Because it isn't an addition. It's replacing some other class that a student would take.
Basically, Waterloo got caught with their pants down being bribed by MS -- nothing new -- but they didn't try to cover up or play it down, which is kind of impressive.
I own Quake 3 for Linux, don't own it for Windows, don't use office suites because I think they suck, and feel that Photoshop is not better than the GIMP in all areas (though it does do some things better).
Guess I don't fit the profile too well.
I use Linux for different reasons. I just like the UNIX environment. It's kind of nice to save money on all your software. It's *really* nice that if you hear about a piece of software, you can just go use it. No reading reviews, no paying or ordering or waiting. Just download and use.
I don't understand why the open source community *needs* revenue, as you claimed. The open source community has been happily existing for a long time as academics and hobbyists writing code for each other. Why should these coders, who are mostly doing this because they like neat tech projects, blow the same amount of time to support complaining end users who think they're dealing with corporate tech support?
This isn't elitist, or at least I hope it's not. I love it when someone else decides to take the plunge and really likes Linux, likes learning their software inside and out. But I don't think that the mindset of most desktop users is likely to do the open source community much good.
Actually, I take one bit back. I do like getting drivers for hardware, and there needs to be a certain number of users available for a company to do that. But I can buy a piece of hardware in just about any arena and have some brand available that makes a really top-notch open source driver available. That's enough to make me happy.
Oh, for chrissake. Your point is good that Linux deserves equal blame for driver problems is good, but your claims are silly. Fixing Windows problems can be much worse.
I swear, Linux has a problem with a driver and you guys are out there doing everything from installing driver after driver to freakin' recompiling the kernel.
A troubleshooting approach that isn't available on Windows.
Go check your system log...in Windows
Which keeps *much* less diagnostic information than the UNIX system log, and frequently has messages that are downright unhelpful.
Here's a hint: Learn how to troubleshoot your system
I consider myself a reasonably competent Windows troubleshooter, and yet I still think that you have far more ability to track down problems on Linux than on Windows.
(besides upgrading to Service Pack 2, because that probably won't fix a driver problem)
Frankly, I don't understand why you're claiming that. Stuff like, say, the kernel has quite an impact on drivers, and Service Packs frequently have a new kernel.
You did listen to those warnings about installing unsigned drivers, right
This is Microsoft propaganda. I've worked with Microsoft's "code signing" system before, and getting something signed involves basically no QA on anyone's part. The only reason Microsoft wants widespread code signing is to strengthen their control over Windows. An unsigned driver is not necessarily any worse or better than a signed driver.
go get on Google Groups and hit up the microsoft.public.* newsgroups.
Online Linux help eclipses online Windows help. I've seen people spend hours in real-time conversation helping people out in #linpeople and other places.
...But the fact that a self-respecting nerd has *also* lost that trust in American products is truly disappointing.
I must say that the recent explosion in not ONLY Athlon chips, but also P4 chips, and *boxed*, not just OEM purporting to come with a "mummified hookah smoking monkey" is really disappointing. This and other Slashdot stories lead one to believe that the rare few *real* processors attached to mummified hookah smoking monkeys may simply have been victims of improper cooling, leaving only a vast body of imitations for the rest of us. It's enough to make you cry. Sure, there are mummified stoned orangutans, acid-dropping monkeys, and many, many really nasty-looking bits of beef jerkey glued to P4s. There are even a few mummified humans that bear a resemblance to the expected mummified spider monkey, but the much-sought after original may be lost to us forever.
Imagine the damage to the open source community! Companies considering using pot-smoking mummified versions of their mascots as trade-show freebies are already having to pull back their plans.
It's a disgrace. As a multiple donor to the EFF, I demand action! Some of those simians may well have been webmonkeys, and the disgrace to the tech community reduces all of our credibility!
I was under the impression that Game Sprockets were dead. Apple said they were putting them into maintenance mode a few years back.
Anyway, SDL is not "inferior" to DirectX or Game Sprockets. It's a *much* smaller, more lightweight library, and if you want more functionality, you use other libraries that sit on top of it, like SDL_mixer or SDL_image.
It also runs on the MacOS, so instead of rewriting the bloody game for every platform, you have to write it *once* and then let it run on Linux, Windows, and the MacOS.
SDL is one of the nicer things to come from the Open Source world. It's also a Good Thing for Mac users. Don't bash it.
And why would anyone use Mac-specific APIs at all for something like a game (which doesn't have OS-specific UI elements), when they could use cross-platform ones? (This is ignoring the few exceptions, like Prince of Destruction, which used the Mac's Speech Manager). Mac users get annoyed enough about coders using Win-specific APIs -- asking coders to then use Apple-specific APIs seems a little hypocritical.
I'm dubious as to whether spam is "free speech", but if it is, you should have the right to anonymous free speech.
The original point of our free speech rights were to allow us to have free political speech -- to spread political dissent if it became necessary. The right to have that speech be anonymous is crucial to prevent governments reprisals toward the authors.
Our definition of free speech is now far, far more broad than our founding fathers intended. That isn't necessarily a bad thing, but we also need to know where the limits are -- is spam free speech?
What about political campaign spam? AFAIK, faxing political compaing spam isn't legal...
What if you do business via the mail with companies in Washington State? You may be operating out of Oregon, but you're still selling to Washington companies.
How about the anti-fax spam laws that are in place -- are those federal only, or do the laws of the state that you're faxing to apply to you as well?
Don't you think people don't upgrade their systems or implement new ones?
We aren't talking about SANs any more? There isn't a lot of reason to be dropping new OSes or new servers on components of the SAN.
Just as I agreed that there *is* a justification for vertical-market applications, I'm not saying that every copy of AIX should be purged. I just think that items like these are frequently sold in situations where they are not needed. That doesn't mean that they're never needed. I don't claim that Linux is the best alternative if you're using, say, oh, a system that needs to dump process info from the kernel very frequently -- Linux's/proc is inefficient. However, there's also a silly perception that unless something costs excessive amounts of money, it must not be up to par with the competition.
I am beginning to wonder if you have ever worked in a company with more than 100 employees.
Well, you're definitely wrong in the literal sense.:-) However, I suspect what you meant was "I don't think you've ever been in IT handling thousands of users", which you would be correct about -- I'm an engineer, not an IT person.
Which would explain some of the different focus here -- you're complaining that given a list of options from different providers, no one currently gives you what I'm talking about. My interest is in adding another option to that list -- whether it's possible to create a new option for the prices being talked about.
So if this car got into an accident...would that be a Denial of Service attack?
In other news today, three RIAA chauffeurs were placed under investigation for apparently ramming other cars off the road. "We were trying to protect our copyrights," claimed Hillary Rosen, head of the RIAA. "Just as VHS is like the Boston Strangler, these criminals are like Ted Bundy in his Volkswagon."
There are three types of people out there...1) There are those people who don't understand computer technology....2) There are those people who understand it a little because they've used it...but they don't really understand it...3) There are people who understand how computers work...sure, they couldn't build their own OS...
...and these game cards these days can output millions of triangles per second
Oh, I'm not thinking of trangle rate fill.
The biggest problem will be when you have more textures than will fit in the video card's VRAM (but that is a problem with games too)
Yup, I'm thinking of texture memory.
BUT, once you get to that point, there might be some intelligence in the CPU side compositor so that it won't send the textures across the AGP bus if they're completely obscured (or is that already part of the OpenGL spec... I suppose it would be
I'm fairly sure that OGL doesn't do that, just because if you wanted to have reasonable latency over-the-network OGL display (remember, SGI made this), you'd really *want* textures to go over when you ask them to do so. And once they're over, they stay over...they don't get resent to the card each frame.
My objection comes in if you have, say, a bunch of semitransparent windows. A fullscreen window is a lot of VRAM -- 1600x1200x3 bytes = 5.5 megabytes. Most Mac users don't have viewports or pagers or anything, so you're looking at a fair amount of hit. Hmm...still, you're right. That may be low enough that it isn't an issue any more. Scary.
Just because you CAN post at +2, doesn't mean you should.
I assume the irony of you posting at +2 was intentional?
Few people sit in front of their microwave for an hour or two each day, but they do that with their computer and TV
How many people sit at their computer for an hour or two each day and watch the boot logo? Most people I know hit the power button and go do something else while the computer is booting.
I've yet to see a spike damage even a system on a cheap surge protector, much less a nice UPS. I *have* seen surges over POTS lines damage equipment, though. Come to think of it, my neighbor's house was hit by lightning at one point, knocking out her modem...yet leaving her computer intact.
Side note: You would use g++ as a compiler for your product? The code it produces is about as efficient as a fully-loaded Excursion full of fat chicks
Not anymore. Take a look at the code that a gcc-3.2 build puts out...It's light years beyond the 2.7 and earlier era, the time that built gcc such a bad rep. It's competitive with the better compilers out there now (at least in generated code...Sun's C++ compiler compiles more quickly). Oh, and the good code generation is on the x86 -- never tried comparing recent builds on SPARC or PPC.
Case in point: we broke IBM AIX 5.1 a few months ago
So you're asking me both to believe that this had to be fixed immediately (as in, whatever you were doing before you broke AIX 5.1 was no longer an option) and that Linux wouldn't have been fixed quickly (and while there probably are issues that have taken a while to fix, I tend to see patch times that beat competing OSes).
They'll meet the ethernet card full-on and be very disappointed at what they see
You're talking raw streaming of a huge sequential series of reads, which may or may not be an issue here -- but that's besides the point. You're leaving out the possibility that data could be interleaved across different machines to avoid exactly this issue. Do it in software, I say -- it's cheaper.
simply because it can do one or two of the things a real piece of networking gear can do
Okay, I'll bite. Short of sheer mass bandwidth that you absolutely require custom hardware for, like a backbone provider, what specific features are you complaining about the lack of?
I've found they spend more in the short term to save more in the long term. If you think doing something the right way is expensive, try doing it the wrong way.
I agree that doing something the wrong way can be more expensive -- I'm just not sure that saving money necessitates "doing it the wrong way".
Why the OS of a 30,000 dollar machine is not mirrored is beyond comprehension to me
This is part of what I'm complaining about. Hardware vendors have sold users on expensive, heavily hot-swappable systems where they make huge profit margins. They work very hard to steer clients away from consumer-level stuff, where their profit margins are nearly nonexistent. If you're willing to make a system the fundamental unit of failure here, you can easily buy a $3K system with a second failover $3K system. Why pay five times as much so that you can swap out a CPU instead of just swapping out a whole system?
The whole measure-system-capabilities-by-dollar-value thing is what I'm objecting to -- your first response was "This is a $30K system".
No, let's buy those things because, if something in them breaks, the production payrool machine doesn't go offline.
I severely doubt that more than 10% of the people with TEMPEST systems actually need them. I was looking at one cluster of very overpriced and very underused set of TEMPEST workstations at a company a while ago. They would have been better off with some stock x86 machines.
hot-swappable replacement part
See above. It's much cheaper at this point to buy two consumer-level systems and let failover take over for one system than to buy a single high-end system.
No, let's buy a $90,000 piece of software because it allows us to precisions-machine aerospace parts more efficiently...
The price I quoted was $2k. You're listing $90K, which is well into the vertical application market. There -- yes, you don't have much of an option. You need an airfoil simulator that does foo, baz, and bar, and there's only one vendor with it -- you pay for it.
I'm talking about buying horizontal market things like commercial variants of CVS, compilers, or other systems where there are very good free alternatives, yet companies persist on evaluating things based on price.
Apparently "throwing RAID" on something is good enough for enterprise-level
Who's to say that this approach is fundamentally flawed? Sun? IBM? Of course they're going to scoff -- they've got machines and service contracts to sell. A high-level IT person? They've been suffused in the "spend lots more to get decent quality" propoganda from said companies for so long that it'd be hard to get an objective viewpoint.
and a 100Mbps Ethernet card in each
This will work great on a network where every client is connected at 100/full, and the normal servers have fiber or gigabit uplinks
Notice that I mentioned having the front-end systems, the ones doing caching, have faster interfaces.
$250 for the rest of the system
For a file server, very little is needed in terms of CPU juice, or RAM (before you start screaming about caching, as mentioned above, I want a systemwide cache sitting at the front of this). Make the cache able to cache anything on the SAN, so that you're efficiently using your resources. Why would I need PCI expansions chassis or RAIDed memory? I've already listed everything every box needs, and I'm willing to bet that the number of RAM chips you've had suddenly and unexpectedly fail (for God's sake, this is solid state storage) is right up there with numbers of servers hit by lightning.
Nobody will ever need a VLAN. The modules in our 6509s cost more than $9k.
Why would I want a VLAN within my storage system? To the outside world, this is a single entity. For that matter, Cisco systems definitely fall into my "overpriced because IT will buy it because it sounds sexy" category unless you really need the few systems that they do that *no one else* can duplicate in functionality. You can run VLANs off a Linux box.
Meanwhile, I'll be enjoying another day of outage-free administration, at least on the machines we built the right way
As I said earlier, I never claimed that this is available out of box right now -- just that you can build something like this. And neither did I say that your systems are outage-prone. I do think that name brand systems are oversold on vague reliability promises. Is my RAM going to suddenly fail? No.
I've found that the primary reason that purchases will spend their employer's money is the ASHF (Avoid Shit if it Hits Fans) syndrom. IT personnel are willing to make suboptimal purchasing decisions so that they have someone *else* to point to if something goes wrong. "Sun's supposed to fix that, not us." "This is a best-of-class component that failed."
Now to some extent, the corporate culture fosters this, but I just want to point out that every time I hear people bragging about the cost of the systems they administer, I wince and think about this.
My guess is that this is going to die over the next five years or so. At the moment, there's a glut of secondhand networking and serving systems available from dying dot-coms. Once that's over, though, you have companies in India and Eastern Asia that can't afford to waste the kind of money that US companies do on systems. So you get manufacturers (probably non-US) springing up to create low-cost systems that fill their needs, without the exorbant profit margins. Eventually, as reputations become established, they'll start selling to US corporations trying to bring down costs and compete with those foreign competitors, and overpriced IT purchases will be a thing of the past.
Linux is part of the advance front of this -- it's cheap to set up, runs on cheap commodity hardware (who's manufacturers make very little profit per unit), and you can build fancy things on top of it. As a matter of fact, that's most of the reason Linux has been propelled into the business market at all -- not because a bunch of geeks think it's sexy to use (though it sure would be neat if that *were* the reason), but because the profit margins are in a more sane range.
Almost all products follow a process of starting out very expensive, becoming more common and understood, commoditization, and eventual drop of profits to near zero. And once a product has reached the end of this process, bringing the price back up is very, very hard.
That being said, this article summary was awfully slanted toward GNOME. Let's take a look at a couple of snippits:...committing to use and support mono, Ximian's...
some of the multilingual programmability it initially forfeited by its use of Qt
...after the Manhattan project, a few of the physicists involved were kind of horrified with how much potential damage the world was looking at and became nuclear weapon opponents.
You know, I liked most of this post, but one thing here is a pet peeve of mine. It always made me lose a lot of respect for sysadmins -- company-wide emails telling users not to do "foo" on their computer or they'd damage it (email viruses being the worst). Why the hell do you ever tell a user something like that? What if your car mechanic said "don't shift into third gear or else your car will explode"?
Why is this sort of thing even exposed to users? Block the damn things.
My opinion is that sysadmins should *never* give technical instructions to end users to do routine maintenance ("You can upgrade to Lotus Notes 5 by clicking on these two icons and then dragging this. This must be done by Friday"). Do it yourself, install remote administration software, do whatever.
Second, why is it funny that the Linux guru didn't know NT? Do your NT gurus know Linux internals?
That being said, I agree with the "we're all stupid sometimes" bit.
Stop before you make a fool of yourself
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When Users Attack
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1) Did you pop out of Mom's womb knowing everything about computers, or did you have to learn it through experience, probably with a few mishaps along the way?
2) People make mistakes all the time that *could* have had horrible consequences. Of course, only the few that actually happen make the Darwin Awards. We then laugh at them. I dare say you've made a couple of potentially fatal mistakes in your own life.
3) People that make fun of people trying to do computer repair piss me off. Yes, I understand that it's monumentally annoying to deal with a user who has destroyed their computer, but that doesn't give you any excuse. I'll bet a lot of people here on Slashdot could easily get their hands ripped off when poking around inside a car, or get chemical burns messing around with chemicals, or (here's a good one) ruin food, equipment, and sometimes damage themselves trying to cook something. Why? We aren't all experts in the given domain. So unless you think it's funny to have a chemist cracking up at your permanently scarred hands, why don't you lay off the user that toasted their CPU?
4) Any sort of useful learning, esp. research or new stuff, usually involves getting burned a few times. You make a mistake or a bad assumption. If you aren't getting burned every now and then, you're doing rote memorization of existing work out of textbooks.
Slashdot Mirror
Because it isn't an addition. It's replacing some other class that a student would take.
Basically, Waterloo got caught with their pants down being bribed by MS -- nothing new -- but they didn't try to cover up or play it down, which is kind of impressive.
I own Quake 3 for Linux, don't own it for Windows, don't use office suites because I think they suck, and feel that Photoshop is not better than the GIMP in all areas (though it does do some things better).
Guess I don't fit the profile too well.
I use Linux for different reasons. I just like the UNIX environment. It's kind of nice to save money on all your software. It's *really* nice that if you hear about a piece of software, you can just go use it. No reading reviews, no paying or ordering or waiting. Just download and use.
I don't understand why the open source community *needs* revenue, as you claimed. The open source community has been happily existing for a long time as academics and hobbyists writing code for each other. Why should these coders, who are mostly doing this because they like neat tech projects, blow the same amount of time to support complaining end users who think they're dealing with corporate tech support?
This isn't elitist, or at least I hope it's not. I love it when someone else decides to take the plunge and really likes Linux, likes learning their software inside and out. But I don't think that the mindset of most desktop users is likely to do the open source community much good.
Actually, I take one bit back. I do like getting drivers for hardware, and there needs to be a certain number of users available for a company to do that. But I can buy a piece of hardware in just about any arena and have some brand available that makes a really top-notch open source driver available. That's enough to make me happy.
Oh, for chrissake. Your point is good that Linux deserves equal blame for driver problems is good, but your claims are silly. Fixing Windows problems can be much worse.
I swear, Linux has a problem with a driver and you guys are out there doing everything from installing driver after driver to freakin' recompiling the kernel.
A troubleshooting approach that isn't available on Windows.
Go check your system log...in Windows
Which keeps *much* less diagnostic information than the UNIX system log, and frequently has messages that are downright unhelpful.
Here's a hint: Learn how to troubleshoot your system
I consider myself a reasonably competent Windows troubleshooter, and yet I still think that you have far more ability to track down problems on Linux than on Windows.
(besides upgrading to Service Pack 2, because that probably won't fix a driver problem)
Frankly, I don't understand why you're claiming that. Stuff like, say, the kernel has quite an impact on drivers, and Service Packs frequently have a new kernel.
You did listen to those warnings about installing unsigned drivers, right
This is Microsoft propaganda. I've worked with Microsoft's "code signing" system before, and getting something signed involves basically no QA on anyone's part. The only reason Microsoft wants widespread code signing is to strengthen their control over Windows. An unsigned driver is not necessarily any worse or better than a signed driver.
go get on Google Groups and hit up the microsoft.public.* newsgroups.
Online Linux help eclipses online Windows help. I've seen people spend hours in real-time conversation helping people out in #linpeople and other places.
...But the fact that a self-respecting nerd has *also* lost that trust in American products is truly disappointing.
I must say that the recent explosion in not ONLY Athlon chips, but also P4 chips, and *boxed*, not just OEM purporting to come with a "mummified hookah smoking monkey" is really disappointing. This and other Slashdot stories lead one to believe that the rare few *real* processors attached to mummified hookah smoking monkeys may simply have been victims of improper cooling, leaving only a vast body of imitations for the rest of us. It's enough to make you cry. Sure, there are mummified stoned orangutans, acid-dropping monkeys, and many, many really nasty-looking bits of beef jerkey glued to P4s. There are even a few mummified humans that bear a resemblance to the expected mummified spider monkey, but the much-sought after original may be lost to us forever.
Imagine the damage to the open source community! Companies considering using pot-smoking mummified versions of their mascots as trade-show freebies are already having to pull back their plans.
It's a disgrace. As a multiple donor to the EFF, I demand action! Some of those simians may well have been webmonkeys, and the disgrace to the tech community reduces all of our credibility!
America being populated by suckers means that her best days are still ahead of her?
I mean, I suppose that you can argue that "today isn't her best day", but...
I was under the impression that Game Sprockets were dead. Apple said they were putting them into maintenance mode a few years back.
Anyway, SDL is not "inferior" to DirectX or Game Sprockets. It's a *much* smaller, more lightweight library, and if you want more functionality, you use other libraries that sit on top of it, like SDL_mixer or SDL_image.
It also runs on the MacOS, so instead of rewriting the bloody game for every platform, you have to write it *once* and then let it run on Linux, Windows, and the MacOS.
SDL is one of the nicer things to come from the Open Source world. It's also a Good Thing for Mac users. Don't bash it.
And why would anyone use Mac-specific APIs at all for something like a game (which doesn't have OS-specific UI elements), when they could use cross-platform ones? (This is ignoring the few exceptions, like Prince of Destruction, which used the Mac's Speech Manager). Mac users get annoyed enough about coders using Win-specific APIs -- asking coders to then use Apple-specific APIs seems a little hypocritical.
I'm dubious as to whether spam is "free speech", but if it is, you should have the right to anonymous free speech.
The original point of our free speech rights were to allow us to have free political speech -- to spread political dissent if it became necessary. The right to have that speech be anonymous is crucial to prevent governments reprisals toward the authors.
Our definition of free speech is now far, far more broad than our founding fathers intended. That isn't necessarily a bad thing, but we also need to know where the limits are -- is spam free speech?
What about political campaign spam? AFAIK, faxing political compaing spam isn't legal...
What if you do business via the mail with companies in Washington State? You may be operating out of Oregon, but you're still selling to Washington companies.
How about the anti-fax spam laws that are in place -- are those federal only, or do the laws of the state that you're faxing to apply to you as well?
Don't you think people don't upgrade their systems or implement new ones?
/proc is inefficient. However, there's also a silly perception that unless something costs excessive amounts of money, it must not be up to par with the competition.
:-) However, I suspect what you meant was "I don't think you've ever been in IT handling thousands of users", which you would be correct about -- I'm an engineer, not an IT person.
We aren't talking about SANs any more? There isn't a lot of reason to be dropping new OSes or new servers on components of the SAN.
Just as I agreed that there *is* a justification for vertical-market applications, I'm not saying that every copy of AIX should be purged. I just think that items like these are frequently sold in situations where they are not needed. That doesn't mean that they're never needed. I don't claim that Linux is the best alternative if you're using, say, oh, a system that needs to dump process info from the kernel very frequently -- Linux's
I am beginning to wonder if you have ever worked in a company with more than 100 employees.
Well, you're definitely wrong in the literal sense.
Which would explain some of the different focus here -- you're complaining that given a list of options from different providers, no one currently gives you what I'm talking about. My interest is in adding another option to that list -- whether it's possible to create a new option for the prices being talked about.
Is standard (unencrypted) Internet e-mail unsuitable for business use?
I'd say so, though it's certainly used for it.
So if this car got into an accident...would that be a Denial of Service attack?
In other news today, three RIAA chauffeurs were placed under investigation for apparently ramming other cars off the road. "We were trying to protect our copyrights," claimed Hillary Rosen, head of the RIAA. "Just as VHS is like the Boston Strangler, these criminals are like Ted Bundy in his Volkswagon."
There are three types of people out there...1) There are those people who don't understand computer technology....2) There are those people who understand it a little because they've used it...but they don't really understand it...3) There are people who understand how computers work...sure, they couldn't build their own OS...
Conclusive proof that Linus does not exist.
...and these game cards these days can output millions of triangles per second
Oh, I'm not thinking of trangle rate fill.
The biggest problem will be when you have more textures than will fit in the video card's VRAM (but that is a problem with games too)
Yup, I'm thinking of texture memory.
BUT, once you get to that point, there might be some intelligence in the CPU side compositor so that it won't send the textures across the AGP bus if they're completely obscured (or is that already part of the OpenGL spec... I suppose it would be
I'm fairly sure that OGL doesn't do that, just because if you wanted to have reasonable latency over-the-network OGL display (remember, SGI made this), you'd really *want* textures to go over when you ask them to do so. And once they're over, they stay over...they don't get resent to the card each frame.
My objection comes in if you have, say, a bunch of semitransparent windows. A fullscreen window is a lot of VRAM -- 1600x1200x3 bytes = 5.5 megabytes. Most Mac users don't have viewports or pagers or anything, so you're looking at a fair amount of hit. Hmm...still, you're right. That may be low enough that it isn't an issue any more. Scary.
Just because you CAN post at +2, doesn't mean you should.
I assume the irony of you posting at +2 was intentional?
Few people sit in front of their microwave for an hour or two each day, but they do that with their computer and TV
How many people sit at their computer for an hour or two each day and watch the boot logo? Most people I know hit the power button and go do something else while the computer is booting.
What were they doing with them?
Basic numerical analysis.
voltage spike that makes it past the UPS
I've yet to see a spike damage even a system on a cheap surge protector, much less a nice UPS. I *have* seen surges over POTS lines damage equipment, though. Come to think of it, my neighbor's house was hit by lightning at one point, knocking out her modem...yet leaving her computer intact.
Side note: You would use g++ as a compiler for your product? The code it produces is about as efficient as a fully-loaded Excursion full of fat chicks
Not anymore. Take a look at the code that a gcc-3.2 build puts out...It's light years beyond the 2.7 and earlier era, the time that built gcc such a bad rep. It's competitive with the better compilers out there now (at least in generated code...Sun's C++ compiler compiles more quickly). Oh, and the good code generation is on the x86 -- never tried comparing recent builds on SPARC or PPC.
Case in point: we broke IBM AIX 5.1 a few months ago
So you're asking me both to believe that this had to be fixed immediately (as in, whatever you were doing before you broke AIX 5.1 was no longer an option) and that Linux wouldn't have been fixed quickly (and while there probably are issues that have taken a while to fix, I tend to see patch times that beat competing OSes).
They'll meet the ethernet card full-on and be very disappointed at what they see
You're talking raw streaming of a huge sequential series of reads, which may or may not be an issue here -- but that's besides the point. You're leaving out the possibility that data could be interleaved across different machines to avoid exactly this issue. Do it in software, I say -- it's cheaper.
simply because it can do one or two of the things a real piece of networking gear can do
Okay, I'll bite. Short of sheer mass bandwidth that you absolutely require custom hardware for, like a backbone provider, what specific features are you complaining about the lack of?
I've found they spend more in the short term to save more in the long term. If you think doing something the right way is expensive, try doing it the wrong way.
I agree that doing something the wrong way can be more expensive -- I'm just not sure that saving money necessitates "doing it the wrong way".
There are some distinguished CMU profs like Touretzsky, Carbonell, and Thibadeau in those posts.
I'll bet that one guy with the joke post never thought that this would come back to haunt him two decades later.
This is quite interesting. It appears that birds have a thing for keyboards.
Some sort of odd quirk in the avian psyche, I suppose...
Why the OS of a 30,000 dollar machine is not mirrored is beyond comprehension to me
This is part of what I'm complaining about. Hardware vendors have sold users on expensive, heavily hot-swappable systems where they make huge profit margins. They work very hard to steer clients away from consumer-level stuff, where their profit margins are nearly nonexistent. If you're willing to make a system the fundamental unit of failure here, you can easily buy a $3K system with a second failover $3K system. Why pay five times as much so that you can swap out a CPU instead of just swapping out a whole system?
The whole measure-system-capabilities-by-dollar-value thing is what I'm objecting to -- your first response was "This is a $30K system".
No, let's buy those things because, if something in them breaks, the production payrool machine doesn't go offline.
I severely doubt that more than 10% of the people with TEMPEST systems actually need them. I was looking at one cluster of very overpriced and very underused set of TEMPEST workstations at a company a while ago. They would have been better off with some stock x86 machines.
hot-swappable replacement part
See above. It's much cheaper at this point to buy two consumer-level systems and let failover take over for one system than to buy a single high-end system.
No, let's buy a $90,000 piece of software because it allows us to precisions-machine aerospace parts more efficiently...
The price I quoted was $2k. You're listing $90K, which is well into the vertical application market. There -- yes, you don't have much of an option. You need an airfoil simulator that does foo, baz, and bar, and there's only one vendor with it -- you pay for it.
I'm talking about buying horizontal market things like commercial variants of CVS, compilers, or other systems where there are very good free alternatives, yet companies persist on evaluating things based on price.
Apparently "throwing RAID" on something is good enough for enterprise-level
Who's to say that this approach is fundamentally flawed? Sun? IBM? Of course they're going to scoff -- they've got machines and service contracts to sell. A high-level IT person? They've been suffused in the "spend lots more to get decent quality" propoganda from said companies for so long that it'd be hard to get an objective viewpoint.
and a 100Mbps Ethernet card in each
This will work great on a network where every client is connected at 100/full, and the normal servers have fiber or gigabit uplinks
Notice that I mentioned having the front-end systems, the ones doing caching, have faster interfaces.
$250 for the rest of the system
For a file server, very little is needed in terms of CPU juice, or RAM (before you start screaming about caching, as mentioned above, I want a systemwide cache sitting at the front of this). Make the cache able to cache anything on the SAN, so that you're efficiently using your resources. Why would I need PCI expansions chassis or RAIDed memory? I've already listed everything every box needs, and I'm willing to bet that the number of RAM chips you've had suddenly and unexpectedly fail (for God's sake, this is solid state storage) is right up there with numbers of servers hit by lightning.
Nobody will ever need a VLAN. The modules in our 6509s cost more than $9k.
Why would I want a VLAN within my storage system? To the outside world, this is a single entity. For that matter, Cisco systems definitely fall into my "overpriced because IT will buy it because it sounds sexy" category unless you really need the few systems that they do that *no one else* can duplicate in functionality. You can run VLANs off a Linux box.
Meanwhile, I'll be enjoying another day of outage-free administration, at least on the machines we built the right way
As I said earlier, I never claimed that this is available out of box right now -- just that you can build something like this. And neither did I say that your systems are outage-prone. I do think that name brand systems are oversold on vague reliability promises. Is my RAM going to suddenly fail? No.
I've found that the primary reason that purchases will spend their employer's money is the ASHF (Avoid Shit if it Hits Fans) syndrom. IT personnel are willing to make suboptimal purchasing decisions so that they have someone *else* to point to if something goes wrong. "Sun's supposed to fix that, not us." "This is a best-of-class component that failed."
Now to some extent, the corporate culture fosters this, but I just want to point out that every time I hear people bragging about the cost of the systems they administer, I wince and think about this.
My guess is that this is going to die over the next five years or so. At the moment, there's a glut of secondhand networking and serving systems available from dying dot-coms. Once that's over, though, you have companies in India and Eastern Asia that can't afford to waste the kind of money that US companies do on systems. So you get manufacturers (probably non-US) springing up to create low-cost systems that fill their needs, without the exorbant profit margins. Eventually, as reputations become established, they'll start selling to US corporations trying to bring down costs and compete with those foreign competitors, and overpriced IT purchases will be a thing of the past.
Linux is part of the advance front of this -- it's cheap to set up, runs on cheap commodity hardware (who's manufacturers make very little profit per unit), and you can build fancy things on top of it. As a matter of fact, that's most of the reason Linux has been propelled into the business market at all -- not because a bunch of geeks think it's sexy to use (though it sure would be neat if that *were* the reason), but because the profit margins are in a more sane range.
Almost all products follow a process of starting out very expensive, becoming more common and understood, commoditization, and eventual drop of profits to near zero. And once a product has reached the end of this process, bringing the price back up is very, very hard.
Then why are they working as NT sysadmins? You make a higher salary as a UNIX administrator than as a Windows administrator.
I love GNOME, and really dislike KDE.
...committing to use and support mono, Ximian's...
That being said, this article summary was awfully slanted toward GNOME. Let's take a look at a couple of snippits:
some of the multilingual programmability it initially forfeited by its use of Qt
...after the Manhattan project, a few of the physicists involved were kind of horrified with how much potential damage the world was looking at and became nuclear weapon opponents.
Forget which ones, though. Anyone remember names?
They might be trying to learn, you know, reach a point where you aren't classifying them as "morons" any more.
You know, there's a logo on the front of most microwaves telling their brand name.
Just out of curiosity, can you recite yours?
You know, I liked most of this post, but one thing here is a pet peeve of mine. It always made me lose a lot of respect for sysadmins -- company-wide emails telling users not to do "foo" on their computer or they'd damage it (email viruses being the worst). Why the hell do you ever tell a user something like that? What if your car mechanic said "don't shift into third gear or else your car will explode"?
Why is this sort of thing even exposed to users? Block the damn things.
My opinion is that sysadmins should *never* give technical instructions to end users to do routine maintenance ("You can upgrade to Lotus Notes 5 by clicking on these two icons and then dragging this. This must be done by Friday"). Do it yourself, install remote administration software, do whatever.
Second, why is it funny that the Linux guru didn't know NT? Do your NT gurus know Linux internals?
That being said, I agree with the "we're all stupid sometimes" bit.
1) Did you pop out of Mom's womb knowing everything about computers, or did you have to learn it through experience, probably with a few mishaps along the way?
2) People make mistakes all the time that *could* have had horrible consequences. Of course, only the few that actually happen make the Darwin Awards. We then laugh at them. I dare say you've made a couple of potentially fatal mistakes in your own life.
3) People that make fun of people trying to do computer repair piss me off. Yes, I understand that it's monumentally annoying to deal with a user who has destroyed their computer, but that doesn't give you any excuse. I'll bet a lot of people here on Slashdot could easily get their hands ripped off when poking around inside a car, or get chemical burns messing around with chemicals, or (here's a good one) ruin food, equipment, and sometimes damage themselves trying to cook something. Why? We aren't all experts in the given domain. So unless you think it's funny to have a chemist cracking up at your permanently scarred hands, why don't you lay off the user that toasted their CPU?
4) Any sort of useful learning, esp. research or new stuff, usually involves getting burned a few times. You make a mistake or a bad assumption. If you aren't getting burned every now and then, you're doing rote memorization of existing work out of textbooks.