Screen shots do not prove anything. From the hardware specs. that I have seen, this thing is a PC with a good video card. Color me unimpressed. There are some big questions hanging around: What OS is this thing going to have? MS had stated it will be a "windows like" OS but not Windows Millenium or 2000 or CE. With Win2k SP1 and SP2, WinMe's next release canidate, and Win98 and WinCE support and bug fixes I can't see MS making yet another OS. Why don't they make just one good OS instead of tons of horrible ones? How much will this cost? The upper limit for gaming systems seems to be around $200-$300. Any higher and it will not sell. Since XBox is just a nice PC, and most PCs that sell below $500 require rebates based on using an overpriced ISP, will XBox be tied to MSN?
Actually, it gets worse. Because they only offer 8GB per card, you have to use multiple cards to get to any kind of enterprise size. 5 cards gives you only 40 GB at 105.6 MBps. Yuck. A good Fibre Channel card can give you 150-200 MBps over 1TB or more. Adding more PCI buses gets expensive and relies on OEM guys to make a special box for you. Check out the cost for multiple 64-bit 66 Mhz PCI Bus systems. This is not a good solution. Good cache managment on a RAID card can get this kind of performance per RAID drive using much less RAM. You computer doesn't have 64 MB of L1, 2, or 3 cache, does it?
"The biggest problem with 32 bit machines is not the 32 bit int, which is really sufficient for most things, it's the inability to address more than 4 gig of memory."
Actually Intel based systems can addres up to 64 GB of memory using Physical Address Extensions (PAE) for 36-bit addressing.
Hardware needs to be 64-bit compliant and/or support Dual Address Cycle (DAC) to address memory above 4 GB.
"because the machine justs sits on it's ass while the DMA moves the block."
If you are using a busmaster PCI device (which any SCSI or Fibre Channel card is) the card itself does the DMA. Most modern operating systems support non-blocking I/O. This means that a read/write call can get a pending response. The caller can than go about other things or wait on an event to signal the I/O completion. If the caller waits, the OS can run another thread or process until the event is signaled. If the caller doesn't wait, it can still be interrupted when its quantum expires.
I have worked on a Fibre Channel/RAID adapter that blows this thing out of the water. 110 MBps? In vanilla direct connect mode (no raid), our card did 190 MBps and 20,000 I/Os per second. With RAID and a 64 MB cache, we can beat that. 8GB? We worked with 1TB to 10TB databases. By putting only up to 8GB on one PCI card you are really limited. 64-bit, 66 Mhz PCI supports up to 528 MBps. Five of their cards on one bus would give you only 40 GB at a transfer rate of 105.6 MBps per card. You can add busses but that isn't cost effective. On other hand, you can put nearly unlimted storage on one of cards. For the best speed you can spread it out over multiple ports (our card has two) and multiple cards. 3 cards on a 64-bit, 66 Mhz PCI bus can still hit 176 MBps each (2 cards can hit 190 MBps each) with MUCH more storage. This thing is too small and too slow for their target market of enterprise computing.
Good points. Actually, I worked on a FibreChannel RAID adapter (hence the mention of it in the first post) and we were looking for replacement for WindRiver's IxWorks on StrongArm. It was I2O compliant (mostly) but was bloated and not too fast. We needed something that would give us a bang on the StrongArm but also work on a MIPS based platform for our next card. We looked at various possibilites including Linux and BSD. We ended up going with our own kernel and I2O shell. When every little bit counts, I suspect that a custom made system will always outperform an off the shelf product. The only drawback is the time it takes to create it.
They need people to use it. I suspect that Linus and his friends at Transmeta are going to have the most success in the embedded Linux market. If they want a bang for thier IPO buck they should have an annoucement about early adopters of the software. They need to grab a major cable box, cell phone, router, etc. Heck, even an intelligent I/O device like a FibreChannel RAID adapter would be nice.
"Lineo does not consider the following to be derivative works: - a driver loaded as a module into the Linux kernel - a module written to be plugged into an API defined specifically to support dynamic loading. - a program which uses a library is generally not a derivative work of that library - a library linked to a program is not a derivative work of the program - a program running as a process on a Linux system is not a derivative work of the Linux kernel "
How is this wrong? I don't understand the need for a one way only stance when it comes to software. OpenSource and ClosedSource can and should play together. I think that there has to be ways to make money off of Linux for it to continue to succeed. There is a lot of great software made free but there is also is a lot of great software made by for-profit companies.
"Lineo is not about squashing Microsoft..." Really? They are trying to fight off Embedded NT and Windows Powered (AKA WinCE). Check out who started them and still owns nearly half the company. Ray Noorda. Ray hates MS! He almost killed off Novel by trying to fight them in software combat. He was the one that was not happy just fighting them in the OS wars, he took them on in the office wars with Novel Perfect Office (now owned by Corel). So please do not tell me Ray is not about trying to squash MS. He has done more to fight MS then almost anyone. He put his carear and a ton of money on the line to fight them. He left Novel in disgrace only to rise up again with Caldera. Caldera fought MS over DR.DOS. Caldera is a Linux distributor and helps the cause.
There is nothing wrong with making money off of OpenSource!/. does it with banner ads above OpenSource articles. Linus did it by using his creation to get him a great silicon valley job working for a for-profit corporation. Lineo may not be our "friends" but they are most certainly not our enemies. They should be judged based on the quality of their product. If their products, services, and support are top notch then they are a friend in my book.
Unisys's ES7000 will support dynamic partitioning on Intel PIII and Itanium processors. It will be able to run mutiple operating systems at the same time. Supported operating systems include Windows NT, Windows 2000, and SCO Unix. Although the entire system isn't mainstream, it does use some standard parts. It supports up to 32 CPUs, 64 GB of memory, and 96 PCI slots.
So you want a company to spend their time and money on creating and running a great site but you expect them not to use advertising? You realize that by using junkbuster you are hurting the sites you are visiting that depend on advertising revenue. Personally, I think that longer download times are a small price to pay for a great site, like/. or CNN.com. If you eliminated all the ads, you would have to revert to a pay-per-view or subscription based model. I think that it is very important that free mediums still exist. Advertising allows companys to create sites that everyone can use, rich or poor.
Their motives are pretty simple. They want to know what things people download. By knowing what a person (or IP in this case) download's they can guess what they are interested in. By knowing what they are interested in they can make targeted advertising. Freeware supported through advertising is here to stay. Given the fact that you are going to see ads, what is wrong with the ads being for things that you are really interested in? What is the big deal anyway? I could really care less if everyone knew where I surfed and what I downloaded, especially if their purpose is to help me avoid pointless ads. The only thing that they are guilty of is bad software design. The "Download Demon" should make it clear that it is being installed, what it does, and how to remove it. Removal should be simple and complete. This isn't a privacy issue, though. It is just badly written software.
It runs on other chips. We currently use IxWorks on a StrongArm. We are moving to our own shell running on a MIPS chip.
As for speed...I am working on a FibreChannel Raid Adapter. We hit speeds of 190 MB/sec and 23,000 I/Os/sec. Imagine multiple boards on one PCI Bus! 32-bit, 33 Mhz PCI can only do 132 MB/sec. Even 64-bit, 66 Mhz PCI can only do 528 MB / sec. We saturate that with three cards. Infiniband is needed now!
You can use other processesors like StrongArm with IxWorks. We are using a MIPS proc with our own I2O compliant code (no IxWorks or VxWorks). It may not be open but it was pretty neat to see our board just magically work on Novel, Solaris, SCO, and even recent versions of Linux. If only MS would release their I2O support...they are on the committee! Now I have learned more than I even wanted about NT/Win2k device drivers.
Intel has Physical Address Extensions for 36-bit addressing for a limit of 64GB. Win2k supports this in their Server version. I believe Linux support is done or coming soon. I also think SCO supports it. I have no idea about Solaris and various BSDs. Over at Unisys we have a monster system called ES7000 that supports 64GB. It also supports 32 processors and 96 PCI slots. IA-64, AKA Merced, AKA Itanium supports full 64-bit addressing for a whopping 16 EB (exabytes!). Microsoft currently claims that Win64 wil only support up to 64 TB, although that may only be in Data Center Server. Anybody know what the other IA-64 projects will support?
Check out www.i2osig.org for an example of another project. I am working on an I2O FibreChannel-RAID adapter at my job. I2O allows hardware vendors to concentrate on making great hardware/firmware. The people who know the most about the OS, the OS vendors, can then concentrate on making great device drivers. The spec is open but currently you have to join the sig to redistribute the headers. Alan Cox, who is working on the Linux I2O drivers, is part of an effort to change that. There are I2O drivers for every major OS except one. You guessed it...Windows. Microsoft's I2O drivers have been infinitly delayed. They are next expected as part of Win2k SP2 if ever. What is crazy is that they are a major sig member and can't even get a working set of drivers. Thanks to them I can now claim to be a NT4/Win2k device driver export. Joy. Supported devices include LAN, Tape, Block Storage (usual disks), Generic SCSI and more.
These things are becoming more common each day. Data warehousing and SANs will create even more demand. Then you have video-on-demand servers that have full screen digital movies on tap. I am talking about full control video with all your VCR functions of stop, pause, fast forward, rewind, etc. stored remotely and sent to simple cable box. This kind of applications take up lots of space.
As for a data-starved CPU...not with IDE. IDE controllers use the host CPU for DMA so your CPU is quite busy. SCSI and FibreChannel adapters are busmasters but they are also faster. It is true that today's CPUs can push much harder than today's storage. It is also true that even a 66 Mhz, 64-bit bus is too slow. Interrupt sharing doesn't help either. That is why PCI is on its last legs. PCI-X will not last too long either with InfiniBand on the way.
I am working on a FibreChannel-RAID adapter at my job. FibreChannel-RAID answers these questions pretty well..for now. 1. I/O Bottelneck - Our card does 190 MB per second with 23,000 I/Os per second in non-RAID mode (direct connect). Another good things to do is offload as much as you can to storage processors. This saves the main CPU. Relying on System DMA is a big part of what kills IDE performance. Both SCSI and FibreChannel adapters are DMA Busmasters meaning they can read/write to host memory on their own, without using host processor. Always use hardware RAID (adapter or external/cabinet based) instead of software based. Software based RAID kills processor. 2. Backup - Various forms of RAID can help here. You can configure things so that there are always at least two copies of your data. This doesn't help for real backup where people need things that were overwritten, like tax records from five years ago. Using RAID arrays of FibreChannel tapes speeds things up quite a bit. As for network speeds...you are right about 100 Mbs being too slow. Heck 1 Gbps (or 128 MBps) are still too slow. That is why you use FC arrays that support multi-initiator. Here, multiple hosts are connected to a set of storage. In this model there is no server front-end to the storage share. No network latencies.
SAN technology is really just starting. Target mode systems (like EMC's storage cabinets) have great possibilities. Simple FC-Adapters can run in this mode as well. In a raw format, they can avoid the OS almost entirely, using it only for initialization and configuration. Backup can be done without any OS interaction.
"You are one spoiled bastard if you think TV is a right. It's a toy, 'kay?"
I think that the major forms of communication (Print, Phone, Radio, TV, Internet) need to be protected by the goverment. Information is power and whoever controls that information has all the power. I don't want any one capitalist company to have that kind of power. I don't want a single goverment agency to be the gods of information either but we need some sort of watchdog group to keep on eye on things. This group needs some real power to keep things safe for the consumer. I think that orgs like the FCC and DoJ are needed but they are not good enough. I don't know what a better solution would be but I feel that these groups are much better than nothing at all. Without their protection, costs would rise and choice would fall.
Do you want the US goverment to get involved with Microsoft? What about the MCIWorldCom/Sprint Merger? I know that the European agencies are giving it a look but the US scrutiny helps. Take a look at how much of the backbone MCIWorldCom owns without Sprint. It is a bit scary. I for one want someone watching them. Heck, I want a lot of big powers watching them. Capitalism works best when no one is winning. Once a company starts to win too much, only stupidity, bad luck, or regulation will slow them. How else can competition be enforced?
If the net had not taken hold in the US, it would not be what it is today. That's just a plain fact. A lot of the resources that went into the net (software, hardware) came from US companies. Many of the sites and companies that have driven the net are based in the US. The net is international and the time will come when the US doesn't matter but that time isn't here yet. SiliconValley and Redmond alone have a ton of power over the entire internet. The actions of large US companies can have an international reach. For example, Cisco, with its 85% market share, could begin to abuse that power. It would most likly be the DoJ that stops them. US goverment regulations matter internationaly when they effect US companies of the size of Microsoft and Cisco. This is true for any country with companies of this size. Japanese law can have a large effect through a company like Sony. As for Universities and new technologies...they are great places to start new technologies but it takes a business to make real use of them. The internet exploded when companies started making money off of it. Most people have internet access only because some ISP thought it could make money by selling it to them.
I don't know what the laws are in your neck of the woods for cable access but around here it is a local monopoly. I have two choice when it comes to cable tv: none or the one company in my area. To make matters worse, the larger area around Philadelphia, PA, USA contains only a few cable companies that are all connected to AT&T in some way. Take a guess what cable internet provider I have to choose: Exite@Home. I can't shop around for competition because there isn't any. There is no real solution to this without some form of government regulation. If there is one, let me know because I do feel that regulation is costly weapon and one that is a last resort. I just don't see another solution to this problem.
I dont't think so. At least not yet. For a moment, forget the Internet. Why is it that I can choose almost everything in my life but I can't choose something as simple and basic as where I get my MTV? I can choose where the electricity, the power for my TV comes from (I live in PA, USA) but I can't choose where the shows, the data come from? That is wrong. I think this type of control is why it took so long for innovations to come to cable. My cable system is about the same as it was in the mid 80s. I have a few more channels and a wireless remote. Wow. I still have to pay whatever the cable company asks unless the government controls them. If I owned a cable company, I wouldn't change a thing. Why bother making it faster, better, and cheaper? Where are your customers going to go? You may say that cable is a luxury and if you don't like it use some of the alternatives. Most of these alternatives are either too limiting (good old rabbit ears), too expensive (massive dish), or owned and priced by the same cable companies (small dish). I really don't think that cable is a luxury any more than the Internet is. There are many forms of important information only available through cable. CSPAN converage, for example. Several channels (Discovery, TLC, A&E, Bravo, etc.) offer high quality educational and artistic content. As for the company's investments; they will still make money off of them. Forcing AT&T (these guys again?) to open up their cable lines does not mean opening them up for free. It just means that AT&T must allow others to pay to use them. They can and would still make tons of money through there investment. They will also make money by increasing the power and popularity of the format. For example, some say IBM should have protected the PC like Apple did with Mac. IBM's chunk of the PC pie is bigger than Apple's whole Mac pie.
This goes to the heart of the DoJ case in my mind. You can draw many connections between AT&T before the split and Microsoft now. AT&T controlled the network and crushed innovation that came from the outside. Microsoft does the same. There is a problem with uncontrolled capitalism. It works very well when no single entity is too good at it. It fails when an entity like MS or AT&T becomes too good at the game. This is where the governement must come in and "level the playing ground" through regulation. It is the only solution to keep things competitive. Professional sports has known this for sometime. The teams that did the worst the previous year usually get some sort of compensation, usually first crack at new young talent. Now compare these new players to intellectual property in the tech. world. Some pro sports have spending limits so that the richest teams can not automatically become the best. This works very well in the NFL and the NHL and MLB really need to take a look at it. This leads to one solution that many people ignore in favor of sexier plans like a break up or open sourcing the OS. Scott McNeally has suggested that MS be banned from purchasing any intellectual property for five years. This would force MS to rely on their on development. They could spend as much as they want but they have to come from inside. If this had been law five years ago, much of MS's software would either not exist or look drastically different. For example, what is now known as Exchange was purchased and then modified. MS literally purchased their way into dominance in two major areas with HotMail and WebTV. Would Cisco have dethroned MS as the biggest company (in terms of market capitalization) without all of their purchases? WorldCom was just a business long distance telephone provider before their spending spree gave them control over half the Internet backbone without including Sprint's network which will soon be added. What will stop the recently formed ExxonMobil from becoming StandardOil again? Regulation is the only way that government can do its job of keeping things competitive. If that means more taxes to pay for the expesive regulation, so be it. I know that I will get value for those dollars through increased competition. If those tax dollars buy me the next innovation that would have been otherwise crushed then I think that it was money well spent.
So to answer your question, no. MS clustering is really more for failover then load balancing. The load balancing works but not nearly as well as you like. The basic problem is that Win2k/NT is not designed to cluster at its core. Linux can be made to do that and thus has a destinct advantage.
The author mentions the need for a single process to map over 4GB of ram. This is really only a very small piece of the puzzle though. The OS can really benefit from seeing more than 4GB. Win2k supports Intel's PAE (36-bit addressing on IA32) for up to 64 GB of memory. Win64 on Itanium/IA64 supports up to 16 TB of memory. This greatly reduces swap and allows massive disk caches. Programs can be left in memory all the time. Swap is the biggest killer of time, cpu, and overall performance. File system caches can grow so that the second time a program or library is loaded it comes right out of cache. Consider a WebServer/Database system. The web server can keep all of its static files in memory. The database can keep all its structures in memory. In Win2k applications can allocate physical memory that will never be moved or swaped out. This gives applications that need it total control. Memory is the only really fast component in the system. The more memory a system has the less often it has to access its disks.
First, its pretty unfair to critique an article before you read it. The author of this news post should have waited until we all can read it instead of giving us his version. It's like a bad movie review before the movie is out. The ideas expressed seem very similar to ideas discussed in, "The Age of Spiritual Machines" by Ray Kurzweil. See page 179-186. Ray takes a more hopeful view but also feels that Kaczynski makes some good points. He talks about the Luddite movement and the futility of going back to nature.
"Although he (Kaczynski) makes a compelling case for the dangers and damages that have accompanied industrialization, his proposed vision is neither compelling nor feasible. After all, there is too little nature left to return to, and there are too many human beings. For better or worse, we're stuck with technology.
...
He makes the basic judgement that the 'bad parts' outweigh the 'good parts' (of technology).
...
It is conceivavle that humanity will ultimatly regret its technological path. Although the risks are quite real, my fundamental belief is that the potential gains are worth the risk."
I tend to agree with Kurzweil here. Also, on the subject of increasing computing power:
(In 2019) A $1,000 computing device (in 1999 dollars) is now approximately equal to the computational ability of the human brain (20 million billion calculations per second)."
This isn't true intelligence but if AI software improves at the same rate as computing hardware, it may be one and the same. Anyone interested in this topic should really check out the book. It explores all of these issues plus a lot more.
Your idea of a public database is a good one except in not noting how sites get in. Who is a valid judge? I think that a voluntary submission system may work for the most part but it may run into problems the same way some films do. Everyone knows that some films are just obvious porn. No one has a problem with those films. People do have a problem with some films that claim to use sex, nudity, and violence for art's sake. All of these things can and should be used in artistic ways. Should we limit artistic expression to avoid offending someone? Where do we draw the line? Who are we to draw one? Why does one need to be drawn anyway?
Online porn is not the problem...poor parenting is. I have to agree with comment:
"The damage, if any, caused to kids by seeing a few pornographic images absolutely pales in comparison to growing up with no real parental contact."
So true. Parents must learn that can not prevent their kids from seeing, hearing, reading, and learning about "bad" things. You just have to teach them how to deal with these things. Parents should be willing to talk frankly about sex and nudity with children. Kids should not have to figure things like this out on their own. Not talking about these things is what makes a porn site dangerous. Kids who have an open relationship with their parents will either know enough not to care much about a "bad" site or be calm in the fact that they can ask their parents about it later. This issue is an old one that hits every medium. Some say that sex and violence on tv is warping young kids minds. They point to the shows that glamorize sex and violence as ruining kids. If the WWF's The Rock has more influence on your kids then you do, it is your fault, not TV's. Remember the big talk about Playboy magazines in 7-11 stores? Guess what parents...if a kid wants to get a Playboy, he or she will. Period. There is nothing that you can do about it. All you can do is teach them to handle it and answer their questions honestly. You can't raise kids in a bubble because someday they will have to go into the real world and deal with all of these "bad" things.
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Screen shots do not prove anything. From the hardware specs. that I have seen, this thing is a PC with a good video card. Color me unimpressed. There are some big questions hanging around:
What OS is this thing going to have? MS had stated it will be a "windows like" OS but not Windows Millenium or 2000 or CE. With Win2k SP1 and SP2, WinMe's next release canidate, and Win98 and WinCE support and bug fixes I can't see MS making yet another OS. Why don't they make just one good OS instead of tons of horrible ones?
How much will this cost? The upper limit for gaming systems seems to be around $200-$300. Any higher and it will not sell. Since XBox is just a nice PC, and most PCs that sell below $500 require rebates based on using an overpriced ISP, will XBox be tied to MSN?
Actually, it gets worse. Because they only offer 8GB per card, you have to use multiple cards to get to any kind of enterprise size. 5 cards gives you only 40 GB at 105.6 MBps. Yuck. A good Fibre Channel card can give you 150-200 MBps over 1TB or more. Adding more PCI buses gets expensive and relies on OEM guys to make a special box for you. Check out the cost for multiple 64-bit 66 Mhz PCI Bus systems. This is not a good solution.
Good cache managment on a RAID card can get this kind of performance per RAID drive using much less RAM. You computer doesn't have 64 MB of L1, 2, or 3 cache, does it?
"The biggest problem with 32 bit machines is not the 32 bit int, which is really sufficient for most things, it's the inability to address more than 4 gig of memory."
Actually Intel based systems can addres up to 64 GB of memory using Physical Address Extensions (PAE) for 36-bit addressing.
Hardware needs to be 64-bit compliant and/or support Dual Address Cycle (DAC) to address memory above 4 GB.
"because the machine justs sits on it's ass while the DMA moves the block."
If you are using a busmaster PCI device (which any SCSI or Fibre Channel card is) the card itself does the DMA. Most modern operating systems support non-blocking I/O. This means that a read/write call can get a pending response. The caller can than go about other things or wait on an event to signal the I/O completion. If the caller waits, the OS can run another thread or process until the event is signaled. If the caller doesn't wait, it can still be interrupted when its quantum expires.
I have worked on a Fibre Channel/RAID adapter that blows this thing out of the water. 110 MBps? In vanilla direct connect mode (no raid), our card did 190 MBps and 20,000 I/Os per second. With RAID and a 64 MB cache, we can beat that. 8GB? We worked with 1TB to 10TB databases. By putting only up to 8GB on one PCI card you are really limited. 64-bit, 66 Mhz PCI supports up to 528 MBps. Five of their cards on one bus would give you only 40 GB at a transfer rate of 105.6 MBps per card. You can add busses but that isn't cost effective. On other hand, you can put nearly unlimted storage on one of cards. For the best speed you can spread it out over multiple ports (our card has two) and multiple cards. 3 cards on a 64-bit, 66 Mhz PCI bus can still hit 176 MBps each (2 cards can hit 190 MBps each) with MUCH more storage.
This thing is too small and too slow for their target market of enterprise computing.
Good points. Actually, I worked on a FibreChannel RAID adapter (hence the mention of it in the first post) and we were looking for replacement for WindRiver's IxWorks on StrongArm. It was I2O compliant (mostly) but was bloated and not too fast. We needed something that would give us a bang on the StrongArm but also work on a MIPS based platform for our next card. We looked at various possibilites including Linux and BSD. We ended up going with our own kernel and I2O shell. When every little bit counts, I suspect that a custom made system will always outperform an off the shelf product. The only drawback is the time it takes to create it.
I got a 2 through my karma. I missed the earlier ES7000 posts because I was browsing at a higher score at the time. Sorry for the repeat info.
They need people to use it. I suspect that Linus and his friends at Transmeta are going to have the most success in the embedded Linux market. If they want a bang for thier IPO buck they should have an annoucement about early adopters of the software. They need to grab a major cable box, cell phone, router, etc. Heck, even an intelligent I/O device like a FibreChannel RAID adapter would be nice.
"Lineo does not consider the following to be derivative works:
/. does it with banner ads above OpenSource articles. Linus did it by using his creation to get him a great silicon valley job working for a for-profit corporation.
- a driver loaded as a module into the Linux kernel
- a module written to be plugged into an API defined specifically to support dynamic loading.
- a program which uses a library is generally not a derivative work of that library
- a library linked to a program is not a derivative work of the program
- a program running as a process on a Linux system is not a derivative work of the Linux kernel "
How is this wrong? I don't understand the need for a one way only stance when it comes to software. OpenSource and ClosedSource can and should play together. I think that there has to be ways to make money off of Linux for it to continue to succeed. There is a lot of great software made free but there is also is a lot of great software made by for-profit companies.
"Lineo is not about squashing Microsoft..."
Really? They are trying to fight off Embedded NT and Windows Powered (AKA WinCE). Check out who started them and still owns nearly half the company. Ray Noorda. Ray hates MS! He almost killed off Novel by trying to fight them in software combat. He was the one that was not happy just fighting them in the OS wars, he took them on in the office wars with Novel Perfect Office (now owned by Corel). So please do not tell me Ray is not about trying to squash MS. He has done more to fight MS then almost anyone. He put his carear and a ton of money on the line to fight them. He left Novel in disgrace only to rise up again with Caldera. Caldera fought MS over DR.DOS. Caldera is a Linux distributor and helps the cause.
There is nothing wrong with making money off of OpenSource!
Lineo may not be our "friends" but they are most certainly not our enemies. They should be judged based on the quality of their product. If their products, services, and support are top notch then they are a friend in my book.
Unisys's ES7000 will support dynamic partitioning on Intel PIII and Itanium processors. It will be able to run mutiple operating systems at the same time. Supported operating systems include Windows NT, Windows 2000, and SCO Unix.
Although the entire system isn't mainstream, it does use some standard parts. It supports up to 32 CPUs, 64 GB of memory, and 96 PCI slots.
So you want a company to spend their time and money on creating and running a great site but you expect them not to use advertising? /. or CNN.com. If you eliminated all the ads, you would have to revert to a pay-per-view or subscription based model. I think that it is very important that free mediums still exist. Advertising allows companys to create sites that everyone can use, rich or poor.
You realize that by using junkbuster you are hurting the sites you are visiting that depend on advertising revenue. Personally, I think that longer download times are a small price to pay for a great site, like
Their motives are pretty simple. They want to know what things people download. By knowing what a person (or IP in this case) download's they can guess what they are interested in. By knowing what they are interested in they can make targeted advertising.
Freeware supported through advertising is here to stay. Given the fact that you are going to see ads, what is wrong with the ads being for things that you are really interested in?
What is the big deal anyway? I could really care less if everyone knew where I surfed and what I downloaded, especially if their purpose is to help me avoid pointless ads.
The only thing that they are guilty of is bad software design. The "Download Demon" should make it clear that it is being installed, what it does, and how to remove it. Removal should be simple and complete. This isn't a privacy issue, though. It is just badly written software.
It runs on other chips. We currently use IxWorks on a StrongArm. We are moving to our own shell running on a MIPS chip.
/sec. Imagine multiple boards on one PCI Bus! 32-bit, 33 Mhz PCI can only do 132 MB /sec. Even 64-bit, 66 Mhz PCI can only do 528 MB / sec. We saturate that with three cards. Infiniband is needed now!
As for speed...I am working on a FibreChannel Raid Adapter. We hit speeds of 190 MB/sec and 23,000 I/Os
You can use other processesors like StrongArm with IxWorks. We are using a MIPS proc with our own I2O compliant code (no IxWorks or VxWorks).
It may not be open but it was pretty neat to see our board just magically work on Novel, Solaris, SCO, and even recent versions of Linux.
If only MS would release their I2O support...they are on the committee! Now I have learned more than I even wanted about NT/Win2k device drivers.
Intel has Physical Address Extensions for 36-bit addressing for a limit of 64GB. Win2k supports this in their Server version. I believe Linux support is done or coming soon. I also think SCO supports it. I have no idea about Solaris and various BSDs. Over at Unisys we have a monster system called ES7000 that supports 64GB. It also supports 32 processors and 96 PCI slots.
IA-64, AKA Merced, AKA Itanium supports full 64-bit addressing for a whopping 16 EB (exabytes!). Microsoft currently claims that Win64 wil only support up to 64 TB, although that may only be in Data Center Server. Anybody know what the other IA-64 projects will support?
Check out www.i2osig.org for an example of another project. I am working on an I2O FibreChannel-RAID adapter at my job.
I2O allows hardware vendors to concentrate on making great hardware/firmware. The people who know the most about the OS, the OS vendors, can then concentrate on making great device drivers. The spec is open but currently you have to join the sig to redistribute the headers. Alan Cox, who is working on the Linux I2O drivers, is part of an effort to change that.
There are I2O drivers for every major OS except one. You guessed it...Windows. Microsoft's I2O drivers have been infinitly delayed. They are next expected as part of Win2k SP2 if ever. What is crazy is that they are a major sig member and can't even get a working set of drivers. Thanks to them I can now claim to be a NT4/Win2k device driver export. Joy.
Supported devices include LAN, Tape, Block Storage (usual disks), Generic SCSI and more.
These things are becoming more common each day. Data warehousing and SANs will create even more demand. Then you have video-on-demand servers that have full screen digital movies on tap. I am talking about full control video with all your VCR functions of stop, pause, fast forward, rewind, etc. stored remotely and sent to simple cable box. This kind of applications take up lots of space.
As for a data-starved CPU...not with IDE. IDE controllers use the host CPU for DMA so your CPU is quite busy. SCSI and FibreChannel adapters are busmasters but they are also faster. It is true that today's CPUs can push much harder than today's storage. It is also true that even a 66 Mhz, 64-bit bus is too slow. Interrupt sharing doesn't help either. That is why PCI is on its last legs. PCI-X will not last too long either with InfiniBand on the way.
I am working on a FibreChannel-RAID adapter at my job. FibreChannel-RAID answers these questions pretty well..for now.
1. I/O Bottelneck - Our card does 190 MB per second with 23,000 I/Os per second in non-RAID mode (direct connect). Another good things to do is offload as much as you can to storage processors. This saves the main CPU. Relying on System DMA is a big part of what kills IDE performance. Both SCSI and FibreChannel adapters are DMA Busmasters meaning they can read/write to host memory on their own, without using host processor. Always use hardware RAID (adapter or external/cabinet based) instead of software based. Software based RAID kills processor.
2. Backup - Various forms of RAID can help here. You can configure things so that there are always at least two copies of your data. This doesn't help for real backup where people need things that were overwritten, like tax records from five years ago. Using RAID arrays of FibreChannel tapes speeds things up quite a bit.
As for network speeds...you are right about 100 Mbs being too slow. Heck 1 Gbps (or 128 MBps) are still too slow. That is why you use FC arrays that support multi-initiator. Here, multiple hosts are connected to a set of storage. In this model there is no server front-end to the storage share. No network latencies.
SAN technology is really just starting. Target mode systems (like EMC's storage cabinets) have great possibilities. Simple FC-Adapters can run in this mode as well. In a raw format, they can avoid the OS almost entirely, using it only for initialization and configuration. Backup can be done without any OS interaction.
"You are one spoiled bastard if you think TV is a right. It's a toy, 'kay?"
I think that the major forms of communication (Print, Phone, Radio, TV, Internet) need to be protected by the goverment. Information is power and whoever controls that information has all the power. I don't want any one capitalist company to have that kind of power. I don't want a single goverment agency to be the gods of information either but we need some sort of watchdog group to keep on eye on things. This group needs some real power to keep things safe for the consumer. I think that orgs like the FCC and DoJ are needed but they are not good enough. I don't know what a better solution would be but I feel that these groups are much better than nothing at all.
Without their protection, costs would rise and choice would fall.
Do you want the US goverment to get involved with Microsoft? What about the MCIWorldCom/Sprint Merger? I know that the European agencies are giving it a look but the US scrutiny helps. Take a look at how much of the backbone MCIWorldCom owns without Sprint. It is a bit scary. I for one want someone watching them. Heck, I want a lot of big powers watching them.
Capitalism works best when no one is winning. Once a company starts to win too much, only stupidity, bad luck, or regulation will slow them. How else can competition be enforced?
If the net had not taken hold in the US, it would not be what it is today. That's just a plain fact. A lot of the resources that went into the net (software, hardware) came from US companies. Many of the sites and companies that have driven the net are based in the US. The net is international and the time will come when the US doesn't matter but that time isn't here yet.
SiliconValley and Redmond alone have a ton of power over the entire internet. The actions of large US companies can have an international reach. For example, Cisco, with its 85% market share, could begin to abuse that power. It would most likly be the DoJ that stops them. US goverment regulations matter internationaly when they effect US companies of the size of Microsoft and Cisco. This is true for any country with companies of this size. Japanese law can have a large effect through a company like Sony.
As for Universities and new technologies...they are great places to start new technologies but it takes a business to make real use of them. The internet exploded when companies started making money off of it. Most people have internet access only because some ISP thought it could make money by selling it to them.
I don't know what the laws are in your neck of the woods for cable access but around here it is a local monopoly. I have two choice when it comes to cable tv: none or the one company in my area. To make matters worse, the larger area around Philadelphia, PA, USA contains only a few cable companies that are all connected to AT&T in some way. Take a guess what cable internet provider I have to choose: Exite@Home. I can't shop around for competition because there isn't any. There is no real solution to this without some form of government regulation. If there is one, let me know because I do feel that regulation is costly weapon and one that is a last resort. I just don't see another solution to this problem.
I dont't think so. At least not yet. For a moment, forget the Internet. Why is it that I can choose almost everything in my life but I can't choose something as simple and basic as where I get my MTV? I can choose where the electricity, the power for my TV comes from (I live in PA, USA) but I can't choose where the shows, the data come from? That is wrong. I think this type of control is why it took so long for innovations to come to cable. My cable system is about the same as it was in the mid 80s. I have a few more channels and a wireless remote. Wow. I still have to pay whatever the cable company asks unless the government controls them. If I owned a cable company, I wouldn't change a thing. Why bother making it faster, better, and cheaper? Where are your customers going to go?
You may say that cable is a luxury and if you don't like it use some of the alternatives. Most of these alternatives are either too limiting (good old rabbit ears), too expensive (massive dish), or owned and priced by the same cable companies (small dish). I really don't think that cable is a luxury any more than the Internet is. There are many forms of important information only available through cable. CSPAN converage, for example. Several channels (Discovery, TLC, A&E, Bravo, etc.) offer high quality educational and artistic content.
As for the company's investments; they will still make money off of them. Forcing AT&T (these guys again?) to open up their cable lines does not mean opening them up for free. It just means that AT&T must allow others to pay to use them. They can and would still make tons of money through there investment. They will also make money by increasing the power and popularity of the format. For example, some say IBM should have protected the PC like Apple did with Mac. IBM's chunk of the PC pie is bigger than Apple's whole Mac pie.
This goes to the heart of the DoJ case in my mind. You can draw many connections between AT&T before the split and Microsoft now. AT&T controlled the network and crushed innovation that came from the outside. Microsoft does the same.
There is a problem with uncontrolled capitalism. It works very well when no single entity is too good at it. It fails when an entity like MS or AT&T becomes too good at the game. This is where the governement must come in and "level the playing ground" through regulation. It is the only solution to keep things competitive.
Professional sports has known this for sometime. The teams that did the worst the previous year usually get some sort of compensation, usually first crack at new young talent. Now compare these new players to intellectual property in the tech. world. Some pro sports have spending limits so that the richest teams can not automatically become the best. This works very well in the NFL and the NHL and MLB really need to take a look at it.
This leads to one solution that many people ignore in favor of sexier plans like a break up or open sourcing the OS. Scott McNeally has suggested that MS be banned from purchasing any intellectual property for five years. This would force MS to rely on their on development. They could spend as much as they want but they have to come from inside. If this had been law five years ago, much of MS's software would either not exist or look drastically different. For example, what is now known as Exchange was purchased and then modified. MS literally purchased their way into dominance in two major areas with HotMail and WebTV.
Would Cisco have dethroned MS as the biggest company (in terms of market capitalization) without all of their purchases? WorldCom was just a business long distance telephone provider before their spending spree gave them control over half the Internet backbone without including Sprint's network which will soon be added. What will stop the recently formed ExxonMobil from becoming StandardOil again?
Regulation is the only way that government can do its job of keeping things competitive. If that means more taxes to pay for the expesive regulation, so be it. I know that I will get value for those dollars through increased competition. If those tax dollars buy me the next innovation that would have been otherwise crushed then I think that it was money well spent.
So to answer your question, no. MS clustering is really more for failover then load balancing. The load balancing works but not nearly as well as you like. The basic problem is that Win2k/NT is not designed to cluster at its core. Linux can be made to do that and thus has a destinct advantage.
The author mentions the need for a single process to map over 4GB of ram. This is really only a very small piece of the puzzle though. The OS can really benefit from seeing more than 4GB. Win2k supports Intel's PAE (36-bit addressing on IA32) for up to 64 GB of memory. Win64 on Itanium/IA64 supports up to 16 TB of memory. This greatly reduces swap and allows massive disk caches. Programs can be left in memory all the time. Swap is the biggest killer of time, cpu, and overall performance. File system caches can grow so that the second time a program or library is loaded it comes right out of cache.
Consider a WebServer/Database system. The web server can keep all of its static files in memory. The database can keep all its structures in memory. In Win2k applications can allocate physical memory that will never be moved or swaped out. This gives applications that need it total control. Memory is the only really fast component in the system. The more memory a system has the less often it has to access its disks.
The ideas expressed seem very similar to ideas discussed in, "The Age of Spiritual Machines" by Ray Kurzweil. See page 179-186. Ray takes a more hopeful view but also feels that Kaczynski makes some good points. He talks about the Luddite movement and the futility of going back to nature.
I tend to agree with Kurzweil here. Also, on the subject of increasing computing power:
This isn't true intelligence but if AI software improves at the same rate as computing hardware, it may be one and the same. Anyone interested in this topic should really check out the book. It explores all of these issues plus a lot more.
Your idea of a public database is a good one except in not noting how sites get in. Who is a valid judge? I think that a voluntary submission system may work for the most part but it may run into problems the same way some films do. Everyone knows that some films are just obvious porn. No one has a problem with those films. People do have a problem with some films that claim to use sex, nudity, and violence for art's sake. All of these things can and should be used in artistic ways. Should we limit artistic expression to avoid offending someone? Where do we draw the line? Who are we to draw one? Why does one need to be drawn anyway?
So true. Parents must learn that can not prevent their kids from seeing, hearing, reading, and learning about "bad" things. You just have to teach them how to deal with these things. Parents should be willing to talk frankly about sex and nudity with children. Kids should not have to figure things like this out on their own. Not talking about these things is what makes a porn site dangerous. Kids who have an open relationship with their parents will either know enough not to care much about a "bad" site or be calm in the fact that they can ask their parents about it later.
This issue is an old one that hits every medium. Some say that sex and violence on tv is warping young kids minds. They point to the shows that glamorize sex and violence as ruining kids. If the WWF's The Rock has more influence on your kids then you do, it is your fault, not TV's. Remember the big talk about Playboy magazines in 7-11 stores? Guess what parents...if a kid wants to get a Playboy, he or she will. Period. There is nothing that you can do about it. All you can do is teach them to handle it and answer their questions honestly. You can't raise kids in a bubble because someday they will have to go into the real world and deal with all of these "bad" things.