Why am I bothering... (Moderators, feel free to troll/flamebait me, I deserve it for feeding this guy).
...when there are people (especially African-Americans) starving in the streets and/or not getting an education, it's a shame.
I just looked at my window... no oppressed African-Americans starving in the street. But if there was one, I would be sure to go out there and kick him! I'm white, that's what we do!
African-Americans in the United States, have to struggle just to get by.
Sorry to hear that, but welcome to the rest of American society. Ain't equality a bitch?
The fact that the PS2 game console is going to be mainly in the hands of Caucasian suburbanites
Can't afford one, eh?
My ancestors were kept down for centuries, and there has to be some kind of reckoning.
Wake them up, I'll wake up my great, great, great grandfather (nevermind that he lived in Europe) and I'll get him to apologize.
In 1995, Tyrone Fine was awarded a Bachelor of Arts in Computer Science...
I'm amazed by the number of people that are suggesting that your roll your own mail server. For a highly available mail service, there should be no single points of failure so you end up with at least the following:
Redundant/Reliable Internet link. Either be connected to multiple providers or link to the same provider via multiple POPs. A Residential DSL link doesn't qualify as "reliable", regardless of where you get it from.
Redundant servers. No one server failure takes out your mail service. If you are small, you can do everything on one box, but you must have at least one other in hot-standby mode.
Redundant disk. Its called RAID and you don't run a mail service without it.
24x7 monitoring. A monitoring framework (e.g. HP IT/O, BMC Patrol, Tivoli) is constantly looking for problems. When it finds something wrong, someone is always ready to start fixing it.
Sorry guys, but I would not be willing to do any of the above just so I can get reliable email. I'm more than willing to pay someone though.
Everyone seems to be missing, what I consider to be, the point in Gnutella: It isn't a Napster replacement, but proof that killing Napster isn't going to make the problem go away.
Sure Gnutella isn't scaling, but it was hacked up with minimal effort as a way to say "See, look what can be done, now who are you going to sue?" Consider it a prototype. A little more elbow grease and some community development and Gnutella's shortcomings could be removed.
I refuse to sign or accept a service contract any more. Mostly just because I don't want to be stuck with the service for any longer than I have to if I decide I don't want it any more. For example, I can add 500 minutes to my Sprint PCS service just by signing a year contract, but I have changed my plan a couple of times in the last year. Hell, the reason I went with Sprint PCS in the first place is because they didn't have a contract.
One that really got me was the Flashcom contract. A 5 page contract for DSL service that has goodies like:
Flashcom may disclose information regarding Customer's use of the Services for any reason and in its sole discretion.
A customer who terminates the service after installation may be liable for any or all of the following termination charges; (1) an amount equal to the monthly recurring charge multiplied by the number of months remaining; and (2) an additional termination charge in an amount equal to any promotional credit, discount, or fee waiver. [In other words, they get your money, whether you want the service or not.]
Flashcom may send email messages or other forms of communication to Customer containing advertisements.
Customer shall indemnify and hold Flashcom harmless against any and all claims, losses, damages and liabilities sustained by Flashcom resulting from, arising out of, or connected with any breach of, or nonfulfillment of any representation, warranty, covenant or agreement. [With this, you are paying for service for the 2 year contract, whether they provide it to you or not.]
These were revised on 8/21/2000. 8 months ago when I was looking for DSL, the contract said that at the end of 2 years, I would be automatically renewed for another 2 year contract unless I notified them in writing 1 month prior to contract termination. No way! Now it is month to month after 2 years and not quite as bad.
Finally, I disagree with any legislation, etc. to keep companies from doing these contracts. If you want to do business with them, you agree to their terms. If you don't like the terms, you don't do business. I think people will eventually get pissed off enough that companies will start losing business and be forced to rethink their contracts. Perhaps that is why Flashcom changed their contract...
In my experience, the only reason the NT TCO can be less than the UNIX/Linux TCO is because of scenarios like the following:
The NT file server is not responding. MCSE spends 5 minutes taking a look at the hosed server and says, "Let's try rebooting." Twenty minutes later the server is back up and operating. The MCSE records the event as "Fixed file server, 30 minutes".
This is not how we fix things in the UNIX/Linux world. We try to figure out what actually happened and make sure it doesn't happen again. While it does cost the IT department less money to pay a monkey to reboot the box than to buy a brain to think about what happened in the first place, the entire company loses much more money in employee time.
Agreed. My recent frustration is that I am one of these technical users, trying to convert myself to a business user. I have always administered my own machine and knew everything that was on it. I enjoyed it.
Now, I'm more into development and integration and my time isn't worth doing administrative level tasks. So, I fall behind in knowledge, but still think I can fix things, usually just making it worse. Add to that that my workstation is running *shudder* NT and I have always had Linux on my workstation. I'm trying to learn to trust the support group to solve my problems and get my real work done instead of spending hours breaking my workstation.
It sucks because I feel like those jerky kids in the support group know something that I don't. Oh, well. I'm getting paid more than them.
The type of user community that you are supporting is very important. I am guessing at two different types of groups: operations and business users.
Operations: These people run one or two applications and don't care about the computer underneath. The workstation might as well be an appliance. Linux is ready for this since it provides a stable, light platform and you don't run into compatibility issues.
Business Users: These people run anything and everything and need to import files from other groups. In other words, compatibility is very important for this group. I don't think Linux is ready for this, and god bless you if you are trying it.
As for Operations, here are my tips:
Automate the install, completely. I think you will find plenty of support for this out there now. Either scripted network installs or blowing an image onto a hard disk. Worse case, you end up with a boot disk that runs a script to make the filesystems, mount a NFS image, copy the image locally, run a script to patch up local info (like IP address and hostname), run lilo, and reboot. Since everything is tangible in Linux (e.g. no stinking registry!), this shouldn't be too bad.
Make all of the machines rubber stamps of each other. If one dies, you should be able to plop another down, power it on, log in the user, and they are home. To do this, make sure all of their non-transient data goes into their home directory. Anything that goes into/tmp better not be needed. This is one area that Linux sings in. It should be a no-brainer to make this happen.
Come up with some sort of diagnostics test that you can run to help determine what part of a workstation is failing (e.g. memory, video, etc.). Otherwise, just lease the computers and let someone else fix the hardware.
For Business Users, good luck. I would first worry about whether you can solve the compatibility issue. From there, try to do as much of the above as possible. Mobile users will make it more interesting. Keep a replicated copy of their home directory local and a boot option/script to pick Mobile/Office.
Have fun.
Re:maybe you need to check some Spec numbers
on
AMD's Duron Birthed
·
· Score: 2
Being on a network has nothing to do with cpu load
Normally, I agree, but college networks are usually plagued with tons of broadcasts. In my experience, I showed 10 times the interrupts from the network interface than from the clock. This was a simple workstation, but Intel-based. Intel architectures aren't known for their efficient interrupt handling.
In the end, the extra interrupts didn't seem to affect my K6 from a usability standpoint, but it definitely bit my old 486. So, I'm not too quick to say that network could have nothing to do with CPU load, but I will say that it should account for less then 1%, probably less then 0.1% of the CPU.
One area in which C does not offer significant benefits over Java is in the area of network server programming
I agree, but with one exception: Java does not do non-blocking I/O. Therefore you have to use tons of threads, at least one, likely two, for each connection. For a server handling thousands of connections, you can see where this gets out of hand. In Linux's case where all threads are kernel level threads, performance is back in the shitter since it has to make a new set of system calls to manage the threads. But of course, you want to use native threads so that you can take advantage of multiple processors.
If non-blocking I/O were possible, one thread and a huge select is all that is needed. Squid is a good example of a server that can handle thousands of connections using one thread. The cost here is complexity, but the reward is performance.
I'm not advocating non-blocking I/O. I think Java's approach makes for much simpler and more stable servers, but JVMs must make threading as lightweight as possible while still supporting SMP for performance to compete with C-based servers. I think this means supporting a mix of kernel and user level threads.
Java's requires more memory simply because you are loading a Java Virtual Machine.
You have to bring in the overhead of another operating system environment. Imagine loading another instance of Linux every time you had to launch a program.
When a JVM is launched, the maximum amount of memory it can use is set. Since the JVM uses garbage collection, it will eventually use all of this memory, whether it needs it or not. Most JVMs don't clean up after themselves until they have used up most of their available memory. This way garbage collection is more efficient since it is done less often.
While Java's program code can be larger, I think it is only a small part of the memory usage most people see. Personally, I want a JVM that will only use as much memory it needs plus a "buffer" so it doesn't have to garbage collect everytime I free something. It would probably just need to garbage collect every few seconds whether it needed it or not. It would sacrifice some performance for memory; therefore, it would be best of the client side and useless on the server side. I missing an existing one that does this?
Ah yes, a building full of lawyers on one side, and a couple hundred users each with their own lawyer and case on the other.
Talk about being stuck between a rock and a hard case.
Re:AtheOS FAQ and mirrored screenshots
on
AtheOS
·
· Score: 2
Alright, so it was funny when a friend came over, popped open his laptop, and we discovered that we were using the same background. But when I start seeing screenshots using my background, I get irritated.
If I wanted to be like everyone else, I'd run Windows.
3Com isn't offering support on these switches as it is. A company I worked for picked up a couple for a song (onsale was unloading them). We had our standard 90 days of support in which we burned the hell out of them and shook out most of the bugs, but after that we are on our own.
As for who is interested? I am. If I could get the source to the firmware, I would love to fix some of the annoying things this box does. But without the source, I have nowhere to begin.
Open source is much bigger than Linux. You are complete right that only those in my situation would want to work on the project. But I'm sure there is at least one other person besides me. Every added person increases the number of improvements and testing over what I could do by myself. None of us are interested in selling our improvements to the switch, we just want the farging switch to not suck so we can get the rest of work done.
There are actually a large number of us.kernel.org's. (Do an nslookup on it, I count 25+ currently.) They are all independent mirrors that have the same directory structure, or at least/pub/linux.
You were probably unlucky and got one of the slow mirrors. Others may have gotten an updated one.
5.972 sextillions? What the hell is that? Oh, you mean 5.972 x 10^18. Is this mag for scientists or what?
Also, did I miss it or did they not tell us the new value? Yesterday, GPS is opened up to civilians, but today G becomes proprietary information. One step forward...
That's funny. Two years ago, everyone was telling me that the consoles were dead and PCs were the new gaming scene. The reasoning was that PCs could do online gaming and had a more powerfull interface (keyboard, mouse, AND joystick/controller if you wanted).
Today, I think the PC still has a lot more potential than a console. PCs are almost always connected to the net, where consoles might be. PCs have much better graphics capabilities; regardless of your 3D accelerator, a monitor just kicks a TV in pixel count. Finally, for the games I play (real-time strategy), a keyboard is a must. Try imagining Starcraft with a console controller.... *shudder* All of my unit building and selection is via the keyboard because it is fast.
Finally, don't kid yourself. Developers have very little control over what platforms a game is developed for. Game companies have much more control, but the ultimate power comes from the gamers themselves. If the majority of gamers want a particular platform, you can bet that is where the companies will be, grabbing all the market they can.
Why not just go with a color palm pilot? Or for that matter, why not just get a color GameBoy?
Part of the point is to be able to run the old x86 games, hence the need for an x86 processor.
As for the power consumption, you are only considering Pentiums the way they were, using a 0.5 micron process, 3.3 volts, and a high Mhz. Today, they could be manufactured in the now obsolete 0.25 micron fabs. This would make for a lower voltage and lower power consumption. Besides, Intel would love to get some more life out of these fabs before overhauling them into something else.
They also won't need to run these full out. 100Mhz or even 60Mhz would be fast for the games they are talking about. Remember that they ahve a small screen, fewer dots to push around. Throw in some power saving technics and you lower the requirements even farther.
Finally, just because they are talking Pentium I now, doesn't mean that they will stick with it. The point they are trying to make is "x86 compatible processor." Maybe they will go with the Crusoe or an AMD chip, but for now, they want the Intel name, which doesn't scare off venture capitalists.
I still won't say that these won't be battery hogs, but they may not be as bad as you think.
AMD is working on the next generation Athlon chipset, known as the AMD 760. Following shortly after this chipset will be the AMD 770, which will be the same as the 760, but with SMP. What I have read puts these chipsets coming out next year. Via, Ali, etc may come up with something sooner, but it is doubtful.
Intel uses a proprietary "standard" for their SMP implementation. This forced AMD, Cyrix, etc. to invent an open standard, OpenPIC(?). OS's have written SMP drives for Intel's standard, but since there has never been an OpenPIC SMP motherboard, there are no drivers for OpenPIC.
So, before SMP Athlons, you need a chipset, a motherboard, then drivers. Sound like a long, sad road to me. I want one too...
Slashdot Mirror
It's called a site license and this is how they are sold.
Yeah, I know BAs in CS exist. I have never seen them get any respect though, at least not in the tech world that alienated this guy.
Why am I bothering... (Moderators, feel free to troll/flamebait me, I deserve it for feeding this guy).
I just looked at my window... no oppressed African-Americans starving in the street. But if there was one, I would be sure to go out there and kick him! I'm white, that's what we do!
African-Americans in the United States, have to struggle just to get by.
Sorry to hear that, but welcome to the rest of American society. Ain't equality a bitch?
The fact that the PS2 game console is going to be mainly in the hands of Caucasian suburbanites
Can't afford one, eh?
My ancestors were kept down for centuries, and there has to be some kind of reckoning.
Wake them up, I'll wake up my great, great, great grandfather (nevermind that he lived in Europe) and I'll get him to apologize.
In 1995, Tyrone Fine was awarded a Bachelor of Arts in Computer Science...
BA... Computer Science... Get it?
Then I would guess you went to the wrong school for Computer Science.
I'm amazed by the number of people that are suggesting that your roll your own mail server. For a highly available mail service, there should be no single points of failure so you end up with at least the following:
Sorry guys, but I would not be willing to do any of the above just so I can get reliable email. I'm more than willing to pay someone though.
Everyone seems to be missing, what I consider to be, the point in Gnutella: It isn't a Napster replacement, but proof that killing Napster isn't going to make the problem go away.
Sure Gnutella isn't scaling, but it was hacked up with minimal effort as a way to say "See, look what can be done, now who are you going to sue?" Consider it a prototype. A little more elbow grease and some community development and Gnutella's shortcomings could be removed.
I refuse to sign or accept a service contract any more. Mostly just because I don't want to be stuck with the service for any longer than I have to if I decide I don't want it any more. For example, I can add 500 minutes to my Sprint PCS service just by signing a year contract, but I have changed my plan a couple of times in the last year. Hell, the reason I went with Sprint PCS in the first place is because they didn't have a contract.
One that really got me was the Flashcom contract. A 5 page contract for DSL service that has goodies like:
These were revised on 8/21/2000. 8 months ago when I was looking for DSL, the contract said that at the end of 2 years, I would be automatically renewed for another 2 year contract unless I notified them in writing 1 month prior to contract termination. No way! Now it is month to month after 2 years and not quite as bad.
Finally, I disagree with any legislation, etc. to keep companies from doing these contracts. If you want to do business with them, you agree to their terms. If you don't like the terms, you don't do business. I think people will eventually get pissed off enough that companies will start losing business and be forced to rethink their contracts. Perhaps that is why Flashcom changed their contract...
Can anyone explain the cow statues? One's a landscape, another is psychodelic, another is currency...
Signed,
One confused tourist in New York City
Then I'll show you a company soon to be bankrupt.
In my experience, the only reason the NT TCO can be less than the UNIX/Linux TCO is because of scenarios like the following:
The NT file server is not responding. MCSE spends 5 minutes taking a look at the hosed server and says, "Let's try rebooting." Twenty minutes later the server is back up and operating. The MCSE records the event as "Fixed file server, 30 minutes".
This is not how we fix things in the UNIX/Linux world. We try to figure out what actually happened and make sure it doesn't happen again. While it does cost the IT department less money to pay a monkey to reboot the box than to buy a brain to think about what happened in the first place, the entire company loses much more money in employee time.
Agreed. My recent frustration is that I am one of these technical users, trying to convert myself to a business user. I have always administered my own machine and knew everything that was on it. I enjoyed it.
Now, I'm more into development and integration and my time isn't worth doing administrative level tasks. So, I fall behind in knowledge, but still think I can fix things, usually just making it worse. Add to that that my workstation is running *shudder* NT and I have always had Linux on my workstation. I'm trying to learn to trust the support group to solve my problems and get my real work done instead of spending hours breaking my workstation.
It sucks because I feel like those jerky kids in the support group know something that I don't. Oh, well. I'm getting paid more than them.
The type of user community that you are supporting is very important. I am guessing at two different types of groups: operations and business users.
As for Operations, here are my tips:
- Automate the install, completely. I think you will find plenty of support for this out there now. Either scripted network installs or blowing an image onto a hard disk. Worse case, you end up with a boot disk that runs a script to make the filesystems, mount a NFS image, copy the image locally, run a script to patch up local info (like IP address and hostname), run lilo, and reboot. Since everything is tangible in Linux (e.g. no stinking registry!), this shouldn't be too bad.
- Make all of the machines rubber stamps of each other. If one dies, you should be able to plop another down, power it on, log in the user, and they are home. To do this, make sure all of their non-transient data goes into their home directory. Anything that goes into
/tmp better not be needed. This is one area that Linux sings in. It should be a no-brainer to make this happen. - Come up with some sort of diagnostics test that you can run to help determine what part of a workstation is failing (e.g. memory, video, etc.). Otherwise, just lease the computers and let someone else fix the hardware.
For Business Users, good luck. I would first worry about whether you can solve the compatibility issue. From there, try to do as much of the above as possible. Mobile users will make it more interesting. Keep a replicated copy of their home directory local and a boot option/script to pick Mobile/Office.Have fun.
Being on a network has nothing to do with cpu load
Normally, I agree, but college networks are usually plagued with tons of broadcasts. In my experience, I showed 10 times the interrupts from the network interface than from the clock. This was a simple workstation, but Intel-based. Intel architectures aren't known for their efficient interrupt handling.
In the end, the extra interrupts didn't seem to affect my K6 from a usability standpoint, but it definitely bit my old 486. So, I'm not too quick to say that network could have nothing to do with CPU load, but I will say that it should account for less then 1%, probably less then 0.1% of the CPU.
One area in which C does not offer significant benefits over Java is in the area of network server programming
I agree, but with one exception: Java does not do non-blocking I/O. Therefore you have to use tons of threads, at least one, likely two, for each connection. For a server handling thousands of connections, you can see where this gets out of hand. In Linux's case where all threads are kernel level threads, performance is back in the shitter since it has to make a new set of system calls to manage the threads. But of course, you want to use native threads so that you can take advantage of multiple processors.
If non-blocking I/O were possible, one thread and a huge select is all that is needed. Squid is a good example of a server that can handle thousands of connections using one thread. The cost here is complexity, but the reward is performance.
I'm not advocating non-blocking I/O. I think Java's approach makes for much simpler and more stable servers, but JVMs must make threading as lightweight as possible while still supporting SMP for performance to compete with C-based servers. I think this means supporting a mix of kernel and user level threads.
Java's requires more memory simply because you are loading a Java Virtual Machine.
- You have to bring in the overhead of another operating system environment. Imagine loading another instance of Linux every time you had to launch a program.
- When a JVM is launched, the maximum amount of memory it can use is set. Since the JVM uses garbage collection, it will eventually use all of this memory, whether it needs it or not. Most JVMs don't clean up after themselves until they have used up most of their available memory. This way garbage collection is more efficient since it is done less often.
While Java's program code can be larger, I think it is only a small part of the memory usage most people see. Personally, I want a JVM that will only use as much memory it needs plus a "buffer" so it doesn't have to garbage collect everytime I free something. It would probably just need to garbage collect every few seconds whether it needed it or not. It would sacrifice some performance for memory; therefore, it would be best of the client side and useless on the server side. I missing an existing one that does this?Ah yes, a building full of lawyers on one side, and a couple hundred users each with their own lawyer and case on the other.
Talk about being stuck between a rock and a hard case.
Alright, so it was funny when a friend came over, popped open his laptop, and we discovered that we were using the same background. But when I start seeing screenshots using my background, I get irritated.
If I wanted to be like everyone else, I'd run Windows.
3Com isn't offering support on these switches as it is. A company I worked for picked up a couple for a song (onsale was unloading them). We had our standard 90 days of support in which we burned the hell out of them and shook out most of the bugs, but after that we are on our own.
As for who is interested? I am. If I could get the source to the firmware, I would love to fix some of the annoying things this box does. But without the source, I have nowhere to begin.
Open source is much bigger than Linux. You are complete right that only those in my situation would want to work on the project. But I'm sure there is at least one other person besides me. Every added person increases the number of improvements and testing over what I could do by myself. None of us are interested in selling our improvements to the switch, we just want the farging switch to not suck so we can get the rest of work done.
Alright! We'll slashdot them with 404s! This could be a milestone for slashdot. A momentous day indeed.
There are actually a large number of us.kernel.org's. (Do an nslookup on it, I count 25+ currently.) They are all independent mirrors that have the same directory structure, or at least /pub/linux.
You were probably unlucky and got one of the slow mirrors. Others may have gotten an updated one.
5.972 sextillions? What the hell is that? Oh, you mean 5.972 x 10^18. Is this mag for scientists or what?
Also, did I miss it or did they not tell us the new value? Yesterday, GPS is opened up to civilians, but today G becomes proprietary information. One step forward...
Not until it becomes "modular".
That's funny. Two years ago, everyone was telling me that the consoles were dead and PCs were the new gaming scene. The reasoning was that PCs could do online gaming and had a more powerfull interface (keyboard, mouse, AND joystick/controller if you wanted).
Today, I think the PC still has a lot more potential than a console. PCs are almost always connected to the net, where consoles might be. PCs have much better graphics capabilities; regardless of your 3D accelerator, a monitor just kicks a TV in pixel count. Finally, for the games I play (real-time strategy), a keyboard is a must. Try imagining Starcraft with a console controller.... *shudder* All of my unit building and selection is via the keyboard because it is fast.
Finally, don't kid yourself. Developers have very little control over what platforms a game is developed for. Game companies have much more control, but the ultimate power comes from the gamers themselves. If the majority of gamers want a particular platform, you can bet that is where the companies will be, grabbing all the market they can.
Why not just go with a color palm pilot? Or for that matter, why not just get a color GameBoy?
Part of the point is to be able to run the old x86 games, hence the need for an x86 processor.
As for the power consumption, you are only considering Pentiums the way they were, using a 0.5 micron process, 3.3 volts, and a high Mhz. Today, they could be manufactured in the now obsolete 0.25 micron fabs. This would make for a lower voltage and lower power consumption. Besides, Intel would love to get some more life out of these fabs before overhauling them into something else.
They also won't need to run these full out. 100Mhz or even 60Mhz would be fast for the games they are talking about. Remember that they ahve a small screen, fewer dots to push around. Throw in some power saving technics and you lower the requirements even farther.
Finally, just because they are talking Pentium I now, doesn't mean that they will stick with it. The point they are trying to make is "x86 compatible processor." Maybe they will go with the Crusoe or an AMD chip, but for now, they want the Intel name, which doesn't scare off venture capitalists.
I still won't say that these won't be battery hogs, but they may not be as bad as you think.
AMD is working on the next generation Athlon chipset, known as the AMD 760. Following shortly after this chipset will be the AMD 770, which will be the same as the 760, but with SMP. What I have read puts these chipsets coming out next year. Via, Ali, etc may come up with something sooner, but it is doubtful.
Intel uses a proprietary "standard" for their SMP implementation. This forced AMD, Cyrix, etc. to invent an open standard, OpenPIC(?). OS's have written SMP drives for Intel's standard, but since there has never been an OpenPIC SMP motherboard, there are no drivers for OpenPIC.
So, before SMP Athlons, you need a chipset, a motherboard, then drivers. Sound like a long, sad road to me. I want one too...