As a sysadmin for countless sites, I've always used RedHat on my desktop and FreeBSD on my servers. I've long felt that RedHat makes a better desktop operating system... the commercial support is there, the applications are written for it, and it's easy as heck to use.
That was until I upgraded my system to RedHat 7.0. OK, so I should have waited until 7.1 (still waiting guys!!), my fault... but it shouldn't have been that bad.
I installed 7.0, and my system became a graveyard. I found myself using other systems more and more frequently, much to my dismay. Eventually, I couldn't stand the instability and unreliability of the system. I dumped it.
I considered several of the other distributions. On a whim, I thought "well gee, I use FreeBSD on all my servers, I might as well see how it does on my desktop." So I installed the latest distribution of FreeBSD on my desktop.
I'll never go back. This has been by far the most reliable, stable system I've ever used. I've yet to see Netscape crash once. It's slim, fast. Uses almost no RAM or or CPU time to do the same thing that RedHat 7 did. I can run KDE or Gnome. For all intensive purposes, it feels and looks exactly like RedHat 7 did... except the damn thing never crashes.
I'm as much a Linux advocate as anyone else here, and I hope nobody misinterprets what I've said here, but I'm speaking from a great deal of experience. I manage several hundred servers, Solaris, Linux, BSD, etc..., and I must say that I've never had a better desktop operating system than what I've got now.
Apparently the trailer is no longer accessible? At least that's what I was told. I happened to grab a copy off the Akamai link.;) I put up a copy of it here:
Wasn't that Chinese guy the President/CEO a few weeks ago? Strangely, on their Management section of their website, his name isn't mentioned, and someone else is President/CEO now. Has anybody else noticed that?
I've seen a few posts from people talking about the phone system "hiccuping" at the stroke of midnight, and attributing the failure to Y2K. I'd like to share my experience.
Our NOC was fully staffed through the date change, to keep our customers informed and monitor any possible DoS attacks or other problems. Sure enough, just after midnight the majority of our POTS voice lines puked.
It was easy enough to say "Ahh, man, of course, it's GTE, they forgot to check some equipment" or something along those lines.
After fighting with GTE all night, we finally get a truck to come at 7AM this morning. Before the tech even looked at our equipment, he knew what the problem was.
You know those idiots that proudly shoot their guns in the air to celebrate the new year at midnight, forgetting that what comes up must come down? Apparently it is fairly common for the bullets, on the way down, to knock out telephone service by hitting the copper lines on the poles.
It's a good thing that there weren't any Y2K-network issues, otherwise we could have had a disaster... the lines won't be fixed until Monday.
Funny... we thought of everything to make sure we'd be up and online through the night. At least we thought we did.:-)
I've played with Tesla coils for most of my life. In fact, I built a nice "little" coil that output somewhere upwards of 2 million volts. Real easy to do... pole pig transformer (those circular transformers on telephone poles, hooked up essentially backwards), a big glass plate/aluminum foil/peanut oil bath capacitor, and a beautiful 10 foot hand-wound secondary coil... what fun.
Seriously though, some people have mentioned Nikola Tesla here. This man was far beyond his time... he was responsible for the modern electrical infrastructure we take for granted every day.
Despite all of his inventions (he preferred the term "discoveries"), Tesla's most amazing feature was his ability to comprehend complex mechanical and electrical theories without the use of any tools.
I'm not going to bore anyone by proclaiming how great and wonderful Tesla was. The simple fact is that he was responsible for many things we take for granted today. For the most part, Slashdot readers seem to be an intelligent bunch of people... please, for the sake of justice, find out more about Tesla and help Tesla to become a household name, as it rightly should be.
OK, the AirPort technology is very cool, and bargain-priced for 11mbps, if you've priced that kind of thing before.
What I find interesting is Apple's attempt at changing the good 'ole standard phone connector. Hehe, I got a good laugh at this obvious typo.
Check out http://www.apple.com/airport/. Take a look at the picture showing the ports on the back of the base station. Hehe, when did Ethernet change to RJ-11 and phone lines change to RJ-45??
Some people seem to be fundamentally confused as to what QuickTime is, so allow me to explain.
QuickTime is, first and foremost, an *architecture* by which varying media types can be handled in a similar and organized fashion. It is an extensible architecture, as "codecs" (compression/decompression algorithms) can be freely added to the architecture.
Most people do not realize this, but QuickTime is designed to handle many media types, including text, midi, audio and video. It does this very well, and for desktop use, is by far the most advanced media architecture available--hence the almost 100% use of QuickTime is professional non-linear editing studios around the world.
So to answer some people's questions: Apple does *not* own the codecs in QuickTime, and as such, cannot give them away. It licenses them from companies like Sorenson.
I truly hope that QuickTime is ported to Linux and the BeOS and other desktop operating systems, as it is truly a superior media handling architecture. I'm an advocate of open source software, but as a business person, I can understand not OSS'ing the crown jewel of a company. If that were to happen, the company would no longer exist, and development would stop.
Sure, OSS developers all over the Internet would start working on it, but part of what makes it powerful is its closed design. Yes, it is an open architecture. But is has a very strict development cycle, which keeps it rock-solid. I once worked in high-end video production, I know that the flexibility and stability of QuickTime is of the utmost importance. It's just not found in any other media architecture.
But regardless---say there is a port of QuickTime to Linux. It would be pretty much useless without the codecs. QuickTime would not be hard to port... it's just a shell. But without codecs, well, it's just not useful.
As much as I don't like to say this, I don't think open source is a Good Thing for all software.
Why can't we all get along? Apple isn't an evil company, contrary to what some people here say. We have a lot to thank Apple for.... many great technologies like PCI and SCSI, for example. Sure, they may not have invented these things per se (they did invent QuickTime), but if Apple had not popularized them, do you think we'd be using them everyday? Things like the GUI?
Apple, at the very least, had the foresight to say "hrmm, that looks like a good thing.... let's try and give it to normal people."
I'm not an Apple zealot (or any other OS for that matter), but I recognize the strengths and weaknesses of all the choices. I have several systems on my desk each running a different OS. Each has different tools for different tasks, and I like it this way.
Our company manages several very large database-driven web sites. There are applications where you need a single, very large system, supported by multiple web servers. For example, a banner network may have multiple low-end web servers cranking out banners, while there is a big database server at the core, on a private switch with the banner servers and a bunch of NICs in it.
These situations frequently go far beyond what even the most expensive Intel-based architecture can do. You can't get something like a Sun E6000 with Intel architecture for any amount of money.
So yes, there are applications where you have to plop down $80k on a machine, but it usually isn't straight web-serving.
In our experience, it is better to load-balance between cheaper and more numerous webservers than fewer, more expensive webservers.
Some people have mentioned that the resolution is pretty poor, with which I agree. But are you going to be connecting something like this to your video card? Probably not.
Doesn't it make more sense to use it in other applications? I'm not sure what Sony had in mind when designing this, but it seems it would be better for these kinds of applications:
1. Wearable computers. Ie; a device with a wireless Internet link. Are you going to try doing a multipage layout using goggles? Probably not. But what about checking your email? Sounds more likely, I guess.
2. PDA-style apps: Palm meets goggles? Or, umm, Palm *in* goggles? Could be cool. You just go around wearing these goggles (should make for interesting scenes in downtown LA) that overlay your Palm screen with what you would normally see. Sounds pretty cool... no more groping for the holster on your belt. I'm not sure about data entry via this method, but still, could be cool.
3. Television/etc...: 512x384 of true pixel resolution sure isn't bad for television watching. In fact, it is pretty good. Depending on the focus depth of the image, it could turn out that you'd enjoy this more than your present television set. Especially with surround sound embedded right in.
Although I'm wondering how they've simulated a center channel speaker...
It really amuses me that the people working for Microsoft are so closed to the outside world. It seems like they think MS is the best thing to hit the computing world.
What I found interesting tho, was the fact that "The flamers were a minority, and they occasionally got stepped on by other audience members."
Sounds like there is a definite attitude of respect at the Microsoft campus.
Jeez, some of you guys are just not getting why this is significant. By purchasing Frontier, Qwest would have access to Frontier GlobalCenter, the crown jewel in Frontier's acquisition spree of several years ago.
They've been operating as a lean, mean machine for several years, and have quietly taken hold of some of the largest sites on the Internet today. Do we really want Qwest, the granddaddy of "last-mile" services taking over the lowest level content distribution market???
We use something like this for a database server. It has two ethernet cards, each with a different IP address (it's a Sun E450, BTW). Then we assign a round-robin DNS entry to the interfaces (ie; interface.server.net round-robins between interface-1.server.net and interface-2.server.net). This works fairly well.
A little off topic from the original, but hopefully someone will read this and find it useful as a quick and dirty trick for interface balancing. =>
Some of this is just absurd. For example, the six points of failure with the Starfire. Hrmm:
"Applications running in Domains are only as reliable as the instance of the Solaris operating system. For applications to gain enhanced reliability from Domains, users must explicitly set up clustering, just as in standalone systems. Sun does not recommend clustering between Domains, suggesting instead that fail-over occur to either separate, standalone systems or Domains in other Enterprise 10000 systems."
Uhh, duh, isn't that the whole idea? Am I missing something here?
"Daemons that control domain operations and perform monitoring functions run on an unreliable device (Ultra 5 workstation), hardly a desirable situation in the context of a data center."
Excuse me? The Ultra 5 an "unreliable device"?? We have a farm of Ultra 5s that have been running for a year now. Total number of system failures or crashes of any kind: 0. Period. How is the Ultra 5 any less reliable than any other workstation-class system?
"When security is compromised on the System Service Processor, which runs on the Ultra 5 workstation controlling domain operations and performance monitoring, all running domains on the E 10000 can be brought down with a short command sequence."
No kidding. When (or rather, *if*) security is compromised, you could do a whole lot more than bringing down all running domains. Just the same as any other platform. How is this a weakness specific to Solaris or the Starfire?
And besides, these are supposed to *secured* (meaning, physically) control consoles. Meaning, locked in a cabinet in the datacenter.
"System boards that are hosting non-pageable kernel data structures cannot be removed from a domain without interrupting service. The Solaris operating system has to undertake a special "quiesce," or suspend, operation while the critical pages are migrated to another board."
Ummm, yeah. So? How is this any different from any other operating system? Again, I fail to see what the problem is. And besides, how often do you change system boards? Please.
Sure, go ahead... try and remove a CPU card from any NT-based system without first warning the OS. Not only will it hang horribly (ie; you can't do it!), you'll probably fry hardware as well!
The fact that the Starfire can even do this is pretty amazing.
"System boards that are hosting Token Ring adapters, ATM adapters, or non-Sun disk controllers cannot be present in a domain if board-remove operations involving kernel quiescence are to be performed on that domain."
Uh-huh. Sure. I know lots of people with Starfires running Token Ring off of non-Sun hardware that are removing boards with non-pageable data. Happens every day.
I'm not saying it doesn't happen per se, I just think that these arguments are rather ridiculous.
"If you remove a system board from a running domain without enough swap space, Solaris will hang. The administrative tools do not warn you if you do not have enough swap space available."
What kind of idiot doesn't leave enough swap space? What kind of admin would go ripping out system boards without really thinking it through first? What kind of person spends the incredible amount of money the E10000s cost without being informed as to the basics of running a Solaris-based system? Come on.
It's like saying "If you remove a CPU card from an NT-based system while running domains are active, the system will be brought down and all domains brought offline." Ummm, duh. If you remove your legs, you can't walk either. Apparently, M$ thinks that true Unix sysadmins are as stupid and lacking common sense like the server admins that they're used to dealing with.
"Reliable hardware is getting even more reliable. For example, customers can take advantage of 99.9% system-level uptime guarantees for Windows NT-based servers from major systems vendors, such as Compaq, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, and Data General."
These are guarantees on the hardware, not software. I'm sure this looks great for the PR, but hello? I'd love to know what the "major system vendors" think about Windows-based servers being equated with their hardware guarantees.
"Microsoft Windows® 2000 Server builds on these gains. For example, Windows 2000 Server supports COM+ load balancing, which eases customer development of highly available and scalable applications in a multi-tiered environment. On the back-end, Windows 2000 Advanced Server supports two-node fail-over clustering, whereas Windows 2000 Datacenter Server will support four-node clustering. IBM and other vendors will provide support for up to eight nodes."
WOW! I am truly impressed. Two or four-node fail-over. Please.
Finally, at the end:
"Which brings us back to eBay. For those keeping score, eBay relies on Windows NT-based servers running Internet Information Server to provide front-end web services, and a single Enterprise 10000 from Sun Microsystems to host an Oracle database on the back-end. According to published reports, the outages at eBay, which began in February, are due to problems at the back-end."
This is curious. Maybe I'm missing something, but a telnet to port 80 shows that www.ebay.com is using Apache 1.3.6 on Solaris. It doesn't get any more front-end than that, does it?
I did notice that pages.ebay.com and listings.ebay.com are running IIS 3.0, and cgi.ebay.com is running IIS 4.0.
Also notice that their web site is still up and running. Not that that means a whole lot, but hey.
I find a lot of what this article had to say utterly hilarious. The implications that the Starfire is an unreliable and dangerous system is the greatest work of FUD that I've seen in my life.
Some of this is just absurd. For example, the six points of failure with the Starfire. Hrmm:
"Applications running in Domains are only as reliable as the instance of the Solaris operating system. For applications to gain enhanced reliability from Domains, users must explicitly set up clustering, just as in standalone systems. Sun does not recommend clustering between Domains, suggesting instead that fail-over occur to either separate, standalone systems or Domains in other Enterprise 10000 systems."
Uhh, duh, isn't that the whole idea? Am I missing something here?
"Daemons that control domain operations and perform monitoring functions run on an unreliable device (Ultra 5 workstation), hardly a desirable situation in the context of a data center."
Excuse me? The Ultra 5 an "unreliable device"?? We have a farm of Ultra 5s that have been running for a year now. Total number of system failures or crashes of any kind: 0. Period. How is the Ultra 5 any less reliable than any other workstation-class system?
"When security is compromised on the System Service Processor, which runs on the Ultra 5 workstation controlling domain operations and performance monitoring, all running domains on the E 10000 can be brought down with a short command sequence."
No kidding. When (or rather, *if*) security is compromised, you could do a whole lot more than bringing down all running domains. Just the same as any other platform. How is this a weakness specific to Solaris or the Starfire?
And besides, these are supposed to *secured* (meaning, physically) control consoles. Meaning, locked in a cabinet in the datacenter.
"System boards that are hosting non-pageable kernel data structures cannot be removed from a domain without interrupting service. The Solaris operating system has to undertake a special "quiesce," or suspend, operation while the critical pages are migrated to another board."
Ummm, yeah. So? How is this any different from any other operating system? Again, I fail to see what the problem is. And besides, how often do you change system boards? Please.
Sure, go ahead... try and remove a CPU card from any NT-based system without first warning the OS. Not only will it hang horribly (ie; you can't do it!), you'll probably fry hardware as well!
The fact that the Starfire can even do this is pretty amazing.
"System boards that are hosting Token Ring adapters, ATM adapters, or non-Sun disk controllers cannot be present in a domain if board-remove operations involving kernel quiescence are to be performed on that domain."
Uh-huh. Sure. I know lots of people with Starfires running Token Ring off of non-Sun hardware that are removing boards with non-pageable data. Happens every day.
I'm not saying it doesn't happen per se, I just think that these arguments are rather ridiculous.
"If you remove a system board from a running domain without enough swap space, Solaris will hang. The administrative tools do not warn you if you do not have enough swap space available."
What kind of idiot doesn't leave enough swap space? What kind of admin would go ripping out system boards without really thinking it through first? What kind of person spends the incredible amount of money the E10000s cost without being informed as to the basics of running a Solaris-based system? Come on.
It's like saying "If you remove a CPU card from an NT-based system while running domains are active, the system will be brought down and all domains brought offline." Ummm, duh. If you remove your legs, you can't walk either. Apparently, M$ thinks that true Unix sysadmins are as stupid and lacking common sense like the server admins that they're used to dealing with.
"Reliable hardware is getting even more reliable. For example, customers can take advantage of 99.9% system-level uptime guarantees for Windows NT-based servers from major systems vendors, such as Compaq, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, and Data General."
These are guarantees on the hardware, not software. I'm sure this looks great for the PR, but hello? I'd love to know what the "major system vendors" think about Windows-based servers being equated with their hardware guarantees.
"Microsoft Windows® 2000 Server builds on these gains. For example, Windows 2000 Server supports COM+ load balancing, which eases customer development of highly available and scalable applications in a multi-tiered environment. On the back-end, Windows 2000 Advanced Server supports two-node fail-over clustering, whereas Windows 2000 Datacenter Server will support four-node clustering. IBM and other vendors will provide support for up to eight nodes."
WOW! I am truly impressed. Two or four-node fail-over. Please.
Finally, at the end:
"Which brings us back to eBay. For those keeping score, eBay relies on Windows NT-based servers running Internet Information Server to provide front-end web services, and a single Enterprise 10000 from Sun Microsystems to host an Oracle database on the back-end. According to published reports, the outages at eBay, which began in February, are due to problems at the back-end."
This is curious. Maybe I'm missing something, but a telnet to port 80 shows that www.ebay.com is using Apache 1.3.6 on Solaris. It doesn't get any more front-end than that, does it?
I did notice that pages.ebay.com and listings.ebay.com are running IIS 3.0, and cgi.ebay.com is running IIS 4.0.
Also notice that their web site is still up and running. Not that that means a whole lot, but hey.
I find a lot of what this article had to say utterly hilarious. The implications that the Starfire is an unreliable and dangerous system is the greatest work of FUD that I've seen in my life.
Maybe someone can explain this for me. I'm not sure if it is because of the differences between RISC vs. CISC processors, or if the PowerPC is better at floating point operations, or just what.
I'm running the SETI@home screensaver on two machines. The first is a Macintosh PowerBook (several years old) 3400c, using the PowerPC 603e at 180MHz and running Mac OS 8.6. The second is a new desktop AMD K6-2 350MHz machine running Win98.
After completing a few data units, I noticed that the PowerBook is completing data units about TWICE as fast as the AMD. I can't figure out why this is!
This is nice. Does anyone know of a brief, not-too-technical history of Linux and Open Source? I keep looking for things to show people that don't understand "what all the fuss is about."
The Frontier GlobalCenter facility in Sunnyvale is generally regarded as one of the very best facilities in the world (that's why Yahoo and many other big-name sites co-locate there). The bandwidth is clean, and the facility is superb. However, it has been the experience of many smaller companies that they have a tendency to pay more attention to the larger clients... as far as I know, they're not even setting up new accounts at less than 2mbps.
One of the things that we offer is server co-location in this facility in our own private server farm. You'll get the same quality of network services (ie; bandwidth, availability, and power redundancy) without the cost of a 2mbps connection and the rental of a rack. Typically, you'd end up paying upwards of $2000 for simple co-lo in Sunnyvale. Because we buy in bulk, and manage our space and connectivity ourselves, we can offer co-location for much, much less.
You can also get actual rack space from us at discounted rates, and run a T-1 off it like Exodus (someone mentioned that in a post here too..)
But what we really pride ourselves on is the level of personal attention and caring we give to our customers. We are always here to help our customers grow and become successful.
By the way, someone mentioned Verio.... I also suggest you stay away from them. Their network management philosophy leaves something to be desired. We've had quite a few customers from Verio tell us how horrible their customer service is as well (ie; I don't have a phone number to call, and I don't know the name of my rep!).
Feel free to drop me a note if you'd like more information...
I think that you'll find the groupware version of Cyberstudio to meet your needs better, especially if you're working with a very large site. I've used both products, as well as Fusion, and found Cyberstudio to have the largest feature set.
For example, Cyberstudio has a web-to-database interface that is unmatched, a great "Actions" interface that allows you to link DHTML and CSS actions, scenes, etc.
But the best feature is the group site-management features. For example, it allows you to move files around at will, renaming, reorganizing, directly over the network, while other people are accessing the site.
And just for the record, quite a few of the major design agencies have the same opinion...
Why pay for the hottest technology around, when it can be had free? Like I and others have said, Redhat doesn't develop, they don't "have" a unique or different technology of their own. Acquiring Redhat would serve the sole purpose of obtaining distributive market share.
Sorry though, I have to agree as a businessman, Redhat is not worth $1 billion in equity stocks.
Linux may be everywhere, and it may be the hot technology. Remember when Windows was like that? Windows 1.0... there were small differences in the situations, but frankly if Redhat goes IPO and they start listening to shareholders, then we have a baby M$.
People people people, Intel is NOT becoming an ISP in the sense of Earthlink or AOL. This is not new, Intel execs were talking about this a while back.
What they ARE doing is penetrating the lucrative datacenter market. For those of you that don't know what that is, it means they are going to begin wholesaling Internet bandwidth to server co-locaters.
(Although I must admit... I didn't think Intel would be a competitor of ours any time soon...)
1. A cool company does not necessarily make a wise investment. Good technology investments are companies with a unique product or service, and one that is in high demand and will continue to be in high demand. Niche companies are usually not wise investments, as they may not have the "staying power" of non-niche companies. Niche companies generally file for IPOs for two reasons: a. Majority shareholders get rich; and b. To increase available capital for expansion into new or larger markets. Option a. is a possibility here, obviously with the media paying attention to Linux and Red Hat in particular, uninformed investors (like many people here... "buy RH, it's cool") pour money into an RH IPO, increasing the equity net worth of majority shareholders. Option b. doesn't make a lot of sense, unless RH is planning some top-secret new market penetration move.
That said, I think this is only a rumor anyway... because:
2. The legal duty of the CEO of a publically-traded company is to make decisions based on the greatest profitability for company shareholders. (I could quote SEC regulations, but I can't think of the numbers at the moment). As has been shown time and time again, profits and OSS don't mix.
I for one hope things stay the way they are.
Oh, and by the way, a COO usually has nothing to do with an IPO... that falls under the duties of a CFO.
Our company has a server farm that we maintain. The bandwidth consumed by our network costs money. When someone spams through our servers, or to users on our network, it uses bandwidth, and bandwidth costs money.
It's a great idea to set up filters, or real return addresses, or laws to prevent this. But don't forget that it uses bandwidth, which, just like gasoline for your car, costs money.
For this reason our company has recently billed a mail-bomber for network usage. We intend to collect on this, as it was a significant usage.
Slashdot Mirror
As a sysadmin for countless sites, I've always used RedHat on my desktop and FreeBSD on my servers. I've long felt that RedHat makes a better desktop operating system... the commercial support is there, the applications are written for it, and it's easy as heck to use.
That was until I upgraded my system to RedHat 7.0. OK, so I should have waited until 7.1 (still waiting guys!!), my fault... but it shouldn't have been that bad.
I installed 7.0, and my system became a graveyard. I found myself using other systems more and more frequently, much to my dismay. Eventually, I couldn't stand the instability and unreliability of the system. I dumped it.
I considered several of the other distributions. On a whim, I thought "well gee, I use FreeBSD on all my servers, I might as well see how it does on my desktop." So I installed the latest distribution of FreeBSD on my desktop.
I'll never go back. This has been by far the most reliable, stable system I've ever used. I've yet to see Netscape crash once. It's slim, fast. Uses almost no RAM or or CPU time to do the same thing that RedHat 7 did. I can run KDE or Gnome. For all intensive purposes, it feels and looks exactly like RedHat 7 did... except the damn thing never crashes.
I'm as much a Linux advocate as anyone else here, and I hope nobody misinterprets what I've said here, but I'm speaking from a great deal of experience. I manage several hundred servers, Solaris, Linux, BSD, etc..., and I must say that I've never had a better desktop operating system than what I've got now.
Grant
Apparently the trailer is no longer accessible? At least that's what I was told. I happened to grab a copy off the Akamai link. ;) I put up a copy of it here:
http://omicron.lax2.viis.net/dl/dnd __4 80.mov
If you're having trouble getting it elsewhere, give that a shot.
The site says it won't be available for download until tomorrow.
Wasn't that Chinese guy the President/CEO a few weeks ago? Strangely, on their Management section of their website, his name isn't mentioned, and someone else is President/CEO now. Has anybody else noticed that?
I've seen a few posts from people talking about the phone system "hiccuping" at the stroke of midnight, and attributing the failure to Y2K. I'd like to share my experience.
:-)
Our NOC was fully staffed through the date change, to keep our customers informed and monitor any possible DoS attacks or other problems. Sure enough, just after midnight the majority of our POTS voice lines puked.
It was easy enough to say "Ahh, man, of course, it's GTE, they forgot to check some equipment" or something along those lines.
After fighting with GTE all night, we finally get a truck to come at 7AM this morning. Before the tech even looked at our equipment, he knew what the problem was.
You know those idiots that proudly shoot their guns in the air to celebrate the new year at midnight, forgetting that what comes up must come down? Apparently it is fairly common for the bullets, on the way down, to knock out telephone service by hitting the copper lines on the poles.
It's a good thing that there weren't any Y2K-network issues, otherwise we could have had a disaster... the lines won't be fixed until Monday.
Funny... we thought of everything to make sure we'd be up and online through the night. At least we thought we did.
On upside.com...
A bit about his "good nature", etc... click here.
I absolutely MUST post on this one...
I've played with Tesla coils for most of my life. In fact, I built a nice "little" coil that output somewhere upwards of 2 million volts. Real easy to do... pole pig transformer (those circular transformers on telephone poles, hooked up essentially backwards), a big glass plate/aluminum foil/peanut oil bath capacitor, and a beautiful 10 foot hand-wound secondary coil... what fun.
Seriously though, some people have mentioned Nikola Tesla here. This man was far beyond his time... he was responsible for the modern electrical infrastructure we take for granted every day.
Despite all of his inventions (he preferred the term "discoveries"), Tesla's most amazing feature was his ability to comprehend complex mechanical and electrical theories without the use of any tools.
I'm not going to bore anyone by proclaiming how great and wonderful Tesla was. The simple fact is that he was responsible for many things we take for granted today. For the most part, Slashdot readers seem to be an intelligent bunch of people... please, for the sake of justice, find out more about Tesla and help Tesla to become a household name, as it rightly should be.
OK, the AirPort technology is very cool, and bargain-priced for 11mbps, if you've priced that kind of thing before.
What I find interesting is Apple's attempt at changing the good 'ole standard phone connector. Hehe, I got a good laugh at this obvious typo.
Check out http://www.apple.com/airport/. Take a look at the picture showing the ports on the back of the base station. Hehe, when did Ethernet change to RJ-11 and phone lines change to RJ-45??
Kinda funny...
Some people seem to be fundamentally confused as to what QuickTime is, so allow me to explain.
QuickTime is, first and foremost, an *architecture* by which varying media types can be handled in a similar and organized fashion. It is an extensible architecture, as "codecs" (compression/decompression algorithms) can be freely added to the architecture.
Most people do not realize this, but QuickTime is designed to handle many media types, including text, midi, audio and video. It does this very well, and for desktop use, is by far the most advanced media architecture available--hence the almost 100% use of QuickTime is professional non-linear editing studios around the world.
So to answer some people's questions: Apple does *not* own the codecs in QuickTime, and as such, cannot give them away. It licenses them from companies like Sorenson.
I truly hope that QuickTime is ported to Linux and the BeOS and other desktop operating systems, as it is truly a superior media handling architecture. I'm an advocate of open source software, but as a business person, I can understand not OSS'ing the crown jewel of a company. If that were to happen, the company would no longer exist, and development would stop.
Sure, OSS developers all over the Internet would start working on it, but part of what makes it powerful is its closed design. Yes, it is an open architecture. But is has a very strict development cycle, which keeps it rock-solid. I once worked in high-end video production, I know that the flexibility and stability of QuickTime is of the utmost importance. It's just not found in any other media architecture.
But regardless---say there is a port of QuickTime to Linux. It would be pretty much useless without the codecs. QuickTime would not be hard to port... it's just a shell. But without codecs, well, it's just not useful.
As much as I don't like to say this, I don't think open source is a Good Thing for all software.
Why can't we all get along? Apple isn't an evil company, contrary to what some people here say. We have a lot to thank Apple for.... many great technologies like PCI and SCSI, for example. Sure, they may not have invented these things per se (they did invent QuickTime), but if Apple had not popularized them, do you think we'd be using them everyday? Things like the GUI?
Apple, at the very least, had the foresight to say "hrmm, that looks like a good thing.... let's try and give it to normal people."
I'm not an Apple zealot (or any other OS for that matter), but I recognize the strengths and weaknesses of all the choices. I have several systems on my desk each running a different OS. Each has different tools for different tasks, and I like it this way.
OK, enough of my rant.
Our company manages several very large database-driven web sites. There are applications where you need a single, very large system, supported by multiple web servers. For example, a banner network may have multiple low-end web servers cranking out banners, while there is a big database server at the core, on a private switch with the banner servers and a bunch of NICs in it.
These situations frequently go far beyond what even the most expensive Intel-based architecture can do. You can't get something like a Sun E6000 with Intel architecture for any amount of money.
So yes, there are applications where you have to plop down $80k on a machine, but it usually isn't straight web-serving.
In our experience, it is better to load-balance between cheaper and more numerous webservers than fewer, more expensive webservers.
Some people have mentioned that the resolution is pretty poor, with which I agree. But are you going to be connecting something like this to your video card? Probably not.
Doesn't it make more sense to use it in other applications? I'm not sure what Sony had in mind when designing this, but it seems it would be better for these kinds of applications:
1. Wearable computers. Ie; a device with a wireless Internet link. Are you going to try doing a multipage layout using goggles? Probably not. But what about checking your email? Sounds more likely, I guess.
2. PDA-style apps: Palm meets goggles? Or, umm, Palm *in* goggles? Could be cool. You just go around wearing these goggles (should make for interesting scenes in downtown LA) that overlay your Palm screen with what you would normally see. Sounds pretty cool... no more groping for the holster on your belt. I'm not sure about data entry via this method, but still, could be cool.
3. Television/etc...: 512x384 of true pixel resolution sure isn't bad for television watching. In fact, it is pretty good. Depending on the focus depth of the image, it could turn out that you'd enjoy this more than your present television set. Especially with surround sound embedded right in.
Although I'm wondering how they've simulated a center channel speaker...
It really amuses me that the people working for Microsoft are so closed to the outside world. It seems like they think MS is the best thing to hit the computing world.
What I found interesting tho, was the fact that "The flamers were a minority, and they occasionally got stepped on by other audience members."
Sounds like there is a definite attitude of respect at the Microsoft campus.
Jeez, some of you guys are just not getting why this is significant. By purchasing Frontier, Qwest would have access to Frontier GlobalCenter, the crown jewel in Frontier's acquisition spree of several years ago.
They've been operating as a lean, mean machine for several years, and have quietly taken hold of some of the largest sites on the Internet today. Do we really want Qwest, the granddaddy of "last-mile" services taking over the lowest level content distribution market???
We use something like this for a database server. It has two ethernet cards, each with a different IP address (it's a Sun E450, BTW). Then we assign a round-robin DNS entry to the interfaces (ie; interface.server.net round-robins between interface-1.server.net and interface-2.server.net). This works fairly well.
A little off topic from the original, but hopefully someone will read this and find it useful as a quick and dirty trick for interface balancing. =>
Some of this is just absurd. For example, the six points of failure with the Starfire. Hrmm:
"Applications running in Domains are only as reliable as the instance of the Solaris operating system. For applications to gain enhanced reliability from Domains, users must explicitly set up clustering, just as in standalone systems. Sun does not recommend clustering between Domains, suggesting instead that fail-over occur to either separate, standalone systems or Domains in other Enterprise 10000 systems."
Uhh, duh, isn't that the whole idea? Am I missing something here?
"Daemons that control domain operations and perform monitoring functions run on an unreliable device (Ultra 5 workstation), hardly a desirable situation in the context of a data center."
Excuse me? The Ultra 5 an "unreliable device"?? We have a farm of Ultra 5s that have been running for a year now. Total number of system failures or crashes of any kind: 0. Period. How is the Ultra 5 any less reliable than any other workstation-class system?
"When security is compromised on the System Service Processor, which runs on the Ultra 5 workstation controlling domain operations and performance monitoring, all running domains on the E 10000 can be brought down with a short command sequence."
No kidding. When (or rather, *if*) security is compromised, you could do a whole lot more than bringing down all running domains. Just the same as any other platform. How is this a weakness specific to Solaris or the Starfire?
And besides, these are supposed to *secured* (meaning, physically) control consoles. Meaning, locked in a cabinet in the datacenter.
"System boards that are hosting non-pageable kernel data structures cannot be removed from a domain without interrupting service. The Solaris operating system has to undertake a special "quiesce," or suspend, operation while the critical pages are migrated to another board."
Ummm, yeah. So? How is this any different from any other operating system? Again, I fail to see what the problem is. And besides, how often do you change system boards? Please.
Sure, go ahead... try and remove a CPU card from any NT-based system without first warning the OS. Not only will it hang horribly (ie; you can't do it!), you'll probably fry hardware as well!
The fact that the Starfire can even do this is pretty amazing.
"System boards that are hosting Token Ring adapters, ATM adapters, or non-Sun disk controllers cannot be present in a domain if board-remove operations involving kernel quiescence are to be performed on that domain."
Uh-huh. Sure. I know lots of people with Starfires running Token Ring off of non-Sun hardware that are removing boards with non-pageable data. Happens every day.
I'm not saying it doesn't happen per se, I just think that these arguments are rather ridiculous.
"If you remove a system board from a running domain without enough swap space, Solaris will hang. The administrative tools do not warn you if you do not have enough swap space available."
What kind of idiot doesn't leave enough swap space? What kind of admin would go ripping out system boards without really thinking it through first? What kind of person spends the incredible amount of money the E10000s cost without being informed as to the basics of running a Solaris-based system? Come on.
It's like saying "If you remove a CPU card from an NT-based system while running domains are active, the system will be brought down and all domains brought offline." Ummm, duh. If you remove your legs, you can't walk either. Apparently, M$ thinks that true Unix sysadmins are as stupid and lacking common sense like the server admins that they're used to dealing with.
"Reliable hardware is getting even more reliable. For example, customers can take advantage of 99.9% system-level uptime guarantees for Windows NT-based servers from major systems vendors, such as Compaq, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, and Data General."
These are guarantees on the hardware, not software. I'm sure this looks great for the PR, but hello? I'd love to know what the "major system vendors" think about Windows-based servers being equated with their hardware guarantees.
"Microsoft Windows® 2000 Server builds on these gains. For example, Windows 2000 Server supports COM+ load balancing, which eases customer development of highly available and scalable applications in a multi-tiered environment. On the back-end, Windows 2000 Advanced Server supports two-node fail-over clustering, whereas Windows 2000 Datacenter Server will support four-node clustering. IBM and other vendors will provide support for up to eight nodes."
WOW! I am truly impressed. Two or four-node fail-over. Please.
Finally, at the end:
"Which brings us back to eBay. For those keeping score, eBay relies on Windows NT-based servers running Internet Information Server to provide front-end web services, and a single Enterprise 10000 from Sun Microsystems to host an Oracle database on the back-end. According to published reports, the outages at eBay, which began in February, are due to problems at the back-end."
This is curious. Maybe I'm missing something, but a telnet to port 80 shows that www.ebay.com is using Apache 1.3.6 on Solaris. It doesn't get any more front-end than that, does it?
I did notice that pages.ebay.com and listings.ebay.com are running IIS 3.0, and cgi.ebay.com is running IIS 4.0.
Also notice that their web site is still up and running. Not that that means a whole lot, but hey.
I find a lot of what this article had to say utterly hilarious. The implications that the Starfire is an unreliable and dangerous system is the greatest work of FUD that I've seen in my life.
OK, enough said.
Some of this is just absurd. For example, the six points of failure with the Starfire. Hrmm:
"Applications running in Domains are only as reliable as the instance of the Solaris operating system. For applications to gain enhanced reliability from Domains, users must explicitly set up clustering, just as in standalone systems. Sun does not recommend clustering between Domains, suggesting instead that fail-over occur to either separate, standalone systems or Domains in other Enterprise 10000 systems."
Uhh, duh, isn't that the whole idea? Am I missing something here?
"Daemons that control domain operations and perform monitoring functions run on an unreliable device (Ultra 5 workstation), hardly a desirable situation in the context of a data center."
Excuse me? The Ultra 5 an "unreliable device"?? We have a farm of Ultra 5s that have been running for a year now. Total number of system failures or crashes of any kind: 0. Period. How is the Ultra 5 any less reliable than any other workstation-class system?
"When security is compromised on the System Service Processor, which runs on the Ultra 5 workstation controlling domain operations and performance monitoring, all running domains on the E 10000 can be brought down with a short command sequence."
No kidding. When (or rather, *if*) security is compromised, you could do a whole lot more than bringing down all running domains. Just the same as any other platform. How is this a weakness specific to Solaris or the Starfire?
And besides, these are supposed to *secured* (meaning, physically) control consoles. Meaning, locked in a cabinet in the datacenter.
"System boards that are hosting non-pageable kernel data structures cannot be removed from a domain without interrupting service. The Solaris operating system has to undertake a special "quiesce," or suspend, operation while the critical pages are migrated to another board."
Ummm, yeah. So? How is this any different from any other operating system? Again, I fail to see what the problem is. And besides, how often do you change system boards? Please.
Sure, go ahead... try and remove a CPU card from any NT-based system without first warning the OS. Not only will it hang horribly (ie; you can't do it!), you'll probably fry hardware as well!
The fact that the Starfire can even do this is pretty amazing.
"System boards that are hosting Token Ring adapters, ATM adapters, or non-Sun disk controllers cannot be present in a domain if board-remove operations involving kernel quiescence are to be performed on that domain."
Uh-huh. Sure. I know lots of people with Starfires running Token Ring off of non-Sun hardware that are removing boards with non-pageable data. Happens every day.
I'm not saying it doesn't happen per se, I just think that these arguments are rather ridiculous.
"If you remove a system board from a running domain without enough swap space, Solaris will hang. The administrative tools do not warn you if you do not have enough swap space available."
What kind of idiot doesn't leave enough swap space? What kind of admin would go ripping out system boards without really thinking it through first? What kind of person spends the incredible amount of money the E10000s cost without being informed as to the basics of running a Solaris-based system? Come on.
It's like saying "If you remove a CPU card from an NT-based system while running domains are active, the system will be brought down and all domains brought offline." Ummm, duh. If you remove your legs, you can't walk either. Apparently, M$ thinks that true Unix sysadmins are as stupid and lacking common sense like the server admins that they're used to dealing with.
"Reliable hardware is getting even more reliable. For example, customers can take advantage of 99.9% system-level uptime guarantees for Windows NT-based servers from major systems vendors, such as Compaq, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, and Data General."
These are guarantees on the hardware, not software. I'm sure this looks great for the PR, but hello? I'd love to know what the "major system vendors" think about Windows-based servers being equated with their hardware guarantees.
"Microsoft Windows® 2000 Server builds on these gains. For example, Windows 2000 Server supports COM+ load balancing, which eases customer development of highly available and scalable applications in a multi-tiered environment. On the back-end, Windows 2000 Advanced Server supports two-node fail-over clustering, whereas Windows 2000 Datacenter Server will support four-node clustering. IBM and other vendors will provide support for up to eight nodes."
WOW! I am truly impressed. Two or four-node fail-over. Please.
Finally, at the end:
"Which brings us back to eBay. For those keeping score, eBay relies on Windows NT-based servers running Internet Information Server to provide front-end web services, and a single Enterprise 10000 from Sun Microsystems to host an Oracle database on the back-end. According to published reports, the outages at eBay, which began in February, are due to problems at the back-end."
This is curious. Maybe I'm missing something, but a telnet to port 80 shows that www.ebay.com is using Apache 1.3.6 on Solaris. It doesn't get any more front-end than that, does it?
I did notice that pages.ebay.com and listings.ebay.com are running IIS 3.0, and cgi.ebay.com is running IIS 4.0.
Also notice that their web site is still up and running. Not that that means a whole lot, but hey.
I find a lot of what this article had to say utterly hilarious. The implications that the Starfire is an unreliable and dangerous system is the greatest work of FUD that I've seen in my life.
OK, enough said.
Hi guys,
Maybe someone can explain this for me. I'm not sure if it is because of the differences between RISC vs. CISC processors, or if the PowerPC is better at floating point operations, or just what.
I'm running the SETI@home screensaver on two machines. The first is a Macintosh PowerBook (several years old) 3400c, using the PowerPC 603e at 180MHz and running Mac OS 8.6. The second is a new desktop AMD K6-2 350MHz machine running Win98.
After completing a few data units, I noticed that the PowerBook is completing data units about TWICE as fast as the AMD. I can't figure out why this is!
This is nice. Does anyone know of a brief, not-too-technical history of Linux and Open Source? I keep looking for things to show people that don't understand "what all the fuss is about."
Grant
Just in case anyone feels like saying hi!
Grant
A little bit about VIIS (http://www.viis.net)
The Frontier GlobalCenter facility in Sunnyvale is generally regarded as one of the very best facilities in the world (that's why Yahoo and many other big-name sites co-locate there). The bandwidth is clean, and the facility is superb. However, it has been the experience of many smaller companies that they have a tendency to pay more attention to the larger clients... as far as I know, they're not even setting up new accounts at less than 2mbps.
One of the things that we offer is server co-location in this facility in our own private server farm. You'll get the same quality of network services (ie; bandwidth, availability, and power redundancy) without the cost of a 2mbps connection and the rental of a rack. Typically, you'd end up paying upwards of $2000 for simple co-lo in Sunnyvale. Because we buy in bulk, and manage our space and connectivity ourselves, we can offer co-location for much, much less.
You can also get actual rack space from us at discounted rates, and run a T-1 off it like Exodus (someone mentioned that in a post here too..)
But what we really pride ourselves on is the level of personal attention and caring we give to our customers. We are always here to help our customers grow and become successful.
By the way, someone mentioned Verio.... I also suggest you stay away from them. Their network management philosophy leaves something to be desired. We've had quite a few customers from Verio tell us how horrible their customer service is as well (ie; I don't have a phone number to call, and I don't know the name of my rep!).
Feel free to drop me a note if you'd like more information...
I think that you'll find the groupware version of Cyberstudio to meet your needs better, especially if you're working with a very large site. I've used both products, as well as Fusion, and found Cyberstudio to have the largest feature set.
For example, Cyberstudio has a web-to-database interface that is unmatched, a great "Actions" interface that allows you to link DHTML and CSS actions, scenes, etc.
But the best feature is the group site-management features. For example, it allows you to move files around at will, renaming, reorganizing, directly over the network, while other people are accessing the site.
And just for the record, quite a few of the major design agencies have the same opinion...
Why pay for the hottest technology around, when it can be had free? Like I and others have said, Redhat doesn't develop, they don't "have" a unique or different technology of their own. Acquiring Redhat would serve the sole purpose of obtaining distributive market share.
Sorry though, I have to agree as a businessman, Redhat is not worth $1 billion in equity stocks.
Linux may be everywhere, and it may be the hot technology. Remember when Windows was like that? Windows 1.0... there were small differences in the situations, but frankly if Redhat goes IPO and they start listening to shareholders, then we have a baby M$.
People people people, Intel is NOT becoming an ISP in the sense of Earthlink or AOL. This is not new, Intel execs were talking about this a while back.
What they ARE doing is penetrating the lucrative datacenter market. For those of you that don't know what that is, it means they are going to begin wholesaling Internet bandwidth to server co-locaters.
(Although I must admit... I didn't think Intel would be a competitor of ours any time soon...)
1. A cool company does not necessarily make a wise investment. Good technology investments are companies with a unique product or service, and one that is in high demand and will continue to be in high demand. Niche companies are usually not wise investments, as they may not have the "staying power" of non-niche companies. Niche companies generally file for IPOs for two reasons: a. Majority shareholders get rich; and b. To increase available capital for expansion into new or larger markets. Option a. is a possibility here, obviously with the media paying attention to Linux and Red Hat in particular, uninformed investors (like many people here... "buy RH, it's cool") pour money into an RH IPO, increasing the equity net worth of majority shareholders. Option b. doesn't make a lot of sense, unless RH is planning some top-secret new market penetration move.
That said, I think this is only a rumor anyway... because:
2. The legal duty of the CEO of a publically-traded company is to make decisions based on the greatest profitability for company shareholders. (I could quote SEC regulations, but I can't think of the numbers at the moment). As has been shown time and time again, profits and OSS don't mix.
I for one hope things stay the way they are.
Oh, and by the way, a COO usually has nothing to do with an IPO... that falls under the duties of a CFO.
Our company has a server farm that we maintain. The bandwidth consumed by our network costs money. When someone spams through our servers, or to users on our network, it uses bandwidth, and bandwidth costs money.
It's a great idea to set up filters, or real return addresses, or laws to prevent this. But don't forget that it uses bandwidth, which, just like gasoline for your car, costs money.
For this reason our company has recently billed a mail-bomber for network usage. We intend to collect on this, as it was a significant usage.