That's not what the article said. It said that it took over the duties for a segment of the company during a period of heavy use, not that it replaced all six servers at once.
That's not what I said. I was replying to his comment that he thinks that 1 pentium class server could replace a 6 server NT cluster...
and my story submissions about athlons and p4s and new hardware and comparisons don't get posted, and I never see any other stories about them either...
if ( random(10) == 0 )
accept_submission();
else
reject_submission();
I have known many people who shut down their computer at the end of the day just because they didn't think that leaving it on was a good idea overnight.
I have known admins who thought the same way. Too much Win98 usage made them think that it was better to reboot servers whenever possible.
ARGH! I can type in a new decent comment in under 2 minutes slashdot! bugger off!
If you stopped to read the rest of my comment, I also said that our machine here at the office has an uptime of 80+ days right now (last downtime was for a hardware upgrade). In fact, I just checked with the admin and he has never had a crash of that server. All downtime was hardware related.
That's also an interesting point for NT4. Apparently all BSOD's are NT's fault. So if a 3rd party driver shit all over itself, NT's apparently at fault. NT must BSOD in these instances because you don't know what else the driver shit on, and killing drivers is not a great idea. NT got a very bad rep for that when it's wasn't totally their fault.
And it was 3 machines + 3 backups. Thus 7000 users (AFAIK) over 3 machines is 2333/machine, because the backups are used if something goes wrong.
good call about 2k vs NT4, but still, every 10 days? I've used NT servers under heavy use before, and as long as we didn't fiddle with things they stayed running for a while.
I find it very, very hard to believe that 1 pentium class server could replace what a 3+3 server NT cluster could do at any decent utilization. It's not 6 servers, it's 3 + 3 backups. And they conveniently left out the utilization of the servers, and the hardware on them. If 3 servers are using.5% total utilization, then yeah, a pentium class machine could do the same.
Does anyone have recent NT vs Linux benchmarks (on the same hardware please). I haven't been able to find any.
This article was short on technical details needed to make a fair comparison between the NT and linux state here.
as for NT crashing under pressure, that's interesting because I have yet to have my 2k box crash, and I have seen many 2k servers under heavy heavy load doing perfectly fine.
Absolutely. I must confess, I am a Microsoft user (and apparently the majority of/.ers are as well), but this does look like a dream. No names provided is a rather odd thing. I must admit however, I am starting to find linux more and more appealing.
I also asked myself this interesting question:
Hypothetically speaking, of course, if I had not paid for my software yet, out of all of the software that I use, how much of it would I still use if I had to pay for it?
I'd be over to linux in a heartbeat if I had to pay for everything on my system. So I don't think that MS can claim that piracy isn't still helping them, at least in part.
Yes absolutely. I got the same impression. The author claimed that the company in question had their servers going down at least once every 10 days.
What the HELL were they doing to these servers? Mine has been up for 140+ days at home (I have run NT Stress Test on it for a week as well), and at work here we have a 2K server up for 80+ days right now, and it's used a lot, it has 2 printers on it, a stack of hard disks and email as well, and we've had no problems.
And if this company was so proud of the change, why didn't they let us know their name?
Yes, except when I'm paying for an unlimited connection, so allowing passers-by to use my 802.11b while I'm not at home doesn't concern me in the least, and doesn't cost me any more than what I'm already paying...
how about this or this or just carrying an extra battery or 2? =) There are more, but I'm too lazy to find the links.
Or you can get a wind-up power provider for your laptop, gives you endless power and you just have to wind it every half-hour or so. Don't have links for that thou...
Lameness filter, filter THYSELF!
"Having a lameness filter on/. is like having a shit filter on your ass" -- as seen on/.
where do they imply this, exactly? I haven't seen them implying this at all, just stating that they have a 1.8GHz and now a 2.0GHz.. They're not runnign around going "Hey, we're now 0.6GHz faster than this unnamed processor over here with a logo that you can easily recognize, so that must mean we're better!"...
Yes, but the only reason why they did that is because PC133 sounds a lot slower than PC800, and corrospondingly PC1600 sounds twice as fast as PC800. It's marketing games, exactly the same.
Sorry, guess I gotta cool my jets a little =) Well, I wasn't rude, like some other posts I've seen here today...
You know, I wouldn't be nearly as annoyed if they at least marketed it as a AMD Model 1600 1.4GHz, but by prohibiting people from displaying the MHz... eh. blah.
How is that dirty?? You're claiming that outright misleading by a name is worse than revving up your clock speed, which BTW, does increase performance...? There's not much wrong with that. In the very least, it's much LESS wrong than designing a naming scheme specifically designed to be misleading.
You say that they market their processors as unquestionably faster... Where do they do this? Other than showing that they have a 1.8Ghz processor, where do they say "see? see?? we're better than AMD because we're faster!!"
What they could have done instead is make a measurement like IBips (Intel billion instructions per second), then market their 1.4 as a 1.6IBips processor, since that's at least true.
And the forcing everyone NOT to be allowed to display the MHz just proves that they're trying to be misleading.
Sigh. I'll still buy AMD as my next system thou =)
I personally want a laptop that will run eight to ten hours on a battery
You can get add-on battery packs that can give you up to 18 hours of battery life in total.
Don't forget, the processor isn't the only thing in the laptop. You have the power-sucking LCD, the hard drive, cd-rom, and sound as well.
And also, try running your current processor at 100% utilization while on battery. You're going to run out in less than 2 hours. So reducing your power consumption of your processor (which is very low while idle) isn't going to give you an astounding jump in runtime of your laptop.
I think the problem there is the lack of any sufficient advancement in battery technology in a long time. =( Where are my feul cells dammit?!;)
before I blew my top over his faster memory claim with RAMBUS
Unfortunately he's right. Rambus memory is technically and realistically superior to DRAM, however the company that's behind it sucks ass and was really evil. The benchmarks show a clear 5-10% memory speed increase over DDRSDRAM, so...
NEVER take for granted what the dealers say, because they're out there to sell
Right, and the public has been brainwashed that car dealers are not to be trusted, so they don't trust them. The public was told that MHz = performance, because that's what Intel's advertising said (and at the time of the Pentium, it was true). However nobody has told them otherwise.
Salesmen
Right on. My Dad used to work for Panasonic eons ago when they made computers. Part of his job was to go out to stores posing as a potential customer and see how much the sales reps knew, and they knew practically nothing about the product. We were able to ask seemingly simple questions, even some misleading ones (like how does the 640kb ram help in performance over that 8Mhz computer?) and have them go bumbling in circles. It was quite humourous...
This whole processor coverup thing started with Intel and their "Pentium" series
Woahhh.... That wasn't done to hide performance, that was done to copyright the name of their processors because apparently 486 isn't copyrightable, so in the public's mind a 486-100Mhz is obviously better than a 486-66MHz because they're the same name, right?
Intel only stuck with the Pentium naming scheme because they put so much damned money into advertising (which AMD has yet to do), and that's what got the public on their side.
AMD just needs to get a good marketing team to whip up a lot of good advertising and put it everywhere. Those "dumb" people that everyone here is so fond of referring to only think that P4 is better and that the MHz counts because they haven't been told otherwise.
Truth is, there -is- no meaningful number you can use, to describe a processor. Applications will vary so much in performance, depending on how well they exploit the various caches and pipelines, that any value you get will be useless for any realistic comparison.
I totally disagree there. For example, take things that users do the most and post benchmarks about them... Hell, that's what hardware review sites have been doing for years. Post how long it takes to load up the computer, how fast you can compress video, how fast you can make word run.... oh wait. That's right, the common user doesn't need > 500MHz for anything these days...
In any case, post benchmarks that are relevant to what users are looking for. There are many many ways to play the marketing game without being intentionally misleading.
(got look at some Tbird vs P4 benchmarks and tell me I'm wrong there).
You're wrong there. Can you cite specific examples of where Intel is "lying"? And in most tests, the P4 1.7 is comparible to the Athlon 1.4.
As long as the public continues to see things based solely on the clock speed, AMD can't win unless they
Play the same game? Focus on raising their clock speed? Or just win the public's opinion by providing many many benchmarks, much much lower prices (they really need to focus on bringing the motherboard prices down), and by convincing OEMs to start shipping many more Athlon system instead of mostly Intel?
1.) try to educate consumers better (not gonna happen because cpu design is complex)
What the hell does CPU design have to do about educating the public? You simply have to educate them to proove that MHz != performance. You don't need to explain designs. Just show facts. Hell, look at the comeback that Apple made. Look at the advertising for Cable vs ADSL over here. Cable put out the facts, and didn't use stupid advertising schemes.
And besides, I can think of numerous P4 commercials that I have seen over TV with those stupid blue freaks, but I can't think of any AMD commercials.... Have there been any??
2.) fight dirty and do Intel's tricks right back to them.
How is what Intel is doing dirty? They're not lying about anything (unless you can prove me wrong). Their 1.7 is a 1.7GHz processor. The benchmarks that they show are true, in certain cases, with memory intensive, especially before DDR sdram caught on, at the same speed Intel did do better. This marketing strategy is call common sense. You take the stats that show you're good, and you don't show the ones that indicate that you're bad. There's nothing more dishonest here than any other marketing strategy that has ever used numbers. Intel knew that people were more interested in thinking that MHz was more important, and pushed to bring their speeds up, which is what they did. Why is this dirty? It's simply a marketing strategy, but they're not calling their P4 1.7 a P4-2000 to try to make it sound better.
it's only a model number
That is designed for the sole purpose of being misleading. That is very dirty.
Unlike Intel, they're at least not lying about clock speed.
Sure, that makes sense, but only if they're not being misleading.
By using numbers that look suspiciously like MHz numbers they are being very very dirty and should go sit in the corner. If they had called it MODEL T, for example, then your argument would hold water. Forcing computer manufacturers to not be able to display the MHz rating just prooves that's exactly what they're trying to do: be dirty and hide the numbers.
And besides, when a TBird 1.2 is 1/2 the price of a P4 1.4, are they really in that much of a loosing spot?
Mind you, DDR did the same trick with their PC1600 and PC2100 memory, to not "sound" slower than RDRAM...
Elcomsoft should be paying for his legal fees
on
Sklyarov Indicted
·
· Score: 2
If they aren't, why the hell aren't they?!!? It was Skylarov under their employ writing the program. So you're telling me that if I write a program for my company that violates some stupid law in some other country, I cannot ever hope to go to that country under fear of prosecution?
If he did it solely and entirely to make a financial gain, then sure I can see this case having a point. But without that, it's entirely pointless.
But luckily, if this case goes to a jury (which I believe that with penalties like that it must go to a jury) they will never convict. There is no way that any group of 12 people could unanimously send a father to prison for 5 years because he wrote a program for his employer that, really, does jack all. How many e-books are there? What does this program really affect ??? This guy has done practically nothing. It's like arresting me for dropping a piece of paper out of my pocket and sticking me in prison for 5 years for "defacing public property" or something stupid like that. This is overkill to the nth degree.
Sorry, but this just gets me all wound up again.
Mind you, it was no surprise that they indicted. There was no way that they were not going to indict, but lets hope to God that this insanity stops before it gets to court, and that if it does get that far that they won't convict. Maybe then I'll still believe that the USA has at least a shred of hope...
With the advent of "The Parasitic Grid" (free 802.11b) and lotsa free software, free internet access, telecommunications rates falling, and things generally getting cheaper, how long can business hold out on the internet? Or for that matter, how long can the "free as in beer" hold out? Who's going to win? I've been having this argument lately with a friends and it's pretty evenly split between the yay/nay votes. What is big buisness going to have to do to change? Is the internet going to turn into a police state, heavily regulated to ensure that businesses get "the profitable internet", or is it going to turn into a giant freeland? How can something last without people paying for it? I have seen far too many people that inadvertantly sabatoge this effort by running things that block advertisements, and go out of their way to not get inconvenienced by the very things that make what we have monitarily free for us to use. Anyone have any ideas? (Gee, I should post this as a "Ask Slashdot", but since every story I have ever submitted gets shot down, I doubt it'd make it past their random acceptance filter).
Slashdot Mirror
I have, and the box doesn't blow up at all. Maybe in windows 98, but not 2k... You do accumulate some junk here and there, but nothing bad happens.
That's not what the article said. It said that it took over the duties for a segment of the company during a period of heavy use, not that it replaced all six servers at once.
That's not what I said. I was replying to his comment that he thinks that 1 pentium class server could replace a 6 server NT cluster...
and my story submissions about athlons and p4s and new hardware and comparisons don't get posted, and I never see any other stories about them either...
if ( random(10) == 0 )
accept_submission();
else
reject_submission();
I have known many people who shut down their computer at the end of the day just because they didn't think that leaving it on was a good idea overnight.
I have known admins who thought the same way. Too much Win98 usage made them think that it was better to reboot servers whenever possible.
ARGH! I can type in a new decent comment in under 2 minutes slashdot! bugger off!
and what were the cases for the downtime?
Just because a server goes down doesn't mean it's the OS'es fault...
If you stopped to read the rest of my comment, I also said that our machine here at the office has an uptime of 80+ days right now (last downtime was for a hardware upgrade). In fact, I just checked with the admin and he has never had a crash of that server. All downtime was hardware related.
That's also an interesting point for NT4. Apparently all BSOD's are NT's fault. So if a 3rd party driver shit all over itself, NT's apparently at fault. NT must BSOD in these instances because you don't know what else the driver shit on, and killing drivers is not a great idea. NT got a very bad rep for that when it's wasn't totally their fault.
And it was 3 machines + 3 backups. Thus 7000 users (AFAIK) over 3 machines is 2333/machine, because the backups are used if something goes wrong.
good call about 2k vs NT4, but still, every 10 days? I've used NT servers under heavy use before, and as long as we didn't fiddle with things they stayed running for a while.
Defintely NOT once every 10 days...
I find it very, very hard to believe that 1 pentium class server could replace what a 3+3 server NT cluster could do at any decent utilization. It's not 6 servers, it's 3 + 3 backups. And they conveniently left out the utilization of the servers, and the hardware on them. If 3 servers are using .5% total utilization, then yeah, a pentium class machine could do the same.
Does anyone have recent NT vs Linux benchmarks (on the same hardware please). I haven't been able to find any.
This article was short on technical details needed to make a fair comparison between the NT and linux state here.
as for NT crashing under pressure, that's interesting because I have yet to have my 2k box crash, and I have seen many 2k servers under heavy heavy load doing perfectly fine.
Absolutely. I must confess, I am a Microsoft user (and apparently the majority of /.ers are as well), but this does look like a dream. No names provided is a rather odd thing. I must admit however, I am starting to find linux more and more appealing.
I also asked myself this interesting question:
Hypothetically speaking, of course, if I had not paid for my software yet, out of all of the software that I use, how much of it would I still use if I had to pay for it?
I'd be over to linux in a heartbeat if I had to pay for everything on my system. So I don't think that MS can claim that piracy isn't still helping them, at least in part.
Yes absolutely. I got the same impression. The author claimed that the company in question had their servers going down at least once every 10 days.
What the HELL were they doing to these servers? Mine has been up for 140+ days at home (I have run NT Stress Test on it for a week as well), and at work here we have a 2K server up for 80+ days right now, and it's used a lot, it has 2 printers on it, a stack of hard disks and email as well, and we've had no problems.
And if this company was so proud of the change, why didn't they let us know their name?
Yes, except when I'm paying for an unlimited connection, so allowing passers-by to use my 802.11b while I'm not at home doesn't concern me in the least, and doesn't cost me any more than what I'm already paying...
how about this or this or just carrying an extra battery or 2? =) There are more, but I'm too lazy to find the links.
/. is like having a shit filter on your ass" -- as seen on /.
Or you can get a wind-up power provider for your laptop, gives you endless power and you just have to wind it every half-hour or so. Don't have links for that thou...
Lameness filter, filter THYSELF!
"Having a lameness filter on
where do they imply this, exactly? I haven't seen them implying this at all, just stating that they have a 1.8GHz and now a 2.0GHz.. They're not runnign around going "Hey, we're now 0.6GHz faster than this unnamed processor over here with a logo that you can easily recognize, so that must mean we're better!"...
Yes, but the only reason why they did that is because PC133 sounds a lot slower than PC800, and corrospondingly PC1600 sounds twice as fast as PC800. It's marketing games, exactly the same.
Sorry, guess I gotta cool my jets a little =) Well, I wasn't rude, like some other posts I've seen here today...
You know, I wouldn't be nearly as annoyed if they at least marketed it as a AMD Model 1600 1.4GHz, but by prohibiting people from displaying the MHz... eh. blah.
How is that dirty?? You're claiming that outright misleading by a name is worse than revving up your clock speed, which BTW, does increase performance...? There's not much wrong with that. In the very least, it's much LESS wrong than designing a naming scheme specifically designed to be misleading.
You say that they market their processors as unquestionably faster... Where do they do this? Other than showing that they have a 1.8Ghz processor, where do they say "see? see?? we're better than AMD because we're faster!!"
What they could have done instead is make a measurement like IBips (Intel billion instructions per second), then market their 1.4 as a 1.6IBips processor, since that's at least true.
And the forcing everyone NOT to be allowed to display the MHz just proves that they're trying to be misleading.
Sigh. I'll still buy AMD as my next system thou =)
I personally want a laptop that will run eight to ten hours on a battery
;)
You can get add-on battery packs that can give you up to 18 hours of battery life in total.
Don't forget, the processor isn't the only thing in the laptop. You have the power-sucking LCD, the hard drive, cd-rom, and sound as well.
And also, try running your current processor at 100% utilization while on battery. You're going to run out in less than 2 hours. So reducing your power consumption of your processor (which is very low while idle) isn't going to give you an astounding jump in runtime of your laptop.
I think the problem there is the lack of any sufficient advancement in battery technology in a long time. =( Where are my feul cells dammit?!
before I blew my top over his faster memory claim with RAMBUS
Unfortunately he's right. Rambus memory is technically and realistically superior to DRAM, however the company that's behind it sucks ass and was really evil. The benchmarks show a clear 5-10% memory speed increase over DDRSDRAM, so...
NEVER take for granted what the dealers say, because they're out there to sell
Right, and the public has been brainwashed that car dealers are not to be trusted, so they don't trust them. The public was told that MHz = performance, because that's what Intel's advertising said (and at the time of the Pentium, it was true). However nobody has told them otherwise.
Salesmen
Right on. My Dad used to work for Panasonic eons ago when they made computers. Part of his job was to go out to stores posing as a potential customer and see how much the sales reps knew, and they knew practically nothing about the product. We were able to ask seemingly simple questions, even some misleading ones (like how does the 640kb ram help in performance over that 8Mhz computer?) and have them go bumbling in circles. It was quite humourous...
This whole processor coverup thing started with Intel and their "Pentium" series
Woahhh.... That wasn't done to hide performance, that was done to copyright the name of their processors because apparently 486 isn't copyrightable, so in the public's mind a 486-100Mhz is obviously better than a 486-66MHz because they're the same name, right?
Intel only stuck with the Pentium naming scheme because they put so much damned money into advertising (which AMD has yet to do), and that's what got the public on their side.
AMD just needs to get a good marketing team to whip up a lot of good advertising and put it everywhere. Those "dumb" people that everyone here is so fond of referring to only think that P4 is better and that the MHz counts because they haven't been told otherwise.
Truth is, there -is- no meaningful number you can use, to describe a processor. Applications will vary so much in performance, depending on how well they exploit the various caches and pipelines, that any value you get will be useless for any realistic comparison.
I totally disagree there. For example, take things that users do the most and post benchmarks about them... Hell, that's what hardware review sites have been doing for years. Post how long it takes to load up the computer, how fast you can compress video, how fast you can make word run.... oh wait. That's right, the common user doesn't need > 500MHz for anything these days...
In any case, post benchmarks that are relevant to what users are looking for. There are many many ways to play the marketing game without being intentionally misleading.
(got look at some Tbird vs P4 benchmarks and tell me I'm wrong there).
You're wrong there. Can you cite specific examples of where Intel is "lying"? And in most tests, the P4 1.7 is comparible to the Athlon 1.4.
As long as the public continues to see things based solely on the clock speed, AMD can't win unless they
Play the same game? Focus on raising their clock speed? Or just win the public's opinion by providing many many benchmarks, much much lower prices (they really need to focus on bringing the motherboard prices down), and by convincing OEMs to start shipping many more Athlon system instead of mostly Intel?
1.) try to educate consumers better (not gonna happen because cpu design is complex)
What the hell does CPU design have to do about educating the public? You simply have to educate them to proove that MHz != performance. You don't need to explain designs. Just show facts. Hell, look at the comeback that Apple made. Look at the advertising for Cable vs ADSL over here. Cable put out the facts, and didn't use stupid advertising schemes.
And besides, I can think of numerous P4 commercials that I have seen over TV with those stupid blue freaks, but I can't think of any AMD commercials.... Have there been any??
2.) fight dirty and do Intel's tricks right back to them.
How is what Intel is doing dirty? They're not lying about anything (unless you can prove me wrong). Their 1.7 is a 1.7GHz processor. The benchmarks that they show are true, in certain cases, with memory intensive, especially before DDR sdram caught on, at the same speed Intel did do better. This marketing strategy is call common sense. You take the stats that show you're good, and you don't show the ones that indicate that you're bad. There's nothing more dishonest here than any other marketing strategy that has ever used numbers. Intel knew that people were more interested in thinking that MHz was more important, and pushed to bring their speeds up, which is what they did. Why is this dirty? It's simply a marketing strategy, but they're not calling their P4 1.7 a P4-2000 to try to make it sound better.
it's only a model number
That is designed for the sole purpose of being misleading. That is very dirty.
Unlike Intel, they're at least not lying about clock speed.
As I said, how is Intel lying about clock speed??
Sure, that makes sense, but only if they're not being misleading.
By using numbers that look suspiciously like MHz numbers they are being very very dirty and should go sit in the corner. If they had called it MODEL T, for example, then your argument would hold water. Forcing computer manufacturers to not be able to display the MHz rating just prooves that's exactly what they're trying to do: be dirty and hide the numbers.
And besides, when a TBird 1.2 is 1/2 the price of a P4 1.4, are they really in that much of a loosing spot?
Mind you, DDR did the same trick with their PC1600 and PC2100 memory, to not "sound" slower than RDRAM...
If they aren't, why the hell aren't they?!!? It was Skylarov under their employ writing the program. So you're telling me that if I write a program for my company that violates some stupid law in some other country, I cannot ever hope to go to that country under fear of prosecution?
If he did it solely and entirely to make a financial gain, then sure I can see this case having a point. But without that, it's entirely pointless.
But luckily, if this case goes to a jury (which I believe that with penalties like that it must go to a jury) they will never convict. There is no way that any group of 12 people could unanimously send a father to prison for 5 years because he wrote a program for his employer that, really, does jack all. How many e-books are there? What does this program really affect ??? This guy has done practically nothing. It's like arresting me for dropping a piece of paper out of my pocket and sticking me in prison for 5 years for "defacing public property" or something stupid like that. This is overkill to the nth degree.
Sorry, but this just gets me all wound up again.
Mind you, it was no surprise that they indicted. There was no way that they were not going to indict, but lets hope to God that this insanity stops before it gets to court, and that if it does get that far that they won't convict. Maybe then I'll still believe that the USA has at least a shred of hope...
With the advent of "The Parasitic Grid" (free 802.11b) and lotsa free software, free internet access, telecommunications rates falling, and things generally getting cheaper, how long can business hold out on the internet? Or for that matter, how long can the "free as in beer" hold out? Who's going to win? I've been having this argument lately with a friends and it's pretty evenly split between the yay/nay votes. What is big buisness going to have to do to change? Is the internet going to turn into a police state, heavily regulated to ensure that businesses get "the profitable internet", or is it going to turn into a giant freeland? How can something last without people paying for it? I have seen far too many people that inadvertantly sabatoge this effort by running things that block advertisements, and go out of their way to not get inconvenienced by the very things that make what we have monitarily free for us to use. Anyone have any ideas? (Gee, I should post this as a "Ask Slashdot", but since every story I have ever submitted gets shot down, I doubt it'd make it past their random acceptance filter).
Doesn't matter. Somebody said it enough to get noticed, so it's still funny =)