Have you ever tried running NT on a DEC Alpha, or a PPC for that matter? What about portables, how many people do you know actually run WinCE? Win runs really well with the intel architecture. Windows' shortcomings will be coming more apparant when we start moving off the current architectures- i.e. Merced, palm and set top devices, etc.
Right now, Palm is leading the market b/c they have something that is easy to use and cheap. All the other manufacturers out there, saw how good Palm was doing and wanted to get on that bandwagon, now. The only way to do that is to get WinCE, it'd take too long to write thier own palm OS. But now, there is Palm which is still commanding the market share, and a billion and one WinCE devices which are hardly selling. I know several people with PalmPilots, but noone with WinCE. Although you wouldn't know this by looking at the display at Best Buy. funny how that is.
Do you guys publish any of your results? Do you know of any places where published reliability tests? Unless anyone publishes this, it's just a bunch of meaningless words.
Pricing does not matter?? since when has a large company _not_ looked at the bottom line. For example, given 5 grand, set up Linux and NT boxes for intranet web serving and e-mail. Well, I can get a nice dual proc box w/ gobs of RAM and free software, or i can get a Celeron and pay the other $4000 for unlimited user NT licenses. Do some benchmarking on that. As for the scale of these (Mindcraft/ZDNet) benchmarks, i sure as hell wouldn't put thirty grand into an intel box (NT or Linux), I'd spring for an UltraSPARC or an AIX box. Let's bench NT against that. Then compare the reduncancy and reliability. This is a huge deficency of the popular computing press, I'd like to see them bench (all the solutions) based on bottom line price, not the same hardware. What's the fastest solution for $500 (my guess, one contender: free unices) for $1000 or $2000 then for $10,000 and finally for 30-50 grand. My guess is that then, Unices would hold the upper hand every time.
Linux has one huge advantage that ZDNet and friends are completely ignoring, the ability to put all those old computers in the corner to good use. I'd like to see them do a story (or even mention) that Beowolf cluster at one of the national labs that was assembled completely for free, with old donated computers. Last i heard, well over 100 486es and a handful of Pentiums. This is what Redmond and everyone else in the industry fear: the ability to get a job done without spending big bucks. As if money makes the world go round.
Well, let's see, 99.9% uptime: out of 8766 hours every year, 99.9% uptime is 8757 hours, which means that the box is down 9 hours during a year. I remember some comments on a recent column linked by/. about the eBay thing which said that for _mission__critical_ apps, nothing short of 24/7 availability is acceptable. Now consider the many *nix boxes that (w/ competent administration) are up for over a year at a time. Consider a common situation: a customer calls, thier server is not working, you have to drive all the way across town (what at least an hour) and then reboot the box and wait for the filesystem to check itself, only then you can even start diagnosing the problem. (Which you usually won't find) End result: over two hours where an entire office has not been able to get any work done. Just imagine all the bitching and complaining. Who cares if i can *point my finger* at MS or HP or whoever, we've just waisted a lot of time and productivity and put everyone in a bad mood. I could care less about marketing and more about technical facts: a simple e-mail server running Linux _won't_ crash without some prodding, and then you have something more substantial to point your finger at.
Okay, number one, if say playstations were to be illegally exported it would be from a relativally small number of exporters (very few people can export something like this in quantity). Furthermore, these illegal exporters would have to be either in the US or in an allied nation that has extradition treaties with us.
Two, if you want supercomputers from the US, just drop a couple hundred thou in the pockets in the Clinton administration. (btw, this has proven to have happened from the chinese army, and as a result, we have drastically increased the # of supercomps to China in the past two years and allowed them to get tons of missle tech.) It's scary how incredibly much the Clinton administration has just given the Chinese and what they will be able to do with it (MIRVs, etc.)
Three, your comparison to software is completely invalid and different from playstations. Any/.er knowes that anyone can put warez on a ftp site which can be DLed from China and put on a CDR. That's a hell of a lot easier than shipping machines to another country. The difference is obvious. And, if they wanted to *steal* our tech and build it themselves, they would have a problem, we control the export of machines that can fab that kind of stuff.
Your comment is completely unfounded and unrealistic. Granted, our export policy is a little behind the times, and beowolf computers only make it easier for *enemies* to develop nukes or biotech or whatever. But there is a lot of dangerous stuff that we have to keep our eyes on.
Your plan still wouldn't cause the massive damage that it is causing for one main reason: priviliged accounts. MS is an OS where a standard user (level program) can take down the whole OS. I'd never run unknown attachments as root. As a matter of fact, most Linux distros set it up to automatically foreward all mail to root to another user. So, _maybe_ one users data is trashed. The system is running and backup tapes are at the ready. This virus didn't affect most NT systems, but there were still people out there who felt like reading email while logged on as an administrator. It's stupid users, not stupid OSes that cause the most damage. So at least use an OS that protects a user from himself in production environments.
I wasn't meaning that to say that there is only one highlt scalable OS-- Solaris, but as an example. While Solaris is excellent in scalibility, it is also a hog on lower end machines. I do completely agree with you there are other excellent OSes out there for large machines, but most of those machines only really run on one OS, like the big SGIs from Cray or whatever. But for web serving on huge machines, Sun is your best choice. This reminds me of the Mindcraft fiasco, I kept thinking to myself: who would spend $25 grand on a windoze or linux box when for the same money you can get a far faster and more reliable Sun box or AIX or whatever. As if Win and Linux are your only choices. Linux runs best on desktop boxes (and so does Windows.) I do agree that there are a ton of great OSes out there, but don't think that one can do everything (as many Windows and Linux bigots seem to think.) I think that competition is great in business, and what competitions usually leads to is specizalization in niche markets. A Honda wouldn't fit everyone's needs, neither would a Tarus or a VW or Lexis or a pickup. While i agree with the general media standpoint that the article took on 'typcasting'-- that BeOS can only do multimedia is bad, far too many slashdotters reacted like there is a 'Single Solution' for everyone. There isn't.
I disagree completely with the idea behind what the author is saying. First though, let me say that I do think that Be is a great OS and I do think that it is largely mishandled by the mainstream press and *in the industry*. But as to the underlying idea in the story and something which has gotten a lot of discussion here is the idea of a universal OS, one answer for everyone's needs. Going back to the Linus quote somebody mentioned earlier, world domination is the ability to have a choice. But more specifically, it is the ability of something (here, an OS) to do one thing and do it well. There is nothing wrong with a niche OS. That is half the problem with MS, it tries to do something with an OS which was not designed to do it. (Win 3.1 doing multitasking, or NT doing multiuser, etc...) There is one key word here, however-- interoperability.
Okay in my perfect world: I'd have OpenBSD on firewall and security sensitive duty, Solaris on the 64 CPU web-monster, whatever on the mainframes, FreeBSD (or maybe Linux) on remaining servers, BeOS for most users, Linux or FreeBSD on the desktops of us hacks and geeks. Java on koisks. Amiga for video editing, QNX for embedded..... Why? Well only one OS has the security of OpenBSD, only Solaris can scale on the big boxes. Most mainframes only have one OS. FreeBSD has the best stability and speed for x86 type serving. You get the idea.
But why not Linux on all desktops/workstaions? I haven't (personally) developed on BeOS. But from what I hear that it has a single, wonderfully designed API and most developers love it. This is great for most apps. But *nix, on the other hand, has dozens of mix-matched APIs, from POSIX to SVGAlib to GGL to xlib to Qt and GTK to OpenGL to whatever. It has wonderful flexibility and openness that is unattractive and unnecessary for many developers, yet perfectly suitable to those who _want_ to know what is going on *under the hood.* I've seen recent discussions on slashdot about what API to use for Linux game programming, and don't get started on GTK vs Qt. This is great for us hacks who love pointless flamew^H^H^H^H^H^H debates. One of the themes of Unix is the perfect tool(s) for the job. In a larger sense, this may mean that there are cases where Unix _isn't_ the perfect tool, so just use the proper one.
I sincerely hope that Be succeeds in replacing MS. If I had to choose, I'd pick a company that knows it's place and does well with interoperability with other OSes, and also has a fast, clean, well designed API (unlike some other monopoly OS out there). Furthermore, in order to maintain a single, coherent API you _need_ the single driving source. I'm not saying that open source _can't_, but remember that one of the ideals of OSS (remember the Cathederal...) is if something doesn't fit you, design your own. Companies are just more adapt to a single strategy (but that doesn't mean that they always stick to it).
Furthermore, from what I hear BeOS has done a decent job of interoperability, TCP/IP facilities etc. With a good secure distributed file system combining all these many OSes, it would make life _much_ easier on us sysadmins: centeralized data and app servers, stable, easy to use OSes, etc. Do I think that everyone will be using Linux or BeOS or whatever in 100 years?? of course not. Technology will change. But for now, w/ today's tech and climate this is what I'd like to see in the next few years.
Simply put, they only looked at Intel Solaris. For the same price of that quad Xeon box, i'd like to buy an UltraSPARC and then redo the tests. Not only that, but then try to give any of the other OSes anything above a F when grading the scalability, i don't think so. They handicapped the best competetor when they did the tests, and ya wonder why?? who out there would honestly spend $15 grand for an intel box to put solaris on?? no one, that's who.
The fact of the matter is that Open Source is new and different, but yet it's not. It is something of a hybrid of capitalism and communism, something which has been founded in academic circles for years, a competition by sharing things. If you don't like it do it yourself, or help me. I don't need to lecture you on the feature of OSS, you know what it is. On one hand many people think that the GNU people, namely RMS are communists, yet they are the ones who are opening up this market to competition, something it's been almost devoid of for 10-15 years. RMS _is_ a *pinko*, and ESR _is_ a capitalist. That's why I loved the article's position that Linux is evil because some people want to make money with it at Bill Gate's expense. It is, yet, it isn't.
i loved the opening lines of this article, i could only laugh, and i though that this must be a put-on. the sad part is that it isn't, the guy actually thinks this way. the end is especially telling:
Whatever the merits Linux might offer the highly technical specialists who use it to administer Internet servers or use turbo-charged text commands to perform complex file transfers, Linux currently offers mighty slim pickings for ordinary computer users
...
Meanwhile, billions of human hours have been spent writing the amazing applications that run on the Windows and Macintosh platforms.
...
Meanwhile, they would have us reinvent the wheel by wasting billions more hours creating applications to take advantage of Linux and make Torvalds' colleagues at Linux software houses like Red Hat Inc. and Caldera Systems Inc. rich.
To insinuate that Linux programmers are evil just because they make money off of it, yet to in the same breath exclude MS is incredulus. then he goes on to say that Linux is _forcing_ prople to rewrite apps for is is to completely overlook both Linux's standard Unix portability and ignore MS's history on the issue. who makes us completely rewrite every app every two or three years because they develop a new *standard.* Throw in some FUD about Linux being hard to use, and some more about how it's not *real* UNIX. Then he says that the internet was working well on NT before Linux was even thought of. I think some more fact checking is in order. i tried, but i couldn't find even _one_ correct fact in that article. if the guy wasn't serious, i'd be laughing my a** off.
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Have you ever tried running NT on a DEC Alpha, or a PPC for that matter? What about portables, how many people do you know actually run WinCE? Win runs really well with the intel architecture. Windows' shortcomings will be coming more apparant when we start moving off the current architectures- i.e. Merced, palm and set top devices, etc.
Right now, Palm is leading the market b/c they have something that is easy to use and cheap. All the other manufacturers out there, saw how good Palm was doing and wanted to get on that bandwagon, now. The only way to do that is to get WinCE, it'd take too long to write thier own palm OS. But now, there is Palm which is still commanding the market share, and a billion and one WinCE devices which are hardly selling. I know several people with PalmPilots, but noone with WinCE. Although you wouldn't know this by looking at the display at Best Buy. funny how that is.
Do you guys publish any of your results? Do you know of any places where published reliability tests? Unless anyone publishes this, it's just a bunch of meaningless words.
Pricing does not matter?? since when has a large company _not_ looked at the bottom line. For example, given 5 grand, set up Linux and NT boxes for intranet web serving and e-mail. Well, I can get a nice dual proc box w/ gobs of RAM and free software, or i can get a Celeron and pay the other $4000 for unlimited user NT licenses. Do some benchmarking on that. As for the scale of these (Mindcraft/ZDNet) benchmarks, i sure as hell wouldn't put thirty grand into an intel box (NT or Linux), I'd spring for an UltraSPARC or an AIX box. Let's bench NT against that. Then compare the reduncancy and reliability. This is a huge deficency of the popular computing press, I'd like to see them bench (all the solutions) based on bottom line price, not the same hardware. What's the fastest solution for $500 (my guess, one contender: free unices) for $1000 or $2000 then for $10,000 and finally for 30-50 grand. My guess is that then, Unices would hold the upper hand every time.
Linux has one huge advantage that ZDNet and friends are completely ignoring, the ability to put all those old computers in the corner to good use. I'd like to see them do a story (or even mention) that Beowolf cluster at one of the national labs that was assembled completely for free, with old donated computers. Last i heard, well over 100 486es and a handful of Pentiums. This is what Redmond and everyone else in the industry fear: the ability to get a job done without spending big bucks. As if money makes the world go round.
Well, let's see, 99.9% uptime: out of 8766 hours every year, 99.9% uptime is 8757 hours, which means that the box is down 9 hours during a year. I remember some comments on a recent column linked by /. about the eBay thing which said that for _mission__critical_ apps, nothing short of 24/7 availability is acceptable. Now consider the many *nix boxes that (w/ competent administration) are up for over a year at a time. Consider a common situation: a customer calls, thier server is not working, you have to drive all the way across town (what at least an hour) and then reboot the box and wait for the filesystem to check itself, only then you can even start diagnosing the problem. (Which you usually won't find) End result: over two hours where an entire office has not been able to get any work done. Just imagine all the bitching and complaining. Who cares if i can *point my finger* at MS or HP or whoever, we've just waisted a lot of time and productivity and put everyone in a bad mood. I could care less about marketing and more about technical facts: a simple e-mail server running Linux _won't_ crash without some prodding, and then you have something more substantial to point your finger at.
Okay, number one, if say playstations were to be illegally exported it would be from a relativally small number of exporters (very few people can export something like this in quantity). Furthermore, these illegal exporters would have to be either in the US or in an allied nation that has extradition treaties with us.
/.er knowes that anyone can put warez on a ftp site which can be DLed from China and put on a CDR. That's a hell of a lot easier than shipping machines to another country. The difference is obvious. And, if they wanted to *steal* our tech and build it themselves, they would have a problem, we control the export of machines that can fab that kind of stuff.
Two, if you want supercomputers from the US, just drop a couple hundred thou in the pockets in the Clinton administration. (btw, this has proven to have happened from the chinese army, and as a result, we have drastically increased the # of supercomps to China in the past two years and allowed them to get tons of missle tech.) It's scary how incredibly much the Clinton administration has just given the Chinese and what they will be able to do with it (MIRVs, etc.)
Three, your comparison to software is completely invalid and different from playstations. Any
Your comment is completely unfounded and unrealistic. Granted, our export policy is a little behind the times, and beowolf computers only make it easier for *enemies* to develop nukes or biotech or whatever. But there is a lot of dangerous stuff that we have to keep our eyes on.
Your plan still wouldn't cause the massive damage that it is causing for one main reason: priviliged accounts. MS is an OS where a standard user (level program) can take down the whole OS. I'd never run unknown attachments as root. As a matter of fact, most Linux distros set it up to automatically foreward all mail to root to another user. So, _maybe_ one users data is trashed. The system is running and backup tapes are at the ready. This virus didn't affect most NT systems, but there were still people out there who felt like reading email while logged on as an administrator. It's stupid users, not stupid OSes that cause the most damage. So at least use an OS that protects a user from himself in production environments.
I wasn't meaning that to say that there is only one highlt scalable OS-- Solaris, but as an example. While Solaris is excellent in scalibility, it is also a hog on lower end machines. I do completely agree with you there are other excellent OSes out there for large machines, but most of those machines only really run on one OS, like the big SGIs from Cray or whatever. But for web serving on huge machines, Sun is your best choice. This reminds me of the Mindcraft fiasco, I kept thinking to myself: who would spend $25 grand on a windoze or linux box when for the same money you can get a far faster and more reliable Sun box or AIX or whatever. As if Win and Linux are your only choices. Linux runs best on desktop boxes (and so does Windows.) I do agree that there are a ton of great OSes out there, but don't think that one can do everything (as many Windows and Linux bigots seem to think.) I think that competition is great in business, and what competitions usually leads to is specizalization in niche markets. A Honda wouldn't fit everyone's needs, neither would a Tarus or a VW or Lexis or a pickup. While i agree with the general media standpoint that the article took on 'typcasting'-- that BeOS can only do multimedia is bad, far too many slashdotters reacted like there is a 'Single Solution' for everyone. There isn't.
I disagree completely with the idea behind what the author is saying. First though, let me say that I do think that Be is a great OS and I do think that it is largely mishandled by the mainstream press and *in the industry*. But as to the underlying idea in the story and something which has gotten a lot of discussion here is the idea of a universal OS, one answer for everyone's needs. Going back to the Linus quote somebody mentioned earlier, world domination is the ability to have a choice. But more specifically, it is the ability of something (here, an OS) to do one thing and do it well. There is nothing wrong with a niche OS. That is half the problem with MS, it tries to do something with an OS which was not designed to do it. (Win 3.1 doing multitasking, or NT doing multiuser, etc...) There is one key word here, however-- interoperability.
Okay in my perfect world: I'd have OpenBSD on firewall and security sensitive duty, Solaris on the 64 CPU web-monster, whatever on the mainframes, FreeBSD (or maybe Linux) on remaining servers, BeOS for most users, Linux or FreeBSD on the desktops of us hacks and geeks. Java on koisks. Amiga for video editing, QNX for embedded..... Why? Well only one OS has the security of OpenBSD, only Solaris can scale on the big boxes. Most mainframes only have one OS. FreeBSD has the best stability and speed for x86 type serving. You get the idea.
But why not Linux on all desktops/workstaions? I haven't (personally) developed on BeOS. But from what I hear that it has a single, wonderfully designed API and most developers love it. This is great for most apps. But *nix, on the other hand, has dozens of mix-matched APIs, from POSIX to SVGAlib to GGL to xlib to Qt and GTK to OpenGL to whatever. It has wonderful flexibility and openness that is unattractive and unnecessary for many developers, yet perfectly suitable to those who _want_ to know what is going on *under the hood.* I've seen recent discussions on slashdot about what API to use for Linux game programming, and don't get started on GTK vs Qt. This is great for us hacks who love pointless flamew^H^H^H^H^H^H debates. One of the themes of Unix is the perfect tool(s) for the job. In a larger sense, this may mean that there are cases where Unix _isn't_ the perfect tool, so just use the proper one.
I sincerely hope that Be succeeds in replacing MS. If I had to choose, I'd pick a company that knows it's place and does well with interoperability with other OSes, and also has a fast, clean, well designed API (unlike some other monopoly OS out there). Furthermore, in order to maintain a single, coherent API you _need_ the single driving source. I'm not saying that open source _can't_, but remember that one of the ideals of OSS (remember the Cathederal...) is if something doesn't fit you, design your own. Companies are just more adapt to a single strategy (but that doesn't mean that they always stick to it).
Furthermore, from what I hear BeOS has done a decent job of interoperability, TCP/IP facilities etc. With a good secure distributed file system combining all these many OSes, it would make life _much_ easier on us sysadmins: centeralized data and app servers, stable, easy to use OSes, etc. Do I think that everyone will be using Linux or BeOS or whatever in 100 years?? of course not. Technology will change. But for now, w/ today's tech and climate this is what I'd like to see in the next few years.
Simply put, they only looked at Intel Solaris. For the same price of that quad Xeon box, i'd like to buy an UltraSPARC and then redo the tests. Not only that, but then try to give any of the other OSes anything above a F when grading the scalability, i don't think so. They handicapped the best competetor when they did the tests, and ya wonder why?? who out there would honestly spend $15 grand for an intel box to put solaris on?? no one, that's who.
The fact of the matter is that Open Source is new and different, but yet it's not. It is something of a hybrid of capitalism and communism, something which has been founded in academic circles for years, a competition by sharing things. If you don't like it do it yourself, or help me. I don't need to lecture you on the feature of OSS, you know what it is. On one hand many people think that the GNU people, namely RMS are communists, yet they are the ones who are opening up this market to competition, something it's been almost devoid of for 10-15 years. RMS _is_ a *pinko*, and ESR _is_ a capitalist. That's why I loved the article's position that Linux is evil because some people want to make money with it at Bill Gate's expense. It is, yet, it isn't.
Reid G. Ormseth, Esq.
i loved the opening lines of this article, i could only laugh, and i though that this must be a put-on. the sad part is that it isn't, the guy actually thinks this way. the end is especially telling:
Whatever the merits Linux might offer the highly technical specialists who use it to administer Internet servers or use turbo-charged text commands to perform complex file transfers, Linux currently offers mighty slim pickings for ordinary computer users
...
Meanwhile, billions of human hours have been spent writing the amazing applications that run on the Windows and Macintosh platforms.
...
Meanwhile, they would have us reinvent the wheel by wasting billions more hours creating applications to take advantage of Linux and make Torvalds' colleagues at Linux software houses like Red Hat Inc. and Caldera Systems Inc. rich.
To insinuate that Linux programmers are evil just because they make money off of it, yet to in the same breath exclude MS is incredulus. then he goes on to say that Linux is _forcing_ prople to rewrite apps for is is to completely overlook both Linux's standard Unix portability and ignore MS's history on the issue. who makes us completely rewrite every app every two or three years because they develop a new *standard.* Throw in some FUD about Linux being hard to use, and some more about how it's not *real* UNIX. Then he says that the internet was working well on NT before Linux was even thought of. I think some more fact checking is in order. i tried, but i couldn't find even _one_ correct fact in that article. if the guy wasn't serious, i'd be laughing my a** off.