The most likely scenario in most congressional offices is that some junior level staffer weeds through the inbox and prints out the interesting emails for a more senior level staffer to read. I suspect that much the same thing happens with snail mail, except that hard copy doesn't need to be printed first.
That said, your point about the superiority of personal correspondance over internet petitions was quite sound. I very much doubt that collections of names from across the country allegedly in support of one thing or the other means very much to a given congress critter.
And to be most effective use SNAIL-MAIL. Five letters with a return address from their home district get more attention from congressmen than 500 digital signatures from unknown locations on the internet, even if they SAY they are constituants.
This may be true, but I have doubts over whether a letter to one's congress critters posted through the USPS is any more effective than an email sent to one's congress critters. I used to think so, until I contacted my US congressional representative last year via the house email contact form. Much to my surprise I got a snail mail response two months later informing me about a different (but related) issue.
Apparently, someone in my congress critter's office reads the feedback and keeps track (to a certain extent) of what constituents are interested in what issues.
Not to mention that events like last year's despicable mailing of anthrax to government agencies have made snail mail much less valuable as a value proposition.
Faxing is probably a good middle ground. But email uses less of my federal tax dollars.
Webstar and other web servers do exist for MacOS. In fact, in 1999 the US army switched to Webstar on MacOS. I don't know how long they stayed there. For all I know, they never completed the conversion after the announcement.
MacOS was also an incredibly secure web serving platform. A number of companies held a "crack a mac" contest in 1996/1997. After several repeats of the contest because no one could break in to claim the US $10,000 prize, third party software was included (Lasso CGI). The system was cracked shortly thereafter.
The original poster certainly overstated the case. Once CGI is enabled, all systems are (theoretically) as insecure. MacOS is no exception. It's superiority on this level is one of security through obscurity.
One 3rd party tool created the only known exploit backdoor in mac history and that was back in 1995 and is not, nor was, a widely used tool. I do not even know its name. From 1995 to 2002 not one macintosh web server on the internet has been broken into or defaced EVER. Other than that event ages ago in 1995, no mac web server has ever been rooted,defaced,owned,scanned,exploited, etc.
The bugtraq mailing list lists a known exploit for Lasso CGI on top of Webstar in 1997.
If CGI is enabled, Webstar becomes no more secure than any other web server with CGI enabled. For static content, Webstar does appear to be unbreakable.
One, none of the *BSDs are derived from any of them.
Irrelevant. This was supposedly a history of BSD Unix, not only of the free variants of BSD.
Two, I don't belive ANY of the ones you mentioned are BSDs to begin with. Ultrix was, as was SunOS prior to version 5.X. Digital Unix is based on OSF/1 (which is based on SVR2 or atleast requires that license) which is also based on Mach. Yes, you can run a BSD single server on Mach, but it is not BSD based. Solaris is a SysVr4 system.
OSF/1 required a SVR2 license, but was based heavily on the 4.3 BSD code base, including using the BSD file system and the BSD admin tool chain. Digital Unix increased its emphasis on the BSD way.
Mach is generally considered a child of the BSD project.
Solaris retains much of the BSD heritage from SunOS 4.x and prior. In fact, most of the BSD userland is still available as part of the standard Solaris configuration.
Plus, none of them are in the BSD family tree except as minor leafs down the line.
Minor leafs? I'd wager that there are more users of Solaris than there are any other single flavor of BSD.
If Microsoft were to take, oh, let's say Ghostscript, and integrate it into MS Office, they would most likely go out of business within a quarter, because all of office would now be GPL'd. MS wouldn't have a choice.
Briefly, aggregation does not necessarily imply being a derivative work. If the interface (using pipes and sockets) between the hypothetical Microsoft Ghostscript and the rest of Microsoft Office is clean enough, then Microsoft would only be responsible for releasing their changes to Ghostscript.
The long BSD tradition of cautious development, extensive peer review, and thorough testing makes them some of the most reliable software ever developed. In fact, as far as anyone knows, only one worm has ever been developed that attacked any of the BSDs.
The Morris Internet worm that virtually shutdown the Internet attacked SunOS, which is a BSD, and DEC VAX running 4 BSD.
The article forgot to mention SunOS
on
Overview of the BSDs
·
· Score: 4, Informative
The article attempts to list the five most famous BSDs, but doesn't mention SunOS (aka Solaris). I'm not too impressed by an article on the history of BSD that doesn't mention SunOS, the Mach kernel (except a brief mention of Darwin), OSF/1, or Digital Unix.
As far as performance goes Apple simply is not in that game. They do not have a machine that competes in the front ranks of the data center game.
This is more or less correct, but it isn't due to the processor. It's due to the system bus, memory architecture, OS and compiler.
Apple's 1GHz XScale server offers similar SPEC2000 scores to IBM's RS/6000 series running a 500 MHz PPC (RS64-III) chip. (Better CINT2000, but worse CFP2000 scores.) I sincerely doubt that a processor of the same architectural family, only two years newer and twice as fast in clock ticks, is the culprit in the poor SPEC scores of the XScale.
I'm also doubtful that performance is the key selling point in most data centers. If it were, Alpha and PA-RISC would have been near ubiquitous instead of also rans compared to SPARC, POWER and PPC.
PPC processors can function big or little endian. Usually they need to be booted in one mode or the other. (See Programming Endianness for IBM PowerPC 405 Core-based Chips.) MIPS processors come in both big and little endian flavors. Some ARM chips are also bi-endian.
The interesting thing about that combination is that Apple would suddenly become a major competitor to Sun, HP and IBM. OS-X is actually a pretty good UNIX implementation with a very robust kernel and with Apple's controls a pretty well defined hardware base.
Do you mean Apple isn't a potential competitor of IBM with a pretty good UNIX running on the PPC chip?:)
I'm not quite sure if you're agreeing, or disagreeing.
I think that the numbers speak for themselves. If the fastest RISC processor (the Alpha) delivers 2/3 of the performance of the fastest PIV at 1/3 of the clockspeed of that PIV, then fastest PIV is faster than the fastest RISC processor.
Granted, this is a relatively recent developement. Until Intel broke the 2GHz range and AMD delivered their 1600+, the fastest RISC chips did perform better in published benchmarks than the fastest AMD and Intel chips.
As an aside, I'd hardly consider the Ultra SPARC to be esoteric.
I also think its funny that you note the Itanium2 as a possible exception. The Itanium2 runs at a much slower clock speed than the PIV or the Athlon.
It will be interesting to see what the next generation SPARC and PPC chips bring to the table. PA-RISC, Alpha (arguably), and MIPS (arguably) seem to be out for the performance race. (Although MIPS will likely continue to do well in the embedded space.)
Of the big RISC chips, only Alpha had a clock speed higher than comparable x86 chips. MIPS, SPARC and PA-RISC all delivered much higher performance at a slower clock speed.
For example, in December of 1995 while Intel submitted SPEC scores for Pentiums in the 100 to 200 MHz range, HP's fastest SPEC submission for PA-RISC was on a 120 MHz processor, IBM's fastest SPEC submission for PPC was on a 133 MHz processor and the fastest SPARC submission was on a 150 MHz processor. DEC was rather exceptional with their 300 MHz Alpha. I think that perhaps you are confusing the poster child of the RISC world, the Alpha processor, with all of the RISC world.
Feel free to correct me and let me know the last year that most RISC chips had higher clock speeds than most CISC chips.
Okay, tell me what processor is faster than the current high end AMD or Intel processors?
Personally, I don't know of any.
A Pentium IV 2.8Ghz offers a peak SPECint2000 score of 1010. Meanwhile an Alpha running at just over 1/3 of the same clock speed offers 2/3 of the performance. That same 1 GHz Alpha has only 80% of the SPECint2000 performance of the AMD Athlon 2600+. These numbers were grabbed from the full list of published SPECint2000 results.
Sun, HP, etc all, haven't sold processors that are higher performing than the high end consumer processors for years. They make up for this by, as mentioned, implementing extreme, and astoundingly costly, SMP.
You are incorrect. Per clock tick, the big RISC vendors provide chips that perform much more work than the big CISC vendors.
Then consider that the PA-RISC at 200 MHz and the MIPS at 250 MHz both far exceed PIII and K7 floating point performance and the PA-RISC at 200 MHz is not all that far behind the PIII at 550Mhz. If you look at more recent SPEC benchmarks (SPECint2000 and SPECfp2000) you'll see much of the same with a 667 MHz Alpha delivering a higher performance than a 866 MHz PIII. True, the gap is closing, but as you correctly noted, Intel and AMD are now providing RISC ships with CISC instruction set wrappers.
(I cribbed the SPEC scores from here. It was the best site I could find with a good historical overview.)
The RISC concept was initially designed to allow HIGHER clock rates than what was possible with the too complex CISC architectures.
No. Clock rate is irrelevant. The original design goal of the RISC paradigm was to make computer chips less complex which frequently has the side effect of making the chips more efficient in terms of how much work can be done in a single clock tick and in how much power is drawn.
Certainly some RISC architectures used the increased efficiencies to produce insane clock rates (Alpha). Other RISC architectures (MIPS) kept low clock rates that delivered comparable performance by doing more work per clock tick. Go back to 1993 through 1995 and look at the SPEC scores for different RISC chips.
In other words, different design teams have taken the RISC paradigm in many different directions.
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Where's the innovation at? Other than the Mario guy at Nintendo's track record, how many non-PC games have you just HAD TO HAVE? Enough so that you'd buy the hardware just for that game? A handful, maybe.
So, uh, how many non-console games have you just HAD TO HAVE? Enough so that you'd buy a PC just for that game?
Whereas on the PC, you've got the FPS, RTS, and whatever genre you want to call The Sims for starters.
The FPS genre came from the arcade. The RTS genre came from mini-computer installations. AFAICT, the sims genre was started on the Commodore 64 with Little Computer People. While the C64 is arguably a PC in the original meaning of the word, the term PC is more and more frequently only to describe IBM PC compatibles.
Nitpicks aside:
Both PC and consoles will find their best markets. Like I've always said, consoles are best for the sports games. The controls are easy. Multiplayer sports games work on the console (no split screen bs). PCs will be best for hardcore flight sims, etc. etc.
I wonder if Ballmer also finds it odd that IBM does the same for Microsoft. That quote could easily read, "It's weird! IBM says 'Hey Company X! Buy Windows.... From Microsoft.'"
In fact, our whole world (mine, anyway) is like this - far more noise than we were intended to hear regularly, and it slowly causes us to lose frequencies and ranges...
It sounds (!) to me like you're just getting old and starting to lose your hearing as is not atypical. I'm aware of much evidence that loud sounds can damage hearing. I'm not aware of any evidence that low level white noise of the sort found in a server closet can do the same.
Unless your server closet has an unsually high decibel level, I think the problem is far more likely to exist solely in your ears and not as a result of your environment.
Other than the Trespassing or Entering (not breaking), I don't think there's any law saying you couldn't sit down on their couch and watch their TV.
Assuming an unlocked door, I believe that entering such a house would only count as criminal trespassing if either the person coming in was asked to leave and refused or if a "No trespassing" sign was posted.
Here we disagree again. There is no "No Trespassing" sign on my front door. I am not required to post public documents stating that random passers-by may not enter to use my water, bathroom or electricity. It is a reasonable assumption to be made by reasonable individuals that this is, in fact, the case.
At least in the US, most courts would probably disagree with your opinion. Per an article by the Tennessee Bar Association What is Trespassing?:
"Trespassing" is a legal term that can refer to a wide variety of offenses against a person or against property. In this tape, we are going to talk only about "trespassing" as it relates to going onto someone's land without consent.
Technically, a person violates the law against trespassing by knowingly going onto someone else's land without consent. "Knowledge" may be inferred when the owner (or the owner's representative) tells the trespasser not to go on the land or when the land is fenced in a manner that suggests that intruders should stay out or there is a "no trespassing" sign in an obvious place.
A trespasser will probably not be prosecuted if the land was open to the public when the trespasser originally entered the land and the trespasser's conduct did not substantially interfere with the owner's use of the property and the trespasser left on request.
If you leave your door unlocked and an unknown passerby entered your house and either you asked him or her to leave and the passerby refused or you have a posted "No Trespassing" sign, then trespassing has occurred. Otherwise, the maxim no harm, no foul most probably applies.
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The most likely scenario in most congressional offices is that some junior level staffer weeds through the inbox and prints out the interesting emails for a more senior level staffer to read. I suspect that much the same thing happens with snail mail, except that hard copy doesn't need to be printed first.
That said, your point about the superiority of personal correspondance over internet petitions was quite sound. I very much doubt that collections of names from across the country allegedly in support of one thing or the other means very much to a given congress critter.
Regards.
This may be true, but I have doubts over whether a letter to one's congress critters posted through the USPS is any more effective than an email sent to one's congress critters. I used to think so, until I contacted my US congressional representative last year via the house email contact form. Much to my surprise I got a snail mail response two months later informing me about a different (but related) issue.
Apparently, someone in my congress critter's office reads the feedback and keeps track (to a certain extent) of what constituents are interested in what issues.
Not to mention that events like last year's despicable mailing of anthrax to government agencies have made snail mail much less valuable as a value proposition.
Faxing is probably a good middle ground. But email uses less of my federal tax dollars.
Good day.
MacOS was also an incredibly secure web serving platform. A number of companies held a "crack a mac" contest in 1996/1997. After several repeats of the contest because no one could break in to claim the US $10,000 prize, third party software was included (Lasso CGI). The system was cracked shortly thereafter.
The original poster certainly overstated the case. Once CGI is enabled, all systems are (theoretically) as insecure. MacOS is no exception. It's superiority on this level is one of security through obscurity.
The bugtraq mailing list lists a known exploit for Lasso CGI on top of Webstar in 1997.
If CGI is enabled, Webstar becomes no more secure than any other web server with CGI enabled. For static content, Webstar does appear to be unbreakable.
Irrelevant. This was supposedly a history of BSD Unix, not only of the free variants of BSD.
OSF/1 required a SVR2 license, but was based heavily on the 4.3 BSD code base, including using the BSD file system and the BSD admin tool chain. Digital Unix increased its emphasis on the BSD way.
Mach is generally considered a child of the BSD project.
Solaris retains much of the BSD heritage from SunOS 4.x and prior. In fact, most of the BSD userland is still available as part of the standard Solaris configuration.
Minor leafs? I'd wager that there are more users of Solaris than there are any other single flavor of BSD.
This is incorrect. The GPL FAQ explains why your statement is incorrect in plain English under the heading What is the difference between "mere aggregation" and "combining two modules into one program"?.
Briefly, aggregation does not necessarily imply being a derivative work. If the interface (using pipes and sockets) between the hypothetical Microsoft Ghostscript and the rest of Microsoft Office is clean enough, then Microsoft would only be responsible for releasing their changes to Ghostscript.
The Morris Internet worm that virtually shutdown the Internet attacked SunOS, which is a BSD, and DEC VAX running 4 BSD.
This is more or less correct, but it isn't due to the processor. It's due to the system bus, memory architecture, OS and compiler.
Apple's 1GHz XScale server offers similar SPEC2000 scores to IBM's RS/6000 series running a 500 MHz PPC (RS64-III) chip. (Better CINT2000, but worse CFP2000 scores.) I sincerely doubt that a processor of the same architectural family, only two years newer and twice as fast in clock ticks, is the culprit in the poor SPEC scores of the XScale.
I'm also doubtful that performance is the key selling point in most data centers. If it were, Alpha and PA-RISC would have been near ubiquitous instead of also rans compared to SPARC, POWER and PPC.
x86 is always little endian.
Do you mean Apple isn't a potential competitor of IBM with a pretty good UNIX running on the PPC chip?
I think that the numbers speak for themselves. If the fastest RISC processor (the Alpha) delivers 2/3 of the performance of the fastest PIV at 1/3 of the clockspeed of that PIV, then fastest PIV is faster than the fastest RISC processor.
Granted, this is a relatively recent developement. Until Intel broke the 2GHz range and AMD delivered their 1600+, the fastest RISC chips did perform better in published benchmarks than the fastest AMD and Intel chips.
As an aside, I'd hardly consider the Ultra SPARC to be esoteric.
I also think its funny that you note the Itanium2 as a possible exception. The Itanium2 runs at a much slower clock speed than the PIV or the Athlon.
It will be interesting to see what the next generation SPARC and PPC chips bring to the table. PA-RISC, Alpha (arguably), and MIPS (arguably) seem to be out for the performance race. (Although MIPS will likely continue to do well in the embedded space.)
For example, in December of 1995 while Intel submitted SPEC scores for Pentiums in the 100 to 200 MHz range, HP's fastest SPEC submission for PA-RISC was on a 120 MHz processor, IBM's fastest SPEC submission for PPC was on a 133 MHz processor and the fastest SPARC submission was on a 150 MHz processor. DEC was rather exceptional with their 300 MHz Alpha. I think that perhaps you are confusing the poster child of the RISC world, the Alpha processor, with all of the RISC world.
Feel free to correct me and let me know the last year that most RISC chips had higher clock speeds than most CISC chips.
Personally, I don't know of any.
A Pentium IV 2.8Ghz offers a peak SPECint2000 score of 1010. Meanwhile an Alpha running at just over 1/3 of the same clock speed offers 2/3 of the performance. That same 1 GHz Alpha has only 80% of the SPECint2000 performance of the AMD Athlon 2600+. These numbers were grabbed from the full list of published SPECint2000 results.
You are incorrect. Per clock tick, the big RISC vendors provide chips that perform much more work than the big CISC vendors.
Consider the following:
CPU MHz SPECint95 SPECfp95
MIPS 195 11.0 7.0
MIPS 250 14.7 24.5
SPARC 200 7.4 10.4
PA-RISC 200 17.3 25.4
PPC 200 14.0 12.6
PII 233 7.0 5.2
PIII 550 22.6 15.4
K7 550 25.0 20.6
Then consider that the PA-RISC at 200 MHz and the MIPS at 250 MHz both far exceed PIII and K7 floating point performance and the PA-RISC at 200 MHz is not all that far behind the PIII at 550Mhz. If you look at more recent SPEC benchmarks (SPECint2000 and SPECfp2000) you'll see much of the same with a 667 MHz Alpha delivering a higher performance than a 866 MHz PIII. True, the gap is closing, but as you correctly noted, Intel and AMD are now providing RISC ships with CISC instruction set wrappers.
(I cribbed the SPEC scores from here. It was the best site I could find with a good historical overview.)
No. Clock rate is irrelevant. The original design goal of the RISC paradigm was to make computer chips less complex which frequently has the side effect of making the chips more efficient in terms of how much work can be done in a single clock tick and in how much power is drawn.
Certainly some RISC architectures used the increased efficiencies to produce insane clock rates (Alpha). Other RISC architectures (MIPS) kept low clock rates that delivered comparable performance by doing more work per clock tick. Go back to 1993 through 1995 and look at the SPEC scores for different RISC chips.
In other words, different design teams have taken the RISC paradigm in many different directions.
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So, uh, how many non-console games have you just HAD TO HAVE? Enough so that you'd buy a PC just for that game?
The FPS genre came from the arcade. The RTS genre came from mini-computer installations. AFAICT, the sims genre was started on the Commodore 64 with Little Computer People. While the C64 is arguably a PC in the original meaning of the word, the term PC is more and more frequently only to describe IBM PC compatibles.
Nitpicks aside:
Your conclusion is spot on.
I wonder if Ballmer also finds it odd that IBM does the same for Microsoft. That quote could easily read, "It's weird! IBM says 'Hey Company X! Buy Windows.... From Microsoft.'"
It sounds (!) to me like you're just getting old and starting to lose your hearing as is not atypical. I'm aware of much evidence that loud sounds can damage hearing. I'm not aware of any evidence that low level white noise of the sort found in a server closet can do the same.
Unless your server closet has an unsually high decibel level, I think the problem is far more likely to exist solely in your ears and not as a result of your environment.
It don't mean a thing if it ain't got that swing . .
Assuming an unlocked door, I believe that entering such a house would only count as criminal trespassing if either the person coming in was asked to leave and refused or if a "No trespassing" sign was posted.
At least in the US, most courts would probably disagree with your opinion. Per an article by the Tennessee Bar Association What is Trespassing?:
If you leave your door unlocked and an unknown passerby entered your house and either you asked him or her to leave and the passerby refused or you have a posted "No Trespassing" sign, then trespassing has occurred. Otherwise, the maxim no harm, no foul most probably applies.