That's correct, and a Ferrari is aimed at drivers who know how to properly handle a sports car. The multitude of schmucks buying them to impress other people, while signifigant, represents a much smaller segment of the market
Are you sure? I imagine there are a lot more schmucks with money than there are qualified drivers with money. I imagine the schmucks are a VERY important market segment. Didn't Ferrari recently release an SUV? I rest my case.
What's more, Sun is not just selling Ferraris. They're [trying to] competing all the way down to low end servers. Even Ferrari seems to know better than to do that.
Right, but the ones that do (They're known as the 'Fortune 500') are willing to pay premium prices to get what they want, just like Ferrari drivers. Sure, it's a niche market, but it's a lucrative one.
500 is not all that many customers, and I bet that IBM has a few of them. Again, if that was all Sun sold to, we wouldn't be having this conversation - but that's not their exclusive target.
Right, and how do I make two hundred clones of your monster Wintel machine in an hour and a half, without needing an assistant?
Easily?
Will I be able to swap out CPUs without a second of downtime?
Maybe not. But I said a few years, so we'll see. Really, though, I think you'd have to go with a cluster to do that with cheap intel hardware.
Can I reassign hardware resources between different virtual domains on this monster workstation from a terminal on a different continent without needing to physically touch the machine, all without downtime?
Sure. Why not?
Is your monster PC going to be able to handle transferring over 40G/sec on its motherboard backplane to multiple drives?
I don't know - that's pretty fast.
I don't think you really understand how this technology is used.
You're probably right - but then, most businesses don't need to. Are there a few that do? Yup. Is Sun trying to sell to them? Yup. Is Sun trying to sell to everyone? Seems like it.
In summary: Need a lot of number crunching (science)? Get a beowulf cluster of something cheap. Need a big database? Get a linux box and Oracle. Need a big webserver? Get a cluster of whatever OS/hardware you like. Need a freakin' huge database that MUST be up all the time? Get a Mainframe - maybe a Sun.
But in reality, most businesses just don't need something freakin' huge like that.
And what should they gear the system to? The end user?
Software should be easy to install and maintain. For end users, or admins.
Sun is proud of their "9's" - 99.999...% uptime. The truth is that 99.99% of businesses don't need that percentage.
What companies have you been working for?
See my resume' from my webpage.
Every single company that is not just a start up or wet dream of some developers (or a development shop) want and most of the time NEED the uptime.
Nope. Most companies don't. Some very few large companies need full uptime - most can make do with 99.9% uptime. Most are happy with around 80% uptime, as they don't do work on the weekends.
Guess why mainframes are still around, not only because of legacy apps, but also because of the fact that they are ultra reliable.... If the company cannot send bills out to thousands of customers alone the lost interrest can cost a couple of millions.
In my experience, bill crunching happens once a month in as short a time as is possible. If you have lots of customers, that means big crunching - but only for as short a burst as possible on the last day of the month when all the numbers are in.
Again, see above. Time is money, if I can just drop in some more CPUs and all of the sudden my number crunching becomes fast the company wins and makes ton's of money with this. [Sun sells big hardware, etc, etc]
OK, here's the bottom line: Most companies don't need the 9's. A few do - and Sun hardware is fine for those. So is IBM, and I'm sure that Dell, SGI, and some others would try to sell you something, but I wouldn't buy that, either.
But what is Sun selling? Not just top of the line hardware - they ARE trying to sell at all levels. And it ain't gonna work.
You take potshots at apache and MySQL, but Oracle runs just fine on linux. Hell, the billboard up the freeway says "Oracle makes Linux unbreakable" (which I always got a laugh out of). The point is, the difference between big iron and little iron is disappearing fast, and Sun ain't keeping it's eye on the ball.
5 9's is a lot. I find it hard to believe they couldn't be down for more than half a minute the 4th of July. And if so, they're some of very few companies where that is the case.
Unless your company runs 24x7 (maybe it does), you don't need all those 9's. If you're down the 4th of July (on purpose), you only need less than 99.9%.
If you don't like windows, use linux.
Really, though, you just have shoddy software. We use Sun boxen and we see downtime every night because the software is not well admin'd. Also not anyone's fault but ours.
The point is that it would work just as [well/poorly] on linux, but it'd be a helluva lot cheaper.
Sun does not, nor will it ever, understand users. The entire company is geared toward sysadmins who are expected to be able to jump through install hoops and tweak systems to get top performance.
It will kill them.
Sun is proud of their "9's" - 99.999...% uptime. The truth is that 99.99% of businesses don't need that percentage. Sun is proud of their scaling, but I've got news - 99.99% of businesses don't need that much power. It's also clear that we'll hit 10Ghz machines with multiple gigs of RAM in just a few years, and they'll cost around $1K; if you want terabytes of disk it may cost around $2K. How is Sun going to compete with that?
When any Luser can buy a machine that competes rather well with a Sun box, and can install any amount of easy software instead of Sun's pain in the ass stuff...
Huh. What is reflection? Traditionally it is the ability to ask an object what it's methods and/or variables are, grab them, tweak them, or invoke them. Really my snippet isn't a good example of reflection - you could do that with C++, which does not support reflection out of the box. Something like (I'm paraphrasing here - look up the java.lang.reflect stuff)
someMethod = myObject.findMethodNamed("todo");
is what relfection is all about. If that doesn't make reflection clear, bug me again and I'll dive into it a bit more.
I've been happy with Apple's Terminal.app since 10.2 (export TERM=xterm-color:-)
I know that there are a few Java terminal emulators (check sf.net). I alwyas liked mindterm for ssh connectivity. I know they closed source, but there's a fork out there somewhere from the last open version.
Anyway, could you post a followup to your article when you settle on something - just a comment would be nice.
I wonder if the editors would let you update the article...
Huh? Last time I checked there is only one stable perl and thats been 5.8.0 for a long time (maybe up to 5.8.1). Why install anything else?
Let's see. I'm using 3ish machines at the moment:
This is perl, v5.6.0 built for darwin This is perl, v5.6.1 built for IP32-irix This is perl, version 5.005_03 built for i386-freebsd
And those are only the version that are default on the path. As to why those particular versions are installed... I dunno. Some admin[s] seem to disagree with your view of what's needed, though.
[stuff about how one java is not another java and that you should probably just install one JVM/app deleted]
Funny, we deploy mission critical apps on 2 platforms and develop on a 3rd, and we never have any of the problems you mentioned - with the occasional problem of a library jar being out of date.
But I could say the same of any number of "C" programs I've installed binaries of.
Err, no. You go through the annoying fetch/"I accept" process once, "make package" on one machine, put the resulting files in a ftp or web server, and then pkg_add from each machine.
I wonder if that's legal. Not that I care enough to look into it, mind you...
Not that I'm against Java, but if you want Java included "out of the box" I'm afraid you understand neither FreeBSD's design or the fundamental issues of working with Java (on any platform).
Huh. Guess I'm a little slow.
But I do remember Java being announce "out of the box" for FBSD 4.5, and not being delivered.
Oh, and I know that Java ships on linux, Solaris, and OSX.
What are the problems with "FreeBSD's design or the fundamental issues of working with Java?"
Arguably Perl has a stronger basis for being in the base system, and even it was been taken out now.
Don't much care for that either, but at least there is a reason I can follow: what version of perl with which options do you want? There are a lot of 'em...
But there are only a few Java's(tm) that are worth mentioning: 1.1, 1.2.x, 1.3.x, 1.4.x. I'm willing to pass on 1.1. And I'm willing to ask for the latest and greatest by default.
Afraid not. If I want to install it on 10 system, I have to log into 10 systems and interactively run the installer nightmare - and it takes a long time to run on each of those systems. Not to mention that you have to run the nightmare every time FreeBSD OR Java updates.
Others have said that this is not feasible, but I worked for a company that charged for a modified version of gcc. We only had about 3 clients that wanted it, and all 3 paid (they didn't know about each other).
This is what I don't get. It's clear that having a wireless notebook in class is a big distraction. Wouldn't the savvy student (perhaps what the Ask-Slashbot is wishing to be) want to avoid being distracted and get the best education possible?
And here I thought that being in class was a distraction to education.
Ba Dum Bah
Seriously, if I went back to school (not in the cards), I would bring a laptop (ibook). I can't read my handwriting, and my typing is pretty good. Not to mention that I wouldn't have to avoid class to keep from being bored to death. 90% of my classtime was a waste - I might as well have been doing homework. Enter the laptop...
What I'd really like is a boom mic and good voice recognition to take notes for me...
#2: Well Apple _can_ very well do whatever they damn please.
With hardware.
My effing first Mac an 867 Quicksilver is loud as hell and it doesn't have a Mic port.... Their previous and future Power Mac models also had a maximum RAM capacity of 2 GB mine and a few other models was shlocked at 1.5 GB.)
No tears for you, dude. You bought the box - it's not like they hid the specs from you. And forgive me for not being sorry for you with "just 1.5 GB"...
Back to my point oh yeah they could just disable the ports that iTunes streaming uses from being forwarded through their crippled SSHd offering.
Not really. The software being port forwarded doesn't have any idea that it's happening. That's the beauty of port forwarding. What's more, you don't need to use sshd on the mac - it could be any neighbor (on the same LAN) machine.
If you people keep publicly posting ways to circumvent Apple's attempts to secure files from being pirated then it won't be long before they're do a Software Update containing an "updated" version of SSHd.
#1: Apple is not worried about one person being able to ssh from work to home to play their music. They're worried about anonymous servers and clients where anyone can listen to anyone else's music.
#2: Apple can't very well release a version of sshd that does not support port forwarding, as that is half the purpose of sshd.
#3: If apple did, fink.sf.net would still have a version of sshd that worked correctly.
Yeah, I forgot that for about the first 9 months on the current job I was telecommuting the 70% of the time I was not in the office. I was running VTUN over ssh and doing DB access. No, it was not fast, but it was not terribly slow, either.
I used to spend 70% of my work days using VTUN over ssh (vtun.sf.net). Close enough to PPP...
It was never slow enough that I was desperate for another solution, and I was never able to find another one, anyway - I could not UDP through the corporate firewall, so TCP/TCP was my only real choice.
I suppose I could have connected via ssh and tunnelled out from work to home, but I never bothered because VTUN/ssh worked fine for me.
Slashdot Mirror
That's correct, and a Ferrari is aimed at drivers who know how to properly handle a sports car. The multitude of schmucks buying them to impress other people, while signifigant, represents a much smaller segment of the market
Are you sure? I imagine there are a lot more schmucks with money than there are qualified drivers with money. I imagine the schmucks are a VERY important market segment. Didn't Ferrari recently release an SUV? I rest my case.
What's more, Sun is not just selling Ferraris. They're [trying to] competing all the way down to low end servers. Even Ferrari seems to know better than to do that.
Right, but the ones that do (They're known as the 'Fortune 500') are willing to pay premium prices to get what they want, just like Ferrari drivers. Sure, it's a niche market, but it's a lucrative one.
500 is not all that many customers, and I bet that IBM has a few of them. Again, if that was all Sun sold to, we wouldn't be having this conversation - but that's not their exclusive target.
Right, and how do I make two hundred clones of your monster Wintel machine in an hour and a half, without needing an assistant?
Easily?
Will I be able to swap out CPUs without a second of downtime?
Maybe not. But I said a few years, so we'll see. Really, though, I think you'd have to go with a cluster to do that with cheap intel hardware.
Can I reassign hardware resources between different virtual domains on this monster workstation from a terminal on a different continent without needing to physically touch the machine, all without downtime?
Sure. Why not?
Is your monster PC going to be able to handle transferring over 40G/sec on its motherboard backplane to multiple drives?
I don't know - that's pretty fast.
I don't think you really understand how this technology is used.
You're probably right - but then, most businesses don't need to. Are there a few that do? Yup. Is Sun trying to sell to them? Yup. Is Sun trying to sell to everyone? Seems like it.
In summary:
Need a lot of number crunching (science)? Get a beowulf cluster of something cheap.
Need a big database? Get a linux box and Oracle.
Need a big webserver? Get a cluster of whatever OS/hardware you like.
Need a freakin' huge database that MUST be up all the time? Get a Mainframe - maybe a Sun.
But in reality, most businesses just don't need something freakin' huge like that.
And what should they gear the system to? The end user?
Software should be easy to install and maintain. For end users, or admins.
Sun is proud of their "9's" - 99.999...% uptime. The truth is that 99.99% of businesses don't need that percentage.
What companies have you been working for?
See my resume' from my webpage.
Every single company that is not just a start up or wet dream of some developers (or a development shop) want and most of the time NEED the uptime.
Nope. Most companies don't. Some very few large companies need full uptime - most can make do with 99.9% uptime. Most are happy with around 80% uptime, as they don't do work on the weekends.
Guess why mainframes are still around, not only because of legacy apps, but also because of the fact that they are ultra reliable.... If the company cannot send bills out to thousands of customers alone the lost interrest can cost a couple of millions.
In my experience, bill crunching happens once a month in as short a time as is possible. If you have lots of customers, that means big crunching - but only for as short a burst as possible on the last day of the month when all the numbers are in.
Again, see above. Time is money, if I can just drop in some more CPUs and all of the sudden my number crunching becomes fast the company wins and makes ton's of money with this. [Sun sells big hardware, etc, etc]
OK, here's the bottom line:
Most companies don't need the 9's. A few do - and Sun hardware is fine for those. So is IBM, and I'm sure that Dell, SGI, and some others would try to sell you something, but I wouldn't buy that, either.
But what is Sun selling? Not just top of the line hardware - they ARE trying to sell at all levels. And it ain't gonna work.
You take potshots at apache and MySQL, but Oracle runs just fine on linux. Hell, the billboard up the freeway says "Oracle makes Linux unbreakable" (which I always got a laugh out of). The point is, the difference between big iron and little iron is disappearing fast, and Sun ain't keeping it's eye on the ball.
5 9's is a lot. I find it hard to believe they couldn't be down for more than half a minute the 4th of July. And if so, they're some of very few companies where that is the case.
Unless your company runs 24x7 (maybe it does), you don't need all those 9's. If you're down the 4th of July (on purpose), you only need less than 99.9%.
If you don't like windows, use linux.
Really, though, you just have shoddy software. We use Sun boxen and we see downtime every night because the software is not well admin'd. Also not anyone's fault but ours.
The point is that it would work just as [well/poorly] on linux, but it'd be a helluva lot cheaper.
Sun does not, nor will it ever, understand users. The entire company is geared toward sysadmins who are expected to be able to jump through install hoops and tweak systems to get top performance.
It will kill them.
Sun is proud of their "9's" - 99.999...% uptime. The truth is that 99.99% of businesses don't need that percentage. Sun is proud of their scaling, but I've got news - 99.99% of businesses don't need that much power. It's also clear that we'll hit 10Ghz machines with multiple gigs of RAM in just a few years, and they'll cost around $1K; if you want terabytes of disk it may cost around $2K. How is Sun going to compete with that?
When any Luser can buy a machine that competes rather well with a Sun box, and can install any amount of easy software instead of Sun's pain in the ass stuff...
RIP Sun
<rant off>
Huh. What is reflection? Traditionally it is the ability to ask an object what it's methods and/or variables are, grab them, tweak them, or invoke them. Really my snippet isn't a good example of reflection - you could do that with C++, which does not support reflection out of the box. Something like (I'm paraphrasing here - look up the java.lang.reflect stuff)
someMethod = myObject.findMethodNamed("todo");
is what relfection is all about. If that doesn't make reflection clear, bug me again and I'll dive into it a bit more.
As opposed to ... Do your prep stuff ... ... Do your post stuff ...
someMethod(Object something, Method todo) {
todo.invoke(something, null);
}
Yeah, it's just sugar. It's a shame that more folks don't use reflection - it's mighty powerful stuff.
Such an obvious answer, too.
<harsh mode>
"In the olden days, when you bought an Apple machine you could develop on it. But now if you buy a PC with windows, you're kinda screwwed."
No shit, sherlock. Buy an Apple - Not only does it still come with dev tools available, they're some of the BEST dev tools available.
</harsh mode>
Without getting too deep into the technical details, the problem with using a PC is that Windows sucks.
Sucks or not - they do the stereo thing perfectly and trivially.
[typed from an ibook]
I've been happy with Apple's Terminal.app since 10.2 (export TERM=xterm-color :-)
I know that there are a few Java terminal emulators (check sf.net). I alwyas liked mindterm for ssh connectivity. I know they closed source, but there's a fork out there somewhere from the last open version.
Anyway, could you post a followup to your article when you settle on something - just a comment would be nice.
I wonder if the editors would let you update the article...
Huh? Last time I checked there is only one stable perl and thats been 5.8.0 for a long time (maybe up to 5.8.1). Why install anything else?
Let's see. I'm using 3ish machines at the moment:
This is perl, v5.6.0 built for darwin
This is perl, v5.6.1 built for IP32-irix
This is perl, version 5.005_03 built for i386-freebsd
And those are only the version that are default on the path. As to why those particular versions are installed... I dunno. Some admin[s] seem to disagree with your view of what's needed, though.
[stuff about how one java is not another java and that you should probably just install one JVM/app deleted]
Funny, we deploy mission critical apps on 2 platforms and develop on a 3rd, and we never have any of the problems you mentioned - with the occasional problem of a library jar being out of date.
But I could say the same of any number of "C" programs I've installed binaries of.
Err, no. You go through the annoying fetch/"I accept" process once, "make package" on one machine, put the resulting files in a ftp or web server, and then pkg_add from each machine.
I wonder if that's legal. Not that I care enough to look into it, mind you...
Not that I'm against Java, but if you want Java included "out of the box" I'm afraid you understand neither FreeBSD's design or the fundamental issues of working with Java (on any platform).
Huh. Guess I'm a little slow.
But I do remember Java being announce "out of the box" for FBSD 4.5, and not being delivered.
Oh, and I know that Java ships on linux, Solaris, and OSX.
What are the problems with "FreeBSD's design or the fundamental issues of working with Java?"
Arguably Perl has a stronger basis for being in the base system, and even it was been taken out now.
Don't much care for that either, but at least there is a reason I can follow: what version of perl with which options do you want? There are a lot of 'em...
But there are only a few Java's(tm) that are worth mentioning: 1.1, 1.2.x, 1.3.x, 1.4.x. I'm willing to pass on 1.1. And I'm willing to ask for the latest and greatest by default.
Java is so easy to install...
Afraid not. If I want to install it on 10 system, I have to log into 10 systems and interactively run the installer nightmare - and it takes a long time to run on each of those systems. Not to mention that you have to run the nightmare every time FreeBSD OR Java updates.
I am so bummed. I really was looking forward to a release that included Java "out of the box."
Others have said that this is not feasible, but I worked for a company that charged for a modified version of gcc. We only had about 3 clients that wanted it, and all 3 paid (they didn't know about each other).
So this can work...
This is what I don't get. It's clear that having a wireless notebook in class is a big distraction. Wouldn't the savvy student (perhaps what the Ask-Slashbot is wishing to be) want to avoid being distracted and get the best education possible?
And here I thought that being in class was a distraction to education.
Ba Dum Bah
Seriously, if I went back to school (not in the cards), I would bring a laptop (ibook). I can't read my handwriting, and my typing is pretty good. Not to mention that I wouldn't have to avoid class to keep from being bored to death. 90% of my classtime was a waste - I might as well have been doing homework. Enter the laptop...
What I'd really like is a boom mic and good voice recognition to take notes for me...
Honest question:
Why don't you just buy one "unused" via eBay, or some other US reseller?
Seems like they could mark up 5% and everyone would be WAY ahead...
#2: Well Apple _can_ very well do whatever they damn please.
With hardware.
My effing first Mac an 867 Quicksilver is loud as hell and it doesn't have a Mic port.... Their previous and future Power Mac models also had a maximum RAM capacity of 2 GB mine and a few other models was shlocked at 1.5 GB.)
No tears for you, dude. You bought the box - it's not like they hid the specs from you. And forgive me for not being sorry for you with "just 1.5 GB"...
Back to my point oh yeah they could just disable the ports that iTunes streaming uses from being forwarded through their crippled SSHd offering.
Not really. The software being port forwarded doesn't have any idea that it's happening. That's the beauty of port forwarding. What's more, you don't need to use sshd on the mac - it could be any neighbor (on the same LAN) machine.
#3: Good point. Fink roX! Or so I've been told.
It does indeed.
If you people keep publicly posting ways to circumvent Apple's attempts to secure files from being pirated then it won't be long before they're do a Software Update containing an "updated" version of SSHd.
#1: Apple is not worried about one person being able to ssh from work to home to play their music. They're worried about anonymous servers and clients where anyone can listen to anyone else's music.
#2: Apple can't very well release a version of sshd that does not support port forwarding, as that is half the purpose of sshd.
#3: If apple did, fink.sf.net would still have a version of sshd that worked correctly.
Relax.
Yeah, I forgot that for about the first 9 months on the current job I was telecommuting the 70% of the time I was not in the office. I was running VTUN over ssh and doing DB access. No, it was not fast, but it was not terribly slow, either.
I used to spend 70% of my work days using VTUN over ssh (vtun.sf.net). Close enough to PPP...
It was never slow enough that I was desperate for another solution, and I was never able to find another one, anyway - I could not UDP through the corporate firewall, so TCP/TCP was my only real choice.
I suppose I could have connected via ssh and tunnelled out from work to home, but I never bothered because VTUN/ssh worked fine for me.
I wonder why y'all are losing so many packets.
Have you actually ran tcp on top tcp over the internet, across distances?
6 days/month for the past 2 years (DSL speeds). And before that, as well, but I can't say how much.
I'm not ranting about minor sluggishness here either, I'm talking about lags so bad that you do really start to actively look for other alternatives.
Hum. I wonder why it works well for me, and not you.
The whole "tcp over tcp is bad" argument is not premature optimization...
Never said it was. Just said that it can be faster, but if ya got nothing, faster doesn't matter.