That Dell brochure is talking from its hat - Apache on a *Palm Pilot* can manage 20k hits/day down the serial cable. Linus oughta sue:-)
If you look at the SpecWeb99 results to date, the number 2 and 3 slots seem to be held by Red Hat / Linux / Tux running on Dell kit, 8 and 4 CPU boxen respectively; the one system to beat them was fairly serious $100k iron - a 12-CPU IBM RS/6000 server - running the infamous Zeus. So maybe Tux is the best webserver?:-)
The real joke is the fact that it is dyanmics that matter; any piece of junk can serve a ton of static content all day, you only have to haul it off the disk and push it down the damn wire.
At work, we front end on the cheapest Intel-based rackmounts we can find, using Apache 1.3.12 on FreeBSD (more secure than Linux) - since 90% of what we serve by volume (99.9% by server load) is dynamic content, the load average on those boxes barely flickers up to 0.05 on a busy day.
IIRC Walnut Creek used to run ftp.cdrom.com on a single 4-way Xeon box (Apache / ProFTPd / FreeBSD), and push about a terabyte a day of downloads. No worries.
Whatever you set up, load is unlikely to be an issue.
Like all the stuff in the IT press about H1's and cheap labor, this is utter horseshit. Have any of these people ever tried to hire good developers? Or, for that matter, crap developers? Thought not.
No, I *don't* want some idiot who's decided that flipping burgers doesn't pay enough, and has done the 6 week intensive VB course at the local community college, because, "err, like, IT people make, like, 30 bucks an hour, right?"; I want a SOFTWARE ENGINEER, this means a professional, with a university education, and preferably some experience (though we do hire a percentage of smart, upstanding college grads, and put them in an environment where they get proper mentorship).
I am the CTO of a venture backed startup in the USA.
We hire every shit hot developer that comes our way, no matter what color they are or where they come from. Does anyone seriously believe companies would go to all the crap the INS makes us do if we could get enough American citizens?
We are a Java shop, but we have hired people with no Java experience. None whatsoever. A good software engineer (note - not "coder" or "programmer") is good in any language; I personally can code in over 20, and none of the skills I consider important are at all relevant to which language you use.
A typical counterexample: I had one resume sent to me by an email blast from Monster (presumably sent to every registered company). The guy was older, had good skills, no Java. Also, curiously, all his lkast 5 jobs have been in the same small town in VA. So, I start a phone interview, and discover that he will *only* accept a job in this one horse town - I can't remember the name, it sure as hell wasn't Norfolk, Arlington or anywhere you've heard of. I said, "You did read on our website that we're based in Austin TX?" and he said, "What website?". So, is it the fault of the British, Indian, Canadian Chinese or Polish guys at our company that he's unemployed? You decide.
Our *average* engineer has a degree and 7 years of experience. We have an *awesome* dev team. It would be a good deal smaller if I had only US citizens to pick from.
Check out the devices in the book Distress by Greg Egan - even though it's over 15 years old, he hits the target strikingly well; I can see them being in the stores by 2007.
This kind of "peeking" is extremely professionally unethical - how would you like it if your doctor's secretary had a snigger over your file and shared it with your neighbours?
If you were working for me I'd fire your ass, no matter how good you are (or not).
And also note that in the field of 8-bit fonts, MS has it?s own incompatible ?standards? (like codepage 437) which it will cheerfully transmit in lieu of (and under the MIME headings of) standards like ISO-8859
One of the other interesting tricks was the PURE executable type and the "p" permission flag; this allowed the OS to preload and link an executable (remember, not all Amiga's had virtual addressing) and then have it used many times by multiple processes.
Coding a pure executable meant avoiding global variables (i.e. static in C) - in typical C you'd malloc a struct with all the context in at the top of main and pass a pointer to it into each function.
There were some packages which implemented virtual memory on 68030 and higher Amigas; none of them worked flawlessly as I recall. I still have a 10Mb A3000/040 (8Mb Fast, 2Mb Chip) which runs lots of things well. I only recently switched from ProPage to StarOffice:-)
If you have the RAM, then just pre-read all the files with something like:
tar cf/dev/null...files...
Running something like this in a cron process is good to stop important binaries (Communicator, XMMS) being swapped out by your home machine's email daemons while you're out.
So, it appears that doing something that is legal in the place where you are and is theoretically outside of U.S. jurisdiction is not necessarily a defense, if you're a U.S. citizen.
The jurisdiction of US federal law is US territories plus US citizens. This is common of most countries, e.g. the UK (well, England and Scotland to be precise) use this to prosecute people who use child prostitutes in Thailand. This is how Mossad could justify snatching Mordechai Vanunu in Italy.
There was a case recently of Americans in tax exile in the Carribean against whom a writ was issued by a redneck judge somewhere for tax evasion (probably the same one who ordered the handover of a German company's domain name to a South Carolina company, only to be frustrated by the limit of his jurisdiction) - there is no way for the US to obtain an extradition order (that depends on satisfying the local courts of the case too) but if these folks ever set foot back in the US they will be arrested.
Life, liberty and the pursuit of lobbyists. Enjoy!
Furthermore, Netscape will never let you view the source of a webpage with only a few clicks (in the right-click menu in IE, there's an option, "View Source,"....
Have to call bullshit on this one - in fact, it's one of the rare things NS it does better than IE: "View - Page Source" from the menu in NS 4.x, and you can also do right button on a frame and view it's source, both with a single mouse action.
Nearly all blank media is used for pirating music, so we have the blank media tax (and pragmatically, how many CompUSA customers have the 65Gb of non-copyrighted data that merits a 100 spindle for $29.99+tax?
Nearly all home PC's have a pirated copy of Microsoft Office. So, why not add a $499 royalty tax to new PC's and pay it straight to Microsoft?
Well, I have 12 years driving history and a motorsport ASN licence as well as road licence from the UK, but here in Texas I pay the same high rate as you due to lack of having held a US licence for long. The double joke is that not only am I an experienced driver, the standards for the previous driving licences I hold are much, much higher than the joke of a test put forth by the Texas DPS.
Also, drinking and driving is still considered to be "cool" here, while in Europe drunk drivers are as ostracised as smokers are in the USA.
The biggest causes of accidents in Texas? Drunk driving and incompetence.
Well, if it's anything to go by about AT&T, we have Southwestern Bell here as our local monopoly telco, and they suck rocks. Reminds me of British Telecom around 8 years ago. A bit of CLEC will do them a world of good.
...it really is......but there are untapped opportunities for originality in puzzles.
The Lemmings series was a true hit, IMHO the best computer game ever, with very innovative use of the mouse as a then relatively new input device for a mass market computer (it was an Amiga game; Mac's were business machines then, and PC's ran DOS). Why hasn't there been some more stuff like that?
Does anyone else remember the following British 8-bit puzzles....
Xor (BBC, Spectrum) - pure turn based cellular puzzle with devilishly hard problems. The icons were chickens, fish, dollies, etc.
Sentinel (Spectrum) - use a point to point move sequence sneak up a mountain avoiding the gaze of a slowly rotating automaton. The pieces were pine trees.
Imogen (BBC) - cute monochrome (done for the resolution) semi-realtime puzzle, though very restrictive, with some sick jokes. Character was a wizard who could turn into a monkey, dog and bird.
Pooyan (Spectrum) - realtime tower climbing platform puzzle with a twist - the tower was a cylinder, with corridors.
Sounds like this fellow is a real luddite. Some people get into IT from all sorts of wierd areas, and get stuck at a certain technology level. It's a sad fact that 90% of people in software development are unqualified:
When was the last time you saw a bridge design approved by someone without a degree in structural or civil engineering?
When was the last time you saw production code designed by someone without a degree in computer science?
The antithesis of this fellow is my father, who has worked in IT for over 35 years, has been there, done that and seen it all, works mostly with COBOL and mainframe technology but is a keen advocate of both Java and Linux.
On the other hand, there is such a thing as too much technological complexity. The last company I worked for (around 1000 people) had all sorts of fancy custom platform code, a tool to simulate VB's "controls" in HTML using callback triggers, an object-relational mapper and all that stuff (they're now in the process of shoehorning EJB into the mix) and it was all full of inconsitencies and ran like a dog. Product revs were always late and bug ridden. The consulting / deployment group's main activity was hacking round this monster to use SQL directly against the DB.
By contrast, in our little startup we have produced a first rev of a server side Java app from cold in 5 months; no fancy crap, a relational data model, no EJB, no ASP - it's lightning quick, it works, and we can deploy a site in about 30 minutes net of customising the HTML and images (a code free process).
Of course, it helps that our 45 employee organisation has more engineering management talent (and I don't count towards that:-) than that 1000 person organisation had.
The screen takeover bid is only a feature of the Win32 version, or at least, it doesn't really have the same potency under Gnome, KDE or CDE (it appears as a fulscreen sized window). I remember being confused when someone reported that to me about the Win-version. It can be turned off by some menu option, not that easy to find though.
StarOffice is great, in terms of relegating VMware to occasional use, and in some feature areas it is superior to MS-Office - the areas in which it needs work are its primary real-world feature, MS-Office compatibility:
1. Better and better Office 97/2k file format compatibility
2. Remove the annoying "Do you want to save this as an sdw/sdc file?" feature - make the MS-Office file formats selectable as the default
I have never had anything other than my Linux box on TW/RoadRunner - there are a number of excellent scripts / tools which are portable, open source replacements for Road Runner Manager. I got my system online for the first time 11 minutes after getting in the door with the cable modem, including compiling rrdhcpcd/rrlogind - a number I have yet to hear of a Time Warner tech matching on Windows.:-)
Here in Austin TX, AFAICT Linux outnumbers MacOS on their network, but they are doubtless largely blissfully unaware. The reason they did away with the login widget was no doubt simplicity, and the fact that the touted "nanny" feature of multiple passwords was little used. They now appear to use the modem's MAC address for authentication.
I recently had them pay me a visit to replace a dead cable modem, and the tech called in the modem serial number - maybe just show though? He also happily tested the circuit using command line ping from a bash shell without comment.
I am the only one to see this as an issue because of its proprietary nature? AOL is trying to portalize and proprietarize its customers. This to me is the cultural antithesis of open source.
They have office suites which are 100% file format compatible with MS Office 97, and that is the killer app.
Note my wording - it's not that Excel is any better than StarCalc for the average user, because it isn't - StarCalc actually does quite a few things better, and overall functionally it's probably a tie. It's the fact that Excel reads and writes.xls files arriving by email, seamlessly.
The proprietary Office 97 file formats, especially Word's.doc, are the lingua franca of business today. Compatibility with them is the primary driver which forced Win 3.x / Office 6.0 users to upgrade.
At work, we have around 30 Linux machines, and around 10 boxed sets of Red Hat, most of which came with Penguin Computing or IBM servers, and half a dozen shrink wrap packs of Red Hat media, which came from Dell. So our machines to media ratio is around 2:1, whereas my personal copy of RH6.1 media was used to install at least a dozen systems, about half of which were dual boot.
By contrast, our ratio of machines to media for Windows 98 is about 0.8:1, as some of the above Linux machines were bought from Dell Factory Outlet (we're in Austin TX) who are subject to the Winopoly contract and ship all their systems with Win98 (and no, you can't even get NT instead).
Even that data hides some more complex truth, as we blew away Linux off a few of the Penguins, and '98 off a couple of the Dell's, to reload with FreeBSD.
Slashdot Mirror
That Dell brochure is talking from its hat - Apache on a *Palm Pilot* can manage 20k hits/day down the serial cable. Linus oughta sue :-)
:-)
If you look at the SpecWeb99 results to date, the number 2 and 3 slots seem to be held by Red Hat / Linux / Tux running on Dell kit, 8 and 4 CPU boxen respectively; the one system to beat them was fairly serious $100k iron - a 12-CPU IBM RS/6000 server - running the infamous Zeus. So maybe Tux is the best webserver?
The real joke is the fact that it is dyanmics that matter; any piece of junk can serve a ton of static content all day, you only have to haul it off the disk and push it down the damn wire.
At work, we front end on the cheapest Intel-based rackmounts we can find, using Apache 1.3.12 on FreeBSD (more secure than Linux) - since 90% of what we serve by volume (99.9% by server load) is dynamic content, the load average on those boxes barely flickers up to 0.05 on a busy day.
IIRC Walnut Creek used to run ftp.cdrom.com on a single 4-way Xeon box (Apache / ProFTPd / FreeBSD), and push about a terabyte a day of downloads. No worries.
Whatever you set up, load is unlikely to be an issue.
Could you explain the difference between a displacement sensor and a strain sensor (think carefully first).
Like all the stuff in the IT press about H1's and cheap labor, this is utter horseshit. Have any of these people ever tried to hire good developers? Or, for that matter, crap developers? Thought not.
No, I *don't* want some idiot who's decided that flipping burgers doesn't pay enough, and has done the 6 week intensive VB course at the local community college, because, "err, like, IT people make, like, 30 bucks an hour, right?"; I want a SOFTWARE ENGINEER, this means a professional, with a university education, and preferably some experience (though we do hire a percentage of smart, upstanding college grads, and put them in an environment where they get proper mentorship).
I am the CTO of a venture backed startup in the USA.
We hire every shit hot developer that comes our way, no matter what color they are or where they come from. Does anyone seriously believe companies would go to all the crap the INS makes us do if we could get enough American citizens?
We are a Java shop, but we have hired people with no Java experience. None whatsoever. A good software engineer (note - not "coder" or "programmer") is good in any language; I personally can code in over 20, and none of the skills I consider important are at all relevant to which language you use.
A typical counterexample: I had one resume sent to me by an email blast from Monster (presumably sent to every registered company). The guy was older, had good skills, no Java. Also, curiously, all his lkast 5 jobs have been in the same small town in VA. So, I start a phone interview, and discover that he will *only* accept a job in this one horse town - I can't remember the name, it sure as hell wasn't Norfolk, Arlington or anywhere you've heard of. I said, "You did read on our website that we're based in Austin TX?" and he said, "What website?". So, is it the fault of the British, Indian, Canadian Chinese or Polish guys at our company that he's unemployed? You decide.
Our *average* engineer has a degree and 7 years of experience. We have an *awesome* dev team. It would be a good deal smaller if I had only US citizens to pick from.
Someone please benchmark this box ruuning Linux / TUX against IIS 5.0 running on W2k DCS - I could use a good laugh.
Check out the devices in the book Distress by Greg Egan - even though it's over 15 years old, he hits the target strikingly well; I can see them being in the stores by 2007.
...so try Austin
This kind of "peeking" is extremely professionally unethical - how would you like it if your doctor's secretary had a snigger over your file and shared it with your neighbours?
If you were working for me I'd fire your ass, no matter how good you are (or not).
And also note that in the field of 8-bit fonts, MS has it?s own incompatible ?standards? (like codepage 437) which it will cheerfully transmit in lieu of (and under the MIME headings of) standards like ISO-8859
One of the other interesting tricks was the PURE executable type and the "p" permission flag; this allowed the OS to preload and link an executable (remember, not all Amiga's had virtual addressing) and then have it used many times by multiple processes.
:-)
Coding a pure executable meant avoiding global variables (i.e. static in C) - in typical C you'd malloc a struct with all the context in at the top of main and pass a pointer to it into each function.
There were some packages which implemented virtual memory on 68030 and higher Amigas; none of them worked flawlessly as I recall. I still have a 10Mb A3000/040 (8Mb Fast, 2Mb Chip) which runs lots of things well. I only recently switched from ProPage to StarOffice
If you have the RAM, then just pre-read all the files with something like:
/dev/null ...files...
tar cf
Running something like this in a cron process is good to stop important binaries (Communicator, XMMS) being swapped out by your home machine's email daemons while you're out.
So, it appears that doing something that is legal in the place where you are and is theoretically outside of U.S. jurisdiction is not necessarily a defense, if you're a U.S. citizen.
The jurisdiction of US federal law is US territories plus US citizens. This is common of most countries, e.g. the UK (well, England and Scotland to be precise) use this to prosecute people who use child prostitutes in Thailand. This is how Mossad could justify snatching Mordechai Vanunu in Italy.
There was a case recently of Americans in tax exile in the Carribean against whom a writ was issued by a redneck judge somewhere for tax evasion (probably the same one who ordered the handover of a German company's domain name to a South Carolina company, only to be frustrated by the limit of his jurisdiction) - there is no way for the US to obtain an extradition order (that depends on satisfying the local courts of the case too) but if these folks ever set foot back in the US they will be arrested.
Life, liberty and the pursuit of lobbyists. Enjoy!
Furthermore, Netscape will never let you view the source of a webpage with only a few clicks (in the right-click menu in IE, there's an option, "View Source,"....
Have to call bullshit on this one - in fact, it's one of the rare things NS it does better than IE: "View - Page Source" from the menu in NS 4.x, and you can also do right button on a frame and view it's source, both with a single mouse action.
Nearly all blank media is used for pirating music, so we have the blank media tax (and pragmatically, how many CompUSA customers have the 65Gb of non-copyrighted data that merits a 100 spindle for $29.99+tax?
Nearly all home PC's have a pirated copy of Microsoft Office. So, why not add a $499 royalty tax to new PC's and pay it straight to Microsoft?
Well, I have 12 years driving history and a motorsport ASN licence as well as road licence from the UK, but here in Texas I pay the same high rate as you due to lack of having held a US licence for long. The double joke is that not only am I an experienced driver, the standards for the previous driving licences I hold are much, much higher than the joke of a test put forth by the Texas DPS.
Also, drinking and driving is still considered to be "cool" here, while in Europe drunk drivers are as ostracised as smokers are in the USA.
The biggest causes of accidents in Texas? Drunk driving and incompetence.
Angle of impact with the atmosphere has a big effect on how much gets down to ground level - look at the precision required for spacecraft re-entry.
Well, if it's anything to go by about AT&T, we have Southwestern Bell here as our local monopoly telco, and they suck rocks. Reminds me of British Telecom around 8 years ago. A bit of CLEC will do them a world of good.
...it really is......but there are untapped opportunities for originality in puzzles.
The Lemmings series was a true hit, IMHO the best computer game ever, with very innovative use of the mouse as a then relatively new input device for a mass market computer (it was an Amiga game; Mac's were business machines then, and PC's ran DOS). Why hasn't there been some more stuff like that?
Does anyone else remember the following British 8-bit puzzles....
Xor (BBC, Spectrum) - pure turn based cellular puzzle with devilishly hard problems. The icons were chickens, fish, dollies, etc.
Sentinel (Spectrum) - use a point to point move sequence sneak up a mountain avoiding the gaze of a slowly rotating automaton. The pieces were pine trees.
Imogen (BBC) - cute monochrome (done for the resolution) semi-realtime puzzle, though very restrictive, with some sick jokes. Character was a wizard who could turn into a monkey, dog and bird.
Pooyan (Spectrum) - realtime tower climbing platform puzzle with a twist - the tower was a cylinder, with corridors.
The canonical Amiga one was Menace, although R-Type did get ported from the 8-bit's
Sounds like this fellow is a real luddite. Some people get into IT from all sorts of wierd areas, and get stuck at a certain technology level. It's a sad fact that 90% of people in software development are unqualified:
:-) than that 1000 person organisation had.
When was the last time you saw a bridge design approved by someone without a degree in structural or civil engineering?
When was the last time you saw production code designed by someone without a degree in computer science?
The antithesis of this fellow is my father, who has worked in IT for over 35 years, has been there, done that and seen it all, works mostly with COBOL and mainframe technology but is a keen advocate of both Java and Linux.
On the other hand, there is such a thing as too much technological complexity. The last company I worked for (around 1000 people) had all sorts of fancy custom platform code, a tool to simulate VB's "controls" in HTML using callback triggers, an object-relational mapper and all that stuff (they're now in the process of shoehorning EJB into the mix) and it was all full of inconsitencies and ran like a dog. Product revs were always late and bug ridden. The consulting / deployment group's main activity was hacking round this monster to use SQL directly against the DB.
By contrast, in our little startup we have produced a first rev of a server side Java app from cold in 5 months; no fancy crap, a relational data model, no EJB, no ASP - it's lightning quick, it works, and we can deploy a site in about 30 minutes net of customising the HTML and images (a code free process).
Of course, it helps that our 45 employee organisation has more engineering management talent (and I don't count towards that
The screen takeover bid is only a feature of the Win32 version, or at least, it doesn't really have the same potency under Gnome, KDE or CDE (it appears as a fulscreen sized window). I remember being confused when someone reported that to me about the Win-version. It can be turned off by some menu option, not that easy to find though.
StarOffice is great, in terms of relegating VMware to occasional use, and in some feature areas it is superior to MS-Office - the areas in which it needs work are its primary real-world feature, MS-Office compatibility:
1. Better and better Office 97/2k file format compatibility
2. Remove the annoying "Do you want to save this as an sdw/sdc file?" feature - make the MS-Office file formats selectable as the default
3. Better font/charset compatibility with Windows
I have never had anything other than my Linux box on TW/RoadRunner - there are a number of excellent scripts / tools which are portable, open source replacements for Road Runner Manager. I got my system online for the first time 11 minutes after getting in the door with the cable modem, including compiling rrdhcpcd/rrlogind - a number I have yet to hear of a Time Warner tech matching on Windows. :-)
Here in Austin TX, AFAICT Linux outnumbers MacOS on their network, but they are doubtless largely blissfully unaware. The reason they did away with the login widget was no doubt simplicity, and the fact that the touted "nanny" feature of multiple passwords was little used. They now appear to use the modem's MAC address for authentication.
I recently had them pay me a visit to replace a dead cable modem, and the tech called in the modem serial number - maybe just show though? He also happily tested the circuit using command line ping from a bash shell without comment.
I am the only one to see this as an issue because of its proprietary nature? AOL is trying to portalize and proprietarize its customers. This to me is the cultural antithesis of open source.
Why not include both Win32 and Linux x86 binaries (and MacOS as well) on one CD?
They have office suites which are 100% file format compatible with MS Office 97, and that is the killer app.
.xls files arriving by email, seamlessly.
.doc, are the lingua franca of business today. Compatibility with them is the primary driver which forced Win 3.x / Office 6.0 users to upgrade.
Note my wording - it's not that Excel is any better than StarCalc for the average user, because it isn't - StarCalc actually does quite a few things better, and overall functionally it's probably a tie. It's the fact that Excel reads and writes
The proprietary Office 97 file formats, especially Word's
At work, we have around 30 Linux machines, and around 10 boxed sets of Red Hat, most of which came with Penguin Computing or IBM servers, and half a dozen shrink wrap packs of Red Hat media, which came from Dell. So our machines to media ratio is around 2:1, whereas my personal copy of RH6.1 media was used to install at least a dozen systems, about half of which were dual boot.
By contrast, our ratio of machines to media for Windows 98 is about 0.8:1, as some of the above Linux machines were bought from Dell Factory Outlet (we're in Austin TX) who are subject to the Winopoly contract and ship all their systems with Win98 (and no, you can't even get NT instead).
Even that data hides some more complex truth, as we blew away Linux off a few of the Penguins, and '98 off a couple of the Dell's, to reload with FreeBSD.