goldsworthy, SCE, Southwire, and ORNL), to develop a design and prototype called CRAC (Composite Reinforced Aluminum Conductor.)
So yes, they really do intend to use composites and the though of putting actual data-transmitting fibers in the power cable is being overlooked. Justifiably so, I might add. There is already plenty of data transmission capacity between SoCal and NorCal and the costs aren't really in laying the fiber in the first place. Lighting the fiber gets way more expensive in the end.
This is really just another example of bad journalism.
It uses the Intel StrongARM processor. To the best of my knowledge, Windows 9x/NT/2k have never been ported to the StrongARM. Win CE on the other hand has been ported StrongARM as well as many other platforms.
You think it's cool to insult people unnecessarilly?
It's one thing to make it clear to someone that they are wasting your time and should do their own research. It's another thing to insult them in the process.
Now, why is Ballmer WRONG? Because there's plenty of BSD-licensed and public domain code out there. BSD is clearly and open source license, and honestly I think Ballmer has chosen Linux as a target because he doesn't want BSD in his sights. There are several reasons for this: 1) he knows that the BSD camp is much more conservative and it would be harder to make wild half-truth claims about them 2) he is not technical and the word on the street (let's not fight over this, kids) is that BSD is faster and more stable than Linux; he likely believes this, right or wrong 3) if the debate is between Linux and Microsoft in government roles, BSD may never gain much more ground than it has now in that sector, and given the licensing, this is in MS' favor.
Additionaly, Microsoft has used some BSD code in Windows. I believe the original TCP/IP stack up through NT4 was derived from the BSD TCP/IP stack.
Noooo, all rich people are evil, they must all suffer!
Wasn't it Nader that said something along the lines of (I'm paraphrasing here) "we should tax wealthy people in greater proportion because of the evil things they had to do to get rich in the first place." According to a lot of liberals, being a successful individual is a bad thing.
I'm suffering from the same problem. This is a situation known as "pair-gain" which basically means that a bunch of copper telephone lines collapse into a neighbourhood box and then ride fiber (or copper) back to the central office. Basically, this means that all the phone lines hit an ADC (analog to digital converter) and then get time-divisioned multiplexed into a digital circuit (t1, ds-3, etc.). Since DSL relies on point-to-point signalling over an unswitched copper line, it won't work in situations where there is pair gain. There are a couple of solutions to this issue. You can get a t1, which nothing but 24-channel circuit that works fine over TDM muxes, you can get an ISDN line which is 2 B channels and a D channel which also works fine over TDM muxes, or you could get something called IDSL. It is offered by Covad as "telespeed 144" and basically consists of a nailed up ISDN line that transits the TDM muxes and digital circuits back to the CO where it terminates on a DSLAM. For what it's worth, it's shitty service that's limited to 144kbps half-duplex but it is definitely better than dial.
Other than these three solutions, the only other thing that you can hope for is that someone puts a DSLAM in that neighbourhood box where your copper terminates. There was some movement in this direction in the industry not too long ago, but that was before everything melted down. At this point, there's no telling how much longer Covad is going to exist. Either your ILEC will provide the service or you're out of luck. Let's all have 3 cheers for monopolies, eh?
This license, nor any license can prevent you from creating a derivative work. Creating a derivative work is not considered a copyright infringement. However, distribution of that derivative work would be copyright infringement unless you were previously licensed to do so.
If you write a patch to this or any software that consists of only code that you wrote then you would own the copyright to that code and license it however you chose without regard to the license for the software that you intend to patch with that code.
Copyright infringement is not piracy, nor is it theft. Theft is defined as depriving someone from the use of something that's rightfully theirs. Piracy is that thing you do where you don an eyepatch and a cutlass and get to sail around the world and rape the land and pillage the women. I believe there are parrots involved two, but frankly, that's just a little too disturbing for me to imagine. Needless to say, neither of these terms have anything to do with copying intellectual property.
a Sparc microprocessor might be considered a pure RISC chip but the UltraSparc II isn't and the UltraSparc III most especially isn't. As a matter of fact, the underlying architecture bears a lot of resemblance to x86 implementations. Go read this article for an explanation of the fact.
One could simply treat the wireless link like one should treat the Internet. All of your traffic is going to go over a hostile network, so you must encrypt where necessary. One could put a Linux or an OpenBSD box on either end of the wireless link and use IPSEC for alltraffic that crosses the link.
And the kids that wrote the most popular online multiplayer game had a big production budget (counter-strike).
It definitely takes longer to complete a game today, and getting published is a major pain in the ass. However, one does not necessarilly have to go through a publisher to release a game. The Internet seems to work pretty well for that.
Let me preface this by saying that I know fuck-all about using Linux in a high-availability environment. Most of my experience comes from running Solaris.
I can't comment about RAID controllers. I've used Network Appliances. You've heard of them right? Bigass $100k file-servers that allow you to rebuild, resize, and just generally do anything you would like to on the fly. Nothing short of a double-disk failure will cause data-loss. I lost a motherboard, the box was down for a whole day (8 hours, an hour or so to troubleshoot, 4 hour response time on the hardware, and another hour or so to get it running again with a new motherboard) effectively causing around $50k of lost productivity. The fact is, no matter how elegant a system you have, if you put all your eggs into one basket, your basket will fail.
I don't know of any server vendor that offers hot-pluggable CPUs. I know Compaq offers some hot-pluggable PCI stuff which hasn't been supported under Windows until just recently. Apparently it's still buggy. Novell has had support for years. According to your logic, we should all be using Novell?
Yeah, Linux doesn't have monitoring utilities. I suppose MRTG doesn't count. It's not really a Linux tool as much as it is just a Unix tool. It's open-source and it *will* run on NT, though it's difficult, at best. Most if the ISPs I know use it as a monitoring tool. As a matter of fact, most of the best management tools that I'm aware of are based on either UCD SNMP, which is open-source and ships with most distros of Linux, or perl in some fashion or other. Apparently perl works great for juggling OIDs around. Oh, I'm sorry, you were referring to the Industry-standard monitoring tool, the bloated, expensive, difficult-to-use and really-only-runs-well-on-unix, HP Openview.
"People who are willing to spend the money for real support often don't care as much about Linux." I'm sorry, your conclusion is wrong. People that have been marketed to effectively by the MS juggernaut often don't care about Linux. People that are wise and are concerned about completing the task at hand will weigh the benefits of using an open-source solution vs. using a closed-source solution. Often this excuse for using proprietary software is that "we'll have somebody to sue if it breaks" which is bullshit. Indemnification clauses in contracts prevent that. Sometimes it's just easier to be able to modify the source-code and fix the problem yourself. Sometimes it's easier to hire someone to do it. Sometimes you'll need things like massive scalability and transactional processing capability and you'll end up using something like Oracle on a 64-processor unix box.
I'm afraid I can't address that last paragraph without being a troll. I'll just list a few of the benefits of using a W2K w/ MS/SQL:
PC/Anywhere Administration (ok, windows terminal services, it's a gui nonetheless)
MS Support
IIS
next->next->next->finish (mouse elbow)
VBScript
ASP
Random Reboots
ODBC
I'm sure there's a host of other things I could come up with, but fortunately, I don't have to use Windows that much (as a server).
You make some well-reasoned responses here, though I'd like to comment on a couple of them.
With regard to interoperability you are absolutely correct. Microsoft has proven in the past that they are only willing to interoperate when it's absolutely necessary for business reasons. This is contrary to the corporate mantra of "innovation". The concept of innovation implies that someone gets there first or accomplishes something different before others. Forced interoperability after the fact is not "innovation". When it became clear that Microsoft could no longer rely on obsolete proprietary networking protocols (netbios) they added support for TCP/IP. This is one instance of "interoperability". As a matter of fact, I'm not sure I've really ever seen any sort of real innovation come out of MS. Someone please correct me if I'm wrong, and no, Bob doesn't count.
Next, on question 2 he seems to lay out a few backhanded attacks like "... Mac OS X, as a result of the new UNIX-like features". Saying that OS X has "UNIX-like features" is like saying that ice has some very water-like qualities. Now it could just be unflattering wording, but it just looks like more incidental MS FUD. "OS X has UNIX-like features but don't get your hopes up".
I didn't see anything unflattering about this statement at all other than the fact that it may have been a poor choice of words. Perhaps a better statement for him to make would've been something like, "I'm not sure much will change with Mac OS X as a result of its underlying UNIX architecture." I think the point that he's trying to make is something that's already evident to most people. Mac OS X is based on UNIX but most users will never know the difference. With this in mind ISVs shouldn't have to change their application model very much.
It would've been nice if he would've addressed the security issue. The real truth of the matter, and the crux of the security problem is that MS products are designed by committee and unfortunately these committees pretty much exist in a vacuum. As I understand it, developers are pretty much forbidden from even looking at GPL software for fear of IP contamination. MS could probably resolve a lot of security problems by getting a very clueful team of auditors to review products for security issues.
His answer to the next question tries to take an isolated incident: Corel's poor results in their one and only foray into the Linux area, and turn it into proof of a bigger issue. Corel failed and they had cool stuff, so what hope does anyone else have? Anybody who knows the whole Corel incident well knows that there were a huge number of problems in the way Corel went about doing things, from arguably violating the GPL in their beta test agreements to making their version of Linux look like a bad Windows rip-off.
Corel is one example of a for-profit company selling closed-source apps into the Linux market and being unsuccessful. There are other examples as well. Quake 3 experienced poor sales in the Linux market for various reasons. The timing of the release didn't really help much, but as I understand it, sales were way below expectations, and expectations were pretty low to begin with.
If Linux isn't better, but is just as good as a commercial version of UNIX then isn't that a revolution right there? An OS as good as a commercial UNIX where every standard component is Free is revolutionary.
I'm afraid I have to disagree with you there. I honestly don't see much about Linux that's revolutionary. The concept of free (libre) software is certainly not a new one. GNU had been around for years before the first Linux kernel was developed. It seems that the origination of free (libre) software is the academic environment in the early 80's. I would really like to see a compelling argument about how Linux is revolutionary. The only revolutionary thing that I see is the multitude of compromised Linux boxes on the Internet hosted by clueless individuals that wouldn't know UNIX if it bit 'em in the ass, but they can damn sure get through the pretty installation routines. But then, that's a whole other rant.
Yes, schools teach kids these things. But consider the alternative. What kind of society would we have if kids were taught that they didn't have to do anything on a schedule, that they didn't have to be on time and organized, that they didn't have a place in a power structure, that they didn't have to respect authority?
I suppose the alternative would be that their parents teach them these things and the schools get on with the business of educating students. I know it's a revolutionary idea to consider a school a place of education as opposed to the babysitter that you use to rear your children for you.
What the hell is wrong with teaching kids to NOT be little shits? Or would you rather raise a generation of criminals because it's not cool to follow the rules? Juvenile crime is bad enough already, why promote it?
There's nothing wrong with parents teaching their children how to behave in a society. This has been a fairly common practice for the last several thousand years. I would contend that any perceivable rise in juvenile crime is a result of this practice failing.
The fact is that rules make a society livable, and you have to teach people the rules at an early age. If you don't, you get a lot of punks who use violence to solve their problems.
If the poster has a kid, I encourage him to adopt a hands-off method of raising him and see what happens. I'll see his ass on COPS someday soon.
These statements make you seem angry and are really a detriment to your argument which was rather weak to begin with. You advise the previous poster against lashing out and then go and do it yourself.
Did you read the documents that you linked up or were you just karma whoring? Each draft standard contains the following text:
9. Trademark Issues
SSH is a registered trademark and Secure Shell is a trademark of SSH
Communications Security Corp. SSH Communications Security Corp permits
the use of these trademarks as the name of this standard and protocol,
and permits their use to describe that a product conforms to this
standard, provided that the following acknowledgement is included where
the trademarks are used: ``SSH is a registered trademark and Secure
Shell is a trademark of SSH Communications Security Corp
(www.ssh.com)''. These trademarks may not be used as part of a product
name or in otherwise confusing manner without prior written permission
of SSH Communications Security Corp.
So it does very clearly state in the text of each document that "SSH®" is a registered trademark of SSH Communications Security Corp.
I'm sure Mr. Ylonen holds copyright on the code that he's written but in this particular case he holds the trademark for the names "SSH®" and "Secure Shell®". I wish you fucking slashdot buffoons could sort out the difference between trademarks, copyrights, and patents. If you're interested in IP law, and you seem to be, since you're bothering to comment on this, why don't you go read the source, or in this case, the law. It's in US Code Title 15, Chapter 22. Copyrights are US Code Title 17 and patents are in Title 35.
In my opinion, the biggest contrast that I see between this decision and the decision regarding guinness-sucks.com is that in this case, the person holding the potentially infringing domain name actually responded to the WIPO panel and the Complainants contentions. Unfortunately, I don't see much chance of winning a dispute if one doesn't respond to it.
Just a little clarification. The 7.62 NATO round is known in non-military parlance as a.308 Winchester. The 5.56 as a.223. Take a look at ballistic specs for a.308 Winchester in the back of any Shooter's Bible. A 30-06 is typically a bit hotter round than a.308. All three rounds can have a muzzle velocity exceeding 3000fps.
Exchange and Outlook are not just simply email applications. I would consider them a suite of applications that include a personal information manager, directory services, calendar and scheduling, etc.
Exchange very obviously is not targeted at small or even large ISPs. Aside from the software licensing costs, the system itself doesn't scale anywhere nearly as cheaply as POP or IMAP. No ISP is going to spend $20k each for 5 PC-based servers just to support 1000 users.
Exchange is targeted for enterprise use. It actually works pretty well if the user-base is mostly Windows and requires the additional functionality. It also requires a decent administrator, which is something more difficult to find. Particularly someone clueful enough to be able to understand Internet-connected email systems and DNS in addition to all the undocumented "features" of NT or 2000.
Well, since the Xeon processors don't suffer from the cache problems that the Sun processors do, I would imagine that the uptime is pretty good.
How's the scalability on the E450 past 4 processors? Non-existent you say? You mean I'd have to spend $223,000.00 on a Sun to even begin to think about something beyond quad-processors? I could spend a 1/5 of that for an 8-processor Compaq/Dell/HP and get better tpc-c performance than the E4500.
The million dollar bet was bullshit and anybody with some sense knew it. Sun's best posted tpc-c score for a non-clustered server is ~150,000 for a 64-way E10k running Sybase for a cost of about $7,000,000. Compaq's best submitted performance for a 4-way server is ~35,000 with Win2k and SQL2k for around $500,000. So basically I get 1/4 the performance for 1/14 the price. Suns cluster really well, you say? The tpc-c number one position right now belongs to a clustered Compaq running Win2k and SQL2k.
Despite these numbers, I agree with you, but not on the basis of performance. When I let my own personal preferences and emotions come into play I like unix a whole lot better than I like Windows anything. As a matter of fact I despise Microsoft Server products, but that doesn't mean that they aren't faster and that they don't get good uptime. Most people's concepts of uptime are based on client systems and sub-optimal configurations that tend to go down. Microsoft server products can be optimized to be stable.
The fact remains that Sun is dropping the ball. Their most impressive hardware just isn't that impressive anymore. The USIII is way way late and not really very impressive. It is an incremental improvement over the USII. Fortunately, it does actually get more done per clock cycle than an Intel P3, but only slightly more. Hopefully they can get the clock speed up.
In the end, if I cared about cost, performance, and reliability I'd be more apt to run FreeBSD. If I were forced to run Oracle, I'd definitely consider Linux on Intel. If I needed to scale really well I'd probably use an HP9000 or an RS6000.
I still haven't seen anybody support an argument for why one would use a Sun Box for a particular application over Win2k on Intel. I can certainly think of a few, but that's me.
That 400 megahertz processor operates on about 4 times more CPU instructions per clock cycle than your X86 chip. You're comparing apples and oranges. And I have bad software support problems on my IBM Aptiva running Windows that crashes every 5-7 days. What problems do SPARC chips have that x86 chips don't?
You are wrong. An Intel P3 or an AMD Athlon absolutely smokes the USII in terms of instructions per clock cycle. Fortunately most people don't use these machines for their raw CPU power, they use 'em for the I/O throughput. Current Sun architecture is quite a bit faster than current Intel architecture in addition to the fact that Sun uses huge amounts of L2 cache. The USIII and the Intel P4 will be on par with each other in terms of I/O throughput (they'll both be at 3.2GBps).
What exactly is standard about needing a massive image editing package with your server? Dumb statement.
How will you ever get a job in the real world when you equate Microsoft Paint with Oracle in the same sentence. I'm a sys admin and haven't touched a graphics program for work in over 5 years.
You seem to imply here that graphics programs are not valid applications for a server. A lot of very strenuous supercomputing that is done is directly related to graphics. I know quite a few people that are using SGIs on the same scale as the E10k to do rendering. Incidentally, SGIs work quite well for this as they have slightly better fp performance as well as a more scalable MP architecture requiring simpler programming (multi-threaded vs. clustered). The fact remains though that neither MIPS nor SPARC have the FP performance of an Alpha, Intel, or AMD which is what some people use to build render clusters (think Titanic).
Calling the original poster dumb was an argument ad hominem. It also makes you an asshole (another argument ad hominem).
Most Sun hardware is pretty reliable though it is overpriced in comparison to Intel hardware of equivalent quality. I can buy a dual-processor E220 for ~$20,000. I could buy an equivalent Compaq, HP, or Dell rack-mounted server for half that. It would have slightly better better CPU performance and slightly less I/O throughput.
Sun's specifically aren't good at hosting dynamic web pages because they can require quite a bit of CPU and relatively small amounts of data. Sun machines do better with huge amounts of data and relatively smaller CPU loads. The make great Oracle servers. Which is what I gather you are using them for.
Additionally, MS SQL Server 2000 on Win2k on a quad-processor Compaq (Xeon 700Mhz) can be faster than a quad-processor E450.
Yes, you are a Sun Bigot. You are also an asshole (once again, there goes that ad hominem thing again). You're almost as bad as a mainframe guy. People that think that they have a concept of system architecture but get their judgement clouded by their own zealous behaviour annoy the shit out of me.
Additionally, I'll provide something that you didn't provide while debunking the earlier poster's comments.
Check out specint and specfp marks on Intel P3s versus ultrasparc IIs. go to http://www.spec.org for the info. For database results that prove my point check out tpc-c benchmarks at http://www.tpc.org. Granted, they don't have results for Oracle 8i on a quad-processor E450, but they do have results from other rdbms vendors. The E450 scores about a third slower than the quad-processor compaq.
Slashdot Mirror
The article misses the point. They do intend to use composite fibers.
What they are trying to convey is that power transmission companies are considering using the same type of fiber-glass strength member that is currently being used in fiber-optic data cables as opposed to a steel strength member. This will make the cables lighter and sag less. Your point about composites is well taken, but carbon-fiber is a bit too expensive for applications such as this. Fiber-glass with intermediate strands of kevlar would probably work very nicely, which oddly enough is exactly how Siecor (and others) makes their fiber-optic cables.
If you go to the link that Wired refers to you will see the following:
Approach: The simplest solution is to increase the volume of the aluminum strands without increasing the assembly diameter. This can be achieved by replacing the steel strands with fiber-reinforced composites that are more than twice as strong and far lighter. Thus, less material is needed to carry loads, and more Al can be incorporated into the design. USC is teaming with several industrial partners (Goldsworthy, SCE, Southwire, and ORNL), to develop a design and prototype called CRAC (Composite Reinforced Aluminum Conductor.)
So yes, they really do intend to use composites and the though of putting actual data-transmitting fibers in the power cable is being overlooked. Justifiably so, I might add. There is already plenty of data transmission capacity between SoCal and NorCal and the costs aren't really in laying the fiber in the first place. Lighting the fiber gets way more expensive in the end.
This is really just another example of bad journalism.
Actually, power consumption is down 7% per capita in 2001 over 2000. So, it's reall not Fat Chance.
It uses the Intel StrongARM processor. To the best of my knowledge, Windows 9x/NT/2k have never been ported to the StrongARM. Win CE on the other hand has been ported StrongARM as well as many other platforms.
You think it's cool to insult people unnecessarilly?
It's one thing to make it clear to someone that they are wasting your time and should do their own research. It's another thing to insult them in the process.
Now, why is Ballmer WRONG? Because there's plenty of BSD-licensed and public domain code out there. BSD is clearly and open source license, and honestly I think Ballmer has chosen Linux as a target because he doesn't want BSD in his sights. There are several reasons for this: 1) he knows that the BSD camp is much more conservative and it would be harder to make wild half-truth claims about them 2) he is not technical and the word on the street (let's not fight over this, kids) is that BSD is faster and more stable than Linux; he likely believes this, right or wrong 3) if the debate is between Linux and Microsoft in government roles, BSD may never gain much more ground than it has now in that sector, and given the licensing, this is in MS' favor.
Additionaly, Microsoft has used some BSD code in Windows. I believe the original TCP/IP stack up through NT4 was derived from the BSD TCP/IP stack.
Noooo, all rich people are evil, they must all suffer!
Wasn't it Nader that said something along the lines of (I'm paraphrasing here) "we should tax wealthy people in greater proportion because of the evil things they had to do to get rich in the first place." According to a lot of liberals, being a successful individual is a bad thing.
I'm suffering from the same problem. This is a situation known as "pair-gain" which basically means that a bunch of copper telephone lines collapse into a neighbourhood box and then ride fiber (or copper) back to the central office. Basically, this means that all the phone lines hit an ADC (analog to digital converter) and then get time-divisioned multiplexed into a digital circuit (t1, ds-3, etc.). Since DSL relies on point-to-point signalling over an unswitched copper line, it won't work in situations where there is pair gain. There are a couple of solutions to this issue. You can get a t1, which nothing but 24-channel circuit that works fine over TDM muxes, you can get an ISDN line which is 2 B channels and a D channel which also works fine over TDM muxes, or you could get something called IDSL. It is offered by Covad as "telespeed 144" and basically consists of a nailed up ISDN line that transits the TDM muxes and digital circuits back to the CO where it terminates on a DSLAM. For what it's worth, it's shitty service that's limited to 144kbps half-duplex but it is definitely better than dial.
Other than these three solutions, the only other thing that you can hope for is that someone puts a DSLAM in that neighbourhood box where your copper terminates. There was some movement in this direction in the industry not too long ago, but that was before everything melted down. At this point, there's no telling how much longer Covad is going to exist. Either your ILEC will provide the service or you're out of luck. Let's all have 3 cheers for monopolies, eh?
This license, nor any license can prevent you from creating a derivative work. Creating a derivative work is not considered a copyright infringement. However, distribution of that derivative work would be copyright infringement unless you were previously licensed to do so.
If you write a patch to this or any software that consists of only code that you wrote then you would own the copyright to that code and license it however you chose without regard to the license for the software that you intend to patch with that code.
Copyright infringement is not piracy, nor is it theft. Theft is defined as depriving someone from the use of something that's rightfully theirs. Piracy is that thing you do where you don an eyepatch and a cutlass and get to sail around the world and rape the land and pillage the women. I believe there are parrots involved two, but frankly, that's just a little too disturbing for me to imagine. Needless to say, neither of these terms have anything to do with copying intellectual property.
a Sparc microprocessor might be considered a pure RISC chip but the UltraSparc II isn't and the UltraSparc III most especially isn't. As a matter of fact, the underlying architecture bears a lot of resemblance to x86 implementations. Go read this article for an explanation of the fact.
One could simply treat the wireless link like one should treat the Internet. All of your traffic is going to go over a hostile network, so you must encrypt where necessary. One could put a Linux or an OpenBSD box on either end of the wireless link and use IPSEC for alltraffic that crosses the link.
Right...
And the kids that wrote the most popular online multiplayer game had a big production budget (counter-strike).
It definitely takes longer to complete a game today, and getting published is a major pain in the ass. However, one does not necessarilly have to go through a publisher to release a game. The Internet seems to work pretty well for that.
It is my understanding, based solely on hearsay, that ColdFusion on any platform does not scale at all.
Let me preface this by saying that I know fuck-all about using Linux in a high-availability environment. Most of my experience comes from running Solaris.
I can't comment about RAID controllers. I've used Network Appliances. You've heard of them right? Bigass $100k file-servers that allow you to rebuild, resize, and just generally do anything you would like to on the fly. Nothing short of a double-disk failure will cause data-loss. I lost a motherboard, the box was down for a whole day (8 hours, an hour or so to troubleshoot, 4 hour response time on the hardware, and another hour or so to get it running again with a new motherboard) effectively causing around $50k of lost productivity. The fact is, no matter how elegant a system you have, if you put all your eggs into one basket, your basket will fail.
I don't know of any server vendor that offers hot-pluggable CPUs. I know Compaq offers some hot-pluggable PCI stuff which hasn't been supported under Windows until just recently. Apparently it's still buggy. Novell has had support for years. According to your logic, we should all be using Novell?
Yeah, Linux doesn't have monitoring utilities. I suppose MRTG doesn't count. It's not really a Linux tool as much as it is just a Unix tool. It's open-source and it *will* run on NT, though it's difficult, at best. Most if the ISPs I know use it as a monitoring tool. As a matter of fact, most of the best management tools that I'm aware of are based on either UCD SNMP, which is open-source and ships with most distros of Linux, or perl in some fashion or other. Apparently perl works great for juggling OIDs around. Oh, I'm sorry, you were referring to the Industry-standard monitoring tool, the bloated, expensive, difficult-to-use and really-only-runs-well-on-unix, HP Openview.
"People who are willing to spend the money for real support often don't care as much about Linux." I'm sorry, your conclusion is wrong. People that have been marketed to effectively by the MS juggernaut often don't care about Linux. People that are wise and are concerned about completing the task at hand will weigh the benefits of using an open-source solution vs. using a closed-source solution. Often this excuse for using proprietary software is that "we'll have somebody to sue if it breaks" which is bullshit. Indemnification clauses in contracts prevent that. Sometimes it's just easier to be able to modify the source-code and fix the problem yourself. Sometimes it's easier to hire someone to do it. Sometimes you'll need things like massive scalability and transactional processing capability and you'll end up using something like Oracle on a 64-processor unix box.
I'm afraid I can't address that last paragraph without being a troll. I'll just list a few of the benefits of using a W2K w/ MS/SQL:
PC/Anywhere Administration (ok, windows terminal services, it's a gui nonetheless)
MS Support
IIS
next->next->next->finish (mouse elbow)
VBScript
ASP
Random Reboots
ODBC
I'm sure there's a host of other things I could come up with, but fortunately, I don't have to use Windows that much (as a server).
You make some well-reasoned responses here, though I'd like to comment on a couple of them.
With regard to interoperability you are absolutely correct. Microsoft has proven in the past that they are only willing to interoperate when it's absolutely necessary for business reasons. This is contrary to the corporate mantra of "innovation". The concept of innovation implies that someone gets there first or accomplishes something different before others. Forced interoperability after the fact is not "innovation". When it became clear that Microsoft could no longer rely on obsolete proprietary networking protocols (netbios) they added support for TCP/IP. This is one instance of "interoperability". As a matter of fact, I'm not sure I've really ever seen any sort of real innovation come out of MS. Someone please correct me if I'm wrong, and no, Bob doesn't count.
Next, on question 2 he seems to lay out a few backhanded attacks like "... Mac OS X, as a result of the new UNIX-like features". Saying that OS X has "UNIX-like features" is like saying that ice has some very water-like qualities. Now it could just be unflattering wording, but it just looks like more incidental MS FUD. "OS X has UNIX-like features but don't get your hopes up".
I didn't see anything unflattering about this statement at all other than the fact that it may have been a poor choice of words. Perhaps a better statement for him to make would've been something like, "I'm not sure much will change with Mac OS X as a result of its underlying UNIX architecture." I think the point that he's trying to make is something that's already evident to most people. Mac OS X is based on UNIX but most users will never know the difference. With this in mind ISVs shouldn't have to change their application model very much.
It would've been nice if he would've addressed the security issue. The real truth of the matter, and the crux of the security problem is that MS products are designed by committee and unfortunately these committees pretty much exist in a vacuum. As I understand it, developers are pretty much forbidden from even looking at GPL software for fear of IP contamination. MS could probably resolve a lot of security problems by getting a very clueful team of auditors to review products for security issues.
His answer to the next question tries to take an isolated incident: Corel's poor results in their one and only foray into the Linux area, and turn it into proof of a bigger issue. Corel failed and they had cool stuff, so what hope does anyone else have? Anybody who knows the whole Corel incident well knows that there were a huge number of problems in the way Corel went about doing things, from arguably violating the GPL in their beta test agreements to making their version of Linux look like a bad Windows rip-off.
Corel is one example of a for-profit company selling closed-source apps into the Linux market and being unsuccessful. There are other examples as well. Quake 3 experienced poor sales in the Linux market for various reasons. The timing of the release didn't really help much, but as I understand it, sales were way below expectations, and expectations were pretty low to begin with.
If Linux isn't better, but is just as good as a commercial version of UNIX then isn't that a revolution right there? An OS as good as a commercial UNIX where every standard component is Free is revolutionary.
I'm afraid I have to disagree with you there. I honestly don't see much about Linux that's revolutionary. The concept of free (libre) software is certainly not a new one. GNU had been around for years before the first Linux kernel was developed. It seems that the origination of free (libre) software is the academic environment in the early 80's. I would really like to see a compelling argument about how Linux is revolutionary. The only revolutionary thing that I see is the multitude of compromised Linux boxes on the Internet hosted by clueless individuals that wouldn't know UNIX if it bit 'em in the ass, but they can damn sure get through the pretty installation routines. But then, that's a whole other rant.
Yes, schools teach kids these things. But consider the alternative. What kind of society would we have if kids were taught that they didn't have to do anything on a schedule, that they didn't have to be on time and organized, that they didn't have a place in a power structure, that they didn't have to respect authority?
I suppose the alternative would be that their parents teach them these things and the schools get on with the business of educating students. I know it's a revolutionary idea to consider a school a place of education as opposed to the babysitter that you use to rear your children for you.
What the hell is wrong with teaching kids to NOT be little shits? Or would you rather raise a generation of criminals because it's not cool to follow the rules? Juvenile crime is bad enough already, why promote it?
There's nothing wrong with parents teaching their children how to behave in a society. This has been a fairly common practice for the last several thousand years. I would contend that any perceivable rise in juvenile crime is a result of this practice failing.
The fact is that rules make a society livable, and you have to teach people the rules at an early age. If you don't, you get a lot of punks who use violence to solve their problems.
If the poster has a kid, I encourage him to adopt a hands-off method of raising him and see what happens. I'll see his ass on COPS someday soon.
These statements make you seem angry and are really a detriment to your argument which was rather weak to begin with. You advise the previous poster against lashing out and then go and do it yourself.
Did you read the documents that you linked up or were you just karma whoring? Each draft standard contains the following text:
9. Trademark Issues
SSH is a registered trademark and Secure Shell is a trademark of SSH
Communications Security Corp. SSH Communications Security Corp permits
the use of these trademarks as the name of this standard and protocol,
and permits their use to describe that a product conforms to this
standard, provided that the following acknowledgement is included where
the trademarks are used: ``SSH is a registered trademark and Secure
Shell is a trademark of SSH Communications Security Corp
(www.ssh.com)''. These trademarks may not be used as part of a product
name or in otherwise confusing manner without prior written permission
of SSH Communications Security Corp.
So it does very clearly state in the text of each document that "SSH®" is a registered trademark of SSH Communications Security Corp.
I'm sure Mr. Ylonen holds copyright on the code that he's written but in this particular case he holds the trademark for the names "SSH®" and "Secure Shell®". I wish you fucking slashdot buffoons could sort out the difference between trademarks, copyrights, and patents. If you're interested in IP law, and you seem to be, since you're bothering to comment on this, why don't you go read the source, or in this case, the law. It's in US Code Title 15, Chapter 22. Copyrights are US Code Title 17 and patents are in Title 35.
In my opinion, the biggest contrast that I see between this decision and the decision regarding guinness-sucks.com is that in this case, the person holding the potentially infringing domain name actually responded to the WIPO panel and the Complainants contentions. Unfortunately, I don't see much chance of winning a dispute if one doesn't respond to it.
Just a little clarification. The 7.62 NATO round is known in non-military parlance as a .308 Winchester. The 5.56 as a .223. Take a look at ballistic specs for a .308 Winchester in the back of any Shooter's Bible. A 30-06 is typically a bit hotter round than a .308. All three rounds can have a muzzle velocity exceeding 3000fps.
I believe Win2k is mostly a microkernel. If I remember correctly, the GDI was moved into the kernel for Win2k to improve performance.
Exchange and Outlook are not just simply email applications. I would consider them a suite of applications that include a personal information manager, directory services, calendar and scheduling, etc.
Exchange very obviously is not targeted at small or even large ISPs. Aside from the software licensing costs, the system itself doesn't scale anywhere nearly as cheaply as POP or IMAP. No ISP is going to spend $20k each for 5 PC-based servers just to support 1000 users.
Exchange is targeted for enterprise use. It actually works pretty well if the user-base is mostly Windows and requires the additional functionality. It also requires a decent administrator, which is something more difficult to find. Particularly someone clueful enough to be able to understand Internet-connected email systems and DNS in addition to all the undocumented "features" of NT or 2000.
If this marketing propaganda is true, why the hell is Real Networks licensing the Windows Media codecs?
Well, since the Xeon processors don't suffer from the cache problems that the Sun processors do, I would imagine that the uptime is pretty good.
How's the scalability on the E450 past 4 processors? Non-existent you say? You mean I'd have to spend $223,000.00 on a Sun to even begin to think about something beyond quad-processors? I could spend a 1/5 of that for an 8-processor Compaq/Dell/HP and get better tpc-c performance than the E4500.
The million dollar bet was bullshit and anybody with some sense knew it. Sun's best posted tpc-c score for a non-clustered server is ~150,000 for a 64-way E10k running Sybase for a cost of about $7,000,000. Compaq's best submitted performance for a 4-way server is ~35,000 with Win2k and SQL2k for around $500,000. So basically I get 1/4 the performance for 1/14 the price. Suns cluster really well, you say? The tpc-c number one position right now belongs to a clustered Compaq running Win2k and SQL2k.
Despite these numbers, I agree with you, but not on the basis of performance. When I let my own personal preferences and emotions come into play I like unix a whole lot better than I like Windows anything. As a matter of fact I despise Microsoft Server products, but that doesn't mean that they aren't faster and that they don't get good uptime. Most people's concepts of uptime are based on client systems and sub-optimal configurations that tend to go down. Microsoft server products can be optimized to be stable.
The fact remains that Sun is dropping the ball. Their most impressive hardware just isn't that impressive anymore. The USIII is way way late and not really very impressive. It is an incremental improvement over the USII. Fortunately, it does actually get more done per clock cycle than an Intel P3, but only slightly more. Hopefully they can get the clock speed up.
In the end, if I cared about cost, performance, and reliability I'd be more apt to run FreeBSD. If I were forced to run Oracle, I'd definitely consider Linux on Intel. If I needed to scale really well I'd probably use an HP9000 or an RS6000.
I still haven't seen anybody support an argument for why one would use a Sun Box for a particular application over Win2k on Intel. I can certainly think of a few, but that's me.
That 400 megahertz processor operates on about 4 times more CPU instructions per clock cycle than your X86 chip. You're comparing apples and oranges. And I have bad software support problems on my IBM Aptiva running Windows that crashes every 5-7 days. What problems do SPARC chips have that x86 chips don't?
You are wrong. An Intel P3 or an AMD Athlon absolutely smokes the USII in terms of instructions per clock cycle. Fortunately most people don't use these machines for their raw CPU power, they use 'em for the I/O throughput. Current Sun architecture is quite a bit faster than current Intel architecture in addition to the fact that Sun uses huge amounts of L2 cache. The USIII and the Intel P4 will be on par with each other in terms of I/O throughput (they'll both be at 3.2GBps).
What exactly is standard about needing a massive image editing package with your server? Dumb statement.
How will you ever get a job in the real world when you equate Microsoft Paint with Oracle in the same sentence. I'm a sys admin and haven't touched a graphics program for work in over 5 years.
You seem to imply here that graphics programs are not valid applications for a server. A lot of very strenuous supercomputing that is done is directly related to graphics. I know quite a few people that are using SGIs on the same scale as the E10k to do rendering. Incidentally, SGIs work quite well for this as they have slightly better fp performance as well as a more scalable MP architecture requiring simpler programming (multi-threaded vs. clustered). The fact remains though that neither MIPS nor SPARC have the FP performance of an Alpha, Intel, or AMD which is what some people use to build render clusters (think Titanic).
Calling the original poster dumb was an argument ad hominem. It also makes you an asshole (another argument ad hominem).
Most Sun hardware is pretty reliable though it is overpriced in comparison to Intel hardware of equivalent quality. I can buy a dual-processor E220 for ~$20,000. I could buy an equivalent Compaq, HP, or Dell rack-mounted server for half that. It would have slightly better better CPU performance and slightly less I/O throughput.
Sun's specifically aren't good at hosting dynamic web pages because they can require quite a bit of CPU and relatively small amounts of data. Sun machines do better with huge amounts of data and relatively smaller CPU loads. The make great Oracle servers. Which is what I gather you are using them for.
Additionally, MS SQL Server 2000 on Win2k on a quad-processor Compaq (Xeon 700Mhz) can be faster than a quad-processor E450.
Yes, you are a Sun Bigot. You are also an asshole (once again, there goes that ad hominem thing again). You're almost as bad as a mainframe guy. People that think that they have a concept of system architecture but get their judgement clouded by their own zealous behaviour annoy the shit out of me.
Additionally, I'll provide something that you didn't provide while debunking the earlier poster's comments.
Check out specint and specfp marks on Intel P3s versus ultrasparc IIs. go to http://www.spec.org for the info. For database results that prove my point check out tpc-c benchmarks at http://www.tpc.org. Granted, they don't have results for Oracle 8i on a quad-processor E450, but they do have results from other rdbms vendors. The E450 scores about a third slower than the quad-processor compaq.
Have a nice day.