Like Hemos mentioned, other schools are doing this.. a year or two ago, University of Minnesota Duluth tried to start this up.. (with little success, and a protest by the local ACM chapter)
the problem was they put a bunch of stupid requirements on it. it didn't fly very well, maybe it would work out better today.. but they started with NON-IT courses. I think that was a mistake.
I have a jensen in my closet, collecting dust.. it's an interesting box, but wow, what a pain in the ass to load.. MILO is broken, it has no alphabios, and the ARC is kinda broken.. SRM booting (with aboot) is about the only good option.. I have worked with several alphas ranging from the jensen, multia, sx164, and lx164.. and I have to say.. the jensen is the worst one to work with as far as install goes.. (EISA is such a pain)
You are right, it does cast a negative light, I was the same way when I was in HS.. i poked around, i connected to BBS's from the school library's modem. (supposed to be for other library lookups) I know the feeling, I did make a couple of mistakes, and broke a computer or two (just software stuff, which i eventualy fixed) but I was learning. instead of helping me learn more, or providing an outlet for my curiosity.. having me learn from the district computer geeks.. I was told "don't touch" and forbiden from using ANY computer at school. HS administrations are stupid, the live in a world of stagnation. anything new, or different, or outside of their realm is shutdown. if it wasn't for an internal moral structure, i probably would have become a kiddie, breaking everything in sight, just to piss them off. the problem is, i know, or find out about a lot of the activities of the geeks in different highschools around town, and out of the few dozen kids i talk to, 2-3 are like you. the rest are crack-crazed script kiddies. it's really sad. I have a goal to get back into the education system, and teach the school administrations how to better handle the geeks. just like discussions of labeling, and categorizing kids who are above average, I want to find them, and get them going in the right direction, no more kiddies, no more warez, no more freaks.. but good, sharp kids who will become the next generation of kernel hackers, admins, and hacking teachers.
Re:Was Linux the competitor?
on
Endgame For SCO
·
· Score: 1
I know from personal experience that Linux replaced SCO, I know of atleast one system that was totaly replaced by SCO, where the database vendor ported the verticle app to linux, and now promotes it over their SCO product.
I have also seen several SCO systems replaced by NT, which i think has eaten more into SCO than linux has.
What I find odd was this situation, I was doing on the side desktop PC repair, and other misc maintence for a small laundry supply distribution company, they had a cute little AIX 3 box sitting in the corner, running a small verticle app/database to do all the ERP stuff. the VP knew the stability of unix, and wanted to stay with it when they did the replacement of the system for y2k issues.. (OS and database) I told them that they should look around to other software vendors, but they wanted to stick with the same system, to save training costs. I went to a couple meetings with them, to see what the software vendor was like.. it had to be the best example of a bunch of morons leaching the proffits of y2k bugs. several things bothered me about the setup of this system, they just didn't seem to have anyone who really knew unix. I warned them that the hardware they were being sold was over priced, and not a good buy.. but hey.. let's spend $7000 on a single PII-300, with no RAID. did i mention that this was only a year and a half ago? but the "officialy supported" platform was a Digital box.. not an alpha, just a plain old intel box. "i told you so" #1 now it's a totaly un-supported compaq legacy system. next I told them, stick with AIX or go linux. I contacted the database developer, and found that the system was simply running on top of an interprited language.. (i don't remember which) that was avaliable for just about every platform under the sun, including linux. (i thought there was source avaliable, but i can't be sure) I said great, let's do that.. "no.. that's not officialy tested" I'm hoping to go back in a year or two and upgrade the whole damn thing, get rid of the shitty hardware, and get them going on linux. either by sco emulation, or just porting the damn thing myself.
here in minnesota, we had a small conferece put on by a local ISP/linux VAR.. VA linux, redhat, corel were all there, and we packed the hotel conference room.. everyone enjoyed it, as far as I could tell, I really liked the survey question that was asked.. "how many people are running linux at work secretly?" and about 3/4 the people raised their hands.. luckly, i didn't have to.. linux is company policy:)
Moral values? since when does morals enter into a persons diet preferance? I can see you objecting to the bbq because of your diet preferance, but are you calling me immoral because i'm omnivorous?
I remember my old cyrix 166 CPU had a cool feature, by adding a small patch to the kernel, you could enable "low power on HLT" since linux's kernel actualy properly uses multi-tasking features of the i386, my "wow that's hot" single voltage cyrix could run at room temperature.. but if i were to do something like play quake, or run rc5.. the CPU would ramp up to full temp.
I agree.. things work smoothly now.. I added the single line to my sources.list, and did a apt-get update, apt-get install task... on the thing.. and it installed perfectly, upgrading my old gnome install. no broken packages at all.
the only complaint I have so far is that tcsh stoped working.. my shell is normaly/usr/bin/tcsh, and now it won't get past the inital login.. I even created a whole new blank account to test this.. to make sure it wasn't something else in my config.. nope.. it just won't do it.. I change my shell to bash.. and it works perfectly..:(
We have several linux controled big yellow robot arms in our factory, the handle alternator stator cores into and out of varnishing, and milling machines. once we finish installing a couple more arms, we will be processing one stator every 12 seconds. the big thing that has to be figured out, is sensing what parts are where, and also measuring them. we use linux systems with IR cameras and BT848 cards to sense, and measure to.003" so the milling machines can efficently cut the parts after being covered in varnish. I wish I had some pictures handy.
I have been looking at phone systems for several months, our phone var wants to sell us a big huge Fujitsu 9600 to replace our not so great Fujitsu Series 3. We also taked about VoIP phones, but all of the phones talk to an NT based PBX router to talk to our POTS and Channelized T1's incoming phone lines. this is totaly _not_ acceptable at a company that is working on 100% unix/linux installation.. our workstations are linux, our MRP server is a big old Unix (soon to be replaced by linux:) and even our embeded factory automation is linux. I have been trying to find _some_ kind of non-NT based VoIP PBX package, I thought I was close with vovida, but they ended up not doing PBX software anymore. so my search continues.
I work at a midsized manufacturing company, and the general IS policy is, if we don't have source, let's see if we can write it. One of the bigest requirements to the new MRP systems we are shoping for is that we get source license (i wish there was an OSS MRP system) we think we have found the closest to perfect MRP system. My boss (CFO) is so happy now that we can simply install staroffice all over the company.. he likes StarCalc better than excel 97.
in a coperate envoiornment, this isn't an issue, since most machines are requesting DNS from a central, or slave DNS server, which are updated within seconds, and don't have to wait for the normal internet timeouts. at a previous company I worked for, we setup a DHCP server, and had to integrate it into the existing DNS update/request system.. (icky email based, but it was reliable, and fairly secure) because of the way the email system worked, (and the fact that it was HP/UX DNS) it took 10min for updates to happen. (cron job) but if we had repalced the DNS server with bind 8 we could have had the DHCP server use the Dynamic DNS update feature of bind 8. updating instantly.
The grape vine has told me that Veritas software will be releasing netbackup client and then later server.. it's expensive, but it's the BEST backup system out there.. the only thing that I know of that comes close is HP Omni-back.. but no linux for that one. there may also be a version of NETbackup lite.. (seagate backup exec was bought by Vertias recently.. this will become lite)
Yes, the reason is not the speed, or weather it does backups properly.. it's a cost of operation, and a reliabality factor.. travan tapes cost between 15 and 25 $ each, where dat tapes are around 5-10 $. DLT tapes are more expensive, but have a capacity of over 35 gig un-compressed. It's also a reliabilty thing. Travan tapes are limited to several hundred backup-restore cycles, DLT/DAT are in the thousands.. which means that they produce less errors. DLT tapes are even more cool, they have a shelf storage life of upto 30 years, compared to the 5 years of Travan (I don't know about DAT tapes)
Very interesting, What was the total cost of your system?
Things I could see improve your system:
drop the Apache RPM's and compile it.. Specificaly with the PGCC compiler, I have heard of 30+% speed improvements with it. you could even go for the PGCC based distro stampede for your base install.
look at mylex RAID boards.. they are supposed to work a little better than the AMI cards that Dell uses.
It'd be fun to send that box to mindcraft, and have them test it as same preformance or 90% preformance of the NT box.. but cost less than $5k not $18,000
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Like Hemos mentioned, other schools are doing this.. a year or two ago, University of Minnesota Duluth tried to start this up.. (with little success, and a protest by the local ACM chapter)
the problem was they put a bunch of stupid requirements on it. it didn't fly very well, maybe it would work out better today.. but they started with NON-IT courses. I think that was a mistake.
EEEeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeek!
I have a jensen in my closet, collecting dust.. it's an interesting box, but wow, what a pain in the ass to load.. MILO is broken, it has no alphabios, and the ARC is kinda broken.. SRM booting (with aboot) is about the only good option.. I have worked with several alphas ranging from the jensen, multia, sx164, and lx164.. and I have to say.. the jensen is the worst one to work with as far as install goes.. (EISA is such a pain)
You are right, it does cast a negative light, I was the same way when I was in HS.. i poked around, i connected to BBS's from the school library's modem. (supposed to be for other library lookups) I know the feeling, I did make a couple of mistakes, and broke a computer or two (just software stuff, which i eventualy fixed) but I was learning. instead of helping me learn more, or providing an outlet for my curiosity.. having me learn from the district computer geeks.. I was told "don't touch" and forbiden from using ANY computer at school. HS administrations are stupid, the live in a world of stagnation. anything new, or different, or outside of their realm is shutdown. if it wasn't for an internal moral structure, i probably would have become a kiddie, breaking everything in sight, just to piss them off. the problem is, i know, or find out about a lot of the activities of the geeks in different highschools around town, and out of the few dozen kids i talk to, 2-3 are like you. the rest are crack-crazed script kiddies. it's really sad.
I have a goal to get back into the education system, and teach the school administrations how to better handle the geeks. just like discussions of labeling, and categorizing kids who are above average, I want to find them, and get them going in the right direction, no more kiddies, no more warez, no more freaks.. but good, sharp kids who will become the next generation of kernel hackers, admins, and hacking teachers.
I know from personal experience that Linux replaced SCO, I know of atleast one system that was totaly replaced by SCO, where the database vendor ported the verticle app to linux, and now promotes it over their SCO product.
I have also seen several SCO systems replaced by NT, which i think has eaten more into SCO than linux has.
What I find odd was this situation, I was doing on the side desktop PC repair, and other misc maintence for a small laundry supply distribution company, they had a cute little AIX 3 box sitting in the corner, running a small verticle app/database to do all the ERP stuff. the VP knew the stability of unix, and wanted to stay with it when they did the replacement of the system for y2k issues.. (OS and database) I told them that they should look around to other software vendors, but they wanted to stick with the same system, to save training costs. I went to a couple meetings with them, to see what the software vendor was like.. it had to be the best example of a bunch of morons leaching the proffits of y2k bugs. several things bothered me about the setup of this system, they just didn't seem to have anyone who really knew unix. I warned them that the hardware they were being sold was over priced, and not a good buy.. but hey.. let's spend $7000 on a single PII-300, with no RAID. did i mention that this was only a year and a half ago? but the "officialy supported" platform was a Digital box.. not an alpha, just a plain old intel box. "i told you so" #1 now it's a totaly un-supported compaq legacy system. next I told them, stick with AIX or go linux. I contacted the database developer, and found that the system was simply running on top of an interprited language.. (i don't remember which) that was avaliable for just about every platform under the sun, including linux. (i thought there was source avaliable, but i can't be sure) I said great, let's do that.. "no.. that's not officialy tested" I'm hoping to go back in a year or two and upgrade the whole damn thing, get rid of the shitty hardware, and get them going on linux. either by sco emulation, or just porting the damn thing myself.
here in minnesota, we had a small conferece put on by a local ISP/linux VAR.. VA linux, redhat, corel were all there, and we packed the hotel conference room.. everyone enjoyed it, as far as I could tell, I really liked the survey question that was asked.. "how many people are running linux at work secretly?" and about 3/4 the people raised their hands.. luckly, i didn't have to.. linux is company policy :)
Moral values? since when does morals enter into a persons diet preferance? I can see you objecting to the bbq because of your diet preferance, but are you calling me immoral because i'm omnivorous?
I remember my old cyrix 166 CPU had a cool feature, by adding a small patch to the kernel, you could enable "low power on HLT" since linux's kernel actualy properly uses multi-tasking features of the i386, my "wow that's hot" single voltage cyrix could run at room temperature.. but if i were to do something like play quake, or run rc5.. the CPU would ramp up to full temp.
I agree.. things work smoothly now.. I added the single line to my sources.list, and did a apt-get update, apt-get install task... on the thing.. and it installed perfectly, upgrading my old gnome install. no broken packages at all.
/usr/bin/tcsh, and now it won't get past the inital login.. I even created a whole new blank account to test this.. to make sure it wasn't something else in my config.. nope.. it just won't do it.. I change my shell to bash.. and it works perfectly.. :(
the only complaint I have so far is that tcsh stoped working.. my shell is normaly
We have several linux controled big yellow robot arms in our factory, the handle alternator stator cores into and out of varnishing, and milling machines. once we finish installing a couple more arms, we will be processing one stator every 12 seconds. the big thing that has to be figured out, is sensing what parts are where, and also measuring them. we use linux systems with IR cameras and BT848 cards to sense, and measure to .003" so the milling machines can efficently cut the parts after being covered in varnish. I wish I had some pictures handy.
I have been looking at phone systems for several months, our phone var wants to sell us a big huge :) and even our embeded factory automation is linux. I have been trying to find _some_ kind of non-NT based VoIP PBX package, I thought I was close with vovida, but they ended up not doing PBX software anymore. so my search continues.
Fujitsu 9600 to replace our not so great Fujitsu Series 3. We also taked about VoIP phones, but all of the phones talk to an NT based PBX router to talk to our POTS and Channelized T1's incoming phone lines. this is totaly _not_ acceptable at a company that is working on 100% unix/linux installation.. our workstations are linux, our MRP server is a big old Unix (soon to be replaced by linux
Yes, I currently have a HUGE itch to start a GPL MRP/ERP system, but have the coding skills of an AOL user :)
I work at a midsized manufacturing company, and the general IS policy is, if we don't have source, let's see if we can write it. One of the bigest requirements to the new MRP systems we are shoping for is that we get source license (i wish there was an OSS MRP system) we think we have found the closest to perfect MRP system. My boss (CFO) is so happy now that we can simply install staroffice all over the company.. he likes StarCalc better than excel 97.
in a coperate envoiornment, this isn't an issue, since most machines are requesting DNS from a central, or slave DNS server, which are updated within seconds, and don't have to wait for the normal internet timeouts. at a previous company I worked for, we setup a DHCP server, and had to integrate it into the existing DNS update/request system.. (icky email based, but it was reliable, and fairly secure) because of the way the email system worked, (and the fact that it was HP/UX DNS) it took 10min for updates to happen. (cron job) but if we had repalced the DNS server with bind 8 we could have had the DHCP server use the Dynamic DNS update feature of bind 8. updating instantly.
The grape vine has told me that Veritas software will be releasing netbackup client and then later server.. it's expensive, but it's the BEST backup system out there.. the only thing that I know of that comes close is HP Omni-back.. but no linux for that one. there may also be a version of NETbackup lite.. (seagate backup exec was bought by Vertias recently.. this will become lite)
Yes, the reason is not the speed, or weather it does backups properly.. it's a cost of operation, and a reliabality factor.. travan tapes cost between 15 and 25 $ each, where dat tapes are around 5-10 $. DLT tapes are more expensive, but have a capacity of over 35 gig un-compressed. It's also a reliabilty thing. Travan tapes are limited to several hundred backup-restore cycles, DLT/DAT are in the thousands.. which means that they produce less errors. DLT tapes are even more cool, they have a shelf storage life of upto 30 years, compared to the 5 years of Travan (I don't know about DAT tapes)
Very interesting, What was the total cost of your system?
Things I could see improve your system:
drop the Apache RPM's and compile it.. Specificaly with the PGCC compiler, I have heard of 30+% speed improvements with it. you could even go for the PGCC based distro stampede for your base install.
look at mylex RAID boards.. they are supposed to work a little better than the AMI cards that Dell uses.
It'd be fun to send that box to mindcraft, and have them test it as same preformance or 90% preformance of the NT box.. but cost less than $5k
not $18,000