"In it, he talks about the declining revenues of software giants such as Siebel."
Well, that and Siebel's software is usually crap. For example, Siebel makes the customer management software that DirecTV uses. I've used it, and a friend of mine informs me that it crashes at least once a week, is painfully slow, and its user interface is almost as bad as that of CUPS.
For example, when one clicks on a drop menu, there is a noticeable delay (up to 2 seconds) before the dropmenu is populated. The only reason for this that I can think of is that the app runs a DB query each and every time a dropmenu is clicked, even though the contents change very rarely. This is quite possibly the worst possible way to fill a drop menu, ever. To add insult to injury, the thing is a "web app", but it makes such excessive use of ActiveX and other Windows-specific tools, it eliminates one of the primary advantages of web applications: Cross-platform compatibility.
To their credit, a rep from Siebel did say that this particular product was once a locally-run binary program, but Siebel was losing sales to competitors simply because their tool was not a web application. That is the only reason! Apparently, it didn't include a sufficient number of buzzwords, so they rewrote it to do just that. How much do you want to bet they'll switch its data storage medium from a proper relational database (even if it is MS SQL) to a purely XML-based system? I am sure that will be plenty fast. The irony is that this system was used to replace two systems that actually worked well--a OpenVMS-based control system and a Tandem-based logging system. Whomever implemented the old systems clearly valued uptime (neither OpenVMS nor Tandem/HP-Nonstop systems crash; at least, I have never seen it happen, and I've worked on such systems that have uptimes of decades), though admittedly both are rather proprietary and dated. I've only used 2 or 3 Siebel products, so my experience with them is somewhat limited. Perhaps some of their stuff is non-crap.
Just goes to show--never let PHB's dominate your design decisions, at least if quality is a concern.
I actually thought that this was common knowledge--that Windows Server 2003 with ASPX was faster than Linux/Apache with PHP, or that Server 2003 was generally faster with static content. (I admit, I only glanced over the article, and Adobe Acrobat's search tool is the worst of crap, so sue me if it didn't mention ASPX).
1)ASP (not ASPX) are fairly flaky and recent versions are roughly comparable to, but slower than, PHP4 (not sure about 5), in general.
2) Windows is not very good at creating new processes quickly. This is why CGI (not fastCGI) in the platform is so glacially slow. Let's have an example. Let's say that you make a dynamic webpage in which all content is generated by a C++ CGI program. Ignoring database access for the time being, since that dilutes the example, on Windows, the website would be MUCH slower than the same website written in ASPX, even though the actual execution time of the C++ program is shorter (assuming a competent C++ coder). This is because for each request, Windows must create a new process (the CGI program), and destroy the process when the request is complete. While the execution time is low, the process management overhead dwarfs the actual page runtime, because Windows doesn't do that sort of thing quickly. This is why CGI has long been blacklistedon Windows systems by good web devs, and this is one reason that Apache 1.x was such a dog on Windows. Apache 1.x creates a new Apache process for each request.
Now Linux, on the other hand, creates processes about as fast as it creates threads, which is to say, really damn fast. Apache 1 has always worked just fine on Linux (and indeed most Unix systems) because the overhead of creating a process, while significant, isn't slower than a dead slug stuck in frozen molasses like it is on Windows. Apache 2.x allows requests to be served by a thread or a process, or a number of processes that each create several threads (any Apache gurus please correct me if any of this is off). It follows that this isn't a big deal on Linux (because process creation isn't really much slower than thread creation), but is a very big deal on Windows.
Windows has ASPX, which is Microsoft's marketing term for the use of the.NET framework for web content delivery (get it--the 'X' makes it sound cool. Or something)..NET is compiled, and ASPX needs neither process nor thread creation. Like any.NET application, ASPX can run sort of close to native speeds (native + lots of wrapper overhead + generic memory management overhead and such.)
Yet Apache is still back here creating a process or thread for each and every request (note that there are some ways to speed things up. FastCGI comes to mind, but I don't want to get into the gory details that I don't know enough about). This is not the brightest way to do it in terms of performance, but then, Apache appears to have been designed for universality and configurability over raw throughput.
It is unwise to hold the attitude that Apache can't be beaten by IIS, especially when IIS is optimized for one platform--by the vendor of that platform. Apache isn't even the fastest on Linux. Take a look at Zeus webserver. It serves circles around Apache on any platform it supports--including Penguin land. In fact, Zeus uses a technique called SendFile() which, oddly enough, is strikingly similar Microsoft's own TransmitFile() API. Hmm.
Think of it this way: Apache is to IIS as GCC is to ICC, at least in terms of performance and generality. Intel's compiler (ICC) consistantly blows away GCC in terms of the performance and size of the compiled code, but GCC runs on just about anything with a CPU, can cross-compile, is free, doesn't pull any PHB evil tricks, and actually compiles things like the Linux kernel without pat
I too have found that Windows (2000 in my case, I can't stand XP) to be just as reliable as my Ubuntu and Gentoo systems.
That said, you are absolutely correct--Macromedia products are particularly shoddy. While I think that Dreamweaver's interface is fairly bad, that is opinion. It is not an opinion that they are flaky and unreliable though. Macromedia fans can throw "PEBKAC" and "RTFM" and "Stupid User Error" all they like. Myself (who is not a web developer) and several professional web developers that I know, including those that somehow like Dreamweaver, have all found it to be the worst of crap in terms of software quality, crashing randomely on a wide variety of systems. In addition to crashing, they often exhibit strange, generally flaky behavior. For example, when I use the edit preview mode (in which you can see a rough preview of what the rendered HTML will look like, and edit it in WYSIWYG mode), the cursor in the HTML preview will be between two characters and the cursor in the source code preview will be offset by one character. As you edit one, the cursor in the other is in the wrong place. Admittedly this was not with the latest version (first release of the "MX" line, though for as long as Dreamweaver had been out, you'd think it would be a mature product).
Big deal? Not at all, but a mass of tiny details are what make the difference between a good product and a shoddy piece of junkware. I won't even go into how it, incredibly, isn't snappy even on a Pentium IV 3GHz HT and 1GB of RAM. Perhaps I've been spoiled by top-quality editors like Jed (a modified release of EMacs), Visual Studio (yes, a Microsoft product. Oh my!), and Kate.
Hopefully Adobe, who makes (IMO) very reliable (if a little hard to use) software, can hire a management team that will give the programmers time to clean up the mess they've likely been forced to make due to the usual bad PHB decisions.
That said, unfortunately, every other feature-rich web-language editor I've tried is lacking in other ways, at least in my opinion. (The editors I mentioned above are editors I used in general, they aren't really HTML editors). About the nicest I've seen for Windows is PHPEdit, which still has a number of really irritating problems, but is at least stable and consistent, not to mention mostly free (Google for it if curious). If only they'd fix the asinine "CTRL-Y deletes lines of text in addition to being redo" bug that persists to this day, and also persists in other editors that use that crappy Delphi text widget (Dev-C++ comes to mind).
As for GAIM, all I can say is GTK-based products are crap in Windows. Try Miranda--it sucks less. I've never found any GTK app to be fast, stable, or well integrated other than in GNOME and XFCE. This isn't GAIM's fault--it's a great LINUX chat client which has been ported to Windows, using a took kit that's little more than bolted on. GTK and Windows do not seem to mix well, and no, The GIMP is not an example otherwise--it still sucks in Windows.
IE has always been remarkably flaky for me. As much as people make fun of it and as much as you lose "geek points" for using it, it is one of the fastest browsers around (it loads faster even under WINE in Linux than Firefox does natively on any platform) and it is easily the best supported, though that is more due to its ubiquity than its support for web features (which by the way sucks--IE's CSS support has made me want to plan more than a few discreet assassinations at Microsoft).
That said, while it appears to be quite stable for many people, it's rarely gone more than 2-3 days without crashing on me, and taking out a number of other processes with it. Maybe I ask too much of it running 15 copies at once. But then, Firefox seems to have little problem (though it is still occasionally flaky).
In any case, Linux users have had extremely legitimate gripes against Windows for the longest time, but since the release of Windows 2000, I think the snide remarks are riding on Windows' old reputation r
Standards are the reason that computers are tolerable to use for any purpose. If a programmer can't be bothered to follow an international standard of his own language, there is no guarantee that the code is future-proof. One can hardly blame the compiler vendor, as we can't expect a compiler to mindlessly maintain backwards compatibility with every weird use of a bug and every bizarre code construct that has ever been supported in the past.
The ability to compile code written for GCC in another compiler is a *good* thing. If it requires informing the programmer that their code has always been broken, then so be it. A little inconvenience is a small price to pay for standards compliance, or should we expect that the GCC authors "embrace and extend" C and other languages until so much code relies on weird GCC nuggets that programmers (and users) are "locked in" to using just that compiler? (But Douglas Adams forbid if Microsoft does the same thing!)
Maybe I am missing something. If so, please enlighten me (This is not a sarcastic remark--I haven't done much research on what 4.0 has broken so I may be way out of line).
Sheesh, for as hard as the GCC authors work, and for as much GCC has improved in the last 10 years, the contributers sure get a lot of flak. Anyone who doesn't contribute code themselves should be greatful (or at least appreciative) of their efforts, even when they do make mistakes.
Opteron's all have built in memory controllers. That means, you cannot populate the second bank without another Opteron
This is correct, however, there are boards in which both Opterons access the same bank of memory, the second through an HT link to the first. This is not the most efficient method in terms of performance (though it is likely cheaper to manufacture). It would not be impossible to design a dual Opteron board with 16 or 32GB of memory through just one processor, though it would be very difficult to make just one controller handle so many banks of DIMMs at once, even registered ones.
My recommendation was not for Tyan above all else, it just mentioned that they were an option. I have built a number of servers using Tyan boards, and other than an some minor issues with an early S2460 (which was, to their credit, a low-end board), haven't had any problems, though admittedly none were equipped with 16GB of RAM.
All motherboard manufacturers release occasional lemons. Tyan is no different, and they are every bit as qualified to design and manufacture server-grade boards as any companies you mentioned (which area both great manufacturers). Tyan was making SPARC-based Sun-compatible servers 15 years ago, and was chosen by AMD to be their primary partner when developing AMD's first SMP Athlon boards (er, not that those boards were that great). It's easy to fling personal insults from behind AC, just as it's easy to proclaim that since you have had problems with some products from brand X, brand X must therefore suck. I would appreciate references to your claims of Tyan's problems (not that I am doubting them--more out of personal curiousity), but I do not appreciate an anonymous coward, who does not know me or my experience in the slightest, liberally spewing meaningless insults.
Two of the cheapest Opterons should do it then. Other than that, would probably have to wait for 4GB memory modules, and those aren't likely to be released any time soon at any even remotely affordable price .:(
I've searched several websites (including Tom's Hardware), and I've googled, but can't seem to locate any commercially available AMD MBs supporting more than 4 sticks of RAM, or 4 gigs.
First, I would recommend going with a server vendor. I honestly do not mean any offense by this, but if you are looking at places like Tom's Hardware for recommendations (a website which is frequently incompetent even at reviewing l33t g4m3r d00ds hardware, let alone server-grade hardware), you are probably not qualified to build a system which would actually need 16GB of RAM (e.g. a corporate server which must be relied upon). I do not know what the system will be used for, but if it is for a many-person organization, my recommendation stands, and if it is just for you and some friends, 16GB of RAM is almost always going to be absurd overkill.
Now that that's out of the way, Tyan has several dual Opteron boards which support 8 DIMMs. Look at their Thunder line, and put just one Opteron in them, and 2GB DIMM modules.
Slashdotters are far more likely than the average joe to recognize a good review from a bad one.
Please post your good/bad/ugly (badly written but probably not corrupt) website opinions here.
I have been following hardware reviews since about 1995, have written a few myself, and am fairly knowledgeable on the inner-workings of hardware and of English, so I have become fairly critical of reviews. Here's my brief list:
The good (Quality, non-biased, well-written reviews with reproduceable results and non-marketfluff technical explanations):
- Ace's Hardware (on the odd occasion they review something)
- StorageReview.com (I am a volunteer moderator on the forums there, so I may be considered biased, but I doubt anyone can point out a website with better hard drive reviews) - xbitlabs.com - Anandtech (usually, Anand usually writes well but some of the staff writes rather awkwardly, and some of their reviews, like that of the Addtronics W8500 case (and most of their other case reviews) are staggeringly awful) - Ars Technica, though I wouldn't classify them as a hardware review site. - Maybe HardOCP. I don't read them much, but the odd occasion I have read them didn't set off any BS detectors. Perhaps a bit unprofessional. - Maybe DansData.com. I rarely read them, but I have always been impressed with what I read.
The bad: - tomshardware.com (These guys were my favorite review site years and years ago, but their quality and either integrity or competence (or both) dropped staggeringly years ago. Their hard drive reviews in particular are awful beyond belief, though that may be because I am more familiar with that type of review than others). -
The ugly: - Just about any review site whose URL contains the word "Game." These websites tend to be full of reviewers that seem to be random average highschool kids with no real understanding of what they are reviewing, how to write a review, or how to test or rate the product they are reviewing. The word "arbitrary" comes to mind. Note that I do not put Gamespot.com in this category (even considering their owner). - CNet. I can't tell whether the reviewers are incompetent or bribed, but the reviews (usually, but not always) are quite lame.
"An implication supported by my own experience: Adaptec cards and drivers suck, and they have sucked for nearly a decade."
hence
However, to the original poster's credit, Adaptec RAID cards really do suck, and they really are buggy (not to mention slow, especially in RAID 5, compared to almost every other brand--and Adaptec's entire SCSI line is pretty consistant in that regard), but that is beside the point.
"A former Adaptec employee admits that the hardware is buggy and tricky to get right."
This smells mildly of FUD.
What the Adaptec guy actually said was:
The hardware is tricky to get right and there are bugs in different cards and different firmware versions that often need to be worked around.
Using the word "buggy" like it was used in the Slashdot front page article implies that the cards are flaky and that non-Adaptec cards aren't (as) buggy. This isn't outright stated, but similarly saying something like "I don't use Microsoft Office because it is buggy" tends to leave the listener with the impression that other office suites are less buggy, even though that isn't stated outright.
The Adaptec employee stated only what we already know--that different revisions of firmware have different bugs (in ALL products that use firmware, not just Adaptec RAID adapters), and that they must be worked around. If different revisions of firmware didn't have bugs, then different revisions of firmware wouldn't exist--the first one would have worked fine (aside from occasional feature additions and tweaks).
However, to the original poster's credit, Adaptec RAID cards really do suck, and they really are buggy (not to mention slow, especially in RAID 5, compared to almost every other brand--and Adaptec's entire SCSI line is pretty consistant in that regard), but that is beside the point. Slashdot shouldn't participate in the same FUD that we so often criticize--just let the facts speak for themselves, and leave the interpretation up to the reader.
So AMD and some other companies did some benchmarks with unequal systems. And?
It would certainly have been less misleading to use an Intel laptop with a similar video card at least, but it isn't like you are going to see these benchmarks on television ads or anything. I doubt any big buyers will care about benchmarks of pre-release products anyway.
It's also noteworthy that TheRegister has a partnership with Tom's Hardware in the U.S., and some editors of Tom's have been noted as being overtly biased towards Intel, though Tom's itself seems to be getting better, having articles like the used to--real tech info rather than the sensationalized, poorly written crap which had infested my once favorite hardware site.
Granted, both AMD and Intel are "evil" for-profit companies, but something like an unfair benchmark hardly brings tears to the eye when you consider some of the staggering bullshit actions of the past.
What it all comes down to is preference--The Turion is going to be a 64-bit chip (isn't it?) with the benefits of AMD64 mode (most of which involve the fact that it has double the general-purpose registers in the chip, and not from the fact that those registers are 64-bits wide). The Turion will likely outperform the Pentium-M in most test, like the Athlon64. The Pentium-M, however, will perform just fine thankyou, and will drain less battery power and thus be in cooler-running laptops with better battery life. I'd pick the Pentium-M myself, since to choose a product based on anything other than overall effectiveness/price ratio set is usually either fanboyism or poor research.
Infospace was a Microsoft darling because they had a very large number of production servers using Windows 2000 when it was first released, e.g. they were an "early adopter," and a big one at that (Fortune 500). I worked for a company that was acquired by them in 2000. They had neat offices and such, but it was hard to take them seriously despite their size. A...guy I know was able to get in to any of their production servers and remote control them. Took about 15 minutes to figure out. Reportedly their main network administrator was a pompous prick with a "you couldn't possibly find a flaw in *my* setup" attitude, but I never went to their HQ to meet him. One of our DBAs, one who really knew his stuff, quit immediately after just such a meeting.
For those that are curious, they are/were a content provider, e.g. they sold canned news stories, articles, polls, etc. to the media, though this is probably an oversimplification as I declined to relocate when my company was acquired.
For the record, though I may have associated with Antidigitalists, I am not and have never been a member of the Antidigitalist party and would be willing to testify to that under oath. I doubt even that would save me from being burned at the virtual stake, or, at best, being placed in a virtual pillory to be pelted with blogs. Ugh!
I hope he realizes that while most blogs aren't worth the bytes they are printed on in terms of content, there are enough gems that one can't write the entire concept off as a bad idea. In any case, judging bloggers by the quality of their writing largely misses the point--blogs aren't supposed to be a regulated, edited, meticulously researched medium of writing--they are a means of sharing thoughts with the world without having to jump through hoops. Whether the world listens, complains, enjoys the blog, takes offense to it, or feels that the author should have gingerly lucubrated every detail as if each entry were a Nobel Prize acceptance speech is beside the point entirely.
While interoperability with Microsoftware is sometimes difficult due to their use of proprietary technologies, a pure Microsoft environment is generally better in the interoperability department than a pure Linux environment. MS Office is integrated with IIS which is integrated with the OS which uses the MMC for a variety of administration tasks (including those outside of IIS), etc. Even under the application level, the GUI is integrated with the OS (it's part of the kernel). All this comes at a price, however, because extremely strong integration (Microsoft's method for implementing interoperability) means that removing certain pieces is difficult to do. Servers usually do not need a GUI, because they sit there and run headless, doing their thing for years at a time with little local interaction. A GUI uses memory and adds a great deal of running code and therefore bugginess. In Unix, to rid yourself of the GUI, you simply never start X. In Windows, it is sort of possible to never start the GUI, but it is very difficult to do and the aforementioned integration of everything means that even if you do manage to accomplish this feat, you will have limited power over the system since at its core, Windows is designed to be administered with GUI tools. Unixy OSes, Linux and the BSDs in particular, can be stripped down so thoroughly as to run on a wrist watch or low-power PDA. In order to run on PDAs at all, Microsoft had to develop an in-house custom Windows system, CE, in order to operate under the constraints of a limited system, and it is still far more resource intensive than a Linux system can be. Granted, Linux has to be stripped down to run on such hardware as well, but since the source code is available, it can be done. You won't find any companies selling custom imbedded copies of Windows made by anyone but Microsoft.
That said, the use of open standards is a system that will eventually overtake even the best fully integrated but proprietary system because any company or group can work on improving the system, products, and ideas, to differntiate themselves. No matter how many resources Microsoft or any other closed company has, "not microsoft" has more.
You probably did an "emerge sync" "emerge -u world" and some trivial change in/etc/fstab made etc-update decide it should be replaced with a new version, which knows nothing about your partition setup.
It's partially Gentoo's fault for being so stupid as to happily overwrite a critical system file like fstab without so much as a "By the way, if you overwrite your working file with this generic, unconfigured one, none of your partitions will mount at next reboot"
And it's partially your fault since etc-update doesn't overwrite any files unless you specifically tell it to. Still, it's a very error-prone process when etc-update is constantly reporting new, non-working versions of base system files, usually ones which have absolutely no important changes.
There's an interesting (as far as "new drive is bigger than old ones!" is interesting) thread on Storagereview.com which includes some insights as to how this thing is built, and why it uses lower-capacity platters than even Seagate's 400GB drives.
a) Doesn't have any drivers available online b) Refuses to install both 32- and 64-bit versions of Fedora 1-2, SuSe, and Mandrake (locks up before setup completes) c) Locks up on Windows 'shutdown'
Funny, my Athlon64 laptop which I purchased over a year ago: a) Uses standard hardware so drivers are no problem to find online (or from the reseller or on the included install discs). One exception being the Radeon 9600m, which I can still easily find drivers for. b) Has compiled both 32-bit and 64-bit Gentoo from stage 1 and never crashed (though even with an Athlon64 it takes forever) c) Doesn't lock up on Windows shutdown, suspend, hibernate, or when transcoding xvid three days in a row.
Have you considered that maybe--possibly, your laptop might be damaged, or that the one you chose was horribly crap and that it is your fault, not AMDs? I mean, my god, even eMachine's Athlon64 laptops work fine in my experience!
This is a commonly spoken statement, but I have yet to see proof, or even evidence that uses reliable statistics. Might as well say that Titanic sold better in the first week than any new car, therefore the movie industry dwarfs the vehicle industry.
Myth: The Game Industry is now larger than the Movie Industry. With enough qualifications, any statistic can be made true. The legend is specific in that the game industry now out-grosses the domestic box office grosses in the movie industry. That's one heck of a qualification.
We are always being told that the game industry is this gigantic industry. It's hard to even figure out how much the industry makes because the figures are so far out there. One week it's a $20 billion industry, the next it's $12 billion and other times it's $8 billion. Usually we just get vague unsubstantiated claims that the game industry is bigger than the movie industry.
Again, maybe it is larger than the movie industry, but until I see some numbers that actually prove this rather than vagually focusing on specific instances of a game outperforming movies in a very specific set of circumstances, this is going to ring my bullshit detector every time.
I've always thought it was absurd that a chat client would use 100% CPU just to resize a window, and have had problems with Trillian not painting its custom controls over the standard Windows buttons. The client works well, but the coding for themes, non-square windows, and resizing seems to have been done by rather unskilled coders. It also uses a hell of a lot of RAM. It's a freaking chat client, and it requires more hardware resources than my web browser. This is just my opinion, of course.
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For example, when one clicks on a drop menu, there is a noticeable delay (up to 2 seconds) before the dropmenu is populated. The only reason for this that I can think of is that the app runs a DB query each and every time a dropmenu is clicked, even though the contents change very rarely. This is quite possibly the worst possible way to fill a drop menu, ever.
To add insult to injury, the thing is a "web app", but it makes such excessive use of ActiveX and other Windows-specific tools, it eliminates one of the primary advantages of web applications: Cross-platform compatibility.
To their credit, a rep from Siebel did say that this particular product was once a locally-run binary program, but Siebel was losing sales to competitors simply because their tool was not a web application. That is the only reason! Apparently, it didn't include a sufficient number of buzzwords, so they rewrote it to do just that.
How much do you want to bet they'll switch its data storage medium from a proper relational database (even if it is MS SQL) to a purely XML-based system? I am sure that will be plenty fast.
The irony is that this system was used to replace two systems that actually worked well--a OpenVMS-based control system and a Tandem-based logging system. Whomever implemented the old systems clearly valued uptime (neither OpenVMS nor Tandem/HP-Nonstop systems crash; at least, I have never seen it happen, and I've worked on such systems that have uptimes of decades), though admittedly both are rather proprietary and dated.
I've only used 2 or 3 Siebel products, so my experience with them is somewhat limited. Perhaps some of their stuff is non-crap.
Just goes to show--never let PHB's dominate your design decisions, at least if quality is a concern.
Yeah, but if you have a Pentium IV or a Geforce 6800 you'd better be one hell of an athlete already.
When someone who has been blind for their whole life sees for the first time, with a device that you and your team designed?
THIS is the true value of science.
I actually thought that this was common knowledge--that Windows Server 2003 with ASPX was faster than Linux/Apache with PHP, or that Server 2003 was generally faster with static content. (I admit, I only glanced over the article, and Adobe Acrobat's search tool is the worst of crap, so sue me if it didn't mention ASPX).
.NET framework for web content delivery (get it--the 'X' makes it sound cool. Or something). .NET is compiled, and ASPX needs neither process nor thread creation. Like any .NET application, ASPX can run sort of close to native speeds (native + lots of wrapper overhead + generic memory management overhead and such.)
1)ASP (not ASPX) are fairly flaky and recent versions are roughly comparable to, but slower than, PHP4 (not sure about 5), in general.
2) Windows is not very good at creating new processes quickly. This is why CGI (not fastCGI) in the platform is so glacially slow.
Let's have an example. Let's say that you make a dynamic webpage in which all content is generated by a C++ CGI program. Ignoring database access for the time being, since that dilutes the example, on Windows, the website would be MUCH slower than the same website written in ASPX, even though the actual execution time of the C++ program is shorter (assuming a competent C++ coder).
This is because for each request, Windows must create a new process (the CGI program), and destroy the process when the request is complete.
While the execution time is low, the process management overhead dwarfs the actual page runtime, because Windows doesn't do that sort of thing quickly. This is why CGI has long been blacklistedon Windows systems by good web devs, and this is one reason that Apache 1.x was such a dog on Windows. Apache 1.x creates a new Apache process for each request.
Now Linux, on the other hand, creates processes about as fast as it creates threads, which is to say, really damn fast. Apache 1 has always worked just fine on Linux (and indeed most Unix systems) because the overhead of creating a process, while significant, isn't slower than a dead slug stuck in frozen molasses like it is on Windows.
Apache 2.x allows requests to be served by a thread or a process, or a number of processes that each create several threads (any Apache gurus please correct me if any of this is off).
It follows that this isn't a big deal on Linux (because process creation isn't really much slower than thread creation), but is a very big deal on Windows.
Windows has ASPX, which is Microsoft's marketing term for the use of the
Yet Apache is still back here creating a process or thread for each and every request (note that there are some ways to speed things up. FastCGI comes to mind, but I don't want to get into the gory details that I don't know enough about). This is not the brightest way to do it in terms of performance, but then, Apache appears to have been designed for universality and configurability over raw throughput.
It is unwise to hold the attitude that Apache can't be beaten by IIS, especially when IIS is optimized for one platform--by the vendor of that platform. Apache isn't even the fastest on Linux. Take a look at Zeus webserver. It serves circles around Apache on any platform it supports--including Penguin land.
In fact, Zeus uses a technique called SendFile() which, oddly enough, is strikingly similar Microsoft's own TransmitFile() API. Hmm.
Think of it this way: Apache is to IIS as GCC is to ICC, at least in terms of performance and generality.
Intel's compiler (ICC) consistantly blows away GCC in terms of the performance and size of the compiled code, but GCC runs on just about anything with a CPU, can cross-compile, is free, doesn't pull any PHB evil tricks, and actually compiles things like the Linux kernel without pat
I too have found that Windows (2000 in my case, I can't stand XP) to be just as reliable as my Ubuntu and Gentoo systems.
That said, you are absolutely correct--Macromedia products are particularly shoddy. While I think that Dreamweaver's interface is fairly bad, that is opinion. It is not an opinion that they are flaky and unreliable though.
Macromedia fans can throw "PEBKAC" and "RTFM" and "Stupid User Error" all they like. Myself (who is not a web developer) and several professional web developers that I know, including those that somehow like Dreamweaver, have all found it to be the worst of crap in terms of software quality, crashing randomely on a wide variety of systems. In addition to crashing, they often exhibit strange, generally flaky behavior. For example, when I use the edit preview mode (in which you can see a rough preview of what the rendered HTML will look like, and edit it in WYSIWYG mode), the cursor in the HTML preview will be between two characters and the cursor in the source code preview will be offset by one character. As you edit one, the cursor in the other is in the wrong place. Admittedly this was not with the latest version (first release of the "MX" line, though for as long as Dreamweaver had been out, you'd think it would be a mature product).
Big deal? Not at all, but a mass of tiny details are what make the difference between a good product and a shoddy piece of junkware. I won't even go into how it, incredibly, isn't snappy even on a Pentium IV 3GHz HT and 1GB of RAM. Perhaps I've been spoiled by top-quality editors like Jed (a modified release of EMacs), Visual Studio (yes, a Microsoft product. Oh my!), and Kate.
Hopefully Adobe, who makes (IMO) very reliable (if a little hard to use) software, can hire a management team that will give the programmers time to clean up the mess they've likely been forced to make due to the usual bad PHB decisions.
That said, unfortunately, every other feature-rich web-language editor I've tried is lacking in other ways, at least in my opinion. (The editors I mentioned above are editors I used in general, they aren't really HTML editors). About the nicest I've seen for Windows is PHPEdit, which still has a number of really irritating problems, but is at least stable and consistent, not to mention mostly free (Google for it if curious). If only they'd fix the asinine "CTRL-Y deletes lines of text in addition to being redo" bug that persists to this day, and also persists in other editors that use that crappy Delphi text widget (Dev-C++ comes to mind).
As for GAIM, all I can say is GTK-based products are crap in Windows. Try Miranda--it sucks less. I've never found any GTK app to be fast, stable, or well integrated other than in GNOME and XFCE. This isn't GAIM's fault--it's a great LINUX chat client which has been ported to Windows, using a took kit that's little more than bolted on. GTK and Windows do not seem to mix well, and no, The GIMP is not an example otherwise--it still sucks in Windows.
IE has always been remarkably flaky for me. As much as people make fun of it and as much as you lose "geek points" for using it, it is one of the fastest browsers around (it loads faster even under WINE in Linux than Firefox does natively on any platform) and it is easily the best supported, though that is more due to its ubiquity than its support for web features (which by the way sucks--IE's CSS support has made me want to plan more than a few discreet assassinations at Microsoft).
That said, while it appears to be quite stable for many people, it's rarely gone more than 2-3 days without crashing on me, and taking out a number of other processes with it. Maybe I ask too much of it running 15 copies at once. But then, Firefox seems to have little problem (though it is still occasionally flaky).
In any case, Linux users have had extremely legitimate gripes against Windows for the longest time, but since the release of Windows 2000, I think the snide remarks are riding on Windows' old reputation r
I know you were just poking fun but--
Standards are the reason that computers are tolerable to use for any purpose.
If a programmer can't be bothered to follow an international standard of his own language, there is no guarantee that the code is future-proof. One can hardly blame the compiler vendor, as we can't expect a compiler to mindlessly maintain backwards compatibility with every weird use of a bug and every bizarre code construct that has ever been supported in the past.
The ability to compile code written for GCC in another compiler is a *good* thing. If it requires informing the programmer that their code has always been broken, then so be it. A little inconvenience is a small price to pay for standards compliance, or should we expect that the GCC authors "embrace and extend" C and other languages until so much code relies on weird GCC nuggets that programmers (and users) are "locked in" to using just that compiler? (But Douglas Adams forbid if Microsoft does the same thing!)
Maybe I am missing something. If so, please enlighten me (This is not a sarcastic remark--I haven't done much research on what 4.0 has broken so I may be way out of line).
Sheesh, for as hard as the GCC authors work, and for as much GCC has improved in the last 10 years, the contributers sure get a lot of flak. Anyone who doesn't contribute code themselves should be greatful (or at least appreciative) of their efforts, even when they do make mistakes.
Yeah, you're probably right.
My recommendation was not for Tyan above all else, it just mentioned that they were an option. I have built a number of servers using Tyan boards, and other than an some minor issues with an early S2460 (which was, to their credit, a low-end board), haven't had any problems, though admittedly none were equipped with 16GB of RAM.
All motherboard manufacturers release occasional lemons. Tyan is no different, and they are every bit as qualified to design and manufacture server-grade boards as any companies you mentioned (which area both great manufacturers). Tyan was making SPARC-based Sun-compatible servers 15 years ago, and was chosen by AMD to be their primary partner when developing AMD's first SMP Athlon boards (er, not that those boards were that great).
It's easy to fling personal insults from behind AC, just as it's easy to proclaim that since you have had problems with some products from brand X, brand X must therefore suck.
I would appreciate references to your claims of Tyan's problems (not that I am doubting them--more out of personal curiousity), but I do not appreciate an anonymous coward, who does not know me or my experience in the slightest, liberally spewing meaningless insults.
Two of the cheapest Opterons should do it then. :(
Other than that, would probably have to wait for 4GB memory modules, and those aren't likely to be released any time soon at any even remotely affordable price .
First, I would recommend going with a server vendor. I honestly do not mean any offense by this, but if you are looking at places like Tom's Hardware for recommendations (a website which is frequently incompetent even at reviewing l33t g4m3r d00ds hardware, let alone server-grade hardware), you are probably not qualified to build a system which would actually need 16GB of RAM (e.g. a corporate server which must be relied upon). I do not know what the system will be used for, but if it is for a many-person organization, my recommendation stands, and if it is just for you and some friends, 16GB of RAM is almost always going to be absurd overkill.
Now that that's out of the way, Tyan has several dual Opteron boards which support 8 DIMMs. Look at their Thunder line, and put just one Opteron in them, and 2GB DIMM modules.
Please post your good/bad/ugly (badly written but probably not corrupt) website opinions here.
I have been following hardware reviews since about 1995, have written a few myself, and am fairly knowledgeable on the inner-workings of hardware and of English, so I have become fairly critical of reviews. Here's my brief list:
The good (Quality, non-biased, well-written reviews with reproduceable results and non-marketfluff technical explanations):
What the Adaptec guy actually said was:Using the word "buggy" like it was used in the Slashdot front page article implies that the cards are flaky and that non-Adaptec cards aren't (as) buggy. This isn't outright stated, but similarly saying something like "I don't use Microsoft Office because it is buggy" tends to leave the listener with the impression that other office suites are less buggy, even though that isn't stated outright.
The Adaptec employee stated only what we already know--that different revisions of firmware have different bugs (in ALL products that use firmware, not just Adaptec RAID adapters), and that they must be worked around. If different revisions of firmware didn't have bugs, then different revisions of firmware wouldn't exist--the first one would have worked fine (aside from occasional feature additions and tweaks).
However, to the original poster's credit, Adaptec RAID cards really do suck, and they really are buggy (not to mention slow, especially in RAID 5, compared to almost every other brand--and Adaptec's entire SCSI line is pretty consistant in that regard), but that is beside the point. Slashdot shouldn't participate in the same FUD that we so often criticize--just let the facts speak for themselves, and leave the interpretation up to the reader.
So AMD and some other companies did some benchmarks with unequal systems. And?
It would certainly have been less misleading to use an Intel laptop with a similar video card at least, but it isn't like you are going to see these benchmarks on television ads or anything. I doubt any big buyers will care about benchmarks of pre-release products anyway.
Granted, this is rather shady of AMD, but it doesn't even approach the raw evil of, say, a company joining BAPCO and systematically removing all benchmarks in their Sysmark tool in which AMD wins. No, that would be unprecedented in this industry's history.
It's also noteworthy that TheRegister has a partnership with Tom's Hardware in the U.S., and some editors of Tom's have been noted as being overtly biased towards Intel, though Tom's itself seems to be getting better, having articles like the used to--real tech info rather than the sensationalized, poorly written crap which had infested my once favorite hardware site.
Granted, both AMD and Intel are "evil" for-profit companies, but something like an unfair benchmark hardly brings tears to the eye when you consider some of the staggering bullshit actions of the past.
What it all comes down to is preference--The Turion is going to be a 64-bit chip (isn't it?) with the benefits of AMD64 mode (most of which involve the fact that it has double the general-purpose registers in the chip, and not from the fact that those registers are 64-bits wide). The Turion will likely outperform the Pentium-M in most test, like the Athlon64.
The Pentium-M, however, will perform just fine thankyou, and will drain less battery power and thus be in cooler-running laptops with better battery life.
I'd pick the Pentium-M myself, since to choose a product based on anything other than overall effectiveness/price ratio set is usually either fanboyism or poor research.
Infospace was a Microsoft darling because they had a very large number of production servers using Windows 2000 when it was first released, e.g. they were an "early adopter," and a big one at that (Fortune 500).
I worked for a company that was acquired by them in 2000. They had neat offices and such, but it was hard to take them seriously despite their size. A...guy I know was able to get in to any of their production servers and remote control them. Took about 15 minutes to figure out. Reportedly their main network administrator was a pompous prick with a "you couldn't possibly find a flaw in *my* setup" attitude, but I never went to their HQ to meet him. One of our DBAs, one who really knew his stuff, quit immediately after just such a meeting.
For those that are curious, they are/were a content provider, e.g. they sold canned news stories, articles, polls, etc. to the media, though this is probably an oversimplification as I declined to relocate when my company was acquired.
Words to live by.
I hope he realizes that while most blogs aren't worth the bytes they are printed on in terms of content, there are enough gems that one can't write the entire concept off as a bad idea. In any case, judging bloggers by the quality of their writing largely misses the point--blogs aren't supposed to be a regulated, edited, meticulously researched medium of writing--they are a means of sharing thoughts with the world without having to jump through hoops. Whether the world listens, complains, enjoys the blog, takes offense to it, or feels that the author should have gingerly lucubrated every detail as if each entry were a Nobel Prize acceptance speech is beside the point entirely.
While interoperability with Microsoftware is sometimes difficult due to their use of proprietary technologies, a pure Microsoft environment is generally better in the interoperability department than a pure Linux environment. MS Office is integrated with IIS which is integrated with the OS which uses the MMC for a variety of administration tasks (including those outside of IIS), etc. Even under the application level, the GUI is integrated with the OS (it's part of the kernel).
All this comes at a price, however, because extremely strong integration (Microsoft's method for implementing interoperability) means that removing certain pieces is difficult to do. Servers usually do not need a GUI, because they sit there and run headless, doing their thing for years at a time with little local interaction. A GUI uses memory and adds a great deal of running code and therefore bugginess. In Unix, to rid yourself of the GUI, you simply never start X. In Windows, it is sort of possible to never start the GUI, but it is very difficult to do and the aforementioned integration of everything means that even if you do manage to accomplish this feat, you will have limited power over the system since at its core, Windows is designed to be administered with GUI tools.
Unixy OSes, Linux and the BSDs in particular, can be stripped down so thoroughly as to run on a wrist watch or low-power PDA. In order to run on PDAs at all, Microsoft had to develop an in-house custom Windows system, CE, in order to operate under the constraints of a limited system, and it is still far more resource intensive than a Linux system can be.
Granted, Linux has to be stripped down to run on such hardware as well, but since the source code is available, it can be done. You won't find any companies selling custom imbedded copies of Windows made by anyone but Microsoft.
That said, the use of open standards is a system that will eventually overtake even the best fully integrated but proprietary system because any company or group can work on improving the system, products, and ideas, to differntiate themselves. No matter how many resources Microsoft or any other closed company has, "not microsoft" has more.
I do not want to appear to be a grammar nazi, but "has wrote plenty of drivers..." is better written, "has written plenty of drivers..."
Sorry, it's just that seeing "DirectX9 - For More Then Just Gamers?" and then this not an hour later were too much.
You probably did an "emerge sync" "emerge -u world" and some trivial change in /etc/fstab made etc-update decide it should be replaced with a new version, which knows nothing about your partition setup.
It's partially Gentoo's fault for being so stupid as to happily overwrite a critical system file like fstab without so much as a "By the way, if you overwrite your working file with this generic, unconfigured one, none of your partitions will mount at next reboot"
And it's partially your fault since etc-update doesn't overwrite any files unless you specifically tell it to. Still, it's a very error-prone process when etc-update is constantly reporting new, non-working versions of base system files, usually ones which have absolutely no important changes.
There's an interesting (as far as "new drive is bigger than old ones!" is interesting) thread on Storagereview.com which includes some insights as to how this thing is built, and why it uses lower-capacity platters than even Seagate's 400GB drives.
a) Uses standard hardware so drivers are no problem to find online (or from the reseller or on the included install discs). One exception being the Radeon 9600m, which I can still easily find drivers for.
b) Has compiled both 32-bit and 64-bit Gentoo from stage 1 and never crashed (though even with an Athlon64 it takes forever)
c) Doesn't lock up on Windows shutdown, suspend, hibernate, or when transcoding xvid three days in a row.
Have you considered that maybe--possibly, your laptop might be damaged, or that the one you chose was horribly crap and that it is your fault, not AMDs? I mean, my god, even eMachine's Athlon64 laptops work fine in my experience!
And I thought we were past racism...
Might as well say that Titanic sold better in the first week than any new car, therefore the movie industry dwarfs the vehicle industry.
Here's some food for thought:
Shacknews:
Avault:
Again, maybe it is larger than the movie industry, but until I see some numbers that actually prove this rather than vagually focusing on specific instances of a game outperforming movies in a very specific set of circumstances, this is going to ring my bullshit detector every time.
I've always thought it was absurd that a chat client would use 100% CPU just to resize a window, and have had problems with Trillian not painting its custom controls over the standard Windows buttons. The client works well, but the coding for themes, non-square windows, and resizing seems to have been done by rather unskilled coders. It also uses a hell of a lot of RAM. It's a freaking chat client, and it requires more hardware resources than my web browser.
This is just my opinion, of course.