Introducing the brand new steam motor carriage, courtesy of Stanley Motor Carriage Company! Featuring the latest in horseless carriage technology! Steam powered and built with pride!
Stanley Motor Carriage Company would like to take this time to talk to you about a growing concern for all of us. As you might have heard several NEW companies such as, Ford Motor Company, are selling horseless carriages based around the internal combustion engine. Did you realize that the internal combustion engine would be more accurately named the internal explosion engine! There are literally thousands of explosions an hour happening right in front of the driver every hour. Just imagine what could happen if one of them went wrong!
Stanley, on the other hand, is committed to maintaining our safe steam powered vehicles. Everyone knows that through the magic of steam, clean and safe travel is assured. And of course water won't explode.
While it would be convenient to have the social networking sites auto-populate their relation ships based on your previously entered data from other sites abuse of this system make me very nervous. Particularly, the use of OpenID. I believe this was the intent of Microsoft Passport (centralized login to all other websites), but I would hardly trust my ONE internet password to Microsoft.
Saying that it does seem better if the entity you entrust this information to (not just password but friend relationships, behavior, preferences, who knows what else) is a non-profit, maybe non-evil, maybe open source, etc... Still what if they aren't as innocuous as they seem, what if they suffer a security breach? Even with a centralized login system as an aside, think about the possibilities for identity theft and social engineering. If someone can reconstruct your behavior, friends, family, location... how hard is it really to become you?
I think a better system may be for a user to establish those per-site IDs then use a common API to link them to each other. The user specifies I'm John-Crazy-Guy on Facebook and my MySpace ID is John123-Crazy-Guy please sync with each other. Of course I'm not sure how MySpace/Facebook would correlate the relationship of your friends to their other social networking IDs. That would probably have to be dependent on if they have established that relationship as well. It still leaves something open to security breaches, but at least it is;
a. Distributed so each breach wouldn't be as large of a compromise. b. Does not include credentials. c. Is dependent on who in your contacts has also done their part of the sync. d. Could be a common RFC for data sharing between sites. e. Probably scales better without dependency on a central authority.
He concludes that the virtualization technology has some maturing to do...
I RTFA and it says very little about the maturity of the actual Xen technology. The article is more a point about several non-related factors;
1.) There is a lack of pretty management interfaces.
True, but these are in the works from Red Hat, Novell, XenSource, and various other ends. Already some of them look pretty promising, but if you are a real admin you don't need them in the first place. There is nothing wrong with using the command line tools to manage your Xen virtual guest environment.
2.) There is a lack of references for companies using Xen.
How does this relate to the viability of the Xen virtualization? Yeah it makes management feel nice and fuzzy that others are using something, but this does not relate to how well the Xen technology performs. I also suspect that like many open source projects, there are many people using it that do not report it. Novell has personally contacted me and my company to ask us to assist in their new paravirtualized Windows drivers initiative and then be a reference for the technology. It seems that at least some companies are moving to address this, at any rate.
3.) There aren't many benchmarks about Xen versus VMWare.
VMWare does not allow benchmarks they do not approve of. It's in that draconian EULA you agreed to by using it.
4.) It's awkward to paravirtualize Windows.
Yes, it is. Novell signed the soul sapping agreement with MS and as such is pushing some paravirtualized drivers for Windows. The article continually talks about woes with Xen on Red Hat. Red Hat didn't sign the agreement and will require some much more intelligent coding to make this happen. It might never happen, so for Windows it's full virtualization with VT (or AMD's equivalent) or bust. Sorry, use SUSE for it or use full virtualization. It's an MS issue not a Xen issue.
5.) MS's new Viridan Virtualization Platform is using paravirtualization as well.
Yep, that should be a testament to the approach versus VMWare. Though it is interesting that VMWare now has a Linux kernel virtualization implementation similar to KVM. It seems VMWare is headed to paravirtualization as well. Obviously Xen did something right.
6.) There is a lot of competition.
True. How again is this relating to Xen as a virtualization technology.
Again, I'm not saying Xen is perfect. It definitely has issues and room to grow. I'm just saying that the article makes little, if any, relevant points to Xen's virtualization technology.
What I desperately need is a reliable caching filesystem with decent performance.
The $COMPANY network is loaded with Linux workstations and servers, all with their own lotsabyte drives -- and the only things those drives are used for is a tiny system image. Meanwhile the network is getting hammered.
Are you asking for a network based filesystem like AFS? Did I misunderstand your issue?
nothing else has done such a good job at integrating contacts, e-mail, and calendars.
This is no longer true. You really need to take a look at products like Zimbra. From my perspective it has everything Exchange has going for it, plus the benefits of running OSS and on my favorite platform. It even handles Blackberrys, Palms, and PDAs (via NotifyLink). In addition to Zimbra there is Open-Xchange and many more (though I'm not sure they're as solid as Zimbra).
Also have you seen GroupWise 7? I would say it has feature parity. I also hear a lot of places are fine on Lotus Notes (but I haven't used that product personally). Exchange is a nice product, but it simply isn't true that there are not Exchange alternatives.
Ugh.. are you seriously going to make me drift further offtopic and demonstrate how the parent IS indeed a troll.
The parent was obviously trolling; he calls Linux a hacker's OS (I'm assuming he means Hacker as an insult rather then a compliment), infers that Linux is somehow less qualified because of Graduate student code submissions, begins his post with the phrase wakademic (which I am assuming means that he thinks you are wacko if you use an OS that allows code from academic students), makes blanket generalizations about Linux's reliability, maintenance, and scalability with no facts to justify these claims and infers that Linux can only handle apps requiring a mere couple of gigs of ram. Either I'm assuming to much in his wording (and I don't see how I could be), or he's intentionally trying to pick a fight.
That being said, Solaris isn't bad. I wasn't saying it was. I wish Linux had ZFS (outside of FUSE), and DTrace is quite impressive. Rather, I was arguing with his uninformed assertions that Linux cannot scale to Solaris competitive levels. I have personally used Linux on IBM PSeries hardware with large cpu counts and dataset sizes and it has outperformed AIX 5.3 in almost all of our workloads (DB2).
I don't believe I sounded like a fanboy by countering his unproven claims about Linux with actual facts. It's one thing to prove something is wrong with Solaris, or Linux. It's another to generalize and degrade something with little to no knowledge or demonstrative evidence.
Trolls..
Oh and I'm not sure what you mean about deployments and upgrades. I've done numerous but I guess I haven't done many on Solaris. I'm not sure how much superior Solaris is at handling those kind of situations. I never really had many problems in Linux though, but a lot of this falls on your distribution's method for things.
Stop trolling, and though I shouldn't feed.. I will.
Where reliability isn't just important, it's critical. Where scalability isn't just important, it's critical. Where maintainability is valued over a hacker's OS because there aren't a bunch of free grad students to do all the damn work.
Hmm reliability, scalability, and critical workloads like perhaps with supercomputers? You'll note how Linux totally dominates this list with over 70% of all supercomputers. Where's Solaris.. oh that's right 1%. Also latest surveys have shown the majority of code commits to the Linux kernel as coming from major corporations like Novell, Red Hat, IBM. I will also say that you can't judge the code quality by the company behind it. I'd probably take most Hacker code over something written by some corporate drone who isn't passionate (as a hacker IS) any day. Grad Students want good code for thesis;). Corporate employees want acceptable code to get through that 9 - 5.
Show me a Linux kernel that can handle multi-threaded apps running on 144 CPUs and using a terabyte of virtual memory.
What about this? 4096 Itanium2 Processors (64 Bit), 17TB of Ram. This system is multi-partitioned though, so it isn't all one kernel. However, they are using SUSE's Enterprise Server 9 bundled kernel which supports up to 512 Processors. So even there it's beaten your criteria for criticism.
Solaris has been fully 64-bit compliant for over a decade.
Linux has been 64bit for at least 7 years with Itanium and I'm assuming it has been 64 bit for over a decade with MIPS and Alpha architecture support. The majority of development was on i386 arch, however. I'm assuming this is now changing to x86_64 arch (like the majority of the world is running).
That said, he's pretty much of an arrogant asshole and Reiser4 is crap. Why would IBM pick it up when they sponsor the totally superior JFS?
Arrogant probably, but let's focus on the quality of the work not the personality type please. I agree that IBM wouldn't pick it up as they have a vested interest in JFS. Novell would be more likely, but they seem more focused on NSS for Linux then resuming Reiser support (which they stopped after 3.6 release).
I say Reiser4 is crap from experience. It ran our system load through the roof and paralyzed us for 3 days until we pulled an all night session to move 1Tb of data to JFS, which has yet to cause a system freeze.
First, lets get some things clear. Reiser4 is unlike any other filesystem out right now. It does have high cpu utilization because it believes that most processors are minimally used these days with I/O as the major system bottleneck. This is true in most workloads. Reiser4 delivers remarkable performance in using more cpu cycles then other filesystems. This is nice, but for me the true selling point is atomic transactions (read NO MORE CORRUPTION EVER).
There are some sticking points, however. JFS has a pretty nice repacker and Reisers kind of sucks at the moment. Also, Reiser kind of reinvented the wheel in some respects to the Kernel and pissed off some of the devs. It also implements extended attributes but in a way that doesn't match other filesystem implementations, and hence breaks things like Beagle (possibly Samba).
The plugin architecture is neat too.. transparent encryption and compression as a mount option on a filesystem (once again taxing CPU).
It has its issues no doubt, but was one of the most innovative and interesting ideas in the filesystem space. I really hope the project stays alive. One last thing. JFS is nice and definitely a step above EXT3, but XFS I think trumps JFS and Reiser4 trumps both (assuming you have spare CPU capacity). I am interested in playing with Sun's ZFS a bit.. that seems promising. Calling Reiser4 crap is flamebait, and should have been modded as such. Sorry you had a bad experience.. did you file a bug report?
When your last car was worn down to rust did you also expect a free replacement from Toyota?
Flawed analogy because the cars innate value does not reside in the copywritten material encoded on the cars surface or within the car, per se. The car's value is derived in its physical ownership. A CD, in contrast, is worth pennies naturaly. The content on the CD is what is being purchased. Do you expect new food from McDonald's if the food inside the wrapper is bad (another totally flawed analogy). What about demanding new underpants because "My So Called Life" was cancelled (obligatory nonsensical response).
I thought about writing, "if the fair use act" made a provision for cars then, sure I would expect a new Toyotoa. I suppose the paragraph above counters better, especially since I said before I'm not even sure what fair use explicitely provides. It seems like it only mentions libraries;
(b) The rights of reproduction and distribution under this section apply to three copies or phonorecords of an unpublished work duplicated solely for purposes of preservation and security or for deposit for research use in another library or archives of the type described by clause (2) of subsection (a),
Again, not a lawyer, but that's the only section I found relating to legal backups.
The cable providers are just now rolling out digital PVR's and HD set-top boxes, with which my setup is compatible, so they're not going to change the way they work anytime soon.
Interesting setup... I wonder if I could use a similar setup with DVB-S and switch to Dish or DirecTV. Thanks for the idea.
2. If I purchase a CD and it is subsequently scratched or broken to the point where it is not playable, can I legally download the songs from that CD from a file-sharing network?
Wow, I always thought this was a fair use issue. I know fair use isn't what it used to be. I didn't realize it was completely negated. Maybe because I didn't physically make my own backup and went and grabbed someone else's "backup" it's off the negotiating table. I'm no lawyer obviously... someone care to comment?
I don't know about you, but I'm depressed after reading this answer.
I'm depressed there had to be an answer, or a question, in the first place.
...perhaps something to do with ATSC, the DMCA, the FCC or some other three or four letter word? Like I said in another post, I can watch encrypted HDTV channels fine with my DVB-C PCI card...
ATSC was adopted in the US, Canada, and Mexico as opposed to DVB-T. It was originally intended for broadcast signals but has been adopted by US cable operators. ATSC is "on the wire" HDTV in the US as opposed to DVB-C in Europe (I think Japan uses something totally different then US and Europe). DVB is used in the US primarily for consumer Satellite television, DVB-S. ATSC is not used in this instance (but I hear it is still used for Satellite transmission from TV networks (but not to consumers)).
I should have ammended my post above, MythTV can watch terrestrial HDTV (ATSC) broadcasts and some cable HDTV (if unencrypted). However, many channels are encrypted (and I expect this to only increase). Basically you only get network TV in most locations; PBS, ABC, Fox, CBS, WB/UPN, and NBC. The remaining channels are encrypted.
I highly doubt that European broadcasters are not encrypting their premium channels (and likely non-broadcast channels as well). What are you able to watch on your card? Do you have another device feeding it? I suppose you would know better then me, but it really makes me extra depressed to think that just the US, Canada, and Mexico consumers are in this boat (or maybe that gives me hope.. I'm not sure).
I know that Dish networks DVB-S used Nagravision 1 encryption in the US and was cracked in the past. They have been working on adopting Nagrivision 2 and it seems less likely this will be cracked.
I love MythTV. I'm very excited to try 0.20 (UPnP especially). It's a great piece of software and IMO handily beats MCE (though I hear BeyondTV puts up a fight). The level of control is great, I absolutely like to OWN my media. I have a looming fear though that poor MythTV is about to get 'shafted' so to speak.
MythTV has HDTV support for broadcast and Cable HD, but lacks a means of decrypting these streams. In fact, PCs in general do at this point, but I suspect that will change. Vista MCE will undoubtedly have encrypted HDTV playback support, Tivo as well (if it doesn't already). How is a free OSS solution like this to compete against imposed proprietary restrictions? I smell a DeCSS debacle all over again. Perhaps it will get cracked. Maybe I can still watch my streams if I subjugate myself to a DMCA violation or two.
Lets face it, another case of a superior product getting kicked to the curb by an industry that likes to wear tinfoil hats at the detriment of its consumers. I guess I have a decision in the future. Use the software I love and watch the shows it can view, or relinquish control impair my viewing experience and broaden my media options. I think I'll stay with Myth, the studios just lost a viewer (though I doubt they'll notice).
The article is talking about Xen not Zen. Oh and Novell has put a good deal of work into fixing the initial launch issues with Zen on both OpenSUSE 10.1 and SLES/D 10.
If you haven't you may want to update (assuming your system is functioning with updates enough to do so).
I need this to work with Linux, OS X and XP clients (my wife needs XP for online classes, thus that support option;))
I can't comment on BSD, but it works with OS X, Linux, and XP quite nicely. I think that's one of its strongest points is cross platform file access and collaboration.
To put it another way, here's why I don't use a selection of other distros: Redhat - too commercial, Suse - ditto, Fedora - can't stand the package management, Mandriva - ditto, Gentoo - would rather spend my time configuring the package well rather than compiling it. I have Debian on my server and love it, and have the closest thing to Debian on my desktop.
When you say RedHat too commercial and SUSE ditto I am assuming you are speaking of their Enterprise offerings. Otherwise you wouldn't have mentioned Fedora seperately. Yet, I noticed that you did not include OpenSUSE.. I think you'd like it if you gave it a shot. You could argue the same package management complaint, I suppose, as Fedora. Although, I don't see why people have such issues with it. The standard tools in Fedora and SUSE do decently well, but if they're not up to snuff you have YUM and Apt 4 RPM.
Other distributions I considered briefly before installing Trustix were:... Gentoo -- I nearly went this way, since I now run a Gentoo server and like the ease of updates, but I did not have the time or resources on hand to do a complete install from source. Plus the machine is a bit slow...
I had begun building servers some time ago with Gentoo. It was not a pleasurable experience. Bugs in portage (yes portage itself) eventually crept in and royally messed the entire package database. It took a significant amount of time to fix. In addition, there were complaints about the time required to install updatedp packages (even though I used distCC across them). All in all It seems to me that Gentoo in any kind of largescale deployment is just not ready yet. It is too bad because I really wanted to go that route instead of an RPM based distribution. I loved BSD ports and that's half the reason I love Gentoo (Debian being too old as you mentioned and Ubuntu focusing on Desktop).
I wonder why you did not consider SUSE in your testing? I have yet to find an administrative tool in SUSE that requires X.. all GUI wizards are available from Console. SLES 10 is about to be released and looks extremely promising. Take a look next time your evaluating your enterprise Linux choices.
I will mention that I did not consider any of the BSDs in this due to my general lack of experience with BSD. I mean to learn it eventually, but for now I'm mainly a Linux admin. (And a Windows admin, but that's by necessity rather than choice.)
As for BSD I love it. However, it should be apparent at this point that BSD is improving too slowly. Latest benchmarks (especially of OpenBSD) show BSD as a poor performer in many ways. The security is huge, yes, and OpenBSD rises to this. Yet, it is becoming harder and harder to justify the performance losses and software compatibility (try getting third party applications to support BSD) versus Linux.
Of course all this depends on what you intend to use your servers for, and is just my personal opinion and experience.
Am trying to convince my boss to give Amanda a try, but I don't think that will be possible until we ditch Novell for Samba...
Just curious, but why ditching Novell for Samba when you could move to Open Enterprise Server (with the Linux kernel) and run Samba on Linux in Novell? You could run Amanda right away, or even RSYNC NetWare to Linux (with TRUSTEE.NLM rights output) and then Amanda that. I guess I just don't see how people can get away from e-Directory and ZENworks if they are still supporting Windows machines...
How do you feel your message is generally received by companies, the open source community, and the public at large? Have you found the open source community in general to be open minded and receptive to counter claims?
Additionally, how does your personal opinion of Linux coincide or differ from the Microsoft sponsored opinion?
I hearby predict the quality of the storyline for Toy Story 3 will be vastly inferior to the first two Toy Story movies.
The storyline? You mean the same pixar storyline they've used for all their movies (with a slight alteration in The Incredibles)?!?!?
Character A doesn't fit in with the group.
Character A goes out in the world.
Character A gets lost and can't get home.
Character(s) X try to find Character A.
Character A tries to get home.
Big obstacle to Characters surface.
Characters work out their differences to conquer obstacle(s).
Character A has to choose to leave or stay.
Character A stays with new friends.
All is well.
I am a big Pixar fan, but unique story telling is not their forte. Certainly you can credit Pixar with a lot, but storytelling is not one of them. Perhaps, you are saying the method Pixar tells the same story over and over again with is the key? It could be argued that Disney gives Pixar the story to portray. I have not seen concrete evidence of that, however.
I am predicting that Intel compilers department will be trashed soon. According to latest Coyote's benchmarks, GCC is caching up with performance. Moreover, you cannot improve performance of C++ compiler beyond certain limit, and it seems both intel and gcc (also MS) are close to that point. So, nobody will buy ICC to gain 5% on one app and loose 3% on another. Times when Intel had 30-40% over gcc will never come back.
This will only hold true if and when Intel and HP scrap all Itanium plans. Itanium processors do not do instruction prefetch. HP and Intel decided it was the compilers job to organize instructions for execution (a point I agree on). However, the vast majority of processors do have instruction prefetch, and GCC disagrees and believes that it is the processors job to organize instructions for execution. As a result, Itanium's GCC performance is absolutely pitiful. There is also no easy fix for this as changing GCC to do instruction prefetch only for Itanium is no small task, and obviously changing Itanium to have an instruction prefetch is also no small task. ICC, however, does do instruction prefetch on the compiler level, and thus results in much much better performance on Itanium then GCC. For Intel and HP to continue to market Itanium, they will need an adequate compiler. However, I don't see them selling Itanium much longer anyways so most likely neither will ICC. It would be nice if they would open source it though as decent competition to GCC couldn't hurt:).
The public has both a need and desire for convenient access to its medical records. It has neither the need nor the desire for convenient access to business-specific information about the auto industry.
This is a discussion about the damage to mission critical infrastructure. The public's convenient online access to medical records is not mission critical to the US infrastructure. The financial transactions and systems of something like the auto industry are mission critical. If you said it was hospital prescription systems, patient billing, and the like that could be slightly more important.
On top of that, if you privatize your sector, you just need to invest that much more money into physically securing your systems because you now have much less capability to do damage control and routing, and smaller, more targeted attacks can more easily bring down your systems.
While this is true, chaining your critical systems to a public network has much higher risks then isolation. Isolation does provide for routing around damage (with the proper money and design), and generally requires physical access to the network for an attack to be played out. It also requires knowledge that those systems exist (but this is a weak argument as obscurity is the worst form of security). I had said that many corporations that become involved in these private networks do have the financial backing, adequate concerns, and general incentive to do this. My point was more or less that it might be harder then people realize for a cyber attack to take down significant portions of the US or World critical systems. I know the Pentagon was discussing isolating all military systems on a seperate network then the Internet as well.
What do you expect hospitals to do, isolate a bunch of servers in miscellaneous locations and force people to print and walk medical records from one place to another? Do you expect air traffic control to build it's own cutoff communications medium that only interoperates with other towers and facilities? Do you expect banks to force people to perform all of their transactions in isolated physical locations?
Umm private networks? This happens all the time. In fact, I know for a fact the auto industry uses ANX net which is basically a seperate Internet for the auto companies, their suppliers, and finanial institutions. It's probably all done over clear channel (not the communications firm). It's isolated from hacks on the Internet, they'd have to originate from a node on ANX net. I'm sure many other large industries now do this. Isolation works so they do it. Locking down Internet systems works too.. but why not combine them. Saying that the public needs to access these systems is ludicrous if you have the financial means to get around that.
Slashdot Mirror
Introducing the brand new steam motor carriage, courtesy of Stanley Motor Carriage Company! Featuring the latest in horseless carriage technology! Steam powered and built with pride!
Stanley Motor Carriage Company would like to take this time to talk to you about a growing concern for all of us. As you might have heard several NEW companies such as, Ford Motor Company, are selling horseless carriages based around the internal combustion engine. Did you realize that the internal combustion engine would be more accurately named the internal explosion engine! There are literally thousands of explosions an hour happening right in front of the driver every hour. Just imagine what could happen if one of them went wrong!
Stanley, on the other hand, is committed to maintaining our safe steam powered vehicles. Everyone knows that through the magic of steam, clean and safe travel is assured. And of course water won't explode.
Thank you for your continued patronage.
While it would be convenient to have the social networking sites auto-populate their relation ships based on your previously entered data from other sites abuse of this system make me very nervous. Particularly, the use of OpenID. I believe this was the intent of Microsoft Passport (centralized login to all other websites), but I would hardly trust my ONE internet password to Microsoft.
Saying that it does seem better if the entity you entrust this information to (not just password but friend relationships, behavior, preferences, who knows what else) is a non-profit, maybe non-evil, maybe open source, etc... Still what if they aren't as innocuous as they seem, what if they suffer a security breach? Even with a centralized login system as an aside, think about the possibilities for identity theft and social engineering. If someone can reconstruct your behavior, friends, family, location... how hard is it really to become you?
I think a better system may be for a user to establish those per-site IDs then use a common API to link them to each other. The user specifies I'm John-Crazy-Guy on Facebook and my MySpace ID is John123-Crazy-Guy please sync with each other. Of course I'm not sure how MySpace/Facebook would correlate the relationship of your friends to their other social networking IDs. That would probably have to be dependent on if they have established that relationship as well. It still leaves something open to security breaches, but at least it is;
a. Distributed so each breach wouldn't be as large of a compromise.
b. Does not include credentials.
c. Is dependent on who in your contacts has also done their part of the sync.
d. Could be a common RFC for data sharing between sites.
e. Probably scales better without dependency on a central authority.
He concludes that the virtualization technology has some maturing to do...
I RTFA and it says very little about the maturity of the actual Xen technology. The article is more a point about several non-related factors;
1.) There is a lack of pretty management interfaces.
True, but these are in the works from Red Hat, Novell, XenSource, and various other ends. Already some of them look pretty promising, but if you are a real admin you don't need them in the first place. There is nothing wrong with using the command line tools to manage your Xen virtual guest environment.
2.) There is a lack of references for companies using Xen.
How does this relate to the viability of the Xen virtualization? Yeah it makes management feel nice and fuzzy that others are using something, but this does not relate to how well the Xen technology performs. I also suspect that like many open source projects, there are many people using it that do not report it. Novell has personally contacted me and my company to ask us to assist in their new paravirtualized Windows drivers initiative and then be a reference for the technology. It seems that at least some companies are moving to address this, at any rate.
3.) There aren't many benchmarks about Xen versus VMWare.
VMWare does not allow benchmarks they do not approve of. It's in that draconian EULA you agreed to by using it.
4.) It's awkward to paravirtualize Windows.
Yes, it is. Novell signed the soul sapping agreement with MS and as such is pushing some paravirtualized drivers for Windows. The article continually talks about woes with Xen on Red Hat. Red Hat didn't sign the agreement and will require some much more intelligent coding to make this happen. It might never happen, so for Windows it's full virtualization with VT (or AMD's equivalent) or bust. Sorry, use SUSE for it or use full virtualization. It's an MS issue not a Xen issue.
5.) MS's new Viridan Virtualization Platform is using paravirtualization as well.
Yep, that should be a testament to the approach versus VMWare. Though it is interesting that VMWare now has a Linux kernel virtualization implementation similar to KVM. It seems VMWare is headed to paravirtualization as well. Obviously Xen did something right.
6.) There is a lot of competition.
True. How again is this relating to Xen as a virtualization technology.
Again, I'm not saying Xen is perfect. It definitely has issues and room to grow. I'm just saying that the article makes little, if any, relevant points to Xen's virtualization technology.
What I desperately need is a reliable caching filesystem with decent performance.
The $COMPANY network is loaded with Linux workstations and servers, all with their own lotsabyte drives -- and the only things those drives are used for is a tiny system image. Meanwhile the network is getting hammered.
Are you asking for a network based filesystem like AFS? Did I misunderstand your issue?
nothing else has done such a good job at integrating contacts, e-mail, and calendars.
This is no longer true. You really need to take a look at products like Zimbra. From my perspective it has everything Exchange has going for it, plus the benefits of running OSS and on my favorite platform. It even handles Blackberrys, Palms, and PDAs (via NotifyLink). In addition to Zimbra there is Open-Xchange and many more (though I'm not sure they're as solid as Zimbra).
Also have you seen GroupWise 7? I would say it has feature parity. I also hear a lot of places are fine on Lotus Notes (but I haven't used that product personally). Exchange is a nice product, but it simply isn't true that there are not Exchange alternatives.
Stop whining, parent wasn't trolling at all
Ugh.. are you seriously going to make me drift further offtopic and demonstrate how the parent IS indeed a troll.
The parent was obviously trolling; he calls Linux a hacker's OS (I'm assuming he means Hacker as an insult rather then a compliment), infers that Linux is somehow less qualified because of Graduate student code submissions, begins his post with the phrase wakademic (which I am assuming means that he thinks you are wacko if you use an OS that allows code from academic students), makes blanket generalizations about Linux's reliability, maintenance, and scalability with no facts to justify these claims and infers that Linux can only handle apps requiring a mere couple of gigs of ram. Either I'm assuming to much in his wording (and I don't see how I could be), or he's intentionally trying to pick a fight.
That being said, Solaris isn't bad. I wasn't saying it was. I wish Linux had ZFS (outside of FUSE), and DTrace is quite impressive. Rather, I was arguing with his uninformed assertions that Linux cannot scale to Solaris competitive levels. I have personally used Linux on IBM PSeries hardware with large cpu counts and dataset sizes and it has outperformed AIX 5.3 in almost all of our workloads (DB2).
I don't believe I sounded like a fanboy by countering his unproven claims about Linux with actual facts. It's one thing to prove something is wrong with Solaris, or Linux. It's another to generalize and degrade something with little to no knowledge or demonstrative evidence.
Trolls..
Oh and I'm not sure what you mean about deployments and upgrades. I've done numerous but I guess I haven't done many on Solaris. I'm not sure how much superior Solaris is at handling those kind of situations. I never really had many problems in Linux though, but a lot of this falls on your distribution's method for things.
Stop trolling, and though I shouldn't feed.. I will.
;). Corporate employees want acceptable code to get through that 9 - 5.
Where reliability isn't just important, it's critical. Where scalability isn't just important, it's critical. Where maintainability is valued over a hacker's OS because there aren't a bunch of free grad students to do all the damn work.
Hmm reliability, scalability, and critical workloads like perhaps with supercomputers? You'll note how Linux totally dominates this list with over 70% of all supercomputers. Where's Solaris.. oh that's right 1%. Also latest surveys have shown the majority of code commits to the Linux kernel as coming from major corporations like Novell, Red Hat, IBM. I will also say that you can't judge the code quality by the company behind it. I'd probably take most Hacker code over something written by some corporate drone who isn't passionate (as a hacker IS) any day. Grad Students want good code for thesis
Show me a Linux kernel that can handle multi-threaded apps running on 144 CPUs and using a terabyte of virtual memory.
What about this? 4096 Itanium2 Processors (64 Bit), 17TB of Ram. This system is multi-partitioned though, so it isn't all one kernel. However, they are using SUSE's Enterprise Server 9 bundled kernel which supports up to 512 Processors. So even there it's beaten your criteria for criticism.
Solaris has been fully 64-bit compliant for over a decade.
Linux has been 64bit for at least 7 years with Itanium and I'm assuming it has been 64 bit for over a decade with MIPS and Alpha architecture support. The majority of development was on i386 arch, however. I'm assuming this is now changing to x86_64 arch (like the majority of the world is running).
That said, he's pretty much of an arrogant asshole and Reiser4 is crap. Why would IBM pick it up when they sponsor the totally superior JFS?
.. transparent encryption and compression as a mount option on a filesystem (once again taxing CPU).
Arrogant probably, but let's focus on the quality of the work not the personality type please. I agree that IBM wouldn't pick it up as they have a vested interest in JFS. Novell would be more likely, but they seem more focused on NSS for Linux then resuming Reiser support (which they stopped after 3.6 release).
I say Reiser4 is crap from experience. It ran our system load through the roof and paralyzed us for 3 days until we pulled an all night session to move 1Tb of data to JFS, which has yet to cause a system freeze.
First, lets get some things clear. Reiser4 is unlike any other filesystem out right now. It does have high cpu utilization because it believes that most processors are minimally used these days with I/O as the major system bottleneck. This is true in most workloads. Reiser4 delivers remarkable performance in using more cpu cycles then other filesystems. This is nice, but for me the true selling point is atomic transactions (read NO MORE CORRUPTION EVER).
There are some sticking points, however. JFS has a pretty nice repacker and Reisers kind of sucks at the moment. Also, Reiser kind of reinvented the wheel in some respects to the Kernel and pissed off some of the devs. It also implements extended attributes but in a way that doesn't match other filesystem implementations, and hence breaks things like Beagle (possibly Samba).
The plugin architecture is neat too
It has its issues no doubt, but was one of the most innovative and interesting ideas in the filesystem space. I really hope the project stays alive. One last thing. JFS is nice and definitely a step above EXT3, but XFS I think trumps JFS and Reiser4 trumps both (assuming you have spare CPU capacity). I am interested in playing with Sun's ZFS a bit.. that seems promising. Calling Reiser4 crap is flamebait, and should have been modded as such. Sorry you had a bad experience.. did you file a bug report?
Can you spell 'vapourware'?
Sure, no problem. Vaporware.
(Yes I had to)
When your last car was worn down to rust did you also expect a free replacement from Toyota?
Flawed analogy because the cars innate value does not reside in the copywritten material encoded on the cars surface or within the car, per se. The car's value is derived in its physical ownership. A CD, in contrast, is worth pennies naturaly. The content on the CD is what is being purchased. Do you expect new food from McDonald's if the food inside the wrapper is bad (another totally flawed analogy). What about demanding new underpants because "My So Called Life" was cancelled (obligatory nonsensical response).
I thought about writing, "if the fair use act" made a provision for cars then, sure I would expect a new Toyotoa. I suppose the paragraph above counters better, especially since I said before I'm not even sure what fair use explicitely provides. It seems like it only mentions libraries;
(b) The rights of reproduction and distribution under this section apply to three copies or phonorecords of an unpublished work duplicated solely for purposes of preservation and security or for deposit for research use in another library or archives of the type described by clause (2) of subsection (a),
Again, not a lawyer, but that's the only section I found relating to legal backups.
The cable providers are just now rolling out digital PVR's and HD set-top boxes, with which my setup is compatible, so they're not going to change the way they work anytime soon.
Interesting setup... I wonder if I could use a similar setup with DVB-S and switch to Dish or DirecTV. Thanks for the idea.
2. If I purchase a CD and it is subsequently scratched or broken to the point where it is not playable, can I legally download the songs from that CD from a file-sharing network?
Wow, I always thought this was a fair use issue. I know fair use isn't what it used to be. I didn't realize it was completely negated. Maybe because I didn't physically make my own backup and went and grabbed someone else's "backup" it's off the negotiating table. I'm no lawyer obviously... someone care to comment?
I don't know about you, but I'm depressed after reading this answer.
I'm depressed there had to be an answer, or a question, in the first place.
...perhaps something to do with ATSC, the DMCA, the FCC or some other three or four letter word? Like I said in another post, I can watch encrypted HDTV channels fine with my DVB-C PCI card...
ATSC was adopted in the US, Canada, and Mexico as opposed to DVB-T. It was originally intended for broadcast signals but has been adopted by US cable operators. ATSC is "on the wire" HDTV in the US as opposed to DVB-C in Europe (I think Japan uses something totally different then US and Europe). DVB is used in the US primarily for consumer Satellite television, DVB-S. ATSC is not used in this instance (but I hear it is still used for Satellite transmission from TV networks (but not to consumers)).
I should have ammended my post above, MythTV can watch terrestrial HDTV (ATSC) broadcasts and some cable HDTV (if unencrypted). However, many channels are encrypted (and I expect this to only increase). Basically you only get network TV in most locations; PBS, ABC, Fox, CBS, WB/UPN, and NBC. The remaining channels are encrypted.
I highly doubt that European broadcasters are not encrypting their premium channels (and likely non-broadcast channels as well). What are you able to watch on your card? Do you have another device feeding it? I suppose you would know better then me, but it really makes me extra depressed to think that just the US, Canada, and Mexico consumers are in this boat (or maybe that gives me hope.. I'm not sure).
I know that Dish networks DVB-S used Nagravision 1 encryption in the US and was cracked in the past. They have been working on adopting Nagrivision 2 and it seems less likely this will be cracked.
I love MythTV. I'm very excited to try 0.20 (UPnP especially). It's a great piece of software and IMO handily beats MCE (though I hear BeyondTV puts up a fight). The level of control is great, I absolutely like to OWN my media. I have a looming fear though that poor MythTV is about to get 'shafted' so to speak.
MythTV has HDTV support for broadcast and Cable HD, but lacks a means of decrypting these streams. In fact, PCs in general do at this point, but I suspect that will change. Vista MCE will undoubtedly have encrypted HDTV playback support, Tivo as well (if it doesn't already). How is a free OSS solution like this to compete against imposed proprietary restrictions? I smell a DeCSS debacle all over again. Perhaps it will get cracked. Maybe I can still watch my streams if I subjugate myself to a DMCA violation or two.
Lets face it, another case of a superior product getting kicked to the curb by an industry that likes to wear tinfoil hats at the detriment of its consumers. I guess I have a decision in the future. Use the software I love and watch the shows it can view, or relinquish control impair my viewing experience and broaden my media options. I think I'll stay with Myth, the studios just lost a viewer (though I doubt they'll notice).
The article is talking about Xen not Zen. Oh and Novell has put a good deal of work into fixing the initial launch issues with Zen on both OpenSUSE 10.1 and SLES/D 10.
If you haven't you may want to update (assuming your system is functioning with updates enough to do so).
I need this to work with Linux, OS X and XP clients (my wife needs XP for online classes, thus that support option ;))
I can't comment on BSD, but it works with OS X, Linux, and XP quite nicely. I think that's one of its strongest points is cross platform file access and collaboration.
To put it another way, here's why I don't use a selection of other distros: Redhat - too commercial, Suse - ditto, Fedora - can't stand the package management, Mandriva - ditto, Gentoo - would rather spend my time configuring the package well rather than compiling it. I have Debian on my server and love it, and have the closest thing to Debian on my desktop.
When you say RedHat too commercial and SUSE ditto I am assuming you are speaking of their Enterprise offerings. Otherwise you wouldn't have mentioned Fedora seperately. Yet, I noticed that you did not include OpenSUSE.. I think you'd like it if you gave it a shot. You could argue the same package management complaint, I suppose, as Fedora. Although, I don't see why people have such issues with it. The standard tools in Fedora and SUSE do decently well, but if they're not up to snuff you have YUM and Apt 4 RPM.
Other distributions I considered briefly before installing Trustix were: ...
Gentoo -- I nearly went this way, since I now run a Gentoo server and like the ease of updates, but I did not have the time or resources on hand to do a complete install from source. Plus the machine is a bit slow...
I had begun building servers some time ago with Gentoo. It was not a pleasurable experience. Bugs in portage (yes portage itself) eventually crept in and royally messed the entire package database. It took a significant amount of time to fix. In addition, there were complaints about the time required to install updatedp packages (even though I used distCC across them). All in all It seems to me that Gentoo in any kind of largescale deployment is just not ready yet. It is too bad because I really wanted to go that route instead of an RPM based distribution. I loved BSD ports and that's half the reason I love Gentoo (Debian being too old as you mentioned and Ubuntu focusing on Desktop).
I wonder why you did not consider SUSE in your testing? I have yet to find an administrative tool in SUSE that requires X.. all GUI wizards are available from Console. SLES 10 is about to be released and looks extremely promising. Take a look next time your evaluating your enterprise Linux choices.
I will mention that I did not consider any of the BSDs in this due to my general lack of experience with BSD. I mean to learn it eventually, but for now I'm mainly a Linux admin. (And a Windows admin, but that's by necessity rather than choice.)
As for BSD I love it. However, it should be apparent at this point that BSD is improving too slowly. Latest benchmarks (especially of OpenBSD) show BSD as a poor performer in many ways. The security is huge, yes, and OpenBSD rises to this. Yet, it is becoming harder and harder to justify the performance losses and software compatibility (try getting third party applications to support BSD) versus Linux.
Of course all this depends on what you intend to use your servers for, and is just my personal opinion and experience.
Am trying to convince my boss to give Amanda a try, but I don't think that will be possible until we ditch Novell for Samba...
Just curious, but why ditching Novell for Samba when you could move to Open Enterprise Server (with the Linux kernel) and run Samba on Linux in Novell? You could run Amanda right away, or even RSYNC NetWare to Linux (with TRUSTEE.NLM rights output) and then Amanda that. I guess I just don't see how people can get away from e-Directory and ZENworks if they are still supporting Windows machines...
How do you feel your message is generally received by companies, the open source community, and the public at large? Have you found the open source community in general to be open minded and receptive to counter claims?
Additionally, how does your personal opinion of Linux coincide or differ from the Microsoft sponsored opinion?
Will this new version of Cedega support Direct X 9.0 graphics API? Is it simply letting the source engine fall back to Direct X 8.0 support?
I was under the impression that WINE had not yet supported Direct X 9.0. I can't wait for this! I can feel the MS grip slipping on my games hehe.
I hearby predict the quality of the storyline for Toy Story 3 will be vastly inferior to the first two Toy Story movies.
The storyline? You mean the same pixar storyline they've used for all their movies (with a slight alteration in The Incredibles)?!?!?
Character A doesn't fit in with the group.
Character A goes out in the world.
Character A gets lost and can't get home.
Character(s) X try to find Character A.
Character A tries to get home.
Big obstacle to Characters surface.
Characters work out their differences to conquer obstacle(s).
Character A has to choose to leave or stay.
Character A stays with new friends.
All is well.
I am a big Pixar fan, but unique story telling is not their forte. Certainly you can credit Pixar with a lot, but storytelling is not one of them. Perhaps, you are saying the method Pixar tells the same story over and over again with is the key? It could be argued that Disney gives Pixar the story to portray. I have not seen concrete evidence of that, however.
I am predicting that Intel compilers department will be trashed soon. According to latest Coyote's benchmarks, GCC is caching up with performance. Moreover, you cannot improve performance of C++ compiler beyond certain limit, and it seems both intel and gcc (also MS) are close to that point. So, nobody will buy ICC to gain 5% on one app and loose 3% on another. Times when Intel had 30-40% over gcc will never come back.
:).
This will only hold true if and when Intel and HP scrap all Itanium plans. Itanium processors do not do instruction prefetch. HP and Intel decided it was the compilers job to organize instructions for execution (a point I agree on). However, the vast majority of processors do have instruction prefetch, and GCC disagrees and believes that it is the processors job to organize instructions for execution. As a result, Itanium's GCC performance is absolutely pitiful. There is also no easy fix for this as changing GCC to do instruction prefetch only for Itanium is no small task, and obviously changing Itanium to have an instruction prefetch is also no small task. ICC, however, does do instruction prefetch on the compiler level, and thus results in much much better performance on Itanium then GCC. For Intel and HP to continue to market Itanium, they will need an adequate compiler. However, I don't see them selling Itanium much longer anyways so most likely neither will ICC. It would be nice if they would open source it though as decent competition to GCC couldn't hurt
The public has both a need and desire for convenient access to its medical records. It has neither the need nor the desire for convenient access to business-specific information about the auto industry.
This is a discussion about the damage to mission critical infrastructure. The public's convenient online access to medical records is not mission critical to the US infrastructure. The financial transactions and systems of something like the auto industry are mission critical. If you said it was hospital prescription systems, patient billing, and the like that could be slightly more important.
On top of that, if you privatize your sector, you just need to invest that much more money into physically securing your systems because you now have much less capability to do damage control and routing, and smaller, more targeted attacks can more easily bring down your systems.
While this is true, chaining your critical systems to a public network has much higher risks then isolation. Isolation does provide for routing around damage (with the proper money and design), and generally requires physical access to the network for an attack to be played out. It also requires knowledge that those systems exist (but this is a weak argument as obscurity is the worst form of security). I had said that many corporations that become involved in these private networks do have the financial backing, adequate concerns, and general incentive to do this. My point was more or less that it might be harder then people realize for a cyber attack to take down significant portions of the US or World critical systems. I know the Pentagon was discussing isolating all military systems on a seperate network then the Internet as well.
What do you expect hospitals to do, isolate a bunch of servers in miscellaneous locations and force people to print and walk medical records from one place to another? Do you expect air traffic control to build it's own cutoff communications medium that only interoperates with other towers and facilities? Do you expect banks to force people to perform all of their transactions in isolated physical locations?
Umm private networks? This happens all the time. In fact, I know for a fact the auto industry uses ANX net which is basically a seperate Internet for the auto companies, their suppliers, and finanial institutions. It's probably all done over clear channel (not the communications firm). It's isolated from hacks on the Internet, they'd have to originate from a node on ANX net. I'm sure many other large industries now do this. Isolation works so they do it. Locking down Internet systems works too.. but why not combine them. Saying that the public needs to access these systems is ludicrous if you have the financial means to get around that.