A number of posts included some incorrect assumptions about how government contracting, esp outside of the US, works.
The idea that government should not support any particular company (ie stand back and let free competition occur) is a peculiarly American idea. Most other nations expect their governments to actively lobby and support favored businessess. This has nothing to do with what business provides the "best" products, and has everything to do with politics and whose hands are in whose pockets.
Germany follows an economic model that favors large, established organizations (business, labor groups, etc.) who avoid direct competition with each other but who instead come to agreements via a closed-door decision process. So Germany knows perfectly well what it's getting with Microsoft; the whole point is to get in bed with companies for the long haul, not for one-time contracts.
The German govmt couldn't care less about the DOJ/MS case. Much of the world doesn't think very highly of American politics; from their perspective, we get all bent out of shape over things that are common practice elsewhere (Presidential affairs, predatory business practices).
Who determines what is "business related"? Even if it is deemed by the priests in the Ivory Tower to be "business related" things can still slip through by accident. I recieved an e-mail mack in march from one of my suppliers that was infected with a MacroVirus. It was a Pricelist, most definately business related. Fortunately, I was procrastinating and never opened the file. But then again I have a Mac, so only MS Office apps would have been effected.
I'm a writer in Washington, D.C., working on a piece about Linux. Are there any network administrators/IT/MIS types who might be able to answer a few questions? I want to know what you use Linux for, what effect recent support of Linux by folks at IBM and HP, etc will have, what kind of businesses will benefit from widespread Linux use, etc.
I think you miss the point. OS diversity in and of itself is a form of protection. Worms/Virii/Trojans that affect win/32 will not hamper un*x. Ones that target un*x can't hurt a Mac. Malicious code that targets Mac will leave a Be system unscathed. This is the point.
No one piece of code can disable an entire network when there is diversity. Maybe 34% of your machines will go down and as bad as that is, it's still better than 95%+ of your machines going down.
Here, where I work, for example I have a Mac on my desk, but in the back room I have Linux and NT servers that I administrate. I can remain (fairly) confident that nothing short of an environmental disaster (be it large or small) will take down all of the machines that I am responsible for.
Thanks for the tip - you've just saved me a lot of typing!
I had problems going from 2.2.6 to 10, patchfile 7 didn't want to patch properly, but with your tip, I was able to easily apply all the patches on a clean 2.2.0
I do believe Sun did not bill the Ultra 5 as "a great step forward for workstations". It is actually billed as a cheaper workstation, designed to compete with wintel, if I am not mistaken.
You're right, the Ultra 5 is NOT a PC! I would expect it to have quite a few more failures and nowhere near the uptime it has, if it were a PC. Great observation!
First off, yeah, I work for the same site, so of course I'm going to defend Mark. But even if I didn't work for ABC, Mark's crystal ball is one of the better ones in this unpredictable biz.
People buying Linux WILL buy RedHat over the $1.99 version, and I'll tell you why: RedHat's customers are major corporations, and they want the support that comes with paying $80. Sure, YOU can go download it for free, but as Linux gets adopted into the mainstream IT market, you can bet that IT managers will pay RedHat for the support. Sure, it's questionable whether RH will make its main bucks off of support, but it makes IT people happier to pay for it. So much the better for everyone.
And calling someone an oaf isn't exactly elevating the debate to the next level, now is it?
As far as I know on Macs after the MacPlus and before the iMac it was a hardware thing. If you hit a Mac's power key and before the machine finishes it's memory check you CMD-CTL-PWR it it'll chime again and reboot. This is before anything except the ROM loads.
You can three finger salute it in rapid succession before the previos chime ends, you can reboot it again.
iMacs and the Blue and White G3s often lose the ability to use the keyboard after a good crash, but that's because it's USB. If you plugged an ADB keyboard into the G3 I bet that you'd be able to force the reboot.
Without getting into whether JPM is an idiot etc. (which has already been well covered in other posts)...it's worth considering where, for whom and in what context this article was posted. InternetWeek is primarily written for corporate IT generalists and non-IT business managers. The article was posted in the "Grey Matter" section (advice and editorials, not "objective" news).
For this audience, these issues in the article are appropriate (regardless of whether they are accurate in this instance!): linux is a different animal from the usual corp/capitalist model. So there's a need for ongoing debate and education about it.
Remember the tech adopter curve from Crossing the Chasm: mainstream corporate adopters do NOT pick up new/leading edge tech, they wait until it has become (is perceived to be) industry standard. Corp IT types do this not because they're stupid, but because they know that you don't last long in the corp world if you're perceived as being too "out there" (ie putting the business at risk).
FYI there was a much more positive article on linux a month or so back in Internetworld ("Open Source: What's Next for Linux"), so having an opposing view may also be perceived as good journalism. Again, I'm NOT endorsing this article, just commenting on bigger picture issues.
Ahh.. yes so use it as an intermediate language where people have more control than say VB, but not as much as C/C++? Well I can see a nitch for a language there. However, this leads to an interesting thought... would it be an interpreted language? I mean you wouldnt need it to be would you since the major reason for that was for cross-platform support....
If it is interpreted, why use it? I guess that is kinda where my point is going.... Compiled languages are generally faster...
Why dont we all just use PERL and get it over with....:P
Garbage collection is a mixed bag... I mean sometimes its good, but for critical time oriented applications, its baaaad....since you cant control when its gonna do it.
Java class libraries are nice, but there are c/c++ libraries that do most of that already.... plus java api's are getting astronomically huge.... seems like you have one for just about everything...
Now swing, even though it is really nice and all, I really dont see the need for in windows if you are just going to program for windows. Then again, its been a while since I looked at swing, so there is a good chance you are much more correct than I, or that you see something which my dim vision hides....:P
What do people think of the excerpt in Wired? IMO I hope there's more to the book than what's revealed in the excerpt. The excert has somewhat entertaining "this is your life" vignettes of various random wanna-be-rich people. OK, so this is "human interest," but I hope that the book contains a little more context and interpretation.
Supporting Soundcards
on
Linux 2.2.10
·
· Score: 1
Posted by NJViking:
I have to agree on this. My buddy wants to use Linux, but it just won't work with his Diamond M80 sound card. Go figure..
-= NJV =- .. happy with his AWE64 Gold
Re:How to patch your kernel.
on
Linux 2.2.10
·
· Score: 1
Posted by NJViking:
Even easier:
In/usr/src:
bunzip2 -cd patch-2.2.10.bz2 | patch -p0
(if you downloaded it in bz2, which I do 'cause it's less.)
First of all, there is the old problem of keeping all your eggs in one basket; Sure, splitting to 3 different os's will reduce the impact of a single type of attack, but it will triple the chances of a smaller attack, and in the gov't, that's not a good thing.
Not to mention the administrative headache that would be. Between having to integrate different OS's, to getting 3 licences for each piece of software you want to run company-wide, to people changing OS's all the time, because some new guy comes in that only knows 95, it's just not worth the hastle... --A good thought, and if this guy wants to do it for his company, that's fine, but let's not push the issue on others.
>actually there are two ppc distributions very >similar to redhat - mklinux >w.mklinux.apple.com) and linuxppc >www.linuxppc.com). you should really check your >acts before making such blatently incorrect >tatements. ppc is a great platform, don't trash >t without good reason.
I'll trash the PowerPC platform anytime I feel free too. It's a chip that's on the same playing field as the CISC based P6 design. What it's not is a real RISC design. I think you've been reading too much MacKido.
As for LinuxPPC and MkLinux being based on Redhat that is somewhat true. Actually I'm not so sure about MkLinux, but the other is.
The problem is that you don't see the port directly from Redhat. You do on the other hand see ports of Alpha, x86, and Sparc. There are a number of ports that are not offical, but none of them are completed enough to use full time. Hell you can't even recompile WordPerfect 8 to run on PowerPC.
Note: The one feature I find attractive about LinuxPPC is that with Sheepshaver you can actually run Mac OS through Linux. Another advantage is that it seems to be rather fast due to the architecture of the processor, but comes no where near Alpha.
It doesnt make much sense... one of the boons of Java was the cross-platform programming potential... so what value is a Windows dependent Java clone? Why not just program in C++ or VC++ or something?
Just saw a FPGA kit that slips into a PCI slot in a PC for some US $300. I hear some FPGA chips have up to 1,000,000 gates and operate at 200 MHz! Given that it would take two gates to produce one register for one bit, I figure the possibility of a 32 bit processor with 200 or maybe even 500 active registers with a humble instruction set of 17. XOR, OR, AND, conditional jump, jump, Shift Right, Shift Left, Integer Math: Add, Sub, Multiply, Divide, Floating Point Math: Add, Sub, Multiply, Divide, Load from memory and Block Transfer. Pretty basic but should get the job done. Each register will have it's own execution unit. Now the number of cycles to complete an operation should range from one to four with the mean being about 2. Lets see 200 MHz average 2 cycles per op that's 100 million times five hundred, that's 50 billion instructions per second! Give me a few months and My supercomputer will be on this list and will only take a thousandth of the space of those other monsters!
It's abundantly clear that JP is a fucking bureaucrat. The only tech manuals he reads are the MTBS (Marketing-Type BullShit) with the six color glossies.
Linux IS *nix, in the best KISS tradition. Extremely complex apps can be welded atop the kernal, without resort to the Favorite Microsoft _Fully_Incompatible_API() calls. And code that runs on Linux runs on scores of other *nix's.
Yahoo has been using FreeBSD for ages - since very early in the company's history. The use is widespread - from development to serving. They are by far the most "succesful" company to use open source software to date, and their use of it is very extensive.
With TCP/IP streams, there are about as many outgoing packets as there are incoming packets. So the graphs aren't going to look much different.
(BTW, anyone know of any inaccuracies in the data from/proc/dev/net when there are hundreds of virtual IPs? Does Linux always keep those statistics accurately?)
Forrest J. Cavalier III, Mib Software Voice 570-992-8824 The Reuse Rocket: Efficient awareness for software reuse: Free WWW site lists over 6000 of the most popular open source libraries, functions, and applications.
Slashdot Mirror
Posted by Mary CW:
A number of posts included some incorrect assumptions about how government contracting, esp outside of the US, works.
The idea that government should not support any particular company (ie stand back and let free competition occur) is a peculiarly American idea. Most other nations expect their governments to actively lobby and support favored businessess. This has nothing to do with what business provides the "best" products, and has everything to do with politics and whose hands are in whose pockets.
Germany follows an economic model that favors large, established organizations (business, labor groups, etc.) who avoid direct competition with each other but who instead come to agreements via a closed-door decision process. So Germany knows perfectly well what it's getting with Microsoft; the whole point is to get in bed with companies for the long haul, not for one-time contracts.
The German govmt couldn't care less about the DOJ/MS case. Much of the world doesn't think very highly of American politics; from their perspective, we get all bent out of shape over things that are common practice elsewhere (Presidential affairs, predatory business practices).
Posted by d_iana:
versus UNIX or NT? How about weaknesses?
tx diana
Posted by Lord Kano-The Gangster Of Love:
Who determines what is "business related"? Even if it is deemed by the priests in the Ivory Tower to be "business related" things can still slip through by accident. I recieved an e-mail mack in march from one of my suppliers that was infected with a MacroVirus. It was a Pricelist, most definately business related. Fortunately, I was procrastinating and never opened the file. But then again I have a Mac, so only MS Office apps would have been effected.
LK
Posted by d_iana:
I'm a writer in Washington, D.C., working on a piece about Linux. Are there any network administrators/IT/MIS types who might be able to answer a few questions? I want to know what you use Linux for, what effect recent support of Linux by folks at IBM and HP, etc will have, what kind of businesses will benefit from widespread Linux use, etc.
Posted by Lord Kano-The Gangster Of Love:
I think you miss the point. OS diversity in and of itself is a form of protection. Worms/Virii/Trojans that affect win/32 will not hamper un*x. Ones that target un*x can't hurt a Mac. Malicious code that targets Mac will leave a Be system unscathed. This is the point.
No one piece of code can disable an entire network when there is diversity. Maybe 34% of your machines will go down and as bad as that is, it's still better than 95%+ of your machines going down.
Here, where I work, for example I have a Mac on my desk, but in the back room I have Linux and NT servers that I administrate. I can remain (fairly) confident that nothing short of an environmental disaster (be it large or small) will take down all of the machines that I am responsible for.
LK
Posted by wMaVerick:
:-)
Thanks for the tip - you've just saved me a lot of typing!
I had problems going from 2.2.6 to 10, patchfile 7 didn't want to patch properly, but with your tip, I was able to easily apply all the patches on a clean 2.2.0
Cheers
Posted by effy-kun:
I do believe Sun did not bill the Ultra 5 as "a great step forward for workstations". It is actually billed as a cheaper workstation, designed to compete with wintel, if I am not mistaken.
You're right, the Ultra 5 is NOT a PC! I would expect it to have quite a few more failures and nowhere near the uptime it has, if it were a PC. Great observation!
Posted by Mike@ABC:
First off, yeah, I work for the same site, so of course I'm going to defend Mark. But even if I didn't work for ABC, Mark's crystal ball is one of the better ones in this unpredictable biz.
People buying Linux WILL buy RedHat over the $1.99 version, and I'll tell you why: RedHat's customers are major corporations, and they want the support that comes with paying $80. Sure, YOU can go download it for free, but as Linux gets adopted into the mainstream IT market, you can bet that IT managers will pay RedHat for the support. Sure, it's questionable whether RH will make its main bucks off of support, but it makes IT people happier to pay for it. So much the better for everyone.
And calling someone an oaf isn't exactly elevating the debate to the next level, now is it?
Posted by Lord Kano-The Gangster Of Love:
As far as I know on Macs after the MacPlus and before the iMac it was a hardware thing. If you hit a Mac's power key and before the machine finishes it's memory check you CMD-CTL-PWR it it'll chime again and reboot. This is before anything except the ROM loads.
You can three finger salute it in rapid succession before the previos chime ends, you can reboot it again.
iMacs and the Blue and White G3s often lose the ability to use the keyboard after a good crash, but that's because it's USB. If you plugged an ADB keyboard into the G3 I bet that you'd be able to force the reboot.
LK
Posted by Mary CW:
Without getting into whether JPM is an idiot etc. (which has already been well covered in other posts)...it's worth considering where, for whom and in what context this article was posted. InternetWeek is primarily written for corporate IT generalists and non-IT business managers. The article was posted in the "Grey Matter" section (advice and editorials, not "objective" news).
For this audience, these issues in the article are appropriate (regardless of whether they are accurate in this instance!): linux is a different animal from the usual corp/capitalist model. So there's a need for ongoing debate and education about it.
Remember the tech adopter curve from Crossing the Chasm: mainstream corporate adopters do NOT pick up new/leading edge tech, they wait until it has become (is perceived to be) industry standard. Corp IT types do this not because they're stupid, but because they know that you don't last long in the corp world if you're perceived as being too "out there" (ie putting the business at risk).
FYI there was a much more positive article on linux a month or so back in Internetworld ("Open Source: What's Next for Linux"), so having an opposing view may also be perceived as good journalism. Again, I'm NOT endorsing this article, just commenting on bigger picture issues.
Posted by Zathuras:
....:P
Ahh.. yes so use it as an intermediate language where people have more control than say VB, but not as much as C/C++? Well I can see a nitch for a language there. However, this leads to an interesting thought... would it be an interpreted language? I mean you wouldnt need it to be would you since the major reason for that was for cross-platform support....
If it is interpreted, why use it? I guess that is kinda where my point is going.... Compiled languages are generally faster...
Why dont we all just use PERL and get it over with
Posted by Zathuras:
:P
Garbage collection is a mixed bag... I mean sometimes its good, but for critical time oriented applications, its baaaad....since you cant control when its gonna do it.
Java class libraries are nice, but there are c/c++ libraries that do most of that already.... plus java api's are getting astronomically huge.... seems like you have one for just about everything...
Now swing, even though it is really nice and all, I really dont see the need for in windows if you are just going to program for windows. Then again, its been a while since I looked at swing, so there is a good chance you are much more correct than I, or that you see something which my dim vision hides....
Posted by Mary CW:
What do people think of the excerpt in Wired? IMO I hope there's more to the book than what's revealed in the excerpt. The excert has somewhat entertaining "this is your life" vignettes of various random wanna-be-rich people. OK, so this is "human interest," but I hope that the book contains a little more context and interpretation.
Posted by NJViking:
I have to agree on this. My buddy wants to use Linux, but it just won't work with his Diamond M80 sound card. Go figure..
-= NJV =-
.. happy with his AWE64 Gold
Posted by NJViking:
/usr/src:
Even easier:
In
bunzip2 -cd patch-2.2.10.bz2 | patch -p0
(if you downloaded it in bz2, which I do 'cause it's less.)
-= NJViking =-
Posted by beer4me:
First of all, there is the old problem of keeping all your eggs in one basket; Sure, splitting to 3 different os's will reduce the impact of a single type of attack, but it will triple the chances of a smaller attack, and in the gov't, that's not a good thing.
Not to mention the administrative headache that would be. Between having to integrate different OS's, to getting 3 licences for each piece of software you want to run company-wide, to people changing OS's all the time, because some new guy comes in that only knows 95, it's just not worth the hastle... --A good thought, and if this guy wants to do it for his company, that's fine, but let's not push the issue on others.
Posted by Redalert:
>actually there are two ppc distributions very >similar to redhat - mklinux >w.mklinux.apple.com) and linuxppc >www.linuxppc.com). you should really check your >acts before making such blatently incorrect >tatements. ppc is a great platform, don't trash >t without good reason.
I'll trash the PowerPC platform anytime I feel free too. It's a chip that's on the same playing field as the CISC based P6 design. What it's not is a real RISC design. I think you've been reading too much MacKido.
As for LinuxPPC and MkLinux being based on Redhat that is somewhat true. Actually I'm not so sure about MkLinux, but the other is.
The problem is that you don't see the port directly from Redhat. You do on the other hand see ports of Alpha, x86, and Sparc. There are a number of ports that are not offical, but none of them are completed enough to use full time. Hell you can't even recompile WordPerfect 8 to run on PowerPC.
Note:
The one feature I find attractive about LinuxPPC is that with Sheepshaver you can actually run Mac OS through Linux. Another advantage is that it seems to be rather fast due to the architecture of the processor, but comes no where near Alpha.
Posted by Zathuras:
It doesnt make much sense... one of the boons of Java was the cross-platform programming potential... so what value is a Windows dependent Java clone? Why not just program in C++ or VC++ or something?
PS: My first post! Whee!
Posted by FrankGraphics:
Just saw a FPGA kit that slips into a PCI slot in a PC for some US $300. I hear some FPGA chips have up to 1,000,000 gates and operate at 200 MHz! Given that it would take two gates to produce one register for one bit, I figure the possibility of a 32 bit processor with 200 or maybe even 500 active registers with a humble instruction set of 17. XOR, OR, AND, conditional jump, jump, Shift Right, Shift Left, Integer Math: Add, Sub, Multiply, Divide, Floating Point Math: Add, Sub, Multiply, Divide, Load from memory and Block Transfer. Pretty basic but should get the job done. Each register will have it's own execution unit. Now the number of cycles to complete an operation should range from one to four with the mean being about 2. Lets see 200 MHz average 2 cycles per op that's 100 million times five hundred, that's 50 billion instructions per second! Give me a few months and My supercomputer will be on this list and will only take a thousandth of the space of those other monsters!
Posted by swtprince:
_ __
As having a direct line to AMD since I am in computer sales. The hype about the ID is very high and most of it negative.
AMD flatly stated that they will NOT have an ID on their chips nor forsee one in the near future.
_______________________________________________
Posted by Reitzel:
It's abundantly clear that JP is a fucking bureaucrat. The only tech manuals he reads are the MTBS (Marketing-Type BullShit) with the six color glossies.
Linux IS *nix, in the best KISS tradition. Extremely complex apps can be welded atop the kernal, without resort to the Favorite Microsoft _Fully_Incompatible_API() calls. And code that runs on Linux runs on scores of other *nix's.
Dork.
Posted by viperx2:
I don't need a vacation for one thing.
Second, who says that a playstation2 will be used as a "nuclear technology?"
Other than that, I think that china can get whatever they want when it comes nuclear tecnology.
Posted by d106ene5:
Yahoo has been using FreeBSD for ages - since very early in the company's history. The use is widespread - from development to serving. They are by far the most "succesful" company to use open source software to date, and their use of it is very extensive.
With TCP/IP streams, there are about as many outgoing packets as there are incoming packets. So the graphs aren't going to look much different.
(BTW, anyone know of any inaccuracies in the data from /proc/dev/net when there are hundreds of virtual IPs? Does Linux always keep those statistics accurately?)
Forrest J. Cavalier III, Mib Software Voice 570-992-8824
The Reuse Rocket: Efficient awareness for software reuse: Free WWW site
lists over 6000 of the most popular open source libraries, functions, and applications.
Posted by mathman100@geocities.com:
i'm not sure about fiber, but if you use the entire EM spectrum in something like a vacuum:
infinate frequencies * infinate amplitudes = a really really big number
although i wouldn't feel very safe if gamma waves and x-rays were just flying around in this data transfer medium.